By Noel K Hannan
The
groundcrawler fractured concrete and atomised glass beneath its twin tracks,
ten metre high caterpillars conveying an armoured behemoth the size of an
aircraft carrier. Bulky, knobbly,
studded with turrets, shit-brown and rusty.
It moved over the shattered terrain with a ponderous indifference,
as if its steel hide and the phalanx of weapons bristling from its flanks
gave it absolute protection against attack.
Certainly, the Battalion Families had nothing that could disable a
groundcrawler – although the 122nd had claimed to have severed
a track once with an enormous improvised land mine – but that wasn’t the 37th’s
style. Far better to slip a single
kommando in undetected, past the arrays of sensors and motion detectors. Direct hits from smart missiles it could shrug
off. Delta Blue and her gumweb boot
soles it could not.
Without poking her head over the parapet of the improvised bunker, Delta estimated
that the ‘crawler was within ten metres of her – the dust powdering from above
and the stress fractures spider-webbing across the concrete were a good indicator.
She broke cover as the bunker dissolved in a spray of head-sized chunks
and shrapnel bloom of rusty wire, running – against all instinct – toward
the wall of brown steel blotting out the pale sun.
Watery lasers probed the dust-laden sky, beams glittering, but none
touched her. If they had, they would have instantly become
supercharged and would have cleaved her body asunder before her mission had
even begun. Nearing the terrifyingly
noisy tracks, she executed a perfect cartwheel to gain some height
and momentum, and spun against the flank of the groundcrawler, sticky boots
and gloves and kneepads holding her firm.
She made a quick appraisal of her self – weapon sling, utility belt
tight, black catsuit to ensure maximum freedom if movement – and began to
inch her way up the cold steel, slowly, painfully.
The tension on her wrists and shoulders was unbelievable – she wished
she worked out more often, it would make this so much easier.
Or to be a boy, with their broad shoulders and casual strength. Reaching her target, she locked herself in tight to a gantry with
buckled straps from her belt. She
unslung her weapon and prepared it for firing.
With
exaggerated hand movements, Delta Blue hosed her weapon against the side of
the groundcrawler, leaving livid scars in its wake. Carefully, slowly, - too slowly, dammit! – she manipulated the weapon,
until the hatch behind the gantry creaked open and a helmeted figure stuck
out a weapon of its own and fired it point blank into Delta’s face. She dropped her own weapon and lost her grip,
plunging backwards, hands to her face, stunned and blinded. The buckle holding her to the rail slipped
and the strap ran free. She heard
laughing as she pinwheeled away from the side of the groundcrawler, into empty
space, and her hand grabbed once – twice – three times lucky for the ripcord
on her catsuit thigh, inflating the ribs on her suit limbs with foam just
a few seconds before she plummeted into an abandoned building, crashing through
four rotted layers of exposed flooring before ending up jammed into a jumble
of masonry, but still very much alive. She
shook herself off and freed herself from the wreckage by deflating her suit,
and clambered to a glassless window where she saw the ‘crawler rumble by,
and laughed as she saw her handiwork splattered across the side :
THE FIGHTIN’ 37th
TWENTY GENERATIONS OF WARRIORS
WE WILL NEVER BE DEFEATED
Let
them scrub that off back at their base, she thought, spitting on her wounds.
She let the groundcrawler rumble into the distance, its lasers probing
the dusty sky, and she slipped from the ruins into the wastelands, heading
for home.
Home
was a welcome sight, the grey conning tower poking up from the rubble like
a sentinel, calling her in. Safety. The rest of the nuclear submarine lay buried
beneath thousands of tons of rubble, deposited here by some freak wave on
the day the world died. Delta knew
that once this thing had prowled the oceans, bearing weapons of mass destruction
in its long sleek belly, but there were those in the Family that didn’t believe
that any more, or who had never done, and thought that they lived in some
sort of overengineered power station. This
was especially true among the younger ones , who spent much of their spare
time sharpening knives and kungfu stars and little on battle studies. Yeah, thought Delta as she scrambled
up the rungs on the side of the tower, past the faded stars and stripes and
the huge faded numerals 23, funny sort of power station. She tapped her combination into the lock on
the hatch and dropped inside.
“Saw
your handiwork, Blue,” said Danan, all smiles and hands, tapping her shoulders
and fending off her half-playful attacks.
He had obviously heard about her selection for breeding. “Pretty cool. You’re a good gumclimber.”
“Keep
your fingers to yourself, tubeboy,” Delta Blue retorted, gripping his slim
wrist between her thumb and forefinger and squeezing. He let out a childish squeak, embarrassed at his own reaction to
the sudden pain she caused him. “When
I want compliments I’ll ask for them, and when I want sperm I’ll go looking
somewhere better than the tubeboys’ jack-off pit. Ok?”
