Yates stumbled and fell, another simulated casualty. …
Garroway dropped to cover behind a sand-polished boulder, his shoulder slamming painfully against the rock despite the internal padding of his suit.
He thought-clicked to the tactical display again, superimposing the remaining members of 1st Squad on a color-coded map of the immediate area. Myers was halfway up the ridge, pinned down behind a scattering of boulders. Kaminski was also pinned, thirty meters behind Meyers. And … damn! Jaffrey had just gone down as well, yet another casualty.
And Garroway had barely gotten started, tail-end Charlie, a hundred meters from his objective.
Three men left, out of a twelve-man squad, strung out across the laser-blasted boulder field. Not good. Not good at all. Gunny Makowiecz was ominously silent. Had he already written the squad off for this exercise?
Garroway sagged inside his armor, almost overcome with frustration and, more, with exhaustion. This week in the Baja was an old Corps tradition—“Motivational Week,” more often referred to by the recruits who endured it as “Hell Week.” In a solid week of exercises and evolutions, each man in the company could expect to get perhaps seven hours sleep in seven days, as his physical and mental limits were tested to the snapping point.
This was day two of Motivational Week. How the hell was he going to see this thing through for five more days? And what was the point? Things had been getting steadily worse ever since he’d arrived at Parris Island. He knew now he’d never make it as a Marine. All he needed to do was flash-link Makowiecz with the words “I quit.”
An hour from now he could be enjoying a hot shower followed by a hot meal as he waited for them to process him out of the Corps. It would be so easy. …
Yeah? he asked himself. Then what? Transfer to the Aerospace Force? Go back to live with your mother? Maybe you could get a job boss-linking construction robots on the moon. …
He sighed, as another round of explosions detonated nearby. He’d had this discussion with himself before, and frequently. It was just getting harder and harder to see the answer clearly.
Still, there was one answer he could see, and that was an advantage, a small one, to the tactical situation he found himself in. The three surviving recruits of 1st Squad were so widely scattered that they were tougher targets for two automatic gun positions. More important, the three of them had more line-of-sight data to work with, with three widely spaced perspectives. Those guns might be invisible to all three men individually, but if they put their AI heads together, as it were …
“Myers!” he called over the tactical channel. “Ski! This is Garroway! Link in with your HSD data!”
He knew he was begging to be slapped down, and kept expecting Makowiecz to step in with his sharp-edged sarcasm and ask what he thought he was doing. He was taking over the responsibilities of the squad leader here … but Philby, the squad ARNCO, was lying helpless among the rocks a few meters away now, his suit dead and his comm suite offline. Somebody had to take charge, and Garroway’s position at the far end of the strung-out line gave him a slightly better overview of the tactical situation.
His helmet AI picked up the data feeds from both Myers’s and Kaminski’s suits. With a thought-click, he could now see what the other men were seeing from their vantage points … and he could let his own AI sort through all three hyperspectral arrays and build up a more detailed, more revealing image of what was really up there.
For over a century, now, military technology had witnessed a race between high-tech camouflage and the high-tech means of seeing through it. The first primitive hyperspectral arrays had been developed late in the twentieth century, allowing analysts to see the tanks, gun emplacements, and other equipment masked beneath camo netting and cut branches. Paint that changed color to match the surroundings had been harder to distinguish, but even the best reactive paint still had slightly different optical properties than steel, plastic laminates, or ceramics, especially at both long infrared and at UV and long X-ray wavelengths.
Nowadays, reactive camo paints used nanotechnology to mimic textures and UV refractive properties and to better mask distinctive heat signatures at all IR wavelengths. While targets like vehicles, which shed a lot of heat, couldn’t be masked completely, relatively cool targets like robot gun emplacements were almost impossible to spot.
And yet …
His helmet AI brought three sets of data together, repainting the landscape in front of him in enhanced colors. A laser flashed again—the muzzle was carefully shielded, so he couldn’t pinpoint the weapon that way—but Myers’s helmet scanners had also detected something else, something critical … a telltale shifting of reflective frequencies that suggested movement.
“Myers, can you work your way farther to the left?”
“I’ll try,” Myers replied. “But every time I move, those damned guns—”
His voice was chopped off as the comm link was cut. But Garroway had the last bit of necessary input now, relayed just as Myers had shifted position. One of the two guns was there, well to the left and halfway up the ridge. The other was straight ahead, close to that wrecked APC but a little below it and to the right, a position calculated to misdirect the recruits into thinking the laser emplacement was somewhere on the wreckage itself. Sneaky …
His helmet marked both guns for him in bright red.
“You see them both, Ski?” he called.
“Got ’em, Gare.”
“You take the one on the left,” Garroway told him. “I’ll get the one by the APC.”
“Roger that.”
“On my command, three … two … one … now!”
Garroway rolled to the left side of the sheltering boulder, coming to his knees and dropping his laser rifle into line with the chosen target. His weapon projected a crosshair onto his helmet display; he leaned into the boulder, bracing himself, as he dropped the targeting reticle onto the patch of enhanced color that marked the enemy gun, bringing his gloved finger tight against the firing button. The weapon cycled as the enemy gun spotted him and swung around to target him.
Garroway was a fraction of a second faster. The enemy gun didn’t fire.
“Got him!” Kaminski yelled. “One echo down!”
“Two echoes down,” Garroway added, using mil-speak shorthand for a gun emplacement. The ridge should be clear now, but he checked it out carefully before moving again. There could be backup positions, well-hidden and kept out of action until the first guns were killed.
“Sea Devil, this is Devil One,” he called, shifting to the platoon frequency.
“Devil One, Sea Devil,” the voice of the platoon controller replied. “Go ahead.”
“Objective positions neutralized, but we’ve taken eighty-two percent casualties. If you want that fucking ridge, you’d better send support ASAP.”
His phrasing wasn’t exactly mil-standard, but the exhaustion and despair of a few minutes ago had just given way to a surge of adrenaline-laced excitement. Rising, he trotted forward, making his way up the face of the ridge to join Kaminski, who was already crouched in the shadow of the wrecked APC.
“Quite a view, Gare,” Kaminski told him.
It was … and a familiar one. From up here, Garroway could look east across the silver-gray gleam of the Sea of California.
It was a bit strange being so relatively close to his old home at Guaymas, a place he honestly expected never to see again. The training range in the desert scrub country of Isla Angel de la Guarda was just across the Gulf of California