We passed a lighthouse huddled against the rocky coast. Abandoned structures peeked out from the waves, most of them ground to ruin by rising sea levels and powerful storms.
“Lots of penguins,” Toranzos said. “Should we clear the penguins?”
“Leave the fucking penguins alone,” Sharpe said.
Chikere snorted.
“Clear the buildings,” Akesson snapped. “I haven’t seen any water craft docked but that doesn’t mean anything. Could be insurgents camped out. Stay alert.”
Akesson led us up the remains of a street. The buildings had fallen into themselves a long time ago. Others had signs of more recent activity: charred roofs, patched doors, the telltale wavering scar of a pulse blast. Most of it had been colonized by penguins.
“Nobody home,” said Sharpe.
“Hey, Akesson,” Toranzos said, “you get eaten by penguins, I get your bunk?”
“I get eaten by penguins and you gotta lead these shitheads,” Akesson said. “So watch my six. Clear this one!”
She and Toranzos took point at the door of the next building, some old schoolhouse, maybe, mostly intact.
We cleared two more structures and Akesson called a water break. The air was hot and dry; felt like you could set a tree on fire just by gritting your teeth. We took cover in a building with a roof that was half collapsed.
Akesson offered me a protein bar. I shook my head. I was thirsty, but not hungry. Took a lot to get me hungry, I found out, after a drop.
“So how you know Tanaka?” Akesson said. “How long he been your platoon leader?
I blinked. “I . . . don’t know.” Sometimes the truth worked.
“Just funny,” Akesson said, “figuring out why it is some of us are still alive here at the end.”
“The end of what?” I asked.
“The end of everything,” Akesson said.
“I really wish they sold beer,” Sharpe said. “You think Norberg’s intelligence people have beer?”
“Pretty sure the beer’s all gone,” Chikere said. “I don’t think there’s any mama here tending a shebeen.”
“As long as anybody’s alive,” Sharpe said, “someone will be making beer.”
I fixed my gaze out the window at the biggest building in the complex.
“Used to be a prison,” Akesson said, when she saw where I was looking. “Shipped all their prisoners out here for centuries. Was a museum for a while, showing how great ShinHana is to citizens, now. Comparatively.”
“The fuck are we?” I said. “It’s like the goddamn ends of the Earth.”
“Southern Africa,” Chikere said. “My grandmother grew up in the desert, just north of here. Nairobi, maybe? What territory is that in? It’s changed hands so many times, I don’t know.” As she gazed out over the ocean, I saw something wistful in her eyes. It was the look of somebody ready to throw away a gun and walk.
She caught my look. Showed her teeth. “Water’s full of sharks. We’d never make it. Plus, you know, the trackers. They can pick us up from anywhere. Bitch, huh?”
I checked my display and confirmed. The local map gave me the positions of our team. I zoomed out to get a view of the rest of the platoon, maybe even a division, thirteen kilometers inland. But as I swept the map, I couldn’t pick up any pings.
They had really sent us out here by ourselves.
“All right, enough chatter,” Akesson said. “Let’s clear the main compound and go meet Norberg. See what intelligence wants us here for. They always call the grunts when there’s some danger they don’t want to put their soft, precious asses in front of.”
“All hail intelligence ass,” Sharpe said.
“Best name for intelligence I’ve heard all year,” Chikere quipped.
“Shut it,” Akesson said.
All chatter ceased. I wondered how long she had led this team, and how I’d ended up on it. We moved.
Akesson led. Chikere and I flanked the door to the old museum; the glass was gone, most of the floor and ceiling charred. Sharpe took point and went in rifle first. Chikere and I came in after, scanning as we went. Toranzos took the rear. Our displays registered heat as a fine red mist, and carbon monoxide as blue. Radiation would register a soft green. Aside from what our team was putting off, I didn’t see anything.
We swept through the ruins of the museum, past the sordid, violent remains of some bygone era. For all the bullet holes and broken glass, I only saw one body curled up under a fallen display, and that one was long dead, dry and desiccated in the heat.
