Livesuit, p.4
Livesuit, page 4
“Check. Kirin Foss, 88-hotel-alpha-bravo.”
“Confirmed,” Kirin said, and a contact appeared in his heads-up. The call sign was SIMEON.
He looked around, trying to find who was speaking to him. The prep room had a hundred livesuit infantry and maybe twice that in support staff. A man—Kirin assumed it was a man from the voice—stepped away from a group of support technicians and started toward them as Piotr stiffened and started looking around the same way Kirin had. By the time the new man had reached them, all four of the intake group were on their feet and braced for salute.
Simeon waved the formal salute away. “Good to meet you, folks. I’m going to be lead on this one. My group two leader is a fella named Estebán Corval. I hear it’s your first time at the party?”
“Sir yes sir,” they all said. He had switched them to a shared channel, so Kirin heard all of their voices like they were a single mind with four bodies. Simeon’s shoulders shook a little like he was laughing at them.
“All right, puppies. This should be pretty much by the numbers. They try to give you a simpler drop your first time out. Lulls you into a sense of competence. You could still get fucked up. Make no mistake, the enemy intends to fuck you up. But stick with me and mine, and we’ll try to make sure that doesn’t happen. We’re dropship four. Be there in ten.”
The heads-up display flickered, and new names appeared. Simeon, Gleaner, Ross, Kirin, Piotr, Jones, Hamze, Corval.
The dropship was an old model, built before the war, when soldiers were still fighting other humans over things like political allegiance and religion and money. The straps on the seats were woven fiber, forest green in the middle and white on the edges where they’d started to wear. Kirin strapped himself in the way he’d been trained to, and checked his weapons: mag rifle with a thousand needle-thin explosive rounds, sidearm, three concussion grenades with their safeties firmly in place, twenty micromissiles in a hard pack on his left shoulder. The others were slower to arrive, and it left him feeling a little awkward. Like the kid who came in early and sat in the first row at a lecture. He was grateful when one of the other livesuit infantry came and strapped in next to him.
“Corval,” the other man said on a private channel. “You’re Kirin?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, good to meet you, Kirin. I’m looking forward to not getting each other killed down there.”
There was a warmth and mordant humor in Corval’s voice. Kirin imagined a rueful smile to go along with them, but the livesuit faceplates were opaque.
“Sounds like fun,” Kirin said. “I’m in. How long have you been in service?”
Corval shrugged. “What is time? I’ve done thirteen operations since intake. Simeon’s at something like fifty, and there was one woman I was on some drops with who said she was coming up on two hundred. She may have been bullshitting, though.”
“What happened to her?”
“Reassigned,” Corval said. “Command does that a lot. Shift us around.”
“Yeah, that kind of blindsided me. I thought they’d try to keep units together.”
“They’ll put two or three people in a group when you shift around sometimes. I’ve been with Gleaner over there about half my drops.”
Two more soldiers strapped into the bench across from them. The suit identified them as Hamze and Jones. Piotr came through, taking the seat on Corval’s other side. The timer counting down to the drop hit three minutes, then two and fifty-nine seconds.
“I guess it makes it easier,” Kirin said. “Fighting changes people, right? If you didn’t know someone before, you don’t expect them to be who they were.”
“Sure, like that,” Corval said. “Or maybe it’s something else. Command is Command. We can make up shit about why they do things, but the truth is…” He shrugged. “Who the fuck knows?”
“How long have you been working under Simeon?”
“Five drops. He’s good. Flexible. My dad used to say that anyone who believes in a fair fight has never been in a fight. Simeon just wants to win and get everyone home. The ones who think there’s a rulebook are the ones who’ll get you killed.”
Kirin tried to keep his tone light. It didn’t really work. “That happen much?”
“People getting killed in a war? What do you think?”
“I heard that we were tougher than cockroaches.”
“We are,” Corval said. “You ever stomp on a roach? Dies like everything else. Just try not to get stomped.”
