Infinity Wars

by Jonathan Strahan

  The carp soldier came with coffee and whiskey. She set up on the sideboard without looking at him; she kept her head down the whole time she handed Verrastro and Madison their drinks. Davis spread out his fingers under the table, like the paws of a big cat warming up to strike. As she served him, he kept his eyes out the window, followed just the edge of her reflection as she moved away, and for a moment he filled with blood all over just thinking about how good it was, how good it was.

  As the carp soldier pulled the last inches of the squeaking cart past the door (it rattled as she scraped the door frame, this whole place was coming apart), Verrastro wrapped her hands around her cup and asked him, “What the fuck do we do without Carter?”

  Davis took a small breath. He felt light all over; he felt like he had the first time he ever saw Catherine turn and look at him with her long neck and those blank beautiful eyes. He felt like he knew what to do.

  “We end this,” Davis said. “The mine’s empty, and they’re already angry about the water, so there’s no point saving it. Make our point. Raze it.”

  The coffee was sour as ever, but he hardly minded. It wouldn’t be for long.

  THAT NIGHT, AS they sat near the fire in the parlor (him sipping on another glass of the liquor that the bees had made, back when there were bees), he told Catherine they were going to be reassigned, just to watch her eyes light up.

  “Where?” she asked.

  He didn’t know what would be best, so he said, “Guess.”

  “Not Europa,” she said, in a tone that felt safe to deny, and then “Mars?” much more promising, and when he agreed she actually took his hand.

  “I’m so glad you’ll be gone from here,” she said, so earnestly that some small fondness scraped at him—a real fondness, like she’d been a good wife all this time. “This has been horrible.”

  “It has,” he agreed. He was off balance, now; tenderness upset him.

  “I’ll start packing tonight,” she said, and stood with that glint in her eye like a General’s wife, and he was a clever enough man to say, “Later,” and keep her hand in his, and draw her down to him.

  She was already asleep by the time he coughed up blood, and realized what he had missed.

  HE HAD DEBATED doing it quietly, overnight, but that was what a man did when someone had betrayed him and he was small and angry. A General—a leader of men—made examples, and laid groundwork for what was coming next.

  So he waited until he was in his office, and then he quietly asked, “Sylvia, who brings up this coffee every morning?”

  She jerked a thumb out the window, where the rain was sheeting down nearly sideways; Davis could barely make out the olive drab of the carp soldier, dragging all those fish out of the poisoned pond.

  “Either Evans or that conversationalist,” she said, then frowned— lightly, innocently. “Why? If there’s a problem with it I’ll tell Evans. Maybe we can get a kitchen on this floor.”

  “No need,” he said. “Can you call in Verrastro?”

  “She’s home sick.”

  The tips of his fingers went cold. He’d thought this was a vendetta —he’d thought one humiliated soldier had dared to lash out because she was stupid enough to believe it was possible to win a war by conquering one man. But if she’d been clever...

  “Sick?”

  “Real bad,” said Sylvia. “I can get Madison on the line for you if it’s a martial matter?”

  “It’s a state matter,” Davis said, “but I can handle it. Can you get the groundskeeper duty sergeant on the line, please?”

  It crossed his mind to have the carp soldier confess; it would mean more, he knew, to have a traitor admit to it in public. It would give the people something to consider when their town was in ruins; they would have that grain of doubt that happens so often among conquered people, that someone else could have done more to prevent this, that someone else had failed them. You could keep people fighting amongst each other until the last house was rubble and clay.

  But a good General could do that without a confession, and before he did something for the glorious good, Davis wanted one thing just for himself.

  He’d told the Sergeant not to interrupt her. He wanted no warning. When the shot came, she still had the net in her hands. After a moment of suspended motion, she pitched forward into the pond, and slowly sank beneath the dead carp; they covered her over, a carpet of grey.

  BY THE TIME he got home, Catherine had packed up half the household. Fifteen crates sat in the front hall. She was at the dining table already, practically alight, and his drink was waiting.

  “I guess when you’re leaving a hated place, everything’s a special occasion.”

  She smiled back at him, bright and real. “Is it that obvious?”

  He laughed and drank, feeling impossibly quiet and content. “Well, I wrapped up my last loose end. No point waiting around. As soon as Madison can recall most of our people, we’re going to finish this and go, so I hope you can keep packing at this rate.”

  “Most?”

  He nodded. Somehow he didn’t want to explain why there had to be a few real casualties from the Forces when the city fell; he was grateful when she took a heavy breath, said nothing.

  “Do you have to be there for it?”

  How heroic that sounded, to be standing alone in front of the endgame! Still, better to give credit. “Madison and I must both give the order.”

  She hmmed. “I’ll pack alone, then. When do we leave?”

  “Two hours past dawn,” he said, and when she said, “Well, that does it for the silverware, then,” he grinned.

  She was laughing when the girls brought dinner in, and they ate in a happy silence. He couldn’t really eat—his stomach was nothing but acid and his throat was burning—but it still felt like a celebration. He felt, all at once, what you might be supposed to feel when a woman’s really your wife. A wife like a partner. A General’s wife. All at once he wanted to confide in her: about what it felt like to swing that metal bar into Carter’s face, about the agreement they’d all made to level the city and let the snake eat its own worthless tail. It was lonely, suddenly, keeping secrets from her.

