“That’s right,” First Sergeant Chau said. “Take a good look, Chah-lee. Our home. Yours and mine. Only it might not be for much longer if we don’t do the job Fleet asks us to do. The mantes aren’t human. They don’t think human. They don’t feel human. They don’t care human. All they want is to see humans die. Are we gonna let that happen, Chah-lee?”
As a company: “NO, FIRST SERGEANT!”
“Are we gonna let the insects take our home, or our colonies?”
“NO, FIRST SERGEANT!”
“That’s damned good, Chah-lee! We are what stands between the mantes and Earth’s destruction. You are all training to be part of humanity’s first, best defense against the mantis threat. Up until now you’ve spent most of your time on the ground, learning how to so-jah the way so-jahs have learned for hundreds of years. Now we gonna teach you to fight twenty-second-century style. Drill sah-jeens, prepare for EVA!”
My heart leapt in my throat.
There’d been nothing on the company white board that said anything about us actually going outside on this trip. Just a longer case of up-and-back. Not so long that I thought I couldn’t hold it together until we landed. But the idea of actually getting up off the bench and floating free, much less going beyond the confines of the troop deck, seemed like a unique kind of torture.
Senior Drill Sergeant Malvino was up and out of his seat, the bottoms of his boots magnetically locked to the deck. He began shouting at us to hook our tie lines to the cables that ran up and down the length of the troop deck. We’d move aft in an orderly fashion—pulling ourselves along the backs of the benches by the railings we found there. One squad at a time, in sequence.
As with everything else we’d experienced in space to date, much ground practice had gone into this moment. Rehearsals which had looked rather comical when performed on the PT field now came back to us as we mimicked our ground training.
At the end of the cable we began to daisychain ourselves in a human strand: each squad stretched out with troops hooked to troops, which in turn formed spokes off of platoons, and the platoons spoked off of the company proper. All of us spread out to the limits of our tethers. Tiny reaction control thrusters in each suit allowing us a limited amount of extravehicular maneuverability.
I found I did best by not looking down.
Some astronauts and supersonic skydivers have reported no fear, upon stepping into the void of space. Because the ground is so impossibly far away, falling towards it feels abstract and unreal.
I, on the other hand, found it excruciating. So I faced away, into the blackness of interplanetary space, and focused on my breathing, trying to pay attention to the commands being given on the squad, platoon, and company wireless networks.
By the fifth sortie, I’d gotten used to it. Not immune. Just . . . used to it.
And we were practicing limited EVA squad tactics using individual maneuvering units, as well as squad-level “pushers” which were basically automobile-sized devices that allowed eight to twenty people to clamp on, latch on, or grab hold, and zoom around in microgravity.
The assault carrier’s troop deck was stocked with a maze of temporary barriers, where we practiced mock shipboarding, our R77A5s outfitted with small lasers that activated upon trigger-pull. The training-issue armor suits would blip at you when you got hit. Depending on where you got hit, the suit would relay your injury information back to the DSs running the mock fight. Torso shots were often judged to be fatal—making some of us wonder what was the point in wearing extra-bulky space armor if said armor was not, in fact, capable of absorbing and deflecting rounds. But an extremity shot was deemed survivable. In the event that the armor was punctured, sealant gel would pour from a liner in the outer layer and into the hole, while a specialized non-toxic, anesthetic, blood-clotting foam would fill around the arm or leg from the inner layer, causing the affected area to stiffen and immobilize, like a cast.
For our purposes the sealant and the foam were kept dormant. The DSs would yell out that your left or right arm was officially useless, and if you got caught using it during the fight your name went onto the punishment detail roster. Something many of us had experienced, more times than we cared to admit, so we tried to err on the side of caution, going limp as dish rags any time we got tagged by a rival squad’s or platoon’s laser beams.
