by Michael Ryan
“Callie,” I said. I sent her a pic of a rocky outcropping with a small blurry distortion near the base. “Doesn’t that look like an anomaly?”
“Or a smear on your camera. Take a chance and shoot.”
“I don’t want to fire at a ghost and give away our position,” I said.
“Well, we’ve got to do something.”
I deliberated for several seconds. “Okay, I guess we should chance it. Our guys are getting smoked.”
“There’s another one,” she said. “A hundred and twenty meters–”
“Never mind that,” I interrupted. “Just time your shot with mine. In five, four, three, two, one.”
I fired.
The spot changed from a blurry bump to a dead fighter.
“I got mine,” Callie said.
“Same,” I replied. “Seek for another–”
“Shit!”
Four missiles locked onto us and streaked toward our position through smoke and dust. The HE-19 was an older variation of the HE-34, relatively easy to evade, but they’d flushed us from our hiding spot and forced us to take evasive action. We leapt to our feet and tore away from the cliff toward the thick trees of the nearby forest.
“Back towards the squad?” Callie asked.
“Not yet,” I answered. “I’m thinking.”
“That’s dangerous.”
“Remind me not to tell you next time,” I said.
“If I remind you,” she observed, “then you’ll know I know.”
“Hell…” I was following a trail that might have been left by mountain animals – or humans.
“I hope you’re being careful,” she said. “You’re going too fast to sweep for mines.”
“I’m hoping this is a game trail.” We were following a well-worn track that zigzagged through the brush. The trees provided adequate cover from the enemy at the top of the ridge.
“Hope’s a lousy strategy for anything, Avery,” she said.
I knew she was right, but sometimes the alternative to not acting swiftly was more dangerous than taking a calculated risk.
My screen blinked a warning. “Incoming!” I shouted, and leapt off the trail.
Callie followed me.
Three missiles slammed into the mountainside above us, creating an avalanche of dirt and rocks that cascaded over us. Momentum and gravity carried us along, and by the time we stopped, we’d fallen more than a kilometer down a steep slope, buried beneath half the mountain.
I checked my systems and pinged Callie. “Are you okay?”
There was no answer.
I couldn’t move. As strong as the suit’s power enhancement was, the weight of the rubble had me immobilized. I suspected Callie was in the same predicament.
“Callie,” I tried again.
Still no answer.
I broke through to the surface thirty hours later.
The company comm was silent. I was alone. My priority was to find Callie. I scanned in crisscrossing grids until I located a mass ten meters below the surface. I dug like a Labrador after a bone, and eventually, her icon lit on my screen.
“Avery,” she said, “I’m stuck.”
“I can see that. There’s a transport-sized boulder above you. Are you locked down?”
“Yes.”
“Okay, I’m going to blast this thing,” I said. I retrieved a missile from my equipment pack and backed off ten meters.
“Our position?” she asked.
“There’s nobody in the vicinity.” I hadn’t fired up my sat-comm. If there were enemies in the area, I didn’t want to announce our presence.
“What happened?”
“Be patient. Let me get you out of there first. Three, two, one.”
I fired the missile. The boulder cracked into manageable chunks, and I helped Callie climb out of the crater.
“That was fun,” she said, her tone dry.
“Let’s see if there are any clues before we try long-range comm.”
“A drone?”
“Probably safer than walking into a trap.”
Callie sent one up and linked me into its feed.
The drone flew over a scene from hell. The area in which we’d initially encountered the enemy was now a deep crater. The ridge above us had also been hit with something massive, a PS-43 at the very least – the kind of bomb that had a blast zone a kilometer wide. Weapons with this much destructive power had been illegal during the Tetra War, but with the Gurt victory, there were no treaties in effect governing their use. Command had to answer to politicians, but this far into the wilderness, I suspected they had a ton of leeway.
