“I’m on Nomad 247,” chants Dexter Keith to himself, in an attempt to clear his thoughts, as he clings to an asteroid tumbling through the vastness of the Near Oort cloud. The asteroid is approaching the pinnacle of its momentary lack of gravity.
“I’m in a combat situation on an asteroid in orbit around another asteroid identified as Nomad 246,” continues Keith as he feels his grip on the universe slipping. “I’m experiencing brief periods of micro-gravity brought on by their close orbiting bodies.”
“Damn straight again, Keith,” calls out Sergeant Collins. “You some kinda brain? I’m gonna recommend you for OCS! Now all you got to do is figure out why you’re down there.” Another wave of phase nausea, and Sergeant Collins turns away to direct verbal fire onto the nearby, and perpetually slacking, Johnson back in Georgia. Back in basic training. “Johnson! Get down and start knockin’ ’em out till I get tired!” In the red dirt of Georgia a year ago, Private Johnson drops to the ground and begins to execute the punitive push-ups, counting them out with feigned enthusiasm.
And back on Nomad 247, the Spiders, the mortal enemies of Private Dexter Keith and his squad, alien invaders come to destroy all humanity, are advancing. In the background noise of Keith’s combat helmet, the rest of the squad scream like children splashing in the waters of a long-forgotten collection of chlorine and water, cackling with calls of delight. His mother—this asteroid—pulls him closer as gravity resumes its embrace. All about him, technological mayhem, as both human and alien cut each other to shreds without prejudice or mercy. The asteroid, pulling him into itself as the dead and dying are flung off into the void, reminds Dexter Keith of that swimming pool and his mother’s arms. In the swimming pool of the universe, gravity is also love.
“Yeah, you’re some kind of super genius, Private Keith,” begins Sergeant Collins above the battle chatter of the dying squad. “Your parents musta paid good money for them genes. Now the big question is, grunt, what’chu gonna do now that you got knocked senseless by that phase grenade and your mind is wobbling back and forth between Nomad 247 and the past? Seems like a real important question right about now, especially since the enemy is advancing on your position. Might be time to fight back or do something, don’t you think?”
“Yeah,” thinks Private Dexter, “fight back, let them know who’s boss.” Gravity begins to let go again, ever so softly, and Private Keith sticks his head up above a black outcrop of deep space-hardened ice and nickel. The edge of the squash-shaped asteroid that is Nomad 247 tracks in his heads-up display, graphing and calculating the lip and contours ahead. Beyond the lip begins the gentle fall toward the waist of the squash, and the enemy gun emplacement firing on the Lexington.
“Damn Spiders musta thrown a grenade up here, trying to dislodge our position. We in the deep end now, Private Keith. Looks like we’re gonna have to repel an assault,” says Sergeant Collins.
“Trooper Keith, this is Doghouse, do you read me? Repeat…” The command net operator sounds distracted, bored, uninterested in the fate of Private Dexter Keith.
“Roger, roger, I read you crystal,” replies Keith in transmission voice. The helmet’s software recognizes his tone and broadcasts the reply on an authorized net.
“Private Keith, I show you as the only active friendly on Nomad two-four-seven, can you confirm?” Again, the tone is bored.
For a moment, Keith lays his helmeted head down on the rock and ice. He closes his eyes and concentrates on breathing. He knows he’s supposed to do this as gravity begins to disappear. But even the sound of his breath fades away as his stomach begins to float. He clings to the rocky surface of the pitching piece of nickel and ice known as Nomad 247 as it flings itself, end over end, through the void.
Johnson, Ferengetti, Reeves, Markowitz—all gone. The entire scout platoon wiped out within moments of jumping onto Nomad 247. And Sergeant Collins? He’s gone too.
“I ain’t gone, knucklehead. I’m still here, you stupid grunt,” roared Sergeant Collins.
“No, Sergeant, you’re dead too,” whispers Keith to a vast universe with a gift for loneliness.
“Listen up grunt, how about I crawl over to your position and show you how dead I am. You got to get back in the game, soldier. You’re Airborne—we’re Airborne, we don’t just roll up and die when those Spiders toss a grenade at us. We’re death from above! It’s time to start killing, grunt! Or are you just some ‘leg,’ waitin’ for orders? If so, why don’t you jes’ dig in and make yo’self comfortable.”
