Astral Fall

by Jessica Mae Stover

  “You already have ideas?”

  “This unit is the rest of our lives. We should move fast to get who we want. Do you mind if I approach Tomtom to ask his insight and hedge our choices?”

  “You can tell anyone you want. Why Tomtom?”

  Her eyebrows rose in slight surprise, as though it should be obvious. “He linked us up as a roselaurel team, and Sentinel places his advice higher than Pilo’s in these matters.”

  “He did? She does? How do you know?”

  “They take an additional elite officer oath—What?”

  Thwip had winced in mild disgust. “Roselaurel unit has to be the worst position an elite can take. A never-ending mission at P2 dealing with the likes of us when we first started, over and over again… Can’t see why anyone would want it.”

  “On the other hand, look how long Sentinel’s stayed alive.”

  “I guess that’s one thing to care about. I’d rather go big on missions I’m interested in.” He finished the reloop and wiped the pulse mechs on the hoods back to default.

  “Any elite would, it’s just different for everyone. Sentinel’s interested in curating the entire top elite force, and the roselaurel trainer oath contains what she cares about most: making us capable of defeating any enemy. She’s worked in-unit with Pilo longer, but assigns Tomtom the most direct contact with us. Watch her command style. When the task doesn’t defer to Pilo’s specialty, Tomtom’s her right hand, just like you’ll be mine.”

  Thwip shook his head, semi-astonished and grinning, as she walked toward the recruit suit-up module that connected to the lab. Disar’s surety and the depth of their mutual agreement rolled over him. An important decision well made—it felt good. It freed him to focus on other matters.

  The entry to the suit-up module sealed behind her.

  Left alone in the lab, he reviewed the recent performance of his group. A month ago, in passing during drill, Tomtom had shouted at them that the odd number of recruits was intentional; Command always washed one recruit out of each group, even if they all excelled and passed into their roselaurels. The inference was that out of the twenty-one who made it into the recruit group, only twenty would make it into units, even if they all performed flawlessly. As units consisted of five elites, on the surface the idea made sense: 21 ÷ 5 = 4 r 1. Yet it didn’t make sense that the UNP would waste top talent after developmental investment, so Thwip took Tomtom’s statement as nothing more than another attempt at unnerving them. There had been side chatter about it in the group; apparently not everyone was as dismissive as he was. It hadn’t seemed important at the time, although it was amusing.

  Thwip set the hardhoods aside, cleared his arc, swiped into his personal data, and entered an additional security swipe he’d implemented. A small log he created revealed itself:

  31.5 DAYS AGO: TOMTOM THREATENS RECRUIT GROUP THAT ONE RECRUIT WILL WASH OUT REGARDLESS OF PERFORMANCE

  22.7 DAYS AGO: RECRUIT BEAU // WEAPONS SIM: STATIONARY MARKSMANSHIP // “PERFORMANCE NOTE: FOUR TARGETS MISSED” // RESULT: MISSION FAILURE/FATALITIES

  9.9 DAYS AGO: RECRUIT SLAV // PILOT SIM: EXFIL // “PERFORMANCE NOTE: FAILURE TO MAKE ENTRY TIME” // RESULT: MISSION FAILURE/FATALITIES

  Thwip mulled over the context of each entry. In Beau’s case, she’d been ranked number one in marksmanship, probably on the verge of advancing into her RLs. As he watched her scores roll in that day, Thwip had thought it more likely the sim’s weaponry failed four times than Beau. As for Slav, like Magi’s, his were mistakes that even academy students wouldn’t make. Tomtom hollered his head off. Slav and his team ran suitless throughout the night, then had to go through another day of training without sleep. It was like boot for them all over again.

  Since Beau and Slav’s substandard performances, Tomtom had slated them last in line as team training leaders for each day’s sims, weakening their position in the group and making it harder for them to get their stats back up and rise into their roselaurels.

