by Marko Kloos
Outside of my window, the platoon marches off to breakfast, in a tight and precise formation, with Sergeant Lear calling cadence from the front of the group. Two out of my three drill instructors have no combat experience. Sergeant Lear is a female trooper from the Fleet’s military police, and Sergeant Dietrich is from Supply & Logistics. Only Sergeant Fisher, my senior drill instructor, has been in battle. He is a Spaceborne Infantry heavy weapons specialist, an autocannon gunner, and the only member of my drill instructor crew whose service experience is even remotely like my own. Strangely enough, I don’t get along with him as much as I do with Lear and Dietrich. He’s sullen, clearly suffering from grunt fatigue, and resistant to advice. Lear and Dietrich are motivated, personable, and eager to learn on the job.
There’s a protocol in place for everything in the military, of course—including the death of a recruit. This is the first time I’ve had to follow that protocol, and I hope it’s the last. It’s shitty enough to lose people on some godforsaken icy rock on the ass end of the universe. It’s several orders of magnitude shittier when they’re fresh recruits still in training.
I get out my PDP and tap in a message to Sergeant Lear to come and see me after morning chow. Then I start reading Private BARDEN, J.’s personnel file, to come up with eulogy material for the lieutenant when he goes to the funeral later this week.
Sergeant Lear knocks on my open door twenty minutes later.
“Good God, Lear, did you inhale your breakfast on the run back? I said after chow, not during.”
“I eat fast, Sergeant Grayson,” she says. “No inconvenience.”
“Come in.” I make a sweeping gesture and point at the chair in front of my desk. Sergeant Lear walks into the room and sits down, squared away as ever. She’s fit and lean, and wears her long hair in a ponytail that reminds me of my old squad mate from the Territorial Army, Private Hansen.
“You are going to head out into the field for the graduation exercise with a short squad,” I say.
“Yeah,” she replies. “Barden was the leader of my second fire team. Now they’re three in that squad.”
“Won’t be the last time they’ll have to patch holes in the squad. I can’t get you a replacement. We don’t have anyone to slipstream in from the Medical Recovery company.”
“We’ll manage,” Sergeant Lear says. “I’ll bump Matteo to fire team leader. They’ll just have to work around it.”
“Tell me about Barden. They’ll send the lieutenant home with him for the funeral. He needs something to talk about over the casket.”
Lear shrugs. “He was a cocky little shit, but he wasn’t bad. Picked up fast on new stuff. Hardly ever had to show him anything twice, never three times. Had a bit of an attitude sometimes, but which one of them doesn’t from time to time. He would have made a decent SI grunt. Maybe even NCO material.”
“Damn shame,” I agree. “One more week.”
“He was a bit of a clown,” Lear says. “Always had to crack stupid jokes. The squad liked him okay, I guess.”
“Well, that’s something. ‘He was good-humored, well liked, and a bright and capable recruit.’ That will go on the lieutenant’s bullshit card.”
“I’m just happy I won’t have to go. I hate funerals,” Sergeant Lear says.
“Same here,” I say. “Been to too fucking many lately.”
CHAPTER 2
The platoon is geared up in battle armor and full combat loadout five minutes before the assigned time. When I step out in front of the building again, I am wearing my own armor—not the HEBA bug suit, but the standard Fleet laminate hardshell. The only equipment on my body younger than half a decade and unscratched is my rifle, one of the new M-90s. We took the design of the Russian anti-Lanky rifles and tweaked it a great deal for Western sensibilities. The Russian guns are single-shot weapons, whereas our modified copy is a heavy autoloader with a five-round magazine, more than twice the capacity of the old M-80 double rifles we were using before. This new cross-pollinating of ideas and designs between very recent former enemies has been radical and strange, but you can’t argue with results.
