by Kali Altsoba
Still, he can’t bring himself to “do it” again, inside his utes. Or to drop them to stream out what he knows will be a green, stinking mush. Not with Ava watching, his front buddy. But the gnawing pain won’t leave him be. It’s threatening to explode out his bowels and beyond his will, to foul his combat suit and spoil his friendship, to confirm everything everyone thinks about him. He can live with all the others, but he couldn’t bear if Ava joined them.
He isn’t like other soldiers, men and women who “drop trou” without caring whenever they feel the need or urge, as so many do in other slits once they hear the sergeant’s blistering order. He’s not like fighters who can pull down the lower half of their combat suits regardless of who’s near, fouling one end of a shared slit trench with green bilberry shit. Not like them at all.
‘I have to get out, I have to!’ Deciding when to crap is one of the few real choices Jedidiah has left, one of the few real choices left to any frontline soldier. So he disobeys the sergeant’s order and risks his threats, creeping out the far end of the double slit, ignoring Ava’s plea that he stay.
‘St-st-stop … you’ll git in tr-tr-trouble, again,” Ava whispers as he leaves. But he’s gone into the blackness, and into the black.
Like Ava, he carries a small can of water. Like Ava, he leaves his headgear and HUD behind. ‘The useless piece of junk never works anyway.’ He’s confused in the blackness, with no HUD. He crawls to a clump of tall sagebrush he can just make out on the edge of his natural vision. He makes it there undetected.
When he’s done and cleaned up he recaps the little jerry can, secures it to his hip and starts to crawl back to the slit he thinks he can see 20 meters ahead. He gropes in the dark, under a night sky barely illuminated by pale Narada and dim Nix. The other three moons are on the far side of the planet tonight, complicating the convoys and choices of hunter and hunted alike, as they interweave through high or low lunar orbits looking to see or avoid being seen.
Jedidiah moves haltingly, pulling himself along on trembling elbows, pushing sand backward behind his rubbery knees. His utes are maintaining full spectrum camo, so he’s effectively invisible below his neck and collar. But he’s not wearing his helmet, so his head is exposed, bobbing along just above the ground. He slowly crawls a lot farther than he thinks he needs to, but still can’t find his slit or buddy. Without his HUD to tell him where he is, he’s soon lost, yet again. He could be a meter from safety, or all alone in DT. His throat tightens. He feels his sphincter open involuntarily and some leftover green liquid ooze out. Just like last time.
“Ava, are you there? Ava?” He pauses his crawling to listen, but no answer whispers back to him out of the blackness. He’s alone in the black, illuminated only at one spot in the far distance by a lonely parachute flare. He doesn’t know whose it is. Only that patrols from both sides are out in Dark Territory again, as they always are. And that someone just got spotted, and is about to die.
Silence.
Stillness.
Sniper.
Klava Nast watches her target’s confused crawl via an infrared sensor that picks up an image of a helmetless head bobbing without a detectible body a half-meter above ground. She feels mild curiosity about why this target has no helmet and is crawling erratically in no pattern she can discern. But she feels no pity whatsoever. No remorse for what she’s about to do.
She’s a pro. She peers through an enhancer mounted on a thin, long barreled sonic rifle. She carefully adjusts the shot angle to precise mil dot calculations of wind, heat, aridity, and distance, then triangulates off two mobile, camouflaged spotter bots disguised as cockroaches that scurry to new hidey-holes every 20 minutes. She slowly, gently caresses the trigger.
The compact sound bullet hurtles across a silent section of Dark Territory, evading all obstacles by darting side-to-side and up-and-down, sending out false EM images to fool anti sniper detectors as to point of origin. It arrives exactly when and where it wants to be after 0.12 seconds, smacking into Jedidiah’s skull to explode his gray brains across warm dirt and thin, colorless night grass.
