Terms of Enlistment (21 page)

She waits for the reply, and by now we’ve all given up trying to be subtle about listening in.

“Copy that, Lieutenant. If I lose another trooper on the way, you can be sure that I’ll pay you a visit as soon as they stitch me back together. Bravo One-One
out
.”

She taps the comm channel button on the inside of her wrist with emphasis.

“We are to exfil to the civic plaza for medevac, on foot. They don’t want to risk another bird. ETA on the drop ship is ten minutes.”

I look around at the remnants of our squad. We have two dead bodies, Sergeant Fallon and the drop ship pilot can’t walk, and the crew chief is still unconscious. Hansen won’t be carrying anyone, either. The five of us who are still on our feet will each need to carry someone. We’re in no shape for a fight anymore.

“Well, let’s get to it, then,” Corporal Jackson says. She shoulders her rifle and bends down to pick up the unconscious crew chief.

“Grayson, you take the sergeant. Let’s get going. If we miss this ride, we’re well and truly fucked.”

I don’t want to go back out into the street, but I don’t want to stay here, either. Once the PRC comes alive after sunrise, and people start collecting the bodies of their friends, any soldier in the area will be fair game for a public barbecue.

“Ten minutes,” Sergeant Fallon says as I help her up and drape her arm over my shoulder. “Don’t be stopping to smell the flowers.”

“Don’t worry about that,” I say.

Encumbered by Sergeant Fallon’s armored bulk, I am out of breath at the end of the first block. We’re running down the street that leads straight back to the civic plaza, stopping on every intersection to catch our collective breath and check the cross streets for enemy presence.

The shooting starts again when we’re a block and a half away from the building where we had holed up. Up ahead, at the nearest intersection, someone leans around a corner and starts popping off shots at our ragged little column. I’m in the lead with Sergeant Fallon, and her bulk on my right side prevents me from using my rifle to shoot back on the run. I sway to the side and lower the sergeant to the ground in the cover of a doorway, but by the time I have my rifle in my hands, the shooter at the corner has disappeared. Then I hear gunshots behind us, from the intersection we had just cleared a few moments ago.

“Watch the corners,” Corporal Jackson shouts.

I sight my rifle and fire back. My flechettes are kicking up concrete dust, but the shooter disappeared around the corner as soon as I brought my rifle to bear. If we’re going to be harassed like this all the way back to the civic plaza, we’ll get there in a few hours at best. They know where we are and where we’re going, and they’re smart enough to avoid a stand-up fight.

“Shoot on the run,” Corporal Jackson says. “Switch to full-auto and hose down the corners when they pop their heads out. Monitor your ammo and reload when we pause to take a breath.”

Our progress along the street is painfully slow. Sergeant Fallon is doped up, but conscious, and she’s assisting me by using her rifle with her unencumbered right hand. Others in my squad are carrying dead weight. We go from block to block, rushing across intersections as fast as we can, and pausing after every dash to reload our weapons and rest for a few seconds. I parcel out the spare magazines I have left from Lieutenant Weaving’s stash to the rest of the squad. Firing bursts makes the enemy keep their heads down, but our ammo stock is dwindling fast.

As we get closer to the civic plaza, the shooting gets more intense. Where before there were individuals taking potshots at us, now there are groups of three and four working together, like infantry fire teams. It seems that everybody with a working firearm is out on the street tonight, and they all know which way we’re going.

I’m in the front for a change, stumbling along with Sergeant Fallon by my side. We’ve turned into a symbiotic organism, a slow-moving creature with three working legs and two rifles. As we come up on the intersections, she covers the right side of our frontal arc, and I cover the left. Without the aiming marker projected onto my helmet display, I wouldn’t be hitting anything. As it is, I’m not wildly accurate firing my rifle from the crook of my arm as we’re ambling along, but it’s enough to make the other guys duck back behind corners. I’m firing three-round bursts, and my rifle is down to a hundred rounds, with two magazines remaining in the pouches on my harness.

