[Issue 2024.68]

‘The Ensanguined Shore’, Jennifer R. Donohue

Art © 2024 Sebastian Timpe

---

Most of us have bags packed when it comes down from command that there’s a freeze on leave, again. Groans and growls ripple through the ranks as us officers are told via HUD, and we tell our soldiers.

“All due respect, Hills, this is shit,” Phee, my second, says.

“Sure is.” I read the message again. “Cowards couldn’t even tell us with their human mouths.”

“They’re just looking out for us.” She smirks when I look at her. “They don’t want us to get charged with murder for bodily tearing ’em apart.”

“Can’t charge all of us,” I mutter, and somebody else laughs. “Okay, you heard the orders, get unpacked, reschedule your tickets, do whatever you need to do. We’re fucking here for the long haul.” My soldiers disperse, much as they can in our quadrant of the beach, and start pulling their armor out of hibernation and back into at-ease mode.

“Yeah we’ll just go wave at the ferry instead,” Phee grunts, hauling out the roll of cable for her armor and dropping it on the ground. “These fuckers keep saying we’re gonna push and we keep not pushing. They keep saying they’re going to figure out the next strategy, or carpet bomb that fucking minefield, or get us jetpacks, and they keep not—”

“Not doing the thing, I know. We know.” I hadn’t even put my armor into sleep yet; just had a feeling, I guess.

“Where’s our jetpacks?” Menny, my third, yells from up the line. I laugh, because what else am I going to do, but there’s a fed-up edge to it that I don’t really like. There isn’t a whole lot that I like, after ten months on this beach.

“We’ve been asking that for eighty four years, my dude.”

“Royal marines had jetpacks in the early 21st.”

“Yeah, and we fought a whole war a few hundred years back that made sure we’re not royal marines today.” This isn’t a new argument, or even a real argument, just banter. Fuck, we really needed that leave. We needed time away from this beach, sitting in our tents with the flaps open in the hopes of getting a cross breeze, armor charging up and waiting and logistics planning and scrapping plans and sometimes moving us around to scout things, but there’s only so much left to scout, and only so close we can get to the cliff city, and only so much inland that’s even valuable to us. This spit of land got turned into a war-torn shithole before we were ever mechboots on the ground, first by one regime change, and then a people’s regime change, and then when we got involved because damn it if these people didn’t need freedom. Wings or not.

That’s what the optics are, of course. The reality has far more to do with dollar signs and rare-earth metals and maybe even still oil, who knows. There’s enough shared values for everybody here, whether you care about the good ol’ stars and stripes, just want your college to be paid, or genuinely think these people need our brand of path to freedom. I’m not saying it’s foolish to think that, but we as a nation admittedly have quite the track record for this kind of messy thing.

They do have wings. That’s a hell of a thing. Wings and clawed feet and the noises they can make; beautiful singing but also things that makes your blood run cold, and sometimes makes your blood run out of your eyes and ears. A hell of a thing.

Most of them, the sirens, are civilians. Some have been conscripted by the other side, of course, either because they agree that they don’t want our brand of freedom or because it’s what they’ve got to do to survive. A number of them evacuated before the city locked down quite how it is now, or they passed their kids through the doors at ground level before the minefield got laid, and those kids got evacuated. A couple sirens are around camp still, to help, to translate, and because they don’t really have anyplace else to go, even though this is a military camp and not a refugee one. They prefer to take their chances around us than on one of the boats that left. Maybe they want to be here, when we liberate the city again. If we liberate the city again.

I get a flag in my HUD that they want to see me in command, because of fucking course they do, and I acknowledge the order and take a second to hydrate. It isn’t the hottest we’ve had, but we’ve had a few wet bulb days and had to get in the armor for the climate control. Of course, in-armor time is up-time and that translates to on-the-books training or performance time, but ten months is plenty of time to figure out how to game that system in an environment, beside the years of knowledge from the armored soldiers that came before us.

I go up to the command tent, where the Old Man is with logistics and the other higher-ups, and a civilian that I don’t recognize but who isn’t a local and isn’t a siren. I catch a glimpse of a vest with lots of pockets. Big green eyes. I stop in textbook attention, and salute, more crisply than I normally would. There’s lots of ways to communicate with the higher-ups that won’t get you dressed down for insubordination but are absolutely a clear fuck you. “Sir.”

“At ease, Sergeant Achilles.” He’s tired too, and he wants to tell me to cut the bullshit, but isn’t going to in front of the civilian. Interesting.

“Thank you, sir.” I reposition, again, textbook, again fuck you, feet apart, hands behind my back, just above my belt.

“You won’t thank me after this conversation,” he says dryly. I raise my eyebrows, and he looks at the civilian, so I look at the civilian. She’s got a camera around her neck. “Patty here is a photojournalist. She’s here to take in the terrain, and the camp, and generally observe the situation.” And put us in National Geographic or something, he doesn’t say, but I know what he means.

“And you’re putting her with me.”

“I’m putting her with you, Hills. I think your squad is a good temporary home for her. Play nice, be safe. Dismissed.” Not a word about leave, of course. And he’s banking on me not asking in front of the guest. Damn him.

“Yes, sir.” This can’t be why leave was canceled, but it doesn’t help. I look at her again. Sort of rangy, tanned and with a scatter of freckles. Rich girl hair, a cropped cap of curls. Expensive, good boots. That vest’s seen some trips, though; it’s not stiff and fresh-off-the-rack of an outdoor play store. She’s even got pens and maybe pencils tucked into the little breast-pocket loops. Nails bitten or broken all the way down. Those eyes. Tourist or true believer? Time will tell. “You need help carrying anything?”

