by Rick Partlow
"Talk to me, Cal," the Colonel said abruptly, staring at a cargo shuttle that rose slowly up above the port on torches of superheated air. "What happened out there?"
I hesitated before answering him. He'd undoubtedly seen the mission record I dumped out of my headcomp into the command system, so he knew what had happened. He wanted to know what had happened to me.
"I fucked up," I admitted with a helpless shrug. "Lost my head. If Deke hadn't taken control of the ship at the beach, we'd have both died or been captured."
"Don't try to play the martyr with me." Murdock's voice was soft as a priest's, but the words were hard like an atomic blast. "I know you fucked up. I want to know why."
I had to think about that for a second. How would I explain this to a man who'd always seemed almost inhuman?
"Colonel..." I began hesitantly. "You know where I'm from. When I decided to attend the Academy, I gave up my family, most of my friends...even my religion, because I thought I owed something to the Commonwealth, to the rest of humanity. That sense of duty's what's kept me going." I turned away from him to stare at the jungle to the east and the mountains they ran into. "After a while, I began to lose that. The killing---the murder, it felt like---and the way we did it, ripping their throats out; the feeling that I wasn't quite human anymore, it was getting to me.
"Then I met Jenna. She..." I tried to search for the words. "She was everything I thought I'd given up: life, and hope and humanity." My throat tightened and my voice threatened to break.
"Since she died, I've been running on one goal: killing as many of them as I can before I die. Deke and the rest of us, we have a word for what happens when our headcomp takes over; we call it the Machine. The last few months, I've been letting the Machine run me, Colonel. I've been letting it use me instead of me using it.
"I haven't been thinking about anything else, even Deke. When I saw him there, with his leg blown off, I realized that the Machine had let me do that to him, and all I could think was that everything I had to hold onto was gone."
I trailed off, and things fell into an awkward silence.
"I think I understand," Murdock said with a nod, but his tone was its same inevitable neutrality, and I didn't know if he really understood or not. He put a hand on my shoulder and I turned to face him. "Cal, I like you. I think I like you more than any of the others...but I'll tell you to your face that I'm your military commander, and I have to see you not as a human being, but as a military asset.
"You're too valuable to the Group and to the Commonwealth for me to let you throw your life away. You don't have that luxury---you embody a huge financial investment by the government. You're going to have to jack yourself back up." He waved a hand expansively. "We've got some time. None of you will be going out again until we can analyze this new enemy strategy---the others are either on-base already or on their way in. We may have to change tactics completely.
"In the meantime, I want you to talk to Dr. Rajiv. Tell her what you've told me. Then you can take some R&R; go to Eden for a few days and loosen up. Find yourself a girl and have some fun. You've got to pull yourself out of this. It's important for all of us."
"I'll try, sir," I acknowledged with a nod. What else could I say?
"I know you will, Cal." He patted me on the shoulder and walked away without another word.
He was right. I had to pull out of this. But I hated the prospect of baring my soul to Dr. Rajiv. She meant well---she'd been our official psych counselor for the last two years---but she wasn't one of us and she couldn't understand just how isolated we were. I supposed it couldn't hurt, though, and it was just as likely to work as anything else.
With a heavy sigh, I turned and headed for her office. Might as well get it over with. I could just hear it now, though: "What do...
"...you think the problem is, Caleb?" Kary Rhavij, registered psychological counselor, asked me in that oh-so-caring voice she had patented. All this introspection, I knew, was a ploy. The whole, earth-toned, homey office was wired with MRI's, voice-stress analyzers, thermal scanners, EKG's, EEG's and fucking Alpha-wave detectors, for God's sake; and it was all fed to a readout in her headcomp. They didn't want us to know, because we 'Boys could mask much of that if we tried. But why bother? They wouldn't pull me off the line permanently, and the shit they'd implanted assured me they couldn't wipe my personality without activating my fail-safes. All she could do was give advice, both to me and to our superiors.
