The Light Brigade

by Kameron Hurley

  “She was a citizen?” Jones asked.

  “Yeah. Older than me. Fancy degree in Corporate Negotiations. She wanted to spend a year in São Paulo advocating on behalf of ghouls. Bleeding heart bullshit.”

  “Sounds like a nice thing to do, to me.”

  “Doing shit like that makes people feel good. Vi had always been a citizen. It’s like, all these rich people swooping in, handing you a bottle of water and a candy bar, and yeah, you make it another day, sure, and they go off and feel good about themselves. But where does that leave people here? Sitting around waiting for another goddamn candy bar. Real change takes time. It’s not something you can do on your gap year. I wasn’t going to endorse that bullshit. I had things to do at home.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like finish school. Join the corps.”

  “But you didn’t join the corps until after São Paulo, right?”

  “It tipped me over, yeah. I wanted to do some good.”

  “Like she did?”

  “This is different.”

  “Is it?” Jones took another hit from the joint. The world was starting to get fuzzy at the edges. “I sure don’t feel like I’ve done anything good for a long time.”

  “But we joined to do good.”

  “I don’t know if intent matters at this point.” He passed me the joint.

  “Jones, when this all goes to shit, you’re going to get the fuck out of here. I want you to know, now, that I totally support that.”

  He laughed. “You’re a fucking trip, Dietz.”

  36.

  Days turned to weeks turned to months in São Paulo. There was a lot of cleanup to do, and our company got the short straw for guarding the monument from further incursions led by protestors and saboteurs. I tried keeping track of the days in a little notebook I bought off a kid hawking shit to us from a basket. I figured we had been in São Paulo thirty days or so by then, and put that down, then put a slash down that night before lights-out.

  That’s how I managed to figure we spent eight months—give or take—guarding the gargantuanly ugly Freedom Monument. By the time we were rotated out, only about half of it was done; the progress seemed slow, to me, for something that Teni wanted to put up as the backdrop on every newscast. They ended up using the composite image, the one drawn up by the architects, to announce to everyone that it was finished when it wasn’t even close.

  I remember watching that newscast with the others in our temporary barracks while playing Go with Omalas. Neither of us said a word, just bowed our heads back to the game, but Marino laughed maniacally.

  “You’re a great bullshit artist, Teni,” Marino said. “It’s why I love you.”

  They shuttled us back to our base on Isla Riesco, though by all accounts, logistics had more or less figured out its deployment problem. I had learned not to rely on the newscasts for information like that, only my fellow soldiers. Even if we were being recorded, you found little ways to beat the system. Like Jones had told us in training, you avoided using certain phrases. We had gestures that meant, “I’m being sarcastic,” or “No shit this is the truth,” that we could append to all our statements.

  Logistics, then, was mostly back online.

  Not that that did me much good.

  Andria thumped me on the back when we arrive at our base. “You ready to tackle the torture mods again?”

  “Sure.”

  “Hey, by the way. You’re promoted.”

  “Huh? Yeah, I earned my specialist promotion before the drop.”

  “You’re a corporal now. You’ve put in enough drops. Performed well on a number of occasions. Captain V approved it.”

  “Why?”

  “I figured you needed the pay grade.”

  “I don’t . . .”

  She made one of those signs at me, the one that meant, “Shut the fuck up I’m not giving it to you straight because the shitty corp is watching.” I shut my mouth.

  “All sorts of benefits to corporal,” she said. “You can access more types of media and information from the knu. Great, huh?”

  “Great.”

  She was unlocking more doors. Maybe she believed in my bullshit after all.

  But we didn’t get the chance to go back to training in the immersives.

  The morning after we got back, Captain V called the whole company together.

  “We’ve got a good one this time, children,” Captain V said. “A full operation. Six divisions are being deployed, including ours. You’ll get a debrief from Major Stakeley shortly. What I can tell you right now is it’s going to be the biggest deployment most of you have ever seen. That means it’s going to be easy to get confused. I need you all to respect the com lines. We will have a medic channel for medical evac. Do not call for a medic over the platoon or company channels. We need to keep those clear.”

  I glanced over at Tanaka and his squad, standing just to the left of me and mine. Time for the Canuck jump, wasn’t it?

  I didn’t want to do that jump again. I didn’t want to go back either. I wanted to go forward. To see if there was anything after the Sick. Forward. Ever forward.

  We geared up and they dropped us onto the deployment field. A fine rain fell. I found myself shaking.

  Andria glanced back at me and opened a two-way channel. “Can you tell me how this goes?” I figured she was relying on logistics and intelligence being too busy to actively monitor our conversation.

  “We lose Vela, and Jones gets his arm blown off. Fire gets my squad and Tanaka’s cut off. It’s . . . a fucking bloodbath. I told you about this one”

  “The rogue NorRus ship?”

  “I’d love to be wrong.”

  “How can I change it?”

  “I don’t fucking know,” I said. “That’s the fucking problem. But if you could point logistics at that park to pick us up before we get roasted, that would sure be good.”

