The Light Brigade Read online

  My father listened to a lot of illegal broadcasts. Watched video and took hits from immersives that weren’t approved by the corp. I didn’t understand, back then, why he did it.

  When corporate security kicked down our door, I was sitting at the kitchen table complaining about eating plain toast. I remember that specifically, because it seems so stupid now, but as a teen, it was important that we be just like everybody else, and everybody else got butter on their toast. Why didn’t we?

  My father grabbed me by the shoulders. “Do as they say.”

  “On the ground, on the ground!” they yelled.

  My father pulled me down with him.

  “What about Tomás?” I said.

  “My son!” my father said. “My son is in the bedroom, there, with my wife. Please don’t hurt him. He’s a simple boy.”

  “Stay down!” Two of the security techs trained their guns on my father and I while the other four pounded into the back room.

  The security personnel wore black: black masks, black helmets, black boots.

  My brother wailed from the bedroom. I heard my mother’s thin, wispy voice.

  “We’ve done nothing wrong!” I said.

  “Shut up!” said the beefy tech holding the gun at my back.

  They dragged my brother into the room with us. Pushed him to the floor. He screamed and thrashed. He was only ten years old, but he was big. One of the techs bashed him in the face with the butt of her gun. His nose burst. Blood splattered.

  My father reached for him. The woman smashed her gun to the back of my father’s head. He went down. Two more techs restrained my brother. My brother sobbed and sobbed, spitting blood and snot and his two front teeth.

  I lay there shaking.

  A woman wearing a long white coat entered through our broken doorway. Two soldiers accompanied her, proper soldiers, not security. Her boots were red. She clasped her willowy arms behind her back. She stood very straight and was so lean she put me in mind of some great crane, head slightly cocked, inquisitive. She paused just inside the door, surveying the bloody floor, our humble flat.

  “There’s a mother here, is there not?” she said.

  “She’s sick, Sergeant,” one of the techs said. “In the back. Hooked up.”

  “Well, unhook her.”

  “I left Martiana back there,” he offered.

  “Is that what I asked you?”

  The tech yelled, “Martiana, the sergeant wants you to bring the woman out!”

  “Please,” my father said, “please leave her. She is very sick. She is in pain.”

  “You are Captain Dietz?” the tall woman asked. She wore white gloves. She ran her gloved finger over our mantle, the one that framed our media screen.

  “I am,” he said.

  My father’s title referred to his career piloting shuttles, and wasn’t a military rank. The way the interrogator said “captain” was almost mocking. I hated her in that moment more than I had ever hated anyone.

  “Martiana!” the security tech said, again.

  The woman in white held up her hand. “A moment on that. Dietz is a German name, is that right, Captain?”

  “What does that have to do with . . . I don’t know.”

  She continued running her fingers along the mantle. “Germany. Germania. The Germanic region. Old Europe. Now Evecom territory. After one of the early capitalist wars, a number of Germans came here, to what was then Argentina. You know it? That area is split now into twelve zones. Most of those immigrants ended up in what’s now New Buenos Aires. That’s quite far from here, isn’t it?”

  “I don’t know it,” my father said. “My family is from São Paulo.”

  “Ah, of course. The labor camp. I always wonder how ghouls manage to escape that camp.”

  “I was useful,” my father said.

  “Clearly. To whom were you useful, though? The highest bidder? Did Teni outbid Evecom? Masukisan? Did Mars ever approach you?”

  “Please. My family’s done nothing wrong.”

  “About twelve thousand of those German immigrants were former Nazis,” she said. “Do you know what a Nazi is, Captain?”

  “I’ve heard the term.”

  “You know the slur, perhaps. But not the history. They were highly organized. Single-minded. High as balls, too, which helped. They had some of the world’s best-educated chemists and engineers. They made good use of them. Every factory worker, soldier, shopkeeper, and childbearer was hopped up on a low-dose methamphetamine called Pervitin. Depression, fatigue, PTSD, post-partum depression—they prescribed it for everything. A wonder drug. But they were myopic, ultimately. Extended use causes delusion and psychosis. They got too greedy too quickly. The way you have become greedy.”

