THERE’S THIS OLD SAYING: “RIGHT out of the frying pan and straight into the fire.” It’s a clunky cliché, but hell if I don’t feel it the moment I make it back from my final check at the infirmary. Nanigel supercharges your white blood cells and accelerates muscle and bone repair. It can be painful if you don’t take your recovery seriously, and since I spent all of yesterday afternoon gliding over a fresh canyon, my bones feel like they are on fire from the inside.
“Can you even see straight?” Ralphie asks as my eyes roll back into my head. The shocks on these field tanks are barely functional. We’re bobbing and rattling like dice, and before I know it, I’m detaching my harness.
“Get back in your seat, newbie!” First Sergeant Clemmons barks from his position up front. I can’t reply because my head is in the nearest bin, throwing up bile. I haven’t eaten in forty-eight hours, and all that comes up is this acrid, noxious phlegm.
“Damn!” Salvador bellows.
“Why is he even here?” Pham asks.
“Phew!” Ralphie shouts.
A chorus of irritated and disgusted comments rings out, along with a few whistles and a handful of claps from some of the older recruits on the transport. Ralphie and I are the youngest, and by far the least prepared. When we get to the field site, an abandoned city with a blast crater in the middle of it, we all pile out. The city’s filled with buildings of different sizes and heights, roads overgrown with carnivorous snake grass and piles of shattered triptofilm, this planet’s version of glass. It’s pretty obvious the site has been hit with multiple sound cannons by the way some of the buildings have collapsed and by the complete lack of a single intact window.
Ralphie is partnered with an excavation team and given a shovel when he jumps out of the transport, but First Sergeant surprises me when he pushes a neutron rifle into my hand not a second after I’ve secured my helmet and passed through the oxygen lock.
“Grab an extra weather-tent capsule off the ledge there and stuff it in your hip bag, just in case. You’re coming with me,” he says.
“I don’t know how to shoot… yet,” I tell him, not wanting to admit I have an aversion to guns of all kinds. Not that I’m scared of them or of violence—I’ll fight anybody hand to hand—but there’s something about guns that makes me uneasy. I can’t say why.
“It’s point and shoot, son. But don’t worry about it. It’s just a precaution.”
A precaution, like the weather tent. WTs are two-meter-by-two-meter-by-one-meter ploy-aluminum flexi-fiber creations included in every soldier’s go bag. They are crude, airless, and coffinlike, and they can save your life if you’re caught in a storm on a planet with subzero temps or need to survive an avalanche. It is a lifesaver, like the gun. Neither of which I thought would be necessary on what should have been a glorified field trip.
“I thought we were on a collection expedition,” I say.
“No one told you to think, private. Now tell me, ’cause I need to make sure. How many languages do you speak?” he asks.
“Seventeen, sir. Twenty if you count variations in dialect,” I say with confidence.
“Good, good. And you’re versed in ancient languages too?” he adds.
“Yes, sir. Old Mandarin, Tipu, Latin, and Hebrew.”
“Just what I needed to hear.”
We hop into another transport. This one is a hoverbed. They’re mostly used for hauling debris and supplies short distances. If I didn’t know better, I’d think this was a hit. But I do know better than to ask more questions, so I’m silent for the fifty minutes it takes us to get to a cave system I’ve never seen listed on the maps. I use the time to think about the girl I met yesterday, Tamar, her legs twisting in the air like soft ribbons, her laugh guarded but genuine.
“Switch your biosuit to stealth.”
“Yes, sir,” I say, and watch the LED lights in the seams of my suit go dark while the fabric adjusts to the color signature of the surroundings. As a team, we’ll be nearly invisible unless you know what you’re looking for.
The caves aren’t accessible from the valley floor, so we have to climb up and over a few boulders to find an entrance. I remain silent, just like I’m trained to do, until we make our way into a man-sized hole and find two other officers staring intently at detailed cave paintings carved into the wall, as high as ten meters, and a Sueronese girl behind them poised to stab both of them in the back.
Despite my inexperience I am the first to shoot. Lucky for her, I’m the only one who had their gun set to disarm rather than kill.
“I want to be mad you didn’t kill the girl, ’cause she’s an attempted murderer, but if you did, we couldn’t interrogate her. So… that’s something, ain’t it.” First Sergeant claps me on the back, and it isn’t a smile on his lips, but like he said, it’s something.
“I’ll be pissed for you, First Sergeant. In the field, newbie, you set your gun to kill. Always,” one of the faceless soldiers says as he pushes the girl to her knees and ties a restraint around her wrists and ankles. She’s spouting a number of curses and speaking so fast I can’t really catch what she’s saying. That is until one of the other soldiers tosses a translation disk at her feet. They’re great for basic conversation, but in pitch languages they can get glitchy, and you never want to use them in a highly sensitive situation. Best to have someone to blame for a misunderstanding. Now I see where I come in.
“Death bringers, whether you carry a rifle or not. Every one of you is a murderer,” she yells. The disk breaks up the words, but her point is made. She’s bald and blue-skinned, young if her height is any indication. A full-grown Sueronese woman can be twice as tall as any human, and though the Sueronese have similar body types to humans, they differ in distinct ways. They have a respiratory system that’s twice as efficient as ours, with two spines and two sets of lungs instead of one. Her nostrils are nearly flat, with two additional holes to help her breathe in the thin air. Their blue skin isn’t really blue, but tinged by a special mud they use to protect them from the UV rays of their twin suns. There are other differences, but I can only speculate, because the Sueronese are notoriously private, and everything we know about them is secondhand and distorted, the musings of missionaries and military envoys. She’s dressed in a gray-green jumpsuit with an elaborate bundle cinched near her shoulders in the same fabric.
