Livesuit
Author: James S. A. Corey
Date: 2024-10-02 00:00:00+00:00
Description: The first novella set in the universe of James S. A. Corey's epic Captive's War series. Humanity's war is eternal, spread across the galaxy and the ages. Humanity's best hope to end the endless slaughter is the Livesuit forces. Soldiers meld their bodies to the bleeding edge technology, becoming something more than human for the duration of a war that might never end. For more from James S. A. Corey, check out: The Captive’s War: The Mercy of Gods The Expanse: Leviathan Wakes Caliban’s War Abaddon’s Gate Cibola Burn Nemesis Games Babylon’s Ashes Persepolis Rising Tiamat’s Wrath Leviathan Falls
Publisher: Orbit

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

Copyright © 2024 by Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck

Cover design by Lauren Panepinto
Cover images by Shutterstock

Cover copyright © 2024 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

Author photograph by Liza Trombi

Hachette Book Group supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.

The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact permissions@hbgusa.com. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

Orbit

Hachette Book Group

1290 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY 10104
orbitbooks.net

First eBook Edition: October 2024

Simultaneously published in Great Britain by Orbit

Orbit is an imprint of Hachette Book Group.

The Orbit name and logo are registered trademarks of Little, Brown Book Group Limited.

The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

The Hachette Speakers Bureau provides a wide range of authors for speaking events. To find out more, go to hachettespeakersbureau.com or email HachetteSpeakers@hbgusa.com.

ISBN: 9780316575348 (ebook)

E3-20240801-JV-NF-ORI

Contents

1. Cover
2. Title Page
3. Copyright
4. Begin Reading
5. Discover More
6. Meet the Author
7. Also by James S. A. Corey

1. Cover

2. Table of Contents

Page List

1. 3
2. 4
3. 5
4. 6
5. 7
6. 8
7. 9
8. 10
9. 11
10. 12
11. 13
12. 14
13. 15
14. 16
15. 17
16. 18
17. 19
18. 20
19. 21
20. 22
21. 23
22. 24
23. 25
24. 26
25. 27
26. 28
27. 29
28. 30
29. 31
30. 32
31. 33
32. 34
33. 35
34. 36
35. 37
36. 38
37. 39
38. 40
39. 41
40. 42
41. 43
42. 44
43. 45
44. 46
45. 47
46. 48
47. 49
48. 50
49. 51
50. 52
51. 53
52. 54
53. 55
54. 56
55. 57
56. 58
57. 59
58. 60
59. 61
60. 62
61. 63
62. 64
63. 65
64. 66
65. 67
66. 68
67. 69
68. 70
69. 71
70. 72
71. 73
72. 74

Explore book giveaways, sneak peeks, deals, and more.

Tap here to learn more.

Kirin thought of the structure he had come to destroy as a bridge, because it vaguely looked like one. It had ends on either bank of what seemed to be a river. It had stanchions that sank down into the turgid flow of the liquid below and held it up. His brain continued to insist this meant it was a bridge. Kirin knew that the river was bromine and long-chain hydrocarbons and the stanchions were built of chitin. The things that used it didn’t travel across its top, but budded, grew, lived, and shriveled to death in place like sponges in a tide pool. But in the thousands of systems where life had solved the complex problem of defying entropy, there were only so many shapes. Sometimes weird shit was going to look familiar. An enemy alien was going to look like a tree or a vulva or a bird because there were too many things and not enough room in design space for all of them.

So, Bridge.

Maybe the wars were about that as much as anything. Who got to keep what shapes. Who got to define what they meant.

His suit squeezed his wrist to get his attention and put up a mission-change notification. The augmented reality of his heads-up display stopped highlighting the base of the bridge nearest his team, and the gentle glow jumped to a stanchion in the flow.

“Acknowledge change of target,” Corval said on the group channel. Kirin said Acknowledged at the same time all the others on the strike team did, their voices blending into a single sound that the suit parsed for him—their names going from yellow to green on his display. All of them except Piotr, who sent his in the text channel; he didn’t speak aloud anymore, and hadn’t for months. Corval’s suit sent the replies to Command-and-Control so they didn’t try to assign any of the other groups the same target while the team reassessed how to get the charges where they needed to be. They hadn’t been planning to go deep enough into the red-brown river that they’d have to do more than wade.

“Want me to send the mosquitoes out?” Gleaner asked. “Get a better look?”

“Not yet,” Corval said, and a moment later his heads-up announced a swirl of enemy insects floating from the top of the bridge like a tendril of smoke.

Gleaner grunted. “Good call.”

“Some days you’re lucky,” Corval said, but they all knew it was more than that. “Group one is me, Piotr, and Noor. Kirin, you’re group two lead. Take Gleaner and Ross with you. We’ll cover you. Sing out if you see any bugs.”

The chorus of acknowledgments followed. And the one in text from Piotr.

Kirin slung the explosive belt over his shoulder and moved toward the river’s edge. The microdrones—mosquitoes—might have been able to swim to map still water—liquid, whatever—but Kirin didn’t think they could handle the flow. The ground crackled and gave under his feet like a memory of snow.

When he reached the river, he knelt and put a hand into its oily darkness. The glove thumped twice like his palm being tapped by a soft hammer. Half a second later, his suit laid an image of the riverbed over the dark, rippling surface. There were shadows. Holes in the map where the sonar return hadn’t been strong enough to be sure what it was seeing. Kirin traced a path to the target, moving from shallow to shallow, sandbar to sandbar. He didn’t know how soft the riverbed would be, but they didn’t have a raft and he didn’t have time to improvise something.

He marked the path, sent it to Gleaner and Ross, and stepped in. The flow felt wrong. Simultaneously too light and somehow greasy. Intellectually, he knew that nothing he experienced here was going to be like home, but his body had still expected the river to feel like water.

“Heads-up,” Gleaner said. “Two o’clock.”

On the far bank, a wide, pale shape moved. It had the sinuousness of a snake but carried by a dozen bone-like legs. Kirin had seen them before on a number of other enemy-controlled planets. Whether they were dogs or drones or soldiers was a question of semantics and metaphor shear. They were one of a thousand aspects of the enemy, and Kirin knew this one hadn’t sensed their presence because it wasn’t actively trying to kill them. He let himself sink into the river until his eyes were barely above the waterline. He remembered a picture of a crocodile floating in a bayou on Edderith or New Cannat. Something he’d seen when he was a boy.

“Hang back,” he said to Gleaner and Ross. He didn’t need to tell them to stay still. They all knew that the snake-thing cued off motion. He was a little over ten meters from the target. He could do that. Kirin slid one foot forward along the riverbed, shifted his weight, felt the silt rising up around his boot, and moved forward slowly enough that the enemy wouldn’t notice him. He hoped. His suit offered him a sedative, but he rejected it. He needed his sharpness now more than he needed to be calm.

One slow, careful step at a time, he moved forward. Caught by the pull of the river, the explosive charge tugged at his shoulder like a child trying to get his attention. As he passed the first stanchion, the glass-legged snake on the far bank turned away and started wandering into the alien landscape. He paused, letting it get a little more distance.

That was his mistake.

The mud under his left foot shuddered, shifted. He started pulling back before he’d fully registered the sensation, and he was already too late. Something closed on his ankle like a mouth biting down. The small bones of his foot ground against each other, and the pain blinded him for a brief moment before his suit flooded him with anesthetics. The crushing and grinding in his foot and ankle became intellectual awarenesses rather than his hindbrain screaming in panic. He drew the knife from his belt, bending double to slash at whatever it was. The black river swallowed him. He felt the explosive charge slide off his shoulder, and he didn’t try to catch it.

“I’m down. Corval, I’m down.”

“Understood,” Corval said. “Piotr and Noor, with me. Go to group one channel. Gleaner and Ross, move to assist Kirin.”

In the darkness, Kirin’s hands found the attacker. It felt like vines or rope wrapped around his leg to the calf. He drew the serrated edge of the blade across it, and it clamped down again. Something deep in his ankle ripped, cutting through the fog of the anesthetic, and Kirin screamed.

Time was a property of space: a statement about relative velocity, the nearness to the limit that was lightspeed, and the temporal lensing that the brane-slip engines invoked when they got around it. By one reckoning, Kirin had seen the news eight years before. By another, forty. For him it had become a meaningless question. There was before, and there was after, and trying to make sense out of duration between the two was a fast track to madness.

Before, it had been a sun-soaked day at the end of spring on Kaladon. The birds sang in the pines. The clouds were swirls of green and orange and gold that seemed to tower up to the edge of space. By the common calendar, he was twenty-three, and for almost half a year, he had been living in a two-room apartment in the ski valley north of Broad Serlath, sharing his bed with Mina and working mobile medical assistance on a team with, among other people, Piotr. That particular day was his off duty, and he sat on the wooden porch that looked out over the valley with a cigar between his fingers and half a bottle of white wine still cold enough to sweat on the little table at his side. The apartment’s system played the latest news from across the governance zone.

Another solar system had just been killed.

The reports played on his little house system, but they’d traveled across thousands of light years to get there. And they followed the same pattern as the ones before. The system this time was called Aumpaena, and Kirin had never heard of it. One smallish sun, halfway through its near-eternal life. Two planets in the goldilocks zone colonized by humanity in the dim past, and one hot exotic with a low-sentience native biome based on silicon and an island of stability just north of fifteen hundred degrees. Whoever had attacked ignored the weird floating fauna of the hot gas giant, and focused their attacks on the two worlds populated by humans. Five billion people dead, according to the reports. The enemy had appeared, seeming to coalesce out of the vacuum almost inside the planetary defense network. The analysts said that was probably an indication that they’d managed to approach unseen rather than some kind of teleportation or variation on brane-slip, but Kirin didn’t know whether to put any faith in that. It seemed like if they actually understood how the enemy worked, the war would have been going better.

The enemy ships had swarmed the planets and cities and towns and stations of Aumpaena. The images that slipped out before the comm relay system collapsed were of violence. Not just killing, though there was plenty of that. The locals were also being rounded up in pens, linked leg to leg and neck to neck with cables that might have been metal or polymer or something alive. Lined up like slaves or cattle. Men who could have been him. Women who could have been Mina. The images shifted to other systems—Desinun three years before, Trium four years before that.

The pattern and timing of the attacks were, the reports said, being analyzed by the best that the special services had to coordinate. Strong evidence about the nature and origin of the enemy was already coming clear. As terrible as the loss of Aumpaena was, it might well give the critical insight that turned the tide of the war. The central government, the reports assured him, was preparing a decisive response.

Mina came out from the house dressed in a work smock and comfortable shoes. Her hair was still wet. When she leaned over for the perfunctory kiss on the crown of his head, she smelled of the cedar shampoo that she favored. She lifted his hand from the wrist to take a puff from his cigar and blew the smoke at the system screen as a way of pointing.

“What’s this about?”

“The war,” Kirin said.

Mina sobered. There was nothing like talk of the war to take the joy and beauty out of the sky. The screen shifted to a group of livesuit infantry drilling in a desert somewhere, and Kirin muted it.

“I didn’t think you were working tonight,” he said.

“Mr. Bulsara’s in the home stretch,” she said, using the hospice-care euphemism for someone in the last hours of their life. “It’s easier for me to be with him than it is for his family.”

“Yeah?”

“They all knew him before he got sick. When they see him, they’re remembering who he used to be. The things he used to be able to do. What his personality was like before he got sick. For me, he’s always been this.”

“You’re a strong woman,” he said, half joking, half serious.

“Mine’s easier than yours. Medical rescue is all about trying to keep people from dying. In the long run, you’re going to lose. I just need to make their last hours as comfortable as I can. I don’t have to fight the inevitable.”

“Are you going to be okay?” They both knew he wasn’t talking about the dying patient but the war. Not the one death but the billions.

“I’ll live,” she said. Kirin felt like there should have been something comforting that he could say, but her footsteps were already creaking down the stairs toward the road. Kirin heard when she reached the gravel, and then the pause. Her voice, and someone answering her. A different pattern of footsteps came up the stairs, as individual as a laugh or a handshake.

Piotr was a thin-framed man with fine, dark hair and a sharp face with a pencil mustache that actually suited him. Kirin didn’t remember when they’d met. It was one of those relationships that had begun as being background players in the dramas of each other’s lives. The man on the other side of the party, the one who arrived just as you were leaving, the vague shape across the bonfire on the beach. By the time they knew each other, they’d known each other for a long time. It was only since Kirin had started working mobile medical assistance that they’d become friends, and even that felt like a continuation of something neither of them had specifically begun. Since then, Kirin had watched Piotr carry an injured child halfway down a mountain while he carried the bag of fluid keeping the infant alive. They’d traded off emergency rebreathing for a man whose wife was shrieking in fear and pain. They’d watched people die together, many times. And so when he saw his face, he knew before his friend spoke that something had changed.

Piotr pulled a rough wooden stool over to the rail, sat, spread his arms out behind him in a way that should have looked relaxed and didn’t. “Watching the reports,” he said.

Kirin took a last drag on his cigar, then nodded as he stubbed it out. “Ugly.”

