Lightspeed Magazine - December 2016, page 2
• • • •
The squad were scraped up by a medroid, to be bagged and identified and maybe sent back to their families in pieces. I got a commendation for bravery. The Petty Officer got another completed mission under his belt.
The squad was full again the very next week. Young and eager and yanked up hard from the low ranks, just how I had been. There were more missions to complete. I went to Sarge, to beg for a transfer, to tell him what had happened, but he cut me off before I could confess. His eyes had never looked so old as they did then. I knew I wouldn’t get a transfer. I knew now there was only one way out of IM, and I figured the next mission would be my last.
But it wasn’t. Not the next one either. Eventually they all started to blur together. Raids, counterstrikes, infiltration, sabotage. Everything always ended in gunfire, in shredded bodies, in unexpected casualties. Other squad members fell and were replaced and I stopped learning their names. I survived.
I survived because the Petty Officer protected me. Dozens of times. He blew out the skull of a cloaked enemy soldier who had a combat knife nearly to my neck. He pinned me to the ground to shield me from a fire grenade. He carried me when shrapnel splintered through both my shins.
I thought he was doing it to torture me. Making me watch my new squad mates die over and over from his recklessness. His uncalled grenades, his unpredictable suppressing fire.
Sometimes other things, too. I saw him break Grigor’s neck with the butt of his rifle, walking up so casually behind him and then driving it down so hard and so precise. I remember the sound of the bone crunching. He told me later that Grigor had been too far gone for medical attention, even though Grigor had only stopped to wrap a muzzle burn on his arm.
But we always completed the mission, even if the Petty Officer and me were the only ones alive at the end of it. He always killed more of the enemy, a hundred times more, and that was enough for Command.
And me, I was losing my mind. Nightmares I couldn’t drug away. Sweats. I was almost as legendary as the Petty Officer himself, now. The one who always lived. But in most ways, I was a ghost. People never spoke to me anymore; people avoided my eyes. I told myself there had to be a reason for what the Petty Officer did. A lesson. But what kind of lesson was worth killing our own men? It took me a long time to figure it out:
The Petty Officer didn’t believe in the war. He wasn’t trying to beat the Coalition. He was trying to beat Command. He was trying to prove a point the only way he knew how. It didn’t matter if the Petty Officer killed theirs or ours. Everyone had been dead since the moment they were drafted. All of us, dead walking.
But the Petty Officer didn’t want me dead. I tried to figure that out, too. I thought of all the times he’d saved me, and the other things. How he sometimes stood too close to me, hulking over my shoulder, sighting around like he was hiding behind me—I thought it was only a joke, his cruel kind of joke, but maybe it was something else.
And sometimes he stared. He would stand in front of me and stare. I had learned to keep my face blank, to wait, to not fidget too much, and eventually he always turned away and the mission went on. He didn’t think how we did, Sarge had said.
Maybe he loved me. The thought made me sick in my stomach, but at the same time my joints went all loose and watery. Maybe I loved him, too. I had dreamt about him, about his huge dark presence, always nearby, always watching.
I had dreamt seeing his body once, all scarred and pale and naked, the way people said he would look underneath the armor. Maybe that meant I loved him. I had never been one for buggering around, except one time on a really lonely long haul, but with the Petty Officer it would be different.
He wasn’t a man, not really. He wasn’t even a human anymore. Maybe he was trying to make me the same way.
• • • •
Another world, another mission. The Petty Officer was squatting in a stream, anchored to the slippery rock by the weight of his armor. He’d been peering down into the sparkling clear water for the past five, six minutes.
The rest of the squad was jumpy, lighting up smokes, scuffing circles in the dirt, checking and rechecking their weapons. The fresh ones stared at the Petty Officer, wondering what the fuck he was doing when we had a dropzone blinking urgent red in our headgear.
I wasn’t jumpy. I was sitting back against a nice moss-slick boulder, perfectly calm, because everything he did had a reason.
“Private. To me.”
