Scarcity

by Robert Calbeck

  “My goal is blow as many SAM sites up as possible and stay alive. Maybe help win this goddamn war.”

  “Ah, don’t be so gloomy, Ten.” Jake said. “It’s not like we are doing a high-altitude jump, into an ice-covered shit storm in the middle of winter, behind enemy lines, without more than a dozen drones for support.” Luthor looked at him sideways. That was exactly what they were doing. “Oh wait. We are!” He actually sounded excited about it. Luthor himself was scared shitless; he just wasn’t telling anybody.

  Jake was something of an enigma. 6’4’’ and rail thin with a purported proclivity for thrift store cardigans, he looked like the last person one would ever expect to be a hard-ass soldier. In reality he was the best shot in their unit, flapless in battle, and tried to convince everyone he was raised from birth by an inner-city gang. Luthor was fairly certain that he was raised in a rich white suburb—not that those existed anymore. He surmised Jake’s skill came from playing enough first-person shooter video games that he actually had been warped in the way the crazy whistleblowers were always warning about. Killing digital zombies was a lot different than shooting a real gun at real humans; maybe it hadn’t been for Jake. Luthor had never been much for video games himself, he’d gained the reputation as the second-best shooter the old fashioned way: by shooting actual guns.

  Most of the men seemed less excited about the prospect of being shot at than Jake and were relieving their tension in other ways. Chaz loaded his massive rocket launcher with an anti-drone rocket, checking it in preparation for the drop. Martinez was crossing himself and praying to saint somebody-or-other who was supposed to protect paratroops.

  The plane rumbled again. They must be getting close. Luthor checked his gear one more time. His MX-5 was safely harnessed to the side of his chute, grenade launcher affixed to the barrel, more explosives were attached on the side of his pack. He wore a belt full of extra magazines he had loaded by hand. Special-issue retractable skis were clipped to the other side of his parachute. Heat batteries were tucked in every spare crevice to keep him warm and melt ice for water along with a week of frost resistant food rations. He still didn’t know how they made food that didn’t snap freeze like everything else, but he didn’t care. Food was fuel in war, nothing more. It kept the human machines running the same as oil kept planes flying. The thin, high-tech fabric that formed the wings of his flight suit was intact. It terminated at his wrists and ankles and allowed the soldiers to travel much deeper into enemy territory than the planes could safely fly. Any rip in that, and he would have to pull his chute too soon and ski untold miles to meet up with the rest of his squad.

  A few minutes later a crackling signaled the speaker system coming online. “We are approaching the drop zone. Make final preparations for jump.” Men tried to raise a cheer, but the howling sub-zero wind swallowed it, giving it a lackluster pall.

  “This is it baby!” It was Sean Marrison, or Marri as everyone called him. Marri was a hulking man that had probably played defensive end for the Bears before the war. He affectionately stroked their unit’s only drone. It was folded up like a falcon on the side of his parachute. It had lasted through more battles than anyone had hoped, saving their asses on each of its multiple deployments in the North Sea. The men affectionately called her Claptrap. Supposedly, Claptrap had been derived from “the Fucking Clap of Doom.” Luthor liked the name.

  Luthor just wished he had a pallet full of Claptraps. They were becoming almost extinct in the Coalition military. The first year of the war had spawned the largest drone battles in history. Hulking bomber drones swarming with mini drone escorts crashed into battle with each other like angry hives of bees. The Chinese won most of the battles due to their heavy use of remotely controlled drones. They conscripted the best professional gamers in the world to control them. But as the world ground to a halt while it recklessly spent its resources on frivolous attempts to secure key oil assets, it had become prohibitively expensive to replace each destroyed drone. Now both sides leaned on infantry like a crutch. Men were cheap, and unlike drones, they didn’t cost any oil to run or any steel to build.

  Luthor patted the drone like a beloved dog. “Kick some ass for us today, Clap.”

  Marri pumped his fist. “Like the fucking clap of doom, brother. Oorah!” He still considered himself a Marine, despite his reassignment to the 501st.

