by Neil Clarke
“It’s not supposed to work like that.”
“It wasn’t supposed to fry Saks’ central nervous system either.”
“Come on, Sofe. That’s ancient history. They wouldn’t deploy us if they hadn’t fixed those problems.”
“Really.” Her bad eye looks pointedly at his bad hand.
“Legacy glitches don’t count.” Nerves nicked during surgery, a stray milliamp leaking into the fusiform gyrus. Everyone’s got at least one. “Maddox says—”
“Oh sure, Maddox is always gonna tidy up. Next week, next month. Once the latest tweaks have settled, or there isn’t some brush fire to put out over in Kamfuckingchatka. Meanwhile the glitches don’t even manifest in zombie mode so why should he care?”
“If they thought the implants were defective they wouldn’t keep sending us out on missions.”
“Eh.” Tiwana spreads her hands. “You say mission, I say field test. I mean, sure, camaraderie’s great—we’re the cutting edge, we can be ZeroS! But look at us, Jo. Silano was a Rio insurgent. Kalmus was up on insubordination charges. They scraped you and me off the ground like road kill. None of us are what you’d call summa cum laude.”
“Isn’t that the point? That anybody can be a super soldier?” Or at least, any body.
“We’re lab rats, Jo. They don’t want to risk frying their West Point grads with a beta release so they’re working out the bugs on us first. If the program was ready to go wide we wouldn’t still be here. Which means—” She heaves a sigh. “It’s the augs. At least, I hope it’s the augs.”
“You hope?”
“You’d rather believe Kally just went berserk and killed a civilian for no reason?”
He tries to ignore a probably-psychosomatic tingle at the back of his head. “Rossiter wouldn’t be talking reassignment if she had,” he admits. “She’d be talking court-martial.”
“She’ll never talk court-martial. Not where we’re concerned.”
“Really.”
“Think about it. You ever see any politician come by to make sure the taxpayer’s money’s being wellspent? You ever see a commissioned officer walking the halls who wasn’t Metzinger or Maddox or Rossiter?”
“So we’re off the books.” It’s hardly a revelation.
“We’re so far off the books we might as well be cave paintings. We don’t even know our own tooth-to-tail ratio. Ninety percent of our support infrastructure’s offsite, it’s all robots and teleops. We don’t even know who’s cutting into our own heads.” She leans close in the deepening gloom, fixes him with her good eye. “This is voodoo, Jo. Maybe the program started small with that kneejerk stuff, but now? You and I, we’re literal fucking zombies. We’re reanimated corpses dancing on strings, and if you think Persephone Q. Public is gonna be fine with that you have a lot more faith in her than I do. I don’t think Congress knows about us, I don’t think Parliament knows about us, I bet SOCOM doesn’t even know about us past some line in a budget that says psychological research. I don’t think they want to know. And when something’s that dark, are they really going to let anything as trivial as a judicial process drag it into the light?”
Asante shakes his head. “Still has to be accountability. Some kind of internal process.”
“There is. You disappear, and they tell everyone you’ve been reassigned.”
He thinks for a bit. “So what do we do?”
“First we riot in the mess hall. Then we march on Ottawa demanding equal rights for corpses.” She rolls her eyes. “We don’t do anything. Maybe you forgot: we died. We don’t legally exist anymore, and unless you got a way better deal than me the only way for either of us to change that is keep our heads down until we get our honorable discharges. I do not like being dead. I would very much like to go back to being officially alive some day. Until then …”
She takes the specs off her head. Powers them down.
“We watch our fucking step.”
Ricochet
Sergeant Kodjo Asante watches his fucking step. He watches it when he goes up against AIRheads and Realists. He watches it when pitted against well-funded private armies running on profit and ideology, against ragged makeshift ones driven by thirst and desperation, against rogue Darwin Banks and the inevitable religious extremists who—almost a quarter-century after the end of the Dark Decade—still haven’t stopped maiming and killing in the name of their Invisible Friends. His steps don’t really falter until twenty-one months into his tour, when he kills three unarmed children off the coast of Honduras.
