"That's where they go," Keyes said, and motioned at the corpse. "Who is that?"
"Watson, sir."
"Oh, him," Keyes said. "That didn't take very long, did it."
"He was excitable, sir," I said.
"I suppose he was," Keyes said. "Well, anyway. Perry, this is Lieutenant Colonel Rybicki, the 233rd's commander."
"Sir," I said. "Sorry about not saluting."
"Yes, dead body, I know," said Rybicki. "Son, I just wanted to congratulate you on your firing solution today. You saved a lot of time and lives. Those Consu bastards keep switching things up on us. Those personal shields were a new touch and they were giving us a hell of a lot of trouble there. I'm putting you in for a commendation, Private. What do you think about that?"
"Thank you, sir," I said. "But I'm sure someone else would have figured it out eventually."
"Probably, but you figured it out first, and that counts for something."
"Yes, sir."
"When we get back to the Modesto, I hope you'll let an old infantryman buy you a drink, son."
"I'd like that, sir," I said. I saw Alan smirk in the background.
"Well, then. Congratulations again." Rybicki motioned at Watson. "And sorry about your friend."
"Thank you, sir." Alan saluted for the both of us. Rybicki saluted back, and wheeled off, followed by Keyes. Viveros turned back to me and Alan.
"You seem amused," Viveros said to me.
"I was just thinking that it's been about fifty years since anyone called me 'son,'" I said.
Viveros smiled, and indicated Watson. "You know where you're taking him?" she asked.
"Morgue's just over that ridge," I said. "I'm going to drop off Watson and then I'd like to catch the first transport back to the Modesto, if that's okay."
"Shit, Perry," Viveros said. "You're the hero of the day. You can do anything you want." She turned to go.
"Hey, Viveros," I said. "Is it always like this?"
She turned back. "Is what always like this?"
"This," I said. "War. Battles. Fighting."
"What?" Viveros said, and then snorted. "Hell, no, Perry. Today was a cakewalk. This is as easy as it gets." And then she trotted off, highly amused.
That was how my first battle went. My era of war had begun.
TEN
Maggie was the first of the Old Farts to die.
She died in the upper atmosphere of a colony named Temperance, an irony because like most colonies with a heavy mining industry, it was sprinkled liberally with bars and brothels. Temperance's metal-laden crust had made it a hard colony to get and a difficult one for humans to keep—the permanent CDF presence there was three times the usual Colonial complement, and they were always sending additional troops to back them up. Maggie's ship, the Dayton, caught one of these assignments when Ohu forces dropped into Temperance space and salted an army's worth of drone warriors onto the surface of the planet.
Maggie's platoon was supposed to be part of the effort to take back an aluminum mine one hundred klicks out of Murphy, Temperance's main port. They never made it to the ground. On the way down, her troop transport hull was struck by an Ohu missile. It tore open the hull and sucked several soldiers into space, including Maggie. Most of these soldiers died instantly from the force of the impact or by chunks of the hull tearing into their bodies.
Maggie wasn't one of them. She was sucked out into the space above Temperance fully conscious, her combat unitard automatically closing around her face to keep the air from vomiting out of her lungs. Maggie immediately messaged to her squad and platoon leader. What was left of her squad leader was flapping about in his descent harness. Her platoon leader wasn't much more help, but he wasn't to blame. The troopship was not equipped for space rescue and was in any event gravely damaged and limping, under fire, toward the closest CDF ship to discharge its surviving passengers.
A message to the Dayton itself was likewise fruitless; the Dayton was exchanging fire with several Ohu ships and could not dispatch rescue. Nor could any other ship. In nonbattle situations she was already too small a target, too far down Temperance's gravity well and too close to Temperance's atmosphere for anything but the most heroic retrieval attempts. In a pitched battle situation, she was already dead.
And so Maggie, whose SmartBlood was by now reaching its oxygen-carrying limit and whose body was undoubtedly beginning to scream for oxygen, took her Empee, aimed it at the nearest Ohu ship, computed a trajectory, and unloaded rocket after rocket. Each rocket burst provided an equal and opposite burst of thrust to Maggie, speeding her toward Temperance's darkened, nighttime sky. Battle data would later show that her rockets, propellant long spent, did indeed impact against the Ohu ship, dealing some minor damage.
Then Maggie turned, faced the planet that would kill her, and like the good professor of Eastern religions that she used to be, she composed jisei, the death poem, in the haiku form.
Do not mourn me, friends
I fall as a shooting star
Into the next life
She sent it and the last moments of her life to the rest of us, and then she died, hurtling brightly across the Temperance night sky.
She was my friend. Briefly, she was my lover. She was braver than I ever would have been in the moment of death. And I bet she was a hell of a shooting star.
"The problem with the Colonial Defense Forces is not that they aren't an excellent fighting force. It's that they're far too easy to use."
Thus spoke Thaddeus Bender, two-time Democratic senator from Massachusetts; former ambassador (at various times) to France, Japan and the United Nations; Secretary of State in the otherwise disastrous Crowe administration; author, lecturer, and finally, the latest addition to Platoon D. Since the latest of these had the most relevance to the rest of us, we had all decided that Private Senator Ambassador Secretary Bender was well and truly full of crap.
It's amazing how quickly one goes from being fresh meat to being an old hand. On our first arrival to the Modesto, Alan and I received our billets, were greeted cordially if perfunctorily by Lieutenant Keyes (who raised an eyebrow when we passed along Sergeant Ruiz's compliments), and were treated with benign neglect by the rest of the platoon. Our squad leaders addressed us when we needed to be addressed, and our squadmates passed on information we needed to know. Otherwise, we were out of the loop.
It wasn't personal. The three other new guys, Watson, Gaiman and McKean, all got the same treatment, which centered on two facts. The first was that when new guys come in, it was because some old guy has gone—and typically "gone" meant "dead." Institutionally, soldiers can be replaced like cogs. On the platoon and squad level, however, you're replacing a friend, a squadmate, someone who had fought and won and died. The idea that you, whoever you are, could be a replacement or a substitute for that dead friend and teammate is mildly offensive to those who knew him or her.
Secondly, of course, you simply haven't fought yet. And until you do, you're not one of them. You can't be. It's not your fault, and in any event, it will be quickly corrected. But until you're in the field, you're just some guy taking up space where a better man or woman used to be.
I noticed the difference immediately after our battle with the Consu. I was greeted by name, invited to share mess-hall tables, asked to play pool or dragged into conversations. Viveros, my squad leader, started asking my opinion about things instead of telling me how things would be. Lieutenant Keyes told me a story about Sergeant Ruiz, involving a hovercraft and a Colonial's daughter, that I simply did not believe. In short, I'd become one of them—one of us. The Consu firing solution and the subsequent commendation helped, but Alan, Gaiman and McKean were also welcomed into the fold, and they didn't do anything but fight and not get killed. It was enough.