Steel Walls and Dirt Drops (11 page)

"Rodriguez, both of you, bounce to these two hills I have marked on your
TAC. You should still have almost a full load of H.E. You will be in a position to lay down a cross fire on the closest group."

"Going, going, gone
," Juanita Rodriguez said.

Misha watched their telltales streak toward the designated areas on her
TAC. They might be able to get out of this mess if the Rodriguezs could take care of the second group, if Papadoropoulis's trick with the bunkers wiped out the first batch before the third group reached them, if there were no other groups of Binders sneaking up on them from out of nowhere, and if the little bastards did not have any other bio or chem tricks up their non-existent sleeves.

"Papa, keep at them, but don't expend your suit's high explosives until the automatics run dry."

"Okay, I could drop one of the armories into that third group of Binders coming through the hills. Whadda ya say?" Papadoropoulis asked.

"Negative. Good idea, but it looks like it will be
photo finish whether you run out of ammo here first or whether you run out of Binders. It may be close, but I think we can squeak through this thing if my timeline reads right," Misha said.

"Okay,
Third McPherson. You are the boss."

"Nothing is coming my way now. I've got to re
-arm with H.E. I am going to work my way back to our lines and scavenge what I can. I am sending the override to all suits, so everybody reload as you can."

Misha reached their original front in three low-level bounds, barely skimming the surface of the planet
, keeping well below the ridge lines and out of the bunker fire. The first APE suit she came to was lying on its back with the face shield still open. Blood and sores covered the face inside the helmet. The lesions seemed to have something growing out of them; small green wiggly shoots of some kind. She toggled the HUD display until she matched the suit number to the telltales. Even without the suit confirmation she knew the APE was dead.

Misha hit the command override to shut the face shield. She reached underneath the body and with a grunt
that was more for the sight of the APES face than for the effort, she flipped it over to uncover the backside. She commanded her suit to unlock the magazines for the high explosives' storage. She sat down on top of the dead APE and she attached her H.E. feeder tube to the other suit's discharge tube. The soft chunk of machine to machine feeding began. While it was filling, Misha grounded her feet to allow the mass-driver to convert dirt and rocks to top off her ammo storage.

"Rodriguez team, report.” The
TAC map showed a rapidly shrinking number of Binders and a steady stream of fire from two green blips.

"Juanito
aqui, hefe. This is just like the shooting range back home."

"Si
si, hefe, Juanita here," the female Rodriguez responded. "We can finish this off about the same time as Papa gets done, but we will be completely out of high explosives."

"Can you finish with mass drivers and not expend your entire H.E. load?" Misha asked.

"Negative" and "No, too many. H.E. takes them down a lot quicker. Plus, we don't have to be so careful in our aim and with H.E we can bounce around and stay out of their direct line of fire."

"Okay. Do it quick. We've still got more company coming."

"Papa, get to Ng as soon as you can," Misha ordered.

Papadoropoulis replied
, "All done here, Deuce. The field is clear and I am heading toward Ng now. By the way, have you sent a sitrep to the boys upstairs?"

Misha would have slapped her
forehead, except she wouldn't have felt a thing inside her helmet. She should have already sent a situation report to the AMSF for their information and for relay to APES Command.

"Dammit. I forgot
," she said. "Uplinking now."

"No
sweat, Deuce. We've been a bit busy," Papadoropoulis said.

"Thanks for the reminder, Papa. I am
ammo'ed up. I've got six telltales showing APES down but still in their suits. I have marked them on our TACs. Get Ng back to the squad bay where you stashed the prisoners. Then help me check vitals on these guys. And Papa, they ain't pretty, so make sure they are sealed up and you stay sealed up too, hear?"

"Roger that."

"We may have a short breather before the third mass of Binders gets here, but don’t get too relaxed. Take on max reload. And everybody stay sealed up until we can get through decontamination. I have notified the AMSF to stay out of the atmosphere until we can get a decon team to clear the area."

"Oh,
hefe," Juanito Rodriguez groaned in mock pain. "That could take days."

"I know.
Listen, team, I don't know what we got hit with here, but we can't afford to spread something nasty to the rest of Allied space..."

Misha allowed
Alpha's squad bay on the Kiirkegaard to swim back into focus as she took a deep breath. She stopped the memory playback, looked around, shook her head and rattled the living nightmare from her mind. She kicked her feet loose from the covers and swung her legs over the edge of her bunk.

She knew how she looked and didn't care. All
the leadership manuals said you should occasionally show your people your human side. "Well," she thought. "You don't get any more human looking than this."

