Tombstone (2 page)

My suit’s AI controlled my internal climate perfectly, but I
was still sweating.  I could feel the slickness of my arms sliding against the
cool metal sleeves of my armor.  I was a little lightheaded – I still wasn’t
used to the oxygen-rich mix my suit fed me during combat operations.  We’d used
it a few times in training, but I think I was a little sensitive to it, and it
was taking me longer to adapt completely.  The suit had given me the standard
pre-battle stimulants which, combined with my own adrenalin, really had me on
edge.

We’d just reached the ridgeline, and my com started
beeping.  It wasn’t any of our communications; it was something else my AI
picked up.  I was just about to report it to Corporal Clark when his voice came
through.  “Everybody down.”  He was in control, as always, but his tone was
excited, urgent.  “Now!”

My body responded to his command before my conscious mind
had processed it.  I’ll never know for sure, but I’d wager the stimulants they
give us before battle saved my life that day, because an instant later the spot
where I was standing was raked with fire.  I was behind a spiny rock
outcropping, maybe two-thirds of a meter high…just enough to duck behind if I
lay very flat.

I was the lowest rung on the chain of command, so I didn’t
have a data feed on the rest of the platoon or squad, but I could tell from the
chatter on the com that we had some people hit.  Getting shot on Tombstone was
especially bad, because if the breach was more than your suit’s auto-repair
system could handle you were as good as dead.  A scratch on the arm could be fatal.

The armor does have a significant self-repair capacity.  The
AI will respond to any breach in a hostile environment by increasing the air
pressure to keep toxic atmosphere from leaking into the suit.  The climate
control adjusts, attempting to minimize the effects of any excess heat or
cold.  While these systems are keeping the Marine alive, at least for a few
seconds, the suit deploys nano-bots to attempt to patch any breach with
self-expanding adhesive polymer.  It is an extremely workable system, as long
as the hole isn’t too big.

They’d laid a trap for us.  The beeping was coming from a
series of transponders they’d set along the ridge, powerful enough to send a
signal through the dense atmosphere, giving them a precise firing solution. 
Now we were caught in interlocking fields of fire – they had heavy auto-cannons
hidden in multiple locations.  It was bait and destroy instead of search and
destroy, and we were the targets.

The heavy auto-cannon rounds tore into the rock wall that
was shielding me, sending shards scattering in all directions.  My body was
pressed down against the front of my armor, an instinctive but pointless effort
to get farther away from the deadly stream of fire just over my back.  My mind
raced…what should I do?  I looked for a spot where I could get a view out over
the ground in front of the outcropping, but I couldn’t find anything.  I
couldn’t move up and fire over the ridge; I’d get cut to pieces before I got a
shot off.

I just lay there, thinking, I’m going to die here.  Six
years of training so I can come here and get killed in my first skirmish?  I
was scared for sure, but even more, I was angry at the waste of it all.  But I
couldn’t think of any way out.  I was starting to panic, to forget all the
training.  Then I heard the lieutenant’s voice on the com.

The Corps got most of its recruits in unorthodox ways, and
it had a tremendous track record of turning cutthroats and gutter rats into top
notch soldiers.  But I wager they found me in the strangest way of all.  I was
stealing from them.

I was a thief, a damned good one.  I’m two meters tall and
then some, and I look like a big clumsy oaf.  But looks can be deceiving.  I
can sneak around without anybody hearing me, and I can strip everything
valuable out of a warehouse in the time it takes a guard to finish his rounds. 

 I was only sixteen, but I had my own crew.  We had our base
in an old suburb outside Houston.  The fringe areas had been mostly abandoned
by the government, and when the police and other services went, so did the
residents…or at least most of them.  Anyone who tried to stick it out gave up
after Houston was nuked; they built New Houston about 50 klicks west of the old
city, and the fallout-contaminated exurbs surrounding the radioactive ruins sat
almost totally empty for a century.

