by Richard Fox
“Assuming the Damocles doesn’t wipe out everything south of Sunshine Coast first,” Sigmund said.
“Which is why you all had better get this done right the first time,” Ibarra said. “The cloak field around this airship gondola is weak, and using it will suck the batteries dry in hours. No weight or power allowance for life-support systems. You four will need to go in boxed.”
“Jesus,” Digger said, shaking her helm.
“Manually steer the ship to the Damocles and board it,” Ibarra said. “At which point you’ll use a mining explosive provided gratis by the Ibarra Corporation to take out the enemy ship. Then you exfiltrate—before the earth-shattering kaboom. For your sake.”
“The Damocles is miles high,” Roy said. “Over the ocean. In enemy territory. Just how will we ‘exfiltrate’?”
“You all have used the Q-11 rocket packs?” Ibarra asked. “Just lock them on to your Armor and use them to arrest your fall after you’ve hit terminal velocity. You’re all as aerodynamic as bricks, but you won’t pass through enough atmosphere to risk burning up. Always look on the bright side of life, yes?”
“The Q-11s are for low- or no-atmosphere entry,” Sigmund said. “Landing on Luna or Mars. Not Earth.”
“They’ll work.” Ibarra held a hand up to his ear. “Jerry, rerun those calculations for the Q-11s…partly cloudy, yes…Yes!” Ibarra looked up and smiled. “You’ll have an eight-second window to activate your Q-11s and land within tolerances of your Armor.”
“And if we don’t?” Digger asked.
“You won’t be around to leave a product review,” Ibarra said and shrugged.
“Almost as bad as the scram jets,” Roy said.
“And where do we land…given your generous window?” Digger asked.
“Sigmund has that information,” Ibarra said quickly. “Would you believe that there’s classified information the Union doesn’t want to share with me? Me. Marc friggin’ Ibarra. I’m almost offended.”
“The Union will get us out,” Sigmund said, “so long as we don’t land in the ocean.”
“The South Pacific is mostly ocean,” Digger deadpanned.
“Worry about accomplishing the mission first,” Sigmund said, “then we worry about surviving it.”
“Generous bastard, ain’t he?” Payne quipped.
“One of you will be rigged up to the controls,” Ibarra said. “You’ve got anti-grav impellers, hard to track—which is why the Chi-Com are using them for the Damocles. Stay cloaked and you should make it in undetected. Who’s it going to be?”
“Me,” Sigmund said. “Get us up there, Ibarra.”
“Don’t forget your jet packs,” Ibarra said as he made for the door. “I’m heading home. Not that I don’t think you all can get it done…I have a dental appointment back in Phoenix. Yes. That’s the ticket. Good luck, boys and girls.”
The hangar opened and technicians filed in.
“Go for tight travel configuration,” Sigmund said. “They’ll slot us.”
Chapter 12
Suggesting to anyone that they climb in a coffin, be buried, and trust that someone would come around and let them out at some point in the future was a hard sell. But this was where the Telemark Lance found itself: their Armor folded against itself into a long rectangle and packed on top of each other like cordwood within the cargo carrier.
Roy watched their course plot on his HUD, the anti-grav impellers taking them over the Great Barrier Reef at a fair pace. He almost felt like he was on an airline flight, watching the red line connecting them from their point of departure grow longer and longer as time passed.
Being in the pod while his Armor was in transport configuration felt better than when he was stuck in his last suit. Now he had a way out. A purpose and destination. Immeasurably better than waiting for rescue or succumbing to madness or oxygen deprivation.
At Fort Knox, the highest rate of washouts came from the frequent pod trials the cadre inflicted on the cadets. At any time during the training, young men and women could be sent to a sensory-deprivation pod—essentially a tank filled with very salty water—and locked inside. With no warning for how long they’d be in there, the cadets knew that panicking or demanding to be let out was an instant “loss of motivation” failure.
