Burning Rock
“It’s been good to us, this place.”
Even before the war began, Cyrus and I had always had each other’s back. That goes to before we were spacehands even, back to when we were boys coming up. He always had good ideas, like going through the SWAKC Academy together, getting jobs on big projects like the Han Ring in the Ariels, or starting off as private contractors rather than working for NIRO-C. So when Cyrus got his number called after the Protectorate started conscripting spacehands following the attack on Veronia, it was natural enough that I would put my name in with his. I just asked them one question: Could Cyrus and I stay together if I volunteered? And they told me as long as we both qualified on all the required systems through each step of the process, there was no reason we couldn’t go through together. Two certified grunts were better than one. So I signed then and there as well.
The Protectorate liked taking pre-certified space walkers because we were already comfortable on a lot of the systems they outfitted their fighters with—exos, suits, remote units, complex visual displays—things Cyrus and I were already comfortable operating on job sites, both in space or on-world colony sites. But they had some toys Cyrus and I had never even heard of, and their displays were something special. You could eye-in on any point of curiosity in your field of vision, and the display could tell by the way you looked at something the exact way you wanted to see it—zoom in, circle around, blow up, zoom out, infrared, color, no color, change perspective, multi-view. The damn eyewear was magic. For some people it was too much, too confusing, too many options. For Cyrus and I, it was like every complaint we’d ever had on a job site was rolled into one big ball and the Trasp engineers had gone to work making sure every last problem was eliminated. And the exo suits? Don’t even get me started on the exos.
After Veronia, nobody knew what was going to happen except that something was. Could have been a peace treaty for all we knew. Then they’d have sent Cyrus and me around to combat training for five years on all those outer moons near the corridor, blowing up rocks, dropping out over landing sites, testing tech, competing with other units, and probably taking watches along the corridor, bored out of our guts. I said that out loud one time during training, and our TOC really let me have it. He seemed sure war was coming. Those Etteran bastards didn’t blindside us at Veronia for no reason if they weren’t fixing for a fight. That was the feeling of most. Cyrus didn’t know either way. But I was holding out hope at least until Humbol-Karnak. We had to specify because there was a Humbol on Carhall, one in the Ariels, and even a cylinder of the same name in the Masons group as well. Karnak was a system Cyrus and I had never heard of, on account of it being all the way on the far side of the corridor, out on the boundary, damn near into Etteran space as well. The system was strategic, according to the real war planners. The humans and the AIs wargaming a full conflict with the Etteran Guild all had Karnak as a key pivot point between the two powers. And as Karnak was really the only rock in the system of any size, possessing it as a staging area was bound to be key if we got ourselves established there first. But of course nobody knew what the Etterans were going to do, so we all had questions. That was until we got orders, then, as military men, all Cyrus and I had was orders to be carried out.
I piloted the drop shuttle in to Humbol-Karnak where we hid the ship in the canyons on the other side of the flats on the southern side of the city. The Humbol Province had already been evacuated according to the provincial edicts. They were expecting some serious trouble there. It was no small matter to evacuate an entire city like that. Most got out via the space tower at the capitol, I’m sure, which meant, there wasn’t much room for cargo and personal belongings on the hypermag going up there. Command told everyone that any entry into private residences would be scrutinized closely, with any sort of loot-taking punished ten-fold harsher than any peacetime thieving. Entry to a private property had to be justified, and the only justifications in their view were to make contact with anyone still left behind, to stop obvious looting in progress, or to suppress a fire if we came across any, which came as a shock to Cyrus and me—the thought of a place catching on fire. But I guess it was a danger here on Karnak, even in the thin atmosphere. They had enough oxygen in the air and the ground itself was filled with carbon, dark dark dirt underfoot out on those flats, and even in the soils they’d been cultivating for generations in the suburbs and the oak groves to the north of the provincial center.
That was part of the reason we landed out in the bare rocks of the canyon. The other was concealment. Never mind that drones and ships had to spot us from far enough out, but as tucked in as I stuck the ship to the canyon wall, and as tight as we got the camo-sheet over her, once Cyrus and I set the sheet on copy, the ship disappeared into the terrain so perfectly I might have marched right past her thinking she was just a part of the canyon wall if I didn’t know she was already there. Cyrus and I both took a moment to marvel at that again, even as we’d seen it in training before. And then we had to iron out some wrinkles once we double-checked it with our eyewear on. It’s one thing to fool our eyes so good, it’s another to fool the instruments of warfare.
With our exit settled and hidden, we set out across the flats for the city. Chunk-chunk-chunk, our footsteps went thumping across that dark terrain. And out with us came trailing our individual striketeams, eight bots apiece, set in patrol mode until we got a sense of the place. Above us, our two tac-swarms hovered and circled, watching the ground beneath them and the sky with equal vigilance. And those displays in our eyepieces—all those streams—cycling and focusing on points of interest, all the while, Cyrus and I progressed in step with our unit of killing machines so uniformly it might have been impossible to tell who was human and who was machine from even a modest distance.
I can’t lie. After all that training, the shouting of instructors, our own shouting when we succeeded, the sweat, the failures we’d overcome to be there—I felt my heart beating with a kind of joy of purpose I’d never known before that moment. We’d become creatures made for a specific objective, let loose to fulfill that objective, and all gakked-up in a badass exo-suit trampling over that black plain at a speed so fast it felt like flying, enough ordnance to destroy half a city on our backs, targeted firepower so precise we could drop a last-breath surprise in a target’s morning tea, it felt awesome. Cyrus and I were two of the galaxy’s most lethal instruments, sent out to defend the Protectorate against our newfound enemy. And we were ready.
