In the Valley

by Jason Lambright

  When he found out about the fleeing villagers, Paul had a serious discussion with Bashir about the importance of passing information up through the halo chain. But that was for later. In the present, Paul came to with ringing ears and instinctively pinged Z’s halo.

  Z was all right; he was apparently calling Paul’s name. Paul couldn’t hear it over the ringing in his ears, however. He grabbed his balls instinctively, just to make sure they were still there. With the reach of his hand, he felt the comforting, undisturbed bulge between his legs. Thank God, his penis was still there. He sat up and clutched for his rifle, rolling over on his belly automatically and sweeping his sector with his weapon. He was having a hard time seeing with all the dust in the air, so he had his halo go over to thermal.

  Paul saw a lot of moving black blobs (he had his halo set to darken for heat in black-and-white; the color displays annoyed him) with Second Company tags above them; one small black form, identified as a civilian boy, was currently being beaten by several Juneau Army soldiers.

  Paul pinged Bashir for a casualty figure; Bashir pinged right back with one dead soldier, a trooper named Nasrallah, and three seriously incapacitated men. Paul was pleasantly surprised—with an explosion that bad, he had feared worse casualties.

  In fact, that little boy being beaten had saved the lives of any number of soldiers, including himself. Paul asked Bashir via halo link to have the troopers stop with their child-beating antics.

  The dust started to clear. Paul almost pinged Z to go forward and provide aid to the three seriously wounded dudes, but then he saw Z’s form already moving out, aid rucksack unslung. Good work, Z, thought Paul.

  Paul mentally toggled over to his tactical display and asked for Second Company’s disposition. He saw that at present the company resembled a blob in two dimensions; their security was a mess. He shot a proper formation over to Bashir, who was busy yelling at one of his platoon leaders, and reached into his backpack for one of his precious tube micros and launched it.

  A man-pack tube-launched micro drone resembled an Old Earth military parachute flare, and its method of deployment worked exactly the same. A person would point the tube in a safe direction, unscrew the cap with a pin inside, and place the cap on the bottom side of the launcher. With a solid thwack on the bottom of the tube, there was a small puff and pop, and the micro drone was on its way.

  Micros were, of course, kept in launchers in a standard or command armored suit. They were also kept in launch tubes on ground-cars. The man-pack version was designed especially for the situation Paul was in—a dismounted patrol with neither a ground-car nor a suit available. SOP (standard operating procedures) on Paul’s team dictated that they were only to be used in emergencies.

  Paul thought that this fucked-up situation could be called an emergency. He needed both a medevac shuttle and eyes in the skies—there would be squirters after this little attack, and he wanted the bastards behind the attack if the Second Company could get them.

  A micro drone would help a bunch. Thirty seconds after launch, the micro’s icon popped up in his visual field. The first thing Paul did was check for any incoming small-arms fire. There was none. There were, however, some outgoing fires: at what, who knew? He pinged Bashir with the micro info and hoped Bashir could give his bubbas some fire discipline.

  The second thing Paul did was send out a priority ping to the colonel, with the location, description, and number of casualties involved in the attack.

  Finally, Paul shot out a medevac request to higher.

  Instantly, there was a halo ping from Mighty Mike. His ugly mug appeared in the lower left-hand corner of Paul’s visual field.

  “Sir,” Mike’s speaking icon said, wearing that curious, catlike intense expression, “I have all the administrative bullshit under control. The colonel saw the attack on your feed. I slaved my feed to his, and he has it all. Be advised: a medevac shuttle is inbound in 2.1 minutes; set up your LZ now. Z will bring the casualties to the CCP, which I designate as being next to your LZ. I suggest the rice field 130 meters northwest of your position would make a decent spot.”

  “Start now, sir; you’re going to have a busy day.” Mike signed off. He knew exactly what to say and when to say it. Things were indeed starting to look busy.

  Paul hustled to set up his landing zone and casualty collection point in the spot Mike had suggested. Why argue with the man about it? It was a good spot. He took three Juneau guys with him for security and pinged Bashir and Z with his plans and whereabouts. Bashir agreed and gave him a “roger” icon back. So did Z.

