Alliance: The Orion War

by Kali Altsoba

  She’s lying where she landed, gulping to refill empty sacs of soft epithelial tissues. A gaping, smoking, heaving wound spurts red onto dirty sand, while toxic free-radical superoxides course into all her organs, pushing into the weakening pressure of her blood-stream with wound trauma. Her chest, then her whole body, screeches to her brain with every stimuli it possesses.

  A squad mate reaches for heavy pain killer, pre-mixed with hydrogen-sulphide suspensor to shut all her systems down. The air-injector attaches to her weaves as a 2cm tube on a blood-soaked shoulder, beside a dozen other routine combat meds every fighter carries into battle. The quick-reacting soldier pushes the flat nozzle against exposed purple, calming the muscle’s erratic beat, mercifully ending Susannah’s consciousness of herself as a point of pain in the Universe.

  All soldiers carry injectors on the outer left sleeve of Blue combat suits. It’s a common prank to bust one open on a buddy’s head back at base, drenching him and his uniform in a rotten eggs stench he can’t escape without a shower and immediate visit to the camp laundry.

  No one does that in a combat zone. Out here in heat and fear you never know when you might need pain-suspensor for yourself. Or to jab hard into a friend, hitting the spray before his life ebbs away as you watch, thinking about what you’re going to tell his folks or girl or kids. It’s just as important that his mates don’t excitedly jab the downed soldier with multiple injectors all at once, chancing killing him with an overdose. Susannah Page’s squad mate gets it just right.

  Already a fat Trauma Pod is arriving, low and fast, slamming down four meters away. A half-moon door cracks to reveal an odd, bear-shaped robot. It’s a stretcher-bot, or Robobear, as medics fondly call the useful, squat-and-eager little bot. It has a curiously cute face for a machine assigned to so grim a task. It’s already partway out the exit-ramp as the Pod comes to a full stop.

  This Trauma Pod was hovering on-standby 10 klics away, waiting while 2nd Company advanced from where three heavy battle-hovers delivered it, beside a small creek cleared of RIK by another Blue outfit two days earlier. It flew at high-speed on acoustic hovers into the clearing where Susannah lies, called in by a nervous captain leading just his second-ever combat patrol.

  It’s the first time he encounters enemy, human or bot. His first-ever exchange of fire and casualties. He summons the Pod seconds after Susannah is hit with the first shot of what’s now a nasty little firefight with the bot. Calls it down as soon as shooting erupts 400 meters in front of the lead wedge of 2nd Company, up there, where he sent Private Page’s squad to scout point.

  Make that Pvt. Susannah Page of 2nd Squad, 1st Platoon, 2nd Company, 1st Battalion, 4th Brigade, 7th Assault Division. Also known as the ‘Enthusiastics.’ Oh my, nearly forgot: that’s a big division in Third Corps, 42nd Army, 3rd Army Group, 1st Star Army, in the Army of the Calmar Union. Not the Navy, not the Marines. Susannah’s outfit, as it’s recorded in all the combat log-books. Like the one where her battalion major will write down that Susannah was killed today in a minor skirmish with a single sniper-bot on the Grün desert-planet of Glarus.

  Well OK, he might write that, but it’ll never make to the Final Action Report at Division or Corps, let alone 42nd Army HQ. At most, the division record-keepers will write down a serial number as part of a long list of those killed on Glarus. Today, that is. In this battalion. There are other outfits here, and many more dead and dying. And lots of days of heavy fighting to come.

  The point is, I suppose, that Armies do nothing quite so well as organize soldiers into rigorously numbered units, sub-units, and sub-sub-units, down to squad level. Then reorganize everybody back into larger units: platoon, company, battalion, brigade, division, corps, army, army group, and star army. Then when a real war starts, forget about all that and hastily write down a number in an After-Action Report, followed by three simple letters: KIA, WIA, or MIA.