“No, thank you. I can manage my kit.”

“Fair enough.” I heel turn out of the tent, and pause outside to let my eyes adjust against the dazzle of the sun on the water, and let Patty catch up. She’s only carrying a duffle, and that gives me a moment’s pause. “No tent?”

“The, uh, general? Said you had an extra cot in yours.” I glance back over my shoulder, and the Old Man’s watching this exchange, expressionless. He can’t hear us from where he is, unless he can. He probably got the ear biometrics years ago. Well, there’s nothing for it. Less chance of her getting in trouble if she’s actually bunked with me, instead of just in my vicinity.

“Room for one, sure.” We walk down the line of tents and mech armors, and she pauses often enough that either she has eye upgrades and is taking pictures that way too, or she’s committing details to memory for writeups later. It’s interesting, seeing that kind of wonderment on an adult’s face, for something I’m used to seeing on the reg. Something I know inside and out. Not a lot of civilians see the armor in person at all, much less this up close. They don’t march us in parades.

“How long have you been here?” she asks.

“Me personally, or my squad?”

“Both.”

“Launching into the interviews already?” I smirk a little, just too tired, too fucking fed up with the bullshit to suppress it. It’s hard for me to play nice on a good day. That’s the other reason sometimes people are here; we’re not suited for civilian life, and it’s military or jail.

“Or making conversation.” She looks at me brightly. I wonder if this is her first war coverage, well-traveled vest or not. Lot of the world to photojournalize outside of conflict. Endangered species and volcanos and shit. “Have you been here since day one?”

“I’ve been here ten months. We weren’t here for kickoff, no. You want to hear about day one, you’ll need to talk to Dess and Meeds further up the beach. Their squads were in the second boat that landed.” Mine was in the third, but that’s fine. We don’t talk about the first boat.

“Do you think it’s unusual that you’re relying so heavily on boats?” There, that’s the interview tone, I think.

“Not once you’ve seen what the sirens can do to things that fly.” She blinks, and doesn’t have anything to say to that. Not a record time for me getting somebody to shut their fucking mouth but maybe the nicest.

“Sarge, we—” one of mine tries to start with the second I get back to my soldiers, and I cut him off. They’re kind of clustered together, tense, unhappy. I need some time to think, though.

“Later. Right now I want to introduce Patty.” I smile big and hard, and they look at her, off-guard, confused. “Patty, this is everybody. Phee is my second, Menny third, after that, everybody’s got nametags and, more importantly, more rank than you. They tell you something, it’ll be for your own safety, and you listen. Understood?”

She bristles, a little frown line pushing between her too-nice eyebrows. “I’m not one of your soldiers.”

“No fucking shit, I didn’t realize.” I let that pause spin out a second, still smiling. “You’re here because we let you be here, and we’re probably supposed to keep you alive. If you don’t help us do that, you’re going to get somebody killed, and then I’ll kill you myself.”

She is taken aback, to say the least. However she thought she sized me up, this doesn’t match that. “The general…”

“Doesn’t want that to happen either, I assure you.” The smile is really throwing her off, I think. I wonder what she thought we’d be like. “Do we understand each other?”

She gives a short sniff and quirks her lips. Nobody talks to her like this. “Yes,” she finally says.

“Perfect. Phee, do you know what I did with the other cot for my tent?”

Phee has watched this with her eyebrows up and her lips in a straight line, but she knows how necessary it is. This is real. “Is it not still in your tent, just folded up?”

I do a brief catalog in my head of my tent’s contents. “No.”

“Hills…” she sighs, and walks off.

“Thanks, Phee!” I call after her and she waves a hand without turning. Patty is still waiting, maybe a little dazed, when I return my attention to her. “You can talk to the soldiers. Stay in our quadrant for now, I guess. Be respectful about what you photograph. Dinner’s at sundown, I assume you’ll join us at the chow tent.”

“I assume,” she says. “Thank you,” she says, to be polite, though I don’t think either of us knows what she’s thanking me for. She walks off, hesitant at first, then goes to our armor like she’s magnetized. I wait until she’s out of earshot and turn to the soldier who I’d cut off.

“None of us are happy about the leave situation. It isn’t fair, it’s shit, and they can’t keep doing this to us. Give me tonight to think about what to do, okay?” He nods. I look around. “Okay, everybody?” They nod. One reason I sent Phee away before I sent this is she keeps her nose cleanest of anybody. She’ll find out when she finds out, and I trust her not to break rank. The other reason is I genuinely do not know where that fucking cot is.

I circulate, make sure everybody’s good as they can be, go find Phee coming out of the tarped supply pile with the folded-up cot. “Found it,” she says.

“Thanks a million,” I say.

“You think she’s going to be trouble?”

“Depends on what kind. Maybe, maybe not. She might be what we need right now.”

“You mean she might be what you need right now,” Phee says.

“Corporal Phoenix, I’m sure I do not know what you mean,” I say, taking the cot from her.

“Sure you don’t, Sarge.” She rolls her eyes, and we both laugh.

“Are you, uh, okay though?” I ask, in a more serious tone.

“Are you asking as my superior officer or…”

“I’m asking however you need me to ask.” Phee and I have never been more than colleagues and then friends, and I feel like we should never be more than friends, because I’d definitely fuck it up. She is somebody who knows how to act in a society.

“Yeah, I’m okay. I didn’t have anything planned, I just wanted to get out of here and take a bath and have room service. See some faces I haven’t been looking at for ten months. At least I got one of those wishes.”

“Maybe we should put her in your tent,” I say, and she laughs.

“No thanks, she looks like she talks in her sleep. Or has pointy elbows.”

