Transcendence (44 page)

“
Shut up!” a voice screamed, an insane voice, one he recognized but couldn’t place.

When Nadir dared glance down, he saw that some of the skeletons had fully formed into EarthCo warriors that danced and dove to the windsong. But most of the skeletons-now-bodies simply lay in the sand and rock, their skin as brown as a dinosaur bone protected from the elements by a meter of mudstone.

Suddenly the wind formed into a fist that punched him in the chest. Young Nadir careened backwards, tumbling down the slope. He rolled for an eternity, unable to feel the ground beneath him. At last he thudded to a stop amid the fleshy bones.

His ribs throbbed where the blow had fallen, and his neck hurt when it struck something on the valley floor. Slowly, he reached out and grasped a length of notched metal that had once, when this land was still called “the frontier,” been a fencepost.

Nadir rose to his feet and glanced about him at the ghostly dance of soldiers and bodies. The wind roared and screamed. Pebbles and sharp stones lanced through the air. A fire somewhere nearby sent up cinders and puffs of smoke. His eyes collided with single objects: a flint arrowhead, centuries old and chipped; a chunk of petrified wood, gnarled and shattered; a fragment of bone, brown and bloody; a glistening pebble; a filament of breeze tingling his cheek; a second of scent, an herb sharp and then gone; a grain of sand glinting in red light. Hardman Nadir, an object like all the rest, nothing more, singular and bright, yet alone and as black as the blood pulsing through the heart of a man condemned forever to hell.

Nadir was terrified, as isolated as a dinosaur in the modern desert, like a cactus on the Moon, like the only lifeform in all the universe, alone, alone; empty, expelled from the refuge of his youth, vomited forth from his Badlands into the world of Man.

A waft of burnt sulfur stung his nostrils. The ring of hard-as-diamond ceramic against steel pierced his eardrums. The taste of dirt and blood and sweat mingled on his tongue. Familiar fibers and plastics clung to his skin, slick with perspiration. He smelled blood—oily, metallic, and molding.

Blood, putrefaction, ozone. Electronic sounds. A rampaging orchestra and chorus. A familiar voice, asking a familiar question.

The fragmented images surrounding him, random pieces of picture-puzzles, fell into understandable patterns.

Now his eyes opened to the animated skeletons. Now he recognized his place in the world. Now he understood why so many bodies lay dark and husk-like amid the storm and stones. Now he heard and understood the song. And now the patterns assembled into a completing puzzle.

He felt himself sing along with half a million anonymous voices celebrating the end of the monopera. It was one line only, the last:

“
I’m alive.”

Silence. The monopera died at its blazing zenith. Someone wept, the sound echoing, alone in the dark and emptying orchestra hall.

Crack-thup
. Crash.

“
Subbs, what’s happening?” Paolo asked—Paolo? Yes that’s Paolo, my young friend. My god, Nadir admitted, he’s no younger than I.

“
They burned the server,” Nadir said, emotionlessly. He was too drained to feel anything. He drew a breath and exhaled slowly as he stared at the young man.

“
But . . . the bodies, Subbs, the bodies!”

Nadir paused and looked around, observing this newly revealed world.

“
The bodies, Subbs. What have we done?”

Amid the calmness inside Nadir, something began to gurgle, to roil. He felt a kernel of hate and fury begin to escape its fractured container at the center of his chest. There was where the enemy round had hit his protective vest and knocked him from the wall. The Sotoi Guntai soldier had not injured a man but freed a demon, which now grasped hold of Nadir’s body.

Scattered all around Nadir and his stunned, numbly wandering unit were dead bodies. A corpsefield, a frozen tableau of flesh that once was man and woman and child.

He knew that. But these were not the bodies of an NKK fortress’ warriors. They were men—civilian men and women and children. They were mostly naked, skins browned by equatorial sun, hair black or brown. One man, near Nadir’s boot, lay with his eyes open and mouth seeming to form a stony word.

