Jonathan Maberry
Clean Sweeps
Cloaking devices are science fiction. Relics of old Star Trek shows from the last century. We don’t have cloaks, we never had cloaks. And we don’t have any chameleon circuits or shit retroengineered from alien craft.
What we got is stealth technology. We got LOT — Low Observability Technology. It doesn’t make our birds invisible, but it pretty much makes the radar and motion scanners look in the wrong place, or misunderstand what they’re seeing. We can look like a big black hole in the middle of the sky. We can look like space junk. Or, we can look like feedback and sensor static. I always liked LOT that makes us look like static because most of the stations have been out here so long that their systems are older than dinosaur shit. Most of what they see nine to five is static.
That works for me. It keeps us from getting shot out of the black before we can put boots on the deck.
We tune our LOT systems to read the static backwash from the sensor arrays of any ship or base we approach, and then the computers work out some kind of math-wizard fluctuating algorithm that matches the normal radio-wave crap the universe has been kicking out since the big balloon popped.
Surprise always helps, but we didn’t know how much of that was on our side. We were hoping to surprise the shit out of them. I’m a big fan of catching the bad guys with their dicks in their hands. Makes for a better raid.
Yeah, I know what the press says. WorldNews and SolarAP both have this thing for firefights, which they insist on calling ‘shoot-outs’ like we’re the O.K. fucking Corral. Army PR sends them maybe six to eight mission video files a month, but do the clean sweeps ever make the Net? Nope. Not a one unless it’s a goddamn slow news day in the middle of August, where they’ll report on crop growth or dig up some old celeb for a ‘where are they now?’ space filler.
But somebody pulls a trigger and it’s a breaking story. And these news fucks don’t give a red-hot flying shit if it’s a bad guy, a Federal Ranger, or one of our boys in Free-Ops that either fires the shot or takes the hit. Bullets and blood, man, that’s all they care about; and the bigger the body counts the bigger the ratings.
We Free-Ops guys only ever get press if something goes wrong, so we’ve been on the news…what, maybe five times in four years? And of those, the first three were during the mine riots following the clusterfuck with the unions. That whole thing took less than a week. Since then the only time Free-Ops made the news was back in ’93 when Captain Lisa Stanley got killed while her team was running down some pirates running the alley between Phobos and Deimos. I mean, come on, Stanley was killed when a stray shot hit an O2 tank in the airlock. I saw the official reports, and the conclusion I drew from it was that she probably tripped on one of the landing sleds the pirates used when they breeched the cargo ship. She tripped and popped off a round that bounced all over the airlock until it punched into the O2 tank. It was her bad luck that it was after they’d repressurized. Twenty seconds earlier there’d have been no spark, and no death, and no story.
The news jackasses made her a hero across half the Network. My guess? If Stanley hadn’t been a California blonde with yabos out to there the news people wouldn’t have run with it as long as they did. That and they’re always starved for action stories. There’s only so much mileage you can get from politicians making assholes of themselves or celebrities getting caught fucking the wrong wife.
The other time was a real firefight — excuse me, ‘shoot-out’—between my team and the Chinese hit team that tried to declare sovereignty over the New Tibet colony on Io. That one was a real ball-burner. My boys — Jigsaw Team — were on point, with Delta, Baker, and Zulu Teams on fast-follow and a squadron of Jackhammers giving close air support. The Chinese team was sharp, even I have to give them that. There were a lot of them, they were well armed, well trained and they weren’t afraid of us. No sir, not one little bit.
It wasn’t until we were on the ground that our forward spotters sent back the news that we were outnumbered and outgunned. Outnumbered like four to one, which can give serious pause even to a bunch of heartbreakers and life-takers like I got in Jigsaw. But by then were in the pipe, riding the adrenaline high, breathing the helmet gas that triggered all those useful dopamine receptors. We were juiced and jazzed, and when the smoke cleared we had a whole lot of dead Chinese. And some dead Tibetans, too, but what the fuck could we do? The Chinese hid among the colonists, and they even put Tibetans in their own uniforms. We shot anyone with a red star.
Here’s how the bullshit plays out, though. First the press is up our ass all the way through the raid. They’re doing advance stories on the men and women of Free-Ops. You know, those schmaltzy human interest things where they show vidcaps of the soldiers as kids, riding horses on the farm or taking their first EVA at Disney Lunar. Then during the battle they’re getting video-only live feeds from helmet cams. The brass didn’t let them hear our team chatter during the raid.
When the battle was over they spent two days canonizing everyone from the first wave of shooters down to the cooks in the galley of the drop ship. Heroes all.
Then they find out that three colonists took fire during the raid. Suddenly we’re reckless killers who can’t tell a friendly face from an enemy’s — and remember, we’re talking Chinese and Tibetans here, and everyone dressed the same. We’re fried by the press. It’s a great story, it kept the news feeds buzzing for weeks.
Then, when that cooled down they have the big clanking balls to ask if they can go on every other raid. And the fucking brass—our fucking brass — says yes.
Tells you everything you need to know about why I think the whole Solar System is populated with nutcases.
And, yeah…they’re on this run with us now. At least we don’t have it as bad as the Federals who have that weekly show. FEDS. You’ve seen it, where they do the fly-alongs with the Federals, following the busts with handhelds and helmet cams. Mostly busting mouth-breathing bozo drug runners or low-level pirates who are too stupid to know how to dodge a full-lit Federal wagon broadcasting siren calls on all frequencies. I ask you.
We came at the Tower with the sun behind us, alternating speed and using LOT to look like feedback from old wiring to anyone who was looking. And they were looking, don’t get me wrong, but this was a clever stunt and we were pretty good at it. So good that on Jigsaw’s last six hard infils we’d had zero shots fired on either side. Before anyone knows we’re even a reality we’re breeching fore and aft airlocks and our Jackhammers are suddenly broadcasting sweetlock signals. The bad guys go from thinking they’re all alone in the big black to having twenty ugly-ass special operators coming into their ship from ass and mouth and every rocket and missile in the catalog cocked and locked from point blank. That’s not a time to make a stand. It’s a time to trigger an isolated EMP to fry your computer records, drop your guns on the deck, and stand around looking extremely cooperative.
That’s what we were expecting on this run, too.
The mission was routine. The Tower was a forty-year-old barrel-style deep-space manufacturing plant that used to make ball bearings and alloy pipes before the company went bust. After that it was empty for ten years and then got bought by some investors who filed papers saying they were going to retool it for drilling equipment to supply mines on Jupiter’s moons.
Then — get this — our intel people got a hot tip from some news guy from SolarAP that the Tower was really making weapons. Nothing exotic, but enclosed gas shell rifles that you can use in any atmosphere including zero atmosphere. Only two kinds of people need guns like that. Guys like me and pirates.