by Kali Altsoba
“Get on my tail, now! Trail, trail.” His wingman barrel rolls into a close trail right behind him. The other two skycraft shift from wide-outside-and-behind in the fluid four to a straight line trail. “Forward and undercarriage guns only. Dive!”
Lee Jin is more than halfway through a medical inspection tour in the southern Amasian desert when, out of a blue-green dawn, four RIK skycraft screech into an air tearing turn-and-dive right over his head. He can just see flashes of reflected sunlight as they roll over in a sweep, abandon sound and visual camo, and fall into an attack dive aiming for him. Four flashing, silvery-green streaks head down fast.
They’re a schwarm of Jabos, four skycraft shifting quickly from a double rotte or wide two-by-two patrol formation to single file behind their leader. They were scouring the Alliance rear sector on a quick duck-and-smash, looking for strays, when they spotted Lee’s stalled medical column. Now they’re maneuvering fast, to make a low strafing run. They’re about to fly right down his throat.
His eight vehicle convoy has halted to try to clear an air pressure valve, on one of the back lifters on the second hovercraft in line. It’s badly clogged with sand blowback and out of sync with its mates. It’s just one of a dozen valves locked in underside racks of 12 lifters per hover. But it’s skewing steering and slowing the column’s speed to that of the second vehicle in line, and now also the slowest.
It’s not a vital or necessary repair to make way out here. Maybe it’s not worth stopping the column to fix? Judgement call. Loaders and drivers told Jan he can get away with stopping to adjust the valve because they’re way back of the black.
The four Jabos in a lethal attack dive easily penetrate the compromised sound camo of the limping vehicle, extrapolating positions of the convoy. They can’t see it, of course. Nothing wrong with any of the hovers’ light camo. But the Jabos are firing-to-grid based on a slight sound exposure. There! The first two air-to-ground missiles hit something! There’s smoke and fire and mortal fear and screaming rising high and fast. A jaeger made a kill.
“Killed a rabbit! Killed a rabbit!”
“Quiet! Relocate the target. There won’t be just one out here of whatever we hit.” Actually, the schwarm strike took out the two lead vehicles in Lee’s column both with high velocity, air-to-ground rockets.
Next comes the pom pom pom of underside double cannon pounding plasma balls into heaving sand. The hits spew moldavite tektites in fast cooling streams that solidify as they rise, then fall through air. Blasts leave little green-white glass craters in long, neat rows that look like a giant octopus walked across the desert when it was a seabed ten million years ago, leaving fossil sucker marks behind. Only this isn’t that kind of desert. There was no life on Amasia before the AI nanny bots arrived, carrying our DNA to the stars inside sterile beakers and jars.
Lee’s in the third vehicle, watching the two acoustic hovers out front of him explode into orange-red fireballs that transition remarkably quickly into rising, black smoke mushrooms. He can’t help a sudden rush of admiration of physics.
“Damn! What the hell just happened?”
“Jabos! Four of them!”
“The trucks are gone!”
“They didn’t have a chance.”
“All camo, all modes. Evasives! Right now!”
It’s the convoy captain shouting over the all-unit coms. Lee’s twelve thruster starts to accelerate into a hard, 90˚ sand spitting turn. Before it finishes, Lee slams open a heavy side door and rolls out and onto the red tan desert: he thinks he saw survivors from the second hover tossed onto the sand. The fall tears a knee patch and some skin underneath. Lots of gold braid gets ripped off his shiny blue, full Major General’s uniform. He comes to a tumbling, needling halt, his back thrust hard up against a large, prickly tumbleweed patch. He stands up and brushes red sand and pale green needles off his blue uniform shoulder and sleeve.
Lee’s convoy is 200+ klics back of Alliance Third Trench, 900+ klics from the back edge of Dark Territory, so skycraft defenses are few in this area. There’s not enough archie to cover all the deep hinter zones behind nearly 23,000 klics of the black, and old manatee barrage balloons that initially flew over The Sandbox southern desert proved worse than useless. They're all gone. Or parked.
Lee moves fast as he can. He’s utterly exposed, without even personal camo over his torn dress uniform: he’s out here on a top level, rear area inspection tour and wasn’t expecting to need combat gear or camos. Seven colleagues from his team in the lead vehicle he can’t help. Their hover is a roaring fireball. He hears fat crackling as his friends melt in intense flames that now become their pyre. He knows they’ll all be dead before he can reach them. He hopes they’re dead already.
He runs instead to the second hover, stopping then bending low to patch three wounded men hurled onto the desert by the explosion. They’re lying and crawling slowly on the hot sand, like mortally wounded jackrabbits. He has no medical bag. Just his hands and skill, and a tiny personal med kit attached to his belt. It will be too late for these three as well, if they have to wait for the nearest REMOTE. The closest Pods and medevac units are hundreds of klics to the east, located between Second and First Trenches to be closer to where they’re most needed. He knows, because he gave the deployment order. That’s why he dove-rolled onto the sand.
Meanwhile, the convoy captain lets the operator at Sky Defense HQ know “an Alliance general is about to get his ass shot off inside your defense grid!”
“Calm down, driver. What are you talking about?”
