by Marko Kloos
We pull our triggers at the same time. Her bullet cracks into my visor, right at the seam between the clear face shield and the reinforced ballistic shell of the outer helmet. It’s another near miss, but an improvement over the last one. I feel a sharp jab of pain right underneath my left eye that radiates out to my ear, as if someone had sliced the side of my head with a sharp knife.
My rifle sends not just one, but half a dozen rounds in return. They hit the woman on the roof dead center in the chest, the perfect aim of a computer. She doesn’t cry out or flinch. Instead, she just falls forward, and there’s nothing between her and the street below to break her fall.
From the way she falls, limbs flailing without any semblance of control or coordination, I know that she is already dead when she hits the ground. Still, I feel the urge to run the twenty yards to where she is now splayed out motionless on the dirty asphalt.
I seize her by the collar of her jacket and turn her around to get a look at her face. Her eyes are open, but unfocused in death. There’s no pain in her face, no surprise or distress. She looks about thirty, maybe a few years younger. Her ball cap fell off her head when she fell off the roof, and her hair is held together in a loose ponytail. I can’t tell the exact color of it with my augmented night vision, but it’s dark hair, brown or auburn.
“Grayson, if you’re still standing, get your ass over here,” I hear over the squad channel, the first time someone has used the voice network since the machine gun opened fire. The identifier tag on my helmet screen marks the speaker as Corporal Jackson, but she sounds odd, like she’s speaking slowly through clenched teeth.
“Copy,” I respond, and check her location on the map. The bullet that pierced the side of my visor missed the monocle of the data computer, and I still have a data feed in my field of vision. The left side of my face feels like it has been worked over with broken glass. I can feel warm blood trickling down my cheek.
The squad is huddled together in the alley ahead and to my left. I reload Hansen’s rifle with a fresh magazine.
“Hansen, do you copy?” I ask into the squad channel.
“Yeah, I’m here,” Hansen replies. “I’m at the end of the entrance hallway, right before the bend. Mind your trigger finger when you come in.”
“How’s the boo-boo?”
“Right arm’s on vacation,” she says. Her voice sounds tired. “I’ll be fine. Just give me a second to catch my breath.”
“Anyone home in there?”
“If they are, they’re smart enough to stay inside. I’m not in a super social mood right now.”
The left side of my face hurts as I smile. Our armor is lined with thermal bandage modules that automatically attempt to seal wounds and stop blood loss, but the helmets lack that lining, and the blood streams down my cheek unhindered. I make my way down to the alley where the rest of my squad is holed up. My rifle is pointed at the edge of the roof across the street as I move, ready to put a flechette into any heads popping up behind rifle sights, but if there’s anyone left up on that roof, they have the good sense to keep their heads down.
“Grayson, you got any trauma packs left?” someone asks as I turn the corner to the alley. My squad is hunkered down behind yet another trash container, and several of them are laid out on the ground.
“Yeah, I have two,” I respond.
“Bring ‘em over here.”
Two of my squad mates are tending to Sergeant Fallon, who is sitting with her back to the wall. There’s a pool of blood under her right leg, and as I get closer, I see that the lower half of her leg is badly mangled. I crouch down next to the troopers who are working on the sergeant, pull the trauma packs out of my right leg pocket, and hand them over.
“She dragged Stratton out of the road, and caught a round in the leg,” Jackson says next to me. I glance over to the two inert bodies next to the dumpster, and look at Jackson in question.
“Stratton’s gone, man. So’s Paterson. Right through the fucking armor, both of them.”
“Fuck,” I say, and Jackson nods in agreement.
“That ain’t no welfare riot,” she says. “Heavy belt-fed guns? Where the fuck did they get those? That’s military hardware.”
“I shot a guy who had an M-66,” I say. “And I guarantee you that fucker on the heavy machine gun had magnified night vision. He was right on fucking target with the first round.”