  Their Jump Master, Sergeant Garcia, raised his voice. His mask muted his voice enough that he must have been shouting at the top of lungs for them to hear him. “Listen up! Remember to fall in formation away from the mountains and toward our rendezvous zone.” Naming directions had become incredibly difficult on Titan, which was the current magnetic South Pole. Literally every direction could be North around there. Traditional compasses were all but useless. They used the craggy Shackleton mountains as a reference point. “Wait as long as possible before you pop your chute. It’ll be hard to see the ground coming up so keep track of your altimeter!

  “Good luck men. Godspeed.”

  A row of yellow lights erupted on the ceiling. The men unhitched from the mesh and lined up to jump in three rows. The hydraulics opened the back door with a squeaking grind. Luthor waited, hardly daring to breathe. He’d made hundreds of jumps, but jumping out of an airplane always played havoc with his insides. This time was much worse.

  Solid red lights splashed their vision. That meant that some of the planes had started unloading. They would be next. Everyone was quiet. Checking his claustrophobic oxygen mask and dawning his infrared goggles, he waited. This was not a routine jump and he wanted to be ready. They were coordinating a high altitude jump with thousands of other men. So many things could go wrong. The terminal velocity of a fully prone person with arms and legs outstretched was only about 125 miles per hour, and even slower in a wing suit. But a trooper in a full dive could reach speeds in excess of 300 mph. Diving with this many men was dangerous. In training, two men at dangerously different speeds had collided; they found pieces of them spread over a 3 square mile area. Luthor had no desire to be the human projectile that impaled one of his friends.

  The plane hit another patch of turbulence. It was horrible timing, they were about to jump. Suddenly green lights replaced the red and the men started leaping out of the plane. No one hesitated; they had been too well trained for that. Luthor walked forward as the distance between him and the open end of the plane decreased. His heart raced furiously. He looked up and the last man in front was gone. All he saw were white clouds puffing by below and other cargo jets in formation behind them. He took a deep breath from his oxygen mask, and took a running jump out of the plane.

  Wind crashed into his body, and the familiar disorientation came as freefall hit him. For an instant he could not tell up from down, images of planes seemed to come from every side of him. Forcing down the rising panic, he reoriented himself. Little red blips on his goggles showed him where the others were. Without infrared technology there would have been no way to see anyone. Their white camouflage was completely invisible on a backdrop of clouds and the endless white of Antarctica.

  Luthor tucked his arms to his sides and fell into the aerial formation taking shape in the clouds below. He made slight adjustments in his position and direction by subtly tilting his hands. The tiny changes in aerodynamics allowed him to turn and stabilize his body. The airborne army flew in a loose configuration. They all gained similar altitude and then opened their wing suits and angled their descent toward the drop zone which appeared as a green flashing dot on their goggle displays.

  Even inside his specialist gear, it was freezing. HA drops were always cold, but it just felt different when dropping over the coldest place on earth. Luthor felt like his very bones were frostbitten, cooling down the rest of his body from the inside out. He had strict orders not to activate any of his heating batteries yet, so he wouldn’t show up on the enemy infrared. The insulation and his adrenaline would have to be enough to keep him warm. It wasn’t working.

  The
y passed through the high clouds and saw the endless ice field. It was barren, no hills, no plants, or even rocks to break up the inexorable whiteout. Over millennia of freezing temperatures, snowfall had accumulated on Antarctica in giant domes of ice that where miles thick. Titan Dome was one of the thickest at 13,000 feet above sea level. Maybe more. The weight of the massive glacier was so heavy it had actually depressed the land underneath it far below sea level. Before the war broke out over the resources, oil rigs around the ice plateau were drilling through three miles of solid ice before they even hit any land.

