The Tetra War_Fractured Peace

by Michael Ryan

  Callie’s first round of missiles approached the mecha. She’d programmed them to corkscrew into the operator’s field of fire and then scatter randomly.

  Randomness on the battlefield is hard to fake.

  She had all the missiles from Abrel’s and Mallsin’s packs lined up like a high-speed bullet train, heading for the mecha straight on. From the mecha’s perspective, it was impossible to tell if it was one missile or twenty. Meanwhile, Callie’s missiles had circled to the flanks and now came at the mecha from starboard and port.

  The mecha pilot was good. He adjusted to his left and fired a centrifugal Gauss at the incoming projectiles. After knocking out those on his port side, he spun and took out the other missiles coming from his starboard. The mecha took off at a surprisingly fast run, throwing off the flight path of the long column of missiles, which had to curve as if going around a bend to stay on course.

  The mecha fired chaff, heat, and flares, and its CMG turned on the row of guided HE and took them out. A massive fireball exploded about two hundred meters out as the missiles detonated, and through the blinding heat came a kinetic round.

  The mecha neutralized it, but that wasn’t Callie’s kill shot. Coming in low and tight to the ground was her surprise: a final KE aimed at the robotic left knee.

  I’ve learned a lot watching Callie fight. Unlike me, who’s always tempted to go for the spectacular headshot or the dramatic explosion, she was perfectly fine hamstringing a zebra and letting the hyenas make the kill.

  The mecha listed left and tripped.

  I’ll give the mecha operator credit. He adjusted and returned to an upright position by locking the left leg in place. But it was too late for him to stop the follow-up assault by our friendlies, who’d watched the results of my partner’s clever programming. The mecha succumbed to death in a conflagration of bright orange explosive rounds.

  “Nice work,” I said.

  “Avery, pay attention.”

  “Good work, Sergeants,” Lieutenant Veenz said over the comm.

  “LT,” I said in surprise. “Where did you come from?”

  “Command sent me. I came with a few guys to assist. Let’s get aboard before anything else ugly shows up.”

  Callie and the lieutenant helped the corporals lift our package into the heli-jet, and I followed them into the escape craft.

  We took off from the LZ in a ground-hugging flight path. Our craft immediately captured the attention of a newly arrived squad of Errusiakos’ heli-jets and a pair of mechas that dashed like marathon runners toward the retrieval beacon.

  I eyed the bundled mess of cords on the floor and turned to Callie.

  “You might have been right about my backup chute.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Versus created war so Guritains would learn geography.

  ~ Abrellent Bolesient

  Our heli-jet pilot was skillful.

  I know this because we were still alive after twenty minutes and in the last Gurt craft that wasn’t a smoldering wreck on the ground.

  A squadron of enemy fighter jets had dropped from high altitude and destroyed two of our heli-jets before we registered that enemy reinforcements had arrived. Another pair of mechas appeared and worked in tandem to eliminate our ground forces, using multibarreled mini-rail-cannons to punch armor-piercing slugs through our TCI-Armored friendlies. Of the four mechas chewing up our troops, only one was destroyed before the last of our boots on the ground died.

  I couldn’t get a message up or down, and our pilot announced we were bugging out.

  “We’re in full retreat?” Callie asked me.

  “I can’t get an answer,” I said. “I’m not getting any command messages or responses.”

  The pilot broke into our comm. “Listen up. I’ve got good news and bad news. The good news is probably temporary. We’re still alive.”

  Everyone aboard was close-connected into the heli’s comm, so several of us asked at the same time what the bad news was.

  “The Apollinaris is off-line. So it appears our mother ship was destroyed. It’s possible she left the atmosphere, but either way we aren’t leaving anytime soon. Oh, and that also means the retrieval boat was obliterated. In case any of you weren’t paying attention back there, those mechas, that armor, and those fighters are all new tech. Nothing my system recognized.”

  An ominous silence settled over the cabin before someone asked why we were still alive.

