The Light Brigade Read online

  “Dietz, what if we’re not at war with Mars?”

  I turned. Wanted to see his expression. “That would be . . .” And I thought of the Ebola riots, and his story about War of the Worlds, and stopped.

  “The corps are all united in this war. That’s what they all tell us. What if they’re lying? What if this is another corporate war like the one that took out Elosha, made the Big Seven the Big Six? Only this time, we’re fighting to the death?”

  “One corp to rule them all?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why lie about it?”

  “Maybe there’s nobody up there on Mars, but us. Just our own colonists. No free Martians at all. Maybe the refugees are the last of the real Martians.”

  “And we’re . . . killing them to cover that up? Doesn’t make sense.” Not that a lot of this war made sense. “Mars goes dark and—”

  “Killing them as insurance. Maybe Mars went dark because everyone is dead up there.”

  “But we’re fighting on Mars.”

  “Yeah, but who, Dietz? Who are we fighting on Mars? There are corp settlements on Mars. We’ve seen them.”

  I had no memory of going to Mars, though everyone else assumed I’d been there at least twice. I dredged my memory, hoping for some revelation, but as ever—nothing but what I already knew. I couldn’t square anything he was saying with my own experience. People go crazy during war. I knew that as well as anyone.

  He said, “I wouldn’t say this if coms were online.”

  “Yeah, obviously.”

  “What if the Martians didn’t blow up the moon? What if it was some corp accident?”

  “You sound like a conspiracy theorist.”

  “So does war with Mars. We can move people around with light. Nobody on Mars can do that. Who can just disappear two million people like in the Blink?”

  “You’re saying we moved them?”

  “I’ve had a long time to think about it.”

  “How long?”

  “Dietz, I’ve been at war . . . forever. I feel like we just keep going round and round.”

  “You know what year it is?”

  His piercing blue eyes searched my face. “Do you?”

  “No.”

  “Me neither.”

  We gazed as one back to the trains, to the burning soldiers, to the black smoke rising against the bloody red sunset.

  18.

  The river lay on the other side of the trains. We gave the wreckage a wide berth. Sandoval sweated heavily, though the air was cool. The bridge over the river was a rocky ruin, but enough of it was left that we could pick our way across. On the other side was a public park, a grassy expanse ringed in a mix of evergreen trees—the evac point.

  The park was deserted.

  No soldiers. No vehicles.

  “We’ll set up here,” Tanaka said. “Clear skies, which is good. It’s going to get cold. Not sure if I want to risk a fire, though.”

  “Pretty sure there’s enough smoke to mask it,” Landon said.

  I knew what he was thinking. I wanted a wash, some food, and a lot of warmth. The slicks were good at absorbing our bodily fluids, recycling them into clean water and excreting the rest, but there was nothing like real warmth, real water, real food, for morale.

  “Omalas,” Tanaka said. “You take first watch.”

  She nodded.

  We chose a site at the edge of the clearing. Landon and Marino dragged over two picnic tables.

  Marino sauntered over to a grill. Pulled off his gloves. “Still coals in here!” he said, and the grin on his face was the most honest, least mad I’d seen on him yet.

  We heated up our MREs—a luxury—as the sun set. I sat at one of the tables, rifle in my lap, watching the bruised red sky blaze. All the smoke made for a hell of a sunset. With my gloves and helmet off, I felt the wind change.

  “Tanaka,” I said. “Wind’s turned toward us.”

  “Got it. River might slow it down, maybe stop it.”

  “Maybe.” The smoke roiled toward us, blooming like a forest of mushrooms.

  “If evac comes, it comes here. We’ll stay as long as we can.”

  “These suits aren’t fucking fireproof,” Sandoval said.

  “I hear you.” Tanaka did not look at him.

