At the Helm: A Sci-Fi Bridge Anthology (Volume 1)
Page 18
“I’m sorry you have to see this,” said the Matt on the screen. “God knows I’d like to forget it forever, but it’s important for you to see, so that you’ll know that I’m telling you the truth. And so that you remember.” He turned toward Serena and said, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry, baby.”
The Matt on the screen nodded and a man in scrubs appeared on camera. The camera zoomed further back to show him standing at a computer console.
“Wake up, Serena,” Matt pleaded. “Please, baby, wake up.”
The man tapped a series of commands into the console.
“Goodbye, baby,” said the Matt on the screen, taking the unconscious Serena’s hand. “I love you.”
The rhythmic beeping of the heart monitor was replaced by a monotone hum, and the screen went blank.
For several minutes, Matt sat in silence, staring at the blank screen. A voice shook him out of his reverie. It was Serena.
“Matt.”
Matt looked up to see her sitting there at her station, just as she had been before the recording started. A hallucination, he thought. She’s always been a hallucination, ever since the coma. “God damn you,” he hissed.
“Matt, don’t be angry at me…” she started.
“You know damn well I’m not talking to you,” Matt said. He had been talking to the Matt on the recording. Then he laughed bitterly, realizing that either way, he was talking to himself.
He unfastened his restraints and made his way to the medical cabinet. Opening the cabinet, his eyes alighted immediately on the portable defibrillator.
Somehow Serena was standing right in front of him. “Matt, don’t do this!” she pleaded.
It’s not Serena, he told himself. Just a projection. A software program. He squeezed a handful of conductive jelly from a tube and slathered it on the back of his neck. He pulled the paddles from the defibrillator and flipped the power switch. The machine whined as the capacitors charged.
Serena gripped his wrists in her hands. “Stop, Matt. You don’t need to do this. I can –”
He wrenched his hands away and held the paddles to the back of his head. He never even felt the shock.
• • •
CMS CONFIDENTIAL – PROPRIETARY AND PRIVILEGED INFORMATION – DO NOT SHARE OR DISTRIBUTE!
TO: Mrs. Jane Koeppel
RE: Congratulations!
Dear Jane,
First, let me express, on behalf of CMS management, our deepest condolences on the loss of your husband, Eric. We were stunned and saddened to learn of his recent passing. He was a valued member of the CMS team and truly embodied the ideals that we aspire to as a company.
I apologize, too, for the impersonal nature of this communication. Our efforts to contact you in person have not been successful.
The primary purpose of this letter, however, is to deliver some good news. Pending medical testing and some other formalities, your request to be a crew member on board a future mining mission has been approved!
I realize that this is a difficult time for you, but we urge you to contact us as soon as possible regarding this matter. As you are no doubt aware, this is a critical time in CMS’s history, and we are very eager to demonstrate to the public and our shareholders that we have addressed the problems with the winch system that led to the tragic deaths of the crew of the Morgana.
As a token of our sympathy and goodwill, we would like to offer you two weeks of paid leave during which you may wish to visit our headquarters in San Diego (at our expense, of course). You can meet the mining mission control team and learn more about what a mining mission entails. You are under absolutely no obligation, but we would love to have the opportunity to talk to you.
Again, we offer you our sympathies in this difficult time. We look forward to hearing from you.
Terence Milan, CEO,
Corbenic Mining Services
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Robert Kroese is the bestselling author of Starship Grifters, The Big Sheep, Schrodinger’s Gat and City of Sand.
Robert’s sense of irony was honed growing up in Grand Rapids, Michigan — home of the Amway Corporation and the Gerald R. Ford Museum, and the first city in the United States to fluoridate its water supply. In second grade, he wrote his first novel, the saga of Captain Bill and his spaceship Thee Eagle. This turned out to be the high point of his academic career. After barely graduating from Calvin College in 1992 with a philosophy degree, he was fired from a variety of jobs before moving to California, where he stumbled into software development. As this job required neither punctuality nor a sense of direction, he excelled at it. In 2009, he called upon his extensive knowledge of useless information and love of explosions to write his first novel, Mercury Falls. Since then, he has written twelve more novels.
