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Diamonds to Rust

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Something Blue
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    It had been a long day of prep, Naomi glued to my side, but we finally finished it up at nineteen hundred or so, my ride parked outside my door with a shitty, paint-by-eye coat of lizard camo thrown on with a shock coat of primer I'd found in the hotel's maintenance shed. A few cans of shitty chili were dinner, and two sets of power armor were laid out where there used to be a second bed in the room before I'd sent it down the pike with a pair of specialists who needed it. An ounce of kindness now would spare a world of pain later, and Naomi was just sticking by me from inertia at this point. The sergeants, at least, were opening up to her presence, and as far as I was concerned that was enough. If some reservists wanted to get fresh with her, well, they'd lose. Nothing more to it.

    "So." My diminutive assistant said, squatting down and leaning against the wall like she was born to it. "Everyone knows the plan, right?"

    "Yep. Athens has been broadcasting the all clear all day." I replied, pulling the barrel out of my Browning with a simple haul as I dug around in a pocket for my headspace gauge.

    "All the guys have trucks? Everyone's ammo'd up and their rucks are filled?"

    I chuckled, checking the go-side of the gauge. "You're worrying like a mother hen. Are they that incompetent-looking to you?"

    Naomi frowned, before I realized my joke had a bit too much truth in it. Finally, she stood up and started pacing while I moved on to fucking about with the no-go gauge.

    "It's not that they're incompetent, but, well," she said, wincing "I don't understand it. With my siblings in the LARP company, we had things to do. And then we'd do them, and the team leads and the sergeants would come in and do the checks. Then we'd get in the trucks, jack in, and wait until deployment. When you do things, you do 'em just like the WHAM guys did."

    "WHAM guys?"

    "Weapons: Heavy, & Assault Maneuver." Naomi clarified. "It's a dumb acronym, I know."

    "I mean, I was a SEAL, so I don't get to complain about shitty acronyms too much." I replied. "Like, who said 'ah yes we'll rename combat divers and recon to an aquatic animal best known for getting booped on the snoot, this is a good idea' and then what idiot admiral signed off on it?"

    "We could look it up?" Naomi suggested.

    "It was a rhetorical question."

    "It was a rhetorical answer."

    Snorting, I tightened up the timing a click, before carefully levering the bolt back on the Browning far enough to check the gauge. There was a trick to it I never quite got, but that was what the witness hole in the side was for. Witness hole said I was in the right spot, no go gauge did not go, go gauge went go, very technical job completed. Critical milliseconds of time marked and gauged by a guy holding a bolt handle in the right spot, and a tiny little shim of metal with a yes side and a no side. Ten gazillion dollars in weapon development, no real replacement developed for "hold it steady right there" and a precision-machined stick.

    Once that was done, I just grabbed a casing to beat the backplate of the gun back into place. It was a stiff old chunk of steel, so it was best to perform precision operations with a good bonk. After that, I made sure the barrel was tight in- it was, the headspacing check had set it just right- and I could safely know it would run tomorrow.

    Of course, since I had handled my kit, this naturally meant Naomi needed to handle hers. The issue with this was, I had a heavy machine gun disguised as a rifle to look after; she had a Remington 870 scaled up to forty millimeter to look after. Checking it took a minute, tops. As she got ready to do it again, I sighed. She was a kid. A nervous, keyed-up kid, working with new people, and panicking over it. There wouldn't be any shaking, any tearful declarations, or panicked utterances. This wasn't home, and nothing I could do would make it home.

    That was okay, though. This shouldn't be home to a kid.

    "Mind if I practice singing?" I asked, going over to open up an ammo box. "It's something to do while I'm checking ammo."

    "Sure."

    Nodding to myself, I projected myself back in the past, back to when I was growing up, goofing around on Dad's ancient-ass console, before reality kicked in the door. Something in English. Maybe even sing something relevant to our current position?

    Sure. Let's go with that.

    "I stare at the stars and the sky up above

    And think 'what am I made of?'

    Am I full of sorrow? Am I hurt and pained?

    Or am I filled... with love?

    I walk by myself on the streets below

    And ask every child I know

    "Do you think tomorrow will bring sun or rain?

    Which one of these will show?    "

    By the time I was done with the first verse, Naomi was starting to slow down. Putting the box of ammo I was fiddling with, I took the time to pick my little ward up, and put her in bed. Saying I tucked her in would be a misnomer; she still had her boots and undersuit on. I could throw a blanket over her, though, and I did before going outside with a package of cigarettes. Lighting one, I just started wandering the former hotel turned barrack, watching as lights went off and drivers left trucks. Our command team's ride was a black Lightning, badging removed and with a private throwing quick stripes of tiger camo on with a rattle can and a grin.

    "Yo." I said lightly, pulling out a coffin nail and offering it. "Got a name?"

    "Roetenburger." He said, squinting at me, before taking the smoke. "You one of the hellions we're hauling?"

    "Hell yeah."

    "Great. Hope your boss likes leading from the front."

    Squinting at the ride, I winced. It was, in fact, a technical. No guns in the back, but it did have what looked like park benches over the truck bed. Yay? "You a good driver?"

    "Pretty damn good." He said, adding another stripe. "Doesn't really matter much, since so far the only criteria for being good is not getting stuck."

    "Fair enough." I grunted. Two more tiger stripes went on, before he finally asked a question.

    "Y'all got any spare ballistic plates?" he asked. I shook my head negative, and he sighed. "Damn. They managed to dig out this ancient-ass batch of flak jackets, but…"

    "Let me guess, it looks like it passed the sell-by date before we got out of Ethiopia?"

    "More like fucking Afghanistan." He bitched. "Probably won't stop shit."

    "I don't know, and frankly, I can't say." I said, offering a shrug. "Last time I fought the Institute, they were handing out some jank-ass Owens guns, and that was two weeks ago."

    "Explains why the only thing that hurts us much are the regulars, then." He sighed. "We've been kicking the ass of the militia they're trying to bulk numbers out with, but they won't fuck around tomorrow. It'll be hell."

    I smirked. "We're the Michigan National Guard. They'll be bounced out before they know it."

    "Very funny, sir."

    "Fuck off, I'm only a Warrant Officer."

    I earned a stink-eye for that, before Roetenburger smiled again, a bloody grim one. "Well, even if they don't know they're gone, we'll be happy to send the corpses back to tell the rest."

    "They'll know something is up when the airwaves stop humming." I said, taking a finger and signing my name in the wet paint. "Climb, climb. Climb to the top of the world. And as you stand tall, you will see…"

    "…that when you fall, you will fall from a height most men will never reach."
     
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    As the trucks rolled out, I pulled off my helmet for a moment. Handing it to Ruiz, who just cocked his head, I dug a small packet of gum, popping out two tablets. Starting to chew, I took my helmet back, before going through the motions of putting it on. Drop on at about thirty degree offset to the right- no, this was a new suit, thirty degree offset to the left you idiot- and shift it back in line. Don't worry when it's pressing into the top of your head more than it should, go down to the neckline, and flick the tabs to get the positive toggles online. Positive toggles would set it back to the comfortable level. Once that was done, check the datafeeds: were all three reading correctly? Yes. Alright then.

    Then I saw Naomi looking at me with that slightly 'what the hell are you even doing' look, and I just sighed.

    "Seriously, Tomas?" Naomi asked. "You're really gonna risk your dental switch now?"

    "Yeah, because I don't have any?" I said, trying to figure out what she was talking about.

    "Wait hold on, you don't have the soft palate mods? You can't be telling me that's just an Institute thing."

    "Alright, I've gone from 'curious' to 'concerned'." Ruiz said, rolling his head towards her. "What's the soft pallet mod?"

    "Well, we call it the soft pallet mod, but it's really more the entire upper mouth, since it's where the data carrier for the helmet is." Naomi said. "It's actually really cool, since the mods are unpowered, but the helmet figures out how you're keying them by doing magnetic field analysis…"

    At that point, I'm not going to lie. I just started dozing, the gum keeping my teeth from rattling in the overloaded truck bed. When the thing stopped, Ruiz was stil slowly nodding along at Naomi's explanation, and- to my mind's eye- slightly desensitized by it all.

    "-and then, once they're done sewing in the wires to your tongue, it's dead easy!" she said in this entirely-too-chipper voice that didn't really sound like it should be discussing mouth surgery in the same tones one would normally hear the discussion of a pastel horse in. As she finished up, a crackle came in on the company net: looked like Fischl had something to say.

    "All units, this is Erebus company command. Arachne and Basilisk companies have entered blocking positions in Athens. We're taking up position as the reserve. Resistance is light. Allied resistance members and partisans have been instructed to wear light blue or cyan in as many positions as possible, and many have been wearing deer antlers as a means of identification. Do not fire on partisans, but don't get too close to them either: comms discipline is spotty at best, and we've had confirmation from recon units that enemy rocket batteries are firing on hot mics."

    Once the message finished broadcasting, I banged on the window to the truck. It took Roetenburger a minute to open it up, and when he did I could see how pale his face was under his helmet.

    "Move us up to the drop point for the reserves." I said carefully, eyes flashing over to Ruiz. "Are we taking the trucks into hot zones?"

    For once, I saw confidence in Ruiz's bearing. "Not unless things go to shit. We can bum some power strips and hot-charge off the trucks, and all our liable areas are well within walking distance."

    "And after that?"

    "We'll play it by ear. Like it as not, once Erebus gets stuck in, we're the tip of that spear. On the off chance we have to handle something else, I want our transit in good enough shape to actually pull it off."

    "Good choice, sir." Rotenburger said, while I nodded.

    The ride was far more tense on the way into our drop-off zone, not helped by the sound of me charging the Browning gun. The occasional gunfire wasn't making things sound better, either- Basilisk company was rolling heavy on the machine guns, and I could hear Arachne using more than a few grenades. Still, we did what we were supposed to, with everyone in the platoon getting out of their trucks, running extension cords, and vamping power carefully. Things were going about as well as they could be expected to go, right until I heard the sound of an electrical 'crack' in the distance.

    Now, normally there were three weapons I'd think of that would make that sharp, lighting-like sound. Certain direct-fire railguns would do it, chemical lasers would do it, and most importantly the plasma room-clearing charges would do it. Ruling out the third, since like hell they were going to waste a ninety-grand hand-delivered munition like that out in the sticks here, that left two equally bad options. Since we weren't hearing calls against armor, though, that probably left out the Railgun Abrams refits.

    That meant laser weapons. Fuck. Looks like I knew what the Canolas were armed with now.

    "This is battalion command," a radio call came in. "Erebus company, what's your status?"

    "Holding back, spread out and mounted," Fischl replied, his voice raspy over the set. "We can go on your order."

    "There's two platoons of tracked IFVs running hell for leather towards Dullahan Company, and they've got some Institute specials taking point. Standby to detach anti-armor assets."

    "Standing by, aye." Fischl called out, before changing channels to legally distribute the orders on down. We weren't supposed to hear this, but I'd made damn sure my cards were up to snuff and my codebooks were fresh: hearing more was rarely bad. "Ruiz, get a squad up and on the wire near Dullahan, and give them extra rockets."

    "Aye, sir."