ZeroS has risen from the depths of the Atlantic to storm one of the countless gylands that ride the major currents of the world’s oceans. Some are refugee camps with thousands of inhabitants; others serve as havens for hustlers and tax dodgers eager to avoid the constraints of more stationary jurisdictions. Some are military, sheathed in chromatophores and radar-damping nanotubes: bigger than airports, invisible to man or machine.
The Caçador de Recompensa is a fish farm, a family business registered out of Brazil: two modest hectares of low-slung superstructure on a donut hull with a cluster of net pens at its center. It is currently occupied by forces loyal to the latest incarnation of Shining Path. The Path thrives on supply lines with no fixed address—and as Metzinger reminded them on the way down, it’s always better to prevent a fight than win one. If the Path can’t feed their troops, maybe they won’t deploy them.
This is almost a mission of mercy.
Asante eavesdrops on the sounds of battle, takes in a mingled reek of oil and salt air and rotten fish, lets Evil Twin’s worldview wash across his eyes in a blur of light and the incomprehensible flicker of readouts with millisecond lifespans. Except during target acquisition, of course. Except for those brief stroboscopic instants when ET locks on, and faces freeze and blur in turn: a couple of coveralled SAsian men wielding Heckler-Kochs. A wounded antique ZhanLu staggering on two-and-a half-legs, the beam from its MAD gun wobbling wide of any conceivable target. Children in life jackets, two boys, one girl; Asante guesses their ages at between seven and ten. Each time the weapon kicks in his hands and an instant later ET is veering toward the next kill.
Emotions are sluggish things in Passenger mode. He feels nothing in the moment, shock in the aftermath. Horror’s still halfway to the horizon when a random ricochet slaps him back into the driver’s seat.
The bullet doesn’t penetrate—not much punches through the Chrysomalon armor wrapped tight around his skin—but vectors interact. Momentum passes from a small fast object to a large slow one. Asante’s brain lurches in its cavity; meat slaps bone and bounces back. Deep in all that stressed gray matter, some vital circuit shorts out.
There’s pain of course, blooming across the side of his head like napalm in those few seconds before his endocrine pumps damp it down. There’s fire in the BUD, a blaze of static and a crimson icon warning of ZMODE FAILURE. But there’s a little miracle too:
Kodjo Asante can see again: a high sun in a hard blue sky. A flat far horizon. Columns of oily smoke rising from wrecked machinery.
Bodies.
The air cracks a few centimeters to his right. He drops instinctively to a deck slippery with blood and silver scales, gags at the sudden stench wafting from a slurry of bloated carcasses crowding the surface of the holding pen just in front of him. (Coho-Atlantic hybrids, he notes despite himself. Might even have those new Showellgenes)) A turret on treads sparks and sizzles on the other side, a hole blown in its carapace.
A shadow blurs across Asante’s forearm. Tiwana leaps across the sky, defractors high on her forehead, eyeballs dancing madly in their sockets. She clears the enclosure, alights graceful as a dragonfly on one foot, kicks the spastic turret with the other. It sparks one last time and topples into the pen. Tiwana vanishes down the nearest companionway.
Asante gets to his feet, pans for threats, sees nothing but enemies laid waste: the smoking stumps of perimeter autoturrets, the fallen bodies of a man with his arm blown off and a woman groping
for a speargun just beyond reach. And a small brittle figure almost fused to the deck: blackened sticks for arms and legs, white teeth grinning in a charred skull, a bright half-melted puddle of orange fabric and PVC holding it all together. Asante sees it all. Not just snapshots glimpsed through the fog: ZeroS handiwork, served up for the first time in three-sixty wraparound immersion.
We’re killing children …
Even the adult bodies don’t look like combatants. Refugees, maybe, driven to take by force what they couldn’t get any other way. Maybe all they wanted was to get somewhere safe. To feed their kids.
At his feet, a reeking carpet of dead salmon converge listlessly in the wake of the fallen turret. They aren’t feeding anything but hagfish and maggots.
