Transcendence (19 page)

The ambulance jetted skyward, its ancient, poorly maintained alcohol-jet drawing a twisting trail of black soot against the washed-out blue. Nadir stood on the steps of the tenant house, one foot higher than the other, every muscle in his body taut, his fists clenched, heart racing, breathing deep and fast, and he vowed right then:

“
Never . . . that’ll never happen to me. I’ll never be like Mom, or Dad, or anyone in this lousy town! I’ll make a difference in the world. I swear, and if I don’t, I’ll die instead.” At the receding silver disk of the ambulance, he screamed, “I’d rather die than live like them!”

For years to come, during his search for a purpose, this single scene of his life stood out like a silver coin on a field of ashes. All the rest simply faded into a blur of sandy ground and wheat and a silent house. Whenever he thought of this moment, his chest would tighten with a yearning—he knew, absolutely knew that his purpose lay just over the next hill of life-experience. But it was horrible how life seemed to whip past. One day in his 18
^th
year, watching edufeed about the new war in the Pacific, Nadir had a revelation.

Three months later, after EarthCo Warrior boot camp in Arkansas, he joined a detachment in Hawaii. Twenty months after that, a wall of fire danced around one islet in the Marshalls, then Nadir was evacuated with the other wounded. In the ambulance jet, Nadir had smiled: This jet was taking him toward something rather than away . . . he was engulfed in a purposeful life, and he had made it happen. He had made it happen. He had left behind the slow sleepy death of insulated life back home, where Dad was nestled in a cocoon of 3VRD. Nothing was real back there, nothing was real anywhere at all except on the battlefront. Yet he would fight until his death to preserve EarthCo . . . or was it only himself he was fighting for? Had he only chosen to fight for EarthCo because he was not as much a thinking man as others who seemed to know exactly why they did things? Was he only fighting for EarthCo because, otherwise, he would be fighting himself?

But none of that mattered. He had sought adventure, and by god, he had gotten it! He had left behind emptiness and filled his life with adventure. He had to fight for something or else he’d die. So he was alive. Even those dark moments in the cave during the Marshalls battle . . . if he could go back and change things, he would choose that suffering again over the insulation of Wolf Point. Knowing that assured him that the life he was pursuing was right and that such suffering was an insignificant price to pay to be alive.

Two months after his evacuation from the islet, after a thorough bio-upgrade at one of the VA hospitals, a trio of Generals had presented Nadir a panel of awards to hang on his dress uniform. Simply for surviving the ordeal. He had helped “reestablish EarthCo presence in the Marshalls, guaranteeing safe trade in the North Pacific.” The medals against his chest were the culmination of his life, the tangible proof that he had chosen the right path. He had not escaped Wolf Point; rather, he had sought exactly this new life and risen above the decay.

Four months after that, in a pitched firefight in northern India, he began to see the Sotoi Guntai—NKK’s military elite—as mere targets, and he had begun to see NKK’s general soldiership as insects. After all, weren’t his enemy choosing life as much as he? Ignoring their kinship kept the adventure from becoming painful, kept the battles just that—battles—and not murders. Indeed, his mind often overlaid memories of the bugs swirling around his boots, swimming beneath the surface and filling his legs with the pus the VA nurses had drained from him for weeks afterward. . . . Enemy soldiers ceased to be men or women, they ceased even to be human. They became equated with the suffering he had endured on that flooded islet a thousand miles from reinforcements, no more or less than the bugs he had fought there. They were the reason men like Nadir’s father were trapped in their headcards, a disease vector, and to rid the Earth of NKK would be to save men like his father and women like his mother.

When each battle ended, he punched his tags into the bodies of the dead marks. They were “meat,” as the young recruits termed bodies. And the feed helped. He had to fight; that was the only path. When fighting began to feel like murder, feed made everything all right; it was good food, bright targets, bedtime lullabies that fought back nightmares—it was even, sometimes, a woman. Feed helped.

Nadir listened to the monopera as he emptied one bullet cartridge. In a fluid motion, in symphony with the rhythm in his head, he disengaged the empty cartridge, withdrew another from where it was clasped to his belt, snapped it into place with a plastic click, and continued to target and fire.

At some point, Nadir realized the resistance had become increasingly sporadic. He set his rifle against the rock in front of him and looked across the squarish courtyard. Marks lay strewn everywhere, in archways, on mud-brick staircases that crossed from level to level like bridges; hanging from windows. The morning sun still hadn’t risen high enough to light more than a ragged line along the inside of the western wall. Nadir studied the bright yellow stone, his brow furrowing when he noticed that the blocks of stone were set together almost perfectly, like an ancient Egyptian Pharaoh’s temple or tomb.

Feeling safe now, he rose and stepped out into the courtyard. An odd thought struck him now: Why would NKK place such a well-made fortress in the middle of the desert? What did it house? And why had it been so easy to defeat?

“
Find anything important?” he 3-verded to the boys. Paolo ran up alongside him, breathing furiously, his face beaming. Three or four other warriors’ avatars overlaid his pov.

“
We cleaned it out!” Paolo declared.

Only the
crack-thup
of EMMAs echoed against the hard walls now. No resistance.

“
Found the commander of this place,” the Polish girl stated. “We’re ready to interrogate.”

Nadir hurriedly scanned for the boy’s position, then overlaid it on the physical structure around him. There, on ground level, to the right. He raced across the fleshy courtyard, through an archway, and into a shadowed room. Paolo followed on his heels.

“
Where’s Jhishra?” Nadir demanded.

“
Haven’t seen him, subbs,” one of the Canadians answered in muted tones, intheflesh. “You know he doesn’t come out of that truck until the fighting’s done.”

