War Stories
Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori:
mors et fugacem persequitur virum
nec parcit inbellis iuventae
poplitibus timidove tergo.
- Horace, Odes
SOME SAY YOU can’t go forward into the future without letting go of the past. Sometimes, it’s the past that won’t let go of you.
Gravity will do that to you, too. You ride up to the starships in shuttles that burn against the g-forces, but gravity—it doesn’t let you go. Not easily. One gravity, two gravities, three gravities press you back into your inertial restraints, the memory of the last tour made tangible, pulling you back.
You get past Saturn, past Jupiter, past Mars—you think you’re finally headed home. And suddenly all the weight you carry is there, a system-sized gravity well of life and death, of comrades lost or left behind, of half-truths and lies, of choices made; all these fill your bones, marrow-cold and heavy, weighing on you like a war story.
But you don’t really want to hear about war. You don’t want to know about how the machine gun fire from Warthog armor drowns out the screaming as you mow down the enemy, or how loud your heartbeat sounds when a hunter-killer drone shines a ranging laser on your position. You don’t want to know about the taste of ash and soot, the smell of blood, the scorching heat burning the small hairs on your body as a flash grenade detonates in the trenches.
You want to hear about courage and honor. You want the medals, the bugles, the drums. You want to hear about starships on fire off Orion’s shoulder, plasma beams glittering as they slice through inertial drives.
I’m sorry.
* * *
We’re waiting at the pickup point, about fifty clicks from where the drop-ship let us off, eight months ago. It’s me and about half the crew I came to Titan with. That’s pretty par for the course. Sometimes, in the mess tents, we forget and set up plates for those who aren’t there anymore. We don’t forget again.
We’re mingling with other squads, here from different missions, our only commonality that we fight on the same side of this war.
Two hours to departure. From here a shuttle will take us up to the starship Miyazaki, where we’ll go into hyper-sleep for the longest leg of the journey. For some of us, it’s to Europa, for others, to Deimos. Already, other ships are on their way here from those settlements, bringing our replacements.
It’s my third tour. I’m one of the lucky ones.
I scan the faces of the soldiers around me, but I don’t see Sharkey around.
Sharkey and I aren’t from the same mission team. We’d met on the Aldrin station on Deimos. All the cubs were at the terminals, reading anything that was sent to them, sending out their messages home. I was passing by, finishing a Molson Canadian lager when a private got up without warning from their seat and ran into me, upsetting what was left of my drink.
She was more distraught than I was over it, but I’d let her buy me a replacement. Hey, however you can get it. On her station uniform, the stencilled patch spelled out A. CHERENKOV. Her name was Anya, but her crew called her Sharkey, so I did.
We made a pact to see each other again, if we made it.
I decide to circle around, see if I could find her, if she did.
As I trudge through the encampment, I’m surrounded by snatches of stories from groups of soldiers, familiar and unfamiliar voices mingling like a congregation prayer.
* * *
A group is in a circle, cleaning their plasma rifles as I pass by.
One of them is talking: “So we’re on Arwen Colles, by what looks like the dried up remains of a river. It’s quiet and there’s time, I duck into the trees for a piss. I’m done with my business and headed back through the brush and all of a sudden there’s the barrel of a plasma rifle poking right in my ribs. It’s this zook, except he’s as shocked as I am. He’s charging up his piece, but it malfuncks on him, and I zap him five—boom boom boom boom boom—before he can get the lead out. Alt history.”
That gets a laugh from the company.
* * *
Sharkey and I had gotten to talking at the bar, and by the second lager she’d told me about how the last mail on her message list—and the reason for my spilled drink—had been from her Mars-based ex, suing for full custody of their daughter, who for the duration of the tour was with her parents.
“He might as well shoot me,” she said.
She bit her lip. I offered her a cig-cap, and she pinched it under her nose, inhaling in the vapors. I didn’t know really what to say, but I knew this was probably a good time to change the subject. What she’d said reminded me about Luther Myers, a guy I knew from my second tour, so I said, I’d been shot once, and memorably.
“Yeah?” she asked.
