by Toby Weston
Stella always welcomed new work for the team.
“Cool, what is it?” she asked.
“Search and Tag,” replied Chris. “A ScumWhale was crippled in a storm last week and has gone rogue. They have teams out looking for it, but the GPS is offline, and the thing is not returning comms.”
“Maybe it sank.”
“Probably not; it was sighted narrowly missing a fishing boat three days ago… here.” A map tag arrives. “Anyway, we get a retainer of twenty Coins a day, the finder’s fee is two hundred, and there’s at least one other operator working on this one, so let’s try to deliver on it. Okay?”
“Great, that will go towards some of the new kit we need! I’ll see if I can get Zaki or Segi to work on it with their network.”
“Right, that would work,” said Chris. “Don’t go too rich with their cut, though; this is a sweet deal. But it’s a good idea; they might have assets overhead that can help.”
“What about the GPS tag?” asked Stella. “Where do we pick one up?”
“See if you can swap one for some of your grilled crab or something. They only cost pennies. There is bound to be one somewhere; every net float has one. Get the gypsies to write a macro for Spray. I’ll send you the schematics, so they know where to get him to wedge it.”
“They call themselves the Kinfolk, not gypsies,” she chided. “And anyway, that all sounds a bit complicated for the seagull... He’s not super smart, you know.”
“If that doesn’t work, just get him to perch on the thing until we can locate them both. I’ve got to go now, Stella. You’re not earning enough for me to retire yet, and my two enormous daughters need to eat.”
They signed off and Stella noticed Tinkerbell and Spray on their way back to the Farm. Obviously, they couldn’t physically fit any more fish into their stomachs and were finally ready to do some work. She pinged Marcel to tell him to get ready, then sent a mail with the new job to Zaki and Segi, offering them a couple of Coins to run a search through any botnets and compromised satellites they had access to.
***
Stella’s Spex chime musically, @5eggE has come online.
[Connection request] @5eggE is requesting to join your room.
“Hey, Stella, how’s it going?”
“Hi, Segi.”
“What ya doing?”
“Working. Did you get my mail?”
“Yeah. I saw it come in and called. It shouldn’t be a problem. Want to help me do drone escorting for a delivery?”
“No thanks, I’m with Tinks and Spray. They’ve just finished eating, which took all morning!” Stella sends an exasperation emoti. “They are going to help me fix some rips in the pen nets.”
“You spend too much time with lower lifeforms,” Segi sends back, accompanied by a moping trollified self-portrait.
“I’m lucky to have a job. Anyway, how about you! I couldn’t get you or your brother at all last week.”
“Yeah, lots going on. We’ve got a new Spirulina bioreactor online, and I needed to set up an incubator for a new project. So what’s the job? If I can save up a bit of Coin, I might come and visit. It sucks being stuck here!”
“You should try being a penniless uneducated orphan for a while if you want to see what sucking means! I’ve been there and done that!”
“Yeah, but at least you never had to actually suck anything!”
And, with that, Segi signs off before Stella can ream him. It’s true, though; she’s lucky, luckier than her mum had been. It will soon be five years since her mother died, and Stella, who will be twenty in a few months, knows too well the career advancement options for an orphan teenager living on a floating brothel. She knows that not all the girls on the Farm will be lucky enough to land a job as CEO of an international corporation.
The Madam had taken her aside a few of years earlier and asked about her plans, mentioning in passing that several of the ship captains had been asking. Because she was very fond of Stella, in case she was ever interested, she could set up an auction and would give her a good cut of the proceeds…
Stella had told her she was very grateful for the kind offer, but her company was starting to make money and, if things continued to improve, she might not have to work as a whore at all. The Madam, usually as inscrutable as the wizened zen master she resembled, looked sceptical for a few seconds and then showed a rare flash of emotion and struck Stella quite hard on the shoulder.
“Good for you, girl!” she had said, before shuffling off in a flounce of robes and ribbons to greet a group of raucous sailors coming through the swinging doors.
Stella gets a short update mail from Siegfried and notices Spray flap off, presumably to start his task. She rides shotgun in his mind for a while, looking through his eyes while he soars off and away from the Farm. From his internal point of view, the seagull is again part of a reassuring confusion of wings and cries—which, by Segi’s careful design, will fly the optimum search grid centred on the most likely location of the ScumWhale.
Once she is confident Siegfried knows what he is doing, she clambers back down from the roof of the Admin Block and heads towards the steps, where Marcel should be getting ready. Rounding the corner, she catches sight of him pulling up his wetsuit. She can’t help noticing he is not a scrawny little runt anymore; then again, she is no longer the scruffiest kid on the Farm, either. She has become an enigma, with her posh clothes and the designer Spex that rarely leave her face. She watches him, while he ties his long, sun-flecked brown hair into a ponytail, then pulls the end back through the elastic loop so he has a tight nub of hair sticking off the back of his head. Marcel’s grin is the same, though, and he turns and flashes it at Stella before diving off the outer, curving rim into the Pacific.
