Once in a while, a mantis silhouette flipped over. Simulated dead. One less bad guy to molest us during the fight.
Chaplain J and I arrived at a squad of recruits from sixth platoon. They’d bunched up behind a small boulder just big enough to protect them from the enemy lasers. Two of the squad had red lights illuminated.
“Dead, or hurt?” I asked.
“Dead,” one of them said, while the other said, “hurt.”
One of the DSs cut in over the wireless, “Badly wounded, both.”
My instinct was to call for the medic and an evac, but then I realized there would be no medic nor any evac. The assault carrier had lifted into the blackness of the sky and was slowly maneuvering away from us, out of the fight. We’d been summarily dumped into the situational meat grinder, and there would be no do-overs now.
I looked at Chaplain J.
“I can’t give aid through the suit,” I said.
“No, you can’t,” she said. “If these were real hits, the suit would be doing that automatically. You have to assume these two are severely hurt and your job is to offer comfort.”
I looked at the unlucky victims, who merely looked back at me. Their faces were vaguely familiar. People I’d passed in the chow line or on one of the endless number of details to which I’d been assigned.
“Uh, how do I tell their affiliation? I can’t even see their ID tags.”
“Ask,” she said firmly.
“Uhh, right. Guys, do either of you, uhhh, you know, belong to a church?”
They each cracked grins and seemed to find me supremely funny.
“Eff this,” I said under my breath. “It’s stupid.”
Chaplain J cuffed the side of my helmet.
“Nothing stupid about it, recruits,” she said to all of us on the squad wireless. “You two wouldn’t be laughing if you had holes in your torsos and were slowly bleeding out. Now answer the Recruit Chaplain’s question before I put all of you on the detail list.”
Their smiles disappeared.
“Catholic,” one of them said.
“Nothing,” said the other.
“Atheist?” I said.
“Uhhh, no, just, well, hell, Rastafarian.”
“I didn’t bring you any weed,” I said.
“Eff you,” the joker replied.
I turned to the Catholic. At least here there was something I could work with. I’d done enough reading to understand that for Catholics, there was a last rite involved. I tapped a couple of small keys on the left wrist of my suit and called up the block of text I’d preloaded into the suit’s memory. The text hovered in my helmet display: a glowing sequence of words preserved in my field of vision.
Mumbling my way through it, I felt fantastically uncomfortable. When I was done, the recruit—Jones—had a surprised look on his face.
“That’s not in the reading I gave you,” Chaplain J said.
“I looked it up online while we were en route,” I replied.
“Problem is, you’re not an ordained priest in the Catholic church.”
“Does it matter?” I asked.
“It might matter to him,” she said, pointing at Jones.
He smiled at me. “Thanks anyway, bro. My mom would have liked that. Priest or no priest.”
I chanced a look around me—at the tense faces of those squad members who were still fighting—and wondered why God would even care whether or not I was a Catholic, assuming Jones were in fact dying. I decided for the purposes of the LCX any kind of effort on my part was better than no effort at all. So I refocused my attention on the joker.
“Seriously,” I said. “No affiliation?”
“Nothing,” he replied.
“Nothing at all?”
“Nope.”
“Okay then. Well, you and, uhhh, Jones here, are both hurt plenty bad. And I don’t know if you’re gonna make it. But I’ll stay right here until we either get an evac, or until, uhhh, well, you know, uh—”
“Right,” he said.
I reflexively grabbed his hand through his suit’s gauntlet.
We each squeezed tightly.
And we stayed that way, just looking at each other, until forty-five seconds later the lights on his helmet went from red to blue.
“Recruit Sungh, KIA,” said a DS over the wireless. “Don’t move a muscle, and enjoy the rest of the show.”
Sungh let his hand fall to his side.
He smiled up at me and tried to speak, but I suddenly discovered I couldn’t hear him.
Oh yes, I’d forgotten. Killed-In-Action troops were cut out of the wireless entirely—so as to make them as dead as could be to those of us around them.
