War Stories: New Military Science Fiction

Warhosts ^{Yoon Ha Lee}

THE WARHOSTS SIT IN THE lees of the starships while the sky grows less flushed with dawn, playing cards. At the same time, the regulators within the Red emissary and our own play their own game across a moist medium of flesh, chemical brew, and stench to determine where the next battle will be fought. We—the Purples—have been fighting the Reds for possession of this moon, jigsaw piece by slow jigsaw piece, as deliberately as a pavane or carved ice. The Reds have grown increasingly desperate. The moon has a certain strategic importance, and the Reds are very close to having to cede it entirely.

The lone Red negotiator is a two, like all of our own: bipedal, bilaterally symmetric, upright–standing except when it isn’t, with a round head and forward–facing eyes. It sits half in the puddle–brew with its arms awkwardly folded to keep its defensive weapon inserts out of the damp. Slime creeps through the slats in its armor plates, a plaque of particulate silver tendrils forming and unforming against the sores in its skin. Its mouth hangs open and it pants lowly, rapidly. It has no escort, but that’s normal. Across from it, our representative is in similar state—although we design our diplomats with no weapons modifications, only soft open hands and hardened hides and sad, downward–slanting eyes from which pink–tinged water seeps.

Crouching inside the nervous system of one of the watching Warhosts, a scout unit, I recognize the vocalizations that the Red negotiator is making, our diplomat’s rigid posture. Both are expressing pain. It is my task to understand the twos’ cultural peculiarities, a largely ceremonial function nowadays. In the early times, when we were still learning to modify the twos so we could ride them into battle, we understood how to install the puppet strings but not the elegance of the violent ballets that could then arise. The protocols have since been laid out in treaties, in mutual accords of honorable behavior, after we overtook the twos’ civilizations and used their starships to travel outward. It has been a long time since they last changed in response to some rupture of fashion or necessity.

The Warhosts’ game is less subtle than what passes between the negotiator’s and diplomat’s regulators, but I find it quaintly beautiful. Aesthetics is a disease of the obsolete, but it does no harm.

Not all of our Warhosts have hands suitable for gripping. Those that do sit in a circle on the pebbled ground, four of them. The tallest one shuffles cards made of thin plastic.

There are pictures on the cards, because twos like pictures. The pictures have names. Ace of Havoc, with its hooks and hells and disintegrating towers. The Five of Quills, which shows birds chasing each other in an elemental pentagram. The Red Mask and the Purple Mask. The rules do not distinguish between the two, although some Warhosts make one superstitious warding gesture toward one and another toward the other.

The Warhosts play for chips, sometimes pried loose from silicon palaces, sometimes scorched from metal with the corners wrenched up. Blood is occasionally involved, small rituals of scarification, atrocities of tenderness. My scout has a meandering narrative of such scars along its arm and down its back, making shackle shapes to either side of its knobbled spine. It isn’t playing today, because it has too few chips, or perhaps because it is preoccupied by negotiations taking place in a language it can’t access.

(Well. It could have put its hand in the sludge, but all it would have gotten for its trouble was a lingering ugly chemical burn, and maybe some stings from the silver filaments.)

I don’t watch the winners in these games. Rather, I watch the losers. By this I mean that I am a circuit of poison impulses and insectine metal particles interpreting the story funneling through the Warhost’s eye and nerve and brain. The regulators watch, too, but they are less concerned with the twos’ harmless quirks during downtime and more concerned with making sure they are fully battle operational.

The dealer is done shuffling. It deals the cards face–down. Small vortices whirl away from each card as it lands, drawn inexorably to the pool where the diplomat and negotiator are still connected by an integument of ooze. Even the game knows its true masters.

The Warhosts converse among themselves in their language of vibrations. My scout hums to itself. Music is another pastime we don’t regulate.

The cards go around and are revealed to the clink of chips. The Rocketeer, a Warhost with an asymmetrical protective tusk–growth of bone and metal where it had once had half its jaw, wins with a hand of two pair, knights high. Knight of Havoc and Knight of Wheels. The Rocketeer’s mouth pulls down grotesquely as it sweeps the chips toward itself.

I watch as the game winds on. The Rocketeer doesn’t end with the most chips, although everyone counts to be sure, because it’s nearly a tie. In a way, it doesn’t matter. The chips are just a way of passing numbers back and forth, an exchange of pleasantries.

The pool makes a horrible slurping noise, and silver tendrils spider out of it, dividing neatly down the middle like a parade maneuver. Half of them clamber up the frowning Red representative, some dissolving upon contact with the sores so they can be absorbed. Half of them withdraw into our diplomat. They have come to an agreement as to what battle would be fought, although the Red does not appear pleased with the outcome.

Warhosts use their game for augury, to find out who will and won’t be obliged to fight in these contests. Nobody keeps any scientific record of the auguries’ effectiveness, but that isn’t the point. The point is to provide a focus for their anxieties. The Knight of Havoc and Knight of Wheels, for instance: they interpret the cards to mean that there will be a reversal on the battlefield, an upsetting of the usual order; if not this fight, then the next. With such untidy interpretations, it’s difficult ever to be wrong.

The regulators drive my scout (more their scout than mine, naturally) to the pool, where orders linger as a scummy green–silver residue. We step in to the knee, and the knowledge of the orders needles all the way through our pores and up through the body’s strata to the brain: we are among those to fight, cards or no cards.

This is a story the twos tell among themselves, furtively, when the shadows grow long and the wind is a low moan.

Once upon a time, there was a fortress made of polished hegemonies and hierarchical crenellations. In the fortress lived a young woman who dreamt bullet dreams. The fortress came to be under siege; there is not much point in building a fortress if it guards a place that no one cares about attacking, after all. Holes opened in the sky and fire the color of blasphemy rained down. Shells of black dysfunction battered the sloping walls. Thunder, threnody, roses of new blood and newly charred bones.

This is the game the invaders played; this is the maze their weapons made. Each time their weapons hit the fortress, the walls and cracks and crevices shifted and crumpled. People perished inside without ever knowing the names of their killers. None of the far–eyes orbiting overhead and none of the distance–listeners warned the fortress’s commanders. None of them gave any glimpse of what was going on.

But a woman, whose name no one can pronounce anymore, heard the drumming and the damage and the whole unsteady structure of massacre. She had no gun or knife or ammunition. She did, however, know where to run: toward a weapon and not toward safety. Safety didn’t exist except as the jaws to something worse, anyway.

Deep in the bowels of the fortress were weapons its masters had considered to be fossilized past any usefulness, ancient of years. Among those weapons was a Warhost, armor of sullen metal, itself welded with weapons meant for the ugly business of cutting and shooting and lancing. A two itself in form—bilaterally symmetric except for its own weapons, upright–walking—it was designed to be piloted by a two. And the woman was a two.

The Warhost opened to her not like a flower, or a shell, but like a clangor of silence, layer by layer, swallowing her into anachronistic magnificence. In most of the variants of the story, she promised vengeance for her family. In most of those variants, her family died not years beforehand, of carbon monoxide plague or paranoia tumors or simply falling down the stairs, but during the attack. It’s unlikely that she managed anything more than a scream when she first entered the cockpit, or a shredded exhalation. The Warhost’s designers had no care for forms of expression other than violence.

Although the woman had grown up in a fortress and watched the soldiers at their drill every day since she was a child, this experience had little to do with her mode of fighting. She knew the library of the Warhost’s maneuvers the way she knew how to blink or breathe. It spoke to her at the level of dreams. She arrowed her way out of the fortress’s debris and its shredded histories, and flew (the accounts are clear that she flew, improbable as it sounds) a trajectory toward the invaders’ cloudship. Like a hammer she yearned for the hearts of her enemies.

The cloud soldiers had no intention of letting this interloper get close enough to spoil their victory. It wasn’t that they mistook her sensor signature for that of one of their laggard units, or that their general was unconscionably slow in ending her dinner of confits and candied fruits with one of her lovers, or that there was a critical failure in the missile launch system at the wrong time. No: all their defenses evaporated like soft mist before the woman’s onslaught.

The remarkable thing about this story is not the fortress, or the Warhost, or the woman’s luck, for all that it’s rare that amateurs show that kind of spontaneous ability. The remarkable thing is that the twos, with their primitive, self–defeating societies, their tendency to gnaw each other red given the smallest opportunity for mutual backstabbing, conceived of themselves as the riders and not the ridden.

It’s not about diagnosis. We know the syndrome.

Twos are architectural creatures. They build compulsively, even in childhood. Teetering cabins of twigs, mounds of wet sand with fingermarks pressed into their sides, piles of dice and houses of cards. From there they progress to sky–kissing arcologies and ships that knife the sea and bridges lanterned day and night by falcon trains. Even from the placid black sky, beyond the atmosphere’s scarf, you can see the glowing spider–tracks of their cities.

This is missing half the story. Twos also build in the opposite direction. Instead of building ever larger, they also build ever smaller. We don’t think they realized early enough what this would lead to.

We didn’t learn to build ever smaller from them, although certainly there are scales ever smaller to explore. Fault the twos for other things. From them we learned to build ever larger.

We alter their inner cavities and install dart launchers, change their tolerances for heat, weave into their flesh circulatory systems that carry pale coolant. With access to certain minerals and metals, we can cause them to grow weapon excrescences from their hands and out of their bones, knife spurs and gun fists; fill the aching magazines with copious ammunition. If they cannot see far enough, or near enough, or into the correct part of the electromagnetic spectrum, we alter their eyes cell by cell until they match our specifications.

Not that this comes without price. The resulting chemical brews have to be managed by the regulators. The twos thus modified walk around with stinking open sores for easy access; we have to concoct medications to manage the risk of infection. Sometimes their arms or legs split from the strain, bone giving way to pulped marrow; or metal shreds its way out of muscle and ligament; or their eyes bleed black from the corners.

Nevertheless, the modified twos are our Warhosts and our weapons of choice. In this time and place, this is the honorable way to face our opponents.

The twos, who inadvertently taught us their folktales of knights and heroic Warhost pilots, would understand that much if we ever asked them, but the regulators have limited interest in old stories. Even if there were some way of spanning the difference in scale and outlook, I would know better than to bring the topic up anyway.

The Reds and Purples are to fight in teams this time. Theirs has five Warhosts, ours eight, in concession to the fact that we have chosen to field more lightly armed units.

I am no strategist, no interpreter of maps or maker of plans. Other intelligences in the network of regulators are responsible for determining where we are to deploy, or why this ridge offers better protection than the other one, or how we are to equip ourselves for a land of black–green swamp. For instance, there is a great deal of concern about footwear. The twos have delicate feet, prone to rotting, and the water here is not just water, but exhales corrosive vapors that degrade the protective hide we have them grow. We could improve their feet, but the twos can only endure so many modifications, and the weapons modifications usually take priority. However, we have a reasonable supply of twos for future battles.

Today, I observe as our eight drill together. My host is a veteran unit that will keep fighting until its internals rupture or its lungs are scorched gray–white. It has been the team leader’s second for the last six matches, and it could have been the leader itself if not for the fact that a cancerous growth, an unintended side effect of the bone plates meant to shield its throat, destroyed its voice.

The first engagements between teams of Warhosts were, according to our historians, ugly and botched. The twos have a certain understanding of coordination, but they require a great deal of explicit drill for this to manifest. In all fairness, our networks, too, require training to react as we desire them to. It’s ironic that the twos programmed these methods into us so we could tunnel into them and make better use of their bodies.

For a long time, the Reds and Purples fought in one–on–one duels. During those matches, we tested combinations of weapons as scientifically as we could. We shifted to team fights not because the one–on–one duels were inadequate for the purpose, but because of a change in fashion. We had tired of the duels and desired a new challenge. The change took place practically overnight, the consensus propagated from world to world.

The eight Warhosts are now marching in drummers’ unison. The leader must already be in pain, because some of the torso armor growths are bleeding around the edges, but it makes no noise. The regulators will be compensating by inducing a flood of painkillers. In times past, I have been involved in similar control measures and repair work. It’s a welcome art, the regrowth of plated cells and vessels, the rerouting of functions from one damaged implant to a backup system. I miss it sometimes.

The twos tell their own stories of these engagements, necessarily imperfect without the precise recording of internal states. But there is poetry to their war–chants, their riddles, their sardonic ballads. Some of their accounts exaggerate the achievements of one or two flamboyant leaders or, just as likely, a disregarded fighter whose ingenuity turns the situation around. My favorite is the one about the Warhost whose close attention to birds and their songs enabled it to realize that the birdcalls they were hearing were in fact enemy signals. A small part of me was embedded in a bird–scout once, in the very early days before they were banned as being unsporting. The nostalgia is ridiculous, but I cannot help it.

There are other stories. The nations of twos that we recruit from recount tales of bands fighting mythical creatures called dragonmotes. The dragonmotes are exactly what their name implies: serpentines composed of tiny, interlocking component dragonlings, with no internal skeleton and no blood. They are ferocious, and kill with the natural talents of fire and metal conjoined. Naturally, the twos outwit them readily. The symbolism doesn’t need further elucidation.

The Warhosts are too disciplined during training to mutter among themselves, although this is also a matter of the regulators inhibiting unnecessary loquacity. My unit is attentive to the beauty of the swamp: the way the light glistens on the murky water, the brightly spotted amphibians that leap from leaf to leaf, the scaly fliers that spear the amphibians with their long beaks and make harsh cries like scraping rock. The splashing of the water that will slowly destroy their feet, and the footprints invisible beneath.

The hardest part for the Warhosts, because of the twos’ inherent frailty, is when they disperse. They would rather huddle together, even though this makes them more vulnerable to attack. We struggled with this tendency until some regulator hit upon the solution of giving them equipment to communicate with each other (as opposed to the existing communication between regulators in different Warhosts).

