The Light Brigade Read online

  “I heard,” he said.

  I put the hit of adrenaline into his hand. “You start feeling like you’ll black out, you hit yourself up with this. Got it? It’s just the arm. The bleeding’s slowed. Medic will be here any minute.”

  “Yeah. Okay.”

  I squeezed his shoulder and pulled myself up into a half crouch. He’ll be fine, I told myself. Medics are coming. I hesitated.

  “Lieutenant. Permission to stay with Jones until evac.”

  “Did I stutter, Dietz?”

  “No, sir.”

  “And that’s First Lieutenant,” the CO said.

  “Moving out, sir.”

  I opened the squad channel. “Deathless! Marino! Omalas! You heard the CO! Head toward Tanaka’s position.” I added Tanaka’s squad to our channel. “Tanaka, we’re headed your way.”

  “Haul ass! We’ve got some quiet. We’re between rounds.”

  I grabbed Deathless by the arm and yanked her up. She huffed and squirmed, but kept moving. She was like a tired old engine; needed a kick in the ass to get going every time she went down.

  Marino and Omalas waited for us with Tanaka’s squad. As we came up, Tanaka called us all forward. The barrage had died down. I heard low rumbles in the distance. Slim chance they were out of munitions—more likely, they were loading up shells and retargeting.

  Tanaka’s team was short by two. Landon was with him, tall and lanky even in his suit, and moon-faced Sandoval. The third was Vela, who stood almost as tall as Omalas and twice as wide. Her name seemed vaguely familiar from one of my drops, but I could not recall her face. While we were eight strong all together, I figured the CO expected more losses, hence the larger fighting groups.

  A light breeze came in from the north. The smoke around us began to rise. As we went, the only sound in my ears was my own breathing. Curtains of smoke and gas purled away from the field, revealing a sea of bodies among the broken shards of once-golden grass, now slick with fine red dew.

  Ahead of us rose the shining spires of the closest city, Shabarat, home to the Martian refugees that had transformed this part of the world. A bulky line of drop ships ringed the city, just behind a massive display of artillery that took my breath away. Fighters screamed across the sky—headed away from the city, not toward it.

  “Where did all this come from?” I said.

  “Mars,” Marino said.

  “Wow,” Landon said. “You’ve got a bright one. Where’s our artillery? Air support? Like . . . anything?”

  The ground rumbled.

  “Those guns are getting ready,” Tanaka said. “Let’s move.”

  “Why . . . why are we moving into that?” Sandoval said.

  “Orders.” Tanaka took the lead. I made myself go after him, though my stomach turned. This was easily the stupidest thing I’d ever done. Bodies lay all the way to the first ring of artillery. About a thousand troops still moved ahead of us, picking over the bodies of the fallen. The dead far outnumbered the living.

  The guns started.

  “Fuck,” Landon said. He stumbled and went down right behind Tanaka.

  I grabbed for him just as a projectile moved past me, about three meters away, so dense it disturbed the air; its presence even before it landed was a tangible thing.

  The boom came from behind us. The patter of earth and dismembered flesh and ground-up gear. A flash of shrapnel pinged against my helmet.

  “Dietz, keep distance,” Tanaka said. “All of you, fan out. We’re sitting ducks.”

  Marino’s high, maniacal laughter came over the channel.

  “Same,” Vela said. “Same, Marino.”

  I kept pace with Tanaka. The sound of the guns was a physical force. Smoke swirled. The air roared. Rumbled. Groaned. Like something alive.

  “Air support incoming,” the CO said. “Take cover.”

  “Cover where?” Deathless howled.

  “Drop!” I said and thumped her back. I lay on my belly, rifle pointed ahead, as if it would do any good at all.

  Fighters streaked overhead as the rest of the squad lay flat. The best we could hope for was to avoid debris. The heavy guns changed their trajectory, lightning fast. Two fighters exploded in a blaze of black smoke and roiling fire.

  “Pull back to the rally point,” the CO said. “They want us to pull back and give air support some room.”

  “Could they have thought of that before?” Landon said.

  “Bullshit,” Vela muttered.

  “That’s six kilometers,” Tanaka said.

