Strong Arm Tactics (10 page)

Chapter 6

“Battle stations!” A siren whooped, filling Emmy Lin’s dreams. “Battle stations! Report! Report. This
is
a drill; repeat, this is a drill!” Lin’s eyes sprang open. She was already standing beside her bunk, reaching for her web suit.

Every light in the barracks went on at once. The Cockroaches sprang out of bed and snatched their new CBS,Ps off the end of their bunks and shrugged into them, shedding their skivvies on the way. The new webs fit like an outer epidermis, adapting to the temperature of the body against the air. Lin took a moment to glance at the chrono glowing over the door: 0400. Typical. Their unit had been placed on third sleep shift. The drill was coming smack in the middle of it. They had only been aboard the ship three days.

“Never mind the grousing!” she shouted, over the usual complaints. “Get the job done.”

“The noises!” Gire complained, lying in his bunk with his hands over his ears. “It’s too loud!”

The small chief gestured at Meyers, who slipped her arm around the medic’s shoulders and helped him up. “What’s the matter, your ear filters not in place?”

The medic felt his head. “The voices are inside!”

Lin sighed. “You left your personal player on again,” she said, patiently. She dug under his pillow and came up with his communications card. Yes, it showed that it was switched to a prerecorded program. Gire often needed entertainment to sleep. Not that he slept much; he had nightmares most of the time when he drifted off. In any other unit he would have been given a medical discharge, but the Cockroaches took care of their own. He was a good field doctor, even though his primary specialty was dentistry, and they all knew he could never make it successfully in civilian life. “What is it this time? Pretty young girls with cultured accents pretending to be men so they can engage in lesbian sex for the pleasure of older men even though a monkey wouldn’t be fooled by their disguises, or a rich family having to deal with skeletons in the closet after the death of a family member they never knew existed?” Gire favored unbelievable scenarios like that that were far removed from his own miserable life. He never talked about where he had come from if he could help it. All they knew was that they’d pulled him out of the wreckage of a small cruiser crushed between two lizard flanks, the sole survivor of a thousand trooper push.

“No …” Gire blinked. His hands groped for the card and switched off the input. He wrinkled his nose at the blaring noise. “What’s all the sirens for?”

“Battle stations exercise,” Meyers said, helping him out of his underwear. As soon as she had yanked down his shorts Gire came to life and started stretching out his CBS,P so it would go on more easily. With practiced hands he drew the body stocking up and on, sealing the front with gloved hands. “Where’s our station?”

“Sanitation,” Lin said dryly, “as usual.”

“Heads up, everyone!” Boland bellowed, his deep voice carrying over the chatter. “Let’s move it! Weapons set for exercise. Non-lethality!”

They jogged into the cabin next door, which was where their armor and arms were kept. Lt. Wolfe and the other two officers were already there, suiting up.

“Evening,” Wolfe said, grinning so that his yellow eyes were slits. The skin around them looked drawn and puffy, making him look older. “Nothing like throwing us in head first, eh?”

“No, sir,” Lin said. “You look like you haven’t been to bed yet.”

“Er, no. Long meet-and-greet session.” Wolfe smirked.

“You leave them any money?”

“Enough for tomorrow,” the lieutenant said smugly. He clapped his helmet on at the same moment as Lin, rendering him faceless and almost invisible as the chameleon armor took over, displaying the wall behind him. The heads-up display inside her helmet gave her a solid red outline showing a warm body, overlaid by the blue image of his energy signature, and topped with a gold tag that carried his ID number and a coded dingbat for rank. That marking served to identify him as one of their own in the case of a scrimmage. Telemetry began to spell itself out in the text box across the top of her readout. Their orders were repeated in text and over their mastoid implants. Wolfe’s voice came over her in-suit comm system. “Squad leaders, troopers ready to rally! Shoulder weapons! Duty stations, double time!”

Lin heard a general-purpose groan from the troopers. He sure was new. Any experienced officer would take it as read that a squad that trained even irregularly would know what to do without being told.

