by Marko Kloos
MEASURES OF ABSOLUTION
A Novella by Marko Kloos
Chapter One
Detroit
For the first time in her military life, Corporal Jackson thinks that she may not make it through to the end of her service after all.
The mobs on the streets of Detroit have done what none of the world's third-rate militaries and insurgents have been able to do--kill or injure almost everyone in her squad. Without air cover or armor, it's just a running gun battle. They're slugging it out with ill-equipped locals, but there are many more of them than there are TA troopers on the ground tonight.
And the locals are about to win.
The bullets clang against her armor so frequently now that she has stopped counting the impacts. The rioters are using mostly old cartridge weapons, and few of those shoot anything powerful enough to pierce the ultra-tough laminate of military battle armor, but there's more modern stuff in the mix as well. Jackson lets the computer pick her targets, but she needs to shoot with one hand because she's carrying the crew chief of the downed drop ship they rescued a little while ago. She needs to shoot burst fire to make up for the imprecise one-handed aiming, and that wastes ammo she can't afford to burn.
In front of her, Grayson and Priest set up a covering position on a street corner. Their rifles start chattering the moment they get sight of the intersection beyond. Corporal Jackson sees a hundred hostile icons popping up, but they start blinking out of existence on her helmet visor screen rapidly as Grayson and Priest are thinning out the rioters' numbers with ruthlessly efficient rapid fire. Dozens fall. Then the others break and run, and the intersection is clear.
"Go, go, go!" Priest shouts and waves her along. Jackson renews her grip on the unconscious crew chief and drags him across the street into the next inadequate cover.
Just as she lowers the crew chief to the dirty concrete of the crumbling sidewalk, there's the familiar chatter of an M-66 salvo coming from the corner of a nearby intersection. Behind her, she hears Grayson groan. When she turns around, he's on the ground next to Sergeant Fallon. Corporal Jackson brings up her rifle and looks for the source of that rifle fire. There's a small group of rioters over by that street corner. Two are armed with old cartridge guns, but the third has a military-issue M-66. Grayson is trying to pick up his rifle, but he's moving slowly, as if in a trance. Jackson puts the target reticle of her gunsight on the shooter and snaps off a three-round burst. The rioter takes all three rounds to the chest. He stumbles backwards and lands on his ass, dropping his rifle in front of him. She moves the reticle up a hair and fires another burst. This one hits him in the face. He drops backwards and doesn't move again. His buddies do an about-face and retreat into the darkness of the unlit street behind them.
"Grayson, you okay?" Jackson calls out over the squad channel. She gets a gasping groan in reply.
"Priest, go check on Grayson," she orders. The intersection is clear again, but she needs to make sure. She runs over to where the man she just shot is sprawled on the ground.
When she is next to his prone figure, she can see that it’s not a he at all. The rifle next to the body is a standard TA issue M-66 flechette rifle. She can see the armory marks on the polymer shell, rack and slot numbers written down in waterproof red marker. She picks the rifle up and ejects the magazine. It's still mostly full, and she sticks it into one of the empty pouches on her armor. There's a round still in the chamber, and she aims the rifle down the road and pulls the trigger. It spits out a high-velocity flechette with a sharp little bark. All TA rifles have DNA locks coded to the individual soldier and his fellow squad members. She shouldn't have been able to fire that gun, but fire it did.
The dead woman’s last expression looks mildly surprised, maybe even annoyed. The flechettes from Jackson’s three-round burst all hit within ten centimeters of each other, right in the triangle formed by her eyes and the chin. There's a familiar-looking ball chain around her neck. Corporal Jackson reaches into the collar of the dusty sweatshirt he's wearing and pulls out the chain. She finds two military dog tags at the end of it.
