by Joel Dane
“Aft target acquired,” the remote operator says. “Impact in nine, eight—”
The lockpick curls into the pinhole.
Missiles light up my CAV. The roof crumples. An edge punches my head and tears the skin off my temple. My neck bends, an inch from breaking.
I can’t do this. I’m dead, I’m finished. As I slump in defeat, the flow sweeps me away: I’m not here, I’m not me, I’m just a ripple in the terrafixing, a single cell in the planetary body. Fractals bloom and roots branch. There’s no hope, no fear. No anger, no future.
The cables jutting from the CAV saddle walls slacken. They loop around the frame with a slow grace, like they’re waiting for direction. For input. Like they’re idling and—
Another explosion rocks the CAV and my vision turns red. I’m losing consciousness. I prod the release switch and watch my suicidal CAV dive toward the remort.
A wave of sludge lifts us and my lockpick deploys a spark into the release switch.
There’s a click and my vision turns from red to black.
CHAPTER 8
Before the Big Three AIs ascended, they designed dozens of minor and failed techs: stem-interface, bond-pairing, and a thousand revolting flavorants. They originated major breakthroughs, too: flowcore processors, vector plasma, and ceralloy manufacture. And they produced an endless outpouring of rude poems in an ancient language called Old Sabaean.
Why?
Nobody knows, and if you asked they’d tell you a dirty limerick in a dead language.
However, they also identified the Waypoints: five locations within thirty-one astronomical units from the sun—inside the orbit of Neptune—that exhibit exotic properties. Though some people insist that the AIs created the Waypoints; they remain in fixed locations relative to the sun, which apparently suggests they’re not natural phenomena.
Every one of the Cherzo-8 Corporations built habs on Luna during the moon-race . . . and they lost money so catastrophically that they became the Cherzo-5. That was the extent of the space race until the Waypoints were located. Then joint ventures sprang into being among the remaining corpos. Mines appeared on Mars, tasked with building formidable Flenser fleets—upgrading that previously minor branch of the corporate military forces into armadas.
The new star fleets crossed billions of miles for an ownership stake in a Waypoint. While the corporations never fought each other on Earth—they stood together against remorts and insurgents—they battled over this new resource in the big empty. Dreadnoughts guarded featureless sectors of space that only flowcore tech could identify. Weaponized fields of kinetic dust wiped out the dreadnoughts, and the corpos replaced them with deepspace fortresses. Which waves of biohacks reduced to frozen rubble.
And for what? Despite the name, the Waypoints don’t lead anywhere.
As far as I know, they don’t do anything, either.
Still, apparently these weird, fixed positions in space hold the key to advances in research and development. According to MYRAGE—the global communications network—they “simmer with boundary-correspondences,” which makes them immensely valuable. So the Flensers are the highest branch of every corpo’s military: the pilots and engineers, the navigators and flight crews. Marines are next: they specialize in micro-g combat and boarding maneuvers. The Garda is a police and intelligence force that serves the enclaves and—sometimes—the Freeholds, while the Army engages all militarized Terran-based conflicts: remorts and patriots.
So when I wake to see a marine logo floating in front of my face, my first feeling is shock that I’m alive. But my second is confusion: the marines? Sure, I’ve been training for months, but on my best day I’m not qualified for the marines.
While I’m still gaping, the logo fades and an embed show starts, a trauma-drama set in Dingxi’s luxury scrapers. Because I’m actually just watching a marine channel on MYRAGE . . . through a lens in my eye.
A lens, not a cuff. In my actual eye. I’ve never rated a lens before. A moment later, I’m lying in the strange bunk, flicking through channels like an excited child. I scan past the date and code and legalese: Revocable Property of the Shiyogrid Armed Forces, CCL, Assigned to Provisional Trainee Maseo Kaytu.
“Whoa,” I murmur.
“Good morning, sleepybean!” a woman’s voice chirps.
