Грег Бир - The War Dogs Trilogy

The helm and the angel process video and tactical memory. Skintight fabric contains circuitry for battlefield diagnostic, which sends our health status to the angel for uplink, so that birds on high can tell our commanders how we’re doing down on the Red.

Skintights do nearly everything except walk and fight and they do it quietly and without complaining. Some say they are like the still-suits in Dune , and they do bear a resemblance, but ours do a hell of a lot more than conserve and filter water.

Every Skyrine has a love-hate relationship with his skintight. Can’t wait to get home and get it off, but then he misses the convenience of never having to worry about pee or crap or sweat, and feels, when naked, that one is minus a real friend, perhaps the best friend ever. Some old hands have to relearn bladder control when they’re back in civvies. All the designers need do is make skintights sexually accommodating and Skyrines might never have to come home again.

Yeah.

That said, a skintight whose batteries are running down, whose oxygen is running out, whose water is turning sour, feels less like a friend and more like a jar full of pickle juice.

We are sinking deep in the jar.

Immediately after drop, or on the way down, you’re supposed to receive updated tactical and maps with known objectives and concentrations of Antag forces clearly laid out, appropriate to your squad’s assigned chores.

Ideally, you’ll drop within a short hike of a fountain or, barring that, a cluster of tent boxes, and somewhere in the vicinity your transport sled will also come down on stealth chutes, spiraling in within a couple of klicks of the company’s drop zone, though they are pretty targets and often don’t make it intact.

Skyrines are trained to make do with what they got. But when you got next to nothing…

Every Skyrine drops with at least one basic weapon, his sidearm. As I said, they look like fat .45s. Someone named them Yllas, don’t know why. They don’t shoot bees. They fire bullets and bolts. Bolts are deadly to anything they hit within five hundred meters. They home on whatever you’re looking at with about ninety-nine percent accuracy. The pistols carry a small spent matter cassette and that has to be switched on to charge the plasma about thirty seconds before combat. A single spent matter cassette can charge and launch about sixty bolts. Gun captain—a rotating duty—collects all used cassettes. Spent matter waste is bad shit and we’re supposed to be sensitive about ecological issues. In truth, however, there are a lot of cached bags of it out on the Red; no time in combat to search and recover if, for example, our gun captain gets zeroed. Vee-Def is supposed to be gun captain for this drop.

Kinetic rounds work in vac, of course—gunpowder supplies its own oxygen. But cold can reduce range, and target practice on Earth doesn’t train you for Mars, where windage is usually very light, the thin air very cold, and the gravity drop much slower. Our other weapons, lasers and even weak-field disruptors, can be affected by heavy dust.

Skyrines have been trained to fight in nearly all conditions. Training is so you might not get killed before you gain experience. Newbies start on the Red with nothing but simulations and a month of Earth-based live fire—not nearly enough, in my opinion. You only really improve by doing.

AND HERE’S WHAT we think we know about the Antags, or at least, what we’re told: They probably don’t come from our solar system or anywhere near. That means they arrived on a big ship, tech unknown but capable of crossing interstellar distances. It’s tough to visualize how huge interstellar space is. Vast, vast, long-long-long distance—repeat a trillion times until you feel really small and silly. Mostly empty light-years and deep cold.

But we haven’t found that big ship, have no idea where it might be hiding, and can only vaguely guess how they get from there to Mars. Or anywhere else they take a fancy to. So far, just Mars, we’re told.

But then the grandma said…

Titan! Jesus.

Maybe I’m seeing things.

A couple of lights are floating up in the sky, competing with Phobos for my attention, bright enough to be space frames, but they could just as easily be Antag. Their Grasshopper -class boats are about that bright in orbit—clusters of pressurized tubes filled with transports and weapons and combatants.

Tak raises his hand. Michelin raises his and shouts there are sats still up—and then I see a thin blue line drop down quick, hit the dust, miss Vee-Def—then try again. This time the line touches him, then shifts over to Tak.

“Bit burst!” Tak shouts, loud enough to hear from five meters. We’ve been found.

I get my blue line next, and my angel is suddenly happy to show me where we are, where there might be supplies and weapons—the immediate logistical picture. Only three of us receive the laser lines, so our angels exchange for the next few seconds while we’re chattering like schoolkids waiting for the bus.

“Something’s coming,” Tak says, having finished a quick skim, tagging data he finds immediately important. To my surprise, it’s not survival data—nothing to do with tents or sleds.

It’s a warning.

“Big stuff coming down,” Tak summarizes, concentrating so hard his eyes cross.

Michelin cranes his neck and looks up at the sky, squinting. He covers his helm with gray-gloved hands. Then he crouches. Instinct. We watch him, bemused.

“What is it?” Vee-Def asks. “Landing parties? Big Mojo?”

Big Mojo is rumored to have been seen once, four years ago: a kind of massive Antag orbital capable of shaving off huge, battalion-strength landers and dropping them to the Red. The lights we see aren’t that bright. But they’re also not what we’re being warned about. Whatever’s out there, whatever’s on its way in, the mass is enormous, and there are nine to twelve of them, maybe more, separate objects tracked by our few remaining sats, which have finally and most kindly supplied us with what they know—just before we suffocate.

“Biggest may be a hundred million tons,” DJ says, winnowing the numbers down to basics. “Others, smaller—five or six million.”

“Jesus,” Neemie says, his voice husky. His air is going fast. So is mine.

“Why tell us this shit now?” Michelin asks, lifting his head from his crouch.

“We’re within five hundred klicks of point of impact,” I say. “Approaching at more than forty klicks per second, which means they’re moving in… I think fast… from outside Mars’s orbit? Solar orbit? Extrasolar, from the Oort?”

Does that make sense? Wouldn’t the Antags want to slow them down, whatever they are, or do they just plan on skimming atmo and making another go-around?

“What can we fucking do?” Michelin cries.

“How soon?” Neemie asks.

“Doesn’t say.”

Some lights now roll into view low in the west, very bright objects indeed, very big, one actually a crescent—and moving fast. Right for our collective noses, so it looks, so it feels.

Then, just as we are about to fall on our knees and wait for the big bright things to fly by or hit us square, Vee-Def finds practical info in the bit burst and shouts, “Three more Russian tents! A whole pallet! A hundred meters that way—” He points.

We run. No questions, no disagreement. We got maybe ten minutes of air.

I look over my shoulder and nearly take a header. But you can stumble quite a ways on Mars and still recover, if you’re fast with your footwork. What I see, as I keep my footing and keep running, is that the objects in the sky are tumbling ; the motion is obvious—bright, dark, crescent wobbling. Quick count: one scary big one, visually wider than Phobos but, I hope, I fear, much closer, and nine or ten smaller, but by now you can see all of them rolling around way up there like happy seals in an ocean swell.