Crisis

by David Drake

  “Sir, I can’t see a way anybody could have lived through the transients of that blast. . . .”

  “Nothin’ shields like dirt and rock, Sawyer. So be prepared.”

  Dead was better than irradiated, at these power levels.

  “The blowback crashed Manning and Cleary, that’s for sure. And took out whatever coms the One-Twenty-First might have had a prayer of using, not to mention their weapons and any other damned thing they had.”

  So you didn’t know if you were going to find lots of spectacularly dead bodies, or worse: lots of semi-destroyed but somewhat recognizable and sort-of sentient lumps of protoplasm that had once been Nick Kowacs’s mighty Headhunters, the MRC that had been the 92nd’s big-brother role model ... and two of their own.

  Two of their own. He’d had a bad feeling about this mission from before it started. He’d had a bad feeling about Cleary since the day she’d brought him her orders. He’d had a bad feeling about Sawyer and Manning ever since Grant from ISA found out that a sergeant was cleaning an officer’s clock and used that information to blackmail the whole dumbass bunch of them into special ops because you couldn’t say no to what you didn’t understand was happening. ...

  English tried to rub his face with his hands and found his depolarized visor was in the way. “Delta One,” he said quietly, “find me my people, you two-buck collection of chips, and I’ll repair your ass rather than chuck you and start from scratch.”

  His Associate burbled at the edge of his hearing and English seduced the NOCM’s nipples and sensors like he’d never had a chance to do to Cleary.

  “I got somethin’,” Sawyer said eventually in an absolutely flat voice.

  By then English had it, too: a chewed-up chunk of ground that was a klick from the epicenter of the underground blast and glittering with fucked hardware.

  “Get back there and see who wants to volunteer for this, Lieutenant.”

  Mentally, he was thinking he’d like Omega, Theta, and Alpha, Trask’s three-team. They were all reasonably whole ...

  Sawyer was unclipping the lead from his helmet to the console as he stood up and reached for his rifle and powerpack. “Wish we had ground packs.”

  They were thirty pounds lighter.

  “We don’t. I’m not expecting much resistance. Nothing electronic is sensing, let alone thinking, after the bath this place took. ETA five ... four minutes.”

  Sawyer’s visor was down as he headed aft.

  English’s dicey com sputtered to life in mono: “Captain, volunteers are Alpha, Theta, and . . .”

  Everybody who was fit to fight wanted to join the party.

  English took the team he’d hoped for and left the rest to defend the NOCM. You could be wrong in this business. English and his 92nd were up and running here. The Syndicate could have brought in more hardware, sure that the Fleet wouldn’t leave its casualties behind, and be lying in wait.

  The first thing that everybody did when they hit the dirt was a wide sweep, recon rules, combat formations. The ground was littered with little robots, in some places as thick as grass seed in a plowed field.

  You kept walking, trying to tell yourself you weren’t afraid to see a hand or a foot with no body just lying there somewhere. Telling yourself that was what you were here to find.

  English had ported-in overhead from the NOCM, which was a hundred feet above now and giving him everything from a synthetic-aperture alert-scan of the terrain for a hundred klicks in any direction, downloaded from some passing satellite, to micro-counts on the fried enemy hardware.

  So he saw the worst of it first, through his helmet display. And stopped for a minute, before he realized that nobody else on the ground could see what he was seeing, or would see it with such graphic clarity.

  He called a grid square number and headed for it, banishing the real-time image of guys crawling over chunks of earth and stumbling blindly around and trying to dig each other out from under debris.

  You set off a planet-wrecker a few klicks down, you move a lot of crust. It would have taken a couple hundred of those Syndicate bombs, maybe more, to have split open the planet totally, and this one was in that Alliance-excavated vertical shaft.

  But it had done more damage to Toby English’s heart than it would have if this whole side of Khalia was vaporized.

  He wanted to look at this some way he could stand it. He couldn’t tell from the visuals just who had whose arm over whose shoulder, or who was under what.

