Every morning, Private Arklight Adana wakes up and wonders how hell can be so insanely boring.
The days out here, at the Yusei-Llawand garrison, on the edge of the sea, blur together in a mind-numbing sameness. Even worse, Arklight can’t seem to get used to it, so it’s as if he discovers how tedious the life of a soldier is over and over again. In fact, the only interesting thing that can happen to someone here has already happened to him. Within a week of his arrival, a bile bug larvae found its way into his colon and laid an egg there. Two days later it hatched, and the newborn bile bug dug in, causing immense pain and voluminous, bloody diarrhea. It took powerful anesthetic and a colonoscopy to remove it and nearly three weeks to recover physically. He knows he will never fully recover mentally.
Also, Arklight has been known as Asslight ever since.
At first call, the other grunts rustle out of bed quickly and get on with their business: hitting the lavs, splashing cold water in their faces, donning their uniforms, and making a lot of noise. Unless one is quick, which Arklight isn’t, one would end up at the back of the line to the lavs. He usually waits out the worst of the scuffle in his bunk, on his back, using his enstim neural implant to conjure up his happy place in his mind: Kolawa Beach. Wakea rising over the hot dunes and the towering waves. The tangy smell of drying seaweed washed up on the shore. The girls on boards out in the surf. A mellow intoxication still clinging to his mind after last night’s party.
His place. His dream.
A solid kick to his bedstead shakes him out of the neural simulation. Sergeant Olega stares at him, his face too close for comfort. “Oy! Asslight! I know you’re stimming! Shut it off and get going!”
“Yes, sir!” Arklight says, bouncing out of bed with that fake–energetic spring he’s been practicing. He’s always the last one up and about. Kind of proud of it, truth be told.
The sergeant looks at him wearily. “You’re not fooling anyone, son. Least of all me.”
“What do you mean, sir?”
“I mean,” the sergeant says, again leaning in so close Arklight can see the thin little veins in the whites of his eyes, “you’re a waste of perfectly good air. You don’t think I can see right through you?”
Arklight’s mind doesn’t need to race for the appropriate response. He’s good at this. He’s always been able to conjure up things to say to get him out of sticky situations—his ending up here the one notable and very irksome exception. “Sir,” he says now, his voice clear and firm, ”if I’ve done something wrong, you should report me!”
The sergeant flinches. Yes, that’s it. Technically, as long as he shows up at the right place at the right time, he’s not doing anything wrong. Just because he’s not doing it with the same eager enthusiasm as the other idiots in this place doesn’t mean—
“You think you’re clever, don’t you, Asslight?” Sgt. Olega says now, barely containing his disgust. Just a little more pressure, and his eyes will pop.
“Definitely not, sir! I’ve never been clever.”
The sergeant’s uniformed chest presses against Arklight’s. “I’ve got my eye on you. One mistake… one… and you’re in for the roughest, dirtiest duty there is. You’ll think that bile bug was a vacation!”
“Yes, sir!”
His breath shuddering with rage, Olega lingers for a few seconds, right in Arklight’s face. Then he turns on his heel and leaves the barracks without another word.
—
Stepping outside, Arklight dons his cap. Wakea is beating down hard. Today like any other day. Funny how the same star can feel so different depending on where you are. In Kolawa, it’s hot and breezy. The Eastern Sea helps cool the air. Out here, on the other side of the civilized world, the sun’s rays needle your skin from the moment it rises above the horizon until it vanishes again. Arklight doesn’t count his lucky stars anymore, but it is fortunate that he got warehouse detail. Down there, below ground, where it’s cooler.
From the air, it sort of looks like the Yusei-Llawand outpost teeters on the edge of the cliff. When he first saw it out of the dusty porthole of the troop transport that brought him here, he thought it might fall into the sea at any moment. He wouldn’t have minded. This place represents the ultimate penalty for being an Adana; the atonement for being privileged. Naturally, being an Adana, his sentence was much harsher than most of his unlucky brethren-in-arms. He would do five years of service rather than the regular three. Nobody could change that, not even his politician mother. No, especially not his politician mother. It would look particularly bad if she used her influence to relieve him of his duty.
What she could have done, he thinks—the thought crosses his mind more often than he likes—is get him out of doing his duty in this forsaken place. He tried to argue that there were plenty of other perfectly reasonable places to put him. He also argued that he wasn’t the soldier type. That he would do much better at headquarters, manning a desk.
”Your father pulls the string on this one,” his mother, Orealee, replied. ”He wants to make a man out of you.”
”I’m already a man,” he said, but she didn’t answer.
And so here he is. His fellow soldiers heckle him, call him a weak, spoiled, rich kid with nothing but smoking kosh, surfing, and getting laid on his mind. On the eve of his being shuttled out to the hellhole that is Yusei-Llawand, he felt so sorry for himself it bordered on panic.
