If they had planned it for weeks, the rebel forces could not have executed a more perfect slaughter of the 97th Airborne.
The Major sat in the dirt and gazed out on a valley of what had been hundreds of fellow soldiers, just moments ago. C and D Companies of the 97th. The only thing he could see now was upturned earth and, where not buried by soil and shrapnel, body parts.
And then there was his own body to deal with. He hesitantly lifted one gloved hand from his gut, and immediately slowed his breathing once he saw the amount of blood coating his fingers. He noticed that he couldn’t feel his legs anymore. They were still attached to him, but they would likely never be used again.
Actually, none of him would ever be used again, he realized. Blood loss at this volume would take his life within… oh, ten minutes or so. Perhaps much sooner than that. Slowed breathing wouldn’t help him stay alive for longer; just regulate emotion and stem the panic that rose from his spine. What was left of his spine.
He returned his hands to his stomach and applied as much pressure as he could stand. The harder he pressed, the fiercer the pain spiked. Almost knocked him back out. He gasped and tried shaking his head awake.
Oh, good, he mused. He had a concussion injury, too. This was wonderful timing. He blinked away the dizziness until he felt like he could think again. Plan. Evaluate.
First: paralyzing pain. Fatal injuries. Okay. He felt ready. His back lay against something hard; he looked up and saw that it was a chunk of rock about the size of a car. It was cracked in the middle but would still provide adequate cover. It sat at the top of a ridge extending to his left and his right, like a naturally entrenched fortification. Behind him, beyond the rock, lay rebel-controlled territory. No line of sight between him and enemy forces. For now.
Second: utter devastation of allied forces. The 97th had been dismantled before his eyes by a delayed-detonation minefield. It must have been buried under their feet the whole time they had been building defensive positions and landing their artillery; he had no idea how the rebels had established a minefield of this size without being detected — but then he stopped himself from wondering. Ten minutes, he reminded himself. It was a depressing number. It meant no time for hindsight.
Third: survivors… He closed his eyes and thought. Not wondering, but wandering. His mind stretched itself, wandered, explored the battlefield. To the east, on his left, he sensed a single breathing soldier.
Only one. Seriously?
He stopped. Scrubbed the emotion from his mind. No time. Turned his head and let his mind scan the other half of the battlefield.
Zero.
…I’ll take the door on the left, he thought.
The Major ordered his brain to reach out again, locating the one remaining soldier and latching onto his brainwaves. Her brainwaves, he realized. With a little more concentration, he discerned that she was both conscious and ambulatory, but her rifle had been lost and her mind was a mess. Shell-shock. Both she and the Major had been near opposite edges of the minefield when it detonated and had been spared the brunt of the deadly shockwave. She had narrowly missed the flying shrapnel from the blast. The Major had not.
He read her name and rank from her memory: Pella Fought, First Sergeant, qualified in combat demolitions and marksmanship. Squad leader of a squad that now lay distributed across the valley in front of her. He felt the survivor’s guilt in her mind that came with that. He knew that feeling himself. She knelt, unmoving, in the burnt grass near where the explosion had thrown her, staring at the field of dead men. Wondering what to do.
The Major heard something on the wind: a slight buzzing sound that grew steadily louder. Probably rebel aircraft. There was no time to lose.
He psychically tapped into her mind and addressed her.
SERGEANT.
She jumped. The voice startled her, as it did most people. Telepathy was still a highly-classified development by the DoD. She looked around for the source of the voice.
Sergeant, this is Major Getty. Report to the front line.
The buzzing in the air from behind him reached a high-pitched whine, then transformed into three spy drones overhead — essentially winged missiles with a dozen cameras mounted on the outside — that bypassed his position and rapidly crisscrossed the carnage before him. The full extent of the 97th Airborne’s casualties were now laid bare. Their secret was out.
On the double! he ordered.
The intensity of the voice inside her own brain shocked her into obeying it. She stood instantly to her feet and yelled “Yessir,” without really knowing who she was saying it to. She turned toward the slope and spotted the rock where the Major lay, perched on top of the ridge like the centerpiece of a dining table.
The Major remembered to breathe slowly while he waited for her. He began to take stock of what few resources they had between them. At his side lay his helmet and his rifle, a specialized weapon that only a psion commando could operate. Beyond that, the only thing of any use to them was the Sergeant’s functioning legs and whatever sidearm she had on her.
