In the Valley Read online

  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.

  “Hey, Z,” he said in a low tone, “you got any more of that joe?”

  Z was sitting there fully ready in his gear. He looked up.

  “Sir, Mike said you might want some, so I’ve got extra,” Z said in that gentle voice of his. His sonorous tones always hinted at a smile or a joke, even under the worst circumstances. It was one of the traits that Paul liked about him.

  That trait didn’t quite balance against Z’s annoying tendency not to clean his weapon, but it helped. Z held a cup up, which edged Paul’s opinion of him upward a little more. Z-man might come across as slow at times, but he was no fool.

  Paul took the cup with thanks and sipped it gently. Then he reached into his near-cig-and-other-shit pouch and produced the local brand of Fortunate, his favorite. Dipping down into the crater to help conceal the light, he lit the smoke and inhaled deeply.

  Paul looked at the stars again, cupping his near-cig in his left hand. Strangely, he felt brilliantly alive—but he would have done anything not to be in the Baradna Valley. The firebase was stirring quietly. Pashto Khel was only five klicks away, and the villagers might have someone watching this primitive base of operations.

  Quiet preps, violent action, and deception were prerequisites for success.

  Firebase Atarab was on the side of the Baradna River Valley, perched on the side of a hilly ridge. Where Paul slept was at the base of a hill, and he had sensibly made camp in the bottom of a bomb crater next to a ground-truck. Looking across the flat—the battalion’s assembly area—he could see antlike columns of Juneau Army soldiers coming down off the other hills. Each company had taken a hill as their area of operations, and the flat step at the bottom of the hills was the assembly area and the area where the advisors slept.

  The night before the intel had come down that a group of shitheads under a certain Commander Mohammed were going to be staying in Pashto Khel. Apparently the group wanted to stir up a little trouble, and a little mouse in the village had passed word to the Juneau Army soldiers about the coming meeting. The rat had spurred yesterday’s furtive meeting with the good colonel Fasi.

  Paul’s counterparts wanted to kill Commander Mohammed. It only took so many bombings and other attacks to rile up the locals. Heck, he’d kill Commander Mohammed himself if he had the chance.

  The show was about to start; Paul’s clock said 0154. He took another drink of coffee. Today, he and Third Battalion, 215th Juneau Army Brigade, would raid Pashto Khel and kill some bad guys. The colonel pinged Paul’s halo, and Paul saw him suit up. What good were the lessons of the Fort Sill armorer to Paul now?

  The Armorer spoke in a loud singsong voice. “This is the M-15 Armored Combat Suit, the trooper version. It stands 2.25 meters tall, weighs 135 kilos empty, and is .76 meter wide at its widest point. It has six subcompartments: one each for the major body areas of a human with standard morphology. It is internally adjustable to accommodate humans from 1.5 meters to 2.1 meters in height. It has a weapon attachment point on each arm, the shoulders, and the back. It is rated at carrying 300 kilos of operator and equipment for unlimited periods. It can lift a rated maximum of 750 kilos, given suitable bracing, and can travel at speeds up to fifty kilometers per hour in an Earth-standard gravitational environment.”

  He seemed to say that all in one breath. There was more.

  “The trooper suit is equipped with mil-grade frequency-hopping burst transmissions with a nonmicro retrans capability out to seventy-five kilometers line of sight. With a micro drone, a soldier in his suit could theoretically have worldwide transmission capability, both voice and cloud. The trooper suit can speak to a nearly unlimited number of halos simultaneously, and it monitors its own power usage. In sunny environments, the trooper suit’s energy reservoir is not a concern, as it gets most of its recharge from solar arrays embedded in the Plastlar skin. In conditions of zero sunlight or other solar emissions, the suit can operate in field-duty conditions for forty-eight Earth-standard hours before requiring recharge.”

  If not for the excitement of finally seeing a real suit and then being trained in its use, Paul would have fallen asleep. Since coming to his advanced infantry training, it seemed that for sixteen hours a day all he had done was exercise, eat, and form up in the field for troop movements.

  And now here he was, in a windswept pavilion by an ancient block building on a range at Fort Sill. He had yet to get a pass to see Lawton. When he did, he didn’t know what he’d do with the freedom. Maybe he’d send his parents a halo shot of the town or drink a watery beer. Whatever it was, it had to be better than sitting there Indian-style with his fellow trainees in a semicircle. His M-74 was perched next to him—butt down, bolt locked open.

  The instructor continued his little speech. Bastard, Paul thought tiredly. I’ll bet he goes home to a nice, warm little place every night.

