Dog Country

by Malcolm F. Cross

  Edane could almost taste the words on his lips. Staring at Louie under his arm, the impulse to try and do something, anything, to make the kid stop shaking was strong. And. And he’d asked a question, so maybe the answer would help him? Only it wouldn’t.

  “Oh my god,” Louie breathed, suddenly like concrete under Edane’s arm.

  The answer wouldn’t fucking help, and that was why Edane’s jaw was clamped shut, keeping him from saying a single damn word, because as he’d learned in a dozen painful lessons — his mothers Cathy and Beth, Janine, Thorne, the folks at the market checkpoint — words could hurt people in a way Edane just didn’t understand, and he knew that, and he knew enough to shut up and—

  “It wasn’t like he even got hurt, Louie. It was too fast. Enzweiler was standing up and then he was gone. Just pieces of him left.”

  “Pieces?”

  “He got hit by a full burst, it wasn’t anything like—”

  “Shut up,” Edane hissed.

  “—like what happened on the field, he was just gone, and there was fog—”

  “Eberstetten, shut the fuck up!”

  “I’m explaining to the kid what happened!” Eberstetten snarled, teeth out. Not a grin. Just teeth on show, glowering at Edane.

  Edane pulled Louie to his chest, even though the kid was shaking. Struggling. Sobbing, now. But Edane held him to his chest the way Cathy and Beth had held him whenever something bad happened, like by shielding the kid’s head you could prevent trauma. “He doesn’t want to fucking know!”

  Eberstetten was waving his hands, now, hard sweeps, teeth grit. “It happened, okay? It fucking happened and I was there and I choked on him, I fucking sneezed, sneezed on his blood because it was all in the air and—”

  “Shut up!”

  “—upper half of his head was just lying—”

  Edane jerked back his foot and stabbed the heel of his boot against Eberstetten’s chin, had to do something to make Eberstetten shut up, but throwing Eberstetten’s head back against the bus wall just made him madder, made him yell, “—Why can’t I fucking tell anybody this? Why can’t I fucking say—”

  Wham, and Eberstetten wasn’t listening, but he’d caught Edane’s foot, was wrenching at it, shoving it away, but somewhere in all that his reflexes fizzled out and his brain caught up enough for him to hear what Edane was yelling.

  Heard, “Stop thinking! Listen to yourself! Get on schedule!”

  Louie was insensible. Clawing at the front of Edane’s uniform, sobbing.

  Eberstetten went cold. Switched off. Ears going slack, pulling himself away, into a corner of the bay. Fingering his jaw.

  Edane stared at him. Stared and stroked Louie’s skull in hard half-remembered sweeps, just like Beth did when Grandpa Jeff died.

  “I’m sorry,” Eberstetten said, eventually, ears flat, taped tail curled against his leg. “I shouldn’t talk about that. I. I got worked up.”

  A little while later Eberstetten made the shuttle stop for a minute, so he could vomit before they went on back to the rest area.

  *

  Edane put himself in charge. Made Eberstetten go and eat something from the chow stand, and since the match clock was close to running out he went with Louie to get Louie’s phone back from the judge stand, then forced Louie to sit and wait for his parents to get there. There was no way Edane was going to let Louie out of his sight and into an automated cab until he knew Louie was with the right people.

  He wound up missing his redeployment round, kept Eberstetten there, and grabbed hold of Ellis when Ellis came back in after another firefight. Made them all wait, and when the rest of the team got back in, well. He had to hand command back to Marianna. Which meant an explanation. Which meant…

  “He’s a fucking kid, Eberstetten!” She had her helmet in one hand, seemed ready to bludgeon Eberstetten to death with it.

  “I said I was sorry.” Eberstetten stood with his head low, as if he could hide in the space between his shoulders.

  “I don’t get it,” Svarstad murmured. “Louie knew Enzweiler’d died.”

  “Yeah.” Eberstetten pointed briefly at Svarstad. “I thought maybe Louie thought Enzweiler’d been suffering like with a gutshot or—”

  Violence was the tool of first resort. No friendly rough-housing, Marianna hit him so hard over the head with her helmet his ear started bleeding instantly, followed it up with very simple orders indeed. “Get psychiatric aid! Do not discuss traumatic events with children!” She drew up the helmet, glaring at him, teeth bared. “You hear me?”

