Armored Tears

by Mark Kalina

  If it hadn't been the night before the evaluation tests, he'd have still been grinning at the memory. As it was, he had... the memory of her; the feel of her lithe, compact body, and smell and taste of her, and of her ecstasy. And his.

  And he had a failing score from his evaluation for service in the Armored Corps. He honestly wasn't sure if it was a good trade or not. If he'd been talking with his friends from school, he'd have said it had definitely been worth it, losing his virginity to a lustful, eager, pretty girl. But now, he was looking at two years of service in the Infantry Corps, and he wasn't at all sure it had been worth it.

  Cal stood at attention while the assignments sergeant read out names and told recruits which Corps would be their home for the next two years. And tried not to cry.

  ***

  "This is the M39 Infantry Combat Rifle!" shouted the instructor-corporal, holding up a huge, heavy looking rifle. "It is the primary weapon of the Infantry Corps. Which means it is the primary weapon of the Defense Force. And that means that it is the weapon which keeps Arcadia free!"

  Five weeks of basic induction training meant that standing at attention was no longer anything new to Cal Piper. Neither were daily ten kilometer runs, or hundred push-up punishment details.

  There was no doubt that Cal was in the best shape of his life, now. And since he was still sleeping, now and then, with the lovely Reiko, he couldn't really count his life as being all bad. Well, some of the time with Reiko was spend sleeping, anyway.

  The Defense Force, he had found, was tough, but not —for the most part— sadistic. Excuses were not tolerated, but neither did the instructors try to micromanage the lives of the recruits. He had no doubt the instructor-corporals knew about him and Reiko, but so long as nothing inappropriate was done during training, what the two recruits did in their —very limited— spare time was no business of the Defense Force. Or so it seemed; no one had actually told him anything one way or the other. Unless he counted the lecture all the Infantry Corps troops had gotten about taking the initiative. In which case, he thought a grin, he was actually following their instructions when it came to him and Reiko.

  "Is there something funny, recruit?" snapped the instructor-corporal. "A joke you want to share with your comrades? Everyone loves a good laugh, recruit!"

  "No, sir, Instructor-corporal!" shouted Cal.

  "Then pay attention!" the corporal bellowed. "The M39 fires an electrothermal-chemical propelled 8.5mm steel-tipped copper-alloy projectile, capable of penetrating a class VII armor plate out to fifteen hundred meters. The maximum effective range of the M39 against light personal armor is three thousand meters. The M39 has an integrated smart-sight. That means that the M39 does not miss! If you acquire your target and lock it in, the round will hit where it's aimed. If you aimed at your enemy, he will die! If your enemy acquires you first, you will die! Is that concept clear to you recruits?"

  ***

  Wearing an infantry frame was a lot, a lot, easier than Cal had expected it to be. The frame was an exoskeleton of servo-powered armatures that moved when he moved. When he'd first seen one, he' thought that the mass of the power pack, not to mention the weapons and armor plate the soldier inside the frame had to wear, would make just balancing the thing almost impossible. The frame balanced without any effort at all, and with the power on, the weight of the power-pack, armor and weapons was nothing. You could sprint in a frame, as fast as if you were wearing just your shoes and running shorts, and you could do it while carrying a hundred kilograms of gear and armor. You could jump over a meter-high obstacle like a track-and-field hurdler. And you were bullet-proof, at least against anything lighter than an anti-frame rifle like the M39.

  "Remember," called the instructor-corporal. "You have to move, acquire your target and shoot first. First! Whoever acquires first wins. Whoever loses dies. If you can't acquire a target fast, you move for cover, pop out in a different location and try again. Keep moving. Keep weaving. Don't make it easy for the other guy to kill you!"

  The exercise ahead of them was a mix of a shooting range and an obstacle course. The recruits would be timed on how fast they crossed it, graded on how many targets they managed to hit, and penalized if any of the emplaced targeting lasers —simulated enemy framers— that managed to get a lock on them for long enough to have put an enemy round on target.

  The recruits were running through the course one by one, while their comrades waited behind a tall, rammed-earth wall, where they couldn't see what the course was like, until it was their turn to go.

