by Steve Perry
Winds were down to the sixties now; he checked the passives and did a quick scan of the trees at the edge of the clearing. Nothing to see.
He couldn’t pull up directly over the break; there was a section of tree as big around as he was lying on the cable, which was probably what had broken it.
Looked as if the tree had been hit by lightning, the way the wood was shredded and split.
He parked the vehicle. Ran another sensor scan. No signs of anything out there but windblown crap.
He pulled on his jacket and slapped the door release. He stepped down to the ground.
He lit the helmet lamp and started looking for the break.
It wasn’t under the toppled tree, it was a meter away, and the cable had been cut, the edges sheared clean and smooth.
Shit!
He dropped flat, landing in the mud on top of the cable. He heard the shot right after he smacked down.
And guess what? The fuckers are still here!
Bullets slapped and skipped from the earth around him.
He rolled, staying prone. Time to call for help:
“This is Demonde, I have some enemy action here.”
No reply.
He tried again: “Anybody awake out there? I could use a little backup.”
Zip.
Great! Fucking com—!
Something on the ground dug into his right hip—
The fallen tree absorbed some of the rounds; those made heavier chonks! as they hit—
He scooted backward under the FCV. Not going to be safe here for long, and with no backup and no way to get into the cabin without exposing himself to fire, things were going to go to shit fast.
He pulled his sidearm, pointed it in the general direction of the incoming fire, and triggered half a magazine, just to let them know he could shoot back.
Even if he could call for help, it wouldn’t get here in time. Any second now, one of the shooters would throw a grenade or decide one man with a pistol wasn’t that big a problem. A captured FCV would be a nice prize.
Time to activate the gun.
The FCV had a roof-mounted extrusion machine gun with 360-degree coverage. All he had to do was telescope it up enough to depress the elevation enough and shoot the fuck out of the guys blasting at him.
He sent the command sig, ordering the gun to backtrack incoming small-arms fire and to hose those sources.
That, at least, was working: The gun rose; he could hear the hydraulics over the rain as it lifted the weapon high enough to get the right angle.
The roof gun spoke, chattering caseless 10mm into the night.
Adiós, motherfuckers!
Then somebody fired a G2G missile and blew the machine gun right off the fucking roof—
Not more than twenty or thirty meters away, he guessed. Where the fuck were they?
Shit, shit, shit!
More rounds splatted or chonked around him.
Screwed.
Wait a second, wait. The angle on the FCV, they were on his starboard side . . .
He spoke a command sequence to the FCV’s tactical comp.
He fired off the rest of the magazine in his pistol to draw their attention.
The stick-on pod’s doors slid open.
The drones’ wings had to be manually unloaded, and the folded wings locked into place by hand or they couldn’t be launched, but he didn’t need them to fly . . .
The incoming fire stopped. Somebody yelled at him through the soggy night:
“Surrender, and you get to stay alive! Otherwise, we roll over you! You have ten seconds to decide!”
He lit the drones, sent the command code for the little crafts’ miniguns’ radar, and gave them leave to fire when they detected moving, human-sized targets.
“Hey, asshole, did your mother get those new kneepads I sent her?”
The enemy soldiers hiding in the night came up and charged—
The little drones couldn’t fly, but their guns worked just fine.
He heard yelling as the drone’s guns fired.
He shut them down and came up_
Don’t shoot Roy, little drones—
He scrambled up into the FCV and closed the door. He plopped his wet and muddy self into the command center seat and put the FCV into reverse.
The drones had done the trick, and they still had a little ammo left, enough to keep any of the enemy still out there from any kind of run at him. He relit the drones. They’d stopped shooting, so nobody was moving around they could see.
As soon as he found a spot where the wireless connection was strong, he’d park. And he’d have to wake up the squad in their igloos and let them know they’d had company. Well. He’d tried to cut them a break and learned once again that no good deed goes unpunished.
He felt a twinge, looked down at his muddy self and noticed a darker blotch on his hip.
Blood.
He stood, noticed he had a pain just under his right iliac crest, and peeled his shirt up and pants down.
Well, shit. There were two holes there, maybe five centimeters apart. He hadn’t rolled over something sharp on the ground, he’d been shot.
It wasn’t bleeding much, and it hadn’t hit anything serious, just punched a little channel through the meat below the bone. Son of a bitch . . .
He went to find a first-aid kit. He cleaned the wounds, dusted them with Antibiotic Clot Factor, and sprayed a bandage over it. One the patch set, he took a quick shower, and put on some clean clothes. Okay, a little harm, a small foul . . .
As he slipped the com bleed-through earpiece back in, he heard “—there, old man? Anybody home, FCV?”
He grinned. “Hello, Chocolatte, I’m here. Feeling lonely?”
“No, just figured it was past your bedtime, and I’d better call and be sure you were still awake. You didn’t answer.”
“Doing a little chore,” he said. “How’s the rain treating you?”
