War Girls

by Tochi Onyebuchi

  A moment of quiet settles over the group.

  Chiamere, Chinelo’s abd, grabs her attention and whispers to her. When Chinelo looks up again, her eyes are wide and determined. She has a plan.

  “Gather, gather,” she says, bringing everyone close together. “Chiamere believes there is a high probability that officer will try to contact us again. During that first transmission, he did not try to gather any information. He did not ask about how many hostages there were, but they definitely know there are hostages here; otherwise, they would have already attacked. His comms channel was encrypted. Which may be why he was able to get through to us. Or maybe they have some other way of piercing the static. Either way, it is our opening. Our abd will hack the signal, then use this Daren’s comms system as a VPN to transmit it to headquarters.”

  Kesandu leans in. “But to headquarters, it will appear as an enemy transmission.”

  Chinelo replies, “We have to trust that they will know better and open it.”

  Obioma snorts. “Or guess right.”

  Chinelo nods. Grimly.

  From Kesandu: “So we wait until he contacts us again.”

  “We have no choice.”

  “There is someone else with him.” This from Kalu. Everyone turns to face Kesandu’s abd. “The pilot is cyberized. Someone has already hacked his channel.”

  “What?” Onyii asks, eyes wide. Who could this be? An enemy? An ally they don’t know about?

  “And they are connected to Abuja, the Nigerian capital.”

  This time, everyone gasps.

  Chinelo is the first to recover her composure. She grins. “That’s it. We don’t send the transmission to headquarters. We send it to the enemy.”

  Kesandu lets out a shocked, hopeful breath. “We broadcast it all over Nigeria. Show them what their government has been hiding.”

  Chinelo nods. “And they will automatically beam it to the Colonies. This is how we will use their own technology to best them.”

  They can’t believe their luck. Obioma whispers a silent prayer of thanks.

  Onyii thinks of the dead Nigerian and that night in the forest when that young woman had fired her rifle into the air then left. Too many memories. Too many emotions. Onyii obliterates them with a thought. I have a mission to complete.

  The already familiar buzz of a transmission from a Nigerian node fills Onyii’s head. She looks to Chinelo, and Chinelo nods. She feels it too. Together, they project the broadcast, and Daren’s face reappears on the screen before them.

  “Come to reconsider your position, goat’s son?”

  The Fulani pilot’s brows knit together in a deep frown. “We already have soldiers converging on your position. Show us the hostages, and we will order them to stand down.”

  “That easy?”

  Onyii glances at Chinelo and sees that she’s biding time. The abd and the other girls stay out of view so that it looks like Chinelo and Onyii are the only ones in the room.

  “I would not have thought you Nigerians would cave so easily.”

  “You forget,” Daren almost growls, “that you too are Nigerian. We are all Nigerian.”

  Chinelo puts her hands to her chest. “I am Nigerian because a white man said so. I was Igbo because my tribespeople long ago said so. And I am Biafran because I say so.” Her hands fall to her sides. “Even now, you seek to guarantee the safety of your colonizers. These oyinbo. They don’t care about you. They care about your minerals. They care about your machines. They care about what is under the feet of Biafrans. That is why they are aiding you. You share no culture with them, and they share no culture with you. And yet you are letting them help you destroy your Igbo brothers and sisters.”

  Daren flinches, and that’s when Onyii knows the signal went through. He detects the activity on his comms network. But he is too slow to prevent it. It’s out there.

  Pretty soon, it will be splashed over every news outlet in Nigeria and in space. How the Commonwealth Colonies have been shipping weapons of mass destruction to the Nigerians in violation of their stated neutrality as well as galactic human rights law. The Colonies will condemn Nigeria’s use of such weapons. The consequences will ripple outward. Military changes, political changes. Stones in the pond that, once the water stills, will mean a ceasefire. Peace.

  They did it.

  “Are you done with your little speech?” Daren asks, condescension thick in his voice.

