Stolen Valor

by Kal Spriggs

  Back in our barracks, we split the rations out and then assembled on our exosuits as Richardson waited. I’d felt a set of ideas boiling through my brain and even as Richardson rattled off the order of who would command the flight through the scenarios, somehow it seemed inevitable that I’d be up first in the morning.

  The scenario loaded and we were in a rubble-strewn section of buildings. I tagged Osmund and Sanjaya for scouting and then formed up the flight. I didn’t split them out, though, not beyond assigning Jonna and Kiyu as sub-flight leaders and giving them each about half of the flight. I sent them formations and we moved out, bounding along, moving rapidly.

  Sanjaya and Osmund had reached the enemy positions and begun identifying them. Enemy roving patrols were moving through the rubble and Osmund pointed out several ambush points on the upper levels of several of the buildings in addition to defensive strongpoints all along a perimeter.

  I pulled both of them back and formed up the flight in a structure near a gap in the enemy defenses. It wasn’t much of a gap, just a building that didn’t give them much cover, so they’d fortified either side of it with overlapping fire on their approaches.

  “Here’s the plan,” I said. “We’re going in fast and hard. Engage the enemy, suppress them as we advance, but the key is to keep moving. I want everyone to empty your first drum of ammunition on my signal, fire at anything that moves. First sub-flight, you’ll take the initial breach site,” I keyed up the building on everyone’s heads up displays. “Second sub-flight, you follow through and secure the far side. Then we move by bounds to the exit point. Maximum firepower. Full aggression.”

  I could have heard a pin drop in the silence that followed. “This isn’t a plan—” someone started to argue.

  “Move out,” I snapped.

  They fanned out and formed up. I drew assault lanes for them, moving us up and across the upper floors of the buildings. “Go! Go! Go!” I bellowed. They ran forward, scattering ahead of me as they moved out.

  They opened up on my signal, thirty-six TBA-2s firing at the same instant.

  We blew through our first drum in just a few seconds. I wouldn’t wager we killed very many of the enemy, but the simulation actually stuttered a bit as it tried to compensate for the simultaneous volley as twenty-five hundred rounds of depleted uranium and tungsten rounds went out into the enemy positions.

  The entire flight bounded right through the building and we kept moving. Some of the enemy had begun to fire back at that point, but we had reloaded on the move. I saw Bahn pause to start to reload, but I ran right up behind her and grabbed her by the shoulder, forcing her to keep moving.

  “Move!” I bellowed, “Keep moving, keep firing!”

  I highlighted targets as pockets of enemy survivors started to open up. Instead of trying to conserve ammunition, I cut loose with a spray of rounds, shredding enemy targets and not even slowing down. Gowri took a hit from an enemy and stumbled. I stooped to throw his armor over my shoulder, firing off-hand at the enemies who’d hit him, even as I ran on.

  The entire flight plowed through the hole we’d blasted and while a few of us fell, others mimicked my actions, picking up the wounded and fallen and running on. I burned through my second drum of ammunition and it blew out. I didn’t even try to fumble a reload one-handed, I just kept running, occasionally shoving people ahead of me if they slowed or looked like they were going to stop.

  We hit the exit as a disorganized mass, but my implant was showing thirty-six of us, with five dead and three wounded. The victory screen came up a moment later.

  “Vars,” Richardson growled, “Exactly what do you think you’re doing?”

  “Sir,” I began, “I thought I’d try a different approach…”

  “You blundered through that scenario like…” He trailed off, clearly at a loss for words. “I don’t even know what you were thinking.”

  “Sir, we survived. We made it to the exit,” I pointed out.

  “By sheer luck!” Richardson snapped. “Most of your people burned through all of their ammunition in less than thirty seconds. If you had run into any serious opposition, you would have been combat ineffective.”

  “We didn’t give them time to organize a defense, sir,” I responded. “And I attacked at the weakest point I identified.”

  Richardson’s lips pressed in an angry line. “That may be true, but there were other ways to achieve your breakthrough. We will run this again, Isagani, you’re up as flight leader.”

