I remembered that conversation as if it was playing out in front of me again, on video, when we moved out. Karazhyngyl
was
one of those really small towns, southeast of Karaganda, and according to Ox, the only other units might be too far to help if anything went down.
And she refused to leave my head. The memory of Bridgette rotted inside me, so that most of the time I couldn’t eat, instead cramming in drugs. In more lucid moments it really messed me—didn’t make any sense.
I hadn’t known her long.
But the more I thought about it, the more it took, until one day, on the back of a truck, it hit me between the eyes so hard that I started crying. Not sobbing. Just a steady stream of tears that left tracks in the dust that had caked to my face.
Innocents.
Bridgette and the others. She had been everything I dug about Kaz, the selflessness and the lack of bullshit, no strings.
Death and faith. That
was what they were all about, and she never would have cheated on me, thought I hung the moon, because by being her first, I had shown her something besides war, so even though I hadn’t intended to give
that
to her, I had. And she had given it back. Take all the betties in the real world, human, and line them up in front of me and I wouldn’t even look. Didn’t want them. Somehow, I’d have to get back with the Gs, and even with Ox I began to feel like I didn’t belong. He didn’t get it. But I did, and in my worst moments I wished I didn’t, because it was like a sucking chest wound, messy and offering little chance of recovery. Only drugs made it OK. Maybe an overdose would kill me, I thought,
and that would be all right too.
Death and faith, drugs and painlessness, bullshit and Kaz. The Gs were better than any human I had ever met.
It took Ox’s task force, almost two hundred men and a pack of rusted-out trucks, several weeks to make the journey by rail and another two days to off-load vehicles and supplies. Most of Karazhyngyl—a tiny railway village—had escaped the devastation of plasma but had been deserted. It was creepy, like a ghost town. Ox ordered the men to construct a defensive perimeter around a hotel close to the station, but it was well into the summer before they erected a network of motion sensors and sentry bots.
Despite the defenses, I felt uneasy. There was no subterrene here—subterrene didn’t exist in the outposts—and all we got were holes, dug into a sickly tan soil. Ox said it best.
“We’re out here now. Alone. And I hate this place.”
We had been there a couple of months when one day, in the distance, a long low whistle sounded and the nearby tracks rattled with the approach of a train.
Ox sat up. “That ain’t right.”
“What’s wrong?” I asked. He had already punched a button to put the men on alert, and a stream of them came running out of the hotel to man the perimeter. I did a mental calculation, counted one hundred and forty, with sixty out on patrol.
“There’s no train scheduled for now,” said Ox. He clicked on to the net. “Heads up. Keep your eyes and ears open. First patrol, status.”
Thick static made the response hard to understand. “One hundred klicks north of base, turning back now.”
“Second patrol?” asked Ox.
“OK, gunny, on our way back now.”
Slowly the train lumbered into town, moving at less than thirty kilometers per hour, and shook the hotel’s few remaining windows as it clacked over a road crossing. I threw up when I saw it.
The train consisted of an engine and an attached string of flatcars that stretched as far as we could see. At first I thought the cars had been loaded with recycling material: vehicle wreckage, parts, and anything else that had been taken from the battlefield to be reused and reshaped when time allowed. But I was wrong. It became obvious once the train got closer. Dead bodies had been stacked on each
flatcar like logs, the men still encased in shattered combat suits that barely kept their occupants in one piece, and neither I nor any of the others had our helmets on, so we struggled to snap them in place. Several of us were too late. Like me, some of the others puked into their fighting holes as the odor drifted through town, and I caught a glimpse of one body that had bloated to the point where it split the combat suit at its seams. It took twenty minutes for the last car to disappear.
“Jesus.” Ox ducked into the hotel and ran down into the cellar, where we had established the task force’s headquarters. There they kept a tac-net radio, which had a much longer range than suit radios, wired to a mobile fusion reactor. Ten minutes later, he returned.
