Part 4: AFTERMATH
War Dog Michael Barretta
HE SLOWED FOR A FEATHERED corpse in the middle of the road. Up above, the local troop of macaques shrieked at a flock of gene–crafted micro–raptors. He rounded the blind curve and jerked the steering wheel back to avoid a washout from last night’s thunderstorm. The truck bounced across broken asphalt, and the steering wheel twisted out of his hands. From the corner of his eye, he saw a man emerging from the woods. He jammed the brakes and his truck left the road, plowing to a stop into the soft red dirt undercut from the crumbling asphalt.
Not a man, but a shroom. The figure staggered, hands outstretched, and pressed its naked body against the side glass. He could see the delicate snowflake tracery of white rhizome fibers under its skin. The shroom’s eyes glinted clear and blue. Its slack mouth drooled. The creature broke away, leaving a moist trail across the car. Its eyes turned skyward and fixed on a power pole draped with broken electrical lines and wild jasmine. It stepped away towards the pole, cast a look over its shoulder at him, almost as if it was still a person, and climbed.
He took his phone from his pocket and dialed 911.
“Gulf Breeze 911, where is your emergency?”
“Yes, this is Major William Jackson, 3rd Florida Infantry, Retired. I need to report a shroom on Soundside Drive.”
“Okay,” said the operator. “Are you sure it’s a shroom?”
“Yes, it’s a shroom. I know what one looks like.”
“Of course, Major. Has it fruited yet?”
“No, not yet. It just started climbing.” The former human, infected with a weaponized version of Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, clawed its way up the pole with fierce resolve.
“Can you show it to me?”
“Yes, hold on.” He tabbed on the camera feature of the phone and spun it to face the shroom.
“We have your location. Can you vacate the area?”
“I ran off the road. I thought I was avoiding a person, and my truck is stuck.”
“Do you have personal protective equipment?” Her voice took on a new urgency
“Yes, I do. I think.” He opened up the glove compartment and took out a government–supplied filtered hood. Three of them crowded the glove box.
“Major, we have a hazmat team on the way. We would like you to stay in your car and put on your personal protective gear. I’ve sent out a cellular warning to all citizens in the area. We want you to stay connected and keep us informed of the shroom’s status.”
“I think I can get upwind.”
“Are you sure it’s the only one?”
“No.” It was a good question of the 911 operator to ask. There was rarely just one shroom. Infections typically occurred in clusters.
“Best if you stay in the car.”
“Okay, I can do that.” He leaned forward to get a better view. The shroom had climbed three quarters of the way up the pole. He propped his phone on the dashboard. “Can you still see it?”
“Yes, we can. We don’t want you to worry. The hazmat team will decontaminate your vehicle should the shroom fruit before we get there, but if you have any powered ventilation we would like you to turn it off. Would you like me to pray with you?”
“No, I’ve already prayed, but you could pray for me; I don’t mind listening,” he lied. He behaved with enough piety to not arouse suspicion and used his combat–wounded veteran status to excuse the acts of contempt that he could not hide.
He opened one of the filter hood packages and pulled the battery lanyard. The filter pack hummed. He put it over his head and cinched it down around his neck. The hood fogged around his mouth and nose with every exhalation, but it wasn’t too uncomfortable.
The shroom reached the top of the pole and checked its grip, tightening and loosening its limbs. A mockingbird, unaware of the danger, harried the creature. The shroom shuddered, going through the terminal phase of its design.
Then he remembered his only neighbor, the Dog.
The wind was blowing from the west. If the shroom fruited, its spores would drift over the Dog’s homestead. Even if they didn’t, the decontamination team would fog the area with caustic chemicals.
He decided.
He stepped out of his truck, abandoning its relative safety, and ran farther up the road. He took off his hood to breathe more easily and turned up the narrow dirt path that led to the Dog’s home. Branches whipped at his face, and twice he ducked under immense dewy spans of banana–spider webs. He broke out into a clearing and slowed to catch his breath. It had been a long time since he had run. The emergency hood hummed in his hand.
He had seen the Dog twice before, and they had acknowledged each other at a careful distance. As veterans, they shared the bond of war, but whereas he had emerged from conflict a respected soldier, she had come out as an illegal gene splice, a piece of dangerous biological equipment.
A neat, wood–shingled house sat in the clearing. The Dog stood up in the midst of her garden with a small hand shovel held like a weapon. Leaf mold flecked the velvet gray fur of her arms.
He felt her fear, surprise, and anger. Dogs were focused telepaths by design and imprinted on their handlers at an intense and intimate level, but an unbonded person in close proximity could still feel strong emotional bleed–over. He imagined the Dog deciding whether to kill him or not. In the CSA, the Christian States of America, she was an abomination and regarded as military property to be neutralized by an ordnance disposal team, but he had known about her presence for almost a year and had not reported her. He hoped that that would work in his favor. He could see her muscles tense as she decided the best course of action.
“Shroom,” he said. “You are in the dispersal range.”
“The hazmat team will arrive in a few minutes. Once they secure the scene, they’ll disinfect with an aerial attack.”
She bolted for her house and retrieved a military pack designed for her body. Like a good soldier, she was ready to bug out at a moment’s notice. She surveyed all that she would lose, came to him, and hugged him. Her body, taught and muscular, smelled like warm sun. He could not remember the last time he’d been hugged.
She stepped back.
“Be safe,” he said.
She ran towards the edge of the woods, and, just before reaching it, dropped to all fours and moved with the grace and power of a cheetah, her spine curling and springing open, covering ground in twelve–foot leaps. She vanished into the brush.
He returned to his truck, winded from the exertion and wet with sweat. He put his hood back on. Military vehicles circled the shroom’s pole. Amber strobes flashed, and men in hazmat suits set up decontamination gear. He looked up in time to see the shroom convulse. Ropey pink antlers burst out of its skull. The shroom swung its head, rattling the antlers and releasing a pink mist of spores that caught the wind and drifted. The shroom shuddered again, and more thick antlers erupted from its back, growing and branching with astonishing fungal speed. The yellow–suited hazmat team finished their setup, and a jet of flame erupted from the fire gun’s nozzle to engulf the shroom. The antlers crisped, turned black, and broke away.
“Did you call this in?” asked the supervising officer.
“Yeah.”
“Good job. Is your hood cinched down tight?”
“Yeah, I’m good.”
“Okay, as soon as we clean up the scene we are decontaminating the area. You know what that means.”
“I do.”
The shroom fell from the pole, hitting the ground with a wet, hissing splat. Broken pieces rolled away, and the team hosed it down with more fire until the thing turned into a pile of ash. They worked the surrounding area with chemicals. Leaves dissolved and dripped under the chemical attack.
“Fruiting bodies visible upon arrival,” said the supervising officer into his radio. “High concentration of spore release. Wind speed is light and variable. I’m recommending immediate chemical decontamination.”
“Roger that,” squawked the radio. “Chopper is on the way.”
“This is going to be inconvenient,” said the major to himself.
In the hospital isolation ward, he breathed the acrid chemical mist to purge his lungs of any shroom spores that might have infiltrated his lungs. Ventilation fans whirred for a few minutes. He dried himself as best as he could with the paper towels. The sealed door opened.
“Major,” said a nurse. She handed him a paper hospital smock and watched as he dressed. “Would you follow me?”
He followed her, and she drew back a curtain.
“In here, please,” she said.
He sat at the edge of the examining table. The curtain was pulled aside, and the Sisters of Eternal Grace stepped in to pray over him. One of the crones put her bony, knuckled hand on his forehead and tapped him. They rattled their donation can in front of him when they finished. He looked down at the hospital smock.
“I don’t have any pockets.”
The lead sister frowned at him and rattled the can again.
“I don’t…”
Her face twisted into an uncharitable grimace of disgust.
The doctor entered. “Get out, hags.”
The sisters scowled in unison but turned on their heels and left in a whirl of gray skirts and sensible shoes.
“You know they are going to bill you for that prayer. The VA will cover their costs, but you should be nice to them; they’re connected like the mob,” said the doctor. “Are you feeling okay? You look like shit.”
He coughed. “I’m okay. Does that stuff work?”
“The shower washes off any spores on your skin, but the mist? No, it just scorches your lungs. The spores are encysted. The prayer is the best treatment.”
“Great.”
“I’ve got something for you.” He reached into his lab coat pocket and took out a bottle of pills, migraine medicine.
“Where did you get them?”
“There are ways, and then there are ways. People need things, and I can get them. How do you think I can help so many?”
“I can’t pay for them.”
“I still owe you.”
“That debt was paid a long time ago.”
“That debt can never be paid, but let me try. You need to be careful.”
“About what?”
“The sampler found chimera hair and skin cells on your cloths.”
“I was wearing old clothes from the war.”
“Yeah, you can try that excuse, but the sampler is more sophisticated than that. It’s the best piece of equipment we have in this hospital, and it is hotwired to the DOFF. They’ll be watching you. You know how they love rooting out heretics and atheists.”
“Yes, and Zionists and Papists and Colored.” Every society needed an underclass to absorb injustice and excess force.
“Do you need a ride home?”
“No, I’ll walk. I need the exercise.”
“You also need some clothes. It’s a long walk.”
“We’ve walked farther on less.”
“Yes, we have. You’re good to go. I’ll have the nurse bring you some clothes. The reverend–director of the hospital will want to stop by and pad your bill with another prayer or two.”
“Prayer is the best medicine.”
“I thought that was laughter.”
“Not anymore.”
Raindrops pummeled the road. He walked into a nightmare landscape of dripping, gray–green slime that coagulated in puddles and ran across the road in sticky, mucosal sheets. The aerial decontamination spray had turned the surrounding woods into a melted, Dalí–esque landscape. The larger trees resembled wilted saguaro, bent and sagging in graceful, boneless curves. Whip–thin branches of heartwood dripped to the ground. The delicate gray bones of small creatures caught in the dissolving spray littered the sticky ground. His truck remained in the washout. With a jack and boards pulled from the bed of the truck, he managed to extricate it from the ditch and drive home.
Inside his home, he wedged a two–by–four into the cleats to bar the door shut. He showered off the slime of the melted forest. As he dressed, the wind shifted with frontal passage, and the house rocked in another direction. The temperature dropped as the cold front engulfed the house. Bizarre weather typified the new normal. He started a fire in the stone fireplace and hung a battered teakettle over it. Thunder boomed. Hailstones pummeled the roof. The ghosts of his family, trapped and framed above the fireplace, regarded him from a world before the I–War and the Second Civil War.
Another roll of thunder shook the house, and he popped two of the doctor’s pain pills to break up the loci of pain that accreted around his Yankee shrapnel whenever the weather turned bad. After a few moments, the white–hot dots of agony abated. He closed his eyes and listened to the crackle of the wood fire and the hiss of boiling water from his kettle.
Someone knocked on the front door. He roused to awareness and fetched his shotgun. He chambered a shell and peered through the glass peephole.
The Dog.
He unbarred the door and held it open. She was soaking wet, shivered in the unseasonal cold.
Desperate and intimate and voiceless thoughts flowed through his mind like sound. Her camouflage T–shirt clung to her shoulders. Blood oozed from a hailstone cut above her left eye. She wiped rain from her face, and he caught sight of the razor–sharp dew claw on her forearm. If she wanted the house, she could take it from him. He stepped back, swinging the door wider.
“I’ll get you some dry clothes.” He put the gun down and went into a backroom.
He felt her gratitude and uncertainty follow him.
The Dog knelt in front of the fireplace and held her hands spread–fingered toward the fire. She turned to look over her shoulder. He handed her some old clothes that had belonged to his wife, and a towel. She stripped in front of the fireplace with immodest military efficiency. Soft velvet fur thinned on her breasts and thickened somewhat at the swell of her vulva. She dried herself with the towel and dressed. The remains of her home stained her feet milky green.
“I’m sorry. Are you hungry?’
He opened a packet of dehydrated chicken soup and dumped it into the tea kettle.
“It will take a few minutes”
He added another log to the fire and stirred the soup mix. Ants boiled from the log and stepped into a miniature hell. They crisped in the embers. The Dog sat on the threadbare couch and curled her legs under her and tucked her hands between her thighs. He was not afraid even though there were strong reasons for baseline humans to fear Dogs. They were stronger and smarter, exotic and dangerous, beautiful, and, above all else, different. She was typical of her kind.
“Yes, I was a soldier once.” Most soldiers of the old USA featured some viral–delivered enhancements. He saw pretty well in low–light conditions, couldn’t run to fat even if he wanted to, and healed a bit faster than before. The processes that modified him had created her from scratch.
“Maybe you’re a woman.”
She smiled against the exhaustion that threatened to overwhelm her. Her canines protruded a bit from her lips. He served the soup.
“You’re safe here.”
She finished the soup and set the bowl down on the end table.
“What’s your name?” he asked.
He waited for the fire to burn down to a safe level. He pulled down a comforter from the back of the couch and covered her. He curled on the adjacent sofa and fell asleep.
Under M’ling’s ministrations, the backyard bloomed with fruit and vegetable and flower. Low–level agents of the Department of Faith Formation intruded several times, but each time she sensed their presence and vanished. At night, when the air cooled, they talked. She told him how a sniper killed her handler in Venezuela, and how she ripped the sniper’s throat out with her teeth. She told him how she battled back from the psychic shock of his loss, her inability to accept another handler, and her escape from the decommissioning facility. In turn, he told her about fighting in Taiwan during the I–War with China, and later in Virginia, during the Second Civil War. They slept together, at first for companionship, and then for something more. At night he stroked the length of her body, soft velvet over hard muscle.
Stories of handlers that slept with their Dogs were ubiquitous in rocket–shattered Taiwanese cities. Contemplating bestiality with manufactured creatures of ethereal beauty was the least of sins in that brief and violent war. Handlers and their Dogs returning from long–range patrols self–segregated at the firebase, and it only added to the mystery and speculation. Once, on a mission, his fire team found a handler carrying the long, lithe frame of his Dog, not over his shoulder, but in his arms like a bridegroom carrying his bride. The handler, agonized with fatigue, refused to let anyone else touch her. He fell to his knees and then collapsed from exhaustion over her body. They convinced him to bury her. Over the grave, the handler cried and murmured gentle words, and when he had finished he said, “I can’t.”
“Can’t what”
“I can’t. Do you understand?”
“I do.”
“You can’t.”
When they looked away the handler shot himself in the head and they dug another grave.
At the time he could not understand the connection, the powerful bond between Dog and handler, each devoted to the other so intimately that the descriptive terms ascribed to the connection were meaningless. It was what made them such a terrifyingly effective weapon system.
Now he thought they worked well together, in a way in which he never expected to do again.
She stood and looked to him.
He heard a vehicle pull into his drive. He walked to the front door and waited. A man wearing a modified roman collar, a badge, and a sidearm walked towards his porch. Two other men scanned the area. He opened the door before the man knocked.
“Major Jackson, I am Reverend–Inspector Carlyle.”
“In what capacity are you here today?”
The man looked perplexed. “What do you mean?”
“Are you here as a reverend or as an inspector?”
“Both. Always.”
“What can I do for you?”
“I have traces unexplained by your statements. Where is the abomination?”
“On my front step.”
The reverend–inspector grinned with professional malice and indignation.
“Right. Harboring an abomination is a capital offense.”
“Every offense is a capital offense these days.”
“The purest metal comes from the hottest fires.”
“Clever.”
The reverend–inspector was the worst kind, a thick layer of true believer over a core of bully, the type to shout damnation on the street corners yet never lift a finger in a poorhouse or soup kitchen.
“May I come in?”
He stepped forward and was pushed back.
He moved his hand to draw his sidearm
“Do you think that you can draw that weapon before I do something about it?”
The reverend–inspector moved his hand away from the weapon. Confusion and genuine fear crossed his face. He was unaccustomed to resistance.
“I have full authority…”
“Major”
“What?”
“Major. What you want to say is: Major, I have full authority. You will address me by my military rank. I’ve earned it, and you are not coming in my house without a warrant. This isn’t the United States. Are you a Yankee?”
The reverend–inspector’s face darkened at the insult. “Major, your story to my associates was unconvincing. There were no squatters in the woods. And I found these.” He held up silver dog tags that flashed in the sun. “When I come back it will be with a warrant.”
He stepped onto his porch, and the reverend–inspector stumbled backwards down the two steps.
“If you come back, we will duel over any further insult. Do you accept? I’ll register our intent with the county.”
The inspector flushed red, unprepared for the personal challenge. Duels were rare, but permitted between CSA landowners and military officers.
“I, I…”
“I thought not. Get off my property.”
The reverend–inspector turned, stalked to his county car, and drove away.
M’ling emerged from the other room and pressed her body against his back. She wrapped her arms around him, and leaned her head on his shoulder.
“He will come back.”
He locked his desk drawer and stepped into the hangar. The helicopters inherited from the USA were slotted in their spaces but immobile for a lack of spare parts. All the mechanics he supervised had already left for Friday services, a euphemism for drinking moonshine in the back room of the local roadhouse.
He drove past a chain gang of un–saved and un–white conscripts supervised by mirror–shaded, shotgun–toting deputy–deacons. He stopped at the toll bridge and honked his horn for the attendant to lift the reflector–bedazzled log gate that blocked his way. The attendant came out of the booth and walked away from him.
“Hey, I need to get home,” he yelled to the attendant, but the man entered the tollhouse and closed the door.
“Under new management, Major,” said a voice from behind the driver’s window. His door was wrenched open and a gun pressed against his temple.
He reached for his own gun in the glove box.
“No you don’t, Major. No you don’t. Please step out.”
The pressure from the pistol barrel eased and he unfastened his seatbelt. He stepped out and recognized the highwaymen, a former military unit that did the unchristian work it took to enforce a Christian state. The man with the gun to his head pistol–whipped him, and he dropped to his knees. Two more heavy blows pounded on his head. Stars exploded, but he held to consciousness.
Rough hands grabbed him and dragged him into the surrounding woods. Twisted hemp rope secured him face–down over the hood of a car. They were strong and fast and, like him, ex–military.
“Major, what is good?”
He spit blood out of his mouth. Some of his teeth felt loose.
“I said, what is good?”
A fist punched him in the back of his head, bouncing his face against the hood of the car. ’19 Mustang, he thought. The last year they made them.