  As unique and special as Susannah Page thinks she is, that she has an express place and purpose in the Universe, no All-Knowing God or Self-Conscious Cosmos did this thing to her. Getting hit with blue fire isn’t about Fate or Destiny or Always-Meant-To-Be. It’s got nothing to do with Character or Morals or Justice or Punishment or Eternal Reward or Eternal Damnation.

  It’s got to do with being a number that’s in a wrong place at a wrong time. She was out-front walking point because her captain ordered her lieutenant to take his platoon up there, and her lieutenant told her sergeant to get his squad into the lead position, and her sergeant told her to take point, because “it’s your fucking turn.” That’s why Susannah, and not some other real nice kid with an express place and purpose in the Universe, stumbled into the field-of-fire of a silent, indifferent bot that doesn’t know and couldn’t care less even what her serial number is.

  “Susannah who? You mean that red triangle in my targeting-scope? I shot that! Perfect hit, too. Dead center, if you’ll pardon a simple AI-sniper a bad field pun. I’ve been out here on my own a real long time. It’s nice to finally kill something. Quite … ummm … well, let’s say fulfilling. Almost like I have an express place and purpose in the Universe.”

  Well yeah, there are traceable reasons why she’s on Glarus at all. Like Pyotr’s vanity and the fact some civis on Kars got a hard-on for a quick strike. But you can go back for fucking forever once you start down that road! So let’s just say she debarked here three weeks ago to do her bit in Operation Roundup. Glarus is a small planet in the Braunwald system, six bohrs over Pyotr Shaka’s frontier. Susannah and the other Enthusiastics are planetside in the first Alliance counteroffensive, just over three months into the Fourth Orion War. That is, counting from the start of the Calmari war with the Imperium and Daura, as most Calmaris do. Not from a year ago and the first invasions of the United Planets of Krevo, as all Krevans date this new Orion War.

  Susannah doesn’t know or care about that ‘big-picture stuff.’ All she knows, uuhhmm, all she knew before the bot killed her was that she was walking point just like she was trained. Then the bot opened up and her world and life and searing present and future shrank with the speed of a collapsing star, down to a 4cm hole in her chest and a rising scream she couldn’t let go.

  The sniper-bot shot blue plasma at her and 2nd Squad as soon as it had them in range. A rapid spray of plasma balls, each 3.5cm in diameter, startled into the clearing she just entered, pulsing brilliantly out of a total-camouflage site. No sound, no movement, no bright HUD vid-light winked any warning before the first blue ball arrived and hit her, right in the heart.

  Bots are perfect loners. Natural bushwhackers, pickets and snipers. They don’t need food, water, air, sex, back pay, R&R, medics or Pods, don’t need to urinate, defecate, sleep, stretch or blink. They don’t need sound baffles like a noisy human gun-crew because they can be trusted to stay totally silent and unmoving in patient ambush for hours or days or weeks. They don’t need traumatic-stress counseling after, because they feel no emotion whatsoever in combat. Right?

  As soon as the squat RIK-bot started shooting with a plasma gun built into its carbon-fiber frame it felt a oneness of pure purpose with the Great Designer, First Cause Uncaused, Who is My Maker, blessed be her protractor. It remained blissfully invisible behind a micro-lens screen that threw off a rainbow-effect light-cloak. Only short spurts of intensely-bright blue plasma panning back-and-forth gave away its approximate position. And by then Susannah was down, hard and bloody and screaming silently into the blackness.

  A “duck blind” the ACU Infantry Manual calls the bot’s hideaway. No one understands why, since no one in the Union has hunted fowl for centuries. Susannah said, way back in Basic: “What the hell have blind ducks got to do with combat? Sometimes I just don’t get the Army.”

  Now blue balls are flying from nowhere and everywhere, and her company is on the ground and firing wildly as her captain tries to locate the filthy duck that just shot his trooper.

  “Where?”

  “Over there!”

  “Where!?
”

  “To your right, 45˚!”

  “No, at your dead center! Shoot, shoot!”

  “Got it! Targeting in HUDs now!”

  “First and Second squads, lay it on!”

  “Fuck the duck! Fuck the duck!”

