Are You There?

They said it was a nuclear weapon.

No matter to us. Nine huddle around the fire, more for fear of dark than of cold. Nine faces lurch out of jungle shade with bodies contoured into the green earth around, insects abuzz drowning out the fire’s each and every crack and hiss of blackening wood.

I write on a waterproof notepad half-full of notes from briefings, from another time when electricity hummed in my hands, across my rifle, on my armor and my uniform. Before the flash and thunder and sudden darkness not experienced since gas shells screamed over trenches the first time the world shook. A shrill ring lingered for hours after the explosion, but I hear better now, my pencil faintly scratching below the other sounds of the primeval world.

I write in the present-tense because all of this is happening now, the men huddling and staring and not one of us speaking a word. I am alone in writing my perceptions. One of the others—this has just happened a moment ago—one of the others looks at me and I say “letter.” The word cuts through deafening ambiance to somehow become the loudest sound around the fire. He lets it hang between us and nods once; that is the end of our discourse.

Stars glitter far above our heads. No light pollution out on these little reef-islands and no moon either—it is turned off. Must have been electric. Occasionally a missile will streak overhead, or the dark and roaring spectre of an aircraft, and we will all look to the sky and wonder if it is the beginning of the end of the world. I only have the fire to write by and its epicenter sets my eyes aching.

Tired now. Will write again soon.

~

Feeling better today—it was a red and orange sunrise behind the smog settling over this area. I sat on the beach (it’s virtually all beach) and watched that lazy ascent while the sand warmed beneath me.

I suppose I will write this like a letter now that my actual upload tablet is fried. I miss you and I am afraid I will die here without ever speaking to you again. If that happens I hope this will find its way to you.

They said it was a nuclear warhead, inbound from somewhere south of us, out in the Pacific. Brave and cowardly soldiers alike watched the sky with their hearts thundering out of their chests, their stomachs twisted into balloon-animal shapes and their lungs excruciatingly conscious of final breaths. All of us waited to die. I thought of you, of course, but I tried my hardest not to—fear tinges all the memories dredged in those horrible minutes. I fear our most recent anniversary is forever tarnished by death’s shadow.

We are all living in a kind of twilight zone. Those moments between announcement and impact stretched time to a thin membrane; our adrenaline-flooded minds scoured every synapse for a solution to an unsolvable problem. When they returned they found a world cast many years into the past.

The most devastating weapon in human history did not detonate on my head, rather many miles above it. All the lights in the South China Sea winked out, along with our gunsights, comms, and navigation equipment. The comms turned back on, but they’re either picking up bogus or nothing at all unless we’re on short-range. I am grateful to be alive.

We were supposed to hold out here, here (if this letter ends up somewhere else) being Bravo Lima in the Spratly archipelago. I’m not allowed to say why we’re occupying, but I figure if China finds this, it’ll be after we leave or die. The islet has 2 barracks, an ops center, one concrete side for ships to dock against and a little thicket we sat in last night in case a strike targeted any of the buildings. There’s no potable water nor lighting. The EMP cooked the substation and generators. We’ve been using iodine tabs like a bunch of marines Marines.

We are minutiae here. Missiles thunder overhead and we all bet on our smallness, that 9 soldiers are a negligible target. Earlier there was a

There is an F-35 overhead now with 2 autonomous wingmen. It glides serenely with its engine roaring. A missile drops smoothly off its wing and the thruster carries it away. A moment later the F-35 spits countless fireballs into the blue sky like lit jellyfish below the ocean. It banks sharply, running from its spewed ink to confuse some predator. A missile from over the horizon hits one of its flares, another strikes an auto-wingman who broke in the opposite direction. The jet retreats toward the horizon with one wingman in tow. All we can see is its afterburner glowing through roving clouds of smog. Nobody says a word; we’re all waiting for the attacker to rear its ugly head as if M4s will knock down a drone or five.

I feel compelled to write things down as they happen. I want each thought to reach this pad so that you and I will be connected across all the distance and time between me writing this and you hopefully reading it. I am scared to stop existing without you perceiving me one last time—that all these weeks later you will learn I’m gone, and I didn’t fill you in on what you missed. ← it took a long time to write that but to you it will all be one unbroken thought.

Chow time now. All the frozen stuff in the mess here is thawing out and will start smelling soon if we don’t eat it. Doc has been cooking while the rest of us post security, not that there’s shit to secure. Will write again after if I feel like it. I want to write something more substantial but that feels silly if a bomb is going to land on my head.

