Collateral collected sto.., p.63
Collateral: Collected Stories, page 63
Kodjo Asante can see again: a high sun in a hard blue sky. A flat far horizon. Columns of oily smoke rising from wrecked machinery.
Bodies.
The air cracks a few centimeters to his right. He drops instinctively to a deck slippery with blood and silver scales, gags at the sudden stench wafting from a slurry of bloated carcasses crowding the surface of the holding pen just in front of him. (Coho-Atlantic hybrids, he notes despite himself. Might even have those new Showell genes.) A turret on treads sparks and sizzles on the other side, a hole blown in its carapace.
A shadow blurs across Asante’s forearm. Tiwana leaps across the sky, defractors high on her forehead, eyeballs dancing madly in their sockets. She clears the enclosure, alights graceful as a dragonfly on one foot, kicks the spastic turret with the other. It sparks one last time and topples into the pen. Tiwana vanishes down the nearest companionway.
Asante gets to his feet, pans for threats, sees nothing but enemies laid waste: the smoking stumps of perimeter autoturrets, the fallen bodies of a man with his arm blown off and a woman groping for a speargun just beyond reach. And a small brittle figure almost fused to the deck: blackened sticks for arms and legs, white teeth grinning in a charred skull, a bright half-melted puddle of orange fabric and PVC holding it all together. Asante sees it all. Not just snapshots glimpsed through the fog: ZeroS handiwork, served up for the first time in three-sixty wraparound immersion.
We’re killing children…
Even the adult bodies don’t look like combatants. Refugees, maybe, driven to take by force what they couldn’t get any other way. Maybe all they wanted was to get somewhere safe. To feed their kids.
At his feet, a reeking carpet of dead salmon converge listlessly in the wake of the fallen turret. They aren’t feeding anything but hagfish and maggots.
I have become Sāḥilite, Asante reflects numbly. He calls up BUD, ignores the unreadable auras flickering around the edges of vision, selects GPS.
Not off Honduras. They’re in the Gulf of Mexico.
No one in their right mind would run a fish farm here. The best parts of the Gulf are anoxic; the worst are downright flammable. Caçador must have drifted up through the Yucatan Channel, got caught in an eddy loop. All these fish would have suffocated as soon as they hit the dead zone.
But gylands aren’t entirely at the mercy of the currents. They carry rudimentary propulsion systems for docking and launching, switching streams and changing course. Caçador’s presence so deep in the Gulf implies either catastrophic equipment failure or catastrophic ignorance.
Asante can check out the first possibility, anyway. He stumbles toward the nearest companionway—
—as Tiwana and Acosta burst onto deck from below. Acosta seizes his right arm, Tiwana his left. Neither slows. Asante’s feet bounce and drag. The lurching acceleration reawakens the pain in his temple.
He cries out: “The engines…”
New pain, other side, sharp and recurrent: an ancient weight belt swinging back and forth across Acosta’s torso, a frayed strip of nylon threaded through an assortment of lead slugs. It’s like being hammered by a tiny wrecking ball. One part of Asante wonders where Acosta found it; another watches Garin race into view with a small bloody body slung across his shoulder. Garin passes one of the dismembered turrets, grabs a piece with his free hand and keeps running.
Everyone’s charging for the rails.
Tiwana’s mouthpiece is in, her defractors down. She empties a clip into the deck ahead, right at the water’s edge: gunfire shreds plastic and whitewashed fiberglass, loosens an old iron docking cleat. She dips and grabs in passing, draws it to her chest, never loosening her grip on Asante. He hears the soft pop of a bone leaving its socket in the instant before they all go over the side.
They plummet head-first, dragged down by a hundred kilograms of improvised ballast. Asante chokes, jams his mouthpiece into place; coughs seawater through the exhaust and sucks in a hot lungful of fresh-sparked hydrox. Pressure builds against his eardrums. He swallows, swallows again, manages to keep a few millibars ahead of outright rupture. He has just enough freedom of movement to claw at his face and slide the defractors over his eyes. The ocean clicks into focus, clear as acid, empty as green glass.
