“This post bids yours farewell and good luck, kozo, my scope is full of incoming –”
The communication cut off as several flashes momentarily brightened the overcast day. Devonport turned and watched in astonishment as the hill his observer was embedded in was pummeled by multiple artillery rounds. Barely a moment later they were followed by streaking missiles that dispersed antipersonnel bomblets over its surface, subsequently tearing the hill apart.
The cacophony of detonations finally reached his ears, and their massive reports made real what had only a moment ago seemed like another dream creature’s unexpected appearance.
Imano was dead. If he wasn’t dead, he was almost certainly dying. Devonport digested that fact with more difficulty than he’d have thought possible.
But in another part of his mind the analyst was quietly at work, and it duly noted that the units he had just dispatched had probably only been an improvised screening force. If the enemy had managed to triangulate his observer’s location finely enough to order an artillery strike, then that meant the presence of E-warfare units and dedicated artillery batteries, which implied that a combined-arms command structure was at play. That in turn implied that Fort Kiba had finally disgorged its entire complement, MBTs included.
Warseed’s principal power unit sputtered into life once more. Devonport hardly took notice. He was engrossed by the sight of the debris as it rained down upon the ravaged hill. The rains had ended, he realized as his head begin to throb, taking away the one edge he could ever really have counted on.
There was no longer any reason to remain there, but still he watched the hill as it resettled, realizing that it was probably his decision to break radio silence that had cost Imano his life.
I killed the man who saved my life, he concluded, aghast at the scale of his sin.
Moving with the sluggishness of the shell-shocked, Devonport turned towards the supporting OAP´s burial site and began to search for his discarded backsword.
It wouldn´t be wise to return to battle unarmed.
CHAPTER ONE
20 kilometers east of Leiben, 03H00, 7th of January, 2771 (21 years later)
Toni peered into the fog surrounding him and thanked the family gods for the concealment it afforded. He winced as he heard a cry in the distance and reminded himself yet again of how much of an idiot he was.
He could have left without a fuss, of course, and in fact every rational bone in his body had urged him to do just that. But instead he had decided to leave a goodbye note upon his bed before leaving. The desperate voice in the distance belonged to his mother. His sweet mother who, possessed by her uncanny maternal sonar, must have gone into his bedroom to check up on him minutes after he had left. As a result, he had been hearing her voice for the better part of the last half-hour, calling for him.
He refused to run, however. Running was something a child would do, and he firmly believed himself to no longer be one. Even so, he hastened his pace.
The fog’s heaviness had Toni wondering whether he would soon be in need of shelter. Peering up was pointless, the unrelenting mist that surrounded him shielding the sky beyond, hiding any clues as to his immediate future. The fact that it was currently the seventh day of the month offered the only indication of what he could expect for the day.
At that time of month over the last century it had become common for the sky to be persistently overcast, with a constant presence of either fog, or a light drizzle, or even a light shower from the second to the eighth before the crimson sun finally made its appearance. It was only day three since the great rains had ended, and so he could confidently expect things to continue just as bleakly.
As he plodded along the winding dirt road, he finally set his eyes on something that gave him a firm idea as to his location. Under his feet the road began to rise until, several paces ahead and at its highest point, a familiar ochre-red wall appeared to his left. He ran his hand along the rough wall, feeling the rock-like bark grating against his skin, feeling the looser fibers in the intermittent gaps giving way as his fingers scraped along. The road curved around the wall for quite a few more steps before finally breaking off at a downward slope. Toni followed the road, sparing only the briefest glance at the tree behind him, its massive trunk disappearing up into the fog. Today was no day to peer at the silent sentinel.
Toni’s heart began to sink as he spied a small redwood flanking the road’s right flank.
Leaning nonchalantly against it with her arms crossed and a furrow on her brow, Kaya Miura waited silently as he reluctantly approached. As he halted before her, keeping the distance between them at a good three paces, she finally uncrossed her arms and shoved her slim fingers into her coat pockets. She was wearing the brown leather jacket. He had worn it once, and knew that its pockets’ interiors were lined with genet fur. It was an extravagant coat, quite appropriate for the tall bitch who stood before him, appraising him with that furrow in her brow that he detested so much. It was his father he saw there.
“So ...” she said casually, “did you hear your mother? Did you hear her calling for you?”
Silently he nodded.
“And?” She asked, the furrow deepening, “Don’t you have anything to say to that?”
“There’s nothing to say.” He replied, despairing at how soft his voice sounded to his ears.
“Nothing to say? Nothing? You ungrateful little prick.” She remarked.
He winced, knowing that he was only feeling the breeze before the storm. If he allowed her to get up to full steam, Kaya would be yelling loudly enough to trip mother’s sonar and draw her in like stellar gravity. He hurried to cut her off.
“It’s not a matter of being grateful, I can’t be what you want me –”
“You hid your final marks from us.” She interrupted, “More skillfully than I would have expected, I must admit. But using my password was a bit much, don’t you think? Was there a hidden message there? Were you sticking your tongue out at me?”
He didn’t answer, knowing any reply would be the wrong one.