She crested the hill at last and he got his first look at her. Slight build. Possibly a fast runner. Brown hair tucked into her helmet, pale face, and sober eyes that looked like they had already seen too much. She spotted him sitting at the base of the rock and approached, speaking once she was within earshot.
“Sir. First Sergeant Fought, Charlie Company —”
“Major Getty,” he interrupted. “I know who you are, Sergeant.”
She halted and regarded him with bemusement. He continued.
“Commensurate with the total loss of all field officers in the 97th Airborne, I hereby requisition command and subsume you into the PSICOM chain of authority. Sergeant, according to army rules, you report to me now.”
“Yessir,” she answered instinctively. Then, realizing out loud: “…You’re one of the commandos. A telekat.”
“Psion is the proper name, Sergeant.”
“Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.” In her mind swirled a thousand rumors and wild theories that the army infantry had come up with surrounding the psychic and telekinetic powers of the psion special operators — many of them secretly true. But most soldiers would never knowingly be face to face with a so-called ‘telekat’. On a subconscious level, she feared him.
“My unit is down.” she reported, and then looked at the valley behind her. “…We’re all down. What’s the situation? Can we call for evac?”
The Major gave her a hollow smile and lifted up his satcom transceiver from the ground with his left hand. It had been cleaved in two by the same shrapnel that had nearly bisected him. “You don’t happen to have one of these in your back pocket, do you?”
She shook her head, and then noticed the blood on his glove. It was too late to stop her from seeing — her face visibly changed once she saw his midsection. The energy in her eyes faded. She understood.
“Sir, I can administer first aid.”
The Major creased his brow and considered how best to explain it to her. “Sergeant, behind this rock lies the main body of enemy infantry. A full battalion of fresh troops who plan on marching over our hill and taking this valley once and for all.”
He swallowed and gave the valley one last look. The 97th had been specially selected to fortify and hold this position; stop it from falling into rebel control. And now the entire battalion was gone. It pained him to consider losing their objective so easily.
“Even if you saved me,” he explained, “by the time you finished, we would both be captured by the enemy’s advance, and then the entire 97th would be K-I-A for nothing. That’s not the way this is supposed to end.”
Her mouth hung open, not knowing what to say. She looked away. She hadn’t yet learned how to maintain eye contact with a dying comrade. The psion wondered if this particular soldier would have it in her to stand and fight.
He reached up and tapped with bloody fingers the fabric badge of the 97th Airborne on the shoulder of his uniform: a kneeling rifleman with an opened parachute above his head. “What does this say, First Sergeant Fought?”
She looked back at him with hollow eyes, then glanced at her own shoulder sleeve insignia as if she hadn’t memorized it long ago. “It says… Airborne. Righteous Indignation.”
The Major monitored the emotions in her head as he pried, searching for whatever would connect with the soldier inside of her. The one he hoped had not surrendered already. “And what does that motto mean, soldier?”
Her mind was frozen. The fear inside her wanted to swallow her whole. But her voice came unstuck and with hardly a tremble said, “It means duty. And ferocity.”
The Major continued the line. “It means we’re good and pissed off. While there remains breath in us…” he proffered.
“…We will deny the enemy victory,” she finished automatically. When she looked back at him, her eyes had accepted it. “That’s what it means, sir.”
He nodded once, firmly. The concussion injury inside his skull punished him for it. He decided to simply stop moving his head. But now he knew that this one could be trusted. Enough, at least, to die on this battlefield with him, and perhaps enough to inflict significant losses on the enemy as they did.
He didn’t really know if it could work, but there was one idea.
The Major reached down and thumbed a switch on his rifle, removing a spiral cable connecting the butt of the rifle to his chest harness. “Sergeant, take my weapon.”
She regarded it with a moment of doubt; it looked too light, almost skeletal, to be a functioning firearm. To him, it felt heavier than ever before as he tried to lift it up for her.
Her hands reached out and grabbed it from him, ignoring his blood on the casing. She was eager to obey. Ready to die with him. He gave her one weak thumbs up before returning both hands to his stomach. There may yet be at least one warrior remaining of the 97th Airborne, he hoped.
The Sergeant stood up and looked away from him. Through his mind, he could sense that her eyes were wet.
“You will not cry, soldier,” he ordered calmly. “Makes for bad marksmanship.”
