Heavy
“The business of dying was much simpler when you stayed dead the first time.”
Auger didn’t expect he’d wake up. He didn’t have a sense of anything. Not a loss of time or consciousness or absence. He took the hit to his helmet and felt the air puff out into space and was just as quickly out himself. No deep thoughts about life; no particular fear or dread; just the sense that he finally knew: Oh, that’s how it happened. And no dreams. It was a moment later, and he hadn’t expected to wake up.
Half the world was missing, his right side. He couldn’t get his eye to open. Blackness. And there was pain over there at his shoulder, but he couldn’t move his head to see. He tried lifting up his arms. His left arm came up, and when Auger let it down it just stayed right there, floating. That meant space. The light, bright and sterile. That meant a hospital ship. His right arm never came up. They’d tell him soon enough, he figured.
Eye, arm, head. All injuries that should’ve been fatal. But they’d been testing safety measures on the suits, those newer suits. Bands in the appendages that self-closed—a tourniquet high up under his armpit had choked off the blood flow. A nanosheet that came up around the helmet automatically if it was breached. Auger shouldn’t have survived, but there he was, and it was a problem. He didn’t want to be there.
Auger didn’t like to talk to people, not even the pretty nurses taking care of him. His vision was good enough with the one eye to see. They didn’t look at him with fear or admiration or respect. Not now. He didn’t know that emotion rightly, somewhere between sadness and pity, and he didn’t like it. And when he talked to them, their tone of voice wasn’t right. So he didn’t say anything.
They’d been at Richfield. He’d been pitched out to attack a drop post where the Trasp were staging up mines for distribution. Auger found out the hard way that they were layering drop posts with drone cover on their outer ends. On the one hand it made it easier to spoil a lot of Trasp ordinance when finding one drop post turned into a cluster. The drawback was that it made them deadlier to strike. And the cost to learning that equation was Auger and three other operators, none of whom came back from Richfield alive. The only thing useful Auger had to give was that last debriefing. He talked then. Auger got quiet again after that. Then they transferred him to a hospital in the mid-core cylinders for surgery.
He didn’t ever figure he’d have to think about his future. By then he could count on two hands the lone-wolf operators in the field older than him. He could name most of them by reputation. A few he knew from ops. He didn’t imagine Hammer, Stokka, or Tripwire dwelled much on what came after. Nothing was supposed to come after, yet he had people coming by to talk to him about surgeries and rehab—the next thing. And then what? Someone else would talk with him about all that when the time came, they said. Not right now. This was the time to think about getting better.
Why? Auger wondered. What was the point of that. They were never going to put him in the field again, so why bother? Was he supposed to wander around a soldier’s home for thirty years playing Sabaca and sharing stories about the times they were all once useful.
He briefly thought about education. Maybe he could teach the next wolves. But you didn’t need a wolf to teach a wolf. Skills were skills. Once you were in the field, you either had it or you didn’t. And other people taught it better than he ever could. Auger was only ever good at doing it.
When the surgeons came to tell him about his eye, he told them he didn’t want it. That was the beginning of the end for Auger.
“I want to speak to the commodore,” he told the surgeon.
He lost track of the number of people trying to talk him out of it, or into it as it were. Their process required that of them. Auger understood. They didn’t understand. He never should have been there.
The commodore was a busy man. Auger knew that. He didn’t need to be told. But he wouldn’t have demanded it if he didn’t mean it. His brain wasn’t that hard-knocked.
“I want to speak to the commodore,” he repeated so many times he lost count. “It’s the least he can do after all I did.”
He knew the commodore would come if the request got to him. It was just the layers, piercing those layers. It was something he could’ve done in a few minutes before Richfield.
It was an eternity in that bright light. The sterility of it. The white. Auger liked the dark and the dirt. There was no sweat here. That’s what bothered him about that place, everyone trying to get pulses down.
Suddenly, however many days or hours later, he was there.
“You should be dead,” the commodore said, looking down at him straight. No pity. No sadness.
Auger appreciated that.
“I am dead,” he replied. “Something got mixed up. A technicality. Bureaucratic mix-up.”
“Yeah?”
“Some asshole thought it would be a good idea to run pressure bands down the arms of my spacesuit—safety measures in the helmet.”
“I might have read something about that.”
“Ketch should’ve nixed it. Do you have any idea the resources I’ll take up lying in this bed. They’re trying to pop a fake eye in my head, slap a mech-arm on me, and ship me back to Draxxis to eat Saturday dinner at the soldiers’ home, boss. What good will that do anyone?”
“That’s a bigger question than either of us have business answering, Auger. I’m not going to bullshit you or sugarcoat anything. I ain’t a philosopher neither. I was a fighter first.”
“I appreciate that about you.”
“What if I said it was your orders?”
“Bullshit. You give me an order that ends in dead Trasp, even if it’s just one more, I’ll follow that to the letter. You tell me to stop fighting, go home, rot? You might as well insubordinate me now. Whatever punishment you got has to be better than this.”
“There’s shit I got pull over, Auger. This is cosmic shit. Bad luck. Fate. That’s above my pay grade. Cosmic shit is bigger than the Guild even. You gotta figure that shit out.”
“I got it figured out. I’m just looking for something official.”
