He threw himself down, then picked his head up to look over the lip of their fighting position. Trees shook off to the south; enemy armor was trying to flank them. A flash of azure plasma burst up into the trees and dissipated in sparks and splinters. The guns cut off as their targets vanished, the individual team leaders shouting for the Marines to conserve their ammunition.
Jabar grunted and checked his own magazines. He had yet to reload, so he still carried a full complement of rounds, minus the dozen or so he had fired off already.
“Keep your heads down!” he shouted, covering the whole, thin line of Marines. Assault was positioned in the middle, laying flat at the road’s crest between the two machine gun positions, ready to detonate their explosives or bring their rockets down on anything coming up the road. “Keep your heads down!” he repeated. “Fire on hard targets only. First ’n’ Worst is coming up with our armor and more ammo.”
The radio buzzed in his ear: “Green, this is Blue. Green, this is Blue. We are cut off from your pos. We are going Alamo at Rally-Mike.”
“Sit tight, Blue,” Jabar said, swallowing on a dry throat, “we’ll come get you soon.”
“Roger, Green.” If Arliss had heard Jabar’s voice crack, he gave no indication.
Merciful Allah, he thought to himself. What the fuck am I doing? He had six months to go in his first enlistment and here he was, with thirteen other Marines, trying to stave off an armored ground invasion. The thought nearly overwhelmed him and he dipped his head, not wanting anyone else to see tears at the corners of his eyes. He shook his head, and the moment ebbed away, leaving only echoes of doubt. He had thought he could do this better than Demeter, and now he was being put to the test.
Allah had a sense of humor, after all.
A walker crunched into view, fifteen hundred meters down the road. It looked like a toy at that range, a blocky thing with a tapering nose and two box-like shoulders. Squat legs lifted and fell on the crumbling road, kicking up dust as it further pulverized the old pavement.
“Team One!” he shouted, looking back at Assault. “Target!”
PFC Krantz popped up to one knee, a rocket already loaded in the launcher. The Marine leaned forward a little, squinting down the optics, and then yanked the trigger. The rocket popped and fluttered along the road, jinking left and right on its own to avoid potential countermeasures and to paint its target from multiple angles. Krantz was already flat again when the walker responded, its right shoulder bursting in a fusillade of unguided rockets. The Marine’s shot seemed to hit square in the walker’s nose, making it stagger then topple forward. A second fusillade launched as it fell, spraying up a screen of dust, debris, and glowing shrapnel.
The first impacted a second later, rippling into the road and jungle fifty meters forward of their position. The shockwaves buffeted them, and another screen of cloying dust kicked up, drifting over them and coating everything in a layer of powdered concrete.
“Keep your eyes open!” Jabar shouted.
“Corpsman up!” came a call in the next moment from the machine gun team to the south.
Doc Hurley leapt to his feet from where he had been crouching with the Assault section and hustled over to the southern machine gun nest. A moment later he was dragging Van Duine back over the crest of the road and onto the reverse slope by the strap on the back of his body armor. The Marine looked to be cursing and kicking, but one of his arms dragged uselessly along the crumbled pavement. Jabar tore his eyes away and scanned the road as the dust started to clear.
The machine guns opened up immediately, zeroing on exo-skins moving up either side of the road. Assault fired another rocket, and the team leaders and ammo bearers started plinking at guys with their rifles. The improvised explosives burst, shattering individuals and sending clusters of armored Venezuelans spinning off to either side of the road. The concussive force threatened to knock Jabar off his knees.
“Green, this is Six. Two hundred meters out.”
The fourth rocket fired and whipped past a walker, spiraling off into the distance.
“Rounds complete!” DesJardins shouted.
Jabar struggled to his feet, leaning against the steep, rocky outcropping that defined the northern side of the pass. He pressed his hand to his ear, pushing the radio earpiece in tighter.
“Green-Three, Green-Three, this is Green Actual. Fire Mission One.”
“Fire Mission One, roger. Splash out.”