  His Associate anticipated him and reformated the data so he got it as a nice, clean C&C grid: colored dots, moving across grid lines: blinking bars under them, awaiting identifying numbers.

  You couldn’t ask for a better buffer, and English’s training responded to the mode of information transfer. He counted moving dots. When he got to seventy-four, he told Sawyer what he had.

  There was ongoing, muted chatter in his com, because he wanted to hear live guys talking. He was running a semitransparent superimposition, so he could see his own men in his visual field, as well as the movement in the casualty grid, and his own guys’ positions, fanned out over the area.

  “Call them in when ready, Sawyer.”

  Sawyer was looking for Manning’s support craft, and English didn’t have the heart to tell him he shouldn’t. There was no way you wanted to push anybody, while you were doing this, to go any faster than that man could go.

  There was just too much death here. English was trying to tell himself that as slow as they were going, it was faster than the Fleet, overburdened and still engaging the enemy out there in the space envelope, could have gone.

  But he wasn’t at all sure that somebody else couldn’t have gotten here sooner or at least zeroed the problem sooner. Better.

  He called the NOCM, and told it to put down in the grid square where what was left of the 12lst showed life signs. “And don’t read me your fucking navy rule book. Patch me through to the Haig–Padova himself, SERPA authority.”

  He was going to get some medevac down here, or he was going to sit down here and crash every Fleet vehicle that came into the 92nd’s line of sight, using the NOCM for booster power.

  One thing about ER outfits was that on the ground or in space, you really didn’t want to get one mad at you, if you were electronic or fiber-optic dependent.

  “Delta Two, status report? Toby?” Captain Padova’s voice was harried and full of static.

  Jay Padova loved technological supremacy, so he loved Toby English’s SERPA toys. The Haig had lots of similar experimental hardware because SERPA’s ER commandos shipped in her.

  English said laconically, “Status report: Iiving casualties, at least seventy, in need of medevac, hours ago. What’s the matter up there, Jay, you too busy to take care of your ground-pounders?”

  “We didn’t have any indications of life signs, Captain,” said Padova stiffly. “At least, I didn’t hear about it. And yes, we’re somewhat overextended.”

  “Well, sir, I know that. Does the captain want to extend me a bird or two for the One-Twenty-First, since their own people seem to be too busy to give a shit, or am I staying out of the war until I ferry each of these guys up to their own ship, one at a time, personally?”

  “Look, Captain,” said Padova’s voice, suddenly thick with emotion. “I couldn’t stop those women of yours. You gave them carte blanche to use your authority. Now, we’ll have somebody down to you as soon as we can. Triage those wounded and get them–and yours–off the ground and back here as soon as you can. Forget protocol. We’ll take care of the One-Twenty-First like they were our own.”

  A blast of static made all of English’s visuals dump, then re-form. So Padova didn’t hear him cursing the way no officer ought to curse a command chain.

  When the static cleared, Padova was saying, “–and give Major Kowacs my compliments and best hopes, if he’s alive down there.”

  “If he’s alive down here, sir, I surely will. Delta Two out.” He punched at the manual cut circuit on his b
elt, but his Associate had broken the connection already.

  Sawyer beat him to the fire zone. It looked like God had taken a handful of this alien earth and dropped it on the 121st for spite.

  Alpha was already digging away at something that might have been a bunker. Artillery lay here and there. English’s feet slipped on small robots that crunched underfoot like broken glass.

  They were all over the place.

  He retracted his visor and the smell of the fire zone was one of blood, new earth, feces, and fried flesh.

  His ears heard an almost subliminal sobbing on a soft breeze. The 121st was a full company. He saw two guys with Headhunter patches pulling a third from a pile of rocks and dirt. Everybody was bareheaded, filthy, ripped to shit.

  The first three faces he saw were badly burned. Then he saw a blind guy being fireman-carried by another Headhunter.

  You just kept moving. His own all-com told him how hard this was for his people. He kept his visor open stubbornly: he was getting all the command and control he needed via audio.

