HECTOR Ramos huddled mute and motionless in the mud at the bottom of his fighting hole, gripping the plastic rosary in his cargo pocket. The barrage had been going on so long he could no longer formulate thoughts. Descended into the mute suffering no-self of a tormented animal, he lay with head tucked, helmet locked under his other arm.
Rain pelted him. The ground quaked. The soft dirt when it burst apart was orange, like the guts of a broken melon. Under that was rock. Fragments of steel hissed overhead. Shattered stone and the red soil clattered down, half burying him and Corporal Karamete. They lay curled together like twins before birth in six inches of slime and splintered rock from entrenching explosive and then the bombardment. He wheezed into the gas mask, hoping dully that the filter would take out the explosive residue that blew over them in invisible clouds, but no longer caring if it didn’t.
The other guy in the hole with them was a replacement. Hector didn’t remember his name. Fresh out of boot camp, without even School of Infantry. The assistant squad leader was holding him down, making sure he didn’t lose it and jump up during the barrage. On the boot’s other side, also holding him, was the last Chad, C323.
Tall stolid Sergeant Clay was dead, killed by a creeping mine that had guided on his body heat west of Chishang. Little Lieutenant Ffoulk was gone, blown over a cliff and missing, presumed lost. Four of Hector’s squad were out of action, one KIA in a barrage, one blinded by a laser dazzler, and two others wounded. The Chads had broken down one by one—the C models were smarter, but didn’t seem as durable as the Bs—or gotten wasted in one way or another. All except for 323, which just kept going. He hoped he’d expended the others in ways that had kept down the Marine body count.
The load-bearing exoskeletons were pretty much useless too, after the first couple of days. The platoon had quietly surveyed them, just leaving them behind as they’d advanced, along with a lot of other gear that hadn’t worked out.
They were a week into the campaign, with no end in sight. It had started low-key, with only the lightly opposed securing of the airhead. The assault grew bloodier as the Marines pushed north along the beach road. They’d fought an encounter battle near Chishang with elements of a second-line Chinese infantry division. After demolishing that unit, the general had wanted to keep pushing north, toward Taipei. But the Army needed help. Higher had turned the axis of advance left and started them slogging up along the mountain road, intending to break through and emerge behind the enemy line of resistance.
But there was no room to maneuver in the mountains of central Taiwan. Highway 20 led west across the island, following the river. The division had managed to link up with the Nationalists, though Ramos hadn’t seen any yet. The insurgents, hastily reequipped with U.S. weapons and stiffened by Force Recon teams and close air support, had driven slowly up the right side of the valley, taking hill after hill. Meanwhile the grunts advanced on the left, in rough step, along ridges that built higher and higher until only this single pass remained.
These mountains were rugged, wild, scabbed with jungle. The maps showed only one village. The armored columns had dueled in the pass for three days, the largest tank battle in Marine history. Until losses got too high, and word had come down to wait for the Army to chew up more enemy before the Marines mounted another push.
The next day both flanks had shouldered forward, to gain the high ground on both sides of the valley. If they got lucky and locked the enemy into a defensive position, the Air Force could drop MOABs on them. But within a day and a night that advance had stalled too. The narrow, switchbacked two-laner was more difficult than anyone had expected for heavy American vehicles to negotiate. The Chinese blew bridges and toppled a cliff. As the lead elements left naval gunfire support behind, and exhausted the fleet’s land attack missile inventory, they’d had to depend on organic artillery and air. Both used up ammunition and fuel far faster than anyone had expected. After a couple of miles, this had stopped the flank advances, too.
Now the Marine Third and the Nationalist 905th were hammering away toe to toe with the Chinese First Amphibious Mechanized and the 45th Airborne Mechanized divisions. The battle had gone on day and night, with only brief pauses of mutual exhaustion. Both allies were in contact, fighting to hold the heights to either side. If they buckled, the enemy could break through the middle, and overrun the battered forces holding the valley.
Only Charlie had heavier artillery than the Marines and a lot more of it than Intel had predicted. Right now they were hurling shells as if they had freight trains running right back to the mainland. Probably, the captain said, to soften them up for a renewed assault.
It would be head-to-head butting, a ground game in the mud. So now, huddled in his hole with tac gloves locked over his helmet, Hector lay empty as a seashell while the earth jolted and earthquaked around him. His ragged Cameleons displayed only brief swatches of color, since the dirt was so ground in by now that the men were the color of the dirt. He lay atop an M240, the new lightweight model printed out of titanium. Trained as a machine gunner, he felt safer behind it than with a rifle.
