We went up a winding ramp, the Martian stairwell, I guess. It was certainly easier to huff up it than stairs. The rooms all lay open. This may have been a school, before. The furniture was all undersized. Martians were supposed to be tall and mostly thin because of the gravity. We cleared the big school room and went upstairs. This was a play area of some kind. Big bouncy balls. Massive blocks. Craft stations. Funny how much of that stuff was the same. A fine red dust covered everything; the cracked domes had let it filter in.
Not a body in sight, though. Whatever had happened here, they had enough time to get out. So what idiot had stayed behind? Probably someone dangerous. Dumb like Marino.
As we came up the third ramp, Marino slipped and bashed me in the helmet with the butt of his gun. My head snapped back. My visor finally shattered completely. My head slammed against the wall. I swore, flipped up what remained of my visor, yanked my mask. “Watch it, Marino!”
His visor was already up. He swung back to look at me, mask hanging against his throat. “Smell that sweet Martian air, Dietz.”
I pushed his shoulder. “Stay on point. I don’t want to die today.”
“Dying’s the only way out, Dietz.” He grinned, showing a chipped front tooth. His brown eyes had a glimmer of gold at the edges. He had that strong jaw that all the streams liked. I wanted to bash it off his face. Little fuck.
Marino swiveled back to the half-open door ahead of us. On the upside, he was the sort of guy who would lead a clearing team and take the first hit and say it was fun. I appreciated that.
Marino kicked the door clear and swung his weapon to the right.
We entered an open space, the hub of the topmost dome. Trash littered the ground; plastic floor? Concrete? I couldn’t tell through my boots. A massive pile of junk took up the far corner, half covering the other entrance. If they had tried to barricade themselves in, they had done a poor job of it. I scanned the left while Marino scanned the right, so I was last to see the massive object positioned along the shattered wall facing the street. The gun was mounted on a tripod; it stood at least as tall as me.
Marino approached it, his own gun still level.
On the blunt metal side of the gun closest to me, I recognized the NorRus logo. I made one last sweep of the room and then lowered my gun.
“This automatic?” I said and shut my mouth. Like Marino would know.
Marino mashed the gun with the butt of his, succeeding only in knocking the whole contraption over. The clatter made me start.
“Shit,” I said. “Don’t touch anything. It’ll go off.”
“I’ll go off on it.”
I heard something: a sigh, maybe, an exclamation. Sounded like it came from the heap of junk by the second door. I raised my rifle and scanned for heat signatures.
The wavy orange wisp of warmth curled from beneath the corner nearest the door. The bowl of the heat signature made no sense to me. Too small, maybe another cat? A heated dinner stuffed into the pile?
“Come out,” I said.
Marino swung his head toward me. “What you see?”
“Heat sig.”
“There’s nobody here.”
A knock came at the opposite door. Then, over the squad channel. “Dietz?” Jones.
“Yeah,” I said. “It’s . . . mostly clear. I have a weird heat signature. You’ll need to push the door good. Got some shit here next to it.”
With three of them on the other side, it didn’t take long to bust in the other entrance. Jones, Omalas, and Prakash rolled in, rifles up.
“Automatic gun,” I said. “We think. Only.” And I gestured to the aura of the heat sig. “Anybody know Martian? I knew Portuguese, but only because I’d grown up speaking it in São Paulo; it wasn’t an official Tene-Silvia language. I couldn’t imagine they spoke Portuguese on Mars. But fuck, weirder things had happened.
“Publichno zayavit,” Omalas said. “Uill ne prichinit vam vreda.”
It sounded Russian. The heat sig wavered. The trash trembled.
Marino raised his rifle.
I pressed my hand over the top of his barrel, forcing it down. “Give them a minute.” I tried a few phrases in halting English. That got me a withering look from Omalas.
“Got any other ideas?” Prakash said. “The heads-up can translate some stuff, but not very good.”
“I’m unsure my Mandarin is better than the display,” Omalas said, and then picked her way through. “Bù huì shānghài nǐ . . . ?”
