Where there’s no air, a battle may leave reminders for ever …
Restless visionary Allen Steele, originally a native of Nashville, has a BA in Communication and an MA in Journalism. He’s a prolific author of short stories and essays, as well as novels, several concerned with the habitable moon Coyote in a solar system to which freedom-seeking pioneers flee in a stolen starship. His work has won and been nominated for several awards.
THE FIRST-WAVE ASSAULT is jinxed from the very beginning. Even before the dropship touches down, its pilot shouts over the comlink that a Pax missile battery seven klicks away has locked in on their position, despite the ECM buffer set up by the lunarsats. So it’s going to be a dust-off; the pilot has done his job by getting the men down to the surface, and he doesn’t want to be splattered across Mare Tranquillitatis.
It doesn’t matter anyway. Baker Company has been deployed for less than two minutes before the Pax heatseekers pummel the ground around them and take out the dropship even as it begins its ascent.
Giordano hears the pilot scream one last obscenity before his ugly spacecraft is reduced to metal rain, then something slams against his back and everything within the suit goes black. For an instant he believes he’s dead, that he’s been nailed by one of the heatseekers, but it’s just debris from the dropship. The half-ton ceramic-polymer shell of the Mark III Valkyrie Combat Armour Suit has absorbed the brunt of the impact.
When the lights flicker back on within his soft cocoon and the flatscreen directly in front of his face stops fuzzing, he sees that not everyone has been so lucky. A few dozen metres away at three o’clock, there’s a new crater that used to be Robinson. The only thing left of Baker Company’s resident card cheat is the severed rifle arm of his CAS.
He doesn’t have time to contemplate Robinson’s fate. He’s in the midst of battle. Sgt Boyle’s voice comes through the comlink, shouting orders. Travelling overwatch, due west, head for Marker One-Eight-Five. Kemp, take Robinson’s position. Cortez, you’re point. Stop staring, Giordano (yes sir). Move, move, move …
So they move, seven soldiers in semi-robotic heavy armour, bounding across the flat silver-grey landscape. Tin men trying to outrun the missiles plummeting down around them, the soundless explosions they make when they hit. For several kilometres around them, everywhere they look, there are scores of other tin men doing the same, each trying to survive a silent hell called the Sea of Tranquillity.
Giordano is sweating hard, his breath coming in ragged gasps. He tells himself that if he can just make Marker One-Eight-Five – crater Arago, or so the map overlay tells him – then everything will be OK. The crater walls will protect them. Once Baker Company sets up its guns and erects a new ECM buffer, they can dig in nice and tight and wait it out; the beachhead will have been established by then and the hard part of Operation Monkey Wrench will be over.
But the crater is five-and-a-half klicks away, across plains as flat and wide open as Missouri pasture, and between here and there a lot of shitfire is coming down. The Pax Astra guns in the foothills of the lunar highlands due west of their position can see them coming; the enemy has the high ground, and they’re throwing everything they can at the invading force.
Sgt Boyle knows his platoon is in trouble. He orders everyone to use their jumpjets. Screw formation; it’s time to run like hell.
Giordano couldn’t agree more wholeheartedly. He tells the Valkyrie to engage the twin miniature rockets mounted on the back of his carapace.
Nothing happens.
Once again, he tells the voice-activated computer mounted against the back of his neck to fire the jumpjets. When there’s still no response, he goes to manual, using the tiny controls nestled within the palm of his right hand inside the suit’s artificial arm.
At that instant, everything goes dark again, just like it did when the shrapnel from the dropship hit the back of his suit.
This time, though, it stays dark.
A red LCD lights above his forehead, telling him that there’s been a total system crash.
Cursing, he finds the manual override button and stabs it with his little finger. As anticipated, it causes the computer to completely reboot itself; he hears servomotors grind within the carapace as its limbs move into neutral position, until his boots are planted firmly on the ground and his arms are next to his sides, his rifle pointed uselessly at the ground.
There is a dull click from somewhere deep within the armour, then silence.
Except for the red LCD, everything remains dark.
He stabs frantically at the palm buttons, but there’s no power to any of the suit’s major subsystems. He tries to move his arms and legs, but finds them frozen in place.