A heavy blast blew more rock and dirt over them. The recruit groaned loudly. The assistant squad leader was talking to him in a slow calming monotone, hugging his waist. Hector pushed his head up. Shuddering, he tried his Glasses again. They were dead, though the opticals still worked. No calm dulcet voice advised him now. To pass orders he had to use hand signals or yell. After the first couple of days hardly anything digital had worked at all. Both sides were jamming and EMPing from the Ka-band on down. The clouds of hand-launched drones had vanished, sucked up by the rain, the mountains, and the raptor UAVs that soon fell in their turn.
Until they cowered in the mud under a furious barrage. Just like World War I.
He figured that in the end it was still going to be human against human, mediated by lead.
* * *
SOME interminable time later the ground ceased vibrating. It was still raining hard, but the shelling lifted, rumbling away into the distance. He kept his head down, trying to quiet his shaking. One more minute until he had to get up. Ten more seconds …
A sliding rush of wet dirt and pebbles, and a hand gripped his shoulder. Hector pulled down his mask and rolled over.
The company runner was a gracile, ironhearted Pfc. In civilian life Patterson was a girls’ soccer coach. She broken-field sprinted through the barrages while others cowered, wearing two sets of jelly armor and carrying nothing but a pistol and supplies for the corpsmen. Her face was orange dirt streaked by rain, and her pale eyebrows quizzical. “Hey, Sergeant. Another day in Marine paradise.”
Hector spat out grit. “Fuck you, Wombat.”
“Need a report. Battalion wants to know effectives remaining.”
“Fuck. Don’t know.”
“You’re Rampart now, Sergeant. Till they send another O.”
“I don’t know. Don’t know!”
“Secret Squirrels expect an assault. Ten to fifteen vehicles moving up the road. Heavies. Self-propelled mortars. Major wants ammo count. Effective rifles. Tac says, move up to the edge of the cliff. Don’t let them push you off 298. You’re the point up here. You gotta hold.”
That was their position. Hill 298. They were dug in on a terraced ridge, with only the hilltop above them. He muttered, “The edge? Where they’re fucking shelling?”
“They’re not shelling us now,” she pointed out.
“They will be in a minute. An assault … we need reinforcements. We need counterbattery. Comms. Ammo. Tell ’em that.”
“I heard something about a team coming up to help you.”
Hector didn’t want to get out of the hole. He wanted to cower in the mud. Away from the hydraulic knives that whickered the air. Away from the Kill Room, which was everyplace above ground level.
But he was responsible for the platoon now. A fucking E-5, and he had the platoon. “Fuck,” he grunted again, and pushed himself up.
The hill had been tangled jungle two days before. Now it was blasted-down matchstick trees and exposed rock with a coat of raw wet harrowed soil. The orange mud glittered with steel fragments and ammo casings. They were dug in on a level bench above the valley, with a fifty-meter rise behind them, then a saddle to the rear of that. Hector trudged his line, fighting hole to fighting hole. Patterson tagged behind, underhanding med packs to the corpsmen.
At Milliron’s fire team Ramos stood over a hole in the ground pasted around with a pinkish doughnut of body parts, unidentifiable except for an incredibly long spiral of intestine, glistening with moisture, and a boot with the lower leg still in it, and a skull fragment upside down like a bowl of gray goo. No, wait, there was a spinal cord, too. The air smelled of burnt explosive and boiled blood. “Direct hit,” the fire team leader said, tone dead, eyes small dark holes. He rubbed a stubbled chin over and over, like a madman locked in a trance. “No point callin’ the doc.”
“Who was it?”
“Salacia. Flynn.”
Hector remembered their faces, and where they were from, all of them. Kansas, Indiana, New Mexico, Pennsylvania. The names of their girls and guys on the Wall of Shame. But he felt nothing yet. Just numb detachment. Another shell crumped upslope, blowing rocks to patter down around them. He crouched, ready to dive for the grisly hole, but the barrage he’d expected didn’t follow.
Yet. Still trailed by the runner, he crawled to the edge of the cliff. Sprawled full length, and peered over.
Not really a cliff, just a slope steep enough that no trees had grown on it, leaving bare earth and rock and bushes. Smoke blew over them from down in the valley. It was more like a canyon there, precipices combed by waterfalls. Before the war the view might have been beautiful. Two hundred meters below, a switchback was blocked with wrecked tanks and APCs. The dead lay in rows where the right flank had dug in. Some of the vehicles were still burning, and the stenches of scorched rubber, explosive, and roasting bodies seethed and marinated like the wind from hell’s mess hall.
Hector scribbled on Patterson’s pad, adding the sums with tongue clamped between his teeth, and jerked his thumb rearward. “We need comms, ammo, reinforcements,” he said again. “Tell them.”
She nodded and sprinted off into the murk. Dropping into the shell hole, he felt around in his assault pack, found one last MRE, and tore it open, staring blankly at the pieces plastered into the dirt.
