by Jack Colrain
“If you picked a fight with someone, would you give him your best weapon?” Hammond didn’t wait for an answer, as it was a no-brainer. “For all we know, this could be as useless as a Daisy air rifle compared to what they use. But it’s superior to anything we have now, so... We’ve nothing to lose by learning to work with it.”
“Is it too late to transfer to the fire department?” Kinsella asked, prompting a few chuckles.
“Are these designed to be regular sidearms, d’you think?” Evans asked. “Or squad support weapons?”
Gray shrugged. “We don’t know, but the fact that it’s man-portable and carries a hundred-round mag suggests it’s probably an individual sidearm.”
“Jesus. I wouldn’t want to get hit with one of these,” she responded.
“Let me put it this way,” Hammond said. “The Mozari suits that Captain Ying and I have been training with have proved to provide effective protection from every small-arms round fired at them, from nine mil to high-velocity, battlefield rifle rounds, and even the occasional fifty cal round, and those sure as hell bruise. I wouldn’t want to wear one that was hit by an XR round, because the railgun seems to be designed to work against fully functioning Exo-suits.”
“Have the suits been tested against this weapon?” Daniel asked.
“DARPA says they don’t want to destroy a suit in a test like that. Which should be all you need to know.” Hammond allowed them to digest that. “So, that’s the skinny on the XR-01. Any more questions?”
Kevin Bailey raised a hand. “Chief, I guess you’re showing us these because we’re going to be training with them. When will they be issued to us?”
“You’re absolutely right, Supes. You’ll be training with them sooner than any of us probably should be.”
Twelve
The official designation for the exercise grounds was the MOUT area—Military Operations in Urban Terrain—but the staff at Camp Peary called it Killtown. It was made up of a small cluster of externally nondescript buildings on the northwest grounds of the camp, separated from the lake and forest sections by several acres of long and whippy grass.
It had been a relatively recent addition to the site, as far as Keith Hammond knew. When General Carver had given him his orders about what he was to do with the people she’d be sending to the Farm, she’d mentioned that there’d recently been a new construction for FISH practice there, and that the buildings were rough and undecorated spaces built of cinderblock and other prefab materials, all representing common types of the interior constructions of houses, office areas, and so on. They were the real-world equivalents of unrendered maps in videogames, just plain gray environments. They had none of the bling and pomp and circumstance that Hammond liked about the military, but they would do the job today.
His and Captain Ying’s unit had driven up in an M35 two-and-a-half ton truck while they had followed in a Jeep. They’d parked the vehicles just outside Killtown’s perimeter fencing and now gathered in the main square, a dusty open area surrounded by soulless gray buildings.
The Homies and the Webbies, like Hammond and Ying, all wore the same digital camo BDUs, with appropriate webbing, and what Hammond felt was a fairly typical loadout. They all carried M27 IARs, pistols, and training ammo that stung and left paint marks. One soldier on each team had a 40mm grenade launcher under their rifle barrels, and one had a SAW, or Squad Automatic Weapon.
Hammond glanced up at the blue sky and thought it would have been a nice day for marching practice, imagining the sound of the horns behind him... But that was in the past, and they had more practical matters to deal with. He had been in the Army for thirty years and didn’t have any plans to let anyone down now. “You’re probably wondering what this place is,” he began. “Captain Ying and I figure it’s time we got into some CQB practice, ready or not. Today’s Friday, so it seems fair that FISH is on today’s menu.” He saw the puzzled expressions on several faces and smiles on a couple more. “For the confused among you, that’s ‘Fighting In Somebody’s House’—the noble art of combat inside buildings.” He pointed to Jessica Evans, whom he knew to be strong and reliable. “Evans, as a senior staff sergeant, you’ll be my 2IC.”
She saluted as Captain Ying called out to Althaus to be her second.
Hammond turned. “Is your squad ready, Captain?”
“Ready and willing, Chief. Yours?”
“As they’re going to be. You want to attack or defend first?”
