In the Valley (5 page)

Paul waved back to him and then stepped into the tent with the colonel. His eyes took a second to adjust to the dim light in the tent. Damn the
necessity, Paul thought. Life was just easier with the halo; there would have been no transition from the blinding white sun outside to the dark interior of the tent. Once his eyes adjusted, Paul spotted Green sitting on a cot in the tent. He was discussing something earnestly with Captain Bashir, Paul’s sidekick.

Colonel Fasi spotted the colonel, who had come in after Paul. He stood and shook his hand.

“My friend, how are you?” said Fasi. The colonel looked at him and smiled while they exchanged more pleasantries. One thing Paul had noticed the past couple of weeks was how the colonel’s smile never quite got to his eyes anymore. The man was maxed out at ten-tenths of capacity, and it was beginning to tell.

Finally, Fasi and the colonel sat down, and Paul and company got to the brass tacks.

The colonel had had a special paper map made of the Baradna Valley, just for haloless meetings like this. The guy really did think of everything, Paul thought. He spread it out on the ground between the opposing cots, where the five men were seated. The colonel sat next to Fasi, and Green, Bashir, and the First Company commander sat on the other cot. Paul chose to stand.

The sheer primitive grubbiness of the surroundings struck Paul. There was a map on the dusty ground and six sweating guys in a tent. Usually, this would be done with halo overlays, data extracted from the cloud, or micros—everything would have a seamless, professional feel. But not today—the meeting was strictly low-tech.

Good, Paul thought. If the price he had to pay to catch Commander Mohammed was a little inconvenience and low-tech, then all to the better. That particular shithead and his gang had tried to kill Paul his teammates during the original assault into the Baradna Valley. His merry dissident crew had set up a rocket-assisted 155 mm round, oriented in such a way that it would shoot into the ground-car of the team as they rode in.

That trick would probably have worked on the Juneau Army. Fortunately, Third Battalion’s advisors had requested some help from some forces armored engineers who happened to be kickin’ around on the June-bug without a mission. The colonel had given those guys from the Eighteenth Engineers a job, and they had performed. The engineers were thrilled to find the bomb. It was a lot like watching kids at a candy store when they came across a device and saved someone from being blown up.

No doubt Commander Mohammed had been pissed. Well, thought Paul, fuck him. And now Third Battalion, Juneau Army, was going to come calling.

The two colonels hashed out a basic plan and sought input from the others. Bashir suggested telling the provincial police that the battalion was going to be operating ten klicks in the opposite direction from where the battalion would actually be; Fasi laughed and thought that was a great idea.

Pashtuns sure did love dirty tricks. Paul thought sometimes that they drank treachery with their mother’s milk. When Paul had first gotten this mission, he had done a little research on the inhabitants of this planet, and he’d found out that such glee at mayhem was a Pashtun trait from Old Earth. Some things just never change.

Paul was chagrined he hadn’t thought of that bit of deceit himself; bringing the provincial police in on what the battalion was actually doing would have been the height of folly. They leaked info like a sieve compared to the army, which wasn’t all that great, except in comparison. After everyone present at the meeting added tidbits to the plan, the planning session was adjourned.

Green caught up with Paul outside the tent. “Hey, Paul, what was that?” he asked.

“What was what?” Paul muttered. He wanted nothing so much as to go back to his crater and eat some field rations. They were delicious, and Paul had saved a hamburger for this night’s fine dining. Green was slowing him down.

“That planning session, of course. Was it just me, or did we just plan a battalion-scale combat operation in less than half an hour?” Green looked at Paul expectantly.

Paul’s headache worsened. With a sigh, he reached for a near-cig. He offered one to Greenie, who took it. Paul held out a lighter, and both men lit up. He looked at Green after taking a drag.

“That was actually pretty good, planning wise, Green. When we first got here, that meeting would have taken just five minutes. As it was, we got a good suggestion out of Bashir. Everyone knows what he is doing and when approximately he will be doing it. Can’t ask for much better than that. What’d ya expect: the ‘military decision-making process’ bullshit that turns force briefings into nightmares?” Paul took another drag and waited.

