Chapter 6
“Battle stations!” A siren whooped, filling Emmy Lin’s dreams. “Battle stations! Report! Report. This is a drill; repeat, this is a drill!” Lin’s eyes sprang open. She was already standing beside her bunk, reaching for her web suit.
Every light in the barracks went on at once. The Cockroaches sprang out of bed and snatched their new CBS,Ps off the end of their bunks and shrugged into them, shedding their skivvies on the way. The new webs fit like an outer epidermis, adapting to the temperature of the body against the air. Lin took a moment to glance at the chrono glowing over the door: 0400. Typical. Their unit had been placed on third sleep shift. The drill was coming smack in the middle of it. They had only been aboard the ship three days.
“Never mind the grousing!” she shouted, over the usual complaints. “Get the job done.”
“The noises!” Gire complained, lying in his bunk with his hands over his ears. “It’s too loud!”
The small chief gestured at Meyers, who slipped her arm around the medic’s shoulders and helped him up. “What’s the matter, your ear filters not in place?”
The medic felt his head. “The voices are inside!”
Lin sighed. “You left your personal player on again,” she said, patiently. She dug under his pillow and came up with his communications card. Yes, it showed that it was switched to a prerecorded program. Gire often needed entertainment to sleep. Not that he slept much; he had nightmares most of the time when he drifted off. In any other unit he would have been given a medical discharge, but the Cockroaches took care of their own. He was a good field doctor, even though his primary specialty was dentistry, and they all knew he could never make it successfully in civilian life. “What is it this time? Pretty young girls with cultured accents pretending to be men so they can engage in lesbian sex for the pleasure of older men even though a monkey wouldn’t be fooled by their disguises, or a rich family having to deal with skeletons in the closet after the death of a family member they never knew existed?” Gire favored unbelievable scenarios like that that were far removed from his own miserable life. He never talked about where he had come from if he could help it. All they knew was that they’d pulled him out of the wreckage of a small cruiser crushed between two lizard flanks, the sole survivor of a thousand trooper push.
“No …” Gire blinked. His hands groped for the card and switched off the input. He wrinkled his nose at the blaring noise. “What’s all the sirens for?”
“Battle stations exercise,” Meyers said, helping him out of his underwear. As soon as she had yanked down his shorts Gire came to life and started stretching out his CBS,P so it would go on more easily. With practiced hands he drew the body stocking up and on, sealing the front with gloved hands. “Where’s our station?”
“Sanitation,” Lin said dryly, “as usual.”
“Heads up, everyone!” Boland bellowed, his deep voice carrying over the chatter. “Let’s move it! Weapons set for exercise. Non-lethality!”
They jogged into the cabin next door, which was where their armor and arms were kept. Lt. Wolfe and the other two officers were already there, suiting up.
“Evening,” Wolfe said, grinning so that his yellow eyes were slits. The skin around them looked drawn and puffy, making him look older. “Nothing like throwing us in head first, eh?”
“No, sir,” Lin said. “You look like you haven’t been to bed yet.”
“Er, no. Long meet-and-greet session.” Wolfe smirked.
“You leave them any money?”
“Enough for tomorrow,” the lieutenant said smugly. He clapped his helmet on at the same moment as Lin, rendering him faceless and almost invisible as the chameleon armor took over, displaying the wall behind him. The heads-up display inside her helmet gave her a solid red outline showing a warm body, overlaid by the blue image of his energy signature, and topped with a gold tag that carried his ID number and a coded dingbat for rank. That marking served to identify him as one of their own in the case of a scrimmage. Telemetry began to spell itself out in the text box across the top of her readout. Their orders were repeated in text and over their mastoid implants. Wolfe’s voice came over her in-suit comm system. “Squad leaders, troopers ready to rally! Shoulder weapons! Duty stations, double time!”
Lin heard a general-purpose groan from the troopers. He sure was new. Any experienced officer would take it as read that a squad that trained even irregularly would know what to do without being told.
At least he was holding back from the door until the point troopers went out it. D-45 and two of the other sharpshooters unshipped their rifles. Crossed on their backs were sword and can-opener, the latter a hooked and flattened metal rod the same length as the sword, with a pointed screw thread at the other end. The can-opener was the space trooper’s best friend. It could be used with equal success to crank open hull plating, or the suit of an enemy trooper. Pop an opponent’s suit in vacuum with the pointy end, and he was no longer a problem. The screw end was to wind into a bulkhead in case of zero-gee conditions. You held onto it with one hand and your shooting buddy with the other while he fought the enemy, anchoring him. Even so-called recoilless weapons caused some kickback. It was hard to fight a successful melee if you were caroming around the room like a ping-pong ball in a wind tunnel. The swords were modeled on classic sabers of ancient Terra, though the point was sharpened to a singularity, the better to pierce through one’s opponent’s armor joints with. Since this was an exercise, the nonferrous blades had guards fastened around them. It was bad form to spit your allies like seekh kebabs, even by mistake.
