The Light Brigade

by Kameron Hurley

  Jones punched in several codes; the system kept booting him off. I heard him conversing with the CO over a two-way channel, no doubt getting more options third- or fourth-hand from some nerd back on Earth in a stuffy intelligence office.

  Marino muttered under his breath. No doubt he had an itchy trigger finger.

  The sixth code worked. Jones pushed inside.

  We padded into the corridor. In here, the lights were on. I wanted to say over the squad channel that . . . you know, clearly, there were no signs of a prior breach, but didn’t. However this place had gotten cut off, it wasn’t by anybody outside of the base.

  We continued through the corridor, heading toward the beating heart of the station itself.

  Here: the dead. Crumpled bodies lay in a heap at the center of the compound. Civilian bodies. All dressed in bright Martian colors, faces smeared with red dust. What had come through here? It was difficult to say. I swept my rifle across the corpses of about a dozen people, all lying around the core of the base’s operations. Bubbling blood. Red dust. Charred smears along the wall. The smell of vodka and sulfur and death.

  The CO, over the platoon channel: “What is the status of the base? Under our control, or the Martians?”

  Jones said, “To be determined. There are casualities. Stand by.”

  This is why I liked not being squad leader. I couldn’t be this composed. I’d tell Lieutenant V that we were fucked. That nothing was what it seemed. I wouldn’t stick to the brief. I was turning into Marino.

  A rattling sound came from the floor beneath us. I trained my rifle along it.

  “Whoa,” Prakash said.

  “Hello?” Jones said. “We are—”

  On the other side of the room: a rattling shiver. One of the fallen cabinets moved across the floor, propelled by two dirty hands clawing up from beneath it. I recognized the work of a pulse rifle; someone had used one to melt a hole in the floor and hide there. A shaggy-haired man in the dirty suit of a Teni officer crawled out.

  I trained my rifle on him. “Identify yourself!”

  The man shifted his mealy gaze to me. Stared like a dog that needed to take a piss in the yard.

  “The fuck is this?” Prakash said.

  “Sir!” Jones said, saluting.

  I saw the ranking on the man’s cuff right after Jones. Lifted my hand . . . and froze. The name was on his shirt. Kowalski. I stared hard at the bearded face, covering the strong jaw. The wild brown eyes, the runnels the sweat made across his dusty, familiar face.

  No way.

  “Frankie?” I said. “Uh . . . sir?”

  Franklin Kowalski stared at me. My god . . . how the hell had he gotten here?

  I lowered my rifle.

  “Dietz,” Frankie said. “Dietz, have you seen it?”

  “Seen what?”

  “The end of the war. You haven’t, have you? No, you haven’t. Because there’s no end, Dietz. It just goes round and round, one big circle. We’re trapped. All trapped. No way out.”

  “Frankie, uh, sir, what happened here?”

  “I tried to save them.” He ran his fingers through his greasy hair. Came forward. I lifted my rifle, instinctively.

  Jones stepped between us. “Sir? Is there anyone still alive? Anyone who needs medical evac?”

  Frankie seemed to become aware of the bodies all around us for the first time. His mouth trembled. “Oh my God, oh my God. I tried to save them.”

  “From who? These are civilians. Why bring the civilians here? Where are your soldiers?”

  “We were bombing the city,” Frankie said.

  “This is a war, Frankie.”

  “Don’t call me that.”

  “Okay . . . sir.”

  “I know you see it,” he said. “There are people they shouldn’t break apart, people who make all this unstable. You’re one of them. So was . . . it’s not important. But you haven’t been there, have you, the end of the war? You haven’t seen it yet.”

  “No.”

  “I knew it.”

  “Doesn’t mean it’s not there,” I said carefully. His face was so red I feared he might burst something.

  “It’s not there. Once you break it, it can’t be fixed. They broke something, Dietz. Broke our minds, maybe. Our bodies. Broke the world. We can’t fight our way out. I knew you hadn’t seen it.”

  “Did you kill all these people, Frankie?”

  “Me? No, no. It was you. You, Dietz. You did all this.”

