War's Edge- Dead Heroes

by Ryan W. Aslesen

  The assaulting Marines advanced to the building. The two lead men put shoulders into the barricade of a charred bulldozer parked before the front door, easily shoving it aside. A following man kicked in the heavy steel door as if it were made of straw. Five minutes later they exited through the same door, escorting their prisoners: the SOI instructors who had served as defenders. The two casualties taken by the attackers stood as if nothing had happened, their pain sensors turned off. The crowd of spectators—all four companies of First Training Battalion—applauded and shouted.

  “Fuckin’ A!” Maddox said. “This is what we came for.” Even one of 2084’s most infamous gray men appeared excited to get training.

  Not even becoming a Marine could get Rizer off Forge. SOI was on the other side of the planet near the equator, only a short flight away. The climate was more temperate here, though it couldn’t be called warm, and it still provided plenty of rain to train in.

  As in the Fleet Marine Force, infantry training companies at SOI were divided into four platoons: first, second, third, and heavy weapons. Marines from Rizer’s bootcamp company and other training regiments swelled D Company’s strength to over a hundred bodies. However not all would have the fortitude to become an infantryman. They were Marines now, no longer threatened with being dropped to the service corps, but upon arrival yesterday they had been told that those who slacked could be rolled back, transferred to another MOS, or remanded to a penal company if instructors deemed such punishment appropriate.

  Life at SOI could not be gauged in a single day, but Rizer noticed the stress level was lower, though far from non-existent. Browbeatings for infractions continued, though the acerbic disdain they’d endured in bootcamp changed to more casual mockery. Their instructors called them boots, the derisive term for new Marines who had yet to serve a day in the fleet. Thrashings were uncommon and, unlike in bootcamp, inflicted for actual reasons. As a bootcamp honor recruit, PFC Belzer was appointed fourth squad leader. Some kinds of stupid simply couldn’t be fixed.

  Rizer had expected to be in the field most of the time and was surprised to learn they would spend their first month entirely on mainside learning about power armor, beginning in a classroom with its specifications and features.

  Immediately after the assault demonstration, D Company and the rest of First Battalion were seated in a vast amphitheater for classroom training. The cutting-edge suits required a technical expert for instruction, one Master Sergeant Hamilton, an aging Marine with the nondescript face of a shopkeeper and the powerful build of a career infantryman. A suit of dark-green power armor on a mannequin accompanied Hamilton on stage, along with a corporal who stood by to assist him if necessary.

  Rizer and the others marveled at the suit; none could imagine being harmed behind all those armor plates, head-to-toe protection fitted closely and precisely together. A man would have a very difficult time moving in the suit if not for its battery power, for it had to be extremely heavy.

  Hamilton jumped right in; training time was short. “You Marines will spend the next week learning the specifications of the M-34 power armor suit, the safety it provides, and the abilities it enhances. Power armor is an extreme upgrade from the skins you wore in bootcamp. The heads-up display on the helmet’s face shield is about the only similarity you’ll recognize. Only Marines in combat arms learn to use power armor, and only infantry and special ops wear it on a regular basis. First, a brief overview.

  “These suits are battery powered, designed to enhance a Marine’s strength and speed. They will make you more mobile, deadlier, harder to kill. They also act as life support systems for space and underwater operations, as well as protection from the elements on worlds with hostile environments. They automatically adjust for ease of operation in both low and high-gravity conditions.

  “The suits’ features can be tailored for a variety of different missions and environments. One such feature is a visual cloaking ability, commonly referred to as the predator mode. If you think the predator mode option will make you completely invisible, think again. Predator mode only works at its optimum when the Marine is stationary; while moving, especially running, the cloaking feature cannot adjust fast enough to match the changing background. The running Marine will appear pixelated, easily discernible to an alert enemy. A cloaked suit will only make you visually invisible; you may still be seen in other spectrums. Predator mode rapidly depletes battery power as well, something you must constantly monitor and conserve when you’re in the field.”

  He moved to the armored mannequin. “The skin beneath is composed of several layers of synthetic ballistic polymer, coated in a 10-micron thick ablative layer of graphene for kinetic and thermal protection superior to standard-issue skins. The outer plates are plasteel coated with a poly-laminate composite, both for increased ballistic protection and sound dampening, so you don’t clatter around like a tray of dishes out on patrol. The neural helmet computer is synched with your control chips for mental commands.”

  He lifted one of the shoulder plates to expose the skin beneath. “The suit functions by reading neurological impulses directed to the muscles and then amplifies them with thousands of battery-powered polymer myofibrils in the skin. The myofibril muscles in the skin will enhance your physical abilities—allow you to jump higher, run faster, carry more ammo and equipment. Strength increases of up to three hundred percent have been recorded, and most wearers are able to run at least twice normal speed for short distances.

  “In addition to powering the suit, the battery also powers heavy weapons and jump packs. Those Marines who landed on the building jumped from an altitude of six thousand meters without so much as a twisted ankle. That is a high-risk insertion method only to be conducted by experts, but you will learn the basics of the technique by dropping from lower heights on training platforms. The jump packs allow for upward jumps of around twenty-five meters. Some suits feature integrated weapons such as power pistols and vibro-blades in the wrist guards. All power armor is compatible with different combat loadouts, allowing the Marine to customize gear for a specific mission.