He
retreated, nursing his nerve-pinched arm, and his tubeboys barracked him and
chased him back down to their dim lair. Delta
Blue watched them go.
The
order was waiting for her on her bunk in the little shelf she called home. She crawled in and lay face down on the bed,
picking up the sheet of white paper. It
told her that her supply of contraceptive patches had been withdrawn and that
she would be suspended from combat operations at the end of that week. She was expected to become pregnant within
a month or face twice weekly medical checks to ascertain her level of fertility
(and, she thought wryly, her sexual orientation). The success of her pregnancy meant more to her than simply life
of an unborn baby – it represented a serious step forward of her citizenship.
If she was ever to gain real respect within the 37th, she needed
a bloodline. The order contained a
list of suitable candidates for the task.
She ran her finger down it, amused, thinking yes, no, no, yes, never,
oh yes………
One
week, she thought, one week to prove herself to these boys before she had
to have sex with one of them. Not
that she hadn’t had sex with some of them before, but this time would be different. She knew it and they knew it. This time it was something beyond pleasure
or conquest or machismo, something deeper, and unfulfilled urge to procreate.
If you are the best warrior, prove it by spawning a race of warriors,
a bloodline to call your own. Delta Blue knew that they would be squabbling
amongst themselves by now, playing mock fighting games, hurting without injuring,
sometimes injuring without meaning to, engaged in a complex mating ritual
designed to win her. Delta Blue found
all this highly amusing. The testosterone was clouding their brains. Delta Blue, of the Special Psychological Warfare
Group, 37th Battalion Family,
was no one’s to win or own, and as a warrior, she was more than a match for
any of them. The one she chose
would have to be very special indeed.
Towards
the end of that long week, when Delta Blue was cooling her heels from the
successful mission that had left the 82nd’s groundcrawler scarred
with her message, reports began to circulate of another groundcrawler, a bigger
one belonging to the 103rd, that had broke down to the north of
the city. Lone reconnaissance soldiers,
the legendary Mavericks, had kept it under observation at extreme personal
risk, for three days and nights. The
feeling was that here was an opportunity for a groundcrawler to be permanently
disabled for the first time, if its power sources were down and many of its
weapons and defences inoperative. But
they would have to move quick, or every other Battalion in the area would
get the same idea, and the ambush would turn into a chaotic, multi-way battle. And so the plans were drawn and volunteers
sought. Delta Blue, with two days
of active service left to go, signed up.
The
list of those who had been accepted was posted on every corridor junction
and Family noticeboard. Delta read
her own name, heading the list, then scanned down – Danan and his tubeboys,
Skurry and Stocker, Pieter and Matty from the Upper Decks, Gerrold from the
bridge. Quite a team – as much as Delta Blue derided
their efforts to fuck her, they were all excellent soldiers, warriors born
and bred. Delta’s task would be to
emblazon the disabled groundcrawler with the 37th’s combat slogan
once the boys had done their job. It
was going to be quite a mission, one to go down in the history books. The first Battalion Family to destroy a groundcrawler.
Delta Blue’s heart swelled at the thought.
Quite a story to tell her unconceived child.
They
were laid out in three rows of ten cots under the soft lights, eight occupied,
twenty two vacant. Delta Blue pressed
her face against the warm glass and watched tiny pink hands and feet waving
in the air.
“It
is hard to imagine them as soldiers,” said the white-coated nurse as she looked
in over her charges. Delta Blue turned
to her. “So tiny. So fragile.
So utterly dependent. How could
they do harm to others?”
“Because
we teach them the way,” said Delta Blue.
“As soon as they are old enough to understand, they are taught how
to fight and protect the Battalion Family to which they are born.”
The
nurse sighed heavily. “It is a mobius
strip, Delta Blue.”
“A
what?”
“A
single-sided, never-ending circle. A
cycle of birth and death, birth and death.
Do you know how long the Battalion Families have been at war?”
“I
– “ She realised that she did not. She
took a guess. “A hundred years?”
The
nurse snorted. “You could be right.
No one knows. No one seems to care. Wouldn’t it be nice if they didn’t have
to fight?” She indicated the babies
in the next room.
Delta
Blue was puzzled. “Not fight? But what else would they do?”
“Love. Live peaceful lives. There are alternatives, you know.”
Delta
Blue shook her head. “We must be strong.
If we do not fight, we die. The
Battalion Family must survive, above all else.”
The
nurse’s breath frosted the glass of the nursery window. “I’ve seen things that you have not, Delta
Blue. The aftermath of your battles.
