Blood in the Snow
Blood in the Snow
DECEMBER- 2523. SOLAR SYSTEMS ARE NOW BATTLEFIELDS.
"I don't think I've ever seen this much ice in one place." Private First Class Santiago El-Jabbour knelt down and bashed the ground with the stock of his rifle, scooping up a handful of chunked-up Europan crust. "God, I'd'a killed for this."
"Whatever, Santi. Just a big ol' fuckin' ball of cold… 'sides, nobody has seen this much ice. Ever." Grizzly kicked a rock off into the distance, letting it rip halfway into orbit in a display of what would have been impressive strength if it weren't for the fact that the moon's gravity was twelve-and-a-quarter percent of what she was used to. "Why the hell would anyone go to this rock?"
"Keep it up, and you'll bean a Blue right outta the sky," Lieutenant Mulligan sighed. "Or give away that we're here. Knock it off, Lance Corporal Griswold."
"Yes, sir," Santi could hear her eyes roll from behind her polarized helmet visor, but he knew that she knew the LT was right. For once. Mulligan was alright. He usually let Sarge Ripley do her thing.
"We there yet?" PFC Joey Liang chirped over the radio, a slight buzz of radiation-induced static slipping past the filters. "C'mon, guys. Let's keep moving. My joints are practically cold-welding out here."
"Okay, okay. We're moving. Look, we're already making good time. Just gotta hump it from here." Santi gripped his rifle's carry handle, striding up next to a visibly annoyed Clara Griswold. "You wanna know why somebody would go to this Godforsaken place, Grizzly?" He held out the palm-sized shard of water ice he'd picked up. "This. I know you grew up back on Minerva where it's all over the place, but try growing up on a station in the middle of nowhere and tell me again that you don't know why people would care about a giant ball of ice." He shrugged. "Look, get me a thermos or a zip bag or something, 'cuz the folks are gonna want to see this."
"Shove it in a pouch or something, Santi. I ain't stoppin' for a fuckin souvenir."
"Yeah, yeah, whatever." He pulled a masking smoke grenade from its pouch, opting to secure it by the bungee cords on his chest rig, and slipped the ice shard into its place. He could tell Clara was giving him side-eye for it. She was a groundside girl. She wouldn't get it.
There was something the Marines in his family had told him when he'd gone Infantry, and he couldn't help but think about it now, about the sound. About how the scariest sound was none at all. About how they'd fill the air with idle, inane chatter in the hope that they'd have something for their brain to do other than scanning a perpetually empty horizon and letting their mind run wild with the possibilities of Blues behind every rock or one of their strike fighters in the twinkle of every star. That it was at its worst on worlds like this.
Europa had a thin atmosphere, mostly oxygen but so diffused it almost didn't exist, and certainly not enough to hear anything from his helmet's onboard mics. The simulated audio suite would do its best to tell him when something blew up in the distance, but if none of them could see it, it didn't work. So he was left with nothing but the things his family told him. The crunch of the ground under your boots. The gentle caress of your breath against the visor. The stupid bullshit spewing from squadmates' mouths. But the Marines in his family were right, you stopped hearing the whir of the power-assist exoskeleton after a while. He almost wished he hadn’t, but he couldn't find it even if he was looking for it. That whir was comforting, in a weird way. It meant everything was working, like the silenced blink of the WRN HIGH RAD icon on his retinal-projected HUD, though that was more distressing than comforting.
"You guys dismissed your rad alarms too, right?" Clara's voice was astoundingly calm for the topic, and so was Santiago's reply. "Nah, Grizzly. I just silenced it."
"Damn, Santi. I can't stand that blinking icon. Too distracting."
"I think distraction isn't really our biggest worry from that alarm, though."
"Hmph." Aurora-crowned Jupiter hung above all of them in the sky, a vengeful god throwing invisible bolts of thunder to tear their DNA asunder.
"So, we're all, like, getting cancer, right? Like the really bad, inop kind of cancer."
"Iunno. I took my antirads. But yeah, probably."
"Well, I don't know about us, but Liang ain't." Lieutenant Mulligan was a mere two promotions off of becoming Captain Obvious.
"No, sir," the metal-and-silicon smartass concurred. "Just data corruption."
"Good man. Say goodbye to my wife for me."
"I'll be sure to comfort her." Joey snickered.
"You know he can hear you, right, son?" Alien smacked his shoulder, the 5'6" Sergeant scowling beneath her helmet. "El-tee, you really gonna take that, or do I gotta raise your kids for you?"
"Yeah," Jack Mulligan shrugged. "Look, I learned this with my oldest. You respond to it, and it just encourages further troublemaking."
"LT, you got a kid?" Joey shook his head.
"Two." LT raised his eyebrows.
"Well shit, now I just feel like an asshole."
"Yeah."
"Pfft." Santi couldn't help it. "Joey, you bastard."
"It's why we love 'em," Clara smirked.
"Apologize, Private."
"I think LT knows I think Kimiko is a wonderful woman, and that I would never exploit a widow's grief for personal gain. Nonetheless, sir, I most sincerely apologize."
Sarge grumbled.
"Never?" Clara walked over towards Joey, pressing her faceplate against his head and turning off her mic. "Bull-shit, you just don't think she's hot enough."
"Fuck you, Grizzly." Liang laughed. "Never. I'm not that much of a heartless bastard. Well, back to the slog! How far we got, Sarge?"
"Six more klicks."
"Goody. Y'know," Joey Liang's monocular optical housing of a head swiveled to meet Santi's side-thrown glance as they trudged across the ice. "If I were them, I'd've hammered us with air support by now."
"Well, you know what they say, don't count your chickens yet, Joey." Santi shrugged. "They still could."
"Yeah, okay, Mr. Never-even-seen-a-chicken-before, but we haven't even seen a Panther up there. That's a lil' weird, y'think? Normally they'd be swarming the place."
"Yeah, I guess. But normally we'd be going in by dropship for this kind of job, not MDV. Usually they save the pods for the hot drops."
"Something doesn't sit right with me, either." Alien grit her teeth. "Just get ready to get dangerous."
"Aye-aye, Sarge." Joey unslung his rifle and nodded.
The anchor cleats on the Marines' boots and the thruster packs on their backs were working overtime to keep the squad of twelve firmly rooted to the ground as they half-walked-half-stumbled their way forward. Walking in .134g was difficult even with the suits' assistance— it was much easier to make bounding leaps, or to trip and fall. The Low Gravity Infantry Tactics School training every Minervan Marine got on Pallas only went so far— the rocky moon of Minerva's gravity was bafflingly high for such a small satellite. Only three months of low-g training and a one-week refresher course several months ago had given their unit the warfare qualification on paper, but this was an attritable skill, and attrit it had.
Santiago ran through the briefing in his head as he scanned the horizon for hostiles that weren't there. There was a battery of camouflaged UN surface-to-orbit nuclear missiles— intel had named them Goalies, he thought— that were harassing the fleet. Their initial salvo had taken out the Coleraine, the unlucky destroyer blindsided by high-speed missiles from an unexpected shooter while its point defense was trained on a bevy of other inbound threats. The Goalie batteries were defended by their own PD networks, and dug into the ice along a canyon— counterfire had failed. On short notice, Marine strike teams like his had been mobilized for a quick strike against the sites, a fairly standard op that didn't usually take place in this hostile an environment with this little gravity— and was usually not their job.
F Company of 4/24 Marines were contributing two squads of twelve, split into six-man rifle and weapons teams in place of the specialists who were usually tasked with this job. This was the Navy's job, but after they'd lost the assault ship Manhattan Beach in the battle for Titan, it'd taken almost all of the Second Battalion and many of their augmenting specialized forces with them, including a bulk of the Navy's SADGRU sappers who had been attached to the Fort McHenry battlegroup. The other battlegroups were too mired in their own furballs up in orbit to send their own forces, and so it fell to the remaining sappers and any Marine squads like his who'd recently done their refresher training to pick up the slack. Two squads of SADGRU, two squads of Marines, and a special guest star for each Goalie installation. Command had hastily slapped a squad from the 1/18 Marine Strategic Operations Regiment— the heavy hitters, their power-armor suits the propaganda image of Minervan might— along with each of the assaults. They weren't really trained for this either, but even so, it felt good to have a force multiplier like that on their side.
