Theo’s voice split the crackle of radio static like a knife: “Time to call it. Delta squad, you’re on rearguard. We need 30 minutes. Alpha, Charlie, Echo, fall back.”
“Roger, Captain. We’ll hold,” Phira replied on the line. “Alright, boys and girls, this is going to get nasty.”
This hadn’t been part of the exercise script, per se, but it didn’t surprise Sam in the least. The mock battle had been fought down on a five-mile-wide stretch of grassy field, hemmed in on one side by a dense treeline and on the other side by a series of difficult, verdant hills. Control of the field, an important vehicle corridor near New Hope, was the objective; the EF-VEC was sending in a full four-platoon armor company augmented with supporting infantry to seize it from Theta, which was playing a small but determined OpFor at diminished single-company strength with only one full armor platoon. Whatever hypothetical adversary Theta was standing in for, they needed this corridor badly but couldn’t afford to lose the entire company in its defense. Sam thought that part of the briefing had made it sort of obvious that they’d end up retreating.
From their vantage up in the hills, the First Company fire support teams had a good view of the unfolding armor engagement. It had gone well in the early morning; the EF-VEC had sent a few tanks and a walker to probe the defenses, and Theta had picked them off rather than letting them escape, which seemed like an important win. But an hour later the EF-VEC came in with everything, hard. Theta’s four black-liveried main battle tanks were strewn about the field, all now knocked out of the fight, their crews lounging on their “destroyed” tanks watching the rest of the exercise swirl around them.
That left Theta in control of the hills with just Ash’s Doru-class walker and three four-man fireteams. The VEC losing their only walker had bought them some time, but with the entire armored unit showering them with high explosive rounds from below and infantry teams preparing to scale the feet of the hills, Theo had made the inevitable call. Alpha, Charlie, and Echo (Alpha being composed only of Ash now) would be getting out of there; Delta would fight to buy them time. Thirty minutes.
“Good luck. Theo out.” The command line closed with a pip.
A great rumbling through the dirt embankment under Sam’s armored elbows told her that Ash’s Doru was on the move. The next thing that told her that Ash’s Doru was on the move was a simulated thump fed into her earpiece, then Ash on the company line: “Ow ow ow, fuck.”
“Cassock, status? And keep the line clean, will you?”
Sam pivoted over to watch the walker—an odd, bulky contraption that brought to mind the shoulders of a gorilla (one adorned with a 100mm autoloading smoothbore cannon) atop the tubby torso and digitigrade legs of an ostrich—squat down hurriedly behind a ridge. Ash, formally Alpha Two but informally Cassock by the old tradition of personal radio callsigns, sat within a little faceted canopy in the front-center of the beast, invisible under the glare.
“Fine fine, shit. They marked me pretty quick; I just took one to the front armor skirt.”
“Roger,” Phira replied. “Still peachy keen?”
“I’m fine, thank you, but I need the fuck out of here.”
“You got it, Cassock. Delta team, let’s give them a show. Yu, Sylva, take the ATWs over to the ridge to the north, where Echo just was. Sam, you and I will hang tight here while they get over.”
Yu and Sylva—who Sam had just met at the morning briefing—hustled low through the embankments, worming their way over to the ridge without exposing themselves to too much fire from down on the plains. The squad’s last two tube-shaped anti-tank weapons flopped vertically along the packs on their backs. No simulated gunfire was forthcoming.
But then there was another thump. Cassock sighed over the line. “Can I shoot that guy? He’s annoying me. And wasting ammo.”
“He wants you to try, so you shouldn’t,” Sam said. She toggled magnification on her visor. “There’s another tank down there about 100 meters north of him with a slightly better angle on you. If you pop out to take a shot…”
“Yeah, yeah, I know.”
“Lines clean, please,” Phira interjected.
A few seconds later, Yu reported their arrival. “We’re here, Lin.”
“Alright. Hey, Sam, would you do the honors?”
“My pleasure.”
Sam had already figured her part in this, from the moment Phira had sensibly ordered both ATWs over to the far ridge, with a better but riskier view of the field.