    As orders flew, I kept waiting. Two platoons of IFVs wasn't a lot; especially considering those were probably some bone-cheap BMPs. Diet Russian surplus wouldn't be too threatening, considering how bad the drivers were likely to be. The real hammer-blow was somewhere else, I could tell. I could practically smell it.

    Then something real fucking big blew up.

    Okay, no. I could describe this more technically. Something very large, probably propane or gasoline from the fireball, and definitely very deadly, decided today was the day for some excitement. As my helmet tried to scan the incoming calls, I felt Naomi wince as her motions rocked the truckbed.

    "Erebus, they managed to blow a tanker truck a few streets down," Battalion command said, barely calm. "Plug the hole, quickly: Basilisk HQ is not responding, and we're about to-"

    A blast of static cut the comms, and I growled. "We're getting jammed. Ruiz, we need-"

    "We're going in." Ruiz said, hands tightening on his rifle. "Roetenburger, go- everyone else, follow me!"

    Naomi's grin was feral under her helmet, and she jumped up, slinging her grenade launcher over the bow of the truck. "It's time!"

    As the truck started flying forward, I just growled, limbering up the machine gun in my arms. I was going to say 'we need to start looking for Basilisk Company', but I couldn't fault the desire to get stuck in. As Roetenburger plowed through three white picket fences and drifted around a corner, my heart stopped dead. Two vics of militia in trucks, just like us, were trying to get stuck in- and our drivers weren't good enough to be hot on our tail.

    It was old instinct to snap the barrel of my gun up, the front site lining up on the engine blocks of the technicals charging at us. As the first whispers of incoming bullets started whistling past my helmet, I pulled the trigger. It nearly blinded Ruiz, and did make Naomi howl, but my first burst knocked out a target.

    Then I realized that recoil was a bitch.

    Normally, I wasn't a true heavy weapons operator. Back in the SEALs, I had specialized in being a driver and suit operator: two very tech-intensive jobs, when you were working with the old Amaterasu models. Naturally, this meant I spent most of my time with guns handling rifles. When you were wrapped up in an Amaterasu, all rifles felt pretty much the same: pull trigger, gun go bang. I'd spent a little time with the M240s and the fancier M400 guns, learning how to do some of the fancy tricks like walking fire with a belt-fed machine gun. I hadn't spent a lot of time beyond the basics learning how to use the assorted library of missiles, or the heavy machine gun. I knew theory.

    Theory didn't save me from the recoil of a Browning being enough to throw me ass-over-teakettle off the side of the technical, cracking down into the road as Ruiz and Naomi sped off. Still, I'd fallen out of trucks in armor before. It didn't stop me from slewing my gun over to the next one and twisting enough to get the stock in my shoulder to start hitting it too. It might have been a bucking, inaccurate spray, but the majority of the bullets tore into the truck and it started spewing steam and black smoke. Insert Cummings engine joke here if you want, I was too busy getting to my feet and diving for cover after the opening shots. As bullets pattered down around the drainage ditch I was hiding in, I considered my options. They didn't look good.

    Then a few houses over, a barrage of machine-gun fire swept the road, and my problems became meat.

    "Hey there!"

    Sticking my head out carefully, I looked at the militiaman in hunting camo with a cyan sash and armband as identifiers on him. I categorically refused to consider those dumb antlers he was wearing as a real sign of allegiance: that was just, well, no.

    "Hey," I grumbled out, getting out of the ditch. Dull brown water covered me, and I sighed melodramatically as it poured off. "Partisan, I presume?"

    "Yeah, I'm with the Scourers," he said, as if being part of a temporary glorified street gang was anything to write home about.

    I nodded along, before a call incoming light pinged my vision. Holding up a hand, I took it. "This is Archangeles," I said, responding to the ping.

    "Ruiz here, what the fuck happened?"

    "Recoil."

    My deadpan narration didn't seem to win any friends. "You in the shitter."

    "No, some of the locals have a machine gun house near here. Looks like they probably could have handled it."

    "Well, round them up and get moving. Basilisk got shot to shit, we're splicing into the line here to backstop them."

    Nodding to an invisible officer, I jerked my head at the partisan. "Got it. I'll round the guys here up," I said, before making the 'circle the wagons' gesture. As a platoon of partisans poured out of the houses with a random assortment of small arms, I just flicked on my external helmet speakers. "Good news, everyone!" I called out. "We need you guys to move up and keep the buildings secure near where we're putting the front line!"

    First rule of thumb I'd learned from Yosuf, back before- well. Back in the hospital, really. Never, ever, ask irregulars to fight in the open. They didn't have the gear for it, and often not the backbone either. Instead, post them up in houses, barns, or with vehicles they could use to flee and regroup. With something to defend it would harden their resolve, and the additional cover and concealment would make light many shortcomings in equipment.

    Kind of weird to think Yosuf was probably dead, so I wouldn't. War was a dangerous business, and we both knew it. "An occupational hazard," he'd say as we drank mint tea in the little kebab shop off Grand River and Warren.

    Focus, Tomas. Focus.

    "Come in, Ruiz." I called out on the radio softly, advancing forward as the partisans spread well out, sticking to three-man packets. "This is Archangeles."

    "I'm here."

    "I've got the partisans, they're going to be holding buildings. We can probably afford to stay out from under cover- where does Fischl want to put us?"

    "He doesn't care- we just need to take best defensible positions and hold on. The engineering teams are working, now, and our grenadiers stopped them cold."

    I smiled, but a soft shudder went over me. Dropping to one knee, I snapped my gun right, up towards the horizon. It was a drone- if any drone were ever 'just' a drone. Three rounds got it to dodge, and another three managed to clip it: a death sentence for some light quadcopter. Feeling that same shiver again, I shook my head lightly. "Is Naomi alright?"

    "She's fine. Sticking to me like glue, though."

    "Good." I muttered, as a familiar truck- now with a pair of bullet holes in the side panel and a bent-up back bench- rolled into view. As Roetenburger pulled up to a stop, I just jumped back in the back like nothing happened. Killing my radio and going to speakers, I smiled under my helmet. Ruiz was growing on me, like most junior commissioned officers and mold did. Friendly mold at that, though.

    Then a pair of arms wrapped around me, clad in a power exoskeleton, too small to be a soldier fully grown. "Tomas, you idiot."

    Hand still warm from shooting, I just patted Naomi's helmet, feeling it compress on the gorget to bounce on her head. "Hey, don't worry. I'm back."

    "Don't leave again," Naomi ordered, ramming her helmet into my plate carrier. As maudlin as it may seem, I agreed with her.

    Combat didn't used to set my heart aflutter- what had changed to make it so?

    (AN: current events recontextualize some of the statements made in this story, which is in no way a terrible feeling for an author hah.)
     
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    There was something about Naomi's gaze that made me concerned when we got up to where the troops had tentatively started stacking out the wire. It was a black look, and as I kept looking, I felt it too. There wasn't really much cover out behind that last line of houses, except for a tree line some two hundred ish meters out, but that tree line was dense and made me twitchy. It wouldn't stop heavy ordnance or my Browning, but I'd consider it at least mildly resistant to rifle fire. When all we had were rifles? This was a problem.

    Our collective nerves was enough to infect Lieutenant Ruiz, who was being very particular about where and how our technicals were parked. I had cut my active link to the battalion to focus, though, as idiots were trying to do the dumbest shit.

    "Corporal Watts, if you don't stop sitting next to that window, some sniper's gonna take an invitation to put a bullet through it."

    As the idiot soldier moved away from the window in the trailer that was getting quickly repurposed as a fighting hide, I snorted. The sandbags were too thin, and wouldn't stop too much. If we had a proper HESCO or something, I'd feel better, but we weren't supposed to bang up these houses and trailers too much. That was the theory at least: in practice, the assorted soldiers 'checking for civilians' that I'd sent in were really seeing how much shit these houses would eat in the fighting.

    Laws and conventions of war were fine and all, but I was willing to skirt them a little right now for two reasons. Reason one, the Institute had previously demonstrated their opinion on heavy weapons was "we don't care", so odds were we'd be having to worry about them blasting those houses anyway. Reason two, and far more pressing, was that nobody was getting hurt. The partisans had managed to get everyone out, or get them recruited. There were probably tent camps in some other bunches of woodline on one side of the line or another that were full of the women and children, but I really didn't care too much. Occupational hazard, that.

    It took three hours before I was vaguely satisfied with the layout of the platoon, and four hours until Ruiz stopped bitching about the partisans. They were an independent-minded bunch, and actually getting them to not clump up ten to a house was an exercise in frustration. Still, their pair of belt-fed machine guns- an illegal M60 from 'Nam, and a stolen Dushka- were both set up with the lion's share of our improvised fortifications. Three deep sandbags wouldn't stop much over a fifty cal, but it did tighten up the danger cone.

    The thing about armor, fortifications, and everything protective is that very rarely will your protection stop everything. There's a point where the incoming is undefendable. Not even the strongest powered armor in the world could eat a mortar shell, tanks still ate shit when they got a love tap to the roof, and there wasn't a battleship big enough to keep fighting after a Moskit turned their armor into a face hardened cutlery set. However, not everything coming at something was that dangerous, really. Most of the time, designers had an upper limit to protect against, and everything over that was a shrug.

    That's overmatch. The thing is, though, as idiots scream about overmatch all day, the fact is war isn't perfect. People miss their shots, tanks get stolen by tractors, and sometimes the enemy paints a fake firing loop five feet to the left of the real one. Those misses aren't perfectly nonlethal, though: they'll still screw shit up.

    In this case, my big fear was autocannon shells. Ninety-ish grams of octol didn't sound like a lot, but it would throw lethal fragmentation for nearly fifteen meters in a fairly narrow cone if airburst, or blast a damn big hole in a house. Presuming they were using airburst shells going off on the outside of the house, the walls would slow down one shot. The next four would then go sailing through without too much issue, and then go into the sandbags. My troops, who were actually manning the gun, would probably be mostly fine as the sandbags ate the fragmentation or slowed it enough to clank off their armor. The partisans in the basement would likewise be fire, and then come up to help beat off the infantry.

    Still, to my extreme surprise, nothing happened. After the initial fighting retreat as we kicked them out, things stayed quiet. Too quiet. As Ruiz made himself comfortable in the garage of one of the shitty little buildings we were using as hides, I grumbled at him as I opened up an MRE.

    "Something's up."

    The response was instantaneous. "No shit."

    Naomi grunted lightly. "I don't see what you're complaining about."

    "So, this is only rumors," Ruiz said, faceplate of his helmet up in a full open as he tried and failed to not to choke his pizza slice to death "but we've got an AWACS II flying out of somewhere classified to fuck doing SIGINT and something's paralyzing the Peacekeepers."

    "Okay, and?" Naomi asked curiously, delicately eating her tuna with a bit of siracha mayo she'd mixed up in one of my bullet casings from the back of the truck. I didn't know how she wasn't absolutely choking on the cordite flavor, but she claimed to have washed it out first. Kids. "I'm not seeing it- so what that we're reading their mail?"

    "They're acting like the dog that caught the mail van," Ruiz explained, "only the mail van isn't stopping."

    "I'm still not getting it."