“I ain’t no leg,” whispers Keith, gritting his teeth as he dismisses the worst insult an Airborne Trooper can be called. A leg. A mere infantryman.
“Then good to go, Private Keith, Airborne! Right now you’re the only one of us Command can talk to. You’re also about to get yo’self overrun by Spiders. So here’s what we’re going to do. I’ll flank to their right and try to get them to shift fire. I want you to lob some chaff grenades past the lip. Those things will mess with their commo for a moment or two, and then, when gravity resumes, I want you to assault through their position. Roger?”
Private Dexter Keith feels his body trying to leave the asteroid, as once again the massive piece of space rock tumbles skyward. Out in space, he sees the Lexington taking heavy fire for a brief, dizzying second.
“Roger that, Private Keith?” barks Sergeant Collins again.
“Roger that,” intones Private Keith, blotting out thoughts of imminent death on a tumbling ball of ice and nickel. Alone and far from home.
“Say again, Private Keith. Your transmission is coming in broken and distorted.” It’s Doghouse, the comm operator aboard the Lexington.
“Command, I have a status update for our squad.” Private Keith reaches back along his web gear, searching for the magnetic clip dispenser that will release two of his six chaff grenades. “I have contact with Sergeant Collins. His communication and telemetry equipment seem to be malfunctioning, but he assures me he’s combat ready.”
“Be advised, Private Keith, that we are tracking multiple Spiders converging on your AO. Fire mission upon request.”
“Don’t let them use those damn cannons,” hisses Collins. “They’ll kill you, Keith. Just one of them heavy-caliber depleted-uranium rounds from the main rail guns will turn this whole rock to powder.”
“Negative, negative, Doghouse, do not, repeat, do not fire on our position. We are engaging the enemy.”
“Damn straight,” says Sergeant Collins. “Now, on my command, pick your butt up and attack, and make sure to use them grenades first, Super-Brain. Just like training back in Georgia.”
Private Keith hurls the two chaff grenades forward into the rising lip of Nomad 247, as the gentle hug of gravity returns. “Forty-five seconds before zero-G returns,” mumbles Keith to himself. Information from the Op Order that has survived the effects of the phase grenade. The chaff grenades seem to hang for a moment as he retinally cues his HUD to track them. Then with a deft flick of his eye reticule, he directs the grenades downward beyond the rapidly descending ledge of the asteroid. A second later, they disappear over the lip of his temporary horizon, and a moment after that, the faint crumple of aluminum foil can be heard in his ears as the comm channel picks up traces of their explosion. He leaps up and leans forward, running toward the falling lip of the tumbling asteroid. Above him, Nomad 246 falls toward the horizon, its scarred face suffering even more violent revolutions than those of Nomad 247.
Bounding over the lip, he encounters two Spiders picking their way forward. One cautiously holds a heavy zip gun between its two forearms, while the other carries a pistol and another phase grenade. The one with the heavy weapon has probably been watching the lip as they make their approach, but the suddenness of Keith bounding over the ledge has taken it completely by surprise. Keith’s HUD highlights the chaff grenades’ explosion radius farther downslope.
For a brief moment, the two Spiders and Private Keith do nothing, while Nomad 246 sinks queasily below the horizon o
f midnight ice. Then the Spider with the pistol begins to fire, rearing up on its back legs. The first shot goes wild, sizzling off into the void, and the next would surely tear a gaping hole in Keith’s battle gear and body armor. But even as the Spider aims for its next shot, depleted-uranium rounds spit forth from Keith’s autorifle in a brutal sewing machine of bright fury, ripping the two Spiders to shreds, and flinging their various parts, along with torn suit fragments, out into the void at the edge of the solar system.
Seconds later, gravity has disappeared, and Keith is grappling with disintegrating ice and crumbling rock. He clutches frantically at the brittle surface of the pitching asteroid as his mother whispers comfort, and murmurs a forgotten song to him, back in the deep end of that pool on that long-ago hot summer day. In front of him, at the far end of the rising landscape, a full cohort of Spiders, ignoring the loss of planetary embrace, scramble forward, their eight major limbs grappling with rock and ice effortlessly.
