CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Transcript of counselling interview, 9th June 2084

Subcolonel (Med) Hugo Vax sits behind his plaz desk. ‘Who’s next?’ he asks his console in a tired voice. He is mid-forties, bearded, head topped by a coarse stubble of steel-grey hair. His thick black eyebrows join in the centre and cast a dark shadow that makes his eyes appear to shine out of deep cavities. He is chewing a gum that gives his small office the reek of an Eastern bazaar.

A synth voice comes from a speaker panel built into the desk’s monitor. Synth: ‘Mr Thom Sorakin is next, Sub Hugo. He is waiting outside, with an orderly.’

Vax: ‘Give me some data, then give me a minute before you call him in.’

Synth: ‘Sir.’

Vax leans back and feels the chair giving slightly under his bulk. He stretches and puts his hands behind his head. A list of details scrolls slowly over the monitor and he sits forward again. Thom Sorakin. Born in Independence Year, 2051. A New Londoner, hence his squad nickname, Plato. Blood imbalance, kept in check by a marrow-implanted biomonitor. Was a sublieutenant, in charge of a high-rating four-man squad until 30th May. On Earth for six —

A knock relays its message from the outside of the door to the ears of Vax and he breaks away from his scrutiny of the monitor. Vax: ‘Yeah?’

The door opens and a man in a soldier’s uniform enters the room as if he has been pushed from behind. An orderly in a crisp white uniform follows him in. Orderly: ‘This is Sorakin, Subcolonel Vax.’ She folds her bare arms and stares at a spot on the wall just behind and above Vax’s head.

Vax: ‘Hi, Thom.’ He glances up at the orderly for a moment and continues: ‘Okay, Julia, that’s it for now. I’ll beep.’ The orderly looks as if she is about to argue but thinks better of it. She lets her arms drop to her side and then leaves the room. She closes the door behind her with a heavy thud. Vax: ‘Have a seat, Thom. Can I call you Plato?’

Sorakin lowers himself into an ice-blue chair. He is average height, stocky with a tendency to excess around the jaw and abdomen. His loose curls of rusty brown hair frame his round yellow face, the jaundice being one of the few symptoms of his blood disorder not suppressed by the implant. Sorakin: ‘I’d prefer it if you didn’t, if that’s okay, sir. Plato’s gone away and I don’t want him to come back.’ Sorakin’s left eye twitches and he flicks violently at a lock of hair over his eye as if it was to blame for the tic.

Vax flinches at Sorakin’s sudden movement. Then: ‘Sure, Thom. I’ll call you whatever you want.’ He reaches for the free end of a lead that protrudes a few cee-ems from the edge of his desk. He pulls at it and it stretches itself out. Vax: ‘Please excuse this, it’s just part of the procedure. You know how it is.’ He smiles kindly and raises the lead, locating the central socket of his suboccipital interface with his free right hand. He plugs the lead in, shunting the Psychan Interview Prompt. Vax: ‘Now, Thom. Let’s begin.’

Vax: ‘You’ve been up here three days now, Thom. How are you settling in?’

Sorakin: ‘I’m settling in just fine.’ He looks around the room with a vacant gaze.

Vax: ‘Are you feeling any better, Thom?’

Sorakin: ‘I’m feeling just fine, now, Subcolonel.’ His gaze settles on his left foot. He covers it with his right foot and then extracts it to cover the right.

Vax: ‘You’re an experienced soldier, Thom. A volunteer, nine years in service. What do you think your problem is?’

Sorakin: ‘I don’t have any problem, sir.’

Vax: ‘No? How do you explain your circumstances then, soldier?’

Sorakin looks up from his feet and fixes his glassy eyes on Vax. Sorakin, his voice breaking slightly: ‘I did have problems. Jesus.’ He flicks violently at his hair as his eye resumes its tic. ‘I had problems so big they filled my whole head.’ He looks down again. Quietly: ‘But not any more. I’m out of it now, no more soldiering for Thom Sorakin. No, sir.’

Vax moves in his chair, recognising that the interview will be a long one. He scratches at his jaw and shunts a message via his suboccipital. Record Pink Sox versus the Menelaus Marauders. Put fifty on the Sox. Sorakin is fidgeting at the split plastic of his chair, pulling at the filling. Vax: ‘Why did you want to get out? What was so bad about the Earth?’

Sorakin: ‘It was what I had been training for since I joined up. But it’s not the same, action’s never what you think it’s gonna be. I guess a lot of us still have the romantic notion that it’s going to be like Crimea or something. Grape-shot in your musket and a warm flask in your pocket. But it isn’t.