“What the hell’s that supposed to mean, Major?”
“If I get sent anywhere, Commodore, I ain’t going to be stopped. I’ll get a ship some way and fly across the corridor, pick off as many Trasp as I can till they get me. You know that’s true. I just want to put it past you, to see if there’s something more useful you can figure. A higher count, a more strategic use of a resource. I can still be that. I trust you still deal in assets and resources? That’s not cosmic shit. That’s your department.”
The commodore thought about Auger’s proposal. Letting a man like him back loose on Draxxis wasn’t ideal. No idle words passed those lips. It didn’t bother the Commodore that Auger intended to write his own last orders. What bothered him was the unpredictability of it, a speck of chaos that might make for a few bad Trasp days. It also might be a problem for the Guild. Chaos didn’t always meld well with war plans. Coordination made Ketch more effective. It made commodores happier.
“You want a one-way trip, Auger? Is that what this is? No other way?”
“Any way you phrase it, the score’s the same. I ain’t done fighting till I’m dead. I don’t want no fake eyeball neither. You tell those doctors that.”
“I’ll see what I can do. You may have to standby and wait a bit. The right play. The right piece. Situation may have to present itself. But I’ll be thinking of you when it does.”
“I have your word on it?”
“You have my word, Auger. Now don’t cause me no more trouble and I’ll make sure your last day is a bad day for the Trasp.”
“Fair words,” Auger told him. “I’ll shut up now, boss.”
Things changed around that hospital bed after that. They didn’t have a bit more pity on him anymore. The look wasn’t quite the same as before when he was whole, but it wasn’t pity anymore, and it wasn’t sadness. Auger didn’t have the right words for it, but it was something better.
As they got him stitched up and healing, moving, walking again, eating, the staff there started talking about getting Auger on to the next place.
It was a strange feeling for him. He had to take the commodore’s request to standby and wait as orders. Otherwise, he had none. For the first time in as far as he could remember, Auger had no orders.
Then, suddenly, he did.
The commodore told him he was to report to the cylinder in Sinorise. The gene bank.
Auger wasn’t sure if it was to change his mind, give him a touch of something pretty in his life, feel something good, even if it was for a night, a few nights, let them tell you something of you goes on. The Guild could use a fighter’s genes through another generation. His genes had two eyes and two arms in them, and the girl, she was told who he was—Auger. One of the wolves. Fierce, fearless, faithful. There were a handful of men like him in all the Guild.
Her name was Annreth. Auger had never heard that name before. She was pretty, and she wasn’t comfortable in this place. He could tell that. He didn’t think it was him.
“Does it bother you?” he asked her as she took him into the bedroom in the suite.
“No,” she replied. “No, not at all. It tells me you’re a hero.”
“Getting blown up? Anyone can get blown up.”
“Yes and no. Not getting blown up exactly. But if you did get blown up, it means you didn’t back down. You fought. I know you did. They told me.”
“I’ve never been to a place like this,” he told her, looking around, running his left hand over the sheets. “I grew up on Draxxis, in a home for boys.”
“I grew up in the Omezi group, in a home for girls.”
“I don’t like to talk to people.”
“We don’t have to talk if you don’t want to,” Annreth said. “We can just be together.”
Auger nodded at that, and she got undressed. He was shocked by her physical beauty. It was hard to know why. He’d been with plenty of girls before, on leave, in moments like this, passing through ports on the way to different points in the Guild, lives intersecting for a few moments in a bed. But this Annreth’s skin was radiant. Maybe it was the situation, the nature of the encounter, the light of the room. Maybe she seemed somehow better than she was.
After the first time, Annreth offered Auger a drink to help him relax. They sat in the bed together.
“How old are you?” Auger asked her.
“I’m twenty-six,” she replied.
“What are you going to do? After, I mean?”
“Inor-Set. They have an opening for a house mother. And I’m going to take care of ours. That’s ... if we’re blessed.”
“Blessed. If he’s my son, he’ll be strong, but he’ll be angry.”
“And what if it’s a girl?”
“Then she’ll be mean like me but beautiful like you.”
“God help Etterus,” Annreth laughed.
The warmth of that place seemed alien to him, an intersection from another life that didn’t belong to Auger.
“Can you live there, Inor-Set?” Auger asked her. “I don’t think I ever could.”
He saw the way she nodded back at him, Annreth, a strange kind of contentment in it that was also alien to him. He didn’t know how to go to a place and stay there. What exactly did people do?
“What are you going to do?” she asked Auger.
She saw him holding his drink, sitting, not answering.
“You don’t have to say anything,” Annreth insisted. “You’ve already done your part. You don’t have to do anything.”
“Yes, I do. I just don’t know what it is yet. I don’t like the question. Please don’t ask it again.”
“All right,” Annreth said. “We can just be quiet together.”
That was better. That time, it was fleeting, and it was precious. Better not to foul it up with words and intentions.
What Auger did later was for later. For then, they could just have that moment.
