Hurley's Heroes Collection 2015-2020, page 2
They were going to save us, they said. But they betrayed us.
Liars.
Aliens.
I saw movement in one of the buildings and shot off a few bursts from my weapon. The façade cracked and wept brown sap. Every- thing was alive in their cities, even the buildings. Everything bled. But I didn’t see any aliens, just us in our boots.
We crawled over that place, looking for the enemy. But the city was deserted. Maybe they’d abandoned it, or they’d found out we were coming and hid in bunkers. I don’t know.
But we couldn’t just come all this way for nothing. We had to do what we came for. We had to be weapons.
We assembled around the heart of the city’s square the way we planned in training. We raised our energy weapons and set them on the new setting, the one engineered specifically for this mission. We pointed our weapons across the broad square at one another. Set them at a high charge. Waited for the signal.
I started to vibrate. We started to come apart.
The trick was to wait, to be patient. But no one had actually tried to use the light like this before, no living person. It was some- thing they’d done with simulators and robots that fired at each other. It’s easy for a robot, to fire at another robot. Harder for a soldier to fire at the person next to them. The one you’d take a hit for. I’d fire into my own face first, I thought, when they told me what we had to do.
But we’re the Light Brigade. We do what they tell us to do.
The vibrating got worse. Then the cramping. My body seized up. I gasped. Somebody shot their weapon; too soon. A scream. A body down. Another shot. Too soon.
Goddammit, hold it together. The contraction stopped.
The world snapped.
I didn’t look at the mirrored helmet of the soldier across from me. I looked at the purple patch on their suit, the one that said they were one of us, the Light Brigade. I pulled the trigger.
Everything burst apart.
We were full of light.
“I’m tired of taking care of living things,” my CO told me once outside the mess hall, right before that operation. “There’s so god- damn many of you. I can’t even go home and take care of my dog at night without getting angry at it. Too much fucking responsibil- ity.”
“Sorry,” I said.
“For what? It’s not your fault. The war’s not your fault. Not my fault either.” But she said the last part differently, like she didn’t quite believe it.
And I wondered if she was right to doubt it, because it was our fault, wasn’t it? We fought this war willingly. We gave our bodies to it, even if we’re only here because of the lies the corporations told us. What if there was a war and nobody came? What if the corpo- rations voted for a war and nobody fought it? You can only let so many people starve. You can only throw so many people in jail. You can only have so many executions for insubordination to the latest CEO or Board of Directors.
We are the weapon.
We fired on one another as we broke apart, and created an ex- plosion so massive it obliterated half the northern hemisphere.
Everything the aliens made grow again, we turned back into dust.
We were the weapon. We were the light.
That was when it changed, for me. It’s like, you think you’re brave, so you carry out your orders. You do it even if you know what the outcome is going to be. You do it because you always wanted to be a hero—you wanted to be on the side of the light. It’s not until you destroy everything good in the world that you realize you’re not a hero . . . you’re just another villain for the empire.
There weren’t many of us left to see what we did, and maybe it was better that way. It was all over the networks, the destruction of half a continent. They didn’t say how we did it. They didn’t say we shot each other up to do it, or say how many of our people died in the explosion, their essential elements broken apart. And right beside these pictures of this barren, smoking wasteland were pictures of our own people cheering in our dingy little cities built on the bones of our ancestors. We had scorched the fucking earth, but everyone cheered because we’d gotten back at those aliens, those liars, those betrayers.
I saw those images and I knew what I had to do. Because I still wanted to be a hero. I still had a chance. But it meant giving up everything I believed in. Betraying everyone I cared about. Being everything I’m supposed to hate.
I know what I need to do because I’ve seen it. A white rose on a black table.
Heaps of bodies lying on the field like hay.
I know where I need to go. I know what’s next.
The CO gave us leave, those of us who were left. I spent mine look- ing up the city from my vision, the one I saw in transit. There are a lot of cities by water, but none of ours have brilliant green fields like that. All of our shining cities are surrounded by gritty labor camps.
I didn’t realize how much they lied to us on the networks until I saw the alien cities. Until I killed the aliens myself. They had made a beautiful world from our shit, and we hated them for it, because they were free. No one owned them.
Betrayers, they said, on the networks. Liars.
They had made the land grow things again, but that was all they were supposed to do. They weren’t supposed to be free be- cause no one is free, and they weren’t supposed to be able to defend themselves because no one can. When we found out they could fight back, when we found out about the organic kites that could take out a drone with a single shattering note, or the EMPs that disabled our networks the first time one of our armies rolled by to see what they were doing, the corporate media started building the narrative—the aliens were liars standing in the way of corporate freedom of commerce.
And then San Paulo.
In San Paulo, the aliens had retaliated. They had turned every- one into light.
A whole city had disappeared.
