What would Franken say? “Can we… can we wake him, ask him?” But I knew the answer. He was clinging to life with such a failing grip that to tug on that rope would be to send him falling away into the abyss. So what would he say, Franken the church-goer, the devout Christ Libber? Would he want to live, even though deliverance came from the paws of demons? Questions I couldn’t answer for him. I could only answer for me. Did I let one of my squad die? Did I let my friend die? Or did I make him live, and damn his principles.
I’m selfish, in the end. Most of us are.
I nodded to the Finn, and Sturgeon retreated to the driver’s seat as she started her work.
THEN IT WAS time for sleep, for whatever the Finns were doing wasn’t quick. It wasn’t any field surgery I recognised: no incisions, no blood, no struggle. Instead they hunched over their patients, with their potions and their elixirs. They were not mending by brute mechanical force. They were growing, changing, tending the bodies of their charges like gardeners.
Sturgeon took first watch, at his insistence. When he woke me for my shift, Cormoran was up as well, watching feedback from her drone as it flew just below the fly-screen and mapped out the country around us. I told her she should sleep; she said she’d slept. Her headware kept her going on just a couple of hours, she told me.
“I’ll bet that cost more than all the gear I ever got from the army.”
“Probably. Nothing but the best, right?” She shrugged. “You’ve got a plan, Sergeant? When we’re done with feeding time at the zoo, what are your orders?”
“You think we should go back?”
“You’re worried what people might think?” Said with a sidelong look and an arched eyebrow. When I nodded, her expression turned pitying. “Sergeant, what they’ll think is, ‘Holy fuck, they’re not dead!’”
“What’s that supposed to mean.”
“Why do you think they sent you and yours on this little jaunt, Sergeant?”
“Because we get things done.”
“Oho, that’s it, is it? And you get things done, what, better than a crack corporate extraction team, do you?”
I opened my mouth to say, We’re not doing so bad, except I was surrounded by manifest evidence to the contrary.
Cormoran snorted. “Seriously, one of their own goes missing, and what happens? They send three grunts nobody’ll miss out of the 203rd and a treacherous little shit like Lawes. That sound to you that they actually even think Jerome Speling’s still alive out there? That he can be rescued?”
“But there’s you,” I told her hotly. “You with your million-dollar skull candy and your million-dollar education. They sent you. So maybe the rest of us are just here to get you where you need to go and then bleed out on the ground while you do it.”
“That’s what you think, huh?”
“Damn straight.”
“Well then let me tell you why I’m here, Sergeant Regan. I’m here because when my commanding officer thought he’d slum it and sleep with the help, I told him where he could get off. And I went on saying no right after he said he wouldn’t take no for an answer.” She was speaking quietly but her voice abruptly had an edge on it like broken glass. “And when he tried to put me over his desk I hacked his fucking phone and overclocked the battery so much they needed a surgeon to unmelt it from his thigh. So no, Sergeant, I am not here to perform a dance of corporate superiority over your cooling corpses. I am here to die like a dog, just as you are. So what are your orders?”
I remember how much hope just fell from me, right then. I hadn’t realized that, however much I expected her to cast us off, I was still taking a lot of strength from the idea that someone on the team would accomplish the objective. An objective. Any objective. I’d imagined her suddenly calling down an unmarked corporate gunship to load Jerome onto, when we’d found him. And even if it flew off without me and mine – as it surely would have – at least the mission was done, then. At least I could stand up and say, “We won!” into the muzzles of the guns. Finding out she was just as damned and lost as the rest of us was a blow, I can tell you.
“I’m open to suggestions,” I told her.
“Fine.” She took a deep breath. “We could actually go find Jerome.”
“You just said –”
“I know what I said. I also know that I hacked the crap out of the LMK system, and I found out where they took him.”