They didn’t send him back to Draxxis. Nor did they send him to a soldier’s home. The commodore knew better. Auger had some resources, and a man like him, even with modest resources, wasn’t going to sit still if he didn’t want to. The Guild set him up in a flat in the Ixxuss cylinder group, halfway between the corridor and Etterus. It was far enough from the line that if he made any efforts to get back toward the corridor they’d know what he intended. It wasn’t like he’d hid it. Auger wasn’t built for anything but the fight. But he also followed orders, and he’d learned patience—patience like few men who’d ever existed held. He’d once waited in a Richfield crater for nearly two weeks on a site Ketch had outlined as a possible Trasp drop point. Command thought he was dead. They’d never had a lunar operator spend two weeks in a suit before, no food, only the water the dermal layer recycled, pissing into his leg-bag, never even thinking to click on comms. Auger shat a rock when he finally got back, having singlehandedly shattered an entire Trasp mine deployment before they even had a chance to open their outer flaps and extend the first rack.
That was war math. Every last square meter of a system mattered. Those two weeks equaled thirty thousand square kilometers that weren’t Trasp and wouldn’t have to be retaken.
The people on Ixxuss didn’t know who Auger was. He looked like another soldier who’d finished his mission, come to live whatever life after. Auger was not that. This was just another two weeks.
Two weeks turned into ten. By then, he was used to things. There was routine—a place he liked to go for mushroom gerrone, a whisky he liked better than the others, a bed that felt like his bed, the loss of his depth perception. Auger knew better than to send the commodore a message. What needed to be said had been said. But he was growing impatient.
Halfway through that eleventh week, a wolf appeared. Who else would he send? These were the people who knew, who could be trusted with these things, who had the frame of mind.
He was wearing civilian clothes, but Auger could pick him out as easily as if the young man’s skin was glowing bright blue. People can pick out their own.
When he returned to his flat following dinner and a few whiskeys, he left the door open behind him. They both understood.
“What’s your name, young wolf?” he asked as the soldier stepped into his flat.
The young man looked around at Auger’s flat. It wasn’t as nice as the suite at Sinorise, but it was better than any place either of them had ever had before. Auger could see the young man noticing.
“I’m Transom. Come to brief you.”
“Which fleet?”
“Whichever fleet they need someone to kill something dead dead,” Transom replied. “Commodore Niama has an offer for you. From the looks of things it’s the kind of job you’re looking for.”
“What kind is that?”
“One way.”
“I’m Auger. Sit.”
The young operator couldn’t have been more than twenty-five. He looked around again. Auger couldn’t tell what he was looking at nor what he was thinking. He had a normal-ish face that seemed an enigma suddenly.
“You’re from Draxxis too,” Auger said. “I can hear it in you.”
“Choices,” Transom replied, sitting across from the older warrior. “I heard some shit about you at ERROLS. Commodore told a few more stories. What the hell happened?”
“Some dumb asshole put pressure bands in the arms and legs of the new-gen suits. Best to hold onto your six-gen till you can’t patch the holes no more.”
“That shit ain’t right,” Transom stated.
“No. It ain’t.”
“Well, you’ve done enough. At least they got the respect for you to hand you something better than this.”
“What do you mean, young wolf?”
“You get to opt out if you want it. Tell me you wouldn’t rather be blowing down these walls than sitting for quiet nights just you and a bowl of noodles. There’s really only one thing we’re good for. You believe that, right?”
“He told you to ask me?” Auger replied. “To see if I’d changed my mind? A trip to Sinorise and a few weeks in the quiet of Ixxuss, then I’m supposed to accept it?”
“You’re not supposed to accept anything, old man,” Transom said. “He told me to ask it before I showed you, and I asked it. You don’t’ want out?”
“Show some goddamn respect.”
The younger operator tilted his head, as though considering. Then he put up a screen from his wristband.
“I’d do it, I think. If I was you.”
“What’s the catch?” Auger asked.
“It’s going to hurt like hell. If things don’t go right, it might take a long damn time to die.”
“What system?” Auger said, looking down at the planet on the floatscreen. “Doesn’t look familiar.”
Transom shook his head. “It shouldn’t. It’s the third gas giant of a system they’ve been calling Ananticore. It’s DX-73 in the registry.”
“Trasp?”
Transom shook his head. “Guild. Right along the corridor. Mined and monitored, but no one goes there. Not a lot of rocks. This gas giant is the only real body orbiting a dim, old red dwarf. Thing is, Ketch doesn’t know what’s going on down there, but surveillance caught a Trasp pod getting dumped out into the atmosphere. And there’s a core down there under all that gas—solid, flat, dark as hell I’d imagine.”
“What the hell do they want me to do about it?”
“You wanted a one-way trip. This is as one-way as it gets.”
“Atmosphere would crush my skull and any hull we drop into it long before I’d get down to that surface. What’s the point? They got machines for that, or no?”
“It’s all electromagnetism, radiation,” Transom declared. “First layer of hell before you get to hell. Season you up for the great hereafter.”
“You’re a funny one,” Auger stated.
“I like to think so,” Transom replied. “Ketch thinks the Trasp are doing something down there. We got a sense of where but not what or why. We can keep a connection—neutrino-based or some such thing. They’ve sent a few modified drones, even specialty probes. Everything crashes out.”
“So they’re going to send me?”
“Unless you want out. Just say the word.”
“How?” Auger asked.
