by Weston Ochse
Nance cleared his throat, a thin smile on his face. He was probably thrilled to be in an actual military unit again. “You mentioned when we’re on the ground we’re going to be doing things your way?”
“Right. Take your seats.” I waited until everyone was seated, then continued. “Formation X-ray is Hero One and Two in bounding over watch on my left and Hero Three and Four in bounding over watch on my right. This will be our basic tactical formation.” I noted that Earl and Pearl looked confused. “We’re going to have to explain bounding overwatch, aren’t we?’
She nodded.
“What’s been your strategy for killing Cray?” I asked.
“Run at them as fast as we can, get there first, and shoot to kill,” Earl said.
“We’re not going to be doing that,” I said. “That’s video game strategy.” Before the invasion, I’d watched as my friends and fellow soldiers would play World of Warcraft, swarming through caves and dungeons in search of loot. Even though every one of them knew military tactics, they’d push and shove, trying to be the first one to the loot cast off by dead creatures, other characters, and boss rooms. No, we were definitely not doing that. “Nance, I expect you to ensure the rest of Hero Squad understands military tactics.” To Charlemagne, I added, “I’m sure I don’t have to explain tactical formations to you, now do I?” The reason his numbers had been lower than these two young gamers was because he’d remained at Nance’s side while they’d sprinted forward. I wasn’t going to have that.
“No, sir.”
I grinned. Ohirra would be happy. Maybe even Olivares would stop giving me eternal shit if he could have seen how I’d turned the group around.
Suddenly the C-130 bucked, then took a sharp left. I barely managed to get ahold of webbing to keep me from hitting the far wall, which was now below me.
Merlin and Charlemagne tumbled into the row of EXOs.
Nance had grabbed hold as well.
Somehow Earl and Pearl had managed to stay in their seats. They were busy buckling up, as was I, when a voice came over the speaker.
“We’ve been hit. We’re going down.”
All I could think at that moment was that I hoped we were over land.
That which does not kill us, makes us stronger.
Friedrich Nietzsche
CHAPTER TEN
THE SHEER TERROR of being in a plane that’s crashing is unmatched by anything. The absolute lack of control one feels, especially in the essentially windowless hold of a C-130, is barely mitigated by the idea that I didn’t want to see us careening into the ground. I held onto the netting with a death grip as I wondered if I wanted to survive. Would it even be reasonable if we crashed and I was able to crawl out of the smoking ruin—maybe paralyzed or worse? Perhaps now was the chance for the universe to decide if I really deserved to live or die, a judgment for everything I’d done. As we spiraled downward, I ignored the cries of Hero Squad, instead listening for the punch line for the intergalactic joke.
Suddenly the plane leveled.
It was in this moment of calm that I realized I’d been holding onto something that I should have long ago let go. It came as an ice pick through whatever reality I’d constructed and shone as a truth I never should have failed to notice. Bottom line was that I wanted to be me. The problem was that I’d been trying to be who I’d been—to find that wet-under-the-nose kid who’d joined the military so long ago. I’d been trying to be that person who hadn’t witnessed innumerable deaths, mass burials, and my soldiers—no, my friends—explode in plain sight. I wanted to be the kid who thought the worst that could happen was to get shot in the arm or the leg and then return home, like what happened to the Duke in all the best John Wayne movies. But I could never go back. I could never be that kid. Why I even wanted to be him was a failsafe my brain had sought for too long. I was the sum of my actions. I’d been molded in combat and forged by what I’d seen. I could never be that kid again, and in reality, I didn’t want to be him again. To do so meant to forget the glorious lives and the terrible deaths of too many friends. It would be an insult to those I’d lead into combat.
This realization was more than stunning—it was life changing. My PTSD had always been magnified through the lens of who I once was compared to who I was now. But finally I realized that this never needed to happen. Why would I have assume that I could return to being that pristine pure kid who chased his friends and shot invisible bullets from finger guns? Was that it? Was the heart of my PTSD that I’d been trying to be a person who’d never done or seen anything bad? A boy in a plastic bubble?
