The Light Brigade

by Kameron Hurley

  The sky above us exploded.

  When you drop, you burst apart like . . . Well, first your whole body shakes. Then every muscle gets taut and contracts, like you’re experiencing a full-body muscle spasm centered in your core. The CO says it’s like a contraction when you’re having a kid, and if that’s true, if just one is like that, then I don’t know how everybody who has a kid isn’t dead already, because that’s bullshit.

  Then you vibrate, you really vibrate, because every atom in your body is being ripped apart. It’s breaking you up like in those old sci-fi shows, but it’s not quick, it’s not painless, and you’re aware of every minute of it. You don’t have a body anymore, you’re locked in.

  You’re a beam of light.

  9.

  When we started to come back together, I expected to suck bad air, to leap with easy confidence, to see the ruddy mountains of Mars. But before our feet had even corporealized, we drew enemy fire. We burned up a dozen of the enemy right there even as we were getting our bearings. Our goddamn coms weren’t even online yet.

  I lay flat on the ground, unsure where the live fire was coming from. Churned brown dirt left rutted trails in thick, chewy crab grass. I peered at the sky, which looked awful blue to me, for Mars. When I confirmed all my body parts had come through all right, I tried to ping Muñoz over our squad channel. I couldn’t locate her call sign.

  My squad mates’ call signs and positions popped in on my display. I had a moment of vertigo. Jones was tagged as squad leader. That threw me immediately. Jones was supposed to be back at base, cozying up with his immersives.

  As more came online, the situation didn’t get any clearer. Prakash’s name came up; I saw her just ahead and to the left, her slim form obscured by early morning fog that snaked along the ground. Yes, that was definitely Prakash and not Jawbone.

  Abascal and Squib were missing too. In their place were two people I didn’t know; a tall woman tagged as Omalas and a heavy man called Marino. My mind went back to all the people Muñoz had introduced me to back at base. I had no memories of these.

  “Where are we?” I said into the squad channel.

  “Holding pattern,” Jones said. “They fucked something up. Stand by for evac.”

  “What?”

  Flashing lights. A smear of red across my vision, as if the world itself tore open. I burst apart.

  Shit.

  We came down in the middle of a banana field and immediately traded fire. I shot blindly this time. Our rifles seared through banana trees, sprayed the fine remains in great clouds of residue. It’s confusing when you come down in the middle of something already going on. Sometimes the energy weapons go right through you because there’s not enough of you stuck together yet. But sometimes you’ve come together just enough, and they hit you, and either you’re meat enough for it to kill you, or all your atoms break apart, and you’re nothing. You ghost out.

  I’ve seen a lot of people ghost out.

  I came together and started firing. I saw the DI’s face as I fired.

  I hit an alien girl—some civilian at the banana farm. She was just a kid. I heard her and her mother screaming on the other side of the irrigation ditch. Their whole family, screaming, because I’d hit her and her legs were gone.

  “Hold fire! Hold fire!” the CO over our platoon channel.

  I lay on the ground and pressed my face across the butt of my rifle.

  “Dietz?” Jones, over the squad channel.

  Goddammit, he wasn’t supposed to be here. The logistics people had fucked this up.

  “Where is everybody?”

  “Don’t shit your pants again, Dietz,” Jones said. “Prakash?”

  “Alive and ready to burn up Martian ass!” she said.

  “Omalas?”

  “Here.”

  “Marino . . . Marino, ping me you shit-fucker.”

  “Yeah, yeah. Cleanup mission,” Marino said. He sounded like some career soldier with everything to prove. “They get it right this time?”

  We rallied around Jones, who was still listed as squad leader. I stumbled over burst banana trees; smears of overripe fruit ground into the loam. The other units were moving too, checking losses. I didn’t see the CO, but her rally point pinged my GPS.

  “There weren’t supposed to be civilians here,” Jones said. He gazed at the farmer family and the screaming girl, about a hundred paces up the dirt track.

  “I don’t get it,” I said. “Where’s Muñoz?”

