by Michael Ryan
High-altitude orbital drops are expensive.
At the conclusion of our advanced training on Purvas, Command promoted Callie and me to master sergeant specialists. Sometimes – believe it or not – there’s logic in the madness of what passes for army command. Our Leopard Squad was reunited under Second Lieutenant Ballanorte after the other six members completed their specialty training. The four specialties complemented each other: sniper, demolition, engineer, and intelligence.
We were part of a company-sized incursion into the mountainous regions of what had once been the Northwestern United States.
“I hate these rust buckets,” Sandie complained.
“I agree,” Callie said. “It feels like we’ve been demoted.”
“It’s the rising cost of jet fuel,” Sergeant Abrel Velesment stated flatly, as if that settled the matter. He and Sergeant Mallsin Vestale were the intelligence component in Leopard Squad. I trusted his declarations as generally being true, if not complete.
We were riding in one of the older versions of the TT-104, the eight-wheeled troop transports that had been so effective in muddy Amazonian battles, as well as for moving troops into the Biragon on Purvas.
“I don’t mind it so much,” Corporal Dantie Boolestion said. Dantie was the attractive half of the engineer team, and I sensed a little jealousy in Callie whenever I spent more than a few minutes alone with Dantie. I tried to remind Callie that we all look the same in armor, but she countered that it was easy enough to send pics back and forth.
“We’d be there already if they’d just dropped us in,” Dantie’s partner, Corporal Cuelein Voolmester, declared.
“But I don’t think they know exactly where ‘there’ is,” Mallsin countered.
“And then we’d be marching for days,” I added. “Better to have ground vehicles. I don’t think there’s a rush. Winter’s coming.” I hated the snow, but it made sense to start our hunt for the headquarters of the Prostosi terrorist group at the beginning of winter because they’d be holed up until spring; at least that was what intelligence analysts had concluded.
I always maintained there was an inverse relationship between the conviction with which one holds an opinion and the truth.
But then, I’m a cynic. Occupational hazard after as many drops as I’ve done.
“Avery is correct,” Abrel said. “If they’d dropped us out here, we’d have less gear, mobility, and logistics.”
“The ride’s not so bad,” Callie said.
Eighteen days later her opinion had changed, but everyone had the good sense not to remind her.
You might wonder why an SDI urban team was trucked in transports through the forest. Command had determined – which generally meant guessed – that the Pros had organized a mobile city to use as a base of operations. There were thousands of towns scattered throughout the continent, ranging from a few dozen families to city-sized outposts of half a million people. The populations were largely human, but progressive Gurts with social agendas often lived among them. Also scattered across the globe were a few hundred million displaced Teds.
It was the Ted population that concerned Command the most. The war was over, so now Gurts couldn’t legally shoot Teds on sight, although a few quietly advocated that. There were Tedesconians sympathetic to the human separatists, and probably a few who merely wanted whatever misguided revenge they could get by continuing to fight a war that had ended with the near extinction of their culture.
Because we were no longer battling a well-defined enemy in a theater that everyone understood, urban teams like Leopard Squad were dispatched into remote enclaves to see if we could stir up the rebels. While many supported our efforts, some progressive pundits made comparisons between us and imperialistic storm troopers seeking to destroy rebel forces who fought for the righteous causes of freedom, liberty, and self-rule.
The similarity wasn’t lost on me, but I never talked about it.
“Incoming!”
An announcement over the all-company comm that enemy combatants were firing on us never failed to make my heart jump. I felt a three-beat thumping in my chest like the triple meter of a battle drum. By the fourth beat, my pulse had slowed. A moment later I felt perfectly calm as the nano-magic coursing through my body went to work.
“Shit, that’s so weird,” I said as I joined my squad’s leap into action behind the rest of the platoon.
“I know,” Dantie said, agreeing with me to the consternation of Callie, who remained silent. “I feel so calm.”
“The spells of science keep getting deeper and deeper,” Cuelein said. “I’m still amazed–”
Our platoon leader broke into our comm. “Leopard team! Shut the hell up. We’re under attack.”
“Sir, yes, sir,” Dantie said. “But, sir, it’s only one little missile. Look – it’s been destroyed. I can see on my display–”
“You will follow protocol, Corporal Boolestion,” he ordered.
“Yes, sir.”
“You do want to make sergeant someday?”
“Sir,” she answered.
“Good. March into this quadrant,” he said. We received a marked map on our screens with an area to sweep. “And Boolestion? Following proper tactical procedures devised by geniuses over thousands of years of combat is the best way to make it to retirement.”
Dantie took the point with contrite agreement. “Yes, sir.”
“Your upgrades aren’t magic,” the lieutenant continued. “It’s going to take a few missions before you’re acclimated to what happens to your body in combat. Unlike in training, you’re not going to be ‘designated deceased’ if you commit a monster fuckup out here. You’re going to find out if Golvin is real.”
The rest of us fanned out behind Dantie.
