Stark's War

by John G. Hemry

  He put on his battle armor deliberately, double-checking each step. He'd found that process kept his mind from worrying itself throughout a mission over whether some minor detail had been overlooked. The readouts were supposed to tell you if anything had gone wrong or been missed, but vets learned not to trust 'trons any further than they had to. If something else could go bad, why couldn't the readouts also fail? Murphy's Law seemed particularly at home on the battlefield. Mendoza, in one of his talkative moods, had said once that some German claimed everything in war was easy, but all the easy stuff was really hard. Made sense out here, anyway.

  The suit's diagnostics said everything go, matching the results of Stark's own painstaking inspection. Just another mission, that's all. Keep the new Lieutenant from doing anything stupid. Meet the objective and get my people out safe. Stark looked carefully around his cube, making sure everything sat neat and organized. Every grunt had their own fetish, a little ritual to give them luck on an op. For Stark, that ritual involved making sure nothing was out of place. Sort of a reverse fetish. He figured if you left something sloppy and undone, something you wouldn't want anyone else to see, you'd get nailed and everybody'd see when they came to pack your stuff up. Leave it all ready for inspection, and you'd come back. So far it'd worked every time.

  "Sarge, the APC's coming in." Murphy, manning the watch station, pointed to the armored personnel carrier image onscreen, enhanced to be visible. Bunker and APC systems exchanged cyber greetings, each deciding the other was friendly. Without IFF readings, the sizable armored vehicle would have been almost impossible to identify until it was right on top of them. Up close, the APC's rounded carapace made it resemble a huge insect, gliding with multiton delicacy over the jagged terrain.

  "Thanks, Murph." He jerked his head toward the rest of the Squad. "Fall in."

  Murphy jumped up, quickly sliding into his place where the Squad stood formed and waiting, Gomez at the head. Stark walked slowly down the lines, Gomez following close behind, visually checking each trooper while he flipped through their battle armor status scans on his HUD. As he passed Chen, a gaggle of red telltales suddenly popped up on scan.

  "What the . . . ?" Gomez was startled into an exclamation. "Sarge, he was green when we suited up."

  "Don't doubt it." Stark knew Gomez would never have let the armor through otherwise. He raised his own armored right fist and rapped sharply on the side of Chen's arm, just below the shoulder. The red telltales flickered, then went green all at once. Damned Mark IV armor. He gestured toward the suit. "This model gets false cascading failure indies once in every blue moon. Totally unpredictable. I've only seen it once or twice, but it's always like this."

  Gomez's head nodded, her gaze riveted on the spot Stark had hit. She'd have it memorized before her eyes moved. "Nice to know. Any fix coming?"

  Stark shook his head. "Not on this baby. The Mark V will fix everything, they promise."

  A ripple of sardonic laughter ran through the Squad. New gear was always supposed to solve every problem. You soon learned it always brought a new set of faults to worry about along with its new capabilities and higher price tag. Besides, the Mark Vs had been "on the way" for the past couple of years. G-4 was probably trying to wear out the inventory of IVs before they issued any new suits, which made sense if you were in Supply and not getting shot at while wearing old gear.

  "All right." Stark stood before them, a dozen opaque faceplates looking his way. Twelve outwardly identical suits of combat armor, but he knew each personality inside each one. That's my job, and if I don't take it seriously, somebody else might pay the price. "This is a tough one. No lie. Long way in, long way out. We've got some aces the brass are playing to make it easier, but I want nothing but the best from you. Anything goes critical, everyone will have to be sharp. Questions?"

  There weren't any this time, even from the new recruits. A muffled clunk sounded as the APC grounded and mated to the bunker's main hatch. After a brief wait, the clatter of steps announced the arrival of the fire team that would man the bunker while Stark's Squad was out on the op. The fire team was from Alpha Company, faces known only in passing these days and names usually heard only on turnover briefs. The Corporal in charge singled out Stark. "We've got it, Sergeant. Good luck."

