by Ian Whates
“I’d like that.”
She looks back out of the window, checking the area. Little white puffs of cloud drift across the blue sky.
“So, what are you going to paint?” she asks. “The heroic rescuers, making the country safe once more?”
“You’re being sarcastic.”
“No,” she says, and she pushes a strand of blonde hair back up into her helmet. “No. We all do what we must to get by. Tell me, what will you paint?”
“I honestly don’t know yet. I’ll know it when I see it.” I look down into the square, searching for inspiration. “Look at your flier.”
She comes to my side. We look at the concrete-grey craft, a brutalist piece of architecture set amongst the elegant buildings of this city.
“Suppose I were to paint that?” I say. “I have plenty of photos, but I need a context, a setting. I could have it swooping down on the enemy! The smoke, the explosions, the bullets whizzing past.”
“That’s what the Army would like …”
“Maybe. How about I paint it with you all seated around the back? That could send a message to the people back home: that even soldiers are human; they sit and chat and relax. Or should I evoke sympathy? Draw the flier all shot up. The mechanics around it, trying to fix it up. One of you being led from the scene, blood seeping from the bandages.”
She nods. She understands. Then her radio crackles, and I hear the sergeant’s voice. “Friis! Get down to the flier! We need help bringing equipment inside.”
“Coming!”
“I’ll tag along,” I say.
The whine of the flier is a constant theme; the engines are never turned off. We join the bustle of soldiers around the rear ramp, all busy unloading the pink-bound boxes and carrying them into the surrounding buildings.
“What is all that?” I wonder aloud.
“Servers, terminals, NAS boxes,” says Agnetha. “I saw this in Jutland. We’re establishing a new government in this place.”
“Keep it down, Friis,” says the sergeant, but without heat. I notice that no one seems to be denying the charge. The head of the soldier behind him suddenly spouts red blood. I’m photographing the scene before I realize what’s happening.
“Sniper!”
Everyone is dropping, looking this way and that.
“Up there,” shouts someone.
The sergeant is looking at his console, the green light of the screen illuminating his face.
“That’s the Palazzo Egizio. The Via Fossano runs behind it …” He’s thinking. “Friis, Delgado, Kenton. Head to the far end of the street. See if you can get into that white building there …”
I raise my head to get a better look and feel someone push me back down. At the same time there are more shots and I hear a scream. I feel a thud of fear inside me.
Agnetha has been shot.
Shot protecting me.
She’s coughing up blood.
“Agnetha …” I begin.
“Get back,” yells the sergeant. “You’ve caused enough trouble as it is.”
Agnetha’s trying to speak, but there is too much blood. She holds out her hand and I reach for it, but the sergeant knocks it away.
“Let the medic deal with it,” he says. “Let someone who should be here deal with it,” he adds, nastily.
The other soldiers have located the sniper now, and I’m left to watch as a man kneels next to Agnetha and takes hold of her arm. She looks at me with those brilliant blue eyes, and I don’t see her. For a brief moment I see another picture. Blues and greens. Two soldiers: a man and a woman, standing in front of a flier just like the one behind us. They’re surrounded by cheering, smiling civilians. A young child comes forward, carrying a bunch of flowers. A thank you from the grateful liberated.
The picture I painted of Jutland.
I push it from my mind, and I see those brilliant blue eyes are already clouding over.
“We all do what we have to do,” I whisper. But is that so true? She joined the Army so her family could eat. I’m here simply to build a reputation as an artist.
The medic injects her with something. She closes her eyes. The medic shakes his head. I know what that means. The sergeant looks at me.
“I’m sorry,” I say.
“So?” he says. “How’s that going to help?” He turns away. The others are already doing the same. Dismissing me.
I take hold of Agnetha’s hand, feel the pulse fading.
The picture.
I wonder if Agnetha would approve of what I have done. I suspect not. She was too much of a realist.
I included the flier after all. But not taking off, not swooping down from the skies.
No, this was a different picture.
The point of view is from just outside the cockpit, looking in at the pilot of the craft. And here is where we move beyond the subject matter to the artistic vision, because the person flying the craft is not the pilot, but the sergeant.
His face is there, centred on the picture. He’s looking out at the viewer, looking beyond the cockpit.
What can he see? The dead children in the square, sheltered by the bodies of their dead parents? We don’t know. But that doesn’t matter, because there is a clue in the picture. A clue to the truth. One that I saw all the time, but never noticed. It’s written across the sergeant’s face. Literally.
A reflection in green from the light of the monitor screen, a tracery of roads and buildings, all picked out in pale-green letters. Look closely at his cheek and you can just make out the words St Mark’s Church. All those names that were supposedly wiped for good by the DoS attack, and yet there they were, still resident in the sergeant’s computer. And none of us found that odd at the time. We could have fed that country’s data back to it all along, but we chose not to.
They say a picture paints a thousand words.
For once, those words will be mostly speaking the truth.
THE WAR MEMORIAL
Allen Steele
Where there’s no air, a battle may leave reminders for ever …
Restless visionary Allen Steele, originally a native of Nashville, has a BA in Communication and an MA in Journalism. He’s a prolific author of short stories and essays, as well as novels, several concerned with the habitable moon Coyote in a solar system to which freedom-seeking pioneers flee in a stolen starship. His work has won and been nominated for several awards.