  He means everyone should concentrate all-out suppression fire on the sniper hole. His order flashes on HUDs, but it’s inescapably and perfectly human to shout it out. From all around the area red and blue laser and maser fire streaks toward the bot’s duck blind, crashing and burning plants and dirt and rocks. Overhead, a startled murmuration of starlings flees the noise.

  “Something hot is in my circuits, climbing … curious ... I wonder if I shall dream electric dreams? … I see a bright light! … Is it My Creator or just my power source failing with a final surge? … Am I to become one with the Universe? Or is this all there is? … Is this all there is!?”

  A medic crawls over to Susannah and finishes what her squad mates started, pulling off her helmet and upper body armor and cutting open her thermal gel-suit. He mist-injects a strong dose of suspensor directly into her carotid artery, instantly stopping all body activity. Not just by her muscles and organs but in synapses of her brain and inside every cell in her body, preventing cell growth and blocking DNA synthesis. Susannah might stay ‘frozen’ like this for years, even decades. After all, military suspensor is a lower-dose derivative of the freeze used by sleepers in the old GDM colony-ships. Or was it the other way around? Did lightsail and GDM-arks adopt suspensor technology developed first by Sol system militaries? No one really knows anymore.

  Anyway, he doesn’t need her to sleep that long. Just long enough for Robobear to lock Susannah into a cyber-surgery unit in the hover, start a synthetic-blood transfusion, and hook her virtually to Pod-to-Ship medical monitors. It’s not even necessary for the Trauma Pod to carry her back to base, though that’s what its navigation-AI decides to do even before swarms of tens of millions of hydrogel micro-robots from the medic’s spray-injection swim through Susannah’s circulatory system, carrying suspensor solution to every cell in her body. Stopping everything.

  Each is six-microns long and highly sensitive to light, salinity, viscosity and other bodily stimuli. Each has two swimming flaps on either side of a hydrodynamic body, and a steering flap up front. The tiny swimmers draw power from oscillating, cyclical electric-fields and respond to minute temperature changes in their hydrogel form. They expand and contract with chemical swelling, beating semi-rigid flaps to swim even against strong currents of her blood stream. As the swimmers arrive at sequential destinations they leave little bits of themselves behind, moving ahead until they’re gone and suspensor in their gelatinous bodies is dispensed to trillions of cells.

  The rest of 1st Platoon is firing en masse, turning the sniper-bot in its duck blind into a smoking ruin by shooting everything they have at the invisible source of blue blasts, zeroed in by targeting systems at last flashing red threat in HUDs. But not before the sentry methodically lays three more of the lead scouts down, sending plasma shots searing into 2nd Squad bone and flesh.

  One is a combat virgin who’s killed instantly, walking his first point just like Susannah. His head neatly departs his flopping body, lofted like a mercury ball kicked high above a school pitch during second recess. His startled face shines under a blue-tinted electric glow as miniature lightning scours his HUD. He looks like one of those cranked-up marvels in science class that no one really understands but schoolboys dare each other to touch, and braver girls really do. Until their hair stands away from their heads and everyone can’t stop laughing, and taking turns.

  Helmet-and-head roll to a stop against a rock, smoking and smelling of scorched fat, fried dyes and burnt enamel. The lad’s best friend retrieves it, crying openly and without shame. He’ll reunite head with body later, inside a blood-wet corpse bag that auto-shrinks and vacuum-seals to preserve ACU dead for collection, assuming a big NCU corpse-ship gets to Glarus. If not, his friend can stay bagged for months or years without ever rotting. So it’s into the bag and move on. There’ll always be another firefight and another dead pal. Either that, or maybe he’ll bag you.

  Two more soldiers in Susannah’s squad are seriously but not mortally wounded, one in his right leg, the other in his upper arm. It could be much worse, but each glancing bot-shot is partly deflected by the soldiers’ ceramic weaves. Both youths are in distress from severe burns and missing chunks of muscle and skin, but they can wait to see the medic. Smart dressings are already in place, auto-tightening around the wounds and applying painkillers and antibiotics.

