by Aeon Authors
The nulls bundled a German into a man-sized port in the cube’s face. He shouted with a high, choked noise, too scared to scream. The machine’s hum deepened—the cube grew dark and more intense. And Rebecca was no longer safe. She was trapped on the wrong side of her story.
When the man staggered free she knew what the machine was for. It was an abattoir, amputating humans from their ability to think. But it was also a birth factory. The Salusa fed you to their cube, hitting each struggling, crying patient with a burst of surgery to the frontal lobes. In the machine, humans were just larvae for the Salusa to nurture. They were killing humanity to hatch something new. The man was now a null.
As the next man was forced inside, fear gripped Rebecca at last. The cube had ripped open both her denial and sense of self. She wasn’t a face. She was its victim.
“Down, Daisy.”
She turned and a wall of sound smashed against her. Belgo’s men were racing through the chamber. Bright ‘X’s leapt from the machine gun in Tate’s hands as he ran forward, his eyes excited in his painted face.
Null bodies slammed over, vomiting blood and writhing as they died. A man in a suit bludgeoned her. She struck the concrete floor face down and pain bit her mouth.
Rebecca’s ears rang with echoing gunfire.
“Easy. It’s over now,” Andy Saul said, drawing her upright. Her legs wouldn’t take her weight. Her knees refused to work. Saul kept his grip on her elbow. He was saying, “Easy, easy,” and soothing her as Belgo strode past. The Major shouted orders, his voice raised but calm. His troops fanned out. Someone set the halogen flood upright and bathed the Salusan cube in its ambient light. Without new instructions, the nulls were happy to stand by, unresisting before the soldiers.
The tall medic, Roper, was having trouble checking her comrades for wounds—everyone’s fatigues were caulked with crud. She saw Rebecca and tossed over a water bottle in passing.
Belgo stopped beside Rebecca. He nodded politely but his eyes were already sliding past her, onto the next task.
“Two of them were here. The Salusa.” Rebecca spoke fast, eager to please.
“When did this happen?” Belgo asked, his blue stare attentive now.
“They left ten minutes ago—maybe.” She pointed into the vault’s shadow. “In a Jeep.”
“Staff sergeant, move us out. Drucker, Tate, attend to this, please.” He pointed his carbine at the Salusan cube.
“How’d you get here?” Words bubbled out of Rebecca. One moment she’d faced the Salusa, the next she was back inside Belgo’s precarious safety.
“What?” Tate said with instant belligerence. “Y’ain’t ’appy to see us?” He snapped an angular magazine box onto his machine gun. Rebecca forced herself to clamp down and stay quiet.
Saul smiled, but his eyes didn’t carry any warmth. They were ancient in his wrinkled face. He slid his helmet from his bandannad head. “You’re a lucky lady.” He straightened the lank silk over a purple scar on his neck.
“Lot of null traffic comin’ here, Daisy. We were followin’ it.” He set his helmet on her head and tapped it hard. “Keep it down an’ stay beside me, now.”
Tate and Drucker wrecked the Salusan machine. Drucker had a sapper’s tool of interlocking plastic blades as long as his forearm. There was no way to turn the cube off, or to get the man inside out, so they didn’t bother. They just hacked and tore till the sculpted facia cracked open and spewed millions of sticky white fibres.
“There’s a guy in there,” Rebecca said. “Trapped.”
But no one was listening. Instead, the soldiers carried on stomping the elegant, vicious machine.
Saul chased the Germans away. Without bothering to speak, he shooed them like a farm hand scaring off turkeys.
“What’s that about, eh?” Tate said.
He didn’t look Rebecca’s way, but he didn’t have to. Why chase these useless civilians away and continue to carry her?
“’Cause we are definitely expectin’ rain,” Saul said, turning round. “Get this done an’ we’re back in the war. Sergeant.” His manner stayed dangerously easy. But he stared a moment longer than necessary, waiting for Tate’s objection. They were muscular blue-collar guys sizing each other up.
In response, Tate was stonily silent.
“You’re walkin’ point,” Saul said.
Tate still said nothing, but the look he gave Rebecca promised a reckoning.
