Crises and Conflicts: Celebrating the First 10 Years of NewCon Press

by Ian Whates

  The console pings and I fire the charged laser. The beam isn’t like the movies, its invisible, but there’s some atmospheric effects, zips and flickers of electricity where it should be. I train the barrel across the outcrop and watch as the rocks shatter and explode then shut down.

  The dust and residual charge take a while to dissipate. I can make out something, a dark stain on the beige/brown dirt. Could be a corpse, a confirmed kill?

  Were they actually going to attack? That familiar second guess guilt grips me like an old friend. Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder was one of the reasons soldiers got replaced by computers, the ultimate detachment from the consequences of war is to not be there, but we have no option in this place. Better I go to my maker and confess than get one of these kids dreaming about it for the rest of their lives.

  The world erupts, projectile weapons of some kind, dull thuds against Jane’s outer ceramics. Not waiting for the laser to recharge, I traverse and return fire with the same. Fifty calibre machine guns haven’t changed much since the second world war, but these two are self-contained, the heat and spent bullet casings recycled into the portable fabricator. The drumming sound of operation shakes the turret as it turns, my finger locked on the trigger. Suppression fire isn’t accurate or pretty, but it’s generally effective, making people worry about their own skins means they’re less likely to shoot at you. The digital ammunition counter spirals towards zero. We don’t have an infinite supply, even if the fabricator makes more, it takes time.

  “Penn, get a move on!”

  I can’t make out the reply. We need more ordnance and I can’t control the main gun from here without transferring the auto-loading system. I keep strafing the arc away from the lander with the fifty-cal, start up laser charging and begin the sequence to switch all operations to my station. I’m not sure I can manage the fine controls, even with meds, but I’ve no choice.

  Figures are moving out there in the dust, shadowy shapes I can’t be sure of. I remember Russian insurgents using smoke as cover to get close with explosives. That was seventy years ago in my lifetime, centuries ago to anyone back on Earth.

  The console pings again. I fire the laser at a dark shape, hoping to hit something.

  Was coming here some sort of therapy? A chance to return the past when there’s fuck all left for me to live for. In that sense maybe I’m a better soldier now. No ties. Means I’m clear in what I must do.

  Something hits Jane on the side, pitching us back at an angle. She groans beneath me. The seat traps tighten as my weight shifts. I can’t reach the joystick with my left hand. I can hear the tortured grinding of metal on metal as the auto compensator system tries to right us, doesn’t sound good.

  Penn’s voice crackles over the comms. “Exiting now,” she says.

  “Bloody hurry!” I shout back. The turret turns towards the sky, giving me no firing solution with the fifty-cal, the laser pivots, but it’s still only half charged. “We’re a sitting –”

  A huge impact, Jane shifts up and forward, ceramic debris flies everywhere. For a second I worry that the duraglass won’t hold if we flip and I’m re-arranged to be on the bottom, but then she crashes back onto her tracks. Somewhere in the rear the pressure door opens; there’s hissing, a red klaxon and light starts up, and there’s shouting. Penn screams before three loud pops ring out around me. A flash of pain, spider web cracks appear on my viewscreen and I feel something wet under my arm.

  “Penn?”

  “I’m here!” she says from below, slipping back into his seat and pulling on the straps. “We had some uninvited guests,” she says. “They’re gone, so we need to get moving.”

  “What about the others?”

  “Making their way up,” her voice trembles a little. I know the signs, the adrenalin’s still there. She’s going to fall apart after, just as we all did the first time. “All present and accounted for.”

  “Get us underway then,” I tell her.

  Penn brings the engine out of idle and starts up both track drives. For a moment, she forgets how it all works and makes like a kid with a game stick, but then she remembers. Jane whines a little but settles down and with a lurch, pulls away. Our girl’s bloodied, but not bad, just like these kids.

  The dust clears. There’s a smoking wreck of something dead ahead on the path; like a beetle from back on Earth, only it’s the size of a house. I can’t see inside, there’s no obvious crew compartment, just dark brown ridges overlaid on each other. Around it, there are things moving though. They’re tall, thin and six limbed, scampering away to keep the dead beetle tank between them and us.

