MEASURES OF ABSOLUTION

A Novella by Marko Kloos

Chapter One

Detroit

For the first time in her military life, Corporal Jackson thinks that she may not make it through to the end of her service after all.

The mobs on the streets of Detroit have done what none of the world’s third-rate militaries and insurgents have been able to do—kill or injure almost everyone in her squad. Without air cover or armor, it’s just a running gun battle. They’re slugging it out with ill-equipped locals, but there are many more of them than there are TA troopers on the ground tonight.

And the locals are about to win.

The bullets clang against her armor so frequently now that she has stopped counting the impacts. The rioters are using mostly old cartridge weapons, and few of those shoot anything powerful enough to pierce the ultra-tough laminate of military battle armor, but there’s more modern stuff in the mix as well. Jackson lets the computer pick her targets, but she needs to shoot with one hand because she’s carrying the crew chief of the downed drop ship they rescued a little while ago. She needs to shoot burst fire to make up for the imprecise one-handed aiming, and that wastes ammo she can’t afford to burn.

In front of her, Grayson and Priest set up a covering position on a street corner. Their rifles start chattering the moment they get sight of the intersection beyond. Corporal Jackson sees a hundred hostile icons popping up, but they start blinking out of existence on her helmet visor screen rapidly as Grayson and Priest are thinning out the rioters’ numbers with ruthlessly efficient rapid fire. Dozens fall. Then the others break and run, and the intersection is clear.

“Go, go, go!” Priest shouts and waves her along. Jackson renews her grip on the unconscious crew chief and drags him across the street into the next inadequate cover.

Just as she lowers the crew chief to the dirty concrete of the crumbling sidewalk, there’s the familiar chatter of an M-66 salvo coming from the corner of a nearby intersection. Behind her, she hears Grayson groan. When she turns around, he’s on the ground next to Sergeant Fallon. Corporal Jackson brings up her rifle and looks for the source of that rifle fire. There’s a small group of rioters over by that street corner. Two are armed with old cartridge guns, but the third has a military-issue M-66. Grayson is trying to pick up his rifle, but he’s moving slowly, as if in a trance. Jackson puts the target reticle of her gunsight on the shooter and snaps off a three-round burst. The rioter takes all three rounds to the chest. He stumbles backwards and lands on his ass, dropping his rifle in front of him. She moves the reticle up a hair and fires another burst. This one hits him in the face. He drops backwards and doesn’t move again. His buddies do an about-face and retreat into the darkness of the unlit street behind them.

“Grayson, you okay?” Jackson calls out over the squad channel. She gets a gasping groan in reply.

“Priest, go check on Grayson,” she orders. The intersection is clear again, but she needs to make sure. She runs over to where the man she just shot is sprawled on the ground.

When she is next to his prone figure, she can see that it’s not a he at all. The rifle next to the body is a standard TA issue M-66 flechette rifle. She can see the armory marks on the polymer shell, rack and slot numbers written down in waterproof red marker. She picks the rifle up and ejects the magazine. It’s still mostly full, and she sticks it into one of the empty pouches on her armor. There’s a round still in the chamber, and she aims the rifle down the road and pulls the trigger. It spits out a high-velocity flechette with a sharp little bark. All TA rifles have DNA locks coded to the individual soldier and his fellow squad members. She shouldn’t have been able to fire that gun, but fire it did.

The dead woman’s last expression looks mildly surprised, maybe even annoyed. The flechettes from Jackson’s three-round burst all hit within ten centimeters of each other, right in the triangle formed by her eyes and the chin. There’s a familiar-looking ball chain around her neck. Corporal Jackson reaches into the collar of the dusty sweatshirt he’s wearing and pulls out the chain. She finds two military dog tags at the end of it.

Up ahead in the darkness, there’s movement again. Her low-light augmentation shows another group of armed rioters, a hundred meters away, dashing from cover to cover and closing in on the intersection. Jackson seizes the dog tags and yanks the chain off the dead woman’s neck. Then she stuffs the tags into one of her empty magazine pouches. She aims her rifle at the approaching rioters and fires a quick series of single shots that send them ducking for cover. Then she gets up and dashes back to where her squad—what’s left of it—is hunkered down.

“More incoming,” she shouts to the others. “Where’s that goddamn drop ship?”

“We’ll never make the civic center,” Priest says.

“Sit tight. Make every shot count,” Jackson replies. “We defend the wounded until we can’t.”

“Copy that,” Priest replies grimly.

The incoming fire picks up again, a discordant cacophony of reports from dozens of different weapons. Priest and Baker move in front of the wounded, and Jackson joins them to form a final defensive line.

Jackson aims at muzzle flashes, sends out flechettes in bursts of three and five. More rioters fall, but others pick up their weapons and take up the fight. She empties her magazine and ejects it from her rifle. When she searches for a new one, the only ammunition she has left is the partial magazine she took from the dead woman with the military dog tags. She loads the magazine into her weapon and chambers a fresh round. Her visor display updates her ammo count: 121.

“I have half a mag left,” she shouts to the others.

“I’m just about dry,” Baker replies. Priest is too busy shooting people to reply, but from the way he picks his targets off with careful single shots, she can tell that he doesn’t have much left either.

She eyes the oncoming crowd and glances at the combat knife she wears on her harness.

They’re not wearing armor, she thinks. I bet I can get a dozen before they take me down.

Someone up the street opens up with an automatic weapon. The fusillade kicks up dust and concrete chips next to Jackson. Baker cries out in pain and anger.

“I’m hit,” he shouts.

They’re everywhere now, shooting from alleys, rooftops, windows. Dozens, maybe hundreds of them, all armed and out for blood. Jackson dishes out what’s left in her rifle, but they’re not dropping fast enough, and there seem to be two more joining the fight for every one she kills. She has never seen such determination and tenacity from the welfare rats.

She shoots down another rioter, then another. Her rifle’s bolt locks back on an empty feedway again. Now there’s only Priest’s rifle returning fire. As if they can smell the weakness of their adversaries, the rioters increase their fire, emboldened.

That’s it, then, Jackson thinks.

She tosses the empty rifle aside and pulls her combat knife from its sheath.

The first indication of their salvation is a burst of autocannon fire high above their heads, the long and ripping thunder of a multi-barreled drop ship turret. The high explosive shells pepper the street in front of the squad, where the attackers have advanced almost to rock-throwing distance. Jackson sees bodies disintegrate under the hammer blows of the cannon shells. Overhead, the drop ship descends out of the dirty night sky and settles in a hover right above the intersection.

The rioters are smart enough to see that they’ve lost. They retreat like a wave pulling away from the shore at ebb. Some brave souls shoot at the drop ship, but they don’t have any heavy machine guns nearby now, and the small arms fire pings off the hull like rain off a tin roof. The drop ship’s gunner responds in kind. In just a few moments, all the rioters Jackson still sees on the street are either dead on the ground or running away.

Jackson puts her knife away. The profound relief and gratitude she feels make her knees shake.

At Thermopylae, the Three Hundred held back a hundred thousand Persians. Everyone learns about Leonidas and his Spartans in boot camp. One of the epic last stands in history.

Tonight, Corporal Jackson doesn’t believe the Spartans went down as heroically as the historians claim. She’s pretty sure some of them pissed themselves before the end. Unless they were insane, or inhuman.

Epic last stand stories are such bullshit.

Chapter Two

After

The drop ship doesn’t go back to Shughart. Great Lakes is closer, and Grayson and the Sarge are in bad shape. Jackson keeps looking over to where the crew chief and the combat medic are stabilizing Grayson, who looks as ashen as the gunmetal paint on the bulkhead. Sergeant Fallon lies next to him, conscious but doped to the gills with painkiller, what’s left of her leg tied off with a tourniquet. Then there’s the rescued drop ship crew, and Priest and Baker. There are more wounded than able-bodied in the cargo hold.

Jackson feels helpless. She can’t help the medics do their job, and there’s nothing around to kill up here at ten thousand feet. She has to fight the urge to unbuckle and go up to the drop ship’s armory to refill her magazine pouches and grab a bunch of weapons to replace the ones she left behind on the street in Detroit.

Three years of combat drops all over the country and across the world, and the squad has never received a mauling like this, not even close.

What the fuck went wrong? Jackson wonders. She looks at the leaking bodies of her squadmates and the dozens of impact marks on the outer shell of her armor.

Everything, she concludes. Ain’t a damn thing that went right tonight.

She reaches into her magazine pouch and fishes out the set of dog tags she plucked off the dead rioter just a little while ago. The services all have their own formats for dog tags, and these are rectangular, with rounded edges and a horizontal perforation right across the middle. Jackson isn’t sure, but she thinks they’re old Navy tags, a kind they haven’t issued in a while.

Military weapons. Squad tactics. Run-of-the-mill welfare rioters don’t chew up a hardened infantry squad. They don’t blot heavily armored drop ships from the sky. You need a certain kind of training and mindset to pull that off.

Jackson puts the dog tags back into the magazine pouch before anyone can see what she’s looking at.

Right then she resolves to find out who’s responsible for this ambush—for half her squad laid out bleeding or dead on the deck in front of her. Find the bastards, and kill them.

When the drop ship lands at Great Lakes, the medics swarm the cargo hold before the tail ramp is fully on the ground. They haul off Grayson and Sergeant Fallon, then the dead bodies of Stratton and Paterson. They come to check her out as she unbuckles herself.

“I’m fine,” she tells them. “No holes in the armor.”

“Let’s get you inside anyway,” one of the medics replies. “Just to make sure.”

They take the combat knife off her harness. She has to suppress the impulse to break the fingers of the medic who unfastens her blade and removes it.

Let them have it, she thinks as they lead her outside toward a row of waiting stretchers. Like I wouldn’t know how to kill someone without that. Dumb fucks.

She just has a few minor scratches, so they clean her up and put her on a shuttle back to Shughart. They won’t let her see the rest of the squad. The flight back to base all by herself is the loneliest trip she has ever taken in the military.

Back in the squad bay at Shughart, the ghouls have already cleaned up. Two of the bunks in the room are stripped down to the bare mattress pads, and two lockers stand open and empty. Jackson walks over to what used to be Stratton’s locker and looks inside. The gear is all gone, and someone wiped down the whole locker with an antiseptic cleaner that left behind a faint lemon smell. They even peeled off the adhesive name tag that used to be on the locker door.

She runs her fingers across the optical sensor of the locker’s latch, the flaky DNA reader that would refuse to read Stratton’s thumbprint sometimes, usually when they were running late for something. Her fingertips glide through a thin layer of cleaner residue. There’s nothing left of Stratton in this room, not even his fingerprints. Twelve hours ago, they geared up for a mission in this room together, and now it’s like he never even existed.

Battalion doesn’t seem to know what to do with her. They put her on light duty, but they don’t actually give her anything to do, so she cleans her gear and stows it, then takes it out and cleans it again. She doesn’t want to do maintenance. She doesn’t want to patch things up, she wants to break them. She wants to go out and kill people. It seems strange to be angry at being the only member of your squad to escape an ambush without injury, but Corporal Jackson is. In fact, she’s fucking furious.

She doesn’t feel like eating at all, but her stomach reminds her that she hasn’t had any food since before last night’s combat drop, so Jackson walks over to the chow hall for lunch. For the first time, nobody from her squad sits down with her at the table. She pokes around in her lunch—spaghetti and meatballs—and gets her PDP out of her pocket to read up on the battalion news while she eats. There isn’t a word about last night’s clusterfuck. The battalion S is probably still trying to figure out how to package the events in terms that don’t make it look like the brass screwed the pooch. Like the grunts don’t talk.

The dog tags from last night are in her pocket now. Jackson takes them out and puts them on the mess table in front of her, next to her plate of spaghetti. Then she enters the name on those tags into her PDP and runs a MilNet data search.

