The APC bounced over something on the tunnel floor, and the vehicle’s other passenger, a corpsman, grinned. “No shit?” he asked. “A reporter for real?”

I nodded.

“Hell yeah. Check it.” I couldn’t remember his name but for some reason the corpsman decided to unlock his suit and slip his arm out—what remained of it. Much of the flesh had been replaced by scar tissue so that it looked as though he had been partially eaten by a shark. “Fléchettes. You should do a story on that. Got a holo unit?”

“Nah. Not allowed.” He gave me the same look as Chappy—what kind of a reporter are you?—and it annoyed me because I hadn’t been lit lately and was starting to feel a kind of withdrawal, rough. I pointed to his arm. “Fléchettes did that? I thought they were like needles, porcupine stickers.”

“Nah. Pops doesn’t use regular fléchettes. Coats ’em with dog shit sometimes, and it’s nasty. Hell, a guy can take a couple of fléchette hits and walk away. But not when they’ve got ’em coated in Baba-Yaga’s magic grease. Pops almost cost me the whole thing.”

“Pops?”

“Popov. Victor Popovich. The Russians.”

He looked about nineteen, but he spoke like he was eighty. You couldn’t get used to that, seeing kids half your age, speaking to them, and realizing that in one year, God and war had somehow crammed in decades. Always giving advice as if they knew. They did know. Anyone who survived at the line learned more about death than I had ever wanted to know, and as I sat there, the corpsman got that look on his face. Let me give you some advice…

“Don’t get shot, rube,” he said, “and if you do, there’s only one option.”

The whine of the APC’s turbines swelled as it angled downward, and I had to shout. “Yeah? What?”

“Treat yourself.” He pointed his fingers like a pistol and placed them against his temple. The corpsman grinned, as if it was the funniest thing he had ever heard.

Marines in green armor rested against the curved walls of the tunnel and everything seemed slippery. Slick. Their ceramic armor was slick, and the tunnel walls had been melted by a fusion borer so that they shone like the inside of an empty soda can, slick, slick, and double slick. My helmet hung from a strap against my hip and banged with every step, so I felt as though it were a cowbell, calling everyone’s attention.

First thing I noticed on the line? Everyone had a beard except me. The Marines stared as though I were a movie star, something out of place, and even though I wore the armor of a subterrener—one of Vulcan’s apostles—mine didn’t fit quite right, hadn’t been scuffed in the right places or buckled just so because they all knew the best way, the way a veteran would have suited up. I asked once, in Shymkent, “Hey, Marine, how come you guys all wear beards?” He smiled and reached for his, his smile fading when he realized it had been shaved. The guy even looked around for it, like it fell off or something. “ ’Cause it keeps the chafing down,” he said. “Ever try sleeping and eating with a bucket strapped around your face twenty-four seven?” I hadn’t. Early in the war, the Third required their Marines to shave their heads and faces before going on leave—to keep lice from getting it on behind the lines—but here in the underworld the Marines’ hair was theirs, a cushion between them and the vision hood that clung tightly but never fit quite right, leaving blisters on anyone bald.

Not having a beard made me unique.

A captain grabbed my arm. “Who the hell are you?”

“Wendell. Stars and Stripes, civilian DOD.”

“No shit?” The captain looked surprised at first but then smiled. “Who are you hooking up with?”

“Second Battalion, Baker.”

“That’s us.” He slapped me on the back and turned to his men. “Listen up. This here is Wendell, a reporter from the Western world. He’ll be joining us on the line, so if you’re nice, he might put you in the news vids.”

I didn’t have the heart to say it again, to tell them that I didn’t have a camera and, oh, by the way, I spent most of my time so high that I could barely piece a story together.

“Captain,” I said. “Where are we headed?”

“Straight into boredom. You came at the right time. Rumor is that Popov is too tired to push, and we’re not going to push him. We’ll be taking a siesta just west of Pavlodar, about three klicks north of here, Z minus four klicks. Plenty of rock between us and the plasma.”

I had seen a collection of civilian mining equipment in the APC hangar, looking out of place, and wondered. Fusion borers, piping, and conveyors, all of it painted orange with black stripes. Someone had tried to hide it under layers of camouflage netting, like a teenager would hide his stash, just in case Mom didn’t buy the I-don’t-do-drugs, you-don’t-need-to-search-my-room argument.

“What about the gear in the hangar—the mining rigs?” I asked.

A few of the closest Marines had been bantering and fell silent while the captain glared at me. “What rigs?”

“The stuff back in the hangar. Looked like civilian mining stuff.”

He turned and headed toward the front of his column. “Keep up, rube. We’re not coming back if you get lost.”

Land mines. Words were land mines. I wasn’t part of the family, wasn’t even close to being one of them, and my exposure to the war had so far been limited to jerking off Marines when they stepped off the transport pad in Shymkent, hoping to get a money shot interview, the real deal. Hey, Lieutenant, what’s it like? Got anyone back home you wanna say hi to? Their looks said it all. Total confusion, like, Where am I? We came from two different worlds, and in Shymkent they stepped into mine, where plasma artillery and autonomous ground attack drones were things to be talked about openly—irreverently and without fear so you could prove to the hot AP betty, just arrived in Kaz, that you knew more than she did, and if she let you in those cotton panties, you’d share everything. You would, too. But now I was in their world, land of the learn-or-get-out-of-the-way-or-die tribe, and didn’t know the language.

A Marine corporal explained it to me, or I never would have figured it out.

“Hey, reporter-guy.” He fell in beside me as we walked. “Don’t ever mention that shit again.”

“What’d I say?”

“Mining gear. They don’t bring that crap in unless we’re making another push, to try and retake the mines. If we recapture them, the engineers come in and dig as much ore as they can before the Russians hit us to grab it back. Back and forth, it’s how the world churns.”

There were mines of all kinds in Kaz, trace-metal mines and land mines. The trace mines were the worst, because they never blew up; they just spun in place like a buzz saw, chewing, and too tempting to let go. Metal. We’d get it from space someday, but bringing it in was still so expensive that whenever someone stumbled across an earth source, usually deep underground, everyone scrambled. Metal was worth fighting over, bartered for with blood and fléchettes. Kaz proved it. Metals, especially rhenium and all the traces, were all the rage, which was the whole reason for our being there in the first place.

I saw an old movie once, in one of those art houses. It was animated, a cartoon, but I can’t remember what it was called. There was a song in it that I’ll never forget and one line said it all. “Put your trust in Heavy Metal.” Whoever wrote that song must have seen Kaz, must have looked far into the beyond.

BY SIMON MORDEN

Equations of Life