  “I have given everything to Teni—”

  “Let us know where to find the contraband,” she said, “and we won’t ransack the flat. We won’t disturb your wife. We can still be civilized here, captain.”

  Her fingers paused just below the right side of the mantle. I heard a soft click.

  “Ah,” she said. The media screen woke; a clear vista bloomed across its surface. A crumpled mountain in the distance, just visible over a swaying field of lupines. “Interesting viewing,” she said, “for a secured channel. Did you know we were coming, Captain? Is that why you changed where this transmission was coming from?”

  “My office,” my father said. “I can take you there. Please, just leave them alone.”

  She turned off the screen. “Captain Dietz is taking us on a tour of his office.”

  When they brought my father back two months later he was . . . different. I know they must have tortured him, but there were no visible marks. Yet he had grown old in those two months. When he looked at me, it was as if he saw through me. He would sit on the back balcony and watch the ships passing in the harbor; he liked it best when it rained.

  One day, I came home from school and he was still out on the balcony, soaking wet.

  I took him by the arm and said, “Come inside.”

  He put his hand over mine and met my look. “You accept reality. This reality. That will keep you safe for now, my little mouse. But promise me that when you come of age you’ll ask questions. Promise me you’ll strive for some other future than the one we gave you.”

  “Okay,” I said, without knowing what he was asking. Not really.

  I still wasn’t sure, lying in the ditch. But the memory reminded me of how far we’d come. My family was all dead, now. All gone. They had wanted to get me here so I was in a position to get citizenship with some big corp. What kind of child would I be if I gave up now?

  “Get up, Dietz,” I said. “Get up.”

  I pulled myself up; achieved it by pretending I was operating someone else’s body. I ignored the insistent pain that told me I was ruining myself, doing permanent damage. What did it matter if the body didn’t belong to me?

  I belonged to Tene-Silvia.

  Up, Dietz.

  I was up. One foot in front of the other.

  The Corporate Corps wants to break you, I know that. They want to break you down and rebuild you. They want to carve away all the softness, all the gooey bits, the fatty deposits that keep you warm and safe. They want to break you down to the bones, see glistening, gleaming muscle and pulpy viscera.

  As I labored on that black road, shivering, hallucinating, I had a moment of terrible fear. When they broke me apart, what were they going to find inside?

  6.

  Dawn came over me like a hangover. I sensed the sky lightening for a long time; so long I figured I was hallucinating it. The hooting and hollering of the rising birds and other crawling, pouncing things convinced me I had made it to see another day. I found a stone along the path and put it under my tongue, like my mother had taught me. When I was younger, we were always hungry and thirsty; sucking on a stone makes the mouth produce saliva and eases the need for water. But as an adult, I knew it was just a trick. I tried to concentrate on something besi
des my discomfort. The sky, the birds, the trail. I had no idea where I was.

  I stumbled around a bend in the path and saw the trailhead marker. I came up short. Leaned against a tree. Below me, the cleared parade grounds around our barracks went on and on. The flag at the center of camp already flew high. I wanted to throw myself on the ground and hope gravity did the rest.

  But seeing the barracks gave me a fresh burst of energy. I moved my dead legs. I kept shuffling until my fingers touched the base of the flagpole. I wanted to go to the cafeteria and beg for water, for food, a shower, and sleep, sleep, sleep, but the DI’s face kept flashing in front of me, his mealy, doughy little mouth. His fist. His certainty that I would quit. That I was shit. That my family was shit.

  The barracks were quiet. I figured my class hadn’t gotten in from the night’s exercise yet. No doubt they all ate fresh rabbit and got hours of sleep before marching in. I pressed my back to the flagpole and stood there as the sun came up, high and hot, burning the mist away.

