Elvis shrugged. "I don't like talking about home much. I think about it a lot. Don't talk about it much. I'm a different person here. I was just Benny Ray back home, just a dumb farm boy. Here you guys call me Elvis. Here I have my sources. Here I have my gun. Here I mean something."
Marco couldn't help but grin. "And there, my friend, you are wrong. Here we are cogs in a machine. Ensign Ben-Ari is an officer. She means something. We're peasants!"
Elvis groaned. "Great, so even here I'm a farmer!" He peered into the darkness. "God, I hate that boulder."
"We'll blow it up tomorrow with grenades," Marco said.
In the darkness, Elvis began to croon, and they stood in the guard tower until dawn spilled across the desert like liquid fire.
* * * * *
"Meet the sand tigers," said Ensign Ben-Ari. "They are nasty beasts. They are deadly. They are nearly indestructible. They can survive in desert, forest, and on the surface of almost any planet we operate on. In battle they are your best friends."
The platoon's recruits stared, silent.
"They're a bit rusty, ma'am," Addy finally said.
"This isn't the goddamn Space Territorial Command, Maple," Elvis said. "This is a training base. We get the rusty old leftovers."
"Watch it, recruits," Sergeant Singh said, reaching for his baton.
As Marco stared at the sand tigers, he tended to agree with his friends. The machines on the lot—he counted twenty of them—looked a century old. At a glance, the sand tigers looked like tanks. They were large, cumbersome, and covered with armored plates. Instead of wheels, their bodies were mounted on caterpillar tracks. But they were smaller than the Behemoth tanks Marco had seen back in Toronto, and they had no cannons. Instead, machine guns thrust out of turrets at their tops. They looked less like tigers to Marco, more like clumsy old rhinos who wanted little more than to spend the day lounging in the sun.
Ensign Ben-Ari stepped toward one of the machines. The top of her helmet reached about halfway up the vehicle's armored body.
"Sand tigers," she said. "Produced by Chrysopoeia Corp since 2112. Each one of these machines is eleven feet tall, weighs sixty metric tons, and can race across almost any terrain at sixty kilometers per hour. That's fast for a machine this heavy. They are topped with .50-caliber, stinger-class machine guns." She reached toward the back of the armored vehicle, grabbed a handle, and pulled open a hatch, forming a ramp. "Inside, they comfortably seat one driver, two gunners, and nine infantry troops. These babies will drive over scum, crushing their exoskeletons, and take you deep into enemy territory without a scratch."
"But do they have a cup holder?" Elvis asked, earning thirty push-ups from Singh.
When Elvis stood up again, Ben-Ari walked toward him. She stared at the recruit, eyes hard. "You're a joker. It's funny to mock these machines. To call them leftovers. To call them rusty. But these machines mean something, Recruit Ray. They mean that humanity still stands. That we survived. That we fight back. That we rose from the ashes of the Cataclysm that wiped out most of our species. You see rust. I see humanity rising from ruin. And I'm proud of that. Because fifty years ago, you wouldn't be looking at rusty machines of war. You'd be looking at burnt corpses."
Elvis lowered his head. "I'm sorry, ma'am."
Ben-Ari walked away from him, pacing along the lines of troops. "Today you'll get to drive these sand tigers. Some of you might even go on to serve in them after basic. Form into fireteams: one driver, two gunners."
The platoon performed many exercises in trios called "fireteams." They grouped into threes when forming rank, when firing their guns, even for kitchen or latrine duty. While squads and platoons were official and unchangeable, the recruits could technically form any trios they liked, changing them each exercise. Yet over time, common trios had begun to emerge in the platoon, friends sticking with friends. Pinky always joined with his friends Dicky, a hulking brute, and Marfa, a snickering girl with shaggy brown hair. Beast and Caveman had become close friends, and Elvis often joined them—smaller and shorter and seeking their strength. As always, Marco paired up with Addy. At first, the third soldier in their fireteam was always different; sometimes Elvis (before he abandoned them to the taller, stronger recruits), sometimes Noodles (before he got kicked out of basic), sometimes Sheriff with the star on his helmet.
Today it was Lailani who approached them.
"Mind if I join in, kind sir and kind madam?" she asked.
Marco nodded, feeling his cheeks heat up. "You may, kind lass," he said.