  “You won’t be wearing one of these suits for a week yet, but let me clear one thing up right now.” He pointed to the suit. “Despite all of its benefits, this suit will not make you invincible. It will only enhance your abilities, which makes it only as good as the Marine wearing it. The stronger the Marine, the greater his abilities in the armor and the better chance he has of surviving the dangers of wearing it. There is a learning curve with these suits, and it’s very tempting for a beginner to lift too much or run too fast, opening himself to injury or death, which is why we devote four weeks to training before you’ll wear one for operations. Even so, we lose a few Marines per company during every training cycle when they get carried away and start thinking they’re superheroes. You’re not, and unfortunately, there’s not a power suit in existence that enhances intelligence. That will always be the infantry Marine’s prime requisite. This armor is only a means to an end: victory with the least number of casualties.”

  If there were questions—Coltin must have had at least one—Hamilton didn’t ask for them. “We’ll start drilling the basic specs now. Follow along on your tablets and try to pay attention. There will be a knowledge test at the end of each day, and an exam at the end of the week.”

  Rizer had aced the simple knowledge quizzes in bootcamp, yet those regarding power armor proved more challenging, more suited to college courses on robotics and kinesiology. Marines who failed the daily test were allowed to take it again; a second failure meant being dropped to a remedial education platoon affectionately known as the rock garden. Abek became a rock on the third day; Stubs and Hagel would have joined him without Rizer’s help. On the final exam Rizer scored a 99, the highest in his company and top five in the battalion.

  His squad leader Belzer was bent about that, though she tried not to show it. “Who cares? It’s all about operating the suit. We’ll see what your high scor
e means then!”

  When he donned power armor for the first time the following week, Rizer had to give Belzer’s jealous prophecy some credit. The numbers didn’t mean much when it came to operation, for the slightest muscle twitch became an exaggerated movement, hard to control. It took several days just to master the simplest movements: walking, standing, sitting. It’s like learning to use a brand-new body. To get accustomed to performing more delicate tasks, they started slowly with tests of manual dexterity, such as extracting eggs from a carton. The cooks might have made an omelet for the entire battalion by the time Delta Company finished that exercise.

  In week two they learned to move through tight spaces while wearing their armor, the Marines constantly banging limbs off bunker and tunnel walls until they got it right. Training then progressed to PT in the suits, first unencumbered, and then with gradually increasing loads that peaked at weights far exceeding those portable by an unarmored human.

  The Corps always incorporated fail-safe measures into training, and Rizer wasn’t surprised when they had to operate the armor with the power supply shut off to simulate a failure in the field. This proved a daunting yet possible task, though extremely fatiguing. They marched five klicks like this, and several Marines dropped out of the hump. The failures humped again the next day; some still didn’t make it and were either rolled back for remedial physical training or dropped to a less-demanding MOS. Rizer noted that many of the drops were taller Marines, their long limbs providing less leverage to move their larger suits. Stubs was an exception, though he was an ox already from performing years of manual labor on a high-gravity world, both before and after prison.

  MSgt Hamilton’s predictions from the first day started coming true when they began training for the obstacle courses during week three. Maddox threw out his back while moving overzealously during a race where the squad flipped massive vehicle tires across a field, and he was dropped to a medical recovery platoon. Other Marines suffered a variety of injuries, mostly strained muscles and joints, though one timed a jump poorly on the simulated bombed-out bridge and died from his fall. Their jump packs weren’t fueled yet; that came later, too late to save the unfortunate man.

  Rizer quickly realized that the various competitions were about who could win and master the suit’s capabilities, along with his own limitations while wearing it. This became glaringly obvious when running a course known as the Trench, a ten-klick trail that wound through a deep canyon and the rocky terrain surrounding it. Even without an operational jump pack, Rizer could make jumps of around five meters. He and Stubs negotiated the rock ledges with ridiculous ease.

  As they approached the final stretch of the trail, a bot instructor got on the radio. “Stop sprinting, Callahan; you’re moving too fast!”

  Rizer assumed Callahan from first squad was the guy far ahead bounding down the trail like a running bear. He and Stubs made their way onto the narrow trail that traced the lip of the canyon and began jogging, which felt like running due to the suit’s power.

  The bot ordered Callahan to slow down again and again but received no answer.

  “Stop, Callahan; stop right fucking now!” said their platoon sergeant, SSgt Griggs.

  “I got this, staff sergeant!”

  Is he out of his mind? That was the problem with the suits: they indeed made a man feel invincible, wrapped his mind in his body’s enhanced power, an unbelievable feeling that could get real in a hurry. Rizer remembered Hamilton’s warning: There’s not a power suit in existence that enhances intelligence.

  Callahan proved it when he slipped and fell from the trail, plunging over a hundred meters with a mighty crash. The radio and Rizer’s HUD erupted with med bot calls; they were already on the scene below when Rizer and Stubs passed by. They had Callahan’s visor raised, exposing a lifeless face. Rizer guessed he’d either broken his neck or sustained severe internal trauma during the fall.