Even chewing exhausted him. His jaw seemed to have lost the ability to close. Finally he gave up on the meal, since he couldn’t taste it anyway. He rolled out and snatched another peer over the edge, keeping his head low. The enemy’s snipers were dangerous out to a mile or more. They’d had their own scout sniper team until the night before, when one of the creeping mines had scrabbled up the cliff somehow and homed in on them. Hector hated the six-legged things. They moved slowly, like ticks, but never stopped. They snuggled up to you as you slept. Then chirped, so they startled you awake a quarter second before they detonated.
The chirp, that was what Hector couldn’t figure out. Unless it was just to scare the fuck out of everybody before it blew some unlucky bastard apart.
Some minutes ticked past. He kept expecting the shelling to resume, but instead it tapered off, then stopped entirely.
Around seven H&S sent up chow and ammo on a robo mule. Eggs, toast, and the nasty sausages everyone called “dicks of death.” Hector got the ammo out to the line first, then chow. The food was cold, and watery with rain, but a private brewed quadruple-strength MRE coffees. Black smoke rose in the distance, and the whump of distant explosions. But only an occasional shot echoed from the valley.
He didn’t like the silence. He kept checking his sensors. A few still worked. But nothing seemed to be coming their way yet.
* * *
NOT too much later, Patterson scampered up again to say his reinforcements were here. She brought a heavy brick of a radio, too. One of the old PRC-117s. He accepted it doubtfully, looking it over. Then got up. Leaving his Pig with the Chad, he walked to the rear to meet the new arrivals, keeping an eye out for cover on the way in case the shelling resumed. The rain had finally stopped, though. That was a plus, though it meant the smoke was heavier.
The team was in spotless Cameleons. The guy in the lead even had a crease in his trou. Their helmets looked new. Even their boots were clean. They stood erect, not crouched, and frowned down at Hector as if at a leper. He felt like one: wet, dirt-smeared, filthy, stinking, with shit staining his pants and ripped gear and hands that only stopped shaking when he held a machine gun.
Marines didn’t wear insignia in combat. “Platoon commander?” the creased guy asked, pulling a bottle of water out and extending it.
Hector uncapped it and chugged it. “Am now.” He wiped his mouth with a filthy sleeve.
“Charlie’s gearing up to hit you. Fortunately, they can’t get armor up here. We’re from Division, and we’re here to help.”
Hector nodded. He picked out a rock he could dive behind and squatted, watching. They jabbed jointed rods into the soil and stretched an IR tent, for overhead concealment, then snapped open crates. Finally they gestured him back, and the lead guy—Hector figured him for staff brass—fingered a controller.
Something buzzed, and a disk the size of a turkey platter jumped into the air. It stopped at eye level, hovering with a buzz. A camera topped a curved carapace like a horseshoe crab’s. Its lens clicked from one jarhead to the next, as if memorizing their faces. Then the thing wheeled and circled them, dipping to search each fighting hole. The grunts stared at it dully, as if nothing surprised them anymore. The flying plate seemed to wink in and out of visibility as it crossed a patch of tumbled rock and plowed-up ground.
“The fuck’s that?” muttered Karamete.
“NASA developed it,” the Crease said loftily. “The Gamma. Charlie won’t even get in rifle range.”
“They’re what, killer drones?”
“Like your Chads. Only you don’t have to give them permission. You got OPs out?”
Hector told him they didn’t, since they were at the edge of a cliff. He shot the thing a distrustful look as it scouted their perimeter, then dipped below the dropoff. The rest of the team were deploying more. Three dozen of the things lifted into the wind, oriented themselves, and sped off. “Up and away, my pretties,” Crease said. Then, to Hector, “They look for avenues of approach that give the enemy cover. Patrol in short hops until they sense movement.”
“Then what?”
“Home and destroy. Twenty Gammas, we’ve seen them get twenty kills.”
“In combat?”
Crease looked away. “Well, not yet. Those are test and evaluation’s numbers.”
Hector wished they’d have sent up another infantry platoon instead, but maybe the things would work. He needed to walk the line again, make super sure his fire teams were set in right and what linked 7.62 he had left was redistributed. “They won’t go for us, will they?”
“They won’t hit an American.”
“How do they know?”
“They integrate uniform, weapon, facial recognition, and query your chip. No ID, facial features Asian, carrying a weapon, they take you out.” Before Hector could object he added, “I know, we’ve got friendlies without chips on the right flank. There’s an inhibit-fire line halfway down the valley. All taken care of, Lieutenant.”
“Sergeant,” Hector said.
“You kidding? Where’s your commander?”
“Out of action. So’s the platoon sergeant. That leaves me.”
The officer looked doubtful. “Well, warn your guys these things are friendly. And very expensive. We don’t want them shot down by mistake.”
Karamete said, “Will they return fire if we do?” She’d been taking a breather on a rock, listening. His assistant did that a lot, just listened. Hector didn’t mind. Shit, she’d probably get the squad next. Once he got his legs blown off like Clay, or took a shell hit, like the guys spread like birthday frosting around the rim of their fighting hole.
