Moon Sostenti was just about to embark on an important personal project when Vemmet’s message came. The project amounted to suicide in the long term, although she’d chosen her own sweet way of getting there.
Moon’s mind had been a stinking fug ever since Operation Silver. She flinched whenever her eye caught a flash of sunlight off a metal surface, and woke every night choking from insane dreams of discorporation where her body was transformed into building blocks, dust, steam, a mispronounced word. She stumbled through her days, clutching after simple things that temporarily evaded her: the names of her fellow soldiers, the drill for presenting arms, the day of the week, her own name.
She was on meds for depression and she had been given an augment – military grade, ugly and visible – to control a severe dyskinesia that was apparently a long-term symptom of spending so long in the neural mesh. Meanwhile, she was still getting all the same dogshit details she’d been getting before, and she was still being passed over for her sergeant’s star in favour of milk-eye recruits who’d been kittens back when she first enlisted. The longer she struggled on under these conditions, the less sense she could see in the effort.
She had thought about alternatives. You couldn’t desert from the Cielo. The physical enhancements you were given when you enlisted were controlled, as a lot of augments were. They had to be cleanly deactivated when you were demobbed. A soldier who went AWOL from their unit was given three weeks’ grace, after which a lock command would be sent. Their limbs would seize up and their organs would shut down. Being twenty-oned, as it was commonly called, wasn’t anyone’s idea of a good way to die.
Moon had six years left on her army contract, after which she could take her demob and try her luck somewhere else. But where? The Cielo was all she knew. She had plenty of friends who’d tried to make the transition back to civilian life, and she’d seen what had happened to most of them. The odds were long.
Or she could continue to shoulder the burden and shovel the shit, in the hope that the demerit on her docket would eventually wear itself out. Good luck with that! The Cielo was like any bureaucracy. You could only rely on it to forget the things you most needed it to remember, like when your next furlough was due.
At last she had reached a decision. She would frag every officer who had ever dumped a rat’s-ass detail on her. Obviously that was a long list, and she didn’t expect to get to the end of it. Somewhere along the way she would be apprehended, court-martialled and executed, or more likely just shot dead on the spot to save paperwork.
So far she only had the one killing under her belt. It was Hossul, the colonel who’d flown into Operation Silver to tell all the guinea pigs there that the army appreciated their sacrifice. She’d got lucky. The colonel had dropped by the 432nd to consult with local brass about a new offensive. That consultation literally imploded when Moon low-lobbed a singularity grenade into his bivouac.
But her programme had stalled there. Magazines were locked down, Sa-Su ammunition was trackable and the camp was awash with tiny Beekeeper surveillance drones. It was going to be a while before she got another notch on her belt.
To her chagrin, Moon couldn’t even bring herself to care. She’d expected that the colonel’s death would bring her something in the way of satisfaction or relief, but it really didn’t. He was just an idiot working in a system that had given him more authority than he could handle. The Cielo was full of them. Probably all armies were.
So what next? The fire exit, as it was sometimes coyly called, seemed like an increasingly attractive option. Trackable or not, she could lean on her Sa-Su and take a slug through the top of her head. Or just wait a month, until the regiment was rotated back into a combat theatre. Casualties in the war were running so high that she wouldn’t even have to try that hard.
Then, out of nowhere, came a comm-stat from Orso Vemmet – the self whose fucking pointless surveillance detail had been the start of all Moon’s many and various sorrows. She almost didn’t open it.
When she did, she thought he must have meant to send it to someone else.
Glad to hear you can visit me on Tsakom, it read. We can talk about your imminent promotion and my reinstatement as watchmaster. So many good things coming to us, and so little we have to do to make them happen.
All of which was baffling enough. But it was the second paragraph that was the kicker. We’ll be hunting, fishing, trapping – all the things you love. I promise you a chase worthy of your old friend Essien Nkanika. I’m sure that brings back memories. Time to make some new and better ones? I think so.
Kindest regards,
Orso Vemmet
There was a hidden message here that Moon would have to be very stupid indeed to miss. Vemmet was up to something, and he wanted her help for it. The mention of Nkanika told her what kind of something it had to be, evoking the mission that had fucked the both of them and teasing the possibility that something could be done in the way of unfucking.
Hunting? Trapping? So Vemmet was asking her to run an op of some kind. A raid, maybe somewhere in the sinkhole.
Moon had some leave coming, as far as that went. But did she want to waste it on Orso fucking Vemmet when she could be finding a ledge to jump off or going on one last glorious bender? Most of the nails in her coffin dated from the last time she and that scrawny little grease-stain had teamed up. Why in the name of the goddess’s holy dildo would she want a second dose of that?
Then again, if oblivion was what she was after maybe this was the nearest way of getting there.
The hell with it, she decided in the end. Vemmet had made her curious. That was a novelty in itself, and a chink in the solid wall of her anomie. Her CO stamped the request without even looking at it. The 432nd was heading out for Ansurrection space soon, and on present showing at least a third of the muster wouldn’t come back. Moon wasn’t the only one who was cashing in her furlough while she still could.