The Mammoth Book of SF Wars (10 page)

We find a room with two doors that open out on to a balcony with a view over the city beyond. Agnetha opens the doors to get a better field of fire, then leans against the wall opposite, her rifle slung across her knees. She smiles coquettishly at me.

“Why aren’t you taking my picture?” she asks.

I point the camera at her and hear it click.

“Are you going to use that?”

“I don’t know.”

“Keeping it for your private collection?” She stretches her legs and yawns.

“You don’t mind me being attached to your group, then,” I say, “not like your sergeant.”

She wrinkles her nose. “He doesn’t speak for all of us. I don’t agree with everything the government says, either. We’re sent out here with insufficient equipment and even less backup, and when we get home we’re forgotten about at best. I think it’s good that we have people like you here.” She frowns. “So tell me, what
are
you going to paint?”

“Actually, I don’t just paint. I use computers, software, all those things. It’s all about the final image.”

“I understand that. But what
are
you going to paint?”

I can’t keep evading the issue. For all my fine words about reflecting the war as it really is, the sergeant had it right. I’ll paint whatever Command wants me to. I like to paint a picture of myself as a bit of a rogue, but, at heart, I know the establishment has me, body and soul.

“I don’t know yet. That’s why I’m here. I need to experience this place, and then I can try to convey some emotion.”

“What emotion?”

“I don’t know that, either.”

There’s a crackle of gunfire, sharp silver, like tins rattling on the floor. I ignore it.

“You’re very pretty,” I say.

“Thank you.” She lowers her eyes in acknowledgement. I like that. She doesn’t pretend she isn’t pretty; she takes the compliment on its own terms.

“How did you end up in the Army?” I ask.

She yawns and stretches. “I worked in insurance,” she says, and that seems all wrong. So drab and everyday. She should have been a model, or a mountaineer, or an artist or something. “I lost my job when Jutland got hit by the DoS attack. Everything was lost, policies, claims, payroll. The hackers had been feeding us the same worm for months; the backups were totally screwed.”

“I’m sorry,” I say, and I am. Really sorry. So that’s why her accent sounded so familiar. Fortunately, she doesn’t seem to notice my reaction.

“Other people had it worse.” She shrugs. “We had a garden; we had plenty of canned goods in the house. My mother had the bath filled with water, all the pans and the dishes. We managed OK until your Army moved in to restore order.”

She seems remarkably unperturbed by the affair.

“So you joined us out of gratitude?” I suggest.

She laughs. “No, I joined you for security. This way I get to eat and I’m pretty sure that my salary won’t be wiped out at the touch of a button. If your Army’s servers aren’t secure, then whose are?”

“Fair enough.”

“No, it’s not fair. It’s just life. Your Army wiped out Jutland’s data. Just like it did this country’s.”

I try to look shocked. “You think that we are responsible for the trouble here?”

“It’s an old trick. Create civil unrest and then send in your troops to sort out the problem. You’ve swallowed up half of Europe that way.”

“I don’t think it’s that well planned,” I said, honestly. “I just think that everyone takes whatever opportunity they can when a DoS hits.”

As if to underline the point, the staccato rattle of gunfire sounds in the distance.

“Aren’t you worried that I will report you?” I ask. “Have you charged with sedition?”

She rises easily to her feet and walks towards me. “No. I trust you. You have nice eyes.”

She’s laughing at me.

“Come here,” she says. I lean down and she kisses me on the lips. Gently, she pushes my face away. “You’re a very handsome man. Maybe later on we can talk properly.”

“I’d like that.”

She looks back out of the window, checking the area. Little white puffs of cloud drift across the blue sky.

“So, what are you going to paint?” she asks. “The heroic rescuers, making the country safe once more?”

“You’re being sarcastic.”

“No,” she says, and she pushes a strand of blonde hair back up into her helmet. “No. We all do what we must to get by. Tell me, what will you paint?”

“I honestly don’t know yet. I’ll know it when I see it.” I look down into the square, searching for inspiration. “Look at your flier.”

She comes to my side. We look at the concrete-grey craft, a brutalist piece of architecture set amongst the elegant buildings of this city.

