by Rick Partlow
When the pod opened and I stepped out into the blissfully cool climate control of the simulator room, there was an officer standing in front of me. The techs who’d sealed me and the rest of my squad in had all been enlisted Fleet personnel, but this was a Marine major, dressed in utility fatigues. He had one of those pinched faces that looked as if all the features had been crammed into the center, and his too-broad forehead was wrinkled in thought as he stared at me.
“Alvarez, right?” he asked me as I accepted a squeeze-bottle of electrolyte mix from one of the techs. I braced to attention and answered with the bellow we’d been instructed to use when addressed by officers or trainers.
“Sir, yes, sir!”
“Oh, stow that shit, Private,” he said, waving it away as if it were an insect buzzing around his face. “Where are you from?”
“Trans-Angeles, sir,” I told him, my voice closer to normal volume.
“Yes, yes, your file says that.” He seemed impatient but not annoyed. “It also says you were a transient orphan. Where were you from originally?”
“Tijuana, sir.”
He raised an eyebrow, sniffing in what might have been surprise.
“People still live there?”
“Only if they can’t get away, sir.” I was probably pushing my luck, but there were no Drill Sergeants around and this guy seemed like he wanted an honest answer.
“So, no possibility anyone tinkered with your genes, optimized for anything?”
I wanted to laugh at the suggestion, but I managed to control myself. Barely.
“No, sir. My parents raised goats.” And chickens, but no use complicating things. Over a decade of soy hadn’t driven out the memory of what real chicken tasted like.
The major grunted and made a note on his tablet.
“May I ask a question, sir?”
He looked up almost as if he’d forgotten I was there and nodded absently.
“What is this test for?”
Now he smiled, and it seemed to stretch his too-close features into something almost normal. “Don’t worry about it right now, son,” he replied. “If it was important, you’ll find out soon enough.”
4
I was barely awake when they stuffed us on the bird. It was the first time I’d flown in anything other than the shuttles to and from the transport, and the VTOL troop carrier had a much different feel than the hundred-meter-long, fusion-powered aero-spacecraft. It grabbed at the air and rode its coattails rather than brute-forcing its way into the sky like a shuttle, and I could feel the constraining hand of the thick air around us, even if I couldn’t see it. I couldn’t see anything. The troop compartment wasn’t lit except for the faint glow of instruments at the crew chief’s status terminal, and it was pitch black outside, the constant overcast even thicker than usual and the planet’s lone moon nowhere to be seen.
Me and the rest of my platoon were jammed cheek-by-jowl into the passenger compartment, all of us shifting as one with every sway and bank of the aircraft. And no one had told us a damned thing. The Drill Sergeants hadn’t thrown any trash cans, had barely yelled. They’d just switched on the lights at somewhere around oh-dark-thirty and instructed poor Private Williams to have us in our utility fatigues, helmets and tactical vests with full water bladders in half an hour. No cleaning, no running around, just get everyone out to the busses.
The busses had gone to the landing field and once we’d arrived, an armorer’s truck had pulled up and issued us training rifles. We’d had a short familiarization briefing on them right after in-processing and I struggled through the haze of sleep deprivation to remember what the sergeant had told us. They were modeled after the Gauss rifles the Force Recon Marines and other dismounted units used, but were only capable of shooting a targeting laser. There were photoreceptors built into our tactical vests, helmets and fatigues that would register a hit from one of the lasers and flash into the helmet HUD whether we were dead or wounded.
“What do you think we’re supposed to be doing out here?” Williams asked. He was sitting right beside me by a coincidence of our loading order, but it took me a second to realize he was talking to me. “I mean,” he went on, holding up the rifle that had been nestled between his knees, “they haven’t even taught us how to use these things, or anything about fighting.”
“Maybe that’s why we’re out here,” I suggested.
He might have shrugged. I couldn’t see well enough to be sure. I frowned. The helmets had pull-down visors and I figured they must have night vision built into them, but they hadn’t told us how to use it. I felt around on mine for the knob I remembered seeing near the crown and used it to slide the visor into place.
Nothing. No power. I shrugged and raised the visor again. Maybe there was a trick to it. They’d probably tell us once we were on the ground. Or would they? There was no Drill Sergeant on the aircraft, just the crew chief and the pilots. I thought that was weird. We hadn’t been left to ourselves for more than a minute unless we were in bed, lights-out, and even then there was a Drill Sergeant sleeping in an office in the same barracks.
“On the ground in two minutes!” the crew chief told us, holding up two fingers. “Two minutes!”
Nerves ate at the inside of my stomach and I wondered why I was scared. I closed my eyes and counted the seconds for two minutes, timing my breath with the count. I had very nearly gotten my pulse back down to something reasonable when the landing gear slammed into the ground with enough force to throw me forward against my restraints.
“Go! Go! Go!” The crew chief was yelling, motioning out the open side hatch into the outer darkness.
I threw off my safety harness and shuffled off the airplane somewhere in the middle of the platoon. I tried to stay with my squad, but that was nearly impossible in the darkness. The engines were still idling with a high-pitched whine, the airflow through the reactors a hot wind against my face and hands. We stood in a gaggle in the circle of the plane’s landing lights, waiting, wondering what the hell we were supposed to do.
