Field Promotions are hell
_________________________
Fiction
by Christopher T. Shields
.... and
then I blinked.
Twice I
think, not sure.
Disoriented.
Williams,
Andy Hollis I thought to myself.
My name.
I mumbled
my service number, did it twice because I think I got it wrong the first time
or maybe I was just calling out some numbers that were flashing in holo on the
inside of my tank. Ringing in my ears, parts of me hurt … parts that
normally didn’t so that was new. I couldn't tell what was what or which
end was up, but I hoped that however I had landed that something was covering
my BPC plated ass and that no one was painting it rosy red with a through-spectrum
target designator right now.
Snap to it.
Williams,
Andy Hollis. Enlisted.
Drafted,
not really enlisted, but that was my rank as well.
Soldier.
Armor
polisher.
Two
Corporal Williams. 5th to the 1st, TACOMBINE, mobile infantry, third squad.
Uh.
There was
more... I thought harder, bit my lip, didn't break the skin, but tasted blood
anyway. Maybe that wasn't sweat running down my face. Sweat wasn't
sticky.
Think.
Hard to
think with all the bells and whistles of the heavy power suit going off around
me. Holographic icons, flashing indicators, subliminal icons, blinking
indicators, pulsing lights, constant flow readouts, sounds layered over sounds,
alarms for everything.
My hand
instinctively flinched, a move copied by the armored gauntlet that was my
second skin, made of laminated bi-phased carbide. I felt the fingertip control
for cracking my suit.
Eject.
I heard
that word.
Eject.
I thought
that I heard that word.
I feel like
the birth of Creation is going on inside my can.
Think...
Hard to
think …
I am...
"Two
Corporal Williams... do you copy?!"
I am Two
Corporal Williams.
Now I
copy.
I realized
that I was just happy to still be breathing.
My fingers
relaxed on the suit release switches. To
pop the suit, you had to go through a somewhat complex routine designed so that
you didn’t crack your shell on accident.
It’s a routine drilled into every mobile infantry soldier just so that
you don’t pop your suit the first time everything in your tank starts screaming
at you.
Breathe
deep.
Count four.
Hold
breath.
Count four.
Let breath
out, force it.
Count four.
That helped.
Everything
around me fell into a kind of place, like days of the week or hours of the
day. Slots in my existence.
There was
three slots I was currently paying attention to …
The first
slot was my existence.
I was in
hell.
The second
slot was my pain.
I was in a
lot of pain.
The third
slot was my heavy power suit of armor.
My suit was
screaming at me and flashing all sorts of icons and imagery at me in my tank.
What first?
Pain.
Pain is
God's way of telling you that you are all right, at least in my
book.
I took
stock of my existence.
I moved my
legs.
I could
move my legs so that was good.
I also
didn’t scream when I moved my legs which was also good.
I moved my
arms, first the left then the right, not enough for the suit to pick up the
movement and mimic it through the myomers and actuators, but enough to tell me
that I wasn’t crippled, at least not physically. I also didn’t scream when I moved my arms, so
that was also good.
Again, my
own personal school of thought was that screaming is just God's way of saying
that you're moving air (which is another very good thing), that your airways
are clear and that your lungs are working … and, consequently, that you are
still alive.
Overall, it
felt like I’d tried to use my heavy power suit to tackle a freight train, head
on.
A thought
came to mind and then left just as sudden.
Missile.
Missile?
Missile.
Vector
lines.
Probability
of point of impact.
Point
defense systems active.
Countermeasures
active.
Not good
enough … or too late to matter.
Incoming.
Incoming!
A blinding
flash …
… a roar
more felt than heard …
… and here
I was.
Okay, my
legs and arms worked, nothing was broken, or my scream would have exceeded
eighty decibels. I got my bearings and
rolled with it. It was more difficult
than I remembered, the heavy power suit felt sluggish, requiring more effort on
my part to sling around. It also made
noises that I swear were the machine equivalent of protests.
I hurt.
My suit
hurt.