Across the strait, barely visible in the morning mist, Outland’s hazy coastline rises out of the sea like a slumbering beast. Like any other Carran, Arklight has been fed enough stories to make him always aware of its horrors, and being close to it hasn’t dulled his fear one bit.
“Yusei is legendary, son,” his father, colonel Danial Adana, said. It was the night before Arklight shipped out. He had gone through training without a scrape but also without commendation—a point of shame for his family, whose military traditions stretched so far back they were practically Earthers. “The Vigil, they call it, serving there. You should be proud!”
“It’s a hellhole,” Arklight’s eldest brother said. He wasn’t even trying to hide his glee. “It’s hot, it stinks, it’s full of nasty bugs, and you’ll be the first to get hit when the Outlanders attack. Good luck.”
His brother was right: the heat and the stink never seems to let up, and, well, he had first-hand experience of the nasty bugs. Even worse, the Yusei-Llawand garrison will be the first to set off for Outland if war finally comes. If Yusei-Llawand is any indication, what’s waiting on Outland will make this place seem like a regular paradise.
Still, it’s the boredom that gets to him. The place, the people, the job—all of it, mind-numbingly boring. Endless stretches of hot, stinking nothing. In fact, bile bugs are the only break in the monotony, he thinks, a thought that makes him smile a little bit. Yeah, sure, he doesn’t have to go on treks through the jungle. He won’t risk having more interesting species of insect chew his insides. But the warehouse doesn’t exactly stimulate his mind like, say, a lithe girl in a swimsuit riding into the sunset on a surfboard would.
Sometimes, he wonders if he might welcome the war. If it ever breaks out.
”Fat chance,” he mutters, steering clear of a large, yellow drone hauling material from one end of the base to the other. It seems to be all that happens here, things getting moved back and forth.
His father told him not to be complacent. ”War will come,” he said. The conviction shone in his eyes. He wanted war. All of Carran wants war. It has been preparing for it for four hundred years, after all. “You just wait.”
Arklight knew not to press the issue. To doubt the need for a giant stockpile of weaponry at the edge of the world was heresy. After hearing all the horror stories about the Outlanders’ cruelties and degenerate way of life, every Carran was expected to whole-heartedly support the three-year mandatory military service, the mountains of government money spent on the armed forces, and the treacherous peace that at any second might explode in violence. Woe to those who question the centuries-long high alert, this half-a-millennium long standoff. Outland cannot be trusted.
—
Walking across the compound takes less than ten minutes; most of Yusei-Llawand lies under Arklight’s feet. Buried in the bedrock are seven floors dedicated to mayhem and destruction. Up top are landing pads and barracks. Below: everything else. Arklight heads down into the cool, air-conditioned mess hall. He actually looks forward to breakfast. Cooked food, not fabbed. One of the few perks of being stationed on this rock.
Halfway across the compound, he slows his steps as the large, featureless shape of the visitor’s spacecraft appears on the horizon. It rises swiftly, growing in size as it approaches zenith.
He had hoped to time his brief walk across the compound so that he wouldn’t have to see it. Every time he does, it frightens him in a way that he can’t understand, much less describe. It’s what he imagines it would be like to be watched by some supreme being, a planet-sized eye staring back at you.
The other soldiers don’t talk about anything else. Even now, several days after it appeared in the sky, they talk. Arklight forces himself to look down and forge on ahead. Soon, he’s safely underground again.
He was in the canteen when it appeared. He’d just made it to the line when the mood suddenly changed. It was palpable, like the way one can sense electricity. It made the hairs stand up on his arms. A silence fell over the chowing grunts. As one, they turned their heads to the big screen feeding Carran news around the clock. What was the big deal? It only showed a hazy blue sky. Then something came into view. Arklight frowned. What was that? It looked distant and tiny at first, like something filmed underwater. Shaped like a cylinder. Or a large pill.
“Turn it up!” someone shouted.
Moments later, a stern and familiar female voice boomed through the room: “…and despite attempts to make contact, none have so far as we know succeeded. The Court of Veterans commented earlier this morning that the visitors may have hostile intentions, and that it may become necessary to put our forces on high alert.”
Another familiar voice took over: “The Court urges Carrans everywhere to remain calm. Meanwhile, questions are already being raised as to how an object of this size could slip right through our planetary alert systems and enter orbit.”
“Yes, and it may be difficult for viewers who are just now tuning in to grasp just how big the object is, but we have some graphics here that will make it plain…”
Arklight watched apathetically for a bit more as the two hosts speculated freely about the origin and purpose of the big, greyish cylinder thing that apparently entered orbit around Alamea around five o’clock standard time. Then someone shouted: “Outside! It’s coming! We can see it!”