“I’ll tell you. Good is that which pleases God, and what pleases God is what I have to do. To the matter at hand: There is an abomination in our midst, and it needs to be purged. Fire has to be fought with fire, an abominable act for an abominable act.”
A knife sliced open the back of his pants and eager hands jerked his trousers down. He breathed in fast, fearful pants.
“Where is the abomination?”
He remained silent.
“When we are done you know what you must do.”
When they finished taking turns, they cut him free, and he fell to the ground. They left him alone and walked back to their camp behind the tollhouse. Darkness fell, and he pulled himself up and limped to his truck. Warm blood dressed his legs and back.
He drove home naked and broken.
He did not need to explain.
She knew.
He radiated humiliation and pain.
She reached for him, but he kept walking through the house to the backyard. He stepped into the small pool converted into a fishpond and sat in the water up to his neck. Carp and brim nibbled at him. In time, he went to bed, and she lay next to him, her hand on his chest. Between them, in the still of the night, thought and feeling ebbed and flowed in a gentle tide.
He awoke alone, his throat raw, his insides dirty. In the bathroom, he looked in the mirror and saw a small snowflake tracery of white on his cheek. He drank tepid water until he gagged. She was not in bed and he went in search. The backdoor to the living room lay open to the night. Dark clouds scudded across the full moon. M’ling stood on the steps in the pool that he sat in earlier. She glowed ghostly in the pre–dawn light, a specter worthy of darkest fear. The water lapped at her ankles. Naked and alien, she washed shadowed blood from her forearms and chest and mouth.
The highwaymen did not know what they had unleashed.
Predatory eyeshine regarded him with love. She stepped from the pool and embraced him. Retractable–clawed hands caressed the fibrous cluster at his cheek. Her dew claw rested across his throat. She would do it if he asked.
“No,” he said. “I want every minute.”
He made arrangements. The doctor visited him and injected him with an expensive antifungal that slowed the progression but could not stop it.
Long ago, the doctor, then a medic, paralyzed with fear over the onslaught of incoming artillery rounds, had curled into an exposed fetal ball in the open battlefield. The major, then a captain, had dragged the doctor into the shelter of the root ball crater of a fallen tree. Anti–personnel shells burst overhead, filling the air with white–hot blades of Yankee metal. They outlasted the fierce barrage and survived the night and spoke no more of it.
The doctor owed him.
“Do this for me and our debt is settled.”
“I will.”
The thirty–foot–long speedboat rolled under the topside weight of three big outboard engines and six fifty–five gallon drums of fuel on the aft deck. Big men dressed in night camouflage unloaded alcohol, pornography, medicine, and other hard–to–find necessities. The run back to Cuba would take twenty hours, but in less than two they would be beyond the decrepit CSA Coast Guard.
By the light of the half moon, the fungal rhizomes luminesced. The fibers spread across his face and neck and reached for the thoughts in his head. The smuggler crew kept their distance. As she embraced him, his hand drifted to the swell of her belly. He pressed, feeling for a kick, but felt none. Maybe it was too soon.
“Our daughter.”
She kissed him one last time and boarded the boat.
As the boat receded into the night, sadness attenuated. His connection grew weaker and weaker until he could no longer feel her. He dropped to the wet ground, empty and hollow.
By unthinking instinct, he selected a dead pine that offered unobstructed access to the wind. Compulsion drove him to the topmost reaches, and he swayed in the amber morning light, rocking to–and–fro in the breeze. He thought his last thoughts of love and war before bizarre biological processes bundled his memories into microscopic spores that erupted from him in a pink haze to be scattered on the winds.
Coming Home
Janine K. Spendlove
“No war is over until the enemy says it’s over. We may think it over, we may declare it over, but in fact the enemy gets a vote.”
“No war is over until the enemy says it’s over. We may think it over, we may declare it over, but in fact the enemy gets a vote.”
PIA RAN AS HARD AS she could, the hot air of this desert planet burning her lungs. She’d never get away. They’d taken down each of her crew in turn, starting with her co–pilot and all the way to her most junior loadmaster. Lingo was only eighteen. Torn apart by the monsters, and Pia had been helpless to stop it.
Stop.
She should stop. She could hear the cans getting closer. Their scrabbling claws tearing at the hard–baked clay beneath them. Soon they would be on her, tearing at her, devouring her. Soon she would join her crew. Soon—
“Pia!”
She jerked awake and grabbed at the guitar in her lap before it could crash to the floor. Her heart was racing, but at least it meant she was still alive. It had only been a nightmare. I’m fine, she thought. Lance Corporal Lingo was still alive too, as were most of her crew.
But not all.
The gravelly sound of a throat being cleared pulled her from her miserable memories, and she fixed her gaze on the comm display installed over the fireplace’s mantle. “Hi, Mom.” Pia set her guitar down; it was the only thing that seemed to capture her attention these days.
On the screen, the dark–eyed woman, with skin and hair color to match, looked as if she’d been crying. Pia stiffened, knowing what was coming.
“Uncle Faust is gone.”
Memories from the last twenty–seven years of Pia’s life swirled through her mind. Uncle Faust pushing her on a swing. Uncle Faust tugging on one of her dozens of braids. Uncle Faust telling her all about flight school. Uncle Faust coming home from a scouting mission to Dixie with a cough he couldn’t shake.
“By ‘gone’ you mean dead.” Pia finally looked at the woman before her, a mirror of what she herself would look like in thirty years or so.
Her mother blinked back tears and nodded. Silver streaks wove through her mane of black hair, making her look exotic instead of old. She pursed her lips together and swiped at her eyes.
“Are you okay? Is Mike home—”
“I’m fine, Mom.” Pia cut her off, anger flaring inside her. “People die every day. I gotta go.” And just like that she terminated the comm, almost savoring the startled and hurt look she’d seen on her mother’s face.
Picking her guitar up, Pia strummed a few chords of the ancient Irish folk song she’d been playing. She thought that maybe she should cry. She’d loved her uncle, after all, and goodness knew he’d doted on her as if she’d been his own daughter. And yet upon further examination of herself she found she felt… nothing. Not an emptiness from his now permanent absence, because that would be something.
This was nothing.
Something is wrong with me. I should feel something. The thought was fleeting, and she brushed it aside. I’m fine.
Hours later, when she entered her bedroom and saw the small stack of neatly folded clothes sitting at the foot of her bed, tears came unbidden. She turned around and silently left the room, her heart pounding until the sound of the door sliding closed behind her quieted it some. But then she felt her heart race again as the reality struck her that the clothes would still be there, waiting for her to put them away when she came back. They would always be there, and the idea of having to put away laundry overwhelmed her completely.
The smooth, cream–colored walls of her home no longer felt peaceful. They seemed to close in around her. The air was stifling, and Pia found herself gulping, trying to inhale as much as she could. Her palms were sweating and she could hear her own heartbeat roaring in her ears as she struggled to maintain control of the anxiety that was swelling within her.
Like a crushing wave sending a swimmer tumbling, the panic over took her and she fled her home.
Later she would realize the fact that it had been the laundry that had sent her into a panic and not her beloved uncle’s death. It was the first real indicator that something was really wrong. But she wasn’t ready to accept that just yet.
I’m fine.
“Thrusters?” Pia tried to keep the excitement from tingeing her voice too much. It was her very first mission as the ship captain. Sure, the converted shuttle wasn’t much to look at, nor was it a very large ambulance—hardly enough space to carry more than half–a–dozen litters. But it was quick and nimble, and that’s what mattered when flying to and from the front.
“All green, all quadrants,” came the crisp reply from her co–pilot, First Lieutenant Angel Miller. Always a consummate professional, Pia could tell Angel was just as excited as she was by the slight acceleration in Angel’s spoken cadence.
Pia’s crew worked together like a well–lubricated machine after flying together for two months in preparation for this deployment. She knew each and every one of them and their quirks and, given the chaos that awaited them down in New Austin, she couldn’t imagine flying with a better team.
Pre–flight checklist complete, Pia pulled back on the yoke while Angel repeated their departure clearance to Space Traffic Control onboard the UPNS COMFORT. It was their home base and main ship of operations, currently in orbit around the colony planet of New Texas.
“Midas Four Two, turn right to one two zero, watch for the asteroids, then it’s a straight shot to landing zone delta.”
“Midas Four Two copies all.” Angel gave Pia the thumbs–up; she pushed the thrusters forward. She heard a whoop of glee not just from her two gunners, but the two hospital corpsmen as well.
“Should I quiet them down, ma’am?”
“Nah, let ’em cheer. I know just how they feel.” Pia let a grin break across her face as she opened the thrusters fully, as she swooped around the asteroid field that stood between them and the planet’s surface.
Pia sat on the prefabricated front porch of her home. It looked like wood, felt like wood, and even smelled like wood, but it wasn’t wood. The old oil companies had seen the writing on the wall long ago and had created new, easily sustainable materials that were both cheap and durable. Perfect for colony moons like Pia’s home of Grace.
Grace was in the same system as New Texas but couldn’t have been more different. Whereas New Texas—with its slightly closer orbit to the system’s sun—was primarily a desert wasteland, Grace was lovely, and so very much like how every child learned Earth had once been before humanity had used it up and nearly destroyed it.
A light breeze blew by, fluttering the greenish–purple leaves on the surrounding trees. The accompanying sound of the little stream in Pia’s backyard almost made her feel at ease. Almost.
“Hey.” Mike sat down next Pia, and she belatedly realized he’d walked up without her even noticing.
That could get me killed. Not that Mike would ever hurt me. It was the canidae, or “cans” as they’d taken to calling them on New Texas, that she had to worry about.
“Hey, yourself.”
“Your mom called me.” He gave her a sidelong glance. “She told me what happened to Faust. I’m sorry.”
Pia shrugged. Her eyes flitted to the trees lining the property line, looking for the monsters she knew had to exist out there. Just because you can’t see it doesn’t mean it’s not there.
Mike followed her gaze, then looked at the old–fashioned hinged front door that hung partially open, then back to Pia. His jet–black eyebrows furrowed together in his classic “I’m worried” expression.
“How long have you been out here?”
“I don’t know.” Pia shrugged and continued to watch the tree line.
“Why didn’t you just go inside?”
Pia tensed, heart racing. He would never understand. And she didn’t have the words to explain it. How could she make him understand that she couldn’t be in the house without someone? That it was too small. That it was wrong in there right now. The walls were too close. Confining. Trapping.
“I couldn’t.”
Raising one eyebrow, Mike opened his mouth to respond, but Pia cut him off.
“I just couldn’t, okay? You don’t need to go all ‘Doctor Chu’ on me.”
Ignoring the hurt look in his brown eyes, she kept her eyes on the tree line.
“Not that kind of doctor, Pia. I’m physical therapist, not a mental therapist.” He ran his fingers through his straight black, closely–shorn hair.
Pia stiffened. “Is that what you think I need? A mind bender?”
“No, I…” He reached out a hand to touch her back and she flinched. “I don’t know what you want me to say.”
“Nothing. I’m fine.” Getting to her feet, Pia went back inside, leaving Mike alone on the porch.
“You ready back there?” Pia kept her eyes on the navigational instruments as she finished another checklist. She knew that beyond the snub nose of her ship lay the gruesome remains of more than one Marine amidst the charred rubble of this section of New Austin. Despite receiving multiple scene–setting mission briefs to supposedly prepared them, she and her younger crewmembers hadn’t expected this; the older, more seasoned members seemed unsurprised. The “cans” were brutally vicious and efficient. Body armor was almost useless against their six sets of claws. Her ship’s hull armor wasn’t much better.
Thankfully plasma rifles are far more effective than claws.
“Stabilizing one more, Skipper.” HM3 Francis Kilmer’s slow drawl sounded in Pia’s headset.
“Copy, Doc. Just let me know when you’re ready.”
Lingo piped in. “Hey, Velazquez, you gotta check out the bleeder! Her leg’s only hanging on by a—”
“Shut it, Lingo!” Corporal Velazquez, who normally had a smile on her face, chastised the junior gunner. “Just focus on your effing job and let the docs do theirs. You never know when a can could come.”
“All loaded and ready. Pax are secure.” HM2 Anton Mierzejewski’s voice crackled over their headsets.
Pia gripped the yoke and scanned the horizon. Once she felt the ramp lock in place and verified it with a look at the center screen, she pushed up the power and headed them back to the UPNS COMFORT.
“Through or around the asteroids?” Angel brought up the two courses she’d plotted. Her fingers hovered lightly over them, waiting for the captain’s direction.
Pia bit her lower lip. Through was definitely the quicker way, but also likely to get them killed. The problem with around was that it would take too long. She didn’t know what shape their casualties were in.
The sound of someone retching filled her ears.
“Corporal Velazquez, is everything all right?” Angel gave Pia a worried glance.
“Yeah. Well, no. The bleeder’s strap broke and she fell off the litter, and her leg fell off her. It doesn’t look good back here. The docs are trying to help her, but Lingo can’t stomach it.” Velasquez’s voice, though calm, was tight. “I think you better hurry, Skipper.”
“Asteroids it is.” Pia turned the ambulance toward the thin belt that stood between them and the COMFORT. Pia knew it was just a saying, that if she didn’t get the trauma patients to the COMFORT within the “golden hour,” they most likely wouldn’t keel over and die, but time truly was of the essence if all these Marines, especially “the bleeder,” were going to survive.
“Make sure everyone’s strapped down tight back there.” Pia eyed a gap between the outermost asteroids before her. She could just make out the outline the COMFORT beyond the belt. “This is going to be a bumpy ride.”
Pia sat straight up, sweat coating her entire body as her heart raced. Disoriented, she reached for the yoke that wasn’t in front of her. Pia’s right hand closed around empty air as she searched for the thrusters.
Everything was dark, and she blinked her eyes frantically, trying to get her vision to clear, when she heard a loud snore. Mike’s snore. It was a loud as a ship’s well deck opening up, and it immediately grounded her back in the here and now.
She was home on Grace. She was not on New Texas. She hadn’t just lost another crewmember to the fangs and claws of a can.
I’m fine.
She couldn’t remember her nightmare, not even fragments, just the feeling of helplessness that stayed with her.
Knowing she wouldn’t be sleeping again anytime soon, Pia slipped out of bed, careful not to wake Mike, and padded softly down the stairs to her guitar.
Their fourth load of injured Marines and civilians offloaded onto the UPNS COMFORT, Pia stifled a yawn. They were nearing the end of their crew day and would soon get to hit the rack. She knew her crew had to be at least as exhausted as she was—if not more, in the docs’ cases.
“Ramp’s up.” Lingo’s tired voice sounded over the intercom. Angel visually verified the indicator on the center console and gave Pia a thumbs–up, confirming the lance corporal’s statement. They had to be more careful than ever now—tired people made mistakes, and mistakes killed Marines.
Pia pushed up the thrusters and eased the shuttle through the airlock and down the COMFORT’s well deck. She rolled her head around, trying to loosen up her neck. The fifteen pounds of survival gear that she wore now felt more like fifty.
“Midas Four Two, turn to zero six three, current angle of attack.”
Pia and Angel exchanged a confused look before Angel responded to control.
“Say again, control? We’re an ambulance on a CASEVAC route to landing zone…” Angel double–checked her notes then keyed the mic, “…delta. That heading takes us to zone…” she checked the digital chart display, “…papa, which is still hot.”
“Do you have gunners, Midas?” A new voice was coming from STC, deep and growling.
“Affirmative,” Pia answered before Angel could, irritated by the change in the briefed mission. “But my crew’s exhausted, and flying them into a hot zone, without a proper brief at the very least, is liable to get someone killed.”
The same growling voice snapped back almost before Pia unkeyed the mic. “If you don’t hurry there won’t be casualties to evacuate! Every second you argue with me you put another Marine’s life at risk, Captain.”
Pia frowned and then keyed the shuttle’s intercom. “Did you all hear that?”
Her crew chief, good old reliable Gunnery Sergeant Anderton, the one among them who had the most to lose because he was retiring next month, was the one to answer.
“They’re Marines, ma’am.”
That said it all. “See if you can plot a somewhat safe way in,” Pia said, nodding toward the nav computer as she angled the shuttle toward the new landing zone.
“And if I can’t?” Angel didn’t look up, fingers already manipulating their flight route in the nav computer.
“They’re Marines. Find a way.”
“Aye, aye, ma’am!”
Pia smiled as she strummed the last chords to the song she’d just learned on her guitar. It was another old tune, but it was bright and catchy and always made her smile. She thought maybe she’d play it for Mike. Maybe she’d even sing along. Maybe—
“Do you want to go for a walk?” Mike leaned against the opening into the den.
Pia’s smile was gone in an instant and she felt her anger rise up inside. How dare he interrupt?
“Do I look like I want to go for a walk? I’m playing my guitar. If I wanted to go for a walk, I’d go for a walk!”
Mike didn’t say anything. Didn’t yell back. Didn’t even turn and leave. He didn’t even have the decency to look hurt or upset by her behavior toward him. He just stood there looking perfectly understanding and calm.
She wanted to hurt him. To make him angry with her. Then she’d feel validated. Then he would see all the things that were wrong with her. Then he would leave her and she wouldn’t have to try so hard anymore.
Setting the cherrywood guitar carefully back on its stand, Pia rose to her feet and calmly walked over to the delicately carved jade vase that had been a Chu family heirloom for generations now. It was older than Grace itself, originating on Earth. Picking the vase up carefully in two hands, she just as calmly walked past Mike and out to the back garden.
“Pia?” He followed her outside, careful to give her the space he seemed to understand she needed. “What are you doing?”
“I hate this vase.” Before he could stop her, Pia hurled the vase into the stream and smiled as she watched it crack and break up amongst the rocks.
She felt hot tears rolling down her cheeks as she sank to the soft grass beneath her.
“I hate it, I hate it, I hate it.” Pia pulled up clumps of grass and dug her fingers into the rich soil beneath. She felt Mike’s arms encircle her and she shoved against him.
“You should hate me!”
He only pulled her tighter and kissed the top of her head. “I think you need to talk to someone.”
“I don’t want to.” She buried her face in his shoulder and felt the wetness from her tears soak the absorbent synth of his shirt. “I’m fine. I’m fine!”
“I know. But I still think you should.”
“Please don’t make me.”
“I can’t make you do anything.”
