Orphan Brigade

by Henry V. O'Neil

  The hands again, telling her that we don’t stand on the kneeler, asking her if she wanted to say a prayer for Mother, but Ayliss had looked around while she possessed the vantage point. Seeing Father at last, tall, strong, a few yards off to the side. Someone was talking to him—­someone was always talking to him—­but he sensed her attention and turned to look. The blue eyes that she loved so much, exactly like her own—­Jan had Mother’s eyes but she had Father’s—­looking directly at her, but different. So terribly different. She knew them as the indicators of affection and praise and mirth, and that day they held none of that. They held nothing at all.

  Not even sadness that Mother was gone.

  Father regarded her for several moments, blankly, as if not recognizing her, and when the hands pulled Ayliss away she started to scream. They misunderstood, picking her up, holding her, cooing words of comfort and the never-­ending litany that everything was going to be all right, but they were too stupid, they were all too stupid, to know that she was screaming at Father to care about what had happened, to Mother, to her, to Jan, and then she’d been carried from the room and the hands were shaking her, trying to get her to calm down, shaking, shaking—­

  “Ma’am? Ma’am?” A male face appeared in front of Ayliss’s, a uniformed technician, a familiar sight at the end of a space voyage. A hand was gently rocking her shoulder, still attempting to rouse her even though she was wide-­awake. Sharp memories of the dream of that terrible day, when everything had changed. The dreams always stayed with her, which was why Ayliss doubted they were dreams at all. The technician released her and straightened up, standing respectfully outside the low compartment.

  “It’s quite all right, ma’am. You shouldn’t feel embarrassed at all. The anesthetic often has that effect on ­people. You’ll stop crying in a minute or so.”

  Broda was the smallest of the planets first settled by humans after Earth. It had been bypassed initially because, though habitable, it had lacked the natural riches that made other planets more attractive. The Brodans liked to joke that their home had none of the things politicians, corporations, and generals would want—­which made it Paradise.

  It also made Broda the destination of choice for ­people seeking that most fundamental aspect of freedom, the desire to be left alone. The planet’s government reflected that desire, heavily codified in law, and over time a culture had developed on Broda that had morphed into its key industry.

  The Brodans dealt in data. Clean, untainted data, accurately processed with a transparent history. Information that bore the stamp of the Brodan Data Guild was considered completely reliable, devoid of manipulation, and as free of bias as was humanly possible. The Guild’s exacting methods for collecting, verifying, classifying, and analyzing information were open for all to see. Those methods were taught at universities on every settled world, not just for proper data analysis, but also as a rival to the scientific method and even a framework for philosophical thought.

  Technology had made the corruption of information both simple and easy, to the extent that analysis and findings from non-­Guild sources were automatically suspect. In a universe where every excuse, twist, and outright lie could be propagated instantly and endlessly, the genuine article was very hard to come by. The Brodans, devoted to clean data in a way that was almost worship, had become the lone trusted source—­which of course earned them enemies in every corner of the inhabited planets.

  None of those enemies hated them more than the Emergency Senate, which was an added reason for Ayliss to rely on them so heavily. She was a frequent visitor to Broda and, although her status as Olech Mortas’s daughter had made gaining their trust difficult, she was now a welcome visitor.

  Dev Harlec was as unlikely an ally as she could have imagined, which was why she’d set out to befriend him right from the start. As a professor of data analysis on Earth, he’d become famous for lectures and publications that skewered powerful entities for their twisted relationship with the truth. Those entities, tired of his assaults, had finally managed to have him removed from his teaching position and blocked from getting another. Much of his writing had then been banned under a blanket wartime-­security act, and Dev Harlec had decided his days as a man of Earth had come to an end. On Broda he was regarded as a cross between a political refugee and a holy martyr, and he took special delight in tormenting the Emergency Senate and the leadership of the Human Defense Force from his new home.

  “Naughty Ayliss Mortas! One of these days your dad’s going to revoke your papers, and you’re going to be stuck here,” Harlec exclaimed when Ayliss stepped from the elevator. Sunlight streamed in from every direction because Harlec’s floor—­and it was all his—­was perched atop a tall building, and most of its walls were transparent. The Brodans’ obsession with openness was reflected in their architecture, and looking out over the capital city she saw miles and miles of translucent surfaces.

  “I can think of worse fates.” Ayliss crossed the shiny floor and deposited a kiss on Harlec’s bald head. She would have been able to do this even if he’d been standing, but the researcher was seated in a chair with outsized casters which he enjoyed rolling from terminal to terminal. Freestanding electronic towers of astounding capacity reached for the bubble roof like pillars, a seeming throwback to an earlier age of technology. Ayliss, already immersed in Brodan technique, knew that many of their brightest minds preferred to perform their initial work unconnected to larger networks. Sharing and cross-­checking of information might be mandatory, but continuous linkage to other systems was not.

