Deserts of Fire

by Douglas Lain

  Mike was right. Paulie would get used to the killing.

  Mike and Paulie walked again, and they’d come a long way down the road. An hour or so had passed, the smell of blood like iron in the air. Mike scratched at his head again. His skull itched like sweaty skin under a bandage. The hole in Paulie’s chest had grown so hard he forgot it was there. A small child, a girl, lay in the middle of the road. She held something close to her chest. Mike groaned at the sight of her, closing his eyes and turning away. His face puckered up. Paulie knelt down and pried the girls arms open. Her hands had been shot clean through, one bullet wound in each hand. The bullet had pierced through the doll, clean into her stomach. Mike opened his eyes again, staring at Paulie as he yanked the doll from the girl’s chest. It had been cemented there with blood.

  “Christ, she can’t be more than six or seven,” Mike muttered.

  “Yeah.” Paulie ripped the doll at the seams in her back, tearing her in half. The blood kept her pretty well glued together, but eventually she tore apart. Mike’s stomach turned a little, but Paulie didn’t even think about what he was doing, he just did it. It would be difficult for anything to affect him now.

  Mike had been the first to die. Paulie saw the piece of shrapnel ricochet, shrapnel that seemed to come out of nowhere. He saw it hit Mike’s head, and he saw the blood. Mike fell to his knees, then onto his side. He gasped a little, his eyelids fluttering. Paulie stared at him, but only for a moment. The gunshots around him snapped him out of it, and he aimed his gun at the nearest man not in a US army uniform, shooting him in the head. The man’s eyes shone in the sunlight, then were dark as he hit the ground. Paulie continued on, shooting one man after the other after the other, never looking back to where Mike had fallen.

  Mike died blinking at the dirt, and Paulie killed almost two dozen men. When a man shot Paulie in the chest, he didn’t think of Mike or his mom or anyone else. He thought of how he wished he could use his arm to shoot the son of a bitch who shot him. Mike would never know how it had happened, how Paulie had changed, and Paulie couldn’t even be quite sure of when.

  Linda Nagata is a Nebula and Locus-award-winning author. Her most recent work is The Red Trilogy, a series of near-future military thrillers published by Saga Press/Simon & Schuster in 2015. The first book in the trilogy, The Red: First Light, was named as a Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2015. Her short fiction has appeared in Analog, Lightspeed, F&SF, Asimov’s, and at Sci-Fi.com, among other places.

  “Light and Shadow” was originally published in the anthology War Stories. It is a story about shell shock and a particular fictional technological fix for the malady.

  “light and shadow”

  LINDA NAGATA

  lieutenant Dani Reid was serving her turn on watch inside Fort Zana’s Tactical Operations Center. She scanned the TOC’s monitors and their rotating displays of real-time surveillance data. All was quiet. Even the goats that usually grazed outside the walls had retreated, taking refuge from the noon sun in a grove of spindly thorn trees.

  The temperature outside was a steamy 39°C, but within the fort’s prefabricated, insulated walls, the air was cool enough that Reid kept the jacket of her brown-camo combat uniform buttoned up per regulation. The skullcap she wore was part of the uniform. Made like an athletic skullcap, it covered her forehead and clung skin-tight against her hairless scalp. Fine wires woven through its silky brown fabric were in constant dialog with the workings of her mind.

  On watch, the skullcap kept her alert, just slightly on edge, immune to the mesmerizing hum of electronics and the soothing whisper of air circulating through the vents—white noise that retreated into subliminal volumes when confronted by a louder sound: a rustle of movement in the hallway.

  Private First Class Landon Phan leaned in the doorway of the TOC.

  Phan was just twenty-one, slender and wiry. Beneath the brim of his skullcap, his eyebrows angled in an annoyed scowl. “LT? You should go check on Sakai.”

  “Why? What’s up?”

  “Ma’am, you need to see it yourself.”

  Phan had been part of Reid’s linked combat squad for nine months. He’d done well in the LCS; he’d earned Reid’s trust. She didn’t feel the same about Sakai.

  “Okay. You take the watch.”