Who was going to complain? The Tedesconians had no officially recognized government, and the human separatists were terrorists. Nobody would mourn their passing, and the world would be safer for their elimination, no matter how it was achieved.
“Jesus,” I said. “I’m not even picking up traces of the TT-104s.”
“Or any traces of armor, either,” Callie said. “You think our…”
“Yeah. This has to be us.” I wondered if our company had been given time to pull back to safety. “I’m going to use the sat-comm.”
Command service operators transferred me through a series of privates and unhelpful corporals, but eventually I was connected to our lieutenant.
“Sergeant Ford,” he said, “I thought you were dead.”
“No, sir,” I responded. “Just buried under tons of dirt and unable to communicate.”
“Callie?”
“Alive and well, sir.”
“Fantastic. I’m sending you the coordinates of a city about a hundred and twenty clicks from you. Get here as fast as you can, and contact me once you’re on the periphery.”
“What happened, sir?”
“Not over comm, Sergeant.”
“Sir,” I said, internally acknowledging the fault in my request. “Moving out now.”
It took us three and a half days to reach the edge of the makeshift city.
What served as streets were dirt and gravel. The trenches alongside them ran with raw sewage past buildings constructed from a mixture of cheap concrete and prefab metal. Thousands of synth-canvas tents lined the dirt paths that ran perpendicular to the main thoroughfare. I tried to guess the size of the population, and from the number of tents, I calculated that it had to be tens of thousands. Maybe as many as a hundred thousand.
We walked down the main avenue, and people parted as we approached.
“Should we be worried?” Callie asked.
“I don’t think so,” I said. The crowd included families, children, merchants, and food vendors. “Send up a drone. Let’s find our guys.”
“On the way.”
She located our company a minute later, and we hiked to their location.
“Glad you could join us,” Lieutenant Ballanorte said.
“Sir,” I replied, reviewing my squad contacts, “we lost–”
“Yes,” he said. “Cuelein and Neal.”
“That’s…unfortunate.” I didn’t know what else to say. “Sir, what happened? It looks like half the company got obliterated.”
“A bit more than half. Those armored fighters who jumped us were advanced.”
“My system didn’t recognize them,” Callie said. “What were they? Where’d they come from?”
“Teds made them,” the lieutenant answered. “Other than that, we’re not sure. After we’d taken some heavy losses, Command ordered us to pull out. They dropped some…well, you saw the damage. Let’s just say that air strike was unofficial, and leave it at that. The terrorists were neutralized, and here we are. We were ordered to this shithole, and we’ve been sweeping for collaborators and looking for illegal weapons since we arrived.”
“Rules of engagement orders, sir?” Callie asked.
“Same as always,” he said. “We rotate twelve on, twelve off. You two are up at eighteen hundred hours.”
Callie and I joined the remains of our squad at the specified time
: Abrel, Mallsin, Sandie, and Dantie. It felt weird to be six instead of eight. Nobody mentioned our losses, and we walked our assigned grid with grim determination.
At midnight I called a break. The monotony of the job had the inherent risk of leading to mistakes.
“Anybody see anything suspicious?” Sandie asked.
“Not me,” Dantie answered. “This seems like a complete waste of time.”
“Maybe,” I replied, “but stay alert.”
“What were those armored guys, Abrel?” Callie asked Abrel, who was also the senior member of the intel team.
“Our best assessment is terrorists using Ted hardware,” he said.
“I meant more specifically,” she clarified.
“We don’t know.”
‘We don’t know’ was a standard army answer. I’d spent the last six hours walking through a town of humans who, by the looks of them, were poor and backward. There were small gardens, livestock, and even a grain silo, but no military hardware. The most advanced equipment we’d stumbled across was a vodka still. We hadn’t seen a single weapon. And other than looks of disdain, I’d had no interaction with the locals.
“This does seem like a pointless exercise,” I said, agreeing with Dantie’s earlier comment. “But that said, don’t get complacent.”