“Been busy. Bangs, booms, this, and that. Must be nice to be in a big ole vehicle with all the comforts of home and nothing exciting going on.”
“Yep, that’s me. Dull as dishwater here.”
He didn’t want to worry her in the middle of things; he could tell her later.
Maybe.
– – – – – –
Gunny logged off. She lay there and listened to the rain, not falling so hard now, and thought about Gramps out there in the FCV. It had become their pattern, to rag on each other, but he was not really that old, not even sixty yet.
He was decades older than she was, but technically, not even middle-aged. He probably had a few moves left.
She hadn’t really thought much about herself aging until recently.
She knew it was the nature of the beast; that she was slowing down. Yeah, she was like that old gunfighter in the ancient vid; she could still catch a fly on the bar with a swipe of her hand, but once, she could have caught two of them.
There was a quick fix: A trip to Formentara’s table, and the best aug available would kick her regular military-grade speed up a few notches.
Thing was, in her mind, that would be cheating.
Sure, everybody in most armies had the military issue. That was part of the requirement, and it brought you up to par; you couldn’t compete without them unless you were some kind of genetic sport. But the high-end augmentation, the stuff like Jo ran, that put you into another whole class of quick and strong and all kinds of other shit.
Without that kind of work, Gunny would never be as fast as Jo. And even with it, she’d still be slower than Kay. There were limits as to how much a human body could be amped, and even staying inside them, the more augs you ran, the sooner you died. They took their toll.
Well, except if you had Formentara tuning you up now and then.
It wasn’t as if she wanted to live forever, but it had always been a point of something, pride, maybe, that Megan Sayeed had gotten to where she was mostly on her own. It was practiced skill, training, and that meant something to her. Like the climbers who scaled the big peaks without supplemental oxygen, there was a different sense of accomplishment.
She was still a young fem, but normal humans peaked in their teens or early twenties when it came to reaction time and nerve-conduction speeds, and she was past that. She wasn’t going to get any faster on her own, only slower. Practice made it smooth, and smooth led to fast, but there was only so much you could do to compensate for the organic slowing.
A year from now, five? Some hotshot on the other side who was younger and faster would beat her to the draw and cook off a more accurate round before she could.
When that happened, the party would be over.
That’s how she expected to go. On the battlefield, taken out by somebody better. There was always a chance of a stray shot, a bomb going off in the wrong place, a sniper so far away she couldn’t see him, but mostly she figured it would come down to a younger, quicker, more accurate version of herself firing the bullet with her name on it. Not really realistic to believe that, but she’d kept that fantasy going for a while. It had a certain romantic charm. Hey, fem, it’s me, the younger version of you, come to take your place on the dance floor. Adiós, chica . . .
So what to do?
She could walk away. She had enough money to live for a couple of years, she could get security work, could teach shooting classes, like that, and get by.
She could upgrade. Formentara could speed her up 15 or 20 percent, and that would put her into the superfast category, with superior skills that would give her another ten or twelve years better than she was now.
It was tempting.
Or she could just go on like she was and meet her nemesis whenever he or she showed up. Kinda fatalistic, but she was a soldier, had been one her whole adult life, and that was part of the trip. Play with fire, get burned; play with knives, get cut; play with guns . . . ?
She grinned. Gramps would have a field day if he knew what she was thinking. He’d be on her like fleas on an orchard rat, he knew she was even a tiny bit worried about getting old and slow, all the shit she had given him. Karma was an absolute bitch.
Good thing he couldn’t read her mind.
The rain came down, and she drifted into sleep.
– – – – – –
Wink watched the MedEvac hopper as its fans kicked up water from the soaked ground; the hopper’s lights caught and danced crazily over the vibrating pools as the vehicle lifted. At least the rain was not as heavy as it had been; bigger craft were able to fly.
Inside the departing unit were four troopers from another unit who’d had a really bad night when the hurricane had swept their cart into a river, and the seals had failed. His work—and Formentara’s since zhe had popped by for no particular reason—was to stabilize and transship the four to the CCU at the Main Base, where General Wood’s medical team treated the really serious stuff. These four had drowned, mostly, and needed high-pressure hyperoxygenation, more specialized gear than Wink had, to make sure their brains came back online as they recovered.
The sound of the hopper faded. The rain came down, the wind blew.
Now he had an empty clinic. He went back inside.
Boredom headed his way; he could feel it approaching . . .
Ping ping PING Ping ping PING Ping ping PING—
So much for boredom. Wink toggled his com.
“This is CFI medical, go.”
“Ah, this is Field Med Orton, Fifteenth, we have two troopers down with serious blast injuries, they need evac, our transport is busy, and you are the closet. Can you help us out?”
“Stet that. How bad?”
“Telemetry uploading.”
“Stand by.”
Wink waved up the telemetry read:
The stats crawled. Explosive concussive effects could be all over the map, but often, somebody standing too close to a bomb when it went off looked as if they had been swatted with a giant, spiked fist. The two injured troopers were hurt pretty bad, but their vitals seemed stable, at least for the moment.