I have become , Asante reflects numbly. He calls up BUD, ignores the unreadable auras flickering around the edges of vision, selects GPS.
Not off Honduras. They’re in the Gulf of Mexico.
No one in their right mind would run a fish farm here. The best parts of the Gulf are anoxic; the worst are downright flammable. Caçador must have drifted up through the Yucatan Channel, got caught in an eddy loop. All these fish would have suffocated as soon as they hit the dead zone.
But gylands aren’t entirely at the mercy of the currents. They carry rudimentary propulsion systems for docking and launching, switching streams and changing course. Caçador‘s presence so deep in the Gulf implies either catastrophic equipment failure or catastrophic ignorance.
Asante can check out the first possibility, anyway. He stumbles toward the nearest companionway—
—as Tiwana and Acosta burst onto deck from below. Acosta seizes his right arm, Tiwana his left. Neither slows. Asante’s feet bounce and drag. The lurching acceleration reawakens the pain in his temple.
He cries out: “The engines …”
New pain, other side, sharp and recurrent: an ancient weight belt swinging back and forth across Acosta’s torso, a frayed strip of nylon threaded through an assortment of lead slugs. It’s like being hammered by a tiny wrecking ball. One part of Asante wonders where Acosta found it; another watches Garin race into view with a small bloody body slung across his shoulder. Garin passes one of the dismembered turrets, grabs a piece with his free hand and keeps running.
Everyone’s charging for the rails.
Tiwana’s mouthpiece is in, her defractors down. She empties a clip into the deck ahead, right at the water’s edge: gunfire shreds plastic and whitewashed fiberglass, loosens an old iron docking cleat. She dips and grabs in passing, draws it to her chest, never loosening her grip on Asante. He hears the soft pop of a bone leaving its socket in the instant before they all go over the side.
They plummet head-first, dragged down by a hundred kilograms of improvised ballast. Asante chokes, jams his mouthpiece into place; coughs seawater through the exhaust and sucks in a hot lungful of fresh-sparked hydrox. Pressure builds against his eardrums. He swallows, swallows again, manages to keep a few millibars ahead of outright rupture. He has just enough freedom of movement to claw at his face and slide the defractors over his eyes. The ocean clicks into focus, clear as acid, empty as green glass.
Green turns white.
Seen in that flash-blinded instant: four thin streams of bubbles, rising to a surface gone suddenly incandescent. Four dark bodies, falling from the light. A thunderclap rolls through the water, deep, downshifted, as much felt as heard. It comes from nowhere and everywhere.
The roof of the ocean is on fire. Some invisible force shreds their contrails from the top down, tears those bubbles into swirling silver confetti. The wave-front races implacably after them. The ocean bulges, recoils. It squeezes Asante like a fist, stretches him like rubber; Tiwana and Acosta tumble away in the backwash. He flails, stabilizes himself as the first jagged shapes resolve overhead: dismembered chunks of the booby-trapped gyland, tumbling with slow majesty into the depths. A broken wedge of deck and stairwell passes by a few meters away, tangled in monofilament. A thousand glassy eyes stare back from the netting as the wreckage fades to black.
Asante scans the ocean for that fifth bubble trail, that last dark figure to balance Those Who Left against Those Who Returned. No one overhead. Below, a dim shape that has to be Garin shares its mouthpiece with the small limp thing in his arms. Beyond that, the hint of a deeper dark against the abyss: a shark-like silhouette keeping station amid a slow rain of debris. Waiting to take its prodigal children home again.
They’re too close to shore. There might be witnesses. So much for stealth-ops. So much for low profiles and no-questions-asked. Metzinger’s going to be pissed.
Then again, they are in the Gulf of Mexico.
Any witnesses will probably just think it caught fire again.
Lady Grinning Soul
“In your own words, Sergeant. Take your time.”
We killed children. We killed children, and we lost Silano, and I don’t know why. And I don’t know if you do either.
But of course, that would involve taking Major Emma Rossiter at her word.