The Warhosts’ reverie goes by different names in their various languages. We monitor the connection, although it is not so much a channel for seditious longings as a tangle of symbols given force by unsinewed dreams. In effect, we walk through three spaces simultaneously: the swamp itself; the regulators’ diagrammed plans and topologies of their tactics; and the reverie’s ever–shifting mire.

We lost and won and lost a great many fights, both us and the Reds, before we understood that we had to join combat on all three levels simultaneously, and that leaving one battleground undefended could jeopardize progress in the other two. This is the reason my profession, recording the twos’ whispers and warbles, returned to respectability after years of neglect.

Here is another of the twos’ stories.

Once upon a time, a puppet hatched in the deep fissures of the twos’ castle–womb. The puppet had been shaped in imitation of the fours that roamed the world. This offended the upright general who ruled the castle–womb. He said: We are meant to live for the twos in the world, and die for the twos, the duality of day and night, the binary of the full chalice and the empty hand. Twos were warriors; fours had fallen out of fashion. And he ordered that the puppet be burned.

However, a surgeon of the twos saw in the puppet’s bleak eyes the seedling desire to survive, and she was moved. She bribed the keepers of the castle–womb with drugs terrible and intoxicating, leaving them wrapped in dreams of black, wild skies and flight and planets plunging past, of empires and expiry and armies holding fast, of victories against enemies reduced to ciphers of bodiless eyes. And she gathered up the puppet and took it to her operating room.

The room was the color of purged steel, and the walls and ceiling looked with mirror eyes upon the puppet child. The surgeon broke the puppet child’s limbs, unchambered its joints, and strapped it wailing to a table of polished regrets. Then she began the tedious, necessary, loving work of carving up the child’s ligatures and refastening its strings so that it could be a proper two instead of a four.

No one interrupted the surgeon. There was no reason why anyone should. For one thing, she was highly respected and not regarded as one given to whimsy. For another, no one imagined that she would defy the general’s wishes, even in so small a matter as this. They were not friends, but they had the necessary mutual respect proper to their stations. As for the castle–womb’s keepers, theirs was not a well–regarded job. It was sordid, although not unexpected, that they should suffer lapses from time to time.

The puppet child screamed in the only language it knew, in syllables cleanly articulated and made of angled phonemes. The castle’s inhabitants, inured to the unanesthesized sounds of suffering, took no notice. The surgeon sang a lullaby as she worked, although it could scarcely be heard over the screams.

When she was done, the surgeon left the puppet bound to the table and sent a servant for the general. The general came a scant hour later, leaning heavily upon his war scepter. He looked down at the mutilated child. “What have you done?” he asked softly.

“You are so concerned with the principle of duality,” the surgeon said. “Look. I have given it to you.” She cut the straps with her scalpel, which was sharper than whiplash scorn, darker than hope unborn. “Look.” She struck the puppet once, twice, and it cringed away from the blows.

“I’m watching,” the general said in a voice that suggested that he had his doubts.

She repeated the exercise. This time the puppet stumbled on two legs, not four, crouched and trembling.

“I see,” the general said, and this time his voice said that he did.

“So tell me,” the surgeon said, “is this acceptable?”

The general smiled at her, then, and his smile was like the moon slivering black. “So tell me,” he said, only slightly mocking, “can you do this with other anomalies, or is your surgical expertise limited to puppets?”

Within a scant few generations, nothing moved upon this world that was not a two.

The march to the battleground is long. I listen to the fliers’ rattling cries, to the wind skittering through the branches of the shroudtrees, to the intermittent splash and patter of the rain. Sometimes there are paths built upon the mire, tottering structures of ropy fibers braided together by hands now rotted nameless.

The Warhosts have designations to us, and names among themselves: a subtle distinction. Mine is telling the team leader about the mountain it sees far in the distance, wrapped in swollen purple clouds. As we approach the mountain in the reverie, its peak grows to resemble a dragon’s head.

One of the units murmurs a story of a six–legged dragon, terrible of mien, and the six corpse–riders it bore into battle against the twos. There is no mountain, dragon–headed or otherwise, in the real–world arena. Perhaps it is simply that we are not imaginative enough to see dragons in dragonless spaces.

I am not sure which Warhost originated this nucleus of dragons. There are competing dragon–myths, including the common ones about hostile dragonmotes and the less common ones, older in origin, about benevolent dragon deities, spirits of rain and storm and ocean unchained. Maybe it has to do with the clouds, with the persistent, seething humidity. An incarnation of discomfort.

Today the Warhosts seem neither to regard the dragon–manifestations as trophies to be slain nor as deities to be propitiated. Instead, the hosts are concerned with going unnoticed. I remember another engagement where they believed that they traveled across a slumbering dragon’s spine, and had to drill holes into it, drive spikes into the holes, to keep it from waking and rousing the earth with rocket thunder and mortar fire. That’s not what they’re doing this time.

One of the regulators within this Warhost queries me directly about the reverie, attention I haven’t received in some time. Presumably whatever I say will be conveyed to the rest of the team, so I had better not waste its time. Unfortunately, I have no magic answers. All I can tell it is what I have told myself, recursive riddles, dragons within dragons. I do, however, offer to walk the reverie myself as a two, and it accepts this as distasteful but necessary.

While I put together my reverie–puppet, the Warhost slaps at a whining sound. Its reflexes, already damaged by its current set of modifications, are not good enough. Whatever it tried to slap has escaped. A red welt rises on the back of its right arm. The welt itches, although at least the Warhost doesn’t scratch.

I am bothered by this, even though the twos have a history of being irritable about pests, harmless or otherwise. But the regulators must think it of no consequence, and for my part, I have other matters to attend to.

We have reached the battleground. The Warhosts have been patrolling it in lonely, irregular arcs. It continues to rain in sizzling bursts, never for long, but the clinging moisture makes the host huddle in on itself in wordless misery.

I hear the buzzing of insects. One of the regulators has induced the secretion of a waxy, foul–smelling chemical mixture to ward away the insects and soothe the welts. Some success on the second count, very little on the first. The insects are swift and elusive, night–fliers with a talent for stealth. I’m only surprised there aren’t more of them, given the environment.

The Warhost continues to cringe from the specters of six–dragons. They are everywhere now: cloudshadows stamped waveringly across the dim waters, claw marks across the hunched trees. Dragon silhouettes rearing in the distance, their sibilant voices threading through the breath of evening. Drums to which dragons recite their prophecies in orderly hexameter.

In the reverie, a new story emerges. Dragons eat the world’s subterranean foundations, chewing open rock and fire and root. The holes are small to the point of invisibility, yet they make the world porous, a sponge to absorb the poison influences that filter through the void from other worlds. Little by little, the world will become infused with coagulating radiation until it can no longer sustain life.

The twos are good at numeration when they care to be, but they don’t seem to care that I have joined their number. I have built myself out of scraps of sinew, layering them over a perfect armature of unhollow bones, and covering that with rough brown skin. In form I am more like the Warhosts’ ancestors than they are themselves. This is deliberate: I wish to see as they see, not as we would have them see.

Unfortunately, journeying through the reverie is not so simple as that. I know the movement–patterns of walking, of running, of stumbling through thick mud, but it is another to think as the Warhosts think, no matter how attentively I listen to their legend–weaving.

There’s another problem, which I am faintly aware of as I wrestle with the difficulty of seeing dragons’ whiskered visages in hillsides and dragons’ lantern eyes in foxfire. The Warhosts, for their part, seem entirely unaware of the regulators’ dismay: in all this time we have seen no trace of the enemy.

You expect a third tale of twos. There is no third tale except, perhaps, to the extent that this embedding narrative is it.

Beware the dragons, I tell the regulators. In the reverie, I have acclimated to my two–form. I march with rotting feet, use callused hands to shade my eyes from sunlight glaring from the black waters. I can hear the dragons gnawing punctures into our carefully planned contests.

The regulators seek dragons outside the reverie. Sixes, they say. They have figured it out, but it’s too late for us, although perhaps not for the rest of the Purples.

It’s not that we weren’t warned. It’s that we didn’t understand the warning early enough.

Ten days have passed, and another ten. That is almost certainly because the Reds have decided to change the terms of the fight. We’ve encountered the opposing team, but it took a form that we had not expected, because we assumed that tradition would take care of the details. If only we had understood how desperate the Reds are for this moon—but our comrades upon other worlds will have to compensate for our failure.

The welts and their associated discomfort are no longer the issue. My Warhost has stopped walking. Earlier, the regulators forced it to seek higher ground, toward a shelf of rock away from the waters. Then, before its strength gave out entirely, it built itself a shelter of fabric and fallen shroudtree limbs. It lies there now, shivering, feverish, unresponsive even to our attempts to feed it.

Our communications with the other members of the team, too, are slashed through with riddles of static, increasingly unsolvable.

Five Red Warhosts descend, buzzing and droning their own hexameter riddle. They are sixes, with dark chitin, iridescent and veined with silica–pale patterns. They are much smaller than the twos—the largest is the size of a two’s hand, and the rest are not even that big—and they have wings and curling querulous antennae. They settle on my Warhost’s exposed, ulcerated skin. Their weight is almost imperceptible, a caress of tiny shuddering feet.

The Warhost is already dying of the toxins generated by the sixes’ bites. Now the Reds with their new mounts are injecting motes of disease, some of which are able to disrupt our own functioning. Some of them have extended ovipositors heavy with eggs, whose young will no doubt chew the Warhost’s carcass into a blossoming of the sixes’ larvae. The regulators are attempting to build a chemical bridge of surrender so they can renegotiate the battle. But it’s too late for this host.

We have lost this moon, although there will be other moons. I record the defeat as it takes place. As the sixes transfix me in the reverie, I wonder what folktale the history will be maimed into after I am gone.

Suits James L. Sutter

YOU’D THINK THAT THE MOST advanced ground weapons systems in service would be able to handle a little mold. Yet down inside each two–ton suit’s armored limbs, running through the reinforced joints and tucked behind hardened sensors and ammunition cradles, there were still some rubber gaskets, synthetic hoses, and casings that the spores could root in. Give it a few days, and the mold on Medupe Minor would eat the legs right out from under a combat suit.

I stepped back out of the bay and triggered the rinse. From behind the clear plastic splash–shield, I watched as the acid shower poured down over the suit’s surface in blue–white rivulets, coursing around barrels and weapon blisters and infiltrating cracks where even a tech’s tools were too large to fit.

A clang of metal on concrete rang out across the armory, followed by Tom’s cursing. I looked over to see him scrambling down a suit arm to retrieve a fallen wrench. The armor was flayed open to expose the drive system, yet his hands never touched an exposed wire or circuit. When he reached the three–fingered fist, he hooked a foot under one articulated digit and swung upside down, then grabbed the wrench off the raised lip of the repair and refueling bay.

“All right, Tom?”

Still upside down, the other tech grimaced, flushing as blood rushed into the white moon–circle of his bald head.

“I’m just fine,” he said. “This thing, however, is a piece of shit.” He rapped the huge leg with the wrench.

I winced. I hated it when Tom played rough with the suits, but of course he could never damage that plating with a simple wrench. The Lockheed Martin IGA Combat Exoskeleton was the best powered armor ever produced, and both of us knew it down to our bones. We’d been made for it.

A timer chimed, and I switched the wash from acid to neutralizer. The drying fans had just kicked in when the armory’s rear door opened and Sergeant Billings stepped through. He moved toward me, mouth working, but the roar of the turbines filled my ears. I rushed to key them off, and the noise dropped away with a whine.

“Sergeant?”

“I said, ‘How’s she looking, Halfie?’ ”

“Good, Sergeant. Her hoses are a little weak, but coolant pressure is still nominal.” My chest expanded slightly. Sergeant Billings had given me and Tom our nicknames years ago, but it still felt special.

Billings moved over to the still–glistening suit and laid a palm against its leg. Next to the armor, he looked as small as a tech. His freckled and crew–cut head barely came up to the exoskeleton’s waist. Above him, the matte–black bulge of the suit’s chest housed the pilot’s couch and controls as well as the power cells and certain key weapons systems and ammunition cases. From behind the clear crystalline shell of the pilot’s canopy, the huge shoulders flared out into arms that hung down past the suit’s waist, lengthened by the long barrels of the chain–fed antipersonnel gun and recoilless rifle.

Billings looked up at it with affection. The soldiers might not be born to the suits, but they understood the beauty of them. In that sense, they were no different than the techs.

“Excellent,” he said. “We just got in orders from Command, and we’ll be taking them out at thirteen–hundred. Think they’ll be ready?”

“Yes, Sergeant.”

“Good man, Halfie.” Billings was the only one of the soldiers who ever called us men. He stepped back over to where I stood by the splash shield, and my already brimming sense of pride doubled as he reached down and ruffled my hair. Most techs were bald by five, like Tom. I was almost seven.

“Thank you, Sergeant.”

Then he turned and walked away, and I pushed the diagnostic cart over to the next suit in line.

We were waiting in the repair bays when the big door rolled open. Even through the shimmer of the anti–spore field, I was almost blinded by the electric blue of the cloudless sky. Then the doorway filled with the silhouettes of returning soldiers.

Four of the ten wore heavy suits, including Sergeant Billings. They stomped over to my side of the armory while the tactical suits went to Tom. I stepped aside as Sergeant Billings walked his suit into the nearest bay and powered down. The bay’s refueling grapnels engaged, and before he had even popped the canopy, I was circling the suit in the narrow, tech–sized space between it and the pit walls, taking stock.

The suit looked fine, with the usual lacquer of dust and spores—until I reached the left hip. My stomach lurched as I saw the cluster of holes blasted through the armor plating.

“EFP,” Billings explained. “The Liberation Front left us a few surprises.”

