by Michael Ryan
“Roger that. Corporal, you’re with us.”
“Sir.”
The four of us trekked across the sand.
Only the superstructure of the starship remained. The skeleton was charred black, and melted metal had formed long rivulets like wax from a dripping candle. The bow of the vessel was buried, and the stern was elevated fifty meters above the desert floor. The length of the craft was impossible to determine by viewing what could be seen of its exterior.
“You think it crashed?” I asked Abrel.
“It looks that way to me.”
“No way it landed like this,” Mallsin said.
“How long ago did it crash here?” I wondered out loud.
“Permission to board, sir?” Abrel asked me. His request to enter the craft was by the book. The Gurt military had complex, often bizarre rules regarding salvage rights, and Abrel was establishing an official record for a potential future claim on the rights to monetize the scrap.
“As a duly recognized representative of Raider Squad, First Platoon of Bravo Company of the Third Regiment, Guritain Armed Forces, I, Master Sergeant Avery Ford, as acting platoon leader, grant you permission to enter the downed starship and further lay claim under article sixty-two, subchapter nineteen,” I said. I created a file, tagged and marked it, and transferred a copy to Abrel, Mallsin, and the corporal.
“We’ll be rich,” the corporal said as he ran his hand along the thick hull.
“We’ll be lucky to make it off the planet alive,” Mallsin said.
“Then our heirs will be rich,” he said.
“Maybe,” I said. “Assuming the government doesn’t have fifty ways to weasel out of a salvage claim.”
“Even if we only got a tiny percentage, there’s enough here. I mean, look at this thing. It’s massive, sir.”
“All right, let’s remember there are a lot of things out here that want to kill us. Corporal, you come in behind us. Abrel, take the point. I’ll follow. Mallsin, I want you posted inside, out of line of sight. If we aren’t back in an hour, attempt contact; but if we’re off-line and another hour passes, you’re to rejoin the squad.”
“Sir,” she said.
I followed Abrel and we made our way through the wreckage. Everything had been stripped clean. As we approached the midline, the starry sky appeared above us through dozens of levels that had exploded and burned.
Abrel pointed to a clean cut in a wall section. “Avery, look at this. It appears recent.”
“So scrappers and salvagers are close? A city or town?”
“Maybe. I’m surprised there isn’t a salvage team here working around the clock.” Abrel knocked his armored fist against a section of the wall.
“It could be they were chased off by the…whoever attacked us. It would make sense for the Pros and Teds to have set up an operation for this. There’s enough here…it’s millions,” I said.
“Tens of millions,” he corrected. “We should have the squad set up a perimeter and send a burst.”
“Who’ll get here first, do you think?” I asked.
“Only one way to find out.”
“Agreed. Let’s get a few more pics for the sat-comm burst.”
Three hours later, we were ready to send our message up to the Hiryū.
The combat engineers placed their meager inventory of mines in the sand to create an early warning system around the destroyed vessel. Callie and I situated ourselves at the high point on the stern and prepped our centrifugal machine gun and sniper rifles. I dispersed the rest of the squad around the upper edge of the burnt remains, giving us a three-hundred-sixty-degree field of fire into the surrounding desert.
We were under-armed and vulnerable if anything as significant as a platoon of armored troops showed up, but we were defending a high position, and the metal we were fantasizing about cashing in as scrap made for excellent shielding.
“You feel we’re ready?” I asked Abrel.
“As ready as we can be,” he answered.
“Okay, three minutes, then. Let’s hope for the best,” I said.
“Hope and a sandwich is still just lunch.”
“Understood.” I notified the squad and transmitted our sat-comm burst three minutes later.
My display screen gave me a view that was near daylight brightness, albeit with an orange translucence from the moon. Only ten minutes passed before I began to receive notifications of incoming friendlies and enemies.
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Low-altitude parachutes popped into view as the advance team arrived. Command sent more troops than I’d thought they would; more troops than I’d believed they had available. As the TCI-Armor infantry company approached, a squadron of SS-14 fighters flew over and launched a volley of missiles at the yet-to-be-identified enemy who’d reached a point four kilometers to our west.
I was pinged by Captain Veneterest.
“Sir,” I said over a private comm.
“Master Sergeant Ford, permission to board under chapter–”
“Sir,” I interrupted, “this is acting platoon leader and the presumptive major of the Third Regiment prior to my comm to the Hiryū-Shimokita,” I corrected. “I wasn’t born yesterday, Captain.”
“Acknowledged. You can’t blame an old officer for trying.”
“No, sir,” I said. “I’d have done the same.”
“On record,” he said over our comm.
“On record,” I replied, setting up an official account of my transfer of authority.
“Living members of Raider Squad, under article sixty-two, remain the sole and only claimants on the salvaged vessel known as item four six alpha dash one thousand seven hundred and seventy-four.”
“Thank you, sir,” I said. “Acknowledged and logged. Permission granted to board, sir. All salvage claims remain as set by your declaration regardless of any and all outcomes of the current or future battles.”
“A young lawyer,” he said.
