by Marko Kloos
At this range, it’s hard to miss. I center the reticle of my gunsight on the silhouettes ahead of me, and pull the trigger of the rifle methodically. A scrawny guy with a scoped rifle dashes toward the mouth of the alley, and I aim just ahead of him and nail him with a single shot that sends him sprawling across the concrete. A girl passes him and bends down to pick up the rifle he dropped, and as soon as her fingers touch the rifle stock, I shoot her, two rounds right into the middle of her hunched-over silhouette. Sergeant Fallon is firing her rifle from the prone position, adding the contents of her magazine to the carnage.
Just as the squad is across the intersection, I hear gunfire from my left. I turn to locate the source of it when something hits the side of my armor. It’s a rather unspectacular impact, barely enough to make me sway, but there’s a sudden intense pain in my side, and I know that the round has pierced my battle armor. There’s another blow, this one lower than the first. It feels like someone sticking a red-hot needle into my side and driving it home with a hammer. Then I find myself on the ground next to Sergeant Fallon. My lungs feel like all the air has been sucked out of them in an instant. I want to shout a warning, but I can’t work up the breath for anything beyond a groan.
There’s a small group of rioters at the corner of the intersection we just passed a little while ago. One of them is kneeling and aiming a familiar-looking rifle at me. I recognize the twin muzzle arrangement of an M-66, topped with a standard military combination sight. My own rifle is on the ground in front of me. I reach for it, but the whole thing seems to have tripled in weight all of a sudden. The shooter with the M-66 takes aim again, and I know that I won’t be able to lift my own gun before he curls his trigger finger and exerts the nine pounds of pressure necessary to launch another flechette round.
Then I hear a burst of fire from behind me. The shooter falls on his butt with an almost comical look of consternation on his face. For a brief moment, he sits on the street, his legs stretched out in front of him, his rifle still in his hands but aimed at nothing in particular anymore. Then there’s a second burst of fire, and the shooter takes all three rounds in his face. He falls back, still holding on to his rifle. His two comrades dash out of the line of fire and disappear behind the corner of the building.
I look over to the right, and see Corporal Jackson on one knee, her rifle aimed at a spot behind me. I raise myself on my hands and knees, and scoop up my own rifle. The ammo counter on my screen shows 159 rounds remaining. I’ve pulled the trigger almost a hundred times in the last minute or two.
“Grayson, you okay?” Jackson asks over the squad channel.
My left side feels like it has a pair of knives sticking out of it. The pain is so intense that it takes my breath away. I have to force myself to fill my lungs, and every breath makes the pain in my side flare to almost intolerable levels. I try to find the air for a reply, but then I just shake my head.
“Baker, with me,” Jackson says. “Whoever’s left, give us some covering fire.”
Baker and Jackson come dashing back across the intersection. Behind them, Priest and Hansen lean around the corner and start firing their rifles. I want to add my own flechettes to the covering fire, but I don’t have the strength to lift my rifle anymore. Someone grabs me by the harness and starts dragging me across the street. I see Jackson helping Sergeant Fallon to her feet, firing her rifle with one hand as she pulls the sergeant along with her. My computer informs me that I still have a bunch of rounds in my magazine, and it points out the threat vectors to the people down the road who are still standing and shooting at us, but right now, I’m just a passenger, no longer able to take advantage of all that superior technology.
Eventually, my bumpy journey across the intersection stops. I don’t remember having closed my eyes, but I open them now to see Baker bent over me, his visor raised.
“How bad?” he asks. Behind him, Hansen and Priest are still firing their rifles, exchanging rounds with the newly emboldened rioters that have decided to stick around and nail us down. Now that they’ve seen our casualties, there’s blood in the water, and the sharks are circling. Soon, they’ll get reinforcements, and our ammo is almost gone.
I lift up my rifle—barely—and pat the magazine well with one hand to let Baker know there’s still ammo in my weapon. He nods and takes the M-66 out of my hands.