“She’s a spy,” I say.
“Well, you are as smart as I’ve been told. I’m impressed. This girl was caught sneaking in and out of this little cave by one of our drones. Imagine our surprise when we stumbled upon one of the most important discoveries in Sueronese and Republic history.”
I gaze up at the wall, now illuminated by field lights. Above the glyphs is a giant sankofa bird, its neck bending back to tend to a glittering, blood-colored, egg-shaped gem the size of a grapefruit.
“It’s a translator,” I say. “Alphabets in each language stacked at the top, one above the other. I don’t understand most of the glyphs.”
“We tried digging out the gem, but it retreats back into the wall the closer you get to it. Looks organic, but there’s some machinery at work; has to be. You do understand some of them, yes? The glyphs?”
“Yes. The fifth from the top is Hebrew.”
He claps his hands excitedly and grips my shoulder too tightly. “Godsend is what you are. Major Thorisdottir is our language expert on site, but she’s down with trench flu and we can’t risk this getting out digitally. She recommended you as a stand-in. What else can you tell me?” First Sergeant urges.
The message is growing out of the stone instead of etched into it. I’ve seen this method used on other colonies, sometimes for religious reasons to mark a holy spot, sometimes just to advertise coffee on the side of a building.
“Uh, you’ll have to take video, because it will disappear once the weather changes. It’s the same message repeated over and over—at least that’s what I’m seeing from the lines I can translate—but it doesn’t make any sense. Loosely, it says:
A blessing to live but a curse to die if only love the heart does find
On the wind of chance does the goddess climb
To turn the many-faced head of time
“It could be ‘crown’ instead of ‘time’; I’m not sure. The rest is a jumble of letters and numbers.”
The girl’s face, previously an angry grimace, softens into something shrewd. She’s pretending not to understand English. My answer surprises her, so I focus on not making eye contact with her again.
“Letters and numbers, huh,” First Sergeant says, a little skeptically.
A groan from deep in the cave erupts from the blackness and brings with it a stench so powerful it makes it through the filters in our suits. This isn’t good. That smell could only mean one thing: volcanic activity, shifting fault lines, and a possible collapse of this very old cave.
First Sergeant raises his voice and the disc begins to translate. “Looks like we’re running out of time, sweetheart. I have a cryptic little message and a teenage spy, just small enough to creep through that hole up there and read it. And if my years of experience don’t fail me, I’d hazard to guess those letters and numbers are coordinates of some kind. Now, my higher-ups, and even the head of the Republic, seem to think the Sueronese are a bunch of primitives on a backwater planet that even they don’t want to defend, but I know better. Even a cowardly dog will bite if you get close enough.”
First Sergeant picks up the girl’s discarded blade, curved in the middle but sharp at the end. He holds it up to her neck, and I look to see if anyone is going to stop him. Killing POWs is against the rules of occupation. Even witnessing a murder can put you up for a dishonorable discharge.
“First Sergeant,” I say tentatively, my voice clear but not too aggressive. “What are you doing?”
“Hush, boy. Now, sweetheart, I’m gonna need you to tell me where those coordinates lead.”
“Rubbish. It leads nowhere. It is a children’s rhyme to teach the youth to listen to their parents,” she says dismissively.
“Ah, ah, ah… don’t you lie to me.”
The girl’s chin is pointed as high as it can go, and her nostrils are flaring with fear, or it could be rage; I can’t tell. First Sergeant presses the blade in farther.
“This knife would be enough for me. A blade like this is unmatched, I’ll give you that. Sharp enough to run through a man, but curved just right to cut a man’s throat,” he adds.
“It is used for fruit,” the girl says, and begins to laugh. “All you see is killing and death. We are a people of light,” she says proudly, unfazed by the blade. “It will take more than a blade and a polyglot lover boy to pull anything other than poetry from my throat,” she says. Her eyes dart to mine, unsettling me with their focus, and then she laughs a bit more.
It unnerves the sergeant so much he pulls the dagger down a bit, but that doesn’t make me feel any better. Men like him would rather be wounded than laughed at. I’m debating whether I’ll have to tackle the sergeant to keep him from killing her when the ground starts to shake, sending us tumbling to the floor. A split second later all the lights wink out.
The girl continues laughing. “It is the goddess. The winds are changing.”
One of the other soldiers gets a flare going, bathing the shrinking cave in orange light as he leads the way to the opening.
“The cave is collapsing!” he shouts. “Everybody out.”
We all run, with me pulling up the rear, and I realize that the girl is down there, her hands and feet still tied.
“What about the girl?” I shout as we run.
“She’s the enemy, newbie. Let her figure it out.”
Maybe she knows some way out of here that we don’t, but just in case she doesn’t, I do the only right thing, hoping no one sees me, hoping it’s enough. Then I full-out sprint to the exit, squeezing through the hole just as a boulder shifts and closes the opening completely.
We barely make it out before the entire cave system shudders and collapses, shaking the ground for miles.
We ride in silence, our mission failed, but I’m glad to have time to think about what the girl called me. Lover boy. Where have I heard that before?