Infinity Wars

by Jonathan Strahan

  Dexter hears Roode’s muffled voice cry a warning just before a wave breaks over them, blinding him with foam. It dumps him over the edge with the colonist still clinging tight. Bubbles stream past Dexter’s face as they pinwheel underwater; his chest tightens. He can hear the colonist’s distorted voice in his ear, screaming.

  He finally gets a grip on the skinny arm wrapping his neck. For a moment it feels like Roode’s. Then he gives a savage twist and feels the bone crack, feels the colonist spasm. Dexter sheds him and kicks his way to the surface. He comes up gasping. The boat is only a meter away, Roode shouting for him. He reaches her with two hard strokes and slops over the side.

  Roode keys the engine and this time it catches. As they bounce away from the beach, Dexter sees the colonist’s head emerge from the water to watch them leave. His mouth is open and wailing. Dexter’s aurals can’t pick it up through the wind and the coughing engine, but he heard it already when they were in the water, heard it once when Roode thought he was already asleep: lu bisca, lu bisca. I love you, I love you.

  DOSA IS IN chaos when they arrive. A blaring emergency siren carries on the wind and Dexter can hear screaming beneath it. Roode’s hand is shaking as she steers them toward the long metal pier that juts out from the shore. Dark figures rush back and forth on the dock; one dives into the water with barely a ripple.

  “I want you to be safe, Roode,” Dexter says. “I should go alone from here.”

  Roode taps the handle of her stunner. “I’m coming. My uncle is here on Dosa.”

  The needlecast tower is visible in the distance, rising up over the squat stucco houses and fabbed admin buildings. Electric blue guidelights scale its length. It looks like a beacon. As soon as they’re alongside the pier, Roode swings up and out and Dexter follows. They lope up the docks; Roode’s phone glows bright white as it calls her uncle over and over.

  Someone sweeps past them in the dark, too short to be a colonist. “Get the fuck out of here, man, they’re killing people back there!”

  Dexter ignores the warning. The tumult of screaming voices peaks as they reach the mainstreet. Battered solar lamps light the nightmare in pale yellow: chaos, groups of colonists with stunners protecting panicked Earthers from attackers with buzz-knives and fishing spears, armed miners barricaded behind an overturned transport, firing into the crowd. Dexter sees a colonist furtively shepherding an Earther away from the violence, into an alleyway, suddenly turn on her, picking up a broken bottle and slashing her across the face.

  He rips the stunner away from Roode’s slack grip and fires twice; the colonist falls. But his action drew eyes and now a swarm is coming toward him, all of them armed. They don’t seem to even see Roode. Dexter drops the two closest of them and then the stunner’s battery is spent. Roode scrabbles it back from him, squeezing the trigger to no effect.

  They run. Dexter does what he can, reaching with his haptics to switch off the swinging buzz-knives, but one still slices his elbow open on the way by. He commandeers an ad-drone overhead, to get a better view of things. The violence is spilling over onto the beach, colonists hunting down drunk and clumsy Earthers, clashing with their protectors.

  He nearly loses Roode twice in the fracas, but when he reaches the needlecast tower she’s only steps behind him, holding her side, panting for air. Dexter seizes both door handles and pulls. Locked. Pursuers are hurtling toward the tower now, coming from all sides. He overrides the lock and hauls one door open; Roode scrambles through. Dexter slips in after her and slams it shut just as a colonist fires his fishing spear. The barbed projectile thunks against the door and clings there.

  Dexter activates the lock, heart pounding against his ribs.

  “We made it.” Roode swallows. “I think I saw him, Dexter. My uncle. I think my uncle had a knife.” She wraps her arms around his waist, and he knows there’s no time but he lets her, just for a second. “Dexter, Dexter, I just want… I want…”

  Her hand moves up to his face, stroking his cheek. When he tries to pull away she won’t let him. Her fingers move under his jaw, to his throat, and dig in.

  Dexter shoves her away. Her wide black eyes are glittering and her face is drenched in sweat.