  The whole team turned to me. They wore fire helmets that covered their faces, and I was almost glad for it. I could imagine the faces behind the stances.

  “You need to spend more time with your psych, Dietz,” Jones said coolly.

  My coms came online. I looked down and to the left, and the encrypted mission schematic came up.

  I reviewed the mission brief. My stomach dropped. I tasted bile. The mission had updated. It wasn’t a Mars recon mission.

  I wanted to confirm this with the squad, to ask if I was nuts, but Jones’s quip about the shrink gave me pause. Had I missed something? Something obvious? My heads-up display said our mission was to hunt for subversives in one of the civilian towns the Martians had set up in southern North America—CanKrushkev territory. The brief was clear. Was it my memory that was fucked up?

  “This is bullshit,” Marino said. “Wiping baby alien asses.”

  “Rally point’s up,” Jones said. “Head to the CO’s position.”

  I clamped my mouth shut and did as I was told. I remembered the DI telling me to follow orders. Remembered what happened when I didn’t. Relax, Dietz, I told myself. It will make sense. Something went wrong, that’s all.

  We rallied with the rest of the platoon at the center of the civilian town; it wasn’t more than a main street, really. I tried to ping Muñoz again, thinking she was with the wider platoon, but she wasn’t. Jawbone, Squib, and Abascal were missing, too. There were new names in this place: Markesh, Leichtner, Sandoval, Landon. I had no idea who they were, and—hidden behind their opaque helmets—I couldn’t even scrutinize their faces to determine if it was a technical glitch giving me the wrong names on my heads-up.

  Two more platoons wearing CanKrushkev fatigues worked their way up from the other side of the street, kicking down doors as they went. Our platoon had two prisoners: tall, thin Martian settlers with dark hair. They wore jeans and T-shirts. One of the shirts said I love my CEO. Nice joke, kid. Someone had taken away the protective lenses they used to shield their eyes from the sun, which was more intense here than Mars. The lenses also served as connected displays like ours. Removing those glasses blinded them in more ways than one.

  “Where the fuck have you been, Jones?” the CO said.

  “Just got a little turned around, sir.”

  “Turned around? You’ve got a fucking GPS. There some malfunction I should know about?”

  “No sir,” he said. “Just, you know—we’ve got Bad Luck Dietz with us.”

  “Sir,” I said, “a civilian was hit, back that way.”

  “Christ, Dietz,” she said. “We’ll send a medic when this area’s clear.”

  The platoons from CanKrushkev met us outside the town hall. They had six more insurgents with them, all zip-tied, their lenses stripped from their skinny faces. They were young kids, younger than us, pock-marked and in need of dental work. Martian settlers on Earth weren’t considered residents, citizens, or even ghouls. They paid a tithe to the corp, and their access to basic care and humanitarian rights was largely self-governed.

  Our CO went over to confer with the COs from the other platoons while we regarded one another over the heads of our respective prisoners.

  “Jones,” I said.

  “Shut up,” he said. “Don’t say anything.”

  “Just tell me where Muñoz is. Did the mission change halfway through the jump? That’s fine, but I don’t have anything in the brief about it.”

  “Shut up, Dietz. Just . . . let’s try to get through
this mission without anyone dying. We can talk all you want at base. Don’t freak everyone out with this stuff when we’re on mission.”

  I had no idea what he was talking about, but he was squad leader. I bit back my retort. I’d save all this for base like he said, but then I wanted answers. The entire point of mandatory training is to get you to stop asking questions.

  When the COs got word the area was clear, I went back with Prakash and our medic to help the alien I’d shot, but it didn’t matter. She wasn’t going to walk unless somebody regrew her legs, and only citizens have those benefits. Shit, these people couldn’t even get their teeth straightened.

  I had only fired once. But one is all it takes.

  I stood over her while she screamed, and kept trying to remember all the horrible immersives they had shown us in training, about how Martians starved their own people and took away their free will. They’re aliens. They’re the enemy.

  Right?

  Prakash walked back with me and the medic. “You seem weird, Dietz,” she said. “I mean, weirder than usual. It bother you, about the alien?”

