by Nick Webb
As the two soldiers passed the open stalls hung with suits, technicians called out or waved greetings. As they approached one such stall—an elaborately decorated suit in the final stages of battle preparation gleaming within—the technician popped out and smiled up at the two soldiers, leaning back so that there wasn’t quite so much neck-craning required to see their faces.
Tango leaned over a little and said, “How’s it hanging, Tech? This is Delta-Four-Bravo. Delta, this is Technician 440 assigned to the First Division.”
The technician’s small hand was lost in Delta’s paw when they shook, but the shake was enthusiastic even so. Delta smiled at the short person, no taller than the bottom of her rib cage. The techs were small, but very nimble, very quick. And very smart. They were to be respected, but Delta always felt big and clumsy around them.
Before Delta was forced to figure out what to say, the tech clapped her hands and giggled, “She’s going to love it. Go show her! Go show her!”
Tango boomed a laugh and grabbed Delta’s hand to drag her down the row, the technician’s high and delighted laugh following them. A few more technicians popped out of their stalls and clapped or shouted greetings as they walked. Delta marveled once again at how many people simply liked Tango. Was it the smile, the easy manner, the battle prowess that never returned to the ship as attitude after a battle was over? Delta could only shake her head at it and watch Tango return each wave and greeting.
Halting suddenly, Tango motioned into a stall and said, “Here it is. For you!”
Inside the stall was a suit, and it wasn’t Delta’s usual suit either. The last battle had seen her dented and damaged—so much so that her suit wouldn’t even join the transport back up to the ship properly, requiring she be lifted with the wounded. Delta had expected a refit, but not a new suit.
She stood in front of the suit and took it in. Instead of gleaming metal or bright decorations like those on Tango’s suit, it was all in shades of tan and brown, swirled about so that it blended beautifully. It wasn’t a common color choice, but it was lovely even so. The exoskeleton that would encase her and join with her looked about the same in terms of general form, but it was smoother somehow. Elegant was the word that came to her mind. The weapons that covered every available surface almost seemed to flow like water from the metal body.
“It’s beautiful!” she gasped.
Tango apparently couldn’t hold back anymore or wait for Delta to explore the suit herself. Punching the button to rotate the suit, Tango opened the back and waved in invitation. “Get in!”
Delta slid into the suit and immediately felt the difference. This suit hugged her, pressing in where it should and giving her room where she most wanted it. It was fitted as only a long-time lover would understand she needed it to, as someone who knew her body as well as she did would create it to fit.
“Turn it on,” Tango said from behind her.
Delta chinned the activation bar and the suit closed in around her, haptic feedback telling her exactly where the suit was touching the rack in exactly the right way. Even the chin-bar was padded on this new suit, an added touch that spoke of love and made Delta smile.
“Weapons,” Delta said and the displays that came up in front of her eyes made them widen. She had everything. No, she had at least two of everything.
When at last she climbed out of her suit, Delta was overwhelmed and didn’t want to sleep another ship-year away before she might use it. Tugging the sleeves of her bodysuit down, she asked, “How did you do this?”
Tango looked almost embarrassed, waving away the singular nature of the accomplishment. “I woke up a few months early, but the techs here did the hard stuff. Really.”
Delta looked over at Tech 440, who was standing outside the stall of the suit she was working on and shaking her head. She pointed to Tango as if to counter that claim.
“Well, I thank you. And the colors, how did you think of that?”
Tango shrugged and said, “During the learning about this next planet while I was sleeping, I saw all the deserts, the sand. I’m not sure why, but it stuck with me for some reason. I like it though. Do you?”
Delta nodded, suddenly shy again with all the techs sneaking glances at them from the stalls. This was unprecedented. Techs made suits, designed suits, maintained suits. Soldiers didn’t do that. Tango was different and always had been, but this was almost too different.
“Why did you do this? The techs would have refitted my old one or made one,” she asked, looking up at Tango, her eyes soft with emotion.
Tango shrugged and touched the pattern on the chest plate of the suit. “I don’t know, really. I just wanted it to be right for you. Perfect. It seemed like something I could do for you that was special. I want you to be as safe as I can make you.”
Delta shook her head, but she smiled even so. “I’m a soldier. So are you. Safety is for the ship, not the ground.” She pushed the button that sent the suit back into the stall to wait for the next battle, eyeing it like the prize it was. Then she rose onto her tiptoes and kissed Tango’s equally scarred lips and whispered, “But it’s the best gift I’ve ever received and I love you for it.”
“Well, anyway,” Tango said, stepping back and eyeing all the grinning techs watching them, “we should get to sleep. Lots to learn. Lots of battles to plan. It’s going to take a long time for the ship to slow, so we might as well not get old while it’s happening.”
Later, as Delta felt the rush of cool gas filling her pod and the sleepiness washing over her, she thought about her suit and murmured, “Bang. Bang. Zap.” Then she dreamed of battle.
