Forge and Steel

by David VanDyke

  “Doesn’t your master have a name?”

  “Its designation is – was – Third. Those of the Pure Race have no names. Only underlings have names.”

  “Bizarre. Okay, we’ll have to do this the hard way, like I told you. Do your part and if we make it through this, I promise you’ll be reunited with your master.”

  “I will do my part.”

  Bull dropped the channel back to standby and tried all the company channels in sequence, hoping to reach someone outside of First Platoon, but no dice. They must not have been able to restore any comms. They might have been stripped of all their equipment by the enemy. That’s what he’d do in their place.

  Then it would all be on him and his people. He switched to the platoon channel. “First Squad, Fireteam Beta, initiate according to plan. Everyone else, shut everything off including HUDs and comms.”

  The rear ramp on his sled dropped and five troops charged out, spreading out in all directions. The ramp raised to seal again and Bull took deep breaths, trying to overcome the frustration of being blind and deaf, unable to speak to his people or even watch them on his tactical HUD.

  If Maydar did his part, the five would be heading for five different points inside the survey ship’s skin. When they were all ready, irises would open and they would charge out into the base, throwing grenades and firing their weapons, raising as much hell as possible.

  And if the enemy took the bait...

  “Bull!” Lockerbie yelled from the cockpit, “positive EMP!”

  “Drop ramps and go!” he replied. “Reboot! Everyone reboot!”

  Front and rear ramps dropped, manually released, and troops poured from the sled. Bull took a moment to reinitiate his armor and weapons, and then followed his people out.

  Four tunnels, pulsing with red stripes, showed the way off of the survey ship. Bull followed the rump First Squad down one of them, lumbering in his massive armor. Without cybernetics to boost his strength and speed he remained clumsy and slow, but at least his weapons and comms worked.

  Now that the enemy had used their EMP against his decoy squad, he had a fighting chance. Third and Fourth squads, which had been outside the ship during the first EMP, hadn’t lost any capability.

  Even now he could see them on his HUD, assaulting left and right around the perimeter of the circular base. He’d ordered this deployment in hope the sleds hadn’t been moved far from their insertion positions. Maybe the prisoners would be kept in their vicinity.

  First and Second squads, with active weapons and armor but no cybernetics, headed for the Meme command center. Maydar had pinpointed it for them, offset from the middle of the base.

  Using cutting charges, Bull and his Marines breached wall after wall, mercilessly burning down every living thing they encountered. For several minutes resistance remained light, consisting of unarmed worker biologicals that threw themselves at his troops, doing little except making them expend ammo.

  Then a wall shivered, and Bull remembered what Reaper had said about a ripple preceding an opening. “Action left!” he snapped as he brought up his pulse rifle.

  The wall split along its length, left to right. The bottom half dropped and the top half retracted upward, and a dozen mantises with blades charged his line.

  Bull found himself bellowing as he emptied his first magazine in one sustained burst. His hands felt as if they were moving through molasses as he performed a quick reload, the lack of cybernetics telling. As he snapped the new magazine in, he ducked a wild swing from one of the mantises and fired into its abdomen. Ichor erupted from its broken exoskeleton even as he felt something slam into his back and drive him to the deck.

  He tried to roll, but pieces of his broken back-rack hindered him. He twisted and fired at his attacker, and then dodged again as the mantis stabbed downward. The blade skidded off ferrocrystal armor plate until it found a weak spot, which happened to be his left wrist. The point pierced his skinsuit and impaled his forearm between the radius and ulna, pinning him to the deck.

  Swinging his rifle upward one-handed, he blew the thing’s triangular head off. It came crashing down atop him and he screamed as the blade twisted.

  Keying a hero cocktail of stims and painkillers made the pain recede. Releasing his rifle, he set himself and pressed a quarter-ton of Pureling to slowly roll off of him. He felt his laminated bones grind together, but it was only a curious sensation, not a deterrent. Once free of the bug’s mass, he seized the blade that held him and worked it back and forth to draw it first out of the deck material, and then from his arm.

