Field of Heroes

by Craig Saunders

  *

  The second thing? The army is out there on its own. It protects its own, it punishes its own, and you will walk the line.

  We were all soldiers, enlisted or conscripted or not, whether I wanted to be or not. Everything from wherever they came? Enemy. It wasn’t any more complicated than that, and didn’t have to be.

  There was something comforting about that. There were no grey lines. There were no demands, no treaties, no discussions. Everything was war, and war was all there was. It was all. We lived war day and night.

  We were Americas Unity forces!

  No. Not wherever I was. We were the dregs, with sergeants or whoever they could barely spare watching over us to make sure we didn’t freestyle completely. They must have hated us. We were on a training camp as big as a continent where everything was live fire, and nothing was a drill, and these sergeants were babysitting people like me who were basically civilians, but we were under their wing, and we knew it.

  People committed crimes in the army, of course they did. They didn’t get away with their sins for long. The army has its own law. A man named Paveet tried to rape a woman in the communal showers who refused to cooperate. She screamed. A sergeant dragged the begging man out into the dirt between tents and shot him in the head. Neither Paveet nor the woman were career. They were outsiders, like I was.

  No one stopped the sergeant or complained.

  A gunnery sergeant was caught stealing food. She was stripped of her rank in a field court martial. She wasn’t given punishment, but sent packing.

  Same result.

  They killed the one. The other, they cut loose. She might be dead, she might not. It wasn’t the crime that changed the punishments. It was the army.

  Stay and join up. Tow their line. Or take my chances alone, in a torn and battered world with nothing but my wits? I never was that smart. It was their house, their rules, and I was cool with that.

  *

  Third, I guess (though it’s a long list), was that we fight.

  Sounds idiotic, but it’s not.

  In peacetime, the army trains. You’re in the army, though. The rest of it is kind of icing, marzipan. The cake? You fight. That’s what the army’s for. Not for keeping people busy, or cleaning the shithouse, or eating stodgy carbs and makeshift cheap proteins. Not for leave, and drinks, or a bed and uniform.

  Just those fit and able to enough to have survived the early days, with arms enough to carry a weapon, joined whatever it was that we were. In case there was any doubt as to what counted as ‘fit for service’, they put up a sign on each hastily constructed base I slept at, wherever it was.

  If you have less than one eye, one arms and two legs, take a seat.

  Everyone else got a gun.

  *

  You can’t describe something as small and huge as the Army in a few points, no more than you can explain something as tiny and immense as physics with a scrawl on a napkin.

  There’s something about not just the Army, but about soldiering, too.

  If fighting was the core, this was tenet on the army’s tablet of stone:

  The army, or a soldier, will never have all the weapons needed. War is never tidy, never perfect. You improvise and adapt. You are the weapon, mind and body. The army was the finger that pointed us to where we needed to be.

  It wasn’t the weapons. It wasn’t the rifles and guns and tanks at our backs.

  Scraps were being picked up on street corners, everything recycled, repurposed. Army standard DTC (Dermals and Thermals, sometimes called Abs and Slabs) were upgraded but the units I fought with those first years didn’t have those. We were those soldiers at the front of the line in old, old times, when military tactics consisted of sending the cheap units like me in first to soak up a bit of resistance. Kind of like getting a couple of people to try a bottle cap, weaken it up. I figured the heavy army, the real trained soldiers just came along later, twisted off that bottle cap and everyone clapped and drank the beer.

  Scientists were already calling the enemy units ‘Zoan’. The other ones, ones that walked on two legs...they were the ‘Cephal’. Stupid names. Like this was biology, like the aliens were something we could understand in terms of Earth’s evolution. But they weren’t. They weren’t a frog on a steel table waiting to be cut open. They were not us. They weren’t even of Earth.

  Did we think by studying we’d understand them? Understand how to beat them?

  We thought aliens would make sense. Of course there were aliens...why wouldn’t there be? But they’d be like us.

