by Rick Partlow
“Grab your shit and let’s find you a bunk,” Hayes said once we were out of the office. “We keep two to a room here, but I think we have an empty if you want one to yourself for the next couple weeks. Unless you’d rather have the company. Giannelli’s old roommate is Corporal Kurita, but I’m not sure if he’s ready for a new roommate after what happened to Gia. They were pretty tight and even though Gia’s not dead, he’s not coming back to the Drop Troops, at least not in time for us to head out.”
His perpetual grin grew wider as we got out of the offices into the sun, as if he was vitamin D deficient and needed to be outdoors to thrive, like a plant. Me, I just felt annoyed at being back in the heat.
“I’m Scotty, by the way, but not in front of Top. You prefer Cam, Cameron, Alvarez?”
“Cam,” I said, a bit overwhelmed by the rush of words from the man. I hadn’t met that many NCOs, and none of them had been as garrulous as Scotty Hayes, nor as friendly. “Cam is fine.”
“File said you were from Trans-Angeles, right? Damn, that’s sure as hell the big city. Me, I’ve never even been to Earth. I’m from Hermes, out at Proxima Centauri. You know where that is?”
“I’ve heard of it.” Everyone had heard of Hermes. It was the first interstellar colony, though all I knew was what I’d audited on the free nets back in Trans-Angeles.
“It’s a great place,” he enthused. “Lot nicer than this shithole, I can tell you that.”
We both saluted a passing lieutenant, but Scotty barely paused in his monologue.
“We actually get a winter there, for one thing, not just a rainy season. Where I lived, just outside Sanctuary—that’s the capital—we would even get a little snow, though not as much as up in the Edge Mountains. You could see them from where we lived and there would always be snow up there in winter.”
“Why’d you join the Marines?” I asked. It slipped out in disbelief that anyone would give up someplace like that for Inferno, but Hayes took it for a philosophical question.
“I figured I had to do my part,” he said. “I mean, the Tahni are a threat to all of us, right? Isn’t that why you joined?”
“I sort of didn’t have a choice.”
I could tell he wanted to ask more about that, but we’d arrived at the barracks and nearly stumbled over a group of four Marines sitting on the floor just inside the entrance to the squad bay. They were playing dice and it might have been a scene in the vestibule of any housing block in the Underground except for the uniforms and the haircuts.
“At ease!” one of them, a short, wiry corporal with dark hair and closely-grouped features snapped, coming to his feet at Hayes’ approach.
“As you were, guys,” Hayes waved it away as if he didn’t have time for that sort of thing.
It was interesting, though. If he really didn’t care about military courtesies, why would they bother to keep doing it? Either the guys respected him enough to do it anyway, or else Top or maybe Gunny Guerrero insisted on it and they were too afraid not to do it.
“This is PFC Alvarez,” Hayes went on, clapping me on the shoulder. “He’s our new guy for your fire team, Tommy.” He nodded to the guy who’d jumped up at his approach. “Cam, this is Lance Corporal Tommy Kurita, your new team leader.”
“Howdy, Alvarez,” Kurita held out a hand and I shook it, hesitating slightly. In the Underground, shaking hands was considered pretentious, something the Surface Dwellers did. We bumped forearms or sometimes had more elaborate rituals depending on your neighborhood and possibly gang affiliation. “This is the rest of the team, Taylor and Rodriguez.” Taylor was as generic as Hayes, but less talkative and bumped forearms wordlessly, while Rodriguez was shorter than Kurita but broader through the shoulders.
“Where you from, Alvarez?” she asked me, not offering her hand or forearm.
“Trans-Angeles.”
She nodded, her expression telling me she was familiar with the city.
“Which Block?”
I chuckled and she frowned in a confusion I understood. Your Housing Block was your nation, your fealty, your religion to anyone from the Trans Angeles Underground.
“None of them. I grew up in group homes and lived in the tunnels.”
“Damn,” she murmured, eyes going wide. “Then this place is like a step up for you, huh?”
“Probably safer,” I admitted.
