EMBEDDED, Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Originally published in Fiction River: Valor (2015).

We cover from a distance:

Embedded in the unit, not part of the unit. Observers who occasionally get an arm slammed across their chest like a three-year-old about to run into traffic. We see all, understand little, and report next to nothing.

Welcome to the life of the embedded reporter.

I thought it’d be so glamorous. Sixteen tours later, five wars, thirty war zones, I’ve seen nothing glamorous. I’ve seen a lot of dirt, dust, blood. Too many severed limbs and even more severed lives. Lost lots of friends, lots of personal enemies too.

Got pelted with shrapnel, nearly lost my own arm, held a colleague while she died screaming in pain. Then left that war zone to go to a bloodless conflict fought by computers and robots, and thought I’d go mad from boredom. Games are more exciting: Even though they’re pretend, they at least have virtual blood.

I realized I wanted to see blood. Real blood. Then I worried that I had gone blood mad.

And then, ironically, I arrived here.

* * * *

I’d heard about LaDucci in a sideways kinda way. Men were taken out of Basic and sent to LaDucci training. Not too terribly unusual: soldiers were taken out of Basic all the time and rerouted to more specialized training. Not even the gender specificity was unusual: some conflict zones suited some genders better than others.

Women take down the Enfelz with almost no effort, but men get no traction at all. Something to do with the biological make-up of both species. Men were part of the attack force heading to Enfelz, but only in support positions.

Just like men and women were in support positions for the Hanen, where the gender neutrals who preferred to remain in that twilight between the gender they were born with and the gender they should’ve been born with, fought with a ferocity (and a success rate) not equaled in any other field of battle.

Men got the LaDucci, and the rumor was that it was because men partnered better, but I’d never seen that. Humans were humans—some partnered with other humans just fine and some sucked at working with another.

I sucked at working with someone else, which is why I usually embedded and usually went into the unit alone. With that system, I got the back-up of a military unit without the pain in the ass of dealing with another reporter. I even did my own filming and uploading, learned how to use all the equipment from driving trucks to flying low-to-ground vehicles to piloting my own orbit-to-ground ship. Heck, I can even pilot a small spaceship if necessary, although I do mean small. I’ve trained on two-person ships, but I’ve flown ten person ships—badly, but I’ve done it.

I took LaDucci like I’ve taken every assignment for the past eight years—vowing it would be my last. Each was a step down in the war zone ladder. I went from the wars that the folks back home cared about to the wars they didn’t care about but had to focus on to the wars they’d never heard of but might care about to wars they’d never care about no matter what happened.

Technically, LaDucci was my first non-war—a conflict that someone else was fighting but with our help. In the as-yet-unwritten histories, LaDucci will get mentioned only if we have severe casualties in some unplanned military action that goes wildly out of control.

Otherwise, LaDucci will remain one of those and we sent support troops conflicts, the kind that gets a half-sentence mention in any history of modern warfare until some enterprising historian decides to focus her entire thesis on the conflict, publishes the account, and gets feted for finding lost stories of war. That’s at least 100 years out, and thank whatever god I’ll never live to see it.

Maybe my imaginary future historian will find this little document. I wonder what she’ll make of it.

Wish I could accompany it into the future, and assure her that it’s all true.

Because there are times when I have trouble believing it myself.

* * * *

LaDucci had devolved into a ground war over some frozen tundra on the northern most continent of a backwater planet in the Scrarart System. The war—excuse me, conflict—had started when the Milwans wanted to depose some genocidal dictator who was screwing up their trade plans in the region.

We got involved because the Milwans had a treaty with the Keylen Alliance who got their military back-up from the Mars Union who always partnered with troops from Northern Earth.

Hell, our people were knee-deep in weird grayish-green snow before our leaders even knew we’d become involved in LaDucci. And by then, it was too late. Too much money, too many lower-level promises, too many alliances at risk to pull out.

The politicians had been assured this was mostly a clean war—fought with computers and tech (other groups’ tech)—and in the beginning it had been. But about the time those assurances happened, the first troops hit the snow, and by the time someone wanted out, entire training units had developed for troops to send to LaDucci, because it took a specialized kind of human fighter, and once the politicians learned that, they hemmed and hawed and decided that we needed to learn to fight alternative wars, and they labeled LaDucci one of those, and once I saw that memo float past my daily feed, of course, I had to get involved.

