The Drift Wars

by James, Brett

  They arrived at their target three minutes late. There had been no resistance along the way, and when they saw what they were up against, they understood why. Who would skirmish in the jungle when they could hole up in a fortress?

  — — —

  The Riel stronghold was an oblong shard of reddish rock that towered over a wide clearing. Its rough-hewn walls tapered to an impossibly narrow base, like a massive spike balanced on its tip. A few green patches were scattered around the rock face—trees and plants that somehow found purchase. In several places sunlight glinted off crystal shields, Riel fortifications impenetrable to even the heaviest rifle in the marine arsenal.

  Mickelson brought the platoon to a halt and moved to the front. His face distorted as the glass in his visor thickened and reformed, magnifying the distant rock. Peter tuned his visor to Mickelson’s to see what his sergeant saw.

  Each of the crystal shields—a half dozen in all—protected a gun nest, either armed with a heavy-caliber recoiling rifle or twin machine guns. Rocket batteries were spread over the stronghold, unmanned, either sentient or operated by remote.

  All these Riel had to be guarding something important, and Peter guessed it was a Delta-class heavy-impulse blaster, which was exactly the sort of antiship weapon they’d have to destroy to get back off this planet.

  Mickelson tracked along a recessed walkway cut into the rock face, spotting a patrolling Gyrine.

  The Gyrine was the smaller of the two Riel species. It was several feet taller than a man, but from this distance its squat body made it look short. Its black skin was dry and scaly, like the skin on a bird’s legs, and its face was pinched, with squinting eyes and the heavy jaw of a bulldog. Thick white fangs jutted up on either side of its flat nose, the effect more cartoonish than ferocious—not that Peter cared to put it to the test. This particular Gyrine had no cybernetic augmentation, which made it an officer.

  “There’s your first target, Garvey,” Mickelson said; a yellow dot appeared on Peter’s visor map.

  Peter unlinked from Mickelson’s video feed and crept off to find a good vantage point. Two GIs peeled off and followed him, his own personal guard.

  More likely, Peter thought, their orders are to recover my rifle when I get shot.

  After five minutes of scouting, Peter found a small boulder among some scrub ferns. He had been warned not to use rocks as cover, but he couldn’t remember why. Meanwhile, Mickelson berated him impatiently. Absurdly, Peter was more worried about getting bawled out than getting shot.

  Peter motioned to his escorts, who took up positions on either side, far enough that they couldn’t all be killed by a single rocket. Peter clipped his pistol to his thigh, reached over his shoulder, and drew his rifle from its protective case. He unlocked the gun’s barrel, extending it from the stock until it was taller than himself, and twist-locked it into place. He popped the rubber cap from the barrel and inspected the lens. He withdrew the battery clip, checked the contacts, and shoved it back in, seating it with a jiggle. This would be a synchronized attack; there was no room for mistakes.

  Peter popped the cap off the optical scope, leaned against the rock, and raised the long gun toward the Riel stronghold.

  — — —

  Peter bent his arm and locked his combat suit’s artificial muscles, making his hand a stable pivot for the gun’s barrel. He pressed his visor to the rubber cone on the back of the scope, tunneling his vision down the gun’s sights.

  The Gyrine officer had moved, but Mickelson still had eyes on it. An arrow appeared on the left side of Peter’s visor, and he shifted the gun up the walkway; he then centered on the Gyrine’s chest. A second set of crosshairs appeared near the first—the battle computer’s suggestion of where to aim. The computer took into account everything it knew, from the video feed of every marine’s combat suit to the atmospheric information gathered by the satellites. Technically, the computer-generated crosshairs were the more accurate of the two, but a good sniper could outshoot the computer two to one. It was instinct, as all snipers have claimed since the invention of the rifle. But Peter wasn’t feeling any instinct, so he just split the difference between the computer’s crosshairs and his own.

