The Acridity Effect

Ch 1

There was nothing more terrifying than sitting in an armored box and sending children off to war.

She’d done it before. It was the silence that got her; that peering, judging thing, curling its thin fingers over her throat and threatening to choke; as if her sarcophagus was not deep enough. She stomped on the metal flooring with the heel of her foot, rung out a hollow war cry in an attempt to ease the panic resting right below her collarbone. It didn’t help.

The walkie talkie hummed in her ear, then crescendoed like a livewire, spitting and hissing and all but flinching around the voice scratching through miles of red dust.

“All systems ready, Cap,” she wasn’t a captain- she wasn’t anything- but she also wasn’t awake enough to deny Andi’s peculiarities.

“Fine. Good, I mean, good work. And the state of, er, the rest of your party?” Party was the right word, she thought, though it didn’t really matter because no matter how pretentious her vocabulary was, her voice still sounded thin and plastic over this damn thing.

 “I’m good!” The voice was chipper and she placed it immediately: Ronnie Mason. Happiest damn mechanic anyone ever met.

“Hush up!” Andi, again. There was squabbling; the captain tapped her foot against the ground, restless for them to grow the hell up.

“Sorry, Cap. There are three in the team, and we’re all set.” Andi, even with her captain-ing and inability to control her crew, was still much more eloquent than the ‘Captain’ herself. Or, at least, a bit more sure.

“Good.”

There was a silence, an awkward one, and then she sighed. “I’m opening her up. Ready yourselves.”

And they did.

The door opening was nothing spectacular, at least not through the cloudy, piece of shit security camera she was sitting vigil at, just a click and a wrench and then a pit of darkness spiraling away from the backs of the ones going to battle. The cavern yawned open in front of them, then bit down and swallowed. Fifteen meters, and their com units would start to break up. Twenty, and they’d cut off from the base completely. The entire tunnel ran for near twenty thousand; that was around four hours of walking. Then to the surface, to approximately two days of searching for the perimeter, the solar slab, and likely losing it.  Two days where their breath hung on a thread so thin it could have been the barb of a feather.

There were three of them, and the captain counted their lives off the end of her thin finger tips, one more person than day. That was for luck, she thought, like how having a spare tire seemed to decrease the need to use it.  Cley and Ronnie and Andi and their faces like the frail ground outside they almost never saw, creased and cracked and broken over with worry. They weren’t saying anything out of the mutual hope that, if everyone stayed quiet long enough, the captain might just forget the mission entirely and order them home.

Instead, she broke the silence, because she had to. “Andi.”

“I know. Sorry.” Then, to the others, “Let’s go.”

And the children went off to war.

--

The captain didn’t even remember her name until the next morning—Iskra, her name was Iskra, and she wasn’t a god damned captain at all—when she woke with sallow eyes and dark hair matted to her forehead. It was early, too early to even think about moving, but the single perk of living underground was not being able to tell how heinous a time the day was starting. She took it gladly, forcing herself up and into the shower, burning herself brittle with a wall of cold until she nearly felt awake, and then out into the base and the upcoming day.