“They’re going to shoot you up with as much nanotech as anybody’s ever heard of. Supposedly, that’ll keep your head from imploding down there. They gotta do it in some kind of pressure chamber gradually, to keep your head from exploding up here. That’s the part sounds like it’s gonna hurt.”
“You’ve got an art for understatement, friend. I’ll say that.”
“And then they got some kind of magnetic exoskeleton they think could work—get you around down there good enough to have a look at things maybe.”
“That’s it? Surveillance?”
“If there’s Trasp alive down there or gear or whatever and you want to take them out, I don’t suppose nothing would stop you if you can figure out a way to do it.”
“What do they think is going on down there?”
“They don’t know. Neither does Ketch. Don’t really have any data. On the bright side, they’ll probably name the planet after you. Ananticore-Auger, something like that.”
“It’s going to hurt like hell. I think you said that right?”
Transom shrugged. “Only for a couple days.”
“I suppose.”
“Do something nobody’s ever done before on the way out,” Transom stated. “Or maybe they’ll blow your head up in the pressure chamber before you ever get down there. Who the hell knows?”
“Right.”
“You still want the file?”
Auger looked at Transom indignantly. “Yeah, I want the file. What do you think?”
“You got any whisky, old man? I may not get another chance to share a drink with a legend.”
“Yeah, I got whisky,” Auger replied. “What was your name again, young wolf?”
“Transom.”
Auger got up from his chair, went over to his cabinets, and fetched a bottle and two glasses.
“What the hell are we going to drink to?” he asked Transom. “And don’t say me because I’m going to die. We’re all gonna die. I ain’t toasting any dumb asshole they’re going to name a planet after.”
Transom grinned. “Then we toast to Draxxis and the death of the Protectorate.”
“There’s two things I can get behind,” Auger agreed.
So they toasted to Draxxis and the death of the Protectorate, and they drank.
Auger had another couple days to kill before reporting. He saw an estate attorney. He used to say he’d have killed Trasp for free. The Guild paid him, though. He had something to give to somebody. It wasn’t exactly straightforward. But they had professionals in the Guild stack office. Auger could leave real currency to hypothetical people. Contingencies could be plotted. He told them about Annreth and the child she wanted to have on Inor-Set. The attorney was a good help. Auger hadn’t ever had to make calls like that before. The business of dying was much simpler when you stayed dead the first time.
Commodore had a medical ship setup. It was converted from an emergency evac transport ship. They had a captain, a spacehand, and a Delius operating the ship. There were also a couple doctors in there. One was a human staff surgeon. The other was some sort of research scientist, the guy who specialized in that nanotech they were going to pump into him till it was coming out his eyeballs. They had a Maícon in the ship’s systems as well. And in the back of that ship was a tank, a big round tank shaped like a submarine. Inside, it was filled with robotic arms.
Those doctors were doing too much talking for Auger’s liking.
“I don’t need an explanation for everything, fellas. Just juice me up and get me down there.”
They kept talking. It wasn’t as much though. Just “do this,” “do that,” “stick out your arm, Auger,” and all that.
That was just the beginning.
The first bag went in okay, and there was pressure. Auger kept thinking back to that Transom, telling him his head would either explode or implode, but neither of them figured it might be both at the same time. Then Auger had to talk. The doctors couldn’t tell all that well from the sensors they’d implanted. Auger had to tell them where the pressure was. If it was in his forehead, they needed to dial back the air pressure. If it felt like his ears wanted to blow out, they had to turn it up.
It took a couple hours after the bag went in for everything to equalize.
“How do you feel, Auger?” the scientist asked.
“Heavy,” Auger told him. “My body’s full.”
That was just the first bag. There were eleven more to go.
The pain and the pressure only got more intense over the following two days. He was tired and in pain, but Auger couldn’t sleep. He knew it. He’d never sleep again. He asked the doctor to give him something, “Pipe it right in,” Auger said.
And the doctor told him he did, but Augur didn’t feel nothing.
His head felt bigger and smaller for nearly three days until Auger’s body was adapted as well as it could be for the stunning pressure they’d pushed into that tank.
It had stopped bothering Auger any, but those scientists out there, as the pressure reading went up and up, they kept looking over at each other, giving each other nervous eyes every time an unpredicted noise ticked into that medic ship’s rear hold. They couldn’t wait to get that hot bomb out the back of the ship. And Auger couldn’t wait to get on with it either.
It was a long process while the Maícon directed the spacehands in preparing to deploy the tank. For the descent, there was a pod that closed over the tank, but Auger had to get himself dressed inside the pod, as once the tank descended, the problem wouldn’t be the pressure if he survived it. The planet’s tremendous gravity would make it all but impossible for Auger to move. Even in zero-G, it would have been difficult enough for Auger to get himself dressed in that stiff, heavy suit inside a tank with two arms, never mind missing one. But the robotic arms that had been shooting him up with needles full of nanotech were repurposed to get Auger into his suit. That was just phase one. Everything else needed to be packed into the drop pod in a specific sequence so that Auger could be pulled out and fitted into the heavy surface vehicle once the pod landed.