  “That’s the closest safe point for rally, possibly evac,” the CO said. “They can’t pull us out; way too hot here. The reds are running interference on our trackers. They can’t get an accurate bead on us.”

  “Copy that, sir,” Tanaka said. “We will—”

  That’s when we lost coms.

  Our heads-up displays cut out. The constant blue aurora at the bottom left of my left eye disappeared. My connection with the platoon channel, gone.

  “Tanaka?” I said aloud, to no one, because their helmets were still on.

  Tanaka pressed his helmet against Landon’s. Came over to me, did the same. When he put his helmet to mine, I could just hear him; mostly through the vibration his voice made.

  “Coms?”

  “Gone for me too,” I said.

  He was thinking a lot faster than me; another reason he was a squad leader and I wasn’t. I heard the DI’s voice in my head again, yelling about how I didn’t have two brain cells to rub together. Fuck him, yeah, but I heard it, still.

  Tanaka waved us all south, pointing in the direction we’d been headed before losing communications. We went after him, lunging over the bodies of the fallen. Ahead of us, a few stragglers did the same. The staggered march turned into a haphazard run as terror coiled through the ranks.

  Our air support circled back.

  A searing rain of fire dropped between us and the soldiers in front of us, cutting us off. The fire cooked the suits from the skins of the squads nearest us, licking greedily. I fell back on my ass.

  Sandoval flailed. His legs were on fire. I tackled him, rolling him across the ground like a sack of screaming meat. Our suits resisted fire, but this slick flame would not come off. Fire peeled away from him and crept up my hand. I tried to wipe it on the ground, but that only spread it; a slithering oil. Desperate, I clawed around for dirt to drown it in. Saw the open chest of a soldier nearby. I shoved my hand into the wound, dousing the flame. The soldier’s guts were still warm.

  When I turned back, Tanaka and Omalas were wrapping Sandoval in a Mylar blanket, snuffing out the fire. But all around us, fire still licked the sky, high and hot, feeding off the air itself. I couldn’t see Vela. Squinting into the flames, I spotted her beefy form, already consumed by the heat.

  Marino stood in front of the great blazing wall. He raised his rifle above his head and fired it in the air. Marino yanked off his helmet. Threw it into the flames like a great black football. “Fuck you!” he screamed. Spittle flecked his chin. “Fuck this! Fuck you!”

  I pushed up my broken visor. “Marino!”

  “Fuck you, too!”

  The others flipped up their visors. Tanaka yelled, “We’re cut off! Vela is down! Head—”

  “The only fucking way we can?” Marino cackled as the flames began to encircle us on a third side.

  “Move! Move!” I said. I helped Omalas with Sandoval. He seemed dazed more than anything; the fire had eaten through the first layer of his suit from his chest to his toes on his right side. I saw raw, pink flesh peeking through. I had no idea how bad the burns would be once we got his suit off.

  We stuck close together as we ran through the slim opening between the flames. The heat was intense. I closed up my helmet again as much as I could, instantly parched. My heart thrummed.

  More flaming pillars appeared ahead of us. The golden grass had caught fire, and burned steadily. Without coms, without our maps, we had no idea where we were. The oxygen in our s
uits was finite. If we didn’t get out of the smoke and heat we would suffocate and burn up.

  Tanaka swerved ahead, cut off by another blazing fire.

  Marino screamed, his own helmet gone. He huffed away from Tanaka, yelling, “This way! This way! Born in flame!”

  “Screw it,” I muttered, and went after him, gesturing to Omalas to follow my lead. If there was anyone crazy enough to find a way through this or die trying, it was Marino.

  I didn’t stop to see if anyone else followed us. Without coms, I didn’t technically have any orders from Tanaka or the CO that contradicted where I was headed. I guess you could argue I should have followed Tanaka, and maybe I could argue about that technicality at my court martial. Hope springs eternal.

  Marino darted over heaps of stone jutting through the grassy, burning fields. The ground sloped upward here. I was out of breath. Sandoval sagged in our arms. His right foot dragged.

  I pushed my visor up again, and Sandoval’s too. “Hey, hey,” I said, smacking his check. His eyelids fluttered.

