Land mines. Words were land mines. I wasn’t part of the family, wasn’t even close to being one of them, and my exposure to the war had so far been limited to jerking off Marines when they stepped off the transport pad in Shymkent, hoping to get a money shot interview, the real deal.
Hey, Lieutenant, what’s it like? Got anyone back home you wanna say hi to?
Their looks said it all. Total confusion, like,
Where am I?
We came from two different worlds, and in Shymkent they stepped into mine, where plasma artillery and autonomous ground attack drones were things to be talked about openly—irreverently and
without fear so you could prove to the hot AP betty, just arrived in Kaz, that you knew more than she did, and if she let you in those cotton panties, you’d share
everything.
You would, too. But now I was in
their
world, land of the learn-or-get-out-of-the-way-or-die tribe, and didn’t know the language.
A Marine corporal explained it to me, or I never would have figured it out.
“Hey, reporter-guy.” He fell in beside me as we walked. “Don’t ever mention that shit again.”
“What’d I say?”
“Mining gear. They don’t bring that crap in unless we’re making another push, to try and retake the mines. If we recapture them, the engineers come in and dig as much ore as they can before the Russians hit us to grab it back. Back and forth, it’s how the world churns.”
There were mines of all kinds in Kaz, trace-metal mines
and
land mines. The trace mines were the worst, because they never blew up; they just spun in place like a buzz saw, chewing, and too tempting to let go. Metal. We’d get it from space someday, but bringing it in was still so expensive that whenever someone stumbled across an earth source, usually deep underground, everyone scrambled. Metal was worth fighting over, bartered for with blood and fléchettes. Kaz proved it. Metals, especially rhenium and all the traces, were all the rage, which was the whole reason for our being there in the first place.
I saw an old movie once, in one of those art houses. It was animated, a cartoon, but I can’t remember what it was called. There was a song in it that I’ll never forget and one line said it all. “Put your trust in Heavy Metal.” Whoever
wrote that song must have
seen
Kaz, must have looked far into the beyond.
I needed to get high. The line assignment had come from an old friend, someone corporate who’d taken pity and thought he’d give me one last chance to get out the
old
Oscar, not the one who used to show promise but couldn’t even write a sentence now unless he’d just mainlined a cool bing. Somehow, I knew I’d screw this one up too, but I didn’t want to
die
doing it.
My first barrage lasted three days. I was so scared that I forgot about my job, never even turning on my voice recorder, the word “Pulitzer” a mirage. Three days of sitting around and trying to watch them, to learn something that might keep me from getting wiped—or at least explain why it was I had wanted this assignment in the first place—and always wondering what would drive me crazy first: the rocks pelting my helmet, not having any drugs, or claustrophobia. Living in a can. The suits had speakers and audio pickups so you could talk without using radio, but I’d never realized before how important it was to
see
someone else. Read his face. You couldn’t even nod; it got lost in a suit, same as a shrug. Meaningless.
Ox, the corporal who had educated me about mining gear, was a huge guy from Georgia. Tank big.
“I friggin’ hate curried chicken,” he said. Ox pulled the feeding tube from a tiny membrane in his helmet and threw a pouch to the ground. “Anyone wanna trade?”
I had some ration packs that I’d gotten off a couple of French guys in Shymkent, and threw one to him.
“What the hell is this? I can’t read it.”
“It’s French. That one is wine-poached salmon.”
Ox broke the heat pack at the pouch’s bottom. When it was warm, he stuck the tube through and squeezed. I swore I could almost see his eyes go wide, the
no-friggin’-way
expression on his face.
“Where’d you get
this
?”
“Foreign Legion.”
He squeezed the pouch again and didn’t stop until it was a wad, all wringed out. “Un-fucking-real. The French get to eat this every day?”
I nodded and then remembered he couldn’t see it. “Yeah. And they get booze in their rations. Wine.”
“That’s it,” Ox said. “I’m going AWOL, join up with the Legion.
