by Ian Whates
My heart sinks.
I feel relief that the zigzag layout of the trench hides most of my squad from sight, because I cannot help but wonder how many of my youngsters will die in the next few hours. I fight down the urge to curse our dead sergeant. Without her, I feel a responsibility that almost numbs me. But Mitchell did her best and gave her all. I wouldn’t want my name to be cursed if I fall at Hill 435, and so I force myself to remember the years when I admired Mitchell.
I find I’m checking my equipment: comms link, carbine charge and ammo status, water reservoir, moler, suit diagnostics... I stop. Equipment checks have become a compulsive routine for me since we dropped, but there are good reasons for routines, and the lives of these Marines are my responsibility now. Time to act like it.
“Check your gear,” I say over the squad channel. “And double check your grenades are stacked in the right sequence, and then triple check the integrity of your weapon seals. I expect we’ll be paying the enemy a visit shortly.”
“Case Blue,” says the lieutenant, right on cue. “Be ready for my signal.”
The lieutenant’s command post is about a hundred meters to our right and slightly behind. She’s out of my line of sight, but in my mind I can picture her clearly. The alien officer has been responsible for me since before I was born, and I feel a pang of awkwardness when I realize that I know her better than anyone human, but picturing her gives me strength. Even in her camouflaged battlesuit, Fangfade is instantly recognizable. She is twice the size of her human Marines and has an extra pair of limbs. She scares the crap out of most of us, and for her part thinks of us as slow-witted children for whom she has endless patience, often sorely tried.
She’s also the best officer I’ve served under, and that’s why she gave her Case Blue instruction to senior NCO call signs only, because she knows it’s better for the Marines to hear the call to go over the top from a veteran human NCO rather than via the computer translation of her alien speech.
Unfortunately, I am now cast in the role of veteran NCO.
Before I can assemble the words that will put fire into the bellies of my Marines, the view through my binoculars reveals another shimmer in the air. The enemy has switched off their shields once again as they prepare to fire.
The hill and its shield is why we are here – why we are about to go over the top, or rather under it. Our lightly armed assault regiments have struck hard and fast out of the LZ, keeping the defenders off balance, but when our advance loses momentum we will be crushed unless we can land heavy reinforcements first. And we can’t land the shuttles filled with soldiers and materiel while the enemy still has the heavy missile battery inside Hill 435. If we can crack this open, the planet will be liberated within days.
The ground shakes in a muddy spray, a prelude to an eruption of flame out of the hill’s recessed centre. A shockwave rocks my head into temporary insensibility, and by the time I can take in my surroundings once more the enemy missile barrage is away, heading for our landing zone, leaving nothing more than contrails. The protective shield over the hill has re-established.
Light blooms along the western horizon, throwing sharply defined shadows behind every raised surface across the landscape. The noise of the missile impacts takes many seconds to reach my position. By now, any asset we still had at the LZ has been destroyed.
I take a deep breath and switch my helmet to tac-display mode. I can’t hide from my soldiers and my responsibility now. The battlesuit AIs inside the heavily armoured chest panels report to me the health of their human partners, and the ammo status of their weapons. I count twenty-nine Marines. How many will I count back when this day is done?
There’s not much time left. I have to say something.
“Mitchell was good with words,” I say on Crimson Squad’s local channel. “You could be without sleep with half your body blasted away and your ammo spent, and she could still spur you on to one last push. There is no poetry in my words, though, just hard truths. Hill 435 is the last of the enemy’s heavy missile batteries, and you’ve just caught a glimpse of its power. Our situation is very simple. If we don’t capture this hill, then we’ll all die. All of us. Everyone in the Legion’s expeditionary force. But if we do take Hill 435, then we unlock the key to this planet, open it up for others to finish the fight. One way or the other, this will be the last battle of our campaign. Survive ten campaigns and the Legion gives you a sack of money and a plot of land on a liberated world. Your war will be over. That’s a long way off for you, but this is my tenth campaign. And that is why I want you to fight and win this day. Not for glory, nor even the principle of freedom...” I pause for dramatic effect. “...but because your Old Man needs his rest.”