  It was a good thing, Cal thought, that Reiko had washed out of the Infantry Corps a week ago. Some women had the aggression and the upper body strength to manage a frame, but most, Reiko included, didn't. If she'd still have been here, he thought with a smile, he might have been short on sleep again. At any rate, he'd given her his newly assigned integrated comm-code; it was supposed to be secure, but Reiko was pretty good with data systems, and figured she could use it to keep in touch. Using the comm-code that way was technically against the rules, but he figured there was no harm in it, and maybe they'd be able to get together on leave. Meanwhile, she was training for the Supply Corps now, and he'd had a good night's sleep to be ready for this.

  "OK, Recruit Piper! Go! Go! Go!"

  Cal moved. It was easy to run fast in the frame; harder to try to track the targets smoothly though the smart-sight targeting system of the massive M39 rifle. At least the frame made the rifle all but weightless in his hands; he'd had to carry and fire it without the frame, and the ten kilogram weight of the monster gun had been brutal... though not as brutal as the shoulder-slamming recoil of the heavy, high-velocity 8.5mm armor piercing rounds it fired.

  "Move, move!" shouted the corporal, and Cal ran, vaulting smoothly over obstacles. The frame's servos hissed and hummed as it took the weight of power-pack, weapons and armor. There was no feeling of encumbrance at all, and Cal felt exhilaratingly light and quick.

  Ahead, his helmet sensors pointed out a probable target and he brought the M39 up, letting the smart-sight get a look at it. The huge rifle felt feather-light in his frame-enhanced arms. All he had to do was center the target in his targeting display and press the trigger to give the rifle permission to fire. Once the target was locked in, the actual shot was automatic.

  The target was in his helmet visor's sights and his finger started to close on the trigger.

  The target disappeared from his view and a picture of Reiko filled his visor.

  "Hey, Cal," she said, smiling. "Is this a bad time?"

  ***

  "Recruit Piper!" The instructor-sergeant's face was utterly without expression.

  "Sir!" Cal replied, trying to keep his face just as expressionless.

  "Well, recruit. It's obvious you are not cut out for the Infantry Corps. I'm just glad you made it clear to us nice and early, so we could get rid of you before you wasted too much of our time, or, God forbid, got someone who was worth it killed."

  "Sir!" Cal managed to say, blinking hard to keep the tears from welling up in his eyes.

  "You are dismissed, Recruit! Pack you kit and take the first available transport to Hamilton Station. Maybe the Auxiliary Corps can figure out what to do with you."

  ***

  Hamilton Station was nothing. An empty place in the desert where someone had once tried to dig for valuable underground minerals. And failed. Now it was a Defense Force outpost, under the care of the Auxiliary Corps.

  "What we do," the Auxiliary Corps sergeant told him when he'd arrived, "is fill in the blanks."

  Cal had said nothing, just stood at attention in the baking heat and wondered how life could possibly get worse than this.

  The sergeant was a tall, lanky man, with much the same coloring as Cal's; darkly tanned skin and dark-blond hair. The sergeant's eyes, though, were blue rather than dark, and his features looked pure Northern-European, rather than Cal's stereotypically Arcadian multi-component ethnic mix. The sergeant's expression was rela
xed. His hair was longer than Cal was used to anymore. He wore a dusty working uniform. In fact, the only thing military-looking about the man was the faded sergeant's stripes on the sleeve of his overalls and the compact light combat rifle slung from his shoulder.

  "Look, we don't need that stand-at-attention stuff here," the sergeant said. "So long as you know who's in charge, you can skip all the stand-at-attention-yes-sir crap and the saluting. Just do what I say, when I say it and all that military formality shit don't matter."

  "Yes, Sergeant!" said Cal, and the man frowned.

  "You probably think you've wound up in the crapper out here, huh? Piper? What do want to be called, anyway? Private Piper sounds pretty dorky," the sergeant said, smiling.

  "Ah... my... that is, people call me 'Cal,' I guess," Cal said.

  "You guess? You're not sure what people call you?"

  "Well," Cal said, figuring that there wasn't much more trouble he could get into, "lately people have mostly been calling me 'fuck-up.' But I guess I'd prefer 'Cal.'"

