Old Man's War

by John Scalzi

  There was. Our toe magnets cut out, and it was like being yanked by a giant through a particularly large mouse hole. As Jane suggested, I leaned into it, and suddenly found myself tumbling into space. This was fine, since we wanted to give the appearance of sudden, unexpected exposure to the nothingness of space, just in case the Rraey were watching. I was unceremoniously bowled out the door with the rest of the Special Forces, had a sickening moment of vertigo as out reoriented as down, and down was two hundred klicks toward the darkened mass of Coral, the terminal of day blistering east of where we were going to end up.

  My personal rotation turned me just in time to see the Sparrowhawk exploding in four places, the fireballs originating on the far side of the ship from me and silhouetting the ship in flame. No sound or heat, thanks to the vacuum between me and the ship, but obscene orange and yellow fireballs made up visually for the lack in other senses. Miraculously, as I turned, I saw the Sparrowhawk fire missiles, launching out toward a foe whose position I could not register. Somebody was still on the ship when it got hit. I rotated again, in time to see the Sparrowhawk crack in two as another volley of missiles hit. Whoever was in the ship was going to die in it. I hoped the missiles they launched hit home.

  I was falling alone toward Coral. Other soldiers might have been near me, but it was impossible to tell; our suits were nonreflective and we were ordered on BrainPal silence until we had cleared through the upper part of Coral’s atmosphere. Unless I caught a glimpse of someone occluding a star, I wouldn’t know they were there. It pays to be inconspicuous when you are planning to assault a planet, especially when someone above may still be looking for you. I fell some more and watched the planet of Coral steadily eat the stars on its growing periphery.

  My BrainPal chimed; it was time for shielding. I signaled assent, and from a pack on my back a stream of nanobots flowed. An electromagnetic netting of the ’bots was weaved around me, sealing me in a matte-black globe and shutting out light. Now I was truly falling in darkness. I thanked God I was not naturally claustrophobic; if I were, I might be going bugshit at this moment.

  The shielding was the key to the high-orbit insertion. It protected the soldier inside from the body-charring heat generated by entering the atmosphere in two ways. First, the shielding sphere was created while the soldier was still falling through vacuum, which lessened the heat transfer unless the soldier somehow touched the skin of the shield, which was in contact with the atmosphere. To avoid this, the same electromagnetic scaffolding that ’bots constructed the shield on also pinned the soldier in the center of the sphere, clamping down on movement. It wasn’t very comfortable, but neither was burning up as air molecules ripped into your flesh at high speeds.

  The ’bots took the heat, used some of the energy to strengthen the electromagnetic net that isolated the soldier, and then passed off as much of the rest of the heat as possible. They’d burn up eventually, at which point another ’bot would come up through the netting to take its place. Ideally, you ran out of the need for the shield before you ran out of shield. Our allotment of ’bots was calibrated for Coral’s atmosphere, with a little extra wiggle room. But you can’t help being nervous.

  I felt vibration as my shield began to plow through Coral’s upper atmosphere; Asshole rather unhelpfully chimed in that we had begun to experience turbulence. I rattled around in my little sphere, the isolating field holding but allowing more sway than I would have liked. When the edge of a sphere can transmit a couple thousand degrees of heat directly onto your flesh, any movement toward it, no matter how small, is a cause for concern.

  Down on the surface of Coral, anyone who looked up would see hundreds of meteors suddenly streaking through the night; any suspicions of the contents of these meteors would be mitigated by the knowledge that they were most likely chunks of the human spacecraft the Rraey forces had just blasted out of the sky. Hundreds of thousands of feet up, a falling soldier and a falling piece of hull look the same.

  The resistance of a thickening atmosphere did its work and slowed down my sphere; several seconds after it stopped glowing from the heat, it collapsed entirely and I burst through it like a new chick launched by slingshot from its shell. The view now was not of a blank black wall of ’bots but of a darkened world, lit in just a few places by bioluminescent algae, which highlighted the languid contours of the coral reefs, and then by the harsher lights of Rraey encampments and former human settlements. We’d be heading for the second sort of lights.

  BrainPal discipline up—sent Major Crick, and I was surprised; I figured he had gone down with the Sparrowhawk. Platoon leaders identify; soldiers form up on platoon leaders—

  About a klick to the west of me and a few hundred meters above, Jane suddenly lit up. She had not painted herself in neon in real life; that would have been a fine way to be killed by ground forces. It was simply my BrainPal’s way of showing me where she was. Around me, close in and in the distance, other soldiers began to glow; my new platoon mates, showing themselves as well. We twisted ourselves in the air and began to drift together. As we moved, the surface of Coral transformed with a topological grid overlay on which several pinpoints glowed, clustered tightly together: the tracking station and its immediate environs.

