Amasia Read online

  “We Amasians saw plenty of fighting down here on Lemuria, lieutenant,” the captain snaps defensively, “before even one offworld division arrived.”

  “You fought bravely and well, then and now,” the lieutenant lies. ‘Except that you, personally, have never once seen combat. You fucking desk jockey.’

  “Haig’s case is closed. I’m filing my report today.”

  “With due respect, major. I’m just saying about Haig what the doctors tell us, what we didn’t know before. There was a command memo about it last month, from General Lee Jin, sir. He’s the top doctor in the whole Alliance. Head of the Medical Corps. He said…”

  “I don’t give an arctic owl’s hoot what some hinterworld jape says! I debriefed Haig this morning. He couldn’t even tell me what happened to the other men in the patrol. He was incoherent. Completely incoherent! Messed up my best AAR to HQ, I don’t mind telling you.”

  “I’m sorry about that, sir. Yet I ask you to reconsider. He’s not doing himself or us any good up here at the black, not in his condition. I’m not sure he’s even fully aware of it. But even if he doesn’t know it, we can help him.”

  “Appeal denied! What would other fighters in his company, why across the whole battalion, say if I permit special treatment of a coward who pisses himself whenever he dips his toe in DT?”

  “Please major, I’ll vouch for him.”

  “No! Denied, denied, and thrice denied! In fact, you send Haig out with a scout mission tonight. That’ll cure him, one way or the other. You can lead the patrol yourself, lieutenant. You can coddle him all you want out there in the Yue ming.”

  “Fine, sir.”

  “Report to me directly on his performance. I’ll also be monitoring yours. I have a field report written up that you can be sure they’ll pay very close attention to at Divisional HQ.”

  “Yes major.”

  The patrol goes out. Jedidiah comes back again, but the lieutenant doesn’t. An errant mortar shell lands on top of him. It doesn’t even leave a mist behind on the dune’s far slope. He’s just gone. Jedidiah’s shaking and constant starts and jumps at small noises are even worse after that.

  Three days later, Major Zhang Xianzhong says a stiff goodbye to 1st Company, 1st Battalion of Argos 7th Assault, and departs to rejoin Xian Division. He’s going back to a camp just outside New Beijing. Great food. Beautiful women. Exciting place for a weekend leave. Best damn locale on Lemuria. It’s also his hometown.

  The general responsible for drafting reports on the Intra Divisional Officer Training and Exchange Program is glad to see the back of the little martinet, but doesn’t want any argy bargy with the Terracottas or HQ over his performance. He knows New Beijing is oversensitive about the bad reputation of locally recruited and trained officers. On the whole, he actually thinks that “they’re quite a decent lot, doing a credible job under very hard conditions.” Just not in this case.

  Still, he takes the easy road and gives Zhang a grade of Outstanding. He adds: “Major Xianzhong shows high initiative and a real capacity for command.” Having moved the problem off his desk to someone else’s, the general goes down to Officers’ Country for a hot meal and cold beer. He heads back to his quarters for a stiffer drink. After all, he has done his duty on the day. Right? Promoted inside his old division, Colonel Zhang Xianzhong spends a week of well earned furlough and accumulated leave relaxing on his brother’s thriving farm on the south Thalassan coast. His older sibling recently switched to growing white roses, and is prospering from that narrow trade as well as broad revival of the local economy. Zhang marvels at the endless greenhouses and perfumed air. Then he heads north to New Beijing to report for duty as the Terracotta’s morale officer.

  ***

  Back in the line, it’s an open question whether Jedidiah will make it as a front soldier. He might be one of those unfortunates who suffers deep trauma after just his first time under fire, not from prolonged exposure to battle stress that breaks down even the toughest men over time. This kind of thing happens a lot more than senior medical officers on Amasia want to officially admit. After all, ACU needs soldiers in the line, not in recovery wards. Lee Jin has been trying to shake the system up, but he can’t be everywhere and resistance is both deep and broad.

  It’s not just frontline doctors who are under pressure from senior colleagues in the hinter zones, told not to certify so many frontline fighters as “traumatized.” It’s a common attitude that echoes in refusals of psych care by troops themselves. Male soldiers, in particular, try to hide their battle trauma. Usually, not very well.