  Right? No. Wrong.

  DTC’s provided a measure of defence against the Cephal’s long guns, which shot bolts like yellow lightning. At a distance, the Cephal were better than good – imagine a sniper, army-trained, sending out thousands of practise rounds a week, time after time, getting to know their weapons. Every Cephal was a great shot.

  Up close was a different matter. They had some sort of flat energy blade, around two, two and a half feet long. Looked like a bar of gold that shot out from gauntlets they wore on each arm so that they fought with two blades which would cut through steel.

  We had standard K-Bar knives, most of us, or stuff we picked up along the way. Some of us had machetes, or hatchets. One guy found a slightly rusted four hundred year old Colonial era sword complete with a fist guard. A Cephal blade cut the thing in two.

  Fight with what you can.

  Also know...it won’t always work.

  *

  I fought from Minnesota, south through Louisiana, on to Texas and battles between burning oil derricks. Galveston was gone, Houston was a war zone the likes no one had seen. Of York, Boston, the East Coast? It was a wasteland. Fayetteville wasn’t the only nuclear strike. In one year, I saw more of the old Union than I’d seen in my life and most of that was gone.

  No matter how much comes first, this always comes last, and I guess it has to:

  Death.

  Worship of Lord Death gained ground and the Army long held him up. They had Chaplains to preach the word. I wasn’t devout, but I understood. Death waited. Death watched over us. We didn’t get to stop being soldiers, ever, except when Death embraced us.

  The guy with the sword? Abraham-something. I can’t remember, but I don’t feel bad. If I remembered every name I wouldn’t have room for anything else. Mostly I remember a feeling – it was close, tight, full of sweat but like a cold kind of humidity. A gradual wall of ice seemed to build around me so that even after a year, the screams, the sights, the pain, the sounds...it was all muffled and came with a cloak of mist attached about it.

  Yes, the Army nurtured us, made us better killers, if not better humans.

  Yes, I killed more with a gun than everything else, but it wasn’t the gun.

  Yes, the gun in my hands was just as much a part of me as the coldness which grew inside with each passing week, with each person I spoke with, laughed with, joked and drank and slept with. That dull chill grew deeper each time they died and I lived. I think I carried a little of their death inside right along with me but penned in a hand I didn’t write, in a book of names without number in a language only Lord Death could read.

  Maybe I needed to bring those memories to Velasan and lay them to rest on the field of battle where they belonged. That was later though, and you can’t bury your memories while you live. Only Lord Death could take those names from you. Lord Death might not be the Alpha, but he was the Omega, and that was the only truth that mattered.

  Part Three

  Embattled, yet Unbroken

  Earth – 2292 A.D.

  ‘The grace of our forebears lay not in their ingenuity, nor tech/mech acumen (for they were certainly lacking), but in their vim and pip, and their valour, for their willingness to bleed for our blessed generations and the good Lord Death. It was without doubt the storied sacrifice of those brave souls which would later sow the seeds for this age of wonders, our second Unity.’

  Attrib: Field Scrivener Sam Banerjee/Lt.
3rd Class/War Diaries

  16.

  Uncountable

  Delphine Mamet

  Delphine wasn’t the woman she’d been at the start of the war, two years ago. She still ran, but three times a week, not daily. She was young. Should be walking somewhere beneath the sun with a girlfriend, perhaps, but then when had she last seen natural sunlight? There was U.V. lighting in the common areas and no one was pasty, not especially. Where would she go anyway? On a date to the cafeteria?

  She didn’t feel young. When she looked in the mirror before joining whatever group discussions or field of interest to which she felt she might contribute, there was something in her eyes that didn’t belong in a face as young as hers. Not quite despair, but close. It wasn’t the coldness a soldier might possess, nor was it hopelessness. In Alexandria she saw death, both natural and unnatural, and she wasn’t inured to it at all.