THE NEXT MORNING, Franken was awake. Still pale, still drawn, but you wouldn’t mistake him for his own corpse any more. Where he’d been shot across his chest and gut was just a load of purple bruising now, and some clenched, hard-edged scar tissue that looked months old, not hours. About his scalp, just into the hairline, I saw some livid tissue too, but right then I wrote it off, because his hair was there, and no way could they have played brain surgeon without a close shave first. I mean, that stood to reason, right?
He was sitting up, eating up our remaining rations like a starving man. When I sat by him, he managed a nod and swallowed his mouthful. His eyes headed off between the trees until they settled on some of the Finns.
“How do you feel?”
“Better,” in a voice still weak, but despite that he added, “Strong.” We looked at each other for a moment, and he started, “You let them...?”
I nodded, and warring expressions crossed and recrossed his face. I was waiting for him to accuse me. I wanted to say sorry, except I wasn’t sorry. I expected disbelief, horror, religious mania. Instead, he took a deep breath, let it out. The factions of his face compromised on acceptance. “Fine,” he said. “Right.”
Viina was already about. She moved a little gingerly but, given how she’d been shot up, the recovery was little short of miraculous. I caught her looking at me occasionally. Maybe she wanted to thank me for getting her out of it; maybe she wanted to blame me for getting her into it. No way of knowing from her face or her feline eyes.
“So, what do you reckon?” I put to Franken. “You going to be OK to move out?”
“Try me. Move out to where? We got a plan?”
“The same plan.” In my mind, I turned over what Cormoran had found out. “Stockholm. Trail leads to Stockholm.” Meaning that if we got there, we’d have crossed the entire breadth of Sweden from where we’d landed.
But Sturgeon had been talking to the Finns. The Finns understood everything, it seemed. Maybe they could read minds.
The Finns could help us, and I wasn’t turning down anybody’s hand right then, even if it had claws and hair on the palm.
CHAPTER EIGHT
THE PARTISANS WEREN’T exactly crazy about the idea, I could tell. Two days out from our unscheduled stop for rest and major surgery, and the Finns had led us south-east to another band of grim-faced locals and foisted us on them. We were clear of the US advance, which was apparently focused some way south for tactical reasons opaque to me, but the locals were digging in. This bunch were better equipped than the last – plenty more body armor, plenty better guns and plenty discipline too. Still, they knew they couldn’t go toe to toe with our boys, nor with any corporate forces that might decide to give them a hard time. So I listened to them talk defiance in their civilian clothes – talk resistance and urban fighting, ambush and trap, and felt like I should do something. There was no winner, I wanted to tell them. Nobody came out of that game well. Recent history told that story over and over.
I knew that if I said that – in the translator’s confident tones that even I was starting to find unbearably smug – they’d not listen to me. I knew that plenty of them were going to die, to drones, to mechs, to us – and they’d get some of us, too. I knew. And a whole load of people who weren’t fighting on anybody’s side would be caught in the middle.
Don’t fight, I’d tell them, and they’d stare back at me and say, Go home. I wished I could.
The reason this bunch were better equipped and led than most was standing in front of me right now, listening to Viina through her own tinny little Nord translator. Her name
was Freya, and she was a solidly-built woman with a round, pale face and hair gathered up in a black beret, straight out of an old film about le French Resistance. She was not a partisan, exactly. She was a Nord government liaison, a political officer. She was, therefore, the enemy. I knew it, and she knew it, but apparently Viina didn’t. Viina was trying to recruit her.
The interplay between the two women was very fast, and Sturgeon’s commentary was erratic. Freya was angry, dismissive, incredulous, hostile. Viina was calm and focused, the sort of stillness that precedes the pounce. And she was patient; she let Freya rage and blow, and steadily wore the woman down.
“I don’t get it,” I told Sturgeon. “Why the hell does she think they’ll do anything for us?”
“That’s pretty much what this Freya wants to know, too. But Viina… I dunno, Sarge. You’ve seen how the Nords look at the Finns, right? Half-spooked and half in awe. Monsters, but they’re their monsters. So now the Finns want to help us get to Stockholm without having to shoot up locals every ten miles. And this Freya can do that for us.”
