by Scott Moon
“Is your armor damaged?” Priest asked as hellfire and damnation burst from a ridge to devastate the front ranks of the Void Troll advance.
“No,” she said. “I just can’t.”
Priest thought McCraw was crying as she stood protectively over the downed lieutenant and fired her weapon into the tree line.
Everything became confused. All he could think as he carried Lacy over his shoulder was how light she was and how he had speed-taped her helmet back together, knowing she would suffocate even if she somehow survived the heavy handed first aid. The damage to her face wouldn’t even register in his mind. He thought she had three arms, one leg, and her armor seemed to be on backward.
Other casualties scrolled across his visor. He didn’t see McCraw listed and wondered if that was a good thing. Frenchie’s name came up with a ridiculous medical abbreviation for chronic nausea and he ignored it like he ignored all the others. Running with an officer on his shoulder proved to be exponentially more difficult as he went uphill despite his Marauder Recon Armor.
“Priest to command, 1st Platoon is combat ineffective. Falling back in earnest. Request evacuation.”
“Command to Zulu Recon Company, the 343rd is all in for the rest of the mission, planetary assault in progress. The 909th and 911th Army Rangers are deploying to flank and enfilade the enemy lines. Hold on; this is about to get real.”
“Alpha Squad,” Priest grunted as he ran between hastily constructed firing positions he didn’t recognize. He didn’t know who to contact and his mind took a dump. This wasn’t his first combat action and wasn’t even the worst, yet all he could do was move and hope someone was covering him.
No one from his squad or platoon answered.
“Priest, this is Travis. I sent everyone from ZRC to the rear. Keep moving until a medic finds you,” a voice said.
He couldn’t put a face to the familiar-sounding voice. Something bit his lower left leg, too small to be a Void Troll weapon and heading the wrong direction to be friendly fire, he thought.
A celebratory voice slipped into his ear with the distinctive clarity of a team that was broadcasting from inside an extraction transport ship. “We have the doctor. Once we hand him off, we’re back in it with you. Marauders, hoorah!”
A moment later, the familiar bustle of a Marauder forward base surrounded Priest.
“I puked a little,” Frenchie said.
Still holding Lacy over his shoulder, he turned to see Frenchie sitting with a medic. Vomit streaked his helmet where filters had purged a prodigious amount of his stomach fluid onto the exterior of his armor. McCraw stood right behind Priest, bent at the waist with her hands on her knees to catch her breath. Her comms were off line. He hadn’t realized she was still with him for the last half mile.
Medics pulled Lacy from his shoulder and put her on a stretcher.
“Is she alive?”
“Sure, Gunny. Get yourself checked out,” a medic said without looking at him.
“I am counting this mission as a win,” wheezed Frenchie.
McCraw punched him in the face, knocking him over the junior medic treating him for injuries that were more serious than nausea.
“Marauders recovered the doctor and started a war,” Priest said.
Corporal McCraw nodded as Priest tried to sit but missed whatever he thought was underneath him and fell on his ass.
2
Siren
THE Connelly orphans needed heroes more than most. Kevin, the second oldest of four, dreamed of military service — of glorious escape from a life that was both hard labor and easy routine. Sleep was not his friend. He spent each night fantasizing about charging into battle with friends and heroes and shades of his grandfather Brandon O’Donnell Connelly, only to find nightmares he couldn’t fight off.
He never spoke about Grandfather Brandon, not with his older brother who was now the head of household, master of the single room apartment where the Connellys lived. By any definition, Kevin was a man. He could leave and start his own family, find a job on one of the solar wind farms orbiting Earth, apply to a university, or run with a neighborhood gang.
He stayed with his older brother Arthur and his younger siblings, the twins. Menial jobs kept him close to home and ready to fight his brother’s battles even when he didn’t agree with the how or why of Arthur’s fantastic fury. At night, he dreamed of his hero and wished he were like the honorable gentleman. When his imagination and his body gave out, he fell into an exhausted sleep.