    Sighing, I put my oar back into the conversation. "What it means is we're reading their mail, and they're not responding to us reading their mail, which in turn means either everyone involved is an idiot or they haven't realized we're inside their high command's OODA loop."

    Sighing, Naomi mimed out a few fingerbangs. "Me no speaky officer," she explained cartoonishly. "Bad guy dumb?"

    "Hold on, I had to take a class in this," Ruiz joked, now having finally found the trick to eating MRE pizza. "Okay, so you're going to the crayon store-"

    "-me LARP not Marine-"

    "-and someone sees you leave your house for it. So they go, jump on the highway, and you're coming up to the store, but they come screaming off the on-ramp to cut you off, get parked first, and buy up all your favorite flavor."

    I nodded. Actually a pretty good explanation of OODA interference, right there.

    "This is, however, patently useless to us ground-pounders," Naomi complained. "since we don't know shit about how this affects the guys throwing bullets at us."

    "I didn't get a read-in, alright?" Ruiz grumped. "I'm an Army lieutenant, on secondment to a National Guard unit, who showed up three days ago. The only reason I'm in this fucked-up civil war is because I wanted to visit Grandma when I was on leave."

    "I can proudly say none of this is my fault." Naomi chipped in. "I'm just here for the food."

    I said nothing, mostly because I knew that if my name went down in textbooks it would be right next to such luminaries as that fellow named Gavrilo who shot a certain Austrian stuffed shirt who got lost in Sarajevo that one time.

    "So back on topic," I said, wheeling the conversation around to more pleasant topics, "the Institute and Peacekeepers are doing a dumb."

    "Yeah," Ruiz said, fishing around for some jalapeno cheese spread. "My guess is that whatever they consider high command isn't getting orders out on time, or there's some other logistics issues holding them up. Maybe the redneck meat shields are throwing a stink, maybe they don't have enough trucks, maybe they can't buy enough food."

    "Maybe the Army's finally mobilized." I opined, making Ruiz start.

    "Wait, you didn't know?"

    "Know what?"

    "They started last week: Fort Benning has been running overtime to get everyone shipped up to Fort Campbell."

    Naomi looked confused, so I decided to clarify. "They're forming up on the west end of Kentucky, and probably going to road march north. If they hit resistance, then it's going to choke to death on Abrams tanks and that, uh, what was that thing they just introduced?"

    "The Scott. They finally replaced the Bradley."

    I snorted. "Bullshit, pull the other one!"

    "It's true! Forty mil gun, four missile tubes in the turret, enough room for eight in the back or six rolling racks for us, and proof against thirty mill to three hundred fifty meters once you put the side-pack arrays on, and the APS is theoretically capable of stopping a tank dart."

    Naomi looked at Ruiz, before smiling. "Wait, were these the ones with the derpy little dent in the troop compartment and the rear ramps that you needed to use the meter-long lever to make sure sealed right?"

    "I haven't been in one yet." Ruiz admitted shamefully.

    I was about to join in the joking, but something in my jaw twinged- a sixth sense for danger. Holding up a fist, I tossed the remains of dinner down and stamped the little flameless heater tablet out, slamming the visor of my helmet down and cranking on the motor to full.

    "All squads, sound off," I ordered, snappish.

    Silence. Total silence.

    "Squad one, sound off." I repeated myself, turning up my transmission power. Then, with that wiggle in my tooth still at work, I turned up my gain.

    A faint, almost imperceptible, hissing filled my ears. As I started swearing, Naomi followed suit before hissing. "We're getting jammed. They've got us shadowboxed- we need to move."

    "Follow me," I muttered, into the mic. Fortunately, whatever had us padlocked couldn't stop local coms, and as I led us to the truck, Roetenburger woke up from where he was napping in the front seat.

    "Where to?" he asked, straightening out his flak jacket.

    "Drive us up to squad one, quietly." I said back, glaring out over to the woods. "If I was in charge over there, I'd be waiting for everyone to get nice and sleepy once twilight's down, and hit them with an artillery barrage. A couple of mortar teams would make short work of the forward lines, and then it's charge the breach with APCs as fast as you can."

    "So we're giving them the first row of houses?" Ruiz asked, frowning.

    "No, we're getting the partisans out and back in the ditches," I replied, tapping my pauldrons. "If they've got eighty mil tubes, they're only dangerous if they drop the thing right on top of us or use an anti-structure round. If they have one-twenty mil tubes, well, we're fucked but they'll be less fucked: the ditches should be out of fragmentation range."

    The nice thing about living in Michigan was that everything, and I do mean everything, had to worry about drainage ditches. Water was a fact of life, and getting it out of the way was incredibly important. What that meant, though, was that in front of all the houses here were two- to four-foot-deep ditches. More than deep enough, in other words, to turn into hasty fighting positions.

    Once I got to Squad One's house, it was a sharp rap on the door to get the watch-standers to start moving around. A few short, sharp orders got the partisans out of the house, even if they were deeply unhappy about it. Squad two was next, Naomi keeping her grenade launcher at a high ready, when a burst of tracer fire flew out of the woodline.

    I wasn't in time to get to Squad Two's position, but we'd gotten lucky: they were lighting up a house we weren't in. I'd checked it over earlier, and even got Squad Three to look at it seriously, but even if it had been built of breezeblocks the floor wasn't stable enough to hold our exoskeletons. As the tracers were joined by a few grenades hitting it, there was a ghost of a smile on my face: they didn't even have mortars! A forty mil grenade launcher was well below what I thought their top end was armed with!

    Now that the assault started, I set my transmission power to max, and started broadcasting. "All squads, hold fire. Make them guess which one you're in, and for the love of god wait until you have targets!"

    Jostling around, Ruiz behind me was trying to get a bearing on where, exactly, that fire was coming from. "Rotenburger, stop the truck!" As I nearly flew into the windshield, Ruiz kept going. "LT. Ruiz, requesting fires, target two-eight-one to two-eight-five, range two hundred forty meters off my signal, target is in woods please arm accordingly."

    A moment passed, in which Rotenburger resumed driving, and I just hissed. They'd opened up on Squad Two's house, and they were returning fire sporadically. I didn't know if it was because they were having issues finding targets or if they were dead, but it wasn't long before that house was getting suppressed and blown to hell.

    Then news came in from on high. "This is Company Fire Control, firing on call."

    As a handful of shells sailed into the forest, I watched Naomi rack a round into her grenade launcher. "I've got a truck spotted, you want me to-"

    "-This is Battalion Fire Control, firing on call-"

    "-blast it?" she asked, before another wave of fire hit, the battalion's 105mm guns tearing into it, wave after wave of fire leaving the woods a shell-pocked mess. As a tree fell over, the fire seemed to stop for a minute.

    "This is Ruiz, good fires, thank you."

    In the distance, a pair missiles launched off a drone; probably an abortive attempt at counterbattery fire. My nerves were still keyed up, though, and as I scanned the bushes, a flicker of flame caught my eye.

    "Naomi, did they bag that truck?"

    "Yeah."

    "Good." I muttered. "Now, where's the real hit?"

    "The real hit?"

    "Mmm-hmm." I affirmed. "They had to be shooting at us for a reason. That wasn't a sloppy trigger finger, either."

    "This is Cerberus Company, they've gotten around us!" a frantic call came in on the battalion net. "Erebus, get ready-"

    "Found it" Ruiz growled. "Rotenburger, get us parked and get to cover! All squads, get ready to move- they're flanking us!"

    I was out of the truck before it stopped moving as Rotenburger threw it behind a house I hadn't seen before. Kicking down the door, I frantically got in, staying away from the windows. The kitchen window had a good view of the road, and more importantly the bathroom door had a good view of the kitchen window: a perfect place for me to pop a squat and dig my feet in. Naomi grabbed the living room-bedroom angle, and Ruiz was frantically barking orders for Squad One to get their partisans spread out.

    "Wait for the second car." Naomi told me, getting her grenade launcher ready. "If you can, aim for the top edge: their armor doesn't replace fluid at the top."

    "Wilco." I muttered.

    The enemy started rumbling past our house moments later, a single Canola leading a pile of militia in Toyotas. "Scrap that, aim for the IFV," I snapped, watching it pass through from the doorway to the window of the master bedroom. As it turned the corner, it briefly entered my gunsight. "Now!"

    With that, I opened up. Amateur machine-gunners just held the trigger down, but I knew better. Three round tap, come back on target. Three round tap, come back on target. The .50 BMG I was slinging was no joke- and more importantly, it was quickly joined by the friendly Dushka that was Squad One and their partisans.

    Then I heard a screaming, pulsing whine, and instinctively closed my eyes. I knew it wouldn't do a damn thing, but if you survived the pulse laser, then the shrapnel was still a risk.

    "Lase, lase, lase!" I yelled, visor automatically darkening as a rolling blast of thunder came out of the Canola. The Dushka fell silent as I heard the rattling of ammunition cookoff once the sound of the thunderclap cleared. This didn't stop me from shooting, though, as I started tracing my aim up towards the protective barrel assembly. The laser didn't need it, but it served a far more important purpose: to hold the protective shutters. Jam those closed, and it would force them to manually override the fire control to shoot, and along the way disable aim stabilization.

    Then four grenades crashed into the Canola, high-explosive shaped charges tearing great, bleeding rents in it's cover layer. However, Naomi's warnings held true: even as the vehicle bled great gouts of blue fluid, it scabbed over with organic electric ripples quickly. Again, I adjusted my aim, bullets now slamming into the scabs. The crystalline patches weren't as strong as the cover plate, theoretically.

    As my belt started dancing, I ducked and ran as the turret slowly started moving in to bear on us. "Out of the house, Ruiz!" I roared, grabbing him under one shoulder and hurling him out a rear window. I was shortly after him, and then the thunderclap spoke again, making a line straight through the damn house as it carved mere wood and sheetrock into flames and rubble. Naomi managed to get out seconds later, the laser's path having missed her by being on the wrong side of the house entirely. As she frantically rammed new grenades into the tube, I winced.

    "We've got to move fast here, come on now!" I roared, bulling through a low wooden fence and behind a neighbor's shed. As the Canola followed us like a damn dog, a part of me started laughing inside when the rest of the platoon opened up on the trucks.

    "Damnit, Tomas, pipe down!" Naomi yelled, punching me in the arm hard enough to initiate the auto-stabilization. As the Canola looked like nothing other than a stuck pig, I just gasped as an idiot officer opened the commander's hatch to take a look at what the hell was going around when he did the dumb.

    Then Ruiz shot him.

    "Right, time to go before they find where their brains went." I snapped, pointing along an un-wrecked bit of fence. The Canola was still after us, trying to wiggle between the house and our parked truck, before slamming into the later and just accepting the collision. By that time, though, we were already two houses down, and cutting around to take it on the flank again.

    Seriously, how new was this driver that three exo-infantry were managing to outmaneuvered him? As Ruiz moved towards the house, spraying a few militia who had the poor sense to try and hide behind their trucks, Naomi and I went back to blasting the shit out of that thing, trying and failing to put it down.

    By the time we got out to the street, it looked like the entire militia platoon following it was either dead, wounded, or faking it. I didn't care, as I ran up hell for leather behind where I knew the Canola was, before hearing it's laser go off for a third time as it wasted some random shed. Dropping my Browning into it's sling, I whipped out a small wrecking bar, and grinned.