  Krees moves up to her seat at comms and turret control. There’s blood on her lip and matting her dark hair. “They’re all around us,” she says. “Where are we going to go?”

  “I don’t know,” says Penn, she’s staring ahead, trying not to look at her. “What do we do, Corp?”

  I try to smile at Krees, but it’s hard to breathe. There’s pain in my chest and something’s not right. “We make for the next target and see who’s following us,” I manage to gasp out. “We need flat ground, then we can understand what we’re up against.”

  She nods, her pinched face relaxing a touch, but those wide eyes are still full of fear. I remember my first fight. It’s easier when someone else makes the plan, you can shut down and just do what you’re told. The voices go away when you’re given a job. “Take over turret. Traverse to rear and see if you can comm the fleet. Tewan, give me sweeps on what’s following.”

  Both girls snap to their jobs. I wince as the cabin shifts round. Jane groans a little too. “Juonal, get me a damage update.”

  “How am I supposed to tell if –”

  “I don’t care about dents; I care if we’re leaking!”

  “Right, Corp.”

  They’re kids – I need to keep reminding myself. Worse than that, they’re super intelligent vat grown kids who take criticism to heart, they don’t know any other way. “Krees, pull up the scans as well, two pairs of eyes are better than one.”

  I’m staring out through the dusty canopy as we accelerate away from the lander. Gradually it clears as Juonal activates the screen optimisers and gets his head around what we’ve bent and broken. I can see three big beetle shapes like the wrecked one. They can’t match our speed and neither can the six-limbed creatures capering around them, all amidst brown rocks under a bleak sky. I can’t quite believe I’m seeing aliens; suddenly this place really is another world, not just a warzone.

  But it is also a warzone.

  “Slow us down and load up the main gun,” I tell the crew, “explosive round please. Penn, find me a good flat spot for recoil. We don’t know how shaken up we are right now.”

  Jane slows and the dust clouds fade. Then she stops and Penn deploys the support legs. I can feel things shifting around below as Krees loads up the charge. There’s a grinding noise too, a little indigestion?

  “The autoloader’s jammed!”

  “Stay calm and unjam it then,” I wheeze in reply, “Penn, your turn to help.”

  Both of them unstrap and get to work. I keep my eye on our pursuit. The natives are getting closer and I bet they have friends nearby. We’ve an advantage if we can get a round in the breach, if we can’t and they surround us...

  There’s a clunk and shout of relief from below. “Loaded!” Krees shouts.

  “Penn get back on the controls. Everyone brace for firing!”

  In 1943 the German army produced the Panzer Tiger II with an eighty-eight millimetre gun. The Americans and British only had tanks with seventy-two millimetre guns. The Tiger could hit them at a range where they couldn’t fire back and its extra armour meant even if they did get close enough, they had little chance of getting through. The only problem the Germans had was they couldn’t produce their tanks fast enough or in enough numbers. German crews ended up outnumbered three or four to one, whilst allied forces knew they had to rush the Tiger as quickly as possible. At least one o
f them would get blown to bits on the way in.

  The same situation happened in Ukraine. The Russian T-14 Armata out-gunned, out-armoured and out-powered our Challenger 2s.

  A one hundred and forty millimetre gun makes us the Russians and Germans in this scenario.

  “Fire!” I shout and depress the trigger. The chair kicks me in the kidneys. There’s a puff of smoke and a faint whine. In the distance, one of the beetles explodes. The tall creatures scatter, but keep on coming.

  “Rotate six degrees right. Armour piercing this time; reload!”

  “Aye, Corp, Reload!”

  There’s feverish working below as Krees pops the steaming chamber and hauls up another round. She knows every second at this brings the aliens closer. These kids looked our enemy in the eye; they know what’s at stake.

  “Clear!”

  I don’t hesitate. I can’t. We’ll die if I do. If we don’t survive, the next batch that gets set down here’ll likely die too. I squeeze the trigger again. Another plume of smoke, but the targeter’s off. The shell smacks into the side of the beetle. The armour cracks, but it keeps coming.

