The roof of the ocean is on fire. Some invisible force shreds their contrails from the top down, tears those bubbles into swirling silver confetti. The wave-front races implacably after them. The ocean bulges, recoils. It squeezes Asante like a fist, stretches him like rubber; Tiwana and Acosta tumble away in the backwash. He flails, stabilizes himself as the first jagged shapes resolve overhead: dismembered chunks of the booby-trapped gyland, tumbling with slow majesty into the depths. A broken wedge of deck and stairwell passes by a few meters away, tangled in monofilament. A thousand glassy eyes stare back from the netting as the wreckage fades to black.
Asante scans the ocean for that fifth bubble trail, that last dark figure to balance Those Who Left against Those Who Returned. No one overhead. Below, a dim shape that has to be Garin shares its mouthpiece with the small limp thing in his arms. Beyond that, the hint of a deeper dark against the abyss: a sharklike silhouette keeping station amid a slow rain of debris. Waiting to take its prodigal children home again.
They’re too close to shore. There might be witnesses. So much for stealth ops. So much for low profiles and no-questions-asked. Metzinger’s going to be pissed.
Then again, they are in the Gulf of Mexico.
Any witnesses will probably just think it caught fire again.
Lady Grinning Soul
“In your own words, Sergeant. Take your time.”
We killed children. We killed children, and we lost Silano, and I don’t know why. And I don’t know if you do either.
But of course, that would involve taking Major Emma Rossiter at her word.
“Did the child . . . ?” Metzinger had already tubed Garin’s prize by the time Asante reboarded the sub. Garin, of course, had no idea what his body had been doing. Metzinger had not encouraged discussion.
That was okay. Nobody was really in the mood anyhow.
“I’m sorry. She didn’t make it.” Rossiter waits for what she probably regards as a respectful moment. “If we could focus on the subject at hand . . .”
“It was a shitstorm,” Asante says. “Sir.”
“We gathered that.” The major musters a sympathetic smile. “We were hoping you could provide more in the way of details.”
“You must have the logs.”
“Those are numbers, Sergeant. Pixels. You are uniquely—if accidentally—in a position to give us more than that.”
“I never even got belowdecks.”
Rossiter seems to relax a little. “Still. This is the first time one of you has been debooted in midgame, and it’s obviously not the kind of thing we want to risk repeating. Maddox is already working on ways to make the toggle more robust. In the meantime, your perspective could be useful in helping to ensure this doesn’t happen again.”
“My perspective, sir, is that those forces did not warrant our particular skill set.”
“We’re more interested in your experiences regarding the deboot, Sergeant. Was there a sense of disorientation, for example? Any visual artifacts in BUD?”
Asante stands with his hands behind his back—good gripping bad—and says nothing.
“Very well.” Rossiter’s smile turns grim. “Let’s talk about your perspective, then. Do you think regular forces would have been sufficient? Do you have a sense of the potential losses incurred if we’d sent, say, WestHem marines?”
“They appeared to be refugees, sir. They didn’t pose—”
“One hundred percent, Sergeant. We would have lost everyone.”
Asante says nothing.
“Unaugged soldiers wouldn’t even have made it off the gyland before it went up. Even if they had, the p-wave would’ve been fatal if you hadn’t greatly increased your rate of descent. Do you think regular forces would have made that call? Seen what was coming, run the numbers, improvised a strategy to get below the kill zone in less time than it would take to shout a command?”
“We killed children.” It’s barely more than a whisper.
“Collateral damage is an unfortunate but inevitable—”
“We targeted children.”
“Ah.”
Rossiter plays with her tacpad: tap tap tap, swipe.
“These children,” she says at last. “Were they armed?”
“I do not believe so, sir.”
“Were they naked?”
“Sir?”
“Could you be certain they weren’t carrying concealed weapons? Maybe even a remote trigger for a thousand kilograms of CL-20?”
“They were . . . sir, they couldn’t have been more than seven or eight.”