  Marino said, “Fucking nutter.”

  “Frankie, I’ve never been here.”

  “No, no,” he said, and he lunged at me. Jones caught him. I reared back, startled. “You did this, Dietz. You started all this!”

  “Fuck you, Frankie,” I said.

  “No,” he said. “Not me, not me!”

  “Enough!” Jones said. “Corporal Kowalski? What has happened here? We don’t—”

  “We murdered them!” Frankie snarled, and pulled himself from Jones’s grip. “This is a Masukisan settlement! They aren’t Martians. That’s Masukisan artillery out there. Our bombers came out here to back us up. I told them there was a mistake. They had to go back. But they kept coming. Wave after wave . . . I did my part. Completed the mission. I secured this base. Me and my people . . . all gone now.”

  He seemed to lose something, some vital energy that was keeping him upright. He sagged to the floor.

  “Mistakes happen sometimes,” Jones said. “It’s not your fault.”

  Frankie swept his hand at the dead. “Does that look like a mistake to you?”

  “You still haven’t answered—,” I said.

  “I brought them here to save them from the bombing,” Frankie said. “There were no soldiers here but the ones in my company. No free Martians. It was a civilian Masukisan settlement. But the Teni brass must have figured out what I was doing, and they dropped something . . . some disease that made us all go mad. What are any of us, but test subjects? Corporate dogs. They started . . . we started killing one another.”

  “Lieutenant,” Jones said, and I figured he had opened up a two-way channel to the CO. I couldn’t hear him over the platoon channel, only out loud. “We have a situation in here.”

  Whatever Lieutenant V was saying . . . well, I could imagine.

  “Frankie,” I said, because though all I wanted to do was kick his face in, I had to know what happened. I had to take it forward . . . or backward, to wherever I jumped next. I wasn’t a passenger. I couldn’t be. I thought of Andria tossing me the pocket watch. Of the look of terror and awe on Tanaka’s face as it blew apart. Prakash . . . and Vi, fuck . . . Vi, the only one who could have gotten through this, I knew, because I had let her go, but look how that had turned out?

  “Give it straight, Frankie,” I said, “for once in your life. Did you fuck them the way you fucked everything?”

  “How are you so low, Dietz?” he said. “Why haven’t you advanced?”

  “I like being a grunt.”

  “Dietz, this is your fault. I could not save them. Because we were all locked in to this from the start. Do you understand?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “We’re just killing corporate civilians. Why? Why all this death?”

  I didn’t rise to the bait this time. Let him hang.

  He peered at me. “You know what happens, don’t you, Dietz?”

  “Yes, sir,” Jones said, over his two-way with Lieutenant V. He raised his head. “Corporal Kowalski, the rest of our company is incoming. I suggest you have a seat and wait for them. We will have a medical team for you.”

  “No,” Frankie said. “No, no, no.” He turned and ran out of the room, bolting through a corridor we hadn’t cleared yet.

  I went after him, with Jones and the others just behind me. More dead littered the hallway. Here and there, I saw the armored bodies of Tene-Silvia soldiers. Had Frankie told the truth? Did he and his company try to save these people, and Teni had them killed for it? Or was he just mad, broken
, incompetent? Maybe he’d done all this himself. I wouldn’t put it past him.

  The hallway led to a large common area open to the sky. Frankie stood at the center of it, struggling to get himself over more bodies, many of them blown apart, half-submerged in fine Martian soil. The ground here was pockmarked with craters.

  “They bombed us!” Frankie said, raising up his hands. “Teni bombed us. They sent a sickness. Made us mad. Made us kill each other. They fucked us, Dietz. It wasn’t me. Not me.”

  I heard movement behind us; the CO approached with the rest of the platoon. On the other side of the parade ground, the rest of the company moved in as well. We surrounded the sea of dead.

  “You are all being played!” Frankie yelled. “This is one big fuck fest! It’s all a fucking joke!”

  The CO came up behind Jones and said, “He’s gone mad. We have orders, Jones.”

  “I know,” Jones said.

  Jones walked across the parade ground. Held out a hand to Frankie. “Sir, we need to go.”

