New Model Army

by Adam Roberts

  We couldn’t stay there.

  Up we hopped, yea, and on we jogged. The jet was circling, its turning arc wide as a supertanker’s and almost as slow. I daresay it was planning to come back and drop a scattering load of sycamore ordnance to mop up any footsoldiers; but we would be gone by the time it returned. I kicked down a garden fence panel. ‘Which is closer?’ shouted Simic. He meant: where are we needed?

  ‘Library hill,’ Tucker said. He was checking his arm to see where everybody else was, working out where we might be needed. ‘Is that Dr Indulge?’ he asked the arm.

  A fxx and a fzz. We ran down a diagonal gravel path, past nodding red-pink flowerheads, twin beds of barbed and wiry rose bushes. My blood whooped and laughed inside me. There is no other thing that makes you feel so alive. We passed marmalade-coloured bricks, and a high narrow roof like hands at prayer, and then we jinked down the side passage. Simic hauled a tangle of pushbikes away to clear the way. ‘Fucking bikes,’ he said. They came away all in one tangle, as if they were right then in the middle of a pushbike orgy from which even war couldn’t distract them.

  ‘[Terence?]’ This was the Dr’s voice. Terence was his personal nickname for Tucker. Don’t ask me why.

  ‘Is this a direct patch?’

  ‘[Direct]’

  We came out at the front of the house, and starting jogging down the road, past a VW Bonus, parked and immaculate. I had once contemplated buying exactly that model of car. The car next to it, a Ford, had all its windscreens smashed and a chunk of concrete sitting in a dent in its roof.

  ‘Three of us,’ said Tucker; ‘coming up towards the hill from - what’s this?’

  ‘It’s either Kaye Drive or the start of Kaye Avenue.’ ‘Where do you need us?’ Tucker asked.

  ‘[There’s sixty or so enemy,]’ said the good doctor. ‘[You’ll come up behind them in two minutes if you come up the avenue. Distract them, would be good.’]

  The jet roared again overhead, fifty metres to our right and a hundred metres up, and as it passed another house disassembled with monstrously exaggerated Brownian motion. Bits and chunks rattled on the tarmac all around us, and on our helmets and shoulders, like hail.

  It was one minute’s running, keeping our posture hunched and making as much use as we could of parked cover, to clear the residential area. Almost at once we saw where the sixty - fifty, I’d have said; but maybe there had been sixty a little while before - enemy combatants were positioned. Walmart Local was offering three-for-two on all bathroom products. I knew this because a cartoon figure on the storefront’s screen was obsessive-compulsively repeating the same simple movements with his arms, and widening his eyes over and over, his mouth blowing out a speech bubble containing that information. He blew that bubble and popped it over and over again.

  Beyond that the road continued its gradient upwards, and I could see the library itself: its broad window-curtain frontage chopped to icicles and stalactites of glass.

  Somebody put in a general request; but this came from the other side of town from where we were, so we couldn’t help. Half a dozen people closer chimed in.

  We stopped behind an adshell - a bus shelter, it was. Poor cover, but it kept us out of sight. As I tried out a couple of aims, we were pinged.

  ‘[We see you,]’ said a gleeful Trooper Hesleff. I knew her from a chess tournament we’d both participated in, though I’d never met her face to face.

  ‘In which case please don’t shoot us,’ I said, looking around. ‘Where?’

  ‘[We’re seventy yards, north-north-east. What’s your defilade?]’

  The combatants were arranged in a large mass. Sloppy tactics, that. They had taken their cover partly behind parked vehicles, and partly behind the bulk of one of their own armoured cars. They were working towards concentrating their fire uphill, away from us.

  ‘Good.’

  ‘[Ours also. Count of three.]’

  We counted it together, and then opened fire. The enemy, at first, did not know where the new assault was coming from. All bunched together like that - it was just asking for trouble. To be fair to them, when you have been receiving fire from the front, and you start to receive fire from the back and the side as well, there can be a natural sluggishness that prevents you understanding that the enemy is not all located in the same place. Half a dozen dropped before they could gather themselves to return fire; and another half dozen followed as they looked frantically from place to place. The quicker-witted amongst them withdrew into the doorway of the Walmart - although that, under its awning of glass, was hardly a safe spot. Others stood and tried to pick out targets down the slope, aiming at cars, buildings, anything. Most clustered more closely about their armoured car, as the solidest cover in the vicinity.

  The car itself wasn’t idle, of course: it span its turret about and sneezed fire promiscuously downhill. One of its barrages broke up the plastic of our adshell and forced us to flatten ourselves against the ground. But they weren’t shooting at us, specifically. They were just shooting. The barrage swept away and we were able to get back up again and resume firing. Debris gravelled the pavement.

  Then one of the Doc’s threesome managed to squeeze a detonator-shell in between the cladding of the turret and the chassis. I’ll give you this tip: no matter how effective its armour, any car that has moving parts - let’s say, a revolving turret - has an unarmoured seam. And with modern weapons, and modern aiming technologies, that’s all you need. Doc, or one of his fellows, put a shatter-shell in exactly the right spot first go, which is good shooting. Not that we wouldn’t have squeezed one in there sooner or later, if we had persevered.