  The sergeant grinned. "Right. Like I was saying, Cal, what we do is fill in the blanks. I'm Dave Halgren, by the way, but we go by first names, here, mostly. So just 'Dave.' I'm the platoon sergeant here. Though you'd have to squint pretty hard to call this a platoon. Anyway, I'm in charge here, more or less... unless an officer stops by, which they mostly don't."

  "OK," Cal said, trying to see where this was going.

  "Right," Sergeant Dave said. "Fill in the blanks. What I mean is, we do whatever job comes up, so the rest of the Defense Force never has to take the trouble to pull their heads out of their own asses. Look, Arcadia is pretty dispersed, right? Stations, towns and settlements all over the place. And mostly, people just want to be left alone, right? I mean, we all agree to do our time in the Defense Force, but that's just so we can make sure we are left alone.

  "But sometimes people need help. Most of the time, it's Defense Force people that need help. Like getting a spare fuel cell out to a stalled truck somewhere... or someone's water pipes start leaking and they don't have to gear to fix 'em. So what do they do? Well, they pretty much call us, is what they do.

  "We're the go-to fix-it guys and gals of the Defense Force. You need someone to deliver something, we do it. You need someone to guard the edge of a mine field to keep the kiddies and morons out, we can do it. You need someone to drag some soldiers out of a pleasure-house but don't want to call the MPs, we can do it.

  "Basically, whatever the job is, we can do it. It's not glamorous. Holy shit, it's not glamorous," Dave said, smiling. "But there's no chicken-shit military crap here, and without us... Well, it's like a machine without lubricant. It seizes and doesn't fucking work. We're the oil that keeps the Defense Force machine running."

  "Yes si... I mean, OK, Dave," Cal said.

  "Right," Dave grinned. "You're getting it. Now you can see the down-sides pretty easy, huh? But the upside is, the sort of people we get as mostly the ones who don't want to have a military discipline stick shoved up their asses, and frankly, that sort of people are a lot better to hang out with than the other sort.

  "You'd be amazed how many people we've had in Auxiliary who wound up really rich and successful after their stint was up; non-conformist creative types, you know? I mean, isn't that what Arcadia is supposed to be all about?" Dave grinned.

  Call laughed. "Sure."

  "Right," Dave said. "So that's how I figure it. We're the purest embodiment of Arcadia. And even though everyone thinks we're the dregs, they all need us, man. I mean, what we do matters. All the other Corps are all getting ready for some day when the UEN comes back... even though we control the gate and they can't come back unless we let 'em. Or maybe waiting for space aliens to attack, or some shit like that. And let me tell you, if space aliens ever attack, we're going to be fucking glad to have those guys and gals. But in the meantime, we're the ones who do things. They just train and wait.

  "Anyway, that's my pep talk, Cal. If you want to tell me it's bullshit and just settle in and be miserable for a couple of years, I'll understand. But I'm not bullshitting you, and if you want to step up and help the mission, me and the other guys and gals will be happy to have you."

  "Wow," Cal said, shaking his head. "That's not... I mean, that's not bad. For a pep-talk, I mean. Well, I'm here, so I might as well step up, like you said."

  "OK, then" Dave said, holding out a hand. "Welcome aboard."

  "Right," Dave told him, as they finished the "tour" of the station. The barracks weren't actually that bad, Cal had realized. They were full of scrounged and improvised amenities... including, almost unbelievably, a working swimming pool made out of the bottom half of an ancient UN patrol boat that must have been as old as the colony... or older.

  "So one thing to remember, Cal. We're only twenty kilometers from the nearest refugee camp, and once in a while, some of those fellows hike all the way up here. Sometimes they're OK, you know? Just want some help that we can give them. But if they were really OK, they'd just move out of the camps and stop being refugees, right? And sometimes, it's some local gang-lord's boys; the sort of hard-core gangsters that really run the camps. So we never, and I mean never, go anywhere unarmed.

  "Here," he added, pressing his palm to the lock plate of a cabinet and taking out a compact H&K G60 rifle.

  Cal had seen rifles like it in vids before, and some of the MP guards at other Defense Force installations had carried them. They were meant for anti-personnel use at close ranges and weren't too much use past five or six hundred meters, or against any serious armor. Infantry frames had made them more or less obsolete.

