by Amie Kaufman
While I understand the need for security and separating workers from their families, I am hoping you will reconsider your decision. My wife is extremely unwell—between the lack of medication for her condition and the undue stress of the occupation, I’m afraid she’s simply not coping. Both myself and my daughter are frightened for her safety, not only from Private Gorsky but from herself.
My daughter is thirteen years old. She should be playing with her friends and thinking about schoolwork, not trying to stop her mother from flying apart at the seams and constantly beating off the advances of an adult soldier who should know better. I served for seven years in engineering and repairs in military shipyards, sir. I know how a soldier should conduct himself in time of war, and this is not it.
I know I am asking for an exception here. But I am also asking for some simple human compassion. If my family cannot move in with me, could I perhaps be allowed to stay in the detention center? Or at least visit it more than once a month?
Please. I am begging you. Whatever it takes, I’ll do it.
Thanking you in advance.
Joran Karalis
Resident ID E892Kar
Engineer
Wallace Ulyanov Consortium
“Building Better Tomorrows”
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To: KARALIS, Joran
From: ADMIN, Sec1b
Incept: 13:03, 08/30/75
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: FAMILY DAY
Request denied. Administrator decisions are final.
Admin, Sector 1b
BeiTech Industries
“Tomorrow, Today”
Message Status: DRAFT—DISCARDED
To: ADMIN, Sec1b
From: KARALIS, Joran
Incept: 13:27, 08/30/75
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: FAMILY DAY
You mother****er.
You ****ing pig.
God, wht would I ****ing give for five minutes alone with you in a room without windows. No ****ing guns, no ****ing suits, just you and me and my ****ing fists. I’d kill you, you slimy, ****eating ****ing *******. I would kick your ****ing jaw loose and push my fist into your smarmy ****ing mouth and rip out your ****ing tongue. I would stomp your ****ing head into the ground until it was nothing but red slime in between the treads of my boots and**** on your****ing corpse and then THEN you’d know exactly what you are. You weak *******. YOU MOTHER****ER. SHE’S THIRTEEN****ING YEARS OLD. DO YOU KNOW WHAT IT IS TO LOSE YOU ****ING PIG BECAUSE I’M GOING TO TEACH YOUI’M GOING TO****ING TEACH YOU YOU FILTHY ****ING SONOFA*****HlERUGUQ3LJKBG 3O4HG0I3H4GOJBQERJBAKJSFBVQEBRO[BUQE[OURBVO[U[BQ[HOI≥FVFKLFDKL.F404
Piq2efh
Pihq2g
R;;r;irug;iu
Footage begins inside the gloomy cabin of a BeiTech armored personnel carrier. Present are Specialist Rhys Lindstrom, who’s pulled duty on the wheel, and Sergeant Yukiko Oshiro, who is sitting with her boots up on the dashboard. Both have their helmets off, faces underscored by the glowing red of their suit LEDs.
It’s dark outside. The snow has eased up for the moment, but the sky is full of boiling clouds, lightning illuminating the frozen tableau around them. The APC is heading back to barracks after a long stint, first at the OC to fix some fritzing computer systems, then the rest of the day at the primary communications array.
The APC crosses over one of BeiTech’s makeshift bridges, spanning the kilometer-deep canyons that opened in the colony ice shelf after the invasion bombardment. The tires drubdrubdrub over the corrugated metal, wind howling in the fissure below. Both Lindstrom and Oshiro look seventeen shades of beat. The clock reads 02:08.
Oshiro sighs, leans back. She’s pulled the golden coin she wears around her neck out from under her breastplate, pressed it between her teeth as she mutters.
“Well, we definitely missed the card game. Again.”
Lindstrom only grunts in reply. He looks worse than Oshiro, dark bags under his pretty gray eyes. Staring at the bridge ahead without blinking.
The sergeant raises an eyebrow, looks at him sidelong.
“Something on your mind, Specialist?”
“No.”
“ ‘No, ma’am.’ And don’t bull**** me. That sullen little pout on those prettyboy lips is a dead giveaway. You run out of hair product? What the**** are you sulking about?”
