LATER THAT NIGHT
UNDEVELOPED TERRESTRIAL COLONY SB-522,687,13
BASE CAMP RAM WOLF PRIME
The barracks was sweltering hot, even with all the temperature regulators straining with mechanical effort, and therefore loud, although Justin Bailey was sure no one but him was still awake. The room practically shook with soldiers snoring and stank with the bodies of too many men crammed on top of one another, sweating. He couldn't have slept if he'd tried. Despite knowing he'd need rest for the excursion tomorrow, he wasn't trying. Some part of him knew that should he close his eyes and go to sleep, he'd never open them again.
He stared at the ceiling, waiting for the moment when the mortar shell would come through it and directly onto him, lying on the top bunk. A roar and blinding light then nothing ever ever. Jesus.
Private Peter Ostro. Twenty years old. Dead before he even got off the ship.
So Justin had done well to make it as far as he did, to lie in this bunk so far from home where he would surely die. He had a wife. Jenny was going to have a daughter. She'd sent him a message letting him know that, and should have had it by now. Soon they'd get a lump sum in substitute for his safe return, and they'd probably use it to get off planet. She'd remarry — well, if she got the weight off and still had the looks for it. Justin's daughter would grow up on a platform somewhere, poor probably, but pale enough to see her blue veins and almost certainly without an accent. She'd get a nice job, or a normal one. And traveling in space wouldn't be her sole aspiration; it would be part of her life. The more he thought, the more he realized it was really the best thing for everyone: he, lying there awaiting the mortar; Jenny and his infant daughter awaiting their check and freedom. All he had to do was die.
Fuck.
Justin felt something twist in his stomach and burn toward his throat. He swung himself off the bunk and rapidly slapped his naked feet on the linoleum floor over to the bathroom, keeping a hand over his mouth as his cheeks filled with small bits of dinner but mainly bile. He got to a toilet and puked and coughed and hacked, as quietly as he could, but too loud.
"I win, I win," someone whispered from the barracks. "I told you he'd be the one."
"Fuck off," someone else said back. "He isn't dead yet."
"First one to blow chunks is always first to bite it. Never fails," a third chimed in.
"Ha! You see?"
"We'll see tomorrow. I won't pay till then."
They didn't say anything else as Justin washed his mouth out in the sink and walked slowly back to his bunk. Climbing up the ladder, he felt someone grab his leg.
"Don't worry about them," the young, broad-shouldered man in the middle bunk said in a low voice at Justin. "They don't mean anything by it. It's just a way to pass time. Keeps you from getting attached to the new arrivals if they, well, if they don't make it."
"I know," Justin said. "But thanks for lettin' me know, anyhow."
"Hey, the secret to getting by out here is just to keep your head down and your eyes open. If you got someone looking out for you out in the shit, you've got as good a chance as anyone to make it back safe."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah." A pause. "Look, you seem like an all right kid. Tomorrow, stick close to me and I'll keep an eye on you," the man in the middle bunk said. Justin smiled and started to thank him but the man started to rub Justin's leg with the back of his hand. "For tonight, just climb in here next to me and give my dick a good suck, hmm?"
Justin stared at him in the darkness, trying to remember who it was that was under him and trying to process what had just been asked.
"Bless the Goddess, he's actually thinking about it! Holy shit, I can't believe it," the man cackled, and a symphony of suppressed snickers from surrounding bunks followed. Justin scowled and finished climbing back into his bed. "We'd better make sure this guy makes it back. This queer could be the battalion's greatest cocksucker!"
And lying in bed, Justin somehow got to sleep after that, finding the prospect of a mortar landing on him no longer so uninviting.
The next day, Justin rose with everyone, showered, dressed and went to the mess hall, where no one said anything more about the night before. It might have been a nightmare but the scheduled proceedings of the waking day were far worse and horrifying. A trip into the bush, an excursion into the unknown.
He went through the food line and sat down at a table with the other new arrivals, digging into the specially engineered but thoroughly tasteless protein and carbohydrates without a word. Almost none of the people around Justin spoke either. But the veterans did.
The veterans of the Mechanized Infantry were nothing like the soldiers and officers who'd trained the fresh recruits up to this point. They complained constantly at everything — the food, the building they were housed in, the Cosmic Navy, and loudest of all at the latest batch of useless faggots the Galactic Federation had sent down to die and get everyone else killed, too.
And while they complained about the idiocy of every (remote) commander and the pointlessness of the whole mission, if it could be called such, they never complained about actually going out to do their jobs. That was the continually amazing thing. They looked forward to going out and looking for an enemy they bore no real malice toward, in order to protect a people for whom they felt little more than contempt, feeling everything they did was an utter waste, but what they did was taken as an absolute. They would risk their lives and possibly not come back and there was no point in thinking anything more about it. Or at least saying it out loud.
