SS Elites (v5.0)

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  Elites

  June 13th, 2011

  Rowena runs the House, a place for homeless Sky veterans. The House, open only to the women who compose the Elite Squad, has only a few rules: No names, no details, no weapons. The problem? Anything can become a weapon—even a toilet bowl scrubber. Even a word. Especially a word. A word that could destroy both Rowena and her House.

  A science fiction short story by Hugo-award winning writer, Kristine Kathryn Rusch. Available for 99 cents on Kindle, Smashwords, Barnes & Noble, and in other e-bookstores.

  Elites

  Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  Published by WMG Publishing

  Copyright © 2010 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  The fight started over cleaning the toilet.

  It’s an old-fashioned porcelain job, swirling water, environmentally unsound. Grandfathered in because the building’s ancient, kept in place because we’re poor, we’re a non-profit, and we get the government to look the other way.

  A self-cleaner costs twice our monthly budget. A self-cleaner that doesn’t use water costs four times that.

  I don’t know how often I have to explain that to the troops. Not quite every day, even though someone has toilet duty every day, but damn close. Every time a new recruit stumbles into the House, I find myself discussing toilets, old-fashioned plumbing, and even older stoves.

  I lead this group of misfits. I’m a vet myself. Two tours each in two different wars. Sixteen medals, give or take, all lost or tossed, and at least that many wounds.

  The scars remain.

  I found that even though the military gives you memory blocks for the post-traumatic stress, PTSD still finds a way to rear its ugly head. Only worse than the olden days.

  Now you don’t know what it is you’re reliving.

  It’s scary as hell.

  The House is a remodeled Victorian monstrosity. Once upon a time, it housed a single family. A single, very wealthy family. Then it became a duplex, then a series of apartments, then college housing, then an abandoned mess. It had been condemned when I found it about fifteen years ago.

  I had the bright idea that restoring the thing would restore my sanity. I managed to buy it, discovered two vets living inside it already—squatting being the more accurate term—and together we ripped and tore and demolished, learning it was easier to tear down than to build. It took us a day to remove a wall and three weeks to build one right.

  By the end of the first month, we were actually friends. By the middle of the second, we started to talk about our nightmares. By the end of the third, we finally learned each other’s full names.

  Names are a big thing. You can be traced by name. Someone can look up your identity card, find your family, send you home.

  We don’t do that here. Privacy is an issue for our vets. Even when the government tried to tie that last grant to the House’s records, we fought.

  We went to court.

  We actually won.

  Which has nothing to do with the toilet battle. Zoomer gets me to stop that. She’s six-one, going to fat, with a long scar that runs from her left breast to her navel, a scar she refused to fix. She goes shirtless half the time, shocks the hell out of the boys who come in for the annual code inspections—fire, insects, population. We always give those boys numbers, never give ’em names. Hell, one year, we weren’t even gonna give them the names of the bugs.

  Zoomer stands on the balls of her toes, leaning into my office, but never entering. My office is the former front parlor, divided in half. The front half has my desk and my book collection, the back half my bed and the e-readers I really use to consume literature. I sneak back there in the dark, turn on the screen light, and read text myself rather than have the reader do it for me. I feel like I’m on the front, in the only safe place out there, my bunker, deep within the ground.

  The shrink says I gotta get past that. I plan to — someday.

  “’Wena,” Zoomer says, “they’re at it again.”

  Zoomer’s the only one who calls me Wena. Everyone else calls me Boss. My real name is Rowena, but no one uses that unless they don’t know me. It’s a good double-check.

  “Toilet or stove?” I ask.

  “Toilet,” she says. “Suzanne’s using the scrubber like a stick.”

  “Fuck.” I stand up quickly. No one considers the germs — and you’d think they would, especially the Sky Vets. The Sky Vets fought our first space war in the Moon colonies, and biological agents became a big factor. How big we’ll never know because that’s classified, but the Sky Vets who came all the way home have some interesting diseases.

  The government says everyone allowed back to Earth was quarantined, tested, and found clean.

  Yeah, right.

  The toilet in question is in the back of the House, in what used to be the entry to the kitchen. I know this without asking; if there’s ever a fight about cleaning, it happens in that tiny hallway or worse yet, in that mean little room that never quite loses the smell of piss.

  I could’ve followed the sounds. The closer I get, the louder voices grow—yelling obscenities, cheering, clapping in approval.

  These women love fights.

  I used to let them do it too, without interference, until the repair bills got too much. Then the House shrink told me about the added toll of repeated trauma—the fights would often replicate something that happened Out There—and I realized that no matter how much steam got blown off, the fights weren’t worth the expense.

  Still, I wished for those old days sometimes.

  Like right now, as I push my way past women bunched up three together across the hallway. The place smells of grease, sweat, and old blood. The closer I get, the more those smells get replaced with the stench of backed-up sewer.

  I see the toilet scrubber before I see the fighters. It flails through the air like a tree branch in a windstorm. Women are leaning forward, urging their candidate on. The sounds slowly die as I make my way to the front.

