One Good Soldier

by Travis S. Taylor

  "Keri!" Buckley grabbed his main propulsion assistant (MPA) by the shoulder. "Listen—when this thing is triggered, the backup systems and breakers will try to shut it down. You have to make certain that they don't. You and your AIC have to stay ahead of the ship's backup hardware long enough for this to work."

  "Everybody has studied the Buckley Maneuver, Joe. They teach it at the Academy nowadays, I hear." Keri smiled at him. "Besides, I was actually there, if you recall. Good thing I wasn't actually in Engineering when it happened."

  "Well, I'm just saying."

  "Understood, sir!" Keri snapped back at her acting CHENG with another smile. "I've got it under control." Joe didn't say anything more. Keri had been there at the Battle of the Oort when he did this before, and he had ordered her out of the room before he and EM1 Shah triggered the Buckley Junction and cooked themselves. He knew that she had seen him and Shah in the hospital with their bodies cooked through and through. She understood.

  "Good. Now let's move." The sound of a firecracker popping one level out went off. The AEMs were on them.

  It only took the AEMs about a minute to get through to the Engineering Room hatch. But that minute was all the Engineering team of the U.S. Navy flagship needed to set up a nice surprise for them. The team hunkered down behind a makeshift X-ray shelter that several of the enlisted sailors had stacked up. There was a stack of cabling spools, spare power couplings, sheet metal and armor plating, chairs, computer stands, and anything else of high density they could find.

  "I hear them at the hatch, sir!" one of the firemen standing guard at the door shouted.

  "Then get your ass over here under cover, Fireman!" Joe turned to his MPA. "Keri, you know, we really ought to consider installing an X-ray shelter in here somewhere."

  "Not a bad idea, Joe."

  "All right, as soon as that door opens, snap the trap on our mice."

  About that time another popper went off just outside the hatch. The lock cycled and the hatch swung open. An infinitely long second or two passed, and then another popper went off on the aft hatch. Both passageways were opened and simultaneously AEMs burst through the doors with their rifles drawn.

  "Wait," Joe whispered to Keri. "We need them all in here."

  Several more AEMs filed into the large Engineering Room in cover formation. They were getting ever so close to the makeshift redoubt. It was now or never.

  "Do it!" Joe said. "Everybody down."

  There were no fireworks this time. There were no lightning bolt–sized arcs jumping around the room from deck to bulkhead. There were no vapor clouds from ionized metal being thrown about. And most importantly, in Joe's mind, was that there were no real hard X-rays cooking his liver and brain! But as far as the sim refs were concerned, it was all there, and the AEMs from the Blair were right in the midst of it.

  The AEMs must have been told of their predicament as there was a chorus of "What the . . ." and "Goddamned motherf—" and other such colorful and untranslatable AEM lingo drowning out the hum of the jaunt drive and the other high-technology components of a state-of-the-art supercarrier's Engineering Room. The AEMs had their masks down, probably because of Joe's gas trick. That hadn't helped with the X-rays. A moment more of the cursing continued as the marines started popping up the antireflection-coated visors one by one. One of them actually twisted his helmet off and tethered it down the back of his armor.

  "Goddamned needed some more sack time any-fucking-way," the AEM lance corporal said. He started to sit down, but his NCO was on top of him and in his face in a heartbeat.

  Debbie?

  They're dead, Joe. All of them!

  Hot damn! And us?

  The sim has given us fifteen minutes of effectiveness, and then we will be listed as casualties. The pile of stuff helped, I guess.

  I guess. Joe smiled to himself then stood up.

  "Welcome to the Sienna Madira," Joe said. One of the AEMs instinctively pulled up his weapon. Joe just smiled and raised his left eyebrow at the man. "Dead marines have a hard time pulling the trigger on those things. Now, if you folks wouldn't mind standing over by the port bulkhead out of our way, we have more work to do."

  "Son of a fuckin' bitch!" One of the marines kicked at the deck with his armored foot, making a loud clank as he did.

  "Fuck it!" one of them replied. "We're dead. You fucking move us."

