Armored Tears (17 page)

"OK,
boys and girls," she sent, "keep switching between optical and
thermal. And get ready to use your zippers. By the time we see a bad guy, or
they see us, they're going to be close."

She
suited actions to words, locking the long M39 rifle in its back-mounted
brackets and taking her zipper from its attachment point instead; the AC44 was
an 11mm automatic weapon, heavy, hard-kicking, bulky but short, with a
spastically high rate of fire and a big magazine. Neither the weight nor the
kick was an issue in a frame, though, and at close range the zipper had a lot
more firepower than an M39.

The
smoke kept billowing, oddly persistent. The smoke rounds must have been some
sort of reservoir shells that
kept
pumping out smoke, Bernie thought. And then she saw a signature in the smoke,
at the same moment as a burst of automatic fire cracked past her. A
muzzle-flash, she realized.

Suddenly
the smoke was full of muzzle-flashes, and streams of automatic fire were
pouring in at the dug in framers' position. Whoever was shooting, though, their
targeting didn't seem to work worth a damn. Bullets flew everywhere, with no
sign of being well targeted. The sound of the gunfire sounded odd in the smoke,
higher pitched than heavy zipper fire, and far too fast to be from whatever
smart-rifle the pissers used in place of the M39.
 

Bernie
put the reticle of her zipper on one of the signatures and held the trigger
down for a half-second burst. Her zipper blasted out a dozen rounds and the
signature, whatever it had been, went down.

More
bullets were pouring in at her out of the smoke, but they seemed unaimed, wild,
and Bernie switched from vague target to vague target, hammering out short
quarter and half-second bursts. The zipper magazine held only 60 rounds, and
she was empty in moments.

Around
her, her squad was firing in much the same way. Bullets came back at them,
pinging off stones and slapping past overhead, but none of her people reported
being hit.

Bernie
slammed a fresh magazine into her zipper and popped up to find another target.
A bullet slammed into her helmet, dead center in forehead. The shock was like a
punch in face, but her frame servos kept her head from snapping back. Bernie
blinked, trying to figure out what had happened. Had she been hit?

A
figure loomed in the smoke, man shaped, with a weapon in his arms. The man saw
Bernie, screamed, fired from the hip, walking a burst across her chest. Bullets
slammed into her torso armor and howled off as the carbon-ceramic plates shed
them.

The
force of the hits was enough to snap Bernie out of her daze, though, and she
triggered a quick burst with her zipper, walking her fire across the man
shooting at her. The stream of heavy, 11mm bullets cut him almost in half.

The
smoke was finally clearing, and now her sensors were picking up dozens of
targets, close, man shaped, running at her platoon's position with their
weapons blazing.

"Unarmored
infantry!" she called, realizing what she was seeing. "Take 'em
down
!"

The
sound of massed zipper fire drowned out the screams.

***

Sergeant
Li watched though his binoculars as Wang's thugs died. Their attack had been as
useless as he's expected, but if the officers sent in the frame infantry
quickly, it would have done its job; the Arcadian framers were busy and therefore
made for relatively easy targets.

But
the UEN frame infantry didn't advance.

"Lieutenant,"
Li said, addressing the Indian officer. "May I suggest that the tanks and
the frame infantry advance before the irregulars are all destroyed?"

"Really,
Sergeant?" the officer said. "Surely you don't care for the welfare
of that scum?"

"They
are expendable," Li said, "but the chaos they cause will be short
lived. We must attack before the Arcadians are ready."

"
Must
? Who are you to say 'must' to an
officer? You forget yourself, Sergeant! I don't care if you
are
Special Operations! Keep out of
officer business!"

***

With
the smoke gone, Bernie could see the dead before her. The heavy zipper bullets
had left some of the dead looking like nothing human, just bundles of
red-soaked rags around torn flesh. The ones with intact faces —or parts
of faces— where the worst. Bernie could feel her gorge rising at the
sight, but she forced herself to look at the gore as if it meant nothing; not
the remains of human beings, not people she's just helped kill; just a
meaningless mess.

At
first she thought she was looking at UEN infantry. They had the same UEN Peace
Force fatigues she'd seen in the Infantry Corps museum, and there were Peace
Force-issue AR-250 rifles on the ground near the corpses. Then she noticed the
odd details. Some of the dead men had wild tattoos on their faces, wild
hair-styles, masses of crude-looking jewelry. One of the dead men even had a garish
gold star, as good as a shiny bullseye, on his camouflage fatigues.

"Those
are refugee gun-boys!" she exclaimed, realization dawning.

"Roger
that," came a reply for Captain Wilson. "They came in dumb, didn't
they? Any casualties?"

"B-squad,
sound off," Bernie ordered, and listened as her people replied. Five of
her six troopers checked in, though two men had taken hits that hadn't
penetrated their armor, as had Bernie. There was no sign of Private Gambier,
the sixth man. Her squad began a quick search, until Bernie remembered the
severed arm, and realized that there wasn't going to be much of Private Gambier
to find.

The
realization that one of
her
men was
dead was like a splash of ice-water. Men got killed in training accidents once
in a while... and they'd lost several carrier crewmen... but she'd never lost
someone under her command before. She found herself trying to figure out how to
somehow
undo
what had happened and
shook herself. This was no time to get irrational.

But
Private Gambier wasn't the only casualty.

"This
is Corporal Millner, 3rd Platoon, A-squad," came a voice over the comm.
"I think the Lieutenant is hit."

"Hit?"
Captain Wilson asked.

"He
took some hits, but it looked like they didn't get through his armor. He kept
shooting, but then he fell down. We got him under cover and tried to see where
he was hit. We couldn't find a wound, but there was a lot of blood around his
armor. He passed out, but he was still breathing. Then the gun-boys rushed us
and everyone had to shoot. And now it looked like he's not breathing. I think
he's dead."