“Priest, here’s another half a mag,” he says over his shoulder.
“About time. I’m just about dry.” Priest takes my rifle and goes back to his spot at the street corner.
Baker checks the damage to my armor. My left side has gone from searing hot to ice cold. I still have to expend most of my energy forcing air into my lungs, and it feels like something important is broken inside. For the first time in my life, I think that I might be dying. I suppose I should feel dread or panic, knowing that I may slip into unconsciousness at any moment and never wake up again, but I’m too tired and too out of it to care.
“You want me to shoot you up, man?”
Baker has a narcotics injector in his hand, and he makes a motion like clicking a ball pen in front of my face. I shake my head—I don’t want to numb myself and lose the ability to suck air into my lungs.
“C2, this is Bravo One-One,” I hear Sergeant Fallon. “We are down for the count here. We have more wounded than we can carry. Hostiles all over the place, and we’re just about out of ammo. Send a ship, or send a recovery detail with body bags. Your call.”
There’s a reply over the platoon channel, but I can’t quite make it out as I am drifting off. It feels like the onset of a really bad flu, that floating feeling you get in your head that makes you all woozy and shaky on your feet as you stumble into the bathroom for some medicine.
I close my eyes, and listen to the battle going on around me. The reports from military rifles are sporadic, single rounds here and there, with the occasional short burst. The gunshots from civilian weaponry are getting more frequent, and it seems like they’re coming from every direction now.
“I’m hit,” someone yells on the squad channel. I’m too out of it to recognize the voice—Baker? Priest?—but there’s nothing I can do, anyway. I barely have the energy to keep breathing.
Then there’s a new sound, a thunderous roar overhead. I smell the stench of burning fuel, and a hot gust blows across my face. I hear what sounds like a giant zipper being undone, and look up to see the welcome silhouette of a Hornet-class drop ship overhead, gun turret blazing as the hulking machine descends in a graceful hover.
I fade out again for a little while. There’s the sensation of floating away from the ground. People are talking right next to my head, but it all sounds like it’s coming through a brick wall, and I don’t even try to make sense of it. I get jostled against a hard surface, and the pain in my side flares up. I squirm, but there are strong hands holding me down, and I feel the pinprick of an injector against my neck.
Then the world turns quiet around me.
Chapter 13
When I was younger, I often dreamed of falling from a great height. The part of the dream that was most terrifying was the moment of weightless feeling just after I stepped out over the abyss—the second when I realized I was going to fall, and my stomach tried to float up inside of me. The dream always felt so real that I took it for the real thing every time, and I was always terrified when I plunged toward the ground, certain that I was experiencing the last moments of my life.
I would always wake up before hitting the ground, but in a way, my mind lived through my final moments hundreds of times. I remember feeling regret every single time—for things I had done, or failed to do, and for all the things I would leave unaccomplished. Sometimes I would think of my mother, and the sorrow that would be added to her already joyless life by surviving her only child.
This time, the dream is different. When I step over the precipice, I am in my battle armor, holding my rifle, and I am fully aware that I am merely dreaming. Still, the feeling of weightlessness is real
, and so is the fear that grips my mind as my body falls into the darkness below.
This time, I don’t wake up before hitting the ground. This time, I crash onto the ground after a fall that seems impossibly long. I don’t blink out of existence, which is what should happen after a fall from such a height, a body shattered in a microsecond, just enough time for the brain to register a final shock before getting turned into paste. Instead, I am aware of the impact, the shock it sends through my body, and the way it seems to jar every molecule in me out of alignment. Nobody can survive a fall like that, but here I am, flat on my back, still breathing. Nothing seems to be broken—there is no pain at all, actually—and when I try to sit up, my body obeys instantly. My armor is unscratched, and my rifle still safely cradled in the harness on my chest.
