by Damir Salkovic
The hold of the troopship stank of old sweat and machine grease, and now someone had been sick on top of it, the pungent smell of vomit contributing to the general miasma.
Elena leaned against the bulkhead and closed her eyes, focusing on the vibrations she felt through the back of her helmet: the steady thundering of the engines, the rush of waves as the ship rode the swells, bootsteps clattering across a gangway in the depths of the vessel. No explosions yet — which meant the drone controllers had done their job right for once. This was her third landing by sea, but she had prepared with the diligence of a greenhorn, memorizing the tactical maps, putting in the mandatory twenty hours a week in the suit. Fear and rigorous training kept you alive. Complacency killed faster than bombs or bullets.
The war had begun when she was still a small child, and showed no signs of coming to an end. Her memories of it blended together until they became indistinguishable from each other, a succession of fragmented images without context or meaning. War was endless stretches of boredom punctuated by chaotic violence and pure mind-numbing terror. It was gunfire and the rumble of heavy artillery, but almost always in the distance, background noise to whatever was happening around her. Marching, resting for the night, breaking up camp, marching again. Chasing an enemy that could kill from miles away, and killing them in turn. War was the blinking HUD icons overlaid on the blasted hellscapes she traversed, and the sweat and discomfort of her armored Guardian, and the constant tension in the pit of her stomach that only grew worse between firefights, in the false lull of the battlefield.
Sometimes Elena imagined the war as a chess game, played by the drones and the armored suits, the satellites and the military AIs. A meticulous mechanical conflict grinding on toward some objective beyond human comprehension. The people inside the machines — the soldiers, the builders, the maintenance corps — were no more than fleshy accessories, vulnerable and increasingly becoming obsolete.
The disembarkation klaxon blared, snapping Elena out of her reverie. A shudder passed through the bowels of the troopship, the clamor of orders reverberating off the metal ceiling, followed by the familiar whine of exoskeleton servos. Elena shrugged her suit upright and felt its systems take over, circuitry coming online, hydraulics pressurizing: all around her, war golems were coming to life, girding their loins for battle.
When they rounded the breakwater walls and the craft’s engines reversed for landing, the tension in the hot, airless hold was thick enough to cut with a knife.
The reinforced doors slammed open and the first wave of Guardians clattered outside, preprogrammed battle plans guiding them in lockstep, an inhumanly straight line of gray-black armor advancing across the empty docks. Elena’s display filled with entrenchment quadrants, possible incursion angles, firing vectors. She would disembark in the last wave, a nod to her battlefield experience and to Command’s commitment to keep the casualties among seasoned veterans down to a statistically acceptable level.
One by one, the troops emerged into the paltry winter sunlight. Elena felt her heart rate pick up as combat stimulants flooded her system, her audiovisual augments scanning the ugly gray blocks of the incoming harbor for incoming danger. But she could hear no explosions or small arms fire, and the automated batteries on the troopship’s gun deck remained silent.
Up ahead, the first wave was already clambering over the abandoned barricades, vanishing into the angular shadows of the harbor buildings. Elena plugged into the feed from the surveillance drones, saw the other troopships converging on the beachhead, her comrades pushing into the city. There was no sign of the enemy. Either the defenders had fled their positions, or were hiding in the residential areas, digging themselves in for a bloody and protracted final battle. They would have scattered deadly surprises behind them: motion-activated ordnance bots, landmines, or even simple booby traps of gasoline cans rigged to a simple detonator. Elena knew from experience that a sweep could be more dangerous than an open firefight, that there was no predicting how the civilian populace would react to the invaders, how many saboteurs and assassins mingled in its ranks.
Broken glass and rubble crunched under armored boots. Elena’s squad split up into threes as they followed the radial streets, heading from the harbor into the business district. Here the damage from the bombing sweeps was more evident — craters in the asphalt, holes in the sides of buildings, not a single window intact. On her map, she could see the different sections of the city laid out in real-time drone feeds, gunships thundering in from the mainland, the Guardian strikeforce creeping in like a slow but relentless tide. It was an old place and its seams were apparent, the fault lines where past centuries rubbed up against the present: winding alleys converging on highways, modern structures wedged between brick and cement ones. Many of them now lay intermingled, pounded into shapeless ruin, another toppled signpost on a road that led nowhere, a war dragging on into infinity.
The street wended between the ruined towers before taking a steep downhill turn, where a firebombed housing block displayed its spilled innards like an animal gutted and hung out to dry. Elena studied the map overlaid on her visor, signaling her two squadmates to halt as she processed the forward intelligence report.
Something was wrong. The feeds still reported no fighting, but several units in the advance battle group had gone dark. There had been no response for almost sixty seconds, yet their vitals were uninterrupted and their suit sensors showed no damage. All sensors on high alert, Elena flicked through the BattleNet, listening to commands coursing through the relays. Drone cameras showed only more empty streets. Intelligence was urging caution. It wouldn’t be the first time the enemy had retreated to clear the line of fire, or deploy some unknown, devastating weapon.
Two icons blinked in her vision, directly ahead, somewhere inside the ruined structure. Two guardians, all systems green, but frozen in place, unresponsive. Elena pinged them with a status check. Got only silence in return, the barely audible background hiss of the network.
Her indecision only lasted a moment. Then she was running up the street, toward the collapsed building, into the shadows.
Warnings exploded in her peripherals, in her ears, but she ignored them, all attention focused on the dark space ahead. Infrared slid over her faceplate as she crossed the line of daylight, pockmarked walls closing to shut out the light. Elena dredged up the building’s floor plan from the BattleNet, slowed down to an amble. She switched her handcannon to single fire as she studied the grainy, low-res visuals for hidden obstacles.