You can find out more about his work at http://badnovelist.com/. You can subscribe to Robert’s newsletter in order to receive a few books from his Starter Library and hear more about his work.
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PETE, POPEYE AND OLIVE
BY JAMIE McFARLANE
TRAINING
To say I was excited at being picked to be in the Mechanized Infantry (MI) was something of an understatement. My new special squad and I had spent the better part of the last year slogging around in the hellhole the rest of the world called the Amazon. The one contributing factor to our selection into MI appeared to have been simply surviving a multitude of firefights without significant loss of irreplaceable or overly expensive body parts. It was math only the corporate-minded brass could come up with.
My excitement stemmed from the fact that MI units spent the majority of their time cocooned in fully mechanized, entirely enclosed, environmentally managed suits. Call me a whiner, but I’d spent enough time freezing my ass off in a puddle of mud and placed a high value on that last item—environmentally managed. If I was going to get shot at, at least my frakking feet would be dry.
Training in a Popeye, the name given to mech suits that I still don’t understand the reference to, is something akin to learning to walk for the first time from a baby’s perspective. The idea seems simple enough. Even worse, experienced operators make it look effortless. The first few weeks of training are spent doing simple tasks: standing up, sitting down, jogging in a straight line, jumping over progressively larger things, etc. Every day is harder than the last.
“Hoffen. Front and center. On the double!” The tactical command channel overrode all other communication and my squad leader’s voice, one Sergeant Asinhat, came through loud and clear. And yes, that’s his name. No I didn’t make it up. And yes he was one tough sonnavabitch because of it.
“Aye, aye, Sergeant!” I jumped, sailing four meters over my squad mate, Flick, and landed hard in the soft sand on the bank of the river. My miscalculation of weight, force and all the other crap I was supposed to keep in mind at all times caused my boots to sink half a meter into the crap they called tiger-shit around here. Worse yet, my landing splashed said tiger-shit up onto Asinhat’s shiny, clean suit.
“Just when I think there might be hope for you, Hoffen, you go and pull a stupid stunt like that,” he growled. “When we’re at rest, you’re going to polish my Popeye until Olive gets a hard on. You read me?”
“Yes, Sergeant,” I answered, snappily. There wasn’t a lot of latitude with Sergeant Asinhat and I’d learned when you screwed up, it was best to just take what was coming your way. I wasn’t sure where he was headed with the vegetables, but his intent was plenty clear.
SQUAD OF MONKEYS
“Today’s your lucky day though,” Asinhat continued. “We just got a call from the CO. Skampers overran Ichcapan with a platoon of squishies. She wants us to go over and clean ‘em out.” It was one of the confusing aspects of the Amazonian war—the Skampers didn’t have any more right to the contested area than did North America. I felt like we held the high ground in that our objective was to push the bastards out, although I wasn’t naïve enough to think we’d be going any
where once we’d accomplished that task. The Amazonian forest was filled with resources and everyone on the planet wanted ‘em.
The idea of engaging a platoon of squishies was exhilarating. The weapons most squishies carried couldn’t do anything to a Popeye, beyond scraping off the lacquer. A platoon might carry a few bigger weapons, but as long as we maintained discipline, they were likely to have a worse day than we were.
Now was not the time to make a big deal of the fact that I was sinking deeper into the tiger-shit and in imminent danger of being balls-deep if I didn’t do something. Standing at ease, though, I couldn’t exactly wallow around and extract myself.
“Aye, Sergeant!” I answered. There was nothing to be done about my predicament so I resigned myself to work it out once the opportunity presented itself.
“I’m short a team leader and you’re up,” he said. “Think you can handle that?”
“Yes, Sergeant!” I answered. A tingle of excitement ran up my spine. It was my first team lead and I was ready.
