Since we weren’t being shot at—a nice surprise—we waited quietly for coms.
The first voice I heard was Jones’s, which was a relief. “Squad, sound off. Dietz?”
“Alive,” I said. “Fine.”
“Omalas?”
“Sir,” she said.
“Marino?”
Marino hummed something on our squad channel. Sounded familiar, but I couldn’t place it. Was that the theme to Vila Sésamo? I had a vague recollection of watching all those happy puppets while huddled around an LED-film projection in the labor camps with two dozen other children while a hot wind kicked up dust outside. You’d think the puppets would have been the most fantastic part of that show, but it was always the world of clean air and flat social hierarchies that felt like a cozy fantasy.
“I need an affirmative, Marino,” Jones said.
“Still shooting,” Marino said. “Let’s carve them up.”
“Deathless?”
Shit, I thought. Who was Deathless?
“Here,” a woman said. She raised her rifle, so I knew she was the one next to me. She was about as tall as I was; I maybe outweighed her, but not by much.
As our trackers came online, I consulted my heads-up display, and saw her last name listed as Ratzesberger. No wonder she had a call sign. I definitely hadn’t seen her in our platoon before this. I would have remembered that name.
Chatter on the line. Marino said, “Big to-do out here.”
“They like to make a show up here in Canuck,” Deathless said. “Get all the Martian immigrants pissing themselves.”
Wait for the updated brief, I thought. The loading icon still blinked at the lower left of my vision.
“Dietz,” Jones said, and my stomach sank. “You all right? All pistons firing?”
“Yeah, good.” I went over the other names in our platoon, trying to figure out who else was missing. Landon was still there, Tanaka, Leichtner . . . Herrera was missing. And Markesh. The rest were the same as I remembered. Deathless must have been one of the grunts rotated in to replace one of them.
Prakash was missing again, too. I let out my breath. I didn’t realize I’d been holding it. I tried to center myself in time. This was after Prakash’s bad drop, probably? Before . . . was it before anything I’d experienced yet? I didn’t know. Maybe not? I wondered if I’d ever see Prakash again, or if she was gone, sealed away in some memory I’d never get back, like Muñoz and the rest of my first squad.
Stick to the brief.
As if summoned, the brief popped in on my heads-up display.
We were part of a major deployment moving into Canuck to secure it after intel reported that six Martian drop ships had landed here, overrunning a CanKrushkev base in the area. Two CanKrushkev divisions had already been dispatched, but we’d lost communication with them. Our platoon was part of Dog Company, one of the four companies that made up the Ghost Battalion. The Ghost Battalion and our sister Battalion, the Midnight Marauders, together formed the Ruby Regiment. The Ruby Regiment was one of the three regiments comprising the Firewalker Brigade, which rolled up into the 91st Armored Infantry Division. Our division numbered about fifteen thousand soldiers, last I heard, but I had yet to see its full deployment.
Until now.
Let me tell you what the Martians did to Canuck. Most of the North American continent has been fought over by Evecom and CanKrushkev for decades. CanKrushkev won. Long time back, CanKrushkev and NorRus fought another big war over it. Called it the Seed Wars, and it was mostly fought over the far north after it thawed out, probably more than a hundred years ago now. The blooming Manitoba and Saskatchewan wheat fields and solar farms were way more valuable than crude oil, by then. Changing weather patterns dramatically altered the Pacific region, and that carried over far inland. Most of the southern half of North America was desert; it happened fast, maybe two decades. People were displaced. It got messy. Nobody won in that war. They blasted the whole place to hell. Turned this melting Garden of Eden into a contagious, radioactive wasteland. So much virulent shit was eating through the organics in Canuck that it became one of those dark places you threaten to send kids if they don’t follow corporate rules.
When a splinter group of Martians broke their silence and offered to fix Canuck in exchange for passage back to Earth . . . shit, who was going to say no? Fix what we broke. Sounds great.
