by Michael Ryan
My camo works miracles, but it can’t eliminate all movement.
As Green Eyes tumbled sideways from my kill shot, the third soldier nearest her pulled the trigger on a full-auto weapon, slamming heavy slugs into my armor and the tree. I managed to remain still long enough to enable my weapon to fire. The third soldier died instantly, but the damage was done. The tree split into pieces.
I had the presence of mind to release the nano-plas that held my rifle’s bipod base, and I hit the jungle floor with a thud, weapon in hand. A fraction of a second later, I was blinded by an explosion.
I received an unnecessary warning. <
The other two soldiers had been waiting for me to reveal my position. I suppose sacrificing sixty percent of your troops was a good strategy when the alternative was death for everyone, but it was still harsh, and a good insight into the fighting mentality of the Tedesconians.
I’d lost much of my remaining suit power during the explosion. Reverse-force technology was a juice hog. So was jet-pack-assisted running, but I had no intention of letting them fire another HEAS round at me.
I leapt to my feet and ran, dodged, and jumped.
A few small-diameter bolts hit me, but none did any damage. Targeting systems for mortar rounds weren’t effective against an erratically moving target in a thick jungle, so I was confident that I could evade a direct hit if I stayed on the move.
A clearing in the trees opened before me, and I saw a glint of sunlight on a waterway. I threw myself down behind a mud berm and replaced the sniper rifle with my standard-issue Gauss assault rifle, which I clamped to my left forearm. I mounted an antipersonnel frag-grenade launcher to my right arm and prepared both weapons to fire on my command.
Something big moved across the water.
One of the local dino-lizards I’d heard so much about was now basking in the sun on the shore of a little tributary that twisted into the jungle.
I reasoned that the mud and water would make for a good ambush nest, although I didn’t suspect the two remaining troops would be so bold that they’d blindly follow me into a clearing. Nevertheless, I wedged into a depression in the mud that was obscured by an outcropping of volcanic rock.
I activated my light-bending camo again, making myself nearly invisible against the surrounding landscape.
I did a mental inventory of my remaining weapons, a routine I often used to get my breathing under control. Forcing liquid through your lungs under stress takes its toll. Responding to my increased heart rate and the activation of my camo, the suit’s medical program released a nano-tranquilizer into my blood to help calm me down.
My breathing returned to normal, and I took a moment to check out the reptilian monster lying in the sun. It was huge, and I laser-ranged it out of curiosity. The beast measured nineteen meters long, snout to tail-tip – a living and breathing dinosaur-sized crocodile. I’d never seen a live croc, although I’m told they still exist on Earth. I once went to a natural history museum that displayed a giant stuffed Nile crocodile, but that was as close as I’d ever gotten to one.
That they were interplanetary cousins would be hard to debate, but this beast was bigger and far more menacing. And clearly alive.
Science had long ago established that Purvas and Earth shared similar DNA. What was open for interpretation was whether each planet had evolved similarly or whether they’d shared a common ancestor – perhaps an intergalactic equivalent of the ark from Christian belief – or had been designed by an intelligent being.
It’s funny what soldiers think about during high-stress operations.
I was almost killed once because our squad became distracted while arguing over why there are dozens of mustard flavors but only one type of catsup.
Don’t ask.
The fear of imminent death causes the mind to wander in odd directions. Two killers were stalking me, and I was wondering if aliens had seeded Earth twenty-five thousand years ago.
Which made as much sense as any other theory I’d heard.
I thought about Callie but quickly realized that worrying about her would be counterproductive.
The reptilian monster’s eyes moved.
I had company.
A significant benefit of being in a self-contained suit is that you never have to hold your breath.
With the suit in locked-down mode, I didn’t have to worry about moving; the suit made it impossible. I could breathe regularly, and a simple program that was easily overridden instructed my computer system to immobilize the suit.
I’d become one with the rock and mud.
I watched the reptile’s eyes as they shifted between two points above me. I released the suit so I could move and aimed the grenade launcher slightly up and to my left. Next I used a program I’d learned from Callie to disable the grenade – a hack.
What was the point of firing a grenade you didn’t want to explode?
In this case, a diversion.
I triggered the launcher, and the grenade looped above the little stream. Neither the dino-lizard nor the two stalkers above me noticed it flying through the air, but when the projectile hit a branch, all hell broke loose.
The massive reptile practically flew across the shore in the opposite direction, surprising me with how quickly it could move. As it entered the stream to my right, the first Ted jumped over the berm, firing into the brush where my grenade had landed. He used me for cover, mistaking me momentarily for part of the surroundings. I think he realized his error for a nanosecond, but too late. I moved like lightning and crushed his lightly armored throat with my power-enhanced gloved hand.
He didn’t make a sound as blood splattered across my DS. For a moment all I saw were dark streaks until my system compensated and scrubbed the offending pixels. Because my external ears were adjusted for high pickup – I needed to be able to hear even a breaking twig – the sound of his bones crushing in my grip echoed in my helmet.
I cringed.
