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“We have been at war with them for seventeen years now,” the major says. “That’s a lot of time to gather combat footage from many different cameras. The Corps has had plenty of material for instructional videos. You will now meet your enemy and learn everything about them an 8infantry soldier needs to know. Tens of thousands of your fellow troops have bled and died for this information. I want everyone in this room to pay attention to this video as if your lives depend on memorizing it. Because there’s a very good chance they might.”
“There are plenty of officers who get combat badges for spending a three-month deployment on Mars. If they qualify for emptying a few mags into a Lanky tunnel and mugging for war pictures with their buddies, then so do you.”
“What was it like? Living on that planet, I mean. With the Lankies on the other side of the front door. I can’t even imagine.” “It was—” Alex pauses for a moment as she searches for the proper words. “It was just life, you know? We were in the Vault, and they were outside. That was the state of things. We had so much to do every day, there were lots of times when I almost forgot about the Lankies, to be honest.” “I can’t even imagine being able to tune that out,” Cressey says. “I think I’d be in a constant state of terror. Knowing that they could show up any minute.”
Like any trauma, you just try to make it to the next day.
“And you decided to trade the PRC for the Corps. Like almost everyone else here. Same question, though—why’d you go infantry?” Alex looks past Cressey at the table where Fuentes, Marin, and the other PRC kids are still eating like they won’t get another meal for the rest of the week. “Everyone in the garrison on Scorpio was infantry,” she replies. “Everything I knew about soldier stuff before I joined, I learned it from them. They are the bravest people I know. I want to do what they did. Stuff that matters.” Cressey nods slowly. “Looks like we’re both here for the same reasons,” she tells
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“You can’t put your hands on a fellow soldier outside of sanctioned training. Period. That’s a disciplinary offense,” he says. “But skating from squad chores is its own offense. Everyone does the work in the Corps, Parker. We do whatever needs to be done, whenever it needs to be done. You can’t just leave your squad a pair of hands short because you’re not in the mood for the task. That sort of thing gets people killed in the field. Switch that shit off, right the hell now. Before you find yourself on the receiving end of a blanket party at 0300 instead of just a dirty rag to the face. The
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“Private Archer?” She turns back to face him. “Sir?” “You know he wouldn’t do the same for you, right?” She thinks about his question for a moment and shrugs. “Probably not. But that’s up to him. What I do is up to me.”
The MAWS shells have a range of slightly over a thousand meters, but the rounds they all have loaded are kinetic penetrators, tungsten darts embedded in plastic sabots to focus all the energy of the propellant into a needle point, and their Lanky-piercing 37abilities decrease over distance.
"Silver Bullets"
“Reload,” Detmer shouts. “Reloading!” Olsen opens the breech of the MAWS and inserts another round, then slams the breech shut again and turns the locking handle before slapping Detmer on the shoulder. “Sabot up!” Olsen shouts and ducks away from the breech end to avoid the backblast of the shell. “On the way,” Detmer calls out and fires again. Between the three of them, the fire team has ten rounds for the MAWS, and Olsen and Detmer launch them at the enemy group in a steady cadence, one every 38three or four seconds, as quickly as Olsen can reload the gun. The Lanky column is in wild
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Alex has only been in the Corps for a little over six months, but she knows not to place bets on anything she hears through the grapevine from the lower ranks because the imaginations of enlisted troops are boundless.
Scuttlebutt
When it points in the direction of the distant SRA outpost, the source of the concussions is obvious even at this range. The camera’s magnification isn’t nearly powerful enough to spot the outpost, but it has no trouble picking up the four billowing mushroom clouds that are rising from the frozen plains far in the distance like angry specters. “Oh, fuck,” Isa says in a tone that’s almost reverent. “Are those nukes?” Harper asks. “They wouldn’t use four nukes so close together. They’d just use one warhead and dial up the yield. Those are kinetic strikes. Rail-gun shots, from the carrier,” Reyes
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Danger close.
No wonder the military recruits them young, she thinks. Make them sign up while they still think they’ll live forever.
“You have a remote-capable ship on station?” Isa interjects. Chistyakov shakes his head. “No. Not ship. If we had ship to call down, we would have called down ship long time ago.” He looks at his teammates, who don’t look like they approve of the subject. “I am team lead, responsible for success of mission. Alliance has new tactics for orbital drop with full regiment. Armed satellite, for—how you say?—last resort. Final argument. Independent from carrier. For when things go shitshow.” “You have a weaponized satellite in orbit right now,” Reyes says. “Da. ” “What is it armed with?” Alex asks.
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Whatever the reason, she is grateful for the calmness she feels right now. She’s been close to death enough that she has resolved to spend her potential last few minutes thinking about the good events in her life instead of fretting about the end: her parents, her friends on Scorpio, the many days that were great days even though she didn’t know it at the time, playing with Ash, seeing snow for the first time. They were small moments, all of them, but they were hers, and she’s glad she got to live them.
