CHAPTER 5
The Chain of Command must be maintained at all times. However, losses due to death, disease, or retirement are routine among Camps. In the event that an Officer is no longer able to fulfill the function of his duty for whatever reason, his replacement is found and installed at the discretion of the Commander, with the position going unfilled for no longer than two (2) consecutive weeks. In irregular circumstances, a temporary Officer may be used for a period up to, but not exceeding, 180 consecutive days.
- HDC Manual, Section 8 § 14
She hid herself again as the gunfire dissipated into the cool night air. After a few very long minutes, everything was still again. Everything except for her racing heart. Gray blinked, swallowed, touched her lips with a gloved finger. Did that all really happen? She tasted him on her, still, though the pheromone had wafted away. The only thing that felt real now was the chemical fear, and the deep ache in her side.
It took a moment to get her bearings, and when she did she left her hole to find the others. There would be injured. Immediately, she thought of Wesson, positioned with the other sappers so close to the attack.
It didn’t take long to run into two other corpsmen from Green Fox, but she was looking more for her friends. Finch would surely be found nearby, so Gray pressed on in the direction the redhead haddisappeared in, calling out her name. Beside a cluster of prickly brush, she found the sixth-year. Even in the darkness Gray could see the younger girl clutching at her arm and breathing shallow.
“Some party that was,” Finch panted.
Gray frowned when she carefully reached out and felt the sleeve of Finch’s shirt soaked through.
“C’mon,” Gray said, grabbing the younger girl’s fifteen–pound gun. “Gimme that. Can you walk?”
“Yeah… yeah. I can walk.”
“One of you get me a med kit and a goddamn light!”
One of the Green Foxers, she didn’t know his name, rummaged through his pack and produced a small box in one hand and then the beam of a flashlight was focused on Finch’s arm shortly after. It was bad.
Gray used her tac knife to cut off the sleeve of Finch’s shirt, and proceeded to clean the wound to the best of her ability. The ‘Nak bullet had only grazed her, but it took a chunk of flesh with it. One lucky inch was the only reason she still had an arm.
Gray tied off a tourniquet to help stop the bleeding, and put two little white pills into her friend’s mouth. They weren’t morphs or codys, but a standard-issue field medicine that would make you nauseous if you took too many.
“If you think you might puke, let me know. We’re gonna get you home one way or another, alright?”
Finch rose slowly to her feet. “I’m done for,” she whispered. “They’re gonna sew me up and leave me for the fucking coyotes like all the others.”
“No they’re not,” Gray hissed. “Now shut up and save your strength for the ruck, alright? Getting home is half the proof they’d need to keep you.”
Gray said it like she meant it, but she wasn’t sure. A different kind of fear knotted her stomach.
* * *
It didn’t take long to find a captain directing soldiers. He represented Blue Fox.
“Get back to the mouth of the canyon,” they were ordered. “And wait until sunrise. If the ‘Naks come back, I don’t want more than a hundred of us out here.”
“What about the injured?” A Green Foxer asked.
“I’ve got fifteen out looking now. To be frank, I don’t think we’re going to find many. You’re dismissed, corpsmen!”
In their exhaustion, not a word of disagreement was said as they turned and headed towards the dark silhouette of the mountains, east. Eventually they stumbled across Saiyeh and the others and continued as a group of seven.
It was slow going. Gray checked her watch for a third time: it was about 0300 hours, and they still had, by her count, almost four miles to go. A pack of coyotes yipped and yowled in the distance.
Finch, succumbing to the pain, was sweating badly. They took turns putting her good arm around their shoulders to keep her steady. Their destination was reached after two hours of this.
“They still dusted us,” somebody muttered, breaking the silence as they all settled down on a strip of soft sand. “We had the advantage and they still fucking dusted us.”
“Their line trailed more than we were expecting,” Gray muttered. “We could only blow up so much road, and half were still on their feet after the charges went.”
She’d been witness to so many defeats, big and small, that getting so upset seemed meaningless. What you did was leave the dead, pick up the living, and make sure to hit harder next time.
“My best friend died tonight.” Another corpsman paused to suck in a breath. “They didn’t even put a bullet in him. Just pulled out a knife and…”
Everyone was silent. He didn’t need to finish.
Gray couldn’t have mustered much of a response anyways. While her body was spent, her mind was buzzing. She couldn’t stop imagining that Anak’s face in the darkness. In a very real way, she’d looked on the face of death itself and survived. This meant that she’d kissed death, too. Gray licked her lip, tasting salt instead of smoke.
That’s when it occurred to her: the enormity of not just being kissed by an Anak, but that he desired it.