The staff officer said they wouldn’t, in a tone that made it clear he got a lot of stupid questions and that had been one. He handed Hector a controller, and demonstrated various screens that showed the things’ locations and how to tap into each unit’s video. Hector nodded and tucked it into his blouse.
The rain had resumed while they talked, pinging with random drops on the IR netting. Now, with a breath of cold air, it fell in earnest, quickly increasing to a downpour.
Then he heard it. “Incoming!” he yelled, and rolled for the rock he’d scoped out.
The mortars ripped across the hill from one end to the other, then back again. Deadened by the roar of the rain, the blasts sounded like the mountain was huffing deep breaths. They squeezed his lungs as he lay flat, fingers digging into the soil. Probably the self-propelled 120mm’s Tac had seen moving up. Hector fumbled with the radio, then yelled to the staff officer, who was flat on the ground, to let Higher know they were under fire. They needed counterbattery, approximate bearing two-nine-zero.
But the techs were pulling out, leaving the equipment cases littering the ridge, the gauzelike tent fluttering in the smoky breeze. Its edge dipped as it shed torrents of rain, then collapsed into a heap as the spindly rods gave way.
The shelling shifted to their flank. Hector scuttled back on hands and knees through the mud and rain, and dropped into the fighting hole in the center of his line.
The last Chad, C323, turned its oculars from the M240 to check him out, but said nothing. Rain danced on its shoulders, on its hatchet-shaped gray metal head, sparkled silver off the machine gun. Hector nodded approval. The bipod was dug in right. 323 was holding a “hand” over the open feed tray, to keep water and grit from fouling the action. The belt was laid in clear to feed. Hector tongued his tac radio, on the off chance, but all he got was the roar of multiband jamming. He tried the older radio next, but the slants were jamming that, too.
The mortars walked back toward them and he cowered. The world staggered. Curled in the mud, he hugged the robot’s curved shell. It shifted to shelter him with its torso.
A blast pressed him down in the hole and shattered the eroding mud sliding down around him. Fragments whanged off metal.
A blackness …
When he came to, water covered his face. He clawed at his mouth, but more mud filled it. He screamed into the slick cold. Then a powerful arm reached under him and pulled him up. He scrabbled at his face, scraping mud off.
From down the ridge machine-gun fire clattered. Then, amid deeper explosions, engines growled. They didn’t sound like tanks or fighting vehicles. These were higher pitched, like the dune buggies the scout snipers roared around in. He needed to see. He needed video. “We got any switchblades left?” he yelled to Karamete.
“All expended.”
He remembered then, pulled out the controller. The screen was cracked. Water slid around a blank screen. He threw it away and hunkered again as mortars thundered and lightninged behind him on the saddle. Softening up their rear, interdicting any more reinforcements and supplies.
But they weren’t getting reinforcements. Just the disks, which he hadn’t seen hide nor hair of since they’d scooted off.
The growl of motors grew, straining, revving. He hesitated, glancing at the assistant squad leader.
I’ll go, she mouthed, tilting her helmet toward the drop.
Hector hand-signaled her to stay put. He jumped up and dashed forward. The wet fabric dragged at his legs. His mud-caked boots squished at each stride. He collapsed at the edge, coughing, and clawed his way forward to peer over.
Behind him something grabbed his boot in an iron grip. When he looked back the C was right behind him, lying full length with its belly in the mud. Its oculars eyed him expressionlessly. The nictitating covers blinked every couple of seconds, wiping its lenses clear from the rain.
Between the treetops below, through streaming billows of white antitargeting smoke that filtered through the shattered forest like hair through a comb, something was moving. No, several somethings. Then, as one reared up to roll over a shell-toppled bole, he saw it clearly.
Only he wasn’t quite sure what he was seeing. He squinted through the mist and rain and smoke. Why was it that in every battle it seemed to rain? Then another of the sluglike shapes crossed an open patch, approaching the hill. The smoke blew aside for a second and he finally saw one clearly, head on.
Intel was right. The Chinese couldn’t get armor up here.
But these weren’t tanks.
They were smaller than compact sedans, but larger than motorcycles. Remotely controlled, apparently. Or autonomous. The low-slung dark-green beetles ground along on wide, ridged rubber tracks. Multibarreled guns pointed here and there as antennaed turrets rotated suspiciously. They bulldozed aside trees and climbed over rocks, and the grinding of their treads on wood and stone was like the chewing of gigantic insects. They were flanked and overheaded by gray-blue quadcopters, and behind them trotted troops in Associated Powers green with camo helmet covers, carrying rifles and light machine guns and RPGs. The drones held their positions like pilot fish on sharks, swaying as sheets of windblown rain trailed between them and Hector. Their high nasal hum overscored the deeper notes of treads and engines and the unending rumble of the mortars.