Teenagers with no legs and no future. Must it always be so? Can’t you break the chain, Delta Blue?”
Delta
Blue placed the flat of her hand on the cold glass.
“No. I could no more break the chain than I could
break this glass. It is how things
are. Now, and for ever more.”
A storm front had moved in across the ruined city. Lightning flashed liked missiles thrown by vengeful fallen angels,
and the sky blackened and boiled, sending down hard sheets of acid rain to
scour the blasted landscape. It was,
thought Delta Blue as she followed the patrol out through the outer defences
of their home, not a good day to die. But
then, what would be a good day to die?
There
was tension among the patrol. Danan,
big, strong and mouthy, and bolstered by two of his tubeboys on the team,
had been appointed Patrol Commander. This
had alienated Gerrold, as the son of a Battalion Chief from the Bridge he
thought the appointment was his prerogative and anyway, he was a year older
than Danan. Such playground squabbles
held no ground within the taskings of the Battalion Families, especially in
the 37th. Delta Blue knew
they had made the right decision – aggression and boldness would see this
mission through, and Danan was nothing if not aggressive and bold.
But
there were other problems too. Delta
Blue had worked with these boys before, had grown up with them, but today
– they were looking at her strangely as they hard-targeted across the terrain.
She was distracting them, a bitch in heat.
They knew that this was her last time on operations for a long while,
maybe forever, and they knew why, and each were determined that they would
be the one. And none were more determined than Danan. Delta Blue watched him bark out his orders
and berate his team for the slow progress they were making, and thought, Yes,
maybe, he wouldn’t be so bad after all.
The
crippled groundcrawler was at least a day’s foot patrol away. The 37th had vehicles, quad bikes
and jeeps, but they were of limited use on the terrain of the city. Once this had been a major metropolis, a thriving
hub of industry and commerce. Then
its towers of glass and steel and concrete had been hurled to the ground like
the building blocks of a petulant child, and lay across the city fouling the
roads and avenues, crumbling into vast piles of rubble, an enormous dangerous
playground of traps and hazards. Danan
chose for their first lie-up the interior of an office block that had been
cast on to its side, where they could light a fire and not be seen. Posting Matty as a sentry, they set out their
bedrolls for the night.
They
found wood among the debris of the office interiors, clambering through doors
in floors and through rooms filled from wall to wall – or floor to ceiling
– with furniture. Danan knew from
bitter experience what would burn with minimum smoke and maximum heat, and
they built a small, efficient fire in the gutted shell of a refrigerator,
and huddled around it on padded chairs that Stocker had laboriously dug from
a jammed room.
There
was little conversation that night. All
minds were focussed on the following day’s mission, and on Delta Blue’s lines
and curved every time she moved. Could
she help it that the uniform of a gumclimber was so tight and left so little
to the imagination?
They
slept, fitfully. Their clothing was
damp from the storm that rattled the doors and windows of their shelter, and
it grew cold as the fire guttered and died in the dead refrigerator. Danan decided to draw in his sentry and rely
on their concealment and silence to protect them as they slept.
“Delta. Delta Blue.”
A
hand at her shoulder, shaking her gently.
She awoke with a start, reached for her weapon. A second hand clamped
her wrist as she stretched.
“No,
don’t. It’s me, Danan.”
“What
do you want? Why are you whispering?”
It was pitch black. Usually she would find the darkness comforting,
hiding her even though it hid her enemies too. But Danan was scaring her. She could feel his breath upon her cheek.
“I
don’t want to wake the others. You
know what I want, Delta Blue.”
She
was amazed. Did he think she was going
to do it right here, right now, in this filthy ruin, with the rest of the
team watching? He must be crazy!
She
moved her hand across his and he made to grab it, but she was quicker and
slid past his groping defence to his thigh and groin. She rested her hand there, unopposed.
“That’s
it,” he whispered.
She
grabbed and twisted and he let out a strangled yelp that had the rest of the
patrol struggling out of their foil bags and scrabbling for weapons. Danan, embarrassed, turned and hushed them.
“It’s nothing, go back to sleep.” Obediently, they returned to their sacks.
“I
guess that means no,” Danan whispered.
“You’re
fucking right. Ever touch me again
like that, tubeboy, and I’ll rip it right off.
You got that?”
Danan
retreated to his bed, pride and possessions wounded. He wondered if he had affected his ultimate chances of impregnating
Delta Blue. Yes, he was that thick
skinned.
Dawn
brought a welcome respite from the storm.