Three days ago, Toni’s Final Examination results had finally made their way via conventional mail to the Miura residence, removing from the household all doubts as to who had been tampering with the domestic server’s electronic mail.
“No?” She answered for him.
“No.” He confirmed, “I needed to make time until I’d gotten an answer from the Forces. I thought that if I deleted the messages I –”
“Fucking coward.”
The word was like kick to the gut, and it silenced him instantly.
“I know,” he finally conceded. “You wanted to know why, so I’m telling you why.”
“And I guess you realized we’d just think it was the money pit’s fault, right?”
Affectionately called the Money Pit, the Miura household’s domestic server was more than thirty years old, having put up with multiple ownership over the course of its existence. The forestation company his father had bought it from had neglected to entirely clear the computer’s memory banks and so, once reconnected to the grid, it had showed some entrepreneurial spirit, acquiring countless seedlings of several tree species to the detriment of their bank account. His opportunistic mother had quietly set to work, planting the seedlings around their farm’s perimeter and tasking Toni to care for them until they found their footing in the soil.
The computer had been subsequently lobotomized, although its reliability suffered a nosedive as a result. It was, in fact, the family’s lack of confidence in their connection to the General Civilian Network that had allowed him to get away with his deception for so long.
“Yeah, I guess so. I also knew that without mom’s or dad’s authentication codes, Southwood would just find another way to send the letters. I just didn’t expect it to be so soon.”
“Dad threatened the school, Leiben varsity and the GCN employees with prosecution, he kept calling them incompetent,” she harangued. “He had to CALL THEM BACK AN
D APOLOGIZE!”
“I know, I was there when he made the call ...”
“You’re a worm, you know that? You’ve brought dishonor to our –”
“This is the problem, right here ...” he growled under his breath, feeling dull anger begin to fester again.
“What? What did you say, shrimp? You sure you want a piece of me?” She challenged, her voice still low but rising.
“I won’t ever be anything.”
“What?”
“I said I won’t ever be anything like this. You step on me. Father steps on me –”
“You screw up, that’s –”
“Let me speak!” He suddenly spat. There was enough anger pressed into the words to give her pause. She watched him coolly, her face momentarily subdued.
“I don’t care if I screw up!” He continued, speaking as loudly as he dared, “From now on I’ll screw up on my terms. Where I’m going I won’t have this insane family to tear me up from the inside out!”
“No. You’ll just have some drill instructor to do it for us! You think we were hard on you? Wait until you get a load of them! They’ll break your fragile heart and send you home crying.” She finished with a laugh.
“No they won’t,” he retorted, laughing with certainty. “I can take them on because they’re not family, which means I’ll be free to hate them without having to feel ashamed about it. And even if I don’t make it somehow, you shouldn’t stand waiting for me to return. If I fail, I’ll just walk into the wild until I find a research hub out there. I don’t care to return even if it means within a week I’ll be eating the bark off trees. What I feel for you all is the worst kind of hate. I’ve been trying to repress the feeling, but it just won’t go away.”
His words seemed to have made an impression on his sister. Kaya leaned against the redwood once more and listened to the forest sounds, or perhaps for some clue as to his mother’s whereabouts. Her anger appeared to have abated, and there was the slightest hint of doubt on her features, although perhaps that was just a trick of shadows.
“What we have here is a failure to communicate,” she finally said. “I don’t really care whether you hate me or not. My conscience is clear on that point. But you might want to rethink those feelings in relation to Sarah. She’s attached to you, and your leaving’s going to leave a mark there that might –”
“Go to hell. I knew you were gonna pull the Sarah Card out sooner or later. She’ll do fine. She’s got two older sisters to take care of her, besides mother. As for me, I’m eighteen years old, my studies are finished and I’ve been accepted into MEWAC.”
“Mewhat?”
“MEWAC. Mechanized Warfare Corps. I’m on my way there now.”
“On foot?”
“It’s not that far away.”
A wicked smile slowly began to spread across her face.
“So you want to break out into the world and be independent. You want to be autonomous, a great warrior, whatever. And you’ll be within walking distance of the farm?! Don’t overexert yourself there, soldier.”
As he always tended to do in such moments, Toni wondered whether his sister loved him at all.
“So tell me about this MEWAC.” She demanded.
“It’s ... It’s a sort of fusion of old infantry and cavalry units from the Henderson and Kumato research hubs. Its home-base is the Adamastor warehouse.”
“That a very big aquarium for such a small fish,” she remarked more to herself than to him, and for the briefest of moments he wasn’t too keen on getting there.
Then he remembered what had most interested him about MEWAC in the first place; it was the outfit to join if one wanted to drive a Hammerhead Suit.
“What about the Military Academy? It might be a bit much for you, but at least dad would respect you a little more.”
Toni grimaced.
“I applied for both the MA and the Army Sergeant School. The Academy didn’t even bother to reply, the Sergeant School just sent me the application form for MEWAC. I filled it in and got an answer yesterday.”
“You mean I got an answer yesterday. You’ve been using my user account, I checked the activity log.”
