The Tetra War

by Michael Ryan

  “What else do you carry in there besides meds and weapons?” I asked.

  “Here, take this,” she said, and handed me a small green pill.

  “What–”

  “Trust me,” she said.

  I did.

  Three hours later, after experiencing sex in a way I hadn’t dreamt was possible, I held Lyndia in my arms, reflecting on the fact that in less than a year I’d be in a combat unit and entering the most dangerous part of my career.

  “What’re you thinking about?” she asked me.

  “That I’m okay dying now.”

  “It was pretty amazing,” she said, and kissed me softly on the lips.

  We never slept together again after that weekend.

  She was killed about a year later in a firefight on her first drop.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  I pronounce to all purvasts: If you have, I shall give you more. But if you lack, even what you have I shall take away.

  ~ Holy Writs of Vahobra, 17:2

  Soon after graduation from TCI-Armor training, I shipped out to my first permanent-duty station. The Riogrand base was located along the coast, where a large river had once flowed into the gulf. The waterway, which had formed a boundary between countries and states, had been reduced to a small stream. The area worked well for a combined army outpost and spaceport, and the city, New Teelsonbia, an ugly collection of industrial buildings and charmless, hastily built houses that had sprung up around the base, had become a huge, unlikely tech center the decade before my arrival.

  Juliana Toleman and I met for the first time during in-processing. We’d both trained at the same base in the Georgia region, but thousands of trainees went through the program at the same time, and we’d never crossed paths.

  “Hi,” I said awkwardly. She was a pretty, full-blooded human. The experts in the army’s psychology department had matched us based upon a battery of tests, our service records, and our pre-army histories.

  “Hello,” she said.

  We hugged, and she blushed.

  “Don’t worry. I’m nervous, too,” I said.

  I smiled and pointed toward our first in-processing station. “It probably gets easier from here.”

  She looked me up and down with an expression that stayed with me from that day. “Sure it does.”

  We spent the first week at Riogrand base doing routine tasks: filling out forms and medical releases, drafting wills, and finding an apartment. The Gurt military philosophy was that soldiers should live part of their daily lives among civilians – whom we were, at least on paper, working for. In practice this idea had limited value, as soldiers ended up living in the same crummy apartment complexes as other soldiers. But it was nice to be able to pretend sometimes that we were just normal citizens, who spent their days going to the market and barbecuing burgers on Sunday afternoons.

  Visnaal and Maaly were both stationed at Riogrand, and they, with their new partners, Valsea and Andrew, rented in the same complex. The six of us became good friends. Juliana bonded with Maaly and Valsea, and the three women would often plan elaborate meals mixing Earth and Purvastian dishes.

  Our first deployment orders came three months after we arrived. The six of us discussed the upcoming challenges on a Sunday evening, the last day off we’d have for some time. While we never said the words out loud, we knew there was a good chance that at least one of us wouldn’t be returning.

  “Dinner is served,” Maaly announced.

  “Wine?” Juliana asked. She received five nods and filled our glasses with a cheap, fruity burgundy we bought by the jug.

  “What’s that fantastic smell?” Andrew asked. He’d been partnered with Maaly, and they seemed extraordinarily happy together.

  “Gurt-loaf with blue cheese and freshly baked Velertarian bread.”

  “I’m not going to be able to fit into my suit,” Juliana said.

