Field of Heroes

by Craig Saunders

  ‘Heard your little soldier had a dishonourable discharge last night...’

  Snigger.

  ‘Fuck off, Kinoshi.’

  Laugh. Snort.

  We were children. Jokes got old. Getting laid didn’t.

  Plenty of Patriot bunked together. Even those of us who were ‘older’ were still under forty and that wasn’t old enough to be riding the kind of scooter I’d literally arrived on when I joined the army. Hell, I was thirty-one years of age by then. I wasn’t ready to retire my libido, either.

  The older soldiers, though, those conscripted, or career, or just those who had nowhere to go didn’t laugh the same. They weren’t like the younger soldiers who shrugged off loss or were lucky enough to shut their emotions down in the earliest, first days, like I had. Those older men and women and neutrois among us had lost family, friends, and because they were older maybe they were more attached, more anchored, in their memories.

  Either way, we were all subjected to the same shitty conversations every morning, or ribbing. It was just a fact of life. We fired off whatever we could to stay alive, in body and mind. We laughed and took the jokes as part of the price of the other comforts we took and received. Whatever would get us through another night, taking away the sweats, or the nightmares. Grunts and groans were still better than listening to a soldier waking with a scream.

  Sometimes people’d sit together in morning mess, too, those who’d been around a while. Cartwright, a woman called Okinado, Sammy, Helen. People and names came and went.

  ‘You think this is it?’ said Okinado, after we’d spent the night together. It was an occasional, easy thing between us.

  ‘The push?’

  She nodded.

  I thought about it.

  It wasn’t all rumours about who was with whom when we finally got to sleep in our hard cots at night. There were other rumours, too. The big ones. Humans were developing something huge. A weapon. A secret. Something to end the war. Rumours like that abounded for years, grew into legends, faded away, but I’d been through the figurative trenches and I wasn’t green any longer. This one felt different.

  ‘New weapon? No. If we had anything other than bodies, we’d be throwing them at this war. A change?’

  ‘You do,’ said Okinado as I nodded and shovelled paste into my mouth.

  ‘Yeah. I do. I can feel something. Can’t you?’

  It was her turn to look thoughtful, but she didn’t answer that question. Instead, she asked me one in turn.

  ‘What’s the deal with you and that ring? It’s a woman’s ring, right? Are you married, Dawes? Doesn’t matter, but...’

  I fingered the ring I always wore around my neck with my tags.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  If it seemed a weird answer, I suppose it was. Since I’d had the metal shard out of my head and Sergeant Pain grafted in among my synapses and neurons or whatever else was in a man’s brain, I didn’t exactly remember more, but my thoughts were different. It was hard to put a finger on the difference. I wasn’t smarter or thinking more than usual. I was maybe a little less closed. Maybe that was letting something in. I still felt cold inside, but like that hot breeze affect me, too. Something had shifted for sure.

  I changed the subject anyway. Habits like that are ingrained. For me, turning anything that might be emotional aside like you might parry a blow was as natural as pissing standing up.

  ‘You?’ I asked, trying to fill the slight gap where she might ask more. ‘You married?’

  ‘I was,’ she said.

  We were quiet again after that, because where was there to go? Both our responses were show stoppers.

  But that conversation I had with Okinado? I must’ve had it a hundred times. What’s with you and the ring? Near enough everyone asked me at some point. It was just a ring, like silver or platinum perhaps, with a small stone set in it. I always wore it with my tags around my neck.

  If it wasn’t important, why did I still wear it?

  I was good at deflecting questions, even the ones I sometimes asked myself.

  Cartwright never mentioned it. Next morning I sat with Cartwright, like I was just putting up a little warning sign for Okinado. She wasn’t dumb. We slept with each other sometimes still, and she never asked about the ring on the chain around my neck again.

  *

  Order came down to Patriot Division from the joint chiefs – those remaining. People changed rank and position so often I didn’t bother remembering who was who apart from those directly above me. We were hitting San Diego, which was the site of one of the largest concentrations of Zoans in the continental northern Americas.