They touched down on the dusty pad of LZ Papa between the remains of the Marine’s forward operating base. Pia’s gunners had just blasted a dozen cans from the air, but not before they’d witnessed a lone Marine get torn limb from limb by one of the six–legged, hairy monsters. The engines were too loud to hear the Marine’s screams, but they could see his mouth contort in pain. Lingo had blasted the can to bits with his plasma rifle, but it had been too late.
A golden retriever lay by the remains of his handler, his chest heaving up and down slowly, and Pia could only imagine the high–pitched keen coming from the grieving dog.
Can’t do anything about that right now. Focus on the task at hand. They had a job to do, and Pia knew her crew would cue off of her behavior.
“Angel, run a scan. Are we going to get hit by the cans while on deck?”
“Aye, aye.” Angel’s fingers flew over the console as she executed Pia’s order. Everything else was quiet as they landed, eerily so.
“All clear, Skipper?” Doc Kilmer’s voice sounded over the intercom once the last landing strut was in place.
“We got a herd of cans coming from two seven zero, about a klick away.” Angel called up the heat signatures and vector and sent them back to the corpsman. “I’d say we have about two minutes.”
The words were hardly out before Pia heard the ramp lowering.
“Gunny, we’re gonna need your help.”
Pia nodded her approval at the crew chief, and Gunnery Sergeant Anderton unbelted and headed to the back.
“Everyone stay on comm. Velazquez, Lingo, shoot anything that has more than four legs. Doc, you guys have ninety seconds to do a sweep, then we’re outta here.” Pia’s crew all voiced their understanding, and with that they were off.
She hated being left behind like this. She hated staying in the safety of the flight deck while her crew exposed themselves to danger. But more than all that, she hated the cowardly feeling of relief that crept over her.
Pia kept her gaze inside and focused on her instruments. The dusty, barren red rock spread out before her was interesting, but the dismembered and shredded remains of a squad’s worth of Marines turned her stomach. Her heart leapt to her throat when she saw a flash of movement out of the corner of her eye.
But it wasn’t the cans, not yet. They were still a minute fifteen out. No, it was Doc Mierzejewski—Ski—trying to coerce the golden retriever to come with him, but the dog wouldn’t leave his handler. Anytime Ski got too close, the golden would charge to his feet and growl with neck hair standing on end.
Pia was just about to tell him to move on, that they only had sixty seconds left, when Gunny spoke over the freq.
“We found one, boss. Little black lab led us right to her Marine. But he’s injured something fierce, and stuck under a wrecked LightTac.”
“Can you get him out?”
“Yes, ma’am, but we need time and Ski to get his butt over here.”
Pia turned to her co–pilot. “How big’s the herd?”
“Couple hundred, but that’s only in the main body. Advance is only a dozen or so.”
“Velazquez?”
“We can buy them time, Skipper.”
Pia felt the floor decks rumble with the charge of the plasma rifles.
“Gunny, you’ve got your time. Get him out.”
“Already on it, ma’am,” the crew chief grunted.
The first of the cans crested the lip of the plateau, and Pia felt her gut clench.
They looked like dogs, but their hair was coarser, longer, wilder. They scuttled on six legs like insects and had razor–sharp, six–inch claws at the end of all of them. They were the size of a short human and as fast as a cheetah. They could filet you before you even realized they were there. And they were smart.
After pausing a moment to howl in unison, the dozen or so cans that made up the vanguard of the herd threw themselves at the shuttle.
Pia felt the shudder of a plasma rifle discharge and watched the lead can drop.
But there were more behind it.
She realized then there would always be more.
Pia stood on the beach. The soft pink sand squished between her toes and the warm summer sun shone down on her, sending beads of sweat down her back. Normally this would have put a smile on her face. Normally this would have calmed her. But now she didn’t know what to think or feel.
A fair–skinned man approached her. He was wearing a multi–colored flowered shirt and clashing black–and–green striped swim trunks. His hair was cut in a familiar military buzz, so blonde it was almost white. He was nearly a decade older than Pia, but his blue eyes sparkled with a hidden mirth Pia was instantly jealous of.
I’ll never feel that way again.
He stood next to her for a moment, not saying anything, just letting Pia stare for as long as she needed. When she finally looked away, he stuck out a hand.
“Jim Rogers. Doctor Chu said you needed to talk to someone.”
Pia took his hand, gave it a brief squeeze, then quickly released it. She didn’t like for people to touch her any more. “You don’t look like a mind bender.”
“I’m a chaplain.”
“You don’t look like one of them either.”
He nodded but kept his gaze on the ocean before them. “Been one for the last eighteen or so years. Last tour was as a battlefield chaplain. New Texas to be exact. Want to go for a walk?”
Rather than answer, Pia began walking along the shoreline, carefully keeping her sandal–clad feet clear of the water surges. The chaplain walked alongside her, his bare feet as often in the water as not. They moved in silence for several minutes, with Pia occasionally staring at him, and the chaplain leaning over to pick up a seashell and smile before putting it back.
“You said you fought on New Texas.”
“Chaplains don’t fight. Leastwise not how you Marines do. But yes, I was on the battlefront of New Texas. New Austen to be exact.”
Pia sucked in a breath as visions of slaughtered Marines and feasting cans danced before her eyes. She banished her memories as quickly as she could.
“How are you so normal?”
The chaplain raised a blonde eyebrow and looked down at his garish clothes.
“You know what I mean. It’s like the war is over for you.” Pia brushed her hand over her brown eyes. “I’m afraid it won’t ever be over for me. I just see New Austin in my head all the time, over and over and over again.”
“That’s not what you’re really afraid of, though, is it? The memories. Those will fade.” The chaplain still didn’t meet her gaze, but there was a kind, understanding smile on his face. She realized that she could tell him anything. He was a stranger; he hadn’t known her from before. Therefore, he was safe.
“No, it’s not.” She let her arm drop, skimming the side of her white cotton cover–up. “Facing the war was surprisingly easy. Often heartbreaking, given what my job was, but I had good Marines by my side. I knew what to do. What was expected of me.”
She placed a fingertip on the dark, exposed skin of her sternum and took a deep breath. “The problem is I don’t know who I am any more. Or rather, I know, but I don’t recognize me. No one does.” Pia shook her head. “I keep waiting to go back to the old me. The always–chipper, happy–go–lucky me. It hasn’t happened yet. I mean, I say I’m fine because maybe if I say it enough it will be true. But it’s not true. I’m not fine.”
She stopped walking and looked up at the chaplain, brown eyes meeting his—kind, understanding, blue. “So I guess what I want to know is when will it happen. When will I be me again? When will I feel right inside?”
The plasma rifles fired over and over again, nearly drowning out of the roar of the cans.
“Time’s up, Gunny,” Pia yelled into her mic. “Where are you guys? We need to leave!”
A can made it past the rifles and threw itself against the hull of the shuttle. Pia winced—their claws were sharp enough to shred through the hull, which meant they wouldn’t be spaceworthy if she didn’t act fast.
“On our way back, Skipper,” Doc Kilmer huffed.
Pia hopped out of her seat and checked the charge on her plasma rifle.
“Ma’am, what are you doing?” Angel looked out from under her sweat–soaked cap, red hair plastered to her forehead and neck, tired green eyes betraying their worry.
“I’m not going to let the cans tear my ship apart.” It was logical, really. Had to be done; no time for thought. No time for worry. No time for fear. “Go through take–off checks and when I say go, you go, even if I’m not on board.”
“Ma’am…?”
“I don’t have time to argue. Do it.” Pia glanced over her shoulder just long enough to see Angel’s nod, then leapt down the ladder well to the cargo hold behind. Lingo had a look of manic glee as he picked off the cans when they crested the ridge.
“Velazquez, with me.” Pia heard the gunner shoulder her rifle and follow her down the ramp and outside. “You take the right, I’ll take the left. Don’t let them near the hull.”
“Aye, aye, Skipper!” Corporal Velazquez grinned broadly, her easy smile confidant and excited. She ducked around the corner, already firing her rifle.
Pia barely cleared the turn when a can was on her. She could smell its fetid breath wash over her face, and a dribble of foamy saliva dripped onto her cheek. It didn’t attack, and she realized the beast was dead. As she rolled it off of her she realized she’d shot it without thinking.
Can I kill so easily now?
“Skipper!”
Pia whirled around and brought her plasma rifle up to bear and shot another can, hot on the tail of Doc Ski and Gunny, carrying a young Marine between them. His tan cammies were torn to bits but still managed to cling to his body. His head lolled to the side, and it was only when she saw the stark white of his eyes cracking open, so much in contrast to the blackness of his skin, that she realized he was still alive.
“What are you doing out here, Skipper?” Gunny asked as he and Doc Ski hauled the Marine on board. He kept calling for someone named “Chesty.”
“Saving your butt.” Pia took out another can that was trailing a skinny little black Labrador. She’d barely lowered her rifle when she felt herself get jerked backward and onto the ramp by the seat of her flight suit.
“Yeah, but who’s gonna save yours?” Gunny Anderton reached past Pia and pulled a knife she hadn’t seen him throw from the body of a dead can. She hadn’t even heard the monster creeping up behind her. “Need you in one piece to fly us outta here, Skipper.”
The sound of claws scrabbling across the ramp ended the conversation as Pia whirled, rifle brought up to bear. The scrawny lab hauled itself up the ramp, swept past Pia and the gunnery sergeant, and leapt into the injured Marine’s waiting arms. Pia watched as the Marine collapsed onto his litter, then looked around and counted her crew.
“Where’s Kilmer?” But she knew even before she finished asking the question. Gunny shook his head and Doc Ski focused on stabilizing the injured Marine. Pia swallowed. Now was not the time to grieve.
“Velazquez, get your butt over here. Time to go.” Pia felt the ramp under her rumble and begin to close.
Angel’s voice piped over the comm, calm and steady. “Ma’am, the main body is here. We need to take off now.”
“No, give Velazquez a minute.”
“We don’t have a minute. We don’t even have ten seconds.”
The sound of another plasma rifle blasting shook the shuttle. Without looking, Pia knew Gunny Anderton had taken Camila’s gunner spot.
“Velazquez!” Pia couldn’t leave her. Looking out the side port she saw that the gunner had foolishly gone up to the ridge to engage the herd. Pia couldn’t watch, nor could she look away. The ramp finished closing and Pia slipped down into the med bay. She pressed herself to another window and watched as Velazquez took out can after can, always with her easy smile on her heart–shaped face.
Pia forced herself to her feet and launched herself up the ladder well onto the flight deck. If she could turn the shuttle to bring the forward cannons to bear, maybe, just maybe…
But as she slammed into her seat and looked out the forward viewport she saw it was too late. Velasquez still had a smile on her heart–shaped face, but it was nowhere near the rest of her body.
Pia couldn’t just leave a member of her crew behind. Marines didn’t leave Marines behind. Not ever, not—
Angel’s hand came over hers and guided Pia to pushing the thrusters forward. Pia pulled back on the yoke and felt multiple shakes along the shuttle as the bodies of cans slammed into the hull.
And then it was quiet.
“You are you now.” The chaplain’s voice was calm and soothing, the way the lapping waves were supposed to be. Pia wanted to punch him in the face. Instead she let a slow breath out and asked a question.
“What do you mean I am me now?”
“The old you is gone. The new you is here, and that’s just fine.” The chaplain stopped walking, and faced Pia. “The new you is wonderful. I think if you gave yourself a chance to get comfortable in your new skin, you’d see that.” He placed a hand on her shoulder, and for once Pia didn’t feel like flinching away. “There’s a lot to like about new you. Doctor Chu says you are more thoughtful and patient. In many ways you’re kinder, and you don’t worry about little things as much. He just wishes you could see how wonderful you are.”
“I’m sure Mike said those things, but he’s just being nice. Like always. He’s always so nice.” Pia stepped away from the chaplain, needing the space.
“Is there anything wrong with that?”
Pia shook her head and then shrugged. “I’m just so temperamental now. I’m always angry.”
The chaplain leaned over and scooped up a glistening green seashell from the pink sand.
“You spent the better part of a year constantly worried about getting not just yourself but your Marines killed.” He brushed the sand off the delicate shell, which was the length and width of his index finger. “You have no idea how much stress and pressure that puts on a person. You need to release it, and that’s what you’ve been doing.” He took Pia’s hand and set the seashell inside. “This will pass. Accepting who you are now, instead of rejecting it, will help.”
“Will I always feel like this?” Pia stared at the shell, unable to meet his eyes. Unable to let him see the tears forming at the corners of hers.
He closed her fingers over the smooth surface of the green shell. “No, you’ll change in time. We all change in time. And that’s a good thing.”
They flew up through the COMFORT’s well deck, and Pia set down where the lineman indicated she should.
“How’s he holding up?” Pia asked.
“PFC Smith has been sedated and Chesty isn’t trying to bite my hand off anytime I get too near anymore.” Doc Ski’s voice sounded as exhausted as Pia felt.
“Well, that’s something,” Pia said, more to herself, just as something to fill the void. Once all three struts were down and locked to the deck, she cleared Angel to lower the ramp.
The ramp lowered, and Angel brought out the shut–down checklist. Pia shook her head.
“Are we not shutting down, ma’am?”
“I’m not.” Pia ran a steady hand over the yoke, feeling oddly calm. No doubt STC had more missions than crews. It felt selfish to shut down, and it felt good to be needed. “I know our crew day is up, but I also know that we can get extended six hours for surge ops if needed.” She met Angel’s eyes and gave a wan smile. “And I think it’s needed. Anyone who wants to leave, can. I won’t blame you and I won’t stop you. But I’m going back down.”
As she knew they would be, her crew was with her.
Always faithful, that was the Marine Corps for you.
Pia was sitting on the front steps again; only this time she twirled the green seashell in her hands. Mike sat down next to her. Not too close, but close enough to let her know he was there.
He didn’t ask if she wanted to go inside.
He didn’t ask if she was hungry.
He didn’t ask if she wanted to go for a walk.
He didn’t ask anything at all.
She spun the shell around in her hands a few more times before finally laying her head on his shoulder.
“I think I’m going to be okay.” Pia held out the seashell toward Mike.
Plucking it from her, he laced his free fingers with hers.
“I know.”
Where We Would End a War F. Brett Cox
WHEN AMANDA CAME HOME FROM the war, her family was there to greet her at the platform. She knew what to expect when she rematerialized, but she’d forgotten about the mortar–like chuff! chuff! chuff! as the others arrived after her. It didn’t scare her—she was beyond being scared by loud noises—but it added to her disorientation as she stumbled off the platform into her dad Ernie’s arms. Her grandmother Rosie and kid brother Larry rushed in to grab her as well. She could hear her dad Neal crying, but the thin skype almost got lost in the other families’ laughing and crying and shouting as their loved ones popped back home. Gramma Rosie smelled like her perfume and their kitchen, and Amanda held on tightest to her.
All the way home Neal kept apologizing for not being able to be there in person, but the teardown in Indianapolis had come up at the last minute and, with the economy being what it was and all, he couldn’t afford to turn it down. Everything he did was for her and her brother. He hoped she understood. Ernie tried to reassure her that the light media presence at the platform was probably because her group was one of the last to get back and they’d moved on to the next cycle, you know how the nets are. It didn’t mean people didn’t care, because they did. Then he quit apologizing and just stared at her like she wasn’t real. From the back seat Gramma Rosie kept reaching up front to rub her shoulder. The car steered itself through the traffic even more smoothly than she remembered, almost as smoothly as the sensed–up transports outside of Cotabato City had dodged IEDs. Probably the same tech by now. Larry was playing a game in the back seat but she knew he was glad she was home.
When they got back to the house, Amanda went straight up to her room. Gramma Rosie had told her in the car that her room was just as she left it, which was technically accurate. Nothing had been moved, nothing was missing. But when she had been there it had never been that neat, and when she had come from work or school it had never felt that empty, so it wasn’t just like she left it, not really.
For the first week or so she slept in late every day. Ernie and Gramma Rosie were fine with that, and so was Neal when he skyped in from his next job in Ft. Wayne. Gramma Rosie kept saying she knew Amanda needed to catch up on her rest. That was true enough, but soon her days had more darkness than light. At night, when everyone else was asleep, all there was to do was watch stuff onscreen and there was nothing that she wanted to watch, which meant all there really was to do was think, and she didn’t want to do that. So she started setting her alarm again.
Once she got back on schedule, she still mostly stayed at home but made a point to go out during the day, not just to get out of the house but also to try to get a sense of what she had come home to. Before she had left for the war she was in the same cycle as most people she knew. Get up, go to school, go to work, go out, come home, go to sleep, get up, do it again. Where she lived was just there and not anything to notice. Now she walked around the town and tried to notice things. While she was deployed she had had this recurrent dream where she was walking around the town and finding all sorts of new places that hadn’t been there before. In the town she returned to, there didn’t seem to be anything missing, but there was certainly nothing new. It didn’t feel any different than it had before, when she wasn’t noticing it.
The closest thing to something new was the American Legion post. At some point while she was gone, the town had found the money to fix it up. Parts of it were shiny and parts were fake old–timey, but it was at least somewhere to go now that she was a veteran. There weren’t too many people there her age, mostly older folks who had been in Iraq and Afghanistan, shooting pool, chugging beer, dancing on robotic limbs. There was one really old guy who supposedly had been in Vietnam. He had two robot legs but he mostly sat by the window and looked out at the town.
One evening she found herself talking to a woman named Sally who didn’t look much older than Ernie but said she had done three tours in Afghanistan. She still had all her original limbs. Sally couldn’t get over the jaunting.
“What’s it like in between? Do you feel anything?”
“No. You just stand there and they throw the switch and then you’re someplace else.” That wasn’t true. There was a split–second when you felt like you were leaving your body, like you were dying, and the first time that had happened was still the most terrifying thing she had ever experienced, way worse than anything she had encountered in the war. After a few times you got used to it. But she didn’t tell Sally that. She didn’t want to frighten Sally, but she didn’t want to reassure her either. Sally was just someone to talk to over a couple of beers. She didn’t know Sally, who shuddered and said, “Not me, sister,” and gulped down the rest of her beer.
“Never say never. You know they’re starting to phase it in for civilian travel.”
“Like I said, not me.”
“They say it’ll help the economy and the climate. Less fuel. Less time.”
“The climate was already fucked when I was your age. And time? Time for what?”
Amanda couldn’t answer that one.