Snuffing out the life of a sentient being with my hands felt oddly personal. He’d been somebody’s kid. Perhaps he was a brother, husband, or best friend.
Maybe, if he’d lived, he’d have gone on to do great things.
I won’t say I felt guilty. He was, after all, trying to kill me.
But after seven years it’s easy to wonder about the reasons we were in the middle of an ancient jungle on an alien planet, crushing the throats of dumb boots. To those reading this account, know that I don’t regret killing as part of the job; but if you lost a loved one on the Tedesconian side during the Tetra War, I sincerely extend my condolences. Had I been living my dream, I’d have much rather been just outside New Sydney or at a resort on Bali, surfing, eating tacos, and chasing blonde German girls, not strangling young Tedesconians for reasons to this day I can’t pretend to understand.
I dropped the dead soldier to the ground and raised my left arm to search for a target with the Gauss rifle. I changed the programming on the grenade launcher and removed my previous hack.
The dead soldier’s partner was more cautious than his predecessors had been.
I no longer had a giant set of dinosaur eyes to indicate movement on the bluff above me, so I launched a minidrone. I was reasonably sure my adversary knew my general location, so I wasn’t concerned he would gain any new information when I sent it into the sky.
The enemy appeared on my screen. Instead of instantly fleeing, which would have been the smart move, he fired at the drone. Instinct, of course, but a fatal error.
I lost the equipment, but he was dead an instant later, the drone having had plenty of time before it was torn to pieces to compute a firing solution for the grenade launcher.
Moments later, Rastic walked out of the jungle.
He was alone.
He smiled and said, “Starman come.”
I followed like an obedient hound, because somewhere my naked and vulnerable partner was being held prisoner by a village of tall, muscular, bronze-skinned w
arriors.
I think I was more jealous than worried for her safety.
CHAPTER SEVEN
A Specialized Drop Infantry sniper must not be susceptible to fear, anxiety, remorse, or doubt.
~ Guritain SDI Training Manual
Hours later I was seated by a village campfire, watching Callie, who was still naked and obviously drunk on some sort of fermented elixir, dance around a fire pit with a dozen other women. I’d been given no choice but to follow Rastic back to their village, as he’d been the only one left behind to watch me battle it out with the Tedesconians. He’d brought back a handful of Ted toes and pinkies as proof of my kills. I found out years later that the tribe was part of a larger group that dwelt in the river lands and worshipped an interesting group of deities. One of their gods commanded that enemies be allowed to enter the afterlife with as much of their bodies intact as possible, so they generally only took small things, like fingers, little toes, and maybe an earlobe; but if an enemy fought without honor, they cut off his penis.
Rastic told me in broken English that we were welcome to stay until the end of days as long as we did our fair share of work and Callie contributed to the tribe by getting pregnant as often as possible. I laughed, which apparently hurt his feelings, judging from the dark look he threw me before padding away.
Callie stumbled over to my log and sat beside me. “I wish we could…you know…I’m kind of…sort of…drunk.”
“You’re drunk, all right,” I agreed.
“Only a little.”
“What am I going to do with you?”
“Nothing,” she answered. “I’m staying here.”
“You’re crazy.”
“You’re staying with me, and we’ll make babies and live off the land.”
“We’d be hunted down.”
“They’d never know.”
“They’d track my suit.”
“Shut up and do me.”
“Callie, I’m in armor, or haven’t you noticed that?”
“Take it off and make me pregnant.”
“You’re really drunk,” I said. “What the hell did they give you?”
“Nothing,” she said. “I’m freeeee!” She stood back up and began dancing again.
I have to admit that her proposal, as crazy and impossible as it was, did have a certain charm to it. Imagine going back in time a thousand years and living off the land. Dancing in the moonlight, drunk on God-knows-what, and making love in a grass hut. I understood the attraction and briefly wondered what the odds were of getting away with such an outlandish scheme.
I had no intention of deserting, but fantasies don’t have to be realistic to be enjoyable.
I’m a soldier. I’d said an oath.
But as I watched her sway and wiggle her hips at me in time to the polyrhythmic tattoo of the drums, I had to admit that her drunken proposal had a certain seductive allure.
The next morning, far from the village and perched in our new nest, Callie claimed she had no recollection of the prior evening.
I wasn’t sure whether that was true or not, but I was smart enough not to press the issue.
“Jesus, Callie,” I said. “You were crazy drunk. I hope you didn’t do permanent brain damage.”
She ignored me.
Women.
“Don’t look at me like that,” she said.
“Like what? You can’t even see my face!”
“You know exactly what I mean.”
Hell. She had x-ray vision and could read minds.
The convoy transporting our target was due in a window that started an hour after we’d settled into our perch. I was pleased with our odds – we’d set up not only an excellent field of fire but a secure spot for Callie to hide.
“You should go now,” I said to her. We’d found a cavern shaped like a lava tube two kilometers from the nest. I’d cleared it of a few harmless bats and a nonvenomous snake, and unless we got really unlucky, Callie would be safe during the kill. Our more significant problem would be getting her back safely to the retrieval.
