Freedom's Fire Read online

  “What did it do?” I ask, as I try to envision what Brice is describing.

  “This whole research program was about trying to understand the human brain to make better soldiers.”

  “And?” I ask again, prodding Brice toward the point.

  “This woman goes into a battle simulator. A big thing, it filled a whole room.” Brice spreads his hands in a wide gesture. “Video screens on all the walls. Big enough to make you think you’re really in the situation.”

  “Sounds like a pretty cool simulator.” I wish the ones we’d trained on had been something along that scale.

  “The woman had never fired a rifle before and had never been in a simulator before,” says Brice. “The simulator starts running, sending dozens of enemy soldiers to kill her, shooting and such. She’s overwhelmed. There are so many and she can’t kill them all. She’s frustrated. She fails.”

  “It happens.” I’m thinking, that’s why we train.

  “The point is,” says Brice, “it was her first time. Nobody expected her to do well. The second time through, they put the helmet on her. They turn it on and run her through the simulator again. Same simulator. Same situation. Same overwhelming number of attackers.”

  “What happened?” I ask.

  “She kills all of the bad guys,” says Brice. “Every single one. Afterward, she can’t believe it was the same simulation. She thought they’d made it easier. They didn’t. It only seemed easier because the thing on her head sharpened her focus, made all her mental distractions go away. Made her a killer. A damned efficient one.”

  Interesting story. I put my hands on my helmet as I imagine having such a device. “You think they have that kind of technology built into these?”

  Shaking his head and pointing at our sleeping troops, Brice says, “You saw how they behaved in combat. Some of them did well. Most are lucky to be alive. No, I think that bug in your head does that the same thing to your brain that the helmet did to that woman. It makes you into a stone-cold killer when you need to be one.”

  I wonder if Brice is right about that.

  Chapter 47

  “You still didn’t tell me about this thing with Phil’s wife,” says Brice.

  “You’re the one who got off on the subject of brainwave helmets.”

  “Why don’t you stop evading and just get it off your chest.”

  I huff. “I don’t need to get it off my chest. It was a mistake. I made my peace with it. Besides, it’s not as interesting as you seem to think it’s going to be.”

  “Try me.”

  Where to start? “They’re twins, Claire and Sydney, his wife and mine. Back when Phil and I met them, you could barely tell them apart.”

  “This has the makings of a good comedy,” says Brice.

  “Are you going to heckle me?”

  “A little.” Brice gestures at the rusty tube we’re riding. “Entertainment on these long flights is hard to come by. A man’s got to do what a man’s got to do.”

  “It’s not a comedy.”

  “Drama is fine. I like those, too.”

  I refocus on my story and say, “I think somewhere back when Sydney and Claire were still sipping make-believe tea and mashing mud pies, Claire lost one too many games of checkers and Sydney decided she was maybe a little better than Claire.”

  “It’s going to be a psychological drama,” guesses Brice.

  “Are you going to let me tell it?”

  “Please do,” says Brice. “I’m riveted already. But first, which one were you married to?”

  “Claire?”

  “And Sydney, she’s the one you… you know.” Brice makes a rude gesture.

  “Sydney was Phil’s wife.” Steering the conversation back toward Brice, I say, “I thought you were Mister All-Business. What’s with the teenager routine all of a sudden?”

  “I am who I need to be,” says Brice. “Right now, I’m just a passenger on a ship. My platoon is asleep. This is my off-time. Get on with the story.”

  “I think Claire developed some kind of complex about Sydney being better than her. The two competed at everything. Eventually, Claire was tired of losing, and gave up on most things. That made Sydney push harder.”

  “You’re talking about more important stuff than checkers,” deduced Brice.

  “Sydney made good enough grades to go to high school,” I tell him. “She eventually became an accountant. Not a bad job. Like most folks, Claire went into the labor pool after sixth grade. She worked on a factory line.”

  “That is big stuff,” concludes Brice.