That excitement lasted for a few minutes, mostly until we came out of the flats and into the outer residential district, into an entirely deserted city. It was some sight. Almost like a virtual reality scene from a docudrama about a failed colony or something of the like. Except here in Humbol-Karnak it wasn’t as though the people’d had time to close things up and think an evacuation through. We’d look on porches and see teacups and pots of coffee, toys on the front grass. Cyrus found a plush stuffed rabbit some wailing child would be missing, packed cheek-to-cheek on some old colony ship for resettlement back elsewhere. And more hauntingly, apart from the thumping of our exos, and the strikebots almost perfectly in step, the whole place was silent. If we stopped for a moment to listen, we could almost hear the hiss of the drones overhead, damn near quiet as space itself.
We set about our duties: primary, surveying for forgotten refugees; secondary, surveying for deployment of sensing gear and visual surveillance; tertiary, surveying for snares for when the holding teams got there behind us with heavy infantry.
We’d had sites marked out in advance, mapped mathematically and mostly accurate. But these people here on Karnak were like most of us Trasp—resourceful and hard working. So there were changes to the map. Additional floors on buildings that had climbed, entirely new buildings, the occasional line of sight that had to be adjusted and recentered. Cyrus and I worked in parallel, from the south of the city to the north, tagging deployments that met our target specs, shifting those that came up short, never once meeting a single human movement or voice or soul. It was almost like it didn’t feel real. As eerie a place as I’d ever seen. Cyrus said it too.
Then it was time to head up north along the steep, jagged lines on the map that represented the base of the foothills.
Because of the darkness of the flats to the south, we’d thought from the view as we’d landed that the north would be more open space. The name “Oak Grove,” we’d suspected, was like any other colony place—a “Shady Hollow” that was solid with no shade, a “Silver Brook” with no water to sparkle or shine nor silver after the first-generation miners had stripped the land of what’d brought them. But in this case, to our shock, there were oaks in Oak Grove—lots of them. And they weren’t like the type of decorative trees cities like Humbol—or even Carhall City itself for that matter—would line their streets with and string lights around during holiday seasons. These trees were towering and majestic, spreading out over us maybe a hundred meters above, branches of great, heavy hardwood weaving together in a wild green canopy that smelled like nothing I’d ever imagined, fresh and living, a beauty so staggering it could scarcely be believed. It was hard enough to even see it with the naked eye, much less all the different angles and perspectives of all our trailing and circling eyes—the drones above the canopy, the ones under it. Cyrus and I hadn’t anticipated it, because Command hadn’t, but there were far more structures under those trees than we’d expected, and there was a dire need for automated defensive assets. It took a long while to survey as we went, until we were certain there weren’t any passable corridors that weren’t covered, maybe twice as many positions than Cyrus and I had tagged in the city. And just like in the city, the homes and businesses through the Oak Grove were abandoned. Completely, we thought, until we came to a light that was dim but seemed bright beneath the shade of all those mammoth old trees.
That was a peculiar find. Out front of an Earth-style structure that seemed like it was made from wood, there was a large three-tiered patio with chairs and tables set up like people used to come to that house to dine. As Cyrus and I walked around the structure, we realized we’d approached from the back, and then around the side; and finally, out front, we saw a sign that read: DULCIE KOHN’S APERITIVO, with a cocktail glass that had a bright green olive in it, all painted on wood, and there was a light on inside.
Like something out of the imagination, a place like that.
“Somebody must’ve left the light on,” Cyrus declared. “All this wood must be worth a fortune. I can’t imagine.”
“Yeah, these oaks,” I said. “We should check it out, maybe shut the lights?”
Cyrus seemed to consider it for a moment before turning and stepping toward the main entrance.
Our exos were fairly light as exos go, made for swift movement rather than close combat durability, but still we could hear the wood creak under foot as we approached the inner door. Cyrus retracted his right-hand muzzle and drew open an old-fashioned wood and glass door by its round ball-handle, gingerly stepping inside, nearly having to duck to bring his frame within the doorway’s. I could see as soon as I tried myself that it was a tricky maneuver.
Cyrus had stopped directly in front of the opening to the lounge, I guess you would call it, and I couldn’t see why Cyrus had stopped until I stepped beside him. And there, across the room and behind the bar was a gentleman staring back at us with a bewildered look on his face.
“Two?” he said in a kind of joking tone, which was a joke Cyrus and I didn’t get.
“I’m sorry? Two what?” Cyrus replied.
“I seen a lot of strange stuff these past couple weeks,” the man stated. “I didn’t figure I’d see a pair of infantry come through my door in exos. You’re welcome, just ...” He gestured to the room in front of us. “That’s real wood, you know, the floor. Would you boys mind?”
“Oh!” Cyrus replied, gesturing for me to stay back. “Chaech and I ‘ll leave ‘em here. Any chance we could get a charge?”
“Sure,” the man behind the bar said. “Just face them up against the front wall there, and I’ll have Harold run a couple cables out.”
So we did as he said and faced our suits to the wall, powered down, and stepped out, and the world felt different again, probably a lot like a snail coming out of its shell—that’s what they said at ATK school anyway. Cyrus and I didn’t know what a snail felt like, but I guess we was snails then. It felt good walking with my feet on that wood floor for a moment. It was a place like none we’d never been. You could smell the wood. Everything was wood—the chairs, the tables, the walls, the bar itself. It was dim in there, warm lights, the kind of place you wanted to sit and stay for a while.
“Name’s Ben Kohn,” the bartender said. “What can I do for you boys?”
Cyrus took a long look at him as we approached the bar. He was a shorter guy with graying dark hair and a mustache that had some gray in it too, and he was carrying a few extra pounds. He looked like the kind of guy who’d enjoyed his good life just about the right amount.
