18
WHEN WE WERE VULTURES
SO, CALLIOPE, WHAT brings you to the station?” Xan asked Calliope as they took a seat a few couches away from the other survivors. They all tried to make themselves comfortable, the only one succeeding being Phineas. Sitting on the massive, Gneiss-size couches, his brother actually looked comfortable. He’d fit in here, furniture-wise, Xan thought.
“You,” she said, crossing her legs under her like a child and wrapping her flapping trench coat around her. He wondered if it had a lot of pockets, and if she still had a klepto problem.
Not the best time to ask.
He grimaced. “I thought you left the army. Why would they send you to fetch me?”
“So you’re not going to ask how I’ve been doing? You don’t look happy to see me.”
“I’m not happy,” he said. “But how are you?”
Her eyes widened in mock surprise. “How can you say that after all we’ve been through!”
“What we’ve been through is why I’m not happy to see you. I don’t want to talk about what happened; I don’t want you to justify it to me; I don’t want to hear that you haven’t told anyone. I know you didn’t tell anyone because I would have heard.” He winced, imagining it.
She laughed. “Course I didn’t tell. If I spill, they know I was involved, too. I got my discharge and I’m a plain old civilian now, and it’s great how much the civilian life doesn’t have to do with finding dead bodies, transporting them, cataloguing every scratch or taking stock of who lost limbs, or love letters or mom’s wedding ring—”
“Don’t have to list the duties . . . H2,” he said, tacking on the nickname she wanted as an afterthought. “I’m still in the service.”
“Or you were till you escaped from Earth, anyway.” She shrugged. “That was a lucky break! How’d you pull that off?”
“That’s why you came all this way? To hear about that night?”
“Actually, yes! Tell me about that party. Was it fun?”
He sighed, remembering how she loved tangents. “Fine. I was at the party, pretty sure someone drugged me, someone tried to kill me during a game of Werewolf, so I ran. And then a ship picked me up, but she was on programmed autopilot and couldn’t drop me off.”
“That’s wild,” she said. “You didn’t plan this? The aliens weren’t your friends or anything?”
“I didn’t know them at all,” he said.
“Let’s talk about you and that woman,” she said, pointing at Mallory, who was talking to some other survivors. “What’s her story? Seems fishy that two people get asylum from the station that doesn’t like humans.”
“No, if you want to know about Mallory, you’ll have to ask her . . . but how did you know she asked for asylum?” he asked, crossing his arms.
“You know the army has ears everywhere,” she said breezily.
“I thought that was the CIA.”
“Them, too.”
This was getting tiring. He went for the blunt question. “Did they send you here to take me back?”
“Oh, most definitely,” she said, grinning. “But you know what else? They sent me here all alone, knowing you’re a much better soldier than I ever was, and I think they’re probably anticipating this adventure to end in my death. I think they want me to try to do as much on their list as I can before you or some alien kills me.”
“So if you think they’re sending you here to die, or to kill me if you get lucky, where do we stand?” he asked cautiously. He could probably take her one-on-one, but he remembered her unique combat skills. Although he had her on height and weight, she had taught him a lot of hand-to-hand fighting techniques, so he guessed they had an equal chance of killing each other if it came down to fighting.
“I’m saying I want to know more about what’s going on before I decide what to do,” she said. “Why do they want you so bad?”
“You have to know that. They briefed you!” he said, exasperated.
“Yes, but they lie,” she said patiently. “I’m not stupid, Xan. Also, I want to know if you know why they want you so bad.”
He glanced around the room. No one seemed to be listening. “All right, let’s make a deal. I’ll tell you, but first you have to answer my questions about what happened to the shuttle.”
“Deal,” Calliope said.
“So I assume you got the seat because the army sent you. Am I right?”
“Pass,” she said.
She had said that a lot. The superior officers had hated it. Back then, they could have threatened her and put her on latrine duty for giving them the runaround, but he didn’t have that option.
He shook his head. “I’ll take that as a yes. If the army sent you, why are you not attacking me right away?”
“That’s not polite, is it? And there’s not much to hide since you know why I’m here. Also, I nearly died in space, you rescued me, and I can’t forget that. I figured we could take a moment, catch our breaths, and chat a bit before all that violence starts. We do go way back, you know. And you called me my nickname, which you always refused to do. Why?”
“I refused because you made it sound like you were a Star Wars droid,” he said, puzzled.
“No, why are you doing it now?”
“When we got separated, I decided if I ever saw you again, I’d call you what you wanted to be called.”
“Why?”
“ ’Cause I’m pretty sure you saved my life, that night before the patrol,” he admitted.
She narrowed her eyes. “How?”
