by Marko Kloos
“Marines,” he says. “2080 to 2106.”
If he served four terms, he must be in his early fifties at least. He doesn’t look that old, even if his short hair has a lot of silver in it. He looks at least ten years younger than that, which is unusual for a career space ape. That lifestyle wears a body out fast. Could be he’s bullshitting her, but somehow Jackson knows he doesn’t feel the need to lie to her.
“Officer?” she asks, and he nods.
“I was a Lieutenant Colonel when I left. Never did get to pin on those eagles.”
He leans forward and studies her face, his chin perched on his steepled fingers. Then he gestures to the area under his eyes.
“Your facial tattoos. What do they mean? I don’t recognize that pattern at all.”
Jackson shrugs.
“Saw it in a manga when I was a kid. Thought it looked bad-ass. Thought I needed to look bad-ass back then.”
He nods at her explanation.
“You’re going to let me go, or kill me?” Jackson asks.
“I’m not going to kill you. I will tell you that the sergeant whose squad you mauled was ready to finish you off on the spot in that staircase. We don’t run things like that around here. But I can’t let you go just yet either.”
“He the one in charge of the people that shot it out with us?”
“Yes, he was.”
“Then you should have let him. I get the chance, I’ll finish him off.”
Her visitor shakes his head, slowly, like he just heard some kid say something outrageously dumb. Then he gets up from his chair and carries it over to the door, out of her reach.
“You were out for a while. You’ll be hungry soon. I’ll have someone bring you some food. It’s not military chow, but I suspect you’re no stranger to welfare rations. I’ll be back later, when you’re fed.”
He walks out and closes the door from the outside. The snap of the deadbolts seems loud in her nearly empty room.
A little while later, someone else brings in a meal tray and puts it on the ground without saying a word. Jackson watches him unblinkingly until he is out of the room again. She gets out of bed—slowly and carefully—and retrieves the tray. It’s the standard generic soy-and-shit chicken they put into the welfare meals with various flavorings. After she enlisted, Jackson told herself she’d never eat another welfare meal, but she has been famished since she woke up, so she eats everything on the tray and washes it down with the box of bug juice that came with the meal. If she wants to get out of here in one piece, she needs to give her body something to burn.
She makes the bed, pulls the ratty sheet over the mattress and tucks it in tightly, then straightens out the wrinkles. Then she lies down on the bed and closes her eyes for a nap. Fed and rested can fight longer and run faster than hungry and tired.
When the door opens again, she is awake instantly. She swings her legs over the side of the bed and sits on the edge, hands clasped in front of her. At least they didn’t shackle her wrists.
The tall, lean, handsome visitor from before walks into the room. He’s wearing the same sanitized fatigues—no rank insignia, no name tag, no unit patches. He eyes the empty meal tray on the floor. Then he picks up the chair from the corner of the room again and puts it in the precise spot he had placed it earlier, as close to the bed as possible while still being out of the reach of the shackled Jackson.
“Where am I?” she asks him. “Who are you? How long have I been under?”
He flashes the sparest of smiles. Then he sits down on the chair and straightens out the tunic of his fatigues.
“You are in PRC Detroit-22, in one of the residence towers we control. My name is Lazarus, and I am in charge of the force that captured and disarmed your platoon. You have been under for three days.”
“Lazarus,” she says, and almost chuckles. “Come back from the dead, did you?”
“In a manner of speaking,” Lazarus says. “It’s a bit of a long story, and I’m not sure you’d be interested even if I were in the mood to tell you.”
“They’ll tear this place apart when they come looking for us,” Jackson says. Lazarus shakes his head slowly.
“I have no doubt they’ll be back soon with more people, but we’ve long left the block where we ambushed your unit. We never use the same trick twice from the same spot. They’ll need to drop a whole battalion just to get control of one block, never mind twelve.”
“You control the entire PRC,” Jackson says, incredulity creeping into her voice.
“Most of it,” Lazarus says. “The wonders of centralized control and command. Now let me ask you a question.”
He reaches into one of the chest pockets of his tunic and pulls out a set of dog tags on a chain. Then he dangles them from his fingers for her to see.