“See the thing was, we saw the light on,” Cyrus told him. “You’re the first person we’ve seen still around.”
“The last person here,” I added.
“There’s a few others lying low,” Ben Kohn replied, nodding his head. “What’s your names boys?”
“I’m Cyrus and this is Chaech here. We was gonna shut the lights for you. Didn’t expect to see anybody.”
“Sure. Appreciate it. You wanna sit?”
Cyrus nodded and looked around, seeing as we had our pick of the spots.
“Anywhere you like,” Ben said, that same joking tone as earlier.
Cyrus gestured toward the center of the bar, just in front of Ben, and I nodded. Best seat in the house.
“I got a question for you, Ben. A couple questions actually,” I stated.
“Sure,” he said as we sat.
“I saw your painted sign outside and got curious. Who’s Dulcie? And what the hell’s an apparvativo?”
Ben started laughing. “Ah-pera-tivo,” he replied when he’d caught his breath. “It’s a kind of fancy word for appetizer that comes from the old world. Dulcie’s my wife, and this place was her baby. We opened the bar and eight tables the year before Marta was born, been adding on ever since.”
“Never seen so much wood,” Cyrus said. “Me and Chaech was spacehands before signing up, closest we seen was in the Arran Cylinder out in the Ariels, wouldn’t you say, Chaech?”
“What the Arbor?”
“Yeah, they had a bar out there had the wood theme. We’d go in after a shift.”
“That was all fake, though. Printed wood look on the paneling. I didn’t know you could tell the difference till you seen the real thing.”
“That’s a fact,” Cyrus said.
“Can I get you boys a drink?” Ben asked. “Whattaya like?”
“I don’t know,” I replied. “Maybe something good that goes with one of those ... ah-perva-tivos? Is that how you say it, Ben?”
We turned around to see Ben’s Harold drawing out a couple cables to hook up to our exos.
“Close enough, Chaech,” Ben replied, smiling. “Ah-perra-tivo,” he repeated.
“Got it,” I said. “What’s in it?”
“That depends on what you want. It’s more a type of pre-dinner. Of course we have dinner too, but the aperitivo is drinks and small plates. We did it all the time with Dulcie’s family when we got together. She’s a Maderina herself, but they all came down from the Companys on Charris anyhow. Some one of those Companys from Duran revived the tradition from Earth: it’s called tapas. We do two drinks and two plates, and we do it for two taps of the swatch here in Oak Grove.”
“Half a cronor?” Cyrus asked.
“And half price on Tuesdays.”
“That’s a hell of a deal, friend. I’m in,” I said.
“I’m in for two,” Cyrus replied. “I didn’t realize how long we’d been out there till I sat down just now. Running all over Humbol-Karnak.”
Ben slid over a pair of tablets, drinks were listed on top, plates on the bottom. I stared at it for a bit, scrolling in and out.
“I don’t know what any of this stuff is,” I finally said, looking over at Ben, who smiled. “Me and Cyrus don’t usually go in for all this fancy stuff.”
“It looks fancy,” Cyrus agreed.
“Nothing all that fancy here, boys. Just fancy names. I could get Harold started fixing you with a mix of our favorite plates?”
“That sounds great. The favorites,” I said, nodding.
Cyrus agreed.
“Want a cocktail? Wine? We even got an ale one of my friends in the North Grove brews himself out here. It’s pretty good.”
“I didn’t expect that kind of choice today,” Cyrus said. “I could try a cocktail. You Chaech?”
“Sure.”
“I got something for you,” Ben Kohn said, grinning. “House specialty.”
So he started mixing drinks, old style, like the wood and the food. I could look around and see how this place would have been just a couple weeks back, people packed in, chatting, all kinds of laughter and music playing, Ben keeping the food and drinks straight. He was telling us how Dulcie ran the room, seating people, making sure the youngsters they had as staff kept on top of things. Real old-style hospitality. Smiles all around.
Then Ben put a couple of glasses in front of us with a nice red glow to them. “Carhall Sunset,” he declared. “Try it.”
I put it to my lips, and the first touch of the red was bitter and cold, but the rim of the glass was sweet, and there was a mix of orange in that red liquid, separated somehow, and the whole thing went down with a sweet, tart flavor, followed by a hell of a kick.
“That’s damn good,” Cyrus stated. “One hell of a cocktail, Ben. I can see how people’d come for a drink down here all right.”
I agreed.
“These damn trees,” I said. “They must be a hundred meters tall and a hundred years old, the big ones anyway.”
“Over a hundred on both,” Ben said. “Seven generations, when they were first terraforming, somebody brought them in. They had an arborist engineer or something like that. Somehow the shipment came in from Athos, stopping on the way through to the Letters, and they had some order for trees out there that the payment got stopped on. Whoever had the colony budget told them to drop as many oaks. The trees have been here longer than the people. They like the carbon in the ground they say. Do very well here.”
“It’s a hell of a way to live under them.”
“It’s been good to us, this place.”
Ben’s Harold appeared behind the bar with a set of small plates. He put out two big plates for me and Cyrus. Then he got us forks and knives and napkins, took the plates from his Harold, and served the small dishes. The first, which looked like toast he called “crostini” with a bunch of toppings in little cups—a hot cheese, a roasted red pepper garlic sauce, and a plum jam. On the other plate there were six pastries with a spinach and cheese stuffing.
“Manna!” Cyrus exclaimed. “That smells damn good.”
We both charged in and started filling our plates, and damn, it was good. Ben sat back waiting for us to enjoy the food. And it was just like getting out of our suits—we didn’t realize how hungry we’d been till that first bite. We’d barely taken a breath before Harold reappeared with two more plates.