  "If that's the way you want it, I'll have one of the firemen pull a repulsor lift in here and have him push you up against the bulkhead. Be advised, we haven't really trained him on that thing yet, and he's as likely to squish you into the bulkhead as he is to run over you. But if that's what you want."

  "Stow that shit, Private!" The same NCO turned to Joe. "Lieutenant Commander, we're out of the game. No need in us causing a ruckus between the two best crews in the fleet."

  "Thank you, Staff Sergeant." Joe turned back to his work. The damned AEMs had taken precious time off his fifteen-minute clock.

  "You heard the lieutenant commander. I want your dead asses against that bulkhead out of the way." The staff sergeant clanked his armored boots across the deck to the far side of the room, glaring at one of his privates.

  "Mira, Keri, make sure to get the Main and Aux Props back on line. We have about fourteen minutes before the sim refs take us out of the game." Joe thought about their predicament. He'd kept the AEMs from taking Engineering, but he had also wrecked a whole bunch of systems. They had work to do.

  "You did it, Joe!" Keri slapped him on the back.

  "Not yet. There's still two teams of AEMs trying to get to the bridge."

  "Let our marines take care of that, Joe. We did our part," Keri said to her longtime friend and colleague. "We just need to make sure the ship is in the best shape it can be before we die."

  "Right. Maybe." Joe thought for a few brief seconds as the rest of the team set to work on undoing the damage they had just caused to the ship's propulsion hardware and software.

  Joe, EM1 Sanchez is trying to DTM you, Debbie said.

  Patch him through. Joe gave her a second to turn the link on. What's up, Andy?

  Joe, the AEMs are trying to get through to the main elevator up the tower. I need you to help me shut the thing down.

  I don't know if you can, Andy. Even if you turned the elevator off, the AEMs could still climb the shaft.

  I was afraid of that, sir.

  Yes, other than welding the damned doors shut, I don't know how else to stop them, so you might as well let our Marines fight it out with them.

  Weld the doors? I could do that sir. I'll start with the floor they're on.

  Andy! Absolutely not. We will not weld the doors, do you understand me?

  Great fucking idea, sir! Weld the doors. Got it.

  Andy! Andy?

  Sorry, sir, having trouble hearing you. Just in case you can hear this, I'm gonna go on over to the main elevator and weld the doors shut so nobody can go up or down them. Then I might look and see if there are some repairs to do while I'm there.

  That's it, Andy! A repair job.

  Sir?

  Routine maintenance of the repulsor-field generator and the upgrade and regularly scheduled maintenance on the braking system we've been putting off. Do that.

  Uh, you serious, sir?

  Yes. In fact, that's an order, EM1. Then Joe had it. He had the plan that would stop the Marines from getting up the tower, period. He wasn't sure he had time to explain to the EM1 what he had in mind.

  Okay, sir, Andy replied.

  The safety regs for upgrading any elevator repulsor systems on the ship required that the elevator shaft be sealed from the inside physically so that nobody could be below the system in case the repulsor-control system went nuts and started slamming the elevator car randomly up and down the shaft. There was a cubbyhole for the repair team to hide inside the shaft and out of the way of a stray elevator car if such an emergency occurred. The team had to physically cover the entire shaft afterward and remove the interlocks by hand.
Joe didn't envy the task that he was giving the EM1. The best part about it, though, was that once the repairs started, nobody could enter from the outside for any reason. Even the simulated explosives couldn't override crew-safety protocols. The logged repair start would shut down the elevator until the CHENG signed off on the elevator's operational safety.

  Andy, as soon as you start the diagnostic of the elevator, the shaft will lock down.

  Aha! I get it, Joe. I'd better run, sir. These repairs just keep piling up. It's gonna be tight, sir. So be prepared to approve the repair protocol rather quickly, Andy replied, and Joe could feel the urgency in his mindvoice. Andy must've realized the red-team AEMs were getting close to the main elevator. You're a clever son of a bitch, if you don't mind my sayin' it, sir.

  As soon as you get inside that shaft, you let me know, and I'll dog it down for the system upgrade and maintenance. If this shit works, I'm crawling in the first door you open and promise to help you do the unlock sequence myself.

  ETA two minutes, sir.

  Go!