    Not a lot of exosuit operators remembered why a crowbar was standard issue anymore, but back in the day there were major issues with getting systems to properly release or de-tension. The solution to manually unhinge them was generally a chunk of steel for one or two of your friends to haul on to pry you out of the PRETZLE, or another suit operator. Now, though, it was going to be a very different kind of can opener.

    Ramming it into the top of the Canola's back ramp, I slammed it with the heel of my hand's power actuator, feeling it bite through the rubber seal. These things were newer than my time with the Peacekeepers, but their CRBN sealing was always subpar: the thing probably only had a travel latch and a rattling support to stop it from opening. Balling my other hand into a fist, I delivered a wind-up blow to the crowbar.

    Between my mass and hydraulically-assisted strength, the ramp's latch broke, and it took no real effort to pry it down. The few remaining soldiers back there turned, cheap submachine guns at the ready, but behind me was Naomi- and her sword was out. Running past me with a hostile laugh, it didn't take any work to see her start slamming it through the bodies in there- because that's what they were. Dead bodies that hadn't realized what happened yet. The few abortive gunshots were soaked up by armor, that same blue crystal-blood pouring down the front of her coat from a few idealistic shots before being silenced. Three swiped disabled the turret, and then down the way another Toyota came trundling along.

    I didn't even need to think about picking up my gun and smothering it in fire. They didn't even try and run, which was the sad thing. A shocked entry, before a panicked trip to the afterlife. Better than their brethren in the woods, I suppose, doomed to die from a barrage.

    As the gunshots died out and the moans of the wounded started, a horrifying grimace painted my face under a blood-splattered helmet. "Sound off, who's not dead?" I called out.

    "First squad, five casualties," A sergeant called, his voice tight. "Maybe six."

    "Second squad, one casualty, three suit failures. Our partisans ate shit, though."

    "Third squad, two casualties."

    Seven casualties out of a platoon of forty-one, nominally. Not great, not terrible. "Ruiz, call it in please."

    "This is Ruiz of Erebus Company calling for medivac, over," Ruiz said into the battalion net. There was a blank moment, before a call came back.

    "We'll send a truck, how many estimated casualties?"

    "Seven of mine, unknown number of partisans and enemy. They drove straight into us."

    "We'll send two trucks. Cerberus got beat up; they had a pair of tanks."

    Ruiz just started swearing. "Come the fuck on!" he yelled into his local net. "I already gave them my grenadiers!"

    "Relax, sir," I said, taking a minute to manually untoggled the emergency laser protection visor that had dropped down. "This went better than I expected."

    "What did you expect?" Ruiz asked, giving me a stare.

    "We get used to stop a cheap impersonation of a battalion tactical group and somehow have to win this thing ourselves."

    "Glad to see you're as optimistic about our chances."

    "You saw what happened when we got in too close- these guys are chumps."

    Our banter was interrupted by Naomi yelling. "Score!"

    "Whatcha got?" I asked, curious.

    "Their logbook- and get this! They have a WHAM unit somewhere around here!"

    Ruiz looked at me, and I shrugged. "Heavy weapons guys."

    "It even has their call-in frequencies!" Naomi grinned madly. "Betcha I can hack their net with this!"

    "We should probably call up the battalion's intel team-" Ruiz said, before Naomi started playing with her helmet. It only took a moment, but I could see her form go limp, before falling to her knees amidst the carcasses in the Canola.

    I was moving in, careful of the remains of humans spread everywhere. "Naomi?" I asked, cocking my head to the side.

    "They're talking about mutiny," she said, before looking straight at me. "but they don't know how."
     
  • Threadmarks
    • The Pits of Damnation
  • Threadmarks

    • View: https://youtu.be/Jb7mTSlcCfQ


    Once I'd been sufficiently hosed off, and hosed off Naomi in turn, we were quickly moved to the battalion's intel center. Most people would imagine this as some big room covered in computers and screens, with some fancy holo-table in the middle of it while officers and NCOs bustled about doing data things and drinking more coffee than God had ever intended one man to put down his gullet as they divined the future by the patterns of fallen brass by a machine gun or the height of dirt coming off the splash of an artillery shell.

    Instead, we got the inside of a McDonald's with a conspiracy board on one wall while the kitchen pumped out coffee and whatever else was in the coolers as some dude in fatigues handed us mac-whatevers as we walked in. Punching the faceplate up on my helmet, I accepted three and a giant cup of coffee, before putting in nine packets of sugar. Naomi tried to get the same, but I just slowly moved my hand over the coffee.

    "I am not too young for coffee," she snapped at me.

    "No, you're too young for bad coffee. Specialist, when was the last time you changed the grounds?"

    "About five minutes ago, sir," the guy behind the counter rattled off.

    My hand left the coffee cup, and Naomi scooped it up without blinking, before pouring in enough milk to fill the thing to the brim. As she stirred it with a plastic knife, I just laughed and tossed her a mac-whatever.

    "Warrant Archangeles and assistant, get in here!" someone snapped from the dining room. Working our way in, I just assumed a standard parade rest, feeling the tensioners in the armor set themselves as I powered down to econo-mode. It was generally considered a mark of professionalism to be able to power down your ICE in meetings: great shame was reserved for people who 'farted', by having to spin up their engines to power up batteries.

    As we walked in, we were greeted by a very tired sergeant, who asked zero questions about the pile of food I was carrying. "I'd say sit down, but we're running low on furniture as it is," he said, before going back to his 'desk', running through a mess of catalogs and two iPads duct taped together to a battery pack.

    I nodded, before finding a spare table and putting my food on it. Not the coffee, though. That would leave my hands if we came under artillery bombardment, and not a second earlier. This was going to be a long night, and juicing up on caffeine would be better than some of the other stimulants I could get. As I did that, though, a sharp-faced young lieutenant with their hair in a tight bun started looking over us.

    "So you're the ones with possible enemy defectors?" they asked pointedly, and I nodded.

    "Yes. We have hard-copy unencrypted notes on their existence, and Naomi is picking up and decoding their radio chatter live."

    "And we're sure she's a reliable source?"

    Naomi bristled a little, pointing to the stains on her armor where several of the bullet-eating cells had been punctured. "Do the bullet holes suggest otherwise?"

    "I think," I said carefully, making sure to defuse this fight before the bitch-slinging could come out, "that it wouldn't hurt anyone's feelings to verify this information with the battalion's radios."

    "Give me a flash drive, then, and I'll get you the hashes. The radio's a low-intercept though, and it might take a minute to walk it onto the signal-shift pattern."

    Grumbling, the lieutenant threw Naomi a flash drive, before staring at her. "How do I know you won't load a kill program onto it to brick our systems?"

    "How do I know you don't already have a kill program on it to kill my suit?" Naomi asked back.

    "Please don't," I said flatly. "Lieutenant, this is approved by Colonel Waver. She wouldn't be with me if there was any chance of this going pear-shaped, and frankly speaking I'm here to make sure her good behavior stays good. Naomi, do not antagonize the lieutenant."

    The two continued glaring at each other, while I just sighed a little. Still, Naomi handed back the flash drive, before going over to a pile of six laptops surrounding an office chair. Putting herself into it, the lieutenant put it in the far right, before scowling a little and then transferring it to the far left. Presumably it swept as clean.

    "When you tune in, don't expect too much chatter," Naomi said lightly. "If they're sticking to doctrine, right now they've fallen back and are renewing armor packages."

    "No, I'm getting chatter." The lieutenant said. "Do they normally have an emissions doctrine?"

    "Not a ton of one…"

    "Call me Fielding," The lieutenant- now Lieutenant Fielding- said brusquely as they went over some things. "I'm getting a lot of chatter- you're right, they're not happy at all. A lot of complaining about something called the Improbability Envelope."

    I blanched, before patting that instinct down and grabbing a mac-whatever off the table. Unwrapping it, I tried to wrap my mind around the creation in my hand: a hamburger patty, an egg patty, some chopped onions, and two tons of Big Mac sauce. An absolute fuck-fuck fest of a food, but as I ate it the result was better than MREs, mostly because it was still pretty hot.

    An Improbability Envelope though, that was big shit. While it sounded like some sort of calculatory suite, what it actually was scared me witless. A lot of Institute projects were sorted by double keyword blinds, which then got pulled from the pool when a successful product with them got named. In this case, "improbability" meant it was a designated transportation system, "envelope" meant it was a high danger controlled substance chemical. Chlorine trifluoride was the one we usually assumed they were carrying, or FOOF (both used in laser manufacture), but they were rated for anything, really: gasoline, rocket propellent, high-stress oxidizers, biological agents-

    "Fuck," I muttered. "Are you certain that they're Improbability Envelopes?"

    "Yep." Fielding said, looking over their intercept screens. "Sergeant Wiles, do you have Improbability Engines on file?"

    "Searching now, sir."

    "Don't bother, I know those things," I said, growling. "They're bulk hazardous fluid tankers. Could just be gasoline, could be some chemical they need to fix laser weapons, could be fucking nerve gas for all we know."

    "Shit," Fielding muttered. "Yeah no, I'm taking that to the Major. That's fucking huge."

    "What sort of complaints?" Naomi asked. "They're out of tac-net range for me, I can't hear anything on my sets."

    "It's late, and they can't detach from their current formation. It was supposed to be in… three days ago, it seems."

    "So we've got a 'due by' date, and we know they're probably burning rubber to get it here," I hypothesized. "What happened to the enemy battalion in Kalamazoo we were supposed to bait out?"

    "Signals and the AWACS II claim they've only dispatched two companies, heavy on technicals and light on anything else," Fielding muttered. "They had a company of motorized infantry here stiffened up by a company of light mechanized, mixed Canolas and BMPs. Parisians think they've got three companies of mechanized back in Kalamzaoo, but it looks more and more likely they're shell gaming us and it's one company of mechanized and two more companies of motorized technicals."

    "Nobody wants to ride in to Kalamazoo guns blazing, but this response is half-assed on every level," I thought out loud, tapping my fingers against my paper cup of coffee.

    "You're telling me," Fielding muttered. "Sergeant, I'm going to go run this over to the Major. Warrant Archangeles, can you stick around until I get back?"

    "Sure thing," I said while settling down to eat the rest of my MacAbominations. It only took about five minutes for Fielding to come back, with, of all things, the Major in tow. While it wasn't exactly dignified, I did manage to get a salute off, even if it did leave a little smear of Big Mac sauce on the brow of my helmet.

    "At ease, Warrant," the Major said. "I'm Major Shah, and this sounds pretty big."

    "Pretty big is an understatement, sir," I said, tidying my hands and brow on a dishcloth that was on my food table- one presumably for this exact purpose. "Those could be chemical weapons carriers."

    "Could be," Fielding said, their voice careful. "They could also be fuel, reactive chemicals, or something else entirely. I finished getting them out of product catalog, they're rated to haul nearly anything."

    "I think the odds of them being full of fuel is fairly negligible," an as-yet unnamed captain said, looking over at me- probably the head of the intelligence section here. "You don't waste strategic haulers like those on something low-value, especially since we know they've been commandeering civil assets for it."

