Armored Tears

by Mark Kalina

  Tara said nothing.

  "Ma'am," said the sensors operator, "are you going to answer?"

  "Maybe later. They made it. We held. What else is there to say?"

  ***

  Bernie and Aran walked slowly amid the burning tanks. It might have been dangerous, Bernie supposed. A round's propellant might cook off and cause a further explosion. But she was too tired to care.

  Ahead she saw a deflated survival pod, walked up to it. The tanker inside the pod was on his back, open eyes staring at the darkening early evening sky. Blood was pooled around a hole the size of a dinner plate that had been punched through the man's torso. The face was that of the boy who'd asked her out a few hours ago.

  Bernie found herself on her knees without any memory of falling. Suddenly she was weeping; racking, bitter sobs that barely let her draw a breath.

  Aran's hand went to her shoulder, barely felt though the armor, but infinitely welcome.

  "A friend?" he asked, softly.

  "No..." Bernie said, gasping through her sobs. "I... I only met him today."

  ***

  Tara walked across the battlefield, seeing with relief that bordered on desperation the faces of those who survived, and accepting the dull punches of pain when she found out who hadn't.

  Both Younger and Feldman were dead, Tara confirmed. Both of them gone. The feeling was like a double punch, somewhere under the ribs. The pain was still muted, though, somehow, and she found herself smiling to keep it from breaking out.

  Seven of her tanks were still combat-ready, though all had been hit at least once and none was perfectly intact. Some of the knocked-out tanks would be repairable, she knew, and some of the dead tanks' crews had survived, some unhurt, others injured and being worked on at the improvised aid station set up next to the laser installation. And there were medevacs on the way; tilt-rotor aircraft didn't dare fly over an active battlefield, but they were perfectly effective for quick pick-up and delivery of the wounded.

  Some of her people were still manning their tanks. A few looked almost drugged with the exhilaration of survival and victory. Others looked drugged with fatigue and shock.

  Some of the survivors were wandering around, like she was. Looking to find out what had become of friends and comrades, most likely. Hoping to find out that this or that friend had safely ejected from a stricken tank, dreading to find out that he or she hadn't... but needing to find out either way. Not knowing was more than anyone could bear, for long.

  A few of her people just stood, or sat on the ground next to their tanks, too drained to do anything else. Some looked like they were asleep, curled up on the ground next to their tanks, or stretched out on the sloping armor of their turrets. Some talked softly with others nearby. Some sat silently. Some cried.

  There was a female framer, one of the survivors that Feldman had rescued, on her knees, sobbing over a body that lay next to a deflated survival pod. Next to her, hand on her shoulder, was the civilian, the reporter, whom Tara had put into one of her tanks as a drone operator.

  "Colonel," the man said as he noticed her. For a moment he whispered to the kneeling framer girl, and then he walked up to Tara.

  "Ah, Mr. Hogan. I see you're still with us," Tara said.

  "Yes, Colonel. I'm still with you. Actually, I believe I'll be staying with you. On Arcadia, that is, I mean."

  "Ah," Tara said, nodding. "Good, I think."

  "It's over, isn't it, Colonel?" the man said.

  "Yes, Mr. Hogan. I think it is."

  "Aran. Name's Aran. Mr. Hogan is what the teachers called me when I got in trouble."

  "Aran. Tara, then. You're a civilian anyway, so I'm not your colonel..."

  "Tara... no. No, I'd say you very much are my colonel."

  "Alright," she replied. "I can let you have that much. Your tank wasn't hit? You were running drones for one of the tanks in my platoon, weren't you?"

  "We were hit. I... my survival pod worked."

  Tara looked down for a moment, looked back at Aran again. "Good. That's what they're for, aren't they? I've taken a survival pod ride myself once... though not quite all of me made the trip."

  Aran looked at the woman in front of him. An attractive woman; a not uncommon mix of Asian and Caucasian features. Her eyes were hard... weary but still razor-focused. The eyes, and her gaze, seemed to hint at a spirit was as armored as the tanks she led. And yet the armor wasn't total, and behind the armor, Aran thought he could see...

