The Drift Wars (6 page)

Peter
had never seen a real marine before, aside from the recruiters back
on Genesia. “population control experts,” as Saul called them.

He
and Saul had grown up just three towns apart but had only met on the
journey here. At least, Peter didn’t remember him. And Saul wasn’t
someone you forgot.

Saul
was big. Bigger than a linebacker. Bigger than two. Peter was tall
himself, but his head barely reached Saul’s shoulders—shoulders
so wide that he had to step sideways through most doorways. He had
large black eyes, skin like cream in coffee, and a pencil-thin beard
traced around his wide jaw. His smile revealed a monolith of white
teeth, and Saul was nearly always smiling.

This
trip had been Peter’s first in space—his family was too poor to
vacation off-planet—and he was entranced. He spent almost the
entire three-week journey in the observation lounge at the back of
the transitship, watching the stars through a half dome of windows.

It
had never been his plan to join the marines. He didn’t want to
leave Amber or his family, but he had bet everything on a football
scholarship—ignoring his schoolwork and pretty much everything
else—and it hadn’t arrived. Then the war started.

Like
the other men in town, he had wanted to defend his planet against
the Riel. But that wasn’t his main motivation. What he was really
after was a way to start a life with Amber. For that, he needed
money. Enlisting seemed the best of his limited options.

It
hadn’t been an easy decision, and it haunted him from the moment
he signed the papers. But he found comfort looking out at the stars.
There were so many; his own troubles seemed insignificant. His
worries faded as the days passed.

For
most of the trip, Peter had the back lounge to himself—the other
recruits preferred the bar amidships. Then one day, as he sat
watching a red-and-blue nebula float past, Saul wandered in.

Saul
had a half-empty bottle of beer encased in one hand and a full one
in the other. He walked a full circuit of the room and—even though
it was both large and empty—dropped into the seat next to Peter’s,
his bulk forcing the shared armrest into Peter’s ribs. Saul stared
at the nebula for a few minutes, then said, “Now that’s
something.”

Peter
murmured, quietly hoping the intruder would lose interest and leave.
But instead Saul offered him the full beer, popping the cap off with
a flick of his thumb.

“No,
thank you,” Peter said.

Saul
was incredulous. “You do know the drinks are free, right?”

Peter
shook his head; he didn’t.

“They’re
free the whole trip, but on the orbital they’ll cost four times
what they do back home. So allow me to suggest, with great humility,
that you drink up.”

“Okay,”
Peter said, taking the beer. “Thanks.”

Saul
tapped the neck of his bottle to Peter’s and they drank. A few
minutes passed in silence, both men watching the nebula. When it
reached the back of the warp envelope, it stretched like putty and
was sucked into the bright spot that floated in the ship’s wake.

“Now
that
is
something,” Saul said. And Peter couldn’t help
but agree.

—   —   —

Mickelson
gave the recruits a quick tour of the orbital, assigned them to
barracks, and allowed them six hours to themselves before training.
Most of the men, ragged from weeks of drinking, fell immediately to
sleep. But Peter lay on his bunk, fondling the locket of hair that
hung from his neck and thinking about the night the war started. It
was a week after his seventeenth birthday, and just a couple hours
after dark, when the Riel invaded the Livable Territories.

A
blackout had been ordered for the entire planet; light made an easy
target for the Riel bombers. Amber and Peter were in town and took
shelter in the feed store basement, along with a few dozen other
people. But after sitting on dusty grain sacks for a couple hours,
Amber grew restless.

“Let’s
go outside,” she whispered to Peter. “I want to see what it
looks like.”

Peter
resisted, but Amber pushed, arguing that the cellar wasn’t going
to protect them from a high-powered bomb and that she couldn’t
think of a more dismal place to die. So they slipped out.

Downtown
was small, a few short blocks of Craftsman-style buildings lost in a
sea of wheat. They wandered out to the fields, stopping at the
deserted general store to borrow a blanket and two bottles of wine.

