The door opened. I stood, reflexively.
A small woman, shiny black hair pulled into a bun, fixed me with a warm smile. Like our CO, she was older than thirty, not older than fifty. I wondered if they gave shrinks the same drugs they gave us, the shots that were supposed to make us stronger and fitter for longer. She wore civilian clothes; loose beige trousers and a white blouse. Flat black shoes. Would the drugs make us live forever? Would the drugs make us nuts the way they had made those Nazis nuts?
“Private Dietz?” The scroll of her heads-up display flared briefly in her left eye; no doubt she was accessing my file.
“Sir . . . yes . . . uh. Ma’am?”
“Doctor is fine. I’m Dr. Elaine Chen. We haven’t met?”
“Uh, no? I mean, isn’t that in the file?”
“We’re testing your recall.”
“Well, no, then. We haven’t met.”
“I see.” Her gaze flicked to the left, flagging that part. I hadn’t met her before, had I? The shrink I saw during orientation was a short dark man called Mufoz. I remembered that clearly because his family was originally from Evecom, and we talked about what it was like to sign a contract with a new corp.
“You want to know about the mission?”
“Just your recollection.” She sat neatly in the chair across from me. Her movements were so precise and elegant I thought she must be a dancer. I wondered what would compel someone who had the talent of a dancer to become a psychologist. Maybe it paid better. It was like Jones trying to get corp support to be a poet.
“I don’t remember much. Intelligence already went over that. Can you see their report?”
“Do your best. The first real heavy combat drop can be stressful, physically and emotionally.”
“There were banana trees,” I blurted. It just came out. “I was distracted. It was just an alien girl.”
“I’m sorry?”
“I shot a girl. An alien girl.”
Her eyelids flickered.
“I see. Was this your first kill? Tell me about that.”
“Uh, yeah.” That seemed like a rude question, like asking if you’d ever had sex. But I related the full story, just like I remembered it—or, the part about killing the alien, anyway. I didn’t say where.
The doctor sat with her hands in her lap, but that heads-up display of hers continued to blink in her eye, probably recording me. I thought about what it must be like for somebody viewing her recording of me and my recording of her at the same time. Like placing two mirrors in front of each other.
“Could you tell what time of day it was?”
“No. My coms didn’t come online, and . . . I guess, just . . . that’s all I remember. That part. I wasn’t there long enough for it to register.”
“But you know you were on Mars?”
“Sure. I . . . No, I don’t think I was on Mars. Do they grow bananas on Mars?” Shit, I was fucking this up. My mom would be tearing her hair out and telling me to shut up.
“Let’s stick to what you recall. You were still aware of your mission objective at that time?”
“Yes? I mean, for the mission we were briefed on before we dropped. But on the ground . . . we just . . . fought. I remember some fighting.”
“And what time was that?”
“I don’t know. They only give us mission time on our displays. Not real time.”
“Did you tell your team about your confusion?”
“No.”
“You didn’t talk about it?”
“I just wanted us all to come back alive, all of us, sir . . . Doctor.”
“How did you feel during the battle?”
“Fine.”
“It’s common to have moments of confusion. Memory loss. Deep emotional feeling. It’s a normal part of being a soldier, and the drop process can . . . amplify some of those effects.”
“Okay.”
“One last question, Private Dietz.”
“Sure.”
“Confirm your age for me, please.”
“My age?”
“Yes.”
“I . . . have no idea. How long has it been?”
Something shifted in her posture. “I see,” she said. “Could you tell me what happened to your prior squad?”
“Don’t you have those records? Shouldn’t you tell me?”
She regarded me like an especially interesting insect. “I see,” she said. “I suggest you take this opportunity to quiet your mind and get some rest. Have you been practicing your meditation?”
“My head moves too fast for that.”
