The Tetra War

by Michael Ryan

  The squad leaders reported to the platoon leader, usually by requesting status updates across their line of sergeants.

  Eventually, Sergeant Veetea keyed me – I had my own quick code designator. “Status?”

  “Avery here,” I coded back. “Team is present and green. Prepared to return fire.”

  “Green light. SPO. Sectors one dash eighteen.”

  The SPO order – small projectiles only – meant our leaders thought we could remain less detectable if we didn’t bring out anything that exploded. I asked Callie if we should set up the CFMG-88, a two-man centrifugal force machine gun that fired minidarts, or if we’d be better off sniping with our Gauss AG.

  She launched a minidrone. “Hold one,” she requested.

  I waited.

  Callie paused before answering. “Lightly armored guard troops,” she said. “They don’t appear to be disciplined. Too tightly grouped. I vote machine gun.”

  “I like the way you think,” I agreed as I typed commands using a holokeyboard projected in front of me on the dirt. My equipment pack auto-dropped a box of mini-slugs, a tripod, and a multibarreled shaft. Callie carried the larger piece, a round, matte black, centrifugal-force-producing chamber. We worked together silently, having done this drill hundreds of times in training.

  The gun can spit out five thousand rounds in a hair over a second, making a human-activated trigger worthless. You’d use all your ammo before you could manually release the trigger, and you’d be likely to put most of the rounds into a single target.

  We were both connected to the gun via a Silver Wire, but I relinquished command of the gun to her.

  “Stable?” she asked.

  “Green,” I answered. The CFMG-88 produces no kickback, recoil, or sound, but an unstable base will defeat any attempt at precision targeting. The secret to using the weapon is to have total stability, accurate environmental information, and a good programmer to plug everything into the computer’s solution program.

  If the troops downrange had been equipped with any advanced armor, our weapon choice would have been different; but they were suited in light shielding, unprepared for what was about to come their way.

  Callie sighted a ranging microlaser on the center of the nearest guard’s head, just below the double black circles formed by his night vision goggles. She programmed the firing solution to deliver the highest probability kill shots: five-round bursts in a star pattern around a single initial shot aimed at the center mass of the face. The weapon would immediately seek the next target, plus or minus five percent differential, and fire identically. It would repeat until a minute passed with no new targets presenting, and then pause for new instructions.

  She programmed the firing module in seconds. I watched her actions in a small pop-up in my DS, not because she needed my input but rather because I usually learned something new watching her program on the fly.

  “Ready?” she asked.

  “Green,” I said.

  The first enemy toppled over dead after slapping his face as if a fly had landed on his nose.

  The next guard twisted slightly.

  Human reaction time to a visual clue is about a quarter of a second. I’m not sure how close to that the Tedesconians are, but I suspect about the same. The physics on Purvas are similar to Earth, perhaps identical, but I’m not anywhere qualified to comment on quantum mechanics.

  In a quarter of a second, a multibarreled centrifugal gun could send twelve hundred and fifty darts downrange. Before the first guard hit the ground, the rest were dead.

  A command sounded from the platoon channel. “Cease fire.”

  We were already repacking our hardware.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Be where your enemy is absent.

  ~ Admiral Slox

  After engaging the guards, an action that had announced our exact location, we were confident that something far deadlier would be on the way.

  We weren’t wrong.

  Three minutes after we bugged out, the Tedesconians launched a small thermonuclear device at the spot we’d occupied. Our suits were plenty good at shielding us from shock waves, radioactive fallout, and even blinding flashes of burning light, but not a direct hit.

  Even the new suits have limits.

  After all the excitement on that first day in enemy territory, the next was dull.

  The life of a soldier, even an infantry soldier behind enemy lines, could be extended periods of boredom punctuated by brief intervals of terror and death. I was never sure if we were waiting for new orders or just being cautious. We were never told.