I tentatively explored one of the punctures with my finger. While an explosively formed penetrator wasn’t as bad as a shaped charge, it was still capable of sending a shotgun blast of molten copper tearing through just about anything. The rebels made them out of copper plates and old sewer pipes, then hid them along the roads.

I finished assessing the ticking, cooling suit’s wounds. The blast didn’t seem to have touched anything vital, but its location along the waistline seam concerned me. The suits were weakest at their joints. “How long do I have?”

Billings levered himself up and out of the cockpit, dropping to the floor without bothering with the bay’s ladder. His fatigues were drenched with sweat, clinging to his skinny frame. He looked tired. “Depends on the captain, but I’d guess about sixteen hours. He’s going to want at least one more patrol before the shuttle lands.”

That was hardly optimal. I nodded.

“Spin ’em down!” Billings called out. “Debrief and chow in ten!”

There came a ragged chorus of “Hooah!” as the nine other soldiers in the squad exited their suits. The sergeant turned to me.

“You too, Halfie. And Tom. You could both probably use some dinner.”

I smiled. Of course, he knew that there would be nothing for us to do for the next several hours anyway, as the automated bays took care of the basic repairs and maintenance. We’d do our individual checkups in the morning. Yet it was still nice of him to invite us.

The mess hall was a blank, white–walled box with long, cafeteria–style tables and an autokitchen off to one side. The place was big enough to seat perhaps fifty soldiers, but in my three years of residence there’d only ever been one squad on base. Ten suits were enough to handle anything.

The soldiers stood lined up at parade rest in front of one wall. Tom and I stood in the corner, waiting.

There was a click and hum from the overhanging projector, and suddenly the wall was replaced by the enormous image of a man’s face. The soldiers snapped to attention, but only Billings spoke. “Captain.”

Captain Reyes was a big man—or at least he looked like a big man. Though the camera never showed him below the shoulders, there was something about his face that suggested he would tower over Sergeant Billings. He wasn’t fat, but neither did he have the youthful, healthy glow of the sergeant. His short hair was shot with gray, and his brow always seemed to be furrowed, as if he expected to be disappointed.

“Report, Sergeant.”

“Limited contact, sir,” said Billings. “The Liberation Front has been pressing closer to the western edge of the township, but so far they’ve stuck to mines and snipers. Nothing nearer than about ten klicks. One heavy suit took a hit from an EFP, but nothing we can’t repair. No casualties.”

The captain grunted, but his expression didn’t change. “The next dropship is setting down in seventy–two hours, Sergeant, and if we lose any more cargo to those rebels, Medupe’s governor might just decide we aren’t pulling our weight. I want that area cleared out to a fifty–klick radius. Enough pattycake—you go in there and root them out. Understood?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good.” The captain’s image grew slightly smaller, as if he were leaning back in his chair, which offered a glimpse of a wood–paneled office with a window. “What’s the status on the suits?”

“All still green, Captain. We’ve got an order in for resupply on the next ship, but so far Halfie and Tom have been—”

“Halfie and Tom?”

Sergeant Billings’s cheek twitched in an embarrassed smile. “Lockheed suit techs, sir. H series and T series.”

Captain Reyes frowned.

“It’s bad form to name a clone, son.”

Sergeant Billings nodded. “Understood, sir.”

The captain waved the issue aside. “Just make sure that the drop zone is clear by the time the ship lands. I don’t want any half–brained locals taking potshots at it. Understood?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good. Reyes out.” The wall went blank again.

Billings gave the order to relax, and the soldiers cued up for the autokitchen, then took seats at the long tables. I got a bowl of the pale porridge the autokitchen prepared special for me and Tom, then sat at our shorter table in the corner.

Tom didn’t follow. The soldiers were eating roast chicken, and he stood over near some of them, playing a game where they’d throw bits of chicken skin in the air and he’d catch them without using his hands, making them laugh. He knew that techs weren’t supposed to eat soldier food—something about carcinogens being hard on our digestion—but he never seemed to care. Maybe that was why I still had my hair and he didn’t. One of the soldiers held the final piece high, making Tom jump for it, and then at last Tom returned to our table, his cheeks flushed.

When he was finished eating, Billings rose and deposited his dishes in the wall’s wash–slot. On his way back to his seat, he passed by my table. “You and Tom better rack out, Halfie. Sounds like we’re going to need those suits even earlier than we thought.”

“Yes, Sergeant,” I said, but Billings had already turned and gotten the attention of his squad. I scooped up my own mostly empty bowl and Tom’s still full one and went to where the other tech stood near the soldiers, their game forgotten in the discussion of tactics and plans for the next day. I grabbed his sleeve and pulled him along with me.

Back in the armory, Tom and I got into our bunks, which were actually hammocks strung high up in an armory supply closet, above and between the wooden crates of replacement parts. I lay there for a few minutes with my eyes closed, then said, “Tom?”

“Mmph.”

“Don’t you think Sergeant Billings is brave? I mean, to be in charge of protecting the whole township—that’s a lot of responsibility, right?”

“Mmph,” Tom said again, followed by the sound of him hacking and then spitting chicken–phlegm onto the floor below.

I gave up and let Tom sleep. It made sense that Tom didn’t notice—the tacticals’ pilots were nice enough, but none of them were like Billings. All I could think about was the sergeant leading his troops into the field, giving orders and outmaneuvering these new rebels. I couldn’t really imagine what that must be like. Yet despite all his duties, he always took the time to talk to me when they came in from a patrol.

And he had still called me Halfie. Even after the captain told him not to. Smiling, I rolled over and went to sleep.

All the suits were up and humming when the soldiers entered the armory the next morning, dressed in their standard short–sleeved pilot shirts and fatigue shorts. I waited next to Sergeant Billings’s heavy as he did his own visual inspection—a formality, as we both knew there was nothing he could see that a tech would miss.

“Good morning, Sergeant.”

“Morning, Halfie.” The sergeant finished his cursory checklist and mounted up, only climbing the ladder for the first few steps before leaning out and swinging himself into the open cockpit, settling in so that only his head and shoulders were visible.

The sergeant closed his eyes and sighed, and I knew that the subdermal controls—needles as long as my thumb—were sliding into the nerve ports in his arms and legs, replacing them with the suit’s own limbs. Fingers capable of crushing a groundcar like a paper juice carton flexed and clenched as Billings stretched.

Once, when I was feeling particularly bold, I had asked the sergeant what it felt like to pilot a suit. Instead of reprimanding me for speaking out of turn, he’d just smiled and said, “Like getting your dick wet for the first time.” I had smiled back, though privately I didn’t find bathing particularly enjoyable.

Billing walked the armor forward a few steps, twisted back and forth at the waist—and stopped.

“Halfie, I’m losing coolant pressure.”

That’s when I saw the spreading puddle beneath the suit’s feet.

Instantly I was clambering up the suit’s leg, peeling open access panels and hatches. It would only take the slightest shifting of one of those metal limbs to turn me into a red smear on the suit’s black frame, but the sergeant stayed perfectly still.

“Shit shit shit,” he offered.

I found the problem: one of the coolant hoses along the waistline near where the EFP had drilled through. It had looked fine during preflight, but the heat of the explosion must have cooked the hose and weakened the polymer. Now that it had cooled and warmed again, a long crack had formed in the synthetic rubber, leaking pale green fluid down into the suit’s innards and onto the floor. I dropped down and began to run for the storeroom, then stopped as a terrible realization struck me.

“Sergeant. We can’t replace it.”

“What?” Billings’s voice was sharp.

“The resupply. We’re low on replacement parts, especially hoses. We’ve been counting on the next dropship to bring more.”

The sergeant stared down at me. The suit’s limbs twitched.

“We can’t wait for the resupply, Halfie. We need to clear the area now. Can you rig something?”

The rest of the soldiers were looking at us, as was Tom. I saw a flicker of sympathy cross his face. Failing to repair a suit was every tech’s nightmare.

“I can try to patch it, but it’s a long break.”

“Do it,” Billings said. “Now.”

I ran. Less than ten minutes later I was back and clinging to the suit’s thigh, knees locked to either side of a weapons blister—the miniature ATACMS launcher, with its internal cache of tiny guided missiles. Using adhesive and pieces of another hose, I patched the break as best I could. When it seemed solid, I topped off the reservoir and moved back. Billings looked to me, got the nod, then tentatively began working the suit once more, twisting and bending.

“Will it hold?” he asked.

I wanted desperately to say yes. “It’s likely.”

“And if it fails?”

I dug my hands into my pockets, searching for an answer that wasn’t there. “You’ll have to power down the legs and wait for an evac.”

The sergeant’s expression hardened. “Unacceptable, Halfie. We can’t risk leaving a suit out there, and I’m not sending my squad out short a heavy.” He paused for a long minute, thinking. “Shit.”

An idea struck me, and I blurted it out without thinking. “I could come with you.”

“What?” Billings looked down at me, startled. “Techs aren’t supposed to leave the base. You know that.”

“I know. But if I go with you, I can fix the suit if it breaks.”

Billings looked skeptical. “What about the mold?”

“I can use one of the breathers.” The air filtration masks were only used on those occasions when soldiers left the building without a vehicle. The air wouldn’t be as good as inside a suit’s hermetically sealed canopy, but it would be fine for a few hours. “I’ll be okay. You need me.”

There was another long pause as Billings considered. Finally, he said, “Fuck it—all right. Go get a breather and a com bead. Quickly!”

I ran for the storage lockers again, yet this time my mind was elsewhere.

The field! In the three years I’d been on Medupe, I’d only been outside our building a four times—once when the dropship delivered us to the base, and three times when we needed to watch soldiers test a malfunctioning suit on the parade ground. On those latter occasions, we hadn’t even left the envelope of the base’s anti–spore shield. I’d never really given much thought to the world outside the base beyond how it pertained to the suits, but now that I was going along on a patrol, the idea sent an electric current of excitement up my spine.

I caught a glimpse of Tom’s contorted face as I ran past, but not enough to tell whether the expression was concern or jealousy. Probably both.

Then I was back again, breathing the stale, dry–tasting air of the filtration mask and rigging a makeshift net harness along the suit’s waist, close to the access panel for the offending hose but still far enough out of the way that I hopefully wouldn’t be at risk from the suit’s arms or the hot, stubby fins of the heat sink on the suit’s back. Beneath me I strapped everything I might need: more patching and adhesive, plus the few spare cans of coolant we still had left. The overall effect was of a gigantic purse, or perhaps a sling for a child. I clambered up and threaded myself through the webbing until I could barely move.

“Ready?” Billings asked.

“Ready.”

Then we were moving out of the big roll–up door and into the sunlight of the compound grounds.

It was bright, even brighter than I remembered, and I was glad I’d thought to grab a pair of the variable–tint welding goggles. Beneath the blazing ball of the sun, the base was a rambling line of gray concrete surrounded by yellow–brown grass. A high chain–link fence marked the perimeter, broken only by a guardhouse where the base’s main road passed through it and into the wilds. We moved in that direction.

Despite having seen the suits in operation a thousand times on cameras or in the repair bays, I’d never ridden on one for more than a few laps around the armory. The whole suit bobbed up and down as each massive foot rose and fell, and before we were more than a klick from the base, the rhythm had almost rocked me to sleep.

The base was positioned in a long, flat expanse of prairie, the better to see any approaching hostiles. It also meant that the spore and pollen count was fairly low—those being strongest in the flowering forests—and the air was clear enough to see for a least two klicks in any direction. Soon the fields began to shift from grass to grain, and I caught my first glimpse of locals working their plantations. They stood as we passed, but none bothered to wave back when I raised a hand. Perhaps they couldn’t see me against the body of the suit. I had just decided to quit trying when the fields gave out and we came into the township proper.

I had been made to understand that the township was heavily populated, but I had no idea until that moment just what the words meant. In my life on the base, there was only the squad of soldiers and a few maintenance workers who came in periodically to take care of the robotics not directly related to the suits. Before that, I’d known only the few dozen caretakers, doctors, and siblings of the tech nursery.

The township had more people than both of those places combined—many more, a hundred times more. Where the buildings of the base were concrete and clear plastic, these people built with what looked like dried mud, painted or stained the same yellow as the ever–present mold. Their roofs were tiles or wooden slats, and their windows had no glass, just shutters.

The township’s residents were as tall as the soldiers but scrawnier, their arms and legs thin and sticklike. Despite the spore–thick wind, none of them bothered to wear filtration masks, and their clothes were dyed bright colors, with many wearing patterned bandannas tied over the tops of their heads. Their skin was dark—though not as dark as that of Jacobs, the brown–skinned soldier who for some reason called himself black—and mottled in places with lighter reddish patches.

As the squad stomped its way down the packed–dirt street, we quickly gained an entourage of children trailing in our wake or darting fearlessly between the great suits’ legs. The adults, too, stopped what they were doing and stood staring at us. I understood the feeling—a suit in action is a magnificent thing. Though they must certainly have seen the soldiers on patrol many times, eyes still widened as we passed. Yet where the children cheered and dared each other to touch the metal behemoths, the adults’ awe seemed tempered with something else—a sort of wary reserve. A few even looked frightened, which was absurd. The soldiers were here to protect them.

As quickly as we entered the town we were out of it again, leaving the close–packed buildings where they leaned and sagged against each other and pressing on to the west. Immediately the fields began to give way to dry forests, and we turned off the road. The towering and segmented bambyan trees stretched forth in a series of successive walls, leaning out over us and raining down their tiny, rustling leaves. I’d heard someone say that all the bambyans in a given wall were part of the same plant, connected by runners under the soil, which was why they tended to grow in rows. They really did look like giant fences, with their twisted branches serving as slats. In between their orderly processions were the flowering fern trees responsible for producing the pollen which attracted and fostered the mold. Everything in the forest was covered with a coating of yellow dust, and when the breeze shook the trees it created a tornado of pollen so thick that it was hard to see the next suit in line.

