Battlespace

by Ian Douglas

  A Section

  Marine LaGrange Space Training

  Facility

  L-4

  1441 hours, GMT

  Something had gone seriously wrong. The transfer pod had rotated, in order to present its dorsal side toward the objective, and opened its clamshell cargo bay doors according to sched. But when the thrusters fore and aft fired to sharply decelerate the vehicle, it had skewed suddenly beneath Garroway’s feet. Garroway had collided with several other Marines, then hit something, hit it hard—he thought it was the side of the cargo bay hatch—and a numbing pain shot through his right arm. He tried to look around and found himself totally disoriented.

  Damn, he was tumbling. The transfer pod drifted across his field of vision…then the broad, white disk of the objective…then the cargo pod again, but smaller now, more distant. The sky was filled with other tumbling figures; the pod’s misfire had managed to scatter A Section all over the sky.

  This was not good, not good at all.

  Alpha Company, First Platoon,

  B Section

  Marine LaGrange Space Training

  Facility

  L-4

  1442 hours, GMT

  In the last few seconds, Lee’s mental orientation had swung wildly; he was now definitely falling toward an infinite white plain…that, or the plain was rushing up to meet him. With a thought, he switched on his mags. He bent his knees, trying to go limp.

  He felt the solid jar as his boots hit the white slightly convex surface. Flex and dump…

  “Flex” meant to go limp, to render himself as flexible as possible. “Dump” referred to dumping his momentum safely into the R-M tank, in order to bring himself to a safe halt. His collapse against the barrier was less than graceful, a heavy thump jarring him toe to head, and it felt like he’d just been dropped onto a flat concrete surface…

  …but he was motionless now, relative to the R-M tank. He reached out and let the magnetics in the palm of his right gauntlet snag hold of the white surface. The material was a ceramic composite designed to ablate slowly during the decade-long bombardment it would be subjected to during the flight. Buried within the ceramic, however, was a mesh of superconductor cable; at high flight velocities, it actually converted the ambient magnetic flux into a powerful magnetic field that shunted aside incoming charged particles like interstellar hydrogen and helium nuclei. His glove’s magnetics grabbed hold and he pulled himself close, allowing the mags in his knees and boots to latch on as well.

  Safe. This, he thought a bit wildly, puts a whole new spin on “hitting the beach.”

  Around him, most of the Marines had secured themselves as well. Several, he saw, had misjudged their flex and now were floating back into empty space, arms and legs waving. Other Marines anchored themselves in place, then tossed lifelines out toward their stranded comrades, letting them grab hold and then giving them a tug to get them moving back toward the R-M tank once more.

  Every action has an opposite but equal reaction and zero-G exaggerates Newton’s Third Law to absurd proportions. Some of the rescuing Marines, when they tugged, were not well enough secured and their pull sent them drifting up toward the Marines they were attempting to rescue. The sight was one of hectic confusion out of which order was gradually being restored.

  Chameleonics in the Marine armor were already reacting to the change of environment, changing surface color from the black of space to an oddly jagged bicolor pattern, white from the waist down, black above. The camouflage wasn’t perfect, of course, especially as the men moved, but it did break up their outlines and make them harder to see.

  It looked like B Section was down and safe, most of the twenty Marines bull’s-eyeing an area of about six thousand square meters halfway between the rim and the shielded forward drive venturi—a good landing, if a bit disorganized. A Section, however, appeared to be widely scattered and some were still adrift. A number of men had either missed the R-M tank altogether, or they’d struck at an oblique angle where the tank’s surface curved sharply away toward the rim and been unable to grab hold. Now they were drifting helplessly down the length of the huge transport.

  A small flotilla of cargo hoppers, scooters, and even Marine Wasps was waiting to home in on the wayward Marines’ IFF beacons, snag them, and haul them back to safety. The situation was considerably fuzzier along the rim, where men had come down in thrashing tangles, drifted slowly clear, and now couldn’t get back.

  “Okay,” a voice called over the command channel. Lieutenant Jeff Gansen, First Platoon’s new CO. “Secure from radio silence! Get those men hauled in. Move! Move!”