  Light spilling from the TOC was the only illumination in the hallway. The bunkroom was even darker. Reid couldn’t see anything inside, but she could hear the fast, shallow, ragged breathing of a soldier in trouble, skirting the edge of panic. She slapped on the hall light.

  Specialist Caroline Sakai was revealed, coiled in a bottom bunk, her trembling fists clenched against her chin, her eyes squeezed shut. She wore a T-shirt, shorts, and socks, but she wasn’t wearing a skullcap. The pale skin of her hairless scalp gleamed in the refracted light.

  “What the hell?” Reid whispered, crossing the room to crouch beside the bunk. “Sakai? What happened?”

  Sakai’s eyes popped open. She jerked back against the wall, glaring as if she’d never seen Reid before.

  “What the hell?” Reid repeated.

  Sakai’s gaze cut sideways. She bit her lip. Then, in an uncharacteristically husky voice, she confessed, “I think … I was having a nightmare.”

  “No shit! What did you expect?”

  She seemed honestly confused. “Ma’am?”

  “Where the hell is your skullcap?”

  Sakai caught on; her expression hardened. “In my locker, ma’am.”

  The microwire net in Reid’s skullcap detected her consternation and responded to it by signaling the tiny beads strewn throughout her brain tissue to stimulate a counteracting cerebral cocktail that helped her think calmly, logically, as this conversation veered into dangerous territory.

  The skullcap was standard equipment in a linked combat squad. It guarded and guided a soldier’s emotional state, keeping moods balanced and minds honed. It was so essential to the job that, on deployment, LCS soldiers were allowed to wear it at all times, waking or sleeping. And they did wear it. All of them did. Always.

  But they were not required to wear it, not during off-duty hours.

  The hallway light picked out a few pale freckles on Sakai’s cheeks and the multiple, empty piercings in her earlobes. It tangled in her black, unkempt eyebrows and glinted in her glassy brown eyes. “You want the nightmares?” Reid asked, revolted by Sakai’s choice.

  “Of course not, ma’am.”

  Use of the skullcap was tangled up in issues of mental health and self-determination, so regulations existed to protect a soldier’s right of choice. Reid could not order Sakai to wear it when she was off-duty; she could not even ask Sakai why she chose to go without it. So she approached the issue sideways. “Something you need to talk about, soldier?”

  “No, ma’am,” Sakai said in a flat voice. “I’m fine.”

  Reid nodded, because there was nothing else she could do. “Get some sleep, then. Nightmares aren’t going to excuse you from patrol.”

  She returned to the TOC, where Phan was waiting. “When did this start?”

  “Yesterday,” he answered cautiously.

  Even Phan knew this wasn’t a subject they could discuss.

  “Get some sleep,” she told him. “Use earplugs if you have to.”

  When he’d gone, Reid considered reporting the issue to Guidance … but she knew what Guidance would say. So long as Sakai performed her duties in an acceptable manner, she was within her rights to forego the skullcap during off-duty hours, no matter how much it disturbed the rest of the squad.

  What the hell was Sakai trying to prove?

  Reid ran her palms across the silky fabric of her skullcap. Then, as if on a dare, she slipped her fingertips under its brim and took it off.

  A cold draft kissed her bare scalp and made her shiver.

  Her pulse picked up as fear unfolded around her heart.

  You’re psyching yourself out.

  Probably.

  She studied the skullcap, turnin
g it over, feeling the hair-thin microwires embedded in the smooth brown cloth.

  No big deal, really, to go without it. It was only out of habit that she wore it all the time.

  The hum of electronics within the TOC grew a little louder, a little closer, and then, with no further warning, Reid found herself caught up in a quiet fury. Sakai had always been the squad’s problem child. Not in the performance of her duty—if that had been an issue, Reid would have been all over her. It was Sakai’s personality. She didn’t mesh. Distant, uncommunicative, her emotions locked away. A loner. Seven months at Fort Zana had not changed her status as an outsider.

  Reid’s emotions were closer to the surface: she didn’t like Sakai; didn’t like her effect on the squad. There needed to be trust between her soldiers, but none of them really trusted Sakai and no one wanted to partner with her. No one believed she would truly have their back if things went hard south. Reid saw it in the field when her soldiers hesitated, thought twice, allowed a few seconds to pass in doubt. Someday those few seconds would be the last measure of a life.

