by Ben Weaver
“Welcome to Columbia Strike Base,” Ms. Brooks said. “As far as we know, the alliances have no idea we exist. I have a debriefing to attend. I’ll have the sergeant take you over to a billet to get cleaned up, then I’ll call for you. I’m sure the generals would like a word.”
My mouth fell open. So did Halitov’s.
Ms. Brooks climbed out, then the sergeant took us on to a billet belonging to the Fourteenth Regiment, Rebel Company, Second Battalion, Thirteenth Platoon, Squads Thirty-seven through Thirty-nine. Beauregard and Dina commented on the claustrophobia associated with a subterranean barracks, but the arrangement seemed quite natural to tunnel dwellers like me and Halitov. Squad Sergeant Jama Chopra, an amiable, baby-faced, twenty-two-year-old whose forefathers had come from Bombay, introduced us to the supply sergeant, a nineteen-year-old black woman named Giossi who gave us fresh utilities free of charge. We took hot showers for as long as we liked, then Chopra took us over to the mess, where we grappled with plates of pasta and tanked down more water and juice than an entire squad. We had found some emergency rations on board the transport, but they had barely satisfied our appetites. During the meal, Chopra introduced us to Squad Sergeants Tamburro and Stark, two fair-skinned, flaxen-haired women whom you would swear were sisters. They gazed at us like the airjeep sergeant had, their awe somewhat tempered by fear. Chopra explained that everyone at Columbia had heard something about the conditioning, but to the best of his knowledge none of the enlisted had ever met a conditioned soldier. With Ms. Brooks’s arrival, the scuttlebutt had run rampant about the four cadets who had rescued her from Exeter, four conditioned cadets.
“Can you show us something?” Squad Staff Sergeant Holmes asked, his hazel eyes fully lit, his brow flexing up and down. “Some of us couldn’t get into South Point.”
“Yeah, but some of us don’t wanna know what we missed,” sniped First Sergeant Mai Lan from the end of the long table. The sergeant, though Asian, could very well have been Pope’s sister. She had his rubbery skin stretched over knotty muscles, his persistent scowl, even his bad teeth. And I loved what she had done with her hair: your basic self-inflicted-butcher-knife-cut-while-drunk. She stared in my direction. “Some of us got fucked out of our opportunity because of testing biases and the encouragement of gennys to apply.”
I opened my mouth. Beauregard squeezed my shoulder, then turned me toward the entrance, where our airjeep sergeant waited. “Ms. Brooks just called for us.”
We were taken to a large conference room divided by a massive oak table littered with tablets, real paper reports, and drinks. Twenty or so people dressed in the black uniforms of the Seventeen System Guard Corps sat talking with each other or tapping on their tablets. Near the table’s head, I spotted four generals, two men and two women, all graying and over fifty, all heavily decorated. I did not know who the rest of the people were or what they did. I recognized only their ranks. Perhaps they were aides or specialists of some kind. No one ever clarified it for us. I scanned the crowd for Commandant Marxi, but she wasn’t there. One of the generals, Ms. Yllar Juvhixa, the woman who had declared the Corps’s secession, rose and indicated that we should stand across from the table, out in an open area that led to a lounge with real leather furniture.
Ms. Brooks left her chair, smiled at all of us, then faced the group. “Ladies and gentlemen, these individuals represent the kind of training and conditioning we were doing at South Point before the attack. And if it weren’t for them, especially Mr. Scott St. Andrew, I wouldn’t be here to share the codes with you.”
One man who identified himself as Colonel Felix Retorda of Intelligence asked Beauregard to relate the account of how we had commandeered the transport and escaped. Beauregard downplayed the event, but Halitov repeatedly stepped in to embellish and point out his contributions to Ms. Brooks’s safe return. Dina answered a few questions regarding the occupying force’s strength and a few inquiries that focused on our enhanced memories. I thought I could remain silent through most of it, since the others did such an articulate job.
“Mr. St. Andrew,” called one of the generals, Joseph Strident, a white-haired Goliath who had probably been one hell of a combatant in his youth.