Nadir swallowed a dry lump and tried to move. He couldn’t. His limbs began to tremble. The thing inside him inched closer to eruption. The scene expanded to a panorama, and now he saw dozens, hundreds of bodies, most wearing the tiny kiss of EMMA rounds like a patches on their skin. Some were mutilated where a trigger-rapt kid had spent her rifle on full-auto. Blood glued the bodies to the dusty earth, made gruesome cakes for the swarming flies to feast upon.

“
Hundreds,” he mumbled. His voice was barely under control.

Beyond the bodies, he saw the smoldering village. Stick huts outnumbered the prefabs, but all wore the grime and abuse of decades. A dog huddled with tail between its legs near the prone body of its master.

“
Fucking piece of shit, Nadir!” Jhishra’s 3VRD howled. It was barely a flicker without the server’s amplification. “You die for not following your Boss’ orders. I kill you!”

Nadir jerked as if he had been struck by one of the ill-aimed rounds mutilating the air overhead. A gout of hatred rose in him like a geyser. His aiming eye twitched. He looked up at the single flight of wooden steps, so new the nails that held them in place sparked in the sunset light. A short platform reached two meters in each direction from the upper landing. As he watched, enemy rounds shredded it and knocked down his soldiers. The Polish girl fell in a heap, her neck crimson and pulsing. She didn’t move. The girl smiled, surely remembering Nadir’s death education—and surely unaware of the fragile reality that rose up around him where she fell.

“
Jhishra!” Nadir cried out across the bands. His voice tasted like venom. “As unit Sub-boss, I declare you unfit. Unfit to lead your men. I, Hardman Nadir, EarthCo Warrior Class 3, assume command at this moment. Let the record show you massacred a civilian village and caused the destruction of your unit at this place.”

A few uniformed EarthCo soldiers moved toward Nadir like birds edging toward bits of bread, or toward a venomous worm. They seemed momentarily blind to the deadly rain falling all around.

“
What? Shut up, shut up!” Jhishra was barely comprehensible. “Traitor, mutineer! Men, kill this Nadir!”

A shell burst against the theatrical wooden staircase, shattering it into a gust of splinters and nails, smoke and burning shrapnel. A chunk of it grazed Nadir’s back and set him in motion.

“
Boss Nadir,” one boy said, transmitting a unique identifier key with the words that accessed a book-keeping program.

Nadir recognized the speaker as Paolo. Then another, another, and then all the soldiers still alive repeated the simple words that verified the transfer of power from a disabled Boss to a Sub-boss—standard procedure when electronic warfare was in use and a Boss’ card couldn’t be trusted. When had a unit ever had more damaging effects than this? Nadir feared no court-martial. He didn’t expect to live that long.

Nadir ran across the corpsefield, hurdling bodies and shattered clay vessels. He reached the command truck and pounded on the side.

“
Don’t do this, Nadir,” Jhishra’s primary guard 3-verded.

Nadir could barely control himself. “Send him out.” His words shook, making it sound as if he were at the edge of laughing. He was not.

“
We kept him from firing on you, Subbs. He’s in his cabin now. That’s all we can do. Honest, he was under orders. This was really our target, sir, agreed-upon by Feedcontrol and NKK. I have the tapes to prove it. The Niks even leave us supplies sometimes in exchange for euthanizing excess—”

“
Are you fucking with me?” Nadir spoke in a low growl.

“
No, sir!” the guard’s 3VRD said. “It’s the only safe way for the Niks to get rid of their dissenting—”

Heavy automatic fire swept through the village, shredding everything higher than two meters. Nadir watched the assault as if from a distance, without the usual pleasure that accompanied such danger. The boys instinctively took cover; Nadir didn’t need to tell them anything. They had survived a lot until now. . . . Or had they? Had it all been show for the subscribers?

“
How much of . . . what we’ve done has been bullshit, boy?” he asked. He fumbled at his belt.