“Whoever it is, they fucked us up,” Sergeant Fallon says. Her voice is slurred, undoubtedly because of a healthy dose of injected pain killers. I try not to look at the mess that is her lower right leg, but I can’t help glancing at it. It looks like someone stuck a small explosive charge into her calf muscle. I can see shattered armor, pulped flesh, and shards of bone.
“What the fuck do we do now, Sarge?” Baker asks.
There’s movement on a rooftop overhead, and a moment later, a bottle with a flaming rag stuffed into its neck comes sailing down from above. It hits the edge of the trash container, and bounces off into the street, unbroken. As it rolls away from the trash container and into the gutter, it leaves a trail of burning fluid. Jackson rushes over, seizes the bottle with a gloved hand, and hurls it down the street, where it finally shatters and ignites. Baker and I get up and rush to the opposite side of the alley to get a bead on our attackers. We don’t see anyone, but a moment later, two more bottles come sailing over the edge of the roof. One of them falls a little wide and cracks open in the middle of the alley, but the other is dead on. It clears the edge of the roof just barely, and then falls straight down into the group huddled behind the garbage container.
“Get out of there!” Jackson yells. The troopers behind the container don’t need the invitation—the bottle cracks open and spews burning liquid, and everyone scrambles to get out of the way. Someone drags the motionless forms of Stratton and Paterson away from the container. Behind me, Baker fires his rifle at the edge of the roof above.
“”We need to get the fuck out of this alley,” Sergeant Fallon says into the squad channel. Her voice sounds calm and relaxed, which probably has more to do with the chemicals in her bloodstream than her state of mind.
“The building is clear,” I say. “Hansen’s inside already. Let’s hole up and get out of the rain here.”
We make our way out of the alley and back to the entrance door where I left Hansen a few minutes ago. Every trooper who’s still able to walk is carrying or dragging another who isn’t. Jackson and I are dragging Stratton, who has two neatly stenciled half-inch holes in the chest plate of his battle armor—one in the abdomen, and one right in the center of his sternum.
“Hansen, we’re coming in,” I say. “Mind your muzzle.”
“Copy,” she replies. “Don’t slip on the blood.”
The building is a low-rise apartment tenement, ten units per floor. There are never any vacancies in a PRC. Even for these shitty shoeboxes made out of paper-thin concrete, there’s a long waiting list. The residents are undoubtedly pressing their ears against their doors as our TA squad barges into the ground floor hallway, and I know that at least a few of them will be on their Net boxes in a moment to ring the neighborhood alarm.
Here they are, come and get them.
We lay down the dead in a corner, and the wounded in the center hallway, away from the entrance door. Sergeant Fallon is severely mauled and doped up. Stratton and Paterson are dead, and every other member of the squad has at least a minor injury. I finally take a moment to pull off my helmet, and wince when the liner on the left side pulls itself loose from the wound to which it was glued with congealing blood.
“Got yourself a beauty mark there, Grayson,” Baker says. “That’ll leave a scar, I think.”
“Yeah, well, I’ll worry about that later,” I say.
“They’ll have to blow off his head before he’s as ugly as you,” Hansen says weakly from a few yards away.
“With the way things are going right now, they just might.”
“Bravo C2, this is Bravo
One-One,” Sergeant Fallon says into her helmet mike. C2 is command and control—the people at Company who are calling the shots and relaying orders from the boss down to the platoon and squad leaders.
“First Squad is holed up half a klick from the admin building. We have extracted the pilot and crew chief from Valkyrie Six-One, but we have two KIA, and most of the rest are wounded. Got anything you can send our way here?”
Sergeant Fallon listens for the response from C2, and everybody sort of listens in without being too obvious about it.
“That’s a negative, C2. No way can we walk that distance, with half the city on our ass out here. Two of my guys are dead, and three of us can’t walk. We barely have enough people to carry all the casualties.”
There’s another delay, and then Sergeant Fallon lets out a chuckle that sounds genuinely amused.
“Look, guy, I’d love to comply with that order, I really would. My squad is combat ineffective. You make us all walk back through Indian country right now, you’ll be picking up our pieces in the morning. Send the replacement drop ship our way once they get here, and we’ll evac from here. They can land in front of the building, and cover our egress.”
