Contact Front #1 Drop Trooper

by Rick Partlow

  “Noted.” I helped him set the cowling down on a service cart. “I hope I don’t have to use that one.”

  He went silent for a few minutes other than to ask me to hand him tools and lubricants, and then we had to slip the cowling back onto the rear of the suit, which seemed to require so much more effort than taking it off.

  “You gonna get that noob to do all your work today, Mutt?” another of the technicians asked him as he passed, cackling loud enough to bounce the sound off the walls.

  “You just wish you were smart enough to pull it off, Kenny!” Mutt shot back, laughing just as loud as he walked around to the front of the suit. “Now off with its head!” he enthused, clambering up on the metal steps attached to the maintenance rack and gesturing for me to take the ones on the other side.

  The housing for the sensor suite in the suit’s head was a lot lighter than the reactor cowling, so Mutt let me take it off all by myself and hold it up while he serviced and calibrated the optical and thermal cameras, the lidar and radar emitters, and the sonic pickups.

  “You know, these things can get fucked up easy in combat,” he confided as my shoulders began to ache. “They’re on top of the armor, not under it, because they wouldn’t be much good buried under a couple centimeters of BiPhase Carbide, would they? But if they go down, your targeting system is fucked, too. Your weapons systems won’t let you fucking fire without the targeting system, either.”

  “But…?” I assumed and he grinned, apparently pleased with my intuition.

  “But,” he agreed, “you go into your targeting menu and toggle all through the submenus until you reach ‘admin settings’ and you find a choice for ‘activate manual targeting.’ You choose that and again, set up a shortcut for it in the display and you can use whatever optical or thermal sensors are left. Or hell, just open the damn chest and peek.” He pulled out the blower he’d been using to clean the radar emitter and motioned for me to lower the housing.

  “Oh, thank God,” I moaned, letting the heavy, metal cover slide back into place and letting him reseal it.

  “Fuckin’ eggheads in design thinking they know better than troops in the field,” Mutt spat a brown stream onto the floor again. “Assholes. If they don’t trust you hard-shells to aim with your fucking eyes, why do they trust you with guided missiles?”

  I nodded in agreement, then thought about Cunningham and wondered if maybe the eggheads were right.

  “By the by,” Mutt leaned in close, as if he was about to tell me something more forbidden than how to melt down my reactor, “there’s also a command override in there to let you take over anyone’s suit in the field. Like if they go apeshit crazy and start shooting at us instead of the enemy.” He shrugged. “Well, they say the real reason is if you gotta hot-swap suits in the field, but that don’t seem too likely to me, you know?”

  I didn’t argue, but a trooper going apeshit crazy and shooting at their own people seemed even less likely. I let him talk me through the sequence, though, because what the hell? I was a nineteen-year-old kid about to be set loose in a flying, nuclear-powered suit of armor and everything else just seemed gravy.

  I probably would have forgotten most of what he told me because I don’t have an eidetic memory or an implant recorder, but he didn’t just tell me once. We went over it all again and again, with each suit we tore down and put back together, and sometimes the other technicians would stop by and ask him questions that seemed to me to be in another language, though I knew they were just using terms I didn’t understand involving nuclear reactions and energy shielding and laser focusing.

  The work was hard and we didn’t take a break, but I didn’t feel tired, even though I was sweating through my fatigues. I didn’t think about the time, just concentrated on trying to memorize what he was telling me, details about hot-swapping weapons in the field, rerouting power leads if your guns went down, how to reload weapons in the field that were supposedly designed to be reloaded by dedicated loading crews…things I might never use, but would be damned glad to know if I did.

  “Jesus, I need a drink,” Mutt said finally, wiping a sleeve across his forehead. “What fucking time is it anyway?”

  “Hey, Alvarez!”

  It was Scotty again, his face screwed up in confusion or maybe surprise, the entrance doors swinging shut behind him.

  “Hey man,” he said, hands spread, “I didn’t think you’d still be in here! You know it’s been six hours, right? Cunningham fucked off like three hours ago and I thought you’d be shamming somewhere.”

