Contact Front #1 Drop Trooper

by Rick Partlow

  Finally, I broke down and messaged him.

  YOU SHOULD HAVE COME WITH US, he replied. MYTHS AND LEGENDS IS A NICKNAME.

  A coordinate pin popped up on the screen with the heading “War Heroes” and an address. On the bright side, I was only three blocks away from it. And it was starting to rain.

  I was only slightly soaked by the time I made it to the place, and without the coordinate pin, I never would have found it. It was a hole in the wall wedged between a fabricator repair shop and a virtual reality gaming center, without as much as a sign or a window, and only a crack of light coming from beneath a door labelled “WH” told me I was in the right place.

  A wave of noise hit me when I pulled the door open, and I had to look twice to confirm the bar wasn’t bigger on the inside than it was on the outside. It was, upon closer examination, a creative use of mirrors. The mirrors also made it tougher to find the squad. The place was packed and seemed doubly so with the reflections behind the bar and along the walls.

  The furniture, the bar, the flooring all looked like real wood, which I had never seen before outside of gossip reports on Corporate Council execs and rich celebrities. It was darkly-tinted and polished to a high gloss, reflecting the light from a dozen wall lamps, more than enough to keep the place glowing brightly with the strategic use of the mirrored surfaces. There was an actual human behind the bar rather than a drink dispenser with a chip reader, and he was as dark and lined with age as the polished oak of the tables. He smiled and laughed as he poured liquor out of what must have been actual glass bottles for the patrons.

  And the patrons, unless I totally misread the haircuts, were all military. Not exactly hard to guess here on Inferno, but they all had that rough-around-the-edges look of enlisted and junior NCOs, laughing a bit too loud and drinking a bit too hard to be officers or senior gunnies. They were, I judged, all Marines, but not all of them were Drop Troopers. For some reason, that bothered me.

  There were the techs, of course, the ones who worked on our armor, the shuttles, and the vehicles, and we all appreciated the work they did and some of them were great to hang with, but it seemed to be the universal feeling among Drop Troopers that the techs weren’t exactly “real” Marines. The officers and the little pop-up ads from the Defense Department could lecture us to the contrary until the stars burned out, but they weren’t going to change anyone’s mind.

  You could spot the techs and maintenance crews and the armorers. They didn’t have ‘face jacks and they generally let their hair grow longer than we did. Most of the Drop Troopers, men and women both, kept the sides of their head shaved to keep the jacks clear. Some of us wore the rest in a sort of barely-regulation mohawk, but I just kept it all buzzed short because anything else just seemed too pretentious to me. There were other differences, though. Armored Drop-Troopers had a certain walk, something I didn’t notice in myself but I saw in others. It was kind of a hesitant sway to their gait, something Drop-Troopers picked up from so much time in the suits. I imagined I’d wind up with it eventually, if I lived long enough.

  The wrench-and-bucket types being here was okay, I supposed, but they even let Force Recon into this bar, and no one liked Force Recon. They all had their noses in the air, like they were the elite or something, the best of the best. They wore their hair long, right at the edge of regulation, like they were rubbing it in our faces that they didn’t have jacks, didn’t need jacks.

  Okay, if I was being honest, I hadn’t ever actually talked to a Force Recon puke, but we all just knew that was how they felt about us.

  “Cam!” Hayes’ voice carried across buzz of conversation and music that had been ten years out of date back home and not in a genre I liked, something twangy and full of banjos. “Over here!”

  I edged my way through the crowd, nearly colliding with a waitress carrying a transparent cooler full of some sort of dark ale and brushing up against a barrel-chested, shaven-headed guy who scowled at me from a face that must have been scarred long before he’d enlisted in the Marines or else the military docs would have fixed it. I tried not to stare as I moved past him to the high-top table where our squad was sitting.

  “What the hell took you so long?” Hayes wondered, winking at me. “Maybe next time instead of being all sulky and bitchy, you’ll ride with the rest of us.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” I acknowledged, raising a hand as I settled down onto a stool. “I didn’t know the place had its own nickname. Sorry, but most of us haven’t had as much time to sham as you.”