“Besides, it was bad enough being back in the world just a couple of days after you’d been out in the shit for a year. It can’t help you guys any to be out in it and then back home just like that.” Sally snapped her fingers. “Turnaround in seconds, not days. How can that be any kind of advantage?”
Would having a day of travel time have made the return any less jarring? Amanda decided it wouldn’t have, but she didn’t tell Sally that, either. Instead she ordered another round. She looked past Sally, who was already talking about something else, at two guys her own age who were at one of the tall tables that lined the wall. One of them was wearing a t–shirt that said, BOG? AIC. TMF!
Sally noticed her staring, looked over at the guys, and smiled. “Cute. You should go over and talk to them. Maybe they were out where you were.”
“Nah. Drone jockeys.”
“How can you tell?”
Amanda gestured towards the t–shirt, but not enough so the guy might notice. “ ‘Boots On Ground? Ass In Chair! Telebombing Mother Fuckers.’ ”
“Shit. What are they even doing here? Like they’re really soldiers or something.”
“They are, officially. They get medals and everything.”
“Yeah, I know, but… shit.” The next round arrived and Sally raised her glass. “Here’s to real combat, girlfriend. Here’s to actual fucking risk.”
Amanda raised her glass, drank, and excused herself to hit the head. On the inside of the stall someone had scrawled, BJ4F. It seemed familiar but she couldn’t quite place it. Blow Jobs for Free? How generous.
When she came back they finished their beers and Sally asked if she wanted to go to another place she knew about that was quieter. Amanda begged off and when Sally left Amanda went over and started talking to the two guys at the table, who really were cute. Turned out the guy wearing the t–shirt was the boyfriend of the other guy, who was the actual drone pilot. The t–shirt guy was an accountant or something. They were nice and it wasn’t too bad talking with them about nothing in particular but when they started technobabbling about the war and the drone pilot started getting all superior about how trying to jaunt bombs to targets didn’t work, how any explosive device moved with the transporter showed up at its target scrambled and useless, she lost interest and went home. The next night she came back and met a guy who had been Boots on Ground and had even been in Bravo Company just like her, although they’d been in different platoons. They went back to his place and fucked, and it was okay, but the fact that he had seen combat didn’t really make any difference. Neither did the fact that he had a robot left leg. She said she’d call him but they both knew she wouldn’t.
The next morning she was in the kitchen with Larry and Gramma Rosie. Ernie had already left for work and Neal hadn’t skyped in yet. Gramma Rosie made morning talk as she prepared breakfast: how’d you sleep (fine), did you have a good time last night (yes, which wasn’t completely a lie), did you see the news, what is Congress thinking trying to push another impeachment so soon after the last one (how should I know, and what difference does it make). But then when they were seated she started trying to talk to Amanda about what her plans were.
“I know you haven’t been back all that long, dear, but your fathers and I both believe you need to start thinking about what you want to do next.”
“You mean get a job? I told you I was setting aside part of my pay to help out.”
“I know, and that’s wonderful, it’ll really help. But that’s not going to last much longer, and—oh, what am I saying, it’s not anything to do with money. You don’t need to worry about that. Go back to school if you want.”
“I’m thinking about it,” Amanda lied.
“I’m sure you are, sweetheart. But don’t you need to make some plans? I’m glad you’ve got some friends to hang out with, and God knows you deserve some time to yourself, but—we just worry, is all. We just want what’s best for you.”
“They’re afraid you have PTS,” Larry said without looking up from his eggs or his screen.
Gramma Rosie glared at him, caught herself, and said, “Larry, that’s not true. Amanda is just fine. I’m sure she doesn’t have post–traumatic stress disorder.”
“It’s not a disorder,” Amanda said. “They haven’t called it that in years.”
“That’s what I told them,” Larry said. “I told them if you had PTS you’d be seeing things and shooting at them, right?”
The mandatory session before she left the islands: During a traumatic event, your higher brain functions are subordinated to the amygdala, the part of your brain that controls emotional responses and memories. When you remember those events, the brain wants to recreate the same processes that controlled your response to the original event. That’s what flashbacks are: your brain wanting your body to crank up the adrenaline and cortisol, to try to survive all over again. But even if you’re not reaching for your weapon when you hear a balloon pop, you can still be at risk. Some of our scientists think the trauma can actually shrink the amygdala, which also shrinks your emotional responses. That’s when we start looking at depression…
“Right. I’m fine. Don’t worry.” So far she’d managed to put off the mandatory check–in at her local veterans’ center.
“Of course you are, dear,” her grandmother resumed. “But you fathers and I still—”
“Why do they call it jaunting?”
Larry put down his fork and looked up from his screen. It took a few seconds for Amanda to answer, she was so struck by his eyes, how deeply brown they were, almost red. Had she forgotten that? Had she never noticed?
“What?”
“The transport. Why do they call it jaunting?”
“It’s from that sci–fi movie. That’s what they called transport in the book.”
“Did they use it for troops?”
“They used it for all kinds of things.” Amanda had seen The Stars My Destination like everyone else and then read the novel while she was deployed. There was more down time than people realized. She had read a lot.
“How was it?”
“It was okay.”
“Maybe you should watch it, Larry, and then you and your sister could talk about it.”
Larry tapped his screen three times. “Got it.”
Gramma Rosie smiled. A bonding moment between her grandchildren seemed to have taken her mind off her granddaughter’s future. Amanda was genuinely glad, if it made her grandmother feel better. Gramma Rosie had always been there, and when Amanda was in second grade and her dads needed some time to work things out, Gramma Rosie had been pretty much the only one there. Amanda loved her grandmother and wanted her to be happy, wanted to please her, but what she wanted now more than anything else was for everyone to just stop talking. The three of them cleared the table and Amanda headed upstairs. Out of the corner of her eye she caught the news crawl on the living room screen, the words BLIND JAUNT FOR FREEDOM, and she remembered. That was what BJ4F scratched inside the stall had meant.
When she got up to her room she checked online and yes, there it was. She had heard rumors when she was deployed, but it looked like since she’d gotten back the whole thing was starting to get noticed. Some people were calling it a fad. Others were calling it an epidemic. Veterans who had gotten to the war and back by jaunting were breaking into the control booths after hours, setting random coordinates, and running onto the platforms just in time to jaunt wherever the coordinates sent them. Some wound up just down the street. Others wound up in another country. A few found themselves a hundred feet above a thousand miles of ocean, and some found themselves inside a wall. Some even found themselves back on the front lines. But the ones who survived and chose to talk about it described how they’d felt before in terms that Amanda immediately recognized, and they all said afterwards they felt better. Some of the contractor firms were starting to post guards at the control booths.
Amanda read some more and decided the whole thing was crazy. Things weren’t that bad. Not for her. They just weren’t. She switched the screen to a book and closed her eyes. The book’s voice made her drowsy. She slept through lunch. Over dinner Ernie tried to have the same conversation with her that Gramma Rosie had tried to have over breakfast, but it didn’t last very long and he wound up kissing her on the forehead and saying, “Just let us know when you’re ready,” without telling her what it was exactly that she was supposed to be ready for.
And then a couple of weeks later Amanda was out walking around town when she got lost. Not lost like she couldn’t locate her destination, because she didn’t have one. She was walking down Pickett Street towards Main, and when she turned the corner at Carter’s Drug Store, she realized she didn’t know where she was. She knew she had just turned onto Main Street and was walking past Carter’s. She knew Gramma Rosie kept her prescriptions there even though Wal–Mart was a lot cheaper because Carter’s was where she had bought her comic books when she was a kid, she knew it was where Larry had had his first summer job. But if the leader of the New People’s Army himself had at that moment put a gun to her head and asked her the name of the town she was in, or even what day of the week it was, he would have had to pull the trigger. Everything outside her was like a screen with the contrast turned way too high, and everything inside her felt almost like it did just before she jaunted. She dropped to her knees and stayed there until a girl about Larry’s age came by and helped her up. She said she was okay and walked away before the girl could start asking her anything. After a couple of blocks everything came back and she made her way home.
That evening down the post she told Sally what happened. She kept running into Sally and had decided she was okay.
“I told you that jaunting wasn’t right,” Sally said.
“It never bothered me before.”
“It’s a delayed reaction.”
“Don’t you fucking dare say I have post traumatic anything.”
“I’d say dematerializing and popping up halfway around the world is pretty goddamn traumatic, wouldn’t you?”
“That’s not what it was.”
“Then what was it? I saw a post yesterday that said jaunting actually shrinks part of your brain, flattens you out—”
“Bullshit.”
“—makes anything that fucked you up in combat even worse.”
The mandatory session: …you may have heard that some preliminary studies have indicated that the jaunting process may affect the limbic system. At this point there is no conclusive evidence that this is the case…
“There’s no evidence for that.”
Sally looked triumphant. “There you go. If someone says there’s no evidence for it, that means someone else thinks there is.”
“Look, I just got dizzy, okay? I shouldn’t have skipped lunch.”
Sally lost her triumphant look. Now she looked more like Gramma Rosie over breakfast. “Okay, whatever you say. But if it happens again, let someone know, all right?”
Amanda promised that she would. They had another round and Sally again brought up going someplace quieter, and this time Amanda said okay. By the end of the evening they were back at Sally’s place, but when it didn’t work and Sally started crying Amanda just walked out.
A week later, Amanda went with Ernie and Gramma Rosie to see Larry’s summer league baseball game. Neal skyped in from South Bend. It was the closest thing to a family outing they had had since she had gotten back. She didn’t tell any of them about what had happened outside of Carter’s, and she certainly didn’t tell them it had happened two more times since then.
The sun beat down as hot as it ever had in Mindanao, but she liked the flat perfect grass and the flawless lines of the diamond, and she liked watching the players. They weren’t scattered. Orderly. They were exactly where they were supposed to be. Larry looked perfectly at ease in center field, and when he came to bat she cheered as loudly as anyone. He struck out, walked, was left on first when the next batter flied out, hit a single that drove in a run, struck out one last time. It all made perfect sense, even the fact that the other team won.
On the drive back she was unaware of anything anyone said. None of the streets seemed to have names, and when they got home she wasn’t sure where she was.
That night she lay in her bed in her room that was still technically just as she had left it and still actually felt so empty. She lay in her bed and stared at the blank ceiling and tried to understand what had happened, where it had all come from. The killing field where the bodies in the mud were so rotted away they didn’t look like bodies, they didn’t even smell. The house call where the parents were silent and the little girl wouldn’t stop screaming as they tore the place apart before Lt. Jeppson declared that it was the wrong fucking house. The guy sleeping beside her waking up screaming with a leech on his tongue—but that hadn’t happened, that had been in one of the books she had read. It all should have meant something, but it didn’t. Knowing the New People’s Army had put those bodies in the field didn’t make her want to be there. Watching the lieutenant drag the screaming girl’s father outside and throw him on the ground and act like he was going to shoot him didn’t make her want to leave. It didn’t mean anything then, and it didn’t mean anything now, and she didn’t want it to. Not her dads, not the vets down the post. Not the guy from Bravo Company. Not Sally. Certainly not Sally. Gramma Rosie? Larry? She didn’t want any of it to mean anything, but she wanted to feel something, she wanted to be somewhere. So she went downstairs and got in her dads’ car and drove to the platform where she had popped back home and, feeling no surprise at all that it was completely unguarded, went in and set the controls just as the net instructions had said. “Here’s to actual fucking risk,” she declared to no one in particular and ran as fast as she could for the platform that was as perfect as the baseball diamond, as brown as her brother’s eyes.
Black Butterflies T.C. McCarthy
I HAVE THE DREAM AGAIN—the one where I guide thousands of butterflies through the clouds and into the city. Gravity is three times Earth standard. My butterflies are jet black with filmy, thin wings joined to narrow cores that hold their anti–gravity drives. The wings aren’t really wings but a kind of antennae that monitors gravity waves to guide acceleration. They flutter, though. Just like a butterfly’s.
The craft also carry a passenger—a robotic burrower that contains a tiny package of antimatter, one that will explode with enough force to crack through a juvenile Siph’s carapace and liquefy its brain matter. This point is important: its brain case is a Siph’s only weak spot, the only way to put one down. The butterflies land all over what looks like a mud dome a hundred kilometers across, and my vision switches to the burrowers’ views as they start drilling through and down, eager to reach targets. When they do, the screaming will start.
“Does it still hurt?” dad asks. He’s old now, his hair wispy and white across his head.
I lie. “No. Not so much. It’s getting less sensitive every day.” Then I reach up and touch the link ports at the back of my skull and realize again that I don’t want to do what he’s asking because it reinforces an already growing suspicion—that having half my grey matter replaced by silicon did something. That it changed me. But dad holds his back now, in pain, and he pants while leaning against the ag–terminal as our bots wait in a row that stretches to the horizon.
“I’m still not used to the new tech,” he says. “I can’t afford the damned eye implants and it’s getting hard for me to see the screens. If you can just code them to cover the fields, it’ll save me a lot of time. And we have about thirty that are down for maintenance; maybe you can look at them once we finish here.”
“What happened to all your help?” For some reason, the question hasn’t occurred to me until now. “All the guys that came in from Earth before I left.”
“Dead. Conscription teams came years ago and took everyone older than eighteen and younger than forty. For all I know they could have even been with you throughout the war; I lost track of everyone. All the children left and so few of you came back after the battle at Listman.”
Where the Black Butterflies lost the war—for everyone. Dad doesn’t have to say it, but I know it’s his next thought, maybe the reason why I have the dreams every night and why they seem so real. Before going into that mental spiral, I grab the terminal cord and slam it into the socket at the rear of my head, kicking my wetware into high gear so that sparks shoot across my field of vision—sparks that aren’t real, just tiny dots of light that form as an artifact of power–up. Dad disappears. Now thousands of views of the field clamor for attention and threaten to overload my system with infrared and radar data as the bots wait to begin their sweeps. A few alarms are beeping because there are pests that dad missed the last time he combed the fields; half the crop is dying, eaten. Barely having to think, I tell the fake part of my brain what we’re doing. Then my thoughts rush forward at light speed with instantaneous decisions, logic that pulls me along in a trip that makes me feel part pilot, part lightning, sliding across the fields with an army of ag bots. After a while my cells need something. The warning for hunger is distant and annoying, an intermittent nudge that feels like a low vibration accompanied by a sensation that hours have passed, but the bots have so much work to do; many of them drop offline, broken. Part of me wants to cry because it’s proof that once I’m gone, dad will need help, since much of the farm is already beyond repair. So breaking for lunch would hurt him; I shut off the energy warnings and the system bends my legs to lower me to the dirt, then onto my back—to prevent damage in case I pass out.
By the time I finish, it’s dark. Dad is on the ground next to me and the terminal’s glow makes his face look dark gray so that he seems dead until I shake him awake and it takes him a second to blink in recognition.
“Thanks, Nick,” he says. “That would have taken me days.”
“I didn’t know things had gotten in such bad shape.”
“During the war it was hard to get repair materials and fertilizers—anything that went into building ships and weapons. There were seasons that I couldn’t even spray.” Then he stands and helps me up, which makes me feel guilty since he’s so frail. “Come on; it’s time for bed anyway—after we eat.”
“I’m not hungry and don’t feel much like sleeping these days, dad.”
Dad holds my hand and it scares me; it’s something he hasn’t done since I was three years old. “Whatever happened out there, Nick, it’s okay,” he says, “You’re home now,” but I don’t have the courage to tell him that soon they will come. For me. Siph have a shared and eternal memory and the Black Butterflies are branded into it, along with the brainwave pattern of their controllers, and Siph warriors never get tired of hunting.
My dream starts off fuzzy. The communications beam takes an eternity to connect with the factory ship, a hollow asteroid containing its own gravity drive, antimatter production, and butterfly manufacturing lines. At first my wetware can’t find a local amplifier; once it does, there’s intense acceleration when the satellite cracks open an aperture to another universe–where the speed of light is infinitely greater than in ours—but then I can’t find a receiver signal. There should be one; there always is. The factory ship is supposed to beacon its receiver aperture location in a coded pulse, but when I query my own equipment to see if the problem is me the wetware responds with nonsense—a garbled mess that gives me a headache. Soon, though, the receiver signal arrives and the mother ship transmits a star map showing my new location, deep within Siph–controlled territory. The revelation almost pulls me from sleep. I don’t remember running an operation here during the war, which means this is new, a real dream that has an ending I’ve never seen, and there’s no choice except to settle in for the nightmare that’s about to come.
The butterflies are ready. Antimatter has been loaded into their bellies and my system has to pause for a few seconds because there are millions of them crowding my mind, more than I’ve ever controlled at once—more than I’ve ever seen assembled. A last–minute query runs through my wetware, which responds in less than a second: I’m controlling enough antimatter to wipe half a planetary population.
Dad’s face is white. He says goodbye and shuts off the com unit, which had woken us both up, and through the window I watch sunlight turn the sky pink. “That was Greg Simmons from downtown,” he says. “He works for the local security forces, and all hell’s breaking loose; a small Siph fleet is on its way here.”
“Why’d he call us?” I ask.
“He knows you came home.” Dad’s voice cracks and the sound of his panic hits my stomach like a cold spike. “He said you might want to think about hiding until we figure out what they want. Just in case they’re coming for you. They’ve been locking down human systems and looking all over the place for something—something that has to do with those antimatter drones you flew.”
I can’t feel my mouth. Terror makes my fingers feel as though they’ve inflated to the point of immobility and it muffles the words from people on the road to the point where they’re impossible to understand. Everyone recognizes me. Many of them hadn’t been born when I left for the war but it doesn’t matter, since they see my bald head with its ports and linkages and the military tattoos over each temple to show blood type, serial number and name; it’s obvious what I am. Some move to the other side of the street. Dad had warned me that it would be like this and had begged me to take his skimmer, to head in the opposite direction and into the country, so to make him happy I drove out of his sight and then turned onto a side road, looping back into town before parking.
Towns change when you leave for a long time, but everything has changed wrong. The Catholic Church is on the wrong side of the street and near it is the bakery where I worked as a teenager; it’s the wrong color. This is another town and the pre–war Nick no longer exists because so much of his grey matter is gone, carbon replaced with silicon and ceramics, so much so that my heat and cold tolerances are narrower and the nerve endings more sensitive, which results in constant headaches and a never–ending supply of painkillers to beat them back. Someone yells across the street wait, repeating it three times before I glance and notice a girl waving at me. She looks familiar. The girl wears a black jumpsuit, its fabric covered in complex Siph codes in orange that resemble intertwined shapes and swirls that only creatures with faceted eyes can read. Stay there! I mean something to her. She waits for a break in traffic and I watch her jog across the street.