“You denying it?”
“Of course I am. If I admit to saving your life, then I admit to assaulting a fellow soldier.”
“So it was you.”
GOING INTO THE army had reminded Xan of a church Christmas pageant. They were told that every single branch of the army, from IT to medics to support to admin to accounting to vehicle maintenance and, yes, mortuary services, was vital and necessary. No small parts, just small actors, the preacher would say. (But his daughter was always Mary in the pageant, regardless of her age. From ages four to nineteen.) However, all the recruits knew that the only army stories that lasted involved going into battle, killing a bunch of your enemy, protecting women and children and American Freedom itself, and rescuing all of your buddies who got injured.
Those who took the active combat roles knew they were better than support, or medical, or definitely mortuary, but their derision was subtle and masked. Everyone knew you didn’t fuck with supply. A funny prank on Monday could have your laundry still dirty and all of the good food gone by the time you got to dinner on Friday.
Most people didn’t fuck with supply anyway. Some of the soldiers at Fort Sam Houston, namely PFC Buck Jones (a name Xan had had trouble taking seriously), had named the quartermaster battalion the Vultures because, in their opinion, they didn’t go out until it was time to pick up the dead. Calliope had tried to reclaim it, drawing an unofficial badge for them, which had helped a little. Vultures had their place, after all, she reasoned. They stopped the spread of disease and just tidied up after carnivores were done. Unlike most other birds, vultures were communal and looked after their own, Calliope told Xan one night when they had shared a bottle of wine.
“Listen, when have you seen any group of animals eating peacefully together?” she’d asked him, waving her finger in his face. She had a habit of getting belligerent when she drank. And when she didn’t drink.
“Even pretty little songbirds are pretty little assholes, chasing each other away from the bird feeder. But you see a wake of vultures around some roadkill, and they just sit like a family going to dim sum on a Sunday. You know if they could put that deer on a lazy Susan and just twirl it around so Grandpa could get at some rotting spleen, they totally would. Vultures are ugly, and they eat rotting things. But they clean up the corpses in nature, which someone has to do, and they do it while looking out for each other. Mark my words, if there’s ever a zombie apocalypse, the carrion eaters will save us. But no one wants to make that movie. Buck the Fuck thought he was putting us down with the ‘Vultures’ bullshit, but he really said we’re a group that looks out for each other and does the jobs no one else will do.”
While she had been monologuing, Xan had finished the bottle of wine. He shook it to coax the last drops out and looked for another one. Calliope handed him her bag and he fished out another bottle. She sat back and stared gloomily into her mug of wine.
“This tastes like shit,” she muttered.
Xan just watched the stars coming out.
“Buck thinks we’re fucking,” she said. “And I let him believe it.”
His head whipped around at her. “What?”
“Just testing you. But I think he probably does. I don’t care. Do you?”
Xan had a horrible feeling in his stomach that she was about to proposition him. He wouldn’t put it past her; he didn’t feel any chemistry with her, but it wouldn’t surprise him if she wanted to have sex because it seemed like a good idea at the time.
“Want to talk about vultures again?” she asked after a moment.
“I’m not going to talk about how awesome corpse eaters are,” he said.
The trash talk from the other soldiers had been infuriating. He knew that they weren’t considered important in the eyes of combat soldiers, but they all knew you couldn’t fight if you couldn’t eat. When Xan and Cal were done with their mortuary training, Jackson, their training officer, had taken all the new quartermasters out for a beer to celebrate and to give them the unofficial but very real reality about mortuary support.
“I’m not saying all companies will do this,” Jackson began. “But you are taking on a role that no one wants. Combat grunts might say you’re bad luck to be around before a mission. And when you do your jobs well, people will be too grief-stricken to appreciate it. And when you do it poorly, someone will remind you the harm you’ve done to grieving mothers and widows. Some will invent missing things that must have been ‘stolen’ from a soldier’s personal effects and try to get you or the army to cough up money for the missing items. Luckily, we have some redundant measures in effect now to combat that. That’s why you do not log personal effects or injuries without at least one other person there.” He knocked his knuckles on the table, staring at Calliope. “Do you hear me, Oh?”
Calliope made a face. “I get it, sir.”
Jackson relaxed and took another sip of his beer. Then he added, “It’s thankless, and dirty, and depressing as shit.”
Xan gave him the prompt he was waiting for. “Then why do it?”
“It has to be done. Someone’s got to do it, and that someone is you.” He held his glass up, toasting them. “So I’m going to thank you here and now for your service, because it may be the last time you hear this.”