It takes a lot of digging to find any references to her MCKENNEY A in the archives. Jackson has no access to the personnel files anywhere, so she can’t just punch in the military serial number on the tag and pull up a name. Instead, she has to do full-text searches on all the open databases on the MilNet—all the sanitized press releases for public consumption, and the thousands of individual unit news nodes updated by the data entry clerks in every autonomous unit in the Armed Forces.

After thirty minutes of increasingly customized searches on increasingly obscure data repositories, her spaghetti and meatballs are cold, but she finally finds a reference to a Navy sailor named MCKENNEY, ANNA K. It pops up in a reference to an awards ceremony, and she instructs her PDP to ferret out the related file. A few seconds later, her PDP returns an article from a base news bulletin, titled TWO RECEIVE NAVY COMMENDATION MEDAL ON NACS CATALINA. There are pictures of the event attached to the file, and the second one she pulls up makes her sit up straight in her chair with a jolt.

The picture shows two sailors shaking hands with a Fleet officer, presumably their commander. The sailor in the middle is the woman she shot last night in Detroit. In the picture, her long hair is neatly tied into a braid, and she’s wearing a Class A Navy smock with petty officer chevrons on her sleeve.

She looks at the picture for a while. She tries to imagine what her voice sounded like, or what her smile looked like.

Petty Officers Third Class Anna McKenney and Pete Willis accept their Navy Commendation Medals from their Commanding Officer, Lieutenant Commander Alan Carreker, the caption of the picture reads.

Anna McKenney will never age past the way she looks in that picture. All that’s left of her is the collection of bytes that make up this picture in some forgotten nook of the MilNet, and the stamped steel tag on the table in front of Jackson.

The article lists Petty Officer McKenney’s home town as Liberty Falls, Vermont. A quick cross-reference with MilNet tells Jackson that Liberty Falls is a small city near the state capital Montpelier. Its population is only thirty thousand, which is a shockingly low number to her. There are more residents than that in any five blocks of tenement buildings of any PRC.

When the military lists a soldier’s hometown, they always mean the place of enlistment. Corporal Jackson very much doubts that Anna McKenney traveled all the way to that little Vermont town just to visit a recruitment office, and she’s willing to bet that some people in Liberty Falls still remember her name.

Chapter Three

Liberty

Don’t make me find you some bullshit job,” Sergeant Sobieski says when Corporal Jackson walks into his office and renders a salute. The platoon sergeant is a stocky man with a graying buzzcut and a permanent frown on his face.

“Negative, sir. I came to check if I can get a few days of leave. Since I am limited to bullshit jobs right now anyway.”

Sergeant Sobieski looks at her, his frown increasing in severity as he undoubtedly ponders whether to consider her repetition of his swear word as borderline insubordination. Then he raises an eyebrow.

“Leave? What the hell you going to do with that, Jackson? Got yourself a civvie boyfriend in town?”

“That’s a negative, sir. I feel the need for some fresh air all of a sudden.”

Sergeant Sobieski studies her face for a moment, his own expression sour as always. Then he shakes his head and sits down behind his desk.

“I sure as shit can’t use you for anything before Battalion gets around to your psych eval and lets you near a gun again.”

He consults the MilNet terminal on his desk.

“You got five days accrued, Jackson. You want to take ’em?”

“If it’s okay with the platoon, sir.”

Sergeant Sobieski hacks away at the keyboard with two fingers, an activity he clearly finds distasteful. Then he taps a button on his terminal’s touchscreen and leans back in his chair.

“I’m the platoon right now, Miss Jackson, and I don’t care. God knows you’ve all earned a few days of drinking and whoring around for that clusterfuck in Detroit. Go over to the company clerk and give him the dates you want for your leave.”

“Thank you, sir,” she says and salutes again.

“Now get out and stop bugging me,” the Sergeant says as he returns her salute casually.

The next morning, Jackson puts on her little-used Class A uniform instead of the far more comfortable ICUs. She’d much rather wear the fatigues—the Class A looks a lot more presentable, but feels a lot more stifling—but she obeys the regulations and puts on the dress smock.

After breakfast, she walks across the base to the aviation section. A soldier on leave can hitch a ride on military transports, provided they have a free jump seat in the cargo hold. Some soldiers spend a good chunk of their leave waiting for rides, but Jackson has no problems getting a sear on an eastbound transport shuttle right away.

She spends the morning hopping across the eastern half of the continent on a succession of shuttles. Finally, after stops at TA bases in Kentucky, the Chicago metroplex, and upstate New York, she finds herself at Burlington, a small TA air base on the shore of Lake Champlain. The base has a public transportation link right in front of the main gate.

As a soldier, Jackson gets certain perks in the civilian world. She can eat at any government facility with a chow room—military bases, public administration centers, transit worker canteens. She can also ride the maglev system for free just by scanning her military ID in place of a regular ticket.

She walks into the terminal building, past the uniformed security guards at the door. Her TA smock gets her respectful nods. She has no doubt that coming up here in her old, ratty civilian clothes would have meant a security inspection and on-the-spot interview instead, to make sure she has a good reason for being up here, and a form of payment sufficient for a maglev ticket. She pulls a ticket with her ID and gets on the regional maglev to Liberty Falls, just ten minutes away.

The town is clean, tidy, middle-class. No high rises anywhere in sight to spoil the view of the Green Mountains which surround the town. It looks like a different world from Dayton, never mind Detroit.

Jackson came to Liberty Falls with only a last name for a lead. The military-issue PDP in the pocket of her uniform trousers only talks to the MilNet, which doesn’t interact with any of the civvie data networks. She can check obscure news from backwater TA units, or look up any number of regulations and manuals, but the PDP won’t let her so much as bring up a schedule for the hydrobuses berthed outside the transit station. She’s almost ready to ask a local to borrow their personal datapad for a moment and rely on the respectability her uniform seems to convey in this middle-class enclave, when she sees a public library up ahead at the corner of the green.

The library has public-access data terminals. She walks in, sit down in front of one, and brings up the public and private Networks directories. There are eight Net nodes in Liberty Falls belonging to people with the last name of MCKENNEY.

She half expects the search for the right McKenneys to require canvassing every address on the list of names she just brought up, but in the end, the resolution is quick and simple. She plugs Anna McKenney’s full name into the heuristic search to see what comes back. The data terminal blinks for second, and then spits out four screens of search results. Jackson opens a few to see if they refer to the right person, and the very first hit is her yearbook entry from her school, Miguel Alcubierre Polytechnic Public High School. The girl in the picture is unmistakably a young version of the woman in the image of the military awards ceremony Jackson has saved on her PDP. She never got a long look at Anna McKenney’s face back in Detroit, but she has had plenty of time to study her picture since she unearthed it on her PDP back in the chow hall yesterday. There are many more references to her in the public news repositories filed away for posterity, and after a few more minutes of digging, Jackson finds the name of her parents, embedded in a picture of the proud family at Anna’s graduation from Alcubierre Polytech back in 2188.

ANNA MCKENNEY, CLASS OF ’88, AND HER PARENTS, JENNIFER AND ROBERT MCKENNEY.

She checks the list of addresses she pulled from the public directories and sees the entry for MCKENNEY ROBERT & JENNIFER near the bottom of the list. They are on a private network, Datapoint, but their listing isn’t locked, and their Net node number is followed by their street address: 4408 Copley Circle, Liberty Falls, NAC/VT/056593.

It’s only when she looks at the address of the parents of the woman she killed when she realizes that part of her wanted to come up empty, to hit a dead end out here in suburban Vermont, and go home to Shughart with an excuse to stop digging. Now, with the address right in front of her, she no longer has the option to return to the way things were before Detroit, no way to rationalize keeping herself in the dark.

According to the city map, Copley Circle is a street in a residential neighborhood two kilometers from the library. Jackson transcribes the directions to the notepad on her PDP, does a hard reset of the terminal to clear all the screens, and leaves the library to go and maybe find a measure of absolution.

Chapter Four

Vermont

Copley Circle is a neat neighborhood. The houses are small, but there’s space between them, and they all have little front yards with patches of artificial grass. The uniformity of the neighborhood reminds Jackson of a military base, rows of largely identical buildings lined up like a TA company at Morning Orders. There are hydrocars parked in front of many houses—personal transportation, an almost inconceivable luxury in a PRC.

4408 Copley Circle sits at the end of a long cul-de-sac. Out here, there are air filtration units in the windows as well, but as Jackson steps into the walkway that leads from the road to the front door of number 4408, she notices that their environmental unit isn’t even running. The air is so clean out here.

She presses the button for the doorbell, and once again, she feels a bit of hope flaring up—hope to have her ring unanswered, hope that the McKenneys are out to visit friends for the day, or down in the clean air of Panama for the season, so she can turn around and get back onto the train to Burlington with a somewhat intact conscience. Then she hears the sound of footsteps inside.

The door opens, and Jackson finds herself face to face with a tall man who looks to be in his sixties. He has thinning red hair that’s gray in many spots, and the soft-edged look of a government employee, someone who has regular access to something other than soy patties and recycled sewage. They look at each other for a moment, and he studies her uniform with an expression of mild distaste on his face.

“How can I help you?” he asks, in a tone that makes clear that he rather wouldn’t. Jackson takes a deep breath, and then finds that she has no idea what to say to the man whose daughter she killed two days ago.

“My name is Corporal Kameelah Jackson,” she says. “Are you Anna McKenney’s father?”

He looks past her briefly, as if he expected more people to have come with her. Then his gaze flicks back to Jackson—or rather, her uniform.

“You’re not on official business,” he says, and it’s a statement rather than a question. “They’d never send just a junior NCO all by herself.”

“No, sir. I’m here on my own.”

“I was hoping I’d never see another one of those fucking uniforms for the rest of my days,” he says. The swear word comes out as if he doesn’t use it very often. “What do you want?”

“I wanted to talk to you about Anna,” she replies.

He looks at her for a long moment, the distaste still etched in his face. Then he purses his lips and opens the door a little wider.

“Well, come inside before you let all the bad air in. And wipe those awful boots.”

The table in the dining room has two sets of used dishes on it. Mr. McKenney pulls out a chair and motions for her to sit down before picking off the dirty plates and carrying them off. She takes the seat and looks around in the dining room. There are framed prints on the walls, black-and-white photographs of untouched landscapes long gone. There’s a little china cabinet in a corner of the dining room, and a small collection of framed pictures on top of it. Jackson recognizes Anna McKenney in numerous stages of her life—basic school, polytech, proud college grad adorned with the obligatory gown and cap. From the lack of other children in that little picture shrine, she deduces that Anna was an only child, which makes the dread she feels even worse.

“You’re not one of Annie’s buddies,” Mr. McKenney states matter-of-factly when he returns from the kitchen, holding two brown plastic bottles in his hands. As he sits down in the chair across the table from her, he pushes one of the bottles across the polished laminate. She picks it up and sniffs the open mouth of the bottle.

“It’s just beer,” he says. “You can have one, since you’re not on official business.”

“Thank you.”

She takes a sip and lets the liquid trickle over her tongue. She’s never been much of a beer drinker—hard liquor is much more cost-effective for welfare rats, and much easier to make in large batches—but the bitter flavor of the cold beer is pleasing after the long walk in the warm sun.

“How do you know I’m not?” ask him.

He nods at her uniform and points at the green beret with the Infantry badge tucked underneath the left shoulder board of my jacket.

“You’re TA. Annie was Navy. Military Police.”

Jackson doesn’t know how to interpret his use of the past tense, and she doesn’t have a way of clarifying his statement without playing her own hand, so she just shrugs.

“So what do you want?” Mr. McKenney says. “If she owes you anything, you’ve come to the wrong place. She hasn’t been home in two years. I haven’t even talked to her on vid in a month or two.”

