Dory Folsom couldn’t breathe methane, but she could damn well swim in it. So could her platoon. At least, that’s what they’d been told. They’d been scheduled for a trial run on the new mods before shipping out, but things had been stepped up, and there hadn’t been time. Nobody told them where they were going, but it didn’t take a genius to guess that it was somewhere with a good supply of liquid methane, since that was all they’d heard for an e-month: methane, methane—oh, and a brief refresher on nitrogen and the bends. And when you were talking methane in all its triple-point glory—solid, liquid, and gas—you were talking Titan.
They came in skipping off Saturn’s atmosphere to confuse the fremden. They skirted the rings (“Not too close, Cap’n, not too goddamn close!”) and used Titan’s thick atmosphere for braking. They descended like fireballs onto the moon. The fremden civs were totally surprised, and Laketown fell in a day. There was some fierce resistance in a couple of sectors of the city, however, and Dory’s unit was sent directly into the heat. It was literally heat, because some clever fremden gristwright had figured out that the big methane snowfall of the past two weeks was not methane at all, but military grist. To simulate snow, it had been given the same physical properties as methane, and one sure way to get rid of the stuff was to melt it. So the locals had used some countering grist and old-fashioned self-contained blowtorches to set their whole part of town on fire.
In the other parts of Laketown, the grist had fallen, accumulated to a certain point, then activated and gone about its tasks. These tasks were varied, but, for the most part, deadly. Some of it just ate a fremden alive, “digested” him or her, then went and ate some more. Some of it was preprogrammed to go after command and control—that is, both structures and people. The local governor’s face was imprinted on the minds of a billion tiny assassins, so it was no wonder that they got him, even though people had caught on by then, and he was dug in pretty deep. Some of the grist insinuated itself into walls, into machinery, into people’s bodies. There it took up residence and slowly replaced crucial structures in the “host” building—a driveshaft, a supporting girder, a ventricle valve. And then, on the day of the attack, it just dissolved. And there you were—or weren’t.
Some bright youngster was rooting the grist out of New Alki, a peninsula that stretched away from the city and formed a spitlike whorl out in Lake Voyager. Dory’s platoon, unlike the methane grist, wouldn’t burn and wouldn’t melt. Nevertheless, somebody had figured out how to make their own homemade evil snow, and Zavers, Dory’s buddy on the obstacle course (and her onetime lover), stepped into a puddle that wasn’t a puddle, and before anybody knew what was up, he was writhing and the “puddle” was crawling up his leg. The fremden grist must have compromised Zaver’s heating elements incredibly quickly, because within seconds he was frozen in mid-writhe like a Popsicle in pain. It was – 180 Celsius out there.
After that, they avoided stepping in anything that looked like liquid. The heat around them was a cold fire by the standards of life from Earth. It flickered blackly, only hot enough to melt the killing snow.
The platoon met their first human resistance near a clump of high-rise apartments on New Alki’s main thoroughfare. It was an ambush from above using some kind of projectile accelerator. They later found that the fremden had converted a railgun used for firing packets into orbit into a deadly weapon that could throw bricks at several times the speed of sound in nitrogen. The brick arrived, followed by a tremendous sonic boom. One of the bricks hit the sarge in the chest, and he exploded into a nova of goo. Another one hit near Dvochek, flung up some rocks that acted like shrapnel, and took off Dvochek’s right arm. The grist of his adaptation quickly sealed the wound; he lived and was able to keep fighting.
When the sarge died, Dory felt a new presence suddenly light up her mind, and she knew that she’d been picked by the lieutenant to replace the squad sergeant.
“Corporal Folsom, stand by for command communication protocols,” said the voice of Lieutenant Uhl in her mind.
“Yes, sir.” And there, in the midst of the brick barrage, she’d been made part of the vinculum, the Department of Immunity Enforcement Division’s Merced communications network.
Commanding officers in DIED infantry battalions didn’t communicate their will to their soldiers, they expressed it through them. This expression, flowing down the command chain of the vinculum from a soldier’s lieutenant, captain, major, and general, was ultimately a product of one controlling mind, that of Director Amés.
The feeling of blissful interconnection that DIED officers felt when they either received or completed their orders was called the Glory, and while her companions fell around her, Dory smiled with intense pleasure as the Glory washed over her.
