Spaceside

by Michael Mammay

  “Try to stand. I’ll help you.” I took his good arm and pulled, and between us we got him to his feet. He wobbled and almost went back down. “Nope,” I said. “I’m going to have to carry you.”

  “I’m sorry, sir.”

  “Let’s go.” I crouched and slung him over both shoulders in a fireman’s carry, making sure to get his good arm and leave his damaged one untouched. Without the enhanced strength of my suit I could have never carried the big man. Even wearing it I imagined that I heard the joints creaking as I adjusted his weight. I rocked a little, then started moving. I couldn’t run, but I put one foot in front of the other, fearing that if I stopped I’d fall down and never get Matua up again. Another explosion hit behind me, close enough that I felt the compression of the shockwave through my armor. I kept walking, head down.

  When I’d gotten clear of the danger area, I set Matua down, leaning his back against a large tree. Sweat poured down my face and neck, and I struggled for breath, despite my temperature-controlled suit.

  Combat was for younger men.

  “Sir, I’m so sorry.”

  “What are you talking about, man? You saved my life.”

  He shook his head almost imperceptibly, seeming to struggle with it. “Not this. The other stuff.”

  “Don’t worry about it. We’ve all had missions we’d have rather skipped. Right now we’ve got to get you out of here.” I took his med pack from the slot on his good arm and got out the auto-injector. It would slow his metabolism and help him clot. He’d be useless, but it would probably keep him alive until he got to more advanced medical care.

  He slurred his words. “You watch your back down here, okay?”

  “I always do,” I said. Things had gotten harder with Matua out of the fight, but I still had Tanaka and his promise. I still had hope that I’d come out okay, even if I couldn’t see the exact path at the moment.

  Just like before, all I could do was put one foot ahead of the other and pray something didn’t explode.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  I crept around a smooth-barked tree and scanned for enemies. Our drones had checked the area, but I didn’t trust them. I couldn’t believe that the Cappans had let us off the hook after the mine ambush. They should have had people here waiting to pick us off while we reorganized after the rockets scattered us, but my display stayed blank—no enemy icons—and an eerie quiet settled in, hanging for several seconds, like a thick blanket. I used the time to check on the points of origin of the rockets. The radar in our suits had tracked a trajectory and back-plotted it to where they’d launched from. All of our suits had the software, and networked together they’d provide an accurate location. My display showed the launch site fifteen kilometers away, meaning they’d fired from the far side of our destination. Somebody had already dispatched one of our drones to the site to get pictures. Flying at one hundred meters per second, it would be there in under three minutes.

  Tanaka broke the radio silence with a call over the platoon net. “First platoon, status.”

  Nobody responded for several seconds, and then an unfamiliar voice came on. “The lieutenant is down. Red Seven is now Red Six. Squad leaders, report.” Red Seven. That meant the platoon sergeant, normally second in charge, had taken over the platoon to replace Red Six, the lieutenant, who had been hit. It was Beefy. Each squad reported their casualties, dead, wounded, and the severity of injuries. It took longer than it should have because two of the squad leaders had also been hit, putting their backups in charge. Changing leadership during a mission was a standard procedure, but one that never went one hundred percent smoothly.

  “Overall tally: seven dead, eleven wounded. Seven of the wounded need evacuation. One immediately.”

  “Roger,” said Tanaka. “Set up an evacuation point. I’ll call in the bird.”

  A different voice, over the company net this time, brought me back to the big picture. It was one of the other lieutenants. “Sir, this is White Six. Second platoon has casualties.”

  “Report,” said Tanaka.

  “Three dead. Fourteen wounded. Minefield, then rockets.”

  “Roger, White. How many require evac?”

  “Twelve, sir.”

  Tanaka shook his head. I knew what he was thinking. Three dead and twelve evacs from a platoon put them at barely over fifty percent strength and in danger of not being able to complete the mission. All that without reaching what would likely be the hardest part of the action. To my left, two soldiers had prepared shoulder-fired rockets. They’d be waiting on the drones to see if there was anything left to shoot at from the enemy rocket positions.

