In the Valley (2 page)

Paul’s advisor group had learned via a rat in the village the night before that the local dissident leader, Commander Mohammed, was going to be home. So the Juneau Army soldiers had moved out for the kill. The entire operation, elegantly simple, resembled nothing so much as a noose tied around the neck of the dissident cell. One rifle company, the First, had circled to the east, and the other, the Second, had circled to the west. Voila—the village was surrounded.

The fight started when a guard dog tipped off the dissidents. A shithead (the team’s earthy name for a dissident) went to investigate and damn near ran into Paul in the pot field by a wall. He opened fire so close by that Paul could swear, over his ringing ears, that he could hear the
clatter clatter clatter
of the bolt working back and forth in the clapped-out receiver of the Kalashnikov rifle.

As firefights go, ordinance began whipping all over the place: shit was flying everywhere; there was mass confusion, chaos, random dismemberment, and death. Laser death rays were still for the future. Hot metal definitely held pride of place in the combat of the twenty-fourth century.

The colonel, Second Company’s guardian angel, had moved with an air-control element to the ridge towering over the unlovely display. He pinged Paul’s halo and got, through Paul’s optic nerves and brain waves, a visual on his predicament. Bashir wanted to kill Paul’s two living prisoners. He wanted it bad. Paul’s duty was to stop him; the prisoners had to make it long enough to be interrogated by the provincial police.

Shooting the two prisoners out of hand would have secretly delighted Paul. After all, not one hour prior, in the shock and fury of the assault, one of these shitheads had tried to take Paul’s head off with a close-range burst from his crappy AK-47 clone while screaming his god’s name. Paul had responded with
a burst from his M-74 and was fairly sure he had clipped the bastard. If he felt like it, he could review the exact moment on his halo and confirm the hit, but—fuck it—he couldn’t bear to see it.

Strange that a thoroughly trained soldier, well within his rights, could feel a drenching shame at the thought of the lives he had just helped extinguish. But it was so.

What he was seeing right now (his medic, “Z-man,” working like a fury to save the two wounded dissidents) was bad enough—let alone rewatching, with diamond-sharp halo clarity, that fateful instant. A man had dropped under the red chevron of his aiming display when he pulled the trigger. He didn’t need a halo replay to see the moment. His mind, and not the halo, supplied the vision.

The wounded men were shaking like leaves, their life’s blood poured upon the ground. From the distant wall, the children’s shrieks grew painful. Close by, the men with the ragged holes begged for their lives.

Funny that he and his medic had been trading fire with these knuckleheads, and now Z-man was racing the clock to save a couple of them. If only Paul could clear his head. The keening from these fuckers pushed away all thought like a white-noise brain-sucker machine.

“Z, stick that fucker you’re working on with some happy juice. I don’t give a fuck how, but shut them up.” Maybe Paul’s order, delivered flatly, would help the situation, would help to clear his head.

He and Z-man, a laid-back, kindly medic from Detroit, were the only forces in the village. Everything else was a local operation, from the dissidents that died to the Juneau Army soldiers that killed. It was classic counterinsurgency, hundreds of light years from Old Earth, using classic tools.

Mikhail Kalashnikov would have been astounded if he could have known that his tool, forged in the Second World War on Old Earth, would have proved
to be the favorite choice for settlers in humanity’s diaspora. Nearly four hundred years later, untold billions had been produced. Like a hoe or a hammer, Kalashnikov’s automatic worked.

Paul shook his head. He looked dead in Bashir’s eyes and said, “These prisoners are under my care, custody, and control. You will not kill them.” Bashir’s prominent eyebrows came together; his swarthy face paled. This battlefield confrontation was not on Paul’s to-do list for the day, but here it was. What made the brewing argument harder was that he could see where Bashir was coming from, in spades.

The dissidents were bad juju. They had killed, blown up, and generally terrorized this valley for years. They were nihilists who delighted in death and destruction. They followed many beliefs: neocommunism, fascism, jihad—you name the poisonous idea from Old Earth’s deep well of bad ideas. All dissidents had one trait in common however. They wanted to cut Earth’s apron strings, to be free to screw up new worlds without Earth’s ideals (or jaded, decadent paternalism, depending on your point of view). The forces existed to stop the dissidents and to provide for a common defense against all threats, even the pie-in-the-sky threat of intelligent-life contact.

The sharp end of the force, as in all armies, was the infantry, armored or not. And the tool of the force infantry was the armored suit and the mil-grade halos that linked the line troopers. Right now, the colonel was watching the brewing confrontation between Paul and Bashir while cocooned in his suit on the ridge, and he was not pleased.

The colonel spoke through Paul’s halo. “Get Bashir’s men to stop looting and let the provincial police into the village. And keep those prisoners alive until the PP takes them into custody.” He was pissed; Paul could tell. He could almost feel the bad vibes through the contact plate in his helmet.

It was time to tell Bashir how it was going to be—Bashir couldn’t hear the colonel, of course. The halo in Paul’s helmet transmitted the colonel’s voice directly into his brain through the contact mounted in the cushioning pad on
his head. In an earlier era, they had locked people up for hearing voices in their heads. Now, the halo made hearing the disconnected voices of others routine.

If desired, the halo could bring up a visual of the colonel, a chemical analysis of the stench coming from the burning man/bush combination two meters away, or Z-man’s vitals and exact coordinates. But Paul didn’t need the visual distractions now—he had a pissed off extraterrestrial Pashtun on his hands and two still-living prisoners to protect.

Paul looked directly at Bashir. Something electric passed between them, not electric as in here come the fiddles and wine, but electric as in grabbing ahold of a cattle fence. “Bashir, you need to get your men under control and stop pissing around in the village. I will deal with these wounded men here.” Paul’s tone was flat and brooked no argument. Bashir just looked at Paul as if he was something to clean off of his knife. His face was as pale as a china cup.