~

Picking skin too deep and leaving scars
Picking at the skin, tearing at the bars
Just a piece at first, just a sip
That potent drink falls rotten from your lip
Look down and find a wound gaping at the stars
A chasm, a hole, your nails crusted blackened with blood
Gravedigging in your own sin skin, underneath your own sin,
This inhuman depth will surely leave scars
Now released from your fleshly thrall, godless armies grin

I hope you like this one. You know I like to rhyme (even when I’m out of time).

~

Garcia is dead and we have prisoners. If you’ve forgotten, Garcia was the one who always had a motivational bible verse ready when one of us complained about training. I just finished my shift digging his grave.

Around sunset (it’s dark now) we saw a boat through the smog, outlined against the sun. It washed up on the sandy side of the island. Some kind of fishing boat by the look of it with a huge net trying to climb its way up the beach, pushing forward in the tide and dragging back again. The ship wedged in the sand halfway up the surf.

The SSgt sent Garcia and Clarkson to do introductions while the rest of us waited in the thicket or the buildings—one of the barracks faces that strip of sand and I posted up there since I’m the marksman. Sunlight slanted through the windows. Dust and sand stirred at each step through the abandoned building. As I set up I watched a fisherman poke his head over the side. He said something in Chinese with a lisp—I saw the gaps in his teeth from a hundred meters away—but his tone was light. He swung a leg over the hull and dropped to the beach when Clarkson shouted him to a halt. A woman showed her face on the deck and Clarkson commanded her as well.

The man introduced himself in English, and the woman as his wife. The EMP had crippled their fishing vessel and set them adrift the day before. He brought something up from his side too fast and my finger twitched on the trigger but it was just a non-functional commercial radio. He lamented its death in the EMP and asked if we might have any communication equipment. His wife smiled blithely and looked between her husband and Clarkson without the barest hint of comprehension.

Clarkson called up the rear team to detain while he and Garcia searched the boat. Their shoulders relaxed. Garcia slung his weapon to clamber up to the deck. There was a moment when he pulled his rifle again and scanned the deck, the porthole into the darkened storage space below the cabin, before turning around to pull Clarkson up.

At my distance there was a delay in sound; I had heard the conversation over local comms while Garcia was still broadcasting it. There was a flash, so dim and quick it could have been errant light bouncing off the storage porthole. Garcia leaned forward. A gentle wind found its way up the beach and through the barracks window and tousled my hair. Then the sound caught up, a thundercrack inadmissible as anything but a rifle shot. Garcia leaned further. He toppled off the deck nearly atop Clarkson. The ship’s cab-atop-cabin cast a giant headstone shadow over his body. I aimed into the porthole and exhaled and fired 3 shots with the gun pushing into my shoulder at each squeeze. My headgear muffled each shot like turning the volume down on a movie.

The rear team grabbed the fisherman and his wife; the wife pulled free and ran. A bullet worked its way into her calf. She crumpled onto the sand wailing something in Chinese while her husband looked between her and his captor, mouth flapping in mute pleas. Clarkson climbed the hull with his rifle ahead of him and Bravo fireteam watching from the thicket. He crouched alongside the storage door and produced a grenade. It tumbled through the porthole, flashed, and he pushed the door open with his gun rattling off. Smoke and dust poured from the open doorway and caught the now-red sun.

Doc and the SSgt pushed onto the beach with rifles raised. They turned Garcia over and the blood that had poured out of his mouth into the sand now welled up in his mouth and he choked. His mic still transmitted and I heard we all heard the bubbling as he tried to speak. He coughed wetly and blood spilled over the corners of his mouth and ran down his face. All the color was gone so that he matched the sand around him, only tinted by sunset, and Doc held a pouch of morphine in one rubber-gloved hand while the other cupped Garcia’s neck. Clarkson joined the SSgt in watching Garcia die—the morphine quieted his cough and his blood-muffled words and for a minute he just laid there gurgling. Then he died.

I was crouched behind my rifle in the barrack when Garcia’s noises stopped. Bravo fireteam emerged from the thicket and swept the ship. They found 4 shrapnel-mangled bodies in the storage room, and in the cab 2 live ones who did not stay that way for long.

The fisherman sat on the beach with his hands zip tied behind his back watching all of this with an unreadable expression, his wife next to him, clot dressing stuffed into the hole in her calf and a pressure bandage around that. Her face was swollen and ugly from crying. The rear team held their weapons at the hip and kept them trained on the hostages’ heads. An aircraft passed overhead and the units retreated to the barracks, Doc hauling Garcia’s corpse while the rear team made one hostage walk and the other crawl 3-leggedly.

