Til Valhalla

by Richard Fox

  “You know damn well when you’re in a fight you can’t win,” Digger said, leveling a knife hand at him. “Recovering supplies and fighting to the last man isn’t what you’re out here for, is it?”

  “There’s too much at stake to just let them get that tech. And Roy—”

  “If he’s dead, there’s nothing you can do for him.” Digger shook her head. A Beetle lifted off, the turbo fans blowing over the floodlights at the landing zone. She held her cannon arm over the crest and fed a pic from the weapon optics to the other Armor.

  “Looks loaded down to me,” she said. “They’re either buggering off with their gear or yours.”

  “They’re not getting away. Cover me,” Sigmund said, vaulting over the crest and landing on a rocky outcrop. He ignored Digger’s shouting as he drilled his anchor into the hillside. Bullets ricocheted off his legs and arms, but he ignored the hits, focusing on the Beetle as it lifted up slowly toward the storm.

  The Light Horse opened up on his sides, firing their rotary guns and arm cannons as fast as the ammo could cycle in, flooding the forest below with shells.

  Twin vanes extended up and out of his back, then snapped down next to his helm, angled slightly upward. He unsnapped a cobalt-jacketed slug of depleted uranium and loaded it between the vanes. They powered up and the round floated in a magnetic field within the chamber.

  “Shoot already, you dill!” Digger yelled as her rotary cannon spun dry.

  Lighting rumbled through the storm, and Sigmund saw the Beetle’s shadow against the flash.

  “Got you. Fire in the hole!”

  The rail gun’s magnetic field reached critical and the round shot out with a clap as it broke the sound barrier. A line of ignited oxygen left a trace from Sigmund into the storm, the clouds ripped apart by the bullet’s passing.

  Sigmund reeled back, but his anchor kept him upright. He heard and felt a crack beneath his feet. He looked down just as the hill collapsed beneath him. A rockslide carried him down, tossing his Armor around like a doll in a dryer until he came to a stop in a cloud of dust.

  He managed to get his helm up and knocked away rocks as the storm beat down on him. In the sky, a trail of fire angled toward the ground.

  Digger slid to a stop next to him. “You alive, seppo?” she asked.

  “I am.”

  Digger kicked him—not too hard—in the side, then helped him up.

  “You’re damn lucky the hill broke and brought you down on our side,” she said. “If you’d ended up at the base full of Chi-com, we would’ve left you to them.”

  “Thanks, I feel appreciated.” Sigmund rotated his shoulder servos, crushing bits of rock within to dust.

  Payne ran down the hill and splashed into a mud flat. “Should go…should go, yeah?” he asked. On his chest, a pair of holes leaked thick fluid.

  “You’re hit.” Digger put a hand on Payne’s breastplate and rubbed the amniosis between her fingertips. “How bad?”

  “Just winged my pod. Nothing. Nothing.” Payne slapped a palm over the damage.

  “The hell it is…we’re going back to base,” she said.

  “If it’s a minor breach,” said Sigmund, “then the pod will—”

  Digger swung around and slammed her forearm into Sigmund’s chest. The shock rattled him within his pod and he had to brace himself against the sides to recover.

  “Bloody oath, if you act like you’re the tall poppy in charge one more time, I will rip your batteries out and leave your can behind. Payne is hurt. You don’t have the charge left to get that far. I am about sick of your shit. We skip back to base to reset, then we’re back it, you get me?”

  “Roy is still out here,” Sigmund said, looking back at the ridgeline.

  “If he’s alive, we’ll find him. But we can’t lose three of us looking for one that might be beyond help. I don’t like it either, but this is Aussie rules out here. We’ve learned to take the losses.”

  “Then…then let’s get going,” Sigmund said. “I can’t believe I’ve lost them both.”

  “We’ll get this sorted later,” she said as she turned and tapped Payne on the side of his helm. “Keep it together, mate. Need you on the bounce with me, yeah?”

  “On the bounce. Back to the ships with you, Digger,” he said.

  “That’s the stuff. Roll out.”

  Chapter 5

  Roy was used to the long dark. The endless time spent within a womb, his body robbed of sensation while floating within the amniosis. The total abyss of full dark. So detached from his body that he couldn’t tell if he was awake or asleep.