That he knew how.
Gray thought back to the mysterious Signy, and froze at what her mind was putting together. The knot in her stomach tightened.
She’d heard stories—rumors, really, or legends—about Anakim passing by civtowns and demanding favors from the local humans. Or abducting them. Though it was supposed to be that they were celibate, since no female ‘Nak had ever been known to exist and what was the point of giving a clone a sex drive? But if the same stuff that made them vicious, brutal soldiers is what made them men, and decidedly so, then it would follow that they’d have needs. Maybe very human needs.
“Something wrong?” someone asked.
Gray almost jumped. “Just… thinking. I heard the local sentinel call off the attack and I want to know why.”
“Christ.What fucking idiot would leave survivors after this?”
“An idiot that wants us to stick around.”
* * *
The sun was just skirting the horizon when the ragged group began to pick themselves up to leave. More survivors had trickled in over the last few hours of pre-dawn, and they numbered in the dozens now. But they paused as the latest group came up the ravine, probably two-hundred strong, with several limping or clutching at bloody bandages. There was one captain leading them, leaving another four unaccounted for.
“Any sign of a ninth-year sapper named Wesson?” Gray asked when people started sitting down to rest. “Wesson? Anybody?”
Most of the corpsmen were too exhausted to pay her much attention, but a few others exchanged looks and shrugged. Eventually someone spoke up. “Tall, blond guy, right? Slashed ear? There’s a salvage team combing the debris out there, mostly sappers. He could be with ‘em.”
That was a pretty big “could”, and Gray was nervous.
Another twenty minutes brought in a few dozen more corpsmen. There were two more captains among them.
“Did Captain Burke make it!” someone shouted over the crowd.
“Yeah, where’s our Brown captain!”
“And Hastings, too!”
“Brown and Red didn’t make it,” a ninth-year replied as he shoved tabs of cody at his injured downrank fellows like candy. “Green and Gold are still at the wreckage. There’s a lot to get through.”
“Fuck.”
Gray returned to her original group and sat down again. There was nothing she could do at this point but wait. She wanted a cody too.
The wounded, now led by ninth-years, eventually picked themselves up to head back to Fox. A few of the badly wounded could barely be coaxed to their feet—it was hard to look at them. Many were as good as dead.
It was past noon when they’d finally reached the first guard station at the edge of camp. A few of them were sent in to fetch medics and litters, and they were quickly received by a dozen medical staff who rushed the wounded into the big white tent, Finch among them.
“She’s gonna be OK, right?” Gray asked, following the medic who had taken a first peek at her friend’s arm.
“She’ll live, if that’s what you’re asking,” he replied, knowing full well that was *not *what she was asking. “Come back in a few hours and I’ll tell you if she’ll be able to aim a kicker ever again.”
With that, he hefted another gurney up off the ground with the help of a second medic, and they disappeared inside. Gray ran a hand, crusty with dried blood, through her matted hair, and thought of the spare few fridays she had stowed away under her mattress.
But first, Harper. She had to find Harper.
* * *
Spending two fridays with the wireman didn’t help much, but they killed as much uneasy time as they could. In the Manual’s short annex on psychiatric hygiene, it was recommended that corpsmen who were MIA should be assumed dead until proven otherwise. It was necessary to move on as quickly as possible. Harper himself was struggling with the guilt of not having been sent out at all, stationed at the comm instead, and said little. Swallowing grief down whole to maintain the famed Corps stoicism was a common sight, and Harper was doing his best. Gray put a hand on his shoulder.
“Sentiment is the enemy of survival,” she said, quoting the mythical figure of General Pierce, the Corps’ first commander and leader of some of the Disruption’s greatest battles. It was painful advice, and a number of younger corpsmen took offense to it. But as the years trudged on, Gray only found it more and more salient. Others usually did too. Life was hard, and the Corps made no promise to anyone that it would ever get better. There was something approaching beauty in that kind of honesty.
“Thanks,” he muttered.
Gray threw back her shine. “Look, I know you were shaking sheets together, it’s harder than you want to admit.”
“Just… don’t.”
Gray eyed him. “I had Graham,” she said, letting the name linger in the air for a second. It had been, what, four years? “And don’t forget, Finch is my fuckin’ friend too.”
Harper looked down at his drink and scowled. “Well we’re two of us down, anyways.”
Gray sighed hard. She refused to believe that Wesson was dead. He was good at this, the whole marching and shooting and taking orders thing; he didn’t survive nine and a half years with the Corps for nothing right? Munez was the statistic, not Wesson, he couldn’t be.