I mean, what the heck is an alternative war?

I embedded in the next unit heading to LaDucci, thinking I would get to see a snow-conflict first-hand.

Instead, I got weird-ass shit right from the very beginning.

* * * *

The embeds get decided up top. I’m not sure how far up top, but farther away than some podunk war in some backwater system. So when I arrived at SC3RT15, the main base for the LaDucci Action (as it’s officially called), I got sent to the Corps Commander, which never happens. Usually I arrive, head to the press office, get assigned a unit, get a dressing down from Whoever Runs The Thing—all of it involving stupid rules that (in recent cases) I knew before Whoever was born. Heck, some of those rules were put into place after I did something that convinced the military that they needed a new rule to prevent anyone from doing that something again.

This time, I didn’t go to the press office. I was sent directly to the Corps Commander.

I’d never encountered her before, but I knew her reputation. I also knew that this posting was a demotion for her, particularly since the rules of engagement stated that no women should fight on LaDucci for “species interaction” reasons. In other words, she could be in charge of the whole fight—from space, far away from the action.

She’d been pretty once, although she’d probably kick my ass for saying that. The pretty had disappeared into a tight-lipped expression that raised lines around her narrow mouth and suspicious eyes.

“Can’t have you here, Khalil,” she said. “You’re male.”

I rolled my eyes. Of all the reasons she could have chose, she chose the one I knew was false.

“C’mon, Commander,” I said. “The guidelines say men only in LaDucci.”

“Only men can serve in the LaDucci campaign,” she said. “Reporters and support staff need to be female.”

I couldn’t resist. “You’re support staff?”

She gave me a preoccupied smile. “Nice try, Khalil. You can’t sidetrack me here.”

“Honestly, I’m not trying to. They sent me, I’m officially embedded, I get to go where my unit goes.”

She studied me. She knew I was right. Once a reporter’s name was attached to a unit already involved in a conflict, the reporter owned that story.

“If you stay, you’re going to regret this one, Khalil.”

My turn to flash the preoccupied smile. “Commander,” I said, “I regret each and every one of them.”

* * * *

When the conflict doesn’t matter to you, war zones differ only by environment. Hot, cold, one sun, five suns, it doesn’t matter. What changes is how you dress and how you deal. Sometimes you wear full environmental gear so the entire experience of combat is accompanied by the amplified sound of your own hollow breathing, and sometimes you wear partial gear to combat the actual elements—the sand, the heat, the wind, the bugs.

That’s what I hate the most about warm places. Doesn’t matter where they are, doesn’t matter what planet they’re on, doesn’t matter how different the topography, all warm places have hideous bugs. It’s as if that old Earth Goddess, Mother Nature, became Mother Universe and declared that heat and insects went hand-in-tentacle.

Cold is actually easier to combat. Some cold places are so desolate they needed full environmental gear, including helmet and hollow breathing. But some are not considered hazardous (unless the soldier got careless) and you can go out wearing a thermal jacket and pants, along with skin coverings over your hands and face.

After a while, most of the troops on LaDucci went without the coverings altogether. The bracing air had a higher oxygen content than Earth Standard, and that elevated mood. The cold made you feel alive—or it made me feel alive, anyway—and it reminded me that I was some place real instead of that constant parade of battleship, orbit-to-ground vessel, base, suited maneuvers, base, ground-to-orbit vessel, battleship, new posting.

The weapons were different here too. Laser rifles had to be used sparingly: they melted the ice-coverings over the tundra, and sometimes released avalanches so severe that we’d taken out some of our own equipment before we realized what we’d done.

Yeah, I say “we.” Language isn’t as precise when you’re embedded. It’s us against them, me versus the enemy, the good guys fighting the bad guys. Your brain gets hardwired that way, which is why embedding is a bad idea and why no real reporter should ever do it, and yet we do it all the time.

If we didn’t, we’d have no access to war zones at all.

The only hope that we have is that after we’re done with our active years, we compose some kind of memoir that tells the “real” facts. Only most of us don’t survive to the memoir—and those of us who do lost interest in the overall conflicts long ago.

