Some old author had once written a book about his time in the Legion out on the edge. The Galaxy’s Heart Is Darkness. That was the title. Or maybe some line in the book. She couldn’t remember. She’d read it. Agreed with it.
But these kids, they had no idea what the situation really was. They were the useful idiots that the dark side of the galaxy, the howling animal looking to make it all one big bonfire, always needed. They thought not being able to pick their college of choice was a real threat to existence. Never mind that it was free. The right one wasn’t selecting them. Time to riot for a better future.
They should try a place like Boarrago V instead. Try that little slice of darkness where the natives are like living zombies in the sway of a grand cleric who’s decreed that every female on the planet is his.
Try fighting a jungle war there against that kind of red lotus-chewing madness. Especially when the other side is paying wobanki mercenaries to get involved.
Talk about darkness. Nothing darker in the night than the cats.
Try finding a marine patrol that got killed and disemboweled without firing once from their blasters.
Try going through that and then decide whether an already-too-coddling government is really the sort of thing that should send you to the streets.
Or Ituria, which was just a few years before Psydon. A Republic protectorate world whose seventeen different factions, all nuclear-armed, had turned that planet into a Stone Age nightmare.
Try being on a marine task force sent to supply aid to just one faction with the added threat that the people you are not supplying might just decide to take it into their heads to nuke you because you’re helping the enemy they nuked five years ago. That’s what you get when the elites spend two centuries building nuke-proof bunkers below the planet. Not enough room for the three billion above who’ll have to pay the price, but enough room to keep lobbing nukes at each other for upwards of twenty years.
And then try being the Legion force sent in to clean out a faction’s bunker to get all sides to stop shooting for a while.
“It was a madhouse down there,” some old leej once told her. “An absolute madhouse like one of them Savage hulks I hit as a private when I didn’t know better.”
The cargo sled comes to a stop and everyone’s putting their masks on. She’s trying to remember as many faces as she can because a part of her promises to come back some day and collect on a little payback.
You don’t mean by trial, right, Manda?
Dad’s voice.
She doesn’t answer.
And then she has her first opportunity. A real dumb stump of a kid—all muscle and no doubt thinking that this plus the gear made him a man—pulls her off the back of the cargo sled. She slips his knife out of his Johnny Action Ranger pistol belt. Black nylon. Purchased from True Warrior Supplies. Veteran-owned, you know.
It’s a nice blade, too. She can tell as she palms it and lets it fall up her sleeve and down to her armpit where she clenches it to the side of her rib cage.
She gets a brief glimpse of the sky.
It’s morning on Detron. But which morning?
The city rises all around her in those stupid wagon-wheel buildings that were all the rage fifty years ago. Massive towers stacked on towers made of wagon-wheel-like levels.
What the past thought the future would look like one day.
Now those towers look tired and anachronistic. Old and beaten. And how much of what’s being built today and fawned over by contemporaries will be viewed the same way in another couple of generations?
The Soshies, MCR pros, and local useful idiots hustle her off the street and into a building. Through a lobby that must have once looked well-appointed and was now covered in graffiti and black mold. Past a blue couch with starburst thread that’s been shot by a blaster several times. The place smells of old greasy food.
She doesn’t know the building, just that she’s in downtown, based on what she remembers of her time over the city. The area once called the Glitter District because the best and the brightest lived there. The captains of industry and the famous architects who built the ships that defeated the Savages.
Her grandfather was a gunner’s mate on the Ohio. Fought at Telos. He was nineteen and he survived that and went on to fight the last Savage fleet at the Hebrides. Then he came home and started a family with the girl who’d been waiting all that time for him to come back.
Grandma.
Think about the knife.
Get out of here and get home. That’s all that matters, Manda Panda.
She’s brought inside a supply elevator. It feels like they’re going down. But it could just as easily be up. It’s not a long trip and they haul her into what is clearly an under-basement. So down it was.
The place is set up like some kind of headquarters. The guards are fresh-faced. Children really. But these are murderous children carrying weapons.
They pass a wide section leading from the hall where some whiny-voiced guy is hectoring a bunch of true believers about what needs to happen if they’re going to “win this war!”
He calls it war, she notes.
You have no idea what war is, little boy. The knife is still in her armpit. I flick this open and you’re going to get a taste, though, she promises him silently.
And suddenly, she feels good. This won’t be that hard. The knife will get her a blaster. A blaster will get her back to the street. Wait a couple of hours until they dial down and smoke a little lotus to come off the high of being “real operators,” and she can at least get to the marine patrols. Those are happening every sixteen blocks.