Grunting with effort, Drucker carried on working alone, levering with his cutting tool till something vulnerable broke within the cube.
The power went off and the nulls went crazy. Screaming and outraged, they ran into the walls or smashed their heads on the concrete floor. The unit crouched in a single organic movement, their weapons ready.
“No firing,” Belgo said. “Leave them. Move us out.”
The soldiers backed out of the cavern. Perhaps in relief or hysterics, Drucker started giggling. His laughter echoed and bounced around them as the nulls drummed the floor with their broken hands and chewed their mouths bloody.
Above ground, the war waited. Rebecca wanted to see the stars, but all she found was a skyline of highstacks that resembled shattered teeth, flickering with ghostly blue flames.
Tommy Tate led them through the wasteland. He walked out in front, untiring and friendless.
Roper nudged Rebecca on. Rebecca stumbled over fist-sized masonry and a stagnant lake of sewage that soaked her boots. This was a patrol in war, walking dazed and exhausted. Rain began falling, gritty and weak. Rebecca jerked awake only when the soldiers glimpsed two Salusa and snapped off gunshots.
“Fuckin’ ghosts,” Roper said. Rebecca wondered if these Salusa were the ones from the underground chamber. They slipped through the jigsaw puzzle wreckage, never graspable, never quite there. The azure sheen of their devices winked as they popped in and out of sight.
“The enemy denies us vital confrontation,” Belgo said, as if his announcements controlled these skirmishes.
They walked for five hours through permanent night. The air was dust-laden yet carried an alpine sting. Each accidental graze bit sharply into Rebecca’s hands.
“Where the fuck,” Rebecca heard someone say. “The fuck is Fox company?”
Rebecca struggled to recall that Belgo’s unit was part of Dog company, and there was a plan, however unlikely, to unite with Fox and Charlie.
If there were no soldiers, there were plenty of people here. The unit had followed the Salusa into a pocket of dead Mannheimers. The Germans were scorched in apartments that had turned into glassine cells from the intense heat of orbiting pillars-of-fire.
Beside these tall, slick coffins, the city rose in a vast cliff of wreckage. Staring at the tide of burning ruins, Rebecca found it was like watching a bad tv set, or doing VR with really good weed. It was all so distant. She grew firm with the need to do her job. She could prove that it could be done, even in the inferno of the Salusa’s fury. She’d had some vague idea about her own Jewish heritage and coming to Germany, but really that was just a quirk in her background. She was here because of the Salusan technological revolution.
Each Salusan breakthrough had been a faster, longer high than any in history. Humanity’s teeming billions were a single junkie, chasing their next hit.
She’d heard a piece of advice, back in the day when it was illegal to buy drugs from a street entrepreneur. “When going to buy dope, don’t take a weapon with you. If you don’t trust the guy, then don’t buy from him.”
Stunningly obvious, but it had meant nothing to her. Now in Mannheim, she saw what happened when the whole world did both—never trusting, but always buying.
A heatbox sprang alight before them. Its blinding matrix shredded the nearest soldier. Rebecca and Saul dropped into a ditch as the weapon’s glow irradiated a smashed Deutsche Bank building.
The Salusa made so many toys for us, Rebecca thought. These are just more of them.
She almost laughed, pressed into Saul’s armoure
d chest, but couldn’t quite manage the effort.
Belgo rallied the men to him as nulls attacked from four directions at once, their railing spikes a forest of Zulu spears. Belgo and Saul were both on one knee, taking slow, aimed shots. But the tide of bodies overran them and Tate had to pull the nulls off Rebecca. He drove a serrated bayonet through a man’s belly, then butted another into submission. Tate stood astride the dying null as his entrails slopped in a blue and red trail between his boots. The soldier had saved her, yet his dark eyes were barely interested.
The null army moved on, sweeping past the unit with as little control as a riot.
Above them, a pillar-of-fire broke out of the thunderheads and lanced the earth. Its flame cut the sky with eerie silence. The light narrowed and narrowed, brightening all the while, till it was a sliver of blue magnesium. The squad stared upwards, their painted faces turned into stark masks. The flame bent and bent again, the Salusa having learnt to play with the laws of light itself.
