The Drift Wars (14 page)

“Things
move fast in a battle, but you still have to take your time. Only
advance from a position of strength and keep your path of retreat
open. A full regiment is a strong force, but if the Riel cut them
off, they’ll be swallowed up from all sides.

“As
you see here,” he added, as Peter’s regiment blinked out for the
third time.

Peter
frowned. “I think it’s beyond me, sir.”

“You
do, do you?” the colonel said, laughing with surprise. “Now
that’s irony if I ever heard it.”

“Sir?”

“Never
mind. The point is, we won this battle in real life, so I know it
can be done. You only have to figure out how.”

“But
I haven’t even studied military history—”

“The
Sim Test is not about what you already know, it’s about what you
can figure out. And I have every reason to believe that you’ll get
the hang of this.”

“Yes,
sir,” Peter said, trying to sound encouraged.

Chiang
San studied Peter, then reached into his pocket and pulled out a
golden locket. “I believe you dropped this,” he said.

Peter
stared at it.

“It
looked important,” the colonel said, setting it on the table
between them.

Peter
popped it open. The hair inside was dark brown, just as it was
supposed to be.

“That
hair belong to anyone I know?” Chiang San asked.

Peter
shook his head, self-conscious, and clamped it shut.

“Someone
back home then,” the colonel concluded. “That’s hard stuff.
Hard enough when I did it, and back then the war was a lot closer to
home.”

“You
have a girl, sir?”

“Had.
A good one too. But this job changes how you see things. No one back
home can understand what we do out here. What we’ve seen.”
Chiang San watched his own fingers drum the table.

“Enough
of that,” he said, looking up. “So how many of these Sims have
you actually won now?”

“Three,
sir.”

“Not
bad. That’s two wins in as many weeks.”

“Vadiraj’s
up to one fifty-three,” Peter said.

“Don’t
compete,” the colonel said sternly. “Not with him, not with
anybody. It’s us against the Riel, not against each other.
Sergeant Vadiraj is good—he keeps his head and he’s methodical.
He wins battles and he brings his men home alive. Seems to me that
you could learn something there. You don’t get to be as old as I
am without taking advice every once in a while. Or asking for it.”

Peter
nodded, unsure.

“You’ll
make it, kid,” Chiang San said, clasping a cold glove on Peter’s
shoulder. “And that’s the only promise you’ll ever get out of
me.”

“They
bring you back.”

“How?”
Peter asked.

Linda
worked on the monitor overhead, her mask off, relaxed. Peter’s
straps were undone, dangling over the edge of the bed.

“I
don’t know,” she said. “Other people do that work. They heal
your body and then bring you to me. I heal your mind.”

“But
I don’t always die,” Peter said. “At least, I don’t always
remember dying.”

“You’re
never supposed to remember dying,” Linda said. “Your memories
are completely overwritten with a scan taken before the battle.”

“And
that’s why we take sleeping pills?”

“Yes,
exactly.”

“Wait,”
Peter said, sitting up. “Did you do that when I first got here?”

“Down,”
Linda snapped, angling her head at the camera on the ceiling. “Or
I won’t say any more.”

Peter
lay back. Linda busied herself with the monitor.

“You’re
dead when you arrive at the base,” she said. “Everybody is.
Crossing the Drift boundary can damage living tissue, so they kill
you before the ship even leaves port. Your body is frozen for the
journey, and you’re resuscitated out here. Your memory comes from
a scan made aboard the transitship. We call that your version one
point zero.”

“And
then what?”

“Then
you wake up and go fight. If you die and we recover your body, then
they patch you up and send you back to me.”

“And
Saul?”

“If
he took a direct hit from a rocket, there wouldn’t be anything
left. Not that I know much about the medical side. I’m not even
authorized for the Purple Area. But my point is that you’re stuck
in a loop until you survive a battle. I can only take a new scan if
you come back alive. Some men will get stuck in the same version for
months, fighting dozens of battles but always waking to the same
memories, always saying the exact same things.”

