Read The Year’s Best Military SF & Space Opera Online
Authors: David Afsharirad
The Year’s Best Military SF & Space Opera (39 page)
The assignment to the WTB came as a surprise to Cervantes and Bishop, since neither had received any serious injuries and had been serving in the field up to the end of their tour. As well, it raised the possibility that they would be either discharged or chaptered out, neither of which were attractive options for the two. Though he has no doubt that whatever had happened to their drones was the reason he and Cervantes were assigned there, Bishop says they were never asked any questions about it and did not receive any specialized treatment, only a daily MRI and system scan.
I got no answer when I asked the medical records department at the Battalion to let me see copies of Bishop and Cervantes’ scans. Major William Jameson, who has been the chief technical officer for the Army’s Hybrid Warrior program since its inception, contacted me a week after I sent my second request, and invited me to meet with him at his office at Fort Lewis. Jameson, a tall, affable New Englander whose John Lennon-style granny glasses make an impression at odds with his crew cut and uniform, supervised the 2-23 IN’s deployment in Yemen. When I asked him about the case, Major Jameson said that he had been aware of it but had not handled it personally. “If they were in the WTB it was for a medical reason,” he told me. “I can tell you that there was nothing wrong with those implants. If there had been, we wouldn’t have let those soldiers off the base.”
When I told him what Bishop had said, about the buzz going away when he was planning and carrying out the robbery plan, Jameson sighed. “There’s a reason why we forbid soldiers from using drugs, and it’s not just the law. The implant is designed to influence the brain on a very subtle level, chemically and electrically, and drugs can interfere with that.” Ghat and other drugs, he told me, are the reason why the soldiers’ later behavior and actions are so much at odds with how they performed on deployment: “Drugs won’t affect the implant, but over time they can affect the brain in ways that are past the implant’s ability to correct.”
He also denies that the implant’s reinforcement systems can be hacked to give pleasure the way Bishop described. “It’s just like the old joke about hitting yourself with a hammer,” he told me. “It feels so good when it stops.”
Six days later, Bishop got a message from Cervantes:
Found him. Tacoma Mall food court.
Without access to Hollis’ drones, Bishop and Cervantes had been forced to look for the terp on foot. Cervantes used an app called SketchArtist to make a picture of the man he had seen in the Allegra and he and Bishop had spent the week on a search-and-detain mission around the parts of Tacoma and Seattle with the largest Somali populations.
Bishop, who had been searching the Hilltop neighborhood a few miles northeast of Tacoma Mall, drove as quickly as he could without speeding, conscious both of the gun and of a large freezer bag of ghat that he had in the car. He took a leaf from the bag and started to chew it as he locked the car and went into the mall. The food court was full of Korean and Somali teenagers, as it usually is on Friday evenings, snacking on short ribs and sambusas. The smell of canjeero coming from the Casho Cambuulo stall summoned memories of Yemen as Bishop scanned the court for Cervantes’ face.
Another message from Cervantes arrived, containing a map of the mall with a location pin on one of the bathrooms. Bishop broke into a run, keeping his right hand on the pistol in his jacket pocket to keep it from falling out, and turned off the mall’s main corridor to an open area with an information panel, two benches and a small play structure. The sign on the bathroom door was a stick-figure picture of a man and woman with a child between them, holding their hands, and inside the small empty room was a Koala Kare diaper station along with two stalls and a sink. Bishop turned sideways and stood edge-on to the door, so he wouldn’t be in the way when he needed to open it. Through the thick door he could just hear Cervantes’ voice over the mall noise.
Bishop pulled the handle and the door swung inward. A frightened-looking Somali man was on the other side, trying to get away from Cervantes. Bishop grabbed the man’s wrist and pulled him inside; Cervantes followed, closed the door behind him and leaned back against it.
Kahin Jama, a twenty-four-year-old Somali man, was a recently-settled refugee from Yemen. When he found himself trapped between Bishop and Cervantes he pulled out his wallet and dropped it on the floor. “Please don’t hurt me,” he said.