“I shouldn’t have to tell you about child soldiers, Sergeant. They’ve been a fact of life for centuries, especially in your particular—at any rate. Just out of interest, how young would someone have to be before you’d rule them out as a potential threat?”
“I don’t know, sir.”
“Yes you do. You did. That’s why you targeted them.”
“That wasn’t me.”
“Of course. It was your . . . evil twin. That’s what you call it, right?” Rossiter leans forward. “Listen to me very carefully, Sergeant Asante, because I think you’re laboring under some serious misapprehensions about what we do here. Your twin is not evil, and it is not gratuitous. It is you: a much bigger part of you than the whiny bitch standing in front of me right now.”
Asante clenches his teeth and keeps his mouth shut.
“This gut feeling giving you so much trouble. This sense of right and wrong. Where do you think it comes from, Sergeant?”
“Experience. Sir.”
“It’s the result of a calculation. A whole series of calculations, far too complex to fit into the conscious workspace. So the subconscious sends you . . . an executive summary, you might call it. Your evil twin knows all about your sense of moral outrage; it’s the source of it. It has more information than you do. Processes it more effectively. Maybe you should trust it to know what it’s doing.”
He doesn’t. He doesn’t trust her either.
But suddenly, surprisingly, he understands her.
She’s not just making a point. This isn’t just rhetoric. The insight appears fully formed in his mind, a bright shard of unexpected clarity. She thought it would be easy. She really doesn’t know what happened.
He watches her fingers move on the ’pad as she speaks. Notes the nervous flicker of her tongue at the corner of her mouth. She glances up to meet his eye, glances away again.
She’s scared.
Look Back in Anger
Asante awakens standing in the meadow up the mountain. The sky is cloudless and full of stars. His fatigues are damp with sweat or dew. There is no moon. Black conifers loom on all sides. To the east, a hint of predawn orange seeps through the branches.
He has read that this was once the time of the dawn chorus, when songbirds would call out in ragged symphony to start the day. He has never heard it. He doesn’t hear it now. There’s no sound in this forest but his own breathing—
—and the snap of a twig under someone’s foot.
He turns. A gray shape detaches itself from the darkness.
“Fellow corpse,” Tiwana says.
“Fellow corpse,” he responds.
“You wandered off. Thought I’d tag along. Make sure you didn’t go AWOL.”
“I think ET’s acting up again.”
“Maybe you’re just sleepwalking. People sleepwalk sometimes.” She shrugs. “Probably the same wiring anyway.”
“Sleepwalkers don’t kill people.”
“Actually, that’s been known to happen.”
He clears his throat. “Did, um . . .”
“No one else knows you’re up here.”
“Did ET disable the pickups?”
“I did.”
“Thanks.”
“Any time.”
Asante looks around. “I remember the first time I saw this place. It was . . . magical.”
“I was thinking more ironic.” Adding, at Asante’s look, “You know
. That one of the last pristine spots in this whole shit show owes its existence to the fact that WestHem needs someplace private to teach us how to blow shit up.”
“Count on you,” Asante says.
The stars are fading. Venus is hanging in there, though.
“You’ve been weird,” she observes. “Ever since the thing with Caçador.”
“It was a weird thing.”
“So I hear.” Shrug. “I guess you had to be there.”
He musters a smile. “So you don’t remember . . .”
“Legs running down. Legs running back up. My zombie never targeted anything, so I don’t know what she saw.”
“Metzinger does. Rossiter does.” He leans his ass against a convenient boulder. “Does it ever bother you? That you don’t know what your own eyes are seeing, and they do?”
“Not really. Just the way it works.”
“We don’t know what we’re doing out there. When was the last time Maddox even showed us a highlight reel?” He feels the muscles clenching in his jaw. “We could be war criminals.”
“There is no we. Not when it matters.” She sits beside him. “Besides. Our zombies may be nonconscious, but they’re not stupid; they know we’re obligated to disobey unlawful commands.”