  Furious at the insubordination that had cost Callahan his life, Griggs placed the dead man’s power armor on display in the company assembly area at course’s end, the first thing seen by the Marines when they finished. “Have a good, long look, first platoon.” He gestured to the damaged suit. “If you get a god complex, this suit will send you to heaven. Anybody else wanna go?”

  ***

  During week four they learned to use a jump pack to surmount obstacles, followed by another written exam and timed runs through several different obstacle courses. Several more Marines failed and were dropped for retraining; suit training concluded for those who passed. Rizer remained a leader in mastering power armor, which had truly become a second skin to him. He’d spent so much time in his suit that readjusting to unpowered movement became the ordeal, not the opposite.

  Training moved on to heavy weapons powered by their armor batteries—multi-barreled machineguns, belt-fed grenade launchers, lasers, plasma throwers—as well as crew-served weapons such as laser cannons, mortars, and the heaviest machineguns, all of which required their own power source. They qualified with the M-11 service pistol and received armor upgrades incorporating the M-11 on their left wrist and a retractable vibro-blade on their right. Field ops resumed; the company saw little of their barracks during the last half of SOI. Delta lost most of its incompetent Marines during suit training and dropped only a couple afterward. They made HALO jumps during weeks eight and nine and practiced assaults on a variety of objectives.

  Week ten opened with two days of written exams. A few failed and were rolled back; the rest went on to the real final exams, two events that would determine if they were true infantrymen.

  During the first test, seizing a ground objective, D Company spent most of a day taking a hill defended by bot and human SOI instructors. As in other simulations fought at SOI, hits caused pain that remained throughout the exercise or until the Marine died. Rizer survived the assault miraculously unscathed. A quarter of the company died taking the heavily defended position. Instructors graded individual Marines on their effectiveness at taking the objective. Dying was not an automatic failure, provided the Marine perished while effectively carrying out the mission. Only one Marine was judged wanting and rolled back.

  After a day of rest, they concluded SOI with a final exercise: capturing a ship in space. This time it was different—an approach distance of two klicks, the ship moving, live rounds in the clips of their M-17s. The live rounds meant they would face bots and would again take excruciating simulated damage.

  Against a ship moving thousands of kilometers per hour, only an expert could hope to land on the target with manual thrusting. They used mental commands relayed to their helmet computers, which regulated their thrust, ensuring a proper approach angle and safe landing speed.

  They attacked the ship—a massive box-like freighter—at company strength, with Marines of weapons platoon assigned to the various squads for fire support. Smythe carried fourth squad’s plasma machinegun, and he had an A-gunner with him. First squad of first platoon went first; Rizer saw the explosion flash when they breached the airlock door. The other squads followed at five-minute intervals, each ordered to secure a portion of the huge vessel. Fourth squad would take the cargo hold. Rizer couldn’t wait to get inside and get busy, anticipating the sight and thrill of blowing some bots apart with his rifle. Enough training. He wanted the fleet—he would get it after completing this mission.

  Red calls for med bots appeared on his HUD as he followed Belzer past the charred, twisted steel of the airlock door, through the space wall, and into a narrow hallway where three Marines lay bellowing and grunting from simulated wounds. The med bot calls were for show; the downed men would receive no medical help for their make-believe wounds, indistinguishable from the real thing in their minds. Just don’t get hit! Radio and text communications were limited to the squad and their instructor back on the dropship; transmissions to and from the rest of the company were cut off except for Belzer, who could contact base if need arose.

  At the f
irst intersection they came across the wreckage of two bots blasted to pieces, their metal innards on display. A directory sign written in a foreign language hung on the wall. Rizer’s helmet computer, fluent in over one thousand languages, quickly displayed the translation on his HUD. The squad broke right for the cargo hold.

  They passed through a door into darkness and descended several flights of stairs, moving slowly as they scanned with infrared. Bots left little heat signature, usually appearing as only a scattering of red dots. They encountered no resistance as they clomped their way down the stairs.

  At the bottom they entered a dimly lit hallway. Rizer felt his boots trying to catch the floor and realized they were in a zero-grav area. Regulating gravity cost reactor fuel aboard ship, so it was common to deactivate gravity in little-used areas of a traveling vessel. Had the floor been metallic, he would have stuck to it just fine. Probably a polymer material. The armor compensated somewhat yet not completely.

  They moved with an airy bounce in their steps. The bots jumped them halfway down the hall, four appearing from alcoves on either side. Rizer opened up on one, winged it, nearly ripping off its right arm. The impact wrenched the bot from the doorway into the hall, where he finished it with three shots to the body, sparks flying as the bolts tore into circuits and mechanisms.

  Four bots lay deactivated within seconds but not without cost. Hagel lay screaming after taking sim shots to the gut and groin. Belzer cut his radio, but that wouldn’t spare their ears until they were well away. Another Marine was hit in the thigh but able to continue.

  Adrenaline pumped through Rizer. These bots were only a warmup, the real action yet to come.

  At an intersection further along, five more bots fired on them, wounding Stubs in the left arm. They took down three bots; the other two fled toward the hold, which must have been close by.