  "Thanks." No sense in envying those who got to stay behind. Everybody went out on op eventually. "Take care of the place, and don't drink all the beer." Old joke. There never was any beer on the line, but rumor always claimed the other outfits had it stashed somewhere.

  "We'll leave you a six." The Corporal waved one of his troops to the watch chair, then headed toward the command console to check in.

  Stark pointed up the access way. "Go. By the numbers." The Squad headed out in predetermined order, Gomez first and Stark entering last. Last in, first out.

  Even after years on Luna, living in spaces grudgingly hacked cubic meter by cubic meter out of the dead rock, the access to the APC still seemed tight. The other soldiers were seated and settling in as Stark came through and swung into the last vacant seat. He strapped down and then jacked in to the APC via the command relay. Secondary readings from the APC's auxiliary command circuit popped up on his HUD, and the internal comm net activated. "Third Squad ready."

  "Roger." The APC commander sounded relaxed. One more transport run for him. "Good evening. Should be an easy ride."

  For you, maybe. "Thanks. Get us there on time and there's a big tip in it for you." APC apes hated being compared to taxi drivers, which was why the grunts rarely lost an opportunity to do it.

  "Yeah, right. Save your jokes for the enemy sentries, wise guy. Cycling up."

  Stark rotated his thumb upward in a spiral to his watching Squad as a warning. A second later, the APC went off surface with a lurch and surged into forward. He called up the vid link to the APC's eyes, watching rock scroll rapidly past. Luxury to a grunt, to see where you were going and had been. The rest of the Squad had only the troop compartment and the armored figures of their Squadmates for scenery.

  Inside the APC, two rows of armored figures rocked in their harnesses in time to the vehicle's turns, accelerations, and brakings. New soldiers tried to hold themselves still. Vets soon learned not to waste the energy, resting against their harnesses and rolling with each movement. In the small, darkened compartment they occupied, the soldiers resembled weirdly costumed worshipers, nodding in time to a ritual only they could hear.

  Time dragged, as always on the run into a drop zone, but it seemed sudden when they arrived. The big rocks dropped away, revealing a long, flat sea of dust ahead. The two other APCs, holding First and Second Squads, were waiting, twin beetles perched on the edge of the dust plain.

  Third Squad's APC braked hard, swinging in to nestle close to the other two. Parade ground routine, out of place here, where you didn't cluster targets close together. The APCs, great vehicles but like most of the heavy equipment too damned expensive, were so rarely employed in combat it wasn't surprising their drivers didn't think tactical. "Okay.

  Sergeant. All out." No parting courtesies from the driver, probably still smarting from the taxi driver comparison.

  Stark keyed his Squad circuit, running an eye over the now-rigid figures of his troops. "Let's go. Follow me, by the numbers." The APC hatch gapped wide, and Stark pulled himself through, lunging forward as soon as his feet hit to clear the space for the next soldier. There were still plenty of rocks here, but broken and interspersed with threads of dust. He did a quick Tac scan, noting the other APCs dropping their troops, the other Squads fanning rapidly out to form ragged lines facing toward the empty plain.

  "Clear," Gomez advised laconically. She was last out, hurrying into position to Stark's left. With sudden, silent leaps the APCs sprang into life again, spinning around and gliding back toward their lines. They'd be back when the rendezvous time rolled around, but wouldn't sit out here vulnerable and relatively obvious waiting for the Platoon before then.

  Stark checked the Tac s
can again. All three Squads looked to be ready, each soldier's symbol lying on the position mandated by the op plan. The time readout in the upper left corner of Stark's scan glowed a happy green, meaning they were on the timeline. Go here, do this. He looked out across the open dust field to the ragged crater walls marking the far side, their broken peaks standing jagged against the eternal night sky. Those crater walls looked a long ways off. His gaze wandered higher, to where stars blazed against the black of endless space. Hidden among them rested the warships, American and enemy, orbiting far enough from the Moon to avoid lunar-based defenses, but close enough to menace those ships trying to run cargo and passengers to and from the lunar colonies. The enemy tried to blockade the Americans, the Americans tried to blockade the enemy, and sailors died in brief flashes of light against the dark. Sometimes the remnants of the battles fell where the soldiers could see them, pieces of wreckage that had once made up ships curving in to add their own impact craters to those formed by countless meteors.