A coordinated assault: fliers, troops, and the new things. But the green beetles were leading the charge. Their first wave reached the base of the slope and started up. They rocked and nearly tipped backward, but recovered and kept climbing.
As if their progress had disturbed a nest there, suddenly small gray objects darted up, weaving and dipping above the slugs. They engaged the quads first, tongues of fire darting from the disks. A quad tilted and fell, bouncing down the slope, but the beetles still lumbered upward, occasionally firing, but mainly ignoring their mosquito-like attackers.
Then, as Hector watched, one of the disks dropped onto a turret. It clung there for a second. The machine tried to shake it off, but it detonated in a flash of light and puff of gray smoke.
The tracked vehicle emerged from the smoke, still climbing. A scar gleamed on its green painted hull, but otherwise it didn’t seem to have been harmed.
Then it noticed him. A fixture atop the hull swung up to steady on him. Instantly other turrets swung up too.
Not only had he been seen, but they were communicating. Passing information. Which meant that though the Marines had no comms and no video, Allied jamming wasn’t working on the enemy.
He pulled back from the edge as the world dazzled. A millisecond later automatic fire, 20mm or so by the sound of it, pulverized rock into powder. The edge sagged beneath him as he clawed backward. The Chad grabbed his load-bearing equipment and they rolled together back into the fighting hole.
Corporal Karamete was firing. But the boot was still hunched, shaking, gripping his rifle, but not aiming. He was muttering something over and over. A prayer, a curse … it didn’t matter. Hector slammed the recruit’s helmet into the side of the hole. “Return fire!” he screamed into the boy’s face, shaking him. “Return fire, goddamn you, or I’ll shoot your pussy fucking face myself!” He snatched the private’s rifle, racked the bolt, and thrust it back into the kid’s shaking hands.
Yet still the idiot didn’t fire. Hector slapped him again, then turned away in disgust. “Climbing the cliff!” he yelled to the fire teams. “Pass it on. Little AFVs. AP and antiarmor.” The cry went down the line, passed from mouth to mouth as the troops hastily reloaded magazines. But there were fewer voices now.
The squad was dying. One by one, like teeth from a beaten-in mouth. War was processing them one after the other. Disassembling their bodies into burnt blood and mangled flesh. Hanging them up to die. Like chickens on the Line …
The roar grew louder. The mortaring was sliding back toward the rear. A creeping barrage, to keep their heads down until the assault rolled over them. Grinding them into dirt and mud and blood.
He lifted his face to the rain. Watched it fall silver, endless, cold. He tongued his mike, then tried the PRC again. “Rampart 1, this is 1-2. Under attack. Troops and light armor. Need support. Artillery. Helos. Air. A missile strike. Anything. Over.”
But all he got back was the drone and buzz of jamming.
A beetle thrust its nose over the edge of the cliff, hung there, treads scrabbling, then fell back. Hector slapped the cover down and pulled the bolt back, charging the 240. The C held the belt up and shook it in its metal hands, flinging the water off in a pewter cloud. They waited for an endless second.
The machine lunged up again, nose to the sky. As it exposed its underbelly Hector depressed the trigger. The butt of the gun jackhammered his shoulder as muddy spray obliterated the target. Every fifth round was tungsten cored. From up and down the line rifles banged, discharging projectiles fuzed to penetrate metal. The beetle faltered, quested this way and that, and at last exploded in a gout of orange fire. Burning, it toppled back out of sight.
But others were shouldering up behind it. The rain danced on their hulls. Their oculars searched the Marine line as they crunched heavily back down on rubberized treads and began to chew their way forward. As soon as they oriented they began firing. Their bullets kicked up mud and spray around the fighting holes.
The recruit bolted up and scrambled out of the hole. Hector grabbed for his harness, but missed. The coward pelted away.
Hector got back on the Pig. Firing and firing. Taking one target after the other. He was gunning for a mud-smeared machine on his right when another lurched up over the lip of the slope, rocked down, then spun its turret and charged for his hole.
At that moment the Pig ran through the last of its belt and stopped. Hector pulled a grenade and yanked the pin. He had his arm back to throw when something hit him.
The blow staggered him back, paralyzing him. The grenade dropped from his lifeless hand, puckered the mud, and slid gracefully down into their hole. Karamete shouted and kicked it into the sump. But too much dirt had fallen. The sump was full. The grenade lay exposed, and they all stared at it, horrified, unable to move.
“I have it,” said 323. The Chad pivoted around Hector, pushed Karamete aside with a stiff-armed thrust, and fell on the grenade.
A hollow, subdued bang blew half its head off, and the side of the hole collapsed and caved in on top of it.
