Tour of Duty: Stories and Provocation

by Michael Z. Williamson

  “What do you mean?” asked Teren suspiciously. He had the feeling that he wasn’t going to like this.

  “After that incident at the horse market, Nerea has received more offers for work and horse training than she knows what to do with. She isn’t going to go anywhere,” he repeated.

  “What about Keth’? Has he spoken to you at all?”

  Lo’isha sat back and steepled his fingers.

  “Yes, he has asked me about becoming a teacher on the Plains. He believes his talents lie not with Valdemar but with his—our—people. He’s not entirely wrong. Her talent, of course, is a latent power manifesting itself. There will be others. He can hardly be the only one needing trained in mind-magic. Since the Storms there is now no reason not to. My people would learn better from one who has the proper attitude; magic is not to be meddled with but controlled and tempered.”

  “But, he is supposed to be a Herald! Anyone a Companion chooses has to be a Herald!” Teren was agitated. He’d thought Lo’isha concurred with him.

  “Why? ‘There is no one true way.’ It’s time to change. Not every Shin’a’in with power can trek to Valdemar, and certainly they can’t remain here. At some point, we must have our own schools. In the meantime, he will be an intermediary, learning here, and mentoring others. Perhaps one day he will return to the Plains.”

  Teren said, “That’s not what he wants.”

  Lo’isha replied, “Nor is it what you want. Nor even what I’d want, if I had a choice. None of us do, though. The Storms have blown the slate clean for us down on the Plains.”

  He took a final sip of tea and placed the cup down on a clear spot amid the clutter.

  “I believe they have for Valdemar as well.”

  Heads You Lose

  Through a network of authors, I was invited to write in Janet Morris’s Hell universe. I wasn’t familiar with it, and am still catching up on the stories now.

  One thing I found very interesting was her edits. Her grasp of proper English is better than my own, and I was raised in the UK. It seems colloquialism brushes off on one.

  I had a lot of fun with this. The anthology was Lawyers in Hell. It almost writes itself. We networked, chose characters, then went through history consigning characters to eternal damnation we devised personally for each.

  I never liked one of these characters. You may be able to guess which one.

  Captain Joseph McCarthy shouted, “Ready men, this is a combat drop. Hostile territory.” Over the angry buzz the C130’s engines, McCarthy was hard to hear.

  Lieutenant Roger Upton Howard III rolled his eyes at that. He says that every damned time. We know it’s hostile. It’s hell. We’re lawyers. Some, like McCarthy, were famous. Roger was largely a nobody. There was no significance to Earthly status in Hell.

  In life, Roger had never imagined he’d wind up like this. It was a joke, back on Earth: Sell the devil your soul. The lawyer asks, “‘What’s the catch?’”

  The catch was, Hell was real, and he hadn’t even signed a contract. Those vague maunderings about ethics were all it took. Was it right to defend drunk drivers and petty crooks he knew were guilty? Apparently not, since the universe had seen fit to have a drunk driver crush him. Death had been close to instantaneous. He recalled a moment of pain, and then waking here. Here, pain was part of the scenery, and it seemed eternal. He couldn’t say how long he’d been here, just “a lot of days.”

  Then Roger stopped reminiscing, because it was time to jump. The light blinked, and McCarthy shouted “Hook up!”

  It was Hell, he couldn’t die permanently, and every drop was terrifying because there were endless new ways to suffer.

  The Coordinating Legal Airborne Platoon (the CLAP, with all the jokes that entailed) shuffled forward toward the paratroop doors, and Roger’s guts and sphincter clenched. He joined the shuffle, hit the door, and jumped out over the choking clouds of hell—or more accurately, Ashcanistan.

  The ripcord tugged his canopy open. He didn’t realize his leg straps were loose until they drew up and yanked his groin. He flinched and tried to separate them. By then he was directly over Henry J. Summers II, another criminal defender. He dropped scrambling through Summers’ canopy as it blocked the air. They didn’t quite tangle, and Roger made it into the open.

  That was worse.

  Now he could see that the denizens of nearby Kabum were expecting them. They didn’t like lawyers in death anymore than they had in life: what price repercussions to the damned?