"I guess I'm just missing Jenna," I replied with a shrug, wondering what she expected me to say.
"She wouldn't have wanted you to take unnecessary risks, would she?" Dr. Rajiv countered, her dark eyes calculating yet somehow interested at the same time. "If she loved you, she'd want you to go on with your life."
"I don't have much of what you'd call a life, Doc." I chuckled humorlessly. "Mostly, I just kill people."
"It's a war, Captain Mitchell," she reminded me gently. "You knew what the job would be when you took it. Forgive me for being brutally direct, but is this an attack of conscience or merely self-pity?"
"Don't have much of a conscience anymore, either," I allowed with a shrug, "so I guess, if those are the only two choices, it must be self-pity." I smiled with false enthusiasm. "Gosh, we've solved it already---can I go now?"
"Please, Captain Mitchell," she sighed. "I know you and the rest of your teammates don't like me or the job I do, but..."
"I don't dislike you, Dr. Rajiv," I told her frankly, squirming in my seat, "I just...don't know you. It's hard to trust someone you don't know with things you don't even want to admit to yourself."
"So who could you admit them to?" She asked me, and I suddenly had the feeling that the sigh of frustration had been just as calculated as anything else she did.
Good fucking question, though. Who could I talk to anymore?
"Deke, I guess," I told her. "Really no one else."
"And I bet you can't even tell him most of it, right?" It wasn't really a question, but I found myself nodding anyway.
“Well, Captain,” she said in resignation, “under more peaceful circumstances, I would prescribe a full regimen of psychological counseling for you and bar you from any active duty for at least a month.” She shrugged. “Things being what they are, I’d say you should try to blow off some steam. Find someone else you can talk to---if not someone you trust, then at least someone you don’t know and will never see again.” She grinned crookedly. “In other words, go to Eden, find some willing girl and get yourself laid.”
***
It was good advice, but I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t find the energy inside me to make the effort, and I knew it would be a disaster if I did. I would have been banging some joy-girl on Eden and thinking about Jenna. What the hell was the point of that?
So instead I was sitting there in the lounge outside our quarters, afraid to go back to my own room because I knew if I did I’d just sit there and stare at her picture...or worse, replay memories of her on my headcomp. There was some ViRdrama playing in the lounge’s central holotank, but I didn't to bother to jack in. I’d have probably wound up killing all the characters.
I wasn't sure how long I’d been sitting there. I could have found out, could have asked my headcomp with a thought, but I didn’t want to know. Maybe if I sat there long enough, I thought, the war would be over.
The door to the lounge hissed open and I looked up, half-expecting against all reason to see Deke enter, but instead it was Brian Hammer and Holly Morai. They couldn’t have completed their mission and returned already so I guessed they'd been recalled after the news of our little debacle. Brian passed by me with a perfunctory supportive clap on my shoulder, no emotion passing across his simple, broad-boned face; but Holly hesitated beside me, frowning with concern. Holly had always been our Big Sister...and more, to some of us. At least she didn’t ask me if I was going to be okay.
“Do you want to talk, Cal?” She said instead. I looked up at her, knowing what she meant and
thinking yeah, that might be a good idea. At least she was a friend, not some anonymous body.
“Okay,” I said with a nod, and followed her to her quarters.
Her room was oddly...girly. Well, she was a girl, almost literally. We were all pretty young, chronologically at least. But the rest of us seemed to have grown---not just up, but almost old. Not Holly though. Her quarters reminded me of Rachel’s room, back home, right down to the stuffed animals on the bed. I remembered the first time I had snuck into Rachel’s room; it seemed like a lifetime ago.
Holly shut the door behind us as I wandered over to her dresser, glancing at holos of her family back on Earth. She was short like her mother and shared her green eyes, but she had her father’s oval face and his reddish-brown hair, though in the picture his was long and flowing whereas hers was cut short and spiky. I idly wondered if they'd planned her that way or just let nature take its course, the way we did on Canaan. Beside her in the picture was her little sister Callie, all curls and dimples. I felt a gut-punch sensation as I realized how hard it must have been for Holly, not being able to talk to her family.