Reach the initial point, then the Chengdu would drop them a pod full of deployable cover for the final approach, then let the infantry weapons platforms on the weapons teams cover the rifle teams as they advance. Clear out any defenders and attack the point defense. Meanwhile, while they're getting shot up, the MSOR operators would free-climb the canyon wall up to the batteries and attack from behind. They'd clear the place, plant demo charges on the dug-in launchers, and everyone would leave in dropships once the site was secure.
MSOR here felt like overkill to him. They were shock troopers, not infantry. Trained for a hot drop into major UN centers to quickly establish control of and hold politically important sites just long enough to bring the negotiators to the table, equipped with full power armor and heavy weapons to awe and intimidate their opposition. They knew they couldn't possibly just stroll into downtown Bradbury, put a gun to the head of the Secretary-General, and take out every Blue soldier on Mars. But they didn't have to kill all of them. Just enough of them fast enough to make the rest back off to regroup; to make it clear that trying to retake the area would be a bloodbath, and that important people would die unless the governments got to talking very, very quickly. That didn't sound to Santiago like the skillset this operation needed.
He opened the clamshell housing of his rifle, one of the new, magnetohydro-whatever-the-hell RTEK-4s that could throw molten tungsten at insane speeds like the guns on the MYEONGNYANG-Class. Too many moving parts, he couldn't help but think. It was an overengineered masterwork of Minervan engineering— a piece of the future in his hands, all the worse for having been built in the present. Sure, it could melt a hole through the side of an armored infantry weapons platform, but as he inspected the swing-arm magazine seating mechanism and used the emergency clearance handle to chamber-check the hybrid coilgun's firing chamber and cycled the test switch on the grip for the heatsink-ejector, he couldn't help but wonder if the weapon would even work by the time they got into firing distance of the IWP. He'd been carrying this rifle for the duration of the War, but even through the last six months its occasional malfunctions under fire had undermined his trust in it. Never anything quite as bad as what he'd heard— none of the jammed-open housings, just stuck heatsinks. He said a quiet prayer in thanks for that.
He slapped the loading cover shut, as he'd been trained to do, and it latched with what would have been a satisfying click, if it hadn't been muffled and only audible through the conduction of his arm. As they came over a ridge, he raised the rifle to ready, scanning the horizon through the combination of good-old-fashioned eyeballs, his helmet's turreted sensor suite built into its forehead, and the higher-fidelity optics on his rifle. After nothing caught his eye and ensuring his proximity tracker was just reading friendlies, he quickly glanced to his life-support and equipment readout. Comms degraded, 96% air, scrubbers holding for an estimated three days, outside temperature a balmy negative one-ninety-one, and inside temperature steady at a just slightly chilly twelve, plus the ever-present blink of the radiation alarm, its blaring whine silenced long ago. The Marine squad continued their awkward low-g march, reaching another ridge, and as Santi, Grizzly, and Joey popped up over its crest, they immediately realized something was wrong.
"Quick, get back! Blues, two hundred meters, south!" Joey pushed himself back down the ridge, sliding down its slope. Clara ducked and dove. Santiago tried his best to emulate her, but scraped his helmet into the ice on the way down. At least he didn't hear any depressurization alarms, and Grizzly had the goodwill not to laugh. Joey shouted. "Don't think they saw us!"
No, wait. That wasn't goodwill. Grizzly was in combat mode. She'd seen the same thing he had.
Where there had been nothing but empty ground behind the last few ridges, this one only had the illusion of it. The ground didn't normally sag ever so slightly from beneath tent poles like it did there. No wonder orbital recon had called the path clear— the picture on the flexible tarp had been perfectly sharp, the only sign it wasn't the actual surface being that from his angle on top of the ridge he could see the ground beneath it— the sloping at its edges was for fighting satellites, not direct observation. He'd never seen a flexible display that good, its picture almost more real than the ground below it. Underneath its cover sat a very familiar sight, though. Four UN Marines and an ASF-17C Panther, the Blues' mainline strike fighter.
Clara rolled him over as he laid in the ice, coming to a horrible, horrible conclusion. "We're fucked."
"You good, Santi?" She waved a hand over his visor. "You good, man? On your feet!"
He was raised to his feet while the two words echoed in his head. "We're fucked."
"Son, get a hold of yourself," Alien glared at him. "What the hell did you three see?"
"Fighter," Santi stumbled on the words. "They hid it. Under a camo tarp. They're setting us up. They're setting us up, Sarge. We're fucked."
The other Marines had fanned out, climbing up the ridge, rifles in hand, waiting for LT to give the go. The ten-foot metal behemoth of the squad's infantry weapons platform had hidden himself a little lower down the ridgeline than the rest, readying himself to teakettle up and open fire with his autocannon.
"Fighter?" Lieutenant Mulligan raised an eyebrow. "Kid's right. If there's one out here, there's more of them. It's a massive, distributed ambush. They're just waiting for us to cross the line."
"We have to warn the others." Santi tried to get his breathing under control.
"Major said radio silence, 'n the lascomm node is lit up like a Christmas tree with jamming."
"We have to warn them."
"We have to take this one out first. We can't transmit long-range with them this close." Alien walked up to Santi, grabbing the shoulder straps of his plate rig and pressing her helmet visor up to his, LPI radio off. "Son, I know you had a close call with one of these last time, but we've got the drop on 'em and it's on the ground. That's our turf. We'll stop it and warn the others. Okay, son? Get it together."
He nodded. "U-understood, Sarge."
"Good." She backed off, hopping back on the squad comms. "Rifle squad, get a snake-cam up and tag that Panther. Weapons squad, when LT makes the call, light it up through the tarp. Full send, Corporal Zahm, and give me directional jamming." She stared the infantry weapons platform's 'head' sensor down with a nod, and then swept a pointer finger across all those assembled. "And if any of you see a lascomm pack on a Blue's back, don't you dare let them get out from under that tarp. Rifle squad, you take the Blues. El-Jabbour, LaFortune, you cover fire from the ridge with LT. Griswold, Zhang, on me. We go down and take the rest. Oorah?"
"Rah, Sarge."
"Alright Marines," LT nodded. "Stack up. We move on my mark." Private LaFortune's snake-cam had marked the outline of the fighter on their HUDs along with the positions of the four Blues in view. Santiago climbed up next to Mulligan and did one final runthrough of his rifle, opening the loading hatch, chamber-checking, heatsink-ejector testing, and seating the hatch back shut with a slap. He flicked the secondary selector switch from slug to bolt, and satisfied that the computer wasn't reporting any fault codes, he nodded and pinged his status as ready on the team comms. A string of green dots affirmed the squad was in position.
"Mark," LT said, the last calm moment in the face of the coming storm.
The simulated audio suite on his helmet was utterly ablaze in the crack of weapons fire as Santi popped up over the ridge, laying down a field of suppressive fire on the Blues as bolts of liquefied tungsten and solid slugs ripped through the counter-observation tarp, stunned UN Marines turning and returning fire as two of their comrades fell to the ground. Alien, Joey, and Grizzly crested the ridge, sliding down with their rifles raised; Santi wasn't about to let one of the Blues get a shot off at them. The virtual crack of a tungsten slug zipped past his shoulder as he recoiled— a second slug struck LaFortune's faceplate, shards of duraglass and flash-frozen blood drifting in the near-airless Europan skies, a storm of crimson snow floating towards him, drenching the shard of ice held in his one of his tactical rig's pouches.
