The Tetra War

by Michael Ryan

  Callie vomited when I carried her out of the cave, coughing up blue fluid as her lungs expelled the last of the fluid from the suit.

  After several long minutes, she began breathing normally, the transition from fluid to air complete. She’d stopped throwing up as well, and gave me a thumbs-up as she sat on a fallen log.

  All of her radio, IR, sat-comm, Be-Tech-34, and direct link capability were built into the suit, so I adjusted my external sound pickup to closely match normal hearing. I still couldn’t speak directly, so I had to type my end of the conversation, and she’d have to bear with whatever distortions my suit spit out. It was better than nothing, but at the moment I was concerned about maintaining noise discipline, so I pondered a way to communicate silently.

  I motioned for her to move away from the log.

  She shrugged in a “what’s up?” gesture, and I shooed her away with a hand signal.

  I toasted the log with my hand flamer until it was good and black, and then dug around in the dirt until I found a pointed rock that would serve as a clumsy writing instrument.

  I scratched sloppy block letters into the ash: Maintain silence until we’re sure we’re alone. I need you to take cover. I’ll topple your suit and trigger–

  She grabbed my armored hand and motioned for me to stop.

  I gave her the stone and she wrote a message: No, leave it.

  I put out my hand, palm up, and motioned with my fingers for her to hand me back the rock.

  I wrote in the ash: Why?

  Her answer: Because we might be able to retrieve it later with help.

  I took the stone from her and wrote my next missive with trembling fingers. If it falls into enemy hands, it’s not only a court-martial, it’s a death-penalty case.

  She scratched the word shit below the word death.

  Callie sank to the ground and tears began to roll down her face. I’d only seen her cry once before: the day she received the news that her mother had died. I felt helpless and wasn’t sure how to comfort her, being as I was encased in metal and she was wet, naked, and red-faced as a newborn.

  I let her finish crying before I wrote again.

  It’s going to be okay. Blowing the suit to protect it from the enemy is the proper action.

  Okay, she scrawled, then: Let’s move over that bluff. She pointed.

  I nodded and walked with her.

  Once I was sure she was adequately protected, using the bluff for cover, I removed one of the HE-Mini-74s from my arsenal and activated it. The missile was powerful enough to knock over the suit, but more importantly, it was a sight, fire, and forget weapon, which would allow me to provide additional protection for Callie before impact. I nodded to her, fired, and placed myself over her the best I could without crushing her.

  The missile exploded when it hit the suit, followed instantly by a massive secondary blast that rocked the ground beneath us. A billowing cloud of gray dust blew past us, and then clods of dirt and rock were raining from the sky.

  I typed in the command for an air quality test.

  A prompt appeared: <>

  I answered: Strategic.

  <>

  Tactical.

  <>

  I pushed myself off Callie and held out my arm, and she used it as support to stand. She gave me a thumbs-up and brushed dirt and debris from her naked form.

  Text appeared on my screen:

  <>

  Good, I thought. I typed some more, and a slightly nasally computerized version of my voice emanated from the suit’s external speaker.

  “I guess we can drop the noise discipline for now. The air’s okay. But we need to move before something dangerous shows up. And we need to find shelter and water.”

  “And pizza,” she said.

  I laughed on the inside, but only for a moment. Her expression had changed to one of shock. I followed her stare and turned to find a troop of natives with smears of tribal paint on their faces, their obsidian-tipped arrows trained on us, the deadly projectiles capable of skewering her naked form in an instant.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Every battle is based on deception.

  ~ General Tenaal

  The TCI-Armor Multiple Specialty Field Suit was not a mecha. I wasn’t transformable. I didn’t have the option to shoot laser beams from my ass or fingertips. Suited warriors carry formidable arsenals on their backs, but even the fastest needs a couple of seconds to select, retrieve, and fire a weapon.

  Don’t get me wrong; I could have killed all twenty-seven natives – I did a quick count and added facial recognition into a firing program – in under four seconds. But as I’ve mentioned, human reaction time to a visual clue is a quarter of a second, and I had to assume the natives weren’t much different. I could have slaughtered them all, but not before at least one of them killed Callie with an arrow.

  A single unarmed warrior stood directly in front of me; the equivalent of the group’s lieutenant, I guessed. His lined face and hard expression confirmed my impression – he was an elder.

  I had limited information on Purvastian native tribes, and our primary doctrine when encountering them was to avoid engagement. I pulled up possible translations for the sentence I come in peace.

  I typed furiously into a translation program, and my external speakers transmitted my attempts to avoid bloodshed. The elder paused and listened, which I considered a small miracle.

  “Don’t say anything rash,” Callie whispered.

  “I’m trying to tell him we’ve come in peace,” I answered.

  The apparent delegate of the tribe spoke. “I be Rastic.”

  “You understand Common English?” Callie asked.

  The elder eased the bowstring on his bow and approached. “Language Earth speak I – little,” he said.

  Huh?

  “You speak English?” I asked slowly, echoing Callie’s question.

  “Language Earth taught me.” He smiled with a broken-toothed grin. “When I was slave of Tedescon. Much years.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Callie said.