“Since my team are visitors to your soil, I think we’re all happy to be invaders,” she said, a glint in her eye.
“Good enough,” he replied with a straight face. He pointed to a two-story blockhouse with simple holes for windows. “We’ll call that a headquarters building that you need to secure. My team will defend.”
“Good luck,” she said.
“And to you.”
Hammond turned to the Homies, whom Evans had already had fall in, humming some free-forming notes to himself. “Evans, we’ll be defending that headquarters building.” He beckoned to them to walk with him towards the building. Once they were out of the Webbies’ earshot, he started giving orders. “Take Peters and Kinsella and position them on the upper floor; you’ll be Beta Fireteam, giving general cover fire, and point-spotting for us. West, Palmer, and Superman will be Alpha Fireteam on the ground floor.”
“Roger that. I’ll use Kinsella as a sniper.”
“Exactly what I was thinking.”
Evans nodded to the two other soldiers and led them to the stairs at the double. Hammond continued, “Superman, I want you at the window, picking off anyone who approaches. West and Palmer, find a good ambush position to fall back to inside the building in case any of them get in. We’ll try to trap them in the stairwell if that happens...”
Daniel had gotten used to the sounds of gunfire, but the previous live fire exercises he’d been on had come in the form of simply trying to get from point A to point B—such as across an obstacle course—while keeping under cover and being fired upon. Now, it was a different matter, as he was set up in cover and waiting to defend a position. His heart was pumping a little faster than normal, and every mote of dust that blew across Killtown drew his attention.
He hunkered down on a landing whose narrow window overlooked Killtown’s main square’s right flank, watching for the Webbies’ attack to begin. He had relatively little idea of what to expect, beyond a rush of weaving bodies like in a movie or videogame, but he felt confident that the professionals, who had all been in their services longer than he had, would have better ideas.
In this second assumption, he wasn’t wrong.
When first he knew that the attack was beginning, he heard Kinsella’s M27 crack, and her voice call out “Inbound, North.” The second sign of attack was a sudden bang, and a cloud of white fragments smashing out from the wall two inches from the side of his head. He choked on dust from the 40mm chalk round that had hit, and then a pair of stinging smacks impacted the side of his head. He fell, knocked off balance by the suddenness of the blinding double-sting. He was about to get up when he realized that he was, effectively, dead for the exercise. He lay on the ground in as safe a position as was possible, ankles crossed so that neither would break if stepped on, and with his head in the crook of his arm.
A moment later, Palmer shouted, “The chief’s down!” Then another flurry of gunfire came, and something blurred past him.
Two shots rang out above him and then he heard Captain Ying say over the comms, “Designated target secure. Regroup in the entrance hall.” He stayed where he was as Captain Ying descended the stairs. How she had gotten up there, he couldn’t even imagine, beyond that she must have been the blur he’d more sensed than seen. She paused on the way down and said to him, “Next time, you might want to not stick your head out so far.” Then she continued back down the stairs, and Chief Hammond called for the Homies to join him outside.
An hour later, Daniel’s body protested at every movement. They had re
peated the exercise another three times, with much the same results. The most recent time, Hammond had set up West and Bailey behind a wall outside the building to turn the patch of ground before the door into a killzone, with the rest of them drawing enemy fire from rooftop positions, and Claymore mines set up throughout the ground floor to take the invading opposition force.
Captain Ying and her team hadn’t been put off. They’d sent grenade rounds through the windows to set off the Claymore simulators, then had two paired soldiers engage and suppress Bailey and Daniel while the others had entered the building through a window and cleared it.
A water break was a great relief, Hammond insisting on the importance of hydration, and Daniel watched now as he and Captain Ying meet up to confer. “We’ve taken the target several times now,” she was saying. “Perhaps we should keep it a while. Then your team can have some practice in aiming to infiltrate, clear, and secure the building.”
“I think you’re right. Victory conditions?”
“Two casualties maximum.”
