Field of Heroes Page 19

  Cartwright knelt in front of me to look at some kind of weird flower that had somehow survived our onslaught on the innocent forests of Zoa.

  ‘Lord’s waiting on us, Cartwright. Got time to smell the flowers?’ I said.

  I don’t know how many of us there were. Patriot Company grew, and shrunk, but a few of us were at the heart of it. Veterans of Earth, we’d fought the Zoan back, and the younger ones – some older, but new, I mean – soldiers without the shine kicked off ‘em even looked up to us. I don’t know why. Like they thought we knew what we were doing.

  I’d known Cartwright, served with him, for years now. He was sniffing flowers. Like we knew what we were doing? We didn’t. Who did? The Fleet Admiral? Not a hope. No one knew. It was guess work. It was an alien planet, and the younger additions to Patriot thought we knew what we were about. It was laughable. Cartwright and I were smart enough to know that we didn’t know much except how to pull a trigger.

  ‘What you think this is?’ said Cartwright.

  ‘Food,’ said Okida, who’d been tagged to Patriot only since Nellis. ‘You should eat it.’

  ‘Really?’ said Cartwright. Okida laughed and shook his head.

  ‘Fuck you, Okida.’

  I shook my head, too, but I wasn’t watching them. I was looking around. The weird flower wasn’t all that odd compared the Zoan I’d seen on Earth, but here were mad colours I didn’t like because this planet didn’t feel quite right. Even the sunlight was weird and oppressive.

  There were trees (coral looking trees, anyway...or broccoli, maybe) all around, sniffers and pointers already moving through them. KES were at out rear, D-Guard ahead, and my marines trudged along tired from landing and now ten hours in without rest. We had stims and nutrient packs we squeezed into our upturned mouths while we marched on behind the tireless fire of the AI tanks burning a path for us. There was no straight on Zoa. Everything was jungle. We made it straight.

  Outside that burned highway everything living seemed to want to kill us. There were signs of battles deeper into the jungle. I saw dead scout bikes and troopers half-submerged in fierce looking vines or fronds of odd hues out there beyond the burned road that marked our passage. Perhaps the plants themselves had killed and taken the forward scouts. Perhaps it was some kind of disease in the air that I was now breathing because who wants to hike miles with a rebreather clenched between their teeth when the air was breathable? I wasn’t worried about disease, or parasites. We were on an alien planet that hated us. I wasn’t expecting to live long enough to die of Zoan dysentery.

  Constant fire streamed out from both sides into the jungle cover around us, and sometimes overhead, too. Another of those giant whale things attacked us, but they seemed dumb. They kind of floated, like they were gaseous bubbles, and when our shots pierced their hides they simply crashed to the dirt. There were other things, too, and things that caught us by surprise despite the sniffers and pointers doing their jobs, and despite our firepower.

  I barely needed to fire my gun, even so. D-Guard killed most things we met before the double column of Patriot Company even reached their position.

  There could have been friendly aliens in there somewhere. I can’t say I cared. It might have been fascinating for a xenobiologist, but not me. I hated Zoa.

  I heard jubilant voices on my comms, routed through Armoured’s more powerful transponders and boosted by Pain’s receivers. Cavalry, on point, ahead of our highway and the tanks on their fast, mobile bikes, had found the portal.

  The portal was the sole non-organic artefact on the entire planet.

  If a portal in Saturn’s rings led us here...where could this next one lead? Those up in the sky who told us where to go and what to do wanted the tech, but if it proved of no use? We’d still burn this world back to nothing.

  But it was important to the enemy, too, because after those first cries of happiness from the advanced team we all heard far more awful sounds – cavalry, dying.

  I knew this wasn’t going to be a hump in our road. Maybe we were meeting the mountain at last.

  My chill heart began to pump faster. I could tell without the furious amount of comms traffic just how much shit cavalry had hit. Not from any sense of panic but because the voices I heard were full of the stone cold calm of the best of the best getting ready to die.

  ‘Hie on!’ yelled Hard Dog. She and I had formed some kind of bond, and she’d set her better comms to route through to mine. Her units were nearly a kilometre ahead.

