Within moments it had ended, and as I crawled back to Megan, the field had gone quiet again.
“You have the enemy on your suit,” she said.
“How can you tell in night vision?”
“I turned it off.”
I sighed and slumped to the bottom of our hole, pulling off my helmet. “He angered me. There were nine more out there.”
“Eleven. They will come in force tomorrow.” She helped me wipe the Russian’s blood and tissue off my armor and popped her helmet to kiss me. “Little Murderer.”
At sunset the next day the booming of plasma cannons sounded well to our southeast, and we didn’t know what to make of it because there shouldn’t have been fighting in that direction. Megan shrugged. Our light amplification kicked in after the sun went down and the landscape again turned varying shades of green, the only sound coming from a light breeze that moaned as it blew through crevices in the debris fields. I shivered. I knew they would come, and still had not gotten used to waiting, defending, having time to ponder the fact that within hours we would both be discharged and gone. Megan wrote with a finger in the dirt.
I love you
.
Movement from the distant rubble caught my eye and I
watched as a line of about a hundred Russians crawled toward us, keeping to cover as much as possible.
Finally it had begun
, I thought. Either way, it will all be over soon.
“Contact,” I said. “Approximately one hundred infantry, northeast.”
Megan clicked in. “Grenadiers. Faith.”
The popping of grenade launchers broke the stillness and flashes blossomed in the rubble, sending flechettes to scatter among the advancing enemy. One of the Russians screamed as his armor smoked under thermal gel and he rose to charge our line. Megan cut him down.
The Russians yelled then, rising from their cover to sprint forward in a mass. “
Pobieda! Ooo-Rah!
” And all of us opened up.
When it was over, Megan slapped my shoulder and I crept from my hole, crouch-walking through the rubble. I drew my pistol. The bodies were easy to see, their dying warmth forcing my vision kit to switch to infrared, and I stopped to pump a single flechette into the head of each one. An hour later I crawled back into my hole, exhausted.
“I can’t see anymore, Megan. I am so tired.”
But before she answered we both heard a rumbling—faint at first, then growing louder by the second.
“APC’s moving up the main road from the north,” a voice announced. One of our sisters had volunteered to man a forward outpost, hidden in a mound of rubble. “Ten of them. Multiple infant—” An explosion lit the distant sky, cutting her transmission short.
“Rocket teams on the line,” said Megan. “Disperse in forward positions then hold for the order. When I give it, APC’s and rockets open fire.”
“Ten isn’t right,” I said to Megan.
“I know.”
“Where are the rest? There should be over ten thousand infantry, and thousands of vehicles.” Fear had almost overwhelmed me by then, forcing my voice to crack and making me wonder how much longer it would be before I ran.
“I know,” Megan repeated. “It makes no sense. The rest may be moving on our flanks. We’ll know soon, Catherine.”
We watched as almost a hundred of our sisters whispered past in groups of two or three, heading northeast, each of them carrying a three-shot antitank weapon. The weapons could penetrate APC frontal armor—as long as they were fired within eight hundred meters of their target.
It was suicide
, I thought,
but these girls were new, hadn’t spoiled
. Anyone who waited until an armored vehicle was within eight hundred meters and fired a rocket would announce to the enemy, “Here I am, shoot back at me.” Anyone who got that close could die before they got a chance to fire; I found myself happy I wasn’t sixteen again, glad to not be a fearless idiot who hadn’t learned the real lessons of the field, an idiot who hadn’t been called the Little Murderer and who hadn’t learned not to volunteer to hunt vehicles.
“Contact,” one of them reported. “APC’s sighted, about two thousand enemy infantry dispersed behind them. Range, nine hundred meters.”
Megan clicked off her safety.
“Seven hundred meters,” the same voice announced. But we saw the vehicles now, lumbering things, whose wheels mesmerized as they bounced up and down to trace a path over chunks of concrete and boulders, their turrets moving back and forth like a single eye, searching. Megan
waited a few minutes and before the girl announced the five-hundred-meter mark, she gave the order.
