by Isaac Hooke
Behind those lenses, his eyes finally focused on me. "I'm chatting with my wife, Rade. My child was born today. It's a girl. We named her Aniidastehdo. It means, Fresh Start."
"Congratu-freaking-lations! " I stood up and high-fived him. "That's awesome news."
He got high-fives and fist-bumps all around.
"When are you going to haul your wife and kid up here?"
"I've been talking with Chief Adams," Tahoe said. "He says once I graduate he'll arrange a residency for them both."
"That's fantastic news." I sat back and took a long quaff of my beer. "That's the great thing about the Navy. Everyone looks out for everyone else. No matter the rank, or pay grade. Everyone counts." I surveyed the men here with me in this room. My brothers. "We're almost on the Teams. Phase Four secured. I can't believe it. I never thought I'd see the day. I'm going to miss you guys." I was focusing on Tahoe and Alejandro.
"Maybe we'll be assigned to the same Team," Alejandro suggested.
I shrugged, trying to pretend it didn't matter, when it meant the world to me. "You never know."
Alejandro saw right through me. "To the end," he said, raising his bottle.
Tahoe raised his as well. "To the end."
I raised mine.
"You guys made some kind of pact in First Phase, didn't you?" This was from Costa, a kid from southern Sicily. He looked a little nerdy with those buckteeth of his, but he was the second best sharpshooter in the class after me.
"We did." I glanced at Costa. "A pact to see our training through no matter what. To overcome everything the instructors threw at us. But if you think about it, everyone in this room made that same pact, with himself. We're all here after all. We all made it."
Jaguar set down his bottle, a little too hard. He was looking at me with a sad expression. I was about to ask him what was wrong when he spoke.
"Not all of us made it," he said. "I wish Branco were here."
"We all do, Jag." I rested a hand on his knee.
He shoved my hand away and pretended (I thought) to be offended. "Don't go gay on me now, like Instructor Piker."
I smiled sadly. "You can try to hide the hurt but it won't work on us. We're too close to you. We all miss him, Jag. Branco was a good man. The best of us. Braver than all of us combined."
"I can't believe he's dead," Jaguar said.
Tahoe set his beer aside. "You know, my ancestors believed that when a man died in battle his spirit rose to the heavens and took its rightful place among the stars. They believed that every star in the sky was the spirit of a warrior."
"Is that what you believe?" I said.
"Hell no." Tahoe took off his aReal. "The stars are massive thermonuclear ovens powered by their own gravity. As much as I hate to say it, Branco's gone, and he ain't coming back."
"Way to go and spoil your own platitude, bro," Alejandro punched Tahoe in the upper arm.
"It wasn't a platitude," Tahoe said. "Listen. Branco didn't die for nothing. Don't you forget that, Jaguar. Don't any of you forget that. He taught us the true meaning of courage."
I stared at my beer bottle, not really seeing it. "Branco taught us courage, that's true, but I think your ancestors had it right, Tahoe. There is a place up in the sky for everyone who dies with courage, fighting the good fight. Warriors, true warriors, get their own stars."
* * *
I tried to arrange a meet-up with Shaw, but she was out in space doing landings on Shack, so I spent the rest of my liberty hanging out on the streets of New Coronado. I was pretty used to the cleanliness and lawfulness of UC cities by now, the profusion of robots and the paucity of guns. Still, it was a strange feeling walking around the city, knowing that I had attained something that 99.99% of the population would never attain. That I was superior, somehow.
Yeah, superior.
It was all too easy to get caught up in my own bullshit. I got in a few fights with members of other military branches. I won of course, but got hurt pretty good once or twice, and that was humbling. I guess I was just restless. I needed to resume my training. I was turning into a warrior and fighting was becoming second nature to me. I'd never been this way when I was a Dissuader. All that PT must have boosted my serum testosterone levels through the roof. Or maybe the instructors were just feeding us steroids.
Liberty finally came to an end. I got back to base and the post-BSD/M craziness began.