  His Delta Associate would tell him if he really should see anything more. Facing this carnage, he wasn’t willing to screen it off with hardware-assists.

  Every once in a while he said, “Sawyer?” just to make sure his lieutenant was still in the circuit.

  Then Sawyer would say, “Still looking, sir.”

  He was glad he wasn’t Sawyer, until he finally found Nick Kowacs and his big lady corporal.

  Major Kowacs was propped up against a boulder. There was another, slightly smaller one, sitting on his left leg. He had Sie’s hand in his lap. Her whole torso was shivering. Everything below her hips was under solid rock, and her face was bright red and yellow with flash burn.

  English took off his helmet and laid it on the dirt beside his knee as he knelt down across from Kowacs. Could the major focus on him?

  Kowacs had a communicator in his other hand, as if the damn thing might just start working. It was nonregulation, some little black job. One half of Kowacs’s face was bright orange and suppurating. The other was greenish white.

  At least they’d had pharmakits, English thought, until he realized that the pharmakits’ electronics wouldn’t have been dispensing, so whatever these guys got out of them was a matter of luck and no kind of measured doses.

  When you manually tried to do anything in this fucking war, you screwed up.

  Kowacs rolled his head, just slightly, as if he were aware that English–or somebody–was there.

  English squinted at that face and couldn’t tell if the swollen eyelids were protecting anything usable in the way of eyes, or if light could get past the lids. Kowacs’s eyelashes were singed off.

  “Hey, Nick,” English said shakily. “It’s me, Toby. S-sorry it took us so long.”

  Kowacs took a deep, ragged breath. “Toby. Sie’ll be glad ... you showed up. She ... was sure . . .” Kowacs’s blistered lips stopped trying to form words.

  English reached out to touch his friend and then couldn‘t: he didn’t know where to touch Kowacs that wouldn’t hurt.

  He said, “We’ll get you guys out of here. Just sit tight.” He thought he saw Sie move her head, so maybe she was still alive, but maybe not.

  Anyway, alive was a relative term.

  He wanted to get out of there, to turn his back and make himself useful somewhere else. So he didn’t.

  He sat down right there, legs crossed, rifle on his knees, to keep watch over Nick Kowacs and his Headhunter corporal until either they died or somehow the 92nd could get them free.

  He put his helmet back on to try to figure how they were going to do that. It took a very long time.

  And then, when they were doing it, Kowacs couldn’t help but scream and English fled.

  He broke and ran.

  And ran. He pulled up short somewhere on the other side of one of the big rocks, head down, gulping air, leaning on the rock with a straight arm. He knew damned well they should have waited for the medevac, not tried freeing Kowacs and Sie on their own. ...

  Now he had to go back there, and face his own guys, who’d seen him cut and run.

  But at least he wouldn’t be seeing big Sie’s mangled legs in his dreams forever.

  The crying of the wind was the crying of the 121st, soft and muted, mixed and more like mourning or keening than guys in excruciating pain.

  He took a deep breath and stood on his own, trudging back, eyes on the ground and on what his visor was showing for progress reports.

  The medevac birds were ten minutes from being any use. When they got here, he’d find out whether strapping his own pharmakit on Kowacs had been the right thing to do or whether, because ER gear was calibrated and neuro-typed to the user, he’d just made a bad situation worse.

  Sawyer said, “Hey, English, get your ass over here.”

  He’d forgotten all about Sawyer’s hunt for the crashed support bird. He didn’t need to ask where “here” was: it came up on his display, along with the best possible route.

  His legs were rubber, and he couldn’t bring himself to ask Sawyer what Sawyer had found.

  Sawyer didn’t volunteer anything, either. English had a rescue mission to run and they both knew it. That meant everybody was an equal priority.

  It was bad enough to hike halfway to hell from the main fire zone before the medevac even set down. ...

  When he got there, Sawyer and his Theta team were just about finished cutting open the bird.

  They’d punched out, both of them: no Manning, no TA Cleary. Their seats were gone, exploded out of the lost canopy, but you couldn’t tell that until you got inside, because the bird had crashed on her back.