“Faith.”
Our APCs lit the night with plasma cannons, and I flinched when antitank rockets shrieked toward their targets. The Russians returned fire instantly. Plasma clouds expanded over the area where our rocket teams had hidden and to me it looked like only a few of them had managed to get off a shot.
“God…” said Megan.
“Five APC’s wiped,” someone else announced, “Five inbound.”
A pink ball of plasma engulfed one of our broken-down APCs and my suit temperature jumped.
“APC one,
out
.”
Suddenly, a final rocket screamed from the rubble in front of us and slammed into the glacis of the lead Russian vehicle, the missile’s shaped charge steaming through its armor in a jet of molten metal. The vehicle shuddered and then exploded.
We cheered at the sight and Megan gave the signal, laughing. All of us opened fire. My tracers streaked out in bright flashes, and I guided them into pockets of the enemy while tears of panic streamed down my face. The Russians fell. At first we held them in place, their vehicles pulling behind ruined structures and their soldiers hugging whatever cover they could. But then we heard the deeper rumble of approaching armor, a basso throbbing that reached a crescendo when two Russian tanks crested the rubble in front of us.
Our second APC disappeared in a cloud of plasma, and with a scream, the Russians charged.
“Fall back,” said Megan.
I leapt from the hole and began zigzagging rearward. Before they left, the men had dug a second perimeter farther to the rear, which covered the Tamdybulak road intersection where our last APC hid under thermal tarps and camouflage netting. I made it to the next hole and jumped in. After taking the time to reload, Megan checked her status board.
“Three hundred of us left.”
I grunted and snapped a new hopper onto my shoulder, trying not to show my terror. “These are
tanks
, Megan.”
The Russians pushed toward us again and I screamed. There were no shafts for us to drop into and I heard the armor of my sisters pop loudly when plasma bloomed around them. None of the Russian troops were visible. Only the two tanks advanced, crunching over the wreckage of our previous positions and firing plasma bursts. Suddenly, a pair of rockets jumped from the ruins of a house near the closest tank and hit the vehicle’s turret. The impact caused a release of plasma, which melted it from the inside out, but which also consumed the area from where the shot had come. There was no cheering that time.
“Fall back,”
I pleaded with Megan.
She slapped on a new hopper and ducked when a plasma shell screamed over our hole. “That is not permitted.”
“
I don’t care
!” The terror had begun to consume me. I couldn’t think anymore, except that it was time to run—run
with
her while we still had the chance. There would be no discharge for me; I had decided it in that moment, knew that something in me had broken so that even if my
mind wanted the end, wanted the honor of a quick death, my body would have rebelled and done whatever it could to evade the inevitable, and that in such a struggle there would be no overcoming instinct; instinct would win. Life, for whatever reason, was now too important.
“No.” Megan pointed her carbine at me, and when she spoke her voice shook. “I will kill you, Catherine. Do not spoil here, we need you.”
Somehow, I turned to face the line again and raised my carbine slowly, the barrel clicking against blocks of concrete as my hands shook. The remaining tank headed straight for us. Both of us aimed for its sensors or any exposed system, and squeezed off several bursts before Megan gave our last APC the signal.
“APC three,” she said.
The Russian tank erupted in flame when our APC scored a direct plasma hit, and we waited, expecting the rest of their forces to charge. Then we waited some more. A haze covered the battlefield, obscuring everything beyond a hundred meters out, and it felt as though the universe had transformed around us, bringing us to a place that wasn’t Earth at all but some other planet where fog ruled everything. Only the burning tank made noise, its expanding ceramic plates popping off one at a time and water lines hissing as their fluid drained to the ground. But eventually even those noises stopped. Everything had gone quiet. None of my sisters spoke over the net and when I poked my head up there was no sign of movement from the positions around us. Still we waited, as the silence fed me with the thoughts of terror, until I was at the point of jumping from the hole, screaming with rage because there was nothing I could do to stop the whispering, a
voice assuring me that something was wrong and that this was all a trick. When the sound of Russian APCs came faintly from the northeast, I cringed; half of me expected them to open fire at any moment, but they didn’t and the noise faded until eventually it vanished.