  He spoke to her while placing his hand on his chest. “Rastic is me. I Rastic. Raa-ess-tieee-ick.”

  A figure separated from the rear of the warriors. I presumed he was their leader, based on his elaborate face paint. He looked me up and down and then began a furious string of singsong speech. None of the tribe loosed an arrow at us, so I assumed we’d made progress.

  “Rastong is chief,” Rastic said, pointing to the man. “Tribute demand.”

  “You wanna take this, Callie?” I asked. She had the right personality for reasonable negotiation. My diplomatic skills usually resulted in dead bodies.

  She nodded her head at me, turned to Rastic, and said, “Tell Rastong we are enemy of Tedescon.”

  A brief exchange between the natives ensued. Rastic pointed to Rastong and said, “Rastong proof wants.”

  “I think he wants a shrunken head or something,” Callie said. Smiling at Rastic, she said, “We killed many Tedesconians. But we have no proof.”

  Another brief exchange between Rastic and Rastong ended when the low hum of an incoming aircraft claimed everyone’s attention.

  Callie glanced at me and returned her gaze to the natives. “We’ll have proof in just a moment.”

  The tribesmen exchanged a frenzy of frightened warnings. The shouting ended, and Rastic took Callie by the arm. He fixed her with a hard stare and said, “Hostage you.” With the number of arrows still aimed at Callie, much as I might have wanted to, I couldn’t intercede with violence.

  I gestured at the tribe. “Make sure he understands that if you’re hurt, I’ll slaughter his whole village.”

  Rastic nodded solemnly. “Starman fight. Starman kill many Tedescon. Starman has much feasting after.”

  My DS lit up with warnings. I had to pivot from the stone-aged warriors to the threats
or I’d never eat a ham sandwich again, much less a feast.

  <>

  <>

  Our spontaneous conference ended. I prepared to engage the enemy, and the natives disappeared into the jungle with Callie in tow.

  ~~~

  The lone incoming Tedesconian craft was a YC-15 attack-troop carrier heli-jet. My system identified that its typical load was a pilot and a squad of six fighters. I launched a TV-89 and broke for the nearest cover. The device activated a moment after it hit the ground, releasing smoke, laser beams, flares, sound makers, nonsensical radio chatter, and a platoon’s worth of shadowy holograms. A strafing run followed me like a dog at my heels, and a missile slammed into a tree as I threw myself behind it, showering me with bark and shrapnel.

  Hell.

  I spun, armed myself with a mini-rail-gun, and selected an HDB-93. The high-density bolt, a kinetic energy round designed to penetrate and disable craft using a combination of mass and speed, was expected by the Tedesconians. They employed a countermeasure so that in the smoke and confusion I couldn’t figure out which of the seventeen signatures my sensors were picking up was the actual craft.

  I switched weapons.

  I’d momentarily forgotten that laser targeting, like ballistic rounds, could be traced to its source. I was brutally reminded when the tree I’d abandoned after my last shot was pulverized with rounds a second after I moved. The heli-jet landed in the distance, and I assumed that six well-armed Tedesconians were now boots-on-the-ground.

  I didn’t have the time or luxury to worry about Callie, but I hoped the natives were good escape artists and had taken her somewhere safe. I was about to unleash covering fire across the field where the heli-jet had dropped its contingent, and the last thing I wanted to do was direct friendly fire into my new friends and naked partner.

  I set up a field tripod, mounted a Gauss minigun that I could control remotely, and attached a block of rounds. I figured five hundred would be enough to allow me to get to the other side of the field, where I planned to backdoor the enemy.

  Activating my jet assist, I took off into the jungle. The Gauss minigun randomly fired across a one-hundred-eighty-degree zone centered on my best guess of where the troops were. I’d programmed a slow rate of fire. My purpose wasn’t to hit anything; I was concerned with slowing them down so I’d have time to get behind them.

  The Tedesconians had undoubtedly relayed my location back to their command. My only hope was that the Teds didn’t have any additional troop transports this deep in the field to spare on a battle with a lone Gurt and a group of bow-and-arrow-wielding natives. No army has unlimited resources, and we were far from bases and cities.

  I put some distance between myself and the Gauss minigun, and after circling behind the Teds, I climbed a tree.

  I engaged my camo system and lowered my external temperature.

  And I waited.

  And waited.

  Heli-jet pilots hate staying on the ground, where they’re sitting ducks. Their vulnerability in an LZ is well known. As I expected, the pilot fired a high-explosive round in the general direction of the Gauss minigun and used its turret guns to lay down a massive amount of suppressive fire.

  The pilot didn’t realize I was one hundred eighty degrees in the opposite direction. He lifted off the ground and flew directly over me.

  Without their previous countermeasures scrambling my targeting system, I was free to fire the rail-gun. The HDB-93 shredded through the craft, tearing apart electronics and destroying any chance of a nonfatal landing. I was already out of the tree and running when it crashed into the canopy and exploded.

  My attack had been successful, but it also gave me away.

  Two missiles, a grenade, and a spattering of small-arms fire hit the trunk of the tree I’d been perched in moments before. I spied another promising tree and climbed high above the ground, reactivated all my camo systems, and settled in to see how the Teds would respond.

  After five minutes, most of the smoke and dust had settled over the rainforest in a low-hanging mist. The jungle foliage provided dense cover I hoped would prove adequate to conceal me. My field of vision was limited, but so was the enemy’s. I armed myself with my most accurate weapon, the long-range Gauss LRGS-32 sniper rifle, and slowed my heart rate so I’d be better prepared for what was to come.

  My perch was nearly perfect. I was well concealed and had a three-hundred-and-forty-five-degree view. Because of my camo, to an observer I would appear to be part of the tree trunk. My heat signature was low and would be difficult to detect with any of the equipment a trooper would be carrying, even in an armored suit.

  Light and shadow flickered through the branches.

  The chirping and whistling of birds and insects eventually broke the silence that lingered over the forest after the explosions. I continued to wait, motionless but ready to attack, like a seasoned jungle predator.

  If reinforcements were on their way, I was going to be stuck – they’d form a search grid and find me. But after another ten minutes of waiting, nothing larger than a few small birds flew into view.

  But still I waited.

  A mortar round exploded fifty meters away.

  Then another four.

  Then five in succession.

  I surmised five of the soldiers were hunting me, the last likely having remained aboard the heli-jet for ground surveillance, but I reminded myself that assumptions could lead to ugly consequences in the field.

  The munitions the Teds were using were too small to destroy me; but they weren’t trying to outright kill me, they were trying to flush me out of my nest. If they succeeded in knocking me out of the tree, I’d be dead meat. Even with my superior armor, five against one on open ground would be disastrous.

  Because I was working without a spotter, the protocol was slightly different. I transferred fire control from my weapon to my suit via Silver Wire, and I alternated between close-in snooping and fish-eye view. I needed to sight in on my enemies before they spied me.

  I was operating on the assumption that because the soldiers were cut off from a command base and their aircraft had gone down, they would get impatient.

  If they prioritized their last standing order and not their own survival, I’d have a chance to use that impatience against them.

  I had the luxury of being on my own and thus unworried about receiving conflicting instructions on the fly. Nobody could second-guess my decisions without a complete review of all my onboard records, after the fact. That gave me flexibility I normally wouldn’t have had.