"One-six is KIA, repeat, one-six is KIA!" Santi shouted. "One-five, returning fire!" He propped the RTEK-4 against the ridge's peak, hiding his body and head behind it, using the gun's optics to aim. It was tough to do one-handed, especially because his hands were shaking, but he wasn't going to wind up like Eddie there. Or Kylie. Or Volodymyr. Or Kareem. He blinked, taking a deep breath. He squeezed off two more shots. They went wide as his hand shuddered, the Blue Marine's shots passing just overhead.
He breathed in. Out. Alien, Grizzly, and Joey needed him.
He pushed himself down the ridge, going deeper into cover, and crawled over past where Eddie LaFortune's dead body lay. A frozen corpse on a frozen world. The bloodstained souvenir felt heavier now; as he crawled up the ridge on his new position he regretted ever having wanted to come here. Eddie was new, he was a replacement, full of fire and pride and patriotism, ready to defend the Minervan Dream, full of 'Rah Sarge and Yes Sir. He was a kid, no older than eighteen.
That's a weird thought for a twenty-year-old to have.
The clarity of his mind, and of the thought that wouldn't leave, was unnerving.
Why? Why us?
He popped up and tried to push the thought out of his head, spraying molten tungsten in controlled bursts at the Blue ahead of him, a man sprinting with animalistic fury to leave the cover of the tarp and summon reinforcements, his back weighed down by the heavy-duty rig of a portable laser communicator. The Blue turned red as the shot struck true; the sight of seeing a man get splashed barely even fazed Santiago anymore. Yup, those were his internal organs flash-frying. Wouldn't be the first.
The second Blue had just turned his rifle on Joey as Santi did the same to him.
"Weapons squad, One-two, site is clear! Say again, site is clear!" Alien slashed her hand in front of her face, turning back to the ridgeline. "Cease fire!"
"A-firm, Sarge." The infantry weapons platform, Corporal Alan Zahm, teakettled his behemoth of a robotic frame down into the clearing as Santi watched Joey and Grizzly come up towards him.
"Shit," Joey said, monocular sensor staring down at the dead body.
"Yeah." Santi sighed.
Alien crested the ridge, coming up next to Santiago, putting a hand on his shoulder. He jerked around in shock to see the Sergeant nod, before cutting off her radio and pressing their helmets together to speak through the conduction of the duraglass.
"LT's on the horn with Command. We're warning the others now. You did good, kid. Breathe. We're almost done here."
For a good minute, Santiago didn't have a response.
"What about Eddie?" The question slipped out of his brain and into his lips.
"We'll bring him back, El-Jabbour. No man left behind. We're not doing that today."
He nodded. The Sergeant stepped away, beckoning Corporal Zahm to the site as those Marines not busy with ransacking the place for any possible information they could find all came to huddle on the top of the ridge, looking down in a mixture of sympathy, horror, and cold acclimation at the body of their fallen comrade. Santiago slung his rifle behind his back, kneeling down to pick what was once Eddie LaFortune up. Santi rolled the body over, barely even bothering to check the impact-shattered sapphire glass of the squad lascomm rig on his back before pulling the oxygen and CO2 scrubber units from LaFortune's life support pack and clipping them to his chest rig. Eddie wouldn't need them anymore. He hadn't even made it long enough for most of the others to get attached enough to give him a nickname. He was just LaFortune, or Eddie.
Santi had wanted to call him Lucky.
Lucky LaFortune was unceremoniously strapped to the side of Corporal Zahm's metal chassis, his rifle clamped to his now-unnecessary life-support pack. The towering, artificially-intelligent robot struggled in low-g just as much as his smaller synthetic or organic brethren; but as an infantry weapons platform, or a Weap, he understood that this was one of his additional duties. The machine-man of few words nodded with a simple question. "Are any of you religious?"
A few Marines raised their hands, Santiago too absent to realize the question until Grizzly elbowed him. He raised a hand, sighing.
"Good," Zahm said. "He could use it."
"I say again. Our laser communications operator is down, his pack is busted, and our Weap took a hit to his emitter boom. We can receive, we cannot transmit. We've switched to RF for the remainder of the mission. Advise, Watchtower. Over."
"Damnit, can't hear a thing in this chop…" Mulligan muttered to himself, his helmet plugged into the side of the Weap's chassis. "Say again your last, Watchtower." He paused, sighing. "Understood, Watchtower." The Lieutenant nodded. "Proceeding as fragged. One-one out."
The Lieutenant walked over to the Sergeant, and they conversed faceplate-to-faceplate, off the comms. Joey and Grizzly couldn't help but notice it, and their stomachs dropped with a collective realization of how fucked they were. Santi already knew.
"Alright, Marines!" Jack Mulligan, Lieutenant, Federated Republics Marine Corps, planted the butt of his rifle against the icy surface. "We are stepping for the objective. The other teams have been warned about the fighter ambush, and our own fighter cover has been tasked. We've got a job to do— the fleet is counting on us. You let them down, we're out of a ride home. C'mon, Marines. Let's do it for the fleet, and let's do it for Eddie." Lieutenant Mulligan pounded his rifle's stock against the ice, his grip clutched around the handguard. "Rah?"
A crowd of dead men gave the worlds’ most uninspiring "Rah, sir." in reply.
The three remaining junior enlisted in the rifle squad trudged onwards in silence and vigilance as a flash from the sky split the horizon. A harsher, brighter one than the myriad they'd been seeing since they landed. For a moment, there was a new sunrise over Europa. It faded in but an instant, an instant burned into any retina or sensor pointed its way.
"NEUTRON SPIKE!" The comms lit up with various shouts of surprise, and Santi recoiled at the glare— even through the polarization of his helmet, green-purple afterimages danced across his vision.
"Tell me that was one of theirs, Ripley." Lieutenant Jack Mulligan's rifle fell from its ready to his side, suspended on its sling.
"No such luck, LT." Sergeant Lena Ripley took in the destruction in orbit with her helmet's forehead-mounted sensor suite. "Definitely one of ours… shit."
"No," one of the others gasped.
"The— the Dutchman?"
"No, no, they can't," Joey shook his head.
"Shh, they're talking." Mulligan's eyes widened. "Direct penetration to the torpedo room. Nuclear warhead set 'em off. Total cookoff."
Everybody's shoulders felt just that little ton heavier.
"No shit…" Zahm's massive robotic frame even found a way to look defeated, the twenty-mil on his 'shoulder' letting its barrel dip just that little bit.
"No, no. They've killed the Dutchman five times and it never sticks. Fuck, if they hadn't we'd still be callin' her McHenry," Joey tightened his grip on his rifle. "The— the damage control teams are too good. Admiral Rama knows what she's doing—"
"Admiral's gone, son."
"What do we do?"
Alien hit the eject paddle-switch on the grip of her rifle, a thermal-film coated heat sink dropping out the front of the weapon. "We do what we came here to do. We finish this," She nodded, face blank of expression. "Fairfield, Chengdu, some of the others are still around. We still got a ride home. We go out there and we earn it."
"All Foxtrot, Sapper, Morrigan elements, this is the MFRS Kilkenny Marine Operations Center, callsign Northstar. We are taking over operational command of this mission…" The voice on the radio faded into the chaos of the background.
Clara found Santi in the shock of it all, tapping faceplates and muting her comms. "Even if we make it off this rock, if they fought this hard for this fuckin' backwater…"
The world in Clara's eyes was just so slightly out of focus.
"You know we're not going home, right?"
"Yeah."
They had made it to their Rubicon, the HUD marker for the initial point hanging Damoclesian over the now-flattening terrain near the edge of the canyon. Santi turned towards Grizzly, nodding in solemn silence, left to the rhythm of his heartbeat and the melody of his suit servos.
The moon of Jupiter was beautiful in its desolation, in its hostility, in how a world so covered in that which brings life so thoroughly had rebuked those who had come to introduce it to death. Beneath his feet, miles below, lay ancient seas, a briny deep not unlike that which his distant ancestors had crawled out of on Earth eons ago. He wondered if there were fish there. He knew somebody knew. He'd never paid enough attention in school in Mrs. Wilkins' astrogeography.
First, he wished he'd learned to swim. Then, he wished the ground would open up below him. It was a preferable alternative to what he knew was about to happen.