  Jane began to flood her soldiers with information. Once I had joined Jane’s platoon, the Special Forces soldiers stopped the courtesy of speaking to me, reverting to their usual method of BrainPal communication. If I was going to fight with them, they figured, I had to do it on their terms. The last three days had been a communication blur; when Jane said that realborn communicated at a slower speed, it was an understatement of the case. Special Forces zapped each other messages faster than I could blink. Conversations and debates would be over faster than I could grasp the first message. Most confusingly of all, Special Forces didn’t limit their transmissions to text or verbal messages. They utilized the BrainPal ability to transmit emotional information to send bursts of emotion, using them like a writer uses punctuation. Someone would tell a joke and everyone who heard it would laugh with their BrainPal, and it was like being hit with little BBs of amusement, tunneling in your skull. It gave me a headache.

  But it really was a more efficient way to “speak.” Jane was outlining our platoon’s mission, objectives and strategy in about a tenth of the time a briefing would take a commander in the conventional CDF. This is a real bonus when you’re conducting your briefing as you and your soldiers fall toward the surface of a planet at terminal velocity. Amazingly, I was able to follow the briefing almost as fast as Jane reeled it off. The secret, I found, was to stop fighting it or attempt to organize the information the way I was used to getting it, in discrete chunks of verbal speech. Just accept you’re drinking from the fire hose and open wide. It also helped that I didn’t talk back much.

  The tracking station was located on high ground near one of the smaller human settlements that the Rraey had occupied, in a small valley closed off at the end where the station lay. The ground was originally occupied by the settlement’s command center and its outlying buildings; the Rraey had set up there to take advantage of the power lines and to cannibalize the command center’s computing, transmitting and other resources. The Rraey had created defensive positions on and around the command center, but real-time imaging from the site (provided by a member of Crick’s command team, who had basically strapped a spy satellite onto her chest) showed that these positions were only moderately armed and staffed. The Rraey were overconfident that their technology and their spaceships would neutralize any threat.

  Other platoons would take the command center, locate and secure the machines that integrated the tracking information from the satellites and prepared it for upload to the Rraey spaceships above. Our platoon’s job was to take the transmission tower from which the ground signal went to the ships. If the transmission hardware was advanced Consu equipment, we were to take the tower offline and defend it against the inevitable Rraey counterattack; if it was just off-the-shelf
Rraey technology, we simply got to blow it up.

  Either way, the tracking station would be down and the Rraey spaceships would be flying blind, unable to track when and where our ships would appear. The tower was set away from the main command center and fairly heavily guarded relative to the rest of the area, but we had plans to thin out the herd before we even hit the ground.

  Select targets—Jane sent, and an overlay of our target area zoomed up on our BrainPals. Rraey soldiers and their machines glowed in infrared; with no perceived threat, they had no heat discipline. By squads, teams and then by individual soldiers targets were selected and prepared. Whenever possible we opted to hit the Rraey and not their equipment, which we could use ourselves after the Rraey were dealt with. Guns don’t kill people, the aliens behind the triggers do. With targets selected, we all drifted slightly apart from each other; all that was left to do was wait until one klick.

  One klick—one thousand meters up, our remaining ’bots deployed to a maneuverable parasail, arresting the speed of our descent with a stomach-churning yank, but allowing us to bob and weave on the way down and avoid each other as we went. Our sails, like our combat wear, were camouflaged against dark and heat. Unless you knew what you were looking for, you’d never see us coming.

  Take out targets—Major Crick sent, and the silence of our descent ended in the tearing rattle of Empees unloading a downpour of metal. On the ground, Rraey soldiers and personnel unexpectedly had heads and limbs blasted away from their bodies; their companions had only a fraction of a second to register what had happened before the same fate was visited on them. In my case I targeted three Rraey stationed near the transmission tower; the first two went down without a peep; the third swung its weapon out into the darkness and prepared to fire. It was of the opinion I was in front rather than above. I tapped it before it had a chance to correct that assessment. In about five seconds, every Rraey who was outside and visible was down and dead. We were still several hundred meters up when it happened.

  Floodlights came on and were shot out as soon as they blazed to life. We pumped rockets into entrenchments and foxholes, splattering Rraey who were sitting in them. Rraey soldiers streaming out of the command center and encampments followed the rocket trails back up and fired; the soldiers had long since maneuvered out of the way, and were now picking off the Rraey who were firing out in the open.

  I targeted a landing spot near the transmission tower and instructed Asshole to compute an evasive maneuvering path down to it. As I came in, two Rraey burst through the door of a shack next to the tower, firing up in my general direction as they ran in the direction of the command center. One I shot in the leg; it went down, screeching. The other stopped firing and ran, using the Rraey’s muscular, birdlike legs to pick up distance. I signaled for Asshole to release the parasail; it dissolved as the electrostatic filaments holding it together collapsed and the ’bots transformed into inert dust. I fell the several meters to the ground, rolled, came up and sighted the rapidly receding Rraey. It was favoring a fast, straight line of escape rather than a shifting, broken run that would have made it more difficult to target. A single shot, center mass, brought it down. Behind me, the other Rraey was still screeching, and then suddenly wasn’t as an abrupt burp sounded. I turned and saw Jane behind me, her Empee still angling down toward the Rraey corpse.