“Yeah,” Piotr said. “It really is.”

Kirin turned off the system. The wider world around them seemed to come into better focus with the screens gone. The distant clouds were warming as the sun tracked toward the western horizon. By the time sunset came, the sky would be scarlet and gold.

Piotr swallowed. “I wanted you to hear it from me. I’m quitting the assistance team.”

He could have said he’d decided to become a sparrow. It would have made as much sense. “Did you get another position?” Kirin asked. It was the first thing he could think of, even though he couldn’t think what work Piotr would rather have. Something in the advanced medical center, maybe. Or a guide job that had all the time outside and fewer trauma victims. Neither one seemed likely.

“I’ve enrolled for military service,” Piotr said. “Livesuit infantry.”

“Really? And give all this up? What more could you want than a beer, the open sky…”

It was a joke they all shared on the medical assistance team that wasn’t really funny, except through the repetition. Piotr smiled and finished the stock phrase.

“… and all the paperwork you can eat.” He sobered.

“You saw all the same reports I did. They’re killing us.”

Kirin took a deep breath, let it out slowly. The war suffered the same strangeness of time that everything did. It had been going on since before Kirin was born, and the time dilation of relays jumping through brane space to deliver their message made it hard to have any timeline of the violence. News of attacks, of loss, or wave after wave after wave of alien malice and murder didn’t necessarily mean that they were losing. It could have been an artifact of the flow of information across interstellar space. Humanity might have been holding its own. Might even have been making some progress. It took a lot of effort to believe that, though.

“I keep thinking about it,” Piotr said. “You know how you get a bad one and there’s that rush when you know they would have died if you hadn’t been there? That thing where you know that you being in that place at that time changed a life?”

“I do.”

“I see the news coming in, and I don’t feel that anymore,” Piotr said. “Even when we save them, I keep thinking that we’re saving them so that those fuckers can slaughter them all later. And us too. All of us.”

Kirin looked out to the sky again, trying to find the beauty that had been in it before the news had come of another loss. The clouds looked the same. The sky too. Something had changed, and Kirin couldn’t tell what it was, except that he didn’t like it. Mina’s line about fighting the inevitable echoed in his mind.

“The central government—” he began, and Piotr shook his head.

“The government’s just people. A bunch of clueless assholes just like us who get paid to take the fact that there’s a bunch of monsters out there looking to kill us and put a brave face on it. They just want to make sure we don’t panic.”

“Or they don’t.”

Piotr grinned. “Right?”

A sparrow flew past, hardly more than a flutter of brown in the corner of Kirin’s vision. “Livesuit infantry?”

“Eight years, subjective,” Piotr said. “Full pension after one tour, even if the war’s over two years in. You know, assuming we win. But with dilation and brane travel…”

Piotr shrugged. He meant that once he left, he wouldn’t be back. Couldn’t be. When he landed someplace at the end of his service, it would be a different world, even if it were this one. Kirin looked for something like Congratulations or It’s been a good run or I respect the decision and good luck with it. Instead, the silence stretched between them until Piotr broke it.

“I just wanted you to hear it from me. So you’d know what was going on. I didn’t want my old partner blindsided.”

“Thank you for that,” Kirin said. “Seriously.”

Piotr blew out a breath. His relaxed pose looked actually relaxed now. “Well,” he said, then stood, turned to the stairs. Kirin heard his footsteps when he reached the gravel and kept listening until he couldn’t hear them anymore. He took his half-smoked cigar out of the ashtray and relit it. He started to pull up the apartment’s system, then shut it down again before the screen could coalesce. It didn’t matter what was on it. He’d be seeing the same things anyway, and they were inside his head already.

The sunset was as beautiful and florid as he’d expected it would be, and in the deep violet of twilight, a thunderstorm formed on the horizon, dark clouds strobing with lightning. He poured out the last of the wine and made enough pasta with black garlic for two. He ate his leaning against the kitchen counter while the system played old Emil and Stannid songs that he’d loved in his adolescence. When it occurred to him that he was only listening to them because he wanted comfort—that they were the aural equivalent of sleeping with his old stuffed rabbit—he turned the music off. The murmuring of glass crickets and abelmet filled the night with a softer melody. He tried to enjoy it, but his mind kept shifting, wondering if they had glass crickets on Aumpaena and if they had been singing the night before the war arrived. If they were still singing now, while whatever the enemy was doing was being done. The lines of people linked leg to leg and neck to neck shuffled through his imagination.

Mina came home at the end of her shift, walking softly until she saw that he was awake. He gestured toward the plate of pasta, and she had two mouthfuls chewed and swallowed before she spoke.

“What happened?” she asked.

“Piotr quit. He’s going into military service.”

“Seriously?”

“Livesuit infantry, he said.”

Mina shuddered a little. “Surprisingly brave, I guess.”

“Not surprising if you know him like I do,” Kirin said.

“Well, I definitely don’t envy him.”

“Me neither,” Kirin said, then, “How was Mr. Bulsara?”

“He did good,” she said, nodding more to herself than to him.

They were quiet while she finished the rest of the meal in quick, functional bites and washed it down with cold water from the drinking tap.

“You’re tired,” Kirin said.

“I am. But I can stay up if you need to talk.”

“No. It’s fine. Just…”

Mina leaned against the wall. She was younger than him by six standard months, but her face was more youthful. She was beautiful. He tried to imagine what she would look like in twenty years. In fifty. He tried to see who she would become, if the universe let her live that long.

“Just?” she said.

“Do you like it here?” Kirin asked. “Do you like living here? This life?”

“I do.”

“Yeah. So do I.”

“Come to bed?”

“Soon,” he said, and held up the stub of his cigar. When she went back toward the washrooms, he stepped out under the stars and lit it. The smoke tasted like exotic spice. Livesuit soldiers didn’t smoke. He didn’t know where he’d heard that, but it made sense. If you never take your helmet off, how would you? The storm had moved away over the horizon. The only lights were the stars above and the scattering of homes and streets below.

He looked up, thought about what it would feel like to see something terrible coming down from among those billion, billion stars.

It was easy to imagine.

The darkness outside his helmet was absolute. The universe boiled down to the voices of his team, the anesthetized but still present pain, and bromine red pressing against his faceplate. He drew the knife across the attacker he couldn’t see. The millions of rippling fibers of his suit read his intention and pulled with him, making him stronger, driving the knife deeper in. The thing beneath him thrashed, and something deep in his knee popped. The pain quickly receding as adrenaline and a new wave of drugs flooded into him. But no matter how hard the suit fought to keep him from feeling the damage being done to his leg, the trauma medic part of his brain knew that this kind of injury was probably life-changing. The drugs only kept him from caring too much to continue acting.

Kirin bent down, prying at the jaws around his leg with his fingertips, looking for a place to set the point of the knife. A joint to unmake and give him a little play to pull his leg free. A deep, atavistic part of his mind thought that because he was submerged he must be drowning and sent a flutter of panic up his spine, but he wasn’t, so he ignored it. The suit fed him good air the way it always did. If he remained buried alive, his team would have half a day to find him before the suit ran out.

The thing eating him mouthed its way up his leg, and he slid two fingers between its crushing grasp and his shin. The gap was enough to fit the blade. Somewhere, Corval was barking out orders in short, staccato phrases. Kirin slid the blade along his leg, the flat against his thigh, then wrenched it so that the cutting edge bit into the enemy. It thrashed, pulling him through the blackness like a terrier killing a rat.

For a moment, he lost his sense of direction. Anything could have been up, anything could have been down. There was only pain and darkness, but his suit wasn’t disoriented. He felt it working his arm, sawing at the enemy even as he forgot to. There was something hot around his leg, and he didn’t know if it was the enemy’s blood or his own or an artifact of the emergency pharma the suit was pumping into him. He forced his attention back to cutting the attacker away. The pain in his foot was as muffled and insistent as someone screaming in another room.

The knife stuttered in his hand. Something in the ropy flesh parted, and the pressure on his leg released a little. He tried to pull free, but the thing sucked at him, pulling him deeper into itself. Ross said I have him on my two. She sounded panicky, and Kirin realized he’d been hearing his team’s voices again. He didn’t know what they’d said. The thing around his leg rippled, pulling him down. Peristaltic wave, he thought. It was called a peristaltic wave.

Something wrapped around his chest, and he pulled the knife up, ready to cut himself free.

“I’ve got him!” Kirin heard Gleaner’s shout and felt it vibrating against his back. The thing around his chest was an arm. He didn’t stab it.

“I’ve got a nasty on my left leg,” he said. “It’s pretty bad.”

“I’m on it,” Ross said. It was the calm, serious voice of a professional. Kirin had had that same inflection a thousand times when he’d been working medical assistance. Don’t move your head, sir or I’m going to put pressure on this or Where was the last place you saw her. Whatever the context, it was the voice of pushing away emotion until only competence remained. Hearing it centered him.

“My ankle’s fucked,” he said as something shifted his leg. “Don’t count on me walking.”

“Copy that,” Gleaner said, and the thing thrashed again, but Kirin didn’t move this time. He was better grounded or it was weaker or both.

“Got it,” Ross said. “Cutting in three. Two. One.” The beast crushed down on Kirin’s leg, shuddering in what he hoped was agony. Ross grunted. “I’ve got incoming. We should get to land.”

“Understood,” Corval said, then nothing more. Whatever was happening on the group one channel, Corval had been monitoring Gleaner and Ross and staying quiet. Kirin hoped that the charges were set. He hoped he hadn’t ruined the mission. Gleaner hauled him backward.

The black wash of the river broke into streaks of red as his helmet rose out of it. Ross was ahead of him, splashing through the shallows, her knees pumping up almost to her chest and coming down again. Kirin tried to find his footing, tried to push at the silt. He couldn’t feel his left leg.

At the base of the bridge, Corval, Piotr, and Noor were coming up the bank. Either they’d set the charge and pulled back or they’d never made it into the river. He and Gleaner reached the bank, stumbling up onto the solid land while Ross aimed her sidearm at the rippling surface. The thing still around Kirin’s leg looked like black tree roots with teeth.

Kirin’s suit threw a direction marker up. A slightly pulsing yellow triangle. Kirin knew what it meant before Corval spoke.

“We have been detected. I’ve alerted Command, and we’re ordered to fall back. Gleaner, help Kirin. Ross with me. Piotr and Noor cover us. Two by two until we’re at evac.”

“Understood,” Kirin said at the same time as everyone else, except Piotr, who used the text channel. Behind them, the black river churned. Dark shapes started to surge up out of it, and a haze of insect-sized machines or animals or some combination of the two rose in front of the unfamiliar sun.

Gleaner kept a supporting arm around him as they ran. Kirin felt his suit stiffening around his shattered ankle, the artificial muscles mimicking what an uninjured leg would do. The painkillers were enough to get a little high. Fear of death and euphoria mixed.

“Go go go,” Noor said in his ear, tense but not shouting. The team never shouted. The suits were networked. Every whisper they made could carry as far as radio signals reached.

“Set,” Corval said. “Noor. Piotr. Fall back now.”

Ross made a soft huffing noise. “That’s a big one.”

Kirin looked back. The thing barreling toward them was larger than an elephant, with gold-and-green plates of armor or chitin and six meaty legs, each as wide as Kirin’s body. It didn’t have a face, but black dots along its front shoulders could have been a dozen eyes. Corval launched a spray of micromissiles out of the pod on his left shoulder, each of them detonating on or under the beast. It reared back, screaming. The ground shook.

“Almost there,” Gleaner said.

“I can run,” Kirin said.

“No, you can’t.”

But the numbness and stiffness were deeper. Kirin threw his left leg forward, caught his weight on it, and staggered ahead. It was gangling and awkward, but he was running. Gleaner let him go. A detonation roared in the distance, followed by two more. The bridge-like hive colony shuddered and slumped into the river, and something set up a keening wail so loud that Kirin felt it in his jaw.

“We’re set,” Noor said, but not to him. “Fall back.”

He reached the ridge. The evac harnesses were waiting, six in a row like the shells that cicadas left behind, but built from titanium and larger than a human body. They’d been opened and prepped before they’d made their approach in case they were leaving in a hurry.

“We’re here,” Gleaner said. “Preparing to provide cover.”

“Belay that. Get out,” Corval said between gasps.

“My leg’s fucked,” Kirin said. “My gun’s fine.”

“I still have command,” Corval said, and Kirin could hear the smile in the words. “Get the fuck out, and we won’t have lost the whole team.”

“Respectfully, sir? Fuck partial credit,” Kirin said, levering himself down at the top of the ridge. He unfolded his rifle as his suit marked the four bodies of his team and half a dozen incoming threats. “Full marks or go home. We are set. You can fall back.”

“Your funeral,” Corval said. “Gleaner and Kirin provide cover. Everyone else fall back.”

Kirin shifted to the rifle’s sight, a targeting window appearing before him. He relaxed his arms and shoulders, letting the suit help him aim. He lined up on the bone-legged snake. The one he’d seen across the river or another like it. When the shot was clear, he pulled the trigger. A burst of needle-thin high-explosive rounds blew the beast apart, and he shifted to the next most threatening enemy. It looked like an armored toad with bright pink skin. He killed it. Kirin came unattached from time. There was only the utter focus of the next moment, the next target, the staccato report of the rifle. And then Corval grabbed him by the back of the neck, hauling him up and back to the harnesses.