Up ahead in the darkness, there's movement again. Her low-light augmentation shows another group of armed rioters, a hundred meters away, dashing from cover to cover and closing in on the intersection. Jackson seizes the dog tags and yanks the chain off the dead woman’s neck. Then she stuffs the tags into one of her empty magazine pouches. She aims her rifle at the approaching rioters and fires a quick series of single shots that send them ducking for cover. Then she gets up and dashes back to where her squad--what's left of it--is hunkered down.
"More incoming," she shouts to the others. "Where's that goddamn drop ship?"
"We'll never make the civic center," Priest says.
"Sit tight. Make every shot count," Jackson replies. "We defend the wounded until we can't."
"Copy that," Priest replies grimly.
The incoming fire picks up again, a discordant cacophony of reports from dozens of different weapons. Priest and Baker move in front of the wounded, and Jackson joins them to form a final defensive line.
Jackson aims at muzzle flashes, sends out flechettes in bursts of three and five. More rioters fall, but others pick up their weapons and take up the fight. She empties her magazine and ejects it from her rifle. When she searches for a new one, the only ammunition she has left is the partial magazine she took from the dead woman with the military dog tags. She loads the magazine into her weapon and chambers a fresh round. Her visor display updates her ammo count: 121.
"I have half a mag left," she shouts to the others.
"I'm just about dry," Baker replies. Priest is too busy shooting people to reply, but from the way he picks his targets off with careful single shots, she can tell that he doesn't have much left either.
She eyes the oncoming crowd and glances at the combat knife she wears on her harness.
They're not wearing armor, she thinks. I bet I can get a dozen before they take me down.
Someone up the street opens up with an automatic weapon. The fusillade kicks up dust and concrete chips next to Jackson. Baker cries out in pain and anger.
"I'm hit," he shouts.
They're everywhere now, shooting from alleys, rooftops, windows. Dozens, maybe hundreds of them, all armed and out for blood. Jackson dishes out what's left in her rifle, but they're not dropping fast enough, and there seem to be two more joining the fight for every one she kills. She has never seen such determination and tenacity from the welfare rats.
She shoots down another rioter, then another. Her rifle’s bolt locks back on an empty feedway again. Now there’s only Priest’s rifle returning fire. As if they can smell the weakness of their adversaries, the rioters increase their fire, emboldened.
That’s it, then, Jackson thinks.
She tosses the empty rifle aside and pulls her combat knife from its sheath.
The first indication of their salvation is a burst of autocannon fire high above their heads, the long and ripping thunder of a multi-barreled drop ship turret. The high explosive shells pepper the street in front of the squad, where the attackers have advanced almost to rock-throwing distance. Jackson sees bodies disintegrate under the hammer blows of the cannon shells. Overhead, the drop ship descends out of the dirty night sky and settles in a hover right above the intersection.
The rioters are smart enough to see that they’ve lost. They retreat like a wave pulling away from the shore at ebb. Some brave souls shoot at the drop ship, but they don’t have any heavy machine guns nearby now, and the small arms fire pings off the hull like rain off a tin roof. The drop ship’s gunner responds in kind. In just a fe
w moments, all the rioters Jackson still sees on the street are either dead on the ground or running away.
Jackson puts her knife away. The profound relief and gratitude she feels make her knees shake.
At Thermopylae, the Three Hundred held back a hundred thousand Persians. Everyone learns about Leonidas and his Spartans in boot camp. One of the epic last stands in history.
Tonight, Corporal Jackson doesn’t believe the Spartans went down as heroically as the historians claim. She’s pretty sure some of them pissed themselves before the end. Unless they were insane, or inhuman.
Epic last stand stories are such bullshit.
Chapter Two
After
The drop ship doesn’t go back to Shughart. Great Lakes is closer, and Grayson and the Sarge are in bad shape. Jackson keeps looking over to where the crew chief and the combat medic are stabilizing Grayson, who looks as ashen as the gunmetal paint on the bulkhead. Sergeant Fallon lies next to him, conscious but doped to the gills with painkiller, what’s left of her leg tied off with a tourniquet. Then there’s the rescued drop ship crew, and Priest and Baker. There are more wounded than able-bodied in the cargo hold.