  Alpha Company, First Platoon,

  A Section

  Marine LaGrange Space Training

  Facility

  L-4

  1443 hours, GMT

  Garroway wished these armored suits were equipped with thrusters of some sort. They were not. Both the training to use them and the thrusters themselves were expensive, and someone high up in the military acquisitions hierarchy had deemed them unnecessary. Besides, Marines were supposed to follow the book, not zip around in the sky playing Buck Rogers.

  Through cautious experimentation, he found he could slow his tumble somewhat by extending his legs and his good arm, but when he drew them in again the tumble speeded up, just like a figure skater drawing her arms in close to her body to increase her spin. He experimented with putting out one leg, then the other, but the tumble just became more complicated.

  At least it didn’t look like he was going to miss the target all together. Some of the others would, he saw. It was a damned good thing the Navy had parked a bunch of cargo haulers and other small craft around the transport. They were going to be busy chasing down wandering Marines for the next few hours, it looked like.

  He heard the order to end radio silence, but said nothing. His armor had an IFF transponder; they were tracking him now. If he did miss the ship’s R-M tank, it was only a matter of time for them to come out and snag him, then drag him back to safety.

  He checked his HUD data. He was coming in faster than he was supposed to. Whatever had gone wrong with the pod, it had added a couple of meters per second to his velocity. Worse, each time he caught sight of the Chapultepec’s white R-M tank dome, it looked more crowded. B Section had reached the objective first, he saw. And some of A Section as well. It looked like about thirty Marines were scattered about one side of the dome in all, with another ten still adrift.

  He was falling very fast. He wondered if he should give some kind of warning…but warning of what? Help, I’m coming in too fast, please catch me? He decided to focus on riding out the impact. He just wished he weren’t tumbling so hard, wished his arm wasn’t hurting so much….

  Ahead of him, a Marine hit the white surface of the R-M tank, hit it too hard and rebounded, tumbling. Gauging their relative vectors, Garroway was pretty sure they were going to collide, the other Marine coming out to meet him as Garroway fell toward the Chapultepec’s broad, domed bow.

  What the hell was the guy doing? He appeared to be fumbling with something small, but Garroway couldn’t make out what it was in the brief instants he had the other Marine in view.

  A collision alarm sounded in Garroway’s helmet. Good. Maybe they would damp one another’s velocity and just hang there, waiting for someone to come out and get them. Not dignified, exactly, but…

  What the hell?…

  The other Marine was holding a sidearm, a Marine-issue 15mm Colt Puller, holding it stiff-armed with both hands as he spun over and over and…

  They collided…hard. The shock was sharp and startling. A bright white star appeared on the upper left quadrant of his visor.

  “Damn!”

  And then his visor frosted over and he heard the thin high-pitched shrilling of air whistling off into hard vacuum. His ears popped.

  And he knew he’d better belay the swearing and save his breath for a call for help, because he was losing air fast. He slapped the button on his ches
t pack that activated his armor’s emergency transponder. “Mayday! Mayday! Suit breach! I’ve been shot!…

  Alpha Company, First Platoon,

  B Section

  Marine LaGrange Space Training

  Facility

  L-4

  1443 hours, GMT

  “Alpha Company, B Section.” Lee’s HUD identified that call as Captain Warhurst’s voice. Warhurst was the company commander, watching the exercise from on board the Chapultepec. “Lieutenant Gansen! We have a problem.”

  “Yes, sir, we do. What the hell happened to A Section?”

  “Thruster misfire on the pod. They’re scattered all over the sky!”

  Lee listened to the brief bursts of radio chatter with growing alarm. Things were seriously amiss. Then he heard someone yelling “Mayday” and “Suit breach.”

  “Corpsman!” another voiced yelled over the platoon channel. “Corpsman front!”

  His helmet AI correlated the call with a vac-armor beacon, projecting the location as a winking targeting cursor on his HUD.