It had been an office building of some sort — multiple hallways branching out from a vast, cathedral-sized entrance hall, with almost as many levels below as above the ground. The front section had collapsed into a pile of concrete, rebar sticking out at odd angles, but the deeper interior was more or less preserved. Thermal imaging showed only Elena’s own signature and those of the two bodies further inside. Soldiers, she chastened herself. She should not think of them as bodies, not yet.
At the end of a long corridor, the walls spread out into an inner courtyard, pale sunlight slanting in. Elena felt her heart rate spike before her suit sensors caught on. She could see the two suits standing motionless in the open space, both showing as operational, but neither returning her pings. Had the soldiers inside been rendered unconscious, or was this some sort of trap?
Elena paused to subvocalize a message to the two Guardians waiting outside the building. Visual confirmed on two friendlies. Moving in. Hold your positions. Carefully, she stepped out of the darkness, sweeping the courtyard with her targeting circles.
Helmet lights shone on a pair of expressionless faces, mouths open, eyes staring upward. Strapped to the exoskeletons, the soldiers’ limbs were slack, their shoulders sagging. But there was no trace of damage on either suit, and the men inside were breathing, their vitals normal. It looked like they were unconscious, or catatonic.
Moving to the front, skin tingling with the anticipated attack, Elena ran her atmospheric gauges. The air in the courtyard showed no presence of toxins or unfamiliar chemicals, the filters reporting the usual combination of gasses. Nothing to indicate what had happened here. Nothing except those empty faces, those wide, sightless eyes.
Turning slowly, Elena followed the direction of their stares.
Her breath stopped for a moment. She blinked, lowered her visor to let her natural sight adjust.
A mural was painted on the wall in front of her. At least ten feet tall, an abstract composition of circles and other geometrical shapes, bursting with bright colors. In spite of the heavy damage to the underlying structure, the artwork — it had to be an artwork — was itself untouched, the pigments thick and vivid, the lines and curves twisting around one another, drawing the viewer’s eyes toward the center of the image. Elena’s mind threw up an impression of flickering flames and lush vegetation, although none of the painting’s elements could be said to portray either. It was as if a message had been written into the composition, a text in a language she could not understand, but one that her deeper subconscious recognized instantly.
Someone had tried to cover up the devastation with beauty, she thought. To breathe life and hope into the bleakness of the blast zone. But whose eyes would see the mural in this hidden nook, tucked away as it was from the street? The ruin was surely uninhabited, useless as shelter, and it was unlikely that anyone would wander in by sheer chance.
So what had drawn the soldiers inside?
Fascinated, Elena took a step closer, switching on her shoulder lights for a better look. The smooth, glossy surface seemed to absorb the beams: the colors were incredibly rich, luxuriant, like they had been applied in layer after layer. At the same time, the lines were clear, with no trace of smudging and smearing that she could notice. Nothing could be more different from the crude, obscene spray-painted messages she had seen in other urban combat zones. Sinuous and complex, it was impossible to tell where one form began and the previous one ended, a calligraphy that spoke to some deep part of her, plucking out sights and sounds and memories she had not perused in years. If she got closer, even closer, she could almost-
Like a kaleidoscope, the drawing turned itself inside out, a huge movement spreading through the mural, taking in the rest of the courtyard, the bullet-riddled walls and the ground under her feet. Elena gasped, but was unable to tear her gaze away from the dizzying swirl. It was no longer on the wall, the dim realization came to her: it had invaded her helmet, her display, filling the confines of her skull. The petals of the geometric flower furled back, revealing the darkness at its center, latching onto her, pulling her in. Elena tried to move, to run, but her body was a thousand miles away, as inert as the pile of cerametal and circuitry and shockproof glass encasing it. Her scream reverberated through the dead space inside her mind, but never got out of her mouth. The darkness spun out of the pattern, enveloping her, eroding her consciousness until there was nothing left.
#
The medic was shining a penlight into her eyes. His face was a flat dark oval against the backdrop of the tent.
“Everything looks normal,” he said, turning the light off and tucking it into his breast pocket. “Just like the others. No apparent disruption of reflex function. I ran the autoscanner, just to be on the safe side. Your brain and nervous system were not affected.”
Leaning away, he held up his tablet to show Elena the results of her checkup. “You’re cleared for duty. But I would like to see you again.” The meaning of his own words seemed to catch up with him and he lowered his eyes. “For observations,” he hurried to add, slightly flustered. “The fact remains that we have no clue what happened to you. Any of you. So we have orders to keep an eye on you for a few days.”
Elena sat up carefully. There were salt tracks of tears on her cheeks, but she felt fine. Better than fine — as if emerging from a long and nourishing sleep. “How many of us had the same reaction?”
“Almost twenty in our battalion alone,” the medic said, looking uncomfortable. He was a little older than Elena, scruffy and tired. The tag pinned to his uniform identified him as Lehtinen. “Probably more. We’ve been warned not to talk about it, except with Intel. So it’s hard to know for sure. But you’re not the first one I’ve treated, not by a long shot.”
Through the slight fog of standard-issue chemical stabilizers, Elena struggled to reclaim her dream. She recalled being home with the loved ones she had not seen in years; the war was over, and they were gathered together, talking and laughing. Waking up had been a cold, cruel shock. “What do you think it was?” she asked the medic, who was preparing a prescription for her, counting pills under his breath.
“My money would be the graffiti,” he said, handing her a small plastic bottle. “It’s the only common thread in all cases. But if Intel knows how they work, they’re not letting on. The official line is that it’s some kind of nerve toxin in the pigments. Get too close, and you get knocked out.”
“It’s not. My filter readings were all clear.”