She shot to her feet quickly, a mass of metal powered by EAPs, and gave the EF-VEC company a full view of her Troya-class power armor. She brought with her a heavy machine gun—the kind a normal foot soldier would only ever use on a wide, sturdy mount, but which her armor would stabilize handily—and leveled it on the company, squeezing the trigger.
(At this point, a sad little simulated takkatakkatakkatakka filled Sam’s headset. Loud though it might’ve been, it didn’t compare to feeling it fill the air around you and hum in through your hands and chest.)
A few of the tankers who were idling at the pintle mounts scrambled down into their hatches to avoid getting sprayed. Sam held down the trigger and watched. There was a beat, and then, under the simulated hail of annoying 12mm bullets, the tanks lumbered into action. One of the tanks turned its turret toward her…
“Hahaha, you dumb asshole,” Phira said. “Yu!”
There was simulated phoomph-hisssssss from Sam’s right. Sam threw herself down. Bang!
Phira’s voice was next on the line. “Got him. Good shit. Cassock, Sylva, get ready. Sam?”
“Ten seconds, reloading.”
“You heard the lady, Sylva. Ten seconds.”
Sam shot to her feet about ten meters away from where she stood the last time, and she held down the trigger. Takkatakkatakkatakka. There was nothing to hit this time; the pintle mounts were all abandoned, the gunners all closed up in their turrets. Still, Sam had to make her point. She kept firing for about two seconds, then hit the dirt before any of the beasts could level their main cannons on her.
The Phoomph-hisssss was repeated, but this time, there was an “aw, shit,” and then the bang from below, and then the rapid hammering of rifle fire, close.
Meanwhile, the landscape seemed to be coming alive behind them as Ash backed the Doru hastily up the hill, tossing off cannon fire as he went.
“Shit. Yu, report,” Phira spat. “Yu? Shit. They made friends, Sam. At least we got those ATWs off.”
“We need to intercept, Sergeant. What if they have ATWs?” Cassock and his Doru could be in trouble.
“Hell. What if they have ATWs?” Phira asked mischievously.
“I like the way you think,” Sam said, crawling back around the corner toward where Phira had been crouching with her binoculars. “But we need to go quickly…”
Bang.
“Sergeant?”
Sam rounded the corner a few seconds later. Phira was reclining on the rocks with her helmet doffed, running her hands through her hair. She met Sam’s eyes, smirked, and shrugged, then gestured toward a blank grenade that lay on its side a few meters from her feet.
Sam leapt back to her feet with the heavy machine gun and surged forward to the other end of this rocky dip in the hill that Phira had been using for shelter. As her field of view cleared the far bank, a three-man squad of Home Guard infantry came into view. They turned their rifles onto her in a mad panic, but it was no use. Their simulated shots must’ve pinged off of Sam’s armor at least a dozen times but registered no damage. In that time, Sam had mowed down all of them with the heavy machine gun.
“Damn, if I weren’t dead, I’d be deaf, now,” Phira said out loud, her radio switched off. Her nose was about ten inches from the barrel of Sam’s gun.
“You’d rather be deaf, though, I imagine,” Sam said, craning her head to see if any other VEC soldiers were behind the ones that were grumbling and finding seats among the rocks.
“Idunno. I hear tinnitus is a real bitch,” Phira said.
“You’re telling me,” one of the Home Guard soldiers said. He looked terribly young. “These sims are really nice. When we’re not doing this we’re doing live fire exercises with the tanks. That sucks ass.” That earned him a slap on the back of his head from one of his mates, who wore sergeant’s chevrons.
Sam hurried past. The ridge would provide her cover for a little bit, but she couldn’t just hunker down. Waiting in safety was just waiting to die. Move; never be found where you just were the last time they saw you; fall upon your enemy before they are prepared; seize the initiative at your foe’s throat…
Sam scrambled up a steep cliff. Over strong, stable terrain, like this granite, the heavy armor with its disproportionately strong EAPs made traversal lightning fast, a welcome advantage…
… and a critical one. As Sam’s visor crested the ridge, she spotted a diminished-strength squad of VEC infantry, all three of them lying prone in defilade on the slope of the hill, readying ATWs. So Cassock was somewhere below…
Boom.