  Our bodies began to shake. My teeth chattered. The contractions bent me back, tried to split me in two. My whole body bursting apart. Bursting apart . . .

  No, I thought. I am going to stay together. Stay focused. I need to go forward.

  I came apart into trillions of little pieces, transformed into light. I soared. This time, I felt it; I kept a thin grasp on my consciousness as the fabric of reality warped around me.

  We rose and shot off through nothing, through blackness, in the spaces between things. We careened, floated, danced, swam.

  North America. Canuck, again? No, I didn’t want to do that run again, I didn’t want—

  A burst of white light. Searing pain. Had I ever felt pain while deploying, before?

  I spiraled down over the great wheat fields of Canuck, heading toward a shining city untouched by the war.

  A new, vibrant city to be razed.

  37.

  A virgin target.

  Totally untouched by drones or bursts or rapidly deployed soldiers made of light.

  I had heard of the city below me, seen it in immersives about the regrowth of the north.

  Nasakan.

  Déjà vu.

  We were a blazing ball of death.

  I saw a glowing green field full of bodies heaped up like hay bales. They weren’t alien bodies. They were us. Our suits. Our faces. And they spread out all around me, as far as I could see. Something had gone badly here. We had done something very wrong, and we had paid for it. I stretched the moment out, tried to hold it. I didn’t just get a few seconds this time, but a couple minutes. And I could sense myself there, like I was visiting Nasakan during two different futures.

  I had this moment of dissonance as I was coming together over the drop zone, both versions of Nasakan lying one atop the other, seeing another way this ended. Another possibility.

  Blink.

  And then, I dropped.

  We started corporealizing over the Martian refugees’ biggest port city, the shining pearl they had carved out in Northern Canuck. It unfurled from the flat black desert they had turned in
to a golden prairie, the way I imagined old explorers dreamed of the Lost City of Z. This time of year, the sun didn’t set. The waterways up here didn’t freeze in winter anymore. The Martian refugees had grown fat in the far north, complacent.

  It was beautiful. The pinnacle of some great civilization. Not a Teni civilization, but something much more earnest. Much more alien. So clean and light and new. New like nothing on the rest of Earth was new, all of us building on top of the dead cities that had come before us, the ruined landscapes. Seeing their untouched city, even our best made us look like what we actually were—vagrants living on the bones of something greater.

  We landed and scattered inside the spiraling towers. I arrived a good two minutes after everyone else, and I heard the screams of those who had corporealized inside buildings or walls or those who’d gotten stuck in the pavers. The whole division was here; coms came online almost immediately, and I saw the full extent of the company all around the city. But we had paid for the speed, and the coms, and the brief, yes, shit, I could already access the brief! We were online, had come online before we’d even come together, and paid dearly. Paid with our bodies.

  What had they done to us?

  One soldier waved her arms at me; she was stuck halfway into the ground. Others I passed were already dead, their fleshy shells put back together in a steaming mess of broken meat.

  Overhead, waves of our drones came in behind us to draw fire from the shining city. They swept across the neatly tilled fields and buzzed over us. I expected to hear the enemy’s defensive guns or the wailing of their artillery in response to the onslaught. But the air was silent save for the soft whirring of the drones and the chuffing of our boots on the paving stones.

  I saw movement in one of the buildings and shot off a burst from my pulse rifle, reflexively. The facade cracked and wept brown sap, like something alive. But I didn’t see any Martian refugees, or anyone else, just us in our boots.

  I reviewed the brief, and my blood went cold. We had come here to end this city, and possibly more than that—you have been hand-selected, the brief said, to deliver the final solution to the Martian problem on Earth. Here are your instructions. . . .

  What they proposed was self-destruction.

  What had the Martian refugees ever done to us that we hadn’t done to ourselves? But that didn’t matter at all. What mattered was destroying everything that they had built on Earth. Destroying the very evidence of their existence here. Because if anything at all about Mars was good, what was there to stop our people from taking their side?

  I was starting to wonder myself.

  We crawled over the entire city looking for insurgents. But the city was deserted. Maybe they’d abandoned it, or they’d found out we were coming and hid in bunkers or left earth intentionally. I didn’t know.

  “What’s going on?” Deathless said over the squad channel.

  I’d been so sick and fearful, coming together inside a city, that I hadn’t stopped to do a squad check. We hadn’t done the usual sanity and digits check, either.

  I swept over the names of my squad: Deathless, Jones, Omalas, Marino. Where did that put me in the time line? I had no fucking idea.

  Marino screamed his head off and ran ahead of us. He fired his rifle into the air, blasting holes into the pristine architecture. He yanked off his helmet. “You fucks!” he yelled. “Where the fuck are you?”

  “Marino,” Andria barked, “put your helmet back on.”

  Marino began to hum that little tune from Vila Sésamo. He walked into a breezy park and did a little dance on the soft green grass, shaking his ass. “Surrender to the first real Martian you see!” He laughed. “Just kidding! There are no more fucking Martians!”