Cynical doesn’t begin to cut it. Cynical is where we start. We end up somewhere long past bitter, beyond hopeless, in a place as bleak as LaDucci on a cold winter night.

What I’m writing here doesn’t count as memoir. I’m not organized enough for memoir.

This is just a document. Because someone has to write this shit down.

And that someone may as well be me.

* * * *

I have to admit: I liked the LaDucci posting.

I liked the quiet.

At first, I thought I was just tired and in need of rest. You can’t spend your life traveling from place to place with no real home, and not have some low-level exhaustion dogging you all the damn time.

I didn’t sleep much—I never sleep much—but I didn’t feel that underlying layer of panic each and every moment of each and every day.

Our post was at the edge of an ice field, about one hundred klicks from any fighting, nearly five hundred klicks from the major fighting. We had to follow the action the way the ships in orbit did: using our computers, filtered through whatever layers the military had set up.

It felt odd to be on land, using in-space information gathering tools. Usually when I was on solid ground, I saw things with my own eyes, learned whether those information-gathering tools were accurate, and tried, as best I could, to report honestly on what was really happening.

I always add “as best I could” because so much of what I would want to report was forbidden: Even the stuff from my very first posting, decades ago, remains classified.

The post, which we only knew by its service number, LD69A2, was bigger than I’d been led to believe. Not too long before, someone had built two barracks, a separate mess, and an officer’s quarters, none of which were in full use.

Clearly the military or the government (ours or Mars Union or maybe even the Keylen) had plans for this area after they conquered it. Because I had little else to do, I started researching what could make this part of LaDucci so very valuable.

It wasn’t the water or the minerals. For a while, I toyed with the idea that it was the location itself.

But I didn’t have enough information to know what made the location valuable—from a military standpoint or a governmental standpoint. And so far, no one was talking.

Still, it was a strange bit of land to be fighting over.

The tundra, the ice fields, the snow glazes were all so fragile that sending probes from vehicles in orbit would often trigger avalanches and destroy the probes. The first troops that came here were considered support, and they were researching the area, to see what kind of tech we could use to fight with.

Then they learned that the land itself was a factor in the fighting—that avalanche thing could be used to our advantage.

It took some kind of scientific knowledge of stresses and ice flows and the way pressure applied from above (or below) could predictably send an avalanche cascading toward the enemy. Or make the ice flow shatter at a point where the enemy could not retreat and save itself. Or make the tundra crumble, sending fumes toxic to the LaDucci into the environment.

It took a diabolical mindset, a combination of science, engineering, and a gleeful childishness that reveled in finding the most creative way to crush an enemy force.

Not that any enemy force ever made it all the way to LD69A2, or as the troops here sometimes called it, “Laid 69. Ate, too.” And then they’d chuckle as if they’d made up a particularly witty and original joke.

I’d laughed the first time, groaned the second, and pretty much ignored it from that moment forward. That joke, and its constant reiteration, actually made me think of the Corps Commander’s prediction that I’d regret coming here.

Decades in war zones left me wired for battle. I didn’t mind the boredom that any posting held, because it was always punctuated with moments (sometimes days) of sheer terror, followed by joy that I was alive—and pressure to complete some kind of story that would make it past the censors, be interesting, and informative.

But here, I’d reported all I could on the young men who got here, the naïve hopeless dreams, the long days, and the even longer nights. I couldn’t mention the cadre of engineers gleefully making models of the snow fields to blow it up, and I couldn’t talk much about the occasional suicide squads that would show up at the very edges of our post, supposedly to make us all a little more on edge and a little more afraid.

Reports from those tiny conflicts would come back, and they were always a bit mysterious: the squads would die long before they arrived at their planned targets. Their vests would malfunction or they’d fall through some ice (without the help of our engineers) or they’d get poisoned by the gas released from the crumbling tundra.

I could and did report on that first gas release, because it surprised all of us, but I couldn’t do the follow-up on the way the engineers glommed gleefully onto that detail to plan even more diabolical strategies to be used closer to the actual conflict.

Because that’s pretty much all this base did: after it finished modeling various scenarios, it would send a group of engineers to another unit, and they would set traps for the enemy—or try to. It was hard to get enough purchase in an active fighting zone to lay under-ice charges that would ripple through the battlefield.