THE FIRST-WAVE ASSAULT is jinxed from the very beginning. Even before the dropship touches down, its pilot shouts over the comlink that a Pax missile battery seven klicks away has locked in on their position, despite the ECM buffer set up by the lunarsats. So it’s going to be a dust-off; the pilot has done his job by getting the men down to the surface, and he doesn’t want to be splattered across Mare Tranquillitatis.
It doesn’t matter anyway. Baker Company has been deployed for less than two minutes before the Pax heatseekers pummel the ground around them and take out the dropship even as it begins its ascent.
Giordano hears the pilot scream one last obscenity before his ugly spacecraft is reduced to metal rain, then something slams against his back and everything within the suit goes black. For an instant he believes he’s dead, that he’s been nailed by one of the heatseekers, but it’s just debris from the dropship. The half-ton ceramic-polymer shell of the Mark III Valkyrie Combat Armour Suit has absorbed the brunt of the impact.
When the lights flicker back on within his soft cocoon and the flatscreen directly in front of his face stops fuzzing, he sees that not everyone has been so lucky. A few dozen metres away at three o’clock, there’s a new crater that used to be Robinson. The only thing left of Baker Company’s resident card cheat is the severed rifle arm of his CAS.
He doesn’t have time to contemplate Robinson’s fate. He’s in the midst of battle. Sgt Boyle’s voice comes through the comlink, shouting orders. Travelling overwatch, due west, head for Marker One-Eight-Five. Kemp, take Robinson’s position. Cortez, you’re point. Stop
staring, Giordano (yes sir). Move, move, move …
So they move, seven soldiers in semi-robotic heavy armour, bounding across the flat silver-grey landscape. Tin men trying to outrun the missiles plummeting down around them, the soundless explosions they make when they hit. For several kilometres around them, everywhere they look, there are scores of other tin men doing the same, each trying to survive a silent hell called the Sea of Tranquillity.
Giordano is sweating hard, his breath coming in ragged gasps. He tells himself that if he can just make Marker One-Eight-Five – crater Arago, or so the map overlay tells him – then everything will be OK. The crater walls will protect them. Once Baker Company sets up its guns and erects a new ECM buffer, they can dig in nice and tight and wait it out; the beachhead will have been established by then and the hard part of Operation Monkey Wrench will be over.
But the crater is five-and-a-half klicks away, across plains as flat and wide open as Missouri pasture, and between here and there a lot of shitfire is coming down. The Pax Astra guns in the foothills of the lunar highlands due west of their position can see them coming; the enemy has the high ground, and they’re throwing everything they can at the invading force.
Sgt Boyle knows his platoon is in trouble. He orders everyone to use their jumpjets. Screw formation; it’s time to run like hell.
Giordano couldn’t agree more wholeheartedly. He tells the Valkyrie to engage the twin miniature rockets mounted on the back of his carapace.
Nothing happens.
Once again, he tells the voice-activated computer mounted against the back of his neck to fire the jumpjets. When there’s still no response, he goes to manual, using the tiny controls nestled within the palm of his right hand inside the suit’s artificial arm.
At that instant, everything goes dark again, just like it did when the shrapnel from the dropship hit the back of his suit.
This time, though, it stays dark.
A red LCD lights above his forehead, telling him that there’s been a total system crash.
Cursing, he finds the manual override button and stabs it with his little finger. As anticipated, it causes the computer to completely reboot itself; he hears servomotors grind within the carapace as its limbs move into neutral position, until his boots are planted firmly on the ground and his arms are next to his sides, his rifle pointed uselessly at the ground.
There is a dull click from somewhere deep within the armour, then silence.
Except for the red LCD, everything remains dark.
He stabs frantically at the palm buttons, but there’s no power to any of the suit’s major subsystems. He tries to move his arms and legs, but finds them frozen in place.
Limbs, jumpjets, weapons, ECM, comlink … nothing works.
Now he’s sweating more than ever. The impact of that little bit of debris from the dropship must have been worse than he thought. Something must have shorted out, badly, within the Valkyrie’s onboard computer.
He twists his head to the left so he can gaze through the eyepiece of the optical periscope, the only instrument within the suit that isn’t dependent upon computer control. What he sees, terrifies him: the rest of his platoon jumpjetting for the security of the distant crater, while missiles continue to explode all around him.
Abandoning him. Leaving him behind.
He screams at the top of his lungs, yelling for Boyle and Kemp and Cortez and the rest, calling them foul names, demanding that they wait or come back for him, knowing that it’s futile. They can’t hear him. For whatever reason, they’ve already determined that he’s out of action; they cannot afford to risk their lives by coming back to lug an inert CAS across a battlefield.
He tries again to move his legs, but it’s pointless. Without direct interface from the main computer, the limbs of his suit are immobile. He might as well be wearing a concrete block.
The suit contains three hours of oxygen, fed through pumps controlled by another computer tucked against his belly, along with rest of its life-support systems. So at least he won’t suffocate or fry …
For the next three hours, at any rate.