  He reached into his tactical jacket and pulled out what looked like a bottle of booze. I recognized it a moment later. It was the petrol bomb he had smuggled out of São Paulo. How long had he kept that with him?

  “What do you think, Hal?” he yelled at his bottle.

  “Marino!” Andria said. “Get back in formation. Stay on mission. That’s an order.”

  “I love you too, Hal,” Marino said. “We are the best of friends, you and me. We are going places. Going places no Martian can!”

  “Marino! Stop being a little shit!”

  He rounded on me. He was still a good forty meters away, but I saw his face contort. “You saw what happens.”

  I remembered his inaccessible file, his missing squad, his madness and hysteria. Whose future had I seen before we came together here? Had he seen that future too? Was that the end he had seen from the beginning?

  Marino pulled a lighter from his pocket. He yanked the plastic wrap from the top of a petrol-soaked rag that served as a fuse. Flipped the lighter.

  The rag caught. Marino smashed the bottle open with his gun, pouring petrol all over his arms, splashing his face, his suit.

  “Goddammit!” I ran toward him.

  He raised his gun at me and fired just above my head, burning all the while.

  I felt the wave of the blast and staggered.

  Then Marino turned the gun on himself, and blew off his own head.

  His flaming corpse crumpled to the pillowy green ground.

  All around him, the members of our company were eerily quiet.

  I pulled off my helmet and listened to the pop and crackle and hiss of his burning body.

  “Dietz?” Jones opened a two-way channel. “You all right?”

  “Why? You think that’s how I’m going out?”

  Silence.

  Mad Dietz.

  Major Stakeley came in over the division channel. “We are nearly in position. Dog Company, we need you to catch up.”

  We couldn’t just come all this way for nothing. We had to do what we came for. We had to be weapons. No matter the price. We were the price. Nasakan was the price.

  I read the brief over again and felt a moment of dizzying vertigo. What would this solve? How many of us would die in this stupid exercise?

  I opened a two-way channel with Andria. “We have to stop this,” I said.

  “I need you to hold your breath, Dietz,” Andria said softly.

  I saw Tanaka ahead of me, and grabbed his shoulder. “Tanaka!” I said, swinging him around. He had his visor down. I could not see his face. “We can’t do this. None of us should do this.”

  He shrugged me away. “You talking to me now?”

  “What?”

  “Finish the mission,” he said.

  “Who the fuck are you?”

  He flipped up his visor, revealing his pale eyes. “No, who the fuck are you?” he said. “It’s like you’re a different person every time we deploy. You want to stop this? Don’t fire.”

  “I won’t,” I said, “but we need—”

  “How do you know? You haven’t lived this one before, have you? You don’t know. That’s the fucking problem. All this jumping the fuck around means nothing. It’s a dead end. Just like the war.”

  He put his visor back down and moved out.

  Jones said, over our platoon channel, “Dietz, we need you here. Move.”

  My heart sank. Tanaka was right. And Andria? What was going on? What had happened right before this?

  We assembled around the heart of the city’s square. Just as the brief told us to do, we raised our pulse rifles and flipped them on the new setting, the one engineered specifically for this mission. We pointed our weapons across the broad square at one another, sticking to the brief. Set the rifles at a high charge. Waited for the signal.

  But, scouring the brief, I realized no one had actually tried to use the light like this before, no living person. It was something they’d done with simulators and robots. Now they wanted us to shoot at one another just as we were coming apart. Shoot the people you’d take a hit for.

  I’d fire into my own face first.

  I opened a two-way channel to Andria. “We can’t do this.”

  “I know. We’re out of options.”


  “Fuck you, Andria. Fuck all this.”

  She cut the connection.

  I swore.

  I started to vibrate.

  We had to wait for the signal. Be patient.

  The brief said to wait . . . and then we should fire on one another.

  Madness.

  Mad fucking Dietz, they all said, and I was the only person here who seemed to have any sanity left.

  I yanked off my helmet and kicked it into the circle. Raised my hands. The cold Canuck wind made my eyes water. “Stop this shit! Don’t do this!”

  I kept the safety on my rifle, and ran out into the center of the circle.

  I was part of the Light Brigade, and I no longer believed in doing what they told us to do.

  The vibrating got worse. Then the cramping. My body seized up. I gasped. Somebody shot their weapon; too soon. A scream. A body down. Another shot. Too soon.

  Goddammit, hold it together.

  “Listen!” I said. “There’s got to be another way. Don’t let them—”

  The contraction stopped.

  The world snapped.

  I didn’t look at the mirrored helmet of the soldier across from me. I looked at the light on my map, the little tag that told me it was Sandoval there, across from me, Sandoval, who was going to shoot me.

  Everything burst apart.

  Our company fired on one another.

  I was aware of the blooming fire of the explosion we made, busting down our component parts.

  I whirled up and up and up with the rushing plume of fire. The city crumpled like a child’s fairy garden. Trees flattened and stripped away.

  The searing explosion kept moving, on and on.

  I watched it from above, still conscious, somehow, in limbo between the darkness and the light.

  The reaction was so massive it obliterated half the northern hemisphere.