  Paul had no sooner chucked his shuttle beacon out, when he heard the distinctive whine of an inbound shuttle. The shuttle’s halo icon appeared in his view at the same time.

  “Two-Three, Two-Three, this is Angel One-Six inbound to your location. Do you read?” came the voice of the medevac crew.

  “Roger, Angel One-Six, this is Two-Three. Do you have a visual on my beacon?” answered Paul. His heart was thumping in his chest—both from the adrenaline of the attack and from having to hustle to set out the LZ. Paul’s mouth was dry—he felt as if he was sucking on cotton.

  “Got you, Two-Three. LZ looks clear. Be on the ground in three-zero seconds.” Paul saw Z moving up with a gaggle of Juneau Army soldiers carrying the wounded in ponchos. Paul saw a twisted arm sticking out of one of them—the blood looked more black than red. He caught Z’s eye and held up his hand, palm outward, stopping Z-man in place. With his other hand, he gestured over his head in a flapping gesture. Z looked upward and saw the bird. Everyone crouched down and the backblast took them, hurtling sticks, sand, and trash around the LZ.

  “Two-Three, this is One-Six. Sending a crew chief to you to guide WIA on board. Wave your hand over your head, so she sees you.”

  Paul complied. A helmeted figure hopped out of the down-thrust ramp of the shuttle. She was carrying three miniskids for Z’s “customers.” The crew chief walked directly to Paul and pinged his halo for additional information. He had none. She already had basic diagnoses for the wounded from Z’s halo.

  Z was ready to receive her, being forewarned through his halo. With some help from the Juneaus, the three wounded men were loaded on the miniskids and carted into the maw of the shuttle. Poor dead Nasrallah was carried on last, zipped up in a shiny black bag.

  From the bomb attack to the shuttle’s imminent departure, Paul’s halo clock told him eleven minutes, thirty-six seconds had passed. Paul wondered how the poor suckers had done medevacs in the distant past, without halo support or micro feed.

  He didn’t know, but he pitied those long-dead, ancient warriors. He bet a lot of guys had died waiting on evac.

  After the shuttle left with an ozone-stinking blast of air, Bashir walked up to Paul. They looked at each other. Without a word being said or a ping from their halos, both men knew Second Company would have to do a “hard” knock search on the village ahead.

  Second Company spread out on-line (soldiers abreast of each other) into a two-hundred-meter-wide rough pincer formation. They conducted the sweep, and it wasn’t pretty. Splintered doors, screaming kids, bleating goats and sheep—the search passed in a whirlwind.

  Worse yet, they didn’t catch the people responsible or find any munitions or other prohibited weapons. In short, the day was a wash, and Second Company had lost some good men, too. Paul would later learn his close brush with death was the work of an asshole he had eaten with and joked with—Najibullah the Bomb Maker, major, Juneau Provincial Police.

  Three hours after the bomb attack at the bridge, Paul looked back on the smoking remains of Nagamas. He lit a near-cig, inhaled, and wished he had never stepped on the FSS Merton R. Johnson, Hyadesbound from Earth.

  Paul was wishing he had never stepped on the FSS Merton R. Johnson. It was boring beyond words.

  When he had first approached the ship on the shuttle, he had been hanging weightless in his bright red straps. Some asshole had gotten to his space-sick bag just a little too l
ate. Globules of puke were drifting around the cargo compartment where Paul and 115 other soldier and sailor guys and gals were strapped in the sea-green compartment. They were waiting to dock and board the kilometer-long, cigar-shaped interstellar transport.

  There was no view screen for the passengers to gawk at or portals to peer out of. He was flying military steerage, and he and his fellow transportees were known as “pax,” short for passengers. Paul guessed that “pax” was a military abbreviation for cattle, and the shuttle was a cattle car.

  Earlier, when Paul had arrived in Cuba, he was immediately seconded to Departure Hold on Force Installation Gutierrez. Departure Hold, he soon realized, was an amazingly boring, nondescript terminal stuck in the corner of the installation. There were no doors to exit the facility, except for emergency exits that looked to Paul to be locked. He mused that that had to be some kind of safety violation. Maybe the locked exits were a breach of safety regs, but they definitely emphasized the cattle chute–like atmosphere of the place.