Yeah, now
that I could think about it, all that noise in the background of my existence
was hurt; a whole lot of it. The onboard
knew I was hurt, but not critical. I felt one pin prick near my thigh,
another in my upper back, and two more on my chest. Bee and wasp stings followed by the cool
weight of chemicals and stimulants entering my system either through veins or
fatty tissue. The main line drips from
the suits IV system also dropped a few stimulants into my system. My body
and mind came awake as the mild stimulant and some artificially manufactured
pseudorphin chains raced through my system.
I blinked
again, and everything became crisp.
Cold air
hit my nostrils from the vents near my face mask, programmed shock effect, the
air was laced with a another short ride stimulant and I winced, breathing deep
and blinking back a smudge of blood in my left eye, the reward for having hit
my forehead against the side of my tank after I had been tumbled by
that last shockwave. Something had gotten our range, probably that
Pan missile track we had been trying our best to skirt but missiles are faster
than fans, unless you're using those fans to blow a cushion under you.
"Two
Corporal Williams, DO you copy?!"
Who was
that?
Didn’t they
know I didn’t want to talk to anyone right now?
I killed
most of the tell-tales to silent mode, dumping my sitrep to a cache for review
in a few. I keyed the mike up to the squad channel. Maybe if I just answered whoever it was they
would shut up and let me be.
"Ten
and ten." I said flatly into the commlink, throat mike picked it up if the
rest of the sensors in my tank didn't.
I
definitely wasn’t ten and ten, but I didn’t feel like trying to explain my
situation to anyone when I was still trying to figure my situation out myself.
A short EMS
spike told me my words had gone out.
A squad
rally point appeared on my overlay. SquadNET
was being nanny for now, picking up our slack and trying to get our tactical
heads screwed back on straight. When our
suits were all synced again, our individual processors would talk to each other
rapid fire, sharing the load and giving us an edge as a whole that none of us
had as individuals.
Rally
point; ninety meters north-west my current position. Two other squad mates were moving that way,
slow but sure in their pace. Suit reps
began to pour in on SquadNET but the overlay was still digesting the data,
trying to get a heads up on our situation.
A short EMS spike as a drone raced past, flitting away to the southwest
of my position. Another drone raced by,
trailing twenty meters behind that, arcing off for the opposite direction and
looking to loop back on a wide orbit.
Green spike
for both.
Both our
drones.
Maybe even
one or two of mine.
I blinked
at the overlay, counting my squad mates.
Some
weren’t on the overlay.
I counted
twice, may have counted a few twice … head still had ringing going off inside
my skull. Couldn’t be sure. How many suits were in a squad?
Five?
Six?
Were there
enough suits showing on the squad overlay?
Too many suits? Maybe I
miscounted. I blinked and the number was
different. Five outlines.
Five suits.
Why were
some of the suits different than the others?
One suit was larger than the others, my suit, I guess, and four other
suits in smaller outlines. One was
blinking red, one was solid yellow, one was blinking green and two were …
ghosted out. Gray outlines of suits with
a small bright white skull symbol inside the helmet outline. The display below each ghosted out suit read
… OFFLINE:KIA.
The first
and last suit in the squad overlay were ghosted out.
Ghosts.
Casualties.
My suit was
the second suit in the squad overlay … larger than the others, blinking green.
If I was
reading the overlay correctly, we were down 40% in squad strength.
Flashes,
memory catching up to an artificially accelerated nervous system, the post
injection crash, the thirty second letdown, rapid fatigue combat stimulants and
drugs losing their punch, but still loitering around my system, like heavy spent
casings banging around together as they floated in my veins.
The squad
point defense array had allowed us a better than fair chance against what the
Pan track layer had been chucking our way … aided by the drone targeting and
the redundant painting from the heavy anti-armor repeaters, even our deployed
point defense cluster munitions, but the rest...
… there
just hadn’t been time.
Rally
point; 60 meters.
Closing.
I took my
heading and bearing, corrected my path, and chose several low bounces rather
than a pair of high jumps. Training more
than conscious thought. Everything I was
doing now was on automatic, instinct and training and experience were basically
taking me where I needed to go and doing what I needed to do on some kind of
personal autopilot. My body was working
while my mind was along for the bumpy ride, trying to catch up with current
events.