At least he was holding back from the door until the point troopers went out it. D-45 and two of the other sharpshooters unshipped their rifles. Crossed on their backs were sword and can-opener, the latter a hooked and flattened metal rod the same length as the sword, with a pointed screw thread at the other end. The can-opener was the space trooper’s best friend. It could be used with equal success to crank open hull plating, or the suit of an enemy trooper. Pop an opponent’s suit in vacuum with the pointy end, and he was no longer a problem. The screw end was to wind into a bulkhead in case of zero-gee conditions. You held onto it with one hand and your shooting buddy with the other while he fought the enemy, anchoring him. Even so-called recoilless weapons caused some kickback. It was hard to fight a successful melee if you were caroming around the room like a ping-pong ball in a wind tunnel. The swords were modeled on classic sabers of ancient Terra, though the point was sharpened to a singularity, the better to pierce through one’s opponent’s armor joints with. Since this was an exercise, the nonferrous blades had guards fastened around them. It was bad form to spit your allies like seekh kebabs, even by mistake.

As soon as the word came over the helmet audio that the hallway was secured, Lin shouldered her way out next, covering Lt. Wolfe’s exit. He looked around too, as he slid out into the corridor, drawing that beautiful pistol of his. She sure would have liked to get a close look at it. Unless she was very wrong about the age of the gun, it was a lot older than the boy himself. There was a story behind that, which, she guessed, the Cockroaches were
not
going to hear. The sword was also not strictly standard issue, a thing of beauty. The metal gleamed silver and blue, ripples of color playing up and down the blade’s length for the moment that Wolfe had had it exposed. It was almost a pity to quench its cold fire in an exercise guard. He was favored by his family. For a moment Lin felt a twinge of envy, then dismissed it. The Cockroaches were her family. So they never gave her fancy birthday presents. They never forgot it, either.

The others poured out into the hallway behind them. The coast looked clear. No warm bodies were within stated range.

Suddenly, three red forms leaped into their field of view at 20 meters distance. The squad dropped into firing formation, then paused, embarrassed, as they paid more attention to the real-view of the ‘intruders’: three junior ensigns in full dress whites, two males and a female. All three giggled at the sight of an entire platoon in armor in the middle of the night. Lin groaned.

“Sir?” she asked on the private channel that broadcast to his mastoid receiver only. “How many units are participating in this drill?”

“Damned if I know, Top,” Wolfe said, over the same channel. “I was not informed this exercise would be taking place. It wasn’t on my schedule, or I’d have prepared a plan of battle. It could be just us and the computer. Borden, see if you can raise Commander Iry or her aide. In the meantime, we’d better get down to deck B. B-deck forward, zone 6 muster station! Let’s move out!”

“Aye, aye, sir,” Lin replied in a dead voice.
Stop micromanaging us!
she wanted to scream.
We know what the hell we’re doing!
“Combat names, sir?”

“Er, yes. Yes, of course.”

“We don’t know yours, sir.”

“Blink,” Daivid replied.

“That’s stupid,” Boland commented, “sir. With respect, with your name we should call you ‘Big Bad.’”

“Hey, yeah!” Thielind agreed.

“No!” Daivid protested, but he knew it was no use. He’d gotten the tag Blink pinned on him, too, for his speed with his sidearm. He’d wanted to be called something like Lightning or Nuclear, but his senior officers paid no attention then, either.

The Cockroaches jogged toward the lifts in double-time, weapons at the ready. The scouts, led by D-45, fanned out to cover all approaches, including scanning the ceiling and floors with their infrared visors. Daivid let his eyes follow theirs for a moment, seeing an engineer above the false panels wrenching something upwards between his hands and hacking at it with a tool, two more sitting quietly studying the tunnel to their left, and another pair who were busy but weren’t engaged in engineering at all.

Daivid chuckled. Over the platoon channel, Daivid heard an echoing laugh from several of the troopers. Normally no one would have noticed a courting couple, officially or otherwise, but the heads-up display played no favorites. It revealed all. If you were alive, you could find yourself on Candid Helmet Camera. At last Borden spoke.

“I’ve raised Petty Officer Gruen,” she said. “He says this is a one-on-one exercise. Just X-Ray versus either a virtual reality program or another unit. We won’t know until we get there. Our objective is to capture the enemy beacon. Hits will be recorded by tagging. Survival is less important than achieving the objective, but both would be preferable. Naturally, sir. The exercise will last for one hour, unless the beacon is secured or everyone is ‘killed.’”