“We have to go! At will. At will.”

Kirin turned and ran. His wounded leg felt strange. Not numb exactly, and not painful, but wrong. Like it had become a prosthetic that still had his nerves in it, which in a way it had. When he got to his harness, he fell into it, letting the metal ribs collapse around him. His suit stiffened, the artificial muscles going into protective rigor as the evac harness launched itself into the sky. Kirin tried to flex his thighs and feet, tried to push the blood up toward his head. His left leg didn’t respond, and his right alone wasn’t enough. His vision darkened at the edges, but the suit didn’t read it as a threat. If Kirin passed out now, that was fine. For this part of the mission, he and the others were luggage.

The dropship was fifty kilometers away, and they’d make that in the next seven minutes. The roar of the evac harness’s thrusters vibrated through his body as he slipped in and out of awareness. Something shifted in his crushed leg, but nothing hurt anymore. Far above him, bright lights bloomed in the sky or else in space beyond it. A dozen more evac harnesses flickered into brightness like fireflies, filling the space between him and the horizon. The attack was on, but his part was done for now.

The nature of the vibration changed, and he realized he’d passed out. He was still in his harness, but the harness was in the dropship’s bay. The thrusters rattling his bones inside the suit now weren’t the chemical rocketry of the harness, but the nuclear roar of the orbital drive. The weight pulling him down wasn’t exhaustion, but the thrust that came of escaping a planet’s gravity well. He almost pulled up a status report to show how long they’d been on the burn and how much longer they would be, but the weirdness of the blood flow in his brain made the effort seem enormous. Or else his suit was flooding him with chemistry to address the damage to his leg. Or both. He felt very relaxed and a little euphoric.

“That was fun. Let’s do it again,” he said, and the others laughed. His suit put up a brief message in the corner of his vision to tell him that Command had updated their status to standing by. It would stay there until the engagement was completed, but the chances of their strike group being called on to do anything but reach the slip boat were effectively nil. Whatever the fight was, they’d thrown their punch. Unless the enemy got in a lucky shot and killed them all, this one was over.

ANOTHER WIN FOR THE GOOD GUYS! Piotr sent, since he never spoke anymore.

Intake training was as brutal as anything Kirin had ever done. For a month and a half, Kirin and nineteen other recruits woke at four in the morning and ran for ten kilometers before breakfast. Physical training could mean anything from carrying fifty-kilo stone spheres until sweat and fatigue made him lose his grip to swimming the length of an athletic swimming pool and back without taking a breath to running obstacle courses that changed as he ran. Evenings were organization and tactics lectures that began with a test over whatever had been covered the day before. Anyone who failed two of the tests would be held back to retake the intake sequence with the next group. Lights-out was eleven at night, with five short hours until it all started again.

Piotr was in the same group, which was a pleasant surprise at first, but it wasn’t long before Kirin was too tired to care who his companions were. The twenty of them all slept in the same room, and through the haze of exhaustion and pain, Kirin came to know them like they were facts of the universe. Thomas Howe had straw-blond hair and a wide, almost simian jaw. Michael Lee Larsen had been held back from the group before and everyone expected him to be held back again. Deborah Ross was thin and determined and talked in her sleep. Samara Ghazali and Aaron Samson got called Sam One and Sam Two, and because of that seemed to be two halves of the same person in Kirin’s exhausted mind. They were all sinners who’d reported to purgatory together, and together they suffered and washed away their sins.

The beginning of the seventh week marked the halfway point of training. It was also the introduction of the livesuit. The night before their livesuit orientation, Kirin had lain in his bunk so tired he could barely will his arms to move and unable to sleep. Everything in his old life—his parents, his brother, Mina and the home they’d shared—felt like things from a story he’d heard and not his actual life. He was excited. He was afraid. He felt like he had as a kid sneaking onto a roller coaster that he was technically too small to ride and feeling the restraint bar almost letting him slip out at the hard curves.

“What are you thinking?” It was Enrique Aguilar, who slept in the upper bunk across from Kirin’s.

“Why do you think I’m thinking something?”

“You’re making that little huffing sound,” Aguilar said, and then imitated him. Three little grunts in a row.

Kirin was too tired to laugh, but he smiled. “Just wondering what the fuck I’m doing here.”

“Being a hero,” Aguilar said.

“Is that why you’re here?”

“I’m just looking to get even.”

Before Kirin could muster the energy to ask what that meant, they’d both fallen asleep, and it was morning.

The room for the livesuit orientation wasn’t much to look at. The windows were old and dirty. The floor was chipped petroleum tile. The chairs were all formed ceramic with unpleasantly sticky gel cushions. A table stood against the wall beneath an ancient whiteboard. A small metal box sat in the middle of the table. There was no banter. There were no jokes.

The door at the back of the room opened and Sergeant Huang walked in.

It was the first time Kirin had seen a livesuit in person. Always before, it had been images in news reports or simulacra in entertainments. From all of those experiences—mediated by the idiosyncrasies of a lens—he’d expected it to be powerful and intimidating. What the cameras somehow missed was its fluidity. Less like the shell of a turtle, and more like the slippery scales of a snake. Huang walked toward the front of the room with the ease and grace of a dancer stepping onto a stage. The suit itself was less bulky than Kirin had thought it would be, its motion more organic. It took some consideration to realize it was because the material didn’t bend like clothing or a more traditional armor would. The material relaxed and contracted with every stride. It gave the suit a sense of being simultaneously finely tailored and nude. The only bit that broke the illusion was the oversized camel’s hump on the suit’s back.

The suit’s outer layer was off-white, but Kirin knew it could turn into any color or texture, as variable as a cuttlefish. The helmet was flexible, with an opaque shield that would stop bullets.

Huang knew the effect he was having. He spread his arms and turned slowly, offering up new angles.

“Drink it in, people,” Huang said. “This is what you all came here for. You all think you know what it is and what it means, and most of what you’ve got in your head is bullshit. I’m here for two reasons. To tell you the truth, and to ask each and every one of you if you want to turn tail and run back to your nurseries.”

They all chuckled, because they were supposed to. Kirin recognized that the line was a manipulation. Every one of them was going to agree to accept the procedure no matter what Huang said. They’d look weak otherwise. Huang was as much a salesman as a sergeant. Kirin knew it, but he laughed anyway.

“Most long-use armor systems are exoskeletal models. Crab shells. The livesuit is a weave of millions of fibers forming an extra set of muscles and protection outside your skin. The suit will expand and contract, and since it’s bonded to your epidermis, it can make every movement stronger.”

Huang lifted his arms like he was surrendering.

“I lifted my right arm,” he said. “The suit lifted my left one. You can’t tell the difference, and after a few weeks, you won’t even notice it’s happening. The bond is semipermanent. Once we put this thing on you, it will provide you nutrition, it will eliminate bodily waste, it will monitor you twenty-four by seven, and provide medical support on the spot if you need it. It will keep you linked to your team and to Command. If you are incapacitated, the suit will keep you moving and fighting. It’ll get you evaced. This shit, it’ll even scratch your nose for you before you know you itch.”

They laughed again. Kirin too.

“Why go to all the effort?” Huang asked. “Just to make a few grunts a little tougher and less likely to jerk off?”

Another polite laugh.

“This is an interstellar war with a coalition of antagonistic aliens from a wide variety of biomes and planetary environments, and make no mistake, we’re going to be taking the fight to them. Right on their home fucking ground,” Huang said. “This suit will let you fight like a native in null grav or three gees. It’ll keep you breathing and fed and hydrated when everything around you is poison gas or empty vacuum. It turns you into the kind of soldier that can fight the war we’re fighting.”

No one laughed.

“Now, I’m not going to bullshit you,” Huang said, his voice losing its jovial tone. “There are some prices you pay with this. It can be hard getting used to having your helmet on all the time. You’re not getting laid again until your tour is up, and you think you’re going to miss that, but I’m here to tell you that you won’t. The things you’re going to miss are little things you haven’t even thought of. Showers. The feel of wind on your face. The smell of food.”

He paused, letting that sink in, then leaned back. Even with his face obscured by the plate, Kirin could imagine the shit-eating grin from the sound of his voice. “You’ll get that all back, though. When your tour is up, the suit comes off, and you’re a civvie again. And I’ll tell you what. You don’t think so right now, but you’re going to miss the hell out of this thing when you have to give it up.”

Ross raised her hand. “If the suits can fight, what do you need us for?”

“That’s a good question,” Huang said. “And it has a few answers, but two of them are dead fucking simple.”

He opened up a box on the table and pulled out a tube of livesuit material the size of an adult’s shirt sleeve. He tossed it on the table and said, “Activate.”

Looking like the reanimated zombie of a snake’s shed skin, the material twitched and a ripple ran down its length.

“Push the box off the table,” Huang said.

The material rippled again, and then in an inchworm-like motion moved across the table. When it reached the box, it spent several seconds feebly pressing itself against the side.

“Abort,” Huang said, and the sleeve stopped moving. Huang reached into the box and pulled out a half dozen small sticks, the size of styluses. He tossed them in a pile on the sleeve and said, “Push the box off the table.”

Now the material moved to wrap itself around the sticks, creating a narrow five-jointed digit. Using three of the joints to form a triangle and plant on the table for balance, the upper length of material began to slowly shove the box across the table toward the edge.

“Abort,” Huang said, and the sleeve crumpled to the table and went still. Huang picked up one of the sticks and pointed at the length of material. “Strong, and with some basic problem-solving skills, but as you can see, without a well-designed framework it’s not very effective.”

“So… we’re just the skeleton for a soft robot,” Ross asked.

Huang took the stick in his hand and tossed it to her. She caught it easily.

“You’re pretty smart grunts,” Huang said. “You know about optic nerves and muscles. I just pitched that to Ross there. She saw it. That means light went in her eyes, made her optic nerve feed the info back to her brain, her brain send the signal along to her muscles to put her hand where she could catch that. Takes about two hundred milliseconds from having that light go in your eye to when your hand starts moving. That’s about long enough for ten neurons in a row to fire. The path length from your eye to your hand, about ten cells long. Now maybe there’s a thousand cells that fire for the whole decision tree, and the longest path through it is ten cells long. I don’t know much about biotech stuff, and I don’t care. What I care is that you each have a lump of electrified fat in your skull that can act like a general-purpose problem-solving engine with a response time we can’t build elsewhere without making the problems real easy. Real easy problems are for drones and automated systems. Tricky problems are for you.”

He crossed his arms. Kirin felt himself growing sober.

“The suit is there,” Huang said, “to make you fast and strong and harder to kill than a cockroach. You are there to give it a functional shape perfected by evolution, and to make it as smart as only billions of years of murder and survival can. And that, boys and girls, is how we’re going to beat these fucking monsters.”

The readout on the slip boat’s medical scanners was eerie. Kirin had seen enough to know what it meant. The blue was his body—blood and skin and bone and vasculature all visible in shades that varied from almost-purple to almost-white. The black was the livesuit. Before the battle, the blue would have shown the shape of a leg—knee and shin and ankle, muscles and ligaments, arteries and veins. He might have been able to see his toenails. He hadn’t actually seen his own toenails since the day they’d fitted him with a suit. He’d heard that the livesuits maintained finger- and toenails so well that when you took the suit back off, it looked like you had a manicure.

Or it would have.

On the screen, the blue of flesh started being complicated by threads of black just below the knee. Tendrils of suit extended into the flesh where the alien soldier or animal or mindless, predatory trap had crushed the bones and ripped the muscles. By mid-shin, there was more black than blue. His ankle—what had been his ankle—was gone. The few splotches of indigo where his foot belonged were dead flesh that the suit had isolated to keep the rot from poisoning his blood. The splotches were getting smaller and smaller, the black growing into them, as the suit cleaned away the debris that had been his foot.

It wasn’t the only place where the suit had grown into him. Apart from the standard points of conjunction that went with a fitting, there was a strand of black that snaked up into his liver where he’d been penetrated by an alien flechette round, and two vertebrae that had been replaced after a fall that broke his back. When his tour was over and the suit came off, all of that would be regrown, replaced by civilian prosthetics, or deactivated and left in place.

Kirin tried wiggling his dead toes. Nothing happened.

“How’s it going, Peg-leg?” Ross asked, standing in the hatchway and speaking directly into his ears.

Kirin waved at the screen. “Bigger, better, and harder to handle,” he said. “I can kick those fuckers in the ass all day, and I won’t even feel it.”

“Nice.”

It was a change they all made, one way and another. The scars of a livesuit soldier weren’t like other people’s. It was a source of pride as much as it was anything. Ross, he knew, had an elbow and part of her left shoulder that would have come back as black as his ruined foot. No one looking at her from the outside would have known.