“This is your graduation exercise,” I say when the squad leaders have everyone at attention. “We will board the ‘drop ships’”—I point to the buses lined up on the street beside the company building—“and we will do a simulated landing on the training ground ten klicks from this base. Pretend you are twenty light-years away and on a colony moon, because you might as well be. Whether you live through the exercise or die a glorious death for the Commonwealth out there will not determine if you pass. You will pass if you do everything out there according to your orders and your training. Pretend those are real Lankies, and they came to wipe out your families and steal your home world. And then show them why it’s not a smart idea to piss off the hairless primates of Sol Three.”
The platoon lets out a short, aggressive holler at this, like they’re the varsity team about to kick someone’s ass in a championship game. They know they can’t die out there for real—that it’s a sophisticated simulation, the full sensory experience of a real battle, but without the chance of actual death or dismemberment. I would be much more excited and pumped up about combat drops in the real world if I knew I couldn’t die.
I step back and let the drill sergeants take over their squads. We use the buses like we would use drop ships in the field, one to a platoon, so everyone files into the bus assigned to us while the other platoons of our Basic training company board the other three buses. As the platoon sergeant, I board last and take the jump seat behind the pilot station. In a combat situation, the platoon commander, Lieutenant Lewis, would sit up front, but our lieutenant is over at training battalion command this morning, undoubtedly for business related to our two dead recruits. I don’t envy him the task.
We roll through the base and the huge security lock at the main gate, and then into the desert beyond. NACRD Orem is as isolated as a military installation can be these days. It sits in the desert just a few dozen miles southwest of the Salt Lake City metroplex, on the site of a former military depot, because there’s nothing but sand and shrubs out here, and nobody cares when we play war with our noisy toys. Over six years and what seems like several lifetimes ago, I passed the same security lock in the other direction on the way to become a soldier. I thought I knew what I would be getting into, but I had absolutely no idea.
We have several satellite training facilities scattered out here in the dust and rocks. Away from Salt Lake, the area looks a lot like some of our colony planets, so it’s close to perfect for drilling off-world combat scenarios. Our platoon bus takes us to OWC Training Facility 38, a re-creation of a typical colony town, complete with a partial mock-up of a terraforming station. As we pull into the facility, the drill sergeants leave their seats and assume drop positions in the aisle of the bus.
“Platoon up!” they yell. The recruits get out of their jump seats and line up along the aisle, rifles in hands, helmet visors snapping closed.
“Check your gear!”
I watch as they go through the proper motions, checking each other’s armor latches and equipment. My drill instructors have been on the ball with these kids. They are quick and thorough, and there’s very little fumbling or horsing around.
“Charge your weapons!”
Thirty-three recruits cycle their rifle bolts, chambering simulated fifteen-millimeter explosive gas rounds. The training version is a pretend cartridge, stuffed with a computer module and a heavy charge of carbon dioxide to vent into the stock’s gas cylinder and simulate the recoil of the real M-90 rifle. I get out of my seat, do a quick check of my own gear, and chamber a round in my own rifle as well. I carry the M-90 and a sidearm, as I would out on a real combat drop against Lankies, but I’m missing my admin deck, which has been an essential part of my real Fleet job for half a decade, and I feel incomplete without it.
The bus comes to a slow stop in the middle of the mock-up colony town. The tailgate opens—not
with the hydraulic whine of an actual drop ship hatch, but with the hissing of pneumatic cylinders—and the platoon charges out into the sunny April day, drill sergeants in the lead. I stay in the open tail hatch for a moment and watch their deployment. They split up into squads and fire teams and take up textbook covering positions. The data display on my visor shows the entire platoon fanning out and covering the area 360 degrees around the “drop ship.”
In a real battle deployment, I would be taking charge of First Squad as the senior platoon NCO. On field days, I used to do just that in the beginning, to get a feel of the recruits and my drill instructors. But once I was convinced that the drill sergeants had everything firmly in hand, I backed off and started supervising from a distance because I found that everyone deferred to my judgment too much. I’ve been in combat against the SRA and the Lankies, and two of my three drill instructors have not, so it’s a natural tendency, but both my boots and my sergeants need to be able to swim on their own. So while the platoon deploys around the fake colony town, I trot over to the training facility’s ops center, a small bunker right in the middle of the place. The computer recognizes my electronic signature and opens the armored hatch for me, and I step into the building.