Jackson had been mostly wrong. Most of the soldiers in Afghanistan treated them with the same respect (or disrespect) they treated everyone. It didn’t get bad until they left Afghanistan and took a post in Texas to help with the growing hostility regarding the water shortage at the US-Mexico border.
Attacks from drug cartels had driven workers from the power plants at the dam, and the army had to go in and take the area back, protecting it. The coast was nowhere near clear, and patrols were sent every few days to keep the power plants and dam safe. Not only were the drug cartels threatening them, but when the military came to the dam, the area towns were convinced they were going to lose their water, and the public relations engine had to rev up.
Water was tightly rationed for the troops, and tempers were short.
“Fucking vultures, get away from us,” Buck had said, throwing a dinner roll at Xan when he’d gotten up to clean his plate.
Buck had harassed them for days with no peace. Xan and Calliope had been helping out supply with nothing to do for their mortuary role. On advisement, they had left dirty sheets for Buck to make his bed, and when they served food, they served him the smallest portions. But it didn’t faze him at all.
Buck’s childish pranks had been edging into hard-core twelve-year-old boy territory, including tripping Xan on the way to the latrine, pouring vinegar in his bed, and drawing on Xan’s face when he’d been sleeping off a rough day.
The night Calliope saved his life, he and Calliope were drinking in their usual place, a table in the mess hall that was the farthest corner from the door. The moon was fat and full, casting its light through the open mess door.
“Why is it worse now?” Calliope asked.
“What?”
“The shit. Buck. You know what I’m talking about. It’s got to be getting to you. It gets to me. And why are we even needed here? It’s like the Cold War or something.”
He stared moodily at the darkening sky. “Exactly, it’s the Cold War, where everything that happens is quiet. We don’t know we won’t be needed. And ordnance needs backup, I guess.”
“Hey, someone could get heatstroke and die; that would give us something to do!” she said hopefully.
More of the terrible wine. Xan winced as it went down. “Hey, question for you,” he asked. “If I found you out there, what would you want me to do?”
“What, you mean besides going by the book and bringing home my dead-ass body?”
“Yeah.”
She got a faraway look in her eyes. “I’d want you to tell people I went down fighting, and then I’d want you to throw me a Viking funeral. Complete with burning boat and everything. Make it epic. Make it fucking metal.”
“You’ve thought about this,” he said, smiling slightly. “But I’m not sure that’s legal.”
“Not my problem. I’m dead,” she reminded him. “What about you?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I hate the idea of burning, so I don’t want cremation. I don’t think I want to be buried near my grandmother’s family. I don’t belong to a church.”
“Buried at sea it is,” she said gaily.
“Yeah, that can work,” he said thoughtfully. “Thanks, Cal.” Xan brushed his hands over his eyes, surprised how touched he felt sharing this morbid and personal thing with his only friend around. “I’m going to bed.” He got up abruptly and swayed. “After I hit the head.”
“Didn’t need the visual, dude,” Cal said as she settled back against the wall with a bottle in her fist. “I’ll stay here for a bit.”
People had joked about Cal and Xan having something romantic going on because they were always together. They were a real odd couple, with little in common, but working with Cal had felt like a puzzle piece sliding into place. They complemented each other but there was no chemistry. Xan would like to fall for a woman who was less likely to act on impulse. He’d found impulsiveness sexy in college, but in the past few years he’d seen nothing but chaos come from running into situations without planning. Usually he could stop her from running into situations. Usually.
Xan’s drunk brain slowly registered movement behind him, and then the punch came to the back of the head.
Shocked from the punch and the fall, he struggled to roll over, but Buck was on him, straddling him.
“No one steals from me, fucker,” he snarled. “You don’t take another man’s personal shit. I’ve had it with you. Stealing from the dead is bad enough, but now you have to steal from me?”
What the fuck is he talking about? Xan tried to protest, but Buck slammed his head into the ground. The grass did little to cushion his face from the packed dirt, and he felt his nose break. He groaned and tried to get up, but Buck was too heavy.
“I bet you fuck the corpses too, after you’re done with your little Chinese whore,” he said, pulling Xan’s head back again.
He was able to turn his head slightly so his battered nose didn’t take the next slam in the ground, but he felt the skin over his eye split, and then things began to get fuzzy. Jesus, he’s going to kill me.
Then a whistling came through the night, and there was a thunk of glass on bone. Buck fell off him. Somewhere close by, glass shattered.
This is the last time anyone catches me off guard was his thought before he grayed out.
“I SHOULD HAVE figured it out sooner,” Xan said, laughing. “I mean, you couldn’t hit the floor if you dropped a ball, but a wine bottle is just the right awkwardly balanced thing for you to throw perfectly. You hit him, dead on the back of the head, throwing a bottle, in the dark.”