Screams rose from down the line as the beetles rolled over the fighting holes. One halted and spun, treads grinding down through the thin soil and mud like a mill to crush the screaming humans beneath. The marines fired from both sides, and its oculars flashed into splinters. Blinded, the machine charged uphill. One tread ran up a fallen tree and it tipped over, crashed down a short drop, and landed on its side. Its tracks spun with a gnashing roar, like the grinding of steel teeth. Then it began crying out, a shrill, insistent beeping that went on and on beneath the clatter of fire and the growl of motors.
Hector lay half in and half out of the hole, dazed, gripping his arm. When he lifted his glove, blood pumped from the torn flesh beneath.
Beside him the C was stirring, digging itself out from the mudslide with finlike motions of its hands. Its wrecked, muddy head drooped askew. One eye was missing. Cables hung from its neck. Hector extended a hand. The head came around and studied it for a second before it seemed to recognize the gesture.
Hector pulled 323 to a sitting position, but when it tried to hoist itself one leg buckled. It sagged against the side of the hole.
He must have blacked out for a second or two then, because when he came back the assistant squad leader was working on his arm. “Hold it fucking out, Sergeant. Hold it straight.” She slapped her belt around it, threaded the buckle, and yanked it tight. The arm felt weak. Dead. But it wasn’t pumping blood now. Just a slow oozing. He blinked at the sliding orange mud in the bottom of the hole. His own blood, dripping into it. Turning it red.
“Another wave,” the assistant squad leader shouted in his ear. Her voice was thin, almost inaudible over the roar of battle. “Milliron spotted another wave. Coming through the woods.”
Hector shook rain off his Glasses to see that 323, mangled as it was, had worked itself upright. It stood half-propped against the front of the hole, one buckled knee thrust deep into the mud to keep it vertical. It patted the Pig. Brushed mud off the feed cover, inserted the end of a belt of linked cartridges into the feed tray, and charged the weapon.
It picked up the butt, and placed it carefully in its shoulder.
Snuggling its single good optic behind the rear sight, it traversed and pressed the trigger. The burst ripped into the turret of a beetle heading for the right flank. The armor-piercing slugs stitched its side, and the thing rolled to a stop and began its plaintive crying. A second burst silenced even that.
Hector hammered the robot’s back with his good hand. “Nice shot. Just keep those bursts short,” he yelled when the Chad’s mangled head turned. He tucked a severed wire back into the chest armor. “Short, asshole, short bursts, you’re gonna melt the fucking barrel.”
His line was thinning. His guys were dying. Another assault would overrun them. Hector called Tac again, got nothing, tried the PRC but got only a thin high tormented squeal. “Fucking useless shit,” he growled, and stood in the hole. “Fall back!” he screamed.
The order caromed down the line. Marines began scrambling out of their fighting holes, so coated with mud they seemed to be born of the earth. The rain increased. He jerked the Pig out of the mud. Then rethought, set it back down, and told the C, “You’re the king. Machine gunner, he’s the king. The king fucks the queen. Copy me? You stand fast. You die, you die right here. At your weapon.”
It nodded, once, and slid behind the gun again. Hector yelled to Karamete, “If I don’t make it, set up at the military crest. Stand fast. Fight till we’re overrun. Then play dead. Maybe you can join up with Third Platoon after these things go past, take ’em from the rear.”
She nodded and turned away to climb, lurching uphill over the cratered, slippery ground.
Like maggots emerging from a rotten corpse, the rest of the platoon squirmed out of their holes and staggered, limped, crawled up the slope. They supported each other, or leaned on their rifles. Niegowski was dragging a body, one of his fire team guys. “Hustle, marines, hustle the fuck up!” Hector screamed. “Leave your claymores, wire ’em up.” A rifleman staggered past, gaze welded to some point in the infinite distance. He moved like one of the Chads, dragging his rifle-butt in the mud.
Hector grabbed him and shoved him along. “Move it!” he screamed. He walked the line again, making sure everyone got the word, then followed them up the hill. Pulling back, the marines clambered over fallen trees. They set up remote-det claymores as they went, antipersonnel charges that sprayed shrapnel when the integral radar sensed motion. They reached the top panting and scrambling on all fours, fell on their knees in the rain, and seized their entrenching tools once more.
* * *
WHEN he stumbled out at the crest the ridges spread below him, around them, open and exposed and rounded and smoking under a charcoal sky. Rain churned the ocher mud Chinese mortars had plowed. Jets thundered invisibly far above. Another battle, detached from yet somehow probably related to their lack of air support. All Hector could see was the clouds, lowering and black as Marine dress oxfords.
He trudged from one end of the line to the other, pegging each grunt to his or her place. His head reeled as if he’d been drinking. Sometimes he fell, but pushed himself to his feet again and went on. The grunts were too exhausted to dig, but he chivvied and kicked them into it. Those who’d lost their e-tools scooped with hands or Ka-Bars or rifle butts. He linked up his flanks with the squads to left and right. Several minutes went by without any hellish new development. It was actually a little breathing spell.