  Reid clenched the skullcap.

  Fuck Sakai anyway.

  Ducking her head, she slipped the cap back on, pressing it close to her scalp. Within seconds, her racing heart slowed. Her anger grew cold and thoughtful.

  Sakai thought she could get by without her skullcap. Maybe she wanted to prove she had more mettle than the rest of them, but it wouldn’t last. It couldn’t. “You’ll give it up,” Reid whispered. “By this time tomorrow, you’ll be back in the fold.”

  Reid finished her watch and went back to sleep, waking at 1900. She laced on her boots, then tromped next door to the TOC, where Private First Class David Wicks was on duty.

  “Anything?” she asked.

  “No, ma’am. No alerts at all from Command.” He flashed a shy smile. “But my niece had her first-birthday party today.” He pulled up a window with his email, and Reid got to watch a short video of a smiling one-year-old in a pretty blue dress.

  “Your sister doing okay now?”

  “Yeah, she’s good.”

  Wicks sent money to his sister. It was a big part of why he’d signed up.

  In the kitchen, Reid microwaved a meal, then joined Sergeant Juarez at the table. “Command thinks we’ve got a quiet night.”

  Juarez was no taller than Reid, but he carried fifty extra pounds of muscle. He’d been army for seven years, and Reid was sure he’d be in for twenty if he could pull it off. “You ever notice,” he drawled, “how the patrol gets interesting every time Command says there’s nothing going on?”

  “Just means we’re good at finding trouble.”

  Phan reeled in, with Private First Class Mila Faraci a step behind him. “How’s it look tonight, LT?” Faraci asked.

  “Quiet so far.”

  “That’s what I like to hear.”

  Juarez finished eating. He got up just as Sakai came in the door wearing a fresh uniform, her cheeks still flushed from a hot shower and her head freshly denuded of hair, leaving her scalp smooth and pale under the ceiling lights with no skullcap to hide it. Phan and Faraci were waiting together by the two humming microwaves. Phan glared. Faraci looked shocked. “I thought you were shitting me,” she murmured.

  Sakai ignored everyone. She opened the freezer and pulled out a meal packet while Reid traded a look with Juarez.

  “What the hell is with you, Sakai?” Faraci demanded.

  “Faraci,” Juarez growled, “you got a problem?”

  Faraci was strong, tall, tough, and full of swagger, but she took care never to cross Juarez. “No, Sergeant.”

  Reid got up, dumped her meal packet, and left. Juarez followed her to her quarters, where there was barely enough room for the two of them to stand without breathing each other’s air.

  “What the hell?” he demanded.

  “You know I can’t ask. She hasn’t said anything to you?”

  “She doesn’t talk to me or anybody. It’s been worse since she got back from leave.”

  Skullcaps got turned in before a soldier went on leave. It was a harsh transition, learning to live without it. But taking it up again after your twenty-one days—that was easy. No one ever had a problem with that.

  “She’s just annoyed at being back,” Reid decided. “If there was a real issue, Guidance would know. They would address it. Meantime, make sure our other noble warriors don’t get in her face. I don’t want to bust the kids when Sakai is the loose cannon.”

  “You got it, LT.”

  “This won’t last,” Reid assured him. “You’ll see. She’ll give this up tomorrow.”

  Reid was wrong.

  Sakai wore the skullcap during the nightly patrols as she was required to do, but for three days running she took the cap off as soon as she hit the showers, and it didn’t go on again until they rigged up for the next patrol. This generated its own problem: Sakai couldn’t sleep well without her skullcap. It wouldn’t be long before she was unfit for patrol.

  Reid rigged up early for the night’s adventures. Her armored vest went on first. Then she strapped into her “dead sister.” The titanium exoskeleton was made of bone-like struts that paralleled her arms and legs and were linked together by a back frame that supported the weight of her pack. Testing the rig, she crouched and then bobbed up, letting the dead sister’s powered leg struts do the work of lifting her body weight. The exoskeleton made it easy to walk for hours, to run, to jump, to kick and hit, and to support the weight of her tactical rifle, an MCL1a with muzzle-mounted cams and AI integration.