  I felt for Frankie in that moment. I realized it could just as easily be me up there. I’d been able to keep myself buttoned up, so far. But if this had been me, the only one left alive out here?

  “I need you to come with me,” Jones said.

  Frankie pushed him.

  Jones pulled his sidearm. Frankie wrestled it away from him. He shot Jones in the chest. Jones went down. Frankie came at me, waving that gun.

  I shot him in the head—one smooth, instinctual movement. It’s how they train you.

  No thought.

  No questions.

  Action.

  Killing.

  Frankie burst apart.

  27.

  I stood over Frankie’s body like some dumb puppet, staring.

  “Dietz?” Jones said.

  For a minute, I didn’t know who either of them were.

  “You’re okay,” Jones said. “It’s all right.”

  Omalas whacked me on the back. I coughed. “Okay,” she said in her calm, soothing voice, and that did it. I came back.

  I lowered my rifle. I gazed across the courtyard. A flicker of movement caught my eye. A figure peeked into the room, so briefly I thought it might be a trick of my eyes. But I knew that figure instantly.

  “Muñoz?” It was her. There was no doubt in my mind. The soldier raised her head, caught my look—and bolted.

  “No!” I ran after her, over the piles of corpses, across the courtyard. I peeled into the corridor I had seen her dart down.

  “Dietz!” Jones, over the squad channel. “The hell you going?” Frankie’s shot hadn’t been lethal. Our suits could easily endure standard fire.

  “It’s Muñoz!”

  I came to the end of the corridor just as the soldier jumped into a refuse chute. I went after her, sliding through the slimy chute and hurtling out the other end. I came up in a mass of composting bio-matter. Lifted my head just in time to see the soldier jump into a vehicle emblazoned with the Martian flag.

  She met my gaze again, eyes wide, like she had done something wrong. And I read recognition there. She knew who I was. It was absolutely Muñoz.

  “Go, go!” she yelled at the driver. The beefy woman at the front had tattooed X’s on her knuckles, and a sheared mohawk of yellow hair. It was Squib. Who else? But how? Had they been captured on that Mars recon mission? Were they working for the Martians?

  The vehicle peeled out, spitting Martian dust. I lay in the compost heap, dazed, staring at the whirls of red particles they had kicked up.

  “Muñoz!” I screamed it again and again, until I was hoarse.

  “Dietz?” Jones, over the squad channel.

  Then, “Dietz?” and he was next to me, knees in the compost heap. Took my face in his hands. “Dietz, I need to know you’re still here.”

  My eyes filled. “I’m here,” I said. “Fuck, I’m here.”

  “Me too.” He pulled me into his arms, and I clung to him, but my gaze still followed the wispy remnants of the dusty path kicked up by Muñoz and Squib’s vehicle.

  They were still alive.

  They were on Mars.

  How the fuck had they gotten to Mars?

  “Did you see it?” I said.

  “What?”

  “It was . . .” And then I stopped, realizing how it was going to sound.

  “Wait, look at this, Dietz.”

  All around me, in the refuse heap, were dozens and dozens of cast-off NorRus uniforms. I waded through the pile and came down the other side. There was a printer recycling station nearby; all this refuse was meant to be pulped and reused in onsite printers to make new clothes and materials. I’d seen this tech in the refuse heaps outside São Paulo. It was always a scramble for us to get out what we could before it got shoveled into the recyclers. It’s why we spent a lot more time along the beach than at dump sites.

  “Why were they tossing NorRus uniforms?”

  “Looks like NorRus infiltrated the station,” Jones said. “I bet he was trying to cover for them.”

  “What, they took off all their uniforms and put on Teni ones? And he was okay with that? I don’t get it.”

  “What makes more sense? That he was a traitor collaborating with NorRus or Teni killed this guy’s whole platoon?”

  I wasn’t going to give my opinion out loud. I wouldn’t put it past Teni to dump a bunch of uniforms here for the drones and snaps to see and then beam a story back home about how Frankie was a traitor. I realized I might never know what really happened here. War was all about the annihilation of truth. Every good dictator and CEO knows that.

