Field of Heroes

by Craig Saunders

  We began helping out where we could because anyone who wasn’t dead didn’t get a holiday, so we got them up, treated if they needed it, or gave them a stern word if I judged they were being lazy. Anything short of missing limbs or organ failure was lazy.

  Fleet learned from the first wave. The second wave of fall ships coming down were moving smarter, controlled by their mother ships way up on high, and when they arrived most of the forward base was established and secure, within a rough perimeter around a kilometre and a half in diameter. Autonoguns and platforms were already assembled; AI tanks at the top end of the scale. Lowly units like sniffers and pointers were small enough to be shipped whole, and those only had to be activated and calibrated.

  Cavalry bikes were moving out, scouting, within that first hour.

  Patriot – us – dragged our tired asses together. Pain whispered in our ears. Guns in hand, displays visors down, we sight and sound synched Pain. She’d survived just fine, but it was a sensible precaution. Anything could have thrown her off. Might’ve been something like EMP mushrooms in the forest as far as we knew.

  She was fine, though, and I was glad to have her along for the ride.

  ‘All right then,’ I said.

  ‘Hard advance,’ said Pain in our heads.

  ‘You heard the lady,’ I told my unit. ‘Come on.’

  We moved out. We were a legendary army on our way to a battle worthy of epic poems. None entertained the idea of defeat.

  39.

  Sweat

  Vidar Dawes

  They imagined the atmosphere heavier than Earth, gravity comparable, but oxygen was higher, so we were giddy, and gravity heavier, so moving was a bitch. But it was the heat, the moisture, and the humidity that was crushing me. It felt as though the coral-looking tree growths, swaying things that might have been some kind of land version of kelp, were pissed all the water wasn’t above. The forest (it was a forest, no matter what it looked like) steamed with moisture thick enough to drip, and sometimes the moisture actually ran from the foliage in small, pattering waterfalls. Like a rainforest, but wetter even than that.

  We puffed, short of breath and energy, just standing.

  Moving was oppressive, miserable, hard work.

  D-Guard units had their own autonomous life support systems. KES had rebreathers, Cavalry were mounted on scout bikes purpose-designed for long excursions and capable of carrying enough extra supplies they could’ve probably cooked a gourmet meal with a little invention. Heavily armoured monsters like the AI tanks, autonoguns, LAWs, they were machines. Maybe the heat and moisture would wear them down to rust and plastic-coated wires eventually, but not in any time scale that’d bother the landing force. Foot, though? Infantry – like us? The change in nomenclature from infantry to marine hadn’t gone to our heads. We were Patriot Company, and we understood what we were.

  We were here to sweat.

  A compliment of D-Guards remained at the landing and extraction site. There were near two hundred of them, and in any other time that would’ve been a platoon. When companies, brigades, battalions, war groups were all changing in a matter of months (weeks, in the earliest days of the war, so whole battalions were just history, now) numbers ceased to matter. My company were Patriot. Alante’s were Bear. Our surviving companies, battalions, divisions, they were our family. The big picture was the survival of our species, but that was a really big picture. Like sitting too close to an immersion screen with your girl on your arm it was best to look away and focus on the important thing right beside you.

  Scale it down from Earth, to humanity, to division, to friends. Those who had your back. That was what you had to focus on. Didn’t matter if you were on a training ground in Nellis, or on an alien planet were the sun and sky were tinted red.

  That thought often helped me focus when war became so large it was all I thought I could see. I only had to zoom out, though, back down to the men and women beside me.

  There would always be a place for mobile infantry and marines.

  Our job was to move, so we moved.

  Our gear was heavy. The fatigues and DTC’s we wore. A week’s rations, as much ammo as we could lug, and flat-pack micro-surgery essentials – mostly glue patches and huge doses of stimulants and pain suppressants. No sense in much else. If you couldn’t fix a wound with a glue patch and painkillers, you were going home in a med cart or not at all.

  Patriot Company, hiking through an alien forest, on our holidays.

  It was a shitty holiday.