“That’s impossible!” Daniel exclaimed, despite himself. Immediately, he felt his face redden. “Sorry, I couldn’t help overhearing.”
“It’s supposed to be impossible,” Hammond said. “Like keeping quiet and following orders.”
The marker rounds used during the day had stung, but not nearly as much as the 40mm chalk round that exploded on impact with his ribs, surrounding him with a halo of suffocating orange dust as he stumbled backwards, and then his vision burst into blinding light when the ground smashed into his tailbone.
This had been the third attempt at taking the target building from the Webbies. On the first go, Hammond had launched a diversionary attack on the front door while Evans and Peters had tried to infiltrate through a window. Captain Ying had sniped Hammond while Evans and Peters had found a Claymore waiting on the approachable window. The rest of them had fallen quickly thereafter.
The next two times, Captain Ying had turned out not to be in the building with her team. Once she’d been patrolling outside, waiting to target Hammond during the Homies’ flanking maneuver, and the third time she’d actually been waiting in ambush in an entirely different building opposite, waiting to take out first Hammond and the then the rest of them.
“It's not that I mind being knocked flat on my ass by a woman,” Casey Peters complained, “but it would be nice if it was by one who would kiss it better.”
“Keep on dreaming,” Kinsella advised him.
“It's not as if the world is short of girls who would.”
“Just the military?”
“They don't know what they're missing.”
Kinsella laughed. “We're trained to pick high-value targets first.”
Daniel shook his head. “Personally, I'd settle for some nice numbing drinks.”
“There speaks a sensible man,” Kinsella said. “Or as close as is possible.”
Hammond caught his breath and sighed. “All right, once more.”
“Unto the breach, dear friends?” Daniel suggested.
“With feeling,” Hammond replied, with a faint smile. “Once more with feeling is always the way to go.”
Kinsella groaned. “I’m definitely feeling it. There isn’t enough Deep Heat or Voltarol on the planet to stop that.”
“What’s the plan, Chief?” Peters asked, before Hammond could vocalize anything out of the evil eye he was giving Kinsella.
“We’ll split into two fireteams.” He pointed to a prefab building decked out as a gas station with a billboard on the corner of the roof. “I’ll take Kinsella and Peters onto that roof. It looks like it gives a good field of fire overtop of the hall’s door and windows. From there, we’ll give cover fire and watch for snipers on the upper floor and roof. Evans, you take West, Bailey, and Palmer, and advance under cover towards that side door.”
“Not the main gate?”
“The Webbies have put their strongest defense there. When they figure out where you’re headed, they’ll have to retreat back to the main door or come out of the gate to flank you. Either way, we’ll have the superior fire position to take them down. Their remaining force inside will have to split up to defend both entrances, so the first team will shift position then to attack the main door while you continue breaching the side door.
“Got it, Chief.”
Daniel saw it all happen as if in slow motion, and that’s how he replayed it in his head. The four of them skirted around behind buildings to avoid being in the line of sight of any of the Webbies in the central building, then advanced two by two under cover—each pair offering cover fire for the other—until the building’s side door was ahead of them.
That’s when he saw a figure flowing up the ladder bolted onto the side wall of Hammond’s building. A moment later, gunfire erupted on that roof, and then the defenders of the target building began firing at the four of them. Marker rounds hit Palmer immediately, as he was so big that it was harder to find effective cover for him. Daniel, Bailey, and Evans hunkered down and returned fire.
“We need to move!” Evans yelled.
“That corner wall,” Bailey suggested.
“Too far from the—” Evens broke off as three marker rounds hit her on the collarbone from above. Daniel barely had time to look up and see a blur moving on the rooftop of the building above them before he and Bailey were also stung by marker rounds. Captain Ying dropped to the ground, eyeing her handiwork.
“Threat neutralized,” she radioed to her team.
The Homies regrouped five hundred meters out of Killtown, and Daniel caught Hammond’s attention. “Chief, can I make a suggestion?”