I wished I’d spent more time on languages. What was left? “Anybody know French?” I said.
“Badly,” Jones said.
Omalas grunted. “You think mine made sense?”
“Uh . . . ,” Jones said. “Je . . . ne te ferai pas de mal? Uh . . . s’il vous plaît sortir?”
“Shit,” Prakash said. “You drunk during that class, Jones?”
“Just light it up.” Marino yanked his gun back up. I batted it down again.
“Why you have to fuck everything up, Marino?” I said.
“The fuck you think we’re here for, Dietz?”
I grabbed the butt of his rifle. He puffed up his chest. Faced me. I straightened. He towered over me. I met his cold stare. Got ready to bash him as best I could, just like with Frankie. I was done with bullies.
A scrabbling in the trash heap.
We both turned.
A small head popped up from the refuse. Skinny, big-eyed, deep circles under the tawny skin of the black eyes. How old was he? Seven? Eight?
The child scrambled away from the trash, fixing us with that luminous gaze.
Jones tried to talk to him, but the kid babbled in something else. Mandarin? The kid held up grubby hands. He wore a too-big gray smock and tatty trousers tied with a rope around his skinny waist. His belly puffed out, as if he were malnourished or parasite-ridden.
Omalas took over, muddling through with more gut-churningly bad Mandarin.
“Did he operate this gun?” Jones said. “Ask him?”
Omalas flipped up her visor and peered at Jones. “And then what?”
“Then we clear him,” Marino said.
“We were told to clear the sniper,” Jones said. “If he was the one who operated this gun—”
Omalas said, “I didn’t sign up to murder children.”
“Masukisan,” the boy said.
We all rounded on him.
“Tu est avec Masukisan?” Jones said.
“Tout à fait,” the kid said. He pointed at us. “Evecom?”
“No,” I said. “Tene-Silvia.”
“He trying to say he’s a corporate kid?” Marino said. “That’s bullshit. If he’s Masukisan, where are all the fucking Martians? We came here for Martians.”
“He’s definitely Masukisan,” Omalas said. “This isn’t one of those free Martian cities. It’s one of the old corp settlements. I bet he’s speaking a dialect. The rest is just stuff he’s picked up.”
The conversation I’d had with Tanaka in Canuck came back to me. The idea that we weren’t just fighting free Martians, but using it as a cover to fight the other corps under some pretense. I examined the kid a little closer. His tattered tunic bore the Masukisan logo on the collar, frayed and dirty as the rest of him. NorRus equipment, a kid wearing Masukisan gear. Was it staged? A setup? Were we all just fighting one another here on the bones of these poor stupid colonists?
“We should stop asking questions,” I said, very aware that our heads-up displays were recording.
“Our mission was to eliminate the sniper,” Jones said.
We all looked at the kid again.
“I’ll do it,” Marino offered.
“He’s a prisoner,” I said. “We can take him with us.”
“We can’t do that,” Jones said.
“Then tie him up here and leave him,” I said. “We’ll come back.”
“I’ll kill him.” Marino, more loudly.
“We heard you the first hundred times,” Omalas said.
�
�No,” Jones said. “Tie the kid up, Dietz. Bring him with us for now. That’s fine. Maybe we can get some information from him.”
I wasn’t sure how much an eight-year-old had to say to us, but if it kept us from committing another goddamn horror, I’d go along. I had nothing to bind the kid with, though. Corps regs of war required us to carry restraints, but I sure hadn’t used them until now. It felt good to do something different, even if it might not matter to anybody but this one kid.
As Omalas bent to bind the boy, a blast rocked the room. The whump of the hit roared. The child screamed. A hunk of metal crashed into my helmet. Omalas shielded the child.
I peered at the ruin Marino had made of the big gun on the mangled tripod.
“You feel better?” I said.
“Yes,” he said. Half the big gun now lay outside the clear, broken pane of the dome, like a tooth still attached by one tremulous root.
“Eliminated.” Marino huffed off down the stairwell.
“Let’s move out,” Jones said, like leaving now was his idea.