Then there’s a bright light in my face, and I flinch. I feel hands on my shoulders, holding my upper body steady, and my brain finally decides to let go of the dream and rejoin the real world.
The bright light is the end of an optical wand, and it’s a scant inch away from my eyes. I’m flat on my back, and as I try to emulate the action in my dream and sit up, I make it about half an inch before a pair of hands gently, but firmly pushes me back into the horizontal position.
“Hold up there, soldier. You can’t do that yet, ‘less you want to undo all the patchwork.”
The voice sounds jovial, but professional, someone who’s used to giving advice and equally used to having it followed. The person standing over me is a woman in a TA Class B shirt, but I can’t make out her rank device, or her collar flashes. I try to speak, but my throat is parched, and all I can manage is a hoarse mumble that sounds nothing like human communication. The woman seems to be able to translate my utterance nonetheless, because she shuts off her wand, reaches past me, and brings a plastic cup into my field of vision.
“Water, cold, three ounces,” she declares, describing the item in mock military supply jargon. “Don’t drink too much at once. The patchwork in your abdomen is still tender.”
She brings the cup to my lips. I take a careful sip, then a bigger one. The water doesn’t even feel liquid as it runs down my throat, just a cool sensation coating my tongue and washing past my uvula.
“Better?” she asks. I nod in response.
“Good. Hold off on the speaking for a minute, okay? I have a good idea what you want to ask, so I’ll give you the rundown. If you still want to talk after I’m done, you can have at it. Deal?”
I nod.
“You’re in Regional Medical Center Great Lakes. You’ve been wounded in combat, and our doctors have stitched you back together. You’ll have to ask the medical officer in charge on details about your injuries, but as far as I know, you had a collapsed lung, and you now have about three feet of small intestine less than you had when you were brought in. You’ll be with us for a little while before we can release you back to your unit.”
She pauses for a moment and then gives me a curt smile.
“Now, do you have any questions?”
“Where’s the rest of my squad?” I ask.
“Not a clue. They brought you in from a different facility via medic flight. We had a bunch of other arrivals that night, but I don’t know who or where they are. You’re going to have to ask the medical officer in charge. I’m just the nurse.”
“How long have I been here?”
“Three days,” she says. “Two and a half, actually. They brought you in early Saturday morning, and now it’s Monday afternoon.”
“Shit,” I say. “Missed Monday morning Orders. The company sergeant is going to kick my ass.”
The nurse laughs softly. She reaches past me again, and turns on a light behind her. In the soft glow of the LED bulb she switched on, I can see her name tag and her rank device. She’s wearing corporal’s chevrons, and the tag above her right shirt pocket identifies her as MILLER C. We’re all just a rank, a last name, and an initial. I’d ask her first name, but she outranks me by three pay grades, and I don’t want to offend the person in charge of my medications for the next few days.
“You have a bit of stuff in your desk drawer,” she says. “Mostly the effects you had on you. See if there’s anything that doesn’t belong, and I’ll get rid of it for you.”
“My PDP make it?”
“Yeah,” Corporal Miller says. “You can’t kill those things, you know.”
She gets up from the chair on which she had been sitting, and straightens out her uniform shirt.
“I’ll leave you alone for a bit. There’s a call button right over your head if you need anything. I’ll be back with dinner in a little while.”
She gives me another curt smile, and leaves the room.
The room is entirely devoid of furniture except for the bed I’m in, a little white night stand beside it, and the display that’s hanging on the wall in a corner of the room. It’s as sterile an environment as I’ve ever seen outside of a PRC tenement.
I roll over onto my side and look at the night stand next to my bed. It has two drawers, and I reach over and pull open the first one. Inside is my dog tag on its ball chain, my PDP, the set of playing cards we all carry in rubberized trauma pack pouches, and the half-empty pack of breath mints I forgot I had stuffed into the right leg pocket of my armor before heading out to the drop ship. I reach up and touch the side of my face, where a fresh line of scar tissue leads from the corner of my left eyebrow to the back of my ear.