The ops center is a small two-room structure, stuffed with holoscreens and computer consoles. There’s a short row of mesh-backed chairs designed for personnel in battle armor, and I drop into one and turn on the displays and consoles in front of me. The entire facility is lousy with optical and data sensors, and I can keep tabs on every member of the platoon from pretty much any angle. Their suit computers are tied in to the facility’s segregated TacLink network, and not only can I see and hear what they see and hear, but I can give them things to see as well. The installation is a giant simulator stage, and I control what goes on out there. If I want them to fight a quartet of SRA drop ships and a company of Russian marines, I can simulate them, and they will become real on their helmet displays and in their headsets. But this field exercise does not involve our old Sino-Russian enemies. They are geared to fight Lankies, so Lankies are what they’ll get today.
I check the tactical screen and open the squad leader channel.
“Squad leaders, prepare perimeter defense. Likely threat vector is one-eight-zero degrees.”
The squad sergeants toggle back their acknowledgments. The platoon elects to get up on the roof of the terraforming station, which rises twenty-five meters above the desert floor and offers excellent fields of fire. Against the SRA, elevated positions like that are too exposed to air attack or long-range precision fire, but against Lankies, you want to be able to see and shoot as far out as you can, because there’s not much room for error when engaging creatures who can cover a kilometer in less than a minute.
I check the visuals I’m feeding to the platoon—dark, rainy skies, a colony world in the middle of having its atmosphere’s CO2 content flipped with its oxygen content. The boots and their drill sergeants don’t know it, but the scenario I am letting them tackle today is a rehash of our First Contact with the Lankies, almost seven years ago on a faraway planet called Willoughby. Overhead, it’s a sunny day in the desert, but with their visors down and their armor suits controlling their individual climates, my boot platoon is on Willoughby right now, seeing what I want them to see and hearing what I want them to hear.
They all know it’s just a simulation, but I can see all of their heart rates climb considerably when I make the first Lanky step out of the squalls to the west and have it approach the terraformer in slow, thundering steps. Twenty-five meters of rain-slick skin the color of eggshells, spindly limbs that look like the thing shouldn’t even be able to propel itself on them, joints that bend all the wrong ways, to our Earth-biology knowledge. Even with the right weapons to fight them, they are intimidating opponents, something out of an old monster movie, and I shudder when I think about how utterly unprepared we were to fight them on that day—no idea of what was coming, and armed with weapons that were never designed to kill something of that size and toughness.
The platoon deploys on the rooftop in one long firing line, the new doctrine for fighting Lankies in stand-up battles. The squad leaders shout orders, and the squads take position in a reasonably efficient way for a bunch of kids who were rank civvies just eleven weeks ago. In a regular SI rifle platoon, Third Squad would be the heavy weapons squad, and they’d be setting up a pair of canister-fed autocannons on the flanks of the platoon, but our boot platoon doesn’t have training on that gear yet. Everyone has an M-90 semiautomatic anti-LHO rifle. LHO stands for “large hostile organism,” and it’s the new tactical shorthand for Lankies. As the simulated Lanky lumbers toward the mock-up terraforming station, thirty-three targeting lasers paint the incoming creature with a swarm of green dots visible only to helmet visor displays.
“All squads, on my mark,” Sergeant Fisher shouts. “Center mass shots. Don’t waste ammo. Three, two, one, fire!”
