We Dare

by Chris Kennedy

  “A little bunker-buster we got this time, folks. Get up and in and clear the path for Dev to blow us an exit, yeah?” Gibbon laughed, and Devra stretched out her hands, releasing the building white noise of her biofeedback loop.

  “I clear out the bombs, Gibb, I don’t set them.” She’d said it a thousand times, but there was comfort in the old lie. If she couldn’t go home, she at least had these idiots in her corner.

  “Don’t listen to her, Rook. She’s a three and crazy as a four. Eyes, fingers, ears. Best bomb squad you could ask for, but she’ll blow you up if you piss her off.”

  “Can never give a man fingers,” Turk said, mournful.

  “Don’t ask why,” Gibbon interjected, exactly too late as the newbie opened his mouth.

  “Why?”

  “We’d never stop pulling our own cords, y’know whatta mean?” As always, Turk cracked himself up, chortling even as he let go of the pull-up bar with one hand to make an age-old gesture.

  Even Devra smiled, despite her best efforts.

  “Or noses, ya smelly git,” Gibbon added, flinging a fieldbook in his direction. “Don’t know why they’d give any of us noses, but the sciencey types gotta keep showing off.”

  “Are you—”

  “It’s rude to ask a lady, newbie.” Gibbon glared at him until he wilted, then laughed. “I got eyes, but not like yours. Distance instead of spec-range. No noses in our unit, thank all the little angels. Hear they’re hell on cleaning duty.”

  “Gibb’s the best sniper you’ll see this side of anywhere,” Shike said, hopping back onto his bunk and kicking one of the loose chairs they’d scavenged over the years toward the kid. “You want to sit for introductions? We got nothing but time, ‘til the next orders come down.”

  Their new recruit was jumpy and all exposed nerves, but his hand snapped out and steadied the chair even as he blinked down at it. The sciencey types didn’t mess around—his reflexes had to be good to be a runner, and they rarely sent half-adjusted mods out into the field.

  Though they’d never missed a pick-up either, and here she was, done with the countdown of her tour and counting back up to some other mystery number. Devra tried not to fixate on it, but her hearing kept slipping into different channels, trying to spot the directive coming out of Command. No one had answered her yet, and if they were sending anything out to anyone, it was encrypted below her range.

  Making a low noise in her throat, she sat up, shoving out the useless thoughts and dropping her ears back into vocal. Her idiots were showing off; both to welcome the newbie and to try and distract her, the least she could do was be a part. Devra swung her feet off the bed, plopping her elbows on her knees and giving Shike her best listening face.

  “Should we start with the newbie, Shike? Not all of us met him at Command.”

  “Some of us were blocking the rest of us out with fingerbangs,” Turk muttered, dropping from his bar and grinning at the rude gesture she flipped him in response.

  “I’m, uh, I’m Dixon Gunner, specia—”

  “Ok, no, shut up. Your name is absolutely not Dix Guns, you twat-faced child. Show your tag.” Gibbon sat up nearly as quickly as Devra had, grabbing a boot and lifting it in mock threat.

  “It’s—no, no, it’s Dixon –”

  “It is,” Shike interrupted, clearly as delighted as the newbie was embarrassed. “Somebody’s parents wanted him to go world-hopping. Got him all colonial-forces-ready from day one.”

  “Gunner is the town.” Dix stared at the floor, but his voice had steadied. “They give you the town name when you’re abandoned and no one knows where you come from. The group home names the kids alphabetically. I came in right after new year, so I was fourth; had to start with a D. No one else was named Dixon.”

  “Are you shitting us with this, D-Guns?” Turk asked, wiping non-existent sweat from his face in an excuse to either hide his expression or show off the flexing of his abdominal muscles. Or, knowing Turk, both.

  “Shit’s bad everywhere, not just the out-planets.” Dix shrugged, still looking down, and Devra made an effort to stop blaming him for Command’s fuckups.

  “Look, it got you the best name in the barracks. Too bad you didn’t get fingers, Dix Guns. Coulda been worlds-class in porn.” Shike’s voice, almost too-kind again, didn’t grate as much on Devra’s nerves this time.