  Patriot didn’t wait for an invitation to the battle.

  ‘Triple time, eyes front, run you beauties!’ yelled Cartwright on my right shoulder. We did. Patriot switched it up from a careful amble to a headlong charge. Tired legs and minds or not, Cavalry were under fire and we weren’t leaving anyone to die.

  Something snatched Cartwright from beside me.

  I span round, stitched a line low into a creature that looked like an octopus with a head on it like an anemone, so it was all suckers and mouths, holding Cartwright’s arm. I didn’t imagine it was just going to give him a hillbilly hicky. My shots hit the long, prehensile tails or tentacles or whatever they were that it moved on, and it staggered. Cartwright rolled to the side and I opened up.

  He stood, still shaky, and put half a magazine from his bolt rifle into the impossible creature. His bolt rifle fired real, steel bolts at a ridiculous speed and the bolts, around four inches long, pinned the octopus-thing to the charred ground.

  I pumped around thirty rounds into it ‘til it stopped squirming. It made my stomach turn. I’d never seen such a disgusting creature in seven years of pure war.

  ‘Still ticking?’ I asked Cartwright as I yanked him to his feet.

  ‘Like a bomb,’ he replied. His face was pale, and his arm was pouring blood where the thing had latched on, and into, him.

  Five KES took rear, watching over me as I patched Cartwright. Patriot ran on like they should without needing orders and me to manage them – battle was like triage, too. Cartwright needed a field dressing. Cavalry were in a fierce fire fight up ahead. It wasn’t complicated who came first.

  ‘Stim?’ I asked.

  He shook his head. ‘I’m out.’

  ‘I have spare,’ I said, and he wasn’t dumb enough to argue. ‘Come on.’

  I was glad he didn’t die. We couldn’t spare any more for Lord Death, and that’s all.

  The lies we tell ourselves get us through.

  Cartwright and I, along with our KES escort looking like future-knights, reached the battle as it was already tailing down. Can’t say I felt guilty about it and that was the truth.

  43.

  No Place for Cavalry

  Vidar Dawes

  Cavalry definitely weren’t designed for pitched battles. They were highly mobile scout and strike units. They’d been pinned by Zoan organic turrets which had apparently risen out the ground. Not like the squid things with whirling arms we met later on, on Velasan. They were more like the octopoid, anemone things that had nearly eaten Cartwright. These were augmented with some kind of biotech or mech like most of the enemy units we’d faced on Earth, but unlike most we’d met so far on Zoa. It seemed the denizens of the planet were naturally hostile, but the things that attacked cavalry were intentional – this was a guard position, an outpost left here to protect the portal that was our goal.

  A.T.’s rolled into the middle of the raging battle between the hemmed-in cavalry units and blasted a semi-circle back, smart enough to not hit the shimmering portal.

  There was no time for pretty. D-Guard moved in, too, driving forward into the spaces the A.T.’s opened up. Marines had taken position and were covering whatever the heavier, slower units could not.

  Smoke was heavy in the air, dragged low by the damp when Cartwright and I arrived, late to the party. The stench of death was all pervading. Burned vegetation and meat reeked. I stank, too, of sweat, or bodily odours like a man who’d charged through a psychedelic jungle under heavier gravity that
Earth with a ton of stimulants producing more sweat and upping my heart rate close enough I wondered if my heart might give out before something could tear me in two. I wondered if anyone considered the effects of normal Earth stimulants on hearts further stressed than was usual in battle.

  We’d all sprinted to relieve cavalry. I didn’t want to run now. My legs were shaking from fatigue, not fear. My heart was working too damn hard, but I wasn’t dead, was I? It didn’t matter that my arms were shaking, too, because I couldn’t even see to shoot straight – everything was smoke and shrapnel and the panicked madness of a close fire fight.

  Scout bikes were burning.

  Soldiers had been cut down, slashed, sliced, burned by acid or stabbed through with spines full of poison on blowfish with fat stubby legs that hopped from the undergrowth. What had been a forest, or a jungle, was turned to a field strewn with dead things and broken trees and ferns. There was a clear field of fire of fifty metres when Cartwright and I rolled up, wheezing and thinking of having heart attacks. In moments, that field of fire grew to a hundred metres and we just kept right on firing until the portal was standing in the middle of us and not them and suddenly we were protecting the portal from the Zoan rather than the way it had been.