  He looked back at where Bernie was gathering herself, getting her sobs under control, looked back at the Colonel... at Tara...

  He was finding it hard to focus his thoughts. He felt simultaneously as if he were in a glassy daze and at the same time as if every nerve and emotion had been laid bare and scraped raw... by terror, or relief, or exhilaration... or a mix of them; he was finding that could not really keep them separate in his mind, just now. He was finding it hard say anything, and at the same time hard to hold back any thoughts.

  "Colonel... Tara, if I may... this'll probably seem presumptuous coming from a fellow you only met today, but..."

  "Presume away. You rode in one of my tanks. That gives you certain privileges."

  Aran nodded. "If it's over, Colonel, then we can get out of our tanks. Take off the armor."

  The man was speaking to her, Tara saw, but looking to one side, where the female framer was shakily getting up from her knees, still looking down at the body of one of Tara's tankers. The dead man's face looked vaguely familiar to Tara... oh, yes... the boy, the Auxiliary Corps boy who Feldman had picked as a driver. One more face to remember, Tara thought, blinking to make sure her eyes stayed dry.

  "The armor?" Tara asked, looking back at Aran.

  "Take off the armor, Colonel. It's over. You can let yourself mourn them now."

  Tara said nothing, nodded, turned away before the man could see her tears start.

  33.

  The official news services were reporting the successful evacuation of UEN personnel in the face of an unprovoked Arcadian attack on UEN non-combatants and installations. The Permanent Oversight Council was sending out thundering denunciations of the Arcadian "criminals."

  But it would not, Bannerman knew, be enough to hide the disaster.

  In a way, Bannerman thought, the improvisation that had allowed the beleaguered UEN troops besieged inside the Arcadian gate dome to escape was just part of the disaster. Somehow they had managed to get one final burst of power from their portable power source, allowing them to open the gate for less than a minute. With no warning of the Tannhauser gate's opening, the UEN forces on the Earth side had been unable to get any reinforcements across in the 37 seconds that the gate had stayed open. It had been just enough time for a few hundred men, crowded to the point of asphyxiation into a single transit rail-car, to get back to Earth.

  Had those men not escaped, Bannerman knew, the task of information control would have been far easier; a bitter irony.

  As it was, there was no way to keep the information of the disaster from spreading. At best, the efforts of the UEN's Public Information Section would serve only to slow down the rate at which the news spread.

  There were too many information sources not fully under UEN control, too many rumors that contradicted the stories released by the Public Information Section. Too many people were hearing those rumors. And too many nations were all too happy to see the UEN fall on its face, and were making sure their news services made the reality of the situation known.

  Success would have made the UEN almost unassailable. Failure had made it look vulnerable, and the jackals were gathering.

  Bannerman instinctively looked around for Major Hafez, before cursing himself for a fool. His aide hadn't returned through the gate. He'd been in a forward position when the unexpected attack of Arcadian armor had struck. He was listed as missing in action, but Bannerman knew he'd never see Major Hafez again. One way or another.

  Reports were reaching him that the Arcadians we
re allowing the remains of the UEN forces, cut off in the Southern Wastes and at the gate dome facility, to surrender. No doubt those prisoners would be returned; the Arcadians could open the gate more or less when they chose, after all, and it was not their style to keep or execute their prisoners.

  The UEN could interfere with the gate, by compromising the vacuum chamber, for instance, but they could not prevent the Arcadians from sending word of their offer to return prisoners... via the orbital gate if not the surface gate. Bannerman strongly doubted that the member nations would go along with the UEN in preventing the return of soldiers they had entrusted to Peace Force service. Nor would they be likely to tolerate a cover-up of all of the returning prisoners. And having been seen to fail so spectacularly, the UEN now lacked, at least temporarily, the political clout and prestige to compel powerful member nations to simply obey. And once the prisoners were returned, he knew, even the pretense of publicly denying the disaster would be futile.