Still, the trees were widely spaced and the ground was dry and firm, so the suits had no trouble maneuvering through the forest. After a time the ground began to rise and fall in a series of hills and ridges, and the com chatter between the soldiers increased as Billings consulted the map on his canopy’s overlaid tactical display. At the top of a ridge, he paused at a rocky break in the tree line to get his bearings, and I decided to take the opportunity to run a few tests, jacking into a line–out port from where I hung in the sling.

The ground exploded. One minute I was adjusting my diagnostic tablet and the next I was being showered with dirt and old loam as a wave of pressure rolled over me. Billings staggered sideways, and I realized that the suit had sheltered me from the true force of the blast. From somewhere to our left came the familiar rattle of a machine gun.

“Contact at ten o’clock!” someone shouted. And then everything happened very quickly.

The squad was arranged in a rough circle around the stone outcropping. As one, the soldiers turned the suits to face outward and began pouring fire into the trees, keeping mostly to the arm–mounted antipersonnel guns that chewed wood chips from the trees in great gouts of bark and dust. The noise was deafening and disorienting, seeming to come from every direction at once.

Through the fog of pollen and spores shaken from the trees by our assault, I could occasionally see shapes moving. They were smaller than the suits, no larger than man–sized. As I watched, hanging helpless in the webbing, one of them stood and aimed a long, thin rifle in our direction. I ducked, and a sound like a tiny bell rang out incongruously above the rattle of the cannons as the bullet spanged ineffectually off the metal above my head.

There came another explosion down our line, making it clear that at least one person on the other side had weapons worth worrying about.

“Flanking maneuver.” Billings’s voice was tense but steady, and I felt a surge of admiration at his courage. “Switch to tags and short–range bursts, firing only on solid lock. Suits three and six, a hundred meters left and turn. Two and four, a hundred right. Five, we’re going around back on the right, on my mark. Let’s tag these fuckers and follow them home. Mark!”

We moved—not the rolling gait of a cruising suit, but a jarring, bone–rattling run as Billings barreled over roots and logs, slapping saplings out of the way like I might brush cobwebs. Inside my sling, I clung to the suit’s side, trying to keep myself from swinging into the fins that were rippling the air with dispersed heat. Around us, gunfire screamed and chattered.

Billings hit his mark and turned, sprinting back toward the ambush. All at once, the ground dropped away beneath us, and we found ourselves looking out over a ten–meter–wide crack in the earth—probably a streambed run dry in the summer heat. Across it, I could make out the muzzle flash of the rebels’ machine gun still spitting bullets back toward the original skirmish point, and the long tube of some sort of rocket launcher.

The steep–walled gully twisted partway around the nest, and then ran due west down the ridge. We could easily fire on their position from here, or we could go back around and come in on the left flank.

We did neither. Billings took three steps, the lip over the gully crumbling beneath us as he ran, and launched us into the air.

For a terrible moment, we were weightless, the boulders at the bottom of the narrow cut passing beneath my feet. Then we slammed down on the other side, every tooth in my mouth clicking together with the shock.

The men in the nest—their weapons looking old enough to be museum pieces, all the way down to the archaic national army logo—turned at the impact, but there was nothing they could do.

Billings didn’t bother with guns. In a few steps, he covered the remaining space and swung one metal arm. Two of the men went flying, bones crunching like eggshells. The third took off running, and Billings paused long enough to call “Tags?” on the com band.

“Three, Sergeant. Rabbits running.”

“Good,” said Billings, and shot the running man in the back. The force of the heavy round sent the rebel flying forward in a spray of blood and bone shards.

As the report’s echoes died, I realized that the woods had gone silent. With the echoes of cannon fire still ringing in my ears, the metallic whines of servos and the snapping of broken twigs seemed like nothing. The other suits ghosted out from between the trees as silent as fog. In my ear, the com bead buzzed and nattered with reports and system checks, but I barely heard the soldiers’ call and response.

I stared at the dead men, the ones Billings had swept aside. Both had been standing, and had caught the blow with their upper bodies. Now they lay crumpled like rag dolls, chests staved in and heads misshapen masses of bone and tissue. One of them had a gold tooth, and it stuck out at right angles from the ruined mess of his gums.

“Halfie!”

“Uh?” I jerked my eyes from the corpses and saw Billings looking down at me. “Sergeant?”

“I said we’re losing coolant pressure.”

That woke me up in a hurry. Tearing myself free of the webbing, I scrambled over to the access panel and levered it open, not bothering with my diagnostic pad.

The hose patch had burst, probably in the shock of our ungraceful landing on this side of the gorge. Coolant streamed down the rubber and into the left leg housing, hissing where it made contact with hot metal. With no time to do things properly, I slathered the whole mess with quick–bonding adhesive and slapped a new patch over the old one. My hands burned as I held it firmly in place, but it stopped the leak. As soon as I dared, I pulled my blistering hands away and studied my work. It was ugly, but it should hold.

Of course, the last one should have held as well. I drained the cans of replacement coolant into the reservoir. As I watched, the levels rose, steadied—and then slowly began to fall.

Shit.

The other break was smaller and higher, behind the backplate and closer to the primary power cell. I patched it quickly. “Now?”

Billings watched his readouts. “It’s no longer dropping, but levels are still way too low to run normally. Top her off and let’s get moving.”

A cold wave rolled over me, settling low in my gut. “Sergeant, that was all the spare coolant we had.”

I was back standing on the ground now, and the huge suit swiveled at the waist to regard me. “What?”

“We’re out.”

“Then bleed some off of the other suits.”

I shook my head. “We don’t have a siphon. And they’re all running at minimum levels to conserve.”

“So you’re telling me if I power back up to full, I’m going to overheat.” Billings’s voice was flat, dangerous, and I took an involuntary step back.

“Yes, Sergeant.” My mind raced. “I guess we could use water. It wouldn’t last long, but it might get us back to base.” Then the stupidity of what I’d said registered. In a smaller voice, I added, “But we don’t have any water, either.”

The sergeant let out a frustrated growl. “Then fucking well find some, Halfie!”

I didn’t argue. As he returned to addressing the squad, I gathered up the empty coolant tanks, my synthetic tool bag, and anything else that might hold water and ran into the surrounding trees.

At first I had no idea where to go. What was I even looking for? As far as I was concerned, water came out of taps. But then I remembered the gully, and figured that if it was indeed a dry streambed, perhaps it would lead down to one that was still wet. The skin on my hands screamed and left wet marks on the rocks as I scrambled down the side of the ravine and began walking along its bottom, following it down off the ridgeline.

My mind kept going back to the dead men. I’d known in theory that the rebels were human, the same strain as the locals, yet somehow I’d expected them to look different. More bloodthirsty. Despite the fact that I could sketch mechanical diagrams for every piece of ordnance on a heavy suit and had seen the weapons in action a thousand times on video or the parade grounds, I’d never really imagined those bullets ripping through anything but practice dummies. Now I saw the sergeant’s round take the rebel in the back and the man’s chest exploding, over and over again.

I must have walked like that for some time, because when I snapped back out of my reverie, I found myself in a shaded hollow in the valley, the underbrush much thicker than it had been on the dusty ridgeline. Sure enough, here was the trickle and babble of a stream. I thrashed my way through the tall, woody grasses until I was standing in it.

The water was no more than ten centimeters deep, but it was there. The trees were so thick that even the transitioning lenses of the welding goggles were too dark, and I pushed them up onto my head. I dropped my bundle of cans on the bank and bent to hold the mouth of the first one under the current. The cool water felt good on my burned hands.

A branch cracked.

I froze. For the first time, I wished that I had some sort of weapon, which was stupid—techs didn’t carry weapons. But listening to the grass rustle and twigs break, I suddenly felt alone and exposed in a way I’d never known.

The sounds drew closer, and I stayed perfectly still, the current running around my boots and the overflowing coolant container. The grasses on the other side of the stream parted.

It was a man. He had the same mottled skin as the locals, but his clothing was more muted, khaki painted with yellow stripes that made him blend in with the mold–encrusted grasses. He wore a brimmed hat and held a string of several canteens strung together by the clever expedient of screwing the attached cap of each onto its neighbor. Over one shoulder hung an honest–to–god infantryman’s rifle, so old that its stock was made of nicked and polished wood instead of plastic.

A rebel. His eyes widened as he saw me, his irises a shockingly bright green, and he glanced quickly in all directions, searching for suited soldiers. Not knowing what else to do, I remained where I was.

When it became apparent that no soldiers were forthcoming, the man relaxed and smiled. He spoke, and in the stream of strangely accented syllables I was able to make out the word “alone.” It had the sound of a question.

Not seeing any advantage in lying, I nodded.

He bobbed his head in return and squatted down by the stream without any further ceremony. Watching him fill his canteens, I remembered my own task and set to it, filling the squared–off coolant containers and then capping them tightly.

I thought about how I must look to him. I was no more than half his size, my skin pale. Though his frame was thin, there was still a corded muscle to it that mine lacked. His face was clean–shaven, but my filter–covered cheeks had never grown hair. I put him at perhaps mid–twenties—the same as Billings, if he and the soldiers aged at the same rate. To him, someone who’d likely never seen or heard of a tech, I must look like a child playing in the stream.

He finished filling his canteens and sat back on his haunches, arms folded over his knees.

“The soldiers sent you?” he asked. Das soldiears sendu?

I nodded.

He shook his head in wonderment, and then dug around in a pocket. He came up with half of a foil–wrapped candy bar, its packaging stamped prominently with the C–grade symbol.

Military personnel weren’t supposed to eat anything below A–grade, but Billings had a sweet tooth, and sometimes when the squad accompanied supply shipments into the township I’d seen him come back with one of these.

The man held it out to me. I stared at it until he shrugged and put it away.

“You don’t have to go back,” he said. His words were getting easier to understand as I grew used to the strange accent. “Come with me. We can hide you, keep you safe from the soldiers.”

Safe from the soldiers? I shook my head, wanting to explain that soldiers were what kept people safe, and that the rebels would be safe too if they’d just stop fighting. What were they even fighting for, anyway? But before I could open my mouth, my com bead began squawking.

“Halfie! Where the hell are you?”

The man looked to the com bead in my ear, then back to me. He waited.

I turned so I wasn’t looking directly at him and spoke into the bead. “I found a stream,” I said. “Filled up, on my way back.”

“Good,” said Billings, and the line cut out again.

On the opposite bank, the rebel stood, watching me. He lifted an eyebrow.

I shook my head.

My answer clearly disappointed him, but he didn’t say anything more. Instead he raised a hand in farewell, then turned and disappeared into the brush.

I watched the spot where he’d vanished for several moments, then realized I was wasting time. As quickly as I could, I filled up the last of the tanks and my gear bag and began jogging back the way I had come, the heavy load slapping and sloshing against my back with every step.

Clambering up the side of the ravine was difficult, but soon I was back on the ridge where Billings and the rest of the soldiers waited impatiently. Using my shirt to filter the water as best I could, I dumped the contents of the containers into the suit’s coolant reservoir. I’d have to flush the hell out of the system later, but for now the levels stayed steady.

“Nice work, Halfie,” Billings said. “Now strap in and get your gear stowed. Carrell, do you still have a read on the tags?”

“Yes, Sergeant,” said the soldier in question, her tactical suit decorated with several long whip antennae. “All three have regrouped and stopped moving less than three klicks from here.”

“All right,” Billings said. “Let’s get moving. Mount up.”

Even as I secured the last of the containers, we were off again. The suits crashed down the ridge in great bounds, following Carrell’s relayed signal on their canopy displays.

The specialist had said that they had three tags. That meant that somewhere nearby, three rebels were hiding in the trees with barbed radio beacons lodged deep in their flesh. In theory, any of the suits could follow them at that range, but Carrell’s suit was specially rigged for com and recon and would pick up the signal the easiest.

Our path took us in a straight line, the soldiers no longer bothering to find the best route but simply powering through any brush thinner than a full–grown bambyan tree. We pounded across the little stream I’d found, the suit’s three–toed feet leaving tracks like enormous birds in the soft banks. Branches whipped and slashed at us as I hung in the webbing, and I pulled the welder’s goggles down again to protect my eyes.

“Five hundred meters,” called the sergeant over the com band. “Get ready.”

There came a rifle shot—possibly at us, possibly a sentry’s warning—and then another. The soldiers didn’t even slow. With a last lashing from the long grass and branches, we burst out of the trees and into a clearing.

It was small, only a fraction the size of the base, but the open area was cluttered with tents and crude wooden structures. Nets of rope wound with local vines and branches covered all the buildings, breaking up their outlines and making them the same yellow–brown as the rest of the forest, no doubt helping hide them from satellite surveillance.

There were people everywhere. Most were men, both old and young, but there were a few women as well. Some wore rifles, like the man I’d seen at the stream; others had outdated energy weapons. All wore variations on the same yellow–slashed khaki meant to blend with the landscape. Some appeared to be in the process of breaking down the camp, while others were assembling what looked to be homemade incendiary devices. The rest crouched in defensive positions along the perimeter, weapons pointed our direction.

For a moment, both sides stared at each other, the ten armored soldiers standing in a towering line at the forest’s edge, the hundred or more rebels of the camp gaping at the offworlders in their midst.

Sergeant Billings broke the silence.

“Burn it.”

It burned. The suited soldiers marched through the camp like giants, heedless of the bolts and bullets that caromed off their metal carapaces. Rebels screamed and fell beneath the scythe of machine gun fire or exploded in the staccato roar of the autocannons. Then all sound was subsumed in the bass whumph of Sergeant Billings’s activated flamer. Gouts of burning accelerant sprayed from one great arm like dragon’s breath, coating buildings and engulfing men in a white–hot nimbus.

