The one left us, an A.T., or armoured transport, was carrying our payload.
We moved forward because there was no moving back. There was nothing to go back to. We’d come through the warp conflux on Zoa to this. Hadn’t had much choice. It wasn’t like stepping into the unknown from that damp shithole was top of any of our Christmas list...but how could we have gone back? Zoa wouldn’t be there anymore. Zoa was just magma by now.
As far as Fleet were concerned, we might as well be dead right along with the planet they’d annihilated. Marines were expendable. Cheap. Dermal and Thermal Combats – DTC’s – and guns. We were nothing which couldn’t be replaced.
That wasn’t fair, though, was it? Fleet were almost definitely dead, and they didn’t know it. The only real difference was that we knew we were fucked.
Maybe that was wrong, too. Maybe we were already dead. But if so, whether this was some Heaven or flat-hell, we were marines. Why not fight? We had nothing left to lose, and fighting was what we did. I might not have been career, like Hard Dog, but I was a marine and it was in my blood by right of all the friend’s gore I’d wiped from my mouth. We were brothers and sisters ‘til whatever end.
‘Colonel Dawes?’ Hard Dog’s hoarse, coarse voice in my head. ‘How your boys doing?’
‘Mopping up the dregs, Colonel Brockner,’ I told her. ‘Hie your huskies on. We’re getting creamed, but that’s how you make soup, right?’
‘You mean omelettes and eggs?’
‘Maybe? Something like that?’
‘Dawes, you’re hopeless.’
‘Ma’am,’ I told her.
‘Sir,’ she said. ‘When you going to get this shit straight? Dickhead.’
‘Lieutenant Colonel Dickhead,’ I said.
She’d probably always been that way. I could picture her kicking the shit out of kids in a kindergarten sandpit, easy.
Me? I was just a guy on the way to some alien pyramid on a mad floating half-world to give them a parcel. Postmen and women, that’s all we were now. Postmen trying to deliver a package to some junkyard full of mean bastard dogs. Our package?
A nuke.
Hardly Christmas, but fuck ‘em.
Part Two
Our Thoughts Turned to War
Earth – 2290 A.D.
‘On gut and limb we crawled,
Over foe or friend,
So masked in blood,
Came disguised to Death,
But Death saw all,
He, who watched over Mankind’s end.’
‘Bane and Valour’
-
Attrib: Poet Frank Callahan (Circa. 2477 A.D.)
4.
On the Hood of the Bronco
Vidar Dawes
Thanatophobia. That’s the fear of death. By Velasan I hardly ever knew what day it was anymore, but I knew some longer words I didn’t know way back when. By Velasan thoughts, words, feelings all seemed more important than time, people more important than a Bronco. War changes you, for sure.
That first day I discovered what it was to fear dying, if not the right word for it. That was the day the sky turned dark, and from the dark came the Cephal.
Friends and lovers in bloodied messes of limbs, or stinking smoking things all curled in, like they held death unseen in their arms as they went to sleep. Death all around me, and none my own.
Sounds poetic, perhaps, but it isn’t. Death’s hard, and so many deaths change a man. I’m changed. Maybe it isn’t war that changes you, though. Maybe it’s blood. Like something of those who do die seeps into you no matter how quickly you wipe them from your face.
I wasn’t this way, that first day. Maybe a little cold inside, but in ways I always figured didn’t matter, like no attachments, no cares. Maybe those things matter more when your choices are whittled down. You don’t pick and choose who you care about anymore. You just care about whoever’s left by your side.
*
I wasn’t in love, but she liked my ride - a vintage, antique probably. It was old, anyway. Replica, of course, because it might be modelled on a fossil, but it wasn’t allowed to run on fossils.
I’m talking about my Bronco. I still remember that Ford Bronco, her on the hood, and the metal popping as we rolled around on it. I barely remember what she looked like. Dark hair, but might’ve been because it was night we were parked out by the airport and she wanted to try it out in the fresh air but her ass was cold and the hood was still warm.
I was twenty-five. A lifetime ago. Lots of lifetimes ago. Not mine, because I’m not done yet.