  We hid and slept during the daylight hours. Purvas has a day that’s nearly identical to that on Earth: twenty-four hours, twenty-two minutes, and seventeen seconds. We’d adjusted our clocks to match local conditions, and I don’t suspect anyone noticed the extra time. Our internal clocks were already scrambled from having gone through the leap that brought us there from Earth.

  Callie and I were well hidden in an observation perch, waiting for orders that would hopefully send us off to do something useful.

  “You awake?” Callie asked. She’d attached a Silver Wire between our suits, and we could communicate most easily via typing on projected keyboards, the text appearing on our display screens. It was also possible to program your partner’s voice and have the comp read the passages, but my unit could never seem to get her voice right, and it sort of freaked me out listening to its attempts.

  In case you were wondering about noise and light discipline in the field, our combined electrical and heat signature would show up as a pair of traboonias, a local mammal about the size of a raccoon.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’m too bored to sleep.”

  “You tired?”

  “No.”

  “I wish we could have sex.”

  “You and me both. Anything to get out of this suit.”

  “I also wish I could eat a peanut butter and jelly sandwich,” she complained.

  “I’d eat an Italian sub if I could.”

  “Italian sub?”

  “Italy. Italians. The lost race back on Earth?”

  “Yeah, I know the mafia stories. Was their food good?”

  “One of the best ever invented.”

  “I want to try it sometime.”

  “Next R&R back home.”

  “Home?”

  “Earth,” I said. I still thought of Earth as home, although I realized it was kind of silly. I didn’t have a home other than with my unit. Wherever my boots were on the ground was home; although to be honest, my place now was wherever Callie was.

  “You think you’ll retire there?” she asked.

  “I don’t think about it.”

  “Bad luck?”

  “I don’t believe in that shit. But why bother thinking about something that’s unlikely to happen?”

  “Now who’s the cynic?”

  “Just a realist.”

  “That’s my line,” Callie typed.

  I nodded my head after reading her words. The background to her text was a never-ending bank of gray clouds that loomed over us, threatening to rain. According to our sensors, there was little wind, which portended a coming storm. We didn’t have long to wait. The sky darkened for another hour before the deluge started, and then it rained twenty-five millimeters a day for the next four days.

  On the fifth day, we saw the sun for an hour.

  Then it rained again for another three days.

  ~~~

  Our orders came on day eleven, via a coded burst from the Amphoterus.

  A starship could send out communications without worrying about giving away its position. The Tedesconians knew precisely where it was, as it was impossible to completely hide an intergalactic carrier even with modern cloaking technology. But we didn’t have the same luxury, so barring a reason to send a suicidal message that would pinpoint our whereabouts for anyone looking to squash us, communication with the ship was one-sided.

  When not in battle or
on the move, a fully powered suit can sustain a soldier for nearly a month. The actual calculations depend on the weather, ambient temperatures, body weight, metabolism, and to a lesser degree the stress, or lack of it, that a soldier’s facing.

  Considering our initial actions, our subsequent movements, and what we’d been ordered to accomplish, we estimated that we had another eight or nine days on-planet before we would be dangerously low on power.

  Extraction from a mission is often deadlier than incursion, and protocol dictated at least a five percent reserve at pickup – pickups rarely being on time and more often than not many dangerous kilometers away from the original scheduled retrieval point.

  SNAFU applies double to extraction. In the chaos that is the only constant of war, I’ve yet to see one go as planned.

  Our mission orders came over the comm: Move to the following coordinates: N393.927.439. Nest. On day fifteen, approximately 18:45-19:00, target TB:678b will be passing in a guarded convoy. Harass and destroy as needed. Target priority: Alpha-Tango.

  “First point?” Callie asked, her armored hand outstretched toward the looming jungle.

  “Sure. Why not?”

  We’d been sitting for days without so much as a fanged or clawed carnivore passing in the night. We’d heard reports of dinosaur-like lizards and of giant beasts with voracious appetites, but the most exciting thing that had happened so far had been a couple of days earlier, when we’d gathered some slugs. They were purple and yellow, slimy, and about thirty centimeters long. We killed time wagering on slug competitions. We held a slug Olympics: races, fights, and tests of strength.

  Soldiers in the field, bored, restless, and stuck in a self-contained suit, will find odd ways to amuse themselves. I once lost a week’s pay betting on tarantula versus wasp contests. I’ll never make that mistake again.

  Walking point is the opposite of boring. In an active theater, point is usually the first soldier to die. In large movements, under extreme conditions, point will be changed by a decent leader every five or ten minutes. A soldier could panic at the worst times under the extended duress of walking point, especially back in the days when armor was practically worthless.

  That day, I didn’t mind leading. I was hoping for contact, perhaps a small firefight or at least something to evade, like a dino-lizard, a saber-toothed tiger, or a flock of giant vampire bats.

  Instead, we hiked for two days without incident, changing positions every hour and getting five hours of sleep each night.

  On the third day we came across an area that appeared to have been recently occupied. Two of our standing orders were data collection and destruction of infrastructure, as long as we didn’t jeopardize our primary objective. Of course, these things were always subjective.

  “You take the north side?” Callie asked.

  “Sure.” There were no signs of life other than small animals and birds, so splitting up to circle the area didn’t seem like a bad idea at the time.

