by Rick Partlow
There were six of us, a typical Drop squad, in a platoon of sixteen and we were supposed to touch down in a canyon and approach the target from the west, and I’ll be damned if that canyon didn’t look barely wide enough to fit a suit’s shoulders on the map. It didn’t seem any bigger in person. We were dropping onto it fast, faster than I would have thought was survivable if my suit systems weren’t swearing to me I was right on the beam. I would have felt better if I could have watched another unit touching down first, but I could barely see the rest of the platoon on the map overlay.
First squad was the westernmost unit in the platoon and we were supposed to provide that end of a pincer movement to cut off an enemy convoy. Well, a notional enemy convoy. In reality, it would be a bunch of Marines, probably dismounted Drop Troops pulling duty as Op-For, driving cargo trucks down a dirt road and waiting to get attacked.
Maybe. I had my doubts it would be that easy. The Virtual Reality training pod programs had thrown in hiccups every now and again, but nothing too hard. They’d been trying to get us familiar with the control systems and didn’t make things too complicated, but I knew it was coming. I figured it would be something small at first. Maybe the convoy would have mounted Gauss guns or Gatling lasers or even air support, and I was looking forward to it. I wanted to see what I could do with this thing.
The altimeter was down to a hundred meters and the terrain below was coming into focus, rough and rocky and nearly bare of vegetation here in the more arid northern half of the Gehenna subcontinent. The canyon had once held a river, back when Inferno had been in a wetter stage, or at least that’s what our operations order had said. I wasn’t sure why it was important, but I got the sense the junior officers who wrote that kind of thing threw in esoteric details like that just to pad the length and make themselves look smarter. All I knew was I wished the river had been wider.
The jets gave me one last kick in the ass, a braking burn harsh enough that my vision clouded up and all the displays seemed blurry and faded for a moment. Dust billowed up around me and the suit touched down with a flexing of mechanical knees and hips, a jolt that ran through my body and bounced my forehead off the padding around it.
My first drop. I took a moment to savor it, just to try to remember the way the ground felt under the feet of the suit, the way the weight settled into the sand, the sound of the pinging of the cooling metal after the jets shut down. The rest of the squad fell into what our instructors had called a Ranger file behind me, about fifty meters between us, the last of them around a curve in the canyon, so far back I couldn’t even see them on the sensors.
“First squad, sound off,” I barked, counting on the laser LOS relay to take the command back to the last of them. “Status report.”
“Bravo Two, down and ready,” Rogan said, her reply sharp and loud, insisting on going by the book, as usual. She set the pattern and the rest of them answered the same way, like cattle.
“Bravo Three, down and ready,” Trent said.
“Bravo Four…”
And so it went, through Said, Dominguez and Calvey. I didn’t know them very well. With all the training crammed into an abbreviated schedule designed to get us out on the line as quick as possible, there wasn’t much time left for bullshitting, and the only reason Trent and I were halfway friendly was because we shared a compartment.
“All right, move out,” I ordered. “We need to be on target in twenty minutes, so keep a quick pace, but everyone stays on the ground, no jumping. They’ll pick us up on thermal if we jump this close.”
I was just repeating what the op order had said, what the training officer had repeated and the training NCO had reiterated, but I needed to sound sure of myself, and since I didn’t know a damned thing about armored combat, the only things I was sure of was what the trainers had told me.
“The canyon runs another four kilometers before it widens out into the valley floor,” I went on, still running through the briefing from memory, “and when it does, we’ll be in position to interdict the convoy from the west. When it opens up, we switch to a wedge formation with me and Alpha Team on point.”
Technically, I should have let someone else walk point. That was the way I saw it in the training videos, but they hadn’t said I had to do it that way and I didn’t trust any of the others not to fuck up.
The canyon was maybe four meters across, which would have been plenty wide if I’d been walking through it on foot, but seemed tight enough to scrape the paint off the shoulders of my suit at the moment. I lumbered forward, the footsteps of the suit drumbeats against the old riverbed, but I kept an eye on the sensor readings from up ahead, wondering if this was the first curve the planners would throw at us, trying to send us down a passage too narrow for our suits and making me decide whether to risk being spotted by hopping up out of the canyon and walking on the plateau above it.