  “After being subjected to power rundown, a suit needs either to be exposed for twelve hours to uninterrupted sunlight or spend two hours attached to the M-118 recharger on trickle charge. It is not recommended to recharge the suit faster than that because of possible thermal runaway issues with the batteries.”

  Thermal runaway issues? That didn’t sound good to Paul. In fact, seeing the hulking suit sitting there with its operator’s hatches sprung open, this whole military thing was striking him as a fantastically bad idea in general. Oh why, oh why, he thought, did I have to get into a snit about Rhoda going into the forces. Even his father’s nagging took on a better light.

  Looking around the windswept tumbleweed range, Paul was starting to feel positively jealous of a life as a drone mechanic, for example. He was cold, and the insides of the suit looked like Death to him. Thermal runaway? Hell!

  He must have missed something because the instructor was giving him the fish eye while he continued his soliloquy about “All Things Armored Suit.”

  “Operator interface with the suit is completely intuitive. I could prop a ten-year-old of the suitable physical parameters in this device here, and he could button up and go for a stroll, just like that. In fact, modified versions of this suit have been used for centuries in the construction field or to allow a severely handicapped man to walk—assuming, of course, that he was resistant to other types of therapy. In fact, I’ll bet one of you soldiers have used a suit before.”

  He cast his eyes around the crowd. He looked right at Sherkarchi. “Sherkarchi, I see from your records that you have used an MkVb materials mover before. Why don’t you tell the class why an untrained operator is better off not using a suit?”

  Poor Bob Sherkarchi looked like he was about to fall through the floor. He mumbled, “Instructor, if you don’t know exactly what you are doing in a specialty suit, you shouldn’t use one.”

  The instructor looked at Sherkarchi like a bird eyeing a particularly tasty worm. “Can you be more specific, perhaps?”

  Bob turned beet red. He flashed all of our halos an image of an overbalanced materials-mover suit falling on its side, its load of sewage pipes crashing to the ground and rolling into his employer’s ground-car. A younger Bob popped out of the suit and ran as his employer chased after him, yelling.

  The students chuckled and gave Bob some catcalls and general good-natured ribbing. The instructor cleared his throat to silence us and raised his eyebrow.

  “Very good, Sherkarchi. We now know how you ended up in the force infantry. More importantly, his example shows us why the laws of physics still apply to an augmented human in a suit. Force equals mass times acceleration, right? The mass of Sherkarchi’s suit could not withstand the acceleration of gravity upon his poorly balanced load of pipes, which applied a rotational force that toppled his suit—resulting in the termination of his employment at the Mexico
City Department of Public Works.”

  The instructor stopped. He looked around. He spoke again.

  “Only, here, soldiers, you will not be dropping a load of pipes. You will be carrying mission-essential equipment for your squad. If you make a bad decision, your suit will fail, and the mission may fail because of your lack of training and judgment.” Another pause. “The Forces will provide you with training, rest assured. And in your twenty weeks here, perhaps you will learn judgment as well.”

  Paul looked around at his peers. He too hoped the guys around him would learn judgment, but he had serious doubts.

  The wind picked up; gray clouds scudded across the October sky. Paul’s behind, pinned against the cold concrete, was going completely numb—but not without hurting a lot first, an uncomfortable pins-and-needles feeling creeping up his thighs.

  The instructor continued his military poetry reading, backed up with halo visuals. “The trooper suit is equipped to wield a standard M-74 rifle stowed in its right-arm weapons compartment. When placing your M-74 rifle in the weapons stowage compartment, be sure to place the switch in your rifle’s magazine well to ‘belt feed.’ That is the switch that they told you over and over again in basic never to use. You do use the switch in a suit.”

  The instructor paused while he played with the balaclava around his neck. Paul guessed the cold wind was getting to him, too. He spoke again, his tempo increasing.

  “The suit’s arm can hold eleven hundred rounds of 6.8 mm caseless, linked, standard, blank, armor-piercing, incendiary, tracer, or high-explosive, dual-purpose ammunition. Your suit’s halo or mission commander will select semiautomatic, five-round-burst, or full-automatic fire. Your weapon’s maximum range in this configuration is 6,446 meters; maximum effective range is 2,100 meters, Earth-standard gravity.

  “In addition, there is an integral grenade launcher located underneath the weapons stowage port and beneath your arm. You can carry up to ten rounds of 40 mm HE-DP, smoke, infrared, or standard illumination, incapacitation gas, nerve-gas, or fléchette munitions.”