Battlespace

by Ian Douglas

  Houston kept screaming and all Lee could do was try to hold him down. Damn, he wished this was “Misery Mike,” not a human being…not someone he’d known and talked with over the mess table. The guy was in agony….

  The Marine’s screaming dragged on for a few moments more, but then turned ragged and began to subside. A level four program was as aggressive as he could make it without knocking the man out…and he didn’t want to do that until he knew it wouldn’t kill the guy. The nanodyne injected through the Frahlich Probe filtered rapidly through his body by way of the bloodstream, seeking out nerve bundles that were in the spasmodic and continual firing that indicated severe pain and shutting them down, both near the wounds and in the brain itself. Parts of the man’s body would go numb, but his mind should stay reasonably alert and without the shrieking pain.

  As the nanodyne took effect, Lee was already working on the leg, using a beam scalpel to slice away torn armor, flesh, and bone.

  Scalpel was something of a misnomer. It was the largest cutter in Lee’s armamentarium, more of a high-voltage Bowie knife than a surgical instrument. As he sliced through frozen clots, fresh blood began boiling from the wound, along with a jet of air white with freezing water vapor.

  He remembered that training exercise on the Mare Imbrium, how he’d let the sunlight melt the bloody ice that had partially sealed the simulated wound on “Misery Mike.” That situation didn’t apply here. Both of the Sirian suns were on the other side of the Wheel, making this the nightside, and at this distance, they wouldn’t warm things above freezing anyway.

  In any case, the damage to both the armor and to the Marine inside were too extensive for him to worry about breaking scabs. Mingled air and blood were boiling from the patient in a steady stream that flashed into vapor and frozen clots of ice as soon as it hit vacuum.

  Marine armor had guillotine irises installed at the knees and elbows; the idea was that a serious injury to the extremities could be sealed off with a single, sharp slice that minimized both blood and air loss. There was also the inner memory plastic layer that sealed itself against the patient’s body.

  The blast that had caught Houston, though, had thoroughly shredded much of his left leg all the way up the groin and there was extensive burn damage, it looked like, to the man’s left side as well. The damage to Houston’s suit and body was far too extensive for the suit’s own damage control systems to more than slow the steady loss of both air pressure and blood. Mark VIII vac armor was good, but it couldn’t work miracles.

  For that you needed a trained man.

  The most serious problem at the moment was bleeding from the femoral artery, the major blood vessel running from a branching of the aorta deep within the torso, through the groin, and down into the leg. Houston could bleed to death in seconds if Lee couldn’t seal it off.

  There was no time for finesse. Lee sliced away the last of the chopped up armor and leg with the scalpel, dropped the instrument, and pulled out a cautery. Probing with the flat blade, he pressed it through the bright red blood bubbling into vacuum and pressed the trigger.

  He had to do everything by feel and by trained guesswork. There was too much blood and ice for him to actually see what he was doing. As the blade glowed red hot, however, the major blood flow slowed, then stopped. He kept moving the blade around, sealing off all of the open blood vessels he could reach.

  An irreverent thought surfaced as he worked. Part of the downloaded portion of his training, of course, included a detailed history of medicine. The French surgeon Ambroise Pare—who’d first introduced amputation as a battlefield surgical procedure in the early 1500s—had in 1572 begun using silk ligatures to tie off bleeding arteries instead of searing them shut with a red-hot iron. Seven hundred years later, battlefield surgery had come full circle. Probing for spurters with a hemostat or, worse, trying to suture a wound shut, was at best damned tough while wearing armor gauntlets; trying to do it when the wound was masked by a geyser of freezing vapor was impossible. A hot iron would stop the bleeding far more effectively in this environment than more civilized measures.

  It took several more minutes, but he thought that Houston’s condition was stabilizing.

  As he worked, he kept trying to talk to the wounded man. “Houston! Houston, can you hear me? Stay with me, man!”

  “Wha…whazzit?”

  He could hear the Marine’s rasping, fast, and shallow breathing. His blood pressure was dangerously low, his heartbeat fast and fluttering.