“Russian push. They hit our front lines hard, and the flanks are being probed. So far our guys are holding but we can expect activity all along the rail line for the next couple of days. Task Force Agadyr captured an insurgent and got him to talk—a local, not a G-boy. Pops has partisans in all the towns around us, ready to go as soon as they get it wired.”
“How long until patrols report in?” I asked. I was only a division historian, a civilian, but somehow I’d wound up as the unit’s administrative assistant. I didn’t mind, kind of liked it. Finally felt useful in the war.
“About ten hours for each of them,” said Ox.
Out here it was a different Kaz, one I hadn’t met. Out here, ten hours was a lifetime.
A few hours later, night settled on Karazhyngyl. My external thermocouples indicated thirty degrees centigrade,
and I thanked God for climate control. Ox had asked me to make the rounds of the perimeter while he and his command group—two corpsmen, an armorer, and a vehicle mechanic—huddled in the hotel cellar.
I was about to jump into the nearest hole when a flash of light overloaded my vision kit, followed a few seconds later by a rumbling boom. I ran to the hotel and down into the basement, where Ox bent over the tac-net.
“First patrol is getting it,” the armorer said. “Gunny’s talking them through.”
“Someone just blew the rail line, about five klicks north.”
Ox heard me and turned. “Any movement on the perimeter?”
I shook my head.
“Fine. We’ll deal with it later.” He turned back to the radio. “Calm down. How many are there and what are you getting hit with?”
There was a second of static before the guy clicked in, the popping of grenades in the background. “Hard to tell, gunny.
They’re everywhere.
Grenades and fléchettes, no plasma. I didn’t see any vehicles; they must be on foot.”
“You have a shitload of firepower on your scout car.
Use
it.”
I almost laughed. “Scout car” was one way to put it. The Marines had taken a bunch of abandoned cargo trucks, slapped in salvaged engines, and then welded Maxwell auto-cannons to the beds. Voilà. Supercharged coffins, also known as scout cars.
“Scout car is out, I’ve lost half my guys. We need support.”
“Negative, you can do this, kid. Get one of your guys
into the scout car now. Even if it’s on fire, your suits can take it for a while.
Get on that goddamn auto-cannon.
”
We listened to static for a moment before Ox clicked in again. “Matthews?” He was gone, though, and we all knew it.
The next morning, second patrol arrived safely, and Ox sent them out to bring back what was left of first. They returned a few hours later, empty-handed. All they’d found were drag marks and bloodstains, along with a battered scout car.
That was the new Kaz, way spookier than the one I remembered from Pavlodar. You could get hit from any direction and never even know what wiped you. And somewhere north of us, at the front, Bridgette’s sisters got it on, so anytime I wasn’t wasted, I prayed—that some of them would make their way back to our position, just so that I could see them and get another look at her.
Sometimes Karazhyngyl made us laugh. The train became our main source of entertainment, the thing that broke up the boredom and could be counted on, a reminder that to our north we had friends and to our south we had a place to escape to, to hope for if things went badly. The engineers would toss dirty magazines and video chits from the engine car, and we’d throw them our old ones, a commerce of sorts that kept all of us sane, up and down the rail lines. And at times my thinking turned for the better. Bridgette still dominated it, but every once in a while the train would roll through and I’d think about something else, something besides joining her. Still, “think” was a strong way of putting what I did; my mind had eroded.
Before coming to Karazhyngyl, I had arranged with supply at Shymkent to have regular deliveries made, not just of zip but of anything they could get their hands on, so on any given day, you’d find me lit on straight fentanyl or one of a hundred pharmaceuticals intended for field hospitals. Mai tais all the way. But check it: I functioned OK because I had everything rigged so that if I needed to get it straight after going down on zip, there was another cocktail ready to go, able to counteract whatever I took in the first place. Still, sometimes the plan didn’t work out. I was totally gone when the white coats arrived, and Ox didn’t give me enough time to find a good antidote. Instead of taking something to counteract the zip, I took something that made it worse.
