by Ian Douglas
"I have reviewed Cadet Cameron's latest battery of tests. Rather than the technomegalomania rating that he exhibited before, he now seems to show a distinct tendency toward technophobia, point one, up from point zero two. His insecurity index is up three points, and that is coupled with a growing sense of persecution and an innate distrust of those in authority. I would guess that he feels as though his life is no longer his, that those in authority over him are arbitrarily interfering with it. Note, particularly, ambivalent feelings toward his father, pride and admiration on one hand, disappointment and a sense of being manipulated on the other. . . ."
Katya listened with growing embarrassment as the psychometrician continued to list his findings with a bluntness that seemed to assume that the subject of his analysis was not even in the room.
"It seems apparent," Sutsumi concluded, "that Cadet Cameron has extreme difficulty concentrating under stress, that while he operates well under simulated conditions of reality, he may always, ah, 'freeze up,' in the vernacular, when faced with severe stress and the need to access data through his implanted linkage. He may now fear cephlinkage. He certainly feels alienation, persecution, and mistrust for authority figures. I, for one, would hesitate to allow him to link again, in any capacity."
"Cadet Cameron? What do you have to say to that?"
Dev looked tired, so tired it seemed he might sway forward and collapse on the floor before them. Though his chair had a 'face pad on one arm, he'd not bothered palming it when Sutsumi had reviewed his test results.
"I have nothing else to say, Colonel," he said. "I guess this pretty much finishes me, huh?"
"That remains to be seen." But Varney did not sound confident.
The final vote was three to two, with Katya and Senior Lieutenant Hagan in the minority. The decision was to transfer Dev to the leg infantry rather than risk another incident with him linked to a warstrider. He would be assigned to the Second Regiment of the Ulvenvakt, the Wolfguard, stationed at Midgard. If possible, a noncombat position would be found for him. Varney suggested the regimental motor pool. He'd been good working on the silicarb-slicked guts of warstriders.
Dev Cameron accepted the verdict without expression, though his face was very pale. What's he thinking? Katya wondered.
She was confused by her own reaction, her hurt and her sense of loss. Tami Lanier had been a friend, and she'd died a nightmare death when the Xenophobe had eaten through the armor surrounding her module and gotten to her before she could eject. Katya had been furiously angry with the man who'd panicked and ejected and left her to die alone.
Now, though, her anger had drained away. It was, she supposed, one of her failings, this concern for the strays and the orphans. Maybe Dev Cameron had nudged her mother's instinct; maybe it was the shared memory of the godsea, the blue light that held the Dark at arm's length.
Or maybe—she forced herself to look at the possibility—maybe she genuinely liked the guy and wanted him to succeed.
She caught him in the passageway outside, shortly after the inquiry was closed. "Dev? Are you okay?"
He looked at her without expression.
"Look, Dev. It's not over yet. I can still—"
"Forget it, Captain. I don't want your help."
"But—"
"I said forget it!" She glimpsed for a moment something behind his eyes, something dark and a little frightening. "I'm tired of fighting. Whatever you people want to do with me, that's fine."
You people. Suddenly he seemed so very much alone. "What will you do? What do you want to do?"
The word grated. "Survive."
Chapter 11
The sergeant came right down the line, he looked at us and swore,
A sorrier bunch of rag-assed scuts he'd never seen before.
He said we'd never make it and he said it was a shame,
But at the fight at Morgan's Hold, by God we won our name.
—"The Ballad of Morgan's Hold"
Popular military folk song
C.E. 2518
Dev sat on the thinly padded seat in the low-ceilinged, red-lit chamber, surrounded by other combat-armored troops. The chamber lurched and swayed with a gentle, rhythmic motion set in time to the muffled hiss, creak, and thump of enormous leg drivers.
"Man oh man, you hear the latest who-was?" Leading Private Hadley clung to the barrel of the Interdynamics PCR-28 wedged between his knees, a 4-mm high-velocity rifle with a stock magazine holding two hundred caseless, armor-piercing rounds. "The Xenies popped up today a hundred klicks from Midgard!"
