Authors: Christopher McKitterick
Nadir smiled, savoring this ripe mouthful of life just before what would surely be their heaviest engagement, listening to the monopera surge through his mind. The lyrics had begun to mutate; the program would soon reach its climax, and then its end. By definition, a monopera must not change substantially from one day to the next, must remain fixed in a transcendent moment. Once it begins to stray from its orchestrated form, once the singers begin to toy with the preset lyrics, it ceases to be a monopera. This piece’s popularity must have begun to wane; one sure way to dramatically, though temporarily, increase subscriptions is to alter a monopera. Everyone wants to watch the death of a great piece of art. Nadir sighed.
“
Tactical position Gamma!” Jhishra’s suddenly appearing avatar bellowed. It vanished just as quickly, a flicker of virtual life to accompany a burst of verbal static.
Nadir slowed from a jog to a walk to a motionless crouch behind the bulletproof car’s curved flank, twenty meters from the six-meter-high walls. He watched Paolo climb into the stowage area behind the seats, near the supplies, and settle with his rifle pointed up at the sand-colored walls. The unit’s other cars spread out siege-style, encircling the 100-meter base of the structure. The heavy EMMA-B atop the Boss’ truck swiveled toward the top of the wall. When all were still, Jhishra 3-verded again.
“
Niks assuming firing positions! Fire at will, firefight code one.”
Nadir frowned, blinking, then realized Jhishra was right. Yellow Sotoi Guntai uniforms lined the wall, visible between the thick crenellation. At least 50 of them, rifles pointed down at the unit. Nadir hadn’t noticed them a moment ago. He frowned and ran a quick fumigator-program through his chip to rid his card of the apparent camouflage feed, then prepared to fight.
Crack-thup
, eighteen EMMAs whined simultaneously like a plague of locusts chewing at the smooth walls. Enemy soldiers toppled down one after another, disappearing behind their ramparts as shaped ceramics slipped through their bodies. Their few particle rifles screamed and common powder-guns boomed down upon the spines the desert had grown overnight. Still they died, their weapons falling impotently to the ground where time would eventually bury them in sand. Sometimes the weapons’ users tumbled afterward to lie crooked among the weeds that cowered near the walls.
Nadir chose targets and fired, fired, consumed by the monopera and its mechanical military accompaniment, reveling in this validation of life. A quick scan told him all his boys were still unharmed. Target, one-second burst, verify kill; target. . . .
Waves of subsonic thunder rippled the ground beneath Nadir’s feet—sonic grenades pulping the core of the fortification. Nadir had an image of expanding perspectives, first watching himself from above, then jumping out to the next magnitude of perspective, seeing the circle of EarthCo warriors focused on their momentary all-consuming interest; then the next magnitude in which everyone was merely a tiny lead soldier melting one another on a clean expanse of sand, glittering in the hot yellow sunshine; shells upon shells, the monopera building along the sound-receptive neurons in his brain, the lyric
crack-thup
of his boys’ rifles, the bass drum of grenades, gunpowder drumrolls, even the tympanic thunder of a mortar digging a ditch near one of the cars.
Nadir realized he had subconsciously engaged an overlay program; he watched the termination of life through what felt like his own eyes, yet this overlaid omniscient pov somehow seemed more real, seemed to encompass an essential truth mere flesh-eyes could not grasp. Surely, this was their server’s representation of how this scene would appear from several hundred meters in the air, or maybe even an extreme zoom from an intelligence satellite. This is probably what subscribers to their feed could see if they chose to watch the battle as a whole. Nadir didn’t care, didn’t question beyond that momentary wonder; he only targeted and pulled the trigger. To do more was to approach death.
“
Breach at [110º],” one of the soldiers’ avatar stated, though the number was the computer’s modification, assuring each soldier received the proper figure for his own location.
“
Move in!” Jhishra cried, his image stern and stolid.