  Tanaka got himself together and contacted third platoon. “Blue Six, any contact?”

  “This is Blue Six. Negative.”

  “Watch for potato mines. Especially in any choke points.”

  “Wilco, sir.”

  Tanaka went silent for a moment on the net, though his lips moved under his visor. He was likely calling in the evacuation ships. Either that or talking to someone on a private channel. Larsson, maybe. It’s what I’d be doing. We’d taken enough casualties where he had to be considering pulling us out.

  After he stopped talking, I keyed a private channel to him. “What are you thinking?”

  “Those rockets were really well coordinated. Accurate, too. They had it dialed in.”

  “The drone has reached the point of origin,” I said. We both paused to pull up the video feed. Empty rails sat in a half-meter-deep hole in a clearing. A radar-scattering tarp lay on the ground. Obviously it had been covering the rockets right up until they fired. No signs of life meant that everything had been on remote control. We had no targets to attack.

  “Shit,” said Tanaka.

  “It was well planned, no doubt,” I said. “What now?”

  “It’s a matter of how much have they got,” he said. “If they threw this at us here but don’t have anything behind it, it could be that they wanted to try to drive us off. Make us quit.”

  “Possible,” I said. “Would you fight it that way, if you were them?”

  “If all I had were some mines and some rockets? Probably. If I could make an attacker believe that this was just the start, I might get him to turn around and run. If I didn’t have any ability to fight on the ground . . . yeah, I might play it that way.”

  He had a good point. It was a coin flip. They either had more surprises or they didn’t, and we couldn’t know without continuing the mission, unless we got lucky and found something with the drones. “You’re right. It could go either way. What’s the call?” I asked.

  He thought about it for long enough where I almost asked him again, when he answered. “We press on.”

  “Roger.” I had doubts, but I didn’t want to share them. He needed his confidence. If that went, we were all fucked. Besides, I had a better chance of escaping if we kept going than I did if we turned back.

  We walked for another five minutes when third platoon reported contact.

  “Snipers on the high ground,” the report came on the company net.

  “Roger. How many?” asked Tanaka.

  Nobody answered. Good. He shouldn’t have asked, though admittedly, it was hard to resist. He wasn’t there, so he couldn’t help. They had to fight their own fight, and they had a platoon leader plus Larsson to coordinate it. But at the same time, we all held our breath, waiting for a response. Aircraft screamed overhead, our air-support going to help third platoon.

  “We should drop some bombs on their living area,” said an unidentified soldier over the first platoon net. “That would get them to stop.” Nobody responded over the comm, but several heads nodded. I checked the two soldiers with the rocket launchers to make sure they weren’t thinking of doing something stupid. Neither appeared ready to fire. Good. There was nothing harder than being shot at with no way to fire back, and nerves were tight.

  An explosion sounded a long way off, a faint vibration at our distance. The aircraft had found targets.r />
  “Black six, this is Blue six.” The third platoon leader, checking in.

  “Go,” said Tanaka.

  “Three enemy shooters destroyed. Three friendlies dead, one wounded, non-urgent.”

  “Roger,” said Tanaka, and the net went silent.

  “Tanaka. I have an idea for an alternate course of action,” I said on a private channel.

  “I’m all ears,” he said.

  “This mission is about me negotiating from a position of strength, but we’re getting weaker by the minute. If we can work a comms channel with the Cappans from here, we might—”

  “Can’t do it, sir,” he said, cutting me off. “It’s outside the mission parameters.”

  I paused for a moment, discouraged. I’d hoped that if I could get in touch with the Cappans I could tip them off somehow without getting caught. “So change the parameters. You’re the commander.”

  “It’s not that simple,” he said, frustration in his voice.

  “What’s the criterion for abort?” I asked.

  It took him a moment to respond. “There isn’t one.”

  Shit.