“Pointy elbows, the fate worse than death.”

“You don’t even know.”

I get stuff shifted around and the cot set up in my tent before Patty manages to find me. She ducks in, arming sweat off her forehead, and blinks around. I can’t really read her expression, if it’s better than she expected or worse. It isn’t as though I’ve decorated. “Thank you,” she says, dropping her duffel on the cot.

“You’re welcome. They’re pretty comfortable, actually. Well. Compared to alternatives I’ve experienced.”

She pulls a little hardcover notebook out of one of her vest pockets and flips it open to where she closed it on a flat pencil. “Are you talking about your time in the service? How long have you been in the service, Sergeant?”

“Four years, I guess.”

“Is that a long time?”

“They say if you don’t make it by five, you should look for something else. So, could’ve been worse.” I shrug. “You asking everybody their rank and how long it took them?”

“Not everybody. But since you’re ranking officer of this… squad? I thought it might give me some insight into your character.”

I drink some more water while she writes whatever it is she’s writing. “Did it?”

She laughs, running a hand back through her curls as she looks up at me. “No, damn it, it didn’t.”

“You’ve known me twenty minutes, I’m sure you’ll glean something eventually.”

She doesn’t respond right away, just studies me for a second. “Which suit is yours?”

“Armor. The one out front.” I jerk my thumb over my shoulder.

She’s in motion, but then pauses, that line between her eyebrows again. “What?”

“We call it armor, not suits.”

She makes a note.

I leave her out there for about two minutes before I stop being such a bitch and go out to explain the basics. The way the armor interacts with the HUD from my eye upgrades. What it’s like inside the visor, when the helmet is on. How the armor communicates with the armor adjacent, at an automatic baseline level, in case the wearer becomes incapacitated but the armor is intact enough to be in formation, to do a shield wall, to get itself out of harm’s reach.

This is just very basic public knowledge, no FOIA request needed, even. The manuals for the older models are easily found online. The comms and the armor functions are two different systems, so hacking one doesn’t give access to the other. And there’s always the manual shutdown, a big easy button to find inside, and a much more discrete button on the outside. It SCRAMs the system, and it opens up and lets you out. I don’t tell her about the manual shutdowns. She doesn’t need to know.

I pass her off to Menny after that, who very enthusiastically wants to show her knot tying. Knots for tent stake tie-downs, knots for the tarps we throw over our armor in the overnight as a barrier to the salt and sand, the knots to put fishing hooks on fishing line because surf fishing is something that Menny does when he gets the chance, and lately he’s been getting the chance a lot. That’s just insult to injury, how quiet it’s been, and they canceled our leave. Or maybe it makes sense; it’s been quiet, so we can assume trouble is imminent. It doesn’t feel that way, though, and I don’t go in for most intangible things, but I feel like I’ve got some kind of battle sense by this point. Trouble sense. I don’t feel that right now, just slackness like a flag without wind. Anticipation, but only of the next sunset.

Not a bad time to have a civilian around, at least. Observing our equipment checks and nose counts and maintenance tasks and PT. It’s a liability, having a civilian on the battlefield, and if it isn’t a battlefield right now, nobody has to be worried about Patty the photojournalist and her lack of armor. We’ve got some of the best emergency medical care that we can have on this beach, but it doesn’t mean we haven’t lost anybody. Or that people haven’t lost limbs and had to get rotated stateside to get fitted for their replacements. Of course, times aren’t so bad that they’ll deploy you with a robot arm, but it’s no longer an automatic medical discharge either.

---

We’re in the chow tent for dinner, and towards the end of that, the cooks make a big show of getting out ice cream. Real vats of ice cream, not the individually flash-frozen servings of the little nondairy pellets. They come around with bowls and spoons for us, not saying what their faces say, which is sorry about the leave, we’re all stuck here but at least we have ice cream. The kids are into it; the careers and officers like me exchange dark glances as we sit back down again.

I catch a scrap of what Patty is saying to Phee about fit for the armor between men and women and, too loud, I say “Excuse me, Patty, did you just ask Corporal Phoenix why our armor isn’t gendered?” and my table and a few other tables around us go still.

“Not exactly, I—”

“You think my armor should have tits? Or why should we stop there, maybe weapons with scopes should have eyelashes. Maybe we should have combat makeup.”

She visibly struggles with how to answer me, maybe not used to being spoken to like this, or maybe weighing if she should meet me on this level or apologize and diplomacize instead.

She’s rescued from that by the muster bell. It’s not a real bell, and it’s even designed to sound criminally digitized and glitchy. It’s a noise that the sirens don’t make, and maybe can’t make. I’m on my feet, everybody’s on their feet, and then instead of falling in with everybody getting out of the chow tent and to their armor, I stop. Consider. Sit back down again.

“Hills what are you doing?” Phee yells, six deep in the crowd already.

“I’m eating my ice cream,” I say, and my voice just cuts through the noise in a way I can’t explain. Phee stops, and the rest of my soldiers stop, and everybody else’s soldiers squeeze past her, and them. She manages to get back over to me.

“I can see that,” she says. “You hear the bell.”

“I hear the bell.”

“You’re not going.”

“I’m not going.” I eat another spoonful of ice cream. It must’ve come in on the same boat as our little tagalong; I’ve smoked in those freezers with the mess staff, and they didn’t have any real ice cream in there last I saw. It’s enlightening, smoking with the mess staff. Makes you appreciate the magic they perform for us daily.

“But what if—”

“If they hadn’t canceled our leave, we wouldn’t be here anyway.” This is direct insubordination, and something I could be court-martialed for, and I just can’t find it in me to care.