  “Houston! Stay awake! It’s me, Doc! We’re going to get you out of this.”

  “D-doc? Wha…happened?…”

  The data link to Houston’s suit showed the Marine’s suit pressure was dropping fast, so as soon as he thought he had the bleeding stopped, he slapped a generous glob of nanogel over the open stump. Air was leaking from the suit torso as well, where armor and flesh had charred together under a high-temperature blast. He could do nothing about that here, save inject some more medical nano programmed for burn treatment through the Frahlich Probe and cover the mess over with nanogel.

  Only then could he spare a thought for Private Tremkiss.

  The man’s right leg was missing from the knee down, neatly sealed off by his suit’s guillotine feature. “How are you doing, Tremkiss?” he asked. “Any pain?”

  “N-no, sir.”

  “I’m not a ‘sir,’” he said, giving the time-honored response of Navy petty officers and Marine NCOs. “I work for a living. Let me jack in.”

  The suit’s memory showed Tremkiss losing a foot to a near-miss plasma blast. The guillotine had sealed off the limb to prevent catastrophic pressure loss; the suit’s built-in field first-aid system had kicked in and fired nanodyne and sealer into the wound. No blood loss, no real pain…and though Tremkiss was on the ragged edge of both physical and emotional shock, he was holding his own for the moment.

  “You think you can move, son?”

  “I don’t know. I…don’t think so.”

  “Hang on. We’re going to get both of you out of here.”

  That unquestionably was the next step, vamming both patients—and himself—out of here.

  “Memphis, this is Mike one-one.” The handle identified him as Alpha Company, First Platoon’s medical asset. “I’ve got two casualties, repeat, two casualties in downtown Cincinnati. Number one is massive burn, trauma and blood loss. Suit is plugged and wounds are stable. Monitor operational. Number two is suit-maintained but nonmobile. We need emergency evac, stat.”

  “Mike one-one, Memphis,” a voice shot back. “Negative on evac. Repeat, negative on evac.”

  Shit. There were no medibugs with the MIEU, he knew, and he figured they didn’t have any other aerospace-mobile vehicles in the battle zone yet that could ferry wounded. But at least they might send a couple of guys with a stretcher….

  He looked around, assessing the situation.

  And it was then that he realized that he and his two patients were not alone.

  It looked like a huge, inverted pie plate three meters wide, jet black and massive, hovering just above the strange, alien surface of the Wheel less than thirty meters away.

  And if that ugly snub-nosed projection was some kind of a weapon, it was aimed directly at them.

  16

  2 APRIL 2170

  HM2 Phillip Lee

  Alpha Company, First Platoon,

  B Section

  AO Cincinnati, Sirius Stargate

  1311 hours, Shipboard time

  Lee froze, staring at the hovering war machine. The only weapon he had was his underpowered LC-2132 laser carbine. He hadn’t been following the radio chatter, but he knew the guys had been talking about taking out hostiles with Onager AT missiles and he very much doubted that his little Sunbeam would more than warm a patch on the menacing thing’s ebon hull.

  But it was all he had. He didn’t see either Houston’s or Tremkiss’s 2120, and he sure as hell didn’t have time to look for them.

  Why hadn’t i
t fired?

  “Someone in Alpha-One!” he called. His voice was shaking. “Anyone! This is Doc Lee! I got a situation here!”

  “Gotcha spotted on the map, Doc,” Gunny Dunne’s voice replied instantly. “Whatcha got?”

  “Two wounded and a fucking flying tank, thirty meters away! It’s…it’s just hovering there! It hasn’t fired…”

  “Get down and stay down, Doc!” Dunne shouted back. “Help’s on the way!”

  Suddenly the monster started floating forward.

  Lee didn’t actually think through what he did next. He simply acted. His first priority was protecting his two patients, and the only thing that occurred to him was trying to distract that thing, maybe lead it away until the rest of the company could rally.

  Rising to his feet, he stood motionless for a second, then lunged to his left, out of the crater and away from Houston and Tremkiss. The machine pivoted, keeping its weapon aimed at the corpsman. Lee reached up behind his shoulder and unhooked his carbine from its carry clip. He didn’t need to aim; he pointed and fired as he took another dive to his left.

