Planetside

by Michael Mammay

  The Goat’s engine whined, and the queasy movement in my stomach told me we’d lifted off the ground a meter or so. When we started moving forward my restraining belts dug into my shoulders until our speed normalized. I glanced out the window and watched the blurry base disappear, but there wasn’t much to see. The browns of this part of Cappa melded into one endless blur. I leaned my head back and closed my eyes.

  “Checkpoint one.” The lieutenant again. The first time they’d made a radio call and we’d been traveling nearly ten minutes. Good discipline. A quiet radio was a mark of a veteran unit. The enemy couldn’t crack the transmissions, but they could track the energy that pushed the signal. Best to keep conversation to a minimum, even on a cleared route.

  We passed two more checkpoints without incident. We’d pass seven before we hit our destination, based on the holo map Politte showed before we left. My head started to bob a bit. I’d been amped up when we started out, but quickly fell back into the routine, and the gentle motion and white noise of the Goat lulled me to sleep.

  I’d just drifted off when an explosion jarred me instantly alert . . . a slight concussion shaking the vehicle. Nothing had hit us, but something came close. My heart slammed against my chest the way it does when you’re jolted awake. For the length of a breath the radio remained silent, and it pounded rapidly, echoing in my ears.

  Then the net exploded with voices.

  “What the fuck!” Belham, on internal. “Lieutenant’s hit. Contact, right front. Return fire.” The big gun above me rattled into action, adding a new vibration to the Goat, almost shaking it.

  “Driver bear right, give them the front armor!” Belham again.

  “Goat Two, get past the lead vehicle and secure the front.” This time Belham broadcasted over the platoon frequency. With the lieutenant hit, he’d quickly taken over the battle, another sign of a veteran unit. The different communications in my helmet jumbled with each other, but I pieced it together.

  The vehicle jerked to the right, jamming me back into my seat and into the soldier to my right at the same time. I tried to breathe in deeply through my nose, calm myself, keep the adrenaline from taking over. I couldn’t do anything from the back of the vehicle, but I needed a clear head for when the moment came.

  “Roger, Three. I can’t see where the fire’s coming from.” A response from the distant end of the radio.

  “Don’t worry about the fire. Get up there!” Belham spoke firmly and with authority, but kept his voice under control.

  “Roger. Moving.”

  Bullets slapped against our armor on the side away from me, and my heart started pounding again. Being strapped into the back of a vehicle with a battle going on, unable to see, is a helpless feeling. I wanted to be where I could visualize the fight, where I could act. Instead, I tried not to get slammed into anything too painful as the Goat dipped and turned again.

  “Dammit, sergeant, they’re in two places!” The gunner, I think. Impossible to say for sure once people get chattering on radio and internal at the same time, unless you know the voice.

  “Keep fire on the rocket position. Don’t worry about the small arms,” said Belham. “Goat Four, suppress right. We need to get up to the LT.”

  “Roger.” A pulse weapon whined behind us. The platoon probably had heavy conventional weapons and pulse guns on alternating vehicles. I should have checked before we left. The heavy vehicle-mounted pulse would do a good job suppressing enemy dismounted troops. It drained a lot of power, but the Goat had that to spare.

  “Blue Leader, status.” Belham, calling to the lieutenant.

  “Leader’s down. Multiple wounded,” came the response.

  “Can you move?” asked Belham.

  “Negative, Three. We’re cold.” I didn’t know the voice, but from context it had to be someone in the lead vehicle. The one that got hit. Multiple casualties and an inoperable vehicle on a cleared route. Not good. I slammed my fist into my hand in front of my face. I wasn’t pissed that we got hit, but rather that I’d thought we wouldn’t. I’d been away from combat, and it had dulled my thinking. I grabbed my belts and almost took them off when the vehicle lurched forward again, and I thought better of it.

  “Dammit,” said Belham on internal. “Move us up. Prepare to dismount. Pull the casualties out and load as many as we can fit.”

  “Blue Four, this is Blue Three,” Belham transmitted. “Continue to suppress, but follow me up to Leader. Prepare to take on casualties.”