One by one, every last one of my soldiers comes back and sits down. We eat our ice cream. The shutter of Patty’s camera whickers; she isn’t just taking pictures of us, but also of the other soldiers funneling out of all the tent exits. Then the empty tent, and us with our ice cream. Real Norman fucking Rockwell.

I don’t think the pictures will be the same, without the bell. But they can put shit like that in magazines now. On websites, as you scroll down the article with its pictures and backgrounds and words resizing, you can’t just read a fucking article words-on-a-page anymore, they have to be a multimedia experience. This one would benefit from the sound. I don’t know what kind of a photoshoot Patty thought she was going to do, before she got here, but I think a focus has now become apparent.

The bell cuts off finally, and no combat noise ensues. No weapons are fired, no ordinance explodes, no sirens give voice to their unearthly noise. Just a drill. We finish our ice cream as the Old Man stomps in, trailed by command staff. He stops just inside, looks at the silent mess staff, looks at us with our bowls. Looks at all the unattended bowls.

“Now I can understand,” he starts in a low voice that carries. To their credit, none of my soldiers flinch. Nobody’s stood up yet, either; we’re all sitting ramrod straight around the table, except for Patty, who’s standing in the middle of things, getting a wide shot I guess. “If you soldiers are here because your commanding officer ordered you to. You trust Sergeant Achilles, and it would be insubordination if you disregarded her order. Isn’t that right, Corporal Phoenix.” He isn’t asking. He knows exactly what happened here.

“Yes sir,” she says in a voice that’s a little smaller than usual, but no less steady.

“Dismissed.”

I see heads shift to me and I nod minutely, and everybody picks up their bowls, files to the dishes drop-off, and then leaves the tent. I stay in my seat, eyes forward, hands flat on the table. The Old Man, furious but silent, watches my soldiers leave. Then he stares at his staff until they leave. He doesn’t spare Patty a glance, not even when her camera clicks. “Sergeant Achilles,” he booms.

“Sir.”

He lets out a long, long breath, and we just stare at each other in the empty tent, the too-bright lights making halos on the corners of my vision. He looks away first, looks again at all the abandoned bowls. “What a damn waste,” he says. As if he wasn’t the one who hit the muster bell, and maybe he isn’t. Maybe somebody back stateside hits it for fun.

I didn’t expect him to try and let me off the hook. I don’t know what I expected. “Sir.”

“Hills, I’m letting this one go,” he says, eyes returning to me. “We’ve had a shit time of it. But you cannot repeat this. Understood?”

“Sir.” I don’t know what else to say to him. I’m not going to apologize, and I can’t explain. It’s self-explanatory. Patty’s camera clicks and it’s all I can do to not get up and go to her and smash it on the ground in a smooth sequence of events. He studies me again for a minute, maybe actually a whole minute, then turns and walks out.

“That went well,” Patty says brightly, and I get up from the table with my bowl.

“Sure. He’s a real softy.” There are few ways in which my tone could be less welcoming.

“What would you have done instead?”

“What?” I stop and turn, and she does a little hop step to avoid running into me. Soldiers are trickling back into the mess tent, dismissed from their muster and from my dressing down. If that’s what you could even call it.

“You said that if you hadn’t made it to sergeant by five years, they say to find something else. What would that have been?” There’s a reason she kept that and waited to ask.

“Are you saying I’m going to need that backup pretty soon?” I ask with a short laugh.

“It seems like a relevant consideration,” she says carefully.

“I guess it does.” I shake my head. “What a fucking mess, huh.”

“You had leave that was canceled?”

“Everybody who had it, no longer has it.”

“Do you know why?”

“Because the brass says so.”

“That doesn’t seem very fair.” She isn’t used to walking on the sand like I am, and is breathless trying to keep up with me and keep talking.

“Fair isn’t really a consideration.” She’s quiet after that, maybe disused to the concept of things being taken away or not available for no reason. “What’s your favorite picture that you’ve taken?” I ask, stopping in the quiet, moon-shaded area between the administration tents and the troop quadrants.

“What?”

“What’s your favorite picture you’ve ever taken.”

“I spent time in Ethiopia, with one of the groups of rangers who guards rhinoceros.”

“What’s the best picture you’ve ever taken?”

She tilts her head. “What do you mean best?” She doesn’t ask why I think favorite and best are different.

“You know, the one that got awards, or on a year-end list, or went viral, or whatever.”

“Oh.” She pauses for a really long time, but I can be patient. I can hear troops at their tents, talking, laughing, telling stories. I can smell the smoke from cigarettes and vape pens and the incense that some of them for some reason bought on layover in Germany. “I was on a Coast Guard boat when it met one of the refugee rafts.” She gives kind of a sniff and quirks her lips, rummages in her pockets until she comes up with a battered pack of cigarettes. She offers the pack to me first and I take one and she sticks one in her mouth and then seems to realize her lighter has become separate from the pack and goes looking again when I flick mine and light her cigarette for her, our eyes meeting in the small glow. “There were two families in that raft. The kind of raft you’d use to screw around on a lake when you rented a cabin with your friends to drink for a weekend. Not for the ocean. Sea. Whatever this is. Two families, mothers, fathers, kids. They had kids with them that weren’t theirs too, little girls whose parents trusted them.” She takes a drag and this taut expression is why I asked her this question. I wanted to know how serious the princess was. “Sirens, all of them. The coast guard, they had noise canceling earmuffs, like people on plane runways wear, and they made me take a pair. One of the little girls started to cry when her father handed her up, and that’s the shot. The waves were slapping against the boat and the raft dropped as her father held her up, and the officer only just had her by the straps of her dress and he had his eyes squinched shut in anticipation if she screamed, and her hair was all plastered to her face with the salt spray, and the lights on the boat were just so bright, and the water so dark, and it was so surreal not to be able to hear anything, but to see sounds happening. And I think I got that, in the picture.” She ashes her cigarette, and her eyes have a look that I recognize, that I see daily.