  “Yes sir,” Eberstetten whimpered, eyes screwed shut. “Sir yes sir.”

  “Repeat those fucking orders.”

  “I’ll get psychiatric aid. I will not discuss traumatic events with children.”

  Erlnicht dared raise his voice. “Louie’s seventeen, Marianna.”

  She spun on him, finger raised like a stiletto blade. “He’s not eighteen. That means he’s a child, and he’s my fucking responsibility while he’s on this team, and this is not what his parents wanted for him.”

  Salzach dropped his jaw, let it swing side to side… at last shifted it left, left until his jaw clicked, and he shut his mouth, looking at Edane, then Eberstetten, then Edane again. “He was going to hear the details some time.”

  “Not when he was in tears because of screwing up the medical aid, not when I’d been fucking yelling at him all—” She halted her pacing back and forth under the rest area tree’s branches, tail up, out, still as ice. “He didn’t have to find out about it like that,” she snapped.

  Silence met her.

  “Get that ear patched,” she growled out, turning the finger of blame onto Eberstetten. “Anybody who needs to piss, go piss.” She started pacing again.

  Nobody moved, except for Eberstetten, marching over to the aid station, for the treatment of real wounds. Edane, Erlnicht, Svarstad, Salzach, Ellis. They all just stared, and after a moment of bearing the weight of the team’s gaze, she whirled, stabbed out her finger at Edane, like it was Edane’s fault, and yelled, “You’re not at attention! You don’t have to stand there like you are, so go finish off your canteens, fill them, drink until you need the Goddamn bathroom, and leave me alone.”

  Edane was the only one who kept standing there. Even Erlnicht loped off, casting a wary glance over his shoulder.

  Marianna stood, palm over her eyes, long enough for them to get out of earshot before spitting out, “What?”

  “It’s okay. Wasn’t your fault.”

  She cracked open her fingers, just looking up at him like he was crazy. “Louie’s family, Edane. His people adopted one of us, he’s family. We can’t fucking do that shit to our family.”

  Edane dipped his gaze away, pushing his jaw left in one quick jerk, back, in brief, tired contemplation. “It’s okay,” he said again. “Wasn’t your fault.”

  “I said go drink your water—”

  “I don’t take your orders like that. We play MilSim, but you’re not my CO, Marianna.”

  She narrowed her eyes at him for a long moment. “You kids are so much easier to handle when you don’t remember that.”

  Edane tried one last time, in case it’d work. “It’s okay. It wasn’t your fault.” After all, it wasn’t Louie’s fault for screwing up, or Eberstetten’s fault for opening his mouth, or Marianna’s fault for yelling at Louie. At a masochistic stretch Edane couldn’t help making, it was his own fault, for getting hit in the first place.

  “Yes it was. I’m the one who put that kid in a team with the knuckleheads who stood and watched the foster-brother he worshipped get torn to kibble.” She covered her eyes again, helmet dangling from her free hand, breath hissing between her teeth.

  “It was an accident. Shit happens.” Edane flattened his ears back.

  Marianna just shook her head. So Edane checked both ways, to make sure that nobody was looking, not one of his brothers, not one of the players on another team, and stepped forward one step to apply the C
athy and Beth maneuver to Marianna.

  After all. It’d helped Louie, a little, right?

  She threw him off easily, jabbing the heel of her hand into his armpit hard enough to throw him over her foot, hooked behind his ankle. He thundered to the turf, legs sprawling, head bouncing off the grass, world dizzier than a carnival ride for just a little longer than it took him to realize he was on the ground.

  Marianna stood over him, blinking at him, dumbfounded. “What the fuck was that?”

  “A hug,” Edane said, shuffling back on his ass, getting his hands under him.

  “Oh.” She stilled her breath. “Okay then.” Her tone was calmer, but she didn’t bother trying to help him up.

  Not really a problem. Edane brushed loose grass off his backside and got up. “You looked like you needed one.”

  “Right.”