We got our Implants the first day—at this point, the military considered us at low risk of failure or dropping on request, so the Brass could justify the expense of implanting us with aReals. In combat, if the jumpsuit's aReal failed for whatever reason and you lost contact with your platoon (not to mention all the other tactical benefits the augmented reality display provided) then you were basically out of the battle. By putting the aReal into our heads the military had direct access to the Brodmann areas responsible for the visual and auditory cortex. There was still a chance the Implant might fail, but having both the jumpsuit aReal and the Implant break down at the same time was considered an unrealistic probability.
These weren't the ordinary Implants that civilians got either. These aReals were military grade, and had the technology to interface with the ATLAS mechs and robotic support troops assigned to each platoon.
I remember when I first woke up after the Implant procedure. All the functionality of an aReal was permanently overlaid onto my vision. The little flashing mail icon on the bottom right. The chat box on the bottom left. The friend stream updates (minimizable) on the top right. I could access each option by focusing on it, just like when I wore an actual aReal.
One difference from a normal aReal I noticed right away was the ability to think many common commands, rather than having to say them out loud or utilize eye movements. After I walked the Implant through a quick thought-training session, which involved thinking the words that flashed over my vision, I could issue commands by merely thinking the words. The most useful command, for me, was "HUD off," which deactivated the overlay entirely. That, and the subvocal communication feature: It was kind of fun to make fun of the instructors and have entire conversations with other students in my head during lessons and PT.
After that first day I signed up to take a bunch of core MOTH courses, which involved brain dumps from the top people in the field: tracking with the best woodsmen in the world, combat driving with the best drivers, mountain climbing with three-time Everest conquerors. We learned desert and jungle survival techniques from the Rangers. Hand-to-hand combat techniques from the Marines. Like I said, the best of the best.
I also got to choose two electives. Some of the options included advanced sniping, knife-fighting, computer hacking, advanced spacewalking, linguistics, advanced demolitions, base jumping, explosive ordinance disposal, advanced hand-to-hand combat. The list was a few pages long, with many of the electives just advanced versions of the core courses.
For our two electives, Alejandro, Tahoe and I signed up for the Introductory ATLAS Warfare course and its followup, Advanced ATLAS Warfare. There was a long waiting list to get into both, but that was fine because we chose our electives at the beginning, right after liberty, so the three of us had lots of other courses to occupy our time with until the ATLAS warfare class-up.
The months passed in a blur, and then we got shipped out to one of the nearby islands for the ATLAS Warfare course.
The first two weeks were spent in the ATLAS simulator, this pod-shaped cockpit that did a bang-up job of simulating the operation of an actual ATLAS. But you could only do so much in a simulator. There were no G-forces when you used the jumpjets, for example. After those two weeks, we were finally allowed to pilot the real things.
I remember standing there on the beach when the bay door opened and the mech stepped outside. This was the first time I'd seen a real life, modern ATLAS 5 outside of the Net vids, or the simulator. It was this massive version of the ATLAS 1s we'd ported around the base. Three times the height of an ordinary man and ten times wider, it
looked like a robot soldier, with arms, legs and a head. The head was a pinched version of a man's. A red visor with two yellow glows made up the eye area. There was a red circle at the center of the bulky chest where the atomic core resided, beneath the cockpit. That's right, no magnesium-ion batteries in this puppy.
Beneath the red circle someone had spray-painted a maroon-colored moth. I recognized it as the Atlas, biggest moth in the world. Put your two hands together, palms facing you, and you had the average size of a typical specimen. The Atlas moth also happened to be the symbol of the MOTHs themselves.
I could see my reflection on that burnished armor, and the reflections of the trainees around me, and I saw the awe in all our eyes.
I can't wait to ride this baby, Alejandro transmitted to my Implant.