‘Vidar. Vidar? Vidar!’
I was in the zone, and something was loud overhead. It thought it was an airplane. It probably wasn’t.
‘Dawes! Get the fuck off!’
No meant no, and I was pissed about it, I imagine, but I wasn’t an asshole. Maybe a fair way, but not all the way, and whatever else I was, and am, I was never a politician when it came to killing time with women. No meant no.
‘The fuck is...’
I rolled away to the side. Probably sighed. Blood up, half-way there. You know how a man gets. Thinking I’m going home to some baby balm and a dent in the hood of a car I loved when I was aware of that noise – a loud drone. The sky was brighter than it should’ve been, because it was around two in the morning.
Something fell out of the sky as I was yanking up my jeans – I was so retro, back then. Hopping away from the car I saw a flaming chunk of something thunk into the dirt about fifty feet away.
‘What the...?’
It was something else that killed the car. The girl was gone, and so was the Bronco. Gone. I flew backward with flames in my eyes and shards of my 2176 tan and orange Bronco replica right alongside me, like wingmen I didn’t need or want.
I woke up later with my blackened Bronco burned out on grass charred in an uneven circle around her. No sign of the girl. There was heat on my face that wasn’t the morning sun. The air felt wrong. Might be the hangover you get from the secondary effects of a Bronco explosion. Maybe that was why I saw the car as a dead thing. I didn’t want to think about the girl (woman, really, but we were twenty-five and childhood fades slow) who’d been on the hood.
That jag of metal that had struck first stuck from the earth. It looked like one of those ceremonial daggers someone like Thugees might have used to sacrifice virgins.
But she wasn’t a virgin, I thought.
All that was left of that big shard was the wavy blade jutting out from the dirt.
God killed the Earth. I remember thinking that.
Maybe God sacrificed the Earth and held up its still beating heart to show the universe how it was done. It was on that day that humanity gave it all over to Lord Death and set aside any out-dated concepts of the old religions and Lord Death made sense to me right then. It was like an epiphany I had while my ears still rang and my face was hot and tender. God started shit, sure. If you want to go right to the top, though, you want Lord Death. He’s your man. The man. He’s the one who ends it.
That whistling noise in my ears from the explosion never went away. When it was quiet I remembered where it came from. A memory I could always hear in the brief moments of silence to come. Sometimes I’d remember her name in those moments. Sometimes I’d reach up, touch my fingers to my skull. It was on the right side, just above and behind my temple. I’d touch that point and it’d be like a door with something behind it I wanted to get to, but couldn’t. A locked door. Something good was in there, but something bad, too. If I had the key, I think my hands would’ve shook, and maybe I would have just put the key in my pocket and walked away time after time, never brave enough to even put it in the keyhole.
I don’t know. No one knows what they might do, or when they might do it.
That first coldness inside, thinking about a Bronco and not the girl on the hood, that never went away.
I survived, and did until the end, and perhaps I only clung on at all because of that simple act of defiance in the face of memory. Th
at key I never take out.
Maybe it was Death who waited behind the door that slammed locked and shut when my Bronco died.
I didn’t want to stare at the blackened space where my Bronco had been. I turned about when everything stopped spinning long enough for me to move my feet without falling flat on my face. There were trees to one side of the wreck, a chain link fence and the airport behind me on the other. The airport seemed like it was all on fire. Blackened hulks of hypersonic intercontinental commercial jetliners were huge corpses out there for what might have been mile-long plane-graveyards. Untidy graveyards, like the old ones, where some headstones were broken in two with age and vandalism. Older memorials lost beneath old trees. Here, at the airport, those broken headstones were jets sliced up, half-off the runways.
I puked, sat down while the sun worked its way higher in the sky. It wasn’t until maybe eleven in the morning I thought about how I was supposed to be at my job, or thought to look anywhere other than the airport.
I stood up. I had jeans on, and one boot. My shirt had a scorch mark on the chest and one of the shirt’s arms was missing. I wasn’t wearing the shirt, which was maybe why I wasn’t missing my arm. Maybe fate had it in for the shirt and a sweet spot for me.
