What that might do to the man inside the superconductive suit who was holding the rifle discharging that energy and wearing the transducer-management system ... that was another of those questions you just didn’t ask somebody from Eight Ball Command who’d come along to log the answers when he saw them.
In the time-honored jargon of English’s trade, it sucked. One guy strutting around some lab somewhere shooting pop-ups in a fun house was a whole lot different from fifty men whacking away at the enemy at will and random in an eight-klick strike zone. Nothing English had seen in his briefing material (which had said on its back cover, before he’d incinerated it personally, PLEASE DO NOT RETURN THIS DOCUMENT/EACH ACTIVITY IS RESPONSIBLE FOR DESTRUCTION OF THIS DOCUMENT ACCORDING TO APPLICABLE REGULATIONS) had treated items such as minimum distance between ELVIS packs, or what would happen if one suit-wearer-weapon system took friendly fire from another. No mention had been made of overload or malfunction conditions, either.
English shifted in his new hard suit gingerly, wishing it didn’t make him so nervous. In seven and a half minutes, they were going to put on their helmets at Sawyer’s signal and start jump check. Then the queasiness he felt would probably disappear. Like as not, his unsettled stomach and back-brain headache had more to do with the way command had fallen out than his hardware.
Sure. As soon as he couldn’t see Grant and Manning, huddled forward of the dropmaster, his gut would settle down. Then all he’d have to worry about was whether the Associate electronics in his helmet would override his damned all-com or his suit would short-circuit in a puddle and fry him where he landed. It was a rainy night down there on Bull’s-Eye, moonless, dark as a black hole, Manning had told them.
Nothing could have been darker than the look on the Intel officer’s face as Manning sat beside the Observer, watching Sawyer out of the corner of her eye.
English had done his best to alleviate the tension between her and Sawyer by separating them. Hadn’t helped. Maybe it would when they got on the ground. English was jumping with Sawyer and the 92nd, Manning was staying with Grant and the dropmaster and the pilot of the APC: the big Observer was along to drop, but not jump, with the grunts.
The APC was a “no-see-em” (NOCM: Nocturnal Operations Clandestine Module); it would sit at the pickup point, safe as its multisignature countermeasures could make it on a grid square designated Ten Ring, and from there the intelligence officer and the civilian observer would watch the whole thing via everybody’s in-suit collection electronics.
If you had a problem, this time, or some nonreg little glitch, you couldn’t just synchronize your helmets and wipe the data strip. This time, the whole go was on the record. Eight Ball Command wanted to see and hear everything that happened when the APOT system met the enemy for the first time. But it bothered English that the Observer wasn’t wearing the system and making the jump with them. Given the nature of the man, and his provenance, it said more about the dangers involved than had the manual English incinerated.
If the Observer had been old, lame, fat, blind, or somehow not jump qualifiable, it wouldn’t have felt so wrong to English, and he knew it. Not that the jump was standard, either. Nothing about this mission was standard. Grant didn’t want anybody hanging in the air in a chute—that was understandable. The insertions were per grid square, without the room for error you needed using chutes.
That wasn’t understandable.
But Grant had insisted, and English was in enough trouble already with the Observer. If he’d refused to lead the 92nd, somebody else, probably Sawyer, would have had to take his place. Grant had made that clear enough.
So two- and three-man teams were jumping with jet-packs, or on rappelling lines, in order to meet the surgically precise logistical requirements of Eight Ball Command’s hand-delivered orders.
English wasn’t sure the order of command would have held if he tested it up the line or in court, but he didn’t have any way to do that, and Padova had flat refused to let him query any marine brass on ship-to-ship frequencies. “Just do the operation, Toby, and don’t ask questions. You know better than this.” Padova had been positively paternal, squeezing his arm and giving him full-bore, concerned stares.
Damn, English just hated drop phase, and it never got any better, he told himself. If it wasn’t this screwy mission with its fuzzy parameters and last-minute command shake-ups, it would have been something else.
The APC was dropping free, vectored to masquerade as space junk burning into atmosphere on a self-destruct trajectory from the recent space battle above. The Khalian repair facility would be on heightened alert, but not for something dead and crashing.
Intelligence said the facility didn’t have enough muscle left operational to blast them out of existence during coast phase, unless it powered up one of the ships it had been repairing, which might have escaped the blanket of electronics-frying beams the Alliance had thrown over Bull’s-Eye when the space battle began. But you never knew for sure.
Sitting ducks sweat, and English’s 92nd was no exception. Usually, you had your helmet on by now. But these new systems had powerful magnetos, and nobody knew what-all powered up when the Associate helmets made their connections with the suit. So they sat exposed, everybody looking as ready as he could manage.
Maybe that was why the talk was so sparse and the edge on his men seemed so dull.
Or maybe it was all English’s imagination. He had more data—so he had more reason to worry—than anyone else except Grant and maybe Manning, who weren’t expecting to leave the safety of the APC.
Just as he was thinking about her, Manning got up from beside Grant and made her way, aft, bent over in her old-style suit, through the gauntlet of armored knees and stowed gear between them.
