Providence - Max Barry Page 0,85

videos before getting themselves arrested. When Anders arrived at the monument, he listened to a bunch of coat-wearing college students shout about corruption and convenient enemies and how in the age of media manipulation, democracy had become a sham.

His brothers returned home for Thanksgiving, just before shipping out. It meant Anders had to go home, too, which he’d sworn he would never do. But it was either that or miss them, and everyone put on their best face and the game was a good distraction. Toward the end, their father put a hand on his brothers’ shoulders and said, “These are good boys. The bravest boys,” and Anders had found that impressive, how they didn’t flinch at all when their father touched them. They had gotten out, he realized. They’d found an exit. He shook their hands but they didn’t hug, of course, and he watched them drive away with a mix of emotions he couldn’t untangle. He wasn’t sure if he was glad they were going or wanted to join them.

They died two years later, in the worst defeat of the war, when salamanders appeared out of nowhere and tore apart a military convoy outside of Fornina Sirius. They were in sleep. Almost everyone on board was. He was told what had happened by two uniformed Service personnel who knocked on his door early one morning, but he didn’t feel anything until he saw the video: the hives spewing salamanders, the ships turning to gouting flame and debris and death. Only then did his feelings resolve into a hot flare of loss. He’d both loved and hated his brothers and their absence hollowed him out.

“After Fornina Sirius, then,” Beanfield said. “That’s what changed your mind?”

He exhaled. “Pretty much. Do you remember what it was like about a month after that?”

“What was it like?”

“Like everyone got used to it. They still talked about it. But not like it was a tragedy. It was . . .” He couldn’t find the word. “It was something people used when they wanted to make a point.”

He especially couldn’t stand the pacifists anymore. What they rallied against, what he’d marched against, once—the profiteering, the secrecy, the hints and whispers of war under false pretenses—even if they were right, it didn’t matter. It was irrelevant against the fact that there were salamanders out there killing people. He sat drinking beer at a party while a guy told them how much money Surplex made from every ship, how they had a secret plan to put their own AI inside them, how they were so deep inside Service that you couldn’t tell the difference anymore, and Anders imagined him on a transport, the alarms going off, the salamander huks falling. His eyes going wide. No longer so idealistic as the hull peeled open and sucked him into nothingness. But Anders didn’t have the words to explain this, or anything that was happening inside him. He put down his beer and left the party and the next day he enlisted.

“Yeah,” he said. “I didn’t like that.”

* * *

—

Every time Jackson spotted salamanders, there were at least two. Eventually Anders wriggled up the side of a fissure and lay beside her on a sloping slab of rock to check for himself. The fractured orange landscape ran flat and barren and across its dinner-plate surface crawled two fuzzy black dots. After a minute, one disappeared. “There you go,” he said.

“They go into the fissures,” Jackson said. “Just wait.” The dot reappeared. Then two more.

“Shit,” he said.

“Yeah. We need to be careful.”

“They’re heading away from the volcano.” The mountain, or whatever it was, still hung in the distance, hazy and inscrutable, refusing to draw closer no matter how much ground they covered. “Maybe they know something about it that we don’t.”

Jackson was silent for so long, he began to get the feeling she knew something about it that he didn’t, too. Then she shrugged. “We’re not going to find power anywhere else.”

He guessed that was true. He shifted, trying to move blood that wanted to pool in his legs, and coughed into his helmet. He wasn’t getting used to the smell of this planet. The air contained sulfur trioxide, which meant it would