  “Yeah,” I agree, already knowing where the story is going, “the big stuff.” I pick up my place in the story. “Phil and me met Claire and Sydney at an MSS social function.”

  “Never went to one of those,” says Brice. “By the time I was old enough, I’d signed up for space construction and I was off-world when my first required function came up on the calendar.”

  “Free food and free beer,” I tell him. “Besides that, a waste of time.”

  “Except you met your wife there.”

  “By accident, really, but that’s outside the scope of this story.”

  “Getting technical?” laughs Brice.

  I nod. “Me and Claire got married. I was happy on that day, maybe the happiest I’ve ever been. Claire glowed like an angel, prettier than I’d ever seen her before or since. The memory still shines in my mind. I can’t reconcile that memory with the one of the shrew who eventually got out of bed one morning and never moved out.

  “Phil and Sydney married soon after we did. I didn’t question it at the time. It didn’t seem unusual, just a bit lucky, two best friends marrying twin sisters. It wasn’t until months, maybe years later when I was trying to figure out why the glue that held Claire and me together didn’t feel like love, I realized I was only a mark on the scoreboard between her and Sydney. I worked at the grav fab, a good job that afforded me a lot of privilege. Because of the bug in my head, but you know that.”

  “You’re saying Claire married you to one-up her sister?”

  “I think so,” I answer. “I think Claire was trying to beat Sydney in the game they’d been playing their whole lives. I think after we met, she played the role of best girlfriend ever, being everything I wanted her to be so she could cross the matrimonial line first. I think when the sun came up the morning after our honeymoon, it occurred to her that winning had a price.”

  “She was stuck with you,” says Brice, “because to back out, to divorce you, would invalidate the win?”

  “That’s right,” I confirm. “We rung up a few years of pretending we were happy. Even smiling for real sometimes. Eventually, I realized she had no love for me.” I look at Brice when I say it, because it’s embarrassing. “I loved her. It broke my heart.”

  Brice reaches around and pats my back. “Everyone deals with it, eventually.”

  “To her credit, Claire tried,” I say. “She was dutiful. Committed. We even had that us against the world thing from time to time. Maybe most of the time. One of the sad aspects of her personality that grew out of all those years of losing to Sydney was an unrealistic idea she was always being cheated by everyone.

  “I fell in with it. Not wittingly, not at first. Hell, back in the early days, I did anything to earn love that was never going to come. I was her champion. I got into fights. I cursed my neighbors. I berated people at the commissary. I went after anyone who pissed-off my sweet Claire.”

  “Sour,” comments Brice.

  Again, I nod. “Funny thing is, I saw Sydney treating Phil the same way as Claire treated me. Actually, worse. But I never saw the mirror of it. Claire saw plenty there, though. In the privacy of our house, she always talked about what an ugly man Phil was. He was a slob. He smelled bad. He’d never make Sydney happy. Divorce was in their future. They’d never have kids. None of us ever did, by the way.

  “That was all just Claire telling herself that her grav fab bug-head was a better catch th
at Sydney’s. She was looking for the decisive win.” I shake my head and laugh. “I can only imagine the conversations Claire and Sydney must have had about me and Phil when we weren’t around.”

  “I don’t think you’d want to hear any of that,” suggests Brice.

  “As the years passed,” I say, “Phil put on more weight, spent more time with his hobbies, and talked incessantly about Sydney, whom he worshipped, though she seemed to ignore him more and more as she spent all of her time hiking in the mountains and going to an old gym that for some reason was still open in Breck. It’s like she was trying to work the imperfections out of her body. Or trying to punish herself for marrying Phil. I don’t know.

  “Claire didn’t have any remarkable habits, except that she was slowly morphing into a brittle, flavorless reflection of the girl I married. Her anger was always lurking behind a veil, unashamed when anyone saw it. She started to overeat, something hardly possible for regular people these days.”

  “Ain’t that the truth,” agrees Brice.