“Kurita,” Hayes interrupted the exchange, “you looking for a new roommate or should I put Alvarez in the vacant room?”
“If it’s all the same to you, Scotty,” Kurita said, “I’m kinda liking having the extra space.” I didn’t know him, so I couldn’t tell whether or not he was bullshitting to hide the fact he was still shaken up about his old roommate.
“No problem, man.” Hayes didn’t push the matter. “Come on, Alvarez, I’ll show you where you can stash your shit.”
The rooms were small enough I could understand Kurita not wanting to share one, though they were a hundred times bigger than the ones I’d had as a kid. Two bunks, two footlockers and two wall lockers and about a square meter of bare wall on either side. I threw my duffle bag down on one of the bunks, then cracked my neck and flexed my shoulder.
“So, Scotty, can I ask you something?” I said, checking to make sure none of the others had followed us into the room.
“Sure, what’s up?” He laughed. “If it’s about where to score chicks, I can tell you to stay away from Banjo’s down in the Fifth District.” He shrugged. “If you’re into guys, I can’t help you, but I think there’s a guy in Third Squad who could…”
“No, that’s okay,” I assured him. “I was just wondering what you thought of Lt. Ackley.”
“Oh.” His eyes narrowed as if he was considering the question carefully. “Well, you know, man, she’s a butter-bar and ain’t none of them really know what they’re doing.” He snorted. “By the time they figure out the job, they promote them out of platoon leader and put some new dude in charge. She seems okay, though, not really full of herself the way some of them are, especially Academy grads.” He looked at the open door, then leaned over conspiratorially. “I heard her dad was an admiral who got killed in the Battle for Mars, though. Don’t know if it’s true or not.” He frowned. “Or maybe he was a captain, I don’t remember. But anyway, she’s okay. And even if she fucks up, Gunny Guerrero is there to set her straight. We NCOs are the ones who really run the Corps. Except for the Skipper, of course. He runs everything.”
The Skipper was, I knew, Captain Covington, the Company Commander, and if he was indeed a veteran of the Pirate Wars, I could understand Hayes holding him in awe.
“You can put your stuff in the lockers later,” Hayes said, heading for the door. “Now we gotta do the important shit.” He grinned. “We gotta get you your suit.”
10
There was something about the Vigilantes in the Delta Company armory, a qualitative difference from the suits in AOT. Those had been training suits, never destined to see combat. These were weapons, and I stared at them with a sense of awe.
“They’re pretty fucking awesome, aren’t they?” Hayes said, patting one of the suits with a proprietary pride. “This is mine.” He looked around, searching amid the other Marines wandering between the Vigilantes and the maintenance and loading gear clustered around them. “Let me see if I can find Warrant Reese and figure out where yours is. Hang out here for a minute.”
I nodded, still staring at the dull grey golems, unable to shake the feeling they were staring back.
“You the new guy?”
He had one of those faces, the kind that warned you just what sort of guy you were dealing with, with the pugnacious set to his jaw and the perpetually narrow eyes. Truth in advertising. His head was shaved to peach fuzz, like he was showing off his jacks.
“I’m PFC Alvarez,” I told him, hoping it answered the question.
“Yeah, I heard about you.” He nodded, mouth twisting into a sneer as he wiped lubricant off his hands.
“A
re you a tech?” I asked, wondering why the guy was talking to me.
“Fuck no,” he snorted. “I’m a team leader from Fourth squad.”
I saw Lance Corporal’s rank on his blouse and “Cunningham” on his name tape and I doubted he’d have volunteered either piece of information.
“I guess you think you’re hot shit on a stick,” he went on. “I mean, killing off three Op-For all by yourself.” Cunningham’s laugh was scornful, mocking. “Of course, you totally fucked your mission in the process is what I heard. You some kind of glory hound, Alvarez? Think you’re a hero or something?”
I glanced out of the corner of my eye, hoping Hayes would come back and get this asshole off my back, but he was nowhere to be seen. I considered just ignoring him, but he was a bully, I could see it in his eyes. Ignoring them never worked.
