The stars are fading. Venus is hanging in there, though.
“You’ve been weird,” she observes. “Ever since the thing with Caçador.”
“It was a weird thing.”
“So I hear.” Shrug. “I guess you had to be there.”
He musters a smile. “So you don’t remember …”
“Legs running down. Legs running back up. My zombie never targeted anything so I don’t know what she saw.”
“Metzinger does. Rossiter does.” He leans his ass against a convenient boulder. “Does it ever bother you? That you don’t know what your own eyes are seeing, and they do?”
“Not really. Just the way it works.”
“We don’t know what we’re doing out there. When was the last time Maddox even showed us a highlight reel?” He feels the muscles clenching in his jaw. “We could be war criminals.”
“There is no we. Not when it matters.” She sits beside him. “Besides. Our zombies may be nonconscious but they’re not stupid; they know we’re obligated to disobey unlawful commands.”
“Maybe they know. Not sure Maddox’s compliance circuit would let them do anything about it.”
Somewhere nearby a songbird clears its throat.
Tiwana takes a breath. “Suppose you’re right—not saying you are, but suppose they sent us out to gun down a gyland full of harmless refugees. Forget that Caçador was packing enough explosives to blow up a hamlet, forget that it killed Silano … hell, nearly killed us all. If Metzinger decides to bash in someone’s innocent skull, you still don’t blame the hammer he used.”
“And yet. Someone’s skull is still bashed in.”
Across the clearing, another bird answers. The dawn duet.
“There must be reasons,” she says, as if trying it on for size.
He remembers reasons from another life, on another continent: retribution. The making of examples. Poor impulse control. Just … fun, sometimes.
“Such as.”
“I don’t know, okay? Big Picture’s way above our pay grade. But that doesn’t mean you toss out the chain of command every time someone gives you an order without a twenty-gig backgrounder to go with it. If you want me to believe we’re in thrall to a bunch of fascist baby killers, you’re gonna need more than a few glimpses of something you may have seen on a gyland.”
“How about, I don’t know. All of human history?” Venus is gone at last. The rising sun streaks the clearing with gold. “It’s the deal we made. Sure, it’s a shitty one. Only shittier one is being dead. But would you choose differently, even now? Go back to being fish food?”
He honestly doesn’t know.
“We should be dead, Jo. Every one of these moments is a gift.”
He regards her with a kind of wonder. “I never know how you do it.”
“Do what?”
“Channel Schopenhauer and Pollyanna at the same time without your head exploding.”
She takes his hand for a moment, squeezes briefly. Rises. “We’re gonna make it. Just so long as we don’t rock the boat. All the way to that honorable fucking discharge.” She turns to the light; sunrise glows across her face.
“Until then, in case you were wondering, I’ve got your back.”
“There is no you,” he reminds her. “Not when it matters.”
“I’ve got your back,” she says.
Watch That Man
They’ve outsourced Silano’s position, brought in someone none of them have ever seen before. Technically he’s one of them, though the scars that tag him ZeroS have barely had time to heal. Something about him is wrong. Something about the way he moves; his insignia. Not Specialist or Corporal or Sergeant.
“I want you to meet Lieutenant Jim Moore,” Rossiter tells them.
ZeroS finally have a commissioned secco. He’s easily the youngest person in the room.
He gets right to it. “This is the Nanisivik mine.” The satcam wall zooms down onto the roof of the world. “Baffin Island, seven hundred fifty klicks north of the Arctic Circle, heart of the Slush Belt.” A barren fractured landscape of red and ocher. Drumlins and hillocks and bifurcating stream beds.
“Tapped out at the turn of the century.” A brown road, undulating along some scoured valley floor. A cluster of buildings. A gaping mouth in the Earth. “These days people generally stay away, on account of its remote location. Also on account of the eight thousand metric tons of high-level nuclear waste the Canadian government brought over from India for deep-time storage. Part of an initiative to diversify the northern economy, apparently.” Tactical schematics, now: Processing and Intake. Train tracks corkscrewing into the Canadian Shield. Storage tunnels branching like the streets of an underground subdivision. “Project was abandoned after the Greens lost power in ‘38.
“You could poison a lot of cities with this stuff. Which may be why someone’s messing around there now.”
Garin’s hand is up. “Someone, sir?”
“So far all we have are signs of unauthorized activity and a JTFN drone that went in and never came out. Our first priority is to identify the actors. Depending on what we find, we might take care of it ourselves. Or we might call in the bombers. Won’t know until we get there.”
And we won’t know even then, Asante muses—and realizes, in that moment, what it is about Moore that strikes him as so strange.
“We’ll be prepping your better halves with the operational details en route.”
It’s not what is, it’s what isn’t: no tic at the corner of the eye, no tremor in the hand. His speech is smooth and perfect, his eyes make contact with steady calm. Lieutenant Moore doesn’t glitch.
“For now, we anticipate a boots-down window of no more than seven hours—”
Asante looks at Tiwana. Tiwana looks back.
ZeroS are out of beta.
Subterraneans
The Lockhead drops them at the foot of a crumbling pier. Derelict shops and listing trailers, long abandoned, huddle against the sleeting rain. This used to be a seaport; then a WestHem refueling station back before WestHem was even a word, before the apocalyptic Arctic weather made it easier to just stick everything underwater. It lived its short life as a company town, an appendage of the mine, in the days before Nanisivik was emptied of its valuables and filled up again.
BUD says 1505: less than an hour if they want
