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  I imagine the intent of the calibration exercise wasn’t to see four hundred people vomit all at once, but you know science.

  *

  We were out in that vomit-strewn field for five hours on that first day. When Pain was switched off for upgrades and software patching overnight, I slept and had these insane dreams. I wasn’t the only one. Turns out having a ton of invasive filaments in your important brain parts makes you a little crazy.

  But we worked at it. Pain got better, and we improved, too. Five hours, each day, for a week. That was the simple stuff. It was six weeks before we were running drills. It was three months before we got onto live fire.

  When they put the shunt in they told me they took out a tiny sliver of metal I didn’t even know had been in my head. I thought it was a spot, or a freckle. Maybe that was why my memory was unreliable. Whatever I’d lost wasn’t coming back. There was only forward, and there was only one door at the end of our journey, and now we all had Sergeant Pain in our heads to keep that final door closed a while longer.

  24.

  Live Fire

  Vidar Dawes

  I was weighing a new sidearm in my palm. Fully loaded, it weighed around 500 grams, maybe. Nothing to make me walk with a limp. The gun was a Fin-S. Like old world spies might’ve chewed on cyanide pills so they couldn’t blab to the enemy, this new armament had a trick, too. There was a small explosive charge in the palm grip. If you were out of ammo you could charge it and throw it like a grenade. I guess you could hug it and it’d blow with the force of a plasma blast through your chest if you didn’t want to go out slow.

  ‘What do you think?’ asked a man in my squad. There were four of us on each run, linked with Pain and learning how to use her in different tactical situations. We were waiting on a go from a real sergeant for our first training session with live fire.

  I didn’t talk to many people if I didn’t have to, but I recognised the guy because you can’t see people for more than a year and at least not get a tickle, like a feeling you should know them.

  ‘Cartwright, right?’ I said.

  He was sweating in the Nevada heat. Nellis was bigger than Vegas had been at its height. I probably saw our barracks and the training grounds more than anything else and didn’t expect I’d see much more than that. After this, we weren’t staying at Nellis long. I felt it, and people were already gossiping about us moving back into the field.

  Cartwright nodded, ejected and reseating the cartridge magazine in the butt of the gun.

  ‘Got plenty of punch,’ he said.

  I shrugged. ‘Sure. An exploding gun seems kind of dramatic,’ I said. ‘Not like they can ask us questions if they capture us.’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Fuck that, right?’

  I nodded. I didn’t fancy taking one for the team. Who did?

  ‘I’ll go down to fists if I have to,’ he said, ‘but I’m not blowing out my own guts for a laugh.’

  ‘Dawes! Squad on three!’

  Cartwright gave me a final nod and me, him, and two others took position at the entrance to the testing ground.

  ‘Remember, kids,’ said the sergeant. His bald head shone in the sun. ‘Sergeant Pain is over watch. You are in control. Her sweet voice in your ear holes are not orders! Don’t do what the dumb kids did!’

  ‘Sir,’ we said. He was fifty feet above us in a watch tower. We yelled. People yell a lot in the army which was fortunate for me because my hearing was shot. Blown and screamed and all other sorts of damage at that point too.

  The ‘dumb kids’ as the sergeant on his platform in the sun called them were a team from the previous day. One of them had lost their life because they hadn’t thought for themselves – another had taken Pain’s directions for literally orders, shot blind and put a bullet through her team mate’s throat. One dead, which was a loss and it hit us hard for some reason. I don’t know. Maybe it was a reminder we weren’t all of a sudden immortal. Maybe it was such a shock because we’d been training and not fighting. You expect death out in the field. You don’t expect to get killed by a team mate in an exercise.

  The woman who’d taken the shot was gone. I didn’t feel sad about that. There really isn’t room for those kind of fuck ups. Not in an army, and not this one.

  ‘Three!’ bellowed out the sergeant on the parapet. He’d be able to see where we were going. We, though, wouldn’t be able to see far ahead because our training ground was a maze, designed so that we would have to rely on each other, on Pain, and on the sporadic directions which would lead us through the fire exercise.

