“Yes,” I said, “of
course
it is glory, but what happens? How do we get to
His
side, what is
He
like?”
“These are questions for our mothers, not questions for us,” Megan said angrily. “Leave it alone.”
I thought it was odd—to have remembered that moment while we waited in the Kazakh steppes for our attack. But it struck me. Megan hadn’t answered my question back then because she couldn’t. Who could? And since we hadn’t simulated the other sided of death, I began to wonder. We simulated everything else, over and over; why not the aftermath of death? How would we know how to reach His side; would there be enemies between us and Him, trying to keep us from reaching His position? Then I thought,
Maybe we didn’t simulate it because
nobody
knows what happens after death, not even men
. I didn’t know how to process the possibilities, and in the end put aside the thought because it made me uneasy.
More waiting
. After ten minutes I suspected something was wrong and after half an hour the Marines got jittery, talking
to one another in whispers. The sun peeked over the horizon and began melting the ice that had formed overnight, turning the fields ahead of us from a semisolid mass into a sea of mud. Then we heard it. Incoming plasma rounds, when they came close, sounded like someone ripping open the sky, and Megan and I shouted at the same time.
“Into the holes!”
We didn’t have time to use the hand holds. I slid into the closest shaft feet first, and fell almost thirty feet straight down, pressing my knees against each concrete wall so that the ceramic of my armor would slow me. The shaft was tight, with barely enough room for my shoulders, and Megan came down on top, her weight pushing down until my legs locked against the walls. I braced myself and waited for the Marines to land on top of her, but it didn’t happen.
Something made me laugh. The temperature on my heads-up climbed and the low oxygen warning light blinked on, but the sensation of being in the middle of it all, of the realization that in a moment it could all be over, brought happiness. For the moment it didn’t matter that we might not know what it was like to die—to transit into His house. A plasma strike would be quick and I’d find out for sure. For myself. The rounds exploding overhead ripped the air from our hole so that as I waited for my emergency oxygen valve to open, it felt as though I would suffocate, and I prayed for an honorable exit, but soon the small tank hissed and filled my suit with air.
The booming of plasma sent me into a place of semi-awareness, where the walls melted to be replaced by the faces of my sisters, writhing in agony next to me as they burned and fused and I cursed them for looking so scared,
which made me laugh all the harder until I wanted to choke them. But they stayed out of reach. The blasts vibrated everything to the point where my jaw refused to clench no matter how hard I tried, teeth rattling against each other as if shivering. The temperature inched higher. Our indicator readouts had been designed to shift from blue, to green, to yellow, and then to red—when the heat was within fifty degrees of damaging armor systems—and mine had gone red some time ago, making me wonder how Megan was doing since she was that much closer to the barrage, closer to glory.
I realized it stopped when all of a sudden I heard my own laughter, echoing inside the helmet. Megan began climbing. We made it to the top and stepped onto a sheet of glass, the ground crunching under our feet as clouds of steam shot from the cracks, and a pair of Marines climbed from the shaft next to us. The rest of them were gone, transformed into black lumps. Our headsets crackled to life and a single word blared over the net three times.
“Zebra, zebra, zebra.”
Megan and I glanced at each other. Around us lay the ruined hulks of APCs, most of the closest ones cracked open and sending columns of smoke skyward as they burned. We slung our carbines and motioned for the remaining Marines to follow as we climbed from one crater to the next, moving westward as quickly as we could, in retreat. The hair on my neck stood up, skin tingling.
The Russians were on their way. You couldn’t see them yet, or hear them, but you felt them and knew it had gone horribly wrong because “zebra” was a retreat code.
The route brought us to the rally point outside Keriz, where we sat, and where a flood of memories entered my mind along with exhaustion.