“I’m sure he’s having the time of his life sorting through ‘Nak trash. It’s Finch I’m worried about,” she said stiffly, giving the three–fingered salute to the wireman as she rose. “I’ll see you outside.”
She didn’t really know what to do with herself. It was a bright and sunny Southland afternoon, a few clouds dragging long streaks across the sky. She should have slept.
Gray thought about planes—she’d heard them described once as big flying cars—and wondered what the skies looked like when they were full of ‘em. Did they flap around in clusters like birds? Did they need to track along some kind of road through the air like vehicles did? Were they loud? Quiet? Did the ‘Naks ever use them? She stopped, feeling that she was wasting her own time. Planes didn’t exist now any more than elevators did, or swimming pools, or internets. They accomplished so little for being such a burden on resources. Casualties of the Disruption, just like people.
Gray decided to trek over to Burke’s office and glance at the board. See if there was anything for her to do. Of course there wasn’t; the schedule was old, and the captain was dead. What was the Protocol for this? Gray struggled to remember, suddenly feeling uneasy at not knowing what her duties were, or if her time was her own, how much of it she had.
It would be weeks before Alpine could reshuffle the camps and send Fox replacement officers; in the meantime, they’d have to get somebody else to do the job.
Glancing around at the half-empty tent city, Gray decided that she needed to put some distance between herself and the others for a while, so she started walking. When she was finally surrounded by nothing butsteep slopes and dry brush, Gray let out the breath she’d been holding.
Her fatigues were filthy and suddenly stifling. With dirty fingers she undid the buttons to her shirt and tore it off to expose her shoulders and beige compression top. A few scars marked the skin of her sturdy arms, tanned as they were compared to her much paler collar bones – some from her wasteland childhood, others from combat. She lifted the hem of her shirt to glance at her side, which still hurt. That was only a few weeks ago, wasn’t it? Seemed like ages already.
The breeze and the sun felt good on her skin, and her boots came off too. Then after her boots, her pants. A minute later and she was laying on a patch of coarse sand to stare up at the clouds in some meager shade. She sucked in a full breath and found she could do so with less pain.
Gray’s mind drifted from one thing to another, but it eventually circled back to that brown figure in the dust with those blue eyes; the man almost twice her height and her lie as big as Fox itself.
It circled back around to that kiss.
“You’re fucked, you know that?” She frowned and closed her eyes. “Right fucked.”
Gray dozed off without realizing it. She woke up in the shadow of the canyon, and her watch told her that she’d been asleep for almost two hours. It was time to head back. As she shimmied her pants back on, she decided that kiss had saved them all. She still felt sorry for what she did to Kessler, but she had to. The idiot youngyear left her no choice. If he hadn’t shown up and panicked, then she might’ve been able to… to what?
* * *
Gray returned to camp, deciding that she couldn’t put off seeing Finch any longer. The med tent was such a miserable place, and she didn’t yet want to know what the sixth-year’s outlook was.
She ducked into the structure, passing the partition to the third bed on the left. Half covered by a cool, white sheet, Finch rested her head on a pillow and stared upwards. Her eyes were sharp, if distant—Gray’s heart sank, knowing that they hadn’t given her any morph.
“Hey.”
“They’re giving me four weeks.”
Four weeks. That was generous for a sixth-year.
“We’ll get a sider back in your hand in four weeks. How’s the arm?”
“Going to leave a nasty scar.”
“Nastier than Cooper’s?”
Finch looked away and cracked a faint smile.
That’s when Gray knelt down and touched Finch’s good arm. “You’re not getting released, alright? I promise. Harper and I are gonna make sure you make it back out there in one piece.”
The sixth-year nodded stiffly.
“You want anything to eat?”
“Just wanna sleep.”
“Would a little shine help?”
Finch gave her friend a telling look, and Gray nodded.
“I’ll be right back.”
She bee-lined for Harrison’s tent, and when she was inside a small commotion had picked up. Though she couldn’t tell what it was, it sounded like it was coming from the quad. She wished the two corpsmen ahead of her in line would hurry up.
“One please, sir,” Gray said to the enormous, bearded officer.
Unceremoniously, he grabbed her friday and stuffed it away into a lockbox under the counter before holding a cup to to large keg behind him. The alcohol looked deceptively like water at the bottom of the metal tumbler, but already she could smell the difference. It would go down scalding.
But Gray collided with a body as she rounded the corner outside, and Finch’s “medicine” went splashing to the ground.
“No!” she hissed, watching helplessly as the liquor sank into the fabric of her fatigues. “Goddammit, you—“
But when she looked up, there was a familiar face there.
“Wesson!” Gray cried, throwing herself at him. “Wesson, you’re alive!”