Akesson waved us forward.
Sharpe took point again. We cleared all three rooms in the next crumbled structure. Signs of recent activity, here: two Masukisan-branded tents, a pack of rations hanging from the rafters away from bugs and lizards, a cold portable cook stove.
Akesson pointed at a basement door. Even with the door closed, I could hear the rise and fall of voices trembling up from the cellar. The scuff of boots. A woman, laughing.
Akesson pushed past me and leaned in to the door frame. The stairs were too steep to see much at the bottom but a dirt floor. “Lieutenant Akesson here,” she said. “We have orders from the chief executive of war.”
The woman, laughing.
“Something’s fucked up,” Sharpe said.
“Dietz, Sharpe, take point,” Akesson said. “The area could be compromised. May not be our people down there. You understand?”
I nodded. Sharpe grunted.
Sharpe went down first.
I followed, with Chikere coming up behind me, and Akesson and Toranzos hanging back to cover us.
What do I remember?
The rotten smell of sulfur. Sharpe blocked most of my view, but I was aware of the bodies of a squad lying on the concrete floor ahead. Blood and dust. And the sound . . . that woman, laughing. At the bottom of the stairs, I caught a waft of voided bowls, the coppery stink of fresh blood. It crept into my nostrils, cloying and sticky. I still smell blood, in the warm months. The light came from a single LED bulb hanging from a coiled power cord nailed to the wall. Two doors. One open, the other closed.
And there, through the open door—
I will tell you what I didn’t tell my shrink. I told my shrink that the last thing I remember is the light from the door, but it’s not true. I remember seeing straight through it. I looked through that doorway, and it was clear the basement was just a front for some larger enterprise. I saw a long metal hallway. A series of stainless steel numbered doors. The holding cells there were far more sophisticated than this facade would lead anyone to believe. A gun turret mounted to the ceiling swiveled toward us.
Sharpe said, “Shit.”
The sounds of the rest of the squad coming after us.
I remember putting my arms out, spreading my body wide, hoping to shield the others for what was coming.
A fiery pulse blew apart the gun turret. The pulse had come from the metal hallway. I heard the slap-slap of bare feet on the floor. A tattered figure came at us, barefoot, filthy, dressed in a torn gray jumpsuit. Whoever it was had a standard low-yield gun, and shot Sharpe. Sharpe’s return shot went wide. I had a choice—shoot back or continue trying to shield Akesson and the others. I was blocking their descent into the room.
I chose my team.
The figure fired at me. I wheeled backward, thrown with tremendous force. Voices. Darkness.
That’s my last memory from that drop.
13.
Darkness.
It’s more comforting than you think, to be alone in the dark.
I came to flat on my back in a room with two flared can-lights flickering overhead. A dozen people hovered over me. Didn’t they have places to be? It was like being at the center of a swarm of angry bees.
A doughy-faced man, balding, gave me a tight smile and said, “Do you know where you are?”
“Doctor’s office?” Seemed like as good a guess as any.
“You experienced an emergency evac. You may be disoriented.”
>
Darkness, again. I came to in an elevator, or maybe a tram. I lay on a gurney. Three women were trying to move me to another one.
“Still covered in blood,” somebody said. “None of it’s the private’s.” Then I was out again.
And . . . awake.
A man knelt on one knee next to me, like he was going to propose. He had a thick needle in his hand. Blood poured down my right arm. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he said, digging into my flesh.
The pain snared up my arm. A jagged flash of it, then a persistent gnawing. It must have been what woke me.
I wanted to comfort him. He looked so terrified, so out of his element. Some people are good at putting in a line, at sticking a vein just right. My brother had been good at it, when he cared for my mother during her long illness. But this man wasn’t. My blood pooled on the floor.
I lifted my gaze, sensing movement at the door. A young woman stood on the threshold, her mouth a moue of concern, face knotted in grief. She wore a short, flowy skirt and a yellow cardigan. I knew her and didn’t know her, because while my brain insisted she was familiar, reason told me it was impossible that she was here. I wanted to say her name but feared the man on the floor would hear me. I was already on intelligence’s radar.