  Chinelo squares her shoulders and puts her hands on her hips, satisfied. “As a matter of fact, I am, Your Highness Master Goat.”

  Daren grits his teeth at the insult in a rare show of anger, then calms himself. “Now, show me the hostages. Once they have been confirmed as alive, I will give the order to call off the soldiers in the facility.”

  The foreigners shuffle forward in their dirty, rumpled jumpsuits, hands and wrists bound in solid metal restraints. One by one they walk past the screen before they are once more out of view.

  Daren’s eyes move back and forth, searching. “There was supposed to be another. Where is she?”

  Onyii’s heart races. The dead one. Daurama. How does Daren know the last hostage is a woman? She sees Chinelo racing through that question and more. Onyii says, “She was deemed a danger and had to be separated. She will be among the others when the hostages are freed.”

  The nervousness shows in new wrinkles on the young man’s forehead. “I need to know that she is safe. I need to see her.” He’s starting to panic.

  The dead woman was not an ordinary Nigerian soldier, Onyii realizes. She was someone close to this man. Onyii hardens inside. That changes nothing. Everyone has lost someone precious. She feels a note of satisfaction. Already, they have hurt this man.

  Daren lashes out. “Show me Daurama or I will bomb you until the water glows.”

  “And risk punishment from your commanders and condem-nation from the Space Colonies?” Chinelo’s smirk widens. “Perhaps you should calm down. Maybe get some fresh air. You get the hostages we send you or you get nothing. That is the deal.”

  Daren grows quiet. Even though he doesn’t take his gaze off of Chinelo and Onyii, they can tell that he is receiving orders from his commander. “Fine,” he hisses through gritted teeth.

  “We will send you confirmation when they are ready for pickup.” Then Onyii ends the transmission. When Chinelo looks her way, Onyii says, “If we’d remained on the line any longer, he would have suspected that we were stalling for time. At least this way, we can still hope that he is in the dark about what we have planned. They still think our mission here is to take hostages.”

  Chinelo grins. “Look at you, the master strategist.”

  A shy smile makes its way onto Onyii’s face.

  “Auntie,” Agu says to Chinelo, “we have taken two of their Igwe. They are below us right now. My sensors do not detect any activity around them.”

  Kesandu’s eyebrows rise. “Is there room for all of us?”

  Chinelo turns to her. “No need. There’s an Igwe for each sister, and a smaller mech for each abd.”

  Kesandu, Ngozi, and Obioma all gasp at once. Some of the abd look to each other and grin.

  “I know the way,” Agu says, and the expressions of the others brighten until Agu says, “but the entranceways are blocked. After the first transmission, they were sealed off.”

  “But then what about the hostages?” asks Ngozi. “They will have to let the doors back open if they want the hostages out alive.”

  Chinelo scratches her chin. “And it’s clear that it’s not simply that pilot’s decision. They want the hostages.”

  “So what do we do?” asks Obioma.

  Onyii looks up from her rifle. “We give them the hostages.”

  Agu has Chiamere’s duffel bag in his hand and drops it before the group. The flap hangs open. Onyii takes out a brick of plastic
explosives.

  “And insurance.”

  The sisters grin.

  CHAPTER

  34

  Gold threads through Ify’s memory. Her legs dangle over the small ledge overlooking the beach. Behind her, Onyii stands with her arms folded, squinting at the sunrise. But Ify only has eyes for the stars. They wink into nothingness, the blue-black of night giving way to the gold and purple of early morning. And when they vanish, they take the constellations with them. A crown. A belt. A shorthorn.

  Ify knows some of those stars are Colonies. A giant pinion—a smaller gear—meshed with a larger annular gear. Outside, in noiseless space, the earsplitting grinding of titanic amounts of metal against each other. But on the inside, due to technological wonders she can’t even imagine, no such sound. People walking and eating and studying and learning and being brilliant, going about their lives in breathable air and habitats supporting stable bodies of water. She has glimpsed pictures of the Colonies in her pirated lessons and images she wasn’t supposed to have downloaded. She knows what they look like, but they are still a puzzle to be figured out. The biggest puzzle of all. If people could build those, what else could they build?