“I… yeah, yeah I’m alive.”
He blinked like he’d lost a lot more than one night’s sleep.
“…Are you OK?”
“OK? Couldn’t be better. I’m, uh… getting promoted.”
* * *
“Weson’s what?”
“He’s getting his promo.”
“He’s going to lead brown toon?”
“I… I don’t know. I just… here.” Gray handed over the shine and Finch threw it back. “I’ll see what he has to say, but I don’t think he knows much himself and the man looks like he needs to sleep for a week anyways.”
“So do you.”
“I think something happened to him out there. He had this look in his eye.”
“…So do you.”
Gray snorted, turning away to hide the redness creeping up her cheeks. “Since when did you care what people’s eyes are doing?"
Just then, a medic stormed through the partition, and the corpsmen hanging around injured friends paused their conversations. He tapped a pencil against his clipboard.
“Alright, alright, everyone out! Y’all smell like shit, and its hot enough in here without the extra bodies crowding around. Come back tomorrow!”
Gray was suddenly glad for the order to vacate. Finch laughed bitterly as she left.
* * *
Wesson sat on a crate, nursing his own cup of shine as Gray and Harper were enjoying seconds. He’d given them all his last remaining fridays, because officers didn’t need them. Officers were paid.
“It all happened so fast,” he said, sounding breathless just from recalling the fight. “We… we were ducked down when the charges went off, and barely had any time to get our bearings before you all started shooting over our heads. The ‘Naks didn’t even realize most of us were there. They rushed right by, heading for the rest of the corpsmen.
“I took a few down, their backs aren’t armored at all. But as soon as they saw muzzle flash, they were on us. I was all ready to get out and join you, but I twisted my foot, fell, and hit my head. Next thing I know, sun’s coming up.”
Wesson turned his head so they could see the purple lump above his ear. No wonder he looked like he couldn’t even remember his enlistment number.
“Holy shit.” Harper shook his head in disbelief. “Of all the times to forget your helmet!”
“Some blue foxer found me, sorted me out, and once I got some water I was told to get to work with salvage. The captain only wanted ninth-years.”
Wesson took a drink and sighed. His tired eyes had been fixed on the ground this entire time.
“And?”
“Huh?”
“What’d you find?”
“Oh, uh…” He took another drink then frowned, realizing his cup was empty. “Nothing, really. The usual. Guns, ammo. Looted the bodies. Acquisition’s packing it all up now.”
That was indeed the usual. There wasn’t much to loot from a ‘Nak, most of them rarely had anything approaching personal possessions. Some of the gear was personalized in some way, either from embellishment or repair, but Protocol demanded that all “raw materials” were to be sent back to Alpine for processing, including body armor. Camps were allowed to keep half of the munitions spoils.
“What was in the trucks?”
Wesson frowned, looking troubled. “Nothing. There was nothing.”
As Gray watched him, Harper continued. “So what happens now? Are they sending you away?”
“I don’t think so. I think I’m filling Burke’s shoes until the Freedom Ceremony, then I’ll get transferred in the big shuffle.”
Camp Fox currently had fewer than a hundred ninth-years, but Wesson was still the logical choice for promo. He could recite the Manual line by line, the officers liked him, and he never strayed from Protocol. Moreover, he was one of the few who wanted to stay: the Corps was more than just a way out of bondship for him, it was his life.
“Anyways,” Wesson said, glancing at his watch, “They’re gonna ring the dinner bell soon. You guys should go get in line. I’m gonna head back to my cot and get some…”
But dirt crunched behind Gray and she turned to see the commander himself, flanked by a clerk and two captains. The seventh-year instinctively made herself smaller in their presence.
“Wesson?” said Hitch.
He snapped up. “Yes, sir?”
“You’ll come with us.”
“I-I was about to go lay down, sir, my head’s killing me.”
“We’ll get you a cody and a cold pack, son. You can sleep later. There’s a lot of work to do now.”
Wesson’s eyes flicked between Gray and Harper as he stood up.
“I’ll see you around,” he said. “Save me something to eat.”
“Don’t bother,” Hitch replied, eyeing the corpsmen squatting on the ground as he clapped a hand on Wesson’s shoulder. “You’re having an officer’s meal tonight. Hsen, go get his effects. He’ll be moved from the platoon tent as well.”
Hsen, the clerk, dipped his head. “Yes, sir.”
As the group disappeared down the road, Gray heard Hitch ask Wesson how he was feeling.
The pair of remaining corpsmen exchanged looks, mouths open. They sat like that for a beat, processing what they’d just seen.
“Another cup?”
“Fuckin’… yeah. I need another cup.”