“So why are the Finns doing this for us?”
I saw where his eyes went, before he told me he didn’t know. Franken was sitting a little apart, gun across his knees, brooding. He was at full strength now – you’d not even know he’d been wounded. His eyes were still blue and human, and he hadn’t sprouted feathers or scales or fur. But Sturgeon and I watched him, and we waited for all these things. We waited for the alien to burst – pop! – out of his chest cavity. We waited to see what the Finns had done, when they saved his life. We couldn’t, either of us, quite accept that saving his life was all they’d done. Every little thing, every word, every action of Franken went through a kind of filter, in our minds, where we thought, Is that right? Is that how Franken would have done it, before?
And of course the more we were off with him, the more he was off with us, and the more food we all served up to our paranoia.
And we didn’t have any better idea of why the Finns were suddenly our best pals. It sure as well wasn’t for our minimal role in saving Viina, and I didn’t think that ‘helping out invading US servicemen’ was in their book of right things to do on principle.
“All right, fine!” said that cheerful Californian in my ear, as Freya threw up her hands. “I can get them on a train to Stockholm.”
Viina followed that up with another patient demand, and a second round of negotiation began. Sturgeon translated this as centering on whether we arrived on our own two feet or handcuffed to a radiator.
“Fuck this.” Franken stood abruptly, silencing the room. The Nords were big, a lot of them, but very few of them were quite as big as Franken. It was when I caught myself thinking, Is he bigger than he used to be? that I knew I’d gone completely nuts.
I went out – we were in a big warehouse or hangar or something, now repurposed as partisan barracks. Outside there was a carpool of random military and civilian vehicles, a couple of old sentry guns and, far too close for comfort, a little town of people who had yet to discover the joys of being bombed or driven from their homes because they were harbouring resistance fighters.
Cormoran joined me out there, hands smudged with dark oil stains from where she’d been adjusting the innards of her drone. “On a scale of one to screwed, where are we?” she asked.
I had no answers. Privately, I reckoned we’d gone off that scale some time back, but I had a care for morale, so kept the thought to myself.
WHEN WE WERE actually on the train – so too late for it to do any good – Sturgeon asked me why we hadn’t just quit. We were already some way out of our skillset. We weren’t black ops; we weren’t special forces. We certainly shouldn’t have been dolling ourselves up like Nord civilians and going on holiday to Stockholm. Yes, we had orders to bring back Cousin Jerome, but… at what point did those orders cease to bind us? It wasn’t as if we hadn’t pulled out before. Under fire? Low on ammo? Promised reinforcements suddenly got better things to do? Sometimes it’s just better sense to fall back. But this… there was no line. There was no point at which I could say, “The mission’s FUBAR, we’re going home.” The mission came so pre-FUBARed that I couldn’t make the call.
Maybe if Cormoran had drawn a blank; maybe if there’d been no trail to follow, I’d have called it a day. But she scooped that intel out of LMK’s systems, and so there we were on a train full of Nords who hadn’t fancied either cosying up to the US army or taking up a gun and joining the partisans, but whose homes lay behind the lines, or would do any day. There we were, three US soldiers and a corporate stooge, and I wish I could say we were heading into the heart of darkness, but from what everyone saying about this war, it didn’t even have a heart.
“How are you feeling?” I asked Franken. He’d bullied his way to a window seat, and the two of us sat awkwardly side by side in a car crammed with families. My hushed words came to him via an earpiece salvaged from his helmet, because it wouldn’t do for anyone to hear a voice from the US of A right then. Oh yes, didn’t I say? Only Sturgeon actually spoke the lingo, and he wouldn’t pass as a local. Our story was that we were English socialists who’d flown out here to support the cause, because apparently that was a thing. Basically we were all going to do our best Lawes impression if it came to it.
Franken shot me a narrow look. “What?” his voice growled in my ear. “Wondering if I’m feeling Finnish?”