  “Just give me something for the headaches, will ya Doc? Then I’ll be fine.”

  “Why’s my hand shakin’? Listen sweetie, I just had too much to drink last night.”

  “Well of course I jumped. That was really loud. You jumped, too. I saw you.”

  “Yeah, sure I work a lot of hours. There’s a war on, and I’m an officer. I have responsibilities. No, I’m not hiding out in my work. You could work a little harder, too. We’re losing, you know.”

  “No, I can’t sit still. I never could. Used to fidget all the time as a kid, my teachers all said. It’s just how I’m wired. No big deal.”

  “I thought I saw Hiro again last night. You never met Hiro? Good buddy of mine. Killed by a sniper. Some of these dreams just seem so real…”

  “No, I don’t want to talk about what happened to Ingrid. None of your business, doc. Change the subject or I’m leaving.”

  “I don’t remember anything. No, I don’t remember what happened out there. Try hypnosis? Hmm … nah, I don’t think so.”

  “No, I’m not avoiding you, nurse. Been real busy, that’s all.”

  “Can’t sleep, doc. How long? … hmmm, dunno. Maybe a week now?”

  “Numb? Yeah, sure I feel numb. Don’t you? Doesn’t everybody? Every grunt I know is either numb or stoned. Or dumb and dead.”

  “What will I do after the war? Are you kidding? I can’t think past next month. I won’t be around after the war anyway, so what’s the point?”

  “Sorry I blew up at ya. Not your fault. You’re doing your best, I suppose. No, I don’t know why I’m always so pissed. Fuck off!”

  It’s four days since Jedidiah made it back from his second patrol, the one that vapored his lieutenant and any hope he might recover. He squats in a narrow two man slit on routine duty, swallowed by fear of going back out again tonight. Or tomorrow night or the one after that. He’s shaking from four explosions that went off 150 meters away less than five minutes ago. He’s not sure where the shells came from. He ducked low, instinctively cowering the second he heard incoming whistles of ceramic sabot tearing the chill night air, ready to spill their loads.

  A thick, colorless fog hangs over the Yue ming this dawn, mixing with smoke drifting over his slit from four fresh craters made by heavy mortars. The predawn mist sinks and creeps until he’s engulfed in a funeral shroud. It conceals odd, gray shapes strewn over a hollowed landscape. If he raises his HUD and looks with his naked eyes, mysterious forms will appear and disappear under obscuring, wispy vapors in an illusion of malicious movement. It’s just the furtive fog sneaking through the wreckage of war on a dank morning. Yet it scares him, badly.

  Behind him the mist seems less thick. He chances a pop-up-and-peek. Some way back, how far he can’t tell, he makes out little figurines parting the ground hugging cloud as they pass through. Wisps of tattered mist and dirty white, smoky sheets trail from their bobbing heads and limbs. The stick people are all walking fast rather than running. They stop, stoop and start off again, in half crouches and evenly spaced pairs. ‘Carrying something? What? Stretcher bearers!’

  Seven pairs of bearers are hurrying past the burning edge of his farthest vision, shuttling wounded in stokes basket shells. They’re carrying them from fresh, still smoking craters to a parked convoy of ground vehicles waiting impatiently to flee back to triage. He can make out the ‘antlers’ on the ambulances, the spring latches wh
ere the bearers will hook up the litters. ‘Why aren’t they using Trauma Pods? It’ll take much too long to run our people back this way. It isn’t right!’ His sudden, unexpectedly forceful opinion surprises him. He’s not sure where all the anger is coming from. His hand shakes. ‘It always does these days, ever since…’

  The fog shifts in a dense swirl. Vision clears. Jedidiah sees a red-and-black oval form emerge through the wisps, larger and thicker than the stick people. It’s a downed Trauma Pod, a smoking shambles 160 meters from his slit. He watches a headless Robobear spinning haplessly on its remaining track, beside the burning Pod. A cluster of long, silver effectors are reaching and straining out the bay door, clawing at the ramp. It looks like a metal squid is trying to get out but something awful has its jaws clamped around its lower half.