  ‘Take her out for a spin, shall we?’ said Cartwright, left hand wrapping his right, right wrapping the Fin-S, thumbs on the left side of the slide, eyes forward.

  ‘On me,’ I told my squad, and we moved in.

  I didn’t intend to shoot one of my own.

  It was me, Cartwright, some woman whose name I forgot, a man I only remember because he was short, thin, like a 13-year old. Thirty seconds into a maze and Sgt. Pain was silent because there were no threats, but she was learning the layout of the board-frame maze we were moving through.

  Forty seconds in and I was getting jittery. Not scared, because no one was really trying to kill us, but the exercise was building up tension. Maybe making us realise Pain couldn’t see through walls, round corners. She could only see and hear what we could.

  It was, I guess, as good a reminder as any.

  Cartwright fired first. A mechanical crab-mine – a replica – popped up. Cartwright shoved me to one side, with his left shoulder, and fired so he didn’t screw up my hearing more, which was thoughtful.

  ‘Two,’ said the woman, and immediately got tagged straight from below. A shitty trick, but accurate. I’d see soldiers step right onto crab mines only to have the things wake up and climb their legs like a feral cat before blowing them to chunks.

  The 13-year old looking guy, taking six for Cartwright and I, fired.

  ‘Six o’clock/90 degree’. Pain’s instructions were minimal by then, the scientists realising less was more in a fire fight.

  I resisted the urge to spin and join the young looking guy in blasting a fake crab mine, and rightly so. A hole dropped out of the cardboard maze and I put a tight three through a catfish thing on a prehensile ‘webbed’ tail. I’d never seen such a thing, but this wasn’t xenobiology and they were only robotic facsimiles.

  The catfish thing fizzed, showing a hit. The younger looking guy got tagged behind me.

  I knew Pain would have informed him of the danger, rather than me, because I was the one who’d seen it. Sgt. Pain and her programmers were quick studies.

  Me and Cartwright remained. The woman and the kid sat it out now.

  ‘Move on,’ yelled the Sergeant from his watchtower.

  Only the two of us stepped clear of the boarded, fabricated maze. We both had ammunition to spare.

  ‘Didn’t need to blow ourselves up,’ said Cartwright.

  We bumped fists, mine on his, his on mine.

  ‘See you on the field,’ I said.

  I liked him. He didn’t talk too much.

  25.

  Leap before you look

  - Kiyoko Jones

  Kiyoko Jones, Rear Admiral of a largely dead sea-going fleet, smoked her third THC cigarette in a row in a crowded situation room.

  People on the ground thought they were the only ones looking older in the war, or bearing scars. Jones didn’t have any new scars. She hadn’t fired the weapon she carried wherever she went but she looked worn down. The war had hurt her in ways that were just as obvious as a bold red slash on a marine’s face.

  Her hair was nearly all grey, instead of the near-black it had once been. It was thicker now it was grey, too, and though she wore it short the added weight changed her face. She’d lost pounds since the war. She slept less, ate less, and barely smiled.

  Admiral Jones waited like everyone else on the man who strolled in. An officer from StratInt. He wore a bland suit, a blank expre
ssion, and carried a heavy briefcase. Inside was a disposable field Netboard, which he routed through the white screen generation unit.

  A map of the solar system came up.

  ‘What are we looking at here?’ she asked. She smelled of cannabis. At this point, she didn’t care much. No one else at the table did, either.

  This is what despair looks like, she thought, glancing around at the assembled great and good of the world’s leaders who survived.

  ‘This is our solar system...’

  ‘We got that, Dima,’ said a consultant from a Russian military manufacturer. Dima; little boy.

  The StratInt officer’s expression didn’t shift.

  ‘Information as to how they came to Earth has been sketchy until now, but we believe we have an answer. It was always evident from the ships’ construction that they would be incapable of interstellar or intergalactic flight. However, an anomaly was discovered by a scientific satellite within Saturn’s rings.’

