Ninth City Burning (25 page)

“Or you could try keeping your breakfast down,” Mersh suggests. He's only joking, but it annoys me. Mersh is pretty good with PG, and it's sort of a shock to find out he's actually better than me at something. Seeing all those guns really got Mersh going, too, and as a result he's decided to be an even bigger turd than usual. A couple of recruits laugh like Mersh has made the world's most hilarious joke.

“Real helpful, Mersh,” Hexi says. “Don't worry, Torro,” she tells me. “Optio Sorril says some people take a little longer to acclimate to manipulated gravity. You'll get it soon.”

Only I don't get it soon. I actually get worse, if that's possible. The training keeps getting harder, and after our like introduction to the City Guns, we hear them pretty much every day, even way out at Limit Camp. It doesn't stop there, either. Other parts of the Legion start running
exercises in the valley, and pretty soon you can hardly go anywhere without getting yourself nearly blown up. They have these things called “equi,” which are basically gigantic versions of our D-87s, only the people inside can use thelemity even without ingenized weapons like lazels and so forth.
Those
kiddos get up to some seriously crazy crap. They can set practically a whole forest on fire like it's nothing, or even change gravity—sort of like we do with PG, only they can use it on
other people
, to like just squash them in their tracks. And that's only if they don't step on you first, or like explode your skull or whatever. Mersh can't get enough of it.

In no time, I'm starting to feel queasy even before I get to spinning and falling and everything on the courses. So while the other recruits are all doing this crazy stuff, like jumping way up and swiveling midair so they land standing sideways five meters off the ground, or running along a balance beam that happens to be all tied up like some big thick bootlaces, I'm mostly falling flat on my butt or getting sick in my helmet. You can tell everyone's getting tired of me, even Optio Sorril, who never gets sore at anyone.

One day, halfway through afternoon training, she just pulls me right off the course. “Why are you hanging back, Recruit?” she asks. She's not wrong—about me hanging back, I mean. The course today is like this big twisting vine, with branches swinging around all over the place. I was looking up at it, trying to pick out a path where I wouldn't just fall off. I already felt sort of dizzy, even though I wasn't moving yet.

“I'm a little afraid I'm going to be sick, ma'am,” I tell her.

“And is this how you intend to behave when you meet the Valentines?”

“It isn't about intending, ma'am,” I say. “It's just what usually happens. So yeah, I guess I will. It stands to reason. Logically, I mean.”

It's obvious old Sorril is pretty sore at me, just from the way she's standing, sort of looming over me, even though she's shorter than I am. “I've been watching you, Recruit,” she says. “There is absolutely nothing that should prevent you from being an exemplary legionary. The trouble is that you are not making the necessary effort. You would not be the first recruit to resent being brought here, or the first to allow your anger toward those you consider responsible—me, your settlement, the Principate—to interfere with your training. But this cannot continue.”

I hadn't been thinking about how I left Granite Shore, actually, how old Cranely got me called up so someone else wouldn't have to go to the Front, but I am now. I start getting pretty mad. And I start thinking, like, maybe
I'd have an easier time if you Prips hadn't been lying to me my entire shitty life. Maybe we could have been practicing this stuff at old S-225, so I'd have a chance to figure out some of this crap before you dragged me off to be eaten by homicidal aliens. It'd feel pretty good to yell all of that at Optio Sorril, probably, but I keep my mouth shut.

“At the beginning of your training, I promised to make a volunteer of each and every recruit,” old Sorril says. “For most, learning that we are in a fight for the very survival of our species is enough. But if preserving the lives of every human being in existence does not motivate you, I urge you to find something that does, because I will not send an incompetent legionary into battle. You will volunteer to fight, or you will volunteer for the dungeons. The choice is yours.”

T
he next day, Sorril announces we'll be having our first official combat exercise. We'll be in a real battle scenario, with a mission to accomplish and everything. She looks right at me when she mentions the mission part, like having a mission is supposed to mean something extra for me. She probably wants me to know I've got more to do than just finish the exercise. I've got to find my
motivation
. That speech she gave me sure didn't do it. I went back to the course all right, but I finished about a thousand times slower than all the other recruits. If I can't get good enough to fight with everyone else, I guess old Sorril'll end up throwing me in prison just to keep me out of the way.

Our mission today is actually pretty simple: kill as many Valentines as we can. They won't be
real
Valentines, of course. Instead, there'll be these things called “V-spheres,” which are basically targets that move around and shoot back at us. We'll be divided into squads, and whichever squad destroys the most V-spheres gets a special dinner and no chores for a week. A lot of the other recruits look around at me when Sorril mentions the competition part. I know what they're thinking. Everyone wants to win, and they know with me on their squad, they won't stand a chance.

