1st to Fight (Earth at War)

by Rick Partlow

  “Come on, Marine!” Julie slapped me on the shoulder. “You wanna live forever?”

  “Kind of,” I admitted.

  “Well, here’s your chance then!” She shot me a smile and something about it woke up the stupid-ass college kid who would do anything to impress a girl. “Bare that arm, boy!”

  I moaned, knowing it was a lost cause, and pulled up my sleeve.

  “It’s not the first time the government’s stuck it to me,” I said, wincing as the shot went into my arm, feeling like something solid had been stuck into my muscle. “Although usually, they pick a lower target.”

  Chapter Eight

  “Ladies and gentlemen of the First Extraplanetary Detachment of the 75th Ranger Battalion, I am Major Andrew Clanton.” I touched an armored glove to an armored chest, my voice amplified by the external speakers of the sealed helmet. “And this is Master Sergeant James Bowie.” Jambo offered a casual wave with his left hand, the other holding an oversized rifle across his chest. “We are your Chief Training Officer and NCO, and we are going to oversee your familiarization with the M-2034A2 Mobile Infantry Combat Exoskeleton.”

  “The ‘MICE?’” someone blurted from near the rear of the gaggle of Rangers. They were all wearing helmets as well, but their visors were up. In the last couple of months, Jambo and I had found it took some getting used to before people were comfortable with a closed visor.

  We’d found that out when I began hyperventilating the first time I tried to use the new armor with the visor down.

  “We are not calling it the MICE,” Jambo declared, “no matter what acronym the Ordnance pukes laid on it. We helped develop this shit and we get to name it, that’s the deal.”

  The woman up front grinned at that. She was tall and statuesque even without the armor. With it, she was…well, she was taller and more statuesque and wearing damned expensive armor. Her hair was cut short and tightly curled and her eyes were dark and piercing and didn’t seem to miss a thing. We hadn’t been introduced, but I’d read her file. Lt. Colonel Daniela “Dani” Brooks, newly-christened commander of the detachment, a force of 300 Rangers, which was significantly smaller than a battalion, more along the order of two companies. She’d seen actual combat in a cross-border incident with the joint US-Mexican task force against the Sinaloa Cartel as a company commander, which was a plus, but I had my doubts about her. I planned on keeping them to myself, since that was none of my damned business.

  “So, what’s the name?” she asked me, seemingly amused by the exchange.

  I hesitated. Jambo and I had gone back and forth on this for weeks, vetoing each other’s kookier and more esoteric ideas until we’d both been ready to just give in and let the Ordnance guys have their way and maybe try to convince everyone it was pronounced “Mike” instead of mice.”

  But a lot of googling and drinking had led to something that was a bit more distinctive if not quite as catchy as we’d been going for.

  “We call it the Svalinn,” I told her.

  “The what?” the man beside her wondered, face screwed up in consternation.

  He was older than me, older than her, with a head shaved against the disloyal desertion of his hair and lines etched into a mask carved from a granite cliff. Sgt. Major Jeffrey Devries, veteran of Venezuela, the Cartel Wars and Syria before that. Bronze Star, three purple hearts. Him, I had no doubts about.

  “Svalinn,” I repeated. “It’s from Norse legend…” I began to explain, but Col. Brooks interrupted me.

  “It’s the shield of the gods,” she explained. “It stands between the Earth and the Sun and keeps us from burning up.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “Wow,” I said, impressed. “It took us hours playing around on the internet to find that one.”

  “It was well worth the effort,” she assured me.

  “It’s better than MICE, anyway,” Sgt. Major Devries murmured.

  The three hundred Rangers had gathered here in the live fire range at what I had found out was originally an Idaho National Guard training area. They looked damned impressive in the Svalinn armor, each of them carrying the same weapon as Jambo and I. We didn’t go out in the armor without the weapon. It was doctrine and we followed it because we’d written it.