Green was a good guy with a strong infantry background. It wasn’t his fault he had been doing the team’s intel work on this rotation and hadn’t gotten out onto many missions. Tomorrow would be his first basic dismounted movement, and it was a movement with a high potential for “contact” as well.
Contact
was mil-speak for the point at which someone tries to kill you. So, yeah, Paul could see where Greenie was coming from. He could also see that Green was sweating things a little.

“Well, no, I didn’t expect MDMP, but I thought there’d be more than that.” Green sounded crestfallen.

Cig finished, Paul just said, “Nope, there ain’t. I gotta take a shit. See you in the morning, Green.” He walked away, leaving Green to his consternation.

Paul had a delicious beef patty to eat, and then he was going to rack out. It was a plan, and Paul intended to stick to it—after he checked Z’s weapon. Z-man was a good medic, but his basic soldiering skills needed work.

Burger finished, shit taken, baby wipes applied, Paul stretched out on his rack. He carefully placed his M-74 alongside his body, closed his eyes, and slept the sleep of the dead for a couple of hours.

“Hey, Paul, wake up,” said the disembodied voice of the colonel. His foot shook. Paul was instantly awake and reached for his weapon. The colonel ghosted backward. The colonel knew that soldiers under stress were prone to doing strange, sometimes violent things when awoken. It was best to steer clear for a few seconds.

In fact, a couple of nights earlier, there had been a firefight on the firebase that had rudely spilled everyone not on guard duty out of their racks. The team admin guy, Birthday, had been asleep in a sleeping bag. When the machine guns and rifles started their insane chatter and pops, he flipped out and tried to get out of his bag.

Birthday run into some problems at that point. The first problem was the result of zipping up in a sleeping bag at a hellhole like Firebase Atarab. The second problem was that he had somehow twisted around in his sleeping bag so that he was lying on his stomach like a moth in a cocoon.

When the party started, Birthday, still half conscious and trying to get out of his bag, couldn’t find the zipper and started screaming and thrashing around like a mental patient in a straitjacket. From what Paul had heard, he looked a lot like a shrieking caterpillar dry-humping a cot.

After the excitement died down, everyone laughed their asses off at poor Birthday. He was still pissed at his tent mates for not helping him out of his predicament. “You motherfuckers are assholes,” he said. “I could’a fuckin’ got killed, and all you pricks can do is laugh.” Birthday had looked like he was going to cry when he said that; he was so angry. That just made everything funnier. When Paul heard the story, he almost peed his pants. The incident had been funny for everyone but Birthday.

Comic relief was a good thing in combat; there was plenty of stuff that was just plain depressing.

Half-asleep guys do strange things. They even forget where they are.

Fuck, Paul thought as his foot shook, I’m still in the Baradna Valley. I’m still on Juneau 3. Then came the next thought: Fuck, I’ve got to help lead a basic dismounted raid on Pashto Khel!

Finally, Paul figured out it was the colonel who had shaken his foot. “All right, sir, give me a second.” Paul forced himself to full awareness and moved.

He groaned, sat up, and placed his feet on the ground. He had been sleeping on a cot perched in a shell crater. He breathed the dusty air in deeply and looked around. He had been using his helmet for a pillow, a poncho for his blanket. The frigid-seeming stars wheeled overhead. His right hand checked the safety on his pistol; his left felt for his rifle. There was no need to dress; he never got out of his multicams in the field. All he had to do was slip on his boots.

His boots were under his foldout cot; he gave them a good shake before putting them on. You never knew when some kind of bug would crawl in them—they were a ready-made shelter for all kinds of creepy-crawlies.

The native life forms on Juneau 3 tended to be “primitive” by earth standards, with algal mats and a trilobite analogue dominating the marine ecosystems. On land, there were ferns and lycopods, a curious determinate tree with a thick trunk and numerous spindly branches and thin leaves. The trees were frequently home to a land trilobite and the scorpion analogue that preyed upon them. Paul figured, too, that all the things that could bite you hadn’t been discovered yet, either. And he didn’t want to go down in the history books as the first guy who had died of this or that plague.

