Steel World

by Larson, B. V.

  It was Kivi. She smiled at me in the dim light.

  “I wanted to thank you for killing the old man.”

  I laughed softly. “I think you’re the only one who’s happy about it.”

  “Are you kidding?” she whispered. “The whole unit is talking about it. No one can believe it. He hasn’t died for years, you know. He was the oldest living ground troop in the legion.”

  “I’ve heard that. How are your legs?”

  “They’re good. The bio people worked on them for six hours, pulling out metal and re-growing tissue. Now I’m ready for anything again. That brings me to why I’m here. Have you figured it out, yet?”

  Then she opened her shirt as a hint, and I got the idea.

  Kivi, like almost everyone in Legion Varus, had a colorful past. She’d been rejected by the name-brand legions just as I had—but for entirely different reasons. I’d heard rumors about her operating questionable websites and services on the public grid during her college years…some people said they were illegal scams. Whatever the case, she was a very expressive and extroverted girl.

  What can I say? I’m young, male and as much of an opportunist as the next guy. We made love, despite the fact that I was bone-tired.

  * * *

  I learned the next day that Kivi had been right about the general mood of the unit. They were secretly pleased by my actions.

  “Dude,” Carlos said to me before I was even dressed, “that fucker iced me first. Not even second, but first. He had twenty targets, but he picked me out to shoot in the back.”

  “Are you really surprised?”

  “Yeah, right. Ha-ha, funny guy. Anyway, I'm so very, very glad you took him out. The old man deserved it. You shouldn’t feel bad for a second.”

  “Don't worry,” I told him. “I enjoyed it.”

  He stared at me for a second, then said, “Remind me not to get on your shit list, okay?”

  “You're already there,” I told him with a grim smile.

  We headed back to training and learned that we’d taken a drastic leap forward. We were no longer going to work as independent squads of recruits. For the remaining weeks of in-flight training, we were to be incorporated into our active duty combat units. We trained every day with light troop regulars as well as weaponeers, techs, bios and veterans.

  We still held the rank of recruit, however. That could not be changed until we’d gone through at least one campaign. After that, we’d automatically be promoted to full-fledged light troops. If we were lucky, we’d be assigned to a heavy troop unit and be issued armor. Further promotions, however, would be based upon performance and aptitude as noted by our officers in the field.

  Varus had a typical legion structure. At the top was a tribune, who was in overall command. The legion was divided into ten cohorts, each of which consisted of six units of roughly one hundred troops. Every cohort was commanded by a primus, while each hundred-man unit in the cohort had a centurion in charge. The cohorts were lightly or heavily equipped. The less experienced troops were always put into the light cohorts.

  Our unit was led by Centurion Graves, with two adjuncts serving under him. Each adjunct commanded a group of three squads. The squads were commanded by veterans.

  The specialists were next in rank, and we had a lot of those around. Specialists came in several varieties. Each squad had at least two weaponeers, two bios for medical work, and two techs who operated drones and serviced all our complex hardware. Other cohorts were made up largely of heavy troops, people who’d earned the right to wear full armor and shielding in combat.

  At the very bottom of the pile were the recruits like me. We wore light armor and carried snap-rifles. We were distinctly unimportant and were offhandedly kicked around by everyone else in the unit.

  I’d been assigned to Adjunct Leeson’s combat group permanently. In the reshuffle before we reached the target world, Veteran Harris was placed under Leeson as well. The rest of the group, about forty men and women, were made up of various flavors of specialists, light troops and recruits. This was a real fighting unit, not just an assembly of raw recruits doing exercises. The prospect of going into real combat with aliens was thrilling and daunting at the same time.

  Several other familiar faces followed me into Leeson’s group, the most notable of which were Kivi, Carlos and Natasha. They looked as scared as I was, but they were doing their best to fake confidence.

  The experienced light troops were very different from my gaggle of recruits. They didn’t think I was cool. They thought I was shit, and they let me know it every chance they got.