  “Three points left and reload!”

  Some of the alien soldiers are in range. The patter of small arms fire on the canopy starts up once more. I shift around and begin charging the laser, but I can’t aim the fifty-cal as well. My seat’s soaking wet with blood. “Tewan...” I gasp.

  The lower guns open up in response. Relying on instruments there’s not much Tewan can do to target them, but the trackers are effective enough, keeping them jumping around outside.

  “Clear!”

  I disengage the auto-targeter on the main gun and aim it myself, shifting around a fraction before firing. There’s a yelp of pain from below, but I haven’t time to check what’s wrong.

  The second shot does the trick, hits the damaged beetle dead on. It crumples on itself, squatting on the ground like a cracked egg. The third one’s in laser range now. I fire from the console and rake the beam across the front of it, watching a dark line score along the ceramic ribbing, but it’s too late, whatever this thing is, it’s got close enough.

  There’s a huge roar as something punches into Jane. Her prow distorts and I’m thrown back in my seat. Spider web cracks appear in the duraglass canopy and the alert klaxon wails, bathing us in red light. There’s a hissing noise that builds into a rushing pull and someone starts screaming. Another bang and suddenly I can’t see. We’re slipping to the left, listing, leaning.

  Then the engines snarl and we’re moving, the noises fade and everything goes quiet.

  “Penn?”

  “Still here, Corp.”

  I’m slumped sideways; my weight is against the seat straps. My left hand is trembling, much worse than before. My right arm is hanging down and the cybernetic servos aren’t responding.

  “How’s it all looking?” I ask, trying to sound calm.

  “It’s bad,” she replies in a shaking voice. “We took a direct hit; some kind of pressure blast.”

  I can’t catch my breath. My mouth is dry. I try to swallow, but it’s hard at this angle. “Just keep driving,” I manage to whisper. “Get us clear, we take stock after. Can you do that?”

  “Yes, Corp, I can do that,” she says.

  ...Kiev (AFP) – Ukraine on Tuesday reported it had repelled a tank assault by the Russian army.

  President Petro Poroshenko said ‘about six thousand insurgents supported by tanks and heavy weapons’ had staged a pre-dawn attack on Poltava – a city halfway between Russian held Donetsk and Kiev – that caught the government and NATO off-guard.

  Lieutenant General Jan Broeks, NATO (DGIMS) stated that ‘allied forces engaged the Russians on the outskirts of Potlava’. Local new sources reported seeing RAF Typhoons over the city and British Challenger tanks moving in to establish defensive positions alongside Ukrainian infantry. Explosions were seen in the direction of the motorway towards Donetsk, suggesting the allies were cutting off potential supply routes for the advancing pro-separatist forces.

  Local pro-Kiev officials told AFP that separatist fighters had also launched several waves of Grad missile attacks on the eastern part of Poltava itself.

  The two self-proclaimed republics of Donetsk and Lugansk began their revolt shortly after the February 2014 ouster of a Moscow-backed president in Kiev and Russia’s subsequent seizure of Ukraine’s Crimea peninsula.

  The clashes have killed more than 64,400 people and driven Moscow’s relations with the West to their lowest point since the Cuban Missile crisis in 1962. Experts are comparing the conflict to the Afghan war (1979-1989) when US forces backed Mujahideen rebels against Russian invaders. Officially, Russian troops involved in Ukraine are ‘volunteers’ and the NATO deployment is ‘defensive and advisory’, but these paper definitions are little comfort to the civilians caught up the fighting.

  The crisis has also left 3.4 million homeless and sent Ukraine’s economy – heavily dependent on exports from the industrial east of the country – into a tailspin.

  The European Union on Monday called the situation ‘unacceptable’...

  Jane’s shuddering now, the power to the track drives is intermittent, coming in waves. There’s no trouble with the generators and passive chargers, but the distributor is damaged. She wants to keep going, but she’s hurt, she’s limping. “That’s enough for now,” I rasp at Penn. After a second or two we slow down and stop.