We'll be traveling the way actual milites would for a real battle, using these things called “tetra fortresses.” A tetra fortress is basically a whole bunch of assault platforms all stuck together in a big ball, layers and layers of them, with a few people in the very middle to control the whole thing. Us milites all load up onto the platforms and sit there while the fortress flies into battle. When it gets where it needs to be, the assault platforms just launch off. “Like seeds from a dandelion” was how old Sorril put it. She showed us a couple of her moving pictures, and those fortresses really do kind of look
like dandelions, with all the little bits peeling off and floating away. Once our platforms are detached, we've got to maneuver into position, making a wall or whatever kind of formation works for that particular battle. We've practiced flying around on the assault platforms a bit, but this time we'll be using an actual tetra fortress, and we'll have an actual source we're supposed to protect.

That's what most battles are really about, when you get down to it—the source. Or the source
s
, depending on how many there are. The official term is “fontani,” which is the name the Prips made up for them, but a lot of the time it's easier to just say “source.” Battles basically revolve around the fontani, which makes sense, because they're how we get our thelemity. No source means no thelemity, and no thelemity means you're pretty much dead. If the Valentines get your source, they can just pull back and pick you off like nothing. The Valentines have sources, too, though—the Type 0s, or just Zeros for short—and if we can get old Romeo's sources, the Zeros, that is, like kill them or trap them or make them run away, then we've more or less won the battle. Most Valentine fighters actually self-destruct the minute they go dark. As milites, it's our job to make up the main lines of battle, protecting our sources and pushing forward into a position where we can go after the Zeros. There's a lot more to it, of course, but that's the basic the idea.

For this exercise, there's going to be a real source out there with us, and we'll have to keep the V-spheres from getting anywhere close. Any squad that lets one past loses automatically. Old Sorril is about halfway through explaining the different formations we'll be using when someone in the back starts to laugh. It's one of the bivvies, the real scary one they call Thom. He had to shave his beard and cut his hair, but he's just as scary as ever.

“Something you would like to add, Recruit Thom?” Sorril asks. She's pretty annoyed about being interrupted, that's obvious, but I'm a little surprised she asks Thom a question instead of just ordering him to leave. He doesn't really speak Aux.

“Pawns,” Thom answers in his thick bivvie accent, a big smile on his scarred old face. “We are pawns.”

I've never heard that word before, “pawns,” but I guess the rest of the bivvies all have. They start laughing, too.

I figure Thom must have said something pretty rude, but Sorril doesn't
seem to care. “Thank you for your contribution, Recruit,” she says. “Please hold any further comments until the briefing has concluded.” The bivvies don't say anything else, but they keep grinning the whole time.

At the end of the briefing, Sorril divides us all up into squads. Each squad is ten people, enough to fill one side of an assault platform. In the Legion, every squad of milites has a leader, the “Decurio,” who gives the orders and so forth. Decurios are usually more experienced milites who've been trained to lead, but for this exercise, they'll just be recruits who've done particularly well in training.

I don't get chosen for Decurio, of course, but Mersh and Spammers and Hexi all do. They're real good recruits, it turns out. I actually end up in Mersh's squad. Nobody's really that happy about it. The other recruits think we're like destined to lose with me there, and I'm not exactly pleased to be taking orders from Mersh. Mersh is pretty nice about me messing up his chances to win, though. “Just stay low and try not to do anything,” he says, giving me a little punch on the shoulder.

The exercise starts out pretty good, or not that bad, anyway. When the briefing's over, we put on our D-87s and line up to load into the tetra fortress. It's waiting for us in a field behind the barracks, this big dark gray ball with a few numbers in yellow along the side, floating about three meters off the ground.

We've got to use personal gravity to get inside. I try to think of the fortress as kind of its own planet, like Spammers said, which isn't too hard, since it really is just a great big ball. It works. I hardly get queasy at all, even when I'm inside, and I have to jog along the curved floor to find my platform.

There are a lot of recruits in the exercise with us, like from other Limit Camps and whatnot, so it takes a while before everyone's ready, but eventually this little voice in my helmet announces that our fortress is lifting off. Really, though, it doesn't feel like we're going anywhere. The walls and floor don't rumble or anything like that. I probably wouldn't know we're moving at all if that little voice didn't keep chiming in to say how far we are from our launch point. We're all sitting in a line, my squad is, our backs against the side of the assault platform that'll face the battle, and Mersh starts getting into the old strategy a bit, telling everyone to look for the biggest concentration of V-spheres and aim there.

I guess I drift off for a little about then, because the next thing I know,
Mersh is yelling, “Ten seconds to launch!” and the little voice in my helmet is telling me the same thing, and suddenly the platforms around us start falling away, and we're out in the middle of the sky.

It's a sunny day, and clear, and we're way, way up above the ground. I'd almost forgotten it was winter, but everything below is covered in snow. Over the edge of my platform, I can see a forest all like blanketed in white, the trees getting smaller and smaller every second. Other platforms float around us, with recruits loaded up on both sides, and I'm just glad I didn't end up on the side facing the ground. As I'm looking around, I hear Mersh yelling for me to get into position. Everyone is already over by the platform's forward wall, ready to shoot. I scoot in next to him and get my weapon ready just as the first V-spheres appear.

