by Nina Allan
Not a problem. Knowledge is a good thing.
“So how do the D.C.s go about inventing a war?” I ask her.
She answers in the practical manner of an experienced non-com: “Above my paygrade, sir.”
“Worth considering all the same. I imagine it goes like this: All the big defense contractors, the D.C.s we love to hate, get together—not physically, but in a virtual meeting. At first they’re a little cold—that’s the nature of a defense contractor—but then one of the D.C.s says, ‘Come on, now. We need someone to host the next war. Any volunteers?’”
“Yes, sir,” Specialist Matthew Ransom says with a grin as he presents himself to me for a mandatory equipment check.
“This is serious, Ransom.”
“Sorry, L.T.”
I initiate the check anyway, making an inventory of his gear and confirming that every cinch on his exoskeleton is secure while I pick up the thread of my story:
“‘Any volunteers.’ That’s a joke, see? Because a D.C. will never allow a war in their own country. Rule one: Don’t kill off your taxpayers. War is what you inflict on other people.”
“That’s the truth, sir,” Jaynie says in a bitter undertone as she initiates an equipment check for Private First Class Yafiah Yeboah.
Maybe I’m getting through to her.
“Anyway, the joke works, the ice is broken, and ideas start getting tossed around until one of the D.C.s says, ‘Hey, I’ve got it. Let’s do a war in the Sahel. It’s good, open terrain. No nasty jungles. It’s not quite desert, and we’ve already got a figurehead in Ahab Matugo.’ This sounds pretty good to everybody so they agree: the next regional war, the one that will keep them in business for another three or four years, or even a decade if things go well, is right here in Africa’s Sahel, between the equatorial rainforest and the Sahara.”
I reach the last point of inspection, crouched in the mud beside Matt Ransom’s left boot where it’s strapped into the exoskeleton’s floating footplate. Everything looks good, so I slap his thigh strut and tell him, “You’re clear.”
The frame of my own exoskeleton flexes as I stand. There’s a faint sigh from the joints as the struts alongside my legs boost me up with no effort on my part, despite the eighty-pound pack I’m carrying on the rig’s shoulder bone. The mechanical joints release a faint, sterile scent of mineral lubricant, barely detectable against the organic reek of mud and dogs.
I turn back to Jaynie. She pauses in her equipment check and asks, “So now the defense contractors have to get the war started, right?”
“First they have to choose up sides, but a coin toss will do it. China winds up as primary backer of Ahab Matugo, and an Arab alliance takes the status quo—”
“L.T.,” Ransom interrupts, “you want me to clear you?”
“Yeah. Go ahead.” I run my gloved hand over my skullcap as he begins tugging on cinches and checking power levels. I’m remembering the buildup to this war, watching it happen while I served my first combat tour at the tail-end of Bolivia. I try hard to keep my voice calm. “So we Americans … we don’t jump in right away. We have another war to wind up first, so we promise to intervene when humanitarian issues demand it—but we don’t discuss what side to come in on because it doesn’t fucking matter. Everyone knows we don’t understand the local politics and we don’t give a shit anyway. There’s nothing in this region we want. The only reason we’re jumping in is so that our defense contractors can keep their shareholders happy. The American taxpayers will listen to their hoo-rah propaganda media outlets and pony up the money, blaming the libruls for the bad economy, while brain-draining the underclass into the army because hey, it’s a job, and even the D.C.s can’t convince Congress to spend ten-million dollars each on a combat robot when you can get a fully qualified flesh-and-blood high-IQ soldier for two-hundred-and-fifty thousand.”
Ransom steps back. “You’re clear, sir.”
I ignore him. “And that, Sergeant, is the reason we are here at Fort Dassari, squatting in a country where we’re not wanted and we don’t belong, and it’s why we get to go on a hike tonight and every night through hostile terrain, giving other people who also don’t belong here a chance to kill us. We are not here for glory—there isn’t any—and there’s nothing at stake. Our goals are to stay alive, to avoid civilian casualties, and to kill anyone with an interest in killing us. In nine months, no soldier has died under my command and I’d like to keep it that way. Is that understood?”