"C'mon, Santi. You look ridiculous." His knees had buckled, his eyes agape. "It's just a beach, man."
His breathing sped, his knees giving out under him and his hands falling into the sand to break his collapse.
"Told you it'd screw with his head, Joey. Remember how long it took him to fuckin' look up in Basic?"
"He said he could do it, 'n' he's a Minervan Marine, isn't he? 'Acta, non verba' kind of shit?"
He watched the incoming tide break over his fingers, caressing his hands under a blanket of seafoam. He panted, closing his eyes, and shook his head as he watched chunks of his now-regurgitated lunch float out with the waves.
"Yeah. Dude's got some work to do on his 'acta'-ing, I think."
"Yo, Santi. Mic sensitivity, man. I can hear you breathing." Joey shook his composite-paneled head towards his squadmate. "'Sides, man. We're here. Eyes up."
LT glanced back over his shoulder, nodding to his Marines. "Marines! This is the last ridge between us and the objective. We will be waiting here until we receive word from the other units. We're safe to radiate RF here, but low power burst packets only!"
Santi flipped the radio switch on his chestplate, his comms now emitting even shorter low-probability of intercept bursts of degraded audio quality. Detailed information about his squadmates stopped updating, and the data-linked motion tracker now only showed contacts his suit could reasonably guess were a person. Everything sounded like one of those old Apollo broadcasts from Mr. Endesha's history class, at best.
"Great. Hurry up and wait." Joey tapped Santi's shoulder. "I take it back. Eyes down, I guess." He sat down against the ridge, and Santiago did too.
The King of the Solar System seemed unaware of the battle raging in his court, the blue crown of electromagnetic ripples dancing atop his head. The planet of Jupiter, swept by storms every bit as violent as the nuclear fray they silhouetted, was massive in a way that hurt his head to think about. He had grown up under arched walkways and fake sky under the faux-natural lights of a spin-grav asteroid station promenade, the only real body of water being a 'river' that was more there for the purposes of the internal ecosystem than for the people there, and the only view out the station's sparse windows a view of nearly-empty space and a distant sun. Environmental acclimation training had been rough for him, but he had wanted a way out of there more than anything. It was a dead end. His parents may have been content mining ice out in the asteroid belt of the system, a middle-of-nowhere Minervan colony system on the border of the Frontier, but he was a wayward child much like his cousins. The Marines had been his way out. They had shown him the galaxy. They had shown him the meaning of brotherhood.
They had shown him the meaning of misery and pain and loss.
Tensions had always been high. War had been a possibility since before he was born, but it had never been likely. His mom called it saber rattling. She had always kept up with politics like that. His dad couldn't seem to care less. "We're here and they're there," he'd always say. "And long as it stays that way, not much else to it." They had been sad to see him go but proud to see him off. He pulled out the ice crystal from his tactical rig, bloodied and jagged as if the edge of an ill-used knife, or perhaps some antediluvian artifact of that first murder. He held the shard in the silhouette of Jupiter, diffracted light bathed in the sanguine tint of the crystallized blood, a kaleidoscopic image of slaughter and frenzy as new stars formed and faded in instants in the flash of nuclear detonations and new nebulas were kicked into the sky by the silent thunder of coilgun fire.
Santiago's breath trembled, and he tossed the shard of ice away, crimson snowflakes curling off his gloved fingertips. He sat back against the ridge, uncomfortably rolling back and forth as he struggled to flatten his pack to the surface. He rolled over to the side, noticing a shard of ice behind him.
He picked it up, smaller than the one he had so unceremoniously parted with. He tucked it into his rig, hoping that of this entire miserable journey, he would have at least a little something to show for it.
A stranger's voice, grizzled and raspy, cut through his moment of calm, the adrenaline once more settling in as he steeled himself for what was next. "This is Morrigan six-one to all Foxtrot and Sapper elements— we are on the X and holding at the bottom of the canyon, prepped for ascent." Even MSOR's comms seemed better than theirs— and they were, as he could see on his HUD that the transmission was being relayed off Corporal Zahm's laser comms receiver, likely being bounced through a ship in orbit.
"Our comms should be able to penetrate that ice, right?" Santi raised an eyebrow at Joey. "What do we do if we can't tell them we're here?"
"Command will have told them. They know what's going on with us," Joey shrugged. "Right? No way they didn't tell them."
"Which Command?" Santi's eyes widened. "Watchtower or Northstar?"
"Well, Watchtower will have…" Joey looked up. "...Oh, fuck. You don't think…?"
"How often does MSOR work with schmucks like us, Joey? What are the odds they even have our RF codes, which we're not even supposed to use for long-range? What are the odds Watchtower even told them to listen to our RF before they fucking— fucking blew up! They got no way to talk to us! We can hear them, but they can't hear us!"
"No no no. They've. They've got the codes. They gotta…"
"They don't know we're here, Joey. They don't know. They don't know!" Santi pushed past Joey on his way to the Lieutenant. "LT! Sarge! They don't know we're here! They don't know! They don't fucking know! Everybody who knows how to hear us is dead! Nobody's listening!"
"Get a fucking hold of yourself, El-Jabbour!" Alien stepped in and grabbed the shoulder strap of his plate. Santi grabbed her wrist, and she snarled. "Private, you are out of line!" Clara started to step forward, but seeing who had grabbed her friend, retracted the gesture.
"He's out of line, but he might be onto something. I've been getting no response from Northstar. I don't know if it's this fuckin' radiation soup, or jamming, or if they're just not listening, but our ground-to-space RF is falling on deaf ears." He shook his head. "You talk fast and explain yourself, kid. I'm getting real worried about you jeopardizing this operation."
His breathing was heavy, audible. "Okay. Okay, sir. Alright. So. We were… we were a last-minute substitution into the mission plan, right? This was supposed to just be SADGRU. The Morrigans weren't supposed to be involved with this. We weren't supposed to be anywhere near this!" His eyes were wide, stapled open by adrenaline and terror. "Listen, I think… I think Watchtower had our encryption codes, 'cuz they were supposed to be running our op, and we've worked with them before. Northstar, though, that's the Kilkenny. We've never run anything with Kilkenny. They'd have to have gotten our codes from Fairfield or Chengdu, and with all the shit that's been going down up there, who knows if they've had the time, or, or, if they're… they're too panicked."
"You're one to talk, Private."
"Point taken, Sarge. But I think it's justified. SADGRU and MSOR are both special forces types. SADGRU is more down in the muck like us, but there's almost no reason the Morrigans would have our codes on file before this op. And even if they did, they'd have had to get them in the… how many hours advance notice did we have? And even if they had them, they'd have to be listening for them! We don't transmit RF long range unless lascomms are degraded or disabled, and they don't have the luxury to be listening to everything all the time. They've only got so much focus. They're listening to the lascomms, because that's where we're supposed to be talking. There's too many moving parts. It's not normally an issue, but this is way beyond fucking normal." He shook his head. "We can talk all we want, but nobody's listening. That's what I think, sir."
"Did getting that out help?"
He could still hear his breathing, labored, shaky.
"Not much, sir. We're still fucked."
"Alien, let him go. He's shaken." Mulligan sighed.
"Yes, sir." She grumbled, letting go and surveying the small crowd that had gathered. "Well? Check your kit, make yourselves useful. Watch the perimeter."
Santi could see Alien and Mulligan meet each other's eyes, and see their lips move. He couldn't hear what they were saying.
"Alright, update." The Sergeant trotted out in front of the other Marines. "We are cut off from communications with the Sapper and Morrigan elements. We will attempt to make periodic burst transmissions to them in a way that won't ping the Blues. But, chances are, that won't necessarily get their attention. So we will be waiting to hear back from Foxtrot 3 and 4. Once they're in position, we will contact them and they'll contact Sapper and Morrigan. Until then? Watch the perimeter. We are still inside enemy territory. Be on your shit. Rah?"
"Rah, Sarge."