“Yes, sir?”
“You’ve been silent during most of this, but I listened to Ms. Brooks’s account of how you pulled her out of her crashed transport, carried her to the Minsalo Caves, then defended her against two Marines and two cadets sympathetic to the alliances.”
“That’s right, sir.”
“Son, I’ll interpret your reticence as modesty. And since you’re not enthusiastic about speaking, would you mind demonstrating a little of that power?”
I hesitated. “Sir, as Mr. Beauregard said, we can’t always count on this process. Something went wrong, sir.”
“Why not give it a try? I understand the conditioning enables you to harness the quantum bond between particles.”
I felt more and more like a circus freak. I was getting flashbacks to my youth, to the days when I had to explain to the other eight-year-olds what this thing was on my face. But I knew that these people just wanted to see what the Corps’s money had bought; the general’s request had nothing to do with me personally. I also realized that if I made them happy, they might happily send me home.
I cleared my throat. “General, sir. I, uh, I believe I can honor your request.”
And with that I leapt at him, gliding three meters through the air, over the shoulders of others seated at the table, then coming at him with my arms outstretched, my hands ready to lock on his throat.
But damn it, the bond didn’t feel that strong. Would I actually choke him?
Even as his face twisted with shock, I suddenly dove, then rocketed myself boots-first toward the ceiling, where I landed with a slight impact, sighed with relief, then looked down on the stunned onlookers. Beauregard nodded to me. Dina winked. Halitov mouthed a curse, upset that he wasn’t in the spotlight.
“There’s no blood rushing to my head,” I told the audience. “I can stay up here for as long as I like—or until the conditioning falters.”
I bulleted across the ceiling, carefully avoiding the recessed lights. I reached the far wall and hustled right down it, hit the floor, then catapulted myself back toward the table in a dirc, the somersault and kick. I froze in midair, with the boot of my extended leg a hairsbreadth from the general’s nose. The others groped for a reaction and finally broke into laughter, while a few blinked against the universe’s magic made impossibly real before their eyes. I held that position a few seconds more, then barrel rolled up and over three others at the table, employing that variation of the chak I had seen Pope use on Exeter. I spun my way back toward Beauregard, then twisted into a reverse somersault and was about to land on my feet—
When the bond vanished. I crumpled onto my butt. “Sorry.”
“No, that’s quite all right,” said the general. “Question. You didn’t receive Accelerated Assimilation Training?”
“Sir, that’s correct, sir.” Beauregard helped me to my feet. “We had just started when the attack began. Our instructor was killed. We’ve been trying to figure this out on our own.”
“I’ll put in the request for an instructor, but I can’t make any promises. Now, how ’bout a demonstration of your cerebro enhancement?”
“Sir, ask me a question about, say, a piece of equipment. We’ll see if it works.”
He queried me on the Alliance’s atmoattack fighters, and I gave him the specs on four different models, the history of test flights, and even the latest innovations, which I suddenly realized were pouring directly into my brain from a wireless link to Rexi-Calhoon’s satnet. The mnemosyne had the ability to access local data systems. I shared that with the general, who seemed far less surprised than I was. Beauregard chipped in to tell how he had learned on the spot to fly the transport, and Halitov pointed out how we had used verbal triggers in an attempt to recall some of our cerebroed data.
Once the mee
ting adjourned, Beauregard cornered the general and asked about his father. I cornered Ms. Brooks. “So what happens now?”
She gave me a funny look. “You don’t know? I thought it was obvious. Maybe General Strident should let you know.”
Ms. Brooks left me and interrupted Strident, who was in mid-conversation with a lieutenant colonel. The general excused himself, then approached, beaming.
“One hell of a demonstration there, St. Andrew. I understand you’re a little uneasy about your future. Well, to be honest, son, we still own you for the next fourteen years. We made a commitment to each other. All the education you would have received at South Point is already in your head. Granted, you can’t get to it so well. But I’m sure that’ll improve over time. And you also have all the combat training you’ll ever need. Once again, that’s in there. We just have to help you find it. So, as far as we’re concerned, while we’ll continue to address the sporadic nature of your conditioning, you and the others are considered ready.”