Green turns white.
Seen in that flash-blinded instant: four thin streams of bubbles, rising to a surface gone suddenly incandescent. Four dark bodies, falling from the light. A thunderclap rolls through the water, deep, downshifted, as much felt as heard. It comes from nowhere and everywhere.
The roof of the ocean is on fire. Some invisible force shreds their contrails from the top down, tears those bubbles into swirling silver confetti. The wave-front races implacably after them. The ocean bulges, recoils. It squeezes Asante like a fist, stretches him like rubber; Tiwana and Acosta tumble away in the backwash. He flails, stabilizes himself as the first jagged shapes resolve overhead: dismembered chunks of the booby-trapped gyland, tumbling with slow majesty into the depths. A broken wedge of deck and stairwell passes by a few meters away, tangled in monofilament. A thousand glassy eyes stare back from the netting as the wreckage fades to black.
Asante scans the ocean for that fifth bubble trail, that last dark figure to balance Those Who Left against Those Who Returned. No one overhead. Below, a dim shape that has to be Garin shares its mouthpiece with the small limp thing in his arms. Beyond that, the hint of a deeper dark against the abyss: a shark-like silhouette keeping station amid a slow rain of debris. Waiting to take its prodigal children home again.
They’re too close to shore. There might be witnesses. So much for stealth-ops. So much for low profiles and no-questions-asked. Metzinger’s going to be pissed.
Then again, they are in the Gulf of Mexico.
Any witnesses will probably just think it caught fire again.
Lady Grinning Soul
“In your own words, Sergeant. Take your time.”
We killed children. We killed children, and we lost Silano, and I don’t know why. And I don’t know if you do either.
But of course, that would involve taking Major Emma Rossiter at her word.
“Did the child…?” Metzinger had already tubed Garin’s prize by the time Asante reboarded the sub. Garin, of course, had no idea what his body had been doing. Metzinger had not encouraged discussion.
That was okay. Nobody was really in the mood anyhow.
“I’m sorry. She didn’t make it.” Rossiter waits for what she probably regards as a respectful moment. “If we could focus on the subject at hand…”
“It was a shitstorm,” Asante says. “Sir.”
“We gathered that.” The Major musters a sympathetic smile. “We were hoping you could provide more in the way of details.”
“You must have the logs.”
“Those are numbers, Sergeant. Pixels. You are uniquely—if accidentally—in a position to give us more than that.”
“I never even got below decks.”
Rossiter seems to relax a little. “Still. This is the first time one of you has been debooted in mid-game, and it’s obviously not the kind of thing we want to risk repeating. Maddox is already working on ways to make the toggle more robust. In the meantime, your perspective could be useful in helping to ensure this doesn’t happen again.”
“My perspective, sir, is that those forces did not warrant our particular skill set.”
“We’re more interested in your experiences regarding the deboot, Sergeant. Was there a sense of disorientation, for example? Any visual artifacts in BUD?”
Asante stands with his hands behind his back—good gripping bad—and says nothing.
“Very well.” Rossiter’s smile turns grim. “Let’s talk about your perspective, then. Do you think regular forces would have been sufficient? Do you have a sense of the potential losses incurred if we’d sent, say, WestHem marines?”
“They appeared to be refugees, sir. They didn’t pose—”
“One hundred percent, Sergeant. We would have lost everyone.”
Asante says nothing.
“Unaugged soldiers wouldn’t even have made it off the gyland before it went up. Even if they had, the p-wave would’ve been fatal if you hadn’t greatly increased your rate of descent. Do you think regular forces would have made that call? Seen what was coming, run the numbers, improvised a strategy to get below the kill zone in less time than it would take to shout a command?”
“We killed children.” It’s barely more than a whisper.
“Collateral damage is an unfortunate but inevitable—”
“We targeted children.”
“Ah.”