“See, there was this guy in my squad, Luther. First tour, didn’t know any better, not listening to anything you said. He was just a kid, right? We were on a march into the Ettenmoors, about a day’s travel across the plains from the drop point. Sarge called a break right at the edge of Eryn Vorn, heavy jungle with no sunlight, snakes, vines, quicksand, you name it. It would be slower going from here, you see, night vision, the works. While we were checking gear, Luther went off and started playing with an Aetna flaregun.”
She cocked her head. “Aetna?”
“They’re the ones that shoot re-usable flares. After you launched your flares, you track them to where they fell, pick them up when they’d cooled enough, and use them again. So Luther was standing maybe twenty feet away from me, holding an Aetna and zapping imaginary zooks in the jungle. And I told him, knock it off. He loaded, and fired the flare straight at me.”
“Holy mack.”
“Hit me square in the body armor. The goddamn heat through the chest plate insulation was just bearable, and I was cursing and tearing off my armor, and Luther stood there laughing as the flare sputtered and died.”
“What did you do about it?”
“Cursed him out and said he’d better not sleep that night, or I’d shoot an Aetna up his ass.”
It worked; she laughed. “For real?”
I took a swig. “No, not really. There were zooks in that jungle, and Luther took a sniper hit to the temple.”
She thought about that for a moment, then took a swig of her own.
“War is hell,” she said.
When hyper-sleep time came, Sharkey and I had chosen parallel sleep pods. After we woke, she told me that she wouldn’t mind hooking up again, after both our tours were over.
* * *
Another group I pass is cleaning out the last of their rations.
“So Rizzo was driving us back to the base, we’re the lead in a convoy. I’m the guy behind the driver, right? What happened next is a blur. The guy riding shotgun, Johnson, yells ‘Truck right!’ and Rizzo swerves right, but there’s two bombs on the road, not just one, and we hit the second with a BOOM! The truck cartwheels and slams into the ground. Rizzo is dead, Johnson is dead, and I’m there with my goddamn arm blown off. Just because I’m the guy behind the driver.”
* * *
When I find Sharkey, she’s with a group sitting by the temporary comm station. She was talking, so I hang back, listening in.
“It was about halfway through my tour,” she was saying, “We were out on a rescue mission in Chusuk Planitia for an advance patrol that hadn’t reported in. We were headed east on our first pass when out of nowhere we were hit by gunfire. We lost control of the spinner, hit the surface at speed. It was twisted metal everywhere, the smell of burning. I was shouting ‘Get out, get out!’ but my leg couldn’t move, and I had to drag myself out when suddenly I was hauled up. I looked up, and I was in between two zooks, and there were more of them, all around, kicking at my crew.
“Well they tried to stand me up but I couldn’t, my left leg was bad off, and when I fell back down again they started shouting at me, and one of them jammed their handgun to the back of my head and I thought, here it is, I’m going to die. He pulled my helmet off and that’s when they realized I was a woman.
“They tore off my weapons belt, examined my medical vest, and then they started shouting. Not at me, but at each other. It kept going for a little while, but then the guy with the handgun put it away. I think they realized this had been a medical mission, and that pretty much saved my life, I guess. They tied up my leg, threw me on a truck, and three of them took me to a hospital in the nearest zook town.”
She took a whiff off of a cig-cap.
“Anyway, on the truck on the way to the hospital, that was when it happened. I was in the back, on the floor because I couldn’t sit right. And there’s the guy with the handgun on the side bench, guarding me, and he’s looking at me like he still can’t believe I’m a woman. I wasn’t really thinking about anything in particular. I was thinking, I’m alive, and were my crew still alive, was anyone else still alive. And then this zook lowers himself from the bench to the ground, and he starts to kiss me.”
Someone says, “Damn.”
“I know,” says Sharkey. “I mean, there I am, cut up and bloody, with my leg in a tourniquet and sitting in a pool of blood and dirt, and this is all he can think about? And before I know it, he’s tearing at my uniform and starting to paw me. At that time I’m not doing anything, I’m thinking if I do something, am I going to die? And here he is groping me, pushing me to the ground, pulling the zip down to my pants.”
“So what did you do?”
She inhaled another vape.
“I grabbed his hand, put it on my crotch, then snapped it back and broke his wrist.”