Those charges generally had to be set ahead of time.

Honestly, it was sheer boredom that got me to accompany one of the engineering teams as they went out to get some readings on the edges of the ice flow.

And it was sheer stupidity that allowed me to see that there was more to the LaDucci conflict than it seemed.

* * * *

When you embed, you travel with the troops. You go where they go, do what they do, hang back when they tell you, and run like hell when they scream, “Get outta here!”

I’m used to that.

I wasn’t used to a squad of engineers, who giggle like school boys and talk in numbers and acronyms I truly did not understand. I knew they were going to measure the length and depth of the ice flow. I hadn’t realized they were also going to measure its thickness and maybe see if some tundra lurked below.

They might, they said with twinkling eyes, set off a small avalanche, just to see if they could do it.

They never said stay close. They never said don’t wander. They never said stick to the trucks.

Not that these were regular trucks: we had hovercraft here, low level trucks in grayish white, so that they seemed invisible over the snow and the somewhat filthy ice. Hovercraft always made me a bit seasick, so I never remained on board if I didn’t have to.

The engineers did tell me I could watch if I wanted to, but after a few minutes, all I saw were holographic renderings of ice layers floating above the probe’s entry point, the light of the holograph slightly dimmed so it was impossible to see from a distance.

There was more talk about numbers and temperature differentials and stability and all sorts of things that floated by me like ice chips on the increasing cold breeze.

I wandered away, although I didn’t wander far. In fact, in my defense, I followed a set of footprints to the place where the footprints stopped, overlooking a ridge that rippled into a valley that connected this part of the ice flow to the closest fighting, a hundred klicks away.

I stared at the valley, wishing I could walk it and get away from all this, craving some kind of action, some kind of change, when I realized I wasn’t alone.

He sat on a snow mound, curved up from the ridge by a no-longer existent wind. One leg touched the ice shelf, the other bent and resting on the snow mound, one arm wrapped around his knee. He looked like he was posing for the Iconic Image of LaDucci: Soldier, in shadow, staring at the distant war, freezing his ass off.

I didn’t recognize him, but that didn’t entirely surprise me. So many soldiers processed through LD69A2 that I sometimes barely noticed them before they got sent elsewhere.

But as I looked, I realized I should have noticed him as he traveled with us.

The footprints I had followed out here were his.

And all of the men—the engineers—I’d come with were behind me, playing with their stupid gadgets.

My heart started pounding, and I thought of the suicide bombers I’d encountered in one of our dirtier little wars. Well, I didn’t entirely encounter them. I had seen the aftermath of their destruction, including a half-caved-in starbase. I’d arrived in time to see body parts still floating among the wreckage.

I certainly didn’t want to become wreckage. Or a big red blob on the grayish-green snow.

That snow crunched beneath my feet, and he turned. He moved his head back once, a half-nod in acknowledgement.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hey,” I said, hoping my voice didn’t reveal my nerves.

“Kinda far from your unit, aren’t you?” he asked.

So, not one of us. Every muscle in my body tensed.

“Not that far,” I said. “Looks like you’re kinda far from yours.”

He grunted and put his leg down. If he made a move toward me, I’d run. He’d probably get too close—he looked to be in much better shape than I was—but I didn’t care.

I’d give it all I had.

“From this distance,” he said, “you can see some of the lights, flashing quietly. Like a message from beyond.”

He was staring down that ridge into the valley. In spite of myself, I looked too. You could see the lights appearing and disappearing like winking stars. Almost pretty, if they weren’t guaranteeing someone’s instant death.

“Your friends are looking for you,” he said.

I glanced over my shoulder, saw a couple of the engineers trudging my way. Their body language spoke of martyrdom and disgust. I could predict the conversation:

—You didn’t tell us where you were going.

—We’re responsible for you. If something happens…

—You know how much time we wasted searching? We brought you out here as a favor…

Their voices rumbled, and the squeak of their shoes was uncommonly loud.

I peaked to see how the soldier on the snow mound reacted to their arrival.

He was gone.

I hadn’t heard him leave—and I should have. Given the noise the engineers were making, and the noise my own shoes had made, any move the soldier made should’ve been audible.

But it hadn’t been.

The engineers reached me before I had time to process that thought.

