by Joel Dane
She shoots him a look that would make anyone else stop being a jackass, but he just gazes happily back at her. “The second thing I shouldn’t tell you is this,” she says. “The world is healing. Every day, the New Growth breathes more life into the lungs of our planet. Every day, the Earth grows stronger. One day our grandkids’ grandkids will play in the woods and swim in the lakes. But there are monsters.”
Voorhivey shifts beside me, like he wants to ask what she means.
“There are remorts,” TL continues, “beyond our current understanding.”
“Eels,” Calil-Du mutters.
TL gives her the same look she gave Pico. “Unidentified emergent remorts. You’re in a pilot program designed to address the lamprey threat—” Before anyone can speak, she pings us into silence. “I have no idea what they are. Command will tell me when I need to know. And all you need to know is this. Most squads never see combat. But you? You will fight . . .”
TL sends video snippets to our lenses, across the group channel. The first one shows me and Pico flanking Ting on an obstacle run, then hefting her over a rampart without missing a step.
“Your squadmates will fall,” TL continues. “And what happens when your fire team leader takes a round between the ribs?”
The next snippets show Rana hip-checking Ting away from a gridmine trigger without even looking in her direction. Then M’bari reaches down a climbing wall, grabs Ting’s wrist, and drags her beside him. Then me again, crouching with Hefco, scanning the field for threats before I tell him when to run.
“What happens if a lamprey shears through a buddy’s arm?” TL asks. “Then they’re deadwood. Dead weight. Weaker than the weakest person in this room. Slower than the slowest. Are you going to leave them behind because they’re weighing you down?”
The last video snippet shows a thunderous-looking Calil-Du body-slamming Hefco—brutally, but effectively—through an airlock in a ship-themed course, keeping him on target.
“This shit is easy when nobody makes a mistake,” TL tells us. “It’s easy when nobody’s weak, when nobody’s wrong—when nobody’s hurt or dead. It’s easy when it doesn’t matter. Confirm.”
“Confirm!”
“But who do you want beside you when you catch shrapnel in your guts? When a lamprey spits death at you? Do you want Group Bay, who never shoved a weak-ass recruit through an airlock? Group Gabrielle, who racks up perfect scores like acing a MYRAGE game? Or Group Aleph, who’ve been acting like fucking soldiers since week one?”
Pico starts the chant, and in seconds we’re all shouting along. “Aleph! Aleph! Aleph!”
I don’t think of myself as a screamer, but my throat is hoarse when TL tells us to shut up. Her eyes are bright, though, and Rana and I exchange a covert glance. I know what she’s thinking: that’s real leadership. TL just took Ting and Hefco, the weakest members of our group, and turned them into a bond between us.
We’re not idiots who helped a couple of feeble, flighty recruits. We’re soldiers who carried our sister and brother across a battlefield. We’re Group Aleph, and that’s something to be proud of.
CHAPTER 21
Admin TL talks about duty rosters for a few minutes and finishes with, “Then there’s this. Live weapons.”
There’s a murmur of excitement and Calil-Du says, “Fucking finally.”
Admin waves an autocart into the barracks and distributes weapons keyed to our lenses. Not just any weapons, either: early-model Ambo combat rifles. Clunky, quirky, paleo . . . and exactly like the one I trained on back home.
Ambos are thirty-one inches and six pounds, the last of the mass-exuded freestyle assault rifles, with finger-pull triggers and detachable magazines. “Freestyle” means they don’t attach to the user’s combat harness: you can throw them, drop them, lose them. The onboard ballistic computer is buggy—the official recommendation is to operate on manual—and the ammunition is primitive. You can toggle rounds for silence or tracking or pre-impact detonation, which makes them explode just past a corner or in midair above a rampart. One round separates into segments connected by nanothreads, turning into a flying buzz saw. You can miss by eight inches and still shred the target.
Except nobody uses an Ambo for the bells and whistles. They kludge up if you toggle them too quickly, and their tech is iffy in a pulse-dense environment. No, you feed an Ambo basic rounds—actual solid rounds, packed ten deep in a magazine that looks like a fat centipede—turn off the computing, and depend on skill.