It
was fall, and the wheat was thick and tall, whispering in the wind
as they followed a rutted tractor path. Amber’s hair billowed like
a soft brown cape. Her white skin glowed in the quarter moon, and
Peter stole lustful glances at her neckline, where deep cleavage
rolled with her every step. Amber was as pretty as any girl he’d
ever seen, in real life or otherwise, and just looking at her made
his heart race.

They
reached a grassy rise in what had once been a cemetery. The bodies
might still be down there, but the headstones were worn to nubs.
They settled onto the blanket and realized they didn’t have a
corkscrew or glasses. Peter pushed in the cork, and they drank right
from the bottle.

The
invasion wasn’t much to see. A few lights traversed the sky, but
that was normal enough. Peter guessed they were navy ships, instead
of the usual cargo freighters, but he had no way to be sure.

“Would
you like to go up there someday?” Amber asked as they lay
hand-in-hand, staring at the sky. “To see other planets?”

“I
like it here fine,” Peter replied.

“I
think it would be amazing. Some of those luxury liners have clear
bubbles where you can float out in the middle of space.”

“Just
float?” Peter asked, running a finger down her dress, from her
stomach to her thigh.

“Peter
Garvey!” Amber said, slapping his hand with mock affront.

“We
might die tonight,” Peter said.

“I
bet you say that to all the girls,” Amber said, but she knew
better. She and Peter had been a couple for as long as either could
remember. They grew up friends and didn’t so much start dating as
notice that they already were. They would get married too, as soon
as they were out of high school.

“Come
up here, instead,” Amber continued, peeling her collar back
slowly, tantalizingly. Peter stiffened, his eyes glued.

“You
like that?” she asked.

“You
know I do.”

“You
have a filthy mind,” Amber said.

“You
know I do.” Peter sprang on top of her, nibbling her soft skin
with his lips. He worked down her neck to her collarbone, then
dropped to a breast, nosing back her dress and taking a bite. He
pulled back before she could protest, then dug his fingers into her
ribs and tickled. He had years of practice—once upon a time, his
only interest in her body had been tickling. She giggled loudly,
slapping his chest until he stopped. He settled on top of her,
circling her face with his fingers and gazing into her eyes.

“Peter
Garvey,” she sighed, “I can’t wait until we’re married.”

“I
don’t see why we have to.”

“Because
my dad owns a gun?”

“That’s,”
Peter said with a laugh, “that’s a pretty good reason.”

“And
because I say so. Girls like me don’t come cheap.”

Peter
frowned, rolling off her. “I’m not sure I can afford it.”

“You
still bothering on that scholarship?” she asked, hugging his back.
“It won’t matter now. No one’s gonna watch football with a war
on.”

“I
suppose,” Peter said.

“I
don’t want you to give it another thought. We’ll find some rich
old hag who won’t mind you too much. I’ll just take you on the
weekends.”

Peter
lay back, and Amber slid on top of him. Suddenly the whole sky
flashed white. Peter bolted up as an orange fireball ballooned in
the distance. It was so low to the horizon he couldn’t tell if it
was on land or in space. He raised his arm to point, but Amber
buried her face in his side, crying.

—   —   —

“This,
gentlemen, is the Drift. You’ve all heard of it and you’ll all
be fighting in it. Most of you will die in it.”

Colonel
Chiang San lectured under the glow of a three-dimensional
projection; a model of the Drift floated over his head. Chiang San
was a stout man, Asian, with a thick chest and a wide wrestler’s
stance. He stood in a large auditorium that was packed with twenty
thousand recruits. It was a lot of men but still only a tenth of the
newly formed Digamma San Division, the youngest in the United
Forces. Or they would be, as soon as they finished Basic.

Peter’s
platoon, lost somewhere near the back, were all sealed inside their
combat suits. They had been stuck inside them for six straight days
now and would remain so for the next two months.

“Starting
now,” Mickelson had told them, “you will train in your suit and
you will sleep in it. You will eat through its feeder tube and you
will use its map to find the bathroom. More important, you’ll
acquaint yourself with the delicate art of controlling your
artificial muscles. Any of you morons can bend bars with them, but I
want you to peel an egg. And you’ll do that for me before I’ll
let you so much as flip your visor up.”