“We’re dropping into the brane-slip in an hour. Anything you want to get done before that…” she said. It was an excuse to talk. He had all the same alerts they all did. The same countdown timer in the corner of his heads-up display. But this was Ross’s second tour of duty, and before she’d signed up for the livesuit infantry she’d been a naval machinist. She’d served in a group that weren’t all connected to each other all the time, where someone could know something that other people didn’t. Habits like that were hard to break.

There were other habits. When they’d been in induction, Kirin had admired her. She’d been nothing like Mina’s soft beauty, but she’d been strikingly fierce. More importantly, maybe, with the pain of leaving their former lives still haunting them, Ross had been interested too. The intense physicality of training shaded into other kinds of physical connection more often than the command structure liked to admit. Kirin still thought of himself as attracted to her even though he hadn’t seen her face since the day they’d been fitted. Hadn’t had an erection or even a particularly intrusive lustful thought. His appetites for food and water and sex would have shown up black on a scan if there was any place he could scan for them, put away for the duration of his tour to be returned later. His little crush on Ross was just an echo, a placeholder for what he would have felt if he’d felt it.

The only purely animal thing he still wanted was sleep.

“I’ll be ready,” he said. Ross gave him a thumbs-up and left. If she’d spoken again, he’d have heard her as loud and immediate as if she’d still been in the room. The group was like that. No matter where they were, they were living in each other’s laps unless the comm link went down. He guessed that was one of the things he’d miss when he was out of the suit, but there was no way to know that until the time came. Maybe he’d be relieved to have the rooms he lived in default to private again. Until it happened, he wouldn’t know. Not for sure.

He took a long, last look at the scanner. It was probably just an illusion that the indigo splotches had grown smaller. They seemed smaller because they would be smaller. Bits of meat and bone that had been him before the action and weren’t anymore. The little touch of lightheadedness, that existential vertigo, was just squeamishness. It had happened now and again working medical rescue. For him, it had usually been eye wounds that did it. Piotr had had trouble with injured children. There were soft spots in anyone, there to be discovered in the moment. Apparently losing a foot was one of Kirin’s.

It didn’t matter. By the time they were going on the next mission, the only thing he’d notice was a little numbness in an ankle he no longer had.

He shut the scanner down.

Gleaner and Noor were in the common area playing backgammon. They usually preferred darts, but the unsteady gravity of thrust and brane-slip engines warming up made it impossible. In other parts of the ship, the crews were getting prepped for the slip. Livesuit soldiers didn’t have any duties beyond getting into the chambers at the right moment. The rest of the crew was there to get them to the next place where something needed to get killed.

As Kirin walked by, his suit put up a notification. A personal message had made it past the military censors and waited to be played. He was surprised. That almost never happened anymore.

Piotr was already in his slip chamber, arms at his sides, helmet facing up with its opaque face shield. Corval was just climbing into his, and lifted his chin in a casual salute as Kirin came in.

“How’re you feeling?” Corval asked.

“I’m good.”

“That one was hairy.”

“Yeah, but we’re too good to die.”

Corval chuckled. The chambers were two and a half meters long, a little more than a meter high, with transparent metal shells that would close over them to protect them from the wild energies that tearing open reality to slide along the brane unleashed. They looked a little like sarcophagi. Kirin went to his own, checking through the settings and pre-slip safety routines. There were technicians in other parts of the ship whose duties were to do the same thing, but Kirin didn’t know them, didn’t trust them, and wasn’t interested in getting this far out into the war just to die from a skipped safety check. The waiting message was a yellow icon glowing in the lower right of his vision. By the time he was satisfied, Corval had settled into his chamber and closed the lid. Gleaner and Ross had come in to start their own checks.

“See you fuckers on the other side,” Kirin said cheerfully.

“Enjoy your beauty sleep,” Ross said. “I need you to stay pretty.”

“Flirting is cruelty these days,” he replied, still cheerful.

Kirin lay back, and his suit went pleasantly stiff. An array of a dozen little tubes clicked into place along his sides, and he felt just the slightest bloom of warmth as the suit purged its stored wastes and took on fresh supplies. He’d run it pretty close to its maximum usage this time. The camel’s hump on his back was incredibly efficient at storage and recycling, but even the livesuit had its limits. It would probably spend most of the slip cleaning out its capillaries and microchannels. The suit was a tough bastard, though. It would be fine.

The muscle relaxants and euphorics slid into his bloodstream, and he let himself melt. The suit held him up like a mattress, and the lid of the chamber closed over him. Ross was just swinging a leg into her chamber. Noor came in and started going through the safety checks.

Kirin set his suit to private and played the message.

Mina was sitting at a table he didn’t recognize in a kitchen he didn’t know. Wherever she was, the light was buttery and warm, the sky outside her window was a perfect blue edging over toward violet. She looked older. Her face was wider, and there were crow’s-feet at the corners of her eyes. He couldn’t tell if there was a touch of gray to her hair. The resolution of the image wasn’t sharp enough.

“Hi, Kirin,” she said. “I don’t know when this will reach you or how much will get through the military censors. I know the war effort means being careful.” She smiled, and it was a middle-aged woman’s smile.

How long, he wondered, had she lived while his personal clock had been slowed by his relationship to lightspeed and the weirdness of brane-slipping? Some part of him had imagined her staying the same as when he’d left. As if the day they’d ended their relationship, she should have been packed in amber. Preserved. But that wasn’t right. He didn’t join to keep her young and unchanging. He was fighting so that she could live her life safe. And maybe for decades, she had.

This was what he’d wanted. This was his win.

“I was reminded of you this week,” she said. “I was cleaning my house, and I put my entertainment feed on random. You know what came up? Silent Horses. The one with Caram Al-Shin and Margaret York that we used to watch at Christmas.”

Kirin frowned, as she—somewhere, somewhen—shook her head and sighed.

“We were good together when we were.” The playback jumped, the military censor blocking some reference or comment that it decided crossed one of its inscrutable lines. “I understand your decision better now. I only ever wanted the best for you and Piotr. Take care of yourself, and know that I remember you fondly.”

The message ended. Kirin’s confusion washed against the cocktail of drugs in his blood. Noor’s lid closed. The whole team was in place, and the countdown for the brane-slip was down under a minute. Noor did cut things a little too close.

Kirin shifted to text channel, direct to Piotr: DO YOU REMEMBER AN ENTERTAINMENT FEED CALLED SILENT HORSES? CARAM AL-SHIN AND MARGARET YORK?

A few seconds later, Piotr answered. YOU’LL HAVE TO REMIND ME. IT’S BEEN A LOT OF TIME.

I CAN’T. I DON’T THINK I’VE SEEN IT.

The count reached zero, and the slip swept over and through him like a wave, obliterating both thought and time for a long, impossible instant.

Kirin met Corval on their first drop after intake training. They were going into the remains of Lapis City, formerly the capital of Matribas and now a live infection of alien soldiers and monstrosities that were dismantling the high towers and consuming the parks and streets where humans used to live.

Kirin didn’t know why he’d expected that the group he’d trained with would serve together in the field. It had been an assumption, unquestioned because it was unconsidered. When the time came, the intake group had scattered, the group divvied up among more experienced groups. He’d been grouped with Sam One, Piotr, and Ross. Kirin found himself surprised by how much he missed the others. They sat in the cafeteria-wide, hive-busy prep room, the four of them sitting together, not speaking but huddled close the way humans had probably done since theyfirst descended from the African trees.

The first sign that Kirin’s personal tribe had changed was a click in his helmet audio. The second was an unfamiliar voice.

“Check. Kirin Foss, 88-hotel-alpha-bravo.”

“Confirmed,” Kirin said, and a contact appeared in his heads-up. The call sign was SIMEON.

He looked around, trying to find who was speaking to him. The prep room had a hundred livesuit infantry and maybe twice that in support staff. A man—Kirin assumed it was a man from the voice—stepped away from a group of support technicians and started toward them as Piotr stiffened and started looking around the same way Kirin had. By the time the new man had reached them, all four of the intake group were on their feet and braced for salute.

Simeon waved the formal salute away. “Good to meet you, folks. I’m going to be lead on this one. My group two leader is a fella named Estebán Corval. I hear it’s your first time at the party?”

“Sir yes sir,” they all said. He had switched them to a shared channel, so Kirin heard all of their voices like they were a single mind with four bodies. Simeon’s shoulders shook a little like he was laughing at them.

“All right, puppies. This should be pretty much by the numbers. They try to give you a simpler drop your first time out. Lulls you into a sense of competence. You could still get fucked up. Make no mistake, the enemy intends to fuck you up. But stick with me and mine, and we’ll try to make sure that doesn’t happen. We’re dropship four. Be there in ten.”

The heads-up display flickered, and new names appeared. Simeon, Gleaner, Ross, Kirin, Piotr, Jones, Hamze, Corval.

The dropship was an old model, built before the war, when soldiers were still fighting other humans over things like political allegiance and religion and money. The straps on the seats were woven fiber, forest green in the middle and white on the edges where they’d started to wear. Kirin strapped himself in the way he’d been trained to, and checked his weapons: mag rifle with a thousand needle-thin explosive rounds, sidearm, three concussion grenades with their safeties firmly in place, twenty micromissiles in a hard pack on his left shoulder. The others were slower to arrive, and it left him feeling a little awkward. Like the kid who came in early and sat in the first row at a lecture. He was grateful when one of the other livesuit infantry came and strapped in next to him.

“Corval,” the other man said on a private channel. “You’re Kirin?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, good to meet you, Kirin. I’m looking forward to not getting each other killed down there.”

There was a warmth and mordant humor in Corval’s voice. Kirin imagined a rueful smile to go along with them, but the livesuit faceplates were opaque.

“Sounds like fun,” Kirin said. “I’m in. How long have you been in service?”

Corval shrugged. “What is time? I’ve done thirteen operations since intake. Simeon’s at something like fifty, and there was one woman I was on some drops with who said she was coming up on two hundred. She may have been bullshitting, though.”

“What happened to her?”

“Reassigned,” Corval said. “Command does that a lot. Shift us around.”

“Yeah, that kind of blindsided me. I thought they’d try to keep units together.”

“They’ll put two or three people in a group when you shift around sometimes. I’ve been with Gleaner over there about half my drops.”

Two more soldiers strapped into the bench across from them. The suit identified them as Hamze and Jones. Piotr came through, taking the seat on Corval’s other side. The timer counting down to the drop hit three minutes, then two and fifty-nine seconds.

“I guess it makes it easier,” Kirin said. “Fighting changes people, right? If you didn’t know someone before, you don’t expect them to be who they were.”

“Sure, like that,” Corval said. “Or maybe it’s something else. Command is Command. We can make up shit about why they do things, but the truth is…” He shrugged. “Who the fuck knows?”

“How long have you been working under Simeon?”

“Five drops. He’s good. Flexible. My dad used to say that anyone who believes in a fair fight has never been in a fight. Simeon just wants to win and get everyone home. The ones who think there’s a rulebook are the ones who’ll get you killed.”

Kirin tried to keep his tone light. It didn’t really work. “That happen much?”

“People getting killed in a war? What do you think?”

“I heard that we were tougher than cockroaches.”

“We are,” Corval said. “You ever stomp on a roach? Dies like everything else. Just try not to get stomped.”

Simeon’s voice broke in. “If you’re not strapped in, do it now. If you are strapped in, check them again. We’ve been cleared for drop.”

Kirin’s throat went dry. He wished he could get a drink of water, but that wasn’t what he was anymore. He’d get a glass of iced tea when the war was over.

A map appeared on his display. A blue marker showed where they were expected to land in a clear spot beside the river that ran through the city. A red one pulsed gently in a plaza deep inside the maze of streets.

“We have our objective,” Simeon said. “We are going to reach Otaki Square, clear it of enemy influence, and hold the territory. Acknowledge.”

A swarm of questions flooded Kirin’s mind. Why were they landing so far from the objective? What resistance were they facing? Why that part of the city, and how long were they supposed to hold it for?

“Acknowledged,” he said along with the others. Their names all shifted in the display. Everyone had agreed. No one had asked a question. Understanding the big picture was someone else’s job.

The dropship shuddered, lurched, and began to shake. The roar of distant engines meant they were descending toward the thin skin of the planetary atmosphere. Someone was humming, and Kirin located the sound as coming from Jones. He put the channel on half-mute. If Jones actually said anything, the suit would let him know, but the subvocalizing was gone. Kirin bunched his fists and released them over and over as the ship dropped, the turbulence rose, shaking them hard enough to rattle his teeth.

A message popped up in his text channel. It was Piotr. SOME RIDE, HUH?

He shifted mode and wrote back KINDA CHOPPY. I THINK THE PILOT MAY BE DRUNK. On the open channel, Piotr chuckled.

The drop began to smooth as they came closer to the ground. Simeon, at the operation command, had each of them sound off and synch their positional data. Even if they were separated, the suits would be able to bring them back together or call out to each other for help. Kirin didn’t know these people, and he was putting his life in their hands. They were putting their lives in his. It wasn’t a feeling that compared to anything else he’d done.