  “Roger Three. On your lead.”

  We sped forward, then jerked to a stop. “Ramp!” The man next to me slapped the button for the door and it whooshed down. I hit the release on my belts and followed my lead man out, three of us to each side in a standard dismount. My team had the side away from the immediate fire. That made us the rescue team, the other three the suppression. Thank the Mother of Planets for standardization. Everyone did things the same way, which made it easy for newcomers to the unit like me and Mac.

  One of the soldiers next to me gave a hand signal to the other, preparing to move. I followed them forward to the smoking Goat in front of us, now pitched on its side at an ominous angle. If the soldiers were surprised that I followed, neither of them stopped to say so. We hit the ground at the front of the vehicle, kicking up dust and taking prone positions in the scraggly brown grass. Bullets cracked through the air nearby, but not so close that we needed to worry. The acrid tang of the burning vehicle bit at my nose, so I lowered my visor and triggered the air filter in my helmet with a flick of my eyes. A low whir began behind my ears and the clean air pushed out the caustic fumes.

  “Load everyone. We need to get the package back to base, we’ll MEDEVAC from there.” Belham over the radio. It took me a moment to realize he meant me when he said “package.”

  What.

  The.

  Fuck.

  He intended to pull out and put guys at risk on my account? No fucking way. If we loaded the casualties and bailed out, it meant more time before they got treatment. More chance they wouldn’t make it.

  I got up from the prone position and hurried around the front of our vehicle. Bullets flew down from the rocky hill that dominated the area and ripped into the side of the Goat, flashing against the armor. I dove for the dirt. My elbow banged on a small rock, shooting a burst of pain down to my fingers.

  I spotted the source of the fire quickly, catching a glimpse of a mottled blue face poking out from behind a spiky rock that jutted out of the steep, brown hill. The enemy had picked their ambush site well. Two Cappans continued to fire from a hundred and fifty meters away, maybe forty meters higher than us. I brought my rifle up to return fire but by the time I got it there they had disappeared.

  I struggled back to my feet after a few seconds, feeling stupid. The bullets had never been meant for me. Too high. They might have been trying to hit the gunner, who continued to rip off heavy rounds at a high rate from his position up in the turret. My senses were off, my reactions too slow.

  I ran four quick steps and caught Belham as he dismounted from the front of the vehicle.

  “What the hell are you doing?” I grabbed his kit and got in his face, yelling so he could hear me over the guns and radios.

  Belham opened a private channel to me. “Sir! What are you doing? Get down!” The gunner fired a long burst mostly drowning him out, but I got the gist of it. I dropped to one knee and he followed me down.

  “Why are we withdrawing? We need to secure the area and call for MEDEVAC.”

  “Sir, we need to get you—”

  “Fuck that!” I cut him off. “We fight through, destroy the enemy, and get our people out. You hear me?”

  Belham hesitated for maybe a heartbeat. “Yes, sir!”

  His voice came over the platoon net. “Blue Four, Blue Two, assault through the enemy. Blue One, lay down suppressive fire. Everyone get your dismounted troops in the fight. Dismounts follow Goats Four and Two’s move.” With that, the soldiers who came out of
the back of the Goats—the dismounts—sprinted into action.

  Belham looked at me.

  I waved him away. “Go! You take the dismounts. I’ll help with the wounded.” Every part of me screamed to join the fight, but that would distract Belham. He needed to lead his troops, not babysit a colonel. He turned and sprinted after the two vehicles, rifle in both hands. I flipped to the company radio net and called to headquarters to give them our coordinates and request air support.

  Seven minutes, they replied.

  A lifetime.

  I wasn’t being poetic, either. For some of these soldiers, it could be all they had left in their lives.

  I ran back toward the overturned vehicle, ignoring the fire around me this time. Nothing close enough to matter. The initial rocket had shredded the front of the vehicle. Three soldiers struggled to pull the platoon leader out of the mangled, half-open door of the passenger’s side. I grabbed on to the jagged metal and pulled, trying to give them another few centimeters. They finally pulled a bloody mess of a body through the gap, their backs exposed to the enemy as they did it.