  “In the bug-head community,” I say, “we had privileges, and one of those was plenty to eat. I don’t know if the eating was the competition again, or a symptom of Claire giving up. She got a little doughy, not so much that she couldn’t cover it up with a slack dress or baggy shirt. She was still pretty and when she turned on that pearly smile, it didn’t matter, I was still her stupid puppy.

  “For my part, it’s hard to say how I passed the years. In a way they were a blur of things I wanted to forget. I felt trapped in a marriage I was afraid to get out of. I was stuck at the grav factory because that’s where the Grays put me. I used to read a lot of history with my mom when I was a kid. I started doing that again. I watched a ton of old videos from when the ticks arrived and conquered the earth. I longed for those older days. It was a romantic view of humanity’s past. Not to say it was all roses and sunshine, I hid all the dirty parts of our history from myself because I think I needed to love something.

  “Everybody does that kind of shit,” says Brice. “Healthy self-deception. It’s a good thing.”

  I go on, “The precarious mess of our lives finally collapsed on my birthday a few years back. Sydney and Phil came over to our house. Phil brought buffalo steaks, a rare treat, expensive as hell. I grilled them in the backyard while we drank on the deck. Phil and I talked about work. Claire and Sydney traded barbs.

  “We had dinner, drank, played cards, and drank some more. We were all a little drunk, at least. Phil checked out early and went home. We had work the next day and he’d had too many tardies at work already and couldn’t risk another. Sydney and Claire found a weird place in their inebriation where they were able to get past their animosity and share nostalgic stories of their childhood.

  “It was weird. They were sitting on the couch looking at old pictures, closer than I’d ever seen them before, smiling, and even crying. I trundled myself upstairs to go to bed. I was drunk enough that I knew when I got up in the morning for my shift, I’d still be buzzed.

  “I don’t remember actually settling into bed but I remember waking up in the dark with a woman’s hands on my skin and a pair of lips breathing alcohol breath into my mouth. She smelled like Claire. Tasted like Claire. In the dark, she even looked like Claire. But she didn’t feel like Claire. She was lean and tight, not soft and comfortable.

  “With alcohol excuses all queued up and impaired logic brushing right past any question of getting caught, I let myself go with it. The blankets were kicked off the bed with the last of our clothes, and we went at it like a couple of teenagers discovering sex for the first time.

  “When the bedroom light blinked on, Sydney was on top of me, facing the bedroom door and making enough noise to wake the neighbors, enough to wake Claire from her stupor.

  “Sydney stopped what she was doing and sat up straight, showing off the perfect sculpture of her body and blocking my view of the bedroom door.

  “I prayed and panicked, hoping I’d been so drunk that I hadn’t noticed the light was on when I got in bed, or maybe it was morning and I’d just lost track of time, or maybe I was so drunk any behavior was excusable, even mistaking my wife for her sister. Anything that would save me from the wrath I knew was only a heartbeat away.

  “Claire called Sydney a slutty bitch. Shouted it through angry tears. She told Sydney to finish getting me off, and flicked out the light. I was seeing spots in my vision when Claire slammed the door and wailed as she ran down the stairs, stomping each one so hard I caught myself wishing she’d break one, fall, and die of a broken neck as she rolled to the bottom. Anything so I wouldn’t have to face my shame.

  “Sydney lifted a leg high in the air to get off me, so high it seemed awkward, rude even, like she was trying to avoid stepping in something she didn’t want on her feet, like something about me was so disgusting she couldn’t bear to have me touch her skin.

  “She deftly rolled off the bed and scooped her clothes off the floor. Covering her breasts with her shirt, I saw only a shadow over her pubic region and a line of moonlight cutting across her face. Everything sweet and flirtatious was gone. She’d turned just as icy cold as Claire. She said, ‘Proud of yourself?’ She wasn’t asking a question. She was stapling the blame to my forehead.

  “She left the room and closed the door casually behind.