By the time the spacehands had prepared the pod, Auger was in agony. There was no amount of pharmacology that could dull the pain. More than that, he lost sense of himself—what he was doing there, what the mission was, if there was a mission. He just felt so incredibly bloated he could hardly move anything. And he was stuffed inside that suit, stuck inside that pod. And every click, bang, pop, or clunk against the side of the tank as the drop-pod was being assembled went right to his inner ears—the sharpest pain.
When the pod was closed, Auger got a few moments of relief. He heard voices keying in to his helmet, but he wasn’t following. He didn’t understand what they wanted from him. They were monitoring his vitals and cognitive activity via the neuroband.
“Yes, I’m alive,” he barked at them. “I’m alive still.”
That was all that mattered. He kept telling them to launch. He couldn’t feel it, and he wouldn’t till the drop-pod hit the atmosphere, but he was already on his way down.
When the pod finally did impact with the upper layers of the planet, the vibrations were all-encompassing. Even through the suit, it seemed his skin was shaking. His hair follicles ached. Auger was in so much pain that his eyes rolled back in his head. His mind retreated somewhere deep behind his consciousness. He saw red, and he felt warm; there was a dull hum, but Auger wasn’t there anymore.
By the time Auger realized he was still alive, the shaking had stopped. He couldn’t move at all. He was so heavy he didn’t know whether he was paralyzed or simply too massive for his muscles to move the tremendous weight of his body. Auger spent minutes trying to figure out whether this was a dream, caught in sleep paralysis. Then he realized that he could move his tongue within his mouth. He could breathe. The pain was bearable. His helmet’s controls were operating, so he pulled up the mission package and began to execute the sequence to open the pod. That was everything. If the gear didn’t work, and work autonomously, there was nothing Auger could do, laid out flat on a slab, the weight of a hundred men maybe. He didn’t know anymore. What did it matter if he couldn’t move?
They’d explained the tech to him. They were “reasonably certain” the setup would work in heavy-G environments. It had been tested in extreme G, but never anything like Ananticore, because in addition to the heavy gravity, there was extreme electrical activity in the planet’s lower atmosphere. In fact, there was so much lightning down there, when Auger had asked them if he’d be able to see anything, they told him the problem might be too much light—blinding flashes every few seconds. It might cause a seizure, they told him. One more fun problem to worry about. That was if he even made it outside.
The gear they’d devised was based on buck-blocks—thousands of rounded magnetic pieces that assembled into formations based on the specific charges precisely orchestrated in the program Auger controlled through his helmet. The initial unload sequence had been pre-programmed in, as it was too complex for him to perform before he’d mastered using the system. All he had to do was issue the command to unpack the pod, and it would begin to assemble Auger’s full setup. That was the real moment. There were flashes of blue-bright light every few seconds in that pit of darkness. The helmet held right there, the prompt awaiting an affirming eye. Auger knew that if he clicked it and nothing happened, that was it. He’d spend the following few days as galaxy’s most sentient anchor at the bottom of the galaxy’s most miserable lightning sea. But Auger didn’t think about it too long. It either worked or it didn’t.
Initialize.
Auger began to hear sounds beneath the thunder claps near and far that seemed to jump through his bones, reverberating. Behind those deep explosions of energy, though, it sounded like machinery was clicking into operation. Something was working. So Auger waited and breathed. They’d shown him workups of how the gear was supposed to work. They’d done plenty of modeling to figure out how the buck-blocks would configure and reconfigure to carry him around. There were hundreds of theoretical options, but the most efficient in the modeling was one that nature had already designed and redesigned a million times over—the quadruped. Whether he would be more donkey or giraffe Auger couldn’t say. He didn’t much care anymore. This was what the commodore had asked of him. The important final mission. This.
He felt like a dish getting pulled out of an oven. Then he got progressively propped up as the blocks rearranged to support the frame containing his suit. Then he could feel the blocks tighten around his hips and ribs while his feet dangled beneath him, the suit coming upright in that entirely alien environment.
Blue fog was all he could see. Blue fog of varying degrees of brightness. Each lightning hit came with a rumble of thunder that shook the bones. Auger’s innards vibrated unsettlingly. Most of the lightning hits were bearable until they got close. The legs of his little vehicle were holding him up, but they hadn’t moved yet when the first close bolt of lightning shattered the entire space surrounding Auger.
It hit with a force that seemed to knock the remaining eye out of his head. His ears rung. His teeth chattered. And the only conceivable way he retained consciousness was the dump of adrenaline that was unlike anything he’d ever experienced in his many years of close combat. He could taste it.
It was probably only the familiarity being close to explosions that allowed his mind to survive such a close blast without losing it. But after a few breaths, Auger looked up at the duller flashes in the distance, and he could see that the blast had done something to the atmosphere. The lightning had cleared the air of the visible fog. He could see into the distance some way. It was difficult to tell how far without any objects to scale the landscape against, that and the rapidly shifting levels of light.
He began to explore the command setup for the vehicle. His donkey legs. He prodded the setup to move him forward into the clearing in the darkness. How he was expected to find anything down here with all the electrical interference was beyond him. But that was not always an alien feeling for him on a mission. Those tech units routinely did things he couldn’t fathom. Few in command understood how a lot of their tech worked. They were the wizards of the war, and they’d setup a tracking program they considered easy enough for a grunt like Auger to use. He was the green dot, and his job was to move those donkey legs in the direction of the red dot. Fortunately, slowly but surely, miraculously, as heavy as everything was, those legs were somehow moving.