He tried to call Tac again, and to his astonishment got an only partially jammed channel. “No, Sergeant. No more reinforcements available. Ammo’s running short too. All we can do is pass requests for air support and artillery up the line.”
Just then he recognized a lone figure scrambling over an explosion crater to where he stood.
The recruit who’d run. White-faced, shaking, biting his lip. He carried two green steel ammo cans. Another was clamped under his arm. Hector waited, thumbs in his webbing. Said nothing. Until the guy blubbered, “Sergeant.”
“Private.”
“I’m sorry, I … lost it up there. I really—”
“You back now?” Hector snapped.
“Say again, Sergeant?”
“If you’re done with your fucking piss break, let’s see that fucking e-tool flying.”
The boot hesitated. Stared, then nodded over and over with pathetic eagerness. “Aye aye, Sergeant. I’ll dig you the best fucking hole—”
“Shut the fuck up,” Hector said. “Give Milliron those cans. Fucking boot recruit. Greenie newbie asshole. Pinche estúpido. Pinche useless motherfucking abortion.”
He was still muttering “Fucking boot” when the 240 went kack kack kack, down below, out of sight in the rain and smoke, and guilt stabbed him like a rooster’s spur. He’d left C323 behind. “Die at your weapon,” that’s what he’d told it. After the thing had fallen on a grenade, to save them.
It felt … wrong.
But it had never been alive. So how could it die?
He strode along the line, kicking legs and shouting. They lay full length in the shallow scooped-out fighting holes, staring out over their weapons. They’d thrown away their useless Glasses and were blinking rain out of their eyes. Niegowski yelled that his team was out of ammo. Hector threw him the last can. The rain plonked on their helmets, mingled with their blood, trickled into the darkening mud.
At the far right of the line he ran into Glasscock, from Third, walking his own positions. The other NCO pointed wordlessly across the valley. Smoke rose from the far ridgeline. Green shapes lumbered eastward. Troops were streaming to the rear. The Nationalists were breaking.
Hector staggered. His head swam. He gripped his wounded shoulder with his good hand. Then forced himself on. His Pig. Where was his fucking Pig? Then he heard it again. Not short, but prolonged bursts. Practically a full belt. “Too fucking long!” he screamed, knowing the Chad couldn’t hear him.
The gun stuttered on. And on.
Then suddenly fell silent.
The sky ripped open and shells screamed in. Hector couldn’t tell if they were Allied or enemy. They burst ahead of his line. So, friendly, probably. But only a dozen or so.
Not enough. Not nearly enough.
“Here they come!” Karamete screamed.
Behind a walking wall of gray-white antitargeting smoke an army of green cockroaches lumbered up the slope. Gunflashes winked from their muzzles. Whistles blew. Lasers reached out, beams probing like antennae through rainfog and gunsmoke. Helmets bobbed behind the beetles. The troops were closed up on the robots this time, providing suppressing fire to keep the Gustav gunners down. Their cheers carried on the wind. The marines yelled back. Bullets puckered the top of the hill and whined overhead.
When the lead enemy was a hundred meters away Hector yelled, “Open fire!” The line opened up with a roar. He crawled from hole to hole, telling each fire team to conserve ammo. “We gotta hold this fucking hilltop. If we retreat, they’ll fucking massacre us. Or I’ll shoot you myself, no shit. Then I’ll call in gunships on the position.”
He didn’t tell them there was no more support. That they were on their own. What would be the point?
Instead of a wide wave, this time four beetles came almost locked together, just enough space between them to see the troops crouching behind them, using the metal ovoids as cover. The battle-noise rose to a massive, roaring climax.
Hector was full length behind the boll of a fallen pine, firing, when a burst tore the wood apart, slashing splinters across his face and knocking him backward in a sticky rain of sap. He lay dazed. The universe smelled of turpentine. He waited dumbly to be crushed into the red soil. For it all to at last just fucking end.
Instead the howl of combat seemed to falter. Lessened.
He dragged a wet sleeve across his face and pulled it back covered with blood and pale splinters the color of canned tuna. Then sat up, gripping his empty rifle.
The beetles stood all around them. Their engines were running, but they weren’t moving. Their turrets were canted upward, and a red light blinked below their lasers. Shouts and whistles came from down the hill.
Patterson took a knee beside him. “Sergeant. Y’okay? I’m gonna pull some of these big splinters out of your face.… Can ya stand? I’ll help you up.”
“What the fuck … What happened?”
“I don’t know. They were about to overrun us, but just sort of … stalled out.”
“Where’s Karamete?”
“I’m slapping demo on them,” his assistant yelled.