Three
The Voice nearly tripped as she shuffled with unusual haste toward the women’s quarters. The Hand assigned to her that day caught her before she landed on her face, a look of barely concealed panic marring her features. If the Voice were damaged, then it would be the Hand that paid the price.
“Thank you,” the Voice said and the Hand cringed at the words.
This Hand was young, just out of the bleeding rooms and newly allowed into the halls of the palace. She was still fresh and fearful, which is why she’d been assigned. The Voice had grown old and weary, not so steady on her feet anymore. She needed a young, strong Hand to help her. But even with her advancing age, her voice was still pure and the notes she could carry higher than any other Voice in the land.
This ability had kept her alive for longer years than most, but she had one more advantage. She had also borne two Masters, an unprecedented accomplishment. That had made her master tender toward her, even lenient. He always ensured she had a Hand nearby to tend her. Even when she had been caught reading a Sky-God book for her own pleasure, he had only taken one eye instead of having her burned to feed the crops.
Though she had only borne five times, just one male had been culled during the Three Year selections. The other two had been sent to the Master’s School, and when openings in the Great 5000 had opened, both her males had been chosen from their like number to fill the gap. The others were culled, but those she had borne had been made masters.
Of her two female bearings, she had no idea, for it was not considered important to the master, but she watched each new selection when it would have been their times, hoping to see some girl-child chosen to be a Voice that carried hints of her features.
Selections were always hard to watch, but those years had been particularly difficult. It would be the final time a child was whole. Each tap on a shoulder meant either the girl-child would have her voice or her arms removed. It was hard to decide which was the better outcome to hope for. Either choice was better than that which awaited all those not tapped on the shoulder. They filed out the other side of the choosing arena and their smoke darkened the skies within hours.
Even so, she’d looked for some hint of herself in those small voices and faces. She’d seen none, but that didn’t mean they were both culled. It was possible that they lived.
Only now
that meant nothing. Nothing in all the land meant anything now. The end was here. There were dark shadows in the heavens and the Masters were in a frenzy of fright.
Her master shifted between abject fear that it was the burning stars returning to blight the land again and ecstatic joy that the shapes might signal the return of the Sky-God. Eventually, he had settled on abject fear and that was that.
Grunting to avoid frightening her young Hand any further, the Voice nodded toward the door that led to the women’s quarters at the end of the dim hallway. The Hand ducked her head and made the sign of obedience before hurrying ahead to open the door for her.
Two Enforcers bracketed the door and their eyes flicked toward her for only a moment. Like the Hands, they had no voices, but unlike every other person who was not a Master, they were male. Or rather, they had started as males.
Pausing at the threshold, the Voice looked down at the floor and said, “The Master calls for you. All Enforcers are to report to the sheltering place.” They did not acknowledge her, but they knew of the dark shapes and hurried off, leaving the door unguarded for the first time in memory.
Like the women, some Enforcers were Hands and a few were Voices. These were Hands, and even though they were Enforcers, they listened to all Voices. Voices relayed the words of the Master and no others. They were trusted.
The hallways inside the women’s quarters were stark. Bare of the decorations and frescoes that lined the halls on the master’s side of palace, they were instead clean and bare, painted in shades of brown and tan to match the bareness of their lives.
The Voice hurried down the passageways, past the cells where pallets for women not on duty held sleeping forms, past the kitchens where they ate in silence. The bleeding rooms were up ahead and this was the only place a male would never venture to go, so it was where women went as often as they could. It was their only place of peace.
The Hand opened the door for her and she rushed in, her robes endeavoring to trip her feet with their many layers. It frustrated the Voice that she was unable to brush them aside or pick them up to make the going easier. Again, her Hand steadied her and as the door to the bleeding rooms shut behind them, she said, “Gather them all. Gather them here. There is no time. There is fire in the sky.”
Four
Two divisions would be conducting the assault, which was a slender number when the number available was considered. Then again, this was a rather unique situation, the population skewed and the defenses oddly absent. Like all colonized planets, the Seed ship for this one sent out updates along the quantum buoys for millennia until finally launching itself into the system’s sun to disappear forever.
And like all ships, this Seed ship did not concern itself with social development, only with ensuring that technological development remained within or below the allowed levels. It was a flaw in the original design, one that the Peace Force had been tasked with correcting long ago. It was the final task given to them before the Earth joined all the other planets whose times had come and gone.
Tango had learned the details of the planet while they all slept, troubled dreams and nightmares interrupting the long learning sessions. The Seed ship had not spared details or flavored the reports with opinion, but that only made the learning worse. Why this colony had become what they were was a mystery, but the asteroid impact that soured so much of their land had probably played a role. It didn’t matter why, though. It only mattered that they had chosen this unacceptable path.
Like everyone else, Tango awoke disturbed. Angry. Ready.
As the suit tightened around Tango’s body, the gel filled every crevice. The gel would sustain all bodily functions and protect its inhabitant from the vagaries of space and the planet’s surface. The moment of breathing it in was hard—as always—but the moment passed. Now Tango was as mute as the majority of the planet’s population, an irony.