‘I guess we paid the price of success: they wanted us everywhere. We landed in Levittown. Our first action was an assault on a terrorist base in Providence. We patrolled for a time in Manhattan stopped an attempt to blow a hole in the Concrete Curtain. We were based near Syracuse for a time, then I lose track of it. Policing in Cincinnati, Des Moines, Davenport, Peoria. Raids in Topeka, Pittsburgh, St Louis, Tulsa. Jesus. I remember the names but all I can see is a crazy mess of images. Concrete towers, grand bridges, seedy tenements, kids on the streets seeing who can be the rudest to a soldier and get away with it.

‘My mind.’ Sorakin puts his hands to his head and screws up his hair. He stops and looks at Vax. ‘All that change — it was too much for me.’

Vax: ‘Was it just the moving about that upset you, Thom? That confused you, so you couldn’t take it any more? Or was there more to it than that?’ Vax hopes it was just the moving. Maybe he can still catch the Sox on hee-vee.

Sorakin: ‘I ... I guess there must be more to it than that.’ Vax settles back into his chair with a loud creak of vinyl. Sorakin: ‘I was just travelling from one city to another, taking a piece of action and moving on to the next place. Raid a third-floor flat in Oklahoma City, shoot someone and maybe capture someone else. Raid a basement in Tulsa, shoot dead four terrorists. Patrol the Curtain in Manhattan, shoot dead a kid carrying a bomb.

‘The only thing it all had in common was the killing. The one constant in my life was the fact that most days I shot someone. Syracuse or St Louis, Tulsa or Topeka. The settings didn’t matter, they all just blurred into one. There was one stable thing in my environment: killing.’

Vax: ‘But surely you didn’t kill them all? Your record says you had a high rate of capture, sometimes you risked your own life just so you could take someone alive. If you’d survived to the end of it all, you’d probably have been given a medal for bravery.’

Sorakin: ‘No, we didn’t kill them all. Usually you come on them by surprise — that’s almost the definition of a raid. If they don’t have a gun to hand then what’s the point in shooting them? They’re usually kids. Kids that might be too young to be called up if they were on our side.

‘Sometimes I think it might have been kinder to kill them right away. Save them from what came later.’

Vax, leaning forward and resting his elbows on his desk: ‘What do you mean by that, Thom?’

Sorakin: ‘Well, there were rumours.’

Vax: ‘Rumours, Thom?’

Sorakin: ‘Yeah. The squads hand prisoners over to the specialists and they get out any information they can. Then they’re handed over to the Frags. To the Grand Union police. Torture, rape, buggery, mutilation. These kids, fighting a war they probably don’t even understand, and this is what they get! And my job was to hand these kids over.

‘Oh no. I didn’t shoot them, sir. I couldn’t shoot a kid without a good reason. So I handed them over, skipped the responsibility. I guess I must have sent twenty or thirty kids down that line. All of them practically young enough to be my children.’ Sorakin rubs at his twitching eye.

Vax notes that his monitor says the time is 14:23. Three minutes into the game. The news window in the top left corner flashes that the Marauders have gone six points up, with a possession penalty on Brubecker. Vax sends a rapid command down his suboccipital lead to close down the monitor. He only wants to find out the result when he can sit watching it in holo in his own room, maybe smoking a joint of Irish Gold.

Sorakin doesn’t have any children and Vax decides that it is best to skirt around any paternal feelings for the young terrorists. Vax: ‘They were only rumours, Thom. You’ve got to expect there to be all sorts of untrue rumours going around in a conflict situation.

‘What effect do you think all this had on you, Thom? The guilt over the prisoners, the killing, the constant movement.’

Sorakin: ‘It didn’t have any effect on me, sir. That was what struck me first. After maybe three or four months I suddenly realised that I had been killing people, witnessing the most horrific scenes of violence, I had been responsible for so much destruction. And it wasn’t having any effect on me. That scared me. What had I become?

‘Then I began to notice the people around me. I looked at what they were and wondered if I was like them. That scared me worst.’

Vax: ‘What was it that worried you about them, Thom?’

Sorakin: ‘They were just ordinary guys. Ordinary guys that had been ripped out of their homes and pushed through a great big machine. They were ordinary guys that killed for a living and didn’t give it a second thought. They didn’t need reasons, all they needed was to be told by someone in a military uniform with those insignia that magically made them your superiors: “This is what you must do.” That was the only reason they needed to kill people, and I was just the same.’