  We ate, talked, joked, drank wine, and then went to our respective beds and savored the ritualistic lovemaking that was a holy rite among soldiers about to ship out. What had been fun sex the day before had become something of a sacrament – a reaffirmation of life that was as old as time itself. I imagined each moment lasting forever, and eventually fell asleep, spent, with my head on Juliana’s chest. Four days later we were in a high-speed, low-altitude drop-ship, about to be sent into enemy territory somewhere in the vast sandy desert that had once been the Middle East.

  ~~~

  An auto message came across the all-platoon channel, the voice robotic and devoid of emotion. “All troops, prepare to drop in minus three minutes.”

  I was in the Fourth Platoon, Hotel Company of the Seventeenth Regiment, Seventh Division, back in those early days. The Guritain Armed Forces didn’t have branches like army, navy, marines, or air force. All military personnel were “army,” but the breadth of specialties was vast, encompassing everything from mechanics on oceanic ships and starships to combat engineers, armor, medics, and pilots of all types. In addition to those in the field, thousands of soldiers operated drones from underground bunkers in secret locations.

  Sometimes I wondered why I hadn’t pursued that specialty.

  Real war, only played as a video game.

  “Ten seconds,” the computerized voice announced.

  I exhaled and closed my eyes.

  Low-altitude drops were usually done around some type of mountainous ridge, and our first drop went pretty much how the textbook said it would. Our suits were attached to a disposable rail system that detached before our chutes deployed. We slid out the rear of the craft horizontally, headfirst. Once on the opposite side of the ridge, we glided over the downward slope of the mountain as we shed altitude.

  My chute detached automatically, and I prepared myself for a hard landing.

  Incoming fire ricocheted off my armor when I was ten meters off the ground.

  The company and platoon channels lit up, and I received a jumble of vocal and text messages. I tried to ignore all except the important ones, but it was hard to know if a message was important until you listened to it or read it.

  “Move southeast! Now! Now! Now!”

  “Incoming!”

  “Fuck! I’m bleeding.”

  “Help!”

  “Get off the platoon channel!”

  “I need a rail-gun team–”

  Static, and then silence.

  The night was moonless, but explosions and flares lit up my display screen.

  “Avery,” a familiar voice said over the squad comm.

  “Juliana?” I looked around and spotted her a dozen yards to my left.

  “Yes, follow me,” she said.

  I ran after her and took cover behind a rise of sand and gravel. “What’s happening?”

  “Ambush,” she said.

  “Where are we supposed to go?”

  “Who knows? I’m not even sure who’s in charge.”

  “Activate your camo. I’ll see where they want us.”

  I attempted to reach our squad leader without success. I went up the chain of command, and our platoon leader gave me a rallying point several kilometers away. We’d dropped practically on top of a large group of heavily armed Ted infantry. Fortunately, they weren’t part of a cavalry group, or we would have been torn to shreds. The next day I learned our air support had suppressed movement of their tanks and mechas.

  “This way,” Juliana said. “I mapped a route.”

  I followed her while staying vigilant with readouts and pop-ups on my DS.

  “Hold up,” I said. I’d spotted movement in a distant shadow. “I think I have something at about fifty degrees.” I dropped to the ground and low crawled to the top of a crest of windblown sand.

  “Whadda you got?” she asked.

  “There’s a heat signature up ahead.”

  “Behind the palms?”

  “Exactly. I didn’t think there were any trees here.”

  “Maybe they’re fake?”

  “Could be.” I adjusted my
view to zoom in at the cost of clarity. It didn’t matter if the image was fuzzy, what mattered was whether the signature was a person or an anomaly. It could be deviation caused by heat absorption, an artifact of the dunes.

  A pic from Juliana with an arrow drawn on it popped up on my screen. “If I could get up to this point, I’d be in range to get a grenade or two in there.”

  “Risky,” I observed.

  “We can’t stay here,” she argued.

  “True. Okay, I’ll cover you.” I dug my boots into the sand and secured my rifle. I commanded my system to calculate a firing solution on the second palm tree and then prepared to make adjustments as Juliana moved off to my left. She descended into a slight depression, putting her out of a line-of-sight shot from the grove. My screen flashed, and numerical coordinates scrolled down the right side. “Incoming,” I warned. “Grenade.”

  “I see it.” She rolled and placed her rear armor toward the projectile, which exploded twenty meters short of her.

  I resisted the urge to fire randomly into the enemy’s cover. I hadn’t been sighted yet, and I wanted things to stay that way.

  “He got jumpy and launched early,” she said.

  “Don’t take any chances,” I urged. “Be patient. Patience is the key to a good shot.”

  “What? We’re in training again?”

  “Hold still,” I whispered, in spite of the fact nothing audible would leave my armor even if I screamed. “I’ve got a little movement. Okay, hold one…” The shadow shifted and I zoomed my sighting in tighter. “Appears to be a single trooper. I have his launcher in my sights. If I can disable it, you’ll have a few seconds of jump on him before he can switch weapons.”

  “Got it. Transferring my GL.”

  I accepted control of her weapon. “Move in fast, but stay low. On my mark.”

  “Ready.”

  I squinted and nodded. “Go.”