I closed my eyes.

It was over in moments. The explosions and rapid–fire retorts were replaced by the crackle of flames and the slow whines and clicks of weapons powering down and cycling out hot barrels. My face felt raw and slick from the heat, and I opened my eyes only when I felt Billings move out into cooler air.

The camp was burning. Every surface seemed alight, sending oily black clouds high into the sky. Somewhere on the far side of the clearing, a fuel or munitions cache exploded, sending up a mushrooming fireball. Smoking bodies covered the ground around us, their twisted shapes burned black and fetal. I struggled in my sling, looking for anywhere safe to rest my gaze, and settled for staring up into the black–and–blue sky.

On the com band, Billings checked in with his squad. Several soldiers were making wide circuits of the camp, scanning the trees and counting bodies. After a few moments they regrouped and compared notes

“Think that’s all of them, Sergeant?” Jacobs asked.

“It matches the estimates,” Billings responded. “Or close enough. And this has to represent the majority of their supplies. Any that are still left out there are likely to keep on running.”

“Shall we go after them, Sergeant? Do a wide perimeter sweep, just in case?” Jacobs’s voice was tense, excited.

Billings considered it for a moment. “Negative, Private. We’re done here. Let’s pack it in and return to base.”

There was a chorus of assent, and then the suits were once more taking their huge strides back across the clearing, angry gods returning to the forest. As we left the camp, I made the mistake of looking down one last time.

Next to the suit’s enormous foot lay a corpse. The jellied fuel of the flamethrowers had caught him full in the face and upper torso, clinging like a second burning skin. His features were blackened beyond all recognition, flesh shriveled and bone showing through in places. A few stray flames still flickered and danced beneath exposed ribs in the ruined cathedral of his chest.

On the ground near him, a crumpled foil candy wrapper fluttered in the breeze.

I closed my eyes again.

Captain Reyes’s face filled the wall. “Status?”

Sergeant Billings stepped forward to his usual place. “At oh–nine–hundred hours this morning, the entire squad and one of the techs entered the field, heading west along the main road through the township and—”

Reyes cut him off. “One of the techs?”

“Suit difficulties, sir. From the EFP yesterday. Field repair was expected, and it was either that or leave one of the heavy suits behind. I judged that the risk to base assets was minimal.”

Reyes grunted. “The politicos won’t like a tech being seen out in public.”

“Understood, sir.”

Reyes’s deep–set eyes drilled into Billings. “Fine. Continue.”

Billings gave a concise report of the day’s events, finishing with, “It’s my belief that we’ve effectively broken the Liberation Front, sir.”

Reyes’s lips twisted, and I realized that he was smiling.

“I’m glad to hear it, Sergeant. And the butcher’s bill?”

“Further superficial damage to several of the suits, sir. No casualties.”

“No casualties!”

The entire room turned to look at me, and it was only then that I realized I had spoken. My porridge sat forgotten as I stood up.

“Sergeant,” Reyes said slowly, “why is it talking?”

“Sorry, sir,” Billings said hastily, then looked back to me. “Halfie,” he said, voice low, “you’ve had a long day. You and Tom should rack out.”

“But you said no casualties!” I found it hard to believe that I was still speaking, but something unfamiliar had taken hold of my throat and wasn’t letting go. “What about the people we shot? The ones we set on fire? They’re all dead!”

Sergeant Billings clenched his jaw, clearly unhappy to be having this conversation in front of Reyes. “Those were rebels, Halfie. Not our people. Hence no casualties.”

“But—”

“You’re dismissed, tech!”

I started to say more, but the command in Billings’s gaze froze any further words in my throat. I felt every eye in the room watching as I walked slowly across the cafeteria, collected Tom, and passed through the door into the hall. From behind me, I could hear the sergeant apologizing to Captain Reyes.

Then the door swung closed, and Tom and I were alone.

The sergeant found me in the armory the next evening, hard at work on an injured suit. There had been no patrol that morning, and neither Tom nor I had seen any of the soldiers all day, as neither of us had felt like entering the mess hall during their meals. Instead, Tom and I had taken our food back to our bunks. We’d had a lot to talk about.

Billings walked alone across the concrete floor. When he saw that I’d seen him, he raised a hand.

“Hey, Halfie. Come down from there for a minute. I need to talk to you.”

I set down my soldering iron, balancing it carefully on the big suit’s shoulder, then swung down until I was standing on the floor.

“Sergeant?”

Billings sat on the squared–off lip of the recessed repair bay so that he was almost at eye level with me. He ran a hand through his red–brown hair and sighed.

“Listen, Halfie, about last night… I’m sorry for how that went down. It’s not your fault. You’ve never seen combat before, and you’re naturally a little shaken. I wanted to let you know that I’m not mad at you.”

“It’s all right.”

“No, it’s not,” Billings said, one hand balling into a fist. “I was wrong to take you into the field. You didn’t need to see any of that. And the captain—well, he’s from an older school of thought. I just wanted to let you know that we don’t all think like him. As far as I’m concerned, you and Tom are people, the same as us. Understood?”

I wanted to ask him why he and I were people, but the man with the candy bar wasn’t. But I said only, “Yes, Sergeant.”

Billings smiled, his face dropping the weight it had been carrying. “Thank you, Halfie.”

I wasn’t sure what he was thanking me for, but I replied anyway. “You’re welcome.”

The sergeant looked like he might have wanted to say more, but instead he turned and walked back across the bunker. The metal fire door swung closed behind him with a clang.

I climbed back up to my perch behind the suit’s opened right shoulder and retrieved my soldering iron, but my mind wasn’t on the circuits. Using the hot iron, I made the last of the changes, then closed up the panels. Across the room with the tactical suits, Tom caught my eye. I nodded.

Inside me, that familiar warmth was spreading again. Sergeant Billings had been worried about my feelings. He really was my friend, just as I’d always known.

I was going to miss him.

I clambered down one last time, then pulled the sack of supplies from where I’d stashed it inside the diagnostic cart. At the far wall, Tom pushed the button for the big roll–up door. He joined me in front of it as the motor whined and metal slats clicked slowly up and out of the way. Outside, the night was dark save for a few lights at the guardhouse. Beyond the fence, the grass blew in long waves.

I hefted a set of bolt cutters.

We had one full day until the dropship arrived with new supplies. At least two weeks before they managed to get a new tech down here to repair the disabled suits, sorting out the mess of our rewiring and bringing the weapons and drive systems back online. More than enough time for two small techs to disappear into those fields, find what remained of the rebels, and see what they had to say. To learn what exactly this war was about, and where we fit into it.

Tom and I knew everything there was to know about repairing suits, and nothing at all about anything else.

It was time to fix that.

Mission. Suit. Self. ^{Jake Kerr}

A BEAD OF SWEAT SLID DOWN the side of Billy’s face as he surveyed the wall of green vegetation. Although the droplet of sweat didn’t distract him, he was aware of it, and thus a tiny fan in his suit switched on, drying his face.

He was staking out the north, and it was a dangerous mess. The forest canopy spread out overhead, removing any satellite intel, and the ground was thick with vegetation and trees. It was enough cover to give the natives an opportunity to get close and launch an attack before Billy’s squad of heavily armored soldiers wiped them out.

He considered the mission. He was running point, laying out the beacons that would mark the defensive perimeter around the planet’s initial settlement. He wasn’t the best in combat, but Billy saw the big picture, and the squad respected his ability to assess terrain, risk, and other strategic elements.

Billy paused and considered the native life forms. The danger from them was real. While he and most of his squad had barely paid attention during the cultural overview, they’d soaked up the tech and military briefings. The result was that while they may not have known much about what the natives looked like, they knew that the natives were extremely aggressive and had enough tech to do significant damage in the right circumstances. After the first attack, the squads didn’t even bother calling them natives. They were just “hostiles.”

Entering a clearing, Billy stopped and ran a full visual and auditory scan. It was more chaos: The heat and vegetation made infrared assessment practically useless, and the sound of movement was everywhere.

He did have a good view of the topography from the clearing, and while he would ideally lay a perimeter with a much larger buffer between the hostiles and the settlement, there was a valley directly to the north that worried him. With the dense trees and the steep hills to the east and west, it would be much more difficult to defend than the flat terrain he was currently standing on. The added benefit of laying the beacon at his current location was that he wouldn’t have to proceed any further into hostile territory.

“Rally One, this is Niner Point. Assessing northern topography. Any secondary intel for this quad?” He spoke, and his neural connection told the suit computer which channel to use. He really didn’t like the look of the valley. The whole quadrant was crawling with hostiles, and if he was going to set the northern perimeter, he wanted it to be as simple to secure as possible.

“Hold on, Corporal.” There was a short pause. “Negative on that. There’s a satellite village about one klick north, but that’s it.”

Satellite village? Fuck. Why the hell did the settlers move farther north to seed a new village before the first one was officially secure? The rest of his squad didn’t have to think in those terms or consider such nuances. They focused only on the mission, and their mission was to defend the perimeter. But for Billy, things weren’t that simple. He was defining the mission.

There was a distant explosion behind him, and Billy flinched. The massive armored suit suppressed the movement but identified the surge of adrenaline and activated an emergency defensive scan. Billy breathed easier as the scan revealed no neighboring activity. Something was going on to the southeast, however. His mind considered Echo Point, and the suit engaged that channel.

“…fall back, Jackson. Ichi and J.F., advance and lay down some cover.”

“Roger, Rally One. Slight damage to my left arm, but otherwise good. They’re still coming, though.”

He refocused on his job, and the channel went silent.

The suit had presented a map overlay of his known location and topography as he made progress. The distance to the main settlement was pretty tight if he dropped the perimeter at his current location. I should probably run the perimeter north of the satellite village, but that was definitely the more dangerous choice. As it stood, command wouldn’t care either way. They just wanted a secure perimeter. Still, he decided to doublecheck.

“Rally One, this is Niner Point.”

“Sorry, Niner Point. We have activity in Echo quadrant. Radio silence unless it’s an emergency.”

Billy looked north again. They hadn’t briefed him on the village, which meant it wasn’t a concern. And with the steep elevation to the northeast and northwest, no one would really question him if he decided to lay the perimeter where he stood.

Billy smiled. If the hostiles were attacking on the eastern quadrant and he laid a beacon this tight to the main settlement, his chances for getting off the planet alive were excellent. He couldn’t believe his good fortune. This would be the easiest point mission he’d ever had.

He stretched his arm downward, and the suit mirrored his movement, augmented by the neural connections between the computer and his brain. A foot–long metal tube extended from the end of the arm of the suit. He couldn’t feel it with his arm or hand, but he could feel the movement with his mind and nerves as naturally as if he had extended a finger. There was a click, and compressed air drove the rod into the dirt.

Continuing to the west, Billy laid two more perimeter beacons, keeping the valley to his right. With the presence of the beacons, his squad’s mission was finalized: if hostiles crossed the perimeter, the soldiers in their mighty armored suits would terminate them.

He hadn’t even had time to take a shower after punching out before Cortez tracked him down.

“Man, you missed some action.” Cortez lived for the moments when she was in her suit laying waste to hostiles, and she was incredibly efficient at it. Billy assumed she was talking about the attack to the east he had heard. The east perimeter was much larger, and they had two suits laying beacons.

“Don’t tell me they attacked Moot. If they did, they have an uncanny sense for knowing our weaknesses.” Billy smiled. He didn’t get along with Moot or his squad, who he felt took unnecessary risks. Cortez kept pace as Billy continued toward the showers.

“No, you idiot. It was that village up from your beacons. The hostiles have it under siege. The civilians jumped on one of the military channels to ask for help.” It was hard to frown with the amount of nerve damage from augmentation and integration surgeries, but Cortez somehow achieved it. “I can’t believe we’re missing out on that.”

Billy slowed to a stop, taking in what Cortez had said. “I didn’t pick up anything on my scans.”

“They started when you were checking out. Small arms fire. Not a big deal, but dangerous for the colonists, though—they’re not even in composite buildings, if you can believe that shit. Probably a bunch of Greens wanting to go native.” Cortez shook her head. “They have a high–end laser defense system, but…” Cortez shrugged. Billy knew what the shrug meant—commercial defense systems didn’t last forever and weren’t foolproof. “So, why’d you bail on the village?”

Billy took a step toward Cortez. “I didn’t bail on the village!”

She backed up, raising her hands. “Calm down, man. I didn’t mean it like that. Just wondering why you laid the beacons so close to the main settlement and away from the excitement. Defending a bunch of native sympathizers from the natives would have been fun.”

Billy lowered his head. “It just wasn’t a good idea, Cortez. A valley like that would be tough to secure.”

“Well, shit, you’re the guru, but we’ve had no problems defending worse.” Cortez slapped him on the back. “But it sucks, man. Freakin’ hostiles taunting us.” Cortez shook her head and wandered off.

Billy knew that Cortez would probably forget the village even existed by the end of the day. Her mission was to guard the perimeter, and that didn’t include the village. Everything else was a distraction. That wasn’t the case for Billy. He knew that Cortez was right—they had handled tougher defensive assignments than that valley.

His mind kept flashing to the moment before he had laid the first beacon, considering whether to include the village or not. It troubled him that his main concern at the time was getting off the planet alive. Why hadn’t he thought harder about the consequences of abandoning the satellite village? Billy turned away from the shower. He had to review the audio that Cortez mentioned.

Without his suit, he had to access the archive in the Comm Center. It was a long walk, an exhausting prospect on legs accustomed to augmentation. He doubted he’d see any fellow suit jockeys—they tended to avoid being in public for just that reason. The awesome image of might they projected in their suits was destroyed as they walked around on scarred, stitched–together, and often weak bodies.