“And did it help them?”

“What?” I wait again. She heard me. “I don’t know.” She drops her cigarette and grinds it out in the sand.

I nod. So that’s why she’s here. “Pick that up.”

She laughs a little, but she does. It is funny; ten months on this beach, the ecosystem’s fucked already. One cigarette butt won’t matter. “So what now?”

“Now we wind down until bed and then we sleep until morning.”

“That’s not what I mean.”

I laugh. “I don’t know.”

---

In the middle of the night, Patty’s sleeping and I’m not, because I really do need an answer to what next. Will I start following orders again tomorrow, taking the Old Man’s pass on this evening’s insubordination? If I don’t, will my soldiers follow me, or work around me? They can’t charge us all, I’d said. That isn’t true, really. It’d just be a pain in the ass to charge so many of us at once. I’m just so damned tired.

I get out of my cot and leave the tent; Patty’s breathing doesn’t even change. She fell asleep as soon as she got changed and laid down, it seemed. She didn’t ask her question again, maybe afraid of what I’d ask her next. I’ll have to look up that raft picture she described; only command has internet, and that isn’t for casual browsing. We can reserve email time in the comms tent, but it’s all locked down to just email, nothing else.

I walk down to the edge of the water, dark now that the moon is down, white-edged with foam, our camp lights glittering off it. I’d thought I was career until this morning. I knew that service isn’t fair. I knew that leave wasn’t guaranteed until you were already on it, and even then it could get canceled and you could get called back. That had even happened to me once, in Eastern Europe, but that was a different deployment. That wasn’t ten months on a beach with hardly any action. That was against regular people. That we knew of, maybe they were fucking werewolves, who knows, but they weren’t sirens, they couldn’t make your eyes bleed by yelling at you. They couldn’t stop your heart by yelling at you, or stall your suit with the right song.

That’s a good reason to not give us jetpacks. They’d crack us like eggs on those rocks, if we tried to fly up there. I’ve never had a siren sing my suit into shutdown, but I’ve read the reports. I’ve seen the pictures. We’ve got noise guns on posts like air raid sirens just past our tents and we’ve only had to use them once to keep our no-man’s land, but I’m pretty sure some of that is the sirens letting us think that they work.

I stand there staring at the water for I don’t know how long, not really thinking anything, my head filled with the noise of the waves. As the sun is coming up, I start to hear another noise, and I go back into my tent and put my hand on Patty’s shoulder. She wakes up sudden but still, opens her eyes to look at me. “Come outside and listen.”

I’ve been up at dawn here before, seen the sky go from black to navy velvet, to purple like a fading bruise, seen the liquid gold of the sun on the horizon, like a giant filling a cup with light. I’ve never heard the sirens sing at the dawn, though. They start quiet, but by the time Patty is out on the sand with me, camera to her eye but silent, seeking a shot, they’re building to a crescendo that wakes all the troops and brings them stumbling out of their tents, some half-dressed, some with weapons in hand. But there’s nothing to shoot, nothing to see. Yet.

“Have they done this before?” Patty asks after a few minutes, looking dazed. Camera lowered again.

“Not in the last ten months,” I say. There’s no way for this to be a good thing. Well, there’s one way. If there was some kind of internal coup and the sirens freed themselves and we can all go home. But I don’t believe in fairy stories.

The muster bell starts ringing and I’m to my armor already, automatically, one foot in before I stop myself. The rest of my soldiers are too, and then they turn as one and look at me. I stop, hands still on the open back, then I take my foot out. Square up in the sand again, taking a deep breath. My officer HUD is flashing emergency muster, the map of the cliff city with circles and arrows and flashing problem areas. A pillar of black smoke, a few pillars of black smoke, are rising from the cliffs. Maybe from beyond the cliffs.

“Sarge, are we—” somebody nearby starts.

“No.”

“Hills, we can’t not,” Phee protests, actual panic in her voice. I’ve never heard that tone from her before.

“I’m not. You can if you want.” The muster bell is still ringing and all through the camp suits are scrambling and I hear other Sergeants, suited up already, voices megaphoned and blaring out. I cancel my HUD notifications and go back into my tent. I stand there a minute, just flexing my empty hands. I’d really like to punch something and have nothing to punch. I feel detached but deliberate. I feel regret. I feel rage. It’s been slow to build, and I’ve been slow to acknowledge it, but it’s rage.

Somebody comes into my tent, and I look up, ready to yell at Patty, but it’s Phee and Menny. “If you’re doing this, Hills, then we’re doing this,” Menny says. “All of us. They’ll have to court martial all of us, if they court martial any of us.”

“That isn’t really how it works,” I growl, not in a place where I can laugh, and it’s not funny haha, exactly; it’s a different kind of funny. We’re going to get another visit from the Old Man, of course. He isn’t going to be nearly so forgiving this time. But it’s all of us. It’s all of us and they don’t have anyplace to put us to court martial us when we’re deployed, and if they can’t give us leave, then they definitely can’t arrest us and cart us off, and the armor is bio-locked unless you’ve got the maintenance override, so they can’t force that either. Our armor is our armor and the decision is ours. “But we’re doing this.”