  “Acosta? Reaper?” he rasped, struggling to his feet.

  “Acosta’s KIA,” Reaper said, stepping into his field of vision. “So are Kronhaller and Colón. Billings and Riggs are walking wounded. You are too, looks like. Can you use the arm?”

  Bull flexed his left hand, but the fingers only twitched nervelessly. “Not really, but that’s all right. I can fire one-handed. Let’s go.”

  “Go where?”

  “Attack!”

  “Have you checked tactical?”

  He almost told her to screw tactical when he caught himself. It was the drugs coursing through his veins, not reason, that made him feel like taking on the whole Empire. He brought up his HUD and saw Third and Fourth squads meeting up on the other side of the base perimeter.

  “Gunny, SITREP,” he rasped.

  “We recovered about two dozen.”

  “Out of a hundred fifty?”

  “They had no weapons, no armor, no wetware. We interrupted the slaughter in two chambers, but the rest...they had no chance, sir.”

  “How about your own?”

  “Seven KIA, nine or ten wounded. Resistance has disintegrated, though. I think we got all the bugs, sir.”

  “You recover any pilots?”

  “One, sir.”

  “Then load up the nearest sled with wounded and get it into space. You and the rest fight your way back to the survey ship and our sleds for extraction.”

  “Roger that, sir. On our way.”

  Checking near him on the HUD, Bull found the remnants of Second Squad nearby. Neither they nor his fireteam had gotten anywhere near the Meme command center, but he hadn’t expected to. Theirs had been a diversion, to help out Third and Fourth in the rescue attempt.

  “Brooks?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Fall back to the survey ship and rendezvous at the sleds. You did good.”

  “Aye aye, sir.”

  Reaper fired a burst from her weapon at a mantis peeping from an opening across the room. “We need to extract, Bull. The shape we’re in, it won’t take much to wipe us out.”

  “Right. Pick up our KIA and bring them along.”

  “Without cybernetics, we can barely carry our suits.”

  Bull realized that was true. Everything that had once been easy had become difficult. Even with his unusual strength, he felt as if he could barely haul himself across the deck. “Doesn’t matter. I’m gonna vaporize this place anyway.” He detached his Final Option bomb one-handed and set the timer for twenty minutes and optional command detonation, and then shoved it inside a dead mantis’ guts. “Let’s go.”

  When he and his Marines shuffled tiredly to the sleds, he found Pureling body parts strewn across the deck. Lock and the other Aerospace personnel stood in their lightweight blue suits, holding pulse rifles at the ready.

  “Looks like you had a little action,” Bull said.

  “Not enough to make me want to join the FMF,” Lock replied. “No biggie. There were only three, with those swords. But sir...”

  “What?”

  She pointed at one corpse. “That one’s not a mantis. Wrong color, too.”

  Bull looked where she indicated. Instead of the gray of mantis chitin, he saw yellow silk soaked in green blood. “Damn. It’s Maydar. The Blend.”

  “Guess they like traitors about as much as we do,” Reaper said.

  “There’s a difference between a traito
r and a defector,” Bull snarled.

  Reaper shrugged. “Eye of the beholder. Sorry, Bull.”

  Gunny Kang came loping up, fully capable Marines behind him helping skinsuited personnel, many wounded. “Load the sleds, move, move! Fourth Squad, pull security.”

  “Good job, Kang,” Bull said.

  “Thank you, sir. Wish we could have rescued more.”

  Bull searched Kang’s face for any trace of rancor. After all, Bull could have gotten everyone home safe if only he’d have traded the Meme. He’d tried to have it both ways, but over a hundred of his people had died. He didn’t see any condemnation in his platoon sergeant’s manner, though.

  In fact, Bull thought he saw approval. He didn’t understand that at all.

  When he turned to Reaper, she nodded at him. “Let’s get our people home, Bull.”

  “How?” he asked, looking around. “Maydar is gone. How do we get out of this ship?”

  Lock pointed toward the noses of the sleds. “Thin spots marked right there. They appeared a couple minutes before we got attacked. I assume it was your bug friend’s dying act.”