“
Out of the car, with me,” Nadir called to Paolo. He didn’t wait for the boy to follow as he sprinted away from the car’s shelter toward the specified breach. He shut down the broad pov overlay and concentrated on the physical, running close along the base of the wall to make it difficult for enemies overhead to fire on him.
He rounded a corner and saw shattered stone strewn out from a gaping hole in the wall. Intheflesh voices and 3VRDs, weapons and calamity, merged in an incomprehensible tangle of sounds and orders. As he ran nearer, Nadir smelled the sharp tang of burned TEST, a high-explosive well-suited to such jobs as blowing walls.
He strode over the pile of rubble, glorying in the thick heat pumping through his thighs—validation of powerful, living muscles. He picked his landing carefully among blocks blown inward and quickly found cover behind a stone buttress that arched upward, out of sight. Cracked sandstone shielded his front from attack while the enemy’s own structure protected three other sides. He was only vulnerable from the left and above.
Something went wrong with his vision; he couldn’t see the heavy walls for a moment. His left hand felt the cold, gritty stone before him; his knees felt sand and sharp pebbles where he knelt; he smelled the TEST and his own days-old sweat; tasted the paste he had eaten on the drive to battle, a vitamin-rich base which his headcard had made taste like steak and eggs; he heard shouts and screams and gunpowder cracks and electromagnetic discharges, heard hard rubber bootsoles scraping against stone and sand, but Nadir couldn’t see anything except a cloudy brown.
He blinked several times, shaking his head, and thought he saw a crowd of dark-skinned men and women screaming and running mob-fashion, aimlessly, into one another and in all directions at once. But they were hazy, indistinct, as in a dream. They wore glowing halos like bad 3VRDs. They moved jerkily, slowly. They were images captured on film from some non-requested subscription, some subterfuge feed run in slow-motion, every other frame edited out.
Nadir cursed under his breath, again debugging his chip. Another damned electronic-warfare program, he assumed. Like the first time, a month ago; like a few minutes ago, a boy in the sand. . . . The virus lingered only a second, however, and he at last was able to survey the interior of the fortress.
It was constructed of squat buildings piled atop one another, each rising higher like steps and blending into the girdle wall so that their roofs were at a level with the crenellation. Open, pointed archways gaped from every structure—mouths of blackness hiding NKK soldiers. Nadir flicked on an infrared-sensitive program to enhance the view through his gunsight.
There they hid, the enemy, peering out from every crevice. He targeted and fired, listening to his boys do the same, listening to a swelling discordance in the monopera, firing and terminating enemies. He fought for life, he fought for EarthCo, he fought for Paolo, he even fought for himself. Along with the other 30 EarthCo units crossing the desert, Hardman Nadir’s unit was furthering EarthCo’s plan to secure northern Africa so trade could be safely pursued in the Mediterranean and the southern, EarthCo-controlled portion of Africa. He thought all these things while his rifle whined and spat tiny slivers of ceramic through the flesh of men who stood in the way of the world’s safety.
His eye began to twitch. No, not men. These targets were what stood in the way of peace in Africa, of free trade in the seas surrounding it. These were mere tags. No, more than that and less than that: These were tiny increments to overcome on the way to EarthCo’s ultimate victory.
A part of his mind receded to another time, half a world away, when he was only a boy himself on one of his first missions.
His unit had engaged heavy resistance for so long, for weeks, in a tropical rainstorm that had lasted nearly as long. He had grown delirious, as had several other of the boys. He couldn’t even remember where they were, only that it was some treeless mound of stone in the middle of the ocean, a numbered rock among the Marshall Islands. They had been pinned beneath the porous lavarock, in caverns they had dug with mines and high explosives. They were drowning as the rain slowly rose around their ankles, then up to their knees, until finally they had to sleep standing up or balled up in fetal position atop boxes of equipment.