Jackson feels helpless. She can’t help the medics do their job, and there’s nothing around to kill up here at ten thousand feet. She has to fight the urge to unbuckle and go up to the drop ship’s armory to refill her magazine pouches and grab a bunch of weapons to replace the ones she left behind on the street in Detroit.
Three years of combat drops all over the country and across the world, and the squad has never received a mauling like this, not even close.
What the fuck went wrong? Jackson wonders. She looks at the leaking bodies of her squadmates and the dozens of impact marks on the outer shell of her armor.
Everything, she concludes. Ain’t a damn thing that went right tonight.
She reaches into her magazine pouch and fishes out the set of dog tags she plucked off the dead rioter just a little while ago. The services all have their own formats for dog tags, and these are rectangular, with rounded edges and a horizontal perforation right across the middle. Jackson isn’t sure, but she thinks they’re old Navy tags, a kind they haven’t issued in a while.
Military weapons. Squad tactics. Run-of-the-mill welfare rioters don’t chew up a hardened infantry squad. They don’t blot heavily armored drop ships from the sky. You need a certain kind of training and mindset to pull that off.
Jackson puts the dog tags back into the magazine pouch before anyone can see what she’s looking at.
Right then she resolves to find out who’s responsible for this ambush—for half her squad laid out bleeding or dead on the deck in front of her. Find the bastards, and kill them.
When the drop ship lands at Great Lakes, the medics swarm the cargo hold before the tail ramp is fully on the ground. They haul off Grayson and Sergeant Fallon, then the dead bodies of Stratton and Paterson. They come to check her out as she unbuckles herself.
“I’m fine,” she tells them. “No holes in the armor.”
“Let’s get you inside anyway,” one of the medics replies. “Just to make sure.”
They take the combat knife off her harness. She has to suppress the impulse to break the fingers of the medic who unfastens her blade and removes it.
Let them have it, she thinks as they lead her outside toward a row of waiting stretchers. Like I wouldn’t know how to kill someone without that. Dumb fucks.
She just has a few minor scratches, so they clean her up and put her on a shuttle back to Shughart. They won’t let her see the rest of the squad. The flight back to base all by herself is the loneliest trip she has ever taken in the military.
Back in the squad bay at Shughart, the ghouls have already cleaned up. Two of the bunks in the room are stripped down to the bare mattress pads, and two lockers stand open and empty. Jackson walks over to what used to be Stratton's locker and looks inside. The gear is all gone, and someone wiped down the whole locker with an antiseptic cleaner that left behind a faint lemon smell. They even peeled off the adhesive name tag that used to be on the locker door.
She runs her fingers across the optical sensor of the locker's latch, the flaky DNA reader that would refuse to read Stratton's thumbprint sometimes, usually when they were running late for something. Her fingertips glide through a thin layer of cleaner residue. There's nothing left of Stratton in this room, not even his fingerprints. Twelve hours ago, they geared up for a mission in this room together, and now it’s like he never even existed.
Battalion doesn’t seem to know what to do with her. They put her on light duty, but they don’t actually give her anything to do, so she cleans her gear and stows it, then takes it out and cleans it again. She doesn’t want to do maintenance. She doesn’t want to patch things up, she wants to break them. She wants to go out and kill people. It seems strange to be angry at being the only member of your squad to escape an ambush without injury, but Corporal Jackson is. In fact, she’s fucking furious.
She doesn’t feel like eating at all, but her stomach reminds her that she hasn’t had any food since before last night’s combat drop, so Jackson walks over to the chow hall for lunch. For the first time, nobody from her squad sits down with her at the table. She pokes around in her lunch—spaghetti and meatballs—and gets her PDP out of her pocket to read up on the battalion news while she eats. There isn’t a word about last night’s clusterfuck. The battalion S is probably still trying to figure out how to package the events in terms that don’t make it look like the brass screwed the pooch. Like the grunts don’t talk.