“Try the guided programs included with your entertainment applications. You still have twenty-four hours of quarantine before you rejoin your company. I want to caution you, however. You may find that some soldiers are experiencing this war differently from you. That’s normal. There’s a great physical and psychological toll with each successive drop. You may find yourself confused, angry, even violent. If you feel that way, I want you to go to your commanding officer and request a psychological evaluation. Do you understand me?”
“Sure.”
“This is very important. Not only for your own personal safety, but for the safety of your squad and your platoon. You wouldn’t want them to come to harm.”
Hearing her talk about my mental state as a danger when we were fighting an enemy that shot at us was laughable. But I didn’t roll my eyes. I didn’t talk back. I was still fairly fresh out of mandatory training and feeling my way around. Having everyone think I was nuts wasn’t going to help my position here.
“I understand, Doctor.”
“Good,” she said. “Good.” She stood and held out her hand. “I will see you again, Private Dietz.”
“If I don’t die before then.”
Her smile was thin. “I’m sure we’ll be able to clear up these issues with your drop resonance. Oftentimes, it’s simply a matter of making a technical adjustment.”
“Sure.”
She let me go. I went into the common room and sat next to Jones. We watched the monitors as Omalas and Prakash sparred in some immersive tournament. Both were hooked into virtual performance harnesses for safety, lunging and grunting. Omalas was a tall, beefy woman, well over two meters tall, with shoulders like a linebacker. Her voice was deceptively soft, though. Even her movements in the harness were purposeful, almost graceful.
“All good?” Jones asked. He didn’t look at me. Omalas landed a hard punch to Prakash’s face. Her avatar on the screen tumbled back, spit blood.
“All good,” I said. I thumped him on the shoulder, then went to the head and vomited my guts out.
11.
When we got out of quarantine and released to our regular barracks, everything looked . . . different. I guess I should have expected that. Someone had made marks on my bunk frame, thin lines in sets of five. I counted. Ninety-three lines.
“Who’s been in my bunk?” I asked.
“Nobody,” Jones said. He threw his stuff into the locker at the head of our bunk, tossed his jacket onto the upper bunk. Muñoz’s bunk.
In the platoon barracks we were only stacked two high instead of three. Even so, Muñoz had made sure I got a bottom bunk. She’d told me she outranked me now, and it was an order. Funny, at the time. Now, I stared at the slats of her old bunk above me and traced the lines. You could only see them if you were lying down like I was. I guess everything we did was recorded, but I couldn’t imagine anybody bothering to cycle through recordings of when we slept.
Ninety-three marks. For what? Kills? I shuddered.
They cycled us into the next drop slot eleven days after we got out of quarantine. I was getting along better with the platoon by then, reorienting myself. Mostly, I pulled it off by keeping my mouth shut. The CO called me into her office and had me shut the door.
“You know what they’re calling you?” she said.
“Bad luck,” I said.
“Huh? No. You performed well on that Mars drop. All things consid
ered.”
I was getting tired of people telling me about this Mars drop where I did really well. If I was so great, why couldn’t I remember it?
“Thank you, sir,” I said, because that’s what a normal person would say.
“Your shrink gave you clearance to go on the next drop,” she said.
I didn’t have an answer for that.
“What, you quiet for once?” she said. “You’re always hot about getting back into the grinder.”
“I signed up to fight, sir.”
“I want you to know that your file says I recommended you get taken out of rotation. I recommended it last time too. But those shits and their shit ideas outrank mine, and yeah, I hope some tech is going over this recording right now and quotes that back up to them, those little pig-fuckers. There are some soldiers who don’t do well on drops. Get sick, go nuts. You’re showing classic signs of that, but I can’t make that call.”
I waited.
“Why do I have to spell out every goddamn thing with you, Dietz? I want you to be honest with them. Tell them what the fuck is going on. I know you’re nuts. I’ve seen nutty soldiers go through here, and every single fucking one of them gets themselves killed. They shoot themselves up, light themselves on fire, go on some Martian killing spree, and run through a minefield wearing underwear on their heads. I don’t buy this bullshit about not remembering. I’ve heard that before. I heard it about your first fuckup drop. I don’t believe it. Come clean, get discharged, go spend the war cleaning out goddamn latrines.”