  We drilled and exercised until our bodies and minds were harder than before. Most of us died in the training sessions during those final weeks, some more than once. I’d managed to avoid the experience so far, but I knew that couldn’t last forever.

  The training changed me—it changed us all. Our spirits were tougher by the end. I don’t think anyone can die, or watch his comrades die around him multiple times, as I did, and still maintain an easy-going personality.

  * * *

  The big day finally came two months after I’d killed Veteran Harris. Today, we were going into action and landing on our target world at last.

  We reached Cancri-9 just after midnight, but the tribune who was running the show up on the bridge didn’t let us hang around in our bunks until morning. By 0230, I was suited-up and marching down into the bowels of the ship where the lifters waited. It was from their massive deployment bays the drop-pods would be released.

  There hadn’t been much in the way of a briefing. I’m sure the officers knew more, but all I’d heard was that we were to drop into a jungle-like landing zone of the planet high in the mountains. Apparently, only the highest lands were wet and green, while the plains were bone dry. There was a large compound that would serve as our LZ, and we were to deploy defensively the moment we were down.

  What were we defending? As I understood it, there was a large mining complex under us, and it was under threat.

  I kept thinking about Cancri-9. I couldn’t believe I was actually here. I’d fought online battles on this planet in simulators for years. I was sure it would be very different in person than it had been in the sims, but I felt confident the basics would be familiar. It was definitely going to be hot and full of intelligent, violent reptiles.

  In a way, it wasn’t that surprising we’d ended up in the Cancri system. Video games had been made about this world for a good reason. The planet was turbulent and full of warring factions. They were, in fact, one of our best customers. They hired Earth’s legions regularly to impress one another—I guess they thought alien troops were cool.

  I read more about the planet on my tapper and learned details from our briefings. The saurian population was a relatively rich people. The planets in their star system, including their homeworld, were heavy with minerals. Their home planet was a carbide world with an iron-rich core and a high carbon content.

  The first carbide planet humanity ever found was 55 Cancri e. In mankind’s exploratory days of the twenty-first century, before the intrusion of the Galactics, such planets were found to be odd but not terribly rare.

  Cancri, as we called it now, was a binary star system in the constellation of Cancer. Its unusual nature was discovered in 2012. The first planet we noticed was an inhospitable world far too close to its star to support life, but friendlier high-carbon planets were located subsequently. Cancri-9 was one of those worlds, discovered in 2039, about a decade before the Galactics first came to Earth.

  As a carbide planet, what made the saurian homeworld unique was its habitability. Most carbide or ‘diamond’ planets were too toxic or too hot to support life. Cancri-9 provided a rare combination: a warm-water world rich in iron, diamond and many other rare earths, with the added benefit of a breathable atmosphere.

  We called them “steel worlds” because they were literally made of iron and carbon, the two primary elements of steel. In places, these two components h
ad formed veins of actual steel, a metal that didn’t occur naturally on Earth. The outer crust was sprinkled with organic matter, but this was a mere shell over an inner core of metal and, most abundant of all, carbon.

  In short, Cancri-9 possessed a fantastic treasure trove of materials perfect for building ships and other structures. As a result, the saurians had credits to throw around, unlike Earth with her handful of mercenary legions.

  After reading several technical articles, I deactivated my tapper and told myself it didn’t matter anymore why I was here. The important thing was that I was about to drop onto a burning rock circling a binary star. The drop itself was going to be a terror. We’d practiced drops and null-grav operations many times, but I knew the real thing was bound to feel different.

  It was my first drop, my first battle, and my first war. I wanted to crap myself.

  “Systems check, legionnaires!” shouted Veteran Harris, marching down my aisle.

  I felt the love when his eyes fell on mine. Then he was gone, marching down the row, checking force-buckles and magnetic locks.

  We were already packed into the lifter. The plan was simple: the lifters would wallow down from Corvus, entering the world’s atmosphere. When we were at a sub-orbital altitude, we would be dropped in our pods.

