The Year’s Best Military SF & Space Opera (19 page)
Read The Year’s Best Military SF & Space Opera Online
Authors: David Afsharirad
She’s less coltish down here, like she’s got more time for every motion, like she’s set aside her haste. “Hey,” Laporte says, pressing her luck. “When I transferred in. You were—in a tough place.”
Simms holds up a hand to ward her off. “You can see the ships,” she says.
Mars is a little world with a close horizon and when she looks up Laporte feels like she’s going to lose her balance and fall right off, out past Phobos, into a waiting wolfpack, into the Eos dawnbringers from
over the horizon.
She takes a step closer to Simms, towards the stanchion that keeps her down.
High up there some warship’s drive flickers.
“I was pretty sure,” Simms says, “that everyone I knew was going to die, and that I couldn’t stop it. That’s where I was, when you transferred in.”
“And now?” Laporte asks, still watching the star. It’s a lot farther away, a lot safer.
“Jury’s out,” Simms says. Laporte’s too skittish to check whether she’s joking. “Look. Moonsrise. You’ve got to tell me a secret.”
“Are you fucking with me?”
“Native guide,” Simms says, rather smugly.
“When I was a kid,” Laporte says, “I had an invisible friend named Ken. He told me I had to watch the ants in the yard go to war, the red ants and the black ones, and that I had to choose one side to win. He said it was the way of things. I got a garden hose and I—I took him really seriously—”
Simms starts cracking up. “You’re a loon,” she chokes. “I’m glad you’re on my side.”
“I wonder what we’ll do after this,” Laporte says.
Simms sobers up. “Don’t think about that. It’ll kill you.”
Laporte listens to the flight data record of that training sortie, the tangle with the Nyx wolfpack, just to warm her hands on that fire, to tremble at the inarticulate beauty of the fight:
“—am spiked, am spiked, music up. Bandit my seven high, fifteen hundred, aspect attack.”
“Lead supporting.”
The record is full of warbling alarms, the voices of a ship trying to articulate every kind of danger.
“Anchor your turn at, uh—fuck it, just break low, break low. Padlocking—”
“Kill him, boss—”
“
Guns.”
A low, smooth exhalation, Simms breathing out on the trigger.
“Guns.”
“Nice. Good kill. Bandit your nine low—break left—”
Everything’s so clear. So true. Flying with Simms, there’s no confusion.
They respond to a distress call from a civilian vessel suffering catastrophic reactor failure.
Indus
jumps on-scene to find an Alliance corvette,
Arethusa,
already providing aid to the civilian. Both sides launch fighters, slam down curtains of jamming over long-range communications, and prepare to attack.
But neither of them has enough gear to save the civilian ship—the colonists don’t have the medical suite for all her casualties;
Indus
can’t provide enough gear to stabilize her reactor. Captain Sorensen negotiates a truce with the
Arethusa
’s commander.
Laporte circles
Indus,
flying wary patrol, her fingers on the master arm switch. Some of the other pilots talk to the colonists on GUARD. They talk back, their accents skewed by fifty years of linguistic drift, their humanity still plain. One of the enemy pilots, callsign Anansi, asks for her by name: there’s a bounty on her head, an Enemy Ace Incentive, and smartass Anansi wants to talk to her and live to tell. She mutes the channel.
When she stops and thinks about it, she doesn’t really believe this war is necessary. So it’s quit, or—don’t think about it. That’s what Simms taught her: you go in light. You throw away everything about yourself that doesn’t help you kill. Strip down, sharpen up. Weaponize your soul.
Another Federation frigate,
Hesperia,
picks up the distress signal, picks up the jamming, assumes the worst. She has no way to know about the truce. When she jumps in she opens
Arethusa
’s belly with her first salvo and everything goes back to being simple.
Laporte gets Anansi, she’s pretty sure.
Fresh off the
Agincourt
coup, they make a play for the
Carthage
—
Indus, Yangtze,
Altan Orde,
Katana,
and Simms riding herd on three full squadrons. It’s a trap. Steele’s been keeping his favorite piece, the hunter-killer
Imperieuse,
in the back row. She makes a shock jump, spinal guns hungry.
Everyone dies.
The last thing Laporte hears before she makes a crash-landing on
Indus
’ deck is Captain Simms, calling out to Karen Ng, begging her to abandon
Yangtze,
begging her to live. But Karen won’t leave her ship.
Indus
jumps blind, destination unplotted, exit vector unknown. The crash transition wrecks her hangar deck, shatters her escape pods in their mounts.
She falls into light.