  Another Pod is a total ruin 50 meters farther back. While power gliding down to pick up wounded, three Pods were targeted by a RIK Forward Observer. He cruelly let them load up before calling in a quick salvo of low trajectory mortars. The shells zeroed precisely on the landing site and blew apart everything within a 100 meter radius, easily taking out the Pods. Acrid black smoke pours from the third stricken Pod. Its loading door and ramp are both blown off, lying somewhere under ground hugging yellow fog. Through a jagged hole, Jedidiah sees an inert figure strapped to a short table that leans at an unnaturally odd angle to the floor. He’s horrified to see giant metal arms flailing toward the wounded man. A waking nightmare overcomes him. He panics, thinking that in this ghastly miasma realm the Pod arms are trying to kill, not save the man. He ducks and curls to the bottom of his fighting hole, terrified to watch but too afraid to either stay or go.

  With his head firmly defensively clenched between his knees, Jedidiah never sees the REMOTE use its last three undamaged effectors to work on its last ever patient, injecting lifesaving suspensor into a ripped up, dying man abandoned by the frightened medics. Misses that it jams its titanium cutter into flaring circuitry above the broken man and table, circling around on a warped interior rail to meet an intense electrical fire. It’s trying to reach the power source and cut it off. He never sees the REMOTE fail to grasp the breaker and decide instead to sit on top of the white hot flames until they extinguish. Doesn’t watch it shield its tender human charge until the fire suffocates, over long minutes of agony as intense heat bores deep into its delicate silicon and tantalum guts.

  The fire sears REMOTE in its vitals, until it wants to scream. Jedidiah never sees it hold steady, impaled by the fire as white-blue flames cut fatally deep into its unprotected undersides, into semi biologic memories and brain, until it expires along with the intense heat. He doesn’t witness it hold place unto death, doing its duty like the good soldier it is, sacrificing itself for the good of a stranger lying unmoving in torn and singed and punctured blues. REMOTE saves the last patient committed to its care from engulfment by flame, from being burned and cooked alive while insensible from suspend. It doesn’t hesitate. It gives up its silvery, silicon spirit to whatever God of Perfect Circuitry AIs worship, goes to whatever heaven or hell of dead vacuum tubes and old transistors, and circuit boards and biologic fluids and final reward, awaits all advanced AIs who serve their human makers with loyalty, integrity, sacrifice and courage.

  Jedidiah never sees any of that. But others do, and so the story spreads. First among the medics, then up-and-down the line and back again, racing up coms and supply trenches. It courses down buried maglevs out to hinter zones and the cities, then offworld. An official investigation is ordered by Cybersurgical Command. It leads to the usual controversy among distant biophilosophers and other human chauvinists who sputter and spit contempt, but it catches the public imagination.

  Lee Jin heads the charge, pointing out that military citations have been given to many creatures besides humans. To rescue and medical dogs, mine hunting dolphins, supply horses and elephants who made the most difficult runs, to ship’s cats and trench cats for gallant ratting, to carrier pigeons who reported on battles or carried vital orders under fire. Many more. So why not a highly intelligent and devoted AI who saved many lives, the last one by sacrificing its own?

  There’s worry at the highest levels of government on Kars, and especially in the Hornet’s Nest on Caspia, that any award for ‘courage’ to an AI bot will be ill received by human fighters. General Gaspard Leclerc is especially cutting and sarcastic, writing directly to Lee. The concern is misplaced. The idea of a Golden Scalpel for med bots is highly popular among the troops, who love the Pods and Robobears and REMOTES. Even more support comes from military families.

  The ACU caves to Lee’s demand and the public’s pressure, and issues its first battle citation to an AI Assist. It reads: “Golden Scalpel. For meritorious courage, and self-sacrifice, for most loyal performance of duty under fire while grievously wounded by enemy action and intentions.” The medal Lee commissions reads on one side: ‘For Conspicuous Gallantry.’ The other side says: ‘We Also Serve.’ Lee hangs it over his desk in a golden frame. He keeps the dead REMOTE’s scorched, titanium cutter in an old Baku scotch box in his quarters. He’ll embed REMOTE’s scored twin blades in a medical memorial that he promises himself ‘I’ll damn well see built after the war.’ It’ll be a special one, dedicated to all AI surgical assistants and Pods, and Robobears and Diagnosticians, serving in Alliance Medical Corps.