A simulated blast erupted just to Sam’s left.
One of the infantrymen turned around, pointed, and yelled.
Oh shit.
Sam heaved herself up on the ridge and threw her HMG out in front of her, pulling the trigger back the moment she had it in something even resembling a firing position. She held the damn thing down for as long as she dared—what was it, three seconds? Four? And then she scrambled forward on adrenaline.
Boom.
Another blast like the one before. It must have been a tank round, fired from below, a near miss. Her visor hadn’t registered any hits.
But in a real battle, would the cliff have held? Would the tank shell had shattered her handholds, sending her tumbling down the cliff in her half-ton metal shell?
She was on her feet and running now. The infantry weren’t firing back and were instead removing their helmets. She had nailed all three of them.
And there were two unspent ATW tubes among them.
“Don’t mind if I do, fellas,” she said, when she finally reached them. She slung one of the tubes over her shoulder on its strap and held onto the other one in her left hand, her HMG in the right, and she took a position a dozen meters or so to the right along the ridge and peered down.
There was a densely forested defile below, dividing this ridge and the next. The south end, to Sam’s right, bent around to the west and connected back to the main plain. Down just at the foot of the far ridge, having navigated the creek and the trees on either side, was Cassock in his Doru. He had begun the climb. Just ahead of him were the eight soldiers of Charlie and Echo squads. Just a little longer, to the far ridge, to freedom…
But they were hideously vulnerable if the Federation armor could make it into this defile. Now that they controlled the plains, it would only be a matter of time until they did.
Sam tromped to the south on the ridge to find a more prominent point. She laid her HMG beside her—here’s to hoping there weren’t any more foot soldiers in the ridge behind her—shouldered one of the ATW tubes, and waited.
Five minutes later, she saw movement, a blur of gray against the green grasses and reddish granite. She lifted her visor and pressed her eye as close to the ATW eyepiece as it would go—which was not very close, the ATW was designed for a standard ballistic helmet, not a whole armored head unit. It was shitty and annoying, but fortunately, it didn’t matter that much. She got close enough on target, and then there was a beep!. She threw the safety latch and pressed down the firing button.
There was an extremely pleasing thump from down at the mouth of the defile.
Sam threw the spent ATW aside and turned on her visor magnification, then frowned. The tank had just started lumbering forward…
Damnit. The ATW had scored a hit, but it hadn’t killed the lead tank. It looked like a hit on top; the simulator command software had instructed the tank to immobilize its turret.
Bang.
Sam ducked. Simulator command hadn’t told her she was dead, at least. But it would do that, soon, if Sam didn’t move. She shimmied back away from the most prominent part of her ridge and took a second to think.
The tank turret was frozen, leaving only the mounted machine gun; the whole thing was about as dangerous as a two men with rifles in a minivan. But it was still thundering toward Cassock. That must be because the defile was only letting one tank through at a time—the company commander was urging the crippled lead tank through so the others could come in behind it without delay and lay down fire. Which they sure could, judging by the one that had tried to put a round through her at 400 meters.
Sam pulled the second ATW off her back and relocated about thirty yards to her right. She wanted to be farther, but she was out of damn time; any second they’d be putting rounds downrange against Cassock.
She stood, threw the safety latch, and brought the ATW to bear. Three tanks were in view now, two turrets swinging around to level with her… where’s the fucking beep?
BANG.
Sam slammed the switch… BANG. and hit the deck. The ATW never beeped. There was no fwoosh. Damaged equipment? “Fuck,” she shouted into her visor. She threw the ATW aside.
Now what?
Well, she had some grenades on her belt…
It would have to do, wouldn’t it?
Sam scooped up her HMG and fell back to a point in the ridge where she’d be out of the tank column’s line of sight. She threw herself down to the floor of the defile as fast as she dared. Just a minute’s worth of work. Then she darted to the treeline, through the trees, into the creek, and pounded down (up? What direction did it flow? That didn’t matter much, did it?) as fast as she could.