“Quarter klick to go,” Sergeant Fallon says over the squad channel as we hunker down for a rest after dashing across yet another intersection. Whenever we walk up to the intersection, people shoot at us from alley mouths and building corners, and every time we cross a major street, the fire from our left and right gets twice as dense as we offer the crowd a clear line of fire from four sides. Standard infantry practice is to pop smoke grenades before dashing across, but we’ve popped our last smoke a few hundred yards back. Now we’re just relying on the laminate of our battle armor, and the knowledge that most black market small arms can’t pierce our suits easily.

In running shoes, I can cover two hundred and fifty meters in well under a minute. Right now, it might as well be two hundred and fifty miles. We’re taking fire from every alley and side street along the way. I fire a burst at a building corner up ahead where someone with a rifle just popped off two shots at our column. The shooter pulls back the moment he sees my muzzle swing towards him, and my salvo hits nothing but dirty concrete. Still, I mash the trigger again, and again, sending two more bursts into the space where his head was just a moment ago.

“Grayson, you got any grenades left?” Sergeant Fallon asks. Her voice sounds weak.

“Just two rubber rounds,” I say.

“Well, fuck. I’m just about out, too.”

As she says this, she aims her rifle at an alley mouth to our right and pulls the trigger. I didn’t even see anyone there, but as her burst tears into the darkness, I hear a cry of pain and a shouted exclamation. Then the bolt of Sergeant Fallon’s rifle locks back on an empty magazine.

“Sling it and take this,” I say, and pull the pistol out of my harness. She lets go of the rifle, which remains suspended muzzle-down by her side, and seizes the pistol.

“Where’d you get that cap gun?” she asks.

“Drop ship armory,” I reply. “I’ll reload your rifle when we’re across the intersection.”

“Good man.” She hefts the pistol. “Shitload easier to use with one hand.”

The next intersection is a major one, two main roads crossing. I stop at the forward edge of the corner building and aim the rifle around the corner with my left hand. The M-66 has a built-in uplink to the TacLink computer, and we can use our rifles as remote cameras, to snoop around corners without exposing ourselves to fire. As soon as my muzzle clears the edge of the building, I see a bunch of red carets on my tactical map, all advancing on the intersection from the left. There are at least a hundred people coming down the street, and the closest one is less than fifty yards away.

“Hold,” I yell into my mike.

“I see it,” Jackson says behind me. “If only half of ‘em got guns, we’ll never make it across.”

“I’ll stay at the corner with the Sarge and cover. You get across and then cover us.”

“You got ammo left?”

“Two mags,” I say. “Hurry the fuck up, will you?”

I lower Sergeant Fallon to the ground and replace the partially empty magazine in my rifle with a full one. Sergeant Fallon holds out her hand and I pass her the other full magazine. I drop to one knee, lean around the corner, and commence firing.

The closest gaggle of people is twenty yards away when I drop them with single shots, one round each. The crowd behind them scatters. Some dash for cover in the nearest alley, some turn around and run the way they came. A few shoot back, and they go down next. I have low-light vision, computer-controlled weaponry, and ballistic armor. They have outdated weapons and battery-powered flashlights. For once, they’re caught in the open, and I have no remorse about exacting payback.

Behind me, the rest of the squad rushes across the intersection. Jackson has the crew chief, Philips has the dead Paterson over his shoulder, Priest is carrying the drop ship pilot, and Baker and Hansen are both carrying Stratton’s body. We’re a rifle squad in a combat battalion, with state-of-the-art equipment, and we got reduced to a limping pack of walking wounded—and two dead—in just a few moments of battle, fighting against our own people, in the middle of one of our own cities.

At this range, it’s hard to miss. I center the reticle of my gunsight on the silhouettes ahead of me and pull the trigger of the rifle methodically. A scrawny guy with a scoped rifle dashes toward the mouth of the alley, and I aim just ahead of him and nail him with a single shot that sends him sprawling across the concrete. A girl passes him and bends down to pick up the rifle he dropped, and as soon as her fingers touch the rifle stock, I shoot her, two rounds right into the middle of her hunched-over silhouette. Sergeant Fallon is firing her rifle from the prone position, adding the contents of her magazine to the carnage.