You,
rube, are welcome in my tunnel.”
And just like that, I was in the fold.
Occasionally the Russians lobbed in deep penetrators, and near the end of the second day, one of them detonated, breaking free a massive slab that crushed two Marines instantly. One of their buddies, a private who sat next to them, got splattered with bits of flesh and bone that popped from their armor, like someone had just popped a huge zit. The man screamed and wouldn’t stop until a corpsman sedated him, but he kept rocking back and forth, repeating, “I can’t find my face.” Finally the captain ordered the corpsman to sedate him further, tie him up, and drag the Marine into the rear-area tunnel, where they could pick him up later.
“Good thing they did that,” said Ox.
I pulled my knees up to my chest. “Why?”
“I was about to wipe him.”
Things returned to normal for a while. Muffled thumps of plasma still shook the ceiling, and suit waste pouches opened automatically to dump human filth on the floor—because someone had been too scared or too lazy to jack into a wall port.
That
was normal for subterrene.
The only flaw in the captain’s plan was that eventually the guy who had been sedated came to and picked up where he had left off. Over the coms net, his voice screamed in our ears that he still couldn’t find his face, every once in a while adding “the shitheads left me.”
Ox picked up his carbine and muttered, “He’s dead,” but fortunately for both Ox and the crazy guy, a corpsman was close to the tunnel exit and sped off to deactivate the man’s communications.
I knew what the crazy guy meant. Ox did too, and that was the problem: nobody wanted to hear it; nobody needed to be reminded that none of us could find our faces. Without being able to touch it, I had begun to wonder if maybe I didn’t have one anymore, like it got left behind in my Shymkent hotel so that some half-Mongolian puke could steal it for himself because I had forgotten to leave a big enough tip on the pillow to make stealing not worth it. I
needed
to find my face, knew that it had to be around there somewhere, if I could just take off my helmet for a second.
By the end of the third day, the barrage lifted, and I sat quietly, watching the Marines and feeling like I was the uninvited guest who didn’t know what fork to use at dinner, too scared to say anything because my stupidity would show. I’d left my rig in the hotel too, hadn’t thought I’d have to go this long without juice, and now I felt the shakes, got that chill, a warning that if I didn’t get lit soon,
it’d be bad. Even so, nobody moved. Everyone soaked in that stillness, and only an occasional click as the armorer went down the line, checking weapons and suits, broke it. Then the captain slapped the four men closest to him. They stood and moved slowly to a ladder before disappearing through a hole in the ceiling.
“Where they going?” I asked.
Ox checked his carbine for about the hundredth time. “Topside watch.”
“Why?”
“ ’Cause Pops is shifty. Sometimes, when neither of us has a barrage on, he’ll try and move in topside.”
I shivered, a mental wind that preceded whacked-out thoughts. No way I could deal with all this shit; I wasn’t ready. It wasn’t what I signed up for; someone else could cover the line, get the first story. My next question proved to me, to everybody, that I was terrified, a rube.
“What about the sentry fields? The bots. Won’t they deal with anything topside?”
Ox laughed. “Pops can make magic in his land, and Kaz
is
his land. Sentry bots don’t always work.”
“Come on, reporter-guy,” Ox said. “You want a story, this’ll give you a story.”
It was Ox’s turn on watch, so he and two of his buddies, Burger and Snyder, moved toward the ladder, motioning for me to follow. I had no saliva. I don’t even remember willing my legs to work, yet there I was, heading to the ladder, and in that instant I knew exactly how the Marines had felt—the ones who had wanted to eat dinner in the basement of my hotel. You didn’t go up; it was all wrong. Anything
could happen up there, and the rest of your unit would be far below, unable to help and just glad that it wasn’t them. My legs seemed to have grown a mind of their own, refusing to work the way they should have, almost detached from the rest of my body as they resisted efforts to move them toward danger. This was tangled.