The platoon’s rifles all bark more or less as one, a stuttering drumroll of thundering reports. The new M-90s are shorter, lighter, fire faster, and are more effective than the old M-80 double rifles. They’re also much, much louder. At the last fraction of a second before the sergeant gives the fire command, I cheat a little and make the Lanky lower its head and cover most of its upper body with the large, bony, shield-like protuberance on its head. Thirty-three simulated explosive gas rounds fly out from the rooftop. Most of them shatter and ricochet off the Lanky’s cranial shield like pebbles thrown against a concrete wall. The Lanky bellows a wail, shakes its head, and keeps coming, undeterred. They have monstrously long strides when they’re in a hurry, easily ten meters to a step, and the three hundred meters between the terraforming building and the Lanky turn into two hundred before the platoon fires the next salvo.
This time, I let the Lanky walk into the defensive fire. At two hundred meters, the rifles’ ballistic computers can put the rounds into a sheet of paper that’s been folded over twice. The better part of three dozen rounds pepper the center of the Lanky’s mass, and the creature’s chest heaves out and explodes with a wet and muffled thump. The Lanky’s stride falters, and the thing collapses midstep, its body crashing to the ground in an ungraceful tangle of limbs. The platoon’s troopers send up a satisfied cheer.
The new rifles have new ammunition, developed by the R&D section at Aberdeen Proving Grounds. With dozens of Lanky bodies at our disposal after the Battle of Earth last year, R&D has had no shortage of ballistic testing material. Lanky skins are thick and almost impossibly tough—even the old armor-piercing shells from our autocannons bounced off half the time—but they’re not impenetrable. It turns out that shooting grenades or fléchettes at a Lanky is mostly pointless. The new ammo is truly evil stuff, saboted subcaliber penetrators that work like hypodermic needles. They hit the Lanky, pierce the skin, release a hundred centiliters of explosive gas, and then ignite the mess. The Lanky on the field in front of the terraformer rolls to one side and lies still, its chest blown out from the inside by a few liters of aerosolized explosive. I’ve never seen what a round like that would do to a human being, and I really hope I never do, because this ammo can take a hundred-ton Lanky down with just a few well-placed hits.
In theory, I remind myself. We’ve tested the new rounds on Lanky corpses, but we haven’t had a chance to use them in combat yet. It’s all conjecture based on dead-meat terminal ballistics, but the gas rounds make an unholy mess out of a dead Lanky, and I have no reason to believe they won’t ruin the day of a live one.
The troops on the roof are still in the middle of their self-congratulatory cheer when I send in the next wave. The cheering ebbs when they hear the thundering footsteps in the fog and mist in the distance. Again, I am cheating a little. When I lived through this scenario in real life over six years ago, the second wave was made up of three more Lankies. We had just a squad then, with fléchette rifles, and no hope of stopping three of those things from tearing up the terraformer. Because these troop
s are a full platoon with much better rifles, I send in not three, but six more Lankies. Let them have a little challenge.
The squad leaders bellow orders again, and the platoon engages the newcomers. I study the camera feeds and the tactical display as they re-form their line and assign fire teams to individual Lankies, just like they should. Two fire teams per squad, three squads per platoon, four rifles per Lanky, five rounds in each rifle between reloads. I’m having the Lankies cross the distance as fast as we know they can move, a kilometer per minute. That doesn’t leave much room for errors on the part of the platoon. Alerted and ready for trouble, the Lankies advance with their cranial shields in front of them, and they bob and weave as if they are walking into a hailstorm as the platoon unloads on them. Their head shields are too tough for anything man-portable in our arsenal—even armor-piercing MARS rockets will just chip off bits—and most of the rifle rounds expend themselves harmlessly in small puffs of aerosolizing gas.
“Aim for the joints,” Sergeant Fisher yells into his squad channel. The recruits shift their fire, but many of the shots miss the relatively much smaller limb joints of the Lanky bodies.
Not as easy as a static target that doesn’t come charging for you, is it? I think and smile to myself. Every last one of these recruits can pot a target the size of a helmet at five hundred meters with those computerized rifles, but it’s much harder to aim true when you’re scared to death and out of breath.