Phee gives a short nod, like she hoped I might change my mind, go out there, not upset the order of things, but we’re so far fucked on the order of things that I don’t even know where to start with that. “Okay then,” she says. “Then it’s a good thing I made sure of our emergency rations before turning in last night, since we probably won’t be going up to the mess tent for the foreseeable future.”

“Phee, you genius,” I say, and she looks pleased, but still anxious. Menny looks resolute, and also kind of pissed. We’re not a demonstrative people, my soldiers and I, so for him to look that way means he’s filled with a similar rage.

We’re still standing there when we hear the first weapons discharge. Our armor ordinance is unmistakable, and I see the regret plainly on Phee’s face, but she doesn’t break. “Ten months,” Menny says. We’ve had plenty of engagements, but never at dawn with the sirens singing. I wonder if today means something to them. We should know things like that.

“Ten fucking months,” I say, and sit down on the edge of my cot. I hear a click and look up; Patty’s there, camera to her eye. She takes another picture as I start to get up, jaw set, and then she makes herself scarce without saying a word.

“That got old real fast,” Menny says.

---

When Patty comes back hours later, her face is both sooty and sunburned. From the sound of it, soldiers are coming back from whatever high water mark they reached. I’d debated with myself, and shut off the battle chatter channel in my HUD once Phee and Menny went off to steady the soldiers and do their own things. I hope they all did the same.

She transfers rolls of film from her pockets to a case in her bag, cracks the seal on a bottle of water and chugs half of it without stopping. “Well?” she asks.

“Well what.”

“Don’t you want to know how it went?”

“I know you got too close to the action, from the looks of you. Did you get lots of pictures?”

She frowns at me. “That’s not what I mean.”

“I know.” We look at each other and she drinks more water.

“Yes, I took a lot of pictures. I won’t know what I got until I develop them.”

“I’m amazed anybody still makes film.”

“Some of it is because of the nuclear monitoring agencies, but film camera tech probably isn’t ever going to go away.” She’s still a little frowny, looking at me, looking around the tent. “You don’t want to know what happened?”

“No. I’ll see a report eventually.”

“But why?”

I shrug. It’s something I don’t even really have the words for, but something that Phee, and Menny, and the rest of my soldiers have gotten on a gut level. I don’t know if Patty can. “I’ll probably be answering that in a tribunal eventually, and you’ll find it out then.”

She stands there for a minute, thinking it over, and then slowly screws the cap back onto her water bottle. Looks me dead in the face and then raises her camera. Click. I look back at her, so angry, so tired. Click. Outside my tent, the din of all of the other soldiers in armor returning, the stand-down bells on the loudspeaker, the roar of the waves. Click.

“Stop it,” I say.

“Or what.” Click.

“Or I’ll smash that fucking camera and put you on the next ferry out of here.”

“I have every right to be here. Maybe more than you.”

“Maybe you do.” Click. She just watched a day of action, but she still isn’t prepared for how fast I come up off my cot, how easily the camera is in my hands

“Don’t,” she says, snatching for the strap and missing, as I hold the camera up out of her reach and consider what to throw it against. Our faces are very close together; we’re both breathing harder than we need to be. It’s the heat, I think. Her eyes are dilated. I’m a fucking idiot, I think. And then I kiss her.

She stiffens, but she doesn’t pull away. No, she leans in, stops reaching for her camera, her hand falling on my shoulder.

We’re like that, the lengths of us pressed together, when Phee stumbles into my tent, says “Oh!” in such a surprised and flustered tone that I laugh, and stumbles away again. Patty looks down and away, smiling, and I put the camera back in her hands, gently, and go after Phee.

“Corporal,” I call; she’s already six armors up the line, walking stiffly. “Phee, come back.”

She does an about face and walks towards me, eyebrows knitting together. “Sorry to interrupt.”

“It just kinda happened. What’s up?”

“They locked our armor.”

“Makes sense.” We’re insubordinate, no sense leaving us literal war machines to frag the Old Man with, if that’s our goal. It isn’t, but gotta check the boxes. “There’s the maintenance overrides, if we need to move them.”

“I know.”

“You don’t need to do this with me.” I’m used to her being the box-checker, but not so anxiously, or for so long. Phee doesn’t lack nerve, and I don’t want to ruin her.

“I know. But I do. We do.” It’s a tense moment that we have no good way to resolve, then she shakes her head and smiles. “Now go on, I’ve never known you to walk away from a pretty girl in your tent.”

“You’ve never known me to have a pretty girl in my tent. Discretion is the better part of valor.”

“Oh she reads too. We’re just going to have a renaissance on the beach.” We laugh, and she walks off.

In my tent, Patty is still standing in the same place. No, she’s put the camera down. “I hoped you’d be back soon,” she says, when I raise my eyebrows at her.

“I’m back,” I say. “Where were we?”

“What happened?”

“Our armor was administratively locked. Probably so we can’t stage an internal coup, but if they think that’s the point here, I don’t think any resolution is going to be had.”

“So you can’t use it now at all?” This was not where we left off, but maybe if I answer her question…

“There’s a maintenance mode, if we need or want to walk them someplace. No biometrics necessary, but no ordinance access, or battle comms connection, or anything.” She looks thoughtful. “It’s fine, it doesn’t matter right now.”

“Doesn’t it?” she asks archly. She hasn’t closed the gap between us again, but she’s got a particular smile on her lips.

“I might have something else going at the moment. Still assessing the situation.” I let my tent flap fall closed, then go to her, and she tilts her chin up to be kissed again, sliding her hands up into my hair, and I wrap my arms around her. It’s too goddamn hot for this, and dangerous, but also if not this, now, then when.