So Laporte was wrong, in the end. The death of everyone Simms knew
was
inevitable.
Monsters win.
Laporte stacks her bottlecaps and waits for Simms to offer her a word.
The game is just a way to pass the time. Not real speech, not like the chatter, like the brevity code. Out there they could
talk.
And is that why they’re alive, just the two of them? Even Levi, old hand Levi, came apart at the end, first in his head when he saw the bodies spilling out of
Altan Orde
and then in his cockpit when the guns found him. But Simms and Laporte, they flew each other home. Home to die in this empty searing room with the bolted-down frame chairs and the bottle caps and their cells rotting inside them.
Or maybe it’s just that Simms hated harder than anyone else, hesitated the least. And Laporte, well—she’s never hesitated at all.
“It’s my fault we’re here,” Laporte says, even though it’s not her turn.
“Yeah?” Simms, she’s got red in her eyes, a tremor in her frame.
“If I hadn’t listened to Karen’s note, if I hadn’t done whatever I did to wake you up.” If they’d never met. “Netreba never would’ve picked
Indus
for the task force. We wouldn’t have been at the ambush. Wouldn’t have watched
Imperieuse
kill our friends.”
“All you did was fly my wing,” Simms says. “It’s not your fault.” But she knows exactly what Laporte’s talking about.
Simms picks up a bottle cap and puts it between them. “I’m transferring you to
Eris,
” she says. “Netreba’s flagship. On track for a squadron command.”
“Bullshit.” Because they’re not going to live long enough to transfer anywhere.
Simms wraps the cap up in her shaking hand and draws it back. “I already put the order in,” she says. “Just in case.”
A dosage alarm shrieks and stops: someone from damage control, silencing the obvious. Beams of ionizing radiation piercing the torn armor, arcing through the crew spaces as
Indus
tumbles and falls.
Is this the time to just give up on protocol? To get her boss by the wrists and beg: wait, stop, please, let me explain, let me stay? We’ll make it, rescue will come, we’ll fly again? But she
gets it.
She’s got that Ubuntu empathy bug. She can feel it in Simms, the old break splintering again:
I can’t watch these people die.
Laporte’s the only people she’s got left. So Simms has to send her away.
“Boss,” she says. “You taught me—without you I wouldn’t—”
Killing, it’s like falling into the sun: you’ve got all this compassion, all this goodwill, keeping you in the human orbit. All that civilization that everyone before you worked to build. And somehow you’ve got to lose it all.
Only Laporte never—
“Without me,” Simms says, and she’s got no mercy left in her tongue, “you’d be fine. You’ll
be
fine. You’re a killer. That’s all you need—no reasons, no hate. It’s just you.”
She lets her head loll back and exhales hard. The lines of her arched throat kink and smooth.
“Fuck,” she says. “It’s hot.”
Laporte opens her hand. Asking for the cap. She doesn’t have the spit to say:
true.
Captain Simms makes herself comfortable, flat on her back across three chairs. “Your turn,” she says.
“Boss,” Laporte rasps. “Fuck. Excuse me.” She clears her throat. Might as well go for it: it begs to be said. “Boss, I . . . ”
But Simms has gone. She’s asleep, breathing hard. It’s lethargy, the radiation pulling her down. Giving her some peace.
Laporte calls a medical team. While she waits she tries to find a blanket, but Simms seems to prefer an uneasy rest. She breathes a little easier when Laporte touches her shoulder, though, and Laporte thinks about clasping her hand.
But, no, that’s too much.
Federation ships find them. A black-ops frigate, running signals intelligence in deep orbit, picks
Indus
’ distress cries from the solar background. Salvage teams scramble to make her ready for one last jump to salvation.
Laporte’s waiting by her captain’s side when they come for her. The medical team, and the woman with the steel eyes.
“Laporte,” the new woman says. “The
Indus
ace. Came looking for you.”
By instinct and inclination Laporte stands to shield her captain from the gray-clad woman, from her absent insignia and hidden rank. She can’t figure out a graceful way to drop the bottle cap, so she just holds it like a switch for some hidden explosive, for the grief that wants to get out any way it can. “I need to stay with my squadron leader,” she says.
“If I’m reading this order right,” Steel Eyes says, though she’s got no paper or tablet and the light on her iris makes little crawling signs, “she’s shipping you out.” She opens a glove in invitation. “I’m with Federation wetwork. Elite of the elite. I’m recruiting pilots for ugly jobs.”
Laporte hesitates. She wants to stay, wants it like nothing she knows how to tell. But Steel Eyes stares her down and her gaze cuts deep. “I know you like you wouldn’t begin to believe,” she says. “I watched you learn what you are. We don’t have many of your kind left here in Sol. We made ourselves too good. And it’s killing us.”