I increase my lens transparency and see Ting standing over me, amber hair falling around her pointy face. The diagnostic panels and clinical instruments lining the wall tell me where we are: in a cramped medical bay.
“Are you awake?” Ting asks, flopping onto my bunk. “You slept through the whole transfer, except we’re not there yet, so not the whole transfer. I mean, you only slept through the bits you slept through. I guess that’s a tautology, except I’m not sure if ‘tautology’ means what I think.”
My head throbs and I close the channel in my lens. I’m alive. I survived the CAV. I did it. I’d popped the manacles and forced the CAV to withdraw from the field.
“You missed the intake interview, too,” Ting tells me.
I stare at her for a moment, too overwhelmed to answer. Images flash in my mind: a CAV churning through the water, absorbing missile strikes, lashing out with ribbons to slice flechettes, slapping away a drone assault.
Then I realize: her pupils are black. She darkened her stemhead gold with lenses. Somehow she wrangled two lenses and modded them to hide the most visible signs of her addiction.
“You missed your lens fitting, too,” she continues, wrinkling her pointy nose. “And you’ve got an earbug. They fitted you when you were unconscious. We’re on the way to basic training. In the Army, I mean. Well, not the Army specifically, the joint services. Boot camp, I guess, that’s our next stop. What’s a shock troop?”
A strap-harness is keeping me on the bunk. When I move to release the buckle, my hand is stiff and my middle finger is cocooned in reconstructive foam. I pop the buckle and pull myself into a seated position. The laminar spray bandage on my temple feels smooth and cool against my skin. More bandages adhere to my leg and shoulder and hip, but the painkillers numb the ache.
“How long—” I shake my head. “You’re alive.”
“Three of us lived!” Ting’s gaze shifts toward the teenager sleeping in another bunk. “He made it, too. So there’s three of us. I mean, obviously. You can count to three.”
“Forget three,” I tell her. “I can count all the way to ten.”
She gives a surprisingly rich laugh. “Your name is Kaytu. I’m Ting. I already told you that. Actually, I’m Ting Ting. My front name and back name are the same name. That’s what I always said as a kid when anyone asked why—”
“Where are we?”
“Medical unit in a transport ship,” she says. “Didn’t I say that? Maybe I just thought it. A ship ship, too! Not an airship, a water ship. They gave us lenses. They give all recruits lenses, if they don’t have them already. If they do have, they mod them. Restrict them really, limit them to the mil-chans, but there are ways around that, if you know how.”
“We’re recruits,” I say, my head swimming.
A smile transforms her pointy face into something fragile and beautiful. “In the actual service!”
“Not too shabby.”
“Just in time, too! I don’t know what I would’ve done, back home. Things got a little—” Her voice quivers. “Bleak, I guess. Or scary. Back home, I mean. Where are you from? I’m from the Anadarko Basin Freehold. Well, and Tangiers too, except not really, not anymore.”
“Three of us lived? What’re the odds?”
“Four point two seven percent,” she says. “More or less.”
I inspect her bright face. She seems harmless and flighty, but that doesn’t mean anything. “How’d you survive?”
She gives a tremulous smile. “Um, my CAV stopped working? Before I even reached the remort or anything?”
I wait for more, but she picks at a scab on her forearm instead of talking. Which means what? That she cheated the system somehow. Just like me.
“It stopped working,” I say.
“Malfunctioned, I guess.”
“That’s convenient.”
“I know!” she says, wide-eyed. “Totally!”
“Mm-hm.”
“Well—” She peers at me. “Well, how did you survive?”
“Mine actually did stop working,” I tell her.
Ting rubs the back of her neck, where she injects stem. “Oh! Um. Well, anyway, the intake interview! You didn’t miss much.”
She’s hiding something, but I can’t think of a reason to care. “No?”
“It was just the three of us. Plus that scary cadet, the CE’s daughter? Cadet Rana. She’s transferring from a civilian unit.”
“Into the same facility as us?”