Alien tapped Santiago's shoulder. He leaned in, tapping faceplates.
"You, son," she stared daggers. "Need to get a fucking hold of yourself."
"I've got watch, Santi." Clara tapped him on the back, and he sat down against the ridge, the other spacesuited Marine gripping her rifle and scanning the horizon. The SADGRU guys had checked in by now, and of course had no way to hear them. He didn't like this, the waiting around. The UN had to have figured out they were here by now. They had to be visible from orbit— they had cover, sure, but little concealment when it came to the black skies above. Perhaps they were just waiting to kill them. Perhaps their communication was embroiled in just as much chaos and compartmentalization. Nobody got anywhere in this world of cyberwarfare and signals intelligence by just handing out encryption keys to any radio that asked nicely.
Santi's hands went on autopilot as he checked his rifle's systems again. Heat sink ejector functional. Diagnostic screen on the primary control panel, a screen that usually served as the display for the optics package, read all checks as good. A quick chamber check verified no blockage, and he slapped the rifle shut.
"All Foxtrot, Sapper, and Morrigan elements, this is Foxtrot four-three," a nervous, rushed voice jolted him back to conscious thought. "Foxtrot four has arrived at the AO. We have taken heavy casualties. Foxtrot three is fu— combat ineffective! Say again, Foxtrot three is combat ineffective. We have three wounded, and five dead— we barely managed to escape the ambush after the fighter that engaged us bugged out. Northstar has recommended we continue the mission." The voice on the other side gulped. "Have any of you guys— is there any word from Foxtrots one and two?" The breathing on the other end of the line sped up.
"Foxtrot four-three, Sapper two-one. Negative."
"Foxtrot four-three, Morrigan six-one. Believe that one and two are KIA. Advise that an assault on the site with reduced forces will be difficult but not impossible."
"Oh, we're fucked fucked." Joey whistled.
"Morrigan six-one, Foxtrot four-three, I say again: we have five dead and three wounded."
"Foxtrot four-three, Morrigan six-one. Verify status of infantry weapons platform."
"They're just going to keep going at this, aren't they?" Alien shook her head.
"Let me interrupt," LT nodded. "Foxtrot four-three, Foxtrot one-one. We are on the X but laser transmission is inop. Confirm."
"Foxtrot four-three, confirm," LT raised an eyebrow in annoyance. "Can you see them, Alien?"
"Yes, sir." The Sergeant zoomed her helmet-mounted optics package in, the IR-ball swiveling on its mount. "Range two klicks, count seven, and it looks like one of their wounded took a pretty bad hit. Good Lord."
"Do they have lascomms?"
"Yes, sir, looks like it. Weap looks pristine."
"Alright, then. We got to get their attention."
Santi decided to once-over his rifle again, running the Trident N5 optics package's diagnostics program, an invisible IR laser emanating from the tip of the electronic brick. Corporal Zahm spun on the spot— or at least, as much as a ten-foot metal behemoth can under low gravity. "Knock it off, El-Jabbour. Watch where you point that thing. Almost thought you were a Blue."
"Good idea, Zahm," Alien said, and lifted her rifle before tapping the laser sight's grip thumbpad.
What if they shoot before they look? Santi couldn't help but think he didn't want to get splashed by a friendly. He didn't want to get splashed in general. They were a little far for that, though. Maybe he'd only get a slug through the face, like Lucky. At least that wasn't painful. For long.
"Shit! We're being lit up— targeting laser, eight o'clock!" One of the Marines— the Weap— from the other side shouted, panicked. "Casta, we got Blues—"
Alien dropped her rifle to her side, strobing her helmet flashlight, putting her left hand over her mouth and her right hand up, open-palmed. I have no comms laser.
"Shit!" The voice from earlier, Four-three recoiled in shock. "Hang on, that's not Blues. That's One! And they got Two. Foxtrots One and Two are here, thank God. Mulli, stand down! Stand down! Their lasers are out. I'm switching RF. Tell the others and send the codes."
"Ho-ly shit, Santi." Joey's ocular sensor whirred in its long-range zoom. "Mulligan almost pasted us."
Santi glanced over his shoulder at the LT. The LT grumbled, to no one in particular. He wasn't even looking at him, much less aiming at him. "Damnit, the resolution on these snake-cams is buttered asscheeks."
"No, man, I mean, the other Mulligan. The Weap. Four-four."
"Oh, right."
Santi's confusion was quickly resolved, for as he watched the Lieutenant peek out over the ridge, the number of Mulligans in the world had suddenly decreased by precisely one.
"LT!" Santi shouted. "Shit! Shit! They know we're here!" He pressed his back against the ridge, glancing at Grizzly. "Fuck!"
"Shit! Mulligan—" Alien's voice quickly steeled. "All Foxtrot, we are under enemy fire. This is One-two, I'm assuming command. Four-four, get Northstar our RF codes and tell them to send the cover we were promised."
"Affirm, One-two. For what it's worth, I don't see any Blues on the other side of your ridge. I think the shot came from the missile complex."
"All the way over there?" Santi raised an eyebrow. "What, a sniper?"
"Maybe," Grizzly nodded. "But I think with this little atmosphere, and this little gravity, you could probably do it with a lucky rifle shot."
"Then we can return fire," Alien said, dug in behind the crest of the ridge. "I want us ducked behind this ridge until we hear from Northstar, though. Hail 'em, Griswold."
"Northstar, Foxtrot One-three. Do you read us?" Clara grit her teeth. "Northstar, come in."
"Fox— we—" Static.
Clara's eyes lit up.
"Do you read, Northstar."
"Foxtrot One-three, we read you. Heavy interference. We understand all remaining elements are at the AO and you are taking fire. Verify."
"Affirmative, Northstar. What's the status of the cover drop?"
"On the way."
"How. Long?" Clara grimaced.
"Two mikes, minimum."
"Great. We're sitting on our hands for two minutes, Sarge. No cover until then."
"Got it, Griswold. We make do. El-Jabbour, get the spotter drone up." Alien snapped her gaze to him.
"You sure, Sarge? They've got our number, and we only got two. The vac ones are bigger than the atmo—"
"Send it, Santi. Rainier, Hariri, rig two snake-cams for IR, six meters between them. Make sure they're pointed at the missile site, and record the footage."
"Got it, Sarge. What's the plan?"
"Hopefully, slow down the footage and track the round. It'll be hot." She nodded. "That'll give us a shooter."
The radio crackled. "Sapper Two is engaging point defense installations. Be advised, heavy weapons fire outbound." Missiles peeled off a ridge to their northeast, corkscrew-spinning in a terminal sprint for the raised defensive towers. Hot tungsten sprayed into the sky in reaction, the automated turrets fighting for their lives— but the missiles had soon passed under their gimbal limit, and rendered the attempt futile.
"Good effect on target, good effect." The Sapper on the other end seemed satisfied, at least. Santi was still terrified, the adrenaline coursing through his body barely managing to convince him he was anything but. He pulled the recon drone off the bottom of his life support pack, unfolding its quad RCS booms and unfolding the control tablet from his chest rig. He flipped the ON switch, and preflight checks ran down the screen, all turning out green. "It's up, Sarge."
"Cameras ready?" Two-five and Two-six, Rainier and Hariri, both radioed in their 'yes'.
"See if you can pick them out with the drone thermals. If not, we track the sniper shot."
Santi nodded, his status light flashing a green, wordless affirm. He pushed the virtual joystick forward, and the drone gently teakettled off the Europan ice.
"Recon drone up, I'm zooming on 'em now…"
He slid the zoom slider towards the right, flicking the camera over to thermal. The blob of heat the lower resolution snake-cams saw quickly distilled itself into figures. Multiple figures.
Far more than the briefing had warned about.
"Sarge. You need to see this."
One of the distant, fuzzy figures of heat raised something in their arms, and the simulated audio suite finally kicked in. Crack. Shots flew out, miraculously missing the drone— though as Santi pushed the zoom slider further, it was less of a surprise.