Laughter rattles across the squad channel, but I don’t laugh with them. They’ve called me Old Man for so long that I now let them say it to my face. They mean it to be affectionate, an irreverent admiration of my veteran status. I see it differently; I see it as a challenge. Before the Legion and its revolution there were no old Marines. No one got to retire or be invalided out of their service through their injuries. I want to be in that first generation allowed to grow old.
What’s keeping the lieutenant? The last moments of waiting before an assault are the most agonizing torture. Is there a delay or is this my impatience unnerving me?
“Odd-numbered fire teams, prepare to give covering fire,” I say, more for my benefit than my squad’s. “Even numbers ready to move out.”
I open a private channel to my newest lance corporal. “Ammo state good, Salter?”
“Ready and eager, Corporal Keita.”
I can see the status of Salter’s fire team in my tac-display, but I wanted to hear the confidence in his voice for myself. Salter sounds like he’s going to be okay. I was intending to share a word with each of my subordinates, but the lieutenant cuts in with the word I’ve been waiting for.
“Execute!”
With half the squad giving covering fire, I lead the others over the top of the trench to slither over the twenty-meter gap to our mustering point, which is simply a crater bored out by a brace of tunnelling grenades the day before.
The enemy chooses not to fire at us, but my heart is still pounding as I count my Marines coming in. Then it’s our turn to give covering fire for the remainder of the squad.
Despite the rain and the shielding of the embrasures, the combination of Marine, AI, and the targeting systems of our carbines means that we can place aimed shots through the embrasures and into the fortified hill. We don’t, though. The darts ejected by our railguns ping off the force wall in sparks of brilliant colours. Some things can pass through the shield: air, rain, nerve gas, but projectiles cannot. For the defenders to fire at us, they would have to deactivate a segment of the shield, and allow us to fire in, and that decision was probably above the pay grade of whoever commanded this section of their perimeter. After all, we are mere foot soldiers creeping toward the base of the hill. What harm can we do?
It’s a question that is about to be answered. One way or the other.
The enemy’s innovators have profoundly reduced the time taken to switch the shield on and off. Our boffins’ breakthrough? We are about to swim through mud.
“Ready?” I call when the last Marine has slid safely into the crater.
“Yes, Corporal,” they chorus.
I can hear they aren’t ready. I groan privately because neither am I. I’m getting too old for digging around in the dirt, but sometimes you have to lead by example.
No deep breath. No silent prayer. I simply clear my mind and blindly follow my training, diving down through the muddy ground, and remembering to keep my elbows bent as I hold my moler over my head.
The ‘M-91(E) portable boring tool, (experimental)’ is called the moler after an Earth animal that apparently swims through dirt. It’s just a modified Fermi drill, a cutter that alters the laws of nature in a localized area. It does something clever to the Fermi bands of whatever it’s pointed
at. The upshot is that the dirt and rock in front of me is transforming into a thick goo, fluid enough for me to push into. As the transformed matter passes behind, it solidifies.
If I weren’t in my ceramalloy armoured battlesuit, this hardening as I passed through would crush me.
As I tunnel down under the hill, and then up again, the millions upon millions of tons of the rock and earth above my head grow heavier until they’re crushing the breath from my lungs. My combat suit integrity holds – even my SA-71 carbine still reports as functioning and secured to my back – but no amount of rationality can convince me that I am safe. How could I be? I’m encased in a temporary bubble deep below the ground. If my suit integrity fails, I will be pulped instantly. If my air hose snags, I will quickly suffocate. I snatch a few tight gasps while I still can, and ready my suit’s med-system to end it all with a suicide injection if I became trapped down here. If I’m going to die, it won’t be through suffocation.