I tipped my finger to my helmet and dropped it in his direction. Sungh nodded at me and laid back calmly, staring up into space.
Jones was still red.
I held his hand for a good three minutes before his lights went blue.
“Recruit Jones, KIA,” said the same DS.
I imagined that the DSs were keeping tabs on all the Charlie Company casualties via computer roster. I wondered how many we’d lost, or were losing. Were things going well? Since arriving at this particular squad’s position I’d dropped out of the recruit command wireless entirely.
Tapping more keys on my suit’s wrist, I plugged back in.
Recruit command wireless was frazzled. People were dropping orders over the top of other people. Frago this and frago that. So many fragmentary orders at once, I couldn’t tell what the hell was going on. Suddenly a couple of mantis dummies appeared over the top of the rock I was crouched behind.
The entire squad screamed in unison—a very real sound—and opened up with their rifles. Rounds—also very real—chewed into the steel mantis silhouettes, which flipped backwards and drifted to the soil. Their maneuvering units automatically grounded.
In prep for the LCX we’d all done practice maneuvers using “rubber duck” weapons equipped with CO2 canisters and firing semi-hard pellets filled with red jelly. Those pellets had hurt like the dickens. So that we’d all learned fairly quickly that carelessness with friendly fire was a good way to bruise up your buddies. Which might lead to a bruising of a different kind if certain people didn’t watch their sectors of fire, and use discretion.
Now, things had gotten serious. About as serious as they were liable to get, short of an actual combat action.
I stared at the bullet holes in the mantis silhouettes and imagined what a real mantis might look like. Were they green and disgusting on the inside, like when I’d stepped on a grasshopper back home? Or did they have blood the way we humans have blood? Was it warm?
Suddenly the squad was up and moving. Me and mine just sat and watched them go. I was still hearing the chaos of the command wireless, but apparently that particular squad had been ordered forward.
I waved goodbye to Sungh and Jones—who looked halfway to falling asleep as they lay in the boulder’s protective shade—and followed Chaplain J out into the hard sunlight. Our face shields immediately deployed. Their one-way mirrored surfaces would protect us from going blind or getting burned by the sun’s intense rays. Without atmosphere or an ozone layer, the sunshine on the Moon could get mighty hot and dangerous.
There, another squad clustered around a couple of wounded—taking refuge behind another small boulder.
Again, I asked the requisite questions. This time, I found a Buddhist and an agnostic.
I had to ask, “What’s the difference?”
The Buddhist rolled her eyes at me while the agnostic laughed.
I held their hands and scoured my mind for words of comfort, forcing them out hesitantly and with no small degree of embarrassment. Eventually their helmet lights turned blue, they were ordered to lie still, and I could no longer hear them as they were cut out of the wireless.
Their squad also advanced, leaving me to look at Chaplain J as she looked over the top of the boulder at the simulated battle going on beyond.
“One person
couldn’t possibly keep up with it all,” I said.
“Pardon?” she said, coming back from her far-gazing reverie.
“One chaplain,” I said. “If the casualties were piling up fast, no single chaplain could handle everyone all at once.”
“In a real fight,” Chaplain J said, “you wouldn’t be the only one. Though the chances of you finding each of the casualties still conscious, or even living, wouldn’t be as good as it is for us today. You’d be finding corpses, not wounded. Perhaps seven times out of ten. Even given how advanced these armor suits are, the weaponry of the enemy is very efficient. And space is very deadly, even when we’re not getting shot at. Most of the time you’d be getting to the dead long after the fact. Or hauling the less critically wounded back to the rear, with the medical people.”
Which is precisely what I wound up doing a few minutes later.
Some of the recruit medics—assigned to their roles, like all of us—had set up a makeshift aid station to the rear of the fight. When next Chaplain J and I bounded out to check on a squad with recruits who had red lights, those lights were flickering between red and yellow, back and forth. Hit, but not doomed. Not yet. And someone had to help get them back to where they could maybe have more done for them? Whatever that might be. Without a vacuum shelter there was no way to peel a person out of his or her armor without sentencing the troop to instant death.