“Damn Spiders everywhere!” shouts Sergeant Collins.
“Damn Spiders everywhere,” thinks Keith. And now the phase nausea rushes at him again, intense like a swarm of softly buzzing bees. Turkey and grease in the air, Johnson doing push-ups near the pool’s edge, on the hottest day of summer at the city pool back in Oakland, California. Memories from the heart of the solar system, far from the edge where the Lexington now barely holds her ground, engaging the three Spider Hulks that twist and roll crazily above, in the spinning microcosm that is another struggle for life and death above Nomad 247.
Time bends like a reed and snaps as the single-mindedness of warfare commences. Was there a time before this? Will there be an “after”? The scout platoon, just like the Spider cohort, had deployed onto Nomad 247 only forty-five minutes earlier, sent in to secure the spinning piece of rock and ice for the tactical advantage it might prove itself to be. If gravity is love in the swimming pool of the universe, then what are time and its inherent memories? Tender mercies of things past in the relentless hell of a moment?
Sergeant Collins screamed, exhorted, cursed, and urged Keith on as he fought the Spiders, first using up all his depleted-uranium ammo, then his remaining grenades, and finally deploying the spring-loaded, industrial, diamond-bladed bayonet from his rifle. He slashed and hacked at the physically weaker Spiders, removing limbs and antennae, gouging out endless eyes, and feeling the rifle find purchase in the pulp beneath the mesh of their fibershell environment suits.
Chaos.
Anger.
Red murder.
Nomad 246 said “hello,” and “hello” again, like some jolly, ageless uncle that galloped above the battlefield. The Spider Hulks erupted in blue fire as their once-impenetrable point defense networks collapsed beneath the onslaught of the Lexington’s main guns and multiple launch system turrets.
Beyond that, the stars swam like children in a pool, laughing and beckoning on a hot, long-ago summer day that promised to never end.
“Damn straight,” said Sergeant Collins to the universe, and then he too was gone.
* * *
“What you’re experiencing,” said the psych officer during Private Dexter Keith’s last session at the VA, “is a form of PTSD. It’s called association cavitation.” Dexter Keith, now a civilian UberMart manager, focuses on those words as wave after wave of housewives, most trailing screaming children, brandish their PDAs in coupon mode at the harried checkers.
The store telemetry system has fritzed out due to solar activity, and now the Transactors aren’t recognizing the PDAs’ coupon signals. Beautiful women, bronzed and reinforced with all the latest offerings in cosmetic efficiency, snort and cackle among themselves as Dexter Keith works on the broken Telecomm box. Sweat streams down his jowly face in rivulets. He has gained more than a little weight since leaving the Expeditionary Corps.
Lately he hears Sergeant Collins cajoling and cursing at him in crisis situations, which now seem to be the norm for the newly promoted manager of UberMart, New Las Vegas.
At first it bothered him. He never wanted to be reminded of the horror of Nomad 247. He didn’t want to hear the screaming of that day anymore. The cries—and other, pulpier sounds—of both friend and foe had plagued him for his first six months back on Earth. As always, there was Sergeant Collins reminding him to “hang tough,” “gut it out,” and in time—someday—he, Dexter Keith, would get better. But ten years later, he was beginning to hear the voice of Sergeant Collins more and more often.
“It’s a minor side effect,” the kind young psych officer had assured him at the veterans’ hospital, “of your training.” The way the psych officer used the word “training” made it seem as though Private Dexter Keith’s long-lost instruction in basic infantry training had consisted of fighting with sticks and heavy rocks. “But the training programs today are much better. The Sergeant Collins program has been removed from service. The tendency for soldiers to hold on to Sergeant Collins caused some unexpected adjustment problems once they were returned from active duty.” Sorrowful warmth painted the smile he offered Dexter.
“He saved my life,” mumbled Dexter in reply.