“Maybe they know. Not sure Maddox’s compliance circuit would let them do anything about it.”
Somewhere nearby a songbird clears its throat.
Tiwana takes a breath. “Suppose you’re right—not saying you are, but suppose they sent us out to gun down a gyland full of harmless refugees. Forget that Caçador was packing enough explosives to blow up a hamlet, forget that it killed Silano . . . hell, nearly killed us all. If Metzinger decides to bash in someone’s innocent skull, you still don’t blame the hammer he used.”
“And yet. Someone’s skull is still bashed in.”
Across the clearing, another bird answers. The dawn duet.
“There must be reasons,” she says, as if trying it on for size.
He remembers reasons from another life, on another continent: Retribution. The making of examples. Poor impulse control. Just . . . fun, sometimes.
“Such as.”
“I don’t know, okay? Big picture’s way above our pay grade. But that doesn’t mean you toss out the chain of command every time someone gives you an order without a twenty-gig backgrounder to go with it. If you want me to believe we’re in thrall to a bunch of fascist baby-killers, you’re gonna need more than a few glimpses of something you may have seen on a gyland.”
“How about, I don’t know. All of human history?”
Venus is gone at last. The rising sun streaks the clearing with gold.
“It’s the deal we made. Sure, it’s a shitty one. Only shittier one is being dead. But would you choose differently, even now? Go back to being fish food?”
He honestly doesn’t know.
“We should be dead, Jo. Every one of these moments is a gift.”
He regards her with a kind of wonder. “I never know how you do it.”
“Do what?”
“Channel Schopenhauer and Pollyanna at the same time without your head exploding.”
She takes his hand for a moment, squeezes briefly. Rises. “We’re gonna make it. Just so long as we don’t rock the boat. All the way to that honorable fucking discharge.” She turns to the light; sunrise glows across her face. “Until then, in case you were wondering, I’ve got your back.”
“There is no you,” he reminds her. “Not when it matters.”
“I’ve got your back,” she says.
Watch That Man
They’ve outsourced Silano’s position, brought in someone none of them have ever seen before. Technically he’s one of them, though the scars that tag him ZeroS have barely had time to heal. Something about him is wrong. Something about the way he moves; his insignia. Not specialist or corporal or sergeant.
“I want you to meet Lieutenant Jim Moore,” Rossiter tells them.
ZeroS finally have a commissioned secco. He’s easily the youngest person in the room.
He gets right to it. “This is the Nanisivik mine.” The satcam wall zooms down onto the roof of the world. “Baffin Island, seven hundred fifty klicks north of the Arctic Circle, heart of the Slush Belt.” A barren fractured landscape of red and ocher. Drumlins and hillocks and bifurcating streambeds.
“Tapped out at the turn of the century.” A brown road, undulating along some scoured valley floor. A cluster of buildings. A gaping mouth in the earth. “These days people generally stay away, on account of its remote location. Also on account of the eight thousand metric tons of high-level nuclear waste the Canadian government brought over from India for deep-time storage. Part of an initiative to diversify the northern economy, apparently.” Tactical schematics, now: Processing and Intake. Train tracks corkscrewing into the Canadian Shield. Storage tunnels branching like the streets of an underground subdivision. “Project was abandoned after the Greens lost power in ’38.
“You could poison a lot of cities with this stuff. Which may be why someone’s messing around there now.”
Garin’s hand is up. “Someone, sir?”
“So far all we have are signs of unauthorized activity and a JTFN drone that went in and never came out. Our first priority is to identify the actors. Depending on what we find, we might take care of it ourselves. Or we might call in the bombers. Won’t know until we get there.”
And we won’t know even then, Asante muses—and realizes, in that moment, what it is about Moore that strikes him as so strange.
“We’ll be prepping your better halves with the operational details en route.”
It’s not what is, it’s what isn’t: no tic at the corner of the eye, no tremor in the hand. His speech is smooth and perfect, his eyes make contact with steady calm. Lieutenant Moore doesn’t glitch.