  We were nervous at every crackle from the ground we crushed underfoot. Strange catcalls came from the oddly coloured landscape. We had no sense of where, because some of those coral blooms were hundreds of feet high and everything was slightly wrong, as though this world had been bumped a couple of meters to the side of normal.

  We knew one thing for sure, because of long range telemetry. A portal just like the one by Saturn was here.

  It had been four days in all since I’d been cleaning vomit after the jump to this system.

  We weren’t here to sign a peace treaty. It wasn’t an escalation of hostility, either. We were already as hostile as we could get. We came to burn the planet down.

  Scout bikes and their autonomous sniffer and pointer units were way out ahead of the heavies at our fore, beating a path into the dense plant growth all around us. They’d been lost to sight in moments after leaving the relative safety of the landing site, and lost to heat sensors within minutes. Alternating radio still got through, but light travels in a straight line and nothing on the ground could see through a forest.

  I’d spoken with Hard Dog. My ears might not be the greatest since that first boom, and since then I’d been near explosions and big guns too often for great ears but I picked up what she told me easy enough back when we’d been surrounded by the drone of a ship in space. Armoured got a better heads up than infantry. Way it was. We were cheap. A DTC was cheap…one of those Armoured Quads? They weren’t cheap. They were an investment. We were fodder and nobody told us shit. Both things were fine by me. I didn’t need to know why, or when, or how.

  She told me what she’d heard from Fleet; we were only on the ground to reach the source of the energy signature.

  Their units, weapons, biology weren’t deemed as important to humanity as their portal technology. Joint priorities, I guess. Get that tech, or do whatever we could...and stop them coming back to Earth.

  You need boots on the ground to do that.

  When we were done, nothing would be left at all.

  On Earth, we didn’t use the really big stuff. We wanted our planet back, not gone. Here?

  If we’d bomb our own cities? Our own species? What would we do to them?

  40.

  Contact

  Vidar Dawes

  It wasn’t first contact, of course. More like a game of tag, and wasn’t that war? You poked me, now I’m going to poke you. It wasn’t the playground, and we weren’t kids, but it was kind of the same. Just the grown up version where you don’t get a grazed knee but your guts hanging somewhere they’re definitely not supposed to.

  The Fleet and the Admiral were all cosy with brandy in the skies up above. Maybe they were yelling down commands like some old world God to Moses. Maybe that wasn’t fair. Admiral Jones didn’t seem like that. I’d kind of liked her though I’d barely met her. But either way, sure it was brave enough helming a fleet through uncharted space to war, but she wasn’t down here with mud, soon to be blood, on her boots, was she?

  Patriot Company weren’t just soldiers, not really. We weren’t just the dregs who were left, either. Before we’d been implanted with Pain to keep us on track, we’d lived through the war on Earth. We were survivors. With Pain watching our six? Maybe we were better than soldiers, more than just mere marines. We might have been the best soldiers Earth had ever fielded. We were Spartans facing the might of Persia, the Knights Hospitaller facing the Ottomans.

  That thought made me proud, but sad, too, be
cause the ultimate fate of true heroism wasn’t often victory but a rousing footnote in a larger body of work called ‘War Sucks and then you Die’.

  I thought, unbidden, of those first three soldiers I met on the day I had a blown truck and only one boot. Laugher, Spitter, and Brawler.

  Their names stuck in my memory. So much else hadn’t. They’d been career soldiers. They had understood the technology and arms humanity had at the start of the war. They’d been told war was one way, though, and it turned out it wasn’t the war they’d been taught. Like they were an abacus in the time of silicon.

  It was there, that moment when my Bronco exploded and I was thrown through the air and left with pieces of a girl I’d been with but not her name that I first died. There are many deaths. Where else had I died?

  I though Toledo Bend, for sure. Whatever hope I’d had for some kind of return to a life that made sense died there in the blinding sun bouncing of a lake rough from rising monsters.

  When did I accept that I was a soldier in my heart, and that’s what I’d die being, whether in battle or with my legs and arms withered in old age?

  There, on Zoa?

