The Terminal State

by Jeff Somers

  Note (D. Hayes): Although Private Sarangerel’s statement does not touch on Colonel Anners specifically and her contact with her CO was brief and uniformly appropriate, her perspective on the operations and health of Anners’s unit is enlightening and is included in this report as depth-of-field material.

  It began after Nickles took it, the fucking moron. We’d been ordered to take the fucking building—who knew what the hell it was, it was just a building, gray and square and all the glass shattered out of it like someone had picked it up and shaken it a little. Why those fucking cops wouldn’t just fall back and give it up was beyond me; why Crazy Anners wanted it so bad was beyond me, but six times he’d formed up an assault team from the stragglers streaming back from the bridgeheads and tossed them at it. Building 159. One-fiver-nine. On the map. Nickles had been acting sub-louie since Barnes ate it in the tunnel, and somehow he’d survived all six assaults, limping back from one-fiver-nine with two or three survivors, and Crazy Anners would scrape up another fifty assholes and hand them to Nick and say, “Take the fucking building.”

  One-fiver-nine. I thought, fuck, it must be filled with Dry Compressed Rations or booze, he wants it so bad. But what did we know. Crazy Anners says, take that building or I’ll fry you, you had better odds taking the building.

  Me and Nickles and the kid, Remy, we were in all the waves. Six fucking times we jazzed up and tore ass across the little square right in front, fire raking down on us from their superior position. Six times we were fifty percent down just getting to the building. Nickles screaming orders—this many left, this many right, door pounders out and loaded, goddammit. Nicks kept me and the kid close as his aides, and we weren’t arguing. Nickles was a lucky charm.

  Stair fighting. The first three times, we waited for the promised bombardment like suckers. After that, we just went for the stairs, small squads, backups stepping forward as people fell, fighting for every fucking step up. Crazy Anners thought we could take the building that way, but he was fucking wrong and we all knew it. We were never going to take one-fiver-nine.

  On the third wave, we made it to the third floor, somehow. Maybe it was the big guy, Mendoza, we picked up when forming up for the third try. He was fucking huge. When he was on the stairs, he blocked out the light, and he screamed like a lion the whole way, just pouring shredder fire—reloaded his rifle like a natural, like he’d been born passing clips every eight seconds into the beast. We all hid behind him, figuring if he got nailed, his bulk would be a shield and if we could outrun his falling corpse we’d probably live to wave four, which was the best we could hope for. We were massed behind him on the landing when his head exploded, and then it all turned to shit and chaos and we went tearing ass back into the open air for a re-form and replacements.

  That’s what Anners and his crazy pals didn’t understand: They could stick a knife up our ass and make us go into one-fiver-nine, sure. But we were just waiting for an excuse to turn around and get the fuck out. A successful assault was just one where we never got an excuse.

  After the sixth wave, I thought, hell, they can’t make us go again. Not until we’d scraped up a full assault-strength unit, not until they got the big guns set up and the hover drones in the air, not until special-ops had taken out the air defense grid. No fucking way. I told Nickles, no fucking way, as I lit a butt, panting in the shelter of a crumbling concrete wall. And then Anners hit us all with a broadcast flag: form up. Form fucking up. The words imprinted on my vision, blood red. I looked at Nicks and he shook his head and I’ll never forget the expression on his face. It was fucking defeat, fucking doom. Surviving six times into one-fiver-nine was impossible. A seventh sortie was kicking us over into bullshit.

  One of the noncoms started shouting behind us, and I looked over. A trio of privates were lying on the ground, gasping like fish behind a scrap of old wall, and the NC was trying to lift them back onto their feet with the power of his voice. It wasn’t working, and one of the privates had a moment of fucking awesome when she lifted one arm weakly and gave the NC the finger, just jabbing it right up into his face.

  “Fucking-A,” Nickles muttered behind me.

  The NC didn’t find that humorous, and in a flash the private’s blackjack was in the NC’s hand. “You wanta get gimped, private? ” the NC shouted. “You form the fuck up or I’m gonna light you up until your eyes boil outta your skull.”