  “Mutt…I mean, Warrant Mutterlin here has been showing me some stuff about the suits,” I told him.

  Hayes’ laugh was sharp and loud.

  “You mean Mutt has been getting you to do his grunt work for him. Anyway, it’s chow time, man. You need to go clean up and get to the mess hall before they’re out of the good stuff.”

  “The good stuff?” I asked him, cocking an eyebrow. “You mean there’s anything except soy paste and spirulina powder rearranged so it doesn’t look like something you feed to babies?”

  “Well, no,” he admitted, his expression rueful. “But there’s brownies with real chocolate for dessert if you get there before everyone else eats them all.”

  “Can’t say no to chocolate,” I said, grinning. I turned back to Mutt. “Thanks. That was some good shit you told me.”

  “I was just running my mouth, kid.” He waved it away, a glint in his eye. “You were the one doing all the heavy lifting. Good luck.” Something clouded over behind his good humor. “Then again, if you had any luck, you wouldn’t be fighting in this war at all.”

  11

  The brownies were gone, but I was okay with that. I’d lied to Hayes. I could take or leave chocolate and only really gave a shit about ice cream. The food was typical military, not a damned bit of difference from AOT, and today the processors gave us the choice of chicken pad Thai or a chicken sandwich on flatbread with fries. I ignored the fact they were all made from the same ingredients and grabbed the pad Thai. At least the peanut sauce was made from real peanuts.

  “Here’s our platoon,” Hayes said, guiding me to a table off to the edge of the mess hall.

  I caught sight of Cunningham as we passed another table, and I pretended to rub at something in my eye and shot him a surreptitious bird. He didn’t try to hide his own return gesture, and I caught a flare of anger in his eyes and grinned.

  Asshole.

  “Hey, Alvarez!” Rodriguez said around a mouthful of faux chicken.

  I recognized her and Kurita, who nodded without speaking, seemingly a little more sensitive about the whole business of talking with his mouth full. The others…

  “Alvarez.”

  The man was lean and leathery, his face weathered if not exactly old, his hair chopped into a wire-brush cut in a stripe down the center of his skull. He wasn’t a tall man, but there was something about the straightness of his posture that made him seem to tower centimeters over me. He said nothing else, as if testing if I was smart enough to guess who he was.

  How fucking smart do you have to be to see the rank on his shirt?

  “Gunny,” I said, nodding respectfully. “Sorry I wasn’t able to report directly to you.”

  “Meetings,” Guerrero snorted, looking as if he wanted to spit the word on the floor. “They’re the bane of my fucking existence, boy.”

  He had an accent I recognized as Filipino. Trans-Angeles had a large Filipino population in the Underground, and they usually kept to themselves except to do business. You didn’t cross those fuckers twice.

  “They give you a heads-up on the training schedule, Gunny?” Hayes asked him, setting his tray down across from the platoon sergeant. I took the seat beside my squad leader and stayed quiet.

  “Fuck no.” Guerrero punctuated the words by slamming his palm down on the table, shaking my tray and nearly knocking over my water glass. “They told us the requirements and how much time each of them should take, and then they
totally flaked on the schedule! Said they had to wait and get back to us after the command and staff meeting! And I asked well, why the hell didn’t we wait and have the damn NCO meeting after the command and staff meeting? And nobody had a fucking answer for that!”

  I dug into the noodles and tried not to laugh. For a gunnery sergeant, Guerrero was pretty laid back. Of course, my whole experience with gunnies had been them screaming at me.

  “We’re scheduled for a couple days off next weekend, aren’t we?” a woman two seats down from me asked.

  She was tall and lithe, with a gentle curve to her jaw that offset her buzzed haircut. I felt a stirring of something I’d managed to keep tamped down since Pris, and I had to warn myself to keep the feelings and everything else in my pants. I had plenty of experience as an outsider, and there was no better way to earn instant hostility than to start macking on some girl you just met in front of her friends. Her name, I noted for future reference, was Sandoval and she was a PFC, the same rank I was, and couldn’t have been more than a year or two older.

