All the streams preferred faces like his, the coach said, and the corp could only justify an American football team if they kept their viewership up. He had beaten me out for first-string quarterback two years before. Franklin Kowalski outweighed me by over twenty-five kilos and was almost two meters tall I had to kink my head up to meet his look. “I bet that’s the biggest advantage for a ghoul like you.” “They’ll take away your name,” said a tall guy coming over from under the balloon of the main party tent. “No human would do what they did to São Paulo.” “I heard they were human once,” the girl from physics said. “I heard they’ll teach you eighty ways to kill a man,” the snaggle-toothed kid said, “when you get to Mendoza.” I look forward to bashing in alien heads.” I knew her from basic physics class, one sponsored by Teslova Energy. “You have any other family but the ones they blitzed?” asked another girl. I remember thinking she was thin, back then, leggy and athletic, but I hadn’t seen what true starvation did to a person, not until later. Freckles smeared the apples of her cheeks. Pushed back the heavy cascade of her black curls. “They give you citizenship on the spot?”Īndria laughed outright. “You get a signing bonus?” a snaggletoothed kid asked. She didn’t drink alcohol her good cheer was all coltish excitement over our new career. Rubem had gone inside, probably to pass out, leaving me and Andria on the lawn to answer everybody’s questions. Me and the other two, Rubem Mujas and Andria Patel, managed to make the party.
I’d signed up with the Tene-Silvia Corporate Corps with six friends, four of whom shipped out immediately. I was at a party not long after the Blink, drinking a jet-fuel tasting concoction out of a pulpy compostable bag, when a kid from my basic education class wandered over. I thought the world was simple: good guys and bad guys, citizens and ghouls, corporate patriots and socialist slaves. I didn’t think about what would happen after I signed up. While you were all upgrading your immersives and masturbating to some new game, we were fighting the real threat. Where were all the patriots? Didn’t they know what the aliens had done? I thought all those people who didn’t sign up were cowards. When I signed up after São Paulo, me and my friends were shocked that the recruiting center wasn’t packed. How many other corporate soldiers signed up for money, or voting rights, or to clear a debt, or to afford good housing, or to qualify for a job in one of the big towers? I wanted to be the light: the savior, the hero, sure.īut more than that, I wanted the enemy obliterated. The enemy had eaten my family and the life I once knew a past I now remember in jerky stutter-stops, like an old satellite image interrupted by a hurricane. Even bleeding-heart socialist drones who play paladin can take an oath of vengeance to justify violence. All my heroes stayed on the path of light, no matter how dark it got. I signed up because of what they did to São Paulo.
#Kameron hurley the light brigade full
And that’s what I’d tell myself, when I was alone in the dark, cut off from my platoon, the sky full of blistering red fire, too hot to send an evac unit, and a new kid was squealing and dying on the field. It’s what I told every CO, and there were. That’s what I told my first squad leader. I wanted to be counted among the heroes who gave us this better world. "synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
Is Dietz really experiencing the war differently, or is it combat madness? Trying to untangle memory from mission brief and survive with sanity intact, Dietz is ready to become a hero-or maybe a villain in war it's hard to tell the difference.Ī worthy successor to classic stories like Downbelow Station, Starship Troopers, and The Forever War, The Light Brigade is award-winning author Kameron Hurley's gritty time-bending take on the future of war. And Dietz's bad drops tell a story of the war that's not at all what the corporate brass want the soldiers to think it is. Those who survive learn to stick to the mission brief-no matter what actually happens during combat.ĭietz, a fresh recruit in the infantry, begins to experience combat drops that don't sync up with the platoon's. Everyone is changed by what the corps must do in order to break them down into light. Grunts in the corporate corps get busted down into light to travel to and from interplanetary battlefronts. The Light Brigade: it's what soldiers fighting the war against Mars call the ones who come back.different. They said the war would turn us into light. From the Hugo Award-winning author of The Stars Are Legion comes a brand-new science fiction thriller about a futuristic war.
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