  “I’m being poisoned,” he said. His vision was swimming; he prayed it wasn’t tears.

  She looked over with a spoon of soup halfway to her mouth. “What?”

  “Poisoned.” The word made him feel tragic. “I’m dying,” he added.

  Catherine was staring at him, aghast. He sat a little straighter in his chair.

  “That soldier—the one who came to the house—was poisoning my coffee. She’s taken care of, but the damage might be done. It was the water,” he said, and suddenly the words sounded heavy, as if he couldn’t hold them. He glanced into his soup, flexed his hands under the table. “The water was ruined.”

  “Yes,” Catherine agreed.

  He looked up. It was dark enough now that the lamp cast strange shadows over her face; earnest, placid. He couldn’t keep her in focus; she looked like a landscape, like a theater with dimmed lights.

  “Catherine,” he started. He reached for his liquor glass; his throat was burning. He couldn’t catch his breath, he couldn’t look at his wife. It was really very dim. The glass slipped from his hand.

  She said gently, “I told her I would help her if I could.”

  VERRASTRO AND MADISON sat in Davis’ office. Outside, rain beat down against the slimy grey bodies of the carp.

  The problem with Davis, Verrastro had realized, was that he never understood the balance in opposing forces. He saw threads of events that somehow led to a single future point. What they did wasn’t a line. It was a web. There was no finish; there were just endpoints that held the rest together.

  He was the kind of leader who never asked how deep that pond must be, to spit up so many carp that it took one soldier hours just to scoop them off, only to have another carpet of them waiting the next morning. That pond went deeper into the soil and connected to something more than he
could imagine, or it was restocked at night to give one soldier a reason to stay on the grounds and learn everything she could about their habits. Either explanation would have told him something; he’d never asked.

  Sylvia, red-eyed, delivered coffee. Neither of them drank.

  Madison stared out the window, his hands clasped behind him. “That pond is going to drown this house.”

  “Not today,” she said.

  After today, it wouldn’t matter. News of Davis’ sedition was already being quietly passed up the line; a Colonel who sent his men to die was doing his job, but one who strangled his own intelligence officers and shot innocent local soldiers was unhinged. (A long illness bravely denied, obviously. Catherine would know what to say; she’d be a General’s wife yet.)

  The fire, the Glorious Forces investigators had conveniently discovered, had been set by dissidents trying to punish Cirrus Prime. A few dissidents had actually been happy to hear it; they were organizing. And Cirrus Prime wasn’t happy about the turncoats; one of their agents had walked right up to the gates asking to discuss it.

  The whole thing was embarrassing enough to the relevant Ministers that it would be better to declare the battle over and leave an empty mine alone. Cirrus Prime could be brought around to peacekeepers; you could convince people to do anything once you told them they had won. Mine or not, this town still needed someone to represent the Glorious Forces when they were gone.

  Outside, the pond was just beginning to spill over; the black-slimed fish coasted gracefully over the edge and out across the manicured lawn. Beneath the carpet of the dead, those that remained were churning the water. It was Friday. They were at war with The Faint Stars.

  WEATHER GIRL

  E. J. Swift

  SOMETIMES WHEN SHE closed her eyes at night she saw spirals, wheeling slowly against the backs of her eyelids, each one its own perfect fractal. She had never told anyone about this phenomenon. It seemed fantastical—hardly worth mentioning, never mind bothering a professional about. But lately, in the moments of not-quite-consciousness before the alarm roused her, she had found that the spirals were still there. As though all through the night they had been present, waiting.

  “MORNING, MAXWELL.”

  The security guard glanced up, glanced away.

  “Morning, sir.”

  As Lia passed through the lobby she clocked other agency employees also averting their eyes. It was a standard reaction, and she was used to it. They called her the weather girl. She couldn’t remember how she had found that out, but the moniker, and her reputation, had evidently stuck.

  She took the elevator to the basement and found her team assembled in the incident room. They were already busy with an array of models, and Lia sensed the anticipation amidst murmured exchanges. Something new had come up. She shrugged off her coat and accepted a cup of coffee that had just been brewed.

  “All right, what have we got?”

  “Early indications, sir.”

  A marker on the map indicated the area of tropical disturbance. Lia scanned the nearby coastlines, geopolitical factors slotting into place as she mentally noted each city or port.

  “No one else has got this?”

  “We’re pretty sure it’s just us.”

  “How far are you with the modelling?”

  “Bringing it up now.”

  She watched as the projected pathways emerged one by one on the map. Her team had outlined a number of potential hit points, the result of complicated equations of global and local weather systems. Each pathway would produce a different ripple effect of infrastructural damage, loss of life, refugee outflow and resultant pressure on the home government and neighbouring countries.

  “I’ll be in my office. Send the files across.”