  Tanaka didn’t mean it literally when he said he had no abort criteria, because at some point we wouldn’t have enough combat power to continue and we’d have to quit. But it still made me cringe. He intended to push forward until he couldn’t. I’d agreed with him a few minutes ago when we faced mines and rockets, but enemy snipers brought another element. That meant that Cappans had physically entered the fight, and that changed everything. They had fifteen or twenty thousand, and we didn’t know how many were armed. Despite our technological advantage, we didn’t have close to enough firepower to combat that. But I couldn’t argue it with Tanaka, the guy who might be trying to keep me alive. It also fit my desire to get closer to the Cappans. If any of us made it that far.

  Still, the deeper implication of his action bothered me. Somebody had enough influence on him to keep him charging forward in a situation where he shouldn’t, and his people seemed to follow him without much grumbling. There must have been a big bonus involved to keep them moving, given the risk to their own lives. Maybe it was more than the money. I wasn’t a part of the unit’s internal workings, so I couldn’t know. Soldiers did things for leaders for reasons that reached beyond the understanding of outsiders. So many intangible factors played into loyalty that to try to make sense of it . . . I couldn’t. I didn’t know the relationships. When Tanaka told us to move out again, I keyed my comm and said, “Roger.”

  We left a small detachment of walking wounded behind to supervise the medical evacuation and moved out. The soldiers proceeded with even more caution now, though it would look the same to an untrained observer. We moved in the same wedge formation at roughly the same pace, but with a different level of awareness. One of the soldiers with the shoulder-launched rockets kept his weapon at the ready. The next target that presented itself, he’d fire first and ask questions later. The drones had returned, and they moved in front of us, flitting across our route about a kilometer ahead, feeding back sensor readings. I set my filter to screen out anything except actual enemy contact, as I found too much data to be overwhelming during this sort of operation.

  Information overload could be a real problem for a leader. Lieutenants could get so focused on all the systems feeding into their helmets that they missed basic things going on around them. Everybody drew the line in a different place, depending on their own capability and experience. I hoped Tanaka and his officers had it down. It was a weird feeling, rooting for the people who had forced me into this difficult situation, but that’s where I found myself. The Cappans weren’t really my enemy, and the Omicron soldiers weren’t really my friends, but those things became less relevant when the shooting started. The soldiers around me did what they had to do to survive, and I couldn’t fault them for that. All the subtleties and politics stopped mattering when you hit the ground humping a rifle. Until I got to a place where I could communicate with Cappans, that wouldn’t change.

  Even at that moment, with the ambiguous situation hanging over my head, some part of me wanted to be there. A big part. As if somehow risking my life for a dubious cause was a better way to live than sitting comfortably in an air-conditioned corporate building and getting paid. Distantly, I think I recognized the flaw in that thinking, but that sort of self-analysis is better saved for outside of the war zone.

  The terrain opened up and flattened, and the trees thinned, making travel easier. We spread out, making ourselves harder targets, and for almost an hour we moved unopposed. Neither of our other units reported contact, either, and I began to give some credence to Tanaka’s theory that the Cappans had tried to run us off with an initial defense.

  I should have trusted my gut instinct from earlier.

  Third platoon reported contact first, and almost before they could finish transmitting, the second platoon leader came up on the feed and reported enemy action as well.

  Tanaka didn’t ask questions this time, instead waiting for further reports. We had our support aircraft still circling overhead, but without knowing which platoon had it worse, Tanaka didn’t direct them. He’d be looking at the feeds generated from each platoon, trying to figure out what we faced at each location and who needed help more.

  The head of the soldier in front of me exploded.

  “Contact, thirty degrees. Sniper!” I couldn’t tell who made the report. I didn’t care. I hit the ground as two more shots snapped past before return fire from the soldiers around me drowned them out. Red blips appeared on my heads-up. Enemy. Near me, the fwoosh of rockets launching cut through the gunfire. Our man with the rocket launcher didn’t hold back.

