by Rick Partlow
Well, actually… But I said nothing.
There were other skeptical looks beside mine, and I thought I knew people enough to discern that some were based on just the sort of ignorance she was warning against, while others were more from the same place as mine, having actually done what she said we weren’t ready for. Still, I got it. This wasn’t a job you wanted people going into overconfident. I was just happy to be getting to a part of the training that actually had some practical connection to reality.
“For this first simulated mission, your platoon leader will be Cadet Tomasi.”
Tomasi nodded to the rest of us, standing up from his simulator pod. I didn’t know the man. He was in a different squad and I’d barely even had time to talk to my own people much less the rest of the platoon. But he gave off an air of competence, so I had hopes he’d do okay.
“All right, cadets, get into your pods and get jacked in.” She raised a finger. “And remember, treat this as if it were for real, because if you don’t, it will be as close as any of you ever come to leading a platoon.”
I pulled the simulator shut, the halves of it closing around me and encasing me in utter blackness for just a moment before the system flickered to life. I was on a barren, rock-strewn plain, the sandstone a blood red under a setting star, the sky a deep amber. We were already down, which seemed to be simplifying the scenario a bit. The platoon was stretched out ahead of me, their battlesuits shifting from foot to foot like toddlers who needed to pee. The interface jacks that lent my reflexes and balance to an actual Vigilante did the opposite in this case, allowing me to feel the ponderous gait of the simulated version of the battlesuit.
“Training Platoon Three,” Captain Perry’s voice crackled in my headphones as if she was speaking to us from orbit rather than the same room only a few meters away. “Your mission is a movement to contact, across this plain due south for five kilometers, through a canyon and into the next valley over. The enemy will be there in at least platoon level force running patrols in that area and they’ll need to be cleared out to allow our troops to penetrate the enemy defenses without being detected.”
I frowned. That was some bullshit. I wanted to ask her who the hell had come up with that mission and whether they’d ever once dropped into combat, but I clenched my jaws tight and let Tomasi do his job.
“Okay, Third Platoon,” he said, projecting his voice like someone trying to fake being a natural leader, “I want first squad to take point, standard squad wedge formations, second and third abreast, fourth in the rear. Acting Platoon Sergeant Nagano will travel between third and fourth squad and I’ll be between first and second. Any questions?”
There were none and surely not from me. I was in fourth squad, dead last, which felt a lot like watching the whole thing instead of participating but, like I’d told Freddy, I could live with that this time.
“Let’s move out.”
It almost felt strange being in a Vigilante again, even a simulated one. I hadn’t had the opportunity in weeks, which was as long as I’d gone without being inside a suit since Armor school. The thought made me laugh softly inside the suit. I was making wearing the suit sound like sex, though the truth was I’d had a lot more of the suit than I’d had time alone with Vicky.
We bounded across the plain with long strides that ate up four meters a piece, nothing stirring on the plain but the odd lizard. Tomasi critiqued our spacing every couple of minutes, seeming to be obsessed with leading, or being seen to lead, and I mostly tuned him out, paying attention to the suit’s tactical display, watching the sensors. Nothing showed up, not a hint on thermal, radar, or lidar, and that pissed me off as much as the simplistic, unrealistic operations order. What mission had we ever gone on that we didn’t catch sight of the enemy after running through open space for kilometers?
The canyon was generic, like any of a dozen I’d seen on worlds throughout our colonies and the Tahni worlds, dug by some ancient, notional river, but wider and smoother than any I’d traversed in real life. I supposed that was convenient to the scenario, since they didn’t want us to spend hours walking through holograms of empty sandstone. We were making good time and I think Tomasi had become so wrapped up in the movement that he forgot about the contact.
They hit us near the end of the canyon, and I was just far enough back to have a ringside seat. Artificial lightning seared away the dusk shadows, the incandescent flares of the proton beams streaking downward from the top of the canyon walls. First squad took the brunt of it, the destruction veiled behind thermal blooms of energy and clouds of angry, black smoke, and the comms were jammed with reports and contradictions, orders and countermanded orders…and then, the IFF transponders began to wink out.