“Sir.” I didn’t have a reason to believe the captain or any of his officers were sneaky bastards, but I didn’t want to find out by getting shot in the back. Not all friendly-fire deaths were accidental, and we were sitting on tens of millions worth of scrap. I like to think most people are decent and honest, but everyone has a price. The captain and I had officially established myself and the rest of Raider Squad as the sole and only members of the claimant class – which would only matter if the current hostilities allowed the Gurt military to recover the alien starship – so I was reasonably sure that the only people shooting at us would be the enemy.
If we lost control during the upcoming engagement, for salvage purposes the whole mess would officially be abandoned again – unless the attacking force was officially listed as a terrorist organization, an illegitimate government, or one of certain unrecognized tribes.
Even if the ship were salvaged by the Gurt military, it would take a decade for the legalities to work out. Our share would likely be minuscule, but a tiny percentage of a hundred million, even divided by seventeen, wasn’t unsubstantial.
I reminded myself that an advancing force was coming our way.
I needed to be more concerned with living than getting rich. Money’s not worth much to the dead.
My screen blinked a warning.
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“Callie, you got this?”
“On it,” she said. “Stay on sniping.”
“Roger.” I ignored the mortars falling from the sky. My Gauss sniper rifle, which was loaded with devil rounds, had a long-range telescope linked to it, and my backup ammunition was near full capacity. When we fell under attack days ago, I’d barely had time to work before we escaped underground. As a sniper in the middle of a company-wide battle, my duty was to seek the highest value targets. I had a reasonable amount of latitude, so I
sought out the most immediate threats to our survival.
Because they were moving across open desert and we were using an impenetrable structure as cover, the battle quickly tipped against the enemy. Our air support was an unexpected help that I imagined the enemy hadn’t expected either. I wondered why command hadn’t originally sent us in with such support, but my cynical side answered with a reminder of what we were perched on.
I leveled my reticule on an armored soldier who appeared to be a leader. Even with IR communication or other forms of giving directives, some can’t help but talk with their hands. The soldier was moving quickly among the troops and pointing in our direction. I ran a targeting program and fired off a nanosec of laser for range finding.
My screen flashed.
<
I turned off notifications. I was relying on Callie for cover fire and protection against incoming threats. My targeting system placed a tiny yellow dot in the center of my display screen, which was linked to my telescope. It blinked four times and turned green. I moved the green point onto my selected bogie and tracked the target’s movement until the weapon confirmed and auto-fired. The enemy jerked into a stiff upright position, but only for a half second before he toppled over.
I searched for a new target.
Our jets dropped a massive load of HE, and for a moment my DS went white. Once my screen cleared, I returned to sweeping the field for targets. I found no movement.
“We get everything?” I asked Callie.
“It looks like it.”
“I wish all battles went this easy,” I said.
“It’s not really a battle,” she corrected me. “It’s an antiterrorist action. We’re glorified police.”
“No, that was Ted armament the other day. And Ted tactics.”
“Maybe it was, but not tonight. This was a ragtag bunch of underpowered grunts sent to die.”
“They might not have known our side was going to send fighter jets.”
“Probably not, but even without air support…”
“Let’s not get worked up over an easy win.”
“No, you’re right, Major,” she teased. “I just get giddy at the idea of sleeping with an officer.”
“You hitting your suit’s nano-juice a little hard?”
“I wish.” A pause. “The next one won’t be this fun, I’m sure,” she said. “Let’s roll up?”
“Roger.”
Callie wasn’t joking about our next battle.
After we returned to the Hiryū-Shimokita Maru VII, we spent a month in transit to a newly discovered planet.
The Teds had found it first, but nothing as big as the news about a new species of sentient beings on a hospitable world stays secret for long.
By the time we entered the solar system of Talamz, the Gurt name for an Earth-like fourth planet in a solar system of twelve, a rogue faction of Teds aligned with the Pros and believed to be supporting their terrorist forays had made alliances with the planet’s dominant nation, Chemecko. The Teds were mining iridium ore, among other things, and had begun building new factories to process it. Spies reported that they’d promised to give the Chemeckos the technology to create Belkinotic drives and starships.
Just what the universe needed, I thought – another species capable of intergalactic imperialism.
Our assignment was about the same on Talamz as it always had been during the Tetra War: harass the Ted contingent and force the natives to think twice about their choice of friends.
CHAPTER TEN
Death, therefore, the most awful of all evils, is nothing to the righteous. When we’re alive, death has not arrived; when we’re dead, true life has.
~ Poems of Beelnt, Book of Truth, Index 2:23
Captain Veneterest liked our work.
Raider Squad was acquired like a sports star being traded to a new city.
We were slotted with the Third Platoon of Delta Company of the Seventh Regiment. I was no longer an acting platoon leader, but some of the guys continued to call me “sir” – our squad’s inside joke. The soldiers in the Seventh Regiment were genuine badasses in a crowded field of candidates. They’d been the first ones in-country on Earth and Purvas campaigns and had won the honor of being the first Gurts to bleed on newly discovered planets.
