Orders of Battle (Frontlines) Read online

  It feels odd to be out here all alone. It’s so quiet and empty that it seems like I have the whole planet to myself for a while. The last time I went to a church was with my mother when I was in my early teens, before she gave up on trying to drag me along. Sometimes we just briefly stopped by, outside of service hours, because Mom wanted to light a candle for someone or duck in for a quick prayer. Even to a bored kid, there was an undeniable majestic gravitas to the huge, empty cathedral and its silent stone-vaulted ceiling. This landscape feels a lot like that cathedral did, with the dome of the storm-gray sky above my head and the silence that almost seems to have a weight of its own. Seabirds are soaring in the breeze coming from the ocean, and out on the water, the wind is whipping the tops of the waves into white froth. Mom sometimes argued that everyone worships in some way. I always disputed that notion when she was alive, but as I make my way across the hills and valleys here on this unspoiled island, I realize that maybe I had missed her point all along, and it gives me a pang of regret to know that I’ll never be able to tell her she was right after all. I feel a sense of restoration and inner peace when I am out here by myself or hiking in the Vermont mountains with Halley. If Mom got the same feeling in a church, then this is my own version of that, a place where I can be reflective, in awe at the knowledge that I’m in the presence of something greater than myself, something enduring and universal. Maybe we all really do attend church in our own way, whether we believe in gods or not.

  I can hear the gunfire on the range long before I round the last hill. The staccato thunderclaps of supersonic muzzle reports echo back from the surrounding mountains. The propellant in the new rifles has a peculiar sound, a hoarse cough rather than a sharp boom. From what I have heard, the R&D teams calibrated the new caseless ammo to be low in flash and report, to minimize the sensor disruptions when it’s fired in underground environments.

  I walk down the hill and onto the range, past the flags that mark a live-fire environment. My company NCO, Master Sergeant Leach, is standing behind the firing line with his arms folded, observing the proceedings. The range has half a dozen live-fire pits. Each of them has a Eurocorps student and an NAC instructor in it, and more Eurocorps troops are lined up in the safe zone behind each pit, waiting for their turns.

  I stay behind the safety line until the course of fire has ended. When the pits change students, Master Sergeant Leach turns around to shout instructions at those in line, then walks back to where I am standing.

  “Good afternoon, sir,” he says. “I didn’t know you were going to join us.”

  “I didn’t know either until I got in, two hours ago,” I reply. “Wasn’t in the mood for sitting on my ass. Not after that ride from Keflavík.”

  “Understood, sir. I see you brought your boomstick.”

  “Don’t tell me you were just about to call a cold range and pack it up. I’d hate to have dragged this thing all the way out here for nothing.”

  “No, sir. We still have an hour left to go.”

  “How are they doing?” I say with a nod at the waiting lines of trainees. Master Sergeant Leach follows my gaze.

  “They’re quite all right. I mean, it’s clear that some of the Euro countries spend more time at the range than others. But the baseline is pretty good. The Germans and the Brits especially. They’d still get their clocks cleaned by an SI line company, though. Never mind a podhead team.”

  We watch as the students in the pits get their weapons ready under the watchful eyes of their instructors. All the Eurocorps trainees are noncommissioned officers with lots of special operations training, and the lowest-ranking ones are still at least corporals with two years of service. But when I look down the line at the trainees who are waiting with their helmets under their arms, they all look impossibly young to me, and I voice the thought to the master sergeant.

  “Tell me about it,” he says. “Buncha fucking kids. They got good training, mind. But none of them have combat experience. The most senior ones? They joined the year after Mars.”

  “Shit,” I say, and the sergeant grins without humor.

  The wind coming from the sea carries the smell of the ocean water, unadulterated by the pollution of a city, a scent so clean and inoffensive that I’d have a hard time describing it to a PRC kid who has never lived in unspoiled air. Overhead, a few seabirds are circling in the breeze, seemingly unperturbed by the ruckus of the gunshots.

