Atlas (14 page)

Then, unbelievably, Branco got up again.

Gains and Tavies exchanged a glance, then looked at Captain Lindberg.

The Captain hesitated a moment, then nodded his head slowly.

The two MOTHs unleashed the OC-40 spray again.

"Get down, sir!" Gains said. "Get down get down get down!"

But Branco didn't budge. His face had become so swollen that his eyes were permanently sealed shut, and he was having obvious difficulty keeping his swollen lips open. The upper part of his chest and neck were a bright, puffy red where the spray had oozed down.

For another thirty seconds he remained standing, until Lindberg himself came forward and, pushing Piker aside, tackled Branco.

"Stay down, Mr. Cervenko," Captain Lindberg told Branco.

Lindberg held him there for a moment, and when he was sure that Branco had finally given in, he released him and took a step back.

"Stay down!" Gains said.

Branco just lay there. His face was utterly unrecognizable, and he breathed in and out like some wounded beast through a tiny crack between his swollen lips.

"I think he's going to stay down..." Tavies said.

But incredibly, Branco got up again. He was wheezing terribly, and obviously couldn't see.

But he got up.

Neither Gains nor Tavies re-initiated the spray. They just stood there, watching in silence as Branco choked on his own swollen trachea. We all did. I knew I was witnessing something of utter horror, yet at the same time sheer, unsurpassable beauty. The strength, courage and resiliency of the human spirit, stripped back and laid bare for all the world to see in this brave, brave man.

Branco fell to his knees, gurgling. Bubbles of blood spilled from his lips.

"Get him to a Weaver!" Captain Lindberg shouted. "I want an EMO! Now!"

Gains, Tavies and Lindberg carried Branco to a Weaver and rested him on the stretcher.

The robot used telescoping fingers to inject two tubes into Branco's chest, above and below his heart. I saw blood flow out of Branco from the lower tube, up to the metallic core of the robot, then back out again through the other tube and into Branco's body. A corpsman hurried him and the Weaver away to a waiting ambulance.

The Combat Resiliency Qualifications continued. Thankfully, there was no repeat of the Branco incident. The rest of the class stayed down the first time they were sprayed. We'd had enough demonstrations of MOTH courage today.

Branco died later that night.

I felt guilty because I was the one who started it all. Getting up again, when I should have stayed down. But I knew in my heart that it wasn't my fault, not really. Branco would have gotten up regardless. It was part of his indomitable nature.

But you know what? Branco hadn't died for nothing.

He'd taught us something important.

He'd taught us what it really meant to be more than a man.

* * *

When Second Phase commenced, we were given standard-issue MOTH jumpsuits, which were basically strength and endurance enhancing exoskeletons. These suits came with burstable jetpacks, used for making tactical elevation adjustments or "jumps." The suits were flexible enough to use in any environment, and were surprisingly tight-fitting. The one catch was that if you wanted to use it underwater or at higher altitudes (or in space), you had to wait an hour after sealing the jumpsuit for your body to adapt to the inner environment, or there was a chance you'd experience slight decompression sickness. For the water and space scenarios, the suit utilized a detachable closed-circuit rebreather—a breathing apparatus that scrubbed the carbon-dioxide from your exhaled air, recycling the leftover oxygen for re-use. The rebreathers came standard with one canister of pure oxygen, one canister of heliox (90% helium, 10% oxygen), and a bail-out canister of oxygen.

After six weeks of combat dive training in those jumpsuits, which culminated in my basic combat diver certification, I was sent with the class to NLB (Naval Lunar Base) "Shack" to complete Third Phase. Conveniently located at the edge of Shackleton Crater on the moon's south pole, Shack was bathed in near continuous sunlight year-round. Average temperature -83 degrees Celsius, or -183 Fahrenheit.

First we learned how to walk on the moon in our jumpsuits. It was tricky. Walking on the lunar surface was like bouncing across a long sheet of ice with your boots dipped in animal fat. I don't know if it was because of all that dust or what, but it was ridiculous how often we fell on the slippery surface. Luckily when you tumbled at one-sixth G you didn't hit very hard.

We got used to moonwalking fairly quickly, and it was actually kind of fun. We were taught this hop-step kind of walk, bouncing forward from one foot to the other. You kind of had to lean forward, keeping your center of mass ahead of you, otherwise you'd just end up hopping up and down. Or slipping.