There were whispers as he walked into the Comm Center. All of the personnel there had worked with armored augmented soldiers for a long time, but it was still rare to see one without his suit. A private walked him to a link, and Billy could see a look in her eyes as she shot furtive glances at him. Was it curiosity? Horror? He didn’t know, and he wondered if he was losing the ability to read people’s faces.

He found it right away, some unsourced audio on the channel assigned to Whiskey Point. He hit play.

UNIDENTIFIED: Hello, is there anyone there? We need immediate assistance. The Dahili are attacking from every direction, and we don’t know how long our defenses can hold. Please help us. [Pause] Is anyone there? Please, there are only five of us.

LIEUTENANT FRANKLIN BOYLE: Attention: This is a military operations channel, and you are forbidden from broadcasting on this frequency.

UNIDENTIFIED: Thank God you are there. Please send help. There are five of us, and four will need medical transport. We are in the Peace Valley outpost.

[Long pause]

COLONEL GABRIEL RUIZ: This is a military channel. You need to use the distress frequency if you need help.

UNIDENTIFIED: We tried that! There was no answer.

COLONEL GABRIEL RUIZ: We are not equipped to do search and rescue. Please refrain from using this channel.

UNIDENTIFIED: Can’t anyone help? Just send a few of those men in the giant suits to carry us out? I’ve seen the holos of them knocking down houses with their hands. Certainly they can carry five of us to safety.

[The sound of multiple gunshots in the background]

COLONEL GABRIEL RUIZ: I’m sorry. We gave an evacuation order, which you clearly ignored. You are on your own. Now stop broadcasting on this frequency immediately.

UNIDENTIFIED: What kind of monsters are you? They have guns. You can easily stop them, but we can’t! Why won’t you help us?

COLONEL GABRIEL RUIZ: Whiskey Point, we are switching to backup channel two, effective immediately.

UNIDENTIFIED: Hello?

[Long pause]

UNIDENTIFIED: You bastards are just going to leave us here to die? Why?

[Unintelligible background voices]

UNIDENTIFIED: They aren’t coming.

Billy sat back in the chair and took a deep breath. Everything made a terrible sense. Command had issued an evacuation order and called it a day. If someone didn’t or couldn’t evacuate, well, that was their problem. Still, he wished he had known all this as he was setting up the perimeter. He wasn’t sure he would have made the same decision.

No. He wouldn’t have made the same decision.

He punched up Ruiz. His assistant answered but put Billy right through when he identified himself. Ruiz didn’t bother with a greeting. “Corporal, I don’t like hearing from suits unless they’re on a mission. Is there a problem?” He was gruff and sounded unhappy.

“That’s why I’m calling, sir. There is a problem. I set the perimeter about one klick too far south.”

There was a pause, and then Ruiz answered, “Wait, is this about the satellite village?”

“Yes, sir. It’s unprotected.”

“Not a problem, Corporal. There was an evacuation order.” Ruiz sounded more relaxed now that he knew the topic. “You made the right decision; now go jump in the hot tub or something.” The line went dead.

Five people were under assault and helpless thanks to him. He turned the comm to the channel that Whiskey Point had originally used. He tapped the talk button a few times nervously and then pressed it.

“Hello? Are you still there?” He cursed under his breath. He wanted to sound commanding but was sure he was coming across as tentative and weak. He just wasn’t used to communicating outside of his suit.

He waited for someone from Comm to ask him what he was doing, but no one else was on the channel. Command must have abandoned it when the woman from the village refused to give up the frequency. After a minute or so, he tried again. His voice was more confident this time. “Hello, is there anyone there?”

A voice replied immediately. “Oh my God, I thought I was dreaming. Yes! We are still here.” There were gunshots in the background. “Who are you? Are you coming to save us?” Her words came out in a rush. Billy didn’t know how to respond. Hell, he didn’t know why he even bothered contacting them. There was nothing he could do. Now all he had done was given them false hope. “Are you there?”

“Yes,” Billy replied. He struggled to think of what to say, but decided to just tell the truth. “I’m sorry, but I’m not sure what I can do.”

“Can’t you just defend us? You have those men in armored suits. I heard that just one could defeat hundreds of regular soldiers.” The voice was more confident than pleading, as if she could inspire him with her words.

“That is outside the scope of our mission.” Billy said the words without emotion. Toneless. Without any conviction.

“Oh.” It was such a simple word. An expression of surprise with a plaintive acceptance. She didn’t object to the primacy of his mission, and her resignation made the mission seem something dark and evil, like death or a terminal illness.

“But maybe there is something I can do.” Billy blurted the words out.

“Couldn’t you carry us out? Maybe we could find a wagon or something and you could just come in and pull us out. Don’t you do that?” Billy cursed himself. The woman had moved from acceptance to hope. Why was he torturing her with hope?

“I’m sorry. You just don’t understand. We’re a tactical infantry unit. Our suits don’t even have hands, and the calibration needed to adjust the sensitivity of my arms would take too long.” He paused trying to think of a way to explain. “I’d be just as likely to crush you as save you.”

“But there’s more than just you! Can’t you bring more people to help? Certainly you all could protect us?” Desperation was again creeping into her voice.

Billy didn’t know how to answer. They had a full squad assigned to guarding the northern perimeter and, despite his conservative assessment, he knew they could defend the village, too. But it was too late. The mission was finalized. Guard the perimeter. The village wasn’t within the perimeter.

It was as simple as that.

The tactical armored infantry would fulfill their mission at all costs—it was what they did—but the moment Billy had laid the last beacon, that mission didn’t include the five people in a village with no name. Billy dropped his head in his hands. He had explained the strategic reasons, but he knew the truth. He dropped the beacon south of the village because he was afraid.

The woman broke the silence. “You’re not coming, are you?” The voice sounded utterly defeated. This was not acceptance. This was hope crushed under the boot of tactical armor guarding a perimeter one klick too far south.

“I’m coming.” It was a quiet voice, almost a whisper, the words spoken without a hint of confidence or force.

But he had said them.

“Oh my God, thank you!” Billy didn’t answer. He didn’t have any idea what he would do, and he didn’t know what to say.

After a period of silence, the woman spoke again, her voice a whisper. “So what’s your name?”

“Corporal Billy Whitaker.” He tried to sound confident, to sound like the savior he had just promised, but he couldn’t.

“You’re going to get in trouble for this, aren’t you, Billy?”

He thought of his training, the words “mission, suit, self” repeated again and again until it was part of his psyche. And here he was abandoning the mission and putting both his suit and himself in danger.

“Yes,” Billy finally said. The woman didn’t reply immediately.

“My name is Ruth. The other four people here are Tom, Ahmed, Iona, and Julie. We are all nice people.” She paused. “That’s worth getting into a little trouble, isn’t it?”

“Yes.” The answer sounded small and inconsequential, and Billy wasn’t even sure he said it loudly enough to be heard. But he meant it, and the fact that he did frightened him, because he had no idea what he would do. “I need to go, Ruth.” It sounded strange saying her name. She was now a person. Not a mission, a person.

“Thank you, Billy. Thank you so much.”

Billy walked as quickly as he could to the staging area. He worried about how long their defenses would hold up. He guessed they had a motion–activated defense system in place. It probably had a battery strong enough for a limited number of strikes, but the hostiles wouldn’t know that. That was the good news. The bad news was that they were clearly testing it every so often, and the commercial batteries weren’t meant to handle constant laser fire for very long. Billy picked up his pace.

No one gave him a second look as he lowered himself into his suit. Between the long hours on duty, the neural connection to the computer, and their own bodies augmented to work with the suit and not outside it, most soldiers preferred to spend as much time suited up as possible, sometimes even sleeping in their suits. He punched in the ordnance for ground combat. That also wouldn’t generate attention: it wasn’t uncommon for off–duty soldiers to be pulled into ongoing missions. Five active–duty suits were already assigned to the northern perimeter, but Billy wouldn’t have been surprised if there were more than ten out in the field.

Claws dropped from the ceiling and detached his arms. His physical arms went numb as the neural connection to the suit’s nerve center stopped having anything to connect them to. His arms glided down a track and disappeared into a storage area. The claws returned with larger arms, the hands made of cannon barrels and the forearms embedded with specialty munitions—rockets, flame throwers, and chemical weapons. The arms were placed in position and, after several twists, the claws retracted. The suit reconnected his nerves, and Billy felt his arms tingle.

The suit’s arms now attached to him could hardly be considered arms at all—fingers replaced by cannons, forearms embedded with lasers, shoulders mounted with defensive countermeasures—but they felt entirely natural to Billy. They were his arms. He ran his final systems check and then took a deep breath.

Billy Whitaker, the strategic pride of Phoenix Platoon, had no idea what he was going to do.

He set off with the simple idea of just fighting his way to the village and then holding off the hostiles for as long as he could. It was a ridiculous plan. He would destroy countless hostiles, but eventually one of them would get in a lucky shot or he would collapse in exhaustion.

He couldn’t see any other result. He would be beyond the perimeter and, in the culture of mission–suit–self, he would no longer be part of the mission. No one would come save him. As he half–heartedly returned the wave of the technician on duty, Billy realized an even more depressing scenario: Command might just destruct his suit by remote before he even had a chance to get to the village. Still he continued onward.

His earlier route to the perimeter was now wide and clear, the thick vegetation and small trees crushed under the feet of the numerous, massive suits that had marched past. Fallen tree limbs lay strewn along the path, and laser burns scorched the trees that were still standing. Billy checked his HUD constantly even though he didn’t need to. The valley to the north was as clear as the perimeter line marked by the beacons he had laid earlier.

He knew that once he hit the perimeter line, the path would split to the west and east, where the thump thump thump of armored suit legs walking the path would be an auditory warning to the hostiles, while the pounded dirt they left behind served as a visual one. Beyond the crushed earth of the perimeter line there would be nothing but thick vegetation and trees.

They had five suits guarding the northern perimeter, and Billy assumed that he’d have a decent chance of meeting one of the guys from his squad at some point, but when he reached the intersection he was alone. He attempted an infrared scan, but it was once again useless. He went silent and did an enhanced audio scan. He could hear an approaching suit from the east, its telltale footsteps obvious. There was rustling all over the forest in front of him, but he couldn’t make out any voices. He heard sporadic gunfire from the north, which filled Billy with relief. The village’s defenses were still holding.

Taking a deep breath, Billy stepped across the perimeter.

Less than ten seconds later, a concerned voice filled his head. “Billy, is there a problem? We have you advancing. Have the hostiles engaged?” Billy turned off all of his comm channels. It suddenly struck him that if command didn’t know what he was up to, they wouldn’t destruct his suit. He heard one of the suits pounding toward him, so he plunged ahead.

After about fifty meters—and without thinking—Billy stopped for a standard initial mission assessment. As he realized what he was doing, Billy shook his head. How could he assess a mission that didn’t exist? He ploughed on.

He skipped the full visual–range scan and kept to human–visual. There was some movement at one o’clock. Audio picked up voices. Then there were voices at ten o’clock. He heard the click of native weaponry being armed. He cursed and charged straight north.

The gunfire started a few steps further and came from every direction. His earlier briefing told him to expect a high volume of hand–held projectile fire, which was low–risk against the heavily armored suits. Billy ignored the constant barrage of bullets and rushed forward.

The vegetation blocked much of his visual range, and he was moving so fast that he ran right into several groups of natives. They were bipedal with reptilian skin and large eyes that protruded from their heads. Their four arms allowed them to carry multiple weapons, creating the high volume of fire Billy faced. He ran right past them.

He burst past a tree and hit the last thing he had expected to see. The hostiles had created their own perimeter: a pathetic patchwork of tree trunks piled in a loose wall from east to west, hidden from the recon satellites by the dense foliage above. There were more gaps than wall and it was little better than tissue paper against a suit, but what it did provide was confidence, and that worried Billy more than anything. Bullets were hitting him from every direction.

He knelt slightly and spread his arms. He felt his skin open and the weapons extend as the suit launched missile grenades at the barrier to the left and right.

Pieces of bodies and wood flew amid bright explosions. Despite the carnage, the rate of fire didn’t decrease at all. The bullets continued to bounce off his faceplate, chest, and limbs. He retracted the missile launchers into his arms, strode forward, and extended the cannons that acted as his hands. High–caliber bullets shredded the barrier in front of him.

Screams filled the air, and Billy adjusted his aural range to focus on the low and very high ranges. He didn’t want to hear screams. He wanted to hear wood snapping, footsteps, and guns firing. He leapt the ten meters over the remaining barricade. There was a high–pitched sound from behind, and Billy switched to his rear view and initiated defensive countermeasures.

The lasers mounted at his shoulders turned and filled the woods with a lattice of deadly light. Shredded leaves fell like rain. Tree limbs fell. Anything that moved was pierced and sliced by the lasers. Three hostiles near a concealed cannon fell to the ground in pieces.

But it was too late.

The first and only shot from the cannon hit him below his right shoulder, knocking him forward and to the ground.

Billy jumped to his feet and recalibrated, maxing out three–hundred–sixty–degree countermeasures while he did field assessment. Both lasers were still functioning and were firing at anything that moved.

Bio came out normal, but the right arm of his suit dropped to twenty percent functionality. It was a disaster. He hadn’t even gone a hundred meters, and his suit was badly damaged. He closed his eyes, disengaged audio, and thought, the lasers flickering in the background his only distraction.

What he really needed was his squad. You could encircle a squad, but you couldn’t surprise one with a cannon shot in the back. Drops of sweat started to form on Billy’s forehead, and the suit engaged its fans.

He tried to put thoughts of the squad behind—they weren’t going to save him or the village. They would observe the perimeter. That was their mission, and if anything defined the power of the corps, it was their rabid devotion to finishing each and every mission, no matter how small—even if it meant leaving suit, civilian, or friend behind.