  He was alone in his office for now, but he knew that it wouldn't last. The order for him to report to the council for a secret accounting would be coming soon. It wouldn't be called an arrest, but he had no doubt that the order would be delivered by an officer with an armed guard, and that they would, as a "courtesy," relieve him of "burden" of carrying his personal wrist-phone and his sidearm.

  Perhaps they were already on their way.

  Or perhaps they were waiting. Major General Jose Salvator Bannerman liked to think of himself as an officer of the old school. And there was a protocol for an officer of that sort, for times like this.

  He stared at the pistol in his hand for a long time, thinking of other generals, in other times, who had come to such a place as this.

  UEN Peace Force Security Colonel Kim Dae-Won and his armed escort were walking up the corridor to General Bannerman's door when a single pistol shot sounded. Several staffers looked startled, shocked at the sound. A few looked scared. Colonel Kim, looking neither surprised nor upset, merely nodded once to himself.

  34.

  The battalion deployment was going well, for a change. All three companies were at full strength and no one had gotten lost. Thirty-six gleaming, new Type-78 "Morningstar" tanks had taken their positions with something close to perfection.

  On some irrational level, Tara missed the old War-Hammers, but the new tanks were better pretty much across the board; a new 47 megajoule gun, better armor, better sensors. They'd been developed by a joint Nipponese-Arcadian design team and had a pretty good claim to be the best tanks in the world... any world.

  The Defense Force had to have the best; there was no way to close the orbital gate. The best they could do was to watch it closely. And for that matter, there was no way to stop the UEN... or anyone... from opening a new orbital gate, one of these years. And while it was unlikely that the UEN could afford something like an outright space-based invasion again, unlikely wasn't the same as impossible.

  Still, the change in relations with the Pacific Alliance was a real achievement, she thought. Getting official recognition of Arcadian national sovereignty from the nations of the Pacific Alliance had probably been the greatest improvement since the end of the war.

  Earth sources were calling it the "Interstellar War," but that didn't sound right to Tara; it made it sound like the fighting had been about spaceships. It sounded fake, and the war had been bitterly real.

  She'd read an article that noted that the formal recognition and the work on a new Tannhauser gate between Australia and Arcadia were the "real prizes" of the war. She'd scoffed bitterly. The real prize of the war had been the same as it had been in 2070; survival... and freedom.

  Even so, she'd be happy if —or maybe it was 'when'— the new gate opened, in another 5 years or so. It would be nice to have access to Earth that wasn't on the territory of a UEN puppet-state like the FSNA.

  Of course the FSNA was still accepting bribes to allow trade. And the UEN was still condemning Arcadia as a rogue regime with no legitimacy and demanding its subordination to UEN oversight. Some things never changed.

  Off to her left, one of the new tanks from her own company's newly assigned 2nd Platoon popped its sensors operators' hatch and a man, anonymous in his tanker's data-interface helmet, pulled himself out and jumped down to the ground. Tara turned to look as it became clear that he was heading for her tank.

  "Something I can do for you, soldier?" she asked as he pulled himself up onto the bow of her tank.

  "Just wanted to personally report in, ma'am," said Aran, raising his visor. "I was hoping to see you privately before I got my first post-training assignment, but then I found out I was going to be in your company."

  "Aran!" Tara said, smiling in surprise. "So Bernie finally convinced you to join up?"

  "A while ago. I've been meaning to for a while, really. Since I decided to stay. But I wanted to finish the book first. Of course, I requested Armored Corps. Maybe I had something to prove to myself. At any rate, I proved that I could force myself to get back into a tank..."

  "You never were as smart as you looked, Aran," Tara replied, her smile faltering for a second, before she changed the subject.

  "How's Bernie?" she asked, "Still running that framer company?"

  "No. She's out on extended leave. She's... well, pregnant, actually."

