The Light Brigade

by Kameron Hurley

  “Ship’s moving!” Omalas pointed.

  The ship rotated. A light exploded through the woods just behind us, leaving a precise hole burned right through the forest; the sliced branches and perfectly carved trunks still glowed red. Whoever was in that ship didn’t want us getting beamed out of the park alive.

  “Up here!” I said. The clearing Tanaka and I had found on the other side of the trees would give us a little more breathing room for a light evac. Even as I moved, my legs spasmed. Sandoval hissed and fell over. Omalas grabbed him.

  The ship shot at us again; a burst of light that cracked through the woods between me and Marino. He howled and shot back at them. “You fucks!” he yelled. “You fucking red illegals! We are going to fuck you!”

  We made the clearing. I fell to my knees, helmet thumping against my ass from where it hung on my belt. My whole body shook. We were easy targets here.

  The rumble of the ship increased. It was coming over the tree cover to our clearing. We spread out around the clearing, over the crushed grass.

  “Where’s Landon?” Tanaka said.

  I turned back to the path. Landon limped along, going tree to tree. Had he fallen and hurt himself?

  “Landon! Get out of the trees!” I shouted. I thought of all the bad drops, the bad retrievals. The less physical interference in our drop zones, the more likely we were to come back with all our digits, instead of half a tree rammed up our ass.

  The ship droned. My teeth chattered. It was a race between the rogue ship and logistics.

  “Dietz! Dietz!” Landon yelled, breaking from cover. His rifle was gone. Dirt smeared one cheek. He held out his hands.

  “I’ve got you!” I said. I reached for him.

  My body spasmed. My jaw locked. Logistics had us. They’d pull us out.

  The ship appeared above us. Its searchlight hit me full in the face. I froze like an animal caught on a midnight road.

  Landon flailed toward me, blotting out the light. I could feel my body begin to come apart.

  We were going to make it. We were—

  My fingers snatched Landon’s wrist.

  Landon exploded in my arms.

  Blood sprayed across my body. Wrecked bits of flesh stuck to my face, my chest. A clump from his scalp dropped from my face onto my shoulder.

  The ship’s light pierced my vision again through the red mist of what remained of Landon’s body. I shielded my eyes, and saw the ship’s logo. I knew that logo pretty well. The blue sickle and thirteen stars. I’d hauled enough scrap with that logo on it to recognize it immediately as NorRus. Not a Martian ship. One of the corps. Firing on us.

  I was next.

  I broke apart.

  19.

  The light between things.

  Why do people keep going when they know they should stop? Why do we fight for something, even when it starts to come apart?

  I’m not stupid. I don’t believe everything they pump us full of. I don’t believe all the networks. When I came apart, covered in Landon’s blood, my mind was not a blank tapestry, a blackness. Time passed there, in the space between things.

  I considered the São Paulo Blink. Why did they pick São Paulo? And, why did these aliens come down from Mars but the others didn’t? And, the question Tanaka had posed, which was how Mars had done something like São Paulo with tech they had never used again. Tech that looked a lot like how we traveled. But most of all—that NorRus logo on the ship that fired at us. Who were we really fighting?

  They don’t like us to ask questions. They try to train it out of you, not just if you’re a corporate soldier, but for citizens and residents, too. The corp knows best, right?

  When I was dating Vi, we talked a lot about sociology. Or, rather, she talked and I listened, because it was pretty interesting, and I’m bad at small talk. She said there’s this thing called escalation of commitment. That once people have invested a certain amount of time in a project, they won’t quit, even if it’s no longer a good deal. Even if they’re losing. War is like that. No one wants to admit they’re losing. To end a war, you have to give them some way to save face, to pretend the sacrifice was worth it.

  You know what you are. What you’re becoming. And you can’t stop it. You’re committed. It doesn’t matter how much people scream or how many you kill whose faces look like yours. This is your job. This is what you’re trained for. It’s who you are. You can’t separate them.

