“Kelly?” Roland staggered back, getting out from under the DropShip’s weapons. “What?”
“Cast-offs. AWOL.” No difference now. “They’ve quit the Donegal Guards and they’re not going to want us telling tales about them. Treeline, now!”
Her commanding officer was not one to bandy about with the order of rank when good advice was being given. Kelly let him slip behind her, and used her autocannon to push back at the charging Caesar, buying them seconds only.
With more BattleMechs sliding up in their direction, the two Guardsmen might have made a bad end of it if not for the mercenaries. The Vindicator and a Blackjack also painted with the Bengal pelt suddenly turned in their direction and sprinted inside the Caesar’s line of retreat. They savaged the Rommel, blasting one set of armored treads clean off and freezing the turret inside a ruined track. Then they turned up from the Lamprey, and came at the Caesar from behind while Kelly pushed forward to catch the RCT machine in a pincer.
The seventy-ton machine held on for a few long heartbeats, then broke for the DropShip in a circuitous path that avoided the scattered Thunders and left the slower mercenaries behind. All of the RCT machines fell back, heading for the final ramp.
The scattered mercenaries, with two of their small number out of position now, let them go. Within moments the DropShip had buttoned up and was blasting itself clear of Gan Singh.
Kelly Van Lou watched it rise into the air, soon losing itself behind a white tuft of clouds. Her breath came short and sharp, and had nothing to do with the hot, humid air in her cockpit. It had everything to do with the hollow pit deep in her gut. If the Donegal Guards could turn on each other, she wondered, what was left for the now-estranged Lyran Alliance and Federated Commonwealth?
As if in answer to her silent question, her communications board lit up on an unsecured channel. “We picked up some garbled transmissions.” The accented voice from before. The Vindicator’s MechWarrior. With a moment to weigh it, he sounded Slavic. Maybe a native of Gan Singh. Maybe not.
“There may be a DropShip set down on the northern coast of Pandora. Near the city of Myros. The last DropShip on Gan Singh,” he said tiredly as the remnant mercenaries gathered near their position.
Of course it was. That was the nature of battle and politics, after all. Always one more chance. If you were smart or lucky, or both at the same time. “Working together for this one might be in our common good,” Kelly said, then waited for Roland to make the final call.
“It’s a ten hour push,” he said slowly. “We can do it without sleep if you can.”
“Sounds like a plan.” The Vindicator turned away to the northwest, and struck out with a determined stride.
Roland switched over to a secure frequency. One reserved for Third Donegal Guards, Seventh Company. Maybe the last time they’d use it. “Did they just become one of ours?” he asked. “Or did we become one of theirs?”
“Right now,” Kelley answered, “I think we all belong to Pandora. And Gan Singh.” She pushed into an easy walk, keeping pace with the limping Penetrator as she switched back to a common frequency. “Maybe it’s time to see what’s left on this world,” she said.
“What we have to work with.”
DAMAGE CONTROL
by Ilsa J. Bick
Scorpius Planus, Thuban
Bolan Province
Lyran Alliance
9 September 3064
There was a muffled roar as heavy cannon fire punched the sky, like the distant growl of thunder. An instant later, the floor of the medical Quonset twitched and jumped under her boots, and Dr. Elizabeth Trainer felt her heart slam into her throat. A steely talon of panic dug into her chest and she clutched at the edges of the chair where she sat. Relax. They’re still more than twenty klicks away. She dragged in a deep, calming breath, and instantly regretted it. The Quonset’s cooling units were going full blast, but the air was heavy with ash and the stench of rancid sweat, rotten eggs, and something sweet and burnt. It reminded Trainer of pork roasted on a spit, drizzling juices into sputtering flames that licked along the meat.
But she knew the smell wasn’t pork.
The front lines were to the east, on the black basalt expanse of the Scorpion Plains that spread around the base of Scorpius Mons, Thuban’s highest volcano. The Plains—a vast, ruined landscape of lava hummocks—were riddled with steam plumes and sulfur vents. And that’s where the soldiers and BattleMechs of the Twenty-Third Arcturan Guard were fighting and dying in a battle against their brothers, the warriors of the Eleventh Arcturan Guard. It was a battle that Trainer could smell and hear and feel but, mercifully, not see because she was so afraid that Jonathan might be there, in the thick of it.
