HEY, SIL? HAVE YOU EVER been on a train?” I ask.
“Huh?”
“A train. A transportation device. Old. Pre-wipeout technology,” I reply.
“Do I look like a transpo scholar? Maybe that guy rattled you a little more than you want to admit,” Sil says as she adjusts the fuel levels on her side of the cockpit.
I let out a nervous laugh, suddenly embarrassed about something as silly as a dream. Then for a split second I wonder if I should go for a mental review. My grandmother had visions she swore were premonitions. They committed her. Nope. Best to just shake it off. It’s probably a symptom of the nanigel.
A day of rest in the infirmary and I’m back to training. Alpha 9’s been ravaged by religious civil war for hundreds of years, and there’s little more than rubble left. Military conscription is mandatory for all citizens of the Republic if you want to have some kind of life for yourself. Ten years of elementary indoctrination and then another five of secondary training, followed by your choice of a number of military posts for advanced training. If you’re smart enough you can test out of those last two years of secondary, like Sil and I did, and skip right on up to advanced. Sure, you can decide to opt out, but if there’s ever an evacuation for a plague—or, God forbid, another atmospheric collapse—you’re on your own. Worse still, you could be sent back to Earth, and not even God can help you in that hellscape.
Our base is a temporary outpost, just thirty-five thousand people if you don’t include the prisoners in the supermaximum- security jail, and the handful of corporate execs sent to oversee investments. It’s one of those quick and dirty operations made for people with ambition and a strong stomach. Our units are here to either find something or destroy something.
Sil and I pull up slowly to our attack position on the dummy course. We’re doing a reconnaissance drill. The instructors are somewhere close by, but we can’t see them. The abandoned city we’re using for the drill looks ancient and eerie at this time of night. Hologram citizens flicker in the broken windows.
“Cue horn grenades to clear out the citizens. We’ll give it ten minutes and then drop us down a few meters. I’m gonna turn off the boosters. We should be able to reduce our noise output by thirty percent and stay hidden for a while.”
“You sure, boss?” Sil asks.
“You’ve been second-guessing me since the match,” I whine.
“Hey, now, don’t get mad at me. I’m just wondering if you lost your edge. It was you who decided to turn a death match into a ballet,” she says, and laughs loud and openmouthed. “If you weren’t knocked out, you’d have seen him. Beautiful and damn near distraught over your unconscious corpse. Don’t worry, your lover boy was pretty beat up, too. His team had to carry him off to the infirmary.”
“They didn’t send a hovercot?” I ask.
“They did. He refused it. Lover boy is all heart and honor.”
“Ha-ha. Happy you got your laughs in? We gotta focus, and I need you to never say ‘lover’ again. It sounds gross when you say it.”
Our ship has been kicking out too much heat during this conversation, making us visible to the enemies infrared devices.
I chew the side of my lip. I haven’t lost a fight in a really long time. Maybe that’s why I’m feeling off. This is going to drive me crazy. Trains. Weird.
“Stop daydreaming,” Sil quips. “They’re serving Andelurian food for lunch today and I don’t want to miss it. I can almost smell the whipped pasha and rulin sauce. I read once that Andelurians have twice as many taste buds as most humans. A crazy surgeon in their primary colony used gene splicing to apply the mutation to all the following generations. You know how much infantry eats? There might not be anything left.”
I cue up the sound cannons and check to make sure our shields are at full strength. Our reconnaissance ship was built for maneuverability and speed, so it’s small, with little in terms of defense upgrades. This kind of mission is meant to be more of an education than anything else. It’s supposed to teach us how to stalk, manage our emotions, work as a team, and follow orders. It’s low risk, but that doesn’t mean no risk, so you still have to be careful.
“You know,” I say, “one of the first markers of civilization is the existence of art, very often music. Music is a marker of life. It’s ironic that it can now be an instrument of death.”
“Okay, Wise One, can we get this show on the road?” Sil groans. “Just pulse it and be done.”
“Where’s the fun in that?” I reply.
“Decimating a city isn’t supposed to be fun,” she says flatly. “Stop wasting time.”
I cue the beat panel on the console and switch it to manual while I roll my shoulders. Adrenaline shoots through my veins as I test the levels, and the pod vibrates with pure unadulterated funk. I love that word, “funk.” It’s old, and dirty, and so right for what this is, for what I do. I look over at Sil, barely able to contain my smile. “For their sakes they’d better be ghosts. This is war. They know what to expect.”
And I let the beat drop.
Sil lets out a battle cry as soon as we’re released from review and I punch her arm.
“Superior! It’s just a coincidence the head of the review team is from the same colony as I am,” I say.
“There are no coincidences. If we keep this up, we’ll be off this backwater in no time. Maybe we’ll be transferred to Section Nine in the Risha Quadrant. I heard there’s a law that restricts shifts based on daylight, and for nine months out of the year the days are only six hours long,” Sil says.