  The sound of straps being undone, and there’ are hands on my back. “I’ve got you, but you need to unfasten the seat belt,” Penn says. “I can’t get to it.”

  “I’m not sure if I can...”

  “There’s no other way.”

  The trembles in my left arm have eased, whether through blood loss or the attack subsiding, I don’t know. I reach up and grope blindly above me, feeling along the taut straps. Half the canopy is caved in, pushing me in my seat down through the main hatch into the crew compartment. I must be dangling over Penn’s head. I find the buckle. “Soon as I undo this, I’m going to fall,” I tell her.

  “It’s okay, I have you.”

  I pull on the belt and slip into her arms. When my feet touch the floor, I manage to take some of the weight and let her guide me into a chair. My breathing is better than before, but other things are higher priority. “I can’t see,” I confess.

  Fingers explore my face, scraping away something. “The sealing foam extinguisher went off when the turret was breached,” Penn explains. “It stopped us being depressurised, saved our lives.”

  “But not all of us,” I say. “Whose chair is this?”

  “Tewan’s.”

  I try to open my eyes, they feel full of grit, but I can see a little. Penn is still cleaning around my eyes, her fingers carefully picking away crusted flakes of foam. She’s covered in blood and scratches, but otherwise seems okay.

  There’s something on my foot. I glance down. Tewan’s lifeless corpse is resting against my leg. She could almost be sleeping, curled away from me, apart from the smell of loosed bowels.

  I hear someone crying. Its Krees; she’s sitting on the floor by the breach, rocking backwards and forwards, her hands hugged under her armpits. Juonal is hunched over her console, shoulders quivering. I know that dark place he’s in. It comes after the adrenaline when you’re trying to block out the world. War does that. It puts things you should never see right in your face.

  “We need to move the body.”

  “We can’t leave her out here,” Penn says.

  “You’re right, but she can go in the airlock for now, otherwise...” I swallow and bite off the rest of the sentence. They’re kids; they aren’t ready to hear it. “What’s the situation? How far did you take us?”

  Penn bites his lip. “I’m not sure, I just drove. I keyed up the scanner and kept going until most of the blips disappeared.”

  “Okay, you did good.” The praise is empty words from me right now until we know what state we’re in, but she held it togeth
er and needs it. “Juonal, I must know how bad...”

  He lets out a strangled sob in response then starts coughing before leaning back in the chair and staring at the ceiling. “Damage was pretty extensive before the last round, Corp,” he says. “Now... well... what’s left...”

  “Can we at least work out where we are?” It’s a thorny problem. With the ionised atmosphere any sort of satellite triangulation is out. For the mission we’d carefully mapped a grid using the landers, and Jane wasn’t supposed to stray outside the boundary. The only reference points we can use are those the computer managed to save. I turn to Penn. “Is there a data log of your drive?”

  “The system is struggling,” Juonal says. “I had to bypass a lot of things just to keep us moving.”

  “Do what you can,” I say to them both. “We’ll stay put till we know, or for as long as we can.”

  The task gives them something to focus on, all except Krees. She’s the furthest away from me and I can’t call her over, not with Tewan’s body at my feet. I can’t ignore her though, she needs me.

  I glance down at my right hand. Then pull it up onto the chair rest with my left. The cybernetics are shot. Whilst the hand is the only limb replacement, it works on electrodes wired under my skin all the way to my brain. The damage means the arm is dead weight, useless.

  I’m not the man I was.

  When I left the army I knew I wasn’t the same; older and wiser maybe, but not as strong, with scars on the inside and the outside. It’s the hardest thing anyone has to do, adjusting to age, illness and injury. After giving up twenty five years to being a soldier, I figured I’d have something left for Helen, my kids and the family.

  The shakes started six months after I’d demobbed. Medication helped for a while, but I had to learn that I couldn’t do what I’d been able to before.

  When I was sixty-seven I climbed a ladder to trim the hedge. Next thing I knew I was in hospital with three broken ribs, a broken leg and fractured arm. It was a long time till I could walk properly again, so I had to make changes. Even afterwards I couldn’t do all that I’d done previously.