  “Three enemy destroyed.” Another unknown voice. The ridiculousness of it all grabbed at me. Disembodied voices telling me things I already knew from my display. Reporting death that had already happened. Thankfully, I didn’t have time to think about it, to process. I sighted through my weapon, increasing the magnification, searching for a target. I locked in on a Cappan with a rifle. I pulled the trigger, but the alien jerked just before I fired, already hit.

  More muzzle flashes flared from our left, too many for me to count manually, but the feed in my helmet put the number at twenty-three. The enemy had us in a crossfire, hitting us in an L shape. Textbook ambush. Somehow they had avoided the drones and our sensors in order to surprise us. I lost that thought when the first rockets slammed into our position, throwing up dirt and wood splinters and sending an armored body careening into the air. I scanned for Tanaka while hugging the ground. We needed orders, but the company and platoon net both stayed silent. I found him, forty meters away, on one knee, firing at the new group of targets. I started crawling that direction while opening a private feed.

  An explosion rocked the ground in front of Tanaka, flinging him backward five or six meters. His back slammed into a large tree trunk, where he hung for a moment, absurdly pinned to the wood, before crumpling to the ground in a heap. Without thinking I leaped up off my belly and covered the ground to him in a few mechanically-aided steps. Something thwacked against the back of my armor as I reached him, loud, but I barely felt it. My system didn’t show any warnings, so I said a quick thanks to good technology and evaluated Tanaka. One of his arms was bent up under him in a way that humans shouldn’t bend, but his battered suit sent a signal to mine that said he was alive.

  I tried to position myself between him and the bulk of the enemy fire based on what my computer told me about their location. Five red blips remained on my heads-up. They’d had the surprise, but once we found them, our superior weaponry took its toll, though several blue icons had gone dark, too. I pushed everything but the essentials to the background so I could focus on Tanaka. I grabbed the med kit out of the slot on the shoulder armor of his good arm and activated it. The twelve seconds that it required to do a diagnostic scan on him crept by as if measured by a sundial. When the screen finally flashed, I winced at the readout. Broken ribs,
the damaged arm that I could see, and at least one cracked vertebra.

  I didn’t want to move him, but we couldn’t remain stationary, either. There were enough red dots still shooting at us to be dangerous, and more joining them. Perhaps twenty meters away lay a mangled soldier, but my eyes passed over him in favor of the rocket launcher lying a few centimeters outside the reach of his dead arms. It looked intact. I sprinted to it, pressed the synchronize button, and waited the three seconds it took to link with my helmet. Bullets skipped off the ground near my feet, and I jumped by instinct, for all the good that would do. I checked the weapon and found it unloaded.

  Shit.

  I rolled the dead soldier over and fumbled through his pack, finding the last rocket box. I’m not ashamed to admit that I hid behind his body, lying on my back, while I fitted the large cartridge into the launcher. I popped up to my knees and pointed it in the general direction of the largest group of red icons, angling it upward at sixty degrees, and fired. The rocket whooshed away with very little recoil, and I couldn’t help following its briefly glowing trajectory. When it reached its apex, it popped in a small puff of smoke, and six submunitions streaked downward toward the enemy, homing in on them from the feed in my helmet. The warheads didn’t carry much explosive—maybe half a kilogram each—but with precision guidance, they didn’t need much. Several more red icons winked out, and the enemy fire slowed to a trickle.

  I sprinted back to Tanaka, kneeled beside him, and pressed his med kit against him where his armor had peeled away. It vibrated in my hand as it injected him with stabilizers that would hopefully keep him alive. He was done for this fight, but if I could get him back to the ship, they could put him back together. I got his weight positioned on my shoulders much like I had with Matua and struggled to my feet. Jostling him when he had a cracked vertebra might paralyze him, but it beat death.

  Something smashed into my back, spinning me and throwing me forward onto my knees. Tanaka’s limp form tumbled away from me, almost seeming like slow motion. It didn’t matter. He’d taken the brunt of the pulse blast I’d felt, and it had scorched his armor, leaving a smoking hole. I kneeled there for several seconds, maybe longer. When I finally gathered myself, the shooting had stopped.