“Suppose I were to paint that?” I say. “I have plenty of photos, but I need a context, a setting. I could have it swooping down on the enemy! The smoke, the explosions, the bullets whizzing past.”

“That’s what the Army would like …”

“Maybe. How about I paint it with you all seated around the back? That could send a message to the people back home: that even soldiers are human; they sit and chat and relax. Or should I evoke sympathy? Draw the flier all shot up. The mechanics around it, trying to fix it up. One of you being led from the scene, blood seeping from the bandages.”

She nods. She understands. Then her radio crackles, and I hear the sergeant’s voice. “Friis! Get down to the flier! We need help bringing equipment inside.”

“Coming!”

“I’ll tag along,” I say.

The whine of the flier is a constant theme; the engines are never turned off. We join the bustle of soldiers around the rear ramp, all busy unloading the pink-bound boxes and carrying them into the surrounding buildings.

“What is all that?” I wonder aloud.

“Servers, terminals, NAS boxes,” says Agnetha. “I saw this in Jutland. We’re establishing a new government in this place.”

“Keep it down, Friis,” says the sergeant, but without heat. I notice that no one seems to be denying the charge. The head of the soldier behind him suddenly spouts red blood. I’m photographing the scene before I realize what’s happening.

“Sniper!”

Everyone is dropping, looking this way and that.

“Up there,” shouts someone.

The sergeant is looking at his console, the green light of the screen illuminating his face.

“That’s the Palazzo Egizio. The Via Fossano runs behind it …” He’s thinking. “Friis, Delgado, Kenton. Head to the far end of the street. See if you can get into that white building there …”

I raise my head to get a better look and feel someone push me back down. At the same time there are more shots and I hear a scream. I feel a thud of fear inside me.

Agnetha has been shot.

Shot protecting me.

She’s coughing up blood.

“Agnetha …” I begin.

“Get back,” yells the sergeant. “You’ve caused enough trouble as it is.”

Agnetha’s trying to speak, but there is too much blood. She holds out her hand and I reach for it, but the sergeant knocks it away.

“Let the medic deal with it,” he says. “Let someone who should be here deal with it,” he adds, nastily.

The other soldiers have located the sniper now, and I’m left to watch as a man kneels next to Agnetha and takes hold of her arm. She looks at me with those brilliant blue eyes, and I don’t see her. For a brief moment I see another picture. Blues and greens. Two soldiers: a man and a woman, standing in front of a flier just like the one behind us. They’re surrounded by cheering, smiling civilians. A young child comes forward, carrying a bunch of flowers. A thank you from the grateful liberated.

The picture I painted of Jutland.

I push it from my mind, and I see those brilliant blue eyes are already clouding over.

“We all do what we have to do,” I whisper. But is that so true? She joined the Army so her family could eat. I’m here simply to build a reputation as an artist.

The medic injects her with something. She closes her eyes. The medic shakes his head. I know what that means. The sergeant looks at me.

“I’m sorry,” I say.

“So?” he says. “How’s that going to help?” He turns away. The others are already doing the same. Dismissing me.

I take hold of Agnetha’s hand, feel the pulse fading.

The picture.

I wonder if Agnetha would approve of what I have done. I suspect not. She was too much of a realist.

I included the flier after all. But not taking off, not swooping down from the skies.

No, this was a different picture.

The point of view is from just outside the cockpit, looking in at the pilot of the craft. And here is where we move beyond the subject matter to the artistic vision, because the person flying the craft is not the pilot, but the sergeant.

His face is there, centred on the picture. He’s looking out at the viewer, looking beyond the cockpit.

What can he see? The dead children in the square, sheltered by the bodies of their dead parents? We don’t know. But that doesn’t matter, because there is a clue in the picture. A clue to the truth. One that I saw all the time, but never noticed. It’s written across the sergeant’s face. Literally.

A reflection in green from the light of the monitor screen, a tracery of roads and buildings, all picked out in pale-green letters. Look closely at his cheek and you can just make out the words
St Mark’s Church.
All those names that were supposedly wiped for good by the DoS attack, and yet there they were, still resident in the sergeant’s computer. And none of us found that odd at the time. We could have fed that country’s data back to it all along, but we chose not to.