The flute music stopped and she looked down the squad bay. Ottiamig was peering around his bunk with a questioning look. He held up his flute and wiggled his hand back and forth from the wrist. It was the combat hand-signal
for ‘okay?’.

In response,
Misha smiled back, pumped her fist up and down and slid her flat hand ahead, the signal for ‘forward.’

Ottiamig's
signaled back, ‘roger, will comply’. He smiled and ducked into his bunk. Soon the soothing sounds of his flute filled the room again.

Misha hung her head in her hands
reflecting on the memory that forced her awake. She knew that once upon a time many combat veterans’ bad dreams were misdiagnosed as the result of post-traumatic stress disorder. That was spot-on accurate for a lot of combat veterans, but it was not always the case. Medicine, specifically combat medicine had since learned post-traumatic stress disorder wasn't what affected many veterans. Studies proved some individuals became addicted to combat, to the adrenaline rush, to the charge and challenge of war. Then, in times of peace or peacefulness, the body reacted to their addiction and the resultant lack of adrenaline to feed the veteran's addiction. In effect, the lack of combat stress induced adrenaline sent the veteran into a type of withdrawal.

Misha's little argument with Britaine had pushed her addiction
to the edge, giving her a fitful sleep, an uneasy feeling something was wrong and most of all a sense of not fitting in with the world around her. But, she knew, as did many combat veterans, without her addiction she could never force herself to go back into combat. After all, what normal person would throw themselves into danger, seeking to kill or be killed time after time?

Medical science
also progressed enough to develop a non-addictive synthetic substitute to ease days and nights like this one. All Misha had to do was push herself off her bunk and get a pill from the ditty bag stashed in her locker. Instead, Misha sat on her bunk in her squad bay aboard the AMSF Kiirkegaard holding her head in her hands and analyzed the events of Guinjundst, replaying it all in her head again trying to make sense of what went wrong.

She, Papa, and the two
Rodriguezs made short work of the remaining group of Binders. They had trapped them in a high walled canyon and used their high-explosives to bury the Binders under tons of rock and rubble. An AMSF spacecraft picked up the squad bay with the injured and their prisoners. Only Ng and one other APE would survive. Misha was left on the planet with Papa and the two Rodriguez. It was a long week trapped inside a combat suit with nothing to do but carry the dead to the up point, until a decontamination team could finally clear them.

Misha shook her head at the memory. Pushing off the bunk she stood and stretched. She glanced down at her
timepiece and decided since it was only a couple of hours until time to get up, she might as well stay up. Since she wasn't going back to bed, there was no reason to take a pill to ease her combat anxiety withdrawal. She might as go stir up trouble.

Marshal Sergeant Gan Forrester stood in the training bay watching the chaos around him. He was breathing heavily after barely surviving a dozen assaults in hand-to-hand combat training. Trey McPherson left him at the mercy of Charlie Squad's Second Takki-Homi.

Forrester
had wanted to spend time with McPherson's squad. She interested him, but she explained that Second Takki-Homi’s squad was the most complete veteran team. They would be able to integrate him with the least disruption to their training schedule. He did not have a logical argument against her reasoning. He would just have to try to get her cornered at another time.

Second
Takki-Homi tapped Forrester on the shoulder and said, "Watch Able Squad." He pointed to McPherson's squad.

"Watch what?"
Forrester replied.

"Trey McPherson is setting up a free-for-all within her squad. It is a good
way to evaluate both the martial arts and physical fitness levels of a team."

"Is she any good?"
Forrester asked.

"I don't know. She looks more like a weight lifter than a fighter, but she moves like a cat. A
big, angry cat, at that," Takki-Homi said.

"Yeah, I noticed that
," Forrester said. "So, why do a free-for-all?"

"
As you may know each APE comes to the service with a martial arts style of his own choosing. This type of evaluation pits each style against a bunch of other styles. It doesn't point out if one style is better than another; instead it shows who needs additional training," Takki-Homi explained.

"Okay. But, I always wanted to ask; why require a martial art form to join? It's not like you guys fight bare handed."

"True enough. But, we don't usually have years to train in the use of a combat suit. Mostly, we get stuffed in a real suit in a combat situation with only a few hours in a tri-wave simulator and just a couple of hour’s suit practice time that is little more than ambling up and down the training bay. Knowing a martial art form helps the recruits with their physical discipline and muscle control." Takki-Homi pointed to a squad who appeared to be resting in reclining loungers with helmets on. "They are using the tri-wave sim with specific integrated training modules. I am sure you used them in school and probably in your training for the Marshal's Service."