“I’m not sulking,” Lindstrom says.
“Cherry, you are the sulkiest ***** in this platoon, including the ones that are on the razzle. Now spit it out before I court-martial your ***.”
Lindstrom pouts harder. You can see the words struggling behind his teeth. They’ve been brewing there for a whole day now, kept in place by Lindstrom’s better judgment. But it looks like fatigue and Oshiro’s badgering and Asha Grant’s tirade are finally getting the better of his instinct for self-preservation, and once they make it across the bridge, he slows down the APC, pulls over to the side of the road.
“All right, fine,” he says, turning to Oshiro. “Why didn’t you back me up?”
“What?” Oshiro frowns. “When?”
“When?” Lindstrom glares. “When those *******s in Marcino’s platoon shot that kid, when else? I sent a report up to Christie and he chewed my head off!”
“Yeah,” Oshiro nods. “He told me about that. Stupid. Chain of command, rook.”
“Why didn’t you report it to Christie, Oshiro?”
The woman rolls her eyes as if talking to a child. “Because Marcino was following orders. Because any unregistered civilian is to be liquidated on sight. Any—”
“I know, I know!” Lindstrom spits. “Admiral Sūn’s orders! But they’re immoral orders, Oshiro. You’re not an idiot. You were about to say something when Marcino pulled that trigger. You know how ****ed up what we’re doing here is.”
“Welcome to Kerenza, Cherry.”
“Don’t give me that gung-ho pounder bull****!”
Oshiro sighs, rubs her temples. “What do you want from me, Lindstrom?”
“I want you to open your eyes! We’re committing war crimes…actually, scratch that, ****ing atrocities, and we sit around playing cards and joking and pretending like nothing is going on! They killed a little girl, Yukiko! A ****ing kid, for crissakes!”
“And you think I don’t lay awake at night thinking about it?” The woman’s voice grows louder, bordering on a shout. “When your lily-white *** was up on theMagellan in the first days of this invasion, I was down here, pounding with the rest of them. When the brass decided to liquidate all nonessentials in the colony, you think Admiral Sūn and his command staff flew down from the Churchill and got out their nice shiny dress pistols? **** no! They gave the dirty work to the grunts, Lindstrom. Like always. To me and Duke and Karp and all the rest!”
Horror dawns on Lindstrom’s face. Two and a half thousand corpses reflected in his eyes. “…You’re talking about those people in the Hole? JesusChrist, Oshiro, you killed those people?”
“We followed orders! We did what we were trained to do! You think every one of us doesn’t see those people in our dreams? You think we sit around swapping girl stories because this is a ****ing joke to us?” Oshiro slams her fist into the door, her power armor putting a dent in the case-hardened steel. “We do it because we’re trying to remember what it was like to be human****ing beings!”
“It’s not enough,” Lindstrom says. “To just le—”
“We follow orders! We
follow orders or people get killed.Our people! That’s what it is to be a soldier, Lindstrom. You forget what happened to Private Day when you first landed on this rock? Or those coffins you saw lined up on the airfield? This colony is illegal.Everyone on it is a goddamn criminal. You think the WUC was using the hermium they mined here to manufacture kittens and ****ing rainbows?”
“That doesn’t make it right!”
“This is a war!” Oshiro roars. “ ‘Right’ is whatever the people who’re standing at the end say it is. ‘Right’ is decided by the people who win.”
The kid looks at the coin hanging around her neck. “Your father teach you that?”
Oshiro’s eyes grow wide, then narrow almost as quickly.
“You are dangerously close to the ****ing line, Specialist.”
“I read about him,” the kid says. “Masaru Oshiro. Fought in the Cortes campaign for the UTA. Just a grunt like you. When AFC rebs blew the wormhole into the system, his company was so starved of supplies they were eating the dead. But still, your old man used to go out every night when the ion storms cut off air support—”
“I know who my father was.”
“He’d take a lifter drone!” Lindstrom charges on over Oshiro’s warning. “Just one guy and a bot. And he’d crawl out into no-man’s-land and retrieve the wounded. Drag them back to the trenches. UTA troops andrebels. Didn’t matter to him. They needed help, so he helped them. And afterward he said, ‘A sol—’ ”
“A soldier’s first duty is to their conscience,” Oshiro snaps.
