The Light Brigade

by Kameron Hurley

  Marino snorted. “You know how many kids die their first drop? Dumb grunt.”

  “Don’t mind him, Deathless,” I said. “I’ll give you the tour.”

  “Deathless,” Jones said. “I like it.”

  “That pretty much guarantees she dies first,” Marino said.

  “Maybe it’ll fake death out.” I motioned for Deathless to follow me, and realized I was the one who had given her this goddamn stupid nickname.

  Of course. This time line had a grim fucking sense of humor.

  33.

  How many days did I have to go?

  A lot, it turned out.

  I guess the bunk could have told me that, again and again, but I still didn’t trust my own reckoning. As I’d found out after the Sick, I knew I wasn’t always going to be here in the barracks to count everything.

  Turns out that was a good guess.

  Logistics started encountering issues. That was how they put it. Our experience was different. A whole platoon from Tangine Company came back wrong. They dropped into the deployment field as a mass of contorted bodies, arms and legs attached to the wrong torsos, heads facing backward, spines made impossibly sinuous, feet twisted like claws, when they were recognizable as limbs at all.

  I didn’t see them come in, but somebody put out a bootleg recording, and I downloaded and watched a copy before the corp had them all purged—including the soldier who shared it. What shook me wasn’t even the images as much as the sound. The grunting, sobbing mass of them, like listening to a squealing bunch of pigs in a pen destined for the slaughter.

  They weren’t the only platoon lost that day; we heard rumors of others, though information was hard to come by. They grounded all of us after that.

  When Dog Company got called up again, I feared where they would send us. Captain V was company commander, and gave us the pre-drop briefing inside the big barracks cafeteria. Outside, the rain came down so hard it sounded like liquid thunder.

  “Logistics is undergoing some issues,” Captain V said, “as you no doubt heard.”

  There were some guffaws at that.

  “Our full company has been assigned to do some babysitting out in São Paulo,” she said.

  My stomach dropped. A few of us exchanged glances.

  “No doubt you don’t believe there’s much left in São Paulo to babysit,” Captain V said, “but our CEO is having a big to-do out there, nice show of military might, and we’re to be part of it. Your duties aren’t just to look pretty, but also to guard the asses of the contractors tasked with building the new Freedom Monument. You probably haven’t heard, but there are some liberals and anarchists out there intent on keeping São Paulo a bare patch of ground, monument to Martian terrorism. Luckily, we’re good with saboteurs, huh?”

  A loud, collective, “Yes, sir!”

  I brooded over what she’d said the whole shuttle ride out to São Paulo, or, where São Paulo had been. We were packed into the back of a troop carrier shuttle, no windows, so at least I didn’t have to see from the air what Mars had left of everything I ever loved.

  When we stepped off the shuttle, I tried to keep my head down, but you couldn’t help but see it. There were still buildings left near the crater; a good chunk of the city remained. Whatever weapon the Martians had used had been incredibly tactical. It was as if a giant ice cream scoop had dipped into the eastern part of the city and carved away a massive hunk of it. Most of that area had contained labor camps.

  São Paulo had been an extraordinary powerhouse of a city once. That’s what we grew up hearing. It lay only about seventy kilometers from the Atlantic Ocean, but was well above sea level. Lack of water, unrest, and the early Corporate Wars left much of the city abandoned and in ruins. The upheaval transformed the face of the city into the one that I knew: the shining new citadels built by corporate interests after the war, the massive solar towers, and the endless sprawl of the reclaimed city ruins where ghouls like me and my family had eked out a living after getting barred from the cities inhabited by citizens and residents.

  I felt a chill, though the day was warm. The camps around the corporatized bulwark of the central city had been razed some time ago. No smoke lingered. All that remained were the charred skeletons of structures.

  “What happened?” I gazed at the ring of ruin around the shining city.

  Jones saw me looking and said, “Yeah, they were planning to bulldoze out everyone in the labor camps right before the Blink. The Blink took out everyone from the camps, carved it right out, but left some of the city.”