Lehtinen tapped his lips with a forefinger. “Speculation is not encouraged,” he said. “It’s above my paygrade anyway. Yours too. Take the pills once a day and let me know if you feel anything different.”
“I’m fine right now,” Elena said, meaning it.
“That’s what you’re all saying.” Lehtinen looked troubled. “But take it easy for the next few days. Until we know how the paintings work, it’s better to take no chances.”
Elena swung her feet down to the floor, stood up, and stretched: even her muscles felt more supple, her old wounds no longer aching, the chafing from her exoskeleton faded to an itch. “How bad was the fighting?” she asked, rolling her neck. “Looks like I missed out on all the action.”
The medic shook his head. “The first drone wave took out a few automated point-defense decks,” he said. “But that was it. We didn’t encounter any resistance.” She could tell that this was disturbing to him, probably more so than any amount of blood and torn limbs and torsos shredded open by flechette fire. “The whole city is empty,” he said.
#
But Lehtinen turned out to be wrong. It wasn’t.
Three days into the occupation, patrols started reporting encounters with civilians. People crawled out of the ruins of the industrial district and the less damaged housing blocks to the north and east of the city: dirty and a little worse for wear, but generally in good health, they kept to themselves and avoided contact with the soldiers. Seemingly overnight, camps had sprouted in abandoned buildings, providing shelter to those in need of it, sharing salvaged food and clothing. Drone footage showed convoys of hardy men and women carting supplies to distribution centers, where busy volunteers assigned and packed them off to local relief points.
By the fourth day, the scale and organization of the effort were apparent. The operation resembled nothing as much as a human-sized anthill, communicating through some mysterious process that evaded all attempts at surveillance. Like the cells of a great single organism awakened after a long sleep, the survivors were rolling up their sleeves and going to work. Old grandmothers knitted blankets alongside strapping youths hauling hundreds of pounds of supplies in hand-pulled carts. Children and middle-aged matrons picked through the dirt under the ruins, revealing carefully concealed gardens. Near the harbor, the suit patrols detained a large group of men carrying pickaxes, intent on creating a crude irrigation system to bring water from the damaged desalination plant.
When stopped and questioned by the soldiers, all civvies gave more or less the same vague answer. The city had been taken and retaken so many times they no longer knew which side of the frontlines they were on. They had no weapons, not even to defend themselves, and they knew nothing about the movement of armies. Shock teams descended into their underground shelters and found no evidence of concealed insurgents, or supply caches, or stockpiled explosives. Autonomous robots combed through the vast maze of sewers and tunnels under the city’s streets, with similar results. Everything pointed to the civvies telling the truth. If any hostiles had been stationed here, they were long gone.
Out on her rounds near to forward base, Elena saw the civvies everywhere, a blur of near-constant motion and industry. At first their actions seemed random, but soon the pattern became apparent: the gardens were arranged along unobstructed streets to facilitate transportation, the burned-out vehicles and building interiors meticulously stripped of every inch of wire and cable. Command had initially posted strict warnings against looting, until someone had done the math and realized the extent of the effort required to police a city of such size. Besides, the civvies seemed to be doing a good job taking care of themselves. What could not be consumed or stored was immediately put to use, building jury-rigged air and water scrubbers, heating units, and electrical cells that provided a faint, but steady output. Where solid roofs were not available, temporary housing shelters went up in a matter of hours — warehouse tents and ConnEx shipping containers with chemical latrines.
In an attempt to establish good relations with the locals, the army’s engineering corps had offered to repair the water supply to the inhabited areas. Soon mixed labor brigades could be seen on every corner, soldiers and civilians working shoulder to shoulder, digging, lifting, and replacing pipes. Silent streets filled with the noise of their labor and camaraderie. Chatter, laughter, songs sung in mutually incomprehensible languages: sounds from a different time, different world, as distant from the war zone as anything could be.
Whatever the outcome, Elena would not be around to see it. Military ‘casts already spoke of another offensive, a new frontline forming deeper inland. Another pivot dictated by politics, or money, or a government forever in search of a new foe to fight. Her Guardian platoon would be on the move in a week, two at most, after AI-directed bombardment softened the enemy defenses. This city and its defiant community, the mystery she sensed humming beneath her feet, would become just another icon on the tactical maps, and then not even that.
Rigged out in her suit, she strode along what had once been a bustling boulevard, the blackened fronts of buildings revealing the remains of a cafe here, the shattered hole of a shopfront there.The Guardians moved in their customary formation, two per quadrant, electronically linked to the other patrolling pairs, monitoring footage from the sleepless airborne eyes.
With no insurgents to hunt down, no crimes to police, their duty was loosely defined as law enforcement, although Elena was yet to encounter a situation in which she would have to intervene. Instead of relaxing, the stillness was disquieting: it felt unnatural in a place that only recently had seen such destruction. Her suit was designed to read her brainwaves and body chemistry, to make subtle adjustments that kept her focus unwavering, her combat readiness high. But it had no answer to the questions that were starting to nag at her, no solution to the growing blankness at the center of the big picture, her rising doubts.
Half an hour into her patrol, BattleNet piped up. One of the Guardians two blocks over had gone silent. Elena’s neuromesh switched to the drone feed, her eyes never leaving the devastated buildings around her.
“Shit.” Jossar, Elena’s patrol partner, had apparently reached the same conclusion she had. “We’re the closest unit. Wanna bet we’re the ones who get to check it out?”
Elena sent a query to the suit, received a response almost instantly. “What does that look like to you?” she asked Jossar, switching to a direct channel.
“Makes no goddamn sense,” Jossar said. “Could be a glitch in his gear. Some kind of malfunction.”