They say a picture paints a thousand words.

For once, those words will be mostly speaking the truth.

THE WAR MEMORIAL

Allen Steele

Where there’s no air, a battle may leave reminders for ever …

Restless visionary Allen Steele, originally a native of Nashville, has a BA in Communication and an MA in Journalism. He’s a prolific author of short stories and essays, as well as novels, several concerned with the habitable moon Coyote in a solar system to which freedom-seeking pioneers flee in a stolen starship. His work has won and been nominated for several awards.

T
HE FIRST-WAVE ASSAULT
is jinxed from the very beginning. Even before the dropship touches down, its pilot shouts over the comlink that a Pax missile battery seven klicks away has locked in on their position, despite the ECM buffer set up by the lunarsats. So it’s going to be a dust-off; the pilot has done his job by getting the men down to the surface, and he doesn’t want to be splattered across Mare Tranquillitatis.

It doesn’t matter anyway. Baker Company has been deployed for less than two minutes before the Pax heatseekers pummel the ground around them and take out the dropship even as it begins its ascent.

Giordano hears the pilot scream one last obscenity before his ugly spacecraft is reduced to metal rain, then something slams against his back and everything within the suit goes black. For an instant he believes he’s dead, that he’s been nailed by one of the heatseekers, but it’s just debris from the dropship. The half-ton ceramic-polymer shell of the Mark III Valkyrie Combat Armour Suit has absorbed the brunt of the impact.

When the lights flicker back on within his soft cocoon and the flatscreen directly in front of his face stops fuzzing, he sees that not everyone has been so lucky. A few dozen metres away at three o’clock, there’s a new crater that used to be Robinson. The only thing left of Baker Company’s resident card cheat is the severed rifle arm of his CAS.

He doesn’t have time to contemplate Robinson’s fate. He’s in the midst of battle. Sgt Boyle’s voice comes through the comlink, shouting orders. Travelling overwatch, due west, head for Marker One-Eight-Five. Kemp, take Robinson’s position. Cortez, you’re point. Stop staring, Giordano (yes sir). Move, move, move …

So they move, seven soldiers in semi-robotic heavy armour, bounding across the flat silver-grey landscape. Tin men trying to outrun the missiles plummeting down around them, the soundless explosions they make when they hit. For several kilometres around them, everywhere they look, there are scores of other tin men doing the same, each trying to survive a silent hell called the Sea of Tranquillity.

Giordano is sweating hard, his breath coming in ragged gasps. He tells himself that if he can just make Marker One-Eight-Five – crater Arago, or so the map overlay tells him – then everything will be OK. The crater walls will protect them. Once Baker Company sets up its guns and erects a new ECM buffer, they can dig in nice and tight and wait it out; the beachhead will have been established by then and the hard part of Operation Monkey Wrench will be over.

But the crater is five-and-a-half klicks away, across plains as flat and wide open as Missouri pasture, and between here and there a lot of shitfire is coming down. The Pax Astra guns in the foothills of the lunar highlands due west of their position can see them coming; the enemy has the high ground, and they’re throwing everything they can at the invading force.

Sgt Boyle knows his platoon is in trouble. He orders everyone to use their jumpjets. Screw formation; it’s time to run like hell.

Giordano couldn’t agree more wholeheartedly. He tells the Valkyrie to engage the twin miniature rockets mounted on the back of his carapace.

Nothing happens.

Once again, he tells the voice-activated computer mounted against the back of his neck to fire the jumpjets. When there’s still no response, he goes to manual, using the tiny controls nestled within the palm of his right hand inside the suit’s artificial arm.

At that instant, everything goes dark again, just like it did when the shrapnel from the dropship hit the back of his suit.

This time, though, it stays dark.

A red LCD lights above his forehead, telling him that there’s been a total system crash.

Cursing, he finds the manual override button and stabs it with his little finger. As anticipated, it causes the computer to completely reboot itself; he hears servomotors grind within the carapace as its limbs move into neutral position, until his boots are planted firmly on the ground and his arms are next to his sides, his rifle pointed uselessly at the ground.