“Keep them coming,” Cyrus said. “Chaech and I are gonna eat.”
“We have entrees too,” Ben offered. “If you’re still hungry after.”
“Yeah, yeah,” I said. “Cyrus and I will eat everything.”
He started talking about what we wanted for dinner so Harold could get it started. He had more small plates coming too. We were eating like the chancellor’s guard, both of us slugging back waters and the cocktails too. Then Ben came by with two big jugs of that ale. Neither of us had ever had the like. Ben told us his friend fermented that ale in oak casks too.
We were just about done with the aperitivo part of things, feeling damn good considering the day we were in the middle of, and Ben started asking about what was coming next—how many soldiers and things like that.
“We don’t know what’s going to happen next, Ben,” Cyrus replied. “All we got is our orders to come through.”
“What are you still doing here, anyway?” I asked him. “They said everyone got told clear to get the hell out.”
Ben shrugged. “Everything I’ve ever had is here—except Dulcie and the girls got out. They’re on their way to Carhall and probably somewhere else from there. We don’t know yet.”
“You should have left with them, Ben,” Cyrus said.
“We just heard ‘war’ and that was enough for most everybody to clear out. But to say this is home sells it all short. Yeah, we got the restaurant, but between me and Dulcie, we got seven properties up and down the Oak Grove. Her parents left a couple to the kids, so did mine when they moved in to Humbol. They got out too, but all our assets are here. And plus, maybe there’ll be war. Maybe it’ll be risky, but I thought I could take a risk to see how it plays out. Maybe there’ll be people stationed here. They need a place to drink, I could serve them too.”
Cyrus started laughing. For me it was more like a smile. It wasn’t like we knew exactly what was coming, but we had the advantage of knowing at least it wasn’t going to be anything like Ben thought, people camping in tents out in the grove, digging trenches and lobbing grenades at the Etterans on the other side of Humbol.
“What’s so funny?” Ben replied, getting agitated at our reaction.
“Who exactly do you think you’re going to be serving drinks to?” I asked him.
“I’m serving you two, aren’t I?”
It was a point, but he didn’t understand what was coming after us, I guess. Mostly bots and drones and chaos and explosions.
“Let me see if we can explain, Ben,” Cyrus finally replied when he got himself composed. “Chaech and I spent all morning scouting for coverage sites, not fortifications really, more surveillance and monitoring. But the remote units won’t just watch a place. It’s automated. If they see heat any warmer than background noise or movement beyond the occasional breeze, they’ll obliterate anything suspect—whatever they identify shouldn’t be here. And you shouldn’t be here, Ben.”
“You set these sites ... what did you call them?”
“Now it’s our turn,” I said, grinning. “Ours aren’t aperitivos or crostinis but we grunts got our fancy words too.”
“I’m sure you do,” Ben agreed.
“Coverage sites,” Cyrus replied. “CSRAs in military talk, but we call them snares for short.”
“Where did you set them all?”
“First, we didn’t set ‘em yet. Chaech and I are just organizing placement. Second, we couldn’t tell you where they are if we did. That’s military business. But that’s besides the point. The trap group is coming to set all those snares behind us, and once they do, nobody’s going to be able to move around here without getting blasted, not you, not anybody. You can’t live here anymore, Ben.”
“That, and I don’t think you realize most of the fighting is mech fighting. It’s us two, but we’ve got teams of strikebots and drones out following us around.”
“Right now?”
“Sure,” Cyrus replied. “What do you think is covering us over dinner?”
“I didn’t think about it,” Ben answered. “They can do that? You don’t even have to monitor.”
“They got all different settings,” I replied. “Cover, scout, harry, hunt-low, hunt-middle, multiple target, single target. I got mine on monitor-patrol, and Cyrus—”
He shot me a bad look like I was talking too much. Ben was just a stranger, after all.
“... well he’s got his on as well,” I finished.
Ben had a look on his face that was about as dejected as I’d ever seen a man.
“Do you think the restaurant ...?” He stopped asking mid-sentence, but we both knew the question.
“It’s possible,” Cyrus replied. “Anything’s possible. Maybe the Etterans don’t come this way at all. Could be you ship off for six months or a year and they come to some agreement with the government and maybe you’re back here same time next year serving Etteran tourists. I’m sure they’d like to come stay in the grove.”
Ben didn’t seem to buy that outcome.
“Any case,” I said. “Whatever’s going to happen will happen whether you’re here or not, Ben. Nothing you can do. Best to go wherever you can, then come back when the war’s over, see what’s left. Maybe you can leave your Harold to watch the restaurant while everyone’s gone. Just tell him to keep inside and put the lights out.”
“And you’d better tell all your friends to get out as well,” Cyrus added. “We didn’t mark anyone on our pass through, and we went all the way up to the edge of the range.”
“I see,” he said. “I don’t know. I’m glad I stayed to see you guys, though. I’d have regretted it if I left and didn’t know. And you’re good boys. Good Trasp fighters. Somebody should serve you a good dinner for the job you’re doing. Speaking of which ...”
Ben got up and went to check on his Harold. He came back with two more ales, which was a welcome sight again.
“Dinner will be right out,” he declared.
Cyrus took one big gulp to get ahead of me. Then I had to catch back up. This was a day all right. Neither of us had figured we’d get anything but grunt work and grief at Humbol-Karnak. I couldn’t wait to tell the boys on the Shin-Ma we’d got tapas. DULCIE KOHN’S APERITIVO. Helluva spot.