  Suddenly, that wind that brought change didn’t feel so fresh anymore.

  It was the hardest task we’d been given. Coastal regions, wetlands, rivers...these had largely been abandoned by humans. We had intelligence on the shallower areas...but deep, deep down? We heard they could survive down there. But what they were doing?

  Anyone’s guess.

  Estimates of enemy forces we might face ranged from a hundred thousand, right up to five hundred thousand. The truth was, we didn’t know. It might be they were breeding beneath the sea and there would be a billion just beneath the waves to greet us.

  Why not just nuke them then? It was a perfectly good question, and it was Sammy who asked it at the briefing when our latest colonel finished speaking.

  ‘Because intact drop ships are rare as rocking horse shit,’ said the colonel with a broad grin. ‘You lucky bastards aren’t going to sunny San Diego to kill everything in sight. We’re taking a drop ship intact.’

  27.

  Mission Park

  Vidar Dawes

  ‘You ever had your balls drip enough sweat to puddle in your boots?’ said Cartwright.

  I couldn’t honestly say I had, up until then.

  ‘Have now,’ I said.

  ‘They’re like peanuts,’ said Cartwright. Yelled, really; the choppers dropped us in a sparsely wooded area that might have once been a park, and were still dropping infantry and whirring and whirling over our heads with their heavy blades thumping against the air.

  Whatever Mission Park might have once been it was a wasteland now. Burned and charred ground, trees with broken limbs like bullet wounds in fallen and shattered boles. The ground near my platoon still smoked and stank because airborne had burned it afresh right just before dawn’s light rose at our backs. Sniffers prowled ahead of us, hunting down any enemy ground units like crab mines or the nasty shelled creatures that burrowed and burst from the ground to shock. They looked kind of like lice, or trilobites, maybe, and I hated them worse than most. The things made my skin crawl even before they unleashed their charge. I loved sniffers, though – small units modified to pick up the organic smell of the crab mines lurking beneath the dirt. Neither the crab mines nor the other arthropods that burrowed in dirt were smart enough to tell man from the cheap drone units. I didn’t see a single sniffer go off.

  I was fairly sure the crabs that might have been waiting for us were gone. Nothing could’ve survived the heat from airborne’s fires. But still...fairly sure is the smartest kind of sure to be facing the Zoan.

  ‘Shitfire and fuck,’ said Okinado.

  I felt it. That ozone charge in the air; plasma bursts from ammonites and whatever else the Zoan might have waiting for us in the distant city. The choppers were banking, clearing out. Balls of crackling energy flew up from some place I couldn’t see through the ruins of the city ahead. The choppers weren’t clear.

  Cold, cool headed, I saw choppers struck and falling from the sky, killing their payload – soldiers – as they smashed to the blackened dirt around us.

  ‘Move...run,’ I said and I was moving as the first chopper hit the ground. I didn’t look back. I didn’t need to look. Pain was talking about threats, levels, directions, but she’d be talking to the whole of Patriot. I knew those who could move would be moving.

  I didn’t lose a single soldier in the la
nding. Other companies lost plenty and we hadn’t even seen the enemy yet.

  *

  We knew this would be the worst we’d faced going in. None of us were confident. Confidence was laughable, and you’d have to be a fool to believe in yourself utterly when we faced death every day out in the fields and cities that were the battlescapes of war.

  Frightened?

  Sure I was.

  Balls like peanuts, I remembered. Cartwright was at my back. He had a way with those few words he did speak. He’d got that about right. Hot, roasted nuts, but scared enough some primal instinct to put all the important parts someplace safe kicked in.

  Explosions brightened the dull reflection of dawn on the remains of San Diego. Smoke billowed and stank. Choppers fled north and south and some remained on the ground, electrics dead, or the choppers dead if they’d had their lights turned out mid-air. Infantry screamed at our backs, dying, and the volume faded as our boots pounded uneven concrete into the city. We couldn’t help them, and we had a job to do.