Death of any veteran Infantryman was spoken only in abstract. Justin found out later to speak such a thing was considered almost a hex, a death sentence. Endless anecdotal tales served as testimony, but in spite of that, veterans discussed in extensive detail how they thought each of the new arrivals would die. Sniped, exploded by tik mine, pierced by tree trap, y-axis missile, or something different entirely. Maybe even fragged by one of the longtimers, if the newbs fucked up badly enough.
A great deal of the conversation centered on Private P. Ostro, specifically whether his death prior to getting off the transport ship nullified all wages or if, because he hadn't gotten off the ship, his death should be irrelevant. For the sake of having something still to bet on, the veterans reached consensus that since no one had had a chance to pick Ostro, the competition hadn't properly started and the wagers should proceed based on those remaining.
Burl Joone was one of the numerous planetside veterans to attain the Specialist rank and operate a powered exoskeleton full time. He had been in the bunk under Justin and thought for sure the backwoods colonist was the dumbest, most cowardly and helpless of all the new recruits.
"I put my week's pay on Bailey," Joone said. Justin looked up and Joone smiled, pointing a finger at him and firing the trigger of his thumb while winking.
"Ah, but that's always your mistake, innit?" Carly Leath said, bringing Joone's attention back to his own table. Leath was also a Specialist but wore only a halfsuit, like most support personnel. "The dumb ones are too stupid to know when they're supposed to die."
"That must be why you're still with us, huh, Leath?" Joone said.
They both grinned then guffawed.
"Ostro wanted to write a book," Justin said, aloud and not knowing why he'd done it. The laughter stopped.
"What did you say?" Joone asked.
Justin looked up and blinked.
"Peter. The ol' boy who got his head blown off 'fore he even stepped outside. He wanted to be a writer."
"Yeah? And what's your point?"
Most other people had stopped talking. Justin shrugged.
"I don't know. I didn't know him, really. But he's dead and he wanted to be a writer, is all. But I let him go out the door aheada me, so he died and I'm still here. I ain't ever gonna write nothin. But I'm here jus the same."
Justin shrugged again and went back to eating. A moment passed of almost complete silence, then another. Then the veterans burst into laughter.
"Well, I forfeit my money. Joone obviously won this round," private first class Cole Ersor said. "Or he's going to. Obviously."
"Obviously," Leath agreed. "This is why I've said we need a draft for what is it, five tours now? Goddamned volunteers."
With that, all of the veterans, themselves once volunteers, hooted and jeered one another, in good humor.
TWO DAYS LATER
'MALIBU' VALLEY
UNDEVELOPED TERRESTRIAL COLONY SB-522,687,13
The company walked through valley of neon vegetation, impossibly wild and verdant, glowing dimly with every color the eye could see but even more gorgeous under an infrared or ultraviolet filter — and in all likelihood hiding some one or thing trying to kill them.
Technically, there weren't any plants here; several billion years of unrelated evolution had produced specie unrelated to what Humans defined as "plant." But few soldiers cared even to dabble as biologists, so these "plants" were referred to without vocal quotations and served the same function for the large, but not especially dense colony planet known as Hale's Depot or simple "Hale"; the origin of the name was a mystery.
The terrain would have been an impossible thing to Justin but months ago, before he had seen all manner of impossible thing and told it was a matter of course for many. For the natives, he realized faintly, even all this was normal, though.
Locked in a rotation about its own axis that was almost exactly the same as the revolution about its sun, half of Hale basked in light all the time, while the other stayed in near total darkness. That had been the situation for at least the past one-and-a-half billion years, and for the last 100 million years or so, there had been only one, magnificent continent, running lengthwise about its equator, nearly into itself from the other side. Life existed under water at the poles and in the dark region under its permafrost desert and icecap, but it was nothing compared to the sunny continent, powered perpetually by that great solar battery. All the flora grew gigantic, killed as often by bursting open or snapping under its own weight as choked by some rival vine or chewed up by some voracious burrowing thing. There were also lands of dune and taiga, a long band of grassy steppe with stalks as huge as a goodly tree, and some mountains too poor in mineral to allow growth except intermittently, but most of the population lived in the rainy, rainbowy jungle. Therefore, most of the military bases were there as well, looking like toy models and fighting the encroaching, mindless growth more regularly than the named enemy.