  Vic's voice on the Platoon command circuit brought him back to this side of the plain. "First Squad ready." Stark quickly ran through his own Squad again, double-checking their status while Sergeant Sanchez reported in. "Second Squad ready."

  Everybody looked good. "Third Squad ready."

  The Lieutenant came on line, audibly nervous as her first combat op began. "Second Platoon, move out. Keep it quiet."

  A very long time ago, a very big rock had wandered through the wrong patch of space, coming head-to-head with Earth's Moon. Where it hit, out somewhere far to the left of where the Platoon now moved, a huge crater had been gouged into the Moon's surface by the rock's death spasm. At the same time, probably breaking free from that big rock, a much smaller rock had hit up here, at the edge of the main event. Much smaller, but still plenty big enough to rearrange the landscape. That second rock had created an elongated smaller crater, with its own walls, forming a fingerlike extension off the big hole. Over time, dust filled the crater and its finger, forming lunar "seas" mockingly devoid of life. Multitudes of smaller craters formed cliffs and ridges radiating out from the seas, remnants of other times when rock flowed like water. Humans came, drawing up defensive lines, and saw the crater walls and dust plains here as fine natural defenses. So the unbelievably ancient legacy of natural violence became the stage for the most modern forms of violence humanity had devised.

  Now the Platoon moved across the finger plain, thirty-nine men and women in three broken lines, plodding through the dust, heading toward a barely visible notch in the crater wall. Sometime, somehow, a pass had formed on that spot, a route through the worst of the ridges on that side of the plain. It was obvious as all hell as an attack corridor—so obvious no one in their right mind would assault toward it through the open plain. So the enemy had strung sensors out to watch the approaches and not worried about manning the site.

  It felt strange, being out here. Stark knew the worm had to be working, or else they'd have been shelled by now. Normally you'd stay among the rocks, keep under cover. They called your suits battle armor, but they wouldn't stop most modern weapons. Only the really heavy stuff, junk an APC or tank could carry, would really protect you, and armored vehicles had their own threats to worry about. Smart soldiers, soldiers who wanted to live, stayed around things they could hide behind. Nobody in their right mind walked out onto a flat expanse of nothing. But sometimes doing something stupid worked, because nobody expected it. That was their only ace, that and the worm.

  If for some reason soldiers found themselves advancing through an area without cover, they'd evade forward, half the Squad covering while the other half plunged ahead, dodging and weaving. But that'd be "noisy," lots of disparate movement, and no telling if it'd be too much for the worm to block. Instead the three Squads moved in route march, steadily eating the distance. Behind them, a strange fog hung low over the plain, fine dust stirred by their movement hanging just above the surface as Luna's weak gravity fought a feeble but unending struggle to tug the dust particles slowly back down to rest.

  After a while Stark's mind shifted into neutral, automatically moving his feet, "waking up" only if something unusual happened. You could march that way almost forever, a lesson learned in boot camp and never really forgotten. Years of experience allowed him to monitor his Squad the same way, reacting only if something stood out as unusual. But the Squad and all their equipment gave no signs of trouble. Even Murphy, apparently unwilling to straggle behind on the open vista of the dust plain, kept pace without any threats or urgings.

  It came as a surprise when Stark realized they'd reached the pass, cliff wall looming up black-on-black against the sky. First Squad went through slowly, carefully identifying sensor sites and placing command-detonation charges.

  When they came back, the worm might very well be dead and they wouldn't want those enemy eyes active.