  “No.” That lie tasted bad. It wasn’t a lie a paladin would tell.

  Prakash rubbed at her left arm. Shook it out.

  “You injured?” I asked.

  “Naw. Something from the drop. Just hurts. Feels funny. No big deal.”

  “You tell the medic?” The medic walked ahead of us. We spoke on a two-way channel.

  “Don’t worry about it,” she said. “Didn’t affect the fight. Area’s clear.”

  We navigated back to where our platoon waited for extraction. The prisoners had been turned over to the CanKrushkev forces. I went over the names of the platoon on my display again. Same glitch. Same new names. Still no Muñoz.

  “Prep for evac,” the CO said over the platoon channel.

  We lined up; kept about a foot between the soldier on either side of us. Secured our weapons. Jones was on my left, Omalas on my right. Prakash was just in front of me, still scratching at her arm.

  “Be still, Prakash,” Jones said on our squad channel.

  This was one of the most vulnerable times for our platoon, right up there with when we first corporealized in the field. A platoon from CanKrushkev stood on the next rise, supposedly to guard our backs, but I wouldn’t put it past another corp to smoke us where we stood if they thought they could get away with it.

  “Something’s fucked with my arm,” Prakash said.

  Jones said, “We’ll deal with it at base. Hold for extraction.”

  Our bodies began to vibrate.

  I locked my jaw, though I knew I wasn’t supposed to. You’re supposed to meditate, but I’ve always been shit at meditating. I fixed my gaze on the back of Prakash’s head, trying to use that as a concentration point.

  “Fuck, fuck!” Prakash said. Her whole form juddered, stutter-stop, like a broken image on a projection. She was there, then gone, then there again.

  The rest of us vibrated.

  “Hold!” the CO said. “Hold for extraction. Stay calm.”

  The pain came. The massive contraction.

  Prakash winked out. Came back. Her left arm was twisted around behind her. It now snaked through her torso, jutting out the front of her chest. Her fingers spasmed. The sound she made over the squad channel was inhuman. A moist gurgling heave. Her mouth twisted impossibly, like wet clay thrown on a slab.

  We broke apart.

  I could still hear the alien girl screaming.

  10.

  We corporealized.

  The screaming was mine. I was on all fours, shrieking my guts out at the broken grass beneath me.

  “Dietz? Dietz?” Jones’s voice.

  Someone grabbed my helmet, pulled it clear. It was Jones, knees in the dirt beside me, a look of fear and concern on his face. I’d never seen him look so scared for anybody but himself. “You okay? You come back okay? Show me your digits, Dietz.”

  I held up both hands. Jones pulled me into a massive hug. I fell into him, still shaking hard.

  “That Dietz?” the CO said, and pulled Jones away and flashed a pen light in my eyes. “Name, rank,” she said.

  “Dietz. Private.”

  “And where have you been, Private Dietz?”

  “I . . . I don’t know.”

  “We did fine,” Jones said. “You were great. All of us came back whole.”

  “Prakash?” I said.

  “Aw, you miss me?” Prakash said, pushing up her visor. She stood behind the CO, giving me a little half smile. “It because I saved your ass on Mars?”

  “What?” I said.

  “Pretty sure it was Dietz who saved your ass,” Jones said.

  “That’s enough chatter, Jones,” the CO said. The scroll of her heads-up display winked in her left eye. “Logistics wants to see Dietz. Dietz, you hear me? Intelligence and logistics will want to see you. They’re sending people down now. Stay clear.”

  Jones moved away. Prakash pulled off her helmet. Two medics were checking the status of the platoon. A vehicle came down from base, carrying two science officers and a corporal. Those ones, I figured, were for me.

  • • •

  “Private Dietz, can you tell us what happened on Mars?” The woman across from me was all lines and angles, that ageless face the officers all had, bushy brows that met like caterpillars over her eyes. I found myself watching her brows as she spoke. She had introduced herself as Lieutenant Ortega.