Tinkerbell is already there and, with a rapid sequence of thrashing oscillations, swims off through the water to meet him. Stella dips into the dolphin’s stream of perception and watches as they play for a few minutes, until Marcel has to come up for air. She stops the remote viewing when she realises she is intruding, a feeling that makes her inexplicably jealous.
“Hey, Stella, look at this!” Marcel shouts, then dives below the waves again.
Before he has swum down more than a metre or so, Tinkerbell places her nose against the soles of his bare feet and pushes; torpedo and propeller, they go straight down. Marcel has one hand on his nose and is constantly equalising the pressure in his ears as they dive quickly to twenty metres. Then, they pause their descent, and Marcel glides over the dolphin’s back and places his mouth over her blowhole. A burst of bubbles slows to a trickle as Marcel breathes the air Tinkerbell is exhaling. Then it’s back to the torpedo position, and they drop another thirty metres.
“We don’t need that SCUBA gear!” Marcel sends.
Stella doesn’t know quite how to reply.
Chapter 3 – Out of Eden
Another day, another dull, dangerous deployment. Just 183 scratches left to make on the wall of the cave in his mind.
Keith got up, ate breakfast, grunted the required obscenities to his comrades, pulled on the new set of techno underwear that had miraculously appeared in his locker, and finally zipped himself into the suit’s removable, pressurised onesie. As he walked to the hangar, the clean fabric felt luxurious against his skin; soft silk quilting over Kevlar, seamless and gel-filled at the joints to avoid pressure sores. The sensory deprivation they all suffered from the command structure’s autistic communication hierarchy meant any vague trace of information was sucked dry and chewed over for relevant content. So, the arrival of new underwear, a rare and portentous event, was interpreted as: ‘You will be in constant combat for the next two weeks with no time to change your kaks.’
The front of Keith’s suit was splayed open, ready to envelop him as he stepped backwards into its cold grip. Once his heels were hard up against the back of the metal feet, the shin armour hinged closed around his calves. He repeated the process with chest, arms and head, leaning back and letting the
exoskeleton’s segments close around him until it enveloped his whole body, like an articulated ski boot. The head-up display showed the fuel cells were at 99% capacity—two days of normal activity—and all systems were showing green. To the left and right of him, more young men were being ingested. When they were all suited up, the Staff Sergeant hustled them out across the pitted tarmac and onto the knackered tiltrotor they knew so well.
It didn’t turn out to be two weeks of combat; the production of the latest adrenalin-soaked montage of hurt to be burnt into Keith’s psyche had barely lasted four days:
Drop off — yomp through the night — close on a group of tents — massacre at Surgie training camp — IED — ambush — “Medic! Man down!” — pinned down by mortars — fuel cells low — snipers in the night — bullet through the foot — “Useless fucking suits!” — “Where’s the fucking backup?” — “We’re on our own.” — big push back — grenades — big gun — bayonets — blood…
The squaddie let go of the Bohunk’s legs. They were barely kicking anymore; more like twitching. Keith let the knife slip from his bloody fingers. The gritty floor was covered in pools of frothy red broth. They were inside the low walls of what was probably the ruin of an ancient, one-room house, although it might just as easily have been a goat pen built at any time over the past five thousand years. To get to the ruin, the two had just spent six hours carefully crawling a five-hundred-metre circle from their last position, where most of the rest of the squad were still hiding. Once there, they had quietly slid over the back wall and killed the sniper lying behind a pile of collapsed stones that had once been the front wall. Ignorant of the danger, he had been peering intently through his scope and patiently pinging rounds down towards the exhausted, petrified squad below. He hadn’t noticed them. He probably thought they would still be clunking around in their stupid suits and hadn’t expected two silent mammals to come slinking out of the night to cut his throat.
They had made as little noise as possible; and, if they were lucky, the other nest across the valley wouldn’t have noticed their arrival. Keith rolled the body out of the way and lay down on his chest in the pool of warm blood. He checked his GPS and pointed the dead terrorist’s dependable Russ rifle towards the second sniper position. Through the sights, he could just make out two men: one lying on his stomach, the other sitting with his back to the wall, smoking a cigarette.
Keith’s buddy took up position next to him. He had unslung his own rifle and was also looking across the valley. With its superior sights, it would be no trouble putting a bullet into either of the enemy soldiers.
“I’ll take the smoker,” Keith said, selecting the less critical target.
Keith counted in a whisper and, on three, they both squeezed their triggers. The sniper’s body spasmed as the high-velocity round entered his chest. Keith wasn’t so lucky with his shot. The bullet went over his target’s head, smacking into the wall and peppering the flinching soldier with slivers of stone. Before Keith had a chance to line up a second shot, he felt a recoil next to him and watched through his scope as the smoker spun round and slumped down to the floor. The minor shrapnel lacerations on his face now the least of his worries.
That took care of the little group of Bohunks that had been harassing them for the past two days. A couple of the survivors had tried to make a break, but without sniper cover to keep Keith’s squad’s heads down, they were easily picked off as they ran, their warm bodies making easy targets in the cold night.