  “How many years have you been in, Leach? Eleven?”

  “Twelve,” he says.

  “No shit. Same as me? You went to Basic in ’08?”

  Leach nods. “San Diego.”

  “I went to Orem,” I say. “January ’08.”

  “Then you have three months on me, sir.”

  “I’m shocked they haven’t made you an officer, too. Damn few of the pre-war crowd left.”

  “Oh, they tried,” Master Sergeant Leach says. “Several times. But I wasn’t dumb enough to let them. No offense, Major.”

  “None taken. And you’re smarter than I was. Those stars, they come with all kinds of baggage. Plenty of days I wish I’d remained an NCO.”

  “Some of us have to do it,” Leach says. “And I’m glad when it’s someone who knows the business. But I’m still happy it’s you and not me.”

  He nods at the rifle that’s slung across my chest.

  “You want me to slot you into the firing line, sir? We brought plenty of ammo along.”

  “Well,” I say. “I didn’t bring that for decoration, I guess.”

  I fill my magazine pouches at the ammo station and step into my assigned firing pit. The new weapon I am carrying is something I wish we had been issued just before Mars, because it’s a game-changing piece of hardware. Over the years, the weapons R&D teams back home came up with the M-80, then the M-90, and finally the M-95, each with an increase in caliber to maximize the amount of explosive gas in the projectiles. Then our people and the Eurocorps weapon designers compared notes and figured out what worked, and what could be made to work even better. The result is the rifle I am now charging with its first ten-round disposable ammunition cassette. It’s the JMB, the Joint Modular Battle Rifle, which spent about ten minutes in active service before it received its nickname: Jumbo. For the first time, the spacefaring services of the NAC and the Eurocorps carry the same gun and use the same kind of ammunition, greatly simplifying logistics and training.

  Jumbo is a mean piece of hardware, and all the troops love it. Where the old M-95 basically fired giant hypodermic needles filled with explosive gas, the JMB shoots a very fast high-density armor-piercing projectile that has an explosive charge behind it. The new rounds are half the size of the old ones. Now we carry twice the rounds into combat we could take along for the M-95, and the new rifles can fire both single shots and automatic bursts. To keep the recoil from knocking troops on their asses, the engineers built in a dampening system that runs on hydraulic buffer tubes and—from what I can tell—a whole lot of Black Forest magic. To an infantry grunt, it feels like having a personal autocannon.

  “Ready on the firing line,” the range safety officer announces when I’ve loaded the rifle and indicated my readiness. Up ahead, the range is a thousand-meter expanse of loosely packed soil, seeded with concealed targets that will appear according to the program the RSO has loaded into the system.

  The first target pops up eight hundred meters ahead and begins moving toward me at typical Lanky walking speed. With the helmet-mounted sight, it’s not a big challenge to put rounds on target. It’s sized to approximate a Lanky’s torso, ten meters by three, but at this range even a silhouette of that size isn’t very large. The rifle is paired to my armor’s targeting computer, using the ballistic information from the aiming laser and combining it with the data from the environment—temperature, air pressure, windspeed. I place the aiming reticle over the middle of the target and select single-fire mode. Then I squeeze the trigger.

  The rifle barks its hoarse muzzle blast and sends a ten-mil
limeter slug streaking downrange at twelve hundred meters per second. The shot hits the Lanky target near the middle of its mass. I quickly send two more rounds after the first. Every time a round hits, I can see the puff of the explosive charge as it turns a ten-millimeter hole into a head-sized one. The target drops from sight, the computer satisfied that the cumulative hits have done the job.

  Three more targets appear halfway down the range at three hundred meters. They pop up one after the other, with a two-second delay between them, and advance toward me. I put two rounds into each, using the same sequence in which they appeared, left to right. The Jumbo chugs out the contents of its magazine, boom-boom-boom, and the Lanky targets drop one by one. The last one wobbles a bit, as if the final round to hit it merely glanced off the top. My ammo counter shows one round left in the weapon, and I adjust my aim and fire it right into the center of the remaining target. It drops with a satisfying clang that I can hear all the way back to the firing line after a second and a half. Then the three targets are all in the dirt, and I eject the empty ammo cassette and replace it with a full one from my ammo pouch.