  We killed them all and I didn’t have to fire my gun at all.

  The A.T.’s wound down last. D-Guard and A.T. were steaming, venting harder than the misty air around us. Everyone was panting. Some of us were staring at the thing we’d just fought for in the first real battle on Zoa, and the last, it turned out. We’d been through one, sure. Everything else, even my thunder-clapping heart, faded away.

  The portal, or the warp conflux as we came to call it, was like a yellowish puddle. Perhaps it relied on similar energy to those yellow laser beams the Cephal used. The metal around the conflux was that same yellow, too. The colour of alien armies, perhaps ubiquitous as our army green.

  It was way, way too small for most of our heavier units, but heavy support or not I knew I wanted to step through it and see what lay at the end of my road. Maybe Death, maybe it was just a door to another hallway full of war. I was determined I would get through it no matter what.

  When the orders came down, relayed from our landing site to us, we were to hold, and to wait, because this was it. We stood before technology which might give us the stars...or might simply be the end of us all.

  We held, and I stayed at the portal and could barely take my eyes from it. I didn’t understand it, but for the first time in years I finally wanted something. I’d forgotten how that felt.

  After all my worrying about being denied my chance, in the end a trip to the other side was as easy as volunteering.

  44.

  Way Behind the Curve

  Kiyoko Jones

  ‘We can’t let them die down there,’ said Delphine after a welcome, warm evening in the company of the Fleet Admiral, now firmly Kiyoko when Delphine thought of her.

  Delphine Mamet’s words hit home for Kiyoko, as they so often did. Jones couldn’t disagree. She had been guilty of valuing anything which might win the war over people. The thought of abandoning everything that Zoa might mean to humanity hurt Delphine, and Jones understood why, and how heartbreaking the necessity of destruction must feel to an academic mind.

  ‘We threw soldiers away once. Fayetteville. I will never do such a thing again,’ Jones shook her head, as though she was about to say more but thought better of it.

  Fayetteville, thought Jones. My...nadir.

  ‘There’s something, Kiyoko,’ said Delphine, taking a long drink of deep red wine and looking over the glass at Jones. ‘Something you’re not telling me.’

  ‘My shame,’ said Kiyoko, simply.

  ‘Do you want to talk about it?’ asked Delphine.

  Did she want to talk about her orders to wipe out an entire battalion over seven years ago? How it haunted her still? No. Definitely not.

  ‘Can we not? For now. Please.’

  Delphine nodded. ‘You know I want to be with you, Kiyoko,’ she said. She said it without pretence or guile.

  ‘And I you,’ said Kiyoko Jones with as much sincerity. ‘Why do you think I put up with your badgering?’

  Delphine laughed. The French woman was becoming important to Jones in more ways than she had believed possible. The fact that Delphine wasn’t a subordinate, was someone Jones could confide in if she wished, was something Jones had sorely missed.

  Later, asleep in each other’s arms, a knock came at Jones’ cabin door.

  ‘Open,’ said Jones from her comfortable position with Delphine’s sleepy arm thrown over her chest, their legs entwined.

  ‘Ma’am,’ said her adjutant. He looked away from the private moment.

  ‘Speak freely,’ said Admiral Jones, rubbing sleep from her eyes and then staring with the hard eyes of duty at the man with figurative cap in his hands.

  ‘They found it,’ said the man. ‘The portal.’

  Jones felt Delphine stir against her. ‘Arrange an extraordinary meeting for thirty minutes,’ said the woman who was Kiyoko Jones no longer. She became Admiral Jones. ‘Transmit the order to hold at the artefact and await instruction now, David.’

  ‘Ma’am,’ said her adjutant.

  While Kiyoko’s lover was still groggy from sleep, Jones prepared herself for the bridge. When she was squared away she found Delphine sitting up in bed with the covers only over her legs. Jones sighed.