  Dix lifted his head, a confused smile trying to tug free on his face, and Shike grinned, then clapped his hands.

  “Right. Dix Guns, the crew. Crew, Dix Guns.” They all chorused a hello, waiting in an expectant silence until Dix turned back to Shike, trying to figure out if they were all fucking with him. Which, of course, they were. After the joke landed, Shike pointed at himself. “Me, you know. Carl Shike, putting you all back together every time you split yourselves open. Eyes modified for zooming in on your little bits, hands for dexterity, but none of that finger sensitivity.” He made an elaborately disgusted face. “Bad enough I get closeups of your assholes, you assholes; I don’t need to feel ‘em real good too.”

  Dix’s smile got a little more comfortable, and Devra lifted her chin toward Gibb, giving him a little more time to settle. Much as her unit liked to joke, there weren’t enough people running around with three modifications stacked through their systems for newbies to always be entirely at ease with her. Any one mod changed you a little, and things got exponential with each addition.

  “Gibbon Merk, and no, I don’t know why my parents named me after some extinct ape-monkey. They blew up on a shitty mining shift when I was schooling, so it’s not some orphan tragedy like yours, but sad enough, all right?” Gibb winked at him, the tiny muscles around her eyes tensing as she shifted her pupils and tightened her gaze. “Eyes got done up for sniping, can see the stray eyebrows on your forehead.”

  Dix lifted a hand halfway to his face before he caught himself, and she winked again.

  “Turk. They ramped up all my glands and some shit so I’m endurance and pretty much peak human.” He gestured at the length of his body dramatically, pausing to pose and flex.

  “He’s the muscle, and the one I get to see inside of most often,” Shike added, waving off the kiss-face Turk gave him in response.

  Dix glanced at Devra and back to Shike, swallowing. She waited until he looked at her again, smiling her slowest, creepiest smile. As soon as his eyes widened she dropped the expression for something more natural, and was rewarded by both Gibb’s snort and Dix’s sudden realization that she was absolutely fucking with him.

  “Devra Hegel. I’ve been on this planet since halfway through the fight. Eyes, ears, fingers. Biofeedback loop from my built-out fingertips to get in the guts of something and differentiate its workings even if I can’t see it, frequency hopping to find the trigger and intercept chatter, and micro on the eyes to differentiate the explosives or find some of the stress faults in buildings.”

  “Total package,” Gibb said.

  “They had to up her processing to be sure she could take all that info in without exploding her damn self.” Gibb tapped her temple, rolling her eyes. “Means she thinks we’re slow.”

  “The word you’re looking for is ‘idiots,’ Gibb.” Turk performed an elaborate bow aimed at the cluster of them.

  “Yes, but you’re my idiots,” Devra said, inclining her head in answer to his overdone gesture.

  “Is everyone else on patrol or out on maneuvers?” Dix relaxed more into his chair, though his gaze moved quickly from each of them to the empty bunks lining the long walls of the packed-clay barracks.

  “Everyone else.” Gibbon laughed, longer and louder than it deserved, and flopped back on her bed. “Kid, we’ve been here for years. This is what’s left of our unit. You’re the first newbie we’ve gotten in…what’s it been, Turk?”

  “Two years,” he replied cheerfully.

  “Five-year tours, so they get their fuel money out of us. Maybe that’s it, Dev.” Gibbon rolled onto her side to stare at the other woman. “They’re count
ing local time, not Galactic Standard.”

  “They know what they put in the contract.” Dev shrugged, looking up at the cracks in the dry ceiling to better ignore the sympathy aimed at her. “Fuckers are late, and the least they could do is send a note.”

  “Maybe they don’t have anything hot enough to send a three into. It’s just Huvo and its never-ending mining scuffle with old colonists who claim-jumped and don’t want to pay their taxes.”

  “Word in the training halls is that it’s hot all over. Tax rates went up, and the colonies aren’t liking it.” While he’d stopped swallowing before every other word, Dix’s blinking was still enough to rattle Devra’s attempt at piecing her calm back together.