As soon as the word came over the helmet audio that the hallway was secured, Lin shouldered her way out next, covering Lt. Wolfe’s exit. He looked around too, as he slid out into the corridor, drawing that beautiful pistol of his. She sure would have liked to get a close look at it. Unless she was very wrong about the age of the gun, it was a lot older than the boy himself. There was a story behind that, which, she guessed, the Cockroaches were not going to hear. The sword was also not strictly standard issue, a thing of beauty. The metal gleamed silver and blue, ripples of color playing up and down the blade’s length for the moment that Wolfe had had it exposed. It was almost a pity to quench its cold fire in an exercise guard. He was favored by his family. For a moment Lin felt a twinge of envy, then dismissed it. The Cockroaches were her family. So they never gave her fancy birthday presents. They never forgot it, either.
The others poured out into the hallway behind them. The coast looked clear. No warm bodies were within stated range.
Suddenly, three red forms leaped into their field of view at 20 meters distance. The squad dropped into firing formation, then paused, embarrassed, as they paid more attention to the real-view of the ‘intruders’: three junior ensigns in full dress whites, two males and a female. All three giggled at the sight of an entire platoon in armor in the middle of the night. Lin groaned.
“Sir?” she asked on the private channel that broadcast to his mastoid receiver only. “How many units are participating in this drill?”
“Damned if I know, Top,” Wolfe said, over the same channel. “I was not informed this exercise would be taking place. It wasn’t on my schedule, or I’d have prepared a plan of battle. It could be just us and the computer. Borden, see if you can raise Commander Iry or her aide. In the meantime, we’d better get down to deck B. B-deck forward, zone 6 muster station! Let’s move out!”
“Aye, aye, sir,” Lin replied in a dead voice. Stop micromanaging us! she wanted to scream. We know what the hell we’re doing! “Combat names, sir?”
“Er, yes. Yes, of course.”
“We don’t know yours, sir.”
“Blink,” Daivid replied.
“That’s stupid,” Boland commented, “sir. With respect, with your name we should call you ‘Big Bad.’”
“Hey, yeah!” Thielind agreed.
“No!” Daivid protested, but he knew it was no use. He’d gotten the tag Blink pinned on him, too, for his speed with his sidearm. He’d wanted to be called something like Lightning or Nuclear, but his senior officers paid no attention then, either.
The Cockroaches jogged toward the lifts in double-time, weapons at the ready. The scouts, led by D-45, fanned out to cover all approaches, including scanning the ceiling and floors with their infrared visors. Daivid let his eyes follow theirs for a moment, seeing an engineer above the false panels wrenching something upwards between his hands and hacking at it with a tool, two more sitting quietly studying the tunnel to their left, and another pair who were busy but weren’t engaged in engineering at all.
Daivid chuckled. Over the platoon channel, Daivid heard an echoing laugh from several of the troopers. Normally no one would have noticed a courting couple, officially or otherwise, but the heads-up display played no favorites. It revealed all. If you were alive, you could find yourself on Candid Helmet Camera. At last Borden spoke.
“I’ve raised Petty Officer Gruen,” she said. “He says this is a one-on-one exercise. Just X-Ray versus either a virtual reality program or another unit. We won’t know until we get there. Our objective is to capture the enemy beacon. Hits will be recorded by tagging. Survival is less important than achieving the objective, but both would be preferable. Naturally, sir. The exercise will last for one hour, unless the beacon is secured or everyone is ‘killed.’”
“Laser tag, eh?” Wolfe mused. A game which had descended almost unchanged from their ancestors of five millenia ago involved running around in danger territory with artificial weapons that shone a beam of low-level, visible laser light. If your timed shot hit another player, you scored a point. A kill was worth three. The military had adopted this useful technology as a training exercise from the very beginning of the space service, with adaptations for the more sophisticated weaponry the military carried. It saved wear and tear on the ship, the troops, and the non-combatant ‘civilians,’ who might otherwise be struck by stray live fire in the closed environment. “Keeps us alert if we can’t anticipate whether we’re facing AI or live fighters we can psych out. Stay with it, troopers. We don’t know who the enemy will be. Everyone else is to be considered a neutral. On stealth. We want to maintain the element of surprise as long as we have to. Is that understood?”
Unable to keep the boredom out of their voices, the Cockroaches chorused, “Aye, sir!” Lin noticed that the red blob that represented Wolfe winced slightly. Good. They were getting through to him. He wasn’t the first baby officer they’d nursed into maturity.
O O O
Wolfe followed his forward point up the forward ladder toward Deck B. It made him nervous that they had to emerge into the ‘war zone’ headfirst. It gave the enemy an advantage. Nothing like being kicked in the head to start off an exercise. Above them, all was dark. The lights had been turned off in zone 6. That way, no one could tell if they were facing AI or live opponents. At first, that was. The readout in the helmet screen would be the same, but a blow from an actual combatant, in identical military-issue armor, was a mule-kick in comparison to the love-tap the suit gave itself when the AI said ‘body-slam.’ It wasn’t a perfect system, but it got troopers used to physical strikes, and didn’t put them in the infirmary for what was just a war game. The idea was to train their reactions, not the ability of their bodies to knit.