Countermeasures bounce off an Ambo like etiquette lessons off a Freehold ganger. They’re primitive slug-throwers, barely a step above hurling rocks, especially compared to the Boaz intervention rifle, which is the current cutting edge.
A few recruits scoff at our ancient Ambos. Not me. I know the quirky, low-tech, feeble Ambo like the inside of my visor.
After four days of weapons training, we’re hitting fifty percent success in the hangar. Oh, and there’s this:
platoon rank: 18 of 42
Hefco decruits, and Gazi and Werz drop a few places in tandem. Of course. Yin and Yang do everything together. They’re both officer-track—better at command than weapons—unlike Shakrabarti, who is my competition for seventeenth place. His gorgeous face hides a quick mind, and he’s strong all-around instead of shining in any single skillset.
Rana is a solid number one not just in Group Aleph but in the entire platoon, and that’s before we discover that she’s freakishly good in an orbital pod. A marine Warrant Technician—called a Wart—oversees the training, and on the first day, she inserts each of us into the pod until we puke.
The average time is four minutes.
I flow into my terrafixing meditation and manage twelve minutes, which deeply impresses the Wart. Rana emerges after thirty minutes, completely unruffled, and the Wart scoffs. I don’t understand the Wart’s reaction until later that night, when I’m listening to Rana and Basdaq argue about some fancy endurance-ballet company.
That’s when I realize that Rana’s deafness and her uncanny balance are related. That’s why she never defaulted her hearing. It’s not a cultural thing, it’s a genetic or surgical manip to boost her extra-orbital performance. Maybe she doesn’t have an inner ear, or maybe it’s been repurposed. I don’t know, that high-level shit is beyond me.
Still, I’m pleased with myself for solving the mystery. And for my performance with the Ambo. Over the next week, I discover that I’m weak in Stellar Navigation and Corporate Policies, middling in Field Medicine and Remort Cladistics, and strong in Strategic Improvisation, Combat Recon, and Urban everything.
In other words, I’m a low-value, low-tech grunt.
Not exactly a surprise.
Of course, most of basic training—except for the lamprey stuff—focuses on the baseline skills that every deployable soldier needs to know. That’s why it’s for shock troops, while nondeployable soldiers attend JMT, Joint Management Training. We only get brief intros to Stellar Nav, Flowcore Interface, Financial Ops, and a dozen others. Just enough to check our aptitude and interest. The rest we’ll learn in Advanced Departmental Training.
Well, if we survive the lampreys.
My platoon rank keeps rising . . . until I choke again.
We’re outside the base building, in the faux terrafixing that covers a few thousand acres within the fence. We’re tracking one of the commoner remorts, which is officially a twelfth-generation Haritech Autonomous Relay for Perimeter Establishment and Integrity, but more commonly known as a “harpy.”
Most of the bio-forged material in a harpy was engineered from flatworms and kudzu, but our lenses remind us that the source of a weapon’s wetware bears no relationship to its function. Genetic imperatives are reshaped; DNA strands are overwritten. Expecting a bio-forged weapon to retain traits from the original organism is like expecting a bowl of tempura locusts to swarm across the table and de
vour the appetizers.
This is our third encounter with a “live” remort, although the training units aren’t exactly live; they were killed years ago, their wetware replaced with remote controls. They’re basically human-operated drones in the corpses of remorts.
Despite the capture-the-crown exercises, remorts aren’t viscerally terrifying. They look like what they are: the messily rejuvenated husks of SICLE-tech weapons, more powerful than contemporary armaments but transformed by centuries of neglect and the idiosyncrasies of the terrafixing’s revitalization.
The control module of the harpy is an armored dome in the center of the designated perimeter. Semiautonomous roller units patrol the surrounding area, eliminating threats. Harpies don’t pose much of a threat to human lives, but they damage the New Growth and the corpos won’t stand for that.