“Attention!”
The call was loud, amplified by a public address speaker. I turned in the direction of the voice and saw a tall man made taller by infantry body armor and a full-visor helmet. The helmet’s external speakers carried his voice over the plane’s turbines and the gabble of forty wannabe Marines standing around in the dark with our proverbial dicks in our hands.
“This is not training,” he declared. I couldn’t see his face through his visor, but his voice was as sharp as a bayonet point and I pictured a face chiseled from hardwood like a recruiting ad. “This is a test. Not of skills you’ve been taught, because we haven’t taught you anything yet. Not a test to see how good a Marine you can be, but more to determine which of you has a certain killer instinct, a will to survive.”
Shit. Was I going to have to kill someone?
“When this aircraft takes off, you have exactly ten minutes before the next one lands. If you’re not at least a kilometer away from here by then, your casualty identification software will declare you dead and you’re to sit down wherever you are and await pickup. If you make it far enough away…well, the next plane in will be carrying your Op-For. That’s short for Opposing Force. The enemy whose job it will be to hunt you down.”
He raised a finger and, for a half a second, I thought he was pointing it directly at me, but then he traversed it back and forth across all of us.
“Your job will be to use your training weapon to shoot the Op-For if you can, while avoiding being spotted and killed yourself. It’s that simple. The operation will be over when either the last of you has been killed or captured, or when the last Op-For has been killed.” There was what I thought was the hint of a chuckle in his voice at the idea.
“Can we work together?” Williams asked.
It was a good question, but one I hadn’t even considered. I didn’t trust any of these people well enough to count on them.
“You could try,” the faceless Marine allowed.
“Given that none of you has ever worked with the others, though, and also given that the Op-For will have full enhanced optics, including thermal and infrared, as well as sonic sensors, the odds are that all staying together will do is make you a bigger target.”
That sent warning bells going off in the back of my head. If this guy was discouraging us from working together, it probably meant it would screw with their test, not that it would hurt us. We should try to do it, but the problem was, something like that would require a leader to take charge of this bunch of half-panicked kids in the dark, yelling his or her head off the whole time, and probably getting themselves taken out early. No thanks.
“Good luck,” the armored man told us, then stepped up into the VTOL transport just as the hatch began to ascend.
The turbines whined and screamed in protest as they came up to speed, and all of us scattered from the plane before the hot breath of its jets could knock us off our feet.
“Alvarez!” Williams called, but I was already running. “Alvarez, we should stick together!”
Yeah, good luck with that, man.
The ground was fairly flat, and I took advantage of the brief wash of light from the transport’s running lights to get an idea of the surrounding terrain. It rose up into the hills north of our landing zone and a spike of apprehension that threatened to turn into panic reminded me I’d never seen hills before except in pictures and video streams. I didn’t know why it scared me, but it did, even though I barely caught a glimpse of them.
I pushed down the constricting feeling in my gut and concentrated on the trees. There was a stand of them nearby, short and twisted and gnarled, unnatural looking. I didn’t know if they were genetically-engineered transplants or native to this world. It was hard to tell sometimes. Either way, they’d be damned easy to run right into with the light gone and I angled away from them, heading for a shadowed section of ground between the valley and the hills. It was a draw or a ditch or maybe a creek bed, but it was cover and I needed cover.
Cover and concealment. The guy from the shuttle, Munroe, had talked about it and what he said had made sense. Cover blocked bullets, concealment kept people from seeing you, and not knowing the difference could get you killed. The trees would be concealment, and not even good concealment if the guys they sent after us had thermal sights, while the ditch would be cover and concealment.
Something nagged at me, maybe my conscience, telling me I should get some of the others and take them there with me. But the more people hiding in the same place the bigger the chance they’d get found out. I didn’t need the rich boy to tell me that, I’d found out the hard way when four or five of us had tried to jam into a maintenance tunnel to get away from the TAPs when I was ten years old. They’d read our heartbeats on their sonic sensors and I’d wound up with yet another psych rehab assignment. It had worked about as well as the first three.
The last flicker of light from the ascending transport died away and I slowed down immediately, going from a dead sprint to a shuffling, flat-footed jog. It was as if someone had dropped a black curtain over everything, like I was back in the tunnels. I wasn’t scared by the darkness, it was as comfortable as an old, familiar blanket.
Gradually, with painful, glacial slowness, my eyes adjusted. I couldn’t make out much, just a darker shade of blackness against the dark grey of the clouded sky, but it was enough to see the outline of the hills, enough to keep me going the right direction. I had less than ten minutes and I had no way of estimating how far away the ditch was. It could have been kilometers, but distance was my friend whether I reached it or not. When the bad guys came, they’d catch the low-hanging fruit first, the ones who’d ducked into the trees or hid behind bushes.
Man, what I wouldn’t have given for thermal sights like those guys had…
Hold up. I did have a thermal sight. My helmet’s targeting system might not be hooked up, but the sights on the rifle had to be. They wouldn’t have sent us out without working sights on our rifles. At least I hoped not. I slowed to a walk and brought the rifle up to my shoulder, putting my cheek against the stock. Nothing. Blackness.