“I think we need to become more aggressive in our searches,” Abrel said. “If there are any Pros here, they’re not going to show themselves. We have to flush them out.”
“Nobody’s going to attack us in our armor,” Callie said.
“She’s right,” I agreed. “No aggression. If the Prostosi are here, they’re going to blend in, and they won’t draw attention to themselves while we’re around. My hunch is they’ll wait us out, which is smart. We don’t want any public-relations nightmares.”
Abrel grunted. “The public doesn’t give a shit about these…”
“Humans?” I asked.
“I wasn’t going to say that. Outlanders. Misfits. People who left the cities for whatever reason. Many are probably criminals who ducked out ahead of the security forces,” Abrel pointed out.
He was right, but I didn’t want that sort of dismissive attitude guiding our actions. “Possibly, but we’ll still remain calm and respectful. That’s a direct order, and it’s the directive from Command. I expect everyone to follow it.”
“You got it, Sergeant,” he said. “But for the record, we’re wasting our time.”
“You’re getting paid the same either way, Abrel,” I said. “Just stick to the job.”
Had we not been inside a cocoon of cutting-edge technology, we’d probably have been sharing a cup of coffee together. In a suit, the loss of physical contact created a sense that we were machines instead of humans, purvasts, or whatever mixtures of DNA our parents had passed down to us. It created instability that tended to increase violence and decrease empathy the longer we were in armor. Part of my job was to ensure nobody gave in to their violent impulses and created a situation.
Our urban training included hundreds of hours of classroom time on the subject, but being in the field was never like the simulations. I wanted to catch the bad guys as much as anyone, but not by wreaking havoc and becoming a bad guy myself.
“Move out,” I ordered, and we resumed our patrol. I switched to my private comm with Callie. “What do you think?”
“Nothing good can happen here,” she said.
“Why’s that?”
“Too many in our company have lost partners and friends. And look around. Nobody cares about these people. We’re in the middle of nowhere. Command probably wouldn’t care if we smoked the whole city and declared we’d made the world safer.”
“You’re probably right,” I admitted sadly. “I don’t like it.”
“Neither do I,” she said. “But we both want the same thing.”
“I’m not so sure I want to kill innocent people to get it.”
“Nobody’s innocent, Avery,” Callie said.
I frowned behind my faceplate, shocked by her cold cynicism. We continued walking our night beat in silence for several hours, and then I slowed and signaled for the others to stop when I noticed something odd. A small puff of heated air rose from a pipe in the ground. I’d been running a heat map program, scanning for anomalies. It had located a few stills and campfires, but nothing else until that plume showed up on my DS.
“Callie, check this out,” I said.
She removed a probe from her kit, slid it into the pipe, and waited. Another puff of heat appeared on my screen. It was only a few degrees warmer than the ambient temperature, but that was enough to cause a yellow flash for a brief moment.
“Anything?” I asked.
“We need the lieutenant,” she said. “We got a hit on seven target chemicals. This ain’t a vodka distillery.”
“Hell,” I said. I keyed over to the all-platoon channel and hailed everyone to give us a hand.
By the time we found an entrance to an underground passage, the entire company had joined us. Nobody had a defined plan should we encounter a terrorist stronghold, much less a subterranean one, and I couldn’t help but wonder how much was about to go wrong. There were forty-seven of us left, and nearly everyone had an axe to grind.
The company commander wasn’t making it any better. “Okay, troops,” the CO boomed over the all-company comm. “It’s payback time. We’re going to smoke and choke.”
The demolition teams had set a charge at the secondary steel doors that we’d identified ten meters below the surface.
“Fire in the hole!” one of them broadcast.
A blaze flared from the mouth of the tunnel like a fiery orange fist, and First Platoon surrounded the entrance and filed into the shaft as soon as the fire died.
I mounted my Gauss assault rifle on my right arm and carried my flamer in my left, and followed the platoon into the shaft. We moved cautiously through the tunnel, stepping past the twisted remnants of the steel doors, and emerged into a vast underground staging area.