The girl catches her breath. “I didn’t think I’d catch up. It’s lucky I found you at all. We never knew that you had made it back until this morning.”
“Do I know you?” I ask. She’s my age, and although she has hair, bits of service tattoos still show from underneath.
“I’m Jennifer Vallaincourt; we went to school together and got conscripted at the same time.” I must have been staring because she points to her temples. “The Siph want the tattoos to stay. So they can tell the difference between our ex–soldiers and civilians.” Then she plucks at her uniform and her smile disappears to be replaced by a far–off look and a red face. “I’m part of the transition team. We have to be ready to help carry out any changes they want once the Siph decide to take over this place, but we haven’t heard anything yet.”
“Then you don’t know?”
She shakes her head. “Know what?”
“A Siph fleet is on the way. Here. Now.”
Jennifer grabs my wrist and pulls me along the sidewalk; the crowds that had been there minutes before are gone, but pale faces peer out from behind privacy glass, their features blurred. Buildings flash by. Doors hum shut and Jennifer pounds on several and she presses the call buttons, but none of them open for us and my mouth goes dry so that now fear trips the targeting system to show movement and distances. A data pattern outlines Jennifer. My wetware recognizes her jumpsuit markings as Siph and I have to suppress the alarms but my thoughts aren’t fast enough to keep the system from stimulating my adrenal glands and everything begins to move in slow motion.
She drags me through a door before its steel lip can slide all the way shut and the motor whines when I push, forcing the slab to stay open for one second longer. Someone yells to get out. But Jennifer flashes a badge and then leads me to a booth, where she sits across from me and smiles.
“It’s a bar. Not a great one but they’ve been open all night and we’re lucky they were slow to lock up.”
“Why was everyone staring at me?” I ask. “Out there.”
“They’re afraid—of the Black Butterfly.” Jennifer whispers it and without thinking I send a signal to amplify her voice.
“What about them?”
“Not them. You. You’re the Black Butterfly and the drone craft are you. After what happened at Listman, everyone knows the Siph have been looking for the one who did it and nobody wants to be close when they arrive.”
“There were lots of us,” I say. “My training class had about a thousand others and when we deployed there were at least a hundred in my group, more than that at Listman. I never learned their names but we all loaded into capsules at the same time; I saw them before we launched. So how can I be the only Black Butterfly?”
Jennifer shakes her head. “That’s not how it happened.”
“How would you know?”
“I was a program engineer on the team that put together the targeting systems for your wetware. Everyone who deployed with you is dead. Gone. We loaded those other capsules with troops who failed the testing phase but who volunteered to accept wetware beacons that produced an emissions pattern like yours. Only they had none of the punch. Those guys didn’t even know about the butterflies.”
My head goes empty, light. None of her claims seem possible but Jennifer’s voice has a soft quality that makes me believe and why would she lie? “They were used as decoys—to protect me.”
“Yeah. Volunteers for the cause. Do you remember me?” she asks. “I mean… at all?”
“No. I’m Nick, by the way.”
Jennifer shakes her head and her expression makes me want to run because she frowns, and both shoulders square off to combine with the set of her jaw. “This would have been easier if someone had told us you were coming—to give us some time. Your name isn’t Nick; as soon as you were accepted into the program we scrubbed part of your memory deck so the Siph wouldn’t find any trace of Earth in the event of capture. Your father too, just in case he was a talker.”
Now the fear returns, colored with an anger that makes me grab the table, my knuckles going pale. If she sees me getting angry, Jennifer doesn’t show it.
“You’re James McLaughlin. You and your father moved from Earth after your mom died, and I had a huge crush on you all the way through school until the war started. They took you for combat. Me for science. I thought you were gone. Then one day I heard about a promising candidate for the antigravity drone program, someone whose synapse function and test scores had blown all our neuroscientists away. You. And there were other candidates from our school on the list. Adam Hermann, Scott Tomasi…”
The names refer to piles of dust. Jennifer’s voice fades as I consider the implications and the knot in my gut gets worse with each minute and tears drip from both eyes but there’s no point in wiping them. Half my head is a foreign object—an invader that my own race put there; soon it will inhibit my tear ducts. While she goes on I ping the bar’s network to look up the names Tomasi and Hermann and the results come back with video clips of children on Leviticus, just like she says, and in one of them I see myself. I’m taller than the others even at that age, but the boy is a stranger to me because who could be so happy in the face of what was coming and the boy must have been a fool because Jennifer is telling me that he died and was replaced by a facsimile named Nick. James McLaughlin doesn’t exist now. The pictures bring back memories of a sort, echoes in my grey matter that resemble old men muttering oh yeah, I remember Adam Hermann because he had the courage to ask Jennifer to be his girlfriend and so I had to watch him get her first kiss and first everything else under the pseudo–pines down on Hawthorne Drive. Her family was rich. Rich enough to have a real dog sent in from Earth, a German Shepherd that almost killed me one day when I walked into her house without knocking. Is that the Adam Hermann you wanted? But she just keeps talking like I care, oblivious to the fact that each word is like an anti–proton that detonates inside my skull, littering it with craters and smoke along with the corpses of people I used to know but can’t remember, people who are long dead from the war. Jennifer thinks she’s helping; I can tell by the way she smiles that she means well but now I know my dad was right and I need to get out into the country, away from her and everything else.
“It’s time to go, Jennifer. I don’t feel good.”
She takes my hand and leans forward. “Don’t go. Stay here for a while, Jimmy, and talk. You and I are the only ones left from the old group.”
“I can’t. Sorry.” But when I stand her face goes blank. Jennifer reaches into a pocket and pulls a black rod from it, a stun wand that she whips across the table. My wetware flicks into combat mode. The wand sparks against the wall, missing my forehead. Everything is slow now and Jennifer isn’t a warrior so she can’t see that she’s off balance and within less than a second her arm breaks in three places when I slam it against the table, making her scream. The door is just a few meters away. But before I can do anything else it opens and military police stream through, joining a separate group of police that swarms from the back—where they must have been waiting the whole time.
Jennifer cradles her arm and backs away. “The Siph want you. I’m sorry it went this way, Jimmy, but we had no idea you’d show up when you did. Our job is to keep everything going and we’ve already lost contact with three human systems now that they’re closing in; we’re just buying time. I’ll let your father know so he can come visit.”
“Visit me where?”
“A holding cell. At the spaceport in Fontaine—three hours by flitter. The Siph fleet should get here tomorrow afternoon and then you’re to be transferred to one of their shuttles for execution.”
My dreams flicker in and out of focus and it feels good to slip into the program and let the wetware cradle me in logic. We’re looking for something. There’s a network of communications channels all around and its beams crisscross to surround me in a web woven by psychotic spiders. Then one pops up that’s different from the rest, its communications encrypted in layers that we begin to pick apart with algorithms, one after another until I’m nestled within military communications traffic that consists of message after message regarding someone named James McLaughlin.
The name awakens a few extra synapses. But before I can dig further, the wetware’s logic master drags us onto something else, a data stream that links with our planetary defense network, and the complexity washes away the name James and replaces it with a sense of hopelessness as status readouts course through. An untouched fleet is docked here at Leviticus. But most of the ships have already been mothballed and are dormant despite being ready for a war that’s already lost, leaving a skeleton fleet that the Siph authorized so the local defense force can fight piracy. It’s better than nothing; we dive into its comms network to begin the sequence for taking over the biggest ship, a large cruiser, to arm its weapons and target the incoming fleet. I’m about to own it when the data streams disappear.
A rifle butt slams into my skull and someone laughs in a high–pitched way that sounds as if he’s insane—part laugh, part scream. The sound is piercing. My hands are up, trying to block the next blow and when this one cracks into my forearm it snaps one of the bones and I realize the laughter and screams are coming from me, and now the pain from my arm is almost unbearable and I curl into a ball and pray for the beating to end, grateful when someone yells stop it!
“He was trying to break into our defense network,” another person says—a man who sounds out of breath and must have been the one hitting me. “Our techs couldn’t handle it and he almost took over the entire fleet.”
“Sedate him. I’m getting the doc.”
There’s minor damage to some of the wetware–gray matter linkages but already my system repairs them and the injection someone gives me will help because it’s a strong sedative and provides chemicals that my system can scavenge for its maintenance. But now there’s a renewed sense of terror: the man’s words—that I was trying to break into the defensive network—register, and what he says can’t be possible because it was a dream. But part of me is beginning to fear that I can’t tell the difference between reality and fantasy anymore, and then I want to scream because just before blacking out I decide maybe the difference is negligible.
“It couldn’t have been my wetware; those were all just dreams.” But the words sound too much like I’m pleading, so when Jennifer shakes her head it doesn’t surprise me.
Her arm is in a sling; I didn’t mean to hurt her. As with mine, though, microbots have healed much of the broken bone and she doesn’t show signs of pain. “I know you really believe that,” she says, “but we had operational scans of your electromagnetic activity, specifically of your cranial area. We did it when you were awake and asleep.”
“So?”
“So your wetware is only marginally active when you’re awake. Storage and query processing work fine, and even lower defensive protocols, but you’re not reaching any of the higher functions like comms or drone operations. At night it’s a different story. We think that once you’re asleep your conscious self isn’t there to control things and so your wetware activates and goes back to war, using your brain for as much processing control as it needs; that’s why you see it as a dream.”
The thought makes my skin crawl—that my system takes over in my sleep, turning me into a kind of zombie. “That’s impossible. They fried my drone and antigravity control systems when I mustered out because after Listman Command didn’t want me active; they didn’t want the technology captured. And I spent a year getting home just because they needed me to take a long route to scrub my exit and make sure the Siph couldn’t track it. Everything went smoothly.”
“Jimmy—”
“It’s Nick, goddammit!” My shout surprises her and the guards raise their carbines, pointing them at my head.
“What is this all about?” Dad sits next to me. He seems ten years older than he did yesterday because his voice shakes and the conference room chair swallows him in synthetic fabric, which is easy because he’s gotten so small and thin. I remember when he was young. There are pictures in his study of a man whose combat suit fails to hide the fact that he’s huge, with muscles that almost don’t fit into the ceramic carapace and that once threw me across the base pool when I was six. I move to grab his wrist—just to touch him because the guilt feels like a pressure on my chest, makes it hard to breathe—but I can’t; they’ve hand–cuffed me to my chair.
“It’s complicated, Mr. McLaughlin,” says Jennifer. She sighs, and at first I think that I’ll have to explain it, but then Jennifer tells him about the early program and that because of Listman I’m being handed over. The story is one that I know. Still, to hear it from her in a clinical way—detached and sterile—makes me realize that for her and others the war isn’t real; it’s a series of events to be discussed in boardrooms and academic think tanks, where death can be dissected using statistics and AI–modeling and where the worst consequences are the inconvenience of the occasional all–nighter or heartburn from drinking too much coffee, and for a moment I feel nauseous. But then the words stop mattering; Jennifer and the war are irrelevant. Dad stares into space and he begins to cry and it’s easy to imagine what he thinks, that his son is gone and instead they’ve replaced him not with a monster but a machine, someone whose name isn’t even Nick and whose silicon and ceramics has changed him into the new angel of death. A weapon. A criminal who needs to be chained to a chair and handed over to the Siph for all that he’s done, and then dad looks at me and I almost start crying too.
“My son is a hero,” he says. “They attacked us first on Aidan, and Nick did everything you asked and sacrificed himself to surgical procedures that could have killed him—all for the war. He was a kid when you people conscripted him.”
She shakes her head. “Mr. McLaughlin, there are details I can’t give; things that happened.”
“Tell him,” I say. “The Siph know and they’ll be here in an hour so what difference does it make if he knows too? Tell him about my targets; tell him why.”
Jennifer hesitates and then stutters. “I can’t. I’d lose my job, Jim—Nick.”
Dad looks back and forth at us. Since I’m about to be handed over, there’s nothing to stop me from telling the whole truth except that I don’t want him to think the worst but if I don’t it means he’ll be confused for the rest of his life, not understanding what made it so important for me to be handed over. I’m still thinking when Jennifer inhales with a wheeze. It’s the sound she’s made every time for the past hour when she’s about to speak and for some reason the thought of her voice makes my decision easy.
“I killed Siph juveniles, dad. Their babies. They were my primary target—not their warriors—and millions of them died while they slept in their nurseries. Our antimatter bombs trigger a chain reaction with the material in a Siph juvenile’s carapace and they scream in a way that makes you think millions of little girls are being burned alive.” I pause but Dad doesn’t react. His stare makes me ashamed and the heat of that shame is so intense that I imagine it must be visible in waves off my cheeks, and I wish there was some way to hide, so I look away. “We captured one of their bio stations early in the war—when things were still going well. We got lucky; the station had a bunch of research outlining Siph reproductive habits and someone got a brilliant idea: kill all their offspring. Destroy one generation of Siph and you annihilate the entire race.”
He looks just as confused as he did a few minutes ago and shakes his head. “I don’t understand. How does going after their children annihilate the race?”
“Siph reproduce once every hundred years. So their warrior cadre is a fixed number, which can’t get bigger, they can’t reproduce on the fly, and all the older adults die as soon as juvenile Siph become adults—every hundred years. It’s hardwired in their genetics. So if you get rid of their kids, you win the war—assuming you can stay alive for another eighty to ninety years.”
Dad’s face goes white. At first I think he’s going to pass out but he leans over in his chair and hugs me so I can’t breathe, and then whispers into my ear it’s not your fault; you were a child and you’re my son. Jennifer motions for the guards. The three of them slip out the door and lock it shut, leaving us alone for the last hour so we can say goodbye.
Jennifer and I wait for the Siph in an airlock outside their shuttle and without warning my system activates to make my fingers tremble with adrenaline. For the first time in over a year the butterfly and antigravity controllers flick on while I’m conscious, overlaying their data patterns on both retinas. Jennifer was telling the truth: the techs never fried the drone controls like they claimed and had reprogrammed major systems so they’d stay dormant until I slept—or they’d trigger melatonin production to make me fall asleep. Now my fear response is so intense that it triggers full systems activation, surprising me with a feeling of exhilaration that had been missing during the dream sessions.
Targeting systems calculate escape vectors and urge me to do something—to kill Jennifer and head back through the airlock door behind us, on the other side of which is a small army of guards who would shoot me if I tried, a piece of information that slows my processors for only a second. Then we try a different tactic. The communications system sends electromagnetic beams to sweep the enclosed space, searching for anything to hack into, any way to change the calculus and give me an advantage because it doesn’t want us to die.
“We won the war, Nick,” says Jennifer. “The story that we lost is just that: a story. Another lie. You deserve to know that before… you know.”
She’s hard to understand, since we’re both wearing respirator masks in preparation for exposure to the Siph atmosphere; I turn to face her. “What are you talking about?”
“You accomplished your mission. In ninety years we’re going to take back everything we lost, and it’s all because of you and what you’ve been doing while on the run; you wiped out over ninety percent of their juvenile population and they can’t recover from it. All humanity has to do is survive. The military is taking your father to someplace safe right now, to a system that’s only known to a fraction of us, and I leave tonight so I’ll make sure he’s safe.”
I shake my head and turn back to face the far airlock door, worried that at any moment I might strangle her. “People like you don’t get it, Jennifer; you weren’t at Listman. As soon as I hit the first nursery they came out of nowhere and ripped open our fleet with antimatter beams—not tiny warheads. I’m talking about three–centimeter–wide, continuous beams of the shit, a kind of weaponry we had no idea they had, and I just managed to escape in a stealth pod that got picked up by one of your intel ships eight months later. I’ve been on the run ever since. And still they found me.”
“What’s your point?”
“You might make it,” I say, “but you didn’t hear the screams. The Siph will look for you the same way they came after me at Listman and beyond, and if they find you they won’t care if neither race survives, and even if they don’t find you your dreams will; and sometimes those are worse than butterflies.”
Now I know why Jennifer told me about the planetary system where she and others hoped to hide: it’s because my brain keeps secrets even from me—like the fact that it can self–destruct; the thing has a failsafe. As soon as the Siph airlock opens, my wetware has an apoplectic seizure and an intense heat sears the inside of my skull, making me scream while the airlock fills with the smell of molten plastic and burning flesh. Plastic drips onto my back. And I’m already forgetting; memories of first this day and then everything else fading into a kind of grey haze, mixing with the pool of molten material on the floor that chars my hand when I fall to my knees. But soon the pain lessens; there are colors everywhere and a sense that tall insect–like figures surround me but it’s hard to get a clear view through all the butterflies, which now swarm by the thousands, forming a cloud of pink and blue and orange wings and I laugh because their fluttering tickles me and for some reason they can talk, whispering something that makes me warm and happy—that now there will be no more dreams. Ever.
Always the Stars and the Void Between Nerine Dorman
THE LITTLE DOG STOOD ON the sill overlooking the yard. The sun had long ago bleached the cedar from which he’d been carved to the same hue as old bones. I didn’t want to think about bones, but I couldn’t resist picking up the figurine and running my fingertips along his spine and pointy ears.
Derik had given the dog to me so long ago: in reality, only seventeen years, but it felt like a lifetime. It might as well have been an eternity. My time serving the African Federation equalled my childhood years on the farm.
Now Derik was dead and I was back. White scars marred my skin and offered mute testament to countless brushes with death. What made it so that one of us lived and the other did not? We were both children of these mountains, who’d breathed the same air and whose bones had sprung from the same river and soil. Brave, loyal Derik, who’d followed me into the wasteland of space to fight a war for people to whom we were nameless. Three thousand dead on Deimos Base. A troop carrier hits an interplanetary mine between Jupiter and Saturn. A gate collapses on a jump ship out from Proxima Centauri. Numbers, objects. Not people.
Krommedrif was home. My childhood loft bedroom with its A–shaped ceiling and exposed beams where I used to dry bunches of herbs had endured, diminished somehow, but mercifully familiar. Did I dare to withdraw here like a snail into its shell? Would this house nurture me the second time ’round so that I might emerge somehow healed and ready to face the world again?