  “Hell, yeah!” the guy next to her crowed, pumping a fist. “We gonna be shipping out in three weeks, I am at least going to spend one last weekend blowing my money on joy-girls and tequila!”

  He was my age, maybe, another private first class, but I could already tell we’d grown up in different worlds. He had that kind of face, stretched downward by a perpetual expression of oblivious optimism, the sort that wouldn’t have survived two minutes in the Underground. Maybe he was from one of the more developed colony worlds, maybe he was a surface dweller from one of the Earth cities, but I’d have been willing to bet he’d never once been in fear for his life and I wondered what the hell he was doing here.

  “You keep talking about joy-girls, Crenshaw,” Sandoval scoffed, lips twisted into a wry smile, “but every time we’ve been out at the rec centers, I’ve never seen you anywhere but the virtual reality booths.”

  Crenshaw reddened but shrugged it off.

  “Joy-girls are expensive,” he whined. “I been trying to save my money. But now we’re heading out, there’s no reason not to have a blow-out.”

  “I’m afraid you may have waited a bit too long for the blow-out, Private Crenshaw.”

  I twisted in my seat, but I recognized Lt. Ackley’s voice before I saw her, even though I’d only met her earlier today. She was approaching the table stiffly, awkwardly, and I guessed she didn’t make a habit of visiting the platoon in the mess.

  “What’s the word, ma’am?” Guerrero asked, standing, hands flat on the table as if he thought he might have to dash out of the building on a moment’s notice.

  “Things have been moved up,” she told him. Ackley didn’t sit down, just stood beside the table, hands clasped behind her back.

  I noticed other officers filtering into the mess hall, each approaching a different platoon.

  “How long do we have?” Hayes asked, his normally boisterous and enthusiastic tone now subdued and hesitant.

  “The official word’s going to come at a company brief tonight at 2000 hours,” Ackley said grimly, “but what I’m hearing is forty-eight hours.”

  “Shit,” Crenshaw murmured, sagging in obvious disappointment. “No weekend pass, then.”

  “Fraid not,” the platoon leader confirmed. “Form up in the company area at 1945 hours. Until then…” She smiled wanly. “Enjoy your dinner.”

  I stared down at the remains of my food as she walked away. It hadn’t looked that appetizing to begin with, and was even less so now. Beside me, Hayes tossed his fork down on his plate with a disgusted finality.

  “Well, there’s some good news, Alvarez,” he said to me, grimacing in what I thought was an attempt at a smile. “I guess you don’t need to bother to unpack.”

  I’d been skeptical about this Captain Covington. Everyone seemed to hold him in some sort of awe, to speak of him in hushed tones of respect as if he were a living legend. So, standing at ease in the company area in the humid, barely tolerable Tartarus City night, swatting at mosquitoes, I was curious to finally see the man.

  And I was about to get my chance.

  First Sergeant Campbell strode out from beneath the eaves of the company office building, tugging on her cover, which I’d learned painfully in Basic was what the Marines called a hat, and coming to attention in front of the gathered troops.

  “Company!” she yelled, and Guerrero echoed after it, “Platoon!” along with other platoon sergeants in the formation. “Attention!”

  There was the usual business of any company formation where Top got a report from each of the five platoons that all their personnel were present or accounted for, then Campbell stayed at attention and waited as the man walked up from the rear of the formation. I hadn’t seen him there before, and I figured he’d circled around the back while the platoons were reporting.

  Campbell saluted him with the gusto most Marine NCOs reserved for the presentation of the Commonwealth flag, then turned on her heel and headed to the rear of the formation. Captain Covington turned to face us and suddenly, I believed every word.