“Live fire is for the LCX,” Drill Sergeant Schmetkin said to me as she worked with my squad, marshaling us through exterior hull movement drills—the bottoms of our boots clomping across the heat-absorbing tiles that covered the entire assault carrier. Magnetism in our boot soles was just strong enough to keep us glued to the exterior, assuming we didn’t jump or push off too hard.
The LCX was the Lunar Combat Exercise: a twelve-day final trial wherein all of us who’d survived IST thus far would take everything we’d learned about soldiering and put it to the test—on the surface of the Moon. When I’d first heard about the LCX it had sounded like a blast. But now that we were coming up on it, I realized that it was going to be a combination of tedium and frenzy. Four days to reach the Moon, four days to bust our butts taking and holding a mock mantis outpost, then four days back. All carried out under as real of conditions as could be managed. Which, in space, where even tiny mistakes could be fatal, was pretty damned real.
Following hull drills, and after we’d all clambered back inside and resumed our seats on our respective benches, I wondered just how the LCX would compare to an actual combat assault. Assuming such things were even conducted? So much of what we’d been doing and training for seemed theoretical. Centuries of infantry tactics and knowledge adapted to conditions and terrain where no human soldier had ever soldiered before. Would we be any good at it, when the situation mattered? Or were we just fooling ourselves?
I chose to keep such wonderings to myself.
CHAPTER 33
AFTERNOON BROUGHT US TO THE EDGE OF A NARROW, DEEP canyon. A small river wound its way across the bottom headed northwest to southeast. The water tumbled and rushed against the rocks below, and a rumbling echo drifted out of the canyon as the Professor and I considered our options. I reluctantly woke the captain, helping her down off the back of the Professor’s disc, while he helped the Queen Mother down too. The two aliens spoke briefly in their insect language, then she scurried off to the Canyon’s edge, peering out over it while the captain and I counseled with the Professor.
“Have you detected any further signs of mantis signals or technology?” Adanaho asked. She didn’t sound as stuffed up as she had in the morning, and her eyes looked somewhat better too. I was encouraged by this. Maybe the extra sleep had done her good.
“No,” said the Professor. “But, given our new geographical impediment, I do not think it would matter even if I had.”
“Can’t your disc take us over?” I asked.
“The carriage is not an aircraft,” the Professor said. “Its impellers operate according to proximity with solid and semi-solid mass, not gravity per se. I would sink like a stone until I’d reached a point within a few of your meters above the canyon floor.”
“If we can find a way down,” I said, “maybe we can rig up a method of traveling on the river current. Plus, we’d have fresh water any time we wanted it. I bet that flood creek we filled our canteens in is a tributary to this drainage. If we follow it far enough, we might reach a lake or something larger. What’s your hunch, Professor? Would your people prefer such a location for setting up a temporary base of operations?”
“I believe that is a logical assumption,” said the Professor.
“How about it, ma’am?” I asked, looking at my superior.
“It’s as good a plan as any we’ve had so far,” she said. “We’ll have to make sure and get the Queen Mother’s opin—OH MY GOD!”
I froze, watching the captain’s arm shoot out with an index finger pointed behind me to the canyon’s edge.
I turned just in time to see the Queen Mother’s body drop over the side. The Profes
sor nearly bowled me over as his disc shot after her, then he too was over the side. The captain and I rushed to the edge and flopped onto our bellies, sliding across the last few inches of sand before putting our chins at the lip, hands clawed across the precipice.
What we saw was the most improbably beautiful thing I’d witnessed since going to space with the Fleet as an older teenager.
The Queen Mother circled lazily around and around in the air, slowly spiraling with her wings spread to their maximum width, each beating in concert with the others, and together making a low rhythm that sounded not too dissimilar from a helicopter. She obviously weighed too much and her wings were too small for sustained flight, but while she flew—her body extended and piercing the air like a javelin, her beak aimed directly forward and her legs and forelimbs folded up tightly against her body—she was magnificent.
The Professor’s disc fell straight down the wall of the Canyon. The speaker grill on the disc’s front was blaring amplified mantis speech. Which the Queen Mother appeared to happily ignore.