  The private did it again—arm up, hand out, finger extended. She couldn’t even talk, she was so winded. A ripple of laughter went up and I looked around, startled. Half the fucking party was watching.

  The NC knew it, too, and without another word he jabbed the remote at her and the laughter stopped like it had been edited out. The NC was gonna pop her. For field insubordination. That was fucking unfair, and I could feel the whole unit tensing, outraged.

  But nothing happened. The private just lay there gasping, and the NC cursed and worked the remote again and again. Finally, he thrust the blackjack into his pocket again and settled for a series of savage kicks to the private’s chest.

  I looked away. The NC was just beating on her now, and it was boring. She’d get up eventually and stagger into line just like the rest of us, and she’d run into one-fiver-nine again, just like the rest of us.

  “What happens,” Remy suddenly said, slow and steady, “if we don’t go in? They can’t execute all of us.”

  I stared at the kid. I’d never heard him speak before. His words were round and distinct. The boy had education.

  “Can and would,” Nickles grunted, standing up. “I was in Dresden two months ago, the CO popped an entire fucking battalion. They were fucking starving to death, hunting fucking squirrels in the woods and eatin’ ’em raw, so they sat on their guns. Every one of them, dropped dead, left to rot.” He spat on the ground. “C’mon. Die sitting out here or die fighting, your choice.”

  I didn’t stand up right away. I’d fucked Nicks a couple of times. I liked him, and he was a good sublieutenant, a good field unit commander. But I sat there for a moment with the kid, and I knew what we were both thinking: More and more the blackjacks were shitting the bed, for whatever reason. This was the third time I’d seen an NC or an officer try to pop someone and nothing happen. I’d also seen dozens of successful executions, but all I could think of were those three.

  “Maybe I just stand up and walk away,” Remy said. “No one’s watching. I could be a mile away in a few minutes.”

  Nicks nodded. He understood. He wasn’t going to try and stop the kid. “Sure. Anners has his proximities set wide. But eventually you’ll pass outside his field and then you autopop.”

  Remy nodded back, shrugging. “An hour of not running up those stairs? An hour of not getting yelled at and kicked and pushed into that fucking building?” He said the word fucking like he’d learned it recently. “Sounds like a deal to me.”

  Nicks nodded again, checking his semiauto rifle. “Go for it. I ain’t gonna see anything. Me, I’m going back in.” He suddenly smiled, yellow cracked teeth, one side of his face kinking up into leathery wrinkles. “Seven’s my fucking lucky number.”

  Nicks was ancient, thirty if he was a day, and he looked it. Old. Old as the fucking hills, and covered in scars. Remy was a kid. I guessed he was sixteen, seventeen. Maybe younger. Me, I was twenty-four and I’d lived a good life up until the last six months, getting pressed outside Des Moines, getting shipped to Brussels for the assault there, getting shipped here. The idea of leaving Nickles to try one-fiver-nine again by himself was unthinkable. If Nicks had said, “fuck it, let’s take a walk,” I would have. But if he was going back in, so was I. I stood up.

  “Let’s form up.”

  Nickles nodded without looking at me. “Form up!” he shouted. “Come on, you shit sacks, let me see some fucking discipline. Tight squads—Monserret, where the fuck is your demo pack? If I order you to blow a door in there, what’re you gonna do, fart it down? Sweet fucking hell—there’s a pile of dead cunts over there, go s
ift for a demo pack. We’ll just wait here for you.”

  I was next to Nickles when he took it in the face. In the face. His cowl just imploded like someone invisible had smashed him with a hammer, and for a moment he kept standing like it was just a flesh wound, something to shrug off. Then he crumpled to the stairs and became just another white suit on the floor, something to step over. Me and Remy, we both just turned and walked out. We were only a few seconds ahead of the general fallback, so no one noticed, and we both just sat down and pulled our cowls off, protected from fire by a pile of bricks that had once been a building.

  That’s when Remy began his quiet mutiny.