“I think so. That’s why they were in the area in the first place.” Ting wrinkles her nose. “I guess there’s some kind of newfangled training program, and they’re recruiting the best of the best, like her, and the worst of the worst, like us.”
“Newfangled how?”
She bounces on the bunk a few times. “Newfangled is a funny word. How come you can’t say oldfangled? Or just fangled?”
“What makes you think it’s a new program?”
“I don’t know. Just a guess. Cadet Rana doesn’t like me. She looks at me like I’m bad tempeh. Why do they let CAV survivors enlist? I mean, instead of putting us back in CAVs for another fight?”
“It’s the law,” I say. “Otherwise, CAVs count as the death penalty.”
“How do you know that? Do you read a lot? I don’t read much because I get jittery. I’m mostly an experiential learner. That means I learn by doing. I’m pretty good with mods and reverbs and stuff.”
“You’re a hacker?”
“Not really,” she says, squirming on the bunk. “A little, I guess. Yeah. When I’m not . . .” She scratches her arm. “You know.”
“Stemming.”
She flushes. “Anyway, I’m good at hacking. I mean, I’m not too bad.”
“How are you going to get stem in basic training?”
Fear flashes in her face, and she looks away, toward the sleeping teenager. “His name is Loa. He’s a little scared of fighting remorts. Maybe more than a little.”
“Smart kid,” I say.
“I’m scared, too. You’re not scared, are you?” She peers at me. “You don’t look scared.”
“I’m always scared,” I tell her.
CHAPTER 9
The swaying of the bunk and the simmer of narcotics makes me drowse off. Ting hums as she fusses over Loa and me, breaking out into snippets of song. She’s like a little kid playing with dolls, and her voice is sweet but small.
When I manage to rouse myself, I check my lens. I want to contact Ionesca and tell her I’m alive. I try to establish a link but my lens flashes a refusal. UNAUTHORIZED TRANSMISSION REFUSED.
“Gutterdamn,” I mutter.
“You can’t contact anyone,” Ting says. “I mean, not outside of approved personnel.”
“We’re not even sworn in yet.”
“It’s only for the first month or three. They keep us sequestered from our old lives, so we bond to the military. ‘Sequestered’? Is that what I mean? It sounds funny.”
The murmur of conversation sounds from outside the medical bay, then fades away. I close my eyes and feel the rocking of the ship. I’m half-asleep before I wonder how Ting knew I was trying to contact someone.
The medics don’t let us leave the compartment. Ting talks nonstop. She tries to shut up when I tell her to, but she can’t help herself. Eventually she recedes into background noise and I explore my new lens.
The truth is, I almost enjoy her undemanding company—at least until I catch her pushing a barb of stem into her neck.
Ting catches me catching her. The previous night, she’d convinced a medic to smuggle her out of the compartment for a few hours. I don’t ask how she paid for the favor; I don’t ask how she paid for the stem. She doesn’t ask if I’m going to report her.
We’re both from the gutter. We know how to keep questions to ourselves.
Loa doesn’t say much, due to a combination of sedatives and shock. He’s the only one of us who survived the assault honestly: his CAV soaked enough damage to withdraw, yet somehow he stayed alive inside the crumpled shell.
On the second night, he wakes with a moan. “Kaytu?”
“Right here,” I say, from the desk where I’m reviewing milspec manuals.
“You’re a Freeholder, nah?”
“Mostly.”
He starts a lamp beside him, illuminating his patchy beard and unsteady eyes. “You’re a ganger? I’m an enclave boy myself. Never had the nerve to break a law. Never had the guts.”
“It doesn’t take guts,” I tell him.
He ignores me. “You know what I had instead? You ever heard of Opium Civil?”
“It’s some kind of game?”
“A hyperreal stratworld,” Loa says, then tells me his story.
I know most of it already, just from looking at him: a shareholder kid who got in so much trouble that dying in a CAV sounded good. Apparently he’d spent his childhood in MYRAGE, exploring the unreal world. Mostly blasting virtual remorts into chunks and freeing enslaved planets from technopath dictators.