“It’s nothing like that,” she says. She takes refuge in action and pulls the dog tag out of her pocket. She puts the tag in front of Mr. McKenney, and he glances at it for a moment before picking it up. Jackson watches as he turns the worn steel tag between his fingers slowly.

“Where’d you get this?” he says after a few moments. “I didn’t even know she still had hers.”

She could tell him that she yanked the tag off his daughter’s neck after she shot her dead, two days ago and almost two thousand miles away. She has come all the way from Shughart to deliver that battered little piece of sheet steel, and maybe find a measure of absolution in the process. She doesn’t feel shame for having killed Anna McKenney—she tried to kill Jackson’s squad mate, after all. Jackson is sorry she had to kill her, this man’s only child, but she’s not ashamed, because she did what she had to do to save Grayson’s life. When she came here, she fully intended to come clean and tell her parents what happened to their daughter that night in Detroit, and that she won’t ever come home again. Now that she’s sitting here, across the table from the man who changed Anna McKenney’s diapers when she was little, the man who probably taught her to ride a bike and tie her own shoelaces, she just can’t bring up the courage to face his reaction.

“I found it,” she tells Mr. McKenney instead. “On the street, in Detroit, a week and a half ago.”

He shifts his gaze from the tag in his hand to her, and then back to the tag.

“Is there more to that story, or an I supposed to believe you came all the way out here just to return this thing?”

“No, I didn’t,” she admits.

“Didn’t think so. Where are you stationed, anyway?”

“Shughart, sir. It’s just outside of Dayton, Ohio.”

“That’s a pretty long way from Detroit.”

“We were on a call. Didn’t you hear about it on the Networks?”

Mr. McKenney raises an eyebrow.

“Hear about what?”

“We were called in to put out a welfare riot,” she says. “”Broke a bunch of stuff.”

“I haven’t heard squat about that. There hasn’t been a big welfare riot since Miami last year, and they say the Chinks started that one.”

“Well,” Jackson says, “I can assure you there was one, because we were right in the middle of it.”

“Anyone get killed?”

She instantly recalls the dozens of bodies strewn in front of her squad’s position after they opened fire on the surging crowd that had seemed determined to kill them with their bare hands. She remembers Stratton and Paterson, cut down in an instant by heavy weapons fire, and crumpling to the pavement like carelessly tossed duffel bags. She thinks of the apartment building Grayson demolished with a MARS rocket. She has no idea how many civvies their TA company killed that night, but if the other squads were only half as busy as theirs, they filled a lot of body bags.

“Yeah,” she replies. “A few people got killed. You mean it wasn’t in the news at all?”

“They don’t usually advertise it when they send you people in to beat up on some welfare rabble,” Mr. McKenney says. “Can’t blame ’em, really. People might get the impression that the civil authorities can’t control the PRCs.”

She opens her mouth to tell him that they were the ones who took the beating that night—eight troopers dead, one drop ship lost, and dozens of wounded—but when she reconsiders the equation, it seems like she’s about to complain of bruised knuckles after having beaten someone to death. They may have had a rough time on the ground, but the squad dished out much more hurt than they took.

“’You people’,” she repeats. “You don’t care much for the military, do you?”

“Sure I do,” he replies. “The real military. The Marines, up there.” He gestures to the ceiling. “The ones that keep the Chinks and the Russians from kicking us off our colonies. You people,” he says again, and nods at Jackson’s uniform, “you’re not military. You’re just cops with bigger guns, nicer uniforms, and less oversight.”

“Your daughter was Navy,” she points out, and she’s briefly satisfied by the hint of pain in his face.

“Yes, she was,” he says. “I could have gotten her in with the Commonwealth, a nice shot at a public career. And she has to go off and play sailor. I tried to get Annie to resign, but those contracts you sign, they’re one-way tickets. She served out her first enlistment, and she took the money and got the hell out, like anyone with half a brain would.”

He puts down his bottle and picks up his daughter’s dog tag again. Jackson watches as he slowly turns it between his fingers, rubbing his thumb over the raised letters of his daughter’s name and service number. She knows what would be going through her head in his place, and she wants to avoid having to answer the question he’s bound to ask sooner or later, so she seizes the initiative again.

“Do you know where I can find her?”

He looks at her and chuckles. It sounds like a stifled cough, entirely without humor.

“Like I’d tell you,” he says. “For all I know, you’re a lieutenant with Intel, and they just put you in a corporal’s uniform to go and sniff around. What do you want from my daughter, anyway?”

“I don’t really know,” she admits. “Well, for starters, I’m pretty sure she was shooting at me, and I’d like to find out what the hell was going on that night.”

“She was, huh?”

“Half the city was. Lots of them had military weapons. They shot down one of our drop ships.”

“Are you sure you should be telling me that stuff?” Mr. McKenney says. “I’m not sure I want to know about that. If they don’t want to see it on the Networks, you probably shouldn’t be talking to me about it, don’t you think?”

“I don’t think I give much of a shit, sir. No offense,” she adds when he looks at her in surprise. “I want to know what the hell was going on that night.”

“Now that’s interesting,” Mr. McKenney says. “A TA soldier who wants to know why they send her out to shoot people.”

She’s getting tired of his hostility, and for a moment she considers coming clean, just to see the amused smugness on his face disappear. Then she gets a hold of her emotions and pushes the chair away from the table to get up.

“I’m sorry I bothered you,” she says. “I guess I ought to be going. Thanks for the beer.”

“Oh, sit down and relax,” he replies and gets up from his own chair. “You’re going to have a thicker skin than that if you want to make it to retirement. The government is full of cranky old jerks like me.”

He walks off again, in an unhurried gait. Jackson studies the silk-screened label of her beer bottle while Mr. McKenney rummages around in a drawer in the next room. Then he walks back into the dining room, an old-fashioned paper notebook in his hand.

“I don’t have an address for her, just a node number. You can try to get in touch with her yourself. My guess is that she won’t be interested in talking to you, but who knows?”

He leafs around in his little notebook for a few moments, and then puts the open book in front of her, his finger pointing to a handwritten Net node address. The rest of the page is filled with notes, written in blue ink, in a neat cursive hand.

“That’s the number she gave me last time I talked to her. I’m pretty sure it’s someone else’s node. Annie’s just been sort of drifting from place to place since she got out of the military.”

Jackson pulls out her PDP and transcribes the node address into the notepad.

“Thank you.”

“You may want to be careful with that,” he says. “If there’s something going on the government wants to keep a lid on, they’ll sic military intel on you if they notice you poking around.”

She shrugs noncommittally and slips the PDP back into my pocket.

“I’m just a corporal on leave,” she says. “With thirty-four months left to go on my contract. They own me one way or the other, right?”

Mr. McKenney closes his little notebook again and puts it next to his daughter’s dog tag on the dining room table.

“Yes, they do. But if you’re not careful, you’ll get to spend those thirty-odd months in the brig, and you won’t get that bank account in the end. Imagine, all that sweating and bleeding and killing for absolutely nothing.”

It’s a short walk from the front door to the curb of the public road. Mr. McKenney escorts her across his front yard, as if he wants to make sure she’s really leaving.

When they reach the curb, Jackson turns around. Mr. McKenney has his hands tucked into the pockets of his trousers. Now that he’s standing in front of her in bright daylight, she notices a bit of a belly overlapping his belt.

“Thanks for your time,” she says, and now he’s the one shrugging noncommittally.

“I’m retired. I have all day to waste.”

Last chance, she thinks to herself. Last chance to come clean and confess to this man that you killed his daughter, shot her through the chest with a salvo of flechette rounds, and put another burst right into her face for good measure. Last chance to save this man from getting increasingly worried in the next weeks and months because his only child isn’t calling him anymore. Last chance to save yourself from adding just another missed opportunity to the list of regrets that will hang around your neck for the rest of your life.

She wants to extend her hand to say good-bye, but she doesn’t want to give him the chance to refuse it. Instead, she just nods and turns to walk away.

“Do me a favor, corporal,” he says, and she turns around again.

“If you get to talk to Annie, tell her to give her mother a call when she gets a chance.”

“I’ll let her know,” Jackson says, and the shame of the lie tastes like bile in her mouth.

On her way back to the transit station, she stops at the library and claims a data terminal once more. She takes out her PDP and enters the node number for Anna McKenney into a directory search to do a reverse lookup.

Anna McKenney’s last Net node number is not on a private network, and it doesn’t resolve to a physical address, just a unified pool of communication nodes. All of them belong to a single party—the Greater Detroit Metropolitan Civil Administration.

Chapter Five

Taps

Jackson hasn’t taken a leave in almost two years. She has no family left to visit, and even if she did, they’d be in Atlanta-Macon, and she has no desire to return to that place in this lifetime. So she takes the maglev back to the Burlington base, which has a rec facility on the lakeshore. She spends two days eating, sleeping, and using the entertainment suites. By Day Three of her five-day leave, she is bored out of her mind, so she takes a shuttle back to Shughart. Better to report to duty early, even if it means having to count towels and clean optical sight modules, than to spend another day drinking shitty soy beer in front of a holoscreen.

When she walks back into the squad room, Priest and Baker are there, playing cards at the table.

“You two okay?” she asks.

“Yeah,” Priest says. He runs his finger across his forehead, where a thin, pale line marks a fused laceration. “Few dings here and there. Grayson and the Sarge got the worst of it.”

“Stratton and Paterson got the worst of it,” Jackson says. “What about Hansen?”

“Her shoulder joint is blown,” Baker says. “Three weeks rehab.”

“We’re on light duty,” Priest says and gets out of his chair. “Top says we’re off the line until the squad gets a debriefing and a psych eval.”

Of course, Jackson thinks. They’re not going to let us anywhere near a loaded gun until the shrinks and the Intelligence officers have cleared us.

“Top said you were on leave for the week,” Baker says.

“I was,” she says. “Cut it short. Ain’t shit to do out there.”

“So what do we do now?”

Jackson opens her locker and takes out her knife and a sharpening stone. Then she walks over to the table and sits down in the chair Priest just vacated.

“We get the edge back on,” she says. “Downtime ain’t gonna last forever.”

She gets her medical clearance the next morning. One of the resident TA MedCorps docs looks Jackson over, checks the medical data from her armor, and pronounces her physically fit for unrestricted duty, as if she couldn’t have determined that by herself. The psych eval and Intel debriefing are equally superficial and cursory, standard “how does that make you feel?” psychobabble bullshit, some half-trained shrink checking off boxes on a form. She gives him the answers she knows will let him make his marks in the right spots.

The Intel debriefing doesn’t even have any sort of point. Her helmet camera captured everything much more reliably than her memory did.

“Forty-three,” the battalion’s intel officer tells her at the debriefing.

“Excuse me, sir?”

“Forty-three kills,” he says. “Your tally for Detroit. All good kills on armed hostiles. You did well.”

Is that supposed to make her feel better, give her pride or a sense of accomplishment? Lighten her conscience, maybe? If anything, it has the opposite effect. Those were not soldiers of a foreign army. They were welfare rats, with no armor and mostly antique weapons. They may have come out on top because it was a thousand of them against four squads, but they paid dearly for their victory if the rest of the company had kill counts anything like Jackson’s. Next time the TA goes in, there’ll be more of them and they’ll be much more determined, because now they know they can win. They almost got a drop ship with a full armory and loaded ordnance racks. Jackson has no doubt they’ll try again. She would.

No, there’s no way to look at this as anything but a disaster. Going back to that place will never be the same. It might as well be a different country now.

Jackson knows that telling the Intel officer these things wouldn’t make a difference. It’s like all the staff officers live in a different reality, one with its own language and customs and laws of physics. What the fuck does it matter that she killed forty-three of those shit-eating, savage sewer rats? There are millions more.

Exactly a week after Detroit, the company commander summons Jackson into his office.

“You’re the ranking member of your squad at the moment,” Captain Lopez says to her when she takes the chair he offers.