  “I waited to hear her feet going down the stairs, to hear the detonation when she made it to the bottom. I listened for Claire to tear into her, to hear the front door slamming, or maybe the police coming because I knew it could get that bad.

  “There was nothing.

  “Only Claire’s sobs drifted up through the dark house.

  “It was as if Sydney dissolved into the night, a succubus, pleased her carnage was sewn, flitting into the void.”

  “What happened after that?” asks Brice.

  “I admit,” I say, “I was a pussy. I was afraid to go downstairs and face Claire.

  “I told myself I’d let her cry herself out and then I’d go down. I spun up a hundred different excuses that all blamed the alcohol. Hell, I even figured I could play dumb, pretend I had no recollection of it. An alcoholic blackout. How could I be blamed for something I didn’t know I’d done? Hell, how could I even be sure her accusation was real and not just a drunken dream in her own head?

  “I dozed off, and slept hard.

  “I woke the next morning feeling like a smashed bug, still afraid to go downstairs.

  “I was late for work before I’d even looked at the clock for the first time.

  “Regardless, I needed to get my ass to the plant. The ticks weren’t forgiving when it came to slowing their production.

  “I showered, brushed my teeth, got dressed, and rushed downstairs, with a promise on my lips ready to tell Claire I loved her, and we’d have to talk about it when I got home from work.

  “She was gone already.

  “Everything downstairs was clean. It was as if there had been no party the night before.

  “I took a perfunctory look around the house, hoping I wouldn’t find her, then I rushed off to work.

  “It was when I got home that evening I found her sitting at the dining room table. She didn’t look at me. She didn’t yell. She simply said she’d told Phil about it and she’d volunteered us to host a Gray hatchling.”

  “Shit,” says Brice. “You’re kidding. She took on a hatchling?”

  I nod. “A five-year commitment to raise a tick from hatching to maturity, a commitment to give herself to it. Everybody knows what that means. She knew it would age an extra twenty or thirty years out of her and likely as not leave her dead. She knew the surviving family would get a big enough stack of money to leave them well-fed for a generation.

  “Claire got her revenge for what I’d done and she’d committed herself to something that would make me feel shitty every day for the rest of my life.

  “Later that night, Phil kicked Sydney out of his house and she came to live in our basement, making it e
asier for Claire to shove her revenge in the face of the two people she hated most.

  “Two weeks after that, the tick moved in and Claire started to shrivel away.”

  “Goddamn,” says Brice. “That’s some shit.”

  Chapter 48

  Seven jumps, and we’re out again. I’ve dozed through three.

  Most of the grunts are asleep. I’ve lost track of how many hours we’ve been trying to reach a destination we should theoretically have made in about forty-five minutes.

  “Lived through another one,” announces Phil over the bridge comm.

  At least there’s that. Our ship hasn’t blown up, yet. I ask, “Are we any closer this time?”

  “Don’t be an ass,” Penny tells me.

  I didn’t think my tone carried any inflection of hidden meaning, but I suppose she’s getting as frustrated as the rest of us.

  “There’s a wonkiness to the drive array that’s—”

  “It’s okay, Penny,” I tell her. She’s explained it to us a few times already.

  “throwing us off course by—what, Phil—as much as thirty degrees in each jump?”

  “Thirty-two’s the most so far,” he clarifies.

  “And we don’t know which direction we’re going to go.”

  Phil says, “At least the hyper-light speed is consistent on each jump, so we’re developing a cone of probability on our calculations as to where we’ll end up.”

  Lenox shakes her head and pretends to punch herself in the face and looks at me with a silent question, “How many times do we need to hear this?”

  “We understand,” I tell them. “When we get to the base, maybe we can fix the ship. They have to have maintenance guys there, right?” That’s only a hope. I know nothing about where we’re going except it’s an asteroid.

  “We’re three thousand miles out,” Phil tells us. “The asteroid at the orbital coordinates looks to be a little more than two kilometers long.”