  I stared at him. To his credit, he looked abashed, as if just remembering I was from here.

  “There’s still half a million people living here,” Jones said. “The Blink only ate a million and a half maybe, but there were more living in the core of the city. Teni burned out and bulldozed whatever was left of the camps, though. Mostly ghouls.”

  “It didn’t bother you? That they lied?”

  “Lied? They didn’t lie about Mars. I mean, you can see the crater. They did Blink most of the city.”

  “But . . . not what they talked about in the media. The media acted like there was nothing left here.”

  “I guess it was . . . well, useful to the war effort. I guess . . . they didn’t think as many people would sign up if they knew Mars mostly just killed ghouls here.”

  “Fuck this place,” I said. “Fuck Teni.”

  “Sorry,” Jones said. “I didn’t think . . . Sorry.”

  Why would anybody ask what happened to the ghouls here? Why would anybody care? Why would they question the line from the corp? The real fate of São Paulo wouldn’t have made it onto any corporate-run media stream. As a kid policed by BLM agents continually, it wasn’t like I was going to get the real story. How stupid was I, to believe everything the corp had told me? I’d eaten it up. Maybe I’d wanted to believe it. I wanted to believe the Martians destroyed the whole city, from here to the sea, because it made it easier to sign up. Made it easier to follow orders. Believing lies just makes everything . . . easier, when those lies prop up your worldview. Would I have believed it if someone told me Tene-Silvia burned out and murdered a million and a half São Paulo ghouls to make way for the resurgence of some shining corporate city?

  No, I would have called it poor propaganda from Evecom, or liberal anarchists, or socialist insurgents.

  Even now, I wondered if Jones was wrong. If his mother in intelligence could have made it up. There’s a tremendous moment of dissonance, like leaving your body, when you discover that one of the core defining moments of your life is mostly a lie.

  “Dietz! Let’s roll.” Andria’s voice, over a two-way channel. At least she wasn’t calling me slow in front of the whole platoon.

  I huffed after her and the rest of the company, off to make a show of protecting the interests of a CEO who had no qualms about murdering people like me with impunity.

  34.

  The protests in São Paulo were massive.

  I had never seen anything like it.

  The new Freedom Monument spanned the breadth of the crater in the east side of the city. The crater itself had gathered water, transforming it into a perfectly spherical lake. The seething mass of protestors surrounded the lake. They had pitched brightly colored tents and parked their beat-up old vans and desert vehicles and solar ATV’s. The protestors were young. Shit, I was still young, but to me they looked like kids, all bright eyes and joyous faces they thought were fierce. The young have nothing to lose.

  Soldiers guarded either end of the Freedom Monument, letting contractors past. I had a vague recollection of what the shining monstrosity was going to look like, in the end, but for now it was a hulking mass of a bridge shot through with half-completed columns and spires, all crisscrossed with cables and marred by the swinging arms of great cranes balanced precariously on barges in the lake.

  The protestors had set up their own crane, from which dangled a flag. I had to zoom in with my heads-up to make out the
words: TENI MURDERED SÃO PAULO.

  Andria met with us that night in the temporary tent that was our platoon’s barracks. “We have a mission to secure the area around the monument before tomorrow’s speech from the CEO.”

  “What does that mean?” Deathless, ever the astute one.

  “What the fuck you think it means?” Marino laughed.

  Omalas stared into her hands.

  “It means we clear the area around the crater,” Andria said, “by any means necessary.”

  I had my rifle over my knees. I had just finished cleaning it and putting it back together. “Sir, does that mean lethal force? On our own people?”

  “They aren’t our people,” Andria said, but her heart wasn’t in it. “Most are paid protestors. We’re doing a job, just like they are. They were told to disperse or face force. They know what’s coming.”

  “They aren’t even armed,” Omalas said.

  “Some may be,” Andria said. “That’s why we have to clear them. We may not even need to use force.” When none of us looked at her she said, more loudly, “This is an order from the chief executive of war, which comes directly from the CEO. Most importantly, this is an order that comes from me.”