The faux terrafixing around Dekka Base is thick with wispy ferns and dangling vines. The spongy ground replicates the fertile thickness of the real New Growth. Little puffs of spores whisper around my boots and the air smells of sweet decay, like rotting cake.
Rana’s in charge of the main assault force while I’m the flanking team manager, leading Ridehorse, M’bari, and Ting along a gully for a shot at the underside of the harpy’s armored dome. Jagzenka’s initial recon identified a potential weak spot where a missile impact cracked the plating, centuries ago.
Our lenses are flickering—on, off, on, off. Not a surprise; most remorts emit pulses. I take the point with Ridehorse. M’bari is on Ting Protection Detail, while Ting is probing the harpy with whatever sensors still work.
A burst of Ambo fire sounds in the distance, as another team triggers one of the rollers. There’s a scream, a blast, silence.
“Jag’s right,” Ting whispers, sending a flickering image of the harpy dome with the weak spot highlighted.
Ridehorse gestures for a halt and proceeds alone. We’re motionless, our fatigues blending into the terrain with paleo pattern-matching pigments. The day is cool—only ninety-two degrees, thanks to atmospheric terrafixing—but sweat drips down my face. My fatigues’ climate-control function went offline twenty minutes ago.
When Ridehorse crawls through a gray-limbed bush, a cloud of insects swirls in the air and vanishes. A moment later, she gestures me to join her.
At the top of the gully, I peek through a thicket of lacquer-grass and scope the harpy dome. Five or six feet tall, encrusted with a layer of what looks like barnacles but isn’t. Three heavy-arms rollers patrol in a formation around the dome and—
Gazi’s team bursts into sight.
Shakrabarti shouts when he takes a roller round in the chest—only a dummy, but still painful. I signal my team to engage. Ridehorse fires bursts from behind my right elbow. Every time a round pocks the harpy’s barnacle-covered surface, the dome bloats and bulges.
“It’s got kinetic self-destruct!” Rana yells, from a copse of lichen-saplings.
Which is insulting. We all know what those bulges mean: if you hit a harpy with enough firepower, it explodes. That’s the terminal stage of perimeter defense.
Ting’s fingers fly on her com-plate. “Can’t deactivate.”
“Reboot our lenses,” I say.
“Trying,” she tells me.
A roller round hurls Ridehorse backward into the gully, and I unshoulder my Ambo and grab the spindle-launcher from M’bari. Spindles are chopstick-shaped, localized-effect munitions that burn hot enough to melt tungsten. These training spindles won’t ignite, but they’ll punch through an inch of armor.
“Keep it off me,” I say, before sighting on the dome.
M’bari rolls in front of me, making himself a target for the roller. There’s another blast and a shock wave I feel in my stomach. Recruits don’t often die in training, but everyone breaks a few bones. My breath is loud, and my sweat stings my eyes. There is nothing outside the terrafixing. I am the gully and I am the roller and I am the air between us.
I don’t flow completely, but I calm myself enough to sight on the harpy. The dome swivels. The crack isn’t in view. Not yet. Not yet . . .
Ambo fire stitches across the dome, which inflates until it’s glossy and bulging, ready to explode. My breath is steady. My lens comes online. My targeting is perfect . . . except five rollers erupt out of nowhere, laying down a hellstorm of fire, and push Rana’s team between me and the target.
My fingertips swirl on trigger but I don’t fire.
“Take the shot,” Rana shouts at me. “Take the shot!”
She’s directly between me and the target. The spindle will explode through her organs. I don’t care about that, but putting a spindle into the harpy will trigger the self-destruct. Her entire team is in the open. If I fire, I’ll take out my entire squad.
So I don’t fire. I don’t freeze exactly, but I don’t fire.
The rollers finish killing Rana’s team, then kill mine.
Kaytu, Maseo
My platoon rank falls two places, and this time I get a thirty-day reprimand. Which is serious. Still, I’m not about to earn two more reprimands, so I don’t worry that much. What’s worse is that Rana hates me.
“I didn’t hold my fire to protect you,” I tell her in the shower, which is the only time she’ll stay still long enough for me to talk to her.