  Chukwu, the supreme being that powers all life, is everywhere. Ify can feel him in the ground underneath her. And she can feel him in the warmth of the rising sun. Anyanwu. The word comes to her from her religion lessons. The sun as revelation, the source of all knowledge, and Chukwu its author. Ify brims with so many questions. How things work, how they happen, how the world is put together. With each new day comes the promise of answers.

  “Onyii?”

  Her big sister has her hands wrapped behind her head, elbows outstretched, back arched mid-yawn. “Yeah?”

  “What’s outer space like?”

  And Onyii looks to the sky, and Ify can tell she’s trying to follow Ify’s gaze and see what she sees, but now the Colony star has winked out. All that’s left is the memory of the sight. There’s no way Onyii can see it, but they both stare anyway.

  “I think it’s quiet,” Onyii says at last.

  “You ever been?”

  Onyii shrugs. “Not yet.” She turns to Ify. “Wanna go?”

  “Yes,” Ify says, breathless, her gaze still inclined toward the stars. “More than anything.”

  “Well, do well in school, and I’ll take you.” She snaps her fingers. “Oya, time to get ready.”

  After a moment, Ify gets up, brushes the grass off her butt, and follows Onyii back into the camp, skipping and dreaming of space.

  CHAPTER

  35

  It takes no time at all for Onyii to form eto-eto out of the C-4.

  The hostages stand in a loose circle while the young women strap the C-4 to the skin under their shirts. When Onyii sees that they were not given body armor, she shakes her head. The Nigerians see you as completely disposable. They did not even bother to pretend to protect you, stupid oyinbo. Before long, they are finished.

  “You are being strapped with C-4,” Onyii says in the voice of a doctor describing a condition. “You will notice there is no timer attached, so you may ask yourself how these are capable of detonating. Look closely, and you will see these eto-eto moving their arms and legs. That means they are sentient. And they are connected to me. That means that I control them. And with a thought, I can detonate them.” She looks into the eyes of the golden-haired oyinbo. “Do you understand what I am saying? I am the timer.”

  He gulps.

  Onyii backs away to address the five remaining hostages as a whole. “There is nothing you can do to alter the eto-eto made out of this C-4. There is no time limit on them. As long as I am in geographic range, they are under my control. Additionally, that means that if I am attacked and my attention diverted, I will detonate them, and you will all lose your lives. Painfully. Once I am out of range, the C-4 will disarm itself. And you will be safe.”

  Kesandu and her abd, Kalu, step forward.

  “These two will escort you to the roof of this strut and remain with you until we believe we are safe. Then they too will leave. The C-4 will not disarm itself until we are all out of harm’s way. Try to interfere, and you die. Try to warn the Nigerian Army about any of what we have done or plan to do, and you die. Make me angry, and you die. Do you understand?”

  The golden-haired oyinbo takes a moment to blink through his sweat, then nervously nods. The others hang their heads in sorrow and manage only gentle, docile nods. They will all comply.

  “So now we wait,” Chinelo breathes to Onyii.

  “Now we wait,” Onyii says in return.

  The girls gather. Kesandu and Kalu are the last to join them. First, Kesandu faces Ngozi and sticks her hand out to grasp the other girl’s forearm. Ngozi looks at it for a moment, rifle in her hands, before grabbing Kesandu’s forearm and pulling her into a tight embrace. They embrace for so long and with such fierceness that Onyii can only wonder at what things were like for them before she arrived. What relationships formed before she walked into their lives. Onyii remembers the stolen glances at their training camp, those wordless moments that happened when they thought no one else was looking. When the two break apart, they look each other in the eye for a long time before kissing like it is the last time they will have the chance to.

