Harvest operations are called off while they do the final preparations, leaving us with too much leisure time, too much time to think. Or maybe it’s just me. But it allows me to make my decision. Not to blow it wide open. (As if they wouldn’t just hold us down and do it to us anyway.) Because I’m thinking that a cell doesn’t have to be a bad thing. It doesn’t have to be a prison. It could be more like a monk’s cell, a haven from the world, somewhere you can lock yourself away from everything and never have to think again.
On Tuesday, we’re summoned to lab three. “You ready?” Catherine says.
“Is my pension paid out?” I snipe. There is nervous laughter.
“Why can’t we use our old suits?” Waverley whines. “Why we gotta change a good thing?”
“Shut up, Waverley.” Shapshak snaps, but only half-heartedly. And then because everyone is jittery—even us uneducated slum hicks can have suspicions—I volunteer.
I step forward and shrug out of my grays, letting them drop to the floor. Two of the labtechs haul a suit out of the tank and sort-of hunker forward with it, folding it around me like origami. It is clammy and brittle at the same time. As they fold one piece over another, it binds together and darkens to an opaque green. The color of slime-mould.
The labtechs assist others into their suits, carefully wrapping everyone up, like presents, leaving only the hoods and a dangling connector like a scorpion tail. The tip has a pad of microneedles that will fasten on to my nervous system. Nothing unusual here. The GMPs use the same technology to monitor vital signs. Nothing unusual at all.
“Don’t worry, it won’t hurt. It injects anesthetic at the same time,” Catherine says. “Like a mosquito.”
“Not the ones on this planet, lady,” Waverley snickers, looking around for approval, as they start folding him into his suit.
Back in Caxton, I tried converting to the Neo-Adventists for a time. They promised me the golden glow of God’s love that would transform me utterly. But I still felt the same after my baptism—still dirty, still broken, still poor.
“Can we hurry this along?” I ask, impatient.
“Of course,” Catherine says. And maybe that’s a glimmer of respect in her blue eyes, or maybe it’s just the reflection of the neon lighting, but I feel like we understand each other in these last moments.
The labtechs slip the hood over my face. She presses the bioconnector up against the hollow at the base of my skull, and clicks the switch that makes the needles leap forward. Suddenly the armor clamps down on me like a muscle. I fight down a jolt of claustrophobia so strong it raises the taste of bile in my mouth. I have to catch myself from falling to my knees and retching.
“You okay, Yengko?” Shapshak says, his voice suddenly sharp through the glaze of drugs he’s on. He must really care, I think. But I am beyond caring. Beyond anything.
I wondered what it would feel like. The soft furriness of the amoebites flooding through the bioconnector, the prickle as they flower through my skin. What’s better than a dead zombie? A live one. And maybe God’s glow is green, not golden.
“Yes,” I say and close my eyes against the light, against the sight of the others being parceled up in the suits, at Waverley starting to scream, tugging at the hood as he realizes what’s going on, what’s in there with him. “I’m fine.” And maybe for the first time, I actually am.
Lauren Beukes (www.laurenbeukes.com) is a South African novelist, TV scriptwriter, documentary maker, comics writer, and occasional journalist. She won the 2011 Arthur C Clarke Award for her phantasmagorical noir, Zoo City, set in an alternate Johannesburg where guilt manifests as spirit animal familiars and dark things lurk beneath the surface of the pop music industry. Her previous novel, Moxyland, is a corporate apartheid cyberpunk thriller where cell phones are used for social control and viral branding really is. She’s also written short stories, a rollicking non-fiction about maverick South African women, TV scripts, and comics for Vertigo.
Sticks and Stones
Robert Buettner
“Don’t touch that red lead!” Barclay’s voice in my earpiece booms, even across twenty-four thousand miles.
I jerk my fingers back from inside my helmet so fast that it rolls off my cross-legged lap, then bounces across the tent’s dirt floor. “Damn it, Barc! This is a battery change, not bomb disposal!”
“No red lead, no beacon. No beacon, no pick up.” Pause. Master Sergeants with twenty years have learned to shrug audibly. “Long walk home, Lieutenant Schwartz.”
I crawl after my helmet and sigh into my mike. “Sorry, Barc. It’s hard down here. Y’know?”
