by Rick Partlow
I stared at her, not in disbelief---for this was exactly the response I’d expected---but in exasperation with myself for thinking, even for a second, that Mother might be any other way.
“Did it ever occur to you,” I asked her, “that if the Tahni do enough damage, none of this,” I waved around at the penthouse demonstratively, “will matter at all?”
“Don’t be melodramatic, Tyler,” Mother said. “No one knows more about the capabilities of the Tahni Imperium than the Corporate Council Executive; I receive weekly briefings directly from the President’s Security Advisor. If the Tahni could have attacked Earth directly, they would have.”
“If you knew so much about the Tahni,” I shot back, “how come you didn’t know they were going to attack Mars?”
She sighed, finally showing exasperation. I felt a flash of satisfaction; it wasn’t easy to upset her.
“It’s beside the point, Tyler,” she said with a hint of sharpness to her voice. “The military are chess pieces in a game we play.” She stood and stepped nearly nose to nose with me, her height just short of my own meter-eight. “Why do you think there was a Truce to begin with? Do you think the Admirals didn’t want to finish off the Tahni a century ago, during the First War? Who do you suppose convinced the President not to pursue our advantage after the victory at Alpha Centauri?”
I frowned, feeling my brows knit in confusion. “What the hell are you talking about?” I demanded. “Why wouldn’t the President want to win the war instead of leaving the Imperium as a military threat?”
“Because as long as they’re a threat,” she answered with a twist of her lips that resembled a smile, “then the monopoly exemptions that allow the Corporate Council to exist can remain in place.”
“That’s treason,” I blurted, stepping back from her instinctively.
“That’s the real world, my son.” She sat back down on the couch. “It’s the world you’re part of, like it or not. You should accept it, because there’s nothing you can do to change it.”
I stared at her hard enough to burn through steel, silent for a long moment.
“I’m going to Anna’s,” I said quietly, turning and heading for the door.
“Good idea,” she commented. “Maybe she can calm you down.”
I didn’t respond, just stalked down the hallway past the Theater Room and into the atrium. Konrad waited out there, leaning against the wall with a look of indolence that was all camouflage. David Konrad was a tall man, and powerfully built under his fashionable jacket, with swept-back dark hair and brown eyes that always seemed to be squinting suspiciously. I didn’t know much about him, but I did know he’d worked in the DSI for years before Mother had hired him as her Security Chief, and the Department of Security and Intelligence didn’t usually employ slackers.
‘Going out, Mr. Callas?” He asked, not budging from his position holding up the wall.
I wondered for just a moment why Mother had let me take my father’s last name instead of adopting her more well-known family name of Damiani. Maybe she’d known even then that I’d be a disappointment.
I grunted in assent, pressing my palm against the ID plate to call the elevator.
“Have a good time,” he said cheerfully, with his ever-present undertone of subtle mockery. “Don’t go too far, though.” I glanced at him, eyes narrowing. Had he been listening in to my conversation with Mother, or had she simply briefed him on what I’d done?
“Why?” I asked, challenging. “What would you do if I did?”
He still didn’t move, but it seemed to me that he was somehow closer to me than before, his smile straightening. The elevator arrived with a chime and the door slid open, but I didn’t look away from him.
“What I always do, Mr. Callas,” he said just before I stepped into the car. “My job.”
I was still watching those dark eyes as the door closed.
Chapter Two
I blinked, squeezed my eyes shut for a moment, then finally pried them open.
Where the hell was I? Oh, fuck, yeah…Demeter.
How long had I been out? I hunted for my helmet’s Heads-Up Display, but it was dead and I could barely see through the pitted and cracked faceplate. I fought to move my arm; it was hard to get up the energy. But I felt like I couldn’t breath and I had a pressing need to see. I dragged my right hand to my helmet yoke and yanked at the quick-release lever, heard the gasket release with a hiss and felt the cold, damp air sliding in through the open gap at my neck.
