Juice, p.26
Juice, page 26
These were not letters designed to persuade. They were reminders to myself that what I’d had was real and beautiful, and they were a means by which I could escape the rage of victimhood and claim my great luck in having had those years. They helped in a way choof never could. And once summer was done, I left them below ground, safe in the bedframe, capped by a wooden bung I carved myself. They were part of my surrender.
By summer’s end I was restless, ready to travel, and – even if I didn’t know it – eager to bury my losses in action. That winter I made a conscious choice to let go. Of course, as I know now, this wasn’t an educated decision. But in the short term, it was a mercy. I stopped feeling divided against myself. And that was liberating.
My first job was back in the Pacific. We worked in full chill suits. Delivered in darkness to the lower slopes of a mountain peak, all that was left of the abandoned outpost of Guadalcanal. The stronghold was unusually elaborate. And the engagement was brief but intense. All our casualties were sustained during the extraction. Needless to say, conditions were horrific. Struck by shrapnel, two operators poached in their perforated suits.
The repat flight brought us back over the Northern Rivers dikes and we set down west of the Hills Enclave. In those days this was the northernmost frontier on that coast. It was supposed to be an entirely civilian outpost. But my guess is it was heavily underwritten by the Service, to assist with transfers and resupply. It’s long gone.
From there we were debriefed and mustered out. I wound up on a truck headed south with seven comrades in full kit, most of them archers, all of them women. I don’t know where or what they’d been repatriated from, but they looked glassy-eyed and weary. There was no conversation. We slept most of the time.
At some point during that transfer, I woke and risked a glimpse through the peep-slot, and there below the blackened mountain pass was the Sydney Wall. I stared at the dirty yellow corona that hung over the plain. For a while it looked as if we might be headed that way, and some part of me was excited by the prospect of seeing that great and troubled city, but instead we pressed on south-west through the charred hinterland.
Next morning, we were on the path of the old highway, juddering through the corrugations, when the vehicle slowed and then stopped with a jerk. I figured we’d pulled up at a watering station, or perhaps our next staging point, so it was an ugly surprise to slide the peep open and see five men in the roadway. Two carried axes, two more brandished old-school ballistics tools. The fifth, the one spouting directions, appeared unarmed. The comrades around me must have been alerted by my sudden intake of breath, because when I turned to signal the situation out there in the road, they were already on to it. They might have been a very tired crew, but they were first-class operators.
When the rear doors were wrenched open, there was no discussion or negotiation. The first two brigands to stick their heads in reeled back instantly with bolts through their necks. At that, the others simply turned and ran. As I leapt out, empty-handed, I saw our driver pursuing the ringleader with a hand tool. He took the big bloke down with a single burst and at that point the other bandits pulled up, horrified. From the way they stared at the aftermath – recoiling at the stench of scorched flesh and ammonia – it was obvious Service-level tech was alien to them.
They were scabrous fellows, dirty and ill-looking. After so many tales of pirates and highwaymen, it was interesting to finally meet some genuine domestic outlaws. They were keen to parley, but they clearly hadn’t bargained with the likes of us before. There was nobody else on the road that day. We despatched them quickly and humanely, and left them where they lay as an example to others.
It took another three hours to reach the staging point. The mood in the back of the truck was subdued. An encounter like that. On home soil. It was new and unsettling, for all of us. Which goes to show how things have changed since then.
From the muster camp there was an uplift that same night. I assumed I’d be headed west, back across the continent, toward home, but once the big stat got to its ceiling above the unlit country, it yawed south-east. And then it sank in. This wasn’t a repat flight. I was being redeployed already.
The briefers emerged in the middle of the next day. We’d been over the sea for hours. This was the South Island job we were headed for. From there I went to New Cal. Again, in a suit.
I wasn’t home much that year, or many of those that followed. Most of that period I was kept in the north. Not our north. The other hemisphere. Up past Cancer. They staged us from sanctuaries in the Sawatch and Avers. Those years it was just one show after another. A big push. As if we were hacking our way through the List at a pace we’d never managed before. But it didn’t feel like a downhill run. Those were all tough outings.
I was wounded and burnt in the Alberta extraction. Broke an arm getting a stranded crew out of the Houston tunnels. Christ, don’t even ask. I went back to the Steppe. Twice. When once was a time too many. And I did some work in the Arctic swamps. The mosquitoes there were the size of a child’s hand. They nailed you through tactical fatigues and any gaps in body armour. Malaria cost us half the company.
It was a long time to be away. Long enough to nearly forget who I was, where I was from.
I hated to think of my mother on her own all those years. The solitary summers she endured underground. She was a staunch old bird, but without the Service, I doubt she’d have survived. They were faithful and discreet. They kept her safe. It felt to me they’d kept their end of our tacit agreement.
Whenever I returned, my mother seemed enormously relieved. The scripts the Service sent me home with seemed so threadbare now that I didn’t bother to recite them, and she no longer even asked where I’d been. All she wanted to talk about was the challenges and triumphs of the homestead.
