Read The Year’s Best Military SF & Space Opera Online
Authors: David Afsharirad
The Year’s Best Military SF & Space Opera (36 page)
I have a secret space pod attached to the other side of the outer wall. I have my nanobots programmed to automatically open and then close a hole in the hull to let me get to the pod. Just in case they are slow and some air leaks out, your suit will inflate automatically and protect you until you can get out through the hatch.
I handed the sheet of paper to her and and waited for her to read it.
“Understand?” I asked.
“You’re leaving? No!”
“I have to. I’ll be right back.”
“Send a robot!”
“No radio communications. I have to keep my hands on the MOM to talk to it.”
Her lip quivered, but she didn’t cry.
I snatched Felicia from the bench and handed her to Nora. “Can you take care of her while I’m gone?”
She nodded, then sealed the suit’s breathing mask over her face.
I sealed my suit, grabbed my tool harness and tucked a MOM under my arm, then used the tip of the screwdriver Nora had been playing with to tap a series of commands on the wall. A section of the wall started to fade, then turned into a hole that continued to grow until I could step through and into my pod. I then tapped the command to close the hatch and the hole.
I switched on the air circulation and heaters, then tapped the separation command against the wall. Within seconds, the pod floated free and I turned it toward the aft part of the station. There were only two antennas positioned on Ring Four that could beam directly at my small comm array, so I moved the pod to a point between them and instructed it to maintain position relative to the moving station.
Then came the part that terrified me. With shaking hands I attached my tether to an interior bracket, then opened the pod’s little hatch and held on as the atmosphere vented. The suit inflated, but I immediately felt cold. The balloon suit heaters weren’t meant for EVA or any kind of extended vacuum exposure, they were designed to give people a chance to survive a hull breach long enough to escape to a pressurized area. I had to work fast.
I gripped the MOM’s carrying handle in one hand and pulled through the hatch with the other. I hadn’t been in hard vacuum for many years and was immediately swept by gut-wrenching vertigo. The only lights on the station exterior were flashing navigation strobes and a few floods that illuminated airlocks and important maintenance panels. Since there were few soft shadows this deep in space, the starkly lit edges contrasted with total blackness and made depth perception difficult. After a few seconds my mind sorted through the individual islands of light and I was able to get my bearings. By tapping on the MOM’s case with the screwdriver, I activated her flood lights and turned them toward Ring Four’s hull.
I was shivering and my teeth were chattering by the time I located the first antenna. It looked much further away than I’d thought it would be, but I had little time and had to try. My shaking hands made tapped commands to the MOM very difficult, but after the third try, a tiny aiming screen flipped open on the MOM’s side and I targeted the antenna, then triggered the heavy mining laser.
At first nothing appeared to happen. I could see the beam diagrammed on the tiny screen, but only occasional sparkles along its actual path as it vaporized some of the dust that orbited the station. Then parts of the antenna started to glow orange and the dish slumped backward against the station’s forward momentum.
Tiny warning lights flashed along the upper edge of my breathing mask, informing me I had only twenty minutes of compressed air left and my temperature was dropping to dangerous levels. I didn’t need warnings to tell me that. I could barely feel my fingers and my shaking hands were almost useless. I found it hard to think straight. I knew I probably couldn’t control my instruction taps well enough to turn the laser off and back on again, so I swung it upward away from the station and then turned toward the other antenna.
I couldn’t see the antenna. In order to use the MOM’s flood lights, I’d have to turn off the laser or risk blowing a hole in the hull. As I tried to tap the off command for a third time, sound crackled through my ear piece. The MOM was sending me a message telling me she would overheat if she didn’t stop the laser.
“I’m trying, damn it!” I said through chattering teeth. Then I realized she had contacted me via radio.
“Turn off laser, MOM.”
“Laser off.”
“I need you to acc . . . ess the EMERGENCY CONTROL CENTER screen back in the wor . . . kshop.”
“Contact established.”
“Ini . . . tiate the Ring Four sep . . . aration pro . . . proto . . . col.”
“Initiated.”
Without a sound, huge mechanical locks swung away from the ring struts. Clouds of chipped paint and ice crystals puffed into space and the ring separated into two C-shaped halves, each carrying three struts. Since the rest of
Arturo
was still under thrust, the two halves tumbled away slowly and fell behind. In the distance, near one of the Ring Four sections, I saw a wheeling, roughly star-shaped figure that resembled a human body. Then it passed out of the light and was gone. Could I have breached the hull? It didn’t matter now. If I had it was too late and I was a murderer.
