Chris Moriarty - Spin Control

The tenor of activity in the abandoned house changed. One by one the soldiers around Arkady fell silent. The frenetic camaraderie gave way to a tense waiting alertness that reeked of approaching danger. “What’s happening?” he asked Osnat.

“Shh! They’re coming.”

It took Arkady another minute to hear what Li’s enhanced senses and the IDF monitors had told the others: the muffled clank and rustle of a fully equipped infantry squad on the move.

The soldiers on either side of Arkady were shrinking back against the wall, clutching their weapons to their chests. Osnat pulled him back toward the wall by one sleeve. “Get back, Arkady. Give them room.”

They waited. Fabric moved softly against fabric. Someone coughed. Cohen tapped sporadically at the old-fashioned keyboard in front of him, making frustrated faces. The sound of the approaching squad swelled and echoed down the empty street until Arkady began to feel that they must already have passed the open doorway before him—or that time had become stuck in an endlessly repeating loop in which the unseen force was arriving and arriving and never actually here.

“Safeties off,” the captain murmured. He looked sick to his stomach.

“NavMesh is initializing,” Cohen reported finally. “They’re checking the patrol waypoints against the terrain database and updating the blind data. Okay. Now they’re getting a modification to their SeekToViaNavMesh.”

The machine paused, watching some process unfurl in the virtual, and to Arkady unimaginable, world of streamspace. Then it shook its head in apparent exasperation.

“These people have an idea of surface and barrier architecture that the word baroque doesn’t even begin to cover! No wonder they patrol the Line on foot. If they sped up to a jog, they’d have to stop every other tick to wait for the next state-of-the-world update!”

The machine fell silent.

“You done yet, Cohen?” That was Li, somewhere across the room and out of sight.

“Yes. No. I think so.”

A bootheel scraped in the dust outside. A shadow flitted past the door, too fast for Arkady to have more than a vague sense of color and movement.

“They’re here,” someone whispered.

And they were.

The Enderbots took the house with a seamless and silent deliberation that was at least as terrifying as the cold competence of Syndicate-bred tacticals. One minute the center of the room was empty. The next an impassively staring trio of infantrymen was flowing smoothly into tactically optimal positions from which they were able to cover the entire room and its approaches. Their weapons were equipped with spintronic range finders: a pale beam that quivered through the dusty air and picked out precise blue circles that wandered over the faces and uniforms of the special forces soldiers. Several of the men around Arkady flinched when the beams touched them, but no one broke ranks.

“God,” someone said, “how the hell can they be so young?”

Arkady felt an almost instinctive urge to reach over and shut him up, but it was clear that the voice made no impression on the shunt-driven infantrymen. It was also clear that Cohen had succeeded in hacking NavMesh; the Enderbots, or Enders, as the Israelis called them, disregarded Arkady and the others as if they really had faded into the peeling woodwork of the old building.

“IDF’s talking about drafting sixteen-year-olds,” another soldier said, answering the first. “Don’t you read the papers?”

“I only read the funnies. And when did you become such a condescending asshole, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“Will you two clowns shut up for once?”

“Why? They can’t hear us. Fucking Armageddon won’t wake the Enders up.”

Gradually, in orderly squads, the rest of the Enders shuffled in and formed up in the center of the room. Then they stopped, quite abruptly, and just stood there doing nothing.

“What are they waiting for?” Li asked impatiently.

“The SeekTo is air-gapped,” Cohen answered, still at the monitor. “Figuratively, not literally. But the patrol still can’t breach the line until a human operator checks the waypoints for blue-on-blue problems.”

“You’re fucking kidding me.”

The AI coughed delicately, then continued with the air of a man delivering slightly embarrassing news.

“There was a little incident along the India-Pakistan border a while ago. I, uh, jumped the gun. Only slightly. But humans have long memories for that sort of slip up.”

“What if there’s no human on-line to check EMET’s homework for it?”

“This is Earth,” Cohen pointed out. “There’s always a human around.”

No one spoke. The Enders waited for their clearance. Everyone else waited for the Enders.

“Jesus,” Li muttered. “Pakistan. Wherever that is. By the way, Cohen, is there anything on this planet you haven’t run?”

Cohen blinked, thought for a moment, then smiled beatifically. “Garbage collection.”

Another minute or two passed, the AI-controlled squad standing passively in the center of the room, the special forces soldiers squatting and sitting and standing along the bullet-scarred walls watching them.

“Okay,” Cohen said, “they’re cleared for insertion. Just another minute now.”

The Enders began to move again, and Arkady watched a surreal scene unfold around him: one squad of soldiers armed to the teeth and ready to go into a war zone, watching a second squad muster, check their weapons, and get ready to go into the same war zone…while the second squad walked around and stepped over their unseen shadows as if they were nothing more than dead stones.

One of the shunt-controlled soldiers was a slender blond girl who didn’t look a day above seventeen. She crouched down a mere arm’s length away from Arkady and began checking her weapon and ammunition clips with smooth precise inhuman movements. She didn’t even have to look at the gun to complete the task; her blue eyes stared blankly at the wall just over their shoulders.

“Fuckable?” asked the soldier next to Arkady in a conversational tone.

“Oh yeah,” his neighbor breathed in a tone approaching reverence.

“Has anyone ever mentioned what losers you guys are?” Osnat said.

They ignored her.

“Hey, beautiful,” the first soldier murmured to the girl. “It’s a big bad world out there. What are you doing playing the Green Line lottery? Why don’t you just stay here and let me make pretty babies with you?” And then, to Arkady’s stunned disbelief, he reached out and brushed the back of his hand down the girl’s cheek.

Arkady heard Osnat curse under her breath. He froze, waiting. The girl shook her head slightly, as if a fly had landed on her skin. Then she finished prepping her rifle and moved silently over to join the little clot of soldiers mustering by the back door.

Arkady sighed in relief. “Why are they called Enders?” he asked the soldier who had caressed the girl.

“’Cause they’re cannon fodder.” The boy’s tone suggested that he was stating the obvious. “Enders. ’Cause they’ve hit the end of the line. Get it?”

“No,” his companion argued. “It’s ’cause they end you. You fuck with them, you’re dead, end of story.”

“You people,” Osnat announced in a tone of profound disgust, “are submoronic illiterates.”

Another few minutes and the Enders were mustered and ready to move out. The commandos slipped into their streamspace shadow, and suddenly everyone was moving out, and Arkady was being dragged along behind Osnat into the heart of a no-man’s-land that he was starting to realize was anything but empty.

Operations in the thickness of the Line turned out to mostly involve sitting around waiting.