Read The Year’s Best Military SF & Space Opera Online
Authors: David Afsharirad
The Year’s Best Military SF & Space Opera (25 page)
It might well be. But Jandro couldn’t eat it. He pushed back from the table and left the food there.
“Is Jase coming back?” he asked.
Andreo shook his head. “No, he’s pretty much sedated and prioritied to return home. He took it pretty hard.”
“I took it pretty hard.”
There was awkward silence for several moments.
“Well, if you need anything, I’m here. They say you’re on extended quarters until tomorrow, then you’re on days.”
“Days” didn’t really mean much here, since each shift would be four plus hours out of synch with the local clock. It was a gesture, though.
Andreo said, “The cooks are all going to be offworld contractors, too. Pricey. We put in a RFQ already, and have some interim workers from BuState and elsewhere. The chow hall is going to be substandard for a while, but that’s better than . . .” He faded off, and shivered.
Jandro nodded. Lots of people had eaten from the local vendors.
Andreo asked, “Can I finish that ration if you’re not going to?”
“Sure.”
At least someone could eat it.
That local night, another MP was shot. Officially they were told counterfire had demolished the sniper’s hide, along with a chunk of that building, but he didn’t think it would matter.
He twitched all night, between wakefulness and dozing. The next morning, he was ravenous. He opened another field ration, and managed two bites before nausea caused him to curl up.
It’s from Earth. It’s vatory raised chicken. There’s eggs and vegetables. It’s guaranteed safe.
Maybe lunch.
He walked into the Logistics compound, into the bay, and got greeted.
“Hey, Jandro. Good to see you back.”
“Danke,” he said. Johann Meffert was German.
He had materiel to process. Three huge cargontainers sat in the bay, pending sort. This shipment was ammunition, spare parts, tools, generators and nuclear powerpacks for them. He had units and their transport chains on cue, with quantities needed. Those always exceeded quantity available. He broke them down by percentage, then applied the urgency codes to adjust the amounts. Once the Captain signed off, the loader operators would dispense it to be tied down and depart for the forward bases.
He ignored Meffert’s periodic stares. Everyone was doing it.
“Ready for review, Captain,” he said into his mic.
He sat back and stretched for a moment. It did feel good to do something productive.
“Looks good so far, Jandro. But those KPAKs need sorted, too.”
He looked at his screen. He’d missed four pallets of field rations.
“It’s not my fault!” he shouted at the bay. “I didn’t plan to eat him, I didn’t want to eat him, and I didn’t put him in the food!”
He stood up and walked out, back to the clinic.
“You really must try to eat something,” Doctor Ramjit said. “Vegetables should be fine. I’ve switched to that myself. It’s perfectly understandable that you don’t trust the meat.”
He sat in a reclined chair, surrounded by trickling fountains, soft images, and with a therapy dog for company. It responded to his scratches with a thumping tail.
“They’re from on planet,” he said. Had they urinated on the plants? Grown them in poison? Fertilized the ground with dead troops?
“How are you managing with field rations?” she asked.
“Better,” he said. “I’ve eaten part of one.”
Her frown was earnest. “That’s not enough for three days. You’ve already lost weight.”
“I know,” he said. “But I can’t. I just . . . can’t.” He hoped she understood.
“It’s not just the food,” he continued. “It’s this place. All of it. I can’t be around people like this. The cooks were giggling. Our people stare at me. They get the gossip. They all know. Jase has already gone. Please send me, too.”
“I’ll try,” she said. Her frown came across as pitying. He didn’t want that, either.
He untangled from the chair and dog and left in silence, though she said, “Good luck, Alejandro. You have our wishes.”
As he entered his room, his phone pinged a message. He swiped it.
“Alejandro, you are scheduled to depart in fifteen days. The clinic will fit you with a nutrient IV to help you in the interim.”
“Yes,” he said to the Marine. “I’m a casualty.”
“Good luck with it, then. I’m sorry, at first I’d figured you were a base monkey. They don’t know what the point is like.”
“No, most of them don’t,” he agreed. He looked around at the other people on the rotation. Some were military, some UN bureau staff, some contractors. They might know what had happened, but they had no idea what it felt like. Thankfully, none of them recognized him.
The Marine said, “But I saw that,” pointing at the IV. “I hope you’re recovering?”
“Yes. It shouldn’t take long. Good luck with the leg.”
“Thanks. They say three months.”
He boarded the ship and found his launch couch. The shuttle was well-used, smelling of people, disinfectant and musty military bags. He settled in and closed his eyes, not wanting to talk to anyone around him. They bantered and joked and sounded cheerful to be leaving. He wasn’t cheerful, only relieved.