Oh, God, please keep him safe…
A man’s voice—tremulous and very frightened—cut into her thoughts. “I… I don’t know what happened. It was as if I’d been airdropped into hell.”
Trainer blinked back to attention. The MechWarrior was perched on the edge of a cot, his head bowed. His right knee jiggled up and down like a piston. Trainer sat on a chair she’d pulled around to the captain’s cot. There were no offices in the Quonset, and so a psychiatrist had to make do. Now, she crossed her right leg over her left, and clasped her hands over her knees. “I know it’s hard, Captain Stanton,” she said, keeping her voice as calm as she could even though she felt a slick of clammy perspiration along the back of her neck. “But you’ll be better off if you talk about it. I know that talking makes it more real…”
“Christ, yes,” said Stanton, jerking his face up in a sudden, spastic movement. His eyes locked onto hers. His eyes were very blue, like Jonathan’s: the color of sky on a cloudless afternoon. But that’s where the resemblance ended.
Stanton had been found, unresponsive and nearly catatonic, in the cockpit of his Zeus, a kilometer from their unit. Medications—not many, because she wanted him lucid—had relaxed him, and he was looking a little more… human. Not like the frightened animal they’d found. Still, there were purple smudges under his eyes that gave him a haunted, wild look. The med techs had stripped him out of his battle gear, and she saw that his cammie tee was sopping wet with sweat, the fabric clinging like a second skin to the muscles of his chest. A cigarette he’d lit but not smoked was tweezed between the first and second fingers of his right hand. White curls of smoke spiraled from the tip in sinuous ribbons.
Grimacing, Stanton screwed his eyes shut and slapped the palm of his left hand against his forehead. “It’s like, they’re pictures… they’re here, in my head, right behind my eyes, and when I talk about it, I see it. I smell it, and I can’t move, I can’t…”
“Stanton.” Trainer took her hand and gently pulled Stanton’s arm away from his face. She could feel him shake. “Captain, open your eyes, and look at me.” She waited until Stanton did and then she tightened her grip on his forearm. She had to appeal to honor and duty; she had to inject the sense of his importance into his psyche like a hallucinogenic drug. Manipulative? Of course, but this was civil war.
“Stop.” She drilled him with a look. “Stop. This. Right now. You understand me? You pilot a goddamn Zeus. You’re a warrior. Shakes or not, you’ve been trained to do a job, and, by God, you’re going to do it. Because we need you, Captain. You can’t afford the luxury of withdrawing from the fight.”
“Luxury.” Stanton’s chin quivered, and she saw the shine of sudden tears in his eyes. “Don’t you think I know that?” he said, and she heard his shame. Stanton looked away, then seemed to remember the cigarette in his hand. He sucked greedily; the tip glowed hot red and, in another moment, twin streamers of blue-gray smoke jetted from his nostrils.
“Look,” said Stanton. He swung his head back, and she saw that while the tears were still there, he’d regained some of his self-control. Good, she thought. Got him crying. Halfway there. Now, got to pace this just right.
“I… ,” he said again, his voice clogged with emotion. “I don’t expect you to understand. But th
ese were… are my friends, and the simple fact is that we’ve never been trained for… for this.”
“You’re a soldier.”
“Sure, but trained for a real war, not this! I haven’t been trained to fight, to… kill my friends, my… damn it,” he said, and now a single tear crawled down his left cheek. Stanton’s face was still grimy with black ash from the battlefield, and the tear left a solitary, white track. “That’s our sister regiment, the Golden Lions, out there. Doctor, I trained with some of them. I know who they… what their faces look like inside those machines. Those are people in there.”
Oh, my darling Jonathan, are you out there, are you safe? “We all know people, Captain,” said Trainer, keeping her voice as steady as she could. Focus, focus on the mission! Her heart felt as if a fist had grabbed hold and squeezed. “We all have friends… and now it’s hard, but they’ll kill us if we don’t kill them first. They’re the enemy.”