“Not her company,” Lindstrom insists. “Not her commander. Not her corps. Her conscience.”
“This isn’t Cortes,” Oshiro sighs. “This isn’t neat little lines of pounders facing each other across no-man’s. This is bombs in our fuel trucks and poison in our air filters. This is IEDs in our latrines and broken glass in our B-Packs. This is not even knowing who the enemy is. This is complicated.”
“I’m starting to think it’s dead simple.”
The woman shakes her head. “You might be singing a different tune when it’s one of your friends lying inside one of those coffins, Cherry.”
“No way,” the kid declares.
“Spoken like someone who’s never lost anyone he cared about.”
“Oshiro, there’s no ****ing way.”
The sergeant slumps back into her chair, stares at the icy road ahead.
“Take us back to barracks, Specialist.”
“Oshiro—”
“That’s an order.”
The kid stares, lips parted as he draws breath to—
“Drive!” Oshiro roars. “You disobey another command from me and I’ll slap your ***in the brig so fast your ****ing head will spin!”
Lindstrom slumps. Puts the APC back into gear. “Ma’am, yes ma’am.”
The kid locks his eyes on the road and locks his mouth shut. Oshiro stares out the window, that gold coin pressed tight between pale lips.
The entire ride back to the OC, the pair don’t speak a word.
RADIO TRANSMISSION: BEITECH PLANETSIDE COMMS—ATLAS CHANNEL L:0091
PARTICIPANTS:
Rhys Lindstrom, Specialist, BeiTech Ground Forces
Duke Woźniak, Private, BeiTech Ground Forces
DATE: 08/31/75
TIMESTAMP: 03:04
LINDSTROM, R: Hey, Duke.
LINDSTROM, R: Duke?
WOŹNIAK, D: Nnngg…
LINDSTROM, R: Duke?
WOŹNIAK, D:Wh…Hustler?
LINDSTROM, R: Yeah. You awake?
WOŹNIAK, D: The Duke is awake. Now.
WOŹNIAK, D: What time is it?
LINDSTROM, R: Zero three hundred.
WOŹNIAK, D: [groans] Are we under attack? We better be under one mother****er of an attack. Like, glaciosaurs with laser cannons or something.
LINDSTROM, R: Not quite.
WOŹNIAK, D: Why you hitting the Duke up on comms? He’s four bunks down from you.
LINDSTROM, R: I didn’t want to wake anyone.
WOŹNIAK, D: …The Duke regrets to inform you that you have failed in your mission.
LINDSTROM, R: I can’t sleep.
WOŹNIAK, D: The Duke hopes you’re ****ting him right now.
LINDSTROM, R: hear about that **** with Marcino?
WOŹNIAK, D: You mean the snafu when you punched a master sergeant in the grin factory yesterday? That ****?
LINDSTROM, R: He killed a kid, Duke. And Oshiro didn’t stop him. It’s ****ed up.
WOŹNIAK, D: You need to relax, kid. Oshiro is the best damn sergeant in this whole ****ed-up division. She’s steering you right. And walking around wound up tight on the front lines is a good way to get popped. Take it from the Duke.
LINDSTROM, R: [sighs]
LINDSTROM, R: How long you been pounding ground for?
WOŹNIAK, D: Four years. Two hundred fourteen days. Eighteen hours.
LINDSTROM, R: You got family at home?
WOŹNIAK, D: You dusted, chum? Ain’t you watched a war flick before? The minute the handsome squaddie starts talking to the plucky hero about his family or fem back home, that’s the signal he’s getting X-ed out in the next scene.
LINDSTROM, R: Nobody’s gonna X you, Duke. You’re too pretty to die.
WOŹNIAK, D: The Duke is talking about you getting X-ed, Hustler. He’s the plucky hero of this particular war story. He’s the one who sleeps in his ATLAS. Your sorry *** is as dead as fried chicken.
