Richard Lovett: Phantom Sense

Cora’s next post was the one that really got my attention.

“You wouldn’t believe how hard these flies are to kill! It’s like they know what a flyswatter is, because the moment I pick one up, they’re gone. I finally got one last night, when it followed me into the shower. I turned up the water and steamed that sucker, good! Thwacked it with a towel while I was at it.”

Lt. McCarthy was going to be hurting tomorrow. If we lived that long. He was staring across the valley through night-vision glasses, in a vain hope of seeing things Jerret and I hadn’t been able to spot, and in the process he’d scooched though a field of something like miniature prickly pear cactus. My swarm had all the night vision the patrol really needed, and I could see the spines sticking out of his forearms like a stubble of blond hairs.

I should have felt sorry for him, but only newbies go that heavy on the pain blocker. From the number of spines, he must have wormed his way through a whole patch of the stuff without noticing. Do things like that a few times, and you decide a bit of short-term pain’s not as bad as it sounds. Yeah, with less block, you’ll hurt more if something awful happens, but the awful stuff is what we’re all trying to avoid, anyway.

Usually, only senior officers get command of CI-MEMS patrols. We were just too valuable to risk. But Lt. McCarthy was green. “Don’t worry,” he’d said as we were leaving base. “Captain Thomas has the Shanghai flu, but he’ll be okay. I grew up in Arizona. I know all about deserts. We’ll do fine.”

Someday, maybe officers will know better than to lie to CI-MEMS operators. It creates “interesting dynamics,” a base shrink once told me. Maybe. One thing I’d learned was that outing the liar’s worse than playing elephant-in-the-living-room. Though in this case the grunts didn’t believe him any more than I did.

If there’s a single piece of my life I wish I could do over, it’s the day I hit Denise.

I didn’t mean to, at least not that way.

Three weeks earlier, I’d flunked a physical—nothing serious, just a bit of arthritis, creeping blood pressure, and a few other things that might or might not be problems in a couple of decades but that they couldn’t risk in the field. Nor did they have a post for me as an instructor. Sorry about that, etc., but we’ve got all we need.

The first step in De-con is simple. They just quit supplying you with insects. Since most only live two to four weeks, and some are always nearing the end, you decline pretty rapidly. But until you’re below 20 percent, you can live at home.

I’d lost that much of my swarm on missions, several times. The blast from a big explosion can do it. And there was the time a wind gust blew my entire fringe beyond retrieval range. Not to mention bats. Even if you’re watching for them, they’re damn fast and hard to dodge.

But this was different. Lose your swarm in the field, and the techs’ll get you replacements as quickly as they can wire ’em up. Here each loss was forever. The psychs say withdrawing that way’s better than going cold turkey. Maybe. What it feels like is extended death.

For ten days, I felt my swarm die. There must have been some chemical in the air, because I was losing them way too soon. I desperately wanted to hold on to what I had. Would have done anything to buy an extra week, day, hour.

Then the neighbors bought their kid a remote-controlled toy—some flying thing that was probably supposed to be a Moon lander. That shouldn’t have been a problem, but there must have been something wrong with my bugs’ control chips, because the toy threw out enough interference to mess up contact with what few remained. In the field, somebody would have fixed that, fast. Here, I didn’t even bother reporting it. They’d have just told me I was ready for to go inpatient a week ahead of schedule. No big deal. Except to me.

Denial is one of the world’s most powerful emotions. As long as I was free and mobile… as long as I had some remnant of the Sense… I could pretend the end wasn’t really going to happen. Not yet. Tomorrow maybe, but not today. Until then, I could at least pretend.

Denise didn’t know about the Sense. All she knew was that I was special ops and that the spiral tattoo that covered most of my back and shoulders had something to do with it. What, precisely, she’d known better than to ask. But other than a calculator on the inside of my wrist, I’d never favored body art, so she had to have guessed it was some sort of bio-mod.

One of the ironies of De-con is that with the insects gone, the Corps figures there’s no need to remove the tat. They think it’s a kindness, but actually it’s a daily reminder of what I’ve lost, like the photos of Denise and Cora Ann I still kept on my nightstand, smiling over me like they no longer do in real life.

Lt. McCarthy was in my section, so monitoring him was my responsibility.

“You see anything, McCorbin?” He spoke louder than necessary, as though he didn’t quite get that I had insects in the very bush he was attempting to peer through.

I inched through sketchy cover until I was close enough for quiet conversation, suppressing the urge to say something insubordinate. How the hell could I see anything? I had my fringe extended as far as possible, but it was only a fraction of the way to the opposing ridge.

“No,” I said. Nothing but rocks. Big ones. Any of which could have a dozen Ladenites behind it.

“What about Lapp?”

“He’d have told me if he did.”

The lieutenant was a vague blur of desert camouflage in my real sight, but in the Sense he stood out like an emotional beacon. Unsure. Frightened. Determined to prove himself. A whole slew of ways to get us killed. There are things CI-MEMS operators rarely talk about, even among themselves. Knowing your squad leader’s self-doubts is one of the scariest.

Scarier still was the subtext. Whatever else he was, Lt. McCarthy was no coward. We were about to become the Light Brigade… though instead of six hundred of us, there were only a dozen.

I woke screaming.

I was blind, Senseless. The enemy was out there and I didn’t know where. I didn’t know where anything was.

We’d been flitting from doorway to doorway, nearly invisible in midnight camo. I’d been at the rear—but not by much, because the place felt like a trap and we needed my perimeter as far ahead as possible. Still, I’d found nothing out of the ordinary. Maybe there was nothing to find. The scariest missions were those where the intel was wrong. Where you inched from house to house, waiting to Sense something before the bullets stitched you… only to discover, hours later, that there had never been anything to find.

But this time there was something. I just never got a chance to find it.

Booby traps are one of the things I most feared. Even simple tripwires can be hard to spot. I found better than 95 percent of them, but when I missed one, someone died. It wasn’t one of those things I liked to think about.

The only thing I knew for sure was that the entire street exploded. No, that wasn’t right; there were no gouts of flame, no crashing masonry. These people didn’t want to blow up their neighborhood. These were flash-bangs: concussion grenades. Or maybe just big firecrackers. I’d had someone toss one of those in a dorm room the year I tried college, before I decided that that life wasn’t for me. In the confined space, it might as well have been a concussion grenade.

Whatever they were, there were a lot of them, all wired to go off at once. My entire perimeter was off-line, probably dead.

The enemy was out there, alert now, with me suddenly blind as a norm. I was the one who was supposed to know where they were, but even as I sent my few remaining assets up the street, I knew it was too late. And it was all my fault. My fault because I’d not seen the tripwire. My fault because I’d not found the enemy before the explosion. My fault because I’d had so much of my Sense on the perimeter that I now had too little left to do anything other than watch my squad die. Dead from a trick I should have anticipated, a trick that had nearly cost me my hearing in college. My fault—