“Did I not weep for him whose day was hard? Job 30:25.”
Master Sergeants with twenty have also learned to tell a newbie officer to quit whining, without uttering an insubordinate syllable. And Barclay, who’s vocally Baptist, quotes me Old Testament because I was born Jewish, but he thinks he can convert me.
I roll my eyes because I’m inconvertible. My twenty years of life have taught me that the bible’s a collection of morally instructive fables, not a history book.
But if Barclay’s literal view of religion is crap, his view of an operational situation is always life-savingly crystalline. Pick-up drones are as dumb as Master Sergeant Reuben Westmoreland Barclay thinks Second Lieutenants are. And he knows that I have the fine motor coordination of a ground sloth, whether the task is bomb disposal, dentistry, or a simple battery change.
Tomorrow, a drone will home in on the transponder beacon in my armor’s shoulder cap, snatch me off this rock on the fly, like an eagle and its prey, and then ferry me back up to the orbiting pod from which Barclay is co-ordinating this preliminary survey of Unclassified Earthlike 604.
One standard day after that, the cruiser that dropped us off will retrieve the pod and leave Unclassified Earthlike 604 to go its own way, probably forever. And cruisers don’t wait on tardy Second Lieutenants.
I swat a sand flea biting my exposed neck, so hard that sweat sprays my armor’s neck ring, and I swear. Based upon what Barclay’s survey drones and I have seen in the four days since I hit dirt, Unclassified Earthlike 604’s early Iron Age humans won’t invent bombs to dispose of for a thousand years, give or take. Still, it’s the locals, not the sand fleas, that are making it hard down here.
Clank. Clank. Someone raps the ornamental brass knocker outside the tent against the pole from which the knocker dangles.
A voice crackles, delayed a microsecond by my ear translator. “Am I permitted entry, Beshtini Men Ja?”
Without looking up from my battery fumbling, I sigh to my host, “Chubbi, it’s your tent! C’mon in.”
A mahogany-brown hand flips back the tent’s entry flap, and the hand’s owner shuffles in behind it, on his knees, his black-bearded head bowed.
I roll my eyes and sigh again. Beshtini Men Ja translates from Local as, give or take a nuance, “invincible man-god.” “You can stand up. And call me Ethan.” I am, in fact, Second Lieutenant Ethan Schwartz, fresh out of Suborbital Arobotic Survey Officer Basic. As Aunt Char reminded me at SASOB graduation, while she sneered at the mess hall cookies, I’m the first kid in my family in a century too clumsy to do my two years public service as at least a family practice dentist. Man-god? Hardly.
My host straightens, and his leather body armor creaks as he adjusts the iron short sword at his waist. Chubbirian the Indomitable, Commander of Commanders, is actually not chubby, he’s wire-thin. But throughout the days that I have known him, Chubbi hasn’t smiled at the joke in my nickname for him. Maybe the irony’s just lost in translation, but Chubbi’s sense of humor, like his sword, his armor, and everything else on an Iron Age, Seeded Earthlike, is about thirty-five hundred years behind.
A survey ’bot overflying a planet at twelve thousand feet can’t detect irony, or other human subtleties. That’s why an arobotic interface—meaning me or another similarly expendable junior officer—actually makes handshake contact with the locals as part of every survey.
’Bots do offer advantages over live survey officers. No whining. No poop. No MIA letters to write when things go terminally wrong, which they do for six survey officers out of every ten.
But Survey Branch learned early on that locals went apeshit when a turkey-sized metal bug fluttered out of the sky and greeted them in their language.
Seems to me that a stranger a head taller than the locals are, clumping around in plasteel body armor and spitting thunder from an iron staff, is even scarier. But at least a Survey Officer’s as human as they are. More human, really. Seeded Earthlike populations spring from humans harvested from Earth thirty-five thousand years ago. Maybe the Slugs dropped our abducted ancestors off on Earthlike planets on purpose, or maybe our ancestors jumped ship like rats down a tramp steamer’s hawser. We don’t know because the Slugs are gone, now. We do know that, once we get imported, humans spread like kudzu in most earthlike environments.