    "This leaves me at an impasse," Shah said carefully. "If I assume they're full of, say, mustard gas or VX precursors, then we've failed our entire job in disrupting supplies to the front lines. Their position dictates we send a fairly light force, without supporting fires, negating our main advantage."

    I could feel, almost as if through some sixth sense, Naomi's willingness to volunteer. I could also tell, through practical experience this time, that she'd cock it up. "Sir, if need be, there's enough of the power armor platoon from Erebus Company that we could hypothetically make an attack on them. Get in, hit the trucks with heavy weapons, put time/distance delay explosives on the tanks, run out to minimum safe if it's a nerve agent, and blow them."

    I could feel Shah's smirk. "I approve of the enthusiasm, but fortunately, we have a better option. Word came in from Headquarters: Canada is now allowing US Air Force combat aircraft to conduct overflights."

    "Sir?" I asked. "I'm afraid I'm missing a piece of the puzzle."

    "We have airstrikes for this."

    Naomi's head fell into her palm hard enough to clank her face shield down. I was tempted to join her.

    "We received this information from a hacked radio signal from a unit preparing to desert, correct?" Shah asked rhetorically. "Captain Tahir, you mentioned a priority on retrieving any would-be deserters or defectors, correct?"

    "Correct."

    "Well then, I believe we have quite possibly the biggest and most important batch of deserters in recent memory here. Can you work together a short operation to use Captain Fischl and Erebus Company to conduct a limited maneuver to retrieve our wayward sheep?"

    Captain Tahir- the apparent head of the intelligence section- nodded. "We can whip something up: being overstrength a company is not a bad place to be, and the partisans around here are thick-skinned enough to trust to hold the lines long enough to put reserves in."

    "Good man: do what you can in four hours, and someone wake the armored infantry platoon in six."

    Naomi squinted. "Armored infantry? Ah, sir."

    Shah's grin went from being invisible to very visible. "Would you prefer being referred to as leg infantry?"

    Backpedaling, Naomi tried to spin her way out. "I was under the impression we were the closest available thing to specialists here."

    "You are. However, since I'm not willing to attempt to use you like Special Forces, the only other options are Armored Infantry and Exosuit Cavalry," Shah said, his eye bright against his dusky skin. "Seeing as you're currently riding around in a mess of commandeered Fords, you're not cavalry."

    "That would be Toyotas," I quipped, seeing as this was a teaching moment.

    "Only if they had mortars and autocannons, Warrant Archangeles," Shah said. "Still, we're left with Armored Infantry. Go stake out a good place to sleep with the rest of the platoon- I'll send your father along in a moment."

    To my eternal surprise, Naomi walked out. It took a solid two minutes of mostly paper-shuffling, but I didn't leave yet. Shah was still here- and he was half-glaring at me with a monstrous intensity.

    "Archangeles."

    "Yes, sir?"

    "Those troops, they're a proprietary Peacekeeper project, aren't they," he said, face now tight.

    "Yes sir. According to Naomi, they're WHAM. Weapons: Heavy Assault and Maneuver. Same program as her, but different gear and training."

    Now he was pacing around, spitting fire. "What sort of fucked-up godforsaken war makes children into supersoldier weapons I have to debate trying to save or kill?"

    "I've been asking myself the same question, to be honest," I said. "Naomi didn't exactly get here easily: she saved my ass after an op went pear-shaped on me."

    "What did they do to her?"

    My face pinched. "This isn't formally need to know information, sir, but I'm not comfortable talking about it in public."

    Shah glared at a table, before pulling out a pack of smokes and lighting up. "Tell me everything."

    "Genetically modified, 'peak of human potential' sort of bullshit," I finally started explaining. "Someone wanted to militarize a designer baby. They fucked it up, used some tech that I know is classified, and saved the batches. Then they got trained up in the stupidest, most injury-prone way possible. Out of a hundred- and fifty-person class, she's implied there were at least fifty washouts, probably more."

    "Exact words, if you can?" Tahir asked.

    "It was a joke about posing for a photo- two hundred red eyes," I said, grimacing. "The albinism is a side-effect of the genetic fuckery. They all have it."

    A dark chill went around the room, and I could feel Tahir's rage building. "How many people do you think are in that WHAM unit?" he asked.

    "I don't know," I said flatly.

    Shah growled, nearly pinching his cigarette in half. "And I don't care. Archangeles, I've heard rumors there might be a specialist operation going on to disable a key point target after this offensive maneuver. If it has anything- anything at all- to do with this, this, abominable act against God and man- then you have my backing. Take everything that isn't nailed down, and drive a fucking nuke up their ass."

    "It might well be," I said, letting the anger start to come out. I wasn't sure where it came from, but it was there, flowing hot. "Naomi said she knew where the rest of her cadre were, some of them disabled. She's wanted to rescue them from day one."

    "Consider this a dry run, then," Shah said. "Tahir, can you get intel on everything with the drone boys?"

    "Their IADS has been going to shit outside laser weapons, and the USAF is flying their drones up and around here too. I won't even need the recon platoon."

    "Good," Shah said. "I don't care what's in that fucking truck, tell the Chairs to turn it and whatever road it's on into a living example of what happens when Uncle Sam decides you're about to make it war crime o'clock. As far as I'm concerned, we're just paying off interest on their back tab. Archangeles, I don't care how many fucking people want out, get them out. If they've got a unit, they've probably got handlers, or officers."

    "If they have handlers or officers, they got shot by the kids before they made these calls," I said, calmly. "And if they didn't, I'll be perfectly happy to teach them how to handle an escape attempt by hostile humanis generis."

    "Good. You deploy in six hours. Make the bastards pay."
     
  • Threadmarks
    • Naomi Remembers
  • Threadmarks
    • Working my way out of the McIntellegence Center, I started off towards what appeared to be the edge of the secured perimeter. The battalion headquarters didn't look like it had a lot of people around it who didn't know what they were doing, but eventually I got flagged down by a very mobile corporal and told where my platoon was mustering up at- right behind the old Methodist church.

    Now that we were detached, Ruiz was pacing back and forth, burning gasoline like an idiot as he glared at a picnic table. "I don't like this," he muttered.

    "Well, sir, that fucking sucks," I said without a shred of sympathy. "but we've got six hours while Intel finds their ass."

    With that done, I plonked myself down on the lawn, and pulled my helmet off. As the reek of military gasoline and JP8 floated over, my over-armor followed it, and I cycled all systems off for a hot minute. "Naomi!"

    "Yeah?" she asked, coming over with a slice of non-MRE pizza in her mouth. "Some of the guys found a Jets, want some?"

    "Later. I gotta top up on motor oil and check a seal, I'm running a few ounces low. Can you help me peel out of this thing?"

    Chuckling, Naomi just shoved the pizza in her mouth like a chipmunk, and reached down to pop the hip locks while I pulled open the chest. About a quarter-minute later, and she was even helping me roll the system over so I could pop the back panel. Fortunately, the engine pack was pretty similar to an Inaba-Maru of all things: flat four, with all the major caps clearly labeled. It didn't take long to pull the dipstick, wipe it clean, and check: still a bit low.

    "Huh."

    Looking over my shoulder was Naomi, with Ruiz a short distance behind her.

    "I'm literally just checking my oil," I groused. "You do this every day."

    "For a HAVE RED, you're supposed to do it every three days, and it's nowhere near this simple," Ruiz said. "Like, you don't even have a fast-fill button there!"

    "A what?" I asked.

    "It's a fast-fill for when you start running low on oil. HAVE RED uses a V2 two-stroke, so it-"

    "-drinks oil." I finished. "Who the fuck thought that was a good idea?"

    "Someone who believed there was no replacement for displacement," Naomi opined. "Wheras my turbocharged boxer four is the best of all engines here!"

    "Until you pop a seal and start chugging smoke," I joked, going over to the big table of POL from a gas station. Grabbing a can of standard-weight oil, I came back to fill up. It only needed a little bit, but I was a perennial overfiller- since there wasn't a gasket leak I could see, it meant the engine was burning a bit. Four extra ounces now wouldn't make things too much an issue.

    My next move was naturally to go take a shit, because you have to drop a deuce when you had the chance when you wore an exoskeleton. One of the derogatory names for the Army's Delta group exosuits was 'the Shitheals' since their bio-management flaps had a distinct tendency to, well, not leave their payloads in the right spot. This meant excrement got on the boots, and then by the powers invested in the SEALS by the Navy, we had to mock them for it.

    Of course, they called us the Weeb Torpedoes since the Inaba-Maru systems were originally a Japanese design, but everyone mocked everyone really. At least neither of us were the Chair Force and their inventory of forty-two thousand PRETZLE units. Poor fucks.

    Once I got back to my suit, and Naomi yelling a great many vulgarities at the inside of Ruiz's HAVE RED, I considered my options while stealing a piece of pizza. On one hand, I could go sleep in my undersuit, maybe grab a blanket, and try and find a bed. On the other hand, I could sleep in my exoskeleton and save ten minutes later.

    Now that Ruiz was doing Naomi's suit-back and they were yelling at each other about what constituted appropriate engine oiling practice, I decided that it would be best to ensure I was completely and totally recursed from the situation. Grabbing a wool blanket, I quickly suited back up, and got up under econo-mode.

    "I'm taking a nap," I said firmly, "and I'm setting my suit's alarm to get me up in four hours. Ruiz, I suggest you do the same. Naomi, don't yell at the poor lieutenant, they literally only get to spend two months on this."

    "One month," Ruiz corrected.

    "One month," I accepted, "and that's nowhere near the time to learn like we did."

    "Fine." Naomi moaned. "I'll stop teasing the lieutenant."

    Ruiz's reaction, while comical, didn't stop me from wanting to throw brass at both of them for being stupid. Clonking over to somewhere I could lay down, I pulled my helmet on, locked the faceplate open for a breeze, and got ready to sleep. Before I did, though, it wouldn't hurt to do a bit of song.

    "Unzählige Sternenlichter fliegen in der endlosen Finsternis, sie verkünden mir ihr sein, sie verkünden mir ihren sinn…"

    ///

    My helmet's alarm woke me with a soft, annoying buzz. It had finally progressed to twilight, the sun low on the horizon. If I stretched my eyes, I could make out most of the sky: Polaris, Sahel, Eltanin and the rest of Draco, and there the points of light that made Orion's belt even if I couldn't make out the shield or sword.

    "Ten more minutes, boss…" Ruiz muttered off in the distance. He'd done as I'd done: crashed in his suit, fully buttoned up. I just nudged his boot with mine softly, before doing it again hard enough to make the suit whine a little. That, at least, got him up, raising my respect of him another notch. It took a good operator to instinctively respond to his suit like that. "Never mind, I'm up."

    "Good. If you get the plan from Ops, I'll get everyone else up."

    As Ruiz started shuffling off towards the McShitty's to get our plan, I started rousing everyone. What this really meant was I got the sergeants up, mostly via the ankle-kick method, and then I got the drivers up. Somehow, with the grace of God, we hadn't lost any of the damn near completely unarmored drivers yesterday- even if Roetenburger was looking a bit singed around the edges.

    "Up and at 'em, my dude," I said as I lightly banged on the roof of his truck. "We've got a mission in an hour."

