Earth Unaware (First Formic War) (28 page)

It was the tenth field exercise in as many days, and Wit had no intention of letting up.

He had devised all kinds of different scenarios: rescue operations, refugee protection, urban warfare, demolition, counterinsurgency measures—each with its own different cultural consideration, terrain, and enemies. One day he’d tell them they were being dropped into a dry mountain valley in Tadzhikistan. The next day they were being dropped at a beach in New Guinea with nothing but jungle as far as the eye could see. The idea was to train for every contingency and enemy.

“I count five guards around the perimeter,” said Chi-won. “But there are probably others we can’t see with the satellite. I say we go thermal from here on in.”

He meant switching their helmet cams to detect heat signatures. “Agreed,” said Wit. “What else?”

“There are more of the enemy inside,” said Pinetop. “We need a floor plan.”

“Coming up,” said Lobo.

A three-dimensional schematic of the structure appeared on Wit’s display. “If you were holding hostages, where would you keep them?” Wit asked.

“Away from windows,” said Chi-won. “Terrorists prefer to keep hostages close, and they’re terrified of snipers. A centralized room is best, probably on the second floor since there’s no basement or attic. And the stairwell can easily be defended. If they were going to hide a hostage, I’d say they’d do it here.”

A blinking dot appeared on a room on Wit’s floor plan.

“Other ideas?” asked Wit.

The men briefly discussed other possibilities but everyone agreed that Chi-won’s assessment was probably accurate.

“Now what?” asked Wit.

“We could send in a peeker and scope out the interior,” said Pinetop.

Peekers were small, near-silent hover drones that carried a through-wall radar. Land one on a roof or a wall, and its signal processing could detect any movement on the other side.

Wit voiced no objection. Pinetop took a peeker from his backpack and flew it upward through the trees using his HUD. They all watched the vid coming from the peeker as it flew high over the meadow and settled on the building’s roof. Three minutes later, they had confirmed Chi-won’s assumption: The hostage was indeed being held on the second floor in the centrally located room.

“Pinetop, you take point,” said Wit. “From here on in, I’m a grunt. You’re in charge.”

Pinetop responded without hesitation, giving out orders to everyone. His instructions were clear, thorough, and intelligent, as if he had been planning his strategy for months.

They advanced up the slope quickly, fanning out, rifles at the ready, approaching the meadow from multiple angles. Thermal imaging revealed three enemy guards hiding in the forest, but the MOPs took these out easily. Their P87 rifles fired almost silently, and the three enemy guards dropped, their dampening suits stiff.

The MOPs crouched at the tree line in the shadows. The guards in the meadow hadn’t noticed the takedown and continued to patrol the perimeter without any sign of alarm. One of the guards walked within a few feet of their position, and Chi-won leaped out of the underbrush and hit the man with a spider pad. The man’s suit stiffened, and Chi-won dragged him back into the darkness.

Four down.

“There’s too much open ground between us and the building,” said Pinetop. “We’ll sniper the rest.”

They extended the barrels of their rifles and made adjustments to the weapons for longer-range fire. Wit put his rifle to his shoulder and blinked a command in his HUD that caused the arms, shoulders, and upper back of his body armor to stiffen. This minimized the slight movements in his hands and made his upper body as steady as a tripod, greatly enhancing the accuracy of his shots. The computer then highlighted each of the targets on Wit’s display. Seven guards total, one for each of them.

Wit watched his display as, one by one, the targets were marked with the name of the MOP who had selected it for takedown. Wit chose the last unselected target.

Pinetop gave the order. The MOPs all fired, and the seven guards went down.

After that it was a matter of following Pinetop’s instructions. They rushed forward and stormed the building. The enemy combatants were exactly where the computer told them they would be. The peeker, which was still attached to the side of the house, warned them whenever new threats charged toward them from elsewhere in the house, giving Wit and his team plenty of time to seek cover or move into a position to neutralize the enemy.

Wit made every shot count, getting up the stairs just behind the others, stepping over the enemy that had already fallen. Calinga was waiting for them in the room. The last enemy guard, who was taking his role as a terrorist rather seriously, attempted to use Calinga as a human shield. But the advancing MOPs fired in unison, and five spider rounds hit the terrorist’s helmet in nearly the same spot. The man’s suit went stiff, and he released Calinga. He didn’t even bother dropping to the floor as was the rule of the game. It was all over at that point.