  Delphine thought perhaps sadness itself was a contagion. There was a staid sense of ennui which pervaded the still air of Alexandria, and she imagined they all felt a little like Sisyphus must have felt as he laboured at a task he could never finish.

  The atmosphere in the first year had been one of terror, but it had been tempered with a giddy kind of excitement. The staggering possibilities for science from the alien contact seemed endless. Though they were hostile (an understatement, that) there was intellectual treasure to be grasped from the adventure of first contact.

  Two years in, and that sense of gleeful wonder despite the horrors was long gone.

  Delphine was cooped up with people like her – academic minds and souls – and people unlike her, too. The civilians and soldiers did not look at this new world above them as she and her colleagues did.

  It wasn’t the civilians’ lot, nor the soldiers jobs, to wonder at the marvels of alien technology or society or distant planets. Their jobs were different. Survival. Control. Calm.

  There were the expected tantrums. Fear came out as anger, and yelling matches in all corners of Alexandria were a common earache. The soul-sickness deepened with each passing day. The learning process of bunker-living was harder in many ways than the thousand specialities the denizens inside Alexandria’s cavernous interior excelled in.

  There were deaths from natural causes, but a rash of suicides, too. A slow trickle of depression eventually overflowed in some shallower vessels than Delphine until those vessels could only sink to depths from which there was no return.

  Several murders occurred, too. It wasn’t even hatred. It was stupid disagreements that echoed to deafening shouts in the stone hallways with nowhere to go. Outside, a failure to empathise or even see another’s view might have warranted a stern argument at most. Not inside. Everything seemed more important in a closed environment than it really was.

  A medical doctor jammed a dinner knife up an off-duty hall sweeper’s nose for the way he drank coffee.

  There were no prison cells. The doctor was expelled.

  Why waste food?

  She saw the sense, and in understanding that, she liked herself and her situation even less.

  As time marched along in slow, artificial footsteps, it became the military’s job to protect those brilliant minds from themselves. The battle was constant and steady, and it was against a kind of mental cascade which might progress far enough to bring down the whole facility. The systems sustained life easily enough, but humans were always the unknown quantity, the unseen contaminant in any experiment.

  Humans contaminate everything, even mathematics because those are our numbers, our machines, our measurements...

  Delphine wasn’t thinking about language while she sat alone by choice. She was maudlin and drunk and she was thinking about numbers. About how humans tried to understand chaos by tidying everything into numbers. Wondering at the numbers she’d seen splashed across screens showing news, reports, data. There were screens everywhere she looked.

  She took another drink of the brandy she’d forgotten was in her hand.

  Billions had died, but what did numbers ramping up mean?

  Delphine’s thoughts were sliding past what she wanted, but she knew it was there, somewhere.

  You can’t see billions of dead. Just those that would fit into a screen. Even from the sky, you can’t see a billion dead. If you laid three people down, perhaps, dependent on the subjects, of course, you had a square metre. Three people in one square metre. Maybe standing up you could squeeze in some more. Call it five.

  A million people in a football stadium, on the ground, in the stands. Zoom back.

  We’ll call that million.

  Stick a ‘0’ on the end. It’s just a zero.

  Only a zero, she thought. She was drinking too much to think straight. She dreaded standing up. But it was drink or cry and she didn’t want to cry alone. Of the two, drinking alone seemed moderately less sad.

  She thought things like that, in the quiet moments. What was worse? Being drunk or crying? What did a zero mean when a number became large enough?

  Will I dream of a football stadium full of corpses, piled all the way up to the top? Ten stadiums, then a thousand?

  Didn’t matter how far the eye panned back. It couldn’t see them.

  Numbers get big enough, they might as well be zeroes.

  She got stuck on that thought as she staggered back to her ‘home’. She was still riding a carousel with number-horses when she lay down, having forced herself to vomit out some of the alcohol.

  So sensible, she thought.