The response from C2 makes Sergeant Fallon roll her eyes.
“The machine guns are gone. Six-Four got the first one on their strafing run, and one of my guys blew the hell out of the other one with a MARS. That drop ship can take a whole lot more small arms fire than we can, chief.”
She waits for the reply, and by now we’ve all given up trying to be subtle about listening in.
“Copy that, Lieutenant. If I lose another trooper on the way, you can be sure that I’ll pay you a visit as soon as they stitch me back together. Bravo One-One out.”
She taps the comm channel button on the inside of her wrist with emphasis.
“We are to exfil to the civic plaza for medevac, on foot. They don’t want to risk another bird. ETA on the drop ship is ten minutes.”
I look around at the remnants of our squad. We have two dead bodies, Sergeant Fallon and the drop ship pilot can’t walk, and the crew chief is still unconscious. Hansen won’t be carrying anyone, either. The five of us who are still on our feet will each need to carry someone. We’re in no shape for a fight anymore.
“Well, let’s get to it, then,” Corporal Jackson says. She shoulders her rifle and bends down to pick up the unconscious crew chief.
“Grayson, you take the sergeant. Let’s get going. If we miss this ride, we’re well and truly fucked.”
I don’t want to go back out into the street, but I don’t want to stay here, either. Once the PRC comes alive after sunrise, and people start collecting the bodies of their friends, any soldier in the area will be fair game for a public barbecue.
“Ten minutes,” Sergeant Fallon says as I help her up and drape her arm over my shoulder. “Don’t be stopping to smell the flowers.”
“Don’t worry about that,” I say.
Encumbered by Sergeant Fallon’s armored bulk, I am out of breath at the end of the first block. We’re running down the street that leads straight back to the civic plaza, stopping on every intersection to catch our collective breath and check the cross streets for enemy presence.
The shooting starts again when we’re a block and a half away from the building where we had holed up. Up ahead, at the nearest intersection, someone leans around a corner and starts popping off shots at our ragged little column. I’m in the lead with Sergeant Fallon, and her bulk on my right side prevents me from using my rifle to shoot back on the run. I sway to the side and lower the sergeant to the ground in the cover of a doorway, but by the time I have my rifle in my hands, the shooter at the corner has disappeared. Then I hear gunshots behind us, from the intersection we had just cleared a few moments ago.
“Watch the corners,” Corporal Jackson shouts.
I sight my rifle and fire back. My flechettes are kicking up concrete dust, but the shooter disappeared around the corner as soon as I brought my rifle to bear. If we’re going to be harassed like this all the way back to the civic plaza, we’ll get there in a few hours at best. They know where we are and where we’re going, and they’re smart enough to avoid a stand-up fight.
“Shoot on the run,” Corporal Jackson says. “Switch to full-auto and hose down the corners when they pop their heads out. Monitor your ammo, and reload when we pause to take a breath.”
Our progress along the street is painfully slow. Sergeant Fallon is doped up, but conscious, and she’s assisting me by using her rifle with her unencumbered right hand. Others in my squad are carrying dead weight. We go from block to block, rushing across intersections as fast as we can, and pausing after every dash to reload our weapons and rest for a few seconds. I parcel out the spare magazines I have left from Lieutenant Weaving’s stash to the rest of the squad. Firing bursts makes the enemy keep their heads down, but our ammo stock is dwindling fast.
As we get closer to the civic plaza, the shooting gets more intense. Where before there were individuals taking potshots at us, now there are groups of three and four working together, like infantry fire teams. It seems that everybody with a working firearm is out on the street tonight, and they all know which way we’re going.