In the depleted hamlet, citizens were leery of me. Absences as long and routine as mine could only have confirmed the old gossip about my infidelity. And now, along with being a faithless husband, I was probably viewed as a negligent son. Whenever I was with my mother in the market square, the wary deference locals had always shown her seemed to have softened into a warmer regard. Not that she ever acknowledged it. She had no use for their sympathy. Or their pity. In the hamlet she was careful to maintain her steely dignity. As ever, she traded hard and fair. With me, she remained solicitous, devoted, but also careful in ways that were hard to pin down.
These were the years in which I became an old hand. By simply surviving. I’m not sure I got better as an operator, but I did get older, and it wasn’t by shirking. You know, comrade, for all the mistakes that were made – the wrong calls, the bunky intel, the losses we sustained – I never saw much cowardice. Whatever gets said, however we’re remembered, if we’re remembered at all, the Service will always have that.
I was around long enough to see my share of body bags and fresh faces. I got used to being the senior on jobs. Unless it was a matter of specialist expertise. For a decade or more, I remember us having many more successes than failures. We acquitted a good number of objects. But then, over time, as the jobs began to seem more rudimentary and the objects less canny, shows became untidy and casualties increased, and that contradiction unsettled me. More than once I felt a rawness in my crew. At muster points some operators struck me as callow and overconfident.
I learnt plenty about tactics in my time, but aside from the notion of an ultimate victory that would trigger demobilization, broader matters of strategy were beyond the purview of rank-and-file operators like me. We were never privy to the status of the larger enterprise. Even so, I was active long enough, and in so many sectors and latitudes, that I began to get a sense of how things might be progressing. I knew the work had been going long before I was born, and for the bulk of my service it seemed as if it would continue long after my time. Because there was such steadiness and regularity to the work. The shows we did, the situations we faced, they were all broadly similar. It was as if the criminal clans reproduced and replenished themselves at roughly the same rate at which we removed them. For the longest time the circumstances felt static, as if we were all repeating ourselves – or worse, trapped in a pattern that threatened to be permanent.
But then, in those later years, things began to shift. More and more of the strongholds we were sent to breach turned out to be flimsy. Hurriedly constructed. Poorly defended. And some of the objects we encountered were hapless. As if we’d already weeded out the stronger specimens – the criminal elite – and stanched their bloodlines. It began to feel as if we’d been reduced to chasing minions and mopping up the dregs of the beneficiary class. By then, you’d have thought any remaining family, institute or trade confederacy with links to the cartels would have been in mortal fear of us.
Not every job had this air of tawdry anticlimax. There were still tough shows, high-end holdouts who continued to evade us. But old stagers like me got the impression we’d battled our way to the arse end of the List. And I began to wonder if I might live to see a resolution, and maybe even witness the grand experiment that came after stand down.
The Service had the best and brightest of humans in its ranks. And tech that could surely be put to use feeding, sheltering, treating folk in every latitude and jurisdiction. Without the threat of contagion and regression, it might be possible to achieve more than just the negative peace we’d birthed and maintained. There could be hope. Order of a decent stripe. And a steadiness that matched the best of the weather.
And so for a few years I lived in a state of anticipation. Yes, those were the days in which we began to sing the names of the vanquished. Openly. Defiantly. With pride. And dear God, there were so many. Though in truth, most were as obscure to us as the faces of our comrades. Even so, disembarking at repat set-downs, filing onto ships or stats at muster points, we bellowed them. Chanted in rigid cadence, bending them to fit. Only rarely did a name bubble up with any hint of familiarity to it. Sometimes because I’d heard it sung before, or because the name was so prominent we’d seen it written or heard it uttered at Basic. But there were only a handful of those. The sound of them sung aloud filled me with exaltation. And when the name above all names entered the song, there was pride, too. Of a kind I can’t even describe. On hearing it, a grin would creep across my mug, wide enough to startle the rookies and set off searching glances, and I’d catch myself and return to being the crusty senior I was expected to be.
You know the name I’m talking about. I see it in your face. And yes, I’m getting to it.
But things took a turn, didn’t they? Which came first, the change in the weather or the leap in tech? Fact is, we saw neither coming. We remained steadfast, comrade. But our staunchness rendered us blind.
Altered conditions. Remember how even saying those words left you dry in the mouth?
We acquitted nearly all of those crime families. But the ones we could never get to, those who’d seen the writing on the wall, well, they made alliances among themselves and traded their assets – their intellectual resources and personnel – and retreated to lairs almost beyond our reach. Sometimes it felt as if they’d gone to the walls of the Hermit Kingdom and bought their way into whatever nirvana or perdition lies within that lake of darkness.
But, really, I think what they did, so late in the piece, was adapt. Innovate. Bunker in together more. Mix blood with blood in marriage trades, so that in time, in tiny, potent pockets, resourced to an unimaginable degree, they found new vigour.
So for us, for the Service, it was suddenly break through or break. But we didn’t know it. Not for years. And once we did, we made a mess of it. Simple mistakes. Strategic errors. And, worst of all, moral failures.
We educated them, comrade. For all our supposed secrecy and all our discipline, generations of Service actions had schooled the smartest of the remaining clans. While we learnt too little, and far too late.