Piercingly blue sparks shatter the darkness of my tomb. I shake my head and try to clear away thoughts of being trapped underground.
The blue flare is good, in fact; it is precisely what the techs predicted should happen when the moler hits the impervious barrier of the force shield. I prod the force shield with the utility knife I holstered over my chest, and feel the jolt up my arm as the blade rams against it.
It would have been very generous of our opponents if they’d left the underside of Hill 435 unprotected by their shield. Unfortunately, the shield is a sphere, equally strong at every point.
I can progress no farther, trapped in my pitch-black tomb until I receive the go signal from the battalion HQ, or my air supply runs out.
This is the easy part. I switch my brain into sentry mode, and know no more... until HQ broadcasts the signal.
“Vladivostok extraction is imminent. And we have the gold.”
I check my internal chronometers. I was out for eighteen minutes; we are bang on schedule.
The ground shakes.
High overhead, another salvo of low-yield nukes is haloing the crest of the hill. This time, the Chambroix battery is not trying to blast the hill, it’s acting as bait.
I test with my blade, and can feel the barrier is still there, but I can also feel the vibrations from great motors pounding their signature rhythm into the deep ground. Inside the hill, the missile loading system is in motion, readying the enemy battery to spew forth destruction.
Abruptly, my arm slips forward a fraction, the blade slicing through semi-liquefied dirt.
The barrier is down.
Frantically, I reapply my moler and push back with my legs so hard that I soon have to pause, otherwise the drill will melt the top of my helmet.
Fourteen seconds.
At most, I have fourteen seconds before the barrier is restored, slicing through legs and feet left in its path.
The hill rumbles once more, this time as the missiles emerge from its crown, to obliterate the irritation at Chambroix.
I keep going. I have to. I’ve abandoned my knife, abandoned my dignity as my helmet fills with my screams.
HQ broadcasts the message I’ve been praying for. “Vladivostok extraction no longer possible.”
I slow a little. If I can hear that message, then it means I’m not going to be sliced in two. Not yet. I am through the barrier – inside the hill.
This is our only chance to get through that barrier. The lives of everyone in the expeditionary force depend upon those of us who have made it through.
The pull of responsibility sobers me, and I tunnel up toward the company rendezvous point without further incident.
I break free of the ground’s embrace, emerging into a dense patch of violet ferns on the lower slopes of Hill 435. I hold position under cover for a moment, trying to re-establish line of sight communication with anyone nearby. I find only Jalloh. She looks okay, skirting the base of a scree slope not far from me. She’s making for the company rendezvous point, and I follow suit.
Shadowy figures emerge in my tac-screen display, other Marines in my battalion, but no one I need to report to.
An explosion tears the air. In augmented real-sight I can see Jalloh is down. Injured but alive.
I race to her aid.
Please not Shauntia Jalloh, I pray. She likes to act the hard nut, but she confided her terror to me as we approached Nourrir-Berge orbit. She was scared of dying, scared too of letting her squadmates down in her first battle. I told her I’d be disappointed if she felt anything different, because I was on my tenth tour and felt the same way. I think it helped a little.
I manage a dozen paces toward her, and then I step on a mine.
The explosion throws me thirty meters through the air, slamming me against a blessedly springy sapling, before dropping me onto a jagged outcropping of rock. A human would have died from the impacts, but I’m a bioengineered cyborg that would make a Neanderthal seem porcelain-boned.
The only serious injury is to my helmet, the visor cracked against a rock edge. It’s no use to me now, so I release the seals and throw it into the ferns. I can still see my squad beginning to pop out of the ground. They can see me too in their tac-displays, but I can’t speak to them without my helmet, not unless I shout.
It’s too late for Shauntia Jalloh, though. She’s dead.
I lead my squad to the rendezvous, but halfway there I see movement on a nearby ridgeline. I freeze and magnify the image of the silhouetted figure. I’m missing the clarity of my helmet visor, but my eyesight is good enough for the task. I think. The soldier’s armour configuration is not to regimental pattern.