The team rose before first light, packing away their kit and making
their way deeper into the city, following Danan’s lead from a hand-drawn map
sealed in plastic. The city steamed
and sweated as the sun rose and began to heat the standing pools of stagnant,
acidic water that had accumulated overnight.
This was a city of environmental extremes.
Danan
pushed them hard again that morning. They
had a rendezvous to make with a Maverick who was keeping the crippled groundcrawler
under surveillance, covering the team’s approach. Delta Blue knew him – a loner called Armalite.
But then all the Mavericks were loners – that was how they did what
they did so well. Armalite was a stone cold killer.
“Where
the fuck is he?”
Danan
was agitated. He had hidden his team
in a huge crater and was peering over the rim with a pair of image intensifying
goggles strapped to his head, scanning the shattered landscape for signs of
Armalite.
“What
can you see?” called Stocker from the depths of the crater. “Can you see anything?”
“I
can see the groundcrawler. It’s about
a klick and half away. Christ, it’s
big. Biggest I’ve ever – “
The
image intensifying goggles blanked out. Danan
tapped them, then flicked them up to examine the switches. His field of vision was filled with a dark
expanse of muddy camouflaged cloth. He
jumped and reached for his weapon that he had placed down in a dry patch. It wasn’t there. Armalite smiled and handed it to him. Danan cursed and retreated into the crater.
“I
found him.”
Armalite
was a man of few words. He didn’t
like talking. He had been living in
a shallow shell scrape for three days, covered by a sheet of plastic, eating
vitamin pills, drinking poisoned rain water and shitting his pants where he
lay. He ignored half the questions
fired at him by the over-enthusiastic team.
He snorted when Danan suggested that he join the assault element as
an extra gun.
“I
watch. Sometimes I kill. But not very often. Mostly, just when I feel like it. But I don’t do teams.”
Danan didn’t push the point. Instead, he outlined his modified plan, based on Armalite’s up-to-the minute observations. Armalite listened and grunted and made observations and criticisms and just outright insults, until finally they had something workable and agreeable to all, and by then it was nearly dark again, and the rain had returned. It was time for some killing. And a little graffiti.
As
they neared the groundcrawler, its sheer size became more evident. None of them had seen anything approaching
this, the Battalion Family that built it must have been very powerful indeed.
But now here it was, stuck in the middle of the dead city, while engineers
and mechanics worked in shifts around its suspension and massive engine bay,
surrounded by arc lights and sheeting to keep off the rain.
Danan’s team, shadowed by Armalite, watched from cover as the work
went on. The mechanics were protected by a ring of steel,
Battalion troopers dug into foxholes covering 360 degrees around the stricken
groundcrawler. Danan glanced at his
watch and waited for Armalite to begin the diversion. He was pleased that he had managed to persuade
the Maverick to take part in the assault. He wondered if Delta Blue was impressed. She looked lost in her thoughts, internalising
her danger.
Phut
phut phut. Heads in the nearest foxhole exploded in pink mists, bone and hair
and brain disintegrating in the path of tiny, silenced explosive darts.
There was no reaction from the neighbouring positions.
Phut phut phut went Armalite’s snipergun, and another three
skulls vanished. This time a trooper in an adjacent foxhole
noticed the spastic final movements of his comrades and swung a searchlight
to bear on the positions Armalite had attacked, illuminating the carnage. Six dead in under five seconds. Delta Blue was impressed. Danan was orgasmic.
There
was shouting and some sporadic fire, nowhere near Armalite’s position – in
any case, he had moved to a better one. Phut
phut phut went his snipergun again, and three more heads went north, reinforced
plastic helmets proving no protection. A heavy weapon opened up, spraying indiscriminately, and an unlucky
burst almost caught Armalite unawares. The
engineers took cover until encouraged to continue by an armed overseer.
Danan saw his chance.
“We
move now,” he told his team. He
gripped Delta Blue by the shoulder – she would be going alone, daubing her
slogans while they worked, to make sure everyone would know who were the heroes
of this day. She turned her face to
his.
“Good
luck,” she said, and before she knew what was happening he had kissed her
hard on the mouth. Leading his team
away, he called back : “I’ll be back for you.
You’re the prize, you know that?”
She
waited in cover until she heard the sound of their weapons engaged in a firefight,
then moved off toward the groundcrawler, confused by Danan’s behaviour.
She tried to push it to the back of her mind, it was dangerous to even
think of something as ephemeral as a kiss while she was in jeopardy.
This was so unprofessional!