  He had no idea how much time had passed since the flood had taken him away.

  His Armor’s systems were dead. He’d detached his umbilical after it had failed to reboot many times. The only option he had left was the manual release at the bottom of the pod. If he pulled that, it would dump his fluid and open the hatch—a decent option if he knew where his pod was.

  He could escape a damaged suit lying on a battlefield, but if he was buried under rocks from the flood, or under several feet of mud, pulling the release could kill him in short order.

  On the other hand, if he kept his discipline, waited for rescue as he’d been trained, he might survive.

  Armor were screened for just this contingency. Most candidates couldn’t take the isolation, the long dark of fear and doubt. Too many of the others from his class at Fort Knox had failed out after losing their nerve and screaming to be released from their pods after being locked away for too long.

  In theory, he could survive for months on the hyper-oxygenated fluid of the amniosis. That was just theory, though. That any human mind could last that long had yet to be tested by ethical scientists.

  There were tricks. Replaying movies in one’s head. Mental math games. Letting the mind wander as the brain created faux visuals and sounds to compensate for the lack of stimuli.

  His brother told him stories about how people would actually pay for the privilege to float in a tank of salt water back before World War III. Just why anyone would do this on purpose was beyond him.

  He thought back to the fight against the Dragon and how he’d delivered a nonlethal blow to the first Armor he’d fought. That one had been fighting to kill. Same with the second. Mercy was not a trait the Armor screened for.

  Shame crept into his mind. Before he’d joined up, he’d discussed killing in war with his church bishop. There was ample scripture to justify killing in war, and the original Hebrew of the Sixth Commandment read “Thou shalt not murder.” Why he’d been unable to kill that Dragon bothered him more than his current state trapped in his pod.

  I probably killed some in those houses I blew up, he thought, but I didn’t see them. I didn’t know. I stabbed that one through and through and there’s no doubt. Josiah didn’t have this problem…I saw the records. I must be a coward. All the instructors at Knox were right. I don’t have this in me…now look where I am.

  There were taps against his pod.

  Roy cocked his head to one side, then touched his face to make sure his eyes were open and he was awake. Did that happen? Or was his mind playing tricks on him?

  The taps came again, in a tune he recognized: shave and a haircut. But the price was missing.

  Roy punched the inside of his pod weakly. Twice.

  A line of light opened up at his feet and he fell through the hatch in a wave of amniosis. He flopped out into a mud puddle, sunlight assaulting his eyes.

  “I got some on me, I got some on me!” a girl yelled. “That’s some right deadly piss!”

  Roy coughed up fluid and squinted, then opened his eyes to a pair of black, hairy feet in sandals. A man squatted in front of him, wearing simple khakis rolled up to his knees and elbows and a rifle strapped over his back. His face was wide and black with a flat nose. A shaggy mass of salt-and-pepper hair twitched in the breeze.

  “G’day, mate. Who’s your mob?” the man asked.

  Roy hit himself in the stoma
ch and coughed up the last of the amniosis. The fluid seeped into a patch of mud, and his lower body sank a few inches into that. Roy smacked his lips, his lungs still not working right.

  “No worries, gubba. I speak the local just fine. I may be an Aborigine but that don’t mean all of us sit around in a loincloth, playing the didgeridoo. You, though, come out in bit better than budgie smugglers looking like a chook fresh out of egg. Bailey back there thought you were just a wired-up noggin in that suit.” He rapped knuckles against his skull.

  “Does this shit come off?” Bailey knelt next to a stream, furiously scrubbing water into her sleeves and her khakis from the knees down.

  Roy touched his plugs and winced, then looked over a shoulder. His Armor’s torso lay half in a muddy bank, one arm jackknifed at an ugly angle, the legs, helm, and cannon arm gone.

  “Where…where am I?” he asked.

  The buzz of insects filled the air. Heat and humidity pressed in on him like wet clothes as the last of the amniosis evaporated from his skin suit. Patchy grass and sparse trees stretched out around his Armor’s final resting place.

  “Good ways from anywhere,” the Aborigine said. “Question is where you need to go.”