Keith’s squad was in a bad way. Most of their suits were out of juice and little more than scrap. Their macho, oversized weapons were impossible to carry unassisted. Four of sixteen were dead—including the squad leader. Another three were wounded, including Keith, whose foot had a hole through it. Bandages and boot held on three toes that were only connected by a flimsy mess of skin and flesh. Keith hopped and slid back down the side of the valley to their temporary base, where, with impeccable timing, word came through that they should expect backup and Evac within the next two hours. Nobody had the energy to bitch that, if command had bothered to tell them about the relief a bit earlier, they wouldn’t have needed to risk their lives in a midnight raid on the sniper nests.
While the adrenalin ebbed, sick and trembling, numb with resignation, they waited for the thrum of propellers that would announce the arrival of their ride.
They had started the night’s operation in icy-pitch blackness; but, while they were waiting, the sun had inched its way up a quarter of the featureless blue dome, and it was becoming uncomfortably hot for those lying on the hard, ochre clay. Thousands of years of winter storms had washed out a deep channel in the pebbly clay, which snaked between large rocky projections sticking up like colossal termite mounds. The slopes of the valley were dotted with olive trees and low shrubs. Semi-feral goats ambled amongst the boulders and bushes, cropping the few blades of grass left over from the previous winter’s rains.
The squad had set up in a curve of the gully, sheltered by its steep outer bank. Keith had started worming his way up the hill at 2 am and hadn’t got more than an hour or so of sleep before that. Additionally, for the last three nights, he had been intermittently shot at and blown up, while trying to sleep inside a humming suit of power armour—humming, in the sense that the fuel cells, hydraulics, and environment control systems were incessantly noisy, but also because it stank to high heaven of sweat and piss.
He was tired. They all were. They lay like a herd of elephant seals; the two functioning battlesuits were the colossal males, Keith and the rest were the diminutive females, nestling in amongst them for protection. Backup and Evac were coming. They didn’t have to march to the next engagement or dig in for combat, so they were grateful for this opportunity just to lie and wait.
Their tiltrotor, familiar from its engine’s painful, irregular whine, came into view around the end of the valley. A small herd of goats broke in a frenzied dash across the scrub, as the droning harmony of the propellers became the roar of a thousand paddles slapping bare arses. It flew overhead, then banked and circled once before coming back to hover a hundred metres to the south.
Like reluctant school kids dragged from sleep by their alarm clocks, the squad grumbled to its feet. It was 10:45. The tiltrotor sank towards the ground, shifting impossible amounts of dust into the air, with its blades slicing the red soup in their fully horizontal configuration. Partly obscured by the throat-clenching dust, Keith watched as four suited figures dropped on lines from the rear ramp, presumably intending to set up a perimeter.
As the roaring, dusty chaos approached, a cackle of surprised yelps from the waiting soldiers indicated something unexpected was happening. Keith grabbed his helmet and used the HUD to zoom in on the four dangling men, now flailing wildly as they descended. Their heads were whipping from side to side like toddlers having a tantrum, while their limbs were bent in what looked like unnatural and very painful directions. It was grotesque, like a cybernetically enhanced epileptic fit. There was a blast of automatic weapons fire, which seemed to come from within the plane, and a neat row of holes appeared in the side of its fuselage.
“Fuck,” shouted Keith. “We’re under attack!”
To his left, there was a nasty gristly sound, followed by a terrible scream. Both armoured marines in working suits seemed to have contracted the same fitting disease. The scream had been from an unarmoured squaddie, who had been punched in the nose by a fifteen-horsepower fist. Keith assumed the guy inside the suit would probably be screaming too, unless he was already dead. His armoured hand had grabbed onto the chin of his helmet and was wrenching his head from side to side at neck-snapping speed.
While Keith had been looking away, one of the tiltrotor’s engines had caught fire. It was sliding sideways at an appalling angle, with one wing practically scouring ruts in the earth, while dragging the four spasming battlesuits through the brush. Keith watched in horror and, a second later, it was over. With a wallop of a concussion, the plane became an
expanding sphere of shrapnel, immediately obscured by a mini mushroom cloud of fire and black smoke.
It was impossible to get close enough to the thrashing suits to help their buddies. They were both almost certainly dead anyway, as were the former occupants of burning wreckage, that only two minutes ago, had been their ride home—or, if not home, at least to somewhere slightly less deadly than this region bordering the Levant, which the Caliphate reluctantly recognised as Zilistan, but which many locals still referred to as Osmaniye.
The wind changed direction, suddenly pressing down the thick, black smoke to envelop the pathetic group of human wreckage that was Keith’s squad. With colossal effort, Keith got onto his knees and pressed his face to the floor, trying to find a pocket of clean air to breathe, but there was no chance. He began to hear peals of ragged coughing and vomiting around him as his colleagues were forced to breathe in the toxic air. He crawled as far as he could and, despite viciously slicing his nose on a piece of red hot plane debris, managed to keep his jaws clamped shut. Finally, with his diaphragm clenching uncontrollably, he gave in and took a breath. He began to cough immediately; with each wracking intake of breath, the acrid burning pain grew worse, until his vision filled with glittering points of light and he blacked out.