  The Gyrine was restless, pacing nervously, as if it could sense Peter’s gaze. No doubt it expected an attack—this operation was far from covert—but it wouldn’t know where or when. The UF satellites were flooding the planet with so much interference that a Riel couldn’t detect a dog humping its leg, much less a small platoon three thousand yards out.

  The Gyrine’s black skin blended in the overhang’s shadows, making it hard to track its movements. When Peter finally settled into his target’s rhythm, he gave the trigger a light squeeze, signaling that he was ready to fire.

  “About time,” Mickelson snapped. “Fire at zero.” A countdown appeared on Peter’s visor. Ten seconds.

  Nine.

  — — —

  Peter would fire the first round, followed by Heavy Weaponry; their countdown was just a quarter second behind his own. Getting the first shot meant catching the enemy unaware, practically guaranteeing a kill but also making his gun the first that the Riel would register. He would draw most of the return fire.

  Getting the first shot right was critical; the marines had to kill enough Riel to offset the advantage of higher ground and protective shields. And officers, like Peter’s target, were of particularly high value.

  Something is wrong, Peter thought. The countdown had stopped; the number seven was frozen on his screen. He waited one second, two, but still it didn’t change.

  He tried to stay focused on his target, but his eyes were drawn to the seven on his visor. He was holding his breath to steady his shot, but his lungs began to ache. He took two quick tugs of air, and then the number dropped: Six.

  Peter instantly felt relieved, then foolish, no longer sure that the pause hadn’t just been his imagination. He looked back to his target, but it was gone.

  Five.

  Four.

  The countdown raced now. Peter panned his rifle side to side, searching the empty walkway. Where is it? Did it see me? Did it run? The green, computer-generated crosshair remained where it was, aimed at nothing.

  Three.

  Salt stung his eyes. He blinked, trying to clear them.

  Two.

  His oxygen light pulsed red, the glow filling his visor.

  One.

  The Gyrine popped back into view—it had been bent over, hidden by the walkway’s low wall. It stretched lazily, gazed into the distance, and scratched its chin, oblivious to both Peter’s panic and the impending assault.

  Peter swung the rifle toward the Gyrine but overcompensated—the slightest movement of the gun was yards at the fortress. He eased the gun back, his muscles tight, working against each other. The crosshairs found the Gyrine just as the countdown flashed zero. Peter squeezed the trigger.

  — — —

  Peter had never fired on a live target before. He closed his eyes, unable to watch the results. When he opened them a second later, the Gyrine was gone. Did I kill it?, he wondered.

  “Christ-all-fucking-mighty, Garvey,” Mickelson barked, and Peter knew he had missed.

  — — —

  Peter whipped his gun around, searching for the Gyrine, but it was gone. The rock face disappeared behind a cloud of dust, pounded by the giant impulsor cannons carried by heavy weaponry. He shrunk down behind the rock; all he could do was wait for further orders.

  Distant machine guns cracked and rockets whistled in close, pounding into the ground and tossing up columns of dirt. Peter listened to the bullets rattle against the rock; then they stopped. The ferns around him vaporized and a nearby tree blackened like a match. The Riel were sweeping the area with lasers.

  Lasers weren’t a direct threat. Even
if Peter weren’t shielded by the boulder, his suit’s ceramic coating would easily disperse the heat. But the beams would burn away his cover, and once they could see him, the Riel had plenty of other ways to kill him. Peter grew anxious just sitting there; he queried the battle computer.

  “Negative targets,” it replied.

  We’re in the middle of a battle, Peter thought. How can there be nothing to shoot at?

  He stood up and aimed his gun at the towering rock, searching. On the very edge of the left face, he saw the top of a Gyrine’s head sticking out over a crystal shield. It wasn’t much—not enough for a kill—but it was something.

  The Gyrine worked a thick-barreled, turret-mounted gun that recoiled heavily with each shot. It fired in the opposite direction, which Peter found reassuring, since it meant there was at least one other platoon involved in this assault. Peter centered his crosshairs just over the Gyrine’s head, thinking perhaps to first draw its attention by shattering the rock.