  A rocket ripped past him with a roar of white noise and a stench of ammonia, and ripped HJS, II’s canopy into flaming shreds. The elderly man plummeted faster and faster as the rushing wind fanned his chute into flames, then embers. Roger tugged a riser to slip away from those glowing sparks. He didn’t want to catch on fire.

  He wondered if that fire had anything to do with Henry defending arsonists on Earth.

  In moments, flak started bursting around them, spit from crude but functional AA guns. All Roger could do was shiver as they dropped. Then they got in range of rifle fire, catapults, javelins and arrows. He pulled the release on his ruck and prayed to no one in particular. He’d never known how. At least he’d known how to parachute; he’d been in the 82nd. Most of these poor bastards jump-qualified the slow, painful way. Or sometimes, the quick, painful way.

  The earth below was cratered landscape; Hell’s Ashcanistan had been a battleground for eternity. The sky above twisted in nauseating lavender and green moirés.

  Then they were landing in heaps on the rocks. Some caught on promontories. Others bashed into cliffs and tumbled into sharp valleys. Roger was lucky. He descended smoothly into a flat-bottomed gully. Two monkeys hopped on the edge of it and threw . . . he grimaced as feces splashed across his chest and spattered his chin.

  He overheard one of the gibbering primates say, “Not like that, Phil, you clumsy monkey . . . ” then Roger hit the ground, landing on a sharp rock, and his knee . . .

  Electric jolts shot through his leg. He heard and felt his knee pop. He collapsed to the ground, whimpering.

  General S.V. Benet (not the poet, but his grandfather) hopped over to shout at him, and a poor trooper nearby whose leg was blown clean off.

  “Pick up that leg and get moving, Horace!” Benet shouted, fluffing his beard with his breath. “And you, Howard, on your feet and—”

  Right then a bullet grazed Benet’s throat, then two more ripped his uniform coat and tore his torso. He gargled, “Bloody repeaters!” in a spray of blood as he bounced away on his pogo stick.

  Roger drew the metal frame from his ruck and assembled his own pogo stick, flinching as bullets whacked past. Then he crawled over to help Carlton Horace with his. The poor man was on his first jump and from the looks of him, in horrible pain.

  “Hold your leg in place,” he said. “It’ll reattach and heal. And hurt.” He made sure the kid did that, while he assembled Horace’s stick.

  “Now up,” he said.

  How they managed, he didn’t know. He never knew. In short order, though, they were astride their metal steeds and bouncing ignominiously across the rockscape, joining up with others and forming a loose column. Satan had decreed that the CLAP’s ground transport would be pogo sticks only. It was undignified, inefficient, liable to make one puke, and excruciating on injuries. Every bounce sent spikes of agony through his balls and up his spine. The only positive aspect was that the bounding, irregular motion made the riders harder to hit.

  He caught sight of Henry, barely recognizable, a mashed sack. He winced in fear and revulsion. Wincing hurt, too.

  Just behind him, Horace said, “Sir, my leg is healing already, like you said, but it’s healing crooked.”

  He nodded, looked over his shoulder and said, “Yeah, sooner or later it’ll get shot off again and maybe it’ll heal straight next time.” It would heal. After all, pain would be less effective a torture if one got used to it.

  He felt sorry for Horace. The poor guy had it wors
e than the rest. He wasn’t even a lawyer. He was an accountant.

  The transit to the site was worse. Whenever you felt at your lowest in hell, they found a way to make it lower. Your only option was to do nothing, sit still, and ferment. Except that didn’t work well, either. Something would come along to displace you or crush you or otherwise deepen your suffering.

  That was exactly their mission here: Make things worse. Hell wasn’t supposed to be fair, or even unfair. There was some kind of algorithm at the head office as to how fair or unfair it was supposed to be, and when. Said algorithm probably changed regularly. Everything else did.

  So the CLAP rode pogo sticks in Hell, because they caused more pain. They’d had camels once, in Sinberia. In Hellaska they’d had fast dirt bikes, but no Arctic clothing. The CLAP’s missions were recorded in the scars on his body—some healed crooked, some that wouldn’t heal and just oozed.