  “Yeah! Yeah!” Marino stood atop the ridge, another fifteen meters up. Then he disappeared.

  “Marino?” I said. “Hold on! Omalas—”

  “I have him,” she said.

  I left Sandoval with her and scrambled up to the top of the ridge. The ridge fell off into a rocky, shallow canyon. Marino lay at the bottom of it, rifle in his lap. A lazy stream wended its way past him. Further ahead—thick copses of trees. I pivoted, gazing back the way we had come. Fire still raged below. The fighters no longer ranged across the blue, blue sky. The tremulous Martian city, rising like Oz from the golden prairie, spouted great gouts of flame. Fire ringed the towers, feathery things putting off plumes of sooty smog. Her smoke rose up forever.

  The rest of our squad struggled up the rise. Omalas and Sandoval, Tanaka, Landon, and Deathless. Behind us . . . nothing. After that bombing . . . there was no moaning or sobbing on the field. There were no whole people, no one capable of sound.

  Everything smelled of blood and smoke.

  I went down and helped Omalas drag Sandoval the last few meters to the top of the ridge.

  Tanaka joined us. “Let’s get down in the gully. We’re exposed up here.”

  We climbed down after Marino. Deathless slumped next to him. She yanked her helmet off, revealing nearly two fingers of dark brown hair. I wondered when the CO had stopped complaining about regulation haircuts.

  Omalas and I set Sandoval down along the waterline, figuring cold water might be soothing, if not exactly sterile. I searched my med pack and shot him full of antibiotics and painkillers.

  “We have to call for evac,” Sandoval said.

  “Our trackers should still work,” Deathless said. “Even with coms down, they can track us.”

  “Maybe.” Tanaka scanned the trees on the other side of the stream, rifle up. “Dietz, when you were on Mars, they disabled your tracker. For your squad, too. Then yours got removed.”

  “That’s what they told me,” I said.

  “Could have done it here, too,” he said.

  “They took mine out. I got ID’d by a civilian.”

  “They could still work?” Landon said. “If we sit tight here—”

  “That fire’s out of control,” Tanaka said.

  “The ridge might act as a firebreak. The stream, too. The city’s on fire now. It’ll create its own weather.” I raised my hand. “Wind is moving over us, toward the city. That means the fire will head away from us too.”

  “Anybody remember the evac point?” Deathless rubbed distractedly at her arms.

  “I do.” Omalas pointed across the stream. “Past the woods, across a bridge over a river. It was an open field on the map.”

  “They’ll tap into our trackers,” Deathless said.

  “If they work,” Tanaka said. “If everyone’s coms and trackers went out, they’ll expect us to rally there. They’ll send standard air pickup.”

  “Like they sent air support?” Landon’s sarcasm was thick.

  “War is messy. Logistics fucks up sometimes.” Tanaka, with the corporate line.

  “Easy for them,” Landon said. “They aren’t on the ground.”

  “Hydrate,” Tanaka said. “We’ll rest here a quarter hour and keep moving. Dietz, watch that wind?”

  “Sure.” I pulled off my helmet and strapped it to a carabiner hooked to my belt. I washed my gloved hands in the stream; my gloves were still covered in rotten innards and char. When they were clean, I pulled the gloves off and splashed water on my face. The cold hit me like a slap; I remembered what the woman had said to my father . . . who was she? Some Corporate Intellectual Property tough. The Nazis were high as balls, she’d said. I understood why. I wished I could take whatever they had taken—the future be damned.

  Omalas folded her legs and sat beside me. She pulled out a protein bar and offered me a hit from her water slug.

  “Thanks. You want to refill it here?”

  “Yes. I have tablets.”

  She meant iodine tabs. I’d half hoped for methamphetamines. Oh well.

  We all sat in silence, listening to the sound of the burning prairie. The exhaustion hit me. I wanted to keel over into the stream and never get up.

  “You all right?” I asked Omalas, which was a dumb question. None of us were all right, but the silence frightened me. The silence invited me to think.

