One Good Soldier

by Travis S. Taylor

  "Oh, the humanity," Corporal Bates added. He had never been smart enough to keep his mouth shut as long as Tommy had known the marine.

  "You two, don't try my fucking patience." Tamara shot them a stern look they could barely make out through her visor.

  "Got it, Top."

  The simulation referee AICs officially announced to all attack teams in the simulation that all troops within a two hundred meter radius of red team's Staff Sergeant Tommy Suez were all dead. Tommy could just imagine how the captain of the Blair must be reacting to the sim refs' announcement. The troops who had teleported down from the Blair never had a chance to fire a single shot before their weapons were locked out and they were reported as killed in action.

  As far as Tommy could see it, he had done his job. He had kept the blue team from taking the hill under overwhelming circumstances, for now. It would be up to Roberts and Warboys from here on to hold it. Tommy found a big rock and sat down on it.

  "What do we do now, Sarge?" PFC Howser asked him.

  "Nothing, Private. We're dead."

  Chapter 5

  July 1, 2394 AD

  Mars Orbit, Sol System

  Friday, 7:59 AM, Earth Eastern Standard Time

  "Aw shit!" Lieutenant Commander Buckley said as Engineer's Mate Petty Officer First Class (EM1) Andy Sanchez screamed from behind a control panel. "What now?"

  "Caught a little extra current flow in my elbow, Joe. I'm all right," The EM1 replied while rubbing at a new burn mark on the left elbow of his orange coveralls.

  "You've been trained on that shit, Engineer's Mate Petty Officer First Class. Don't make us have to write some incident up." Joe laughed at his senior enlisted man on the team. Hell, Andy looked young, but he had at least fifteen years in carriers. He had transferred over from the Lincoln just after the Battle of the Oort. Joe liked him, mostly because he was a very proficient engineer's mate. He planned to do everything he could not to fry this petty officer with hard X-rays like he had done his last one. He turned to his main propulsion assistant for an update on the jaunt projector.

  "All looks good, Joe."

  "Engineering! Bridge!"

  "Go Bridge," Joe replied. He could tell by the voice it was the Air Boss.

  "CHENG, I don't know what you people are doing down there, but I've got two squadrons of Ares mecha stuck on the lower cat bay! When do we expect to have that back up?"

  "We're on it, Bridge!" Joe turned to his DCAS operator. "Goddammit, I thought I was gonna get verbal updates on the main systems until the Damage Control Assessment System was back online!"

  "Joe?" Damage Control Assistant Lieutenant Concepcion gulped. "I'm checking that, sir. I sent two firemen to watch that but haven't heard a thing."

  "Mira, get them on the speaker. And check out what other systems are down!" Joe turned to check on the engineer's mate as he was crawling from behind the DCAS control panel on his hands and knees.

  "I've got the diagnostic for Aux and Main Prop hardwired directly to the readouts now, Joe. We should be able to keep continuous watch on them until the DCAS is fully up again." EM1 Sanchez took Joe's hand as he offered it and hauled himself up.

  "Good work, Andy. Do me a favor and follow the power flow to the cats and see where they are shut off."

  "I'm on it, Joe." The young engineer's mate took off through the hatch, down the hall, and out of sight.

  He'll find it. He's a good sailor, Joe thought.

  I'm tracing it, too. I see a disruption two decks down and one over between here and the hangar bay. There is something else interesting there, too, his AIC, Debbie Three November One Uniform Zulu Juliet One, added with a very animated tone in her mindvoice.

  What? Joe tried to keep himself cool and focused. It's just a sim.

  That corridor is very close to the exterior hull, and the air pressure reads as though we are venting.

  You mean a sim, right? There is a simulated leak?

  No, Joe. I mean there is an actual venting taking place. The air handlers had to kick in. Wait. It just stopped. Debbie sounded perplexed, but Joe wasn't. Joe had loved every aspect of the modern-day hyperspace supercarrier and enjoyed pouring over the blueprints, designs, and construction plans almost as much as he enjoyed sex. Sometimes, he thought, even more. And he knew immediately where that corridor led and how many maintenance hatches there were along the way. If the SIFs were down, somebody could QMT inside the outer armor layer inside the bulkhead. There was no atmosphere in the outer hull sections to prevent fire from transferring from the armor to the inner pressure walls, but that wouldn't stop marines in armored e-suits.

