Dog Country

by Malcolm F. Cross

  He smiled too, a little.

  She crossed the open plan front room of her apartment — kitchen and living room both — and sat herself down on Edane’s knee. “So what are you busy with, Sweetie?”

  “Yesterday’s game.” He showed her his pad. “Doing some thinking about ways to improve. Want to help? Always good to have someone to bounce things off.”

  He knew it was a mistake the moment he’d said it, but it just all spilled out anyway. He wanted to share things with Janine, things that mattered, like how his aim hadn’t been too bad for the first hour or so of the game before his arm got tired, but…

  But she smiled a little awkwardly, head pulling back from him in guilt, ears lifted in surprise. “I’d. I’d just distract you, Sweetie.” She nosed in to kiss him briefly. “Maybe later, though.” With that she hopped off his lap, and padded back to the bedroom, scrunching her hair into a tense, red tangle behind her.

  The last time they’d tried talking about MilSim she’d gotten bored, hadn’t really followed what was going on in the game. She’d needed things explained to her over and over — which Edane didn’t mind, but she did. Janine had just sat there, struggling to keep up, getting more and more frustrated as Edane tried to rephrase things so she’d understand. It wasn’t that she was dumb, or anything. Janine was smart — so smart. She just asked, without thinking, stuff like why can’t the players just negotiate, and gotten so mad at herself for suggesting it even before Edane could reply, because she’d known it was stupid — she just didn’t understand fighting. Not with guns, anyway.

  Edane leaned over the couch’s armrest, looking back at the bedroom door, and wondered if it made her feel kind of like Edane did, when he needed a shower to feel normal again, but he didn’t dare go and ask her that. That might start a fight — the kind of fight Janine was good at, with words — and that was just about the only kind of fight that Edane never wanted to experience again.

  4. Medical Evacuation.

  ::/ San Iadras, Middle American Corporate Preserve.

  ::/ April, 2105.

  ::/ Edane Estian.

  Getting into the second half of the spring season, things felt okay. The team’s overall rankings were up, Edane’s stretches of good performance at the beginning of each match and after rest breaks were getting longer, and he and Janine were very carefully not talking about things. Instead they sat quietly most nights, comfortable with each other, while Edane did his arm exercises and she relaxed after work. It was companionable. Nice, even though it was a lot quieter.

  Gave him time to think.

  He’d never realized how valuable that time was, but he’d never really had things to think about before — like Janine, and his arm, and his worries about the team. He wasn’t really built for thinking. Not the way most people seemed to talk about it, anyway.

  The kind of thinking Edane had done, still did — preferred, even — was the kind that happened between heartbeats when something bad happened. When there was something to react to.

  Like the turret.

  It was the third deployment of the day, last game before the mid-season rest week, so everyone was a little worn out by the last two months of play and extra driven to push hard, get their scores up before the break week and all of the teams had a chance to switch tactics.

  The team was going after secure hardlines again. That meant slogging overland, the long way. Cutting through back zones, avoiding contact, running with their electronics off as much as possible, staying flat on their bellies while waiting for the mission coordinators to open up EMWAR assets and jam any local surveillance that might be around. This far back-field there weren’t many enemy players. Leaving a team out in the middle of nowhere to cover nothing on the off chance someone was moving, that was inefficient. Instead, the enemy used fixed assets.

  League rules for equipment budgets were meagre at this level of play. Standard play-theory for a fireteam of four said each member saved part of their individual budget, the team pooled the resources, and they got either a fixed automatic turret or a UAV. A full team of eight usually carried one of both, deploying the turret early for fixed defense or medium range fire support — getting the turret’s heavy machine gun to fire in a ballistic arc over the horizon at a target zone — and saving the UAV for light anti-vehicular roles. In this case, the turret had been left back-field.

  Edane hadn’t seen it. None of them had, it was lain under a chameleon cloth and set up on a ridgeline covered in scrub. The first thing they’d seen was the blazing muzzle flash turning the augmented reality special effects overlay in their goggles to explosions and tracers and nothing else.