There was no warning when they touched down. There was just a last, heavy bump, and the engines huffed and went silent. They unstrapped and trotted down and out the ramp. The buildings that had been Lapis City rose ahead of them like the ruins of an ancient empire. Scorch marks darkened the sides of the great arcologies and skyscrapers. A maglev train lay on its side on the far bank of the river, its track broken. Smoke made the sky a haze of white, and Kirin imagined it with an acrid stink like burning hair, but he couldn’t actually smell it. At the thought, his suit began displaying atmospheric data.

“Mosquitoes out,” Simeon said, and their suits released the microdrones. A real-time map began forming itself out ahead of them. In the sky to the north, another dropship glowed and drew a dark line of smoke through the unfamiliar sky. In the distance, something began to wail. A frightened animal or a siren. On the map, three red dots appeared, then two more.

“Well, fuck,” Simeon said, his tone relaxed and conversational. “Group one is Piotr, Noor, and Hamze with me. Jones, Kirin, and Gleaner are with group two under Corval. Spread out and let’s set up a kill zone. We’re about to get our exercise for today.”

The things that boiled out of the rubble of concrete and ceramic had long, loping strides and mouths like a nightmare. They wore a flexible armor or else grew plates of bone and shell, and spat missiles as hard and fast as bullets.

Kirin lost himself in the immediacy of violence. Simeon’s calm voice led them like a conductor leading an orchestra. Street by street, doorway by ruined door, they fought and ran and—to Kirin’s surprise—joked and laughed. And raged.

By the time they reached Otaki Square, he’d forgotten to wonder why they’d come.

There could be no definitive news of the war. The scale was too large for that. Everything came in fragments. Keryunyua system had been overrun by a vastly superior alien force, the people hauled from their homes and set on fire. That had happened, but when it had happened, or in reaction to what, was impossible to know. Human forces had found the center of an alien outpost, destroying what looked like an egg chamber and driving its soldiery into a death frenzy that claimed fifty thousand lives on seven planets, but then the timestamps and locations were checked, and it was the same seven planets that had been destroyed five years before. Not news, but history. A report that had been bouncing through the network, relay to relay and ship to ship, until it arrived where it had already been. An echo.

It didn’t keep Kirin from watching the reports.

The attack on the hive-bridge had been Kirin’s twenty-eighth operation. The slip boat had taken them to a station called Maja-HHX, deep in the sunless emptiness above the galactic plane. There was no civilian planet to spend time on, no local life that could show what strangeness evolution had bumbled into here. It was all metal and ceramic and the force of war.

But there were ships, and so there was the traffic of information. A new arrival had come in the day before, the survivors of a desperate, long-haul counterattack from a decade before who’d spent so long on the brane and bumping up near lightspeed that soldiers born five years before him were younger than he was now. Kirin’s four years subjective—half his tour—had been a blink for them. There was no point trying to make sense of it.

He imagined them on their slip boats, watching the news that he’d brought, trying to catch up on the events that had gone by them too quickly to register, their futures already behind them.

“You know what I miss?” Ross said on the open channel.

“Getting drunk,” Gleaner said.

“Getting drunk.”

“Wonder if we could hack the suit’s nutrient system to pump a little ethanol into our blood.”

“Someone has to have figured that out,” Ross said with a sigh.

“If we find that person,” Gleaner said, “I will offer them a lifetime of free blowjobs once the suit comes off.”

Kirin didn’t know if they were on the ship or the station, in their bunks or the gym, and it didn’t matter. They were in his ear, on his display. He opened audio on the general channel and smiled so they could hear him smiling. “It’s the price you paid for becoming a god. If you wanted to get fucked up and laid, you should have stayed a monkey like all the rest of them.”

“Nah,” Ross said, and her voice was a grin. “I’ll save it up for muster. By the time they shuck me out of this thing, I will be ready to spend a year in a dive bar.”

“You’ll have the money for it,” Corval said. “Used to be, I blew everything I got during shore leave. Now, what is there to spend it on? I could get all the exotics I want, and the suit’ll just filter them back out.”

“Fuck that,” Ross said. “Mine’s pumping more psychoactives into me than I could have paid for with my salt.”

“Yeah, but they aren’t the fun kind.”

“Try going without. They’re plenty fun enough.”

Kirin closed his eyes, but he left the channel open. The downtime between drops was like this. Boring. Nothing to be done but talk to the same people they always talked to, say goodbye to the ones rotating out, or get to know the ones rotating in. It was restful for now because they’d just gotten out of their slip pods. Eventually, it would be oppressive. Like being a gun locked in a gun rack was how Piotr had described it. Kirin always remembered that.

Sleep didn’t come. Instead, he found himself thinking about Mira. About her message. About how much older she’d looked. In a way, it justified all he’d done. Wherever she was, whenever she was, she’d been able to live out decades safely. At least safely enough to live through them. She might be an old woman by now. A mother. A grandmother. If she was, he’d been part of what got that for her.

But he wished he remembered that feed she’d talked about. He wondered if maybe he’d forgotten it, or if she’d seen it with some other lover she’d had back when she was young. He opened his eyes again, scrolled through his old messages. Silent Horses. It still didn’t ring a bell.

He went through the ship library. It wasn’t in the official catalog, but there were personal or legacy drops here and there, obscure feeds and books that one soldier or another had stowed in a corner of the public space. He found a copy in a cache of Avanicc-era crime dramas. He transferred it to the suit, switched audio to override only, and spent a couple hours seeing if he could remember what his old lover seemed to recall.

When the first images came up—a man walking alone in a park, a gray drizzle falling around him, an ancient pagoda rising up in the background with a red light glowing in its eaves—Kirin thought it might have looked familiar. Within the first ten minutes, he was sure he hadn’t seen the story before.

It was odd, the acting a little disjointed. The man was a police officer discovering that the force he worked in was corrupt. The female lead was a criminal who seduced him and then might or might not have developed a real attachment to him. The strangest thing was its age. Seeing anything set before the war felt like stepping into a fantasy. Here was a launch pad, but there were no guns pointing at the sky. There was a band of soldiers, but they were all preparing to fight other humans. No one talked about alien soldiers. No one had lost anyone to an attack. No one worried that the planet might be taken over. The sense of doom that the story wanted to portray felt so much lighter than the real world that the lead character’s tragic death wound up feeling quaint. He lay bleeding to death in the park from the opening images, the woman kneeling beside him. He handed her his police identification, smeared with his blood. The camera lingered long enough to see the rain wash the worst of the gore away. I thought we would come back together, but I was wrong. No one makes it home. He closed his eyes. The light on the pagoda changed from red to white. The story ended.

Kirin sat for a long time, trying to figure out how he felt. Amused by the—being honest—pretty ham-handed, dated story. Annoyed that his old lover had misremembered something that was supposed to have been important to the two of them. Nostalgic for the mornings he’d woken up beside her, the rooms they’d shared, the life he’d had once and thought on some level he might have again. Not with Mira, but with someone.

Now that he looked at it, maybe he’d held the idea that going back would be like going back. Mira, all unintentionally, had told him that it wouldn’t. He’d put on the suit so that people could have that life. When he took it off, he’d go back to civilian life himself. It wasn’t only that it wouldn’t be with Mira. He also wouldn’t be him. The Kirin who’d enjoyed smoking cigars and looking out over their little town was as old and outdated as Silent Horses. He wouldn’t be back. That was the sacrifice. It was worth it, but he wished he’d understood better at the time what he was giving up.

He went back through his messages, found hers, and recorded a response. Audio only. If he’d sent images, they would have been of a faceplate. She didn’t need that.

“Hey, I got your message. It was good to hear from you.” But we never watched that story at Christmas. But I’m never going to see you again. But your life and mine are already so different, we don’t even remember it the same way. “I hope… I hope things went well for you. I want you to know that I remember you fondly. The time we spent together was good.”

What else was there to say? There was hardly any reason to say that much. By the time the message got to her, her grandkids might be reading it. He imagined some young brother and sister who looked a little like Mira staring at each other, eyes wide, and saying Meemaw used to date a livesuit soldier? That was funny enough to make it worth doing. He queued the message to send.

And an error appeared. RECIPIENT BLOCKED BY SECURITY SERVICES. FLAG ID 3432-H

That was a censor’s office code. Kirin scowled and felt a little chill that had nothing to do with temperature. He opened a connection to the station security office. The image that appeared was a thin-faced man with short, gray hair plastered against his head and a thin, pinched, passionless mouth.

“How can I help, soldier?”

Kirin laid out the situation from Mira’s message to Silent Horses to the error code. The security man listened, his bloodless mouth in a practiced smile. When Kirin was done, he shrugged. He felt like a schoolboy confessing himself to the school matron without knowing exactly what he was confessing for.

The security man nodded and held up a finger. Give me some time. His gaze shifted down from the camera to some monitor Kirin would never see. Light glittered in his eyes and the soft tapping of fingertips against keys and touchscreens was the only sound for almost a full minute. Then a short, percussive sigh.

“I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news for you, son,” the security man said. “Mina Alzabeta Caulson?”

“Yeah, what’s the matter?”

“I’m sorry, son. She passed away in a hospital on Gerrian Station at age fifty-eight. That message you got didn’t find you before she was gone.”

“Oh,” Kirin said. “Can I send a message to her family, then?”

The bloodless smile shifted into something like sympathy. “I’m afraid not. Toward the end of her life, Ms. Caulson was involved with an anti-military faction. The message you had was scrubbed of some critical identifiers. It really shouldn’t have gotten through at all.”

“Wait, what? Anti-military faction? Mina? That’s a mistake.”

“You sure about that? I mean, you knew her. I didn’t. She never said anything against the war effort?”

“Why would she?” Kirin laughed. It wasn’t funny. “I mean, it’s not like there’s a peace option. No one’s offering to negotiate.”

“They are not,” the security man agreed with a nod. “Well, who knows? People are strange. Sometimes they get caught up in little things and miss the big ones, you know? They find some detail they don’t agree with and lose sight of the reasons behind it all. No way to know.”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“Sorry I couldn’t give you better news. If I were you, I’d try to put it out of my mind. Remember how it was when it was good. Let the rest go.”

“It’s just, when there was a flag on the message—”

“Don’t worry about it. You reported in to me, I documented everything. No one’s going to hold this against you. You’re livesuit, for God’s sake. No one questions your loyalty.”

“Thanks.”

“No problem, buddy,” the man said, and the connection dropped.

The suit defaulted back to the open channel. Corval and Noor were talking about breweries they’d liked, back before they’d joined up, and competing with stories of how drunk and stupid they’d been when they were teenagers. Gleaner popped in with the occasional wry comment. Nothing had changed, but it felt different.

HEY. YOU DOING ALL RIGHT? Piotr sent on the text channel.

FINE. WHY?

YOU GOT QUIET. NOT THAT I CAN TALK. SEE WHAT I DID THERE? HUMOR.

Kirin smiled. If it wasn’t for graveyard humor, they’d never laugh at all. And it helped, it did. Just not enough to take the unease completely away.

Mina had seen all the things he did. The reports of the murdered worlds, the enslaved people lined up like machine parts in a factory, the aliens and their zoology of murder and violence. How could she be against fighting back? It didn’t make sense. I thought we’d be together again. But no one goes home. Was that what Caram Al-Shin had said, looking up through the rain and blood at Margaret York? It had been something like that. He pulled up the feed again, wanting to rewatch just that scene and get the wording right in his memory, but his suit said the file had been erased.

The last time Piotr spoke had been during the liberation of Lirebas system.

In the first days of the war, the government had put spies in populations. Well-trained, technologically altered operatives designed to slide in with the prisoners and report back what they could about the alien civilizations. When the enemy figured that out, they stopped taking prisoners for a while. Corval, who liked to think of himself as an amateur intelligence officer, said it was a good thing in its way. If the enemy just killed them, then they weren’t experimenting on them. It was less information for the enemy and a faster death for the prisoners. But it meant there was only a narrow window to save the savable, and with the weirdness of time dilation and the vastness of space, that meant it couldn’t be planned for. Rescue operations were the rarest because the enemy attack and the human response force had to be almost on top of each other by coincidence.

“We don’t have enough support,” Simeon said. “We don’t have enough troops. We don’t have enough supplies. What we do have is a little colony world barely on its feet with ten million people in its capital city and less than a week before they’re all corpses.”

Lying in his bunk, Kirin closed his eyes. He’d been on a dozen missions by then. This was the bleakest assessment he’d ever heard.

Ross sighed. “How many of us are we talking about?”

“On the ground, ten strike groups,” Simeon said, “of which we are one. We don’t need to kill every single enemy on the planet, though we’re welcome to if the opportunity arises. Seven groups will be taking out monitoring emplacements to give our naval friends the cover to drive the ships out of orbit and drop a few thousand of our standard troops on the ground to clean up. The other three groups will be visiting the enemy staging-and-elimination camp.”

“Which one are we?” Hamze asked.

“We’re freeing the prisoners,” Simeon said. “If we fail, they die. If we procrastinate, they die.”

“If we go, we die,” Gleaner said, but with a grin in his voice.

“Control hasn’t given us authorization to die,” Simeon replied. “It’s not in the budget.” The others chuckled. Kirin chuckled too, on his way to the dropship to strap in.