It
had been a difficult week. The artificial muscles were hard to
control, and Peter had to relearn the most basic tasks. Things broke
and mangled in his hands, and the first time he tried to walk, he
launched himself into the ceiling. Worse, after a couple of days,
the suit began to itch and chafe, especially at the joints. Peter
wanted to claw his skin off.

“The
Drift is a desolate place,” Colonel Chiang San continued, circling
the projection, which depicted a long, thin pocket of black with a
burning orange skin. “It’s large enough to pack several galaxies
inside but has few stars and even fewer planets. Mostly it’s just
barren rocks and empty space.

“Passing
through the Drift’s boundary,” Chiang San said, running a
pointer along the Drift’s orange exterior, “is such a violent
experience that for centuries we were convinced it was impossible.
At this scale, it looks peaceful, but in real life it’s a terrible
thing, an eternal storm of radiation and X-rays that will pulverize
anything that gets near it.

“The
boundary surrounds the entire Drift, but there are only two parts
that concern us. Here, where we cross it, and way over here, where
the Riel do. Right now, they’re over here, by our side, ready to
attack at any moment. Our job is to push them all the way back to
their side and, just maybe, beyond it to where they live.”

Chiang
San paused, considering the model as if imagining a long and
journeyed battle playing out. He nodded with satisfaction and turned
back to the audience.

“There
are scientists who argue that the Drift is the seam of the universe,
the place where space wraps all the way around to meet itself like
some vastly oversize doughnut. Others argue that it’s a border, a
no-man’s-land between our universe and the next.

“Me?
I don’t give a shit what it is. I only care that it’s full of
Riel. And if we allow them back into our universe, then they will
burn our cities and slaughter our families. The Riel have no mercy.
Hell, they don’t even have common sense. They exist only to kill,
and they’re damn good at it. To quote the Great General, ‘This
is a battle of evolution, from which only one species will survive.’
Personally, I’d rather it be us.”

—   —   —

The
night the Riel attacked the Livable Territories, every power station
on Genesia was either bombed out or shut down. As a result, the town
received no news until the following morning, when a white pickup
drove in from Genesia City. It was loaded with medical supplies and
copies of a special edition of the
Genesia Tribune
, just two
pages thick. The truck left some of the supplies and a half-dozen
papers and continued down the road.

Peter
and Amber were tucked into a booth at the diner, having breakfast.
Amber had pancakes, but Peter ordered a cheeseburger, which was free
on account of the thawing freezer. Downtown was nearly abandoned, so
they got a copy of the paper to themselves.

The
headline screamed, “SNEAK ATTACK!” The Riel had broken the
sixty-year-old peace accord without warning, swarming out from the
Drift and taking the United Forces by surprise. A counterattack
hadn’t been organized until the early morning.

The
Great General declared the situation dire, but under control. The
Riel had retreated, and the UF was on high alert. Civilians were
urged to remain near shelters and to conserve water and food,
particularly canned and dry goods.

The
rest of the paper was just pictures of Genesia City, which had been
pounded throughout the night. One photo showed a toppling high-rise;
another was of a fire that ran for blocks and blocks. In the middle
was a foldout of the skyline, taken at first light. It looked like a
collection of shattered bottles. Peter had never been to Genesia
City, but the image shocked him: the capital of his planet was on
fire.

“What
are we going to do?” Amber asked. Peter had no answer, so he
wrapped his arm around her and pulled her close.

“It’s
war now,” Chad McGuffin said, appearing over the far seat. He was
a sturdy kid, muscular, but with a soft layer of fat that would win
out in a few short years. His sole hobby was brawling, but in the
presence of adults, he had to settle for just being an ass. “See
if it’s not,” Chad continued, his S’s whistling through a
missing tooth. “I always knew those bastards would pull something
like this. They only signed that accord so they could catch us
jerking off.”

Peter
felt his blood rise—he didn’t like McGuffin, and he didn’t
like him talking like that in front of Amber—but he let it go.