***
A week later, a Blue raid in strength finally secures the area opposite Gastown. General Yupanqui wants her line straightened, to reduce two local enfilades that bulge out from the RIK side. It’s more important to most of her fighters that the advance takes out several snipers and a series of enemy FOPs that have been guiding in nightly mortars. A battalion of genuinely eager Enthusiastics shoves the perimeter back 4,200 meters, in an angry push after the Specter kills every single member, save one, from a “Dead Patrol” of seventeen fighters. The last one she leaves alive to tell the tale. He’s in a psych ward now. The outlook isn’t good.
During the advance, stuttering Ava Mack finds Jedidiah lying spreadeagled on his face atop a smear of warm, brown dirt. His body is 130 meters past their old slit, heading out into the Yue ming. The fool mistook direction. He was crawling toward the sniper’s perch when she ended him. There’s a dark ruby stain on the ground around the hole in his head, and a smaller, greenish stain on his ass. Truth be told, the platoon is relieved to hear “Jinxed Jedidiah” is finally gone. They’re a bit surprised that he left to ride the wheel of redeath without taking one of them with him. Even Ava is relieved. She forgets about him once a new partner is assigned to her. It’s another kid about her age, but he’s got six months combat experience. She’s relieved after their first night on the line together. ‘This one ac-ac-actually knows what he’s doing on pi-pi-picket duty.’
General Yupanqui is grimly satisfied with the tradeoff of lives for space and more defensible positions. The battalion major who led the pushout is even more pleased, though mostly with himself. He files a verbose AAR smugly praising his tactical success. He gives passing nod to those who killed the Specter and seven spotters. He makes brief reference to “light, acceptable casualties,” but mentions himself seventeen times in four pages: “I ordered … I assessed … I concluded…” Jedidiah isn’t mentioned at all, not by name or number. He’s subsumed into the standard AAR phrase “light, acceptable casualties.”
Graves Registration Corps rolls Jedidiah’s recovered body into an abandoned slit trench, along with the body of the Specter, who they're certain killed him. The grave is one of the slits that are no longer needed after the fighting lines move four klics eastward, across what was DT but is now cleared ground behind a new section of Allied First Trench. Once guarded at mortal peril, the empty slits in the abandoned picket line before Gastown are redesignated ‘field latrines.’ They're used by medical workers from a brand new Combat Support Hospital set up in the bunkers.
Enthusiastics move a few klics farther out from Gastown and settle into new slits and dugouts, along a marginally tidier and straighter section of First Trench. Their war slips into low intensity attrition, the wearing both sides are used to after years of fighting on Lemuria. Soldiers, medics, cooks, nurses, bearers and maglev drivers, everyone returns to daily life in the black, lived as normally as one can.
Combat engineers bulldoze into an old crater 1,427 rotting corpses recovered in DT, along with a few fresh kills. Most are unidentifiable, too far gone to bag up and send home in a ‘reefer,’ a morgue ship. They don’t come to Amasia in any case, or only for the officers. So the bodies are hastily covered with lime and soil. They come from both armies, from a dozen raids. Some are snipers from one side or the other, who tried a shot-too-far and died a whistling, sound bullet death from a triangulator: an anti-sniper autogun that swiveled and fired inside a blink.
Susannah’s battalion moves in to relieve Ava’s outfit, part of a regular rotation that’s one of the few things to break routine and dull monotony of trench life in the third year of the war. Some nights she’s able to spend in Gastown with Lee, whenever he finagles some ‘shore leave.’ He got the last long one by pretending he needed to oversee set up of the new CSH in Gastown.
The dead Rikugun sniper who Graves Registration tagged and reported to HQ is no
t the Specter. She pulled back two days earlier, to set up new kill zones from where she’ll take down more careless squids and terrorize Enthusiastics across the way. The 7th’s pushout only killed her less skilled replacement. She was older that Klava at twenty-one, out on her second mission. She’ll never see twenty-two, because she made a basic mistake. She killed two, but broke her camo too soon. A triangulator fixed her firing direction, picked up a glint from her long gun, and sent a powerful rocket grenade hurtling into her exposed blind. They buried her in pieces in lime, on top of Jedidiah and a hundred other corpses in blue or green.
