by Joel Dane
“It’s an interesting approach,” M’bari tells me when we’re finally sent back to the barracks.
“What is?” I ask.
“Training us to decouple what we’re thinking from what we’re doing.”
“Almost like blinders,” I say.
He considers that. “Maybe. I don’t know what’s standard for training, though, and what’s part of this pilot program.”
“What’s the story with that?”
“How would I know?”
“You’ve got that gleam in your eye.”
M’bari snorts. “We don’t look like anything special. Well, there’s that Class A cadet and—” He stops and inspects me. “You and the girl. You survived the CAVs?”
“Yeah.” I take a breath. “How could you tell?”
“It’s the only thing that makes sense. Except . . .” He smiles apologetically. “I can’t see you committing a crime in a corporate enclave.”
“We all make mistakes,” I tell him.
“Maybe,” he says. “But you’ve got a gleam of your own.”
The second day starts with another work shift. This time, the lecture covers base security, urban riot suppression tactics, and basic corporate history. A dozen quizzes flash on my lenses as I march, and after a few hours even M’bari seems distracted.
Then the TLs introduce us to a fitness training regime intensive enough to break us down. Calil-Du bellows; Ting weeps. Pico teases clean-cut, blue-eyed Voorhivey, who stammers in response. Jagzenka, the tiny woman with the jaguar markings, struggles with her height but manages to maintain an appropriately feline competence. Hefco pukes and a tall, gaunt woman named Ridehorse grumbles.
Over the next few days, medically trained Gazi—white-skinned and dark-haired—leans on a mechanically inclined woman named Werz, with dark skin and white hair. Pico calls them “Yin” and “Yang.” Nervous Voorhivey leans on Basdaq, the older guy who looks like an actor playing a CEO. Ting leans on whoever’s closest.
Nobody leans on Calil-Du.
CHAPTER 14
On the fourth day of basic training, I’m switched from dorm overwatch to latrine duty. This is supposed to be a nightmare, surrounded by stench and splattered with filth. Even the unflappable Rana looked shaken after her shifts.
Ting flashes a grin at me, and I can’t help smiling back.
We’re from the gutter; when you’ve spent years knee-deep in shit, a little more doesn’t bother you. We don’t say anything, though; speaking isn’t allowed during work shifts. There’s no time to talk during meals, and everyone’s too exhausted to chat before lights-out—everyone except Pico—which means that after a week, we still don’t know much about the other recruits.
The training is designed that way on purpose, of course.
“Social engineering,” M’bari explains, when tall, gaunt Ridehorse complains about it at dinner. “They’re telling us that our pasts don’t matter, our personalities don’t matter. Only our function matters.”
Fine with me. I’m here to get away from my past, and my personality is nothing to brag about.
I’m switched to consumables maintenance and after that to emissions reclamation. Always with new partners, so even though I don’t know anyone’s story, I know their approach. Calil-Du is as mean as she looks and almost as stupid. Gazi is meticulous, M’bari is savvy, Voorhivey is eager and nervous. Jagzenka is a stiletto. Werz is quick. Gorgeous mop-headed Shakrabarti is a jack of all trades, the fourth best at everything. Basdaq is solid, Hefco is struggling. Ridehorse is grimly fatalistic, and so tall that Pico calls her “Highhorse.”
At first our least-favorite fitness regime is jogging the tracks until we complete one flawless lap, moving in perfect sync, every step of our slippered feet measured by the surface. Takes fourteen hours and five enraged outbursts from Calil-Du before Ting and Hefco achieve adequacy.
Most of us prefer Full Contact Negotiation, which is the official name for unarmed combat training. We practice a series of attack-counterattack patterns that bear no relationship to any fight I’ve ever been in. We drill in burst strikes, joint locks, and kinesthetica, and I ignore dozens of chances to put my sparring partners in the morgue.
On the fifth day, I neglect to pull a punch and break Pico’s nose. “Shit!” I say. “Sorry.”
“What do you call that, slipper?” TL barks, crossing toward me.