What nobody said is that San Paulo was where the corpora- tions kept a lot of their most profitable labor camps. My cousin was there, so far in debt to the corps that she couldn’t get out. I joined the Light Brigade so that wouldn’t be my fate, too. The corps take care of you, as long as you give them everything.
Maybe the aliens did those people a favor. Now that I’d been light, I started thinking that maybe they didn’t die after all. May- be they just went somewhere else. Maybe the aliens found out what we were, too, and tried to save us from ourselves, the way I was now trying to save them.
The San Paulo Blink showed the corporations what was pos- sible. And they used the tech to fight back.
The aliens gave us the light.
Eight million corporate slaves, gone in a blink.
And our response: half a continent scorched of all life.
Maybe the light was our downfall. Or maybe we’d been falling the whole time.
After a couple days’ leave, after I located the coordinates of where the city in my vision used to be, I asked to go out on the next of- fensive. The city I’d seen in my vision had been one of the first we destroyed in the early days of the war, after we tried to invade and they retaliated. In the archives, I saw the city the same way I had in my vision: heaps of our bodies on the green grass fields all around the city.
In the here-and-now, we were still looking for rogue aliens, try- ing to find out what had happened to all of them, but I already knew. I wasn’t there to help them clean up. I was there because I wanted to jump with them.
I could blink forward. And now I knew I could blink back.
My CO gave me a look when I made the request, like she was trying to figure out if I was crazy. She told me that if I could pass the psych eval, she’d approve my next drop. I asked her if she ever gave her dog away, because it was too much responsibility.
“My dog’s dead,” she said. “That makes it easier,” I said.
“No,” she said. “It doesn’t. But I guess you can’t save everything.”
No, I thought, you have to choose.
I almost turned back, then, but I was too committed. Escalation of commitment.
The shrink asked me a lot of questions, but I knew the ones that mattered.
“So do you still think you can travel in time, when you become light?” she asked.
I laughed. “I haven’t had any of that déjà vu since the last drop.
Those aliens are dead. It’s over.” I passed my evaluation.
I prepared for the drop. Closed my eyes. Held on to my sense of self while everyone else broke up around me. I pictured the city in my head, the place I wanted to go back to.
We broke apart.
And I saw it—I saw the alien city of my vision, again sur- rounded by brilliant green fields. The shining spires. The inland sea. It wasn’t the city we had scorched when we became the weap- ons—though it was just as surely obliterated in the here-and-now as that city was. This was the capital. The center of everything. Those spires were their ships, grounded forever at the foot of the gleaming sea. I had arrived before our first offensive on this city, before the fields were full of the bodies of our people. Before we knew the aliens could fight back.
I came down into my own body, trying to yank myself together, but it was like trying to put together a bucket full of puzzle pieces as somebody poured it out around you.
There were no bodies yet. I had time.
I skimmed into the city, past crowds of startled onlookers. I still wasn’t fully corporeal, but I was getting there. I needed a few more minutes. I needed to tell them. Just as I was able to draw air into my lungs, I felt my body vibrating again. It wanted so badly to come back apart and go where the people in charge had sent it.
I held it together.
I yelled, “They’re sending us. We’re weapons. We’re going to scorch the whole continent.”
They all stared blankly at me, like I was some dumb beast, and I wondered if they understood Spanish. I tried again in English, but that was as many languages as I knew.
When I didn’t say anything else, the crowds dispersed and the people went on their way.
But one of them came up behind me, and I recognized her. It was the bag lady from the restaurant. She put her hand on my arm and squeezed, but it went right through me. I was coming apart again. “It’s you who brings the light,” she said. “We won’t be here when
it comes. You can do what you need to do now without fear for us.” I broke apart.
Saw nothing. A wall of blackness. Then, another city.
But not the one my CO had sent me to. Someplace else. I was skipping out of control. I was losing it.
I knew this city because I had grown up here, before it became a work camp. I was eight years old now, staring into the lights of San Paulo. The ocean wasn’t as close as it is now, but I could smell the sea on the wind.
I knew this place, and this day.
My cousin was with me, young and alive, laughing at some joke. I wanted her to be safe forever. I wanted us all to be safe.
I stared up at the sky. Mars was up there, full of socialists. But they hadn’t lied to us after all, had they?
It was my lie. My betrayal.
I held out my hand to my cousin. “Have you ever wanted to become the light? Go anywhere you want? Be anyone you want?”
“It’s impossible to be anyone you want,” she said, and I was sad, then, for how soon the corporations took away our dreams.
“Hold my hand tight,” I said. “There’s going to be a war soon.
There’s going to be a war, but no one will come.”
That’s why the aliens weren’t in the city when we arrived with our weapons.
It was because of me. My betrayal. And so was this.
I blinked.
I was high above the city now, still in San Paulo, but the sea was higher, the sprawl was even greater, and I could see the work camps circling the city one after another after another.
Eight million people.
What if there was a war and nobody came? I broke apart over San Paulo.
I was a massive wave of energy, disrupting the bodies around me, transforming everything my altered atoms touched.