  Susannah is top priority for the company medic. Robobear lifts her from the ground with thick effectors and carries her carefully into the Trauma Pod. The equipment inside brumes over her with antiseptic-spray and yet more suspensor. The interior smells of dried blood and harsh bright lights, of hardworking metals and distant ingenuity and the promise of plastic and sterility.

  After checking that the uplink works, the medic leaves Susannah in the Trauma Pod and trots over to tend to the lesser wounded. Robobear tucks her in, then follows the medic to the two simpering boys. He ties into each lad’s bioelectronics, into graphene implants that read nervous system outputs while speaking directly to white blood-cells and lymph, monitoring infection and redirecting immune responses to where they’re most needed. It sounds terrific, but battle wounds are usually so gaping and traumatic to the body that all the fancy tek does is help on the margins.

  These cases are different. They’re light wounds, so the medic uses a portable bio-printer to make fresh skin for a temporary graft over one boy’s burn site while Robobear does the same for the other lad. That’ll keep the wounds cleaner and more sterile even than a smart dressing. They don’t need suspensor or synthetic blood, but the medic gives each a localized painkiller, but not enough or of a kind to slow reflexes or impair combat judgment. They’re walking wounded, but if kept alert with combat-meds and stimulant they’re expected to stay in the field and in the fight.

  Once Robobear is back onboard the Trauma Pod it whizzes off to deliver another frozen trooper to First Battalion’s Field Triage Unit, a 22-minute flight to reach base 900+ klics away. It’s as if Time’s Arrow stopped for Susannah back in the clearing, which in a real sense it did. Suspension of all bodily animation by the medic stopped her heart from beating, ended breathing and bleeding, prevented organ damage or any change. That means she’s not really here. She’s a manikin, as a distant surgeon explores her deep heart lacerations with virtual probes and fingers.

  Dr. Lee Jin does the work. He’s not just a surgeon. He’s not just Chief Surgeon on the big hospital ship NCU Red Rover in geosynchronous orbit over Glarus. He’s Chief Surgeon of the whole Combined Army-Navy Cyber-Surgical Corps. He’s not really supposed to be out here in a combat zone, even if tucked in high orbit. But just try telling him that. See how far you get. Dr. Lee Jin is his own man. Always has been, always will be. That’s exactly why, when Wildfire flew deep into Imperium space on a butcher-and-bolt raid without his hospital ships, he brought them forward to Glarus on his own authority. ACU down below are very glad he did.

  He blinks brown, almond eyes twice to lubricate his corneas. He always does that before probing a combat wound. Even when examining a patient virtually as he is now, working from a surgery-cubicle, a nurseless med station holding steady inside Red Rover at 400,000 klics out at the Glarus L1. Even missing nurses, the cubicle reeks of starch, disinfectant, and canned mercy. Lee ’s personal quarters are different. Like him, they exude a slight scent of cloves.

  He doesn’t only peer at a holo image of a burned heart. With haptic feedback and touch auto-set to dynamic compensation for a 3.2 second round‑trip communications delay, caused by Red Rover’s distance from the patient on Glarus, he pushes two fingers into a virtual version of the failing organ and surroundings. He feels Susannah’s burned and torn heart as though it really is under his roving fingertips, warm and rigid, pliant to his gentl
e push and brushback.

  Complex-polymer spray coats the Remote probe 400,000 klics away that’s really moving into and across a wounded heart inside a Trauma Pod flying at speed over the surface of Glarus. The coating prevents bacteria from forming biofilms that resist natural or drug-assisted defenses, even while gently lubricating the probe that Lee feels as his own fingers.

  He brushes along a pathway of surfaces that guide his virtual fingers, as well as the real blades, away from ‘no-go’ critical areas in Susannah’s chest. He feels strings of damaged purple muscle, locates burned and dead fatty tissue, plucks out tiny bits of shattered rib, maps any and all salvageable areas to repair and seal later with a surgical wand, and marks off with digital dye several large pieces of burned muscle so damaged he must cut them away with a laser-scalpel.