The old riverbed snaked to my right ahead, so sharply I couldn’t see around it, and I muttered a curse as I leaned around the curve, sure this was where we would get stuck.
The figures were so still, they could have passed for statues left behind in this dry, winding labyrinth by some mysterious alien culture, stone guardians to keep intruders at bay. But I knew what they were on an instinctive level and acted before the thought had echoed from one side of my brain to the other.
Battlesuits. No IFF transponders on them. Enemy. Ambush.
We didn’t have live weapons, of course. We’d fired them on the range, but for this exercise, laser designators were our only tool, and our armor’s detection systems would tell us how effective our notional shot had been. The weapons were manually controlled, the only thing that was. I suppose they didn’t want a Drop Trooper getting their lather up and firing off a shot through sheer bloody-mindedness, and requiring a finger to pull a trigger added a layer of intent.
My right thumb was already hovering over the trigger for what should have been a plasma gun, and I jammed it down reflexively before I’d even managed to process what I’d seen through my conscious mind.
“Contact front!” I yelled, fumbling over the phrase we’d been taught. It meant I had enemy to the front, but even as I said it, they were already hitting the jets and arcing over my head to attack the rest of my squad behind me. “Enemy armor!”
The one I’d shot didn’t move, and the simulated image projected over the suit by the targeting program told the story of why. I’d hit him with a virtual plasma blast right in the center of the chest. There were centimeters of BiPhase Carbide plating there, but I was less than thirty meters away, point-blank range for a weapon that delivered gigajoules of energy in the form of a coherent packet of hyper-ionized gas the temperature of a star. It would have burned right through the armor and the pilot behind it and that was just what the targeting screen image showed, a ragged, blackened hole surrounded by white-hot metal.
Which was one down, and a shitload to go, and I was facing the wrong direction. There was a whole squad of battlesuits, and five of the six had jumped the second I’d made contact, leaving the lead one to deal with me. I went with my first instinct. They’d gone airborne, so I jumped right after them, the crush of the jets a comfort, a signal I was doing something, even if it turned out to be the wrong thing.
Triggering the jets with my nerve impulses was easy, one of the first things we’d learned in the simulators. Twisting the body of the suit around in mid-air to turn myself around and angle the jets the opposite direction wasn’t quite as easy and definitely not intuitive. Controlling the jump-jets through the interface wasn’t a matter of thinking “fly!” or picturing the motion in my thoughts. If the Commonwealth military could read thoughts through the interface, they hadn’t let us in on the secret. Instead, the interface read the impulses my cerebellum was sending to my body, intercepting them and using them as control keys for the suit.
To jump, all I had to do was…jump. How high and how far depended on how hard I tried to jump, just as if I was doing it with my physical body
. Unfortunately, that meant I couldn’t really maneuver the suit unless I knew how I’d maneuver my body the same way, and I wasn’t any sort of acrobat. The Vigilante flailed awkwardly in mid-air, over-turning and over-correcting just the way my brain told it to, but I finally got it and myself pointed in the right direction.
“I’m hit!” someone screamed into the net, but I couldn’t tell who from the voice and didn’t have the attention to spare to read it off the IFF transponder.
“There’s too many of them!” Rogan was yelling, and then Trent’s transmission was stepping over hers and I couldn’t make out what anyone was saying and I was already tired of their shit.
“Get off the fucking net!” I bellowed, coming down almost on top of Rogan’s position, only meters behind her. “Get out of the damned canyon! Jump!”
Even in mid-air, I was being bombarded by data, and even a system designed to break it down into something easy to understand and control was having trouble making it coherent for me. Rogan was behind me, still yelling something despite what I’d told them all, a warning that there was an enemy trooper right in front of me, as if I couldn’t see the big, three-meter hunk of man-shaped metal only ten meters away. It was damaged, Rogan was damaged, there were eight other battlesuits somewhere in front of me, with IFF transponder warnings flashing at me not to shoot them by accident and other flashing warnings basically saying “hey dude! You got enemies here, better shoot ‘em!” at the same time.