The battle started after they left the slip boat and before they hit atmosphere. On the ground, targeted bombardments were burning through the high air, a swarm of tiny, intelligent comets falling on enemy centers but sparing the human infrastructure as much damage as they could. In the vacuum, human battleships emerged from the brane-slip into normal space, shedding clouds of fighter drones even as they cut their way back into the universe. Standard infantry stood by in their own dropships, waiting for Kirin and Simeon and Ross and the dozens like them to secure the beachhead for them. To see whether they were able to get in fast enough to keep the innocent from dying more than they already had.

Kirin felt the shift in each layer of air by the frequency and amplitude of the turbulence. He heard it in the creaks and groans of the dropship’s expansion plates. When he checked his instincts against the suit’s display, he was always close to right. He’d become a citizen of moments like these. He knew them the way he used to know when the coffee at the corner café was fresh by the smell on the street or that rain was coming by the color of the western sky. Part of him wondered if, when he went home, he would think about dropships shaking under him with the same sense of nostalgia. He thought he might.

The ship lurched to his left, then right, vibrating with a fast new drum roll. Evasive maneuvering and defensive weapons firing. His weight doubled and then vanished entirely. A wave of nausea began and was instantly quashed by the suit’s standard regulatory connection to his vagal nerve. Livesuit soldiers were like horses. They couldn’t vomit.

“Almost there, folks. Make your last checks now,” Simeon said, “and sound off.”

Kirin ran his hands over the rifle’s indicators, checked them visually against the thing itself, then did the same for his sidearm. He ran the pre-action diagnostic on his suit. It took him seconds.

“Ready,” Kirin said along with everyone else. The display showed them all shift to green except Ross. Half a second later, she said Ready too and her name clicked to green.

“Hamze, Jones, Piotr, and I will be first group,” Simeon said, with the calm of someone ordering groceries. “Corval, Gleaner, Noor, and Kirin will be group two. Our target is what we think is an elevated weapon emplacement. Kill it fast or it kills the prisoners.”

The dropship screamed and whined, pressing Kirin down as it made its final deceleration. Then the bang and shock of touchdown, and he was out of his seat and moving.

They were only about a kilometer from the prison camp. Much closer than usual, but speed was more critical. The time it took to cover a thousand meters could measure a lot of lives when the enemy was executing prisoners.

Kirin raised his rifle, ready to lay down covering fire, as the first group sprinted forward and into cover. His display set the target guard tower in a gentle AR glow, but no enemies.

“Maybe they forgot to post a guard,” Noor said.

“Lucky for them if they did,” Piotr said between breaths.

“We have cover,” Simeon said. “Group two, move.”

“Moving,” they said as if they were all one organism with four mouths. The livesuit pressed and contracted, making every stride stronger, letting Kirin relax even as he sprinted at what would have been an exhausting pace. He could have kept it up for hours. Forever. Compared to his first drop, it was almost automatic. He and the suit and the unit were all parts of the same dance, and everyone knew their steps.

“I’m good,” Noor said.

Kirin found a stone—granite, with purple-and-green moss on its north side—and hunched beside it, sweeping his rifle before him. There was still no resistance. A tendril of what might have been smoke rose from the camp ahead. He hadn’t seen anything like it before. No one had, or things would have gone differently.

Corval and Gleaner reported in. He did too. There was a moment’s hesitation before Simeon spoke. “I’m putting out the mosquitoes. Let’s see if we can get a clear path.”

On Kirin’s display, a map began to form.

Something behind him detonated.

Simeon, Jones, and Hamze dropped off his list, CONTACT LOST blinking in the space they had been. Over the open channel, Piotr began to scream.

Kirin turned his back on the prison and ran to the cloud of dust and smoke where his team had been. His suit shifted, outlining two hulking forms hidden by the haze that merely human eyes couldn’t have made out.

The huge aliens were built something like massive insects. Two meters of long, broad abdomen carried by four legs, then a thorax bent at ninety degrees like a centaur and rising up taller than the largest human. Two massive arms grew from their shoulders, each thicker than Kirin’s torso, and he knew from briefings that two smaller manipulating arms were tucked into their chests. Kirin felt himself screaming, but he didn’t hear it. He felt the rifle bucking in his hands and the rounds detonating on the green-and-gold armor shells that the things wore.

The nearer of the two spun toward him, rearing up on its back four limbs, the massive arms stretching out at its sides like it was going to take the whole world in a bear hug and squeeze the life out of it. Kirin fell to one knee, throwing a constant stream of fire at the enemy.

Something hit him from the side, bowling him over just as the massive arms crashed together in the space where he’d been. The concussion wave was loud enough to reset his helmet mic and leave his ears ringing. On his helmet display, he saw Piotr’s indicator brighten for a moment and Gleaner, Ross, and Corval flicker in response. He knew they were speaking, but he couldn’t hear them. The ground at his side was churned, dark soil and white roots. Something writhed just beyond his arm’s reach. A human leg, the livesuit still trying to make it run. With a cold detachment, Kirin understood. Simeon, Hamze, and Jones were dead.

Piotr rose up, looked back over his shoulder. The two aliens were turned away, distracted by Corval and the rest of the strike team. Piotr’s rifle was gone, but he plucked his sidearm from its holster and charged at the alien beasts. Kirin was only three steps behind him.

“Keep them distracted!” Piotr shouted.

They were the last words he spoke.

For a long, glorious moment, they ran together, side by side. Their suits lent them power and endurance. Their guns reached out before them, ripping at the enemy like claws. There was a slowness to it, a euphoria unconnected with the horror of the moment the way things sometimes were in dreams. Kirin felt a tug at his leg where a round from Corval or Noor or Gleaner blasted off a chunk of the enemy’s armor that passed through his thigh. It didn’t hurt. He leapt onto the green-and-gold back, shoved the barrel of his rifle into the joint where the armor was articulated between abdomen and thorax, and leaned hard, like he was pushing a stake into fresh earth, as he pulled the trigger.

The beast bucked against him, its huge forearms swinging back, slamming against him like trees falling. He held on, pumping round after round after round into the flesh beneath the shell. When it rolled over, he felt the shift and jumped off, just avoiding being crushed by the massive body. He pulled up his rifle, bracing it against his shoulder. His suit reported that half its ammunition was spent. The beast shifted onto its forelegs, rose, then sank back to the ground and never moved again.

The second monster was ten meters to Kirin’s left, with Piotr, Noor, Gleaner, and Corval moving around it like dogs attacking a lion. Its shell was pocked where their rounds had bitten into the armor. A thin, watery blood sheeted down its side and coated its vast, dark arms. Kirin turned, aimed, added his fire to theirs. The massive alien let out a loud, fluting call, like a vast, low-pitched birdsong, and stretched out its arms. Kirin tried to call out a warning, but before he could, the huge limbs snapped together, and Piotr went flying, arms limp at his sides. The thing settled, folding its rear legs under itself and resting on its forearms like a samurai leaning on his sword. Kirin’s suit told him that its wide, distributed heart had stopped beating, but it still looked alive. He fired a few rounds into the alien’s face. It didn’t react.

“We lost them,” Corval said, his voice shaking. With Simeon dead, he was supposed to be in command now, but he didn’t give any orders. “As soon as we put the mosquitoes out, that weird smoke just blew up. It was like they were waiting for it.”

Piotr shifted, pushing himself up on one elbow. When he stood, he was visibly unsteady. In Kirin’s helmet display, Piotr’s name flashed a dull orange, shifted to INITIALIZING for a half second, and then returned to green.

“Piotr,” Kirin said. “Report in.”

Piotr’s fingers shifted, manipulating controls in the glove, and a message came through on the text channel. MY JAW AND THROAT ARE BADLY INJURED, BUT I CAN CONTINUE THE MISSION. WE SHOULD KEEP GOING. Noor was kneeling over something that had been a friend of theirs half an hour ago. On the edge of Kirin’s vision, the guard tower glowed AR red. The mission goal, still untaken. Kirin waited for Corval to give orders, to take command. The other man only stood there, shocked. In grief.

“Form up,” Kirin said. “Noor and Corval, you’re group one. Gleaner and Piotr with me. We’ll cover your advance.”

“They’re dead,” Noor shouted.

“We’re not,” Kirin snapped. “So move, and we’ll cover your advance.”

For a moment, they were silent and still. Corval and Gleaner acknowledged, and then Noor half a heartbeat later.

Moving carefully, they advanced toward the target.

The news was bad, but it wasn’t unexpected. After the first week of downtime on the station, Kirin expected it. They were waiting for something, and the only things that came out here were soldiers. So they were waiting for soldiers. The only reason they’d be doing that was Control making a change to the teams.

The order came through in simple, clean, bureaucratic text. The livesuit strike teams were being reassigned for purposes of cross-training. Kirin, Piotr, and Gleaner would remain with the dropship they were currently using. Ross, Corval, and Noor would report to a ship that was scheduled to drop out of the brane-slip in four hours. With Corval gone, Kirin was being promoted to lead. He’d become what Simeon had been on that first drop. He didn’t feel ready.

Four hours to say their goodbyes, gather their things, and break up the team. It was too fast and too long at once.

“Really,” Corval said, “it’s kind of a miracle this group stayed together as long as we did.”

They were in what had been Corval’s quarters, and now wasn’t anybody’s. Kirin had put them on a private channel, approximating the experience of being alone in the room together. Soon enough, the comms would be reassigned, and Corval wouldn’t be in Kirin’s constant company anymore. It felt like a private moment before that happened was respectful. Like lowering your head at a funeral.

“Still, I don’t have to love it.”

“If it hadn’t been for Lirebas, we’d have been split up a long time ago, I figure.”

Kirin shrugged. “I guess I’d rather Simeon, Jones, and Hamze were out on different strike teams instead of mustering out the hard way. But I’m still going to miss you fuckers.”

“I’m going to miss you too, asshole,” Corval said, and Kirin could hear the grin in his voice. “I was hoping I’d be around when you took your helmet off so I could see if you’re as fuck ugly as Ross says you are.”

“I asked for permission to take it off in the battle, but Control said it’d be a war crime,” Kirin said. “Kinder that we just shoot the bastards to death.”

“Well, I can live with that plan.”

Corval hefted the little bag of personal effects. Other soldiers carried more, but the livesuit was a universe of its own. There were no shoes, no shirts, no letters from home. The suit, the weapons, and a little leather bag of whatever mementos Gleaner had gathered to remind him of whatever in this shit he wanted to be reminded of.

“What do you know about the new meat?” Kirin said, trying to keep the moment from being over quite yet. “You serve with any of them before?”

“I didn’t see the list had come through. Let me take a look.” Corval went still and silent, and a moment later coughed out a laugh. “Yeah, okay. Eric Santos is coming in. I trained up with him. He’s funny as hell, but he will talk nonstop. I had a selective mute rule set up for him just to get him out of ear.”

“See, that’s the kind of thing you need to pass on before you go. The secret teachings.”

“You’d figure it out. You’re dumb, but he ain’t subtle.” Corval paused. The moment was coming to an end. “It’s been a pleasure. I hope we get this fucking war over before we have the chance to serve together again.”

“Amen,” Kirin said.

Corval nodded and walked out of the room, heading for the lock and the station and his new strike team. Kirin didn’t expect he’d ever see him again. The helmet shifted, whisking away the tear before it could cloud his vision. No one saw him weeping. He had already taken a moment with Noor. There was only one left. But when he got to Ross’s bunk, she was already gone. The bunk, the shelf, everything about the place was as generic and pristine as if she’d never been there. When he pulled up the team list, she wasn’t on it. Ross was already gone. She’d left him a note on a private text channel. LOOK ME UP WHEN WE’RE CIVVIES AGAIN. FIRST BEER’S ON ME. It was as good a farewell as any.

Gleaner and Piotr were in the gym, a place that had become as unnecessary for their new lives as toilets were. The suit took care of toning the muscles for them. Which was definitely something Kirin was going to miss when it was gone. He hadn’t done a sit-up in years, and he didn’t look forward to starting again. Or maybe once they peeled the suit off he would give himself permission to just go all to hell. It was a pleasant idea.

There were others—maintenance and navigation and regular troops—all through the slip boat. A full crew. The place still felt empty. He went to the common area and sat, checking his team listing to see when it changed. The old names vanishing, and the new ones not yet joining in.

His missing foot hurt. He could feel it curling in, the toes and heel reaching for each other until the bones and tendons ached. It wasn’t true. It was just a phantom produced by nerves that were still confused by being severed. If he stood, put his weight on his missing leg, it would work just fine, even if internally he felt like he’d be walking with one foot on point like a ballerina. Just because you could feel something, that didn’t mean it was there. He thought about going to the medical bay, tracking down which nerves were misfiring, if he could. The suit could probably intervene, but something about the pain felt right. Felt genuine. He let himself hurt because it was better than numb.

The time would come, he knew, that he’d be reassigned and Piotr and Gleaner would part ways with him too. His old connections from before the service were probably dead by now. Mina was. His parents were. In a fundamental way, he’d already won, giving the people he cared about the dignity of a death by natural causes rather than aliens raining fire from the sky. It felt like a betrayal of those people that the victory felt hollow just because his friends were leaving.