Once we learned to moonwalk, that meant of course we'd have to pass the Moonwalk Qualification.

The first half was a ninety meter (hundred yard) moonwalk away from the base with the rebreather disconnected. I had pretty good lung capacity by now, after all the dive training, so the first part was a breeze. When I reconnected the rebreather and headed back toward the base, that's when things got
tough. The instructors kept getting in my way and tripping me. About halfway back some instructor spray-painted my facemask so I couldn't see a thing. I tried wiping it away. No good. I kept going, relying on the Heads-Up-Display map built into the lens. I tripped again, and an alert sounded in my helmet.

"Suit oxygen level fifty percent," the voice talent in my helmet intoned.

I'd seen others go before me, so I had an idea of what was wrong. I unbuckled the primary life support subsystem and swung it around to the front, stretching the various tubings that connected it to my suit. I blindly felt my way along the various parts. There— as suspected, one of the instructors had disconnected my airline intake.

When I reconnected the intake, the alarm didn't stop.

"Suit oxygen level twenty-five percent."

I felt my way lower down the tube. A knot was tied in it. Wonderful. I had to disconnect the intake again so I could work on the knot. I did my best to keep calm, knowing that if I panicked I'd only use up the rest of the oxygen in my suit.

Finally I untied the knot, reconnected the intake, and re-secured the life support subsystem. I had one percent suit oxygen to spare.

I finished the moonwalk, and passed.

Three guys failed that qualification. Actually failed, after everything. Two couldn't get their airlines reconnected, and panicked. The third guy managed to reconnect his line, but he was hyperventilating so much that he used up all his oxygen and blacked out before making it back (we were purposely given low oxygen-levels at the start of the qualification). The Weavers had to resuscitate him.

It was heartbreaking to lose our brothers so late in the game, but the MOTH instructors took moonwalking very seriously. It might seem harsh to roll someone back at this point, but honestly, I wouldn't want my life in the hands of someone who panicked when things went wrong while the team operated in space.

Next we were taught how to use the jumpjets (very delicately), and performed insertions from shuttles. Manually navigating with jets was surprisingly difficult. AI-assisted insertions were easy of course, but we had to know how to do it by hand. The first few times I hit the lunar surface a bit hard and rebounded too high, and was forced to compensate with the jets. But after six or seven drops I had pretty much mastered it, and landed perfectly almost every time.

We did untethered, zero-G spacewalks, which were somewhat nerve wracking, at least for me, because whenever I went any distance from the shuttle, a part of me always wondered if the jetpack would fail and leave me drifting endlessly through space (until my oxygen tanks ran out). It was a needless worry, because someone in the class would've come out to get me if that happened. No one was left behind and all that. But still.

Learning to fire rounds in low-G was interesting. Projectile weapons designed for use in the extreme cold of space came with an adjustable recoil buffer to dampen the effect of the kickback. You could dial the buffer down to zero or leave the weapon at full kickback. Usually you wanted zero kickback, because obviously in space the slightest momentum could drastically alter your course (or send you flying off the surface of the moon). But depending on the tactical situation, a slight recoil could actually be good, especially when you were low on jetpack fuel.

So anyway, after six weeks of spacewalks and moonwalks I got my basic space EVA (Extra-Vehicular Activity) combat certification.

And then we were flown back to Earth for Fourth Phase and spent ten weeks learning to be the navy commandos we'd all seen in the vids. We practiced on the shooting ranges for hours on end. We were introduced to every military gun available. Submachine guns. Rifles. Handguns. Single shots. Multi-barreled. Semi-automatics. Machine pistols.

We had to do jumpsuit training all over again, because the strength-enhancing suits and their jumpjets behaved differently in Earth's gravity. The maximum vertical height we could attain with one full jump spurt was four meters (thirteen feet), but by firing the jets repeatedly and "stacking" the jumps we could go higher. We had to be careful because the jetpacks had enough fuel for only about twenty full jumps in Earth G, and if we didn't keep track, and stack-jumped too high, we could quite literally fall to our deaths. There were no parachutes, at least not in these models.

With and without the jumpsuits we practiced small unit tactics on the rough terrain, and sometimes inside virtual kill houses and street mock-ups, taking down holographic terrorists and freeing holographic hostages. We practiced raids, ambushes, building searches.