“I knew mom was checking up on mine, so ... yes.”
“Wonderful. And their reply?”
Toni grudgingly handed his sister the printed sheet, and her eyebrows slowly rose as she studied the document.
“Two spelling mistakes ...” she commented. “Anyway, it says incorporation dependent upon approval. Which means you haven’t even been approved yet. To an outfit whose soldiers apparently don’t know how to spell, no less.”
She handed the sheet back to Toni disdainfully and he refolded it, trying not to let his feelings show. He was already painfully aware of that fact, and it worried him terribly. He wondered whether soon he really would be eating the bark off trees.
“I have to go.” He said.
“Sure. I wouldn’t want to keep you from abandoning your family. However, mother told me that, if I chanced to come across you, it was my solemn responsibility to tell you to inform base medical services about your folic acid deficiency.”
“My – what?!”
“Yes, your folic acid deficiency. She never bothered to tell us about it, but she´s been supplementing our meals with the stuff, it’s apparently something that runs in her side of the family. Since you can be sure the army won’t be supplementing your meals, you’ll have to inform the medical service’s genetics department to get your pills.”
Toni was dubious.
“Does that even exist? I don’t need to know this and I’m certainly not going hang myself by the tongue at medical. Goodbye.” He muttered as he skirted his sister, giving her a wide berth.
“That’s just fine, then, I’m sure you’ll be getting all the supplementation you need when you’re eating the bark off trees. I heard they’ve got a lot of folic acid here.” She taunted, rubbing the redwood beside her.
It took him only a dozen steps to lose her in the fog.
*****
The sounds of the forest were beginning to make themselves heard. Toni checked his digital watch; it read a quarter past four in the morning, but of course the critters didn’t know that, and so they kept to whatever timetable they had figured for themselves. By the looks of it, at least some squirrels had decided it was daytime, and he could see a pair foraging among the roots of a Tanoak to his left. He wondered for the millionth time what true night might be like.
Close your eyes and you’ll know, his father had joked the first time Toni asked that question.
He had learned to never expect a straight answer from his father, and had long suspected that that was a treatment the old man reserved only for his son. He felt relieved once again to be walking away from Mushima farm. His encounter with Kaya had only strengthened the feeling.
He increased the length of his stride, dreading to be late for his first encounter with military life. His father’s backpack felt heavier, and he was switching it from one shoulder to the other more often. His surroundings were becoming noisier. Birds chirped musically as some began to take flight, and it at last became clear to him that the forest had decided it was daytime. Nature’s dawn had finally arrived.
Despite everything he’d been taught about nature’s adaptation to his home planet, Toni still found its biological clock fascinating. In the absence of day-night cycles, the forests had adopted their own circadian rhythm of about twenty two hours, although the cycle-length happened to vary depending on the time of month. On more than one class excursion out to the groves, Toni and his primary school colleagues had been instructed to sit silently and listen to the forest as it woke. It wasn’t every day that nature’s dawn coincided with the chronological one. Today was no exception.
Nature’s dawn was not, however, a simultaneous continent-wide event. It appeared to progress in waves, the gradual increase in wildlife activity propagating across the countryside like a planet-wide Mexican wave. The wave moved alo
ng at over a hundred kilometers per hour and was eleven hundred kilometers deep, sometimes taking more than two weeks to make a full circuit around the Thaumantian supercontinent’s arid center. There were never less than twelve such dawn waves in motion at any time, although very rarely dawns fused, or spontaneously emerged from between sister waves progressing at particularly large distances from each other, or even swirled and eddied over vast mountain ranges and other interruptions to the far south. Watching a time-lapse simulation of the event on a continent-wide scale, it had appeared to Toni as if a giant hypnotic eye was hard at work, trying to bewitch him.
The tree-roots under his feet had become so densely intermingled he was having difficulty keeping his footing. The road had been reduced to a long disused path, but he knew it was too late to think about turning back. Besides, there was supposed to be nothing else out there except for the base. He maintained his heading, swallowing his anxiety as the minutes passed by.
Half an hour later, the road began to look promisingly well-traveled, and every once in a while he would find a dirt path leading off it, wide enough for a single column of men to travel through. The visibility had also begun to improve and Toni could see farther out around him. He groaned inwardly, knowing that it was now only a matter of time before it began to rain. He kept following the dirt road until finally he spied something that made his heart leap. He took a quick look at his watch. It was a quarter to six.
Two hundred meters down an arrow-straight paved road, he saw an ornate wrought-iron military gate with a solitary black sentry box standing beside it. To its left was a whitewashed wall of about a man’s height, and it led off into the forest without any end in sight. Another wall on the opposite side led off diagonally into the forest as well.
Toni sprinted to a skidding halt in front of the gate only to find the sentry box empty.
The gate must open at six o’clock sharp, he realized as he slowly recovered his wind.
The avian chirping gradually grew to become a nuisance, and Toni saw a number and variety beyond count in flight, or pecking along the ground in ever closer proximity to him as he rested on a rock beside his pack.
Descent into Mayhem (Capicua Chronicles Book 1) Page 2