I’m in the front for a change, stumbling along with Sergeant Fallon by my side. We’ve turned into a symbiotic organism, a slow-moving creature with three working legs and two rifles. As we come up on the intersections, she covers the right side of our frontal arc, and I cover the left. Without the aiming marker projected onto my helmet display, I wouldn’t be hitting anything. As it is, I’m not wildly accurate firing my rifle from the crook of my arm as we’re ambling along, but it’s enough to make the other guys duck back behind corners. I’m firing three-round bursts, and my rifle is down to a hundred rounds, with two magazines remaining in the pouches on my harness.
“Quarter klick to go,” Sergeant Fallon says over the squad channel as we hunker down for a rest after dashing across yet another intersection. Whenever we walk up to the intersection, people shoot at us from alley mouths and building corners, and every time we cross a major street, the fire from our left and right gets twice as dense as we offer the crowd a clear line of fire from four sides. Standard infantry practice is to pop smoke grenades before dashing across, but we’ve popped our last smoke a few hundred yards back. Now we’re just relying on the laminate of our battle armor, and the knowledge that most black market small arms can’t pierce our suits easily.
In running shoes, I can cover two hundred and fifty meters in well under a minute. Right now, it might as well be two hundred and fifty miles. We’re taking fire from every alley and side street along the way. I fire a burst at a building corner up ahead where someone with a rifle just popped off two shots at our column. The shooter pulls back the moment he sees my muzzle swing towards him, and my salvo hits nothing but dirty concrete. Still, I mash the trigger again, and again, sending two more bursts into the space where his head was just a moment ago.
“Grayson, you got any grenades left?” Sergeant Fallon asks. Her voice sounds weak.
“Just two rubber rounds,” I say.
“Well, fuck. I’m just about out, too.”
As she says this, she aims her rifle at an alley mouth to our right, and pulls the trigger. I didn’t even see anyone there, but as her burst tears into the darkness, I hear a cry of pain, and a shouted exclamation. Then the bolt of Sergeant Fallon’s rifle locks back on an empty magazine.
“Sling it, and take this,” I say, and pull the pistol out of my harness. She lets go of the rifle, which remains suspended muzzle-down by her side, and seizes the pistol.
“Where’d you get that cap gun?” she asks.
“Drop ship armory,” I reply. “I’ll reload your rifle when we’re across the intersection.”
“Good man.” She hefts the pistol. “Shitload easier to use with one hand.”
The next intersection is a major one, two main roads crossing. I stop at the forward
edge of the corner building, and aim the rifle around the corner with my left hand. The M-66 has a built-in uplink to the TacLink computer, and we can use our rifles as remote cameras, to snoop around corners without exposing ourselves to fire. As soon as my muzzle clears the edge of the building, I see a bunch of red carets on my tactical map, all advancing on the intersection from the left. There are at least a hundred people coming down the street, and the closest one is less than fifty yards away.
“Hold,” I yell into my mike.
“I see it,” Jackson says behind me. “If only half of ‘em got guns, we’ll never make it across.”
“I’ll stay at the corner with the Sarge and cover. You get across, and then cover us.”
“You got ammo left?”
“Two mags,” I say. “Hurry the fuck up, will you?”
I lower Sergeant Fallon to the ground, and replace the partially empty magazine in my rifle with a full one. Sergeant Fallon holds out her hand, and I pass her the other full magazine. I drop to one knee, lean around the corner, and commence firing.
The closest gaggle of people is twenty yards away when I drop them with single shots, one round each. The crowd behind them scatters. Some dash for cover in the nearest alley, some turn around and run the way they came. A few shoot back, and they go down next. I have low-light vision, computer-controlled weaponry, and ballistic armor. They have outdated weapons, and battery-powered flashlights. For once, they’re caught in the open, and I have no remorse about exacting payback.
Behind me, the rest of the squad rushes across the intersection. Jackson has the crew chief, Philips has the dead Paterson over his shoulder, Priest is carrying the drop ship pilot, and Baker and Hansen are both carrying Stratton’s body. We’re a rifle squad in a combat battalion, with state-of-the-art equipment, and we got reduced to a limping pack of walking wounded—and two dead—in just a few moments of battle, fighting against our own people, in the middle of one of our own cities.