“No, no.” Yes. “It’s just… You were shot just a couple of days ago. So I can’t ask?”
“I’m fine.” He stared angrily out the window at the Nord countryside speeding past. “Don’t keep asking.” That sounded like Franken, anyway.
So we went on to other topics, just passing the time as socialist public transport took us further and further away from the fighting. While Cormoran dozed, clutching her case, and Sturgeon read a Nord newspaper, the two of us tried to pretend that what we were doing was normal and sane. For a couple of hours we almost managed it.
I decided I’d get some shut-eye then, and hunkered down with my shoulders about my ears. The car was rowdy with people, especially screaming kids, but I had got to sleep through worse.
Only, just as I was letting myself go, Franken said something else, soft as he could, as though he didn’t really want me to hear it.
“My eyes are different.”
Something clenched inside me. Outwardly, I held myself calm and still, and just cocked an eye at him.
“I never saw this well before. Never.” He wasn’t looking at me, seemed most of the way asleep himself. I opened my mouth a couple of times, but couldn’t find anything to say.
WE GOT OFF the train outside Stockholm in a flood of tired, unhappy, unwashed people. They had camps there, outside the city, and it looked like the soldiers there – gov and corp – were very keen that this tide of displaced humanity didn’t wash up on their doorstep It reminded me of back home, how every so often there’d be some great cause, some refugees from one of the little wars in Asia or Africa, say, and everyone would be like, Oh, why don’t they do something? And we’d wire a few dollars over and feel good about ourselves. Only, when New Orleans went under for good, somehow that was totally different. Franken and me, we were on crowd containment detail for that one. I got shot in Mexico the next year, and I still preferred that to the orders we got in Louisiana.
So the Nords had these camps. You know what? I’ve seen worse camps. They looked neat and orderly, kind of like you’d expect. For all I knew, Ikea was mass-producing a flat-pack lean-to called the ‘Fükd’ just for the occasion. It was still a camp, though. It was never going to be a happy place.
We weren’t supposed to get off there. Political Officer Freya had given us papers to take us all the way to Stockholm Central, only we didn’t trust her and so we went the last leg on foot, after Cormoran found the bugs we’d been tagged with and EMP’d them.
“Are we clean?” I asked her. No sense in making it easy for the Nords, after all.
“Clea
n as I can make us,” she confirmed, although there was something eating at her, you could see.
“What is it?”
“When I was going over Franken,” she said, eyes flicking over to find him. “It was like… I thought I’d found something for a moment – a signal of some sort. It was like something meshed with my headware, made a connection.”
“But you zapped it.”
“I couldn’t find it. There was nothing there, nothing at all.”
I felt I knew exactly what she was saying, but it was easier to play dumb. “You’re not making sense.”
If we’d got our teeth into the subject then, who knew how things would’ve played out, but instead Cormoran backed down, and I was too chicken to force the issue. “You’re right,” she said. “I must have been mistaken,” and that was that.
Sturgeon found a delivery guy – just some package courier heading into the city on totally civilian business – and talked him into giving us a lift. This is the thing that, looking back, I find hardest to believe. Once we showed we’d got papers, though, the driver just didn’t really care. We were going to give him a couple hundred dollars and he was obviously a pragmatist who reckoned a little US currency in his back pocket would be useful insurance. Cormoran sorted the money transfer and I had a sneaking suspicion she took the money from her old boss.
And so we were cut loose from Nordgov supervision and just coasted into Stockholm in the back of a van, and our papers held up when the checkpoint boys stopped us, and we thought we were terribly clever. The plan was that Cormoran would hack the local networks and send a bunch of netbots hunting for any mention of Cousin Jerome, and then they’d report back to her, and we’d bust in to wherever he was being held and GTFO just like the plan said. Or at the least we’d find out what we could and then call up Rich Ted and give him the good or bad news. That would also count as mission completed, as far as I was concerned.
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