  Whatever happened out here tonight, Andria wanted me to put it on her. She’d put it on Captain V. Captain V would blame the lieutenant colonel of the battalion, who would blame the colonel of the regiment, who would blame the major general of the brigade, and up and up, until what happened tonight rested on the peacefully sleeping head of some CEO who would never get her hands dirty. Never see the blood pumping from a mortally wounded friend. Never watch the life leave the face of some poor dumb kid who believed the world could be a better place.

  We moved out.

  Our company struck the protestors’ camps a little after two in the morning. It was never going to be a fair fight. It wasn’t meant to be. I put the safety on my rifle before we hit the camps. A lot of soldiers didn’t.

  The protestors fought us with fists and rocks and sticks. As they came awake, they used crude petrol bombs, but those weren’t enough to get through our suits, which had been made to endure the sort of violent incendiary that we’d encountered in Canuck. Even the bullets from the few standard guns they had stashed in their vehicles or under their sleeping bags didn’t faze us much.

  We advanced, we advanced . . . and I found it easier if I saw this as a collective action. A “we” and not an “I.”

  Deathless, so fearful on a real battlefield, found this poorly matched slaughter far easier to bear. She was the second in our company to fire her pulse rifle into the screaming, rock-throwing crowds, obliterating one protestor and parts of two more. I didn’t see the expression on her face when she did it, because her visor was down, but I could imagine it. The rush of awe. The surge of power.

  She raised her rifle again.

  I plowed past her, after Andria, who was doing her best to goad the protestors with riot spray and an electric truncheon. But the protestors had decent defensive tactics. They were not complete fools. They came equipped with homemade power-nullifying vests, pepper-spray triage kits, and they had painted their faces to evade the face recognition software in our heads-up displays. Drones surged through the sky, ours and theirs. I admired the janky little craft they employed against us. It made me think of Mars, and the little boy Lieutenant V had killed. How fearful did the CEO have to be, to encourage us to murder children with homemade explosives and milky pepper-spray remedies? We were killing the symptoms, but not the disease.

  I wondered what I would tell my shrink after this. How would she tell me to soothe my conscience over this one? Just a war, just orders, just following protocol for the good of Tene-Silvia?

  I raised the butt of my rifle and prodded at a kid ahead of me, telling her to move, in Spanish. She responded in Portuguese. Hearing that language made me stumble back, nearly lose my footing.

  “What are you doing?” she demanded. “We’re your own people! You’re murdering your own people! Put down your gun and join us!”

  My grip on the rifle tightened.

  My people.

  I stood there amid the throng of screaming humanity. Pulse shots sailed past. Human flesh, viscera, blood collected around my feet. The buzz and clatter of the fighting drones mingled with the screams and jeers of those around me. The protesters had begun a chant, in Portuguese:

  “Join us, brothers and sisters. Power belongs to the people.”

  I fell to my knees. Blood mixed with the heavy dust, turning it to mud. I flipped up my visor and pulled away my mask and took a huff of the filthy, choking air. I dug my hands into the earth and took a whiff of its familiar scent; death, diesel, the tang of char that still lingered from the Corporate Wars when most of the sprawling city had been demolished.

  As I raised my head to the young woman who peered over me, her eyes hopeful, triumphant, she blew apart. Her torso simply disintegrated, spraying me in a fine red mist, and the rest of her collapsed like a discarded pig carcass.

  Behind me, Deathless came over, hefting her rifle. She offered her hand to me.

  “Let’s go, Dietz.”

  I took her hand.

  35.

  Morning dawned warm and drizzly. Our platoon stood in formation with the rest of the company on the east end of the half-completed monument, right behind where the CEO was speaking. She stood on a massive silver podium that shone the light right back into my eyes.

  All signs of the protestors’ camp had been cleared out by noon, just in time for her scheduled appearance. We disintegrated most of it using our pulse rifles, which was faster than burning it. The bodies went into trucks and were carted off to the crematorium. Those who survived were taken away by local BLM agents. I wondered how long they would survive in custody.