  “I can only guess it’s because of our prisoner. Or I’m just a fantastic pilot. In either case, we’re still being pursued, so don’t get too comfortable.”

  “Can you log into the heli-jet’s system?” I asked Callie.

  “I can ask,” she answered, and pulled out a Silver Wire. She plugged into a port, and a moment later she patched me into the heli-jet crew’s CPU. We watched the landscape flash past. “We’re over six hundred clicks from the retrieval point,” Callie said after several long moments. “We’ve entered another country’s airspace.”

  “All right,” the pilot said. “Our maps are mostly pictures taken from space, meaning we don’t have much data on this planet’s geopolitics and things like borders. But we’ve lost our pursuers. It’s possible to believe they couldn’t fly after us for political reasons, but I haven’t picked up any–”

  There was a screeching noise over the comm, and then it went dead.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “Ground-fired antiaircraft,” Callie said. “Something the system didn’t pick up. The pilot and copilot are off-line. You’re going to start missing your emergency chute in about a minute.”

  “Can you try to get control of the craft?”

  “I don’t know how to fly a heli-jet.”

  I switched over to the squad comm. “Can anyone here fly a heli-jet?” I was joking, but a human corporal by the name of Sam Jordan answered me.

  “Sir,” he said, “I was a top-rated heli-jet pilot in War Demons of the Atlantic.”

  “In what?” Callie interjected.

  “War Demons. It’s a popular VR-RPG,” I explained.

  “He was a top-rated pilot in a video game?”

  “That’s what he’s saying,” I said.

  “Corporal Jordon, is that a fact? You’re saying you were a top pilot in a fucking video game?” Callie asked.

  I intuited that she was angry.

  Or scared.

  Probably both.

  We were losing altitude and spiraling out of control, so I didn’t blame her. Death was imminent for me, Abrel, Mallsin, and the prisoner. The rest of the crew could deploy their emergency backup chutes. They’d have a reasonable expectation of living long enough to land. After that, it was anyone’s guess.

  We would be in no-man’s-land on an alien planet. And we had very little intel about what kind of environment was rapidly passing below us, other than that there were a lot of trees.

  “Sergeant Dunn,” the corporal said. It took me a second to realize he was addressing Callie. “Yes, a video game. But a very realistic one.”

  “Plug in, Corporal,” she said. “The attack heli-jet is all yours.”

  The corporal did a good job. He could pilot a heli-jet with the best.

  This turned out to be a good thing, since the crew was dead.

  As the pilot, Jordan took on the rank of captain, and his first act was to command Callie and the rest of the conscious crew – at least those with emergency chutes – to abandon ship. They followed his order and threw themselves out of the heli-jet as we continued to plummet toward the trees below.

  I liked him immediately. We survived. As it turns out, the only way to beat level one hundred in War Demons is to go through a series of crash-landing exercises, so Corporal Jordan had lots of experience surviving heli-jet accidents.

  At least in virtual reality.

  We ripped through the treetops and smashed into the ground hard enough to send us bouncing around the cabin like pachinko balls, but when I did a head count to see if a
nyone had been killed in the landing, even the egghead prisoner was still breathing.

  “That was impressive,” Callie admitted when she rejoined us on the ground.

  “We’re alive,” I said. “Thank you, Corporal Jordan.”

  “Don’t mention it, sir,” he said. “All part of the job.”

  “You could have parachuted to safety with the rest,” I said.

  “No, sir,” he said. “I know it’s not official, but I’m a space marine. We don’t abandon our mates.”

  In spite of Jordan’s skill at keeping us alive, the heli-jet didn’t fare well. The wreckage was spread out over the jungle floor for a kilometer. Nothing was salvageable. None of the communications equipment had the slightest chance of working. I think the only reason we were alive was due to the suits. I couldn’t figure out how our prisoner had made it, but he had, and that was all that mattered.

