The Fleet Book Three: Break Through

by David Drake (ed)

  English, APOT rifle at chest height in front of him, began to trot in that direction, the direction of the flashes he could see in the sky, the direction in which Omega had engaged an invisible enemy.

  Sawyer, beside him, was overriding the push chatter with a prioritized “man, I don’t like this one shit bit. How come we don’t call the APC for a recon?”

  “Cause they’re hearin’ us, big fella,” English answered with a savage satisfaction that devalued everything but what must be going on in the APC. “They know what’s goin’ on better than we do. You want me to ask for overflight? If we need it, how come my Delta One Associate ain’t asked for it already?”

  A purple bead flashed on the com status block in the upper-left-hand corner of English’s faceplate. Sawyer, he realized, knew this equipment better than he did. Purple Priority better be a recording defeat, he thought when he heard Sawyer’s next transmission.

  “Toby, Grant’s a pig-bastard; he’ll let every mother’s son of us go down here to make his point about this system he’s testing. And we don’t know what result he’s lookin’ for—good, bad, or indifferent.”

  “I can’t make that colored light you’ve got work on my set,” English said, a warning and a guarded reply.

  “Here.” Sawyer reached over and tapped it on. His gloved hand stayed on English’s chest. “Manning slipped me a plasma gun, reg issue. Ain’t that strange?”

  Chancing that the lit purple diode was all Sawyer assumed it to be, English said, “She wants you to shoot him for her?”

  “Nah, she wants me to come back alive. You know, she don’t say nothin’; she’s a good soldier.”

  “I’m not trackin’ this, Sawyer.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m not sayin’ it’s right. He’s bustin’ her butt, more than command ought to push stuff.”

  “Easy, Sawyer. Anything can happen out here. And he’s busted my butt, up where Jay Padova could see, so I sympathize. But they’re like that, so’s she, and don’t forget it. They ask more than any manjack can deliver, like it’s their due or something.”

  “She wouldn’t ’a given me this plasma gun if somethin’ weren’t real wrong.”

  “Hey, man, this a fucking war zone. Everything’s real wrong, or we wouldn’t be here. Now, you want me to call them into the field, is that it?”

  “Manning? Hell no. I just think that, since it’s the Observer’s project, he ought to be out here risking his tail with the rest of us, observing.”

  “I’ll see what I can do. But I gotta tell you, I hope to hell you know what you’re doing with this purple bead.”

  “There’s no spook-generated system in this man’s arsenal that doesn’t have a safety net.”

  “Disable it for now—we can’t hear the chatter unless it’s off. Just show me how you did it, and let’s get back to the war.”

  English then called in on Delta One’s freq that “given the reports of invisible enemies, we think we’ve got technical difficulties. Request Ten Ring Observer on the spot.”

  Manning’s voice answered, so distinctive she didn’t need the call sign she used. “He’s on the way, Delta Two. You find those wheels?”

  “Nosiree, ma’am. But they’d probably have stuck in the mud anyhow, and then we’d be worse off. Delta Two, out.”

  They were headed toward a stand of trees which looked strangely thick where they bunched when unfriendly fire belched out from among them, gouts of red and green and yellow-white that taxed his faceshield’s imaging ability.

  English was down in the mud before Sawyer’s yell to hit the deck, or his Associate’s calm “take cover, take cover; return fire, return fire” penetrated past his reflexes to his conscious mind.

  The Associate, intent on preserving itself or him, had wiped all discretionary scans. He couldn’t see the 92nd’s field-of-fire grid, only his own.

  “Damn, I hate this thing. That’s for the frigging record, if anybody cares,” he told his recorder. “Thing thinks I ain’t got enough sense to return fucking fire?”

  Sawyer was already blasting away at the woods, firing at ground level.

  And that was the first moment that Toby English thought about what the fire characteristics of the APOT system would be when you and the suit it depended on were lying in a mud puddle.