  I was sweating. If I was lucky, I might live. Real luck (luck for a soldier in the sixth year of the war was something like a shower or a beer, mind), would have to wait.

  Dead people don’t sweat, I thought.

  My DTC’s were pretty much made to order now. I was comfortable as I was going to get and we were born to sweat.

  Suck it up.

  ‘Move it on up!’ I panted into my helm comms.

  I had my visor down even though the sun was at our backs. The fires in the city were bright enough we all had shaded periglass visors keeping our eyes sharp. I had a pack on my back. Emergency provisions, ammo, change of anti-bac pants. I hadn’t needed anything like that yet, but I’d been in the field for a week at the longest. We, none of us, not command and not StratInt, had any idea how long we would be in the city. We’d hit it just about as hard as we could before we dropped and that’s everything short of annihilation we could manage without blowing the hell out of the prize – the giant alien drop ship, in prime condition, in the heart of the bay area.

  ‘I’m on it, captain,’ said Sergeant Cartwright. We had chevrons now, and people listened to us when we told them what to do, and we didn’t get to complain to our troops any longer. ‘Come on! Bustle and hustle!’ he yelled. It was nice having someone else do the yelling for you.

  I was growing attached to Cartwright. For some reason, the idea of losing people seemed more important since that metal splinter came out of my head. Loss became more real. I was changing. I wish I wasn’t responsible for people, but there it was. You’re a captain, and people rely on you, you don’t get to sit down and cry about it. You just do it.

  The three hundred or so of us who’d dropped and survived moved into the wrecked outskirts of the city.

  Two miles we walked under hot sun with the ground throwing hot air, too, and hot winds from airborne’s corridor of fire. It was like walking through a furnace as we prowled in formation along shattered rubble that was once city streets, with the mountains and hills of broken high rises on either side and ahead of us.

  The zone was just about as hot as a place could get for soldiers without a shot even being fired. I’d never sweated so much.

  Triple timing in forty plus degree centigrade heat, sweating so the weight of water drenching our anti-bac underwear chaffed and the sweat inside felt like the gritty sand around us rubbing at our thighs, and nipples, and armpits. I think my thighs were bleeding inside my combats and beneath the DTC plates. I wish I was coated in grease, not sweat. I wished I was in a shower with a woman. Any woman, any shower.

  Bear were already ahead of us, and at three miles in the noise of the LAWS guns and Bear Division’s heavy weapons became like the beat of drums. I wondered if the guns might set off an earthquake. I wasn’t sure I’d mind. I could take all the softening up we could muster before things got up close.

  Drones hovered over the city. Small things, so they looked like birds circling from a distance. Sniffers hopped around here and there. I tried to think of it like a simple hike in the wilds. Deer, birds. Except in war the wildlife was drones and sniffers and pointers. I guess I didn’t mind. Deer and birds didn’t save soldiers’ lives.

  The thumping of artillery drew us on. Comms were constant, almost automatically registering now. Sweat stung my eyes.

  Was it hot in a D-Guard, or a KES? I didn’t know. They ran on nuclear slugs. They were insulated. Did they have air con in there? Net shows to watch? A beer cooler?

  Sergeant Pain wasn’t comms. Sergeant pain had a very specific skill set. Keeping us alive. She wasn’t there to boost morale, and she wasn’t there to keep my mind drifting.

  I was drifting. Dehydrated. Overheated. I couldn’t focus. My pack was lighter from the three litres of water I’d drunk from it. It would’ve been hot wearing anything. We were carrying five or ten pound guns, twenty pound packs, in full battle gear. The fatigues must have weight a few pounds, the DTC’s another fifteen.

  My head pounded. The noise was loud for me and I probably had around forty percent hearing loss.

  We began to hear a symphony of agony from dying soldiers so we moved faster because soldiers don’t do the normal thing and run away from pain. We run to.