I toggled into the all-company comm to see if there was any chatter about who had attacked us. Nobody knew. I suspected the missile had been triggered by our approach – an early warning device that had alerted whoever had set it to our presence.
We were recalled to the transport after an hour of fruitless search for clues. The convoy traveled another twenty kilometers northwest and stopped when the first vehicle’s sensors identified a strip of buried mines. We changed our course. After heading north for another five clicks, we were forced to stop again at the base of a rocky cliff.
“Now what?” Callie asked.
“Leadership, in their infinite wisdom…” I said.
“Will send us into an ambush,” Abrel added, completing my thought.
“I think we’re being used as bait,” Mallsin said. She stood and paced up and down the aisle that ran down the center of the transport. Our squad occupied two sets of four seats located at opposite ends of the vehicle. Command strategy dictated splitting us up during movements, so an entire team wouldn’t necessarily be killed if the TT-104 was walloped with an HE or drove over a landmine. In actual practice, the vehicle’s substantial plating, combined with our TCI-Armor, usually gave suited infantry enough protection to escape the first round of an attack.
What came after the initial hit was usually what took out a squad.
“Like a worm on a hook,” I said.
“Cheese in a rat trap is more appropriate,” Corporal Neal Smith, the demolition specialist, said. “And the trap’s getting anxious.”
Sandie stood and joined Mallsin in her pacing.
“Take your seats,” Lieutenant Ballanorte ordered.
They both complied and attached restraints to their armor.
“We’re moving in two minutes,” the lieutenant said. “A minefield channeled us up to this dead end at the base of an impassable mountain cliff. I agree with the consensus: we’re being funneled into an ambush.”
“And Command is doing this on purpose…because?” Dantie asked.
“I’m just a lowly second lieutenant,” Ballanorte said. “They don’t invite me to the strat-cons. But my gut tells me that the ‘cheese in a trap’ analogy is apropos.”
“And we’re the c
heese,” I said.
We traveled east until we reached a gorge, where four hundred meters below us a river flowed to the south. With the mountain range to our left and a minefield behind us, we’d completed our trip into the funnel. Predictably, the attack came a moment later.
Historically, when a platoon of regular infantry was ambushed, some percentage of the troops would panic. Some would freeze. The numbers varied depending on the mental state and experience of the soldiers. On Earth, pharmacologically augmented warfare entered its infancy in the mid-twentieth century. Soldiers were supplied amphetamines along with bullets, enabling them to stay in the fight longer, which translated to greater efficiency, given finite human resources.
Our medical programs delivered whatever nano-pharma our bodies needed.
Nobody panicked.
Nobody froze.
Our squad moved like synchronized gears in a precisely engineered machine. We leapt out of the transport and ran in a column behind the lieutenant. He guided us to a covered position fifty meters away from our ride, which was gushing smoke and tongues of orange flame that licked at the overcast sky.
“Well, that didn’t take long,” I said.
“Avery, you and Callie take this position,” the lieutenant ordered. He transmitted us a picture of a rocky bluff to the west with markings.
“Sir, that’s two and half kilometers from here,” Callie said.
“Then you’d better start moving,” he answered. “The rest of you deliver covering fire to that ridge.”
Whoever the enemy was, they’d created a good trap. We were being strafed from a high position from across the gorge to our north. Of two possible escape routes, one led into a minefield and the other was a path below us that led into the unknown.
“I’ll lead, Callie,” I said. “Stay behind me and to my left.”
“Ready when you are,” she said.
I fired my jet assist and ran.
Time seemed to slow as I accelerated to impossible speed. I had roughly one hundred and fifty meters of ground to cover before reaching the tree line that would provide some shielding from the onslaught. The small Gauss rounds and baby HE mortars from the enemy were diversions, being used as chaff to confuse any missiles we fired at them. Designed to overwhelm my defenses, the incoming fire warned me of what was sure to follow.
Something deadly.
We’d covered half the distance when my system alerted me to the real threat: a guided missile launched in tandem with a kinetic round. Based on the trajectory, the high-speed projectile was targeted ahead of me, which forced me to deviate from my course and slow my pace. A Gauss round deflected off my right shoulder as I spun to face the enemy on the ridge above. The missile had locked onto the heat signature of my jet assist. I cut it, but it was too late. My system auto-fired a flare and a buzz-bomb, but neither tricked the incoming missile’s tech.
Its flight path didn’t waver.
I locked my assault Gauss into place and triggered it at full auto.
The missile flew into the stream of mini-bolts and disintegrated fifteen meters in front of me. Debris pelted my suit, and I activated my jet assist again and resumed my flight. A jolt of adrenaline and pharmacologically induced alertness hit me as I ran for safety. My weapons control programming auto-launched another round of missile defenses, which were successful in tricking the next two inbound projectiles.
I reached the tree line and took cover.
Callie had been forced to take a more southerly course and ended up below me by a couple of hundred meters.
“I’m putting you two into my background,” the lieutenant said, which meant he wasn’t monitoring us minute by minute and we could operate somewhat autonomously. But our mission still required us to get to the coordinates he’d specified and set up a sniper’s perch.