Tomasi’s went first, and the rest of us were trapped behind, useless as the front two squads engaged an enemy we couldn’t even see behind walls of blinding energy and waves of heat the simulator did its best to duplicate with its internal heaters.
“Nagano!” I snapped, trying to get her to take charge. “Tomasi is down! What are your orders?”
The right thing to do would have been to tell us all to jump. We needed to get out of the canyon and into open space, to break out of the terrain funnel and get room to maneuver. But if I did it on my own, or got just Freddy to follow me, it wouldn’t accomplish anything and would only succeed in making me look like a huge Blue Falcon—military slang for buddy fucker. And if this had been real combat, I might have done it anyway and dealt with the consequences later, but this “realistic” training had other purposes not at all connected with combat. So, I stayed where I was and watched for targets and waited for orders. And tried to get Nagano or someone to pull their head out of their ass.
“Nagano!” I yelled again. “Tomasi’s down, take command! We need to either charge through or break contact!”
But my words were lost in the yells, shouts, and screams of a couple dozen others and so were Nagano’s, if she was saying anything. Next in the chain of command was First squad leader, Hasper, but she was tangled up in front, and if her armor wasn’t deadlined yet, it was about one good hit away from it. Which left the Second squad leader, Gutierrez. I toggled a private channel to the man, hoping he’d accept it and wasn’t already overwhelmed by all the cross-chatter.
“Goot!” I said, using the nickname I remembered from our brief conversations. “Tomasi’s down, Nagano’s doing fuck-all and Hasper is caught up in the brunt of the attack. You need to take charge of the platoon and get us out of this trap right fucking now!”
“I don’t know,” Goot said, a hesitant whine unraveling ragged edges off his voice. “I’m fourth in the chain of command, Cam…I don’t want to make Nagano look bad.”
Oh, sweet Jesus and Mother Mary…
I switched to Bethany Chang’s frequency. She was Fourth squad leader for the mission, the very last in the chain, but fuck it, at least she was a link.
“Chang,” I snapped. “Everyone’s fucked. Take charge and get us out of here or the whole platoon is toast.”
“Yeah,” she muttered, obviously not happy about the idea. “Maybe I should, at that.” When she spoke again, it was on the platoon net and she used the command override the leadership came equipped with to drown out the other confused voices, something Tomasi should have thought to do, but hadn’t. “Fourth platoon! Hit your jump-jets and advance out the end of this canyon! We have to break through the ambush!” Everyone, go! Now!”
I didn’t know who was in charge of Fourth squad or who was acting as her platoon sergeant and there was no time to find out. The tethers had been slipped and it was time to move.
“Follow me, Fourth squad!” I said and jumped, hoping someone would follow me,
A flood of data washed over me with such speed and vehemence I couldn’t sort it all into a coherent picture on a conscious level. I just knew, the way you know where your hands and feet are, or where the door is in a room you’ve lived in for years. I knew the Opposing Force, the OpFor, was arrayed in
an inverted V across the front of the canyon entrance, dug in behind hasty fighting positions stacked with rock and sandstone, something we trained with but I had never actually seen fighting the Tahni.
I targeted the two closest and fired off a pair of fire-and-forget missiles, the pod jolting me with the simulated shudder of the weapons rocketing out of my shoulder launcher, one after another. I didn’t wait to judge their effectiveness because things were even worse than I’d thought. Most of First squad was dead, right alongside Tomasi, and the enemy’s reserve was taking to the air, arcing over the elements in contact to try to take us in the rear.
We could bypass the ones who’d dug in, but the reserve squad was going to take us head-on and I made the decision to deal with them first.
“Freddy, stay on my shoulder.”