The breeze grew cold. I pulled the window shut with my rifle slung near my hip and my knuckles aching. As soon as Doc and the SSgt entered tense words flew, about the trap and being more careful except the only careless one had been Garcia and he clearly did or did not learn his lesson based on the existence of some kind of afterlife. In any case his learning would not make us better off in the future. Clarkson leaned on the windowsill next to where I sat on the floor. Through his dark scowl he wordlessly proffered me a cigarette and I accepted even though I don’t smoke. Something in his look pleaded for connection. Our shadows spanned the floor, across Doc’s broad gestures, across the fisherman and his wife still at gunpoint and out the barracks door which swung lazily.

Our shadows lengthened for 30 minutes or more—Doc’s lecture quieted gradually to silence—and while everyone stood around chewing their cud and despairing, Garcia’s skin discolored to sickly white. I nudged Clarkson about it and he announced his intent to find a shovel and that he’d meet me wherever I decided to bury the body.

I chose the thicket. Garcia always sat in the shade before and after training; Georgia had been blisteringly hot in the summer, and you could join him under an awning or a tree and he’d ask how’s it going and how’s your week and he’d remember details. If you talked to him long enough he’d often find an applicable bible verse for your current situation. A couple times when we talked he didn’t have one, and each time he found me later and told me a verse and that it reminded him of me. He probably thought of one for his last moments on the beach but couldn’t say it through all that blood.

Garcia also had anger issues and was quick to snap at another during training. Apologized later without fail, but it still happened in the heat of the moment. I write this because I don’t want this part of the letter to be a military obituary. “Long, storied career, never got angry, never said a thing out of line, an exemplary soldier and a true loss for the 75th.” Never the truth about a dead man—that he had his flaws, did his best to correct them, died. Garcia was not perfect but personally I like liked him, enough to see him buried somewhere he could stay out of the sun.

The crackling fire cast long, leaping shadows without actually illuminating my work. I dug with a full-sized shovel, made in China. Better than squatting in wet dirt with an e-tool. I poured sweat with the fire and nighttime heat. My mind wandered and somewhere it found my old store of religious verses from when I was a kid. Without thinking I murmured them toward the work. Toward the grave. Revelation 21:4. Psalm 23:4. The shadow of death. I guess my mind grasped for that same relief even though it would not find me in a thicket in an ocean in Armageddon’s epicenter. Every generation cries wolf, saying the end times are upon us, but this feels like the end times. Here is a war raging on all sides of us and yet nowhere near. The horsemen riding just over the horizon. Trumpets blaring faintly. As though God had forgotten to include our party of 8 plus 2 prisoners.

All of this occurred to me with the fire’s soft crackle, with the rasp of metal sinking into dirt. With the ache in my arms and the sweat off my brow. All the sensations Garcia would not be feeling again.

The SSgt found me digging and took the shovel from my hands. I climbed up on the ops building’s flat rooftop and here I am. I am writing this by starlight—a million little holes poked into the box so I can breathe, so whatever God is up there can watch me string words in a sequence on a darkened notepad. All addressed to you.

I hope you get a chance to read this.

~

In the jaws of mercy
The tongue hangs like a star, pale rays for teeth
Sightless by starlight,
It sees no faces.
A beast disguised as a beacon,
A man cowering, hiding, behind a gun.
The sea digests
Ash, gunpowder, and sand.
Even blood fades in the mouth of the river,
But its shore is heavy with silence.

~

Currently watching the prisoners. The woman is asleep with a raging fever. Her wound is becoming infected despite Doc’s best efforts. She was malnourished to begin with and now withers to nothing though we have given her food and water. Her husband urges her to eat now while her lips move wordlessly; her eyes are screwed shut and a sheen of sweat coats her forehead. I think she is going to die soon.

I have just slid a portion of my meal into their cell (and returned to writing). We give them the same stuff we eat, but slightly smaller portions. The man’s meal is cold now but I feel he should eat something warm. He offers me a wan smile and places some of the food to his wife’s lips. I shake my head and say it’s for him. We both know his wife will eat no more for now. He looks to her discolored lips with worry creasing his plain face, thanks me and eats, glancing at her between bites as if she will scold him for taking the food. She does not and he chews with myself watching and writing. I realize I must be a frightening figure to him with my rifle slung across my lap, angled just to the side of the cell.

We keep the prisoners in the ops building’s brig. There are 2 small cells in the building’s basement—we only use one so that the prisoners can stay together. This is the easiest and coolest shift even without air conditioning. The basement is dark except for a ground-level window strip providing illumination to the cells. It lights the fisherman’s blackheads and clogged pores in urine-yellow, except on his right cheek where the cell bars lay their shadow. He is missing a couple of teeth and his tongue pushes into the gaps as he eats—the rest of his teeth are uneven.

