This time I heard the Colonel who answered the General. “Sir, the initial attack from here during the first week after landing was thrown back. The Canaries have substantially strengthened their defenses on that ridge since then.”
“We can’t stay on the defensive,” MacDougal repeated. “We need that position.” He turned toward us, and I felt a strange sense of reliving the past. This was just as that first attack had happened. MacDougal here, eyeing the ridge, waving us forward…That time we had just gotten a serious taste of how tough the Canary defenses were when a sudden storm blew in and we had been forced to fall back among the rocks. That storm had saved our butts, but this time I couldn’t see any signs of bad weather coming.
The General’s arm came up and he swung it in an arc toward the Canary lines. “Get ’em, Heavies!”
He had said that the first time, too.
Sergeant Hel said nothing, just coming to her feet as the rest of us did the same.
“General?” Lieutenant Cathar asked, his voice incredulous.
“Make it happen,” General MacDougal said.
That was it. A direct order to attack right there, right now. My AA prodded me, my display flashing with an attack route aimed straight at the ridge. If we didn’t follow that order, our own AAs would lock us down until the execution commands were received. But tactical autonomy wouldn’t help here, not when it was just a straight shot across open ground. I looked toward the others, knowing what they were thinking and feeling even though I couldn’t see their expressions. We’re dead whether we disobey the order or try to carry it out. Might as well go down fighting and take our damned AAs with us.
We made it maybe forty meters out of the rocks before the Canaries opened up. I had never been in a barrage that intense, so heavy that the command net links fuzzed and popped. Lieutenant Cathar went first, of course. I saw Gonzo stagger, then explode. Higgins seemed to float upward a little and then he just disappeared in a blast. Cady did a funny kind of sideways dance and fell over.
Something jerked at my legs but I didn’t fall. I felt a peculiar sense of weightlessness beneath me, as if I were walking on air. My legs didn’t hurt anymore from running. The view in front of me tilted as if I were falling but I couldn’t feel my legs or get them under me. My AA’s voice sounded oddly distant. “Major damage. Activating auto-tourniquets. Activating auto-first-aid. Activating auto-amputation to seal armor. Major damage. Wounded needing pickup.”
I fell onto the rocks, wondering why the damage display on my armor wasn’t showing anything beneath my thighs. Something hit me really hard and I rolled, then another hit, another roll, more damage lights flashing on my display, and somewhere in all that the drugs from the first aid and the shock hit me so I passed out with the toxic gases of Niffleheim swirling over my armor. My last thoughts were wishes that I could have seen the stars and that the stupid AA would shut the hell up.
I woke up.
The first thing that registered on my brain was that I wasn’t in armor, but after a moment’s rising panic I realized the air was good in here.
The low ceiling was rock. So were the walls. On either side of the med-bed I was in, and on the other side of the long, narrow room, other med-beds stretched in long rows. I couldn’t make them out well, though, and I remembered they had added distortion fields to med-beds to give patients privacy.
I looked down at myself as tumbled memories surfaced. Below my waist I was locked into a rebuild unit.
I was still staring at that when a medic came by, her eyes filled with that seen-too-much look. She didn’t say anything to me, just checked the rebuild.
“What happened?” I finally asked.
The medic looked at me. “You lost both legs. Your armor had to activate emergency seals at the thighs or the atmosphere would have got in and turned you to mush. We’re doing a fix. This is just temporary though. We’re having problems with our bone reconstruction gear so we’ll do an evac of you later so a full facility can do a proper leg rebuild.”
“Where is this? Are we still on Niffleheim?”
“Yeah. Underground. This was the first room they finished. Your armor was totaled. You want the AA?”
“Hell, no. Wipe it. Uh, do you know how many others from my unit—?”
“No. Sorry.” The medic looked toward the front of the room as something caught her attention.
I looked down at the rebuild unit grasping my waist, recalling the last things I had seen as we attacked the ridge. Had anybody else at all survived? How had I made it?
“The General’s back,” the medic sighed. “Every damned day. Try to look military if he stops to talk to you.”
