by Kali Altsoba
“Yes sir.”
“Make it an officer, if you can. If you find one, shoot-him-up with suspend. Make sure he lives. Kill all the rest. No one reports back to the other side about the bioluminescence film.”
Susannah has no qualms about the order to kill the enemy’s wounded, but she’s a 1st Platoon sergeant so she stays put in her hole after checking over her NCO platoon link on all fighters under her charge. One is dead, two are lightly wounded, but the rest are OK. She tells them all to stay alert and ready to cover fire until 2nd and 3rd Platoons are done searching. It’s the kind of initiative her superiors like. It’s why they want her to take the 2nd lieutenant’s exam.
There’s another reason she stays in the pot. There’s something she needs to do before it’s too late. Death fascinates her. Any death. All death. And all kinds of dying. It has been like that since she “almost bought it” on Glarus. Death consumes her far beyond a normal 25-year old’s natural interest. Even a 25-year old long at war. She takes off the dying man’s headgear and bends low over the gurgling shōsa’s face, the better to watch him die. To get right close up to Death.
The shōsa has big, semi artificial, yellow eyes, preset for combat not to blink at all. They keep frantically whirring and switching from side-to-side, driven by pumping adrenalin and mortal panic, as if by looking his metallic eyes can latch on to some external thing that might yet save his life. They see Susannah peering down from half-a-meter away. Her natural green eyes lock with his fast dulling metallic ones. His are evermore weak and cloudy, slowly losing focus with frothy blood and oxygen loss from his cut throat, with disconnection from his autonomic brain. Hers are intent and piercing, looking down like a hawk with a dying rodent wriggling inside its talons. His plead with warm metallic urgency. Hers are unpitying in their organic coldness.
A few moments more and he grows lethargic, too weak to swallow or cough. His death rattle starts: wet respirations, as secretions of mucus and saliva build up in his throat, inhibiting air from cleanly inhaling or departing. His corneas glaze and start to lose clarity, turning milky and opaque ... and ‘there it is!’ The moment of death she looks for, waits for, longs to comprehend. It’s not Death Himself, since this is another man’s and not her own. It’s unforgettable and indefinable all the same. Is it the escape of his spirit or the end of all delusion that there ever was a spirit inside this house of flesh? She’s intrigued either way.
When it’s over she closes the dead major’s still, cloud yellow eyes. She isn’t a ghoul, after all. She sticks her hand inside his wine stained, sodden utes to draw out his Rikugun ID. She flips it open and reads the scroll. Shōsa Alfonso Gomez, Special Action Commando. Unlike an ACU ID, this one is in his reverse order of service: Citations. Lemuria campaign, combat ribbon; First Shaka Offensive; Caliban Liberation; Alto Incident: Amasia counterinsurgency task force, head of special interrogation unit; Verloren Kinder Operation, Genève, special action squad; Special Commendation for leadership, Bandit Clearance Campaign.
There’s a lot more about his so called special actions on Genève. ‘That’s one of the Krevan worlds,’ if Susannah remembers right. The ID says something about how he overcame “special difficulty” in leadership of a “heroic antipartisan unit.” He was recommended for that citation by a SAC colonel, Takeshi Watanabe. Then there’s all the usual stuff about his military education and prewar service. She sees that he has a wife and son on Koblenz. The boy is 14 or 15 years old, judging by the holo. Nice looking lad, waving from a balcony halfway up a typical residence tower, squat and ugly in the usual Grün style. The major is clearly Third Caste, at best. She snaps the scroll closed and slips it into an outer combat sleeve. She’ll give it her Company CO later, who’ll pass it along to Battalion HQ, who’ll send it to Division, who’ll give it to Corps, who’ll pass it to MI outside New Beijing.
“Let’s move people!” The captain warns, “five mikes to bug out! I don’t want us here when the big locust missiles start coming over.”
He looks over at Susannah. He likes, and he lusts, for this tough yet still pretty and even vivacious NCO. But he never acts. He finds her unapproachable, more than a little aloof. At least, outside combat. Out here in the black and in a fight, is a whole other matter. She’s a helluva small unit leader and a fearless fighter.