Space Pirates were the named enemy, but even company commander Nichua Tower admitted they were rarely seen and he had interacted with Zebesians only a handful of times during the entire course of the engagement. It wasn't their way, Second Lieutenant Ruce Volante had further explained to the company's latest reinforcements before they set out two days before. Pirates struck quickly when they had an advantage or when someone was defenseless and ran away again.
"For the past four years, the Pirates have not had a major base aboveground, or any real presence at all," Lieutenant Volante said. "We do not have reason to think they had any working oceanic or polar bases, and the dark portion of the continent is regularly patrolled without fear of anything but the local fauna. On the other hand, the subterranean activities of the Zebesians continue to be prodigious, if primitive. And large numbers of the indigenous population either favor them, or cooperate with both sides as it suits them.
"Our main foe," he continued as his fingers manipulated a thin, waist high device," is the native Jenecio themselves."
Four rows deep, Justin strained to better see, but the hologram quickly rose to be within eyesight for everyone. A muscular, olive-skinned humanoid female wearing nothing but a loincloth and horned headdress woven into her hair towered above them all. Her chin, right breast and left forearm bore ornate tattoos; her eyes were dark brown with yellow, staring intently at something unseen. The left hand also had a glove of four sharp claws that would look like decorative jewelry unless they were scraping across your throat. She looked about 1.7 meters tall, and gorgeous, fiercely gorgeous. With her, no taller than her hip, a small blue humanoid, bald and almost unhealthily thin, hugged her thigh with his eyes closed. He wore no clothing whatsoever, so his genitals were recognizable enough. Nearby, another such blue child squatted, resting his elbows on his knees behind the female, gazing unconcerned in the same direction as she.
"What you're looking at is an adult Jenecio female, and two adult males," Volante said. "Yes, it's on one-to-one scale. And again, those are adult males. The sexual dimorphism of this species is highly pronounced, so don't let it fool you. The women give birth to five-to-eight times as many males as females and seem to be unconcerned with how many sons they lose. The daughters are another story.
"Your sergeants and corporals will brief you better on their particular habits and predilections. The point is, when you see either one of these approaching you, assume they're a hostile. If they don't behave as they're supposed to, you protect yourselves. Your lives are worth a lot to us – and so is the training and equipment we gave you. It's your mission to get you and your brothers through each day safely, on this earth or any other."
Now, as the company made its way through the jungle in search of little blue men and haughty brown amazons, Justin was doing his best to do just that. He took a step, trying to match the giant footprints the exoskeletons ahead of him had left. He was close, but in avoiding a large root he didn't get the metal boot down to quite the right spot. His helmet's audio sensors were very precise, but he could have sworn he heard the sound with his own ears.
Click.
He froze, as did everyone around him. Through his audio, he heard a very unnecessary command from his lance corporal.
"Do not move, soldier. Do you hear me?"
Two days earlier ahead of their first excursion, Platoon Sergeant Rory Dalime stood in front of them, holding a small, primitive looking mechanical object. He squeezed it and released it, squeezed it and released it.
Click-tik.
Click. Tik.
Click… Tik.
"This is the sound you need to listen for, and it's very important. It is the most important sound you will ever hear, more important than your mother's voice. More important than the sound of your old lady's moan when you know she's about to cum."
They all laughed, but Sgt. Dalime didn't. More importantly, neither did Lieutenant Volante. The laughter died out quickly and Dalime continued.
"I'm holding the detonator to a 'tik mine.' When you hear the sound 'click-tik,' you will likely not hear anything else after. When this is hooked up to a large, conventional bomb buried in the ground, there will be a powerful explosion in your immediate vicinity. If you were the lucky one to step on the mine, you'd better hope you're lucky enough to have it kill you because, you won't have a legs or anything resembling a cock afterward, get it?"
"Sir, yes, sir," they answered, with rote enthusiasm.
"However, if you hear a 'click,' " Dalime demonstrated, "stay where you are. The charge is set by the decompression, not the compression. Listen to what I just said: the charge is set by the decompression. As long as you stand where you are, you'll be OK, and more importantly, you'll give your brothers time to move away. We don't know why they haven't used compression or timed or remote charges yet. They very well may at some point. But whatever you do, do not let anyone be around you to hear the—." Dalime let go and the device finished the sentence for him.
So intent was Justin in not letting the sentence finish in the present that it took him a moment to move within his suit safely and answer.
"Sir," Justin croaked. But he didn't move.
Second Lt. Volante ordered the platoon to hold, although most of those who were near Justin already had. Volante relayed the message to the first lieutenant, and the rest of the company adjusted accordingly. From the base, automated mine sweepers made another pass through the valley and an additional Specialist came back toward Justin's platoon. But Dalime ordered the rest of the platoon to proceed forward or backward in one another's footsteps as quickly and safely as possible, and soon only Sgt. Dalime was in shouting distance of Justin.