Bugs whose carapaces glistened like oil swirled around his pantlegs. The water stank like piss and excrement and curdled blood. His toes burned with fungal infection and rot. They had only the light provided by headfeed to brighten their tomb. Not surprisingly, half the unit receded into feedrapture; most of those eventually drowned by incautiously falling asleep or were destroyed from within by pneumonia or other assorted illnesses. And it had been weeks. Weeks. This battle had begun to earn one of the lowest subscription-ratings ever recorded.
Because of that, one woman kept muttering, “They’ve got to end this soon. No one’s watching. Why drag it out? They’ve got to end this soon. . .”
Occasionally, one of his cavern-mates climbed screaming from their self-dug grave only to be punched full of holes by Niks waiting offshore in their patrol boats. But even the enemy was weak in firepower, so each side stood helpless, trapped in a tortuous stalemate. At long last the battle reached its climax.
One of the Big Bosses in EarthCo’s military component had decided this unit deserved attention, even with the low ratings, and the entire NKK siege-group had been blasted from the water in an airstrike that lit up the rainy night like Fourth of July, a blazing wall of thunder and fire surrounding the islet with red liquid curtains, velvet and shrapnel, blood and napalm.
At that moment, watching the dance of flames, Nadir realized that these weeks of suffering had been exactly what he wanted. Not the pain, not the horror of watching his comrades die—but battle, the abstracts of life and death clashing swords with one another over each man and woman . . . abstracts become concrete. He had joined up with the EarthCo Warriors to escape stifling life on mainland EarthCo, in Wolf Point, Montana. Nothing there mattered to him, not even his parents who lived exclusively in feed.
Nadir was 14 when his mother was taken away for feedrapture treatment, and she never returned. He didn’t seek her out, not even when he’d become a citizen, mainly because his father never spoke of her again. The only solid image of Wolf Point that he carried through life was of his mother, being carried away by two men in white jumpsuits wearing black masks over their faces. Wires sprouted from the sides of the masks, and a sort of antenna bounced in the air above each.
Nadir’s mother was a short woman with dark skin and hair, but even her natural coloring couldn’t hide the pallor that had consumed her over the years. Now, as she was lifted from the gel-pillows in the living room, her bones strained against the skin, her mouth fell slack and revealed yellow teeth, her head lolled back. She didn’t say a word, not even in 3VRD. She looked dead. Young Nadir thought he would cry out, but he didn’t. Everything was too quiet, only soft footsteps and the sounds of cloth, and he couldn’t bear to shatter such solemn silence. That would be like killing something, and he was still to young to kill. After a moment, all he could hear was the gurgle of the pillows as they formed back into disks. That, and a distant sort of hush from the everpresent prairie winds.
Nadir’s father didn’t say a word, didn’t even stir from his desk near the window—oddly, the man seemed to be staring out at the rolling plains and desert-like wheatfields that carpeted them in straggly patches. Dust rose in dervishes like tornadoes from a type of ground that could grow no life.
The latch creaked. The door opened. The men carried a woman outside. The door clicked shut. The wind sounded like a distant scream, muffled and indistinct. Silence.
Two minutes, three. . . . Nadir waited as long as he could. When he heard the rising whine of the ambulance’s motor, his chest tightened and filled with anger. He felt so hollow within, the fury and confusion so dense, that he believed one more second of standing still would make him explode.
He ran across the house and threw open the door. The wind tasted dry. Dust got in his eyes and made them water. His chest heaved with the exertion of not being able to do anything. And then the ambulance rose from the dusty earth against a backdrop of tan and grey landscape, stone and rock bluffs hulking above poor fields. Out here, the vast tracts of land used to grow crops were not fenced in as in the Midwest—here, pockets of wheat stood bare, swaying in the wind. This was utter isolation from the world: No one lived for hours around, except the retro Amerinds on their rotting reservation, the farmers who owned Wolf Point, and those few folks who worked for the farmers. Nadir’s father worked for one of them, but Nadir had no idea what the man did. Whatever it was, he could work entirely at home by feed and feedback. He didn’t know what kind of farm work was done that way.