In a clear space on the outskirts of the camp, separated from the nearest buildings by a hundred yards of scrub and churned earth, squad TS5-683 stood in a single line, spaced one stride apart. Facing them was a wall three metres high. The wall was solidly built, with three thicknesses of brick, but had been haphazardly painted. Swathes and streaks of whitewash only partially hid the dark stains that marked the wall along its entire length.
Twenty men and women stood with their backs to the wall and a foot or two in front of it. Their right wrists were cuffed, the other cuff in each case being locked through a metal ring set in the top of a chest-high concrete post. There were faint stains on the posts that matched those on the walls. Where the walls had been whitewashed the posts had been scrubbed with bleach or lye, but the stains seemed deeply ingrained. The selves who’d been bound to them were naked, apart from the sacks of rough, straw-coloured fabric that had been put over their heads.
The symmetry – twenty Cielo troopers, twenty bound and hooded prisoners – unnerved Essien. A fear was growing in him, strong enough to cut through the fuzzy, percolating solace of his squad’s nearness.
“The thing you’ve got to understand,” Otubre said, “is that matter isn’t evenly distributed. If it was we’d all just be dust floating in space. But the dust comes together and makes stuff. Garden furniture. Buildings. People. Keep Left signs. That’s order coming out of chaos, and it’s a good thing. Cleave to it, soldiers. Order is what we want. Order is what we stand for.
“But the breaks and the bumps, the good luck and the bad – none of that is evenly distributed either. It’s random. If the universe is 90 per cent full of diarrhoea and you find yourself in one of the dry spots, you thank any gods that get you going and then you move right along. Life is life.”
Otubre had his back to the prisoners as he spoke, paying them no attention at all even though some of them were crying or whimpering and one had fallen to his knees – or not quite to his knees. The tie that bound his wrists kept him awkwardly squatting, legs bent under him and body folded sideways against the bare concrete pillar.
“Life is life,” the sergeant repeated. “Good, bad, whatever card you draw, there’s no point kicking against it. Wishing’s not going to change one fucking thing. But you – each and every one of you drew an ace because fuck me, here you are.”
He began to walk slowly down the line, head bowed a little in what looked like deep thought. When he came to Essien, Essien’s armour registered the proximity of a senior NCO and performed a digital salute. The letters and numbers of his ident scrolled across the inside of his helmet display. PTE/NKANIKA E/432nd HVY INF/DG10014/U5838784453, and then the temporary suffix TS5-683.
“Let me put a case to you,” Otubre said. “You go for a walk, and you come to a fork in the road. You could turn left, you could turn right. You choose left, and you find a ten-star on the floor. My lucky day, you think. You pick it up, find a bar. Treat yourself to a bung of the good stuff.
“But there was another world, where you turned right. And in that world a big bad wolf bit your head off before you’d gone ten steps. Bang. In that world you’re dead.”
The sergeant had come to the midpoint of the line. He lingered there for a little while, and for the first time turned to glance at the prisoners. Another of the hooded figures, a woman, had sunk to the ground right in front of the sergeant. Otubre nudged her leg with the toe of his boot.
“But wait a second, Sarge, I hear you say. I’m still alive here. I can feel my pulse. My heartbeat. The breath going in and out of my lungs. So what’s this bullshit you’re shovelling at me? Where is that other world? Where is that place where I died?”
He turned to face the recruits again and waited, hands clasped behind his back. “Okay then, where is it? Can anyone tell me?” Evidently this had stopped being just rhetoric. The sergeant expected an answer. None were offered. There was silence in the little clearing, except for the noises the prisoners were making.
“No? Nobody? Okay then, I’ll tell you where it is. It’s nowhere. And who lives in nowhere? Come on, troopers, who lives in nowhere? Gavangar, you tell me.”
Private Gavangar (432nd HVY INF/DG456827/G683726496) took a long time to reply. “Nobody, Sarge?” he said at last.
“Nobody!” Otubre boomed. “You got that right, Private. Nobody lives in nowhere.” He became more animated now, using his hands to model his argument. “Your homeworld—” left hand raised with the fingers spread “—is somewhere. And the rest of the Pando is somewhere. That’s where your friends come from. Your squad. Your platoon. Your regiment. And they’re as real as you are. You know damn well they are. But everything outside the Pando—” right hand coming up now, closed into a fist “—well, that’s right-turn land. That’s where you made the wrong choice, and you died. And everyone else that’s there, stands to reason that they’re dead too. Might have been that big bad wolf. Might have been a car. A heart attack. A bomb. A rabid dog. Doesn’t matter. We’re the left turn, they’re the right. We’re alive, they’re dead. Less than that, even. They’re smoke from a fire. Spray on a fucking windshield. They’re not real.”