“Negotiating, TL!” I answer.
Pico laughs, despite the blood running down his face. Nobody else does.
TL tells Gazi to ping a medcart, then addresses the group. “Nothing’s worse than recruits who think they already know how to fight. Graduates of shop-front combat training and jerkoff MYRAGE sims. They need to unlearn a lifetime of bad habits before they take a single step forward. Confirm.”
“Confirm!”
“Kaytu,” TL says, “what’s the key to winning a fight?”
“Hit first,” I say.
Apparently she expects more, because she keeps looking at me.
“TL,” I conclude.
She continues to expect more, but I’m done. She fines me a day’s wages and gives me a few double shifts. Which sucks. On the other hand, I’m pretty sure it’s what leads Rana to talk to me for the first time in days.
I’m lounging in the barracks with Pico and Jagzenka in the five minutes before lights-out, when Rana is suddenly standing in front of me. Jag drifts away—she’s good at that—but Pico looks between me and Rana like he’s hoping to be entertained.
“You think she’s wrong,” Rana tells me. “The TL. About close-quarters combat.”
“I’m not getting paid to think.”
“You—” She almost takes the bait, derailed by the suggestion that I’m doing this for money. “You’ve been in combat.”
“Sure,” I say, like I’m not trying to impress her. “I’ve lost a few fights.”
“We need to master the basics,” she says, her atonal voice clipped. “We need to train our muscle memory so when we find ourselves in combat we won’t have to think, we’ll just act. That’s what Full Contact Negotiation teaches.”
“Whatever you say.”
She arches a queenly brow. “That’s what the training protocols say.”
“Okay.”
“Just give her your gutter wisdom already,” Pico tells me. “I want to hear it, too.”
I look at them both. “Have you ever been scared?”
“Sure,” Pico says, while Rana nods.
“I mean scared for your life. Out of your mind with fear.”
Pico shakes his head and Rana says, “Once.”
“Your vision tunnels, your hands shake. You can’t breathe.” I look at Rana, wondering what scared her. “Forget muscle memory. You can’t even keep from pissing yourself.”
“So what’s the answer?” Rana asks.
“A fight isn’t you squaring off against an opponent. It’s chaos. It’s walking down a hallway and suddenly you’re on the floor. You can’t feel your arm and a boot breaks your nose. Why?” I flick my gaze toward Pico’s bandaged face. “Because if you break someone’s nose, their eyes tear up. You blind them.”
“So what do you do?” Pico asks. “You’re on the ground, blind, with one arm.”
“You die,” I say.
Rana’s perfect jaw clenches. “Very helpful.”
“You’re faster and smarter than Calil-Du,” I tell her. “And Pico’s stronger. But she’d rip either of you apart. Her mind won’t blank. She’ll go for the throat. She’s an animal, and if she gets hurt? Then she’s a wounded animal.”
“Like you,” Rana says.
“You’re saying it’s a mental game,” Pico tells me. “If you stay cool, if you enjoy violence, you win.”
“I’m saying it’s a game for pawns like me and Calil-Du.” I look at Rana. “We all know you’re heading fo
r the boardroom—if you ever get your hands dirty, the battle’s already lost.”
“What about me?” Pico asks, with a lazy grin. “I’m not heading for the executive suites?”
“People like you,” Rana tells him, as if it’s an accusation.
“That’s one problem you don’t have,” Pico says, and manages to make it sound like teasing.
Rana’s dark eyes lighten. “You’ll rise all the way to the top, Pico, or fall all the way to the bottom.”
“What about Kaytu?”
She plucks a hydration cube from the vend. “Oh, we all know where he’s heading.”
“Where?” I ask.
“She’s teasing you, prez,” Pico says, scratching the freckles beside his bandaged nose.
Rana pops the cube in her mouth and tells me, “You fight like an insurgent.”
“Like the odds are always against you,” Pico adds.
“The way you fight, the way you live . . .” Rana shakes her head. “You take everything personally.”