Lailani tipped her helmet at him and came to stand between Marco and Addy; she didn't even reach their shoulders.
"Hey, Poet, Maple," Pinky called out, pointing at them. "You two adopt a little boy?"
"Watch it, Mack," Sergeant Singh warned.
Marco had to admit—with her buzz cut, slender frame, and short stature, Lailani did look like she could be their son. Even the diminutive Pinky was tall in comparison.
"Hey, Pinky," Lailani said. "Do they call you Pinky because of your height, or because that's the size of your dick?"
"De la Rosa!" the sergeant said. "Enough. Into your sand tigers. Move it!"
Face red, Pinky flipped them off, then turned to join his friends. They stepped into one of the armored vehicles. The other fireteams were doing the same. Marco, Addy, and Lailani walked toward a sand tiger and pulled open the back door. It creaked downward with a shower of rust, forming a ramp. Ben-Ari had claimed that a vehicle could hold a dozen troops, but even for just the three of them, it was a tight squeeze.
"These things are a lot bigger on the outside," Addy muttered.
"Sort of the opposite of a TARDIS," Marco said.
"What did you call me?" Addy frowned at him.
"I said TARDIS. You know, from the show?" Marco sighed. "Never mind.
"These walls are thick," Lailani said, looking around. "It's a mobile castle. Half this beast is just the armor."
Equipment filled the chamber, taking up a lot of the space. Two litters hung from the walls. Metal boxes were piled up, labeled Medical Supplies, Ammunition, and Battle Rations. A bench stretched between them. There were countless dials, buttons, cables, monitors, and pipes everywhere, and no fewer than three fire extinguishers. A narrow opening led to the driver's seat at the front, and a ladder rose toward a hatch in the ceiling.
"I call gunner," Marco said.
"Me too!" said Lailani.
"Me too!" said Addy, then cursed. "Fine. Fuck it. I'll drive. I'm a better driver than Marco anyway." She climbed over the boxes and under hanging cables, making her way toward the driver's seat. She pulled on a lever, and the engine coughed, sputtered, then growled before easing into a purr. Sixty tons of reinforced steel vibrated.
Marco climbed the ladder, and Lailani followed. They pushed open the hatch and reemerged into the sunlight. They found themselves standing in a gunner's turret. It offered only minimal protection—a ring of iron plates that rose to Marco's chest and Lailani's chin, leaving the rest of them exposed. From the ground, the machine gun mounted here had seemed small. But standing here in the turret, Marco realized how large the gun was. The barrel was longer than Marco was tall. No, this wasn't a tank, but it came damn close.
There were two places to stand in the turret. One gunner could hold the gun and pull the trigger. The other could turn a wheel, spinning the turret from side to side. Lailani took wheel duty. It was the right height for her, and she'd have to stand on her tiptoes to reach the machine gun's trigger. When Marco placed his finger on that trigger, a shudder ran through him. Firing his T57 was one thing, but this gun seemed powerful enough to knock down buildings.
Ahead of him, he saw Ensign Ben-Ari emerge into the turret of another sand tiger.
"We head out!" Ben-Ari said. "Drivers, follow me. Keep your speed slow and steady until we leave the camp—ten kilometers per hour, no faster. Once we're in the sand, we'll see some speed."
Ben-Ari's sand tiger began to move first, rumbling ac
ross the lot on its caterpillar tracks. The machine was so heavy that even in first gear it sprayed sand and pebbles like a car spraying water from puddles. One by one, the other sand tigers followed, moving in single file out of the lot and across the base.
Fort Djemila was several kilometers long, most it just empty space. The line of armored vehicles rumbled along, spraying sand and belching out smoke. Marco watched the base roll by: rows and rows of tents, drilling platoons, the concrete mess hall, the trailers where the commanders lived, the bulky armory, the firing range, the infirmary and the chapel, and mostly just sand and stone and heat. From here in the gunners' turret, the base seemed somehow smaller. The soldiers jogging, doing their jumping jacks, or marching seemed like mere toys. When Marco had first come here, he had been so terrified, so disoriented, that Fort Djemila had spun around him, had seemed like a swirling nightmare he couldn't escape. Now it had form, had internal logic to the madness.