  Second Squad followed, moving faster, almost treading on First Squad's heels as they cleared the pass. "Sanchez," Reynolds called over the Sergeant's private circuit, "keep your people back until we've located and mined all the sensors."

  "Understood. I am holding them as far back as I can," Sergeant Sanchez replied. "The timeline is very tight here."

  Too damn tight, Stark mentally agreed. Officers sit back at headquarters and dream up timelines to match their plans instead of making the plans match reality on the ground. Good thing Vic won't be rushed on this job. Something else bothered him for a moment, something that wasn't there. Then he grinned in relief. Normally there'd be multiple officers from up the chain of command jumping in to issue orders directly to the Platoon or the individual Squads or soldiers, but on this op the need to keep transmissions to a minimum had apparently kept that from happening. Thank the Lord for not-so-small blessings.

  "Sergeant Reynolds, what's the holdup?" Lieutenant Conroy questioned.

  "My Squad needs to do this task right, Lieutenant." Reynolds kept her tone even but unyielding.

  "We're pushing timeline," Conroy complained.

  "Lieutenant?" Stark hailed. "Do you want my Squad to deploy now and cover First Squad?"

  "Deploy? Uh, wait one."

  While Conroy was still considering the question, Reynolds called in again. "All sensors mined, Lieutenant. Continuing advance." Vic immediately switched to the Sergeant's circuit. "Thanks for keeping the Lieutenant off my back, Ethan."

  "No problem. Making an officer think always buys you a few minutes."

  Second Squad swung into motion as First Squad finally advanced, moving rapidly to catch up with the timeline. Minutes later, Third Squad cleared the pass in turn, their line bunching briefly through the notch and then spreading again on the other side. After that it was a forest of interwoven lesser crater walls, one after another, the Squad members weaving through rocks to find the easiest route. Stark felt himself relaxing, happy to be in broken terrain again, an absurd feeling for a grunt rapidly closing in on the objective.

  An alarm beeped insistently, warning of a problem in the Squad, even as Private Kidd called in. "Sergeant, I'm losing one of my rebreather cartridges."

  Stark checked his readout of Kidd's systems, scanning the whole display. "Got it. Looks like contamination die-off. Your other cartridges look good from here."

  "Yes, Sergeant." She sounded a bit nervous, pretty new to lunar operations and one step closer to losing her oxygen supply on the surface of the Moon with friendly help a long ways off.

  "You got two backup cartridges, Kidd. If one of those goes, too, I'll make sure Corporal Gomez is positioned next to you to do a rebreather link if you need it." Not good tactics, sitting two soldiers right next to each other, but the only practical thing to do. "You copy, Gomez?"

  "Si, Sargento. Keep it cool, Beth," Gomez added. "You're plenty small, like me. Not a big clod like some of the guys out here. You'll do fine on two cartridges. I've done okay on one, sometimes, for a while."

  "Okay, Corporal. Thanks."

  Stark's Squad was still in the
last crater rim, so ancient as to be little more than a mild rise, when First Squad advanced into the relatively open area around the metals refinery, cautious once again, to take care of the merc bunker and its two weapons pits. Without the worm they'd probably just blow the bunker with a shoulder-fired antiarmor round. That'd be real noisy, though, certain death for the worm, so instead Vic's troops moved with precise care, emplacing charges on the bunker's exterior and on the remote weapons sites.

  Stark momentarily shifted his scan to a remote view from Vic's suit, curious for a closer look at the fortification. From the First Squad leader's perspective, he saw that the bunker had been poorly maintained. Outside cover had been allowed to deteriorate, exposing patches of artificial material. Light, heat, and/or gases leaked from a half-dozen tiny ruptures. Really sloppy. They might as well have hung a sign on the damn thing. Inside the bunker, Stark knew, the mercs would be paying little attention to the outside, counting on their sensors to give them plenty of heads-up to anything unusual. Odds were, nothing unusual had ever happened here. Given that, and normal merc level of performance, the bunker's crew would probably be dead before they ever realized their sensors were lying to them.