Every ship, no matter how high technology rose in civilization, had retained the low-tech methods of securing a deck, with heavy-duty latches or wheels to close the door and seals, in case power failed during an emergency. Both physical and electronic locks were easily disabled by Thielind and Aaooorru, the corlist acting as the ensign’s assistant, his ‘good four right hands,’ as Thielind put it. As they exited the ladder, the scouts hesitated, weapons up, against the ceiling before slipping through and crouching on the floor in the dark. Wolfe read the first bogey signal about fifteen meters ahead. He clicked over to D-45’s audio frequency. “I’m seeing five, chief, er, Numbers.”
“Me, too, sir.” A moment of silence while the noncom checked with his squad. Wolfe could hear Ambering’s voice over the other channel responding to a query. “Cuddles says six, but she’s at a better angle than me. From 12 o’clock, twelve, one, one-thirty, two at five, seven.”
“Got it.” Wolfe passed the word, but the others had already seen what he had. “Ready to go?”
“Aye, sir!” twenty-two voices chimed in his ears.
“Go, go, go!”
At the word, D-45’s squad leaped up through the hole into the dark, laying down covering fire as the rest of the Cockroaches scrambled up into the combat zone. Returning fire cascaded, red streaks lancing out from the dampened laser weapons. The bolts represented the smart-bullets the weapons would normally fire: each explosive projectile had an onboard chip telling it not to detonate when it hit hull plate or other materials that matched certain chemical signatures. That way defenders wouldn’t be scuttling their own ship while attempting to defend it.
Daivid and the others returned fire. In his headset he watched the red-in-blue forms duck and come up shooting, over and over. He wished there was a visual image for his eyes, but the automatic targeting software in his heads-up display helped him track the enemy. He let out a short burst over the head of one opponent behind a square obstacle. As soon as the form raised its head to return fire, Daivid nailed it in the throat. The blue glow around the ‘live’ body went green, then yellow. A solid kill. In a real combat situation, he would just have put an explosive armor piercing round right into one of the most vulnerable points on an invader’s suit.
“Oh, slag!” Somulska wailed. Daivid glanced at him, checking the stats in his heads-up display. The big man’s armor had gone green and begun to flash on one side of the upper body. “I’m hit!”
“Where, Talon?” Gire asked.
“Left shoulder. My damned web suit’s pinching me. Fraxing computer simulation.”
“You’re not dead yet,” D-45 growled. “Keep fighting. Cockroaches can keep fighting for a week even if you cut off their heads.”
“We’re fighting for the glory of all the cornflakes under the refrigerator!” Mose cheered. The others joined in.
“Axe?” Wolfe asked his XO. “Are you hearing the beacon yet?”
“No, sir,” Borden answered, firing her sidearm with one hand while she ran a scan with her infopad up and down the range of sound waves. “It’ll be faint; otherwise it’d be too easy to find in a small environment like this one.”
“Sir! Right roll!”
Lin’s warning came just in time. Daivid threw himself down and rolled over twice, coming up firing. Two of their hidden foes had chosen that moment to leap straight at him. He shot one of them, a clean hit in the joint between the left shoulder and back. At that angle it ought to have been a killing blow, piercing through the heart, but the fighter scrambled away on hands and knees.
“Cheat!” Boland bellowed. Lin and Corpsman Gire blasted at the retreating body. The corlist, brandishing six miniature sidearms and one two-handed rifle in its small manipulative limbs, blazed away from between their hips. Finally, the suit dropped to the ground, its aura yellow.
“Bad AI,” commented Ambering.
A barrage of flashes erupted at three o’clock. Boland’s squad spun to return fire. Two of the unfriendlies fell; their suits registering slightly green instead of blue. Wounded, not dead. They elbow-walked behind an obstruction to get out of the line of fire. Meyer’s ‘bullets’ stitched the floor in pursuit, nipping at the heels of the figures’ boots. Her suit gave her enhanced targeting abilities, but their suits lent them speed.
“Damn, I missed!”
Daivid scrolled the map of this section of the deck on his side screen. “There are two exits from this room. One leads to two more corridors. Ammo, take the exit at 11 o’clock. Tullamore and Numbers, the one at 3 o’clock. Go!”
D-45’s sharpshooters laid down covering fire for the other two units to scramble across the room toward the doors. Three of the remaining unfriendlies rushed to block Lin’s way. The petite chief drew her sword and swung out at the hot signature of their weapon barrels, now too close to fire at her. The resulting clang! surprised them all.
“Hey! These are real bodies!” Gire exclaimed. Ewanowski waded forward, grabbing one enemy fighter’s gun by the barrel in one huge paw and wrenching the trooper off the ground. It kicked as he picked off its sword and can-opener and threw them across the room before heaving the body after them. Aaooorru started jabbing at the other suit blocking the door with his can-opener, making him dance.
“Go, sir!” Lin shouted. “Find the base!”
Ashamed of himself for temporarily freezing up, Daivid signed to the other two units. One of the scouts at the fore drew a flash grenade from a pouch, triggered it, and sent it flying overhand into the corridor beyond the doorway. Daivid closed his eyes, but his mask registered the actinic glare. The enemy on the other side would be temporarily blinded. He hoped.
