He selected the bookmark for Ellis’ place next, and the van drove itself out back towards the freeway.
With Louie gone, the real post-mortem could begin. Marianna unfolded her pad to its largest size, and took a sharp breath at the game map, showing their paths during the match as glowing lines.
“I fucked up,” Edane said, breaking the silence. He folded his arms, left over shaking right, as Marianna flicked through the engagement’s recording. “That’s all I have to say about it.”
“No, no,” Erlnicht protested, shaking his head, ears flat back. “The mess started with that UAV. What the hell was up with that?”
Edane had forgotten about that. Their request for a UAV fly-by had been responded to with a loud, hydrogen-turbine drone that buzzed them at tree-top height. They’d expected something electric and near-silent. It hadn’t given away their position, exactly, but it certainly hadn’t helped them avoid fighting.
“Okay,” he said, “that’s where things started? But I fucked up. I took too long reloading, got left behind. That elimination was my own damn fault.” Edane grit his teeth.
“Putting that aside,” Marianna said, leaning over the map, “the thing with the UAV was bullshit. I talked with the coordination tent, apparently they were running low on resources, and their guy at the airstrip mistakenly sent out the wrong model, with the wrong AI mission parameters loaded. So what we can take away from that is when shit goes wrong for somebody? It rains down on everybody else.” She tapped the map’s time control, skipping it forward. “Moving on.”
The post-match post-mortem debriefing covered a lot of ground, but Edane didn’t have the guts to say it, and apparently neither did anyone else. He was holding back the team. He’d fallen behind, because his coordination wasn’t up to scratch, and he just wasn’t good enough. It was right there in the stats — his accuracy had even fallen under Louie’s. If Edane ignored his shooting immediately after starting, before his arm got tired, started shaking, he was miles behind Louie’s accuracy performance, and best will in the world to the kid, but he was only human. Edane wasn’t, Edane was supposed to be more than that.
Later, after they’d dropped off Ellis and Erlnicht, when it was Edane’s stop, Marianna cornered him, exiting the van and slamming the door on Eberstetten.
“Stay in the van,” she told him and Salzach and the others. “I’ll help Edane with his things.”
“But…”
“Stay.” And Marianna circled around the van, hauling Edane’s armor bag out of the cargo compartment before he’d even finished getting his equipment bag over his shoulder.
Edane felt sure that this was it, this was when he got kicked off the team.
Marianna shouldered the armor bag and grit her teeth, and not in the way Edane wanted to emulate. “You listening to me, knucklehead?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I told you to fucking go easy on that arm.”
“I did, I’m shooting left handed like you said, I’m even letting my right side take a rest.” He held up his hands defensively, gripping his MilSim gun’s bag in his left hand, not his right.
“No, you’re not listening to me. I said go easy — it’s not a goddamn secret that you got fucked up in Tajikistan last year, kid. If you were human I’d say it’s a miracle you’re even on your feet, let alone using your hand and growing your nerves back, but you are you, so I’d say you’re doing adequately.” She narrowed her eyes at him, teeth clicking as she slung her jaw left for a moment. “You hear me?”
“Yes sir.”
“I am going to drag this team into the professional league bracket if it kills every last one of you little shits — except Louie, he’s a rookie, he gets a year to live.” Marianna took the gun bag from him, and marched for the apartment lobby doors. “So you had better goddamn listen to me, Edane, when I tell you that you fucking take it easy with that arm. And to make this explicitly clear, that means you slow the hell down.”
Edane followed her, warily.
“If you need more time to reload, plan for it, don’t try and do something you can’t. Okay? You’re trying to act like you didn’t get your ass blown up. That’s bullshit. You aren’t at everyone else’s pace and you’re not supposed to be — you hear me?” She set down the bags when they got inside, piling them in front of the elevators.
He didn’t answer, this time. Couldn’t answer.
“I don’t care what the hell you think they made you for, what you’re supposed to be capable of. Before you speed back up, you have to slow down. Heal, take your time, accept that you’re not as fast as you used to be — accept that you got injured.”
