Asante realizes that he isn’t breathing.
The Insect woman (a diveskin, he sees now: her mandibles an electrolysis rig, her compound eyes a pair of defraction goggles) retrieves a tactical scroll from beyond his field of view and unrolls it a half-meter from his face. She mutters an incantation and it flares softly to life, renders a stacked pair of keyboards: English on top, Twi beneath.
“Don’t try to talk,” she says in both tongues. “Just look at the letters.”
He focuses on the N: it brightens. O. T. The membrane offers up predictive spelling, speeds the transition from sacc’ to script:
NOT SOLDIER FISH FARMER
“Sorry.” She retires the translator; the Twi keys flicker and disappear. “Figure of speech. What’s your name?”
KODJO ASANTE
She pushes the defractors onto her forehead, unlatches the mandibles. They fall away and dangle to one side. She’s white underneath.
IS KITO
“I’m sorry, no. Everyone’s dead.”
Everyone else, he thinks, and imagines Kito mocking him one last time for insufferable pedantry.
“Got him.” Man’s voice, from across the compartment. “Kodjo Asante,
Takoradi. Twenty-eight, bog-standard aqua—wait; combat experience. Two years with GAF.”
Asante’s eyes dart frantically across the keyboard: ONLY FARMER NOT
“No worries, mate.” She lays down a reassuring hand; he can only assume it comes to rest somewhere on his body. “Everyone’s seen combat hereabouts, right? You’re sitting on the only reliable protein stock in three hundred klicks. Stands to reason you’re gonna have to defend it now and again.”
“Still.” A shoulder patch comes into view as she turns toward the other voice: WestHem Alliance. “We could put him on the list.”
“If you’re gonna do it, do it fast. Surface contact about two thousand meters out, closing.”
She turns back to Asante. “Here’s the thing. We didn’t get here in time. We’re not supposed to be here at all, but our CO got wind of Sally’s plans and took a little humanitarian initiative, I guess you could say. We showed up in time to scare ’em off and light ’em up, but you were all dead by then.”
I WASN’T
“Yeah, Kodjo, you too. All dead.”
YOU BROUGHT ME BA
“No.”
BUT
“We gave your brain a jump start, that’s all. You know how you can make a leg twitch when you pass a current through it? You know what galvanic means, Kodjo?”
“He’s got a Ph.D. in molecular marine ecology,” says her unseen colleague. “I’m guessing yes.”
“You can barely feel anything, am I right? Body like a ghost? We didn’t reboot the rest of you. You’re just getting residual sensations from nerves that don’t know they’re dead yet. You’re a brain in a box, Kodjo. You’re running on empty.
“But here’s the thing: you don’t have to be.”
“Hurry it up, Cat. We got ten minutes, tops.”
She glances over her shoulder, back again. “We got a rig on the Levi Morgan, patch you up and keep you on ice until we get home. And we got a rig there that’ll work goddamn miracles, make you better’n new. But it ain’t cheap, Kodjo. Pretty much breaks the bank every time we do it.”
DON’T HAVE MONEY
“Don’t want money. We want you to work for us. Five-year tour, maybe less depending on how the tech works out. Then you go on your way, nice fat bank balance, whole second chance. Easy gig, believe me. You’re just a passenger in your own body for the hard stuff. Even boot camp’s mostly autonomic. Real accelerated program.”
NOT WESTHEM
“You’re not Hegemon either, not any more. You’re not much of anything but rotting meat hooked up to a pair of jumper cables. I’m offering you salvation, mate. You can be Born Again.”
“Wrap it the fuck up, Cat. They’re almost on top of us.”
“’Course if you’re not interested, I can just pull the plug. Leave you the way we found you.”
NO PLEASE YES
“Yes what, Kodjo? Yes pull the plug? Yes leave you behind? You need to be specific about this. We’re negotiating a contract here.”
YES BORN AGAIN YES 5 YEAR TOUR
He wonders at this shiver of hesitation, this voice whispering maybe dead is better. Perhaps it’s because he is dead; maybe all those suffocating endocrine glands just aren’t up to the task of flooding his brain with the warranted elixir of fear and desperation and survival at any cost. Maybe being dead means never having to give a shit.
He does, though. He may be dead but his glands aren’t, not yet. He didn’t say no.
He wonders if anyone ever has.
“Glory Hallelujah!” Cat proclaims, reaching offstage for some unseen control. And just before everything goes black:
“Welcome to the Zombie Corps.”
Savior Machine
That’s not what they call it, though.
“Be clear about one thing. There’s no good reason why any operation should ever put boots in the battlefield.”
They call it ZeroS. Strangely, the Z does not stand for Zombie.
“There’s no good reason why any competent campaign should involve a battlefield in the first place. That’s what economic engineering and Cloud Control are for.”
The S doesn’t even stand for Squad.
“If they fail, that’s what drones and bots and TAI are for.”
Zero Sum. Or as NCOIC Silano puts it, A pun, right? Cogito ergo. Better than The Spaz Brigade, which was Garin’s suggestion.
Asante’s in Tactical Orientation, listening to an artificial instructor that he’d almost accept as human but for the fact that it doesn’t sound bored to death.
“There’s only one reason you’ll ever find yourselves called on deck, and that’s if everyone has fucked up so completely at conflict resolution that there’s nothing left in the zone but a raging shitstorm.”
Asante’s also running up the side of a mountain. It’s a beautiful route, twenty klicks of rocks and pines and mossy deadfall. There might be more green growing things on this one slope than in the whole spreading desert of northern Africa. He wishes he could see it.
“Your very presence means the mission has already failed; your job is to salvage what you can from the wreckage.”
He can’t see it, though. He can’t see much of anything. Asante’s been blind since Reveille.
“Fortunately for you, economics and Cloud Control