“Inbound!” he screamed, “Inbound!” But he doubted anyone could hear him. His ears had to be bleeding from the noise, but he felt himself almost adrift on a calm little island. Strangely, he could hear the mortar rounds, cutting the air overhead with that distinctive zzzzzzzzzzzip. A bolt of plasma burst over his head, melting rock and showering him with fragments. The mortars burst at head-height, five hundred meters up the road. Armored Venezuelans toppled as the pulse of detonation overwhelmed their armor. One stood up again just in time to catch a dud in the chest—the velocity and weight of the projectile punched a hole in the armor and almost turned it inside out.
A hand fell on Jabar’s shoulder and he spun, bringing his rifle butt up and smashing it across the masked face behind him. The armored figure didn’t flinch.
“At ease, Corporal.”
“Jesus, sir, it’s you.” The mottled green armor was pure Marine Corps, decorated only with slim black bars on the shoulders, indicating that the suit contained Lieutenant Hogarth.
Hogarth and 1st Squad, meanwhile, moved forward into the pass, screening Weapons as they engaged the Venezuelans for the first time.
It was now metal versus metal ripping the jungle apart as giants smashed through trees and unleashed unholy amounts of firepower against each other. The sound of combat moved away from Jabar and his men, and was soon only visible as the tops of trees snapped and fell, distant explosions thudded, and bursts of tracers zipped up into the air as armor fell.
And then the jungle fell silent.
Jabar sat next to a small table on a sealed trunk he’d dragged out near the perimeter of the camp, looking out at the jungle. He poured a finger of scotch from the flask he’d confiscated what seemed like an eternity ago.
When he held the small glass up to the sun, the light flickered with amber shadows.
“I thought you were Muslim,” Stilwill said, interrupting the moment.
Jabar sighed silently. “I am.”
“But you’re drinking,” Stilwill observed unnecessarily.
“We are all sinners in the eyes of Allah,” Jabar said, and raised the glass to his lips. He breathed out mellow, expensive scotch fumes. “And that was some incredibly good scotch.”
“Thirty year old Macallan,” Stilwill said. “There aren’t really snipers out here, are there?”
“There used to be,” Jabar said. “When we first built the camp.”
Stilwill laughed. “You’re right to be out here celebrating,” he said. “What you guys did today, that was fucking epic. You realize they’re going to be talking about you, no, teaching what you did, today? Unarmored marines versus enemy power armor, and you took them out!”
“Some of them,” Jabar pointed out.
“It’s a first. It’s huge! Awesome!” Stilwill was floating on the air, Jabar saw. “We now know for sure that flesh and blood Marines can fight effectively against powered armor. And we sent the Venezuelans packing!”
“We got caught naked. It wasn’t awesome, it was a firefight. And there’s always a price. A billion dollars worth of armor, or some drones, or blood. To be honest, I would have preferred not to have found out how well flesh and blood does against armor. I would have rather we paid the price in scrap metal.”
That got through. Stilwill realized that people here had lost friends. That wrecked armor was scattered around the motor pool being worked on.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Enjoy the scotch.”
After he left, Jabar stood up, leaned over, and opened the trunk. Inside sat the components of h
is powered armor.
Piece by piece he took it out and set it on the table, and in between sips of the expensive scotch Stilwill had donated, set to cleaning it and checking the diagnostic software.
David Klecha is a science fiction writer living in West Michigan with his wife, three children, and no cats. After graduating from university, he skillfully parleyed his degree in History and fuzzy mastery of Russian into an enlistment in the Marine Corps and a series of entry-level IT jobs. A deployment to Iraq brought the opportunity to start a milblog, and when Dave returned home he began writing professionally, as well as climbing the IT ladder, putting his combat experience to good use. Now Dave works as a Network Administrator for a global oral care products manufacturer you’ve never heard of and mixes his science fiction writing with online how-to articles and sporadic blogging. His short fiction has appeared in Subterranean Magazine.