Tango’s throat made the motions of speech, and the suit created the sounds and transmitted them. An acknowledgement from the Company Communicator came rapidly, and soon all the members of the team were ready to form up. Testing weapons came last, each soldier passing through a testing chamber on the way to formation. The sizzling pops and hums were felt more than heard inside the suit, each one like a caress to a heart formed for battle.
Each company filed into the formation bay and the crowd grew, a thousand suited bodies standing on their markers and ready by the time their leadership filed in to take their places. More than twenty bays would be used for this launch, but that only accounted for the use of two ships and a mere twenty thousand troops. That was nothing in comparison with most. It was very few when considering the target was an entire planet.
As Tango crossed the bay, a final look brought Delta into view. She was far back in the formation, her tan and brown standing out in the forest of bright colors and patterns. Raising the suit’s arm in a final wave, Tango’s boots found their assigned spot and locked into place.
Two more ships stood at the ready in case of need, the bombardment cannons ready to destroy all of the surface that needed destroying, but this plan called for a more delicate operation. It was decided that though this would remain a no-two-stones operation, the vast majority of the population had been classified as victims in need of rescue. This was also an unusual wrinkle in the history of such planetary cleansings. Not entirely, because there had been others, but not at all common.
In practical terms, it meant that Tango and every other soldier deployed could not simply eliminate anyone they encountered within a set battle zone. Instead, each human would have to be cleared or targeted as individuals, a process that increased risk and delayed completion.
It was also a challenge. Tango liked challenges almost as much as battle itself.
The suit feedback probes attached to the bones behind each suited ear vibrated as the channel opened. “Brigade, prepare for deployment!”
The red lights of the opening bay door raised the pulse rates of all the soldiers. The anticipation of insertion and the battle that would follow heightened their bio-readings enough that the support techs in another part of the ship were highlighted in the red glow of their screens. Smiles and butt-fidgets inside their thousands of support pods followed the glow. For them this was battle too. Each soldier had a support tech, and each support tech lived the battle through their soldier.
As the bay floor lowered into open space, the planet loomed bright and wide around the edges of the platform. Too much brown, too much red, not enough green. Soured land. It would recover, but such things take time. The wide green strip to either side of the equator was jagged and broken by the seas, but already Tango could see tendrils of green stretching up along rivers and spreading abundance. Yes, the planet would recover in time.
But not with these people. Not with this society.
“Deploy!”
Like one thousand others, Tango’s boots detached from the bay floor and the propulsion systems kicked on, pushing the suit over the edge and into space. With only the briefest pause, the matrix began to form, each suit connecting in its assigned spot, the ball growing around those suits in the center. Within moments, the Battle Ball was formed and propelling itself toward the atmosphere and planet below—one thousand suits meant to bring destruction and death. Other balls deployed, each one headed toward a known population center that the inhabitants called Palaces.
Once the spin began and the ball approached atmosphere, there was nothing to see as the face plates went opaque. Now, all they could do was enjoy the ride.
Five
The Voice crouched outside on the large platform roof above the women’s quarters. Through the window, a crowd of women waited for her words, each ear ready and each body pressed forward. Her Hand steadied her as she gazed upward, though the girl would not look up at all. Perhaps she was even more fearful than the masters of the sky-fire, but she could be forgiven fear when her youth was considered.
“They are balls of fire,�
�� the Voice said. The awe she felt at the sight filled her voice and made the women nearby sigh. One of the many reasons she had lasted so long while other Voices fertilized the fields was her ability to tell a story with such feeling that the masters would cry at the telling. And that had been acting on her part. This was real.
“I see one coming this way. They are round, I’m sure of it. I do not know what they’ll do, but if they bring that fire, we will be burned. That is nothing to us, is it?” She expected no answer, but she felt the trembling of her Hand through the arm around her waist.
One of the older Hands stuck her head out of the window and looked from side to side. The yard below was strangely empty. No Enforcers watched the un-bled Hands as they tended chickens and no Hands crossed the yard with food or water. Seeing her way clear, the Hand stepped out of the window for the first time in her life.
Even without a voice for speaking, the gasps of the other Hands drew the attention of the Voice. She smiled, creating a web of wrinkles around her eyes that spoke to her venerable years. At forty, she was long past the time for burning and she feared these balls of fire far less than the fire that would certainly take her soon in a much more personal way.
“Come. Come out. All of you. There is no one to see!” For the first time in her life, she gave an order that did not first come from a master’s throat. It felt odd, strange… good. It was her duty to gather the Hands, to keep them together until the masters returned, but the Voice was quite sure that duty did not include standing outside against all the rules.
And her words were true. For the first time, there was no one to see, to judge, to send them for burning. The Voice knew where the masters had gone, at least the hundreds that lived in this palace complex. Her own master had grabbed a bag of gold, shocking the Voice into silence as she relayed his commands. No master touched an object in labor. No cup was lifted to their lips by their own fingers, no shoe shoved onto their own foot. And yet her Master had done so, nearly tripping at the unfamiliar action and putting the shoes on the wrong feet.