I landed,
sprinted three meters for hard cover, did a short range low key tactical pulse,
then went on a low bounce again, total NOE.
The suit vibrated somewhat, the ducted fans and gyros still trying to
sync back up, just a little off balance but close enough and I was moving at
what I thought was a good pace. Along
the way, SquadNET painted a few more choice pieces of hard cover on our tactical
overlays, good places to park our hides and lick our wounds. I think I was almost to the one I had picked
when my suit started screaming warnings at me.
Incoming!
Vector
lines.
Flashing
indicators.
High speed
precision guided munition.
Active
terminal guidance.
Missile!
Point of
impact … 99.74% probability that the POI was our current squad rally
point. The Pan missile thrower had seen
our suits moving … converging on a map point … and had decided to chuck another
tac missile at that location for good measure.
SquadNET
went nanny again, collecting squad resources and allocating them without any
input from me or my squad mates. My suit
started throwing everything it had and everything it could at the incoming Pan
missile, multiplied by the other still responding suits in the squad in an
overlapping level of layered protection.
“Incoming! Missile!
Scatter! Scatter!” I shouted as
SquadNET painted the rally point now as the impact point for the enemy tac
missile.
The other
two squad members scattered, their vector lines moving away from the rally
point, looking like single strands of spider webs in my tank overlay, dots
where the squad member landed, strand again as they went low bounce away from
that landing point. I was watching squad
positions three and four now. Apparently,
my squad mates had been farther away from the rally point than I was. Neither was in danger of being within the warhead’s
detonation radius now … but I still was.
I think I
tried to dodge … more reflex and instinct than actual training, maybe aided by
a deep fear of my own mortality kicked up three notches by the chemicals still
in my system but somehow it worked.
The tac
missile screamed in from over the tree line, riding a ducted fan pushed to its
limits for speed, homing on the squad rally point or what would have been the
squad rally point. The missile’s warhead
detonated five meters above the ground, air burst, producing a five-meter-deep,
fifteen-meter-wide crater sixty meters to my left.
My two remaining
squad mates made hard cover as the blinding flash faded to orange and yellow,
splintering trees flashing to ash, engulfing dry brush in sheets of cascading
liquid flame that moved like a living creature, and the rolling shock waves,
white concentric rings expanding outwards to smash anything and everything with
indifference. I was mid-bounce, moving as fast as I could, trying to do
fifty things at once, heading for a nice looking deep creek bed when I caught
the edge of a shockwave and it scrambled my gyros, again, sending me tumbling.
Shaft power
to the lift thrusters fell as the lift units reached their stall speeds.
More
tell-tales screamed at me, chiding me like I had any real control over what was
happening to the hardware right now.
Then I
fell.
When you
fall in a powersuit, you can really tell that you’re falling! All my monitors and inputs went off-line as
the shock wave rolled over me. I felt the rumble through the suit and
heard the armor plates creak and groan in protest. Groan, but hold.
Possible micro-fractures, but the seals held.
Again, my
body reacted before my mind knew I was doing anything.
Overpressure
slapped me like my ex-wife’s lawyer after I missed an alimony payment. My suit gyros didn't like that, and I went
along for the helpless ride, tumbling in mid-jump, ducted fans cycling desperately
to keep balance and flight profile. I
managed to use my legs at full power assist and my fans for forward thrust to
do a less than graceful dive behind a ridge line, smashing into the base of a
tall pine. Above me, the flash and
firestorm accompanying the shockwave instantly sheared off the great pine at
the level of the ridge over me.
I was
moving blind through a radiation flash bath, smoke and steam from vaporized
earth, a rainstorm of falling dirt clods, rocks and debris thrown up by the
detonation. The missile would have been
closer to me but at least some of the squad point defense and electronic
countermeasures were still working to put a blanket over our naked asses …
The suit
stopped screaming at me. The silence was
almost as deafening as the tell-tales had been.
I got my bearings and stood up which for me meant that I got to my
knees. The servos and hydraulics
protested, pumps and motors coming back to full speed.
It took
some effort to lift my suit and gear but I was alive and, surprisingly, in no
worse shape than I had been before. Red
tell-tales turned to yellow warnings and then to green nominal indicators. It’s amazing what a few meters of difference
… and a few centimeters of BPC wrapped around you … can do for improving your
chances of survival with a near miss.