Even as Charlemagne and Merlin scrambled to their feet and buckled themselves in, I laughed, the sound loud and intrusive in the suddenly chaos-free space.
Was the solution that simple? If I embraced who I’d become—if I accepted it as the continuing version of me—would that make everything easier?
I thought of who I’d become:
An itinerant lieutenant in the only real western block military unit who’d been asked to lead a group of soldiers to recover alien debris.
A man who’d loved and been forced to do the right thing, even if it had been the hardest thing.
A soldier who could be counted on to accomplish a mission.
I glanced at my squad, now nervously looking around, strapped to a suspect airframe, and realized something. Each of them had already accepted their deaths. They’d thought about it, checked the block beside the possibility and moved on. Damned if I wouldn’t do everything in my power to keep them from dying, but if they did, it wasn’t on me. I let out an explosive breath of air and felt a lightness of being I hadn’t felt in an age.
“Jesus, Lieutenant, why are you so happy?” Nance asked. “We almost died.”
“Almost only counts in horseshoes, sex, and hand grenades.” I couldn’t stop grinning. “Hero Squad, repeat after me.” All eyes were on me. Pearl clearly thought I was insane. “Whatever doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.”
No one said a word.
My eyes narrowed. “That’s an order.” I repeated. “Whatever doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.”
Charlemagne and Merlin mumbled a repeat.
“Everyone. Whatever doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.”
They all sort of said it.
I shouted it again and they said it with a little more energy.
I shouted it again and they matched it.
I shouted it again and they drowned me out.
Soon, we were shouting the line and laughing, over and over and over, trying to voice our joy of life and laugh at death so that the world could hear it. We continued shouting, everyone smiling, everyone finally one team, until the pilot interrupted.
“Corporal Nance, we need you up front.”
Nance glanced at me and I smiled. He in turn gave me a worried look.
I unstrapped and went to the access door to the cockpit. I knocked once, then it opened.
I crouched down and looked out the windscreen. We were low. Probably less than five hundred feet. Beneath us, tundra with a few splotches of snow whizzed by.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
The pilot glanced at me, eyes narrowed. “You finally in charge, Mason?”
I nodded. The intricacies of the relationship with me and my warriors weren’t his business. He was a bus driver, pure and simple. But I knew to be polite. “We took a hit?”
“Surface-to-air missile. Left engine. We’re going to have to set down.”
“Were you able to identify the attacker?” I asked.
“SA-7 Grail. Old school Soviet tech.”
“You weren’t able to avoid it?”
“Santa and his reindeer have more jukes and moves than this old rust bucket,” the co-pilot said. “We’re lucky to still be in the air.” He glanced at the pilot with barely concealed admiration.
“You getting anything on the frequency scanner?” I asked.
The co-pilot shook his head. “Only some native gibberish. L
ow end coms. Walkies really. Nothing we can confirm. Nothing Russian.”
That got me thinking. I stuck my head back in the hold. “Merlin, put on a headset,” I said pointing towards where a pair of them hung, plugged into the plane. Had I been on my game, I would have been wearing them to keep track of what was going on.
Merlin complied and after I asked the co-pilot to pump in the feed, Merlin began to listen. It only took him a few minutes to get excited. He began to summarize what he was hearing. “Two reindeer herders complaining because they lost two of their herd to soldiers. Seems last night they poached two deer and cooked them.”
“Can you get a location?” I asked.
“Can I ask them?”
I glanced at the pilot who had the ultimate decision about the safety of the aircraft. He shrugged, and I said, “Sure. Why not?”
Merlin spoke into the headset. I could only pick out a few words, but I did know he repeated himself three times. It seemed like the Yupik on the peninsula hadn’t been expecting to talk to a cousin from St. Lawrence Island and began by asking about the fishing and how much winter stores had been packed. Within moments, Merlin reported the location of a Russian contingent numbering thirty-three soldiers who were on the move to a crash site. The good news was that we were closer to the crash site than the Russians. In fact, if the herders were to be believed, it was only fifteen clicks away. The bad news was that they’d probably been the ones to fire on us as we passed over them and they knew we were here.