The command crackled in my helmet. I got up off the rock and waded into the stream, feeling the collective gaze of the squad on my back. Some of them jealous, sure. Most of them confused.
“Yes, sir?” I said, once I was close, but not too close, more than an arm’s length away.
“You understand, don’t you, Private.” The Petty Officer turned his head towards me. “If we don’t stop and look at the river, if we don’t enjoy the little touches, the artistry, it’s disrespectful. Disrespectful to whoever made the river.”
“I’m very respectful, sir,” I said, and I squatted down, too, even though the cold water snuck up to my crotch and clung there.
“I know you are, Private,” he said. “Maybe that’s why I picked you.”
He stared down into the stream again, and I looked, too. Saw how the sun dappled the surface, how sediment shifted in the flowing current.
For at least a moment, I understood.
• • • •
The last body went down and my motion tracker jittered clear, but I stayed low a second longer to be sure, to let the smoky room settle and my adrenaline ebb away. The Petty Officer racked his rifle and strode right out of cover. He never waited.
I’d asked him, once, if he had any fear of dying left.
“I’ve died a hundred times,” he’d said back. “You just never remember.”
Sometimes the things he said were so beautiful, so strange, that they made my lungs catch.
There was a big fucker laid out by the control panel, gargling blood. His burnished red armor was riddled all over with bullet holes—we must have emptied a dozen clips into him before he went down. He’d fought hard. I get the Coalition insignias mixed up, but I think the gold swatch meant a Lieutenant.
The Petty Officer stopped over him. I thought he was going to pick up the dropped burner rifle and have a look at it. He does that. Picks them up, turns them over, scorches a few marks in the wall and then discards them.
But he didn’t. He started adjusting his armor, switching off the magnetic seal on his abdomen plate, then the cod-piece, setting them both down beside the Lieutenant’s twitching body with two loud thunks.
“Something slip through, sir?” I asked.
The Petty Officer ignored me, reaching a gloved hand down to his crotch to peel back the black skinsuit. His cock flopped out like a thick bruise-colored worm. Nothing like in my dream.
“Watch this,” the Petty Officer said.
I knew I should be confirming kills, securing the doors, sending Command the all-clear. But I was stuck rooted to the floor. The rest of the squad was, too, all of us watching, none of us speaking.
The Petty Officer crouched down and guided his cock onto the Lieutenant’s sweaty forehead. The man’s face twisted. Confusion and shock, then rage and horror. Blood burbled out of his lips and he made a desperate swing with his one arm that was still intact, but the Petty Officer knocked it away like a fly. He squatted and straightened, slapping his cock and balls against the dying man’s face. My stomach heaved.
“Sir, fucking stop, please fucking stop,” someone babbled. One of the fresh ones.
The Lieutenant gave a low animal moan. I wanted to look away, but I couldn’t. The Petty Officer squatted down again and again. I realized I could end it. All of it. His abdomen was gloved in nothing but soft black skinsuit. One frag, cooked and lobbed gently underneath him, just how he’d done to the hover all those eons ago. The shrapnel would shred his cock and his stomach both to pieces. He was still human enough to die.
But there had to be a reason. He was showing me this for a reason.
A single gunshot cracked the air. I whirled and saw Hernandez, a two-weeker who never spoke, cupping his pistol in both hands.
The Lieutenant finally slumped, strings cut by the precise bullet in his brain. The Petty Officer wordlessly wiped the spatter of gore off his cock and tucked himself away. He didn’t so much as look at Hernandez, but I knew Hernandez had signed his own death warrant.
• • • •
It happened in the corridor. The Petty Officer spun on his heel and ripped his pistol off his hip in one motion, capping Hernandez with a single bullet. The two fresh recruits rounded on him without a second’s hesitation and I realized they must have back-chattered, must have discussed it with Hernandez on a channel they’d hidden from the Petty Officer and from me, too. Even so, they were both dead before they could get more than a couple shots off.
I stared down at the bodies, at the three bullets in three shattered craniums, while the Petty Officer’s shielding recharged with an electric hum. I could have ended it all back in the control room. Now there were three more dead squad mates. And there would be three more dead after them, and after them, and forever.