She doesn’t answer, but her silence is barbed.
“I’m happy to put a spindle through your spleen,” I tell her. “Rana, listen to me. I don’t think you’re fragile.”
“I see how you look at me,” she says.
“That’s not protectiveness,” I say.
Water sheets her face and spills between her breasts.
“On the list of things Kaytu wants to do to you,” Ridehorse tells Rana, because privacy is a myth in basic training, “‘protect’ isn’t in the top ten.”
“‘Snuggle’ is eleven,” Pico says.
Ting giggles. “Spleen is a funny word.”
“Leave them alone,” Basdaq says, in his commanding baritone.
“Would everyone shut up?” Voorhivey pleads. “Please? And focus on the training?”
Calil-Du digs in her ear with a pinky. “Why are you such a sphincter?”
“I’m not! I just—my family’s been fighting remorts for generations. They’re all heroes and I, I don’t want to let them down.”
“Too late,” she says. “Look at you.”
When Rana steps through the drying film, I follow. It’s my favorite trip of the day. She ignores me until I swing onto her bunk beside her, and then she ignores me some more.
“You didn’t fire,” she finally says, “because you didn’t want to hurt the squad.”
“Yeah.”
“So instead we all died.”
“Well . . .” I rub the back of my neck. “Yeah.”
“If you’re not willing to kill your squadmates to achieve your objective, Kaytu, do you know what that makes you?”
“Human?”
“Worthless,” she says.
“Fuck you,” I say, though it sounds like an apology. “What do you know about killing? Nothing. You think you know what you’re talking about because what? You have blood on your hands?”
“No, Kaytu,” she says, her toneless voice gentle. “I think it because sacrifice is the fundamental law of service.”
Her gentleness unravels me: my anger, my pride. I’m suddenly more naked than I’ve ever been. “I can’t, Rana,” I tell her. “I just can’t.”
“Then you’re worse than a beggar.” She touches my arm. “You’re a liability.”
CHAPTER 22
I was born in an upside block of Vila Vela. My family lived in a sprawling apartment complex overlooking a balcony park: my parents, cousins, auncles, and all my grandparents. Six grandparents on my father’s side, and seven on my mother’s. I only had two parents, though, which ma
de my more-traditional grandparents a little uncomfortable. My father was a conceptual recyclist with a spiritual bent. My mother was a tight-cell mechanic who believed she could fix anything if she swore at it loudly enough, including me.
My grandmother—who I called my sayti—is the one who raised me, though. That’s how things worked in Vila Vela; child-rearing skipped a generation. My great-grandparents raised my parents. My grandmother raised me. My parents would’ve raised my kids, if they’d survived the insurgency. Well, and if I’d had any.
Sayti called herself a dirt collector. She was the leading soil scientist in Vila Vela. She’d take me to her shop and unleash me in the workroom, with scopes and smartwire and fusers. I’d fiddle for hours, making sculptural shapes from crushed gearbits and charred l-boards.
“Just like your father,” my grandmother said, ruffling my hair.
I never developed her genius but I gained a passable knack for fiddly work. I loved twining fiberscopes into busted engines and piloting microscopic fuse-drones to recover detached rydbergs.
And I loved AI.
The city of Vila Vela was a sleepy backwater, but decades before my birth we’d developed one of the most advanced AIs in the world: Sweetwater. Tremendously powerful and tremendously complex . . . but not sentient. Not self-aware.
Sayti told me and my cousins that as a young woman she’d thought a truly sentient AI was impossible without a biological base. “I was certain that self-awareness doesn’t emerge from calculation, only from sensation.”
Then Sweetwater ascended.
Nobody knew how, but the techies claimed that Sweetwater achieved true sapience. Idiosyncratically self-aware, inconceivably intelligent; foreign to life and beyond evolution. Several minutes later, halfway across the globe, the other two S-level AIs—called Greengrocer and Lunj—followed Sweetwater’s example.
Ascended.
Limitless.
Superior.
Humanity held its breath. What would they do now?