“Aaaarrgh!” Boland bellowed, as they burst into the hallway. Six bodies faced them, one lying down behind a machine gun. Pencils of hot red light strobed across the floor, each burst representing a bullet. The Cockroaches retreated into the room from which they had just come.
“We’ve got to take out that machine gun!” Daivid yelled, ducking back.
“Yes, sir!” Boland bellowed. He chambered a round, leaned out the door, pulled the trigger, then leaned back in again. The flechette beams had stopped. “What now, sir?”
Daivid stared for a moment, then pulled himself together.
“Go get ’em!” he shouted.
D-45’s sharpshooters led the way with flash grenades and short bursts of fire. Daivid and Borden followed in their wake, shooting over their heads. On the other side of the wall, the six had frozen temporarily from the surprise of the second flashbang. Choosing their shots with remarkable speed, D-45’s scouts picked off the leader and another trooper. Both suits of armor faded to yellow, and the troopers inside them sat down to play dead. Their fellows, however, returned fire fiercely. Boland took a hit in the knee, which made him hop around and swear, but he kept shooting.
Five more shadows moved in from the rear. Daivid had been aware of them as faint glows beneath the deck, tracking the movement from below. Now they surged upwards through another hatch in the floor as the remaining defenders rushed them from the other side.
The Cockroaches were caught in a pincer movement. The door through which they needed to escape was beyond the newcomers, to the right. Still firing, Daivid transferred his pistol to his left hand while drawing his sword up and over his body.
“Duck!” yelled Boland, as Party A, the three remaining troopers on the left, opened a barrage on them. The Cockroaches hit the deck. Red light flashed over their heads. A howl came from behind them. Party A realized they had just killed a fellow unfriendly in Party B in the crossfire. Several others were slightly ‘wounded.’ Daivid snickered. His troopers let out derisive snorts and catcalls. Too bad audio channels weren’t open. There were some choice insults being wasted. The enemy drew swords and closed.
The Cockroaches, clustered together, still had the advantage of firepower. The center line came up shooting over the heads of the sword wielders, one squad facing in either direction. They took out two more of the enemy before suits of body armor slammed into them from both sides.
“I’ve located the beacon, sir,” Borden said. Her voice cut through the hollow banging of swords.
“How far?” Daivid asked, without turning his head.
“Ten meters, sir. Behind you, second left, then left again, then third left in an equipment cabinet at the rear of the chamber.”
“How do you know it’s an equipment cabinet?”
Borden sounded hurt. “The platoon is stationed down here during normal shifts, sir. I make it a point to know the department the unit is in.”
Once again Daivid couldn’t help but be impressed by his XO’s precise ways. “I see. Okay, everyone, you heard the lady. Let’s clear the bodies and get out of here. Ammo!”
“Aye, sir,” the senior chief’s voice came. She sounded as if she was enjoying herself.
“Axe is sending you coordinates of the target.”
“Aye, sir.” There was a pause. Daivid ducked under a wild swing from the trooper he was facing, and came up with his blade upward, taking a swipe through his opponent’s crotch. It counted as a cut to the left femoral artery. The enemy trooper tipped over, and its aura turned pale green. Daivid spun to confront the next fighter in line. “Dammit, Tullamore, I told you they’d put it there! It’s in the sump closet.”
“The what?” Daivid asked, parrying a chop from his opponent.
“The sewer head, sir,” Lin explained. “Aaaggh! Spidey, that’s me!”
“Sorry, Ammo,” came the corlist’s little voice.
“It’s the main valve for the ship’s disposal system. If there’s a major clog, you open it up and send the bots through from that point. It always stinks in there, sir. Like a dead diplodocus and the forty tons of rotting kelp in which it was buried.”
“Well, we’re not likely to smell it through the armor, chief,” Daivid said sternly. Lin sighed audibly. “Did you say something, chief?”
“No, sir. We’ll make our way to you.”
O O O
Party B realized that they were just getting in the way of Party A and retreated down the long corridor, pursued by Boland’s squad toward a linked cluster of rooms. Daivid saw in his heads-up display the color change and slump of another unfriendly as it ran out of hit points. The Cockroaches were doing very well in this battle. He was impressed by the cohesiveness and skills of the unit. They must have pissed off some very high-ranking personnel to be considered outcasts. Or, he reasoned, as he kicked an enemy combatant in the chest, they could be innocent victims, like him, who were too inconvenient to keep around. He and his unit would show the skeptics who had value!
His kick had all the force of his powered armor behind it. The enemy flew backwards, crashing into the bulkhead. It slid to the floor, blue aura becoming tinged with green. Daivid grinned. The hard landing wouldn’t really hurt the trooper inside, since servos and the CBS,P would absorb most of the force. The officers and D-45’s squad continued to hammer away at Party A until they were forced to retreat toward their original position. Daivid sheathed his sword and drew his sidearm.
“Snipers! Take out that machine gun!”
“We’ve already killed the gunner, sir.”
“Not the gunner, the gun!” Daivid said. “Tag it. I want it out of the equation.”
D-45 dropped flat to the ground and fired off a shot that went between the legs of the enemy. As they were hopping around trying to figure out who had gotten hit, the sharpshooter bounded to his feet.