He wondered what it would be like, getting a beer with Ross in some bar on Cinnibas or New Cannat, open air against their faces. He imagined Ross reaching across the table and touching his hand, and the idea sent a tingle through his body that far more pornographic thoughts wouldn’t have. He imagined it would be like rising from the dead, sucking in first breaths like a newborn. A future washed over him. Victory. Peace. Or if not those, at least a passing of the baton. Some other soldier in their suit, aging slowly while Kirin took his turn to gray and wither and die.

Three hours later, the suit made a low, purring chime in his ear. Gleaner and Noor and Ross vanished from the list. Michah, Santos, and Smith appeared. The new ones began muted, as was custom. For all that the livesuits made them a single organism, there were some traditions that survived. Meeting someone in person was an ancient artifact, as anachronistic as Latin on a diploma. Kirin pulled up a map. The new three were in a corridor on the docks, moving through the station from the dropship that had been their home to the one that was. He imagined Noor and Ross and Corval passing them somewhere along the way. He could have requested location data on his old teammates and seen it happen, but he didn’t.

Twenty minutes later, three people walked into the common room. Kirin and Gleaner and Piotr were there to meet them. Two of the new soldiers were tall and broad shouldered, almost indistinguishable except that one of their suits had an odd olive cast to it that Kirin hadn’t seen before. The third was smaller, slighter. Kirin stepped forward, introduced Gleaner and Piotr. The smallest of the three new ones returned the salute. When she spoke, she had a lilting accent. Chella Smith, Eric Santos, Dawid Michah.

“Come on,” Gleaner said. “I’ll show you your pods.”

The four left, leaving Kirin and Piotr behind. Kirin switched to a private channel. “Those two look like halves of a wall. Santos and Michah? March those two across a field, we can take cover behind them.”

THEY SEEM LIKE GOOD PEOPLE SO FAR. I THINK THEY’RE GOING TO FIT RIGHT IN.

“Yeah,” Kirin said. “I hope so.”

Later that night, a news drop arrived from some ship that hadn’t been too long in the brane space. It was some of the newest information Kirin had seen, with almost no echoes of old battles being reported as if they’d just happened. The enemy had appeared between Jepha and its sun, the first time enemy ships had attacked from sunward. The planet was a loss. A plague on New Cannat was being studied to determine whether it was natural or a bioweapon snuck into the human population. A researcher from a Control black site had been arrested, accused of sabotage, and jailed. Something he’d seen in the government labs had troubled his conscience more than the prospect of death at the enemy’s hands. If he’d said what it was, the military censor had redacted it.

Kirin tried to divine from the news whether they were winning the war or losing it. He might just as well have swirled tea leaves and looked for patterns there.

The olive-tinted one of the large pair was in the gym staring at the resistance equipment like he wished he still needed it. Santos, Kirin’s suit told him.

Santos turned as Kirin entered and nodded to him. The voice in Kirin’s ear was oddly soft. “I thought I’d miss sex the most. Turns out I can barely remember what fucking was like, but I remember exactly what a post-workout ache felt like. Pretty fucked up, right?”

“I miss cigars, so who knows?” Kirin said. “Santos, right? I think we have someone in common.”

There was a pause. The big man’s helmet shifted as he tilted his head. The faceplate was opaque—blue and silver. Kirin wondered what expression was behind it. Mistrust or curiosity or sorrow. “Do we? Who’s that?”

“Estebán Corval. He had the bunk Smith took before you three got here. He said you went through induction together.”

Santos nodded. “Corval. Yeah. I remember him. I… I liked him.” He paused, then nodded again like he was agreeing with himself. “Wow, that was a long time ago.”

“How much action have you seen?” Kirin asked.

Santos shrugged. “Two dozen drops. Something like that. A couple of them were… hard. You?”

“Coming up on thirty.”

“Damn.”

They stood for a moment, then Santos turned back to the weights and resistance bands hanging from the bulkhead. Kirin crossed his arms. He’s funny as hell, but he will talk nonstop. “Hey, brother. Don’t take this wrong, but are you sure Corval had that right? Maybe he was thinking of some other Eric Santos.”

Santos paused. “No. Corval. Had red hair and… freckles, right?”

“I don’t know. I never saw his face.”

“Right, right. You wouldn’t have, would you? No, I remember him. I liked him. He laughed at my jokes.” Santos picked up a dumbbell like he intended to do some irrelevant curls with it. Kirin watched him for a moment, then left. Smith and Gleaner were in the common area, gesturing with their hands as they talked on a private channel. Piotr and Michah were in the galley, playing a game of backgammon. A stab of frustration came, apparently from nowhere. Or maybe it was grief. He couldn’t think why, but he wanted to take his helmet off. It felt smothering. He wanted to drink a cup of coffee with his actual mouth. He wanted to shower and feel water against his skin. A hundred memories of eating with his family, of breathing fresh air, of touching another human being and being touched flooded into him, and he felt like he’d been buried alive. He was suffocating.

The suit noticed his distress. A moment later, euphorics slid into his bloodstream. A warmth bloomed in his gut like he’d just drunk a glass of wine. The past retreated into the past, and he was back again. Everything was fine, except he maybe needed a little nap. It was just the gears grinding a little bit. It happened whenever there was a change to the team. Nothing to worry about.

His missing foot bent in against itself. It ached.

“They’re dead,” Noor shouted.

“We’re not,” Kirin snapped. “So move, and we’ll cover your advance.”

For a moment, they were silent and still. Corval and Gleaner acknowledged, and then Noor half a heartbeat later.

Moving carefully, they advanced toward the target. On the horizon, something bright happened. Half a minute later, a rumble deep as thunder shook the ground. The suits didn’t throw out a warning, so Kirin decided it was a victory for their side, whatever it had been. High above them, the sky began to glitter. The battle had spread to orbit and beyond. Hundreds or thousands of people were dying in among the sparks and flashes. He could only hope it was more of the enemy than of them. The prison tower rose before them.

“Group two, move east. Let’s get some crossfire set up.”

On a private text channel, Corval said I’M ALL RIGHT. I FREAKED OUT A LITTLE. I’M BACK.

Kirin typed YOU’RE IN COMMAND. But Corval and Gleaner slid east the way Kirin had ordered without comment. The prison wall was a mesh of wire anchored on steel beams that rose from the ground like fingers. The tower—the objective—was poured concrete, harsh and gray. The suit marked three entrances and a gun turret at the top that was hidden behind a screen. The sensor arrays were picking up motion on the other side of the walls, but not clearly enough to locate specific targets. Kirin checked his ammunition for the sixth time. His jaw ached. His impulse was to rush in, storm the place, and take control of the prison before any more of the inmates could be executed. If they’d been at full strength, maybe they would have. As it was, the right thing was to draw the turret’s fire, then drop an incendiary on it once the screen was down. When the fire started, they could mark the exits and pick off anything that tried to escape. Anything they didn’t shoot could burn.

He waited to see what Corval chose.

“Eyes on the turret,” Corval said. His voice was calmer now, focused. The horror and the trauma were still there, but he’d swallowed them like they all had. “We need to take it out.”

Piotr dropped I’LL DRAW ITS FIRE ON YOUR ORDER into the text channel. Kirin almost objected. Piotr had just taken a massive blow to the head and neck. There was a good chance it had affected his inner ear. Sending the soldier with bad balance into the line of fire seemed like a terrible choice. He didn’t speak up. Piotr had volunteered. This wasn’t his call.

Corval took a deep breath, the hiss of air audible in all of their ears. “Go.”

Piotr sprang up, sprinting. His gait was strange and loping, but he didn’t fall. The turret caught sight of him, opened its screen wide enough to let the rounds pass through. The target was no more than six centimeters across, but the micromissiles that Corval launched were smart. They burned across the gap to the tower, sticking close to the ground, shaking the weeds and grasses as they passed like rabbits startled by the sound of violence. When they reached the tower they shifted to full burn, the fire of their propellant drawing a line as bright and sudden as lightning. The turret bloomed in fire. By the book.

Kirin lined up on the entrances, ready, waiting, surprised by the bloodthirst and anger rising in his chest but pleased by them.

“Permission to fuck these fuckers all the way up,” he said.

“Granted,” Corval said. “Spread out, target the exits, and kill whatever comes out.”

Kirin lay on the ground. He imagined the cool of the dirt conducting heat away from his body, but he didn’t really feel it, not through the livesuit. He shifted his aim between two of the exits, sweeping back and forth in a gentle rhythm, waiting. When an alien burst out of the eastern door, his rifle purred against him. The thing was one of the snakelike things—pale and shivering on bone-knife legs. The explosive rounds opened its back, tumbling it onto the ground as two more boiled out. The smoke rising from the tower was thick, black, and greasy. He wondered what it smelled like. Tiny sparks rose up from the fire, flaring and fading to gray. The suit tagged them as enemies, but low to no threat. The movement on the far side of the walls increased, frantic, panicked.

“Get ready for it,” Noor said. Not an order, just anticipation. Kirin was ready.

When they came, they came in a rush. The snake-things, but also long-limbed, squat-bodied things covered in a thin gray fur that exploded in white pus-like mucus when they died. A wide, lumbering thing with a dozen eyes set in what Kirin would have called its chest. An eight-legged thing that looked like a lizard with its scales scrubbed away. Monsters, demons, aliens. The term didn’t matter. They all meant enemy.

Kirin watched them fall. Noor fired more micromissiles into the tower, and the detonation felt like the planet tapping Kirin’s chest. The movement inside the tower had stopped. Kirin’s livesuit updated, letting Control know that their target had been eliminated. You asked for it to die, and we killed it. Kirin waited to hear Simeon’s next order, then remembered why he wouldn’t. He rested his head on the ground.

“Report,” Corval said. He sounded exhausted.

“Something poked a hole in my ribs,” Noor said. “Suit’s patching me up. Just give me a second.”

“Is it bad?” Gleaner asked.

“I’ll live,” Noor answered through what sounded like clenched teeth.

“I took some shrapnel through the thigh,” Kirin said. “Still good to go, though.”

THAT WAS ROUGH, BUT AT LEAST WE WON, Piotr texted. Kirin closed his eyes and tried to feel the victory. He even did, a little bit.

His suit chimed, and Corval said “Acknowledge change of target.”

Kirin’s eyes clicked open. The new mission was in red. Prisoner holding pens. Extremely urgent. The map showed it as a glowing rectangle, only a few hundred meters past the prison fence. “Acknowledged,” he said, a moment after Gleaner and Noor did and a moment before Piotr dropped his reply into the text channel.

“Ammunition?” Corval asked as they stood. He had access to the information, but operating procedure was that each soldier double-check.

Piotr texted that he had 128 rounds left. Gleaner had 78. Noor was dry and had switched to her sidearm.

“Kirin?”

“One hundred twenty-four,” Kirin said. Out of a thousand.

It was as low as they’d ever been on a mission. He knew what Corval was thinking. He felt the same impulse to go back for Simeon and Hamze and Jones. Three fully-loaded rifles on one hand. Extremely urgent on the other. Prisoners were dying right now.

“Well fuck,” Corval said. “Only take kill shots if you can. Let’s make ’em count. Group one, cut a hole in that fence to the east of the tower. Group two covers. Go.”

They got through the fence and covered the distance to their target in under two minutes. It should have been faster.

The holding pens were in an open-air field, the perimeter secured by the same wire fencing that had marked the prison camp’s edge. Hundreds of tents were set in neat rows, their gray canvas shuddering in a wind, and each one had a bronze-colored metal loop set into the ground before it. Each metal loop had four or five people—the citizens of Lirebas system—kneeling before it, their hands secured behind their backs, their necks tethered to the rings with some kind of pale plastic too short to let them stand. They were screaming, all of them, like a chorus from hell, as four aliens moved methodically down the rows and cut their throats. A hundred at least were already still, their blood running together into a single spreading pool.

“At will,” Corval said grimly. He didn’t need to. Noor found a gate and snapped off the locking mechanism with her hands. Piotr, Gleaner, Corval, and Kirin spilled through, guns at the ready but not firing. Not yet. Two of the aliens were the snake-things, one a smaller figure that looked like a land-born cuttlefish, and the last a two-meter-tall cylinder of metal with complications on its sides. An automaton or some kind of alien livesuit for a thing that couldn’t breathe human air.

The metal cylinder drew a monofilament knife through a child’s neck as the other three turned toward the attack. Piotr, silent, threw himself forward as the cuttlefish thing spat out a spray of projectiles. Kirin saw one of them exit Piotr’s back, but the man didn’t pause. He reached the nearest of the snake-things as it reared up, its knifelike legs whirring. Kirin drew a bead on the cuttlefish. As Noor slammed into the same snake-thing Piotr had engaged and Corval and Gleaner tried to flank the metal alien, he forced himself to be still. He breathed in slowly, then out again. At the bottom of this breath, he fired. His rounds unzipped the alien, starting at its middle and tracking up to the top of what Kirin assumed was its head. His rifle announced that it was spent. He dropped it, balled his fists, and charged.