I could no longer feel my hands or feet, but using tiny puffs from the MOM’s attitude thrusters and hooking my arms and wrists around the hatch frame, I pulled myself back into the pod. Using the MOM as an interface, I verbally commanded it to close the pod’s hatch, pressurize the cabin and turn the heat on high.
I felt no elation as I left the pod and floated back into my little hub workshop, only exhaustion and a niggling worry about what could only have been a floating body. My hands and feet felt as if they were on fire, but I knew from my winters in Chicago that feeling the pain was a good sign.
I instructed the nanobots to seal the hull again and turned to Nora. She sat in the control seat with my interface goggles covering the upper half of her head. I immediately realized that her bubble suit hood was pulled down around her neck, but before I could yell at her I also saw that her quivering mouth and chin were covered with tears.
“Nora?”
She didn’t answer.
I pulled myself over to the control station and looked at the scroll screen attached to the workspace next to her. It showed the same employee location diagram I had used to watch the Ring Four occupants scurry back to their cabins, only now it was separated into two large C-shaped sections. One of the cabin wedges was flashing red with a decompression tag. Blinking employee ID markers filled the corridor outside the ruptured cabin. So perhaps I really had killed someone.
Nora flinched when I gently pulled the goggles from her head. Tiny tear beads left a glittering trail between the goggles and her face, then started falling aft. She slapped them aside and ran wet hands through her rumpled hair.
“I’m sorry you had to see that, Nora. I’m not sure what happened. Nobody should have died. I don’t know—I just . . .”
She cocked her head at me and squinted tear-clogged lashes together. “You didn’t kill anyone. I did.”
I blinked at her, totally confused.
She pointed at the employee location diagram. “You left that open. I saw where Seth’s cabin was and I remembered what you told that guy about burning a hole in his wall.”
A cold chill crept down my back.
“And you’d already showed me how to control the MOMs.”
I couldn’t speak, but I grabbed her and pulled her into a tight hug. She broke down into great gulping sobs muffled against my chest. Then she spoke. In long unbroken strings.
“I saw it all! Through the camera. I’m not sorry he’s dead, but . . . I didn’t know you were going to leave them behind. Will I go to jail? He just clawed at . . . at nothing. I thought he’d die instantly, but . . .”
“Shhhh . . . It’s all over.”
“Will I go to jail?”
“No . . . I don’t know. I don’t think so. You were trying to protect your mother.”
She cried again. I stroked her hair and there was nothing I could say that would make it better, but I might still be able to protect her. I’d gone to this much trouble to get Nora fee, I wasn’t about to let her be incarcerated by the Martian state if I could help it.
Since the MOM systems are under my control, if I admitted to ordering the attack on Seth, the Martian investigators would probably not see any need to dig further. I decided to send the authorities a message admitting that I had stolen the station and killed Seth. Perhaps, under the circumstances, they would be lenient.
After a couple of minutes, I sat Nora back in the control seat and looked at the EMERGENCY CONTROL CENTER screen. Just over an hour had passed since I sent the de-spin command. I ordered the station to slowly spin up again, increased the thrust to sixty percent and triggered the automatic course corrections that would send us to Mars.
After the station’s remaining three rings were once again spinning and providing Earth normal gravity, we entered the elevator for Ring One so that we could go see Nora’s mother in the Medical Unit.
When the lift doors closed, Nora looked up and me and said, “I can’t stop thinking about what I did.”
“I know,” I said and knelt down next to her. “Look, what you did is wrong and that will never change, but it’s over. You can get past this and live your life. I didn’t think I could go on after Felicia died, but I did. Does that make sense?”
She shook her head slowly. “It’s not the same thing.”
“No. It’s not the same,” I said and then stood up. I couldn’t look her in the eye for my next statement. “When we get to Mars, it will be kind of crazy, but I need you to do something for me. I don’t want you to lie to anyone, but I also don’t want you to tell about Seth unless you’re asked.”
Her eyes squinted at me, immediately suspicious. “Why?”
Before I could answer, the door opened and a burner gun was thrust into my face, with Meathead attached to the other end.
“My last orders from Lieutenant Eisenhower were to arrest your sorry ass and that’s what I’m going to do.”
I sighed and gently pushed Nora behind me.
“No, you’re not,” I said, trying to sound calm and reasonable, “and I’ll tell you why. We’re on our way to Mars. It’s all automated at this point and the controls are locked down. Nothing you do to me will change that. I’ve also already started broadcasting messages to the press about what has happened here, how we were all enslaved, but finally managed to take over the station and come seeking freedom and justice from the Martian people.”