  She bolted toward the palms, keeping the launcher pointed in their direction. I fired a three-hundred-round burst. Properly secured to a base, the Gauss assault rifle has no recoil and will deliver rounds in a tight grouping. The handbook says two hundred UR-Ts are sufficient to knock out a Ted grenade launcher at six hundred meters, but I wanted to be extra careful. The enemy soldier disengaged his GL and swung a standard-issue Ted Gauss rifle at Juliana, but before he could fire a shot, the grenade I’d launched remotely from Juliana’s GL detonated at close range, sending a fountain of sand into the night sky.

  Both Ted and Gurt armor were designed to take grenade shrapnel without disabling damage, but at extremely close quarters, the shock wave was devastating to the body in the suit. Even if the armor survived the first explosion, the soldier would likely be incapacitated – stunned for at least a few critical seconds, if not off the playing field for good. I’d gone overboard and sent two more grenades downrange from Juliana’s weapon before she took back control.

  I switched to my Gauss rifle and unloaded another few hundred rounds.

  “He’s done,” she said. “Cease fire and catch up to me.” Juliana dove into the enemy’s cover, and there was a long pause. “I can confirm a kill.”

  I was running through the sand when she broadcast her announcement. I didn’t stop moving, but my mind froze for a moment. I’d never killed anyone before, and the elation of still being alive and protecting Juliana was shattered by the realization that I’d taken a life. Up until that moment, that part of the job hadn’t seemed real to me. I’d taken the life of someone’s son or daughter. A person – a living being with a name, likes and dislikes, hopes and dreams – was dead because of me.

  I sprinted across the open sand and drew incoming fire from a new enemy in the distance. My momentum carried me into the slim protection of the trees, and I dove next to the dead Ted fighter and used his armor for cover.

  “You got a range on that shooter?” I asked.

  “A kilometer out,” she said. “Hundred and twenty degrees from objective point. I called it in for suppressive fire, but I don’t think we have enough priority.”

  I moved to a better position and scanned in the direction of the new threat. I picked up nothing. “Maybe they got him?”

  “Perhaps. We need to figure out why this guy’s alone.”

  “Agreed.” We edged along the sand until we reached another set of trees and then crept along a low rock wall until we came to a small water-pumping station. The area had been hit with HE from our air support not long before we’d arrived. The armored corpse of another Ted lay twisted in the rubble.

  “I have a new route selected,” Juliana said.

  “I’m behind you,” I replied.

  Juliana jogged along the side of a ridge, weapon at the ready. I followed, easily keeping pace. Anything to our right would not have line of sight on us as we made our way through the desert. I tried to follow the jumble of messages on the platoon comm, but it was a confusing mess. I decided the distraction might get me killed, so I silenced it. We made another kilometer and a half before we saw an outcropping of sandstone that concealed a dozen enemy troops, who were firing farther downrange.

  “We’re behind them,” she said.

  “Fortuitous.” I found a spot in the sand and dug myself in so that I had a covered field of fire.

  “I’m going to move up to that burning mecha,” she said.

  “Go.” The disadvantage to having the best weapon in a given engagement was that the enemy was forced to make it the priority. The mecha unit was burning brightly enough that I had to quickly highlight it so my DS could block the light input. I wondered if any other mechas or tanks were in range, but realized as soon as I thought about it that knowing wouldn’t help me. I needed to concentrate on the enemy at hand.

  “In position,” Juliana said.

  “Hold one.” I adjusted my sights to each of the twelve Teds and programmed a firing sequence.

  “Transfer your GL.”

  “On the way.”

  Juliana release control of her launcher to me. I programmed her grenades to fire in high arcs so that the first wouldn’t reach its target until the last was dropping on their heads. From her position, dug in behind the burning mecha, she was reasonably safe. It would be nearly impossible for one of the enemies to reverse track her grenades; they were going to descend at a radical angle, leaving them nothing from which to get a bearing.

  My position, though, was going to be announced once I followed the grenades with the volleys from my Gauss rifle. I timed the entire sequence so that my rounds would hit moments after the grenades exploded, at a rate of two hundred and fifty bolts per soldier. It was a calculated risk.

  “Secure your barrel,” I ordered.

  “Secured.”

  I started the program. The grenades detonated in quick succession, and my rifle spat death.

  The first enemy fell. The second spun, fired at the burning mecha, and then shifted to my position.

  The third through eighth were disabled, but not killed.

  The ninth and tenth fired at me.

  The eleventh and twelfth launched grenades my way, but they were well out of range. I wondered how green these troops were as my platoon from the opposite side of the sandstone dropped two dozen HE grenades on them. For a moment my DS went white and fuzzy from the sudden flares.

  Juliana took back control of her weapon, and together we loosed another few thousand Gauss rifle rounds into their midst.

  The platoon comm crackled to life. “Cease fire,” the platoon leader said. “We’ve got twelve Teds decommissioned. Ford, move your ass down here.”

  “Sir.”