She blinked a few times and then nodded. Exhaled through her mouth. “Understood, sir,” she answered. “Wilco.”
“Get eyes on the enemy,” he commanded. She hefted the rifle and clambered up the steep face of the rock using the split in the middle as a foothold.
Moment of truth, the psion thought. If hostile counter-snipers were paying any attention, they could take her head off the second it poked above cover. He read her emotions through her brainwaves and discovered that she was thinking the same thing.
Her helmet reached line of sight with the enemy, and the live camera mounted on its top recorded a two-second sweep of the terrain on the other side before ducking back down.
“Bad news, sir,” she reported as the video feed displayed itself on both of their helmets’ visors. The Major picked his helmet up from the dirt beside him with one hand, careful not to smear his blood on the visor display. The video showed a low plain, what looked like a dried-up swamp full of tall grass and occasional copses of dead trees — and starting from about 200 yards away, several hundred brown-and-gray rebel uniforms spread out and advancing toward their hill. Two squads of three were in the front, running point.
“Eh,” he answered. “They’re all Oscar Mike. Bad commander.”
“Sir?”
“They’re all moving at the same time; they don’t anticipate any resistance. Stupid commander. An enemy on a milk run is ripe for an ambush.”
She licked her dry lips. Nervous. “Orders, sir?”
“Let’s give them an ambush,” he growled. And then he lied to her. “Sergeant, what you’re holding is an experimental directed energy weapon. It was bound to change the war, but too few were manufactured in time. It fires differently from anything you’ve trained with.”
The Sergeant pursed her lips thoughtfully and lifted the rifle to her shoulder to test the sights. “If it shoots straight, I can use it.”
What a woman. “Then get into position and use it. Forwardmost squad is your target. Line up your shot and then take it.”
She repositioned herself to the top of the rock, shouldered the rifle, and squeezed her face behind the rifle’s optic. He listened to her brainwaves — felt them, more like — and waited for the distinctive sensation of the trigger pull. Her mind tensed up in that old familiar way, and then:
Clack. Nothing happened. But now he knew what it felt like in her mind the moment her trigger finger squeezed.
“Malfunction, sir.”
“Dry fire,” he lied. “Battery pack is on disconnect. Slap the switch on the left side, above the trigger guard.”
She found the switch and then set up her target again.
“And, Sergeant,” he interrupted. “This weapon will surprise you. Once you begin firing, don’t stop. Recover from recoil as fast as possible, and make the enemy miserable.”
She breathed out, then in again, calming herself. “Wilco.”
“I’ll be watching through the helmet.” Another lie. His vision was already becoming blurry. So much of his blood was now outside of his vascular system that his body was shutting down everything non-essential. He would only be able to watch the battlefield through his mind. “I’ll call out targets as I see them.”
All that mattered was that she trusted him.
“Hostiles at 50 yards and closing fast,” she reported.
That was close enough. “Then let them have it.”
The Sergeant put her finger on the trigger, and he was ready for it. The moment he felt her squeeze the trigger past the threshold, he ordered the weapon to fire.
It reacted to his thoughts and drew power from his mind. All in one instant, a fiery lance flashed out of the muzzle, burned in a laser-straight vector, and penetrated the target. A massive cavitation bubble and sonic boom erupted from inside his torso — and the enemy combatant vanished from view. The two soldiers on his left and right were knocked down by the blast. For a moment, time stopped as every head on the battlefield turned to identify the sound.
I may have overcooked that one a little, the Major thought to himself.
“Wow,” she remarked.
He recovered his focus. “Acquire your targets and continue firing. That’s an order.”
“Yessir,” she answered dutifully, but not without a hint of almost trepidation. She had newfound respect for the rifle, which would only tempt her to be more cautious with it.
But there was no time for caution. The enemy was now fully apprised of the situation. Commands were being yelled across the field as men turned and dove for cover or kneeled in the grass and swept the horizon with their weapons, hunting for the sniper’s position. The Sergeant did not have an ideal hiding place; dead center on top of a boulder with the bright blue sky behind you was the equivalent of wearing a big red bullseye on your helmet. The only solution to poor camouflage was intimidation and intense firepower. The Major could supply her with both, but only as long as she kept firing that gun.