“He screamed, of course. The truck stopped. I zipped up my suit, the others came running and when they saw him, cursed and switched him to the front of the truck, and we continued on. But no one ever touched me again.”
* * *
That’s when she sees me. She gets up, crosses the group, and hugs, saying nothing.
“Sharkey,” I say, hugging her back. “Sharkey. I missed you.”
She nods, and although she wasn’t before, she is suddenly crying.
What we both know, in that moment that we are holding each other, that we didn’t know a moment before, was that we are, the two of us, alive. It’s a gift.
Someone else in her group starts telling a story—but just then the shuttle breaks through the clouds above us, looming like the hand of God.
Through the roar of the retro-rockets I shout to her that I have to get back to my squad, that we’d meet up again on the Miyazaki.
She nods, but it’s a long time before she lets go.
“Thank God,” she says.
* * *
Funny thing, that.
On our final mission before tour end, our squad receives orders to move in on a specific set of coordinates on Titan. We mobilize and head out, all we know is that the enemy had taken the target, and that we had to take it back.
It turns out to be this church in Echoriath Montes. There’s even a goddamn cross on the top of the tower, and a bell in that tower. The guys hesitate for a second, and I know what they are thinking, we’re going to hell for this.
Still, we’ve got orders.
We surround the place, cover all the exits. We train our howitzers on the windows, and then we hit them with everything we’ve got, plasma charges spitting out smoke like there’s no tomorrow. We’re raining fire on that church like God’s own wrath.
When the zooks pour out we let go with the Weyman J77 machine rifles, yelling obscenities, shells spraying all over the place like they’re fireworks, firing until there’s nothing moving.
Sarge waves us forward, and we close in.
As we cross the threshold I remember, and here’s the kicker, I remember that this is a place of worship, and for some reason I remember my Nana, who used to take me to church; I make the sign of the cross.
* * *
Thank God.
But does God have anything to do with it?
The odds were always against me surviving for a fourth tour. War is like Russian roulette; you pull the trigger, and if that chamber is a blank, it only means that the next time you pull the trigger, the odds have shifted considerably against you.
On my first tour, I was brought to the trauma centre at Faramir Colles, which was nothing more than three trailers at the base of a hill.
An hour earlier I’d been sitting down to Thanksgiving dinner with my regiment, when suddenly a spinner crashed through the perimeter. The sentries opened fire as everyone dived for cover, but it was too late. It turned out the spinner was loaded with explosives, primed to go within a minute after it had crossed the gates. Jack Eastbrook stood his ground, coolly firing at its tires. He hit one, the spinner veered away, but not enough—then it went off.
There was blood everywhere, Eastbrook had all his limbs blown off. But he was still alive when the med vehicle got there.
I had shrapnel in the legs, and they took out every excruciating piece in one of those trauma centre trailers. I screamed throughout. But they stopped me from bleeding to death, augmented me with cybernetic implants so I could walk again, fight again, kill again. As long as they could keep me alive they could keep on replacing my limbs, almost until I became indistinguishable from the zooks we were fighting.
I’ll take trailer number two for five hundred, Jack.
In trailer number three, quietly, Eastbrook died.
* * *
I watched an old vid-reel once, about day-to-day life in a field military surgical hospital. In one episode there’s this doctor talking to a chaplain.
He says, “Father, William Sherman was wrong.” Sherman was a general in the Union Army in the first American Civil War.
The doctor is saying, “War isn’t Hell. War is worse than Hell.”
And the priest says, “How so?”
The doctor says, “Only sinners go to Hell.”
And the priest goes, “And war?”
“War is full of the innocent,” says the doctor. “Civilians, children, old people. Doctors and nurses. Factory workers. Soldiers. Almost everyone—except maybe for the weapons-makers and some generals—almost everyone in war is an innocent.”
* * *
In the hyper-sleep hall on the Miyazaki, I fold my uniform neatly and put it in the drawer underneath. Now fully clad in a sleep-suit, I haul myself into the pod and wait for the fluid that would come in and cover us before we went into hyper-sleep.
“Sam.”
It’s Sharkey, on my right.