  All around me, men and women began tapping at their interfaces and moving their armored limbs. The guy in the jump-seat next to me whacked me with his rotating shoulder joint. It didn’t hurt too much, but I was wearing only smart cloth, not an inch of steel. The jarring contact was enough to cause me to flinch away.

  “Sorry splat,” he said to me in a rough voice. “Didn’t mean to scare you.”

  I glanced at the nametag and rank insignia on his shoulder, which identified him as Sargon, a specialist. Sargon had a cannon emblem over his stripes, indicating he was a weaponeer. I could have figured that out just by looking at his gear. He got up and hauled down a huge collapsed cylinder from the upper racks. It was a weapon nicknamed the “belcher”—a heavy plasma weapon that resembled a rocket tube that needed to go on a diet.

  As he retrieved his weapon, he made a point of putting his armored ass into my face. I punched him hard enough to put a bright silver mark on his burnished armor. My knuckles were armored with steel gauntlets, not just smart cloth.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  Sargon sat down again with the belcher in his arms, and he laughed while I ignored him. I’d been called ‘splat’ countless times by everyone since leaving Earth. It was something a new recruit had to get used to. The only way to prove them wrong was not to panic on the way down and splatter yourself all over the ground of your first alien world. Apparently, this happened quite often.

  I went back to my check-out routines. I tapped at the back of my left wrist with mesh-covered fingers. Lights glimmered green one after another in sequence. Oxygen, power, rifle—they were all good.

  Out of nowhere, Veteran Harris appeared again and loomed over me. Like all his kind, he was big, loud and hell-bent on stomping the newest men flat on our first drop.

  “Show me your lights, McGill!”

  I dutifully rotated my wrist in his direction. He strained to peer down through his faceplate. In full jump-gear it was a difficult trick to read another man’s vitals, but he managed it.

  My suit wasn’t armored, but it wasn’t white and papery like the vac equipment of last century’s astronauts, either. Instead, it was like wearing thick, stiff cloth covered with aluminum foil. It made me think of a parka made of tough canvas.

  The heavy troops around me wore metal shells with spherical rotating joints at the shoulders and elbows. I envied their expensive gear.

  “Huh,” Veteran Harris grunted after reading my numbers. “You’re good to go, splat.”

  “Thank you for looking after me, Veteran!”

  Harris shook his head and chuckled. He clanked away. Both of us knew he hadn’t forgotten about taking a half-dozen rounds in the chest from my snap-rifle, and I had a weapon in my hands right now that probably served as an excellent reminder.

  The moment he was out of sight around the end of the row of seats, the ship began to shake violently. I saw the weaponeer next to me look around worriedly.

  “It’s only interceptor fire,” I said to him, grinning. “Don’t rust your armor. That’s legion property.”

  For some reason, this made him mad. I’d encountered this sort of thing on many occasions. Splats were constantly teased and expected to take it. I did so, but I always took the time to dish a little back whenever I saw the opportunity. This seemed to anger most of my seniors.

  “You don’t know anything,” Sargon told me with conviction. “This is exactly the time to be nervous.”

  “Why’s that?” I asked him.

  “Listen up, McGill—what kind of name is that, anyway? What are you, from Scotland?”

  “Georgia.”

  “Whatever. Listen up, you want to live through your first jump?”

  “I was planning on it.”

  “Then get out of this lifter fast. It won’t go all the way down, it will toss us out over the target. But that’s a good thing. The best and earliest way for any legionnaire to achieve perma-death is right here, right now. This lifter has all your data uploaded. If you want to come back in one piece from this campaign, or get revived, the lifter can’t blow up while you’re in it.”

  I frowned. It seemed like someone was giving me actual information for once. But considering the source, I wasn’t sure that I should trust it. I wasn’t accustomed to such treatment. Maybe it was the reality of what we were about to face in the next few minutes that had prompted the weaponeer to give me survival advice.

  “What happens when we reach the surface?” I asked.