“Yeah. Blow the fuckers to hell, ASAP. Before they wake up again.” He staggered up, clinging to the runner, and hobbled along the line. More wounded. Two more dead. He wasn’t even sure who he had left anymore.
Leaning on Patterson, he tried to raise Tac again. The answer was nearly obliterated with static, but they seemed to be able to hear him. He reported casualties. Asked for ammo and water and reinforcements again.
Then he slumped to the mud, and nodded, stunned for a timeless time as the world spun viciously around him but he, himself, floated at a detached and motionless center.
* * *
A corpsman was bending over him. He took off the belt tourniquet, poured in clotting powder and antibiotic, and applied a field dressing. “Gonna have to evacuate you, Sergeant,” he murmured.
Hector winced away as the medic plastered another bandage over his face. He shook his head. “No.”
“Sorry, dude. Sendin’ you to the rear.”
“No, fuck that. Ya valí madre. Stayin’ here, Doc.”
The corpsman started to argue, then shrugged. “At least, some morphine.”
“No. Gotta stay sharp. Gotta hold the line.”
“Here, drink this. Drink it all. Hear me? Sergeant, can you hear me?”
Hector shook himself. Something was cradled in his hands. Something … to drink? He’d almost been asleep. “Gotta … hold. Take care of the other guys, Doc. Patch ’em up, so we can keep fighting.”
* * *
ANOTHER hour crept past. The rain kept falling, now light, now heavy. His face was numb, as if a dentist had novocained it all over, but his arm was starting to really ache. A guy from H&S drove up with a cart. Rounds for the recoilless Gustavs, rifle ammo, flares, batteries, MREs, water. Hector yelled over to Glasscock, to coordinate, then told Karamete to move the platoon back down to the edge of the rise.
Stumbling, weaving between fallen trees, they filtered down toward their old holes. He could only stagger a few steps before he had to collapse and rest, head propped in his hands.
Corpses and parts of bodies lay tumbled along the bench where they’d fought. Below and around the fighting holes wrecked beetles stood burning, farting sparks as ammo cooked off.
Hector paused next to a twisted mass of metal and wires, torn apart and crushed into the mud behind a wrecked machine gun. He looked down at it for a few seconds.
Chads didn’t have helmets, though their heads were vaguely helmet shaped, if you glimpsed one in the red-lit dark of an aircraft fuselage, hurtling toward battle.
They didn’t have boots. Just plastic and alloy lower limb terminations that splayed out slightly when they pressed into soft ground, on the march.
He bent, and picked up a discarded rifle. Sorted through the wreckage in the hole.
When he stepped back the rifle stood upright in the mud, muzzle down. On top of it he hung the mangled wreck of what had once been 323’s head. On the ground, he arranged a mangled foot assembly.
He stood there for a moment more, but found no words. What could he say? How could you envision an afterlife for something that had never lived? At last he just sighed and turned away, digging his fingers into his arm, which now felt like it had been plunged into boiling grease.
Their old fighting pits were shallow puddles now, nearly erased by treadmarks and shell-gouged craters. He ordered the fire team leaders to stack the dead, Marine and enemy both, in front of their positions for cover.
He sagged to half sit, half lean at the cliff, boots dangling over the edge, staring down at a smashed, annihilated forest. Quads and Gammas lay tumbled broken in the red mud. More dead lay down there too. Except for the rain falling on them all, the sky was empty.
* * *
AN hour later far-off whistles blew again. The grunts rousted from whatever rest they’d found, and charged their weapons. But Hector still sat by the cliff, contemplating his fields of fire as the whistles and cheers grew closer through the smoke and mist and rain.
He couldn’t hear any more beetles. But another wave of troops was pushing up from the rising ground, as if growing from the soil itself up through the stumps and craters of the shattered jungle. But these shadowy forms looked different. Helmetless. Weaponless. He adjusted his Glasses.
No. Not troops. Old men, kids, women. Not uniformed, but in colored shirts and pants and dresses. They stumbled forward, glancing back fearfully as someone screamed at them from behind.
Hector pressed Transmit on the radio, and sent it in. He dragged a sleeve across his face, wiping away blood and tears, sweat and powder-grime.
The enemy was driving civilians ahead of them as shields. Taiwanese from the villages. They emerged from the smoke holding each other’s hands, families clinging together, helping each other over fallen trees and along the ridges between shell holes.
The marines would have to machine-gun women, children, old men. Or else be overrun.
But they had to hold. Or the whole force could be pushed back, into the sea.
And then they would lose the war.
The fucking war, the endless pinche fucking war that got more desperate every day.
In his pocket, Sergeant Hector Ramos fingered the pink plastic rosary. Whether they held or not, he wouldn’t be going home. He knew that now. He no longer cared. It didn’t matter. But he knew.
Maybe Mirielle would remember him.