In some ways I resent them for hiding the soldiers. Not that I would have done differently if you and I were fishers. But they are interlopers in our world and in the broader sense, we are interlopers in theirs. Except there is no broader sense until we know the rest of the world is still there beyond the daily missile exchanges and aerial battles. Early this morning we saw a ship on the horizon, in a tunnel of thinner fog. Then it was gone.

The fisherman asks me what I am writing. I tell him it’s a letter.
To who?
To my partner. My pen scratches paper between our exchanges.

He looks down at his wife and manages a toothy smile. He writes her poetry sometimes. She says it’s ridiculous but pins them up nonetheless. I ask if there are any in the boat. He shakes his head—too damp there.

He asks to see some of my writing. I show him. After I explain many of the words, he says he likes it. He asks me if I will write a poem. He has family from the Phillipines and they write a four-line poem with seven syllables per line. He says it used to be rare for a Chinese Filipino to live in China.

Below I will write the poem he requested:

That is a tanaga. The fisherman’s smile grows as I read it to him—the sun has shifted to his damp shoulders as they heave with a gleeful laugh. He tells me his name is Li Haoyu. I tell him my first name only.

We talked for the rest of the shift. Haoyu Li Mr. Li was very forthcoming with personal details, myself less so, though he said he understood. He told me he’d been a fisherman for 10 years and worked in a fishery before that. Plenty of people become fishers that way, apparently. I told him I was in the military and he laughed and asked for how long. 5 years.

He asked if the US dropped the EMP-bomb or if China did. I wanted to say China but I didn’t actually know. Here was an American and a Chinese man and one of us was bound to be unhappy no matter who dropped it. I said I didn’t know. He said he hadn’t thought either country could do that. A lot of South Asian countries would be very unhappy about it and probably throw their support behind whichever country didn’t send the bomb so the move made no sense at all.

~

I joined up to leave the desert and here I am again. God damn it. Will write again soon.

~

I am going to write this part of the letter with the assumption that you are still alive. I prayed for the first time in ten years last night and I did it again this morning. We’ve been working on a better communication setup for 2 days now, using what already exists on the island and our comm units. I didn’t don’t understand any of it but yesterday it worked. We tuned to civilian frequencies and heard a message repeating itself in Chinese on a lot of channels.

Mr. Li and I are not friends by any means but I see no reason to antagonize him nor avoid conversation. I brought him in and asked him to translate, and while he was reluctant to leave his wife in her worsening condition (we don’t have nearly enough medical supplies here) he agreed.

His face paled as he listened. He told us in halting English that it was a nuclear shelter-in-place warning. That Hainan had been hit with more targets to be announced. We all stood there unblinking until Doc pushed his rifle into Mr. Li’s chest and told him not to “spew bullshit.” I had to push his rifle down myself and he stepped back and left the room.

Nobody has been coping with the news well. One of the Bravo guys, Lakot, went and vomited a step out the door. The SSgt is holding us together but even he can’t quite spin a positive from this. I went to Garcia’s cairn and thought to say something but instead I just sat down and watched a cloud travel across the sky between shading leaves. I thought of you too much. I’m torn now between dredging up every memory and pushing it all down. I can’t live without you unless there is no you. I love you.

Please be alive.

~

Stupid bastard. If I ever see someone who looks like you I’ll shoot them. I hope you and your cripple wife end up happy in hell. Thank you for stranding me here fucking forever while your body rots. “I have kids” I hope your kids are scorch marks you inbred

~

Bodies buried in thicket——rank/alphabet order. Prisoners deposited on beach.

~

We went to sleep after trying the radio for hours. Civilian and military frequencies. We heard English here and there but all in code, and no code we had heard before. Sometimes with accents. Aussies in the South China Sea. We transmitted sparsely, none of us wanting to trigger a long-range strike, but received no response.

At night I woke up and heard floorboards creaking madly and flesh slapping. Somebody grunted and I almost rolled over to sleep. One of the beds crashed and broke in 2. I stood, eyes bleary but wide, and grabbed my gun.

Doc crouched atop the ruins of the bed. A pair of legs beneath him. His fist reared. Swung down. That was the slapping I heard. I asked him what the fuck was going on. Shouldn’t have done that.

His head turned. His mouth opened, too far. Something had cut his cheek open like a Glasgow smile. He said my name and a blade flashed out of the darkness and stuck in his neck. I raised my rifle in one hand with the safety off and pulled him away by his blouse collar. His hands clamped over the wound—a losing battle. With his shadow and his weight removed I watched Mr. Li the prisoner scramble to his feet an arm-length away with no weapon. Distress dragged against his face.

