by Michael Ryan
“Keep talking like that,” she said, “and I’ll drag you back to our bunk for another round of PT.”
“Please, Callie,” I protested. “I’m only human.”
“Three-quarters,” she corrected.
“I’m not–”
“Quit bitching,” she said, and looked away. “I’m going to breakfast. You coming?”
“Stomach content is the most accurate predictor of an army’s odds of victory,” I quoted from an old military textbook.
We were rising from the table when a voice rang out.
“Platoon! Alert and ready!” a private shouted from the far end of the room.
We straightened to attention, startled by the entrance of our platoon leader. It wasn’t often that an officer entered our living quarters, especially when in transit.
“At ease, boys and girls,” he said. “Gather around and take a knee.”
Callie and I exchanged a knowing glance. We were approaching the drop.
~~~
The institutionalized bond that formed between partnered warriors was an old Guritain army tradition. I wasn’t convinced at first that it was a good idea or a viable standard; it seemed, on paper, to be unnatural and mechanical.
What could a bunch of army psychologists understand about my taste in the opposite sex, after all? The matching was based on a battery of tests and questionnaires, the kind of thing that doesn’t make sense…until it does.
I’d been in the middle of changing my mind when Juliana perished. I felt abandoned by her death, and I ended up devastated and angry at myself, at her, and at the army for pushing us together. After months of despair and a pain that felt like I’d been gut-stabbed with a dull knife, I promised myself that I’d never allow myself to experience that kind of misery again.
But I was forced to admit that after a few weeks of bonding with Callie – by which I mean everything from shared showers, meals, sleep, and sex to being punished together during TCI-Armor retraining – I became a true believer in the tradition.
I knew Callie was good for me, and I was good for her. We soon lost count of how many times we’d saved each other’s lives.
That morning, we ate breakfast together without much talking before we returned to our bunk and made love as if it would be the last time.
Three hours later, we reported for fitting.
~~~
“Relax, Avery,” the medical specialist said.
“Easy for you to say,” I mumbled under my breath.
I groaned as the specialist slid the suit’s anal extraction tube into place.
“Hold still, please.” He mechanically inserted a catheter, and I nearly bit my tongue.
I closed my eyes and tried to imagine myself on leave – somewhere amazing, peaceful, and safe, like a secluded beach in the Pacific, far from any war zone. I imagined a warm, sunny day with a gentle breeze and crystal clear, temperate waters.
I turned my head toward where Callie was lying on another table. “Let’s go to Australia when we get Earthside,” I said.
“Remain still and look up,” the specialist droned. “And don’t let Top hear you use that name. Open your eyes, please. This isn’t the first time you’ve done this.”
“Sounds good,” Callie said, responding to my fantasy in a voice that was close to a purr. “I like beaches, bitches in bikinis, and beer as much as the next trooper. Maybe we could hit Vietnam or Bali instead of Aus–New Tacveeton?”
I opened my eyes, as instructed. “Yeah, sure,” I said. “We could try scuba diving.”
The specialist squeezed several drops of milky white liquid into each of my eyes. I blinked. He lifted my eyelids and set contact lenses into the fluid floating on my corneas. I had myrtle green eyes that were more sensitive to light, so I required a special-order part – contacts designed for blue and green eyes.
I blinked again.
“Hold still,” he repeated as he taped my eyelids shut.
“I hate this part.” The transition from normal eyesight to the contacts meant not seeing your body, which, no matter how many times I did it, I still found disconcerting.
“Quit complaining,” Callie advised. “You’ll have reason enough in a few hours.”
“Let’s talk about women in bikinis again.”
“Enough, both of you,” the supervising medical sergeant ordered, from the opposite side of the room. We were outranked, so we obeyed, even though I felt the joking around helped relieve tension and made things run more smoothly during times when anxiety could get you killed.
Corporal Veening hummed atonally as he plugged in wires and tubes. I knew he could hook me into the suit blindfolded, but I still felt a sense of relief after he set my faceplate into position and my eyesight returned. I tried to blink.
“Don’t move,” he cautioned as he forced a spongy material into my ears through the gaps where my helmet side pieces would fit. I clenched my jaw and heard a distinctive pop in my right ear.
“How’s that?” he asked, keying his hip-mounted comp. A series of beeps and tones sounded into my ears.
I gave him a thumbs-up with my left hand, and he interlocked the sides of my helmet. I felt slight vibrations as the pneumatic driver tightened bolts between the fitted sections. Accustomed to being encased in an expensive military puzzle that had been customized for my body, I momentarily relaxed and wondered how it could possibly make sense to outfit someone like me into such complex and pricey hardware. A wise sergeant had once explained to me that a few million spent on an armored suit was trivial compared to the trillions in value being harvested from Earth, but it still seemed like profligate waste to equip us in gear that cost as much as it did to support a family through a lifetime.
“This is going to hurt,” the tech said without a trace of empathy. “Some idiot in requisitions misfiled a 34b-form, so local anesthetics are on must-use-only status ship-wide. Hold still.”