I could turn my head enough to see the General. His aides were out of armor, but he was still fully sealed in even though this was one of the only places on Niffleheim where you could unseal.
“I wish he’d take off the armor,” the medic grumbled. “He had to wear it the first couple of times he visited because the air in here was still being scrubbed and we were all still suited up, but this is a medical facility, not a combat post.”
The General came down the lines of cots, occasionally pausing to talk to someone.
Then he came to me. I looked at the sealed face shield, blank and menacing in strange contrast to MacDougal’s voice, which sounded bluff and comradely. “How’s it going?”
I just stared back at the General until I noticed a Colonel giving me an angry look. “Okay,” I said.
“Good. Good.”
That made something snap inside me. “I lost my legs,” I said.
“Your sacrifice is an inspiration to us all,” General MacDougal said.
“My platoon got wiped out. You ordered us into a hopeless attack.”
“We can’t stay on the defensive. We’ll do what we can for you, soldier.”
I lost it. I admit it. If Sergeant Hel had been there she would have given me holy hell. But this general had ordered my platoon to be slaughtered in an attack with zip, zero, nil chance of succeeding. And now he was standing here, still in his damned armor, not even giving me the courtesy of eye to eye contact, while mouthing meaningless phrases. “You lousy son-of-a-bitch! You murdered my platoon! Do you understand that? Does it mean anything to you?”
The medical officers and the aides standing near General MacDougal were gaping at me, too stunned for the moment to react.
“You want to know what you can do for me, you stinking bastard?” I shouted. “Open your damned face shield and look me in the eye! Can you do that?”
A colonel lunged for me, his hand coming to rest hard on my shoulder. “Shut up, soldier,” he told me.
“Just open your face shield!” I yelled at MacDougal, ignoring the colonel.
General MacDougal’s hands rose slightly toward his face, and I saw the face shield crack open and begin to rise.
Remember when I talked about how bad you get to smelling in armor after a while? What came wafting out from MacDougal’s armor was incredibly bad. Bad enough that the colonel pinning me down stared at the general as the faceplate rose.
I was watching the colonel, and saw him grow really pale, so I looked toward the general.
What looked out at us from the armor had been dead for a while.
Someone screamed, other people shouted, while General MacDougal’s armor just stood there. Then MacDougal’s voice came from it again. “Your sacrifices will not be in vain!” the voice boomed out before another colonel managed to punch in an emergency deactivation code on the general’s armor that shut down the AA.
The medic was fumbling with the rebuild unit attached to me. I felt a surge of meds hit me and blacked out again. When I woke up, everyone was gone, and so was General MacDougal’s armor.
For another day nobody told me anything. The medics who walked past or checked me occasionally said they hadn’t heard anything, which I knew was a lie. Rumors had to be flying all over the place.
The second day since I woke up had almost ended, the light
s starting the slow dim to evening illum, when I saw her enter the medical ward.
“Sergeant? Sergeant Hel?” I couldn’t believe it.
The Sarge walked up to my bed and looked down at me. “Goofing off again, London?”
“I need some new legs, Sarge.”
“Pretty weak excuse for lying in bed all day. They’ll grow ’em back.”
“Yeah. Is there anybody else? Besides you and me?”
Sergeant Hel sat down on the chair beside my bed, her eyes on mine as she shook her head. “You and me,” she repeated. “That’s it.”
“How did you—?”
Hel shrugged. “Cady fell on top of me. I got her up and she came apart, so I dropped the pieces and started forward again.” She touched her head and I realized a faded bruise covered most of her forehead. “Something hit me hard, I went down, almost all systems in my armor dead, saw you lying there, nothing else moving, no emergency beacons visible from the others, a rain of fire coming down from the Canary positions on the ridge, so I grabbed you and hauled you back. I think I passed out before I made it to the rocks, but somebody recovered us both. They stuffed me into the concussion recovery magic box, and a half day ago they let me out and woke me up again, good as new.” Hel touched her forehead again. “Almost. I hear you yelled at a general.”