The
firefight, conducted by Pieter and Matty, had drawn in many of the troopers
who had survived Armalite’s sniping, providing both cover for the demolition
team of Danan, Skurry, Stocker and Gerrold, and a gap in the iron ring that
Delta Blue, in her black suit and gumweb boots, could penetrate like an inconsequential
shadow. She slipped through their
lines, past the bodies with the smashed skulls lying over foxhole parapets
and the pools of cooling blood, to the groundcrawler’s hull. Undisturbed by the chaos raging around her,
she unclipped her own special weaponry, and set to work.
Armalite
watched from his vantage point as the battle unfolded below. He had run out of explosive rounds for his
snipergun, so he could only watch\h as the operation foundered. Delta Blue worked obliviously on her psycho-graffiti,
rapt in concentration, while Danan and his team knelt with their hands behind
their heads, captured by the troopers from the 103rd. Pieter and Matty were either mortally wounded
or dead – Armalite couldn’t tell from this distance – but their prone forms
had been dumped next to Danan. A trooper
stepped forward and emptied his weapon into the two bodies. That settled it, then.
But
had they set the charges? There was no way of knowing. Armalite could have walked away – he had done
his job here, done more than enough. It
wasn’t his fault that they had cocked it up. He couldn’t save them, but he could save the
cute psycho-artist who was still scrawling her message – what did
that say? – on the groundcrawler hull.
Shuffling out of cover, Armalite cursed himself for his weakness. He should have been extricating himself from
this situation. Instead he was charging
in like the cavalry. This wasn’t his
style at all.
It
was too quiet. Delta Blue put away
her paintgun and twisted her body away from the hull. The firefight had stopped. She
saw Danan and some of the others in the custody of the enemy. She saw dead bodies on the ground. She wasn’t sure who they were, but they were
not 103rd troopers. Danan
shot her a glance and an ill-thought wink, brave and bold to the end. But his gesture almost spelt disaster. A trooper followed his line of sight and saw
her, and directed a withering barrage of fire.
She took impacts on the light body armour she was wearing, and tumbled
headlong into space.
She
had not climbed very far up the groundcrawler’s hull, so she barely had time
to inflate her suit before she hit the ground, driving the air from her lungs.
Almost immediately she was being manhandled, but the hands that were
lifting and pulling belonged to Armalite, and he was firing on her attackers
as he carried her away. Over his shoulder, she saw her comrades take
single bullets to the head before Armalite sprinted her away to safety.
Later,
they sat in the window of a miraculously upright office building while the
103rd troopers scoured the streets for them.
Armalite glanced at his watch.
“If
they succeeded in setting the charges,” he said, “they should go – “
A
dull crump echoed through the city.
They could see the groundcrawler from the window, and a sheet of flame
fanned out from beneath it, destroying its suspension and engine bay. The crawler seemed to leap several metres into
the air, an amazing feat for such a massive object. The destruction was not total, but it was unlikely
that the groundcrawler would ever move again. And a heavily armed fort was still just a fort.
Static, vulnerable, a magnet for attack.
“They
were early,” Armalite commented dryly.
Delta
Blue had been silent since her rescue. The
shock of losing her team had stunned her. Armalite was an unsympathetic counsellor.
“You
should be very proud. You did a good
job. Your team too. They didn’t make it – it happens. But you got the job done. That’s all that matters. Isn’t it?”
“Is
it?” Tears rolled down her face. “I’m not so sure. But that’s it for me. It’s
over. My last operation.
By next week, I’ll probably be pregnant.
And the six best candidates for the job are dead.
Do you think I distracted them? No,
that’s stupid.”
“You
distract me.” He looked away, embarrassed
at his sudden confession. He had never
spoken so intimately in his entire life! But then, he had never rescued a damsel in
distress either. It was a day of firsts.
The best was yet to come.
He
is strong and brave, thought Delta Blue, even if he is rude and
smelly. But he saved my life, and he’s here, now.
He’ll do.
Their
lovemaking was fast and frantic and over far too soon for any kind of mutual
satisfaction. He was a virgin and
it showed. He could not meet her gaze
again as they dressed. He wanted to
leave straight away.
“I
have….. another mission,” he lied. “I
can escort you home – “
But
they were safe now, and she was still a warrior, no more the damsel in distress,
and she didn’t need anything more from him. She would walk home alone. He
contemplated kissing her on the cheek, but thought it might freak her out.
He left, silently.
Delta
Blue sat and watched the fires burn in the groundcrawler, a funeral pyre for
Danan and Skurry and Stocker and Pieter and Matty and Gerrold. Her own handiwork stood out against the night
sky, luminous paint charged and emboldened by the light from the flames.
She didn’t know why she had written it.
It wasn’t in her orders, she had done it as a spur of the moment thing.
She got up and made her way home through the dead city, leaving her
graffiti to shout to the darkness.
DELTA BLUE
IT ENDS HERE
fin