Bishop took off Jama’s belt and drew it tight around Jama’s wrists, like a zip-tie. Then he drew his gun from his jacket pocket and trained it on Jama.
“Why are you here?” Cervantes asked.
“Don’t hurt me,” Jama said to Bishop.
Cervantes brought a fist down between Jama’s shoulders, knocking him to his knees. “Talk to
me
,” he said. “I bet you thought we’d never find you, huh?”
“Please,” Jama said, sobbing. He held his hands up on either side of his eyes, like a horse’s blinders. “I didn’t see your face. Let me go, I won’t tell anyone, I promise.”
Bishop sidled over to a sink and spat green goo into it. “Do you think . . .” he asked.
“He fooled us once,” Cervantes said. He took a step forward, drew his gun from his cargo pants and pressed the barrel to the back of Jama’s head. “What are you doing here?
Where is Guleed?
”
The door behind Cervantes pushed inward, knocking him briefly off balance. Jama threw himself at the now-open doorway, trying to get to his feet, and Bishop shot him in the back. Jama fell forward and landed at the feet of Emily Park, a thirty-two-year-old mother who was bringing her two-year-old son Levi to the washroom for a diaper change.
Bishop later said that he did not notice either Park or her son screaming. Instead, as he looked down at the gun in his hand, his only thought was
How did I do that?
A moment later he fired again, obeying his conditioning to do a “double tap”—two shots into a target’s chest or back.
Jama’s body kept the door from closing fully and they could see a crowd of people outside. Cervantes turned to face the crowd, and Bishop moved to stand beside him. Both held their guns in front of them, and the screaming got louder. Many of the people in the mall that day were refugees, and for them the sight of Bishop and Cervantes was not only frightening but triggered painful memories as well. Those nearest to the soldiers froze or fell to the floor, while some further away ran for safety.
Cervantes and Bishop turned partway away from each other, dividing the mall corridor into two arcs of fire. When soldiers in a counterinsurgency campaign are surrounded by hostile forces, they are trained to execute what soldiers call a “death blossom”—a constant barrage of fire in all directions until the enemy is killed or forced to retreat. Bishop and Cervantes had participated in three of these while serving in Yemen, two of them while assigned to Abyan province following the incident that downed their drones.
“Looks like we’re boxed in,” Cervantes said. “I don’t think we’re getting any backup.”
Bishop nodded and began to scan the crowd, picking targets. Emily Park’s cell phone began to ring, playing a tinny version of “Hipper Than Me,” and suddenly, Bishop says, he was aware of where he was, tasting the ghat in his mouth and hearing the screams of the terrified mall customers.
He turned to Cervantes. “Tony. Hey, Tony,” he said.
“What is it?”
“This is—this isn’t right,” Bishop said. His jaw was working furiously and he had to spit out ghat juice before he could keep talking. “These people, they aren’t Shabaab, man. You need to put down the gun.”
Cervantes shook his head. “They’re lying,” he said.
Levi Park began to cry, a single, rising note. Cervantes aimed his gun at him and Bishop fired, two quick shots into Cervantes’ back.
“The crazy thing is,” Bishop told me later, “all that stuff, everything we did, I never felt like anything was wrong. The only time I felt the buzz was when I shot Tony.”
Daniel Perez, a professor of neurocybernetics at the Medical College of Georgia, first heard about the case when I contacted him after meeting Bishop. Though he was too late to give testimony in Bishop’s defense, he has met with Bishop several times since then. “The reason the Army hasn’t found anything may be because it’s not just something the implant is doing, but an interaction between the implant and the brain,” Perez told me. He has studied the effects of cognitive implants since they were first introduced, and he describes them as an interaction of two chaotic systems. “In order to work with a human brain, the implants have to be able to rewrite their programming, even while they’re running. But our brains do this too, and the studies we’ve done don’t shed much light on how they might interact in highly stressful, emotionally charged situations.”