“That’ll take ’em a minute to realize,” he announced.
It took less time than that for the defending force to deduce that their heavy weapon had been disabled, but by their body language, it made them mad. As the Cockroaches bore down upon them, Party A met them squarely, charging their approaching opponents with frenetic force. Coolly, Daivid assessed the big figure who had targeted him. His suit’s reaction time had been tuned up to where he could dodge Daivid’s laser bolts. Daivid stopped trying to land one on an easy target, and began to bracket the fighter, making him dodge from side to side. He might not have been able to hit the other, but he hoped, by the time the red-in-blue figure reached him, that that the faceless trooper would be damned motion-sick. As the trooper closed, Daivid tried one more shot to the neck. The trooper ducked, and came forward with amazing speed, wrapping his arms around Daivid’s body.
The suit’s servos whined as a force equal to its own crushed inward. The exoskeleton was rigid, providing a solid framework but a certain amount of flexion existed in the material in between, to help dissipate the force of a missile, much the same way the ancient and time-honored protective material kevlar did. One quickly learned in hand-to-hand combat training that those softer zones were where sword blades and can opener tines could lodge. The other clearly knew where the vulnerable places lay. He swung one arm up, trying to get it around Daivid’s neck. Daivid’s hands shot up, breaking the hold of the arm around his chest. He kicked out at his opponent, flinging himself backwards.
An obstruction stopped his flight. Another armored combatant grabbed him by the arms, locking onto his wrists with a death grip. Daivid tried one martial-arts twist after another to make the trooper let go, including mashing him backwards toward the nearest bulkhead. The first would-be crusher picked himself up and charged. In a moment, Daivid would be caught in a suit sandwich. Well, if his hands were not available, he still had his legs. Feinting backwards with his heel for a dirty kick to the crotch, he suddenly threw in every servo and flung a leg forward, upward and over his head. His body protested mightily at the abuse as it was forced to follow the leg, but it was an anti-grav trick that he had used before in a non-zero-gee situation. He ended up more or less sitting on the fighter behind him, who had let him go in surprise. Daivid took a point-blank shot up the gasket at the back of the fighter’s head, then aimed at the oncoming hulk. Unfortunately, a couple of suits tumbled in between them.
Daivid scrambled up, and a twinge of pain shot up from his knee to his groin. He wished he’d had time to limber up before the exercise began, but it wouldn’t have helped much. He wasn’t a yogi or a ballet dancer, and he was going to pay for that twist later. Still, it worked. The fighter under him had turned yellow, a casualty.
“Take this one, sir,” Trooper Software’s voice said in his ear. The red-in-blue blob with the gold tag gestured toward the suit she was facing. “He’s almost finished.”
“What?”
Instead of replying, Software threw a flying kick at the knees of the approaching suit. It staggered, and drew its weapon over its head. Or tried to.
“I got mine,” Thielind’s voice said as he leaped onto the enemy’s back. The floating gold tag superimposed over the small blob clinging to the hulk identified the ensign. “I can help.”
“I don’t need anyone to help me!” Wolfe roared. The new opponent at his feet was glowing green. Almost in pique, Wolfe reached down and twisted the helmet until the seals protested and popped. Yellow. “I can take out my own targets!”
“We saw you do that leap,” Borden said calmly, as she fired precise round after round into the joints of the huge combatant’s armor. No chance of an accidental slug impacting a fellow attacker. Wolfe couldn’t wait to see her scores on the target range. The last remaining fighter in Party A slumped to the ground. “Can you walk?”
“Of course I can walk!” Daivid raged, and took a step. The pain shooting up the tendons in his inner thighs made him stagger. Tightening up the servos so the suit would carry him instead of relying upon his abused muscles, he strode out ahead of his surviving platoon members toward the beacon location.
“Uh, sir,” Borden began, as they approached the door with Daivid in the lead.
Fuming with embarrassment, Daivid barked out orders. “Sharpshooter scouts, to the fore! Everyone else, draw weapons and cover your piece of the pie!”
“Aye, sir,” the squad replied, with a sigh. D-45 and the other scouts slipped through, then relayed a signal to follow. No unfriendlies within range. Daivid’s own display agreed.
“How many does that make, Axe?” Wolfe asked, as they scoped out the new chamber. In the darkness, towering red signatures on a deeper blackness indicated the position of the sanitation plant. Sticking to the edge, the platoon skirted huge, booming cabinets from which pipes a meter across ascended to the ceiling. This must be the main pumping station for the sanitation department. In a ship this size there were auxiliary stations in at least three other locations, but this was where most of his troopers spent their shifts, overseeing the machines that extracted all the water out of the waste material. As he understood it, the solids remaining were dried down to a fine powder that was nearly odorless, stored, and offloaded in regulated facilities, where it went for uses like fertilizer. The water was purified and went back into circulation throughout the ship. The gas was not so nearly easily dealt with, venting occasionally through escape valves into the sanitation chambers when pressure got too high, as now. His suit took out nearly all of the smell in the air, but a small amount of it made it past the filters. He coughed, then gagged.
“God, this is awful,” he said.