When they sealed up, pressure increased to Earth normal. He breathed deeply.
The acceleration and engine roar took a faint edge off his nerves. Soon. Off this nightmarish hellhole and home.
The tranks worked. He had a scrip for more, and a note that said he should not be questioned about them. Doctor Ramjit had said that wasn’t unusual for some of the Special Unit troops, and even some of the infantry. “The ship infirmary should be able to refill you without problems,” she’d said. “Especially as we’ve put out a bulletin about personnel generally suffering stress disorders. We haven’t said why.”
They even helped with launch sickness. He felt blissfully fine, not nauseous.
He zoned through until the intercom interrupted him.
“Passengers, we are in orbit, and will dock directly with the
Wabash
. Departure for Earth will be only a couple of hours. Final loading is taking place now.”
Good. He eyed the tube on his arm. He could have them unplug this, and he could eat real, solid food from safe, quality-inspected producers on Earth.
Well, he’d have to start with baby food. Fifteen days of the tube had wiped out his GI tract. He’d have to rebuild it. That would be fine. And he’d never touch a sausage again.
He unlatched when the screen said to, and waited impatiently. He wasn’t bad in emgee, knowing how to drag himself along the couches and guide cable. Several passengers didn’t seem to know how, and some of them were even military.
Shortly, he was in the gangtube, creeping along behind the Marine and a couple of contractors rotating out.
There was a small port to his right, looking aft along the length of the ship. He looked out and saw the open framework of an orbital supply shuttle detach a cargotainer from the ship’s cargo lock, rotate and attach another in its place.
He flinched, and nausea and dizziness poured into him again.
The cargotainer was marked “Hughes Commissary Services, Jefferson, Freehold of Grainne.”
He fumbled with his kit, slapped three patches on his arm, and almost bit his tongue off holding back a scream.
PALM STRIKE’S LAST CASE
by Charlie Jane Anders
Fleeing crime-ridden Argus City for the colonial world of Newfoundland, Luc Devereaux, also know as the vigilante Palm Strike, thought he’d left his crime-fighting days behind him. But Newfoundland is not the paradise he was promised. Crime and drug abuse run rampant. The colony needs a savior—and Palm Strike has found his last case.
1.
PALM STRIKE’S
costume has never been comfortable, but lately it’s pinching his shoulders and chafing in the groin area. Sweat pools in the boots. The Tensilon-reinforced helmet gives him a blinding headache after two hours, and the chestplate is slightly too loose, which causes it to move around and rub the skin off his stomach and collarbone.
The thing that keeps Palm Strike running past water tower after water tower along the cracked rooftops of Argus City, the thing that keeps him breaking heads after taking three bullets that night, is the knowledge that there are still innocents out there whose lives haven’t yet been ruined.
Kids who still have hope and joy, the way Palm Strike’s own son did before Dark Shard got him. When the bruised ribs and punctured lung start to slow him down and the forty-pound costume has him dancing in chains, he pictures his son. Rene. It never fails—he feels a weight in his stomach, like a chunk of concrete studded with rocks, and it fills him with rage, which he turns into purpose.
Argus City is full of disintegrating Frank Lloyd Wright knock-offs and people who have nothing to lose but someone else’s innocence. This was a great city, once, just like America was a great country and Earth was a great planet.
Palm Strike catches a trio of Shardlings selling dreamflies in Grand Park, under the bronze statue of a war hero piloting a drone. The drone casts deep shadows, and that’s where they hunker in a three-point parabolic formation. They’re well trained, maybe even ex-Special Forces, and decently armed, including one customized 1911 with a tight-bore barrel. Dark Shard must be getting desperate.
Once they’re down, Palm Strike feeds them their own drugs, baggie by baggie.
“You know my rule,” he growls. The process is not unlike making foie gras. One of these men is so terrified, he blurts out the location of Dark Shard’s secret lair, the Pleasuresplinter.
Ambulance called. These men will be fine. Eventually. Palm Strike’s already far away before the sirens come. Losing himself in the filthy obstacle course of broken walls and shattered vestibules in the old financial district. Leaping over prone bodies. He doglegs into the old French Quarter. All of the bistros are shuttered, but a few subterranean bars give off a tallowy glare, along with the sound of blues musicians who refuse to quit for the night. Cleansing acrid smoke pours around his feet.