  “We are here at Staging Base Alpha,” I told the Rangers, “not just to get you used to the new armor, but also to familiarize you to what is going to be the standard weapon for the Extraplanetary Detachment, the M900EMA1 Kinetic Energy Weapon.” I held up the heavy, fat-barreled weapon one-handed. “This is an electromagnetic weapon that fires 4mm depleted uranium darts at 3,000 meters per second from a double drum of two hundred rounds.”

  It was a damned sight more high-tech than the light machine guns Jambo and I had carried around the first couple months, but then, so was the armor. I was frankly amazed at how quickly they’d perfected the stuff and rushed it into production. Maybe “perfected” wasn’t the right word. They’d made it usable, which would have to be enough for now. The weapon, though…that made me salivate, after seeing what it could do to the frontal armor on an M1A main battle tank.

  “The armor and this rifle wouldn’t have been possible just a few months ago,” I explained. “They both depend on the high-temperature superconductors and the new energy cells the Helta taught us how to make. The energy cells are incredible pieces of technology, but they are not infinite. Your weapons have fresh energy cells built into each drum of ammo and your armor will need to be recharged after seventy hours of normal use.”

  “We’re Space Rangers,” one of troops piped up from a couple ranks back. “Why aren’t we using lasers? Can’t the aliens build us laser guns?”

  I winced at the question, wondering whether any of these guys had actually read my books, and was about to go into a long-winded explanation when someone else did it for me.

  “That would be a damned good way to get yourself killed in a firefight in about two seconds.” The kid was three ranks back and I could barely make out his earnest, chiseled features, but the handy-dandy Identification Friend or Foe display projected into a corner of my helmet’s visor told me he was Corporal Randolph Quinn, a team leader in Second squad, First platoon, Delta Company.

  “You’re one hundred percent right, Corporal Quinn,” I told him. “Care to explain to all these people why that is?”

  The kid’s face reddened. He was about twenty-one if I judged right, and probably not used to being the center of attention.

  “Um, sir,” he stammered, “it’s because of the thermal signature. I mean, we didn’t have starships or any of that shit, sir, and we already had thermal sights built into our optics. If you tried to use a laser in a gunfight, it would be like shining a damned spotlight. Everyone within a klick would know right where you were.”

  “Exactly right, Corporal Quinn.” I grinned, though he couldn’t see it. “I bet you’ve read my books.”

  “No, sir,” he admitted. “But I watch the show…”

  “Of course you do,” I muttered, frowning. “Jambo, take the whole bunch down to the static range and we can start running them through familiarization fire one at a time.”

  I hung back as Jambo set off, our squad of half-trained trainers following, most of the Detachment in tow. Lt. Colonel Brooks stayed behind as well, staring at me as though she could see right through the reflective visor. I popped it up politely and was immediately hit by the oppressive late summer heat. I’d gotten used to my own personal air conditioning.

  “Did you have any more questions, ma’am?” I wondered.

  “Just one, Major Clanton,” she said. “I’ve read your file, of course. I assume you’ve read mine.” I didn’t answer and she smiled thinly and went on. “I’ve also skimmed a few of your books. You’re old-fashioned in many ways, particularly for a science fiction writer. I wonder if you have a problem with women serving in the infantry?”

  “I might have once, ma’am,” I admitted. “Most women can’t match most men for upper body strength, and I’ve a
lways been of the opinion that they didn’t belong in the infantry for practical reasons. But those don’t matter anymore, do they?”

  To illustrate my point, I bent down and picked up a case of ammo from a stack on the ground in front of me. The metal cannister held a thousand of the depleted uranium darts and probably weighed one hundred pounds, but I lifted it one-handed using the Svalinn armor and tossed it to her with a casual, underhand throw. She caught it just as easily, her arm barely giving an inch in the exoskeletal armor and she nodded understanding.

  “Happy to see it doesn’t bother you,” she said, setting the cannister back on the ground. She was still smiling, but the expression had taken on a hard edge. “I’m used to working with assholes, but that doesn’t mean I enjoy it.”

  Ooh. Put me in my place, didn’t she?