  Edane hit the dirt instantly. Waiting to topple forward was too slow, and diving forward kept the body in the air too long — the way to do it was to let your legs go slack and throw your shoulders down, as if starting a forward roll, except instead of rolling the ground came up and hit you like a hammer and if you had time, had foresight, you broke your fall with the stock of your rifle, but if you were unprepared — like Edane — you just let the ground do its best to break your ribs.

  Going prone, that was the reflexive reaction. Then there was the thinking part. Figuring out the turret’s line of fire, trying to work out if there were any others, calculating the possibility that the turret was linked into the enemy network or not, putting all those factors together in the blink of an eye. Edane thought his best bet was to crawl left, where there wasn’t much more cover, but the contours of the ground would block the turret’s line of fire.

  An explosion of smoke bloomed nearby, flooding the world with grey. The smoke was almost dense enough to completely black out the sky, but Edane knew it was mostly AugR effects because the scent of it wasn’t very thick in his nose, just a thin, water-based smoke effect, and what he saw was a hot, oil-black mess with metallic threads of chaff glinting and twisting everywhere. Thick enough he couldn’t see the turret, not even with his rifle scope’s tuned thermal imager, which meant the turret couldn’t see him.

  He got to his knees, hopped to his feet, and ran as low to the ground as he could, catching himself on his left hand every time he stumbled and throwing himself forward again in a mad three-limbed scramble.

  “Who’s hit?” one of his brothers’ voices warbled through the murk.

  Gunfire knifed through the smog, dark and invisible, but splittingly loud, the high velocity rounds screaming as they cut past Edane’s head and towards the voice behind him. Edane yanked a grenade off his webbing, ripped out the safety bar with a spasm of his right hand, and lobbed it in the direction of the muzzle flash.

  More gunfire, but this time the flash wasn’t where it had been, the bullets were whining from a spot far to the right, tracking after the grenade… the turret had moved? The grenade exploded, shot apart at the arc of its throw.

  Edane hit the ground, struggling to remember the lay of the land compared to where he’d last seen it all, and in desperation flicked his electronics back on. “It’s not a turret, it’s an Unmanned Ground Vehicle,” he hissed over the newly established com-link.

  A set of scarlet contact markers appeared in his booting HUD, as the weapon fired again.

  “No shit,” Marianna replied. “Oh, good. You’re right on top of it.”

  As the local map finished loading up, he saw Marianna’s marker a football field behind him, and Svarstad even further back — the rest were still electronics off, even though they’d obviously been spotted.

  “Svarstad, distract that fucking thi—” Marianna didn’t finish her order, Svarstad’s LSW already spitting a line of glowing tracers through the smoke.

  “Edane, kill!” she snarled.

  No hesitation. He rose to his knees, sighted through the smoke at the muzzle flash of return fire ahead of him, and emptied his rifle in a single, two second, forty-four round burst that pounded his left shoulder to gravel.

  His weapon clicked its last.

  The turret — the UGV — fell silent.

&nb
sp; “Think it’s—” his ears rang. Not a real noise, a harsh tinnitus-pitched squeak playing in his earbuds, and the game’s simulation of his electronics instantly cut out. For a moment he wondered if the match software had bugged out — that had happened once, a month or so back — but the AugR smoke around him was intact, still boiling clouds of oily black despite only the weak tang of chemical-tinged water vapor in his nose.

  No, not a game bug — HERF, a high-energy radio frequency attack. Microwaves. He was being microwaved, his electronics burnt out with a concentrated HERF beam powerful enough to fuck with his ears. Those were deployed on satellites, sub-orbital aircraft and heavy high altitude UAVs. For one to hit you, they had to have a lock on you. He’d been close to the UGV when he’d killed it — it wouldn’t cost the enemy team much to sweep the immediate area with HERF in the hopes of hitting a straggler, but he hadn’t been that close. So they had to have some kind of lock on his location, had to have aimed it, and if they’d aimed it they knew where he was with precision, and if they knew that…