“Sure, son, everyone can do that. The whole point of the exercise is to get everybody thinking.”
“We keep getting killed because of Hope—I mean, Captain Ying. She keeps getting the advantage over us because we can’t see her.”
“She’s like the fucking Predator out there,” Kinsella agreed.
“Yeah, and so might any Mozari that decides to visit us,” Hammond pointed out.
Bailey looked around, as if scanning everything with the fictional Superman’s X-ray vision. “Hell, how do we know they haven’t already?”
“Is that relevant, Bailey?” Hammond’s tone suggested it was not.
“Look,” Daniel continued, “the suits bend light somehow, and she may not be totally invisible, but... close enough. So, she kills us.”
“Thanks for that BFO, but that was a statement, not a suggestion, West.”
“What if we don’t need to see her? We know she always goes for the Chief first, because she knows he’s leading the squad, and he’s the most experienced of us, and therefore the most dangerous.”
“I’m flattered,” Hammond said dryly.
“So, if she’s going to go after him, let’s use that.”
“Use me, you mean. As bait? So, she kills me first again; then what?”
“We can’t see her, not even with infra-red or thermal, but she’s still physically solid. She can’t fly. She has to walk, run, and touch the ground. Which means she can touch things on the ground. Like tripwires.”
“Won’t she see a wire?” Bailey asked.
“Maybe, but maybe not if there’s no reason to be looking for one.” He pressed on eagerly. “If we strategically place tripwires around the chief’s position, we only need her down for a second. Then she’s off-balance, paused, and we can concentrate our fire on her position. What do you think, Chief?”
“Well, that’s some plan you’ve got there. A real piece of work.” Daniel started to smile, but Hammond continued, “And by work, I mean GOBI-level shit. I’ve been in the service a long time, and I’m pretty damn sure that’s the dumbest, most ass-backward plan I ever heard of in that thirty years.”
“Sorry—”
“See, I can see why you came up with it. In a videogame or a good paintball melee on a company team-building weekend that might do some good, because when you get hit, you’ll resp
awn or head to the res point and get right back into it. In the field, like in Iraq or somewhere, you don’t respawn, and there’s no res point to walk to to get back in the fight, because you’re just fucking dead, and death is pretty permanent for most people in the real world.”
“If I was willing to risk it—”
“Oh, you got a martyrdom complex, huh? Like everything will be OK if you die for the cause? So long as the team wins, it’s OK?”
Daniel deflated. “I thought that was what we were training for. To win—”
“Oh...” Hammond nodded patiently. “You ever heard of General George S. Patton?”
“I’ve seen the old movie—”
“One thing he said that makes perfect sense: No poor dumb bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. You win wars by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country. And that’s without even getting into what ‘winning’ means. See, you’re assuming you get killed nice and neat, but that’s not guaranteed. Usually, it takes a while to bleed out. And, worse, if there’s snipers around... Well, what they teach you at sniper school is that you don’t kill the first guy who comes into your sights. You maim him with a gut-shot. Then, when his squadmates try to get his ass to safety, or a medevac unit tries to get to him, you kill them. So, being a martyr doesn’t just get you shot, it gets other members of your team killed, as well. That’s nowhere near winning in my book.”
“Let’s hear it for us getting killed not being winning,” Kinsella said.
Daniel felt like an idiot, and like he should probably be wearing a dunce’s cap. “I didn’t mean—”
“At the very least, even if your squad doesn’t get killed in your martyr-mania, it’s still going to divert them from the mission, and generally fuck things up in some other unpredictable way.”
“Everything’s unpredictable in the field, I get that,” Daniel admitted. “But even by those standards... I mean, we’re here at a secret CIA facility, training to use sci-fi weapons against actual aliens who we don’t—hell, by definition, can’t—know anything about. All our rules and strategies are based on what humans do. Cultures may vary, but there are some universal things that don’t change, even if it’s just that people have two arms and two legs. We can’t even guarantee that the Mozari are like that.”