  The casual dismissal of a tactic that had worked burned like acid. I’d won, something that only Jonna and Kiyu had managed thus far. But because I hadn’t won in an approved manner, that victory had been dismissed.

  As we went through three more runs, it became clear to me that I wasn’t the only one upset with that reaction. Isagani tried something like Jonna’s outflank plan, with elements of my full attack thrown in to suppress the enemy. The next two after her tried different variations on Kiyu’s tactics. But they grumbled as they did it. Doing that was hard and even though they both did good jobs coordinating the synchronized movement of the stealth groups, we still got caught.

  When we paused for our first meal, Osmund and Sanjaya sat next to me again. “That whole attack,” Osmund noted, “what would you call it?”

  “Thunder run,” I shrugged. I’d pulled the title from one of my sister’s military history books.

  “Yeah, it worked pretty good, actually,” Sanjaya nodded.

  “It’s risky, that’s why Richardson doesn’t like it,” Jonna noted as she sat down next to us. “It relies on aggression and shock. It’s not the way we fight.”

  “Maybe not, but it was effective, in that scenario,” Sanjaya pointed out.

  “I guarantee the next time someone tries it, they’ll run into a wall of return fire,” Jonna told us.

  “Why?” I demanded. “If it works, why not allow us to make use of it?”

  “Because it’s dangerous and risky,” Jonna repeated. “Look, it’s an all or nothing play. They don’t want us to employ forces entrusted to us by the Emperor in all or nothing gambles, understand?”

  I did, but all the same, my survival here on Drakkus had been a series of all or nothing gambles. They’d paid off, after all, I was still alive. I understood that they might be against that, that they wanted to preserve their forces, to maintain their advantages in equipment, personnel, and ships.

  But sometimes there’s no choice but to take a gamble, I thought about what Shadow had told me about how my grandmother had embarrassed Crown Prince Abrasax and forced him to stand down. She’d viewed it as a bluff, a near suicidal gamble. She had put her entire planet at risk… in the hopes that Drakkus wouldn’t want to risk so many of their ships at a close-range engagement where they were likely to take heavy casualties.

  Shadow had seemed to think it was a foolish gamble, that Drakkus could have called the Admiral’s bluff. But I thought that my grandmother might understand Drakkus better than Shadow realized. They were risk adverse, especially when it came to losing their advantages in ships.

  If Crown Prince Abrasax had been willing to take that risk, if he’d called her bluff, she would have stood down. But she’d had to make that play, because otherwise he was going to take Century with no resistance.

  When the enemy is willing to gamble and you aren’t, sooner or later you’re bound to lose a fight. And if you’re left with a situation where you have to gamble or you’re going to lose anyway…

  I thought about the final phase of Second Screening. In all likelihood, we were going to go up against a prepared, numerically superior foe. Maybe a gamble was exactly what we needed under those circumstances.

  From the expressions on Osmund and Sanjaya’s faces, they were thinking along similar lines to me. “Does it hurt to rehearse my plan, just in case?” I asked.

  Jonna frowned and I saw her glance over at where Richardson watched us. “We have to be careful about it. Maybe if we propose it as a… divergent m
ethod of rehearsal, a reaction, rather than our plan, he will accept it.”

  “I don’t get why he’s so personally against it,” Osmund growled. I kind of wanted to hit him, since we were being monitored and expressing that much dissatisfaction with an officer seemed like a good way to get arrested and sat down in front of Institor Dyer.

  “Jade Flight is his responsibility,” Jonna answered. “The Empire entrusted him with the lives of thirty-six entrants. He wants to see all of us survive. An all or nothing gamble is a failure on the part of his training, in his opinion. He wants us trained to the point that we can survive on our training and capabilities.”

  “Do you think those will be enough?” I asked.

  She closed her eyes, “No. We need something to change things up. Maybe this is it. Maybe Kiyu’s stealth option is better. I don’t know. But these are the relatively easy scenarios. We’ve got another week of scenarios and then they start pulling flights for the final phase. I would wager we will be one of the first to go.”

