“No shit?” The captain looked surprised at first, but then smiled. “Who are you hooking up with?”
“Second Battalion, Baker.”
“That’s us.” He slapped me on the back and turned to his men. “Listen up. This here is Wendell, a reporter from the Western world. He’ll be joining us on the line, so if you’re nice he might put you in the news vids.”
I didn’t have the heart to say it again, to tell them that I didn’t have a camera and oh, by the way, I spent most of my time so high that I could barely piece a story together.
“Captain,” I said. “Where are we headed?”
“Straight into boredom. You came at the right time, rumor is that Popov is too tired to push and we’re not going to push him. We’ll be taking a siesta just west of Pavlodar, about three klicks north of here, Z-minus four klicks. Plenty of rock between us and the plasma.”
I had seen a collection of civilian mining equipment in the APC hangar, looking out of place, and wondered. Fusion borers, piping, and conveyors, all of it painted orange with black stripes. Someone had tried to hide it under layers of camouflage netting, like a teenager would hide his stash, just in case mom didn’t buy the I-don’t-do-drugs-so-you-don’t-need-to-search-my-room argument.
“What about the gear in the hangar—the mining rigs?” I asked.
A few of the closest Marines had been bantering and fell silent while the captain glared at me. “What rigs?”
“The stuff back in the hangar. Looked like civilian mining stuff.”
He turned and headed toward the front of his column. “Keep up, rube. We’re not coming back if you get lost.”
Land mines. Words were land mines. I wasn’t part of the family, wasn’t even close to being one of them, and my exposure to the war had so far been limited to jerking off Marines when they stepped off the transport pad in Shymkent, hoping to get a money shot interview, the real deal. “Hey, Lieutenant, what’s it like? Got anyone back home you wanna say hi to?” Their looks said it all. Total confusion, like, Where am I? We came from two different worlds, and in Shymkent they stepped into mine, where plasma artillery and autonomous ground attack drones were something to be talked about openly—irreverently and without fear, so you could prove to the hot AP betty, just arrived in Kaz, that you knew more than she did, and if she let you in those cotton panties you’d share everything. You would too. But now I was in their world, land of the learn-or-get-out-of-the-way-or-die tribe, and didn’t know the language.
A Marine corporal explained it to me, or I never would have figured it out.
“Hey, reporter-guy.” He fell in beside me as we walked. “Don’t ever mention that shit again.”
“What’d I say?”
“Mining gear. They don’t bring that crap in unless we’re making another push, to try and retake the mines. If we recapture them the engineers come in and dig as much ore as they can before the Russians hit us to grab it back. Back and forth, it’s how the world churns.”
There were mines of all kinds in Kaz, trace-metal mines and land mines. The trace mines were the worst because they never blew up, they just spun in place like a buzz saw, chewing, and too tempting to let go. Metal. We’d get it from space someday, but bringing it in was still so expensive that whenever someone stumbled across an Earth source, usually deep underground, everyone scrambled. Metal was worth fighting over, bartered for with blood and flechettes. Kaz proved it. Metals were all the rage, especially rhenium and all the traces, which was the whole reason for us being there in the first place.
I saw an old movie once, in one of those art houses. It was animated, a cartoon, but I can’t remember what it was called, except there was a song in it that I’ll never forget and one line said it all. “Put your trust in heavy metal.” Whoever wrote that song must have seen Kaz, must have looked far into the beyond.
I needed to get high. The line assignment had come from an old friend, someone corporate who took pity and thought he’d give me one last chance to get out the old Oscar, the one who used to show promise but who couldn’t even write a sentence now unless he’d just mainlined a cool bing. Somehow I knew I’d screw this one up too, but didn’t want to die doing it.
My first barrage lasted three days. I was so scared that I forgot about my job, never even turned on my voice recorder, the word Pulitzer a mirage. Three days of sitting around and trying to watch them, learn something that might keep me from getting wiped—or at least explain why it was I had wanted this assignment in the first place—and always wondering what would drive me crazy first: the rocks pelting my helmet, not having any drugs, or claustrophobia. Living in a can. The suits had speakers and audio pickups so you could talk without using radio, but I never realized how important it was to actually see someone else. Read their face. You couldn’t even nod, it got lost in a suit, same as a shrug. Meaningless.
Ox, the corporal who had educated me about mining gear, was a huge guy from Georgia. Tank-big.
“I friggin’ hate curried chicken,” he said. Ox pulled the feeding tube from a tiny membrane in his helmet and threw a pouch to the ground. “Anyone wanna trade?”
I had brought some ration packs that I got off a couple of French guys in Shymkent, and I threw one to him.
“What the hell is this? I can’t read it.”
“It’s French. That one is wine-poached salmon.”
Ox broke the heat pack at the pouch’s bottom. When it was warm he stuck the tube through and squeezed. I swore I could almost see his eyes go wide, the no-friggin-way expression on his face.
“Where’d you get this?”
“Foreign Legion.”
He squeezed the pouch again and didn’t stop until it was a wad, all wrung out. “Un-fucking-real. The French get to eat this every day?”
I nodded and then remembered he couldn’t see it. “Yeah. And they get booze in their rations. Wine.”
“That’s it,” Ox said. “I’m going AWOL, join up with the Legion. You, rube, are welcome in my tunnel.”
And just like that, I was in the fold.
About Orbit Short Fiction
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright © 2012 by T.C. McCarthy
Excerpt from Germline copyright © 2011 by T.C. McCarthy
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First eBook edition: June 2012
ISBN: 978-0-316-22792-6
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