  We untied him from Abrel and Mallsin, and I checked their medi-port monitors. They were in comas, but not dead. I wasn’t sure how long that would last, but they did have at least sixty days of power left as long as we didn’t engage the suit’s force-resisting defense. I had two of the corporals hide them while the rest of us prepared to recon the area. We numbered twenty-seven: a mixture of soldiers from Raider Squad, Lieutenant Veenz and a few other boots from the Third, and the handful of space marines who had come from the Apollinaris to help evacuate us. Twenty-eight if you counted the prisoner. The ranking member of our newly formed team was Lieutenant Bolestand, from the marines unit.

  “We need to get this equipment working,” the lieutenant said.

  “Sir,” a corporal said, “it’s not possible.”

  “Have a positive attitude,” he said.

  “He’s right, Lieutenant Bolestand,” I said. “I’m Master Sergeant Avery Ford. There’s nothing here to salvage. We should find high and defendable ground, sir.”

  “Our mission is to get that prisoner back to the…”

  I think the realization of our situation finally struck him.

  “Sir, permission to take charge of the detail?” I asked.

  “You’re the ranking noncom,” he answered. “Do what you feel is right – that is, if it’s okay with Lieutenant Veenz. He’s next in the line of command.”

  “Yes, I trust Ford without hesitation,” Veenz said. “Avery, I’m going to verify that everything is beyond salvageable. Give me two men, and you take charge of the rest.”

  I assigned a couple of corporals, one from Raiders and one from the marines. I figured the more we started to get friendly with each other, the smoother things would go in the long term.

  It appeared we’d crashed in the middle of nowhere.

  Lieutenant Bolestand sat near Abrel and Mallsin, which was a good place for him. Their hiding place was out of sight, and he could guard them. We had little information on the ecology of the planet, and I felt a small sense of relief knowing someone was near my friends. This also allowed the lieutenant to take control of the prisoner; not that I expected him to run away.

  There was nowhere safe to escape to.

  “Maybe you can learn his language, sir,” I suggested.

  “Perhaps, Sergeant,” he said. “I’ll give it a shot.”

  I instructed Callie to set up a new squad comm. We remained the Raiders – it seemed appropriate. Twenty-one of us went out on patrol, so I split the group into three groups of five and one of six, assigning each team a forty-five-degree slice of a circle I centered on the lieutenant.

  “No long-range comm,” I ordered. “Head out for four hours; stay in sets of two and three. We’ll regroup in eight. Avoid contact. Don’t kill anything unless it’s you or them. I need one volunteer to bring the prisoner water or edible fruit in a few hours. Questions?”

  “What’s our long-term plan, Sergeant?” one of the marine troops asked me.

  “Good question,” I said. “I don’t know yet. We’ll discuss options after we have a better idea of where we are. We have no idea if anyone from the Apollinaris is alive, much less if they know we survived the massacre. Stay alert, map, tag, and observe.”

  The alien terrain was a mixture of jungle, swamp, and forest, as if the evolutionary battle between the plants and trees had come to an armistice. Callie and I walked into a meadow and scared a group of large herbivores that resembled moose.

  “At least if we have to de-suit, we won’t go hungry,” I said.

  “If we have to de-suit, we have bigger problems than food.”

  “We’d better solve them while we can.”

  “Good thinking. How?”

  I considered our options. We could attempt to find a city before we ran out of power. Based on the pursuit craft having given up, perhaps this country was an enemy of our enemy. Or we could build a shelter and hold tight, hoping Command would send a search party.

  “You think they know we survived?” I asked.

  “No.”

  “You’re that certain?”

  “Our pilot tried to contact them when we were escaping, and couldn’t. So without a message verifying we were alive, why wouldn’t they assume we’d been killed along with everyone else?”

  “It was pretty bad back there.”

  “We were bait, don’t forget,” Callie said. “Command wanted to know what was happening on this planet. Now they know.”

  I didn’t like being used like chum. “Yes, now they know,” I agreed.

  “Maybe they’ll send a larger force,” Callie said hopefully. “Then we can connect with it once they get here.”