One thing at a time.
Tempting as it was when nothing was happening, there was nothing more unproductive in the field than worrying about a future that you couldn’t control. I wanted Callie in the hole so I wouldn’t have to worry about her.
“I have a little more time, don’t I?” she asked. “It’s kind of claustrophobic down there.”
“Okay, thirty minutes,” I said. “But that’s tops. I mean it.”
“Yes, master,” she said sarcastically.
I could never be upset at that freckled face for more than a minute. I hated being this close to her but unable to touch her. It’s shocking to me that throughout most of Earth’s history, soldiers had sex with prostitutes during wartime instead of being allowed to form bonds with equals. I guess it’s not surprising, but it still makes me shake my head. I wondered what current practices humans considered normal would be found insane by people in a thousand years.
War, perhaps.
But knowing humans, and Guritains, Tedesconians, and even Errusiakos, I wasn’t holding my breath that anything would change.
People covet things.
Things require resources.
Because things are scarce in a universe mostly comprised of nothingness, war was the natural state among sentient beings.
“What are you thinking about?” Callie asked, pulling me back into the present.
I held up my gloved palms. “How can you tell I’m thinking when I’m in this monstrosity?”
“It’s the way you hold your arms.”
I dropped them to my sides and frowned.
“Don’t change,” she said. “I like knowing I can read you, even when you’re in that–”
“Quiet,” I ordered.
She instantly obeyed. We joke around a lot, but at the end of the day, Callie is a first-class soldier.
I gave her a hand signal to bug out. She returned a thumbs-up and dashed to her hideout. The moment she was out of sight, I switched my focus to a convoy of vehicles that was bouncing along the rutted jungle road in the distance.
Ten minutes crawled to twenty.
Being this far out meant using a BV-87-LL telescope, which was the latest version distributed to sniper-spotter teams. With the telescope secured on a self-correcting pentacle mount, I began searching the vehicles for my target.
All four were identical.
None had side windows. Then again, I hadn’t expected any.
But I did expect to find a clue as to which vehicle was carrying my objective – the VIP I was tasked with eliminating.
A rule of thumb is that you can forget about the first vehicle. Nobody in their right mind puts a VIP in the lead transport.
Even knowing everyone knows this isn’t reason enough to put a VIP on point, using the logic that nobody will suspect such a move because lead vehicles notoriously end up being the ones that trip explosives.
And you can safely eliminate the rear vehicle. There’s too much of a chance that a sneak attack will occur from the rear.
So the trick then becomes guessing which of the middle vehicles is carrying the target. Sometimes you can deduce it through observation.
Once I was observing a trail of vehicles cutting through the forest in the western Drone Zone, near the old Earth city of Anchorage, and I noticed that one slowed slightly to avoid potholes. It turned out to be the target’s transport and an effective one-shot, one-kill mission for me.
I got a medal for that excursion.
I continued scanning each vehicle through the scope, hoping to find something to give me a clue as to which of the vehicles I should hit first.
While it’s possible to take out two transports in a convoy, it’s wishful thinking to consider it likely. Once I fired a shot, everything that happened afterward needed to mesh together seamlessly.
Below me, a valley gorge with a swift river stretched for kilometers in both directions. A suspension bridge spanned
it, creating a natural pinch point. The convoy sped across but stopped once it reached the opposite side.
A group of natives emerged from the trees and approached the vehicles. A pair of guards left the lead transport. My telescope was powerful enough to zoom on faces and hands, and I was curious to see what the natives were carrying.
It turned out to be fruit.
They were offering chopped fruit, as if the convoy were carrying a group of tourists on an adventure tour. I chuckled to myself as the guards made a purchase and delivered it to the third vehicle. The procession got under way again, and I had my target.
Five minutes later, the vehicles approached a straightaway located directly below me. I switched my view from telescope to riflescope and programmed a sequence of attacking actions.
I launched all six missiles that I’d saved for the mission. In order to avoid being pinpointed, I’d set them up three kilometers away on a rocky outcropping. Firing them all at once was an all-or-nothing proposition, but one that carried the greatest likelihood of success.
Callie’s programming skills were superior to mine, but I wasn’t so bad in a pinch, and I had better tactical abilities.
Or so I thought. She’d disagree, but what good are soldiers if they don’t think they’re the baddest killers in the field?
I’d scanned the topography when I set up, but I’d had to make some educated guesses about features that were out of my line of sight. Sending up a drone would have been too risky.
I’d programmed three missiles to hug the ground, giving them auto-adjust permissions at a higher tolerance than I’d have preferred, but as I’ve observed before, nothing in the field ever goes easy or as expected.
The other three missiles were programmed to track high.
All were sent on a flight path that took them well away from my nest when they first launched, so the enemy’s defensive radar wouldn’t know where they’d originated unless they had air support, which I’d seen no indication of.
I had about ten seconds from launch before the convoy’s defense systems acquired the missiles. It happened at eleven seconds. The lead vehicle sped up and veered off the road into the jungle. It was the move I’d been expecting because the trees provided excellent cover.