  The turret snapped up like a Pringles’ lid and flipped right over in the air before hitting the ground with a prodigious clatter. The second time I’d seen such a thing in half an hour. There was a flare of smoke and many tinkles as shards of metal rained through the glass front of the Walmart Local.

  Then, comically enough, somebody from the innards of the car poked his head up through the hole. He did not look scared or angry so much as bewildered. Don’t you think bewilderment is one of the most human of all expressions? After all, it is one of the most unselfconscious things we do with our faces. It always strikes me as an especially intimate thing. A soldier in combat ought to be guarded, and seeing one so evidently unguarded was like seeing him nude.

  This fellow blinked, blinked, looked around. Then Simic aimed his weapon and put a bindi-mark in the middle of his forehead, and the fellow sat down again.

  We had culled the fifty enemy combatants to thirty, or to a number, at any rate, in that ballpark, before they properly got their bearings on us. After that, things got hotter and considerably less pleasant. A dozen of them located us precisely with their aims, and began pooling their fire. That’s one of the cornerstone tactics of the old-style feudal army: you need to get a whole bunch of soldiers together, and focus all their firepower upon a certain point. It’s a strategy that has its uses, although it is also solidly arthritic, because it needs a whole bunch of soldiers to stand together, and it works best if the target stays where it was. We didn’t.

  Instead we extracted ourselves and made a run, behind a parked 4by4 and into a doorway. As we dashed we got pinged again: two more squads of our people had found their way to us, and started shooting at the shooters from different positions. I didn’t look behind; but I can imagine that their confusion was pitiable. ‘[Down to ten]’ reported a trooper called Jiggs (I didn’t know him personally, though I’d spoken to him on the wiki several tines) and his words were swaddled, before he spoke and then again immediately afterwards, by bursts of avant-garde symphonics, all rattle and smash and white noise.

  ‘[I thank you, sir,]’ said the Doctor.

  A jet roared overheard, loud, then much too loud, then going off. Its swollen sound faded, and then the noise of an approaching helicopter could be heard, creeping up behind. It was surprising that this machine was still airborne after an hour of combat. Of all aerial
devices helicopters are most vulnerable to small-arms fire; and that it was still flying meant it had been lucky, or we had been careless.

  The three of us jinked from our doorway to the end of the block, which is where Simic got shot. He was on my right, and he was running with his daft knees-high gait, and then, exactly as if he had tripped on a loose pavingstone, he was down on his front. I skidded to a stop and in doing so, stupidly, overbalanced such that I fell down myself. I hit the ground with my face and cut something in my mouth: tooth against tongue-tip.

  Like: ouch.

  I could see Tucker stopping in his tracks too, and probably he was thinking that we were both shot, so I scrabbled up to my feet again and waved him on.

  I gobbed blood, and shouldered my rifle. The cymbal crash of a detonation, somewhere off to the left. Simic wasn’t moving, which was not an encouraging sign. If I had stopped to think about the possible implications of this, I might have felt genuine terror, for I loved Simic more than any other human being. But it can be the case that the momentum of battle sweeps you along through even the profoundest fear. I didn’t think about it. I grabbed a shoulder strap and hauled him, main force, across the pavement. The ground was covered with a layer of those transparent beads generated by the shattering of an automobile’s windshield, and that made transport rather easier than it would otherwise have been. Like moving a menhir on ballbearings. Simic, you see, was not a thin man.

  The air was full of gunfire’s slow sizzle.

  Round the corner, and Tucker took the other of Simic’s arms. We pulled him faster now. My mouth was full of that unpleasant black-pudding flavour of blood. I spat, and spat again. Out came my saliva, Bovril-coloured.

  We found some cover, and took a moment, laying him down. ‘He’s OK,’ said Tucker, rolling Simic on his back. This meant: he’s not dead yet. It did not exclude the possibility that he would be dead soon.

  ‘Can you hear me, Sim?’ I yelled, in the fellow’s face. Or, more precisely, I tried to yell that, but the words came out all rubbery and peculiar, and as I spoke I dribbled blood on to his front.

  Tucker pulled Simic’s medical supplies from his pack and gave pressed an analgesic ampoule against his neck. Simic’s eyes were open. ‘Don’t der,’ he said. ‘Don’t der.’ These seemed all the words he could get out. ‘Der, der. Don’t der.’

  ‘I bit my tongue,’ I wailed, the words smearing as I spoke them.

  ‘Don’t der-dribble,’ Simic gasped, ‘on my lovely clean jacket.’

  ‘You’re OK,’ said Tucker.

  ‘My legs have,’ he panted, ‘gone numb.’

  This didn’t sound good. We were all of us, as NMA soldiers, medics as well as fighters; in the same way that we were all engineers, and staff officers, and logistics and supply, and cooks and laundrymen. Which is to say, we were all these things with the help of google, and as much self-training as we could fit in to our otherwise busy lives. I spat, and spat, and called up the appropriate wiki. Tucker rolled Simic on his side and took a look at the wound. ‘It’s low, but to the side,’ he said.