  They drill discipline into you during mandatory training. As the seven of us sat here, cut off and abandoned, probably presumed dead as fire threatened to consume us, I understood why. In the heat of battle, yeah, you need it. But adrenaline and protecting the guy beside you are usually good enough motivation. Here, though, here—the waiting, the time to think—that’s when you had to lean hard on the discipline. I watched Tanaka. He chewed on a long blade of golden grass, gaze fixed on the trees on the other side of the park. Omalas had eyes on the south, where the city burned. Sandoval gingerly tended to his inflamed skin, slipping second-skin adhesives onto the raw patches.

  I thought I might feel better in the dark—less exposed. But as dusk enveloped us and there was still no sign of air or light evac, I found the blackness cloying and claustrophobic. The blaze of the city continued to make the north glow. Embers and ash drifted over us, borne by the soft wind. If the blaze jumped the rocky gorge and the river, it would light up all the trees around us and move fast, far faster than we could run. Fires were common in the trash heaps where I grew up, fueled by toxic waste and unnamed flammable fluids, often sparked by the heat generated by the mounds of composting garbage. When the fire came, you checked the wind and gathered your shit and ran. The community made a series of fire breaks around the landfill, but the corp kept filling them in.

  Sitting at the picnic table here, entranced by the glow, I found myself back there, my hand in my mother’s slick palm. The stench of smoke. She roused me from dreams of catching geckos, of geckos pouring out of our cupboards, roaring from beneath the bucket we used to drain water from the sink.

  “Mama,” I said, and I was very young here, my brother wasn’t even born. “What about Papa?”

  She said nothing. Firmed her mouth. She was an imposing figure to me, then: all hard angles, sharp elbows, skinned knees, sinewy forearms. I didn’t see my father much in those days. He was a mythical figure to me.

  We climbed into the deep, damp ditch with dozens of others. She pressed her body over mine. The heat and smoke rolled over us. I screamed and clung to her, suddenly desperate to get out, to run. I feared the walls of the ditch would close on us, sealing us in like a tomb.

  “Dietz?”

  I started, still lost in the smell of earthy loam and burning diesel. “Yeah?”

  Tanaka stood over me, partially outlined by the glow of the sky. “I want to walk the perimeter of the park. See if we missed anyone. You up for it?”

  “Sure.” I hefted my rifle and started after him.

  “You have the squad, Omalas.”

  Tanaka followed a path out behind the tables, well-worn and scattered with pine needles. We walked in silence, keeping to opposite sides of the path. I kept the quiet, wondering what he was thinking. I was so used to keeping my mouth shut because of the heads-up recording that I found it difficult to think of something to say. Cut off, alone, fire on all sides.

  “You have someone back home?” Tanaka asked.

  I started. It wasn’t a question I expected. “Girlfriend. Broke with her before this, though. Got tired of losing things. You?”

  “I was married. Already military when this all got rolling when the moon . . . She was up there, when it happened, or . . . that’s what I heard. It’s where I was stationed. I was doing some training exercise. Saw the whole thing break apart. They can’t confirm it. No body. They could have taken her prisoner, the Martians. . . . When this war ends . . . I’ll look for her. The kids are all right, though. Were back on Earth, visiting my parents.”

  I couldn’t help but gaze through the twining branches overhead, the big black sky, and the whirling shards of the moon, just visible as the ghostly smoke breezed by. A remnant of
the moon streaked across the void like a big bright firefly, and was blotted out by another plume of smoke.

  “You believe it was the Martians?” I said.

  “I don’t know anymore.”

  “You saw something.”

  “Maybe.”

  “What did you see out there?”

  “The future.”

  A chill rode up my spine. I cast a look at him, trying to read something from his profile. I remembered Muñoz pointing him out, how our tastes differed except in this. A man with a strong jaw and a kind face. Still, looking at him, I could not help but miss Vi. Miss how she fluttered around like an anxious bird, parroting stories about hostage negotiations and how to power-prime yourself before a test. She had a life ahead of her that I could never be a part of, though I seemed to be the only one of us who knew it. Vi would get into corporate IP, corporate affairs. She would excel. There was no place for me in that life, nursing at the tit of the corp. I had known it then. Knew it now. Even when she decided to take a year off and do the work she did . . . I never figured it would last. She’d get into one of those shining towers soon enough. I wouldn’t.

