2014 Campbellian Anthology

by Various

  “There goes ten dollars,” she says around the mouthful of food.

  I’m sure they’ll make us sweat for every bite later on, but right now I am resolved to enjoy my meal and stuff as many calories into myself as possible without throwing up. The food alone made the signing up worth the effort, and if all the meals in the military are like this, I’ll cheerfully jump through whatever hoops they put up.

  • • •

  After lunch, Sergeant Gau walks us over to a warehouse full of military clothes and gear. The equipment issue works much like the chow line. We file past the issuing stations in a single column.

  At the first station, the surly-looking attendant pulls a large rucksack and an even larger duffel bag from a stack and tosses them both onto the counter in front of me. There are scuff marks on the heavy canvas, the olive-drab color is faded in spots, and I can see the rectangular line of pulled-up stitching where the previous owner’s name tag was removed from the outer flap of the rucksack.

  The rest of the gear is used as well, ranging in condition from merely scuffed to nearly unserviceable. At one of the stations, they hand me a folding shovel and a utility knife. The blade of the knife shows the marks of hundreds of sharpenings. The folding shovel used to have a blade coated in olive-drab paint, but most of the paint has come off, and the edges of the shovel blade are nicked. It seems like they’re issuing us mostly stuff that’s good enough for one more issue cycle before being scrapped.

  They measure us for our uniforms and then give each of us several sets of fatigues. Those are used as well, but I am happy to see that at least the underwear and socks seem to be brand new. I guess there are limits even to government frugality.

  “Those are yours to keep,” Sergeant Gau says when he sees me inspecting the new pairs of knee-high gray socks, checking them off on my “Received Equipment” list, and stowing them in my duffel bag.

  “When you wash out, you get to take your socks and underwear with you. Nobody would want to wear them after you anyway. Consider those a souvenir of your short life in the military.”

  We spend the afternoon filling our rucksacks and duffel bags: uniforms, rain gear, equipment pouches, helmets, combat boots, chemical-warfare protection kits, running shoes, shower sandals, sewing kits, and a bunch of other articles of unknown purpose. When we finally clear the last station, it’s late in the afternoon, and we are each weighed down with a rucksack and a bag that probably weigh a hundred pounds together. Some of the smaller members of our platoon are swaying under the load as we assemble again in front of the building. Marching us to our quarters with a hundred pounds of gear seems the perfect opportunity for a conditioning exercise, but Sergeant Gau has a bus waiting for us.

  We are quartered in a large, flat-roofed building that stands in a long row of identical buildings. The only way to tell them apart is to look at the signs over each entrance, where a large screen lists the numbers of the platoons housed within. We share our building with five other platoons. The central staircase splits the building in half; each floor has a large room to each side of the staircase. When Sergeant Gau leads us into our platoon bay, we see two rows of bunk beds, one on each side of the room. There are two lockers in front of each bunk bed, facing out into the center aisle.

  “There are name tags on your bunks,” Sergeant Gau says as we file into the platoon bay. “You will find your bunk and place your equipment bags on top of the mattress. Execute.”

  There’s a bit of disorder as thirty-three recruits fan out to find their respective bunks, but we find that the order is alphabetical. There is a small stack of sheets, a blanket, and a pillow at the head of each bunk.

  My bunkmate turns out to be the dark-haired girl from our lunch table. We give each other encouraging smiles as we haul our gear onto our beds. She has the top bunk, purely by alphabetic proximity—she’s HALLEY D; I’m GRAYSON A.

  We spend another hour unpacking our gear and putting everything into our lockers according to Sergeant Gau’s direction. He stands in the middle of the platoon bay, with one recruit’s bags emptied on the floor in front of him. He holds up one item at a time, calls out its designation, and waits for us to find the same item in our own piles of stuff. When he is satisfied that we’re all holding up the same thing, he tells us where to place it in our lockers.

  When all our gear is stowed, Sergeant Gau has us open our lockers again and take out our issue sweat suits and running shoes. We change into the suits, and for the first time the platoon looks uniform in appearance.