“They’ll make us pay for this, master sergeant,” he says with a wink. “Once they find out we left their precious SAC boys out here as food for vultures and nests for ghoul snakes.”
“It’s only what they deserve, sir.”
“Yeah, like this one here. A real sǐ bù yào liǎn.” He laughs coarsely at the thought and image. He has been on Lemuria for two years. He almost likes the place.
“A what, sir? Sorry, my Amasian slang’s still not that good.”
“A shameless corpse.”
Susannah laughs, too, but not about the snakes or vultures or shamelessness. She’s still throbbing with kill thrill, still in love with the power of her maser as it cut men clean in half. ‘No, not men. Just enemies. Just Rats.’
She stoops to collect a small Black Eagle flag that a dead Rat dropped just beyond her octopus pot. It’s holo wings are still flapping. It tries to reach out with its useless talons, as if to scar her. She rolls it up and stuffs it in her kit. ‘Time to round up the platoon and skedaddle.’
She tells the kid to clean off her trench knife by wiping it on the dead shōsa’s dull gray utes. Then to drop the octopus lid back over the pot with the shōsa inert inside, his blood already soaking into the thirsty soil. The lid’s camo will prevent his side ever recovering the corpse.
“Let him fertilize and wet the dunes of south Lemuria. New roots will reach down to feed on him, turf will grow above to cover his marrowless bones. It’ll be the one contribution he makes to a world to which he helped bring so much ruin.”
There’s almost poetry in her hate.
The kid complies without comment or hesitation. She looks older already. Not so much a ripe schoolgirl anymore. Her knife is clean and back in its sheath on the side of her combat boot. ‘Looks more like a fighter,’ Susannah thinks. She’s seen it before, this sudden loss of a “combat cherry,” as even male troopers call it. She knows that for the ripe kid, just like it was for her after her first fight in the black, there’s no way back to innocence.
As the platoon moves into open order to pull back to the main line of First Trench, she thinks about the forever change that’s overtaking the kid. ‘Combat is just like first time sex. Going into battle as a combat virgin is a totally different experience for everyone, and exactly the same.’
Patrol
Well, maybe not exactly the same, not for everybody. About 34 klics south of the ambush site where Susannah watches Shōsa Gomez die is a hinge in the line where Enthusiastics hand off to 32nd New Meccan Division. Two weeks after the octopus ambush, a small fight takes place there that scares Pvt. Jedidiah Haig witless.
“The Lost Patrol.” That’s what Major Zhang Xianzhong of 1st Company, 1st Battalion calls nine missing fighters while writing up the mission AAR. It’s quite odd, he thinks, dictating a memo about events no one knows anything about. He has no witnesses except Haig and damn few facts to record beyond the names and ACU registration numbers of the missing.
‘Well, that’s the Army for you.’ He voiceprints the terse report with his usual minimalist indifference to casualties and the details of his command. He has social calls to make. And dinner is waiting underground, in secure Officer Country.
Zhang is a late transfer into Argos 7th Assault from one of the recently raised Amasian units, Xian Division. Neither it nor he has seen combat. He made 1st lieutenant, then he made captain by luck of his Amasian birth, advanced education, and availability in New Beijing. He made brevet major because all his rivals from other divisions were either KIA or WIA or MIA by the end of the second year, unavailable to leaven the new division with real experience. Now here he is, on an officer exchange program intended to beef up intra unit training and improv
e native Amasian tactical skills. He’ll go back to Xian division soon. Now that the troop crisis has more or less passed, it’s pretty much on permanent garrison and strategic reserve duty outside New Beijing. It’s a perfect setup, for him.
The Enthusiastics of 1st Battalion are counting the days until Zhang leaves. Less than a week now. He isn’t liked or respected by the tough and tested men and women who are temporarily and unhappily under his command. They know he’s just marking time. They despise him for it. And they envy him.
The ‘Lost Patrol’ started out as a routine perimeter scout. A recce mission combined with field training for combat rookies. It got lost on the last leg back, after making a shallow sector sweep into Dark Territory, just to give the rookies a taste of it. Nothing too serious or dangerous. Or that’s what they were told when gearing up.