“You should try it without armor, sir,” Mose said. “The pump head’s worse. That’s the actual interface.”
“Sixteen combatants, sir,” Borden interjected, after a moment’s calculation. “All dead or too wounded to follow us. If the exercise is truly one-on-one, then there are only seven left.”
“Squad leaders, report,” Daivid said, trying to ignore the fumes. It seemed as though the smell had a cumulative effect. He thought he should be getting used to it as he went, but it seemed to get worse. Deprived substantially of one sense, sight, under the terms set by the exercise, it felt as though his other senses had become heightened. Now was not the time he would have welcomed enhanced senses.
“Two casualties,” Lin stated. “Doc and Spidey. No wounded. These guys couldn’t hit a starship from the inside.”
“Taz is a casualty,” Boland announced, lighting up Streb’s and Vacarole’s stats in Wolfe’s helmet display, followed by Nuu Myi’s and Haalten’s. “Mustache, too. I’m wounded. So are Pearl and Mantis.”
“Romeo’s out,” D-45 added, illuminating Injaru’s icon. “Three wounded, all walking.”
“Good. Let’s get this over with. The hour’s almost up.”
O O O
Instead of hampering his thinking, the hammering of the sewage pumps created a deafening white noise that was surprisingly easy to ignore. If Daivid was designing an exercise like this one, and he had, the squad that was left to defend the objective would be the best troopers he had available, and they would have the most ordnance. They knew the Cockroaches were coming, they were holed up in a small, defensible location, and all they had to do was wait out the time limit. Twelve minutes to go. Daivid didn’t have to announce that to the platoon; all of them had chronos in their visor displays.
Lin’s voice came through his headset. “We’re in the room, sir, seven o’clock off your flank.” Daivid noticed the cluster of faint red smears behind the heat signatures of the engines.
“Thanks, chief. You’re familiar with the terrain. Any suggestions? Anybody?”
“They’re going to sit tight,” Boland opined. “That room’s about three meters on a side, very cosy. I doubt we can get them to chase us. I vote for flashbangs and a hard push when their eyes are dazzled.”
“Anyone got anything they like better?” Daivid asked. “No? Good. Are percussion grenades likely to rupture the sump?”
“Doubt it, sir,” Lin said. “It’s made to withstand over 6000 kpc.”
Six thousand kilos per centimeter. “Right. Grenadiers, load ’em. Sharpshooters, give them cover. Ammo, I want your squad to be in charge of retrieval. You’re pretty sure the item is in this sump?”
“It’s what I would do, sir,” the senior chief replied.
“Right. We’ll have to assume they’d play the same.”
“Okay,” Lin announced to her squad. “I want a volunteer to be dirty bird.”
“Aw, chief!” “Peee-yeeew!” “Uh, I just cleaned my armor.”
“I’ll do it,” Jones said amiably. “I’ve smelled worse.”
“Thanks, Songbird. You’re elected.”
“Troopers ready?” Daivid asked. “Open ’er up!”
Ewanowski and Ambering leaped forward to spin the big wheel. The semicat grunted, and the human groaned with the effort.
“Can’t move it, sir,” Ambering said.
Borden consulted the circuitry behind a panel on the left of the door. “They’ve got the bolts locked and the electronics jammed.”
Daivid turned to his ensign. “Tinker, you speak machine. Can you get it open the easy way, or do we have to blast it?”
He could almost hear the grin. “Sir, I can get that door to understand me. If they haven’t changed the emergency codes since last night.”
Daivid stopped himself asking why the ensign would have wanted to break into the sump the night before, and decided it would take longer than the now eleven minutes they had left. “Then start cracking! Everyone, hold ready until you see the whites … uh …”
“The red of their heat signatures,” Borden supplied, helpfully.
“Uh, yeah. Hit it!”
There was no way to disguise what they were attempting to do. On the other side of the door, Wolfe picked up the faintest pink traces of body heat as the defenders mustered. One of them had leaped forward and was mirroring Thielind’s actions, trying to prevent him from engaging the battery-powered emergency system that would unlock a jammed hatch.
“Got it!” the scrawny ensign crowed, leaping backwards into the ranks of the sharpshooters as the hatch sprang free.
“Go, go, go!”
Ewanowski grabbed the edge of the hatch and swung it open with himself behind it, as Parviz and Okumede heaved flash and percussion grenades into the room. They ‘exploded,’ filling the room with blinding light. Their visors automatically darkened against the blaze, the Cockroaches charged in, firing.
The wave of stink that greeted Wolfe clawed at his nose and throat with sharp fingers, almost halting him in his tracks. He swallowed his gorge with difficulty. Though his web suit kept him at a constant comfortable level, the ambient temperature was almost twenty degrees Centigrade higher than outside the room.
“We should have left them in here until one minute to,” he gasped. “They’d have been begging to have us shoot them.”
Red lights flashed towards him. He rolled out of the way behind the doors, firing as he went. The defenders must have been expecting flash grenades, because they did not seem to have hesitated a moment before responding. Their shapes, dark pink like rare meat, hunched along the walls, shooting round after hot red round at the invaders. The charging Boland let out a yell, then tumbled to the ground as his suit went yellow. His troopers dodged, using the falling body as cover, to press further into the room. Wolfe, Borden and Thielind came in behind, shooting as targets presented themselves. Lin’s heavy-weapon squad pushed in behind, then kept going with the rest of the platoon covering them.