“Yes, sir,” she replies. “Sergeant Fallon isn’t back from Great Lakes yet.”

“And she won’t be, not for a while. Anyway, I have orders to send people to the funerals. I’m sending Lieutenant Weaving to PFC Paterson’s funeral. I’ll be attending Private Stratton’s. I want you to accompany me as the representative from his squad. Send one of the other privates with the Lieutenant. Your pick.”

“Yes, sir,” she says. The military has probably already reclaimed all the money in Stratton and Paterson’s accounts. Their families won’t see a penny of the money they earned while in uniform. If you die before the end of your term, it all goes back to the government. Not that it’s ever more than a number in a database somewhere. So why would they even go to the expense of sending funeral delegations? It makes no sense to Jackson. But she’s just a corporal and Captain Lopez is the company commander, so she salutes and obeys.

In the old days, they sent dead soldiers home in caskets, big wood-and-metal troughs large enough to hold a body. They’d put flawless uniforms on the corpses, complete with all the ribbons and decorations, even if nobody ever opened the casket before the burial. That sort of waste seems obscene to Jackson—burying a good uniform with a dead soldier. Never mind the idea of burying a body whole, dedicating dozens of square feet of precious unspoiled ground to park a corpse in perpetuity, even after body and coffin are long gone.

These days, the mortuary’s incinerators reduce a body to just a few cubic inches of fine ash, and they pack it into a stainless cylinder small enough to fit into a magazine pouch. Stratton’s cylinder is engraved with his name, rank, branch of service, and dates of birth and death. Captain Lopez carries the little capsule in white-gloved hands as they board the shuttle together the next morning. Jackson bears the flag they’ll be presenting to Stratton’s next-of-kin. It’s folded into a tight triangle, with the NAC’s star, maple leaf, and eagle exactly in the center. She also carries a small padded case with all of Stratton’s awards, which aren’t many. He had just started his second year or service. The family sent a son to Basic Training a little over a year ago, and now they’re getting back a little capsule full of ash and a few pieces of alloy and cloth ribbon worth maybe twenty dollars altogether.

Corporal Jackson doesn’t like any of this. The stiff Class A uniform she only wears a few times a year is scratchy and smells of locker dust. The seats of the shuttle are uncomfortable, and she doesn’t like the thought of an hour-long flight alone with her company commander. But she figures that she owes Stratton at least this inconvenience. She knows that he would be itching to make fun of her in that Class A monkey suit, but that he feared her just enough to not have dared.

Stratton was from eastern Tennessee, so the shuttle doesn’t have to go too far from Dayton. On the flight, the Captain asks her about Stratton. What was he like? Any anecdotes we should share with the family? How did he do on the ground during the drops? Did he get along with his squad mates? Jackson answers the Captain’s questions with a growing sense of disgust. She realizes that even though he didn’t know Private Stratton at all, he’ll use her information to talk to the family about their son’s accomplishments as if he has a personal connection to every member of his company. It’s all so transparent, she thinks. Trying to pretend that you gave a shit about that boy. If you had, you wouldn’t have sent him out into the middle of a riot without proper intel or air support.

The funeral is the most gloomy, depressing event she has witnessed in a very long time. Not just because they’re burying a twenty-year-old kid who was her responsibility, but also because of where they lay him to rest. Stratton doesn’t even get an outside plot. They stick his capsule into a receptacle on the wall of one of the many underground cemetery vaults of the K-Town Public Cemetery. They lock and seal the compartment, and the little door is barely big enough to hold a palm-sized memorial plaque. They’re storing what’s left of the kid in a space that’s smaller than the valuables compartment of his military locker. Jackson didn’t know him very long, but well enough to know that he probably would have chosen to be scattered out of the open tail hatch of a drop ship on the way to another deployment, not locked forever in a little hole in the wall along with ten thousand others.

Stratton’s parents are stone-faced during the whole thing. His father, tall and imposing, takes the flag from her without a word of acknowledgment. When Captain Lopez holds out his hand to offer thanks on behalf of a grateful Commonwealth, Mr. Stratton throws the folded flag at him. It smacks into the Captain’s chest and falls to the ground, still folded into its tight triangle.

“You can take that and stick it up your ass,” he tells Captain Lopez. Then he turns to Jackson and takes the case holding his son’s medals out of her hands.

“I will have those,” he tells her. “But I have no use for that rag. Or for you. Now get the hell out of here and leave us with our son.”

Jackson knows this is deep, desperate grief talking. She knows the man doesn’t hate her personally, that his hate is aimed at the uniform she wears. Still, she feels a surge of shame and anger. She liked the kid, served with him for over a year, tutored him, shared meals and played cards with him. She doesn’t deserve this loathing directed at her. But there’s no point saying any of it to this grieving and angry man who is no longer a father thanks to some overconfident desk pilots at Battalion. The TA didn’t kill his son, but they put him in front of the gun that did.

Next to her, Captain Lopez bends over to pick up the NAC flag Mr. Stratton tossed at him. Jackson turns and walks out of the cemetery vault without waiting for her company commander. There is nothing more to say or do here. Maybe someday she can come back here and talk to the Strattons, tell them about the anger she will always feel for failing their son and surviving the battle when he didn’t, but today is not it.

On the way back to Shughart, she doesn’t speak another word to the Captain, and he doesn’t ask her anything else, which is good because she won’t have to tell him to go fuck himself. She considers telling him anyway, though. Thirty days in the brig seem like a good start at penance.

Chapter Six

Mazes

When the First Sergeant walks into the squad bay, Jackson is by herself, sorting out her kit and checking for defects.

He waves her off as she snaps to attention.

“As you were. Come over here and have a seat.”

She obeys and sits down at the table with the First Sergeant, who is the only person in the battalion that scares her as almost much as Sergeant Fallon.

“I need a squad leader,” the First Sergeant says. “After that clusterfuck last week, I’m short a few heads. You up for padding a squad with the rest of your guys?”

“What’s the drop?” she asks.

He looks at her and purses his lips.

“Charlie Company is doing a public safety sweep assist in Detroit-22. Fifth-gen PRC.”

Jackson feels a unsettling tightening in her chest.

Fifth-gen PRC. Good God.

“I’ll take a squad in Charlie,” she says. “Just keep my boys off the line for a few more days.”

The first-and second-generation PRCs were old school traditional thinking. High rises, none taller than twenty floors, laid out along wide streets, with parks and stuff in between. They meant to give it a regular neighborhood look and feel. All the oldest PRCs are first- or second-gen. They didn’t have to tear down the old cities, just clear blocks piecemeal for new high rises. They worked okay, for a while anyway.

The third-and fourth-gen PRCs were much the same, only they tacked ten more floors onto the maximum for the high rises and clustered them all together like small cities. Twenty to a cluster. Most of the worst shitholes are third- or fourth-gen, because they’re difficult to manage in a centralized manner. Too many people spread out over too many acres.

The fifth-generation PRCs—now those are something else entirely. The Commonwealth’s crowning achievement in efficient people storage. All the latest thinking in crowd control, food distribution, security, and space utilization.

Residence towers a hundred floors high. Built around a hollow core, for convection cooling and to let daylight in. Each tower with its own fusion plant, medic station, security office. A hundred floors, a hundred apartments per floor, average occupancy two. Those are the units. Four towers put together in a square, the spaces between them walled off with thirty-foot concrete dams. That makes a block. The plaza between the four towers is for public services—recreation, food distribution, shops, public safety, transit station. Each block is centrally managed, its own little city. Eighty thousand people put together in a square footprint a thousand feet on each of its sides.

Twelve of those blocks arranged in a much bigger square, four blocks on each side of the square—that’s a fifth-gen Public Residence Cluster. Forty-eight towers, split into blocks of four. Close to a million people in a fifth-gen, and that’s at designed capacity. Many hold one and a half, two times that number. In the middle of that gigantic square made up of residence blocks are the wastewater and garbage facilities, the main power plant, the food manufacturing and reprocessing stations, administration building, and the main law enforcement and detention center for the PRC. From here, the Public Housing Police can lock down blocks and quarantine them in case of public unrest, and send backup to the public safety stations in the twelve blocks. Three hundred sixty-seven acres, a little over half a square mile, and it’s a self-contained, compartmentalized, centrally managed city that houses and feeds over a million people. And the average metroplex has twenty or thirty of them.

In theory, the fifth-gen PRCs are easier to police than the older ones, and that’s mostly true. You can shut down a floor, a unit, a block, three blocks, the whole damn place, all remotely from the central law enforcement facility that sits in the middle of the PRC like a spider in the center of a web. For some reason, however, Jackson hates going into the fifth-gens. Maybe it’s because she grew up in a third-gen PRC, and she’s used to the warrens of high-rises clumped together. In a third-gen, you always have a place to run and hide. It’s sprawling and cramped, but everything is interconnected. The fifth-gens are so compartmentalized, you have choke points everywhere. Residence towers have two main entrance halls. Blocks have one entry and exit point, toward the middle of the PRC. It’s all too easy to shut down, too easy to trap people, funnel them like animals in a slaughter chute.

They drop into PRC Detroit-22 with a full company. It’s a lot of combat power, but Jackson knows that if things go to shit again, it won’t be enough, not even close. The four drop ships of Charlie Company circle the towers of the target block at a safe distance. Then the lead ship swoops in and lands on the roof of the ten-story civil administration building, down on the square between the residence towers. Jackson is with Second Platoon, and their drop ship does not follow. Instead, they circle around and settle on the roof of the outermost residence tower, a hundred floors up. Then the tail ramp drops, and Second Platoon’s thirty-six troopers rush out to deploy.

From up here, a thousand feet above the PRC, the view is actually almost beautiful, Jackson thinks. The streetlights and shop signs below illuminate the dirty night air in many colors. From up here, she can see clear across this PRC and into the next one, and the one beyond. A hundred thousand apartments, millions of people. Thousands of thefts, hundreds of assaults, dozens of murders committed right this second in her field of view. No guns allowed in public housing, but Jackson knows there are almost as many of them out there as there are people. You’d be foolish not to go armed in a place like this. Without teeth and claws, you’re food to everyone out on those streets.

The rooftops of the residence towers are official use only. There’s a landing pad for drop ships, and the access doors are controlled by the security office down in the basement of the tower. The entrance vestibule on the rooftop leads into a service area with its own express elevator. A platoon can walk out of their drop ship, onto the elevator, and out into the atrium at ground level in less than two minutes.

From the moment they leave the roof and go down into the service area underneath the roof, Jackson has a strange feeling about this call, a little nagging voice in the back of her head. The place isn’t restless enough to justify a company of TA. Something feels all wrong to her. Maybe Detroit has made her shell-shocked, paranoid even, but when she’s forced to pick between staff officer judgment and her own instincts, she knows which to pick.

“Hold on,” she tells her squad as they wait for their turn to take the elevator down to the atrium. The other three squads of the platoon are already down there, and there’s no gunfire, no distress calls, but that nagging voice in the back of Jackson’s head screams at her not to let her squad go on that elevator.

“Hunter 2, this is Hunter 22 Actual, do you copy?” she sends over the platoon channel. The Lieutenant doesn’t respond. She checks the TacLink, but there’s no status update for the first three squads of her platoon, all down in the secure area of the atrium by now. The short-range TacLink signal sometimes doesn’t have the pop to go through a hundred floors of reinforced concrete, but she should be getting at least something. Thirty troopers down there, and none of them in a spot to get a good signal?

“Something’s fishy,” she tells her squad. “We’re not taking the elevator. I’m checking in with Company.”

She walks to the door leading back to the rooftop. When she pushes the unlock button, the light flashes red. She tries again, gets the same result.

“What’s going on, Corporal?” one of her fire team leaders asks.

“It’s locked,” she says. “They locked it behind us. I can’t get on the roof to get better comms. Secure that emergency staircase over there.”