“And
that’s why you sit at your desk pretending to work?”

“Something
like that,” Linda said.

“Are
you drawing?”

“Doodling,”
Linda said with a shrug.

“Doodles
of what?”

“Things
from back home, mostly. What I can remember.”

“I’d
like to see.”

“Maybe,”
Linda said, but it sounded more like never.

Peter
changed the subject. “So what version am I?”

“Two
point thirteen,” Linda said, checking her screen. “The two means
you’re a sergeant. Three for colonel, and so on. The point
thirteen is because you’ve advanced thirteen times at your current
rank. I have a chart where I can see what battles you participated
in and how long ago it was—both real and in your perception. It
helps me check the integrity of your memory.”

“So
how many real battles have I fought?” Peter asked. “How long
have I been here?”

Linda
looked away. “I can’t tell you.”

“What
does it matter? It has to be over a year, right? I lost count of how
many missions I’ve been on. Somewhere in the hundreds, and a few
of those lasted several weeks—”

“You
don’t always remember,” Linda cut in, anxious.

Peter
shut his mouth and waited. Linda tapped her fingertips together,
chewing her lip.

“How
long?” Peter asked.

“I’ll
show you,” she said.

She
searched the drawer in the bed, pulling out a mirror and holding it
to Peter’s face.

“Look
at that,” she said.

It
took Peter a moment to see the change, that his face was leaner, his
skin duller.

“Oh,”
he said, taking the mirror and inspecting the thick stubble on his
cheeks. “That long, huh?”

“Longer
than any other patient of mine,” Linda said.

“How
many patients do you have?”

“Just
you since you became a sergeant. You’re only the second patient of
mine who has.”

“Out
of how many?” Peter asked. “You don’t look that old.”

“That’s
some compliment,” Linda said, hands on her hips.

“I
didn’t mean…” Peter said, struggling up to his elbows.

“I
know,” Linda said, smiling more to herself than to Peter. “It’s
more flattering than you realize.”

She
raised the bed and took his hands, pulling him to his feet. He
landed very close to her. Linda smiled up at him, embarrassed. But
she didn’t back away.

“I
like that you remember,” she said.

“You
do?”

“I
do.”

“I
like it too,” Peter said. “Except for the part about dying.”

“Right,”
Linda said, laughing, covering her mouth. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t
be. I’m getting used to it. And there are benefits.” He squeezed
her hands.

“That’s
the other reason I don’t talk to my patients. This far from home,”
she said, pulling her hands free and stepping back. “You marines
are a little too eager.”

“I’m
different,” Peter said.

“I’ve
never heard that one.”

The
chime sounded, calling Peter to his post. He opened his mouth to
speak, but Linda held up a finger.

“Later,”
she whispered. “Now get out there and do your job.”

Peter
all but danced down the hall, electrified. But he stopped short at
the door to his room. Inside lying on the blanket was Amber’s
locket.

Fist-size
chunks of blue ice floated in the air as in a photo of a hailstorm.
They rattled against Peter’s suit as he pushed through, dragged by
the dead bodies of two marines whose rocket packs he drove by
remote. He moved slowly, the ice limiting the range of his sensors.
He had no idea where he was going; he wanted only to be far away
when the fighterships returned.

The
mission had been a complete bust, beginning with a serious
miscalculation of the enemy outpost’s location. Their target was
inside the planetary ring of Catrols, a gas giant deep within Riel
territory. Six platoons under Peter’s command had been dropped
several klicks away; they then advanced through the ring itself,
using the ice as cover. But the cover worked both ways: Peter and
his men couldn’t see any better than the Riel, and when the
outpost turned up closer than expected, they didn’t even notice it
until the Riel opened fire. It was a short, brutal battle. Peter
won, but at the cost of half of his men. And then, just as they
quieted the outpost, a squadron of Riel fighterships swooped in.

