Descent into Mayhem Page 2
20 kilometers east of Leiben, 03H00, 7th of January, 2771 (21 years later)
Toni peered into the fog and thanked the family gods for the concealment it afforded. He winced as he heard a cry in the distance and reminded himself again of how much of an idiot he was.
He could have left without warning, of course. In fact, every rational bone in his body had urged him to do just that. He had decided instead to leave a goodbye note upon his bed before leaving. The desperate voice in the distance belonged to his mother, his sweet mother who, possessed by her uncanny maternal sonar, must have gone into his bedroom to check on him. He had been hearing her voice for the better part of the last half-hour, calling for him.
Toni refused to run, however. Running was something a child would do, and he firmly believed himself to no longer be one. Even so, he hastened his pace.
The fog had Toni wondering whether he would soon be in need of shelter. Peering up was pointless, the unrelenting mist shielding the sky beyond, hiding any clues as to his immediate future. The fact that it was presently the seventh day of the month offered the only clue as to the weather he could expect.
At that time of the month, the sky could be counted upon to be overcast, with a persisting presence of fog, drizzle, or even light showers from the second to the eighth before the crimson sun finally made its appearance. It was only day three since the Great Rains had come to an end.
As he journeyed over the winding dirt road, he finally set his eyes on something that gave him a firm idea as to his location. Under his feet the road began to rise until, several paces ahead and at its highest point, a familiar ochre-red wall appeared to his left. He ran his hand along the rough wall, feeling the rock-like bark grating against his skin, feeling the looser fibers in the intermittent gaps giving way as his fingers scraped along. The road curved around the wall for quite a few more steps before finally breaking off at a downward slope. Toni followed the road, sparing only the briefest glance at the tree behind him, its massive trunk disappearing up into the fog. Today was no day to peer at the silent sentinel.
Toni’s heart sank as he spied a more humble redwood at the roadside.
Leaning nonchalantly against it with arms crossed and a furrowed brow, Kaya Miura awaited her brother’s silent approach. As he halted hesitantly before her, she uncrossed her arms and shoved her slim fingers into her coat pockets. She was wearing the brown leather jacket. He had worn it once, and knew that its pockets’ interiors were lined with genet fur. It was an extravagant coat, quite appropriate for the tall woman who stood before him, appraising him with that critical expression he hated so much. He couldn’t help but see his father there.
“So ...” she finally said, “did you hear your mother? Did you hear her calling for you?”
Silently he nodded.
“And?” she asked, the furrow on her brow deepening. “Don’t you have anything to say?”
“There’s nothing to say,” he replied, despairing at the softness of his voice.
“Nothing to say? Nothing? You ungrateful little prick,” she remarked quietly.
He grimaced at her tone, recognizing it for what it was: the light breeze before the storm. If he allowed her to get up to full steam, Kaya would soon be yelling loudly enough to trip mother’s sonar and draw her in like stellar gravity. He hurried to cut her off.
“It’s not a matter of being grateful, I can’t be what you want me –”
“You hid your final marks from us,” she continued. “More skillfully than I would have expected, I must admit. But using my password was a bit much, don’t you think? Was there some hidden message there? Were you sticking your tongue out at me?”
Three days ago, Toni’s final examination results had finally arrived at the Miura residence by conventional mail, removing from the household all doubts as to who had been tampering with the domestic server’s electronic mail.
“Well?” she insisted.
“No,” he lied. “I needed to make time until I had an answer from the Forces. I thought that if I deleted the messages, I –”
“You coward ...”
The word was kick to the gut, and it silenced him instantly.
“I know,” he conceded. “You wanted to know why, so I’m telling you why.”
“And I guess you realized we’d just think it was the money pit’s fault, right?”
The Miura household’s domestic server, affectionately known as the Money Pit, was more than thirty years old, having survived multiple ownership over the course of its existence. The forestation company his father had bought it from had neglected to entirely clear the computer’s memory banks and so, once reconnected to the grid at its new place of residence, it had showed some entrepreneurial spirit, acquiring countless seedlings of several tree species to the detriment of their bank account. His opportunistic mother had made the best of the mistake and quietly set to work, planting the seedlings around their farm’s perimeter and tasking Toni to care for them until they found their footing in the soil.
The computer was subsequently lobotomized, although its reliability suffered a nosedive as a result. It was, in fact, the family’s lack of confidence in their connection to the General Civilian Network that had allowed him to get away with his deception for so long.
“Yeah, I guess so. I also knew that without mom’s or dad’s authentication codes, Southwood would just find another way to send the letters. I just didn’t expect it to be so soon.”
“Dad threatened the school, Leiben varsity and the GCN employees with prosecution, he kept calling them incompetent. He had to call them back and apologize!” she said with rising anger.
“I know, I was there when he made the call ...”