  Before he’d even finished shaking his head, trying to clear of it the unfamiliar noise, he started running. Direction didn’t matter, just running, because a heartbeat later there was an explosion where he’d been standing, the sound of a mortar shell airburst, and even if it didn’t come with a blast-impact rattling through his body, a brief irrational fear took him, made him stumble down, lanced panic through him even worse when the second blast detonated to his left. He scrabbled back onto his feet, but his right arm shivered, sent him nose down into the dirt, and by the time he was up and running again, trying to evade a spiraling fire pattern he couldn’t work out in the half-second available to him between panicked breaths, the noise was on him and loud and terrifying and the only reason he didn’t collapse to the ground screaming was because he hadn’t actually been hit — Edane had to remind himself of that very forcefully, he hadn’t been hit with a mortar shell, it was just the game, just part of the game, he wasn’t hurt at all. All that had happened was that his goggles were flashing casualty instructions at him, and barking, “Casualty-Casualty-Casualty,” in his ears, and it wasn’t real.

  Just a game.

  He gulped breaths of dirty tasting air, and lay down, like the casualty instructions told him, and looked down at his body fearfully. He was covered in blackberry jello, and so relieved he almost laughed. The wounds covering his torso, streaking his legs, were just AugR black gunk. At its worst, it looked like someone had dumped a bowl of half congealed pudding over him.

  Edane lay back, able to shut his eyes and relax now, while explosions thudded both near and far, and twisted around to get his tail comfortable under his ass.

  He opened his eyes, and looked up at the sky. It wasn’t blue, just the roiling grey of the smoke, sparkling with metallic chaff strips. Disappointing.

  The casualty instructions flashed ‘stay down and take no action’ at him, and ‘do not respond to questions or voice communications’, so it was bad. Not immediately lethal, and it hadn’t blinded out his goggles after he’d lain down, so he had to still be conscious by the game’s wounding model. Kind of.

  Edane grit his teeth. He wasn’t a fan of ‘kind of’ conscious. Been there, done that, never wanted to do it again.

  At last he heard Louie’s sharp cry of, “Edane’s here! I’ve got him!”

  Louie emerged from the smoke’s depths, his expression frantic.

  “Can he be moved?” Marianna called back.

  Louie fell to his knees beside Edane, checking him over, asking him questions — none of which he could answer. “I don’t know if he’s conscious,” Louie shouted back, ripping open Edane’s medical kit. Louie squirted make believe AugR sealant foam all over Edane’s belly, checked him again, and pushed a clinging pad down over his armor, representing a sheet of skinplast.

  “Can he be moved?”

  The kid didn’t answer. As much in his own world as Edane had been. Hands shaking as he felt at Edane’s neck and waited for the game’s goggles to tell him about Edane’s pulse. Tears building in his eyes as that pulse no doubt began to fade.

  Marianna lunged out of the fog. “For the fucking tenth time, Louie, we gotta move!”

  “I have to stabilize him first.” Louie’s hands were shaking as he pushed down harder on Edane’s abdomen, a layer of AugR ink staining his fingers.

  It wasn’t up for discussion. Marianna grabbed Louie’s wrist, and yanked his hand to one of the straps on Edane’s armor. “Drag him,” Marianna ordered, before sprinting off into the fog.

  People always thought that a medevac had to be like in the movies, rescuer carrying the patient across a shoulder or in their arms or something, but that took a lot of strength. Edane could do it, sure, but over most terrain dragging was the better option. With a good strap to hold onto, just about anybody could drag someone else, and at a reasonably fast speed, too.

  Edane did lift his head a little, to make things easier — that was hardly taking action — but otherwise Louie moved Edane by himself, back and out of the smoke into a curved gully between two patches of trees.

  Louie looked a little shaky, and Edane wanted to congratulate the kid, help calm him down — he’d done great, after all, he was smaller than Marianna and he’d still gotten Edane moved — but the goggles kept telling Edane not to say a word.

  Not while Louie started to lose Edane, forgetting that he needed to replace Edane’s lost blood volume, and not when enemy players stepped over the gully-line and saw him panicking his way through first aid on Edane, instead of maintaining situational awareness.

  *

  “I screwed up.” Louie shook his head miserably. “I’m sorry, Edane.”