We were taught how to snipe man-sized targets up to five thousand yards away, ten percent of the time. The EXACTO rounds did most of the work, their internal CPUs constantly making microadjustments to the flightpath, but a certain degree of skill was required. My hit rate as a sniper at targets five klicks away was about fifty percent, near the top of the class.

We used aReals at all times, either in goggle form or helmet form. Augmented Reality in combat was an interesting thing. Imagine a video game where you had a HUD (Heads-Up-Display) overlaying your vision. You had a map in your upper right, which you could enlarge at will. Your allies were shown in green, your enemies in red. In your actual field of view, your allies were outlined a slight green, and their names and ranks floated above their heads. Your enemies were outlined in red, with threat levels shown above them as a series of red bars, one being the lowest while five bars meant run like hell. You could do things like tag an enemy to help you launch certain tracking rounds or compute a laser range find. Great stuff.

In addition to small unit tactics and marksmanship we also learned patrolling, land navigation, demolitions, and rappelling. We went to a training facility two thousand feet up the Laguna mountain range and learned the art of camouflage and stealth. For one qualification we had to make seven klick journeys across the mountains in pairs, evading detection the whole way. Alejandro and I managed to come in sixty minutes under the time limit without being discovered—not the fastest time, but definitely not the slowest.

And then amazingly enough it was done. All twenty-five of us had completed Fourth Phase.

No one failed this last phase.

We weren't MOTHs. Not yet. But pretty damn close.

I bumped into Instructor Piker at the phase completion ceremony. He shook my hand and said, "Not bad, Mr. Galaal. Not bad at all. Congratulations. I knew you had it in you."

He offered to buy me a beer.

Surprisingly, I said yes.

We had two weeks off after Fourth Phase. A few of the guys had gotten together and rented a pimped-out pad in the city, and they invited half of us to stay up there while on liberty. We set up cots and mattresses in the hallways and closets, and the first night up there we basically bought out the local liqueur store.

"Damn," I said, seated around the kitchen table, on my eighth or ninth beer. "This is the most I've drank since I signed up." I took a long sip of foamy suds and then belched. Loudly.

"I thought Piker took you for beers," Jaguar said. The lieutenant was one of the last remaining officers who hadn't quit. He was still our class leader, and a co-leaser on the pad.

"Yeah, but he only bought me one drink. Not ten."

Jaguar chugged his bottle. "What did he want anyway? Let me guess. He tried to make a move on you. How about that? For all his anti-gay remarks, he's the one who turns out to be gay."

"No," I said, laughing. "He didn't make a move. Sorry to disappoint you Jag. I know it would have fulfilled all your deviant fantasies."

"Pfft." Jaguar waved a hand in dismissal. "We're going to have to make a visit to the Gaslamp if you keep this up. Get ourselves cleansed." The Gaslamp was a strip club.

I finished my beer and slammed the empty bottle on the table. "Piker just wanted to congratulate me, okay?" Well, he also told me he expected great things from me in the years to come, but I wasn't about to reveal something like that. It would come off too much like bragging.

"My condolences." Jaguar shot me a mocking grin, then he opened another beer and slid it across the table to me.

I caught it, and lifted it to my lips. "Wooyah."

"Hey," Alejandro said. "Rade's had too much as it is."

Jaguar smirked. "What are you, his mom?"

Alejandro rolled his eyes, then took another bottle for himself. "Just saying."

Jaguar raised his bottle in toast. "Here's to us. The best damn human beings I've ever had the pleasure of serving with."

We clinked our bottles together.

"But we haven't really served together, Jag," I almost called him sir. Hard habit to break, him being the class leader and all. "We're still in training."

"Same difference. Some of our qualifications may as well have been missions." His lips pursed, and his eyes twinkled. "Hey Alejandro, remember when Piker disconnected your rebreather on the moon and you were hopping around like you'd lost your head? Then when the air in your suit ran out Piker threw you on the ground to reconnect it for you, but you kept flailing around so that he had to tie your hands together. But just when he finished binding you, you kicked him with both feet and sent him flying across the crater. Your way of telling him that you weren't giving up just yet. I thought you were going to black out and fail right there. I'm sure everyone else thought the same thing. But somehow you managed to reconnect the rebreather with your hands tied. Alejandro, you're a regular Houdini."

"Thank you thank you." Alejandro gave a bow.

"How'd you do it, anyway?"