  "EM1 Sanchez! This is Buckley. Stop dead in your tracks! I repeat. Stop dead in your tracks. Communicate DTM only and hide your ass! I think we've been boarded, and they are right on top of you!" Joe turned toward two firemen at the aft edge of Engineering near the hatch who, in a real fight, would have been putting out fires, pounding damaged metal back into shape, and scurrying about with heavy tools or repair parts for some senior NCO or officer. As it was, they were standing around watching with nothing to do but stay out of the way and keep their thumbs in a neutral posterior location.

  "You two! Go out the passageways from both Engineering Room exits three hatches deep and secure them. Dog them down and step back each level dogging the hatch doors from the inside with lockdown protocol. Then get back in here and secure that hatch. Watch out for enemy boarding parties and get yourselves some firearms!"

  "Aye, sir!" they responded eagerly. They were probably just happy to remove their thumbs from where they'd been and to get busy doing something useful to help the ship win the war game.

  Debbie, patch me through DTM to Sanchez.

  Patched! Go, Joe.

  Andy! What do you see?

  Nothing yet, Joe, he replied in a somewhat shaky mindvoice.

  "CO, CHENG!"

  "Hold on, CHENG!" the CO replied. Joe hated having to wait. Every second could matter here. In the meantime he turned to his technology officer, Lieutenant Kurt Hyerdahl. "Kurt, I think the structural integrity fields are down! Get on it! And Goddammit, Mira, get that DCAS back online or get me a work-around!"

  "CHENG, CO. Go!"

  "CO. I think we've been boarded, sir. I've got someone trying to confirm visually, but we have real venting in the aft section that suddenly stopped. It's in the same corridor near an exterior maintenance hatch, sir," Joe said quickly.

  "Understood, CHENG! Keep your man under cover."

  "Aye, sir!"

  "Kurt! Tell me about those SIFs!" Joe shouted with urgency.

  "I've got it, Joe! There is a power inverter blown out on the main control panel of the SIF-generator distribution assembly. It is, uh, hold on . . ." Kurt clacked away at his panel keys and at the same time was talking DTM with his AIC, but it didn't matter. Joe knew the answer.

  "Never mind, Kurt. I know where it is." Joe whipped his head around to look across the room at the SIF control panels. They should have been lit up like a damned Christmas tree, but instead they looked normal. Then he shook his head and glanced to his left at the DCAS panel. That damned diagnostic system was a single-point failure in the major systems. They weren't there six years ago, before the fight at the Oort. During the repair, updating, and retrofitting of the ship afterward, the damned engineers at the Luna City shipyards had seen fit to upgrade to the new, approved all-in-one Damage Control Assessment System. If you asked Joe, it was a piece of shit.

  To calm himself, he let his gaze settle for just a second on the Main Prop system—the true love of his life. The power couplings between the vacuum fluctuation energy collectors and storage system and the hyperspace projector and fluctuation-field shields were intact, and the spacetime metric modification projector tube was swirling a perfect pink and purple hue. That meant that the Main Prop was in tip-top shape and humming beautifully.

  It's just a sim, Joe reminded himself. Joe had seen the real thing up close, personal, and almost deadly for himself. Sims were
a piece of cake. Hell, there was no violent ship motion and gravity lurches that nearly made you vomit. There were no horrendous thwangs against the hull plating from enemy missiles. No constant and never-ending fires, blowing circuit panels, fused breakers, overheating power couplings, and, best of all, no goddamned liver-toasting hard X-rays! It was just a sim. Hell, the firemen and other lower-rank sailors might as well have been playing checkers for all they could add. In a fight, they'd be working their collective asses off. At least now they were getting to stand guard and dog down the doors. Maybe there was more they could do. But Joe decided he'd just have to get back to that one.

  Right, it's just a sim, Debbie agreed with him.