She emerged from the trees a hundred yards before the front tank, its turret angled way up and over her right shoulder. The commander was halfway out of the hatch with his binoculars raised to his eyes, scanning the ridge.
She couldn’t see the two or three tanks behind it… and they couldn’t see her.
Sam grinned like a maniac as she charged up to the rumbling tank, shot the commander (who nearly jumped out of his skin when the simulated takkatakkatakkatakka in his headpiece heralded his simulated death) and bounded up onto the front skirt of its armor.
The “dead” commander watched sourly as she ripped a grenade off her belt, unpinned it, and tossed it into his lap.
Bang.
Sam leapt off the front skirt and made to disappear back into the forest…
BANG.
Beep beep.
“Corporal Arif, this is simulation command; you’re out. Please switch off your squad and command radio channels. Take off your helmet and have a seat somewhere safe and out of the way. Await further instruction.”
Sam sighed. “Roger wilco.” She turned back to face the tanks. The second and third had been able to fan out from behind the first… a little bit. She was staring right into the barrel of tank number three.
And tank number two had a line on Cassock.
Sam didn’t talk the whole way back to base, crammed shoulder-to-shoulder in a VTOL bird with Phira and the rest of Charlie, Delta, and Echo. Those things were damn noisy anyway, and nobody really likes talking over the headsets if they don’t have to. And, having a glance around, everyone looked damn tired. That was all good. Sam really didn’t want to talk.
When the bird touched down and the rear ramp folded out, though, Phira glanced out and back and smirked, clapping Sam on the shoulder as she hauled herself and her kit up to disembark.
Sam soon saw why. The squads were disembarking onto the asphalt into a little rank and file facing a lone, broad-shouldered man, standing with his hands clasped behind his back in a cap and a night-black uniform with a standing collar. As Sam fell in beside Phira, she got a better look at the man’s face: long, high, slightly gaunt, bones tight around a pair of hard gray eyes, deep set.
That would be Colonel Rogier Tholas, commanding officer and owner of Theta Group, by the single vertical silver stripe on his shoulder tab. He wore no other medals or adornments, his uniform a vast, dark expanse.
Captain Roche stepped up, saluted, and said something to him, lost in the warbling whine of the VTOL as it powered down and the ground crews hauled their gear over to it. In the moment of perfect silence that followed, the Colonel simply said, “at ease. Carry on.”
Roche slung his pack back over his shoulder and motioned with his head, and the squads began to follow him back toward the base.
A few seconds later, Phira and Sam were pulled aside: “Sergeant Lin. Corporal Arif.”
“Sir,” Phira replied, halting. The Colonel had appeared before them with an eerie suddenness, as if the fog had parted from around a mountain.
As the squad flowed on past them, he seemed to be watching them intensely. He didn’t look like a man who did anything less than intensely. Sam found the silence deeply uncomfortable for reasons she couldn’t articulate.
When, finally, the squad was mostly out of eavesdropping distance, the Colonel continued. His voice was deep, even, and unmarked, like gray polished slate. “Corporal Arif, I’m told you are from the Dominion. You seem to have been trained in their armored infantry tactics. Is that true?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good. Lin, please see to it that when she teaches the others listen. I will tell Roche the same.”
“Yes, sir,” Phira replied.
“One more thing, Corporal.” He was smiling now. It seemed to come from somewhere dark and far away. “Do you fear death?”
“Sir, that’s a wei—” Phira began, but Sam was already answering. “That’s part of the creed of the Knights of Aquila, sir, but I was never knighted.”
“So do you?”
“I’ve trained for decades not to, sir.”
The Colonel said nothing for a beat. “Hmm. That is a very useful thing in a soldier. A very dangerous thing in a person. Carry on. I think Roche will be looking for you two.”
As Sam and Phira headed after Roche and the Colonel went to go speak to the VTOL crews, Sam realized that her shoulders were tensed and her hair had been raised.