I don’t think anybody figured they would fix it so well, though. I had seen the place in lots of immersives, but in real life it felt—crisper. Colder. I searched for a date on my display but got nothing. If I had to guess, it might be early autumn. There were trees in the distance, out beyond the soft undulations of the fields all around us. Clouds hung low in the sky; a black thunderhead bloomed to my left. Took me a minute to realize it wasn’t clouds, but smoke.
Our objective lay over there; Martian drop ships and the missing divisions, all obscured by the billowing smog.
“Incoming!” the CO yelled over the platoon channel. Her voice sounded different. Was that Lieutenant V? That was as much warning as we got.
A massive explosion tore away the ground ten meters to my left, engulfing the entire platoon next to us.
It threw me like a freight train.
I went ten feet in the air. Crashed to the ground. Hunks of grassy earth, bits of flesh and gear, tattered slicks, rained from the sky. The smoke mixed with the reddish mist of blood. Bloody soil smeared the front of my helmet.
I tried to wipe it clear, and only distorted my vision even more. I instinctively reached for my helmet to pop it off and stopped myself. The only reason my hearing was intact was because of the helmet. I pushed up my visor—the risk of going blind preferable to getting hit because I couldn’t see anything. All this tech, and they couldn’t keep our field of vision clear when the shit hit.
“Jones?” I said.
“Assess and advance north!” the CO said across our platoon channel. “We are advancing! They took out our drones. You are the eyes on the ground.” That definitely was not Lieutenant V’s voice. It sounded a lot like . . . Who? I couldn’t place it.
I hefted my rifle and kept low. My heads-up gave me direction, which was good, because the smoke was so bad I still couldn’t see anything. I snapped on my oxygen line, the one we were supposed to use for Mars, figuring now was as good a time as any to use it.
The GPS marked my squad on the display. I caught up to Omalas, who was helping Deathless get free of the tumbled earth.
“Anybody injured?” I said over our squad channel.
“I’m up,” Jones said. I didn’t have a visual on him, but his tracker marker on the local map pivoted toward me; his and Marino’s.
“I have Marino,” Jones said.
“Still got my balls,” Marino said.
“Dietz! Visor on,” Jones said. “They’re using gas. Probably sarin. Everyone, check your med kits. Secure your masks.”
I wiped away the smear on my visor as much as I could and lowered it. The edges sealed around the helmet. I brought up the full oxygen mask, yanking it down from inside my helmet and securing it. The oxygen line threaded through the mask. I knew about various nerve agents, had learned about them in mandatory training, but the idea that they would actually be used still shocked me. I dug around in my med kit and found the antidote syringe labeled GAS. I had no idea if it would work against sarin, or all types of gas, or . . . shit.
“Division is moving north,” Jones said The heavy whump-whump of artillery continued. Arcs of plasma sailed over our heads.
I kept low next to Omalas. This was heavy shit.
“Move!” Jones waved us all forward. The rifle trembled in his hands.
I slowed my breathing, trying to center myself like I did in the torture modules. The fire and fury on the field is meant to kill, but it also confuses, and confusion can kill you just as easily.
The bulk of the division moved north across my heads-up display map. They were little blue beads on the read-out, clumping and falling
and reclumping. To get their names, I could focus on each individual, but I didn’t want to. They fell so fast I feared getting attached even to a name. I scanned the map for the CO but broke off when another blast ruptured the ground thirty paces away.
A mass of grassy earth smashed my head. I stumbled, caught myself, and ran to catch up with my squad.
“Spread out!” Jones said. “Don’t bunch up!”
We moved away from one another, trying to keep fifteen feet between every member of our squad and the larger platoon. That was the recommendation in training; it helped minimize losing your entire squad to a mine or a blast, but these bursts were big; they spewed earth and shrapnel and body parts with massive force. I wasn’t convinced any of us would survive a nearby hit.
Jones went crater to crater; probably figuring the likelihood artillery would hit the same place twice was low. I was pretty sure that’s not how chance worked. Smoke hugged the ground; twisting yellow and green. Sarin was clear, tasteless, and odorless. This had to be something else.
I pushed the thought out of my mind. Heard only the sound of my own breath. The formerly flat plain was pockmarked with craters and dirt mounds and bodies. I tripped over two soldiers still writhing, soaked in blood. As we advanced, the field of bodies grew thicker. I kept my heads-up map of the area minimized, terrified to watch us all falling and dying in real time.