Vax: ‘But that’s how the Army works, Thom. It needs lines of command.’

Sorakin: ‘Yeah, I guess so, sir. But what I saw was individuals. They were taken into the military and chewed up so they could be fitted into their roles better. I saw the nicest guys turned into monsters. Like my corporal, Brindle.’

Vax: ‘What happened to Brindle, Thom?’

Sorakin: ‘Jed was a really nice guy. He was conscripted from one of the Lagrangians, then he became one of the top recruits at the Merc. He was excellent physically and a good steady learner. A really nice guy. Everyone liked him, he had a sort of magnetism. People who’d never met him before would tell him things they’d never told anyone in their life.

‘But that was Jed’s one weakness, from a military viewpoint. He needed sharpening, needed to be given a killing edge.’

Vax: ‘So you worked on that in your squad-training.’

Sorakin: ‘Yeah, we sharpened him up. It all started to pull together in the final simulations on the Disc, but Jed didn’t really lose his “weakness” until we went into action in Grand Union.’

Vax: ‘What was he like, this new Brindle?’

Sorakin: ‘Scary. As I said before: I didn’t see what was happening at first. It was all just action, action, action. No time to stop and think. But when I saw what Jed had become it frightened me.

‘There’s one scene that just keeps on going round and round my head. It was a raid. Tulsa, Wichita — I don’t know where it was. I just keep getting this scene played through my head. A comfortable house in a comfortable neighbourhood. A real gas-fired Buick, all shiny and clean, parked on the front lawn.

‘Passing through a loose circle of Grand Union troops, hiding a safe distance away, we pull our gas masks on. It’s dusk and a mockingbird yells at us from the shadows. There’s a light patter of Comtac in my belly and Lohmann kicks in the front door. I follow him in and hear the sounds of Jacobi and Brindle’s forced entry at the rear. Lohmann and I throw three gas canisters up the stairs and I leave Lohmann on guard. The pre-raid scan had told us there was nobody up there, but mistakes are not unheard of. Lohmann was a precaution. Screams come down the passage as Brindle and Jacobi locate their four targets in one of the back rooms. A door to my left is open and I burst through, still early enough for surprise to be on my side.

‘A candle feebly lights the room, a flat TV lights the face of an old woman. My target. Her hair pulled back from a face of folds and lines and liver-spots. Her tiny circular eye-correction glasses reflecting the flickering image of the candle against the dancing pattern of the TV screen. I stop with my PTII aimed at her chest. She waits a while before she looks up at me. Shoot me if you’re gonna shoot me, then, she says and returns her flickering spectacles to the TV. The old woman is fidgeting with a tangle of string on her lap. Then I realise what it is: she’s knitting. Not even with a machine, just two sticks and a tangle of some sort of yarn. I move slowly into the room, searching its dark corners for signs of life. Looking back over the old woman’s head I can see the TV screen. It’s showing a public execution, the three kids that shot President Sanchez. They used the finest weapons: manual PTIIs, stolen from some luckless EPs. They’re being executed by a very old weapon: the guillotine. I look away. I guess the killing’s the same, no matter how you do it.

‘The bubble bursts, the moment is dragged out of my grasp and I become a soldier again. A screaming girl, thirteen or fourteen, Latin features, comes rushing into the room with her blue-black hair flailing around her shoulders. Gramma! Gramma! she cries. Man gonna shoo’ me! Man comes running in after her, sees her, shoots her. A gasp comes from the crowd on TV as the guillotine descends on some kid’s neck. Brindle looks up at the old woman, his eyes glinting in the darkness. He raises his gun. Leave her! I say, and he drops his gun to his side and heads back out. The kid lies in a spreading pool of blood that looks like oil in the weak light of the room. The pool reaches the old woman’s right foot. I look up at her but she is watching the TV, her needles working away in an unbreakable rhythm. Adverts now. A policeman comes in and as I leave a single tear finds its channel down a fold in the old woman’s left cheek.’ Sorakin begins to cry freely, his face in his hands, his elbows in his lap. He rocks slowly back and forth.

The game will be into its third quarter, now. Vax tugs at his mat of hair and presses it down. Vax: ‘Did Brindle act incorrectly, Thom?’

Sorakin: ‘No. I don’t know. “Following Orders” — you know. But that look in his eye.’ Sorakin shudders and forces himself back in his seat. Sorakin: ‘One of my first assessments of Jed was that he was solid. I reckon there’s no such thing as a solid person. Some just have higher breaking points than others. They’re brittle, not solid. They can let the pressure pile on, then it’ll get too much and they’ll blow. They’ll do something crazy.’