“Laser tag, eh?” Wolfe mused. A game which had descended almost unchanged from their ancestors of five millenia ago involved running around in danger territory with artificial weapons that shone a beam of low-level, visible laser light. If your timed shot hit another player, you scored a point. A kill was worth three. The military had adopted this useful technology as a training exercise from the very beginning of the space service, with adaptations for the more sophisticated weaponry the military carried. It saved wear and tear on the ship, the troops, and the non-combatant ‘civilians,’ who might otherwise be struck by stray live fire in the closed environment. “Keeps us alert if we can’t anticipate whether we’re facing AI or live fighters we can psych out. Stay with it, troopers. We don’t know who the enemy will be. Everyone else is to be considered a neutral. On stealth. We want to maintain the element of surprise as long as we have to. Is that understood?”

Unable to keep the boredom out of their voices, the Cockroaches chorused, “Aye, sir!” Lin noticed that the red blob that represented Wolfe winced slightly. Good. They were getting through to him. He wasn’t the first baby officer they’d nursed into maturity.

O O O

Wolfe followed his forward point up the forward ladder toward Deck B. It made him nervous that they had to emerge into the ‘war zone’ headfirst. It gave the enemy an advantage. Nothing like being kicked in the head to start off an exercise. Above them, all was dark. The lights had been turned off in zone 6. That way, no one could tell if they were facing AI or live opponents. At first, that was. The readout in the helmet screen would be the same, but a blow from an actual combatant, in identical military-issue armor, was a mule-kick in comparison to the love-tap the suit gave itself when the AI said ‘body-slam.’ It wasn’t a perfect system, but it got troopers used to physical strikes, and didn’t put them in the infirmary for what was just a war game. The idea was to train their reactions, not the ability of their bodies to knit.

Every ship, no matter how high technology rose in civilization, had retained the low-tech methods of securing a deck, with heavy-duty latches or wheels to close the door and seals, in case power failed during an emergency. Both physical and electronic locks were easily disabled by Thielind and Aaooorru, the corlist acting as the ensign’s assistant, his ‘good four right hands,’ as Thielind put it. As they exited the ladder, the scouts hesitated, weapons up, against the ceiling before slipping through and crouching on the floor in the dark. Wolfe read the first bogey signal about fifteen meters ahead. He clicked over to D-45’s audio frequency. “I’m seeing five, chief, er, Numbers.”

“Me, too, sir.” A moment of silence while the noncom checked with his squad. Wolfe could hear Ambering’s voice over the other channel responding to a query. “Cuddles says six, but she’s at a better angle than me. From 12 o’clock, twelve, one, one-thirty, two at five, seven.”

“Got it.” Wolfe passed the word, but the others had already seen what he had. “Ready to go?”

“Aye, sir!” twenty-two voices chimed in his ears.

“Go, go, go!”

At the word, D-45’s squad leaped up through the hole into the dark, laying down covering fire as the rest of the Cockroaches scrambled up into the combat zone. Returning fire cascaded, red streaks lancing out from the dampened laser weapons. The bolts represented the smart-bullets the weapons would normally fire: each explosive projectile had an onboard chip telling it not to detonate when it hit hull plate or other materials that matched certain chemical signatures. That way defenders wouldn’t be scuttling their own ship while attempting to defend it.

Daivid and the others returned fire. In his headset he watched the red-in-blue forms duck and come up shooting, over and over. He wished there was a visual image for his eyes, but the automatic targeting software in his heads-up display helped him track the enemy. He let out a short burst over the head of one opponent behind a square obstacle. As soon as the form raised its head to return fire, Daivid nailed it in the throat. The blue glow around the ‘live’ body went green, then yellow. A solid kill. In a real combat situation, he would just have put an explosive armor piercing round right into one of the most vulnerable points on an invader’s suit.

“Oh, slag!” Somulska wailed. Daivid glanced at him, checking the stats in his heads-up display. The big man’s armor had gone green and begun to flash on one side of the upper body. “I’m hit!”

“Where, Talon?” Gire asked.

“Left shoulder. My damned web suit’s pinching me. Fraxing computer simulation.”

“You’re not dead yet,” D-45 growled. “Keep fighting. Cockroaches can keep fighting for a week even if you cut off their heads.”