All the recruits are armed with lazels, just the way we would be if this were a real battle. They're much easier to use than the rifles they gave us in the settlement militia. For one thing, you don't have to worry as much about wind and distance and whatnot, since lazels shoot energy instead of bullets. I'm actually not too bad with the old lazel, at least when I'm shooting targets, and that's all the V-spheres are, really.

The V-spheres come down at us like a sheet of rain, and our platform rotates to face them, Mersh shouting at us to open fire. Another good thing about the lazel is you can shoot forever, and it'll never run out of ammunition as long as you're someplace that has thelemity, so we just let loose as those V-spheres come charging in. Everywhere we land a shot, some sphere or other gets wiped away in a blue-white shadow, but we've hardly gotten started when they all swerve back, pulling away into the sky. Our platforms have no problem keeping up, so we just follow, spreading out to give everyone a clear shot. We're moving pretty fast, but our suits keep us from feeling it, the same as they keep us from feeling the cold and wind, even though we're getting real high off the ground—three or four kilometers, probably. Pretty soon we're riding in and out of these big, thick clouds, with huge white slopes towering over us like mountains.

We've done a pretty good job thinning out the V-spheres by then. There are only a few left, whirling around and shooting at us. But just as we swing over this one very tall cloud, a whole new swarm of V-spheres rises, heading straight toward us. Mersh shouts for everyone to aim for the front edge, where the V-spheres are thickest, but even though that area
lights up blue like crazy, the spheres keep coming. After only a few seconds, it's obvious they're going to crash into us. Even I can tell.

“Break 'em up!” Mersh yells.

Lazels do more than just shoot those little blue needles of light. They're made for close combat, too. They've got something a bit like the bayonets we had back at old S-225. What you do is you split the lazel into two pieces, so you're basically holding half in each hand, and when you do, each piece turns into a kind of weapon. There's what we call the blade, which is basically a big knife, almost a meter long, and the buckler, which is more like a shield. They're both made of that same blue-white energy the lazel shoots, only a lot stronger. The blade is like a hundred direct hits in one, and the buckler can fend off just about anything, even a blade.

“Break 'em up!” is Mersh's order to draw our blades, so we all step back from the platform wall and pull on our lazels. In a flash, everyone has a blade in one hand and a buckler in the other. Just in time, too, because the V-spheres are coming down on us. A lot of Valentine fighters have blades like ours, but fortunately the V-spheres don't. Instead, they have little glowing spots they try to bump you with. If one touches you, your squad loses points. Also, it really knocks you over.

For a few seconds, our whole platform is crazy with V-spheres and blades hacking away. I get sort of scared one of us'll accidentally hit another recruit, which would be just as bad as getting slashed by a Valentine, but pretty soon there are only a few V-spheres left, then none. We didn't let a single one past. The whole squad is pretty happy, but me especially, because it looks like I made it through the exercise without completely screwing up. Maybe we didn't get the most points, but at least it wasn't my fault.

And then out of nowhere my helmet goes black, and when I can see again, the sounds and colors are different. For half a second I have no idea what's going on, but then the platform starts to tilt, and I get it: We've gone dark. I don't know how it happened, but my blade and buckler are gone, like I'm just holding two halves of a lazel, and I can see my reflection a little in the clear surface of my helmet. I start to wonder why my D-87s don't feel heavy yet. Then I realize it's because I'm falling.

This is bad. I mean, we're totally screwed, me and all the other recruits. It's not like we have parachutes or anything. We might as well be a bunch of rocks standing on bigger, flatter rocks, for all the flying we can do. Up
above, other platforms have started tumbling like great big snowflakes, recruits spinning off, flailing in their heavy suits. I look around and see the recruits on my platform lifting off as we gather speed. Mersh is near the back, and he gives me this big surprised look as the platform drops out from under him.

All at once, I get this idea. I don't know where it comes from, really, but for some reason I just feel like we've all got to stick together. I reach for one of the handles on the platform and pull myself down, then start making my way around, grabbing any recruit I can reach and motioning for them to hold on. It isn't easy because the platform has started going end over end, and people are sort of floating away, but we're all falling at about the same speed, so mostly everyone is within reach. But a few are way out there, like Mersh, and they can't seem to get back. We've dropped through the clouds now, and those snowy trees are getting closer and closer. And even though it seems totally pointless, I get a few recruits to make a sort of chain, like one person holding on to the next person's ankles, so I can swing out and grab Mersh and the rest.

The last recruit from our squad has just grabbed onto our platform when suddenly my helmet blinks again, and the platform starts to slow, then swoop upward. Our thelemity is back. We barely have time to feel relieved, though, before a new wave of V-spheres comes flying up out of the snowy trees. I just sort of gape at them, but Mersh yells for everyone to open fire. A few recruits managed to hold on to their lazels, but mine is long gone, so I run for one of the extras stored at the side of the platform, then start shooting away with the rest of my team. There aren't many V-spheres this time, which is good because we're the only platform doing any real shooting. Most of the others are almost empty, with recruits floating all around, trying to get back into position using PG. By the time they do, my squad's already cleaned up pretty good.