  He just quit fighting. We both got ordered into the eighth wave, and he formed up without a word. But when we were inside one-fiver-nine again, Remy just hung back. He didn’t make for the stairs. He stood his ground and let the rest of the unit move past him. I got swept past him, carried up by the squirming wave. Wave eight was just a blur. I don’t know how I made it back out alive. I was setting records. When I stumbled out, soaking in my own sweat and jittery from adrenaline, we still hadn’t taken the fucking building, and Remy was sitting outside, calm and relaxed.

  He kept doing it. I was amazed, because we’d all seen enough idiots getting popped for insufficient enthusiasm. The idea that you could just fucking ignore orders and sit in that gray area between running away and throwing yourself at bullets—it was an amazing idea. We got formed up for two more waves before Anners finally decided his tactics needed some massage, and both times Remy just... stepped aside, let the wave move past him, and waited it out.

  We rotated out of one-fiver-nine, but Anners had a lot of asshole projects he was burning people for, and all we got was three hours down for wound remediation and R&R. Three hours wasn’t the most I’d ever gotten between assaults, but it was close. It was nice to let my levels drop a little; some even got green.

  I asked Remy what the fuck he thought he was doing. Sooner or later he was gonna get nailed by some officer looking to bust balls. He just shrugged. He didn’t blink. I watched him for a while and he didn’t blink once.

  “I’m going to die either way. At least this way, I’m not running up and down the stairs all day.”

  The idea got into my head: We were going to fucking die anyway, why not relax on the way? I thought about it. Getting a vessel blown in your head by some screaming asshole with a pip on his collar versus getting shot in the face in a dusty stairwell, sweating your ass off, and staring at someone’s grass-stained ass? It made this crazy kind of sense.

  Some other unit took one-fiver-nine three days later, but we were already heading south, the blooms bright orange and yellow on the horizon as we humped. None of us had seen a hover or even a truck in weeks. It was just walking and walking, two hours down and eight up, two hours down and eight up, until you forgot there was anything but ground and your boots, the lights in the sky—the hell we were walking toward—and N-tabs, dry and dusty, swallowed hard and held down with discipline.

  I studied Remy. He obeyed orders. Anners took a liking to him—the cunt liked to slip into the line for an hour here and there, acting like he was one of the grunts, salt of the fucking earth. Remy didn’t talk back, didn’t hesitate. You wouldn’t know the kid had decided to just sit it all out. Just outside Shenzhen, Anners attached him to his staff.

  “Maybe I can slit that motherfucker’s throat,” he said that night while we were down. I’d thought about fucking him, see if he was cherry or not, but he was creeping me out with the staring. “Now I’m on staff.”

  Man’s got to have a purpose.

  I told him he’d be dead a second later, if he did that, and the kid shrugged again.

  Shenzhen was gone by the time we arrived. The ground was hot, sour steam rising everywhere, the city just a collection of rubble. The cops had beat their way out of it before we shelled, so it was just a few days of securing whatever was left standing and organizing sorties out into the brush to see where they were hiding out, massing for a counterpush. Eight up, two down, walking the perimeter and reporting contacts, sometimes we even got our blood pressure up if we flushed a dozen Stormers out of some sagging old building and had to mop ’em up. Remy was on Anners’s staff, and so I didn’t see him too much. He started going for walks.

  We hit him on a patrol, way out in the fucking suburbs, all of a sudden his name and number floating up. He was just tramping it, didn’t even have his rifle, just his sidearm strapped to his side. We all relaxed and a couple of the guys gave Remy some shit for making us tense up, but Remy just floated by as if he didn’t hear. I called his name a couple of times, but he didn’t look at me, just kept walking. Normally, he would’ve been SOL, getting caught outside his unit, but he was staff, and no one wanted to take a risk by questioning Anners’s boy. Thing was, he was far, far away from his CO. Anners had a rep for being careless with his staff, setting his proximities tight and then forgetting, so wandering away from him—especially without permission—was fucking suicide. But that was Remy’s gig. Suicide. He knew none of us was getting out alive; he just didn’t want to do the work before his card got pulled.

  After that, I started finding him all the fucking time. He just wandered. He tried to get popped. He still did his job; he still humped after Anners everywhere the crazy fuck went; he still jumped to it whenever he was given an order. But whenever Anners forgot about him, the kid wandered off and really pushed it, really took his time. It was coward’s suicide, sure, hoping the universe would deal him out, but it was still fucking balls.