"No sniper. But a lot of guys with rifles."
"You mean Mulligan was a lucky shot?"
"Yeah, looks like it." Location tags for the heat signatures started to pop up on the squad HUDs as Santi outlined the Blues with a finger. "Too far away for auto-rec, but I got their sigs."
"Good. That'll—" Alien watched over Santi's shoulder, frowning as she saw the feed turn to static. "Help."
"Alright, I'm saving their last known positions." Santi nodded. "I… I don't like this, Sarge. There's way more than we thought. At least another squad."
"Me neither, kid." She put a hand on his shoulder, which quickly morphed into a pat on the back, and a glance at the timer she'd set on her wristpad. "Twenty-three seconds."
A bright flare lit the lip of the ridge, and three missiles soared into the sky from the battery below.
Joey glanced up.
"They're getting hammered up there, man. Fuuuck."
Santi nodded.
He knew somebody had to do something. He just really had hoped it didn't have to be him. Unfortunate, the world seemed to say. You're up, kid.
"I just wanted a way out, man." He shook his head, watching as a constellation of distant stars came closer into distance, pods hurtling for the surface with their promised cover. "Something better than waiting around for death to come."
"I know, man. Me too." His metal-and-silicon brother laid a hand on his shoulder. "How does running towards it sound?"
"Worse."
"Yeah, I figured. Not much choice, though."
The silence hung even as the pod split open, strewing graphene barricades across the open field.
"For what it's worth, Santi, ain't nobody else I'd rather run towards death with than you."
"Th—thanks." Santi clutched his rifle.
Northstar cut him off.
"All Foxtrot, Sapper, Morrigan elements. Positive deployment of cover. Execute. Execute."
"Foxtrot Four-three, this is One-two, you have wounded, affirm?"
"Affirm, three WIA, Sarge, and we lost our corpsman."
"Have one of your Marines stay with them. Ensure they stay alive for medevac if able." And to help surrender if not, a subtext looming large.
"Sarge, we're fucked pushing with two."
"You're fucked pushing with three, and they would be too. Do what you can to appear larger. Thermal smoke. It won't diffuse well in this environment but take extra from the wounded to make up for it. We're going over the ridge now."
"Understood, Sarge." The voice on the radio gulped.
"Rainier, Hariri, lay us down some smoke. Rest of you, form staggered echelons, Zahm, up through the middle with me. We're stepping."
They flashed affirm and all lined up in their position in the formation as clouds of body-temperature smoke barely contorted under the nearly-negligible Europan atmosphere. The Marines hefted themselves through the smoke a few at a time, filing into the maze of graphene, concealing their next movement with a cloud of thermal smoke. Santi had four of the grenades. Joey and Clara each had four, too.
Joey tapped his left shoulder. "On you, Santi."
"Alright," Santi took a deep breath, curling his fingers over the top of the ridge, the ball of thermal smoke above promising concealment if not cover. "Foxtrot One-five, stepping off."
He pulled himself over the ridge, grabbing his rifle from its dangling sling, and ran for the nearest cover. Slugs of tungsten cut through the near-airless sky between the graphene pillars, trailing tendrils of thermal smoke where they'd punched through another cloud of protective haze.
He saw the silhouettes of the last-known thermal locations overlaid on his HUD, and used the hail of gunfire through the clouds of masking smoke to reckon a general area to shoot at, content the IFF tags of any squadmates weren't in the way. He flicked the forward selector switch to slug mode, Tynekill Arms Concern's latest and greatest piece of overengineering eagerly sitting in his hands, ready to send some Blues back to meet their Maker.
He squeezed the safety-bladed trigger, tungsten cutting paths through the gray smog and hopefully doing something of help to his friends. With the covering fire, Joey and Clara joined him ahead, and they glanced at each other before popping another smoke and getting ready to do it all over again. He un-bungeed the smoke grenade his ice crystal had commandeered the pouch for earlier, and tossed it.
Together, they leapfrogged from cover to cover, staggering their way bit by bit forward under the low gravity, watching their HUDs as IFF status lights flickered off. They moved forward with their minds having been shoved to the wayside by their instincts, and now, off in the corner where they couldn't hurt anything, locked in prayerless prayer; that longing that unites all people who haven't thought much about what happens after they die when suddenly thrust into the midst of an urgent need to consider it— whatever it is, not yet.
Santiago's prayer had form, but it had faded to the background static of instinct's image. It was shaped like a cry for mercy to be found among the Almighty and the saints of heaven, and if they had managed even to fish any out from the cracks between the couch cushions up there, even the slightest scrap of it, for them to send it his way.
They reached the end of the graphene headstones, a few new graves waiting only to be dug in their wake. Two had taken a few losses. Suarez, Rainier, Hyun, and McClonk. They'd always made fun of McClonk for having a funny name. Bye bye, Bonk McClonk. The pit in his stomach sank. The simulated audio of his helmet spit havoc in his ears.
He could see the graphene vibrate under the kinetic energy of the coilgun rounds. By now, they were close enough for him to flick the forward selector switch to bolt, and the internal mechanisms of his rifle prepared to flash-melt the next round it sent downrange. His ammo counter read 3. He poked the rifle around the corner, squeezed off a burst of liquid tungsten, and pulled it back around to reload. It was the sharpened blade of instinct. Pull out a fresh magazine. Depress the button just ahead of the trigger. Let the mag carrier swing out to its angled rest position. Swap the magazines. He'd opted to discard this magazine. Faster, that way, and they had plenty back at the ship. Slap the mag carrier into battery. Slap the housing shut—
Slap the housing shut. He did it again. Why wasn't it budging?
Not. Not now. Please.
Slap the housing shut. He banged it against the graphene cover wall and it gracelessly slammed shut. He tapped the keypad at the back of the clamshell hatch. Diagnostic. The gun still worked, apparently. Unless the computer was broken too.
Clara and Joey nodded. "Good?"
"Good." He ducked out to spray out a burst, the ammo counter reading a fresh 60. On the other side of the battle, power-suited Marines tore through Blues with rifles that were really more of a medium machine gun. Special forces combat engineers readied the demo charges to blow the battery sky-high. The other Mulligan lay in the smoldering wreckage of his heavy-duty Weap body. Their grizzled Sergeant took a round through the chest. More and more status lights blinked off as Santi saw shapes hidden in the frost crackle and stand up.
"They got Weaps—" Hariri was pasted right then and there, a twenty-five-mil slug tearing his chest apart from his head in a single violent instant. Santi blinked. He'd never seen that before. He didn't think so, anyway.
"Shit, Weaps!"
"Alright, Santi, Joey, listen to me carefully. If we concentrate fire on the Weaps we can take them down. You guys on bolt?"
"Yeah." Santi and Joey nodded.
"I'm marking one. Shoot on my count."
"Alright." He was too afraid to be scared.
"Three, two, one, mark!" She popped her gun out from cover along with the others, spraying liquid tungsten at the metal behemoth.
The Weap's armor melted to slag under the energy of the thermokinetic impact. Elsewhere, Morrigans ripped through defenders as if through wet paper. The crunch of slugs impacting ice rang virtual in Santi's ears. Zahm engaged a Blue Weap in a duel with their autocannons, his left shoulder shredded by the hum of a 25mm gun before his 20mm answered for a kill. A hissing filled his ears as armor ablated into vapor. Sappers fought for their lives, overwhelmed by infantry and infantry weapons platforms. The hiss grew louder. The Morrigans began to slow against the onslaught of heavy weapons fire.
"This is Sapper Two-two! We are pinned and have six down. Where the hell did these Weaps come from? There's just too many of them, we can't kill 'em fast enough!"
The hiss was subsumed by a rushing woosh. An explosion lit the Sappers to their northeast, drowning out the rest of the virtual soundscape.
"We've lost Sapper Two!"
Twin fusion microtorches lit the black skies, a sickly blue-white halo silhouetting a blue-gray monster. Smaller puffs of fusion exhaust lit and faded ephemerally as course-correcting jets, lighting along the beast's skin in myriad places like the many eyes of some horrible angel of death. It drifted above the center of the battle, gold-tinted canopy surveying those assembled with the Reaper's stare.