  The sentiment brought Joe's heart rate down a good fifteen beats per minute. That enabled him to focus on winning the sim. After all, winning was what the crew of the flagship of the fleet was best at. Under all types of unbelievable, overwhelming odds, they had come out on top time and time again in war games and in battle. Joe was sure that the admiral wasn't going to let up without a fight, so he wasn't about to let up now, either.

  "The problem here is, folks," he shouted to his engineering team as he tried to keep a calm demeanor and look each of them in the eye, "we have a blown fuse between the power to the SIFs, Aux Prop, Main Prop, Directed Energy Guns, et cetera. And that fuse is the goddamned DCAS piece of crap. We need to unhook that thing and bypass it without shutting down the major systems. I'm sure if the admiral were to out of the blue lose his DEGs just because we are monkeying around with shit down here, he would be a bit, uh, unnerved. Any suggestions?"

  Joe looked around and scratched at his head for a brief instant. He was perplexed. How the hell did he bypass that damned DCAS panel without wrecking the ship?

  The problem was that there was no way to get the energy from the storage units on one side of the DCAS to the power inverters across the room on the SIF panel. That was a distance between the two panels that might as well have been light-years. Besides, that damned DCAS was tied into everything. Joe was beginning to feel like he had been in this situation before. It was déjà vu all over again for him.

  "Joe." Lieutenant Mira Concepcion snapped her fingers. "Who cares about the DCAS? If we bypass each system to the appropriate control panel, the DCAS will just read that they are not working. But we're using visuals anyway, so who gives a shit?"

  "All right! Good plan. Everybody, we're breaking into teams. I'll take the SIFs. Fireman's Apprentice, you're with me." Joe pointed at a sailor behind the Aux Prop panel and motioned the young enlisted woman to follow him. "Keri, take the Props. Kurt, the DEGs. Mira, get the cats going."

  "Aye, Joe!"

  Joe! Eighteen AEMs just passed by me. They're headed you're way! EM1 Sanchez reported through the DTM link.

  Thanks, Andy. Good job. Unless you've got a weapon and want to tangle with a bunch of jarheads, just stay out of it. My guess is that the cat bay has been taken also, so don't go that way, either. Best to stay put and wait it out. If you see something nearby that needs fixin', and you can get to it, go ahead. Otherwise, sit the bench for a little while. Joe hated not having one of his well-trained, more-senior enlisted sailors where he needed him, but that was just the way it was.

  "We've got company headed our way, people! Everybody grab a sidearm!"

  Chapter 6

  July 1, 2394 AD

  Mars Orbit, Sol System

  Friday, 8:07 AM, Earth Eastern Standard Time

  There was just no way in hell that Andy Sanchez, United States Navy engineer's mate petty officer first class, was going to sit in a wiring closet and hide while enemy marines, simulation or no, marched around on his ship. But first, he needed a plan.

  How can one EM1, unarmed and unarmored, take out a squad of armored-to-the-damned-teeth e-suited hardassed fucking marines with weapons, and explosives, and lidar, and radar, and infrared, and QM sensors, and no telling what other shit that I ain't been trained on? he thought. I'm not about to let the Madira lose this wargame if I can do anything about it. But what . . .

  Joe said to stay put, his AIC, Petty Officer Third Class Bebe Six Four Alpha One Sierra, reminded him. She had always been an AI that liked to follow orders to a tee. But she had no choice except to go where Andy took her, being inside his head and all. So she had learned, all the way back to Andy's fireman-apprentice days, to not push the spit and polish too much.

  He said to fix something if it needed it. So we just need to find the right thing to fix. Andy started running scenarios in his mind about how he might be able to slow down a bunch of marines. He had been repairing and upgrading parts of the ship for the better part of six years now, and he understood it well. Not quite as well as Joe and Benny, but well. There had to be some repair trick he'd learned over the years that would let him set up some sort of catastrophe at the right time. But just what was the right thing to do?

  Bebe, pull up the repair and upgrade schedule for this part of the ship. And can you track where those marines are? he asked.