  And then we moved into Hong Kong. The tunnel, shit, I don’t want to talk about that.

  On the other side, I saw Anners. There was this five-minute window when my sub-louie had eaten some bullets and I had no intermediary CO, which technically put me under Crazy Anners’s command, and he had so much shit going on, he couldn’t pay any attention to a detail like me, so I got a breather. I was hunkered down in a pit with my cowl off, gasping for air and trying to let my trembling muscles relax, but Anners was like a sun shining there, all the crazy just beaming off him, and I watched him at his mobile command, swishing holomaps through the air, shouting and hollering. And Remy wasn’t there. His whole staff was hopping to, either running his errands or at least standing there and looking busy, but Remy was nowhere. I didn’t know at the time if he’d gotten clipped or if he was on another of his walkabouts.

  After that, I got transferred to a new sublieutenant, Second Lieutenant Mortenson of the Asshole Division, who didn’t like me on sight and gave me a zap just for the hell of it. Mortenson liked to goose you. He had his fucking blackjack in his hands all the time, just making you hurt constantly. Too slow, sloppy aim, forgetting to say “sir” after every sentence—the motherfucker was the worst sub-louie I ever had. We all would have taken a chance and fragged him if we’d had a moment to think, but the next couple of hours was just one-fiver-nine all over again, just squirming our way up stairwells, taking buildings one fucking block at a time.

  Later in the day, though, Anners decided to form up a unit under his personal command. Most of the COs didn’t do shit like that, because they had a fucking war to run, you know, but Anners did shit like that all the fucking time. An honor guard or something, I dunno; he liked getting up a couple dozen grunts and double-timing it around the field with ’em. When I linked up with him, Remy was there. The kid didn’t say a word, just humped after Anners with his cowl down.

  Anners had gone fucking batshit. Hong Kong wasn’t subdued yet. Those cops were hanging onto every block with their fingernails, and we were getting bogged down because we didn’t have the manpower to occupy every slab of concrete we took, so the cops kept sneaking three or four people behind us. Just three or four—sometimes two. Or one. One guy with a gas-powered gun bolted to the floor on an elevated angle could fuck us up, and it happened again and again. I began to wonder if our intel on the manpower stationed in Hong Kong was wrong. Anners should have been hunkered down in a
stable command center running the show. Instead, he was on the move, and no one knew where the fuck he was one minute to the next and it was causing chaos. But he didn’t give a shit. He didn’t seem to even be aware of it. He just kept charging this way and that—shit, members of his staff were getting nailed by sniper fire as he trotted around, and he didn’t seem worried.

  You wanna know why we didn’t take Hong Kong despite an overwhelming advantage in metal, look at Colonel Malkem Fucking Anners.

  Some of us, though, they loved Anners. They loved the way he couldn’t be sniped, the way he was fearless.

  Remy deserted about an hour after I linked up. It was amazing—I think I was the only one who noticed, although Anners must have gotten a red flag in his HUD when the kid slipped out of range. But Anners never flinched. We’d come across some shitbag crawling out of a burning building. Anners talked to him like they knew each other, so he was a cop, maybe, but Anners asked for a volunteer to put one in the shitbag’s head. And Remy volunteered. Last time I ever saw the kid, or heard him. He took the shitbag around a corner to put a bullet in his head, and he must have just gone on one of his walks. Anners had us humping away immediately, expecting Remy to catch up. He never did.

  It didn’t matter. I pictured him sitting with his back to a wall, just watching the smoke and fire go by. It didn’t make any difference. Either way, we were dead. The only difference was, I was breaking a sweat doing it.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  As I continue to work off my gambling debts and bar tabs by writing and publishing books, more and more people are involved every year in helping me create these stories and get them into your hands. I am of course speaking of the various bartenders of Hoboken, New Jersey, who serve me heroic amounts of inspiration while tolerating my tendency to ramble on about baseball statistics and alternate universes. Of course, they do not labor alone.