Clad in Steel

by Kevin McLaughlin

  “Hi!” Owen said as soon as he reached the open office door. He didn’t bother knocking this time, just walked in and plopped down on his usual chair.

  “Hi back,” James said. “Good mood today?”

  “Yup. They had us driving the real thing,” Owen replied.

  “Quite the rush, hmm?” James said, smiling.

  Owen cocked his head to one side. “Were you an Armor pilot, sir?”

  “Me? No. But I’ve flown other things. I wasn’t always a — how did you put it? — ‘head-shrinker,’ you know,” James said.

  Owen frowned, feeling a bit embarrassed by his earlier words. James had never done anything to hurt him. Quite the opposite, in fact. He could have shown a little more respect. “I’m sorry for that.”

  James seemed surprised but hid it quickly. “So, how was the exercise?”

  “Complicated,” Owen said. He filled James in on the events with the drill cadets and watched as the man’s face clouded over. He hurried to finish. “But DI Graham said he was dealing with it. The cadets involved won’t be hurting anyone else.”

  “He did? Good. If Graham said he’s fixing things, then I’ll consider them fixed,” James said. He ran his fingers through his hair. “But I’ll tell you, I wasn’t expecting to have you deal with such a big challenge so soon after our talk. You did well, keeping your cool like that.”

  “Thanks. I could feel when I was getting angry, this time. I reined it in,” Owen said. “But is there something I can do to stop it? I mean, anger is sometimes OK, right? But I felt like I wanted to rage out and go in swinging. Which would have ended badly.”

  James sat there thoughtfully and drummed his fingers on the table. For a moment Owen thought he’d asked a bad question. When the man opened his mouth to speak, it wasn’t what Owen thought he was going to hear.

  “There is. But you may not like it. I’m not sure you’re ready for it yet,” James said.

  “Try me. I can handle it,” Owen said. He was still pumped up from the drills earlier and felt like he could accomplish anything he wanted.

  “OK. I want you to think back to Miami. To the attack,” James said.

  Owen’s mind recoiled from the idea. He didn’t want to think about that day. In fact, he felt himself growing angry at the request. How dare he bring that up! Then he remembered that James had just said it would be hard, and he’d told the man he was ready. Either he was, or he wasn’t.

  “OK,” Owen said. That one word was harder than anything he’d done in training.

  The memories felt jumbled together at first. Fear, panic even, as they were fleeing the attack. Then he remembered how he’d felt as his father died, and then his mother. No, it wasn’t a memory. He was right there again, on the street. He felt every moment of that ragged event as if it were happening for the first time. The raw emotions tore through him. Owen wanted to scream, to cry out, to lash out at something or someone. The way he’d done that day by picking up his father’s weapon...

  “Owen! Come back,” James said.

  Owen opened his eyes. James’ face was right in front of his, the man’s hands on his shoulders, shaking him gently. Owen gasped, sucking in a long breath. He wasn’t on the street. This was the office, at the Space Force base. He wasn’t in danger. But it had all felt so real!

  “Slow your breathing. Deep breath in,” James said. “Now let it out slowly. Another breath in, then slowly ease it out.”

  It took a few more breaths before Owen’s pulse returned to anything close to normal. When it did, James backed away from him and sat down again.

  “What the hell was that?” Owen asked. “It was like I was back there again! What did you do?”

  James shook his head. “I didn’t do anything. That memory is still right there on the surface for you. It’s stuck, like it can’t jar loose so that the rest of your brain can process it properly. This is trauma, Owen. Bad trauma. Not shocking, given the nature of the experience.”

  Trauma? Owen wasn’t sure he could accept that. “You’re saying I’m broken?”

  “No! Not at all. But you were hurt,” James said. “Think about trauma as a wound, OK? Usually, the wound just heals with time. We get past the traumatic event and move on. But sometimes we get stuck, and the healing never happens. Like a wound that gets infected, it never really heals. It just goes on hurting.”

