“You. Are. Filth.”

These were the first words spoken by the first person to give us instruction on the first day of Basic. You’d think First Sgt. Petty is just trying to intimidate you, but hear it often enough and you start to believe it.

To endure it, I reminded myself that Petty was making up for four hundred years without war: two hundred years while the survivors weaned the shattered biosphere of Earth back to its former self, weaving magic with their gold dust and red dust and green dust; then another two hundred years for the world to really get back to the way it was, for the great coastal cities, with their tower farms and kelp forests, to finally dismantle the old scourge of nationalism, for the first humans spread out into the cosmos with the newly recovered Bloom drive.

If you’re going to save your species at the expense of another, there’s some time to make up.

The second thing we were told on the first day:

“You are filth because although you are about to receive everything, you deserve nothing. You happen to be the inheritors of a military legacy dating back four thousand years. It is a legacy earned through the spilling of guts and shit and brains all over the battlefields of Earth. It is a legacy forged by the steel of Alexander, the might of Hannibal, the cunning of Shaka Zulu, the dogged perseverance of Halsey, the steel balls of Yang-Zhu, the steel breasts of Rossikova. They all died for you.

“Six hundred million. Burn that number into your brains. Forget it, I’ll break your arms.” He paused for effect. He stood a full head taller than even the tallest of us, his bulk comparable a savanna predator. “From the first Hittite to have his eye plucked by an arrow in ancient Uruk, to the tens of millions who were plowed into the soil from Berlin to Stalingrad, the hundred million who littered the road from Beijing to Bombay — you are the ultimate recipients of the sum of their toil. Every man, every woman who shit their guts out and was left to desiccate under the blazing sun — they fought and died and were forgotten so they could advance the art of war. You may think war an inglorious thing. There is not a single one of you for whom war is your heritage. As I am sure you do not know, and as you will soon learn, compared to nearly every generation before the Impact, you are privileged fucks. And because of that, you will work for me, work until your skin peels away and your bones show through your fingers to prove to me you are worthy of that legacy bequeathed you. If there was any time in history the sacrifice of the dead seemed meaningless, it is not now. You are that meaning. Therefore, you will be perfect. If you are not perfect, you will die, either because the Scyphons have killed you, or because I have.”

To his credit, Petty did not lie about privilege. We all of us were born of a peaceful age, when the specter of national war had long since passed us by. Forever, we had thought. But here we were, subjects of an ongoing experiment: could the old ways be grafted to new hosts? Or would this cure prove to be far more deadly for us than the Scyphons ever could?

***

Physical, tactical, technical, and mental training took up much of our time: the rest was reserved for Petty’s “lecture series,” which were always delivered on the parade grounds at sunset, close to the airfield and space port. I had the misfortune to be singled out on occasion.

“Humans are soft. They have not always been soft. We can be hard; and we can be too hard. Your task is to be just hard enough. Too hard, and you become what we once were. The Scyphons, you see, did us a favor, by peeling the rotten onion that is Homo Sapiens. You,” he said, looking to me. “Tell me why the Impact has been of service to us.”

I looked from squaddie to squaddie, hoping to be saved. No such luck. “Because,” I stammered, “because it gave us incentive?”

“No! Are you asking me a fucking question?” His words carried the force of a slap. I flinched. “Vague answers are a protective cloak for the mentally impoverished. Another. . . You.”

“Um, there were twenty billion people, and only enough food for ten.”

“Incorrect! Food was plentiful. It was simply wasted. Those problems are overcome by systematic restructuring. Another — you!”

“Uhm, because . . .”

“Yes . . .”

“Well, you see . . .”

“Out with it!”

“Th-the onion was rotten?”

“Good Christ! No!”

I decided to reclaim my pride. “Sergeant,” I ventured, swallowing hard as my lone voice echoed across the parade square. He whipped around to face me. Don’t choke. “If I may — it’s because it gave us the opportunity to start again. Which we did not deserve, but received anyway.”

When Petty smiled, white teeth and white eyes against his ebony face, you knew you were in trouble. “Very good. Someone’s been paying attention. Continue, Recruit. What did we do with our second chance?”

Crap. I’d just exhausted my knowledge on the subject. Anything else I was getting ready to say would be (correctly) seen as floundering. I tried anyway.

“We were able to avoid the mistakes of the past, because. . . Because their beliefs were gone, also. We could make our own. And we chose differently.”

“Yes. Yes!” He clapped his hands together, and actually smiled. “We did. We grow our cities, ladies and gentlemen, we grow our ships. Our lives are the dreams — the fantasies — of bygone eras. We chose again, and we chose well. Now, where was I . . .”

My eyes flitted to the window as I tuned out Petty. Thank the Gods I’d given him the ‘right’ answer. I thought of my hovel, all the hovels of fibreplastic, the people in the muck. Oh yeah, tons had changed. And nothing.

