Steel Walls and Dirt Drops (9 page)

Britaine's face clouded rapidly, "Once again, Misha, you have misunderstood. I didn't offer an invitation. Dining together is a tradition I expect to be upheld. I made an exception for that pig you replaced because I wouldn't have him at my table. You may be rude at times, but you will attend."

"No, Colonel. I will not. Once again," Misha said mimicking his own words, "You misunderstand me. I don't take your orders. APES tradition says I eat with my squad."

"McPherson, are you determined to continue with your insubordinate attitude?"
he all but shouted.

"Colonel Britaine. I formally request you address me properly as Third McPherson from this point
forward," Misha spat out the words. "I don't care if you see me as rude, uncouth or ill-mannered. I cannot be insubordinate to you because I do not report to you or anyone else in your chain of command. And further, I don't care if you respect me or not. I am going into combat with my squad in just a few days. I do care that they know and respect me. APES tradition is for squads to eat together. Got that, Colonel Britaine?"

"You can't talk to me like that in my own command. I will report your attitude to your commanders before the end of the day
," Britaine shouted.

Misha felt the sudden rush of
adrenaline pumping into her system. She felt the same rush in combat. It was more than a surge of energy. It was a calm feeling of power where each action seemed to slow down. Had she and Britaine been on opposite sides in battle, he would have been dead and dismembered before he could have finished his last sentence. The rush also seemed to slow her thoughts where each idea became clear and each thought became precise.

"Colonel Britaine," she smiled like ice. "
Report away as you see fit. Now, what about my request to get help clearing the training bay?"

"
Clean it yourself if you want it cleaned up. My people have better things to do than cater to a group of dirt worms."

"Colonel, if you please, when you report on my attitude, please
include a reference to your contract adherence failure regarding the training bay maintenance. Britaine stood and started to speak, but Misha interrupted, "And Colonel, if you think that you can make me to bow to your petty little tyrannies, then you have made another mistake. You can bully and insult your own people, but not me or mine. You just drive the bus, Colonel. Leave the real fighting to us."

Misha awoke with a start. She could feel the sweat soaking her skivvies and her hair was plastered flat on her scalp. Pulling an arm free from the twisted sheets she reached up and slapped open her bunk’s blast shutters. The sounds of the squad bay had been a quiet murmur easily drowned out by the white-noise generator. Now sounds flooded into her bunk. She could hear Ottiamig's flute playing a quiet little tune, general laughter and the sounds of a card game going on somewhere in the back.

The
nightmare that had startled her awake returned as a vivid memory, not unlike a bad meatball sandwich eaten way too late at night. The nightmare was more memory than random dream sequences. It all came flooding back much clearer than dreams ever did. She was once again the newly promoted Second-Level Commander Hamisha Ann McPherson fighting for her life on Guinjundst.

As a new second, she
did a quick mental review of her squad. It was about her thirtieth time running through the list, but it was her first time in command during actual combat. She was nervous, even though everyone knew this was a milk run, a cake walk or as easy as a two-dollar curb-crawling whore on New Las Vegas. Her combat suit fit her like a second skin. All of its tell-tales were reading in the green. The massive shell of armor and ordinance was working as well as a human could make a machine function. All of her APES were where they should be.

Misha had spent her whole APES career in the squad she now commanded. Eight of the troopers had been with her since her first day in the APES. She had trained with them,
eaten with them, gone on liberty with them and they watched each other’s backs in combat. They were already a highly trained fighting unit when Misha was promoted, replacing Second Saheed who retired to take a job as a civilian security consultant.

She had been promoted above veterans with many years more seniority. Misha was pleased to learn her
promotion over those veterans was at the insistence of those same veterans. Every combat experienced warrior anticipated today’s action against the Binder to be mild. Easy or not, she was thankful Jackson wanted to give her time to get used to her suit's newly uploaded command functions in substantial action. Earlier in the mission briefing, Third-Level Commander Richard Jackson told his seconds that he expected the battle on Guinjundst to be more of a training exercise than an actual combat situation. Binders were not much of a threat against the heavily armored APES. Misha wanted to be ready anyway since people died in wild ass hairy combat, in milk runs and even from slipping in the shower. Dead was dead and she wasn’t going to take any chances, whether the enemy was Binders or a bar of soap.

Binders
always attacked straight into the APE lines, so it was mostly a matter of what lasted the longest. Would the APES run out of ammo first or would the Binders run out of Binders? Since a combat suit could process raw dirt and rock into ammo, the Binders rarely came out on top.