Forrester
nodded, "Yeah, but all of them were individual modules, where we went through the live-action scenarios and came out learning the prescribed courses of learning. I have never been hooked into an integrated system. How does it work?"

Tak
ki-Homi shrugged his shoulder, "Damfino. You might ask Trooper Ortiz. She is our squad's repair tech. All I know is that we go in, get linked, spend anywhere from a few days to a week or so in combat situations and I come out knowing more about my team, my suit and combat than I went in. Plus, after day’s session, I will somehow be able to read and write French. And just like magic it all takes place in about an hour. And you ask me how does it work? Damn, Gan, it could really be magic for all I care. It works. If it doesn't work, then I call Ortiz to fix it. What more do I need to know?"

Forrester
said, "I get all that. I grew up on Heaven Three. Every school on the planet has the tri-wave sim. Of course, we learned things like math and science, instead of fun simulations. We always got dropped into some dry historical era, you know?"

Tak
ki-Homi nodded, "I know."

"
May I ask a personal question?" Forrester asked. "I get that combat simulations are standard, but the second part of a tri-wave is the download into the brain of some course of learning. Do you get to choose the course of learning that gets crammed into your head along with the live-action simulation? I mean, why not learn APE approved subject like suit maintenance or even how to repair the tri-wave simulator? I would think APES would want to learn something service related. Why would you come out knowing French?"

Tak
ki-Homi laughed, "Reading French is service oriented. Didn't you know that I am Charlie Squad's cook? I have some French cookbooks that tomorrow I can read in their original. Today I can't. You’d be amazed at what I can do with APES standard rations."

Tak
ki-Homi continued. "Okay, I think Able Squad is ready to set-to."

Forrester
watched as one of the troopers in the squad shouted, "Go!" He expected an immediate clash, but the free-for-all began so small it was as if no one moved. Subtle movements showed here and there with the individuals moving around sizing up each other's skills before striking.

"Watch carefully
," Takki-Homi said. "I am willing to bet the tall black kid makes the first contact."

Suddenly
the young man lashed out with a foot aimed at a short Asian man's head. But, the man's head wasn't where it had been. The Asian whirled, grabbed the extended foot and drove the black man into the back of a skinny white woman. Bodies began to spin, strike, hiss, grunt and hit the deck. Once a person was knocked to the deck, they rolled to the side and stood, out of the contest.

A wild melee ensued.
Forrester watched in fascination as McPherson deliberately leapt into groups and clusters of fighters; jabbing, punching and throwing bodies around with raging abandon. She seemed to lash out in all directions at once, without any apparent style or gracefulness. All too soon it was over. McPherson stood alone in the center of the group having defeated all comers.

"What kind of style is that?"
Forrester asked. "It just looked like she was using wild street fighting."

"I've seen it a few times, but never done that well
," Takki-Homi replied. "It is called Bào Dòng. That is old Earth One Mandarin for mayhem. Bào means explosive, huge and sudden. Dòng means movement and chaos. It is a word that actually used to be used for riots or melees. As a martial art, it doesn't have any such thing as belts, levels or ranks. It is a matter of win or lose, get better or keep getting beaten. No holds barred and no pulled punches. They use any object at hand as a weapon in offensive movement in all directions at all times. It also blatantly steals moves from all other known martial arts styles. No apparent grace or fluid movement, no ritual or fancy outfits, just all out wanton destruction and devastation until no enemy is left standing to oppose you."

"Damn
," said Forrester.

"Damn indeed
," replied Takki-Homi. "It works if you have the right attitude."

"I see it works for our Third McPherson."

The two men turned as a voice called out. "Yo, Taks, who is your new friend?"

"Second
-Level Commander Race Jackson, Foxtrot Squad. This is Sergeant Gan Forrester of the Marshal Service," Takki-Homi said introducing the two men.

Jackson nodded at
Forrester. "Training with the big boys today?"

Forrester
smiled back, "No, just Taks' squad. It looks like your new commander is the big boy today."

"Damn straight
," Jackson said. "You guys see her moves? She must be hell on wheels in a combat suit."

"Yeah, a hard act to follow
," Takki-Homi said.

“
Hard or easy, follow it is. With the hero of Guinjundst in the lead, it is payback time for those Binder bastards,” Second Jackson said.

"Hey, Deuce Taks,
how did you know who would strike first in that free-for-all?" Forrester asked.

"Rookies always do. It's a guarantee if it is a confident
rookie. And most of the time they end up on their butts. Now, Sergeant Forrester, it is time to put you on your butt."