"I'm awful sorry, sergeant, sir," Justin said.
"There's nothing to be sorry about, solider. It's not your fault. It could just as easily be me standing where you are, God knows," Dalime said. "Listen, Private Bailey. I'm not going to tell you that everything is going to be OK, because I can't promise that. But we aren't giving up on you. I need you to keep your head on straight."
"Sir, yes, sir," Justin said, as enthusiastically as he could.
Dalime explained the solution, although Justin hardly heard it. In the food stores were protein rations divided into 50 kilogram portions for bulk carrying. Justin weighed a little less than 75 kilograms, so one and a half rations should be able to replace his weight as he carefully, gradually climbed out. Dalime would have an additional blast shield in front of him while he brought the rations over to Justin and helped him climb out and on to the sergeant's own exoskeleton. Justin would certainly die if the tik mine went off during the transition, but staying there, he could hope for little more than being irreparably maimed.
"Do you think it can actually work, sir?" Justin asked as the first ration was delivered and a corporal efforted diligently to cut the second in half.
"I wouldn't be trying to get you out if I didn't, private," Dalime answered.
"If it don't though. I mean, if I— if this is the end, can you do me a favor?"
"I can try."
"Sir, can you tell my daughter her Pa loved her and wanted her to do something with her life, offa Kal'on?" He was crying now, but quietly.
"Of course." Dalime received the cut piece and began to carry them toward Justin. "But I'd rather you tell herself, and concentrate on helping me with that. Now be very—"
Justin heard and explosion, and thought he was certainly dead. But following the thought came the realization that having it was proof of its invalidity, and a moment after that he realized it was the rest of the platoon under attack.
"Stay, stay!" Dalime radioed everyone now, no longer just him. All of the veterans remained where they were, crouching. Several recruits, instincts favoring the weeks of training they'd received previously to the recent days of advice, did not listen to Dalime in the moment, and moved to find suitable cover under some large, bright yellow husks that had fallen over and hardened. It was a good, standard tactic for a Mechanized Infantryman under attack, on an orbital platform or some other terra. But not here.
"Often the enemy will engage you on the move when you are out in the open, and catch you in a vulnerable position under his fire," Justin remembered Dalime saying. "You must stay as you are. You are more likely to find a mine than safety behind cover."
An explosion shook the ground, and the shockwave started setting off other several other explosions that shook loose pieces of the top most layer, burdened by their own stupendous girth. Snapping branches the size of signal poles landed with a crash nearby, and a piece of someone's torso rolled in front of Justin's foot, ID tags reading: Specialist C. Leath.
"Jesus, Jesus, Jesus," he said, but all the time he kept his mind on the compression, not the decompression.
Unmanned gyros whooshed overhead, blocked from sight by the overhanging lushness as they rushed from the nearby base to their target. Moments later, light began to shove its way through the leaves and branches, then the roar came followed by a wind that shook everything even more. Then there were no more explosions.
Justin looked to see what had become of Sgt. Dalime, and saw him standing to his suit's full height once again. Orders began coming through to identify yourself and list any injuries, if possible. This engagement had resulted in 18 casualties: five dead, 13 wounded. On the other end, 30 to 35 native hostiles had been killed as they lobbed bombs at the convoy, and Mechanized Infantrymen had killed one spotter while wounding and capturing another.
Justin found all that out later. At present, he was still concerned with the more pressing matter of keeping his foot pressed down. That was, until Dalime looked at him, looked down at Justin's foot, then back up at Justin.
"So that's why they missed it," Dalime finally said. He unleashed and torrential, but quiet string of curses, then laughed bitterly. "You can move as normal, Bailey. If that was an active tik-mine, we'd both be dead now."
Justin looked down and saw his footprint no longer where he'd tried so hard to keep it through all the battle's maelstrom. The bomb was either a dud or intended to be a distraction the whole time.
Medics arriving and already assigned were treating the wounded based on their suit's triage determination, and preparing them for transport back to base or farther still. But everyone still able to move was preparing to move forward once again, Justin included.
"So, what now, sir?" Bailey asked, doing his best to re-form in proper position.
Dalime didn't acknowledge him at first, and when he did he sounded tired.
"Now we pay the nearest village a visit, and we have a pleasant conversation with them about all this."
Author's note: With very minor liberties taken, the description for the 'Jenecio' come from Jeremy Enecio's work 'Tribal Tech.' Very cool, but tastefully not work safe fantasy/sci-fi paintings. Check them out, buy a print if you see something you like.