  “He doesn’t sound like that pom tin can I met,” Bailey said as she rubbed pebbles against the back of one hand. “Your goop stain? Poisonous to normies without a plug like you?”

  “It’s harmless,” Roy said, gripping the side of his Armor and pulling himself up, his feet sinking deeper. He looked around the back, and his shoulders fell. The emergency supply case that should’ve been beneath the back armor plate was gone.

  “Who’s your mob, gubba? I’m Monaro. That tidda’s Bailey. Rest of our squad’s pulling security around us,” the man said. “Chi-com’s on our ass for a bit of a nick and I reckon they’d like to get a hold of you too, eh? Can you walk or do we have to start not liking you?”

  “Mob? I’m…Cadet Warrant Officer Amos Roy. Telemark Lance. Atlantic Union Armor Corps.” He took a squishy step out of the mud and onto a rock-strewn bank, grimacing as the stone touched his bare feet.

  “You don’t have anything else to wear?” Bailey’s eyes went to Roy’s crotch, then snapped up.

  “There was a survival kit,” Roy said, waving downstream. “Who knows where it is now. I can…there’s an emergency beacon behind the pod I can—”

  “Yeah, nah, mate,” Monaro said. “Chi-com will be here in a jiffy with kill drones. We’re not looking for any more attention.”

  “Hurry. Up!” came from the foliage.

  “Come out looking like a bloody dag,” Bailey said, picking a rucksack off the ground and rummaging through it. “Least you ain’t nuddy. Here.” She thrust a pair of sandals into his chest. “They’re my favorite thong. Don’t nick ’em.”

  “Thongs? Not sure what you mean, but OK.” Roy kicked mud off himself and put the soles against the bottom of his feet. “Appreciate the sentiment, but these are too small. How old are you?”

  Bailey snatched them away. “Old enough to be out here plinking Chi-com, you bastard. Monaro, help him out.” She slipped the shoes into her pack and picked up a sniper rifle leaning against a rock.

  “Here you go.” Monaro gave Roy the sandals off his own feet, then walked into the brush without hesitation.

  “You never been in the bush before, have ya, mate?” she asked Roy.

  “Spent a lot of time in the desert. Utah desert.”

  “They have browns? Taipans? Copperheads? Death adders?” She lowered her voice and glanced around. “Drop bears?”

  “Bears?” Roy frowned and looked to the treetops.

  “Drops are the worst,” she said, her eyes twinkling. “Leave you cactus in a split second. Stay close to me and don’t step on any twigs—that gets their attention.” She hefted the pack onto her back and tightened the straps.

  Tilting her head to one side, she followed after Monaro as more Australian soldiers emerged from the brush, forming a cordon around her and Roy as they walked.

  Roy’s legs felt like jelly as they moved, the heat and the thick air bringing out sweat within minutes.

  “Why is it so hot?” he asked.

  “It’s summer.”

  “In November?”

  “Welcome to Down Under.” Bailey rolled her eyes. “Where’d you think you were?”

  “It was a normal day at Fort Knox, then Captain Sigmund grabbed me, told me to mount up and get in the scram jet. Time to fight Chi-com. Been kind of a blur since then.”

  “That’s all it took? We’ve had Chi-com here to fight for years. You seppos just forget about us?”

  “I think most of that’s above my pay grade, you know what I mean?”

  Ahead, a soldier held up a fist, then thrust three fingers into the sky.

  “Shit.” Bailey grabbed Roy and yanked him to one side, tripping him over her shin. He landed next to a tree in knee-high grass. Bailey dropped the pack and reached inside. She drew out a tarp, its color fluctuating with a digital pattern until it solidified to match the sky.

  She fell on top of Roy, pulling the tarp over them both. “Not a muscle,” she whispered.

  Roy got a good whiff of her hair, so matted with sweat and grime it was on the verge of turning into a dreadlock. The tarp’s temperature changed, cooling to match the ground beneath them.

  He touched a wooden handle of a grenade hanging from her chest harness. The anti-armor grenades were a metal cylinder attached to the handle. They were short-ranged weapons, and had to be thrown hard straight at a target to aim the shaped charge in the warhead. Using them against the drones would be tricky, but some chance was better than none.