  Schedule up, Andy. Hmm . . . track the marines. Using the internal environment controls, I have been able to track a grouping of heat signatures travelling in a pattern that would suggest they are moving carefully and covertly. Also, using the internal sensors I can track them because there is a region of sensors being jammed that seems to be moving. Must be them. There is another group behind us several hundred meters, and one on the other side of the ship.

  Good. Andy thought about it for a moment and then started reading through the maintenance schedule in his head. Bebe, plot that track on a deck-overlay map for me and keep it up in my visual. Might as well start heading toward the ones going for Engineering. Pass this map along to the bridge.

  Aye, Andy. Though I'm not sure we'll make it to Engineering in time.

  We'll see. If we don't, we don't.

  Andy crawled out of the wiring cabinet and adjusted his orange coveralls. His tool belt hung on the cabinet door's handle, slamming the door against his back.

  "Shit." Andy cursed at his clumsiness and told himself to be quiet. Then a thought hit him.

  Bebe, those marines are in armored e-suits. They'll be bumping into hatches and shit all the way. They'll have to take the outer and larger corridors to get where they want to go without damaging the ship. And we know they don't want to do that—after all, they are U.S. Marines, right? So can you extrapolate from the motion you are detecting which likely big hatches and passageways they would be taking to potential targets?

  Sure, Andy. Here. Then his AIC highlighted three new paths in his mind. The three groups weren't going for different locations. Well, one of them was going for Engineering and was already knocking at the door. Nothing he could do for Joe and the rest of the Engineering team. But the other two were headed to the main elevator shaft internal to the upper deck tower located midship, which led to the bridge. Then he noticed one small line on the maintenance schedule that he had almost missed. The line read:

  Main Tower Elevator Repulsor-Field Generator Recalibration, Upgrade, and Checkout.

  The main tower elevator shaft was the only internal passage to the bridge and the command crew. Andy didn't have to think about what to do any longer. He had to shut off that elevator shaft somehow. He started running as fast as he could go in the direction of the forward main elevator. He made a point to stay in the tighter hallways. He also made it a point to beat those red-team marines to that damned elevator.

  Patch me through to Joe.

  Done.

  The Engineering team had managed the patches around the confused and failed damage diagnostics hardware of the DCAS, and just in time as a squad of red-team AEMs started knocking on the doors three levels out. At first they tried hacking the protocols on the locks. When that didn't work, they went to high explosives—simulated high explosives. The sim boxes that attached to the door made a pop like a firecracker, and if the box was set to simulate the right level of HE, then the AIC referees running the simulation would open the
hatch. It took the AEMs several tries on the first hatch. Joe knew that they wouldn't make the same mistakes a second and third time.

  What the hell can we do? he thought to himself, not necessarily to his AIC.

  Too bad they're in suits or we could gas them, Debbie added.

  Hey, do it anyway! Maybe they don't have their faceplates down. You know how AEMs are about breathing real air anytime they can. That might buy us some time. Joe thought more about that approach. They didn't have much heavy firepower, but they did have the power equivalent to a miniature neutron star trapped in the Main Prop hyperspace-jaunt projector tube.

  "Everybody on me!" Joe said in his voice of command. The full complement of the Engineering team and the supporting seamen and firemen and fireman apprentices converged on him as he made his way to the center of the room underneath the four meter in diameter pink and purple swirling tube that ran the length of a major portion of the ship. He reached up with his hands and tapped the bottom of the conduit to the projector tube. Then he addressed his team with a somewhat wacky idea. Hell, it wasn't that wacky—he'd actually done it before. Last time he did what he had in mind, it worked, but—and there was always a "but" in these situations—it had nearly killed him and his first engineer's mate.

  "Listen up, everyone. We haven't got but a few minutes maybe. We're going to pull a cable from that power coupling on the jaunt drive projector here"—he pointed at the now-infamous Buckley Junction—"tie it around the junction housing, and then drag it to both exit doors and then over here to the power unit for Aux Prop. Get to it!" The team scurried about to set up the makeshift power conduit rerouting. The enlisted men and women began pulling the heavy flex-conduit that was several centimeters in diameter and heavy as hell. The senior techs and engineers began rerouting power flow and making certain things were connected, they could get a power-flow circuit that would work, and that every breaker in the ship wouldn't blow.