I leaned Doc against the next bed. My jaw clenched. The prisoner said he was sorry over and over again. His hands trembled at his sides. He said he never intended to hurt me and he needed to get back to the mainland to help his wife and to see his children again. His government would kill him for being friendly with us and our government would kill him for being Chinese, he said. At last he spoke just my name with tears welling in his eyes and I couldn’t look anymore. Out the open window the moon was almost half-full and it gleamed atop a narrow, shifting band of water. Again a breeze found its way to my skin. Again my finger tightened on the trigger.

I opened Doc’s JFAK and took the clot dressing out, packed it around the knife and wrapped a pressure bandage over that and under his right arm. I leaned back from him, still whispering reassurement, and saw the 2 puncture wounds in his abdomen spilling dark blood. By the time I wrapped those he was already dead.

Clarkson and some of the Bravo fireteam found me holding pressure on the wounds. One of them ran to get the SSgt and there was a commotion outside. By the time Clarkson had gotten my hands off Doc’s body the news had spread like wildfire through the group. SSgt was dead. So was a watchman on the night shift. The other was missing—we found him on the fishing boat. Seemed like the fisherman asked to get medicine or a keepsake off the boat and took his filleting knife instead, to cut our throats and make for home. For his kids.

Nobody could sleep so we started a fire and dragged the bodies to the thicket and buried them in a row with Garcia’s grave in it. Taking turns digging while the others sat around the fire in absolute silence like that first night. The moon cut through the branches and a breeze came up from the sea to chill the dried blood on my hands and forearms. I tried writing but all I mustered was boiling rage. I think somewhere I understood what the fisherman did and why and I hated hate even understanding.

Later, as we were heading back to the barracks, Clarkson took me aside—he was the highest-ranking member at this point—and said the fisherman’s wife was still alive and locked away in the cell. Said that she’d probably die soon from her wounds and that I could go down there and “do what I needed to do” and that he’d make sure nobody asked a question. I asked him what he would do if she was still alive in the morning and he said he’d decide that in the morning. His tone was dark.

I went down those steps with my rifle and my torch raised like she’d spring from the shadows with claws and teeth. Instead she laid on the cell bench and her head turned at my approach. Tears ran horizontal across her nose and cheeks at the sight of me. I opened my mouth to explain things to her but she would not understand anyway. Instead I stood and thought about what my grandpa had told me about Vietnam. About what they did to the women there and the aftermath. The mutilation. Clarkson might have expected something like that from me—I haven’t asked.

I don’t know what you would have done. Never will I imagine such a situation for us.

Eventually I went upstairs and fetched some of the tuna we’d dried and heated some rice. I pulled the salty fish apart and scattered it in the rice and took it back downstairs and kneeled before her. I held the food up so she could smell it and mimed eating. She continued weeping silently and closed her eyes with her head shaking weakly. I left the food before her and watched her through the cell bars for a while. When it seemed like she had fallen asleep I raised my rifle and shot her. I know it was a war crime but it was all I could do for her.

I moved her onto the beach and laid her body next to her husband’s. Sometimes being dead is not enough. I trust the soldiers stranded here but when do we stop being soldiers and start being something else?

Think as you will of me, if you are alive. I have my flaws and I do my best to correct them. And the world bears the raking wounds.

~

I am putting this letter in a waterproof bag and letting it float away. I cannot cling to the naive belief that you survived nuclear fire. I cannot kill myself to join you. I will not indulge in words if they only punctuate the end of my world.

To the other ‘you,’ the one who finds this, please do not desecrate my countrymen’s graves. Please read my last true words. I leave a poem to you as a memorial for the dead.

As prayers wish violence silence
pale dawn follows the long night
and ends violence

Signed,
Me.

Essay #13

FROM Mars Base Alpha, Valles Marineris, Mars
TO NASA//SCaN2, Houston Relay, Earth
SENT 2041-05-15 SOL 1034.452
ORSEP +119.6° (+1056s, Receding)
—BEGIN SIGNED MESSAGE—