He looked away, and she grabbed the neck of his shirt, yanked him forward until he looked at her. “Man up, and stop pretending it never happened Edane. I’ve got no use for you otherwise. You hear me?”
“Yes, sir,” he murmured.
Marianna shoved him back a step. Wagged her finger in front of his nose. “You fucking listen this time. No more ‘I fucked up’ out of you, Edane. Especially not in front of the rest of the team. You don’t tell me you fucked up — I tell you that you fucked up. Got it?”
He nodded meekly.
She slapped him across the face for it. “Don’t you nod at me, you little shit. You say ‘yes sir’ like all the other knuckleheads.”
Edane grit his teeth, ears flat. “Yes sir,” he ground out.
“Good boy.” She half turned away, as if to leave, then spun on him — thwack! — beating him across the side of his skull with the heel of her hand. “Do not make me give you a fucking pep talk again,” she hissed, pointing a finger under his jaw, at his throat, as if about to stab him. “This was fucking embarrassing.”
Edane winced away, rubbing life back into his ear. “Sir yes sir.”
“Goodnight, Edane.”
“Goodnight, sir.”
3. Home again.
::/ San Iadras, Middle American Corporate Preserve.
::/ March, 2105.
::/ Edane Estian.
First thing after Edane got home, he stuck the stimulator pads the doctors gave him on his arm, their cables almost invisible in his fur. Leaving them on made his muscles twitch and fingers tingle in a way the doctors assured helped restore feeling and nerve function, but it didn’t stop him from cleaning up the apartment. He put the sheer mesh nightgown back in the cupboard where it belonged, reclaimed the black lace underwear from under the couch and stuck it in the hamper, set the roses on the dining table straight, and generally put things in order. All with his left hand, of course.
He loaded up the dishwasher, but kept the cheap mugs with the printed jokes on them aside to hand wash — Edane didn’t understand any of the jokes, but Janine said they were jokes. The washer had a tendency to make them peel, and all of Janine’s old joke coffee mugs had white specks where the joke parts had chipped out, and Edane didn’t want that to happen to her new mugs. She liked coffee, and she liked drinking it out of mugs that said things like ‘You don’t have to be crazy to work here…’, ‘Today’s a blue-movie Monday’ and ‘Work it’, with a butt-slapping animation.
After that and getting her underwear in the wash cycle, he stripped down his MilSim rifle and took out the mud with an old, worn down toothbrush — the older the toothbrush, the softer the bristles. Oiling the recoil engine was strictly unnecessary, but checking the pneumatics and weights was part of his routine. It felt nice, reassuring. Like cleaning a real gun, and a lot of the parts — except for the recoil engine — were the same. When Janine’s underwear was out of the washer, he threw in his uniform. His uniform and her underwear didn’t mix. The uniform’s fabric was rough-woven, actually hard enough to put wear and tear on Janine’s lace. He didn’t really understand why she had clothes that fragile, or why anyone would, but it was like her mugs — Janine liked things a certain way, so Edane respected that.
It was kind of nice, seeing how different she was, despite being so nearly the same as him.
When
he’d finished cleaning up he took off the stimulator pads, went in the shower, and saw that she’d drawn ‘E + J’ on the shower door in soap, with a heart shape around it, so when the glass fogged up it was visible, and not before. He didn’t get it right away, took him awhile to understand, but when he did, he smiled a little. Janine was very different to him.
He got out of the shower, set all their clothes out to dry, and afterward he sat on the couch with his MilSim goggles, and loaded up an augmented reality firing range simulation for sidearms to practice with, left and right handed, graphed his scores — better than last month’s, at least — and spent a further fifteen minutes unable to think of anything else to do with himself until Janine came home.
She didn’t have any set time to come home, but usually she got home before he was done with his firing drills. When Janine did come home tonight, late, it was with the winding, almost piercing scent of the Korean take-out from down the block that Janine always referred to as Chinese.