  Tiny black specks were emerging in Luthor’s vision. Enemy emplacements. Mobile Comm units, Tanks, Dragon guns, missile sites, anti-missile batteries, Artillery, and infantry spotted the ice. The Chinese had dug in deep on Titan, it was where the largest of all the newly discovered oil fields was located. It was easily four times bigger than any other field ever discovered on earth. The Allies believed if they could shove the Chinese off Titan then they could push them all the way into the Indian Ocean and end the war. The paratroops were supposed to soften up the defenses ahead of the main assault.

  The commanders claimed that the enemy couldn’t see them with their camo under cloud cover. Even if they did start shooting, their heat signatures were too minute to be tracked effectively by surface missiles, and they were too high to be hit by the Dragon guns. Luthor hoped it was true.

  After a minute of gliding Luthor glanced up. They had traveled far enough laterally that the clouds were dissipating. It looked like they were going to disappear completely if they didn’t change course. Other men around him were looking up too. Damn it, he thought, this wasn’t supposed to happen. I hope all that crap they told us about not getting shot wasn’t complete bullshit. They are going to see us. He thought about trying to signal to change direction and hike in farther on foot.

  It was too late.

  White-hot streams of bullet fire strafed up from the surface. Dozens of gun emplacements were pouring bullets into the sky. He couldn’t hear them, but he imagined the ominous drum roll of the smaller guns, and the relentless waterfall of bullets spewed by the Dragons. How the hell do they see us? Luthor didn’t have time to reflect, he joined in on the evasive maneuvers of the rest of the airborne column. Thankfully the guns were still out of range. But they wouldn’t be for long.

  There was a flash from the ground, followed by the telltale contrail of Indian-made Surface to Air Missiles. Shit shit shit. They had better be right about this, Luthor thought, following the column. He held his breath as the missile closed the distance at frightening speed.

  It homed in on men half a kilometer in front of them. They dodged and the missile passed through them. Three more flashes issued from the ground. More missiles. One of them was aimed right at Luthor’s position. He spun sideways and went into a full dive directly at the missile to minimize his cross section. In seconds the missile was in range. He leveled off, directing his body away from the projectile. The missile missed wide, fizzling out harmlessly above him. No more flashes from the ground. What a shame, waste enough on us, and maybe we wouldn’t have to blow them up.

  Many other paratroopers had tried the same trick, diving straight at the missiles to avoid them. That put them in the extreme range of the Dragons. They were getting closer to the ground, but there was no way in hell he was going to pop a chute here. It would make him a stationary target. He followed the rest of the main force above him toward the landing site. The Dragons pissed bullets at them. Luthor tried to avoid the streams of ammunition lancing up between them, but mostly he trusted his luck. Mathematically, the odds were poor any of the bullets would find him; unfortunately, the Dragons fired enough ammo to negate his advantage. A few men, several hundred yards below him, were the main targets. A trooper underneath him twisted and turned trying to outsmart death. He failed; a shower of sparks poured up from below. The man had been hit. No longer in an aerodynamically optimized position, the body flew up through the formation. Luthor had no time to react, and only managed to tuck in his left arm. The change spun his body sideways, and the corpse missed him by inches. Any closer and he would have sprayed his own frozen body parts on the enemy position.

  Two other sprays of sparks bloomed from other plummeting paratroopers. Bullets penetrated their thin armor and bounced off metal chute encasements, lighting them up like fireworks.

  Luthor cursed Murphy and his law. Things had become much worse. A small swarm of mini drones began systematically slicing through their ranks. Their calculated shots fired the precise quantity of ordinance to knock a man from the sky, but no more, maximizing their killing potential. Dozens of men tumbled toward the earth like drunken gymnasts, their life stolen by the deadly machines. One drone streaked toward Luthor. He tucked in his limbs and dove frantically to avoid it. Jake tumbled next to him in free fall, looking as if he’d been hit. But a second later, Jake leveled out, rifle in hand. As the drone circled back for another pass, Jake ripped off a ferocious burst of fire. The drone sparked and died, a small explosion tearing off its dorsal stabilizer.

  Men and drones fell from the sky. Too many men.

