Stark's War (10 page)

"Bastidos."

"Damn straight."

"So you let them stop you?"

"Not like that." Stark smoldered, old slights rising to the surface. "But I turned around. Didn't go home."

Desoto tried to make a joke of it. "Never thought Sergeant Ethan Stark would be afraid of a couple of civ cops."

Stark stared at his hands, not rising to the levity. "I wasn't afraid of them, Pablo. I was afraid my parents would be the same way. That's what scared me away."

"Sorry. Why they got to be that way, Sergeant? We put our lives on the line all the time, but they treat us real bad when they see us. Why?"

"Because they don't know better, I guess. Civs like the mil to protect them, but they want it done from far away."

"I wonder why we do it, sometimes. Why not do something else?"

"Something else?" Stark laughed. "Like what? You gonna get a civ job? Wear some kind of suit to work?"

"No. I guess civs are as alien to us as we are to them, huh?"

"Yeah. I grew up civ, and sometimes I can't even remember what it was like anymore. Other times it's like some weird dream where everything is different from what you know."

"Different? Like, how?"

"You know." Stark fumbled for words. "Different."

"I grew up on a fort," Desoto stated. "I don't know different. Like in school, everybody's mother and father, or maybe both, were in the mil and maybe off fighting. And we all knew we'd grow up and join the mil like them. Is that what civ kids are like?"

"No." Stark lowered his head, staring at the metal flooring beneath his feet. "No. Civ kids . . . okay, their parents do a lot of stuff. All different jobs. But hardly any of them run around saying, Tm gonna do what my dad or my mom does.'"

"How come?"

"They just don't. I dunno. Everything's confusing. You got all these . . . options . . . but most of them ain't real and you don't have any way of really understanding what the others are like. I mean, the mil, it's your life. Everything you do is mil. But civ jobs are all different. Maybe you understand what your parents do for a living, maybe you don't. Maybe you want to do the same thing. Maybe not."

Desoto nodded, his face puzzled. "You didn't want to do what your father did?"

"No."

"It was a real bad job?"

Stark looked up finally, face set in an unreadable expression. "I used to think so. I used to know everything when I was a teenager."

"We all did, Sergeant." Desoto laughed.

"Yeah. Now, I dunno. Maybe Dad didn't have the most important job in the world, but I guess he did it as best he could."

"You got an important job."

"I like to think so, but I know civs don't understand it. I was there, Pablo. One of them. Didn't have a clue what the mil was like." He shrugged. "Doesn't matter now, I guess. My life as a civ ended a long time ago."

"But you still have a home there."

"I guess. Sorta. Like I said, that civ life doesn't seem real anymore." Stark slapped Desoto on the shoulder. "Why do I need to go to a civ neighborhood to get home? Hell, I'm home right now."

Sensory overload threatened, even through the filter of the battle armor's systems, as the final American defensive line on the ridge got pounded by everything the enemy could throw at it. The lunar soil shuddered repeatedly as enemy rounds and submunitions hit, dust thrown up to hang in slowly falling curtains that were quickly ripped by small-arms and heavy-weapons fire.

Stark's Tactical glowed serenely, displaying no changes and no updates. It looked like the brass had locked up again. No decisions, no brilliant stratagems. Just hold until there was no one left to hold. Not the first time a unit died in place because no one could figure out how to extract them. But now that kind of thing was being shunted to the civs to see on vid. Great drama. Blood and guts. Now the civs would get to see them buy it, not staring in sick fascination at a rain of death displayed on their HDDs but watching all nice and comfortable in their media rooms with pretzels and cold beer.

Can't run, not without screwing every other soldier on the line. Can't stay, unless dying in place counted, which sometimes it did but not now. Stark hugged the rocks and dust and felt death's impacts trembling through them. The ghosts of trampled grass blades seemed to wave in front of his face shield, vibrating in time to the explosions. How many of the soldiers on this ridge might already be down, how long was left until the enemy pushed again and cracked the line wide open?

A unit could take only so much punishment, throw out only so much destruction at the enemy before ammo started to run low and battle fatigue ate at their brains. Too much combat, sustained too long, and you reached a point where the incoming rounds started to overpower resistance, a point where your own stuff couldn't hit back hard enough. Then it was just a matter of waiting until the unit's line started crumbling like cardboard under rain, falling apart into individuals and breaking away.