  There was nothing in particular I could point to, mind. He wasn’t a huge man, wasn’t massive or muscular or towering. He was lean and rangy, with a fairly normal-looking face, thin and hawkish but not particularly remarkable. But those eyes…

  I’d met some dangerous people in my life. I’d come face to face with stone killers who would kill whoever their bosses told them to without question, men and women who tortured people to death as a specialty for the gangs, enforcers who would shoot a bystander without blinking if it meant getting to their target. You could see it in their eyes, the willingness to kill, the familiarity with death, the acceptance of their own impending end and the peace they’d made with it.

  Captain Covington had seen death on a scale none of those men and women had ever dreamed of. He’d seen thousands burn, and it had taken away a part of his soul. That was the story his eyes told, and if he was faking it, he was better at it than anyone in the worst streets of Tijuana or the depths of the Underground.

  “At ease,” he rasped, his voice sounding as if he’d damaged his vocal cords at some point and never had them completely repaired.

  I relaxed, hands going behind my back. Most of the time, when officers had addressed us in Basic or AOT, they’d left us at attention or at best, put us at parade rest, I suppose on the theory that enlisted pukes like me would be too tempted to let our attention stray if we could relax too much. But I never even considered it, any more than I would have turned my back on a loaded gun.

  “Delta, you’ve probably heard the news by now,” he went on, “that things have been moved up on us. I know you were all counting on the extra time for training, and I’m as disappointed not to have the extra prep as you are. But the war waits for none of us, and the Fleet has its own scheduling issues. And to coin a phrase, no battle plan survives contact with battalion staff.”

  There was a broken chorus of subdued chuckles, as if some of the troops were half afraid to laugh and half afraid not to.

  “Since we’ll be doing a shitload of training on the Iwo Jima in the virtual reality pods, let’s get all the jawing and speechmaking out of the way right now. The Tahni didn’t just haul off and hit our Martian shipyards on the spur of the moment. That’s not how they operate. The Tahni don’t dig a cat-hole without a plan and six months of preparation. They established staging bases between their homeworld and the Solar System a year ahead of time, before they even bombed the human squatter colonies in the Neutral Zone.

  “Some of them, the Fleet has hit already to get them out of the way so they don’t use them for the next attack. Most of those were on airless moons or asteroids, but our target is different. It’s a habitable.” He shrugged. “Marginally habitable, but still, the Tahni religion has a thing for habitable worlds. They believe their Spirit Emperor has declared that every living world in the galaxy belongs to them, and anyone who stands in the way, us, for example,
are the equivalent of the Antichrist. Which means they won’t just set off a nuke and leave it in ashes behind them the way they might a lifeless rock.”

  He spread his hands. “It also means we don’t particularly want to fusion bomb the place from orbit, because we’d like to preserve habitables, too. So, they’re all set to defend it, and we want to take it down and neither one of us are keen to blow it to shit. They’ll have full deflector screens set up over their base, which makes kinetic bombardment a no-go, so we do this the old-fashioned way.

  “We blind their sensors with a proton bombardment, then we send in the dropships and drop right on top of them. It’s not going to be neat and clean, boys and girls. We’re a sledgehammer, not a scalpel, and they’ll know we’re coming, so we’re going to have to duke it out with them. We root out their armor, take out the air defenses and then the Intel spooks sweep in and get whatever they can before we set charges and collapse the place in on itself. Nothing we can do to make it any easier except train as much as we can, as well as we can, while we can. So, don’t spend your off time on board the Iwo just plugged into the latest adventure porn, go over the operations order, go over your part of it, your squad leader’s part of it, your platoon leader’s part of it. Hell, go over my part of it.” He chuckled, a low, grumbling sound. “I know some of you think I’m immortal, but shit happens.”

  More muted laughter, this time with a tone of disbelief. He was right, I realized. His people did think he was immortal…or, at least, so much better at this than they were that the thought of outliving him seemed absurd.

  “All right, follow your superior’s instructions and get your shit together because everything is moving double-time from now until we’re loaded on the ship. Coffee is your friend, chow will be meal packets eaten while you work, and sleep will be a rumor. If you’re going to complain, complain to God, or the Commonwealth Space Fleet, whichever you think is likelier to respond.” He took a breath and came to attention. “Company!”