The all-company comm lit up with alerts. “Contact!” one of the lead soldiers warned.
I sought cover behind a crate of metal parts and scanned for threats. Small Gauss bolts pinged off my suit and ricocheted everywhere. Dense black smoke filled the area, and my display screen soon became useless.
Our enemy wasn’t unprepared.
Countermeasures included intermittent flashes of blinding light from spotlights, random sensor-jamming multicolored lasers, flares, chaff, and radio jammers. Communication became difficult as our IR signals were disrupted by the chaff, and switching to radio just yielded the harsh rasp of static.
Percussion grenades started raining down on us.
Callie crawled next to me and connected via a Silver Wire. “Avery, this is turning ugly fast.”
“I can see that,” I acknowledged. “I’m not sure–”
I was cut off by a shock wave that sent us tumbling apart. The area behind us collapsed in a massive cave-in, sealing the entrance – and with it, any ability to retreat.
The rain of grenades triggered our reverse-force tech to engage, rapidly draining our suit power as we scrambled for new cover. I tried to contact the rest of the team without success. I made out a doorway through the haze and pushed my way through it, leading with my weapon. Callie followed me through, and we reconnected our suits.
“Jesus, Avery,” she said. “We’re trapped.”
“Again.”
“I can’t reach anyone,” she said.
“Same,” I replied.
“I don’t know what to shoot at.”
“Nothing for now,” I said. “We need to figure–”
Another detonation in the main vault stopped me from finishing the thought. I launched a minidrone. It didn’t make it twenty meters before being shattered by small-arms fire. I low-crawled to the doorway and looked out. Between the alternating flashes of lights and sudden darkness, I couldn’t acquire any useful images. I assumed the fighters I could
make out were our own.
Two armored infantry dove through the doorway to escape the grenade blasts. My comm hummed like a hive of angry bees, but I was still able to pick out the voices of Abrel and Mallsin. They linked into Callie.
“I think the lieutenant is dead, Avery,” Mallsin said. “That makes you platoon leader.”
A job I had no desire for. “You sure?” I asked.
“No,” Abrel cut in. “But absent his presence and with no way to communicate…”
Protocol put me in charge.
“We need to get a missile lock on that damn light source,” I said.
“It’s coming from dozens of locations,” Mallsin said. “And it’s randomized.”
“What the hell is this place?” I demanded.
“A weapons-manufacturing plant would be my guess,” Abel said.
“Then where are the guards?” Callie asked. “Shouldn’t there be guards?”
“Those suits in the field we nuked would be the answer, don’t you think, Abrel?”
“Probably so,” he answered.
“So who’s running the defense here?” I asked.
“Auto-programmed drones…maybe.”
“Could be there are still armored suits down here,” Mallsin added. “This might just be the welcome greeting.”
“Shit,” I said. “Advice?” A smart leader is always open to suggestions, especially when temporarily field promoted only moments before. I was leaning towards trying to move forward and establishing contact with any of our company we could find, but I wasn’t confident in a plan that seemed to be one of only two viable options – the second being holding tight and seeing what came for us.
“We gain nothing by staying here,” Abrel said.
“Callie?”
“I concur. We’re–”
She was cut off by a series of explosions that had a familiar signature. My suit registered five self-destructs among our company’s units.
“That can’t be good,” Callie said.
“Follow my lead,” I said. “In five.”
Callie disconnected our Silver Wire after reminding me she loved me.
I sprinted through the door armed with grenades and an HE missile. I was reluctant to fire a missile in close quarters, but using a Gauss rifle seemed pointless. Smoke and light blinded me to most of the chamber’s layout, but I could see a section of concrete stairs being used as cover by some of our team. I fired my jet assist and took off toward them. A grenade went off dangerously close and knocked me to the ground, and I skidded into the wall behind the troops I was trying to reach.
