Elizabeth Bear - Hammered

2247 hours, Sunday 10 September, 2062

Queen Street Cafe

Toronto, Ontario

I worked places like this before I made it into the army, but mine were in Montreal. I keep thinking I see Chrétien out of the corner of my good eye, oiled black curls and superior smile, pretty face and scarred knuckles. Every time I turn to look, he’s not quite there, and I’m not too upset about it.

He’d be somewhere around sixty now. Imagine that.

“Aren’t you kind of old for a cyborg?” The bartender checks me out critically, an up-and-down sweep of the eyes from scarred black boots to ragged-cut crown of hair.

I feel naked without my sidearm. “It wasn’t voluntary.” I’m too fucking worn through the tread and down to the cable to smooth his ruffles, and I don’t give a damn what he thinks of me anyway. “Bourbon, please.” I don’t really mean please, and he frowns as he pushes the booze across the bar at me and takes my cash card. A long pause while he reads it lets me take in the scenery. It’s worth observing.

When I was in the service this was a cop-and-soldier bar, and it had a different name. Now it’s home to a new crowd, with a taste for the self-conscious archaism of the name and the razor-edged five-minutes-in-the-future of the decor. A body-modified crowd, which reflects extremes of bio and mecha engineering in the black mirrored floor.

We don’t see this sort of thing in Hartford. Some are cosmetic mods: cow-dark eyes, lips that scintillate with purple and orange light. Many more have the functional ones: I spot somebody with a second pair of prosthetic arms — not armored like my steel hand, but a color cycling pattern of LEDs — giving the appearance of some Hindu god. I bet those aren’t really hardwired on. Another patron, straddling the difference, has a steel snake, hood-flaring and hissing, raising its head from the unzipped fly of his pants. It’s fascinating in a train wreck sort of way, but I don’t want him to catch me looking and think I have more than an academic interest.

Some of these guys make Razorface look like the girl next door. Freaks.

Hey. Look who’s talking, freak.

The music is three generations of loud removed from the last kind I knew how to dance to. Someday, the noise will grow so noisy that the next generation will have to start playing polkas and Mozart to rebel. I take my drink and sit down across from Barb, in the quietest corner, which isn’t.

Barb, what the hell are you thinking, meeting Valens here? But I know: she’s thinking that I won’t stick out like a sore thumb. In fact, I fit right in. Except I’m thirty years too old.

It’s a good place for the spirited sort of… negotiations… I’m expecting. Two decades and more, and I still know what she’s thinking. Except when I don’t.

“Vous êtes sûre qu’il vient?” I surprise myself — the question comes out in French. Québecois, anyway. You’re sure he’s coming? Which reminds me of a joke.

“Je suis sûre,” she answers in the same language, and I have a sudden sharp-as-a-flashback memory of Maman singing us McGarrigle Sisters songs when she had us in the bathtub. She loved old folk music — français, English, the Haudenosaunee tales her grandmother told her. “Il est toujours ponctuel. I bet he’s here at five minutes to the hour.”

He will be, too. Salaud. “Look, Barb… when he gets here. I want to talk to him alone.”

She sips white wine and makes a face. What she expected in a joint like this, I have no idea. At least she’s traded in her carefully tailored suit for blue jeans and white cotton. “Are you going to stick a knife in him, Jenny?” Her eyes sparkle as she smiles. Somehow, Barb got all the charm.

We split the mean down the middle, but I like to think I got the slightly smaller half. I like to think a lot of things, really. Nell was the sweet one, my little baby doll, youngest of us three. “Not immediately.” I sip my drink, which is less watered than he might have gotten away with. “I’ll let him talk for at least five minutes first.”

Barb sighs and shrugs, rolling her eyes in that way that says, plain as if she wrote it on the wall, that she doesn’t know why she puts up with my obstinate, intransigent, insubordinate self. She leans forward, flashing red and orange lights daubing her handsome features like warpaint, like the glow of something important burning. “Quoi que, Geni. Just remember that he’s dying to help, and try not to be too much of a… une chienne.” Hah. She was going to say “putain.” “He really does care.”

It’s twittering, and I tune her out. Rien, rien. Je ne regrette rien. Yeah. As if. I am not an exception. I am a statistic. And forgetting that is a good way to wind up a permanent statistic.

It’s something you learn the hard way, if you learn it at all. There are two ways to cope with combat. Well, that’s an outright lie. There are probably thousands. There are two ways that I’ve seen work pretty well and still leave you with something like a soul to call your own when it’s over. If it’s ever really over.

One is denial. Convince yourself that you’re bulletproof, ten feet tall, and it’ll never happen to you, and sometimes you can even convince the world for a while. The other way to do it is to decide that the worst has already happened, and you’re living on borrowed time, and when your number is up, your number is up. They say you never hear the one that has your name on it, but brother, I can tell you, it isn’t true. You hear it coming every time you close your eyes.

Barb’s saying something, but the words mean nothing. I lean back in my chair, raise one hand to shut her the hell up, shaking my head. Something’s rising up in the back of my consciousness, something big and bright and featureless as a drought-seared plain under an African sun.

Merci à Dieu . Pretoria. 2037. I know it’s a flashback. I know it down in my bones and it doesn’t make a damned bit of difference, the same way it doesn’t when I know it’s a dream and I know I’m going to die, because I always do. Every time.

And every time, I’m right.

And the heat is a forge during the day, the cold a quenching at night. The land is an anvil and the sun a hammer in the hands of a lame god. Sun setting gory as the weeks before, smearing pale walls with bloody handprints. Before the drought, before the heat, the hills overlooking the city were green and rolling, hedged in some sort of purple flowers. I’ve seen pictures.

Three ammo haulers, two staff vehicles, two A.P.C.s, and an Engineering Corps tank with a bulldozer blade on the front — a Christmas carol in Hell. We’ve got air cover as well, a pair of gunships and a spotter. I’m shepherding the convoy down the already ruined road north of the city — shiny, modern city: good university, once. We couldn’t get through without the tracked vehicles now. My tactical display shows clean and green: the first clue something’s gone sour is a trail of smoke from the roof of a nearby building, the death gasp of one of the deadly, fragile helicopters shredding at the seams. Then the explosions start in earnest.

Anything hauling explosives is not where you want to be during an artillery barrage. The guy ahead floors it, and I do, too.

Gunfire. Ambush. I hear the whine of the fifty cal on the escort tank, the unforgettable rumble of its enormous engine. The guy sitting next to me is terse and professional into his throat mike, bringing the TOC up to speed on where we are and what we’ve run up against. A second after tactical gets the information, my heads-up stains red with confirmed hostile presence. Nice to know now. I wrench the big machine aside as a crater opens up seemingly between my feet, black hot plastic slipping through my hands.