The Year's Top Hard Science Fiction Stories 2 by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: AudioText
Published: 2018-12-21T00:00:00+00:00

“In your own words, Sergeant. Take your time.”

We killed children. We killed children, and we lost Silano, and I don’t know why. And I don’t know if you do either.

But of course, that would involve taking Major Emma Rossiter at her word.

“Did the child . . .?” Metzinger had already tubed Garin’s prize by the time Asante had reboarded the sub. Garin, of course, had no idea what his body had been doing. Metzinger had not encouraged discussion.

That was okay. Nobody was really in the mood anyhow.

“I’m sorry. She didn’t make it.” Rossiter waits for what she probably regards as a respectful moment. “If we could focus on the subject at hand . . .”

“It was a shitstorm,” Asante says. “Sir.”

“We gathered that.” The Major musters a sympathetic smile. “We were hoping you could provide more in the way of details.”

“You must have the logs.”

“Those are numbers, Sergeant. Pixels. You are uniquely—if accidentally—in a position to give us more than that.”

“I never even got below decks.”

Rossiter seems to relax a little. “Still. This is the first time one of you has been debooted in mid-game, and it’s obviously not the kind of thing we want to risk repeating. Maddox is already working on ways to make the toggle more robust. In the meantime, your perspective could be useful in helping to ensure this doesn’t happen again.”

“My perspective, sir, is that those forces did not warrant our particular skill set.”

“We’re more interested in your experiences regarding the deboot, Sergeant. Was there a sense of disorientation, for example? Any visual artifacts in BUD?”

Asante stands with his hands behind his back—good gripping bad—and says nothing.

“Very well.” Rossiter’s smile turns grim. “Let’s talk about your perspective, then. Do you think regular forces would have been sufficient? Do you have a sense of the potential losses incurred if we’d sent, say, WestHem marines?”

“They appeared to be refugees, sir. They didn’t pose—”

“One hundred percent, Sergeant. We would have lost everyone.”

Asante says nothing.

“Unaugged soldiers wouldn’t even have made it off the gyland before it went up. Even if they had, the p-wave would’ve been fatal if you hadn’t greatly increased your rate of descent. Do you think regular forces would have made that call? Seen what was coming, run the numbers, improvised a strategy to get below the kill zone in less time than it would take to shout a command?”

“We killed children.” It’s barely more than a whisper.

“Collateral damage is an unfortunate but inevitable—”

“We targeted children.”

“Ah.”

Rossiter plays with her tacpad: tap tap tap, swipe.

“These children,” she says at last. “Were they armed?”

“I do not believe so, sir.”

“Were they naked?”

“Sir?”

“Could you be certain they weren’t carrying concealed weapons? Maybe even a remote trigger for a thousand kilograms of CL-20?”

“They were—sir, they couldn’t have been more than seven or eight.”

“I shouldn’t have to tell you about child soldiers, Sergeant. They’ve been a fact of life for centuries, especially in your particular—at any rate. Just out of interest, how young would someone have to be before you’d rule them out as a potential threat?”

“I don’t know, sir.

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