  Two teams of the Blair's boarding party converged on the main elevator shaft from opposite directions. Major Frances Jones pinged the corridor with her suit's sensor suite and mapped out the area. Her suit showed only her team and the other one approaching them from head-on. There was no resistance. This was going to be far easier than she had thought. Oh, there had been a team of firemen and a few MPs armed with handguns here and there, but there had been nothing along the lines that a team of AEMs couldn't handle. Too easy. All too easy.

  "Ma'am, we're here. Want me to check it out?" her NCO asked.

  "Nah, I got it, Jack." Frances bounced in front of the main elevator with her HVAR at the ready. The metal blue-gray bulkheads and the recessed lighting panels as well as the oversized passageway were exactly like the one on the Blair and other supercarriers she had been on. It always made her feel a little weird to be attacking one of her own ships.

  You could damn near get a hovertank in the supercarrier tower elevators. The double-wide doors had to be five meters across when they were fully open. Frances had her AIC hack the electronic lock for the elevator, but nothing happened. Then she noticed a yellow and black striped warning sign taped to the door where it joined. The sign read:

  Notice:

  Main Elevator System is down for regularly scheduled upgrades and maintenance and is temporarily out of order pending recertification of the system's safety by the Chief Engineer. No entrance to the elevator shaft is to be approved under any circumstances without prior approval from the Chief Engineer. Thank you.

  "What the fuck?" the major said. "Jack, get your ass over here!"

  Chapter 7

  July 1, 2394 AD

  Mars Orbit, Sol System

  Friday, 10:40 AM, Earth Eastern Standard Time

  "So then Staff Sergeant Suez says to First Sergeant McCandless that he is standing on the target coordinate spot, right?" Private First Class Rondi Howser held up her hands and shrugged her shoulders at the others around her in the shower. The movement of her arms exaggerated her brilliant red, black, and blue cobra high-resolution laser-printed tattoo. It curled around her left leg three times from the knee, up between her legs from behind, across her rippled abdominal muscles, and around both breasts with its open mouth and fangs showing on the left side of her midsection. The red and blue were fluorescent and glowed brilliantly in the low lighting of the showers. "Then the first sergeant tells the colonel that we had secured the spot."

  "Yeah, we were there. We heard it, Private," Army Specialist Karla Hammermill responded, almost annoyed by the PFC's story. But the two of them had been running partners for more than a year, since they had both been deployed to the Madira, and the army specialist had gotten used to the marine's tall tales.

  "Sure, you may have heard it on the QM wireless, but you didn't see it," Corporal Sandy Cross, who was in McCandless's team, added. "I was there. Goddamned FUBAR if we ever get attacked like that in real life."

  "The next thing you know," Howser continued, "we—well, shit, we're all standing on the hill looking around at all these empty e-suits and all of a sudden just five of us plus the two sergeants were surrounded by like two hundred fucking marines from the Blair. Snap! Just like that we were outnumbered and surrounded."

  "Don't undersell it, Howser. We were waaay-the-fuck outnumbered," Cross added.

  "Right. We were waaay fucking outnumbered. There was no way in hell that we were gonna hold that hill with those kinds of odds against us barring some kinda fucking miracle."

  "So?" One of the Army pukes shrugged her shoulders at her.

  "So? Don't you see? What the staff sergeant did next is what was so brilliant. He self-destructed his suit! Now if that ain't a big fuckin' 'oorah,' I don't know what is. The simulation refs said the blast took out everything in a two hundred meter diameter." Rondi stepped away from her showerhead, and it turned itself off. The dryer blasted her for about five seconds, and then she began rummaging through her bag for her other personal hygiene sundries.

  "We thought that was an accident," Karla said in disbelief. "I was told that there was a suit malfunction caused by damage from the fight."

  "Nope, you can read the sim logs. He blew it himself." Rondi pulled her female-specific compression undergarment into place and stood tall in front of a sink and mirror as she pulled and squirmed into her Marine-issue compression short-sleeve top. "It was all Staff Sergeant Suez."

  "Goddamned crazy fucking jarheads think it was cool that their NCO sacrificed them all to take a fucking hill. Glad he ain't my NCO," another Army puke added.