It’s the enemy.
Any vestiges of fire in my belly turn to ice. I like to think in my mind of ‘the enemy’, of or ‘my opponents’, but seeing them in the flesh makes it personal, and this is the worst kind of enemy. This hill is defended by fellow humans.
In the long waits between deployments, I’ve looked back into our history and seen many examples of inter-human conflict, but I had to look back over half a millennium for the last significant example.
I reach behind and feel the familiar shape of my carbine still securely clamped to my back. I’m simultaneously relieved and horrified, because as I remove its protective sheath I know I’m about to kill the sentry. It’s only by pure chance that we are on opposing sides in the civil war, but my responsibility is to keep my Marines alive.
The sentry stops and looks intently in our direction. Has the sentry seen us? Our suits are in stealth mode, which makes them seriously difficult to see but not impossible.
But the enemy must have heard the mines going off. He’ll know that something is not right. The sentry’s too easily silhouetted—something else that isn’t right. I’m hesitating, reluctant to kill him.
Mercy has no place here. I squeeze off a shot. It takes the sentry’s head off, but the rest of the body stays standing.
A decoy.
I hear a deep groan that sounds as if the very earth beneath us is moaning. Some kind of a sonic weapon?
“Make for higher ground!” I shout, not caring at this point that I’m giving away my position.
I run. Amplified muscles propel me from rock to rock, taking me up the slope to where the decapitated sentry still stands. I’m spraying the ridgeline with darts, but the ground is so unstable that my aim is wild.
A GX-cannon opens up on us from our flank, but I can’t deal with that threat because the ground has given way to mud. Weighed down by my heavy battlesuit and carbine, I sink to my knees. I flail my arms, seeking purchase. But there’s nothing to arrest my descent. Whatever they’re doing is liquefying the whole area. How deep does this mud trap go?
My tenth tour. My final engagement. I will not die now!
I sink down into this brown quagmire, but refuse to give up. I throw away the carbine that has served me faithfully for decades and orient my feet downward, praying for a solid bottom to this mud trap. I clamp my mouth shut and resist the temptation to blow the b
rown slime from my nostrils because I must keep hold of my precious breath. I must not give up. I disable the suicide cocktail tempting me in my med system because I won’t drown here. The other Marines have helmets and air. They will be safe. They will find me.
Even with my eyes shut, I sense the world narrowing as my last breath fails me. My hand is held high. Will someone grab it in time?
How many moments do I have left?
And then my fingers brush against something... fingers reaching for me!
“Hold on,” calls a voice in a strange accent. “We’re trying to bring you out.”
Ten tours...
It can’t end here...
“Not again,” the voice says, as the fingers slip away, and I feel myself topple into the liquid mud, drowning...
A steady curtain of rain drapes Hill 435. Through my binoculars, I study the fleeting patterns of spray as the natural watercourses cascade off the western embrasures. The embrasures look like they’re crying.
An interruption flickers through the sheets of rain, an interference pattern visible only for a fraction of a second, but it’s what I’ve been waiting for.
“Shield powering down,” I say as calmly as I can. “I repeat. Shield powering down.”
Regimental artillery at Chambroix sends a salvo of tac-nukes into the top of the hill, hoping to catch the missile silos with their shield down.
The bombardment achieves nothing, other than to give us light show and a radiation dose. We’ll have to tunnel underneath. It’s a desperate gamble, but we’ve no other choice.
I lie in wait, entombed beneath the hill, until the shield turns off for a few seconds while the enemy missile battery swats away the brave Chambroix mortars.
It’s enough. Just.
I tunnel through before the shield can slice off my legs, and emerge into the lower slopes of the hill. Marine Jalloh is first out, but she steps on a mine. I race blindly to her aid like a green recruit, only to trigger a mine myself. Jalloh dies, but I only lose my helmet.