Taylor asked, “When did you start using stimulants?”
Greer met Taylor’s eyes. “It was about six weeks into our assignment here, ma’am. During one of our training missions.”
“What prompted you to start using?”
“That mission was a head game. Different than the others. Screwed us all up.”
Brodie said, “Describe the mission.”
Greer took a moment to gather himself. Then he said, “We were defending the village against two squads of tin men. That’s twelve bots.Pretty standard, or so we thought. Usually they fan out and launch their assault. We take some of them out, but never enough. We all die, and the village falls. Well, this time, they took up positions around the village, weapons trained, and they waited. One of our guys popped up to get a better look and was sniped. Head shot. We had an M2 open up on them, but the bots took cover in the hills and man-made barriers around the village. And it went on like that. Guy exposes himself and gets sniped. We return with heavy fire but can’t get a kill. The hours drag on. We take shifts eating and eventually sleeping. It’s a siege. They’re starving us of food and ammo. And energy. But they run on batteries, so we figure maybe we can wait them out. We’re thirty hours in when our spotter catches sight of them taking rations from their sacks and… they have, like, these slots, where they can process food and recharge, and these things… they’re just shoving the rations into their bodies, all still wrapped up in paper and plastic, right into their bodies. The same food we had, but they had more of it. And that’s when we knew we were fucked.” He added, “Sorry.”
Brodie tried to imagine what this must have been like—under siege by machines that don’t sleep, that don’t lose patience, that don’t even run out of gas, shoving human food, wrapper and all, into their microbial fuel cells. It was beyond bleak. It was a mockery. Brodie wondered if that was the intent, and if so, whose intent it was.
Greer continued, “One of my squad buddies, he gives me some pills, and a bump of coke. I’d never done anything like that and I gotta be honest, it felt good. I felt like I needed it. I got confidence, it was almost like I got hope. The rest of the survivors in our squads, they took some too, and we all decided to just charge them. Go out in a blaze of glory. It was dumb, but we were all flying high and out of options anyway. They cut us down in seconds. We didn’t take out a single one of them.”
Taylor asked, “How many Rangers were involved in this exercise?”
Greer thought a moment. “About thirty-five. Over half the platoon.”
Thirty-five versus a dozen. That was about a three-to-one ratio of defenders to attackers, which, if they had all been human, would have given the defenders unbeatable odds.
Greer said the drugs gave him “hope,” but the hope wasn’t to win or even to survive. The hope was to die well.
Brodie asked, “And then you kept using?”
Greer nodded. “Yes, sir. Basically, every exercise from then on out. It made things easier.” He clarified, “It made thingsfeeleasier. We kept losing. But as time went on things weren’t so lopsided. And they never did the siege tactic again. Kinetic assaults from then on out.”
Brodie nodded. If the Rangers had to go through thirty-hour sieges on a regular basis, General Morgan would probably have had a mutiny on his hands. Though Brodie wondered who had decided to change tactics, and why, and how. According to Caroline Dixon and Captain Spencer, the D-17s had a simple doctrine statement that remained unchanged, and the rest was up to them to figure out. Or at least that was how he understood it. He needed to clarify that.
Taylor asked, “When did you feel yourself beginning to lose control from your drug use?”
Greer appeared uncomfortable with the question. “I don’t know. Hard to say. We already feel like we’ve got so little control here, ma’am.”
Taylor clarified, “You experienced some sort of psychotic break the night you assaulted your roommate. Was that the first and only time you felt yourself losing your grip on reality? Have you experienced any hallucinations—visual, auditory, anything?”
Greer shook his head. “Nothing. Nothing like what happened on that night. Confusion, maybe, feeling delirious. But that was something else.”
Brodie asked, “Were you high any of the nights that Major Ames came by the Vault?”
Greer nodded. “The first two nights I was. Not the third.”
“What did Ames say to you?”
“Nothing out of the ordinary, sir. We greeted each other, I saluted, and I let him into the elevator.”
“And you gave him your code to release the access keys and the holding bays.”
“That’s correct, sir.”
“How often is that code changed?”
“Daily.”
“How long did the major stay down in the Vault?”
“Well… I wasn’t keeping good track of time the first two nights. But the last night he came by, I’d say he was down there for maybe an hour.”
“Were you aware of what he was doing down there?”