Once we’d left the squad comm line and had our direct person-to-person comm set up, I pinged Callie. “Callie, you good?”
“What the hell are they firing at us?”
“Looks like high-quality Tedesconian hardware.”
“And these are supposed to be rebels?”
“Rebels, separatists, Ted loyalists out for revenge…”
“It never ends, does it?”
“Eventually,” I said, my pronouncement sounding hollow to my ear. “Let’s move down this line.” I sent her a terrain pic, and she responded with a short affirmative along with a minor adjustment to the route.
We made our destination without attracting any additional attacks, probably because the rest of the company was furiously exchanging rounds with the enemy. I found a ledge in the rocks with a good line of sight, and we set up a pair of LR-34S sniper rifles.
With our new light-bending camo system activated and most of our armor concealed by a slight downward angle of the granite shelf, we were invisible to the enemy. Our mission, unless altered by an updated command from our squad leader, was to follow standard target-of-opportunity protocol: shoot at whatever presented itself, prioritizing the highest-value targets first.
We each had twenty-five MQ-12 “devil” rounds. The new scale of operations, having decreased from full-scale battles to chasing terrorist groups, meant our supply of ammunition was more generous than in the past. The allowances for what we could expend expensive weaponry on had expanded as well, and we could use the MQ-12 rounds on anything we could later defend as reasonable.
The method Command used to grade targets was a mystery to me. For practical purposes, in this type of terrorist-hunting mission, we could reasonably justify burning through ammo on anything that moved. If someone was out and about in that forest, with a pitched firefight under way, they were up to no good.
I scanned the ridge for a target.
“I’m glad we did all that urban training,” Callie said.
“Yeah, I’m finding this somewhat familiar.”
“At least there are no dino-lizards,” she said. “But, seriously, why are we–”
“Hold on a sec,” I said in surprise. “Holy shit…”
“What the hell is that?” she asked.
I was wondering the same thing. I toggled through my enemy ID program.
My system spat back <
“It’s a ‘not found,’” I said.
“That’s not funny, Avery,” she said. “I have a bad feeling.”
I began to say something like “don’t worry,” when everything went to shit.
CHAPTER FOUR
An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics.
~ Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus
Surprises are common on the battlefield, but they usually fall into consistent categories:
Your enemy has more troops than you suspected. Or fewer.
Your reinforcements don’t show up. Or they do, but in the wrong place, or too late to do any good.
You expect something from the south, and get hit from the north.
A plan to retreat gets revised into an offensive engagement.
On a recon mission years ago, we were five minutes from being shot into a high-orbital drop when a recall command arrived and the drop was canceled. The entire company was ordered to go on mandatory leave, and instead of spending a week in the swamp, Callie and I went to New Vegas, saw a dozen shows, and gained a couple of kilos at all-you-can-eat buffets featuring non-syn meats and seafood.
Surprises are only surprises in the details, and the only predictable days are experienced by the dead.
A dozen armored fighters leapt off the top of the ridge.
The Teds loved to group their patrols into even groups of twelve, but there wasn’t any known Ted hardware that matched what was descending on our company. The units weren’t flying; they were falling in a controlled glide. They were also zigzagging erratically, making it impossible to target them with a sniper rifle.
Our company’s first salvo of missiles streaked past them without doing any damage. They were too close for the weapons t
o adjust their flight paths after the gliders slightly altered their courses. Gauss rounds were as ineffective on them as they were on our TCI-Armor, and based on that, I concluded the technology was similar.
The official position was that human groups didn’t have the funding or the facilities to develop advanced weapons, so I suspected we were fighting against Ted loyalists and human factions who’d banded together. And they were employing technology that was new to us, things that none of us had imagined. I wondered if Command had been suspicious of a collaboration between terror groups and actors with deep pockets. It was a logical explanation as to why they’d sent what had seemed like overkill deep into the wilderness.
Two of our transports were equipped with roof-mounted rail-cannons with kinetic-round capacity. One of those had been obliterated in the initial assault, but the other fired at the first enemy to hit the ground. When the high-velocity weapon struck, the fighter disintegrated in a massive explosion that shook the ground beneath us, and a barrage of enemy HE rounds took out the TT-104.
My screen lit up with multiple <
I attempted to get a lock on one of them, but they were moving erratically and at high velocity.
“Should we go to assist?” Callie asked. I assumed she was thinking out loud – she knew the protocol as well as I did.
There was no reason to move. If our company couldn’t handle the new threat, sacrificing ourselves wouldn’t achieve anything.
“We’ll hold tight and observe.”
“You think they’ll ever stop moving so fast?” she asked. “I’d like to take a shot.”
“Maybe.” I concentrated on a single figure as it darted across an open stretch and disappeared into the forest. Our unit had sent up over forty drones, so I called up a holographic representation of the fight.
It was beginning to get ugly. From the ridge above, shooters began taking out our drones. My display screen images deteriorated.