  You’re with me—she sent and signaled me toward the shack. On our way in two more Rraey came through the door, sprinting, while a third laid down fire from inside the shack. Jane dropped to the ground and returned fire while I went after the fleeing Rraey. These ones were running broken paths; I got one but the other got away, pratfalling over an embankment to do so. Meanwhile, Jane had got tired of volleying with the Rraey in the shed and shot a grenade into the shack; there was a muffled squawk and then a loud bang, followed by large chunks of Rraey flopping out of the door.

  We advanced and entered the shack, which was covered with the rest of the Rraey and housed a bank of electronics. A BrainPal scan confirmed it as Rraey communication equipment; this was the operation center for the tower. Jane and I backed out and pumped rockets and grenades into the shack. It blew up pretty; the tower was now offline, although there was still the actual transmission equipment at the top of the tower to deal with.

  Jane got status reports from her squad leaders; the tower and surrounding areas were taken. The Rraey never got it together after the initial targeting. Our casualties were light, with no deaths to report in the platoon. The other phases of the attack were also going well; the most intense combat coming from the command center, in which the soldiers were going from room to room, blasting the Rraey as they went. Jane sent in two squads to reinforce the command center effort, had another squad police Rraey corpses and equipment at the tower, and had another two squads create a perimeter.

  And you—she said, turning to me and pointing to the tower. Climb up there and tell me what we’ve got.

  I glanced up at the tower, which was your typical radio tower: About 150 meters high and not much of anything besides the metal scaffolding holding up whatever it was at the top. It was the most impressive thing about the Rraey so far. The tower hadn’t been here when the Rraey had arrived, so they must have put it up almost instantly. It was just a radio tower, but on the other hand, you try putting up a radio tower in a day and see how you do. The tower had spikes forming a ladder leading up toward the top; Rraey physiology and height were close enough to humans that I could use it. Up I went.

  At the top was some dangerous wind and a car-size bundle of antennae and instrumentation. I scanned it with Asshole, who compared the visual image with its library of Rraey technology. It was all Rraey, all the time. Whatever information was being piped down from the satellites was being processed down at the command center. I hoped they managed to take the command center without accidentally blowing the stuff up.

  I passed along the information to Jane. She informed me that the sooner I got down from the tower, the better chance I had of not getting crushed by debris. I didn’t need further convincing. As I got down, rockets launched over my head directly into the instrument package at the top of the tower. The force of the blast caused the tower’s stabilizing cables to snap with a metallic tang that promised beheading power to any who might have been in their path. The entire tower swayed. Jane ordered the tower base struck; the rockets tore into the metal beams. The tower twisted and collapsed, groaning all the way down.

  From the command center area, the sounds of combat had stopped and there was sporadic cheering; whatever Rraey there were, were now gone. I had Asshole bring up my internal chronometer. It had not been quite ninety minutes since we hurled ourselves out of the Sparrowhawk.

  “They had no idea we were coming,” I said to Jane, and was suddenly surprised at the sound of my own voice.

  Jane looked at me, nodded, and then looked over to the tower. “They didn’t. That was the good news. The bad news is, now they know we’re here. This was the easy part. The hard part is coming up.”

  She turned and started shooting commands to her platoon. We were expecting a counterattack. A big one.

  “Do you want to be human again?” Jane asked me. It was the evening before our landing. We were in the mess area, picking at food.

  “Again?” I said, smiling.

  “You know what I mean,” she said. “Back into a real human body. No artificial additives.”

  “Sure,” I said. “I’ve only got eight-some-odd years left to go. Assuming I’m still alive, I’ll retire and colonize.”

  “It means going back to being weak and slow,” Jane said, with usual Special Forces tact.

  “It’s not that bad,” I said. “And there are other compensations. Children, for example. Or the ability to meet others and not have to subsequently kill them because they are the alien enemies of the colonies.”

  “You’ll get old again and die,” Jane said.

  “I suppose I will,” I said. “That’s what humans do. This”
—I held up a green arm—“isn’t the usual thing, you know. And as far as dying goes, in any given year of CDF life, I’m far more likely to die than if I were a colonist. Actuarially speaking, being an unmodified human colonist is the way to go.”

  “You’re not dead yet,” Jane said.

  “People seem to be looking out for me,” I said. “What about you? Any plans to retire and colonize?”

  “Special Forces don’t retire,” Jane said.

  “You mean you’re not allowed?” I asked.

  “No, we’re allowed,” Jane said. “Our term of service is ten years, just like yours, although with us there’s no possibility of our term lasting any less than the full ten years. We just don’t retire, is all.”

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “We don’t have any experience being anything else than what we are,” Jane said. “We’re born, we fight, that’s what we do. We’re good at what we do.”

  “Don’t you ever want to stop fighting?” I asked.

  “Why?” Jane asked.

  “Well, for one thing, it dramatically cuts down your chances of violent death,” I said. “For another thing, it’d give you a chance to live those lives you all dream about. You know, the pasts you make up for yourselves. Us normal CDF get to have that life before we go into the service. You could have it afterward.”

  “I wouldn’t know what to do with myself,” Jane said.

  “Welcome to the human race,” I said. “So you’re saying no Special Forces people leave the service? Ever?”

  “I’ve known one or two,” Jane admitted. “But only a couple.”