“A dead general.”
“They were going to court-martial you,” Sergeant Hel said. “Because you didn’t know he was dead when you mouthed off.”
“Sarge—”
“You would have deserved it, too, you stupid ape. But if they court-martialed you they’d have to shoot you, which means a lot of publicity might get out, and the brass doesn’t want that. No, sir.”
“How long had he been dead?” I hadn’t been able to get that face out of my thoughts.
“Three weeks, a couple hours, and a few minutes according to the autopsy. He died about a week after we landed.” The Sarge looked around the casualty ward. “His AA had been running everything, just going on auto. He must have ceded more and more routine tasks to it, so when he couldn’t function at all anymore, the AA just stepped in and kept doing what he and it had been doing.”
“Why the hell couldn’t MacDougal’s armor tell everyone he was dead? We can’t get a sore throat without the armor alerting the medics so they can order remote treatment from the first aid modules!”
Hel sat back, still looking across the ward. “The autopsy also found out that MacDougal’s heart had been failing. He’d hacked his armor so the med read-outs showed he was okay. When he actually died, well, the read-outs showed he was okay.”
“He hacked his armor? Nobody caught that?”
“MacDougal wanted to be the hero of Niffleheim and he was the General, London. Generals get to play by their own rules. If they don’t want their armor systems inspected and deloused, they’re not inspected and deloused. You should know that by now. How long have you been in the infantry?”
“Too damned long.”
“You haven’t learned a hell of a lot.”
It felt so normal, so routine, the Sarge telling me how dumb I was, but I was in a bed in the casualty ward and we were all that was left of the platoon. I had to blink fast to try to keep from crying.
“Let it out,” Sergeant Hel said. “But I ain’t gonna hug you.”
So I cried for a while. They encourage that, these days. Don’t bury the feelings when you bury your friends. That’s the motto. Seriously. Ever since I first heard it I’ve wanted to kill the morons who thought up that motto.
The Sarge waited until I stopped blubbering. “You gonna be okay?”
“Yeah, Sarge. Why wouldn’t anyone else tell me about MacDougal? Why are the brass so worried about keeping it quiet?”
“Think about it, London. MacDougal had been dead for three weeks. Before we were ordered to assault that ridge, how was the battle going?”
I did my best to concentrate on that, running mentally through the blur of movement and boredom and fear and waiting and fighting that made up my memories. “I think we were winning.”
“Yeah. That move against the Canary position at Axe-handle Hill? Pretty sweet, huh? Perfect use of a diversion using the right kind of troops.”
“Yeah,” I agreed.
“That was two weeks ago. MacDougal had already been dead for a week. His Armor Assist ordered that attack, using the patterns it had learned about how MacDougal fought.” Hel looked at me again. “Now, how many bosses have we worked for who never would have come up with a plan like that? And how many of those would have ordered, or did order, senseless attacks like the one against the ridge that we got cut to ribbons on?”
I didn’t have to think hard about that. “Several. What’s the point, Sarge?” Before she could answer, I understood. “That stupid AA did as good as some of the humans who’ve commanded us in the field? It did better than some of them? Even though it was incapable of original, independent thought?”
“Yeah.” Hel stood up. “Think about it. Or don’t. You might be happier that way. Now as long as you’re lying in bed get some rest so you can get back on duty status as soon as possible.”
I watched her go, walking steadily away between the lines of beds and the wounded on them. “Sarge?”
Hel stopped and turned, looking back at me across the distance. “Yeah?”
“I didn’t die before you did.”
She grinned. “Not yet.”
I lay there, trying not to think, as Sergeant Hel left the building.