Our new platoon leader was mixed race. Second Lieutenant Veenz was a half-human of European descent, with a strong Russian influence and a seasoning of Pacific Islander. His family history on the Earth side was fascinating, but nothing compared to his Purvas side. His ancestry was strongly Guritain. He could never have made lieutenant if that weren’t the case, but he carried enough Tedesconian blood from a grandparent to be extra tall and copper-skinned.
However mixed his ancestry, his loyalty had never been questioned, based upon what the rest of the Third Platoon had told us during our first week aboard our new starship, the Apollinaris. Raider Squad members soon became enthusiastic fans of his leadership style. By the time we were preparing for the first Gurt drop onto Talamz, there wasn’t a Raider who wasn’t prepared to lay down his life for the charismatic lieutenant.
We were eating lunch together when Lieutenant Veenz gave us the news we’d been waiting for. “We’re slotted for zero four hundred ship’s time tomorrow.”
“Local time?” I asked.
“It’ll be dawn when we hit the dirt,” he answered. “Give or take. I don’t know if the locals even use clocks.”
“They must have clocks,” Callie chimed in. “If they have women, they have clocks.”
“Yeah, so they can ignore them,” Abrel grumbled.
“You’re the one who can’t tell time.” Mallsin picked at her food, her expression glum. It was obvious she was upset, and not about Abrel’s aside.
The previous month had been tough on everyone.
“You gonna eat that?” I asked her.
“Go ahead.” She shoved her tray towards me.
I swallowed her synth-vanilla pudding in three big gulps.
“How can you eat that shit?” Veenz asked. “It’s not real.”
I shrugged. “I pretend.”
“I’d kill for chocolate.”
Callie smiled. “Avery traded the last of his chocolate–”
I cut her off. “Don’t reveal my secrets.”
Callie glared at me. “Don’t interrupt me,” she said. “Avery traded my damn chocolate for grenades a couple of missions ago. I could have killed him when he told me.”
“Those grenades saved our lives.” I scraped the sides of the pudding container with my spoon and managed to accumulate a tiny final bite of fake vanilla pudding. I smiled.
“Life without chocolate isn’t worth living,” Callie continued.
“I agree,” Mallsin said. She stood. “Sir, with your permission?”
“Yes, of course. Get some rest.”
I set the dessert container aside and looked for anything else worth scavenging. Nothing jumped out at me. I glanced at Callie and winked.
“Sir, I’m tired, too,” Callie said. “May I be excused?”
“Yes, but I need Avery.”
“Sir,” she said. She threw me an unmistakable stink eye and walked away.
“Avery, I’m going to rely on you to keep Raider Squad up to speed with the rest of the marines. It’s a different type of fighting than they’re used to.”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“As everyone has been told, the faction of the Ted leadership that’s supporting the Pros has established a foothold on this new planet. Obviously we’re not going to stand for that – our position is that these Teds are equivalent to the terrorists, who we’re at war with. Our mission tomorrow will be to prepare the way for a larger force that will follow us. The big guns and equipment coming are less expendable than we are. You can read that as ‘more expensive’ and you wouldn’t be too far from the truth. Command doesn’t want to set down a squadron of heli-jets and have them destroyed. They want us to ground and pound. If there’s a
n enemy force operating on-planet, it’s our job to flush it out.”
“Understood, sir. What kind of weapons are we being issued?” I asked. Unlike my previous units, there were no weapons and ammo requisitions for us in the Seventh. You got whatever Command wanted you to have. I had been informed, privately and tactfully, that any attempts to bribe the armory staff would be dealt with in unpleasant ways. I hadn’t realized that Command had such efficient intelligence gathering on its own people.
The lieutenant repeated the standard lines from the manual. “Command intel makes recommendations. Command logistics disperses the appropriate weapons and ammo for the mission.”
“Understood, sir. But do you have any idea what it’ll actually be?”
He rolled his eyes. “Standard shit, Avery. Off the record, intel is just a bunch of glorified guessers. But you won’t be getting a sniper rifle, if that’s what you’re asking. There’s no reason to snipe anything; we’re going in to destroy and draw out their defenses.”
“We’re sort of being used as bait,” I whispered. “Seems like that’s been a regular tactic lately.”
“Yes, in a way,” he agreed. “But it’s not so bad. We’ll have a full load of missiles and mortars. We drop, blow shit up, and then get picked up.”
“You make it sound so glamorous.”
His mouth twisted into a smirk. “It’s a lifestyle.”
Getting hooked up was a ritual I could have done without, and one I endured with gritted teeth no matter how many times I did it. Tubes and wires went into places I didn’t know existed. The suit’s medical program could deliver a huge variety of meds in the form of nano-pharma that could lower or increase heart rate, induce euphoria, check fear, increase adrenaline, improve cognitive ability, reduce judgment, remove libido, and accomplish dozens of other things. I didn’t like to think about the long-term health ramifications of being a medically manipulated, partially cybernetic killing machine, but the reality was I’d probably never live long enough to find out, so I added it to the long list of shit that didn’t matter to me in the moment.
You might wonder why the psych and medical experts had designed a way to reduce the judgment of a soldier, but the answer’s easy if you think about it: soldiers were often commanded to accomplish missions nobody with a shred of sanity would attempt.