  ‘Is it?’ Simic gasped. ‘Is it?’ I’ve seen a lot of people shot; and I’ve been shot myself; and I’ll tell you - the main thing about a bullet wound is that it knocks the puff out of you. It’s a bodyblow punch in the first instance, and a sword-stab only subsequently. ‘Is it spinal?’

  ‘No way.’

  ‘Kidney?’

  ‘No kidney.’

  ‘No kidding?’ Simic wailed. ‘Who’s kidding?’

  ‘With a begging your pardon,’ Tucker asked his arm, putting out a localised ping. ‘A little help? It’s Simic, and he’s shot in the back.’

  ‘[Who’s it?]’ came an immediate reply. The speaker’s tag didn’t register at first. The air crackled. Overheard, a hundred metres or so away to our left, a helicopter thrummed past. That deep-resonant lawnmower sound, as the sun beat down and I lay on the grass I could almost hear - I glanced across at it. The fireworks package slung under its belly was dispensing, with insolent little puffs, packages of sycamore bullets; but it was firing away to our left, not at us.

  ‘You’re tag is stalling,’ said Tucker, to this pinger.

  If the fellow had said anything like ‘where are you?’ or ‘what’s your location?’ or tried to give us his details verbally, we would have known something was wrong, and snapped the connection. But he did the right thing. He said: ‘[It’s a firefight here, there’s cracklefire, I’ll try again]’ and he repinged us. This time his tag came through fine: it was a man called Todd, somebody I knew a little. ‘[Who’s down?]’

  ‘Simic.’

  ‘[I know Simic. He’s a Chelsea fan,]’ said Todd, disdainfully. Behind his voice there was a shower of battle noises on the line.

  ‘The intersection of Hill Street and Silkmarket,’ I cried. But my mouth was slimy with blood and my words didn’t come out well.

  ‘[I don’t speak bloody gibberish]’ said Todd. ‘[Again in English, which is the global lingua franco after all, too-raloo.] ’

  ‘Franca,’ said Simic, from the ground. He was a pedant, even when shot in the back.

  Tucker gave him our location again, and we waited for thirty seconds or so. If Todd and his comrades could get to us to help they would, even for a Chelsea fan; if they could not then we’d have to try and sort Simic ourselves. I darted my head round the corner and pulled it back: a dozen or so enemy combatants were approaching. They were keeping a neat line, a discipline particularly prized, incomprehensibly enough, in feudal armies. But they were not coming forcefully; but advancing hesitantly, and looking over their shoulders, so I deduced that they were in retreat, rather than advancing.

  I took aim.

  At that very moment the sun chose to wipe a great cloth of brightness over the pavement and the road, and let off its silent white fireworks in the glass frontage of the office block opposite. I looked up. The clouds gaped like a widescreen special effect: a beam of light broad as a football pitch. There was a cathedral-like aspect to this ceiling of grey and white and this sculptural, massy shaft of sun slanting down. I could see, far away and to the west, two helicopters; and I was able, as thought slowed, to connect what I saw with the drowsy bee-buzz somewhere else in my sensorium. Sudden light refreshed the whole city. The up-billows and reaches of smoke were there to link earth to grey sky. A dark line was tracing itself, etch-a-sketch, upon the white ground of the western cloud cover, and this line joined dots: rooftop dot; helicopter dot. The right-hand copter jiggled and bloomed into a chrysanthemum shaped tangle of fire and smoke. The sound of the explosion arrived seconds later.

  Cloud sieving light.

  Then the effect passed. I dropped my sightline as the clouds closed and the brightness departed from the stone and the tarmac. I began firing.

  A target went over.

  A dog appeared from nowhere and dashed hard across the road. That squeezebox way dogs run: compressing their whole bodies to tuck all four legs together beneath them, and then stretching themselves out wide. The beast went right through the middle of the troop and out the other side. Christ knows where it came from, or what it thought it was doing.

  I shot again. Another target went down.

  It’s always at the back of your mind: if they get to me, they will kill me. Sometimes it comes into sharper focus and adrenaline spikes in you bloodstream and does its caffeiney work. Mostly that thought stays in the background somewhere, grinding along. But this keeps your focus. Then the memory of that boy came back to me, on his back in his own house with a key stuck in his forehead. Projectile. I aimed, and loosed another round. Another.

  The enemy combatants were looking about themselves. Several skidded to a stop and tried skittishly to aim their weapons. But it took them seconds to work out where the firing was coming from. Others carried on their running, several in blind panic.

  Tucker was on one knee beside me, shooting. Another target dropped. Another target dropped. The easiest ones to hit were the ones runnin
g blindly.

  The others, getting more of a handle of their composure, were jinking, and trying to keep low, and going for cover. There were several parked automobiles nearby. There was a sports car. There were a couple of 4by4s. I tend to disapprove of 4by4s on principle, on environmental grounds. They can have a terrible effect on the environment.