  “It’s a thing to make bad feelings better, according to my fosters.”

  “Yeah, well, your fosters are full of shit.” She settled her palm over her muzzle again. “Go drink your water.”

  “I said you’re not—”

  Marianna held up her helmet, eyes narrowed. “Don’t make me beat the shit out of you. You ain’t that big.”

  “Right.” Edane averted his eyes.

  “We’ve still got nearly forty minutes on the game clock, and we need to get redeployed and back onto the field. Now, are we done here? You going to go drink your water like a good puppy, and leave me alone so I can go talk to the off-field support controller?”

  Edane lifted his hand to his temple weakly. “Sir yes sir,” he murmured.

  5. New Blood.

  ::/ San Iadras, Middle American Corporate Preserve.

  ::/ April, 2105.

  ::/ Edane Estian.

  Marianna could move fast, when she had to. “This is Eissen. Any of you know him?” She looked around at the gathered team, minus Louie.

  Right in the back of the dojo Marianna worked at for her day job, between a pile of padding mats and a dusty rack of wooden sword things, Edane lifted his hand. “I do. I’m Edane.”

  Eissen grinned, a brief feral flash of teeth, pointing Edane’s way. “Hey. I haven’t seen you since the Tajikistan medevac. How you been?”

  “Could be doing better.” He waved his right hand, for effect, and Eissen jerked back, startled.

  “The hell did you get that back…?”

  Ellis grinned too — but in a much more human way. “He got a new arm stitched on last year. Nerves ain’t all finished growing back, but Edane pulls his weight.”

  “If he doesn’t drop it,” Erlnicht chipped in, to more laughter.

  “Alright, alright.” Marianna snapped her hands in the squad-lead hand signal for silence. “Button up. See, Eissen? You already have a friend.” She turned to the rest of them. “Until we know what the situation is with Louie, we’re lucky enough to have Eissen in as a substitute.”

  Up front, Salzach cocked his head to the side. “You already play semi-pro?” he asked Eissen, ears splayed. Substitute players had to have a league ranking, which meant… “Aren’t you already on another team?”

  Occasionally teams doing really badly with no chance at a good ranking split up — that was the usual source for substitutions. But Edane didn’t think one of his brothers would be caught dead on one of the drop-out teams.

  Eissen shook his head. “I got asked to leave. I was on team eight-two-seven.”

  “Why the hell would they drop one of us?” Salzach asked.

  “You ain’t heard?” Eissen asked, looking around. “Eight-two-seven’s trying to go pro, and they’re sponsored by Kennis-Purcelle Combat Games…” He searched for recognition in the others’ faces.

  The only person who looked like they knew anything was Marianna, and that was because she had her mouth clamped shut tight.

  “The K-P are in talks with the league,” Eissen went on, blinking. “They’re lodging a doping complaint… Haven’t you guys heard of this?”

  “No.” Edane shifted, glancing at Marianna. “I don’t think we have.”

  “Our genes are too fucking good, man.” That feral flash of a grin came back to Eissen. “They want to ban all furries — really, just us — from the pro level of the league. There’s already an exemption for the genemodders, but apparently we’ve got some kind of unfair metabolic or genetic advantage they don’t have. They want to get the league rules rewritten for the 2106 season.”

  Eissen kept looking around, that nervous grin appearing and disappearing, but nobody said a damn thing. Not a thing.

  Not until Marianna clapped her hands sharply. “They ain’t rewritten shit yet,” she snapped. “And I have some good news for a change. We’re about to be done with being team Eight-Eight-Zero.” She zipped open a shoulder-pocket on her uniform, and spread out a sheaf of shoulder-patches like a hand of poker cards. “We, provisionally and if you knuckleheads don’t fuck this up for me, are gonna be the Hallman Hairtrigger Hounds.”

  She flung them at the team, one by one, and Edane caught his out of the air, blinking at it. They were pro? Semi-pro teams were referred to by their registration code, only pro teams got to pick names.