Nightmares came like clockwork. He didn’t remember much in the morning. Fighting the Connelly dreams, his grandfather had explained one morning to a five-year-old version of Kevin, only made the headaches worse.
“Just make sure you can force yourself into action the moment you awake,” his grandfather had told him.
Kevin remembered the day as the last time he saw the sun, even though that was not literally true. For some reason, he had his grandfather all to himself for an entire afternoon. They played war games in the park with toy guns carved from soap. Kevin Connelly knew with the conviction of his infallible five-year-old self what he would do with his life.
He never saw Grandfather Brandon again. The reason for the outing had been simple. Kevin’s mother had been fighting a losing battle in the hospital.
His grandfather volunteered for a combat mission behind enemy lines after the doctors failed to save his daughter-in-law.
Long ago, humanity had united and built starships and other technology to explore and colonize distant star systems. Unity lasted less than a decade after the first habitable world was found. Hundreds of Earth nations now maintained galactic fleets. A small country on Earth might also have its own planet somewhere else. Soldiers as skilled as Kevin’s grandfather were welcome to reenlist in whichever national, international, or interstellar force was offering the best deal, but he had always remained loyal to the United Nations of America — especially during the bad times.
Kevin Connelly jolted from his sleeping pallet, gasping for air, muscles clenched for an attack that was in his mind and already invisible behind a blinding headache. There were two sources of weak light in the room, the glowing ember of a bootleg candlewick and the amorphous gray light of the Moon on the other side of a thunderstorm pierced by lightning. Taking his first deep breath since the nightmare ended, he twisted on the pallet without getting up. He looked right and left, saw empty blankets, and resisted panic.
The hazy nightmare from moments ago crushed the back of his neck like a hydraulic vise. He sucked air through his nose and across his teeth, darting his vision toward windows and doors, in search of danger.
Without a word, he threw off his scratchy blanket just as clouds broke outside the window. Silver light cut through the safety plastic. He saw lights in the tenth floor apartment across from his apartment, wondering how his anonymous neighbors could afford the electricity with honest work and fair power rations.
After a titanic pause only possible for gods and North American storm systems, the rain crashed against the window, plunging the scene into darkness.
“Arthur!” he said, knowing his older brother was probably down the hall at his girlfriend’s family’s apartment.
His big brother wasn’t his concern. Arthur was a grown man, more than strong enough to head the family and do whatever he wanted so long as he showed up to handle police, gangs, and rival families. Kevin worried about the twins, Ace and Amanda-Margaret Connelly. The family domicile was a single room with all the grandeur of a terminally poor family of orphans. Ace and Amanda were gone. There was no place for the teenagers to hide in the dark room.
He revived the candle and shielded it with one hand. Like many residents of Tower Building 595, they had “modified” the safety window to admit fresh air. Candles were illegal, expensive, and the only way to have light after curfew. For several heartbeats, he considered whether he should risk re-lighting it in the deflected gusts. The truth was obvious. He would only search the r
oom to feel better.
Wet wind tortured the outside of the window and created a fine mist through the homemade corner screen that gave him chills.
Methodically as a factory worker, he searched the room with suppressed emotion and ruthless efficiency. The voice of his father, more of an idea than an actual sound in his head, walked him through the steps to calm his thoughts and control his pain. Long ago, before his mother gave up, his father smiled sadly and sang the pain and the nightmares away. Kevin remembered — would never forget either parent.
He knew he should be thankful. His nightly misery was far less than the youngest of his twin siblings. Ace trembled after his nightmares. The intensity and irrationality of his behavior increased as he approached manhood, bringing all of his siblings to tears as he screamed himself hoarse and fought invisible creatures. That drove Arthur to spend more and more time at his girlfriend’s apartment down the hall.
Kevin pulled aside his little brother’s pallet covers almost reverently, imagining Amanda holding Ace as she turned her sleepy smile upward in the grim, struggling moonlight.