"Suck methane, Had." A hard-looking woman opposite Hadley grinned. "Ain't no Xenos within a thousand klicks of the place. Unless we count your brain."
Dev leaned back in his seat and joined the answering chorus of chuckles and catcalls. Who-was—a corruption of the Nihongo word for rumor—was, as ever, among the enlisted man's favorite pastimes, the topics monotonously predictable. Where are we going? When are we leaving? What's happening in the world beyond our own tight circle?
There were twelve of them, Third Squad, First Platoon, Bravo Company of the Second Ulvenvakt Regiment. The platoon's first, second, and fourth squads were packed away in separate chambers within the huge VbH Zo Armored Personnel Walker's belly. The Zo—the word was Nihongo for elephant—had a swaying, four-legged gait, uncomfortable, but far smoother than those of any wheeled or tracked vehicle covering rough terrain at fifty kilometers per hour.
His transfer to the Ulvenvakt's motor pool as a techie had lasted for just one week. He'd requested the assignment to a combat unit, for reasons that were only now becoming clear. Bravo Company had been only too glad to get him. Few of the men and women in the leg infantry had three-socket hardware, and C-sockets were necessary for jacking plasma guns.
Dev clung to his helmet and the long, complex bulk of his plasma gun and looked from face to face, studying his new companions, his kamerats as the native Lokans in the group called it. Fully armored except for helmets that they cradled in their laps, they sat in two rows of six facing one another, each trooper pressed against the legs and shoulders of the soldier to either side. Their faces showed a gamut of emotions, from fear to excitement to boredom to outright unconsciousness; two of his new squad mates were taking advantage of the experienced soldier's ability to sleep anywhere and anytime to catch up on some sack time.
The most common expression, Dev decided, visible on six of the eleven faces around him, was boredom, feigned or real, he couldn't tell. Two, Kulovskovic and Dahlke, looked excited, while one young man, Willis Falk, looked genuinely frightened.
Dev tried to analyze his own feelings. Fear, certainly, but excitement as well. And boredom. Mostly he wished they could get on with what had to be done. This tiny, steel-lined compartment would have been hell for a claustrophobe.
He took a deep breath of air tasting of oil, sweat, metal, and fear. It was strange. After four weeks, he felt more at ease, more at home, with the Wolf guard than he'd felt at any of his previous duty assignments. He'd been quickly accepted by the others in Bravo Company, by browns and greens alike. Browns were combat veterans, so-called for their khaki uniforms. The greens, who also wore khaki but were "green" by virtue of their lack of experience, were the trainees assigned to the company to complete their training and military indoctrination, newbies who would stay newbies until their first combat.
His position in this regard was unique; he'd been in combat—once—but he hadn't been in combat with the members of Bravo Company. As a result, he would be a green until he proved himself, but he already enjoyed a greater degree of acceptance among the company's old hands. The fact that he'd goked his one and only firefight seemed to matter not at all. Everybody screwed up their first time in combat, or so the old hands told him. He'd been there, and that was what counted.
For his part, Dev found the transfer carried with it a sense of profound relief. For two months, every part of his awareness had been focused on two primary concerns: Could he somehow manage to wan
gle a transfer to the navy, and could he survive the regimentation of Basic and avoid ending up as a legger?
He would never get his slot aboard a ship. He knew that now. Not only was his TM rating a problem, but the way he'd failed in harness when that Cobra had attacked had convinced him, once and for all, that he did not have what it took—call it discipline, the right stuff, grit, whatever—to jack a mobile canteen from Towerdown to Tristankuppel, much less a starship through the godsea.
And now he was a legger—though he'd quickly learned that his new comrades never referred to themselves by that name. Now that the raw and panicky edge of anticipation was gone, he was finding that life in the infantry was not nearly so bad as he'd imagined it. The striving for perfection, mental and physical, was over. He was a nito hei, a second-class private, and he was content. For the most part, Dev's daily routine had fallen into the eternally grumbling hurry-and-wait and make-work routines of the combat infantryman, a constant at least since the time of Sargon the Great. If he wasn't happy, at least Dev was at peace for the first time since his arrival on Loki.