“There was a guy here,” I said. “On that snow mound.”

I pointed, but the engineers didn’t look in that direction. Instead, they shared a couple glances, and I felt the instant conspiracy.

“What aren’t you telling me?” I asked.

“Nothing,” said one of them. I mentally called them Brainiacs One, Two and Three, because I didn’t need to clutter my brain with their names. I would never be able to do a comprehensive piece on these guys, so I didn’t bother with the details.

“It doesn’t sound like nothing,” I said.

Brainiac Two gave his friends conspiratorial glances again, then said, “Why don’t you check out the snow mound?”

“And let him shoot me?” I asked.

“Was he humanoid?” Brainiac Three asked.

My cheeks were heating up. Dumb. Dumb, dumb, dumb. The LaDucci weren’t humanoid. They looked like a cross between a dolphin and an alligator, the short squat legs and long snout with the round bodies and gray-green coating that made them almost impossible to see in the snow.

“Yeah,” I said, feeling stupid.

“Then you should be safe,” Brainiac One said, contempt dripping from his voice.

I trudged toward the snow mound, stunned to be slogging through deeper snow than I’d encountered anywhere else on LaDucci. No tracks either—not leading up to the snow mound, not behind the mound, not on its other side.

And creepily, not on the mound itself, even where the soldier had placed his foot.

“You’re telling me I’m seeing ghosts?” I asked.

“We’re not telling you anything,” Brainiac Three said with such emphasis that I realized he wasn’t speaking to me; he was speaking to his friends.

“We’ll let the commander talk to you,” Brainiac One said. “And you won’t like it.”

* * * *

But the unit commander wouldn’t talk to me. Not for three days, anyway.

He was dealing with a troop swap, an inspection, and some engineer’s hare-brained idea that had nearly caused one of the barracks to implode on itself.

His adjunct told me that the commander would talk to me when he had time, and I knew the tone. The tone meant I’d be lucky if the commander ever talked to me, and I shouldn’t hold my breath.

Not that I was holding my breath. The Brainiacs had set up the meet; I certainly hadn’t wanted it. I would ask for a meet with the unit commander when I needed him to confirm or deny something officially about some military action. I really didn’t want to see him for any other reason.

Especially one that painted me in such a stupid light. I researched my experience out there, and discovered it was something that happened on the ice fields. Along with snow blindness (on really bright days), nights often brought what were called ice hallucinations—visions of something or someone that had no real basis in fact.

The more I dug, the more I learned that any frozen expanse brought those kinds of visions, although usually they happened after some kind of deprivation, not to some idiot trudging across snow because he no longer felt like watching engineers enthuse over ice-field depth.

The engineers knew I had seen an ice vision. They probably wanted me to talk to the commander so that I’d get transferred out of here. I wasn’t ready to leave yet; I hadn’t found the definitive story, so I didn’t push the meet either.

I just needed to remember to eat right and wear the proper equipment the next time I headed into an ice field. I probably should have gotten more sleep, but I wasn’t about to kid myself. I couldn’t will myself to sleep more, no matter how hard I tried.

I was just getting past the incident with the vision showed up again. I had dozed in my own little corner of the barracks. I didn’t quite have a room, but I had a private bed (no bunk), a desk, and some blankets I could pull across the only open area so that I could work more or less undisturbed.

I usually spent most of my time in my chair, working, documenting bits and pieces of things that I could compile when I left. I’d been working to understand snow fields, ice flows, and tundras for the previous 24 hours, and had focused so hard that I’d forgotten to sleep. The sleep caught up with me in the afternoon, and I hadn’t managed to stagger to my bed. Instead, I’d cratered in my chair, my head back, mouth open.

The pain in my neck woke me up. My mouth was dry, and my throat ached, which told me I’d been snoring. I looked around to see if any of the men had snuck in to my ignominious position, only to see someone sitting on my unmade bed.

Unmade beds offend soldiers. They either force me to make the bed, or frown at it mightily. They never sit on it. So the fact he was sitting caught my attention right away, a half second before I realized he had one foot on the floor and the other up against his chest.

His face was in shadow, even though the room was well lit.

“Oh, for god’s sake,” I said, “not again.”