    Roetenburger, as it turned out, was the type to wake up mute. Fortunately, he was not the type to wake up and draw a gun, since I could see a very nice little MP-whatever that he hadn't started with yesterday. Like hell I was gonna complain about war booty, though.

    Thankfully, via the providence of Intelligence or Operations, we had a roach coach pulling in to our little abortive staging area, followed shortly by a supply truck full of happiness: anti-tank rockets, real machine guns, and our guys from yesterday that had suit failures. We were down to thirty-four dudes, but I wasn't worried.

    Once I checked out that we basically had free reign on what was on the truck (most of it was captured supplies, to the surprise of nobody), I imidiately started divvying up everything.

    "Grenadiers, get two of your buddies, and all of you carry a rocket!" I yelled out for effect. "Automatic riflemen, ditch that shit and get a real machine gun here! Grab two shmucks without rockets, they're your ammobearers! Ammobearers, grab at least six boxed belts, eight if you can! Everyone not yet mentioned, grab two boxes of machine gun ammo, and don't bitch!"

    "We've got a pair of RPGs too," the quartermaster offered. "but you need to take all the rockets."

    "Fucking done," I said. "Squad two, give me four dudes who can hit the broad side of a barn! You're an RPG team now! Don't take the plastic caps off the warheads, that's the only fucking safety the Soviets thought clownshoes conscripts needed. Don't prove them wrong!"

    As equipment piled on to the troops, one of the sergeants- Kaler- looked over. His was Squad One, and had taken the worst losses after the debacle when they ended up being the shortstop in our impromptu L-ambush earlier.

    "Not worried about overloading the trucks?" he asked. "This is a rescue mission after all."

    "Four suits to a truck, and we have two spare trucks," I rounded back. "If the WHAM kids weigh too much, we'll leave squad two to secure the ingress zone and make two trips."

    "Sounds risky."

    "Sounds like necessity. If we get lucky, maybe they've got organic vehicles we can take out with us."

    Coming in with a map and a tight smile, Ruiz came up next to me. "I doubt it. Squad leaders and seconds, gather 'round!"

    As we circled the wagons around him, Ruiz pulled out the map, laying it flat out on the picnic table. We weighed the edges down with whatever we had: loaded magazines, knives, a crowbar, and got to work reading it.

    "Intel lucked out: when they told Colonel Waver, and he bumped it up to General Wheeler with CENTCOM." Ruiz started explaining, taking a small orange crayon out to mark up his map. "Wheeler got on the horn with the Air Force, and started arranging some rather criticus flights to get us air cover. The Michigan Air National Guard has already confirmed receipt of the remains of the A-10 fleet, and more importantly, there are already BUFFs throwing cruise missiles at key road and rail junctions. As it stands, the mission of this battalion to interdict enemy supplies and draw a response out of the units in Kalamazoo is accomplished. Current orders for Major Shah are to engage the battalion in Kalamazoo in open field engagement or series of engagments and to prevent them from regaining operational capability without committing to a siege. To this end, the battalion is getting near-constant AWACS II intercepts, and Ninth Air Recon squadron."

    Knuckling down, the markings started growing in detail. "Our current tasking has been changed from being part of Erebus Company's rapid response force to being an independent platoon attached to Captain Tahir and the Intelligence Center. Captain Tahir, and everyone over him all the way to General Wheeler, believe that recovering more of the Institute's highly-placed deserters will produce actionable intelligence in current timeframes, and ensure that not one of those slime-covered bastards ever gets away with this."

    Now, the map was clear. We had a road set up, with each squad taking a marked path; down to the intersection and notes, as well as a handful of GPS units. "We'll be moving out by squads; command section will be on squad two, moving out in ten-minute intervals. This is going to be an hour-long drive, at twilight, in deer country, during a war. Keep your headlights off, and make sure the lead car has night vision for the driver. Radios will be silent until I give the go-order. We currently think there's a hole in the lines, but if there isn't, the dismount points on the map should be close enough to make it going in on foot in about three minutes. Good luck, and god speed."

    That was my cue, I suppose. "Drivers, coordinate your maps and get loaded. First squad, you have five minutes to get out the gate. Let's go."

    With that said, I immediately went to grab my four extra boxes of fifty cal, a box of seven-six-two for some other machine gunner, and the only case of forty-mil in the joint for Naomi. The back of Roetenburger's truck was fast filling, though, as Ruiz had already gotten there with his gun and a rather bulky looking case.

    "Did you seriously snag us a Javelin?" I asked, trying to calculate whether to be impressed or annoyed.

    "I absolutely snagged a Javelin. Do either of you two know how to use it?"

    Closing my helmet quite ritualistically, I facepalmed. Behind me, Naomi did the same. "Did you remember the master designator?" I asked, trying and failing to keep a straight face.

    "No."

    God damnit. Grumbling with a passion, I started toggling through menus in my powered exo, trying to see if my weapons database and targeting links had "purloined fire and forget anti-tank missile" in them. The Amaterasu system had the suit's fire-control protocols loaded, which was good, but if the guys at Michigan State had managed to pull that out I'd need to chase them around with chanclas for fucking with the core programing. The helmet had inbuilt thermals, albiet shitty ones that needed an IR flare to get any sort of decent ranging, but it didn't have weapons integration.

    "Alright, I can shoot it," Naomi said after a minute, going into a belt pouch for what looked like a really weird, mono-lens night optic. Clacking it onto her helmet like a demented mouse-ear, she scowled at me. "If you knock the weapons control optic I'm making you carry the missile."

    "I am most solemnly not mocking the weapons control optic," I said with a straight face and my serious-face tone that said I was trying really hard not to mock the giant glass mouse ear sticking off her helmet.

    "Yeah right, fuck you."

    Well, I tried. Mounting up, I cut all active radio transmissions, going down to passive listening and speaker-out only. "Mic check, everyone. Don't want to broadcast early."

    "I copy," Naomi grumbled over speakers. It took Ruiz a moment, though, until he finally had to reach up and hit a helmet switch.

    "I copy."

    "Good," I muttered, just loud enough for the pickup. "Good."


    ///


    View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJ2kS9yyIwk


    The roads and countryside were quiet as we rolled through. Our little caravan was small, the decision to move by squads making us a silent creature. Nominally, we had ten trucks to move everyone, but by breaking down to squads our largest blob was only four trucks, at wide spacing. Every so often, I'd scan the tree lines, but there was nothing except the sound of the wind whistling around my helmet.

    The silence was kind of poetic, in a weird way. This was the emptiness of the world, something I could deeply appreciate as we rushed towards doom. Still, fatalism didn't become me: nor did this antsy navel-gazing. Checking to make sure I had a fresh belt in my gun, I found the half-expended one instead. Naturally, I decided to change them out.

    It was a smooth, rhythmic feeling, as I opened the top cover and gently shook the half-used belt back into its box, before retrieving another from my battle ruck. It slotted into the belt-box holder, and then I pulled the cover open to get the bullets out. First one in the groove, and a little push in to make it stick before I shut the cover. Rack once, to get the pickup to pickup. Rack it again, to get the bullet in the chamber. Don't think, don't feel, just let the repetition take your mind away. Close the old belt box, and place it back in your webbing: every bullet counted here.

    "You okay, Tomas?" Naomi asked.

    "I'm fine."

    "You know you can talk to me, I don't mind," Naomi smiled, expressing emotion with the lilt of a head and an adorable bobble with the targeting lens. "I had to help a lot of first-timers, over the years."

    "You had people under you?" Ruiz asked lightly.

    "Yeah, I was creche batch thirty-two, and I helped with some of the training on creche batch forty."

    My breath caught in my throat. Thirty-one batches before her. At least eight batches after her. A hundred and fifty kids per batch. Two hundred eyes, she'd joked. I still have screws in my fibulae. Presume a fifty percent wash-out rate. Seventy five effectives per batch. Times forty. Three regiments- old-fashioned, traditional regiments- of genetically modified supersoldiers with equipment to make me weep with envy if it wasn't so antithetical to my own training.

    They invaded us with five battalions. A third of what could have been their top cadre, instead filled out with the scum of the earth who thought they could get paid to put the boots to the people they despised for the gall to have a government that was willing to show they cared with two hands instead of one, for having more than one color of skin or language spoken at home or in school, for still having a hope in the future instead of a screaming need to grab onto past glories a century gone in hope that some half-dead cocaine-addled actor could save them from themselves again by holding the rest of the country hostage.

    God could weep for it, for the irony, for the pain, for the hubris and the ambition. Man's reach extended far more than a handspan past his grasp; and the devil cared to sell him rope for his neck to make the difference. To think of the time, the money, the hours of work by man and machine that could be made to serve their needs and grow their people! The Peacekeepers had started as law enforcement! There had been an ideal there once, I hoped. Even if an omniscient creator could stomach the thought of this being the goal and result of some long con, I couldn't.

    The humanity of it- a killer like me, who traded in death, made ill by the works of men who never wielded more than a pen. Was it worse, I wondered to myself in the comfort of my head, that I was sickened more not by the cruelty, but by the waste? Two regiments, one launched from Gary and the other from Toledo, could have laid waste to us. The state of Michigan had to hold Detroit at all costs: it was the heart of the state, while Lancing was the head. If they had acted competently, we could have saved one while the other burned. It took time to muster the National Guard, took time to deploy, and most critically took time to prepare and evacuate the citizenry.

    Leave others to consider what documents written in the ink of innocents as they razed my home to the ground.

    "Naomi, how many of you were there, in the LARP?" I asked, the road going past carefully.

    "Never more than two or three hundred: we were recon units, you know!" she said with pride. "Rushed is death, slow is fast, fast is safe."

    "And the rest?"

    At this, my little ward pursed her lips. "You need to understand, we never had the full TOE of our corps," she said, trying hard to remember. "About half of us were deployed at any one given time, and not every creche batch was allowed to contact each other too much. Batch twenty-four, for instance: they all hated each other. Poor bastards."

    I couldn't say anything else for a few minutes afterwards, but I didn't have to. Ruiz just put his hand on Naomi's knee, and conked his helmet into hers with a companionable 'tonk' noise. "Don't worry: we'll get everyone out we can."

    Naomi just had to chuckle. "Don't worry about 'everyone', worry about whoever's in front of you. If that raid on the New York barracks ever goes through, we're gonna need a lot of wheelchairs, though!"

    "I'll make certain that gets remembered," I promised. "No man left behind."

    "Or women, or boys, or girls, and definetly not the dogs!" Naomi scolded me. "The poor mechanical mutts would be heartbroken if we left, and Project Canis was the only one more extreme than ours-"

    At the cut, I looked at Naomi carefully. "Project Canis?" I asked carefully. "Like the dog star?"

    "Yes," she said, with a mouth full of sand. "Creche batch fifty-two."

    "Can you tell me what happened to them?" I asked.

    "No."

    I was almost taken aback, but this was dangerous ground. "Is it-"

    "I don't have time to cry," Naomi said, helmet staring me straight in the soul. "So I won't tell you now. I will tell you now, though, a name. Doctor Areki Bonhomme. If you see him, shoot him. If you see his assistants, put a gun in their mouth until they take you to him, then shoot him, and shoot them too. I'd say make it slow, but we can't risk him surviving, so paint the fucking walls with his brains."