Tech, says the bowman.
Yes. But we’d always used devices. Ships, aerostats, drones.
Not that sort. Don’t play dumb with me.
Well, it was a matter of culture, brother. Scruples.
Fuck off – we just didn’t have the tech. Or the blood and treasure to build them.
We’d never use mercenaries. Let alone slaves.
They’re fucking machines, you dozy prick. A clunker doesn’t care if it’s slave or free.
You wouldn’t know.
Fucking skin crawls at the thought.
It wasn’t just the tech, I said. Before that, something else was happening. To do with us.
We were tired. Our kit was rubbish. Intel was piss-weak.
We got leggy.
Leggy? What the fuck are you talking about? he says, twisting in his chair.
Like plants. Seedlings. When they’re in a hot patch, or they have to reach too hard and far for light.
Overstretched?
Yeah. And overconfident. Discipline. Morale. We got thin. Brittle. I had some bad shows.
Christ, we all had bad shows.
These were avoidable.
You went sour, he said.
Well, yes. Things curdled. I started to lose my way. And it felt that, the better I got, and the closer we got to victory, the less I had in me.
We shoulda been more ruthless.
Or just more thoughtful.
One trip I came back with nothing. No outcome. No object. And none of my people. I won’t bore you with the details. But I was distraught. And livid. At the waste. The cost in human life. At least with Utah I could tell myself we’d achieved something – even if I hadn’t understood the significance of it at the time.
A change had occurred. Altered conditions, remember? But I couldn’t account for it. For one thing, it seemed we’d been expected on that job. So we had leakage, right? Some Service asset had been tortured or bribed. On top of that, our gas didn’t work. We sent it in, salvo after salvo, to no effect. They just kept lighting us up. As if we were just hurling smoke canisters.
Back at the muster point, an island well off the eastern coast, others were talking. Which was bad in its own way. We were supposed to keep tight, say nothing except to the planners in the debrief, one on one. But all over the island, operators young and old were swapping stories about gas failures and betrayals.
Face to face, the spooks and planners weren’t having any talk of disasters. Setbacks, they said. That’s all these fuck-ups were. They asked if anyone in my team had deployed incendiaries. And I told them of course not, they should know better than anyone that the rules of engagement forbade the use of fire – we weren’t barbarians. They said they didn’t like my tone. I told them they hadn’t had to scrape their comrades’ skin off their suits, tweezer their mates’ bone fragments out of their own flesh. I stripped to show them. They didn’t appreciate the display. Or the open defiance. I said our casualties were mounting. They told me that was just conjecture. I lost my cool. Told them they were either deluded or lying. It was a low point, I won’t pretend. They said I was lucky not to be going home in restraints. And that was the first I knew about going home.
In the transit camp, waiting for the repat flight, I was limping along a salt-scoured terrace, watching a stat ghost in toward the mooring mast, when I came to a long row of converted habs being used as a field hospital. I’d spent the previous morning there, having frags extracted, and wasn’t keen to linger, but my puncture wounds and their dressings kept me to an undignified shuffle. Outside the last hut, a wounded operator sat smoking what smelt like low-grade choof. In fact, it was a hemp stogie. I didn’t even acknowledge her until she spoke.
She was strapped to the chair. The legs of her fatigues were pinched off above the knees.
Our ride home, she said, jerking her plaited fag at the landing stat.
Yeah, I answered, her wounds causing me to feel a little more obliged than usual. Looks like it. About time, too.
The lame and the halt and the blind.
I shrugged, squeamish and reluctant to engage.
Ah, she said. I remember you.
Only then did I make myself look at her closely. Her face, the eyes. At this point, I still hadn’t properly recognized her, but something about the wry grin felt familiar. Her silver hair was buzz-cut. The burn scars around her neck were almost obscured by the crepiness of her skin. She was impossibly old for active service.
You’re the farmboy, she said.
Used to be, I said, looking away along the row of habs, anxious about the breach of protocol.
The west, right?
I glanced back at her. We shared a complicit glance and then, despite myself, I nodded.
Well, you lasted, she said. One of the hardy ones.
Lucky, I spose.
We make our own luck.
That’s what we tell ourselves.
So, she said. What’s my excuse? Insufficient industry?
And then it came to me. I placed her. She was the instructor from Basic, the one I’d known as Awe.
You! I said, smiling in disbelief.
Indeed.
They have you back on ops?
Well, she said brightly. Had.
I found myself looking a little too frankly at her stumps and the terrible seepage around the bandages.
Got no drones? Send in the crones, she said with a bitter grin.
How long have you been back in the field?
Oh, long enough. As you can see.
It’s gotten to that?
I’ll try not to take that as an insult.
I’m sorry.
Listen, farmboy, when you’ve run more shows than me, let me know.
Like I said. I apologize.
No need.
The airship came down, locked on to the mast. A gust of wind caught it broadside and it yawed slightly, giving off a mighty flash of golden sunset light.
Strange place to say goodbye to it all, she said.
I nodded. It struck me, though, that anywhere would be an odd place to give it away.