“About time you got here,” said Calinga. “It’s no fun being the hostage. I don’t get a weapon, and they wouldn’t even give me something to read.”

When they got outside, Wit ended the exercise. He blinked the command to unfreeze everyone’s suits and had them all gather in the meadow for a debriefing, both MOPs and terrorists alike. The men sat in a wide circle all around him under the moonlight.

“What did we learn?” Wit asked.

“That Calinga makes a terrible hostage,” said Deen, who had played a terrorist. “He wouldn’t stop whining. We almost shot him to shut him up.”

The men laughed.

“I almost shot myself,” said Calinga. “Boring as hell, this crew.”

The men laughed again.

“Here’s what I learned,” said Wit. “Seven MOPs prevailed against twenty-four equally trained commandos. Why? Because we’re better soldiers? Because we’re smarter? Faster? No. We won for two reasons: One, you bad guys were sloppy. You weren’t taking proper cover. We picked you off way too easily.”

“We were giving you the real thing,” said Deen. “Terrorists are always sloppy.”

“Don’t give me the real thing,” said Wit. “Give me you, one of the finest trained, most intelligent soldiers I know. Be merciless. I don’t want realism. I want worse than realism. I want a hundred times more difficult than realism. Do everything in your power to annihilate us. That way, when the bullets are real, when our lives are on the line, we will do our duty with exactness. We will never lose. I should have seen nothing when we approached this compound. You should have been completely invisible to me and the satellite. You should have killed us before we left the trees. Why didn’t you?”

“You were with the new guys,” said Deen. “We thought we’d make it a little easier for them.”

“Do you think they need any hand-holding?” asked Wit. “Do you think that just because they’re new to this unit that they’re not good enough or experienced enough to take you at your best? If so, you’re in for the surprise of your life tomorrow when we do this again. From here on out, we pull no punches. If you lose, it’s because you screwed up and were bested and not because you
let
someone win.”

“I was actually trying,” said one of the guards. “Chi-won jumped out of the bushes so fast, I nearly pissed myself.”

The men laughed.

“Good,” said Wit. “I’m glad you only
nearly
pissed yourself. Had you actually done so your suit might have short-circuited and given you quite the shock.”

“Smoked sausage,” said Deen, to another round of laughter.

“From here on out,” said Wit, “you act as if your life is on the line. No more going easy. No more pretending that the enemy is inferior or less intelligent than you. Which brings me to the second reason why you failed. We MOPs had better tech. The enemy had older rifles, no computer assistance, no satellites, no peekers, no thermal vision. This was a tech war, and we won because of our equipment. Pinetop, if I had stripped you of all of your gear, could you have taken the hostage?”

“I don’t think so, sir.”

“Why not?”

“I’d be unarmed.”

“So you’re only an effective soldier if I arm you? You’re only good if I give you better equipment?”

Pinetop hesitated. “No, sir. It’s just more difficult. If I had been unarmed, I would have taken down one of the guards and confiscated his weapon. Then I could have picked off the others.”

“And what if you didn’t know how to operate the enemy’s weapon?” said Wit. “What if it was tech you had never seen before?”

“Then I’d be in a pickle, sir.”

“So you would have given up?”

“No, sir. I would just have a harder time of it. I’d need to devise ways to beat my enemy using what little resources were at my disposal.”

“Such as?”

“The forest could supply me with spears, for example.”

Deen laughed. “Spears? Against twenty-four armed men holding a defensive position?”

“Does that seem unlikely to you, Deen?” asked Wit.

Deen saw that no one else was laughing. “Forgive me, sir, but that sounds a touch impossible, doesn’t it?”

Wit stared at him for ten long seconds. “Are you a MOP, Deen?”

“Yes, sir. To the core, sir. Absolutely.”

“Then I expect you to take down twenty-four armed men, using only a spear. I expect you to take down a thousand men with a toothpick. We are not soldiers until we know how to go stark naked against a fully armed enemy and kill him.”

Deen nodded, humbled. “Yes, sir.”