“Sure.” I inspect her sculpted face. “Don’t you?”
“No.”
“None of this? Not the fighting, not the squad? Not your rank? You don’t care about any of it?”
“I care, but I also know that how I feel isn’t important. With you? How you feel is the engine that drives you.”
“You make that sound like a bad thing.”
“It is.”
I look to Pico. “Help me out here.”
“You’re on your own, prez.” He shows me his careless smile. “Corporate troops fight for corporate guidelines. Saving humanity is the mission statement. Only patriots fight for passion.”
I open my mouth to argue, and a memory flashes behind my eyes:
In the refugee camp, violence erupted without warning but Ionesca and I never expected anything else.
When the sugarbee gangers cornered us in a stairwell, I hit first. I smashed the biggest one with my breakbar and received the snap of his bone like a gift, and the next one punched Io, and a third stabbed a hole through my cheek to my teeth so I shoved the breakbar’s claws into her armpit and she howled and—
—my throat was hoarse from shouting—
—my heartbeat surged in my throat—
—I stumbled from the stairwell, blood on my hands and in my mouth. Silence fell except for my ragged breathing. The hallway dimmed and brightened with my flickering vision. I slumped against the wall and slid to the ground.
Ionesca crouched in front of me, her scarred fingers soft on my face.
“I’m sorry,” I told her. She’d wanted to talk to them, she’d wanted to deal.
“You’re crying,” she said.
“I’m your—” I couldn’t speak. “I’m your—”
She took me in her arms. “You’re my everything.”
The sugarbee gang stayed away from us for a while, and Io blossomed. She smiled for the first time in months, and I would’ve slaughtered the entire camp for her, because my heart is an insurgent with a patriot’s passion instead of a soldier’s discipline.
I close my mouth without speaking. I’ve got nothing to say. Rana and Pico are right. I need to bury the Vila Vela patriot and the refugee camp ganger in an unmarked grave.
I need to turn myself into a soldier.
The next day, we complete three perfect laps in five hours, so the TLs introduce obstacles and bottlenecks. Our lenses lock into an overlap function. We learn to monitor each other and ourselves at the same time.
Leaving my feelings behind is easier than I expect, because none of this is about me: it’s about us.
A week later, we graduate to trap laps, with branching tunnels, climbing walls, high ledges, and hostile films. Then the TLs add swarms of moskito drones—which deliver painful shocks—and prox-mines designed to pick us off one at a time.
We struggle, we weep, we bleed, we learn. We are greater than the sum of our parts.
At the end of four weeks, Group Aleph is a machine in motion. We’ve stopped hesitating and started interlocking across the obstacles like a single organism. My lens tells me to reach left to grab the baton, so I reach out even if nobody’s there.
Every time, someone suddenly is.
CHAPTER 15
When M’bari asks Rana about the pilot program, she shrugs. “I don’t know the details.”
“You know the outline,” he says.
Rana doesn’t bother denying it; M’bari is nothing special in terms of training, but he’s a systems thinker and uncannily good at reading people.
“It’s a new curriculum,” Rana says.
“Why?” M’bari asks. “To prepare for what?”
Rana shrugs. “A new threat.”
“None of this feels new,” Ridehorse grumbles.
She’s right. We’re neck-deep in basic exercises fifteen hours a day, every day, with incessant lens-lectures. We’re driven to exhaustion, and past exhaustion into a sort of fugue state. I might not know about Shakrabarti’s family or Pico’s hobbies, about Ting’s history or Calil-Du’s home, but I know exactly how they move. I know the length of Ridehorse’s stride and the speed of Jagzenka’s hands. I know to compensate for Voorhivey’s split-second hesitation and to depend on Werz’s exactness.
We’ve learned the basics of facing insurgent threats—patriot and nationalist terrorists—but the fifth week starts with a change. First, communications discipline is lightened: we can talk to each other. And second, Group Aleph is sent deep into Dekka Base to assemble at the doors of a twelve-acre free-fire hangar.