My letter of resignation in its creamy envelope with the official AF watermark was the only object I placed on the desk by the window. Though we moved between the stars—folded space, even—and warred against other nations for resources on moons and asteroid belts, some customs endured—like simple, archaic paper and ink.
“Keep it with you until the end of your leave,” Magister Oroyu says.
“My mind is made up. I’m done with this. I want to go home. There is nothing for me here.”
He places his dark hand over mine, and I can’t break eye contact. “No, little falcon. Listen to me. Keep the letter. When you change your mind, you can always discard it and come back once your leave is over.”
When. Not if.
I was not going to change my mind, but something in Oroyu’s implacable dark stare had me obey. I’d humour him. That was all. After six weeks I’d make the trip out to Clanwilliam, where I’d mail the letter and then go enjoy a celebratory pint at the pub.
My personal effects were pitifully few once I’d unpacked them. My civvies consisted of two pairs of denim jeans, five T–shirts (white, non–labelled AF inventory), and a fitted charcoal flight jacket with the winged lion flashes that marked me as AF Special Ops, among a few other sundries. Everything about me screamed off–duty military.
The only other item that bore any stamp of my personality was the digital picture frame that I had bought at the Saldanha Space Port seventeen years ago and that had now come home with me. It was an outdated thing, made to look like a small, baroque gilt frame complete with cherubs and scrollwork. My seventeen–year–old self had thought the hideous device to be precious back then and had squandered a week’s allowance purchasing it.
Over the years the gold had worn to grey, and at one point I’d dropped it; a hairline crack ran diagonally from the top left–hand corner. And still I couldn’t bear to toss it away and transfer the data back down from my virtual drive onto a new frame. All my family photos were stored here: Mother, Father, my brother Johan… pictures of the farm, of the mountains. My favourite places… even old Broekgat, the pony I used to ride, though he had been dead for nine years now, according to Johan.
There were pictures from the academy days too, and those years of service that I’d seen, but I didn’t want to look at those now. I’d see his face, and that’d hurt too much.
“I’m resigning,” Michael tells me.
My heart stutters and I stare at him, unable to form the words. “Why?”
“I need to spend more time with Saskia and the kids. I’m through with active duty, and besides, what use is a cripple?”
He offers his usual self–deprecating laugh but it rings hollow. His eyes tell the truth—there’s enough pain lodged there to power one of the jump ships’ Gibson drives.
I followed that man into space. I could have stayed behind, perhaps even had a life on Earth and found a cushy job in admin on one of the orbital stations. Instead, I trekked after a married man I knew I could never have. Love made fools out of all of us. Oh, we’d been lovers, but Michael was never in love with me, and I’d been a fool to think I could convince him otherwise. I’d been doubly a fool to ignore Derik, who’d waited patiently all those years for me, for nothing.
Michael left without saying goodbye. Ten years of me playing the dutiful mistress, and all I got was an empty officer’s suite and a cleaning assistant’s terse explanation that Captain Michael Louw had caught the morning shuttle to the Callisto Base en route to Earth.
I tried to hand in my resignation two weeks later.
Even now I could look Michael up on the social networks. It wouldn’t be difficult to find him; we both have friends in common. I don’t bother making contact. Obviously. Over the years we’d been nothing but discreet. For me to go blundering into his life now like some inconvenient spectre of his infidelity would not be right. Two beautiful, blond children. An erstwhile supermodel wife who ran an NGO that supported war veterans. They were picture perfect.
Who was I to shatter these perceptions?
I was small, brown–skinned, and decidedly native, so far as Michael was concerned. While we’d been serving on board assorted vessels, these differences had not been so apparent—our crew consisted of a melange of other races and nationalities. Back on Earth, we were reminded of the people we’d been when we first left the planet behind us.
Like I was reminded now, in this tiny bedroom. Muted scuffling and chittering in the roof told me the resident population of serotine bats were still here. How many nights I’d watched them from this very window as they squeezed out through the gap in the eaves and hurled themselves into the star–speckled sky. How many nights I’d stared at the stars and wondered if I’d ever take wing myself.
If I’d been able to have words with my wide–eyed sixteen–year–old self who’d blithely filled in the AF application form on the sly…
Sandra was in the kitchen by the time I went downstairs, fussing with the clean dishes. Poised. Perfect. Not a bronze–tinted lock out of place.
“Hey,” I said.
She paused, about half a dozen side plates grasped firmly. “Oh, hi.”
“I don’t think we’ve met, at least not properly. You weren’t in this morning when Johan brought me.” I’d spoken to her via a few long–distance family conference calls in the media lounge, but even a screenwall offering the illusion that folks were in the same room as you didn’t quite make up for meeting someone in the flesh. Sandra was much taller than me, though for some reason she gave the impression of cowering the moment I’d entered the kitchen. My brother’s white trophy wife.
Sandra shook her head. “We haven’t, now that I think about it.”
We stood awkwardly, saved only by Johan thumping in. “Where’s the vaccine ampoules for the cows? They’re not in the store room,” he growled at Sandra, who looked as if she’d drop the crockery.
“How should I bloody know?” Her mouth pulled in a tight line, and she slammed the plates on the kitchen counter.
“I told you to have Essie bring them down.”
“They’re probably still in the deep freeze,” Sandra said.
For a moment I thought an ugly argument would erupt but then a child yelled from deep within the house and Sandra darted out of the kitchen. I doubted whether my younger relative needed help but it seemed like Sandra was only too happy to abandon me to my brother’s ire.
Instinctively, I pressed myself against the wall. Johan was so much bigger than me now. The past seventeen years had been bountiful, it would seem, and my brother’s girth spoke of too much of a good thing. He looked like Oom Swart from Dwarsfontein over the pass.
Odd that I’d faced down enemies on a battlefield, yet when family turned the home into a warzone, I cringed like a beaten dog.
“You going to stare at me like I’m the Devil?” Johan asked, his face contorted in a ferocious scowl. He was probably embarrassed that I’d caught him bitching at Sandra.
I shook my head, hating how like a cockroach I felt in my childhood home, in the very kitchen where Ma used to bake. Try as I might I could hardly recall those warm, yeasty smells and the taste of butter melted on a crust of fresh bread.
“Well, you’re going to have to sort out your life now that you’re back. Can’t have you lying about like the other vets. You’ve still got all your limbs. You gonna have to pull your weight round here.”
“What the—” My anger surged hot and sudden. “My life is—” Who was he to point fingers when it seemed like his own life had visible cracks?
But he was out the door already, his back turned on me like I was no more than one of the farmworkers to be ordered around.
I stood for a few moments, just to regain my composure. I’d wanted to ask the other question that I hadn’t dare voice since my arrival. How is Ma? Not talk about my problems light years away. I’d barely had a chance to shake the dust off my feet and we were already arguing.
Seventeen years yawned like a bottomless chasm between us, filled with accusations. Where were you when Pa fell ill and died? Where were you when the Great Fires burnt down the plantations? Where were you when the modified anthrax killed all the livestock?
To say that I was at war, fighting so our enemy would not lay waste to our precious farm or carry away the children, would not wash with my brother. Those who remained earthbound took it for granted that the wind always raced through the scrubby veld or that rain came in the cooler months. The sun that rose and set on their world was always tame, yellow.
If I told only a fraction of the stories I held locked away in my heart, would my family be able to sleep at night? My hands were red with blood, if only they had eyes to see, and no amount of scrubbing would ever remove the stain. I’d done it all for them.
Dare I remind them that it was my AF stipend that connected the electricity to Krommedrif or sent my nieces to a private school in Clanwilliam? It was my blood money that kept my brother’s tractor pulling the plough when the crops failed.
Nowadays, the crops failed more often than not.
Ma was in a back room—one where she used to keep her sewing things and that had been set aside for guests. Now Ma lay contorted beneath a sheet. The linen was half twisted from the bed and the stench of piss hung heavy in the air. I remained on the threshold, unable to take that fateful first step that would carry me to the foot of Ma’s narrow cot.
Her condition had deteriorated even before I decided to return home. I could read between the lines when they stopped letting Ma join on the family calls, which grew steadily further and further apart the longer I remained on active duty. There was always some sort of excuse—I had to train raw recruits, Johan had to bring in the crops, no secure connection… it was all too easy to reschedule our calls. After all, the farm wasn’t going anywhere.
The last I’d seen of Ma she’d seemed to somehow slump in on herself, in only six months. “Where is the other one?” she’d asked over and over again, meaning Pa. Since then, within the space of three years, she’d shrivelled into this husk that made me think more of the mummified remains of those long dead in the vacuum of space rather than a living, breathing woman.
Ma climbs like one of the klipspringers, and I struggle to keep up with her. We’ve gone much higher than before, and below us the valley is spread out like a patchwork quilt of fields. The barley will ripen early this year. Pa’s tractor is a tiny toy near the vineyard, and it raises a plume of dust behind it.
“It’s here somewhere,” Ma calls. “C’mon, Rachel!”
She vanishes for a moment and I scramble to follow. Then we’ve reached the ledge and I flop down gratefully to let my poor arms and legs rest.
Ma, however, peers at the red oxide figures painted across the rock face. They describe a graceful arc running from right to left, clutching their spears. To the far left is a big blob Ma says is an eland. When I look carefully I can still make out the white pigments the ancient artists used to denote the heads and feet of these giant antelope.
“You only ever get eland in the zoos and parks now,” says Ma. “But once upon a time, in the days of your grandfather’s great–great–grandfather, when Mantis still walked among the people, we hunted the eland. Your forefathers painted these pictures before the Dutch settled.”
In many ways, I had become a hunter of sorts, just like my ancestors, who’d left their images on rock faces, and it was Ma who’d filled my head with all the stories about the olden times. Names, faraway places. All mixed up.
“I’m back, Ma,” I whispered.
The thing in the bed that wasn’t my mother anymore shifted slightly and craned its neck before it flopped down again. A broken thing, like the time I found a bird that had flown into the lounge window. I’d run to Pa with the dove and he’d taken it from me and wrung its neck. Just like that. Then given me a hiding later for crying to Ma about it.
My heart clenched painfully but my eyes remained dry. This thing in the bed wasn’t Ma. Then the guilt for those missing years gnawed and gnawed like a mole rat. You could have been here. All those times lost. You’re a terrible daughter.
“I want to go home,” she mumbled and almost raised an arm in supplication.
“You are home,” I replied.
Her only response was a garbled, ululating cry. I didn’t stay to hear more.
Sandra was in the media lounge watching some stupid show about fashion makeovers. Even though I stood within range of the wall–to–wall screen, she remained so engrossed in the fashionista’s efforts with a dowdy matron that she didn’t bother looking up.
“Ma’s nappy needs changing,” I said.
Sandra glared at me. “I told Essie to do it after lunch. Should still be fine.”
“It smells like it hasn’t been cleaned all day.”
“Essie!” Sandra shrieked, and I jerked back a step, surprised by the volume and pitch of my sister–in–law’s voice. “Where are you? Esssieee?”
A faint response drifted toward us from somewhere within the house. “Ja, madam?”
Sandra stabbed at the console to silence the programme, then rose just as the hapless Essie entered the room.
Poor Essie darted her gaze from me then to Sandra and back again. I was reminded of a childhood visit to the Swarts. Old Mrs Swart had used an imperious tone similar to the one Sandra employed. Pa had always said we wouldn’t order our workers around like that, and my face burnt at the sinking realisation that this was exactly how we’d become. As people had lived two hundred years ago, during the apartheid times.
Essie used to bathe me, dress me, and feed me. I grew up with her son, Derik, and we’d run all over Krommedrif together before our AF days. We were best friends forever, and it didn’t matter that his dad was a farmworker and mine was the farmer.
To have Essie standing here wringing her hands in obvious distress made me want to sink into the carpeting.
“Ouma needs changing,” Sandra said.
“Ja, madam.” Essie shuffled out.
“Happy now?” Sandra huffed at me. “Essie’s very busy with the kids. She probably forgot.”
“That’s not an excuse. Why is Ma being kept in that room? There’s not enough air, and she should be sitting up for at least part of the day. She needs to go outside a little. She’ll get bedsores.” I clenched and unclenched my hands, hating the somehow supercilious expression on my sister–in–law’s face.
“I’ve enough on my plate.”
“Evidently.” I glanced meaningfully at the screen.
“It’s not easy, you know. You have no idea what it’s like living out here, and your brother—”
“You married him,” I said.
Sandra had the temerity to turn from me and unmute the programme. In fact, she dialled the volume higher. The only outward sign of her anger was the way her jaw was working, like she was grinding her teeth.
“Bitch,” I muttered.
There’d be no help from this quarter, and I had little desire to fight with the woman. I might as well go find my brother and have it out with him—lay the entire figurative deck of cards on the table. If I was going to be groundside from here on in, I’d sooner sort out whichever differences existed between us before matters turned uglier.
The late–afternoon heat caught me the moment I stepped outside the house’s air–conditioned confines. Behind the guest cottage, Abjaterskop gleamed like a skull in the westering sun and I had to squint across the yard. So accustomed was I to the mostly sterile atmosphere onboard space–faring vessels and stations that the air, rich as it was in the farmyard smells of dung and livestock, was almost physically overwhelming. I’d get used to it soon enough.
The farm buildings crouched beneath the oaks, and I headed in that direction across the furrow. The old–style aluminium gate clanged shut behind me—like most of structures here, harking back to more than a hundred years ago. Here walls showed sign of intense repair—polymer composite bricks shoring up where old redbrick or even mudbrick walls had collapsed. Rusted corrugated iron warred with newer and obviously scavenged orbital–grade ceramic plating.
Out here, far away from the metropolises, farmers always had a plan.
A rooster and four hens scrubbed in the dirt and watched me warily as I passed them on my way to the kraal. I heard Johan before I saw him, and had already cringed before I rounded the corner.
“What the hell did I tell you about having that latch looked at?” Johan yelled. “Now who’s going to go get the bull out from the cows?”
“Sorry, baas,” the worker replied.
My brother moved fast and backhanded the guy, who stumbled and landed on his back in an especially mucky part of the kraal. What the hell? I quickened my pace and slipped past the gate.
“You people won’t hear, then you must feel,” my brother growled.
When he made to kick the fallen man—that was when I tripped into overdrive. Pa might’ve been a hard taskmaster, but he never beat up on the farmworkers. Where Johan had picked up those tendencies, I didn’t know.
I grabbed his shoulder and, though I didn’t weigh half what my brother did, I shoved hard so that his foot missed the worker and we both spun to the ground. Time congealed. My brother’s motions slowed, his bellow of rage extending and deepening as my physical modifications flooded my system with stimulants. I knew exactly where to punch—short, sharp jabs—to incapacitate an enemy.
Johan didn’t stand a chance, and I finished with my fingers brushing against his windpipe. Judging by his wild expression, he knew I’d had the power to crush his larynx but I’d halted. Just in time.
Scuttling sounds informed me that the downed farmworker was making himself scarce, but I did not break eye contact with my brother. Despite his skin being so much darker than my generally caramel tone, he’d paled visibly.
“When did you think it acceptable to beat your workers?” I asked him.
He twitched a little before he sucked in a breath. “What gives you the right to interfere?”
This is my farm as much as yours. I bared my teeth at him. “Father never taught us to be like this.”
Straddled as I was across his girth, I was conscious of how much spare flesh he carried, and the way his heart thundered a rapid tattoo within the prison of its ribcage. Even now I could count at least half a dozen ways I could end this man’s life without even a weapon at hand. And I hated myself for it.
“You disgust me,” I sneered.
I disgust myself.
He lay there, watching me as I rose to my feet. Only then did I notice the liquid staining his trousers. My brother had pissed himself.
Because of me.
My shame flushed through me, sudden and hot, and I had to turn away and walk back to the house. I was like a jackal among dogs here. My teeth were sharper, but either I would eventually lash out, or they would tear me to pieces.
Little falcon, Magister Oroyu called me. Little hunting falcon.
There was no escaping what I truly was. That young girl whose gaze had been trained on faraway stars had turned into something feral, dangerous. For her to consider turning her back on the fast strike, the quiet death, and the pursuit—now that was madness.
I am the only one of my unit small enough to worm my way through the air ducts. I am the only one quiet enough to slip unremarked into the very heart of the enemy’s holdout. The rebel doesn’t see the blade I bring to his throat and, when he clutches with ineffectual fingers, his life blood spatters to the composite alloy tiles in a hot fountain. I don’t need guns when I’m the weapon.
How much longer before my brother foolishly goaded me again? Then what? Would I step over that line with an unarmed civilian?
I waited in my room until the household settled for the night. No one called me for supper. I was hungry, but I’d experienced worse privations. Food could wait. My bag was already packed but there was one thing I had to do before I left. The ampoules were shiny blue gemstones in my palm, each with its own capped needle. I only needed six of the soporifics. They were synthetic opiates for the nights when my old injuries pained me more than usual. One or two were sufficient for a grown woman to sleep soundly for six to eight hours. Six would guarantee eternal slumber.
No one stirred when I made my way downstairs. I knew exactly where to step to avoid the squeaky stairs. The door to Ma’s room stood ajar, and the ammonia stench was even stronger than it had been this afternoon. Essie never did get round to bathing her, and now was not the time to berate myself for not checking up on her.
My anger flexed within me but I tamped it down. Eventually Johan and Sandra’s study in neglect would turn around and bite them, but I wouldn’t be that dog. Ma, on the other hand…
She’d somehow rucked the linen up so that she was hunched on the plastic mattress protector. The sheet that should have covered her was piss–stained and crumpled to one side. Her eyes shone in the moonlight filtered through the gauze curtains. Her gaze was trained on me but I couldn’t be sure whether she saw me.
“Ma, I’ve come to take you home.”
She didn’t stir as I encircled one birdlike wrist in my fingers. Try as I might, I couldn’t find the woman who’d climbed up those mountains with me. Here lay only a withered skeleton, the skin sliding loose on fragile bones.
I could smother her, break her neck. What was a moment of pain compared to the days, weeks, or even months that awaited her otherwise? There was no telling how long a body could linger. How was it that Johan, who would no doubt shoot one of his horses if it broke its leg, couldn’t do the same for Ma?
Derik has plunged twenty metres or more down a shaft in the bowels of the enemy station.
“Hold on!” I call to him, my pulse tripping as I grip the edges of the hole.
Already sounds of pursuit are not far away. We have three, maybe five critical minutes.
“Go!” he shouts back.