“Good girl, sister,” Kevin would have said. “I didn’t hear you get up.”
“You never do.” She would pause and stroke her twin’s hair like he was a child much younger than she was. “Bad dreams never leave him, but he sleeps when I hold him.”
Kevin wanted the conversation to be real and wished he could see both of them, even if he was angry at being woken up by Ace’s hysteria and panic. The twins couldn’t be gone. He hadn’t really considered what it meant, other than the sensation of dread in his gut.
Balling his fists, then stretching open his fingers, he arched his back and rolled his neck, expressing all of his lanky strength. He felt his height and his broad shoulders as he breathed like his father had taught him years ago. Be ready, son. Fear nothing but the shame of giving up.
A second search, quicker this time — energetic and grim and futile — led him to staring through the window at the city below. His hands remembered blankets he had shaken as though his quarry were small enough to disappear in the folds. He sensed the high, utilitarian ceiling of the room and watched the dreamlike mist swirling from the window vent in the corner. This couldn’t be real.
Ace and Amanda couldn’t be gone. They never left, never ran away, never disobeyed Arthur’s Draconian rules and curfews.
I must be dreaming, he thought. People don’t vanish from 595, not from the tenth floor.
All of life’s most important lessons came from his elders, and he missed them terribly despite the years. His father taught him to master his mind and his body; face each crisis with calm determination. His mother taught him all things practical; list making and getting things done. His grandparents inspired him to courage. Now that he had searched the meager Connelly domicile and faced the desperate truth, a plan grew in his mind.
He considered details, wrestled with fear and anger, and watched the streets. Perhaps a childish part of his twenty-year-old body hoped to see Ace and Amanda-Margaret Connelly waving from the rain-swept sidewalk, street level neon sparkling on wet skin and wide smiles.
Clouds retreated across the city all the way to the horizon, which was a wall of even taller and more massive buildings. This place was not so much Greater Kansas City as it was all of Kansas, the space industry capital of the world. Streetlights stitched the roads and bridges. Safety lights warned aircraft away from building tops. Neon street signs illuminated the ground level and second floor of building fronts. At major intersections, there were digital screens sharing time with governmental announcements, news, and advertising sequences.
A line of armored vehicles moved down the center of the roadway. Cars and pedestrians moved aside and waited. The soldiers deployed into defensive formations, then searched the area in squads. Kevin drank in the vision despite his agitation.
Behind the Starship Army Corps soldiers, several police officers wearing tactical gear followed. The SAC belonged to the Starship Corps of the United Nations of America. The Starship Corps included the Starship Marine Corps, Starship Army Corps, Starship Pilot Corps, and Starship Civil Peace Corps. Kevin was probably the only person in the building aware of the distinction.
His heart raced. He had seen soldiers in the city, but not often and not recently. They came for riot control or when a VIP gave a speech. This was different. The SAC soldiers were looking for someone.
Moisture rimmed Kevin’s eyes, causing his carefully controlled breathing to hitch. He’d do just about anything to follow in Grandfather Brandon’s footsteps, wear the uniform of a Starship Marine Corps officer, and stand proud before the nation’s enemies and detractors on land or sea, in the air or in space. Thinking of better days when eight Connellys — four kids and four adults — gathered for Thanksgiving made him breathtakingly happy and heartbreakingly sad at the same time. Memories, for better or worse, came to life when he imagined his grandfather in uniform.
3
Brother
KEVIN looked up, sensing the lack of drones — which were the lowest level of air traffic and the most densely mobile, moving in synchronized rows and layers. Large and small, drones populated three levels above the rooftops of the highest buildings. There were personal, business, and governmental drones of every possible design.
Above the mechanical haze were commercial and private aircraft, mostly sound-dampened helicopters. Military aircraft dominated the top level, operating by a different set of rules from the rest of the populace. He had never met a soldier or a civilian who had been in the air. That took money and prestige. It was the stuff of action movies. Most people walked or rode the rails in trains much closer to, or under, the surface.