There was a woman’s hand atop my shirt. It had a ring on it. I looked at my own hand. There wasn’t a ring there.
I have passed out, or blacked out, but whenever I was thinking again I wore my shirt and I felt the small circle of metal in the shirt pocket.
I forgot all about the ring, unbearably light inside my pocket.
I still couldn’t remember her name. It had been a pretty hand. I never looked back at it.
Jeans, one boot, a one-armed shirt. That was all I had. Not even my belt.
She’d pulled that free and slung it away into the long grass, hadn’t she? Had she?
I couldn’t remember. I didn’t want to. I didn’t have a ring. What ring?
Minds are remarkable things, aren’t they?
Out there in the burned grass, by the dead airport, there was no way for anyone to find me, no way for me to call...what? Fire? Sec-pol?
I laughed, then, when I set out back toward the road.
Sec-pol.
The fucking airport was on fire.
It was a Monday, hot, so probably sometime in the middle of a summer. It was Minnesota, I was twenty-five, and the year was 2290 A.D.
5.
Three for the Road
Vidar Dawes
Walking sideways I headed back for town, thinking I’d get somewhere, maybe find a bus, get to work. I couldn’t remember where I worked, or what my job was, but I knew it was a Monday and people had jobs so I probably did.
I was still in the trees – didn’t even think to follow the rutted track out to the main road – when I decided work would understand if I took a sick day. I’d lost my truck. That was bereavement, right?
I didn’t know where I was going, but I wasn’t messed up enough to bounce from tree trunks, and it was just woods, a new thing planted around the airport to pretty it up. It was mostly easy trees – conifers, pine. There were needles and cones underfoot even though it was summer. I liked it there. It was shaded and cool in what I knew was a hot and sweaty day.
With my one boot and lopsided, stunned gait I went for the road through the wood and sparse, needle-strewn undergrowth. I was thirsty, but I wasn’t worried about dying in a couple of hundred feet of woods. You can’t get lost and die in a little wood like that.
I was sideways because I only had one boot on. I thought about a pretty, small woman’s hand on my shirt and puked again. Vomiting made the ringing in my ears worse. I didn’t know where town was right then, or where I was, or if there was a bus out here. If I’d had my Personal Lock-Com, I could’ve beeped my location, got a cab to come out to me. My thoughts were like my footsteps. I let them take me wherever, as long as it was somewhere better.
The spruce and pine spat me out onto the road and I tried to work out which way to walk. A car came round a long easy bend far enough for me to scoot to the side of the road. A new car, one of those soulless things kind of half-possessed by specialised AI in case the driver’s an idiot. Bright blue, unnecessarily long, show off. A rich folk thing. It was doing around 100kph and the driver wasn’t looking, but you’d have to really try to crash one of those things. The processor would know I was there, even if the driver wasn’t paying attention.
I held out a thumb anyway because all I had was what I had, and hope.
Coming round that easy bend, the long blue car didn’t need to slow. Doing an easy hundred, it rode the curve smooth and went straight past me.
‘Fuck you, then,’ I said, and gave it the finger. As it passed something blinding and yellow like the sun pissing down a stream hit the car. It blew, flipped burning and spinning into the trees. The trees didn’t bend. The car did. That whine in my ears grew louder, and I looked up to see something flit by overhead. Fast. Like hypersonic. The sonic boom, and a cloud, and that tore needles from trees and blew it all back at me so I shut my eyes and staggered.
Before I shut my eyes though, I was sure I had seen something. Didn’t know what. Just that it was military, for sure.
It wasn’t a fighter jet that killed the rich folk car, though, because whatever shot the showy car blew the plane out of the sky, too.
*
Ten minutes or so later, and maybe a lopsided mile, I passed an intersection. I took the straight, not the turn, because that led out to the quarry road not town. It wasn’t that it was familiar. It was just because the intersection was signposted. I didn’t really know where I was. I remembered my name. I was near fear, near panic. Maybe it was all settling in, that shock.