  Sawyer looked up at him and wiped his arm across his mouth. “Now, what?”

  “Now we mark them down MIA and go back–or at least I do. I found Kowacs, alive, sort of; and Sie–Iess alive, sort of. I can’t stay here–”

  English’s voice broke and Sawyer got off the wing he was sitting on, fast.

  English didn’t remember how Sawyer came to be holding him in a bear hug. He just stood there and shook until his lieutenant could let go.

  English said, “You can stay here until you’ve satisfied yourself, or until you find something, or until I call you in. I call you in, you and Theta come here. I don’t need you MIA.”

  “Understood, Toby,” said Sawyer. And: “We get the Observer, this time.”

  “Yeah,” said English, slapping his Delta into ERASE, RERECORD. “We do.” The Observer was Grant. If this rat fuck was anybody’s fault, it was Grant’s. The lSA honcho had had this coming for a long time. “Kowacs had what looked to me to be an A-Potential communicator–nonstandard for his outfit–in his hand.” Only Grant could have given Kowacs SERPA-spec gear. “So whenever you’re ready, Lieutenant Sawyer–”

  “I hate MIAs.”

  “Yeah,” said English. There was a part of his soul that was MIA, too.

  He couldn’t tell if they’d ever get any of the missing back. His body didn’t think it needed a heart anymore, anyhow. It hadn’t thought so for the last few hours.

  He heard the medevac birds above and slammed down his visor. “Good luck, man,” he told Sawyer, but he couldn’t look at him.

  They’d run out of luck, and both of them knew it. Next, they were going to run out of time. War doesn’t stop just because you’ve misplaced a couple of people.

  Even when you care too much about those people.

  Caring about Kowacs and Sie and the poor fucked 121st was already more than English could handle. His helmet and his AI were beginning to seem like the only refuge he had in a world turned upside down and crazy.

  He stayed in there, doing everything he could for everybody, but making sure that nobody was more than a colored set of number designators, until they had the entire 121st medevacked off the kill zone.

  Then he had to go pick up Sawyer in the NOCM, and he couldn’t say a damned word.

  They hovered three feet off the ground, ki
cking up dust, until Sawyer and the Theta team came aboard empty-handed.

  And finally, he was in a bird with no dead guys and no wounded guys: the medevac had taken the 92nd’s own wounded to the Haig, as well as the 121st’s.

  English was secretly glad that he couldn’t hear anybody crying or breathing with difficulty or groaning or moaning. Not in his com. Not in the belly of the personnel carrier. Not anywhere but in his memory.

  * * *

  The Haig seemed too empty to English, even though it was busy as hell with all the space combat units in the area that needed help from the leading-edge destroyer’s special Intel-gathering capabilities.

  MIAs made it empty. Missing In Action is the emptiest acronym the armed forces ever created. Your MIAs follow you around like personal ghosts, always there between you and what’s happening in the real-time they may, or may not, be inhabiting.

  Where were they, down there, Cleary and Manning? With all their electronics fried in the blast that crashed their ship, there just wasn’t any way to find them. You could scan for life signs, if you had the entire ship’s capabilities at your personal disposal. But not for a particular set of llfe signs. And there was plenty of life on Khalia. So it was a waste of time.

  If they were slowly bleeding to death down there, English thought he’d be able to tell. If they were being eaten alive by renegade Khalians, Sawyer surely would have felt it. If they were already dead, the two men assured each other, then years of combat instinct would have let them know.

  So they convinced themselves that Manning and Cleary were out there somewhere, trying to make it to an Alliance facility. It was what they wanted to believe.

  And it was easier than thinking about the casualties they’d sent up, before the 92nd, to the Haig. Once they’d parked the NOCM and shepherded their own men through equipment check-in, after-action reports, combat refit, and ready-checks, there was nothing left but physicals.

  Which meant you had to go up to the mededeck–where the 121st was. Where what was left of the 121st was.