  “I took you to the cascades, remember, and it was only the two of us in that last pool?” she murmurs, slipping between patois and Basic. “Oh, I want to go back there with you. I want to drown you there, hold you close and tight so you can’t breathe at all, not at all…”

  “You have what they have, Roode,” Dexter says, his voice cracking. “You’re sick. Please, stay away.”

  He sees the spiralling metal staircase leading up to the needlecast, but makes barely a half-step before Roode leaps at him, clawing at his back. Dexter shakes her off. “I’m sorry,” he says, seizing her ankle. “I’m sorry about this, Roode.”

  He twists.

  WHEN HE GETS to the needlecast room, Dexter slams the door behind him. He took the stairs at a dead sprint with Roode crawling after him, cursing at him and pleading with him at the same time. He feels sick in the pit of his stomach as he turns the lock.

  It takes two tries to jack in; his hands are trembling. He feeds it the Combine needlecast codes, then starts dumping the data over, the raving colonists, the bedlam, the bodies. The AI’s face jitters, half-formed.

  “This is an emergency,” Dexter says. “Mass psychosis. Widescale attacks on Combine citizens. Casualties climbing. I need to know what’s going on.”

  “Programming error,” the AI says.

  “Let me talk to a fucking human, then!”

  “You are, Sergeant. This is Commanding Officer Markkanen.” The AI’s face reforms into one Dexter remembers vaguely from his earliest briefings. Deep wrinkles, hard eyes. “And this is the programming error I’m referring to.”

  A surge of data comes back across the needlecast. Dexter’s eyelids thrum as once-restricted files splash open, encryptions laid bare, and he begins to understand. The colonists were modified to match their world, and after the rebellion, the next generation was modified another way. Not only by Combine propaganda and sponsored schools. Something deeper, grown into the limbic system. A feeling on feedback loop. A feeling about the heavies.

  “No models predicted it would make this sort of leap,” the officer says. “High positive-affect, approach aggression reorientation. It’s working, but it’s working too well. Put simply, they love us to death.”

  Dexter thinks of the colonist kneeling over the child’s corpse. Panya, weeping in the holding cell. He thinks of Roode leading him up the cascade, her eyes fixed to him so intently, her body so attuned to his. Despair hits him so hard he can’t stand. He sinks to his knees in front of the interface. He hears Roode slamming her palms against the door, begging him.

  “Then this is all because of the Combine,” he says. “Because you went into their brains and twisted them.”

  In a flash of anger he snaps up the restricted files, packaging them for transmission, however far the needlecast can scatter them. Everyone will know what the Combine has done here. But the files are gone again, flitting out of reach.

  “You’re our eyes and ears, Sergeant,” the officer says. “Not a mouth. We will contain this error before it spreads, quickly and quietly. Another fifty years of peace is worth some casualties.”

  Through the needlecast, through his implants, Dexter can feel the combat satellite winging through the night. Nearly in targeting range.

  “Not all affected colonists need to be eliminated,” the officer says. “Only those posing an immediate threat to Combine citizens. But the satellite’s targeting systems aren’t as discerning as they could be. For instance, it’ll see the colonist currently trying to gain access to your position as a combatant.”

  Roode hammers on the door again, still calling his name. Dexter’s breath sticks in his lungs.

  “Don’t think you’ve operated a combat satellite in quite some time, but from your records it looks like you had a touch for it.” The officer�
��s face is expressionless. “You can make sure there’s no unnecessary bloodshed.”

  He disappears. Through the needlecast, Dexter feels the satellite ping him. Once. Again. With an ache in his chest, he finally accepts it, rising bodiless up into the sky. The satellite’s sensors paint the island in grayscale. They tag the colonists a glowing red. Everything so simple.

  Far away, Dexter’s fists clench and unclench in his lap. He finds his first target and fires.

  OVERBURDEN

  Genevieve Valentine

  THE RUNOFF HAD broken the sandbags overnight; by the time Davis got to the office, somebody was skimming dead carp from the top of the pond.