Probably less. The digital chronometer and life-support gauge are dead, so there’s no way of knowing for sure.
As he watches, even the red coal of the LCD warning lamp grows dim until it finally goes cold, leaving him in the dark.
He has become a living statue. Fully erect, boots firmly placed upon the dusty regolith, arms held rigid at his sides, he is in absolute stasis.
For three hours. Certainly less.
For all intents and purposes, he is dead.
In the smothering darkness of his suit, Giordano prays to a god in which he has never really believed. Then, for lack of anything else to do, he raises his eyes to the periscope eyepiece and watches as the battle rages on around him.
He fully expects – and, after a time, even hopes – for a Pax missile to relieve him of his ordeal, but this small mercy never occurs. Without an active infrared or electromagnetic target to lock in upon, the heatseekers miss the small spot of ground he occupies, instead decimating everything around him.
Giordano becomes a mute witness to the horror of the worst conflict of the Moon War, what historians will later call the Battle of Mare Tranquillitatis. Loyalty, duty, honour, patriotism … all the things in which he once believed are soon rendered null and void as he watches countless lives being lost.
Dropships touch down near and distant, depositing soldiers in suits similar to his own. Some don’t even make it to the ground before they become miniature supernovas.
Men and women like himself fly apart even as they charge across the wasteland for the deceptive security of distant craters and rills.
An assault rover bearing three lightsuited soldiers rushes past him, only to be hit by fire from the hills. It is thrown upside down, crushing two of the soldiers beneath it. The third man, his legs broken and his suit punctured, manages to crawl from the wreckage. He dies at Giordano’s feet, his arms reaching out to him.
He has no idea whether Baker Company has survived, but he suspects it hasn’t, since he soon sees a bright flash from the general direction of the crater it was supposed to occupy and hold.
In the confines of his suit, he weeps and screams and howls against the madness erupting around him. In the end, he goes mad himself, cursing the same god to whom he prayed earlier for the role to which he has been damned.
If God cares, it doesn’t matter. By then, the last of Giordano’s oxygen reserves have been exhausted; he asphyxiates long before his three hours are up, his body still held upright by the Mark III Valkyrie Combat Armour Suit.
When he is finally found, sixty-eight hours later, by a patrol from the victorious Pax Astra Free Militia, they are astonished that anything was left standing on the killing ground. This sole combat suit, damaged only by a small steel pipe wedged into its CPU housing, with a dead man inexplicably sealed inside, is the only thing left intact. All else has been reduced to scorched dust and shredded metal.
So they leave him standing.
They do not remove the CAS from its place, nor do they attempt to prise the man from his armour. Instead, they erect a circle of stones around the Valkyrie. Later, when peace has been negotiated and lunar independence has been achieved, a small plaque is placed at his feet.
The marker bears no name. Because so many lives were lost during the battle, nobody can be precisely certain of who was wearing that particular CAS on that particular day.
An eternal flame might have been placed at his feet, but it wasn’t, because nothing burns on the Moon.
POLITICS
Elizabeth Moon
There’s an art to writing military SF well, an art at which Elizabeth Moon is an acknowledged master. Moon, whose novel The Speed of Dark won a Nebula Award in 2004 and was shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award the previous year, attempted her first novel at the age of six and started writing science fiction in her teens. “Politics” is a prime example of M
oon at her best: the military aspects infused with a sense of authenticity that few can match, no doubt aided by her time as a US Marine – she achieved the rank of 1st Lieutenant. This is more than simply an “action” piece, however, and it’s the added dimensions that help Moon’s work stand out.
POLITICS IS ALWAYS lousy in these things. Some guy with rank wants something done, and whether it makes any sense or not, some poor slob with no high-powered friends gets pushed out front to do it. Like Mac … he wants a fuzzball spit-polished, some guy like me will have to shave it bare naked and work it to a shine. Not that all his ideas are stupid, you understand, but there’s this thing about admirals – and maybe especially that admiral – no one tells ’em when their ideas have gone off the screen. That landing on Caedmon was right out of somebody’s old tape files, and whoever thought it up, Mac or somebody more local, should’ve had to be there. In person, in the shuttles, for instance.
You know why we didn’t use tanks downside … right. No shields. Nothing short of a cruiser could generate ’em, and tanks are big enough to make good targets for anyone toting a tank-bashing missile. Some dumbass should have thought of shuttles and thought again, but the idea was the cruisers have to stay aloft. No risking their precious tails downside, stuck in a gravity well if something pops up. Tradition, you know? Marines have been landed in landing craft since somebody had to row the boat ashore. Marines have died that way just about as long.
Now on Caedmon, the Gerin knew we were coming. Had to know. The easy way would’ve been to blast their base from orbit, but that wouldn’t do. Brass said we needed it, or something. I thought myself it was just because humans had had it first, and lost it; a propaganda move, something like that. There was some kind of garbage about how we had this new stealth technology that let the cruisers get in real close, and we’d drop and be groundside before they knew we were there, but we’d heard that before, and I don’t suppose anyone but the last wetears in from training believed it. I didn’t, and the captain for sure didn’t.