“Eyes,” Elena called out to BattleNet, her leg struts already thrumming with power, the cracked asphalt disappearing under her shockproof feet. The nearest communication node obliged, spreading a live feed of the sector across the right corner of her vision. She could see the Guardian as an icon, then an image, before the aerial image pixelated beyond recognition.
“It looks undamaged,” she subvocalized to Jossar as they swung round a street corner, targeting circles dancing along the pitted facades. “But I’m not getting any vitals.”
Jossar didn’t respond immediately. “There’s only one way that can happen.”
The Guardian came into view, standing just inside the entryway to an apartment building. An empty exoskeleton propped in front of a cavernous darkness, like a sentry. BattleNet identified the missing squaddie as Dunn. There was no sign of blood, no trace of a struggle. Ghostly visuals tracked across the inside of the faceplate.
Her mind raced as she tried to process the implications. Abandoning a Guardian inside a combat zone was a punishable offense. Maybe Dunn had been incapacitated without a shot fired and taken prisoner. Or he’d gone rogue, in which case they could be walking into a dangerous situation.
“Gone,” Jossar said. “Can we pick up his chip signature?”
Elena waited for the node to process the request. Time wound back and she saw the signature trail disappear into the dead building. Then it moved out of range and dissolved to nothing. “He’s inside,” she said. “We have to secure his Guardian unit. Any other objectives are secondary.”
“If he gets away-”
“He’s not getting away,” Elena said, undoing her straps and safety belts. “That’s why you’re staying out here, and I’m going after him.”
“Those are not our orders.”
“The situation just changed.” Removing her helmet, Elena slid out of her exoskeleton’s embrace. Took a deep breath, smelling ashes and the distant sea. “I’m making a judgment call, and you’ll do as you’re told. Unless you’d prefer to switch places.”
She couldn’t hear Jossar’s response, but his facial expression spoke louder than words. Turning away, she walked past the empty suit, the building swallowing her like a gaping mouth.
#
Naked and vulnerable. That’s how Elena felt as she moved through the debris-cluttered interior, away from the sunlight, without the protective carapace of her Guardian. Nothing but a jumpsuit and a pair of thin shoes on her feet, a cerametal blade on her belt as her only protection.
Deaf and blind as well without the BattleNet’s many ears and eyes, relying only on her visual augments to break down and digest the lightless space around her, to warn her of approaching threats. Operating on instinct as much as sensory feedback, she pressed on into the sunken chambers, feeling like she was being sealed into a tomb.
Thick walls threw back her footsteps at her, magnified the smallest noise. Jossar’s voice crackled over her implant, a thin line tethering her to the daylight. “… against protocol,” it said, sounding even more peevish than usual. “Command wants you back, and pronto. Otherwise we’re both in deep shit over this little excursion of yours.”
“Standard op.” Even her subvocals sounded loud, a whisper carrying along the room’s boundaries. “Call it a rescue, or a retrieval. The ‘ware in Dunn’s head alone has to be worth more than you and I make in a year. Can’t let that fall into the enemy’s hands.”
“That’s not going to fly when we’re hauled before a court-martial.”
“Let’s worry about that later.” A noise from the shadows fired up Elena’s reflexes, but it was too small to be human. “Right now I need you to be my eyes, Jos. Where was the last ping on Dunn’s chip?”
“Thirty paces along the right wall,” came the reply. “Should be a door, and behind it stairs to the basement. That’s what the old floor plans show, but it could have caved in. Might be better to come out and wait for backup.”
“No time to wait.” Elena’s augments gave her a limited degree of infrared. She scanned the ruined atrium for blood spatter, or a heat signature, but found none. Dunn didn’t appear to be bleeding. At least he wouldn’t be until she caught up with him. “He’s got a head start, but he’s blind, and I’ve got you. I think I can get to him before he gets himself into bad trouble.”
“Or you could be running into an ambush.”
Elena had considered this, but the explanation somehow did not fit. She tried several doors before she found an unobstructed staircase leading down. In her suit, she could fling fallen cement blocks around like papier-mâché. In the flesh, it was an entirely different proposition. “Will this get me there?”
Jossar’s voice wavered, meters of thick concrete absorbing the signal. “… a garage. If you don’t get eyes on Dunn right away, get your ass back up here. Too many variables.”
Sliding the blade from its sheath, Elena crept down the steps, feeling along the rail with her free hand. It was almost completely dark this far in, and her wetware could only render her surroundings in blurry outlines. Rubble under her soles told her that she’d reached the bottom of the staircase. She groped for the release bar on the door, pushed through as it swung into a boundless open space.
Jossar was gone from her subaurals, but she had her eyes back: between fallen concrete blocks, a track had been laid down in biolume strips, emitting a faint yellow-green glow. A figure could be seen at the very end of the light, racing into the darkness. Tall and square-shouldered, clad in a jumpsuit identical to her own. Moving as silently as she could, Elena set off in pursuit.
Small claws scrabbled unseen as she plunged along the track. Her aural enhancements picked up a second set of footsteps under Dunn’s hurrying ones: an enemy extraction team, perhaps, moving toward the rendezvous point. Once again she was reminded of the danger down here. But she was committed now, with nowhere else to go.
A brighter light floated in the distance, blinking in the hadal dark like a beacon. Ahead of her, Dunn, who had vanished from sight for a moment, rose out of the black nothing, heading directly for the signal. Instinctively Elena reached for her blade. But he wouldn’t be able to see her, even if he turned round, not with his pupils adjusting to the illumination. Near-blinded, he was staggering toward the light which had stopped moving and appeared to be waiting for him.