And in the depths of that cold knowledge, a solution formed in Billy’s head.

He turned back toward the perimeter and re–oriented the systems for maximum defense and speed. The cannons in his arms retracted, and the lasers on his shoulders switched to full power.

He leapt back over the demolished barrier and turned to the southeast. An alarm started to sound: the battery was exceeding its safe operational range. He silenced it. There wasn’t much else he could do. He needed full power for his defensive lasers and full power for traveling at speed.

The hostiles hadn’t anticipated him rushing back south, and the ones who now operated the cannon fled in disarray as he attacked them. The lasers took out the hostiles while he crushed the cannon itself with two blows from his left arm. He rushed onward, running parallel to the northern perimeter.

And there it was: the first beacon. At this point, Billy was more concerned with Command than the hostiles. He didn’t know how they would react if they realized what he was doing,.

He knelt down, gunfire striking him in the back but, with the lasers wreaking destruction within close range, the rate of projectiles had significantly slowed. He reached for the beacon. With his combat array, all he had was a small, two–pronged maintenance claw. The rest of his suit was nothing but weapons. He reached for the beacon but it slipped. God, please make this work. He wiggled the beacon and then pulled again.

It slid out.

He held the beacon against this chest with his damaged right arm and ran. He could hear another suit approaching from behind and to his left. Wondering if they would try to stop him, he arrived at the second beacon. It came out easily, and he ran to the last one. Cortez was standing next to it, motionless in her suit.

Billy ignored her and knelt down and worked on the beacon. There were some explosions, and he looked up. Cortez was wreaking destruction on hostiles in every direction. Her missile launchers were firing in harmony with her cannons in a terrible symphony of destruction. Missiles shattered trees, cannons flattened logs, and screams bled into the upper range of Billy’s audio.

Billy stood up and opened up his external speaker.

“The perimeter is moving north, Cortez.” She nodded, her faceplate mirroring sunlight and falling leaves. She didn’t move.

Billy felt the heat of the battery against his skin so he turned off the lasers and put all energy into field assessment and mobility. He sprinted toward the valley. With the beacons cradled against his suit by his right arm, he had to avoid even small trees rather than just knocking them out of his way. He had every sense turned to the max. The sound of gunfire and ricochets off his suit were constant, but he tuned them out.

Focusing on sound, Billy avoided areas with heavy hostile audio indicators. It took him longer but he side–stepped immediate danger. After a few hundred meters, the gunfire slowed down. He switched to full visual and could see the lasers from the village firing in the distance. He passed the village, added a fifty–meter buffer, then knelt down. The rods tumbled out of his right arm. He grabbed one with his working claw and shoved it into the dirt. He awkwardly pounded it in with the barrel of a cannon. He fumbled with the other two beacons, cradled them under his arm, and moved east.

He had just laid the second beacon when his audio warnings screamed. It was too late. A cannon shell smashed into his back and threw him forward in a rolling mass of metal. He slammed against a tree.

He tried to engage his suit’s countermeasures but found them to be nonfunctional. He did an emergency assessment. The suit had cushioned his body so he remained unscathed, but the suit itself was ruined. Arms nonfunctioning. Legs nonfunctioning. Helmet mobile but visual nonfunctioning. All other functions failing.

Billy ignored them all.

The new perimeter was incomplete, and he had to set the final beacon. Billy initiated his emergency disengage protocol. The wires that connected his brain to his suit retracted into the box at the base of his skull. He suddenly felt deaf and blind.

Plugs that connected the nerves up and down his arms, legs, back, and body jerked out as his suit opened. The smell of forest decay, burning ozone, and dirt staggered him as he collapsed to the ground.

Billy Whitaker, half naked, nerves raw and senses overwhelmed, looked around. He heard rustling somewhere in the trees as his eyes alighted on the last beacon, lying on the ground five meters away. He half–ran, half–stumbled to the beacon, picked it up, and ran east.

He surprised a hostile, who didn’t fire as Billy ran past him. Of course, they are expecting a suit. That thought was short–lived, however, as a bullet whizzed past his head. The shot must have alerted the hostiles, for he could hear them rustling through the vegetation in every direction.

As he considered whether he had gone far enough, Billy felt a bullet smash into his left arm. He cried out and reflexively tried to turn on maximum defensive countermeasures but then remembered—he wasn’t in his suit. Leaves rustled and branches cracked. It’s now or never, Billy.

He stopped, pressed the edge of the beacon into the ground, and leaned all his weight against it. It had slid about six inches when another bullet hit him in the leg. He fell to the ground next to the beacon, pulling it downward with his body. Another bullet hit him in the side of the chest.

Looking up, all Billy could see was green, a beautiful verdant green. In the distance, he heard an approaching thump thump thump, and then he started to cry. He had lost his suit. He had lost his self. But the mission lived on.

In Loco ^{Carlos Orsi}

THE SNOW IS EVERYWHERE. WITH the whip of the wind, it even hits you from below. It’s a blizzard. They say that a hundred years ago, Scandinavia was a beacon of civilization. I can’t see how people can remain civilized in a climate like this. The situation now—with the warlords, the ruthless infighting, the sheer anarchy—seems much more attuned to the environment.

The sensors in my mask are all but worthless in this weather. The snow and the shards of ice disrupt the lasers in my night vision, and the contrast between warm bodies and cold particles flying around at high speed turns infrared into a kaleidoscope. So I turn everything off: time to go with the two wetware eyes I was born with.

Ours is a peacekeeping mission. The rest of the world believes it has a duty to help Scandinavia back on its feet, ignoring the fact that the Scandinavians seem quite happy lying on the ground with their hands at each other’s throats.

My platoon is escorting a shipment of medical supplies to a village far inland. Bad weather prevents us from using aircraft, and the weather is rough enough to scare even the VTOL drone people, which should mean something.

“Transport of medical supplies” means we have a big target painted on our backs: every warlord in the area would love to get their hands on some antibiotics and frost blockers. It keeps their foot soldiers fighting and helps blackmail the villagers. Guerrillas can’t eat ammo and there’s only so much deer you can hunt on the hills, after all, so popular support is needed, even if by extortion.

The road is, of course, a frozen riverbed. There are mountains and all around us. And we are moving uphill all the time. It’s an ambush waiting to happen, but this is the fastest route, the medicine is badly needed, and frankly the captain is cocky: he thinks that if the barbarians want to try something, well, they are welcome to have their asses handed to them.

And then it happens, textbook style: three mortar shells, one at the point of the column, one at the rear. The air smells of burned body armor and is already thick with smoke when the third explodes five meters above our center—they don’t want to hit the center with a direct impact and run the risk of destroying the supplies, but the detonation over our heads, with the light and shockwave, stuns us.

I fall hard on the ice, thinking for a moment that it will break and plunge us all in the river below, but it holds.

Despite the helmet and mask, I feel blood in my mouth and my ears are ringing. I feel something sting at the back of my neck, then a numbing cold—some shrapnel must have broken through the neck line, where the armor is softer.

Above the ringing in my ears, I hear someone scream “The loco is hit!” and I know he’s talking about me. There must be blood on my armor, visible against the white plating, now that the flak has subsided. I turn and see someone with corporal stripes on his chest pointing at me. I am painfully aware that a bleeding loco is always an extraordinary thing to have around, but, being a corporal, he should be paying more attention to the enemy.

Our attackers don’t rush us. They wouldn’t dare. The shipment is now, ironically, our hostage. They can’t risk having it destroyed. The blizzard is still running at full force all around us, but the amplified voice comes loud and clear above the wind, speaking Spanish with a cracked accent:

“You are surrounded. Give us your cargo, and you may leave with your lives.”

“Leave with your lives.” This guy has to have watched some very old movies to use such a line. That, or he doesn’t know shit about the international peacekeeping corps.

“These supplies are sorely needed in the village ahead. We will deliver them. Leave us and you may live,” our captain shouts back, not to be outdone in the corny line department, even if his point is somewhat stronger than the warlord’s. Some of the survivors in our front and back are already morphing into flying configuration. Quite limited in such weather, but even a few seconds airborne might be enough to allow them to send a killing barrage of fire onto the slope the guerrillas are using as cover.

But then something strange happens: everybody stops. The morphing remains incomplete. The corporal is still pointing at me like a statue. The captain remains in his preposterous, self–conscious heroic pose without moving a simulated muscle. I twitch my fingers. I can move. I breathe. But I decide to stay prone on the ground. The guerrillas come down and take our cargo, and nobody does anything about it. They are all frozen, and I do my best to imitate them. I don’t want the guerrillas to know that there is a single human being among this platoon of drones.

Since the beginning of this century, no self–respecting civilized democracy has ever sent one of their sons or daughters into the senseless carnage of war. Those countries instead send them into RV cocoons, from which the aforementioned sons and daughters can control drone bodies into the senseless carnage, etc. When a drone “dies,” its pilot feels a little discomfort—to call it “pain” would evoke an interminable legal harangue, human–rights–wise—but nothing else.

The one exception to this wise policy are people like me: in loco soldiers, or “locos” for short. Locos are needed for something like half a dozen obscure reasons, chief among which is the logistics of the link between drone and pilot: the warriors in their cocoons may be a continent away, and such distance implies a split–second delay between input and output, seeing the menace and reacting to it, seeing the enemy surrender and stopping firing. And in the war business, split seconds might mean lives.

We, the locos, work as an emergency feedback loop: our mental states are broadcast to the drones, stabilizing them. They have algorithms that use this information, plus every individual droid’s sensory input, to fill in the minuscule voids of command. Crucially, if some boundaries are surpassed, the drones start responding to our emotional states—fear, relief, whatever—before responding to their pilots’ commands. If I feel panicked and duck, everybody ducks; if I just duck to avoid a spiderweb or something, everybody keeps following the pilots, with the algorithms kicking in now and then. It usually works.

If you ask around in one of those civilized democracies, they’ll tell you that the in loco soldiers are all selfless people, humanitarians, heroic volunteers. As for myself, I can say I was rightfully convicted for the murder in the first degree of my now ex–wife’s lover. Every two years of in loco military service erases a decade from my hundred–year–plus prison sentence. You may say that I’m a volunteer, I guess, but you may also say that the circumstances that led me to sign in were somewhat exceptional. And I have never met an in loco who wasn’t a convicted felon, a fugitive, or both. Some thought of the service as a kind of atonement. For me, it is a job—the lesser of two evils.

With everybody paralyzed, the guerrillas come down from the hills and start plundering. The medical stuff is their first priority, of course, but they also take some time to strip a few of the drones from their armor plating and take some ammo. They don’t steal weapons. They know the hardware is locked to the drone’s equivalent of a biometric signature: the pressure level of its simulated muscles, the invisible marks etched in its gauntlet.

And then they are gone.

Nobody touched me. I’d been just one more body among many, the blood oozing from my body covered by a thin layer of bright ice. They hadn’t noticed that I was breathing. Lucky me.

Once they are gone, I get to my feet. First I run to the captain’s drone and open its body—not a hard thing to do when the damn thing is still and you know where to push and where to pull. The hydraulic locks hiss and puff, the servos work, the panels slide. The drone still has some power reserves left, and its systems weren’t completely fried. An electromagnet pulse is not an explanation for what just happened.

The captain’s drone contains the mission log and the main comm link to Stockholm. The link is dead and, while there’s nothing wrong with it physically, I can’t get it to work. The platoon collapsed like so many puppets with their strings cut. Something has jammed the communication with home base or destroyed their receptors at a level so deep I cannot identify—in the software, perhaps.

I try my own link with Stockholm and base, with the same results. Nothing. As a unit, we are like a body with a broken spinal cord. Alive, but unconscious, unknowing.

The blizzard has since abated, and the cloud cover opens up. There are a few stars and I think I see one or two planets among the ice–covered gnarled tree branches. I inhale deep, pretending that the processed air that I get through the mask is the real thing.

I am alone. Totally alone. I can walk away, wipe my slate clean, start a new life, and perhaps even become a warlord myself. All the shackles that tied me to the military were severed by the same mysterious power that cut the platoon from home. It isn’t as if I lost friends here. A few of the other soldiers were nice to me even knowing that, as the platoon’s loco, I probably was a convicted felon. But none of them are really dead. They are just having some kind of RV–induced hangover thousands of miles away. Away from the cold, the bullets, the real death.

I am not bound by honor, nor by friendship or by revenge. So I just start walking away. I feel elated. At this point, I have no plans: every option seems equally good, equally free—finding a village and going native, becoming a bandit on the hills, going south and stealing a boat to take me to France or perhaps Morocco, going east and then across Russia…

But there are those medical supplies. The people of the village really need them. I know what a shortage of frost blockers can do to a child in a climate like this. It isn’t beautiful.

Damn.

I start to follow the guerrilla tracks.

Tracking the guerrillas isn’t a hard thing to do. The blizzard has blown itself out, and they aren’t trying to cover their tracks. Why would they? But the going is slow due to the terrain and because I have to see to my wounds.

At the beginning, the tracks cover a large area—just what you would expect of a group of men moving in the same general direction in a haphazard manner—but after a while they converge, the whole terrain tapering between some basalt rocks on the sides into a quasi–tunnel covered by a canopy of crisscrossing black branches. It’s like the entrance of a fortress designed by nature. It would be a surprise if there were no guards, so I stop some fifty meters away from it, using some of the lower rocks for cover, and wait.

My systems still don’t get any uplink to Stockholm or any other remotely civilized place. Not even a satellite signal. But now there’s a lot less ice floating in the air—the mask sensors start to be somewhat useful. As the readings start to improve, I use the time to take a better look at my wound. It’s nothing serious, and the body armor has begun to work on it already, dousing it with antibiotics, anesthetics, and plaster. Feels numb, but nothing else. I can move with little discomfort.