  The rain was pissing down and the big nets must have been borrowed to shore up the sandbags, because the soldier was using a hand skimmer. Davis watched her sluicing the net hypnotically back and forth, piling up hundreds of bodies, scraping the oil off whenever it got too heavy to lift or too slippery to hang on to anything, until the living fish were rippling the surface again in commas of grey and orange. It was Tuesday. They were at war with Cirrus Prime.

  Sylvia had brought in coffee (a little too cold, as always, because of the milk she put in it), and Carter wasn’t due in until practically lunch, so he sorted through a few reports—the paper already curling at the edges from the damp—and choked down as much coffee as he could stand until the reports gave him acid stomach and he had to give it up. The filtered water here tasted staler than the stuff from transit, and he’d dismiss it except that water rights were half the reason Cirrus Prime had brought down the Glorious Forces and he’d been called up to the post.

  When Carter came in, Davis was already waving him to a chair.

  “It’s a bad idea, Carter. Arming anyone just gives them something to point at you as soon as you disagree.”

  Carter dropped himself into a chair too small for him and sniffed. “Maybe so, Colonel, but later is later. For now we’re all pointing them at Cirrus Prime. Some artillery, some guns. We’ll handle whatever comes up after that.”

  Davis ran his tongue over his teeth. It was easy for men like Carter to suggest this kind of thing—find a stranger you think you can make into a friend, give them a gun, hope for the best—but Carter wasn’t the person being asked to decide the future. He was a soldier. He wasn’t sitting in an office that had been a formal dining room once, facing the sculpted gardens some traitor had devised for his country house before the Glorious Forces had liberated it, constantly being reminded of the stakes if he should fail. The job of a General was to divine success from a string of failures. And though no one liked to talk about it, particularly Carter, before Cirrus Prime there had been Cirrus; but then someone had handed some guns to a stranger and hoped for the best.

  Davis had been on this planet for seven years, trying to drag a promotion to General out of the rain and the mud and people who couldn’t recognize how this was going to end; he wasn’t sure how much stomach he had for handling what came next. The coffee was already gnawing at him. Maybe he’d have to give in to Sylvia’s nagging and let her bring him pastries from the officer’s mess on her way back from coffee. Something to soak up the damage.

  “You have someone on the inside?” he asked finally. He wondered how long a pause it had been.

  If it had been too long, Carter didn’t betray anything. He nodded —once, downward only. He’d been a soldier all his life, and had developed economy in everything, a quality Davis tried to appreciate for its value in the field. (It was useless in meetings; Davis had to do all his own presenting, which was always the downside of requesting Carter for a long-term assignment.)

  Outside, the soldier was loading the carp into the garbage pod, one shovelful at a time. With every slop, two or three slid back onto the mess at her feet, gleaming scales slimed over with black on whatever side they’d died on. He wondered if she was being punished for something. He couldn’t imagine being assigned to the carp every day. Better to be stuck filling sandbags.

  “All right,” he said. “Check out their leadership and whoever’s next in line. Let’s make sure this is a happy family before we invite them in.”

  “Sir,” Carter said, and left without another word, like he was happy, and that as much as anything worried Davis until it was time to go home.

  AT HIS HOUSE, Catherine brought him a drink as soon as he’d settled at the dinner table, which meant she was worried about his good opinion or that she wanted him to stay home while she went off and did something. He sipped it; it was the one they distilled from the honey up in the mountains north of the crater, the one they couldn’t make any more. Whatever it was, she was serious about it.

  “What did you forget?”

  She smiled, a quick tick of her lips and then gone, and smoothed her skirt as she sat down. “That benefit’s tonight. For the filtration plant, for the water.”