I wanted to yell at Jones for not taking on Marino. Jones was squad leader, but shit, I didn’t blame him. When the bucket of rage that was Marino finally boiled over, it was set to burn everything around him.
We followed. I took the rear guard with Omalas; the kid walked in front of her, behind Prakash and Marino, with Jones catching up to the lead position. The kid slowed us down, of course. We were all more quiet than usual. No one wanted to say it out loud. Except Marino, probably, but as I watched him sashay ahead, I figured he’d already moved on to seeking out the next thing to be outraged about.
“Jones! You there, over?” The CO, on the platoon channel.
“Affirmative. We’re a few hundred meters from your position.”
“We’ve hit a stretch of mines. Khaw and Tanaka are down. We need your squad immediately. Double time.”
“Affirmative, sir. We . . . uh, we have a prisoner.”
“You have a what?”
“Prisoner, sir. Uh, over.”
“No, you do not, Jones. You were to eliminate all threats.”
“The threat is eliminated, sir.”
A long silence. My heart clenched.
“Get your ass over here, Jones. Move.”
Omalas hefted the kid over her shoulder. He screeched. She said something to him in Mandarin, and he quieted. Maybe she mentioned Marino and his gun.
We darted down the ruined streets. I covered the rear, gazing back, always back, at what had come before.
The positions of our platoon lay over the street grid on my heads-up. But I heard them before I saw them. Howling.
Tanaka lay on the ground; I barely recognized him. His helmet had been blown right off. His left foot was a tangled mess of flesh; Sandoval knelt next to him, holding the tourniquet that kept him from bleeding out. Khaw was further up the street, her legs completely gone. Two of her squad still tended to her, their voices too loud, panicked. Shit.
The CO strode toward us. Visor up, oxygen mask dangling. I had not seen her face so angry before. “Are you fucking kidding me, Jones? We don’t have time for this.”
Omalas put the kid down. The kid tried to hide behind her, but she pushed him before her.
“It was my idea,” I said. “It’s just a kid. We don’t even know if he was operating the gun. He may not even be a combatant. I thought—”
The CO pulled her sidearm and shot the kid in the head.
It happened so fast my mind struggled to accept it.
The boy’s blood seeped across the dusty road, mingling with the blood of our own soldiers. The kid didn’t even shudder. Just a twitch. The glassy eyes.
In that moment, I thought of my brother. When had I last seen him? Six weeks after our mother died, months after our father was disappeared by the corp, Tomás announced he was going back to São Paulo.
“Why?” I asked. “We have residency. Things are better now.”
“Are they?” he said. We were packing up the house. As two unaccompanied minors, we were required to move to the unaccompanied minors’ barracks. By then, Vi and I were serious enough that we wanted to apply for a place. But I didn’t want to leave Tomás alone.
“We have access to good jobs,” I said.
“You do. What will happen to me?”
“I’ll take care of you.”
“And what if you die?”
“I won’t.” I took his hands. “We have each other. They won’t take that away.”
“Why not? They took everything else.” He gazed out the window to a blooming cherry tree. “Papa said they would give us some new life. But we didn’t get anything new. It all came with rules. New rules. And we weren’t supposed to learn them. Because they only apply to certain people. We’re still no one. We’re no one with a better name.”
“Don’t say that. We’re somebody.”
Tomás was quiet, then. I should have known what would happen. But I was thinking of Vi, of our own life, of what I would do after school. Thinking of myself. Always myself.
“Everything we really are is in São Paulo,” he said.
“That’s a bullshit life.”
“At least we were free.”
When I came back from school the next day, Tomás was gone. He left a note saying he was going back to São Paulo. To the friends we had made in the squatter camp. To eating wounded birds and going to bed hungry and worrying about gangrene and broken bones and wounds that wouldn’t heal.
At least I will be free, he wrote, and it was as if he had wrapped his fist around my heart and squeezed. Free to die terribly, I thought. But being a resident hadn’t saved my mother. Hadn’t saved my father. Why did I think it would save us?