  For the next few minutes, the computer serves up a variety of targets at different distances. Some advance toward me, some move in an oblique line, others stand still or move away. With the targeting computer and the magnification of my helmet-mounted sight, I don’t miss a single one. The armor doesn’t have automatic aiming servos like the PACS suits do, so the weapon can’t fully aim itself, but the corrective booster servos in my arm-joint links adjust my aim a little with every shot; this compensates for my small movements and those of the weapon under recoil. I use up my second magazine, then my third, putting Lanky targets into the dust one by one.

  When I insert my last full cassette, my helmet display flickers and turns itself off. The reticle projection in front of my right eye winks out of existence.

  “Simulated suit malfunction,” the RSO says into my ear over the range safety comms channel. “Switch to iron sights and engage manually.”

  The Jumbo doesn’t have its own sighting optics because it uses the sensors in the shooter’s battle armor for targeting. If the armor fails, the only way to aim the rifle is with a set of backup sights on the top receiver. I push the lever that releases the sights, and they pop up out of their storage position with a snap. Then I bring the gun up to my shoulder to aim through the sights, like a rifleman from the pre-electronics age.

  The next target appears at five hundred meters. Without the corrective aim of the optical sight projection, I have to account for the distance myself, but the caseless ten-millimeter rounds are so fast that the heavy armor-piercing explosive projectiles don’t drop very much even at this range. I put the tip of the trapezoid front sight in the center of the Lanky target and squeeze the trigger twice. One hits low and barely clips the bottom of the target, but the other smacks into the top half of the polymer silhouette and sends it crashing down into the dirt. Then two more targets pop up, much closer than the last. One is a hundred meters out and rapidly advancing. The other is less than thirty meters away, and its size makes it look like it’s right on top of me. I suppress a momentary surge of instinctive panic and flick the rifle’s selector switch to burst-fire mode. The closer target is the bigger threat, and I hammer it with a three-round burst that tears bits and pieces off the gel-filled polymer silhouette. It seems to teeter on the edge of falling down, so I follow it up with another three-round burst, aimed high near the head to give the silhouette the added momentum it needs to fall over. When it drops, there’s a cloud of dust that momentarily obscures my field of vision. I bring the rifle to the left a little, take a bead on the advancing Lanky silhouette that is now less than thirty meters away, and fire the last three rounds in one rapid burst. Even in fully automatic fire, the Jumbo barely moves. It’s intoxicating to be able to dish out this much kinetic energy and explosive power without the punishment from the savage recoil the old M-series anti-Lanky rifles inflicted when fired with live ammunition. The simulator ranges with their holographic targets are useful for staying in practice in the confined space of a warship, and it’s certainly safer and more economical to shoot virtual rounds at holograms. But nothing beats the sensation of sending live ammo downrange and punching big holes into actual things.

  When the course of fire ends, my helmet display comes back to life and tallies up my score. With my fifty rounds, I have killed seventeen Lankies, scoring a 91 percent effective hit rate. On the battlefield, a single soldier mowing down seventeen Lankies with nothing but a rifle and a basic combat load of ammo would get so buried in medals that they’d never again be able to put on a dress-uniform blouse without the help of two strong attendants and a forklift. This isn’t real life, of course, but it’s still enormously confidence building to know that even our personal weapons are now powerful enough to reliably let a single trooper stop a rush from multiple Lankies.

  “Not terrible,” Master Sergeant Leach says when I step back behind the safety line and show the RSO the open action of my rifle to let him verify its unloaded status.

  “That gun makes it easy,” I say. “Where was this stuff when we were hand-cranking rounds into the chambers one by one?”