    "Can you at least tell us what's so bad-" Ruiz pressed, before an alarm beeped and Roetenburger started pulling off the road. We were at the drop point.

    "No." Naomi growled. "We're on a mission, so I don't have time. What I can say is this- at least I'm still human. What that monster made isn't. Not anymore. If we see one, I might be able to save it, but if not? Put it down like a rampaging tank- and if you're not sure whether or not it's dead, thermite the corpse. I've seen them getting back home with shattered spines, dragging their hips after they cut off their fucking legs. There should only be thirty or so left, and if we're lucky, they'll die in their sleep."

    "We're going to need to tell this to Intelligence, possibly the brigade's intel shop." I warned.

    "Make it the divisional one then: I'm only telling this story once," Naomi snapped. "Sound the boys off, Ruiz. I'd rather worry about what's left of my family I know I can save."
     
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    • Manzikert II
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    • View: https://youtu.be/FcnrrlkkyQY


    Hitting the jump-off point, I fired up my engine to combat mode and started checking everyone over. Engines were warming up on my thermals, and my battery charge started trickling up.

    "RPG team, stick close to Naomi," I directed softly. "Squad two, remember spacing. Fifteen feet, keep track of each other on thermals. If you don't have thermals, look for exhaust plumes. Remember, we're heading due south, bearing one-eight-zero. Any questions?"

    Nothing. I nodded, and looked over at Ruiz. "We can go on your mark."

    A pair of sharp 'clack' noises pinged off my radio set, and then soon enough came the twin chirps from squad one and squad three. Two more clacks, and everyone set out. If everything went according to plan, this would be a long walk in the woods, followed by us finding some people and taking a long walk back. One minute turned into five, five turned into ten, and I started to let myself unwind back from the edge a little. Only an inch, though, before Naomi looked at me.

    "I'm getting pings from the WHAM units, please advise."

    Thinking fast, I looked at Ruiz. "Call a general halt, we're in radio range."

    This was the diciest part. We were coming in uninvited, and that was a dangerous proposition in the best of times: I still remembered how close we were to a friendly fire incident last time we had to come in on a unit. "Naomi, start talking."

    "Wilco. I'm hailing them- let's hope my LARP codes check out…"

    It wasn't long before an IR flare flew out of the treeline, a few hundred feet to our collective left. "Head for the flare, and make sure everyone stays calm. We'll be under their guns for most of the walk."

    "Everyone, or just us?"

    "Everyone."

    Nodding, I just started sending out hand signals. It took a few minutes for our skirmish line to change direction, and I was no easier for knowing, rather than suspecting, that we were zeroed in a killbox. Still, the WHAM unit was acting in good faith as far as I could tell, and pretty soon we were at a lone birch tree where a kid in power armor was waiting.

    Allow me, if you will, a moment to explain the difference between a powered exoskeleton and a powered armor. Powered exoskeletons had a primary job: moving things. To this end, they were built with massively overstrength structural members, joints capable of channeling tons of force, and redundancies three layers deep in the motive cores. Powered armors, meanwhile, had a different primary job: protect the squishy guy inside them. I had, roughly speaking, two different ceramic plates between my soft and squishy bits and the outside world, plus an RHA backer plate, plus my massive overcoat of ceramic/armor steel inserts. A powered armor, meanwhile, tended to go a little something like this:

    Ballistic nylon overlay, to go over a 4mm cemented plate of RHA, over a 1cm ceramic backer, over a rubberized composite or aluminum foam (sometimes alufoam over the rubber even), then a ceramic waffle sheet, then a titanium backing plate, with another centimeter of rubberized foam or alufoam, then the final backing plate, then an underlayer trauma gambeson, then thermal regulation suit, then a final layer of wicking material. Then human skin.

    Yeah, I'm being real here: that's an armor array that is, in places, three inches deep. Anything less than my Browning, they could walk off if it hit center mass. The .455 Commando their own 'infantry rifles' were built off of was barely enough bullet to do the job, and even now as I got a good look at once when I wasn't trying to kill it I wondered how I'd previously pulled the job off.

    "Naomi?" the trooper asked, his long anti-material rifle slung low in his arms.

    "Yeah, it's me and mine," she said. "Need to see my ink?"

    "Yeah. It's nothing personal, you know?"

    "You're lucky we're on an op, though," she tried to joke, unsealing her helmet and opening the faceplate, looking at him. "If we were back at home, I'd be wearing makeup so you couldn't make it out."

    "Your handler lets you have makeup?" he asked. "Seriously?"

    "Yeah, it's great," she said, before looking at him. "Now, fair's fair: I show you mine, you show me yours."

    "Didn't we used to make that joke about bathing together?"

    "Maybe in your creche, mine wasn't that crass."

    "I'm pretty sure every creche did that though."

    "As fun as it is to argue, though, pop your dome," Naomi said. "They don't trust me enough to forgive this if I fuck up."

    "Fair enough."

    With that, the power armor trooper started the process to open his helmet. It was involved, the bucketlike design having made zero compromises on protection. As the visor opened on a series of cams, a young, pale face looked out at us with one red eye, one black lens, and that damnable diamond-tied tattoo string under one eye.

    "Call me Ishmael."

    I resisted the urge to snort, and Naomi chuckled a little. "You know there's a guy in a book with that name, right?"

    "Well he's gonna have to fight me for it, I like this one," Ishmael said, crossing his arms on his chest as he shut his helmet.

    Okay, it was really hard to resist the urge to laugh. Fortunately, that's what I had Ruiz for, who let out a single, unitary guffaw, before shutting up.

    "Don't mind him," I said, throwing my lieutenant under the bus so he could develop an immunity to them. "Can you lead us to your main point?"

    "Sure. There's gonna be a few problems with us getting out, though."

    My stomach fell like a rock. "What kind of problems?"

    Ishmael cringed, just a little. "There's about a company- ah, sixty of us- that want to leave. My platoon's the one on the line, but we're gonna need to spring the rest of us from the battalion headquarters."

    Well, Tomas, you know how it goes. It never just rains, but fucking pours.

    "We don't have nearly enough trucks to do this all in one run," I warned. "Are you your platoon's leader?"

    "De-facto, yes. Our commissar and LT got wiped in that artillery barrage yesterday."

    "Well, that answers questions I didn't want to ask."

    Ishmael laughed a little, and let his rifle down from a low ready to a butt-on-ground rest. "Nah, you didn't actually kill any of us. Hell of a lot of armor damage, but we made it out fine since we dug in right. They didn't."

    "That's what happens when they put people who don't understand how our kit runs in it," Naomi griped. "Oh, I'm invincible! I'm faster than a speeding truck! I still get wasted because my armor is rated to stop one absurdly large bullet and they sent out two!"

    Ishmael offered Naomi a high five for this, which she accepted, and it was at that point I offered a little grin. "We're gonna have to adjust the plan. Ruiz, you've got the maps, right? Someone clean us off a spot, and someone else get a flashlight. Ishmael, you can synch to us caveman commo, right?"

    "No sweat."

    "Great, so time to cough up the enemy battle lines."

    As the map went out and so did the crayons, I started seeing a picture I liked, and didn't. On one hand, I liked the number of militia platoons scattered about, barely in communications range of each other. On the other hand, I did not like seeing a fucking platoon of no-shit tanks next to the headquarters area. More details were quickly made apparent too: nonexistant anti-air, yet a drone and helicopter staging area in the rear areas. Small, isolated fire support positions: half-batteries of mortars and singular TOW missile teams. Line of communication were skimpy at best; in some areas connected by field telephones and hope.

    "If we had a few companies of Bradleys, we could roll over this," Ruiz muttered, looking over his newly-marked map. "What the hell."

    "You're starting to see why we're leaving," Ishmael said, the rest of our platoon coming up through the dark not seeming to bother him. "We're out of armor packs and the rations went bad. If we get supplied this week, it'll be a miracle, and my people aren't looting stores- there aren't any around here worth it."

    I winced. "Did they teach you how to cook, at least?"

    "Yeah, it's when you go to the commissary and give them a food voucher for catering." Naomi joked.

    "So, in other words, no." Ruiz muttered. "How many do you have down to food poisoning?"

    "We've got twelve immobile casualties, but they're all in armor right now so you can stack them up like crates," Ishmael said. "They won't mind, most are too out of it to object."

    Ruiz just nodded. "We'll get them out on the first truck run. If we move up to about here-" he said, pointing to a nearby crossroads, "then we can safely load up anyone on foot. The dangerous part will be moving the immobiles. What's your suit curb weight?"

    "Three hundred fifty kilograms, four hundred if we pack on our Fortification Shields."

    I winced. God, that was a heavy powered suit! Even if there was a fifty-kilo slab of composite armor they were calling a shield cut out, three-fifty a suit was going to give our trucks some trouble. Still… we could make it work.

    "Your people will have to move them out from around the enemy headquarters; our HAVE REDs wont' be able to move that weight."

    "Some of them will follow us out," Ishmael warned.

    "We'll be dug in by then. Our first trucks will be getting your wounded out; when things go hot we can probably use your shields to help make better fighting positions," I kicked in.

    "Then let's do this," Ishmael decided.

    "Gonna report this in, then we fucking boogey," I warned. "While it's likely there's too many idiots in the kill chain, I wouldn't be surprised if 'unknown radio contact' turned into 'new fire mission' inside a minute."

    "We've got extenders," a voice called out of a ditch, before another power armor trooper popped out of the sod. Dusting off that aforementioned shield, the new guy tossed over a repeater and a length of cat5e. "Jack in, run the cable out, and call home.

    Surprisingly, the call in to base didn't turn into a new fire mission, which was pretty good for us. I'd already rallied the squads, and started marching us out to the intersection we'd chosen as our recovery point while Ishmael and Ruiz finished hammering out the details. The minute we got there, I broke out my e-tool, and started spinning the locks together. It was time to dig in.

    As Ishmael's WHAM boys filtered through past us on the return leg of the trip, we kept digging. It took a while to build a satisfactory fighting position, and happily enough everyone understood to make sure they had both proper spacing and mutually supporting enfilades. Sure, I had to yell at them to make the fighting positions deeper, but y'know, power exoskeletons change the equation enough so there needed to be some reminders.

    Ten, fifteen, then thirty minutes passed before someone started flashing a light at us from the return axis of travel. Slowly, a few pairs of the WHAM troops started filtering in, each pair using a heavy steel litter to bring a casualty in. Most had been doctored up a little; massive medical foam plugs showing through armor and rebar splints holding joints up and open. Most were covered with blue stains, their titular 'armor packs' having burst for some reason or another. Better blue than red, though: I knew which ones meant what.

    "When are the trucks getting here?" one of them asked me, my natural aura of command (and clearly different helmet) making them think I was an officer.

    "They get here when they get here," I replied, tossing him my e-tool. "If you're worried about 'em, dig them in a little."

    "Fine, fine."

    While my entrenching tool was being borrowed, I just kept looking, scanning around with my thermals. We had most of the injured and immobile out to here, which was the easiest part and the hardest part. The easiest part, since they weren't going to be missed; and the hardest since they had to get smuggled out of whatever headquarters area they were using.