  “Colonies never like anything.” Turk sat on the edge of Shike’s bed instead of making his way back to his corner. “Command gives them the speech—‘you’ll probably die! But if you live, you get a whole world that maybe your children’s children can definitely survive on!’ So Command only gets the crazies.”

  “I thought we were the crazies.” Shike grabbed his pillow from under Turk and shook it out so fast Devra could hear the fabric snap. “We get the other speech—‘We’re going to make you better, stronger, faster, or at least one of them. You’ll probably die if we try to do more than that! But if you don’t, you get to keep your mods for life and can probably live on one of the colony worlds where the air doesn’t want to eat you!’”

  “We’re not the crazies.” Gibb pointed at Devra. “The threes are. The fours. We came out totally normal. The colonists are a little crazy, but hell, who wants to pay taxes for the honor of dropping dead on some shit rock?”

  “Aaaanyway,” Devra drawled, repeating her obscene gesture for Gibb’s benefit. “Dix, you said there was word around training—you get any actual intel, or was it all rumor?”

  “Rumor.” He scratched the back of his neck, but met her eyes. “They don’t tell us anything, but we trained over every kind of terrain. No one could figure out where we were getting sent because we were trained for all of the different worlds.”

  “Not very efficient,” Shike acknowledged.

  Turk frowned and glanced at Devra. She knew they were thinking the same thing—they’d been due a relief force since Turk, Gibbon, and Shike had hit the back half of their tour, but no one had come. Her second tour had been up weeks ago, but no ship or word. Then, still no word or actual force, but a quick buzz by a ship and a single newbie to train…

  Did they all just…live here now? Had Command stretched itself too thin, or were they finally letting go of Huvo? Rumor had it the Galactic Command had jettisoned colonies before, and for less antagonistic reasons than twenty years of Command and two waves of colonists blowing each other’s shit to pieces.

  Ten years ago, she would have told herself Command had too much invested in them to dump them on a planet and not look back, but even then she wouldn’t have quite believed it. If the modded soldiers were term-complete, Command lost that investment either way. Why bother with the pickup fuel?

  Devra shook her head slightly, playing it out in her head. Shit way to do business, and no matter how strung out the colony worlds were, word would get back to the training halls. Eventually it would hurt recruitment, which would hurt profits, and even Command…

  Even Command wouldn’t be that short-sighted.

  The conversation turned again, to the regularities and familiar shared misery of training, and she dropped her hearing into radio. Still no chatter. It wasn’t entirely unusual, but nevertheless added to her unease.

  She pressed all the fingers of her left hand against her hip, letting the buzz of the feedback loop and the sharp pangs of the protesting nerves down her arm take over for her thoughts. Without another word to the group, she dropped back on her bunk and rolled over, putting her back to them.

  Easier to go to sleep with her arm on fire than spiraling through the possibilities of Command fucking her over.

  Her unit would educate the newbie, or they wouldn’t. For the moment, she couldn’t bring herself to care.

  * * *

  Part 2

  A full decade on this rock and she’d never gotten used to the emptiness. Swathes of dry land, flat or sweeping into jagged hills that erased sight lines, covered in dust. Not enough cover, and even her eyes could only find so much of interest.

  Underground was better for stalking, but the echoes were worse. Sound bounced for miles, whispering at her thoughts every time she tried to sleep.

  She tried not to sleep.

  Eventually they’d catch on to her tactics. She hadn’t been able to erase every record of the cave systems, though she’d collapsed, rerouted, and mined enough stretches of it for some grace.

  Only a few more targets.

  Command didn’t want to come back. They wanted it done.

  She’d finish it.

  Four Months Ago

  “Oh, they remembered we’re here?” Gibb had a knack for tying her boots with such sharp movements everyone kept an eye on her knives. “Fucking Command. How hard is it to crunch the numbers and send us somewhere worthwhile?”

  “It’s not an attack, it’s a call from another unit.” Devra checked the message’s tags again. Unnecessary, but it gave her something to do while they finished getting suited. “The Diggers—”

  A chorus of groans answered her. The Diggers were a bunch of barely-mods, all passive—enforced bones and beefed up hand-eye-coordination that made them good for drop and grabs.

  It also made them good at calling for backup, which was really Devra’s fault.