  The officer zoomed and enlarged the display until a gap in the rings was clearly evident.

  ‘This is the Keeler Gap. We believe what you are seeing may be a portal,’ said Global Net’s talking head.

  Jones leaned forward to stare at the space on the display. Despite having all but given up, she couldn’t help but feel intrigued at this latest discover.

  ‘You’re telling us with a straight face that these aliens came through a portal?’ said the belligerent Russian representative. ‘Like a hole in space?’

  ‘Yes. Hypotheses include space-folding technology, wormholes, FTL boosters...like a rubber band flicking a...’

  ‘Bollocks,’ said Jones before the man from StratInt could get himself knocked out by the Munitions’ manufacturer he was currently patronising.

  ‘Ma’am?’ said the Intel Officer.

  ‘This changes a hell of a lot,’ said General J. John Haugan, who didn’t just look older, but looked jaundiced, with heavy jowls now, like he’d taken up drinking in a serious and devout manner.

  ‘Doesn’t it?’ said General of the Airforce Sam Farel, still looking vigorous and eager which Jones’ thought was some kind of miracle. ‘We need to change our focus.’

  ‘From what?’ said Jones. ‘Losing?’

  ‘No. To ending this threat once and for all.’

  ‘Destroy the portal?’ said a man Jones didn’t know.

  ‘Why? If they can make one, they can make another, surely?’ said a sever-looking woman from an Asian conglomerate which developed space flight tech. Had, Jones reminded herself. That was before the world had turned all brown and runny.

  ‘No,’ said a man whose face Jones knew from years back. Peck, she thought. He politely indicated with a gesture that Jones might want to listen and not be quite so stoned.

  Not bad advice.

  She stubbed out the butt of her cigarette with a nod of recognition to Peck.

  ‘What if we were to go through?’ Peck continued.

  ‘With what?’ said a delegate from the Africas Unity. He was a veteran of the land war with the Cephal and the Zoan across the broad continent. He boasted bold white hair in a cloud around a bald pate. ‘We’ve reached Mars. Interstellar, though? Through a portal? My friends...we still miss Mars sometimes.’

  ‘With their ships? Use them?’ scoffed a Japanese delegate.

  ‘Global Net is working with StratInt on a solution,’ said the officer. ‘Please allow me to...’

  The Intel Officer was tenacious, Jones had to give him that. Whatever he was going to say, voices from across the globe were far louder than his.

  ‘Let him speak!’ yelled Jones. She was a Rear Admiral, and she was tired. Listening to the brightest political, military and corporate minds behaving like children was making her head ache.

  ‘Please,’ she added in a more reasonable tone.

  ‘StratInt and Global Net are suggesting that we take back the initiative. This should be our focus.’

  ‘Go through?’ said Farel. ‘Seriously?’

  The StratInt man changed the display, seemingly relieved despite his cold demeanour, that the question was something he was prepared for. He tapped a port in his head and his connection with Global Net boosted, he brought up various displays simultaneously.

  ‘We lost contact with three orbital platforms in the first arrivals, but three more are still operational. Not all off-world assets have gone quiet. Seven manufacturing facilities on the moon still function at full or near full capacity. Construction of parts began under the direction of StratInt and Global Net after the first month of this war.’

  ‘What?’ said someone from the India/Pakistan Hegemony not in the know about the extent of A.U.’s wealthy and resources.

  ‘Heavy ships manufacturing,’ asked Farel. ‘On the moon? Since the invasion? And Global Net didn’t inform, oh, I don’t know...humans?!’

  ‘Global Net forestalled a problem which it believed would arise,’ said the man, straightening an already immaculate suit. ‘That is all. Because of Global Net’s predictions we are in the position of having a fleet large enough to carry a retaliatory force. We needed time, and we have had that time...’

  ‘Time for what?’

  ‘To build,’ said the StratInt man, smiling for the first time. ‘I suggest we focus now on the future, not our past failings.’

