by Shuvom Ghose
"The more I look into the bands, it only looks like three things can go wrong with them," he whispered to us. "One, they can fail to detect the wearer has died. They use a heartbeat sensor, and when you flatline, that's when the transmit starts. So you're out of luck if that sensor had fails, or if someone gets you by headshot." He looked at me. "Which makes me wonder why we don't wear helmets in battle, sir."
"Because the Spiders don't have snipers, private. And command considered it unlikely they would invent gunpowder during our war with them."
"But, they could still like, plunge one of those claws right into our-"
I sighed. "And where would you put the band then, Grimstone? On the outside of the helmet so it gets hit first? On the inside so you can't see how many bars you have?"
"And so the metal helmet itself blocks the radio transmission?" Ann-Marie added.
Grimstone started pulling some schematics up on his tablet. "Well, I had a few ideas about that too-"
"I'll take the helmets under advisement," I interrupted. "Later. But do you think that's what happened to Ridley?"
He frowned. "That's what I thought at first. The band had green bars showing, which is pre-transmission. Not solid red, which would be post-transmission. But I looked into the band's diagnostic logs, and there was a record of a scan and transmit, about ten minutes after the Immortals had died."
"So why were the bars green?" Ann-Marie asked.
He frowned more. "They only turn red after a successful transfer. Which brings us to failure mode two: if the signal gets interfered with along the way, like microwaves sometimes do to radios."
"Or signal jammers," Ann-Marie said, holding up her smartphone.
"Yeah," Grimstone agreed. "That could do it too, but it would have to be strong. Much stronger than a phone. These bands aren't messing around- we're probably all going to get brain cancer later."
"No," Zazlu said, low and definitive. "The Immortals on the patrol all transferred. At different times. From different points on the mountain. They would have been jammed as well."
Grimstone looked crestfallen. This was obviously his pet theory. "Well, I figured if someone turned on the jammer at just the right time..."
"Wait," I said. "Didn't I fight Three-Spot thirty minutes later? And I transferred fine. So you're saying that some massively powerful signal jammer turned on just in time to prevent Ridley's transfer, but not to prevent the Immortal's or mine?"
"And lasted short enough that we didn't all notice our bars go to zero and raise hell?" Ann-Marie added.
Grimstone swallowed. "I mean, I figured-"
"Evidence, Grimstone," I interrupted. "We need hard proof if we're going to do anything about this. Do you have any for failure mode two?"
He looked even paler than usual. "Well, there is the signal strength log..." He pulled up a graph on his tablet. It was a noisy scattergraph of mostly horizontal points, that if I squinted real hard kind of made a straight line.
"What is this?" I asked.
"This is Ridley's band trying to communicate with resurrection station 25734, which is our base. It pings to test signal strength five times every second. Most of the time it's up around five bars." He pointed at the mostly flat points marching along the graph. "But look at this."
There was a valley on the graph, where the strength almost dropped to zero and stayed there, then ramped back up to normal. It was noticeable, unmistakable. Deliberate. My adrenaline started kicking in. Then my brain caught up.
"Wait a minute- how long is this valley? Five pings a second?" I started counting the dots. "Two, four, ten-"
"Three seconds," Grimmy admitted.
"Three seconds!" I spat. "And how long do the bands take to transmit?"
He was blushing, nervous. "Two seconds."
I stood up. "Zoom out. Show me the rest of the graph. How far back does it go?"
"A few days." He scrolled the graph backwards, over the last hours of our First Lieutenant's life.
"So what's THIS valley?" I asked.
"He probably walked by the radar room," Grimstone admitted. "You know how our bands act in that one corner of the hallway-"
"And what are all THESE sharp valleys?" Butcher asked. "This big set, here?"
Our tech was full on blushing now. "Remember, the night before, we had that lightning storm and all missions were canceled-"
"And this one the day before?" Zazlu asked. "It lasts just as long."
"I don't know!" Grimstone said, shutting the graph off. "That could have been a lot of things."