“Lee fucking Jin is out there alone in the desert, under that swooping schwarm of Jabos I know is on your screen. Fire your godsdamn missiles!”
“You mean General Lee Jin, head of Alliance Medical Corps?”
“Yes, godsdamn it. General Lee Jin. You gonna fire or what?”
“Battery One … Fire! Battery Two … Fire!”
“There’s no sky cover here!” Just four killer jaegers overhead, lusting to finish the hunt of the frightened hares below. Even so, help is on the way. On the edge of the far western horizon six brilliant point, white lights suddenly appear. They’re rising fast and getting bigger and brighter by the second.
‘Better late than never, I suppose,’ Lee thinks, then turns back to tourniquet and pack a gaping wound in one man’s thigh.
“Missiles on the way! They’re streakers!” It’s a young convoy ack ack officer, letting survivors know long range missiles are inbound to chase the Jabos, though probably not to actually take them out. That’s hard to do. The jaegers are already in a tight banking turn, repositioning for a third firing run along the convoy.
“Can’t get here in time. The bastards are gonna hit us again!”
“Acknowledged. All vehicles: starburst evasives.” The convoy captain pours it on: “Get as much distance from each other as you can before they make another firing run. Spread out, people! Break the line! Damn all your speed protocols!”
Six surviving vehicles race away from Lee in a starburst pattern at top speed. The danger is that high speed evasive action will throw up so much sand from under acoustic nozzles that motion detectors in the Jabos won’t need to penetrate wraparound vehicle camos. They’ll just zero in all weps on the heaving sand. It’s a high stakes gamble: pinwheel away at top speed and maybe lose one or two more trucks, or chance losing all six in a turtle defense.
This is a medical convoy. The hovers have only the barest ack ack targeting gear and just one gun each. The convoy captain and ack ack officer might ‘Roman Turtle’ the trucks against one diving Jabo, but four? “Move it, all possible speed!”
Six hovers leave Jan behind, alone and visible as a small blue dot as the Jabos flip upside down and turn back for a third strafing. They swoop low right over the smoking attack site but lose contact with their expected targets as the hovers go silent camo and flee in six directions at once. They’re also shooting light, sound, motion, and infrared distractors in every direction while two bogey EM
S ‘flutters’ race over the hot, wrinkled sand, mimicking damaged ground vehicles on the Jabo schwarm’s vidscreens. Lee watches one hurley-burley pulling hard turns every 50 meters, after it hurtles past him at shocking speed for such an odd looking bot.
It’s not clear if the Jabo pilots see Lee or not. He’s kneeling now, beside another wounded man he saw fly out of the second burning hover right before the convoy accelerated and scattered. He might be masked by heat plumes from the burning hulks, both clearly visible for many klics with black smoke rising several hundred meters. There must be a hundred bits of hot debris lying all around the explosion sites. Maybe they glow more red than he does on Jabo viewers?
More likely, he’s showing up on their motion screens but they don’t think one man is worth shooting at, not with six streakers running hot from the west coast. And now, on their IFFs, there’s a flight of five Mach 20 AI Wasps heading down from near orbit, called to an area they never cover. The jaegers fire another line of plasma at random around the perimeter of the burning site, but don’t see or hit anything. “Two coneys in the bag. Time to skedaddle. Reform in fingertip. Mark!”
They pull out and away, engaging their own full spectrum camo while racing low, fast, and in erratic zig-zags back toward Dark Territory and thence the safety of their own lines and protected sky. Behind them, lying on a desert floor, are the expired lives of thirteen men and women these sky pilots never met or hated. Also changed forever are dozens of connected lives of friends and family. Such is the nature of war waged from the sky. Detached, indifferent, indiscriminate.
***
“Are you alright, sir?”
“Yes, I’m fine.”
“Did you hit your head sir? You seem a little dazed.”
“No, or at least I don’t think so.”
“But you had a fall, yes? Your blues are torn up.”
“I’m fine. Really.”
“Maybe. But you’re done here, sir.”
“What? But I…”
“Those three are going to make it.”
“Are you sure?”
“The nurses have them now.”
“Yes, thank you. I just need to…”
“What, sir? What are you looking for?”
“There might be something personal left over. You know, from the explosion. Something to … send back to their families.”
Three doctors and five nurses were incinerated in the first hover. Four nurses and a doctor died instantly in the second. Lee knew them all. He drank scotch and played Mancala and Mahjong with them. He knows their families.
“I’ll help you look, sir.”
“Thank you. Maybe under here?” He doesn’t find anything. The fires were too fast and too hot. Lee finally accepts Vulcan’s verdict. He orders warm ash sitting in little mounds on the burned hovers’ seats marked for collection and bagging.
New Beijing sends four mobile archie teams and a full company of marines to bring him back to safety. General Lian Sòng is deeply embarrassed and angry that so senior and famous an officer as Dr. Lee Jin, who’s also her very dear friend, was nearly killed. He’ll make no trouble for her. He knows that in combat death is random, and that Lian Sòng is doing the best she can under extreme conditions. Most officers of his rank and influence would not be quite so understanding.