They were the last words I said before I was in the fight, before conscious thought slipped away, stepping back and letting something instinctive and unthinking take over. The suit was an extension of me, the maneuvers a dance I’d learned so long ago that it was a part of my identity. It came as a surprise when my plasma gun fired, as if someone else’s finger had been on the trigger, as if the roiling ball of super-ionized gas had come from the accusatory finger of an angry god rather than by any intention of my own.
Whether it was Zeus or me pulling the trigger, the results were the same. A simulated Tahni High Guard battlesuit took the blast in the left shoulder and lost its arm in a splash of starfire, leaving only blackened, charred metal behind. The enemy suit had been in mid-jump and it tumbled out of the air, the jets still operational but the mind behind them gone into deep shock, or at least so the simulation’s AI shepherd had decided. I didn’t follow its descent, moving to the next target.
I had two missiles left and I used them now, deciding they probably wouldn’t let me take them home after the war. I was less than three hundred meters from the enemy now, barely enough space for the warheads to arm before they slammed into the Tahni High Guard troopers. Again, I couldn’t wait to do a Battle Damage Assessment, could only afford the time to run a quick scan of my surroundings, find the next one in line.
I was vaguely aware of my own movement, the way a boxer in the ring isn’t consciously moving his feet, just letting years and years of training guide his footwork, letting it lead him to the right spot. I was down, then up, then down again, bouncing left and right in a zigzag pattern over the ancient, dry riverbed, and Freddy kept at my shoulder as I’d directed, moving with a natural flow I admired. He knew his business and it was clear why he’d been sent here. Enemy targets were dropping off the scope and some of them were his, enough that I allowed myself the space of a half-second to feel impressed.
The next half-second I gave to checking my own status and finding, to my shock, that not only had I not been hit yet, but that my whole squad was intact. That was enough back-patting, though. The attack of the reserve squad had been disrupted, but there was still most of a platoon dug in behind us, still engaging the rest of our people.
“Turn back and hit ‘em from behind,” I instructed.
Somewhere, Chang was shouting orders and I should have been listening, but I figured she had her hands full with the rest of the platoon and I should try to do my best to help out without distracting her. Fourth squad followed my lead and our approach didn’t go unnoticed. The High Guard troops backed out of their fighting positions and turned to face us.
Their missiles were gone, as were ours, spent in the first, mad minute of fighting, and it was down to our energy weapons, as it usually was in real combat. I didn’t have to remind my people to randomize their movement, to cut their jets and bounce off in a new direction, to stutter-step in the face of gouts of proton lightning. Every one of us was a natural in a Vigilante or we wouldn’t have been sent here, wouldn’t have been given this opportunity. We were all the best fighters and this simulation’s computerized OpFor didn’t stand a chance against us.
But computers, as they so often do in these sorts of situations, tend to cheat. The enemy platoon was toast, as good as gone. My squad was blasting it from the rear, almost at point-blank, while Chang led the charge from the canyon. But this was the computer’s show and it wasn’t about to be upstaged.
“I’m picking up multiple contacts inbound from behind us!”
The voice was unfamiliar and I didn’t have time to check the IFF transponders to see who it was. The truth of the message was evident in my own sensor display, the thermal and radar hits popping up like Christmas tree lights, closing in from the plateau atop the canyon walls. They were heavy, slow-moving aerospacecraft, the Tahni equivalent of a drop-ship, each laden down with the burden of two platoons of enemy battlesuits, and I counted at least five of the ships burning in on superheated air sucked through their intakes and heated in reactors before being expelled at hypersonic speeds.
And if the ships hadn’t fired on us already, it was only because we were too mixed with their own forces. There was no question of standing and fighting, no hope of reinforcement, and if Chang hadn’t made the call, I would have.
“Scatter!” she said, the word explosive, a gunshot. “Everyone scatter by twos and meet back at Rally Point Alpha! Go!”
I echoed the command and then Freddy and I were gone, jetting forward in short, frantic hops across the high desert terrain in what was likely a forlorn hope, and for just the briefest of moments, I forgot this was a simulation and felt the hind-brain panic of flight, the wolves at the heels of one of my hunter-gatherer ancestors.