Orton was one of the FMs for the scout team next door, not part of CFI.
“Got no transport vehicles near their location,” said Formentara, from behind him. “We’re the closest facility,” zhe said, “and our transport won’t be back for forty-five minutes, if that. We’ll have to go collect them in the crawler.”
The doctor nodded. Only a couple of klicks, and mostly it looked like friendly territory, plus nobody was supposed to shoot at medical vehicles, which the crawler obviously was; it was plainly marked with standard Caduceus, the twin snakes twining around a winged staff, black on a bright yellow background, plus broadcasting the medical sig. Though that was kind of a running joke . . .
Corporate rules were much like the GU Army’s when it came to medical vehicles and buildings—firing or bombing them was generally not allowed, as long as nobody in them was shooting at you. Not that troops always paid attention to that rule. All you needed to say was, “Hey, some asshole stuck a gun out the door and fired at me!” If there wasn’t a Monitor standing right there, you could get away with it. Wink’s vehicles had already taken fire several times during this war, and likely as not, their side had sent a few potshots at Dycon’s medical crawlers.
Play in a war zone, why, you might get killed. Imagine that.
Still, they could zip over and back, should be no problem . . .
Wink said, “Transport is on the way. ETA your location is”—he checked the PPS—“six minutes.”
“Stat that, Doc. We’ll keep them alive until you get here.”
– – – – – –
The medical crawler rolled along, treads churning mud, the rain, which had eased up, came back harder, sheeting over the vehicle. Winds weren’t so bad, but it was breezy enough.
Wink glanced at the readouts, looked through the armored plastic into the dark night, and back again, gaze constantly shifting.
“Nervous?” Formentara sat to the left at the weapons console. Mercenaries were covered by the medical-noncombatant conventions, but the crawler was armed because sometimes you had to shoot back or get killed. Better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it.
Wink shook his head. “Not me. It’s just a walk in the park as far as I—Fuck!”
Bullets smacked into their windshield, ricocheted off, leaving metal-smudged dents on the stacked plastic.
“You know, they aren’t supposed to do that,” he said, “and yet they keep doing it. Where are the Monitors when you need them? Hey, morons, we are medical here!”
Formentara’s hands flew over the controls as zhe initiated a suppressing fire back along the trajectory the tactical computer identified. “That will give them something about which to think,” zhe said.
“‘About which to think’?”
“Grammar is important.”
“Really? Grammar? How far?”
“Almost there,” zhe said.
He gunned the engine, pushing their vehicle as fast as he dared on the muddy ground.
“Wink? Where the hell are you?”
“Medical evac, Colonel, and we are kind of busy here. Let me call you back.”
Formentara wiggled hir fingers: More chatter erupted from their gun.
Zhe said, “They eased off, but I expect they have help coming. Negative on local air support, still too much wind and rain for the drones, and we don’t have a heavy aircraft close enough.”
“That’s okay, we’re here.” Wink tapped the brake, locked the crawler to a stop.
He hauled ass back to the bay doors and opened them.
Into his com: “Orton, your ride i
s here. And we probably have more enemy coming, so let’s move it, hey? I’m bringing gurneys.”
“Affirmative, Doc. We are forty meters SSE of the crawler. I’ll wave.”
Wink yanked two of the slide stretchers off a table, pulling them by a thick handle. The gyroscopically stabilized gurneys rolled on fat tires, or could be skidded on almost frictionless plastic runners that would glide over pretty much any kind of terrain, and were handy when there weren’t two people to carry a stretcher. He and Orton could each pull one back, or he could chain them together and haul two, if necessary.
He jumped out into the stormy night and felt his boots sink into the damp earth. Rain poured down.
The heads-up display in his helmet pinged an ID sig. Right where Orton said they were.
A walk in the park. In a hurricane. Where the park muggers are armed with full-auto carbines looking to kill you.
He grinned.
– – – – – –
“He’s in, lock it tight,” Wink said.
Orton, a gaunt man who seemed made of rawhide, said, “Strapping down.”
The medic finished securing the second of the two casualties and grabbed one of the handles.
Wink was about to do the same when he noticed that the soldier in the other gurney had gone a chalkier shade of pale.
Fuck . . .
“We got a new bleeder somewhere on this one,” Wink said. “I need to plug it.”
“Doctor, pradar says company is arriving,” said Formentara’s voice in his head. “I suggest you move with more deliberate speed.”
“Yeah, yeah.” Got to find that hole—
It was hard to tell in the darkness where the blood was the freshest, but it had to be on the left side, which had taken the main force of the explosion. He flared his helmet lamp to full. That would make a nice target in the rainy night . . .
He could feel time slipping away and the enemy getting closer.
Where are you, little bleeder? Come to Daddy . . .
There—!
He found the vein, managed to clamp it with a hemostat. It was meatball stuff, but it would have to do.
“Let’s move!” He killed his helmet lamp. He yanked the gurney and started for the crawler.