  “Good find, Dietz,” Jones said.

  It didn’t feel like a good find. It felt like I’d made everything more complicated.

  When we brought Lieutenant V out, she accessed the base’s coms and recordings to verify what had really happened. I waited outside the coms door, but she closed it behind her. Whatever she saw, she didn’t share it with any of us. She just patted me on the back, said, “You did pretty good this time, Dietz. Just keep following orders.”

  “You aren’t going to tell us what happened?” I said. I wanted to know if she’d seen Muñoz or Squib on the recordings. Probably not; Frankie had cut the power to the security systems around the perimeter.

  “Stick to the brief, Dietz. Secret to every successful grunt.”

  Goddammit.

  The cleanup at the base took a while. Jones’s suit had protected him from the worst of the shot; it was a standard sidearm, not a pulse rifle, but he had a good bruise to show off underneath when the medics got to him.

  I wanted to stay on Mars longer. Wanted it to last awhile. Maybe because I didn’t want to see what happened next, because I already knew what was coming. Maybe because I hoped to see Muñoz again.

  “What’s the line from Teni?” I asked Omalas after the two of us finished carrying bodies from the corridor and into the evac ship. I had that déjà vu again, remembering Omalas and I during the Sick, hauling around the dead.

  “Some Martian bug,” she said. “Killed the civs. Made the soldiers go crazy.”

  “You believe that?” I said.

  She tapped my forehead. “That was the brief. It’s what we have to believe in.”

  “You aren’t even curious? What really happened?”

  “What would the truth change? We follow orders.”

  Omalas offered me half her protein bar. I took it and we stood a moment in silence, gazing at the abandoned Martian settlement, both of us reluctant to go back into that stinking deathtrap of a base.

  “Want to buy some illusions?” she said. “Slightly used.”

  I laughed. I don’t know why. Maybe I just needed to laugh. “Better platoon name,” I said. “The Disillusioned.”

  “You think we’ll see the end of the war?”

  I gazed up at her; thought of beets and truckloads of the dead. “Yeah. We will.”

  When the dead were sorted thirty or so hours later, the CO marched us back throu
gh the settlement to our drop point. We got in formation. The Martian wind was high; dust coated everything. I tasted sulfur.

  Prakash knocked me on the shoulder. “Good job out there.”

  My big damn hero moment: Shooting Frankie in the face. Trying to save a civ that got shot anyway. Not letting Prakash die yet. Sticking to the brief.

  The air began to tremble.

  I gazed at the butterscotch sky.

  Where to next?

  I closed my eyes. I needed to go back.

  Time to go back again.

  Interview #4

  SUBJECT #187799

  DATE: 27|05|309

  TIME: 0300

  ROOM: 100

  I: Interview beginning at . . . see notes. Subject is one-eight-seven-seven-nine-nine. Let’s commence. You’re looking better.

  S: You know how to sweet talk, Sergeant, but you have poor taste in vodka. Is this really all that’s left?

  I: That’s better than our officers get.

  S: The sweet talk, or the vodka?

  I: Both.

  S: I see you’re warming up. Feeling good about yourself, are you? Got some answers to make your superiors feel better? I’m doing my best to keep you upright, Sergeant. Can’t do to start over with some new guy, after all we’ve been through together. We’ve developed such a fine relationship, after all.

  I: I’ve struck your comments from our last meeting. As a show of good faith.

  S: For me, or you? I wasn’t bullshitting you.

  I: It’s impossible I sent you to Saint Petersburg. Don’t insult me. My superiors want you strung back up.

  S: I didn’t say you sent me, you just put the idea into my head. You don’t remember where we met for the second time, do you? Then, as now, you had no idea who I was. That’s not uncommon, especially when there are power differentials. The higher-status person forgets the lower-status person. I was a grunt, a cockroach. Before that, you saw me as a ghoul, the child of an insurgent. You shared intelligence with my CO. I just tagged along. But I remembered you. I remembered what you said about Saint Petersburg.

  I: You seem to have very good intelligence. You’re telling me I gave it to you?