Alien shouted. "FAST MOVER IN THE—" Static and simulated flame.
Zahm's sensors swiveled, and he brought his twenty-mil to bear on the Panther, streams of red-hot tungsten slugs dumped into the sky forcing the UN fighter to pirouette on its RCS jets to avoid death of its own. "Run!" Zahm shouted. "Get to better cover!"
"Where?" It slipped out of Santi's mouth.
"See if you can clear the complex! I'll hold—" The fighter cut the Weap short as an air-to-ground missile smacked right into the side of his body, knocking Lucky's corpse once again into the ice.
"Sapper One, Morrigan Six-one. Status on missiles!"
"We're dry on missiles, Morrigan! Down to small arms!"
"Fuck!" Morrigan Six-one grit her teeth. "Can you finish the mission?"
"We can try, ma'am! It'd need a mad dash to the missile launcher, but we can try it."
"Do it! Six-seven, Six-ten, cover them!"
"Affirm, Captain!"
"Rest of you, cover Ricks and Euri!"
Santi saw a chunk of the graphene cover next to them chipped away under the 25mm fire of the fighter's autocannon. Or was it one of the Weaps? The angle was too high. Had to be the fighter.
"Any of you still got any masking smoke?" He only narrowly stopped himself from hyperventilating.
"I got one," Clara nodded.
"Toss it. We try to take cover in the complex."
"What about the fighter? Or the guys inside—" Santi snatched the grenade off her tactical rig. "Trust me."
"I want to, Santi, but I don't want to die." She grabbed his wrist. "Joey, do you have any?"
"I got one, too."
"Okay, then." She nodded. "We drop two. Two possible routes. We only go in one. Then it's a coin flip instead of a certain death. Concealment ain't cover, Santi."
"Okay." Santi exhaled. "Tell me when."
"Three, two, one… mark."
Two clouds of thermal smoke puffed into being, and the Marines ran-stumbled-bounced through one of them. In the other, they could feel the tremors of the 25mm slugs impacting the ice nearby as they ran up onto the patio entrance of the crew quarters. Santi pried at the emergency lever. "It's not budging, we don't have the codes! Splash the complex door!"
"It's an airlock, Joey!" Santi shook his head.
"Yeah, and we don't have the key!"
"What if it's pressurized—"
Clara shot the lock through the smoke swirling on the steps, a bolt of liquid tungsten punching through the metal door— and scraps of solidifying, cooling tungsten getting spit out through the hole it created. "Oh, that's what I was… Joey, watch out!"
Joey depressed the emergency open lever and the door flung open with an atmosphere's worth of force. He went with it, barely managing to hold on, as the blast of air brushed aside their concealing smoke, a curtain giving way to a spotlight.
"Agh, my arm!" Joey fell to the deck, barely stumbling to his feet. The Panther began to spin in the air, turning its nose towards them. "Shit! It sees us, it sees us!" Santi and Grizzly scrambled, gracelessly grabbing Joey under the awkward urgency of .134g, and dragged him into the airlock. "It won't open!" Clara shouted. "It can't equalize!"
"Shit, shit, no…" Santi shook his head. "I'm going to blow it, Clara. Mag-locks on, grab something tight, and clear the door. You too, Joey."
"Grab something?" Joey raised his right arm, a mangled mess. Chips of his rifle were embedded in the composite skin and metal skeleton.
"As best you can, Joey." Santi flicked his rifle to full-auto, and point-blank fired it at the door's hinges and brace, the three of them ducking into the side-channels of the airlock chamber. It flew off with explosive force and a trail of unsecured trinkets, mangling the entrance and skidding to a stop two meters of tumbling later outside, a wake of coffee mugs, playing cards, and tablets strewn behind it. The force of the air pushed the three of them flat against the wall.
"Ow," Joey complained.
Santi breathed out. He raised his rifle and started slowly walking into the corridor.
The crew quarters looked abandoned. Personal belongings had been strewn across a few of the closer walls by the sudden depressurization of the building. A Blue Marine not much unlike Joey, synthetic with a frame designed with few resemblances to the organic, twitched and sparked, impaled by a shattered wall light before their head hung, the light of digital life draining from them. Santi's eyes widened in silent prayer.
"Guys, look at this." Joey pointed to a sign on the wall. "Map of the complex. We had bad intel from the start."
"The control center is down that set of stairs. I didn't know this place had stairs. I don't think intel did either." Clara shook her head. "You know, I think… I think we should do what we can."
"What?" Santi gripped his rifle. "What can we do?"
"Take out the controls. Wreck this place," Clara said, glancing back over her shoulder as she walked towards the staircase.
In the middle of the staircase, on the wall, a slush of frozen blood had painted a new, streaky coat. Below it sat the body of a Marine, the cracked visor of her Hoplite-Seven helmet puffing out air, the powder blue flag of the United Nations on her right shoulder just above a white flag unmarred but for a red cross, the starry blue field of the European Union on her left. "You… Minnie bast… bast. ards," an open radio channel crackled. "You're all gonna… die here. Like… like me."
"Clara, look at her. She's fucked up. We… we should help her."
"Why?" Grizzly and Joey stared daggers.
"Because that's a terrible way to go, Clara."
"I've heard hypoxia is quite pleasant, actually." Joey shrugged. "Euphoria and all."
"Santi. We finish the mission." Clara shook her head. "If you want to give that Blue a pity patch when we get back up, sure. Whatever. But our guys are dying up there."
He nodded.
They crept down the stairs, rifles raised. Even after all this time, there was no good way to clear a stairwell. They proceeded with fear and apprehension, finally coming to the control room below.
Count five blues. Four, a mix of organic and synthetic, in that ridiculous blue camouflage working uniform, the emergency depressurization helmets unfolded from their neck-ring housing. Unarmed. One organic Marine in Hoplite-Seven armor. Armed. One pull of the safety-bladed trigger on his RTEK-4. Count four Blues.
"Step away from the consoles," Clara said calmly on an open channel. "Santi, get the flexcuffs, and Joey, grab that guy's rifle."
"I'm no good shooting lefty."
"Better than not shooting at all."
The four UN sailors were soon pushed up against the wall, hands and legs clamped together. "Alright, let's fuck this stuff up." Clara loaded a fresh magazine into her rifle, and lit up the consoles. A distant explosion made the lights flicker.
Santi grabbed an extra emergency patch kit off the wall, and satisfied with her work, Clara hopped on the radio and started up the stairs. "Morrigan Six-one, Foxtrot One-three. One-four and One-five, we just trashed the control room. The battery should be disabled. Say again, Goalies should be down. Was that explosion you guys?"
"Affirm, but not the way we intended. We lost Sapper One, and I'm down two men. We need to evac, now."
"Roger, Six-one. Confirm evac?"
"Down the canyon. Get out here and be advised— enemy fast mover is damaged but still operational."
"Gotcha."
Santi stopped in front of the bloodied UN Marine with the cracked, leaky helmet. The girl from England. She couldn't be much older than him. He squatted down and opened the patch kit. "Alright," he said, radio open. "This should hold you over. I can't do anything about that… well, your back," he gestured to the smear of blood on the wall. "But you won't die. I hope." He brought the patch tape to the crack, sealing it down.
"Get… out." She rasped. "Get out. Get out of. Our system." The ice-hot dagger of a gunshot cut through Santi's gut with no trace of a sound outside the deafening crack he and he alone could hear. His eyes widened. He stumbled back, air hissing from his suit and the cold creeping out from the hole as the viscous gel layer on his suit started to creep in and try to fill the gap. Joey put a round through her head and the Blue fell sideways, a black streak of tape the only thing holding the splattered red back from leaving her helmet. "Shit, shit, Santi, you're hit!"
He looked down his body and gripped the hole with his left hand. Air pushed against it. "P..patch. now."