The train actually stopped in Karazhyngyl, which was way odd, and then Ox called me to the hotel, which filled me with dread. At first I thought I’d been busted. Two guys in suits sat in the hotel lobby, their black shoes covered with Kazakh dust, and over it all they wore white lab coats, which had turned a sickly yellow from the long train ride northward. Both of them were old and wore glasses, and you could tell if you’d spent any time in D.C. at all that they were Feds, civilians, here for some reason that was bound to make you sick.
Ox looked grim. When he saw the expression on my face, and my need to prop myself against the doorframe, he shook his head.
“These guys want to talk, Scout. You
can
talk, right?”
One of them stood and shook my hand when I approached. “I’m Dr. Stephens and this is my colleague Dr. Franks. Thanks for joining us, Mr. Wendell. We won’t take too much of your time.”
“You guys look like shrinks. Did you come to take me away? Because I like it here. I don’t want to go back, not yet.”
They looked at each other, and one pulled out a clipboard while the first kept talking. “No, Oscar, we didn’t come to take you away. We just came to talk.”
“Man.” I sat near them on a soft chair, its cushion half burned. “I’m freakin’ tired. They don’t get many holo-vids out here and the restaurants are awful.”
“I’ll be downstairs in ops,” Ox said. “If you need me, just yell.” When he was gone, the room went quiet except for the sounds of a basketball game outside.
“Mr. Wendell, we were wondering if you wouldn’t mind talking to us about Bridgette.”
“What about her?” I didn’t let it show, but the question turned me cold despite the heat, and I could see a hunger in them that made everything outside go dark and the room get a little dimmer. Something about them said
killers. Murderers.
“According to our records, you had a relationship with her. You two were close, is that correct?”
“That’s correct.”
“And she helped you on the retreat from Pavlodar, last year?”
“Yeah.” The quiet one’s hands looked jumpy as he took notes, and I couldn’t tell if it was a hallucination or reality, but the hands appeared to vibrate—so fast that he looked about to break a finger while writing. When they disappeared in a blur, I knew that I was more messed up than anyone realized. “She helped me.”
“Did you love her?”
I glared at him and then his friend. “Who are you guys?”
“Relax, Mr. Wendell. We’re with the Defense Policy Board—actually, a special subcommittee under the DPB, established to represent the interests of contractors engaged in war production. We’re here to ask questions, to learn from you.”
“Learn what?”
The other one spoke then, and his voice was high, like a girl’s, but quiet. “About Bridgette. So we can optimize.”
“What he’s trying to say,” the first one explained, “is that you got closer to one of our products than we ever could, near the end of its service term. You’re not the only one to, uh… have feelings for one of our units. We’ve been tasked to interview you and others like you so we can figure out what the units are thinking, in general, when they’re close to discharge; why they would want to be with a real human.”
“But what good would that do? And I have a few questions of my own, like why did you make them all the same? Why did you make them girls?”
He looked at the floor. The room went quiet again and I could hear the other one gulp loudly as he took a sip of water, the plastic bottle sweating with condensation. The first one tapped a finger against his thigh before answering.
“To answer your first question, we use the information to extend their shelf life. If we can get a more accurate picture of the things they focus on after two years on the line, what issues they have, psychologically, it’s entirely possible we can establish a protocol—either with drug therapy or mental preconditioning—to prevent them from collapsing so quickly. To make it so they don’t get attached to men like you. If we can do that, we have a product that’s
useful over a greater period of time and, consequently, worth more to the Defense Department. It’s all about lowering production and maintenance costs and making a larger profit. Commerce.
“To answer your second question, we make them all identical for the same reason each soldier is issued the same armor, the same weapons, why we have one kind of main battle tank and one kind of APC: it too makes production and maintenance more simple. To answer your third question, we tried producing men a long time ago. It didn’t work. But the details are classified.”