A fresh jab of pain. I cried out.
“Sorry! Sorry!” the guy said. Blood kept pumping out. I wondered how much blood could come out of my arm before I passed blissfully back into the darkness.
The girl in the doorway came to me then. My heart caught in my throat. I thought I might choke.
“Vi?” I said, even though it was impossible.
“You look like shit,” she said. She had never been one to mince words. Her eyes were wet. She grabbed my good hand and squeezed it. Her hands were soft, just like I remembered, the nails cut short and lacquered with plain polish. She smelled the same, like baby powder and herbal shampoo. I wanted to kiss her just to prove she was real. Why had I let her go? “What are you doing here, Vi? You . . . shouldn’t be . . .”
“They won’t tell me what happened.”
“They can’t.”
“Can you?”
“I don’t . . . know. War is . . . I should be in quarantine . . .” My mind spun. I felt a little nauseous. Found it hard to focus. It was impossible she was here. “We can’t be together,” I said.
“Why? Because I’m older? Because of your parents?”
“I’m not going back there.”
“I am,” she said. “There’s work to do there, and I’m qualified to do it. What are you so afraid of?”
I knew what conversation we were having. A conversation we’d had before. Our last. I took her hand in mine, squeezed. I knew she wasn’t real, knew this had to be a hallucination, because the words were falling out of me just as they had then, every poisonous, stupid thing I’d said.
“You saw what happened to the moon,” I said. “You think you can stop that with negotiating? You think words are going to help? You’re deluded. It’s time to fight. I’m going to fight.”
“Fight what? Another corporate war?”
“You’ve never been a ghoul,” I said. “You don’t have anything to fight for.”
The look on her face killed me then, and it wrecked me now. She pulled her hand from mine. Her eyes filled. “You need to grow up,” she said, poking at the age difference for the first time, trying to wound me as I’d wounded her. “When you grow up, you come find me. Or wallow in your own guilt here, fine. It’s up to you.”
In my memory, this is when I had gone, but she was still here. So I said, “I needed to do this myself.”
“We were a team. We were going to—”
“Not like my team.”
“What?”
“This team,” I said, and now the past and present became muddled. “They are my team. They have my back. You couldn’t understand what we’ve been through. What we’re going through.”
“I had your back. You never had mine.”
“I didn’t want to lose you. But I fucked that up, didn’t I?”
Pain shot up my arm. I rounded on the little man. “Sorry, sorry!” he said. “I’ll try the other arm.”
I turned back to Vi. She was gone.
I blinked furiously. Stared at the doorway. No one. Just me and the morose doctor.
“Where did Vi go?” I said. “Did you see?”
“Soldiers see a lot of things, after. Emergency evacuations are especially traumatic.”
“That was . . . a memory, but not. Like she was here.”
“What is the mind, but an interpreter of stimuli? I’m sorry, but it can misfire after drops like this.”
“You need to know about the island. Who sent us to that island?”
“You were deployed to Mars,” he said. “But you are safe now. There will be a debriefing. You’ll feel better soon.”
He stuck the line in, one clean jab, and then they were pumping me full of drugs, and I drifted off.
14.
I was in quarantine for seventy-two hours. A woman from corporate intelligence came in once I was able to eat solid food.
“Where’s my CO?” I said. “Lieutenant V?” Please let me have the same CO, I thought.
“We need a report, first, Private Dietz,” the woman said. “I’m First Sergeant Jasso. We need your report of the operation.”
“Where’s Lieutenant Ortega?”
“I don’t have any record of you speaking to an Ortega.”
Of course not.
“Private Dietz, you were deployed for a Mars recon mission,” she said. “Very simple, your first real drop. Something seems to have happened to you.”
“No shit. Logistics is fucked up. Where’s my squad?”
“You tell us, Private Dietz. Our last communication from your squad was a distress call from specialist Muñoz.”