  That sounded remarkably right to Owen, given what he’d just experienced. “But is there a way to get rid of the infection? To unstick things?”

  James took a deep breath of his own and let it out slowly. “There are, yes. We have a few tools we might use to help. But given the nature of the reaction you just had, I’m not sure that sort of deep work would be helpful to you yet. This sort of thing takes time, Owen.”

  More time. He’d already had enough go by. This wasn’t like a cancer in his brain that they could surgically remove. In some ways it felt worse, like there was a monster lurking inside him, ready to burst free any time. “Can we try?”

  “All right, we can try something,” James said. “That memory you just felt, how bad was it on a scale from zero to ten?”

  “Ten,” Owen replied, not even having to think about it. “Easily ten.”

  James nodded. “I figured as much. All right, I want you to follow my finger with your eyes. Just your eyes, not your head.”

  He started moving his finger back and forth in front of Owen’s face. At first, it was hard to remember not to move his head around to track the finger, but then Owen got the hang of it.

  Once he was tracking well, James nodded. “Good. Now, this is where it gets hard. I want you to go back into that memory of your parents’ death. This time, keep your eyes open as you think of it, and track my finger.”

  Owen started tracking the moving finger again as it drifted back and forth like a pendulum. He sank back into the memory as he did. This time, part of his brain felt focused on the finger, so it was like splitting his concentration in half. The intensity was still strong, but bearable. They kept that up for a short while, then the finger stopped moving.

  “All right, what were you thinking and feeling?” James asked.

  “Grief. Pain for my lost parents,” Owen replied.

  “Good. Go with that,” James said. Then the finger began moving again, and Owen refocused on the dual job of tracking the finger and remembering his pain.

  They stopped and started another half dozen times. Maybe more than that; it was hard for Owen to keep track, after a while. Each time James stopped moving his finger he asked Owen what his most recent thoughts had been., and each time he used that as the next prompt to explore the memories from another angle. It was excruciating and exhausting work.

  The finger stopped again. “What were you just feeling?” James asked.

  “Rage,” Owen said, astonished at how angry he felt at the question. “Rage, fury, I wanted to hurt someone like I’d been hurt.”

  “Good, go with that thought,” James said. The finger started moving again.

  Then at last, he stopped. James put his hand down and looked at the clock. Owen followed his gaze and was astonished to see that they’d gone over their time limit by half an hour. How had so much time passed without him noticing?

  “Good work today, Owen,” James said. “Now, without tracking my finger, think back to Miami. How intense does the emotion feel now? How disruptive is it for you to think about it?”

  Owen steeled himself, ready for the same experience he’d had the first time. But the emotion was nowhere near as strong. It still wasn’t pleasant to think about it. He still felt some of the anger and pain. But it wasn’t as bad this time.

  “Um. Maybe a six?” Owen said. He held both palms up, questioning. “How? What did you just do?”

  “It’s called eye-movement desensitization and reprocessing, or EMDR,” James said. “It’s often a good treatment for post-trauma healing. But in your case, I wasn’t sure you were ready. It seems you were right, and you are.”
/>   “Is that it, then? Is the stuck memory gone?” Owen asked. It didn’t feel gone, just less, somehow.

  James shook his head. “No, not yet. The goal is to get the distress down to zero. Or as close as we can to zero. That will take time. But you’ve done a good job with this today. It’s an excellent start. See you next time?”

  Owen rose. “Definitely. And — thanks, James. I’m sorry I was such an asshole to you at first.”

  “You had plenty of reasons to treat me like you did,” James replied. “It wasn’t going to do any good for me to push you before you were ready. Now you are, and I’m glad to see it.”

  Owen thanked him again and left the office, feeling somehow lighter than he had been when he entered, like he’d cast off at least a portion of a burden he’d been hauling around with him.

  Eighteen

  Hereford’s jet couldn’t land fast enough for his taste. Time mattered, and that damned Pahwel was a stick in the mud. He needed functional Armor units now, not a week or two away. There wasn’t time to waste on screwing around. Ready or not, training was over. It was time for the real world.