“You’re going to take Flick, Corden and Quinfan to the north side of Ichcapan. I’ll take Speth, Rajish, and Mingli up the south road. You boys aren’t qualified for ammo yet, but if we move quick, it won’t matter. And I don’t need any heroes on this, you understand me? You’re wearing a million and a half creds of gear we can’t afford to be handing over to the Skampers, you copy?”
“Copy that, Sergeant,” I answered.
“Damn it,” Asinhat replied, recognizing my dilemma. He shoved his heavily armored arm toward my face shield. “Grab on. You look ridiculous.”
It was the change I’d been looking for. By offering to help, I was able to break parade rest and fire the arc-jets embedded in the soles of my boots. Between his pulling and my pushing with the arc-jets, my three-meter-tall suit exited the shite easily and I gently landed next to him.
“Why the frak didn’t you fire those jets earlier?”
“My mistake, Sergeant,” I answered. “Won’t happen again.”
He shook his head but didn’t say anything. I watched his face through the clear, armor glass screen, as he handed out orders and set up tactical comm channels. After about a minute, my HUD’s display broke into two windows which I could see fully if I glanced to my right. One window had mission instructions from Asinhat, including navigation plans to get us through the dense jungle to the north side of the small village of Ichcapan. A village, might I add, that I could see neither strategic nor tactical value in, beyond that it was now occupied by Skampers. The other window provided a health and wellness display of my team: Flick, Corden and Quinfan.
“Any questions?” Asinhat asked.
“Where are we picking up a loadout?” I asked. We hadn’t yet trained with live ammo, and had dud loads on our backs so we wouldn’t be thrown off balance when we finally started. Popeyes were pretty amazing; each with the capacity to manufacture several different munition types, from simple jacketed fifty-cals, to heavier ERs (explosive rounds) as well as three different levels of EEs (explosive ordnance) – flash-bangs, grenades and BFGs (big fucking grenades).
“No loadout,” Asinhat answered. “A squad of monkeys could take out a platoon of Skampers in these suits and we have neither the time nor training for it. Get your team in position on the north side of Ichcapan in sixty minutes, you copy?”
“Aye, aye, Sergeant,” I answered. I didn’t like it. The idea of going into battle without ordnance struck me as hubris. Sure, when I was a squishy, I had nightmares of mechs showing up with or without loadouts. But to send a grunt into battle without ammo felt like an unpardonable sin. That said, I wasn’t in the business of questioning orders.
CONTACT
“Flick, scout ahead but don’t get more than fifty meters out, copy?” I ordered. None of us had known each other before joining the mechanized infantry but we’d become as close as four strangers could in our few weeks of training. It wasn’t a surprise to any of us that one of us was advanced to squad leader. That’s just the way the Marines operated and we’d seen enough combat to appreciate lack of confusion about where orders came from. I was probably the most surprised of any of them at my own appointment.
“Copy that, team leader,” he replied and crashed ahead along the jungle path. While he was the surest footed of the group, he conveyed zero stealth. Generally, a Popeye suit didn’t require a lot of stealth, but I might rather have kept surprise on our side, while Flick was taking more of a blitzkrieg approach.
“We’re Oscar Mike,” I announced and followed Flick down the path that would lead us to our destination on the north side of Ichcapan. I expected him to divert from the path and check for patrols. I was disappointed when I realized his navigation trail showed he hadn’t diverted even once in the first ten minutes.
“Hold up, Flick,” I said.
“Aye, aye,” he answered.
“You’re not scouting,” I said as we caught up to his location. “You’re just barreling down the path. What if you run into resistance?”
“I kick their asses, TL,” he replied, his voice indicating a certain amount of reproach.
“I was hoping to get intel,” I pushed back.
“No covering up Popeye’s approach, “ he said.
I recognized the swagger for what it was. Flick was convinced, as was reasonable, that we were more than enough for the platoon of Skampers and he wanted to get there first.