I’m sure they’ve told you already, but it is the understanding of the PRC at this time that this message was impossible to send. Most of your satellites have been hit—either kinetically or otherwise—but we have a few very classified constellations in HEO in anticipation of exactly this. Who knows how long those are going to last, though. I’m not too optimistic about the chances there, given how easily they were able to hack INCOMM, but I suppose what’s happened’s happened. Hopefully those fools at NSIC finally learn what an “airgap” actually means, but I digress. (Side comment: who installed an autocorrect on our terminals? It’s not an official memo, I should be allowed to use contractions in a letter to my family without some computerized protocol officer yelling at me for it. I’m going to disable it if I ever find out where on this system it’s buried.) The entirety of LEO will be unusable for at least the next six months or so as all the debris de-orbits. In any case, it’s quite possible that I won’t be able to talk to you again for a while, so I’ll get the sappy stuff out of the way first. I would love to send a recorded voice message as usual but we’re down to only a few kb/s now when our glorious sun isn’t acting up—and Houston is happy to blow though all of it if I don’t complain. My personal downlink will be limited to these for a while.
I know I’ve said this to you before, but sometimes it’s alarming to me when I don’t have as potent an emotional response to something as I know it would be proper to. I love you, mother, more than any other living soul, but I find myself strangely at peace with the knowledge I may not speak to you again for a long time. Call it fatigue, call it galvanization, but we’ve dealt with the knowledge of how fragile our connection is for almost eight years now. I’ve been emotionally bracing myself for this not just since liftoff—but since I set my ambitions left Earth in the first place. The pain of our separation is constant and sharp, but I have never felt regret. America was built by settlers, by those who were driven by a deeply held conviction that the possibility of a better life for their children meant deep sacrifice for themselves. That Starship was my Mayflower, and now Base Alpha my Plymouth. I had no children and that better life is likely generations away, but I would not be able to sleep at night knowing I didn’t at least try. That same optimism tells me we may yet meet again.
-Paul
—END SIGNED MESSAGE—

FROM Mars Base Alpha, Valles Marineris, Mars
TO NASA//DSN, Houston Relay, Earth
SENT 2041-09-02 SOL 1503.238
ORSEP +89.5° (+840s, Receding)
—BEGIN SIGNED MESSAGE—

Comms restored at 800b/s. We (and this time I mean me and Carl, not Houston’s busybodies) had to get the old DSN stuff around Venus back up for it to work. They let me send this as a thank-you, I suppose. The news is trickling in by the hour, at least what they’ll let us read. I’m relieved to hear that there doesn’t seem to be danger of a mainland US assault, mostly. As long as you’re safe, the rest seems relatively unimportant to me. I know dad won’t let anything happen to you, but it’s still something I think about.
It’s surprising to me that after all these years, all this talk about asynchronous warfare and cyber assaults, it’s boots on the ground and boats in the water that are doing the real damage. Carrier groups playing the same song-and-dance from the 40s, Guam overrun by PLA armor units in the first week. With all the satellites out and the undersea cables cut and everything, I’m guessing they quite literally went back to WWII communication technology. It’s a lot harder to hack a box of tube transistors, as I’m sure a roomful of frustrated generals and a few vindicated radio techs are learning right about now. How long before I get word we’re back to using Navajo code talkers? You’ve heard the rant a million times, but this is one of the reasons I wanted to come here in the first place. Mars sounds futuristic, but I’ve made sure this remains a simple place. Wipe out every computer in the central dome and we’ll carry on just fine, maybe even better without Houston breathing down our necks every time we try to do anything.
I wish I had more to say, but life’s been trundling along fairly well over the past few months. We finally got enough of the breeder reactors running at Proxima to be able to power the propellant cryo-coolers (way behind schedule), so we should be able to at least start thinking about self-sufficiently generating propellant and oxidizer here in the next few years. I may even be able to come back for a visit! I love you, and I miss you as always.
-Paul

Edit just before I send this: I just heard about James. I can’t imagine what it must have been like on that carrier, but I am relieved that he came out alive. I wish I had some encouraging words, or some poetic motivating speech to send his way, but the truth is that I just can’t in good faith justify what’s going on in the South China Sea at the moment. It’s not that I’m against war—far from it, as you know—just that I don’t think I’m in any position to make a value judgement from all the way over here. Soldiers in an existential war are motivated by the threats to their life, to their community, and to the nation whose values they hold dear. We’re dependent on US infrastructure for communication back to Earth, but we are physically self-sufficient. It would be disingenuous for me to try to empathize with James’ experience on the John F. Kennedy, being so incredibly removed from it all as we are. Tell James that I love him, am proud of him, am praying for him and his shipmates, and hope we can trade stories over a beer sometime a few decades down the road.
—END SIGNED MESSAGE—

FROM Mars Base Alpha, Valles Marineris, Mars
TO NASA//DSN, Houston Relay, Earth
SENT 2041-09-09 SOL 0820.955
ORSEP +87.8° (+804s, Receding)
—BEGIN SIGNED MESSAGE—

Looks like 800 baud is all we’re going to get for a while, if that. It’s quite interesting going back to plaintext communication like this; I think this is probably the closest anything has felt to sending a telegram across the Atlantic for at least a hundred years. I read your letter—but without any visual aids it’s quite a bit to try to wrap my head around! Taiwan’s out of play, it seems, if I had to guess because the value of our Spruce Pine Mining District was underestimated, and it’s turning out that warfare isn’t as dependent on high-volume microprocessors as we had expected. I hope that means James doesn’t have to patrol the Suez for much longer—it feels like the PRC’s bargaining chips are running low, but what do I know.
Nothing, really. Right now I know how to properly aerate the hydroponics, which is normally Floaty’s job, but he cut himself up pretty badly over in the sulfur mine. We put him on reactor watch until he heals up. I honestly have no idea how he didn’t go crazy doing this the past six years, mom. It’s so mind-numbing I find myself wishing I was back home, which is never a good sign. You and I, on a breezy evening sitting on a porch swing… It’s the only thing that makes me think twice about getting in that rocket. I love you as always.
-Paul.