  Jones wondered if anyone was going to hit the man, for his tone, his irritating manner, his tacit accusation that Earth’s plight was somehow the fault of any and everything except Global Net.

  If Global Net was so damn smart, how in hell did it not foresee the coming, overwhelming force in the first place?

  It was a question that had been asked before, many times. Bringing it up again wasn’t going to get this meeting anywhere useful.

  She should be angry that this was only revealed to the world’s most powerful leaders at that moment, but she only felt tired.

  Besides, she thought. We’re not the world’s most powerful leaders anymore, are we? We’re only humanity’s most powerful leaders.

  The world had Global Net, didn’t it? Global Net troubled her more with each passing year, with each unanswered or deflected question.

  ‘Even if going through were a viable option,’ said Jones, trying to keep her calm, despite that the thought of some kind of new space faring ships was patently ridiculous, ‘such an endeavour could take years. Years, frankly, we don’t have.’

  ‘Yes,’ said the delegate from the Japanese company. ‘It takes nine months for a light science vessel to reach Saturn’s rings. A mining barge? A year.’

  General Haugan interrupted, thoughtful. He didn’t know, but he wouldn’t see out the summer of ’94, let alone the war. ‘If I may? In D-Day, every ship available, civilian and military, came to get the soldiers out of Europe in the war of 1939-45. I suggest, with respect, that the entire world is capable of quite a lot more.’

  ‘Billion are dead! Billions!’

  ‘Which means even at a conservative estimate that billions are not!’ Haugan didn’t look well at all, but Jones was pleased to see someone, at least, still felt righteous anger. ‘We need this. That, I suggest, is incontrovertible.’

  ‘And what if we go to their planet and just lose everything?’ said a Chinese embassy official.

  ‘This could mean the next leap in human evolution. This could see us not on Mars and the Moon...but among the stars. A new age for mankind,’ this thoughtful statement came from a General Ng, his visage cast in 3-D from one of the academic bunkers.

  ‘It could still take years,’ said a voice Jones missed, and she missed countless others, too, but she watched Haugan. How tired he looked, but how angry, too.

  Is that how I look?

  She thought she might.

  She glanced around. She could see the flow of the meeting changing. Haugan was right. She might well distrust Global Net, too, but their current strategy wasn’t working too well, was it?

  Isn’t that the definition of madness? To keep trying something
you know won’t work, over and over again?

  Even if Earth’s combined nations and states managed to hold out or destroy the enemy entirely they would come again.

  ‘We can hunt down everything on Earth,’ said the StratInt man, mirroring Jones’ private thoughts. ‘The threat will remain. Then what? What if this is the first wave? What if there is the second wave? We would face the extinction of our species.

  ‘Or...as a united world we make an all out effort to finish this alien threat utterly.’

  Jones looked at the table, at the holographic faces dotted among those physically present. She saw how things were falling, and she was in, wasn’t she?

  What else can we do? We fight. That’s what being human is, isn’t it?

  ‘Fuck it,’ she said. ‘I haven’t got anything better going on. What about you?’

  26.

  From Nellis

  Vidar Dawes

  For nearly two years, until late 2296, we held. We were beat down and we were prey, but there was a change coming and we all felt it. A hot breeze, sure, but a relief. It blew through the sweaty barracks and air fields of Nellis, and like a real breeze in a summer might it gave us some sense of relief.

  We, Patriot, who were the cast-off carnival freaks who just refused to die were emergent, evolving. We were the ones left when a race who thought they had conquered war were dragged back to battle. Patriot were relics, but in war we need the beasts, the unpredictable creature backed into a corner. We needed tools to fight a war, but it was the raw dogged determination and barred teeth with which we – I – fought that might finally win it.

  I felt refreshed. I’m sure others did, too. Barracks got a little more...lively. Sexuality and sex were just a fact of life. Among a bunch of physically fit soldier in their prime? We were like rabbits when we didn’t fight. Each morning I’d wake and hear the usual exchanges in the communal showers, or over breakfast of the pasted, fortified protein stodgy muck we ate.