  He had his own rifle butted against his shoulder before it occurred to him that the conducting characteristics of water might not be the best thing for a human inside a suit whose partial function is to act as a conductive circle. Then he told himself, They would have thought that out.

  He said, “Hey, Sawyer? Sawyer? Ain’t that enough, man?” while beside him Sawyer lay on his trigger like there was no end to the amount of firepower the APOT could dispense, blasting away at one spot where there’d been trees but now was just a white-gray-brown haze with a hot center you couldn’t describe in any report because it ... fluxed. It seemed to phase. It was so bright that his faceplate was blacked everywhere else but where it was trying to deal with it.

  English knew he should do something: shoot his own rifle, maybe. Maybe Sawyer was just not going to answer until he’d got his target. You don’t talk and aim, that’s for sure. But English really didn’t want to shoot his rifle, especially because his Associate wasn’t saying “return fire” any longer. As a matter of fact, it wasn’t giving him any kind of target in those trees.

  Thinking back, and then scrolling back with his hand-held, English realized that it never had given him a target, that is.

  It had told him to return fire, but it hadn’t targeted any Khalians in those trees.

  “Sawyer, man, stop goddamn shooting,” he said in his com. Then he decided that maybe the mud and water they were lying in was somehow screwing up helmet-to-helmet transmissions, and he wriggled over, still aiming his APOT at the trees, to put his helmet into contact with Sawyer’s.

  When he did, it was as though the world dissolved under him. Everything went funny: his whole body felt like a low-level electric shock was bathing it. He couldn’t see anything. Then he could see lots of things but nothing you could talk about in tactical, or even human, terms. He could see swimming things like giant sperm with toothy mouths, things like electric eels, and all sorts of squiggly foamy stuff. And he could see things moving in the background that maybe could have been people or, more exactly, could have been heat signatures or infrared images of people.

  Then he used every bit of willpower he had, broke contact, and repeated his original motion, this time slamming his helmet,

  Sawyer’s head went sideways. His shoulder came out of contact with the APOT; his finger eased off the trigger. Still holding the rifle, he turned slowly and lay on his back, one leg bent at the knee, in the mud. The APOT pointing skyward, he let off two more bursts of fire.

  It seemed like a twitch, not anything premeditated.

  Given the circumstances, English got the hell out of the mud puddle. Pointing his own APOT down at his lieutenant with one hand, the stock butted against his hip, he reached for his service pistol. All he had to do was thumb the safety off and pull the trigger, and Sawyer would be a memory. Nothing to do with field effects or conductivity, just a nice clean slug in the face or up under the chin, depending on luck and which shot was most likely to go through the armor and kill his friend cleanly.

  But first, you had to be damned sure you were looking at that kind of problem.

  Both weapons at ready, English went down on one knee and said, “Sawyer, talk to me, man. Associate, give me some kind of feed to Delta Three, now!”

  He held his breath. The dual-com bead lit in his peripheral vision. He could hear the other man breathing. The breathing was ragged, but calm. Please God, don’t make me have to shoot him.

  Not with some enemy out there, maybe even now drawing a bead on Toby English, a damn-fool officer making a perfect target of himself, the only thing standing in
a whole field of Bull’s-Eye’s blood-red mud.

  “Hey, Toby, what . . . ? What the hell?”

  Sawyer came up out of the mud onto his elbows real fast, so fast that the APOT rifle Toby was holding seemed to slam itself against the other man’s faceplate.

  Both men spoke at once.

  Sawyer’s voice said, very softly and calmly, “You want me to lie back down? Drop my weapon? Tell you what I think just happened?”

  English nearly shouted, “Hold it, man! Just fucking freeze, okay? Drop the APOT and—”

  Sawyer’s rifle splashed into the mud.

  English sat back enough to use his own APOT, his revolver still trained on Sawyer, to push the other rifle out of Sawyer’s reach. “Now talk to me, buddy.”