I ran my hand over my face, removed some of the drool from my chin, and felt the sleep along my eyelids. I’d really been out—and now I was hallucinating in the barracks instead of the ice field.

“They’re an hour away from the ridge where we met,” he said. “You have a team out there, measuring. Bring them back.”

I frowned. A team? They? What?

“I can’t stay here,” he said. “It’s too far away.”

And then he vanished, like the good little hallucination I wanted him to be.

I rubbed the aching muscles in the back of my neck, took a sip of very cold coffee, and staggered to the latrine to wash off my face. That wasn’t enough to wake me, so I decided to go for the full-shower-and-some-kind-of-meal method of getting rid of the grogs.

I was covered in soap when someone burst into the shower area. “Get out, suit up, we’re going into lockdown,” he said, as the door slammed. When I asked what was going on, my voice echoed.

He had already left.

I rinsed the soap off, passed a towel over my body, and yanked clothes over my still-damp skin. I didn’t have an environmental suit in the showers, so I sprinted to the barracks as everyone else sprinted out, weapons in hand.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“Suicide squad,” one of the men said as he jogged past. “Took out the surveying team at the edge of the ice flow.”

I felt cold—and not because of the weather. I looked at the time as I grabbed my suit from the barracks. Less than an hour after my vision.

Son of a bitch.

* * * *

We lost five men, and would’ve lost the entire barracks if it weren’t for the rest of the engineers. The ice flow had cracked where the surveying team was working, and the crack was working its way to us. It would have either collapsed the barracks or destroyed the tundra if the engineers hadn’t planned ahead for just this kind of contingency.

I have no idea what they did—something about depth charges, frozen barriers, and recreation of original conditions—but whatever they did, it worked and saved thousands of lives.

Just not the team. Five lives lost, in a way that could’ve been prevented, if I had just spoken up.

And said what? That a vision told me the suicide squad was coming? Besides, the bastard had been vague.

And that thought—about the vision’s lack of specificity—made me realize I was being childish and short-sighted.

I’d been to enough war zones in enough strange places to understand that sometimes not all is as it seems. You can’t accept Earth Normal in a place where Earth isn’t even visible with advanced space-viewing equipment.

So I went the unit commander, just like the Brainiacs had wanted me to.

The commander looked older than he had when I arrived. He probably looked older than he had twelve hours before.

He was standing near some holographic projections, scrolling through them as if they dissatisfied him. I knew he could see me through them, but he didn’t acknowledge me for nearly a minute, probably hoping I would go away.

“Make it quick,” he said. “I have families to contact, and planning to do.”

My speech on the strange things I’d seen in war zones went out the window.

“I had warning about this,” I said.

He stopped, collapsed the holo images, and turned toward me. His blue eyes were flinty, his chin set.

“Tell me,” he said.

So I did.

* * * *

He didn’t quiz me. He didn’t recommend a trip to the base psychiatrist. He didn’t ask for a full medical work-up.

Instead, he asked, “Where’d you see him the first time? Show me on the map.”

He called up a holographic map of the area, and I pointed out exactly where that vision appeared.

“Took him a lot of energy to hightail it here,” the commander said to me, “and you ignored him.”

I frowned. My stomach clenched.

“You mean he’s real?”

The commander peered at me, as if he couldn’t understand what I had just said. Then he clenched one hand into a fist, and slowly released that fist, one finger at a time.

“You’re a damn reporter,” he said, mostly to himself, voice a lot calmer than his expression. “No one briefed you. Of course no one briefed you.”

“Briefed me about what?” I asked.

“The imaginary friends,” he said.

* * * *

The imaginary friends was the nickname the first troops to arrive in this place gave the Eldanten, which was what the creature that I had seen was. They first became visible to male soldiers who’d had imaginary friends as children. It never happened to women or to other species. It seemed that something in the human male physiology made the Eldanten visible, and the Eldanten took the form of the man’s childhood imaginary friend.

I had winced at that description. I was so far from my child self that I hadn’t recognized my own imaginary friend. I’d had one too, and he’d helped me through some truly ugly years from ages five to twelve. Puberty gave me height and weight and that gave me confidence to claim the smart mouth I’d developed for my imaginary friend as my own.

And I’d never thought of him again.

Until now.