Minutes felt like hours. My heads-up began displaying heat signatures in the near distance.
“Three k’s to the target,” Jones said. “Keep moving.”
“Fucknuts should have dropped us into camp,” Marino huffed. “I’d come together inside some fucking red and kill him right there.”
“Less chatter,” Jones said. Another explosion rocked through a nearby platoon. A helmeted head careened past me and disappeared into the smoke.
Tanaka’s squad kept pace with us; our platoon was strung out, and we’d taken several losses.
“This is bad intel,” Tanaka said over the platoon channel. “It shouldn’t be this heavy.”
“Keep your heads down!” the CO barked over the platoon channel. “We advance.” Whoever she was, she sounded younger than Lieutenant V.
My breath was loud inside my helmet. The forms of my platoon and those nearby came in and out of the smoke like ghosts.
Deathless stumbled; just ahead and to my left. She went down. I ran over and offered a hand. The ground trembled under another blast. Deathless lay just behind the lip of a crater. I saw nothing of her face behind the helmet, but I opened a two-way channel.
“Come on,” I said.
“I can’t.”
“You can.” I grabbed her arm, but she shrank away from me.
“That’s death up there. That’s death for no reason. They’re running us into a grinder.”
“We signed up for this. I’m not leaving you. Come on.”
I hooked her under the arm and dragged her out. Forcing her to move woke something within her; the soldier, maybe, buried beneath the fear. She moved. I kept close to her, closer than we should have to avoid a double-death by bombing, but I figured seeing somebody else next to her was good peer pressure. If I was moving, so could she.
The bodies beneath our boots grew more frequent. Shredded flesh. Mangled torsos. Burst heads. Bits of helmets and broken pulse rifles, abandoned medical kits and tattered MRE wrappers. We careened past a soldier who’d gone to his knees in the middle of the dead and taken off his helmet. He wept there in the bloody dirt while the snaking tendrils of the gas enveloped him.
Deathless was right. We were all going to die here. And for what? What had the Martians done up there that deserved this show of force, this mindless run into gas and artillery? Why had they sent infantry into a deathtrap?
We caught up to Jones and Omalas. Marino weaved just out of sight, to my left. I jogged ahead to catch up with Jones, and opened up a two-way channel.
“Jones, we—”
I’m not even sure what I was going to say. We should watch Deathless? We should go back? We should tell the CO to hump us out? We should become cowards, now, when we faced a hopeless mission?
The ground exploded around me. Heat. Pattering of earth. My ears went dumb. I choked, realized it was dirt, pushed myself up. My visor had shattered. Muted groans. Screaming? My vision swam. I let myself drop back to the ground, still dazed. I turned over. My limbs, I thought. Do I have all my limbs? Are my guts hanging out?
I patted at my arms, my groin, my thighs, and lifted my head to gaze down the length of my body. I lay covered in dirt and blood; bits of flesh and shredded golden grass.
You are alive, I thought. You are whole. You can move.
“Jones,” I said aloud, and it was like I was speaking from the bottom of a well. Ahead of me lay a smoky ruin of a crater. My heads-up blinkered; I couldn’t figure out how to access it, my brain was so muddled.
I moved rocks and twisted grass away as I went toward a dark, heaping shape. My mind served up the image of Grandma’s body, again: her torso torn open. “No, no,” I said; the sound hummed in my ears. Like speaking underwater.
An arm. Exposed fingers. I went to grab the arm, pulling myself close enough to see that most of it was no longer attached to the body that had rolled into the crater.
I slid into the lip of the crater and hooked my arms under Jones’s. Aside from the mangled arm, he seemed mostly intact, but out of it, eyes glassy, confused. His dangling arm dragged across the ground as I pulled him. The bone was sheared; jagged splinters. Tattered flesh. What was left of the arm was attached to him by two taut sinews, nothing more.
I opened the company channel; the howls of fear, of the dead, of the dying, pierced my helmet. “Medic!” I said. “Jones, the six-oh-four, needs a medic!” A dozen others called the same.