“Sir, ready for what, sir?”
“Mr. Scott St. Andrew, you are about to become a commissioned officer in the Seventeen System Guard Corps. You will hold the rank of second lieutenant and be assigned as a platoon leader. As a matter of fact, I’ve already got a unit in mind for you. They’re an element of Strike Force Two-Four-Seven-A, the Gatewood-Callista campaign.” He winked. “You wouldn’t mind going there, would you?”
“Sir, no, sir. But do you really think I’m capable? I’m mean this conditioning, it’s just—”
“Son, I’m putting colos with barely six weeks training out on the line. Trust me. You’re ready. And you know what? The war won’t wait for you; it won’t wait for any of us. At eighteen hundred local we’ll have a small ceremony where I’ll present you with your lieutenant’s star. Congratulations.” He thrust out his hand.
“Thank you, sir.”
We shook, then he slid an arm over Ms. Brooks’s shoulders and pulled her away from me, whispering something about the ceremony. Someone shoved me hard in the arm.
“Fucking second lieutenants, you believe this?” Halitov asked. “Talk about the fast track.”
“You overheard?”
“No, General Juvhixa just told us. So we each got a platoon. I heard we’re shipping out in two days. Beauregard and Dina are going to Mars. Ms. Brooks worked it out. I’m going home with you, same battalion. We secure the colonies, we can go looking for our parents. I flat out told the general that’s what I plan to do. She didn’t have a problem with it.”
I gazed across the room at Dina, who lingered near the door, speaking with a lovesick Beauregard. I caught her gaze, and her lips tightened.
Halitov looked at me, then her, then rolled his eyes. “Yeah, all right. I’ll miss looking at her ass, but you? You don’t need her. She’s screwing you up. You should be glad she’s leaving. And Beauregard? We can both live without him. Once he gets that commission, his superiority complex is gonna swell.”
“Hey,” I said with mock surprise. “Just like yours.”
“In my case, it’s not a complex,” Halitov said, folding his arms over his sweeping chest. “It’s a fact. But what pisses me off is that you’re the one who should be flying this whole conditioning shit in our faces. You go from gennyboy to quitunutul master overnight. How does that not go to your head?”
“I guess I still don’t believe it. It’s all a dream. My brother’s still alive. Haltiwanger. Clarion. Pope. None of this has really hit me yet.”
Standing there with him, I didn’t realize how right I was. Even the commissioning ceremony swept by like the cool current of some dream river. When I washed up on shore, I had a lieutenant’s ten-point star pinned to my breast.
It was not until that night, when everyone else had drifted off, that I locked myself in the latrine and clutched that lieutenant’s star so tightly that my palm bled.
They gave me the same platoon I had bunked with for the past two days, and I was less than ecstatic to have Mai Lan as my first sergeant. Chopra assured me that he would do everything in his power to establish a smooth transition of command.
During my first inspection of the three squads, I told them that after seven days of training we would ship out to Gatewood-Callista to take back the colony from an occupying force. I told them I was born and raised there. I told them I knew those tunnels as well as any native. I gave them a quick demonstration of the dirc and chak to establish a bit more credibility for myself—but that backfired when, during the chak, I lost the connection to the bond and fell.
Some first impression…
Most of my platoon had probably been trained by officers at least six to ten years older than me and with a lot more field experience. In fact, a few of the privates were in their late twenties, and I felt that gap all too painfully. They were stuck taking orders from a kid. I had to show them I was much more, even though I doubted that myself. One piece of advice that I found in my head, words of wisdom from Yakata himself, held that integrity, honesty, and a stalwart commitment to victory are a leader’s best friends. If you show your people that you are only half committed, that integrity is but a word to you, and that honesty only works when it benefits you, then they will not follow. Your commitment to the ideals must be superhuman. I tried to explain that to Halitov, who told me after the first night that he was already having a morale problem with his platoon. The sergeants called him conceited and ill-prepared. I told him—as clichéd as it might sound—that he needed to model proper behavior, that he needed to explore his own training. The answers were there for the finding. He just snickered and walked away.
