Gavin Smith: Veteran

The soldier’s environment is mud. It doesn’t matter where they go. Tundra, woods, jungle, even paved colonial suburbs, by the time a few thousand tanks, walkers and armoured personnel carriers have tramped through it, once the defoliants have been sprayed, all that’s left is mud.

What we terraform we can still destroy. It’s why all the colonies look the same to me. It’s also how I knew I was dreaming; I couldn’t taste the mud, couldn’t smell it. This was more like watching a viz. My dreams were becoming less real than my time in the sense booths, but what was another loss?

It had been a forest once. You could still see the rotted stumps of alien trees pushing up through the plain of mud. Defensive trenches ran across the plain in a way that was probably supposed to be planned but looked utterly random to me. The harsh burning brightness of Sirius A was sinking beneath the horizon; even from the fourth planet it looked huge and too near for a sun to someone who’d grown up on Earth. Behind us the much smaller Sirius B was rising, casting its pale twilight light.

I watched our shadows shrinking and distorting in the changing light. The strangeness of it added to my feeling of being comatose with my eyes open. Four days, no sleep, kept awake by Slaughter and amphetamines. None of this seemed real and it hadn’t at the time. Which was a good thing because what we were doing was thought of as difficult and dangerous, driving through an enemy armoured push.

Off to my left I saw Mudge pop out of a trench as he gunned the armoured one-man scout hover. He was on point. He wasn’t even military, certainly shouldn’t have been out with us. He was a journalist; sense, viz and even old-fashioned print if the heroin made him nostalgic. Howard Mudgie, Mudge to his friends, a crusader when he started, then a war junkie, now a burn out and as good a soldier as any. That was why he was on point. His scout hover sank out of sight again.

Nobody was talking. Our encrypted comms lines were silent; everyone was too tired. All around us They advanced. Their heavy tanks made out of what looked like chitin and reactive liquid. Their honeycombed ground-effects drives glowing pale blue like Sirius B. They were in a staggered line as far as the eye could see in either direction.

According to the orbital data I had received, this new front was over two hundred miles long. They were just rolling up the joint British, French and Congolese task force as they went. Their troops were still in the tanks; they were big enough to act as APCs as well. Their Walkers policed the gaps between the tanks. Organic mechs with tendrils and rotary shard guns that fired bone-like razor munitions. It was the Walkers that were making the Wild Boys’ life difficult, that and trying not to dump the Land Rovers in a trench. That would‘ve been crap as well.

We were covered in mud. It was everywhere, except on the weapons, which had been treated with a stay clean finish. Spinks slewed the Land Rover round a tank. They were ignoring us if we ignored them. Close behind us Ash sent up a similar wall of mud as she followed us in the second Land Rover.

I saw the trench coming but didn’t need to mention it. Spinks was jacked into the jeep. In the weasel-faced Essex wide boy’s head was a 3D topographical rendering of the surrounding terrain. It was as up to date as our orbital support, Mudge’s sparse scout data and the vehicle’s own sensors would allow.

Spinks found the high ground and gunned the Land Rover over the trench. This used to be exciting. In the air, I saw Mudge shoot by beneath us in the trench. We showered him in mud, once this would’ve caused comment. I barely registered the jarring impact as the Land Rover sank into the earth, the independently driven smart tyres biting into the mud for traction.

‘Walker,’ I said quietly as we skidded round another tank. Spinks didn’t show a sign of paying the slightest bit of attention but the Land Rover was suddenly going in another direction. Straight at one of their tanks.

‘There’s not enough ground clearance,’ I muttered, mainly to myself. Spinks was already committed. Shards started coming our way. Something hit my helmet. At first I thought I’d been shot but it was Gregor folding the heavy plasma gun down and lying on the bed of the Land Rover.

‘Get your head down,’ he told me. If he hadn’t, I doubt I’d have had the presence of mind to do so. Under the tank their ground-effects drives pushed us and the Land Rover down. It was like a warm wind. I heard something get torn off the wagon and we were out the other side. I barely noticed when we hit the second Walker.

Spinks wrapped the front of the Land Rover round the Walker’s legs. We stopped and it had its legs knocked out from beneath it. I was vaguely aware of Gregor bailing out of the Land Rover. I looked next to me to find an alien war machine lying on the wagon, tendrils flailing. It looked like parts of the alien machine were bathing in what used to be Spinks. Flailing tendrils flung bits of him around. I tried to feel something for my friend and squad mate but there was nothing there any more.

I could hear shouting from the rest of the squad. I climbed out of the Land Rover, and then stopped. I’d forgotten my SAW. I turned and went back for the weapon. More shouting. The Walker was trying to right itself. By rights one of its tendrils should’ve torn my head off by now. Then I had the SAW in my hand. The smartlink connected to the palm receiver, and the weapon’s crosshair appeared on my internal visual display. It sounded to me like I started screaming. There was an orange blossom, flickering but permanent at the front of the SAW, it seemed to go on for an age. The Walker’s carapace looked as if it was rapidly distorting as I played the SAW across it.

Things went quiet as my audio dampeners kicked in. Gregor was at my side, his railgun held high on its gyroscopic mount as he fired it down into the Walker. The SAW muzzle flash stopped. At some level I knew that meant I’d fired off the entire cassette. I’d put two hundred rounds into the Walker. I felt a hand on my arm, strong, boosted cybernetic strength pulling me back. It was Gregor. How did he have the strength, always there getting me out of trouble?

Mudge was in front of me. I was pushed pillion onto the bouncing hover scout. I heard the sound of superheated air exploding behind me. Hydrogen pellets heated to a plasma state impacted again and again into the Walker as Bibs fired the heavy plasma cannon on the other Land Rover. I was vaguely aware of the sensation of moving as we began to bob across the mud.

‘Where the fuck’s our artillery! Where the fuck’s our air support!’ Mudge screamed with more anger than I could muster, but he always had better drugs. He knew the answer, like I did. We were finished here. Dog 4 and the rest of the Sirius system was Theirs now. I just hoped They’d let us get to an evac site.

I awoke from the dream with a start. My knuckles ached from where I’d tried to extend my blades; I ran my fingers over the domed locks, a compromise to let someone with my capabilities walk free after he’d served his country and his species. A right that had been won in blood and vacuum.

The bruises from last night’s pit fight were now tender memories, thanks to my body’s implanted internal repair systems. As ever I wondered why the same systems couldn’t help me with the white-hot throbbing lance of pain that was a dehydration headache. The pain seemed to live just behind the black polarised lenses that replaced my eyes. Why was it that man could create millions of tons of complex engineering capable of travelling across space but could still not find a cure for a hangover? One of the many skewed priorities of our society.