  “I would have expected your tan to be better, spending so much time under the sun.” She reached for an identical chair and rolled it closer while Harlec smiled at her jab. The transparent material of the walls was a special polymer created to block dangerous rays and emissions, from within or without. Additionally, Harlec’s petite frame had never known exercise even though he favored athletic warm-­up suits with hoods that hung down his back like a monk’s cowl. What was left of his hair was all gray, and his slitted eyes looked across at her from behind thick glasses. Harlec was rumored to have already gone through several pairs of transplanted eyes because of the brutal hours he spent poring over data streams. Whenever he started wearing a set of glasses, the ocular anachronism indicated he was due for another surgery.

  “Afraid I don’t get around as much as you do.”

  “You know I only make the trip so I can see your smiling face.”

  “Of course. But it doesn’t hurt to demonstrate you can pretty much go anywhere you please, while your outlandishly powerful father is basically stuck on Earth.” One of the secret pleasures of visiting the different planets was the knowledge that Olech, despite his high position, couldn’t risk being lost in the Step. With only a few exceptions, he was essentially Earth-­bound.

  “Sometimes I think you dislike him as much as I do.”

  “Why would I have a reason to dislike him? He and his cronies wanted to put me in jail, and to this day they persist in their silly scheme of overloading Broda with data that’s simply noise.” Unable to combat the Guild’s popularity, Olech and others like him had adopted the strategy of agreeing to every request for information, then providing oversized feeds loaded with garbage. “And we won’t waste any time discussing their endless war.”

  “Oh, we would never do that.” Ayliss winked. “Listen, I may have finally come across something juicy.”

  “I’m crushed. You only visit when you want something.”

  “If it’s half as good as I think it is, we both might see my father headed into early retirement.”

  “Tell me.”

  “I’ve been digging through the Auxiliary’s records for a long time, searching for something nasty, but I finally figured out I’ve been looking in the wrong place. Most of the returned vets don’t trust anybody, and at any rate the database has been sanitized. Honestly, I suspect the good
information never leaves the war zone.

  “So I got hold of a smuggled eulogy, the ones the troops send back, and it mentioned a facility where a new soldier was questioned about his background. His history regarding violence, personal hostility, gang membership. When he protested, saying he hadn’t seen action yet, he was told that they were establishing a baseline.”

  “That is interesting.”

  “So I began looking again, now that I knew what I was after. I didn’t find much, but there were fragments. Tests of brain function on returned vets, for example.”

  “That could be easily explained, especially if the subjects had been concussed.”

  “Exactly. Which is why I screened out the ones who’d suffered trauma to the head. A surprising number hadn’t even been wounded, and every one of those soldiers fell into one of two categories. Decorated for bravery, or punished for cowardice.”

  She let that hang in the air, watching Harlec’s expression turn deeply contemplative.

  “Sneaky Command. You think they might be looking into brain function as it relates to performance on the battlefield?”

  “Fits, doesn’t it? Get a baseline with the new guys, then compare that with the performance of the survivors at the other end. If there is a link, they should be able to find it that way.”

  “And if they can establish that link, they might be stupid enough to think they can alter the brain function through drugs or surgery. Take any normal human being and turn him into a hero.” He shook his head. “It’s been tried before, many times. All sorts of undesirable side effects, and the results were far from reliable.”

  “I found a ­couple of professional papers that came to that same conclusion. But that doesn’t mean they wouldn’t try it anyway. And here’s where it gets really interesting: I couldn’t find any record of this kind of testing on unwounded veterans that wasn’t at least two years old. Prior to that it was pretty common.”

  “So either they gave up, or they found what they were looking for.”

  “If they found what they were looking for, they’d need to do a lot more research and then move on to experimentation. Human experimentation. And they sure couldn’t do that anywhere near the settled words. Probably not even this side of the CHOP line.”

  “Now that’s nasty. But I’ve seen them do nastier things, and for dumber reasons. If they thought they could find the switch that takes flight and turns it into fight . . . Command would certainly consider that worth the risk.”

  “The risk gets a lot lower if they keep the experimentation in the war zone. So where would they conduct something like that, and how could we find it?”

  “You’re doing very well on your own. Where would you look?”

  “There are a lot of possibilities. Space stations. Uninhabitable planets we control. Ships in space. Military-­controlled planets. I ran some rough numbers and they’re enormous. Besides, if they really are doing something like this, the location’s not in any database.”

  “So stop looking at the data that’s there and look for the data that’s not.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Sometimes it’s not what you see, but what you don’t. The puzzle pieces that should be there but aren’t. Large amounts of money that suddenly disappeared from someone’s budget. Logistical support that got rerouted with no explanation. Even ­people who vanished, for asking the wrong questions.

  “You mentioned reading some professional papers on this subject, which of course would have been authored by the ­people working in this field. What about the papers that aren’t there, and the ­people who should have been writing them?”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “Sure you do. Command drafts ­people all the time, and so does your father, even if he never puts a uniform on the ones he selects. All sorts of noted scientists have dropped their civilian work and become part of the war effort over the decades. Some of them did it publicly while others simply packed up and shipped out.

