DIXIE CUPS
Beneath Ontario
Three years later
The armored train car slowed to thirty kph as it exited the wormhole into a vast subterranean chamber containing Camp Helena. The track arced along the canyon's ridgeline and descended to the chamber floor. Inside the car, Ike roamed from end to end, stepping over exhausted men and combat gear and the blood, tireless, shotgun ready. Through the front window he saw the lights of man. Through the rear, the strafed, fouled mouth to the depths fell behind. His heart felt pulled in two, into the future, into the past.
For seven dark weeks the platoon had been hunting Haddie, their horror, in a tunnel spoking off the deepest transit point. For four of those weeks they'd been living by the trigger. Corporate mercenaries were supposed to police the deep lines, but somehow the national militaries were back in the action. And taking the hits. Now they sat on brand-new cherry-red plastic seats in an automated train, with muddy field gear propped against their legs and a soldier dying on the floor.
'Home,' one of the Rangers said to him.
'All yours,' Ike replied. He added, 'Lieutenant,' and it was like passing the torch back to its original owner. They were back in the World now, and it was not his.
'Listen,' Lieutenant Meadows said in a low voice, 'what happened, maybe I don't have to report it all. A simple apology, in front of the men...'
'You're forgiving me?' Ike snorted. The tired men looked up. Meadows narrowed his eyes, and Ike pulled out a pair of glacier glasses with nearly black lenses. He hooked the wings on his ears and sealed the plastic against the wild tattooing that ran from forehead to cheekbones to chin.
He turned from the fool and squinted out the windows at the sprawling firebase below them. Helena's sky was a storm of man-made lights. From this vantage, the array of sabering lasers formed an angular canopy one mile wide. Strobes twinkled in the distance. His dreadlocks – slashed to shoulder length – helped shield his eyes, but not enough. So powerful in the lower darkness, Ike shied here in the ordinary.
In Ike's mind, these settlements were like shipwrecks in the Arctic with winter closing in, reminders that passage was swift and temporary. Down here, one did not belong in one place for long.
Every cavity, every tunnel, every hole along the chamber's soaring walls was saturated with light, and yet you could still see winged animals flitting about in the domelike 'sky' extending a hundred meters above camp. Eventually the animals tired and spiraled down to rest or feed – and promptly got fried upon contact with the laser canopy. The work and living quarters in camp were protected from this bone and charcoal debris, as well as from the occasional fall of rocks, by steeply angled fifty-meter-tall rooftops with titanium-alloy superframes. The effect, from Ike's window, was a city of cathedrals inside a gigantic cave.
With conveyor belts spanning off into side holes and an elevator shaft and various ventilation chimneys jutting through the ceiling and a pall of petroleum smog, it looked like hell, and this was man's doing. A steady stream of food, supplies, and munitions churned down the belts. Ore churned back up.
The train car glided to a stop by the front gate and the Rangers unhorsed in a file, nearly bashful in the face of such safety, eager to get past the razor wire and lay into some cold beer and hot burgers and serious rack time. For his own part, a fresh platoon would do. Already Ike was ready to leave.
A tardy MASH team came rushing out with a stretcher, and as they passed through the gate, a panel of arc lights turned them as white as angels. Ike knelt beside his wounded man because it was the right thing to do, but also because he had to find his resolve again. The arc lights were arranged to saturate every thing that entered this way, and to kill whatever lights killed down here.
'We'll take him,' the medics said, and Ike let go of the boy's hand. He was the last left in the car. One by one the Rangers had gone through the gate, turning into bursts of blinding radiance.
Ike faced the camp's gate, straining against the impulse to gallop back into the darkness. His urges were so raw they hurt like wounds. Few people understood. He had entered this Manichaean state: it was either darkness or light, and it seemed that all his gray scale was gone.
With a small cry, Ike cupped his hands to his eyes and leaped through the gate. The lights bleached him as immaculate as a rising soul. Like that, he made his way inside once again. It seemed more difficult each time.
Inside the razor wire and sandbags, Ike slowed his pulse and cleared his lungs. Following regulations, he shucked his clip, then dry-fired into the sandbox by the bunker, and showed his tags to the sentinels in their Kevlar armor.
CAMP HELENA, the sign read. HOME OF BLACKHORSE, 11 TH ARMORED CAV , had been crossed out and replaced with WOLFHOUNDS, 27TH INFANTRY . In turn, that had been replaced with the names of a half-dozen more resident units. The one constant in the upper right corner was their altitude: Minus 16,232 Feet.
Hunched beneath his battle gear, Ike trudged past troops in their field 'ninjas,' the black camos issued for deep work, or off-duty in their Army sweats or gym trunks. Whether they were on their way to training or to the mess or the basketball cage or
the PX to snarf some Zingers or Yoo-Hoos, one and all carried a rifle or pistol, ever mindful of the great massacre two years before.
From beneath his ropy hair, Ike cast side glances at the civilians starting to take over. Most were miners and construction workers, sprinkled with mercenaries and missionaries, the front wave of colonization. On his departure, two months ago, there had been just a few dozen of them. Now they seemed to outnumber the soldiers. Certainly they had the hauteur of a majority.
He heard bright laughter and was startled by the sight of three prostitutes in their late twenties. One had veritable volleyballs surgically affixed to her chest. She was even more surprised at the sight of Ike. The soda straw slid from her strawberry lips, and she stared in disbelief. Ike twisted his face from view and hurried on.
Helena was growing up. Fast. Like scores of other settlements around the world, it was evident not just in the explosion of new quadrants and settlers from the World. You could see it in the building materials. Concrete told the tale. Wood was a luxury down here, and sheet-metal production took time to develop and needed the right ores in close proximity to be cost-effective. Concrete, on the other hand, had only to be teased up from the ground and out from the walls. Cheap, quick to set, durable, concrete meant populism. It fed the frontier spirit.
Ike entered a quadrant that, two months ago, had been home to the local company of Rangers. But the obstacle course, rappeling tower, firing range, and primitive track had been usurped. A horde of squatters had invaded. Every manner of tent, lean-to, and gypsy shelter sprawled here. The din of voices, commerce, and dog-eat-dog music tracks hit him like a foul smell.
All that remained of unit headquarters were two office cubes taped together with duct tape. They had a ceiling made of cardboard. Ike parked his rucksack by the outer wall, then looked twice at the roughnecks and desperadoes wandering about, and brought it inside the doorway. A little foolishly, he knocked on the cardboard wall.
'Enter,' a voice barked.
Branch was talking to a portable computer balanced on boxes of MREs, his helmet on one side, rifle on the other. 'Elias,' Ike greeted him.
Branch was not pleased to see him. His mask of scar tissue and cysts twisted into a snarl. 'Ah, our prodigal son,' he said, 'we were just chatting about you.'
He turned the laptop so that Ike could see the face on the little flat screen, and so the computer camera could see Ike. They were video-linked with Jump Lincoln, one of Branch's old Airborne buddies and presently the commanding officer in charge of Lieutenant Meadows.
'Have you lost your fucking mind?' Jump's image said to Ike. 'I just got a field report slapped in front of me. It says you disobeyed a direct order. In front of my lieutenant's entire patrol. And that you drifted a weapon in his general direction in a threatening manner. Do you have anything at all to say,