Alejandro folded his arms. "Hey, if I told you all my secrets I wouldn't be Houdini now would I?"

Jaguar opened a new beer for himself. "That should be your callsign."

"What? Houdini?" Alejandro didn't sound impressed.

"Yep." Jaguar took a long drink. "If we were on the Teams, you would definitely be a Houdini."

"We're not on the Teams," Tahoe said. That was the first word the Native American had said all evening. He had his aReal glasses on, and was obviously multitasking.

"Not yet, no," Jaguar said. "But we may as well be. The statistics are on our side. No one quits after Fourth Phase. No one washes out. The guys you see here here in this room, well, this is it. We're part of the brotherhood now. It won't be long before all of us are the proud recipients of a certain golden badge."

"Now
that's
something I'm looking forward to," Alejandro said. "Finally getting my MOTH badge. What's the first thing you're going to do, Jag?"

"Me?" He smirked. "Bang some MOTH groupie."

I shook my head. "Way to be a class leader."

"Hey, I always believed in leading by example." Jaguar's grin widened. "So what about you, Alejandro? First thing after you get your badge, what are you going to do?"

"Me?" Alejandro sat back, and put his hands behind his head. "I'm going to treat myself to a filet mignon buffet at the most expensive restaurant in town, get a massage at the most luxurious spa, rent a loft at the fanciest hotel, and hire ten of the most beautiful
putas
to entertain me the rest of the night. Erectopills all the way baby."

"Nice," Jaguar said. "Though given our meager pay grade right now, you might want to scale back those plans a bit."

Alejandro pursed his lips. "Maybe I'll hire nine call-girls instead of ten."

Jaguar slapped him on the leg. "That's the spirit bro. Though one question remains: Human, or robot?"

"Robot obviously, man. Only the best for me."

Jaguar smiled reminiscently. "There's something to be said about a real woman, though."

"Hey, if you want disease and inexperience, then you rent human. If you want mind-blowing pleasure, you rent robot. Besides, no lives are destroyed when you go robot. It's the safest way to play."

Jaguar shrugged. "I guess it's all the same, when you rent." The disapproval was obvious in his tone, but he didn't say anything more. He glanced at me. "What about you, Rade? What are you going to do to celebrate?"

I frowned. "I don't know. I never really thought about it."

"What do you mean you never thought about it? Graduating is all the rest of us can think about."

I sighed. "Well, I guess I'll take a hot shower, have a nice bottle of wine, read a book. Just relax, really."

"That it?" Jaguar glanced at Alejandro. "He for real? No girls, no partying, just... a
shower and reading a book?"

I put my elbow on the table and rested my chin in my palm. "Well, there's a certain girl from Basic I'm looking to get back in touch with. Maybe if things work out—"

"Basic?" He cut me off. "Sheesh. How'd you ever find time to bang a girl in Basic?"

"Let's just say things got a little out of control after graduation, during weekend liberty."

Jaguar finished his bottle and gave me a knowing smile. "Don't they always."

I glanced at Tahoe. "You've been pretty quiet Tahoe."

"Mmm?" he said distractedly, still behind his aReal. "I said something already."

"Are you doing astrophysics crossword puzzles again?"

Tahoe shook his head.

"Come on, take those off and actually spend some time with the people you're spending time with." I reached forward to snatch the aReal from his face, but he swatted my hand away.

Behind those lenses, his eyes finally focused on me. "I'm chatting with my wife, Rade. My child was born today. It's a girl. We named her
Aniidastehdo
. It means, Fresh Start."

"Congratu-freaking-lations! " I stood up and high-fived him. "That's awesome news."

He got high-fives and fist-bumps all around.

"When are you going to haul your wife and kid up here?"

"I've been talking with Chief Adams," Tahoe said. "He says once I graduate he'll arrange a residency for them both."

"That's fantastic news." I sat back and took a long quaff of my beer. "That's the great thing about the Navy. Everyone looks out for everyone else. No matter the rank, or pay grade. Everyone counts." I surveyed the men here with me in this room. My brothers. "We're almost on the Teams. Phase Four secured. I can't believe it. I never thought I'd see the day. I'm going to miss you guys." I was focusing on Tahoe and Alejandro.

"Maybe we'll be assigned to the same Team," Alejandro suggested.

I shrugged, trying to pretend it didn't matter, when it meant the world to me. "You never know."