“This will be hard to explain,” I said, feeling hollowed out.
“We won’t explain it,” the Petty Officer said. “We’re not going to the pick-up zone. We’re going our own way. You’re coming with me.”
There was a reason for everything. The Petty Officer had had to kill them so he could go AWOL. So the both of us could. He hadn’t been desecrating a dying soldier. He’d been desecrating the rank, desecrating authority, defying the men upstairs who sent us to our deaths.
And now we were escaping together.
“I love you,” I said, to test out the words in my mouth. They didn’t feel true, not yet, but maybe they would eventually.
The Petty Officer looked at me for a long moment. “Gay,” he said, but he motioned for me to follow him out into the starry night.
• • • •
We cut through the wilderness, away from enemy lines, away from ours, too. I had never seen the Petty Officer like this before. He was giddy, like a little kid almost, sprinting ahead through the forest and then sprinting back to dance circles around me. He would fire his rifle off into the bush at random. Once he tried to spray letters into the trunk of a massive tree. One night he showed me his dog tags, the old world vestige stamped with his name and number: Harrison Cox 969. But to me he was still the Petty Officer. Always would be, I figured.
By the time we made it to the coast, I was sick and exhausted. The Petty Officer had no need for sleep and hated waiting for me to wake up. And even heavier than the physical wear and tear was the realization: We’d gone AWOL, and Command was going to come after us. The Petty Officer’s armor alone was worth more than a dropship, and with him inside, more valuable than any weapon ever created.
The only thing I could do was follow the Petty Officer. And trust him.
“Why do you do that?” I asked. “It’s not any faster than jogging.”
He was leaping again, bounding along the surf in big two-footed jumps, sending up clods of sand and water. It was beautiful, in a way. Sometimes it seemed like he could float there in the air forever.
He looked back at me. “It feels faster,” he said.
I finally let my rifle fall into the sand. I unstrapped my chest-plate and dropped that, too. I didn’t need them anymore. I was following the Petty Officer. With my weary legs screaming, I ran, gathered, jumped. Not nearly as high as him, but high enough. High enough to feel almost light, with the wind whipping at my face, with the smell of the sea in my nose. The sand was soft underneath my boots.
The Petty Officer leapt along the beach, and I leapt after him, through the foamy surf, laughing and laughing with tears pouring down my dirty face.
© 2016 by Rich Larson. | Art © 2016 by Lovely Creatures Studio.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Rich Larson was born in West Africa, has studied in Rhode Island and worked in Spain, and at 23 he now writes from Edmonton, Alberta. His short work has been nominated for the Theodore Sturgeon and appears in multiple Year’s Best anthologies, as well as in magazines such as Asimov’s, Analog, Clarkesworld, F&SF, Interzone, Strange Horizons, Lightspeed, and Apex. Find him at richwlarson.tumblr.com.
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The Fifth Star in the Southern Cross
Margo Lanagan | 4465 words
I had bought half an hour with Malka and I was making the most of it. Lots of Off girls, there’s not much goes on, but these Polar City ones, especially if they’re fresh off the migration station, they seem to, almost, enjoy it? I don’t know if they really do. They don’t pitch and moan and fake it up or anything, but they seem to be there under you. They’re with you, you know? They pay attention. It almost doesn’t matter about their skin, the feel of it a bit dry and crinkly, and the colour. They have the Coolights on all the time to cut that colour back, just like butchers put those purply lights over the meat in their shop, to bring up the red.
Anyway, I would say we were about two-thirds the way there—I was starting to let go of everything and be the me I was meant to be. I knew stuff; I meant something; I didn’t givva what anyone thought of me.
But then she says, “Stop, Mister Cleeyom. Stop a minute.”
“What?” I thought for a second she had got too caught up in it, was having too good a time, needed to slow things down a bit. I suppose that shows how far along I was.
“Something is coming,” she said.
I tensed up, listening for sounds in the hall.
“Coming down.”