Jaynie keeps her face carefully neutral. “Yes, sir, that is understood.” And then, because she’s not about to be intimidated by a male lieutenant five years her junior and with a quarter of her combat experience, she adds, “Guidance described you as a crazy motherfucker, sir—”
Behind Jaynie, Yafiah claps a hand to her mouth, stifling a snort of laughter.
“—but they promised me, no matter how much of an asshole you are, they won’t walk us into an ambush.”
I smile pleasantly. “They’ve come close a few times.”
As the most northeastern in a line of remote border forts, we are more exposed than most. The fort itself is our shelter, our base of operations. Its fifteen-foot-high walls enclose the housing unit and a yard just big enough to park two tanks—not that we have tanks—but we do have three ATVs stored under an accordion canopy.
Our mission lies outside the walls. We do interdiction—hunting for insurgents filtering down from the north—while the insurgents go hunting for us. Guidance doesn’t always spot them in time, which is one reason we keep a pack of five dogs. They’re not official army issue, but the motto of the linked combat squads is Innovation – Coordination – Inspiration … meaning as an LCS we get leeway to come up with our own strategies.
“One more thing, sir,” Jaynie says as I turn away. “Is it true you’re cyborged?”
“It’s just an ocular overlay.” I touch my gloved finger to the corner of my eye. “Like built-in contact lenses, but they receive and display data.”
The gold line tattooed along the curve of my jaw is an antenna, and tiny audio buds are embedded in my ears, but I don’t mention those.
“You’re not linked to the outside world, are you?”
“From a warzone? Not a chance. The only link I’m allowed is to Guidance.”
“So you’re hooked into Guidance even when you’re not wearing the helmet?”
“You got it. Everything I see, everything I hear, gets piped straight upstairs.”
“Why is that, sir?”
Not a discussion I want to get into right now, so I turn my attention to the last of our little crew. Private First Class Dubey Lin is standing on the catwalk, nine feet above the ground, peering through a machine-gun port at the surrounding trees. Dubey over-relies on organic sight, but he’s always ready to go on time and he never argues. Actually, he never says much of anything at all. “Dubey!” I shout. “Get down here.”
“Yes, sir!”
He jumps nine feet to the ground, letting the shocks of his exoskeleton take the impact and startling the dogs, who are so wound up in anticipation of the night’s patrol that they lunge at each other. Vicious growls erupt as they spin around in play fights. Ransom gets in on it, launching a few kung-fu kicks and chops in Dubey’s direction, flexing his exoskeleton’s leg and arm struts, but Dubey ignores him, as always.
In the LCS ranks, we’ve nicknamed the exoskeletons our “dead sisters” because all the parts except the floating, boot-shaped footplates look a lot like human bones. Shocked struts with knee articulation run up the outside of the legs to the hips. Across the back, the rig takes an hourglass shape to minimize profile, ending in a shoulder-spanning arch that easily supports both the weight of a field pack and the leverage that can be generated by the slender arm struts.
Packets of microprocessors detect a soldier’s movements, translating them to the rig in customized motion algorithms. A soldier in an exoskeleton can get shot dead and never fall down. I saw that in Bolivia. And if there
’s enough power left in the dead sister, it can walk the body back to a safe zone for recovery. I’ve seen that too. Sometimes the dead just keep walking, right through my dreams. Not that I’d ever admit that to Guidance.
Jaynie pushes me a little harder. “So if Guidance is listening in on everything you say, sir, why do you keep talking shit?”
“We have to play the game, Sergeant. We don’t have to like it. Now, helmets on!”
We all disappear behind full-face visors tuned to an opaque black.
Tiny fans vent cool air across my face as I watch an array of icons come up on my visor’s display. They assure me I’m fully linked: to my skullcap, to my M-CL1a assault rifle, to each one of my soldiers, to my angel, soaring invisibly high in the night sky, and to my handler at Guidance. “Delphi, you there?”
Her familiar voice answers, “Gotcha, Shelley.”
They don’t call us a linked combat squad for nothing.
I use my gaze to shuffle through the displays of each soldier in my LCS, confirming that they’re linked too.