My PDP turns on at the first press of the button. I had it in my pocket throughout the last mission, and it seems impossible that the electronic gear has survived all the running, falling, and getting shot at, but there’s not a scratch on the thing. Even the battery is still at a full charge.
I check the MilNet link, the wireless network that connects all the military’s communication systems, and that every military PDP can access from anywhere on Earth and Luna. There are smaller MilNet nodes on Navy ships and Marine outposts as well, but they only synchronize with the rest of the network every few days. On the two inhabited bodies in our own solar system, however, the network is always in sync, and always just a tap on a PDP screen away.
The network is present, but for some reason, my PDP can’t connect to it. I can bring up everything that’s not reliant on the MilNet—my calendar, the technical manuals, the ballistic conversion tables, and the book reader—but every time I try to access something that requires network access, I get an error message, even though the PDP shows full network signal strength. MilNet works over satellites, and it’s always available, even on the top of the Himalayas or the middle of what’s left of the South American rainforest, but my PDP can’t connect to it, which means that the hardware has been locked out.
I want to send a message to the rest of the squad, and another one to Halley, but I’m cut off from the rest of the world, which is a rare experience. The Net terminals in the PRC apartments crap out every time a gnat farts in front of the government communications relay, but the MilNet link has been so reliable that the lack of connectivity feels a bit surreal.
There’s a remote on the table for the screen in the corner of the room, but I’m not interested in boring myself to tears with some insipid Network show, or the stuff they sell as news reports.
Since I can’t get in touch with anyone, I decide to use the opportunity to catch up on some sleep. I toss the PDP back into the drawer, and roll over to settle into a more comfortable position. The mattress is better than the one on my bunk at the base, the room is quiet, and whatever drugs I have in my system are making me sleepy.
When the door opens again, I wake up once more. The window in the room shows a starry night sky outside, which makes it a projection—there are few spots left on the continent where you can see stars at night, and I’m pretty sure the Great Lakes isn’t one of them, not with Chicago and Detroit nearby.
“How are we doing?” Corporal Miller asks. She’s carrying a meal tray in her hands.
“I don’t know about you, b
ut I feel like I’ve been hit by a bus,” I reply. “What’s for dinner?”
“For you, Liquid Nutritional Package Seventeen. Your choices are vanilla or applesauce flavor. I have to warn you, though. The flavor designations do not accurately reflect the taste experience.”
“I’m used to that,” I say, eyeing the nondescript white containers on the tray. “Ever tried BNA rations?”
“Yes,” she says. “My hometown is PRC Houston-23. Trust me, this stuff here is gourmet food compared to welfare chow. Just pretend it’s a milkshake. You’re on liquid diet for the next few days, by the way. Doctor’s orders.”
“I’ll try the vanilla. Any idea why my PDP can’t get onto the network in here?”
Corporal Miller shrugs.
“Not a clue. I’m not a network tech. The Information Support group at your home battalion is in charge of your access. You may want to check with them when you get out of here. Maybe your toy is broken after all.”
I know that it’s not the PDP, but I just shrug in return. If Corporal Miller knows why they killed my link, she’s not willing to tell me, but I have my own theories.
“Have your dinner, and call me if you need help.”
“I’m going to have to hit the head before too long,” I say. “I’m guessing you don’t want me up and running around.”
“No, I don’t,” she smiles. “There’s a relief tube on the right side of your bed. Use it at your convenience. Your bowels are empty, by the way, so don’t worry about the other thing. That won’t be an issue for a while.”
“Good to know. Thank you, ma’am.”
She leaves the room, and I take a sip from the container in front of me. Liquid Nutritional Supplement Seventeen tastes as bland as unadorned rice cakes, but there is a vague vanilla aftertaste to it, so I take Corporal Miller’s advice and pretend I’m sipping on a milkshake.