Binders were odd little creatures. They looked more like living tumbleweeds than any animal. They came in all colors and sizes. They seemed to be all arms and legs that rolled, twisted and turned so no one knew which was their front or back, or even if they had fronts or backs. Their body, or their head, or whatever it was they called it, was in the center of the mass of twirling arms, legs, hands or whatever they were called. All of their sensors were at the end of their arms, along with bundles of tentacle-like fingers or toes, depending on your point of view and the Binder
’s own orientation.

Binder hardware was non-metallic. They had developed a plant-based technology that few
xenobotonists or xenoagrologists had come to understand. No human scientist could duplicate Binder technology. It was only speculation on how such a technology could have developed into a space going civilization. Their ships were fairly easy for humans to capture, but they died quickly without their Binder handlers to keep them alive.

Little was known of the Binders other than what could be gleaned from the remains of a battlefield. Captured Binders died rapidly. Humans hadn't discovered
much about any Binder language, written, spoken or mental other than a few seemingly non-random symbols on various flat surfaces. Humans hadn't discovered any permanent space stations. Humans hadn't discovered the Binder’s home planet. Humans hadn't even discovered why the Binders insisted upon attacking well established and well defended human systems.

The first human and Binder contact
was deadly to humans. But, that was because the humans had been unarmed farmers. The Binders swarmed by the hundreds using energy weapons from long distance, hard thorny-like projectiles fired from close range, and a myriad of cutting weapons for hand-to-hand combat. In fact, one early surviving farmer claimed that when the Binders moved into close combat, they looked like rows upon rows of whirling harvesting combines. The name stuck since humans also hadn't discovered what the Binders called themselves.

A Binder, no matter how it was armed, was no match for a human in a hard-shelled combat suit. None of their weapons, projectile or energy, could penetrate the armor. The most damage th
ey could inflict was for a large knot of Binders to swarm over a suited APE and hold him down until other APES could rescue him. This was cause for serious ribbing at the expense of the unlucky APE who found himself buried under a squirming pile of Binders. The normal APES anti-binder combat strategy was to line up and lob explosives or to use skid plates to hover over them dropping hand grenades or high-explosive shells until everything was dead.

Misha, Kosimov and N'Guakkano were all newly promoted
second-level commanders. The commander gave the easy positions to the least experienced of his second-level commanders. Jackson ordered Misha's squad to cover the right flank, sending Kosimov's squad to the left flank and N'Guakkano's squad to protect the rear. This put the unit in a square approximately seven kilometers to a side, with all their mobility pallets arranged inside the square. The rear and flank positions should have been cushy assignments. He designated the squads in the front line as acting artillery. The remaining squads were to use their skid plates to hover over the attacking forces, dropping explosives and generally expending ammunition with an APE’s usual wild abandon.

Jackson
placed his ten squad unit in a flat area facing a series of high ridged hills. The Binders encamped to the far side of the hills. There were dozens of passes through the hills. He used his unit to plug the largest pass. Around the APES was clear ground with small, but steep sided hills on each flank that should funnel the Binder's main attack through the big pass and allow the APES to concentrate fire into the Binder’s mass. Not being a stupid man, Jackson deployed his unit in a standard box formation, in case the Binders deviated from their normal attack pattern by spitting their troops and coming at them from more than one direction.

Misha deployed her squad along the flank
as ordered, linking Mendo to the front line and Loranzo to the rear guard. She sent Bambi and Boozer up on skid plates to provide squad air cover and to relay a tactical overview. Each trooper was strapped onto his skid plate, but she grounded everyone else.

It was a warm day with a slight wind; a nice day for combat and a good day to kill something. Since Guinjundst had a breathable atmosphere,
Jackson did not order face shields sealed. The time for sealing up would be when the Binders got close enough to tangle with in hand-to-hand action.

Misha
was watching her squad's activities while keeping one eye on the front line action on her suit's display. It necessitated her closing up the suit to get the full effect of the heads-up display and tactical relays. Everything seemed to be going like velvet. There were no warnings that things were about to start going horribly wrong.

She saw the flash of a Binder energy weapon highlight Boozer's skid plate on her HUD. At that
range, it would not do any more damage to Boozer than give him a medium-sized sunburn and only then if he was naked. Boozer’s preferred state was nude, but on the battlefield instead of being naked he was encased in armor twice the size of a normal human. He might get a rosy glow on his cheeks from the Binder’s flash if he had his faceplate up.