Meathead blinked and glanced at his equally confused partner. Most of that had been a lie. I wasn’t really broadcasting to Mars yet, but still had the better part of two weeks to start that up.
“So? You’re still under arrest.”
“You don’t want to be jailed for murdering me as soon as we get to Mars space, do you?”
“No one said anything about killing you,” he muttered and lowered the gun.
“Good. If you don’t beat anyone up during the next two weeks, we might actually be able to pass you two off as heroes who helped save all these poor people. Wouldn’t you like to be a hero?”
Meathead chewed on his lip and glanced at his partner who just shrugged.
“It’s not like he can go anywhere,” Nora said. “You’ll know where to find him if you decide you need to beat him up later.”
“Gee, thanks,” I muttered.
Meathead holstered his gun. “There will be a trial, you know.”
“Yeah, but wouldn’t it be better for the press to think you’re a hero instead of a bully?”
“Girls love heroes,” Nora said.
That made him smile, then he produced a stern face again. “Why should we trust you? What would stop you from making us out as the bad guys when the trial comes?”
“I just want to get this station to Mars. I don’t really care what happens to you two after that. Besides, you know that with my robots I could have killed you any time I wanted, and yet you’re still here.”
He thought about that for a second, then shrugged. “C’mon, Ramon. Let’s go get some grub.”
Nora and I started down the corridor in the other direction, toward the Medical Unit.
“You did good, Clarke,” Felicia said, and I stopped in the middle of the hall. I had forgotten Felicia’s canister in my workshop. It was the first time since her death that I’d gone farther than the bathroom without her.
I wasn’t really crazy, not totally. I knew that Felicia’s voice was all in my head, but part of me had always believed that voice would go away if I didn’t keep what was left of her near me. Now I knew that wasn’t true.
“What’s wrong?” Nora said.
I took a deep breath, shook my head and continued walking. “Nothing important. Let’s go see your mom.”
RULES OF ENGAGEMENT
by Matthew Johnson
Since the introduction of the Hybrid Warrior implant progam, violent crime by military personnel had dropped to almost nothing. The same cybernetic implants that ensured proceedures were followed on the battlefield kept soldiers on the right side of the law, stateside. So why was PFC Kevin Bishop awaiting a death sentence?
A REPORTER AT LARGE
IT WAS NOT MUCH
of a fight, as bar fights go: not even enough to get Kevin Bishop, Tony Cervantes and Tom Hollis thrown out of the bar in which they had spent the afternoon and evening of July ninth. The three soldiers had been drinking at The Swiss Bar and Grill, a bar popular with college students on weeknights but largely taken over by military on weekends, when their implants relax the usual restrictions on alcohol. Bishop, Cervantes and Hollis had served together in the second Battalion of the twenty-third Infantry Division (more often referred to as the 2-23 IN), mostly in Somalia and Yemen, and two of them were still on active duty. Fire team Chinook had survived the worst that the war and al-Shabaab could throw at them, but before long two would be in prison and one would be dead.
The immediate cause of the fight was money. Bishop, who had ordered the last two rounds, had revealed that he was unable to pay his share of the night’s tab. The entire 2-23 IN had been flush with back pay when they had come home from deployment in Yemen, bringing a welcome stream of money into the city’s bars; it was not unusual during that period for John Pratt, The Swiss’s owner, to make two or more bank runs per night, each time with a duffel bag full of money. (Soldiers in the 2-23 IN pay for almost everything in cash, due to a widely-held belief that their implants track direct payments.) Two months later the money was beginning to run out, and for Bishop—who was no longer receiving combat pay and was also making regular payments to the city’s
ghat
dealers—it already had.
There are two common reasons why soldiers, especially regular infantry, enlist in the Army. One is self-improvement: though some join with an eye on pursuing a military career, many more do so for the neural implant that, after their tour, opens doors to otherwise unattainable jobs. That was why Hollis had joined, and why he now had a job with the city that paid well enough for Bishop to expect him to pick up the tab. When Hollis stood up and dropped a twenty on the table, just enough to cover his share of the bill, Bishop punched him in the side of the head.
“Get away from me,” Hollis said. Bishop leaned forward and started swinging wildly with both arms. Hollis held his forearms up to ward off Bishop’s punches until the buzz in Bishop’s head got loud enough to make him stop. Tony Cervantes took Bishop by the arm, led him back to his chair and poured him a beer from a neighboring table’s pitcher.
“What do you want from me?” Hollis asked, shouting to be heard over the dance remix of Julee Cruz’s “Hipper Than Me,” that summer’s inescapable hit, playing on the Swiss’s speakers.
Bishop drank his beer in one long pull, until the buzz quieted enough for him to talk. “I want you to have my back for a fucking change,” he said.