“So my marksmanship with a wine bottle gave me away?”
“I was so fucked up at the time I had no idea what had happened. And then you wouldn’t shut up about the Bad Guy you saw.”
Calliope laughed in delight. “I loved that Bad Guy. I wrote fanfic about that Bad Guy.” She shook her head. “Got a ton of karma on AO3 for that one, too.”
“You wrote fanfic about a fake attack on Archive of Our Own?” He shook his head, and added, “What did you tell them, anyway?”
“That you and Buck were talking, and you got jumped. Buck got hit on the back of the head, and then the Bad Guy jumped you and beat the snot out of you.”
“And then ran off, without robbing us or anything.”
“Well, Buck jumped on my lie to say the Bad Guy had stolen from him, too. Very convenient. But no one knows the motives of Bad Guy. That was the whole mystery around him,” Calliope said seriously. “I told the infirmary I found you two and they came to get you taken care of. After I cleaned up the glass, of course. It was better if Bad Guy took all his weapons with him.”
“So, yeah. That was the day before everything went to shit. I’d say the last good day we had, but it didn’t end that well.”
“You know, I tried to keep track of you. You could have emailed,” she said after a moment.
“Not from Bowser. They had me on some pretty strict security.” He met her eyes. “Now will you talk to me?”
“Yes. What do you want to know?”
“First, I need to know about the shuttle. That shuttle could seat fifty. Why wasn’t it full?”
“We had to report for translation bug implantation yesterday, and a bunch of people chickened out at that. I saw some yelling, others crying, and some just terrified that the aliens were microchipping them. These morons who won’t let their phone out of sight, ever, are worried about being tracked via microchip. Don’t know what they were whining about. It was painless.”
“Lucky you,” he muttered. “Mine was administered by a drunk rock person with the mentality of a teenager. At least I was passed out when it happened. Anyway, I saw how the passenger area was laid out. Can you remember who was sitting where?”
“I’d need a shuttle layout to get it exact,” she said, closing her eyes. “But the shuttle had six rows of six seats with an aisle down the middle. Only it had more room than our shitty planes with the shrinking seats. I remember that the old Black lady and her granddaughter were sitting in the front of economy, on the left side. The seat next to them was empty, while that doctor was on the aisle on the right side. The white kid, blond hair, big-time reader, he sat alone on the left in the back, hunched up against the window. He kept reading and looking around the cabin and then back at his book. I didn’t trust him.
“Also, in the back, on the right aisle, was the blonde woman, looking like she’d just kissed an asshole and was determined not to lick her lips. All uptight and shit. I was on the aisle two rows in front of her. That Hispanic couple had the two seats beside me. Across the aisle was the big guy—your brother, I take it?—and then an empty seat, then me. Everyone else was in the middle four rows and I think like ten or so folks were seated up front, first class, I guess, but had to come through our cabin to go to the bathroom. Which I don’t think anyone did when they saw it. Guessing the Gurudev don’t pee like we do?”
He shook his head. “No, they don’t. Lucky for us, Eternity made some human-appropriate plumbing when humans got on board. So, do you remember much about the kid in back?”
She narrowed her eyes. “Why?”
“He’s the only one outside of first class who died. But”—he paused—“most of his wounds were similar to everyone else’s, and everyone else survived.”
Calliope whipped her head around, counting the survivors. “He’s not here? Shit, you’re right. I didn’t even notice.”
“So you remember him?”
“I remember seeing him reading some battered book. A physical book.” She paused to share a “Can you believe it?” look with him, but he just waited for her to continue.
“Anyway. It was like a boring plane flight to the West Coast, only with fewer snacks and better views out the window.”
“Do you remember anything that happened that was weird? About anyone, not just the reading guy?”
She thought for a second. “The old lady was lecturing the Black girl about something, sounded like proper violin or vigilante technique or something. The big guy looked nervous as hell, and then took a pill and slept. The white woman just sat and looked out the window, playing with her bracelet charms. She’s got one of those tacky white lady bracelets with the big charms. But, yeah, this was weird. At one point the guy—Sam—got up. I thought he was going to go to the bathroom, but then he just came back up the aisle and started pacing. Maybe the bathroom wasn’t built for humans and he really had to go. But he seemed really nervous.”
“This is in the middle of the flight, after the jump? Not the beginning?”
“We were just flying along. I don’t know what spooked him. After about four or five trips up the aisle, I got up to try to talk to him and see if he was okay.”
“What did he say?”
“I said, ‘Hey, are you okay?’ He looked at me like I was insane, said he was just worried about meeting aliens for the first time, or something. I said that he should just sit down and do some deep breathing, my people invented yoga, you know.”