It hurt when I moved, a tearing, burning, wet pain in my chest, but I had to have that damned helmet off. One last act of will, grabbing the rim and pulling it off, gasping in the fresh air with a fresh wave of pain that told me I had broken ribs. It was dark outside, too dark to see anything at all, and I felt a light rain falling on my face. Had it been raining before? I couldn’t remember.
I felt around me, my gloved fingers sinking into mud, then finding something firm and unyielding. It was a shoulder. I shook it, but it was still, with the unmistakable feel of dead weight. My hands automatically went to the release lever and I gritted my teeth at the pain in my chest as I took the helmet off the motionless form. I stripped off my right glove and touched the skin of the face under that helmet and then recoiled instinctively at the feel of cold lifelessness. I checked the carotid pulse out of habit and training, but there was nothing.
I took a few shallow breaths, testing how deeply I could inhale without the hot knives of pain in my chest, then I shoved the dead man’s helmet onto my armor’s neck yoke and sealed it. The Heads-Up Display lit up with a notification that the system had identified a new user and was rebooting. Marines didn’t normally exchange helmets in the field, and it took some time for the sensors in the skinsuit under my armor to link up with the new computer.
Finally, the infrared filters snapped to life and I could see again. I was lying off the path, in the trees. They were oaks, genetically engineered to grow here and planted a century ago, burdened down with soggy clumps of moss. I made myself look down at my own body, to assess the damage. The left side of my armor was scorched, the chameleon camouflage material over it torn and tattered and burned, and a few splotches of blood dotted my legs. I touched a control on my wrist and saw a diagnostic pop up in the HUD. The frag wounds were superficial, the bleeding already stopped by smart bandages applied automatically. The real damage had been done by the concussion that had sent me flying into the trees in the first place.
The system’s medical diagnostics told me I had three broken ribs, various major bruises and a fairly serious concussion. Yeah, that definitely fit the pain in my chest and the fuzziness in my head and the general feeling of not being with it. I felt a jab in my neck as the helmet system injected me with painkillers, and then there was a wave of warm comfort that seemed to wash away the jagged knives in my chest. It didn’t do anything for the fuzziness in my head, unfortunately.
Able to breathe again, I relaxed slightly. Then I made the mistake of looking down at the face beside me, the one whose helmet I was using. It was a lean face, sharp like a boot knife, with dark eyes open wide and staring into eternity.
“Ah, shit, Johnny,” I muttered. I reached out with my bare right hand and thumbed his eyes shut.
Then I pulled the glove back on and sealed it. I was still alive, and even though I didn’t think that situation would last too long, I had to try. I felt for the retractable sling that had held my rifle to my tactical vest, but the ends were frayed and burned and the weapon was gone. I couldn’t stay here long enough to look for it, so I used the quick-release catches on Johnny’s vest to free up his gun and pull it towards me.
I checked its functions briefly with rote motions drilled into me over months of training. The magazines were fully charged and fully loaded, and it only took a moment to connect the HUD to the gunsight module. I used the rifle to lever myself to my feet, feeling a twinge in my chest despite the pain drugs. I hesitated, wondering where the hell I could go.
I coul
dn’t stay here; the Tahni would be back to do a battle damage assessment, or whatever the hell they called it in their language. Should I head for the ship that had brought us here? A check of the time on my HUD told me it had been two hours since the ambush. There was no way we could have accomplished the mission with half our forces dead or wounded, so I had to assume our guys had bugged out and the ship was gone.
I sure as hell didn’t want to head into the city. What was the name of the place? Something stupid, I remembered that much. Amity? Something like that. Anyway, that would be a huge goat rope, with the Tahni kicking down doors everywhere looking for the resistance, and I knew I didn’t want to be there. I tried to slug my brain into gear, working hard to recall anything from our mission prep, as abbreviated and inadequate as it had been.
There’d been something east of here…something marked in green on the map. A nature preserve? Oh shit! A light came on in my head and I suddenly remembered why I’d read about the Demeter colony before this mission. This was where they’d brought the Revenants, the extinct species the researchers had brought back using genetic samples. Saber-tooth cats, giant sloths, cave bears and a host of less exotic examples dumped into a forest of imported and engineered Earth flora. And monitored by a crew of Commonwealth researchers.