Bishop had joined the infantry for the other common reason, because he—and his parents—feared that it was either the Army or jail. Though he had never had any major trouble with the law, when Bishop turned nineteen he was no nearer to finishing high school than he had been five years before, and his father had given him a choice: he could join the Army or go on the street, but he could no longer live at home.
There is surprisingly little connection between the reason why a soldier joins the military and his performance there. Though Bishop found basic training difficult, once he had passed that and been fitted with his implant he thrived. There was an appealing simplicity to Army life: if you followed orders and didn’t make trouble, you were “squared away”; fail in any of those respects and you were a “shit bag”—the lowest of the low, and subject both to constant harassment from superiors and fellow soldiers and to buzz from your implant. Though he had occasional run-ins with superiors, when he was deployed in Yemen he found a way to make use of his natural rebelliousness as a “pit bull,” someone willing to do things and take chances other soldiers wouldn’t, and was promoted to Private First Class and recommended for an Army Achievement Medal. Now that he was back home, though, and unable to return to active duty until he had been declared medically fit, he was falling back into old habits: he would later say that it was only the fact that Cervantes, his team leader, was in the same situation that had kept him from getting into serious trouble.
If Bishop was fire team Chinook’s “bad cop,” Tony Cervantes was the good cop. He had not needed the army to provide either money or stability: his parents, Daniel and Anita, started an implant fund for him when he was in middle school. If he had wanted for anything, his father told me, it was focus. After his high-school football career failed to lead any further he had spent a year doing little but sleeping and playing video games before settling on the Army.
“I was against it at first,” Daniel Cervantes told me. He and Anita still live in the home where Tony was raised, in the solidly middle-class Albuquerque neighborhood of North Valley. “I served a tour in Iraq when I was his age, and I saw what it did to a lot of kids. But he told me that he needed something like this, something that would give him a purpose like football had, and once I saw what the idea of it did to him I changed my mind.” Between enlistment and basic training Cervantes began to train on his own, lifting weights and hiking the Sandia mountains with a full backpack. His size and his attitude made him stand out during training and, once deployed, he was promoted to Sergeant and put in charge of a fire team that consisted of Kevin Bishop, Tom Hollis and himself.
The incident that had left Bishop and Cervantes in medical limbo had taken place more than a year before. The 2-23 IN’s base, FOB Gambit, is in Ta’izz, or “Brooklyn”—soldiers have nicknamed all of Yemen’s cities after New York boroughs, due to the mud-brick high-rises that make them look like a sandcastle version of Manhattan. Their main duty in Yemen is counterinsurgency: as part of the mission to root the al-Shabaab out of Yemen and Somalia and make the Gulf of Aden safe for shipping again, the Cervantes’ team conducted daily “block parties” in which they would cordon off an area and go door-to-door, taking a census of the population and comparing it to intelligence. Mostly these would follow a schedule, moving in a grid around the city to keep tabs on as much of the population as possible, but at other times the mission would be a follow-up on some fresh intelligence. On that day fire team Chinook was one of three fire teams dispatched in a Stryker personnel carrier to a neighborhood centered around the Abu Walad stadium, following a tip from one of the interpreters, or “terps,” who worked for the Battalion that a high-value Shabaab figure was hiding out in a house there. (Though implants provide near-simultaneous translation, the Army still relies on interpreters to provide a friendlier face and to catch subtle cues, such as a speaker’s tone of voice or body language, that might be missed by a non-native speaker.) Now the terp, a Somali man in a black-and-white keffiyeh and a borrowed ballistic vest, was whispering directions to the driver as the Stryker crawled along the narrow road. Though there was no other traffic the vehicle moved in fits and starts, stopping periodically when one of its slaved drones detected signs of an EFP. Bishop began bouncing in his seat.
“Keep your shit together,” Cervantes told him.
Bishop tucked a wad of
ghat
between his teeth and lower lip and started working it around his mouth. “Sorry,” he said. “I’m just buzzing.”
I first met Kevin Bishop in the visiting room at Washington State Penitentiary, where he is currently serving a death sentence and awaiting execution. His trial received some attention in the media, but the local papers had covered it as a straightforward crime story: I only became interested when I learned, through a friend in the military, about Bishop’s experiences in Yemen, and found out just how remarkable it was that he was in prison at all.
A decade ago, servicemen were not an unusual sight in the Penitentiary. Since the introduction of the Hybrid Warrior implant progam, though, violent crime by military personnel in Tacoma—as well as everywhere else that the 2-23 IN has been posted—has dropped to almost nothing. When I asked Bishop why he thought it had failed in his case, he explained that there were three ways around the negative reinforcement the implant uses to control behaviour, which soldiers call “the buzz.”