“For now, we anticipate a boots-down window of no more than seven hours—”
Asante looks at Tiwana. Tiwana looks back.
ZeroS are out of beta.
Subterraneans
The Lockheed drops them at the foot of a crumbling pier. Derelict shops and listing trailers, long abandoned, huddle against the sleeting rain. This used to be a seaport; then a WestHem refueling station back before WestHem was even a word, before the apocalyptic Arctic weather made it easier to just stick everything underwater. It lived its short life as a company town, an appendage of the mine, in the days before Nanisivik was emptied of its valuables and filled up again.
BUD says 1505: less than an hour if they want to be on target by sundown. Moore leads them overland across weathered stone and alluvial washouts and glistening acned Martian terrain. They’re fifteen hundred meters from the mouth of the repository when he orders them all into the backseat.
Asante’s legs, under new management, pick up the pace. His vision blurs. At least up here, in the wind and blinding sleet, it doesn’t make much difference.
A sound drifts past: the roar of some distant animal perhaps. Nearer, the unmistakable discharge of a –40. Not ET’s. Asante’s eyes remain virtuously clouded.
The wind dies in the space of a dozen steps. Half as many again and the torrent of icy needles on his face slows to a patter, a drizzle. Asante hears great bolts unlatching, a soft screech of heavy metal. They pass through some portal and the bright overcast in his eyes dims by half. Buckles and bootsteps echo faintly against rock walls.
Downhill. A gentle curve to the left. Gravel, patches of broken asphalt. His feet step over unseen obstacles.
And stop.
The whole squad must have frozen; he can’t hear so much as a breath. The supersaccadic ticker tape flickering across the fog seems faster. Could be his imagination. Off in some subterranean distance, water drip-drip-drips onto a still surface.
Quiet movement as ZeroS spread out. Asante’s just a Passenger, but he reads the footsteps, feels his legs taking him sideways, kneeling. The padding on his elbows doesn’t leave much room for fine-grai
ned tactile feedback, but the surface he’s bracing against is flat and rough, like a table sheathed in sandpaper.
There’s a musky animal smell in the air. From somewhere in the middle distance, a soft whuffle. The stirring of something huge in slow, sleepy motion.
Maybe someone left the door open, and something got in . . .
Pizzly bears are the only animals that come to mind: monstrous hybrids, birthed along the boundaries of stressed ecosystems crashing into each other. He’s never seen one in the flesh.
A grunt. A low growl.
The sound of building speed.
Gunshots. A roar, deafeningly close, and a crash of metal against metal. The flickering tactical halo dims abruptly: network traffic just dropped by a node.
Now the whole network crashes: pawn exchange, ZeroS sacrificing their own LAN as the price of jamming the enemy’s. Moore’s MAD gun snaps to the right. An instant of scorching heat as the beam sweeps across Asante’s arm; Moore shooting wide, Moore missing. ET breaks cover, leaps, and locks. For one crystalline millisecond Asante sees a wall of coarse ivory-brown fur close enough to touch, every follicle in perfect focus.
The clouds close in. ET pulls the trigger.
A bellow. The scrape of great claws against stone. The reek is overpowering, but ET’s already pirouetting after fresh game and click the freeze-frame glimpse of monstrous ursine jaws in a face wide as a doorway and click small brown hands raised against an onrushing foe and click a young boy with freckles and strawberry-blond hair and Asante’s blind again but he feels ET pulling on the trigger, pop pop pop—
Whatthefuck children whatthefuck whatthefuck
—and ET’s changed course again and click: a small back a fur coat black hair flying in the light of the muzzle flash.
Not again. Not again.
Child soldiers. Suicide bombers. For centuries.
But no one’s shooting back.
He knows the sound of every weapon the squad might use, down to the smallest pop and click: the sizzle of the MAD gun, the bark of the Epsilon, Acosta’s favorite Olympic. He hears them now; those, and no others. Whatever they’re shooting at isn’t returning fire.
The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2018 Page 29