The sensation only lasted a moment, however, and then she was rallying the other soldiers and storming the building on which the railgun was perched. After they were inside, there was some intense hall-to-hall fighting, but Met soldiers were dressed out like attack helicopters used to be on Earth—rockets, projectile weapons—and all around them, stretched out for many meters, a grist pellicle that served as an advance scout, could see around corners, and could, to a limited extent, attack in and of itself, like a long stinging tentacle. The fremden didn’t stand a chance in close quarters. Dory took point as her unit charged up the stairs (the lifts were disabled), and she, personally, took the converted railgun out with an arm rocket, along with its civ crew. Before the final assault, she thought of Zavers, and toyed with the idea of letting the civs die slowly, but settled for a clean kill. Killing cleanly where possible was part of her orders, anyway, and if you wanted to feel the Glory, you had to obey orders.
The school recruiter back in Clarit Bolsa on the Vas had told Dory it would be like this, but she hadn’t really believed—not even after the merci simulation and the class vote on the coolness factor of being a Met soldier (93% approval, with a 75% rip quotient). Both Dory’s parents were big supporters of Director Amés, and every e-week they watched the show The Department of Immunity Presents together, so Dory figured she might as well give the Department of Immunity recruiter a chance to personalize her settings.
Fifty-three seconds later she had totally understood about order and how chaos needed it, and basically manufactured it out of nothing. The recruiter had shown Dory some extremely cool virtuality graphics of things called Mandelbrot sets.
“See how it goes down? Pattern, then chaos, then repeated pattern? See how the little patterns are basically repetitions of larger? That’s the way the New Hierarchy is going to arise out of this present chaos. You’re a seed crystal, Dory. You could be, that is. Don’t you want to be an attractor?”
Being an attractor sounded good to her.
“Rip,” Dory had said, and she’d signed up. Her parents had been proud as hell. Something better was coming. Some real order was going to arise from all this mess of a solar system, and Amés was the one who could pull it off, pull everyone up. And those who didn’t want to be pulled up? They could stay where they were, as long as they didn’t get in the way of the uplifted. But, you know, they always did. And that was what the Department of Immunity and being a Met soldier was all about. Getting obstructionists the hell out of the way so a good change could come, so that order could finally flow. You didn’t want to kill anybody, but sometimes you had to, for their own good.
That was only a year ago, and here she was, fucking on Titan, a moon of Saturn. Taking out the strange elements, sweeping the system clean.
And with the Glory as a reward. With Director Amés smiling down through the command chain right on her, saying, Dory, you did a hell of a job. Dory, I will not forget you when it comes time for medals and promotions. And, with the dead fremden lying about her and their stupid railgun blown to pieces, Dory stood on top of the apartment building against the red photochemical smog of Titan as the Met forces subjugated the rest of Laketown. She watched the portions of the town that had been on fire surrender themselves to the extreme cold. She felt a tingle when the merci blackout was lifted, and General Haysay announced the surrender of the remaining ground forces, and the subjugation of the moon. She knew from vinculum sidebands that what was left of the fremden space fleet was gathering above, to make one last stand. But the ground was taken, planetary defenses were in Met hands. What were they going to do, attack their own populace?
The fact was, Amés had won. And when Amés won, everyone, all along the vinculum, got a share of the Glory.
And Dory, standing there, got her share of it, too. Like the sun. Like a warm shower on a cold morning. Fucking marvelous! Fucking 101 percent approval rating!
“Rip,” Dory said, and smiled like a madwoman. Then she and her unit stacked the enemy bodies and set them to dissolve into the general grist.
It was only after the Glory faded that Dory and the squad went to collect their own dead and pack them into the cremation cubes for their trips back. All except Zavers. They couldn’t get the fremden grist to let him go, so they had to leave him there, all froze up and nine hundred million miles away from home.
And then it started to snow—real methane, this time—and Dory watched as the flakes filled in Zavers’s eyes and the lines around his mouth so that he didn’t look so much like he was being tortured or something.
Zavers had been a good guy, really. Her first lay, to tell the truth, at least with full penetration. He had been all right, even though he hadn’t gotten Dory to come. Nobody had, and she wondered if it was really the big deal everybody made it out to be.
She wondered how it would compare to the Glory.
Then it was time to move on. She gave a last glance at Zavers and felt like she was sorry about something, but couldn’t say what. It wasn’t like the guy had meant that much to her. But he had been a good guy. Basically tender. She looked around and found the rest of the squad looking at her.
“Where to, Sarge?” asked Darkroom, the guy from Mars.
“To our next glorious destination,” she told him. “Wherever the fuck that is.”
Then she felt it again. The weird feeling. Sorry, when there was nothing to be sorry about.
“Rip,” Darkroom said.
“Shut the fuck up,” replied Dory.