  “My bug friend...” Bull looked at Maydar’s body once more. “Gunny, roll him in a survival blanket and bring him along.”

  “Sir?”

  “He was on our side. Or at least, on his master’s side. And he returned with us to help. Without him, we’d never have gotten any of our people back. And I made a promise to him, that he’d join his master. So he comes along. We treat him with respect.”

  “Aye aye, sir.” Kang detailed two Marines to carry out Bull’s instructions.

  “Wish I had another bomb to put on this ship. Make sure it’s dead too, so there’s no escape for the surviving enemy.”

  “Final Option bomb, you mean?” Reaper asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Here.” Reaper opened her chest armor and pulled out a small, flat device. “It’s a mini.”

  “Mini?”

  “Tenth of a kiloton instead of half, but it’ll get the job done.”

  “Only officers are supposed to have these.”

  “What, Bull, you don’t trust your first sergeant to run with scissors?”

  Bull shook his head in exasperation. “Fine. Ten minute timer. Hide it in a mantis body and let’s get the hell out of here.”

  On the crowded shuttle ride back, some Marines slept. Others treated wounds, tended to gear or jabbered until their battle-stimmed nerves calmed. Several of the rescued shook Bull’s hand and thanked him for coming back for them. He didn’t bother trying to explain that he could probably have saved everyone if only he’d abandoned his mission orders and taken the deal the Meme offered.

  “You did the right thing,” Reaper said quietly, leaning in.

  Eerie. Seemed like Reaper could read his mind. “Did I? I could have traded the Meme and everyone would have lived. So what if I’d have been court-martialed. Small price to pay for so many lives.”

  “You didn’t take your oath to save your life, or even Marine lives. You took your oath to uphold Earth’s constitution, to protect humanity against all enemies, and to follow all lawful orders. You feel like your mission orders were unlawful?”

  He sighed. “No.”

  “How many are coming back?”

  Bull consulted his HUD. “Sixty-eight.”

  “Better than fifty-two. Your actions saved a net sixteen lives, and you carried out the mission to capture a Meme. The fact that it’s actually a willing defector is a bonus.”

  “Once the whole story comes out, nobody’s going to trust me to lead them to a whorehouse, much less on another mission.”

  Reaper lifted her index finger and poked Bull in the eye.

  “Ow! Shit, what the fuck?”

  “That’s for being a whiny asshole. Look around you, young lieutenant. Do you see anyone glaring daggers? Blaming you? Did you think those Marines thanking you were lying?”

  “No...”

  “Then quit beating yourself up. You made a plan and you executed it. The worst plan, violently executed, is better than no plan at all. Everything else is up to God, fate, the competence of the enemy and the roll of the dice. You made a command decision. You completed your mission. You lost some people. Shit happens. Do the dead the courtesy of honoring their sacrifice and move on, because this sure as hell won’t be the last time people die under your command.”

  Bull put his head back against the bulkhead and closed his eyes. He had no energy to argue with Reaper, and everything she said seemed to make sense while she was saying it.

  Yet, he felt his heart harden within him, and he had a vision of it, like a lump of metal under the blacksmith’s hammer. Perhaps that’s what it would take to become the leader he must: a soul of iron, tempered within a hotter forge.

  The End of A Hotter Forge

  What Price Humanity?

  by David VanDyke

  Excerpt from A Personal Memoir: Survival Against the Meme, by Xiaobo HUEN, Admiral, EarthFleet, Commanding; 2110 A.D.

  With their vast, intelligently designed living ships, the hostile aliens we call Meme employ superior strategic mobility in the outer Solar System. They are able to operate with few bases and no resupply more advanced than the nearest collection of asteroids and cometary nuclei. They lurk within the Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud, losing themselves among millions of objects across incredible distances, consuming ices, metals and silicates to refuel, replenish and reproduce.

  While gathering strength, they raid, attacking our outposts and asteroid acquisition operations, our transiting cargo ships and task forces, looking for easy victories, forcing us to expend more resources than they. In accordance with their conservative – the misinformed might say cowardly – nature, they hit and run, always with the aim of preserving themselves while damaging us.