“You’re not Indian,” Xan said.
“Tai Chi, then.”
“You’re not Chinese!” he said, exasperated. “Your family is from Korea, and you’ve never been there!”
“Don’t you appropriate me!” she shouted, then calmed down. “Well, we had to have made something relaxing. K-pop?”
He glared at her stonily. “Can you take one thing seriously? Please?”
She rolled her eyes and sat back like a pouting toddler. “Fine. I told him to calm the fuck down, he was making people nervous. So he did! Maybe I should claim that as a Korean method of relaxing.”
“Bullying?”
She glared at him. “My turn. Why are you here?”
“Do you remember William Williams?” he asked.
She got a guarded look on her face. “Yeah. He was at Falcon Dam. He was the idiot with two identical first names. One of the guys who got the pukes on that day . . .” She trailed off. “Is he the guy who died at the party?”
“I don’t think this had anything to do with Falcon Dam,” he said. “I was at his birthday party and we were playing a game. The lights went down, someone was behind me with a knife, but they got Billy instead.” He shrugged. “I ran. A ship picked me up, and three Gneiss were standing over me talking about me like I was a rescued dog. They said they had their autopilot locked and set to Eternity, so I was forced to come here. I asked if I could stay, and the station told me yes.”
“Not like you could have come home if she didn’t want you, right?”
“Pretty much.”
Calliope scooted back in the huge chair she had chosen and crossed her legs under her. “So you didn’t kill Billy.”
“No.”
“And the army didn’t send you here?”
“Why would they send you to come get me if they already sent me here?” he demanded.
“Maybe you didn’t come home when they wanted you to,” she said, shrugging.
“So come on, H2Oh, why are you really here? What’s been going on with you?”
She considered him for a second and then leaned forward, even though they were nowhere near anyone else. “Tell me, what do you know about God’s Breath?”
“Fuck me,” Xan said, a little louder than intended, startling everyone around them. “What do you know about it? Is that why you’re here?”
“Not exactly. My Uncle Drop was dealing something new called ‘God’s Breath,’ and he got locked up. He claims the government hired him to deal it and then hung him out to dry. He was always blaming some other guy for his troubles, and I never believed him. But I think this time he may be telling the truth. They were paying him a lot for it. He’s a small-time dealer, but he had a lot more cash than usual squirreled away in his trailer. I asked him about it, and he said the order came from Fort Bowser, and I knew they’re studying aliens there, and you were stationed there, so I thought you might know something about it.”
“How did you know so much about Bowser?” he asked.
“Listening, eavesdropping, reading superiors’ phones when they were otherwise occupied,” she said.
“Christ, Calliope,” he said, leaning forward and putting his hands on her shoulders. “Please tell me you didn’t bring any here.”
“Actually, I think I’ve got some right here,” she said, pulling out a baggie of blue powder from one of her many pockets. “Uncle Drop told me it was super-addictive and not to take any . . . Hey, are you all right?”
Xan felt the blood drain out of his face. He reached out gently and put his hand over hers. “Put that away, please. You’ve got the local equivalent of C4 in your pocket.”
“What the hell is this stuff?” she asked, holding the baggie up to her face as if she hadn’t looked at it closely before. “Why did the government make it?”
Xan opened his mouth. If she didn’t know what it did, she might be reckless with it. If she knew and was testing him, they could all already be in trouble.
“It’s a weapon,” he said, his voice low. “Please don’t use it, or even take it out.”
She looked at him, calculating, and then slipped it back into her jacket pocket.
“A weapon against aliens? Those big rock guys and the little bark-covered ones? All of them?”
“Even the station itself. That’s why it’s so goddamn dangerous that you brought it here. And the station here is under enough stress right now. She might freak out again.”
“Again?”
“You don’t know what happened to your shuttle, do you?” he asked.
“I assumed someone shot at us. It was weird. We were all doing that communing-with-the-station thing when everything went all crashy and dark. I blacked out and then woke up in a pod.”
Xan sighed, remembering he was supposed to be talking about this the whole time. Not about the chemical weapon from the government that she blithely carried around in a sandwich bag. “Can you tell me anything else about the trip?”
She frowned and rubbed the back of her head. He guessed she had been hit there. “After yelling at the kid to sit down, I started talking to the big guy, Phineas. Your brother, right? He’s like a rap star or something?”
“He is. Among other things,” Xan said, tamping down the flare of resentment against Phin.
“Hey, can you introduce me? You promised that once upon a time.”
“Let’s get through this, okay?”