  “That’s what being an E-5 is all about, Corporal Alvarez,” he said, offering me a glass of beer. “Optimizing your opportunities to sham.”

  I took the beer and downed half of it in one chug, trying not to make a face. I didn’t particularly care for the stuff, but I’d learned to fake it. An underage street criminal living in the tunnels drank whatever they could get their hands on.

  “You always got to go it alone, don’t you, Alvarez?” Rodriguez asked, staring down at her drink, not seeming too happy to have me here.

  Taylor said nothing, taking a sip of his drink, his eyes boring into me. Betancourt glanced back and forth between Rodriguez and me, wide-eyed and looking shocked at the hostility of her question.

  “What?” I asked, trying to play it off as a joke. “Did you miss me that much? It’s only been a couple hours.”

  “I wouldn’t say I missed you.” She smirked. “But maybe Betancourt did.”

  “I’m your team leader, not your momma, Rodriguez,” I said, giving in to the annoyance gnawing at my last nerve. “You want me to hold your hand out there?”

  “I want you to have my back,” she snapped back at me, finally meeting my eyes. “That’s your job, right?”

  “And I’ll do my job.” I downed the last of the beer in my glass, then thumped it onto the table. Glass on wood made a very satisfying sound, one I’d never heard before. “Part of doing my job is finding out how good each of you is. It’s training, right?”

  I was talking out of my ass, but it was something I’d learned to sound confident doing.

  “It was my fault,” Betancourt lamented. He was such a puppy dog, his big, dark eyes constantly seeming on the verge of tears. “The damn drones hit me with a missile.”

  “They could have hit any one of us,” Taylor told the younger man, shrugging.

  “Not me!” The voice took me by surprise. I’d heard it before, but I hadn’t expected to see Vicky Sandoval out tonight. She was sitting at the next table over with the rest of her squad, but leaning over into our conversation. “Those paper airplanes have never taken me down once. There’s a trick to it.”

  “Oh, really, Corporal Sandoval?” Hayes asked, leaning forward on his elbows. He hadn’t intervened when Rodriguez was going off on me, but now that Sandoval was involved, he was suddenly a conversationalist. “Please share this secret with your fellow Marines.”

  “Hell, no!” Sandoval said, looking at him askance. “If I tell you, everyone would know and they’d fix the glitch! Then how would I keep my record spotless?”

  “Oh, fuck me,” Taylor muttered, staring at something across the room. “I didn’t realize Fourth would be here tonight.”

  I followed his eyes toward the sound of a half-drunk laugh and the shaven, egg-shaped head that had produced it. I’m not sure how he managed it, but Wade Cunningham looked even more self-important and obnoxious in civvies than he did in uniform. One of the dumbasses he’d had with him in the shower room during our fight was with him again tonight, pretending to laugh at whatever lame joke Cunningham had made while they waited at the bar for their drinks.

  “Cunningham is enough to make me give up on men,” Sandoval muttered.

  “I thought you did that years ago, Vicky,” Rodriguez said, with more salt than I’d have expected. Sandoval grinned a challenge at her.

  “You trying to convert me, Nancy?”

  I watched, fascinated, almost forgetting Cunningham…until his voice cut across the bar in a
foghorn bellow.

  “Watch where you’re going, you fucking ground-pounding prick!”

  Cunningham was squared off with a broad-chested, square-headed dwarf of a man with the haircut of a Force Recon Marine. The guy might have been from a heavier gravity world and looked as if he could bend lead pipes with his hand, and I wouldn’t have fucked with him on a bet, but Cunningham wasn’t that smart.

  “You made me spill my drink!” Cunningham insisted, holding up a shot glass as if it was evidence in a murder trial. “You’re gonna fucking buy me another one!”

  “Fuck off, jack-head,” the broad, short man rumbled, not backing off a centimeter from the man. “Buy your own damn drink and get out of my face.”

  I didn’t hear what was said next because Cunningham’s ugly, bald friend was yelling and three other Force Recon types jumped up and started shouting back. The words lost coherence in a wall of sound. Hayes and Rodriguez pushed off their stools, wary expressions on their face, their drinks forgotten, and so did Sandoval and a few others from her squad.

