“Catherine.”
“Katarina?” he asked. The song stopped then, and at first I thought I’d said something wrong when a discussion broke out in Russian, but then the boys with instruments arranged themselves again, preparing. “Not Catherine. Not on this trip. While you’re with us, your name is Katyusha.”
Everyone screamed
“Katyusha!”
and the boys played a new song, faster than the last.
The boy above me leaned over and smiled. Now I saw that his left hand was severed at the wrist, the wound still open and raw but without losing blood, and many of his teeth had broken to make his grin a jagged, but friendly one.
“Katyusha is an old song. Very old. The first one we
learn in training; it’s about a girl who sends her lover off to war and promises to wait for his return.”
“Why are you being…” I searched for the right word but couldn’t find it. “Why am I alive?”
“Why haven’t we killed you?”
I nodded.
“Orders. We found you on the river bank, in Dargan Ata where we had been sent to scout American movements in Uzbekistan. Across the river. The American Specials came and didn’t know we were there. They were looking for you, and so we let them have it, but they called in an airstrike, which is when we all got wounded. The doctor took care of you while you were out, and your wounds aren’t bad, a few flechette hits, but we know what happens to you after two years in war. He says you’re dying anyway so why
should
we go to all the trouble of killing you when nature will handle it soon herself? Besides, we’ve been told to take as many of our sisters alive, whenever we can. Orders.”
If it were possible, his grin got even wider, so wide that it made me forget my legs.
I said, “We assumed all of you hated us.”
“Why?”
“Because we’re enemies.”
“That’s the difference between you and us, the American synthetics and Russian ones: we don’t have enemies, we only have missions. It’s just a job, Katyusha. Some of us might hate you, but most of us don’t care about those we kill and when you think of it we both have the same mission, the same parents. Hatred, amidst all that, is just too tiring.”
My limbs went slack and the cigarette fell to the floor
in a shower of sparks as another wave of exhaustion hit, forcing the room to go dark. The last thing I heard was the boy.
“Hatred is an obscurant.”
My dreams traced a path of hatred.
Time and repetition should have illuminated its genesis sooner, but I suspected that constant fatigue had kept me blind, or maybe there was something about being wounded that clarified it, brought the reasons for my hatred into focus. Whatever the reason, they came. Faces, Marines with whom my unit had always been attached, and their thousands of expressions played out in my subconscious, laughing, and I couldn’t blame them for it, wondering at my own stupidity and that of my sisters—especially of Megan and the Lilies. For having served without question.
There was the Marine leaning out of the APC and waving good-bye—
see ya, bitches—
just before the image faded, transformed into another where a supply depot near the town of Yangiyul’ stretched out as far as we could see, the detritus of war mingled with the lifeblood of its participants. Piles of crates and shipping containers formed massive square structures. In places these had been hit by enemy air attacks, and cranes moved in to salvage the containers that were intact, discard those beyond salvage, which sometimes, when lifted, spewed their contents—usually helmets, rations, or spare parts—onto the ground like a bursting piñata. On the northern side of the depot, three massive portals lay open. Dark. The entrances led to tunnels so wide that vehicles could pass
in either direction for front-line supply runs, but one of them had been targeted, its mouth filled with concrete rubble that I saw, when I zoomed in, also held mangled bodies of those unfortunate enough to have been caught in the blast.
Yangiyul’ was a wreck
, I realized.
Marines scrambled over rubble and slid down into plasma craters while we climbed from the flat cars, and from the open platform we could see more of what remained of the Tashkent-Shymkent sector’s main depot. Point defense towers lay flat on the ground where an aborted Russian advance had destroyed them, and new towers stretched upward. When Russian drones approached there wasn’t an alarm. Instead, almost as soon as we had assembled, the Yangiyul’ plasma defenses thumped like a chorus of tympanis and Marines sprinted to any cover they could—rubble, bomb shelters, or the bottoms of craters. We just stood there. Then we shrugged when the drones and missiles never came, having been driven off by defensive fire.
After the all clear, a group of men closest to us complained of the heat but they returned to their work, lifting sections of magnetic containment coils to place them on cargo crawlers—huge flatbed tracked vehicles that artillery units used to transport reactor equipment, which would provide power and deuterium for our plasma cannons. The coil-pipes were flexible ceramic-and-alloy tubes roughly one meter across, about a metric ton per section, and would line narrow rock channels that had been drilled from the rear into our main underground positions. That way, if the enemy took a section of our line, artillery units could pipe super hot gas into our abandoned tunnel; many
Russians had been cooked this way. The coils themselves would be electrified, creating a charge that prevented the gas from making contact with the pipe-walls, ensuring that the plasma was still hot when it arrived.
The men moving the coil-pipes didn’t actually
do
any lifting, but merely had to guide them to make sure they didn’t rotate out of alignment as the crawler’s crane carefully lowered them to its deck. Our orders had not yet arrived, so Megan and the rest of us squatted on the platform to watch the work. We had been there almost an hour when it happened.
“McTear!” an officer shouted, “Get out from under that coil-pipe.”
The man shuffled out and waved. “Sorry.”
“Listen up.” The officer stood at the bottom of a crater and observed as they loaded the last section onto a carrier at the crater’s lip, above him. “When we’re done with this one, y’all can have a half-hour break. Chow’s inside entrance four.”
The Marines gave a half-hearted cheer and the one named McTear rested his hands on the nearby coil and pushed, his expression turning immediately into one of horror. “Shugart, get out of the way, it’s swinging wide!” But the warning came too late. The section was on its way down and started to rotate in the direction of another man, who stood on the edge of the flatbed. His back was to the coil, and he stared off with a blank expression as if he didn’t hear the shouts.
“Get out of the way!”