Clara stripped the individual patch kit off Santi's rig, tore it open, and gestured for him to move his hand aside. "Oh, shit, man, shit. We need to get you to a corpsman." She sprayed a wound sealant and slapped the patch in place, Joey scanning the perimeter in nervous vigilance. Santi winced from the sting.
"Let's get you on your feet, man. Joey, you help carry him. Okay?" Worry overtook Clara's face. "Santi, I'm… I'm sorry, man. You… we're gonna get you out of here."
He staggered to his feet, harder under the low gravity but possible. He coughed. "Fuck. Fuck."
"Take it easy, man. It didn't look horrible. About as clean as an abdomen shot gets, man."
Those don't usually get clean.
He wrapped an arm around Joey, nodding.
"Alright. We're going out the other side, RVing with Morrigan."
"Morrigan Six-one, Foxtrot One-three. I have one man with a fucked up arm and one with a gunshot wound. We need cover coming out of here. Can you provide? What is our egress into the canyon?"
"We have to jump," the Morrigan replied.
Clara glanced back at Santi.
"Say again your last."
"We have to jump down. We'll use RCS to descend slow."
"Shit."
"I know, but it's our only way out right now. We can cover you with smoke and distract the Panther. That'll have to be enough. Give us a mark for when you step."
"Yes, ma'am." Clara turned around and put her faceplate to Santi, radio off. Joey put his head against Santi's to listen in. "If we die, I'll miss you guys."
"Me too," Joey said.
"Okay," Grizzly nodded. I'm opening the hatches now. We step on my mark." The untouched airlock hatch on the other side of the habitat opened without a fight this time, the airlock already drained. "Okay, give us some smoke!"
The Morrigans launched smoke grenades to cover their path, spraying fire at the fighter in what would hopefully be a distraction. "Three, two, one, mark!" The three Marines made their way through the smoke, Joey and Santi doing their best to keep pace. He felt a sharp point digging in against his wound's seal, and he pulled the ice shard he had taken as souvenir out of his tactical rigging. It was bloodied as its predecessor had been, but this time the blood was his.
Generations had clothed themselves in justice, embroidered principle and law into the cloaks they had worn to cover the iniquity of war and empire. Not much had changed. Cain had just gotten a faster rock.
Santiago's breath trembled, and he tossed the shard of ice away, crimson snowflakes curling off his gloved fingertips, consumed into the maelstrom of smoke. He couldn't bring that home. He couldn't go home like this. He had never set out to be a killer, and he could bet a million Blues felt the same way. Even the one who'd shot him.
An explosion rocked his world, the simulated audio of his helmet placing it high and to the left. "Shit, yeah, we got 'em!" A Morrigan proudly shouted. "Fast-mover is down, fast-mover is down!"
"Good shot, Wiz! Good shot."
Three of the power-suited operators ran over to the three Marines, the lead one pointing for the edge of the cliff. "Alright, we're going to jump— hand me your wounded guy, our thrusters get more power. But light yours, too."
Santi nodded. He expected rougher treatment from the power-armored hands, but the suit seemed very capable of delicate handling, too. "Okay, jumping!"
Slugs of tungsten streaked by from UN defenders, the metal rain abating under the umbrella of the canyon wall. They didn't fall very fast, both suits' RCS packs struggling against the weak gravity of Jupiter's moon. His wound ached as they touched down.
"Th..thanks, man."
"Don't mention it," the armored visor gave a faceless nod.
The thirteen survivors walked on, gathering together in a cave some distance away. Three mere mortals stood alongside ten graphene-titanium titans. "Doc," Captain Yun nodded. "You take a look at the wounded reg."
"Got it, ma'am." One of the MSOR operators, a Navy man, by the markings on his armor, walked over. "I'm a corpsman. Doc Faulkner. Nice to meet you." He unslung the massive pack on his back. "Gotta find a good place in here to set up a small operating theater."
He unsealed a canister, pulling a rolled membrane out and an oxygen tank. "Lemme set this up."
Soon, there was an inflatable tent, small but big enough, pressurized and holding. Joey and Clara limped Santi through the rudimentary airlock, a manually-equalized contraption.
"Gonna need your friend's leg exo." Doc nodded. "Both of your friends', actually."
Clara disconnected her leg assist exoskeleton, and did the same for Santiago. Doc plugged in a drive to both, and they buckled down into a bent state, almost like the legs of a table. He rolled a graphene tarp over them, stiffening at the touch of a button. "Voilá. An operating table. Lay 'em down."
She did, and he looked up at the armored visor surveying his body. "Gunshot wound to the abdomen. Point blank, you said?"
"Yeah, Doc. With a four-mil."
"Sidearm?" He cocked his head. "Rough, but let's see it." He leaned over, cutting the patch off with an unseen tool, holding a diagnostic scanner over the wound.
"Oh, I think I see what happened. Shot outside the plate, grazed the outside of the stomach, minor tears but I don't see any acid leak yet. You are very, very lucky about that shot placement. Narrowly missed your pancreas. What you are not lucky about is that level of internal bleeding." He shook his head. "May have bounced around a little when you landed. Let me get that fixed... Son, you ain't flight-worthy. You take that to zero-g, it won't clot and you're dead. I can't fix you here, but I can give you more time." He removed a surgical tool from his kit. The many robotic prongs of the micro-surgery device clicked in his hand as he pushed it into the wound, pulling a cable out of the base and slotting it into his helmet. "Gonna start by draining the wound and stopping the bleeding… alright. That is a clot, but it could break. You're not flying."
"How are we getting out of here, then…?" Clara shifted on a foot.
"You're not, Marine. If you want your friend to live, you need to surrender. Once I'm done with this, you guys pull your code drives, smash 'em, and hand 'em over to us. Twenty minutes after we leave, you radio at full power on an open channel your intent to surrender. You'll get taken in as POWs and you hand them the note I'm going to give you, which will tell their doctors how to fix him up so he can get moved offworld."
"No, you.. you gotta get us out of here."
"You want to leave him for dead, Corporal?"
"No, I don't."
"So, that's that?" We're prisoners?" Joey shook his head.
"'Fraid so, kid." Doc sighed. "Only one of you has to stay—"
"I'll stay," Joey nodded.
"I—" Clara shot daggers at Joey. "We both will, then."
"Shit." Joey sighed.
"Yeah."
Clara pulled the data vault drive from Santi's helmet, her own already in hand. Joey had extracted his with his good hand, and the three encrypted chips clattered to the ground, Doc smashing them under a power-armored foot. He cleaned up the scraps and took their helmet sensors, bagging them for himself, and handed Clara a flash drive. "You make sure they get that," he nodded. "Alright, let's get your friend out of here."
They abandoned the tent, exoskeleton legs returned to their waists and Santiago patched up as much as a makeshift surgery like this could do.
Six-one walked over to Clara, nodding. "Good luck, Marine. You get him safe. We'll get you three home before you know it. You did good, today."
"Thank you, ma'am." She rendered a salute.
It was quickly returned, and the ten Morrigans disappeared into the icy distance.
"We're fucked," Santi muttered.
"Yeah," Grizzly nodded. "Yeah, yeah we are."
"No, like. All of us." He rolled his head to look up at her. "Like, as a species."
"Yeah," she nodded. "That too."
For a while, the silence was nice. No whirring exoskeleton, no crunching ice, no simulated cacophony of war and violence. Just the gentle pulsing sigh of breath curling off his visor. Just the soft static of the radio. He sat like that for a while, minutes ticking away in the calm after the storm. The calm amidst the ruins.
"Alright. That's twenty," Joey sighed. "Let's get this over with."
Clara and Joey helped Santi to his feet, an improvised white flag rigged from their IFAK tourniquets. They threw down the rifles ahead of the mouth of the canyon and staggered out together, hands raised. Clara keyed her radio.
"This is Foxtrot One-three of the Federated Minervan Marine Corps, transmitting in the blind to all United Nations forces in the vicinity of Drumskinny Linea. This is a declaration of surrender. I have two wounded…"