“You had these on you when we stripped you of your gear. Would you mind telling me how you got them?”
The dog tags are those of Anna McKenney, of course. She had been carrying them in the water-tight pocket insert where she keeps all her personal stuff. She looks at Lazarus, who is returning her gaze impassively.
“I took them off a woman’s neck on the street in one of your shithole PRCs in the center of this shithole of a city.”
“Did you kill her?”
Jackson senses that a lot is riding on her answer. She doesn’t even consider lying.
“She wounded one of my troopers. Was about to finish him off. I put two bursts into her. Fuckin’ right I killed her.”
He doesn’t say anything to that, just looks at her with this steely, unmoved expression, but she can tell there’s a lot swirling behind those eyes right now. Then he lets out a small sigh and looks down at his hands.
“I suspected as much. We never found her body, but we had a lot of missing that night. What a waste.”
Jackson agrees, although for different reasons. She doesn’t say anything else, though. Lazarus shakes his head and puts the dog tags back into his pocket.
“It’s all a waste, you know. Us down here, squabbling about who gets to eat how much of what shitty calories, you up there putting the boot on our throats whenever the pot boils over.”
“We keep order,” Jackson says. “We hold the line.”
Lazarus shakes his head with a sad smile.
“Is that what you think you’re doing? Do you see anyone glad for your presence whenever you come down into a PRC? Do you honestly not know how these people see you when you come in with your gunships and your battle armor, and walk the streets like you own the place?”
“Food’s shitty,” Jackson says. “Life sucks. I know. I was welfare before I joined up. But without the TA keeping you all from burning the place down, there wouldn’t be any calories for anyone.”
“You ought to know better than that, Corporal Kameelah Jackson,” Lazarus says. “You’re not there for our benefit. You’re there to keep the shit from spilling over into the suburbs and the upper-class gated communities. You’re attack dogs, and you don’t even know who is holding your leashes. When people see you tromping down the street in the PRC, they don’t see law and order. They don’t see civilization. They see an occupying army.”
Lazarus gets up, puts the chair back into the corner of the room, and looks at the door in front of him, fists clenched. Then he turns around, and for the first time Jackson can see emotion through his disciplined, collected expression.
“Just so you know, Anna McKenney was one of my platoon leaders. She was the kindest person I’ve ever known. Hell of a fighter, too. She was Navy, you know. Never had a lick of infantry training. We were together. If I had something like a soulmate in this life, she was it.”
Jackson feels her face flush, and she’s glad her skin color doesn’t make it obvious to Lazarus.
“I’m telling you this so you can appreciate how hard it is for me to not just go outside, fetch a rifle, and shoot you right in the forehead.”
He turns around and leaves the room. The door falls into its lock in his wak
e. Jackson doesn’t even realize she has been holding her breath for the last few moments until she exhales shakily.
Chapter Eight
Choices
The noise of the door opening shakes Jackson out of her sleep. Two of the uniformed civvies walk in. One stands by the door with a rifle, the other tosses a set of fatigues and a pair of slip-on shoes onto the bed.
“Get dressed,” he says. Then he steps up to the foot of the bed and snips her plastic restraints with a tool. “You try any funny shit, Olsen’s gonna go full auto on your ass.”
She gathers the clothes they gave her and gets out of bed. The pain in her side is still there, still just this side of tolerable. She wonders if anything got broken permanently.
The uniformed civvies don’t look like they have any intention of letting her get dressed in private, so she puts on the clothes while they’re watching her. She glances at their gear and the way they’re positioned, then concludes that she won’t be able to drop the closer one before the rifleman by the door mows her down with the M-66 he’s aiming at her.
When she’s dressed, they step out of the room and wave her forward.
“We’re moving. Go in front of me. Olsen will be behind us. You turn toward him, he’ll shoot you. Now move.”
She obeys and leaves the room, careful not to give Olsen an excuse to twitch his trigger finger.