Vax: ‘Is Brindle going to “do something crazy”?’

Sorakin: ‘We’re all gonna do something crazy eventually. Yeah, Brindle will break. It’s like gravity: it always pulls you down in the end.’

Vax: ‘What made you finally break, Thom?’

Sorakin: ‘I dunno.’ He looks around the small room as if searching for something, then: ‘I guess it all just built up. It started when I realised what was happening to me and it ended when I went on my last leave.’

Vax: ‘How did it end, Thom?’

Sorakin: ‘It was Kansas City. We’d just shot up some kids in Lexington and they downloaded us in the nearest city for our thirty-six hours standard. You coming out to burn up the town? asked Brindle. I just tore away. Couldn’t get away from him fast enough. He’d begun to give me the creeps. I hit the first bar I found and collected a lot of verbal from the drinkers. Some places are like that in Grand Union: no mixing with the aliens. They usually get away with it. The next place 1 found was friendlier. Four bourbons friendlier. I moved on.

‘Eventually I came to a basement bar, somewhere off Southwest Boulevard, I think. The sounds and smells of sleaze were fighting their way out onto the street. Through my blur of liquor that seemed to be just what I wanted right then.

‘There was a big black guy on the door. He stood in front of me when I tried to get in. Wha’chou lookin’ for? he says. Don’ wanna no mudcrushers here. Then he looks at me. Juz wanna drink, I say. Maybe he senses that I’m not looking for trouble — at last: communion between EP and Frag. He lets me in. You wanna some tuskie, go see hammer man in the corner, says the guy on the door. There was a little black guy sitting where he pointed, all jewels and leather. He had a diamond set between his eyes and a sapphire nose stud. I walked over. Shit, I didn’t know what “tuskie” was. Maybe I thought the hammer man would buy me a drink, maybe I wasn’t thinking at all, you know what I mean?

‘I was stopped two tables away by a guy even bigger than the one on the door. I think you wanna sit over there, he says, pointing to the other end of the room. But I juz wanna see Mr Hammer, I say. I guess I wasn’t thinking. The bruiser steps towards me, but the little guy says, Let him through, Julius, let him through.

‘Well it turned out this little guy was a pusher and he didn’t have to push very hard. I don’t know what it was but it wasn’t like anything I’d hit before. I guess it was cruder, everything is down there.’ Sorakin’s story seems to have run out of steam and he goes back to stacking his feet.

Vax checks the time. The game will be coming to an end, now. Vax: ‘What happened next?’

Sorakin: ‘Next I remember was a hospital ward and feeling like I’d rented my body out to a circus. As I came to my senses I began to realise that somewhere on that leave I’d made a break with my past. Yeah, I’ve been feeling real shaky, nervy, ever since, but I’ve been chipping down on that since even before I blew myself in Kansas City. It helps a lot, you know? I got to feeling that I had shaken the Army out of my system for a time, and now I just didn’t want to let it creep back in. My soldiering was finished.

‘A few days later, they shipped me up here to this place, a high orbital base, they tell me. And now I’m here, waiting to see what happens next.’

Vax shunts a summoning bleep to the orderly. Vax: ‘What happens next? We’ll try to patch your life together again and see how you feel then. I reckon that if you still want to quit the Army then you’ll be allowed to buy out.

‘Of course, we’ll have to take your suboxy away from you, Thom. You realise that?’

Sorakin’s mouth opens and then closes again. The door opens and the orderly walks in, her crisp white uniform making slicing sounds as her legs swing past each other. Vax: ‘Okay, Julia, you can take him away. Confine him and boost him eighty mils chlorprimazate. He won’t be any trouble then, for a time.’

Orderly: ‘Yes, sir.’ Sorakin has stood up and the orderly grabs him by an arm and pulls him roughly out of the room.

Vax, quietly: ‘Fucking nut-case.’ An endless stream of cowards and nut-cases is Vax’s lot in life; he spends most of his working hours wishing he hadn’t majored in Psychiatry at the Academy. With a heavy hand he reaches up and deshunts his suboccipital lead. Vax: ‘Any updates before I go and watch the game?’

Synth voice, from the panel by the monitor: ‘Fifty has been debited from your account, Sub Hugo. Pink Sox lost one-twenty-eight to one-ninety-four and they’re now out of this year’s play-offs.’

Vax tries to swipe the OFF switch at the base of his console as soon as he realises what the synth is telling him, but he is too late. Vax: ‘Shit.’