“Sounds depressing,” I add.
“That’s ’cause you don’t know how to club like I do.”
“Whatever.”
“Let’s celebrate. I got a friend in the engineering department who found a thin pocket. We can go gliiiidiing!” she sings. “C’mon. You know you want to. I’ll even see if he’ll let you do the first blast.”
“Let’s do it,” I say with a nod.
Sil makes the call, and a few hours later we’re dressed in our biosuits, helmets secured, with about six other trainees from engineering and linguistics. It isn’t an official mission, so we have to walk, but two hours later Bilal, the engineering guy, raises his hand.
“This is it,” he announces.
At first glance it doesn’t look like anything, just a salt bed of cracking and baked gray clay. We’re nowhere near the grasslands, but there are mountains rising in the distance. Cave systems snake beneath the surface of Alpha 9 no matter where you are, but you need someone who really knows the topography to find someplace thin enough to create a gulch.
“You the blaster?” Bilal asks, and I nod. “You’re up. The edge is right here,” he says, and drags his boot across the ground to make a rough line. “Walk about twenty paces and you should be dead center.”
I drop my bag and pull out a bass grenade. It looks like a silver pancake with a spike in the center. Our ragtag group is full of nervous excitement, chatting across the same comm frequency. They’re all ready to jump and so am I. I run out to the center, stomp the grenade in with my boot, and give the gang a thumbs-up before I pull the pin and run.
I’m booking full out because I’ve only got ten seconds before it erupts. I barely make it before the first boom rattles the ground, knocking everyone off-kilter. I fall flat on my face, and one of the linguistics guys pulls me up. I have only another second on my feet before the smaller tick-tick-ticks of the snare package programmed into the grenade kick out and he grabs me with both arms.
“This is pretty cool,” he says as the first cracks in the ground erupt like trapped lighting, spidering out to the farthest edges of the hidden canyon.
“Thanks,” I say, and straighten up as best I can.
“I know this song. It’s a backbeat, isn’t it?” he asks.
“Uh, yeah. Most people don’t recognize my rhythms.”
“My mama filled our home with all kinds of music, especially classical jazz. Let me guess. It’s—”
The final drumbeat cracks through the ground, and the grenade disappears into the roof of the canyon along with an avalanche of rock and soil. Dust fills the air and everyone cheers.
“Max Roach,” he yells over the din as he scoops me up in the excitement.
My body freezes and warms all at the same time, and he must realize his mistake because he puts me down as quickly as he picked me up.
“Sorry.”
“It’s fine,” I say.
“No, really. I shouldn’t have. I was just overexcited. I’m new here. Fayard.” He juts out his hand for me to shake and I take it, making sure to squeeze hard.
“Tamar.”
“It’s a pleasure to meet such a lover of violent music,” he says smoothly. Light glints off his helmet, and for a moment it’s like the entire planet has decided he should be in the spotlight.
I want to hold on to my offense, but his smile is so warm I let it go.
“I wouldn’t call it violent, just effective.”
“Definitely,” he says as he falls back into the canyon, nose-diving until his gravity sensors kick in and he shoots up like a champagne bubble, somersaulting in the air. I don’t realize I’ve been holding my breath until I hear his breathless cackle in my ears.
One by one we take turns diving into the center of the canyon, waiting until the very last moment to turn on our boosters. Sil’s paired off with some ballistics girl, her arms pinwheeling in the air like a puffer fish. After the initial rush of diving wears off, I find the perfect place to flip onto my back and float.
I’ve just gotten to that meditative spot where your mind and body melt together and vibrate with everything around you when I catch a flash of arm in my periphery.
“Peaceful, isn’t it?” Fayard says.
“It was.”
I try to get back to that thrum of oneness and fix my gaze on the rising twin moons, but there’s too much movement. He’s on his belly and then his back again, backstroking in the air.
“How are you doing that?” I ask. He should be bouncing wildly, but he’s as steady as a duck treading water.
“Gravity stabilizer.”
“They don’t issue those to trainees.”
“I won it in a card game off a captain in the geology unit. Alpha Two is a lot looser than Alpha Nine.”
He flips in the air again, graceful, his long legs arcing lazily in the still-dusty haze. The tiniest sliver of the setting suns casts light on the crumbling canyon, making the dust look like glitter and him like a man-sized dragonfly.
“Thank you,” he says.
“Why are you thanking me?”
“Because this is a perfect moment. Without you, this would not be possible. It’s hard to block out all the noise at base, and I am very happy right now, so thank you.”
I don’t know why, but a deep sensation of bashfulness washes over me. I turn my head slightly to look at him smiling. I look away and swallow hard.
“You’re welcome.”