Our first combat advisor had a kind of look, like his soul had already left his body, an empty shell similar to the orphans I had seen in Tashkent on my push up from Iran, children whom the world had changed so they looked only at their feet. He sensed things. I never forgot the first time the man stared at me, with eyes that had stopped recognizing anything of this world, and if anyone knew what happened after death, I realized later, it would have been him. I should have asked. Among all men, this one we considered a brother, someone who understood what it meant to kill and how to do it, not a white coat, but a guide who had been tasked to show us the way north because he spoke Russian. Sisters that came after us spoke a hundred languages and had local geography vision-imprinted in their memories, but we didn’t. We had only this broken human. On his last day of life, we all sat in the back of an APC, in one of the large main compartments surrounded by flechette hoppers and boxes of grenade magazines, waiting for the orders to hit Shymkent prior to pushing northward.
“You have been in more than one war?” someone asked him. When he nodded, Megan and I scooted forward on our seats. “We have not. This is our first one, I mean. It is good that you will be with us.”
He leaned against a bulkhead and looked at the ceiling. “Why?”
“Because prior to this,” said Megan, “in training, we only killed convicts and the insane. After the landing in
Bandar, on the push north from Iran, they all ran away and it didn’t feel like combat, like it wasn’t a
real
war; those men almost never returned fire.”
“That’s great,” he said. “I’m so glad that you at least have experience with killing the mentally ill.”
“I agree,” I said. “It was an excellent training method.”
When the APC ground to a halt, we slid from the rear hatch and followed him into ruins, a playground of tactical possibilities. The suburbs of Shymkent had been leveled. Fields of concrete rubble lay in a jagged landscape that seemed impassable but to us the area spoke of prospects, and Megan and I crouched as we followed the man through the wreckage, tracing the movement of our sisters on either side. Thousands of us filtered silently through the city.
Our advisor held up his hand and the word passed instantly to hold in place, drop to the ground. It went wrong a moment later. The Russians had placed plasma mines in the rubble, waiting for us to get within range, and when the man turned to run, explosions lit up the fields, blinded me for a split-second before my goggles frosted over. A pocket in the rubble protected Megan and me from the blast, but when it ended we heard nothing. I peered out. The blackened hulks of our sisters littered the concrete, and the ones closest to the plasma mine had fused to the soil, but there was no sign of our advisor. He had vaporized. Megan and I moved forward with the remaining survivors and attacked. I leapt into an enemy hole and flechetted the closest Russians, grabbing one who tried to run so that his helmet ring cracked when I snapped his neck. I twisted it further. Megan laughed with me and we pushed forward.
I didn’t need tranq tabs back then. But after that initial battle, when it was over and we all sat amidst the concrete blocks to eat, I cried. It seemed strange. There was no sadness, just some need to release tears as if my eyes had become a kind of safety valve for an unfamiliar pressure in my chest.
And while we sat there now, near Keriz after our retreat, I saw myself in them—in the new ones, the replacements who had just survived their first battles only to run. Megan saw it too. Some of them took off their helmets, then their vision hoods with goggles, and showed their faces, which just a day ago had looked fresh but which now showed dirt and burn marks, their eyes empty so that you would have thought they had been fashioned from black glass, lifeless.
“Where is the Second Division?” Megan asked. “Our reinforcements?”
I shook my head. She didn’t really expect an answer, but I gave one anyway. “I don’t know. I worry more about what will happen next; the Russians might come before we can load into our own vehicles.”
You still felt the Russians, out there. The horizon to our east had turned a reddish brown with the exhaust and dust from their vehicles, and I had taken off my helmet to feel the mild chill of a windy spring morning and to hear the enemy’s vehicles if they got close enough. We had run all the way to the rally point. At least a hundred of our APCs were moving in from the west, reserve vehicles from Keriz that the Marines and Foreign Legion had sent to pull us back to a defensive line, and now it was a race to see who would get to us first—our forces or theirs.
Ten minutes later, we heard our rescue vehicles. It took
some time, but eventually they sped into our position and began the process of loading the wounded. I put on my helmet. Megan looked at me as though it were odd, which it was; there was no need for a helmet inside the APC, but I didn’t want her to see me cry or suspect what I already knew—that I was crumbling faster than anyone realized.