“You sound like you really know what you’re talking about, Lance Corporal Cunningham,” I told him. “You must have seen a lot of combat, right? How many Tahni have you killed?”
“We ain’t seen any combat yet,” he grumbled. “But it don’t matter how many Tahni you kill if you fuck up the mission trying to be some kind of hotshot.”
“I guess it’s a damn good thing you’re going to be there, then.” I said, my voice going lower as I took a step closer, nearly nose-to-nose with the man. He was about my height, maybe three or four centimeters taller than me but not much heavier. “I mean, you’re the guy who thinks he knows everything about me, right? So, you can make sure I don’t fuck things up.” I cocked my head to the side so I could get his eyes into focus. “You going to make that your job, Lance Corporal Cunningham? You going to make sure I don’t fuck things up for you?”
The words weren’t insulting. That was key, that was what you had to do. You had to make them either agree with you, which would mean they could walk away without feeling dissed, or you had to make them ratchet it up to the next level. Because even if you lost the fight, if the bully thought the fight had been their idea, they wouldn’t feel like they needed to come back later to save face.
But I also wasn’t backing down. Because backing down would be an invitation for him to try to push me around whenever he felt like it. I’d become an expert at dealing with bullies. I wish I knew as much about anyone else.
“You better get the fuck out of my face,” Cunningham barked, his breath sour and smelling of some kind of chew, “before I put my Goddamned foot up your ass!”
I didn’t move.
“You think you got it in you,” I said, not yelling, almost whispering, “then let’s get it on.”
I tried not to brace myself. The key was to stay loose, to go with it when he pushed me. And he was going to push me. It was always the first move when you were this close, the opening act. He’d push me back and then take a swing, and if I was tensed up, I’d wind up staying just inside his swing. I had to let myself fall back a few steps and make him miss, then I could step in behind the swing and take him down. I hoped.
“What in the living fuck is going on here?”
The voice was hoarse and gravelly, the kind that made me want to clear my throat in sympathy, but the words were a bellow echoing off the sheet metal walls of the armory, like every Vigilante in the place was yelling in chorus.
“At ease!” I didn’t see who barked the command, but they were enthusiastic about it and both Cunningham and I stepped away from each other and came to attention before going to the at ease position.
The woman who stepped between us was about a head shorter than me, but I wouldn’t have tried her on a bet. Her head was shaven so close I could have seen my reflection in it and shaped like an anvil with a neck almost wider than the head curving into shoulders as big as mine. Her rank was on her uniform blouse, the three bars and four rockers of a master gunnery sergeant and I knew that this was Top, the Topkick, the First Shirt, the company first sergeant. The name tape read “Campbell.”
“Lance Corporal Cunningham,” the woman growled, “I fear you may have misunderstood the orders you were given earlier today. Were you told to perform maintenance checks on your WF-4100 Vigilante battlesuit, or were you instructed to come down here and engage in a Goddamned dick beating contest with a fucking newbie?”
“I was told to perform maintenance checks, First Sergeant Campbell!” Cunningham sounded off as if we were back in Basic.
She was centimeters from him, as close as I’d been, but his nose was on a level with the top of her head.
“Since you’re having such a difficult time understanding the concept and staying on task, maybe I should have you perform maintenance checks on every Goddamned suit in this company then!” Her lips were skinned back from her teeth and I was half-convinced she was about to rip his throat out if he dared to talk back.
“Yes, First Sergeant!” He might have been a bully, but he wasn’t a complete dumbass.
She rounded on me, her eyes wide and white and I swallowed hard. She was more intimidating than any of the Drill Sergeants I’d had in Basic, a force of nature crammed into a meter-six of muscle and bone.
“Alvarez, you seem to have taken quite the shine to Lance Corporal Cunningham and we all know how good you are inside a suit, so let’s see how well you do on the outside. You are going to assist Cunningham in performing maintenance checks and he will show you every last detail of how Delta Company takes care of their gear. Since two of you will be on the job, I expect it to be done by the close of business today! Do I make myself clear?”
“Aye-aye, First Sergeant!” I shouted with all the enthusiasm I could muster. It sounded perfectly horrible, but when Top orders a PFC to do something, there’s only one correct answer.