  Lee didn’t try running, a sure way of losing his magnetic grip and falling out of reach of the R-M tank. Instead, he dropped to all fours and began moving in a rapid spider crawl, always keeping at least two mags on the ceramic surface at all times. The blinking cursor, as he got closer, clearly marked a vac-suited figure drifting clear of the R-M tank. The Marine, obviously in trouble, appeared to be flailing, but with only one arm. His movements had set him tumbling, and it looked like his trajectory was carrying him, not past the tank’s horizon, but farther out into empty space.

  Damn. There were two casualties. His cursor had split to indicate two floating figures, both now tumbling about twelve meters off the edge of the R-M tank moving away from one another.

  He didn’t have a tether. The organizers of this little party had ruled that there was enough of a safety factor with cargo pods and other small vehicles at the ready. However, with two injured men out there, he couldn’t wait for someone to pick them up. He would have to go to them.

  His HUD identified the source of the suit breach emergency call. Carefully, he positioned himself in a squatting position, thought-clicked his mags off, then launched himself into space with a hard kick…a bit too hard of a kick, as it turned out. He collided heavily with the man, setting both of them tumbling. He clung to the Marine’s suit, however, and tried to blot out the background of dizzily drifting stars, Earth, sun, and transport. He kept his eyes on the man in front of him, on the visor, actually, which had been starred, it looked like, by a gunshot. He could see the air escaping through the pinhole-breach, a tiny jet of freezing water vapor appearing as a thumb-sized cloud dancing above the star. The breach was tiny, but the rest of the visor might weaken and blow at any moment.

  The repair, fortunately, was simple. Each Marine carried a tube of nanoseal in an external suit pouch. The Marine—the name GARROWAY was stenciled across the helmet above the visor—seemed to be having trouble moving his right arm and the pouch was on his left hip, awkwardly out of reach for the left hand. Lee pulled a tube out of his own kit, broke the tip, and squeezed the contents directly onto the cracked visor.

  The clear gel spread rapidly across the curving transparency, adhering to it, already hardening to an airtight rubbery consistency as it was exposed to vacuum—and turning bright orange as it did so. Using one hand to hold on, Lee pulled his intercom jack from its helmet reel and plugged it in to Garroway’s helmet for a direct suit-to-suit link.

  “Garroway? You with me?”

  “Yeah. I’m…okay, I think.”

  “I got the visor leak plugged. It’ll hold until we get you on-board the ship. Anything else wrong?”

  “My arm…my right arm. I’m having some trouble moving it.”

  “Hurts?”

  “Yeah.”

  Lee studied the data from Garroway’s suit, coming to him now over the comjack. “You’re not losing air now.”

  “I think I hurt it running into that guy.”

  Lee sent a coded thought command to Garroway’s suit, and the right arm stiffened. “I’m immobilizing that arm, just in case. Anything else hurt?”

  “No. Just…a bit shaken.”

  “Your suit pressure reads stable at nine and a bit psi. I’m going to leave it there, so we don’t put any more stress on that visor, okay?”

  “Okay. Uh…who are you, anyway?”

  “Sorry. HM2 Lee. Platoon Corpsman.”

  “Oh, great. Thanks, Doc.”

  “Don’t mention it. Just hang tight, don’t panic, and we’ll get you back to the ship.”

  “Roger that.”

  Lee worked himself around, trying to get a glimpse of the other injured Marine. “Platoon Tango Oscar,” he called over the platoon radio channel, using the call sign for Training Overwatch, the HQ team overseeing the operation. “This is HM2 Lee. I’ve got Garroway and he’s stable. Can you orient me on the other casualty?”

  “Lee, this is Warhurst. We have the other casualty. Stay put. A broom is on its way to bring you in.”

  “Roger that, sir. Thank you.”

  “Don’t mention it. Good work.”

  “Thank you, sir.” He clung to Garroway’s armor, watching the stars slowly sweep around him in a vast circle. His movements had shifted their axis of spin enough that he could no longer see Earth or the transport. The sun glared briefly through his visor every ten seconds or so, darkening it, and giving him an idea of his rate of spin. Otherwise, there were no reference points at all. He and Garroway might as well have been adrift in interstellar space.