But the red-yellows couldn’t move on their own.
So I wound up doing stretcher duty—thankful for the low gravity, and resentful of the bulkiness and clumsiness of the armor suit.
DSs—also in armor suits—had clustered near the ad hoc aid station, and were seemingly making remarks to each other on the secure cadre wireless while half a dozen medics were putting hole patches on suits or inflating balloon bandages around limbs too imaginarily mangled for hole patches. The vital signs monitors on each of the wounded were carefully checked and integrated into a closed medical wireless loop, to which I was summarily added without my consent. Suddenly eight different waving sets of vitals appeared in my field of vision, each with a name next to it.
I noted that one of the wounded was a recruit platoon sergeant from fifth platoon.
“Are we winning?” I asked her as I pulled out a patch, per the DS nearest her pointing at her leg and informing us she had a hole in it.
“Can’t quite tell,” she said. “Fifth platoon was split and I was trying to get us formed up on our weapons squad when a fat wad of mantes came over the top of a low rise and creamed us. Most of my squad were blue-lined immediately. The rest grabbed me and hauled it for the back of the battle. And dropped me here.”
I looked around and noticed more red-yellows being dropped off.
“How many casualties in all?” I asked the recruit platoon sergeant.
“Uhhh,” she said, tapping keys on her suit’s wrist while I applied the patch to the imaginary hole where the drill sergeant had pointed.
“Sixty-eight,” she said.
“Dead?” I said.
“Not all. Command stats wireless shows twenty-one wounded, the rest permanently out of action.”
Heavy casualties, considering the fact that the fight was only about twenty minutes old. Charlie Company was down roughly a quarter of its total strength.
I keyed my way back into the command wireless. Things still seemed chaotic.
Once I was convinced my patch job would hold, I slapped the recruit platoon sergeant on her shoulder and went to work on others.
Then I was summarily called away as a squad from first platoon began howling for medical support.
I bounded behind the two medics who went with me, Chaplain J, and our four assigned guards.
One of whom became a blue-liner along the way. One more was blue-lined on the way back. For the sake of three more simulated wounded.
Back and forth. Forward, and out.
I found blue-liners and red-yellows and reds-soon-to-be-blue. When the cluster of casualties at the aid station had passed thirty, I was sweating profusely and growing quite exhausted. Even in the weak lunar gravity, carrying someone—or assisting someone in the process of being carried—was strenuous work. Such that by the time the fight was over an hour old, I was trudging my way forward, not always looking where I was going, and allowing myself to be led by Chaplain J, who exhorted me forward with every new call for help.
“Might as well be a corpsman,” I said, huffing.
“We do a lot of that,” Chaplain J said, bouncing her way in front of me. “Since chaplains don’t carry weapons—we have chaplains’ assistants for that—we pretty much try to find ways to keep ourselves useful. One thing we didn’t do back on the carrier was have a pre-battle service.”
“What’s that?” I asked.
“If there had been time, and if we’d have been headed for a real fight, I’d have spared time to set up something on one of the assault carrier decks—where people could come and get a last dose of spiritual pick-me-up. Even offer confession, if I were ordained and authorized to hear it.”
“Confession?”
“Catholic stuff. Didn’t you look that up too?”
“No,” I admitted.
“Anyway, as the chaplain you don’t send your flock into battle without a last bit of hope and a prayer. Doesn’t matter whether those who come to hear it are truly believers, or just the kinds of atheists and agnostics who temporarily find faith when it suits them. The Fleet chaplain’s job is to support the spiritual well-being of the Fleet soldiers. Before, during, and after the battle.”
“I doubt I’ll have any energy left over, even to tend to my own bladder,” I said, becoming annoyed by the fact that any sweat that ran into my eyes could not be wiped away—with my hand hitting the transparency of my helmet’s face plate.
“Just be glad these wounded and dead are all simulated,” she said. “If they were real . . .”