  Paul thought that somewhere there had to be a sign: ABANDON HOPE ALL YE WHO ENTER. A couple of hundred soldiers and sailors milled around: the veterans with rank pips were staying off in their own little groups; recruits found a hard chair to sleep on or were busy gambling on the floor.

  Paul really didn’t feel like making acquaintance with anyone as of yet. First, it was apparent that the shuttles would make a couple of stops to ships parked in geosynchronous orbit, and a lot of the guys and gals here were going to be on different ships. Also, Paul figured that whoever was on his ship would become familiar to him all too soon.

  Of the estimated 270 days’ transit time that Paul’s orders claimed it would take him to reach Ottawa 6, almost all of it was subluminal travel out of and into the gravity wells of the two respective systems, Sol and Ottawa.

  The Glimmer drive wormhole transition was nearly instantaneous, from what he had been briefed, so it took hardly any transit time.

  So he figured he’d be cooped up awhile with at least some of these people. Might as well catch up on some shut-eye, he figured. He spotted a likely bench and popped a squat. Eventually, he fell into a fitful sleep.

  He was awoken by a Klaxon horn and an announcement. “All passengers for the FSS Merton R. Johnson are directed at this time to take your luggage to the ADAG counter for stowage aboard transport. All passengers ranks E1 through E4 will report…” The announcement droned on and on. Paul caught the bit about “boarding” and “luggage” and shouldered his bags to the ADAG counter, wondering what the hell ADAG meant anyway.

  After a wait in the line that seemed to go on forever, Paul finally deposited his duffel and personal-effects bags on the scale. The fat, unpleasant military clerk at the desk gave the scale readout the fish eye, but Paul was underweight, so the clerk just grunted. A halo icon popped up in his visual, and it said, “EMBARKATION INSTRUCTIONS.” Paul got out of the way of the next guy in line and took a look at his newest icon and groaned.

  Apparently the part of the announcement he missed, about the E1–E4 (junior enlisted) personnel, meant that he had some work to do. He shuffled over to the steadily growing group of soldiers by the luggage gate. They had to palletize everyone’s bags under the supervision of an air terminal guy. Two sweaty hours later, after stacking bags and securing them with nets, the job was done.

  Paul was released to wait some more. He spent his final hours on Earth looking at clouds, wondering if this was to be the last time he saw Old Earth. When the passengers finally boarded the bulbous gray shape that was their transport, Paul felt nothing but relief. He was finally headed to space.

  Three months later, Paul was really regretting stepping onto the shuttle that fateful day. The cattle-chute nature of Departure Hold back on Gutierrez made more sense to him by the day.

  At first, going to the ship’s junior-enlisted “relaxation lounge” was fun. There was a view port there, and Paul liked to go after his duty hours and stare at it. The number and color of the stars to be seen from the lounge was amazing for a while. If one wished, a direct halo feed would seemingly put you out into the center of space, along the exact track of the ship. It was awesome, in the old-fashioned Biblical sense of the word.

  The feeling of awe at space travel wore off pretty quick, though, and was replaced with loneliness and boredom. It turned out the Merton R. Johnson had been named after some poor private who had killed a bunch of Chinese during one of Old Earth’s endless wars. That ancient trooper would surely have known all about the busywork handed out as the force’s solution for his feelings of boredom, of course. As the saying went, “Idle hands do the devil’s work.”

  So Paul and his fellow passengers had a series of duties that ate away at the shipboard day. He was woken up at 0530 shipboard time and given fifteen minutes for ablutions. Then it was time for one hour of physical training, a half hour of calisthenics and weight training, and a half hour of running along the ship’s slowly spinning outer wall. All activities were monitored by a senior NCO via halo link, of course.

  Then came breakfast, which was unusually good. It certainly wasn’t the force swill Paul had had in training at Sill. After breakfast, there were about three hours of details, cleaning this or that in the ship. Then there was lunch call, which was broken up into three shifts for the junior enlisted.