“You’re a worm, you know that? You’ve brought dishonor to our –”
“This is the problem, right here ...” he muttered under his breath as dull anger began to fester.
“What? What did you say, shrimp? You sure you want a piece of me?” she challenged.
“I won’t ever be anything like this.”
“What?”
“I said I won’t ever be anything like this! You step on me. Father steps on me –”
“You screw up, that’s –”
“Let me speak!” he spat.
There was enough anger pressed into those words to give her pause. She watched him coolly, her expression momentarily subdued.
“I don’t care if I screw up!” he continued, speaking as loudly as he dared. “From now on I’ll screw up on my terms. Where I’m going I won’t have this insane family to tear me up from the inside out!”
“No. You’ll just have some drill instructor to do that for us! You think we were hard on you? Wait until you get a load of them! They’ll break your fragile heart and send you home crying,” she finished with a laugh.
“No, they won’t,” he countered with certainty. “I can take them on because they’re not family, which means I’ll be free to hate them without having to feel ashamed about it. And even if I don’t make it somehow, you shouldn’t stand around waiting for me to return. If I fail, I’ll just walk into the wild until I find a research hub out there. I don’t care to return even if it means within a week I’ll be eating the bark off of trees. What I feel for all of you now is the worst kind of hate. I’ve been trying to repress this, but the feeling just won’t go away ...”
His words seemed to have made an impression on his older sister. Kaya leaned against the redwood again and listened to the forest sounds, or maybe for some clue as to his mother’s whereabouts. Her anger appeared to have abated, and there was a hint of doubt on her features, although perhaps that was just a trick of shadows.
“What we have here is a failure to communicate,” she finally said. “I don’t really care whether you hate me or not. My conscience is clear on that point. But you might want to reconsider those feelings in relation to Sarah. She’s attached to you, and your leaving’s going to leave a mark there that might –”
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nbsp; “Go to hell. I knew you were gonna pull the Sarah Card out sooner or later. She’ll do fine. She’s got two older sisters to take care of her, besides mother. As for me, I’m eighteen years old, my studies are done and I’ve been accepted into MEWAC.”
“Mewhat?”
“MEWAC. Mechanized Warfare Corps. I’m on my way there now.”
“On foot?”
“It’s not that far away ...”
A slow smile slowly began to spread across her face.
“So you want to break out into the world and be independent. You want to be autonomous, a great warrior, whatever. And you’ll be within walking distance of the farm? Don’t overexert yourself there, soldier.”
As he always tended to do in such moments, Toni wondered whether his sister loved him.
“So tell me about this MEWAC,” she demanded.
“It’s ... It’s a sort of fusion of old infantry and cavalry units from the Henderson and Kumato research hubs. Its home-base is the Adamastor warehouse.”
“That a very big aquarium for such a small fish,” she remarked more to herself than to him.
For the briefest of moments, he suddenly wasn’t too keen on getting there. Then he remembered what had drawn him to MEWAC in the first place; it was the outfit to join if one wanted to drive a Hammerhead Suit.
“What about the Military Academy? It might be a bit much for you, but at least dad might respect you a little more.”
Toni grimaced.
“I applied for both the MA and the Army Sergeant School. The Academy didn’t even bother to reply, the Sergeant School just sent me the application form for MEWAC. I filled it in and got an answer yesterday.”
“You mean I got an answer yesterday. You’ve been using my user account, I checked the activity log.”
“I knew mom was checking up on mine, so ... yes.”
“Wonderful. And their reply?”
Toni grudgingly handed his sister the printed sheet. Her eyebrows slowly rose as she studied the document.
“Two spelling mistakes ...” she observed distastefully. “Anyway, it says incorporation dependent upon approval. Which means you haven’t even been approved yet. To an outfit whose soldiers apparently don’t know how to spell ...”
She handed the sheet back to Toni with disdain and he refolded it, trying not to let his feelings show. He had already been painfully aware of what she had said. He wondered whether soon he really would be eating the bark off trees.
“I have to go,” he finally said.
“Sure. I wouldn’t want to keep you from abandoning your family. However, mother told me that if I chanced to come across you, it was my solemn responsibility to warn you to inform base medical services about your folic acid deficiency.”
“My – what?”
“Yes, your folic acid deficiency. She never bothered to tell us about it, but she´s been supplementing our meals with the stuff, it apparently runs in her side of the family. You can be sure the canteens won’t be supplementing your meals, so you’ll have to inform the medical department about that.”
Toni was dubious.
“Does that even exist? I’m sure as hell not going to hang myself by the tongue at medical, Kaya. Goodbye,” he muttered as he skirted around his sister, giving her a wide berth.
“That’s just fine, then, I’m sure you’ll be getting all the supplementation you need when you’re eating the bark off trees. I heard they’ve got a lot of folic acid,” she taunted, rubbing the redwood beside her.
It took him only a dozen steps to lose her in the fog.