“Captain, I’m sor—”
“Phira told me you’d say that. I’m not going to let you.” He nodded to someone behind Sam.
PFC Sylva—his first name was Damien, Sam was pretty sure, but he really didn’t seem to like it much—had just entered the room, and he appeared at her elbow with a beer.
“Sam! Once the captain is done with you, find us downstairs. Have this; don’t want you to have to catch up too much.”
He had vanished, leaving her with the cold can, before Sam could get a word back in.
“Anyway,” Theo was saying, “Simulation command sent me the playback to study on the flight back. I’ll be getting a proper report from Lin later—the playback can’t tell me everything—but I’ve seen enough to know that you have nothing to apologize for. Nobody’s perfect, and we’ll have adjustments to make for the whole squad and we’ll find little execution errors everywhere; we always do. But for now, don’t keep them waiting. Dismissed.”
“…Sir,” Sam said, retreating.
Sam thumped down the narrow stairway and into the hall. It was a quaint little building they had been billeted in: the forward operating base was, centuries ago, a village built to staff a nearby lithium mine, which, when the mine had been exhausted, had been bought by the Prince of Agunda and turned into a Tuscan-style family retreat. The Prince of Agunda was, apparently, another figure with whom Colonel Tholas was able to exchange favors, and so it became a seasonal home to the varied companies of Theta Group when they did exercises on the plains.
She pushed open the door, and then Sylva was pushing another beer into her hands.
“The woman of the hour!” His face scrunched up at her other beer. “I told you that you need to catch up.”
“I… what?”
“Beer. You need to drink your beer,” Sylva said, stepping back at letting Sam into the room. It was a long living room (screen, coffee table, sofa, armchair, ridiculously large neoclassical painting) across a counter from a small kitchen glowing with fluorescent light. Delta was here—Phira, Sylva, and Yu (her first name was Olivia, Sam was pretty sure)—as well as Ash and some others from the other squads Sam hadn’t met. A deck of cards and poker chips had spilled out onto the tables between the beers. Ash was perched on the back of the armchair.
Everyone turned to look at Sam.
A cheer erupted.
“Um,” she said, holding two beers.
Most of the gang was back to their game or their conversations, but a few pushed up to greet Sam. “Damn,” Olivia said. “What’s wrong? You don’t look like the lady who stopped a tank column earlier.”
“She does too,” Ash said from over on the chair. “She had to stoop in under the door frame.”
“Yeah, yeah, but she ought to look, Idunno, happy about it. Seeing your enemy driven before you, right? Best thing in life?”
“Lamentations of their women,” Ash added.
“That too. Come on, Sam, what’s wrong?”
Phira was visible over her shoulder, enjoying this.
“It didn’t go that well,” Sam mumbled.
“It did too!” Olivia shouted over the din. “Damn, Phira was right.”
“About what?”
“That you’re used to taking blame.”
Sam, feeling put the back foot, bought time with a sip of beer. It wasn’t good beer but it was beer enough. “They still got Cassock, didn’t they?”
“You could’ve warned me I was about to be shot in the ass,” Ash said.
“Oh, shut up,” Olivia said. “Sam, Ash always gets shot in the ass.”
“It’s not really a maneuver warfare thing for the VEC,” Phira said. “It’s a counterinsurgency drill we run every year or so. They outnumber us four-to-one in armor and winning the engagement is important for them but it’s more important that they inflict disproportionate casualties on us. We’ve never escaped that scenario with any armor at all.
“We didn’t this time, either, but Charlie and Echo got out, and you really fucked them up trying to get Ash,” she finished.
“Well,” Sam said, “this is the first time you had some power armor, right?”
Ash rolled his eyes so hard he almost fell off the top of the chair. “Which has a radio. You really could’ve warned me.”
“Oh shut the fuck up you baby,” Phira said, snorting. “Sam, this isn’t the first time we’ve had power armor. It is the first time we’ve had a former knight candidate with extensive training in the armor, but I don’t care about that. You took out two squads of infantry and killed a tank unsupported. And it wasn’t some sort of pointless heroics, either. You did your damn job.”