When she stopped before Sawyer, she was only a few meters from English, but he couldn’t hear what she whispered in Sawyer’s ear. English saw the black hard case she handed him, though. You couldn’t miss it.
English made a command decision to ignore whatever the hell it was that was going on. Sawyer would tell him if it was any of his business once they got out of this damned can.
He went back to worrying. The Associate AI was preset to detect Weasels—Weasels at a thousand meters; Weasels twenty meters belowground through solid concrete; any Weasel with a heat signature or a heartbeat. But English had no real familiarity with how that targeting was going to look through his heads-up visor display. He fingered the helmet between his knees, playing with the retractable faceplate, trying to wait patiently for the drop light to stop strobing, which would mean they were on-site for the first jumps.
But when Manning quit huddling with Sawyer, English couldn’t resist the temptation to try and do some damn thing to better the 92nd’s odds. “Hey, Manning,” he called softly, and everybody else shut up.
She straightened as best she could and said, “Captain?”
“You get me some wheels down there, Manning. I’ll carry your books.”
“We called for them, Captain,” she said, taking a cautious, backward step along the aisle of armored knees, “but you know how it is ...” She trailed off; English couldn’t see her face.
The civilian observer’s voice carried effortlessly all the way from the bulkhead separating the flight deck from the troops. “Your trucks are down there somewhere, marine. But knowing the Fleet’s efficiency,” Grant added, “the chances of them being within twenty klicks of where we’re going aren’t the kind I’d bet my life on.”
It wasn’t really what you wanted the men to hear, but English had started it. Still, smart-mouth critiques from an outsider just before going into combat ... English came up off the jump bench.
Sawyer’s big arm slapped him across the chest. It seemed like it could have been an accident, two men moving at the same time in the APC, both trying to get clear field of vision on somebody up front. English’s butt hit the bench again.
>
Sawyer was half out into the aisle and already saying, in a voice he reserved for body count and interrogation, “Bein’ our civilian observer, sir, we was hopin’ you might know if it’s true that Weasel technology is really a hundred years behind our own?” It wasn’t a question; it was a lateral escalation.
But the remark was alchemical: English slumped in his seat (forcing his hand away from his equipment belt and the good old-fashioned kinetic kill pistol nobody was going to take away from him), thankful for Sawyer’s intervention. If English was going to smoke Grant the Observer, there was plenty of time, and he needed either the confusion of battle or a better reason than not liking Grant’s critique of Fleet efficiency.
English wasn’t the only one whose mood was abruptly changed by the line lieutenant’s remark. His old squad started swapping recon jokes about Weasels and everybody began to loosen up.
Which was a goddamn gift from the Almighty, wherever He was billeted, this close to point and shoot.
Two minutes later, the red light stopped strobing. English came half out of his seat, marked the time, and reminded the 92nd, “Remember, we take the facility and hold it, with whatever prisoners we’ve got, until the militia from Bonaventure relieves us—that’s Plan A. Plan B’s the same, but we hose it down and reform at Ten Ring—”
“With the prisoners,” Grant added from forward.
“You heard the man,” English said and didn’t know he was smiling as he spoke. “The rest is through your all-com. Let’s get those helmets on ASAP when we’ve got burn ...”
Burn kicked in, and English let himself be pushed back onto the bench.
Controlled descent gave way to radar underflight in a matter of seconds. Every head was in its helmet now. Every hand checked its gloves and its gear bag and its APOT rifle and ELVIS pack and webbing.
Inside the Associate helmet, the world of the APC looked real different, but English could live with it. The left-side display gave him numbers and plot points for each of his men, voice actuated and voice identified: color-coded call signs that couldn’t be misconstrued.
The low-light filter made it seem like dusk in an Eirish glen. English ratcheted the filter through his settings and then began on his privacy channels and dual-coms, checking his presets.
“Sawyer?” he said, without a single convention. The Associate shunted him onto dual-com.
“Yo, boss,” came Sawyer’s reply, and a yellow bead above the digital number two shining from the com status grid projected onto English’s visor display, told the captain that his lieutenant had invoked privacy, as well as, because that dot was blinking, ISA encryption. “How ’bout that? This Associate really can read my mind. Cut a tenth of a second off my decision to tell you that Grant bastard’s due for a whole very uncomplimentary sentence to himself in my after-action report.”
“Delta Three, we’re on the record all the time,” English reminded his first officer formally. “That don’t mean I disagree with you.”
“Delta Two, sir,” Sawyer came back. “Let’s get these dogies movin’ ... if you’re ready, sir.”
All-com came up so fast that English wasn’t sure he’d actually had time to toggle it; could be, like the book on this equipment had said, the Associate took its cues from his neural firings.
And then English heard a voice he didn’t know, a voice he’d never heard in his life and wished to hell he’d never hear again. It was clear, uninflected, and it sounded more like a computer information system giving him an old girlfriend’s new phone number on-planet than anything else he’d ever heard.
But it wasn’t giving him data he’d requested; it was giving him orders. And it wasn’t coming from a planetary source; it was coming from the Associate (Command Pull Down) module in his helmet. It said—on all-com to everybody under English’s command—“Delta One to Redhorse. Deploy Alpha Team One-One, sixteen seconds. Fifteen. Fourteen ...”