  I came back together still shaking. My rifle hung beside me. A soft wind blew, making the rifle clack against my helmet. All around me, the other soldiers looked the same, though the way they were spaced out, it didn’t appear to be many of us had made it back from whatever our last drop was. Their suits were well-worn, their armor threadbare and patchy.

  I pulled off my gloves and used them to wipe the blood and viscera from my face. It was sticky, still fresh.

  The blue coms indicator blinked at the lower left of my eye. I brought up our platoon map, wondering where the fuck in space and time I was. Was I changing anything, jumping around like this? Or was it all decided already, like running through an immersive?

  “Dietz?”

  I minimized the map. Swung my head.

  Jones had taken off his helmet. He stared at me. “What . . . where’s—? Shit, Dietz.”

  I flung my arms around him. “You’re alive. You goddamn bastard.”

  “What the hell are you covered in? What’s this?” He pulled away. His hand knocked the piece of Landon’s scalp off my shoulder. “Shit, Dietz.”

  “Who else is alive?”

  “Our squad made it.” But of course that didn’t mean anything. Everyone who’d been on whatever mission they were on had made it, but it clearly hadn’t been the shitty Canuck mission I’d just survived.

  “So evac came for you,” I said. “You survived? But Landon—”

  “Dietz, I think you need to see intel again.”

  “Fuck intel.”

  “Hey, First Lieutenant,” Jones said over our squad channel. “We got . . . a Dietz thing again.”

  “Hold there,” the CO said. It definitely wasn’t Lieutenant V here either. What had happened to her?

  A lean woman walked over to us. Two medical personnel moved ahead of her to run everyone through the post-drop check.

  The woman pulled off her helmet, revealing thick, curly black hair. She had shorn her head up from the nape to the middle of her ears, making the nest of curls look like a jaunty cap. For a minute, I didn’t recognize her. She peered at me.

  “You told me you were Light Brigade,” Andria said. “I didn’t believe it.”

  “Andria? When . . . ?” I stopped.

  She raised her brows. “Wow, Jones.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “To be fair, that wasn’t a fucking good drop for anybody. But at least it’s over.”

  “I’d send you to intel,” Andria said, “but they’re pretty busy after that last run. We lost a lot of people. Come on in. Time for quarantine. I’m sure your shrink misses you.”

  20.

  Have we met?” the shrink said, holding out her hand.

  “Yes. You probably see a lot of people like me.”

  “A few.” She perched in the big easy chair. “Let’s continue where we left off last time then. How long has it been?”

  “Don’t you have a record of that?”

  “I’m interested in your personal recollection.”

  “Have you had problems with other soldiers and recall?”

  She smiled thinly. “You know I can’t breach the confidentiality of other soldiers. It’s just a question we ask.”

  “Except to our superiors.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You can breach confidentiality, to our superiors.”

  “Does that surprise you? You understand that your contract is owned by Tene-Silvia. Do you understand the terms of that agreement?”

  “I read it.” That was only partly the truth. Nobody reads the full terms.

&nb
sp; “Last time we spoke, you had some thoughts about death and mortality.”

  “So you do have records?”

  “I understand this can be confusing.”

  “I don’t remember talking about death.”

  “I see.”

  “I keep feeling like I’ve done all this before.”

  “Déjà vu? When you think you’ve seen something you’ve seen before. It happens a lot, though we aren’t certain why it happens to some more than others. Soldiers seem to experience it even more than those with epileptic seizures. We believe it has something to do with electrical discharges in the brain that cause faults in the way you store memories. It’s not that you’ve really seen what you’re seeing before. It’s that your brain already wrote the memory, but your consciousness doesn’t realize it yet. You feel like it was a long time ago, but it wasn’t. Time is highly subjective. Its interpretation relies on the brain’s ability to interpret and imprint memories correctly. There’s a tremendous amount that can go wrong.”