  Suzanne is bent over her victim, a new recruit—Darla, Dopa, Demmi—some dumb “D” name. The recruit’s curled up in the fetal, her face spattered with what I hope is water. She’s whimpering.

  I wade in, shove Suzanne against the wall, and wrench the scrubber from her. “You want to tell me what this is about?”

  Suzanne’s height matches my five-five, but she has broader shoulders and a powerful mean streak. Not as powerful as mine, though. When I get me an anger on, no one in the House can take me, not even the big girls.

  “Bitch shoved my face in the john,” Suzanne says.

  That’s when I realize the front part of her hair is wet. The back part isn’t. I’d blamed that on sweat initially, but the smell tells me otherwise.

  “Why’d she do that?” I ask.

  Suzanne shrugs. “Ask her.”

  I glance over my shoulder. Debbie or Danni or Diane is still whimpering on the floor. I’m not even sure she knows the fight is over.

  I turn back to Suzanne. “I’m asking you.”

  Suzanne’s lips thin. She’s pressing them together hard, and I know she’s not answering any of my questions any time soon.

  “Suzanne’s been taking her ration cards.”

  I can’t identify the voice, but it comes from behind me. All of the women are staring at us, as if they haven’t heard a thing.

  “Is that true?” I ask.

  Suzanne’s dark eyes meet mine. “I been denied.”

  Ration cards buy a lot of things: medication, clothing, the occasional outside meal. Most of the troops don’t use them, though, because it marks the bearer as former military, and that’s not the most popular thing these days.

  “So?” I say. “Someone can loan you theirs.”

 
“Thought that’s what she was doing,” Suzanne says.

  “But that’s not the case, huh?”

  Suzanne shrugs. I want to hold those shoulders down, just so that Suzanne won’t have the nonchalant option.

  “Ask her,” she says again.

  “I will,” I say. “When the shrink’s done with her.”

  Then I hand the scrubber back to Suzanne. “When you finish this john, do the second and third floor johns. You can do the showers too. Make sure you take one when you’re through.”

  “Hey,” Suzanne says. “The rules say no more than one toilet a week.”

  “The rules also say no violence in the House.”

  “She dunked me.”

  “And you should’ve reported her, not beat her.” I take Suzanne by those misbehaving shoulders and push her toward that horrible half bath. “Get busy.”

  Suzanne scowls, but knows better than to argue. No one fights with me. They don’t raise their voices to me or their scrub brushes. They know they’re here on my suffrage.

  This is my House and I run it as I see fit. I’ve tossed women on the street before.

  Other vet’s houses, they try to accommodate everyone. But I treat all the troops in this place like the military they once were. If they don’t measure up, they get kicked down a rank. If they still don’t do the work, they get my equivalent of a Dishonorable Discharge—my boot in their ass, my hand in their pocket as I take their key, my voice in their ear as I tell them never to darken my doorway again.

  Every once in a while, some Important Person gives me a citation or a key to a city or some other kind of Important Recognition for the “good work” that I’m doing. No one else rehabs vets like I do. No one else has as high a success rate. No one else really tries.

  What shocks all the regular folk is that I’m working with the Hardcore. They’re called Elites in the recruitment vids, and when you get to Basic, you get told only the best qualify for the Elite Squad.

  They don’t tell you what the best is, though. The best isn’t the smartest or even the strongest. The best is the fiercest—the biggest do-or-die in the entire camp, the person who gets such a mad-on that she will slaughter fifteen enemy before she realizes she’s even activated her weapon.

  The Elites get chosen for the last bastion of war, the only part that resembles what our ancestors knew of battle—hands-on combat. Most of the battles nowadays are fought at great distances—heat-seeking weapons, smart drones, bot warriors. But for clean-up and delivery, for reconnaissance and ground-clearance, nothing beats troops on the ground.

  Those troops on the ground gotta be tough. Tough, indestructible and fucking ruthless.

  Once upon a time, seems the human race used men for that. Seems too that that turned out to be a mistake.

  Here’s how it was explained to me:

  Several generations ago, the military let women join up. Women were non-coms at first; everyone was afraid their delicate sensibilities couldn’t handle the violence of war.

  Then warfare tech made a lot of things equal—equal weapon strength, equal machinery—and someone assumed the women could handle some combat.

  But it was the biologists who changed everything. They found a way to enhance the natural self-defense reaction so that the soldiers in the thick of things became even more violent, even more determined to survive.

  That still would’ve kept the men in the forefront if it weren’t for some dog—or so the story goes—who went all feral defending her puppies. The scientist who saw it had this theory that mother-love made women even more ferocious than men in defense mode.

  The scientist raise some hormone levels, altered adrenaline responses, made a few other alterations in the soldiers who volunteered for the experiments and, the rumors go, the men didn’t survive.

  The women ripped them to shreds.

  Literally.

  I’ve never seen the literature, though I’ve looked. I’ve never seen the studies, even though I’ve been searching for them for years.

  What I do know is that ever since I got my booster when they approved me for the Elites, my emotions are stronger than they ever were before. And the darker the emotion, the more it controls me.

  In the early days, I couldn’t have broken up a fight, not without breaking the fighters. I somehow saw them as a threat not just to me, but to everything I held dear.