Briefly, Elena considered negotiating, or trying to persuade the fugitive to surrender. But Dunn was larger and stronger than her, and she couldn’t know how many others were waiting behind the light, probably armed to the teeth. Staying unobserved was her only advantage, and she wasn’t about to give it up until the last possible moment.
He must have heard her feet on the concrete because he half-turned, but Elena already had momentum on her side, and he was unbalanced by the dark. She tackled him hard, shoulder to midriff, rolling over him as he went down. His heavy fists swung a split second too late, finding only empty air. By the time he got his wind back, Elena already had him in a hold, the blade at his throat, his jugular thudding under her fingers.
The light grew brighter, spilled over them, two human forms caught in a tableau of violence and destruction.
“Back.” Elena wasn’t sure how far the invisible newcomers were prepared to go, or why they were here. The possibility that she might have misread the situation flashed through her mind. Maybe there was no sinister intent at play, only a shell-shocked soldier and a band of wartime scavengers who happened to find themselves in the same place. But there was no going back. She shifted slightly to make sure the blade was visible. “Stay back. Or I’ll cut his throat open. Lay down your weapons.”
“They don’t have any,” Dunn croaked in her arms. When she released the pressure on his windpipe, he raised his arms slowly. Not to defend himself, but to ward off the unseen arrivals. “No one here is a threat to you, soldier. Let me go.”
Elena’s only response was to add pressure to the blade. The skin of Dunn’s throat parted under the cerametal edge, a thin red thread trickling down to his chest. He gasped, but made no attempt to resist her.
“If you want to kill me,” he said, “I won’t stop you. They won’t either. Enough have shed blood already. For my own part, I’m sick of spilling it. Sick of taking life. Aren’t you?”
Elena was only half listening to him. Her attention was focused on the shadows behind the light. Two or three of them, their stances and breathing indicating neither fear, nor aggression. “How enlightened of you,” she said into Dunn’s ear. “If you don’t want to see blood spilled, tell your friends to put their weapons down and back off. Or you’ll leave me no choice.”
Dunn made a coarse rasping sound. A chuckle, she realized. “Come out into the light,” he said. “Let her see you. Let her see we mean no harm.”
Two men and a woman stepped forward. Elena’s breath stopped. All three were dressed in cast-off civvie clothes, but she could easily make out the barcodes and markings tattooed on their cheeks and hands. One of the men belonged to her own battle group. The other man and the woman were enemy soldiers. Her grip tightened on the knife.
“Hostiles,” she spat at Dunn. “Still trying to tell me this isn’t a trap?”
“There are no hostiles here,” came the reply. “I can explain, if you let me go.”
Understanding rushed through Elena’s mind like a cold tide. “Deserters, then. Traitors. So this is what you came here for.”
“Cut the network propaganda crap,” the woman said. In her hands was a small rectangular object, some sort of metal box. Elena tensed, but the item did not look like a weapon. “We’re part of something bigger here. You can be part of it too, if you wish. But not if you insist on being a brainwashed tool.”
Elena calculated angles, distances, probabilities. She estimated she could take out at least two of the hostiles after eliminating Dunn: all three, with a little luck. But the deserters’ fearless attitude unnerved her. “Save your breath,” she said. “We don’t negotiate with traitors. Especially not our own.”
In response, the woman bent down and placed the box on the rubble-strewn floor.
“Then seek us out when you’re ready to listen.”
Some part of Elena realized what was about to happen. She rolled off Dunn, the blade thrust out for protection, her other hand covering her eyes. Fast, but not fast enough. The hologram blossomed in the subterranean darkness, engulfing her entire field of vision. Spinning out of the cube and into her head, immense and inescapable, dissolving her consciousness like acid. It was beautiful, but the beauty was terrible, consuming and erasing everything in its path. Elena felt the universe tilt on its axis: for an infinitesimal moment she was weightless, suspended over an abyss of oblivion, but then she plummeted down like a rock.
Hard ground underneath her, harsh lights shining in her eyes.
Groaning, Elena raised herself on one elbow, put up one hand to shield her eyes. The hulking shapes of two Guardians loomed over her, floodlights and targeting sights scything through the darkness. Dunn was gone and the deserters were gone with him. They had taken the box.
#
“It’s an encoded message,” the intelligence officer said. He was young and earnest-looking, with bright, sharp eyes. Not at all like the cadaverous starched-collar bureaucrats Elena was accustomed to seeing in the role. “We’re not sure how it works yet. But our best researchers are on the job. We’ve taken down at least a hundred of these murals all over the city. Now you’re telling me the saboteurs have figured out a way to package them in a hologram format. That’s troubling news.”
Elena rubbed the back of her neck, feeling like she was being interrogated, rather than debriefed. “Will I be able to resume full duty?”
“Do you want to?”
There was a trap in the officer’s question, even though his tone remained casual. Elena raised her gaze to the young man’s face again. What she’d mistaken for ardor was zealotry, the light in his eyes not shrewdness, but blind dedication to a cause. Put on guard, Elena decided to stall for time.
“Those are the facts. Exactly how they happened. Am I under suspicion of something?”
The officer tutted dismissively. “You have been missing your scheduled evaluations,” he said, skimming his tablet. “Already two missed appointments. Can you explain?”
He’d ignored her question, Elena realized. “There’s a war going on,” she said, hoping she sounded convincing. “There aren’t enough of us to cover a city of this size. We’re all pulling extra hours on patrol duty. It isn’t easy to find the time for checkups.”
“Right.” The officer’s expression was carefully neutral, but Elena could tell she’d hit a nerve, even if she didn’t know why. “How do you feel about the war effort? Do you still believe that our cause is just, soldier? Or are doubts starting to creep in?”