“Please,” Laporte croaks. “I can’t leave her.”
The woman from the eclipse depths of Federation intelligence extends her open hand. A gesture of compassion, though she’s wearing tactical gloves. “What do you think happens if you stay? You’re not going to stop changing, Noemi. You’re never going back to humanity.”
She sighs a little, not a hesitation, maybe an apology. “This woman, here, this loyalty you have. You’re going to be an alien to her.”
Laporte doesn’t know how to argue with that. Doesn’t know how to speak her defiance. Maybe because Steel Eyes is right.
“Ubuntu,” the woman says, “is a philosophy of human development. We have a use for everyone. Even, in times like these, for us monsters.”
What’s she got left? What the fuck else is there? She gave it all up to become a better killer. Humanity’s just dead weight on her trigger.
Nothing but Simms and wreckage in the poison sunlight.
“You know we’re losing,” Steel Eyes says. “You know we need you.”
Ah. That’s it. The thing she’s been trying to say:
Monsters kill because they like it, and that’s all Laporte had. Until this new thing, this fragile human thing, until Simms.
Something worth fighting for. A small, stupid, precious reason.
Laporte gets down on her knees. Puts herself as close to the salt sand cap of Simms’ hair as she’s ever been. Says it, the best way she knows, promising her, promising herself:
“Boss,” she whispers. “Hey. I’ll see you when we win.”
For Darius and the Blue Planet crew.
LIGHT AND SHADOW
by Linda Nagata
The skullcaps kept emotion at bay—anger, fear, hate. They kept the mind cold and calculating. A boon on the battlefield, a way to stay sane.
LIEUTENANT DANI REID
was serving her turn on watch inside Fort Zana’s Tactical Operations Center. She scanned the TOC’s monitors and their rotating displays of real-time surveillance data. All was quiet. Even the goats that usually grazed outside the walls had retreated, taking refuge from the noon sun in a grove of spindly thorn trees.
The temperature outside was a steamy 39°C, but within the fort’s prefabricated, insulated walls, the air was cool enough that Reid kept the jacket of her brown-camo combat uniform buttoned up per regulation. The skullcap she wore was part of the uniform. Made like an athletic skullcap, it covered her forehead and clung skin-tight against her hairless scalp. Fine wires woven through its silky brown fabric were in constant dialog with the workings of her mind.
On watch, the skullcap kept her alert, just slightly on edge, immune to the mesmerizing hum of electronics and the soothing whisper of air circulating through the vents—white noise that retreated into subliminal volumes when confronted by a louder sound: a rustle of movement in the hallway.
Private First Class Landon Phan leaned in the doorway of the TOC.
Phan was just twenty-one, slender and wiry. Beneath the brim of his skullcap, his eyebrows angled in an annoyed scowl. “LT? You should go check on Sakai.”
“Why? What’s up?”
“Ma’am, you need to see it yourself.”
Phan had been part of Reid’s linked combat squad for nine months. He’d done well in the LCS; he’d earned Reid’s trust. She didn’t feel the same about Sakai.
“Okay. You take the watch.”
Light spilling from the TOC was the only illumination in the hallway. The bunkroom was even darker. Reid couldn’t see anything inside, but she could hear the fast, shallow, ragged breathing of a soldier in trouble, skirting the edge of panic. She slapped on the hall light.
Specialist Caroline Sakai was revealed, coiled in a bottom bunk, her trembling fists clenched against her chin, her eyes squeezed shut. She wore a T-shirt, shorts, and socks, but she wasn’t wearing a skullcap. The pale skin of her hairless scalp gleamed in the refracted light.
“What the hell?” Reid whispered, crossing the room to crouch beside the bunk. “Sakai? What happened?”
Sakai’s eyes popped open. She jerked back against the wall, glaring as if she’d never seen Reid before.
“What the hell?” Reid repeated.
Sakai’s gaze cut sideways. She bit her lip. Then, in an uncharacter-istically husky voice, she confessed, “I think . . . I was having a nightmare.”
“No shit! What did you expect?”
She seemed honestly confused. “Ma’am?”
“Where the hell is your skullcap?”
Sakai caught on; her expression hardened. “In my locker, ma’am.”
The microwire net in Reid’s skullcap detected her consternation and responded to it by signaling the tiny beads strewn throughout her brain tissue to stimulate a counteracting cerebral cocktail that helped her think calmly, logically, as this conversation veered into dangerous territory.