  Since we were behind the raised stage, someone had put up screens so that we could watch the speech like everyone else. It was surreal to stare back at your own company, lined up as a living backdrop behind some CEO talking about how her troops were accomplishing the mission they had undertaken right after the Blink.

  “Our enemies understand that Tene-Silvia is stronger than ever,” the CEO said. I found it telling that she didn’t explicitly mention Mars. She wasn’t talking to Mars. She was talking to the other corps. She was talking to her own people. She was talking to us. “Today we dedicate the Freedom Monument to those who perished here. Let it stand for a thousand years, a tribute to our will to carry on, to restore Tene-Silvia to the greatness of our forebears of Teniente Azul!”

  Beside her, on the screen, I saw a conspicuous figure dressed all in white. Her pale hair was pulled back tightly into a bun. She did not applaud along with the prompted crowd. She did not smile. She simply stood behind and to the right of the CEO, planning and plotting, as she always had. Norberg had already begun her ascent into the inner sanctum of Tene-Silvia, no doubt well on her way to convincing our CEO to broker a deal with the son of Evecom’s CEO.

  The worst part about knowing the future was feeling that I had no way to stop it. It all seemed so inevitable. Frankie had certainly seen something during his jumps. Muñoz, too, and Andria had said Rubem talked of it. What did we all see? A loop. A world at perpetual war.

  “I am proud of the fine soldiers here with me.” The CEO smiled warmly. “They represent the very best of Tene-Silvia. I am pleased, then, to announce that anyone who joins the Corporate Corps is now eligible for citizenship after ten years of service.” The CEO waited for applause. The ripple began on the outer edges of the gathered crowd, prompted by her PR team.

  Marino nudged me. “Hey, Dietz.”

  I couldn’t bear to look at him. “What, Marino?”

  He opened up his tactical jacket, revealing one of the home-made petrol bombs the protestors had lobbed at us the night before.

  “Shit, Marino, put that away before the BLM’s snipe your ass.”

  He giggled. The sound of him giggling creeped me out. “Going to call him Hal,” M
arino said. “My little baby Hal.”

  “Just . . . keep that shit away from me, Marino.”

  He giggled again.

  “We serve those who serve Teni,” the CEO continued, and another wave of applause filled the air at her use of the affectionate name so many of us used for the corp.

  Ten years, I thought. We weren’t going to survive that long. Maybe she knew that.

  When the parade of bullshit was over, we got assigned to do more cleanup duties, and finally retreated to our temporary barracks.

  • • •

  I couldn’t sleep. I got up sometime after two in the morning and sat outside. The lights of what remained of São Paulo were dimmed, part of the energy conservation initiative. I gazed skyward, searching for the constellations I’d never been able to see in my youth.

  Jones came out a few minutes later and offered me a joint. I didn’t ask where he’d gotten it. The best part about being deployed with a lot of other troops is all the bartering you could do. I took it.

  Neither of us spoke for a long time.

  A shooting star streaked across the sky, so fast I thought I’d imagined it. But there was another, and another. Some celestial event. A rain of pretty but ultimately harmless meteorites, or maybe pieces from the busted moon, a new wave of debris finally hitting reentry.

  Jones tilted his head with me, gazing at the free show.

  “They were ghost messages, weren’t they?” he said.

  I released the smoke from my lungs. “In training?”

  “Yeah, those messages you deleted. From that ex-girlfriend. They were ghost messages?”

  “Yes.”

  He nodded. I passed him the joint. “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “Not your fault. Vi wanted to go to São Paulo to help people. She was full of big ideas. I got those messages from my brother, too, my cousins, after. But hers kept coming for a long time.”

  As if what they had done to São Paulo wasn’t bad enough. Whatever tech they had used to obliterate the place caused the local servers to go haywire. The knus were all controlled locally by centralized nodes, and the one for São Paulo went nuts. They kept coughing up old video, voice, and text messages, usually from dead people, for at least a year. I hadn’t seen any messages from Vi since mandatory training, though. Maybe it was over. Maybe the dead would be quiet, so we could move on.