One of her troopers tries the door of the escape stairwell.

“It’s locked too.”

“Those are never locked from the inside,” she says. “Break that son of a bitch open.”

Two of her troopers take turns trying to kick down the stairwell door, but it’s a fireproof hatch with tamper-proof cladding, to prevent the residents from breaking into the maintenance spaces from the outside. They kick it a few times, but for all the good they’re doing, they might as well shoot spitballs at it.

“Kelly, Grenade launcher,” she says to one of her fire team leaders. “Load buckshot. Aim at the spot where the main lock meets the frame. Everyone else, back to the other door. Cover the elevator door.”

“What about the rooftop hatch?” Specialist Kelly asks.

“That’s ten centimeters of laminate,” Jackson replies. “Can’t blow our way through that one without blowing ourselves up with it. Now move it and get that stairwell access open.”

“What the fuck is going on?” one of the privates asks.

“Don’t know yet,” she says. “No comms, and they’ve locked us in remotely. You want to take that elevator down and find out for sure?”

“Negative,” the private says and eyes the elevator door.

Specialist Kelly chambers a buckshot round in her grenade launcher and walks over to the staircase door. The other troopers get out of her way with some haste.

“Fire in the hole,” Kelly announces.

Her rifle’s launcher barks its deep authoritative thunder. The sound reverberates in the small service area. The buckshot load from the oversized caseless 40mm shell punches into the lock and doorframe like a wrecking hammer. Kelly walks up to the door and gives it a sharp kick, and the heavy steel door pops out of its shattered lock and swings open.

“Where are we going, Corporal?” Kelly asks.

“The fuck away from here,” Jackson answers. “Get to the floors below. Reassess the situation. Try to get the rest of Company back on the radio. Now move your asses.”

They move down the stairwell to the floor below in tactical formation, rifles at the ready. Jackson can tell that some of the troopers think she’s being mental, but she’d rather err on the side of caution than find herself trapped in a steel box with her entire squad. After last week, anything seems possible.

The fire-proof door on the 100th floor only opens from the inside as well, but another buckshot round from Specialist Kelly’s grenade launcher takes care of the lock and half the frame. They file into the hallway beyond. There are apartment doors all along both walls of the hallway, but nobody sticks their heads out to see what’s going on, not even after the thunder from a low-pressure rifle grenade. The hallway terminates in a little foyer that links the four corridors on this part of the floor and provides a little common area. There are no residents around here either.

Jackson checks her datalink to tap into the local security network. All the apartments have bioscanners and explosives detectors, and any assisting TA squad usually has full access to that information when they do sweeps. You walk up to an apartment door, you can instantly see how many people are present, their security classification, and their arrest history. When Jackson tries the datalink at the next apartment door she passes, nothing comes up. It’s like the network for the entire building is out. She knows that can’t happen—it’s triple-redundant, and she should be able to get at least something from the wireless transmitters. It’s either deliberately turned off, or someone is solidly jamming all their data comms.

“Watch the corridor junctions,” Jackson cautions. “We’ll go to the central core, get line of sight to the atrium.”

None of this feels right. The building’s security office is supposed to link with them as soon as they are on the ground, keep them up to date, tell them where they’re needed. The rest of the platoon is supposed to be online, feeding their sensory data to her and the squad. This total radio silence is the strangest thing she has ever experienced on a drop, and it’s unnerving.

At the next corridor intersection, Jackson can see the open space of the building core past the hallway in front of them. Every central corridor on each floor lets out onto a gallery overlooking the big open space in the center of the tower. You can see right down to the atrium on the first floor. There’s a chest-high railing and another meter of polyplast barrier above that, to keep people from falling over the edge, or throwing each other. There’s a safety net, attached to the gallery of the tenth floor, but without the polyplast, the hood rats would make it a sport to jump into it on purpose. Some still do, barrier or not.

The squad is twenty meters from the gallery when a warning buzzer trills, and the fire door at the end of the corridor comes down and locks into place. Jackson whirls around to see the same event mirrored at the other end of the corridor, back where they had just entered the 100th floor a minute ago. The corridor is pitch dark for a moment. Then the red emergency lighting comes on.

“Visors down,” Jackson yells. “Go augmented. Spread out and stay sharp.”

She pops her own helmet visor into place and lets the computer adjust the optical input. The section of corridor sealed off by the fire doors is sixty or seventy meters long, but that’s not a lot of space for nine troopers to find cover if someone decides to hose them down with automatic fire. The infantry calls narrow indoor passages “death funnels”.

Jackson prowls back to the corridor junction and takes a right turn to explore one of the side corridors. It ends at a bare concrete wall thirty meters beyond the intersection. The only ways in and out of this apartment cluster are shuttered with inch-thick armored fireproof doors, and they have nothing in their inventory to break down one of those.

“Hunter 22 Actual, this is OPFOR Actual.”

The voice comes over the emergency public address system in the corridor. Jackson stops, dumbfounded. OPFOR Actual? Someone knows military radio protocol.

“I count nine of you in corridor 100-16. Would the NCO in command please approach the public safety terminal at intersection A-16 and patch in?”

Jackson goes to the terminal labeled A-16 and taps into the circuit. This drop has gone so far off the rails that it feels like she’s in some sort of alternate reality.

“OPFOR Actual, this is Hunter 22 Actual, Territorial Army. Open those blast doors or I will shoot my way through them.”

“That’s a negative.” The voice on the other end of the connection is clear, businesslike. It would have an unconscious swagger if voices could have those. Jackson has been on military comms for long enough to know that she’s talking to a fellow combat trooper.

“You have a squad with rifles. I don’t see MARS launchers,” the voice continues. “Even if you have HE for your grenade tubes, you’ll barely scratch the paint on the blast doors. You can shoot holes in the walls, but I can just seal you in again wherever you pop out.”

She looks back at her troopers, who are still hunkered down in the corridor, rifles pointed toward the blast door.

“Who the hell are you?” she asks.

“I’m the commander of the force that just captured three quarters of your platoon without hurting anyone. I’d like to get you to surrender your squad to me so we can keep this blood-free streak going.”

“Not an option,” Jackson answers flatly. “You think I’ll hand over my gun without firing a shot, you’re out of your mind.”

“You have eight troops. I have a full company in this unit alone. We have the numbers and the home field advantage here. There are two ways for you and your troops to leave this tower: unarmed and in our custody, or feet first in a body bag. Everyone else in your platoon has decided to pick the first option just now. Your lieutenant is unusually wise for a junior officer.”

The man’s voice is confident, convincing. Whoever he is, he has experience in making people do what he says. Jackson scans her comms and data channels again, but there is nobody in her circuit except for the eight troopers in the hallway with her. Not even the residence towers’ electronic jamming systems could turn off her comms and data access so completely. Only her platoon or company commander could cut her out of the loop like that.

“Who the hell are you?” she asks again, this time more to herself than whoever is on the other end of the comms link. Then she cuts the connection.

Ninety-nine floors below them, and a rooftop above that’s inaccessible through the half-meter thick ceiling of the maintenance floor. Jackson’s squad is trapped at the top of a very large box like rats in a maze, and they have no way to chew themselves out of it. She has no way to tell the drop ships overhead that the platoon is in deep shit. And nine troops, fighting their way down 99 floors in a residence tower with a compromised security office and a hundred hostiles to fight?

Without the schematics of the building on her tactical screen, Jackson tries to reconstruct the floor design of the residence towers from memory. A hundred apartments, in four sections of twenty-five, with four main corridors sectioning the floor into quarters. If they can cut through the apartments to either side of the fire door ahead, they can break into the gallery that overlooks the open space of the building core. If the roof hatch above the core is open, she may be able to get line-of-sight comms to a drop ship overhead. She’ll be able to look down onto the atrium and see just what the hell is happening down there. It’s a messy way out and a long shot, but it beats the prospect of hoofing it down ninety-nine flights of stairs while dodging rifle fire from every floor along the way.

“Kelly, Pearson,” she says and points when she has the attention of her troopers. “That apartment and that one. Break down the doors. Go soft, just in case there’s civvies inside.”

Kelly and Pearson do as ordered and kick down the doors Jackson pointed out. Both require multiple kicks and no small amount of cursing. The fifth-gen stuff is built to last, designed for occupation by ten consecutive generations of welfare tenants. Nobody’s inside, though. There’s furniture and the detritus of daily life scattered about, but nobody challenges their forced entry. Not that it would have been a smart thing to do. Jackson walks into one of the open apartments and checks the layout. Two bedrooms, bathroom, combined kitchen and living room. The far wall of the living room is her demolition candidate—on the other side, there will be the open space of the floor’s gallery.

“Launchers,” Jackson says. “Buckshot the shit out of that wall right there. Aim for the same spot. We need a hole to crawl out of.”

Her troopers ready their launchers. Jackson steps back into the corridor to let them do their thing. The combined bark from three grenade launchers makes the concrete floor under her feet shake. When she sticks her head back into the apartment to observe the results, there’s an irregular hole half a meter wide in the far wall of the living room.

“Do another round,” she orders. “And hurry up, or every civvie asshole with a rifle is going to be out there waiting for us to pop out.”

Her troopers fire another brace of 40mm buckshot into the wall. Whoever lives here just got an upgrade, a nice big window overlooking the 100th floor gallery. Kelly and Pearson extend the hole with their rifle butts until it’s big enough for an armored trooper to fit through.

“Let’s go,” Jackson orders.

She goes through the breach first. There’s nobody in the space beyond, which is relieving and worrisome at the same time. Nobody’s ambushing them, but the gallery space shouldn’t be completely empty. This is the common area for the entire floor, and people are here at all times of the day to socialize, trade, or catch some fresh air and sunlight from above. But there’s nobody here, not a soul.

She looks up to where she should be seeing the dirty evening sky above Detroit. The huge retractable rooftop hatch is closed. There will be no line-of-sight comms with the drop ships. If they’re even still there, Jackson thinks. Anything seems possible in this new gone-to-shit scenario. Three full squads in the bag without a single shot fired, and the opposing team in full control of the security facilities of a fifth-gen residence tower. Jackson wonders if they control just the tower, or the whole block, or maybe even the entire damn PRC, all twelve blocks and forty-eight residence towers of it. Not that it matters. It’s not like she can even take on a company with the few troopers she has.

Jackson knows that this is not going to end well. But she can’t just walk over to the nearest security panel and surrender herself and her squad without putting up a fight. There would be no point in ever again suiting up after that.

Overhead, the the public address system comes alive again, much louder than before in the narrow corridor.

“I admire your initiative,” the voice from before says. “But you have nowhere to go up there. You can’t fight your way out of here. If you try, you’ll get yourselves killed. Whatever you think they called you in for, I guarantee you that it’s not worth that.”

There’s a pause, and when the voice comes on again, the man sounds almost gentle.

“NCO in charge, contact me on the nearest security panel when you are ready to discuss your surrender. There’s no shame in wanting to stay alive, you know.”

Jackson looks back at her squad, hunkered down behind concrete benches and planters with rifles at the ready. Most of them look like they’re in a death row cell and they can hear the footsteps of the execution delegation. They’re all privates, most of them green second- and third-class, and a pair of more seasoned first-classers that have been in the TA and doing combat drops for a little over a year. Jackson wishes she had her regular squad with her. If she is going to bite it on this drop, she’d rather be with Hansen, Baker, Priest, and the others. Her own squad would cause that smooth-talking OPFOR commander a much bigger headache than this squad of green kids. And with Sergeant Fallon here, the other team would be in deep shit.

But she doesn’t have her own squad, just these eight scared privates.

“What are we going to do?” Private Kelly asks her. Kelly is a young woman who looks like she just barely made the height and weight minimum for infantry. She’s the only other female in the squad.

Jackson ponders her reply for a moment. Of course, there’s no real choice, not for her. If Sergeant Fallon were here, she would have potted the comms console with her rifle the second the other guy mentioned surrender.