“I won’t leave you!”
He gives a sharp cry and I shine the torch so I can see him as he contorts, trying to free himself. Derik bares his teeth at me when the light flashes in his eyes.
“I can’t feel my legs! It’s no use.”
“I’ll come down!” I shout.
“Go, woman!”
“They’ll kill you.”
Metal grates on metal and he cries out again. This entire subsection is unstable. Derik’s slowly being crushed to death and I can do nothing to help him.
His eyes are glassy with pain as I get a bead on his forehead. Through my rifle’s scope the shaft is lit up in eerie colours. Derik shines like an angel. I pull the trigger.
Ma’s breathing eased by the time the third ampoule emptied. It was intramuscular so the effect would be gradual. She’d go to sleep. That was all. Gentle arms would unfold for her and whatever flicker of her that remained would ease out of existence. I could only hope someone would be my angel of mercy one day. I administered the last three measures quickly, then pocketed the evidence. No one would look for the marks on her arm—small, like mosquito bites. And even if they did find them, I’d be long gone.
Back in my room, I paused long enough to light a candle. My letter of resignation didn’t burn easily, but I held the envelope to the patient, hungry flame. Libations of black smoke twisted cobwebs into darkness. The picture frame I crushed underfoot until the fragments of polymer composites squeaked across the scuffed pine floor. But I swept this up and deposited the remains in the waste basket instead of leaving it there, because Essie would be the one sent up here to clean after me and she didn’t need the extra work.
The little dog stood on the sill, his muzzle pointed hopefully out the window. I almost didn’t take him, but then I remembered Derik’s smile, white against his burnt–sugar skin, and I tucked the little carving in my flight jacket’s pocket.
Some of us were destined to nurture, to walk with the sun shining on their faces. I didn’t number among them—rather, cold starlight for the hunter. Always the stars and the void between, until something stronger and faster than me came along. There would be no tears.
Enemy State Karin Lowachee
WAR, WAR, WAR, WAR, WAR.
I’m so sick of hearing about the war.
It’s everywhere and you’re not.
It’s everywhere that you’re not.
Two years into this loss, and the garage, which used to be my zen place, is now just another place. Everyone thinks asking about you might make it better because it shows concern. As if I want to talk about it. Two years waiting and I no longer want to talk about it. “How’s Tuvi, Jake?” they say. “I haven’t heard from him,” is my refrain, while I keep my head above an engine and pray that some part of the fuel cell will spontaneously combust in my face so I don’t have to answer anymore. So I don’t have to think about you anymore, as if you were dead already, just a ghost. As if I can put you in a trunk with my parents’ history and never look at it again. But you can’t kill a memory like you can kill the enemy.
I try anyway to kill the memory of you. I make the plans. I attempt premeditation. All this time waiting has made me a silent murderer. Is it murder when it’s in war? If the enemy doesn’t do it, you can count on me.
Because they won’t tell me. Because they don’t know. Because you somehow can’t find your way home. You’re out past five solar systems and nobody knows anything. Not the media that pretends they’ve exposed the war, not the military that brags like they’re winning it. Maybe not even you, Tuvi. Maybe you don’t know where you are either. Maybe to you I’m a ghost as well, haunting all of the quiet places in your mind.
Absence is still grieving. I have nothing to throw my voice against. I go home and the walls of our apartment absorb futility as much as anger. They take the tears and don’t give them back. It’s not like arguing with you, there is no makeup sex. There is no mess. I’ve become a clinician of emotion, a recipient of symptoms. Check for signs of life. The walls and the floor and our bed hold all the memories and beat them back at me like the echo of a heart, a reminder of where you still occupy. An invasion force of your heart in mine, razing my surrendered territory.
Maybe I should’ve fought harder. Maybe I should’ve put up barricades and forced you to lay siege.
If I’d known at Anna’s barbecue two years ago. A winter grilling and you walked out onto the snow like it couldn’t touch you. Like this wasn’t the worst cold that you’d ever felt. I noticed your boots first because they used to be white. You had that easy, unconscious swagger, parting the drifts that blew around your legs. “This is my cousin Tuvi, he’s just come back from a tour.” And me in my half–drunk ignorance: “A tour of what?” A tour of the islands? A world tour? A tourist? Your grin was patronizing but also a little relieved. Like you’d finally found someone who saw something else in you, before the other things.
If I’d known.
I babbled something about taking apart bikes, tricking out cars. The race I was prepping for at the end of the month. (“Yeah, we ride in any weather.”) Ended by apologizing and claiming I didn’t usually talk this much. “I can tell,” you said. The only people who run on like that are the ones who keep all their shit stored up.
You let me trace the scar on your skull, flowing like a tributary from behind your ear to the back of your head, to meet up with another pale line. The military cut bristled beneath my fingertips but you were motionless. “There’s no story to tell,” you said. But don’t all scars come with stories? This wasn’t playtime, though. This wasn’t a gathering of mats in the library before recess. The kids’ swings creaked in the cold and beneath our weight, and our clothes had taken on the scent of wood smoke and ice. The party had moved inside and the gold light and faded voices could have been flickers from an aged film, echoes from a movie soundtrack. Neither of us cared to retreat into the warmth.
Inevitably I looked up at the stars. You kept pulling at your beer, two fingers around the neck, and looked instead at the shadows at our feet. You kicked the snow until ashen grass showed beneath, then buried the ground all over again.
My curiosity, but not about the stars: “I’ve never been up there.”
Another swig of the beer. “There’s nothing up there.”
“There’s a war out there.” Rebellious company colonies that we called terrorists. “You were up there. Are you going back?”
“Yep.”
It didn’t have to matter then. This was only supposed to be one time.
I love a man in uniform used to be a punch line.
It was only supposed to be one time, seeing you, but the next day I let you ride one of my bikes, a vintage that you said you had experience with, yet you brought it down at the side of the road. Gravel flew like tiny meteorites. You laughed. I wanted to hit you for the scratches and the dents, for all the ways you thought my anger was funny. “I didn’t do it on purpose.” Sure. Anyone who liked to crash probably always did it on purpose.
It didn’t occur to me until later that you’d lied about the experience. That you just wanted an excuse to do something I loved. That you dived in so readily and risked your limbs for an extra day together. “I’m not bad with machinery,” you said. “Just not used to roads.” We walked back to the garage, five miles pushing the bikes on snow–dusted road, with rockets from the base launching in the distance, returning your brothers and sisters to the stars. The contrails carved white across the blue sky, making wedgewood out of the Earth’s canopy.
It was a clear day and maybe that had been your plan all along. This way we talked instead of the wind rushing between us. You might’ve even faked a limp to ease my irritation. Tough guy. Bright smile. I talked. You just listened, gathering my stories of childhood spills and sun–drenched road trips to your chest like they would keep you warm. That was exactly what you were doing, why you didn’t tell me any of your own stories. Your stories, you said later, would only leave behind the cold.
Anna wore a smile the following weekend, like people do when they’re in on a secret. I found it infuriating. We said it was casual. We shot pool and went for drives. The snow on the fields made you quiet and I didn’t mind. You know you get along with someone when silence isn’t a barrier. You know you belong with someone when breaking it opens a door.
Because you didn’t tell me stories, I made up my own. Confirm or deny. The only rule was you weren’t allowed to lie. It was my version of invading a foreign space, of setting up convoys and creating a supply line. We tried to outflank each other but I don’t think you tried very hard. Soldiering was all you knew. Your parents had both worked at the base. They’d shipped out early in the war and you were raised by Anna’s father, your uncle. You heard about their deaths through the report of the battle. Everyone remembers the battle out by the belt. Confirmation came later, in uniforms. Some things they still do the old–fashioned way.
I changed the direction of my march when your eyes started to drift to open spaces. This was over days, picking up the conversation before and after sleep, between shared drinks and naked bodies and sheets. The truth wasn’t everything, I said. Let’s say we grew up together. Let’s say I pelted snowballs at you and we ruined each other’s forts. Let’s say you broke my arm pushing me from a tree and felt sorry after.
Let’s say I followed you to space.
“No.”
Pretending didn’t go that far. You skirted my attempts to advance.
It was stupid anyway.
So I took it back even if it was too late.
That night I knew I didn’t want you to go.
But it was too late.
Pretty soon you realized my temper was a mask. “You put all of your aggression into these machines, but it can’t fuel you the same way.”
“Thank you, Doctor.”
I wanted to rewind to the moment when I could make the decision to fortify these walls. Instead I lowered the damn bridge and beckoned you across.
It felt like a homecoming, not an invasion. That was the problem. And we had years to catch up on.
Years of when you were somewhere else, growing up, losing your parents, going off to war. And I was just here.
We spent every day together for two weeks. If only I’d forced the siege.
“Don’t write to me,” you said. Do you ever think about taking that back?
“I’ll write to you. I just won’t send it.” Civilian comms didn’t go that deep into the war anyway. The soldier you were didn’t sit on base or on a ship somewhere waiting for the mail to light in. I watched your eyes glint in the morning sun and asked you if you’d miss it. The sun. Earth sky. Snow on the tips of your boots. I was asking something else and your gaze caught mine in the mirror.
Tough guy. Bright smile. “Of course I will.”
Your uniform was black like space. I planted a kiss to the back of your shoulder and the imprint only remained for a couple seconds. Black absorbed light. It also hid blood. But it couldn’t mask your heartbeat, I still felt that against my palm.
I want to joke at you, I wrote. The tenth letter and two months into your absence. I want to start this off like I started off the first one, ignoring the facts. We can be troublesome lawyers too crooked to take into consideration something as variable as the truth. You are not out there in deep space, I am not back on this planet waiting. I’ve never waited for anyone in my life. Nobody’s ever waited for me. Remember when I told you about riding my first bike over the neighbor’s yard and crashing into the fence? Of course it was on purpose. Of course my parents yelled. Of course a few more stunts like that and they kicked me out of the trailer. They didn’t wait for me to come back before they left. I keep it all inside because there’s nowhere to put it.
In one night, though, you heard my crash stories. I can blame you.
When you come back I want you to tell me everything.
I want to understand if this is real, or are you just good at saying the right things and listening the right way? I won’t believe Anna. Your cousin isn’t allowed to vouch for you. This isn’t a swearing in of eyewitnesses or a pledge to a club. I won’t believe the hearsay. I want you to look me in the eyes. I want you to take all of my letters. You don’t have to read them, just know that I wrote them for you.
We still call them letters because they’re made up of the minimal components that create language and meaning. They’re not handwritten anymore, I don’t have to get them stamped. Letters on a screen. Letters made of light. Letters going only as far as the transparent display over my eyes.
It’s not enough just to have your feet back on Earth. You don’t get off that easily. Let’s just assume you’ll live and you owe me something, even if we said we didn’t owe each other anything. We were just ignoring the facts then too.
Apparently I have it in me to make demands. Maybe it wouldn’t be this way if you just worked in another town.
But I have to know.
You might die and I have to know.
Everything you do makes my life immediate.
Six months later you showed up at the garage. I was beneath a car fiddling with the repulsor panel settings. You grabbed my ankles and yanked me out and I kicked you in the shins before I saw you. We made a scene. Crashed into one of the bikes. Fell over parts. I might’ve been trying to punch you. My boss said to take it elsewhere, but there was a smile on her face.
So you did. You took me elsewhere.
In bed you told me about all the parts of you that weren’t human anymore. Starting with your fingers, which had been blown off three years ago, and now they’re reset with mods that can arm guns and grenades with just a caress. I could’ve told you that, for the way they pass along my skin, detonating me.
Your eyes, at least your left one, that can see in the night or the black of space, can read radiation levels and zoom in on targets from ten thousand meters away. But to me they’re green with flecks of gold, like something people used to mine, something rare and valuable that catches the light. I saw an old movie once where the cowboys bit down on coins to test their authenticity. If I set my teeth in you I would know that you are genuine.
The line of your spine doesn’t show a scar, even though that was replaced, regrown, made new so you could walk. Seven years ago you’d been ripped apart, torn out like a fish, and they said you’d never walk again. Tough guy. I smiled because I didn’t want to think about it. You smiled because you didn’t want to say it.
This was everything. These were your stories.
The months of convalescence, physiotherapy, reprogramming, refusal. Stubbornness. Let me ask just one question, and it isn’t a game, this isn’t pretend.
Why did you go back?
Don’t they have robots for this now? Isn’t this a machine war?
But it’s humans that wage war.
War is a human problem.
And the rebels have been taking our robots, reprogramming them, and sending them back. Trojan warfare.
This was more than the news said. More than the military let out.
Human beings started this war, human beings have to end it.
I touched your fingertips. Now I knew why they were so smooth. I have another question, I’m sorry.
Every time you go back to the war, they steal another part of you.
How much of you returns home? Not because these scars bother me. Not because I can almost feel the triggers when we lay our palms together.
“I don’t really come back,” you said. “They don’t fix me for that reason.”
You weren’t talking about your body.
These were your stories and they left me cold.
After breakfast I gave you the letters. I wanted to leave while you read them but you gripped my hand and made me stay. Two of us on the bed with the scent of chai tea and waffle syrup, in an apartment small enough to house voices long after they died.
Thirty letters and you read every one, the light from the screen making your skin glow.
As if you weren’t real.
But your thumb moved over my fingers like you didn’t even know you were doing it. Moving at the same speed your eyes did as they gathered up the words. Your thumb moved over my fingers like I was a trigger.
I had the quiet and the worry, as you read.
I had my heartbeat in my ears.
Who needs romance? Reality is better.
At least in moments. At least in imprints before they fade away.
Dear Tuvi.
It’s easier to write when I know you won’t read it. I can be honest. More honest. I can go through all the stages of things and be imprecise about it. Things. I can say I miss you and it doesn’t feel like I’m giving something away into a void. The void. Even if this is going into a void. You’re not here and it’s a void. You’re the one in space, in a void. Write a word enough times and it begins to look funny. It becomes nothing. If I write it enough times maybe it won’t exist anymore. Void.
I only have mundane things to say, but maybe that’s what you want to know. About the orange cat that came by the garage and everyone wanted to keep it. About how it just took our milk then went away, never returned. I raced last weekend and came in second. I think my repulsor alignment was a little off. I’ll fix it for next week. I mixed a new paint and maybe I’ll add a flag to the bike. How can any of this interest you?
The truth is I’m just thinking of you.
The truth is I’m angry that I’ve become one of those. I never expected you, and now look.
I wonder if writing these letters makes it worse. With all my focus on the words, maybe you’re more than you really are. Or maybe I made you up entirely.
I spend months missing you. It’s a currency that never dries up and I get slapped with interest. Maybe at the end of this I’ll be bankrupt. Maybe when you come home and decide you don’t care, I’ll go into foreclosure.
This is what your absence does to me. Suddenly I doubt everything. Should I wear this shirt to the bar? Do I want to talk to anyone else? I don’t feel like riding this afternoon. There’s no more solace in speed.
I go to sleep thinking of how long it would take for word to come back that you’re dead. Sometimes I don’t sleep at all.
Why can’t you at least try to write?
What’s so important about this war?
Why do you care when you can stay here on Earth (with me)?
I can hear you already: Tell a different story, Jake.
Tell me one about going cross country. Tell me all about getting lost in the trees. Give me your injuries one by one. The first crash and the last.
Especially the last because that one is you.
One night I met a soldier in the snow. He wore white boots and didn’t seem to feel the cold.
Tell me the best thing about the seasons changing. How the trees light up like fire and warm the cool blues of the sky. Nothing is as beautiful as that. Death can be beautiful.
No, let’s not take it there.
It’s not death, it’s transition.
It doesn’t matter how many parts of you aren’t homegrown from birth. Don’t you see what I do for a living?
Whatever happens, I can fix you.
Yeah, I believe that shit too.
I never met anything engineered that I couldn’t understand. Taking things apart and putting them back together. That’s what I do.
Dear Tuvi.
Just come back.
I miss you.
Don’t die.
On the last letter: Love, Jake.
And your fingers squeezed the blood from my hand.
We had two weeks the first time we met. The second time around, after six months of absence, we had another two and you said you weren’t going back.
I thought you were joking and it was cruel. But the nervousness told me this wasn’t a joke. You made the decision to stay. I didn’t ask if it was for me. Vanity is the other side of love.
There, I said it. Doesn’t matter that it’s in my head. It feels loud.
You were nervous because you didn’t know how to live in this world. I thought back to those first two weeks. Mostly we were alone. Even at the barbecue we were alone.
The only time we were never alone was with each other.
The secret to being in a room full of people but not noticing a thing is you.
At first we lived.
You moved in with your meager belongings.
Anna threw a homecoming and you didn’t leave my side.
I saw how the laughter was a strain. I saw how you were already regretting it.
“No, no, of course not.”
That was the first time you ever lied to me. I didn’t call you on it because I wanted to believe. I knew it could work. It would just take time. The things beneath your skin now could be used for other things.
Vague things. A vague future but at least it’s a future and you’re here. Just give it time.
We all have our mantras.
I fell into the trap. The door in the floor opened up and I dropped in. It had your name on it, that was the problem. You didn’t want to hear it but I would’ve followed you into space.
Instead I followed you into the hole, into the dark.
Same thing, maybe.
In the light that came through the window, sunlight or moonlight, I traced the curve of your spine and marveled at the technology that gave you to me.
Vanity is the other side of love. Of course it was all for me.
The hands that used to set off grenades and fire weapons now handled drinks at the bar. We met at odd hours but they worked for us. Other people didn’t work for you though. Too many people. Every time the vid cycled the news you switched it to sports.
At first you tried. You came to my races. You read books while I worked on my bike, music threading between us on the driveway. You learned to cook stir fry, made me a birthday card from scratch like we were in fifth grade. Fixed the misaligned window so the rain didn’t leak in.
But the other window cracked.
Little things frustrated you.
Then you didn’t want to get out of bed.
Then you just kept saying, Tell me another story.
I ran out of stories.
We tried running away for your birthday, took a road trip to the mountains but the silences stretched. They became barriers. You didn’t want to celebrate. You gripped my hand until I no longer had feeling in my fingers.
Please talk to me.
Don’t tell me a story, just talk to me.
Or write it down if you can’t say it out loud.
Just something.
It was winter again and I felt futile. The frightening part was how much you loved me without saying a word. You turned your body to the shrapnel in order to protect me. You lay down on top of me when the tanks rolled over. You gave me your last tube of oxygen and with my last breath I yelled at you, I said, I just want you to live.