The skullcap was standard equipment in a linked combat squad. It guarded and guided a soldier’s emotional state, keeping moods balanced and minds honed. It was so essential to the job that, on deployment, LCS soldiers were allowed to wear it at all times, waking or sleeping. And they did wear it. All of them did. Always.
But they were not required to wear it, not during off-duty hours.
The hallway light picked out a few pale freckles on Sakai’s cheeks and the multiple, empty piercings in her earlobes. It tangled in her black, unkempt eyebrows and glinted in her glassy brown eyes. “You want the nightmares?” Reid asked, revolted by Sakai’s choice.
“Of course not, ma’am.”
Use of the skullcap was tangled up in issues of mental health and self-determination, so regulations existed to protect a soldier’s right of choice. Reid could not order Sakai to wear it when she was off-duty; she could not even ask Sakai why she chose to go without it. So she approached the issue sideways. “Something you need to talk about, soldier?”
“No, ma’am,” Sakai said in a flat voice. “I’m fine.”
Reid nodded, because there was nothing else she could do. “Get some sleep, then. Nightmares aren’t going to excuse you from patrol.”
She returned to the TOC, where Phan was waiting. “When did this start?”
“Yesterday,” he answered cautiously.
Even Phan knew this wasn’t a subject they could discuss.
“Get some sleep,” she told him. “Use earplugs if you have to.”
When he’d gone, Reid considered reporting the issue to Guidance . . . but she knew what Guidance would say. So long as Sakai performed her duties in an acceptable manner, she was within her rights to forego the skullcap during off-duty hours, no matter how much it disturbed the rest of the squad.
What the hell was Sakai trying to prove?
Reid ran her palms across the silky fabric of her skullcap. Then, as if on a dare, she slipped her fingertips under its brim and took it off.
A cold draft kissed her bare scalp and made her shiver.
Her pulse picked up as fear unfolded around her heart.
You’re psyching yourself out.
Probably.
She studied the skullcap, turning it over, feeling the hair-thin microwires embedded in the smooth brown cloth.
No big deal, really, to go without it. It was only out of habit that she wore it all the time.
The hum of electronics within the TOC grew a little louder, a little closer, and then, with no further warning, Reid found herself caught up in a quiet fury. Sakai had always been the squad’s problem child. Not in the performance of her duty—if that had been an issue, Reid would have been all over her. It was Sakai’s personality. She didn’t mesh. Distant, uncommunicative, her emotions locked away. A loner. Seven months at Fort Zana had not changed her status as an outsider.
Reid’s emotions were closer to the surface: she didn’t like Sakai; didn’t like her effect on the squad. There needed to be trust between her soldiers, but none of them really trusted Sakai and no one wanted to partner with her. No one believed she would truly have their back if things went hard south. Reid saw it in the field when her soldiers hesitated, thought twice, allowed a few seconds to pass in doubt. Someday those few seconds would be the last measure of a life.
Reid clenched the skullcap.
Fuck Sakai anyway.
Ducking her head, she slipped the cap back on, pressing it close to her scalp. Within seconds, her racing heart slowed. Her anger grew cold and thoughtful.
Sakai thought she could get by without her skullcap. Maybe she wanted to prove she had more mettle than the rest of them, but it wouldn’t last. It couldn’t. “You’ll give it up,” Reid whispered. “By this time tomorrow, you’ll be back in the fold.”
Reid finished her watch and went back to sleep, waking at 1900. She laced on her boots, then tromped next door to the TOC, where Private First Class David Wicks was on duty.
“Anything?” she asked.
“No, ma’am. No alerts at all from Command.” He flashed a shy smile. “But my niece had her first-birthday party today.” He pulled up a window with his email, and Reid got to watch a short video of a smiling one-year-old in a pretty blue dress.
“Your sister doing okay now?”
“Yeah, she’s good.”
Wicks sent money to his sister. It was a big part of why he’d signed up.
In the kitchen, Reid microwaved a meal, then joined Sergeant Juarez at the table. “Command thinks we’ve got a quiet night.”
Juarez was no taller than Reid, but he carried fifty extra pounds of muscle. He’d been army for seven years, and Reid was sure he’d be in for twenty if he could pull it off. “You ever notice,” he drawled, “how the patrol gets interesting every time Command says there’s nothing going on?”
“Just means we’re good at finding trouble.”
Phan reeled in, with Private First Class Mila Faraci a step behind him. “How’s it look tonight, LT?” Faraci asked.
“Quiet so far.”
“That’s what I like to hear.”