“Oh, fuck it,” I murmured and gave one last burst on the jets.
Instead of coming down between Rogan and the enemy suit, I landed right on top of the damned thing. I don’t know how much I expected it to hurt, but it was worse. The impact shook me like a bone in a dog’s teeth and metal rang and screamed and shrieked as if it were about to give way, and I felt like Ivan Jaropillo getting smacked with the front end of a train. I could only console myself with how much worse the other guy must feel.
The Op-For trooper collapsed under the weight of my Vigilante, and I somehow kept my feet, triggering a stabilizing burst kick of the jump-jets when I thought I might stumble backwards. My head was floating somewhere ten meters over my body, or at least that was how it felt, and I was too out of it to even remember to shoot the guy. Rogan took care of it for me, her suit moving stiffly from the simulated damage, reminding me of old Mrs. Martijena creaking through the streets of Tijuana on her wooden cane. She blasted the downed Op-For with her training laser and the suit went still, its damage sensors freezing its servos as they sensed its destruction.
I was already moving, spurred by a massive adrenaline dump, my senses overloaded by the eye-searing flashes of simulated electron beams scorching the air up and down the canyon in the display. In the moment, I forgot we were playing a war game, forgot the worst that could happen was embarrassment and failure, and really expected to die at any second. IFF transponders were flashing distress and I couldn’t tell exactly how bad it was or even who was getting hit because the system was doing its best to distract me.
I had to focus on one thing. It was the only clear thought hammering its way past the confusion, the noise, and blinking lights. I had to do one thing and do it fast, and I had to keep it simple. Kill the enemy. That seemed simple enough, and it had the added benefit of protecting whoever in my squad was left alive.
“Get out of the canyon!” I yelled again. It was the only order I could think to give, the only thing that made sense, but I wasn’t sure if anyone was listening.
The enemy certainly wasn’t. They liked it down here, where everything was close and we were trapped in a shooting gallery. I wasn’t much of a shooter, not before the Marines. I’d fired a gun before Basic, which put me one up on most of the other recruits, but I didn’t like them. Nothing philosophical about it, it was just too easy to get caught when you had a gun. A stun wand was a battery with some wire leads encased in plastic. It could have been anything, and wasn’t even illegal most places. I’d taken a couple of long-distance shots at the Op-For during Basic, but I’d had time to think. I wasn’t doing much thinking at the moment and I forgot about my missiles, barely remembered the plasma gun and waded in like a brawler.
Battlesuits were wedged into the canyon ahead and thank God the sensor array lit up my people with blue haloes, because all the grey metal looked the same even with the enhanced optics and I wasn’t exactly a surgical weapon. I swung fists half a meter across in wild hammer-blows, ignoring the flash of simulated energy weapons, ignoring the alarmed shouts of my own squad members and ignoring the damage warnings on the array projected in front of my face.
I hit the right target almost by chance, pushing aside a Vigilante suit I thought might have been Trent with a hip-check and slamming my suit’s armored fist into the shoulder joint of the enemy. I think the impact surprised the Op-For trooper more than it damaged them, but it was enough of a blow to throw off their aim and the computer-generated flare of a simulated Tahni electron beamer passed a meter off to the right of my head.
I shoved my right arm where the Op-For Vigilante’s chin would be if it had an articulated head and triggered the plasma gun. Damage indicators screamed at me and I was sure I would have blown my suit’s right arm off, and maybe my own, if I’d tried it for real, but number three bad guy was down.
And that was enough for them. Jets glowed white and red and the surviving enemy troopers were gone just as quickly as they’d arrived, leaving me standing in a cloud of smoke and holding my proverbial dick.
What the hell was I supposed to do now? I hesitated a moment then keyed the squad net.