“Index, index, index. End simulation.”
The world around me faded into darkness and the pod hissed open automatically, letting in the painful light of the training center and a sea of scowling, disapproving faces.
“All right, cadets!” I had almost forgotten about Captain Perry, but there she was again, along with Lt. Manzer, Sgt. Reznick, and a couple of other trainers I didn’t recognize. “Everyone out of the pods and double-time to the briefing room for the AAR!”
“You heard the Captain!” Reznick bellowed. “Go! Go! Go! If you’re not all there and standing at attention by your seats in thirty seconds, I will take you outside and smoke you till you collapse from the heat and the medics drag your asses to sick call!”
Reznick, I thought as I yanked free the interface cables from my implanted sockets and let them spool back into the pod’s housings, was a joke. I wondered if she thought her Boot-Camp schtick was getting to us, if she realized we’d all been yelled at before. If she even considered how much more stressful it was to see your friends die around you than to have some idiot who’d never seen combat try to make you panic by yelling at you.
“Come on, Freddy,” I said to my bunkmate. I could see a muscle twitching on his cheek and I thought maybe he was having the exact thought about our training NCO. “I think the circus is about to start.”
3
“Can anyone tell me what they think went wrong with this exercise?”
Perry was very self-consciously trying to sound in command. Which, I suppose, was necessary for a training officer, but it was so deliberate, so obvious it made me want to laugh in her face. I wanted to raise my hand, wanted to answer, but I didn’t think she’d like what I had to say.
Behind her, the whole cluster fuck was unfolding on a screen stretched across the back wall of the conference room, playing out in two-D because the Marines were too cheap to spring for a holotank. The Vigilantes looked like toys in some giant sandbox, or perhaps, more accurately, like pieces in a giant Virtual Reality computer game, each labeled with the wearer’s name, squad and leadership position, if any.
It wasn’t a pretty picture. The lead elements of our platoon had been royally sodomized by the enemy troops, and the long seconds between the start of the ambush and Chang taking charge had been enough to give our platoon five KIAs and three suits too damaged to continue fighting. Three more of us had notionally died in the counterattack and God alone knew whether anyone would have survived t
he flight away from the incoming drop-ships.
Tomasi raised his hand.
Oh, jeez, this should be good.
“Yes, Cadet Tomasi?”
He stood and came to attention, as we’d been instructed, projecting his voice as if he were on the parade field. It sounded ridiculous and I wondered how stupid we all looked to anyone who wasn’t part of the OCS class.
“Ma’am, I accept full responsibility for the failure of this mission, ma’am. I should have taken control of the situation.”
“It was your responsibility, Cadet Tomasi,” Perry agreed. “But your suit was badly damaged in the initial attack and your communications were out even before you took a critical hit and were ruled KIA. Which means acting Platoon Sergeant Nagano should have stepped up and taken control of the unit.” Her face hardened and she speared Nagano with a glare. “Sit down, Tomasi.”
Tomasi managed to make sitting in his folding chair look as stiff and uncomfortable as any drill and ceremony move we’d practiced on the parade field.
“Cadet Nagano,” Perry said, and Nagano stood and braced to attention.
“Ma’am, yes, ma’am?” Nagano tried to bark the words but they came out as more of a squeak.
“Why don’t you tell us what you think went wrong with the operation?”
“Ma’am, I neglected to engage command override on the communications net and my orders were drowned out by everyone else, ma’am.” Which was, at least, concise and accurate and showed some self-awareness. I wondered if she’d figured that out herself while we were still in the simulators or if someone else had told her on the way into the conference room.
“Yes, you did neglect to do that, Nagano,” Perry agreed. “And do you know what would happen if you did that in real combat? You’d all be dead. That’s why you’re here, because none of you are ready for this job. I hope to God you’re prepared by the time you leave here.”