SNAFU has always been a recognized acronym in any military, even an alien-led one, and I’m sure if other intelligent species exist, their armies have an identical term.
Corporal Veening placed my chest plate into its seating slots and shoved down without warning.
I winced as tiny sterile probes entered my lungs and heart.
He clicked the abdominal plates in place, continued down each leg and installed my boots, and then moved to my arms. When he was finished with the armor, he attached an umbilical cord. The official classification of the data transfer wire is Part #34-MCD-4, but everyone, at least everyone human – or partially human – calls them umbilical cords.
My system powered up. I ran internal checks, and everything was green and good to go across the board. I gave Veening a double thumbs-up.
“Okay, great,” he shouted, mouthing the words so I could lip-read. “Begin exhaling, please.”
I followed his instructions and felt the familiar claustrophobic sensation of being trapped. Once the vacuum sequence begins, bodily movement is impossible. Warmed to body temperature, Oxy-Nurt-Gel flowed into my suit. The feeling was soothing. I counted down from ten and inhaled as deeply and forcefully as I could.
If you’ve never breathed oxygen-infused liquid before, it’s not pleasant, but you get used to it. I exhaled and inhaled as the pressure inside my suit increased. The slight tremoring of multiple pumps, guided by internal servos and the external medical server, imbued me with a sense of peace. Like a newborn lying on the chest of a loving mother and hearing her heartbeat, I fell asleep while the system ran through its testing and calibrating sequences.
I dreamt about a warm beach.
Callie was wearing a bikini that drove me crazy.
The sky was blue and clear. I embraced her. We kissed. Warm, gentle ocean waves splashed around us, she told me she loved and trusted me…and then she froze and shattered like brittle glass in my arms.
I tried to scream, but screaming is impossible when you can’t force air across your vocal cords.
A voice in my helmet speaker ja
rred me from my torment. “Ford! Wake up! You’re having a nightmare and setting off a ton of monitor alarms. Calm down, soldier, and report to the armory.”
I lingered outside the medical bay until Callie exited. My system recognized hers and notified me. I confirmed the pairing that granted special permissions into each other’s CPUs.
“You have a bad dream again?” she asked.
“Nothing important,” I said. I wanted to change the subject, so I picked a topic I knew would start a friendly argument: weapons and munitions selection. “Have you decided to take my advice and–”
“Don’t deflect,” she said. “And no. I’m sticking with what works.”
“I’m just saying. If you let me carry the entire CFM, it’ll allow you to load more grenades.”
“We’re a team.” She stopped and put her mechanically assisted hands on her hips. “I’m not breaking protocol so you can feel better.”
“It just makes more sense–”
She cut me off. “Avery, we’ll survive or die together. Case closed. Besides, the CFM is classified as a two-man weapon. That’s why the components are split up.”
“You know that’s outdated.”
“And you know I’m not changing my mind.” She was undoubtedly smirking at me behind her faceplate.
I sent her a picture of my face in a frown; she responded with a familiar close-up of her signature smirk.
“Okay,” I said. “You win.”
“You’re still deflecting. Come on, we’re slotted in fifteen minutes.”
We arrived at the armory on time, but still had to wait an hour before we reached the front of the line. I’d sent in my requisition form the day before, and I was silently hoping that nobody had screwed it up.
“Turn around and hold still,” droned Private Jacobson, the armory assistant.
“You really love your job, don’t you?” I asked, heavy on the sarcasm.
“It beats getting ejaculated into space,” he replied. “And you can quit messaging me. You’re not getting extra grape HE grenades. We’re short.”
I’d bribed Jacobson a few times in the past. The nano-munitions in this generation of TCI-Armor were small enough that it wasn’t uncommon for suit capacity to outstrip supply. I’d survived more than one mission by virtue of his abiding love of chocolate.
“I still have some of that dark stuff from my Peruvian stock. Amazing. Just seems to get better with age.”
“Bullshit,” he replied.
“No, seriously. But if you’re that short on gear…”
He paused for a moment. “I’ve got a half dozen grape rounds that can find their way to you, and an extra kilo of flamer fuel. But I want at least five hundred grams – and the shit better be real.”
“Like I’ve ever pawned anything off on you that wasn’t.”
“Then you agree?” he pressed.
“Deal.”
Jacobson left his station for two minutes. He returned with an EP – my equipment pack – on a three-wheeled hydraulic jack that he positioned behind me.
“Lock down,” he said.
I keyed in the command and felt a tingling in my back as he bolted the component to my armor. After receiving a notification that the weapon and munitions cache was secure and that I’d been green-lighted to the drop bay, I sent a short authorization willing him all my chocolate in the event of my death.
It was the polite thing to do.
CHAPTER FOUR
Do not be troubled, believer! Rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in Golvin.
~ Holy Writs of Vahobra, 23:79
By the time I entered my assigned drop capsule, any anxiety I’d been experiencing had been replaced with reluctant boredom.