Fear remained, of course, and guilt. He'd watched as they'd pulled Tami Lanier's body from the wreckage of the High Stepper. Not much had been left—her upper torso, some scraps of clothing and bone, part of one leg fused with the padding of her couch; a piece of the Xeno had eaten its way into her compartment and turned most of her into smoke.
The shock of what had happened had so numbed him that he'd not even been able to speak in his own defense at the inquest. The facts—and the data downloaded from his own RAM—had spoken for themselves. Even after three weeks, it was still hard to remember the sight and the smell without gagging.
He'd reached a point where, intellectually at least, he did not blame himself for Lanier's death, but the knowledge that he'd panicked and abandoned her to a hideous death, then ended up safe and secure in a stridertink techie platoon, was simply too much to face. Even knowing that he couldn't have done a thing to save her didn't help.
Only after volunteering for combat had the guilt been appeased somewhat. Somehow, accepting his worst fears had helped exorcise Lanier's ghost.
Someone forward was humming something, a familiar tune. Dev tried to remember the words.
The who-was had been flying about the barracks for two days. A major Xeno breakout had occurred, it was said, somewhere to the north of Midgard. An attempt to stop them by another Lokan strider regiment, the Odinspears, had been brushed aside. The Xenos were said to be heading for Midgard and the sky-el, and attempts to hit them with heavily armed ascraft and hastily assembled strider teams had all failed. A series of defensive positions was being thrown up in the Xenophobes' path. Farthest north, twenty kilometers from Asgard, was the Norway Line, supported by an airfield and nano manufacturing center called Norway Base. Ten klicks south of that was the Sweden Line. And behind that were the defenses at Midgard itself.
The big question, of course, was why foot soldiers were being thrown into it. So far, there'd been little use for leg infantry in a war that required the strength, speed, and firepower of warstriders.
Superior Private Lipinsky, a pretty, dark-haired girl, started singing the song aloud. By the second line, half of the men and women in the compartment had joined her.
The Xenos came from underground, they swarmed toward Argos town.
By God the plain was black with them, and Nagai had withdrawn.
But Morgan called us to his side, Hegemon infantry
And let us choose to stand and die, or choose instead to flee.
"The Ballad of Morgan's Hold." That was the name of it. He'd heard it a time or two before during Basic, though no striderjack would ever have sung the thing. Dev noticed that Falk, wide-eyed and with sweat beading his forehead, was singing along.
Morgan's Hold was a battle fought against the Xenos years before, on Herakles. The third planet of Mu Herculis had been the site of a terraforming colony for three centuries. A Xenophobe incursion in 2515 had wiped out several outlying settlements and a nearby atmosphere plant. At that time, the Xenophobe menace was still new, and few worlds of the Shichiju had the troops or equipment to make a serious attempt at stopping them. The only military forces on Herakles were an Imperial Marine battalion and two companies of the 62nd Hegemony Infantry, foot soldiers from Earth tasked with keeping order in the panicked planetary capital of Argos.
As the song told it, the warstriders withdrew before the battle, loading their heavy equipment onto the sky-el and shuttling up to synchorbit, leaving the colony on its own. Their commander, a Colonel Nagai, had ordered the foot soldiers under Captain David Morgan to withdraw as well.
But Morgan and most of his men had refused the order, electing instead to stand and fight.
We disobeyed our orders when they said to sound retreat
And Morgan laughed and said "My God, we'll see who's the elite!"
For fighting steel had broken faith, the samurai had fled.
But Morgan's men defied Nagai, they stood and fought and bled.
Argos was a classic infantry holding action against superior numbers. Three hundred eighty-eight infantrymen had dug in on Mount Athos at the peninsula's base and waited for the enemy to come to them.
Warstriders did not make that stand, it was the infantry
Who stood and fought and died and paid the price of mutiny.
We took our stand on Argos Hill, four hundred fighting men.
And when the smoke had cleared away, sixteen walked down again.