  “Take your civilian clothes and stow them away in the bottom drawer on the right side of your locker. Most of you will need them again soon.”

  When all our equipment is stowed in our lockers, Sergeant Gau leads us to the chow hall. Dinner is no less overwhelming than lunch, and we eat ourselves into a stupor once more: grilled cheese sandwiches, beef stew, three different kinds of fruit.

  After dinner we’re back in our quarters, where we find personal data pads on our bunks. Each of them has a label above the top of the screen, bearing the last name of its new owner. The PDPs are of a kind I’ve never seen. They’re large and clunky, with monochrome screens that look like a throwback to a bygone century. They have translucent polymer covers that fold over the screen for field use, and the whole thing is perfectly sized for the side pocket of the fatigues they issued us earlier today.

  “Not exactly the latest technology,” my bunkmate muses in a low voice as she inspects her own data pad. “I’ve had better stuff in elementary school.”

  “Those are your new companions,” Sergeant Gau says from the center aisle of the platoon bay. “They may not look like much, but they’re tough and reliable. Familiarize yourselves with your PDPs, and call up lesson 1.001, titled ‘Enlisted and Officer Ranks.’”

  We sit in two rows along the center aisle, calling up the lesson as directed, and Sergeant Gau has us repeat the rank structure of the armed forces from top to bottom. When we have prayed the litany a few dozen times, Sergeant Gau has us turn off our PDPs and repeat the process from memory another few dozen times. When he is satisfied that we have the rank structure memorized, he makes us stow our PDPs.

  “Now,” he says. “Let’s see which one of you people actually listened to me earlier today. Assemble in front of the building, in three rows. Execute.”

  We look at each other with budding dread. We’ve all stuffed ourselves at both lunch and dinner—more so at dinner, since we didn’t have to exercise all day—and my stomach is still uncomfortably full. Just the thought of running or doing push-ups is making me nauseous.

  “That means now, people,” Sergeant Gau shouts, and we all rush to file out of the platoon bay.

  • • •

  When we’re all assembled in three untidy rows, Sergeant Gau leads us down the road. We start out walking, but after a few steps Sergeant Gau falls into a trot.

  “You want to keep up,” he says. The way he words the statement makes clear that it’s not a suggestion.

  • • •

  Sergeant Gau’s pace is not particularly fast, but after ten minutes my sides are hurting and my stomach bounces up and down like a badly balanced counterweight. We’re groaning and coughing as we try to keep pace with Sergeant Gau. He’s running in fatigues and combat boots, and not even breathing hard.

  After thirty minutes, the first members of the platoon stagger to the side of the road and puke out their dinners in hot chunks. I can feel the bile in the back of my throat as my stomach wants to follow suit, but I manage to keep a lid on things.

  Then Sergeant Gau slows down to a walk once more. He gestures for the platoon to turn around, and then he has us gather around the three recruits who are now standing doubled over by the curb, straddling puddles of puke. The smell of fresh vomit triggers a new wave of nausea in my head, and I fall out to barf the contents of my stomach into the gutter.

  As I finish retching, I notice that I wasn’t the only one who couldn’t take the smell. Half the plat
oon is busy adding to the stinking soup that’s now filling the gutter by the side of the road.

  “Lesson learned, I trust,” Sergeant Gau says, without any mirth or malice.

  • • •

  Back in the platoon bay, Sergeant Gau has us stand at attention in front of our lockers once more. It’s hard to look dignified with vomit on your clothing.

  “Good enough for today,” he says. “If you’re wondering why none of you have washed out yet, the answer is simple. You have not begun your training yet, so we have not given you much of a chance to screw up. That will change tomorrow morning, precisely at 0430 hours. Right now, you have ten minutes for personal maintenance in the head at the end of the platoon bay. At precisely 2100 hours, you will line up before your lockers again, and you will be wearing your issued sleepwear. Execute.”