We’re unarmed: we haven’t been issued weapons yet, not even training weapons. Hell, we’re still wearing slippers. We haven’t been issued boots.
“Is this another obstacle course?” Werz asks.
“I don’t think so,” Ting says, but nobody listens to her.
“It’s some kind of course,” Calil-Du says. “And we’d better crush it. We’re lagging Bay and Gabrielle.”
“Chief is right.” TL steps in front of us, her scarification livid in the harsh light. “Gabrielle finished this exercise in two days, seven hours, thirteen minutes.”
“How did Group Bay do?” Voorhivey asks.
“Three days and counting,” she tells him, and falls silent until she commands our complete attention. “Your target is inside the hangar.” She projects an image of a jeweled crown that looks like a special item in a MYRAGE game. “This is your first real test. Confirm.”
“Confirm!”
“Your mission objective is to find and capture the crown. Confirm.”
“Confirm!”
“Follow your lenses,” she tells us. “After the pulse hits, secure the crown and return it to any exit. Confirm.”
“Confirm!”
“There’s going to be a pulse?” Calil-Du asks TL.
“That’s what she said, prez,” Pico tells her.
Calil-Du shifts one of her burly shoulders. “So we grab the crown and burn ass to an exit?”
“The concept is simple,” TL tells her, as the door opens in front of us.
My lens flashes directions and the group moves. We trot into the hangar and find ourselves on a fifth-floor balcony. Overhead, a projected sky roils with a simulated aurora borealis. The proving range is designed to look like a generic cityscape, with bridges and overpasses, towers and roofs. My lens shows me interior layouts of the mock buildings surrounding us, where hundreds of interior rooms open into hallways and atria.
“They’re throwing remorts at us,” Werz says, as we follow the curved balcony past a dozen windows.
“C-cool,” Voorhivey stammers.
“We’re not even fucking armed,” Calil-Du says.
“We’ve got your sharp wit,” Pico says.
“Huh?” Calil-Du says.
Ting giggles a
nd my lens sends me into point, prowling forward with Jagzenka a half step behind.
“If they mocked up a cataphract,” Shakrabarti says, “I’m going to cry.”
“They won’t start us on a cataphract,” Werz says. “They’ll start us with a standard remort. One of those long-stemmed stationary munitions systems—”
“A toadstool,” Rana says, because of course she knows the nickname.
“—or, I don’t know, a knuckletank or something.”
“This is a pilot program,” M’bari says. “Don’t expect ‘standard.’”
Voorhivey gulps. “W-what does that mean?”
“That we’re fucked,” Ridehorse says.
The balcony ends at a smooth chromacrete wall. My lens tells me to climb over, but screw my lens. Instead of climbing, I kneel.
Jagzenka puts one foot on my knee, one on my shoulder, then slips over the top like a shadow. She’s smaller and faster than I am; she can scout ahead in half the time it’d take me.
My lens docks me a few points but six seconds later, Jag pings the group, giving us the all-clear.
We follow her over the wall, moving like clockwork except for a pause when Pico heaves Ting into Ridehorse’s grip. Ridehorse yanks Ting onto the higher ledge and we prowl onward. Ten steps through a shadowy archway that leads into the building, Hefco slips on a friction pad, which is a common insurgent technique. Shakrabarti pulls him free, and then a trapdoor swallows Gazi.
She yelps and falls. When Werz lunges to save her, Basdaq shoves Werz into the wall to save her.
Ting bleats a warning two seconds before harassment moskito drones swarm from ceiling vents.
Calil-Du roars for us to run while she falls back to take the brunt of the shocks. Burns pepper her uniform from dozens of shocks. There’s a char mark across her cheek. The moskitos do everything but set Calil-Du on fire, yet she stays on her feet. She’s a brute, but she’s our brute.
The moskitos harry us through a mile of hallways until—at Rana’s suggestion—Basdaq and M’bari draw the tiny drones into an apartment, using themselves as bait. They’re immediately flagged inactive, which means that for the purposes of the exercise they’re dead.