“I’ve been meaning to tell you. It didn’t happen that way.”
I nod.
“I mean, not all of it.”
“I know.”
She’s lying down in her pod, looking up at the ceiling. All around us the soldiers are talking to each other, bantering with jokes, other stories. But on her right, the pod is empty, as on my left. She must have noticed that, one of those little things that push you to go further with your secrets than you intend to.
“After that zook touched me, I didn’t break his wrist. I froze. I didn’t do anything. I didn’t want to make the situation any worse than it was. I didn’t want to die.”
I say nothing. Her eyes are still on the ceiling, as if that metal stretched far away into infinity. Her hands are clasped, as if she’s praying, or in a confessional.
“He ripped my suit open and when he pushed my legs apart I screamed. And the truck stopped, and the others came. They were shouting, and at first I thought they were going to stop him. Then they started watching.”
She is silent for a moment, maybe waiting for a sign from me that I’m listening, maybe for me to say something about forgiveness, or about penance. I don’t know what to say, so I nod again, and maybe the movement is enough.
“They all did it. Raped me.”
I watch her for a moment, but she’s closed her eyes now, and presses the button on the inside of her pod. The lid slips down on her. For a while you can see her breath fogging up the glass porthole, then disappear as the hyper-fluid fills the tank.
* * *
Dulce et decorum est.
Sweet and glorious it is...
We’ve repeated that lie to each other for thousands of years. You’d think we would have learned better by now.
Yet here we are—on this godforsaken ship, circling the moon of a godforsaken world, seven hundred and some odd million miles from home, three years’ of travel in hyper-sleep to where our families and children weep for us, and everything we cling to—everything we tell ourselves is real, every story we tell each other—is either half of a truth, or a lie.
* * *
When Sharkey’s pod is filled, I settle back in my own. The memory material form-fits to me, cushioning my human arms and half-human legs in a familiar embrace. I press my own button, and the casket lid closes on me with a hum.
Anya, I whisper to myself, and I repeat her name, because she’s who I want to think about, she’s who I want to see in my three-year-long dreams. But sometimes, the past won’t let go of you. When I close my eyes, it isn’t Sharkey that I see.
It’s her.
I can still see her very clearly, the zook hiding in the confessional in that church in Echoriath. I’m pretty sure it was a confessional. I remember my grandmother taking me when I was eleven, because unlike my mother she hadn’t stopped believing in a God.
At the rear of La Iglesia de San Juan Bautista, where Nana went on Sundays, there was a small, enclosed booth with a central chamber, where—in place of God—the priest sat, with two smaller booths on either side. You sat kneeling in the dark, until the priest opened up a small, latticed window to your small booth, which was a sign to start fumbling through your sins.
At the rear of the church in Echoriath there was also a confessional booth. I was the first one there, and I kicked open the middle door. Empty, as was the small booth on the right. I kicked open the one on the left, and there she was, hands clasped and kneeling, whispering through the lattice window to no one.
“You!” I said, and I motioned her outside with the rifle, but she ignored me, still whispering to no one. “You!” I said again, and she looked at me, and crossed herself.
She came out, arms and legs bruised and in a rag that must have once been a dress. She was the smallest thing. Her lips were ashen, her eyes were teary, and her face was smeared with soot. Her auburn hair was askew, strewn with caked mud. The smallest thing. So frail, almost inconsequential.
She raised her hands. There, on the palm of the little girl’s left hand was branded a single letter: ‘R’.
I stood there, about as close to her as Sharkey was from me, three feet away from the face I see so clearly now, imploring, understanding but not understanding why.
Then Sarge’s voice: “What the frag are you waiting for?”
I looked back, and there was Sarge and half my patrol on the altar platform, weapons ready, watching me. I raised my plasma rifle, touched it to her heart, and I fired.
* * *
The Miyazaki is turning.
You can feel the slow rotation of the ship as it turns, and the thrum of the ion thrusters readying their push against Titan’s gravity.
But the secrets we keep, the lies of war honorable and glorious, they hew a gravity well deeper than for the planet and all of Saturn’s sixty-two moons, an abyss from which there is no escape.
I close my eyes, and prepare for dreaming.