“
Boss,” Nadir 3-verded to Jhishra, “we have the leader here. How about an interrogation?”

“
On my way,” the ephemeral statue of the unit’s Boss replied.

Nadir shut down his 3VRD and drew a deep breath. Besides Paolo, four other warriors milled about the dark room with him. Outside a window-slit that passed only a sliver of yellow light, a desert bird chirped a single note over and over. A light breeze hissed through the window. A skinny man clad in NKK golds lay on the floor, scuffing his boots against the sand that lay across the packed dirt; his breathing was ragged, and he muttered what could only be curses in a foreign tongue.

Nadir looked away from the man—no, the mark—and peered back into the courtyard, ablaze with light in contrast to the dark room. His men shouted and laughed, occasionally firing their EMMAs into the air or at random into the fortifications looming around them. High-pitched twangs sounded as rounds ricocheted off the stone. Somewhere nearby, a female voice cried out. Nadir’s eye-twitch returned.

Jhishra and his two-man guard finally walked through the breach in the wall, the furiously decorated man looking unusually small when framed by the ragged stone gouge. The guards carried their rifles at an angle across their chests, respectfully tilted away from the Boss. When Jhishra stumbled over the body of a mark, Nadir noticed a mismatch between the glorious image and Jhishra’s real self.

Nadir’s lips curled back in a spiteful smile as he remembered Jhishra never went anywhere without projecting a self overlay so anyone observing him would see only the image.

“
Took you long enough,” Nadir said as Jhishra reached the archway leading into the room.

“
What’s that, boy?” the Boss responded, acid in his voice. His eyes flashed through the projected calm of his overlay.

“
This is the fort’s commander,” the Polish girl said quickly.

Jhishra turned his attention to the prone body and fired off several rapid sentences in a language Nadir didn’t recognize. The Nik responded only with a few words and then spat. Jhishra straightened and backed away from the enemy commander.

“
He doesn’t know anything,” the Boss declared, then drew his ceremonial gunpowder-pistol from a leather and silver holster and fired a heavy slug into the mark’s head.

Nadir’s stomach muscles tightened. He walked out of the room, onto the packed dirt of the courtyard. Warriors ran up and down the stairways like children reveling in a new day, drinking the hard liquor of death, pumping their veins full of a substance Nadir had taught them to call “life.” Here, a man could lay his hands on his soul. In a dead place like Wolf Point, he could only dream electronic dreams of other men’s souls and imagine he were they. No, Nadir hadn’t gone that route. He had escaped. This was what he wanted, and, dammit, he would relish every painful moment.

Walking toward an unoccupied staircase, he slung his rifle over his shoulder and plugged its power cord into a fresh unit at his hip. Once he had reached the top of the steps, he stepped onto the platform that ringed the compound, the top of the wall, and looked out across the gentle rolls of the land. He could see hazy mountains in the distance. In other directions, small cities sprawled across the desert, ruins of war machinery littered the sand, and, nearby, tracks led from a dark crater to parked vehicles surrounding this fortress. The sun warmed his cheek and his blue, short-sleeved uniform.

Nadir looked down at the stone beneath his feet and was again struck by the strangeness of building such a perfect structure in the middle of nowhere.

“
Search for anything important,” he 3-verded to the boys, certain this place had been chosen as an objective for some reasonable purpose.

“
There’s nothing here worth our time,” Jhishra said. “If we’ve gotten all the marks, lay tags before anything else. Now!”

Nadir turned to watch the boys scurry from their former play to start tagging the fallen soldiers. Again the arguments, again the fistfights over whose tag was laid first.

He began to descend the steps, tired now that the adrenaline was wearing off. Drawing his tag-gun, he walked to the marks nearest him, those he had not seen already tagged, and fired. The tiny needles hissed from the pistol and punctured the marks’ uniforms. He spliced in battle data, watching the average tally for the men rise, and tagged marks who had fallen in hidden corners—enough to keep him above average. The unit’s total reached 210 before leveling off. Nadir stopped tallying after thirteen. His stomach was starting to bother him.
Hunger
, he told himself.

A piece of data seemed to leap out of his splice: No casualties for the unit. Nadir frowned and shut down the splice.

“
Casualties?” he asked.

“
No, sir!” an indistinct avatar reported.

“
Call off,” Nadir said. Each EarthCo warrior reported in good health. A Brazilian had been slashed across the cheek by mortar shrapnel, but he was less interested in medical care than finishing his tally. Otherwise, the unit had decisively defeated a heavily constructed fortress defended by 210 Niks.

“
That can’t be right,” he mumbled to himself, watching his boys tumble on the hard dirt and continue to tag marks that had already likely been tagged half a dozen times.

He turned and again studied the perfectly fitted stones of the graceful buttress, each rock planed to a sheer surface. He laid his palm against the stone; it was as cold and hard and smooth as it looked. He picked up a rock and threw it against the wall above his reach; it clicked and rebounded away from him, falling among other pebbles. He stamped his boot on a stone step.

It echoed. Hollow, like wood.

It felt as if icy fingers reached under his helmet and gripped his scalp, scraping metallic fingers along his spinal cord. He stamped again; again, what he heard wasn’t the sound of rubber on rock. Nadir swallowed hard.
We defeated this place too easily
, he thought.

Inspiration struck him; he rebooted his headcard, keeping an intense focus on his surroundings, on every sense. The world around him fluttered and blurred momentarily—but only for a millisecond; EarthCo warrior headcards are extremely fast. What he saw was almost enough to complete the disillusionment.

The stone wall grew nearly transparent in places. The buildings shrank and even disappeared. The dead around him lost their uniforms. Was this more electronic warfare, messing with his perceptions? Why now, after the battle was decided?