I got a great big plate of eggplant charveo with roasted potatoes. Cyrus had a tremendous bowl of Charran rice with all kinds of stuff in it. We had to ask Ben for another plate and another bowl so we could split up our dinners like we did with the tapas. I couldn’t decide which was better, but Cyrus liked the eggplant even though it was close.
When we were finished Ben asked us if we wanted dessert, but I was so stuffed I couldn’t force down another bite, or at least I thought so.
But he came back with a few squares of chocolate apiece.
We were just about ready to square up to leave, getting on our feet, stretching our legs out, and we could hear the pings coming out of our earpieces from all the way across the room.
We both got there on a hop and had our ears in, figuring there was something in Cyrus’s outer perimeter, as I had my drones cut in close while his were watching the whole grove from above. Instead it was a general alert—planet wide. They were engaging the Etterans in orbit, five ships on our side, three had jumped in on theirs so far. It was an alarm to get back to the shuttle asap for exfil. I couldn’t believe my ears as much as Cyrus. It was hard to believe it was even happening, but then Cyrus’s drones started chirping with territorial alerts—upper-atmosphere displacement they’d tagged as most likely automated air units. And we were about to find out what kind of drones the Etterans had as well. Karnak was now hot.
“Etterans are here,” Cyrus told Ben Kohn.
His eyes got wide like he couldn’t believe it.
“Now?”
“Overhead,” I told him. “They can’t get on the ground for a bit, but Cyrus and I are screwing out of here, Ben.”
“Well ... Holy hell, what am I supposed to do?”
Cyrus and I unplugged the charge and started to get geared up again. He already had our overhead calculating routes, times, cover drops, and defense postures. I was sure glad to have all that gear to cover our asses. And there was Ben behind that bar, no armor, no ammo, no sensing, and no exo. Nothing but his arms, his legs, and his housebot to watch his ass.
I pointed to the pegs and bars on the back of Cyrus’s exo. It wasn’t ideal, but that’s what they were there for—in case your gear got hit, so you could grab onto your partner’s frame and ride it outta there if you could hold on.
Cyrus kinda grimaced back at me, and I could tell he was thinking what I was thinking—that it might be tough for somebody like Ben to hang on all that way back to our shuttle. We could tell him to hide, but he wasn’t going to last long if he stayed behind. Who knew if anyone else was coming back that way now.
“We can get you out on the shuttle if you can hang on till we get to the landing site,” Cyrus said. “But you better not come unless you’re sure you can hang on.”
He called Ben over to have a look at the pegs and the footholds.
“I can try,” Ben said. “Go a few steps outside and see first. If I can’t then I can hop off and hunker down.”
“Sounds good,” Cyrus said.
“It looks like I can do it if it’s not too bumpy a ride.”
“Good,” I told him.
“What about Harold? Can he run with us?”
I shrugged.
“The weight,” Cyrus answered. “Sorry, but humans only. Any weight we take makes the shuttle less agile on the way out, and we may need to dodge around.”
“Let me grab a few things, boys,” Ben said, turning back toward the kitchen.
“We go presently, and we go with your life only,” Cyrus declared. “Nothing else. Stay or go now.”
Ben shook his head. It was easy enough to read on his face that he couldn’t believe it was happening for real.
Once Cyrus got locked in, he stepped out sideways toward the front door, instructing Ben to come out behind us and hop on once we got outside. I fell in behind Cyrus. We stepped out to the front of the restaurant, analyzing the field on our viewscreens. They weren’t telling us what was coming, probably because they didn’t know yet. Cyrus got the idea to bring his drones down under the oaks’ canopy with mine so that all our gear had some cover from the trees. That way we could rush out of Oak Grove fast, then use the buildings in Humbol for cover before making a break across the plain. That was the best we were going to do. I was hoping the Etterans didn’t have a plan for the city.
When we got out to the main path, I had Ben climb up on the back of my exo-frame. Right away, once he got his feet set and had a good grip on my shoulder plate, he was on there good. He was shocked how decent it felt up there, even easier than standing on a ladder, but I hadn’t started moving yet. I began on a walk and then a slow trot.
“Okay back there, Ben?” I asked him.
“Yeah. Good.”
“I’m going to kick it up,” I told him. “Ready?”
When he nodded, I started into a run. Cyrus was behind me to the side in case Ben fell off, but he was feeling good, even giving us a hoot like it was fun. Cyrus signaled for me to stop.
“We gotta get one thing straight,” Cyrus told him. “You hang tight and keep it buttoned up. Our drones have good ears, Ben, and there’s no reason to think the Etterans’ drones don’t work the same way too. Don’t speak. Don’t make any noise. Don’t do nothing unless we tell you to. If we tell you to do anything, don’t ask questions, just do it right away. Do all that and we’ll get you to the shuttle. Got it?”
“Yes, sir,” Ben answered. “One thing before we go, though.”
“Go ahead,” Cyrus replied.
“How do you two communicate if you can’t talk?”
“The neuroband in our headgear. I think something and it comes out in Chaech’s earset. Same back the other way. We’re a good team.”
“I believe it. I’m ready if you are,” Ben Kohn said. “Don’t worry about me. I’ll hang on.”
Cyrus nodded and turned us forward.
“We’re going fast through the Oak Grove,” Cyrus stated. “Get a good last look on the way out.”
Cyrus got ahead first, moving pretty good. I felt sluggish with Ben on board, but the exo was designed to carry a load bigger than Ben Kohn. We just had to watch the charge. The cable at his house had barely added two bars, which figured. It wasn’t like he had a military battery or fusion generator in that old wood house. If it got low, we could always switch him over onto Cyrus’s frame.