“He just told me he had won the shuttle seat in a lottery and wanted a vacation. Weird that he didn’t tell me you two were related. Anyway, everyone was awake and seemed excited about arriving at the station, or trying to peep at the celebrities in first class.” She frowned. “Did everyone in the front die?”
Xan nodded. “Yeah. You eleven are the only ones left.”
“Damn. When we got close, the captain told us to relax, and that we would have our minds touched by the station. We all kind of freaked out, and I yelled that no one told us that was going to happen—and by then she was already there.” She frowned, remembering. “She wanted to know who I was and—she pulled it from me. I didn’t even have to tell her. She said something about me being fractured or something, which wasn’t true because I haven’t had a bone break since the army days.”
Xan chose not to point out that Eternity had been speaking in metaphors. Best not to distract Calliope.
“Anyway, we were almost done talking when I heard this screaming, and then something slammed into the ship. Then I woke up here.”
“And you didn’t have any of that in your system?” Xan pointed toward her jacket pocket where the drug baggie had been hidden again.
“Of course not,” she said. “I don’t use my uncle’s stash.”
“Why did you bring it?” he asked her, looking around to make sure no one was paying attention.
“Uncle Drop said for me to go to his trailer and get some supplies for the trip. He had money and weapons and drugs, so I took a little of everything.”
Eternity could have freaked out just talking to Calliope, he thought.
“All right. I guess we’re done for now,” he said, looking to see who Mallory had been interviewing. She was across the balcony, holding the sobbing blonde woman stiffly in her arms. Her aunt? He looked at Calliope again. “Unless you want to tell me exactly what the army told you to do regarding me.”
“Nah, not yet. I want to see how this plays out. Do I get to talk to that other woman?”
“Mallory? Why?”
Calliope shrugged. “She seems interesting.” She peered at Mallory for a long moment, then added, “Will you tell me something?”
“What?”
“When we were Vultures. Don’t you think they had it coming?”
Ah, fuck.
XAN HAD WOKEN up in the infirmary with his nose splinted and right eye swollen shut. Medical tape was holding a forehead laceration together. His lip was swollen badly, having been cut on his crooked canine when Buck had hit him. But he had all his teeth, so that was a win.
“What the fuck happened to you?” came Calliope’s voice.
He struggled to sit up and then was shocked to see Buck asleep in the bunk next to him with a bandage around his head and a cut on his cheek. “I—I have no idea,” he said. “I was going to the head last night and then everything went black.”
“Are you okay to work today? We’ve got an assignment.”
“Is someone dead?” he asked, alarmed.
“Nah, ordnance has a few guys puking their guts out. Norovirus or something. We need to help get a patrol supplied.”
The medic let him go with bad grace, accepting that even a beaten-up quartermaster was better than one puking norovirus everywhere.
After taking some painkillers for his head, Xan followed Calliope to breakfast. “Okay, seriously now, are you going to tell me the name of the door you walked into?” she asked as they grabbed trays.
“All I remember is Buck jumped me,” he said quietly.
“Going to report him?”
“What’s the point?” he asked. “I’m a pussy if I don’t fight back and a troublemaker if I do. And a snitch either way if I report him.”
“Pussy. Wow. Our enemies have a lot of weapons, but I hope they never find out that the easiest way to take down a man in the army is to call him a part of a woman that is incredibly strong and can take the trauma of childbirth and keep doing its thing.”
“Is that all you are going to focus on? That I said ‘pussy’?”
She stared at her food for a moment and then brightened and looked up. “Hey, want me to teach you some fighting moves?”
“I’m not a bad fighter, Cal, I was drunk and he jumped me.”
“Drunk fighting, then.”
“That’s a Jackie Chan movie, not a real thing,” he said.
She looked at him, nodding and grinning. “I’m not saying you can earn belts in it or study in a serious martial arts school or something, but there are some moves you can learn. Booze can mess you up for fighting, but only if you keep trying to fight like you’re not drunk. If you try to stay upright and fight the dizziness, of course you’ll be terrible. But if you work with the enhanced relaxed state and the unexpected movements, then you can be deadly. Or at least confusing.”
“Okay, now I know you’re just talking about the movie,” he said, drinking juice and wincing when the citric acid hit his lacerated lip.
“I’m not,” she said. “You’ve heard that drunk drivers aren’t injured as much as the people they hit because they don’t tense up, right? Same thing. I’m pretty good at it.”
“But you told me you were a shit grappler.”
She drank her coffee. “I am. But if you turn the lights off, throw me in some water, or get me drunk, I turn deadly.” She grinned.
“You’re serious.”
“Come find out,” she said.
“All right,” he said reluctantly. “When we’re off duty next. We have work to do today, right?”