Roy thought back to the aftermath of one such test. He wasn’t exactly sure how long he’d been in—he’d had at least three nutrient-paste meals (the cadre changed up the time between meals to throw off any attempts at tracking time)—but his body was weak, his skin drained to the consistency of a raisin by the salt. He’d gotten out, dried off…and the cadre immediately directed him to another pod.
Now, doing his best sardine impression with his ad-hoc lance, he appreciated that training. The cadre had been brutal during selection, but the quote the head instructor, the German Carius, kept repeating—“the best form of welfare for the troops was first-class training”—made even more sense now. Roy had been too gripped in fear and adrenaline during his time in the outback to appreciate what he’d gone through at Knox.
“Oy!” A picture of Payne came up on his HUD, an older photo of him in uniform, smiling, head and shoulders in front of an Australian flag, the sort taken before a deployment to be used by public affairs in case they needed to make you a hometown hero. But every soldier knew what they were—a record of how you looked before you might be killed in battle. The Payne Roy knew was a shallow wreck compared to the vibrant man in the photo.
“Oy, maybe a stop at Bali?” he asked. “Haven’t been there since I was a kid.”
“That’s nowhere near where we’re going.” A new photo came up, one of Digger in the same pose and uniform, but without the smile or the tattoo. “And the Chi-com wrecked all the resorts to turn it into a logistics base to support the occupation. Well…maybe a visit is in order.”
The images of the two Armor on his HUD were so at odds with who they were now. He tried to fathom just how they’d changed so much…and realized he barely knew them at all.
“Where are you two from?” Roy asked.
“Adelaide,” Payne said. “Bit of a shit town, but it did me right growing up. Me mum made soap, sold it to hotels and whatnot. Pa did labor…when he was working. You ever travel much, seppo?”
Roy checked the connection to Sigmund. The lance commander was monitoring the channel among all four suits, but he was the only one navigating and hadn’t spoken in hours.
“Not too much,” Roy said. “Saw a lot of the Rockies up and down Utah and Arizona. Training at Knox was the farthest I’d ever been from home…until recently.”
“Huh…thought you Americans were the richest ones of the Union,” Payne said.
“Low bar to clear,” Roy said. “With all the reconstruction on the West Coast from the war and the Depression in the fifties…in my neighborhood, you were ‘rich’ if you had a data slate that was only a couple years old. And having seven brothers and sisters didn’t make for bountiful Christmas mornings.”
“Seven?” Digger asked. “Your mum had a bloody litter.”
“I’ve got thirty cousins. I was lucky if my grandparents even remembered who I was. But that’s Utah.” Roy shrugged within his pod. “How about you, Digger? Where you from?”
There was a long pause.
“Darwin,” she finally said. “Born and raised. I never got far beyond the city until I was drafted. First time I left the country was to deploy to Taiwan for that shit show.”
“Oh…” Roy hesitated, unsure if he should question further.
“I was there for all of it,” she said. “The first landings south of Kaohsiung City and the drive north. Saw the linkup between our forces and the Americans at Miaoli. What a crock that was. Everyone saying we had the Chi-com force on the ropes when we met up with the Yanks. Remember that, Payne?”
“Yeah,” he said. “News feed made it sound like we’d broke through the Reds. But they were pushing hard on us from the south. They were trying to run us down.”
“I heard about that,” Roy said. “This was before their major offensive across Japan, right? When the Chi-com took Okinawa and Kagoshima.”
“Heard about it, did you?” Digger asked, her words dripping with sarcasm. “Payne and I were there,” she said evenly. “Both of us were on the Shulin line when the offensive started. We held out for a good week…lost mates. Then the American 8th Division on our Corps’ right flank broke and ran. You know what happened next, Roy?”
The question was loaded with poison, but Roy answered anyway. “I wasn’t there…but a typhoon was coming in that had all the close air-support assets on the other coast in Yilan grounded. The Chinese made a push with their Dragon Armor and broke through the 8th Division. Then the entire front collapsed.”
“Dragon and a couple hundred thousand infantry came through the breach,” Digger said. “Command and control turned into a dog’s dinner. It was a rout. The last thing we got from Corps HQ was…you remember it, Payne?”