I was glad for the series of familiar checks I’d been through before being admitted to the capsule. Triple redundancy has saved more lives than penicillin. A series of clicks and beeps announced a check-in request from our squad leader, Master Sergeant Veetea. Guritain names are pronounced phonetically, similar to how they’re written, but the Vs are nearly silent, and there’s a sharp emphasis on the Ts.
I keyed back: Present and all systems green.
You wouldn’t think we could speak while breathing a nutrient-laced liquefied-oxygen soup, would you? In-armor communication in the latest generation suits is done via codes, or with text messaging that appears on a soldier’s display screen and is controlled by our contact lenses – although to make my account easier to follow, I’ll transcribe the coded discussions as speech.
There were no holes in the Delta Company roster. We’d just come from the Guritain Eastern Hemisphere Command Base located in New Detroit – named for an abandoned city in what had once been the state of Michigan before the Wars of the Americas – and Command had filled every available slot with a soldier: some human, some Guritains, and a few mixed. As usual, a good portion of our complement was made up of freshies: green troops, FNGs, punks, boots, noobs, and cherries.
Many of them would never make a second drop. The casualty rate among green troops on initial actions ran about twenty percent during this period of the war; it would get worse later as necessity dropped the skill level sought by recruiters. The casualty rate per drop for the rest of us ran about three percent – a rate that might seem low until you began multiplying by the number of drops we’d accomplished. It added up to lot of death; but on the plus side, if you weren’t dead after a slew of drops, you were likely to be promoted.
Titanium-carbon-iridium linings.
~~~
Delta Company was the only announced insertion in this sector of enemy territory. Our mission was to harass and inflict damage on a large mining operation that was supplying the Tedesconians with iridium ore. Intelligence was supposedly limited, but that didn’t bother me – I never trusted any declarations by distant intel while in theater.
Command had told us they suspected that Tedesconian troops had dug themselves into defensive positions in a perimeter around the mining operation. It was a logical assumption to make. One of our standing orders was to avoid conflict with the military defenders and to instead directly attack civilian workers and infrastructure – the primary objective being to fuck up the mining operations.
That’s a military designation, by the way: FUS.
“Fuck up shit” was a common standing order.
My capsule fired out of rail-gun number six.
When in an insertion capsule, you’re basically a bullet, with your body as the core of a slug with layers of capsule exterior surrounding you. This mission had us fired at an altitude of four hundred fifty-seven kilometers while the Amphoterus held geosynchronous orbit over Purvas. The starship was on the edge of Tedesconian territory at launch, so our company quickly entered enemy airspace. I was later to discover our attack was part of a coordinated joint task force invasion.
To fully comprehend how the body can withstand being propelled at lightning speed in high-altitude orbit, you’d have to get an advanced degree in fluid dynamics, hydraulics, and anatomy. What I understand as a layman was that one of the many reasons that TCI-Armor was filled with fluid – why we basically became fish – was so that the body could withstand the forces exerted during this phase.
The first three capsule sheddings were accomplished via in-suit computer.
The final exterior shell was jettisoned via command from the platoon leader in an attempt to get the troops to land in a reasonably tight group in the drop zone.
I could make out the planet below me the moment the final shell broke away from my suit. The greens of an endless rainforest carpeted the area below me, stretching seemingly forever to the far horizons. Everything shimmered in the preternatural silver of the moonlight. I could barely discern a series of rivers, the biggest of which was nearly five kilometers wide. Tributaries and streams branched from it like a body’s circulatory system.
Vision in a TCI-Armor suit is unobstructed, as the optical signal is digitalized and delivered like a three-hundred-si
xty-degree movie. I could turn my head and see to my port and starboard. Gazing down or up gave me a disembodied view. It takes some getting used to, but the cadre works the kinks out of you in basic. About the only thing I couldn’t do was spin my head like an owl, the limitations of human anatomy being what they were. That said, a simple command would provide a rearview picture in my DS. I tended to leave this window in place at all times. Guarding your six was one of the secrets to a longer life.
My internal system used text and voice to inform and alert me.
<
<
My drop was going by the book, and then my DS flashed bright red with a warning:
<
I could see the contrails of at least forty rockets soaring toward us from the planet below.
<
I keyed in a No.
<
<
<
At five seconds, onboard systems override manual controls.
<
I fired my D-18 series minirockets and triggered a handful of flares and noisemakers.
In the following minutes, many of these would trick some, although not all, of the incoming missiles.
Another screen command dropped the external temperature of my suit to match the air temperature. I felt a chill as my body temp dropped a few degrees. I shivered in the cold liquid but stayed alert to the task at hand, which was to stay alive long enough to touch ground before hypothermia or an enemy missile finished me.
You might wonder why I didn’t activate the LBCS – light-bending camouflage system – and here’s the reason: the outer layer of our suits is covered with thousands of nanolight-emitting diodes and nanolight collectors. But with missiles coming from below me in every direction, I had no safe path toward which I could bend light. Any attempt at photon manipulation would have made me more visible instead of less.