She didn’t finish her thought.
CHAPTER 37
MY HEART RATE WENT TO TRIPLE-TIME.
The war—humans versus the mantes, round two—had suddenly become real again.
The burning remnants of human aircraft lay scattered across the canyon, or steaming in the river itself. Marines were firing their rifles indiscriminately into the air. Whatever had attacked and destroyed the gunships was momentarily gone. Though I suspected they would return, probably with drop pods loaded with mantis shock troops. I’d seen such in action on Purgatory. The canyon was about to become a slaughterhouse.
I saw the Professor with the Queen Mother half aboard his disc. They’d been pushed far out into the river by a trio of marines who were shouting at them, rifles raised and aimed dead-center.
Captain Adanaho was between the marines and the Professor, water up to her waist. She’d pulled out her sidearm and pointed it at the marines.
Humans hurled incomprehensible commands at each other.
One of the rifles went off.
Captain Adanaho was pitched backwards into the water.
Alien jets howled down on us. The water around the trio of marines suddenly erupted with hundreds of little fountains. What was left of the trio began to drift down stream.
Not caring whether I was next to be fragged, I plunged into the river and strove mightily to reach the captain. Her body was limply drifting with the current, and the Professor stared dumbly at it as it passed both him and the Queen Mother, who also stared dumbly.
I threw myself forward and began to breaststroke, the water chill and electric on my skin. My hand finally hit something soft. I knotted my fist into the fabric of the captain’s uniform and began to beat back towards the shore.
When I came out, my chest heaved for air.
I dragged the captain’s limp body onto the sand at the river’s edge.
Turning her over, I observed the bloody hole in the front of her uniform. A liver shot? Warm blackness flooded from the wound and the captain’s eyes blinked furiously as she tried to draw breath. Whispered gasps w
ere all she could manage.
“Oh God, no,” I said, wishing madly for one of the med kits in our packs. Which were who knew how far away. The current had taken us downriver too quickly for me to correctly reckon where camp might be. And there was still shooting happening, though from whom and towards whom I could not be certain. Lacking a better idea, I pressed my hand hard on the wound and willed the bleeding to stop.
The captain groaned loudly and clutched at my arm with both hands. Her eyes were wide and she stared up at me.
“Chief,” she spat. I read her lips more than I heard her.
“Ma’am,” I said, trying to sound calm, “you’re hurt bad, and I have to stop the bleeding.”
“Chief,” she said again, our eyes locked. I quickly lowered my ear to her face. Her voice rasped and sputtered.
“The Queen Mother,” Adanaho said, “you’ve got to protect her. She is the key, Chief. She has been . . . chosen. Like you. Padre . . .”
I started to blubber my incomprehension, then looked up to see the Professor hovering almost directly above us. The Queen Mother slid off the front of his disc and came to Adanaho’s side—her forelimbs framed Adanaho’s young face as the captain fought to draw additional breath, but could not.
I pressed harder, to combat the gushing blood, but felt in my heart that it was no use.
“We must flee!” The Professor commanded. “Caught in the crossfire, we will all die.”
“We can’t move the captain!” I hollered, looking up at my friend with a sense of panicked helplessness ripping me up inside.
A trail of bullets spattered across the sand near us.
The Professor spun on his vertical axis to face the four marines who advanced with rifles up. I couldn’t see them, but I could hear them splashing through the river shallows. Automatic fire stuttered and suddenly I was flattened across Adanaho’s body as the Professor lowered his disc right down on top of us: me, the captain, and the Queen Mother.
“My friend,” the Professor said, “I regret to inform you that—”
He never finished his sentence. Bullets pinged and panged off his disc. Some tore through chitin, slicing mantis organs and soft tissue. The Professor’s disc moved forward three meters, then gouged its bow into the wet sand—the disc proper tilting up like a shield. I looked up to see the silhouette of his thorax and limbs flailing around the disc’s black edge, bits and pieces of him coming off and mantis blood splattering.
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