  “I started shooting at those trees, you remember that,” Sawyer said. “Then time just sort of stopped. I couldn’t get disengaged. It was kind of like an electric shock, but it was more like being stuck. I was stuck shooting at those trees, and my AI—that damned Associate—couldn’t give me a target. It wanted me to return fire, but it couldn’t give me anything to shoot at, so I was going at them by their muzzle blasts ... Then you hit me, and I could make my trigger finger lay off. That’s it.”

  “Sounds pretty good to me.” English thumbed the safety back on his kinetic pistol and said, “Probably the mud. Shorted something in the system, what with you lyin’ belly down for all your length. Sorry about hittin’ you.” His own neck hurt, now that he thought about it, from the force of their helmets’ concussion. “But I had to do something.”

  “I’m real grateful you didn’t shoot me. Little headache’s nothin’ to sweat. Think I’ll get upright now, real easy.”

  Sawyer had to pick up his APOT next; English had to shoot him or let him. He let him.

  They got the hell out of the mud and headed downslope to where Sawyer’s fire had dried everything for half a klick, crouching halfway to the fallen trees that seemed to have exploded.

  “Well, it’s a test system,” English offered lamely.

  “Yeah, I guess. You with me, Captain? We got men out there. We got targets we maybe didn’t smoke. We got lots of ground to cover ...”

  “Yeah, it’s okay, Sawyer. Just don’t shoot that APOT when you’re lyin’ in the mud, and I promise I won’t either.”

  Sawyer, motioning to him, pointed to the hard case he’d shouldered at jump time, the one Manning had given him. “Remember we’ve got an alternative if you want to issue an order to use it, sir.”

  Damn, Sawyer was twitched and so was he over what had almost happened.

  “Let’s get back into the 92nd’s circuit and see if there’s any tails up there that we can cut for our coats,” English said more heartily than he felt.

  English’s head was still aching, and Sawyer was reeling slightly as he climbed the hill. The instinct to keep the other man a little ahead of him was too strong for English to offset it, so he lagged behind rather than give Sawyer a shot at his unprotected back, even though the recon specialist was the last man you’d ever distrust ...

  What the fuck had that been, back there? English told himself to forget it, to wait until he viewed the mission transcript. If Grant would let him.

  That reminded him, and he called in for a check. Then he got real busy, seeing as how he found that Manning had a half-dozen queued reports of no-contact with hostile fire to shunt to him, and that Grant was on-site at a concrete building they’d designated 23A, waiting for him and generally directing the mission because English had been “out of contact, presumed MIA.”

  He wasn’t going to argue about it. He wasn’t going to ask how the Observer had gotten himself into the middle of the Khalian facility while Delta Command was still hiking in from the periphery.

  But as he listened to stale, unit-status reports shunted from the APC, he remembered the whispers that Padova might make landfall on this one, which didn’t necessarily mean that there was air support at Grant’s disposal and not the 92nd’s, but probably did.

  And, more immediately, there wasn’t a dead Khalian among what was left of those trees. Sawyer pulled out his scanner when he saw the nature of the debris and the size of the explosion, saying, “Damn, that looks hot.”

  But it wasn’t hot. Not at all. It was cold as death. And that was all a field scanner was going to tell you, even though, if you looked up into the paling night, you could see what looked an awful lot like a mushroom cloud just beginning to disperse.

  “I’m liking this mission less and less,” Sawyer said, then stepped gingerly into the twigs and toothpicks and kindling that crumbled at your touch—all that was left of the stand of trees he’d hosed down with the APOT.

  Well, not quite all, it turned out. “Look at this!” Sawyer’s voice was real flat. His helmeted head turned toward English as English came to take what his lieutenant was holding, and he could see his own reflection distorted in Sawyer’s polarized face shield.

  His image was as anonymous as what he picked gingerly from Sawyer’s hand: a frozen, blue, human finger with a gold wedding band gleaming at its root. Below the band, there was nothing. The finger was hard as stone. But it wasn’t stone: when English prodded the bone centering it, the bone itself crumbled away.