I told myself, when he left, that he was crazy. How could anyone trade the security we had for the unknown bullshit we had put up with in the labor camps? Was it my fault? Should I have made it clear that me and Vi would always care for him, that he could stay with us? Or did he just see more clearly then what had taken me an entire war to realize?
Staring now at this dying boy, I understood. When you are under the thumb of a corp, they own you. They say you have freedoms, choices. When your choice is to work or to die, that is not a choice. But São Paulo was no choice, either. It was a bad death, when this world was more than rich enough to ensure we could all eat, that no one needed to die of the flu or gangrene or cancer. The corps were rich enough to provide for everyone. They chose not to, because the existence of places like the labor camps outside São Paulo ensured there was a life worse than the one they offered. If you gave people mashed protein cakes when their only other option was to eat horseshit, they would call you a hero and happily eat your tasteless mash. They would throw down their lives for you. Give up their souls.
Like we were doing. The Corporate Corps.
They made sure we had no good choices.
“Fuck you,” I said to the CO, low and cold. “Fuck this war. He’s Masukisan, not Martian. What the fuck is going on?”
“They’re all Martian, Dietz,” the CO said.
“Fuck you!” Louder. I felt it. Deep in my gut.
She hit me; not an open slap, but a punch right in my exposed face. I staggered back. Fell on my ass.
“You stand down and you follow orders, Dietz,” the CO said. “Stick to the motherfucking brief. You disobey a direct order again, and the next bullet out of this gun is for you.”
It had been a long time since I felt like crying. The spike of pain in my sinuses, the rush of tears; it was like some awful foreign sensation. Something that happened to other people.
Omalas held out her hand. I stared at it. She, too, had her visor up. I liked that, because I could see her eyes. Cool and black, like staring into some clear, cold pool. It comforted me. I knew she didn’t want this any more than I did. This boy had trusted us, hadn’t he? We may have been the only living people he saw today.
I took Omalas’s hand. She pulled me up.
Prakash came up
next to me. Put her hand on my arm, opened a two-way channel. “You all right?”
“None of this is all right.” I closed the channel.
The boy’s body lay in front of us. The CO had already moved away. She gazed at the incoming medical evac drones as they swooped in to pick up Khaw and Tanaka.
I found myself oddly detached about Tanaka. I knew he would live, didn’t I? For a while. Unlike Prakash. Her time was more limited. But Khaw? How long did Khaw have? When was the last time I saw Khaw in the platoon ranks? Was this it for her? Should I mourn or be happy that she escaped this fucking circus?
“Jones,” the CO said. “I need your squad to take the breach of the front. Sandoval will be doing breach of the back.”
“Yes, sir.”
The drones arrived. Two evac units painted with the crescent moon and cross of the medical corps. I watched Sandoval and Leichtner load Tanaka and Khaw up and then I was moving again, right after Jones, heading to that fucking base on the hill.
Fuck.
Our squad, one of the two still intact, approached the base directly. I won’t lie, I was trembling. We were completely exposed. I came up the front with Jones, leaving Prakash and Omalas at the back, and Marino yanking his dick in the middle, looking for something to fuck up.
Jones and I approached the main entrance. He motioned me forward. Yeah, of course, I had to breach this fucker. I hated the idea of trying to shoot in the door. There could be people on the other side.
“I have the code,” Jones said, just as I reached for the door.
The door sagged inward like a wilted flower. I exchanged a look with Jones.
He motioned me forward.
I pressed the massive door open further. Metal. Heavy, even in Martian gravity. The darkness inside swallowed the pale burst of sunlight that preceded us. The place relied on solar power; I’d seen the compact solar cell towers from a distance. Even if they had been damaged, there should have still been some juice in the solar-charged batteries. If the lights were off, it was either because of a catastrophic system failure, or—someone had turned them off on purpose.
I rolled into the doorway, rifle up. I had a light attached to my rifle. It illuminated the narrow corridor. Gave me a clear view of the second doorway, set opposite of the entrance. I went to the inner door. This one was locked.
The Light Brigade Page 22