Simeon’s voice broke in. “If you’re not strapped in, do it now. If you are strapped in, check them again. We’ve been cleared for drop.”
Kirin’s throat went dry. He wished he could get a drink of water, but that wasn’t what he was anymore. He’d get a glass of iced tea when the war was over.
A map appeared on his display. A blue marker showed where they were expected to land in a clear spot beside the river that ran through the city. A red one pulsed gently in a plaza deep inside the maze of streets.
“We have our objective,” Simeon said. “We are going to reach Otaki Square, clear it of enemy influence, and hold the territory. Acknowledge.”
A swarm of questions flooded Kirin’s mind. Why were they landing so far from the objective? What resistance were they facing? Why that part of the city, and how long were they supposed to hold it for?
“Acknowledged,” he said along with the others. Their names all shifted in the display. Everyone had agreed. No one had asked a question. Understanding the big picture was someone else’s job.
The dropship shuddered, lurched, and began to shake. The roar of distant engines meant they were descending toward the thin skin of the planetary atmosphere. Someone was humming, and Kirin located the sound as coming from Jones. He put the channel on half-mute. If Jones actually said anything, the suit would let him know, but the subvocalizing was gone. Kirin bunched his fists and released them over and over as the ship dropped, the turbulence rose, shaking them hard enough to rattle his teeth.
A message popped up in his text channel. It was Piotr. SOME RIDE, HUH?
He shifted mode and wrote back KINDA CHOPPY. I THINK THE PILOT MAY BE DRUNK. On the open channel, Piotr chuckled.
The drop began to smooth as they came closer to the ground. Simeon, at the operation command, had each of them sound off and synch their positional data. Even if they were separated, the suits would be able to bring them back together or call out to each other for help. Kirin didn’t know these people, and he was putting his life in their hands. They were putting their lives in his. It wasn’t a feeling that compared to anything else he’d done.
There was no warning when they touched down. There was just a last, heavy bump, and the engines huffed and went silent. They unstrapped and trotted down and out the ramp. The buildings that had been Lapis City rose ahead of them like the ruins of an ancient empire. Scorch marks darkened the sides of the great arcologies and skyscrapers. A maglev train lay on its side on the far bank of the river, its track broken. Smoke made the sky a haze of white, and Kirin imagined it with an acrid stink like burning hair, but he couldn’t actually smell it. At the thought, his suit began displaying atmospheric data.
“Mosquitoes out,” Simeon said, and their suits released the microdrones. A real-time map began forming itself out ahead of them. In the sky to the north, another dropship glowed and drew a dark line of smoke through the unfamiliar sky. In the distance, something began to wail. A frightened animal or a siren. On the map, three red dots appeared, then two more.
“Well, fuck,” Simeon said, his tone relaxed and conversational. “Group one is Piotr, Noor, and Hamze with me. Jones, Kirin, and Gleaner are with group two under Corval. Spread out and let’s set up a kill zone. We’re about to get our exercise for today.”
The things that boiled out of the rubble of concrete and ceramic had long, loping strides and mouths like a nightmare. They wore a flexible armor or else grew plates of bone and shell, and spat missiles as hard and fast as bullets.
Kirin lost himself in the immediacy of violence. Simeon’s calm voice led them like a conductor leading an orchestra. Street by street, doorway by ruined door, they fought and ran and—to Kirin’s surprise—joked and laughed. And raged.
By the time they reached Otaki Square, he’d forgotten to wonder why they’d come.
There could be no definitive news of the war. The scale was too large for that. Everything came in fragments. Keryunyua system had been overrun by a vastly superior alien force, the people hauled from their homes and set on fire. That had happened, but when it had happened, or in reaction to what, was impossible to know. Human forces had found the center of an alien outpost, destroying what looked like an egg chamber and driving its soldiery into a death frenzy that claimed fifty thousand lives on seven planets, but then the timestamps and locations were checked, and it was the same seven planets that had been destroyed five years before. Not news, but history. A report that had been bouncing through the network, relay to relay and ship to ship, until it arrived where it had already been. An echo.