  “Damn, this is from a human shooter. That’s why we couldn’t get targeting fixes. The Associate was looking for Khalians, not humans.”

  “Why didn’t it give us the humans as friendlies?”

  “We didn’t ask it for humans; they weren’t ours—at least I hope to hell they weren’t our logged soldiers or the Bonaventure militia’s. Nah. It couldn’t have been friendly fire, man. It couldn’t.”

  “Get a head count,” said English, already beginning to trot toward his rendezvous with the Observer, already in the center of the complex. “And current status reports. We need to make some command decisions. While we’re moving.”

  His voice was totally controlled, he thought, but Sawyer said, “Take it easy, sir. We don’t know what kind of problem we’ve got, yet.”

  “Maybe you don’t,” English told him, trying to pace himself. He had to run nearly two klicks through hostile territory before he could confront the real enemy.

  * * *

  Sometimes you really wish you were wrong about people. Skidding into the damnedest firefight in Marine Corps history, English kept wishing he’d been wrong about the civilian observer, Grant.

  Then he could have been wrong about the APOT-Associate system he was lugging into battle like a technological albatross hanging on him. But he’d known in the back of his mind, ever since Grant had started that “don’t let this equipment fall into enemy hands” shit, way back when they were spaceborne, that the program was experimental, X-class in the jargon, which meant that the marines testing it were liable to become ex-marines.

  He couldn’t even get his damned command back, not really. On the way into the Khalian complex, he’d had one nasty exchange, via his com circuits, with the Observer, who told him tersely that “your Delta-One Associate’s running this mission, buddy, not me. Like it’s supposed to, when human frailty becomes a command liability.”

  The purple bead that wasn’t supposed to be there was blinking in English’s face when Grant said that, way off the record. Now the troop deployment weirdness made sense, command group of two, not the regulation three, way out in the boonies, as far as possible from the action. There was no way that Grant hadn’t set English up to take a fall so the Delta-One Associate could strut its stuff. The negative points English was going to pick up on this one were real enough—he shouldn’t have let this happen.

  But ahead of him were problems more real than reprimands and demotions. You had to stay alive for those. You had to get your men off-planet alive, more to the point, to worry about how it was going to look later.

  Right now, it wasn’t looking like anything English had ever see
n, and he and Sawyer were running all-com and dual-com and yelling themselves hoarse, without the vaguest notion whether anybody could hear them, were listening if they could, or if it even mattered.

  The big concrete-and-steel shipyard was coruscating with light, like it was on fire, which it couldn’t be. Buildings kept shivering, shimmering. Once in a while a whole wall would fall, coming down like melting icebergs.

  In between the buildings, his marines were firing at will upon the enemy.

  And there wasn’t a Khalian to be seen. Nobody was sure when it became clear that the opposition in the Khalian facility was uniformed-human opposition.

  It just was. Consequently, there was more confusion in Toby English’s ears than he’d dreamed in his wildest nightmares could occur in combat.

  “Can’t see the fuckers. Jesus God, what’s the matter with this shit gear?” somebody screamed in his ears on all-com.

  “Shoot the weapons, fool,” came Corporal Bucknell’s recognizable voice through the audio melee while, beyond English’s helmet, the sky seemed to come apart; men phased in and out of his helmet display as if they were using revolving doors, and reality itself came apart.

  He knew it was the A-field effects, in close proximity.

  But he shot his own APOT anyhow, wherever he found unfriendly fire, and each time he did, the whole world shifted under him. At one point, he and Sawyer found themselves holding hands like a couple of schoolgirls, stepping over half a human body which kept shifting: first the trunk would be there, then the legs. Only the blood in the mud was consistent.

  Sawyer was locked on privacy com with Grant, trying to find out how the hell you got the Associate syscom to recognize human adversaries and blip them on-screen for you, while English yelled himself hoarse arguing with Delta One, and talking to his men by name.