He’ll make no complaint, file no AAR shifting blame for his command losses to the convoy captain or Sky Defense HQ or to her in New Beijing. On the other hand, he refuses to return to her HQ. “Sorry Lian, but I’m not coming in.”
“Now listen here, Lee. You’re not on one of your hospital ships down here. You’re in my command zone. I’m bringing you back right now!”
“No, actually you’re not, my old friend. Medical Corps is independent of all other commands. I answer to the Hornet’s Nest and Kars, not to you. Even here.” Actually, it’s not clear who in MoD he answers to, or if he really answers to anyone except the PM.
“You should know that, Lian. So tell your very nice marine major to please release my convoy captain and his brave crews, and it ends here. He’s under my orders. And we are going to visit the black.”
Lee insists on finishing his inspections. So do all the survivors of his team. To honor their dead friends, they all say, but also from deep personal loyalty to Lee. “That’s fine people, and thank you. Now, let’s all get under cover, shall we? Captain, please lead the way. And have I thanked you yet for your fast thinking? I suspect you saved half my command or more today.”
He takes them to the closest section of Third Trench. They're surprised when they don’t stop. They move by maglev under Second Trench as well, until they arrive at a section of First Trench where he says he wants to see the triage system in action, at the edge of real combat. He has been planning this for months.
It’s after midnight when they get there. A big raid has just gone out. They’re told to take cover at least six floors down from the surface, that Nadine Yupanqui expects heavy return fire from RIK short range mortars and howitzers. “Could be hours before it let’s up. Sorry sir, but you’ll have to wait it out down here.”
Lee’s not sorry. He’s happy to be here, not in his always-too-busy Medical Corps office. He hopes to fix this sector’s notorious reputation for inadequate med facilities and too high death rates among the badly wounded. He calls a meeting in a subsurface bunker with a hundred medics, to assess their needs and hear any complaints.
Five minutes later, incoming fire starts to pound the ground overhead. Trauma gongs sound and sirens wail up-and-down the line within minutes, announcing casualties among the raiders. The medics scatter like leaves in an autumn blow, without asking Lee’s permission. Stretchers are coming down, loaded with wet trauma cases and howling wounded. Word has it that the big raid ran right into a waiting ambush by elements of Gross Imperium. That elite RIK division is living up to its fearsome reputation. And it has only been here for a day.
Word has it that the raid ran right into a waiting ambush by elements of Gross Imperium. That elite division is living up to its fearsome reputation, and it has only been here for a day.
“OK people, round up any off duty and stray medical personnel you can find. Let’s get an emergency surgery set up right here and right now.”
“New Beijing calling, sir. They insist you leave, and right now. You’re to stay underground sir, to use the supply maglev. They say a big fight, maybe at division scale, is brewing and that there’s real danger from the expected counterbarrage.”
“Anything else?”
“If I may, sir?”
“What is it? Out with it. We have wounded coming down.”
“Sorry sir, but you always say to report it to you straight.”
“Proceed.”
“Sir, I have to say, sir, General Lian Sòng’s exact words were: ‘Get that bloody fool out of my trenches right fucking now.’”
Lee laughs. “She said that? Gods I love that woman! Knows her Baku scotch blends, too. Though I always win at Mahjong. Call her back. Tell her that I’ll be in surgery and off the milneb and the medneb for the next few hours.”
He finds the perfect site on a base wall map embed. “We’ll set up down there. The sheet says it’s 500 meters down, cut into the chalk bedrock. Should be cool, dry, and sterile. It’s perfect.”
“Where sir?”
“Division Mess Tent #3.”
“Pardon sir?”
“Look, it’s right here on the sheet.”
“A tent, sir? Down there?”
“The sheet says it’s directly below us.”
“A tent, sir?”
“That’s what it says.”
“That can’t be right, sir.”
“It doesn’t matter! I don’t care if it’s a whorehouse. Let’s go!”
“Right sir, I’ll start moving our equipment and people down.”
Lee expects there’ll be a head cook or sergeant or someone in charge. He’ll invoke his medical trump and order the mess tent to be emergency con
verted into a Combat Support Hospital. No one can stand before his direct, unimpeachable, irresistible, overriding authority. He hasn’t a doubt about that. It’s the other thing that worries him, nagging at the back of his mind. Something very private.
“Make sure you call ahead. I want the place cleared so we can set up stat, with no bullshit. OK, let’s go people!”
He strides forward, not waiting to see if anyone is following. They are. A line of nine doctors is pulling on sterile onepiece med suits, 15 nurses similarly dressed are in tow, along with 23 harried looking medical assistants and combat medics wearing isolation gowns and bouffant caps. All follow in Lee’s insistent wake. After 100 meters of descent into chalk he adds a resting field stretcher team to his little convoy. They look pretty rough, but he needs them. Another 150 meters down and he dragoons two dozen confused looking, off duty privates who were planning to sit out the bombardment safe below ground. He impresses them, too, into what’s becoming a formidable little medical navy. By the time he reaches 500 meters everyone but Lee is ‘trailing pike,’ as soldiers say. No one knows what it means anymore, except that everyone means by it: “I’m really fucking tired and dragging my ass. Can we stop all this useless marching already?”