Eventually he’d found a gaming cartel playing Opium Civil. Good people, he tells me, and smart. They recognized a natural. They taught Loa; they trained him. He rose through the echelons until at seventeen he broke onto the bigboard.
“Now I’m the eighth-ranked player in the second-biggest cartel in Opium Civil,” he says.
This means nothing to me. “Whoa.”
“Yeah,” he says. “Except I was stuck there. My link was too slaggy, my gear too slow. Everyone else on the board, they’re Class A, Class B. I’m barely even C, nah?”
“So you went for better gear?”
Loa’s shocky eyes glint with tears. “I didn’t mean to hurt anyone.” There’s a long pause. “I thought, after it happened, at least I can do something good, you know? Not to make up for it. Nothing could. But to try. You know?”
“I know.”
“And now here I am.”
“Ranked number eight in Opium Civil,” I say.
A sad smile rises on his face. “The right gear, and I would’ve broken the top five. Except, um, I don’t think I can do this. Join the military. Become a soldier.”
“Remorts are worrisome, but the training—”
“Worrisome?”
“Okay, bad choice of words.”
“They’re worse than worrisome, they’re terrifying. I don’t even want to fight patriots.”
Patriots, nationalists, insurgents: the labels are interchangeable and they all mean “rebel.” The corporations tolerate everything except independence. Alarm bells ring if a critical mass of the population cleaves too strongly to a homegrown culture, passionate civic pride, or deeply felt regional identity.
Genuine independence leads to competing power centers, which leads to instability. To bloodshed and catastrophe. We’ve been down that road before; we followed it to the brink of extinction.
The corpos step in quickly, atomizing any emergent identity by forcibly relocating the population. They even crack down on languages. A few centuries ago there were a few thousand languages; now there are a few dozen. That’s not an accident, it’s policy.
Yet if they wait too long to act, violence erupts. A group fighting for its homegrown culture becomes armed insurgents. A region with more local pride than corporate loyalty falls prey to fanatical nationalists. The people defending their civic identity against the corporate culture transform into extrem
ist patriots.
In Vila Vela, we were called all three—until the corpos erased the city from the face of the Earth.
“I can’t do this,” Loa says.
“You can’t do it now,” I tell him. “By the time we finish basic training, you’ll be ready.”
“I—I guess.”
“You’ll be a soldier.”
“Yeah,” he says, though he doesn’t sound convinced.
For the rest of the day, our lenses run instructional programs and we mutter to ourselves, memorizing rank structures and corporate guidelines and remort cladistics.
There are six general classes of remorts: Stationary, Itinerant, Predatory, Migratory, Aquatic, and Unique. Stationary remorts are bio-forged systems like harpies and toadstools, reevolved from smartmines and area-denial tech. They’re rooted to a single spot and usually pose more of a danger to the terrafixing than to humanity.
Itinerant remorts roam the New Growth, driven by a bizarre mishmash of programming and instinct. An itinerant remort like a Terrain-Adaptable Sabotage and Interdiction Unit—known as a bay-jack for some reason—might wander harmlessly for years before assaulting an extraction filter or slaughtering a herd of wild goats.
The apex Predatory remort is the cataphract, evolved from nigh-impenetrable medipedes with “extraction and recovery” limbs that can slice through a gunship. If that’s not bad enough—and it is—they’re surrounded by a phalanx of shambling semiautonomous paladin battlesuits. Knuckletanks are resurrected from engineering rigs with a faintly simian design and compelled to hunt and destroy like the other remorts in this class.
Migratory remorts swarm. Hundreds of moths swirl from the terrafixing, reevolved from a pursuit deterrent bio-film. Millions of umires the size of a pinky fingernail burn swathes in the New Growth that are visible from orbital craft.
There are more Aquatic remorts than any other class, but my lens glosses over them. Apparently the Ijapa class—like that submarine I’d fought in the CAV—are the only ones that use the services of a cry pilot. Other than that, they’re handled by the naval branch.