  “I’ll tell you what I don’t like and can’t abide though, Colonel,” I said, determined for some stubborn reason not to be one-upped. At her cocked eyebrow, I went on. “I can’t abide this Space Ranger shit.” I shook my head, pursing my lips in distaste. “We’ve all stepped straight into every space opera novel I ever read as a kid, and by God, it should be the Space Navy and the Space Marines, not this namby-pamby, bureaucratic-sounding Space Force shit, and definitely not the damn Space Rangers. What’s the damn unit motto gonna be? To infinity and beyond?”

  That got her. She laughed, an honest laugh this time, and the hardness left her eyes.

  “Major,” she said, “only a jarhead could take Space Marines seriously.”

  ***

  It had taken some doing and a lot of ear-chewing for the tech types to understand the importance of making the Svalinn armor capable of firing from the prone position. I’d actually had to call Olivera and have him call the fucking President to force the modification down their throat.

  It’s impractical, they’d whined. It decreases the functionality of armor in the neck and arm joints…

  I’d yelled at Theo Blackwell, the General Dynamics rep, that the increased protection on the neck and arm joints wasn’t going to do a damned bit of good if all the Rangers were standing out in the open getting hit square in the chest because they couldn’t assume the prone firing position. Then I’d yelled the same thing at Olivera before realizing he outranked me and apologizing. And of course, the whole time, Jambo had been yelling at me, as if it were my fault, and letting me stick my neck out with the brass, just the way good NCOs have since Alexander the Great.

  But it was a testament to my own personal abrasiveness that the Rangers getting their first live range time with the M900s were lying in the prone with the stock tucked into their shoulder, the same way infantry has been shooting their rifles since the cartridge was developed.

  “I’m sure all of you boys and girls know how to shoot,” Jambo was saying, transmitting over their helmet frequencies at the same time as he was amplifying it through his Svalinn’s external speakers. He was also calling two captains and two master sergeants “boys and girls,” but I wasn’t going to be the one who broke Jambo of a career’s worth of bad habits. “But let me be the first to assure you, the M900 is not like any of the rifles you’ve fired in your whole damned life. It has a variable rate of fire, for one thing. Check out that little switch on the side. That’s the manual control, just in case something goes wrong with the contact link between the rifle’s pistol grip, your gloves and your helmet’s Heads-Up Display.”

  “Master Sergeant Bowie,” one of the company commanders had rolled onto his side and raised his hand like he was in elementary school asking the teacher if he could go to the bathroom. I knew who he was without checking the IFF transponder. The two company commanders were Jeremy Spires and Alicia Freeman, and this guy didn’t look like an Alicia.

  “Sir?” Jambo said curtly. He did not, I knew, like being interrupted.

  “Why did they go for something as complicated as a contact link through the gloves? Why not just link the weapons optics and controls to the helmet wirelessly?”

  “For the same reason we built and tested this armor, sir,” Jambo told him, thumping his chest with his fist, producing a hollow thump, “instead of just putting an M900 on a remotely piloted drone and calling it a day. Our friends the Helta may not be much for soldiers, but they’re very, very bright when it comes to gadgets, and one of the first things they did when they thought there might be the possibility of going to war with the Tevynians was to develop jamming systems that could shut down any and all wireless control systems.” He smiled thinly.

  “And because the Helta suck at war, the Tevynians promptly stole those jamming systems and kidnapped Helta technicians and forced them to mass-produce them. Now, every Tevynian battle group, every fighter, every infantry company they put in the field has a full suite of signal jammers to make sure no one can use remotely piloted armed drones against them.”

  The woman next to Spires, the aforementioned Captain Freeman motioned at Jambo, then used the same hand to swipe a strand of blond hair out of her eyes.

  “Why not just use autonomous armed drones, then?” she wondered.

  Jambo shot me a sour look and I rubbed my thumb and fingers together at him, letting him know I hadn’t forgotten our bet. I’d told him one of the Rangers would ask it.

  “Couple reasons,” he said, showing admirable patience, particularly for a Delta operator who’d never had to defer to any officer outside his chain of command for most of his career. “One, autonomous systems are susceptible to hacking, and it would be damned inconvenient for all our armed drones to start attacking us in the field because the Tevynians figured out a way to fuck up their target designation systems.