  She wouldn’t have needed to pull out the good booze to convince him to stay home for that. He never liked formal events; his dinner jacket was too big and his uniform pulled at him, and he certainly wasn’t interested in getting more grief about what the Glorious Forces Mine had done to the water. But when she asked him to stay home it always implied that she would look better alone, and that stung—wasn’t he a Colonel? Wasn’t he overseeing the people she was spending her evenings with? Were they so much better than he was, to be worth her time?

  “I see,” he said, pressing his tongue to the roof of his mouth to press the jealousy out for something colder. “You want me to stay out of your pet causes so you can do as you please.”

  Her eyes were so pale it always startled him a little when she looked at him. He glanced away. Their dining room was more modest than whoever had given way for headquarters; the wallpaper, a deep green with little red sprigs of some native plant no one had ever identified for him, was beginning to peel away from the plaster. The damp, he thought. Maybe the heat from last summer. Nature was always battling you for the things you tried to make beautiful.

  “I’d love you to come,” Catherine said finally. “I didn’t know they’d let you.”

  They probably wouldn’t. Showing up at a benefit for civilians implied guilt. Really she shouldn’t be going, either, but tonight he thought it was wiser not to fight.

  “No, of course you’re right,” he said, and watched her relax into her chair before he added, “This damp isn’t doing me much good anyway.”

  “Knows better than to fight a war on two fronts!” General Madison always joked, whenever HQ staff sat in the war room late enough that someone started talking about wives, and Davis always raised his glass and let everyone chuckle. Madison’s first wife had disappeared from Mars while he was losing to colonists on Europa. Davis knew there had to be some length on the leash, or a wife would bolt at the first opportunity.

  He sometimes thought he should have married a soldier out of the ranks, who might understand him better. Any table he shared with Catherine always felt longer than it really was. She’d been the daughter of an Admiral, but born after his busy years. She knew nothing of the business. She played three instruments and made pressings of plants with botanical notes calligraphed into the margins.

  But after dinner he looked at the line of her long neck, her shoulders in sparkling blue; he watched her threading heavy earrings into the holes in her ears and painting her lips a deep warm purple like she’d been at the wine, and the same warm satisfaction came over him that always came over him when he considered what he had that no other man did.

  There was a little tremor underfoot as she bent for her shoes— enough that she paused and held on to her dressing table, but not enough that he felt obliged to get up from his place on the bed and assist her. (She hadn’t offered him her zipper; if he wasn’t going to get to do his favorite part of their evening routine, he didn’t see any reason to drop to his knees for something he didn’t care about.)

  “Goodness,” she said after it was over. One hand was pressed to her necklace, and he watched her hand sh
ift up and down by inches as she breathed. “Have they gotten so close?”

  “They must have stolen some artillery,” he said.

  THE WAR ROOM had been the ballroom of the great house once, and Sylvia refused to set foot in it. “Ghoulish,” she’d called it the only time she’d ever seen it, standing in the doorway and staring at the Intelligence officers tacking up the terrain maps as well as they could over the decorative moldings.

  At the time, Davis had thought it was superstition. Hire enough civilians from whatever colony you were peacekeeping, and you realized any one of them was as superstitious as the next one. These people wouldn’t even step on a streak of dark stone in the street, because runoff from the mines was bad luck. They lined up patiently to step over it at the thinnest point, the only time Davis ever saw them patient about anything. Superstition turned everyone into a fool.

  But Madison and Verrastro argued about Carter’s report, and Davis had been staring at the chandelier long enough that there was a chill at the base of his spine. It wasn’t worth mentioning to Sylvia, of course, but he didn’t like it. The last thing he needed was to start cracking about things the locals didn’t like.

  “Cirrus Prime must be the end of the line,” Madison was shouting. He swept his arm across the map to indicate the northern mountains, the desert behind them. “What are we supposed to do, spend the rest of our lives in this backwater trying to get these people to stop behaving like children?”

  Verrastro folded her arms. She was with the State branch, and military frustrations never interested her. “Our real problem,” she said, “is that you keep underestimating them. If they were actually behaving like children, one would think you and Davis would have been able to smoke them out by now.”