Still …
"Two
Corporal Williams to squad. Ten and ten. Squad sit rep now!" I
said.
I struggled
with the suit gyros to right the suit, got a few no-gos, switched to backups,
braked the gyros to a stop, initialized a three second level 4 systems check,
wasn't real happy with the results, but jump started the gyros back
to full spin. I watched the RPMs build to a hundred kay and the
suit motor reflex functions steadied out. From my knees I managed a
slow baby crawl with some effort until I could get the suit into a more upright
position. It was like trying to get up while wearing a really heavy
backpack … a backpack that someone kept putting stuff into and trying to
rearrange on your back.
The
feedback relay seemed more sluggish than I liked and I restarted it as
well. It wasn't pretty or graceful, but it worked, and I managed to
roll over the lip of a crater and tumble downwards where I lay, checking my
systems with a more thorough eight second Level 5 diagnostic. Things
didn't look as bad at this level, or if you simply ignored all the small stuff
and damn, there was a lot of the small stuff that the onboard was griping
about!
The seconds
crawled by as I did a check on my assignments.
Definitely
not good, my checklist was missing a few lines of essential
equipment.
The locator
tags were not responding, but that could be because the suit was still coming
back online and SquadNET was still in nanny mode, handing off bits and pieces
of managerial duties as and when other suits came back into the network. SquadNET was good at what it did and it had a
lot of fall-back capability but the more load that the squad itself could take
off of the shared processing, the better.
SquadNET functioned better as a tactical advisor than as a babysitter
and right now all it was doing was babysitting.
Time to get
back on our feet.
I did an
inventory rep of my gear, suddenly realizing that besides the heavy power suit I
was wearing that I wasn’t sure what I had to my name.
Some of my
gear was scattered, OK, I still had my anti-personnel sidearm which was okay if
I ran into anything with a hide as thick as mine (or thinner). My heavy anti-armor repeater was pinging
about seven meters more or less to my west.
Other than being dirty and having been tossed a lot all of its
tell-tales were in the green so there was that.
What else
did I have?
Some
digging charges.
My spares
and supplies looked intact, still attached to the outer shell of my suit.
Onboards
were … good. Not great … good but then beggars
can’t be choosers.
Suit
diagnostics said I was still at combat operational effectiveness meaning I may
have a few lumps and bruises, but I could still do my job which was to kill the
enemy and break their toys.
Drones.
How many
drones did I still have left?
I counted
two.
Something
told me that it should be three.
Two … so I’d
lost a drone, probably too close to the initial blast, but both of my other
drones were still in loiter / free-roam mode, flitting around here and there,
never more than about fifteen meters in any one direction from my reach and always
… always … streaming live sitrep data to my suit, to SquadNET and to the other
suits.
Drones from
the squad were at about 60% attrition meaning we’d lost a lot of our
coverage. Maybe we’d pick up some orphan
drones from other KIA squads along the way, the orphaned drones would hear the
fall-in call and join up with our squad through SquadNET seamlessly. Each suit normally worked with three
dedicated drones but we could handle twice that many easily, any more than that
would just slide up to our spares racks, lock-in with hardlines to our C3
resources and suck juice until they were needed again.
I checked
my stores … three spare drones left. I
prepped and loosed one of my spare drones, watching it take two point seven
seconds to go from cold start to full integration with SquadNET. The replacement drone whirred off on ducted
fans. I saw more indicators … a few of
my squad mates had loosed fresh drones from their spares as well. When the other drones had come online,
SquadNET was reporting about 74% coverage which meant that we were missing more
drones than I thought or, if every suit still in operation had spun up its
quota of drones then we were simply missing more suits than I hoped for.
Again …
good, but not great.
Okay …
sidearm. Good for close-in
anti-personnel work against anything that had a hide as thick as mine or
thinner.
Check.
Heavy
anti-armor repeater that I needed to bounce over and pick up. I was getting a locator beacon but no
telemetry. Maybe it was still functional
… maybe not. I’d have to plug it back
into my suit to make sure.