Far above the unit came a doleful moaning—a dragon bellowing its challenge through the air.
Drucker stepped up to Belgo. “Roper got hit, sir. She’s gone.” He tipped his helmet back, his forehead wet with sweat.
“Ah.” Belgo’s voice was soft. Rebecca thought that he shared her awe at the sight of the Salusa at war. But really it was sarcasm that she heard. “Protect your medic at all costs.” His control was slipping as his men kept dying.
Saul said, “Major. We should have linked with Fox by now. Or found their stragglers. So far squat, sir.”
“Do we pull back?” Rebecca said without thinking. She winced before Belgo’s answering glare.
“Hell no, Daisy.” Saul calmly broke the tension. “Salusa’s prob’ly got a shitload of ordnance in our rear.”
“Sergeant,” Belgo said, loading that word with annoyance and renewed determination. “Inform the men. These two Salusa have evaded us. We will press on to the emergency coordinate for UN Command.”
Rebecca understood what Belgo was doing. He had a plan, and another behind that. He would have yet more plans, even if he and Saul had to make them up as they went along. Each plan—no more likely to succeed than its predecessor—was a vision, a promise to his men that they could resist the Salusa.
“You still need today’s bite, yes?” Belgo waited for Rebecca’s dutiful nod.
Belgo’s men picked through the rubble, staying close. They were more nervous now, as they tried to disengage from the Salusa. Except Tommy Tate, who volunteered to walk point. Tate was becoming something Rebecca had heard of from other wars—the lucky grunt. He was awesome in his violence and the unit invested him with their fortune. They needed to believe that Tate would carry them safely on. The Salusa had everything else, so humanity would have superstition and luck.
Belgo said, “Ms Miller, shall I tell you what I know of the Salusa?” His eyes were reddened in his painted face.
“We are a man standing on the bridge—the one in San Francisco. We do not want to jump. But simultaneously we cannot resist, yes? The ground sways beneath our feet. The wind sings all about us. We see air between our toes and we could do it. Just a step, just swinging over a fence and off. Falling, we would be free. We are frozen though—not taking the step, not refusing it. Mannheim.” His hand barely moved to capture the wreckage and blackened sky. “This is our bridge. We cannot let the Salusa go, but we can no longer live by their side.”
She got it all, even without active ’ware. It wasn’t Pulitzer quality yet, it needed work to take out the refinements—wind sings about us, falling, we would be free—to make it suitably rough. But it was good. Belgo had been working on it as he watched his men die.
Rebecca listened, she could do that at least.
But when Belgo called a rest stop and the unit disintegrated into random movement and conversations, Rebecca realised that everyone had listened. Privacy here was a laughable idea, like toilet paper or running water—or being able to step between buildings without your belly clenching tight in fear of a screamer or heatray.
Saul stood guard while the soldiers rested in a crater. The oiled steel of their weapons glittered off their broad shoulders. The men were both knights from another age and lumpen, crudely formed creatures from the dawn of time.
Rebecca held both images in her head, though she couldn’t finish them without diving into cyberspace’s sea. She felt its absence like her sense of smell had died. She fumbled with ideas of monochrome W Eugene Smith and pastoral covers of Walter Scott novels.
She struggled to recall a title, when every detail in history used to click into a menu on her retina. Maybe Saul could be Ivanhoe. His face was mixed greasepaint and grime, one eye coloured black, the other artfully green. He was the face of war, instinctive, American, and handsome.
Rebecca idled over smuggling Saul back to her Tenderloin apartment. They’d start out well enough. She’d be elated to come back to safety and hot showers, deli sandwiches and envious stares at the office. Seven PM, she’d find Saul at home, a sexy beast, eager to fuck. In peace, he would be a fitness freak, running, lifting weights and burning the sheets with her every night. But he’d be restless too, awkward with her dense schedule and irresistible career arc.