Alejandro saw right through me. "To the end," he said, raising his bottle.

Tahoe raised his as well. "To the end."

I raised mine.

"You guys made some kind of pact in First Phase, didn't you?" This was from Costa, a kid from southern Sicily. He looked a little nerdy with those buckteeth of his, but he was the second best sharpshooter in the class after me.

"We did." I glanced at Costa. "A pact to see our training through no matter what. To overcome everything the instructors threw at us. But if you think about it, everyone in this room made that same pact, with himself. We're all here after all. We all made it."

Jaguar set down his bottle, a little too hard. He was looking at me with a sad expression. I was about to ask him what was wrong when he spoke.

"Not all of us made it," he said. "I wish Branco were here."

"We all do, Jag." I rested a hand on his knee.

He shoved my hand away and pretended (I thought) to be offended. "Don't go gay on me now, like Instructor Piker."

I smiled sadly. "You can try to hide the hurt but it won't work on us. We're too close to you. We all miss him, Jag. Branco was a good man. The best of us. Braver than all of us combined."

"I can't believe he's dead," Jaguar said.

Tahoe set his beer aside. "You know, my ancestors believed that when a man died in battle his spirit rose to the heavens and took its rightful place among the stars. They believed that every star in the sky was the spirit of a warrior."

"Is that what you believe?" I said.

"Hell no." Tahoe took off his aReal. "The stars are massive thermonuclear
ovens powered by their own gravity. As much as I hate to say it, Branco's gone, and he ain't coming back."

"Way to go and spoil your own platitude, bro," Alejandro punched Tahoe in the upper arm.

"It wasn't a platitude," Tahoe said. "Listen. Branco didn't die for nothing. Don't you forget that, Jaguar. Don't any of you forget that. He taught us the true meaning of courage."

I stared at my beer bottle, not really seeing it. "Branco taught us courage, that's true, but I think your ancestors had it right, Tahoe. There is a place up in the sky for everyone who dies with courage, fighting the good fight. Warriors, true warriors, get their own stars."

* * *

I tried to arrange a meet-up with Shaw, but she was out in space doing landings on Shack, so I spent the rest of my liberty hanging out on the streets of New Coronado. I was pretty used to the cleanliness and lawfulness of UC cities by now, the profusion of robots and the paucity of guns.
Still, it was a strange feeling walking around the city, knowing that I had attained something that 99.99% of the population would never attain. That I was superior, somehow.

Yeah, superior.

It was all too easy to get caught up in my own bullshit. I got in a few fights with members of other military branches. I won of course, but got hurt pretty good once or twice, and that was humbling. I guess I was just restless. I needed to resume my training. I was turning into a warrior and fighting was becoming second nature to me. I'd never been this way when I was a Dissuader. All that PT must have boosted my serum testosterone levels through the roof. Or maybe the instructors were just feeding us steroids.

Liberty finally came to an end. I got back to base and the post-BSD/M craziness began.

We got our Implants the first day—at this point, the military considered us at low risk of failure or dropping on request, so the Brass could justify the expense of implanting us with aReals. In combat, if the jumpsuit's aReal failed for whatever reason and you lost contact with your platoon (not to mention all the other tactical benefits the augmented reality display provided) then you were basically out of the battle. By putting the aReal into our heads the military had direct access to the Brodmann areas responsible for the visual and auditory cortex. There was still a chance the Implant might fail, but having both the jumpsuit aReal and the Implant break down at the same time was considered an unrealistic probability.

These weren't the ordinary Implants that civilians got either. These aReals were military grade, and had the technology to interface with the ATLAS mechs and robotic support troops assigned to each platoon.

I remember when I first woke up after the Implant procedure. All the functionality of an aReal was permanently overlaid onto my vision. The little flashing mail icon on the bottom right. The chat box on the bottom left. The friend stream updates (minimizable) on the top right. I could access each option by focusing on it, just like when I wore an actual aReal.

One difference from a normal aReal I noticed right away was the ability to think many common commands, rather than having to say them out loud or utilize eye movements. After I walked the Implant through a quick thought-training session, which involved thinking the words that flashed over my vision, I could issue commands by merely thinking the words. The most useful command, for me, was "HUD off," which deactivated the overlay entirely. That, and the subvocal communication feature: It was kind of fun to make fun of the instructors and have entire conversations with other students in my head during lessons and PT.