  Pahwel met him on the pavement. “Sir. Good to see you.”

  “I got your reply,” Hereford said. “It’s unacceptable.”

  Pahwel frowned. “Sir, I’m sorry. They just aren’t ready yet. All of them need at least another week of training to get up to speed. You’re sending them into a combat situation without proper preparation. It’s asking for trouble.”

  “You know damned well I wouldn’t be doing it if there were any other way,” Hereford snapped.

  Which was true. He didn’t want to waste the lives of men and women under his command. But circumstances had forced his hand. The mayday had arrived by quantum communication on the Constitution just an hour before. She’d left orbit on his orders almost immediately, but even at top speed it would take time for the ship to respond. What he needed was a quick reaction force on the scene right away.

  He had a ship handy. One of the captured Bug cruisers was fully repaired and ready to go, complete with the wormhole drive the Constitution lacked. The Lynx — how the humans had renamed the ship — was more of a large shuttle than an actual starship. But it was fast and could carry a squad of Armor just about anywhere almost instantly.

  The damned thing was that the Naga had almost made it to Earth. They’d been attacked by Bugs while in hyperspace on their way for a diplomatic meeting. The Bugs broke into their ship, boarding and slaughtering Naga, from the sounds of the communication.

  The Naga were tough. Even with the attack, they had almost made it to Earth. But the Bugs finally captured their engine room and dropped the ship out of hyperspace while it was still in the outer reaches of Sol’s Kuiper Belt.

  Too far for the Constitution to reach quickly, but near enough that if the Bugs took over the Naga ship completely, they’d be able to figure out where they were quick enough. The one secret which had been humanity’s saving grace against the Bugs was that they’d managed to maintain secrecy around Earth’s location. If they didn’t know where the planet was, they couldn’t bomb it or blow it up.

  But if they beat the last of the Naga defending their ship, the Bugs would have that information. Earth would be a logical next target for their fleet, and humanity didn’t have enough defenses to stand even a chance of beating them off.

  No, the only way was to make sure the Bugs never took that ship, even if it meant blowing it to bits before they could.

  “I do know, sir,” Pahwel said. “I also know how obstinate you are, which is why if you send them up, I’m going with them.”

  “You? Why you?” Hereford asked. He frowned. Pahwel had the command and combat experience, but he was also a good teacher. If they lost him out there, it would be a blow to future training programs.

  “Graham can handle things down here. I’ll take Casiano with me to fly the ship, and a squad of the recruits. Assuming we have a squad actually graduate intact, I’ll send that unit. Better to maintain squad unity if we can,” Pahwel said. “They’ve been training in teams. They’ll fight better that way.”

  Hereford still didn’t like the idea of losing Pahwel, but he was right. Sending raw recruits into battle meant they needed expert leadership on the ground. Otherwise, they’d be chewed up for nothing. But that meant Pahwel needed to understand the desperate nature of this mission.

  “This might be a one-way trip, Captain,” Hereford said. “Those Bugs have to be stopped, whether that means taking back the ship or blowing it up.”

  “I figured as much, sir. Won’t be the first time I’ve been on a do-or-die agenda,” Pahwel replied.

  “All right. Wait — what’s that about graduating?” Hereford asked.

  “As soon as I got your message, I figured things would come to this,” Pahwel said. “I’ve got them in their final exams right now. Graham and Casiano are supervising. Sir, I have to say, I wish we had Colonel Foster and her people here instead.”

  “As do I,” Hereford replied. But Charline had taken the entire complement of trained Armor pilots with her on her mission. They weren’t expected back for days, maybe a week or more. He could call them back, but again it became a matter of timing. They simply weren’t going to arrive in time to make any difference in the final outcome.

  “All right, let’s go see this graduation,” Hereford said. “The Lynx is on her way here to pick you all up. Soon as she lands, you go.”