  “We need to identify the top experts in this field. Then we need to see who’s still on the settled worlds and who’s not. Should be easy to do, just by finding out who’s no longer publishing. And if we find somebody who quietly disappeared in the last ­couple of years, we’ll have a good prospect.”

  “What would that do for us, though? How would we track a brain expert in the war zone if Command and my father didn’t want anyone to know they were there in the first place?”

  “Ayliss, Ayliss, Ayliss.” He gave her a smile. “Have you ever met a scientist who followed security protocol?”

  After finally passing the latest in a long series of proficiency exams, Mortas shut off the monitor and rubbed his eyes. He was seated in the adjutant’s office in the battalion headquarters, and it was late at night. Through the open door he could see the NCO and young private from C Company who’d been assigned staff duty with him, seated near a bank of radios. Although the building was empty for the night, an emergency order could come in at any time, and so it was always manned by at least one officer, an NCO, and a runner.

  It had been a long day, the latest in a succession of them running back to his arrival. As a new lieutenant with no combat experience, his every waking moment was taken up with a crash course in the lessons that the veterans had all learned on the battlefield. Grueling physical training with his platoon, followed by live-­fire ranges that were slowly increasing in complexity now that the new men were progressing past the more basic tasks. At the end of each day Mortas received further education from Captain Noonan, who was proving to be a bit of an enigma. The company commander alternated between a taciturn coldness and an impassioned energy that manifested itself whenever the combat scenarios in the training simulator became particularly intense. Mortas hadn’t noticed this behavioral change at first, because it usually coincided with the point in the simulation where he was being overwhelmed by the many tasks he had to perform as a platoon leader.

  Though equipped with a detailed understanding of the weapon systems available to an infantry platoon fighting the Sims, Mortas’s knowledge came from his precommissioning training at university and the few months he’d spent in Officer Basic. Out in the war zone, however, he was discovering just how much of his schoolroom learning was incomplete or actually outdated.

  He’d trained in the Force’s excellent simulators many times, but the experience with a unit like the Orphans was a rude shock. Standing in a darkened room, wearing or holding exact replicas of his gear and weapons, he would be thrust into alarmingly realistic depictions of actual combat through a set of goggles almost identical to the ones he would wear in the field. Different scenarios would burst into existence before his eyes, and he could physically move around in that world by turning his head, jumping, or throwing himself prone.

  Sometimes he was the only trainee, in which case the program would provide the voices and images of notional platoon members as well as important characters such as the company commander. Explosions would boom in his ears while Mortas was trying to hear what other players were saying, figures would be running, shooting, and sometimes collapsing nearby, and of course the enemy was present as well. The software had been modified to reflect the procedures that the Orphans used in the field, and so he was faced with a steep learning curve.

  The most important skill Mortas had to gain was related to the Orphans’ spartan firepower. Lacking the heavier weapons systems that were standard in Force infantry units, the Orphans worked hard at incorporating the extra muscle offered by drone gunships, higher-­echelon artillery, and missiles delivered from orbit. Although most of that was managed by the ASSLs who accompanied the infantry, every Orphan was expected to become an expert at requesting and directing those lifesaving assets.

  As the platoon leader, Mortas already knew he would be expected to assume the ASSL’s duties if the man was incapacitated, but he hadn’t anticipated the complexity
of coordinating his troops’ movements with the overlapping delivery systems available to him. Despite Noonan’s personal coaching, he was finding it difficult to juggle all of the available support while also directing the actions of the troops he commanded.

  “Up late studying?” He recognized the voice of Captain Pappas, the battalion intelligence officer. Mortas stopped rubbing his eyes and saw the blond-­haired man standing in the doorway, smiling.

  “I’m on staff duty, sir.” That sounded a little self-­important, so he added wryly. “You know, in case anything big happens.”

  “Yeah, big like having to go rescue some poor MPs from the boys.” Pappas entered the room and pulled up a chair. Mortas already knew that the Orphans had a hostile relationship with most of the units near the brigade’s area, and with the military police just about anywhere. “I’d like to ask you a few questions about the Sims you encountered on Roanum, if you don’t mind. The ones you walked with.”

  “I don’t mind at all.” At first Mortas had been skittish about discussing his experiences on the barren planet that now bore Roan Gorman’s name, but the brigade commander’s edict had held and not many ­people had asked him much about it. “Although we really weren’t with them for very long, so I probably didn’t learn anything important.”

  “Now that’s where you’re wrong. The best information comes from the ­people on the ground, the ones who are right there. Always has. When you’re out there with your troops, you need to keep your eyes and ears open—­and theirs too—­because everything is potentially important. Footprints, trash, the way the enemy operates, all of it means something. And don’t just pass the information up the chain. Give it some thought yourself, and talk to your men about it. If the Sims change something they’re doing, why did they change? What does that mean for us, and for your platoon?”

  The words were soft and inoffensive, so Mortas merely nodded.

  “You walked with that Sim column for hours, then hitched a ride with them right through the colony defenses. What was their reaction when you joined them?”