  That Fucking Benet. He was as atrocious in afterlife as he’d been in life. Roger had never heard of the man. Apparently, it was his brilliant idea to have single-shot rifles at the Little Big Horn and for several other battles during the Indian Wars, insisting (despite evidence and pleading troops) that “aimed single shots” were better than repeating weapons. The locals here had AK-47s, RPGs, that Russian .50 caliber machine gun whose designation Roger could never remember. That Fucking Benet, as everyone referred to him, insisted they use .45-70 Springfield rifles, single-shot. The rifles were accurate enough, except when gravity or the laws of explosives suddenly changed, but the CLAP were routinely slaughtered by peasants with better weapons. And That Fucking Benet would never learn. “Aim better!” was his only advice.

  All Benet did was tell them to aim better. McCarthy ran everything else, while constantly ranting about Communists. He was doing so at that moment, voice shifting and syncopating as he bounced along. They could hear him through the speakers in their helmets. The CLAP had the highest tech gear imaginable, sometimes. The helmets contrasted with their proper pinstripe suits and ties, and their patent shoes. You could tell what era someone was from by their style of suit.

  “Remember . . . that the Commies . . . had a huge . . . operation in . . . Afghanistan . . . Probably did . . . here, too . . . Be on the lookout . . . We’ll need to ask . . . that question of anyone . . . we meet.”

  Seemingly, the locals would never run out of ammo. However, while progress was infuriatingly slow, pogo sticks did make the CLAP harder targets.

  There were ways to approach that wouldn’t have seemed like an invasion. Of course, in the best traditions of armies and hell, they didn’t use those. Who could one complain to, in hell? In fact, that was their task here—to ensure that unfairness escalated.

  Given the idiots in charge, that was certainly the case. Roger pounded across the landscape, the pain in his knee like a red-hot rod, jabbing through the side of the knee joint. He motioned Horace slightly ahead of him, watching the poor kid grimace rhythmically in agony. It always sucked to be the new guy. Although Roger wasn’t that salty himself.

  He had no idea how long he’d been here. Why think about eternity? He hadn’t been here long enough to get philosophical about the stabbing pain, or the stupidity. Though he wasn’t sure one ever did. The discomfort changed regularly, you never got used to it.

  Roger threw himself off and behind cover. It was trained reflex. He was in the air before his mind told him there was incoming fire. A moment later he realized he was about to smash into hard desert and sharp rocks.

  As he crunched into the dirt, he shouted and groaned, “Contact right!” Others yelled the same warning.

  Then he sought cover by rolling behind a slight rise. He abraded a shoulder on something rough. The new pain joined that in his knee, and every movement felt like fire.

  His military training came to the fore, as did his military gripes. The designer of the ALICE pack he wore should be somewhere in hell, wearing one for all eternity; and that the stupid Springfield rifle he carried was a bitch when you had to roll over on it.

  He pulled its sling from around his shoulder, dragged it from underneath him, opened the breech, then fumbled for ammo. He had twenty cartridges, which That Fucking Benet determined were all one needed, if every shot counted. The man predated suppressing fire.

  Unfortunately, the enemy didn’t.

  The locals were pouring out fire from a Russian Dushka, now that he recalled its name, and he thought he recognized AK fire.

  Between bursts, Roger heard Benet shout, “. . . precise, aimed shots . . .” and gritted his teeth. In his opinion, they needed a machine gun to lay down fire, then maneuver, suppress, and riddle every enemy in sight. This aimed shots crap was not going to work—again.

  He wriggled out of the pack, with the frame gouging him as he did. They had no body armor, of course. They couldn’t die permanently; obliteration was a mythical fate, or at least very rare. If you did die, you were recycled through the Mortuary and usually sent right back to your unit. The CLAP wasn’t issued body-armor. Why carry the extra weight? Why bother?Why bother with anything?

  Then someone started screaming as he was hit.

  That’s why.

  He slid his pack up near the ridge of this little hummock, raised his rifle carefully, and tried not to flinch as he shot. He didn’t shoot at anything in particular. He just felt better doing something instead of nothing.