  I told her that made sense. It’s just a faulty memory. It’s just being a soldier.

  You see things other people aren’t supposed to see.

  “Can you tell me about your last drop?” she asked.

  “I . . . don’t remember.”

  “We have a record of what happened to Specialist Landon.”

  They would have tested whose blood and flesh I had smeared all over me.

  I shivered. “When did it happen?”

  “Some time ago.”

  I began to shake in earnest.

  “Perhaps that’s enough for today,” she said, rising. She had known, I realized. Maybe she had always known what was happening to me. Intel knew it, too. The Light Brigade. A whispered name, one Tanaka had told me in that field. But here, now, whenever this was, it wasn’t a secret.

  Quarantine lasted forty-eight hours. Once again, I spent quarantine alone. I lay in the shower for over an hour, just letting the hot water beat down on me. I slept a lot. I considered tapping into an immersive, or practicing with the torture modules, but I wasn’t up for it. The shrink had given me something to sleep; every time I closed my eyes, I saw Landon coming apart.

  The second night, I tapped into the knu and searched for a piece of media. “You have War of the Worlds?” I asked the knu. It returned twenty different films, sixteen editions of a text, but no radio play. Radio drama. That’s the word Tanaka had used.

  One text said it was a history, and included a transcript. “Read it to me,” I said, and the knu picked up the soothing default voice I had programmed into my heads-up, and told me a story about how little towns went crazy thinking the Martians were invading, back during the days of peak capitalism. What makes people believe this shit? I thought as I lay there listening. But it was easy, wasn’t it, when people were isolated. When information was scarce or siloed. People would believe whatever you put in front of them, if it fit their understanding of the world. Bad Martians. Logical, well-meaning corporations.

  I opened my eyes, alone in quarantine, with only these softly spoken words for company, and I understood.

  When they let me out of quarantine, the shower water in our barracks was much worse, barely tepid. The food in the cafeteria was mashed tubers on toast, and that made me think of Muñoz and her shit on a shingle. Everyone I came in contact with had the dead-eyed stare of exhaustion. I was still feeling too sick to see who was alive and who was new on the platoon map, but just walking around, I saw a mix of old and new faces.

  “At least it’s over,” Sandoval said at a nearby table. I sat by myself, nursing a very poor cup of coffee. All the food tasted watered down, strung out. The tubers tasted of sawdust, a common filler. The coffee could have been filtered through underwear.

  I glanced over at Sandoval, grateful to see he was still alive. Like the others, he’d grown out his hair. Was this an Andria thing? Was she just lax about regs?

  “Lot of dead Martians,” his table companion said. I didn’t know her. “But yeah, I guess this is probably it. At least for Martians on Earth. They’ll be pissed though, won’t they? Retaliate?”

  “They’ll see what we did,” Sandoval said. “They’ll know we could do it up on Mars, too, if we wanted.”

  I trudged back to the barracks, ready for my own rack. I crawled into the bottom bunk and lay peering up at the slats of the bed above me.

  My stomach twisted.

  There were more marks there. Hundreds of them. I felt my dinner coming back up. I rose and put my head between my legs. When I was ready, I counted up all the lines scratched into the slats.

  Nine hundred and sixty-seven marks.

  I had spent nine hundred and sixty-seven days between missions here since my first drop.

  What had happened during all that time? What was going to happen?

  21.

  They called it the Sick.

  I woke the next morning to see my platoon crowding the screen in the rec room. Going in there, I didn’t even pay attention to what the corporate spokesperson was saying, at first. I was noting who was alive.

  No Prakash. I had expected that, but it still hurt. No Landon. They had confirmed that. Jones sat on the edge of a chair, legs on the back of a couch. Omalas stood with arms folded, closest to the screen. I recognized Deathless, though she was thinner than I remembered, her face little more than skin stretched over bone. She leaned in a doorway, sucking at a flameless cigarette. I had already seen Sandoval, and there was Leichtner, chewing on her thumbnail at the back.