  “I thought they put the least likely to succeed up front?” Sanjaya asked with an expression of confusion.

  “Yeah, they do,” Jonna nodded. “If we’re not one of the first groups to go, then I’ll be surprised.” I took her meaning. They’d front-load us to give us less time to prepare and to make it even more likely that whatever they reinforced the defenders with, it would be enough to bring us all down.

  ***

  Our training became more and more focused. I spent about fourteen hours a day in my armor. Occasionally the instructors ran us through Tangun Steps, but most of the time we were doing the training scenarios for Second Sweep. We did it over and over again and every time we succeeded, Richardson would rachet up the difficulty still further.

  Most of those scenarios, we tried Jonna’s and Kiyu’s techniques. But sometimes we tried mine. Every time, Richardson would get angry and generally he’d make us do it again. But more often than not, doing it my way led to success.

  The three of us, Jonna, Kiyu, and me, were the only ones to consistently win. That didn’t mean we won every time, only that we were the ones who pulled out more than one victory in three.

  It was extremely frustrating and also totally exhausting. The problem set never changed, just the conditions of the scenario, the numbers of enemies we faced, and their equipment. Every day it was like slamming head-first into a wall. I started hating my stupid Kavach exosuit, hating the training, hating this stupid place. I should have escaped. Yet I couldn’t justify that, even with how frustrated I had become. I’d stopped House Mantis from swapping out the artifacts. Jonna had managed to get the renegade entrants to the spaceport. I had done some good here, or at least, that was what I tried to tell myself.

  Shadow had become more and more withdrawn. She kept focusing on the problem of the alien data, or at least, all of it that she’d been able to copy over to my implant. Now and then she’d talk to me, when we were both taking breaks, but she seemed just as tired and frustrated as me. I began to worry that this life, that living without a body, was getting to her.

  Since she was my only real confidante, I kept trying to get her to engage, to talk to me, but while she would answer questions and occasionally venture to give me an opinion, the conversations felt increasingly one-sided.

  I didn’t know what to do about it. I had so much on my plate, so much to occupy me, that I could barely function and I didn’t have the energy or attention left over to try and figure out how to help her.

  Even if I had, I’d run out of time.

  One morning, much like any other, they had us suit up and march out. Out on the parade ground, a combat skimmer sat waiting, engines idling. It was pouring rain and lightning flashed down from above. The heavy rain rattled off the surface of my armor, a dull roar that washed out thought and reason. I had to fight back an animalistic urge to turn and run. I knew it wouldn’t help me, that they’d either shoot me down or use the exosuit’s electrodes to trigger a lethal shock. That unreasoning part of my brain didn’t care, it just wanted to escape.

  The instructors marched us up the ramp, a pair of them locked us in place, each of us held still by locking clamps that kept us from moving around and probably from attempting to escape. Richardson came up the ramp as the instructors finished with the last of us.

  “Today is your last day of Second Screening,” he told us. “Today you will prove yourselves worthy to be officers in the Drakkus Imperial Space Korps.” He looked tired, I noticed. Since we were the very first flight to leave, I wondered if he assumed we wouldn’t be coming back. “Long live the Emperor!”

  “Long live the Emperor!” We shouted it back at him.

  He gave us a nod and then turned and walked down the ramp. A moment later, the ramp lifted and the skimmer’s engines rose in pitch.

  As we took off, an automated voice came on over our network, “Entrants, you are about to embark on the final phase of Second Screening. Thirty-six of you are aboard this transport. Thirty-six of you must reach the exit point for the doors to open, alive or dead.”

  “The final phase testing area is bounded by a sensor fence. If any of you cross the fence, your suit will trigger a lethal electrode charge.” Well, I suppose they don’t want any of us going off on our own. “The only location where you can safely leave the exercise is the exit point.”

  “A map of the final phase has been uploaded to your implants. Good luck, entrants.”