  On Zoa my death was more literal for me. The kind a soldier knows when he understands what war really is – trying to sort out a mass of slippery shit-tubes and figuring out how they got so tangled.

  *

  ‘We’re burning a road to the signature. A.T.’s ahead. Patriot, move up on ‘em.’

  We moved up.

  Around a hundred metres through the bush took us ten minutes. Everything on Zoa was hostile. We were hurting from the heat, moving in a crouch. Watching my back and watching everyone else’s was as hard as running through the desert.

  The A.T.’s moved up in front and LAWS guarded our flanks. I never trust my life or those of my Company to an autonomous machine, so my head was swivelling enough my vertebrae ground when I turned my head.

  Tiny insects buzzed in a mist. I squinted against the barrage flying, biting midges. My skin was crawling with them, and when I wiped sweat from my face my hands were black. I was cleaning my slick hands on my DTC’s when they hit us.

  Fire from the some unseen assailant ricocheted into the bug-hazed air and the dirt. Trees that looked like coral of all sorts of lurid colours splintered, blown by the enemy’s weapons. They hit us so hard I barely had time raise my weapon before I heard the first cry of pain.

  ‘Contact,’ said the omnipresent voice of Pain in my head.

  Thanks, I thought.

  Then I found my LMG was on the crushed, charred path by my right hand and for some reason I couldn’t quite reach out to grasp it.

  I tried to hold in my in guts with my left. Bits that shouldn’t have been outside of me, were.

  I was thinking maybe colon, liver. Long, slippery, wet. Gross. A shock. My DTC’s were torn right through. I could see a gaping, bloody horrible hole right through them.

  I figured this was the bit where I died.

  I was stunned, my head swam. I couldn’t see straight. It was carnage everywhere. Body parts, screaming soldiers, quiet soldiers. LAWS units on fire.

  I was busy trying to grip slippery bluish snakes crawling out of my belly. I couldn’t help. I was dying.

  I didn’t die. Of course I didn’t. There are many deaths. One of them came later, on Velasan.

  This one was just the death of any sense of immortality. Everyone else had died, but it wouldn’t be me.

  I learned acceptance that the death of my body was inevitable.

  Velasan was true death. Not of the body, but of the mind, but it doesn’t matter which comes first because that’s the truth of it; everyone dies in the end.

  ‘Lord Death,’ I managed in a husky, winded voice, and that was all.

  41.

  Gut’s Ache

  Alante Brockner

  Armoured charged along the pathway – a carved, burned and flattened path through the thick, strange foliage toward the site of the battle, D-Guard and KES lined the route like an honour guard.

  ‘Dawes,’ she said into comms, routing through Sergeant Pain’s larger AI interface to break through interference from the planet’s heavier atmosphere. ‘Dawes? You there? What’s happening?’

  She heard him cough, just a vague, quiet and tired sound only just audible.

  ‘3rd Platoon,’ she said, glancing around at those from her Company with her. ‘On me. Hard run. Weapons hot and burning going in.’

  Already she heard the sound of heavy fire ahead, in real time, not through wide array comms. Because of the haze she couldn’t see what was happening, but she could see the larger heat signatures of fires, and the smaller signs of life from the enemy. Marines, too, because if there hadn’t been, it wouldn’t have been so bright or so loud.

  Marines weren’t damsels in distress, and Armoured were on them already. Hopefully, by the time she and units one and two got there, they’d be mopping up.

  She charged out into the clearing where the battle was still hot, three hundred yards ahead of the bulk of her Bears. She found the embattled marines in a rough square, laying down heavy fire at the bush around them, flattening smoking trees. There were dead LAWS, dead men and women, too, their bodies being used like sandbags in old wars.

  ‘Light it up! Burn it all down!’

  She jammed her stabilisers down – long spikes into the dirt that ran parallel with her four legs – and brought up her rear cannons.

  The forest around them exploded into glorious colour – the strange hues of alien flora and fauna, but Armoured’s blistering attack was so fierce everything blew in green or blue or red, primary and secondary and tertiary colours until it was the palette of a schizophrenic artist splayed on the moist air. A mess of strange fungal looking things, a fine mist of bugs. Carapace and segments of Zoan beasts, splattered gore, shards and heads from coral trees.