“We’re Territorial Army,” Jackson says. “We do our jobs, Private Kelly.”

She looks over to the closest elevator bank.

“Kelly, Pearson, cover that. Anyone steps out with a gun, you punch their ticket. No warnings.”

Kelly and Pearson look at each other, then obey. They move up to a cluster of planters ahead and train their rifles on the elevator doors.

“Everyone turn off your TacLink,” Jackson orders. With their data links compromised, they’ll have to go the old-fashioned way, voice and hand signals. Not having that almost omniscient TacLink awareness is a huge disadvantage, but letting the enemy—whoever they are—see through the squad’s eyes would be an even bigger one.

Jackson looks around for a way off this floor that doesn’t involve a ride in a computer-controlled elevator. There are staircases, but they’re at the corners of the floor, reachable only through corridors that can be sealed off piecemeal remotely by the security office. And they can’t all rappel down to the atrium ninety-nine floors below. They would have been better off in the staircase back under the roof.

Jackson curses herself for that tactical blunder. She led them in here, and now there’s no way out.

Then there’s movement to her side. Across the chasm of the central core, on the other side of the gallery, armed civilians are coming out of hallways and quickly taking cover in the gallery. There are two layers of polyplast security barrier between Jackson’s squad and these armed civvies, so she can’t engage. She signals her squad to take up covering positions and watches the force across the chasm as they take their own cover behind planters and low walls, every bit as efficiently as her own squad. There are a lot of them—three, four squads, and more coming out of the shadows of the hallways beyond, all converging on the gallery. Jackson knows her squad can’t take on that many, not in the confines of this rat maze.

“Last chance,” the enemy commander’s voice comes over the public address system. “Surrender your weapons, or we’ll come and take them.”

Across the core, a lot of rifles are aimed in Jackson’s direction now, and a lot of them look like military hardware.

But they don’t have battle armor, Jackson thinks.

None of the civvies have the sealed armor to go with those stolen military rifles, and she wants to bet they’re a little short on augmentation too, because nobody over there seems to be wearing a helmet.

“Launchers,” she tells her squad in a low voice. “All gas grenades. Lob ‘em over the barrier and onto the other side. Give me a volley on my mark.”

Her squad obeys. They take buckshot shells out of launchers and replace them with riot gas canisters. Kelly almost fumbles her reload, then readies her grenade launcher and looks at Jackson with wide, fearful eyes.

“Left side shoots left, right shoots right,” Jackson orders. “Kelly, shoot straight across with me. On three. Two. One. Fire in the hole!”

Nine launchers thump in a short, stuttering drumroll. Two of the gas grenades clatter against the polyplast barrier on the other side of the chasm and careen off, then fall down into the core spewing smoke. The other seven grenades drop into the gallery space beyond and burst apart. Within a few seconds, the other side of the gallery is blanketed with riot gas.

To a trooper in sealed armor, a gas grenade is just a minor inconvenience. The helmet keeps out the chemicals, and the augmented vision from the sensors cuts through the smoke. To an unprotected civvie, however, it’s like getting your face doused with alcohol and set on fire.

Instantly, there are screams of anger and pain coming from the far side. Jackson can see people hunching over or dropping to their knees in the noxious white cloud her squad just conjured with their launchers.

“Flank and flush,” Jackson orders. “Southeast corner, doubletime.”

She rushes her squad to the corner of the gallery, then turns left to cover the stretch of garbage-strewn concrete that is the south side of the gallery. Then she’s at the southeast corner. She looks around the edge of the concrete retaining wall to see the armed civvies retching in the chem cloud. The stuff is pretty persistent, but it won’t keep them suppressed for more than a few minutes. Until then, they’re blind and in no shape for fighting.

Jackson draws first blood. In the mouth of a hallway ten yards in front of her, two of the armed civvies are still alert and on their feet, at the far edge of the chem cloud. They see her and raise their rifles. She shoots first, letting her computer select the burst length as she sweeps thecivvies with her muzzle and holds her trigger down. The M-66 pumps out two three-round bursts, and both civvies fall over. Their rifles clatter to the floor as they die silently.

When Jackson looks to her left again, the remaining civvies have retreated into the vestibules and hallways of the floor beyond the gallery again. She wishes she had some HE or frag grenades to bank off these walls and bounce after them, but the ammo loads for the mission were limited to nonlethal and buckshot for the launchers. Nobody anticipated having to use high explosives for a simple public safety sweep assist. The world seems to have gone nuts since last week.

She has never missed that heavy, unwieldy piece-of-shit MARS launcher more in her life. With armor-piercing rockets or thermobarics, she could crack these walls like eggshells, blast a hole into the exterior wall, radio the drop ship, get out of this mess.

“Back to the hallway,” she tells her troops and points at the wide main hallway on the south side. The fire-proof door isn’t down yet, and the main hallways lead straight to the main staircases. They rush over to the south side, trying to cover in all directions.

Just as they reach the mouth of the hallway, the elevator bank nearby chimes, and the doors open. Jackson and her squad are maybe fifteen meters away as the elevator disgorges a squad or more of civvies with weapons. They see her group and raise their guns just as Jackson’s squad bring up theirs.

She wants to stop time at that moment. She knows what is going to happen, but she’s powerless to avoid it. It’s that freeze frame of mental acuity when that trigger has been pulled and the striker is racing toward the primer of the cartridge. The civvie in the lead starts to shout something, but Jackson can’t understand it, and it doesn’t matter in the end anyway.

Oh, shit.

Then everyone opens fire seemingly at once.

Jackson dives out of the way to the left, into the hallway and away from the elevators. She fires her rifle from the hip, into the tightly packed group of civvies coming off the elevators. As fast as she gets out of the way, a burst of flechettes still rakes her arm and right side. Behind her, the squad is out in the open, without the time to get to cover.

At a short range like this, a firefight between two squads with automatic rifles is like a knife fight in a boot camp locker. People scream and fall. Flechettes are piercing armor and flesh, ricocheting off hard surfaces and spraying apart in tiny splinters. Eighteen, twenty rifles firing in rapid cadence. Jackson has never been in the middle of such a hail, not even back in Detroit.

Her rifle’s target reticle disappears from her helmet display. She pays it no mind, just keeps firing her rifle from the hip. Hard to miss at this range. People are on the ground, others are madly scrambling for distance and cover. This isn’t holding the line. This isn’t a heroic last stand against the odds. It’s naked, bloody slaughter.

Jackson’s rifle stops firing. She automatically ejects her magazine and reaches for a new one on her harness, reloads, keeps firing.

She catches the movement above out of the corner of her eye. Reflexively, she throws herself backward. Overhead, the heavy steel-and-ceramic fire door of the main hallway entrance comes down quickly and silently. It slams into the concrete floor in front of her with a resounding crash that makes the floor shake. One meter to the right, and she would have been bisected by the hatch that locks into place not five inches from her right boot.

She is alone in the dark. Everyone else, her squad and all their enemies, are on the other side of the fire door.

Jackson screams in rage and frustration. She slams the unyielding laminate of the fire door with her fist. On the other side, the gunfire sounds muffled now, but rifles are still firing on full auto, and people are still shouting and screaming. Her people, her squad. Her responsibility.

“I’m locked in,” she shouts into the squad channel. “Covering fire, and retreat to the breech we made.”

Nobody replies. She pounds the fire hatch again, and this time there’s a sharp pain in her hand that shoots all the way up to her elbow. She examines her hand in the green-tinted augmentation of her helmet’s sensors. One of the flechettes from the enemy fire hit her armored glove and shattered. A shard of it must have pierced the armor and gone up her forearm. She can feel the blood running down the inside of the suit even as the armor’s computer works on stemming the blood flow with its integrated trauma kit.

There are more holes in her armor, on her right side. Jackson isn’t in pain, but her side feels numb, which is bad news. It means she’s wounded badly enough for her suit to numb her up. Still, she has her legs, arms, and hands, and everything still works.

There’s no way through that hatch except for blowing it up with a MARS rocket, which she doesn’t have. Jackson checks her rifle—180 rounds remaining—and her spare magazines. Three left, plus the one in the gun. Maybe enough to fight her way out of here.

The corridor behind her is deserted as well. A whole floor of a welfare high-rise, and it’s empty. Jackson wonders how far down they’ve evacuated. The floor below, five floors, ten? Where did all those people go? And how did these welfare rats become so organized?

On the other side of the fire door, the muffled sounds of automatic rifle fire cease. She tries the squad channel again. No reply.

Jackson replaces the partial magazine in her rifle with a full one and tucks away the partial in one of her magazine pouches. Then she moves down the hallway, away from the heavy fire door that traps her in this section.

The dark hallways of the apartment floor are eerily quiet and empty. Jackson clears the corridor, doorway by doorway, eighty meters of grungy rat warren without any rats inside.

At the end of the next hallway, there’s an escape door to a stairwell. The green fire escape sign glows in the dark like a dim beacon. Jackson walks up to the door and pushes the panic bar down to open it. It doesn’t budge.

There are two buckshot grenades left on her harness. She stuffs one into her launcher’s chamber, steps back, and blows the lock assembly to scrap with a thousand grains of polymer-coated tungsten shot. Then she kicks the door open.

The staircase is dark and empty. It’s 99 floors down to the atrium level, and she doesn’t really want to go down to where her whole platoon just got bagged by the locals without firing a shot, but there’s no other way out of this trap. She could hole up in one of the empty apartments and wait for them to come and find her, but she will not be pried out of a hiding hole like vermin.

The pain in her side is burning through the local anesthetic. The suit’s autodoc is keeping her from bleeding out, but she knows that she needs to get to a medical center soon.

She makes it almost ten floors down before she hears fire doors slamming open above and below her. It’s a trap, and she has walked into it willingly.

Jackson retreats to a corner of the stairwell and brings up her rifle. The optic on top of her M-66 is shattered, probably taken out by the same burst of flechette fire that tore up her side. The IR aiming laser still works, though. She puts the green dot of the laser on the first silhouette to appear on the staircase above, and pulls the trigger for a burst, then another. The silhouette disappears. The civvies carry high-powered weapon lights on their rifles, and the beams tear through the dark, casting harsh shadows on walls and ceilings.

Then she takes fire from the staircase below. She replies in kind, sending a few bursts downstairs. The ammo counter readout on her helmet screen goes from 250 to 210 in a blink. The civvies above her pop off a few bursts of un-aimed fire, holding their rifles over the railings without sticking their heads out.

Two grenades come flying down the stairs. They clatter on the concrete, bounce off the floor and walls, go in two different directions. Jackson rushes for one, kicks it down the stairs, knows that she doesn’t have the time to reach the second one. But she tries anyway.

She kicks the second grenade, and it flies off and hits one of the steel posts for the handrail of the staircase. It deflects at an angle and lands in the space to her right, where she can’t reach it without running right in front of the guns of the civvies down the stairs. It never comes to rest before it explodes.

Jackson is thrown backwards against the unyielding concrete of the staircase wall. Then she’s on her side down on the dirty concrete of the sub-landing. She gropes for her rifle, but it’s gone, blown from her hands. She feels the air leaking out of her, takes another breath, can’t get her lungs to respond the way they should. There are footsteps above and below her in the dark. She gives up her search for the M-66 and fumbles for the knife strapped to her harness even as she feels her consciousness slipping away. Then there’s just silence and darkness.

Chapter Seven

Lazarus

Jackson wakes up and immediately wishes she hadn’t.

There’s a bright light above her head that’s hurting her eyes, and she is thirsty, thirstier than she has ever been in her life. She turns her head sideways to avoid the painful glare of the light above. She’s in a room with unwashed floors and unpainted walls, dirty concrete. The merciless glare from the light fixture on the ceiling makes the place look inhospitable, pointing out every pockmark in the walls and mold spot on the ceiling as it does.