“Do you miss your family, Cal?” she asked me softly. I turned back towards her and saw that she’d shed her Reflex suit and was standing before me nude. I took a moment to appreciate her toned, hard body, and I experienced a stirring I hadn’t felt in weeks.
“All the time,” I replied to her question---I could see the glint in her eye as she noticed the hesitation in my answer from checking her out. “But I don’t think my father misses me too much.”
I was dressed in standard utility fatigues---we didn’t wear the Reflex suits when we were in garrison---and Holly stepped close to me and began unfastening the front of it. I smelled the strawberry scent she was using in her hair, felt the warmth of her bare skin.
“That’s right,” she said, nodding, as casual as if she weren’t undressing me. “Your dad is a pacifist, right?”
She pulled my fatigue top off my chest, her fingers brushing softly against my skin, as hot as a fusion drive.
“My whole planet is,” I told her, fighting to control my breathing and heart rate as both wanted to speed up. “New Society of Friends…neo-Quakers.”
“I’ve heard of them.” Her hands unfastened the connectors of my pants, sliding them down my legs. “There are a lot of religious splinter groups on the frontier colonies.”
Unable to maintain a casual pretense anymore, I leaned in and kissed her, pulling her against me as our lips met, then opened, our tongues entwining, my hands traveling over her soft skin, to places they’d been before, if not recently.
Much later, lying side by side on her bed, she restarted the conversation as if two hours of sex hadn’t interrupted it. “So, your family didn’t take your leaving too well,” she said, her fingers running affectionately across the skin of my left arm as I faced her. “What about your friends?”
“Most of them didn’t understand,” I replied with a shrug. “My girlfriend Rachel---hell, we probably would have wound up married---she was really hurt by it. She thought I was abandoning her personally.” I thought about her, a vision of a teenage girl with long brown hair and grey eyes, an easy smile and a laugh like a spring shower. Walking hand in hand through the woods behind my family’s farm, making love in the maintenance shed on a blanket…
“I miss her,” I said, more open and unafraid to be myself than I could ever be with our team psychologist. “I used to think about her a lot, but after I met Jenna…” A knife twisted in my gut and I forced down those feelings. “Anyway, the only one who really understood was my best friend, Jason Chen. His family was from off-world, they worked for the Agricultural Survey Board. They weren’t Friends. People didn’t hang around them much, except me…”
Chapter Three
Then:
I wiped sweat from my forehead with a rag and grimaced as it came away covered with dirt and grease. It was the middle of the Day on Canaan---30 Earth days into the 62 that this side of the world would face our star, Goshen---and I was busting my ass trying to repair a broke-down harvester motor in time to bring in the last four thousand acres of wheat in time to plant another four thousand acres before the Night and the storms it brought that would make any outdoor work impossible for weeks.
“Cal!” I heard a voice calling to me from down the dirt road that led to our house and barn. “Cal, are you out here?”
I didn't need to look up to know who it was. The voice was higher-pitched than any native Canaanite male over the age of ten and had the odd lilt of someone born on old Earth, on the Asian continent. At least that's what Jason's family had told me; I'd never met anyone else from Earth.
I hopped down from the maintenance catwalk on the side of the machine, absorbing the fall with bent knees as I watched Jason Chen running towards me, his feet kicking up dust from the road. It always seemed unnatural watching Jason run: he was nearly two meters tall, making him a giant on Canaan, where gravity half again that of Earth tended to breed short and stocky people. When he ran, it was with a clumsiness that made it look like he was always about to go out of control and smash into the ground in a heap of shattered bones. He had put on a lot of muscle in the six years he and his family had been onplanet, but he still seemed as emaciated as a skeleton by our standards.