"Who's
your squad's ranking NCO?" the captain wanted to know.

"Ah,
I am, sir."

"Then
you're in charge of your squad now, Millner. Link your comm into the command
push and stand by."

Maynard
dead, thought Bernie, trying to shed the feeling of glassy unreality. This is
serious. This is for real. We're in a war, and people are getting killed around
me.
I
could get killed. I could fuck
up and get my people killed. Maybe I already have, she thought... though what she
could have done to save Private Gambier escaped her.

"Keep
it tight, people," Captain Wilson ordered over the company push.
"This isn't over. Keep scanning. They've found us. I don't think they're
just going to leave us alone."

"They
might not have anything to hit us with except old-school artillery and gun-boy
irregulars," suggested Chief-Sergeant Norton, over the comm.

"They
had guided missiles and tanks," Captain Wilson reminded him. "How
long till they bring them up, do you think?"

"What
do we do, then?" asked Lieutenant Sawyer, the 2nd Platoon leader. "We
can't just wait here, can we?"

"I
don't think that the parabolic communications dish was hit by the artillery. If
we can get it transmitting, we can call for help," the captain replied.
"If not, then we'll try something else; we'll rig our last long-range
drone as a communications system. We'll record a message, and sent it up into
the highlands. It should have the range to reach the Armored Corps station up
there.

"We
don't know how big this UEN force, or where they came from, or how widespread
their communications jamming is. One way or another, we have to get the word
out. And we've got to hold here till we do."

Bernie
let the conversation wash past her. Lieutenant Maynard, her platoon leader, was
dead. Private Gambier was dead; one of
her
squad-mates. Eight out of the eighty-one people who had been in her company
that morning were
dead
.

Her
mind didn't want to deal with it, so she started scanning the barren ground in
front of her. There was no smoke left now, but an angle in the slope of the
land meant that there was dead ground for an enemy to hide in. Her thermal
sensors could see the faint tracks left by what looked like some sort of
wheeled all-terrain trucks; it looked like they had driven up within half a
klick of the company's position and then headed back out of sight. And there
were other rocky outcroppings visible, scattered across the ground, some just a
few hundred meters away, some so far that they were just dark patches on the horizon.
Plenty of places for an enemy to hide.

She
was only vaguely aware of the two reporters as they scuttled over and crouched
near her, taking shelter in her trench.

"This
is one
hell
of a 'field trip,'"
Aran said. He looked disheveled and intense. Ulla crouched next to him, looking
starkly terrified.

"Aran.
Shit." Bernie said. "Aran, Ulla, you guys should get back to the
carrier. If they attack again, you've got no armor. If there's any sort of
explosives, the fragments could shred you."

"No
chance for a battlefield interview?" Aran asked in reply, sounding not
quite serious. "I mean, I'm not a war correspondent... or I wasn't... but
what reporter hasn't had fantasies of this sort of thing?"

Bernie
shook her head, somewhere between amusement and amazement.

"You
Australians are pretty tough. Or is it Indonesians?"

"Little
of both," Aran answered. "What's going to happen? To us, I
mean?"

"Well,
we're trying to call for help. Once we do, we either hold tight till help shows
up, or we run for it and try to get to a safe place."

"Is
this a war? Are you at war with the UEN?" he asked.

"It's
sure as fuck a war. Against the UEN? I think so. Those troops had UEN weapons.
But I don't know."

"What..."
Ulla started to say. "What will you do with us? If you're fighting the
UEN? We're from the UEN."

"You're
civilians. You're not fighting. We'll keep you safe... or try to. And try to
get you back out of the combat zone. I'm really sorry I dragged you out
here."

"Nothing
you could do," Aran said with a false lightness in his tone. "If we
make it, I get a
great
story out of
it. What more could a reporter want?"

"You're
something else, Earther," Bernie said with a grin. "But you two
should get back to the carriers. If it's just smart-rifle fire, these trenches
are safe enough... if you keep your head down. But like I said, without armor,
any sort of fragmentation will kill you."
    

***

"We
need to run away," Ulla said, whispering to Aran as they headed back to
the carriers. "Bernie might not turn us in. She seems decent, for what she
is. But the rest of the Arcadians? As soon as they remember that they have two
UEN hostages? At best, they'll try to use as to negotiate with the UEN forces
out there. At worst... Shit, Aran, you've seen what happens when anti-UEN
savages take hostages."

"You
mean like in Eritrea or Kyrgyzstan... or those sorts of places?"

"Yes!"
Ulla hissed.

"I
think the Arcadians aren't that sort, Ulla."

"They're
violent anti-UEN savages," Ulla said, wide eyed. "Didn't you see all
the dead bodies out there, of the people they
just
killed? I think you're
crazy
to trust them."

"Well,
we don't actually have a choice other than trusting them. Where would we
run?"

"If
there's UEN forces out there, we run to them!"

Aran
frowned. "That's an 'if,' Ulla. So far, all we've seen is local refugees
with weapons. I wouldn't care to take my chances with their 'help,' and I
wouldn't suggest you try it either, if I were you," he said.

"Then
we wait for real UEN forces to arrive. Or go look for them!"

"If
you're right about how savage the Arcadians are, those big rifles they have can
hit a person at two or three kilometers' distance. And if they let you run
without shooting you, then they're not as savage as you think."

"I
think... Aran, I think you're
really
wrong about these Arcadians. I think you've let them convince you they're like
your Australians or something. But they're not. They're going to kill us, Aran.
They'll probably r...rape me first. And then they're going to kill us!"
Ulla was almost in tears now.