  Bailey pushed his hand away from the grenade.

  A buzz grew in the air and Bailey rolled off him and into a fetal position. “Please…please, please not again. Just go,” she whimpered.

  The tarp shifted, and Roy saw treetops swaying overhead. A drone shadow floated by, a square body with four turbo fans. An underslung machine gun swung from side to side. Roy flexed his right hand, muscle memory attempting to load rounds into a cannon that wasn’t there anymore.

  An ant the size of his thumbnail crawled onto his face, causing his cheek to twitch. Bailey reached over and flicked it off.

  The drone froze, then popped higher. There was a burst of machine-gun fire and it came tumbling down, trailing smoke and missing a fan.

  “We got it jammed,” came from somewhere nearby. “Bug out. Bug out!”

  “Swear you’re bad luck,” Bailey said as she sat up and mashed the tarp against her chest. “My bag, get it! Can’t lose this thing.”

  “East, five hundred!”

  The command repeated from around Roy as he got to his feet, confused. Soldiers ran past him, and Monaro jabbed a hand the same direction they were running as he passed.

  “Here!” Bailey thrust her pack into Roy’s arms and she took off. “Catch up, you idiot!”

  Roy followed, his flip-flops and the heavy pack reducing his dexterity and speed to almost toddler-like levels.

  He found his footing and managed to keep a steady distance from Bailey, his lungs burning with the effort.

  I want my Armor back, he thought.

  Chapter 6

  Sigmund strode across the cemetery catwalk, his hair and beard still damp from the showers, his footfalls the only sound since the techs retired to sleep through the night. His mind was revved up, a side effect of dismounting.

  He stopped in front of an empty bay, where Roy’s Armor should have been. He tugged a chain beneath his undershirt and drew out a small hammer talisman. He pressed it to his lips briefly, then let it fall back against his chest. Sigmund leaned against the railing, staring at the vacant space.

  “I failed them again,” he said.

  A clatter of metal on metal sounded from behind. He whirled around, muscle memory raising his right arm to aim an absent cannon.

  From the half-repaired Armor, a man in a light tan jumpsuit slipped out of th
e open pod. A long ponytail of salt-and-pepper hair flopped down over his shoulder as he landed on one foot, his other leg stiff and unable to hold weight. He steadied himself against the Armor, then made the sign of the cross over his chest.

  “A man died in there,” the newcomer said, his accent German. “May the Lord receive him.”

  “Colonel Carius,” Sigmund said, walking over and saluting his brigade commander. “I didn’t expect to see you so soon.”

  “Things move fast when the generals start panicking,” Carius said, returning the salute before taking up a cane hanging on the railing. “The planners didn’t think the Chi-com would bring their Damocles platform into the strategic equation. My Armor was the first element they could bring in as an answer. Three lances came with me via commercial transport. Not the best way to cross the Pacific, but here we are. Rest of the brigade’s taking a slow airship out of Knox.”

  “You flew commercial?”

  “Stuffed into the bottom of an Ibarra Air jetliner with XVIII Airborne Corps operations staff sitting in coach. It was the fastest way to get Down Under, as you’d used up the only hypersonic transport we had on station at Knox,” Carius said. “But enough of the small talk, yes?”

  Carius’ eyes darted to the empty bay.

  “We ran into some Dragons,” Sigmund said. “Roy got separated in the melee and went MIA. It’s my fault, sir. He hesitated in his first engagement. I shouldn’t have taken him into the field again.”

  “No one’s ever ready for their first fight.” Carius rubbed his bad hip and made his way down the catwalk. “And I sent you to the opposite side of the planet with a single lance mate with instructions little better than ‘Find Chi-com. Shoot Chi-com. Repeat as necessary.’ I thought Roy was up for this…but you can’t have a trial by fire without the fire, yes?”

  “Doesn’t change the fact that he’s likely dead,” Sigmund said. “First his brother…now I have to write a letter to the family. Again.”

  “You assume he’s dead,” Carius said, wagging a finger at him, “which does not speak of your confidence in him. And you take the blame upon yourself, which is your burden as his leader, but his fate is not your responsibility, Sigmund.”