“Can you land this thing near the crash site?” I asked.
“I can land this baby on a desert island. That’s not our problem,” said the pilot. “Once we land, we’re not going to be able to take off again.” The co-pilot plugged in the new coordinates. “Or at least we shouldn’t.”
I saw the problem right away. “We don’t have enough fuel to get back.”
The pilot shook his head. “Not even halfway. By the time we crossed the coast, we’d be nothing more than a flying brick.”
“Do we have any radio coms with anyone?” I asked, remembering how Thompson had communicated with me. “I think there are some UAVs within range that can retrans your signal.”
The co-pilot looked at me. “How do you know about the drones?”
I shrugged. “Seems like the obvious solution.”
“Well, we’ve been sending a continuous SOS, but have no way of knowing if it’s getting through,” the pilot said. “We’re going to keep sending it along with coordinates until we land. Once we’re down, it’s cross your fingers time.”
“Been there done that,” I said. “Let’s worry about what we can change. You get us down and we’ll conduct the mission. We just have to hope that the cavalry arrives in time. What’s the projected ETA of the Russians?”
“Eighty minutes,” said the co-pilot.
“Looks like we’ll be fighting them regardless.” I grinned. It was about to be grunt time. “You get us down and let me handle things from there.”
Both the pilot and co-pilot acknowledged. I let them do what they had to do to keep us in one piece and headed back to the hold. I explained the situation to the squad, then strapped in. We had about seven minutes until landing. I spent that entire seven minutes sending my own mental SOS to Thompson. As much as I hated the fact he could peek into my brain anytime he wanted, now was the moment when I hoped he was doing just that. Because if he wasn’t, we were either going to freeze or face odds I wasn’t too confident we could survive.
The debris field was seventeen miles long. As the pilot sought a landing strip level enough not to rip the wheels off the old rust bucket, he described the scene a mere two hundred feet below.
“…must have been immense. Pieces of what… fuselage… metal or some material littering the tundra… are those… impossible… bodies...”
“But they can’t be,” said the co-pilot. “The proportions are all wrong.”
By now we all wore headsets and were listening to their ruminations. I felt, then saw, the others staring at me as if I had the answers. I just stared back. We’d find out soon enough. It was ironic, really. Before the invasion we’d have relied on satellite imagery to find the crash site, but now, after we’d been ass-kicked back into the Dark Ages, we’d had to rely on the complaints of a pair of reindeer herders to pinpoint the exact location of the alien ship.
Amidst the bewildered half-descriptions came a sudden harried command from the pilot. “Everyone hold on.”
The aircraft slewed left, then right. I held on, staring blankly at the fuselage, imagining the ground coming up to meet the plane, even though it was really the other way around. A low singing came to my attention. I glanced over at Merlin, whose eyes were tight shut. He had a white-knuckled grip on the netting he was sitting on. It was at that moment that I realized that Merlin had probably never been on a plane. He looked terrified, which was such an atypical emotion for him. I’d seen him stand toe-to-claw with a polar bear, holding it off with a lance until the other men of the tribe could bring it down. I’d seen him on partially frozen seas, blocks of ice capable of caving in his kayak at any second. I’d even seen him stand unfazed as a grizzly bore down on him, rifle in his shoulder, knowing that he only had one shot and confident in his ability that he would bring it down.
I’d love to be able to tell him that this was nothing. That a C-130 could probably land sideways and never get a scratch. The old battle hound of airborne divisions was made to be tough. I’d been on enough spiral combat landings and take-offs that they seemed normal to me.
Then the earth came up to meet us with a bone-jarring slam.
All we know is that, at times, fighting the Russians, we had to remove the piles of enemy bodies from before our trenches, so as to get a clear field of fire against new waves of assault.