Limbs, jumpjets, weapons, ECM, comlink … nothing works.
Now he’s sweating more than ever. The impact of that little bit of debris from the dropship must have been worse than he thought. Something must have shorted out, badly, within the Valkyrie’s onboard computer.
He twists his head to the left so he can gaze through the eyepiece of the optical periscope, the only instrument within the suit that isn’t dependent upon computer control. What he sees, terrifies him: the rest of his platoon jumpjetting for the security of the distant crater, while missiles continue to explode all around him.
Abandoning him. Leaving him behind.
He screams at the top of his lungs, yelling for Boyle and Kemp and Cortez and the rest, calling them foul names, demanding that they wait or come back for him, knowing that it’s futile. They can’t hear him. For whatever reason, they’ve already determined that he’s out of action; they cannot afford to risk their lives by coming back to lug an inert CAS across a battlefield.
He tries again to move his legs, but it’s pointless. Without direct interface from the main computer, the limbs of his suit are immobile. He might as well be wearing a concrete block.
The suit contains three hours of oxygen, fed through pumps controlled by another computer tucked against his belly, along with rest of its life-support systems. So at least he won’t suffocate or fry …
For the next three hours, at any rate.
Probably less. The digital chronometer and life-support gauge are dead, so there’s no way of knowing for sure.
As he watches, even the red coal of the LCD warning lamp grows dim until it finally goes cold, leaving him in the dark.
He has become a living statue. Fully erect, boots firmly placed upon the dusty regolith, arms held rigid at his sides, he is in absolute stasis.
For three hours. Certainly less.
For all intents and purposes, he is dead.
In the smothering darkness of his suit, Giordano prays to a god in which he has never really believed. Then, for lack of anything else to do, he raises his eyes to the periscope eyepiece and watches as the battle rages on around him.
He fully expects – and, after a time, even hopes – for a Pax missile to relieve him of his ordeal, but this small mercy never occurs. Without an active infrared or electromagnetic target to lock in upon, the heatseekers miss the small spot of ground he occupies, instead decimating everything around him.
Giordano becomes a mute witness to the horror of the worst conflict of the Moon War, what historians will later call the Battle of Mare Tranquillitatis. Loyalty, duty, honour, patriotism … all the things in which he once believed are soon rendered null and void as he watches countless lives being lost.
Dropships touch down near and distant, depositing soldiers in suits similar to his own. Some don’t even make it to the ground before they become miniature supernovas.
Men and women like himself fly apart even as they charge across the wasteland for the deceptive security of distant craters and rills.
An assault rover bearing three lightsuited soldiers rushes past him, only to be hit by fire from the hills. It is thrown upside down, crushing two of the soldiers beneath it. The third man, his legs broken and his suit punctured, manages to crawl from the wreckage. He dies at Giordano’s feet, his arms reaching out to him.
He has no idea whether Baker Company has survived, but he suspects it hasn’t, since he soon sees a bright flash from the general direction of the crater it was supposed to occupy and hold.
In the confines of his suit, he weeps and screams and howls against the madness erupting around him. In the end, he goes mad himself, cursing the same god to whom he prayed earlier for the role to which he has been damned.
If God cares, it doesn’t matter. By then, the last of Giordano’s oxygen reserves have been exhausted; he asphyxiates long before his three hours are up, his body still held upright by the Mark III Valkyrie Combat Armour Suit.
When he is finally found, sixty-eight hours later, by a patrol from the victorious Pax Astra Free Militia, they are astonished that anything was left standing on the killing ground. This sole combat suit, damaged only by a small steel pipe wedged into its CPU housing, with a dead man inexplicably sealed inside, is the only thing left intact. All else has been reduced to scorched dust and shredded metal.
So they leave him standing.
They do not remove the CAS from its place, nor do they attempt to prise the man from his armour. Instead, they erect a circle of stones around the Valkyrie. Later, when peace has been negotiated and lunar independence has been achieved, a small plaque is placed at his feet.
The marker bears no name. Because so many lives were lost during the battle, nobody can be precisely certain of who was wearing that particular CAS on that particular day.
An eternal flame might have been placed at his feet, but it wasn’t, because nothing burns on the Moon.