Jedidiah’s fear starts the second he sets foot outside First Trench, on his virgin venture into the Yue ming. The clutching in his throat and dry mouth are still there three hours later, with just 300 meters left to cross to get back to friendly lines, after an uneventful but, for Jedidiah, scary first patrol. Then it all goes wrong. A lustrous starburst brilliantly illuminates the area all around him and seven more rookie patrollers. Only the corporal leading the squad is an old hand.
It’s pitch out there, except for pale reflected light from Narada, the smallest of five moons but now ascendant. So when the first starburst goes up from behind the home team’s lines, Jedidiah feels nakedly exposed. He knows he’s optically camouflaged and thus invisible across most of the EM spectrum, but his combat suit is squealing that he’s now exposed anyway, because a spectrum strobe flare is stripping him naked of all normal light defense camo. He dives beneath a chunk of smashed armtrak, a burned out, ruined Mastodon that was gutted by a high-jumping fougasse. The smart mine attached to its naked underside when the unlucky armtrak charged at just five meters height, keeping low to avoid snagging on long carbyne spars angled at 45˚ in front of First Trench.
Lian Sòng got the idea for the spars from her friend Gaspard Leclerc, who got it from his prewar hobby of virtual walking tours of ancient fortifications. He had a habit of going back to the losing wars of his Huguenot ancestors, especially the long, failed defense of their last holdout castle at La Rochelle. He walked its stone walls and its holo surrounds a hundred times; stood beneath murder holes, waded in the wet moat; shot arrows at holo gendarmerie from high walls, and crossbow quarrels through tight loopholes. He watched his forebears die on French swords, and saw them burned for their faith on tall, crackling Catholic pyres. He thought a lot about how they might have won. That’s when he suggested adding jumping fougasse to trench spikes, to blow out the bellies of armtraks forced to rise above the stakes. Lian Sòng thought it very odd, but now is glad that she approved.
Jedidiah tumbles under the rusting wreck of the shattered warhorse and rolls toward the field of spars, lined up in triple rows in front of the black as far as the eye can see, like vineyard stakes. He thinks he spots a Rikugun patrol also caught out by the starburst and spectrum strobe combination. The naked enemy scares him even more than the denuding strobe.
He knew before he set out that there were going to be other patrols in DT. Hostile fighters armed like him, stumbling like him over broken ground, trying to avoid mines, motion detectors and reactive bot guns. What he doesn’t know is that also, just like him, all his own squad and the enemy are confused and scared, wanting only to return to the relative safety of their black wall. Jedidiah thinks everyone in the war except him is brave. He thinks he makes a real lousy soldier.
It’s even worse when the strobe parachutes back to ground and goes out. But only after flopping all around like a Taningia squid hauled up in a deep sea net, flapping and squirting and spilling bright luciferin from its tentacle tips before leaving this mortal coil. Jedidiah covers over his very small, mousey brown eyes. He’s deathly afraid the light will reflect and give his position away.
He squints almost superstitiously, to check his HUD. Nothing. Neither red threats nor blue friendlies. Either it will reset soon or he has no tactical connection to his squad, and no way to locate or identify enemies five meters away or five hundred. No way to call home to open the front door of the black to let him back in. No way to know who to shoot or who will shoot him.
“Nobody move!”
He hears his corporal’s whispered order. Other men and women in blue are nearby! He’s not alone in the Universe! Others are here too, inside the nakedness of the night where green wraiths creep toward him with murderous intent.
“Where are you?” he calls out in a trembling voice, too loudly.
“Shut the fuck up!” the corporal whistles back. “Silent protocol.”
Jedidiah watches another flare shoot up, then float and blossom and strobe. He sees the RIK patrol clearly this time, in a startling silhouette easily penetrated by the flashing, migrainous light from high overhead. Nine shadows 80 meters away are in a crouching line, moving in short runs right toward him. A hundred meters farther out are 15 or 20 more stick figures, in blue or green, he can’t say. They're also running in low crouches or are splayed on the dirt, also startled afraid and exposed. At least they're moving farther away from him at a sharp angle. They're lost, or on some other secret errand.