Which was when I felt it, pushing against the end of me.
I pulled out. I made a face. “What is it? Have I got you up the wrong hole?”
“No, Mister Cl’om. Just a minute. Will not take long.”
Too late—I was already withering.
She got up into a squat with one leg out wide. The Coolight at the bedhead showed everything from behind: a glop of something, and then strings of drool. Just right out onto the bedclothes she did it; she didn’t scrabble for a towel or a tissue or anything. She wasn’t embarrassed. A little noise came up her throat from some clench in her chest, and that clench pushed the thing out below, the main business.
“It’s a puppy?” I said, but I thought, It’s a turd? But the smell wasn’t turd; it was live insides, insides that weren’t to do with digestion. And turds don’t turn over and split their skin, and try to work it off themselves.
“It’s just a baby,” Malka apologised, with that smile she has, that makes you feel sorry for her, she’s trying so hard, and angry at her at the same time. She scooped it up, with its glop. She stepped off the bed and laid it on top of some crumpled crush-velour under the lamp. A white-ish tail dangled between her legs; she turned away from me and gathered that up, and whatever wet thing fell out attached to it.
This was not what I’d had in mind. This was not the treat I’d promised myself as I tweezered HotChips into artificial tulip stalks out at Parramatta Mannafactory all week.
The “baby” lay there working its shoulders in horrible shruggings, almost as if it knew what it was doing. They’re not really babies, of course, just as Polar “girls” aren’t really girls, although that’s something you pay to be made to forget.
Malka laughed at how my faced looked. “You ha’n’t seen this before, Mister Sir?”
“Never,” I said. “It’s disgusting.”
“It’s a regular,” she said. “How you ever going to get yourself new girls for putcha-putcha, if you don’t have baby?”
“We shouldn’t have to see that, to get them.”
“You ask special for Malka. You sign the—the thing, say you don’t mind to see. I can show you.” She waved at the billing unit by the door.
“Well, I didn’t know what that meant. Someone should have explained it to me exactly, all the details.” But I remembered signing. I remembered the hurry I’d been in at the time. It takes you over, you know, a bone. It feels so good just by itself, so warm, silky somehow and shifting, making you shift to give it room, but at the very same time and this is the crazy-making thing, it nags at you, Get rid of me! Gawd, do something! And I wouldn’t be satisfied with one of those others: Korra is Polar, too, but she has been here longer and she acts just like an Earth girl, like you’re rubbish. And that other one, the yellow-haired one—well, I have had her a couple of times thinking she might come good, but seriously, she is on something. A man might as well do it with a Vibro-Missy, or use his own hand. It’s not worth the money if she’s not going to be real.
The thing on the velour turned over again in an irritated way, or uncomfortable. It spread one of its hands and the Coolight shone among the wrong-shaped fingers, going from little to big, five of them and no thumb. A shiver ran up my neck like a breeze lifting up a dog’s fur.
Malka chuckled and touched my chin. “I will make you a drink and then we will get sexy again, hey?”
I tucked myself in and zipped up my pants. “Can’t you put it away somewhere? Like, does it have to be there right under the light?”
She put her face between me and it and kissed me. They don’t kiss well, any of these Offs. It’s not something that comes natural to them. They don’t take the time; they don’t soften their lips properly. It’s like a moth banging into your mouth. “Haff to keep it in sight. It is regulation. For its well-being.” Her teeth gleamed in another attempt at smiling. “I turn you on a movie. Something to look away at.”
“Can’t you give the thing to someone else to take care of?” But she was doing the walk; I was meant to be all sucked in again by the sight of that swinging bottom. They do have pretty good bottoms, Polars, pretty convincing.
“I paid for the full half-hour,” I said. “Am I gunna get back that time you spent … Do I get extra time at the end?”
But I didn’t want extra time. I wanted my money back, and to start again some other time, when I’d forgotten this. But there was no way I was going to get that. The wall bloomed out into palm-trees and floaty music and some rock-hard muscle star and his girlfriend arguing on the beach.