The local kudzu-in-charge speaks. “Ethan, my men have captured a Huppic spy. He was armed with this!” Chubbi raises and turns in his hand a dull steel shortsword, similar to the one scabbarded at his own waist. In the tent’s dimness, Chubbi’s hand quivers as though he’s holding ball lightning on a stick.
I raise my eyebrows. The Huppics have fomented a half-assed rebellion, complete with a quarter-assed army, which is presently encamped three miles from here. Here being the camp of Chubbi’s actual full-assed army. Tomorrow Chubbi’s legions will battle the Huppics, who are legally forbidden by Chubbi’s regime to possess iron weapons.
Not because the Huppics are primitive or dangerous. Au contraire. The first culture I sampled when I got here last week were the Huppics. They’re more advanced than Chubbi’s bullies, who rule them. The Huppics built the first iron forges on this planet ten years before Chubbi’s people tumbled to the idea. The Huppics used iron to make things like sewing needles and plows.
But iron, or more precisely iron forged at high temperature into carbon steel, holds a harder and deadlier edge than bronze, which was the previous age’s go-to metal. Once Chubbi’s people learned to make carbon steel swords, they burned down all the Huppic forges, beheaded all the Huppic blacksmiths, and then forbade iron implements to the Huppics, to preserve Chubbi’s lead in the local arms race.
People call SAS “Sticks and Stones” Branch instead of “Suborbital Arobotic Survey” Branch because we spend—some say waste—lots of time pegging the cultures we encounter to a point along the development curve between the Eolithic and contemporary Earth. Among ethnologists, tools have always been the signature benchmarks of cultural sophistication: Stone Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age, combustion propulsion, nukes, computers, C-drive. So I’m pretty sure I would have noticed if the Huppics had been swinging steel swords.
“It’s just one sword, Chubbi. Maybe he took it off one of your sentries.”
Chubbi shakes his head. “No. He claimed their whole army has them. Then he stopped talking.”
I cock my head. On the other hand, if the Huppics were stockpiling illegal weapons, would they show them to an overly tall stranger wearing an armadillo suit?
For Chubbi, this discovery is as disturbing as the day old America found out that the Russians had the atomic bomb.
I shrug inside my armor. “Then maybe you should just call off the battle. Leave the Huppics alone. Maybe they’ll come around. Or wither on the vine.” Heck, America won Cold War One that way.
“Thin ice, sir.” Barclay, who hears what I hear, whispers in my earpiece.
Barclay means that I’m not supposed to change this planet, just observe it. But, I think, it’s like Heisenberg, the physicist, said about subatomic particles: the very act of observing something changes it.
Whatever I think, Survey officers are forbidden to take sides in local conflicts. Drop your pack because a tyrannosaurid is chasing you and Quartermaster won’t bat an eye. Normal field wear and tear. But come back light ammunition, after subtracting demonstration rounds, and you’d best present a self-defense alibi, preferably with backup video.
Survey officers are supposed to let local history take its usual, bloody human course. But if I enjoyed bloodshed, I’d have majored in pre-oral surgery, like my cousin Ruth, instead of xenoethnology. Merely suggesting peaceful coexistence isn’t taking sides, is it?
Clank. Clank. Another knock on the post outside.
“Come!” Chubbi snarls to the new visitors like the absolute despot he is.
As I put my helmet back on, two of Chubbi’s minions drag in a bound, squirming figure, dressed in a shepherd’s cloak, then drop him at Chubbi’s sandaled feet.
The boy looks up, eyes dark and wide. He might be twelve. A bruise swells above one eye.
Chubbi bends, grabs the kid by the hair, while he presses the captured sword’s edge against the boy’s throat. “Where did you get this, boy?”
The kid shivers, but just stares.
Chubbi jerks his head at one of the soldiers, who tugs something from a bucket he holds, and hands it to Chubbi.
Chubbi swings a wide-eyed human head by its long hair like it was a cantaloupe in a grocery bag.
The boy gags. So do I, just like I did when cousin Ruthie, the root canal princess, detonated a live frog in the microwave the day before her Bat Mitzvah.
A Huppic earring still dangles from the head’s left ear.
Chubbi leans close to the boy and whispers, “This spy wouldn’t talk, either.”
The boy squeezes his eyes shut, swallows, and then turns his face away. “I’m not a spy. I’m a shepherd. My father gave me the sword for wolves.”