  “They say you grow up in war, but only parts of you do. Other parts . . . they get suppressed, eroded.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Who can say? I have been fighting this war a long time. Once you begin to drop, time becomes a luxury, an outdated thing, like the idea of voting or equality or freedom that meant anything but freedom for the rich from the burdens they force the poor to carry for them.” It was the most I’d ever heard her speak.

  “Is that a quote from something?”

  She smiled without showing her teeth; a sad smile that never reached her flat black eyes. “No. Only a statement of truth.”

  Tanaka got us going again. Maybe he had some drugs we didn’t. He bent next to Sandoval. “You think you can march?”

  “I’m good. Good painkillers.”

  “Great. Need help?”

  “No, no. I’m good now.”

  Tanaka helped him up, and Sandoval limped forward. I hoped those painkillers would last until the evac point.

  “This is bullshit,” Deathless muttered, and I couldn’t disagree.

  All I had was, “You want to stay here?”

  She grumbled at me.

  “Marino?” Tanaka said. “I want you up here with me. Dietz? Watch our ass.”

  “And the wind.” I pointed at the fire.

  “And the wind.”

  It still blew toward the city. Small blessings.

  The seven of us hiked across the stream and into the trees, following worn paths. We came across a few abandoned structures; or, I hoped they were abandoned. Doors and windows were fixed tight. Parts of the fields had been burned. We found a paved road that wound toward our objective. From here I could just see the ripple of a wide river.

  “Split up,” Tanaka said. “Stick to either side. Sandoval, Marino, Omalas, with me. Dietz, Landon, get over there with Deathless.”

  Staying to the side of the road would make it easier to break for cover. Just like avoiding sticking close together on the field reduced our chances of getting blown up all at once, staying on opposite sides of the road ensured at least half of us might survive a mine blast.

  The world had gone silent. Nothing above us. We passed a few more residences, all boarded up. No smoke here. No barking dogs. Not even bird song.

  “More smoke.” Marino pointed over the trees. Great gouts of black made heavy plumes above the tree line.

  “Another city?” I said.

  “Ridge up here,” Tanaka said. “Deathless, run up and scout.”

  She forged ahead, lighter and nimbler than the rest of us. Outside the kill zone, s
he moved a lot faster.

  She headed back down to the road, said, “Couple of trains, looks like. Fighters must have hit them.”

  “Hope that wasn’t our evac.” Landon headed up the ridge too. I followed.

  We stood on the rise overlooking the flaming trains. A large vehicle on the track had halted the first train; a second train had backed up behind the first. The bodies inside writhed like shadows.

  “Why didn’t the second train turn around?” Marino said. “Dumb shits.”

  “Probably lost coms like we did,” I said. “I bet they were fleeing the city. They couldn’t turn around and go back. Maybe they thought they could bump the other train out.”

  “Dumb shits.” That explanation probably made Marino feel better. We all wanted civs to die because they were stupid, because they deserved it, not because we were the bad guys.

  Tanaka came up beside me. Marino spit and headed back down with the others. For a long moment, Tanaka and I watched the burning trains. There must have been a thousand people on those two trains, all charred, twisted wrecks now, like the vehicles they had tried to ride to safety.

  “Think they were . . . maybe soldiers?” I said.

  “No. Probably civs.”

  “This isn’t what I signed up for.” Paladin. Hero of the light. This wasn’t heroic at all, throwing ourselves at Martian artillery, blowing up regular people fleeing for their lives.

  “You ever see War of the Worlds?”

  “Sounds familiar.”

  “It’s about Martians invading Earth. But the original . . . my sister loved old media. Radio dramas. You know what that is?”

  I shook my head.

  “Like a movie, but just the words. The sounds. Like closing your eyes on the battlefield. People used to sit around these big wooden boxes, listening to this stuff. All you got was the voices. War of the Worlds got broadcast like it was a news report. Lot of people believed it. Went crazy. Thought giant Martians with tentacles were invading. Called the law. Totally freaked out.”

  “Like the Ebola riots in Europe, before Evecom.”

  “And the ShinHana Panic, back in ’75. Exactly.”

  I watched the burning train, not following his line of thought. “It’s easy to get confused when you’re scared,” I said. “Maybe they didn’t mean to blow up these trains. Thought they were something else.”