Elena’s mind reeled from the pivot in questioning. Could the officer know about the dreams she’d been having, the surges of memory she’d been experiencing? She had not spoken a word to anyone, but she’d forgotten that she was not alone in her head, with her wetware tracking her body chemistry, monitoring her brainwaves. Sweat stuck her uniform to the skin between her shoulderblades.
There were other changes taking place, ones she couldn’t ignore. Her few weeks of relative peace in this strange, ruined city had awakened old memories, recollections of times before the neverending war swallowed up her future. Faces, places, fragments of events that held a special significance to her alone, now all swallowed by the fires of the conflict.
Elena tried to fight them, and so did her suit. Empathy and nostalgia had no place on a killing field, they dulled the keen edge of experience and skill and nerve. Thoughts of this sort were worse than unpatriotic — they were downright treasonous. But no matter what defenses she put up during the day, her dreams only grew more vivid, the emotions more intense. Her Guardian no longer felt like an extension of her own bones and sinews and nerve endings: it weighed down like a metal trap, an infernal device capable only of wreaking havoc and destruction, an instrument of devastating force capable of tearing down in seconds what had taken decades of planning an ingenuity to build.
Without thinking, she reached into her pocket, squeezed the empty metal ampoule she’d found in the underground garage.
“The enemy is at breaking point,” she heard herself say, as if at a distance. “This offensive could be crucial to our ultimate victory. I have taken an oath to see it through to the end.”
Her reply seemed to please the intelligence cadre. He put away his tablet with a faint smile. “Good,” he said. “I’ve reviewed your file, soldier. Nothing but meritorious conduct on and off the battlefield. A true warrior and patriot. I wish more of your comrades were the same way.”
“There were others who deserted? Not just Dunn?”
A shadow flickered across the cadre’s face, a sure sign that he’d slipped up, let his mouth run away with him.
“No more than usual,” he said, a little too quickly, averting his eyes. Fumbling with his tablet, he stood up, indicating that their conversation was over. “It isn’t anything to be alarmed about. You saw it yourself. Private First Class Dunn was working with the enemy. He chose his own path. He will be found and made an example of.”
“Does it have to do with the murals?” Elena asked, staring right through the officer’s angry glare. “They’re not just street art, are they?”
“Above your clearance level, soldier.” His voice was now stern, a warning. “Rest assured, we’ll find out what’s going on. We always do.”
#
A market of sorts had sprung up in one of the central squares, selling everything from old clothes to meals in self-heating pouches to tiny circuitry stripped from damaged drones. Elena moved through the crowd, invisible in nondescript clothing, her dataglasses scanning under her hood. Guardians roamed the edges of the square, their metal exoskeletons reflecting the meager sunlight, handcannons idle under their great metallic arms. She knew that she stood out in their visors, the biochip embedded in her cervical vertebrae distinguishing her from the press of bodies: but if any of them wondered what one of their own was doing here on her day off, instead of getting fall-down drunk in one of the bars on base, they kept their interest to themselves.
Sunshine and the smell of the sea, the nearness of human chatter and laughter, the smell of food cooking in the stalls. As far as Elena could tell, the transactions here did not involve money, or scrip transfers, or even barter. Buyers exchanged goods with sellers with no apparent concern for respective values; she saw others who simply helped themselves to what they needed without offering anything in exchange. Just like with the food handouts and the building of shelters, people seemed to come together spontaneously, or guided by some secret grapevine, putting in the work without complaint, giving away valuables without greed or rancor. The situation put Elena on edge. It hinted at some higher organization at work behind the scenes. But the locals met all questions with blank-eyed confusion, either genuine or feigned, and the army’s intelligence units were faring no better. If she wanted answers, she would have to find them herself.
She saw Lehtinen enter the marketplace from one of the side alleys, moving with purpose, but not quickly enough to attract attention. Hands in his pockets and hood pulled up to evade the facial scanners. Like Elena, he was hiding, but not so well that he would not have an excuse if he was stopped and questioned. Elena’s heartbeat was steady, her breathing only slightly elevated as she slipped into step behind him, surreptitiously checking the machine pistol under her coat.
Shadows swarmed around her as she ducked into a row of duraplast stalls, drawing glances from the traders. The medic was walking faster now, weaving between people and obstacles, clearly familiar with the area. For a moment, Elena missed her smart targeting systems and the situational guidance from the AIs. But enlisting their help would have been too risky, and she would probably have found herself sidelined by Intel. If she was wrong, no one would know about it. A queasy, tingling sensation in the pit of her stomach, a distant echo of her chemically boosted combat instinct, told her she probably wasn’t.
Lehtinen was under a concrete doorway, speaking to a thin woman in a jacket several sizes too large. They blended into their surroundings, a vendor and a customer haggling over a display of wares. As Elena stepped out behind the medic, his companion’s face flashed surprise and fear. Her gaze darted to the side, then to the blunt muzzle of the weapon protruding from under Elena’s coat, as she realized there was nowhere to run.
“Turn around slowly,” Elena said, keeping her voice low. “I want to see your hands. Both of you. Now.”
They obliged. Lehtinen looked resigned, like he’d seen it coming. “How did you know?” he asked, clearly not expecting an answer.
Elena’s free hand reached into her pocket, tossed the empty ampoule at him. “The deserter dropped it during our tussle,” she said. “You’ll recognize the label. It’s a drug designed to suppress the suit’s hormone protocols. For when you’re damaged and have to bail out. Dunn couldn’t have gotten it without help. It wasn’t hard to scan the code and see who checked it out.”
She spoke to Lehtinen, but kept her eyes on his contact. The thin woman didn’t look like a threat. She looked about to wet her pants. Another damned civvie: what sort of operation was this?