Those were the things I was thinking about as we clicked our way out of there. Cyrus was tracking what we could from his position on point, but the drawback to the stealth of keeping all our drones under the canopy is that we were somewhat blind as we moved through the grove. But what took us hours on the way up, checking sightlines and snare positions, now just took us a few minutes reversing course with no order of business but getting the hell out of Humbol, back to the Shin-Ma, and out of Karnak altogether.
Codes were coming in fast across my display. I didn’t know them all. Even the ones I did know came so fast I had to think about it to follow anything. Luckily those fleet codes were translated to plain speech. I switched it to audio in my left ear so I could see clearly in the shade of the oaks. It was hard to know how the fight was going up there. Nobody’d been in a spaceship battle like that in real life in who knows how long, not between military ships anyway. From the sim time I’d put in on fleet operations and VR astro-tactical, it seemed like things weren’t going good at all on the Shin-Ma or the Oberon. Poor Ben didn’t have any idea back behind me. I imagine he was just watching his home go by one last time.
Before long, we were at the southern line of the Oak Grove. Cyrus put out a few drones at about hip level to canvass the streets of Humbol, clearing a path before us. We discussed it between us, because eventually, we were going to have to put up air cover to get a sense of what else was in the sky. That would risk exposure, but that was a hell of a lot less of a risk than running out there without a thorough look first.
When the ground level intel came back as clear, Cyrus gave the signal to execute on one of the urban movement patterns using our strikebots as decoys. They came out of the trees first, moving from the cover of the shade to the three-quarter cover of Humbol’s buildings. Then about halfway through, as the strikers were entering the city, we went in as well, Cyrus following one street, Ben and I heading down a parallel street as well. I was following the tactical retreat Cyrus had set, a glowing dotted line on my display. That was when my earpiece started ringing.
Drones were coming in. Enemy drones.
“Highcaps,” Cyrus’s voice echoed in my earpiece. “Who knows what those bastards can drop out of one of those.”
It was a bigger unit than anything we had on hand—atmospheric entry that dropped a payload, reconnaissance drones we hoped. Even fighting buzzards like the mid-sized ones we were running was preferable to a payload of bombs. At least then our units could engage them while we made a break for it. Cyrus agreed, but we had to stick our neck out first, show a few drones for them to chase. We picked a number based on our tactical training. Three—enough to make it look like a group, not so many we were showing our ass, though. That way we’d have a sense of how things might go when they dropped superior numbers on our three flying rabbits.
And that was how it went, just like in UT-school. We watched as their highcaps deployed a spread of low altitude buzzards, just like we’d guessed. Cyrus told me to keep moving anyway. He figured they wouldn’t figure we could do two things at once. And as we moved, so did our strikers, mirroring and drawing attention to them instead of us. That was the first time I learned war was like that—us trying to guess what they were thinking, and us thinking about what to do based on what we thought they were thinking, or more properly put: what their drones’ algorithms might be based on what ours were. Cyrus was better than me at that stuff. I just figured I’d go when he said go, put up units when he said, and do my best to keep up with the extra weight on my frame. I couldn’t see him, but I could feel Ben back there. He was doing perfect. Just like Cyrus had said. Not a peep out of him.
Cyrus started flashing a route and plan to my display, laying out our exit strategy. With those Etteran buzzards overhead it was going to be tricky. Luckily, the plains weren’t strictly flat. There were rises and low areas, and by Cyrus’s thinking, if we got our drones to engage their drones at spots of our choosing, drawing them down and away from our egress, we could sneak out without being noticed.
I guess Cyrus wanted my approval before we moved, so I told him it looked good to me. We were each tucked behind the southernmost structures on the edge of the city. Humbol was like a lot of cities out of the main worlds of the Protectorate—clear city lines, tall buildings, and then suburbs. I gave a wave to Ben to warn him we were moving. And when Cyrus took off in a dead sprint, I ran us up in a steady acceleration so Ben wouldn’t get kicked off.
Cyrus had the strategy just right. He’d pulled those buzzards out and away from the depression in the plain where we were heading to. And before we reached the open plain, Cyrus’s strikebots set out on lines that pulled the Etteran drones away farther—east and west—followed by my strikers behind his. Then our drones, one by one, drew them down toward the ground, disguised as support for the strikers, lowering the enemy sightlines toward the ground. It worked as perfect as I could’ve imagined. My display had all the vectors on it, shadows showing the lines of sight to the Etteran buzzards above, and we could see the pathway out, where to move, when to go, how fast to run.
Above us in the sky, there was a fight. I had a funny thought in my head in that moment, that I couldn’t wait to see the replay of the drone battle going on in the sky. I was almost disappointed we had to get out, because I’d never seen something that interesting and amazing maybe ever. But I couldn’t slow down to think about it because Cyrus and I were moving out.
Everything was going all right for a while. But the lines on the display kept getting tighter and tighter, windows narrowing. I could see the canyons ahead, though, gaps in the flats, and Cyrus was far enough ahead of me that I started to wonder if I was going to make it. He was calculating our exit based on his position, but if those windows closed before I got to the canyon behind him, I would pull drones down on top of us both. I had to move.
Cyrus, though, was already down into the front edge of the canyon. He was clear. He stopped and was looking back my way—using his own eyes, his visor’s optics, and his remaining drones above.
“Stop, Chaech!” I heard Cyrus tell me. “Get low.”
I didn’t think about it. I was too busy running and watching my perimeter to process what was coming, but it was a good thing Cyrus was. The window slammed shut, and I was stranded in a shadow in that depression about fifty meters from the rim of the canyon where Cyrus was. I crouched, knees and then arms. I started a crawl where I could see a small window to go forward slowly, but I didn’t want to go too far in case the sightlines shifted. Plus, Ben Kohn was still up there on my back, which made us stick out a little more, even though I was low.