  His chest was warm. Not just warm, hot. Searing. He pulled back from the scope; the boulder he was leaning against was glowing red. Peter suddenly remembered why he wasn’t supposed to use rocks as cover.

  While his combat suit was immune to lasers, rocks were not. They would become superheated and explode. A melon-size rock had the destructive power of a fragmentary grenade. This boulder was a hundred times that.

  Peter felt the rock tremble and crack, expanding from the heat. He might have even heard the explosion before everything went black.

  [14.08.2.14::3948.1938.834.2D]

  A white light clicked on—bright, painful. Peter blinked, his eyelids scratching over the crust that coated his eyeballs. His head was fuzzy, and the room’s silence pressed against his ears. He heard footsteps—soft and light-footed—padding toward him. A pink blur slid into the light. Peter blinked again and saw a woman in a green surgical mask. She was leaning over him; he was lying down.

  “There you are,” she said. Peter couldn’t place her accent. She wore a white smock with short sleeves that jutted off her shoulders like little wings, leaving her arms bare. The uniform was cut slim, but not as slim as she was. It dangled loosely over her body. Her dark brown hair was pulled tight, and a ponytail hung in a net behind her head. Gunmetal eyes inspected him from over the mask, faint wrinkles radiating from their corners.

  The nurse settled onto a stool and raised a long finger, its nail trimmed short, with a dark stain under the tip that looked like dried blood. “Can you see this?” she asked. Peter nodded. “Follow it, please.”

  Peter followed the finger up and down, left and right. The woman ignored him, watching the video monitor that hung over his head.

  “How many letters in the alphabet?” she asked.

  “Twenty-six,” Peter said.

  “Recite them, please.”

  Peter did, feeling silly.

  “What’s the last thing you remember?” she asked.

  “What?” Peter asked, confused.

  “What’s the last thing you remember?” the woman repeated impatiently.

  Peter thought back. First he was crawling through the mud on his elbows. Then he was being thrown from a ship into the black nothing of space. And then he was free-falling through a white cloud, his stomach tight and sore. And finally, he stood at attention with the rest of his platoon. They wore full dress, and a general spoke on a distant stage.

  “Basic Training,” Peter said. “Graduation.”

  “Good,” the woman said. She tapped around her monitor. “Anything else?”

  There was something else, the memory of a memory. It felt important, but his efforts to remember it only pushed it farther away. His head ached from the effort, and he felt a sharp pain, like a hundred needles pricking his skull.

  “No,” he said. He tried to rub his head but found he was strapped to the bed.

  “Easy, kid,” the woman said, taking his wrist. “Don’t rush.” Her hand was searing hot; it burned his skin.

  She flicked a finger at the crook of his arm, then dug her thumb in. A vein swelled with blood. The woman smiled warmly, raising a long syringe of oily liquid.

  She slipped it in with practiced ease.

  [19.17.3.17::1845.9671.402.7D]

  The ship was so minimal that it didn’t even rate a pilot, much less a name. It was designed to be cheap and disposable, and it served but one purpose: to transport marines to and from extra-planetary combat.

  It had no hull, just an open frame made from thick bars that curved like a down-facing rib cage. Where there should have been a bridge, there was only a small metal box for the remote control. Marines were packed to the frame on all sides, crowded ass-to-knee. It was a full regiment: twenty-four hundred men, plus their colonel. Far in the back, at the tip of one rib, Peter craned his neck and watched the tapered flame of a relay module. It fired its rocket as it left the ship, then flipped around and fired again to fix its position. Next it fell still, disappearing against the black background. Space was unnaturally dark inside the Drift, which had a scant few thousand stars.

  The relays had been dropped at regular intervals, leaving a trail between them and the commandship far behind. They allowed the transport to be guided by tight beam, thereby protecting the location of both ships. The transport was fed its route one coordinate at a time to keep its destination from falling into Riel hands.