  “Is there gonna be a fight?” I asked, having to yell it in Hayes’ ear to be heard.

  “It’s Cunningham,” he answered. “What do you think?”

  Shit.

  The first punch was lost behind a wave of bobbing heads as Recon and Drop-Troopers began to move in on the confrontation, but the next flurry came from Cunningham and I was impressed he’d lasted past one shot from the big guy. His friend had grabbed the troll from the back and was trying to put him in a sleeper hold but other Recon guys started wading in, as if two on one was unfair when the one probably outweighed the two of them.

  And that was it, it was on. Hayes was rushing in, followed by the rest of the squad and I was somewhere in the middle, caught up in the tide of people and adrenaline and sound. Instincts acquired over years trying to avoid other people’s fights sought out the nearest exit and safe routes through the crowd and I had to force myself to go against my better judgment and do something stupid, which was the opposite of the way things usually went.

  I was lost almost immediately, swept into a press of bodies and drowned in the competing odors of body spray and alcohol, and I couldn’t tell who was who except by haircuts and the occasional flash of a face I recognized. Fists were swinging and I put my arms up to guard my head and threw my shoulder into anyone who came too close. I wasn’t trying to hurt anybody, mostly because I wasn’t sure who they were, but I did my best to push people away from each other and avoid getting hit myself.

  That worked for about thirty seconds. A skinny, long-armed Recon Marine zeroed in on me with eyes glazed over in an alcohol haze and shot a pair of surprisingly controlled jabs at my head. One of them clipped my left ear in a flare of pain and a sudden, tinny ringing and I decided I’d showed enough restraint. I ducked inside his guard and buried a fist in his gut. The breath gushed out of him in a waft of stale beer and I managed to smack a forearm across the side of his neck and knock him aside before he puked all over me.

  His fall knocked three other people backwards and opened up a space right in front of me. The thought hit me of using the bit of open floor to get the hell out of the bar, but someone beat me to it. Wade fucking Cunningham was blasting past the fight he’d started and right out the front door before the hole closed up behind him and two Recon Marines lunged for Nancy Rodriguez right in front of me.

  Random blows were raining down around me, but I kept my hands up and stepped into a kick to the side of a leg and one of the Marines trying to grab Rodriguez squawked and tumbled into the other. I thought I saw her glance at me in recognition before the fight drifted in and forced us apart like a flood. Something hit me hard behind the right ear and I went down, stars filling my vision, and I caught a boot or three to the legs and ribs that I barely felt through the pain in my head.

  I was in a bad spot and I had the stray, nearly coherent thought of how ridiculous it would be to go off to war only to get my head caved in during a stupid-ass bar fight. When I heard the siren, I wasn’t sure if it was real or just part of the symptoms of a major concussion, but the feet pounding around me began to part and the shouts of the combatants faded under the amplified assault of loud and very authoritative voices.

  “Everyone against the fucking wall unless you want to be fucking stunned!”

  It was the MPs. I was going to live. I closed my eyes and blacked out.

  17

  “You awake?” Someone yelled in my ear, shoving at my shoulder.

  Light speared into my eyes and I threw an arm over my face. The floor was cold beneath me, smooth and hard like tile and I rolled off my back, pushing myself up to my knees. I put a hand to my head, thinking it should hurt, but finding to my surprise, that it didn’t.

  I opened my eyes and looked up into the not-unpleasant face of Vicky Sandoval. She looked very different dressed in civvies, and since I didn’t feel as if I was nursing a serious concussion anymore, I took a moment to appreciate the view.

  “I think I am,” I answered her question. “Though I’ve had dreams that started this way.”

  She rolled her eyes and walked away from me, accompanied by a guffawing laugh from behind us.

  “If you have dreams about sex in a jail cell,” she said, “then maybe the crack on the head did you some good.”

  Jail cell?

  My eyes focused past her face on the bare, concrete walls, the white, tile floor, and a wall of transparent plastic a couple centimeters thick, peppered with tiny holes to let in sound and fresh air. Beyond the polymer barrier was a corridor marked with warnings in big, glowing letters.