Technically, every linked combat squad should have nine pairs of boots on the ground, but at Dassari we’ve never had more than six and, due to personnel transfers, we were down to four before Jaynie got here. The army likes to brag that every LCS soldier is an elite soldier, meeting strict physical and intellectual requirements, with a demonstrated ability to adapt to new systems and circumstances. Translated, this means we’re chronically shorthanded—and no one gets a night off.
“Let’s all stay awake,” I say over gen-com. “It’s been too quiet these past few nights. We’re due.”
“Yes, sir!” Ransom answers like this is good news. Yafiah swears softly. Dubey kicks at the ground in frustration. Only Jaynie doesn’t get it.
“You know something we don’t?” she asks over gen-com.
“Just a feeling.”
Ransom says, “Sometimes God whispers in his ear.”
“L.T.,” Yafiah pleads. She knows what’s coming, and so do I, but I don’t try to rein him in. Ransom is my favorite redneck of all time. He loves everyone, but he’ll still kill anybody I tell him to without hesitation. His way of explaining the world may be non-standard, but his enthusiasms have kept us both alive.
“Ma’am, this here is King David,” he informs the sergeant. “Saul don’t dare touch a hair of the man’s head and Goliath can’t get his bullets to fly straight when the lieutenant’s around, because James Shelley is beloved of God. Do what L.T. tells you and you might live long enough to see Frankfurt one more time.”
Ransom is six-three. He has a hundred pounds of muscle over Yafiah and a year more experience, but as far as she’s concerned, he’s the dumb little brother. She turns the blank black face of her visor toward Jaynie and says, “Don’t worry none about Ransom, ma’am. He’s kind of crazy, but he’s good in the field.”
Jaynie sounds honestly puzzled when she asks me, “How can you be King David, L.T.? Because I would have sworn that we were Goliath.”
“Goliath,” I murmur, using my gaze to select the encyclopedia icon from my overlay, because the truth is, I don’t really know the Bible story.
But before I can listen to the abstract of the Goliath entry, Dubey surprises us all by actually speaking. “King David played his own game,” he says, his shy voice amplified over gen-com. “And he didn’t lose.”
Good enough for me.
I whistle at the dogs. The fort’s gate swings open. We head out into moonlight, the five of us, Dassari LCS. The fort will defend itself while we’re away.
We spread out so we can cover more territory, and so one bomb blast, one rocket, won’t take out all of us. The primary weapon we carry is the M-CL1a, also known as the Harkin Integrated Tactical Rifle, yielding an acronym only a gamer could love. The HITR uses AI sights to fire both a 7.62mm round, accurate to 500 meters, and programmable grenades from the underslung launcher. We’re also armed with a handy assortment of hand grenades—frag, flashbang, smoke. Subtlety is not our talent. We’re rigged to hit fast and hard. Powered by the dead sisters, with photomultiplier-based nightvision to see where we’re going, we’re able to make a sweep through the entire district on most nights.
Near the fort the land is flat, and much of it is cultivated, marked off by tall fences that protect sorghum fields and tree farms from roving goats and wandering cattle. But after a couple of kilometers, the farms end. Then, it’s mostly scattered trees that look a lot like the mesquite I saw in Texas. We’re well into the rainy season, so all the trees are leafed-out and where there used to be bare red ground between them, wild grass is growing almost head-high. The dogs run through it, hunting for rogue soldiers.
A light wind sighs past, setting the grass swaying around me. I know it’s rustling, but my helmet’s audio pickups are set to filter out white noise, so I can barely hear it, while more distinct sounds reach me clearly: the panting of the dogs, the lowing of cattle, a bird’s piping call.
With the grass so tall I can’t see very far, but I keep a map overlaid on my visor with the position of each one of my soldiers marked. The map is constantly updated with data gathered by my angel—a toy drone with a three-foot wingspan, piloted by a semiautonomous AI. The angel watches over us. Everything within range of its camera eyes is recorded, and the raw video boosted to Guidance. In offices in Frankfurt, Charleston, and Sacramento, our handlers scan the raw feed, while Intelligence teams run analytical programs to pick up any bogeys human eyes might miss.