We became eight million points of light.
I broke them all apart, and brought them with me.
You can’t save them all. But I could save San Paulo. I could take us all . . . someplace else, to some other time, where there was no war, and the corporations answered to us, and freedom wasn’t just a sound bite from a press release.
This is not the end. There are other worlds. Other stars. Maybe we’ll do better out there. Maybe when they have a war here again, no one will come.
Maybe they will be full of light.
THE PLAGUE GIVERS
I.
SHE HAD RETIRED to the swamp because she liked the color. When the Contagion College came back for her thirty years after she had fled into the swamp’s warm, black embrace, the color was the same, but she was not.
Which brings us here.
The black balm of dusk descended over the roiling muddy face of the six thousand miles of swampland called the Freeman’s Bath. Packs of cannibal swamp dogs waded through the knobby knees of the great cypress trees that snarled up from the russet waters. Dripping nets of moss and tangled limbs gave refuge to massive plesiosaurs. The great feathered giants bobbed their heads as the swamp dogs passed, casual observers in the endless game of hunter and hunted.
Two slim people from the Contagion College, robed all in black muslin, poled their way through a gap in the weeping moss and brought their pirogue to rest at the base of a bowed cypress tree. Light gleamed from openings carved high up in the tree trunk, far too high to give them a view of what lay within. There was no need.
This tree had been marked on a map and kept in the jagged towers of the Contagion College in the city for decades, waiting for a day as black as this.
“She’s killed a lot of people,” the smaller figure, Lealez, said, “and she’s been wild out here for a long time. She may be unpredictable.” The poor light softened the contours of Lealez’s pockmarked face. As Lealez turned, the lights of the house set the face in profile, and Lealez took on the countenance of a beaked fisher-bird, the large nose a common draw for childhood bullies and snickering colleagues at the Contagion College who had not cared much for Lealez’s face or arrogance. Lealez suspected it was the arrogance that made it so easy for the masters to assign Lealez this terribly dangerous task, rushing off after some wild woman of legend at the edge of civilization. They were always saying to Lealez how im- portant it was to know one’s place in the order of things. It could be said with certainty that this place was not the place for Lealez.
Lealez’s taller companion, a long-faced, gawky senior called Abrimet, said, “When you kill the greatest sorcerer that ever lived, you can live wild as you like, too.”
Abrimet’s hair was braided against the scalp in a common style particular to Abrimet’s gender, black as Lealez’s but twice as long, dyed with henna at the ends instead of red like Lealez’s. Lealez admired the shoman very much; Abrimet’s older, experienced pres- ence gave Lealez some comfort.
Full dark had fallen across the swamp. Swarms of orange fireflies with great silver beaks rose from the banks, swirling in tremulous living clouds. Far off, something much larger than their boat splashed in the water; Lealez’s brokered mother had been killed by a plesiosaur, and the thought of those snaky-necked monsters sent a bolt of icy fear through Lealez’s gut. But if Lealez turned around now, the Contagion College would strip Lealez of title and what remained of Lealez’s life would be far worse than this.
So Abrimet called, “We have come from the Contagion College.
We are of the Order of the Tree of the Gracious Death! You are summoned to speak.”
Inside the tree, well insulated from the view of the two figures in the boat, a thick, grubby woman raised her head from her work. In one broad hand she held the stuffed skin of an eyeless toy hydra; in the other, a piece of wire strung with a long white mat of hair. An empty brown bottle sat at her elbow, though it took more than a bottle of plague-laced liquor to mute her sense for plague days. She thumbed her spectacles from her nose and onto her head. She placed the half-finished hydra on the table and took her machete from the shelf. The night air wasn’t any cooler than the daytime shade, so she went shirtless. Sweat dripped from her generous body and splattered across the floor as she got up.
Her forty-pound swamp rodent, Mhev, snorted from his place at her feet and rolled onto his doughy legs. She snapped her fin- gers and pointed to his basket under the stairs. He ignored her, of course, and started grunting happily at the idea of company.
The woman rolled her brown, meaty shoulders and moved up to the left of the door like a woman expecting a fight. She hadn’t had a fight in fifteen years, but her body remembered the drill. She called, “You’re trespassing. Move on.”
The voice replied—young and stupidly confident, maybe two years out of training in the city, based on the accent, “The whole of this territory was claimed by the Imperial Community of the Forked Ash over a decade ago. As representatives of the Com- munity, and scholars of the Contagion College, we are within our rights in this waterway, as we have come to seek your assistance in a matter which you are bound by oath to serve.”
The woman did not like city children, as she knew they were the most dangerous children of all. Yet here they were again, shouting at her door like rude imbeciles.
She pushed open the door, casting light onto the little boat and its slender occupants. They wore the long black robes and neat purple collars of the Order of the Plague Hunters. When she had worn those robes, long ago, they did not seem as ridiculous as they now looked on these skinny young people.