  You can do a lot more than you think you can. That’s what mandatory training is about. Seeing how far they can push you. How far you can push yourself. I’d marched, stumbled, and jogged almost the length of a marathon in twenty-four hours. But I wasn’t going to fall yet. Not yet. Not until I saw the DI. Not until I spit in his face.

  I must have blanked out. The sound of my class’s marching cadence brought me back. One vehicle led, with another taking up the rear, just like they’d come in.

  As the lead vehicle parked outside the parade grounds, I straightened my weary body and stood at attention.

  The DI got out of the vehicle with one of our handlers. They marched up to me. The DI’s expression was unreadable.

  “Get out of my face, Dietz,” he said. “You’re dismissed.”

  “Sir. Yes, sir.” I took one step away from the flagpole, intending to march back to the barracks. My legs gave out.

  I fell hard, snapping my chin on the tarmac.

  The DI called for a medic. The DI squatted next to me. “You want to lead a squad, Dietz? We don’t value narcissistic heroes here. Know what a narcissist is? It’s some idiot kid drunk on his own shit. Heroes get themselves killed. They get their squads killed. You aren’t shit without your team. You’re hardly shit with them.”

  The medics showed up with a stretcher and hauled me to the infirmary. I got hooked up to a line and treated for dehydration and general exhaustion.

  I learned later that my group was also punished for my transgression. They lost two hours of sleep and had to hump back to the barracks early. When I returned from the infirmary the next day, not even Muñoz wanted to talk to me.

  We kept going.

  No rest for the Corporate Corps.

  • • •

  “What do you know about the enemy?” said Sergeant Older from the head of the classroom the next afternoon. She was a steely woman, all hard angles. She must have been fifty or so, though it was hard to tell, with half her face scarred by acid or some explosion (I never asked. Nobody else did either). She wore a shit-brick of military honors on her jacket. Her left arm was an organic-machine hybrid, and she walked with a hitch in her step. I wondered if she was supposed to serve as a warning or a promise.

  We had at least three hours of classes every day. I’ve never been one to volunteer first, but she called on me.

  “What do you know, Dietz?”

  “Sir, they’re aliens, sir,” I said.

  Four or five people guffawed.

  “Well, that’s a good start. You learn that in a book?”

  Martinez said, “Sir, they turned on us after we gave them land up in Canuck. Started shooting babies in their beds . . . sir.”

  I hadn’t seen propaganda billboards outside Tene-Silvia. I didn’t know you just say the same shit about whatever new enemy you’ve got. All I knew was what I was told. Every enemy shoots babies in their beds. It’s kind of amazing.

  “They are indeed aliens,” Sergeant Older said. “How did this conflict begin?”

  “Sir,” Martinez chimed in again, “they hate our freedoms, sir.”

  “Why?”

  Silence. One woman in the back was asleep. She snored so loudly the sergeant rapped her on the forehead and sent her out to do a lap.

  “Is this boring you?” Sergeant Older said. “Knowing your enemy is the best way to defeat them.”

  “Sir,” Jones said, “I think military strategy is a better way to defeat them than that . . . sir.”

  “And what will you base your strategy on, Jones?”

  “Experience,” he said. “Sir.”

  “Experience of what?” she said. “Being a citizen?”

  Jones’s complexion was dark, and it deepened even further.

  “We are fighting an enemy who bit our extended hand,” she said, “like a rabid animal. Such an enemy is unpredictable.”

  “Aren’t all of them?” Muñoz said.

  “No,” Sergeant Older said. “Who are we fighting? We gave these alien people half the northern hemisphere to rehabilitate, because it was such a wreck after the Seed Wars, and the climate shifted. Nobody cared who settled it, not even CanKrushkev. It was their territory. Nothing would grow there until the aliens came. They had technology that they developed when they split from us on Earth and made their communist colonies on Mars.”

  “Sir,” Jones said. “What tech was it, though? That reseeded Canuck?”