  “Is that sixteen?” Saul asked over a closed channel. He was seated opposite Peter, his face hidden behind his mirrored visor. But you didn’t need to see Saul’s face to recognize him; his suit was twice as wide as—and a full head higher than—any other in the regiment.

  One small benefit of Saul’s size was that he was seated at the very tip of a rib, since he would otherwise fill two seats. And Peter, by virtue of being his best friend, got the next seat in.

  “Nineteen,” Peter said.

  “I thought it was sixteen?” Saul asked disingenuously.

  “Nineteen,” Peter repeated.

  “And they launch every four hours?” Saul mumbled, making like he was calculating. “So this is our fourth day. And you lost the bet.”

  Neither man had any real idea of how long they had been in transit. The computer in their suits had been disabled before they left the base, leaving them without a clock or access to movies, music, or anything that might give a sense of time. If they knew how long they had been traveling, they could guess how far they had come. And if they were captured, the Riel could use this information to locate their base. The United Forces had only one base, so losing it would be tantamount to losing the war. Protecting the base’s location was a top priority, certainly more so than entertaining a few divisions of marines.

  “I didn’t say we were betting,” Peter replied.

  “You didn’t say we weren’t.”

  Peter shook his head, but the gesture was lost inside his helmet—their artificial muscles were locked to keep their movements from affecting the transport’s course.

  “You haven’t won yet,” Peter said, deciding to play along.

  “I don’t see any Riel creeping around,” Saul replied. “So I figure we’ve still got a long way to go.”

  “So you hope,” Peter said, but he did as well. The journey might be boring, but it was far better than the destination. This was his first combat mission, and even after five months of Basic Training, he still felt completely unprepared.

  — — —

  Two hours later a half dozen relays shot off all at once—a redundancy that anticipated enemy fire. More relays lit up the sky around them. It was jarring to suddenly be in the middle of so many ships; they had been alone since they left the base. Every ship in the fleet had taken a different route to reduce their energy signature and thereby avoid detection. That they had converged could mean only one thing.

  Incoming rock
ets exploded on all sides. The transport banked hard, pulling at Peter’s guts. A dozen rockets lanced through the ship, which twisted to let them pass harmlessly out the other side. One shot past Peter’s head so close that he felt the heat of its exhaust.

  His suit sparked to life and his visor flooded with information. There was a click as his suit separated from the ship’s umbilicus, followed by the hiss of oxygen flowing from his own tank. Sergeant Mickelson shouted instructions over the open channel, but Peter didn’t catch a word of it. Another rocket raced by, exploding right in the ship’s belly. It was terrible and silent, and the orange flame reflected on the visors of a thousand marines. Then the shock wave slammed against Peter, knocking the air from his chest.

  The ship bucked, then recovered, rolling one hundred and eighty degrees and whipping straight up. Peter had been through these maneuvers in simulation, but there was no comparison.

  He jerked his head around, trying to see where the ship was going. Mickelson cursed sharply as more rockets shot past. And then it was over. With a blaze of engines, the ship wrenched to a stop and lay still.

  They had ducked behind a wall of rock that floated in empty space. The rock flickered in the light of a nearby transport, which smoldered like the coals of a campfire. The ship was dead, rolling slowly as if capsizing. It twinkled as the air tanks of the attached marines exploded.

  Another rocket plowed into the burning ship. Peter shielded his eyes with his hand as the explosion lit up giant rocks floating all around them.

  The Teisserenc Asteroid Belt. They had arrived.

  — — —

  Muscle relaxant tingled through Peter’s body, delivered automatically by his Life Control System to ease the stiffness of the long journey. The motors in his combat suit whirred as he flexed his arms and legs, stretching, working in fresh blood. There was a heavy clunk as the ship unclipped him, its rib sliding up and away. The ship drew out from the jumble of men and then shot off to safety.