    We'd been at the crossroads an hour, when our first trucks showed up. It took four of our guys in HAVE RED and two PRETZLEs that had ridden up with the truck to move the guys onto the empty flatbed, and a pair of drovers to tie them down. Still, we'd gotten all the injured into one vehicle, with one of the teamsters even grabbing a rattle can of red paint to put the cross and crescent on the side. Everything was going pretty good- right up until a mortar shell hit the side of the road about twenty feet away from the truck.

    The improvised ambulance kept driving, but it was clear they'd found us. "Everybody, get the fuck down!" I roared, jumping into my foxhole. "Naomi, get the WHAM boys on the line, can they silence that mortar?"

    "Negative, there's militia shooting up their first platoon, and their second is strung out moving the injured!"

    "Damnit!"

    Ruiz, bless his heart, managed to join me in my foxhole. This would be great if I had the time to dig a proper three-man foxhole, but I didn't. As such, we were radiator-to-radiator here, and I couldn't properly get my head down out of the smattering of mortar fire. "I've got a call in for counterbattery fire."

    "We don't know where those shots are coming from, though."

    "Which is why I gave them map cords for every artillery site they've got, and the drone field besides."

    I chuckled. "Good man."

    As the artillery fire cut off, presumably from one of our gunners getting lucky, the battered remains of the first WHAM platoon started getting themselves out of the treeline. They were all coated blue, and more than a few were limping.

    "How bad is it?" I asked, while everyone took the silence to be an opportunity to continue fortifying this position.

    "Pretty fucking bad," one moaned, before realizing that yes, that piece of shrapnel in his coat did manage to get all the way down to him. After ripping it out like a goddamn idiot, he just jammed a medical foam applier in deep, before trying not to scream at the pain.

    "Christ on a bike, kid, wait for medical. Ruiz, you called medical, right?"

    "They're with the rest of Erebus, who're moving forward now!" Ruiz yelled. Since we had been found out, everyone was running radios hot. "It's a five mile jaunt, they're gonna drive like hell for it!"

    "What the hell, Athena is like twenty miles out!" I shot back. "We don't have the good artillery, what's providing counterbattery?"

    "Air force!"

    You know what, not expecting that was on me. Of course, that's when one of the WHAM kids, standing up to inspect the bunker, caught a spray of rounds across his back. Snarling, I turned myself to get my Browning on target, slapping the dinky little bipod into the ground to help stable my aim. There were militia moving up through the woods, thinking their camouflage clothing was helping them.

    Joke's on them, though, as I snapped on my thermals and started spitting lead. I didn't need to try and look through the sights, as close as they were and as energetically as my gun was throwing itself around. Of course, that wasn't all they had: some genius had managed to get a gun truck through the woods, and they were about to start firing.

    "RPG team, bearing two-five-five, two hundred meters!" I snapped, and a pair of rockets went screaming into the woods. One hit a tree, sadly, but the other one was the sort of near miss that liked to make the crew too concerned for their lives to man the mount. "Two more salvoes should do it, keep pounding it!"

    "Well this is better than I thought this would go," Naomi idly mentioned over our private comms channel. How did I still have this available for her to use- right. Institute comms. "I kinda expected us to have to go in and blow up a tank."

    "Wait for it, things still might go back in the shitter," I responded, before dragging my gun back on target and finishing off a belt of mostly-suppressive fire.

    As the gunfire died down as we killed off whatever that attack had been, I panted and checked over my systems. Something in my shoulder was sticking; one of the pauldron plates. Grabbing my crowbar to reset it, I didn't mention I was busy. That's probably what caused what happened next.

    A battlefield is noisy, both in terms of radio and physical chatter. I was busy, Naomi didn't know better, the WHAM guys weren't ours, and our own troops were still more green than not. I was the only one who knew, fundamentally, to corral Ruiz so he didn't do something stupid. For all his brains, common sense could be a bit lacking. That was what rules were for, but it was ours- the senior NCOs- job to remember that shit and remind them. The sergeants were, well, probably all jumped-up corporals who barely had enough suit time not to kill themselves while walking and chewing gum.

    On battlefields, people got hurt. When people- like an unnamed WHAM trooper- got hurt, they called out for help. For medics, for their mothers, for their gods: it didn't really matter. Someone, I never heard who, was crying out for help. Past a certain point you tune it out: the sergeants could handle it. They sounded young, but a lot of the people in our unit sounded young to me. Frankly, I didn't care.

    "I've got it, yeesh," Ruiz said, getting out of our foxhole. I finally got the crowbar in right, though, and gave the strut a good little smack to reseat it. That didn't fix it, but did change the pitch of the shitty grinding, so I fished around with narrow end to knock it back in. Looking up to scan my sector, I didn't see anything as Ruiz bent down to grab a power armor.

    "Contact, one-one-five!" someone yelled, before letting rip with a burst of rifle fire. As I grabbed my gun, I watched with horror as the rocket trail of an RPG flew past me. It hit at Ruiz's feet, sending him falling over the WHAM trooper with a scream.

    "Squad one, fucking get on that shit! Medic, get over here!" I roared, clearing my foxhole with a bound and leaving my gun there as I frantically got over to Ruiz. I'd been lucky, if luck was relative: the rocket had slammed into the ground instead of his body directly. Instead, though, it had 'only' blasted his legs to hell and back. The feet were a lost cause, but there was a lot of blood. So much blood.

    As Naomi and a WHAM kid with a green cross on his power armor ran in, I started getting to work. Powered armor and exoskeletons added a massive load to medical personel: the need to be able to get people out of their armor. Hydraulic shears were generally the minimum: in lieu of that, I had a crowbar and a willingness to use it. Grabbing behind him to get at the emergency lever, I flew through the out-up-down sequence at full power.

    Meanwhile, the medic was swearing, getting his tourniquets out and a stack of drug injectors. "I've got clotting formula, but most of that leg is a write-off."

    "Get the kid some morphine, I'm getting the armor off," I grunted, cracking the knee articulators with quick strikes. Once that was done, I grinned: this was two-support armor, so I didn't have to go through the complex knee joints my suit had. Once that was done, I could try to get the armor plate off, and I had to hold my bile.

    I could clearly see bone in a few places, but only because the blood was still starting to flow across the wounds. It wasn't hamburger: hamburger is consistent, and red versus this pale muscle. "Fuck."

    "Yeah, I don't think I can save the shins," the medic growled, working his tourniquet on about a half inch over where the damage started. "Do we have permission to amputate?"

    "God damn fuck shit hell putas do to me?" Ruiz asked weakly, his hands struggling against the dead weight of his suit. "Archangeles, my legs are killing me, and I can't move. Did I get hit?"

    "Yeah," I said, wincing as I cracked open the other knee's joints. "It's pretty fucking bad."

    "I can't move, Archangeles. How bad is it?"

    "We're putting on tourniquets now," I said, looking over at the medic, who was very pale. "What is it?"

    "I don't have enough foams or cuffs to stabilize the bits outside armor and we can't do a full removal: we don't have stretchers,"

    "Use one of your damn shields, or some ammo belts strung between spare barrels then. I shouldn't have to give classes on improvised stretchers now!" I snapped.

    "Oh."

    Turning around, I looked over at where Ruiz had popped open his faceplate and struggled to look at what was left of his legs. "Oh fuck."

    He then promptly fell back, rolled his head to the side, and vomited.

    "Fucking hell, I don't have time to deal with this," I growled. "Naomi, help the medic. Medic, make sure he's stable. Next trip out, he's going with it. Understand?"

    "You do know I got trained by the Institute, right?" the medic said, looking at me carefully.

    "I don't care if you were trained by Comrade Khrushchev in a fucking dugout, as long as he's alive next time I see him I don't care. Do your fucking job, I've got to make sure nobody does anything just as stupid."

    "Yessir."

    I didn't even bother to correct him as I stormed off. "Squad one, eyes on that fucking tree line! Squad three, keep digging in! Move, people!"

    Fortunately, the next truck came less than a minute after I issued those orders- and unfortunately, it also contained a squad from Erebus Company. This had turned from a commando raid to a strategic push- with the information from Ishmael's map, Shah was willing to bet on being able to get in, capture their command post, and clean them up piecemeal. If it wasn't for the shitty reaction to this raid, I wouldn't believe it, but Tahir had to be backing him on this.

    I just set them to digging in more, and watched with baited breath as Ishmael got the last platoon of WHAM troops out of the woods. As Captain Fischl got out of his own headquarters HMMV, I stalked up to him.

    "Permission to withdraw the power armor platoon from the field, sir?"

    "The fuck's gotten into you?" he asked back. "Archangeles, we're about to kick them in the balls so hard it'll be free bottom surgery."

    "I'm down a lieutenant, and the platoon's getting worn out. We barely had six hours downtime between two major fights, they're already making mistakes. We lost lieutenant Ruiz to an RPG team that never should have snuck up this close."

    Fischl frowned. "I'm not liking this. I'm going to need the backup for the next hour or so, but there's A-10s flying suppression missions soon. Can you stick it out for an hour, or until I get my mortars?"

    "Might be closer to two," I admitted. "Wounded get priority on trucks, and we need to get the kids out."

    "Fair point. If I leave you to hold this crossroads, are your troops still up to that?"

    "Good. I'll call higher, and see what they say."

    Turns out, Tahir wanted us back all right. It was good for me that Fischl was fine with us just holding the line here: we did end up shooting up a pair of truck patrols. It wasn't much, but it justified his decision. Still, it was damn near double-oh thirty when I finally stood relieved by the first incoming element of Arachne company, and could get back to Athens.

    When I got back to the marked-out area for us to return to, I'll admit it: my platoon wasn't in good order. Still, I didn't care.

    "Unload your shit, safe your motors, and rack out!" I yelled, mirroring word to deed as I pulled the mostly-full belt box off my gun and tossed it on the ground. "Don't loose your shit, don't burn all your gas, and don't break shit!"

    Then I took the time to key into the battalion officer's net, dreading what was to follow. "This is Warrant Officer Archangeles with platoon, now returned to base."

    "Very good," Lieutenant Fielding said, their voice calm. "What's your current status?"

    "Beat to shit, sir, and not happy. We've got plenty of ammo, but we need to get a good few hours in the sack or we'll be glorified shock troops."

    "You're in luck: you've been given to me in lieu of a recon company, and with the new mutineers you brought back I don't need a recon company."

    "Very good, sir. Anything else?"

    "Two things," Fielding said carefully. "First, you need to show up at eleven-hundred tomorrow for debrief and to help me figure out how to use your unit."

    "Debrief at eleven hundred tomorrow, aye."

    "Second thing, I would prefer if you referred to me as 'ma'am' for formal language. It's, ah, less incorrect."

    "Yes, ma'am," I corrected. "Had a bit of a feeling, but I can't tell."

    "Anything not in armor doesn't count?" they asked.

    "More like you seemed like an option three, but there wasn't the time to ask."

    That earned a laugh. "Thanks, Archangeles. Been a while since someone noticed."

    "I got paid a lot to notice small things, ma'am. Don't worry about it. I'm going to rack out now, unless you need anything."

    "Nope. Get some sleep- you sound like you need it."

    "That we do."
     
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