She stood between the two of us, eyes scanning back and forth like a security camera.
“Am I going to hear of any more problems between the two of you?” she asked, her words pitched low but still as sharp and serrated as a hunting knife.
“No, First Sergeant!” both of us yelled in antiphonal chorus.
“I’d better fucking not.”
She stalked off and Hayes emerged from the shadows, whistling softly, eyes following the stocky woman as she exited the armory.
“Shit, Cam,” he said, shaking his head, “you don’t waste any time, do you?”
“I guess not.” I eyed Cunningham sidelong. “So, you gonna show me how to perform service checks on a suit?”
“Fuck off, noob,” the Lance Corporal sneered, giving me the finger as he sauntered away, suddenly fearless again now that Top was gone.
Hayes scowled after him.
“I should go tell his squad leader he’s disobeying a direct order from Top. She’ll have him cleaning latrines until we lift for our tour.”
“Naw, please don’t,” I begged him. “I don’t need to get a rep as a narc already, I just got here.”
“All right, man,” Hayes said, though he didn’t seem happy about it. “Just do the best you can. I’ll see you at chow.”
I turned and looked across all the suits in the armory. They’d seemed so impressive a couple minutes ago, but now all I could think was how damn many of them there were…
I knew how to perform maintenance checks on a Vigilante, of course. It was probably a third of what we learned in AOT, and probably half of what we did. I found the gear easy enough. There were half a dozen carts full of the scanners and all I had to do was plug them into the data-ports on different sections of the suit, get the readout, then transfer it to the tablet hanging on the rack next to each Vigilante. It was just time-consuming and tedious and I wanted to kill myself after about an hour of it.
“You don’t learn a fucking thing about the suits doing that shit, y’know?”
I finished transferring the data from the last reading on Vigilante ARD-227 to its tablet before I turned and found a doughy-faced, beady-eyed little man watching me, his arms crossed, a skeptical frown dragging down his jowls.
“You’re probably right,” I admitted, checking his rank instinctively and
seeing he was a technician, “Warrant. But I gotta finish the checks, anyway or Top’ll have my ass.”
“Yeah, I heard the little runt running her mouth before,” he said with an irreverence I found a bit shocking, even from a WO-3. “She don’t know any more about the fucking suits than you do.” He worked a wad of chew in the side of his mouth, then spit a dark stream on the stained floor. “You’d think people who count on the fucking things to live or die would want to know more about how they work, but if all you care about are the scanner readings…”
“Hey, Warrant,” I protested, holding up my hands, “if you want to…”
“Mutt,” he grunted.
“Excuse me?” I blinked.
“Name’s Mutterlin,” he expounded, “but everyone calls me Mutt.”
“Okay, Mutt, if you want to teach me anything about the suits, I’m more than willing to learn, as long as I can keep doing what the Top told me and finish the maintenance checks.”
“Oh, son,” he said, chuckling as he pulled a cart full of power tools up next to the suit, “we’re gonna do so much more than maintenance checks.”
We sure as hell did. Mutt and I tore down a full squad’s worth of suits from helmet to ankle joint and I became familiar with every single idiosyncrasy and eccentricity of the Vigilante battlesuit.
“There’s a lot of shit about these suits the military doesn’t want you to know,” Mutt assured me as the two of us pulled off the reactor cowling from the rear of one of the Vigilantes. “Take the isotope reactor, for instance. It’s got that overheat shutoff, they told you about that, right?”
I nodded. They had stressed that we couldn’t use the jets when the heat indicators were in the red, and that we couldn’t run too fast for too long if the heat indicators were in the red and yadda yadda yadda, and it all sounded like it would be really inconvenient if someone was shooting at you.
“Well, there’s a fudge factor built into that, of course, and what they don’t tell you or most people who use the things for a living is that there’s a manual override. You gotta go deep into the menus, but once you get to it you can put a shortcut on your display.” He barked a laugh. “Of course, you’re taking the chance of your reactor melting down and burning right through your shielding and turning you into a black cinder, but you know…”