Mars recon. The first drop. Muñoz missing now, here. All right, I thought. I was getting a handle on how this was going—or thought I was. I needed to give them the names of the right squad. The Mars recon squad, right? “So my squad . . . Muñoz, Jawbone . . . er, Hadid, Abascal and . . . uh, Squib . . . Specialist Hussain—they went missing? During this mission? The Mars recon mission?”
Jasso’s eyes narrowed. “You tell me.”
“Listen, I don’t know. I’m trying to figure this out too. You have recordings, don’t you?”
“We have some limited recordings from others in your platoon. When they arrived on Mars, your fire team was caught in a Martian ambush and we lost all communications with you.”
“Shit.”
“Indeed.”
“I don’t remember any of that,” I said. “You can test me.”
“Oh, we are,” she said. “I have someone on the intelligence team monitoring you right now.”
“Then you know I’m telling the truth.”
“On dropping to Mars, we have a record from your platoon. You and your team got cut off by a group of Martian insurgents. They deployed smoke, an EMP, and . . . something else. Your trackers were disabled. So were coms. When the noise and confusion cleared, you and your team were missing. If you were captured by the enemy, Private Dietz, any information you have to share with us would be very useful in this conflict.”
What she left unsaid, of course, was, “And we want to know if you’re a spy now.”
This was the first fuckup, I realized. The first fuckup everyone kept talking about on the banana drop. Bad Luck Dietz. Shit, no wonder. I’d come back. My squad hadn’t.
“I don’t know what happened,” I said. “My memory is . . . bad. Penguins. It wasn’t even like we were on Mars.” I had to give them something, I thought, but as soon as I did I knew it was a mistake. Never, ever, give them anything. The more complex your story the more you have to remember.
She leaned in to me. “What else, Private?”
“I don’t know. Maybe it will come back.”
“If it does, we expect to hear from you. We’re on the same side, P
rivate.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Your medical report came back clear.” I saw the flicker in her eye. “No augments. No additional trackers. There’s some unaccounted for anomalies related to your cellular tissue; it indicates that this drop did some damage at the cellular level, an amount we haven’t seen in soldiers who are this early in their drop cycle. That’s a concern. If you are cleared to drop, you will be receiving additional medical screening before and after each mission.”
“How did you find me? On Mars?”
She stood. The flickering in her eye darkened. “We didn’t find you on Mars. We found you in Cape Town. ShinHana territory. A child found you. You had no tracker. It was completely missing, unaccounted for. You were still bleeding from its removal. I’m deeply concerned you seem to have no memory of that either.”
“I thought there weren’t any people on the Cape?”
“I realize your geography may be lacking,” Jasso said, “but the Cape is a perfectly functioning little town. The desalinization plants have kept them in clean water since ShinHana repaired the old ones. ShinHana has numerous launch facilities there. It’s no New Buenos Aires, but it’s coming along again.”
I sat with that. “What about the island, off the coast? Robben Island?”
“It’s a museum, Dietz. A record of all the horrors unchecked capitalism can lead to, and a celebration of ShinHana’s progressive work policies. You can look it up on the knu if it fascinates you. I just had a bottle of wine from Cape Town last week. Lovely red. You know they couldn’t produce wine there for a hundred years, after the climate debacle?”
“I’m just wondering why I was there.”
“So are we. What was the significance to Mars, to drop you at the Cape after an interrogation, memory wiped, with no discernable alterations or tracking devices on your person? Until you tell us what you know, it’s a great mystery.”
I didn’t rise to her bait, and changed the subject. “I heard them say . . . the doctors, that I was covered in blood when I came in. Whose blood?”
“That’s an interesting detail as well,” Jasso said. “None of that blood was yours. It was blood we could not trace, which means it had to be Martian, or from someone who hasn’t been recorded by the corps. So you see, despite your protestations, it’s clear you were on Mars. Whether you escaped or were beaten near a Martian prisoner . . . we don’t know. Your tracker is missing. We have no recordings.”
The Light Brigade Page 10