  Nothing like those two poor performances had happened in the history of Thwip’s group, and judging by Tomtom’s reaction each time, it had never happened before in the history of the program. Thwip couldn’t believe that both Beau and Slav would error out so badly. He had begun trying to figure out what might have gone wrong. The two wore different suit sizes; it couldn’t have been a single suit issued at different times to both of them. And in any case, the techs would have caught systems errors before the suits were issued for the day. The mistakes were in different sim structures, and different sim programs, with no record of similar errors. If it wasn’t the tech or the sim, and he refused to believe it was operator error, then the possibilities left were few. He had started watching everyone during training sims, keeping a log for his observations, checking the stats daily, and setting up a contingency plan. He entered a new line item:

  0.1 DAYS AGO: RECRUIT MAGI // CHESSIE BATTLE SIM: URBAN STRIKE // “PERFORMANCE NOTE: INAPPROPRIATE COMMANDS AND LACK OF STRATEGY” // RESULT: MISSION FAILURE/FATALITIES

  Two is a coincidence; three’s a pattern.

  A month ago Thwip hadn’t had the swipes and unsupervised freedom of the PT lab to analyze recruit gear. Now, with increased roselaurel lab privileges, he could access and service all recruit training suits. The recruit suit-up module was empty; the entry that led to the corridor sealed. Disar was gone.

  He set the recalibrated rosed and laureled hoods on the module’s center bench. In the third row of mounted training suits, Thwip located the suit Magi had used in her earlier sim. A tiny red X glowed in the corner. Good. Techs haven’t checked it in and reset it yet. He looked the suit over for damage. Finding none, he removed it and brought it to the module’s arc wall so that he could access its mechs in the privacy of the suit-up module. Since he didn’t have the tether master swipes that trainers used to remote-access individual suits, he put the rosed hardhood on and tethered the suit and hood Magi used into his loop.

  Through his hardhood he tethered Magi’s suit to the arc wall, wiped the history on the rosed hardhood a final time so it reverted to default, removed it, and worked on Magi’s suit directly from the arc wall. Forty seconds into a root-level diagnostic, he discovered that the pulse mechs in the suit’s gloves were crossing every twenty-some tasks. Tasks mapped to the right would go left and vice versa, with a feeble variation in count that was implemented to mask the pattern of error. It would inhibit the movement of a suit enough to cause Magi’s command failure, while making it look like operator’s error on her part.

  Thwip fixed the task mapping, and then figured out how to re-create it himself. Techs could create this particular suit problem by a simple hash change, but there were safeguards against accidental changes; the command would have to be repeated and confirmed three times in the IF flow. It wasn’t advanced or well-executed hashing, but P2 was secure and sims were safe: no one would be looking for sabotage on sim training suits, so it was effective.

  Someone purposefully made the change and then let the suit go out for sim training. No tech would be that unskilled: they wouldn’t have done it by mistake, and if they did it on purpose, they would have covered it up better, setting the suit to automatically reset when checked in, wiping the evidence. Possibility: someone who has access to suits but doesn’t have reset swipes did this. A recruit.

  Thwip let the diagnostic run to the end, in case it discovered any other changes. When it didn’t, he ran it three more times to confirm the results. After the night of elite mission unity he’d just witnessed, it didn’t seem possible, but either someone had targeted Magi, or she’d ended up with a sabotaged suit out of bad luck. But who would have done it? Command might wash me out if I make accusations that I can’t prove. Or they might bring it to the group as a matter of honor, threatening that if someone doesn’t confess, they’ll wash us all out. And what if the saboteur doesn’t confess? There goes my career. Disar’s career. There are still too many variables in play. I need more actionable evidence.

  H
e swiped into the arc wall and added his discovery to his log. Finding that his new access gave him access to the module’s check-in logs, under the guise of reviewing his own log-in and -out times, he pulled the entire log for the last twenty-four hours. The change to Magi’s suit must have been made after the techs wiped the suit at night or in the morning shift, but before or during her suit-up for training thereafter. He accessed the time the suit was checked in and cross-referenced it against recruit module check ins and outs. After the techs wiped the suit, no recruit had been alone in the module.

  If I could manipulate the remote roselaurel tether on Disar’s suit without her noticing, then someone could make this change on Magi’s suit from their own once they were looped in to the recruit group. They might even have been able to fool her into doing the three-peat hashes herself, under the guise of instruction.

  He thought about how he had just had Disar repeat multiple pulse commands while teaching her to manually sync hardhood views.

  I could have hidden a suit change in those and had her repeat it three times to pass her suit’s hash error protection. She wouldn’t have noticed right away.