“Get the target!” Wolfe shouted.
The defenders were well dug-in. Their pink silhouettes faded behind obstructions invisible in the dark. His visor provided him with a rough topography, but he and the rest of X-Ray wasted a lot of rounds on metal cabinets, ceramic-lined objects, and pieces of portable equipment on wheels and gurneys.
Almost as soon as he had thought it, his sensors warned him of an inanimate object rushing towards him. He threw out his arms to fend it off, and was hit below waist level by a rolling metal table of some kind. It served to distract him for just the moment needed by one of the defenders to leap out of cover and make directly for him, sidearm blazing away.
Without stopping to wonder if the trooper knew he was the CO, and how he could identify him without ident tags, Wolfe ducked behind the convenient rolling table and fired back. Tags floating over red forms in the center of the room showed Lin’s squad covering Jones as he belly-crawled toward the fountaining heat source there. He felt a ‘click’ that indicated the current magazine in his pistol was spent. The figure was almost upon him. With a twinge, he cast the gun out of reach and drew his sword.
Quick as lightning, his opponent whisked his own saber out of the sheath with the opposite hand, continuing to bracket Wolfe with red flashes until he was close enough to sweep the blade over and around. Damn, this trooper was fast! Wolfe had just enough time to raise his own guard to keep the other’s weapon from slamming into the side of his neck. He sprang to his feet, using the momentum to parry and riposte, cutting at the other’s neck and shoulder joints. His opponent was several centimeters taller than he. The table still lay between them. Wolfe felt it push to the right, as the other tried to get it out of the way. Just as tenaciously, he hung onto it and kept it in place. Anything that prevented the other from closing that distance was good.
Around him, shots bombarded X-Ray’s troopers as they attempted to enter the chamber. Daivid counted three more fall to keen marksmanship that would have been superior anywhere, though there were few awards given for knocking off a target at three meters. He also counted far more than seven bodies without tags in the room. His onboard computer found fifteen.
“Axe, do you see a discrepancy between what we were told and what you can observe around you?”
“Aye, sir,” the voice of his XO sounded cool even though he could see her engaged in a close-range sword fight with a bruiser who would have outweighed her two to one without the armor. She brought her blade down and around in a nasty riposte that slashed into the trooper’s knee joint and up again into his groin. The blue aura turned sickly green. “We are outnumbered. That is far more likely in a real-world scenario.”
“But not one we’re supposed to have to face on our first surprise assault in the middle of the night.”
“Captain Harawe has a reputation for testing the mettle of those under his command, sir.”
“Bugger Harawe,” Daivid said, leaping backwards as the heavy blade of his opponent slashed downward. He felt it nick the surface of his armor. He slashed back, but the other was a much better sword fighter. He was parried almost at every turn. Gradually, he was beaten back to the edge of the room, not a long trip, and held there as a barrier against any more Cockroaches getting in.
The others figured out the ploy, and fired around Daivid at the big trooper, who ducked and dodged the bolts, using Daivid as a human shield. Wolfe continued to hack at his opponent, though his own aura was turning green from all the small hits he was sustaining.
“Help the lieutenant!” Lin shouted.
“No!” Wolfe yelled back. “Achieve the objective!”
With renewed energy, he resumed his defense, hacking with the lower half of his blade. It bounced off the other’s helmet and shoulder guards, but he used the momentum to keep striking. Few of the hits scored any points, while he continued to lose ground. He heard a yell behind him, and saw on his scopes that a single defender, heretofore hidden on top of the pumping equipment, was shooting his troopers in the back. They hadn’t looked up. Fatal mistake.
He was making more fatal mistakes at the moment. His next slash missed his opponent’s elbow joint, impacting instead on the upper arm. Not enough to disable. The other took advantage of his arm being out of the way to take a shot of his own. One skilful stroke that started in the upper right quadrant of his body and skirted his guard streaked down to the leg joint on the opposite hip and struck home. He could almost feel the other’s glee as the CBS,P tightened around his body, preventing him from moving. He lost his balance and toppled over, his aura reading yellow.
“Lieutenant!” Borden cried.
“Keep fighting,” Daivid ordered them. “Get the … ack!” The CBS,P closed firmly over his windpipe. It loosened in a moment. He gulped in air, and tried to speak again. “Use the … gack! Slag … urk!” The web suit or someone in a control room monitoring him evidently had ideas about him giving orders from beyond. He took the hint.
So did Lin. All three officers had been taken down, along with several more X-Ray troopers. Seven of the fifteen defenders survived. She and the remaining gunners carried on a barrage to protect Jones as he pried open the sump hatch with his can-opener. It let out a pop. Daivid’s eyes watered as gas poured out into the small chamber. The rest of X-Ray Company, stuck out in the hallway, decided discretion was the better part of breathing, and stayed beyond the stench, potting away at the defenders from there. Jones began to feel around in the sump, which was approximately a meter across, swearing colorfully in three or four languages.