  “And two, the Helta have….” He made a face, partly because this was hard to explain and partly, I knew, because he found the whole thing ridiculous. “They have what you might call a religious problem with letting robots kill people. I don’t know where it comes from. Hell, to be honest, they don’t know where it comes from, but they are just dead set against artificial intelligence in general and armed robots in particular. They have robots, but they can’t think like a human, or a Heltan, and they’re not much more sophisticated than one of the automated receptionists you can find in the high-end boutiques in Europe and Japan.”

  “And it’s a damned good thing they don’t have AI,” I put in. I was standing behind the firing line, flanked by Colonel Brooks and Sgt. Major Devries, watching the show, and the two captains twisted around to look back at me. “Because if they did,” I finished, “then the Tevynians would have them by now, and we’d be fighting them. So Thank God for small favors.”

  “Anyway,” Jambo went on, his voice rising, letting them know he didn’t want to be interrupted again, “getting back to the M900. You can adjust the rate of fire with the knob on the gun or using the eye-controlled HUD in your helmet, and we’re going to practice both. The thing to remember is, the faster you fire, the slower the muzzle velocity is going to be. If you’re going up against armor or troops behind thick cover, set the gun for single shot and you’ll get the full 3,000 meters per second. If you’ve got multiple targets in the open, lightly armored, set it for the maximum rate of fire, six hundred rounds a minute, and you’ll empty that two hundred round drum in twenty seconds, but the slugs will only be traveling about 1,000 meters per second. Everyone clear on that?”

  There were nods all around and Jambo grunted in satisfaction.

  “All right then, the next thing to keep in mind about the M900 is there is no windage or elevation. This damn slug is going fast enough when it clears the barrel that it ain’t gonna have any bullet drop before it hits the fuckin’ horizon. Windage…well, maybe if we’re in a hurricane, but nothing you’re going to have to worry about.”

  He lifted his rifle and held it out for all the platoon and the officers and senior NCOs to see. He tapped his finger against the armored cylinder riding atop the receiver.

  “This is your optics. As I said, it’s hooked up to your helmet HUD via the link throug
h your gloves, but if you have to, you can use the optics with your eye the way God intended. Normally, I’m a big proponent of having physical backup sights on a rifle just in case the electronics goes all to shit, but in this case, the rifle, your armor, just about everything is powered and if the electronics go to shit, you’re going to be running around in your skivvies anyway.”

  He cocked his eyebrow at them.

  “Now, if the brass decides to send good old Master Sergeant Bowie into combat in one of these here Svalinns, I am definitely going to bring a regular bullet-shooting gunpowder pistol as a backup, because I might be naked, but I ain’t ever gonna be unarmed.” He slapped a palm against the SIG holstered at his chest, looking distinctly out of place on the high-tech armor. “Word to the wise.”

  He hefted the rifle.

  “Side note here, you ain’t gonna be firing this thing unless you’re in armor. It weighs a shit-ton and kicks like a son of a bitch. You won’t notice it in the Svalinn suits, but if the power goes out, don’t bother trying to salvage the rifle. And the last thing we’re going to talk about before the live fire is, make sure you know your fucking backstop. It’s important with a regular weapon and it’s a million times more important with these fuckers. If this slug misses, it’s gonna keep on going for a couple kilometers until it hits something and likely fucks it up. If it hits something flimsy, it’s going to fuck it up and keep going until it hits something harder.” He looked around. “Hoo-ah?”

  “Hoo-ah,” they responded. It was an Army thing. Marines said “ooh-rah,” but mostly as a sign of enthusiasm or a battle cry. The fucking Army used it as a catch-all response to “do you understand type questions.”

  “Okay, then. Everyone, take up your firing positions!”

  At a normal live fire range, there’d be a range control tower with a loudspeaker to give orders, but the armor’s communications gear made that unnecessary. Jambo could handle it, and I was his backup.