  “Why’d you have to tell them anything could explode?” Gibb stood, stomping her boots and pulling the cords tight on her vest.

  “Because these colonists are creative as hell, and anything could explode. First two years it was all—”

  “If it has wires or there’s a burning smell, call me.” Turk and Shike chorused the rest of her sentence—even after their arrival, she’d still had to drill the directions into the other units.

  It had nothing to do with the Diggers’ processing capability and everything to do with the long stretches of time between colonist and Command skirmishes. Even her idiots got complacent.

  “Turk, where’s your vest?”

  “Fuck a vest, Dev. It’s hot. You’ve got the bombsuit, you’re the bomb squad, I’m just lookout.”

  “Lookouts vest up too, Turk.” Shike grunted as he checked his gear. “Just cause it’s the Diggers doesn’t mean they didn’t find something, and it definitely doesn’t mean there aren’t collies holed up in the rocks.”

  “Collies, really?” Dix interjected into the team channel. “They get nicknames now?”

  “Bored of calling them crazies. Or colonists. Or mentally empty assholes who got lost on their way to wherever and thought, hell, this dust planet looks great, Imma live here and fight about it for a hundred years.” Shike’s words all but ran together. He’d settle once they were in the shit.

  “Twenty-one and point two standard, Shike.” Gibb could never resist heckling him when the big man was at his antsiest. “You think they’re going for the record?”

  “This is the record.” Dix again, engine noise starting to layer over his words.

  “C’mon, Galactic Command’s been around almost two hundred years; you can’t tell me there’s not some longer fight out there they decided to drop from the records? That sound like them? You know those first hundred years were them duking it out with someone, until the science brains got mods straight.”

  “Gibb, you gonna talk all morning, or can I actually fly this thing somewhere interesting?”

  “Dix is right, let’s get loaded before we burn all the fuel.” Devra squinted, pinging Lolly into her start-up mode.

  “And Dix is wrong, because there isn’t anywhere interesting to fly to on all of Huvo. Thought we learned you better than that, Newbie.” Turk grabbed his vest and stalked out of the barracks, Shike on his heels.

  Gibb looked back at
Devra, and they both shrugged, following the men out.

  “Dix stopped being Newbie when he took three hits at Coronus,” Shike rebuked, though he would have known better if he weren’t all early-action adrenaline.

  “He’s back to Newbie when he says dumb shit we trained him out of already, and they were all grazes. Vote’s still out.” Turk would have argued the point further—every one of them knew it—but Lolly tore ahead of them, kicking up an excessive cloud of dust in her path to their lift.

  “Really, Dev?”

  “Really, Turk. Shut up and follow the robot, there’s a good boy.”

  He responded with her favorite gesture, and they all got loaded with a minimum of additional fuss.

  “Flying us in low,” Dix said, running through the checklist with easy confidence. Faint clicks in their channel indicated everyone else had switched to listening mode. Their team channel was designed not to screech feedback when they were in close proximity, but like everything Command gave, it had its moments. Better safe than crashed when it came to their pilot’s concentration, so the conversation could wait until they landed.

  The engine roared, and the lift lurched upward a hundred feet, allowing the stabilizing thrusters to level them before they shot forward. Dix flew with a slight downward tilt of the lift’s nose—it made the most of his sight lines, but always made Devra’s inner ear sure they were constantly, infinitesimally falling for the entirety of the ride.

  She ran through Lolly’s diagnostics as they flew to distract from the hint of ever-fall, closing her eyes as she commanded the implant to fully connect to the robot. Each system checked green across the board, from the secondary containment unit to the spectrometer.

  The science arm of Command hadn’t figured out how to get human eyes into the x-ray range—full infrared was still more of a hassle than just giving them goggles—and without that part of the spectrum even Devra couldn’t fully analyze all the components of a potential explosive. Lolly had saved her ass more times than she’d chosen to count, and still hung in there. She couldn’t ask more of their faithful robot sidekick, beyond maybe an additional containment unit. The colonists had gotten fond of cluster traps lately. Lolly had never played well with the drones, but Devra could hook another containment unit into the robot’s system without affecting her processing if she did a little tweaking—