  Probably the only thing that saved Lee in that instant was the fact that he was so close to the enemy combat machine, close enough that even a small movement on his part translated as a large arc of motion for the machine to keep its weapon trained on him. He hit the ground and rolled clumsily just as the weapon fired. Static roared in his headset, and he felt a wave of heat brush past him, accompanied by a tingling pins-and-needles sensation gone as swiftly as it came.

  From flat on his belly, Lee raised his carbine a second time, hoping that the thing’s weapon might be a vulnerable point in its hide….

  CPL John Garroway

  Alpha Company, First Platoon,

  B Section

  AO Cincinnati, Sirius Stargate

  1311 hours, Shipboard time

  Garroway and the other two in his fire team were fighting for their lives.

  They’d been making their way along the top of a long, narrow plateau, a kind of ridge or broad wall across the face of their sector of the Wheel, homing on Houston’s and Tremkiss’s suit beacons. They were still at least a hundred meters away, however, when two massive Wiggler vehicles seemed to detach themselves from the black mass of the broad valley below the plateau and started moving up-slope toward them.

  “Targets!” Cavaco yelled. “Paint ’em, Sis!”

  Garroway, Cavaco, and Geisler took aim, letting Sissy paint the nearest target with an aiming-point reticle. He steadied the red aim-point dot of his 2120 inside the triangle, held it…and then Sissy triggered his weapon.

  There was a flash, and a spray of hot debris, but the enemy vehicle kept coming. The shot hadn’t even slowed the monster.

  All three men ducked behind the lip of the ridge top and shifted left. The enemy’s answering particle beam bolt shrilled just over the ridge in a burst of hard static.

  “Jesus!” Geisler cried over the company channel. “What’s Doc doing?”

  From this new vantage point, Garroway could see down the shoulder of the ridge to a long, narrow slash in the Wheel surface a hundred meters away. IFF beacons marked three Marines in green; two were flashing, indicating they were wounded. The company data net IDed the wounded men as Houston and Tremkiss, the third as Doc Lee.

  A red icon marked a third enemy vehicle, seventy meters from Garroway’s position, thirty from the corpsman and the two wounded Marines. It was moving toward the trio, turning to bring its weapon to bear. Garroway snapped his 2120 to his shoulder, taking aim.

  CCN INTERRUPT: LOW PRIORITY TARGET flashed in red across the top of Garroway’s HUD, and the weapon failed to lock. Shit!

  “Insufficient firepower available to successfully engage chosen target,” a woman’s voice said over his headset. “Redirect fire as advised.” A flashing arrow appeared in his visual field, pointing right, telling him where to find the more urgent target.

  He knew that two other enemy vehicles were much closer, and posed an immediate threat to the fire team. But sometimes you simply did not take orders from a fucking machine.

  “Sissy! Override fire priority!” he screamed over the company channel. “Repeat, override fire priority!”

  The flashing warnings winked off. Garroway fired into the rear armor of the distant war machine, but without visible effect.

  “CCN!” Cavaco called. “Override protocol Foxtrot Alpha one-one! Link us in and repeat salvo!”

  Obediently, a red triangle appeared on the rear of the target vehicle, as Garroway bumped the image magnification up to times-fifty. Garroway slipped his aim point into the reticle and, an instant later, Sissy triggered his weapon. He kept the 2120 on target, however, and let Sissy continue to fire it again and again, as fast as the weapon would cycle.

  The Wheel defenders, most of them circular in shape like inverted dinner plates, appeared to be armored equally on all sides, unlike the tanks Marines had battled for the last couple of centuries in more conventional wars. Evidently, there weren’t enough Marines with a direct line of sight to the same patch of the target’s hull to ensure a burn-through and a kill, so Cavaco had directed Sissy to hold the lock and keep firing, trying to elevate the firepower of three Marines to that of eight.

  Normally, that tactic was less efficient than having the CCN combine the fire of eight or more Marines in a single instant’s volley. The target was moving, after all, and the explosion of vapor from the area where the laser pulses were striking would tend to scatter successive shots as effectively as an anti-laser aerosol fog.