Tobias S. Buckell is a Caribbean born SF/F author who now lives in Ohio. He is the New York Times bestselling author of Halo: The Cole Protocol, as well as Crystal Rain, Ragamuffin, and Sly Mongoose. His fifty or so stories—many of which have been collected in the volume Tides From the New Worlds—have been published in various magazines and anthologies, including other John Joseph Adams anthologies such as Under the Moons of Mars, Brave New Worlds, Wastelands, and Seeds of Change. His next novel, Arctic Rising, is due out from Tor in early 2012.
The Last Run of the Coppelia
Genevieve Valentine
When Jacoba saw the glint of metal she signaled without thinking, and her mech, Arva, dove past the shallows towards the deep. Jacoba just hoped Arva’s hull would hold.
The comm crackled to life in her ear. “Jacoba, we’re not reading any algae down there,” David said from aboard Coppelia.
Jacoba was nearly down to Hyun, who was piloting Chollima to pull the last of the algae from the crevices in the rocks, sliding both handfuls into the plasma-front storage pod each of the mechs had built-in. Hyun frowned through his faceplate as he saw her passing, and flicked on his comm.
“Nosey,” she muttered.
He smirked and gave her a thumbs up. Chollima echoed it, one tentacle-finger raised.
“I’m not after algae, David” Jacoba said. “Arva knocked something loose when we were picking. I’m retrieving. Two seconds.”
“Is it bio?” David was a stickler for regs—in the four years he’d been crew they’d never gone an ounce over weight, or had an off-limits life form. They’d saved so much in fines that they’d be able to fix up Ruth’s mech Polly in a year or two.
“Negative,” she said. “It’s tech.”
David heaved a martyr’s sigh. “There’s no tech in this sector but us. Arva, bring it in.”
“Override,” said Jacoba, and Arva gave an acknowledging chirp and dove like she knew time was running out, the hull beginning to hum as she moved deeper into the murky dark.
(Mechs were coded to have some loyalty to their makers, but Jacoba suspected she’d built Arva more adventurous than the rest.)
“You’re not pearl diving, Jacoba,” snapped David. “We’re at limit. Get Arva back up.”
“But this is tech! For all we know it fell off Polly.”
Polly’s pilot, Ruth, buzzed into the comm. “Hey!”
But Ruth didn’t deny it, either. Polly was as docile a mech as you could dream of—with Ruth at the helm, she could harvest as much as Hyun in Chollima—but when a mech’s AI component had the uptake of a radio, it was hard to expect a lot of good judgment from her.
A thin line of static, quiet as a heartbeat, came over Arva’s sensors. Arva pinpointed the source; her legs and flipper-feet never stopped their steady, calm propulsion.
After a bemused moment, Jacoba said, “It’s still on.”
“No one told you to scan it,” said David. “You know scavenge regs on Minerva. It’s none of our business.”
The problem with David was that his voice gave him away every time, and though he was trying his damnedest to sound angry, he was curious—and worried.
That gave her pause. It was one thing to needle David, but the two of them knew better than the rest why you don’t get involved in things that aren’t your problem.
A moment later, Captain Shahida’s voice came over the line. “Jacoba, you have fifteen seconds.”
Arva’s depth gauge showed another forty meters before she was below regulation, and since that put her out of sensor range, Jacoba could probably fudge another ten before Arva’s storage container started to leak.
The hull beneath Jacoba squealed.
Okay, she thought, maybe five more meters.
But the little silver flash was almost within reach—it knocked gently against the rock, slowing it down just enough for Jacoba to catch up to it. When Jacoba extended her hand, Arva’s right arm moved, and when Jacoba closed her fingers and pulled back, Arva’s seven slim tentacle fingers plucked it carefully from the rocks.
It looked like a jellyfish, but there wasn’t time to examine.
“Arva, can you make room for some air?” she asked.
From the floor under her seat came the whoosh and whir of Arva pushing some ocean brine around in the plasma-front storage to make a dry air pocket to store the finding in. The storage space made up half the mechs’ torsos, and held a grown man’s weight in algae. The mechs could control how permeable the membrane was; it allowed them to push things inside that couldn’t float back out again.