  “I don’t remember,” I said. “Sorry. My numbers are bad for drops. Don’t you have recordings?” What I wanted to tell her was that I’d never been to Mars. But saying that out loud wasn’t looking like a good idea. I was still processing the girl I shot in a banana field and here they were chattering about Mars when I’d never seen it.

  “We need to know what you remember.”

  The cramped room was painted a soft, calming blue. I knew there must be more people watching, but couldn’t figure out which walls they were behind. It was all flat, blank surfaces.

  “I remember . . . bursting apart. Coming back together.”

  “You came back screaming.”

  “Shouldn’t my recording—”

  “Private Dietz.” She tapped the metal table between us. I tensed, but she did not give away where the other watchers were. Her gaze stayed on the table. I figured she must be conferring with her superiors, hiding her heads-up flicker from me.

  “Here’s what we can tell you. I do have recordings of your performance on that last drop, the Mars combat mission. You performed well. Better than well. It’s why I can almost excuse the shit that happened the first time.”

  “The first time?”

  “Don’t play dumb, Dietz. People died.”

  I eased back in my chair. Hard metal.

  “What gets me, Dietz, is that every time your medical records come back, your cellular structure has degraded faster than anticipated. This is one reason you weren’t authorized for the first line of drops. I’m willing to—grudgingly—believe that maybe you don’t have recall after some drops. This is the second time we’ve had this issue. At least this was . . . better than the first. My recommendation, at any other point in the war, would be to ground you. But we need all the good soldiers we can get. So if you’re redeployed, well . . . Maybe something will come back to you. If it does. Tell us.”

  “If I’m redeployed?” I said, because that seemed to be the safest question.

  The light of her heads-up display went out. “You still need to clear your psych evaluation. C’mon, Dietz. This isn’t your first rodeo.”

  • • •

  They sent me to the psych evaluation. I guess they sent the rest of my squad too, though clearly our memories of what had happened on the last drop differed dramatically. Everyone gets a basic psych evaluation before they recruit you, but this felt different. Me and the rest of the platoon were housed in the decon barracks for our forty-eight hours of decompression and quarantine after they returned us to base. T
here were no clocks in there. No live broadcasts. No access to the outside at all, just stuff to read and listen to, immersives, games, and plenty of workout equipment. I spent the first day after we came back running on the treadmill and doing shooting simulations. I had no way to ask about Muñoz or Jawbone or Squib or Abascal on any outside communication system, and I feared asking anyone in the platoon. I kept my mouth shut and listened. Another good tip from my mom. People are always looking for reasons to imprison or kill ghouls. Stay quiet. Keep your head down. Be polite. They may still kill you anyway, but maybe they’ll kill the other guy first.

  I got called in to see the psych on day two.

  “How was it?” I asked Jones when he came back from his time with the shrink.

  “Just stick to the mission brief,” Jones said. “You especially.”

  The brief was the only thing I’d been able to study with any detail since I got back. While there was no access to our performance, or our platoon’s recordings, I could always see the brief for whatever our last mission was. It hadn’t been a Mars recon mission, or an insurgent roundup in the southern half of North America. We had been on a straight-up Mars combat mission to retake a base under heavy artillery fire. I had absolutely no memory of that. I really wished I had. It sounded great.

  One of our handlers beckoned to me from the hallway. “Dietz!”

  The handler escorted me to a windowless room painted the pale blue of a robin’s egg. A great shrub took up one corner. LED film lined the ceiling, displaying the image of sunlight trickling through cherry tree branches exploding with blossoms. The branches moved softly, as if tickled by the wind. I enjoyed the view; it was soothing, as it was no doubt meant to be. A lot of the rec spaces had them, and so did our barracks in quarantine. They gave you the illusion of being outside. I figured we were stowed away underground somewhere, and somebody had put in the imagery for morale. A beige couch and matching chair sat facing each other over a low wooden table that was probably synthetic. I’d watched enough immersives about soldiers and shrinks to figure the couch was for me. I sat up straight, hands between my knees. Stick to the brief, Jones had said.