He had seen soldiers before but had never seen the sky clear of vehicles — not with a storm leaving a clear sky in its wake.
Far above, satellites and spaceports twinkled like brand new stars in the sky. Beyond everything was the tunnel-filled Moon rivaling Earth for industrial importance.
Excitement gave way to worry and melancholy. Ace would want to see this. The entire family should be competing for the best spot at the window.
“What the hell, Arthur,” he muttered, turning from the window and striding for the door. Outside, he took three steps before returning to activate the lock. The Connelly family had nothing to steal, but no one in TB 595 left a door unsecured.
Searching the featureless hallway required only a glance. He would have been amazed and relieved to find Ace and Amanda waiting outside. The only time this happened was on the occasions Kevin returned home to find his brother entertaining Ruby McGuire or some other girl inside the one-room apartment.
Rare.
Arthur never brought a girlfriend home unless they were both drunk.
Unlike the interior of the apartments, the hallway was lit at the expense of government-subsidized landlords. The cheap light-emitting diodes were small, high up, and surrounded by theft-proof frames. A smart person avoided looking at the retina-piercing bulbs. Harsh lights meant harsh shadows on concrete walls holding paint fifty years past its gray-green prime. The surface of the floor was rubberized carpet — indestructible, dreary, and never clean. Sure there were crews that pushed scrubbing machines over the surface, but no one believed they did more than earn the janitors a salary.
He stood for a moment in front of the door labeled McGuire. Unlike most of the residences in Tower Building 595, this door was painted maroon with the family name stenciled in careful letters. He wasn’t sure where they found paint or how they could afford it, but at least once a month, a member of the McGuire family cleaned the door and painted over vandalism. There was a reason for their pride. Such a large family was extravagant. He didn’t understand why they put on pretenses.
There wasn’t a member of the McGuire clan he didn’t like. His brother didn’t deserve Gwyneth “Ruby” McGuire as a girlfriend. Right now, he didn’t think his older brother deserved anything. Ace and Amanda-Margaret were missing and the h
ead of the family was playing house with a girl he did not intend to marry.
After three loud knocks, Kevin pushed on the door without result.
Ruby’s father and mother were small people who worked in the computer industry. That was one reason they could afford seven children and paint their door in defiance of neighborhood vandalism. The extravagance frustrated Kevin, but he wasn’t worried about that now. Every passing moment fed his desperation to learn the whereabouts of Ace and Amanda. The fact that his brother was missing as well only frustrated him. For a moment, he considered the possibility that whatever evil had befallen his twin siblings might also have taken his older brother.
It was hard to imagine Arthur Brandon Connelly as the victim of anything. He was shorter than Kevin, but thick with muscle and the physical maturity of full manhood. His older brother was the head of the household and had been for a long time.
One of his rules was that Kevin stop sharing food with his younger siblings based on the reality that Arthur and Kevin needed their strength to fight off police, gangs, and rival families.
Arthur wasn’t all bad. He wasn’t the villain Kevin sometimes thought him to be. In a neighborhood as rough as TB 595, hard living made hard rules. His brother never left food on a plate and constantly worked to strengthen himself. Kevin divided his into thirds, ate one, and gave the other portions to the twins.
He wished Arthur wasn’t a selfish jerk. Their parents had wanted them to go to school — something he had forgotten about until the twin siblings became old enough to study the publicly available government courses. He tried to catch up but would always consider Ace and Amanda smarter and better than he was. So now he prepared to face his brother, who was shorter than him by several inches but many times stronger.
In moments like these, he felt he was weaker than his older brother and dumber than his younger siblings.
He clenched his teeth when Ruby McGuire’s parents opened the door, not that he was waiting for an invitation. The domicile was enormous by neighborhood standards, containing three rooms, not including bathroom and kitchen area. All five of the cubes were small and overcrowded. Ruby wasn’t the only McGuire offspring to welcome guests on a regular basis.