All
the sergeants had been killed in the fight with the outpost. The
remaining men were scattered and disorganized—most froze at the
sight of the fighterships, and of the few who reacted, none did
anything useful. Some fired on the incoming ship’s thick hulls,
others tried to flee. All were slaughtered.

Only
Peter had taken cover, slipping behind a blue glacier as the
fighterships made their strafing run. He doubted they had even seen
him, but there was nothing to gain in taking that chance.

—   —   —

The
dead men’s rockets sputtered out, and Peter flung them backward,
taking their last bit of momentum. He turned, watching them
disappear into the quiet storm and marking their location in his
computer. The men were basically intact—Peter had certainly been
through worse—so he was sure that if they could be collected, they
would be resuscitated. Not that he would ever find out. Even as a
master sergeant, he still wasn’t officially privileged to the UF’s
practice of bringing men back from the dead. And his knowing about
it was a secret between Linda and himself.

It
must be a lot to keep track of
, Peter thought,
making sure no
one ever meets anyone he saw get killed.

Peter
moved deeper into the ring, and the ice grew thicker and larger.
Massive glaciers rolled by his scope in colorless dimension,
shifting so rapidly that Peter had to use his computer just to dodge
past.

Safely
distant from his own mission, Peter scanned his map for nearby
platoons that he could link up with. He was looking for a chance to
redeem himself, but he was out of luck: the nearest action was a
hundred miles away, too far to reach by rocket pack. For him, this
battle was over. Irritated, he signaled for pickup.
Seventy men
lost for only four Riel
, he thought.
Chiang San will give me
an earful over that.

To
his surprise, the battle computer denied his request. “Fightership
activity in proximity,” it reported. “Retrieval prohibited until
area secured.”

Damn
,
Peter thought. He dialed up the Riel fighterships on his map and
watched the four red dots spiraling through the ring. It was a
search pattern; they were looking for him.

—   —   —

Based
on their flight pattern, the fighterships would fly right past him.
They wouldn’t be hard to avoid—there were plenty of places to
hide—but Peter wanted to give a little back. These were the same
ships that killed his men.

Marines
normally avoided Riel fighterships, and for good reason. They were
fast and well armed, with metal hulls impenetrable to the heaviest
weapon in the marine arsenal. But the ice complicated everything,
perhaps in Peter’s favor.

The
ice in the ring shifted constantly, and sensors could penetrate only
a few hundred feet, making it difficult to navigate. The Riel had
solved this problem by sinking transponders into every glacier,
which sent them up-to-the-second information on their position and
rotation. As a result, their fighterships could plot hyper-accurate
courses, weaving through the glacial ice at high speed with only
inches to spare. But it was a blind trust, one that might be
exploited. The fear, of course, was tangling with an enemy whose
weapons far outclassed his own.

But
so what?
Peter thought.
If they kill me, I’ll just wake up
back on base.

Though
Peter had long taken comfort in this way of thinking when things got
particularly grim, it was another thing altogether to willingly put
himself in the path of death.

As
long as I don’t get blown up.

—   —   —

Peter
drained his last battery clip and cast his rifle off into the blue
ice. He looked down at the glacier beneath his feet, to the watery
pit he had just melted. It was already crusted with ice.

He
pulled all four explosive charges from his belt, dropped flat to the
surface, and plunged his arm deep into the water. He released them,
spreading his fingers wide to catch them if they floated back up.

Water
clung to his arm as he drew it out, instantly turning to ice. He
slapped it off and rocketed away from the glacier. The explosion was
silent; light twinkled in the blue haze. Peter watched the glacier
split in half, its two parts rolling away from each other.

The
glacier was now directly in the path of the fighterships. Assuming
he hadn’t destroyed the transponder, they would mistake one part
of the glacier for the whole. By shifting course to avoid it, they
would aim right at the other.

Peter
flattened himself to the surface of a nearby glacier and killed all
noncritical functions in his suit; it wouldn’t make him invisible,
but it would take the Riel an extra second to notice him.

And
by then it wouldn’t matter.

—   —   —