“‘All personnel evacuate to Yilan. Stop and you die,’” Payne said.
“We got that word just as the typhoon hit,” Digger said. “There are mountains between Taipei and Yilan. Bloody big-arse ones. Payne and me got in a cargo truck we nicked from a local, loaded it up with everyone we could, and started driving. Got about a kilometer before we had to give that up because Dragon were in the hills. They shot up any vehicle that was moving. See, weather treats everyone the same. The Chi-com infantry were sucking just as hard as we were in the wind and rainstorms. We’re all in Armor now. We know just how easy it was for the Dragon to run around and fuck shit up as they liked. Those cunts.”
“We…we hit back,” Payne said.
“One shot from an antitank missile convinced the Dragons to back off. Course, it was our only shot. What was the name of the shooter? Good bloke.”
“Ma,” Payne said.
“Fair dinkum. Ma…his parents were born in China, but he was just as Aussie as any of us. We kept joking with him that he should’ve just stripped down to his skivvies, borrowed some clothes, and run off into the countryside. He would’ve fit right in.”
“’Cept he didn’t speak a word of Chinese,” Payne said.
“Ha! That’s right. Kept whining about how his mum was right and he should’ve gone back to work the family farm when he was a kid and learned the language…good bloke. Where’d we lose him?”
“Drowned at the river. Yeah?”
“Yeah…took us all night to get to the Beishi River. Engineers had a pontoon bridge set up…didn’t look like much in that storm, but it was a way across. The Americans had control over it. They made sure their people crossed first.”
“There was an inquest,” Sigmund said. “The Pentagon picked apart every detail of the Fall of Taipei, and the order of march across the Beishi River was done as best as could be expected in that mess. The engineers didn’t care what uniform anyone was wearing.”
“Look who decided to chime in. The Americans cleared themselves. How nice,” Digger said. “I was there. Almost came to blows before one of the Yank commanders volunteered to set up a cordon around the bridgehead…let us Aussies finally get across.”
“Didn’t…didn’t the Chi-com blow the dam?” Roy asked.
“They did…” Digger trailed off. “We heard the explosion after we crossed the bridge…thought it was thunder from the typhoon, which isn’t how those storms work. Should’ve been a warning. Then the water started rising. Thought it was just a surge from all the rain, then this wall comes in…like a wave at Bells Beach. Took out the bridge while it was chockful of soldiers. Ma was on it. Flood swept up the banks and nearly took me away, but Payne had ahold of me.”
“No one else got across,” Payne said.
“That’s right,” Digger continued. “Most of the Expeditionary Corps was on the wrong side of the river. They had to fight in place against Dragons until…well, there wasn’t any ‘until.’ Storm was in full force by then. Those that got across kept moving. Stop and you die, eh, Payne?
“It was another forty kilometers on foot. Thought we caught a break when the eye of the storm passed over. Tried to make up time, but that’s when the Dragons caught up to us. They must’ve had a battalion of Armor across the river before they blew the bridge. Not like the mountains were much of an obstacle to them.”
“Get to the port,” Payne said, detached. “Get them to the ship.”
“I took a hit just outside the city,” Digger said. “Shot through the flank. Bleeding like a stuck pig. Payne patched me up and carried me the whole rest of the way.”
“I left mates behind,” Payne said.
“You did more than anyone could ask, mate,” she said. “He’d taken some shrapnel along the way. The scars on his back look like a cracked windshield. I blacked out on the way. Came to on a fishing boat trying to steer out of the harbor during the tail end of the typhoon. Only a couple boats made it…how many, Payne?”
“One thousand ninety-four,” he said.
“Out of a corps of fifty thousand that fought in Taiwan…that’s how many made it home,” she said.
“The Americans lost similar numbers,” Sigmund said.
“Piss off,” Digger snapped. “Shouldn’t have been any Australians dying on Taiwan. Wasn’t our fight. We got dragged into another war our ‘allies’ needed us to die in.”