Morgan's Hold had taken its place in the annals of military history next to Thermopylae and the Alamo. For two bloody weeks the men and women of the 62nd held out against wave upon wave of Xenophobe Alphas and Gammas surging toward Argos. Though a few Xenophobes did break out inside the capital toward the end, the defenders bought precious time for the city to complete its evacuation. At the end of the siege, the last sixteen of Morgan's unwounded men departed up the sky-el, the last humans to leave Herakles. An hour later, the 500-megaton thermonuclear device they'd left behind vaporized Argos and kept the Xenophobes from following them to synchorbit.
Morgan had died on the third day.
At golden Tenno Kyuden they cannot begin to see
That honor's price is paid in full while glory can be free.
So give a cheer for Morgan's crew, the God-damned infantry,
The men who fought the Xenophobes, the grunts like you and me.
Hegemony Command did not approve of the "Ballad of Morgan's Hold." It rubbed the Japanese the wrong way, reminding them of their part at Herakles. There were plenty of horror stories floating around of men and whole Hegemony units disciplined for singing it, or even for possessing a recording in their personal RAM.
But soldiers from the beginning of history considered it a God-given right to grumble at those higher up the ladder. Perhaps because they knew that troops needed to have some outlet for their frustrations, most small unit commanders turned a deaf ear. Twenty-five years after the battle it recalled, "Morgan's Hold" continued to enjoy an underground popularity quite out of proportion to any musical virtue it might have had.
The deck of the APW jolted with a rapid-fire string of concussions. "That's thirty mike-mike AC," a dirty-looking private said from the rear of the compartment. He looked up toward the compartment's low ceiling. "Dorsal turret's got a target."
The APW was a boxy, headless beast with a flat turret mounted on its dorsal surface. If the turret's 30-mm autocannon was firing, the enemy must be damned close. For a long moment, every person in the squad sat deathly still, straining to hear past the thud of the cannon. Dev desperately wished he could see. The lack of jack connections in this primitive vehicle was going to drive him crazy yet.
There was a clatter from the front of the compartment, and Socho Gunnar Anderson, the platoon sergeant, dropped down the ladder, bulky in his armor and combat harness. "Listen up, people!" He had to yell to be heard above the thunder of the cannon. "We've reached our assigne
d area on the Norway Line. Prepared positions have been established along the crest of a ridge. When the ramp goes down, you will move to those positions, take cover, and engage the enemy on your front. Take time now to check your weapons and gear." He then repeated his instructions in Norsk-Lokan.
Dev lifted his Mark XIV plasma gun and slipped the pintle into the steadimount socket at his right hip and locked it home. The heavy weapon floated in front of him, muzzle up, its weight taken up by the complex harness Dev wore over his armor.
"Hey, Strider-man," Superior Private Rosen said from the seat opposite his. "Hope you're better jacking that thing than you were striders!"
The others laughed, and Dev managed a good-natured grin. Anyone with three sockets was assumed to have failed with either striders or the navy. Three-jackers, as they were known, were usually assigned the squad's heavy, link-adapted weapons like the Mark XIV.
"Don't forget to keep monitoring your nano count," Anderson told them. He held up a small gray canister in one gauntleted hand. "If you get hit, remember your AND canisters. They contain a counter-nano agent. Use it fast enough and you'll save yourself the muss and fuss of a breached suit."
There was another, heavier jolt, then silence. "We've stopped moving," Falk said, staring at the ceiling. "We've stopped moving, guys!"
"Easy, kid," Lipinsky said. "There's plenty of 'Phobes to go around."
"Okay, people," Anderson continued. "Welcome to Norway Base. Helmets on!"
With a clattering sound, the troopers donned their helmets, sliding them over their heads, sealing the gorget assemblies to their cuirass locking rings. Dev made sure the helmet's internal jack was snapped home into his right T-socket.
"Communications check," Anderson said, his voice even louder now inside Dev's helmet. "Squad, by the numbers, sound off!"
One by one, each trooper called off his number.
Then, "Stand up!"