  No Marino.

  I wondered when the war had gotten him. Maybe he had gone AWOL. I hoped.

  Tanaka? I scanned the group, but didn’t see him. The rest were new faces, about twenty of them. Way too many new faces.

  I tuned in to the corporate spokesperson then. She stood in front of an imbedded press pool, all hand-selected people with approved questions.

  “Can you tell us where the virus originated?” one of the reporters asked.

  “We cannot confirm it’s a virus,” the spokesperson said, “but we believe it is Martian in origin. It originated in Canuck, after our great victory there.”

  “The war was supposed to be over. Is this a new front?”

  “The war is over,” the spokesperson said. “Our final solution initiative was successful. Mars has gone dark again. This new development is one we expect to eradicate quickly. A virus is not a war. We have contained and quarantined those affected. We expect a quick resolution.”

  “How can citizens and residents protect themselves?”

  “We urge anyone with flu-like symptoms to report to the nearest corporate wellness center. We are working diligently on a vaccine and expect it to be in trials very soon. But again—if you do not present yourself to the wellness center, we cannot treat you. Please speak to your friends, your neighbors, your coworkers, and urge them to come in. If they are reluctant, contact your local corporate security liaison.”

  I kept to the back of the room, in the doorway. The war was supposed to be over? I thought of those nine hundred and sixty-seven marks. That was a lot of living that I couldn’t remember.

  “Dietz?”

  I turned into the hall.

  It was Tanaka.

  I let out my breath. Didn’t realize I’d been holding it.

  “I listened to War of the Worlds,” I blurted, like an idiot. It had been, what, years since we had that conversation. But for me . . . three days ago.

  “It’s you,” he said.

  “Isn’t it always me?”

  “No. You want to get out of here? Go for a walk?”

  “What’s happened?” I asked as I followed him down the hallway. “Since . . . Landon.”

  “You just came back from the grinder. The fire. They said you had his blood all over you.”

  “Yeah.”

  He stared at me; I wanted warmth, but there was something fearful in him, remote. I remembered he had a missing wife, children. He would want to go back to his chi
ldren, and keep looking for his wife. The war was over. At least now I knew how it ended.

  “You have to tell them next time you drop,” he said. “Tell them what’s going on here.”

  “The war’s over. There’s no next drop . . . right?”

  His gaze moved over me, to the screen. “You still have gaps in your memory?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then you still have drops.”

  “Shit.”

  “Shit is right. I always check with you, see what’s coming next. You told me how bad this gets.”

  “How bad what gets?”

  He nodded at the screen. “The Sick.”

  “How bad does it get?”

  “Bad. You’re on the right track with the torture modules. That’s what you wanted me to say to you. To keep going. That maybe you could . . . change this.”

  “What else?”

  “That’s . . . it.” It wasn’t it; I could see it in his face, but I let it lie. Who really wants to know their future? I didn’t like the one I was seeing.

  I wondered why we weren’t being hauled away by intelligence, the both of us.

  “We still being recorded?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Just . . . not monitored as much. After the Dark, we started running out of people. Lots of intelligence got reassigned from babysitting us to restoring everyone lost. Still, better to talk to you now, when they’re monitoring all of us, seeing our reaction to this.”

  “Do I want to know what the Dark is? Was?”

  “We lost coms.”

  “Like in the last . . . like in Canuck?”

  “Something like that. All over, though.”

  “Mars?”

  “That’s what they say.” He no longer looked at me, but at the screen. “I didn’t believe you. About all this.”

  “I wouldn’t have believed me either. Figured everyone thought I was nuts.”

  “Hey, Dietz!” It was Andria, our new CO, coming down the hall.

  “Sir,” I said.

  I broke away from Tanaka, putting some distance between us. I wanted to hug her. Wondered how long she’d been CO. What had happened to Lieutenant V?