At times a walking plasma barrage moved ahead of us so that we moved faster, jogging over a crust of hard glass. It was a Godsend, and I heard Megan whisper her thanks. We spent the whole first day of the advance like that, walking then jogging, and soon I remembered that distances in Kazakhstan killed resolve almost as easily as the spoil. A tree on the horizon might look close. But as you walked through the day, it barely changed position,
and was enough to drive you mad with the feeling that you would never reach it.
Then, at last, contact. Close to sundown, Megan and I found ourselves in a hole with three Marines. One of them screamed as Russian grenades cracked on every side, sending sprays of thermal gel over our position to hiss and smoke as the droplets melted whatever they touched. The other two men were hardly better. Both huddled at the bottom of the crater, screaming to us that we had encountered the outermost positions of a Russian defensive line.
I kicked one. “How can you aim from there?”
“Get up and fight,”
said Megan, but the men cursed at her.
She grabbed the grenade launcher from one and peered over the lip of the hole. I fell beside her. A hundred yards away, behind a small rise, tiny flashes marked the position of a Russian grenadier whose helmet and shoulders the low sun outlined, and we had to duck when a spray of white tracer-flechettes kicked up the dirt around us. Megan dialed in the range. At the same moment she popped back up and fired, I sprinted from the hole, doing my best to zigzag through the mud toward the Russian position, not able to think through the haze of fatigue.
We continued like that for a few minutes. I would drop to the ground when she stopped firing, until her grenades started detonating ahead of me again—my sign to get up, keep going. Finally, I got close. I waited for her to stop and almost immediately saw the shape of a Russian behind the edge of a fighting position. His helmet was black, with paired, round, blue vision ports instead of a single slit like ours, and a series of cables connected the
outside of the helmet to a power pack, so that they draped over the man’s shoulders like thick strands of hair. You almost forgot why you were there, transfixed by the realization that he was so close, his proximity releasing an influx of hatred that made you want to scream. The man shimmered in the light. I saw all of them then, the ones who jeered at us as we waited for the cars in the railyard, who pelted us with empty food packs, but especially the ones in white lab coats, always there when we returned from the front, eager to punch data into their tablets as they forced us to answer questions. This was a man. It was rare to get this close, and it made you want to savor the moment, to get even closer and rip his helmet off so you could watch his expression change with death.
I slipped a grenade from my harness, hit the button, and waited for its detonation before rolling into the hole to push aside the dead Russians. “Check fire, Megan. Clear.”
A set of three shafts led straight down in the center of the hole, the only way the Russians could have survived our plasma barrages. I tossed in grenades to make sure the shafts were empty, and then let the exhaustion wash over in a warm tide, numbing my muscles and nearly sending me to sleep. The sun set at that very moment and according to our locators we had made it to a point west of Karatobe.
They
were in Karatobe. The Russians had retreated there to establish a major defensive line on either side of the Syr Darya River, with Shymkent well to the south.
Tomorrow
, I thought with a shiver.
Tomorrow is our day
.
Megan flopped down next to me and yanked off her helmet. She laughed. I removed mine before kissing her,
after which we lay against the dirt wall of the hole and stared up—the sky turning an unbelievable reddish orange as the sun’s light faded—waiting for the stars, something we never got tired of seeing. Megan especially loved stars, and they always brought wonder to her face. Soon I would dream. Sleep was a thing feared, something that resurrected buried memories and then twisted them into nightmares, a time to avoid. But you couldn’t evade sleep any more than you could avoid the men in white coats.
“I count seconds as if they were hours,” I said to him, “minutes like days.”
“Explain that.”
“What is there to explain?”
A man in a white coat sat on the other side of the table. He punched his computer screen with a shaking finger, and every once in a while glanced at me, then to the side to make sure the better men were still there, still keeping him safe. From me. The room shifted and my head hurt, a stabbing pain that shot through my spine and blurred my vision.
“I mean let’s go further, and I’d like it if you’d elaborate on why you count seconds as if they were hours.”
“Sava, nie toma Meg. Sava.”
“What language is that?” he asked.
“What?”
“What you just said. I didn’t follow, was that Serbian?”
I shook my head. The better men stared at me, not even blinking, and looked as though they’d be more of a challenge than a typical soldier; they wore Special Forces desert hats in a way that spoke of ease. Familiarity. The
stocks on their carbines were worn, and when my focus returned I counted the screws on their sights, custom ones, but each spaced a little differently from the other’s, maybe due to one of them experiencing the onset of near-sightedness or ocular injury.
“It’s not Serbian, is it?” He continued. “Is that the language of your sisters? The secret language, tongue of the bred?”
I stared at him and said nothing.
“I thought they cured all of you, in training. Thought that the punishments were so severe that even nerve override wouldn’t work, that Germline units knew better than to keep speaking that crap.” He smiled as he punched something else into his tablet. Data. This one had never
seen
.
“You’re not the usual one we meet after battle,” I said, “not the white coat I’m used to.
Bentley
. I think that was his name.”
He wiped his forehead with an arm. “Insurgents killed Bentley on his way in from Bandar Abbas. I’m Alderson, new to the team from MIT, and here to replace him… Catherine, is it? Germline-One-A, Unit oh-five-seven-triple-one?” When I nodded, he tapped his foot on the floor. “Why do seconds seem like hours?”
“We don’t have enough time.” It should have been obvious, and a feeling of pity took the edge off my hatred, the realization that this one would never know God. “He put us on this Earth to serve. Death and Faith. Anyone who doesn’t believe this, anyone like you, will never cross over into heaven. It is in the manual for all the faithful to study. You should taste a war, Alderson, or at least read about one.”