Outside, there’s a narrow hallway that looks like it’s in a basement somewhere. Jackson follows the first civvie as instructed. The hallway leads out into a spacious vestibule. Out here, at least a dozen armed civvies in partial battle rattle are gathered, Lazarus in the middle of the group. He’s wearing chest and back plates, a sidearm on a drop holster, and a harness with magazine pouches. When she steps into the vestibule, it seems that every pair of eyes in the room is on her.
“Corporal Jackson,” he says. “We are relocating. Please follow along and don’t give anyone a reason to shoot you. Trust me when I tell you that most of them would be glad for an excuse. Let’s move out, gentlemen.”
They rush through a maze of corridors and vestibules, Lazarus’ men keeping a wary eye on her every time she strays close to one of them. Jackson’s side hurts, and she feels something stabbing into her chest every time she takes a breath, but she knows it would be pointless to ask them to slow down.
Then someone in front throws open a set of doors, and they’re outside.
It’s nighttime, and Jackson sees that they’re in the middle of a residence block. There’s a droning noise in the air, and the reason for the sudden rush becomes clear when she sees a Hornet-class drop ship coming out of the night sky and circling around the top of a nearby high rise tower. The dirty nighttime sky is ablaze with the searchlights from more drop ships. Whatever TA unit is making a drop onto this block right now, they’re coming in force, maybe an entire battalion dropping at once.
“They’re on Tower Thirteen,” Lazarus says into the earpiece he’s wearing. “Don’t engage. Let them have it. Second platoon, fall back to the atrium and take the rabbit warren down to the admin center. We’ll meet up with you there.”
They’re a hundred meters from the admin building in the middle of the square when another Hornet swoops out of the sky and thunders down toward the square. Jackson sees the skids of the drop ship lower out of the belly armor as the Hornet swings around to claim a landing spot. There’s rifle fire in the distance between two residence towers, and a moment later, an explosion blooms up in the same spot. The sound of the detonation rolls across the plaza like the rumbling thunder of an approaching storm.
“TA squads on the ground between Thirteen and Fourteen. Also in Blocks Five and Six. They’re all over the place, sir,” one of the troopers says, listening to the comms in his own headset.
There are civvies on the plaza, most of them without weapons and moving away from the spot where the drop ship is descending. It settles on the landing pad at the top of the admin center, a hundred meters away. Then the tail ramp opens with a low whine, and a platoon of TA come rushing out. They take up positions at the edge of the roof. Behind them, the drop ship guns its engines and lifts off again, raising the ramp in mid-air. It rises into the night sky, position lights flashing in the haze. The TA troopers file into the rooftop staircase one by one, weapons at the ready.
“We have a TA platoon on the ground at the admin center,” Lazarus says into his headset. “Second platoon, don’t engage them. Pass through and make for the fallback.”
Another drop ship weaves its way between two of the residence towers ahead and thunders over the plaza at low altitude before banking and turning to the right. They’re so low that Jackson can see the decals on the helmets of the pilots as the ship roars directly overhead.
“Told you they’d come back,” she says to Lazarus. He turns around and glares at her.
“They’re not coming for you. They’re coming for their gear. They’re here to send a message, you dumb shit.”
There’s rifle fire coming from the inside of the admin center now, short staccato bursts of automatic fire. A muffled explosion follows, then another.
“Sir, Second Platoon is engaged in the admin center.”
“Goddammit,” Lazarus says. He looks over to Jackson, then points at Olsen and the other civvie who escorted her from the room earlier.
“Olsen, Lepitre. Take our guest here over to the warren at Tower Eleven. Head for the spider nest. Don’t stop for coffee. The rest of you, with me.”
Lazarus leads off to the admin center, and most of the troopers move out with him as ordered, covering corners and sectors like a seasoned TA infantry squad. Olsen points out the way for her with the barrel of his rifle, back toward the tower they just left. She obeys and follows Lepitre.
They’re back inside the basement hallway when the overhead illumination switches from white to the dim red emergency light. The change is startling without helmet augmentation to compensate for it.
“What the fuck,” Lepitre says ahead of her. On the floor directly above, there’s gunfire, the hoarse chattering of flechette rifles interspersed with the lower single booms of cartridge guns.