We heard some private stirring in his bunk and I shushed the three of them, then started talking in a low whisper again. "So your theory is, that someone turned on a massive signal jammer right at the exact time that Ridley flatlined, and that's why he didn't resurrect? What were they doing? Watching his every move for days by satellite?"
Grimmy looked defeated. "Maybe."
"No. Tell me about failure mode three."
He swallowed, then began. "The imprinting process could be blocked. Not the hardware part- that's got more layers of security and redundancy than the World Bank. Once the signal comes in, it's going into a clone, no one can stop it. No one this side of the wormgate has the access codes to. But the actual wetware of the clone... if someone pulls a few wires off the clone's head at just the right time..."
I could picture Doc Murphy doing a lot of things, and I had done so last night. But I couldn't picture her doing that.
"Someone could also kill the clone in the tank," Zazlu added sourly. "The moment after they awaken- a knife in the chest."
Or that. I shook my head again. "No, that doesn't make sense either. Great. More dead ends." I rubbed my forehead. "Okay, Grim, keep investigating Ridley's band. Take it apart if you have to. We need something definite."
I looked at Ann-Marie, perched on her chair. The bandages were off but her skin on her knee was still the wrong color. And texture. "Butcher, can you walk yet?"
"I can manage."
"Enough to see if anyone was watching a satellite feed of that patrol? Or monitoring the comm chatter?"
She stood up stiffly, using the chair for support. "Yes sir."
I frowned, watching her limp to her bunk, then turned back to Grimstone.
"So Ridley's band lost contact with the resurrection tanks but it transmitted anyway? Is that normal?"
He nodded. "The bands always transmit upon death, even if they don't have a solid signal. Just on the chance that some set of res tanks are on-line, somewhere." He swallowed and looked up at me. "But in this case, no one was listening."
I tried not to think about Ridley's consciousness being beamed out into the coldness of space never to be received, as I walked over to Butcher's bunk where she was getting out her crutches.
"You need crutches?" I was truly surprised. Yes, it had been a burn, but over her clothes. They usually didn't take this long to heal.
Her lips were drawn tight. "Just for a few days."
"Why?"
She looked uncomfortable, then finally said in a low voice, "Steve says if you hadn't tried to pull the burnt clothes off of my knee the skin would have healed faster. You never pull clothes off a burn. He said any medic would know that."
That hurt. She had been in pain. I had just been trying to help, as the helicopter took the long way back to base, to hide our lies. I hadn't meant to...
Butcher patted my arm. "Sir, don't worry." She smiled bravely. "I can hide all sorts of listening gear in crutches. And chicks dig scars, right?"
No. Not right. I turned to my second lieutenant. "Zaz, get all the privates up. Steve's going to teach us field medicine."
He raised an eyebrow at me. "All of us?"
"All of us. Today."
He nodded, then started shaking private's bunks down the line. "Come on, Infinity Squad! Up and at them! Come on, out of bed!"
Most of the squad had already hopped out and started dressing when Juan's female reporter pulled their curtain back, h
er hair mussed and an arm covering her breasts. In the commotion, she tried to slink unnoticed towards the chair with her clothes but somewhere in the barracks, a private clapped just once. Then again. Then with slowly increasing speed.
The other privates took up the slow clap until the embarrassed woman was getting a standing ovation in the middle of the room. I waited for her to grab her clothes and bolt or to start lashing out, but instead she stood up tall, straightened her thong, and then bowed formally to each corner of the room, like the lead actress at the end of a play. She even crossed her feet and did that flourish thing with the arm that wasn't guarding her breasts.
I chuckled, as did some of the guys, and the clapping broke up as people went about their morning tasks. I turned to Ann-Marie. "Huh. I guess she's one of us now."
Even Butcher was smirking, just a little. "I guess." She swung up onto her crutches. "I'll go show 'Dakota' where the women's showers are."
I led the squad into the cafeteria after Steve's first lesson on triage. All the privates were picking it up eagerly- they didn't want to be clones any more than I had.