  MILITARY POLICE HOLDING FACILITY: NO WEAPONS PERMITTED.

  DO NOT ATTEMPT TO COMMUNICATE WITH DETAINEES UNLESS ACCOMPANIED BY AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL.

  24-HOUR VIDEO AND AUDIO MONITORING. ANYTHING YOU SAY OR DO CAN AND WILL BE USED AGAINST YOU IN A MILITARY COURT.

  “Oh, yeah,” I said, remembering the last thing I’d heard before I passed out. “The MP’s. I was hoping I’d hallucinated that part.”

  “You were pretty out of it when they hauled you off the floor,” Rodriguez agreed. She was huddled on the floor, arms wrapped around her calves, head resting on her knees. She had a bruise on her right cheek. “They must have let the medics take care of your head. They only dropped you in the cell a couple minutes ago.”

  “How long was I out?” I asked, coming to my feet, suddenly spooked at the thought of missing morning formation. “How long have we been in here?”

  “Just a couple hours,” Taylor said. He and Betancourt were leaning against the opposite wall. The newbie looked pale and panicking, as if he was convinced this was the end of his military career. “They just dumped us in here, haven’t even offered us a pee break yet.”

  “And I got to go,” Rodriguez complained.

  I looked around, noting who wasn’t there.

  “Did they get Scotty?” I looked over to Sandoval. “What about your squad? Did anyone get out before the cops came?”

  “God only knows,” the Lance Corporal from Fourth squad replied, hands turned upward. “I was too busy trying not to get hit with a sonic stunner to see.”

  “Scotty got out,” Rodriguez said, sounding confident, or at least sounding like she was trying to be confident. “I’m pretty sure I saw him head out the back door.”

  “What happens now?” Betancourt wondered. “Are we going to be court-martialed?”

  Sandoval barked a laugh.

  “If they court-martialed every Marine who got into a bar fight, the courts would run sessions 24-7-365. Plus, most of the damned platoon got picked up. They can’t afford to lose that many Marines.”

  “Article 15, max,” Taylor added. “Non-judicial punishment. Maybe your next promotion gets delayed a cycle, if you were up for one. No big deal.”

  I sagged against the wall, feeling both relief and exhaustion. Whatever the medics had done to my head had taken care of the concussion, but left me drained. Since my next promotion
would require NCO school and another six months in grade, and I never wanted to be a squad leader, I didn’t care how many article-15’s I racked up. As long as I didn’t get stuck in a cell for too long.

  “Hey Sandoval,” I said, the sudden looseness combining with the effects of the concussion or maybe whatever they’d used to treat it to make the words tumble out of my mouth unguarded, “do you like to be called Vicky?”

  She regarded me with a cautious glare, the way I might have stared down a dog in the street if I wasn’t sure if it would bite.

  “My friends call me Vicky,” she said, a bit cool and detached in her tone. “My close friends.”

  I shrugged.

  “So, when do I find out if I’m close enough?”

  I was not a particularly smooth talker. Where I came from, flashing a wad of paper trade-notes or, better yet, a few tabs of Kick worked better than words. I had the sense things weren’t like that here. I kept eye contact, though, because I’d been advised it was the thing to do to let a girl know you were interested. Her eyes were hazel but they might as well have been ice blue.

  “Alvarez,” she said with deliberate care, “I don’t know you let anyone close enough to call them by their first name.”

  Motion caught the corner of my vision and I turned just in time to see two MP guards stomping toward the cell. They both wore bulky, padded armor designed more to protect against physical strikes and blades than guns or energy weapons, and holstered in a mount on the shoulder of each of them was a sonic stunner, the size of a giant handgun but with a bell-shaped nozzle at the end. Their helmets were of the same material and design, with visors they could pull down to protect their faces at need. The visors were up now, and the cop in the lead had one of those eternally-old faces I’d seen on veteran cops back in the Underground, the kind where you couldn’t tell if they were bored, angry, or tired.

  The woman behind him seemed younger and less jaded and cynical, and I could sense the disapproval in her glare, as if we had all let her down personally with our actions. And behind her was Scotty Hayes, a smirk on his face.