“Merde! DT’s crawling with patrols tonight!”
The harsh whisper is almost in his ear, it’s so close. It’s the corporal. Jedidiah didn’t know he was there. His maser is held tightly against his chest by interior elbows as he sidewinds over.
“Doesn’t anyone stay in their fucking trench anymore?”
Jedidiah doesn’t answer. He’s far too scared. The corporal looks him over, noting his tension and clenched jaws and fists.
“Hey kid, they’re just as scared as you are. Relax. Keep your running lights front-and-open, and calm down. We’ll get out of this.”
Jedidiah tries to relax as ordered, but he can’t. Sixty meters away are men who will kill him if they find him lying here. Less, if the RIK patrol is still moving like he saw it move when the first strobe flare went way up, throwing vacillating EM frequencies down. Its successor wants to penetrate his cloaked armor, fix his position, and wail his discovery to eagerly waiting mortars.
The enemy will obliterate him and all that he is, as easily and thoughtlessly as they take their next step or suck in a cold breath. Him. Jedidiah Haig. With all his precious hopes and fine wit, all his humor, aspirations and uniqueness. All his doubt. Snuff him out like he’s just another dune ant. ‘It’s not fair.’
He realizes it’s still O’ Dark Thirty, the dangerous period between midnight and sunrise, always the coldest, wettest, darkest, shittiest and scariest time of the 10 hour UST military cycle. He knows that eventually it will be dawn, but the thought brings him fear more than hope. ‘My gods, I’ll be caught out here in daylight! They won’t need strobes to find me.’
Actually they will, in order to penetrate his excellent light camo, which he has forgotten he’s wearing. He’s thinking like a civvy, not a soldier. Anyway, he has more immediate concerns. There are too many in the enemy patrol to take out with his maser, and he has no frags to throw. He grabbed the wrong grenades just before the patrol went out, when he was ordered to “mount battle kit.” He reaches up a sonic grenade and readies to arm it, to hurl it forward should the enemy close the midnight gap to him. He’d rather have a powerful frag. His hand is shaking.
He startles rigid when he hears a whispered argument nearby. Maybe four or five meters away. Maybe less. He can’t make out the words, so he listens harder. Now he’s sure. The hushed voices aren’t speaking any language he knows. Not an Alliance tongue, in any case. And not Universal Standard. ‘Must be Grünen.’
The corporal touches Jedidiah’s elbow. He swivels his head, making out the slightly older man’s oddly kind face under his visor, through the dim moonlight. The old hand indicates the squat grenade in Jedidiah’s hand and a frag fondled in his own. He starts a
silent, finger countdown: ‘Four ... three ... two ... one.’
Jedidiah pushes the arming button and pulls his arm back as far as he can, still lying down. He throws the sonic egg at exactly the same moment the cool corporal throws his frag. Two dark ovals somersault over each other, Jedidiah’s not going as far as he wants or intends, as the thick 1.35 OE gravity of Amasia makes him underestimate the strength needed for the throw. Each explosive egg lands with a soft thud before detonating. Jedidiah’s is a half-second late.
His grenade is a standard issue sonic. That means anyone wearing an Alliance HUD is protected by auto generated, mutually cancelling sound waves from the multi range frequencies and superlarge amplitude of the sound explosion. In short, his reactive armor is sonically tuned in advance to Alliance weapons frequencies. The effect on unprotected Rikugun is far less benign.
Infrasound is unstoppable by any body armor or by common, prewar building materials. Which is good, but who wants a sonic over a frag? Sonic grenades are nonlethal. They're more useful than lasers or masers if what you want is to capture instead of maim or kill an enemy, to bring back a frontline tongue to MI, to grill about locations of local gunpits or bunkers or HQs. Some capture patrols go out looking for prisoners carrying sonics exclusively, so they don’t frag their target in the rush of combat. They’re used under protest by troops but under orders from MI officers, usually some toff just down from HQ for a day and a night.