The commander punctuated his description of all of this with asides, reminders for his superiors, things like we need to fuckin’ brief the reporters and how come no one psych evaled you? as if someone could have. I’m not military, I’ve never been military, and when I’m not an officially assigned embed and not on some battlefield, I don’t have to follow orders. I’d’ve run from a psych eval faster than a washed-out cadet ran from Basic.

“We’re allied with the Eldanten,” the commander told me, “although it wasn’t a willing alliance at first. They took our men and made them fight the Eldanten’s war—a different war than we’d been supporting with the LaDucci. Now, we help each other.”

Gre-at, good, wonderful. Names I didn’t recognize, conflicts I’d never heard of. Normally, I would have been ecstatic to learn of a story no other reporter had. But at the moment, I wasn’t a reporter.

I was a man who had somehow gotten roped into something I had no connection to.

“The Eldanten taught us about the poison in the tundra,” the commander was saying, “and they helped us minimize damage from the suicide squads.”

Then he peered at me. “At least until today.”

“I didn’t know,” I said.

The commander raised his hands in a gesture of surrender, although his eyes still glimmered with fury.

“I know, I know. That’s on us. But now we’ve got to train you and bring you into the team.”

“What?” I said. “I’m not a soldier.”

“You are now,” he said.

“Oh, no,” I said. “I’m not here to fight. I haven’t had training, and I don’t want it. Your little wars aren’t mine.”

“The war’s not little,” he said, “and it’s yours now.”

I shook my head. “Partner him with someone else.”

“Can’t,” the commander said. “Once they choose they’re bonded. It takes some massive kind of energy flow for them to pick a partner. They can’t repartner again. You’re stuck here, Khalil. And we’re stuck with you.”

I don’t do stuck well. I don’t do orders well. I don’t do military drills and proper behavior well.

“No,” I said.

“And,” the commander was saying as if I hadn’t spoken at all, “his territory is the ridgeline. We need intel from there. We’ve been sending new men to that area from the beginning, hoping someone would be able to communicate with an Eldanten.”

“Keep sending people,” I said, “because I’m not staying here. You can’t compel me to do so.”

“Oh,” the commander said with a dark glimmer in his eye, “I most certainly can.”

* * * *

I’d been through similar things with commanders before. They seemed to believe they controlled every human they ever came across. And, honestly, because I was embedded, I had to follow some of his rules—as long as I stayed.

But he didn’t control the length of my stay, and since I was a freelancer, he couldn’t threaten me with job loss or talk to my boss. All I had to do was get out of LaDucci.

I’d done this before: I’d snuck out of some commander’s clutches. It took a ground-to-orbit vehicle, enough money to bribe a few guards, and the short-term theft of a small ship.

The two times I’d done this before, I’d programmed the ship to return to its parent vehicle, leaving me “stranded” somewhere, usually a place with a large criminal element. That way, I could get my own ship (without registration), fly to some other place without being tracked, and then move to a whole new sector.

The universe was vast, and the parts we controlled big. It took official information a lot longer to arrive than it did for me to do so. I could even continue embedding, because most commanders never checked a freelance reporter’s history. There was always an assumption of shadiness, and a willingness to look the other way, if the reporter promised to follow the rules inside the base itself upon penalty of expulsion.

Anyone who ran a unit knew that reporters like me feared expulsion much more than they feared losing work or some military court-martial that was never going to happen.

I was annoyed that I’d have to go on the run again—third time in fifteen years—but I knew how to do it.

I had already picked out the vessel I was going to commandeer. In fact, I had picked it out when I arrived (old habits die hard) because it was queued up for repair, and not on the usual heavily guarded landing strip. The repairs weren’t happening because the techs were busy with the ice field, so the ship remained there, minimally damaged and ripe for the taking.

I would have taken it too, if I hadn’t had to go back and get my gear.

* * * *

He swirled in like a miniature blizzard, face still in shadow. I truly could not remember what my imaginary friend looked like, and that had an impact on my vision of the Eldanten.

“I thought your job was to report,” he snapped. He sounded furious.

“It is,” I said.

“You didn’t tell them. I told you to tell them. You failed at your job.”

I let out a small puff of air. We were standing just behind the barracks. No one was around, at least that I could see. Just the two of us, a lanky young man without a face and me, grizzled and tired and out of his depth.