  “That could be months,” I said. “We’ll have to de-suit before that happens, and then we’ll be unable to communicate with them. If any Gurt landing force spots us without our armor, they’re just as likely to kill us as try to talk to us.”

  “One thing at a time, Avery,” she said. “A solution will present itself.”

  “Or we’ll get eaten by one of those.” I pointed.

  “I don’t see it,” she said.

  “Look up, just above that–”

  “Oh, I see it. Jesus, it’s huge.”

  It was mammalian and at least three meters tall at the shoulders.

  “Go to camo and lock down,” I said. “If we have to shed our armor, we’ll do better if we have a clear idea of what’s going to try to kill us.”

  I sat next to a tree trunk and activated my light-bending system.

  The animal didn’t appear to be stalking prey. It moved with confidence, and I assumed it was the alpha predator in the area. Its front legs were long and muscular and seemed to work almost like arms. It stopped and sniffed the air as it approached me. It reminded me of the polar bears I’d faced in the Arctic, only it was bigger and walked more like a great ape when it went to its hind legs. The animal’s fur was a mixture of chocolate brown and ivory, with stripes like a tiger.

  It noticed that I wasn’t part of the tree.

  And it was inquisitive, like my old tomcat.

  When it reached out to touch my camouflaged armor, glassy retractable claws at least fifteen centimeters long extended from its paws. The animal’s snout was canine-like, but with long feline-like fangs.

  It sniffed my suit.

  “Holy shit, Callie. If we have to de-suit, we’ll last about a minute.”

  “It’s impressive, I’ll give you that,” she said. Callie had melted into the background, and I wasn’t sure if the beast had noticed her.

  But it sure noticed me. It roared at my faceplate, and I got a close-up of its fangs. Then it batted me like I was a barn rat.

  I was safe inside my armor, but I involuntarily shuddered. A moment later, I felt a calming sensation flood through my body. My medi-program had kicked in and given me a shot of something to steady my nerves.

  The beast had a long tail that flicked me in the face like our old house cat Maximus would do as it walked away bored. It looked around and then noticed Callie.

  The creature had an amazing leap. It covered the thirty meters to Callie i
n a flash and roared like a lion at her. After trying to bite her and giving her suit a few investigative swats, it snorted in frustration and dashed off into the forest.

  “Well, that was exciting,” Callie said.

  “We’re going to need a bigger boat,” I said.

  “What’s that mean?”

  “It means we’d better figure out a way to build a shelter and make fire.”

  “I wonder if any of the space marines have flamers?” Callie asked.

  “I hope so.” I wasn’t sure. If they’d been given the same EP as we had, then the answer was no. Command wanted us to blow stuff up, not burn it, so they hadn’t allocated us any flamer fuel.

  “Let’s move,” I said. I turned off my camo, stood, and stretched my muscles. “I can only imagine what else is out here.”

  “Space dragons, likely,” she said.

  We walked together into the unknown.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Force settles war. Violent destruction. This is what those who celebrate victory seek.

  ~ General Sond Holljore

  I spent a week sending out recon patrols.

  They reported back the discovery of fascinating and bizarre animals, plants, and a few natural dangers like quicksand, cliffs, and raging rivers, but found no signs of intelligent life.

  “It’s time to decide whether we’re going to pick a direction and try to reach a population center, sirs,” I said to Lieutenants Bolestand and Veenz during an evening leadership debriefing.

  “I’d like your opinion, Avery,” the ranking officer said. The lieutenant had little experience outside of urban fighting, and Callie and I had a reputation that preceded us. Her stories about going full native on Purvas, coupled with her tales of me fighting dino-lizards, had spread among the troops.

  It helped bolster their confidence in us, so I never bothered to correct the stories, even when they became outlandish exaggerations.

  “We can survive here indefinitely,” I said to the lieutenant. “There’s plenty of water and vegetation, so I’m confident we can hunt game and find edible plants.”