She nodded. “Officer McReady is taking some time off for his injury. So we really do have to step in on ordnance,” she said. “That guy still wants a Purple Heart for the broken ankle he got on the stairs at the dam.”
“An injury not gotten in combat? I don’t think that’s how it works,” Xan said. “So, what do they need? Inventory? Supplying patrols? Sounds like a one-man job.”
“If that one man hasn’t been punched in the head repeatedly,” she said pointedly. “Besides, they want two of us so we can make sure one doesn’t make mistakes. I’m your right-hand gal.”
And then Xan replied, saying the phrase that he would regret for the rest of his life: “Yeah, thanks.”
“ACTUALLY, FIRST, BEFORE you answer, did McReady ever get his Purple Heart?” she asked.
“Yes,” Xan said curtly.
“But he didn’t get that in battle,” she protested.
He shifted to get more comfortable on the couch. This was not a thing he’d thought he’d have to detail today. “We did see combat during that trip. And no one who was around would refute his claim.”
“That seems like a bigger insult than—”
“No, H2. It’s really not.”
XAN ALWAYS THOUGHT the phrase “friendly fire” was one of the biggest bullshit pies with whipped cream that the PR propaganda division served the military. It didn’t matter if it was your enemy’s gun or a buddy’s gun: if the bullet tore apart your insides or blew your head apart, the result was the same in the end. Dead, dead, dead.
But the military was very strict as to their medal distribution: People who were injured or killed by an enemy’s bullet got the Purple Heart. Friendly fire taken while in combat with an enemy also ranked. No medal for shooting range accidents, flying wine bottles, or breaking your ankle on some wet stairs.
There was no medal for soldiers who died due to broken supply lines.
When they got to the supply room, Xan swore out loud. Equipment was stacked against a wall. Apparently, people had been bringing their items by and dropping them off when they didn’t see anyone in supply to turn stuff in to.
“We have to log all of this, and we don’t know who turned it in,” Xan said, picking up a radio that was tangled with a drone. The battery latch was on the floor, beside two batteries that had fallen out. “Goddamn, McReady really lets things slide here.”
They took the better part of an hour, logging everything they could and storing things back on shelves where they belonged. Xan’s painkillers were wearing off and spikes of pain were hitting him every few minutes or so. He would log the item and assume who had delivered it, then put it away. Calliope was going through the new manifest needed at the dam. The current standing patrol had radioed back that they needed a refresh of supplies and to send it along with the new patrol. Cal began packing items into a trunk.
“Who’s leading this patrol?” she asked.
“Buck, if he’s conscious,” Xan said, rubbing his forehead. His vision was blurry. He shelved a radio and went to unlock a weapons closet.
“Seriously? If this isn’t the perfect time to get back at him, I don’t know what is! And he’ll never know it was you!” Calliope said.
“That could get us into so much trouble, I don’t even want to think about it,” he muttered. “What do you have in mind?” he added, hating himself.
Cal hefted a radio thoughtfully, then put it in a box. “I don’t know. Forget the toilet paper?”
“Buck would use a sock. He doesn’t care.”
“Jesus, there is so much more I want to know in this world than that,” she said. “This radio doesn’t have batteries,” she said thoughtfully.
“Yeah, they fell out on the floor,” he said. “I’ll get them.”
She grinned wickedly. “Or we could put other batteries in. From the spent rechargeables pile.”
In later memories, he would tell himself that he had told her it was a terrible idea to mess with supplies. That they would be found out. Sometimes he would try to convince himself that he had a concussion and it was an honest mistake when he didn’t immediately replace the batteries for the radio.
However, Calliope had no concussion, and she had loaded the radio into the trunk with the other supplies. And a small part of his brain would always know that they both knew what they were doing. The dam hadn’t seen any action, they reasoned. This would only be a prank.
What was the harm in that?
After the patrols went out and they were released from duty, Cal and Xan spent the afternoon trying new fighting techniques. Xan had wanted to beg off because of his head, but she pointed out that pain would also hobble him in a fight and that he shouldn’t fight against those sensations either. After some injured fighting, they got drunk and then tried drunken fighting. Xan was very bad at it, and the second time Calliope threw him, making the stars explode in his head, he begged off.
Two uneventful days later, the new patrol headed off to relieve Buck and his team. After about an hour, there was a panicked radio call—Buck and his team were all dead, scattered about the power plant on the US side of the dam. Dead mercenaries hired by drug smugglers also littered the area; Buck’s crew hadn’t gone down lightly. They’d done the mercenaries enough damage that they’d had to retreat, because the area was deserted.