“Hi, baby.” She blinked, surprised to see him at the door — but he knew the sound of her gait on the tiled floor outside her apartment.
“Hi.” He couldn’t help from wagging his tail, she just had that effect on him.
Janine let him take the bag of take-out, but stopped him from turning around to put it down with a hand over his shoulder. Her fur — a yellowy, sandy color — brushed over his as she snaked her hand up to the back of his skull, drawing him close.
He flicked his ears uncertainly, blinking at her as she pushed one lock of her very deliberately and artfully styled red hair to one side, and brushed her muzzle against his. This was one of those parts he didn’t understand, but she didn’t have to use any force to wrestle him into place, pulling his head down, down, until she could tilt her head and kiss him.
He’d seen his mothers kiss each other almost all his life — for longer than he was in the barracks, even — but actually kissing someone himself was… was strange. He didn’t mind how it was warm, or how it was an excuse to stand near her, but when she did the curly thing with her tongue, groaning gently, he didn’t know how to respond.
Instead of responding, Edane stood still, moving only a little, letting her push and pull him around until she seemed satisfied with his lip in her mouth, and released him with a smile. Then, with a sniff and a blink, she stared up at him quizzically.
“Did you use my shampoo?”
“Yeah. I ran out. That’s okay, right?”
She pushed her black nose in under his throat, sniffed again, again, before leaning back and blinking at him.
He blinked back at her.
She was like him — kind of looked like a dog — but she’d been gengineered out of something else entirely. Something marsupial that just looked like a dog, but it actually had stripes? Janine had stripes, covering her back from her shoulder blades down to mid-thigh. She’d shown him — often. She was also smaller than him, a lot smaller. Warm to hug.
Edane liked hugging better than kissing. His mothers had hugged him a lot, a process he thought of the ‘Cathy and Beth Maneuver’, especially when they thought he might be sad, so he understood hugging a lot better than kissing. Kissing was okay, but he could hug Janine for hours.
She was good to hug. Tiny in his arms. Like just by hugging her, he could armor her against everything in the world that could ever hurt her, everything that could make her think she wasn’t a nice person.
Janine took one last sniff, and squirmed, lifting her head to regard him with a quizzical glint. “You smell like rose petals,” she announced.
“Yeah. That’s what your shampoo smells like.” He stilled the wagging of his tail. “Is that wrong?”
She looked at him without quite seeing him, thinking. “No,” she said at last. “It’s not wrong.” She smiled up at him, stroked her hand down his jaw, over his neck, and patted his shoulder. “Weird, but kind of nice.” She hesitated, before adding, “It’s a little like I can smell myself all over you, which is… kind of very nice.”
Edane let his tail wag uncertainly, relaxed his grip. “Okay.”
She stood up on her tip-toes, kissed his nose, kicked off her high-heels and threw her bag on the couch, then set up a movie for them to watch while eating take-out.
Janine had gotten ‘fu. Edane wasn’t a huge fan of ‘fu, under normal circumstances, but ‘fu from the take-out place wasn’t ‘fu that looked like a piece of steak, trying to pretend it was meat. ‘Fu from the take-out place was a kind of white block for dipping in all the weird sauces they had. At first Edane hadn’t bothered with the sauce, just eaten, but Janine had found out and blinked at him and made him try all the different sauces until he liked one.
After the third try, he kind of liked the one soy sauce enough to choose it for his own, but Janine had persisted, and he almost couldn’t remember a time when he hadn’t liked the horse radish, even though it had only been a month or so, since Janine invited him to move in with her.
It was nice, living with Janine. Much nicer than the hospital room he’d shared with some of his brothers, immediately after Tajikistan, and differently nice to the apartment he’d shared with some of his brothers after leaving hospital. Janine was a lot messier than his brothers had been, but she was different, and different was its own kind of nice.
After the movie they had sex, and Edane took another shower. Then Janine offered to join him in the shower, and Edane said no, that was okay, and she was waiting in bed after that with a kind of… hard to understand expression.
