I am not a soldier.
Usually those words hold some comfort for me. In the rec-hall I repeat them over and over for hours on end while nursing an endless stream of bad beers alongside my squad.
I am not a soldier!
The words are a prayer, or maybe a nursery rhyme, and at night when it’s quiet they roll back and forth inside my head until I fall asleep.
I AM NOT A SOLDIER!
But standing in the ready-room, with my armor climbing up my legs and the klaxons blaring and the crimson emergency lights bathing everything in blood, the words were a roar growing louder and louder between my ears until finally—mercifully—my helmet closed over my face and I could let it all out in one long scream that the guys wouldn’t hear. They’d think I was cracking up, and I that’s one thing I could never live with. Because even more than I didn’t want to be a soldier, I didn’t want to let the guys down. I’d known one of them for a total of six months and the rest for half that, but they were already family. They were all I had left, now that Earth was gone.
A million emotions were tied up with that one fact—Earth was gone—memories and feelings I couldn’t afford to wade through right then, so I shoved them back to wherever it is they hide in my head and jerked my rifle off the rack. The gloves of the TTA-suit transmit tactile senses like texture and temperature just like a second skin—heck, better than my own skin—and the feel of the blocky grip of the VMR-1 in my hand was like a firm handshake from an old friend. But I swear to you, I am not a soldier.
The in-suit systems of my armor kicked in as I formed up with the rest of the squad, constellations of symbols and light flickering to life, my HUD pasting my view with glowing, translucent icons and status bars: the health status of my mates, distance to the bulkhead walls all around me, latest updates to our orders, and the ticking clock steadily marching towards drop-time. Smaller windows just within my peripheral vision show right, left and rear views.
A cool chime toned in my right ear—the armor letting me know it had completed the digital link with my neural port. Using half-a-dozen mental commands I flipped through the armor’s infrared, ultraviolet and x-ray imaging schemes, just to make sure they worked.
By then our NCO was pacing back and forth in front of us, giving one final inspection before we piled through the round portal behind him into the waiting drop-pod.
Rafael Quintana Carranza was the only real soldier in the whole group, and he had beat three of the other guys to the ground before we’d dropped the whole “Sergeant” act and just called him Boots like he wanted. Back on Earth—back when there was still an Earth—he pulled five tours in Nigeria with the 101st Airborne. Tall for a Mexican, he’s got a nose that looks like its been broken three or four times and a nasty scar across one cheek where some Nigerian douche-bag tried to add to his smile with machete—all of which was hidden by the flat, polished steel faceplate of his helmet.
Creepy things, those TTA-suits. There’s no viewport that you can see, no visor that lets you look a trooper in the eyes and read what he or she is thinking. The faceplate is completely opaque, and like the rest of the suit it’s painted over in a molecule-thin layer of nano-particles that act like a chameleon’s skin, blending in with any background. Basically making a guy invisible. Tiny cameras and sensors too small to see ring the helmet and feed data straight to the trooper. I had to admit it was a pretty slick system. Too bad it was made by the same alien crap-shooters who’d blown our home away.
“No use repeating your briefing again.” Boot’s voice came out cold and neutral, filtered by his armor’s comm-system. “You heard the big-brass. Whatever mierda lives down there dirt-side has intel we need, and they’re not giving it up. Not willingly, at least. We’re in this for the long haul. Winning over hearts and minds and all that jazz.”
Boots nodded at the scattered chuckles from some of the squad. I wasn’t laughing. My stomach was doing crunches and I was too busy trying not to puke. Inside my helmet, that would be a mess.
I am not a soldier. I am not a soldier.
Seeing that there were no more questions, Boots shouldered his VMR and made a quick, two-fingered gesture towards the open portal.
“Right then. Load up!”
Orbital insertions are a tactician’s worst nightmare. But you wouldn’t think so at first glance. Up front, the problem seems pretty straight forward: how do you get a bunch of jarheads from point A to point B alive and ready to fight? Simple, right?
Well, as always, first appearances are deceptive.
Problem number one is point A. It’s a ship—a big ship—orbiting roughly five hundred klicks above the planet surface. Now that ship might be trucking along at a good clip—maybe about seven thousand meters per second—but in space combat that’s basically a standstill. So there it is, a big, fat, thousand-meter sucker moving at a constant velocity with nowhere to run and nowhere to hide. Any idiot with something as primitive as a chemical rocket and a nuclear warhead can take a potshot at it—and believe me, you’d be amazed out how many idiots there are in this galaxy.
Problem number two: your group of ruggedly handsome troopers have got to pile into a smaller ship—and remember, in space smaller always equals less protection—and get down to point B, which is any old spot dirtside.
Now, gravity is already helping out, pulling you down to the surface; but whatever puny acceleration local gravity can cough up isn’t going to get you moving fast enough to avoid all of the really nasty things being shot at you: x-ray and gamma lasers, nano-swarm clouds, auto-drones, guided missiles, smart-flak and kinetic kill devices . . . you get the idea. And your tiny drop-pod has to travel through five hundred kilometers of this with nothing to hide behind but a few paltry clouds. Maybe. If the weather is cooperating. All of this means you have to be moving fast. Damn fast. Gravity just isn’t enough.
So the drop-pod doesn’t just undock from its big carrier ship. Oh no. It gets fired from a launch tube, which is actually just a nice military euphemism for ‘really big rail-gun’. By the time the drop-pod exits the ship it’s traveling at almost relativistic speeds—something like 0.001c or 300,000 meters per second. At that rate, you’d be ramming face-first into the dirt after just one second—fast enough to avoid most of the nasty things flying at you . . . but also fast enough to separate all your atoms into their constituent particles. So, obviously there are still some issues to work out.
Every void space in the drop-ship (and yes, that includes the troopers’ void spaces) is filled with a nano-gel that forms a semi-solid, oxygen-permeable foam that stabilizes the ship’s interior during acceleration and deceleration.
Ok, sorry for posting this so late. This is the beginning of a short story concept I've been brewing on for quite some time. A few things to keep in mind while reading it: 1) You're not supposed to know why the main character doesn't think he's a soldier yet. It'll come. I promise. 2) I realize that the second section of the story may go directly against what I was telling David about info-dumps. Give me your opinions as to whether it seems too much like an info-dump, or whether the narration is active enough to keep it interesting. 3) I know it ends abruptly. Sorry.
Questions:
1) This is the first time I've tried 1st person. Does it work? Any problems that you see?
2) Give feedback like Colton said to on his recent post
3) General Impressions
Ok, sorry for posting this so late. This is the beginning of a short story concept I've been brewing on for quite some time. A few things to keep in mind while reading it: 1) You're not supposed to know why the main character doesn't think he's a soldier yet. It'll come. I promise. 2) I realize that the second section of the story may go directly against what I was telling David about info-dumps. Give me your opinions as to whether it seems too much like an info-dump, or whether the narration is active enough to keep it interesting. 3) I know it ends abruptly. Sorry.
Questions:
1) This is the first time I've tried 1st person. Does it work? Any problems that you see?
2) Give feedback like Colton said to on his recent post
3) General Impressions