Her right arm is bandaged from fingertips to elbow. There’s a dull ache throbbing underneath the antiseptic gauze, but when she tries to flex her fingers, they obey. She uses her left hand to check the right side of her body. More bandages, taped to her skin, worse aching underneath. She feels like absolute shit, like she just woke up with the world’s worst hangover.

The room is small, just the overhead light, a toilet, and the bed in it. Her bedroom back home in Atlanta was smaller still, but not by much. Jackson checks the bed and sees that it’s bolted to the concrete floor in typical welfare housing fashion. She throws aside the thin blanket covering her and sees that she’s in a set of military issue underwear that aren’t the ones she put on when she left for this fucked-up drop. Both her ankles are tied together with polyplast restraints, and there’s a strand of it connecting her shackles to the bed frame. At the far end of the room, there’s a steel door, but Jackson doesn’t even have to try to know that her tether is just long enough for her to use the toilet, but too short to let her reach that door.

She sits up, ignoring the pain that shoots up her side, and clears her throat. There’s nothing in the room she can use as a weapon, and without a good knife, she can’t get rid of the plastic shackles that keep her feet together.

She clears her throat again. Her mouth is so dry that it feels like she’s gargling with wood splinters.

“Hey,” she shouts toward the door. Then again, louder. “Hey!”

She doesn’t have to wait long. On the other side of the steel door, there’s shuffling, someone getting out of a chair maybe. Then the door opens, and a surly civvie in combat fatigues looks at her without expression. He doesn’t say anything, just studies her for a moment. Then he closes the door again.

Jackson sits and waits.

Two minutes later, the door opens again, and someone else walks in.

The man who steps into the room is tall and lean. His skin is almost as brown as Jackson’s. He wears his hair in a military cut, shorn close to the skull on the sides and left just a little longer on top. From his bearing, the economy of his movements, Jackson knows that this man is a combat trooper.

“Good evening, Corporal,” he says to her, and it’s the same voice she heard over the security feed in the residence tower before things went all to shit. It’s silky and sonorous, and it carries the air of authority.

The man carries a plastic cup. He walks up to the bed and hands it to her, along with a handful of pills. She takes them without taking her eyes off his face. He has a closely cropped beard and mustache, shaved so thin it’s barely more than a black circle around his mouth.

She takes a sip from the cup. It’s water—warm and with a slightly rusty smell to it, but liquid to get the tissues in her mouth and throat back into speaking shape. Jackson downs the contents of the cup briskly.

“Where’s my squad?” she asks him.

He regards her with a faint smile.

“No ‘where am I’, no ‘who are you’, or ‘how long have I been under.’ Just concern for your troopers. I appreciate a combat leader with her priorities in the right order.”

She doesn’t reply, just looks at him without expression. She has already sized him up to see if she can take him down, and concluded that she can’t. He has stepped back just enough out of reach that she won’t be able to launch a surprise attack, as if he doesn’t even want to tempt her into trying. Jackson can tell that this man is as tightly wound as a steel spring underneath his clean fatigues. He radiates a sort of latent, barely restrained energy that reminds her of Sergeant Fallon, who looks like she’s always half a second away from unleashing violence.

“Your squad fought well, but they got the short end of the stick in the exchange,” her visitor continues. “Five were killed in action. The other three should be back with their unit right now.”

“Bullshit,” Jackson says flatly.

“We took their guns and gear and let them go,” he says. His clinical, calm tone tells her that he doesn’t give a shit whether she believes him or not.

“Why would you do that?” she asks. “Let them go when you know they’ll be back with new guns soon.”

“Because we don’t kill people unless we have to, and because I have no interest in going into the prison business. Too many mouths to feed around here as it is.”

Five dead, Jackson thinks. Because I told them to fight, and they listened.

“What about the rest of the platoon?”

“A mixed bag,” her visitor says. “Most were let go. A few of them accepted our invitation to stay. Nobody was harmed. We had a full company in the atrium, and crew-served weapons. Your platoon commander had the good sense to recognize an unwinnable scenario, unlike you.”

He clasps his hands in front of his chest and pauses briefly.

“I do admire your initiative and your fighting skills. After you turned down my offer, you managed to keep an entire platoon busy trying to flush you out. And your squad killed seven of my troops and wounded eight more. But you pissed away the lives of your troopers for nothing at all.”

“Not for nothing,” she says. “Can’t just surrender to everyone who asks. Sets a bad example.”

He looks at her with that intense gaze, his face perfectly expressionless.

“I suppose it would,” he says.

He takes the chair out of the corner of the room and puts it next to the bed. Then he sits down, just out of her reach, and folds his hands.

“Where did you serve?” she asks him point-blank. He doesn’t even raise an eyebrow, just smiles faintly.

“Marines,” he says. “2080 to 2106.”

If he served four terms, he must be in his early fifties at least. He doesn’t look that old, even if his short hair has a lot of silver in it. He looks at least ten years younger than that, which is unusual for a career space ape. That lifestyle wears a body out fast. Could be he’s bullshitting her, but somehow Jackson knows he doesn’t feel the need to lie to her.

“Officer?” she asks, and he nods.

“I was a Lieutenant Colonel when I left. Never did get to pin on those eagles.”

He leans forward and studies her face, his chin perched on his steepled fingers. Then he gestures to the area under his eyes.

“Your facial tattoos. What do they mean? I don’t recognize that pattern at all.”

Jackson shrugs.

“Saw it in a manga when I was a kid. Thought it looked bad-ass. Thought I needed to look bad-ass back then.”

He nods at her explanation.

“You’re going to let me go, or kill me?” Jackson asks.

“I’m not going to kill you. I will tell you that the sergeant whose squad you mauled was ready to finish you off on the spot in that staircase. We don’t run things like that around here. But I can’t let you go just yet either.”

“He the one in charge of the people that shot it out with us?”

“Yes, he was.”

“Then you should have let him. I get the chance, I’ll finish him off.”

Her visitor shakes his head, slowly, like he just heard some kid say something outrageously dumb. Then he gets up from his chair and carries it over to the door, out of her reach.

“You were out for a while. You’ll be hungry soon. I’ll have someone bring you some food. It’s not military chow, but I suspect you’re no stranger to welfare rations. I’ll be back later, when you’re fed.”

He walks out and closes the door from the outside. The snap of the deadbolts seems loud in her nearly empty room.

A little while later, someone else brings in a meal tray and puts it on the ground without saying a word. Jackson watches him unblinkingly until he is out of the room again. She gets out of bed—slowly and carefully—and retrieves the tray. It’s the standard generic soy-and-shit chicken they put into the welfare meals with various flavorings. After she enlisted, Jackson told herself she’d never eat another welfare meal, but she has been famished since she woke up, so she eats everything on the tray and washes it down with the box of bug juice that came with the meal. If she wants to get out of here in one piece, she needs to give her body something to burn.

She makes the bed, pulls the ratty sheet over the mattress and tucks it in tightly, then straightens out the wrinkles. Then she lies down on the bed and closes her eyes for a nap. Fed and rested can fight longer and run faster than hungry and tired.

When the door opens again, she is awake instantly. She swings her legs over the side of the bed and sits on the edge, hands clasped in front of her. At least they didn’t shackle her wrists.

The tall, lean, handsome visitor from before walks into the room. He’s wearing the same sanitized fatigues—no rank insignia, no name tag, no unit patches. He eyes the empty meal tray on the floor. Then he picks up the chair from the corner of the room again and puts it in the precise spot he had placed it earlier, as close to the bed as possible while still being out of the reach of the shackled Jackson.

“Where am I?” she asks him. “Who are you? How long have I been under?”

He flashes the sparest of smiles. Then he sits down on the chair and straightens out the tunic of his fatigues.

“You are in PRC Detroit-22, in one of the residence towers we control. My name is Lazarus, and I am in charge of the force that captured and disarmed your platoon. You have been under for three days.”

“Lazarus,” she says, and almost chuckles. “Come back from the dead, did you?”

“In a manner of speaking,” Lazarus says. “It’s a bit of a long story, and I’m not sure you’d be interested even if I were in the mood to tell you.”

“They’ll tear this place apart when they come looking for us,” Jackson says. Lazarus shakes his head slowly.

“I have no doubt they’ll be back soon with more people, but we’ve long left the block where we ambushed your unit. We never use the same trick twice from the same spot. They’ll need to drop a whole battalion just to get control of one block, never mind twelve.”

“You control the entire PRC,” Jackson says, incredulity creeping into her voice.

“Most of it,” Lazarus says. “The wonders of centralized control and command. Now let me ask you a question.”

He reaches into one of the chest pockets of his tunic and pulls out a set of dog tags on a chain. Then he dangles them from his fingers for her to see.

“You had these on you when we stripped you of your gear. Would you mind telling me how you got them?”

The dog tags are those of Anna McKenney, of course. She had been carrying them in the water-tight pocket insert where she keeps all her personal stuff. She looks at Lazarus, who is returning her gaze impassively.

“I took them off a woman’s neck on the street in one of your shithole PRCs in the center of this shithole of a city.”

“Did you kill her?”

Jackson senses that a lot is riding on her answer. She doesn’t even consider lying.

“She wounded one of my troopers. Was about to finish him off. I put two bursts into her. Fuckin’ right I killed her.”

He doesn’t say anything to that, just looks at her with this steely, unmoved expression, but she can tell there’s a lot swirling behind those eyes right now. Then he lets out a small sigh and looks down at his hands.

“I suspected as much. We never found her body, but we had a lot of missing that night. What a waste.”

Jackson agrees, although for different reasons. She doesn’t say anything else, though. Lazarus shakes his head and puts the dog tags back into his pocket.

“It’s all a waste, you know. Us down here, squabbling about who gets to eat how much of what shitty calories, you up there putting the boot on our throats whenever the pot boils over.”

“We keep order,” Jackson says. “We hold the line.”

Lazarus shakes his head with a sad smile.

“Is that what you think you’re doing? Do you see anyone glad for your presence whenever you come down into a PRC? Do you honestly not know how these people see you when you come in with your gunships and your battle armor, and walk the streets like you own the place?”

“Food’s shitty,” Jackson says. “Life sucks. I know. I was welfare before I joined up. But without the TA keeping you all from burning the place down, there wouldn’t be any calories for anyone.”

“You ought to know better than that, Corporal Kameelah Jackson,” Lazarus says. “You’re not there for our benefit. You’re there to keep the shit from spilling over into the suburbs and the upper-class gated communities. You’re attack dogs, and you don’t even know who is holding your leashes. When people see you tromping down the street in the PRC, they don’t see law and order. They don’t see civilization. They see an occupying army.”

Lazarus gets up, puts the chair back into the corner of the room, and looks at the door in front of him, fists clenched. Then he turns around, and for the first time Jackson can see emotion through his disciplined, collected expression.

“Just so you know, Anna McKenney was one of my platoon leaders. She was the kindest person I’ve ever known. Hell of a fighter, too. She was Navy, you know. Never had a lick of infantry training. We were together. If I had something like a soulmate in this life, she was it.”

Jackson feels her face flush, and she’s glad her skin color doesn’t make it obvious to Lazarus.

“I’m telling you this so you can appreciate how hard it is for me to not just go outside, fetch a rifle, and shoot you right in the forehead.”

He turns around and leaves the room. The door falls into its lock in his wake. Jackson doesn’t even realize she has been holding her breath for the last few moments until she exhales shakily.

Chapter Eight

Choices

The noise of the door opening shakes Jackson out of her sleep. Two of the uniformed civvies walk in. One stands by the door with a rifle, the other tosses a set of fatigues and a pair of slip-on shoes onto the bed.

“Get dressed,” he says. Then he steps up to the foot of the bed and snips her plastic restraints with a tool. “You try any funny shit, Olsen’s gonna go full auto on your ass.”