“But they’re not,” said Stanton. His lips were shivering so much that when he took another pull from his cigarette, the tip bobbled up and down. “They’re still the same people. It’s the damn politics that have changed, that’s all. This isn’t a war about principles; there’s nothing just about it. It’s simply killing.”
“And that’s why you froze?” Trainer asked, choosing another tack. They could discuss the illegitimacy of a civil war all day and, while she agreed, they’d get nowhere. “That’s why you ran? That’s why you left your infantrymen to fend for themselves?”
“I…” Stanton’s mouth opened but nothing more came. After a few seconds, he scrubbed his lips with the flat of his left hand. He looked away, but not before she saw the emotions chase across his face: fear, shame. Despair. “I’m tired,” he said, finally. “I want to be left alone for a little while. Please.”
“You know I can’t do that.”
“Please.” Stanton’s expression was fierce, and she saw that his left hand was fisted, the skin over his knuckles white from tension. “Just for a little while.” And then, in a low murmur: “You don’t know what I’ve done.”
“And what have you done, Stanton?” When he didn’t respond, she touched his shoulder. He flinched. “What have you done?”
“No.” He seemed to shrivel into himself. “No, I can’t. Not… not now. I don’t,” he pressed his fists to his temples. “I don’t want to think!”
“About what?”
“No, please, can’t you leave me in peace? Please, just go away,” Stanton whispered. His eyes snapped shut then bugged open, as if he couldn’t stand what was in the darkness before his eyes. “Please.”
Trainer debated then pushed up from her chair. She felt as if she were very close to getting at the terrors bouncing around in Stanton’s mind. But while she had to wiggle into his head and twist his thoughts to serve the mission, she couldn’t afford to break him. “All right, Captain. But be very clear about this. My job is to get you back to duty, pronto. Yours is to fight. Everything else—love, friendship, compassion—is a secondary consideration. Hell, they’re not even on the damn list.”
They locked gazes for a few seconds. Then, Stanton said, “I was wrong about one thing. You know what I said before? About it being like hell?” He dropped his cigarette, then crushed the smoldering butt against the concrete floor with the heavy wedge of a MechWarrior boot. “It was worse.”
“Your hell’s inside you, Stanton, and you’ll beat it,” Trainer said, unsure if she believed this. “You’re going to go out there and fight… and you’re going to be fine.”
As she turned to go, Stanton said, “I want to ask you a question.”
She looked back. “Go ahead.”
“How can you do this?”
“Do what?”
“This.” Stanton looked around at the cots, the other soldiers. Men, women. “How can you stand to look me in the eye and assure me that all’s right with the world when tomorrow I might destroy someone who was…” He broke off, sucked in a breath, then said, “When tomorrow I might be dying in a pool of my own blood… and all because of you.”
For a moment, Trainer didn’t know what to say. If she were truthful, she wondered this herself. She cleared her throat. “I’m just doing my job,” she said. It was like a mantra that kept her sane. “Now… you get some rest. You’ll be fine, Captain, you’ll see.”
Stanton stared at her for a long moment. “That’s so easy for you to say.”
• • •
She left the usual orders for Stanton with the nurses: clean clothes, a hot meal. A mild sedative and some rest. She debated about ordering a stronger medication but decided against it. Better to let Stanton grapple with his demons with a clear head than with a mind fogged by drugs.
At the door, she stopped and glanced back down the long stretch of cots in the Quonset. Only five days of fighting, and we’re jam-packed and just getting worse. The Quonset was ten meters wide by forty meters deep and filled with a double row of cots, one row to a side. The fresh arrivals, those med-evaced from the front lines, lay on their cots, hands folded over their chests, and stared at nothing. There were empty beds, but that didn’t mean she didn’t have patients. Those soldiers who had been on-site for more than twelve hours were put to work: cooking, hauling supplies, cleaning. They were kept on-site for thirty-six hours, perhaps forty-eight. Then they were sent back to fight.