Though the Army denies that the soldiers’ implants had anything to do with their crimes, Perez has joined the effort to apply for a stay of execution for Bishop, and has also called for a freeze on military implants until more long-term studies can be done. He told me about experiments he’s done in which similar implants were used to help teach rats how to get food from a machine, and the rats were then made to switch to another method. “Even when they learned the new way to get the cheese, the implant punished them for it,” he said. “And when we switched back they got a huge dopamine rush.” He feels that Bishop’s lawyers should have raised the possibility that the implants, alone or in conjunction with other factors, predisposed the soldiers to violence in a way they might not have been before.
I asked Perez how he could square this with Major Jameson’s claim that the implants were undamaged, as well as the fact that other soldiers from the 2-23 IN had not been involved in any similar incidents. “Their implants weren’t damaged, just reset,” Perez said. “It’s a learning device: whatever it takes as normal, it reinforces. What happened to Bishop and Cervantes may just have happened
sooner
.”
On the morning of November third, two months after I met with Perez, Tom Hollis arrived at the Seattle Municipal Tower trailed by two Cormorant drones and carrying a Swiss Arms K91 rifle over his shoulder. Witnesses say he looked like he was going hunting.
TEN RULES FOR BEING AN INTERGALACTIC SMUGGLER
(the Successful Kind)
by Holly Black
Growing up on Mars, you dreamed of a life full of adventure in space. Your parents loved to tell you how bad things could get out there in the void. You’re about to discover for yourself how right they were, and that if you want to make it in an uncaring universe, there are rules that have to be followed.
1.
There are no rules.
THAT’S WHAT YOUR UNCLE TELLS YOU,
after he finds you stowing away in his transport ship, the
Celeris,
which you used to call the
Celery
when you were growing up, back when you only dreamed of getting off the crappy planet your parents brought you to as a baby. No matter how many times you told them their dumb dream of being homesteaders and digging in the red dirt wasn’t yours, no matter how many times you begged your uncle to take you with him, even though your parents swore that he was a smuggler and bad news besides, it wasn’t until you climbed out of your hidey-hole with the vastness of space in the transparent alumina windows behind you that anyone really believed you’d meant any of it.
Once you’re caught, he gives you a long lecture about how there are laws and there’s right and wrong, but those aren’t
rules.
And, he says, there are especially no rules for situations like this. Which turns out to be to your advantage, because he’s pissed but not that pissed. His basic philosophy is to laugh in the face of danger and also in the face of annoyance. And since he thinks his brother is a bit of a damp rag and likes the idea of being a hero to his niece, it turns out that
no rules
means not turning around and dumping you back on Mars.
He also turns out to be a smuggler. Grudgingly, you have to admit that your parents might not be wrong about everything.
2.
Spaceports are dangerous.
YOUR UNCLE TELLS YOU
this several times as you dock in the Zvezda-9 Spaceport, but it’s not like you don’t know it already. Your parents have told you a million stories about how alien races like the spidery and psychopathic Charkazaks—fugitives after their world was destroyed by InterPlanetary forces—take girls like you hostage and force you to do things so bad, they won’t even describe them. From all your parents’ warnings about spaceports, when you step off of
Celeris,
you expect a dozen shady aliens to jump out of the shadows, offering you morality-disrupting powders, fear inhibitors, and
nucleus accumbens
stimulators.
Except it turns out that spaceports aren’t that interesting. Zvezda-9 is a big stretch of cement tunnels, vast microgravity farms, hotel pods, and general stores with overpriced food that’s either dehydrated or in a tube. There are also InterPlanetary offices, where greasy-looking people from a variety of worlds wait in long lines for licenses. They all stare at your homespun clothes. You want to grab your uncle’s hand, but you already feel like enough of a backworld yokel, so you curl your fingers into a fist instead.
There are aliens—it wasn’t like your parents were wrong about that. Most of them look human and simultaneously inhuman, and the juxtaposition is so odd that you can’t keep from staring. You spot a woman whose whole lower face is a jagged-toothed mouth. A man with gray-skinned cheeks that grow from his face like gills or possibly just really strange ears loads up a hovercart nearby, the stripes on his body smeared so you know they are paint and not pigmentation. Someone passes you in a heavy, hairy cloak, and you get the impression of thousands of eyes inside of the hood. It’s creepy as hell.