“Careless.” A wry smile creased the medic’s face. “I’ve never done anything like this, you know. Never felt the need to. But there was no alternative. Someone has to help these people.”
“What you think is none of my concern.” Elena motioned with the pistol. “You’ll be given the opportunity to explain yourself in court. Now get moving.”
Lehtinen cleared his throat, glanced pointedly over Elena’s shoulder. Too late, she realized what she’d failed to notice, used to relying on her suit’s three-sixty vision. She spun round, finger on the trigger.
There were four of them, all four unarmed. Elena recognized the woman from the garage and the tall, broad-shouldered man standing to her left. Dunn. Stunned, she raised her pistol.
“Put your weapon away, soldier,” the woman said.
Lehtinen reached into his pockets. Elena tensed to fire, but all he did was take out two ampoule boxes, handing them over to one of the thin woman’s companions. Wide-spectrum antibiotics, synthetic coagulant, other medicines Elena did not recognize.
“We’re leaving now,” he said to Elena. “This doesn’t have to end in violence.”
“You’re not going anywhere.”
Behind the four arrivals, a wall of bodies had formed. Faces grim and resigned, hollowed out by war and want. No one made a threatening move, but their combined resolve hit Elena like a physical force. Even if she could bring herself to fire on these civilians, they would easily overwhelm her in the narrow alley, with no backup in sight.
The medic stepped between her and the crowd, raising his arms in a placating gesture. “I can take you to him,” he said. “I can show you. Let you make up your own mind.”
“Take me where?”
“To the man who paints the murals.” Lehtinen’s voice wavered, as if he were unsure of his ground. “You want to know what this is all about, don’t you? Don’t deny it. Otherwise this place would already be swarming with Guardians, and I’d have been arrested before I left camp.”
“It’s too dangerous,” the thin woman said. “I won’t allow it.”
“It’s not your choice,” one of the others said, eliciting a murmur of approval. “It’s hers. It has to be. That’s the way things are now.”
The woman scowled at the speaker, but held her tongue.
Lehtinen’s eyes found Elena’s. “Those are your choices,” he said. “Walk away. Surrender your weapon and come with me. Or we’ll have a bloodbath. None of us are armed. It’s not our way. But you can’t take us all out, and we’re ready to defend ourselves. What will it be?”
Duty and curiosity fought in Elena’s breast, but only for a moment. She could feel the gazes of the gathering pass through her, sapping her will. Clicking the safety on, she handed the machine pistol to Lehtinen and followed him down the alley.
The crowd parted to let her pass, then closed around her, hemming her in.
#
It would have made sense to blindfold her, or take some other precaution to prevent her from remembering the route they took through the ruins. But the group escorting her made no effort to conceal where they were going. Whatever the reason, Elena was thoroughly disoriented within minutes, the trek taking her through identical shattered courtyards and down tunnels that hid the sky and any memorable landmarks. The best she could tell, she was walking in a general westerly direction, which meant next to nothing in a city of this size.
Painted icons marked the way, smaller versions of the great murals whose very memory made her head spin with vertigo. The pattern of their distribution meant nothing to her, but her escorts read it like a secret language, guiding her through wrecked buildings and shadowy passageways without once having to backtrack. Gradually the fallen masonry opened up and the procession came to a halt. Elena found herself in another ruined plaza, sunlight streaming in through empty window casements in a high wall, the last standing part of a structure that had collapsed to rubble.
An elderly man with a kind face was standing at the base of the wall, speaking and pointing at a drawing in colored chalk: a stylized human figure inside a circle, dissected by straight lines to illustrate proportion and composition. His audience was a group of youths in paint-smeared clothes, seemingly so rapt that they gave no sign of noticing Elena and her guides. The old man — a teacher, she realized — rounded off a particularly animated speech with a sentence spoken in a low, mock-conspiratorial tone. Several of the girls present burst out laughing and a boy in the middle of the impromptu amphitheater turned a bright red.
The woman accompanying Elena gave an officious cough and the teacher looked up, eyes crinkling in a smile. Puffs of chalk rose from his palms as he dismissed his students with a clap. He motioned for Elena to come closer.
“Human anatomy,” he said, nodding at the drawing. Every square inch of his outfit was dusted or spattered or stained with color. “Always good for a laugh or two. There’s something about naked bodies that turns young people into children. Thankfully, that bashful phase never lasts long.”
Elena sat down on a concrete step, feeling awkward. To her surprise, her escorts were already wandering back the way they’d come, leaving her alone with this — leader didn’t seem quite right, prophet sounded ludicrous. Maybe it was all a show put on for her benefit, another layer in an incomprehensible mystery.
“Your students seemed to enjoy it,” she offered, studying the lined visage for a hint.
“Every smile I draw out from them is a blessing.” The artist was still smiling, but his eyes darkened. “They have seen things no human being should see. Experienced death, hunger, terror. But the young are resilient.”
He patted Elena’s hand, which she retracted immediately. “You have seen this too, and much worse. I suppose that’s why you sought me out.”
“I didn’t.”
“Then how come you’re here?”
How could she explain, when she didn’t know herself? “The murals you painted,” she said. “They bring out a change in the brain. Almost like a hypnotic state. How did you do that?”
The teacher nodded slowly. Elena couldn’t tell if he was agreeing with her, or simply keeping time with some tune only he could hear. “It may be more helpful to ask,” he said, after a long moment. “What did you feel when you saw them?”
Elena contemplated her response for a moment, settled on the truth. She remembered the terrifying sensation of falling into nothing. “I felt afraid,” she said. “I felt lost. But then there were the dreams. Good dreams. I dreamed of home. Of my mother, and being outside in the springtime.”
The teacher studied her through slitted eyes. “Did you want the dreams to stop?”