As we waited in line for breakfast, I looked over the skulls Oakley had mounted on the walls like trophy deer. Cleaned to a shiny black polish and with the eyes looking right at you, the two-foot wide spider heads did look imposing and dangerous. And seeing so many lined up, severed from their powerful bodies would be morale boosting. If you didn't know how we had actually come across them.
At the tables underneath the heads of the alpha predators on this planet were members of Immortal and Ohhhhmmega Squads, finishing their breakfast. The Immortals were in their purple uniforms with the big 'I' patch on their chest, the Omegas in brown uniforms with the ancient Greek symbol for electrical resistance on theirs.
Theoretically, we were all part of the same army. Even literally bred from the same stock- the Immortals were all clones and half the Omega's were too. But as we sat down at the table in front of them and I looked back between my soldiers and theirs, I couldn't help but wonder.
There was a hunger, an animal intensity to the way the Immortals devoured their steak and eggs that no one in Infinity squad had. They had tattoos on their arms, some on their face, those damn death marks ringing their necks, and the way they stared at me while they sliced their razor sharp K-Bar knives through their meals, it was like a pack of feral wolves.
They were killers. And they knew it. Maybe Zazlu or Juan could match them on a bad day, but ten of them versus ten of us in a dark alley... I didn't want to think about it.
I made a note to look for a killer instead of another medic from the next replacement class. Just in case.
Even Omega squad, started by First Lieutenant Ching to embody the Buddhist principles of "nirvana, enlightenment, and calm" had more pure killers in it than we did. Now, they were killers just like a master Japanese swordsman was. One who could decapitate three attackers, wipe his blade clean and bow before their heads hit the ground. Precise, professional. But killers nonetheless. And even in some of their cloned members, I saw it, that feral stare. Like I was a sheep in a pen.
Yeah, I definitely wanted one of those under my command, instead of against me. I elbowed Zazlu to get his attention.
"What have you heard about the two newest squads?"
Zaz shrugged. "Phoenix Squad is full of average soldiers. Nothing special."
"And the other? The ones walking around with a big red '2' on their patches. Any good recruits in there?"
He swallowed, then frowned. "The Second Chance Squad. They are bad news. Most of them are washouts from other units. I didn't even trust any to smuggle cocaine for me."
"Worse than that," Ann-Marie added. "They pulled them from the brigs in Leavenworth and other prisons. Serve out their term here, maybe their sentence is reduced, and they get a 'second chance'."
Great. Hardened criminals. More feral looks. More killers around us. I sighed. "Doesn't any little kid want to grow up to be a Space Marine anymore?"
"Not until we nuke these bugs from orbit," Juan laughed. "That's the only way to be sure," he added, then kept shoveling food into his mouth as Zazlu, Butcher and I looked at him in disbelief. "What?" he cried out a few seconds later. "We had movies in the ghetto!"
"That movie came out before you were born," I said.
"My grandmother made me watch it when we got our deployment orders!"
I shook my head as the squad laughed, and Grimstone just kept saying, "Game over man, game over!" Which was right before things went to shit.
It started with Oakley walking in, of course, and he was leading a group of thirty people dressed like hicks. But in a good way. After seeing nothing but fatigues or useless suited bureaucrats for the last month, it was refreshing to see men and women dressed in jeans and overalls, boots and rolled up shirts, ready to work. They were from every race, every part of the world, it seemed, but all shared the quiet intensity of people who knew how big a task lay ahead of them. It would be their shovels, not our guns, which would be the key to colonizing this planet. So of course Oakley looked down on them.
"Now, the base cafeteria is restricted to service personnel only," the General spouted on as he led them along the wall, "but I wanted to show you the lengths our brave soldiers have gone to, to make your new home a secure one. All of these skulls were collected in just the last week, as our heroic squads have felled one Hell-Spider after another-"
"Now General," asked a cheerful but inoffensive Midwestern accent I recognized from last night, "which squad in particular killed the spider under which you're standing now?"