The dog tags from last night are in her pocket now. Jackson takes them out and puts them on the mess table in front of her, next to her plate of spaghetti. Then she enters the name on those tags into her PDP and runs a MilNet data search.
It takes a lot of digging to find any references to her MCKENNEY A in the archives. Jackson has no access to the personnel files anywhere, so she can't just punch in the military serial number on the tag and pull up a name. Instead, she has to do full-text searches on all the open databases on the MilNet--all the sanitized press releases for public consumption, and the thousands of individual unit news nodes updated by the data entry clerks in every autonomous unit in the Armed Forces.
After thirty minutes of increasingly customized searches on increasingly obscure data repositories, her spaghetti and meatballs are cold, but she finally finds a reference to a Navy sailor named MCKENNEY, ANNA K. It pops up in a reference to an awards ceremony, and she instructs her PDP to ferret out the related file. A few seconds later, her PDP returns an article from a base news bulletin, titled TWO RECEIVE NAVY COMMENDATION MEDAL ON NACS CATALINA. There are pictures of the event attached to the file, and the second one she pulls up makes her sit up straight in her chair with a jolt.
The picture shows two sailors shaking hands with a Fleet officer, presumably their commander. The sailor in the middle is the woman she shot last night in Detroit. In the picture, her long hair is neatly tied into a braid, and she's wearing a Class A Navy smock with petty officer chevrons on her sleeve.
She looks at the picture for a while. She tries to imagine what her voice sounded like, or what her smile looked like.
Petty Officers Third Class Anna McKenney and Pete Willis accept their Navy Commendation Medals from their Commanding Officer, Lieutenant Commander Alan Carreker, the caption of the picture reads.
Anna McKenney will never age past the way she looks in that picture. All that's left of her is the collection of bytes that make up this picture in some forgotten nook of the MilNet, and the stamped steel tag on the table in front of Jackson.
The article lists Petty Officer McKenney's home town as Liberty Falls, Vermont. A quick cross-reference with MilNet tells Jackson that Liberty Falls is a small city near the state capital Montpelier. Its population is only thirty thousand, which is a shockingly low number to her. There are more residents than that in any five blocks of tenement buildings of any PRC.
<
br /> When the military lists a soldier's hometown, they always mean the place of enlistment. Corporal Jackson very much doubts that Anna McKenney traveled all the way to that little Vermont town just to visit a recruitment office, and she’s willing to bet that some people in Liberty Falls still remember her name.
Chapter Three
Liberty
Don't make me find you some bullshit job," Sergeant Sobieski says when Corporal Jackson walks into his office and renders a salute. The platoon sergeant is a stocky man with a graying buzzcut and a permanent frown on his face.
"Negative, sir. I came to check if I can get a few days of leave. Since I am limited to bullshit jobs right now anyway."
Sergeant Sobieski looks at her, his frown increasing in severity as he undoubtedly ponders whether to consider her repetition of his swear word as borderline insubordination. Then he raises an eyebrow.
"Leave? What the hell you going to do with that, Jackson? Got yourself a civvie boyfriend in town?"
"That's a negative, sir. I feel the need for some fresh air all of a sudden.”
Sergeant Sobieski studies her face for a moment, his own expression sour as always. Then he shakes his head and sits down behind his desk.
“I sure as shit can’t use you for anything before Battalion gets around to your psych eval and lets you near a gun again.”
He consults the MilNet terminal on his desk.
"You got five days accrued, Jackson. You want to take 'em?"
"If it's okay with the platoon, sir."
Sergeant Sobieski hacks away at the keyboard with two fingers, an activity he clearly finds distasteful. Then he taps a button on his terminal's touchscreen and leans back in his chair.
"I'm the platoon right now, Miss Jackson, and I don't care. God knows you've all earned a few days of drinking and whoring around for that clusterfuck in Detroit. Go over to the company clerk and give him the dates you want for your leave."