“If it helps, there never was a Sergeant Collins. He was just a program written at WonderSoft to teach trainees, like yourself, how to fight and survive in space. From the day you first entered basic training, you were inundated with all kinds of subconscious programming to encourage you to respond to him. His African-American straight talk and his Mississippi mud accent were all contrived to make him seem both familiar and terrifying. When you simmed in Virtual he was always there, punishing you when you did wrong and rewarding you when you accomplished a task.
“It was thought,” droned the psych officer, “that if soldiers were ever isolated on the battlefield—overwhelmed, as it were—the Sergeant Collins program would kick in and give the soldier the illusion of help. A form of security, as it were.
“I know events that day were horrible and that you feel bad, but there are things to feel good about. Those days were a fight for our lives. I mean, I was still in elementary school, but I remember the war. It was a fight for the very existence of the human race. We were that close to going over the hill and into history. But what you did that day, along with the entire crew of the Lexington—and in fact, the whole effort of the human race—turned the tide. That’s something to be proud of. You did that, not Sergeant Collins.
“So just remember, when Sergeant Collins starts talking, it’s just association cavitation produced in a time of crisis or stress. It’s just a harmless medical condition brought on by the phase grenade injury you sustained, and the result of bad programming we didn’t have the time to test back in the early days of the war. It’s only a minor side effect. Ignore it, and in time it will probably go away. And if it doesn’t, I can write you a prescription for Blissadol.”
* * *
Now, back at the UberMart, petulant housewives are starting to mock him. He sees what they see, and in a way, he agrees with them. A fat man scrambling to meet their insatiable needs on one of the hottest days of the year, with everything he does going wrong, exploding in his face like a series of gags in some silent film. It’s almost laughable. It could be something from the early days of cinema if only it weren’t happening to him. It’s a comedy of errors—and sadly, it’s his life.
“Now stop that talk, Private Brain. You’re going to break my heart with all your bellyaching. Put it in gear, son, and get it done. Time’s a-wastin’,” barks Sergeant Collins from across the folds of Dexter Keith’s combat-fried brain and antique faulty combat programming.
“Excuse me,” says one platinum-blond, BlueChem-eyed housewife over her monstrous breasts. “Is there someone else in charge here? Someone who knows what they’re doing? I really have a lot of very important things to do besides sit here and watch you fumble with what seems to be a very simple procedure.”
“Tell her to eat depleted uranium and die, Private Keith,” hisses Sergeant Collins.
No can do,
Sergeant. Customer service is critical at UberMart, whispers Keith.
“Damn me, Private Keith, I never thought I’d see the day when one of my grunts ended up like this. Runnin’ an UberMart. I bet you think you’re somethin’ and all.”
No, Sergeant. Not at all.
“Well, we’ll see what we’ll see, but first you’d better extricate yo’self from this mess you seem to be in. What’chu gonna do, Private Keith?”
“Excuse me,” says Monster Breasts. “What’s your name and employee ID number? My husband golfs with the regional head of this crappy little store and…”
“Smack her around, Keith.”
No can do, Sarge.
“All right then, ignore her. She’s harmless. The most important thing right now is that you work the problem. Not the equipment. You know what I mean, young trooper. Just like a rifle malfunction. The equipment works; it’s just that there’s a problem somewhere in the system—and once you fix that problem, the equipment will work like its s’posed to. Roger?”
Roger that, Sergeant.
Keith finds the problem, and seconds later the Transactors go online. Housewives clap for themselves and say things like, “Honestly,” and, “It’s about time!” Keith smiles his fat man’s smile and mops the sweat from his forehead. Delora, the head checker, gives him a thumbs-up and a grateful victory smile. An honest smile, a good smile. A smile he thinks about late at night when he sits on his back porch in the cool breeze of the Martian night and thinks about not being alone anymore.
Later in the afternoon, on the loading dock out back, Dexter Keith smokes a cigarette and leans against the red sandstone wall.
“It’s days like today…” he thinks, but doesn’t finish.
“It’s days like today,” whispers Sergeant Collins out of the silence, “that make me proud to have trained such a fine soldier as yourself. You done good, son! You just been too hard on yourself lately. Don’t let things mess with your head.”
Synchronic: 13 Tales of Time Travel Page 11