The heavy
anti-armor repeater was just a short bounce and a trot away.
Get to it,
Williams!
Directional
indicators and points of reference on my tactical overlay guided me back to my
heavy weapon on the bounce!
What about
my missile pack, I thought, as I brought my suit in for a (somewhat) soft
landing? I’d need my missiles if I ran into anything with a skin a lot thicker
than mine … I keyed my active inventory listing
but my stand-off tac missile drone pack didn’t respond to my suit’s query. The locator tag on the drone missile pack
also didn't light off even after some of my other stuff gave me the “I'm here,
come get me” notification, meaning that if I did find the missile pack, it was more
than likely just going to be so much useless scrap. Maybe I would get
lucky and find an orphan missile pack along the way … a drone pack from a MI
sidekick that would no longer be needing it anyway, rest in peace. The battlefield was often littered with
orphaned MI and orphaned MI equipment. MI
were orphan makers and orphan takers because as you learned early in the MI …
“gear adrift is a gift.”
I grabbed
up my heavy anti-armor repeater, itself looking somewhat the worse for wear,
and made for a good point of cover. Once I made sure that I was behind
some part of the terrain that would mask me, I locked my suit in place and reclined
back into the form fitting cushions, breathing deeply, feeling the stimulants
and pharmaceuticals race through my system. I took a long swig of hydration
fluid as the commlink crackled like lightning in my ear, brutally reminding me
that my head was still pounding like a blood-filled gong.
"One Sergeant
Williams. Respond.” a voice said loudly
in my tank.
A voice.
I knew the
voice.
The
artificial female voice of SquadNET.
I could
have picked a male voice or a gender-neutral voice, but I guess I just liked
the idea of SquadNET being a woman, at least the digital avatar part of the
software, especially when SquadNET went into nanny mode. I checked the SquadNET callout … I was seeing
some of my squad but comms were down, LOS only right now. Some might be damaged, others disrupted as
the suit systems rebooted or ran repair routines on subroutine layouts.
Or … maybe
everyone else was like me … just trying to learn how to think straight again
after having had their brains bounced around inside their craniums like mine
had been. Concussions weren’t really the
catalyst for group discussions, come to think about it.
“Williams. Ten and ten for the most part.” I replied,
clicking my teeth to knock the volume of the speakers in my tank down a few notches.
One Sergeant
Williams?
We didn’t
have a One Sergeant Williams in our squad.
We had a One Sergeant Jenkins, my CO.
I was her XO. I was Two Corporal
Williams … that was me … last I remembered.
I think.
I looked at
the SquadNET tactical overlay.
Nope.
I was now listed
as One Sergeant Williams.
Apparently,
I’d just gotten a field promotion because my squad leader and CO, One Sergeant
Jenkins was posthumously reporting in that she was KIA according to the
SquadNET squad status board. I looked at
the squad to see that One Sergeant Jenkins had been one of the ghosted out grey
suit outlines, one of the ones that had the bright white skull in the helmet
and the declaration of OFFLINE:KIA under the suit outline.
So I’d been
promoted.
Not really
the thing you want to learn as soon as you get your wits back about you. The silhouette of her and her heavy power
suit and her equipment were all ghosted out on the display and according to the
squadlog, her suit signal had gone offline at the instant the Pan missile had
detonated so I guess she had been the point of impact.
Rank had
its privilege, I guess, just like rank had its responsibilities. Always aim for the suit making the most noise
on the EMS because that’s going to be the squad leader.
Jenkins’
suit had been a command suit, like mine … or more specific, my suit was a
command suit like Jenkins’ suit had been.
Two command suits per squad, command suits were just up-smarted Ranger
suits. Two command option ranger suits
and three regular ranger suits in the squad.
Maybe the Pan missile liked all the extra EMS spikes that Jenkin’s suit
had been throwing out when she was in command of the squad and the missile had
just homed in on the loudest spiker in the EMS spectrum for its target zone.
Or maybe it
was just her time.
Jenkins
probably hadn’t even had time to scream … if she was lucky.
