“Isn’t that the point? That anybody can be a super soldier?” Or at least, any body.
“We’re lab rats, Jo. They don’t want to risk frying their West Point grads with a beta release so they’re working out the bugs on us first. If the program was ready to go wide we wouldn’t still be here. Which means—” She heaves a sigh. “It’s the augs. At least, I hope it’s the augs.”
“You hope?”
“You’d rather believe Kally just went berserk and killed a civilian for no reason?”
He tries to ignore a probably-psychosomatic tingle at the back of his head. “Rossiter wouldn’t be talking reassignment if she had,” he admits. “She’d be talking court-martial.”
“She’ll never talk court-martial. Not where we’re concerned.”
“Really.”
“Think about it. You ever see any politician come by to make sure the taxpayer’s money’s being wellspent? You ever see a commissioned officer walking the halls who wasn’t Metzinger or Maddox or Rossiter?”
“So we’re off the books.” It’s hardly a revelation.
“We’re so far off the books we might as well be cave paintings. We don’t even know our own tooth-to-tail ratio. Ninety percent of our support infrastructure’s offsite, it’s all robots and teleops. We don’t even know who’s cutting into our own heads.” She leans close in the deepening gloom, fixes him with her good eye. “This is voodoo, Jo. Maybe the program started small with that kneejerk stuff, but now? You and I, we’re literal fucking zombies. We’re reanimated corpses dancing on strings, and if you think Persephone Q. Public is gonna be fine with that you have a lot more faith in her than I do. I don’t think Congress knows about us, I don’t think Parliament knows about us, I bet SOCOM doesn’t even know about us past some line in a budget that says psychological research. I don’t think they want to know. And when something’s that dark, are they really going to let anything as trivial as a judicial process drag it into the light?”
Asante shakes his head. “Still has to be accountability. Some kind of internal process.”
“There is. You disappear, and they tell everyone you’ve been reassigned.”
He thinks for a bit. “So what do we do?”
“First we riot in the mess hall. Then we march on Ottawa demanding equal rights for corpses.” She rolls her eyes. “We don’t do anything. Maybe you forgot: we died. We don’t legally exist anymore, and unless you got a way better deal than me the only way for either of us to change that is keep our heads down until we get our honorable discharges. I do not like being dead. I would very much like to go back to being officially alive some day. Until then …”
She takes the specs off her head. Powers them down.
“We watch our fucking step.”
Ricochet
Sergeant Kodjo Asante watches his fucking step. He watches it when he goes up against AIRheads and Realists. He watches it when pitted against well-funded private armies running on profit and ideology, against ragged makeshift ones driven by thirst and desperation, against rogue Darwin Banks and the inevitable religious extremists who—almost a quarter-century after the end of the Dark Decade—still haven’t stopped maiming and killing in the name of their Invisible Friends. His steps don’t really falter until twenty-one months into his tour, when he kills three unarmed children off the coast of Honduras.
ZeroS has risen from the depths of the Atlantic to storm one of the countless gylands that ride the major currents of the world’s oceans. Some are refugee camps with thousands of inhabitants; others serve as havens for hustlers and tax dodgers eager to avoid the constraints of more stationary jurisdictions. Some are military, sheathed in chromatophores and radar-damping nanotubes: bigger than airports, invisible to man or machine.
The Caçador de Recompensa is a fish farm, a family business registered out of Brazil: two modest hectares of low-slung superstructure on a donut hull with a cluster of net pens at its center. It is currently occupied by forces loyal to the latest incarnation of Shining Path. The Path thrives on supply lines with no fixed address—and as Metzinger reminded them on the way down, it’s always better to prevent a fight than win one. If the Path can’t feed their troops, maybe they won’t deploy them.
This is almost a mission of mercy.
Asante eavesdrops on the sounds of battle, takes in a mingled reek of oil and salt air and rotten fish, lets Evil Twin’s worldview wash across his eyes in a blur of light and the incomprehensible flicker of readouts with millisecond lifespans. Except during target acquisition, of course. Except for those brief stroboscopic instants when ET locks on, and faces freeze and blur in turn: a couple of coveralled SAsian men wielding Heckler-Kochs. A wounded antique ZhanLu staggering on two-and-a half-legs, the beam from its MAD gun wobbling wide of any conceivable target. Children in life jackets, two boys, one girl; Asante guesses their ages at between seven and ten. Each time the weapon kicks in his hands and an instant later ET is veering toward the next kill.
Emotions are sluggish things in Passenger mode. He feels nothing in the moment, shock in the aftermath. Horror’s still halfway to the horizon when a random ricochet slaps him back into the driver’s seat.
The bullet doesn’t penetrate—not much punches through the Chrysomalon armor wrapped tight around his skin—but vectors interact. Momentum passes from a small fast object to a large slow one. Asante’s brain lurches in its cavity; meat slaps bone and bounces back. Deep in all that stressed gray matter, some vital circuit shorts out.
There’s pain of course, blooming across the side of his head like napalm in those few seconds before his endocrine pumps damp it down. There’s fire in the BUD, a blaze of static and