Beyond the rows of quonsets a new transport was landing, a dark shape silhouetted against the golden rays and violet clouds of the western North American sunset. The air beneath its twin VTOL jets rippled and shimmered in the heat of exhaust. The moment it landed the landing doors hissed open and a swarm of troops unloaded: no recruits these, resplendent in dark crimson Ce-Pod jackets of a model I had not even seen. During training, Petty had warned us, we would only be exposed to the most basic hardware. We would not be trusted with the glory that was the Ce-Pod suit until we were bona-fide soldiers of the Global Armed Forces.

“Recruit!” yelled Petty, and I realized he was screaming at me. “Answer the question.”

“The question?” I dared not ask him to repeat it.

“The question.”

I froze. Guessed. “An — an honorable death?”

Petty’s face melted into a frown. “If that is what your squad is serving for breakfast, Recruit, I shudder to think what you will serve for lunch. Report for latrine duty. Dismissed!”

***

Petty hadn’t lied. We worked for him until our skin peeled, until our heels were tempered by blister upon blister, our eyes were made red and irritated from sleep deprivation, and our bodies could muster the strength to fight on a world 1.3 gravities our own, or the dexterity to fight on a world 0.5 gravities our own, or the patience and discipline to keep formation in EVA maneuvers without panicking and floating off into space. We were worked until the absence of pain in some part of our body seemed amiss, until our hands cramped and shook with the weight of our extra-heavy training weapons, until the Ce-Pod trainer suits seemed like a second skin, and when you were out of it you began to feel unnatural, like your normal skin wasn’t your own.

Eighty percent of us graduated, I imagine because GAF is desperate for warm bodies, and only the brutally incompetent washed out.

My squaddies and I crowded the display screen the day the results came out. We’d grown close, but we’d be leaving each other just as soon. A shout as Park saw she got Space Ops. A hoot and whoop as Mendez and Wang both got Intel. Then there was me.

PVT AKHIL VINASHRADI; GAF-10 [GROUND ASSAULT]

Well, that was that.

“Shit, Vinny,” said Mendez.

GAF-10 did things the old fashioned way: on foot, gun in hand, over the top. No walkers. No mechanized support. Nothing with even a whiff of anything electronic, which the Scyphons rendered as useful as a bag of compost. The only thing between us and their death rays would be sound, tactical squad-based thinking, and a two-inch thick slab of ceramo-laminate covering the vital areas.

Not a thrilling prospect.

Apparently my maths and abstract reasoning scores were below-average for GAF-9, Atmospheric Ops, for GAF-8, Space Ops, for GAF-7, Logistics, GAF-6, Intelligence, or even GAF-5, Coastal. GAF-5 was everybody’s dream, of course: all the pay of ground assault, all the leisure of Earth-side patrol boats on azure, Pacific waters. I scored too highly on initiative, too highly on tactical competency, too highly on psychological fortitude. Too bad for me.

In short, I was perfect for the meat grinder.

To Mendez, I said “Prime rib.”

***

I received a forty-eight hour pass and an open-ended ticket to the hyperloop before shipping out for advanced training at Ceres Station. One-way ticket from Earth to L-5; say your goodbyes when you can. Just enough time to return to Kolkata — to nonstop motion, to air laden heavy with a thousand smells, putrid and inviting both, to humidity and heat that drowned the lungs.

The transport touched down at night. I wondered, as I traveled on foot along dirty streets in hard neon light, under the yawning chasms between the vertical farms, through the beggars and riff-raff and the street vendors, was the city always so? What had it been like before it had been rebuilt? Like any city that hadn’t been partly underground — the Van-Seattle Ring had fared the best — it had simply ceased to exist for a time.

Home remained a nondescript place, a hovel in a field of hovels, a street in a maze of streets where little boys and girls ran barefoot even in the dark, and men sat in chairs playing backgammon and smoking savory things under yellow lanterns, unperturbed by the tidal wave of insects. The air smelled of mud, of palm, of cooking oil, of unwashed bodies, of thick warm night.

I almost did not recognize the place. In the six months I’d been gone, Nikhila had repainted it red, with Nithum’s help. I knocked and waited for the door to creak open.

I had expected to see the face of a child, but it was the face of a boy becoming a young man. Or a boy who had aged through that most important year, when his face lengthens and his jaw becomes a little bit strong, his eyes sharp and keen. His smile immediately brought tears to my eyes — he said nothing, nor did I, as he grabbed hold of me. His strength surprised me.

“Mother says I’m not a little boy any longer,” said Nithum as he released me, surprising me with his articulation.

I tousled his short black hair. “Not quite, I’m afraid. But only a little while longer.”

Nikhila appeared behind him. Her face had become harder, but like her son she illuminated the small room with her smile. She sobbed as she embraced me, burying her face in my fatigues. I had tricked myself into thinking my only family was not so far away, when my datapad provided a continual video link to be used at our leisure. But being here made it too clear how much I had valued and missed the scents of the house, their touch, the clear and present sensation of a voice speaking next to you, low and soft in dim light, instead of through a screen.