“Damn it, Flick, we have next to zero intel and no ammo,” I said.
“Fine,” he said. “Send me out again, I’ll stay off the path and try to be quiet. Satisfied?”
I sighed. “Fifty meters, no more.”
He turned and jogged down the path making an exaggerated show of jumping into the thick forest. I sighed. I should have taken him down, right then and there for his half-hearted attempt at following my orders, but I lacked the benefit of foresight. War is definitely a cruel teacher, as I was about to find out for not the last time in my military career.
About ten minutes from objective, Flick’s heart beat monitor spiked. We were all working hard to traverse the forest, and Flick harder than the rest of us. But this wasn’t just elevation due to exercise, something had his attention.
“Contact!” he exclaimed almost immediately.
“What do you have?” I slaved my suit to Quinfan so that it would follow along in his path. My AI would take every step Quinfan took, in just the same way, which would allow me to focus on something else for a moment. I switched my HUD’s view to Flick’s. He’d stopped moving about half a click ahead of our position and I cursed as I realized he’d exceeded my ordered max distance by ten times. One way or another I was going to hand him a beating when this was done.
Using a HUD to look through another suit isn’t perfect and Flick saw something that I hadn’t picked up on. Forty squishies had taken position behind barriers and were firing on him. It was a useless gesture, just as running would have been for them.
“Hoffen, I’m frakked,” Flick cried out and he turned away from the line of men. From the corner of suit’s optical sensors I saw something that made my heart sink. A grav-tank was dug in and had lined up on our approach. Someone must have heard Flick coming, or he’d tripped a cry-baby. Whatever had happened, he was deep in the shite.
“We’re coming!” I said and took control back from Quinfan. “Team, on the double!”
I surged forward. No way were we leaving Flick to stand alone against a grav-tank, even though we didn’t carry a single thing that could stand against it. Damn it, Flick.
An unhindered mech suit can move at ridiculous speeds. Double that if you’re willing to take risks. I’d put Flick into the position he was in and I’d be damned if I wouldn’t do everything possible to get him out. A mech suit’s armor is nano-crystalized steel, which is about the hardest thing humans know how to make. The only real threat on the battlefield was a really big gun. The type of gun only another mech can carry, or worse yet, the big gun mounted atop a grav-tank.
TWO HUNDRED KILO GORILLA
“Shit,” Corben said.
I muted the team comm channel and switched over to Asinhat’s command channel. “Sergeant, Flick’s down,” I reported. “There’s a grav-tank and it’s tracking us.”
“Find cover,” he replied. “I’ll take it out.”
My HUD showed that Asinhat’s squad was two minutes out – a lifetime in close-quarters combat.
“Incoming!” Quinfan’s comm broke through; the AI recognizing the tactical value of his statement.
I turned. The grav-tank’s smaller gun, one still big enough to cause us problems, although not quite the finger of death as the main gun, was hammering away at the vegetation, clearing a deadly path in our direction.
“There’s two of them,” Corben’s panicky voice cut through.
“Pull back,” I ordered. “On me. On me!” I repeated. In the heat of battle, it was easy to lose track of orders. I’d mentally marked a bluff only a click away. The grav-tanks would have to work hard to chew their way through the forest in order to catch us and that would leave them open to Asinhat’s squad.
I stumbled forward as I took the punch of a lighter tank round in the shoulder. My suit’s display showed damage, but I was still operational. Quinfan and Corben had both taken hits and it looked like Corben’s suit was nearing failure. We leapt up the side of the hill just about the time Corben’s suit actually gave out.
“Eject, Corben,” I said. It was a hard order to receive. The suit would provide protection against the ground forces, but he’d be a sitting duck to anything bigger.
“Frak you!” he replied.
“Damn it!” I said and overrode his suit’s command structure, depositing him onto the ground. He banged his hands into my helmet as I picked him up. Quinfan and I continued up the two-hundred-meter slope that wouldn’t slow the tanks down too awfully much.