The radiation had long since ceased to be a major hazard, at
least this far out, and the place made a great base of operations.  None of the
monitors and detection devices that were so thick in the inhabited areas.  We
hijacked freight shipments, and we raided the Cogs living around New Houston. 
Since the original city had been destroyed, New Houston didn’t have the ancient
factories and decaying slums most of the other metro areas did.  The Cogs lived
in cheap prefab housing units and tent cites set up around the big plasti-crete
and chemical plants the megacorps had built there.  They had it a little better
than those in some other cities.  There was crime, certainly, but there wasn’t
as much of an organized gang presence as in other places.  It was more a series
of company towns, and while the inhabitants lived just above sustenance levels,
they were a little more prosperous than Cogs elsewhere.  They had a bit more
material wealth, and we tried to steal it all.

We snuck into the city sometimes and stole there too.  We
always targeted the middle classes, never the rich.  Going after the upper
classes was a fool’s game.  The wealthy have power and influence; become too
much of a problem for them and your days are numbered.  But what is some
engineer going to do?

I was prosperous, at least my own version of it.  I set
myself up in a big old abandoned house.  It must have been a politician or
executive who built the place, because it was huge.  There was a big double
staircase right inside the entry and a high ceiling – at least six meters.  It
looked like the floors had been marble at one time and the walls covered with
paneling, but there were only a few bits and pieces left; the rest had been
stripped long ago by some scavenger who got there a few generations before I
did.

I’d traveled a long way to get where I was.  My father’s
name was Gregory Jax, and I have no idea what possessed him to name me Darius. 
He was a Cropper, a Cog recruited by a megacorp to work on one of the big
agricultural preserves.  The work was difficult and dangerous, but no worse
than working in one of the factories, and the farming campuses were a little
safer than the outer ghettoes of the cities.  I think he took the job because
he thought it would be better for me; at least I’d grow up away from the Gangs,
which were really bad in the Louisville slums where I was born.  My mother was
gone.  She died when I was young; I’m not really sure how.  My father couldn’t
even talk about her without getting upset, even years later.  I know her name
was Risa, but that’s about all.  I always meant to ask him to tell me more
about her, but the days went by and I never did.  Then, one day, he was gone
too, and I had no one to ask.  I was alone.

He died in an accident on the farm.  They never told me
exactly how it happened, but the machinery was mostly old and poorly
maintained, and accidents were common.  It was easier and cheaper to replace
workers than it was to inspect and maintain the equipment.  The Megacorp was
owned by the government, and they established a production quota and a budget. 
The Corporate Magnates who ran the thing got to keep whatever was left unspent,
and they weren’t going to lose sleep over a few dead or crippled Croppers. Not
as long as profits were rolling in.

I was only twelve, but I was already taller and bigger than
most of the adults, so they assigned me to take over my father’s workload.  Technically,
he still owed the corporation for transport and housing, so I had to work off
the debt.  It was all bullshit; the whole system was a scam run by the
megacorp, and no one ever got out of debt.  They just kept working on the farm
until they were too weak or hurt to continue, and then they were discharged,
which probably meant they starved to death. 

I did the work for a while, but I had no intention of
spending the rest of my life in those forsaken fields.  One of the supervisors
rode me constantly – I think he had been in some sort of quarrel with my
father, and now he took it out on me.  He was a miserable bastard, and he was
relentless.  I tried my best to put up with it, but I blamed him for my
father’s death and one day I’d had enough.  He was giving me a hard time about
nothing, and I just grabbed him and twisted his head.  His neck snapped like a
dry twig.  I can still remember the feeling of his body jerking around, then
going limp while I still held him and the hideous stench as his bowels released
in death.  It was the first time I’d ever stood up for myself, the first time
I’d ever killed anyone.

After the initial adrenalin rush, I panicked.  The other
supervisors backed away, but they were all calling frantically for security.  I
knew I’d be lucky if they gave me the formality of a trial before gassing
me…most likely they just shoot me down on sight.  So I ran.  I ran, and somehow
I got away, past the checkpoints and over the perimeter fence.

I was alone, hiding in the rugged ground east of the farm
complex, terrified, frantically trying to think of what to do.  I knew I had to
get my implant out or it would lead them right to me.  I sat for what seemed
like a long time, working up my courage.  Finally, reaching behind me, I sliced
into my back, digging for the implant.  I didn’t have a knife, but I’d found a
jagged shard of metal when I was running – probably part of a broken farm
tool.  I had no idea what I was doing, but I knew the chips were implanted in
the lower back.  I couldn’t see; I couldn’t even get a good grip on the
makeshift blade as I dug it into my back.  I gritted my teeth against the
agony, and I could feel my hands getting slick with my own blood.  I got
nauseous and almost threw up, but I managed to stay focused.  I knew I was as
good as dead with the damned implant still in me broadcasting.  I can’t
remember how long it took – it seemed like hours – but I finally found the
thing and got it out.