Shit.
I touched the trigger… and the view in front of my right eye lit up. There were numbers and symbols all around the central image and I didn’t know what any of them meant, but the picture itself was all I needed. The hills were lit up like daylight, every tree and rock visible, and the ditch was straight ahead. I still had no idea how far, but at least I was going the right direction.
I lowered the gun and cursed my own stupidity. Now my night vision was shot. I started walking anyway, figuring the ground was even enough to walk blind, and I immediately tripped over something, a root or a clump of plants or a rock, I couldn’t tell, and fell flat on my stomach.
At least no one had seen me. I nearly waited there until I regained my night vision, but every second passing was one closer to the Op-For plane coming in. I crawled. If I’d had full body armor like the guy who had briefed us, it would have been painless and quick. With just my utility fatigues, every bramble, thicket, and rock dug into my knees and elbows, but still I crawled.
I don’t know why I felt so desperate. It was a test, but I’d failed tests before. If I just let them find me, they’d take me back to base and I’d probably sleep in a bed tonight, but I couldn’t make myself do it. After a few minutes, I didn’t even consider it. I’d made the decision and going back on it seemed harder than whatever lay ahead.
The darkness began to take shape again and I used the butt of my training rifle to push myself up to my feet. It felt like it had been more than ten minutes, but the Op-For plane was nowhere in sight.
But then, it wouldn’t be in sight. They would be coming in like they were at war, not with their running lights on the way we had. I tried to listen for engines, but I was breathing too hard to hear anything, and when I tried to hold my breath, my pulse pounding in my ears still drowned out everything but the sound of my own footsteps.
No, wait. There it was. A sound like a wind rushing in, but there was no wind, not a single breeze to carry away the sweat coating my body. It had to be jet turbines. They were coming in the same way we had.
I ran. Knowing I might trip at any second, knowing I might fall right into the ditch before I saw it, but I ran anyway. The distant roar of wind had become thunder rolling across the plain. And something else was coming with it, something even more frightening. Dawn. It was just a line of lighter grey on the horizon right now, just a slight brightening of the darkness, but it was coming. The safety of the darkness might have been illusory, but it was all I had.
The incremental increase in the light helped me spot the ditch before I fell into it. Only it wasn’t just a ditch, it was a dry river bed. Those I had seen before, as a kid, though this one seemed wetter than the ones back in the Sonoran Desert on Earth. Probably seasonal, but I hadn’t seen any rain since I’d arrived and I hoped we were in the dry season. I clambered down into the river bed and flopped into a grooved slide, a notch between two higher outcroppings, and brought the rifle to my shoulder again.
It took a few seconds of scanning back and forth before I found the aircraft. I was looking too high and too far away. It had landed already and it was damn close, maybe three hundred meters from where I was concealed. The side hatches were open and Marines in infantry body armor and visored helmets were pouring out, rifles at their shoulders, falling into a prone position a couple dozen meters away from the plane, in a semi-circle around it.
It was a long shot, particularly when I’d never fired anything but a zip gun in my whole life, but I figured the laser training system wouldn’t be affected by wind or distance. If I could see it, I could hit it. I pushed the trigger just a little harder and a circular aiming reticle popped up in the center of the image. I didn’t need to be too well trained to know what that meant; I’d played video games, after all, even the banned, violent kind. Especially the banned, violent kind.
I put the circle
over one of the Marines who was still standing, just coming down the ramp, and I pulled the trigger. Nothing happened outside the gun-sight. I was fairly sure of that as I had kept both eyes open. But inside the targeting optics, a red line connected the rifle to the Marine’s torso for a fraction of a second and he stopped in his tracks. I’d hit him, I knew it.
I laughed and slewed the gun to the right, trying to find another target. There was one other still upright. He might have been a sergeant or an officer, but he was running towards the semi-circle where everyone else was already lying down flat and I had to put the reticle just ahead of him, trying to get him to run into the shot. I squeezed the trigger and the red line appeared in the optics once more, but this time I had missed off to the right, leading him too far. I shifted my aim and tried again. He stumbled, not falling over because this wasn’t a real weapon, but stopping and obeying the orders of his system, taking a knee. I could almost hear him cursing.
That was when I found out the gun’s optic also detected incoming targeting lasers and simulated them with bright white flashes like horizontal lightning. The only reason I didn’t get my ass virtually killed right then was the little outcropping of rock at the left side of my helmet. It absorbed the laser enough that the helmet’s HUD, suddenly very willing to operate when they told it to, informed me I’d only received minor flash-burns and could still walk, see and fight normally.
Well thanks very much, but I’ve learned my lesson just the same.
The dry riverbed was cover and concealment and, more importantly to me right now, it was also a highway. I slid down the bank and my boots sank a few centimeters into the sloppy, muddy soil in the bed. It was narrow, maybe a meter across at its widest, and strewn with rocks and pebbles and gravel where it wasn’t slick with mud, and I moved down it with a side-to-side, flat-footed motion, the same way I did back in the maintenance tunnels when they were wet from a drainage pipe leak.