She gathers the clothes they gave her and gets out of bed. The pain in her side is still there, still just this side of tolerable. She wonders if anything got broken permanently.

The uniformed civvies don’t look like they have any intention of letting her get dressed in private, so she puts on the clothes while they’re watching her. She glances at their gear and the way they’re positioned, then concludes that she won’t be able to drop the closer one before the rifleman by the door mows her down with the M-66 he’s aiming at her.

When she’s dressed, they step out of the room and wave her forward.

“We’re moving. Go in front of me. Olsen will be behind us. You turn toward him, he’ll shoot you. Now move.”

She obeys and leaves the room, careful not to give Olsen an excuse to twitch his trigger finger.

Outside, there’s a narrow hallway that looks like it’s in a basement somewhere. Jackson follows the first civvie as instructed. The hallway leads out into a spacious vestibule. Out here, at least a dozen armed civvies in partial battle rattle are gathered, Lazarus in the middle of the group. He’s wearing chest and back plates, a sidearm on a drop holster, and a harness with magazine pouches. When she steps into the vestibule, it seems that every pair of eyes in the room is on her.

“Corporal Jackson,” he says. “We are relocating. Please follow along and don’t give anyone a reason to shoot you. Trust me when I tell you that most of them would be glad for an excuse. Let’s move out, gentlemen.”

They rush through a maze of corridors and vestibules, Lazarus’ men keeping a wary eye on her every time she strays close to one of them. Jackson’s side hurts, and she feels something stabbing into her chest every time she takes a breath, but she knows it would be pointless to ask them to slow down.

Then someone in front throws open a set of doors, and they’re outside.

It’s nighttime, and Jackson sees that they’re in the middle of a residence block. There’s a droning noise in the air, and the reason for the sudden rush becomes clear when she sees a Hornet-class drop ship coming out of the night sky and circling around the top of a nearby high rise tower. The dirty nighttime sky is ablaze with the searchlights from more drop ships. Whatever TA unit is making a drop onto this block right now, they’re coming in force, maybe an entire battalion dropping at once.

“They’re on Tower Thirteen,” Lazarus says into the earpiece he’s wearing. “Don’t engage. Let them have it. Second platoon, fall back to the atrium and take the rabbit warren down to the admin center. We’ll meet up with you there.”

They’re a hundred meters from the admin building in the middle of the square when another Hornet swoops out of the sky and thunders down toward the square. Jackson sees the skids of the drop ship lower out of the belly armor as the Hornet swings around to claim a landing spot. There’s rifle fire in the distance between two residence towers, and a moment later, an explosion blooms up in the same spot. The sound of the detonation rolls across the plaza like the rumbling thunder of an approaching storm.

“TA squads on the ground between Thirteen and Fourteen. Also in Blocks Five and Six. They’re all over the place, sir,” one of the troopers says, listening to the comms in his own headset.

There are civvies on the plaza, most of them without weapons and moving away from the spot where the drop ship is descending. It settles on the landing pad at the top of the admin center, a hundred meters away. Then the tail ramp opens with a low whine, and a platoon of TA come rushing out. They take up positions at the edge of the roof. Behind them, the drop ship guns its engines and lifts off again, raising the ramp in mid-air. It rises into the night sky, position lights flashing in the haze. The TA troopers file into the rooftop staircase one by one, weapons at the ready.

“We have a TA platoon on the ground at the admin center,” Lazarus says into his headset. “Second platoon, don’t engage them. Pass through and make for the fallback.”

Another drop ship weaves its way between two of the residence towers ahead and thunders over the plaza at low altitude before banking and turning to the right. They’re so low that Jackson can see the decals on the helmets of the pilots as the ship roars directly overhead.

“Told you they’d come back,” she says to Lazarus. He turns around and glares at her.

“They’re not coming for you. They’re coming for their gear. They’re here to send a message, you dumb shit.”

There’s rifle fire coming from the inside of the admin center now, short staccato bursts of automatic fire. A muffled explosion follows, then another.

“Sir, Second Platoon is engaged in the admin center.”

“Goddammit,” Lazarus says. He looks over to Jackson, then points at Olsen and the other civvie who escorted her from the room earlier.

“Olsen, Lepitre. Take our guest here over to the warren at Tower Eleven. Head for the spider nest. Don’t stop for coffee. The rest of you, with me.”

Lazarus leads off to the admin center, and most of the troopers move out with him as ordered, covering corners and sectors like a seasoned TA infantry squad. Olsen points out the way for her with the barrel of his rifle, back toward the tower they just left. She obeys and follows Lepitre.

They’re back inside the basement hallway when the overhead illumination switches from white to the dim red emergency light. The change is startling without helmet augmentation to compensate for it.

“What the fuck,” Lepitre says ahead of her. On the floor directly above, there’s gunfire, the hoarse chattering of flechette rifles interspersed with the lower single booms of cartridge guns.

Two more troopers appear around a bend in front of them. In the dim light, it takes Jackson a second or two to realize that the newcomers aren’t civvies in partial battle gear, but TA troopers in full armor, M-66 rifles at the ready.

Everything happens at once.

Lepitre up ahead shouts something at the TA troopers, but whatever he’s saying is drowned out by the booming warning coming from the troopers’ suit amplifiers.

“DROP YOUR WEAPONS AND GET ON THE GROUND! DROP…”

Lepitre goes for his sidearm, but he’s either too slow or too fast for the TA troopers. They both open fire, and Lepitre twitches once and falls to the ground. Behind Jackson, she hears the creaking of the plastic on Olsen’s rifle as he brings it to bear.

Jackson stops cold and drops to the ground. Olsen’s rifle spits out a full-auto burst, and both TA troopers go down in the hail of flechettes, half a magazine dumped at maximum cadence. Olsen is right behind her, less than half a meter away, and she rolls around and kicks his legs out from underneath him. He goes down, still clutching the rifle, and squeezes the trigger again. The burst hits the wall next to them and peppers Jackson with concrete chips and flechette fragments. She tries to wrestle the rifle away from him, but he’s holding on to it with a death grip, and he’s stronger. He tries to aim the rifle at her, but she’s on top of him, and in those close quarters, there’s no space for a sixteen-inch barrel between them.

Jackson drives an elbow into Olsen’s face, then his throat, as hard as she can thrust it down. He gurgles and lets go of his gun to clutch his throat. Jackson seizes the M-66 and backpedals, aims the muzzle at Olsen, and squeezes the trigger. The burst takes him in the side of the chest. He stiffens, groans, exhales. Then he stops moving. Jackson has seen enough KIA to know even in the dim light of the emergency illumination that he’s dead.

She gets to her knees and checks the condition of the rifle. Without a helmet display, she has to eject the magazine and count the rounds through the witness strip on the side. A quarter of the magazine left, so maybe sixty rounds. Olsen isn’t wearing an ammo harness. Dumb fuck ran around without reloads. If he was a vet, he wasn’t infantry, she thinks.

The TA troopers are down as well, both drilled with at least fifty rounds from Olsen’s full-auto magazine dump. They have magazine pouches, of course. Jackson doesn’t have a harness, but the too-big fatigues she’s wearing have roomy pockets, and she fills them with magazines as quickly as she can pry them out of the pouches of the dead troopers.

Up ahead in the hallway, a door opens, and another TA trooper appears.

He’s less than twenty meters from where Jackson is tugging at the harnesses of two of his dead comrades. She knows instantly that he will not shout a warning, that there won’t be time to put-up her hands and explain the situation, tell him that she’s Corporal Kameelah Jackson, 365th AIB GODDAMNIT DON’T SHOOT ME

He brings up his rifle, she grabs hers. She shoots from the hip, not wanting to take the time to use the sights. The M-66 in her hands roars and spits out the rest of the magazine at the dumb-ass high rate of fire Olsen dialed in manually earlier.

Her burst almost goes high, but some of the fifty or sixty flechettes find their way into the visor of the TA trooper’s helmet. He drops instantly, like someone turned off his power switch. His rifle clatters to the concrete.

Jackson screams a curse. She rushes over to the trooper she just shot, somebody here to rescue her, one of her own. She checks the unit markers on the armor and instantly hates herself for the relief she feels when she sees that his unit isn’t the 365th, but the 332nd.

She gets up, changes the magazine in her rifle, drops the empty one on the ground. Then she takes the magazines of the dead 332nd trooper, too.

Her drop two days ago ran into a planned ambush. All of Lazarus’ troops, with home field advantage, with control of the security office, using the bottlenecks of the elevator banks. This drop, a whole battalion of TA descending on an unprepared enemy, is a much more even fight. There’s gunfire everywhere now—the floors above her, the plaza outside. Jackson finds a staircase and gets out of the basement, up to the atrium of the residence tower. She advances through the hallways, rifle at the ready. There are civvies rushing past her to get out of the way of the shooting, but they pay her no mind. Probably think she’s one of them.

When she gets to the gallery, the place is a madhouse. There are groups of TA troopers out in the vast expanse of the tower’s public space, exchanging fire with Lazarus’ armed civvies shooting down at them from the floors above, and welfare rats scrambling out of the line of fire. If she steps out into this circus, she’ll get drilled by the first TA trooper who spots her, oversized fatigues and stolen military rifle. She turns the other way and goes down a hallway that looks it may lead to one of the entrance vestibules, out of this place.

The plaza outside doesn’t look much better. There are TA troopers on the roof of the admin center in the middle of the plaza, shooting at targets Jackson can’t see. She dashes from cover to cover, sticking to the outside of the building, away from the fighting. Get into the clear, ditch the gun, find a way to a PRC that has a functioning police station.

Jackson is halfway around the perimeter of the plaza when she sees a group of armed and armored civvies, hunkered down behind a low wall, shooting at the TA troopers on the roof of the admin center. Lazarus is in the middle, directing fire teams and talking on his headset.

She brings up Olsen’s rifle, drops to one knee. The optic on Olsen’s gun works fine. She ranges Lazarus with the rifle’s laser. 110 meters, a shot she could take half dead or fully drunk. She puts the targeting reticle on the back of Lazarus’ head, switches the fire selector to single shot, puts her finger on the trigger. One round would probably get lost in the automatic weapons chatter that reverberates all around the plaza. They’d think the TA grunts on the roof hit him.

Maybe.

Jackson dials up the scope’s magnification all the way, She studies the shape of Lazarus’ head, decides where to put the round to cut the brain stem. He moves around a bit, but she has no problem tracking him. One twitch of her index finger, and their outfit loses their leader, maybe falls apart entirely.

She holds her finger on that trigger for what seems like a day and a half. Then she flicks her fire selector switch back to “SAFE” and lowers the weapon. With all the red she has on her ledger, she has never shot someone from behind who couldn’t shoot back at her. That’s not the way she does business.

The access ramp to the block is only eighty or ninety meters to her right. Beyond it, there’s open space—parks, plazas, recreation areas for the welfare rats. Easy to hide there, make her way out of the PRC, back to the urban wasteland in between, the shitty seams between the PRCs where the truly unlucky live, the ones that can’t even get welfare housing. Go to a different PRC, one where the public safety offices haven’t been infiltrated. Hitch a ride back to Shughart, report back to duty.

Maybe.

Jackson takes one last look at Lazarus through her scope. He may even pull this one out of the fire, if he’s lucky. Maybe he even deserves it. She has a feeling that she will see him again someday.

She steps back into the shadows between the residence towers and makes for the access ramp. Her side still hurts like a bastard, TA troopers will shoot her on sight in that outfit, but she has clean fatigues and a rifle, and she’s in charge of her own fate again. The day is looking up.

Content

MEASURES OF ABSOLUTION
A Novella by Marko Kloos

Chapter One Detroit

Chapter Two After

Chapter Three Liberty

Chapter Four Vermont

Chapter Five Taps

Chapter Six Mazes

Chapter Seven Lazarus

Chapter Eight Choices