During the morning of our second training day, I was tested by the Corps’s scientists. They hooked me up to another cerebro, one they said would help me to better recall my combat training. I did not feel any different when they were done, but I knew the operation of most major weapons, knew artillery procedures, knew how to react to EMP bombs, and that I had trained on all seventeen colonized worlds, pitting my platoon against varying numbers of Alliance troops. I had fought thousands of skirmishes, seen hundreds of faceless troops die, but all of it felt clinical, statistical, mechanical. I knew how to react to a multitude of combat scenarios, but none of them included watching a dear comrade, a man in your charge, spill his blood over your boots. If the experts had provided me with a psychological cushion against all the death I would encounter, I wasn’t aware of it.
After testing us individually, those scientists brought Halitov, Dina, Beauregard, and myself together. They took us down into the lower tunnels, asked us to race and fight each other with the quitunutul arts. Although Yakata had said my conditioning was supposed to be three times more powerful than normal, I performed no better than the others, who struggled at trying to maintain a consistent use of the conditioning. One minute we could run at over a hundred kilometers an hour, the next we were out of breath and barely able to jog. The arts posed similar challenges. You’d launch yourself up for a kick, only to find that gravity had returned at exactly the wrong time. I began to think Yakata had lied to me—that was until the scientists asked us to begin projecting ourselves to places, to reach out and see things out of sight. The others had trouble with this, but I remembered how I had willed myself to Ms. Brooks’s shuttle. I had ridden the bonds between particles, bonds that existed everywhere at once. With a thought, I had arrived. That kind of power scared me.
“Take yourself to the tunnel’s end,” one scientist asked me.
I closed my eyes, reached out, saw the tunnel, then forced myself there.
When I opened my eyes, I stood just behind the scientist.
“Did you see that?” Halitov asked. “One second he’s right there, the next he’s over there. That was weird.”
“Yeah, but he never got to the end of the tunnel,” Beauregard said. “You have something extra, St. Andrew. But so far it’s not much.”
I removed a plastic tablet pointer from my pocket. Then I remembered. A second scientist had go
ne to the end of the tunnel. He had handed me his pointer, and I had come back, although I hadn’t planned on arriving behind the first scientist. The whole thing had happened in the blink of an eye, and my memory had just needed to catch up with my body.
“Shit, he was there,” said Halitov. “Damn. How’d he get the pointer so fast?”
“All right,” challenged Beauregard. “St. Andrew, go to Earth. Bring me back a hot dog.”
“Stop messing around,” Dina said.
“No. That’s—” I broke off. The bond was gone. And suddenly, I felt very tired, so tired that I actually fell onto the scientist.
“What’s the matter with him?” Dina asked.
“We’re not sure,” answered the scientist.
They helped me up.
“I need to sleep. That’s all. Just sleep.”
The subterranean rifle range allowed my troops to experience a decent simulation of urban combat via preprogrammed holographic opponents. Still weary from my tests with the scientists the day before, I went to the range’s computer and programmed a no-win situation. I was curious to see how Mai Lan and my staff sergeants would handle defeat.
We entered a city that could easily be mistaken for a colony on Gatewood-Callista, though most of the buildings were facades. One squad of fifteen guardsmen skinned up and fanned out to the left, another to the right, and the third ran straight up the middle of a wide boulevard.
I had programmed three hundred holographic snipers to fire at us from the windows, rooftops, and ground vehicles. Although they fired only laser light that would automatically deactivate our skins, their weapons sounded real.
The place erupted.
I ran across the street and kept close to a wall. A gauntlet of light beams clogged the street. Six people from the Three-eight bought it right away. Another four from Chopra’s squad dropped to their knees. Stark’s people got massacred; only three privates were left.