Dear Tuvi.
Please don’t die.
Just come back.
I miss you.
I had a dream the night before you told me. We were climbing a sloped road and it was winter. Wolves paced behind us but they just followed our tracks. At the top of the hill lay bodies in black open bags. We walked right by them and entered a bar; the Olympics were on TV and everyone looked at us with vague suspicion. I tried to order nachos and eventually you had to flag down the waitress and repeat it three times. For some reason we were lodged into a table with three other men, all older, who stared at us with the blank looks of the lobotomized. They were locals and we weren’t.
We ate our nachos and left the bar. The wolves were gone. More bodies had collected on the hill. At the bottom of the hill, at the side of the road, a child was digging ditches. I asked you if you recognized any of the dead and you said no.
The dead lined up outside our door.
They wouldn’t let us in.
We couldn’t go home.
So I started to zip up the body bags and you churned the dirt and snow together with a shovel until it looked like cake mix.
The world was quiet and the air didn’t bite. In any other dream it might have been peaceful.
The next morning you told me you were going back to space.
I yelled at you for two hours.
The things we say when we’re trying not to hurt.
You have a death wish.
You’re an adrenalin junkie.
You just want to kill people.
It hasn’t even been a year, you can’t give it a year?
You stood there with your hands open like you wanted to take all of my words, like you were inviting them.
So I threw them at you like knives.
And you bled. The red ran down your body and pooled at your feet, stained the floors, threw in spatter behind your head to be analyzed later by an evidence unit.
How many lives do you think you have?
Why don’t you go to therapy?
Who’s the guilty one here?
“I’m not built for anything else.” While you began to pack.
I’m not built for anything else either.
I’ve modified myself for you. I had my organs ripped out and replaced, programmed to your genetic code. I was brought down by the side of the road. I can’t scour out the scratches, can’t bang out the dents. I’m running on my last fuel cell and you’re just running.
“Better to get out now.”
Why?
“Better to only waste a year on me.”
So now it’s for my own good. Unilateral decisions for my own good.
It got down to begging. I’ve become one of those. Because in the dream I was zipping up body bags and you’re going back to war. You’re going too far and I don’t want to write any more letters.
I don’t want your cousin to call me in the middle of the night.
The things we say when we’re trying not to hurt.
I love you and I don’t want you to leave.
I don’t think I said that first part.
I won’t wait for you.
“Good.”
And you walked on out.
Do you ever want to take it back? That last word?
I lied too, you know.
I’m still waiting.
Two years waiting and Anna says no news is good news. We’ve been whittled to pat assurances.
You’ve been gone for longer than we were together. In the scale of that I wonder some days why I’m holding on.
Between the anger and the missing is some truth I have yet to grasp.
I won’t call it love.
Let’s say you show up at the garage again and yank me out from beneath a car.
Let’s say we make a scene and it’s like fighting but it’s not.
Let’s say neither of us apologize because we’re just so happy you’re alive.
Let’s say it lasts.
Let’s say you aren’t dead already, or missing, and the war will end.
Let’s say it ends and you come home for good. There are no more fronts to fight, no more rebels to put down.
Let’s run through this one more time. I’ll give you five scenarios, the only rule is you can’t lie.
The only rule is you can’t die.
Confirm or deny.
Let me tell you a story about a soldier I met in the snow.
Let me show you all the parts of him that make up the whole of me.
Dear Tuvi.
I’m sick of feeling this way.
You’re a bastard.
Love, Jake.
The truth is life happens anyway. I have conversations with it too and I’m yelling at it just as much. You’re not allowed to carry on. The air isn’t allowed to move into my lungs. The world isn’t allowed to spin. I’m not allowed to win more races. This isn’t the way it’s supposed to be. I don’t want to drink to victory. I can’t see Anna anymore. Your niece and nephew miss you. Your uncle still brings his car by. Everyone keeps asking about you.
It’s worse when they stop asking.
It’s worse when the news says the war is over and our boys and girls are coming home.
Everyone is lying.
If there’s a way for you to stay in deep space, you will.
If I’d only known that first night how far the cold ran.
But who am I kidding?
The news shows the footage of the ships blinking in, like stars. Spontaneously birthed.
One, two, five, nine, fifteen.
Popping in like God is sticking pins into the night sky.
Almost three years you’ve been gone.
I can’t do the math.
The theory of relativity states that the further out you are, the harder it is to forget you.
Do you know you left one of your T–shirts in my drawer? Actually two.
I’m sorry but you don’t get them back.
When she told me you were at the VA hospital I nearly crashed trying to get to you.
The theory of relativity states that the second you’re in my orbit again, I forget the past three years.
Time contracts right back to that moment. When you left me. Do you want to take it back?
My footsteps on the hospital floors.
Take it back, take it back, take it back.
I’ll wait for you.
I’m not angry anymore.
I was selfish and scared.
I’m not brave.
I touched your spine and the scars on your skull. I was afraid with all the lives you’d lived up, there wouldn’t be one left for me.
They put you to lie on a flat bed.
They’re growing your insides.
They’ve printed out your skin.
They’re giving you a new eye.
Your body seems transparent in the light of so many lasers and the glue they use to hold you together.
I imagine you turning to look at me. You see me through the doors.
You see right through me.
Here to give me a new paint job, Jake?
Let me get my hands into you. Let me meld this bone to that, drive this rivet in, attach an extra plating for heat resistance. Heart resistance. I can make you run again. I’ve designed you something new. You’ll be stronger, faster, and happier. I’ll scour out all the things you’ve seen, I’ll burn the bad dreams until they’re winter blue.
Just let me touch you.
I don’t care if you’re cold.
I don’t care where you’ve been.
This is what I’m good at.
I’m good with you.
They say not to expect the same you.
I’m not the same, so we’re even.
Distance and time flayed us both alive.
I promise you soba noodles done just the way you like. A little spicy, served with chopsticks. Open your eyes. It’s been a long sleep. You won’t remember, maybe, but that won’t stop my dreams.
We don’t have to leave the covers when it’s a snowy Sunday morning. Later in the afternoon I’ll pack your coat with ice. We’ll chase each other down the block and cheat the rules. I’ll teach you how to ride in bad weather and you’ll dent every piece of machinery I own. The fluid in me can manufacture you. Let’s pretend we grew up together. Let’s be born anew. Say the scientific names of the stars because romance isn’t as sweet as reality. Give me an idea of what it’s like to lose gravity. I’ll be the thing you fall back to.
Everyone is waiting.
We’ve got more places to go. I’ve mapped the route. We’ll pass through every season and stop at the beach and all the seas. You’ll get salt in your eyes and I’ll allow myself to cry. We’ll have a picture perfect ending that’s all about horizons. There are more colors in a sunrise than there are stars in the sky. Let me show you.
I’m waiting.
Then we’ll awaken and figure this out.
You don’t have to know right now.
There’s no more war to run back to. Just this one inside of you.
Here, that’s my fingertip.
I know you can feel that. I see you move.
Even if you return to space, this time I’ll follow you.
Here, tell me a story. Tell me there will be no more killing. Tell me there will be no more enemies.
Tell me a story and begin it with I love you.
War 3.01 Keith Brooke
FRIDAY NIGHT WAS GOING TO be just how Friday nights usually were. A few pints of Guinness, although it’s never as good as it is back home in Donaghmede. A kebab from the Istanbul, heavy on the chili sauce. Maybe one or two JDs at the Talbot to finish. It was pretty much a sure thing he’d end up scuttered and wake up sometime Saturday with a head–splitting, sandpaper–throated hangover. That was the plan, as far as planning went. It was Friday night, after all, and he’d just been paid two days ago.
Town was more relaxed than it had been for months. People were out again, allowing themselves to get back to some kind of normal. The latest round of bioterror threats had put a damper on that for a time, but now they’d faded away without anything much new to be scared of. Time for a few drinks, some food, people’s guards starting to drop at last. It was almost a party atmosphere on the streets, and it was as if Kevin could feel the weight lifting. He hadn’t realised how oppressive it had all been, how much it had affected everything.
The downside was that the squaddies were out too. That always added an extra dimension for a young Irish migrant worker in a garrison town. Weedy, shorter than average, Kevin O’Farrell was easy game for skinhead soldiers pushing him about “for the craic,” as they would say. That kind of shit’s okay as long as everyone’s having a laugh, right?
He headed up Queen Street, fists in his hoody’s kangaroo–pouch pocket, sticking to the far side of the road from the squaddies’ pub, The Union. The chip shop next to the pub spamyelled him, sent taste–centre endorphins kicking down to his belly, making him hungry when he was not. Special deals for our regulars, Kevin. He Xed it.
The Union burned amber on his meSphere, a threatening glow layered over the real by his enhanced–reality lenses. It was a squaddie pub and it knew from his meSphere profile that he was a Mick. There was an app for that. There always was. Fuck ’em all and back, eh?
There were three of the gobshites outside, sucking on cigarettes held in meaty–clawed hands. Pressed dark–blue jeans, heavy black boots with a mean shine, white polo shirts, tattoos of union flags and barbed wire. StreetThreat flagged the situation as level 8: squaddies, booze, a vulnerable ethnic who’s fair game because he’s young and male.
Kevin kept his head down.
HeadKutz spamyelled his meSphere: half–price weekday haircuts, and, for a moment before he Xed that too, his vision was overlaid with head and shoulders of how he might look with a buzz, a flick, a sweeparound, rather than the shaggy urchin mop he had now. Even as he blocked HeadKutz, he had to smile at the real–time wizardry that had taken CCTV stills of him and realityShopped him almost beyond recognition.
Bad move, that. Walking past a squaddie pub, smiling.
Just as Kevin had layers of apps in his ’sphere feeding his enhanced perception of the world all around, so too did they. They’d be standing there with their lagers and their cigarettes and their testosterone, and they’d see Kevin: flagged up as a Mick, coming here and taking English jobs. And smiling about it.
They weren’t all like that, of course, and Kevin was smart enough to know as much: he’d never make the mistake of lumping them all together the way some of them did to everyone else. But the ones that did… their realities were enhanced, their meSpheres knew what they liked and what they believed, and they filtered out the irrelevant noise. Everything was enhanced, and that included prejudices.
Kevin knew how it worked. He knew all about the fuzzy quantum mathematics that helped meSphere apps anticipate the illogical logic of human thought. Just because someone likes A and they also like B, it doesn’t mean they like A and B together. The brain doesn’t follow that kind of logic. Except when it does. Search engine developers had known for years that algorithms based on quantum logic could uncover meanings and patterns in data far more efficiently than classical algorithms. Quantum reasoning was a far better model for how the brain worked out those hidden meanings than any other approach. Apply these algorithms to the meSphere and you got a reality enhanced with prompts and ads and buddy–links you could almost have chosen for yourself, only better.
And so those three squaddies—with their fags and their beer and their apps that picked out Kevin and said he was the kind of scruffy gobshite that was bringing this country down—turned as one, like programmed automata. One raised a fist with a ciggie sticking out between first and second finger; another started to make some kind of gesture that involved a finger and the side of his head and lowering forward like a caveman.
Kevin kept walking.
He wanted to run, but if he did and they were serious he knew they would catch him easily.
He locced Ziggy and Emily and Matt via the meSphere. The three of them were in the Lion’s Head on High Street. A couple of minutes’ walk if he could just keep going and the gimps at The Union would forget about him. He pinged his friends, let them know he was on his way.
He risked a glance across and was accosted by HeadKutz again, something in his profile flagging him as a prime target for a cut–price haircut. Maybe he should. No reason why a backroom search–logic geek had to look like one.
But the three gobshites…
Two were staring at each other, and the other one of them peered up as if he could see the stars through the glare of the street lights and it was the first time he’d ever seen them.
And there was nothing.
The Union wasn’t amber, flagged as no–go. StreetThreat didn’t hang 8s over the three thugs. It was gone. All of it was gone.
That was when the war started. And that was when it ended.
The meSphere kicked back in with a pixelated staccato of screen–flicker. It stablised, and then a message flashed up, a semi–transparent pop–up overlaying everything.
There was a war, it read. You lost. Life will go on as normal, but with less extravagance and with the utmost respect for those who believe. We will not relent in pursuing the enemy. We control the meSphere. We won. In the name of Allah, Most Gracious, Most Merciful. We are the Brethren of the Jihad. We are your humble servants.
Kevin’s head pinged with messages and alerts. Friends and family loccing him.
Ziggy: You get that bro? What the fuck? It for real ya think?
Sandeep, uber–geek on the search–illogic team: Hey Kev. Dig the profiles! They bucket–testing the shit outta this war.
Even his kid brother Eoin, back in Dublin: They shitting us or what? We just lost World War fricking Three?
“Stand down? What do they mean, stand down?” grunted one of the squaddies, the one with a ginger buzz–cut and cartoon–square features. “We’s not even fucking stood up.”
Kevin forgot himself and stood there staring at the three.
One of the other squaddies shrugged. “How we supposed to know?” he said. “We only got orders, init?”
They saw Kevin staring, but somehow they didn’t look threatening any more. They looked confused, diminished. “You know what’s happening, do you?” Kevin asked.
Ginger buzz–cut looked across at him, then let loose with a stream of violent abuse.
Kevin backed off and hurried away.
All around him, the meSphere stuttered its overlay. Restaurants spamyelled him, then fell quiet. His headspace was quiet, and then there was an abrupt flurry of pings and messages. Then quiet again.
Another pop–up appeared, empty, then vanished.
He felt dizzy, disoriented.
He had to stop, and lean against a wall. It felt like there was a war in his head, even though he knew that the war had already happened. It had started, it had finished. It was all over, lost.
But still, his head was bombarded with spamyells and visual static. Noise that meant nothing, or might have meant everything if only he could understand. His head kept reeling and he felt sick.
He concentrated on breathing. A simple thing, yet so hard.
Breathing.
He messaged Emily and Ziggy, and Ziggy sent back, Hey bro. Ya getting the news?
He blinked up a feed, but it was sporadic, frequently interrupted and washed over with random noise. What he could pick up was being doctored, realityShopped like those HeadKutz photos. The BBC stream had a new overlay in a language he didn’t recognise. It used Latin characters but not in a way he was used to. Indonesian, Phillipino… he wasn’t sure.
The government had resigned. Heads of the military and security services had been detained, automatically locked in their offices. Software agents of the Brethren of the Jihad had taken control of the nation’s military, power, financial, and other systems, maintaining stability in this time of crisis. In his closing speech, the former Prime Minister spoke of his gratitude that at last someone had taken responsibility for tackling the moral decline of the nation and that they could all look forward to a time of spiritual maturity and respect.
It was a coup, but the powers of the land seemed almost grateful.
Jesus, but I never thought World War Three would go like this, Kevin messaged everyone in a mass reply–all. It’s like the PM was waiting for it.
He reached High Street and saw that people were in the road looking dazed and confused. The Exchange flashed that it was closed until licensing laws had been reviewed. The Shackleton too.
Farther down there was a crowd outside the Lion’s Head. Quick messages revealed that Ziggy, Emily, Matt and Lola were there. All turfed out.
Waiting for it? messaged Ziggy. Blown to pieces more like. I don’t call that waiting for it…
Kevin found his friends, gave gang shakes and hugs. Ziggy, all dreadlocks and shell beads, said, “What you saying, they were asking for it, bro?”
Kevin didn’t know what to say. He’d checked the feeds again as he worked his way along the crowded High Street. Asking for it: such a meek and humble handing over of power. “I don’t know,” he said. “You tell me: what’s happened?”
“It’s in the feeds, bro. The bombs, the snatch squads. Swift an’ clinical is what they saying. A show of force so we know just how beaten we are. Didn’t you check the feeds?”
Kevin shrugged, said nothing. He remembered the point, the moment when the meSphere faltered and then righted itself and then the message came through.
There was a war. You lost.
The kind of military takeover Ziggy described would never happen so swiftly. The war was in the wires. It had taken place in cyberspace, started and finished in milliseconds. A takeover of all the systems that ran the country.
Ziggy grabbed Kevin’s arm, getting antsy, lairy from the drink and the adrenaline. “Hey bro,” he demanded. “Don’t just go ignoring me. This is big shit. What’s happening?”
Kevin put a hand on his friend’s wrist, calming him. “I don’t know,” he said. There was something nagging away in a corner of his mind. “Just give me a mo’ though, would you? That’d be grand.”
Sandeep! Sandeep Patel, the second–generation Indian from the East Midlands who liked to call Kevin a “bloody foreigner” and had made him more welcome at SphereIllogic than anyone else, back when he’d started there last year. His message earlier… Kevin flipped it back up: Hey Kev. Dig the profiles! They bucket–testing the shit outta this war.
Bucket–testing. A/B testing. Where a web feed showed some users a variant of a page so the owners could measure the outcomes, how many more clicked to buy; or where some passersby would get a spamyell from a shop or restaurant with a different wording, different tone. Real–time testing with subtle variations. Amazon and Google had done it all the time, way back in the when of things.
And now… Kevin looked around at all the confused, defeated faces.
How many different versions had people been fed so that the so–called Brethren of the Jihad could modify their campaign depending on user–segment responses? How many variants were there of that BBC feed, videoShopped in real–time by some semi–AI in order to model and shape and defeat a nation’s head–space? How much was even true, and how much just a piece of misinformation carefully engineered to steer the collective illogical logic of the population?
Kevin grabbed Ziggy by the arms and his dreadlocked friend fell quiet, mid–rant.
“It’s not over,” said Kevin. “Do you see? It’s not over at all. It’s still happening. All around us. Everything: one big bucket test. We haven’t lost, Ziggy. We only lose if we believe we’ve lost.”
Ziggy shook himself free. “Bro, you gone mad in the head. It’s all over the feeds.”
Kevin turned to Emily and Matt, but they just looked dazed, lost. In their heads they’d lost and there was no getting through.
Kevin started to run. Run until his breath came ragged and his lungs burned and his legs were like jelly.
He turned back down Queen Street, heading for the Union, the squaddies. He didn’t know what he was going to do, what he could find to say to them to convince them, but he had to get through. Had to try to persuade them that they were only beaten because they thought they were and that they might just still have a chance if they’d listen instead of just beating the crap out of the ranting gobshite of a Mick who was about to burst into their bar and start haranguing them.
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