Two more troopers appear around a bend in front of them. In the dim light, it takes Jackson a second or two to realize that the newcomers aren’t civvies in partial battle gear, but TA troopers in full armor, M-66 rifles at the ready.
Everything happens at once.
Lepitre up ahead shouts something at the TA troopers, but whatever he’s saying is drowned out by the booming warning coming from the troopers’ suit amplifiers.
“DROP YOUR WEAPONS AND GET ON THE GROUND! DROP…”
Lepitre goes for his sidearm, but he’s either too slow or too fast for the TA troopers. They both open fire, and Lepitre twitches once and falls to the ground. Behind Jackson, she hears the creaking of the plastic on Olsen’s rifle as he brings it to bear.
Jackson stops cold and drops to the ground. Olsen’s rifle spits out a full-auto burst, and both TA troopers go down in the hail of flechettes, half a magazine dumped at maximum cadence. Olsen is right behind her, less than half a meter away, and she rolls around and kicks his legs out from underneath him. He goes down, still clutching the rifle, and squeezes the trigger again. The burst hits the wall next to them and peppers Jackson with concrete chips and flechette fragments. She tries to wrestle the rifle away from him, but he’s holding on to it with a death grip, and he’s stronger. He tries to aim the rifle at her, but she’s on top of him, and in those close quarters, there’s no space for a sixteen-inch barrel between them.
Jackson drives an elbow into Olsen’s face, then his throat, as hard as she can thrust it down. He gurgles and lets go of his gun to clutch his throat. Jackson seizes the M-66 and backpedals, aims the muzzle at Olsen, and squeezes the trigger. The burst takes him in the side of the chest. He stiffens, groans, exhales. Then he stops moving. Jackson has seen enough KIA to know even in the dim light of the emergency illumination that he’s dead.
S
he gets to her knees and checks the condition of the rifle. Without a helmet display, she has to eject the magazine and count the rounds through the witness strip on the side. A quarter of the magazine left, so maybe sixty rounds. Olsen isn’t wearing an ammo harness. Dumb fuck ran around without reloads. If he was a vet, he wasn’t infantry, she thinks.
The TA troopers are down as well, both drilled with at least fifty rounds from Olsen’s full-auto magazine dump. They have magazine pouches, of course. Jackson doesn’t have a harness, but the too-big fatigues she’s wearing have roomy pockets, and she fills them with magazines as quickly as she can pry them out of the pouches of the dead troopers.
Up ahead in the hallway, a door opens, and another TA trooper appears.
He’s less than twenty meters from where Jackson is tugging at the harnesses of two of his dead comrades. She knows instantly that he will not shout a warning, that there won’t be time to put-up her hands and explain the situation, tell him that she’s Corporal Kameelah Jackson, 365th AIB GODDAMNIT DON’T SHOOT ME
He brings up his rifle, she grabs hers. She shoots from the hip, not wanting to take the time to use the sights. The M-66 in her hands roars and spits out the rest of the magazine at the dumb-ass high rate of fire Olsen dialed in manually earlier.
Her burst almost goes high, but some of the fifty or sixty flechettes find their way into the visor of the TA trooper’s helmet. He drops instantly, like someone turned off his power switch. His rifle clatters to the concrete.
Jackson screams a curse. She rushes over to the trooper she just shot, somebody here to rescue her, one of her own. She checks the unit markers on the armor and instantly hates herself for the relief she feels when she sees that his unit isn’t the 365th, but the 332nd.
She gets up, changes the magazine in her rifle, drops the empty one on the ground. Then she takes the magazines of the dead 332nd trooper, too.
Her drop two days ago ran into a planned ambush. All of Lazarus’ troops, with home field advantage, with control of the security office, using the bottlenecks of the elevator banks. This drop, a whole battalion of TA descending on an unprepared enemy, is a much more even fight. There’s gunfire everywhere now—the floors above her, the plaza outside. Jackson finds a staircase and gets out of the basement, up to the atrium of the residence tower. She advances through the hallways, rifle at the ready. There are civvies rushing past her to get out of the way of the shooting, but they pay her no mind. Probably think she’s one of them.