  Luthor looked at his altimeter. He was quickly approaching the magic number where he could no longer safely deploy. He narrowed his eyes. Seeing a spot sufficiently far from the Anti-Air guns, he made for it, praying he would be able to make it to the rendezvous zone in time.

  2000 meters.

  1500 meters.

  He was running out of time.

  1000 meters.

  If he opened the parachute too late then it wouldn’t matter if he wasn’t shot, he would have a broken leg, if not a worse injury, in the middle of Antarctica. That could be a death sentence. I am not going to end up a human Popsicle in this God-forsaken continent.

  500 meters.

  He pulled his chute. Straps dug into every limb as the parachute guzzled air and rapidly decelerated his fall. The ground rushed up frighteningly fast.

  More bullets erupted from the ground directly underneath him.

  Chapter 4:

  CERN labs, Geneva, European Union

  Luthor woke up in a sweat. He had been reliving his worst memories again. It happened frequently, it was supposedly a common occurrence for the surviving soldiers who fought in World War III. The overwhelming majority of returning men and women had been diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. He had worked long and hard to not be crippled by his own struggle with his broken mind. He attended years of counseling to help heal his mental wounds and had thrown himself into his studies to help distract from his dark thoughts. Luthor still never had been able to come to grips with why he had survived and so many of his brothers hadn’t.

  The only evidence of his continued battle were the occasional explosions from the angry, violent Luthor. Luthor kept that part of his psyche, his Antarctica-Luthor— “Anti-Luthor” as he thought of it— locked up tight. He gained better control over Anti-Luthor every year. The only other daily reminder of his PTSD was strange, but debilitating fear of heights that had not existed before the war either. He struggled to climb a flight of stairs at times.

  He could never go back to sleep right away after a dream like that. The best way was to get up, move around, use the bathroom, and try to forget. He exited the office by the side door, leading into the hall. It creaked horribly, like most doors. Oil was too expensive to waste on something as frivolous as a noisy hinge. He hoped it didn’t wake anyone up. He left it ajar to minimize the creaking when he came back in. He shuffled drearily into the dimly lit bathroom and sat down on the toilet, resting his face in his hands. He was glad that the solar relay lights were almost out of charge for the night. There was nothing worse than a bright LED after a bad dream to ruin any chance of rest. Maybe Eli was right; maybe a gun would help. Mental note: thank Eli for the advice.

  Going through his routine he tried to think of other things. Put anything into his brain other than the freezing cold of war, the thrill and fear of jumps, his dead fri
ends, the sound of gun shots. That was one of the worst. He still thought he heard them sometimes when doors would slam, or if he dropped something on the ground. The sound of them had never left. They were ominous. Hearing them meant you were still alive; but probably wouldn’t be for very long. He could almost feel them in his chest, still ringing there, that one bullet waiting to find his willing flesh. The sound of a single bullet shot filled his mind, he failed to remove it no matter how hard he tried.

  Wait! That wasn’t my memories. That was real. Luthor realized. He had heard a gunshot. It sounded like it had come from inside the lab.

  #

  A door creaked. Cracking a sleep-crusted eye, Tanya saw Luthor leaving to use the bathroom. It was a common occurrence. She knew he had a legitimate reason for his sleeplessness, but the man acted like he was a geriatric with an overactive bladder. No matter, if the man ever got off his ass and proposed there would be vows to deal with that: “For better or for worse.” 3 AM pee runs would definitely wind up in the “worse” category. So what if he can’t sleep through the night if his life depended on it, I love that boy anyway.

  She had always liked the way that Tanya Tenrel had sounded in her head. Alliterative names always had a ring to them, rhyming names, not so much. Marriage would be wonderful, she knew it would be.

  But Luthor didn’t make sense. It seemed to her that he should appreciate the security that came from marriage. Instead, he always said that it was an “antiquated notion of an exiled religion.” She supposed to an extent, he was right. It was old fashioned, and pretty much nobody outside of the Christians out in the boonies got married anymore. That didn’t mean marriage was a stupid idea. Not everything that’s old is bad Luthor, even if it has to do with God.