---

None of us go to the mess hall for meals today. I open the flaps at the front and back of my tent, later, and pull the tabs on a couple of MREs so they heat, and me and Patty sit out front and the ocean sucks a breeze through the tent past us. Some of my soldiers come by for reassurance, but they don’t say that, of course; we just make some small talk and they move away again when they feel steadied. It would be better for them if we could meet all at once, but also worse for command, trying to figure out what to do with us.

Patty takes some pictures, of them, of the meal, of the ocean. More of me. She writes in her little notebook periodically, and listens to the chatter around us. Everybody’s waiting for the other shoe to drop: my soldiers, Patty. Me.

But I’m also worried about what other action is about to happen; there’s an electricity in the air that hasn’t been here before, and we’ve got a clear blue sky all the way up. I know what I see circling are birds, but I have sirens on my mind. We should all have sirens on our mind. I should ask the sirens working with us what—

Such a skull-splitting, eye-watering noise rips over the beach, I lose track of my existence as a person for probably five or ten seconds. Finally it recedes, or I’ve lost my hearing, temporarily or for good, and I see Patty hunched over with her fists pressed to her ears, like that’ll help, but it never helps. I see a couple of my soldiers had the presence of mind to slap on ear protection; some of them have just been wearing the muffs around their necks, not a bad move, but a hard recommendation to follow when it’s hazy, hot, and humid, and most of us hadn’t been doing that anymore by now.

I slap around in my tent for my earpro, slap it on, and claw a second pair out of a box that I wedge onto Patty’s head over her fists. She’ll get the idea. She’s worn it before. I get out to my armor and stop. Admin shutdown.

Is a muster bell ringing? I can’t hear it if it is. My nose is bleeding, and I wipe at that with the back of my hand as I cycle through my HUD channels for an update. It isn’t the sirens that have been on the beach with us; they’re all accounted for and not actively sirening. I wipe my eyes. Jesus. No, it’s coming from the cliffs. Why today is the day they’ve decided to go hot, we may never know. I may never know.

A shock wave ripples through the tents, and another one, and Patty’s next to me and yelling something. I can see her mouth moving and I take her to the ground as debris starts to whicker through the air. The minefield, they’re detonating the mines, I think. They’re clearing the ground-level doors.

The only reason they’d do that is if they’re moving something that can’t fly.

Patty’s got her camera and she’s holding it up awkwardly out of the sand even as I’m still keeping her pinned and that’s funny not-funny and I start jaggedly laughing in a way I can feel isn’t right but I can’t hear. But I’ve been through this shit before and she hasn’t. She’s trying to make something of her life, and I’m working on burning mine down. Fuck.

There’s a lull in the explosions, in the rain of debris, and I get up, drag her to her feet with me, and over to my armor. She stares at me, blood smeared on her face from burst capillaries, but she’s acting like she can still see okay. That’s good. I take her camera and mime putting one foot, then the other, into my armor and she gets it. She’s frowning, she doesn’t know why, but she gets it, she understands, and she steps into the armor. It lights up at the human weight, and I flick open the cover for the maintenance switch, push-pull-turn, and the armor closes up around her. She turns to look at me and I point up the beach, towards where the ferry docks, where we have evac boats. She reaches her arm out, hesitant like she isn’t sure how she’s going to move, and opens her hand, and I give her camera back, point again, harder. She nods, starts walking.

The thing about the suits is they’re bulky, absolutely yes, but they’re programmed and built and calibrated to respond to normal human movement, no exaggeration necessary. Anybody who can walk, or who has once walked, can walk in a suit. If she tries, she’ll be able to use that camera pretty well too. Patty doesn’t have ordinance but she can walk herself to evac if they’re doing evac, and even if they’re not, somebody will help her up that end of things.

I go back to my tent and shrug into a flak jacket, check my weapons, slap in magazines as needed, clap on the regulation helmet. I’m not going to the line to engage, wherever the line is now, but I’ll help hold this beach if it comes to that. My hearing is fading in and out like I’m spinning near to a sound, away from a sound, and I think it’s armored ordinance, but scattered. I still don’t have any intel on any of my comms and that’s frustrating as hell, but my own fault.

I go look for Phee, and of course she’s standing at her armor, visibly frustrated and conflicted. Then she sees me and looks even more confused. Her lips move but I don’t think either of us can hear her, and she twists her mouth in frustration, points at the empty spot where my armor was, and makes the emoji shrug. I mime taking a picture and point up the beach, and she nods.

There are other armors missing up the line, though, and I wait while Phee gets her weapon and jacket as well. I’m a little surprised she wasn’t suited up before me. I point at the missing armors and she says something and I can almost hear her and she actually shrugs and flaps her arms like an upset cartoon character and writes in the sand “They followed your armor. They thought it was you.” There’s no comms. Fuck.

Slowly, too slowly, a couple of things fall into place for me.

Patty’s most memorable picture, the one she doesn’t know helped or not. The sirens moving something that can’t fly. Siren kids can’t fly.

“Fuck,” I yell, loud enough to hear myself. Loud enough for Phee to hear me, and stares at me, wide-eyed. I run up the beach, trusting that she’ll follow. It’s hard to do anything like reading tracks in the sand, it’s been so churned up by us all day every day, but there’s a point at which I feel like I should veer off inland, and I do that.

The line of noise guns is fucked; that minefield really did double duty. There’s soldiers in armor doing an unsteady sweep, up by the city line, and so I turn to the beach again. Maybe I wasted time, coming over here like this. Or maybe I just need it to understand what comes next, I don’t know. Phee doesn’t know either, I can see it in her face, but she’s shaken, maybe also without knowing why. There isn’t any blood here, that seems important too. There is one feather, caught on the wires, black from one angle and a rainbow oil slick from another, and I pick it up even though it came off a siren it came off a person, it’s weird to pick up, and I let it flutter to the sand. Free now, anyway.