  The bathroom is one large room, with toilets on one wall, shower bays on the other, and a circular arrangement of stainless steel sinks in the middle of the room. There isn’t much space for privacy. Neither toilets nor showers have doors or partitions.

  We wash up and change into our issue pajamas as ordered. The male and female versions look exactly alike, shapeless blue things that don’t look martial at all. When everyone is assembled in the center aisle as directed by Sergeant Gau, we look like a bunch of overgrown orphans lining up for a bowl of soup.

  “Rack time,” Sergeant Gau announces after giving the platoon a cursory inspection. “You will climb into your bunks. There will be no conversation once the lights are out. If there is an emergency, one of you will knock on the door of the senior drill instructor, where I will be sleeping tonight instead of in my quarters with my wife. Don’t bother me unless one of you is bleeding from the eyes.”

  When we’re in our bunks, the scratchy military-issue blankets wrapped around us, the LEDs on the ceiling dim slowly until they are extinguished. The room is dark, and all I can hear is the breathing of my fellow recruits and the humming of the environmental system that keeps the room at sixty-eight degrees and filters out all the junk in the atmosphere. We’re a long way from any of the metroplexes, but with Chicagoland, Los Angeles—San Diego—Tijuana, and Greater New York all topping fifty million these days, there are few parts of the country where you don’t need environmental conditioning.

  My bunkmate leans over the edge of her bed, and I can just barely see the outline of her head in the near-total darkness.

  “This is not so bad,” she whispers.

  “Except for the puking part,” I whisper back, and she chuckles softly.

  The food was the best I’ve ever had, but the sleeping arrangements in the military aren’t any better than what I’ve had in Mom’s apartment in the PRC. The mattress feels like it was probably made in the same government factory as the one in my old bedroom.

  As I try to go to sleep, I’m surprised to feel homesickness. As much as I was looking forward to getting out of the PRC, part of me doesn’t want to be here, sleeping in a room with so many complete strangers, listening to their breathing and occasional coughing. At least at home I had privacy when I wanted it. Part of me wants the predictability of my old life back. When I woke up at home, I knew exactly what the day would bring. When I wake up tomorrow morning, I have no idea what’s going to happen. It’s liberating, but it’s also scary as hell.

  I wrap the thin foam pillow around the back of my head so it covers my ears. In the new silence, I finally drift off to sleep, my brain surrendering to my overtired body.

  Francis Knight became eligible for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer with the publication of Fade to Black (2013), from Orbit.

  Visit her website at francisknightbooks.co.uk.

  * * *

  Novel: Fade to Black (excerpt) ••••

  FADE TO BLACK

  (excerpt)

  by Francis Knight

  First published as Fade to Black (2013), by Orbit

  • • • •

  MAHALA, city of contrasts. Sun and hope. Dark and despair. I love her, and I hate her too.

  As a boy, I would look down, into the mesh of walkways that criss-crossed the gaps Under. Into the gloom of thousands of lives lived in near-darkness, all squashed together by the weight of Over above them. The weight of obedience.

  Even at ten it rankled me, but my hate wouldn’t fully harden for years yet. At ten, I knew little else except the stories Ma told us, and what the priests said in the little classroom behind the temple, or in their sermons.

  But I was still a good boy, then, who believed what he was told. I believed what the priests said, that the new Archdeacon would make everything right if only we prayed hard enough, that the world was essentially a fair place and our father would come back to us.

  I roll my eyes at the boy I was.

  Chapter One

  IFORCED the door, nice and quiet, with my ever-so-slightly-illegal pulse pistol at the ready. Magic wasn’t usually on the agenda for runaways, but this little madam was exceptional: booby traps a speciality—I’d almost gone up in flames this morning. Twice. If it wasn’t for the obscene amount of money her parents had offered me to find her, I’d have given it up as a bad job.

