Рич Ларсон - Tomorrow Factory - Collected Fiction

Elliot takes the hint and sends a widecast order to dial up immunity and use filtration, at least for the time being. Then he goes to where Tolliver and Santos are vacuum-sealing Beasley’s body bag, the filmy material wrapping tight like a shroud. Tolliver looks up at his approach, flicking dark lashes. He has smooth brown skin and sly smiles and a plastic-capped flay a skin artist did for him on leave that shows off the muscle and tendon of his arm in a graceful gash. Elliot has felt it under his fingertips, cool and hard. He knows Tolliver is fucking at least one other squadmate, but he doesn’t think it’s Santos.

“Me and Tolliver will finish up,” Elliot says. “Go spot for Mirotic. He’s tapped in. Then get the tents up.”

“Sir.” Santos is the only one on the squad who says sir, who salutes, and she does both with enough irony to slice through power armor. Santos was a foot soldier for one of the Brazilian families up on the lunar colony. She looks like a bulldog, squinty eyes and pouched cheeks. Her clamp didn’t go in right and there’s double the scarring up her head.

When Santos leaves, still sneering, Elliot drops to a crouch. “Did they know each other?” he asks, grabbing the foot end of the body bag. Tolliver takes the other and they carefully stand up.

“Talked Portuguese together sometimes,” he says. “Beasley knew a bit. Said the moony accent’s a real bitch to follow, though.”

Elliot tells himself that this is why he needs Tolliver on his side, because Tolliver sees the webs, sees all the skinny bonds of social molecule that run through the squad.

“Fucked up seeing him halfway gone like that,” Tolliver says, with a put-on hardness to his voice. “At least the clamp is good for something, right?”

Elliot grunts in response as they carry Beasley away from the downed Heron, away from the surveillance unit and the carbon-fiber tents now blooming around it.

“When I said we could give him paineaters, that vein in your forehead, it went big,” Tolliver says, almost conversationally. “You were in the back when they hit us. You were in the medcab again.”

“I’m coming down,” Elliot says, even as his itching arm gives another twinge. “And I’m staying off it. Staying sharp.”

Tolliver says nothing, and then they’re at the hole where the other Prentiss, Noam, is waiting with a spade slung over her shoulder. They lower the body bag in slowly, gently. Elliot reaches down for a fistful of damp earth and crumbles it over Beasley’s shrouded face. Tolliver does the same. Prentiss starts shoveling.

“We got the extraction request through before we lost altitude,” Elliot says. “Won’t be down here long.”

Tolliver gives him a sidelong look. “Some of us will be,” he says, then turns and leaves.

Elliot stays to watch until the body bag has disappeared completely under thick wet dirt.

Dusk drops fast on Pentecost, dyeing the sky and swamp a cold eerie blue for a half-hour before plunging them into pitch dark. Most of the squad already have peeled eyes—the night vision surgery is a common one for criminals—and Elliot orders all lights dimmed to minimum to conserve the generator.

Elliot has a tent to himself. He lies back stiff on his cot in the dark and reviews mission parameters in his optic implant, scrolling up and down over words he’s read a thousand times. They were heading north to reinforce Osuna, cutting slantwise across marshy no-man’s land the rebels usually stay away from. They were not expecting hostiles on the way, and now they’re grounded at least a thousand klicks from the nearest outpost.

Elliot tries to calculate how long the paineaters and emergency morphine he salvaged from the shattered medcab will last him. Then he accesses his personal files in his implant and watches the one clip he hasn’t deleted yet, the one he watches before he sleeps.

“She’s awake… Just looking around…”

His wife’s voice draws three syllables out of awake , drags on around , high and sweet and tinged weary. His daughter’s soft and veiny head turns. Her bright black eyes search, and Elliot can pretend they see him.

Something scrapes against the side of the tent. He blinks the clip away, hauls upright and reaches for his weapon before he recognizes the imprint of a body pressed up flush to the fabric. Elliot swipes a door with his hand and Tolliver slides through, already halfway undressed.

“Told the Smell I’m out back for a long shit,” Tolliver says, working his stiff cock with one hand, reaching for Elliot’s waistband with the other. “Let’s be quick.”

“Wasn’t sure you’d be coming,” Elliot says, helping yank the fatigues off. “Because of Beasley.”

“Don’t fucking talk about Beasley,” Tolliver says.

Elliot doesn’t, and Tolliver’s body all over his is second best to a morphine hit for helping him not think about that or anything else. But when he comes it’s a throb and a trickle and then everything turns lukewarm dead again. Afterward, Tolliver sits on the edge of the cot and peels his spray-on condom off in strips.

“Jan went walkabout in the swamp a bit,” he says, because this has been the usual trade since they deployed last month. “Think he’s testing the range limit for the clamp. Wants to skate, maybe. Him and his sister.”

“In the middle of a mined bog?” Elliot asks, pulling his fatigues back on.

“They’re both settlement-bred,” Tolliver says. “Colonist genemix, you know, they think they’re invincible. Probably think they can tough it out and get south to the spaceport.”

“He told you that he wants to desert?”

Tolliver takes a drink from Elliot’s water bottle and runs his tongue along his teeth. “He told me he did some exploring,” he says. “Wanted to jaw about some odd bones he found. I filled in the rest.”

“What did he find?” Elliot asks.

“Animal bones,” Tolliver says. “Really white, really clean.”

“Mirotic thinks a plague might have come through,” Elliot says, instead of saying a bioweapon. “There’d be bones.”

“Plagues don’t usually put them in neat little heaps,” Tolliver says. “He said they were all piled up. A little mound of skeletons.”

Tolliver swipes a door and disappears, leaving Elliot sweat-soaked and sick-feeling. He only hesitates a moment before he gropes under the bedroll for his syringe. Before he can start prepping his favorite vein, the cyclops starts to wail.

Everyone is out of their tents and armed in a few minutes, clustered around the cyclops. Half of them are rubbing their eyes as the peel sets in and turns their irises reflective. Elliot switches to night vision in his implant, lighting the shadows radiation green. The air sits damp and heavy on his shoulders, and with no breeze nothing moves in the flora. The stubby sponge trees and wide-blade ferns are dead still.

“Where’s your brother?” Elliot asks Noam, counting heads.

“Taking a shit out back,” she says. “He’ll have heard it, though.”

Mirotic is tapped in now, his implant blinking red. “Just one bogey,” he says. “Thirty meters out. Looks like some kind of animal.”

“You set it to wail for every fucking swamp rat that wanders through?” Snell says. His face is still streaked with soap.

“It’s a lot bigger than a rat,” Mirotic says. “Don’t know what it is. It hasn’t got vitals. It isn’t warm.”

“Mechanical?” Elliot asks, thinking of the spider-legged hunter-killers they used to drag rebels out of their caves around Catalao. Tech has a way of trickling over in these long engagements, whether stolen or sold off on the side.

“It’s not moving like any of the crawlers I’ve seen,” Mirotic says. “Circling now, toward the back of us. Fast. Jan’s still squatting back there.”