An elite, all women sniper cell operating across from Gastown isn’t deterred by the loss of one of its shooters. Losses go with the skill set. The unit commander sets new routes into DT, scouts and maps fresh spot-and-kill sites where a score of reserve, decoy, and real sniping positions are marked and staked. Then two dozen spotters move out, human and stealth bot, to assist ghillie suited shooters taking patient kill positions across from the freshly dug Enthusiastic pickets.
Specter’s kills are 42 and climbing. She’s pulling away from the competition, top score on the leader board. Not just among the new girls. Among all RIK snipers, male and female. Her politruk makes sure she makes the news, pumps her story into regime propaganda mills. Already, millions of fighters are following her codenamed feats on Rikugun milnebs. Billions of civvies tune in excitedly on homeworld memexes to hear of her next glorious feat.
Specter isn’t buried in some forgotten slit with the corpse of Jedidiah Haig, sadsack soldier and accidental Enthusiastic. She isn’t dead. She’s a star! Already she’s setting up in a new system of nests, listening to grinding, groaning sounds of ACU Earthworms and constructor bots in the distance, burrowing somewhere behind the enemy’s First Trench, building a new hospital at the old Gastown site and filling in three mass graves.
She settles into silence, to wait.
She’s utterly deadly and still.
She has all the time in the worlds.
She won’t turn twenty for a month.
She plans to make it 50 by her birthday.
Ambush
“Listen up marine. That carbyne armor ya got on over yore utes is adaptive as well as reactive.”
“What sir?”
“Don’t call me sir.”
“Sir?”
“I’m yore platoon sarjant, not yore papa or an officer.”
“Yes, sergeant.”
“Like I wus saying, yore armor avoids hits in duh first place, or sorta throws ‘em back as soon as it knows it got hit. That protects ya better than duh strongest liquid armor those bastards had to use in the Second and Third Orion Wars. Early type reactive, I s’ppose, but I seen some on duh dumb Daurans on Portus Cale and Minotaur. Passive shit. Our masers fucked up dem popovs.”
“That’s great, sergeant. But I’ll be invulnerable?”
“Whaddaya think this is, a comic book? It’s fucking war! Ya’ll be lucky to survive yore first five mikes in combat.”
“But you said…”
“Listen marine, yore armored weaves, yore ‘combat utes,’ yeah, maybe dey’ll deflect microwave an’ sound and shit from some angles. But a stub maser is still a maser. Short range and duh angle don’t matter shit. Heavy and far away, like a RIK spandau or our rapidos, and yore still cooked.”
“Jeez sergeant…”
“Carbyne ain’t no good against lasers, so yore utes is layered with ceramics.”
“That’ll stop a laser?”
“Slow it down, long enough for ya to jump out of duh beam, if ya’ll know it’s stuck on ya. Ya got, maybe, three-ta-five sec’onds before yore bored through an’ making liddle red fountains.”
“How will I know to jump?”
“Now dat’s duh trick, ain’t it son? Ya won’t, unless ya watch an’ listen ta yore HUD. So keep dat piece of yore deuce gear clean an’ working at all times, yeah?”
“Yes sergeant.
“Ya just gotta hav’ ceramics. Dey make all kinds of lasers deese days, from armtrak cannon to autobot an’ sniper rifles. Masers are duh main weapon for us marines an’ infantry, but a laser in a steady hand dat stills-the-beam an’ holds-on-target is a real fuckin’ problem for us grunts.”
“Hmmm…”
“What?”
“It all feels so light. I thought armor would be thick and bulky, you know, like in all the old space stories and in memex vids.”
“It’s all carbynes an’ ceramics, son. Dey wear as light as a cotton suit.”
“So how come in the stories…”
“Shit kid! Dose are all ‘bout war 300 years ago! Ancient history! Unless yore a popov, den yore stuck dere. No one wears armor like dat ‘cept duh dum popovs.”
“Even vacuum suits are pretty light. It’s not what I expected. Besides, I look almost like a civvy in these, ‘utes’ you called them?”
“Delete yore memex account kid. An’ leave all duh comics here when we debark. Yore not headin’ out on some Boy’s Adventure Tour or Exciting Tales of Combat. Yore going into a real fuckin’ war.”