You do not, however, see a single Charkazak. No one offers you any drugs.
“Stop acting stupid,” your uncle growls, and you
try
to act less stupid and keep from staring. You try to act like you stroll around spaceports all the time, like you know how to use the gun you swiped from your mother and strapped to your thigh under your skirt, like the tough expression you plaster on your face actually
makes
you tough. You try to roll your hips and swagger, like you’re a grown lady, but not too much of a lady.
Your uncle laughs at you, but it’s a good kind of laughter, like at least you’re sort of maybe pulling it off.
Later that night, he buys you some kind of vat-meat tacos, and he and some of his human “transporter” buddies get to drinking and telling stories. They tell you about run-ins with space pirates and times when the InterPlanetary Centurions stopped their ships, looking for illicit cargo. Your uncle has a million stories about narrow getaways and hidey-holes, in addition to a large cast of seedy accomplices able to forge passable paperwork, but who apparently excel at getting him into dangerous yet hilarious situations. You laugh your way into the night.
The next day your uncle buys you a pair of black pants and a shirt like his, made from a self-cleaning material that’s both hydrophobic and insulating, plus a shiny chromium steel clip for your hair. You can’t stop smiling. And although you don’t say it out loud to him, in that moment you’re sure that the two of you are going to be the greatest smuggling duo of all time.
3.
When someone says they’ll pay double your normal rate, they’re offering to pay at least half what you’d charge them if you knew the whole story.
THE
CELERIS
stays docked in the spaceport for a couple of weeks while your uncle buys some used parts to repair the worst of wear and tear to her systems and looks for the right official job—and then an unofficial job to make the most of that InterPlanetary transport license.
You try to keep out of your uncle’s way so he doesn’t start thinking of you as some kid who’s always underfoot. You don’t want to get sent back home. Instead, you hang around the spaceport, trying to make yourself less ignorant. You go into the store that sells navigational charts and stare at the shifting patterns of stars. You go into the pawnshop and look at the fancy laser pistols and the odd alien gadgets, until the guy behind the counter gets tired of your face and orders you to buy something or get out.
After a while the spaceport seems less scary. Some of your uncle’s friends pay you pocket money to run errands, money that you use to buy caff bars and extra batteries for your mother’s gun and holographic hoop earrings that you think make you look like a pirate. Just when you start to feel a little bit cocky and comfortable, your uncle informs you that it’s time to leave.
He’s lined up the jobs. He’s found a client.
A little man with a red face and red hair sits in their eating area on the ship, sipping archer ethanol, booze culled from the Sagittarius B2 cloud, out of a coffee can. The man tells your uncle that he supplies alien tissue to a scientist who has his laboratory on one of the outer worlds, where the rules about gene splicing and cloning are more lax. The little man has come across a particularly valuable shipment of frozen alien corpses and needs for it to get where it’s going fast, with few questions asked.
The assignment creeps you out, but you can tell that your uncle has been distracted by the ludicrously high offer the man is waving around. It’s more money than you’ve ever imagined being paid for anything, and even with the cost of fuel and bribing Centurions, you’re pretty sure there would be enough to refit the
Celeris
in style. No more used parts, no more stopgap repairs. He could have all new everything.
“Half now,” the man says. “Half when the cargo arrives
intact.
And it better get there inside a month, or I will take the extra time out of your hide. I am paying for speed—and silence.”
“Oh, it’ll be there,” your uncle says, and pours a little archer ethanol into a plastic cup for himself. Even the smell of it singes your nose hair. “This little ship has got hidden depths—
literally.
” He grins while he’s speaking, like the offer of so much money has made him drunker than all the booze in the sky. “Hidden depths. Like me.”
The red-haired man doesn’t seem all that impressed.