Stark had been here before, in another place, where grass grew. Lots of grass, tall and wild on the open hilltop, grass that had been trampled by heavy boots and matted down with blood as a long afternoon turned into despairing sunset. A place where the indigs had outside backing, a place where his unit had found itself on the downside of the firepower game, the manpower game, and the tactical thinking game. He could see it still, the tree line on all sides flashing with gunfire, those deadly flashes only partly obscured by the haze of battle. The soldiers to either side dying in sudden silence or long agony, their final duty to have their bodies plundered by those still living for desperately needed ammunition and medical supplies.

Not this time,
Stark thought with rising rage.
I'm not gonna sit here while everyone dies around me. I don't care what happens to me. But what can I do?

Over the squad net Hector called, his voice distorted with strain. "Sarge, it's getting
mondo
bad over here."

Stark came back quickly, trying to sound as sharp and cool as if he were on inspection.
No panic. Keep their fear, your fear, under control.
"You need me to hold your hand? I've been through a lot worse than this."

There was a long pause, then Billings came back, unnaturally calm. "Hector's down, Sarge."

Startled, Stark checked his HUD. No unit casualty stats showed.
Sonofabitch. They're screening out casualties. Damn. Damn. Damn.
Brigade had started sanitizing the information available to lower-level systems. That meant the brass expected heavy losses and didn't want them to know they were being torn apart. Never mind that filtering out the information at squad level meant Stark couldn't keep track of his own capabilities.

Like hell,
Stark thought with redoubled fury.
I'm not playing that damned game. Not here. Not now.
There was another way. No orders? Fine. He'd make up his own. Maybe for the last time. Save his Squad if he could. If they were going to buy body bags anyway there wasn't much sense in not trying.

Stark raised his head, fighting down fear that the movement would attract instant fire, and scanned the ground ahead slowly, concentrating to block out the panic that threatened to break free. The intensity of the enemy barrage had grown so bad it actually provided some cover, the rocks, dust, and other junk tossed into slow-falling lunar trajectories that confused or blocked enemy targeting systems. Stark squinted, matching what he could see with the partial map on his HUD. If he could just cover that flat area between him and the next ridge, he'd be in among the enemy grunts and at least he wouldn't die cowering here. At least. Do the unexpected. The enemy had been pushing them hard, trying to make them break, and by now the enemy had to be tired, too.

Okay. Get to that ridge. Maybe one hundred meters. Piece of cake on an exercise track, but impossibly far here and now. He and the Squad would need cover, and they didn't have the bullets left to provide suppressive fire.

They did have the damned dust, though. There was plenty of that.

Stark called up a personal circuit, one jump-wired so the command channel and the vid monitors couldn't access it. "Pablo," he called his Corporal. "Need you. Get ready to put a string of delay-fuzzed eggs along this line." As he spoke, Stark used his helmet sight to draw a ragged series of impact points along the far ridge and through the low terrain before it.

"Okay, Sarge." Desoto wasn't happy, but he didn't question the order. "That's going to use up all the grenades left in the autolauncher."

"If this doesn't work, we won't need them." Stark switched back to the regular circuit, ready for the chain of command to track his actions again, now that it would be too late for them to veto anything. "Third Squad, stand by. Okay, Corporal Desoto. Fire."

Stark's HUD suddenly tracked a dozen grenades flying toward the points he'd designated. Every round on target despite the intense enemy fire.
Good shooting, Pablo.
The rounds hit, and, after a pause, detonated from below the surface, throwing up a dense cloud of dust along and before the ridge. 'Third Squad! Follow me!" Fighting down the voice screaming in the back of his brain to hide-hide-hide, Stark lunged forward, rolling headfirst down the slope before him, running, staggering back and forth to confuse aiming in case the enemy could somehow see him, trying to hold a course toward the next ridge. His HUD flickered, staggering under the load of enemy jamming, then blanked out, blinded by the dust, picking up incoming small-arms fire and energy pulses close by, here and gone in a blink through the obscuring cloud. He kept going, hoping his Squad had followed, trying not to think beyond the next step.