  Thwip reviewed the group’s sim schedule from earlier. In the chessie sim, Magi had worked with Wiji, Kevlin, Silo, and Illotar, but outside of sims, different teams usually looped in and out of one another’s teams through the day, especially in the suit-up module, so they could to talk once they had their hoods on. They had no reason not to allow one another access. Disar hadn’t thought twice about trusting him to check her hardhood in for her. Magi’s group chessied against and therefore also was in contact with a team headed by Jinn. It could be anyone. We all have access to one another at some point. His fingers thumped across the arc wall as he closed out of his task, looking at the rows of empty suits and hardhoods. It could be more than one person. It could be Disar. I have no evidence that it’s not.

  He reset and remounted the suit into the wall, pulsed its glass casing cover, and racked the hardhoods he and Disar used along the back wall with their corresponding roselaurel suits mounted behind higher-level recruit security swipes. An empty space awaited the return of the suit he wore. He left the glass unsealed and turned back to use the arc wall. When unused, it always rotated through various recruit-relevant information and reminders. The words YOU ARE SAFE WITH YOUR UNIT currently dominated. Reading it twisted his stomach.

  Thwip swiped back into the module’s arc wall with new purpose.

  Hereafter call saboteur Shadow. Stay with the plan, continue to gather intel, draw Shadow into the open, close the snare.

  From the moment he began planning a contingency, he understood that he would have to dangle himself as bait, and that he’d need witnesses. It would have to be public. Honeypot tradecraft was the safest way to accomplish intel with no leads, and he wanted to find out who was sabotaging recruits without making rash accusations or getting anyone else involved in case he somehow failed and was penalized. To accomplish that, he’d somehow have to make himself the honey. The day after Slav’s failure, over breakfast, he thought about how he could make himself the most appealing target for a saboteur.

  Then Oly had come into the commissary and announced that their run of home-planet boyfriend jokes at her expense was now over; she was newly single. It was expected: long-distance romantic relationships outside the military didn’t work for elites and as such were slightly taboo, although not disallowed. Meanwhile romantic relationships inside elite units or between any elites, including recruits, were forbidden as an explicit violation of the oath they’d all agreed to on entry to training. Thwip’s eyes had glazed over, and by the end of the meal he had an Oly-inspired plan that went by the name of Airwreka.

  In his personal data he located the collection of letters he had written to her. He visualized the mission he’d chosen, visualized her, Airwreka, seventeen, like him, but serious, a flop of dark bangs pushed out of her face with a flick of her hand, the way her shirt hung loose on her sharp shoulders… and began to write on the arc wall.

  DEAR AIRWREKA, I SAW SOMETHING TONIGHT THAT WAS NEARLY AS BEAUTIFUL AS YOU ARE…

  He begged her advice about minor career decisions and confided his frustrations, cloaked in words that wouldn’t violate the military’s Code of Silence, then stored the message along with the dozens of others he’d composed to her since Slav’s failure. He’d been playing it subtle, but based on the sabotage he’d discovered on Magi’s suit, Shadow didn’t seem subtle. He made the honeypot more obvious.

  Finally he confirmed that the messages appeared in the intended order, yawned, stretched, and surrendered to Tomtom’s warnings about getting enough sleep.

  The rows of suits drew his eye once more, and he wished he had the time and cover to run root diagnostics on all of them. He closed out his data, and the arc wall displayed a new message: CHECK YOUR TECH: GEAR IS EVERYTHING IN SPACE!

  Frustrated, he stripped himself out of his suit down to the grey basic dress he wore underneath, placed the roselaurel suit in its mount, pulsed the glass to seal, and hashed the mount as checked in for PT review. He swapped out his greys for a fresh set, swishing the first set hashed with his call name in halfhash into an industrial-size sanitizer set into the module’s right wall. Its insides were littered with other sets of greys left overnight to be orgo-wiped. They may as well not have been called greys: pigment came with advancement, and as recruits, their greys were nearly white. Disar’s were there. He recognized one of her tops by a small tear on the back collar. She’d caught it on her auttie yank when the techs emergency banana-ed her out of her arrow suit for a protocol med check after she took a nasty hit in an environmental sim early in UTS. He was in the lab when support crew brought her in, protesting that she was golden and had a sim to finish. Her suit was so damaged that later he’d gotten to watch the techs securely destroy and dispose of it. He since noticed that not only did she keep that particular set of greys despite the defect, but she wore it on every roselaurel mission. Resisting the urge to mess with her by hiding it, he left his greys and strayed a finger over the arc wall to grab the hour as he exited. Shit. Two forty-five.