  Several minutes later, a Marine on a broom drifted into view, matching velocity with the tumbling pair and edging closer. The broom was a long, narrow tube with small rocket engines at either end and a row of saddles along the spine, a cheap and useful form of transport in the space around orbital stations and other space facilities. The Marine reached out, grabbed Lee’s arm, and then fired a number of brief, sharp bursts from several rockets, skillfully killing the rotation. After that, it was easy for the two to clamber onboard.

  The flight back to the Chapultepec was made in silence. With the crisis over, Lee was beginning to think again, instead of merely react. What the hell had happened? The hole in Garroway’s helmet appeared to have been caused by the impact of a bullet, a bullet that had not, thank God, gone through, but which must have ricocheted off into space. But the Marines weren’t supposed to be carrying loaded weapons.

  In fact, the whole operation had taken on the air of what was known in technical terms as a cluster fuck. A platoon-strength drop of forty men onto a large flat DZ…but half of them had scattered to hell and gone. Those Marines should have had personal maneuvering units, instead of having to wait for pickup.

  The fallout from this little debacle, he thought, was going to be interesting.

  8

  12 DECEMBER 2159

  Ramsey’s Office

  UFR/USS Chapultepec

  0839 hours, GMT (Shipboard time)

  “So?” Ramsey asked. “What went wrong?”

  “The insidious Mr. Murphy, Colonel,” Warhurst replied. Both men were seated in Ramsey’s office, which no longer was in zero-G. Chapultepec’s hab modules had been spun up late the day before, creating an out-is-down simulation of eight-tenths of a G. “What can go wrong will. And then some.”

  “I have the maintenance report on the pod,” Ramsey said. “A faulty gasket blew in a coolant line, and the stuff fouled a circuit board and froze. Shorted out one of the lateral thruster control lines at exactly the wrong moment. As you say…Murphy’s Law. But I’m more interested in the human component.”

  “It’s in my report, sir. Uploaded it late last night. Sergeant Wes Houston panicked when he saw he was falling clear of the ship. He tried to use his pistol as a handheld rocket, to push himself back.”

  “The devil, you say. What was he doing with a loaded sidearm? All weapons were supposed to be empty, checked, and locked.”

&nb
sp; “It seems Staff Sergeant Houston managed to draw and load his weapon on the fly, as it were.”

  “While in an free-fall tumble?” Ramsey pursed his lips. “Impressive control.”

  “I thought so, sir. I suspect it would have worked, too, except that he collided with Garroway just as he was waiting for the right alignment so he could fire. The weapon went off accidentally.”

  “Garroway is okay?”

  “Yes, sir. His armor would have absorbed the impact fine if the round had hit anywhere else. He was lucky it just punched a pinhole through his visor. His arm was injured in the collision, so couldn’t reach his nanoseal. Doc Lee got to him in time, though.”

  “Arm okay?”

  “Lee says it’s just a bruise. Caught him at an awkward angle, though. Caught his shoulder against the suit’s joint. He’s on light duty for a day or two.”

  “Outstanding.” Ramsey steepled his fingers, elbows on the desk. “The question is, though, what are you going to do about it?”

  “Sir?”

  “About Houston.”

  Warhurst nodded. “He was technically in violation of orders.”

  “Technically?”

  “They were ordered to have their weapons unloaded, sir. No one said they couldn’t load in the middle of the op, however.”

  “Sounds like a dodge for sea lawyers.”

  “Or space lawyers, in this case. In any case, I have him confined to quarters for the moment.” Warhurst chuckled. “As if he could go anywhere else at the moment!”

  “I see you have his mast scheduled for Friday.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Only a mast? Not a court-martial?”

  “Well, I know it was a weapons violation, Colonel. We could throw the book at him, sure. But I’m using my discretion on this one and not bumping it up to a court. Houston was using his head, damn it. He was using initiative, trying to think the problem through. It just didn’t work out this time, is all.”

  Ramsey sighed. “I tend to agree, Captain. At the same time, we need to let these kids know the seriousness of the situation. When the word gets passed, ‘no loaded weapons,’ there’s a reason for it.”