His feet hit an upslope and Stark surged forward, putting all he had into a final burst of speed. He cleared the cloud of dust and debris, sudden stars and black night seeming unnaturally bright, bursting out with the top of the ridge before him and in a single motion dove low down and across the rocks, turning to glide down into the dust of the reverse slope, head down on his back, bringing his rifle around and triggering its two grenades to either side, lining up the sight to aim-squeeze-fire, aim-squeeze-fire at the figures scattered here. Enemy soldiers fell, atmosphere venting from ruptured armor, firing across at him from each side, rounds passing above his prone body to inadvertently engage their own forces on either side.

Stark slid to a halt, aim suddenly jittery as he tried to keep shooting, feeling a long, slow moment of despair as enemy fire steadied, knowing he had only seconds left and panic frozen inside.
Didn't work. At least I tried. Sorry, you guys. I guess the civs will get to watch us buy it after all. Hope Mom and Dad see this, know I did 'em proud, if they can stand seeing me die out here.

Another figure loomed, shockingly close from over the ridge, and Stark swung to fire, freezing his finger on the trigger as IFF shouted "friendly!" Then there were more friendlies coming over the ridge. His Squad, shouting and firing at enemy ranks already disrupted by Stark's charge. The enemy began falling back in confusion, ranks torn and broken.

"Jesus, Sarge," Murphy screamed as his armored body flopped down near Stark, his weapon jumping as rounds ripped out in an almost steady stream, "why the hell'd you do that? Next time give me a heads-up!"

"Sure," Stark shouted back, automatically rolling away from Murphy to avoid providing a clustered target. Stark's comm system was screaming now, too, commands from up the chain tangling with each other and enemy jamming. "Get the heavy weapons!" he ordered.

Murphy and the rest of the Squad turned, targeting the weapons pits that were finally reacting, shifting aim to target Stark's Squad now that their own troops weren't intermingled. Some of the Squad scrambled up, trying to get in among the enemy once again, but dropped rapidly as the heavies opened up, raking the area with firepower the Squad's own small-arms fire couldn't match. The charge's momentum faltered, events hanging in the balance as the enemy tried to figure out what had happened and how to crush the unexpected assault.

A huge object jumped the ridge to Stark's left, gouging out a swath of terrain as it shaved the top, then slid ponderously down in a slow avalanche of rocks and dust, turret swiveling and secondary rounds going out, enemy weapon pits erupting into clouds of debris as the tank took out local targets. Whoops of triumph filled the comm circuits.
Of course,
Stark realized.
We cleared the troops manning the ridge, so a tank could get across without being targeted.
He suddenly loved all tankers, especially the one who'd risked his or her machine and life in that mad leap to join them. The turret steadied a moment and the main gun jumped, followed seconds later by a massive detonation in the distance.

More infantry came over the ridge. Stark's overloaded HUD painted a flickering picture of tentative IDs that indicated the rest of his Platoon had followed his Squad. "Stark!" Lieutenant Porter's outraged voice rang out in a moment of comm clarity. "What the hell—?" Then it was overridden, Tactical clearing momentarily to shift in a wild update, ordering an advance all along the ridge. Someone up the chain had seen the opportunity offered by Stark's Squad's charge, had broken out of paralysis long enough to shove everything available after them.

The enemy line had fallen apart. Some of their infantry were still running, others stopping and dropping their weapons to await capture. The tank continued methodically chewing up every target in sight, shifting position as the second and third tanks in the squadron heaved up over the ridge to join it. On the HUD, Stark watched as more troops poured into their penetration, widening the hole and peeling away the edges like a river in flood tearing open a dam. Then the river faltered, slowing to a trickle as the stream of troops ran dry.
Nothing left to exploit the success,
Stark noted bleakly.
We used up everything we had stopping the enemy.

Stark came up to one knee, trying to judge the status of his Squad from their position markers, knowing he couldn't yet trust their health or readiness readouts. Somewhere up ahead, a sudden flurry of fire marked the enemy rushing in reinforcements to stabilize their front and seal the penetration, the two armies clashing in drunken exhaustion like punch-drunk fighters still trying to land blows but too worn out to achieve much without rest. His HUD displayed tangles of estimates warped by jamming, comm delays, and enemy deception, but the lines seemed to be holding on both sides even as Stark's Tactical ordered another advance against the rapidly solidifying enemy resistance.