“Status.” I scowled. Maybe now wasn’t a bad time to start sounding professional. “This is Bravo One. Sound off with your status, First squad.”
“Bravo Two,” Rogan answered, not sounding quite as full of enthusiasm as before. “I’m mobile but my missile launch tube is down and my main weapon is damaged.”
“Bravo Three here.” Trent’s voice sounded shaky. “I’m…I’m down, I got no reactor feed, dude. You guys are gonna have to go on without me.”
“Bravo Four, I’m up,” Said told me. He was curt, quiet, to the point, which I appreciated at that moment.
There was a silence and I checked the IFF. Bravo Five, Dominguez, was completely off the board. No telemetry, no biological readings, no reactor output. He was dead…or at least his armor wasn’t letting him move or respond, which was close enough for the exercise.
“Bravo Six, status?” I snapped, irritated with Dominguez for getting himself killed and Bravo Six for wasting our time. “Calvey, are you awake in there?”
“Uh, yeah, I’m here,” she stammered. “My reactor took a hit, getting a lot of thermal blooming and interference from a gap in the shielding, but I can still move.”
“Everyone hold up here,” I ordered, hoping they’d listen better now that no one was shooting at them.
I jumped out of the canyon, twenty meters straight up and then arcing out another thirty onto the plateau above. We weren’t supposed to break comms silence, but the enemy already knew we were here.
Hell, they’re Op-For. They probably saw the assault plan before we did.
“Alpha One,” I called for the acting platoon leader, a guy named Marcus, “this is Bravo One, come in. We’ve been hit by enemy armor; we have one KIA and one immobile. Do you read?” I paused, got nothing, saw no IFF in the sensor display or any readings on long-range thermal towards the planned attack. “Alpha One, do you read?”
“Index, index, index.”
I groaned, sagging against the padding inside the armor. The voice belonged to Major Bullough, the lead Armor trainer, and “index” meant the end of the exercise.
“All units are loose from damage holds. Report to the main Collection Area for the AAR.”
AAR was the After-Action Review. That was where we could sit around and listen while the trainers told us how badly we’d fucked up.
“All right, First squad,” I sighed. “Everyone out of the hole and f
ollow me back.”
This wasn’t going to be pretty.
8
“Okay, who here can tell me where you fucked up?”
Captain Charles reminded me of the nasty, trained dogs the gang-bangers used to keep down in Tijuana. He was thick through the chest and shoulders, with jowls that hung down in an expression of perpetual disapproval, eyes dark, beady and dangerous. And that’s exactly what he was, Major Bullough’s attack dog, sent to chew us up and spit us out while Bullough waited and watched, tall and lean and nearly skeletal in the shadows, silently observing.
Charles scanned back and forth from where he stood on the isolated boulder at the center of the formation, as if he was a street preacher and us trainees were his flock, clustered around him, butts on the dry, dusty ground. The immobile Vigilante battlesuits were lined up behind him, backlit by the temporary camp the Op-For had set up, an accusatory choir waiting to echo his message.
“No one?” He shook his head, hands raised in invitation. “Come on, someone has to have an idea.”
“We joined the Marines,” someone murmured behind me, too low and quiet for me to figure out who’d said it, probably too low for Charles to hear, though I thought I saw his eyes narrow.
Finally, someone raised their hand. It was the platoon leader for the exercise, Private Marcus. He was quiet and unassuming, dark enough he nearly blended into the night.
“They knew we were coming,” he suggested. “They were ready for us.”
“They were,” Charles agreed, “and some of you may think that’s not fair, that the Op-For cheated. But that’s going to happen out there, too.” He gestured up at the night sky to demonstrate where “out there” was. “The enemy is going to know you’re coming and you’re going to have to change your plans on the fly. Still, this was your first live mission and it wasn’t designed to be unwinnable. Your problem was your plan. It required too much coordination with limited communication.” He pointed at me. “Your First squad was sent on a pincer movement ten kilometers away from the rest of your platoon in a situation where you didn’t have secure comms and couldn’t coordinate if something went wrong.”