  Now Tara grinned in earnest. "That's great, Aran! That's wonderful! Congratulations!"

  "Yeah, it's a bit amazing, really," Aran said. "I still can't get my head around it half the time."

  "You'll manage," Tara said. "I think it's good that you and Bernie are starting a family."

  "How about you, Tara?" Aran asked. "When are you going to settle down? And don't give me the 'too old' crap. You haven't seen the wrong side of forty E-years yet."

  "Not yet," Tara said, as if in agreement, and turned her gaze out to the broken, rocky land ahead of her.

  The parade the day before had been the official commemoration, her gleaming tanks rolling down the main boulevard past the Government Mall in Redstone. But for her, the real remembrance was here, where the fight had happened. She had driven her battalion out past the laser installation, to the ground where they had held.

  Out among the rocks and ridges stood two dozen polished stone pillars, each one engraved with names; a few with just one name, some with two or three, some with four. Feldman, Younger... Velazquez... Piper.... Behind every name was a memory of the dull, clawing pain; of knowing they were gone; of facing mothers, fathers, siblings, wives —worst of all, children— with the news of a place where their loved one would not be returning from. All the names were here. All in good company.

  Tara wiped her eyes and tried to blink her bleary sight clear as the huge setting sun caught the polished stone of the pillars, and made them shine, gleaming like armored tears.

  ...

  Appendices:

  Appendix 1:

  Structure of the Arcadian Defense Force:

  The Arcadian Defense Force is a military force consisting of a mix of professional career soldiers and short-term "conscripts" in the service of the government of Arcadia. The Defense Force as it currently exists evolved from a purely volunteer militia that was raised by the Arcadian colonists to deal with raids and attacks from so-called "bandits lords" who had emerged as the primary political power inside the largely neglected "economic refugee" camps set up by the UEN on Arcadia.

  The original Defense Force was a largely irregular and informal organization, with no set rank system, no standard issue gear and no central command structure. Within a period of a few years, however, it began to develop into a coherent and organized armed force, though one that remained relatively informal and retained a traditional aversion to extensive bureaucracy and staff operations. The Defense Force is a young organization (barely 25 Earth years old) and its informality and "stripped down" structure have, for good or ill, remained one of its hallmarks.

  The informality expresses itself in several ways. For instance, there is no soci
al correlation between rank and non-military status, and as a result, there is a marked lack of military ritual and formal deference between the ranks.

  Another aspect of the informality of the Defense Force is a relatively high "tooth to tail" ratio; combat units of the Defense Force do not maintain large numbers of "staff" or "planning" officers. Since the Defense Force was founded in an age where advanced, ubiquitous computing capability was a given, much of the role of traditional military "staff officers" is taken over by computers, an integrated Defense Force data-cloud and carefully designed "military operations staff" software agents.

  The validity of this approach has often been called into question, especially given the need to keep a lot of sensitive information out of the data-cloud due to concerns about info-warfare attack. None the less, a Defense Force combat unit will usually not have any dedicated intelligence, supply, administrative, operational or logistical staff officers. Instead, all these roles will be undertaken either "at a distance" by officers from the Supply Corps or the Technical Corps, or else will be handled "on site" by the line officers in charge of a given combat unit; a task that is made somewhat easier —or at least somewhat possible— by means of well designed and integrated computer planning systems.

  This lack of formal staff organization has been criticized —not least, by officers in the Defense Force— as militarily primitive and unprofessional, leading to excessive officer workloads and suboptimal outcomes in terms of contingency planning. However, to date, the innate flexibility and the deliberate lack of military bureaucracy (which a strong aspect of the Arcadian Defense Force military culture) that is inherent in this approach has been seen as outweighing the negatives.

  As noted above, the Defense Force does not have any innate social rank structure. There are no "officer academies" that graduate new officers with no prior active duty experience. Instead, all individuals serving in the Defense Force initially join as "conscript recruits" and may then be promoted. All Defense Force officers are thus promoted from soldiers who started as enlisted conscripts.