There had to be some place out there they all lived and worked. I hunted on my wrist ‘link, trying to find the maps they’d uploaded for us, and finally called it up on my helmet’s HUD. There it was, just a cluster of red icons in the middle of the green. The closest of them showed 22 kilometers away, and I’d have to cross a fucking river. Great.
I set the navigation system in my helmet to take me to the closest of the structures, then followed the blinking arrow at the top of my vision off the beaten track and into the trees. I had less than four hours of darkness left, and I needed to be far away from here before the primary rose.
I walked carefully, not wanting to take a tumble and find out just how broken my ribs were and how close they were to puncturing a lung. I still felt like my head was full of sand and it was hard to keep my balance. There wasn’t a damn thing the helmet or the medical kit in my thigh pocket could do to fix a concussion. I should have been resting, but that wasn’t an option. Without a fully equipped medical bay or at least an auto-doc, I’d just have to hope it wasn’t too serious.
Gramps used to say, “hope in one hand and shit in the other and see which one fills up first.” I missed Gramps. I hadn’t thought about him for a while. Honestly, I hadn’t thought about my old life at all in a while. Maybe it was the knock to the head, or maybe it was how bad things sucked, but I couldn’t get it out of my mind now. Couldn’t get that day out of my mind, almost two years ago…
***
“This sucks,” I said petulantly, slamming the flat of my hand against the inside of the car door. “She can’t control me this way, I’m a fucking adult.”
“He says, being driven in a private car to the most expensive restaurant in Trans-Angeles,” Anna commented with heavy sarcasm.
I looked at her sourly, but felt my expression soften at her smile. Anna Eastbrook and I had been dating for a year now, pretty much since we’d first met in our senior year, and she knew just the way to pull me out of a funk. Anna had a beautiful smile, and long, blond hair like silk, and eyes as clear and green as polished jade.
“It’s not like she or Konrad would let me walk,” I pointed out, still trying to sound upset. “Or ride the train.”
“Yeah, your life is controlled by other people,” she allowed, her hand warm and soft on my arm. “You think there’s anyone out there,” she waved at the massive housing projects passing by below the nearly empty roadway, “whose life isn’t controlled by circumstances they can’t affect? You think you could find one person down there who wouldn’t trade places with you in a heartbeat?”
I shrugged, unwilling to admit she was right.
“She won’t even let me talk to Gramps anymore,” I said, trying to steer away from the good point she’d made to something that still pissed me off. “She’s had all his addresses blocked, even ones I didn’t think she knew about.”
“She’s probably mad that he’s filled your head with all this military stuff,” Anna said. “I mean, would you have even thought about going to the Academy if he hadn’t been telling you his Marines stories all the time?”
I looked at her askance. “We’re at war, Anna! Of course I’d be thinking about joining the military!”
“We’re at war,” she agreed readily. “But look out there.” She pointed at the vast hyper-city around us. “How many people know? How many care? Maybe the taxpayers have bitched about the half a percent increase in the VAT, or maybe the chawners have ooh-ed and ahh-ed over the footage from Mars, but do you think the war really makes a difference in any of their lives?”
I remembered what Gramps had said, and paraphrased it for her. “By the time it makes a difference, it’ll already be too late.”
“Maybe you’re right,” Anna sank back into the cushioned seats, real leather grown from cloned tissue in a vat of biotic fluid. How much did little things like that cost? I didn’t even know. Anna sighed, eyes locking with mine; I couldn’t look away. “Maybe everyone’s being careless and stupid and self-involved. But why does that mean you have to go to the Academy and fight in the war? What difference is one pampered executive’s son going to make when it’s all said and done? Maybe you’d do more for the Commonwealth making important decisions someday in the Council. Maybe that’s what your mom is thinking.”
“Why are you taking her side of this anyway?” I wondered, throwing my hands up.