“That’s not what I signed up for, sir.”
“And I didn’t sign up to babysit nutters. They have other kinds of institutions for that.”
“I’m not crazy,” I said, only half believing it myself. She was confirming what I had feared all along. If the truth came out about where I’d been, what I’d really seen, they’d take me out of the platoon. “I performed well on Mars,” I said. “You all told me so. I can do it again.”
“Don’t tell me I didn’t try, is all I’m saying.” She grimaced. “Go get in formation for the next drop.”
The transport took us to the drop field. We still hadn’t been briefed, but I could see the flickering of the CO’s heads-up display. Her helmet wasn’t on yet. I figured she was still getting her brief.
We got in formation. I lined up between Jones and Omalas. Prakash and Marino stood in front of us. The CO’s voice came over the platoon channel, “Got a smash and grab for you today, children. We will be deploying to a Martian settlement in CanKrushkev, old Canuck territory and assisting Kev’s forces in rounding up some insurgents.”
I chewed that over. That mission sounded . . . awfully familiar.
She said, “I don’t want to hear a word of jaw vomit over this one. The Martians here are legal, even if most of them are trouble. This isn’t my call, but shit rolls downhill. We will drop. We will secure the area with our CanKrushkev friends. When the area is secure, we will round up our targets.”
“Babysitting fucking Martians,” Marino muttered.
I stared at Prakash’s strong back. The image of her with her arm torqued through the middle of her torso flashed before me. No, I thought. No, we’re not doing this now. We’re not doing this again, are we?
Oh shit.
We burst apart.
12.
You aren’t supposed to see anything when you break apart. I know that. Knew it then, too. But when the light took me this time, I found myself aware of a great landmass beneath me surrounded by a roaring black ocean.
We came together over a jagged, dusty peninsula thrust into a churning sea. A curled ridge of mountains wound across the back of the peninsula like a dragon circling its own tail. The ruins of some city gave off a thick pall of smoke. But as we came down the smoke resolved itself into a dense blanket of clouds kissing the mountaintops, bleeding over its edges into the broken warren of the city below. The age of the place struck me even before I fully corporealized. Ancient layers of rock, worn by wind and sea from time immemorial, lay exposed along the coastline.
The violent sea welcomed us. That black, black sea. Harbor seals. Giant sharks. As we came together again, grabbing for our rifles and our genitals and praying to whatever deity we worshipped that our heads would be on the right way, we found ourselves facing a most peculiar flock of disinterested penguins.
I let out my breath. Watched my left arm materialize as the penguins cocked their fat heads at me. I was ankle deep in water. I scrambled out of the sea, terrified that my molecules would merge with it, or I’d sink into the sand before I’d finished coming together, and recorporealize inside a sand bank.
I ran onto shore and pushed the safety off my rifle and got down on one knee, waiting for coms to come back online. Up ahead I saw a larger gaggle of waddling penguins. I’d only seen penguins in immersives, and once at a zoo my mom took me to when we had residency. Zoos depressed me, though, all those animals locked up with nothing to do and nowhere to go. I still remember the grim look on my mother’s face when she stared at a sad-faced orangutan sitting in its own piss.
Around me, four other soldiers flexed and shuffled; the littlest one moved up the coast.
“Prakash?” I said over the squad channel. Maybe we weren’t doing this again. I’d gone somewhere else instead. “Wait for Jones.”
The figure stopped. Turned. “Who? You come through all right?”
The voice was completely unfamiliar. I tried to access the names on my heads-up, but it wasn’t online yet.
“I’m . . . all right?” I said.
The figure pushed up her visor. A small, fine-featured blond woman. I had never seen her before in my life—not in the platoon or the company. I was absolutely certain.
“Who are you?” I asked. It just slipped out. Shit.