Damage control: If the term hadn’t been so accurate, she would’ve laughed because it sounded like something one did to fix a machine. But it was accurate because the military was a machine, and they—her patients, the ´Mechs, her—were the cogs that made that machine go. Long ago, the armed forces on Terra had given what psychiatrists like her did the nickname three-hots-and-a-cot. Someone had figured out that the best way to treat combat fatigue was not to med-evac soldiers far from the front lines. Taking them away from the action was actually debilitating and reinforced their sense of failure. The best option was to treat them as close to their fellow soldiers as possible, to keep them involved in doing a soldier’s work while driving home, over and over again, that they had a duty to the other men and women who were doing their jobs. Oh, yes, fear was fine. Fear was normal and, in fact, it was abnormal not to be frightened out of your wits in battle because a man or woman had a pretty good chance of dying.
So, she acknowledged her patients’ fears; she empathized with the sudden, sometimes shocking revelation of their own mortality—that they might be dancing on the razor’s edge between life and death, a difference that could be erased in the blink of an eye. She helped them through all these things—with kind words or harshness when she had to, with rest, clean clothes, a hot meal. And then, she sent a soldier back out to fight, and maybe die.
She despised what she’d become. The perversity of what she did. Every minute of it.
Trainer pushed out of the Quonset and into a blistering hot late afternoon at the lip of the Scorpion Plains. There was that constant pulsing roar of autocannons, and the vibrations from the battle were so much stronger outside that she felt them shiver up her boots and into her calves and thighs. The med unit was close enough for her to see the tiny hump of the mountain rising to the east. As she scanned the misty summit, she caught glimpses of the insect-like figures of BattleMechs boiling over the black rock, like ants dislodged from a hill.
She felt her blood chill in her veins. She hadn’t been able to make out any ´Mechs on the summit yesterday, but their presence confirmed her worst fears. The Eleventh, led by Colonel Linda McDonald, was continuing its relentless advance. The Twenty-Third was low on ´Mechs, and that was why even a single soldier like Stanton was so vitally important.
She turned her back on the volcano and stared out past the small village of Quonsets and tents to the middle distance. Not an inspiring sight: More lava flows marked here and there by spiked stands of silver swords, the only plants that could survive on the lava field. The sun was very hot—it hadn’t rained on the Scorpion Plains for almost a month—and her body respon
ded to the sudden change in temperature by popping out little beads of sweat that trickled between her shoulders and wet the pits of her arms. The stench of battle was so much stronger out here, she could taste it: ash and grit and something oily. She made a face, spat out a gob of gray-tinged saliva. She was tempted to go back into the Quonset, or maybe head over to her quarters and duck into someplace relatively cool. But she had a lot of work to do—the soldiers just kept coming—and then there was the medical unit’s general briefing for later that evening. She really didn’t have the luxury of time.
Luxury. That’s what Stanton had said. What had made a battle-hardened man like Stanton crack? Trainer fished out a packet of cigarettes from her left breast pocket. She rarely smoked and thought it was a filthy habit. But smoking helped mask the taste of death in her mouth. She lit the cigarette, then smoked for a few moments, staring at and thinking of nothing, letting her mind drift the way the smoke billowed then dispersed on the wind. But then her restless thoughts settled on Jonathan.
Her vision suddenly blurred as the tears came. Stanton was the trigger, probably. They had the same eyes… Most days she was able to clamp down on anything to do with Jonathan, although the nights were hard. She sucked on her cigarette, savored the burn a moment, and then let the smoke go. Her left hand inched to her neck, and to a length of gold chain pooling in the hollow of her throat. She ran her fingers over the chain and felt how the gold was warm from her skin, then let her fingers trail over the pendant: a diamond in the shape of a single tear.
She remembered when he’d given her the necklace: five months ago in April, not long after the disastrous campaign at Tikonov where Victor’s forces were forced back into Lyran space. She remembered hearing the sizzle of rain against stone outside their window. A light breeze fluttered the curtains, and she smelled water and wet leaves. They made slow, lingering love, taking their time, delighting in the taste and feel of one another. The sheets felt cool, and in the dim light of a single candle, Jonathan’s skin glowed a rich warm amber.
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