  I brought up the map before the recording finished talking. We were to be dropped in what looked like an abandoned factory. There were dozens of floors, sections of abandoned machinery turned into rat mazes, and several wide-open areas that would be killing grounds if the opposition had time to set up defensive positions.

  It was hard to wrap my head around all of it, it was a huge, sprawling area. The drop point they marked for us was at the back corner, in a low point outside of the building itself. That meant we’d have to try to find an entrance into it, before we could even begin to scout the rest of the structure.

  The exit point, a glowing, blue icon, lay at the furthest point. It was on the upper levels, all the way at the front of the huge structure. I measured it out: we had three kilometers to cover, straight line distance. I somehow doubted that we’d be able to go in a straight line.

  “Who is flight leader?” Someone asked.

  “They didn’t appoint one,” Kiyu answered. “We are expected to select one based off of the situation on the ground.”

  Of course. It was probably another test. A group might spend precious minutes arguing over who would lead them.

  My impulse was to suggest her or Jonna, but until we saw the situation, we wouldn’t know what tactics would work best.

  The skimmer banked around and then, after a weaving route, it settled down into a hover. The clamps on my shoulders unlocked. “All entrants will exit the skimmer. Terminal shock will be initiated in twenty-nine, twenty-eight, twenty-seven…”

  They certainly know how to motivate you to get off, Shadow noted as we all rushed out the back. It was a three-meter drop, but in our exosuits, that wasn’t an issue. We fanned out, establishing a perimeter.

  The skimmer took off, rising straight up and banking around in a fashion that no one on the ground could have missed. Hock, I thought, the enemy will have a good guess where we are.

  “Who’s going to scout?” Bahn asked, her voice a bit nervous.

  “I will,” I volunteered.

  “Me,” Osmund spoke up.

  “Initial scouts out, let’s see what we’re up against,” Jonna told us. “Osmund and Vars, you’re on the left. Nadzeha and Cheetan, you have the right.”

  I signaled the affirmative, not really upset at her taking charge at the moment. We needed to know the situation.

  I moved over to the building even as the rest of Jade Flight took up defensive positions. I hoped that the enemy wouldn’t be too aggressive early on. The skimmer’s take-off had probably given away our position and ru
ined any chance at real stealth we might have had.

  Osmund found a breach in the wall and led the way in. He and I split up, then, him going low while I began climbing a rusted iron support column. The hand over hand climb was easy and I quickly scaled up four floors, jumping over to a rusted catwalk. It creaked under the weight of the Kawach, but it didn’t collapse. I moved quickly along the catwalk, dialing up the exosuit’s sensors.

  I caught the sound of voices relatively soon. Moving up a bit, I stopped and listened. My sensors were able to identify location and numbers, highlighting the positions of a small team of armed men and women. “…do you think about the offer?”

  “Kill this first group and we all get pardoned, whether we’re the ones who bring them down or not?” Another one spat. “Sounds too good to be true.”

  “They gave us better guns this time,” the first one pointed out. I zoomed in on him, and I bit back a curse as I saw him heft a TBA-2. Looking at the others, I saw more of the advanced rifles and even a couple of magnetic sabot rifles.

  The TBA-2’s were bad enough. The magnetic sabot rifles were anti-tank weapons. While a hit from a TBA-2 might not penetrate armor, the sabot rifles were likely to punch right through even the thickest part of the Kavach exosuit and right out the other side.

  My suit was picking up heat signatures and locations and movement icons for the opposition were popping up all along the inside of the factory. There were more than a hundred, more than two hundred. They started blurring together and overlapping, there were so many of them.

  I got on the flight’s communications net, “This is Vars,” I said, “we have a problem. We have a really big problem.”

  ***

  Chapter 18: When There’s Nothing Left To Lose

  “There’s two or three hundred over on the other side, too, and they’re sending out scouting teams,” Cheetan told us. “Thirty or forty of them, all headed this way, just like Vars and Osmund saw on the left.”