Turns out Dark Shard’s Pleasuresplinter is hidden right under City Hall. But service tunnels from the river go all the way, almost. Catacombs, filthy and crawling with vermin. Palm Strike’s boots get soaked, both inside and out. Men and women stand guard at intervals, but none of them sees Palm Strike coming. Palm Strike’s main superpower is the stupidity of his enemies. He sets charges as he goes, something to be a beacon for first responders, firefighters and EMTs. And police. But don’t trust the police,
never
trust the police.
Palm Strike crashes through the dense mahogany door just as all the charges he set in the tunnels go off. Smoke billows up out of the fractured street behind him. The door explodes inwards, into a beautiful marble space—a mausoleum—with a recessed floor like a sauna, and a dozen little dark alcoves and nooks. Red drapes. Gray-suited men sporting expensive guns and obvious body armor with the trademark broken-glass masks.
In one of those nooks, just on the far side of the room, he spots the children: all in their teens, some of them barely pubescent. Their faces wide open, like they are in the middle of something that will never leave them, no matter what else they see or do.
Everyone over eighteen is shooting at Palm Strike. Lung definitely collapsed. Healing mojo has crapped out.
First priority: get the children out. Second priority: bring this den of foulness down on these men’s heads. Third priority: find Dark Shard.
Children first, though.
One of the bullets goes right through Palm Strike’s thigh, in spite of the ablative fibers. Femoral artery? No time to check. This place probably smells like candy floss and cheap perfume most of the time, but now it’s laced with vomit, blood and sewage. Clear a path to the exit for the children. Drive the armed men into cover, in the far alcoves. Be a constantly moving whirl of anger, all weapon and no target. Unleash the throwing-claws and smart-javelins. Find one brave child, who can be a leader, who will guide the rest to safety. That one, with the upturned nose and dark eyes, who looks like Rene only with lighter, straighter hair. “Get them out,” Palm Strike says, and the kid understands. Throwing claws have taken out most of the ordnance. Children run past Palm Strike, stumbling but not stopping, into the tunnel.
Palm Strike blacks out. Just for an instant. He snaps awake to see the boy he’d appointed leader in the hands of one of the top Shardlings—you can tell from the mask’s shatter pattern. Stupid. Busting in here, with no plan. Dumb crazy old fool. The kid squirms in the man’s grasp, but his little face is calm. Palm Strike has one throwing-claw left. He hears the first responders in the tunnels behind him, and they’ve found the children who got away.
Palm Strike’s throwing-claw hits the pinstripe-suited thug in the neck, and slashes at him on its way to find a weapon to disable. An angry insect, made of Tensilon, stainless steel, and certain proprietary polymers, scuttles down the man’s neck. The man pulls the trigger—just as the throwing claw’s razor talons slice the gun in two. The recoil takes half the man’s hand, and then the boy is running for the exit. Palm Strike wants to stay and force-feed this man every drug he can find here. But he’s lost a lot of blood and can’t breathe, and the shouts are getting close.
Palm Strike barely makes it out of there before the place swarms with uniforms.
The Strike-copter is where he left it, concealed between the decaying awnings of the Grand Opera House. He manages to set the autopilot before passing out again. Healing mojo works for crap nowadays. After only three years of this, he’s played out. He regains and loses consciousness as his limp body weaves over the barbed silhouette of downtown, and then the squat brick tops of abandoned factories. At last, the Strike-copter carries him up the river, to a secluded mansion near Mercy Bay.
Josiah, his personal assistant, releases him from the copter’s harness, with practiced care. Josiah’s young, too young, with curly red hair and a wide face that looks constantly startled. As usual, he wears an apron over a suit and skinny tie. “You really did it this time,” Josiah says, prepping the gurney to roll Palm Strike through the hidden doorway in one of the granite blocks of the mansion’s outer walls. Josiah removes the headpiece, but before he can attach the oxygen mask, Palm Strike says: “The children.”
“They got out okay,” Josiah responds. “Ten of them. You did good. Now rest.”
Some time later, a day maybe, Palm Strike wakes with tubes in his arms and screens beeping ostentatiously around him. The healing mojo has finally kicked in. He still feels like hell but he’s not dying any more. He sits up, slowly. Josiah tries to keep him bedridden, but they both know it’s a lost cause.
“You’ve received a letter,” Josiah says as Palm Strike scans newsfeeds on his tablet. “An actual piece of paper. On stationery.”
Palm Strike—now he’s Luc Deveaux, because he’s out of costume—shrugs, which makes his ribs flare with agony. But then Josiah hands him the letter, already opened, and the Space Administration logo sends a shiver through Luc before he even sees the words.
“Congratulations. You have been selected to join the next colonization wave . . .”
2.