“This is the five-oh-six, medic! Medic one, this is the five-oh-six. Ferreira’s down!”
“Seoane, the three-oh-nine—we need blood! Med team two! This is the three-oh-nine! Over!”
“Get off this channel! Use the evac channel!”
“Who the fuck is sending us into this shit? We all need evac! This is bullshit!”
I searched for the medic frequency. Was this new? I didn’t know it. This operation was massive; I’d had no real brief, or at least not that I remembered. I called my request again into the new channel.
Voices overwhelmed here, too.
“Med team two, med team two. This is Vásquez, the three-oh-nine. I’m hit, we’re—” Gone.
“Med team, med team, I have Coelho and she needs immediate—” Gone.
“Hey, three-oh-nine, this is med team one. We are sending personnel to your position, three-oh-nine. Hold. Shit. We’ve lost the last of the three-oh-nine. Is the five-oh-six still—yes! We’re sending three medics. Hold position. Over.”
“The five-oh-six is down to one squad! I repeat, we are all down but one squad! Requesting immediate evac! Over.”
“Hey, five-oh-six, this is med team one. I cannot send evac, five-oh-six. Best we can do is patch and run. Over.”
I didn’t dare open a higher channel. The division channel must have been a screaming mess. I’d get lost in that one.
Jones was bleeding out. I yanked open my med kit. Unraveled a tourniquet. I looped it around his upper arm, pulled it too tight, trying to stop the blood flow, knowing I was doing it wrong. Gas settled in the bottom of the craters; no harbor there.
I let go of the division channel and switched in to a one-on-one with Jones. “I’ve got med evac,” I said.
“Leave me.”
“Evac will be here soon. Hold for evac. Hear me?”
I fumbled around in the kit, looking for a hit of adrenaline. I needed to keep him conscious, keep shock from taking hold. I grabbed him under the arms and shifted him so his head pointed down into the crater, so his legs were higher than his head. Jones’s breath was rapid. He kept waving his injured arm—what was left of it. The sinews strained. The stump waggled.
I fumbled
for a knife to cut away the sinews, but my utility knife was missing. Where had I lost it? I leaned over and bit the sinews with my teeth, releasing his stump from his ruined arm.
“Keep it with me. Keep my arm with me.”
I set his severed arm onto his chest.
“You look good,” I said. “That’s it. They’ll fix you right up. New arm. Good as new. But you gotta stay awake for evac. You understand?”
“Go ahead. Keep moving.”
“Not leaving you behind.”
“Bad Luck Dietz. Bad luck.”
“Think you’ll do better if I’m not here?”
“I don’t want to die here.”
“You won’t.”
“My moms . . . tell them I fought—”
“I will.”
“My grandmother fought. Hers before. We all fought. All citizens. I didn’t have to fight. Why did I—”
“Calm down. Be calm for evac.”
“I should have been a journalist. My mom . . . wanted me in intel. I couldn’t. Dietz, I couldn’t.”
“It’s okay.
“ ‘We kill time; time buries us,’ ” Jones murmured; one of his Machado de Assis quotes. “My arm. Will they fix my arm, Dietz?”
“It’s all right. They’ll fix it.”
I pulled up my local map. Tanaka and his squad were ten meters ahead of us, either dead or staying low under heavy fire. Omalas and Marino were behind me, slowly moving toward us. Deathless lay flat on her stomach in the dirt, just far enough to my left that I could barely make out her form in the shifting smoke.
“Jones!” the CO said over the platoon channel.
“Jones is injured, sir. I’ve called for evac.”
“Tag him for the medics and leave him. Gather your squad and get moving, Dietz. Tanaka! Meet up with Dietz’s squad. Tanaka, you’re squad leader for the combined squad. We are still advancing on this fucking target. Keep your heads down and keep moving. You hear me, soldier? I need your head in this game, Dietz.”
“Yes, sir.” I stared at Jones. His visor was opaque. I could not see his expression, and I was glad for it. “Medic is coming. I have to move.”
The Light Brigade Page 14
