Every once in a while the realization of what was happening would pierce my cocoon of exhaustion, even make me smile a little: it was almost over. We had just completed a three-day march—barely—and once we finished our assault we’d be Legionnaires, complete with white kepis. This was our final exam.
The corporal called me and Buttons over and a map popped onto our heads-up displays. “Give me your plan.”
“Heavy weapons won’t be helpful inside,” said Buttons. “So Grandmother will set her girls to cover all the exits, and my people will sweep the interior levels, one at a time, moving by fire teams.”
I marked the map using forearm controls and listed the personnel I’d assign to each spot while the corporal waited. When I finished he shouldered his Maxwell carbine, motioning to Buttons.
“Take us in.”
I was nervous. My groups moved to their assigned locations and there shouldn’t have been anything to worry about, it was just another training exercise—our last. But it wasn’t. The excitement of completing basic evaporated, replaced by a sense that something was off, like maybe we had always been cursed and only now would it hit. Jennifer moved her team atop one of the waste-containment berms overlooking the main entrance. She stumbled up the slope. It took them longer than the others to set up their auto-Maxwell, and while I scrambled up to join them I couldn’t shake the feeling that things were about to go wrong.
Once the teams had settled into their positions, I passed the word to activate chameleon skins. Our suits functioned the same way real combat ones did, so had been coated with a polymer that, when activated, mimicked the wearers’ immediate surroundings. By now I should have been used to it. But when one by one my people disappeared, their suits masking all thermal emissions and the skins making them completely invisible, I felt alone. Only blinking dots on my map said otherwise.
“Positions set,” I announced, and the lights blinked from red to green.
Then we waited. Winds picked up so that whenever a gust blew across the mine entrance it howled, and at first I heard the sounds of Buttons and her teams as they moved their way deeper into the mountain. A second later we lost them in mid-transmission.
“Shit,” I muttered.
Jennifer stirred next to me but all I saw was a patch of shimmering air. “What’s wrong?”
“Relays. We forgot the relays.”
“I’ll take care of it.”
“Negative. Send your—”
Before I finished, a craft appeared on the horizon, and our perimeter warning alarms tripped, piercing my eardrums with a loud beeping until I cut them off. The alarm meant that whoever was coming, they weren’t supposed to even be on the planet.
“Anyone see who that is?” I asked, and one after another the girls radioed in that they couldn’t tell. A second craft appeared then, larger than the first, and as soon as I saw it—a huge ore transporter, almost two hundred meters long, that settled with a boom near the main entrance—I knew things had just gotten worse. Toly confirmed it.
“Raiders.” Her voice over the radio startled me.
“What?” I asked.
“Raiders, Grandmother—they’ve come to scavenge for equipment, ore, whatever they can get their hands on. Might be Chinese, you can’t tell from the ship but trust me, I know. I used to be one. This is bad. They’ll kill rather than be taken.”
Unease turned into fear, which then shifted into terror. Everything moved in slow motion, and when the transport’s loading ramp lowered to release a gang of men I thought they looked strange; I almost didn’t recognize them as human. All of them had a dirty appearance, unshaven, and I had spent so much time in the Legion now that their bearing screamed disorganization—telegraphed a lack of discipline. But none of that helped. Toly’s announcement had sent a shock through me, and sweat covered my palms, making the insides of my gauntlets feel slick and uncertain. This was the real deal, and despite the fact that we had spent the last two months training for exactly this—combat—my mind turned into concrete. A wrong decision would kill everyone.
“Grandmother?” Toly asked. “What do you want us to do?”
Half the men were armed, some with Maxwell carbines, others with grenade launchers, and they took up defensive positions as the rest offloaded equipment. There was no way to get into the mine now, no way to move in and relay communications with the rest of our unit, with the corporal. Buttons was cut off.
“Grandmother? Goddamn it!”
Toly’s anger made something click. I had begun to shake and my breathing had gotten so loud that it was all I heard until a calmness swept over me, melting the sensation of horror and paralysis. I recalled the hundreds of times we had trained for contact, mentally ticked through the checklist, and repeated the words over the radio.
“Maxwells at full power, safeties off.”
I checked my map. The other ship was out there, but it was obvious we hadn’t been spotted. Most of my girls held positions at the mine’s secondary entrances, far from the main one, and would be of no use unless I got them closer.
“Teams one through four, move to new positions.” I marked spots on the map that would surround our visitors, and sent the updated tactical plot.
It all happened slowly. The green dots turned red again and crept over my heads-up display, and I heard the men’s voices as they relaxed and began talking. The terror almost returned. Waiting for my girls to move left plenty of time to convince myself that our visitors would notice us and open fire, and I began to think we should run.
The dots finally turned green, and Toly clicked back in. “We’re ready, Grandmother.”
“Open fire.” It didn’t even sound like me when I said it.
The auto-Maxwells functioned on the same principle as our carbines. A ceramic-encased alloy barrel wrapped in a series of electromagnets propelled a stream of flechettes down its barrel at high enough velocities that the projectiles cracked when they broke the sound barrier. But with the auto-cannons the flechettes were huge. And every other round was a high-explosive armor-piercing one, which, as I watched, tore the men apart. One man disintegrated as he sprinted for the ship’s ramp. Another screamed just before his head popped from his shoulders and rolled along the ground to stop against the mine railway, a grimace frozen on his face.
When our rockets slammed into the ship’s sides I realized I had forgotten something, and radioed back to base that we had made contact with an unknown enemy.
“Is this a training exercise?” a voice asked.
“No it’s not a damn exercise,” I shouted and then ended the discussion. Who cared what they did with the information? Our base was too far for them to offer rapid assistance anyway.
We had begun to get the upper hand when the ship overhead roared in. Things happened so quickly that it was hard to focus on any one event, the chaos making me chew the inside of my cheek until it bled. Then one of my green lights blinked out at the same time that I saw an explosion, and the ship banked away to turn for a second pass, to target another of our positions. Jennifer’s auto-cannon zipped loudly nearby, and it looked as though the ship had zeroed in on the firing signature so that when the craft grew larger in my faceplate I buried my head in the dirt, hoping that I would sink into the ground, willing myself to become smaller.
Nothing happened. I looked up to see the ship wheeling silently, end over end, before it slammed into one of the waste ponds along with two rockets that chased it.
“Grandmother,” said Toly, “we need Buttons.”
I ran. I couldn’t even see anything except tracer flechettes as they cut the air, sounding like angry hornets if they got close enough. By now the men had organized a defense and there were more of them, their volume of fire getting heavier. It didn’t matter that we were invisible. Our flechettes and rockets traced back to the weapons, and another of our positions went silent when one of the men fired a salvo of grenades that landed dead on. Before I knew that I had even made it I was inside the mine entrance, my vision kit shifting to light amplification.