I took that
in for what it was worth as I realized that the squad was mine now as I had
been Jenkins’ second. I sighed heavily
at the amount of responsibility that just got dumped on my shoulders. Hell of a way to earn a rank and with that I
guess it was time to do squad leader things. I took another pull on the hydration nipple
then keyed the suit for another stimulant and a pain reliever. The suit cautioned me against what I’d chosen
from the menu of good stuff, but I overrode the suit cautions and felt the tiny
needle pricks.
Yeah.
Just … oh,
yeah.
A lot of
the haze in my head almost visibly cleared away and the pain went from its own
tell-tale screaming at me from someplace between my ears to a dull reminder way,
way off in the distance.
Much
better.
Time to do
squad leader things.
“Squad
sitrep now! Jenkins cashed out. You report to me now." I repeated.
"Nap time’s over! Give me a sit rep!
Call in!"
My MI Issue
sidearm was still serviceable so at least I had that for close-in
anti-personnel work as well as working over any thin-skinned targets that I
might cross paths with, but I’d need something more powerful for anything
else. I hefted my heavy anti-armor
repeater, doing a quick visual of the weapon.
Everything seemed okay when I plugged the weapon back into my suit’s integrated
network, I was rewarded with multiple input and relay error messages. I
guess the weapon had taken more of a beating than I thought. I threw the heavy weapon away with the
disgust suitably reserved for things you really need that break just when you
really need them.
Damn!
I said a
few more words, none of them becoming of an officer and none loud enough to be
picked up by the tank mikes. With the heavy anti-armor repeater trashed I
had just lost my second-best can opener compared to the wrecked scrap I used to
call a slaved tac missile launcher drone. I checked the locator tag again, not really
sure why I did that since I already knew it wouldn’t work but God sometimes
dispensed minor miracles to the truly unworthy.
The locator
pulse came back negative.
I guess God
was busy or maybe I’d already used up all of my minor miracles today because I
wasn’t even getting a transponder repeat from the tac missile launcher, which
meant that my best armor killer was nothing more than scattered scrap and junk,
probably laying all around me. Hell, I may even be sitting on the damned launcher
for all I knew or at least what was left of it.
The
displays in my tank started to stabilize and the suit seemed to shrug as its criticals
and essentials came back awake. The gyros were green across the bar at
full spin, and seemed to be happy again, which sure made the suit a lot
easier to sling around. The tac pulse came back negative, I looked up,
totally having forgotten that someone had rained on our parade and that someone
was still out there!
Mistake, I
thought.
Make too
many mistakes and you don't go home.
Whatever
had hit us wasn't interested in anything more than busting up a few hard skins
moving in the tree line. No incoming rounds, no ground huggers, and no
fast movers coming for a look-see to verify if we were moving in our shells or
not. And no follow-up anti-personnel rounds to clean up their first mistake...
And they
weren't trying to bake us by raining down thermals on the woods around us.
First bit
of good news I had today.
"Five
Enlisted Smith!" I shouted into the squad channel, trying to get what was
left of my squad reassembled. My squad. Still having trouble wrapping my thinking
muscle around that idea.
"Five
Enlisted Smith? Got your heads up yet?"
Whatever
was out there ranging in on us was in better shape than we were, even if it
might have moved on. It had hit us and we hadn't returned fire...
yet. I was wanting to return the favor.
Anxious, even.
"Five
Enlisted Smith? Do you copy? I need a TSR most fox pronto!"
Static.
No answer.
I wasn't
even getting a locator beacon on her suit which was bad. Five Enlisted
Smith was our Equipment Officer, the squad liaison between us and the techs /
mechs that maintained our suits. A lot
of our suits had her unique 'touch' to them. Our electronics were
modified, not exactly to field regs either. One of the reasons we had
survived as a squad as long as we had. If Smith was gone, we would be in
the hurt locker until we could get another competent EO from reserve
draw.
And
tomorrow was her birthday ... Smith would have been nineteen tomorrow.
"Three
Enlisted Travetti?" I asked, expecting the same zero response.
The comm
crackled, filters kicked in and fine-tuned the input. A voice.
Three Enlisted Travetti.
"Five
Enlisted Smith is gone, sir. I found what was left of her suit with most
of her still in it near 296 when I was bouncing for some hard cover. I
also found your drone pack near 285."
