Goddammit, I said ’battle-space’ again. The Skipper would kick my ass for that.
I trusted Vicky, of course, and I was going to keep an eye on Third because, whether Bang-Bang was competent or not, they were my Marines. Cano…well, Billy was Billy, and if he wasn’t the best platoon leader I’d ever encountered, he was going to have to be good enough. And Freddy was competent, if uninspired, and I at least trusted him enough to let Vicky watch out for him.
If the makeshift company didn’t split exactly like a well-choreographed dance routine, they at least managed to make the move close enough to each other that the enemy wasn’t able to focus fire on any one element. And I found I couldn’t focus my eyes on any one of the enemy suits in particular. They faded to ghosts in my peripheral vision, a secondary problem beside the movements of my own Marines.
Was this what the Skipper saw when he led Delta into combat? Because it was uncomfortable as hell, something akin to that mild feeling of motion sickness that tugged at my gut when I was travelling fast in one direction and looked aside just far enough to where my peripheral vision could pick up the forward motion while my eyes were mostly fixed to the side. I had the terrible intuition it would fade if I gave too much thought to it, so I just shoved the mild nausea aside and let the image form an active map in front of me, using the data from the display and the feedback along my interface jacks, the intuitions that were actually data flowing back along the lines into my brain.
The gestalt of all that data input was like a new sense, a spatial awareness of where everyone around me was, their trajectories, their status. It forced me to withdraw from the more immediate sensations of my suit’s footpads slamming into the pavement, of the pavement transitioning to clay, then sod, and the subtle difference in the sound and vibration as the surface changed. The High Guard suits were everywhere, and if they didn’t happen to be shooting at me, it was only because they were still too involved with the group defending the earthen steppe nearly a kilometer up ahead of me, their backs to a wall of dirt and rock, their Boomers arrayed in a semi-circle like old paintings I’d seen of early settlers on the frontiers of Earth defending against raids from the natives.
And if the endless ballet of move and counter-move on the ground and in the sky above us wasn’t confusing and distracting enough, the very air seemed to crackle with the constant discharge of energy, the static electricity of hundreds of electron beams and plasma blasts and coil gun shots crisscrossing in grid-square lines of destruction. The helmet optics did their best to minimize the flare and flash, to make them just one more bit of information rather than the apocalyptic web of death I knew from unhappy experience of a battle such as this outside my suit. But there was too much of it, too much pure energy in the air to be survivable, it seemed.
And many didn’t survive. I saw IFF transponders blacking out on my display and forced myself to think of them only as game counters, not people I’d met, Marines I’d worked beside for months. Jurgensen went down from Third squad, Third Platoon…my platoon. I didn’t see him die, didn’t personally witness the damage the electron accelerator did to his armor, didn’t hear his final scream, but I could imagine it all. It was present in my head, a replacement for the sterile and impersonal disappearance of the vital blue line beside his name on the display.
I was going to have to write the notification to his parents.
Notifications. They’re not together. Cleveland Metroplex. Both of them non-workers on the dole their whole lives. But that doesn’t mean they loved him any the less.
The thought was almost clinical, distant in a way that frightened me. I was planning out the messages in a small compartment of my thoughts, like it was a job I had to do, one more chore to be accomplished after the battle, like clean-up and PMCS. It wasn’t that I didn’t care about Jurgensen, it was simply an overload of information, too much input for me to process it all, much less allow myself an emotional reaction to any of it. Vicky could have died before my eyes in that very moment and I wouldn’t have had the luxury to grieve until the battle had ended.
She didn’t, and neither did I. I hadn’t died yet, in this one, solipsistic reality where I wouldn’t die, where I couldn’t, where all the twists and turns of reality conspired to keep me alive. It was easy to believe in the wild idea now. I hadn’t died when the wild shots from the street had hit our house, Momma had. I hadn’t died in the desert crossing, Poppa and Anton had. I hadn’t died crossing in front of that train in the Underground, the cartel enforcer had. I hadn’t died at Brigantia or in all those battles after, and maybe I couldn’t. But even in my crazy, combat-stress-induced fantasy where the universe revolved around me, I could be hurt and I knew how badly it sucked, so I still dodged and moved and hopped and shot and maybe prayed just a little.
One of Vicky’s Marines went black, then another from Manley’s platoon just before they reached our defensive lines, but the second they did, something shifted. I’d had different trainers call it different things: the Flux, Momentum, the Tide, the Big Mo. But you could tell when it happened, when the battlefield began to tilt in one direction or another. Maybe it was just adding