  But here I was, not just sucking off a corp but dying for it. It’s funny, how sometimes you run so hard away from something that you find yourself exactly where you started.

  “What kind of future?” I said.

  “The war. This war. It didn’t matter who it was—another corp, free Martians. They were going to start a war over it. Most of the corps had left the moon. Low losses on all sides. Mostly research. Convenient most of the soldiers stationed there were out on an exercise that day.”

  “Had you been to Mars?” I remembered my mother and father doing their cargo runs to the asteroid belt.

  “Yeah. Before.”

  “Before?”

  “Before they went dark. Before the war. One day we just . . . didn’t go to Mars anymore. No explanation.”

  “You had contacts there?”

  “Naw. You didn’t talk to anyone there. Just dropped off supplies, took on cargo.”

  We kept on the path as it circled the green parkland. From here I saw the warm coals of Marino’s grill still glimmering. The MREs had not been made much more palatable heated, but it was a nice change, I guess.

  Continuing on, as the world burned. We kept along the path, making half the circle back to where we had come, perhaps two kilometers.

  “Tanaka, how long have we served together?”

  He paused. Turned his face to me, and I lost myself. Lost all sense of time, of who and what we were. Instead, it was just the two of us, two grunts on a long walk, hoping this wasn’t the end.

  I still have the Mars combat mission, I thought. I still have a chance to be a hero. But beyond this? Maybe this was the end? Maybe this was how we died—cut off from the others, swallowed up by fire.

  “You tell me,” he said.

  “Not a fair ask. I haven’t experienced things like . . . normal people.”

  “None of this is normal.”

  The trees thinned. We broke into a clearing, still shielded from the park proper. A stream—little more than spring runoff—gurgled at the other edge of it. I envied the Martians who had made a home of this place. They had transformed this blasted heath into a vibrant, secret garden. Why had we come back to destroy it all again? What was the point?

  On the other side of the break, Tanaka slowed, then stopped. I came up short. He walked over to me, rifle pointed down, eyes intense.

  “I wanted to ask you about Mars,” he said softly. He stood close, only a forearm of distance between us. He softened his grip on his rifle.

  “I don’t remember anything.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “I lost my squad, Tanaka. I would love to remember how. I can’t.”

  “There’s nobody recording. You can be honest.”

  “I am.”

  “I don’t know anyone else who came back from Mars after getting captured. Thought you could speak to my theory.”

  “Sorry. If it’s a corporate mindfuck, it’s a good one.”

  He nodded and started walking again. His manner bothered me. I wasn’t sure what this was all about. I didn’t follow him. When he noticed, he turned back.

  “What’s this about?” I said. “You should have had Omalas and Landon do this walk. You didn’t need to. Is this just about Mars?”

  “No.” He came back over to me. My pulse quickened. “You going to punch me if I kiss you?”

  “You outrank me. You going to pull rank if I don’t?”

  He laughed. “I haven’t outranked you since before we dropped, Dietz.”

  That hit me like a gut punch. “What?”

  Tanaka grunted. “Check out your display on the heads-up,” he said.

  I accessed the local map and opened my vitals profile. There it was: Corporal Dietz. “Huh,” I said, because anything else invited more thought. More questions. I deflected. “Thought you and Jones were a thing.”

  Tanaka raised his brows. “You go giving one guy a hand job and everybody around here thinks it’s a marriage proposal.”

  “Truly, romance isn’t dead.”

  “What do you think, Corporal Dietz?”

  I figured, hey, you only live once. I shrugged my rifle over my shoulder and took his face in both hands and kissed him. He was taller than me by a head; he leaned into me. The last time I touched anyone like that was Prakash, and it was for the same reasons. When death is all around you, you want to prove you’re alive.