This must be how the commanders see the fort, Marco thought. Not as a frightening, dizzying dream, full of pain and danger, but just a stage. Just a stretch of desert. Just an illusion.
As he watched a few new recruits marching into the base—"fresh meat," he could imagine Elvis muttering—Marco knew what they were experiencing. They saw only the blinding sun and burning sand. They heard the roaring engines, the shouting sergeants, the gunfire from the range. They didn't perceive the base as Marco could, with weeks of experience under his belt. All they had was the world in their heads, filtered through the pain and sunlight and sound. It seemed to Marco as he rode here that reality was fluid, that so much existed simply in the mind, open to many interpretations.
His thoughts were cut short as the sand tigers reached the barbed wire fence enclosing the base. The guards opened the gates, and the armored vehicles rolled out into the open desert. They rumbled past the small spaceport—the new recruits' rocket was still smoking here—and over a hill. The dunes rolled endlessly before them.
And they began to charge.
Sixteen sand tigers roared, racing over the dunes. Sand rose in great clouds around them. As they rose and fell over the dunes, the gun turret rocked, and Marco had to cling onto the railing with one hand. Lailani swayed at his side, grinning, clutching the gun's wheel with both hands. Inside the vehicle, Addy was whooping as she pressed down on the gas.
"Hold on tight!" Addy cried. "We're going all the way up to sixty!"
Sixty kilometers per hour wasn't very fast on a highway, definitely not very fast for a jet. But in a rusty, clanking, massive machine of metal and chains rumbling over dunes, it seemed as fast as a rocket leaving the atmosphere. The engines bellowed. The sand flew. Marco was nearly tossed from the turret as they crested a massive dune. For a moment the front of the vehicle hovered in the air before slamming down with a shower of sand.
"Hey, Poet!" Pinky shouted from the turret of a nearby vehicle. "Race you, asshole!"
"Faster, Addy!" Lailani shouted.
They seemed to go even faster. The caterpillar chains blurred. Sand gushed out in storms. Marco felt as if he were riding one of the sandworms from Dune. They raced for half an hour across the desert until they crested a hill, and Ensign Ben-Ari shouted into a megaphone, calling for them to halt. They arranged themselves along the hill in a row. Below in the rocky valley rose a hundred or more scum—just exoskeletons, still and propped onto metal rods.
"Gunners!" Ben-Ari spoke into her megaphone. "Aim!"
Lailani spun the metal winch, and the gun turret creaked as it turned, facing the scum exoskeletons. Atop the other sand tigers, the turrets creaked too, moving into position. Both Marco and Lailani pulled on their earmuffs.
"Fire!" Ben-Ari said.
Gripping the machine gun with both hands, Marco fired.
Even with his earmuffs, the sound was deafening. Blazing-hot .50-cal cartridges flew into the air. The bullets—each like a dagger—flew through the massive barrel, twenty firing per second, raging with fury. Marco clung to the gun, jaw clenched, body rattling. He had never even fired his T57 in automatic mode, let alone a machine gun with a barrel longer than his body. He shouted wordlessly, clinging on, as the ammunition belt raced through the machine.
The scum exoskeletons shattered. Claws, abdomen segments, and mandibles flew through the desert. As the guns kept firing, the recruits cheered.
"Die, assholes!" Lailani shouted at Marco's side, wheeling the turret toward a second target.
"Hell yeah, fuckers!" Pinky was shouting, firing his machine gun.
Marco remained silent, firing until the ammunition belt was done. The gun clicked to a halt, smoking. Hot shells sizzled around his boots.
"Who needs tanks, right?" Lailani said. "Give me machine guns over cannons—any day."
As the recruits were cheering and pointing at the shattered scum exoskeletons, Marco remained silent. He had seen live scum before. Live scum didn't stand upright and still, waiting for bullets to riddle them. They moved faster than the sand tigers. They leaped through the air. Their claws could pierce through armor—maybe even the armor of these vehicles. If Marco ever met them in battle, he doubted Lailani could turn the turret fast enough, doubted he could hit them as they swarmed from all sides. But he said nothing.
After basic, just give me that nice, cushy office job, he thought, so I never have to fire these guns in actual battle. Maybe I'll get to share an office with Noodles and spend the war dissecting The Silmarillion.
They turned and rolled back toward the base, and Lailani kept talking about how many scum she'd kill in the war, and Marco listened and nodded silently.