  First shift was ship’s complement. (Paul and his force friends thought the sailors got the best chow, of course.) Second shift was navy in transit. Finally, they bothered to feed the grunts in the hold, which only served to reinforce the perception that the navy got first pick.

  In ship’s afternoon, Paul and the other armored infantry types had remedial halo training on any number of topics: suit maintenance, consideration of others, on-world finance, and so forth. It got old, but it did pass the time.

  And on the Merton R. Johnson, all they had was time. For three hours every ship’s night, the passengers were free to think, fornicate, or gamble—each according to his or her ability or desire. The junior-enlisted pax were quartered in a battleship-gray, open-bay hold in bunks stacked three high. For privacy, they frequently hung up blankets or ponchos to hide their time-passing activities.

  In the ship’s artificial “night,” Paul frequently heard soft moans, arguments, or snoring. On a good night, Paul got to witness a fight. Sometimes those grew to the extent that the navy cops had to break them up; then Paul got to witness a free-for-all, followed by bleary-eyed NCOs coming down into the hold to chew everyone out.

  At 136 ship’s days from Earth and past the orbit of the former planet Pluto, the ship transitioned and emerged from not-space into the Ottawa System, 153 light-years from Old Earth. Paul hadn’t felt a thing.

  After the Glimmer transition, he couldn’t wait for the duty day to end. For at least 70 of the past 136 days, Paul hadn’t gone to the relaxation lounge at all, the sight of stars and the occasional bright glow of a planet on halo feed or the view screen having lost all novelty to him.

  But after the transition, he had to check it out—as soon as the stupid halo class on M-74 optics operation was done. It turned out that if you set the parallax just right on the ACOG scope of the rifle, you could see through women’s clothes.

  Naw, not really, but Paul could dream, couldn’t he?

  The faux instructor on the halo class paused and asked Paul to pay attention. The simulations were just a touch too good for Paul—you couldn’t even daydream properly! Of course, that just made it easier for the force to feed info to its recruits, as Paul well knew. Maybe one day the automatic range-finding function on the MkVIIb optic would save his life. Here’s hoping, anyway, thought Paul.

  After the class, Paul went to the lounge to virtually bathe in the stars of another planetary system. He wasn’t the only one in the relaxation lounge; there were a number of other soldiers and sailors there, virtually sightseeing or staring at the view screen.

  Here were stars native to a place where humanity was an interloper. Paul clicked on th
e “Ottawa System Stars” icon in his visual field, and he was seemingly hanging in space, dangling at the entrance to the Ottawa System. The constellations all seemed wrong to him. As he “turned” his head in the view, he found a bright blob labeled “Ottawa 6.”

  The 6 in “Ottawa 6” meant sixth planet from Ottawa Prime, the star of this planetary system. It was a naming convention for planets that had started in the infancy of Glimmer travel, and humanity had stuck to it since. By that definition, Earth should be “Sol 3.” Of course, no one called Old Earth that. Only the planets of the diaspora had number tags.

  In Paul’s visual of the stars, he could see all the various planets of the Ottawa system, except for Ottawa 2, which was occluded by Ottawa Prime. And looking around further, he finally found what he was looking for—the faint star at 184 degrees relative, called Sol Prime—the sun of Old Earth.

  All of a sudden, Paul felt like crying. Sol was so dim—he was an eternity from home.

  And he was only about 130 days from Ottawa 6.

  Three months after entering into the counterinsurgency fight on Juneau 3, Paul was wishing that he was anywhere else but there. This was a fight where you looked into your enemy’s eyes as he lay dying. This was a fight where the enemy looked into your eyes and laughed and called you his “friend.”

  The team was back on Camp Kill-a-Guy, waiting for a new round of missions to come down from Jade, the capitol of Juneau, or from Force Command Juneau (a.k.a. FORSCOMJUN).

  Paul was sitting in a folding chair outside the team’s barracks building, a one-story, tan brick building with a watchtower nearby and protective basket barriers around it.

  The barrier baskets were for occasional incoming mortar or, more commonly, rocket rounds. The local dissidents amused themselves by tossing their local 107 mm Sino-bloc knockoff rounds into the camp on the off chance they could send some infidels to a well-deserved hell.