There are more feathers along the trampled path down to the dock, some blood maybe, but I don’t stop to look close enough, or smell; it could be fluid from the armor. We pass some bursts of feathers, some places that are definitely blood, some spent casings. A doll in a blue dress, with black wings. I pick that up. I don’t know why. I jam it in my pocket, have my rifle at ready, because there’s a haze in the air here from engagement, and it’s hard to see anything, was already hard to hear anything.

Phee sticks just behind me to my left and we move towards the dock with our rifles at near-ready, excruciatingly cautious, and it isn’t long before we see a dead siren. Nobody I recognize, not one of the sirens who’d been around camp. I don’t speak their language, and in the moment I realize I don’t remember a single one of their names. Shit. Maybe I would have yesterday, this morning.

What are we doing here. Me and Phee. The army.

A little further, and even after the buildup of everything we heard today, and didn’t see, and now have seen, it’s still a shock when we see fallen armor, three soldiers. Nobody ranking, nobody in our squad; Phee checks each while I cover, shakes her head three times. We move on. My skin feels like it’s drawing up tighter and tighter, and when a siren comes out of the haze, eyes streaming and wings spread, I have my rifle shouldered and my finger at four pounds of pressure on the trigger before I recognize him; I’ve talked to him, his name is Jonas, and I feel like less of a shithead and, more importantly, I don’t kill him.

“Sergeant Achilles,” he says, in the most oh thank god tone I’ve heard in my life, and lowers his wings. He’s empty-handed. “I thought—”

“No, Jonas, it’s okay.” I pat him on the shoulder, cursory, one-two, already looking past for what will come at me next. Come at us next. Phee covers while we talk. “What’s the situation?”

“We’ve nearly gotten the children to the boats but the group in the city didn’t let them come quietly.”

Yeah, no shit, I think. “So you came to cover the rear?”

“I’m not alone, but yes.”

He must mean more in the air, I think. Which is also where more hostiles could come from. Not that I’ve seen a hostile today. Not all hostiles are going to be sirens. Anyway, there could be more three feet to the left of me and I wouldn’t be able to see them in this. “Do you have a weapon?” I ask him, offering my handgun butt first, and he looks at me oddly.

“Not one of yours.” His voice, of course. Always locked and loaded. The power in it always a hum that I can’t hear exactly, but I can always feel, like standing near a transformer.

“Understood, good.” I nod, reholster. “I’m sorry.” Another odd look, and what is my apology worth, for all this. I look at Phee and she nods and we keep going.

The next time a siren comes out of the gloom at us, I reach that fifth pound on my trigger. Three rounds, center mass, and they crumple into a pile of wings and limbs. I take a knee and cover, wait until I’m sure it’s too long for even one of them to be holding their breath, and we move on.

I feel the thrum of the big diesel boat engines through the soles of my boots about when we start to see muzzle flashes, because even now, we’re still using diesel for the boats. Phee and I vector off to the sides, staying low, so we don’t get fragged, and then suddenly we’re at the water and looking at dead sirens, ours and theirs, and dead soldiers, ours and theirs, and a staggered line of my squad protected by armor with ordinance as they essentially bucket-brigade siren kids onto a boat that’s foundering in the surf but the fucking dock is gone and the pilot is doing their very best to keep things near enough and steady enough so the kids can get loaded and nobody’s getting chewed up by the propellers. There aren’t a lot of kids left, the back of the line isn’t passing any more, they’ve linked arms and made themselves a wall.

My armor is the last one in the surf closest to the boat, and it’s like an out-of-body experience to see it there, taking kids under the arms, passing kids up to the soldiers on the back of the boat. Patty’s camera is hung around the neck and down the back, and I don’t know if it’ll work anymore after this, but probably the film will still be good. She reaches up with the last kid, straining as far as the legs will let her reach up, the soldier on the boat stretching as far as his safety harness will let him go, everything slick, the kid twisting and complaining, not in full voice or neither of them could stand it, but twisting and reaching, opening and closing empty hands beseechingly, and I think of the doll in my pocket, slap my pocket to make sure it’s still there, and slap the safety on my rifle before heading into the surf.

Patty almost drops the kid, and she’s starting to wind up, even at this distance, even with how little she is, I can feel it, and I bellow “Hey” as loud as I can without still fully being able to hear myself, and raise the doll over my head. The kid’s eyes get big and an unbelievable smile breaks out on her face despite the tears that shimmer in her eyes, and I’m tall but without armor I can’t walk out deep enough but Patty walks it back a couple of steps and dips the kid so I can reach up with the doll, stretch, and get it in her hands. Then Patty’s stepping back to the boat, reaching up as high as the armor will let her as another big wave slaps down, the soldier in the boat straining against his safety harness, and he gets the kid by her arm and her shirt and pulls her aboard and into his arms and she has the doll in her arms and she turns and looks at me before he carries her off to wherever they’re stowing them.

The Old Man is supervising, but he got action too, his faceplate’s broken and he’s grimly chewing a cigar when we make eye contact. He can’t have spent more than two seconds looking at my armor before knowing it wasn’t me. I wonder what he thought, when he saw my armor and some of my soldiers. I wonder what he thinks now, looking at me. But there isn’t time, there are sirens screaming down from the sky, and sirens screaming up into the sky, like a goddamn war in heaven and I hope like hell we’re on the side of the angels, but there’s never any real way to tell, is there.

© 2024 Jennifer R. Donohue

[Issue 2024.68]

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