  ~~~

  I wasn’t worried after an hour – the terrain and jungle can be such that movement is extremely difficult – but after two I knew something had gone wrong.

  We shouldn’t have been in such a hurry.

  It had been boredom working on the mind like the inexorable dripping of water on stone.

  Clouding judgment.

  I initiated a tracking program and scanned the forest where I’d lost contact with Callie. It took less than five minutes to pick up her tracks, a combination of boot prints, broken grass, and crushed leaves. I followed the trail into a dark area under a canopy of trees. Her tracks were almost noticeable enough to bird-dog by naked eye, but I let the program do its job, and within moments a dotted path appeared in my DS.

  I followed her footprints at a moderate pace. I didn’t want to alert any hostiles, although no threats appeared during my regular scans of the area. There were no unusual noises, heat concentrations, mechanical vibrations, or anything else that would indicate the presence of anything bigger than a mouse. The surroundings were surprisingly barren for the depths of a rainforest, except for an occasional bird, a variety of snakes – though none of them the thirty-meter-long, venom-spitting monsters we’d been warned about – and a few lizards.

  I arrived at a thick tangle of vines that showered over a rocky cliff face and continued following her tracks along the perimeter until they stopped. Judging by the abrupt end to her footprints at the vines, she’d found an opening.

  I carefully parted the strands. My DS adjusted for low light, and I spotted Callie twenty meters inside a cavern near the bottom of a steep slope, standing motionless. I moved toward her, an antipersonnel flamer in my left hand and a small-caliber, silent, rapid-fire Gauss gun in my right.

  After circling her twice and scanning for heat, gas, and electronics, I came to the same conclusion she had: the landmine she’d stepped on was designed to bring the entire mountain down.

  Or at least half of it.

  A density scan below her feet revealed a cube about a meter square. When the bomb triggered, we’d be blown into microparticles a fraction of a second before the cave collapsed and buried any evidence of our existence.

  “Sorry about this,” she said.

  I took her gloved hand. “Don’t mention it.”

  “You should leave me.”

  “Fuck you for saying that.”

  “I wish we could.”

  “Only you would think of getting naked while standing on a pressure trigger.”

  “What type you think it is?”

  “Hard to say, but don’t move.”

  “Captain Obvious.”

  “I’m not the idiot who walked in here without an adequate scan.”

  “I did a quick sweep. Nothing showed up on my screen.”

  “Nothing but a giant bomb.”

  “Yeah, and a few bats.”

  “I like bats.”

  “I know.”

  “I love you,” I said. “Now be quiet.”

