I volunteered for regular topside duty. A week after the bot experiment, Popov still hadn’t attacked, and none of
us figured out why they waited, but the general guessed they were concentrating on our main forces, pushing them back to Tashkent, and would get to us eventually. Occasionally drones transmitted information, so we learned that the rear-guard task force in Tashkent had blunted the main Russian advance to our west, allowing the rest of our forces to withdraw into Iran. After hearing that, I wanted topside duty more than anything. The general didn’t understand; he hadn’t expected me to join the duty roster. But I couldn’t explain that waiting and thinking had begun to take a greater toll than I had anticipated, that I had stopped trying to read emails because I couldn’t concentrate, or that hearing news made me want to put a fléchette through my own forehead; it felt like the walls would collapse at any second, and I couldn’t stand the other faces anymore. All of them looked the same: scared. And thick blue smoke began accumulating near the tunnel roof once restrictions were lifted. Everyone smoked so much that it had become a concern, because when the cigarettes started running out, people were really going to lose it, and what then? I didn’t want to be around to find out, and decided to spend as much time as I could aboveground if for no other reason than to breathe cleaner air.
When I got to the elevators, someone was already there and held the cage open for me. A kid, a Marine. His grenade launcher hung from its strap and he struggled to untangle it from the bars as the elevator shuddered on its way to the surface.
“Where are
you
going?” I asked.
“Topside. Skipper said to wait for some guy named Wendell.” The kid tried to look tough—glared at me, even—but I saw his eyes, which darted around and
couldn’t stay focused on any one thing for more than a fraction of a second.
“You got any drugs?” I asked.
“No.”
“Get some. Soon. You’ll need them, trust me. And put your helmet on.”
The pair already on watch duty didn’t wait for us to relieve them. They pushed me against the wall in their haste to get below, and when we arrived at the post, we found it empty. It was barely a pillbox, and not linked to the underground defenses. The engineers had done their best to resurrect the old topside positions, so this one showed the blackened surfaces of multiple plasma attacks, the glass of its vision slits long ago melted away or shattered, letting the evening breeze course through. The sun had already set. Just before ducking inside, I paused and took off my helmet, pushing the hood back so I could look at the sky with my own eyes, careful to make sure that my head was below the trench lip. There must have been a million stars. You couldn’t see all of them yet, because the sun still cast a weak glow to our west, but you saw enough to know that under different circumstances, Kaz wouldn’t have been so bad.
I don’t remember much of what the kid said during those first hours of darkness, and did my best to ignore him as I arranged myself on an old wooden box, but maybe I
should
have listened. In the distance, something moved. Within a second I had yanked my vision hood in place before snapping my lid shut, and then I slid my carbine through the empty view slit, ratcheting up the magnification.
“What is it?” the kid asked.
About three kilometers away, the Russian lines had erupted into a glow, with flames that twinkled in green sparks.
“Fires. Bonfires.”
“Jesus. It’s like they don’t care.”
“They care.” We both went silent. A faint sound reached us then and I tuned up, struggling to figure out what it was before I laughed. “They care, because they’re singing; they care about having some fun while they can.”
“I remember before I left, a few months ago, we had a cookout…
The kid popped his helmet and pulled his vision hood back, still peering into the night at the Russian lines. I didn’t notice his head was bare until it was too late.
“… and I got so wasted that I had to—”
The fléchette didn’t even crack. Whoever fired must have amped down the muzzle velocity to keep it below the speed of sound, and I was staring at the kid when it hit—just about to tell him to button up, that he was an idiot for looking out without a helmet. The kid’s head snapped back. There was nothing to be done; he died before his body hit the floor, and the one that hit him hadn’t been a tracer, so I couldn’t pinpoint the shooter’s position.