She’d send him to wharfside barrooms for pool and all-day drinking. The fucking would still be good, but not great. His swearing at cocktail parties and crass conservative attitudes would no longer be trophies of her war but banal faux pas. And she didn’t have his manners, she couldn’t avoid being bored by him. She’d glide away in her usual guilt-free parting—as she realised that she already had from Bernie. But with Saul she’d have a nagging doubt that she’d stepped on someone’s dreams.
Rebecca didn’t care enough about anyone else. In her world of faces and guys like Bernie, no one did.
Eyes wandering, daydreaming, she found Saul staring at her. Rebecca realised she’d got it wrong again. He was career military, smart and capable.
His eyes were hard in his greasepaint mask and Rebecca knew that she’d been rebuked, that even her daydreams made her a fool.
The unit inched down Moltke strasse, among cars melted into toffee-shaped lumps. This street led to the old Eichbaum tower. It was a UN Command emergency field centre and Charlie and Fox companies should be waiting here.
The tower stood half-hidden in the gloom. Its huge doors of bevelled glass hung wonky and open, as if a vast foot had kicked them aside.
Walking towards Eichbaum, with its smoke-stained windows and pocked concrete, Rebecca saw Germany’s proud history scarred and defiled. An obscure satisfaction tweaked in her. She had told herself that she was in Mannheim to show the world the Salusan front-line—the inferno, as she had cleverly tagged it. But her other motives nagged for attention—for more honesty from her. She was Jewish, though not really. It was her inheritance rather than a calling. Now she was back in Germany. Her ancestors had fled Europe or stayed and suffered the Holocaust’s murder. She watched Mannheim burn, trying to fit it to her mind that Germany was finally paying. But that belief didn’t hold. If anyone now should pay a fraction for the Abras and Matteas and Tamaras lost in the Nazi maw, shouldn’t it be Rebecca and her generation, born to success and comfort in the Salusan age?
There was a flash behind the Eichbaum, gold light licking off pewter. The unit scattered in a bomb-burst pattern. Tommy Tate started shooting. Saul’s bandana popped up behind tangled concrete. “What d’you see?” he called to Tate.
Tate’s heavy machine gun ran dry. He tipped it over and stood up. “Fucken thing.” He drew a European automatic from his hip holster. He stood in the open, his fury barely suppressed. The moment stretched, ratcheting on everyone’s nerves. Still nothing happened. They were all sick of these collisions and sick of suffering the waiting between them.
“You out, Tom?” Drucker asked from behind a wall.
“’Course I am, y’stupid nigger bastard.”
“Sergeant Tate,” Belgo’s voice snapped. “Come here.�
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Tate marched back to Belgo, spitting a gob of phlegm into the rubble. Saul waved the remaining soldiers forward, sending another man on point.
“That boy’s got to chill himself out,” Drucker said, his tone relaxed. He was staring at Tate and Belgo, and Rebecca couldn’t tell which man he meant.
A screamer went off, then another, followed by the concussion of collapsing buildings. The explosions rolled closer in a single echo as the Salusa walked their weapons to them. Rebecca’s teeth buzzed with feedback.
“Saul, get us out of here.” Belgo raised his voice as the next sonic screech howled over them. It was nothing to be concerned about. Screamers went off all the time. The soldiers broke into a loose trot towards the gaping entrance of the Eichbaum.
A shooting star zipped through the air. It turned sideways and punched Drucker’s back. He stumbled, grunting. The air was flooded with silver particles. They swept at all angles through the sky.
Rebecca ducked behind a broken wall as the finger-length missiles fell. She had it in her head that she was safe there, that she wouldn’t be hurt as long as the Salusa couldn’t see her. A missile bounced off the wall, scattering razors of stone across her face. Too breathless to scream, she opened her mouth to suck in air.
Then Saul was dragging her into the open. She fought him, but he body-slammed her, pulling her over the wall, then across loose rubble and up to the huge doors of the Eichbaum.
“Come on, Daisy,” he said, leading her up the steps to the entrance. His eyes were constantly moving, alert yet calm, as the rain of missiles increased. Her mother would’ve called his stare sound as a dollar, and it smoothed away her resistance.
Whining filled the air, growing into an ululating screech as more missiles arced over concrete. Saul shoved her into the tower.