  The four of us carried Politte around to the safe side of the vehicle, putting it between us and the bad guys. The fire had shifted away, focused on the assault force, but we didn’t take any chances, in case it started up again.

  It didn’t matter to Politte. He’d bled out.

  Shit.

  I knelt down and wiped my bloody hands and forearms on the dirt and thin grass, smearing it and coating myself in reddish-brown mud rather than getting clean.

  Hardy lay in a line with the other wounded. They’d evacuated the injured before the dead. Cold, but proper procedure. He bled some from his shoulder, more from his hip, where a piece of bone jutted out, startling white against the crimson wound. A medic hunched over him.

  Hardy had his eyes closed, but he seemed to sense me as I walked up, turned his head slightly in my direction. “I’m sorry, sir.”

  “It’s not your fault . . .” I wanted to say more—a lot more—explain the randomness of battle, but I had to turn away before I choked up. I couldn’t let a wounded man see that.

  “I put him under,” said the medic, a few seconds later. Mini-stasis, we called it. It would slow Hardy’s body and his wounds, knock him out so the medic could work.

  I nodded without looking back, and walked away. I didn’t trust myself to speak.

  Chapter Fifteen

  I stood next to Belham, unable to hear anything across my headset for a moment as the engines of the MEDEVAC ship screamed on takeoff. We stood out of the blast area, but barely, and the heat singed my face enough to make me turn away. Five of our team left with the ship. Two dead, including Lieutenant Politte, and three wounded, including Hardy, who along with his shattered hip had lost a lot of blood. I still couldn’t believe his dumb ass apologized to me, like it was his fault somehow.

  The evac bird disappeared through a small bank of clouds, leaving an empty silence in its wake. When I spoke, I found myself almost yelling at first, even though I no longer needed to. “Continue to the objective or back to base?” I asked Belham.

  He took his helmet off and held it in the crook of his arm. “Back to base.”

  Not the answer I expected. If I thought he would quit on the mission, I might not have given him an option. But I couldn’t go back on it after asking. “You sure?”

  “Yessir.” Belham drew out his “s” and turned it almost into a z-sound, running the words together so they sounded like one. “There’s something wrong here. This attack . . . it smells funny. This was a cleared route.”

  “Cleared routes get hit sometimes,” I said.

  He paused. “That’s not it, though, sir.” Something flashed across his face. Confusion? “The Cappans . . . they don’t attack like this. A sustained ambush where we can bring our firepower to bear? This never happens. We killed nineteen of them. No saying how many we injured that got away.” Not that the injuries really mattered: Cappans had superb healing capabilities and could block out almost all pain. If you didn’t kill them, they almost always got away. Or kept fighting.

  I thought about it. I’d never seen it before either. Not since the early days, when they learned their lesson about head-on confrontations. After that, they tended to stick to hit-and-run tactics. But I hadn’t been here recently, so Belham had newer information. “That does seem unusual. They haven’t been attacking like this?”

  He met my eyes. “Never, sir.”

  I chewed on my bottom lip. “What do you think it means?”

  “I don’t know, sir. But I don’t want to push on until I have a chance to think it through. Talk to Intel.”

  I considered it, then nodded. “Okay. Back to base.”

  “Besides, sir, there are some guys back there I think you’re going to want to talk to.”

  “I talked to everybody yesterday,” I said.

  Belham gave me a flat smile. “Not everyone, sir. You only talked to the guys on your list.”

  “And some of them lied to me.” I took a shot in the dark hoping to get lucky. Maybe he wanted to tell me something. Firefights had strange effects on people, changed the way they thought about things, sometimes.

  He shrugged. “Maybe. But none of them knew anything anyway. None of the people you talked to saw anything.”

  “But somebody else did?”

  Belham raised his eyebrows. “There are two soldiers you need to talk to, sir.”

  “Why didn’t you . . .” I’d raised my voice, so I cut myself off, and when I spoke again, I controlled my tone. My words still contained a bit more venom than I intended. “Why didn’t you tell me this before?”