We had tea and talked. They were in awe at the final stages of training, the Ce-Pod suits, large-scale maneuvers. Nithum bombarded me with a continual stream of questions: what was it like to fight? To be in a war? To be a soldier?

“I’m not in a war yet,” I said, chuckling. “I’m barely a soldier yet. But . . .” I withdrew the credit disk from my pocket. “This will cover everything.”

“For how long?” asked Nikhila, concern in her brow. She pressed her thumb to the disk. Her eyes widened as she examined the sum.

“For as long as it takes.”

“You know I did not like you on the ships,” she said, “but this is far worse.”

“What else do you propose?” I waited silently for her response. “Nikhila, you and I agreed.”

She bit her lip and sipped her tea, keeping her eyes firmly on the table. I banged the table sharply, surprising myself. The cups and saucers rattled and Nithum jumped a bit. “Do you think I wish to leave? Do you?”

All she said was, “Never do that. You must be calm.”

“This is serious, Nikhila.”

“I think you could have found another way.”

“Oh no,” I said, rising, shaking my finger. “We agreed.”

“Agreed?” she said, aghast. “Agreed? I never agreed. You went and did it.”

“You don’t want to be in the lottery? Is that it?”

“It’s still a tiny chance. It’s no guarantee.”

“Better that nothing!” I shouted.

Nithum remained stone faced, but I could see his chin puckering.

Nikhila quietly said, “You have to listen to me. To what I think. That’s the price.”

“But I can’t back out now!” Outside, a dog barked and some men yelled and laughed loudly.

“The law says so?” asked Nikhila. “Or you say so?”

“The law,” I said, but also thinking, Because I say so. “You’ll have a home, Nikhila, a home for the two of you. And when you marry, so much the better.”

“Who says I’d do such a thing?”

“All the more reason to accept this.”

We went on to sip tea in silence. Calm descended. Eventually Nithum seemed satisfied things were not spinning out of control between the only adults in his life.

He asked, “When you become an officer, will you be paid even more handsomely?”

“Yes,” I said. “Very. And it will all be for you.” I did not try to explain to Nithum that a commission would be a wild fantasy for one such as me.

“And then you will lead.”

“Yes, I will.”

“Like Shah Jahan?”

I chuckled. “Probably not, I’m sad to say.”

“So. . . more like GI Joe.”

I nodded, gripping his shoulder and giving him a little shake. He laughed.

“Do you know yet where you will go?” asked Nikhila.

“Probably Kenya. Maybe one of the other colonies.”

“Doesn’t it take years to go there? And for us to talk to you?” asked Nithum.

“To go there, sure. But not to talk. We use a special thing called a tachyonic anti-telephone.”

“That sounds stupid,” said the boy.

“We call it the Tach. And we can’t send much information. It sort of. . . Could break the universe, I guess you can say. So we have to be careful. We can only send little bits of information.”

“The news says Kenya is where the most fighting happens,” said Nithum. “Is it true they used to give the soldiers big robots and metal power armor?”

“Yes, but they didn’t work well enough. The Scyphons can do strange things to machines and electronics, and people would get stuck inside and not be able to move. So now they give us suits that are very light and strong and protect most of our bodies. The good part is that it’s forced us to think creatively to solve our problems. . . And we are very fast, very light on our feet. The Scyphons are always a lot slower than we are.”

A shadow passed over Nithum’s face, as if the boy remembered for a moment that soldiers really did have to kill, really might have to die. “They could kill you,” he said. It was not a question.

“I’ll be careful.”

“People say there’s no such thing in this war. That we are going to lose no matter what, and then we won’t be here anymore.” He studied my face in the moment of silence, trying to assess whether what I was about to say would be a convenient lie, told by a reassuring adult, or an actual truth. “Uncle, is that true?”

Nikhila stood and flipped the switch for the ceiling fan. It creaked to life and distributed a cool breeze around the room. I sipped my tea, unsure of how to answer. I wanted not to have to answer.

I said, “I don’t think we have come so far, and survived so much, and learned so much to be so easily overcome now. Don’t you agree?”

Nithum smiled, nodding, satisfied. Nikhila did not look at me. She would know I was lying. She always did.

***

“So that was it?”

“Pretty much. Said our goodbyes pretending we weren’t. Too brief. Too difficult. It’s a blur, just a melange of feeling. I remember most clearly the ship. Couldn’t see it, just the absence of stars. Getting hustled everywhere like cattle. And once the ship was spun up full, Tau Condition Nill, thinking a lot about staying young while everyone gets old and dies.. . What was it like for you, leaving?”

“It’s you we’re talking about.”

“Humour me, Dawson.”

“I just got drunk. Called my ex-girlfriend, told her to go screw herself. Kind of pathetic.”

Next Chapter: 5. A Good Death