Noor screamed as she wrestled sections off one of the snake-things’ body, ripping the pale alien flesh with her fingers. Gleaner had his arms around the body of the last snake, its legs flailing against him, cutting through the livesuit and into Gleaner’s back. Every slash resealed as soon as the bone-knife was gone.

Kirin and Corval barreled into the metal thing, knocking it to its side. Kirin’s helmet informed him that it had absorbed a massive electrical discharge—more than enough to kill someone—but Kirin hadn’t felt it. Corval found a niche he could press the barrel of his sidearm into, and he emptied his clip. The metal thing stopped moving.

“I’m dry,” he said.

I HAVE 37 LEFT. CATCH THIS, Piotr sent, but he threw wide, and Kirin didn’t have the strength to scramble after the clip. He ached and was numb at the same time. The world swam. On his helmet’s display, alerts were flowing, telling him how many drugs the suit had pumped into him and how little remained before it would need to be serviced. He’d been cut open along his torso on the left side. The monofilament blade had gone almost to the bone of his hip. He hadn’t felt it happen, and he didn’t feel it now. He took the knowledge of his injury on faith, and forgot it. The wind shook the canvas tents. Some kind of vapor or steam rose from the metal figure, but the suit didn’t identify it as a threat. High above them—in orbit or beyond it—something flared bright as a second sun, faded to red, and vanished.

Something popped up in his display, and it took a few seconds to focus on it. Corval had informed Control that the mission objective had been secured, but that they were low on supplies. A moment later, Control replied with the order to hold position until reinforcements came. The ETA was ten minutes, and there was, Control said, no sign of local resistance. It was over. Their part was over. He hoped their part was over.

He didn’t recognize the sound when it came. He thought it was more screaming. Someone had freed some of the prisoners from their loops, and the freed had rushed to unlock the ones still captive. A hundred people stood. Some came and kicked the corpses of their oppressors. Some were weeping, but most were dry-eyed.

They were cheering.

A third of the camp was dead clay and thickening blood, and they were cheering.

Simeon and Hamze and Jones were dead, and they were cheering.

Of course they were. They’d looked death in the face. They’d smelled it in the breeze. And then the livesuit infantry had come and stopped the slaughter. They were heroes. They were gods. Their wounds, their losses, their damage were all covered by the suit.

Kirin lifted his fist, and the cheers grew louder.

Three days after Smith and Santos and Michah came, the team got its new orders. They were going into the brane-slip in two days, and coming out in Abalam system. Kirin knew the name, but he wasn’t sure where he knew it from. Maybe he’d worked with someone from there? Maybe he’d read news of the war that happened there. His missing foot ached, but not enough to distract him. He searched the bases for Abalam. Two habitable planets, one of them with breathable air. Nothing about the war, but also nothing recent. The assignment could be garrisoning against an attack, it could be upgrades to the suits or deeper training. Or Abalam could be a wasteland by now, the people smiling into the cameras in all the articles and feeds dead or enslaved.

He’d find out when he got there. It didn’t matter really. The things he had to do next didn’t change.

He shifted his search. Estebán Corval. Deborah Ross. Noor Alamin. The data requests came back with errors. He’d known they would. When members of the team were reassigned, there was supposed to be a cool-down period. He should be spending these days getting to know his new teammates, not pining for the ones who’d gone. Still, some part of him had hoped someone might have overlooked the block this time. It would have been good to hear Corval’s voice again. To see Ross’s name in his list. But maybe they’d already shipped out, lightspeed and the brane-slip changing what time meant for them.

His missing foot spasmed, curling in on itself, his unreal toes pointing so hard they ached. He tried closing his eyes and willing himself to sleep. When that didn’t work, he considered asking his suit for something to put him down or a painkiller to block the discomfort. Smith and Michah were on the open channel, talking about places they used to live and comparing the best meals they’d eaten, back when they’d been the sort of organisms that ate. Gleaner chimed in now and then, a familiar voice in with the new ones. Piotr didn’t participate, and Kirin wondered if he was asleep or distracted or listening in the same way he was.

The phantom ache didn’t fade and Kirin didn’t ask for drugs to make it go away. It had been happening long enough now that the suit wasn’t going to be able to do anything but mask the discomfort anyway. And if he didn’t get it taken care of before they hit the slip, he’d be stuck with it as his closest company for the transit.

He passed a few people on his way to the slip boat’s medbay. Technicians and normal troops. They went by each other like different species of fish all in the same tank. Livesuit infantry were a breed apart.

There were plenty of open stations. They hadn’t seen action for weeks. Anyone in here now was dealing with the usual frailties, not battle wounds. Kirin picked a private suite with walls that were blue and green. Soothing colors. Like a little slice of nature.

The medical readout held surprises. It began at his head, working its way down. The old injuries and private invasions by the suit were familiar enough. The black vertebrae. The old scars. Each one was a battle, a memory, a moment of pain that was almost forgotten now. But the blue of his living body ended above his left knee now. The black of the suit had tendrils shifting up through his thigh in a swirl, like he was looking at a whirlpool. When he sat forward, the machine sounded an annoyed beep, told him to be still, and started the whole scan again from the top. He tried not to move, but it was hard not to fidget. His leg had been dying, and he hadn’t noticed. It was how it was supposed to work, but he thought he’d have noticed when big pieces of his body went away.

When the image reached his thigh again and the whirl of dark threads appeared, he moved his arm. It had already been scanned. The machine was done with it. He rotated the angle of the scanner image, trying to get a better sense of what the suit was building. Replacement veins. Or a kind of internal bracing to shore up a decalcifying femur. If he knew what it was doing, he’d understand what was happening.

There were minute tendrils coming off the blackness like new leaves emerging from a springtime branch. He leaned forward and the scanner beeped again, told him to lie down, and started over from the crown of his head.

Someone came in behind him, but he didn’t dare turn to look or the scanner would complain. It was only a few seconds before the text appeared on a private channel. HEY. THERE YOU ARE. YOU HAVE A MINUTE? THERE’S SOMETHING I WANTED TO TALK ABOUT.

Kirin flicked his gaze to the suit controls, switching his mic to a private channel with just him and Piotr on it. He kept the open channel up, but softened to the point it was more like listening to voices coming in from a different room. The tones and cadences of conversation. A few of the words. “I can’t move. Scanning. But sure.”

The scanner made a low warning tone, but it didn’t stop. A few centimeters of Kirin’s shoulders appeared—muscles, bones, the pale complication of his trachea as it reached down toward his lungs.

ARE YOU HAVING MEDICAL TROUBLE?

“Phantom limb pain.”

I’M SORRY TO HEAR THAT.

“I’ll stimulate some nerves. Trick my brain into thinking my foot’s okay.” The scanner warned him again. He tried to be still.

I’VE BEEN THINKING. WE’RE STILL A FEW YEARS OUT, SUBJECTIVE. BUT I THINK I’M GOING TO REENLIST.

“Yeah?”

Piotr pulled out a stool from its place against the wall and sat beside him, leaning forward with his forearms on his knees. The blankness of his helmet managed to seem apologetic. Kirin wondered if he still had the little pencil mustache or if the suit had barbered it away.

I STARTED THIS FOR A REASON, AND THE REASON’S STILL THERE. THERE ARE GOOD, INNOCENT PEOPLE WHO NEED US IN THESE SUITS. WE’RE FIGHTING BATTLES NO ONE ELSE CAN FIGHT. AND UNTIL THE ENEMY’S DEFEATED, I HAVE TO KEEP DOING MY PART.

“Noble.”

HAVE YOU THOUGHT ABOUT REENLISTING? THEY’RE OFFERING A BONUS FOR PEOPLE WHO COMMIT EARLY. IT’S ENOUGH TO REALLY MAKE A DIFFERENCE TO YOUR CIVILIAN LIFE.

“I’m a simple man, I don’t need much,” Kirin said. He paused the scan and sat up. “Just a beer, the open sky…”

SOUNDS NICE.

“No, come on. Just a beer, the open sky… You know the rest.”

YOU’LL HAVE TO REMIND ME. IT’S BEEN A LOT OF TIME.

“And you beside me, whistling beside me in the darkness,” Kirin said.

OH YEAH. RIGHT. THAT. Piotr shifted like he was laughing a little. I FORGOT.

“We’ve been at this a long time,” Kirin said, but something cold was happening in his belly. Santos, who talked nonstop and was always funny. Caram Al-Shin covered in fake blood saying something about going home. Kirin stood slowly, stretched, then put an arm around Piotr’s chest and lifted him as he spoke.

“There’s something to be said for at least thinking about it. Reenlisting, I mean. Livesuit infantry is pretty effective, right?”

WE’RE THE BEST OF THE BEST. THAT’S WHY WE’RE HERE. WE MAKE A DIFFERENCE. WE REALLY DO, Piotr sent back as Kirin pushed him gently into the scanner’s bed and took off the pause.

“You know, I really thought I was going to miss a lot of things when I put this on. Eating. Bathing. Fucking. I really thought it was going to be a hard change, you know?” He tried to keep talking, keeping Piotr still with the flow of his words. The scan started at the crown of the other man’s head, ticking lower centimeter by centimeter.

Blackness.

Blackness.

Blackness.

“I think about all the things I thought I was going to miss, and it’s not that bad. Maybe if we sign up for a double tour, they’ll let us take one of these things home with us, you know?”

THAT WOULD BE AMAZING, WOULDN’T IT?

The scan reached Piotr’s jaw. There was a little swatch of blue there. A length of bone. Three recognizable teeth. Then a little more as it reached his lower jaw. By the time the scan reached Piotr’s throat, it was mostly shades of blue and white, with only a scaffolding of black lacing through it to hold the living flesh in place. Kirin turned off the scanner. His missing foot flexed. He felt the ghost of a charley horse starting in the calf muscle that he didn’t have anymore. A perverse thought flashed through his mind. I wonder if Piotr gets headaches.

“I’ll have to think about it. Maybe see how things go the next few missions.”

YOU’RE GOING TO BE A GREAT LEADER. CONTROL IS GOING TO WORK TO KEEP YOU. COUNT ON IT.

“Thanks. That means a lot coming from you.”

I LOVE YOU, MAN. MORE THAN THAT, I TRUST YOU TO DO THE RIGHT THING.

Kirin’s suit squeezed his wrist, asking for his attention. His heart rate was high. His blood pressure had spiked. Was he in pain? Did he want a euphoric?

Piotr rose from the scanner. Kirin wondered how long it would take for Control to realize what he knew now. And once they did, if it would change the words they put in Piotr’s mouth. Maybe they’d all just pretend it hadn’t happened. In his imagination, he saw through the helmet. What had been Piotr’s face black and sculpted. Sightless. Maybe wracked in permanent shock and pain. All that had been him, replaced like the minerals in petrified wood. How long have you been dead? How long had it hurt? Was it all at once, or did it fill in slowly over time? Did you know it was happening?

HOW’S YOUR FOOT FEELING?

“Better. It’s feeling better. Thanks for asking, brother. We should probably go bond with the new kids. Get to know everyone before we’re in the shit again.”

BUILD RAPPORT, Piotr’s suit sent to him. SPOKEN LIKE A LEADER.

In the open channel, Gleaner laughed and one of the new ones—Michah or Smith—said something about being misunderstood.

“Hey,” Kirin said. “They don’t actually let us go home, do they?”

The suit that had Piotr in it shifted, mimicking concern, confusion. WHAT DO YOU MEAN?

These suits were never made to come off. Even if they wanted to, we’re too woven together. It was all lies. They were bullshitting us from the word go. We’re an army of the dead. It was all there, so easy to say. And then what would happen? Would they send in the censors? Would his suit just flood him full of poison? And how would anyone know if he was dead? Would he?

“They just keep upping the bonuses until we stay,” Kirin said.

PROBABLY. I’D DO IT FOR FREE, THOUGH. IT’S WORTH IT JUST BEING THE GOOD GUYS.

“Yeah,” Kirin said. “Me too.”

Discover Your Next Great Read

Get sneak peeks, book recommendations, and news about your favorite authors.

Tap here to learn more.

Meet the Author

Liza Trombi

JAMES S. A. COREY is the pen name of Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck. In addition to writing the novels and short stories of the Expanse, they wrote and produced the television series of the same name. Daniel lives with his family in the American Southwest. Ty will tell you where he lives when and if he wants you to come over.

Find out more about James S. A. Corey and other Orbit authors by registering for the free monthly newsletter at orbitbooks.net.

By James S. A. Corey

THE CAPTIVE’S WAR SHORT FICTION

Livesuit

THE CAPTIVE’S WAR

The Mercy of Gods

THE EXPANSE

Leviathan Wakes

Caliban’s War

Abaddon’s Gate

Cibola Burn

Nemesis Games

Babylon’s Ashes

Persepolis Rising

Tiamat’s Wrath

Leviathan Falls

Memory’s Legion: The Complete Expanse Story Collection

THE EXPANSE SHORT FICTION

Drive

The Butcher of Anderson Station

Gods of Risk

The Churn

The Vital Abyss

Strange Dogs

Auberon

The Sins of Our Fathers