It’s funny what you think about at moments like that. Most people would have felt terror at the thought of Pops out there, somewhere, wriggling his way through the rubble and scoping for targets, and maybe also some sadness because the kid had just bought it, and a natural reaction would have been to wonder how old he was or whether he would be missed, and whether he at least got
laid
at that cookout. Had he
ever
gotten laid? I felt nothing. It just clicked. I activated my chameleon skin, radioed down to
the tunnels what had happened, and then scanned the horizon for any sign of movement, my view reduced to whatever fed into the eye of the Maxwell, a circle of green that spat ranges and temperature and any other data it could think to throw, anything that might affect range or accuracy. That was what life had become. A reduction had occurred so that whatever madness had afflicted me on the mountain was gone, along with any kind of caring about life or death or drugs or Ox, replaced by a kind of mathematics—the calculus of
wanting
to kill. Needing it. The search for a target became so consuming that I barely noticed when someone else arrived at the outpost, pulling the kid’s body into the trench before taking a position next to me, joining me in a silent hunt. It clicked because that kind of concentration made everything go away. Maybe it was the same way people enjoyed carpentry, or surfing, or building model airplanes, things that took so much concentration that whatever else was going on in your life didn’t matter; bad stuff just melted away during the time it took to complete the task.
Movement. Something shimmered about a hundred yards from our position and I zeroed, waiting for whatever it was to move again so I could make sure I hadn’t imagined it. We squeezed our triggers at the same time and twin lines of tracers reached into the darkness, some of the fléchettes bouncing off concrete to go spinning wildly into the night. Whoever that Russian had been, he was dead now, and it felt good.
I spent the rest of my watch like that, staring at the Russian positions, knowing that one of them had died and praying for another one to show up to give me something to do. I never met the guy who replaced my kid, but it
didn’t matter. Killing, for the moment, was the only thing on my mind.
When the attack finally started, it came on one of the most beautiful days of the war, an especially crisp fall afternoon that carried the hint of burning charcoal from the Russian lines, which drove us crazy, because we had just been put on half rations to conserve our food supply. The charcoal reminded everyone of cookouts. Not only that, but Pops must have been roasting something, because on top of the charcoal was the smell of burning meat, which wafted through the observation post and tortured us to the point where some people buttoned up whether they were exposed or not—just to keep the smell away.
On that day I shared the post with two others, a Marine corporal and an Army private. The corporal sighed and slumped down from the viewing slit so he could face me.
“When will they hit us?”
“How old are you?” I asked. I didn’t need to; I heard it in his voice, but I mentally flinched anyway, wondering why it was that all the kids found their way into my post.
“Fifteen.”
“Did you have to get your parents’ permission or something?”
“Nah, not for the draft, but I wanted this and would have volunteered if I needed to.”
“A fifteen-year-old corporal? You’re an idiot.”
The other one sat beside him. A helmet hid the private’s face but he sounded about the same age, and I imagined cheeks covered with pimples, maybe a little peach fuzz. “Screw that. We need the metals. Where I
come from, they shut down a bunch of electronics factories, and people can’t find jobs. They needed
us.
To stop the Russian aggression.”
“They don’t need you. They need about a million genetics, an army of betties, and maybe then we’d be OK.”
“You’re an asshole,” the corporal said.
My mind warned me to shut up—some part of it that could still compute and realized that these two weren’t worth it. But that wasn’t going to happen, because my chest needed to vent before I puked in frustration.
“Maybe. Maybe I’m all asshole, I don’t know, but I
do
know that you won’t live to see sixteen and that I don’t even remember sixteen. And I know that there wasn’t any Russian aggression; there was just us, and we pushed over into Popov’s territory, and now your propaganda is totally for shit. Does your ass itch yet—from the tube? Mine does. The last time I saw a medic, he said that everyone’s ass is infected, and just to rub my suit against a wall as hard as I can, but that won’t get it, man, because my ass itches on the inside.”
The private began to sound angry. “Screw you. If old men like you hadn’t messed up in the first place, we wouldn’t be here. How old are
you
?”