“Ascending,” Jacoba called, grinning. For a backwater mech, Arva was still something.
Arva kicked furiously up to the platform on the water’s surface. When Arva pulled herself up, Hyun was already waiting, tapping his wrist, Chollima echoing the motion with a rhythmic clanging.
“Well,” Jacoba said, “where’s Ruth?”
Ruth sighed over the comm. “Dammit, Polly—I’m caught in a jelly swarm, over.”
Hyun cackled and tilted backward in his chair, and Chollima dropped off the platform and into the water.
“It’s not bad,” Hyun said. “Give us ten seconds.”
“Jacoba took your last ten seconds,” David snapped. “Move it.”
Polly piped through two bars of an apologetic song.
Unloading was always a trick.
The mechs were built for water, too-long arms and dexterous hands and powerful short legs. Though the webbing in their flippers contracted under the wide toes, they were still just awkward talon-feet on which the heavy torso—with its pilot pit and storage tank—balanced precariously. They lumbered like headless gorillas across the cargo bay to the tanks.
Then it was the division of their take into enormous tanks of algae and plankton and lichen bound for Alhambra Corporation’s terraforming stations. The species tended to smother one another in close quarters, so the mechs helped sort them as they poured through the membrane and into the right tanks.
It was an easy enough concept for Arva and Chollima. Polly tended to be surprised by the process every time, and three runs out of five Ruth ended up straining plankton out of an algae tank or rescuing stray squid with a noose-pole. Jacoba had done all she could for Polly—she moved just fine—but there was only so much analytic integration possible with a seven-ton SCUBA suit and a radio brain.
Jacoba couldn’t wait; she slid her hand into the plasma and pulled out the silver tag.
It wasn’t some loose joint.
It was a data drive, trailing wires.
She looked at it, weighed her options.
Then she climbed back up into the pilot pit, plugged it into the console, and whispered, “Have a look?”
Arva knew what she meant without Jacoba having to give the command, and as Jacoba rinsed brine out of Arva’s joints and checked for damage and logged their haul weights, she knew Arva was hacking the tag.
It wouldn’t hurt to have a copy, just in case. Old habit. You could never have too much information in your corner; she’d learned that much long before she reached Coppelia.
“D
one,” called Hyun, as Chollima’s plasma storage container slimed shut. “Six ounces under. I knew it! I told him! David can take a long walk off a short reef.”
“It’s his job to keep us regulation,” Ruth said.
Ruth had been an athlete, before they caught her doping and the bad press had pushed her so far out that she landed on Coppelia. Jacoba knew that these days, Ruth had a healthy respect for regulations.
Hyun rolled his eyes. “Or what, we make an extra hundred credits on excess algae? The horror.”
“That Minervan patrol ship crowded us this morning,” said Jacoba. “David didn’t give them an excuse to board. You’re welcome.”
“I think it turns his crank to nag us down the line,” Hyun said, shutting the algae tank. “Petty tyrants are a dime a dozen. Guy needs a hobby.”
Jacoba pressed her lips into a thin line.
“I don’t see the problem,” said Ruth, climbing into the crook of Polly’s left arm. “I also don’t see the problem with this shoulder—joints are all fine, what’s causing this lock underwater I’ve been getting?”
“A colony of microshrimp,” Hyun offered.
“A useless smartass, most likely,” Ruth said, and tapped Polly’s arm. “Hold still, I have to look at this.”
“Let me see.” Hyun swung up beside her. “It might be pressure. I had to reinforce Chollima’s knees last year.”
“Not buying it,” said Ruth. There was the screech of metal as she peeled back the scales at the shoulder.
Jacoba reached into Arva’s pilot pit for the drive. She was so exhausted it felt like Arva was shaking.
Over on Polly, Hyun whistled. “Damn, this shoulder’s keyed up tighter than David after an Alhambra inspection.”
“Shut up,” said Jacoba.
“You should talk,” Hyun said. “I thought he was going to blow a blood vessel when you dove. You can’t—”
Armored-ARC Page 8
