Luna Marine(100)
Far off, down the valley, Chancre Lake—actually the Ozero Khanka or Chanka, depending on which maps you consulted—gleamed silver in the morning light, twenty kilometers to the northwest. The enemy mortars were south of the big lake, between the lake and the fire base. Other enemy positions must be closer…perhaps as close as that tree line beyond the outermost ring of the base’s robotic defenses. The bad guys were rarely seen, however. Since Jack had arrived at Fire Base 125, he’d been in exactly one firefight. He’d scrambled to his assigned position on the wall and taken his place with the rest of his company, blazing away with his ATAR into a thick middle-of-the-night fog of smoke and dazzling flashes, burning flares, and savage explosions, trying to make sense out of the confused jumble of greens and yellows squirming across his helmet visor’s HUD on its IR setting.
Once, during that ten-minute firefight, he thought maybe he’d seen someone running out there…but it could easily have been a shadow cast by a drifting flare or fast-strobing chain of poppers. He’d fired at the target and not even known if he’d hit anything or not.
So much of his recruit training, and the combat training that had followed, had emphasized personal combat. He now knew a dozen different ways to kill a man with his bare hands, could take a man down with a knife or a rock or the butt end of his ATAR, could end any hand-to-hand encounter with a Marine-approved shout and stomp to the head. A lot of that training, he knew, had been designed to overcome civilian sensitivities and squeamishness and to bring out what Knox had called “the native aggressiveness of the US Marine.” Somehow, though, he’d never quite picked up on the fact that most combat was at ranges where you never saw the enemy.
From here, he had an impressive view of the entire Chancre Valley. In the distance near the lake, a flight of drone VT-20 hunter-killers banked and darted in the sunlight, seeking out the enemy mortar tubes, as a pair of Marine Valkyries circled watchfully overhead. Closer, a pair of hulking Marine A-25 Cataphracts growled and rumbled as they nosed through the underbrush outside the perimeter. ’Phracs in the distance were always a comforting sight, quad-tracked mobile weapons platforms twice as long and four times more massive than the old Abrams and Schwarzenegger tanks that still served as Marine reserve armor. They were the subject of lively debate at the base, now, with their detractors claiming they were obsolete in an age of smart-AI battlefield HK missiles and pinpoint railgun bombardment from orbit, but most Marines liked having them about.
Just so long as they weren’t too close by; ’Phracs tended to draw enemy artillery fire like bodies drew flies, and it was generally safer to admire the behemoths from a comfortable distance.
“Hey, Flash!” Slidell called from behind. “Whatcha doing? Admiring the scenery?”
“Hey, Slider,” Jack replied. He still wasn’t sure how Slider and the others had picked up on the handle he’d earned at boot camp. It almost had to be Lonnie or Dubber or one of the others from his boot company, but he’d thought he’d had them all sworn to silence. “You know what they say. Join the Marines. See exotic, far-off lands. Meet fascinating people. Kill them….”
“Ooh-rah. Listen, buddy. You ’n’ me need to talk!”
Jack peeled back the Velcro cover on his watch. “Got a few minutes. I’ve got honey-bucket detail at zero-eight-thirty.”
“This won’t take long.” Slider gestured at a stack of sandbags and grinned. “Step into my office and pull up a seat!”
Jack grunted and dropped onto a sandbag. Slider pulled another bag a bit closer, sat, and leaned forward, dragging his PAD from its holster. He opened the screen, keyed it on, and Sam’s lovely face appeared, wearing a sultry smile and nothing else. “Hi, Slider,” she said.
“Listen, Flash,” Slidell said, ignoring her, “this has got to be the greatest fucking gimmick since Net-babe downloads! You are a fucking genius, man!”
Jack shrugged, embarrassed. “Hey, no big deal. I just hacked some commercial AI software.”
“‘No big deal,’ the man says. How’d you crunch her down to fit on a Marine PAD, anyway?”
“That was pretty easy, actually. The government-issue AI, well, the source code just isn’t that efficiently written, you know? Loose, redundant, and looking like it was turned out by a committee. Turned out that Samantha’s source code wasn’t that much bigger than the government program. It just, well, it’s tighter. Does more in less space, and better.”
“Better! I’ll say!” He eyed Samantha’s body appreciatively. “Hey, baby!” he said. “Let’s see your ass!”