The sergeant angled his body so he could point at the hooded, cowering men and women behind him. “They,” he said sternly, “are not real.”
He reached down with one gauntleted hand. Taking hold of the hood of the woman who’d fallen down, he snatched it from her head in a single sharp movement. She was left shivering and blinking in the daylight, her wide eyes darting to left and right. She looked as human as Essien himself, except for the nubs of horns on her forehead and a wispy stub of beard on her chin.
“Take a good look,” Otubre invited them all, “because that’s what nothing looks like. It looks like you. It looks like any and all of us, but it isn’t. Because we are the Cielo. We are the soldiers and defenders of the Pandominion, and these pieces of shit here are not a part of that. They’re not a part of anything. The worlds they come from are maybe-worlds. Worlds that are trying to be real. They’re never going to make it, but they can do us some harm as they bump up against us. They can spill over into our territories. Steal our stuff. Get in our way when we’re just trying to do our job.
“Well, we’ve got no choice but to put them in their place when they pull that indefensible bullshit. Or when they’re about to pull it and we know they’re thinking about it. That can be bloody and it can be ugly, but it doesn’t trouble our hearts because we know the truth. You can’t kill what was never alive in the first place. The people who live in nowhere aren’t people.”
He stood off to the side. “All right then,” he said. “Pick your target and step on up. No firing until I say so, but you will remove the target’s hood on my command. You will look the target in the eyes and tell them your name. They won’t remember it, but manners are manners.”
There was a moment when nobody moved. In that moment, Sergeant Otubre made to lock his hands behind his back again – and remembered that he was still holding the prisoner’s hood. He thrust it into Essien’s hands. “There you go, Nkanika. I’ve unwrapped yours for you.”
Still nobody moved.
“Sergeant,” Muks said, “are these people… what did they do? Are we an execution detail?”
“Private,” Otubre said, “are you disobeying a direct order?”
“No, Sergeant. I’m just—”
“What? Haggling about the terms? Deciding whether or not this order is for you? The Cielo wants these people dead. Isn’t that enough for you?”
“Sarge, yes. Of course. But—”
“Fall out, Muks. I’ll put your discharge papers through when we get back to barracks.”
With her helmet on, Muks’ face could not be seen. She still didn’t move.
“That makes two orders, Muks, and you haven’t carried out either one. But I’m a forbearing man and I’m going to let you choose. Which is it to be? I’ll give you a count of three. One. Two—”
“Sergeant, I’ll take the first order.”
“Okay then. Soldiers, step up. We’ve wasted enough fucking time here.”
Some of the recruits were moving now, stumbling or striding forward. Most of them chose the man or woman who was standing directly opposite them, but around Essien there was a little shuffling and weaving because he was now out of sequence. The woman he’d been assigned was still skittish, still glancing in all directions in case there might somehow be a way out of this. But when Essien’s shadow fell across her face, her gaze was drawn to him and stayed there.
“Hoods off,” Otubre said.
They all moved in perfect synchronisation on the command. Essien felt the pull of it, even though he was already holding the woman’s hood and had nothing to remove. He wanted to be in synch with the rest of the squad. Being in synch was a pleasure in itself.
“Identify yourselves.”
A chorus of voices, mumbling or declaiming. “Nkanika,” Essien said. “E. 432nd heavy infantry. Ident DG10014. Planet of origin U5838784453.”
The woman shook her head. She said something back to him, but he couldn’t make out what it was. She wasn’t speaking any language his suit’s AI could translate.
“Select fine beam,” Otubre said. “Intensity three, low dispersal.”
Menus and sub-menus blossomed and branched in Essien’s field of vision, overlaid on the real world without occluding it. He threaded them with his mind, folding the array down to a single choice. His right hand prickled as his wrist gun reported itself charged and ready.
The woman spoke again. She had a look in her eyes that Essien knew. An Oshodi look. The look of someone who’s been kicked and spat on often enough to know what’s coming. But she wasn’t begging him. The tone of the words and the outward thrust of her lower lip told him that much. She was telling him to go fuck himself.
Waka. Waka, go an quench.
“Fire,” the sergeant said.
Essien very much wanted not to, but it never really came to a decision. There was a tidal pull, from twenty minds obeying the same command at the same moment. They fired, all at once. Twenty shots, but only one sound.