  “The tech is nice. But it won’t keep them from shitting their pants and fumbling their reloads the first time there’s half a dozen pissed-off Lankies rushing their position.”

  Behind Sergeant Leach, some of the trainees have watched my performance, and I can tell by their nods and low conversations that I haven’t made a total fool out of myself in the firing pit.

  “If you were trying to show off, it’s working,” the sergeant says.

  “Hardly,” I say. “They’re just glad the Old Man still remembers which end of the rifle the bullets come out of.”

  I watch the rest of the range exercise with Sergeant Leach as the afternoon wears on. One after another, the trainees collect their allotted live ammo and take their turns in the firing pits. The RSO keeps changing up courses of fire for every round. Whenever he chooses a scenario where the Lanky targets pop up almost right in front of the pits, I get a strange, uncomfortable feeling in my stomach. The targets are only rough silhouettes of Lanky torsos, but the polymer they use for the outer layer looks disturbingly like real Lanky skin, and at short range, the effect triggers some of my dormant battle stress. I’ve seen too many Lankies at close range, and every time I have, people died in horrific and violent ways right beside me. I read in a book once that the howling of wolves is a racial memory to us, that it used to cause fear and discomfort in ancient humans even if they had never seen a wolf before. Wolves have been all but extinct on Earth for decades, and the sound of their howling isn’t disturbing to me. But I know that from now until I die, the sight of that eggshell-colored Lanky skin will be my personal specter, the memory that keeps me close to the campfire at night.

  When we are done at the range, I join the company for their speed march back to the base, voluntarily tacking two hours and a lot of sweat onto my workday. We did these sorts of marches all the time back in every podhead school I’ve attended over the years. A march goes quicker when the reward of a hot meal and a long shower is waiting at the end of the hump, and it gives extra motivation and dopamine on the way back. We march along the path that snakes through the majestic barren landscape, and I listen as the master sergeant makes the section leaders call out cadence and sing marching songs in their respective languages. The singing and laughter echoes from the hills and down the valleys as we make our way back to base, and it’s the most enjoyable thing I have done in weeks. It feels strange to admit it to myself, but despite all the bullshit that comes with life in the service, all the chunks the war has taken out of my soul over the years, I have missed this feeling of belonging and purpose. As the trainees sweat and huff and banter on the trail back down to the little cluster of ISTS buildings that’s huddled on the shore of the fjord like a little island of light in the late-afternoon dusk, I realize that it may be the only r
eason why I am still wearing the uniform.

  CHAPTER 4

  A FLY-BY OFFER

  Of all the duty stations I’ve ever had, Iceland is hands down the best, at least as far as conventional soldier metrics go. I only break a sweat when I choose to do so. The chow on the base is excellent, the landscape is breathtaking, and the MilNet connection is superfast, with enough bandwidth to do video calls with Halley anytime I want. The commanding officer of the school is a lieutenant colonel I know back from my busy podhead days in the Fleet, and he runs his shop without superfluous bullshit. We are in the middle of the North Atlantic, far removed from the rest of Special Operations Command and the rest of the Corps establishment, so we don’t have to waste much time on putting on appearances for the high-level brass or the civilian oversight committees. As far as billets go, it’s the cushiest one imaginable for someone of my rank and job specialty.

  I know that I don’t have a right to feel any discontent. There are plenty of my friends and comrades resting in the soil of far-off colonies or scattered in space who never got the chance to make it this far. And I know that I’ve expended enough sweat and blood over the years for this privilege. But deep down, I feel a sense of unease, as if the universe is setting me up, that it’s raising my comfort level and expectations just so I can fall so much harder whenever everything gets yanked out from underneath me again. So I try to treat the billet as the temporary reprieve I suspect it to be. I run five kilometers every morning, and sometimes in the evening as well. I make it a point to join the company for as much of the hard stuff out in the field as I can get away with. And with typical grunt paranoia, I wait for the other shoe to drop, just so it can’t take me by surprise.