“Maybe because I don’t want you going to school somewhere I can’t visit,” she said, grabbing me by the back of the neck and pulling me into a kiss. I felt my anger and frustration float away and I wrapped my arms around her, hands going under her shirt to feel the warm skin of her back. “And maybe,” she finished, pulling away slightly and giving me a scolding look, “it’s because I don’t want you going off to fight in a war where you could get killed.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, hanging my head a little. “I wasn’t thinking about that, I guess.”
“It’s okay,” she assured me, tugging at my ear playfully. “Your passion is one of the things I love about you.” She glanced around the automated car and at the road ahead of us. “You think we have time before we reach the restaurant to…” She wiggled an eyebrow at me and licked her lips.
“Maybe,” I said, glancing around self-consciously. “But you know there are security monitors in these cars, right? I don’t want the net-divers in the Council Security division selling videos of us on the indie nets.”
She grunted in dissatisfaction, slapping me on the arm playfully. “All of a sudden you’re the soul of propriety.”
“Hey, you were the one trying to get me to resign myself to a life as a Corporate executive,” I reminded her. “I have to try to avoid controversy, don’t I?” I laughed at her pout. “Maybe later, after dinner.”
Dinner was excellent but afterward, I begged off going back to her family’s apartment, telling her that Mom had forced me into an appointment with the family therapist to try to break me of the idea of going into the military. She hadn’t…yet, though probably just because she was saving it for later. I had the car drop her off at her building, but then instead of taking it back home, I rerouted to the Zocalo.
I knew it wouldn’t seem suspicious to Mom or Konrad for me to go shopping when I was upset. I think it was some sort of twisted revenge in my head to spend shitloads of Mom’s money to get even with her for real or imagined slights.
So maybe I hadn’t been lying to Anna , I thought sardonically. Maybe I am seeing the therapist .
I had my ‘link tell the car to return to the pickup spot in two hours, then stepped out into the sunlight, trying not to notice the envious glances of shoppers walking up from the train station. It was hard not to feel their eyes on me after my conversa
tion with Anna. Their faces weren’t exactly resentful or full of hatred, but they weren’t friendly either. They wanted what I had and knew they could never get it.
Mom had accused me of not living in the real world, and maybe she was right; but that didn’t mean she was seeing reality either. To her, these people were pawns, if she even thought about their existence at all.
I stuck my hands in my jacket pockets and walked through the crowded mall, glancing side to side at the kiosks selling fabricator patterns, ViR-dramas and local snack foods. I had to walk about a third of a kilometer through the outdoor market before I came to the kiosk I was looking for. The woman who sat on a stool there was pinch-faced and unpleasant, her clothes outlandishly flashy and equally cheap. She eyed me suspiciously from under a broad-brimmed hat, leaning forward as if to protect her wares from my unclean gaze.
“I want a clean ‘link,” I told her, fishing a wad of trade-notes out of my pocket. It had been a pain in the ass to get hold of them; in the end, I’d had to sell a very nice jacket I’d gotten for myself to a street vendor in order to get my hands on physical cash.
She eyed the trade-notes warily, then motioned at the selection of ‘links on the right-hand side of her kiosk’s table. They were pretty old and basic, probably twice as thick and heavy as mine, but they weren’t officially registered and they wouldn’t be traced back to me. They were quasi-legal, but no one bothered to enforce the murky laws that might have banned them because so many people had uses for them. I pointed to one of them pretty much at random---I was going to throw it into a recycler after I used it anyway---then handed her the correct amount of cash and pocketed the ‘link.
I didn’t head back to the entrance yet. I weaved my way through the crowd to a coffee bar and paid for an espresso from the automated vendor with my ‘link, the conventional way, then sat down at one of the unoccupied tables to drink it. Glancing around carefully to make sure no one was watching, I took out the clean ‘link and powered it on. There was an address Gramps had given me several months ago, one he’d told me I could only use if I really needed his help, if it was an emergency. I wasn’t sure if this qualified as an emergency, but I really needed his help and I had no other way to contact him.