  Alante wound down her rear cannons. They, and her twin .63’s, burned hot and smoke draped her suit from shoulder to back like a cape.

  Only when her guns were still did she stomp through the carnage looking for Dawes’ corpse among hundreds of others.

  There.

  He was groaning and half-covered in parts of other soldiers.

  ‘Contact!’ yelled someone. ‘Air!’

  She had a sense of firing around her again, units aiming up. She glanced to one side and saw some huge creature that looked like a prehistoric seahorse mixed with a whale slam into the ground and slide on through the trees, dead, but still taking fire.

  Oh, she thought, sparing it a glance. Don’t see that every day.

  But Dawes had her attention, and she wasn’t worried about her soldiers. They could ruin some saurian flying whale’s day easy as pie.

  Dawes was the issue.

  Fuck, she thought at first. Then Alante looked closer, lowering her D-Guard so it looked like a dog stretching out after a nap. She snorted in laughter, despite the grim situation.

  ‘Fuck’s sake, Dawes,’ she said, head shaking inside her heavy helmet.

  She slid the mess of some other soldier’s breastplate from Dawes, slapped aside the coiled guts, and shook Dawes’ shoulder. He didn’t respond but of course he was breathing.

  Death help me from stupidity.

  Alante grabbed Dawes’ arm in her augmented gauntlet and squeezed hard enough that he yelled and his eyes sprang wide open.

  ‘Brockner?’ said Dawes. ‘Don’t...don’t.’

  He was trying to pull the guts of another soldier back inside but failing miserably because he didn’t have a hole in his guts. It was hideous, but Alante was having serious trouble fighting laughter.

  ‘Stop being a fucking idiot,’ she said. ‘That’s someone else’s guts, not yours.’

  ‘Huh?’ he said. ‘Oh. Oh.’

  He had the grace to look sheepish.

  She yanked him up to feet.

  ‘You finished acting?’

  ‘What’s this, third date?’ said Dawes, steadying himself on her hard steel a
lloyed shoulder. He wasn’t dead, but being hit in the chest by a flying corpse packed out with armoured plates, even just a marine, still knocked the puff out of you.

  ‘Want to go back in the muck?’ said Brockner, but she smiled, still. He was kind of charming. Kind of. His nose was still swollen. He made her laugh and she didn’t know why.

  Fire and death all around them and she was laughing.

  That was where Brockner and Dawes became friends – as they oversaw the evac of the messed up marines while the AI tanks crawled forward, and the sniffers stood prowling for crab-mines on the perimeter of their enforced forward position.

  ‘Thanks for the save,’ said Dawes as the half-way rescue mission wound to a close.

  ‘Got to look out for each other, right?’ said Alante with a nod and a slap on his back. Thankfully she wasn’t in her suit right then, or she might have broken him for real. ‘Else, what was the point in fighting at all?’

  ‘You’re sweeter than people think, you know,’ said Dawes.

  ‘Don’t tell ‘em,’ she said, standing ready to mount her D-Guard again.

  ‘Hey, Hard Dog’s a...’ softy, he was going to say, but she beat him to the punch.

  ‘Fire...burn it down!’ she yelled over him and the heavies and autonoguns began to tear a straight road toward the portal.

  42.

  Cartwright

  Vidar Dawes

  Bear’s D-Guard spearhead moved us forward pretty well, and after that first skirmish things went better, and faster. Marines hung back, because we weren’t tanks. D-Guard and KES and the actual tanks were like icebreakers running through Earth’s poles in old days, or someone ahead whacking aside vines with a machete.

  We didn’t see any Cephal. There were crab-mines, but we had mine detectors – sniffers – sweeping ahead of the AI tanks now we knew it wasn’t going to be a quiet run.

  A.T’s crushed smaller foliage and blew aside the larger with hard beam swipes. Sappers and engineers followed on behind, establishing turret defences as we advanced in a thick column around two hundred metres wide.