Megan stood and I shouted.
“Get down!”
“I’m getting a transmission—on command net,” she said. “Our sisters, the Second Elite Division is pushing northward, Shymkent retaken with no resistance, forces pushing toward Karatobe, to our east. Enemy air-cover nil. Russian units routing en masse.”
We flinched at the sonic boom of aircraft as they flew close overhead, toward the retreating Russians.
“That’s what happened to our reinforcements,” I said. “Our second division moved back to Shymkent to attack from there rather than come to
us
when we retreated two days ago. They surprised the Russian flank.”
Megan nodded and motioned for me to be quiet. “It’s much bigger than that, Catherine. Division estimates that Tenth Mountain will be back in Astana within a month, in Pavlodar to retake the mines a month after that. Third Marine, Eighty-Second Airborne and One Hundred and First Airborne will be pulled off the line for refit in Bandar as Spanish and French units move up.”
“And us?” I asked.
“We hold here.”
She popped her helmet with a hiss. I didn’t know what to say, and popped mine, my tears now a reflection more of relief than fear. Wind blew the smell of battle away from us and I almost didn’t notice it when the three-girl APC crew joined us to begin searching among the wreckage for survivors. It didn’t take long. All our sisters were
dead and Megan and I dove to the ground when a last Russian soldier detonated a plasma mine, its blast catching the other three girls to incinerate them in an instant.
I had never seen Megan lose control, but when the field had gone quiet again she dropped to her knees and screamed. I couldn’t get her to stop. Her body shook in my hands as she kept yelling until finally her voice died with the effort, fading into sobs so that finally I understood what she was saying, over and over.
Nonsense
.
Before I could respond, new orders crawled across my display.
Surviving Elements of First Elite fall back to Uchkuduk for reassignment or discharge
.
I didn’t know if Megan saw them. “They want us to fall back to Uchkuduk,” I said. “It is our time. I will not go, Megan. I won’t die.”
“I don’t want this anymore,” she said, nodding. “Don’t want the Lily.”
At first the words were a shock, and the thought that I should kill her for cowardice popped into my mind. Instead I grinned. “Come with me.”
“Wait,” said Megan, just before she started laughing.
“What’s so funny?”
She wiped a tear from her cheek. “They never told us—told us what this war was about. And we never asked.”
“It was not our place,” I said. “We do not need to know.”
“No,” said Megan, “we do not need to know. But we
deserve
to. We know how you earned your name, but don’t you want to know why? It can be your last name: Catherine Murderer. Why did we murder, was it for the mines alone? What could have been the calculus behind that kind of decision?”
I began to feel uncomfortable, not knowing where she was going. This was a new Megan. She spoke of things forbidden and of not wanting to be a Lily, and I sensed that I needed to choose my words carefully, unsure of what they would do because I had begun to wonder, what effect would the spoil have on
her
? “I don’t understand.”
Megan grinned and reached out, sliding her fingers over my neck ring. She kissed me. “You have hair now—growing through the remains of your thermal block.”
“We have not had time for a cut,” I said.
“It’s beautiful.” She looked westward and sighed when a red message flashed over our display, Division demanding an immediate response to their order. “They’ll find us. We can’t run forever, it is not permitted and they hunt down anyone who refuses their discharge. I love you.”
“I still don’t understand. What are you saying?”
“I want to run with you. West. I want to live, because I have no more faith—no faith in war and no faith that we’ll make it. But maybe
you
do. Now you can be the Lily. I never told you what Mother said to me that day in training, when she struck me with her cane.