  This situation reminds me of my studies of the twentieth-century conflicts in Vietnam that pitted various outsider-supported indigenous forces such as the Viet Cong and Viet Minh against foreign powers – notably, but not only, the French, the Americans, and my own Chinese ancestors. This guerilla strategy would be a model for insurgents and terrorists for decades, until Earth finally became united in the face of the Meme threat.

  To counter this strategy, EarthFleet employs heavy sweeps of areas where we suspect their presence. When we meet them, we defeat them if they stand; thus, they seldom give battle. Screened by clouds of living hypervelocity missiles, they flee faster than we can pursue until we retire again to the orbit of Jupiter, the true edge of human territory.

  Thus, for a time, we fight the classic asymmetric war. Our machines, our discipline and our locally superior firepower are mismatched by the Meme ability to strike with little warning, inflict damage, and withdraw with impunity.

  That is until, every decade or two, their reinforcements arrive from beyond the solar system.

  Each time, the Meme gather to conduct a massive assault, hoping to penetrate our defenses and damage our single, fragile home planet. Each time, we have beaten them back with great losses, heroic sacrifices. Each time, their remnants withdraw to the outer reaches to continue their guerrilla warfare and await the next push.

  And each time, they come closer to wiping us out.

  We are losing this war, not because we are getting weaker, but because they grow stronger more rapidly than we. Yet we must win, every single time. If we lose, we lose Earth, the basket in which most of our eggs lie.

  To win, I believe humanity has no choice but to consider inhuman solutions to inhuman threats, to fight fire with fire.

  But if we ignite this conflagration, might we not burn down our own house?

  Chapter 1

  “Do you know who you are?”

  The woman’s warm, professional voice soothed him. “Sure. I’m Vango Markis. Flight Lieutenant Vincent Markis, EarthFleet, Aerospace branch, I mean. What happened? Did I get hurt?”

  “Nothing we can’t fix. You’ll be fine.”

  “I’m blind.
Why can’t I see?”

  “You don’t have use of your eyes.”

  “Why can’t I feel anything? Will I fly again?”

  “We’ll explain all that soon, Flight Lieutenant Markis. For now, we need to re-baseline your cognitive profile while we work on your body.”

  “Call me Vango. It’s my call sign. You’re a doctor?”

  “I am.”

  “How bad is it, doc?”

  “You’re not dead. You’re thinking clearly enough to converse.”

  “But will I fly again?”

  “Yes, Flight Lieutenant Markis. You’ll fly.”

  Vango detected a false note behind her calm and wondered what she wasn’t telling him. How bad could it be? Between the Eden Plague’s healing and the reconstructive nanotech, if the brain made it back alive and undamaged, the body could eventually be regenerated, cell by cell, good as new.

  That must be it. He couldn’t remember, but he must have been hit bad, really bad, worse than he’d ever been. He wondered about the other fliers in his squadron. Did they make it back?

  Make it back from what, though? He couldn’t remember.

  “Doc, what happened?”

  “What’s the last thing you recall? Tell me your last memory of anything at all.”

  “I’ll rack my brain.” He tried to laugh, but felt no muscles respond. How was he speaking? It must be a low-level neural link, audio only.

  “Was that supposed to be humorous? Humor’s a good sign. Now please answer the question, Flight Lieutenant Markis.”

  “You can call me Vango. Really. I remember...I remember heading back to Earth from Callisto, sealing into the coldsleep cocoon. Hate those things, the slime and everything. Don’t trust captured Meme biotech.”

  “The technology is safe and proven.”

  “So’s bungee jumping. Doesn’t mean I have to like it.”

  “Do you remember waking up?”

  “No.”

  “Do you remember anything after that? A mission, perhaps?”

  Vango mulled this over, trying to strain out the most recent memory among the many sorties he’d flown against the Meme, but everything seemed to muddle together. “I’m not sure. I remember a lot of missions. Last one I’m certain of is when we beat the Destroyer.”