  Belham turned and started walking away from the nearest pair of soldiers, gesturing for me to follow. “No offense intended here, sir. But you showed up from headquarters in your shiny new body armor. We didn’t know why you were here, but come on. Colonels from outside don’t show up to help.”

  I paused, then I chuckled. “Yeah. I get it. I’m from your higher headquarters and I’m here to help. So what changed?”

  Belham stopped and gestured at some of the men to load up. “You’re one of us, sir.”

  I nodded. “Thanks.”

  “Thank you, sir. I didn’t think about air support. And if we had bugged out instead of fighting through and didn’t get the MEDEVAC, I’m not sure Jacobsen would have survived the ride.”

  I nodded again. “Okay. So back to base, I talk to your people, and then what?”

  “Then I try to figure out how the bastards knew we were coming,” said Belham.

  True to his word, Belham ushered two soldiers to meet me a few hours after we got back. We’d all had time to do our after-action reviews and clean up, but not much more than that. Belham didn’t want me to talk to them in the headquarters, so he set me up behind one of the vehicles in the motor pool to give us some privacy. The sun hung barely over the horizon, casting long shadows and painting the world with a reddish tint. With the cooler evening air and a slight breeze blowing—and the fact that no one was shooting at me—I’d finally stopped sweating.

  He brought me a small wooden stool that someone had taped a foam pad to for me to sit on—perks of rank, I suppose. The soldiers—Essenbach and Xiang—stood, their backs to the vehicle shading them from the remaining sunlight. Both of them fidgeted, like they’d rather be somewhere else. They were the same height, and while it was hard to tell while seated, I figured I’d look them in the eye pretty evenly if I stood. Essenbach wore her service cap over her blonde hair, while Xiang had taken his off. His short black hair rippled slightly in the breeze.

  “You want them together or separate?” asked Belham.

  “We can start together,” I answered. “I can take them separately later to get official statements.”

  “Roger that, sir. You two answer whatever the colonel asks, you hear me?”

  “Yes, Sergeant!” The two soldiers answered in unison.

  “Relax,” I told them,
once Belham left us. They didn’t change posture at all. Privates tended to have a tough time slouching in the presence of colonels, even when given the opportunity. “You can lean against the vehicle, if you want.”

  Neither of them moved.

  “Okay then,” I said. “Your platoon sergeant says you know something about Lieutenant Mallot.”

  They glanced at each other, as if silently discussing who would speak. Xiang won. Or lost. I’m not sure which. “Yes, sir. Where should we start?”

  “Why don’t you start from the beginning? Tell me what happened on the patrol.”

  Xiang nodded. “Yes, sir. It was at a different base camp. We were augmenting the special forces, providing perimeter guard, convoy security, those types of things.”

  “Right.” I’d read that much in the report, but I didn’t let them know that. Better to have them tell me the whole thing in their own words.

  “We were out on a patrol, on foot, escorting a few of the operators out to a Cappan camp to do some training. We had some of the friendly Caps with us, walking up front. We got hit hard. Command-detonated mines—you know, remote controlled—and a couple of heavy weapons opened up. They really pinned us down good. LT went down in the initial mine strike, which hit the middle of our column. Blew part of his leg clean off. I remember seeing his boot laying there. The firefight lasted pretty long, until we got air support in, then the enemy bugged out.”

  Everything he said matched the earlier reports. “What happened next?” I asked.

  “One of the special ops guys, a captain—”

  “Captain Sessma,” interjected Essenbach.

  “Right, Sessma,” said Xiang. “He started yelling at one of the friendly Cappans on the patrol.”

  “What did he say?” I asked.

  “I couldn’t tell, sir. He had his translator on and I didn’t have mine.”

  “But he was yelling?”

  “Yes, sir,” said Xiang. “For sure. Yelling and walking forward, and the Cappan was talking too, but backing away. I think the captain was blaming him for us getting hit. We took seven casualties and the captain was pissed. But three of the seven were Cappan, so I don’t know why he was yelling at them. They’d lost some of theirs, too.”