A lot of the worlds that humanity had found were more or less similar to Juneau 3: some had nothing but algal mats, seas, and sterile landmasses; others,
such as Mumbai 3, had small land lizards and primitive fliers. Humans had not yet encountered any planets with “modern” mammals and primates. The lifeforms found on other worlds, however, did share Earth-cognate DNA. Once the scientists discovered this, they had been puzzling over the strange apparent universality of life for hundreds of years. While no one had explained the riddle as of yet, DNA had remained a constant.

Of course, the settlers of Juneau had also brought their own creepy-crawlies with them from Earth, along with their livestock, crops, and Kalashnikovs. The ecology of Juneau was a riotous mess—it wasn’t unusual to see a pistachio tree growing among the native “dinosaur trees” (a nickname that sounded better to most visitors and settlers than “lycopod”) or cats chasing trilobites. Everyone avoided the orange-and-blue-striped “scorpions,” though, even the cats.

Amazing, thought Paul, the things you think of while preparing for a mission.

He stood up, fully dressed, and put on his helmet, with its embedded, solar-charged, mil-grade halo. Paul asked for day vision and got it. He called up a clock, and the digits in his preferred Arial script appeared: 0141 hours local. He had nineteen minutes to finish prep and walk to the assembly area.

As usual in the mountains, it was cold and clear. A mist would lay on the valley as morning approached, and an imam would call the faithful to prayer. After the obliteration of the Middle East, there were surely more Muslims in the galactic diaspora than on Old Earth.

Z’s icon appeared in his view. Paul queried his readiness: Z’s weapon was clean (Paul thought it should be, after last night’s bitch session); he had a day’s rations, full ammo load out, and medical supplies for five casualties. Paul looked over at Z drinking coffee on his cot and knew he was good to go—all without saying a word. Plus, Mighty Mike, back at Camp Kill-a-Guy, had been checking on his troops. No doubt he had gotten to Z before Paul had even woken up. That was probably the real reason lethargic ol’ Z was ready to rock.

Mighty Mike was the advisor team sergeant—he supervised and ramrodded all of the team’s preps and formed a duo with the colonel in the tactical prep as well. He had come to the team from the Force Rangers—a subset of the force that traced its ancient lineage to the old US Army Rangers.

Generally speaking, the Force Rangers were the guys that were called when something needed to be unfucked in a hurry, with maximum violence applied. Mighty Mike was a part of their tradition, and it showed in everything he did. Mike was a pro, and Paul thanked God for him.

Mike had needed to physically return to Camp Kill-a-Guy the day before for maintenance and casualty-replacement issues, but he was monitoring what was happening through his halo. No doubt he was sitting in the motor pool and drinking coffee. Paul pinged Mighty Mike a good morning and thanks through his headset and yawned. The halo made leader prep and the troop-leading procedures awfully easy.

Paul flipped on his combat rig. Usually, for infantry combat, a soldier would inspect the entire exterior and all the compartments of his armored suit and then climb in and be enveloped by the suit. But alas, that was not the case for advisor work. The forces had found out long ago that many combat situations didn’t call for the suit—it was overkill. A suit tended to escalate situations that didn’t need to be escalated. Nothing like a trooper in a suit saying, “We come in peace.” That sort of thing usually ended up in people being carried away in pieces. Generally, such incidents could be framed as an undesirable result.

Also, a suit was expensive and relatively difficult to manufacture. Another consideration was that Earth forces really didn’t want suit proliferation—with all the trouble with dissidents, the last thing planners of whatever political bloc back on Old Earth needed was 114 different worlds to each develop their own suits and raise their own armored armies.

It was probably the same reason that most spaceship dry docks were located in the Sol Prime system. Why spread trouble?

To play the advisor role properly, guys like Paul had to struggle into low-tech combat harnesses in the dark at scabby shitholes like Firebase Atarab. Compared to the pre-Glimmer drive soldier, however, Paul had lots of advantages—drone coverage on demand, an ability to “see” all the friendly pieces and communicate with people at will. His trauma-weave cams were his body armor, instead of some ridiculous vest. He also had a nearly recoilless rifle that shot so flat it might as well have been line of sight.

Yeah, he had his advantages over the soldiers in the distant past. Soldiering was still soldiering, however. What Paul really wanted was a cup of coffee and a near-cig.