  “That’s not important, Jones,” the sergeant said. “Let’s stay on target. We cut ourselves off from them when they left, so it was a real surprise when some of them asked to come back. I guess they thought they were saving us, but we don’t need saving. The tech, whatever it was, got rid of all the radiation and restored the soil, probably the same way it did on Mars after the Water Riots. And stuff grew. We trusted them, but they betrayed us. I don’t just need to tell you. You can experience it.”

  Sergeant Older pulled up a series of augmented experiences and immersives for us to engage in firsthand, so we could feel like we were there, seeing all the horror our parents did when these aliens turned on us. It wasn’t pretty. It never is. They know what to show you. They know how we work. They know how to turn people into aliens. Kids into monsters.

  After that was marksmanship. We lined up for bayoneting practice, skewering dummies made of real flesh and skin grown in a lab.

  The DI yelled, “Hit that slab like you mean it! This is the enemy! Give me your fighting face, you scuttling little roaches. This is the enemy that blew up the goddamn moon! They Blinked two million of our own! Gore them! Gore them!”

  All our targets looked like people. All our targets were meant to be Martians.

  People ask what aliens are like. I can’t say I’d seen an alien outside of a corp news bulletin back then. The images they gave to us were of lanky, sneering men and women bundled in colorful clothes and carrying outlandish, oversized firearms painted with the number of their kills. They were just people. Like us.

  This is who you kill. This is how you kill. You kill without thinking. You kill. You kill. You kill.

  I remember the first time the DI praised me. Remember it starkly, even now. Me and Muñoz at the firing range, me at the sniper rifle, her stretched out just behind me, acting as spotter. Using her direction, I adjusted for wind, corrected the angle.

  The target staring back at me through my scope was a lean, wrinkled woman. She wore dark glasses and a red headband. The flesh wasn’t real in this extended range exercise, but she looked as real as they could make her. She even moved; the hands coming up and down, the eyelids fluttering.

  I took the shot.

  The shot hit her just above the left eye. I pulled away from the scope, and there was the DI above us, checking my shot with his heads-up.

  “That’s a good shot, Dietz,” he said. “Muñoz.”

  I huffed in a breath. I felt such a profound sense of relief that it’s almost embarrassing to talk about now. I wanted to please him, no matter how muc
h I hated him. And the only way to please him was to kill without hesitation.

  This is how they break you.

  7.

  The next week they sent us with our guns on a mock recon: a team exercise. It was capture the flag, basically, with real stakes. They called the course “land navigation,” and it seemed like a dumb idea, since we all had GPS devices integrated with our trackers and heads-up displays.

  “The winning team skips PT tomorrow,” the drill instructor said. “Winning team gets two extra hours of sleep. Gets an extra hour checking messages from home. How does that sound, children?”

  Four weeks into mandatory training . . . skipping PT and sleeping sounded absolutely treasonous.

  “My colleagues will not be shooting live rounds during this exercise,” the DI said. “But your coms will be disabled throughout. We will be monitoring your trackers but will not intervene unless absolutely necessary. Your teams get to navigate to the rally point. You will retrieve the payload and hump it back here to this flag. You have three days.”

  I got paired with Jones, a slack-jawed kid named Hadid, who everyone called Jawbone, and a tall, meaty woman, Vargas, who our group called Grandma because she was a good five years older than the rest of us. She didn’t think the nickname was funny. I never used it to her face.

  We got our pulse rifles, a water slug, a folded paper map, and a compass.

  “Who the fuck uses a paper map?” Grandma muttered.

  The DI rounded on her. “You think we’re fucking with you, Vargas? You think Teni is wasting your fucking time? Dumping money into some negative ROI exercise? You may find yourselves cut off, your gear fried by an EMP. You know what that is, children? It’s like somebody frying the shit out of the little smart boxes that gear out your apartment blocks and civ houses. It’ll fry your interface, your tracker, all that expensive shit the corp wires into your head. You will be blind, children. And when you are blind, what do you learn?”