  Even drunk she wasn’t far enough gone to simply pass out like she’d hoped.

  Too cowardly. Delphine pushed that snide, slippery admonition away. She understood perfectly well that she was suffering from a deep depression, and it was far more dangerous than taking on more brandy than she could handle. So she fidgeted in her bed too drunk to sleep, not drunk enough to pass out. To start with, she’d thought of her domicile as her room. Not any longer. Now, she thought of it as a cell.

  Drunk enough to see the number carousel spinning about her closed eyelids, she still couldn’t get a break from a mind that wanted to run even when she slept.

  Finally, Delphine slipped over into sleep. The words ‘cell’ and ‘Cephal’ were all jumbled in a dream she couldn’t quite hold onto. She got up, splashed her face and drank water with aspirin.

  The next time Delphine slept, she snored, sweating out drink as she hit upon the deeper dreams. She dreamed of blue waves, of a sea, of dolphins and whalesong.

  She woke with the kernel of an idea.

  What is faster than the concept of ‘1’?

  Perhaps it isn’t a language at all. Not something with sounds, or words, or anything that a human might ever get to know.

  ‘0’ is faster, isn’t it? The thing before ‘1’.

  ‘Sir,’ she said to Gen. Ng on private conference channel that morning. ‘I have an idea that might sound ridiculous.’

  Her head thumped in the tiny spaces between each word she spoke.

  ‘Right now I’ll take fantasy and hallucinations, Dr. Mamet.’

  ‘Well...there is no sound, no wave, no light that we have detected between Zoan and Cephal. Nothing discernable to any equipment we possess. What if the augments aren’t links to boost words, or even thoughts, but something entirely more direct. An emotional response. Something humans cannot measure because we never have been able to. Something outside of scientific instruments’ ability...’

  ‘Like the soul? Something uncountable? The ineffable?’

  ‘I was thinking psychic energy...but yes. What if what they do is so far outside our human experience our assumptions are blinding us?’

  Her thoughts drifted again. She scratched at unruly, dirty hair while General Ng visage faded and she focused entirely on her thoughts, not the General’s response.

  She wasn’t psychic. She wasn’t some kind of empath. She was a linguist, but before words? What did intellect have?

  Emotion, she thought.

  Prehistoric
times. The id. The very base of thought?

  Is that what they’ve harnessed?

  ‘Dr. Mamet?’

  She didn’t know what he’d said. It didn’t matter right then, because she knew what she wanted. They had dead Cephal.

  What we – I - need is a captured Cephal.

  ‘Sir, is it possible to get me one? I want a Cephal.’

  Gen. Ng laughed, but he didn’t dismiss her out of hand.

  When Delphine crawled back to bed in the middle of the day, it wasn’t the General’s laughter that drew a soft blanket over her despair, but having something to aim at.

  17.

  Advancement

  Vidar Dawes

  What can you do with nothing? That’s what we were – those of us who survived long enough. Not Army, not civilians. Most people, they get nothing, they can’t do a damn thing with it. Like I said, though; the Army wasn’t most people. They used what they were given and they made it work or just wore it out and sometimes both.

  Career army, they didn’t want us. They assigned captains and lieutenants and sergeants, gave us some training, sure. Equipment, too, but we got the leftovers. Whatever was old, or battered, or inferior, that was what came our way.

  While the regular forces had KES suits, and D-Guards, and Fist Cannons, we had machine pistols that jammed every other magazine and no oil to maintain them, but you know what? We figured it out. It’s surprising what you can make work if you get your head around the fact that you are never, ever going to have all that you want. Across the continent there were tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, just like me. Those fit enough to fight and not smart enough to break our own backs so we could take up manufacturing munitions in a basement someplace quiet away from the heavy action.

  There’s a limit to what you can do with people like me. You can’t train a man to fly a fighter jet in a couple of years. We were army, though. They might not have wanted us, but we survived. Me, Cartwright, Okinado, more...we survived.