Just as the squad is across the intersection, I hear gunfire from my left. I turn to locate the source of it when something hits the side of my armor. It’s a rather unspectacular impact, barely enough to make me sway, but there’s a sudden intense pain in my side, and I know that the round has pierced my battle armor. There’s another blow, this one lower than the first. It feels like someone sticking a red-hot needle into my side and driving it home with a hammer. Then I find myself on the ground next to Sergeant Fallon. My lungs feel like all the air has been sucked out of them in an instant. I want to shout a warning, but I can’t work up the breath for anything beyond a groan.

There’s a small group of rioters at the corner of the intersection we just passed a little while ago. One of them is kneeling and aiming a familiar-looking rifle at me. I recognize the twin muzzle arrangement of an M-66, topped with a standard military combination sight. My own rifle is on the ground in front of me. I reach for it, but the whole thing seems to have tripled in weight all of a sudden. The shooter with the M-66 takes aim again, and I know that I won’t be able to lift my own gun before he curls his trigger finger and exerts the nine pounds of pressure necessary to launch another flechette round.

Then I hear a burst of fire from behind me. The shooter falls on his butt with an almost comical look of consternation on his face. For a brief moment, he sits on the street, his legs stretched out in front of him, his rifle still in his hands but aimed at nothing in particular anymore. Then there’s a second burst of fire, and the shooter takes all three rounds in his face. He falls back, still holding on to his rifle. His two comrades dash out of the line of fire and disappear behind the corner of the building.

I look over to the right and see Corporal Jackson on one knee, her rifle aimed at a spot behind me. I raise myself on my hands and knees, and scoop up my own rifle. The ammo counter on my screen shows 159 rounds remaining. I’ve pulled the trigger almost a hundred times in the last minute or two.

“Grayson, you okay?” Jackson asks over the squad channel.

My left side feels like it has a pair of knives sticking out of it. The pain is so intense that it takes my breath away. I have to force myself to fill my lungs, and every breath makes the pain in my side flare to almost intolerable levels. I try to find the air for a reply, but then I just shake my head.

“Baker, with me,” Jackson says. “Whoever’s left, give us some covering fire.”

Baker and Jackson come dashing back across the intersection. Behind them, Priest and Hansen lean around the corner and start firing their rifles. I want to add my own flechettes to the covering fire, but I don’t have the strength to lift my rifle anymore. Someone grabs me by the harness and starts dragging me across the street. I see Jackson helping Sergeant Fallon to her feet, firing her rifle with one hand as she pulls the sergeant along with her. My computer informs me that I still have a bunch of rounds in my magazine, and it points out the threat vectors to the people down the road who are still standing and shooting at us, but right now, I’m just a passenger, no longer able to take advantage of all that superior technology.

Eventually, my bumpy journey across the intersection stops. I don’t remember having closed my eyes, but I open them now to see Baker bent over me, his visor raised.

“How bad?” he asks. Behind him, Hansen and Priest are still firing their rifles, exchanging rounds with the newly emboldened rioters that have decided to stick around and nail us down. Now that they’ve seen our casualties, there’s blood in the water, and the sharks are circling. Soon, they’ll get reinforcements, and our ammo is almost gone.

I lift up my rifle—barely—and pat the magazine well with one hand to let Baker know there’s still ammo in my weapon. He nods and takes the M-66 out of my hands.

“Priest, here’s another half a mag,” he says over his shoulder.

“About time. I’m just about dry.” Priest takes my rifle and dashes back to his spot at the street corner.

Baker checks the damage to my armor. My left side has gone from searing hot to ice cold. I still have to expend most of my energy forcing air into my lungs, and it feels like something important is broken inside. For the first time in my life, I think that I might be dying. I suppose I should feel dread or panic, knowing that I may slip into unconsciousness at any moment and never wake up again, but I’m too tired and too out of it to care.