“Don’t…mate,” Payne said. “Don’t say that about our history. We’ve fought hard and won since the days of ANZAC. And we were never fighting for the Yanks, or for the Taiwanese. We fought for each other. For our mates. Always been that way for us.”
“And it’s that sort of thinking that…no, you’re right, Payne.” Digger’s icon changed as she opened a closed channel to the other Light Horse soldier. The two icons pulsed as they spoke. As the lance commander, Sigmund could have monitored or cut in if needed, but his icon remained still. Silent.
“Sorry,” Digger said. “Had to set myself right with Payne. Aussie business. Where was I? The Chi-com…they made sure we paid for getting in the way of their new empire. I got put on convalescent leave back home to Darwin. Some shrapnel worked its way into my spine and I had to learn to walk again, kept me off my feet for a month. Payne did a stint in the hospital for combat fatigue.
“I was almost set to return to active duty when the Chi-com hit Darwin. They captured the city in less than two days. I…couldn’t put up much of a fight, not when I could barely hobble around my parents’ house. Had to keep me being in the armed forces a secret, as anyone the Chi-com could identify as being current or former military got a trip to a slit trench and a free bullet.”
“I can’t imagine,” Roy said. “They took Honolulu and Anchorage around the same time…which the Commies came to regret.”
“They held those cities for less than a month,” Digger said. “Then you Yanks finally remembered how to fight a real war. Wasn’t like clearing out daesh from Europe. Took you long enough to get them out of Nome, didn’t it? I was in Darwin for over a year. Didn’t play nice. Didn’t accept my role as a proletariat finally free of the yoke of capitalism blah blah bullshit. Got this brand for ‘illegal market activity.’ Traded potatoes out of the family garden for a kilo of salt. Got sent to a reeducation camp out in the Northern Territory where they were going to work me to death or just let me starve in the desert.”
“How’d you get out?” Roy asked.
“Payne found me,” she said. “He volunteered for the Armor Corps after he got out of the hospital, had just the right neurological profile to take the plugs, and was just wrong enough in the head to think plugging himself into a tin can was a great way to fight a war. Corps was desperate for anyone it could get, but the procedure…made him a bit off.”
&
nbsp; “Everyone has to come home,” Payne said. “Everyone.”
“He’s alright when he’s plugged, most of the time. Anyway, Chi-com pushed on Alice Springs and got their shit mixed. Payne and what was left of our 2nd Armored Brigade tore through their supply lines and found my work party. He didn’t leave any Chi-com alive. The commissars back in Darwin never knew what happened to me or the rest of us di qia.”
“Then why—”
“Because they may be Commies, but they’re still Chinese Commies. Their politburo likes to style themselves off the old emperors, and collective punishment is a very Chinese tradition. Used to be that if someone committed a bad enough crime, they’d kill him and his family. Went out of fashion in the early twentieth century, but Beijing brought it back after they realized how much manpower it would take to quell the rebellions in their occupied territory.”
“Wasn’t that the reason they gave for carpet-bombing Hong Kong? ‘Zoo zoo’ or something? So many people in Hong Kong revolted that they declared the whole city guilty,” Roy said.
“Six million dead in a day. They toned down the policy for non-Chinese,” Digger said. “Now if they find out one of their ‘properly indoctrinated subjects’ is fighting against them, they’ll make their family pay.”
“Your family’s still in Darwin…”
“That’s right. Australian government doesn’t keep digital records on soldiers from the occupied territory,” she said. “My true name’s on a roll in a vault somewhere that’s set to burn up if the Commies take Canberra. They won’t take me alive again. Maybe they’ll cut my corpse out of this suit…and then they’ll see who was inside and know Australia won’t go easy like Vietnam or Korea.”
“And that’s why you’re ‘Digger,’” Roy said.
“All of us who’ve escaped the line and fight are Diggers. Payne knows my true name. I’m not worried about him slipping up. But you two…the Rupert’s already come close to getting nabbed. Commies love getting their hands on Armor. How do you think they reverse-engineered the plugs?” Digger asked.