  Hence all the medals and all the tours. Whenever I came home, I’d react “inappropriately” to “minor stimuli.”

  Then I got too old to re-enlist. The best thing to do, I figured, was stay on the streets, get uninvolved in life.

  There’re lots of Elites just like me out there. Some who actually went home and then went berserk over a “minor infraction” like the cat from next door digging in the flower bed. Most held off the reaction (the few who didn’t are serving time now) and lit out for the cities, places where they wouldn’t ever feel at home.

  That’s why there’s so many of us on the streets.

  But I found the House and two more Elites who lived the same way I did, and we began to realize that there was more to living than survival, and more to survival than violence.

  It took us a while, but eventually we figured the way the Elites survive in the field is simple: they have structure and discipline.

  No Elite goes kamikaze on her squad because she knows that she’s safe. She’s given a protected hole in the ground, told she’d be called on when she was needed, and pointed in the right direction when the time came.

  And that was how it worked.

  Took me years to figure out why.

  Command was scared of us. They had created monsters, managed to hold us on a short leash, but knew if that leash ever broke, the only ones who survived would be the small, enhanced women of child-bearing years.

  That leash works—not just for them. But for me.

  ***

  The D Girl’s name is Davi. I’m not sure if it’s her real name, but it’s the name she gave when she arrived two days ago. Her entrance interview was mostly about her service—Sky Squad, Elite (of course), tattoos to prove it–, three years on the streets, hints that her family might’ve thrown her out, might even be dead.

  Hard to tell with Elites until they’re ready to tell you. Sometimes they never do. Sometimes only the shrink gets in, and then we never hear what the real deal is.

  We do group sessions, mostly encounter stuff, trying to pull the PTSD memories out of the block. We’ve had some luck with that. It gets rid of an Elite’s hair-trigger.

  We’ve gotten some funding to reduce hormone levels, try to undo the biological changes, but we’ve had almost no success with that. That’s like trying to make the body forget motherhood. It don’t happen. The changes are too profound.

  So in addition to the blocks and the group stuff, we do a lot of self-control work, and sometimes that’s enough to reintegrate a woman back into society.

  The thing about Davi is I get the sense I’ve seen her before.

  Zoomer cleaned her up. Anti-bacterials on her skin and clothes, a super-hot shower, and a clean robe from my stash. Zoomer left her sleeping in my office, partly because Zoomer knew Davi’s my responsibility now, partly because we don’t dare let her back into her room—not until we’re sure Suzanne’s gonna stay calm.

  Davi’s still asleep, still whimpering, and I sit at my desk watching her, wondering if I should call the shrink. We actually have two: a soft-hearted, soft-handed, sensitive male straight out of shrink school, and Carla.

  Carla’s the best. She’s former Elite, and part-owner of the House. She’s one of the original three. She’s the one who led our discussions, and realized that the PTSD blockers just blocked the memory, not the response. Years later, she made her career on that—some series of papers in the right venues, talks all over the Earth and in Moon Base too—and now she’s working on a real cure for PTSD—not blocks, not memory removal (which doesn’t work anyway—the brain rebuilds the neural links, unless too mu
ch is removed and then there’s no real brain left), not drug therapy.

  But she still comes here, she says because she needs the contact for her research, but mostly because she’s wired as tight as the rest of us, and only here does she remember that, and manage to hold on.

  She’s taken our toughest cases, and brought them back to society.

  She’s a goddamn miracle worker, and the House wouldn’t be such a success without her.

  But we have a deal. She comes in twice a week, generally Tuesdays and Wednesdays (leaving the other five days for travel and research and teaching the occasional class), and I only call her for emergencies when they merit her special skills.

  That whimpering says Carla to me.

  But I know Carla. She’ll yell if I don’t try the other shrink first.

  ***

  The other shrink’s name is Robbie. He’s not bad. In fact, he’s good for a lot of these women, especially the younger ones who got out before the anger and violence hardened them into something not quite human. Some of them see him as a son, some as a husband, others as a nebbish father figure—all in desperate need of defense.

  In those women, he brings up the good emotions: love and warmth and gentleness, the emotions that supposedly need defending, the ones that get forgotten in years of Elite work.

  But for the hardcore, he’s just one more victim waiting to be chewed.

  I can’t tell you how many times I’ve rushed into his office, and pulled him out just as the blood starts flying.

  I don’t know why he comes back. I can’t ask him. I’m one of the hardcore. I see him as a victim. Every time he walks into a room, I shake my head and hope that he manages to walk out alive.

  Carla explained his dynamic to me. She explained why he’s so damn important to the House, and why she needs him as much as the recruits do.

  She can’t do the soft stuff.

  I get all that. I probably would’ve gotten it eventually on my own. I just don’t know what he gets out of it, and even though both he and Carla have tried to explain it to me, it doesn’t stick.

  The shrink—my shrink, who isn’t on the premises, who’s at the V.A. and has been my hand-holder since before I bought the House—says it won’t stick because it means something to me, something deep, something that may be buried in one of my blocks.