Our ATLAS Warfare instructor came forward, PO1 Saunier. "Welcome to the Atomic-powered, all-Terrain Land Assault Supersuit you've been dreaming about, gentlemen. Otherwise known as the ATLAS, Model Five. There's a good reason why we've named it after the ancient Greek Titan who held up the world on his shoulders. Let me introduce you. Over a thousand hydraulically actuated joints with closed-loop positions and force control. On-board hydraulic pump and thermal management. Crash protection. Jumpjets. Head-mounted sensor package with built in LIDAR, night vision, flash vision, zoom and other augmented reality perception boosts that smoothly integrate with your Implants. Modular wrists that accept 3rd party hands—when you're looking to throw a party put a couple of serpents in one and a twin M2A1 in the other." He grinned widely. "The ATLAS 5. The war machine of your dreams. And your enemy's nightmares. Definitely gives its Titan namesake a run for the money."
Stepping into the big steel suits was extremely disorienting at first, not to mention claustrophobic. When you climbed the steel rungs on the leg and sat in the cockpit, the hatch sealed up and actuators pushed the elastic inner material into your jumpsuit, wrapping you up like a cocoon, ensuring a suit-tight fit (you always wore your standard jumpsuit, in case you had reason to leave the mech). You couldn't see anything except the inside of the cockpit, not until the vision feeds from the mech kicked in—there was no glass in these cockpits, not like in some of the earlier models.
We'd all experienced that "cocooning" in the simulated environment, but it was different being inside an actual ATLAS, with all that steel over your head. I now understood why the BSD/M instructors had made us crawl through cramped pipes on the bottom of the bay—sealing yourself inside three tonnes of metal that might suddenly break-down wasn't for the claustrophobic. If power to the suit failed, the skin-tight inner material was supposed to release you, but that wasn't guaranteed. If you weren't released, you were basically trapped motionless inside a metallic coffin. Claustrophobic indeed. (There was one qualification where the instructors shut off power to the suit and made you sit there, motionless, for two hours. Wasn't fun.)
Operating the ATLAS 5 proved relatively simple. You moved your body, and the mech moved with you. While it was true that the inner elastic material bent and flexed around you, it was the Implant inside your brain that did all the heavy lifting, interpreting your body movements and relaying them instantly to the servomotors of the metallic monster that encased you.
The mech could still be operated in "manual" mode, without an Implant. The encasing material of the cockpit had pressure sensors, so that if your Implant was damaged for whatever reason, you were still in the fight. It was a bit harder than operating with an Implant though—at first it felt like wading neck-deep through a swamp, with every part of the ATLAS pressing against you, impeding your every movement. But when you got used to it, it wasn't so bad.
The mech had basic weaponry strapped-on beneath each forearm: a gatling gun with three-thousand rounds, four serpent rockets, and an incendiary thrower. There was also a deployable ballistic shield on the left forearm, used for protection against armor-piercing bullets. These forearms could be swapped out pre-mission with entirely different appendages for specialized tasks, such as a giant buzz saw, a welding torch, and so forth. Heavier limbs threw the center of gravity of the ATLAS way off though, and were normally reserved for the more defensive operations.
Operation of the weapons system was relatively straightforward. To cycle between the available weapons, you'd identify the hand first, then the weapon. For example, right hand, swivel M61 would swivel the Vulcan M61 Gatling into your fully tactile, five digit right hand, placing the trigger right above the index finger. The actuators inside the mech would apply slight pressure to the inside of your glove, which would then be transmitted to your palm by your jumpsuit, providing further feedback to let you know that yes, you now held the weapon. Gun off hand folded the current weapon out of the way, so you could use your ATLAS fingers to grasp objects, while Gun in hand brought it back again.
Those first few days were spent mostly walking around and getting comfortable operating actual ATLAS 5s. I hung a "New Driver" sign on the back of my mech, right between the twin jumpjet nozzles. Kind of suited my driving those first few days. All I can say is, it was a good thing we trained in sand because I toppled over more than a few times.
"You damage that ATLAS it's coming directly out of your paycheck!" Instructor Saunier roared over the platoon circuit one time when I took a pretty bad tumble. "That'll take you the next four thousand years to repay at your pay grade, moron!"