The seven, knowing as surely as Daivid did that there was less than two minutes for X-Ray to achieve its objective, moved in blasting out a river of red dashes. The Cockroaches returned fire more slowly. One after another of them fell, suits turning from blue to yellow. It was apparent that not only were they outnumbered, but the defenders had a lot more ammunition than they did. Daivid meant to take the matter up with Commander Iry in the morning, after he’d had some sleep. The smallest figure in the center, whom he identified as Lin, took out the biggest defender with a keenly placed shot to the throat, then her gun clicked audibly.
“Oh, damn!” she shouted, feeling through her side pouches for more magazines. There were none. More guns clicked empty. She turned to the four remaining troopers. “We’re history, guys! Do your best!” They took individual shots, but Daivid could tell they had fewer and fewer charges left. The defenders crawled towards them, inexorably, until Jones raised a hand on high.
“Hey, you!” Jones shouted at the trooper who had dispatched Daivid. “Kill our commander, will you? Here’s my reward to you!” He drew his arm back, then flung it forward, as if throwing something.
The substance barely registered above room temperature in Daivid’s scopes, but the disgusting splat as it struck the trooper in the chest left no doubt as to what it was. The trooper cringed and retreated, batting at its chest. The other Cockroaches, seeing the fantastic reaction, took to Lin’s idea at once, and began to scoop up handfuls of raw sewage from the bubbling sump.
“Hey, ugly!” Ambering shouted, heaving glob after glob at the nearest defender. “Is it raining slag, or is it just your aftershave?”
“This has got to be yours,” Ewanowski said, throwing a headsized dollop of sludge at the largest trooper left. “I recognize the butt print!”
The Cockroaches slung their useless guns aside and began to reach for more material. The stink was overwhelming. The defenders retreated to the walls and covered their heads with their arms as the Cockroaches pelted them with slag. Daivid, lying helplessly beside the door, wished he could crow.
Suddenly, Jones let out a musical yodel of triumph. He raised a blue flashing orb over his head. “I’ve got it!”
At that moment, the lights came on.
O O O
Commander Iry walked into the room, clapping her hands very slowly. “Very good. Very good. That was the ugliest performance I have ever seen in my entire life. Effective, but ugly.” She turned to Daivid as the CBS,P let go of his limbs and let him struggle to his feet. The abused ligament in his thigh erupted into a symphony of pain. He tried to keep the wince off his face as he removed his helmet. He glanced around at the shadows that represented X-Ray Company, some of whom were all but scuffing at the deck with their toes. “You win, son. I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it. Disgusting, but I can’t fault you for resourcefulness. I guess what they say about your unit is true.”
The defender who had cut Daivid down strode forward. His chameleon armor dripped with brown sludge that almost radiated visibly with stink. He yanked off his own helmet. It was Bruno. His dark eyes were ablaze with righteous anger. He threw a hand back at the other members of his team. Almost all of them had been liberally decorated with the same substance. “Commander, this is hardly fair. They were supposed to achieve their objective with conventional weaponry.”
“Who says?” Iry asked, turning to him. “Results are what count in wartime, son. Just because they weren’t afraid to get their hands dirty, they did what they were supposed to do. I believe that I can make a case for your team having started the caca pelota rolling, Lieutenant. Whose idea was it to put the beacon into the pipe in the first place?”
“Well … but now we have to clean our armor.”
“Inside and outside?” Daivid asked, innocently, enjoying the memory of the other troopers cringing against the onslaught of the rain of crap. Iry let out a snort.
“Save it, sonny. It could happen to you one day.”
“Hey, slag happens,” Ewanowski leered. “In this case, it happened to Lt. Bruno.”
“You should eat some of that,” Streb advised Bruno, indicating the mess on his chest. “It’ll do you good. Hey, if you eat some, it’ll do us good, too! With all due respect to your rank, sir.”
“Troopers!” Daivid thundered.
“That’s insubordination!” Bruno raged. Iry looked at him impassively.
“No, just being sore winners. I’ve heard you indulge in a little extracurricular trash talk in your time. Let it go. Lt. Wolfe, will you please tell your platoon to save their gloating for the day room?”
Wolfe threw himself into the salute. “Aye, aye, ma’am!” The gesture was worth the pain.
“Right. I’ll log this one as a successful exercise. Dismiss.” The commander turned to the other officer, now seething openly. “Lt. Bruno, you were supposed to give them a run for their money, and you did. Though,” she added, running a summing eye over the defenders, “I think you might want to send whoever counted your troops back to remedial mathematics. That’s all right. You have plenty of personnel available to clean up this site.”
“Ma’am!” Bruno protested, looking around at the sickly greenish brown stains running down the bulkheads and equipment in the small chamber. The defenders looked aghast. The Cockroaches tried hard not to grin from ear to ear. Some of them failed. Daivid didn’t plan to punish them for it.
Iry was unmoved. “Loser’s penalty. You know the custom. By the way, well done. In the end you only left four of them standing. That’s why you’re an Eastwood officer.”
“Made my day,” Wolfe muttered under his breath, as they gathered up their weapons and pushed past the other troopers.
***