“Shit,” said Sawyer, in the dual-com through which they could both talk at once without the primary speaker overriding the contactee. “That’s my job—”
English swore and said, “It’s not me; it’s the damned Associate.” Delta One was the call sign reserved for the APC, through which could come orders from off-planet, the Observer’s comments, and possibly critical Intel reports from Manning. He slapped the privacy toggle to make sure it was engaged, too rattled to deal with the complexities of his new visual displays. “Let’s ride this out till we get groundside, Sawyer. Every damned piece of equipment this man’s Alliance makes has got an override.”
“I hope to hell so,” Sawyer said with a grunt as he rose to check the rappellers. The dropmaster opened the bay door. “Nobody wants a commander he can’t frag if it comes to it.”
English said nothing. He was working on his own group of unwelcome reactions. He didn’t want to hit the ground so spiked. He told himself that the Associate wouldn’t have entered the circuit if he and Sawyer had been up and running, doing their jobs to the split second as they should have been. Then he concentrated on lowering his pulse rate and staying a full two seconds ahead of every step in the deployment of pairs and three-teams that remained to be executed before he himself jet-dropped into whatever Bull’s-Eye had to offer.
* * *
Jumping with jet-pack assist and heavy gear from a low-flying APC had never been English’s choice for a thrill. The gravity of Bull’s-Eye was an eighth lighter than home world standard, so that was some help. It was also as dark as the inside of a Weasel’s belly, so English was going to give Manning one point.
Was, until he and Sawyer landed spot-on where they were supposed to, and nothing resembling a command jeep was there or anywhere within the Associate’s sensing range. Or range of the hand-held scanner, either. So he took away Manning’s point.
That left the score on touchdown: Weasels, zero; Redhorse, zero; Fleet Intel, zero; and Eight Ball Command, one (since they’d done one hell of a job positioning the strike force, as far as grid coordinates went).
English and Sawyer had been in constant contact with the 92nd and every pair and three-team spread out over the five-klick grid was exactly where it was supposed to be, and seeing precisely what it was supposed to be seeing. The only bitch was that the damned Associates were keeping the men on schedule with inhuman precision, and the voices in their ears were spooking marines who just didn’t spook easy.
There’d been nothing in the manual about the distracting effect of having some machine tell you when to duck and when to run, when to turn to the right and when the left, and when to sight down your weapon’s barrel.
By the time Omega got into a shooting situation, everybody was so tense that English had decided to take back the point he’d given Grant on his mental scoreboard.
He and Sawyer were working their way through knee-deep mud that looked like sludgy blood in his night-enhanced vision, listening on all-com and dual-com at the same time, so they could hear everybody’s heavy breathing and swearing and hear when it stopped dead because Omega had walked right into a social situation.
All this tech, and the Associate couldn’t project a better holo of Omega’s situation than English’s old and trusted gear could have done. He flipped through the logistical and tactical grids and couldn’t find what he wanted. At last, he asked generally, “Can’t this damned system show me what’s happening at Omega’s plot point?”
And wham! Up came a split-screen view of what the two Omega marines were seeing through their helmets that entirely blocked out little items like the ground in front of English and where the hell he was and what was happening with the rest of his men.
Blind and surprised, he stumbled on something and went to his knees.
“Captain, you all right?” came Sawyer’s voice in his ears.
Conscious that everything he said would be on the permanent record for some subcommittee somewhere to ponder, English spoke ver
y slowly. “Delta Three, I’m fine. Except I can’t see a damned thing except what Omega’s seeing as they engage the enemy, and that’s mostly trees and muzzle flash that screws up the video. I’m going to disengage this system and go back to as close as I can get to what my old, low-tech stuff would have given me—something a man can use and has got a right to expect in combat.”
He was sitting on his ass in the mud now, breathing heavily and shaking with suppressed emotion. He could hear his heart beating, and it was louder to him than the sounds being shunted to his helmet from the twenty other locations his command system was monitoring.
When his trembling fingers had found the right toggle and banished the holo display from his faceplate so that he could see what was in front of him, Sawyer said, “Hey sir, did you hear what Omega said about that firefight?”
“No, I was too busy with my goddamned toys,” English growled.
“They said they couldn’t pinpoint the enemy. It was like the shooters were invisible or robots or something. Plenty of bang, plenty of muzzle flash, but no Khalians.”
“What the fuck?” English came to his feet, sliding in the mud. “Invisible?”
Through a clear faceplate overtraced with grid lines, English saw Sawyer shrug fatalistically, a huge and ominous shadow against the electronically paled night, which seemed to be burning in the distance. “Don’t know, sir. What say we go get into some trouble and find out?”
“Soon as we can call this quadrant swept for the record, Sawyer.” Elaborately, English circled in place, tapping scans on his overqualified snooper gear. When he’d done his 360, he enunciated clearly, “Well, would you look at that, Sergeant—I mean Lieutenant Sawyer? The Associate program pronounces this section of the grid clear of Khalians. Proceed, mister, to Square Thirty-eight, by the fastest route.”
The Fleet Book Three: Break Through Page 29