“Did the child … ?” Metzinger had already tubed Garin’s prize by the time Asante reboarded the sub. Garin, of course, had no idea what his body had been doing. Metzinger had not encouraged discussion.
That was okay. Nobody was really in the mood anyhow.
“I’m sorry. She didn’t make it.” Rossiter waits for what she probably regards as a respectful moment. “If we could focus on the subject at hand …”
“It was a shitstorm,” Asante says. “Sir.”
“We gathered that.” The Major musters a sympathetic smile. “We were hoping you could provide more in the way of details.”
“You must have the logs.”
“Those are numbers, Sergeant. Pixels. You are uniquely—if accidentally— in a position to give us more than that.”
“I never even got below decks.”
Rossiter seems to relax a little. “Still. This is the first time one of you has been debooted in mid-game, and it’s obviously not the kind of thing we want to risk repeating. Maddox is already working on ways to make the toggle more robust. In the meantime, your perspective could be useful in helping to ensure this doesn’t happen again.”
“My perspective, sir, is that those forces did not warrant our particular skill set.”
“We’re more interested in your experiences regarding the deboot, Sergeant. Was there a sense of disorientation, for example? Any visual artifacts in BUD?”
Asante stands with his hands behind his back—good gripping bad—and says nothing.
“Very well.” Rossiter’s smile turns grim. “Let’s talk about your perspective, then. Do you think regular forces would have been sufficient? Do you have a sense of the potential losses incurred if we’d sent, say, WestHem marines?”
“They appeared to be refugees, sir. They didn’t pose—”
“One hundred percent, Sergeant. We would have lost everyone.”
Asante says nothing.
“Unaugged soldiers wouldn’t even have made it off the gyland before it went up. Even if they had, the p-wave would’ve been fatal if you hadn’t greatly increased your rate of descent. Do you think regular forces would have made that call? Seen what was coming, run the numbers, improvised a strategy to get below the kill zone in less time than it would take to shout a command?”
“We killed children.” It’s barely more than a whisper.
“Collateral damage is an unfortunate but inevitable—”
“We targeted children.”
“Ah.”
Rossiter plays with her tacpad: tap tap tap, swipe.
“These children,” she says at last. “Were they armed?”
“I do not believe so, sir.”
“Were they naked?”
“Sir?”
“Could you be certain they weren’t carrying concealed weapons? Maybe even a remote trigger for a thousand kilograms of CL-20?”
“They were … sir, they couldn’t have been more
than seven or eight.”
“I shouldn’t have to tell you about child soldiers, Sergeant. They’ve been a fact of life for centuries, especially in your particular—at any rate. Just out of interest, how young would someone have to be before you’d rule them out as a potential threat?”
“I don’t know, sir.”
“Yes you do. You did. That’s why you targeted them.”
“That wasn’t me.”
“Of course. It was your … evil twin. That’s what you call it, right?” Rossiter leans forward. “Listen to me very carefully, Sergeant Asante, because I think you’re laboring under some serious misapprehensions about what we do here. Your twin is not evil, and it is not gratuitous. It is you: a much bigger part of you than the whiny bitch standing in front of me right now.”
Asante clenches his teeth and keeps his mouth shut.
“This gut feeling giving you so much trouble. This sense of Right and Wrong. Where do you think it comes from, Sergeant?”
“Experience. Sir.”
“It’s the result of a calculation. A whole series of calculations, far too complex to fit into the conscious workspace. So the subconscious sends you … an executive summary, you might call it. Your evil twin knows all about your sense of moral outrage; it’s the source of it. It has more information than you do. Processes it more effectively. Maybe you should trust it to know what it’s doing.”
He doesn’t. He doesn’t trust her, either.
But suddenly, surprisingly, he understands her.
She’s not just making a point. This isn’t just rhetoric. The insight appears fully formed in his mind, a bright shard of unexpected clarity. She thought it would be easy. She really doesn’t know what happened.
He watches her fingers move on the ‘pad as she speaks. Notes the nervous flicker of her tongue at the corner of her mouth. She glances up to meet his eye, glances away again.
She’s scared.
Look Back in Anger