Boozer didn’t
shrug off the effects of the energy weapon as Misha expected, instead his skid plate flipped end over end. It drove him straight into the ground. His combat suit would normally have withstood the force causing only a few minor jests by the rest of the squad. However, Boozer’s face shield was up. The skid plate pushed him face-first into the ground and down a dozen feet, packing dirt and rock into his suit, crushing him into a small squished mess at the bottom.

Almost at the same time
, a Binder pod burst over Bambi's skid plate. The pods were not a serious threat to armored humans. The worse thing a pod could do is clog up one of the intake valves on the skid plate. It would take a dozen pods going off all at once to ground a skid plate. Nevertheless, Bambi's skid plate slewed sideways. It slammed through the squad's line, knocking men and women a dozen different directions. Misha used her suit's power to kick free of her skid plate and bounce to Bambi as she shot past her position. A quick twist of the manual override on the skid plate and Misha grounded it. Bambi slumped to the ground in a metal heap.

Within seconds,
Misha sent a situation report to Third-Level Commander Jackson and ordered Severin and Yamara to dig Boozer out of the ground. She called Pushkin the squad's medic to give her a hand with Bambi and ordered everyone else to get back to position. Almost as an afterthought she ordered the squad to stay off their skid plates.

Although
a combat suit weighs near three and a half metric tons, the servos in Misha's suit flipped Bambi onto her back. Bambi was bleeding profusely from her mouth and nose. Her eyes had already begun to glaze over when the convulsions hit.

The APES combat suit is
designed to encase an APE and amplify every muscle twitch and movement. This allows an APE to jump higher, run faster and kill quicker than most people can think. Lack of movement discipline can send a suited APE bouncing around the terrain like a lopsided rubber ball on amphetamines. Bambi's convulsions threw Misha a hundred yards to the rear before she could react and compensate.

"Pushkin. Dammit, get to Bambi. Now!" Misha shouted over the squad comm-link. She
bounced back up and leaped on top of Bambi's suit. By design, there is no external off switch on a suit. However, all command suits have an emergency override. Misha ordered Bambi's suit to shut down, run diagnostics on all physical systems, pump any appropriate medicines into Bambi, and shut the face plate.

"Pushkin, where the hell are you?" Misha shouted.
She knew shouting did not help amplify her voice any more than normal speech. It just seemed like the thing to do.

There was no answer.

She checked Pushkin’s telltale on her HUD. He was in position on line, but not moving. Quickly scanning his vitals, she realized he was ill. All of her squad was beginning to red line.

"Face shields down now!" she shouted. Not waiting for a
response, she hit her command suit override and shut down every face shield in her squad. She flashed another sitrep to Jackson, but did not receive an acknowledgement.

"Misha?" a voice sounded in her ear.

"Deuce Goober? Is that you?" she asked. Second-Level Commander Aric Gubicza's squad was on the front line.

"Yeah. What the hell is going on? Where’s
Jackson?" Goober asked.

"Dammit, Goober. I don't know. He's supposed to be up
on the front line with you. We need to order all suits sealed up. Now! I think the Binders have started using biological or chemical warfare," she all but shouted, trying to keep her voice calm yet forceful.

"I can't order that on the unit net for the whole unit. Where’s
Jackson?"

"Goober, at least get your squad to shut face shields. I don't know where
Jackson is now. He was supposed to be with you. He isn't reading on my HUD or on the TAC map. Are your sensors reading him? Who is next in line if he is out of action?"

"I don't know. Suzuki or Chang is next in line, I think. Check your HUD. Suzuki is not reading on my HUD. Park shows as
red-lined. What do we do?"

"You are senior to me. Order all suites sealed
," Misha said.

"Who is in the chain of command after Park?" Goober said. "I don't think it’s me.  I don't want it to be me. I don't know. Get off the line, whoever you are. Let me think. I don't know."

"No time, Goober. Order it done."

"Can't do, Missy. No time for
all of this jibber jabber, I’m gonna go fishin’."

Misha realized the
second was incoherent and babbling. She toggled her communications to broadcast. "Hostile air! Listen up, people. Everyone in Jackson's Second, seal your suits immediately. Run your diagnostics for bio and chemical contamination. I say again hostile air, seal up now! Ground all skid plates."

Misha bounced to her squad line. Bambi's telltale was still showing as active
, but it was redlining fast. "All troops, tag your suits to me, now! Stand your line."