“I am the goddamn team leader,” she said. “Are all your brain cells still there? I’m Akesson. Shit, Tanaka said this might happen.” She pointed at the others on the beach. A curly haired man with his helmet off, vomiting into the sand. “That’s Toranzos.” A tall, dark woman with a face like a shovel, staring down at me like I was a broken thing. “Chikere.” And last, a woman about my height, with bruises under her dark eyes. “That’s Sharpe. Got it? Jog your memory?” It occurred to me that they all looked hungry and exhausted and very, very dirty.
“Sure,” I said, which was a terrible lie. I must not have sounded convincing even to her, because she rolled her eyes. She wore a loose tactical jacket over her armor. She patted at the pockets, came out with a slug of water, and threw it at me. “Take a breather,” she said.
I drank the water gratefully. A strand of her light hair stuck to her forehead.
Exhausted people without regulation haircuts. Even their gear looked worn.
“Akesson,” said Chikere, gesturing up the dunes. “You have some gum?”
Akesson dug around in her jacket and tossed it to Chikere. “Girl can never have too many pockets,” Akesson said, and winked at me. “Hey, Toranzos, you all right?” She bent over him, offering him a slug of water.
He rinsed out his mouth, nodded his big square head. “Thanks. Let’s get this party started.”
Akesson scanned the beach. “Coms up for anyone yet?”
“I don’t see fuck-all,” Chikere said.
“Heads up, team,” Akesson said. “I want an official count. Check your digits. Chikere?”
“All here,” she said, chomping gum.
“Toranzos?”
He struggled to his feet, patting at his chest, his crotch. “All accounted for.”
“Sharpe?”
She flexed her fists. “Fine,” she said. “Considering.”
I raised my rifle. Coms flickered back online. The mission flag tapped at the corner of my vision. I looked left and down. The mission brief scrolled up. Where the hell were we supposed to be and what the hell were we supposed to be doing? Was I really messed up or was it logistics? Had they sent me out with the wrong team? No, they knew
who I was. I was the one in the dark.
“Verify your mission logs, people,” Akesson said. “Norberg wants us to ensure the island is clear before we head into the main structure. Remember that this is sensitive shit we’re dealing with. I want all your heads on straight.”
I scanned the general area. It came up completely clean. No signs of any other platoon trackers.
“Akesson. Something bad is going to happen. Maybe we should wait.”
Akesson smirked. “The worst has already happened. We’re just cleaning up. It’s all right. Just follow my lead, Dietz. This is as safe a place as any right now, but we have to verify it’s clear. Chikere?”
“Yeah,” Chikere said, popping her gum. “My GPS is up. Looks like this island’s about two kilometers long, a kilometer wide, total. Lot of it’s underwater. I suggest we go east, clear the coast and the docks first, then head up the ass end of the main drag where the buildings are.”
“Why not the buildings first?” I asked.
Akesson peered at me. “Because we need to clear the island, Dietz. How about you shut up and follow orders.”
I nodded. One call to the CO about how nuts I was and I’d get pulled out and sent back to building bridges. I wasn’t leaving until I found out what the fuck was going on, and what had happened to Muñoz.
“Great,” Sharpe said. “Think anywhere’s open? Let’s find ourselves a drink and a fuck.”
“I don’t think there’s anywhere here to buy beer,” Chikere said, deadpan.
Toranzos said, “We could eat penguin.”
“I’m not eating penguin. That shit’s disturbing.”
“You think penguin tastes like chicken?” Toranzos said. “Or fish?”
“Who the fuck said anything about eating?” Sharpe said. “You were just horking up your rations two minutes ago.”
“Why am I having flashbacks to my babysitting days?” Akesson said. “Get your rifles up.”
We hiked east, following a dusty road along the shore. Scrub brush, sand: there were rundown buildings in the distance, but no signs of fresh human habitation. No tracks. No smoke. No radio transmissions. No knu nodes.
The Light Brigade Page 9