Before it could strike him, the section’s straps snapped and the thing crashed against the edge of the carrier, catapulting the man, Shugart, twenty meters into the rubble. His officer, who had begun his way up the crater, stopped
to look. Three coil sections tumbled off the carrier and slid down the sloping side of the pit in slow motion, rolling over him before they stopped with a groan. He never had time to even scream. A smear that looked like raspberry jam had been wiped against the glassy crater side, all that remained of the officer, a message spelled out in dead tissue, that war could touch you anywhere, anytime. Even the rear could be a dangerous place.
“Corpsman!”
one of them yelled.
What would a corpsman do?
I wondered, glancing at Megan. You could see she was thinking the same thing.
“Someone fucking
do something
. Goddamn it!” The Marine named McTear slid to the bottom of the crater and pulled at the edge of one of the pipes, a tiny pool of blood collecting next to his boots as Shugart stood to shake his head clear.
Someone said, “Get outta there, McTear; he’s gone. The coils might shift again.”
But none of the other Marines moved except for Shugart. He had finished dusting himself off and started sobbing. Eventually, after he dropped to his knees, a sergeant arrived and the men began the slow process of pulling out the sections, one by one until they reached the officer, who had been crushed so badly that all that remained was a pile of ceramic shards, meat, and intestines, collected in a pool of blood at the crater base. I zoomed into it, fascinated by the realization that on the inside we looked the same.
McTear saw me watching. “What the hell are you looking at?”
Then he threw up and my thoughts cleared. Some of these men cared about each other and couldn’t stomach
death, especially not when it was one they knew. I wanted to see more, to stay there and hold hands with Megan, but the play faded, beyond my control, and I felt a sense of blind acceleration until another scene crystallized.
It was the first time we had seen real human cruelty. I don’t know why it affected me the way it did, but even Megan had trouble on that day.
“Jesus,” a Marine Lieutenant said, “
look
at that, Top. Bunch of animals.”
It had turned into a surreal morning for me, as soon as Megan and I came topside to a clear day, in which the sky seemed a lazy blue. There were no contrails, no plasma bursts, and no whining APCs—just a breeze that teased one with the thought of unsuiting, so you could feel and smell what the world was really like, and it was so clear that if you zoomed far enough, you could almost imagine seeing the ruins of Pavlodar, thousands of kilometers away.
The lieutenant had called us up to join him and the Top Sergeant in an above-ground observation post, where the four of us now crouched in a shallow bunker, its thick ceramic walls capped with a three-foot concrete slab. A mound of rubble covered the position and narrow slits allowed us to see in every direction. After we waited for a few minutes, Megan cleared her throat to let them know we were there.
“Oh, hello ladies,” said the lieutenant, “glad you could join us.”
Megan asked, “You called for us, so what do you need?”
He motioned for his sergeant to move, so we could get closer to the vision slit. “Look out there, about eight hundred meters, eleven o’clock.”
I fingered the zoom controls and scanned the snow-covered
fields, moving back and forth until I saw it. It took a moment for my goggles to autofocus, but when they did it took another for my mind to process what I saw, for the sight to register as something horrific, even for someone who didn’t fear dying. Megan tensed next to me.
“Well?” The lieutenant asked. There was laughter in his voice and the sergeant nearly shook with the trouble of controlling a giggle. “What do you see?”
At the enemy lines, Russians lifted four women in black undersuits, their arms and legs lashed around steel poles. Eight soldiers secured the poles with rubble and concrete and when they had finished, raised their arms, a single word drifting across no man’s land.
“Pobieda!”
“The ones on the poles are our sisters,” Megan said. “Probably captured in our last action.”
“You don’t say,” said the lieutenant. “Wow.”
The sergeant burst out laughing. “Looks to me like they’re having a barbecue.”
“You want to call in the fire mission, ladies, or should I?” the lieutenant asked.
Megan keyed into tac-net. “Fire mission, pre-established coordinates zebra-seven-seven. Fire for effect.”
Thin wisps of smoke floated up under the girls, and we watched four separate sets of flame blossom. Within seconds, our sisters’ high-pitched screams echoed over the empty fields, forcing me to manually shut off helmet pickups. The artillery unit wasn’t far to our rear, and we felt the vibrations of our guns at about the same time we heard them, followed by the roaring containment shells. The Russians disappeared into their airlock. Our sisters kept writhing atop the poles until blue plasma enveloped them in a flash, blackening them into charred hulks.
“Check fire,” Megan whispered into her radio. “Is that all, Lieutenant?”
The two men looked at each other and the sergeant gave her a thumbs-up. “Man, they’re cold, L-T. Cold-ass
bitches
. They’ll wipe their own friends and then go on like nothing happened.”
“Yeah, Top,” said the lieutenant, “watch out for these ones.” He waited for a full minute, not looking at us before he waved Megan away. “OK,” he said, “that’s all.”
There my dreams ended. I felt a tingling on my skin, not in my dreams but for real, and a bright glow forced me to raise a hand to my eyes, the air suddenly colder than it should have been.
Freezing
. I remembered then, that I was on a train.
A few of the boys said something in Russian, which sounded like curses, and then the door to our car slammed shut, returning the warmth slowly.
“Easy, now,” a man said. I didn’t recognize the voice, didn’t want to pull my hand away because this wasn’t a boy’s voice; it was a man’s, a human’s. “We’re heading north now, back to Russia, where we can take care of your infections, try to save what’s left of your feet and legs.” The man touched me and I nearly screamed, wishing I had a knife to slam into his throat. My dreams had shown me everything—convinced me that for the rest of my life, whenever I encountered humans, they would die. It was a
new
kind of faith. But when I finally looked at him, my hatred softened, because if this was a human it was a type I had never seen before, one damaged and then redamaged, and a feeling crept in, one that almost never materialized: pity.