I lay there a long time, tears streaming down my face.  I’d
never been in so much pain.  The bottom of my shirt was soaked with blood.  I’m
going to die here, I thought.  But I finally managed to get control of myself
and think clearly for a few seconds.  I smashed the implant with a rock; it
wouldn’t be tracking me anymore.  But it would lead them here, to the last
known position it had transmitted.  So I had to move on. 

I tried to get up, but I was dizzy and it took me a while to
steady myself.  I took off my shirt and tore it into long strips, wrapping it
around me the best I could to bind the wound.  I thought about just lying there
until it was all over, but again, something inside me drove me to live.  I
staggered my way over the rocky hills in the fading light until I couldn’t take
another step…then I collapsed and passed out.

I couldn’t have gotten more than a couple klicks at most.  I
don’t know how they didn’t find me, but they didn’t.  I woke up – it must have
been hours later because the sun was high in the sky.  My back hurt like fire,
but I managed to drag myself to my feet and start heading south.  I had no idea
where I was going; south was an arbitrary decision.  I just kept stumbling on
my way, putting more kilometers between me and that damned megafarm.

I knew most water outside filtration plants was polluted,
sometimes dangerously so, but I didn’t have much choice, so I drank from the
streams I passed.  Most of them seemed OK, except for one that smelled so badly
of chemicals I passed it by.  I did my best to wash the wound every time I
reached a body of water, but it got infected anyway.  I had a few feverish days
when I was too weak to do anything, but finally it broke, and I started to feel
better.  I’d been eating what I could scavenge, but that wasn’t much.  The fear
first, and then the fever had blunted my appetite, but now I was ravenous.

I started looking around, paying attention to my
surroundings and trying, for the first time since I ran, to figure out where I
was.  I found a mag-rail line, and I decided to follow it, figuring it had to
lead somewhere.  The mag lines were huge plasti-crete structures, suspended
about five meters above the ground.  As it turned out, I had stumbled onto the
freight line serving the megafarms all over the area.  It wasn’t long before
the rail line led into the next agri-complex.  I managed to sneak in after
dark, and for the first time in my life I stole something.  That first theft
wasn’t anything of great value, just three loaves of bread.  But to me, alone,
terrified, and hungry, they were priceless.

I made my way south, following the rail line, sometimes even
sneaking onto a train and riding it to the next stop.  The line terminated in
New Houston, and by the time I got to southern Texas I was getting pretty good
at stealing.  I had found a way to survive.

Over time I got better at stealing, and I moved past just
surviving.  I put together a small team so we could hit bigger targets.  We did
pretty well for a long time by limiting our ambitions.  We stole enough to get
by comfortably, but not enough to make it worthwhile for the authorities to get
too interested.  Once in a while a few of the other guys wanted to get more
aggressive and go for some more lucrative jobs, but I always managed to keep
control.

The Marine Corps’ main training facility was just a few
klicks west of our basecamp, and it was a huge complex.  There were transports
moving in and out of there constantly carrying all sorts of supplies.  We’d
avoided targets that made us a problem for powerful people, but that wisdom
finally failed me.  I think I just gave in to the desire of the crew to ramp up
our efforts.  Caution gave way to greed, and we started intercepting their
convoys, laying in wait for them a few kilometers outside the camp gates.  We’d
hit three of them and gotten away with it – it was almost too easy.  But the
night we hit the fourth they were waiting for us.  That was the first time I’d
ever seen a soldier in powered armor.  They came out of the brush and
surrounded us.  Despite the fact that they were fully armored, they came
streaming out of the forest quickly and quietly.  I was amazed that soldiers in
such heavy gear could move so gracefully.  They worked flawlessly as a unit,
each seeming to almost predict the actions of the others.  I turned and tried
to run, hoping to make it into the heavy brush and somehow sneak away.  But the
first step I took was the last.  All I remember was the blinding flash and then
the darkness.