“I… thanks, Sergeant.”
“Oh my God. Drink your beer, will you?”
“What?”
“Just… drink the damn beer. Have a seat. Wanna be dealt in?”
“Ah. Uh. Sure.”
They all crammed around the table. Phira was about to make Ash climb down off the chair, but Sam signaled that she’d just sit on the floor. Sylva appeared—how did he keep doing that?—and Sam found herself setting to Olivia’s left.
“So what do you do when you’re not super-soldiering?” Olivia asked.
“Um,” Sam said, peering at her cards. “Please, I’m not a supe…”
“Okay, okay. But what do you do, then?”
“Um.”
“Yu,” Phira said.
“What?”
“Play is on you.”
“Oh.” She shoved some chips into the center of the table. Sam matched the amount. “I’m new in town,” she finally said.
Olivia smiled. Her smile seemed naturally sly, somehow. “Phira told me as much. I had to ask anyway, though. You’ll like it here. Or, there, anyway. This base is comfy but not as much fun.”
“Oh, is our illuminating company not to your satisfaction?” Phira asked, calling and laying down the flop.
“No, you all smell like unwashed socks. And Ash hates jazz.”
“I told you,” he complained, “the so-called hard stuff is just wankery. Go listen to some fu—”
“Nobody asked you.”
“Nobody ever asks me,” he grumbled. He folded, flinging his cards like frisbees, where they landed face-down on the table.
Sylva folded, too; Olivia raised and Sam called. “What about you?” she asked. “If I’m the weirdo who doesn’t do much other than soldiering.”
“Yeah you’re the weirdo,” Olivia said pleasantly while Phira called and laid down the turn. “I play jazz,” she said.
Sam laughed.
“You’ll have to come to the square at the end of Jean Street one of these afternoons. I’ll tell you next time I’m going if you want.”
“You busk?”
“Oh, no. It’s more of a jamming thing. I’m not turning anybody who wants to just give me money, but I’m not asking for any either.”
Phira called, and then she laid down the river. Olivia raised ostentatiously; Sam rolled her eyes and folded. But she said, “sure, next time you’re down there.”
“I’ll let you know,” Olivia said, as Phira called and she and Olivia showed their hands. Phira had won with a flush.
“Cheers,” Olivia said, pounding her beer.
“So,” Sylva said as Olivia was otherwise occupied and he was dealing the next hand. “Good show out there today and all, but, Sam, it occurs to me…”
“What’s that?” she asked, peering at her new hand.
“You’re an armor specialist, right? You need a callsign.”
“Oh no,” Sam groaned. “No I don’t.”
“Yes you do.”
“I’m infantry. We don’t do that.”
“Maybe in the Dominion. But we’re considered combined arms here. Our armor elements have callsigns, right Cassock?”
Ash smirked. “Just right.”
Sam was staring hard at her cards.
“You already have one, don’t you?” Ash shouted, bordering on genuine glee for the first time Sam had ever seen. Callsigns were always embarrassing; that was nearly the whole point. It must be especially true for Ash; she had asked once: “Cassock? Don’t you mean Cossack?” “No, it’s Cassock,” he had replied, in a tone that indicated he would not elaborate.
“… I already have one,” she mumbled.
Recognition dawned on Sylva’s face. “Dread Fist, that was the name for your company, right?” (“Hahahahahaha,” Ash said.) “They give everyone callsigns? I hear merc companies do that.” (“Fucking dorks,” Ash added).
“… yes,” Sam said, steeling herself.
“Okay. Own up,” Sylva demanded.
“Condor,” Sam said.
“Oh, that can’t be that bad. How’d you get it?”
Sam sighed. “The first time I showed up in the locker room. I could hear the voices on the other side of the door talking about the new ‘Dominioner bird’ in the company, and that’s when I walked in with my duffel full of stuff to throw in my locker. One of my new squadmates, Al, turns to look at me, looks up, and says, ‘that’s a damn big bird’.”