  The rest of the squad was still prepping when she slung her weapon, tucked her helmet under her arm, and strode out into the small yard enclosed by the fort’s fifteen-foot-high walls.

  The night air was heavy with heat and humidity and the scent of mud and blossoms, but the clouds that had brought a late-afternoon shower had dispersed, leaving the sky clear and awash in the light of a rising moon. Reid allowed herself a handful of seconds to take in the night as it was meant to be seen. Then she pulled her helmet on. Seen through her visor, the yard brightened with the green, alien glow of night vision while icons mustered across the bottom of the display, one for every soldier wearing a skullcap: Juarez, Faraci, Phan, and Wicks.

  A familiar voice spoke through Reid’s helmet audio: “You’re early tonight.”

  She smiled, though he couldn’t see it. “So are you. Slow night?”

  “Not too bad.”

  He was her primary handler from Guidance, codenamed Tyrant, the only name she knew him by. His job was to assist in field operations, overseeing data analysis and relaying communications with Command from his office, five thousand miles away in Charleston. Tyrant had access to the feeds from her helmet cams as well as the display on her visor, and he kept a close eye on all of it. “Where’s Sakai’s icon?” he asked. “You didn’t give her the night off?”

  The door opened and, to Reid’s surprise, Sakai stepped through, already rigged in armor and bones, her pack on, her weapon on her shoulder, and her helmet in her gloved hand. But no skullcap.

  And without her skullcap, she didn’t appear as an icon on Reid’s display.

  “She’s challenging you,” Tyrant murmured, amusement in his voice.

  Sakai shot Reid a sideways glance, but if she was looking for a reaction, she was disappointed. Reid’s face was hidden behind the anonymous black shield of her visor.

  Sakai turned away, setting her helmet down on a dusty table. Then, like a good girl, she fished her skullcap out of a pocket and put it on.

  Her icon popped up on Reid’s display. Reid gazed at it and a menu slid open. She shifted her gaze, selecting “physiology” from the list of options. Her system AI whispered a brief report: status marginal; brain chemistry indicates insufficient sleep. But as Sakai’s skullcap went to work, stimulating the chemical factory of her brain, her status ramped up. By the time the squad assembled, Sakai’s condition became nominal, and the AI approved her for the night’s mi
ssion.

  That night, they were to patrol far to the north. They spread out in their customary formation: two hundred meters between each soldier, with Reid on the east, Sakai on the west, and the others in between. The physical separation let them cover more territory while they remained electronically linked to each other, to Tyrant, and to the angel that accompanied them. The surveillance drone was the squad’s remote eyes, hunting ahead for signs of enemy insurgents.

  Reid moved easily through the flat terrain, the power of her stride augmented by her exoskeleton’s struts and joints, while the shocked footplates that supported her booted feet generated a faint, rhythmic hiss with every step. Her gaze was never still, roving between the squad map, the video feed from the angel, the terrain around her, and the quality of the ground where her next steps would fall.

  Threat assessment had gotten harder since the start of the rainy season. Stands of head-high grass covered what only a month ago had been bare red earth. Thickets had leafed out and the scattered trees had sprouted green canopies. Cattle liked to spend the hottest hours of the day beneath the trees, their sharp hooves treading the ground into sticky bogs. For most of the year this worn-out land was barely habitable, with the Sahara encroaching from the north. But for at least this one more year the rains had come, bringing life back—and providing extensive cover for an enemy made up of violent but half-trained insurgent soldiers.

  Reid held her tactical rifle across her body, ready for use at all times as she searched for signs of disturbance that could not be accounted for by cattle or goats or the herdsmen who accompanied them. At the same time, video from her helmet cams was relayed to Guidance for first-pass analysis by Intelligence AIs—a process duplicated for everyone in the squad.

  Tyrant remained silent as three hours passed with no anomalies found. Despite the uneventful night, no one’s attention strayed. The skullcaps wouldn’t allow it. If a soldier’s focus began to drift, brain activity would reflect it, and be corrected. Every soldier remained alert at all times.