[LAUGHTER]
[EXTENDED SILENCE]
LINDSTROM, R: Four years, huh?
WOŹNIAK, D: Two hundred fourteen days. Eighteen hours.
LINDSTROM, R: Tell me the truth. Have you ever been in **** this deep before?
WOŹNIAK, D: …No.
WOŹNIAK, D: The Duke has seen some ****, no doubt.
WOŹNIAK, D: But nothing this messy.
LINDSTROM, R: How…how do you deal with it?
WOŹNIAK, D: The same way soldiers have been dealing with it since the beginning of time, Hustler.
WOŹNIAK, D: **** your pants, then dive in and swim.
WOŹNIAK, D: It’s not like you’ve got any other choice.
LINDSTROM, R: …No other choice.
WOŹNIAK, D: Get some zees, kid. Things always look darkest in the middle of the night. You’ll feel better on the morrow.
LINDSTROM, R: Yeah.
LINDSTROM, R: Maybe.
LINDSTROM, R: Thanks, chum. You know, for listening.
WOŹNIAK, D: No problem. You wake him up in the middle of the night again, the Duke will kill you and your whole family.
LINDSTROM, R: Night Duke.
WOŹNIAK, D: Sweet dreams, Hustler.
Our footage opens on a tableau I like to call Portrait of a Bad Idea. Nik Malikov is sitting on a cot in the Mao’s infirmary, leaning against the wall. He has his head tipped back, and he’s holding a bloodied cloth to his bloodied nose, glaring at the ceiling with two rapidly blackening eyes. The skeleton medical staff have all hurried into a nearby cubicle from which screams are emerging, though they (the screams, not the staff) start to quiet just as our second player makes her entrance.
And who do we have here? It’s Ms. Hanna Donnelly stalking through the infirmary door. She doesn’t look happy, and her displeasure finds a target quickly enough. Zeroing in on Malikov, she walks over to him and folds her arms. “What happened to you?” she asks, in a tone that openly supposes that whatever it was, it’s his fault.
“Nothing,” he says, slightly muffled. He risks lowering his head so he can look at her. “Just passing through, nothing to see here. How have you been?”
She leans down to inspect his face, eyes narrowed—though at least in her case, it isn’t because somebody’s punched them. “Do you still have all
your teeth? Good luck finding someone around here with the time to apply the regrow for you.”
“Hanna, it’s fine,” he promises, pausing to bare his intact teeth in a quick, mirthless grin. “See? All there.”
“Well, wh—” Donnelly blinks, for the first time noticing the black slimline case strapped to Malikov’s back over his flight suit. “Wait…is that a parachute?”
Malikov nods, dabbing at his still-bloody nose. “Found it in a storage locker down on Level 8. Falk and his goons must have done some work in atmo. All kinds of weird **** down there. I swear, I found this inflatable—”
“Why are you wearing a parachute, Nik?”
“Babyface has been training me in the Chimeras.”
“…You do realize those fly in space, right?”
“You know someone did mention that…”
Donnelly frowns, obviously keen to know what the **** he’s thinking. But Malikov’s next question stops her interrogation in its tracks.
“Did you come to check on me?”
“Of course not,” she says, straightening, and planting her hands on her hips. “I didn’t even know you were here. Though I don’t know why I’m surprised.”
“It’s just that when you came in, seemed like you were looking for someone…”
“Chief Grant,” she supplies. “I told Kady I’d check in.”
He nods. “He okay? I was gonna visit him in my time off.”
“He’s coming along. I’m trying to keep an eye on him when I’m not working through the files.” They both pause as the screams start up again behind the curtain, but neither makes a move to interfere—they lack the expertise, and besides, noises like that aren’t so uncommon on the Mao. “I heard you punched a pilot and ended up picking a fight with half the flight training crew. If you want a brawl, all you have to do is go to Level 4, which would also save you taking out one of the people we’re hoping will defend us soon enough.”
Malikov’s eyes widen, and he lowers the cloth that’s meant to be stanching the flow of blood. “You’ve been to Level 4? There’s a dustup reported there every second update, and I heard there was a food riot, you can’t just—”