When we became comfortable walking, we practiced with the ATLAS jumpjets. Very carefully, I might add. I could almost feel Instructor Saunier and his assistants cringing with every landing. The same rules regarding stack jumps applied to the ATLAS 5, because there were only enough charges for about twenty jumps on a full tank. If you stack-jumped too high and ran out of fuel, not only did you kill yourself but you demolished three billion digicoins worth of equipment.
After a few days practice on the shooting range, the class spent the next five weeks stalking through rocky defiles and across open fields, learning the role of the ATLAS 5 in the platoon and how to integrate with other units.
"You're going to be fighting side-by-side with the actual units you'll be with on the Teams," Instructor Saunier told us. "None of this Fourth Phase kindergarten playground crap."
He divided us into eight-men squads. Six trainees wore jumpsuits—the usual roles were officer-in-charge and his assistant, two snipers, a heavy weapons specialist, and a drone operator—while the remaining two trainees were assigned ATLAS mechs. Each squad also had eight robotic support units. A Weaver, the robotic corpsman. A MQ-91 Raptor, for reconnaissance and air support. A K-4 Equestrian, basically a robot tank. Four M-1 Centurions, humanoid foot soldiers capable of fulfilling any role the situation demanded—when dressed in jumpsuits, Centurions were almost indistinguishable from human MOTHs, and only their metallic faces betrayed them. Lastly there was a T-2 Praetor, a humanoid soldier with a more advanced AI that gave it the ability to command other robots. The Praetors helped offload some of the command burden from the drone operator, and were able to react to changing tactical situations on the fly.
Adding in ATLAS 5s and support robots changed the battle space completely, and we had to redo all our small unit tactical training. In each simulated combat mission we rotated to a different role, so that I only got to operate the ATLAS maybe once every five missions. We soon learned that the success or failure of any given mission hinged on the skills of the drone operator more than anyone else. He was the one who controlled the entire cadre of support robots assigned to the squad, and he needed a firm grasp on tactics. I assumed the role on several occasions, and it wasn't the easiest job in the world I can tell you that, not even with a T-2 Praetor to share some of the command load with. Controlling the drones was sort of like playing one of those realtime strategy games popular on the Net, except your mind was the controller and the battlefield was your game board. I quickly realized drone operation wasn't my forte, but I worked through it, doing my best not to let my squad down. I usually made up for it when I got to pilot an ATLAS agai
n, because riding the mechs was definitely one of my strengths.
Alejandro, Tahoe and I eventually graduated to the Advanced ATLAS Warfare class, which was pretty much more of the same. The only difference was that we did more training in space. The practice insertions from orbit were particularly tense: we dropped from low Earth orbit in an ATLAS and freefalled all the way to the surface. The ATLAS 5s had a deployable single-use heat shield that burned away on re-entry. Air brakes and aerospike thrusters slowed the descent enough for a relatively soft landing. Well, as soft as three tonnes of metal could land, anyway.
There isn't really much more to say about training, because just like the end of Fourth Phase, it all ended abruptly.
A MOTH detailer sent for Alejandro, Tahoe and I. Detailers were the basically human resources people of the Navy, and he asked us our top picks in regards to the Teams we wanted to be on. Alejandro, Tahoe and I insisted on staying together, and we chose Team Seven, Six, and Five as our top picks, in that order. The detailer said he'd do his best to make sure we got our top picks, but because each Team had multiple platoons, he couldn't promise we'd be on the same one.
After that meeting I went outside and spent a long time on the beach, watching the sunset.
The sun was setting on the old phase of my life. I was about to join the Teams, the culmination of all my goals and dreams up to this point.
And yet I was probably leaving my friends behind.
When Alejandro, Tahoe and I went out for drinks that night, it was a bittersweet moment to say the least.
"Even if we're separated we'll stay in touch on the Net," I told my friends. "And if we're on the same Team, but different platoons, we'll still get to hang out when we're not on deployment. Every night. It'll be just like when we were Dissuaders."
Alejandro and I hadn't been apart since we were kids. This was going to be hard, if we were assigned to different Teams.