There had been no higher-level medics to deal with the bodies, so Xan and Calliope were on duty. Swallowing back bile, Xan logged all the details about the bodies, using his small knowledge of corpse forensics to guess that they’d been attacked earlier that morning. He found the unusable radio on the floor, a few spent batteries spilling out, giving Xan no plausible deniability. Buck’s team had tried to message base for backup or orders, and the message hadn’t gone through.
That night Xan and Calliope both sat, shocked, on the bumper of the Humvee they had used to bring back their fallen brothers and sisters. They made no move to clean up the blood they’d gotten all over their hands and uniforms.
“I’m a walking biohazard,” Cal said.
“Two things,” Xan said, and his voice sounded light and forgettable like smoke. He coughed and cleared his throat. “Two things.”
“Yeah,” Cal said, not looking at him.
“One, we never forget that this was our fault.”
“We don’t know if the mercenaries would have killed them before backup came,” she complained. “And they have charging stations there; they’re just too lazy to plug them in. It’s beneath—”
“Cal!” he said, hitting the bumper with his fist. “We will never know that. You know why? Because the soldiers who could clear up the confusion are dead. Our. Fault.”
She was silent for a moment. “And the second thing?”
“If it ever comes up, it was an honest mistake that we made because we’re not used to the way ordnance had things laid out. Someone had bumped the battery charger, it wasn’t charging. It was an honest mistake. We tell no one what we did.”
“Right. Tell no one,” she said, sounding very far away.
That slaughter led to a few more skirmishes, but none the army couldn’t handle; they had a grudge now, after all.
When they weren’t bringing back their dead comrades or logging the dead mercenaries, Xan and Cal trained in what she called “four fighting,” nonstop.
Or maybe they just drank a lot and beat the shit out of each other. Xan couldn’t remember. It had the same result.
“SO THAT’S THE lie you told yourself? That they had it coming?”
“Well, Buck did. He could have killed you.”
He shook his head. “No. They didn’t have it coming. Even if Buck did have it coming, the others weren’t involved.” He touched his nose, still with a bump that his glasses usually masked. “That’s a lot of death over a broken nose.”
“True. So at this party, you were drunk, possibly roofied, and someone came at you with a knife in the dark?”
“Yeah,” he said, staring at the silver mesh metal wall of Eternity.
“And they only barely got you, hitting Billy instead.”
“Yeah.”
“I’m so goddamn proud right now,” she said, grinning widely.
“What?” He coughed out a surprised laugh. He had been going down a melancholy road of regret, while she was basking in pride for her former student. “I did learn a lot from you. I guess you’ve saved me twice.
“So are you going to try to kill me?” he added, trying to keep his voice mild.
“What about those fuckers in first class today? Or that kid, Sam?” she asked, startling him. “Did they have it coming?” She was messing with something inside her pocket.
“Not them, either. And what do you have against them?” he asked.
“The first-class people? Money. They were all money. Old money, famous money, government money.” She removed her hand from her pocket. “Sam? Nothing, except he made me nervous with all that pacing.”
“H2, back to killing me. Are you going to?” Xan asked.
“Not yet. I have to get the lay of the land. I’ve got three missions. I’m a busy vulture.”
“Three?”
“Yes! You’re not the only pheasant to bag up here. Don’t feel so special now, do you?”
Jesus. “Are you even here for me at all?” he asked. “There’s no ‘lay of the land.’ We’re staying here till we can figure out what happened with the shuttle accident. Just keep the Falcon Dam shit to yourself. That’s all I ask when you talk to anyone else.”
She turned her head and pointed at Phineas, who was reading on an e-reader. “Does he know?”
“No, I never told him. I haven’t even seen him since moving from Texas to North Carolina. And I figure no one ever found out, considering the security level they gave me at Bowser.”
“All right, secret’s safe for now,” she said.
He groaned. “Will you let me know when it’s not safe?”
“Sure.”
He sighed and got up. “I have to talk to Phineas.”
“It’s good to see you again, Xan. Didn’t realize how much I missed you!”
He was about to say that he couldn’t say the same, but then he smiled. He had tried to blame her for the disastrous “prank,” but honestly, he had easily gone along with it. He had some serious mixed feelings about her, but she had held his greatest secret, and even if she was here to take him back home, her chaos was as amusing as ever.
“Good to see you too, H2, provided you don’t attack me.”
He walked over to the railing and looked into the now dark medbay. His back was tight, knowing he was presenting himself as vulnerable to Calliope, and knowing that she knew he was testing her.
Mallory was across the room, talking to her weeping aunt. Mallory didn’t move to comfort the woman. Their eyes met.
Too many connections, her eyes said.