  Kesandu then makes her way around, embracing each of the sisters in turn, whispering into their ears and looking them in the eye lovingly before moving to the next, until she gets to Onyii. “I was very happy to see you returned to us,” Kesandu says.

  “I was happy that God returned me to you.”

  Kesandu glances quickly at Ngozi, then back. “Take care of her for me. Please.”

  Onyii nods. The one sister she can’t seem to get along with. She almost laughs at the irony.

  Kesandu heads to the group of hostages. “Kalu, oya. Let’s go.”

  Kalu breaks away from the abd, who had all been huddled together, whispering among themselves and grabbing forearms and embracing in imitation of their sisters.

  They are learning to display affection, Onyii thinks with a smile. If they practice this enough times, it will become muscle memory, and real affection will follow. She lets out a soft chuckle. So, this is how a synth learns to love.

  Kalu leads the hostages to the entrance of the room, with Kesandu bringing up the rear. The door is closed tight before them, and they all wait until they hear a massive thunk, the warning siren barking a few times, then the hiss of the door opening. Then the seven of them vanish in a cloud of steam.

  The massive door hangs open, and the others charge through, then scatter down the stairways that flank the main passageway. Once they hit the floor, everyone turns to follow Agu. Agu winds them down corridor after corridor, through narrow spaces between boilers and up and over fallen pipes, all with a broken arm.

  “Here,” he says, panting. They stand over a solid, nondescript patch of concrete. He points at the ground, and Onyii realizes what he means.

  Onyii tears a chunk of C-4 from her breast pocket and fashions it into a charge right in the space’s center. The others back away as far as the enclosure will allow. The explosion is louder than Onyii intends, and the ground shakes underneath them, but right in front of them is a hole big enough for all of them to go through at once. Chinelo puts her head through, as does Onyii, and they see it all just as the first chunks of concrete hit the water.

  Chinelo whistles. “Hey! Jackpot-oh!” She taps Onyii’s shoulder. “Hey, if we are trading with the Nigerians, they can gladly keep my little horsefly if I get to take this dragon.”

  Ngozi slaps her hand on the stone. “Chinelo! Now is not the time!”

  And Onyii catches a glimpse of what they might have been like before things became so serious, before so much blood was spilled. Joking. Fun.

  The abd pull ropes and magnetic fasteners from their bags and secure the fasteners a
nd rope to the ground. Then they shift so that the fasteners face them, and they grip the fasteners and brace themselves against the floor. Each of their sisters grabs a rope and launches herself over the side, rappelling down until she lands on the torso shelf of a different Igwe. The abd follow after them, then yank the magnet fasteners from the floor and let them fall into the water. Agu and Onyii rappel down to the platform they stood on just hours earlier.

  Behind each Igwe stands a hunched aquamech, built for land and water like the Igwe but smaller, more compact. A variation of the ground mechs Onyii used to pilot so often.

  Obioma gestures toward an untouched pair. “We leave these for Kesandu and Kalu?”

  Onyii shakes her head and shouts up at them. “We cannot risk it! When we leave, we will sink them into the water. No one will have them.”

  Obioma winks. “Kesandu will be jealous.”

  The cockpits open all at once, and the sisters climb into their Igwe. Their abd hop from shelf to shelf until they get to the cockpits of the aquamechs. In an instant, the lights of every machine glow to life.

  Onyii looks to Agu. “Go with the abd. I will ride with Chinelo.”

  A steel rope ladder falls from the torso of Chinelo’s Igwe and sweeps Onyii upward so smoothly that she topples onto Chinelo in her seat. For a second, they are a tangle of limbs, and as they try to extricate arms and legs and move elbows and push at shoulders, Onyii catches herself giggling. It surprises her, but on Chinelo’s face is only satisfaction. She doesn’t look surprised at all to find Onyii happy. They are touching, and Onyii can tell that this is the only thing either of them wants.