At least he dressed like a local now, in utilitarian work clothes and not the gaudy flash he'd worn as a twelve-year-old. He'd been teased quite a bit at school about that, and his height, and his accent until I'd knocked a few heads together. Most people still treated Jase like an Offworlder, but we'd been best friends ever since.
"What's up Jase?" I asked him, grinning a little as he skidded to a halt in a tangle of long, black hair. He'd started trying to grow a beard last year and that wasn't working out too well. "Why you running, your bike broken down again?"
"Shit," he said, blinking as if he'd just woken up, then pausing to wipe sweat out of his eyes. "I forgot and left it at home."
I goggled at him. "You ran all the way here from your house? That's like five kilometers!"
"Yeah, I guess." He shrugged it off. "You haven't heard then? You don't have your 'link with you?"
"It's in the barn," I waved over at the large, aluminum structure that was barely visible half a kilometer back down the road. The house was another kilometer past that. "Last time I brought my datalink with me to work on the harvester, I dropped it into the motor and it took me three days to get it out." I frowned at him. "It's pretty hot out here...you want some water?" I grabbed my canteen off the side of my four-wheeler and offered it to him.
"Jesus Cal," he sighed, and I felt my lip curl downward instinctively. Usually, Jase was careful not to blaspheme; I didn't say anything about it because we were friends, but it would get him shunned by the other church members if they'd heard it. "We're at war," he said, and his too-high voice seemed to lower octaves in my head.
"War?" I repeated in disbelief. "With the Tahni?"
It was a stupid question and I knew it even as it left my mouth. Who else would we be at war with? The Tahni were the only other intelligent alien species in the Cluster, as far as we knew, and certainly the only other species with FTL. Anyway, I didn't think Jase would have run five kilometers to tell me if we were raiding the Pirate Worlds or something.
He was nodding anyway, ignoring the inanity of my question. "Yeah, they attacked a half dozen squatter colonies in the Disputed Systems, wiped them out to the last. Half a million dead, they say."
"Holy shit," I murmured, eyes losing focus as I tried to take in a number like that. The squatter colonists had been warned that it was dangerous to set up homesteads on the disputed territories at the edge of the Tahni Neutral Zone; but habitable and hospitable worlds, while not exactly rare, weren't common enough to ignore. "I mean, I thought they might blockade them or something," I qualified, "but to just kill everyone...holy shit."
"President Jameson is sending an expedition out there right now," Jason told me. "Th
ey're already starting construction on more cruisers at the Martian shipyards, and some people are even talking about a military draft."
"A draft?" I heard a squeak in my voice and scowled angrily. I was almost eighteen, too old for my voice to be breaking. "Not out here, though, right?"
He shook his head, sweat whipping off his long hair. "I don't know, man," he said, then seemed to stumble a step. "Whoa, I think I will have a drink of water."
I handed him the canteen almost absent-mindedly, my brain churning around the idea of winding up drafted into the military. "We...we should get a religious waiver though," I reasoned. "They wouldn't force the Friends to serve in the military, would they?"
"No," he admitted, almost grudgingly---Jason always had a flare for the dramatic. "But they might put you into key noncombatant roles, like working in industrial services." He took a long swallow of water before he pointed a finger decisively. "I know they'll want to put an orbital defense system out here, and that'll go over like a pleasure doll at Sunday services."
"No shit," I agreed, letting him take another swig before I took the canteen back and threw it in the cargo cage on the back of my four-wheeler. "Come on," I said to him. jerking my head towards the vehicle. "I'll give you a ride back to your house if you don't mind riding bitch."
"My dad doesn't like that term," Jason reminded me, clambering on behind me. "He says it's sexist and regressive."
"Yeah?" I started the motor and revved it a couple times before putting the cycle in gear. "Well, my dad says that anyone who doesn't like it here can go back to Earth or go to hell."
We both laughed and I could feel him having to grab the rear hand-holds to stay on as the four-wheeler hit a patch of rough ground.
"Hey, let's head into town first," Jason said, yelling over the hum of the motor. "I heard there's a bunch of people getting together there."