Juarez finished eating. He got up just as Sakai came in the door wearing a fresh uniform, her cheeks still flushed from a hot shower and her head freshly denuded of hair, leaving her scalp smooth and pale under the ceiling lights with no skullcap to hide it. Phan and Faraci were waiting together by the two humming microwaves. Phan glared. Faraci looked shocked. “I thought you were shitting me,” she murmured.
Sakai ignored everyone. She opened the freezer and pulled out a meal packet while Reid traded a look with Juarez.
“What the hell is with you, Sakai?” Faraci demanded.
“Faraci,” Juarez growled, “you got a problem?”
Faraci was strong, tall, tough, and full of swagger, but she took care never to cross Juarez. “No, Sergeant.”
Reid got up, dumped her meal packet, and left. Juarez followed her to her quarters, where there was barely enough room for the two of them to stand without breathing each other’s air.
“What the hell?” he demanded.
“You know I can’t ask. She hasn’t said anything to you?”
“She doesn’t talk to me or anybody. It’s been worse since she got back from leave.”
Skullcaps got turned in before a soldier went on leave. It was a harsh transition, learning to live without it. But taking it up again after your twenty-one days—that was easy. No one ever had a problem with that.
“She’s just annoyed at being back,” Reid decided. “If there was a real issue, Guidance would know. They would address it. Meantime, make sure our other noble warriors don’t get in her face. I don’t want to bust the kids when Sakai is the loose cannon.”
“You got it, LT.”
“This won’t last,” Reid assured him. “You’ll see. She’ll give this up tomorrow.”
Reid was wrong.
Sakai wore the skullcap during the nightly patrols as she was required to do, but for three days running she took the cap off as soon as she hit the showers, and it didn’t go on again until they rigged up for the next patrol. This generated its own problem: Sakai couldn’t sleep well without her skullcap. It wouldn’t be long before she was unfit for patrol.
Reid rigged up early for the night’s adventures. Her armored vest went on first. Then she strapped into her “dead sister.” The titanium exoskeleton was made of bone-like struts that paralleled her arms and legs and were linked together by a back frame that supported the weight of her pack. Testing the rig, she crouched and then bobbed up, letting the dead sister’s powered leg struts do the work of lifting her body weight. The exoskeleton made it easy to walk for hours, to run, to jump, to kick and hit, and to support the weight of her tactical rifle, an MCL1a with muzzle-mounted cams and AI integration.
The rest of the squad was still prepping when she slung her weapon, tucked her helmet under her arm, and strode out into the small yard enclosed by the fort’s fifteen-foot-high walls.
The night air was heavy with heat and humidity and the scent of mud and blossoms, but the clouds that had brought a late-afternoon shower had dispersed, leaving the sky clear and awash in the light of a rising moon. Reid allowed herself a handful of seconds to take in the night as it was meant to be seen. Then she pulled her helmet on. Seen through her visor, the yard brightened with the green, alien glow of night vision while icons mustered across the bottom of the display, one for every soldier wearing a skullcap: Juarez, Faraci, Phan, and Wicks.
A familiar voice spoke through Reid’s helmet audio: “You’re early tonight.”
She smiled, though he couldn’t see it. “So are you. Slow night?”
“Not too bad.”
He was her primary handler from Guidance, codenamed Tyrant, the only name she knew him by. His job was to assist in field operations, overseeing data analysis and relaying communications with Command from his office, five thousand miles away in Charleston. Tyrant had access to the feeds from her helmet cams as well as the display on her visor, and he kept a close eye on all of it. “Where’s Sakai’s icon?” he asked. “You didn’t give her the night off?”
The door opened and, to Reid’s surprise, Sakai stepped through, already rigged in armor and bones, her pack on, her weapon on her shoulder, and her helmet in her gloved hand. But no skullcap.
And without her skullcap, she didn’t appear as an icon on Reid’s display.
“She’s challenging you,” Tyrant murmured, amusement in his voice.
Sakai shot Reid a sideways glance, but if she was looking for a reaction, she was disappointed. Reid’s face was hidden behind the anonymous black shield of her visor.
Sakai turned away, setting her helmet down on a dusty table. Then, like a good girl, she fished her skullcap out of a pocket and put it on.
Her icon popped up on Reid’s display. Reid gazed at it and a menu slid open. She shifted her gaze, selecting “physiology” from the list of options. Her system AI whispered a brief report:
status marginal; brain chemistry indicates insufficient sleep.
But as Sakai’s skullcap went to work, stimulating the chemical factory of her brain, her status ramped up. By the time the squad assembled, Sakai’s condition became nominal, and the AI approved her for the night’s mission.