“She’s beautiful,” the captain whispered.
“I didn’t know they could fly,” I said, still astonished.
After a couple of seconds, Adanaho’s lips peeled back from her teeth in a wide, genuine smile. “I don’t think the Queen Mother knew either. Until now.”
We watched as the Queen Mother continued her slow descent, until at last she lightly touched down on a wide sand bar in the middle of the river. Walking to the edge, she lowered her mouth to the water and began taking in copious amounts of fluid. The Professor zoomed up to her, his disc’s motors making funny shapes in the surface of the water as he moved across it. The Queen Mother appeared to ignore him for a few more moments as he hovered directly next to her, animatedly talking with his mandibles.
Finally she looked up at him. She said something.
The Professor backed away from her and went across the water to the canyon wall directly beneath us. I gauged the distance to be two hundred meters down. Now he really did look like a bug. Smaller than my thumb.
“We are committed,” he said, his speaker grill turned up to maximum. His vocoder-voice echoed long and far, up and down the canyon.
“We can’t climb down at this point,” the captain yelled, then began coughing.
“Let us travel downriver until there is a place where you can join us,” replied the Professor.
“Agreed,” I called at the top of my lungs. Then I stood up and retrieved my load from where I’d dumped it on the ground. The captain stood up too. She trudged over to me.
“Sorry ma’am,” I said. “Looks like you’re hoofing it again.”
“It’s okay,” she said. “I need to work the knots out of my muscles. Here, give me the pack; I will carry it.”
I eyed her, but decided to follow orders. She took the pack without complaint, and off we went, staying close enough to the canyon edge that we could see down to the Professor and the Queen Mother, but not so close as to give either of us vertigo. Afterimages of the Queen Mother’s sudden, elegant, altogether astounding flight ran across my vision as we walked. Until that time I’d still considered the mantes to be an ugly race. They were also vicious and brutal in combat. But for a minute or two, I’d seen a mantis take flight—soaring and spectacular.
“What a story you’ll have for the intel people,” I said as we walked.
“What a story,” the captain agreed. “Nobody’s going to believe this. I wish I’d had a camera or a recorder on me to get evidence. She looked as natural as can be. Free as a bird, one might say.”
“Amazing that her instincts were that good,” I said. “She jumped off that cliff purely on faith, apparently.”
“Apparently,” said the captain.
I sensed something else from her, though she didn’t speak for several more minutes.
“Chief,” she finally said.
“Yes, ma’am?”
“Is it true what you said?”
“About what?”
“About you not having had a woman in your arms for a dozen years?”
“You were eavesdropping again,” I chided her.
“I have good ears,” she said. “So, it’s really true?”
“Uhh, yes, ma’am.”
“How come?”
“Beg your pardon?”
“How come you didn’t have a lover on Purgatory? That Deacon person you talked about, back aboard ship. Wasn’t she interested?”
“That’s a good question. I’m not really sure. Granted, I am not the world’s most handsome fellow, but that didn’t stop a lot of the other prisoners from getting the attention of the opposite sex. I think once I built the chapel and took over where Chaplain Thomas left off, people viewed me like I’d been set apart. The chapel and I became synonymous.”
“That’s too bad,” she said. “It must have been hard.”
“Yes, it was,” I admitted.
It took a couple of seconds for the unintended double entendre of my reply to sink in, then she and I both burst out laughing.
For a moment we stopped and doubled over, until our diaphragms hurt. Then we got back to walking, the laughter dying to giggles, and then spastic coughing on Adanaho’s part.
She drank water while I waited, then we started out again.
“Sorry,” I said. “Didn’t mean to make you gag up a lung.”
“I think it’s allergies,” she said. “Something here—in the dirt, on the dust of the wind—is rubbing me wrong. I’ll be okay. FIDO.”