We all looked up to see a bathed, dressed, and professionally made-up Dakota leaning forward on her high heels to put her microphone in the General's face. Juan was beaming, trying to lean forward to catch her gaze, but Dakota was a pro: she only had eyes for Oakley right now. And he was eating her attention up.
"Well, Miss Rand," he started, taking a quick look down her body before answering, "this fearsome skull in particular was collected by Infinity Squad. But our other squads, most notably Immortal Squad right behind you, have actually lead the effort to-"
"And these other two skulls? With the bullet holes in them? Who collected those?"
Dakota was all bubbly charm and innocent interest. I knew what she was trying to do for Juan and possibly his grandmother back home watching TV, even as I could foresee the slow-motion train wreck she was leading us into.
Oakley frowned. "Well, those two as well were collected by Infinity Squad the other day. But the other squads have also-"
"And these two skulls here, the ones almost torn to pieces in the fighting?"
Now Oakley was scowling. "Those were also Infinity Squad."
The Immortal soldiers between us and her weren't all too happy either. And then one of the farmers snorted.
"Have ALL these trophies here been collected by just ONE squad?" he asked. "What do you have your other grunts doing- putting their thumbs up their asses all day?"
Now Oakley was red-faced. "ALL of our squads have been fighting tooth and nail for this planet, every day! In fact- Immortal squad- AT ATTENTION!"
First Lieutenant Hector jumped up and saluted in his purple uniform, a scowling tiger tattooed on half of his scowling face. "Sir!"
"Take your squad out NOW, and kill some spiders to put on these walls! Drop in the same valley that Infinity Squad did yesterday!"
"Sir, yes sir!"
Hector snapped at his Second Lieutenant and their squad rose as one, then started hustling towards the door. Shit shit shit.
I sprang to my feet and ran after them, past the farmers and the news team.
"In fact, here is the leader of Infinity Squad now, the brave Lieu-"
"Not now Dakota," I said, rushing past her to try and catch Hector.
I sprinted and caught him at the armory, handing out rifles and grenades to his men. "Hector, look-"
"Back OFF Forrest," he growled, and I did, just from the tone in his voice. "We d
on't need another Infinity Lieutenant tagging along on patrol. You know what happened to the last one." And then he wolf-grinned at me, daring me to hit him, alone in a hallway with ten of his killers.
And I almost did.
They had done something to Ridley. Maybe jammed his signal or killed him in the tank, I don't know. But I could see the happy malice in his face and I knew.
I should have LET him drop into that valley and get sliced to pieces by Red-Stripe and his hunting party. Except that would have led to 'balancing the scales' and a chilly reception the next time we wanted skulls.
"Yeah, I do know what happened," I said. "After you were killed on first contact, Ridley led your squad up the mountain like a hero, found a defensible position and then killed five spiders alone after your men cracked and suicide charged the enemy. He outclassed you all, that's what happened."
Now I was daring him to hit me. I actually saw one of his men unbuckle the knife strapped to his thigh.
That's when Ann-Marie crutched into view at the end of the hall and just stood, staring at us from a distance. After a second, Hector gave his man a subtle sign and the private slid his hand off the knife.
"Look, I just want to go home," I added. "So I want these spiders killed just like you do. Ridley taught me how to outthink the spiders, that's why we can bring so many skulls back. And if I teach you, we all get home faster. I don't CARE which squad has the most hanging up in the cafeteria."
Hector crossed his arms at me as his men continued arming themselves. He was listening.
"The spiders hunt by night," I continued, "and then return to their tree homes before the sun hits noon."
Their Intelligence Lieutenant and second in command, Samson, perked up, looking at me strangely. "Tree homes? I read that the spiders live in caves."
"Did you live in some strange part of Earth no one knows about?" Ann-Marie said, crutching closer. "Because in my part, spiders lived in webs. And here, the webs stretch between trees. If you find them sleeping in their webs during the day, they're pretty easily to kill."