  ‘Now that you’re so close to the Rosetta Stone...to a new age...and you’re still going to do it?’

  ‘I have doubts, Delphine...but no one else must.’

  Delphine nodded, but there was a deep sadness in her eyes. They both understood what needed to be done, and neither wanted to do it. But there was want, and there was duty, and the two rarely met on common ground.

  ‘I understand, Kiyoko. I hate it but I will not step on your toes. I’m here for you, when it’s done. God bless you.’

  God, thought Jones. The half-remembered tenets of an old and bygone world surfaced.

  Jones’ smile was stripped of the joy she’d felt in the evening, and the night. She saw the change in herself through her lover’s eyes – her passions closing down, and the face of the Admiral of the A.U. Fleet asserting itself.

  Which is really me? wondered Jones. Am I Kiyoko Jones, or am I the Admiral of Earth’s vengeance, about to rain down nuclear fire on an entire planet of living things?

  Perhaps she was just both. Janus, maybe.

  Gods and monsters.

  She didn’t want those discussions now. There was work to be done still. She was Admiral Jones completely now. Straight-backed, business-like, and perfectly tidy in her crisp uniform, as though she hadn’t woken a mere nine minutes before.

  ‘I’ll see you on the bridge, Delphine. It will be good to have you there.’

  ‘I will be there,’ said Delphine. ‘Whatever I can give, I will.’

  Jones wondered whether this was the reason humanity existed; the calm moments where love and passion could abide. The beauty in all the chaos surely had to be why people struggled so hard to hold fast to the sharp edge of the precipice between life and death.

  *

  Jones gave herself twenty minutes for a private briefing with the shipboard AI, Halley, to compose herself before her staff turned up. The Admiral was tight lipped as Halley laid out every detail for her.

  Admiral Jones took her place at the head of the table before her advisors, staff, and subordinates precisely thirty minutes after her adjutant had knocked on the door to her cabin. The adjutant waited on her needs to one side. Aside from the seven arrayed at the table, waiting on Jones’ briefing, there were five others in attendance. Anyone present had clearance as far as Jones was concerned. And she was in charge, wasn’t she?

  Any other time she might have allowed herself a wry smile at that thought, but not this day. Her heart beat faster than she’d hoped, and it was all she could do to stop herself from shaking as she stood before the a
ssembled people.

  ‘Halley, could you apprise us all of the situation on the surface, please?’

  The tonal voice of the shipboard AI Halley filled the room in response to Admiral Jones’ words. Halley’s visage was projected on a wall around which the conference room was arranged, in a horseshoe, rather than a grand long table. It was more practical for Halley to present a human face upon the wall there, though Jones didn’t like it. It felt like Halley was somehow granted a position of greater import, her face huge and taking up as much room as the entire head of the U-table, where seven people sat. At times, Jones thought of Halley as an argumentative combatant, rather than the aid she was designed to be.

  She thought of it as a ‘she’, too, and the representation or avatar Halley chose didn’t sit well with Jones. It was disingenuous, as though the AI wormed her way into people’s trust by appearing to be more human that she really was.

  Sometimes Jones had to remind herself that Halley was an AI. She didn’t trust it at all, any more than she had ever trusted Global Net. But each of the seventeen ships under her command were reliant on AI. Would it let them down? Global Net had mysteriously gone blind (or willingly? she still wondered), hadn’t it?

  Was Global Net the reason humans were in this mess in the first place, or had they all simply placed too much responsibility and power in an artificial intellect?

  ‘Ma’am,’ said Halley, and proceeded to give all information in her feminine voice; the battle, the absence of Cephal on Zoa, the detailed schematics of the portal and the lay of the land on the surface of the hostile planet below.

  ‘Engineering are examining the artefact in the hope we may be able to retrieve it for study off site and aboard the Boston,’ said Halley, toward the end of a brief presentation. ‘There is no current indication of threat to the Fleet, which remains in stable orbit, and communications with the retrieval site are stable.’

  ‘And please, Halley – would you remind us of A.U.F.’s primary goal?’ Jones asked for the benefit of her seven chosen advisors, with uplinks to similar situations in the other sixteen ships in the fleet.