I cried because another thought had occurred to me: I didn’t want to disappear like our first advisor had. As if he never existed.
Even the bouncing motion of the APC—my head slapping against the ceramic bulkhead—couldn’t pull me from the hallucination. The real world didn’t exist. It took Megan some time to reach me, and I didn’t notice her efforts until she had removed my helmet and poured a packet of water over my head.
“Come back,” she said, crying.
I stroked her cheek. “I’m here.”
“Where do you go?”
“Everywhere,” I said. “And nowhere. Sometimes it’s like being in darkness until something brings me back. Other times I walk through our past, unable to change anything.”
Megan grabbed my hand and squeezed it. “Please stay with me. We still have today.”
“Death and faith.”
We had to stop talking when the whine of the turbines rose. The vehicle angled upward, climbing a small slope. If you hadn’t been in an APC before, it would make you wonder how long it would take to suffocate, which, in turn, opened the door to hundreds of additional death
thoughts. Alcohol fumes made it difficult to breathe. Behind my head the motors of the plasma turret screamed as it rotated back and forth, and I felt the throb of the compact fusion reactor that took up the center of the vehicle, its sole purpose to generate hot gas so it would be a race if they hit us. When enemy rockets struck an APC’s reactor, a bloom of plasma might melt the passenger compartments before its energy dissipated, or the rocket might penetrate into troop sections, where its overpressure and flames combined to liquefy the occupants.
Those kinds of thoughts had never been a concern. But as we sat there, listening to the vehicle communications, I began to shake.
“Contact,” a voice said. “Enemy APC columns, moving toward Keriz, over three thousand vehicles.”
Megan and I glanced at each other and shifted closer, our hips touching.
“New contacts, airborne—bearing oh-one-five, oh-twenty three, and oh-five-two. Speed, six hundred. Distance, three hundred klicks. Forty thousand targets. Computer solution in ten seconds.”
“Roger that,” another voice responded, “Proceed to Papa-Golf-three-four-nine-two-four-one, offload and hold. Orders being distributed.”
Megan and I checked the maps. Tamdybulak. We waited, until a few seconds later the orders crawled in green letters across our goggles’ heads-up displays:
Reform at Tamdybulak and prepare defenses
. I couldn’t swallow. The anticipation became palpable, an electricity that ran from my feet to my scalp, cold with the certainty of war and the equal certainty that there would be nothing to shoot at, that we’d be targets for Russian auto-drones.
“And the time will come for a reckoning,” said Megan. “When God’s final test will be laid upon you in a blanket of fire and chaos. We will know then the true purpose of our existence—the meaning of death and faith.”
A short time later, the APC screeched to a halt and the floor dropped out beneath us, a Marine commander’s voice coming over the intercom. “Everybody out. Inbound, E-T-A two minutes.” Already the plasma turret spun slowly as it tracked its first target, still not visible over the horizon.
Megan’s voice clicked over the headset. “Button up. Take cover.”
I glanced to the side as we sprinted. There were still at least a thousand of my sisters and three times as many Marines, but we had begun the day before with more than twenty thousand girls, and I wondered how many more we’d lose in the next few minutes. Tamdybulak swallowed us in its rubble. Megan and I spotted a gap between two overturned slabs of crumbling concrete and dove in, just as the APCs opened fire.
“I will be as a viper,” I whispered, “hidden until the time is right. I will melt my enemies from the earth, and slaughter his family so that none may take up arms again. Each death is a trophy for my Lord, a testament to my willingness. This is a test of faith.” The pulsing of plasma cannons shook the ground so that dust and pebbles pattered on my helmet like rain.
Like most of the settlements you encountered in Kazakhstan or Uzbekistan, Tamdybulak had been reduced to a sea of blackened rubble, pockmarked by thousands of craters, and the inhabitants had long since fled or been killed. Dust coursed around us as a strong wind blew through the ruins.