It was an awkward slog, lumbering along. The lightning continued to break off at varying distances. Auger didn’t know exactly how, but he figured those engineers had to have accounted for all that lightning, in the case of a direct strike. His body was off the surface himself, but the legs, they had to be conductive—electromagnetic and all that. He briefly imagined a full strike drowning him in a blinding electrical burst and scattering those tiny blocks into the darkness like so many pieces of shattered glass. And then there he’d be, laid out flat in his coffin, helpless to move another centimeter. They had to have accounted for that. Somebody probably even said something to him about it over that time they were pumping all that shit into his bloodstream, equilibrizing his pounding head. If they did say something, he couldn’t remember what. Probably, it was okay. Just keep those donkey legs moving. Green dot, red dot, Auger.
CRACK!
The lightning struck down just behind him. Auger could feel his heart expand. He got a splitting headache. He’d thought he’d had a headache before in his life. He’d also thought he’d felt pain. The things you could learn at the bottom of the deepest gravity well a living being had ever endured.
One donkey step in front of the others.
Auger lost track of time. The pain in his head was excruciating. It never seemed to subside from the pounding of the close strikes, only to increase each time it happened again. And it did happen again. Many times. Auger lost count at four. He couldn’t keep any ideas in his head, much less numbers. He just kept moving toward that red dot, and he didn’t have the faintest idea what he’d do when he got there. It probably depended, he thought, on what he found.
Observe, report, destroy. That was probably the order of things. He remembered now that he had a nuke on his back. One final blast in a life defined by them.
His screen began to flash yellow, then orange, then red as the dot approached. It had to have been hours since he’d left the pod, but Auger had no sense of it with his head pounding like that. There was a tremendous lightning burst overhead that cracked horizontally along the dark, flat surface of the planet, clearing the air for long enough amid the blinding blast of light that Auger could see a shape against the backdrop. Whatever it was, it was ahead.
He approached slowly, step by step, focusing on that point of difference in the vast sea of sameness. Each breath a chore. He started noticing the old aches of war wounds long since healed. He tried to hold onto those aches. In them he could at least feel a sense of pride, which was something other than the paralyzing weight and the pain that came with it.
The lightning cast that shape against the backdrop over and over, growing larger as Auger approached. It couldn’t be natural, he knew, because everything solid in this place had been flattened to the outer surface of the great pressure ball. It had sharp edges that time would press into the gas giant’s inner globe. These lines were new here. And, they could be nothing but Trasp lines.
Auger approached.
He took images with his helmet when the light was right. He analyzed them. He circled.
Then, at about three-quarters of the way around the Trasp drop pod—not too different from his own—he discerned the outline of a figure that was leaned, upright against the frame of the vehicle, clasping on, motionless, seemingly dead or in some type of a trance.
Suddenly, a burst of lightning lit up the area. A knife-shock of pain obliterated any other perception but the agony. For a second, Auger thought he must have been struck by that bolt of lightning. And maybe he was, but he wasn’t dead, and he could still think to think that he was thinking still, so he must not be dead. Pain is not death.
That burst was followed by another. Then another. He thought he was holding his arms up to his head, clasping them there against the agony. But it could not have been so. His remaining arm was too heavy to move. Auger was just stuck there, inside the body of his stationary donkey.
When he looked up again, in the glow of the next distant lightning blast, the figure was gone.
Auger turned his head to try and see. Then he turned his body, commanding the donkey legs to turn in place, to circle, to find that enemy. His head was pounding, his face grimacing.
Suddenly, there in the darkness, there was a figure—a humanoid figure walking on two legs. Impossible.
A light went on inside a space helmet. There was a human face inside it. The figure clearly saw him.
Auger thought for a moment. Regardless of the circumstances, he would not cower in the dark. He clicked through with his eyes, directing the helmet to illuminate the interior.
Then impossibly, as he observed the figure step slightly closer, it raised an arm, forming clear signals he understood—directions to open a local channel.
Another blast. Another violent flash of pain. And through it, he could see, the figure looking in on him, understanding, knowing, yet not sharing in the agony.
The figure signaled again. Open. Open.
Auger opened the frequency.
“You are in pain. I will send you a sequence so we can talk. Install it.”
“What is it?” Auger managed to speak back.
“Pain relief. I’ll explain when you can think again.”
Auger looked at the file, wondering why this Trasp would give him anything but the bloody, brutal death he longed to give to that strange figure out there. He could see the Trasp looking back at him, recognizing. The same questions he would ask if their roles were reversed.
“No need to kill you, Etteran,” he said. “We’re already dead.”
That much was true. Auger thought about it for a moment. Another brutal lightning blast seemed to crack his skull. What could it hurt? Certainly it couldn’t hurt any more than Auger was already suffering. Pain relief, he thought. He’d take a chance on that. He eyed the file and clicked to execute an installation.
There was an instantaneous rush of relief that washed from the tip of his head down his entire body—all the way down to his spine, like a great wave, as though a body on fire had suddenly been submerged in cool water.