P.S. I don’t normally get to put in a post-script, but this damn message has been on the downlink queue for almost 6 hours now. Sorry for being flippant about the war, I know it’s a big deal for you and even more so for James.
—END SIGNED MESSAGE—

FROM Mars Base Alpha, Valles Marineris, Mars
TO NASA//DSN, Houston Relay, Earth
SENT 2041-09-25 SOL 0820.955
ORSEP +85.7° (+759s, Receding)
—BEGIN SIGNED MESSAGE—

I’ve a spent a lot of time thinking about it, alone here pulling weeds in the hydro farm, thinking about how much I’ve missed you, and at the same time how much I love my men here. Our downlink is getting worse by the day, so I’ll probably only be able to send one of these a month for a while after this. LEO is looking worse than anticipated, Houston is telling us, and we might be on our own for some time. It’s not something we haven’t prepared for, though. Self-sufficiency for the survival of humanity is the mission, after all.
From up above, looking at our Earth through an 800 bit-per-second pinhole from millions of miles away, I come short trying to understand its nuances. To one man in the terror of battle, each bullet fired—either from his weapon of the enemy’s—carries a weight, a real power and potential for great and terrible change in his life. I cannot hope to ever appreciate what that bullet meant to that man, nor even the tactical consequences of the skirmish he fought in. From high on my Martian perch, all the billions of bullets fired, hundreds of thousands of men killed, hundreds of battles won and lost, even the war itself has blurred and scarred even as I try to understand it. The war cannot rattle my understanding of humanity, for through the noise and the fog, that is all I can hope to see with any clarity: humanity.
Does this make me cruel and unfeeling? I learn budget my love and my agony where its effects are most potent, where my feelings can translate into action. No good has come from quarrelling over the matters of Earth, here in our little lava tubes scraping the bottom of self-sufficiency. Even the very powerful and very wise cannot hope to appreciate the nuance of every little of the world’s injustices, so I spare my appreciation for what I can affect: the lives of my crew of settlers and friends here on Mars, and you, mother. Knowing every soldier by name is the purvey of God. I can only hope to know a few—and to love them in earnest, as I love you.
-Paul
—END SIGNED MESSAGE—

Fiction #03

JTF JAPAN
PERSONNEL RECORD SERVICE

JUNE 18, 2054

Mr. STADLER
8421 W OAK SADDLE DRIVE

Dear Mr. Ben Stadler,

Upon a review of our stored records, we came upon this file. The document appears to have sustained considerable damage; however, we have transcribed the portion that is still readable. As you are the next of kin on file, we thought it prudent to notify you of its existence.

JTF JAPAN PRS

Begin Transcription;

5 AUGUST 2033
33rd RESCUE SQUADRON
Ben,

Thought I’d try my hand at some literature seeing as I had some time to spare. Ramert worked hard to find me this little notebook in the TOC, and I don’t want to let it go to waste. I know you’re studying hard right now, and I’m proud of you. I don’t want to burden you with the thoughts of what’s happening here, but you are the only person I feel I can tell.

You know as well as I do that the life we’ve lived has left more than memories behind. The next time the Air Force lets see you see Ma, give her a big hug for me, won’t you? The last time they let me use the Sat-phone, I told her not to worry, but I know she’ll never listen. Words of reassurance feel different when they’re spoken across an ocean. I would know.

This ink and paper isn’t the most efficient, but at least it won’t be stored as a record on some PLA server somewhere. I hate writing, always have, but they’ve told me comms are a no go for the near future, and if I’m going to remember any of this, I might as well start now.

When I was at the Academy, they told us air power was the key to winning this war. The first few days of the Indo-Pacific campaign were powerful and sleek. I’m sure you saw it on the news. Our fighters and carriers, going toe-to-toe with some of China’s shiniest technology. I don’t know how we survived the opening days of this war. At first, they had us on basic recovery, pulling drowning pilots from the carcasses of their flightless cockpits. But as the stockpiles of air-to-air missiles dwindled, and the fancy new stealth fighters gave way to the dirty, patchworked skins of surplus jets, it got more and more dangerous to be out there in the air.