My shoulders were quaking with a chill and some fear and confusion when I met another vehicle up ahead, parked...
A tank.
I didn’t know what kind of tank it was, because I was life guard at the spa where the rich girls swooned at the sight a long-haired twenty-five year old with his old-school Bronco and a clean smile. Me.
That’s what I figured I was, but I was kind of guessing. I had no idea what my job was, still, and had blood running down my head from a wound I didn’t know about just then, either. I was in shock. I wasn’t thinking about any one thing well. I was thinking about a hundred irrelevant things badly.
The tank was easy enough to make out in the noon sun. I saw two men and a woman in green clothing, too, but from this distance that was about all I could tell. They weren’t looking at me, and I carried right on toward them because it was peace, this was a new America, an enlightened America, and we’d done our fighting already, hadn’t we?
I wasn’t scared of them.
Something just piss-fired a fine car up against a pine tree, I thought, but the whine in my ears swallowed that up. Bronco’s dead, I thought, and I slid that under those lapping sound waves, too.
‘There! Someone there!’
The three of them spread wide on the road. A truck, a military thing, was parked to one side. The tank’s long gun was pointing back from me. The three looking at me had their rifles shouldered.
‘Hey,’ I said, closer. Worried, because even though they were ours, they were pointing long dangerous-looking things which spat fast and killed quick.
‘You hit?’ said a woman, her front teeth missing and stitches angry on her bottom lip, eyes wild.
‘No. My ride blew up,’ I said. ‘Going to town?’
‘Town?’ said a guy, and dribbled a thick wad of brown hashish-chew juice to one side. The other one of the three laughed, the woman just staring, eyebrow raised, because I had a dried-up waterfall of blood staining one side of me and didn’t know it.
‘Ain’t no town, Bub,’ said Spitter.
‘Oh,’ I said. I shrugged. ‘Know which way town is?’
The laugher called me a dumbass. He was probably right.
‘Oh, Honeybunch,’ said the woman – Brawler, I thought. ‘You deaf? Town�
�s gone.’
‘You don’t...’
‘Don’t matter,’ she said. ‘All the towns. This is it. This is the fucking end. Told you.’
‘Told me shit,’ said Spitter. ‘Your arms work, cowboy?’
‘Yeah,’ I said, confused, and maybe a little deaf, because their voices didn’t sound like they should.
‘Put your hands down,’ said the woman. ‘This isn’t a stick up, you’re not a stagecoach and this definitely isn’t a horse.’ She patted the side of the tank like it was, in fact, a horse. She kept her hand there, calming it. The tank whisperer.
I hadn’t realised I had my hands up. I put them down.
‘Yeah,’ said Spitter. ‘His hands work. Sling him a gun. You done signed up. What’d they call it? Conscriptanted?’
‘What?’ I said. I heard him, he just didn’t make sense.
‘Welcome to the army,’ said Laugher, and laughed.
‘Idiot,’ said Brawler to Spitter. ‘There’s no army no more. We’re like, ex-army. Resistance,’ she added.
‘Get over yourself,’ Spitter told her. ‘You’re so smart. You got no teeth.’
‘Screw you,’ Brawler told him.
‘What the fuck?’ That was what I said.
6.
That’s what the Fuck
Vidar Dawes
‘We’ve been invaded.’ Brawler. Her name was Georgina. She wasn’t bad looking, considering her teeth were knocked out. She wasn’t about to get any fancy dentistry.
‘By who? What? What?’
I sounded like an idiot. That ringing in my ears was still there over the top of everything. Tinnitus, I guess. I don’t know if that’s a gradual thing or a sudden thing, but it wasn’t a thing that got better, only worse. Kind of like being invaded.
‘Come on,’ said Brawler, and I moved over to them. I looked over my shoulder. I could see smoke behind. About a mile or ten minutes was a light-grey plume from the long fancy car burning up, and further away was a darker stain on the sky from the fighter jet. I didn’t think about the pilot, or the woman. I couldn’t see smoke from my Bronco. That was all burned out by the time I’d got up and dusted off.
Field of Heroes Page 2