  The room beyond the door was even more dingy and rubbish-strewn than the corridor, and that was saying something. Rainwater had driven through a broken window and the faint stench of synth drifted up from where it pooled. I sidestepped around it. You could catch a fatal dose and never know until it was too late. Residents hurried away behind me with a mutter of footfalls. One sight of me, a burly man in a subtly armoured, close-fitting all over with a flapping black coat, and the scavenge-rat teens that called this place home took to their heels. I dare say it looked too much like a Ministry Specials uniform with an added coat. Living this far down, a nose for trouble was essential.

  I checked around carefully, trying to listen past the far rumble and thump of factories above us. A flash of movement off to my left, a hint of bright blue shirt. Lise, the girl I was after. With nothing to alarm me—yet—I made my careful way in. There it was again: a flicker of blue, floating in the gloom. I slid my fingers round the pistol’s trigger and pointed it. It wouldn’t kill her, but it would give me just enough of an edge. I didn’t understand it myself because it’s not my kind of magic, but the man who sold it to me had explained it as a way of interrupting thought processes, quite abruptly. An almost painless magical cosh, if you will. It would shut her down, at least for long enough for me to restrain her. Killing people wasn’t my line of work, or my style. If I’d had a taste for it I’d have stayed with the guards or, Goddess forbid, gone into the Ministry Specials, but I hadn’t liked the amount of paperwork, or the restrictions. I preferred the more freeform business I was in, where responsibility wasn’t something I needed to worry about.

  I slid forwards, making sure there were no nasty surprises waiting in the rubbish at my feet. She moved again and black hair whirled out as she ran down a short corridor. I followed with exaggerated care, in case she had any more tricks in store for me. She wasn’t stupid. There had been those booby traps. Plus, she’d covered her tracks like a professional. It had taken me a week to find her, a length of time almost unheard of. I’d nearly had to resort to magic, and I never like to do that.

  The information from her parents had shown me she was book-smart at least, a high-ranking fifteen-year-old student in alchemy. Bright enough to cover her tracks almost seamlessly; and ruthless, or desperate, enough to defend her retreat. Clever enough to come down here, on the border of Namrat’s Armpit and Boundary, right where the people she normally mixed with wouldn’t dream of coming. Where people minded their own business or else, and she had a hope of hiding without falling into the black hole we knew as Namrat’s Armpit, or the ’Pit for short. I tried not to think of the alchemist’s brew of toxic chemicals, residue of the synth disaster, just below the floor.

  Rain rattled a broken window and a door snicked closed ahead of me. The little brat had led me a merry chase, but I
had her now and the fat pay-purse was all but in my hand. She knew I was there though, and she’d proved resourceful so far. I decided not to trust the door, or the girl. Trust wasn’t a luxury I could afford in this line of work. I had a small wooden baton attached to my belt and used it to push the handle down.

  As I pushed, fat sparks bloomed from somewhere above and dripped down the doorframe. I leapt back just in time to avoid the blast. Heat seared the exposed skin of my face and hands and the stench of burning clothes choked me. I rolled until I was sure the flames were out.

  Electricity was a new development, and not more than two or three of the really good alchemists had got a grip on it yet. Luckily. Yet she’d learned from my earlier care with her traps, wired the whole damn thing and rigged it up to black powder just as an added bonus in case I avoided the electricity. I was reluctantly impressed.

  Runaways had never given me this much trouble before; it was the bounties that did that. This girl had a powerful desire not to go home. Having met her parents, I could sympathise, but a paying job is a paying job, and once I took one on it was hard not to follow through.

  I slipped through the door with the pulse pistol held out in front of me. The room was dank and gloomy, lit with fifth-hand light bounced down from better areas far above. Among heaps of rubbish, a parade of small puddles rippled on the bare stone floor where rain leaked through two broken windows. The water gleamed with an oily glint—synth, almost certainly. A thin, filthy mattress contaminated the end of the room. A small light, a rend-nut-oil lamp with a glass cover, scented the air as it glowed next to the makeshift bed, casting a pool of warm light on the sodden blanket that was littered with food wrappers—pretend meat, fake gravy, the tarted-up processed vegetarian shit that was the only kind of tasteless junk available down here. Or pretty much anywhere under Trade.