Wit turned to the others. “We have become too reliant on our tech. Who’s to say we will always have the technological advantage? What if there were an enemy with capabilities and weapons far beyond our own? Do we give up?” He waited for a response. “I said, do we give up?”

The men shouted in unison, “No, sir!”

“This is an inevitability, gentlemen. Sooner or later we will face a threat whose tech surpasses our own. Or we will face an enemy who figures out how to completely neutralize our tech. Weapons, communication, GPS, drones, rifles, explosives, everything. Let’s figure out how to fight them no matter
what
they do and no matter
how
hard it is.” He paused, coming to a decision. “From here on out, we will also train for missions without tech. Zero. Then we’ll train for missions without gunpowder. Then we’ll train for missions in which the enemy can always see us. Whatever the situation is, we will always be at the severe disadvantage. It’s time we reminded ourselves what makes us PCs and MOPs. It is not the chips inside our rifles. It is the gray matter between our ears. The enemy may outgun us, but they will never outthink us.” He turned to the six MOPs with whom he had taken the compound. “Gentlemen, leave your rifles and tech here. Carry only a pouch of spider pads. These will serve as your spears. Wear only your dampening suits. No helmets. Head into the hills, no farther than three miles. In two hours, twenty-four soldiers equipped with all the tech we possess will come hunt you down and kill you unless you kill them first.”

The six MOPs stood and began removing their gear.

“And Deen,” said Wit, turning to the man. “I’d like you to go with them. You may doubt your own abilities, but I don’t. I will be coming for you personally. Take me down before I find you.”

Deen stood and smiled, pleased for the chance to redeem himself. “Thank you, sir.”

The MOPs ran away from the group at a sprint into the forest. Deen ran after them, hopping over the underbrush at the tree line and disappearing under the cover of trees.

CHAPTER 13

Files

Lem looked through the mining reports in the cargo bay and tried his best to appear pleased. The crew chief was beside him, smiling, waiting for Lem’s praise. By the look of the reports, the man deserved plenty of praise indeed. The numbers were impressive. The scoopers were bringing in so much metal from the dust cloud that the men couldn’t smelt it into cylinders fast enough. Iron-nickel, cobalt, magnesium, all the big-money metals. Thousands of tons of it already. It was more than Lem could have hoped for. Yet Lem’s mind was so plagued at the moment by El Cavador and the files that they had stolen from the ship’s computers that he couldn’t even enjoy the good news.

“Hard to believe, isn’t it?” said the crew chief. “I’ve been in this business for twenty years, Mr. Jukes, and I’ve never seen anything like this. This is the fastest I’ve ever brought in ferros.”

Ferros, or ferromagnetic metals, the most valuable of minerals extracted from asteroids.

“The scoopers are working well, I take it?” said Lem.

“It’s like trolling for fish, Mr. Jukes. We stick out the magnetized scoopers, move the ship back and forth through the dust cloud, and when we bring the scoopers back in, they’re teeming with ferro particles. My whole career has been digging and scraping and blasting away at rock to get metal up out of a mine, but this glaser turns that whole model on its head. Now we blast the rock to dust, wave some magnets in the cloud, and the minerals come to us.” He laughed and shook his head. “Damndest thing I ever saw.”

“Yes, yes. This is all very impressive.”

“We picked the right asteroid for it, too,” said the crew chief. “It’s no wonder those free miners were camped here. This rock was the mother lode. All kinds of high-value metals, and plenty of them to go around. Most miners see a rock this good once every few years or so. I got to hand it to you, Mr. Jukes, you picked one helluva rock to blow up.”

Lem was only half listening. “Yes, wonderful. Well, keep up the good work. Is there anything you need?”

“More people,” said the crew chief. “This is a research vessel, so we’re shorthanded. Our boys smelting the dust and making the cylinders are already working two shifts.”

“How many do you need?”

“Another ten would work wonders.”

“I’ll have Chubs send some people down.”

“Thank you, Mr. Jukes.” He pulled off his hat and scratched at his head, looking hesitant. “Now, you’re sure you don’t want us to load up a few quickships? We’ll get a much bigger haul if we send some of these cylinders straight on to Luna.”

“No,” said Lem. “I don’t want to send anything back ahead of us. Once we load the cargo bays, we’ll pull out.”