Cyrus was trying to direct me to move my units to open a window. I asked him if he could direct them. I didn’t see those lines the way he did, even with the guidance systems operating them on auto.
“Hang on, Chaech,” he told me.
I was watching the shadows on my display as they shifted and moved around me. We hunched down in that depression. I could hear my heart pounding in my chest. Then I got the request code for the transfer of my remaining units to Cyrus, and I was happy to give it, happy to have him there watching my back.
Suddenly, I felt like I had to piss. All that ale and water and cocktails. The urge was fierce. There was no time for that, though. I had to be ready to run the second Cyrus said go.
The drones were so close I could hear them hissing. They were buzzing at each other, banging bodies till they smacked so hard they fell out of the sky. Then I could see the window about to open on my display. Cyrus was playing those sightlines good.
“Get ready,” Cyrus said. “You’re gonna have to move fast when I say it. Ready ... Hold. Hold. And ... Go!”
I could see it. It was a tight window. I only thought of one thing. Sprint. Sprint. Sprint.
I should have thought to breathe, because by the time I dove in beside Cyrus, I could feel my chest tightening up like I had a belt around it. My eyes were starry, and I could see Cyrus looking back from where I’d come while I was catching my breath. I figured he was fixated there because he was busy on the display directing our retreat. I was still just huffing—even with the exo doing the work, you had to run with it to direct the gear. Plus, that was the moment, escape or death. Even after a few good, hard breaths my heart was still thumping from that sprint.
It was only after my vision cleared that I could see what Cyrus was really looking at. Ben Kohn. He was back at the edge of the flat, maybe ten meters from where we’d been hunched down, writhing in the dirt. I couldn’t tell, but it looked like he’d been hurt. He was howling. And I could see on the display that those Etteran buzzards were in a fight with our drones Cyrus was flying overhead. They’d seen Ben and flown over to investigate.
“Get down,” Cyrus said. “Watch your lines, Chaech!”
For a moment, I was confused, all the blood rushing around, but I thought I heard him talk, and I almost forgot to think instead of speaking. Use the neuroband, I had to remind myself.
“I gotta go get him,” I told Cyrus, ducking down like he told me. “We can’t leave him out there.”
“He’s dead out there, Chaech,” Cyrus answered. “We gotta go.”
I could see Cyrus moving our two remaining strikers through the plain, shooting bolts up at the Etteran drones. One of them had a microwave cannon on its back, but it had to get close. Cyrus was trying to pull them away from Ben, I thought. But the more I saw the way he was moving them, I realized he was only trying to keep them from flying over our egress in the canyon.
“When I say move, we gotta move,” Cyrus said.
“We can’t leave him out there like that,” I replied, looking out at Ben.
I could see then, he’d been hit by something. He had blood all over his left side, from the shoulder down. He was in a bad way, shouting. Cyrus didn’t like it. I could tell why. Ben Kohn was looking over toward us—eyeing the lip of the canyon like it was salvation. If there was a set of human eyes monitoring those algos above, they’d flag it and set them all on us. Cyrus was thinking about ending it himself. I could see.
“Don’t do it. We can save him.”
I thought about engaging those drones—the cost of it. Our units were outnumbered already. One sight of us would bring all those buzzards swarming.
“Is he your family, Chaech?” Cyrus asked. “Ben Kohn?”
“That’s not the point.”
“That is the point. Risk your head for your mothers and brothers in war; let the devil catch the rest. That’s what they say. This is why they say it. Those LLRs catch one sight of us and we’re meat.”
“Cyrus,” I said, “if we leave him out there bleeding like that, I don’t know how I’ll be able to live with myself.”
“Stick your head out there ten seconds, Chaech, and that won’t be a problem no longer. Some asshole serves you one crostino and you’re ready to go get your head blasted in for him? And then what am I supposed to do? Out here all alone? We’re supposed to look out for each other, have each other’s backs.”
“I guess that’s so.”
“Those asshole Etteran drones are programmed to do that, I bet, hover, leave him lying and suffering to draw us out. Let’s leave our nuts in the dirt till our Tens get low enough to engage them, Chaech. Then we split.”
Cyrus was looking at the display. We had our own highcaps flying in at speed. Then those Etteran buzzards would be too engaged to care about one casualty on the ground.
“We can get him then,” I told Cyrus.
“We should go now, while we still got the chance.”
“Aw hell,” I replied. “All that drink. I gotta piss so bad.”
“Me too,” Cyrus replied, which surprised me. I thought he was gonna lash me for not being strong in the fight.
We were lying there face-down in that black dirt anyway, hidden. I drew my arm out, wormed it down the front of my exo enough to get my thumb down to my waist and pull down my base layer. Cyrus must have thought it was a good idea. Before another moment passed I could hear it, two streams in the dirt. Our breath, and farther back, off in Humbol, there was the occasional explosion that shook the ground. And something behind it all, like an echo. A voice crying out.
That was Ben Kohn.
The highcaps zipped right past us. They didn’t drop anything. There was only one choice to heroism and death and one choice down the canyon toward exfiltration and survival. I told myself what I needed to hear, that I had a duty to Cyrus to not get myself killed stupid on account of the same dumb sense of what war was, same faulty sense that got Ben Kohn killed. He wasn’t dead yet, but as soon as I knew what we were doing, I thought of him that way.
I pulled up my base layer over my waist again so my stones wouldn’t flap in the wind on the run down the canyon, and as soon as Cyrus had done the same and got set to go, he called it.
“Ready, Chaech?”