“Fuck it, drive on,” I said, smirking. The motto had been around in one form or another for as long as men and women had saluted and marched. Contrary to my first impression, as an intel officer the captain didn’t seem averse to physical challenges. In fact, the longer we walked and the more I watched her, the more I came to believe she actually relished the effort. Every stride was a statement. Her back held straight and her head up, swiveling occasionally so that her eyes could take in the landscape.
“Ma’am,” I said.
“Yes, Chief?”
“What have you and the Queen Mother really been discussing the last couple of nights?”
“Like I said, it’s hard to discuss anything with someone who doesn’t speak our language,” she said.
“I’ve been thinking about that, and I’ve decided I’m wrong. They may not be able to speak as we do, but they can hear us just fine. You don’t have to be able to speak a language to hear it, or understand what’s been said. I’m now wagering that the Queen Mother understood every word out of your mouth. Back on the Calysta she stated that our beliefs and rituals were of no interest to her. Why’s she suddenly become curious now?”
Adanaho knit her brow while she considered my words.
“I can only speculate,” she said.
“Speculation’s better than nothing,” I replied.
“I believe the Queen Mother is in a state of flux. Pulling her out of her disc terrified her almost to the brink of insanity. But in the days since we left the escape pod, her perceptions have been pure. Unadulterated.”
“Unadulterated?” I said, somewhat incredulous. “You make it sound like her disc was an impediment, rather an advantage. Five will get you ten the Fleet would kill to replicate a functional disc. That’s a nifty piece of the mantis puzzle we’ve still been unable to unravel. Imagine that kind of advanced technology adapted for human use.”
“I can,” she said, with a slightly sour expression. “But we’re already so dependent on our own technology—for what we eat, how we travel, how we live, even how we play, and for what we think and how we think it—that we forget what it was like before computers, spacecraft, faster-than-light travel—”
“Do I detect the sensibility of a Luddite?” I said archly.
“I do not hate technology,” she replied. “I simply think we’ve gotten lazy. Did you know that the bulk of our major scientific discoveries came to us without the aid of modern equipment? Hell, Chief, they built t
he first atomic weapons using long math and vacuum tube processing power. The first true spaceplane, the X-15? Also built using nothing but slide rules and a lot of shrewd paper-and-pencil figuring. Then came the Information Age, and suddenly anyone could know anything via Internet search engines. Why waste time memorizing or synthesizing? Click, the info’s at your fingertips. Entertainment too. The immersive games became addictive. People forget about the danger of VR.”
“Nobody’s forgotten about that,” I said. “There are boatloads of Americans back home who were going through therapy and rehabilitation when I joined the Fleet.”
“Not just in America, Chief,” she said, stopping in her tracks and facing me. Her eyes had begun to sparkle keenly. I could tell from her posture that we’d hit a sore point.
“There are whole generations of people addicted to VR. Why come out and face the real world when make-believe is so much nicer?”
“Plenty of people recovered when the mantes attacked,” I said.
“Sure, when we were forced to, we snapped out of it. Sort of. But if the mantes never existed and we’d been left to just toodle along the path of least resistance . . . I am not sure any force could have reversed the trend. We built ships in virtual bottles, then climbed in after the ships and pulled the corks tight behind us.”
I couldn’t deny the ferocity or facts of her argument. Just about every American knew somebody who’d become addicted to VR. Minds lost to imaginary spaces existing purely inside the global information networks. Each man or woman become a fairy king or cyber queen, a god or goddess of his or her own private electronic realm. Wealth, luxury, power, all limitless and beyond belief. Sit down, plug in, turn on, and tune out. An infinity of sweetly alluring lies.
I shuddered.
“So how does the VR addiction epidemic tie back to the Queen Mother?”
“Have you ever seen the bad cases? The ones who went into VR as kids only to come out as adults? Everything you and I take for granted, even eating and drinking and shitting, is an alien experience for them. They don’t remember the real world, and because there are no rules in VR there’s no need to bother with the mundane functions of ordinary existence. Most of those recoveries take years, and the patients hate it.
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