“Yes sergeant.”
“By duh way, yore main enemy wears duh same cloth armor. His is green. Don’t shoot blue or oak. Shoot any’ting in green or gray or brown.”
“Everyone has this flexible, cloth armor, sir?”
“Like I said, not duh popovs. Dose poor bastards are stuck in old fashioned shit, liquid armor or just ultrasteel. Freeze right to ya in duh winter, an’ tear yore flesh off when heated up by a maser.”
“Shit, sergeant. Really?”
“Point is marine, yore facing Rikugun an’ dere up ‘gainst you. An’ dat means everybody’s camoed an’ armored ‘bout duh same an’ ev’ybodys gotta see an’ get thru enemy camo an’ armor.”
“Is that why I have to carry so much stuff?”
“Yore learning, kid. Yeah, among duh shitload of deuce gear ya gotta hump inta battle are t’ings ya’ll need to hide from duh enemy an’ just ta find an’ see yore enemy: optical scopes an’ sound webs that read distortions at duh nano scale, camo sheets to hide under. Lots of stuff is built inta yore HUD, but duh platoon also humps long range gear. Ya gotta carry yore share.”
Marines call all the bullcrap the Corps makes them carry “webs, weapons, and wraps.” From combat drugs and smart bandages to three days food and five days water, to ammo, big combat knives, and a bunch more shit. Rookies don’t see the point, and sometimes even old combat vets won’t admit it as they gripe, but they’ll need it all once fighting starts. Their enemies carry all that equipment, too.
Yeah, right. I forgot. Except for pathetically backward, ill equipped Daurans. Otherwise, so it goes. Round-and-round, measure and countermeasure, that means troopers and marines carry a boatload of crap into every war. It’s an age old story, an arms race of offensive vs. defensive weapons design, double helix shaped. In the end, tek will balance tek. In the end, combat comes back to grit and guts. Not high tek or extra gear. It always has and it always will.
Besides, no armor or equipment is foolproof. No matter what the Argos Arms Company Inc. adverts say on the memex about how their utility suits are “keeping all our soldiers safe!” Or what that handsome, homeworld government recruiter in your kid’s high school said last week to your fifteen-year old, getting her all hot for him and for the war. Or how your father lied to your mother when you came home all breathless with a new ACU or RIK tattoo and announced “I’m a marine!” Wear any armor you want. The truth is, it’s still real dangerous to go to war. Someone’s sure to figure out a way to get through all that neat stuff you wear, and the other neat stuff you carry into your very first fight, and fuck-you-up before you can turn it on or set it up. “Move out, marines!”
***
Fifty bohr jumps from Amasia, some would say in the boondocks of the war, four marine scouts lead a two platoon ACU patrol into the open end of a town square. They wear light blue utes nested deep inside sophisticated, reactive armor. According to the Argos Arms C
ompany Inc. it can repel just about anything except pointblank kinetic rounds. Even deflect incoming plasma. Since they're also under light-and-sound camo, they’re effectively invisible to anyone in the square or surrounding buildings who doesn’t have some pretty sophisticated detection gear.
Four scout HUDs scan the rooftops and market stalls in passive search mode, but active broadcasting cancels enemy frequencies that jam unfriendly distorters and detectors. About a hundred civvies are going about their day’s affairs in the town. Vendors and shoppers cluster about fruit and goods stalls lining three sides of the partly closed square. The crowd is unaware of the approaching patrol. Mixed among the civvies are two dozen lazy looking Rikugun regulars from a Guards division, wearing standard green ceramic weaves. They’re armed with grape clusters of frags slung over their chests, and regular stub masers.
Most look bored and careless of their duty. One gochō’s faceplate is pitched up so he can inhale smoke from an exotic smelling hemp stick whose sickly sweet odor is so strong it reaches even to the scouts skirting the far perimeter, wrinkling their noses with spiced tartness. It’s also clear the man hasn’t shaved in days. Another Guard’s throat is naked and exposed as he drinks greedily from a clear glass jar, head back to take deep gulps of some darkly purple beverage.