“Yeah,” I told him. “Let’s go.”
He kept our last two drones hovering over the plain, trying to draw those buzzards close to the microwave cannon. And they had a pitched fight I’d have loved to monitor, but we were too busy running. And it was a few minutes at a strong clip down that canyon before we made the shuttle site again. And hell, we’d done such a good job of concealing it, I’d have run right past if it wasn’t on our displays, marked in a big flashing red dot. We ducked under the camo-sheet. Then we were inside.
I started breathing deep. We got our suits off and hung and clipped in. Then I collapsed on the tech bench across from Cyrus, who’d done the same. It was the first moment since we’d left Ben Kohn’s to relax and breathe. We didn’t say anything about him, just looked across at each other like we’d done good—did our best, survived our first mission. So it was war after all, at least for now.
That thought brought me upright, because even hidden, we were there in a hot zone, and we had to fly out of there with Etteran drones and highcaps and even a firefight going on between the ships in space above us. We’d been so focused on getting to the shuttle, Cyrus and I hadn’t even given a second thought to all that.
Cyrus got up first, flipping on the display to the front screen. I had to fly us out of there. I was a steady pilot, especially with Cyrus watching all the hazards and pathways and movements of the ships. We sat for a few minutes waiting, getting a sense for the right moment. We were going to make a hotspot when our engine fired, but down in the canyon we hoped it would stay hidden from the buzzards for long enough for us to get up to speed without getting targeted by something high-velocity.
As I was prepping for flight and Cyrus was choosing our best upward vector, we had a chance to look for the first time, really. We could see. The Shin-ma wasn’t doing so good in the fight. It looked like she was hobbled on our display, and all the chatter was that she was breaching.
“Can’t stay here noways,” Cyrus declared.
He seemed to know that, but going up was a risk. I started wondering whether it was a bigger risk than sticking in the canyon, but our window was opening. Cyrus didn’t hesitate to call it, so I didn’t either.
Blastoff!
We burned a minute of holy hellfire under our asses, like they say in ACES, only shifting our trajectory twice. Then the sky cleared and opened to black. We didn’t want to stay lit up for long in that field. A drop shuttle wasn’t much of a fighting ship. Best thing we could do was stay quiet and hidden and out of the fray till the fight was decided, which was why I noticed Cyrus hadn’t set us on a course for the Shin-ma. We could see her with our own eyes now from there. Gasses were venting everywhere, e-pods popping out in little puffs, Etteran drones and starfighters circling and picking them off. It was hard to even see anyone firing back from our side. A tough sight.
He’d set us to make a slow orbit in the planet’s shadow, where we could shut everything down but the display. It seemed a miracle, but I got us there. And when I shut it, engines down, butts toward Karnak, our eyes out scanning the darkness, there was this eerie moment of total silence. You could see the field out the front screen—nine ships now onloading on each other, a host of smaller crafts of war buzzing around, far too many to count, like an electric cloud of tiny sparks of angry energy and the occasional violent pop of light. Out the sides, Karnak curved away from us, a dark black mass on Cyrus’s side, but on mine, you could see the demarcation of her sun where it met the limits of its reach over the planet’s open landscapes.
We sat without saying anything for what had to be minutes. I thought for sure somebody would come, another couple ships, something. Somebody had to tip the balance.
Then, before I’d even seen it, I found myself recoiling, my eyes shut, my hand shielding my face. There was a blinding light from the darkness in Cyrus’s window. A glow beneath the clouds and a fire spreading out in a dark orange circle.
“Holy hell,” Cyrus exclaimed.
I wasn’t even sure if he knew he’d thought it or said it, now that we had our neurobands off.
Still, it was silent again.
Then there was another flash and another, lighting up the black side of that black planet in dull orange. We watched those orange rings creep outward across the planet’s surface. After maybe twenty minutes of watching those nukes popping off like that—straining to see with my naked eye—I spotted the missiles coming in as tiny specks of light against the dark of space, on vectors from the Etteran side of the firefight, down into Karnak’s atmosphere, and then, about right where I figured the city of Humbol to be, a sudden blinding flash of light.
“Oh,” I said, just like Cyrus had. It just came out.
“All those trees,” he said. “That city.”
“The people,” I added. “What more were left. Ben Kohn’s friends.”
I think the two of us just sighed.
The fight raged for nearly another half hour before the Etteran ships jumped off. About an hour after that, we started seeing ping traffic. There were still Etteran drones out in the field trying to pick off survivors, so Command set the order to keep quiet and keep still until our side could clear the field and start picking people up. They estimated a couple hours.
It was longer. Cyrus and I kept a watch out those windows, and I couldn’t help but watch the planet below. As the initial bright orange puffed out, I imagined there’d be clouds of dark smoke blocking out everything down there, just as we could see on the horizon at the terminator line where the light went to darkness. I expected it to be darker than space beneath us all night. But as the hours passed, despite the thick clouds of smoke, I could see it almost more, everywhere, beginning to glow a dull gray-orange. And on the sensors, it was reading hot. Hot beneath us. And I couldn’t figure why until Cyrus said it.
“All that carbon in the dirt. The black. All that’s coal,” he said. “Burning, burning.”
Well that was Karnak now beneath us. A sight I thought I’d never see, an entire planet caught on fire. Who ever knew if it would ever go out.
We sat up there for another thirteen hours before we got clearance to fire and come in to the Okunkwe, which had jumped in to extract survivors.
And who would remember but the few of us who were there before the start of the war? There was a living planet here once called Karnak. To me and Cyrus now and all the other fighters, even on the maps before long, they didn’t call it that any more. Now we would just say Burning Rock, and everyone in the Battery would know where that was.