  "Carry it with you, man. Keep it with you. The G60 is a sweet gun. Germans build the best guns, man. 6.7mm, light-weight, accurate, reliable. No smart-sight crap or anything, but there's not much recoil and it shoots straight. Feeds from a 45 round magazine. Two or three taps from this'll take down a gangster gun-boy, even if he's high as a kite on some home-brew chems.

  "Right," Cal said, taking the weapon nervously.

  "Come on, we'll get you checked out on it. We've got a firing range out back. It's not going to take out a framer, but man, we don't ever have to deal with framers. It does just fine against some refugee gang-lord's gun-boys.

  "Or, if you'd rather, I can issue you a zipper. You know, close-in room-clearing gun."

  A "zipper," Cal knew, was a weapon for close-quarters combat, heavy caliber with an ultra-high rate of fire and extensive recoil-absorbing gear. It was compact but heavy and short-ranged. It was meant to be carried as a back-up weapon by framers; in really close-in combat, it was sometimes more useful than a big anti-frame rifle like the M39. Cal wasn't sure he'd want to carry one all day with only his own muscles, though.

  "Yeah," Cal said. "We checked out on zippers in the Infantry Corp... before I got... you know."

  "Right," Dave said. "Well, the thing with a zipper is it's damn heavy to lug and useless past a couple hundred meters. Close in, I'd rather have a zipper myself. But we're in open territory here, and the gun-boys do have some real rifles. Lots of hand-made stuff. And smuggling from Earth, too. Not to mention sometimes any guns they can steal when the raid. And anything they can trade for. So they got a few decent rifles. Lots of crude, old-fashioned zippers, too; 20th century-style submachine-guns, basically. They've even got some AK-fucking-47s, if you'll believe it. They got guys in the camps who can build 'em by hand."

  "I've heard of that," Cal said.

  "I know. Unbelievable," Dave said. "I mean, if some guy is that good with metal and tools why the fuck is he still squatting in the camps, right?"

  7.

  "Man, but I hate convoy duty," Tara said into her helmet comm pickup.

  "And I love it?" came a reply from Younger on the tactical push.

  "OK, got it, Younger. The lieutenant-colonel is not allowed to bitch," Tara replied.

  The fact was, sending an entire battalion, even an under-strength one of thirty-one tanks, was massive overkill. A compan
y of twelve would have been overkill. A single platoon of four tanks would have been more than enough. But convoy duty gave her battalion a chance to train on the move, to maneuver and operate together, and shake some of the peacetime dust off. That made it worth it, more or less.

  Besides which, riding a seventy-five ton War-Hammer at speed across the rolling terrain of the Highlands was fun.

  The driver, a stocky private named Darryl Hanneman, was driving with his head out of the hatch, blasting Nihonjin Idol-Pop though his helmet speakers, loud enough for the rest of the crew to catch rhythmic snippets of music.

  Tara had her own head out of the turret as well. Her screens probably gave her a better view than her unaided eyes did, but riding inside felt detached and isolated, not to mention cramped, and many —most— tank commanders kept their heads out of their turrets when it was safe to do so.

  She watched as the convoy trucks maneuvered along the route, flanked and followed by loose columns of her tanks, and frowned.

  "Driver," Tara said, switching to her intra-tank communications push, "you'd better turn that down. Sensor Operator, link me with the convoy leader, please."

  "You're linked, ma'am," replied the sensors operator, a fresh-faced young corporal named Piet Malan.

  "Convoy Azure-1, this is escort commander," she said.

  "This is, er, this is the convoy," came a woman's voice.

  "Convoy, you have some of your trucks pulling ahead of hill 57-A. That's the hill up ahead of us on the west side. My people have not cleared that hill yet. Please pull back your trucks and give my drone operators time to work."

  "Look, Commander... I mean Colonel," came the woman's voice, "I've run convoys here before. We know the route. We don't need you to hold our hands out here."

  "She sounds like an opt-out," murmured Corporal Shalik, her gunner.

  "Not nice," Tara told him, grinning, before keying the communications to reply to the convoy.