I’m there, thinking about discomfort and wondering for how long the punctured–but–still–functional armor will be able to keep the cold outside, when the sensors show me a source of heat shinning bright somewhere to the left of the tunnel entrance, moving slowly between rocks and trees. My first impulse is to aim and shoot, but I am reminded that there’s possibly a real human being lurking there, not a drone. One gets quite trigger–happy around drones.

Despite my history, I dislike killing people. And I don’t even know if the heat signal is a man. It might be some kind of animal. Small reindeer? Wolf? If I kill a reindeer I’ll feel obliged to eat it. If I kill a wolf, I’ll feel guilty as hell. The directional mike doesn’t help. I have to get closer.

There is a semicircle of low rocks that I can use as cover to go in there. Not a very good cover, but I’m all in white, there’s snow everywhere, and the sensors will let me know if someone gets too close. This outfit can even detect if a rifle’s LiDAR sight is pointing my direction. And so I start moving and, of course, I’m screwed.

I take two steps and then everything goes dark. Really dark. My mask’s visuals just die out and I begin to suffocate: there’s no more air circulating inside my helmet. I fall down, thrashing, my arms and legs suddenly heavy, too heavy. The servomotors of the armor are inactive. I feel dizzy. It’s an effort just to raise my hands and to claw the mask out of my face to let the fresh air in. It’s night, but the sudden shock of light still blinds me for a second. I think I’ll heave but I don’t.

The weight of the armor forces me down onto my knees; it’s painful in my awkward position. My legs are paralyzed. Frantically, I work to remove my gloves, the helmet, open the collar, bend again to take off the boots, trying to crawl out of the armor as an aborted butterfly coming out of the cocoon.

It’s cold and I begin to shiver, naked but by for my undersuit in the snow. Then someone says, in crystal–clear Spanish:

“Welcome to the doorway to Eanmund’s Hall. Now, now, don’t you fret. Come here.”

The man has a skin as dark as mine, which marks him as a foreigner in these parts, not one of the white barbarians. But his hair is bleached blond—perhaps he was trying to fit in, going native? He’s wearing a more colorful version of the Scandinavian savages’ dress, all furs and cannibalized plate armor, but with lots of collars and bracelets of bright stones and animals’ teeth.

He throws a stinking blanket over my shoulders and pushes me toward the rock–and–tree tunnel. There’s a small lean–to just hidden on the outside and to the left, close to the place where I’d seen the heat signal. When I’m sitting down there, my mouth trembling and my lips blue, he starts a fire.

“I am glad you came,” the stranger says. “I knew a platoon like that would certainly have to have an in loco. If you did not come, I would’ve gone down there after you. Nasty place to spend the night alone, these parts.”

“And you are…?”

“I am Pascual de Andagoya. I am the UN ambassador to His Highness Eanmund’s court. Call me Pascual.”

A UN representative. Then it hits me.

“You have a peacemaker.”

“Had.”

A peacemaker is a specialized tool used by UN representatives on peacekeeping missions. The device neutralizes all drones nearby when activated, a last–resort measure to stop atrocities against civilians and the like by drone pilots. They’re rarely used—only in special circumstances, such as like what happened during the Rape of Berlin, when a few of the guys went killer–crazy after finding a glitch that created drone–induced orgasmic highs. A peacemaker in the hands of a guerrilla group would be disastrous indeed.

“How did you lose yours?”

“Eanmund’s sister, Freawru, is quite a persuasive young lady.”

“Were you seduced?”

“It’s complicated… she’s not like the rest of them. She studied engineering in the south. She even made some improvements on the device.” I recall my blindness, the shutdown of my air supply, of the armor servomotors. The communications blackout. These things are not part of the peacemaker’s normal function, and were activated only when I got close to their lair.

“Freawru was a brilliant engineer once, with a great career before her despite the racism and the bigotry of our people,” he added. “She gave up a life in civilization to be by the side of her barbarian brother when he sent for her.”

He gave me a sad smile before continuing: “I did not know any of this when I first met her, of course. And, well, I was here as an official envoy, trying to get this guy Eanmund to stop brawling with everybody else and be part of the alliance we are trying to establish, uniting the warlords, shaping them into a semblance of government… given their culture, it would’ve been impolite to refuse the overtures of the warlord’s sister.”

“Impolite?”

He waves his hands at the cynicism of my voice. “It was a trap. Once she got me naked in her room, and got me distracted…”

“Distracted.”

His eyes flash with anger, but he keeps his voice level. A diplomat, indeed. “I woke up in fetters. She’d disabled my passive surveillance devices and personal safety alarms and made it quite clear that no help would come.”

“And you gave them the peacemaker.”

My tone has gone from cynical to contemptuous. He doesn’t like it.

“You are an in loco. What’ve you done? Robbed a bank? No, you don’t look like a professional criminal. Killed someone, then? Not professionally? Not in cold blood? In a fit of rage, perhaps? Was it a woman?”

Now the contempt is in his voice. He might be an incompetent fool and a coward, but I am a murderer.

“Not a woman,” I say, defensively, without thinking. It comes back to me: I remember the man’s face, the face of my victim, as I punched the life out of him. I was big and strong; he was small and weak. If she’d preferred him, why hadn’t she just left me and been done with it? Why…? “What is it to you?” I ask.

“I need a murderer. Someone to get the peacemaker back.”

“I was going to retrieve the medical supplies,” I say. “With the armor, I stood a good chance. But you can’t expect me to get a whole bunch of barbarians single–handedly and unarmed…”

“There is another way,” he pauses, looking for a tactful phrase. “Because of how they’re organized.”

“And because I am a murderer?”

“A man who can kill another man, face to face, is a rare thing nowadays. It’s an uncommon skill in our civilization. I, for instance, cannot, will not. As I said, if you did not come, I would’ve gone down there after you. I needed to get us a murderer.”

He urges me to pretend to go along with her plans, to use the opportunity to get the peacemaker out of the barbarian’s hands, to use it to send a distress signal.

“There can be a full pardon for you, if you can manage to do that,” he says. “You could go back home with a clean slate.”

After committing a second crime, I think but do not say.

He takes me to her, to the woman who seduced and betrayed him.

She’s waiting for us a little further down the tunnel in an improvised tent. She has the washed–out blond hair and blue eyes of the Scandinavians, a perky nose, fuller lips than I am used to seeing at these latitudes. The fur coat encases her body so I can’t see anything of her curves or absence thereof. Not really my type, anyway.

“You talked to him?” she asks Pascual, ignoring me.

“Yes.”

“Will he do this for us?”

“I may, if I know what ‘this’ is,” I say abruptly, to make it impossible for her to keep pretending I am some kind of dumb animal. Pascual had already made it quite clear what they want from me, but I have to get her to acknowledge my presence.

“You are to go before Eanmund and call him a thief in his face. It will be a challenge for trial by combat, and if you win…”

“I get the peacemaker?”

Pascual nods. “He made the thing his badge of office. The winner will be the new ruler and thus the rightful owner. With no further dispute.”

“Why is his sister helping us?” I ask Pascual, pointedly ignoring her.

The answer, however, comes from her:

“Because I should rule by his side, as his equal, his sister, not a servant. Because he used me and then placed me along this… this…”

She looks at Pascual with contempt. He shrugs, but there is a new hardness around his eyes. “I seem to have evolved from valued prisoner into court’s jester,” he says, flatly.

Well, I am big and I have an enviable set of muscles. I have to, being a loco who follows a platoon of tireless, almost superhumanly–strong drones. Even before that, I had killed a man with my bare hands in a fit of rage. I am quite confident I could take on this Eanmund, whoever he might be, and regain my freedom. Get home. Home.

They lead me into a small natural amphitheater scooped from the rock wall by centuries of ice and covered by an artificial ceiling made of rags of parachute silk, sailcloth, and the like, interspersed with straw and sustained on wooden poles and beams. There are lots of men—the ones who attacked the platoon earlier, probably. Some of them are dozing, strong–scented beer spilled all over, but others are checking equipment, fixing the plates they’ve managed to remove from the drones to their armor. If I had a few drones with me, or even my own suit, I could have easily rounded them all up. Even the sentries Frewaru waves away as we proceed would’ve been nothing more than a joke. As it is, I enter half–naked, half–frozen, packed in a stinking blanket of wolf hide. Unarmed and escorted by the boss’s sister and by the new shaman–clown of the tribe. This will be a challenge.

Eanmund is seated in the center of the room on a dais, a huge guy with an ugly, broken version of Freawru’s perky nose. The box of medical supplies is ensconced in a big niche behind his crude throne. The peacemaker—a green–golden band of circuitry that the diplomat in charge ought to keep somewhere on his body during combat operations and safely hidden away every other time—is above it, like a laurel wreath laid over the spoils of war. He’s bigger than I am, muscles straining at his shirt. Despite my condition, I’m a close match.

“Brother!” she cries, clinging with her body to me for all she is worth. “Here is a surviving warrior from those I massacred for you, a strong man who calls you a weakling, a coward, and a thief!” She is using a local variant of the common Scandinavian pidgin. I feel tempted to raise my hand and retract the “coward” and “weakling” charges, but then I think it would be useless.

And then everybody is suddenly quite awake: they might have been guzzling beer for hours before my arrival, but they sleep lightly and recover fast from the hangover.

I see steel gleaming under the almost psychedelic mixture of steady, cold LED light and hot, flickering torchlight—guns and rifles and machetes, axes, the greasy black of small artillery pieces glinting side by side with a few makeshift swords. There’s a loud click when someone shifts a machine gun.

“So you finally found yourself a champion, eh, my ingenious sister?” Eanmund smirks. He’s way bigger than me, I can see it now. This stuff about electing leaders by combat has a Darwinian effect: only the biggest and meanest survive long in office.

Eanmund comes down off the dais, cudgel in hand. It is a large piece of bone, the femur of some big animal reinforced with metal. Someone removes the stinking blanket from my shoulders and replaces it with something made of fur. A challenger’s cloak, probably.

“I just want the medicine to be delivered to the people of the village,” I tell him. “And the peacemaker returned to its rightful owner. I am not here to challenge your right to rule your men.”

“If you challenge my decision about the medicine and want to take the crown away, you challenge my right to rule,” he coldly replies. And then he smiles: “I think maybe my sister has tricked you. Leave now, and you may live.”

These guys are fond of that line.

“And may I take the medicine and the peacemaker with me?”

“No.”

“The only way to get both is to fight?”

“Over my dead body.”

I feel something pressed in my right hand—a mace, a stout piece of wood with a metal ball at one end. As a weapon for naked barbarians it seems impressive, but its balance is lousy, with almost all of the weight in the metallic point. I know this shit is going to break on the first serious impact. So much for honor and fair play among the noble savages.

Eanmund gives a step forward and strikes without warning, roaring in frustration when he sees me dodge. I duck and I dodge and I use my left forearm as a shield of sorts, trying to avoid any direct impacts that might break it: I just keep it moving, sliding it along Eanmund’s weapon, diverting it without really stopping the blows, redirecting the force instead of blocking it. It is risky and it is painful, but it also works: I can see he is not used to the technique, and that it is getting him off balance.

But it does have its limits. The semi–healed wound starts to itch and then to ache, and I’m getting tired. The audience is getting tired, too. There are people booing, armed people, which is not a good thing. I cannot delay it anymore.

I make a feint, at the same time using my left elbow to divert his mace just a little too much to the side, and then I jump into the opening. Then two things happen: first, I slip—I’m in my undersuit’s socks, after all—and second, my weapon breaks even before it hits. The shaft just arches and then snaps in mid–swing, sending the ball flying in a tangent.

But it’s a good tangent: it hits him right on the hip, and even as I am falling on my face I can hear the bone break. He falls with a scream.

I scramble to my feet, the broken shaft still in my hands. It has a nasty point now. Not enough to, say, pierce a vampire’s heart as in the old movies, but it can do a lot of damage against soft tissue—a throat, let’s say. And if the victim is laying defenseless on the ground with the hipbone broken, better yet.

As I get closer to him and prepare the final blow, there is silence all around. The only things I hear are my thoughts. They scream inside of my head. “You are doing this so you can go back home,” they say. “But where’s home? Where do you belong, murderer?”

I have the ragged point of the broken shaft touching Eanmund’s Adam’s apple. “Home!” the blood pounding in my ears yells. “Do it and go home!” I breathe.

“Release the supplies to the village. Relinquish the peacemaker. It is your last chance.”

He spits. “Kill me and do it yourself.”

I don’t know why, but I am smiling.

“Wouldn’t you rather survive as adviser of the new king?”

“Adviser?” He is shocked, I can notice that. “Why would you want my advice?”

“To deal with your sister, I’ll need all the help I can get.”

He laughs. “Yes, you will. And I take the job.”

I offer him my hand. He starts to get up, but then scowls in pain.

I look around. Freawru and Pascual are puzzled; the other men seem to relax a little. In their guts, they understand what just happened. They recognize my new power over them. Before anyone can move, I jump into the dais and grab the peacemaker. Then I place it on my head, as the wreath of a Caesar. Pascual is now whiter than the snow outside. Freawru gasps.

There’s sound again. I start making plans—to get the cargo to the village, to send Pascual back with a message telling people that they are to negotiate with me from now on. And to forge this band of desperadoes into a proper fighting force with a bigger mission than just plunder and survival.

I know that everybody is already plotting against me. I am not worried. I’m free, surrounded by real people, fighting side by side with, and against, real people. One day leading them to make peace as a real people. The warriors of yesterday used to say that a man fights not for himself, his country, or his flag, but for the brother–in–arms by his side. Now I have brothers–in–arms that can bleed by my side. With them, I am finally home. We are all locos together.