Weary

By Christopher Ruz

In the irradiated ruins of post-war Melbourne, children are going missing. 

The war in China changed Lance Corporal Diana Yossole. It broke her. It rebuilt her. Now she patrols the shanty-towns along Melbourne's shoreline, keeping the peace with engineered, military precision. 

But when Yossole is tasked to assist the local bluecaps in an infant kidnapping investigation, she discovers that war has a way of following you home. There's a conspiracy at work, hidden just out of sight between the sunken streets and bombed-out favelas, one that people would kill to protect... and that Yossole would break all the rules to uncover. 

WEARY is a cyberpunk/military scifi short, first published in Apollo's Daughters.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Christopher Ruz
• Release date: Mar 27, 2016
• ISBN: 9781524272951

Book preview

WEARY

by Christopher Ruz

Weary

By Christopher Ruz

The Essendon War Memorial fascinated me as a young girl. Every morning, when Mum walked me past the duck-pond on the way to school, I'd pull away from her hand to read the plaque at the base of that great pale spear of stone, lancing the clouds like some latter-century rocket ship.

It read:

They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old,

Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.

At the going down of the sun and in the morning,

We will remember them.

I was nineteen when the first Australian troops landed in China. I already knew what I had to do, what I'd been fated to do since I was eight years old, a tiny girl dwarfed by the shadow of that memorial. Six months later I stepped off the bus outside Blamey Barracks. The first things I saw were the words, HOME OF THE SOLDIER in bold brass letters on the gates.

Home, I whispered. For the first time in my life, I felt wanted.

If only. If only.

* * *

Orders arrived as I was finishing my circuit of Port Melbourne, subdivision six. Civ police investigating a kidnapping in subdiv three wanted military escort.

On any other day I might've spat the order back in Captain Dolis's face – me, a thirty-eight million dollar combat product playing bodyguard for bluecaps? But I knew the address. I knew the woman that lived there, and her daughter. Amelia Wood and squealing, pink-faced baby Elizabeth, barely a month old.

I knew everybody along my beat. I wasn't programmed to forget.

The bluecaps were waiting at the gate to subdiv three. Two men, police blues faded and a couple sizes too large. Cloth rationing had hit hard when even the police had to timeshare their uniforms. One saluted as I approached, but his partner coughed and the first man jerked his hand back down. Lance Corporal Yossole?

I nodded, but said nothing. First thing I'd learned after coming home was to speak as little as possible. Civilians rarely liked the lilting, electronic cant of my voice.

Constable Roberts, the first man said. He reached out to take my hand, thought better of it, and retreated. And Constable Lodge. I know we took you off your beat, but-

I shrugged. Subdiv six was mostly empty these days – even squatters didn't dare brave the UN patrols.

Lodge rubbed his stubble, glaring at the few thin-faced itinerants slipping through the gates. Should be security out here. This whole area should be quarantined-

I waved my hand: shut up and stop wasting my time.

The bluecaps followed at my heels.

I'd been through subdiv three that morning. Empty streets and blank windows. A few dozen scabs lifting Red Cross food relief straight off the boats into private warehouses, a couple pimps lounging in the shadows of rapid-print emergency housing. No gang activity that day; the Melbourne crews had a healthy fear of a seven-foot, half-ton piece of military hardware kicking in their doors. Even at their worst, the subdivs were a holiday compared with my deployment in China.

Lodge and Roberts whispered to each other as we walked. I watched the skyline, the silhouettes, the boarded windows, the twitching curtains. I zeroed on plastic-bag tumbleweeds and stacks of rotten car tyres, paper-waste and dog corpses, peculiar arrangements of leaf mulch and chrome medical scrap. I looked for patterns, for tripwires and too-deep shadows, laser-pointer lights blinking in the dark.

Amelia Wood lived in the centre of an apartment complex that'd been battered by cluster bombs and repaired with dock refuse. Red-brick buildings patched with corrugated iron and bound together with lengths of wire. Favelas in everything but name.

The two bluecaps pulled plastic filters over their mouths as we approached. My filters were built into my alveoli and graded for chemical warfare. Think she'll cause problems? Roberts asked.

She's a good woman. It was the first time I'd spoken since I'd met the two men, and I noticed how Lodge barely suppressed a shudder. She loves that baby.

Maybe so. Doesn't mean we don't take precautions. He thumbed the catch off his holster and knocked on the door. Ms Wood? Lodge counted to ten and banged hard enough to shake paint off the lintel. Ms Wood?

A bare croak sounded from inside. It's open.

Like all apartments within a kilometre of the waterfront, Amelia Wood's home was a ruin. Bombardments from sea and mini-tsunamis meant the only folk willing to live in the subdivs and risk their lives being swept away by a toxic ocean were veterans and junkies. Amelia was one of the latter. She was sitting in a pile of plastic ration wrappers when we arrived, stinking of