  Benet whacked him stingingly with a swagger stick, and shouted, “What are you shooting at, trooper?”

  “A general,” he snapped.

  Poor Benet was condemned to try to lead lawyers, accountants and philosophers in battle, for all eternity. A more prestigious post in the regular military perpetually eluded him. That didn’t make the jackass pleasant.

  BA-Boom!

  The massive explosion blew a huge ball of dust into a rising cloud, followed immediately by a concussive slam that shook the ground and punched his ears. Overpressure slapped him with hot gas and ammonia. The explosion would be the calling card of the Supervising Legal Airborne Group, SLAG, dropping aerial judgment on the opposition.

  Then it got quiet, very quiet, and not just only he was partly deaf. There was no opposition left alive anymore.

  The deafness was always temporary. Hell liked its residents to experience every sensation to the fullest, like that Britney Spears song playing incessantly at full volume for a week. He’d never get that insipid tune out of his mind.

  Benet had been blown flat, and no one was disposed to help him up.

  Captain McCarthy took over, with his helmet off, slicking his hair.

  “We are here to provide the damned with the benefits of modern legal judgment and, I hope, to promote the American way of life. I—”

  “Shut it, Taildragger Joe, America ain’t no part of perdition,” someone shouted.

  McCarthy spun, snarled, seemed to realize there was nothing he could do about it, and gritted his teeth. His speech shifted to practical matters.

  “Before we start, let’s find a building and organize our files. Thurmond, go ahead, please.”

  Catcalls went up throughout, though they’d all known this was coming.

  The crusty old sergeant bounded away with two flankers. It was hard not to respect Strom Thurmond, even if he was a stubborn old womanizer. The man had volunteered for the Airborne in WWII while in his forties, then served in the U.S. Senate until he was over a hundred.

  Roger grabbed his ruck, gingerly easing it on his blistered and battered shoulders. He found his pogo stick (sadly still functional) and joined the rest of the CLAP bouncing into town. His slung rifle banged his shoulder and head with every leap, until he was in a murderous rage.

  Up ahead, Sergeant Thurmond had picked a convenient building from several still standing. It was of low, thick brick, on the near edge of this once-sprawling hive of scum and villainy. Once within a hundred yards of it, Roger gave up bouncing. Holding the stick over his shoulder like a ladder, he sprinted for the designated headquarters through t
he jolts of pain. He tumbled through the doorway in a tangle with Horace and McCarthy, who never waited to be last.

  Benet, the jackass, was at least was man enough to wait outside until they entered, counting them. His bushy beard fluffed with every word.

  The bombardment and confusion seemed to have given them a hiatus. Troopers stood watch at the high windows. Medics treated casualties.

  Roger waved one nurse away: he didn’t need a clumsy lawyer-medic looking at his knee. The knee was intact; little would improve it; and, with no anesthetic, treatment would be agonizing.

  Speaking of which, Henry Summers looked pretty bad. Half his face had been shot off. Now the remaining face was healing, crushed and twisted, with a drooling smile that exposed broken rear molars on the right side. Missing teeth and crushed bone made his jaw asymmetrical. Added to the wrinkled ruins of his leg and torso, Henry’s situation was nightmarish.

  Henry would adapt to it. Roger would get used to it. Eventually. But not quite yet. Roger dropped his eyes and busied himself with his gear.

  Everyone was preparing for the next phase of their mission. They carried the necessary legal codes with them, in those brutal ALICE packs. Roger reached for his, safe in a lockbox with sharp corners, then bound in an accordion file, sealed with a Perdition Seal that whoofed into flames when he released it so he could access the several binders within. The acrid smoke from the seals was something he was used to. He wondered if that would change shortly.

  Each of them carried two hundred pounds of documentation. All documents must be accounted for, because those were their only references: the infernalnet was, of course, unreliable, even if they could get signal out here. Pages were always out of order. Any file might contain any page, in different fonts and spacing, so it was hard to tell which followed which. It was an administrative nightmare.

  Right then, McCarthy screamed like a girl, and kept screaming.