  ~~~

  We reunited with our platoon and received updates.

  We’d sustained ten casualties. None of the dead were people I knew, which was a relief I felt guilty for.

  “Troops, listen up,” our platoon leader said over the Fourth Platoon comm. “We’re coordinating with First, Second, and Third Platoons on an assault in eight minutes. Air support will be pounding the
position in six. The objective is to destroy the oil field I’m going to highlight on your maps.”

  It was ironic that over a hundred years ago, these fields had been abandoned. Petroleum use had fallen out of favor as solar and nuclear technology advanced. Then the purvasts showed up. It turned out that petroleum had uses humans hadn’t even imagined. Desert wastelands were once more strategically important as the axiom that “history repeats itself” was again proven true.

  I received an update to my mission parameters, and a location three kilometers from our current spot was outlined in red.

  “Our task is to take out the enemy’s mop-up teams – their fire control, combat engineers, and any other units trying to stop the oil fires and contain the damage. The priority for Fourth Platoon will be guard troops first and then fire-control teams. We want that shit burning. Squad leaders take over. Out.”

  “This is Green Squad Actual,” our squad leader, Master Sergeant Terllvering, said over our squad comm. “I’m taking Green along the marked route, and we’ll meet up at the highlighted coordinates. Red will be to our north. Keep the lines tight along the ridge marked in light blue.”

  I sent an acknowledgement via our background messaging.

  “Moving in five, four, three, two, one,” Terllvering counted.

  Juliana moved ahead of me, and we trailed the rest of our squad in an orderly fashion. We made it about thirty seconds before incoming fire spread us out and halted our progress. We returned fire, but at the distances we were shooting, neither side was doing any serious damage.

  “Hold one, troops,” Terllvering commanded. “Engineers in the Sixth of Charlie Company got a light rail-cannon set up, and Second of Bravo is firing down our lane in T minus ninety seconds.”

  I dug in next to Juliana and continued taking potshots at an enemy I could hardly make out in the gloom.

  We heard a series of explosions as the rail-gun began its firing sequence.

  “Move,” our SL commanded. “We’re expected right behind the birds.”

  Our air support came in low and blanketed the area with explosives. Fires spouted in bright blazes of light, and my DS darkened as massive fireballs blew into the sky and plumes of smoke billowed above the fields. Enemy aircraft flew overhead, but their object was our birds, not us, and we continued moving.