Chubbi’s enhanced interrogation techniques are blunt, even by Dr. Ruthie’s standards. But you can’t say they’re ineffective.
“A sword? For a boy? I don’t believe it!” Chubbi snorts and hurls the severed head so it thumps against the tent’s hide wall. Then he pinches the boy’s jaw between his thumb and fingers while he tips the kid’s head back, forcing the boy’s mouth open. Chubbi traces the boy’s upper lip with the sword’s point. “I’ll cut your lying tongue out and drown you in your own blood!”
“Wait, Chubbi!” I lay my gauntleted hand on Chubbi’s forearm.
His guards gasp. Not because they’re shocked by the impending oral surgery—they’ve seen it before, I’m sure. But they’ve never seen their god-king touched.
They don’t pounce and beat the crap out of me, however. Chubbi’s merely a god-king. Whereas when I showed up at their encampment, I announced myself by bringing down a wolf at one hundred paces with nothing but a 7.62 mm thunderclap. That made me an instant, unhyphenated god in these parts.
“Lieutenant!” Barclay, however, knows how godlike I am not. “Sir, don’t get in the middle of this.”
Barclay’s right to scold me. But we call him Barc because his is worse than his bite. And regardless of Barc’s wisdom, I’m the highest ranking officer within twenty million cubic miles, so if I want to risk my neck and my career to save this child, that’s my call.
Chubbi freezes, the sword still poised to strike. “The boy’s life is mine to take.”
I nod. “Sure. But what if he’s lying? The Huppics may have planted him with his story to frighten you off.”
Chubbi narrows his eyes. “They are devious.”
The boy quivers, his eyes wider than ever. I can see in them that he’s no spy and no liar. He’s a shepherd who wandered too close to Chubbi’s picket line and got caught. And he’s terrified.
I shrug inside my armor. “Kill him and you’ll never know.”
Chubbi nods. “You’re right. I’ll sever his fingers one at a time, first. The Huppics always talk before I reach the thumb.”
I bend and squint at the kid, who can’t weigh more than fifty pounds. “Regular spies, sure. But he’s just a kid, Chubbi. What if he passes out after one finger, and then dies without talking?”
Chubbi frowns.
“How ’bout this? I’ll make the boy lead me back to his lines, and see whether the Huppics
really have iron swords. If he’s lying, I’ll cut off his head and bring it back to you.”
Chubbi smiles. Decapitation is the Next Big Thing in intimidation and terror among cultures that have just discovered sharp edges.
I say, “But if he’s telling the truth, and the Huppics have iron swords, I’ll report back to you.”
“Why would I do that? If they don’t have iron swords, we’ll slaughter them easily, down to the last infant. If they have iron swords, it’s even more important that we kill them all now, before they grow even stronger. Better to lose some men now than lose all later.”
Chubbi may be brutal, but he’s not dumb. Preemptive first strikes were a hot option during Cold War One, too.
I nod. “Tell you what. Let me try my plan. If it turns out that they do have iron weapons, I’ll fight on your side.”
Barclay sputters in my ear. “Ethan! Have you lost your mind?”
Fair question. My offer violates about a dozen regs I know of, and probably a dozen more that Barclay will be pleased to read to me. To say nothing of, I suppose, several of Barclay’s Commandments. I’m not sure what part of Barclay’s reaction startles me more; calling a commissioned officer by his given name or Barclay’s failure to support his position with a bible verse.
As Barclay sputters in orbit, Chubbi’s eyebrows rise as he looks me up and down.
My Eternad armor’s hardly new. The early versions protected light infantry clear back during the Slug War, and the basic concept’s unchanged. Eternads don’t amplify muscle power like a Silverback suit, and they’re puny next to a Marauder with a 20 mm minigun and epaulet launchers, which is basically an anthropomorphic light tank. Eternads are simply ultralight body armor, incorporating a sensor and life support package eternally (“Eternad.” Get it?) powered and recharged by storing the kinetic energy generated by the wearer’s movement.
But when I’m buttoned up, locked and loaded, nothing the Iron Age can throw at me will make a dent. And my basic load of featherweight cerammunition’s enough to take out a battalion with my rifle. To say nothing of the thumper and the flamer.
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