  “Then everything is automatically downloaded to ground command. At that point, it will be a lot harder to get permed.”

  Perma-death. That was the one thing we all feared, deep down. Who hadn’t, in the vast history of warfare? In my lucky legion, no one seemed to mind the idea of being torn apart in Earth’s service. But perma-death was different. No revival, no reconstruction—it was the old-fashioned kind of death, the type that lasted forever.

  The ship shook again, and this time there was a new development. A puff of vapor shot out of the curved metal roof over our heads. The puff came inward for a fraction of a moment, showering us with sparks. Then, the vapor vanished, sucked up into the hole that had appeared.

  “Depressurization!” shouted the weaponeer next to me. “Seal up, everybody!”

  Sargon linked with Veteran Harris and reported the hit. It had to be a chunk of shrapnel. There wasn’t any other explanation. I frowned in concern. This shouldn’t be happening. Nothing like this was in the briefing.

  I looked up at the hole and my computer systems automatically went to work, analyzing and recording it. Our helmets did more than protect our brains. There was a full set of computer displays inside. The heads-up display, or HUD, overlaid whatever we looked at with computerized data concerning the item in question. Our eyes were tracked, and whatever we focused on was analyzed and anything the suit’s computer knew about it would be immediately displayed. Viewed externally, the sophisticated helmets were a cross between a biker’s protective gear and something a deep sea diver might have worn a century ago. But from the inside, it looked like a flight simulator.

  The computer listed “hull breach” as the number one analysis bullet point. There was a small suggestion box at the bottom of my faceplate that recommended patching it immediately. The recommendation wasn’t very useful in this instance, as I wasn’t qualified, nor did I have any gear for the job. I stayed in my seat.

  Veteran Harris came back down the row and stopped at the leak with what looked like a plunger. The silver tip moved like liquid and looked gelatinous, however, as if it was made of flexible metals. It melted into the gap and sealed it.

  The old man gave me the finger and walked away. I stared after him, bemused.
>
  “That guy hates me, but he seems to be looking out for me at the same time,” I told the weaponeer.

  “Just don’t get between his guns and the enemy. He’ll cut you down if he has to. The same goes for me.”

  I shrugged, less than encouraged. My job was to snipe and scout. I was expendable and expected to die. New troops in every legion started off that way. To get good gear, you had to earn it. Only experienced survivors who’d proven themselves in combat became regular light troops, or heavy troops with expensive armor and energy weapons. Good gear wasn’t produced on Earth, and the legion had to use hard-won Galactic credits to buy it. They didn’t like wasting such a precious resource on a loser.

  The buzzer finally sounded, and the big light on the ceiling went green. It was go-time. All thoughts of equipment and Cancri-9 vanished from my mind. I wasn’t even worried about the saurians I was about to meet on the planet’s surface. I was worried about not going splat on my first day out.

  Properly managing a drop-pod wasn’t a trivial task. First off, just loading yourself into one was dangerous. Rather than a calm process where each soldier was strapped into the delivery system by competent techs, the method used was dangerous and tricky.

  You began by rushing to a circular hole at the end of the row of jump seats. When the light flashed green, you had to drop within a second down into the hole, careful to place your arms flat at your sides and keep your face looking straight ahead. It was rather like jumping off a diving board feet-first, forming an arrow with the body to fall in the smallest region possible.

  Waiting for me below was an automated system. It sensed the falling body, and shot two half-shells from both sides at once. If your form and timing was good, and you were mildly lucky, the mechanism caught you and enclosed you in an instant capsule. The capsule was then shunted at a right angle, loaded into the ejection gun and fired like a bullet out of the bottom of the lifter.

  I watched as Veteran Harris went first. He did it like a pro, because he was one. He stepped out over the hole in a smooth hopping motion, pointing his boots downward and keeping his arms stiffly to his sides. He vanished, and the ship shuddered as he was grabbed, encapsulated and fired in about a second. The line then moved forward and the light went green again. A bio specialist took a deep breath and dropped. She did it correctly as well.