“Twenty-eight.”
“Wow,” said the corporal. “That’s old.”
The pressure in the bunker shifted slightly and I felt the skin on my neck go cold, just before I shouted at them to get down. It shook the ground when the shells hit. Plasma rounds impacted all around the bunker, filling it with an otherworldly glow that shifted from one color to the next, and when I risked a glance, I saw streamers of hot gas snake in through the viewing slits, playing against the ceiling to leave blackened patterns. I don’t know
which one started it, but within a moment both the kids were screaming and one yelled that he couldn’t breathe. It was probably true. My suit temperature indicator leapt into the yellow zone and a blinking light popped on to let me know that it had switched to the emergency oxygen supply because the plasma had sucked up all the air.
“Cry on, idiots!” I yelled, and then started laughing. “This is what you wanted, boys. Isn’t it fantastic! Popov aggression! See what you two can do to stop it,
because I’m still waiting for the day when guys like you teach him a lesson, for the day when I can finally itch my own ass.
”
You lost track of time during moments like that. Part of it was fear. Whatever had changed in me wasn’t enough to negate a primal instinct that returned unexpectedly and lodged in my throat, an almost overwhelming urge to book from the pillbox and make for the rear—anywhere but there—regardless of the fact that it would mean certain death to get caught in the open. Instead I curled, not even noticing that I had done it until long afterward, because my attention had shifted to the constant
whump-whump
of containment shells as they impacted in the fields around us. During momentary lulls, I heard the hissing of water boiling off, water that had soaked into the dirt or concrete blocks during some rainstorm that I had either missed or failed to notice.
Every once in a while the general would click in to check on me, to let me know that I should announce when the barrage was over and report in so they’d know if there was any sign of a topside infantry attack. Somehow I found a voice. It wasn’t obvious if he heard my responses, but it was likely he did, because the general always clicked off with an acknowledgment.
It ended about eight hours later. The fields went quiet except for the cracking and popping of partially molten bricks, and I flicked on my chameleon skin before rising to peer through the slit. There was no sign of them.
A group of three Marines popped in, shutting the door behind them, and I wasted no time, slapping one of the kids on my way out.
“Let’s go.”
The corporal started to get up and then stopped, glancing at his friend. “What’s wrong with him?”
A plasma tendril must have arced through a slit and played over the private, because his ceramic had melted, along with most of the function-control unit on his back.
“He’s dead, kid. Suffocated.” I grabbed the corporal by the shoulders and kicked him in the rear, forcing him toward the door, which he barely remembered to open.
It was slow going. Some of the trench works had collapsed during the barrage, so we had to slide out and into the rubble, doing our best to keep as much space between us and the Russian lines as possible. When we made it to the elevators, we popped our helmets and I saw that the corporal really was fifteen and that he was crying.
“Nothing you or I could have done,” I said.
“I want to go home. This doesn’t end.”
The elevator dropped underneath us and I nodded. “Nope. It doesn’t. But always check your emergency air bottles and make sure they’re full before going on watch. Always, kid.”
The kid stayed with me after that. I tried a couple of times to get rid of him, but nothing worked—not reporting him
to his unit or begging his sergeant, who informed me that he had a bunch of babies and old men to look after and he’d be damned glad for me to take a few more, show them a thing or two. He had a crazy look and started calling them over, so I booked it as fast as I could, headed back to the command tunnel before the guy succeeded in saddling me with more teenagers. It was madness. At the same time, though, it made sense, because it was Kaz, after all, and the same thoughts that had once plagued me had infected these kids with some vague notion of glory and sacrifice—that maybe you could learn something through hardship and become a better person for it. Right. When I got back to the tunnel, the kid was asleep, using my carbine for a pillow, and I had to chuckle, because he looked like such a baby. The tunnel wall, wet with runoff, felt slick and cold against my head, and I slid down to start reading the emails never gotten to, wishing a moment later that I hadn’t bothered.