Jack Campbell is the pen name of John G. Hemry, author of the New York Times bestselling Lost Fleet series (Dauntless, Fearless, Courageous, Valiant, Relentless, and Victorious). His latest book is Dreadnaught, the first in the Lost Fleet—Beyond the Frontier series. He is also the author of the Stark’s War and “JAG in space” series. His short fiction has appeared in places as varied as the last Chicks in Chainmail anthology (Turn the Other Chick) and Analog magazine (most recently ”Betty Knox and Dictionary Jones in the Mystery of the Missing Teenage Anachronisms” in the March 2011 issue). He also has stories in the anthologies Breach the Hull, So it Begins, and By Other Means, as well as the essay Liberating the Future in Teenagers From the Future (about the Legion of Super Heroes). After retiring from the US Navy and settling in Maryland, John began writing. John lives with his wife (the incomparable S) and three great kids. His oldest son and daughter are diagnosed autistic.
Jungle Walkers
David Klecha & Tobias S. Buckell
“Chinese metal? What does he mean?” Dan Stilwill asked.
Corporal Faisal Jabar eyed the thick Colombian jungle around the gravel road, an old smuggler’s route that ran down into Venezuala, and took a deep, humid breath. Who said that no plan survived contact with the enemy? The origin of the quote escaped him, but it was really hitting home right now. So far, their routine patrol was failing to survive contact with today.
His squad, detached fragments of a full weapons platoon, started the morning on its usual babysitting routine: escorting their State Department chump, Dan Stilwill, on his daily nature walk through the ass ends of Colombia that Camp Bell sat in.
Stilwill was a specialist in convincing drug growers to switch to vege-plastic biomass crops, and he was, apparently, great at his job. Everyone had their niche, Jabar supposed. But neither Stilwill nor Jabar was inhabiting their own proper niche right this second.
“What does he mean?” Stilwill demanded. An officious note crept into his voice as Jabar continued to scan the jungle thoughtfully.
“Lance Corporal Rader knows his armor silhouettes backwards and forwards,” Jabar said. “It means what it means. I’d recommend you stay low and stay put while I give out orders, Mr. Stilwill. You’re not going to be making your next speaking appointment.”
When Jabar glanced back, Dan Stilwill was crouched in the bush, his face half-obscured by foliage, his bright yellow Packers cap sticking out above it.
Jabar sighed.
A few minu
tes later, Jabar moved down the line, crouch-running from Marine to Marine placed in the dense jungle foliage alongside the road. “Keep your heads down,” he called out. “Tell me when you see anything. Private Van Duine, everything good?”
“Locked and cocked, Corporal,” Van Duine replied, a little louder than absolutely necessary.
“Not what I asked, Van Duine,” Jabar said, sliding in to kneel beside the private. Van Duine had his shoulder pressed into the stock of a medium machine gun, the silver-gray tips of armor-piercing ammo visible on the feed tray.
“We’re good, Corporal,” he said. “Could use some air-conditioning, though.”
“Yeah, we all could, brother,” Jabar said. His men hadn’t expected to be grubbing through the dirt here in the jungle. When they’d first arrived in the transport airships from Florida and started unpacking, they’d figured they’d be stomping around in full, mechanized armor with fluid coolant packs running to pull the sweaty heat away from their bodies and keep them in tip-top comfort as they operated the mechanized suits his platoon was trained to fight in.
That’s what they’d trained for in Florida. But the jungle out here had been brutal to their first attempts to patrol in it. Rather than invincible metal giants, the moisture wreaked quick havoc on their delicate electronics, and green, wet wood sprung back with surprising velocity at soldiers trying to push their way through. Creepers and vines could tangle legs, and soft earth could give way with no warning.
Their first day trying the armor out in the jungle, one of his Marines had sunk to his waist in quicksand, and another had gotten his leg stuck deep in an ant colony—and Ko had an aversion to the crawly buggers ever since.
They’d figured pretty quickly that for bog-standard patrols of the nearby grower villages, helping the Colombians hunt the last, most dug-in border drug lords left, it was more effective to dismount and be an old-fashioned Marine on the ground, in the flesh.
Jabar had sympathized with the flicker of disappointment in Stilwill’s eyes when Jabar had explained that to the man on their first patrol with him a couple weeks back. Now being in the flesh was going to cause problems. Somewhere out there was at least a pair of Chinese walkers, according to Rader.
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