“How the hell?” he stated.
The Trasp could see the relief in his expression.
“It took me three days to perfect the algorithm. I could hardly think. Same pain as you. Then I reprogrammed the helmet to noise cancel the earset’s pods. Very challenging trying to figure out exactly when a lightning strike is coming. There’s a certain threshold that precedes the strike. Ambient charge in the air. It’s sonic—the pressure that was in your head. Now it is not.”
“No,” Auger replied, “it is not. Never thought I’d say this to a Trasp, but ...” he almost choked on the words; “… thank you.”
“You’re welcome. My name is Josiah. I have been here for almost two weeks. I almost thought you wouldn’t be coming, but our models, military intelligence AI—like your Ketch—all the models said that Etteran CCom would respond. Pardon me, talking so much. I haven’t spoken to anyone in weeks. I’ve had a lot of time to think.”
“That’s okay,” Auger said. “I don’t talk a lot myself. And I’ve never talked to a Trasp before.”
“Nor have I spoken to an Etteran. We’re supposed to kill each other, but one of the first things I decided, once I configured my helmet to dull the sonic pain, was that if anyone came we would both already be dead, so I might as well take advantage of that fact to finally converse with the enemy. I say ‘the’ enemy, because you, sir, whoever you are, are the enemy of the Trasp government. I’m not certain that makes you my enemy anymore. I didn’t have much love myself, and now I have even less after they sent me here.”
“I like the Guild good enough,” Auger stated. “I volunteered to come down here and sniff you out.”
The Trasp circled Auger, looking down at his legs. “Buck-blocks. Like a set of magnetic horse legs. Our engineers would be in awe. You cannot move yourself though.”
“Maybe not. But I can be deadly enough.”
“Doubtless. I recognize your kind. You’re one of the wolves, aren’t you? Special operator without a unit. Loneliest job in the galaxy.”
“And I recognize you easy enough. You’re one of those gene-freaks.”
“We don’t characterize ourselves quite so uncharitably, but it’s a fair enough description. I was engineered as much as that set of legs you’re using. May I ask your designation? As I said, I’m Josiah.”
“Major,” Auger replied.
“Not your rank, Major. I know you wolves don’t go by your real names. Your call sign.”
“They call me Auger.”
“Glad to speak to you, Auger. Looks as though you’ve dug yourself deeper than any ordinary human before you. I don’t know about you, but they filled me so full of nanotech I don’t imagine there’s much human left in me but the thoughts.”
“How are you walking?” Auger asked.
Josiah turned. “You see the exoskeleton. It has articulated bones. Each one is drilled right down into my real bones, which they’ve hardened and filled with all kinds of nanotechnology I figure wasn’t worth understanding.”
“It’s in your bones—the exo? Drilled to it directly?”
“It’s excruciating,” Josiah replied. “Or it was. Now I don’t really feel it so much. I think the pressure in my head is confusing everything. I haven’t slept in a long time.”
“Me too.”
“It’s a hell of a final mission. Coming down here. Why did you volunteer, Auger? If I may ask.”
Auger thought about it for a moment, considering whether what he could say would give anything away. Could the Trasp be monitoring the encounter? Could they have their own neutrino emitter. He wasn’t sure whether his own comms device could get out. And they couldn’t have a ship up there to receive it, even if this Josiah was transmitting.
“I should be dead. I got blown up at Richfield. Blasted monitoring a drop post. Some asshole put these bands in our suits that kept me from bleeding out—built a tourniquet right down the arms and legs. So I lost an arm. And we don’t put mech fighters in the field like you Trasp do. Not in any real way. So I was going to rot in a home or do something on my own, and the Commodore asked me to wait before I did something, and he came to me with this. Said you were down here. Up to some Trasp bullshit, and if I wanted one last mission on the one-way, this one would be a good one. What about you?”
“Similar story. We gene-freaks, as you say, a lot of us have problems—more than our engineers would like our enemies to know about. Some of us come out okay. Others develop problems over time. I have these growths—fibromas. They do what they can, gene-based therapeutics. For a time, they worked for me, stopped the progression. And then they came back. Mine are involved in the lungs now. So I was terminal. They ordered me here.”
“You’re not doing anything?” Auger asked. “They just sent you down here to die with that setup?”
“I’m testing it, I guess, for what it’s worth. I suppose they figured they might get the data out to a terminal up in orbit. But more likely, the more I thought about it—and I had a lot of time to think about it—I came here so you would.”
“I don’t understand,” Auger replied.
“Basic simple sabotage,” Josiah stated. “Earliest field manuals for spies read like mischief guides for troublesome teenagers—start a fire in a trash can, pour sand into gears, unscrew light bulbs. The theory is that any time the enemy spends responding to even the smallest problem is opportunity cost. So here you are. You said yourself you were going to do something—blow up something along the lines? In the corridor? Something like that? Rather than live out your time in a home, eating, costing your side resources, not fighting? It’s noble. But now you’re here instead of taking more casualties on our side. And all it cost the Protectorate was a terminal gene-freak filled with fibromas. So here we are, canceling each other out.”
“I didn’t expect a Trasp, gene-freak or not, to ever talk like that about the Protectorate. Then again, you’re the first one I ever met. I guess it was a good enough plan.”