  “I love you, too,” she said. “Avery, I really did fall in love with you. It’s not just one of those conditioned military responses designed for optimal–”

  “Be quiet and let me work.”

  I began to dig the soil away from her right boot. Gently, slowly, and precisely. I don’t have much use for gods, but I’ll admit my hypocrisy at that moment.

  I prayed for a miracle.

  ~~~

  “You’re going to have to de-suit,” I announced twenty minutes later.

  “I’ll face a court-martial,” Callie objected.

  “Extraordinary circumstances necessitating drastic and life-saving action will be mitigating exceptions allowable under chapter twenty-seven, subsection ten of the Joint Uniform Multinational Armed Services Code of Conduct.”

  “You have that memorized?”

  “Hell no. I just called it up.”

  “You have the JUMAS Code stored in your–”

  “Doesn’t everyone?” I asked.

  “No.”

  “What do you do with all that extra storage?”

  “Porn, video games, pirated movies, all my old emails…”

  “Jesus…really?”

  “Sure. What if I get stranded on some deserted planet for a year?”

  “Power?”

  “I’d manage.”

  “Hell. Women–”

  “Don’t ‘hell women’ me,” Callie said firmly. She began the sequence to de-suit, and I watched her in fear for both of us. De-suiting outside the medical bay on board was not supposed to be possible, but Callie was a more than competent hacker.

  Per section 109-17b, subsection A: Upon a soldier’s capture by enemy forces, the soldier must activate program 17-4c.

  Program 17-4c was the self-destruct sequence. Tedesconian forces were aware of this protocol and never attempted to capture a suit. If they couldn’t outright destroy an armored soldier, they’d attempt to disable the suit in the field, knowing eventually the loss of power would drive the sold
ier to self-destruct.

  Suicide, which left the suit undamaged, was only acceptable if a soldier knew with certainty the suit would be retrieved by Guritain forces.

  This policy was loosely enforced by punishing or rewarding the soldier’s survivors.

  Being as we were in enemy territory, the proper protocol would be for Callie to wait until her power level reached one percent and then, sans any rescue, initiate the self-destruct sequence. As long as we destroyed the suit, however, the only violation would be her computer hack.

  A minor punishment would await, but considering death was the alternative…

  The planet’s atmosphere – its flora, fauna, bacteria, viruses, and parasites – were all within human tolerances. The fact that Callie’s grandparents and great-grandparents had lived through the die-off on Earth meant she’d probably be okay. Good genes. But animals and microbes weren’t the biggest threat. We still had a job to do. Fortunately, I could complete the heavy lifting on our mission. Killing our assigned target? A simple task I could manage alone. But an unsuited soldier trying to reach a beacon and jump into an off-world boat back to mother?

  Nearly impossible.

  Too many things could go wrong.

  “You should leave…just in case,” she said.

  “Forget about it. The weight differential is insignificant. Your suit will hold the trigger when you exit.”

  “But why risk it?” she asked.

  “The trigger will hold,” I said firmly.

  “Why, when you–”

  “I’m not leaving you. End of discussion.”

  “At least…see that rock over there?” She pointed to the cavern wall.

  “Yeah.”

  “It looks like it weighs about what I do.”

  “So?”

  “So I’ll step into your arms while you set the rock on my pack for counterbalance.”

  “You’re being paranoid.”

  “Humor me.”

  I’d learned in the beginning of our relationship that there was a point where it wasn’t worth arguing with her. I fetched the rock.

  The system purged. After three and a half minutes, the front of her suit made a loud cracking sound, and I went to work. I didn’t want to risk removing too much weight, so I allowed the plates to swing freely where I could, just enough to let her step into my arms. I set the rock in place and took her in my arms. Lifting her was nothing. I could have carried a hundred of Callie if I had to, but suits aren’t designed to be gentle and soft against naked human flesh, and I worried about accidentally injuring her as I walked toward the sunlight.