Rossiter plays with her tacpad: tap tap tap, swipe.
“These children,” she says at last. “Were they armed?”
“I do not believe so, sir.”
“Were they naked?”
“Sir?”
“Could you be certain they weren’t carrying concealed weapons? Maybe even a remote trigger for a thousand kilograms of CL-20?”
“They were… sir, they couldn’t have been more than seven or eight.”
“I shouldn’t have to tell you about child soldiers, Sergeant. They’ve been a fact of life for centuries, especially in your particular—at any rate. Just out of interest, how young would someone have to be before you’d rule them out as a potential threat?”
“I don’t know, sir.”
“Yes you do. You did. That’s why you targeted them.”
“That wasn’t me.”
“Of course. It was your… evil twin. That’s what you call it, right?” Rossiter leans forward. “Listen to me very carefully, Sergeant Asante, because I think you’re laboring under some serious misapprehensions about what we do here. Your twin is not evil, and it is not gratuitous. It is you: a much bigger part of you than the whiny bitch standing in front of me right now.”
Asante clenches his teeth and keeps his mouth shut.
“This gut feeling giving you so much trouble. This sense of Right and Wrong. Where do you think it comes from, Sergeant?”
“Experience. Sir.”
“It’s the result of a calculation. A whole series of calculations, far too complex to fit into the conscious workspace. So the subconscious sends you… an executive summary, you might call it. Your evil twin knows all about your sense of moral outrage; it’s the source of it. It has more information than you do. Processes it more effectively. Maybe you should trust it to know what it’s doing.”
He doesn’t. He doesn’t trust her, either.
But suddenly, surprisingly, he understands her.
She’s not just making a point. This isn’t just rhetoric. The insight appears fully formed in his mind, a bright shard of unexpected clarity. She thought it would be easy. She really doesn’t know what happened.
He watches her fingers move on the ’pad as she speaks. Notes the nervous flicker of her tongue at the corner of her mouth. She glances up to meet his eye, glances away again.
She’s scared.
Look Back in Anger
Asante awakens standing in the meadow up the mountain. The sky is cloudless and full of stars. His fatigues are damp with sweat or dew. There is no moon. Black conifers loom on all sides. To the east, a hint of pre-dawn orange seeps through the branches.
He has read that this was once the time of the dawn chorus, when songbirds would call out in ragged symphony to start the day. He has never heard it. He doesn’t hear it now. There’s no sound in this forest but his own breathing—
—and the snap of a twig under someone’s foot.
He turns. A gray shape detaches itself from the darkness.
“Fellow corpse,” Tiwana says.
“Fellow corpse,” he responds.
“You wandered off. Thought I’d tag along. Make sure you didn’t go AWOL.”
“I think ET’s acting up again.”
“Maybe you’re just sleepwalking. People sleepwalk sometimes.” She shrugs. “Probably the same wiring anyway.”
“Sleepwalkers don’t kill people.”
“Actually, that’s been known to happen.”
He clears his throat. “Did, um…”
“No one else knows you’re up here.”
“Did ET disable the pickups?”
“I did.”
“Thanks.”
“Any time.”
Asante looks around. “I remember the first time I saw this place. It was… magical.”
“I was thinking more ironic.” Adding, at Asante’s look: “You know. That one of the last pristine spots in this whole shit-show owes its existence to the fact that WestHem needs someplace private to teach us how to blow shit up.”
“Count on you,” Asante says.
The stars are fading. Venus is hanging in there, though.
“You’ve been weird,” she observes. “Ever since the thing with Caçador.”
“It was a weird thing.”
“So I hear.” Shrug. “I guess you had to be there.”
He musters a smile. “So you don’t remember…”
“Legs running down. Legs running back up. My zombie never targeted anything so I don’t know what she saw.”
“Metzinger does. Rossiter does.” He leans his ass against a convenient boulder. “Does it ever bother you? That you don’t know what your own eyes are seeing, and they do?”
“Not really. Just the way it works.”