  But at the moment, three Marines were all that were available. Garroway kept his 2120 on target for as long as he could, despite the target’s movement, despite the blurring haze of vaporizing metal. Under his imaging system’s magnification, it looked like they might be punching through….

  HM2 Phillip Lee

  Alpha Company, First Platoon,

  B Section

  AO Cincinnati, Sirius Stargate

  1311 hours, Shipboard time

  Lee fired his underpowered carbine into the bulk of the hovering monster time after time, with absolutely no effect. If he was hitting the muzzle—if, indeed, the muzzle was a weak point—he couldn’t tell. The war machine was closer now, ten meters, getting closer….

  Suddenly, miraculously, the thing halted its advance, hovered for a moment, then rotated in place, a full one-eighty that brought its rear armor into view. Lee could see a ragged gash there, close to the vehicle’s rim, that glowed a dull red at optical wavelengths, and a bright yellow under infrared.

  The thing was hurt. Was that why it had broken off its attack? He didn’t know, but the damaged spot offered him a new target for his carbine. At almost point-blank range, he took aim and began slamming bolt after bolt of coherent light into the vehicle’s wounded hide. As it continued to move away, he stood up and advanced, carbine at his shoulder, continuing to fire until his weapon’s computer flashed a warning to his HUD: PWR CELL DEPLETION.

  The weapon went dead in his hands. With a scream he flung the useless carbine at the retreating war machine, saw it strike and bounce harmlessly aside.

  But the machine continued to move away. Lee and his patients were in the clear, at least for the moment.

  “C’mon, you guys,” he said, returning to the crater where Tremkiss and Houston were still lying on the ground. He knew Houston couldn’t hear him, but that didn’t matter. “Let’s vam the hell out of here!”

  Mark VIII vac armor had an inset catch ring on the back, just below the helmet seal, used for holding it upright on a storage rack or during maintenance. It also had a reel of carbonweave line inside the backpack unit, like heavy-gauge fishing line for use as a tether in zero-G operations. Reaching into Tremkiss’s back unit, he dragged a three-meter length from the reel, snicked it off with his scalpel, and secured one end to Tremkiss’s catch ring, the other end to the ring on Houston’s suit. Standing, he put the lanyard over his left shoulder, across his torso, and under
his right arm, leaned forward, and started to move.

  One man together with his armor massed over 140 kilograms. Surface gravity on this part of the Wheel ran around .9 G, so Lee was still trying to drag a dead weight of over 250 kilograms—a full quarter of a ton.

  He managed one agonizing step…then another, but he couldn’t get a good enough purchase on the Wheel’s surface, even when he clicked on his boot magnets in an attempt to get better traction. He tried another step, struggling, pulling, and then he collapsed, panting hard, sweat fogging his visor, legs shrieking with the strain. He…couldn’t…do…it….

  Think, damn it!

  Thermalslick. He was trying to think of what he was missing, and all he could think of was that botched training exercise at the Mare Imbrium a few lifetimes ago. His debriefing had emphasized, in loving detail, the proper use of a Navy-issue thermalslick.

  Dropping his makeshift harness, he fished the wallet-sized packet out of his kit bag, ripped off the cover, and unfolded it, silver side up. The material could reflect heat and light, or drink it in. The black side possessed an upper coating of buckyball carbon that rendered it very nearly frictionless, at least until that layer wore away.

  He tried to roll Houston onto the blanket, but had to stop when he found that some of the nanoseal he’d used on the Marine’s leg had bonded to the surface of the Wheel.

  Shit, and shit again!

  But it only took a moment to apply a smear of nanotech dissolving agent to free the bond—carefully to avoid opening the suit and the wound again—and then Houston was free. Together, he and Tremkiss manhandled Houston’s armor onto the spread-out rectangle of foil, and then Tremkiss rolled onto it as well, lying partly across Houston’s body. The blanket was really only big enough for one, but with Tremkiss clinging tightly to Houston’s armor, they made a small-enough package to fit—barely.