The Fix

Jonesey stuck his head up above the turret, just enough to see what was going on, just so that his helmet was the most exposed thing about him, and then enough so that he could survey the entire area. “Clear!” He screamed into the intercom, alerting the gunner to the notion that he could start re-targeting, preparing for the next shot. He adjusted his nosepiece, and got a slightly clearer burst of Alert Red. It was sweet smelling, but still stung, even after a month of continuous use. But it sharpened his senses and clarified his vision, without the side effect of Red Blue, which was that it amplified pain so much that slightly wounded men had been known to take their own lives. (Not Jonesey, not his guys, they were too tough.) But still. This stuff beat the hell out of the old stuff.

“Jonesey!” the commander had barked, “We need to put the fix in!” Right, Jonesey thought, who else to put in the fix but us. We’re tough, me and my men, we been through it all, been to Hell and back, we’re a known quantity. We can put in the fix. The thing that happened with Alert Red was soldiers tended towards The Drift. Usually whole companies of them, or at least crews. It was situational. One by one, the soldiers would just zone out, stop thinking, stop acting, and it would go from one man to another. Not Jonesey, though, and not his men. The second he ever thought one of his guys might be Drifting, it was “SNAP OUT OF IT, MAN!” And the guys were back on task and sharper than ever.

So if ANYONE was the right pick to put in The Fix, it was them. Never mind that they’d been up for seventy-two hours, had already taken part in three assaults, two retreats, and the occupation of a city. They’d seen other crews get sloppy in their logistics, driving over cliffs and turning their machines over crossing sand dunes. Jones and his crew had stayed sharp and salty. And if there was a bottleneck at the front that had to be cleared before they could head towards the next assault, So be it.

They adjusted their Alert Red “pitchforks,” one prong inside the nostril, one outside, so that the stimulant came with a slight electrical charge to speed it into the bloodstream. Rules were rules: when you go off alert, get off the Alert, but now that they were going back into action, they went back on the Alert. It gave them an extra jolt of attention span as the Commander pointed out the obstructions to be blown away.

And now he saw them, clear as day. “FIRE!” he shouted, and the tank with a Drifting crew turned into a nuclear sunblast, spinning in infinity. For a moment, he actually thought he saw that face of a once drifting soldier, suddenly alert with tension.

Nah. Just the drug talking.