  “Understood, sir. They’re already in their Armor units. It’ll just be a matter of walking into the Lynx and taking off,” Pahwel replied. “This exercise isn’t in the sims. It’s live Armor units, with simulated munitions and enemies.”

  “Let’s take a look, then,” Hereford said.

  Pahwel held up a large tablet. He tapped the screen to wake it, and it immediately displayed a birds-eye view of the battlefield. Four squads of Armor marched across an open field in a diamond formation. That looks good, at least so far. He saw names over the head of each Armor. McInness was on the far left flank. Would he be in the squad Hereford was sending on this potentially suicidal mission? Did he want him to be?

  “It’s a movement to contact. Pretty basic, although I made a few changes,” Pahwel said. “And now they have contact.”

  The battlefield lit up with new contacts, flagged in red. Bug attackers, a wave of them coming in from their platoon’s direction of travel. Hereford watched the recruits’ reactions as they saw the Bugs approach. Some of them were quicker to respond than others. The right flank was a little sluggish in particular. The computer-controlled Bugs noticed this as well and surged forward toward the weak side.

  “That could cause them some problems,” Hereford said.

  “Give them time. I’m pretty pleased with this batch of recruits, overall,” Pahwel said.

  “All of them?” Hereford asked.

  “Most of them,” Pahwel amended.

  Hereford shook his head, a thin smile on his mouth. Maybe he and Pahwel were never going to see eye to eye when it came to McInness. He admitted that there was probably more than a little personal bias when it came to the attention he paid the boy, but that didn’t mean he was wrong about his potential. Even as he watched, Owen McInness and another member of his team were moving to support the right flank until the rear guard could move up into position. It was a well-timed maneuver expertly performed, and Hereford found himself nodding.

  Maybe these raw recruits would have a chance out there after all. He hoped so. The idea of sending out half-trained cannon fodder didn’t sit well with him. If there’d been any other way..! But there wasn’t.

  More dots appeared on the screen from the left flank. That they were icons instead of real images meant they were computer-controlled virtual characters. But unlike the Bug icons, they were painted green. Hereford wasn’t sure who they were. He tapped the tablet screen. “Who’s that?”

  “Reinforcements for the good guys,” Pahwel said.

  He sounded to Herefo
rd like the cat who ate the canary, which couldn’t be right. “Friendly forces?”

  “Yes, sir,” Pahwel said. “I have a troop of Naga moving to reinforce our people and help them hold the position.”

  Hereford saw the trap then. Those virtual Naga troops would look like actual Naga on the recruits’ screens. As far as McInness would be able to see, they would be real Naga. They were moving to reinforce the same flank he was on, so he’d be close to them. If there were ever a time when he’d snap, this would be it.

  “It’d be a shame if we had friendly fire casualties, general. But better to know now, don’t you think?” Pahwel asked.

  Hereford nodded slowly. He didn’t like the method being used. But Pahwel wasn’t wrong. If McInness was going to have a reaction to Naga, better to see it now than out there in space.

  Nineteen

  Owen was sweating in his cockpit, trying to maneuver the big hulking steel chassis around him as quickly as possible. Just the day before, it felt so damned powerful to be cruising around in the thing! Now they were in a VR exercise, trying not to get ‘killed.’ It didn’t matter that the enemies were virtual and no one was going to actually die, not if the rumor mill was accurate.

  Scuttlebutt said that something big was going down. Hereford was back on base, and the instructors were all pissed off about whatever it was. The stories ranged from the plausible —some sort of surprise inspection — to the outlandish, like the rumor saying this exercise was the last test before they were tossed out into combat.

  That couldn’t be true, could it? Owen felt a combination of fear and excitement at the idea. Yeah, nobody wanted to get blown up. But getting out to space was his childhood goal. With the feelings around his parents’ death now a bit more manageable, he began wondering if he might be able to return to that sense of wonder, instead of a desire for vengeance.

  “Hey, Mac! Head out of the clouds,” Kowal said.