So, there
it was … confirmation that my drone pack was scrap. The drone pack was somewhat expendable, Five
Enlisted Smith was definitely not. I logged her as KIA and added
squad honors for good measure. I also logged the Squad as having
position Two for an EO as open. Three Enlisted Travetti had
delivered his report with just a bit too much professionalism.
Maybe he took a tumble harder than I had, his speech sounded like he was riding
a pseudorphin high.
Internals?
I checked
my monitors, looking for the squad medical pulse as still smoking dirt landed
around me. Hot smoke and dust suspended in the air wafted over my
position. I jumped lightly into a crater six meters away from my previous
position, crouched, and began organizing my squad into the squad net.
There were
three of us now.
Jenkins and
Smith were gone.
The two
ghosted out icons in the squad overlay had names now … or maybe they had always
had names and I just hadn’t seen the names.
There were five suits in the squad overlay.
Suits one
and five were ghosted out.
OFFLINE:KIA.
Four
Enlisted Pierce, and Three Enlisted Travetti resynced and I started getting
data from their arrays. Things were starting to look better, most of the
damage was superficial, some scratches, bruises, Five Enlisted Smith was gone,
so were seven of our drones. Three Enlisted Travetti had managed to keep
one of the heavy anti-armor repeaters with him and it was reading green which
gave us some armor killing ability. Four Enlisted Pierce still had a tac
missile drone under his tether.
I double
checked my BDA as my onboard flagged me it was online. One by one, the
red illuminated indicators in my tank turned to a 'stand by' yellow, and then
to a solid green. The [NOMINAL] icon began to illuminate next to a whole
hell of a lot of functions that I thought were gone for God.
We were
back in business, down 40% squad strength, shaken, and looking for some
payback! On the bounce! My thrusters kicked in and I made a smooth
transition from ground to NOE tactical jump. I came out of my
bounce, sprawled under some hard cover, bounced again and cleared the lip of an
older, large crater. The thruster units were still in the green,
full power to the turbines. The holographic overlay showed one combat loss, but
the SquadNET was just coming online now, integrating our four remaining suits
on a squad level via the SLICS interface. It would take another ten full
seconds to reinitialize and reconnect, until then, we were going to have to do
the best we could, on a one by one basis, and move towards a regroupment.
Five
seconds to squad integration, a hell of a long time.
"Jenkins
and Smith are gone." I said on squad channel. "Travetti,
Pierce! Form on me, on the bounce! Squad come together at 0312.”
I
came out
of my jump in the bottom of an old crater filled with stagnant muddy
water, runoff from the last storm this area had seen. A
quick pulse, and I was clearing the crater for a hill face 30 meters
south-south west.
We began our slow bounce north, the three of us, fully integrated.
Three of us ... three left out of five.
60% squad strength and almost orphans ourselves.
Along the
way, we picked up two surviving members of One Sergeant Giovanni's squad,
joining our SquadNet and being reassigned as Four Enlisted Macgregor and Five Enlisted
LaFontaine. Each of the orphans had a
full flight of drones with them. LaFontaine
had a tac launcher drone platform with about three quarters of its munitions
left. Macgregor had a tac missile
launcher drone platform with about half of its munitions left and she had managed
to keep her hands on another heavy anti-armor repeater. LaFontaine wore a ranger suit that was beaten
for wear but still functional. Macgregor
wore a marauder suit, heavier and a bit slower, but also able to soak up a lot
more damage than a ranger suit. When
SquadNET finished integrating the two new orphans and their gear into my squad,
everything looked like it was back at nominal in the tank. I keyed up my squad overlay.
Back to
full strength and with that, it was time to do squad leader things.
“Travetti? You are now Two Corporal Travetti. Congratulations. Pierce?
You are now Three Sergeant Pierce.
Congratulations."
Field
promotions were hell.
I keyed
command of my squad’s status and changes to personnel, on the bounce.
I thought
about Smith. Tomorrow was her birthday …
she would have been nineteen.
-From the personal diary of William Hollis,
Sergeant, TACOMBINE Mobile
Infantry