I
knew it was tangled, Ox knew it, the captain knew it, and even the guy who had lost his face knew it, but everyone except
that
guy managed to pretend it was all cool, all smooth. Normal.
“Come on,”
said Ox.
When I got to the base of the ladder, the captain stopped me.
“Hold a sec.” He grabbed a Maxwell carbine from the closest Marine, snapped the hopper from the kid’s armor, and then rigged me with it. The carbine felt heavy and I slung it over my shoulder.
“Anyone who goes topside is a cranker,” the captain explained.
“Sir, I’m a reporter. I didn’t think I’d even be allowed to carry a Maxwell on the line.”
He had taken off his helmet during the lull in shelling, and smiled. “You’re DOD—a civilian who wanted this crap, right?”
I nodded.
“Well, you got it. Here… He lifted my helmet and placed it over my head, sliding the locking ring into place. “You’re going topside, you button up. Period.”
When I caught up to the others, they had stepped off the ladder into a tiny mining elevator, about a hundred feet up from the main tunnel. Ox laughed and pointed toward my carbine.
“You know how to shoot one of those?”
I could barely talk, realizing for the first time how important spit was. “Yeah. I fired one in Rube-Hack.”
“Going up,” said Snyder, and our elevator jerked.
The car rattled. I wondered how often the thing had been used, recognizing what it was from some of my earliest stories on deep-mining operations in Nevada, where collapses and explosions had made mine rescues something boring, not even newsworthy anymore. It was ironic. The elevator was a modified rescue rig, two cages welded together to fit four men, but it wasn’t doing its job anymore; it wasn’t taking men out of danger but throwing them in. You can hate an inanimate object on the line. Every bump and shake made me want to throw up, rip the yellow wire cage apart and scream, because it wasn’t supposed to move people to their deaths, and I just knew that the thing was laughing at our expense, that the elevator had clearly lost its way, been corrupted. It was an orphan. A street kid that had learned to make the best of it and survive any way it knew how—at our expense.
It took us a little under an hour to make the trip topside and we had to switch into three different shafts to do it. When we got to the top, the other watch was waiting and didn’t say anything as they fought to get on the elevator, to get back inside Mother Earth, while we tried to dismount as slowly as possible. We still had one more ladder to climb, another hundred feet up to the observation post, and when we got there, I had to blink from the sudden light, a bright bluish glow that made me remember everything, including that there was a world aboveground and that it rested under a thing called the sun. There was snow. Fall had made its escape while I had been tunnel-bound, and winter claimed the land with its pale blanket.
I had never seen a battlefield and hadn’t expected it to be so… clean. You sensed the rubble but couldn’t see it under what looked like about two feet of fresh snow, and the land was flat, vacant except for wind. The war had vanished. But at the same time there was a thrill, an undercurrent of danger, because you knew that no matter how peaceful it looked, here, exposed, you had reason to be scared. The position allowed us to see in three-sixty, from a concrete bunker that just barely protruded from the rubble fields and had four narrow windows, their glass three feet thick.
My face pressed against the nearest window, looking north, and I stared, hypnotized. Somewhere out there was Pops, looking back at us, and I just wanted to see him. I knew there was a word for my type, but my brain hadn’t been working since getting on the line. Choked up. It had clogged with ass puckering, with the sound of my own breathing inside the helmet, and with dreams of getting wired again, plugged in. Words started coming to me as I stared out across the rubble field, words that described me to a T. “Voyeur.” “Spectator.” “Pulitzer-fanboy.” “Coward.”
Ox yanked his helmet off and I nearly choked in surprise. “What are you doing?”
He laughed and the others took their helmets off too. Vision hoods came next, and Ox and Snyder carefully disconnected the series of cables that connected coms and goggle units to the suit. Burger kept his hood on. The goggles made him look funny, like a bug with big green bottled eyes, and he grinned at me.
“Rube, you’re about to get initiated into the brotherhood. First reporter on the line, first reporter to get
zipped
!” He took a seat near the north window and stared out.