“We don’t know what we’re doing out there. When was the last time Maddox even showed us a highlight reel?” He feels the muscles clenching in his jaw. “We could be war criminals.”
“There is no we. Not when it matters.” She sits beside him. “Besides. Our zombies may be nonconscious but they’re not stupid; they know we’re obligated to disobey unlawful commands.”
“Maybe they know. Not sure Maddox’s compliance circuit would let them do anything about it.”
Somewhere nearby a songbird clears its throat.
Tiwana takes a breath. “Suppose you’re right—not saying you are, but suppose they sent us out to gun down a gyland full of harmless refugees. Forget that Caçador was packing enough explosives to blow up a hamlet, forget that it killed Silano… hell, nearly killed us all. If Metzinger decides to bash in someone’s innocent skull, you still don’t blame the hammer he used.”
“And yet. Someone’s skull is still bashed in.”
Across the clearing, another bird answers. The dawn duet.
“There must be reasons,” she says, as if trying it on for size.
He remembers reasons from another life, on another continent: retribution. The making of examples. Poor impulse control. Just… fun, sometimes.
“Such as.”
“I don’t know, okay? Big Picture’s way above our pay grade. But that doesn’t mean you toss out the chain of command every time someone gives you an order without a twenty-gig backgrounder to go with it. If you want me to believe we’re in thrall to a bunch of fascist baby killers, you’re gonna need more than a few glimpses of something you may have seen on a gyland.”
“How about, I don’t know. All of human history?”
Venus is gone at last. The rising sun streaks the clearing with gold.
“It’s the deal we made. Sure, it’s a shitty one. Only shittier one is being dead. But would you choose differently, even now? Go back to being fish food?”
He honestly doesn’t know.
“We should be dead, Jo. Every one of these moments is a gift.”
He regards her with a kind of wonder. “I never know how you do it.”
“Do what?”
“Channel Schopenhauer and Pollyanna at the same time without your head exploding.”
She takes his hand for a moment, squeezes briefly. Rises. “We’re gonna make it. Just so long as we don’t rock the boat. All the way to that honorable fucking discharge.” She turns to the light; sunrise glows across her face. “Until then, in case you were wondering, I’ve got your back.”
“There is no you,” he reminds her. “Not when it matters.”
“I’ve got your back,” she says.
Watch That Man
They’ve outsourced Silano’s position, brought in someone none of them have ever seen before. Technically he’s one of them, though the scars that tag him ZeroS have barely had time to heal. Something about him is wrong. Something about the way he moves; his insignia. Not Specialist or Corporal or Sergeant.
“I want you to meet Lieutenant Jim Moore,” Rossiter tells them.
ZeroS finally have a commissioned secco. He’s easily the youngest person in the room.
He gets right to it. “This is the Nanisivik mine.” The satcam wall zooms down onto the roof of the world. “Baffin Island, seven hundred fifty klicks north of the Arctic Circle, heart of the Slush Belt.” A barren fractured landscape of red and ocher. Drumlins and hillocks and bifurcating stream beds.
“Tapped out at the turn of the century.” A brown road, undulating along some scoured valley floor. A cluster of buildings. A gaping mouth in the Earth. “These days people generally stay away, on account of its remote location. Also on account of the eight thousand metric tons of high-level nuclear waste the Canadian government brought over from India for deep-time storage. Part of an initiative to diversify the northern economy, apparently.” Tactical schematics, now: Processing and Intake. Train tracks corkscrewing into the Canadian Shield. Storage tunnels branching like the streets of an underground subdivision. “Project was abandoned after the Greens lost power in ’38.”
“You could poison a lot of cities with this stuff. Which may be why someone’s messing around there now.”
Garin’s hand is up. “Someone, sir?”
“So far all we have are signs of unauthorized activity and a JTFN drone that went in and never came out. Our first priority is to identify the actors. Depending on what we find, we might take care of it ourselves. Or we might call in the bombers. Won’t know until we get there.”