It was another day in the forces. Paul was a long way from the stars that had shown over his cradle, his mother, and her lullabies.

H
opefield, Ohio, was a good place to grow up. Crime was low, as it was everywhere in the federation. The restless youth signed up to go off-world as either settlers, soldiers, or sailors. There wasn’t much cause for those that remained to go around kicking up fusses. The people who remained generally had it good. Conversely, some who remained didn’t have the ambition to tie their own shoes. There was no financial impediment to getting on a ship, what with the indenture clause and all.

Earth had known relative peace for centuries, ever since humanity could dump its teeming population into the stars. Of course, it had helped that the almost third world war in the 2040s had collectively scared the pants off of everyone. Nothing like watching most of the Middle East and a couple of other places dissolve into nuclear fire to wake up everyone else. The brief war had been “pour encourager les autres” on a global scale.

Hopefield had weathered it all, from the American Civil War to the Glimmer drive and beyond. There was one main street, State Route 151, and old Highway 22 passed through on the north side. Along ancient 151’s permapave were a few stores providing nothing much and a cemetery. There were the rotted remains of a railroad trestle, willow trees, and numerous gardens.

In the ancient two-story, white clapboard farmhouse that Paul had been born and grown up in, nights were still, and the days were long. If one listened
very carefully, you could even hear the whisper of ground-cars as they sped down the two lanes that crossed in front of his house.

His childhood had consisted primarily of caring for the family’s goats and going to school. Sometimes Paul and his childhood friends would walk to the swamp and catch frogs. On a really big day, they’d haul a snapping turtle out of the bog and poke it with sticks.

Paul had a large extended family, with an uncle in Rio who dealt in solar applications and a cousin in Los Angeles who worked on cloud support. His father sold niche goat products and serviced drones in Wintersville, a nearby town, for a living.

In other words, Paul was the typical product of rural Northern Pan-America. He was ethnically mixed, patriotic, mildly religious, and eager to go someplace else. That morning, eighteen years before he met Bashir, he heard “the call.” At the time, though, he would have called it something else—“the disaster.”

There was nothing different about the day. He woke up in his room, a three-meter-by-three-meter cube set on the top floor of his ancestral house. He yawned, rolled over, and smote his alarm clock. It shut up with an indignant squawk. Dumb artificial intelligences like his clock were still smart enough to hate rough treatment. He kicked out of bed and went to the bathroom; splashing water in his face always finished the job of waking up.

He returned to his room and made the bed. It was a Thursday, and from time out of mind, that meant school for a minor male like Paul. So he put on his student halo and walked downstairs. As the icons in the upper left of his vision told him, his father was at work; his mom was out with the goats; his sister, Mary, had him blocked; and the ground-bus that would take him to Harrison Hills High was 21.5 minutes out. Also, he needed to complete his calculus homework, and graduation was three months away. With a gesture of his left hand, he clicked each icon away. He knew what he needed to know.

So he poured himself a tall glass of goat milk and kicked back. It was too early to ping Rhoda, even though he wanted to. He couldn’t stop thinking about her, and he wasn’t sure if it was love or simple lust. If he asked his halo, it probably would have given him a short and earthy reply, but he really wasn’t going to pose a question to it that would be viewable by his parents. Student halos were amazing, but they did have their shortcomings, and his parent’s access to his queries was one of them.

The bus was two minutes out. He left the house. With a sigh, the tired, old ground-bus came to a halt in front of his place. Paul stepped on and grabbed a seat, buckling in, as he had done since his fifth birthday. With a mild shudder, the bus accelerated. Paul looked out the window at his town and the rolling hills and promptly fell asleep.

His halo woke him up with a ping as the bus approached Harrison Hills High.

Earlier generations would have thought Harrison Hills was a barren, sparse brick-and-Plastlar box filled with chairs and a cafeteria and little else. There were no signs, menus, cheesy educational slogans—nothing. There were just the classrooms, the principal’s office (with the M-74 on hooks above his desk), and an athletic field. Students weren’t authorized ground-cars, either, so there wasn’t the crowded parking lot that had been familiar to earlier generations.

The Harrison Hills School District, in one form and location or another, had been educating students for over four hundred years. These days, over half the students would end up in the spreading human diaspora, tens or hundreds of light-years away. Generally, it was a one-way trip—like the trip to the stars had been for his uncle Jack, his father’s brother.

When Paul got off the ground-bus at the school, his visual icons lit up. He liked to keep them neatly arranged in rows on his left. He clicked off the majority of them, except for Ms. Janowski’s, his calculus teacher. With her he would have to buy time. He saw the latest slogan on the side of the school in neon blue:
GO HILLS BEAT CREEK
. The slogan referred to the coming football
game with a neighboring district—but if you didn’t have a halo, you’d just see a bare wall.

Thanks to the headband-looking doodad he had known since his second year, his optic nerves, through a link to the device via skin contact, broadcast the lunch menu to him. An icon appeared with his family food chit, and he ordered and paid in the blink of an eye.

He was relieved that his parents had filled up his school lunch account. Usually they were pretty good at that, but sometimes his account showed zero lunch money, and then he would have to go through the bother of putting a query into his mom’s bank account. Distracted by the quick financial transaction, Paul almost ran into Annie Borchard.

She hadn’t noticed him, and her halo broadcast that she was recording, a definite social no-no if you hadn’t asked the people involved. He stepped aside and sent her a frown icon. Startled, she looked at him and went off-line. Nothing needed to be said, and the incident shouldn’t have happened in the first place.