“The easiest way is to drown out the buzz with drugs, booze, or both at once,” he told me. Though he says he no longer chews ghat, his gums and teeth are permanently stained green. His fingers twitch constantly, seeking out any object—a pen, my notebook, a cigarette—that they can use to beat out their rhythm. “That’s why so many guys started chewing ghat, so if you have to violate the rules of engagement—like maybe shooting somebody you know is a Shabaab, but they haven’t shot at you yet—you can ignore the buzz long enough to do it.” The other method was to trick your implant: “If you can make yourself believe, I mean really believe, that the Shabaab had fired on you even though you hadn’t heard it, or that a girl wasn’t a whore even though you were paying her for sex, sometimes your implant will let it go.” The problem with that method was that to trick the implant you had to trick yourself, and you might wind up married to a Ukrainian bar girl, as Tom Hollis had.
And then there was Dirty.
“Dirty” Dunn, known as Daniel to his mother if no one else, was a legend in the 2-23 IN as the man who had, supposedly, hacked the buzz. “Hacked” is something of a misleading word, because he had done nothing to modify his implant’s hardware or software. Dirty’s method, instead, was to start the week leading up to a leave with a series of small but increasingly frequent violations of the Code of Conduct. “He’d stop polishing his boots, stop making his bed, even stop showering, just put up with the shit his CO gave him—and the buzz, which would get worse and worse,” Bishop explained. “As soon as his leave started he’d go to a drinky bar and get pissed, do whatever drugs he could find, get in a fight, and have a whore do things to him ‘til it hurt—and when he got that far he didn’t just feel the buzz, it hurt like hell. Then, when he’d broken every rule that he could without being put in stockade, he’d go back to base, shower, make his bed, shine his shoes, and then he’d have the greatest fucking orgasm of his life.”
Kevin Bishop never tried Dirty’s method, but he told me he had no doubt that it worked: like every soldier, he knew how much of a relief it was after he had heard an AK-47 fire, or an EFG go off, when the implant allowed him to fire his weapon. Being in a situation where he was anticipating something like that—such as riding in a Stryker on the way to a block party—could bring on the buzz even if he wasn’t doing anything wrong.
The mud-brick skyscrapers in a traditional Yemeni city are built without any space between them, making literal “blocks”: as the Stryker neared its target the streets between became too narrow for driving, so it slowed and turned ninety degrees to bar the way in and out. While one of its drones turned in a tight circle overhead, watching for an ambush, the others set up a perimeter around the area that was to be searched that day.
“Bella Bella will stay by the Stryker and handle any PUCs,” Staff-Sergeant Brenda Hamm said to Cervantes and the leaders of the other two fire teams. “Aleut takes the left side and Chinook the right.” So long as the Stryker was rolling, Hamm, the squad leader, was in command of all three fire teams: once they were on the ground Cervantes was expected to lead his team on his own unless he got direct orders from Hamm. “Have fun.”
Cervantes saluted and then turned to Hollis and Bishop. “Bishop, keep your drone heeled and stay on me. Hollis, get your Raptor up—I want a map of that building before we set foot inside.”
Hollis nodded and shut one eye, making mental room for the feed from his drones. Each fire team in 2-23 IN is made up of two regular infantry and one drone operator, who has an upgraded implant that lets him multitask between multiple drones as well as what they’re doing on the ground. “Vehicle’s clear,” he said a few moments later.
“All right,” Cervantes said. “Let’s see what Brooklyn has to throw at us today.”
Even after he had left Yemen, Bishop had little trouble maintaining his ghat habit. Both Tacoma, the nearest city to Fort Lewis, and Seattle, which is not much farther, have large Somali communities, and while ghat is technically illegal it is not a high priority for the DEA. After he and Cervantes were moved out of the 2-23 IN and reassigned to the Warrior Transition Battalion, Bishop began to chew ghat nearly all the time. “I was always buzzing,” he told me. “Every day we’d get our tests and our scans and wait, just kill time all day, and every day it got worse.”
The purpose of the Warrior Transition Battalion, or WTB, is to provide specialized medical care for soldiers well enough to be out of the hospital but not currently able to return to active duty, as well as education and training for those granted medical discharges. Some critics, however, say that the main focus of the Battalion’s staff is looking for reasons for soldiers to be “chaptered out,” or discharged without benefits. The more common name for the Battalion within the Army, the “shitbag brigade,” suggests that little sympathy is felt for the soldiers there.