  He makes sure that all doctors and nurses and orderlies and REMOTEs and medical bots are told about the citation and the award. Then he vids Susannah, to tell her that he’ll be returning to Amasia soon. The one thing he can’t figure out is the last, quirky message REMOTE etched on its silicon circuitry with a final, metallic sigh. ‘I only wish they’d let me try open heart surgery, just once. I know I could’ve done it, but what the hell ya gonna do? Doctors’ egos, right?’

  Cramp

  They look for two weeks, every time a new patrol goes into Dark Territory. It’s not priority. It’s more curiosity. Still, they scan with IFF detectors. They peer under broken bits of armtraks as they pass by, in two-by-two scoot formation. Or maybe it’s a split open Earthworm they search for a helmet or silent maser. They look everywhere they think the Lost Patrol went. They never find the bodies.

  Quick sand?

  Maybe jackals?

  Was it rats?

  Carrion birds?

  If so, where are all the eaten out utes? At least heavy jump boots should be out there still, and maybe a few gnawed bones. They looked the day after the firefight that licked flames and flares into DT, echoing over the edge of the black on the night the missing patrol went out. And the day after the day after that.

  It’s a minor mystery to those left behind. Where is the ill fated patrol that never returned and can’t be found where it was killed? How did it drift so far south that it got wiped out by friendly fire from New Meccans? If the sole survivor is to be believed about that, or anything. He smells like dribbled piss. “Stinks like a neglected baby,” the major says after he interviews him for his perfect report.

  Above all, why of all the fighters who went out that night with an experienced NCO was it ridiculous Jedidiah Haig who came crawling back, all alone, with his maser and trousers both fully loaded? How was it that the worst soldier in the company, maybe in the whole battalion, maybe in the fucking division, was the sole survivor of a scouting mission that everyone now calls the “Lost Patrol”?

  “And why the hell does he call himself Jedidiah and not Jed, like a normal bloke would? He’s just so damn, well, different! Why can’t he be more like the rest of us? Shit, he’s odd!”

  It’s because his mother always used the full name she so carefully gave him, in honor of her own father. A hoary, family patriarch who pretty much ruined and ruled her life. It doesn’t fit the slightly built boy she raised, but it sticks to him as she stuck with her undeserving father. Loyalty runs deep in Jedidiah’s family, if maybe assertiveness and boldness and self-confidence are lacking. He never tells anyone in his squad or platoon or comp
any the reason why he keeps the full name. Insists on it. He knows they’d only laugh and call him a momma’s boy.

  No one who knows him understands how he made it back to the line a day and a night later, lone man out of ten missing in the Lost Patrol. Some of them more experienced and all of them, even the rawest rookie, everyone agrees, much better soldiers than sorry, absurd Jedidiah Haig. “Lucky bastard,” is the consensus view. Though no one in Jedidiah’s company thought of him as lucky before. In combat, where all other explanations fail, “luck” is the tale of last resort.

  Surviving alone makes him more different and unlikeable inside his squad and platoon. They hate that his maser always seems to jam and that his HUD malfunctions. He’s sure it does, even though the tek corporal who looks it over reluctantly and skeptically says that it works fine, loud enough for a dozen other fighters to hear and after just a couple of mikes of tinkering. “See? It’s just some dirt in the visor. Clean it better next time, private. Now get back to your post.”

  Jedidiah cleans and cleans. Yet it never seems quite right to him. At night, when he pulls guard duty in a perimeter slit, his malfunctioning HUD shows red apparitions that make him jump in alarm even when everyone around stays calm. Three times in two weeks he fires his maser into the dark, after a red ghost refuses to answer his challenge. Or his malfunctioning HUD displays nothing at all, which is worse and far more frightening. It wrecks his nerves. Especially the night an old hand in the next slit tenses and hand signals in frantic frustration, then loudly whispers: ‘Get down, you fool! Enemy patrol!’ After the probers move off, chased away by platoon harassing fire, his slit partner and other squad mates look over at Jedidiah with angry disgust and sadsack disdain. His disconnection from them all, over his HUD and in person, is a terrible drag on their nerves, too.