You have lots of questions about where the alien bodies came from and what exactly the scientist is going to do with them, but a quick glance from your uncle confirms that you’re supposed to swallow those and keep pouring drinks. You have your guesses, though—you’ve heard stories about space pirates with alien parts grafted on instead of their own. New ears and eyes, new second stomachs tough enough to digest acid, second livers and new teeth and organs humans don’t even have—like poison glands or hidden quills. And then there were worse stories: ones about cloned hybrids, pitiless and monstrous enough to fight the surviving Charkazak and win.
But you’re a stupid kid from a backworld planet and you know it, so you quash your curiosity. After the client leaves, you clean up some and fold your stuff so it tucks away in the netting over your bunk back in your room. You go down to the cargo hold and move around boxes, so the way to the secret storage compartment is clear for when the redhead comes back with his alien parts in the morning. That night you look out through the transparent alumina windows at ships docking on Zvezda-9, and you get excited about leaving for your first mission in the morning.
But in the morning, the
Celeris
doesn’t depart.
It turns out that it takes time to get ready for a run like this—it takes supplies and paperwork; it takes charting a course and new fuel and lots of batteries and a ton of water. The whole while you careen between sadness over leaving Zvezda-9 now that you’ve become familiar with it and wishing you were in space already. You visit your favorite spots mournfully, unsure if you’ll ever see them again, and you pace the halls of the
Celeris
at night until your uncle orders you to your bunk. His temper is a short-sparking fuse. He sends you to buy supplies and then complains loudly about what you get, even though you’re the one who’ll be doing the reheating and reconstituting.
The client arrives in the middle of the night. You sit in the shadows above the cargo bay and watch what he loads—a long cylindrical casket, big enough for several human-size bodies. Smoke curls off of it when it’s jostled, as though it is very, very cold inside.
An hour later you’re back among the stars. There, your uncle starts to relax, as though space is his real home and being on a planet for too long was what was making him tense. Over the next week, he teaches you a few simple repairs he has to do regularly for the
Celeris,
shows you a few of his favorite smuggling hidey-holes, teaches you a card game and then how to cheat at that card game, and even lets you fly the ship for an hour with him hanging over your shoulder, nagging you about everything you’re doing wrong.
Considering that he turns on autopilot while he sleeps, letting you put your hands on the controls while he watches isn’t that big of a vote of confidence, but sitting in the cockpit, gazing out at the spray of stars, makes you feel important and wholly yourself, as though all your time laboring in that red dirt was worth something, because it brought you to this.
Mostly the trip is uneventful, except for an evening when your uncle comes up from the cargo hold and won’t look at you. He downs a whole bottle of archer ethanol and then gets noisily sick while you watch the computer navigate and fiddle with your earrings. He never says what set him off, but the next day he’s himself again and you both try to pretend that it never happened.
Then you wake up because the whole ship is shaking. At first you think you’re passing through an asteroid field, but then you realize something bad is happening. There’s the faint smell of fire and the sound of the ship venting it. Then the gravity starts going crazy—lurching on and off, bouncing you against the floor and the walls.
Once it stabilizes, you manage to crawl out into the corridor. Your heart is pounding like crazy, fear making you light-headed. You clutch your mother’s gun to you like it’s some kind of teddy bear. There’s shouting—more voices than there should be on board. You think you hear your uncle calling your name and then something else. Something loud and anguished and final.
You head automatically for the cockpit when a man runs into the corridor, skidding to a stop at the sight of you. Based on the mismatched array of weapons and armor, you figure he’s got to be a pirate—if he was a Centurion, he’d be in uniform. He reaches for his weapon, like he’s just shaking off the shock of seeing a kid in her nightgown aboard a smuggling ship, but you’ve already swung your mother’s gun up. You blast him in the head before you allow yourself to consider what you’re doing.
When he drops, you start trembling all over. You think you’re going to throw up, but you can hear more of them coming, so you try to concentrate on moving through the ship, on remembering all the hidey-holes your uncle pointed out to you.
The lights go out all of a sudden, so you have to feel your way in the dark, but soon you’ve found one big enough for you to fit yourself into and you’re shut up inside.
Snug as a bug in a rug,
your mom would say.