Edane thought she might have been mad, or disappointed, but apparently she wanted to experiment, showing him her stripes again, and other parts of her, and asking him to kiss her — so he looked at her, and he kissed her. She talked him into more sex, but this time things went a lot slower, and with more hugging — though hugging was very different when having sex, it was still hugging, still warm and something that made Edane feel good about how different Janine was. About how little she was, and how he could hold her, like he could protect her from everything.
Edane wanted a shower afterward again, though — he felt weird, a little sticky — but didn’t think it’d be nice to Janine if he went and showered again, at least not that night, so he waited for morning.
*
“Edane?” Janine asked, taking her seat at the table.
“Yeah?”
She turned her head to one side, then the other, staring at her bacon and eggs. Smiling, lopsidedly. He’d drawn the heart shape with ketchup around the edge of her plate for her, and she was inspecting it very, very curiously. Hadn’t even picked up her fork to eat, as if she didn’t want to mess it up.
“Did you, uhm.” She leaned back from the table, palming at her eyes, hand folded over the bridge of her snout, frowning for a second as she thought about it. “Did. Did you do this for a reason?”
He perked his ears worriedly. “Yeah. Did I do it right?”
“You did it fine, Sweetie,” she said from behind her hand. “But. Why did you do it?”
“You did the one in the shower.”
She pushed her lips together, hard. “I see.” She didn’t sound too pleased.
“Was there a reason I was supposed to have done it?”
Janine shook her head, looking away.
He set down his pad, pausing the game replay from yesterday, and got up to join her at the table. “Tell me? I want to understand.”
Her gaze wobbled over his face uncertainly. “Well. It’s one of those romance things. I drew the shower one because we’re…” she trailed off.
“In love,” Edane said.
“Yes.”
“And I love you, so.” He gestured at her plate.
“Yeah,” she looked away, awkwardly — her tail still over the back of her chair. “It’s just that the little romantic gestures, they’re… they’re for togethery stuff, y’know? And you already ate breakfast.” She gestured at his plate, waiting in the dishwasher’s top rack for the next cycle.
&nb
sp; He looked at his plate, then at hers. At Janine, directly. “Was that wrong? I got up earlier than you.”
“I really, really appreciate you making me breakfast, Edane.” She leaned forward, and kissed his cheek, before flopping back — a ruffled mess of thylacine (the thing she was gengineered from — sometimes called a Tasmanian tiger) and uncertainty. “Don’t think I don’t, but, it’s just… didn’t you maybe want to eat breakfast with me? Us together?”
Edane twisted his ears back, looking down at the empty patch of table in front of him, and the breakfast in front of her. “Oh.” A pause. “I. I didn’t think about it like that. I was thinking I needed to go over yesterday and tomorrow’s maps, for the matches, and get in to the physiotherapist and… Sorry. Eating breakfast together didn’t… didn’t really cross my mind.”
“It’s okay.” She sagged back, relieved. “Maybe we can try tomorrow?”
“Maybe.” Tomorrow Edane was up early again, for training. Janine never managed to get up as early as he did, she only had to get to work by nine, but pointing that out felt like a bad idea.
“It’s just a little confusing with you, Edane. Lots of, uh… mixed signals. And I don’t always know what you’re thinking when you do romantic stuff. You know?”
“I know.” He got up, and leaned over the table to kiss her cheek, like she’d kissed his. “I’m still learning all that stuff.”
“Yeah.” She smiled, picked up her fork and swiped her bacon lightly across the corner of the heart. She sat there chewing slowly, watching him walk around her apartment. “We’re both still learning,” she said, brightly.
“Both still learning,” he agreed, veering past her to kiss her cheek again — which made her smile all the more, so he knew he’d done something right.
He left her to breakfast, and sat down to go over yesterday’s maps again. He looked up again when she stood, taking her plate, with its still partly intact ketchup heart on it. Janine put it very, very carefully next to his in the dishwasher’s top rack, her tail swiping side to side slowly as she smiled.
Dog Country Page 3