“What do you mean when you say there isn’t enough time? To live, you mean? You want to live longer, to become a…” He stopped and turned, looking at one of the soldiers. “What is it you call them, Sergeant, the ones who run, who want to live?”
“Satos,” one of them said.
“That’s it. Sato. You want to become a sato?”
I shook my head. “I want more time to kill.”
He punched at the tablet more quickly now, leaning over the desk until I could have grabbed his throat. “Kill the enemy, you mean.”
“Kill anyone.”
Megan shook me awake, ripping me from my dream so that I found myself in Kazakhstan again, in the hole, wanting to finish what I was about to say. But the white coat had vanished. In the darkness light amplification made everything green and I waited for Megan to inspect my armor, to finish the routine. She checked for leaks. Our armor was designed the same way as human armor, sealed tight except for air intakes and exhaust, so that minimal thermal emissions would escape and no chemical or biological agents could penetrate. I checked my heads-up display, made sure that I had enough power and that the chill can, which would cool my exhaust to ambient temperatures, functioned.
“Clear,” said Megan.
“
Sava
.”
“What?”
“The language,” I explained. “I remembered it in a dream.”
She laughed and touched a gauntlet to the side of my head, and I imagined a smile on her face.
“You are different than the rest. Better. I had forgotten it, and don’t know if I could remember much, not when we’re this old.”
But by then I was fully awake and the dream had begun to unravel, clarity taking hold and convincing the conscious part of my mind that nothing had happened while I slept. It had all dissolved.
“I have trouble remembering everything these days. Contact?” I asked.
“No. I patrolled for four hours. It’s your turn, and I uploaded the path into your computer. Do you have enough of a charge in your fuel cells?”
“Yes.” I flicked the forearm button and watched as my suit transformed, taking on the same colors and texture as my surroundings to the point where I couldn’t see my own hand unless I moved it, and only then as a hint, a distortion in the air. I crawled slowly over the hole’s edge and moved out.
There were four more hours until sunrise.
By the next morning, ten of us occupied the hole, Megan, me, and eight Marines. The ground shook with the explosions of a plasma barrage, as shells rained down over enemy positions a few kilometers away. I peered over the edge and watched. The clouds of gas—born from magnetic containment shells—expanded in brightly colored bubbles that hypnotized, their edges melting into hot tendrils that disappeared almost instantly. We’d move out soon. I felt it. The plasma wouldn’t kill many Russians but it would keep their heads down and eventually we would jog across the open fields, behind the APCs, advancing
toward the explosions to get as close as we could before the barrage ended. I lowered my helmet and slid the locking ring shut with a hiss.
It was almost unbearable. The ceramic threatened to collapse onto my face, to close over my mouth and nose in a suffocating mass and—
this isn’t real
, I told myself,
this is the spoiling. My helmet is fine
… I tongued a tranq tab and shook my arms. While I waited for the tablet to dissolve, orders crawled across my heads-up display and crackled over the headset:
Prepare for jump off. Move bearing zero-nine-zero, neutralize all enemy positions and hold on east side of Syr Darya River. Jump at code sign Bravo
.
Megan flicked her safety off.
“You guys hear about Shymkent?” one of the Marines asked.
Another one answered, “Messed up.”
“Shymkent?” asked Megan.
At first, the Marines didn’t say anything, and although helmets hid their expressions I guessed what their faces looked like—what these men felt. Revulsion.
Do we have to talk to these things?
They were all men in white coats.
“Russian genetics pulled out of Shymkent last night, took positions in front of us to reinforce against you guys.
Thanks
.”
“Then we shall destroy them all,” I said. “This is a
good
thing. They will be a challenge, a means to prove your faith.”
“Jee-zus,” the Marine said. “
Whacked-out
G’s.”
It wouldn’t change our plans. Unless the reinforcement had been enough of a concern to change the overall
strategy, we would attack the same way we always did, regardless of opposition. I glanced at Megan and saw her cradling her left arm with a free hand, shaking it up and down to get the blood flowing, and bringing back to me a flood of memories.
On our first exercise outside the atelier, Megan had broken her arm. A concussion training grenade had landed in our position and rolled close to her side before it blew, shattering her upper arm in ten places because we hadn’t been wearing full armor. As soon as she tied it off with her belt, we rose to advance through the forest.
A bot popped from the ground. I raised my carbine and fired, the weapon dialed down to the point where the flechettes barely had enough energy to leave the barrel, and a few of them bounced off the thing’s metallic skin, enough to alert it that it had been hit and should deactivate—but not before it lobbed several grenades in our direction. When one of them detonated behind us, someone screamed.
Megan and I crawled and then stood when we realized the exercise was over, so that we walked a few meters through tangled brush into the clearing from where the noise had come. The girl screamed again. A grenade had detonated on her back, carving out a crater so that we saw portions of her spine, but by the time we got to her side, she had silenced the pain and smiled at us.
“My name is Sarah,” she said. “I think my back is broken, paralyzed.”
“Does it hurt?” asked Megan.
“Not anymore. I am so lucky—to be the first from our unit.”
Megan nodded. She dialed up her carbine’s muzzle velocity, aimed, and fired into Sarah’s head. A few minutes
later we had reached a nondescript hill, our objective, and waited for our trainers to arrive, but the image of Sarah wouldn’t leave me.
It should have left me
.
“What do you think it’s like to die?” I asked Megan. She leaned against my back so that we wouldn’t have to lie on the ground.
“We have simulated it. You know what it is like, an instant of pain and then darkness.”
“Not the actual moment,” I explained. “I mean afterward. On the other side.”
Megan thought for a moment. “It is glory.”