“I wanted them to go on forever,” Elena said. “That’s what you’re doing, isn’t it? This isn’t a subversion, or a plot to demoralize the troops. You just make us remember. How it was before. How it could be again.”
“Something like that,” the artist said. “This war has gone on for far too long. We have all lost so much. So many. But life finds a way to propagate itself. Every wave of this senseless invasion brings death, but also an opportunity to replenish our numbers. There will always be those who want to stay. The special ones. For them, we create an escape into a new life.”
“How many?”
“Enough to keep our numbers up.” The old man tossed a piece of colored chalk from hand to hand. “Not enough to attract attention. Soldiers die and soldiers disappear. A few here and there make no difference to the war machine. Like your friend.”
“You make it sound like it’s our choice,” Elena said, frowning. “But it isn’t. It’s yours. The murals do it to us.”
The artist seemed about to debate the point, then changed his mind. “Before the war,” he began. “Well. Not before the war, but before this latest escalation, I was a well-known name. If you’ll forgive my immodesty. I toured the great cities on both sides of the frontline. Exhibited in the biggest galleries. The technique I painted in wasn’t my invention, but the critics considered me one of its best known exponents.”
With a wry grin, Elena pointed at her barcode tattoos. “Indenture contract at age twelve,” she said. “They didn’t teach art classes at tactical school.”
“Synesthetic pigments.” Long, elegant hands traced a shape in the air between them. “When interacted with — touched, or inhaled, or mixed with certain pheromones — they induce a sensory response that varies from viewer to viewer. Even for the same viewer at different exposures. Art is never experienced in the same way twice. But synesthetes took it a step further. We got into the viewer’s mind and guided it where we wanted it to go. Audiences couldn’t get enough of us.”
“That must have been nice.”
“It didn’t last,” the artist said. “Too many copycats, almost none of them any good. Even mass-printed pieces sold as cheap pornography. People abused it, as they usually do with anything that makes money. The style fell out of favor.”
He tapped his gray temple. “The pigments can’t create what isn’t already here. A synesthetic painter sketches a general outline of the emotion he wishes to evoke. Sadness, or calm, or rage, or erotic lust. The watcher’s mind interprets it and populates the scene with its own details. That’s what makes it meaningful. Without it, all you have is some fancy paint on a wall.”
“So I’m right,” Elena said. “You put these thoughts into our heads. Through your special pigments.”
“At first we did,” the artist said. “Later, all it took was ordinary spray paint. Some of my students even use simple chalk. Don’t you see? Once the brain wants to remember, it keeps remembering.”
Elena remembered. If she closed her eyes, she could clearly see her parents, the street they’d lived on, the small slice of life she’d been allowed to live before being bundled off by the enlistment transports. To train for a war that was already older than her parents and grandparents, vaster than anything else she knew in the world. It was most of what she’d experienced, almost all she knew.
Could she turn her back on her comrades, on her commanders, for nothing more than this distant memory, faded by the passage of time?
When she looked up, the artist was exactly where he had been a moment ago, wearing the same patient expression. Her machine pistol was at her feet. She picked it up and slid it into her bioholster. Tried to think of something to say and couldn’t.
The old man merely nodded. If he felt any disappointment in Elena’s unspoken decision, he didn’t betray it. There would always be others like her, she realized. Bright murals would keep blossoming on the battlefields, whispering of a secret, gentler world to anyone willing to listen.
Elena walked out of the courtyard, into the bright midday sun. When she glanced back, all she could see was a geometric flower bursting impossibly from the ruins, petals quivering in an imaginary wind, as if to bid her farewell.
#
At the airfield, troop carriers sat with their enormous jaws hung open, showing rows of tightly-packed Guardians in their holds. Out of their suits, the soldiers traded jokes and playful punches, a nervous giddiness showing through their banter.
“It’s on,” a beaming officer said to Elena and her squadmates in passing. “The big push. With any luck, we’ll be in the enemy capital before winter. Put those bastards in their place, right?”
Another line of razed towns, more bleak fields scorched by hypersonic missiles and suborbital bombardment. It had not meant anything before, and it wouldn’t mean anything tomorrow. Because the war had to go on. Like any monstrous thing, it had to kill to keep moving, keep feeding.
It was a cloudy day, the sky a slate lid over the horizon. When Elena walked over to the airfield fence line, all she could see of the city were a few tumbledown blocks emerging from a curtain of light rain blown in from the sea. A vision presented itself: the artist at work amid the fallen towers, hands moving over his creation, white hair swirling in the shadows. Soon it would all be behind her, fading into the past. A memory, and then not even that.
Elena realized that she didn’t want to fade with it. Perhaps the war would never end, or at least not in her lifetime. But she wanted to feel something, to make her mark somewhere. As monstrous and inane as the war machine may be, it had made her into what she was, defined her from the rest of the world. Accepting that it has all been meaningless felt like a negation of self, a fate worse than death.
Downblast scattered dust across her visor as the first squadron of troop carriers took off, tiltjet engines howling. Ponderously at first, then more smoothly, finding the air currents, picking up speed. Orders flashed in her peripherals: her battle group was next. Elena’s Guardian took over before her brain could send the command to her limbs, marching across the tarmac, seamlessly falling in line behind the others. Familiar icons flared in her field of vision, chatter filling the communication channels. Elena felt a tightness release somewhere deep inside her. Perhaps there would be no going home. But she was already there.
Damir Salkovic is an aficionado of horror and the weird living in Arlington, VA. He enjoys reading, traveling, and low-budget horror movies. He earns his living as an auditor, a profession that supplies nightmare material for his stories and plenty of writing time in the form of long-haul flights and interminable layovers. His homepage can be found here.