It didn’t keep Kirin from watching the reports.
The attack on the hive-bridge had been Kirin’s twenty-eighth operation. The slip boat had taken them to a station called Maja-HHX, deep in the sunless emptiness above the galactic plane. There was no civilian planet to spend time on, no local life that could show what strangeness evolution had bumbled into here. It was all metal and ceramic and the force of war.
But there were ships, and so there was the traffic of information. A new arrival had come in the day before, the survivors of a desperate, long-haul counterattack from a decade before who’d spent so long on the brane and bumping up near lightspeed that soldiers born five years before him were younger than he was now. Kirin’s four years subjective—half his tour—had been a blink for them. There was no point trying to make sense of it.
He imagined them on their slip boats, watching the news that he’d brought, trying to catch up on the events that had gone by them too quickly to register, their futures already behind them.
“You know what I miss?” Ross said on the open channel.
“Getting drunk,” Gleaner said.
“Getting drunk.”
“Wonder if we could hack the suit’s nutrient system to pump a little ethanol into our blood.”
“Someone has to have figured that out,” Ross said with a sigh.
“If we find that person,” Gleaner said, “I will offer them a lifetime of free blowjobs once the suit comes off.”
Kirin didn’t know if they were on the ship or the station, in their bunks or the gym, and it didn’t matter. They were in his ear, on his display. He opened audio on the general channel and smiled so they could hear him smiling. “It’s the price you paid for becoming a god. If you wanted to get fucked up and laid, you should have stayed a monkey like all the rest of them.”
“Nah,” Ross said, and her voice was a grin. “I’ll save it up for muster. By the time they shuck me out of this thing, I will be ready to spend a year in a dive bar.”
“You’ll have the money for it,” Corval said. “Used to be, I blew everything I got during shore leave. Now, what is there to spend it on? I could get all the exotics I want, and the suit’ll just filter them back out.”
“Fuck that,” Ross said. “Mine’s pumping more psychoactives into me than I could have paid for with my salt.”
“Yeah, but they aren’t the fun kind.”
“Try going without. They’re plenty fun enough.”
Kirin closed his eyes, but he left the channel open. The downtime between drops was like this. Boring. Nothing to be done but talk to the same people they always talked to, say goodbye to the ones rotating out, or get to know the ones rotating in. It was restful for now because they’d just gotten out of their slip pods. Eventually, it would be oppressive. Like being a gun locked in a gun rack was how Piotr had described it. Kirin always remembered that.
Sleep didn’t come. Instead, he found himself thinking about Mira. About her message. About how much older she’d looked. In a way, it justified all he’d done. Wherever she was, whenever she was, she’d been able to live out decades safely. At least safely enough to live through them. She might be an old woman by now. A mother. A grandmother. If she was, he’d been part of what got that for her.
But he wished he remembered that feed she’d talked about. He wondered if maybe he’d forgotten it, or if she’d seen it with some other lover she’d had back when she was young. He opened his eyes again, scrolled through his old messages. Silent Horses. It still didn’t ring a bell.
He went through the ship library. It wasn’t in the official catalog, but there were personal or legacy drops here and there, obscure feeds and books that one soldier or another had stowed in a corner of the public space. He found a copy in a cache of Avanicc-era crime dramas. He transferred it to the suit, switched audio to override only, and spent a couple hours seeing if he could remember what his old lover seemed to recall.
When the first images came up—a man walking alone in a park, a gray drizzle falling around him, an ancient pagoda rising up in the background with a red light glowing in its eaves—Kirin thought it might have looked familiar. Within the first ten minutes, he was sure he hadn’t seen the story before.