There’s always something to see. This is the Old World. People have made their homes here since the beginning of time and they’ll probably still be here come the last day—which might not be as far off as we’d like to think.
Yeah, apocalyptic thoughts come a little too easily these days.
Anyway, it doesn’t matter how empty this land looks, it is inhabited. People live here, raising their children and their livestock, most of them pretending there isn’t a war in progress. We don’t want to shoot them.
So with the angel’s help we’ve developed a census. We know the names of everyone living within twenty-five kilometers of the fort. We know their facial details, along with their height, weight, gender, posture, and age. We know where they live, what they do for a living, and how they’re related to the people around them. Using the census, the angel can ID an individual in low light, from over a kilometer away, with his back turned, and once we’ve got an ID we go on our way. It’s rare that the people here even see us, unless we’re on the road.
But if the angel turns up someone who’s not in our census? Then we move in.
Not every stranger is an enemy. Smugglers pass through, and so long as they’re not carrying weapons or proscribed tech, we let them go. Same for the refugees wandering south out of the Sahara. We talk to them all, and add them to our records.
But it’s the insurgents we really need to find, before they find us. It’s a game of hide-and-seek, and the better the angel gets at spotting people, the better the enemy gets at looking like nothing at all.
So when I get a sudden premonition of danger—a heart-pounding, muscle-tensing certainty that something seriously bad is very near—I visualize a red light. My skullcap picks up the image and displays it on the visors of everyone in my squad. They freeze. Jaynie and Dubey tap into my visual feed right away like they’re supposed to. Yafiah and Ransom take a little longer, but within a few seconds we’re all looking ahead toward one of our district’s rare, rocky outcroppings. It’s an anomaly in the flat landscape: a wide, irregular formation that rises only a little higher than the low trees around it. I’m pretty sure it’s natural, but it looks like it could be the remnant of an ancient pyramid, reduced to a shapeless lump after thousands of seasons of rain.
My handler, Delphi, hasn’t said a word since we linked up at the fort, but the moment I break routine she speaks, “What have you got, Shelley?”
I focus on the words, A feeling. It’s a phrase I’ve practiced, so the skullcap picks it
up easily and translates it for Delphi.
She tells me what I already know: “The angel’s got nothing. I’m bringing it in for a closer look.”
“They’re in the high ground,” I say in the softest of whispers, letting the helmet mic compensate for lack of volume.
Delphi doesn’t like my “feelings” because she can’t explain them, but she’s been with me twice when I’ve sensed an imminent ambush, so she doesn’t argue.
I tap into the angel’s infrared feed as it soars on silent wings high above the outcrop. I’m looking for bright points of heat, but I only see our soldiers and our dogs, scattered in an arc on the east side of the mound.
One of our dogs, the cream-colored female we call Pearl, is two meters in front of me. Alerted by my posture, she’s standing still, testing the air with her nose. I hiss at her, urging her to move ahead. She trots forward willingly, but then she freezes just short of the mound. My helmet audio enhances her low growl.
“Fuck,” Yafiah whispers over gen-com. “I want to launch a grenade up there.”
So do I, but we can’t do it. If it’s just a farm kid out on a lark, we could all wind up in prison—and the only reason I’m in this uniform is because I desperately do not want to be in prison.
“Easy,” I warn Yafiah.
I wish I could put skullcaps on the dogs. Then I might be able to get an image of what they’re sensing. But the defense contractors refuse to outfit strays. They don’t want to get fined if the equipment gives false results, so they’ll only cap a dog if it’s specially bred and trained—and that kind of dog costs twice as much as a soldier. Our LCS isn’t authorized.
I hiss at Pearl again, but she lowers her head and looks back at me, refusing to advance any farther.
We’ll have to go in ourselves.
I visualize an approach path: me and Yafiah moving directly in, Ransom circling around the back, and Dubey and Jaynie providing cover from opposite sides. Ransom picks it up and takes off fast, staying well back from the mound as he circles around it. Yafiah moves in, until we have only thirty meters between us as we cautiously advance.