Paul von Hindenburg
CHAPTER ELEVEN
WE WERE UNSTRAPPING before the C-130 came to a stop. The first thing I did after they let the ramp down was have Charlemagne suit up and then deploy him outside the aircraft. Inside his EXO he towered over me. I led him down the ramp. The air was crisp but not cold. The ground had a softness to it. Not muddy. A foot or two of the tundra had melted.
“Head two kilometers in that direction,” I ordered, pointing to where the Russians were coming. “Burst your radar for three seconds every five minutes, then switch off. Got it?”
The EXO head nodded, making me feel as if I’d just been talking to a robot. Good thing it was on my side.
When I turned to go back in, I noted the crew chief and his assistant were busily erecting two large tripods, one on either side of the ramp. Once they slid the M2 50 caliber machine gun on one and began to rack an ammo belt into the side of it, I immediately felt better. Knowing there were two of them made me feel almost hopeful that we’d survive this mess.
Inside, Nance had just finished explaining bounding over watch to the kids, telling them they had to coordinate their movements with himself and Hero Two. I ordered them into their suits and had them standby.
As it turned out, Nance had brought a box of goodies. Good thing, too. Out here on the edge of the world with Russians heading toward us, I felt sort of nervous. I reminded myself that a modern EXO had the firepower of a Vietnam War-era battalion. It wasn’t as if we were powerless. The problem was I’d never gone up against traditional forces, unless you count the treachery of Dewhurst, who’d tried to sell us out so that Sebring could have an EXO to reverse engineer. Luckily the M63 tank hadn’t been able to fire because I seriously doubted I would have been able to withstand a round from a 105mm main gun. It probably would have left a hole in me the size of a basketball, then keep on going for a few more miles. Not knowing what we faced with the Russians worried me. Knowing what arms and armor they had could let me better plan. As of this moment, we were completely blind.
But that was about to change.
Nance showed me the gear.
Two things immediately intrigued me.
The fir
st was a small V-winged UAV with a downward looking camera. It was slick, black, and had a four foot wingspan.
“We can control this through our suits. Your command module can allocate control to any one of us. The feeds are also available to us, depending on your information sharing setting. This other one here,” he said, pointing to a quadcopter, “is for battlefield management. It goes on station directly above us, and moves based on our movement, providing us with a flat representation of the battlefield.”
I quickly reimagined how helpful it was going to be, allowing me to deploy forces to points under direct contact. Both were necessary and needed.
I suited up. When I pulled on my helmet, I could have sworn it had that new EXO smell. I switched on the internal electronic grid which made the suit impervious to a Cray EMP burst. I remember back when the Faraday Suit was first revealed. Its invention had been a logical response to the threat of the Cray. We’d all read Scalzi and Steakley and knew how they’d portrayed power armor and powered exoskeletons. Borrowed from Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, which were in turn borrowed from E. E. Doc Smith’s Lensman novels, it wasn’t as if there was a copyright on the idea. When mere humans were forced to fight creatures so much larger than themselves, they needed mechanical assistance to survive, which was why the Electromagnetic Faraday Xeno-combat suit, or EXO, was invented by OMBRA technicians.
The suits initially had problems with external communication. Just as an EMP burst couldn’t get in, transmissions couldn’t get out. Fortunately, OMBRA had been able to beg, borrow, and steal the best technicians on the planet, who devised a method using Extremely Low Frequencies (ELF) with a ground dipole antenna established through the soles of the EXO’s feet. Since the majority of EMP energy is seen in the microwave frequencies, the system was capable of operating on a battlefield in which EMPs had been brought into play. Advanced digital modulation techniques allowed them to compress data on the signal, allowing real-time feeds between team members and back to base. A backup, transmit-only communications system resided in an armored blister atop the helmet. Called the Rotating Burst Transmission Module (RBTM), it was comprised of a one-inch rotating sphere inside of the blister with its own battery power. One side of the sphere was able to pick up a packet of data when rotated ‘inside’ the Faraday cage of the EXO; when rotated ‘outside’ this protection, it transmitted the packet as a burst.