“I didn’t fail at my job,” I said. “You misunderstood my job.”

“You’re supposed to report,” he said.

“To the people back home. I’m supposed to compose stories about what happens here, and tell them about it. I have nothing to do with the military,” I said.

His body froze for a half second. At that moment, I wished I could see his face—or what passed for his face—because I wanted to know what he was feeling.

Oh, hell, who am I kidding? I knew what he was feeling. He was pissed as hell at me.

“I risked everything to come to you,” he said. “My entire family is dead.”

I frowned. I thought, somehow, that the Eldanten were beings of light or some kind of ghosts or something. I hadn’t realized that they actually existed.

They exist—I later found out—but they are in some kind of zone that we can’t see, hear or smell. Our senses are incredibly limited, and the Eldanten exist in a place our senses cannot perceive.

“Your family?” I asked.

“And my friends, and my entire village. You lost five people. We lost two thousand. Because you didn’t report.”

He launched himself at me, and I felt a chill run through me, like a sharp wind had suddenly blown up. Then he reformed behind me, and sank to the ground in a crouch, arms wrapped around his head, moaning.

At first I thought I had hurt him.

I hadn’t. Not physically, at least.

But oh, emotionally. Mentally. I had devastated him.

And all he believed in.

That realization came to me quickly—almost as fast as the guilt.

And I can’t shake the guilt.

No matter how hard I try.

* * * *

We’re stuck with each other, he and I. Him, because he had bonded with the wrong man, and me, because I can’t leave him now. I call him Nevas, which isn’t his name. I can’t pronounce his name. I don’t know if he can pronounce mine. He’s never tried.

He’s younger than I thought—the equivalent of a teenage boy in our world—and he has no more chances to bond and help his people. I’m his only hope.

Not that he wants to help his people. His people are gone. But he can help the remaining Eldanten that live along what we see only as tundra and ice flows and snow fields.

Hundreds of thousands of them in large cities, teeming with life that we can’t see. Our barracks exist on the edge of the smallest of those cities. The inhabitants tolerate us because our weapons work better against the LaDucci than the Eldantens’ do.

I’d love to say that I’m a changed man, but I’m not really. I’m still an asshole. If I could figure out how to flee this place without adding to my nightmares, I would.

But I can’t.

I have waking nightmares, the way I used to have waking visions of my imaginary friend, back in the days of my horrid childhood, when I thought things could not get any worse than they were.

Of course, they could get worse.

You could be bound to a creature who blamed you for the destruction of everything—and everyone—he ever loved.

A destruction he had sacrificed his entire being to prevent. He can’t return to his people, not in the same form. He’s as stuck with me as I am with him.

And he showed that kind of unwavering courage we celebrate in story and song. But he was too young to understand that some people aren’t worthy of loyalty, and sometimes a person who is in the position to do something won’t do it at all.

He gets that now.

Whenever he tells me something, something the base or the unit or the commander need to know, he adds, “You’ll report this, right, reporter?”

I assure him that I will.

And then I do.

What he doesn’t understand is that I’m not a reporter any longer. I’m part of this unit now. I’m in training to be some kind of soldier. A half-assed one, I guess, but something the unit can claim.

He keeps asking me, my Eldanten imaginary friend, what the point of my old job was, if not to save lives and protect the ones we love. What’s the point of reporting, he asked, if you’re not allowed to say much, and when you do, no one pays attention?

I had no answer for him the first time he asked that question, and I have no answer now.

I’ve saved more lives with him at my side than I ever had as a reporter. Or rather, he’s saved more lives.

And he’s not even human.

Late at night, in that bitter, bitter place beyond cynicism, that place where people like me most comfortably dwell, I sometimes think the fact that he’s not human is why he’s saved so many lives.

But that’s not fair to all our men here. Our boys here. Because they save lives each and every day. Human lives. Eldanten lives. Hell, sometimes even LaDucci lives.

Our boys are trying to find a way to win this thing so we can all go home.

Not that home exists for most of us.

But our boys don’t know that, any more than my Eldanten imaginary friend does.

Like them, he’s young. He’s strong.

Unlike assholes like me, he cares.

And unlike me, he can actually make some kind of difference.