  They were sat in the back-bay of an equipment cart while it hummed along one of the side roads around the field, back to the rest area. Louie was slumped facing one way, feet up against the opposite wall, then Eberstetten facing the other way, with his boots against the wall next to Louie, and then Edane, his elbow on Eberstetten’s toes.

  Edane dipped his ears back. “It wasn’t really your fault.”

  “Yeah. Worry about that later, work on what you can.” Eberstetten rubbed at his face tiredly.

  “That’s what Marianna always says.” Louie frowned at his hands in his lap, while the road rolled by.

  Usually, the silence was comfortable. But Eberstetten yawning, tongue curled, just made the silence that much more obvious. Hardened it.

  Edane leaned his head back against the bay’s sidewall, splaying his ears out, flat against the rough fabric liner. Stained with ingrained dirt and scrapes and scuffs from years of muddy players piling into the vehicle. He listened to the engine’s hum, the hiss of the tires on asphalt. Numb.

  It hadn’t been Louie’s fault. Edane should have done better. Maybe… maybe if he hadn’t stumbled on his right arm, getting up, he’d have gotten out of the blast zone. Maybe if he’d spotted sooner that the turret wasn’t a turret at all, but a UGV, he could have had that extra moment to figure out what to do. A lot of maybes, but no answers.

  “I’m sorry I messed up the first aid,” Louie said again, scrubbing the back of his hand and wrist against his nose, all wet in the face.

  “It’s okay. Wasn’t your fault.” Saying that was getting to be a reflex. “First aid’s just one of those things you have to practice.”

  Louie looked up at Edane uncertainly. “I got distracted, thinking. Thinking about how you got hurt.”

  He slanted his gaze down at Louie, just as uncertainly. “Wasn’t like that, for me,” he said. “It’s just a game.”

  “Yeah, I know.” Louie edged down, hunching his shoulders up. “But you got hurt with a mortar, and Eberstetten got shot by the UGV. Automatic fire.” He palmed at his eye. “Like Enzweiler.”

  Eberstetten’s ears perked in one stressed lift. “Aw, Louie, no…”

  Eberstetten had been there. On one of the escape marches out of Dushanbe, post-revolution. After three days of madness that left
Tajikistan a place where Edane’s brothers were hunted, shot on sight as a particularly visible part of the fallen government’s power. Eberstetten had been with Enzweiler, along with Salzach, a group of almost a dozen.

  “I just. When I started to screw up with Edane I started thinking, thinking what if it was Enzweiler, and then—” The kid choked, a heavy sob, covering his eyes, skin red suddenly, his breaths wet and teary. “I was just, oh my God, oh my God, this is how Enzweiler died, and I can’t save him and. And I wasn’t looking and I screwed up and I got us knocked out and it’s my fault and I’m sorry!”

  Eberstetten blinked slowly, confused. Ears low, back. Edane didn’t know what to do either.

  “Louie… it’s okay.” Edane carefully set his hand on Louie’s shoulder, pulled the kid closer.

  “I’m sorry,” he sniveled, pulling away, hesitating, then giving in and collapsing back against Edane, eyelids trembling.

  Eberstetten pulled straight, sitting cross-legged, leaning forward, turning his head, this way, that. Half curious at how upset Louie was, half confused. Concerned. “Louie, it’s okay. That’s not even what happened to Enzweiler. You wouldn’t have been able to do anything, nobody could have done anything, it wasn’t anybody’s fault.”

  “Really?” Louie looked up, choking on his own breath.

  “Yeah. It was quick. There was nothing we could do. It was fast.”

  “Salzach told us. It was a machine gun. Like the UGV.”

  “Kinda, yeah. It was a Korel.” Eberstetten held out his hand uncertainly. Let it thump onto the floor when Louie didn’t reach out for it. Poor guy didn’t know what to do with Louie’s wide eyes on him.

  “W-what’s a Korel?”

  Before Eberstetten even opened his mouth, Edane had tensed. He wasn’t quite sure why, but the impulse to stay silent tugged at his spine.

  “It’s an anti-aircraft automatic support turret. Big one, three rotary barrels on a motorized spindle.”