I wrote this story last year and floated it past a few markets with no luck, so I’m posting it here because I’m still rather proud of it. Hope you enjoy! (And thanks to all of you who beta-read it!)

Faces

The concussion has blown off his helmet and part of his head with it, but from where you sit, crouched on your heels at the lip of the smoking crater, still blinking double-time on account of the white phosphorus flash and the suddenness of it all, you recognize his face, which is turned towards you and which from this angle—if you squint through the haze and the salt-crust on your visor and the sweat drops coalesced on your eyelashes—still looks intact, well and whole, apart from the spattered chemical burns and the blood spooling out in thin red ribbons from his ears and nose and the corners of his mouth.

You study him as you’d study a work of art. Your mind is rebooting, sorting itself out, so you grasp first the things which are immediate and obvious. The way he fell, almost gracefully, curling up on himself as he slid down into the crater, legs folding in like a spider’s. Left arm blown away at the shoulder, right arm flung back against the crater wall. Acrid smoke going up from his body, wisping away on the hot wind—the smell of it in your nostrils, and the smell of burnt metal alloy and churned-up dirt.

All these things are familiar to you. You’re familiar with death here on the Spur. It doesn’t shock you anymore—the frequency of it or the ugliness of it or the leering irrationality of it. It can come in a moment, in a flash of blinding light, or it can come slowly and drawn-out like a wasting disease, but it comes regardless and indiscriminately. Mostly you don’t even think about it. You know better than to think about it. You know better than to dredge for meaning. Soul-searching is for the generals afterward and for the media and for the politicians back on the Capital World. You’d go crazy looking for meaning here on the Spur. You know this because you’ve seen it happen.

The helmet makes it easier. Put on your helmet and you’re no longer a face but a serial number, a string of characters, systematically derived, constant, stripped of connotation. An entry in a database. A statistic.

Faces are complicated.

Looking at him, now, you’re engulfed in memory. Wave after wave of random stupid things, jumbled images flashing through your mind in quick succession. You were twelve and he was ten and Mam had saved all that harvest cycle to buy you both new boots—really new—for the first time in your life. You were sixteen and he was fourteen and you’d buried Da that morning and now you were sitting together at the kitchen table in cold blue fluorescent lamplight trying over and over again to make the numbers work, to figure out a way you could keep the farm. You were twenty and he was eighteen and you’d just joined up and he was shouting at you all the things he’d learned to shout at the protests—coward, traitor, imperialist pig—and you were shouting right back at him that he didn’t understand, couldn’t understand, that you’d held this family together and maybe he’d realize that once you’d gone—and he said he hoped you never came back.

You knew he didn’t mean it. You knew it was just the heat of the moment, the eruption of everything he’d kept bottled up inside since Da’s death, because for you that’s what it was, and by the time you shipped out here to the Spur with orders to put down this rebellion you’d forgotten. For you it wasn’t about politics and you knew it wasn’t really for him either, deep down. You knew he’d figure it out when your pay went in. He could go on about imperialism and exploitation and colony worlds all day but in the end the only thing that mattered was that there was food on the table and medicine for Mam. Deep down he knew that as well as you.

That’s what you thought, anyway, before you blew him to eternity with a hand grenade.

You’d accepted the official line on the rebellion. Always the same line—a fringe group fighting a war that had been lost since Union. A handful of deluded radicals, socially isolated, politically out-of-touch, running counter to history because they were running counter to the will of the people. You hadn’t questioned it because it didn’t matter. As long as they were faceless suits of armor, notches in a kill tally, it was explanation enough.

In the clearing smoke you sense rather than see the rest of the chalk spreading out around you, securing the position. You can’t bring yourself to move, to tear your eyes away from his face. There’s a stiffness in you, a weight pressing on your neck and shoulders that has nothing to do with thirty kilograms of polymer-coated titanium. You sit on your heels and you look into his glazed half-lidded unseeing eyes and you fight a war of attrition inside yourself, trying to figure out where it went wrong—whether it was his fault, or yours, or both of yours, or neither of yours, or nobody’s fault at all, or everybody’s. At first you’re stricken with the need to know. It claws at your throat like a desperate, starving thing. It beats itself slowly senseless against the cold steel walls built up in your head and your heart. It doesn’t matter, you tell yourself—doesn’t matter, doesn’t make a difference. Over and over until the war is won. You know better than to think it makes a difference.

Col’s voice is in your ear, silvery cool and filtered over the comm. “Everything all right, sir?”

“Everything’s all right.” It comes out automatically, thoughtlessly. Pre-programmed in response. “Gun jammed—had to use my WP.”

Col circles the crater and picks up the carbine lying there on the far lip. You know it’s his carbine, torn from his hands before he’d had the chance to use it. Still intact, serviceable. You wonder if he’d have used it if he’d known, if he’d seen your face.

And you, if you’d seen his—?

Col slings the gun across to you and slides down into the crater to strip the spare ammo from the body.

“You had me worried,” he says to you over his shoulder. “Thought you were getting all philosophical up here.”