  We fumbled toward a patch of grass, peeling off armor, yanking off our slicks. Fucking after you’ve almost died is a heady thing. Intense. You’ve never fucked anybody until you’ve done it frantically, joyfully, after surviving a slaughterhouse.

  After, we lay in the grass, trying to catch our breath. The smoke had moved over the stars.

  Tanaka traced my bare collarbone. “No scar,” he said.

  “From what?”

  “Mars.”

  I closed my eyes, barely suppressing a groan. “Right. Which time on Mars? I get them all confused.”

  “When you were captured. I saw it happen.”

  I hitched myself up on one shoulder. “Intel told me no one saw it. Or . . .” What had they said? A Martian ambush. Smoke, an EMP, and . . . something else that made us impossible to track. “Anyway. This is the first I’ve heard of it.”

  “Nobody talks about what we saw up there, with our heads-up recording all the time. You were hit here.” His fingers just beneath my collarbone again, rough and calloused. “I thought that was it for you, for our whole platoon. But they only took you and your squad.”

  “They shoot anyone else? How did it go down?”

  “You seriously don’t remember? That’s not just a show for intel?”

  “You wanted to fuck me to prove it?”

  “No, that’s . . . sorry, it wasn’t that.”

  “I’m not slow, Tanaka.”

  “There were rumors about you.”

  “Bad luck?”

  “That you were part of the Light Brigade. I just figured you were the strong, silent type.”

  “The Light Brigade?”

  “It’s a joke. Some people go through the war . . . I don’t know. It does something to them. They experience things, remember things differently. It’s freaky shit, honestly.”

  “Try living it.”

  “No thanks.” He sat up and reached for his undershirt. “That blast took you right in the shoulder. After the smoke. You all took some fire. It was a good hit, though, Dietz.”

  “Maybe Martians have great health care.”

  “Maybe.”

  I rolled over and pulled on my clothes, grabbed my slick. My rifle sat within reach, safety on. I considered what would have happened if either gun went off while we fucked around, blowing us up instantly. Death might be a relief from all this madness.

  “You ever beat the torture modules?” I asked, pulling on my boots.

  “Take
control of them, you mean?”

  “Yeah, force a restart.”

  “No. I hated those things. Never touched them after training.”

  I strapped on my armor and shouldered my rifle as Tanaka got into his boots.

  I said, “What if we could . . . if we could control where we dropped?”

  “Us? Grunts? I don’t know how the tech works. Sounds . . . doubtful.”

  “So does breaking apart into light.”

  “Fair. But if that could be done, wouldn’t someone have done it already?”

  I thought of all my weird drops, hopping around in time and place. “Maybe they already have.”

  A low rumble.

  “Shit,” Tanaka said.

  Spotlights appeared over the open field of the park. “Evac?” I suggested. I stepped toward the clearing.

  “Wait. Let’s go back on the path.”

  We ran back the way we had come. I kept gazing into the clearing. A single ship hovered there, shining big searchlights below. In the brilliant white light near the tables, I saw Marino step out, rifle up.

  “Hey, you fuck faces! The fuck you been?” Marino yelled.

  A beam of energy surged from the ship, destroying the table right next to Marino, pelting him in splintered wood. He screamed and fired on the ship, backing up toward the woods as he did.

  “Cover! Cover!” Tanaka yelled. “That’s not one of our fighters!” He raced ahead of me.

  We met the squad on the path, heading toward us. Marino limped along behind Sandoval, the right half of his face seared and peppered in splinters. A wedge of wood as big around as my thumb stuck out from his hip; another handful had made his ass into a pincushion.

  “Warm fucking welcome!” Marino said. “Who the fuck are those people?”

  Omalas brought up a fist. “Listen. You feel it?”

  My body trembled. I’d thought it was fear, but Landon’s teeth were chattering too.

  “Logistics must have found us at the same time,” I said.

  “Still no coms,” Landon said. “Can logistics get us out before this rogue ship fucks us up?”

  “This is a bad place for logistics to pull us out,” Tanaka said. “We need to be in the clearing.”