It was odd, the acting a little disjointed. The man was a police officer discovering that the force he worked in was corrupt. The female lead was a criminal who seduced him and then might or might not have developed a real attachment to him. The strangest thing was its age. Seeing anything set before the war felt like stepping into a fantasy. Here was a launch pad, but there were no guns pointing at the sky. There was a band of soldiers, but they were all preparing to fight other humans. No one talked about alien soldiers. No one had lost anyone to an attack. No one worried that the planet might be taken over. The sense of doom that the story wanted to portray felt so much lighter than the real world that the lead character’s tragic death wound up feeling quaint. He lay bleeding to death in the park from the opening images, the woman kneeling beside him. He handed her his police identification, smeared with his blood. The camera lingered long enough to see the rain wash the worst of the gore away. I thought we would come back together, but I was wrong. No one makes it home. He closed his eyes. The light on the pagoda changed from red to white. The story ended.
Kirin sat for a long time, trying to figure out how he felt. Amused by the—being honest—pretty ham-handed, dated story. Annoyed that his old lover had misremembered something that was supposed to have been important to the two of them. Nostalgic for the mornings he’d woken up beside her, the rooms they’d shared, the life he’d had once and thought on some level he might have again. Not with Mira, but with someone.
Now that he looked at it, maybe he’d held the idea that going back would be like going back. Mira, all unintentionally, had told him that it wouldn’t. He’d put on the suit so that people could have that life. When he took it off, he’d go back to civilian life himself. It wasn’t only that it wouldn’t be with Mira. He also wouldn’t be him. The Kirin who’d enjoyed smoking cigars and looking out over their little town was as old and outdated as Silent Horses. He wouldn’t be back. That was the sacrifice. It was worth it, but he wished he’d understood better at the time what he was giving up.
He went back through his messages, found hers, and recorded a response. Audio only. If he’d sent images, they would have been of a faceplate. She didn’t need that.
“Hey, I got your message. It was good to hear from you.” But we never watched that story at Christmas. But I’m never going to see you again. But your life and mine are already so different, we don’t even remember it the same way. “I hope… I hope things went well for you. I want you to know that I remember you fondly. The time we spent together was good.”
What else was there to say? There was hardly any reason to say that much. By the time the message got to her, her grandkids might be reading it. He imagined some young brother and sister who looked a little like Mira staring at each other, eyes wide, and saying Meemaw used to date a livesuit soldier? That was funny enough to make it worth doing. He queued the message to send.
And an error appeared. RECIPIENT BLOCKED BY SECURITY SERVICES. FLAG ID 3432-H
That was a censor’s office code. Kirin scowled and felt a little chill that had nothing to do with temperature. He opened a connection to the station security office. The image that appeared was a thin-faced man with short, gray hair plastered against his head and a thin, pinched, passionless mouth.
“How can I help, soldier?”
Kirin laid out the situation from Mira’s message to Silent Horses to the error code. The security man listened, his bloodless mouth in a practiced smile. When Kirin was done, he shrugged. He felt like a schoolboy confessing himself to the school matron without knowing exactly what he was confessing for.
The security man nodded and held up a finger. Give me some time. His gaze shifted down from the camera to some monitor Kirin would never see. Light glittered in his eyes and the soft tapping of fingertips against keys and touchscreens was the only sound for almost a full minute. Then a short, percussive sigh.
“I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news for you, son,” the security man said. “Mina Alzabeta Caulson?”
“Yeah, what’s the matter?”
“I’m sorry, son. She passed away in a hospital on Gerrian Station at age fifty-eight. That message you got didn’t find you before she was gone.”
“Oh,” Kirin said. “Can I send a message to her family, then?”
The bloodless smile shifted into something like sympathy. “I’m afraid not. Toward the end of her life, Ms. Caulson was involved with an anti-military faction. The message you had was scrubbed of some critical identifiers. It really shouldn’t have gotten through at all.”
“Wait, what? Anti-military faction? Mina? That’s a mistake.”
“You sure about that? I mean, you knew her. I didn’t. She never said anything against the war effort?”