  Edane opened his mouth to ask what was going on, but so did Ellis, and Erlnicht, and Svarstad, and—

  “Shutcher yaps!” Marianna yelled. “We have a contract. You knuckleheads are going to sign it, and Hallman Electronics, a very nice custom fabrications company, are going to provide gear and pay us appearance fees at the maximum rate for semi-pro sponsorship. If we get into the top ten on the ladder by the end of the 2106 spring season, they will put up the registration money and we’ll be a pro-league factory team — we have the remainder of this season, this year’s fall season, and next year’s spring season to do this. In exchange you will use their and only their gear, wear the logos, and let them use photos of us using their stuff in ads.”

  “But — why?”

  “Because you knuckleheads made the mid-season highlight reels. That’s why.”

  *

  They might have made the highlight reels, but Janine wasn’t really all that interested. Not in the game, anyway.

  “You move so fast. This isn’t sped up, is it?”

  Edane slouched down a little further on the couch, left arm loosely behind Janine, right arm wound up in nerve stimulators. “Nah. But it’s got the effects on…” He started lifting his hand to gesture at the screen on her living room wall, but she did it first, tilting her head one way, then the other, as she switched between the feed’s options with little shifts of her fingers in the air.

  One way, Edane in the choking smoke and chaff beside the UGV he’d thought was a turret, while Svarstad distracted it. The other way, stripped of effects, Edane standing there in a few wisps of smoke — just enough for the AugR to work with — firing at the thing on full auto.

  Then, after that, the team skirmished with the enemy faction’s response team, coming to hunt them down in a series of rapid firefights. For the first time Edane saw where Ellis got taken out, intent on his target, forgetting that the enemy might have been coming up behind him — as they were.

  “Which one is you?” Janine asked, staring at the screen.

  “None of them. I was off the field, here.”

  “Oh.” She sat back, leaning against his arm. “Can we fast forward to the next part with you in it?”

  “I don’t think there is one.”

  There was plenty more Edane wanted to look at, the commentary analysis on the way they dealt with the ambush, the exit path Marianna and the survivors took to sweep back around to the hardlines, deliberately hitting the enemy ambush team in the back before cutting the lines. But none of that, or the follow-up on the push across the middle field to grab a persons-of-interest objective, held Janine’s interest whatsoever. In fact, she turned her back on the screen, scooting up to straddle Edane’s lap, and pushed her nose into his face. “Wanna turn it off?” she purred, striped tail batting at his knees.

  H
e pushed his muzzle against hers, back. Just mirroring what she’d done. Unsure, uncertain, still unfamiliar, even though this was one of the things she sometimes did. There were things that Edane didn’t understand about ‘relationship’ maneuvers. Janine had explained it was like dancing, some things were for the lead dancer to do, some things for the follow dancer to do. Some things, like edging her hands up onto his collarbones, were more for the girl to do, and some, like putting his arms around her shoulders, were for the guy to do. Some stuff like that seemed entirely arbitrary, and the inexplicability of the rules behind it confused him.

  She slowed, stopped, blinking green eyes at him from the other end of her long muzzle. He hadn’t answered her. She knew he hadn’t. Maybe even knew why, because Janine was smart like that.

  She was so much like him. Just littler. Her muzzle longer, more slender. She could’ve been another canine, another dog, if not for being something very different. Thylacines were weird little extinct marsupial critters that just looked like a dog, but on the inside they weren’t remotely the same.

  Janine wasn’t much like Edane at all. Not on the inside.

  “We can turn it off if you want.” He dipped his ears back, eyebrows up, worried about making her sad.

  Softer, weaker, the electric life and joy in her ebbed out, she sank back on his lap, blinking at him slowly. Her ears dipped back, too. “You don’t wanna turn it off? Maybe…” She leaned forward, pushed her muzzle alongside his. A quick touch of intimate warmth, and he did his best to respond, nuzzling into her cheek, cupping the back of her head before she drew back, her eyes gentle in front of him. Searching.

  Whatever it was she was looking for, she didn’t find it in him.

  He lifted his hand and gestured the screen off, in case that’d help.

  It didn’t.

  “You like me right?” Her voice was thin, strained.

  “Yeah.”

  Something hard in her chest pushed out in her breathing, one puff, then another across his face. She hesitated. Asked, “Do you think I’m pretty?”