“
The Niks don’t send out their soldiers to be slaughtered, sir.” The man laughed, a high, insane laugh that the 3VRD couldn’t disguise. “Except what we got coming our way now is real, even though they don’t use the normal BWs. I guess they’ve used us up. Time to pay the piper, eh sir?”

The truck’s top port clanged open and Jhishra burst out, pistol in hand. Screaming, he slid down the curving side of the vehicle and landed only two meters from Nadir, who watched in silent amusement.

Paolo shrugged his rifle from his shoulder as soon as he saw the man. Nadir watched but didn’t try to stop him. The boy tracked Jhishra as he slid, then fired a two-second burst when the Boss’ feet hit sand.

I’ve got to say something, Nadir thought, or this boy will go nuts thinking about this moment.

“
Good job, Paolo.” He smiled kindly for a few seconds, oblivious to the fighting, and then felt his face transform into the killer’s, into the mask he wore every time he knew his own death lurked nearby.

Nadir strolled away, toward the village gate. His back felt warm where the shrapnel had cut his armor, and his cheeks burned from small nicks. He walked without haste. His neck swiveled as he walked. He felt like a sightseer in a surreal land.

A plastimesh fence surrounded the wood and domed-plastic huts to keep out unwanted animals. The gate was a simple arch of carved saplings, cracked from exposure. Nadir noticed a crater to his left, where his unit had blasted open a hardened fortress’ stone wall.

“
Troops,” he said, “I want you to scope out the enemy and identify him. Is he Sotoi Guntai or something else? If it’s Nik, it’s a mark.”

“
What, Subbs—I mean, Boss?”

“
Just do it, goddammit! Live!”

He shut down his commcard and flung his rifle to the blood-caked ground. His arms rose high as if in victory or defeat, shaking as the muscles flexed hard and corded against the skin. Both of his fists clenched so tightly that his knuckles beamed white in the glare of a shell-flash.

Nadir’s whole body began to shake with a rage he hadn’t known could exist, every muscle quivering like bowstrings.

And then something inside him snapped. The toxic waste of his rage ruptured its containment. His chest trembled. It was as if he felt a part of his body break. He could hear the snap. Past his eyes flashed images of Wolf Point, boot camp, all the battles. . . . Everything in his life that made him who he was rushed through his mind at that breaking point, all broke free as that psychological bottle came uncapped, all in a moment.

“
Murderer!” he cried. “Murderer! Nothing but a bloody murderer.” Nothing, nothing, I am nothing, his brain howled. I am less than dead, I am less than putrefied, less than petrified, less than dust.

He felt violence like a wave of magma sweep through him, an impetus driving him perhaps toward destroying every person and place and object wrapped up in his mind, every fragment that composed the shattered yet still-standing statue of Hardman Nadir. Perhaps it drove him toward self-destruction, toward striking that cracked statue of himself just firmly enough to send it to the sand, just another pile of quartz glistening in the setting sun.

His eyes went to the rifle that had been his murder tool; that would be appropriate.

No, I don’t deserve something so easy. So perhaps the wave of hate drove him toward righting a world whose existence he could no longer deny, a world he could no longer deny was untrue and wrong.

“
That’s it,” Nadir said, his voice crystalline-clear. To his ears it sounded like the voice of an alien. Paolo backed away, a question and a look of fear on his face.

Nadir howled that prehistoric human cry of pain and release as he ripped off his uniform shirt and the medal-encrusted vest beneath it. He flung the medals as far as his arm allowed; the shirt sailed through the buzzing air thick with flies and bullets, and disappeared among a brown heap where not-soldiers had gathered out of fear when their world came down on them in waves, waves; waves crashed through him and Nadir finally broke off his scream when no air remained in a sobbing chest.

He fell onto his knees and then face-first into the dust. He did not break his fall, but he also didn’t notice the slight impact. Bullets and an exploding shell shrieked and rang around him. Tendrils of the dead monopera sang at one corner of his consciousness. Nadir’s chest continued to heave; dust rushed in and out of his gasping mouth and nostrils.