THE SPACE AGENCY
interview process is the last vivid memory Luc has of Rene. And he remembers it two different ways.
First version: They were happy, a family, in this together. His son leaned his head against Luc’s shoulder in the waiting room, with its framed Naïve-art posters of happy colonists unsnapping helmets under a wild new sun. Rene joked about his main qualification being his ability to invent a brand new style of dance for a higher-gravity world, and even demonstrated high-gravity dancing for the other families in the waiting room, to general applause. Rene aced the interviews, they both did, and Luc was so proud of his son, as he gave clever answers, dressed up in a little suit like a baby banker.
In that version of the memory, Rene turned to Luc in the waiting room and said, “I know our main selling point is you, your geo-engineering experience. But they’ll need young people who are up for literally whatever, any challenge, to make this planet livable. And that’ll be me. You’ll see, Dad.”
So. Damn. Proud.
The other version of the memory only comes to Luc when he’s half asleep, or when he’s had a few single malts and is sick of lying to himself. In that other version, Rene was being a smartmouth the whole time—in the waiting room, in the interviews, the whole time—and Luc had to chew his tongue bloody to keep from telling his son to put a sock in it. They both knew that Luc was the one with the land-reclamation skills the colony would need, and all Rene had to do was shut his trap and let them think he’d make himself useful and not be too much of a smart-ass. That’s all.
Luc can just about remember the stiffening in his neck and chest every time Rene acted out or failed to follow the script in those interviews. Rene had to get cute, doing his high-gravity dance and annoying all the other families. It’s a close cousin to the anger that keeps him laying into Dark Shard’s thugs every night, if he wants to be honest with himself, which he mostly doesn’t. Except after a few single malts, or when he’s half asleep.
Both versions of the memory are true, Luc guesses. If he really wanted a second opinion, he could ask Josiah if he was too hard on Rene when his son was alive, but he never does.
He has too many other regrets crowding that one out, anyway. Like, why didn’t he pick Rene up from school himself that day? And keep better tabs, in general? Or, why didn’t he get Rene off this doomed planet before it was too late to save him?
3.
NOW LUC GRIPS
the letter in both hands, wondering whose idea of a joke this is.
“You have to go,” Josiah says. Luc is already crumpling the letter into a ball, aiming for the recycling. “You have to go. Sir. If you stay, you’ll die.”
“My work here is not done.” Luc realizes he’s slept through most of the day. Almost time to suit up. “Dark Shard still needs to pay. For Rene. And all the rest.”
Luc can’t find his headpiece. A jet-black scowling half-mask, with a shock-absorbing duroplex helmet built in, it usually isn’t hard to spot in the midst of civilized bedroom furnishings and nice linens. But it’s gone. Now he remembers—Josiah took it from him when he was strapped to the gurney.
“How do you think you’ll best honor Rene’s memory?” Josiah is touching Luc’s arm. “By throwing your life away here? Or by following Rene’s dream and going to another planet, where you could really make a difference? You’ve destroyed Dark Shard’s lair. Which will weaken him a little, but also drive him further underground.”
“Where is my headpiece?” Luc asks. Josiah won’t answer. “Where did you put my helmet? Tell me.”
Josiah backs away, even though Luc still walks teeteringly.
“You could help build something new,” Josiah says. “Instead of breaking things, over and over, until you’re broken in turn. You could build something.”
“That part of me is dead.” Luc is already thinking about alternatives to the headpiece. There are prototypes, which he hid someplace even Josiah doesn’t know about. Flawed designs, but good enough for a night or two, until Josiah comes around. “This is all I have left.”
The nanofiber-reinforced lower half of his costume still has that bullet-hole, and his leg is so heavily bandaged that the pants barely fit. This could be a problem, especially if the rip widens around the bandages. He could end up with a big white patch on his leg, like a target for every thug to aim at in the darkness. Stain the bandages black? Wrap black tape around them?
“Luc. Please.” Josiah grabs his arm and shoves the letter, which he’s retrieved and uncrumpled, in Luc’s face. “I helped bury your son. I don’t want to bury you.” He has tears in his eyes, which are also puffy from sleepless nights caring for Luc’s slow-healing wounds. “There’s more than one way to be a hero. You taught me that, before all this.”
Luc stares at the letter again. Departure date is in just a few weeks, and there are a lot of training sessions and tests before then. Someone must have backed out, or maybe washed out. “If I go,” he growls at Josiah, “I won’t leave you any money. I’ve spent every last penny on my fight.”
“I know that, sir,” Josiah says, smiling wearily. “Who do you think has been keeping them from taking the house? We’ve restructured your debt five times in the last two years.”