  ~~~

  The first soldier I spotted was crawling low through a patch of brush a hundred and twenty meters out, at twenty degrees. I had no idea whether this poor sucker was the point or if they’d encircled me. But I did know she’d be the next to die.

  I’d affixed the bi-mount extending from the stock of my LRGS-32 to the tree trunk in two places. Nano-plas was efficient at sticking to nearly anything that wasn’t liquid, and with my right shoulder and arm rigidly locked, I had a tripod-like base for the rifle.

  I sighted in, and the Ted fighter’s face came into focus.

  Bright, beautiful green eyes stared back at me, although she had no way of seeing me or knowing I had her in my sights.

  I was preparing to fire when she glanced right.

  I hesitated and followed her gaze.

  Another silhouette appeared.

  I ranged in and discovered a soldier who was using effective camo, but I could make out that it wasn’t a natural shape I was seeing. I counted in my head. One one thousand. Two one thousand. Three one thousand. Back to Green Eyes. I didn’t want to act prematurely, which is an easy thing to do when you’re being hunted by five enemies and your partner’s being held hostage.

  I waited until Green Eyes looked to the left, and I tracked her stare. Pausing for a few seconds, I saw a tiny movement in the brush. A third soldier revealed himself.

  I moved my left fi
ngers, just barely, to type commands and program my system to target all three shapes and maintain ballistic solutions for them. I focused on my heart rate and willed it slower, ignoring the thudding of my pulse in my temples.

  Green Eyes raised tactical field goggles and scanned her surroundings. None of the three was looking for me up in the trees; they assumed I was on the ground. I suppose because I’d been running away from my original position along the jungle floor, their thinking got stuck. As I’ve warned greenies many times, failing to consider all possibilities in-theater could get you killed.

  I wanted to avoid revealing my hiding place until I’d locked on all five targets, and counted to myself again to clear my mind.

  One one thousand.

  A mantra.

  I’d maintained constant vigilance on my rearview DS, but I still had a small blind spot caused by the tree. Nothing appeared to be behind me. I watched Green Eyes, hoping she’d look toward the two hidden enemies I hadn’t placed yet, but she maintained her vigilance and gave away no new secrets.

  Another two minutes passed.

  My sniper rifle didn’t generate heat or noise when fired. While the rounds displaced air, the tech involved to track a high-speed sniper bolt was pricey and unlikely to be part of the equipment in the arsenal of a patrol squad.

  Once programmed, the rifle would fire automatically when I centered it on the target I’d selected. It automatically calculated the distance, humidity, wind speed, temperature, gravity, and our relative positions. I green-lit the firing system and then slowly inched the weapon toward the enemy and centered the display screen cursor on the torso of the first soldier. The instant the system confirmed target acquisition on the silhouette’s neck, the weapon fired. I didn’t wait to confirm the kill and instead swung the barrel toward Green Eyes.