  Exhaustion edged over him. He rushed through the empty corridors, hurrying to rest. Two uniformed food service technicians passed him, headed in the opposite direction, carrying trays of empty dinnerware from the RL officers’ quarters. He nodded to them deferentially—recruits, even roselaurels, technically held no rank—and turned into the corridor that led toward the dormitories. Its lights were dimmed nearly to darkness at this time and tinted orange to aid in sleep preparation, and the lack of light made him drowsier. He put an impatient hand to a panel of arc wall on the right, swiping farther into the restricted elite section of P2, passed the elite support offices, swiped through the entryway that led to the recruit dormitories and took the next turn wide, then ducked back behind the corner.

  There was a man there who he did not recognize.

  The stranger was tall and athletically lean, similar to Thwip in height and build, but with a presence Thwip lacked, and that had sent him into defensive maneuvering. Although he was unarmed, hoodless and suitless, everything about the man—his height, his posture, the muscles in his arms and back, his focus on the wall—exuded a sense of power. He stood in the middle of the corridor, his arms crossed over his chest, facing the wall. The dimness, coupled with the dark hair that brushed his shoulders, shadowed his face, obscuring his features. He wore a set of basic greys marked with thin bloodred lines on the sleeve in high contrast, signifying that they were on loan from the medica module. The shade of his greys lay somewhere between that of Tomtom’s and Pilo’s. On his right bicep a tiny light blinked on a fitted band that the medicas used for gathering biomarker data to monitor health.

  There’s no arc wall in this corridor. Why is he looking at a blank wall?

  The man shifted his weight and turned his chin slightly toward where Thwip hid.

  Thwip tensed. He knows someone’s here.

  The
man refocused his attention on the wall, then strode away in the opposite direction.

  I’m in the elite restricted area, and he’s not a recruit. That means he’s an elite officer from a unit. After mission, elites must report to medica and undergo observation as protocol, even if they suffer no body damage. Possibility: he’s one of the elites from the Leto Cross mission!

  Seeing movement at the top of the wall in front of where the stranger had stood, Thwip rushed forward from the corner, wondering what had fixed his attention. There were rows of engravings in the wall. A rose symbol haloed in five-point stars, another, haloed in ocean waves. Diamonds, snowflakes, handprints, knives, helixes… each engraving was an identical rose, laureled with a different elite honor symbol, its lines filled with a dark grey material. Slowly, a panel of matte glass slid downward, smoothly and silently, from the ceiling above.

  The rumored rosewall. It exists. And each rose represents…

  Before the glass could cover them, he raised a hand toward the wall to touch them, to connect present to the far-off future when he would appear here with them, and then, respectfully, he thought better of it and pulled his hand back.

  Thousands of roses, over a hundred years of elite heroism—the last line ended at eye level. It held but a single rose, wreathed in a serpent shaped into a Möbius strip. Unlike the other roses, its fine grooves were unfilled.

  The glass panel continued its gentle descent until it slid over the engravings, obscuring them. Without the swipes to move it himself, Thwip watched as the last roses disappeared. A larger rose, haloed by a laurel crown over the words ETERNAL HONOR, shimmered on the glass. Then the symbol faded, and an abstract mosaic pattern overtook the matte surface so that it matched the rest of the wall.

  Thwip walked the rest of the way to his quarters in silence, gave his clothes to the floor, crossed his personal module to the adjacent body sanitizer, and stood inside in an exhausted daze for what seemed like long enough. Then he pulled on the bottom half of his greys and flopped in bed, his mind tracing over the LC mission, his agreement with Disar, and what she said about them shedding their roselaurels. Reality drifted to the surreality of light dreams, a mesh of recruit experiences and fantasies: perfect missions set against the starry backdrop of space, newly discovered planets filling hardhood scans with foreign continents and oceans—all protected by perfect technology and perfect camaraderie.