That night, as the squad slept in their tent, Marco couldn't fall asleep even after his guard duty. He looked at Addy sleeping at one side, Lailani at the other, and his friends deeper in the tent. He imagined them in battle, scum tearing through the camp, ripping open the sand tigers, dodging their bullets, their claws sinking into flesh. When he finally slept, he dreamed of that day long ago in Toronto, but it wasn't his mother dead in the snow. It was Addy, Lailani, Elvis, and the rest of his friends as the scum fed upon them, and even as Marco fired his gun, they closed in around him, as plentiful as grains of sand in the desert.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
They were five weeks into basic training, halfway through, when Ensign Ben-Ari gathered the Dragons Platoon and told them, "Today we are leaving our base. Follow me. Leave your duffel bags."
Marco stood with the fifty soldiers of his platoon in the rocky fields of Fort Djemila. His heart burst into a gallop. The scum! The scum were surely attacking! Just last afternoon the sirens had blared for three hours, and they had crouched between their cots with their guns, waiting for a battle that had not come—that, perhaps, was now here.
"Are we going to fight already, ma'am?" Elvis said.
"We're not ready, ma'am!" said Elvis. "We're only halfway through training."
"I'm ready." Addy hefted her gun. "Time to kick scum asses."
"For the millionth time, Addy," Marco said, "they don't—"
"Shut the hell up, soldiers!" Sergeant Singh shouted, drawing his baton. The tip crackled. "You do have asses, and next soldier to speak gets this rammed up theirs. And no, you're not going to fight today. You're still good for nothing but scum food—which would be a good use for you, if you ask me." The sergeant pointed at Addy and Marco. "You two just earned extra guard duty tomorrow night."
Ensign Ben-Ari waited until the soldiers were all silent, then spoke again.
"Earlier this week, HDF special forces launched a brazen attack on a scum laboratory deep in the Scorpius system, destroying a particularly nasty virus the enemy has been developing for chemical warfare. We haven't struck this deep into their territory since the Cataclysm. We don't like to escalate the conflict, but this was an action that had to be taken. We're expecting the scum to retaliate—on Earth."
The ensign paused, giving the soldiers time to digest the news. Marco felt a chill even in the heat of the desert. He knew that the scum dared
not gas entire Earth cities again like they had fifty years ago, not since humanity had developed the technology to leap through space and nuke their world. But since the Cataclysm, the War of Attrition had ebbed and flowed, some days quiet, others devastating. Would the war now escalate, perhaps even into another Cataclysm?
"Ensign," he said, "if we're not about to fight, what will we do?"
Ben-Ari looked at him. "The scum have already increased their sorties against our cities, landing ten times the usual number of pods. But we predict a larger retaliation sometime within the next few weeks. We believe the scum are planning the operation now. In preparation, cities across the world are conducting disaster relief exercises. Drills. Today you'll become actors. We head out to Greece this morning, where HDF medical forces will seek casualties within yards, streets, and ruins." She pointed at the recruits. "You will be the casualties. Some of you will be missing your legs. Others will be infected with scum venom. Others will be burnt. Sergeant Singh will hand out cards with your acting roles on the way there."
"Now march!" Singh shouted. "Linden, call out time!"
"Left, right, left, right!" Addy cried, and the recruits marched, heading out the gates of Fort Djemila for the first time in five weeks.
Five weeks? Impossible, Marco thought. It had been five years. Five generations. Five epochs. He felt like a man who had languished all his life in a dungeon, finally emerging into the light.
"There's actually a world still outside," he whispered to Elvis.
His friend marched behind him, looking around at the dunes. "I just see sand and a dick-shaped airplane."
Caveman grinned at them and clasped his hands together. "We're going to Greece! Flowers!"
A heavy HDF plane waited on a slab of concrete. A company of recruits soon exited the camp, two hundred soldiers in all, and they entered the aircraft. Several rows of benches filled the interior, and Marco took a seat between Addy and Elvis. He was careful not to sit too close to Lailani; gossip had been spreading through the platoon, which Marco didn't want to fuel. But he sat close enough to meet her eyes, to nod at her. She made a goofy face at him, eyes crossed and cheeks puffed out.
Earth Alone (Earthrise Book 1) Page 19