  The unit’s strategy was ostensibly simple. A typhoon could not be contained. What could be contained was information about its approach. Data could be masked, or it could be leaked. The decision to mask was dependent upon the relationship with the destination sites, and that was where Lia came in. Was it more beneficial to national security for the typhoon to hit with maximum warning, or with minimal? Would the resulting devastation be advantageous, or damaging? Then there was the unpredictability factor. The complexities of typhoon tracking, and their sometimes unexpected detours. It always came down to a gamble.

  Lia reviewed her team’s reports. Usually she found it easy to settle her mind, but today for some reason she felt restless. The facts, Lia, she reminded herself. Just the pertinent facts. At the time of her appointment, she’d had psychological profiling and counselling to ensure she wasn’t a psychopath, that she would not make decisions borne out of bloodlust. They’d felt that was important. She’d felt it was ironic.

  So: vulnerability indices.

  Population density.

  National debt to the governments in question.

  And crucially, the latest metrics in the materials war. They were behind, and it was a problem.

  Her watch vibrated. She’d forgotten to turn it off, which was unlike her. Distracted, she tapped it against the desk and waited as a photograph unfolded. From Nicolas, naturally. There was no caption, he never explained the provenance of his photojournalism. The image was of a street market stall, fruit and vegetables stacked in bright pyramids, a pair of hands reaching to bag the produce. No filter.

  Even after three years, the impulse to reply was acute. You’re cooking tonight then? would be her default, or if she wanted to wind him up, Nice lens flare would do the trick. But instinctively she knew he didn’t want her to respond, he wanted her to bear witness. How long had he been travelling now—two years? He had given no warning of the abrupt severance of his city life. Not to Lia, unsurprisingly, but not to any of his friends either. One day he was an investment banker in a global financial centre, the next Lia was receiving images of weatherbeaten temples, drowning island archipelagos or dust-drenched cities. Each new photograph brought another tug of loss.

  “Archive it, Hendricks.”

  Her virtual assistant responded instantly. “Image archived.”

  Lia had never told Nicolas the details of what she did for a living. He had never told her if he’d guessed.

  It was not something she had dwelled upon in the past, but increasingly it returned to her, this question. How much he knew. She used to imagine conversations between them where she was forced to justify her work. He would question the ethics of it—because it was Nicolas, and because that was to expected from anyone of even average intelligence and empathy. He would drag up international treaties, conventions of human rights. She would respond with the imperative for security in a world whose boundaries were increasingly porous. She would talk about future-proofing. A safe nation for their children (theoretical, now), and their children’s theoretical children. About necessity. About the war, invisible to most but inescapable for all, a war of electrical impulses and petabytes of data and hackers duelling in the cloud. They could not afford to fall behind. They could not afford to be magnanimous. In these imagined conversations she talked Nicolas around to her way of thinking, but there was an element of doubt in his eyes which she could never quite erase.

  Removing the watch, she stuffed it into her pocket. Back to the task in hand. Pathways. Possible outcomes. It was crunch time. On this occasion, as on every other, she did not hesitate to make a decision. She dictated her analysis and recommendations to Hendricks, and Hendricks set up an encrypted link to the CIC for sign off.

  The initial hacks ran successfully but in the end it was a false alarm, the disturbance absorbed harmlessly into the warm breezes of the region. Her team returned to surveillance. The data from the stillborn storm was despatched to a second unit, who would feed the analysis into their fledging weather control database. The research unit was the latest fad of certain politicians, but thus far it had achieved little other than dumping large quantities of dirt from one side of the dust bowl to the other.

  The reality was that Lia’s particul
ar fiefdom was much the same as any other in the military. Days of quietude, sometimes boredom, interspersed with abrupt action and the adrenaline of an unfolding crisis. But not today.

  Which meant she could confirm her date for the evening.

  IT WAS DUSK when they got into the city. By then Nicolas had been on the bus for eighteen hours and the windows were thick with grime from the road. He was dozing, if you could call it that, a series of tumbles into sleep to be pulled back by a violent lurch of the bus as it navigated another hairpin turn. The driving had scared the shit out of him at first. Now he let his head drop, numb to the shock of it. Doze for five minutes. Jerk awake. Doze. He woke to find the elderly woman in the adjacent seat shaking his arm, pointing at the window, repeating a few insistent words in a language he didn’t understand because his translator was offline, but the woman’s meaning was clear. The city. They were arriving.

  He couldn’t see a thing, or rather, what he saw was light through a haze: electricity muted. The haze grew stronger as the bus slowed in gathering traffic, crossing the bridge to the island. He stretched his arms above his head. There was no part of his body that did not ache. When they pulled into the depot the bus shut down with a wheeze and everyone began to stand, grab their bags and talk at speed. He groaned, in solidarity with the woman beside him. He could not imagine enduring the same journey at her age. For now, it was all part of this new stage in his life. Catharsis. No, that was the wrong word. Catharsis implied trauma, something he was running from, and whilst there had been challenging times no event in his former life could be considered traumatic enough to run away from. If he were forced to describe his odyssey he might say he was running towards something.

  He joined the shuffling queue of passengers desperate to get off the bus, and gave the elderly woman a hand with her luggage, though the woman protested: she did not need help. It was probably true. She looked tougher than Nicolas. From outside he could see the thickness of the dust on the windows. He could have stood a spoon in it.