“It’s coming!” another one yelled.
Like a camouflaged tidal wave, the grunts surged outside. Arklight let himself be swept up the stairs into the searing morning sun. The soldiers milled about on the tarmac, craning their necks to the sky. Someone pointed out to sea, past the dim, jagged shape of Outland. “It’ll come from the east! Any second now!”
And it did. There was a collective gasp followed by a stunned silence as a blue-grey shade the shape of a cylinder rose above the horizon, grew impossibly large, and zoomed across the sky. It passed almost directly overhead, and for once, the news reports hadn’t exaggerated or over-dramatized. The thing was enormous. Arklight’s math skills were wanting, but given its orbital altitude and the sheer apparent size, it must have been several tens of kilometers long and a few wide. To his knowledge, there were no spacecraft that large in any fleet. It was just not practical to move such masses around in space.
He was not the only one thinking it. “Are there even any ships that big anywhere?” a soldier next to him asked.
“Miners,” another one said. “Much bigger.”
“They’re not technically ships, though, more like asteroids with engines strapped on them. Nobody builds ships this big.”
“Someone did,” Arklight mumbled under his breath.
—
As predicted, only a handful of soldiers remain in the mess hall when Arklight arrives. He gets his breakfast and sits down by himself, trying not to think about the visitors, who they were, and why they have come.
At least the giant cylinder has brought some of the soldiery some energy. Before, they all wore that dumb, collective look of servicemen everywhere: a sort of resolve and pride that only got steelier once they donned their uniforms and grasped their rifles. Now, they all look animated, excited, and babble amongst themselves, gesturing and comparing sizes as if spaceships fit between their stretched-out palms.
He knows what they’re thinking: this means war. For real this time.
Here’s the thing, Arklight muses (and he feels himself more qualified for such musings than anyone here), war is great before it starts. A constant state of pre-war tension, especially one that’s lasted this long, works well for the common soldiery. It makes them feel like they’re part of an unfailing machine. But when war does come, it won’t be like the endless propaganda says it will.
What better proof than an unknown, humongous spaceship?
“You wanted something to happen, Adana,” a voice behind him says. “This what you were hoping for?”
“Let’s not talk about it, Brey.”
If he has one friend on this base, it’s Arminata Brey. They make a fine pair: both skinny, pale, and as un-soldier-like as can be. Arklight has his father’s sharp features and heavy eyebrows, but other than that, he doesn’t have much of a commanding presence. Brey even less so: a soft, punchable face with thin lips and small eyes, the sort of face you can stare at for minutes and still not remember afterwards.
Arminata puts her tray down. “We can’t not talk about it. It’s all we’re going to talk about forever.”
“Not if I can help it.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s just going to be… conjecture.”
“Conjecture. Listen to you,” Arminata chuckles and takes a seat. “Fancy talk.”
“Whatever. You know what I mean.”
“So… what do you think it is?”
Arklight sighs. “I don’t care.”
“Yes, you do. Don’t try that with me. I know you’re as interested as everyone else.”
“I am not, as a matter of fact,” Arklight says and angrily tears his bread roll in two. “Weak minds discuss people. Average minds discuss events. Great minds discuss ideas.”
“Clever, but that, my friend, is evasion, not disinterest. I bet you’re stimming about it right now.”
“Wrong.”
Enstim makes everything easier. Living, loving, hating, being. He rarely thinks about it in those terms, but the tiny, pinky-nail size enstim implant that gives instant access to, well, everything, is a fundamental trait of the Carran way of life. It’s impossible to imagine existence without it. If you, like Arklight, have a visual augmentation implant as well, then the the secrets of the world are simply displayed right before your eyes, whenever and wherever you choose. He can, if he wants to, watch the news right there, literally in his mind’s eye.
Only he doesn’t want that big, hazy cylinder thing anywhere near his mind’s eye. Also, he’s only allowed to so much stimming on duty.
“I think they’re aliens,” Brey goes on, drooling with excitement. “Think how big they must be!”
“Maybe it’s just one big alien.”
“Oooh good one! There you go! Excellent conjecture,” Brey says, smirking. Arklight grins, despite himself. “I thought I’d get you smiling.”
To be fair, Arklight can’t get a handle on his own reaction. He can’t wait to get to the warehouse, where he doesn’t have to think about it or see it. Which is kind of funny, because only moments ago, he was thinking about ways to get out of working without raising suspicion.
—
A few hours later, while directing a liftbot to where it should store the newly arrived AS-71B rapid deployment surface-to-air plasma cannon (now 36% deadlier!), a very old, stooped woman in ragged clothes appears before him, and he nearly trips over his own feet.