We gave up the helicopter searches two weeks in, when our lead helicopter drew the attention of a roving Chinese fighter plane. I was waving one of my pararescuemen onto the rescue winch, hovering over a life raft when I felt the shockwave. It was a vicious shove, like a ten-pound sledgehammer hitting my rib cage. Out of my periphery, I watched the water around us spray in a million directions as hot metal from our sister aircraft raked the surface. I heard the engines of our rotors scream to maintain stability as our pilot fought the controls to veer us away. I prayed, clutching on to the litter on the floor, unsure if the Chinese pilot could hear the tone of his radar lock as he closed in to finish the job.

It was the presence of a Japanese F-16, in the end, that gave us the window we needed to limp back to our FOB, chasing away the bird of prey that hunted us. I had never been so happy to see the flame of an afterburner twisting above me. I hope he made it home from that duel, but the odds were not in his favor.

From that moment on, we never left our operating base in anything but speedboats, and the thermal-camouflage covers were never to be removed from the engines, not even in an emergency. We would watch the skies at night from our blacked-out craft, watching the debris from satellites streaking down to earth like fallen angels. Standing there, looking at the stars under my night vision goggles, I thought about sneaking out together in elementary school, watching the stars above our house.

The GPS went out soon after.

The last month, we have scraped together anything we can to maintain our footprint in the South China Sea. Alves, one of the Green Berets living with us, modified one of our high-frequency radio antennas to serve as a potent drone-jammer. It uses most of the power from our generators to keep it up all the time, so we don’t really get hot water, and we have to be strategic about when we charge the batteries for our radios and night vision. It really is worth it though.

After the skies became hazy with the smoke of burning jet fuel and smoldering aircraft carriers, the drone swarms began to appear. The first time I saw one, my hair stood on end. A million angry hornets the size of dinner plates, swirling like some resentful force of nature. Our beaches are littered with the corpses of these one-time wonders now.

Our uniforms are nearly worn beyond recognition, minus the flag on our shoulders. It’s the only thing that still counts. I’ve carried litters and zipped up body bags for anyone who’s needed it. Marines, Navy, Army… it doesn’t make a difference anymore. I’ll never forget our last medevac drone. It came screaming in a couple weeks ago, trailing smoke like an eagle with a smoke grenade strapped to its back. When we got the flames cooled enough to pry open the dented rear doors, we found two marines inside. I’m not sure if they came from the expeditionary unit on the mainland or one of the many defense units in the island chain, but they were in rough shape. The scene is literally burned into my retinas.

A young man, probably no older than nineteen, cradled his fellow marine like a kid clutching a favorite doll. She was in rough shape, torn apart by some kind of anti-personnel munition. Even if the drone had been faster, there was no way she would have made it. Her face was ashen, grey from the loss of blood pooling beneath what was left of her legs. The compartment was tiny, barely enough room to transport one man. The second marine had wedged himself in, and by the looks of the scattered brass shells around the compartment and fragmentation wounds he bore, he had done his best to protect her as the drone was exposed to enemy fire.

But Ben, the thing that haunts me the most is his face. His eyes. They were piercing and embraced by the puffy darkness that only a man at war with himself truly understands. He just stared at me, wobbly with terror and the knowledge that the world is indifferent to his suffering.

I’ve seen those eyes before. In the mirror, as a little boy, with clenched fists and a bloody nose. On your face, staring at me with tears welling at the end of those morning runs before school. In the reflection of the glass that Mom swept up in the mornings, careful not to wake Dad passed out at the dining room table.

All of it came rushing back at once, standing there in the smoke staring at those two marines. I remembered my first day of high school, wearing my torn-up backpack and a fresh black eye that Dad had given me the night before for talking back. I remember the way you looked at me when I told you I got into the Academy and was leaving in the summer. The ambulance and police car lights flashing outside our house on New Year’s Eve, sophomore year, when Dad finally pushed too far and left for good.

We’re survivors Ben, you and me.

I hated myself every day for a long time knowing that you had to face all of it alone. Sometimes, I wonder if my presence here is some kind of punishment for not staying longer. Maybe the universe has a way of settling old debts. I’m making my peace with it, little by little. I hope someday you can forgive me for not doing more when I should have.

I don’t want to be long-winded, I know you have your own worries. Stay out of trouble kid, you’ve got a bright future ahead of you. Keep your friends close and remember why you do what you are doing. I’ll be home soon enough, and we’ll catch up over a good meal somewhere.

Every time we scramble to load up and get out there, to bring someone home, I see the flags on our gear and remind myself…

In the end, it’s the people. It always was.

 

All my love,

Your brother.