  "Hey, fuck you! The sarge followed orders and took the hill," Rondi snapped back while she adjusted her top.

  "Hey, stow that shit!" another Army woman Rondi didn't know shouted from farther down the shower stalls.

  "Yes, Sarge!"

  "No shit," Karla said in a calmer tone to cool the discussion back down. She stepped through the dryer and turned to her running partner. "Don't pay them no mind. They're just mad that there was nobody left to kill after you Robots blew your top."

  "Hey, that would have been funny had it been First Sergeant McCandless that had blown her suit. Ha, ha, blown her top, get it?" Corporal Cross laughed. Nobody else thought it was funny.

  "Damn." Rondi just shook her head and ignored the corporal. "Suez's suit blowing took out all of us Robots except for Colonel Roberts. That's when he, the Warlords, and the rest of you Army pukes swarmed in and held the hill. Hell, at least we had front-row seats for it." She was a good-looking corpse, though. The fireproof fabric conformed to her Marine-hardened midsection and pushed up her breasts into a supported position. The compression shirt had been designed to fit skintight as a lightly armored fireproof paper-thin layer. And it did. The shirt not only wicked away sweat and moisture, conformed to most environment color schemes, would repel low-order shrapnel, resist fire, and compress the muscles, improving the wearer's performance, but it did it in a way that made the person wearing it look damned good. The new universal combat uniforms (UCUs) looked great on recruiting posters. Rondi smiled at herself in the mirror approvingly and tapped the membrane panel under the neckline to display bulkhead blue-gray, which was the standard uniform color for onboard a ship. She slapped the 3rd AEM Recon patch onto her left shoulder. The patch and shirt fabrics meshed together and hardened into a seamless decoration. She then slapped her name tag atop her right breast, with similar results, and then donned her digicam pants. The pants tracked the color scheme of the top and changed to the same blue-gray base colors. Marines always wore base color camo that matched their environment. The Navy always wore a darker blue camo base, and their tops were different colors, depending on their job. There was never any chance of mistaking a marine for a Navy sailor—that is, unless a marine was trying to be camouflaged as one. Rondi adjusted her short-cropped blond hair and then tucked her cover in her pocket.

  "And here I thought you poor marines had simply managed
to get all yourselves killed and us 'Army pukes' had to come charging in and save your asses." Karla smiled at her friend. She adjusted her UCU for Army digicam with the standard Army green base colors. Her green base color top was just as form-fitting, protective, and flattering. "Hoowah!"

  "First Sergeant McCandless, did you give Staff Sergeant Suez the authority to self-destruct and take out my platoon of Robots?" Colonel Ramy Roberts, the commander of the 3rd Armored E-suit Marines Forward Recon Unit, looked solemnly at his longtime friend and staff noncommissioned officer (SNCO). He had fought with Tamara all the way back before the Martian Exodus. The two of them were friends and had no problem completely entrusting their lives to each other in the direst of situations. In fact, there had been any number of times when the two of them played rock-paper-scissors to see which one of them got the honor of staring the lion in the teeth first.

  "No, Colonel. I had no idea." Tamara stood at attention and stared blankly ahead. "On the staff sergeant's behalf, sir, I must say that he did take out a shitload of enemy combatants, sir."

  "Taking that into consideration, First Sergeant, is the only reason I haven't busted his balls further down. However, he did take out my entire platoon!" Colonel Roberts turned his attention from Tamara to Tommy. "Well, Staff Sergeant Suez? Just what in the flying fuck makes you think you have the authority to self-destruct not just yourself but an entire platoon of marines? I mean, there I was all by myself with nothing but a bunch of damned Army pukes to help me retake and hold our objective. Do you realize how much money Uncle Sam has invested in a platoon of AEMs? Well?"

  "Sir, I, uh, was pretty sure we were dead anyway, and our objective was to take that hill, sir," Tommy replied nervously.

  "Take it! Take it!" Roberts shouted. "Take it, hell. You took it all right! You took it and blew it to fuck and gone. Had it been the real world and not a sim, you would have blown that hill halfway to the Oort Cloud. What if there was something special about that hill that we needed? A decision like that is above your pay grade, soldier. Hell, it's above my pay grade!"