  It was then that we met resistance. Nephropids, they were called, and I hadn’t faced any this close in the years I’d been fighting. They were mostly a coastal threat, and looked like lobsters mated with scorpions. They burst from the torn buildings around us, skittering, fast things bearing guns on their hard backs as long as they were – two, three meters, maybe. A blast from one and we were dead. I saw that firsthand – a bright deadly lance flashed out and took a corporal through his chest plate and the ablative slab inside and then all the way out the back of him.

  Shit.

  Any threats I saw, or any of us saw, and Pain relayed it to all in an instant.

  I shifting sidelong, walking like a sea creature on the ocean floor myself, and pumped out short bursts as I moved toward some kind of cover...any kind of cover would be better than being hit by one of those things. My gun shuddered in my hand and I was firing, shouting orders, moving, barely even thinking about what I was doing.

  Pain couldn’t keep up with threat assessments. She was better, we were better, but sometimes someone has to override. That someone was me.

  Pain kept right on doing her best in that patient, calm, dulcet voice. We could see just fine without Pain, though...the nephropids were everywhere. Fire, and you’d hit one.

  Shit, there were dozens of them.

  My coil LMG tore the carapace and the fleshy insides of one, two...I didn’t bother counting. We were moving and firing and it was as hard as a fight got. It wasn’t tactical. It was toe-to-toe with monsters.

  Some lizard mind place inside me understood something even as my arms ached from swinging my LMG left and right; if armoured had already been through here, then these things had waited behind.

  I never thought the Zoan were stupid, and the Cephal certainly weren’t, but the longer we fought, the more apparent it became – these things were not simple idiot warriors. They were learning.

  My arms shook even when my gun was quiet. I watched and thought in a ten second lull. Think. Shoot. It became a rhythm. How long does a battle last? No one really knows. It was a subjective thing. For me? Longer than most, maybe, because time felt slow.

  Patriot weren’t just soldiers. We moved as one now. Like something organic, natural. Like cells moving around each other or joining up under a microscope. We didn’t need orders down to the minutiae. Without prompting were split and joined into cells that were smaller, mobile fire teams.

  Three hundred of us dusty with sweat and the blasted concrete and soot faced spry nephropids that were the black and blue, or mottled, of uncooked lobster.

  My LMG ran dry and I slammed home another drum.

  A three or four metre long lobster Zoan shifted and moved toward me the instant I was out. The heavy weapon on its back turne
d.

  I knew they were smart in a cunning, animal way. Traps weren’t a surprise now, but now they were learning how our weapons worked, too? Their speed of movement and decision making worried me.

  Be cold.

  The thing fired but I had already ducked low. The blast tore a chunk from an already battered wall at my back. I unleashed nearly a full magazine from my hip. I think maybe I was hoping to take off the thing’s legs. That’s probably overly charitable. More likely I was just trying to survive another second, another minute.

  Someone threw a grenade and a detonation ten meters ahead made my tinnitus sing and for a moment all I could ‘hear’ was Pain.

  ‘Six, seven, eight...’

  I zoned her out, too, so there was no sound.

  I didn’t know where the nephropid facing me had gone. I was in the carcass of a building. I stepped over a soldier missing part of her face. Dust peppered the air.

  The heat of the day and the sweat and everything but blood and mess just sank away in my cool head state. Kind of zen.

  ‘Legs are weak!’ I heard.

  No shit, I thought, then realised they were talking about the monsters attacking us.

  It didn’t matter right then if I said anything or not. Any orders would only be lost in the chaos.

  Those of us with coil rifles were doing better than those of us with longer, heavier, weapons, or those with weapons better suited to house to house. Patriot were a company, and we were used to fighting back to back in fire teams, so we didn’t all have standard issue guns, but a mix to match most situations, from long range to close in. Mine was a coil with a fast fire rate.

  Close in they had pincers that could tear an arm away. I found out when one of them tore the arm from a screaming soldier and flung it aside.