“I have to say, Auger, you don’t seem as sore about it as I’d feared.”
“If I’d have killed another ten or fifteen Trasp in one final blast—about the best I could’ve figured to do without any help from the Guild—that’s a rounding error on my count. Yours too, I’d imagine.”
“You wolves are good killers. A worthy adversary.”
“So are you gene-freaks,” Auger replied. “What about those fibromas? Sounds painful. They just come up anywhere?”
“It’s the mostly fascia. All over my body. Worst one is in my foot. My right foot, just in front of the heel. It feels like having a ball stuck under your foot. I’m almost glad I have an exo drilled right into my leg bones. Takes the pressure off.”
“Well shit. This ain’t how I thought this was gonna go, Josiah. A one-armed bastard wolf like me and one of yours down here at the bottom of creation. Look at that shit.”
Auger nodded his head toward the light in the dull blue clouds. He was beginning to breathe easier. The pain was still there, but it was dull enough and far enough in the background that he could think straight.
“It’s something,” Josiah agreed. “No two people in all of humanity have ever seen what we’ve seen down here, Auger.”
“That’s a fact.”
“I thought as much. I had suspicions.”
“Suspicions about what?” Auger asked.
“This war. Our governments are fighting sure. The last thing they’d ever want was this—for two people like us, the hardest fighters, to have a conversation. Then we’d realize what I’ve already learned pretty much right away. They can demonize you like they have, but once we talk to each other, we learn pretty fast we have a lot more in common than we’re taught.”
“I don’t know,” Auger stated. “But I didn’t figure I’d have two words to say to a Trasp, certainly not one of your kind. I probably wouldn’t if you didn’t fix my helmet the way you did. We couldn’t have talked without it.”
“Auger, I bet if it were up to us, we could end the war in less than ten minutes. Sign an armistice and everything.”
“How do you figure?”
“I figure we stay the hell on our side of the corridor, and you stay the hell on yours. We don’t nuke you, and you don’t nuke us. And we agree to those terms for twenty years. Maybe in a generation we don’t hate each other as much anymore. Maybe in five generations we’re no longer adversaries. Maybe in ten we’re allies.”
“I don’t know about the ally part, Josiah. No matter how many generations. But the rest of that sounds sensible enough.”
“And we could talk to each other again. Like this.”
“Well, hell. Simple sabotage. I guess you got me. Now what are we supposed to do?”
“I don’t know,” Josiah replied. “I was thinking all this time about what to say if I ever got the chance to talk to another soul again, Auger. Now I have. All the pain, to talk to a wolf, I’d have to say it was worth it. I was thinking about philosophy, about metaphysics, the supernatural, pondering an afterlife.”
“I don’t know about all that. We wolves are simple enough. I got told to blow something up and I’d blow it up. Things didn’t get complex till I got blown up. I wasn’t supposed to come back from that.”
“And now you’re here too.”
“Now I’m here too.”
“Was it worth the pain?” Josiah asked.
Auger looked around. “I could have done with a little less pain, but I’m not going to complain about it. Sure, I guess. I’m glad I got to talk to a Trasp before I go. Been killing you assholes long enough I should.”
Josiah smiled and laughed. “The people that made us never wanted this.”
“I didn’t get made like you did.”
“Didn’t you, Auger? You weren’t conceived this way maybe, but we’ve both had more than metal drilled into our bones. So here we are, made men—wolf, gene-freak—creatures of war.”
“Maybe so.”
“You can communicate?” Josiah asked.
“Supposedly.”
“Will they hear all this?”
“They might. Some sort of neutrino pulse technology. Like my buck-blocks and your bones—who the hell knows how it all works?”
“I hope they do hear. They can play it for others, listen. We don’t have to do this anymore.”
“I don’t suppose we do.”
“Unless I’m mistaken, they sent you down here with a weapon. Am I right?”
“How do you figure?” Auger replied.
“Your setup—you can’t fight with those legs. And your body—you can’t move. They wouldn’t send you down here without a way to neutralize whatever you found.”
“I guess you know us well enough.”
“Then the question is how much longer you want to wait, Auger. We could talk for a little while longer or we could end it.”
“I think it’ll happen so fast we won’t have the time to feel it.”
“Maybe we should stay a little while longer. Nobody’s ever been to a place like this. Have a look around first?”
“Yeah, maybe.”
“Along the way, I’ll tell you about the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen. And you can tell me yours.”
Auger could hear him more clearly now. As they’d been talking, he could hear a hoarseness growing in Josiah’s voice. And he was struggling to breathe.
“I had a good whisky last week with a young wolf. That was after they sent me to Sinorise to be with a girl. If she wasn’t the most beautiful thing I ever seen, I’m not sure what was. The whisky, though, that was good too.”
Josiah turned and began to walk into the pale blue fog. “I’d like to hear about the girl, Auger. Tell me about her.”
Auger’s head wasn’t pounding anymore. It was clear. He thought about all the commands he could execute with an eyeball in the span of a second. He scrolled through and decided that it wasn’t time just yet. Auger looked over at Josiah’s spine moving slowly away from him, and he prodded his donkey legs to step forward once again.
The light in the distance was blue and quiet.