She shifted the rifle and eyed the other trio of point men to her left. She selected one and put the crosshairs on his center of mass. Her trigger finger squeezed, and the Major forced the rifle to fire. The enemy soldier fell with a sudden hole in his chest.
The Sergeant paused. Odd, she was thinking. This time the target didn’t explode.
“Sergeant!” he barked. “Keep. Firing.”
“Yessir!”
She acquired another target. Fired. No explosion; just a plasma bolt through the center. Reacquired. Fired. The last of the trio fell.
He began hearing more screams from beyond the firing line; a quick psychic scan of the enemy revealed a coordinated counterattack brewing. The enemy CO believed they could locate the sniper’s nest if they moved fast and flanked the ridge. He stole a mental image from their commander’s mind, flipped it like a mirror, and overlaid it onto what he remembered of the territory from the video feed.
“Ignore the suppressing fire, Sergeant,” he said only a fraction of a second before enemy fire began peppering the ridge all around them. Only a few dozen rounds impacted the rock they were braced against, which meant that they still had not spotted the Sergeant’s exact position by some miracle. He sensed her brain beginning to panic.
Sergeant, he repeated directly in her mind. Ignore incoming fire. One o’clock, low, through that grass. Look for movement.
The enemy continued to fire and she flinched, fighting the instinct to get fully behind cover. Then she obeyed his command and began hunting for signs of movement in the tall grass on the right.
“…Enemy spotted.”
Weapons free.
Her trigger finger did not hesitate, this time. The Major felt her pull it twenty times with only minor pauses throughout. Each time, he concentrated his mind to send a single and powerful pulse through the rifle, catching the enemy in the grass and setting it and the adjacent trees ablaze.
It was exhausting. He was already dying, and every trigger pull robbed another wave of psionic energy from his already-fading pool of strength. He felt like he had more of that left in him than he did blood, but that wasn’t saying a whole lot. He would be able to last another five minutes, if he gave it his all.
Five minutes to route an entire enemy battalion. And/or die trying.
He heard something else, something distinct from the gunfire. The sound sharply crescendoed until it suddenly impacted the rock at his back, detonating with terrific force. The shockwave kicked the breath out of his chest and knocked him to the ground. His eyes turned watery with pain, and he found that he couldn’t breathe for three long seconds. Panic almost overtook him.
Then the Sergeant was in front of his face, somehow, and dragging him by his arms a few feet away from where he had lain. She was yelling words at him which he couldn’t hear. Tinnitus — his ears were ringing so sharply that he couldn’t hear anything. He read her mind instead to figure out what she was saying.
“MAJOR! Are you with me, sir??”
I’m alive! he shouted back psychically. She froze. He must have yelled quite loudly inside her brain; she wasn’t used to it. Sitrep, he ordered.
She blinked. Then replied. “They fired a rocket at our position; it split the boulder wide open but we’re alright.”
Okay, he answered. Then reposition and get fire back on those rebels. He was finally able to breathe again, a little, and he blinked the tears out of his eyes. They definitely know where we are now.
“Yessir.” She reached under his arms and hoisted him back into a sitting position, propped up against the rock. “Don’t you cry on me, sir. It’s bad for marksmanship.”
He said something unbecoming of an officer in reply, but his ears were ringing too loudly for him to hear his own voice. She was back on the rifle and leaning against the rock next to him, finding a new firing line through the newly-formed gap. The rocket blast had literally blown the rock into two pieces; they now stood separated by a few inches at their closest point but widened out to a considerable space on the far side. By some strange, unusual fortune, it now formed a natural sniper’s nest.
The Sergeant lowered the rifle through the gap in the rock and found her next mark; put her finger on the trigger; squeezed. The Major forced another energy pulse through the weapon and felt the target go limp and fall.
We may have used up the last of our luck with that rocket. Make it count, he said psychically.
She grunted an acknowledgement, but kept her eye glued to the optic. No more distractions, she told herself. She didn’t know that the Major could hear her thoughts.
She tried to find the hostile who had fired the rocket. At last she spotted him. A team of two were reloading the launcher together.
Five more shots. Two kills. She was getting frustrated with her misses.
Do not stop firing, Sergeant Fought.
Sorry, sir, she thought back at him, before she realized that she had just answered him psychically. It made her pause.
Sergeant!
She clamped her eye back to the optic and returned to firing. Five more shots. Three kills. She decided to stop counting and just keep squeezing the trigger.
“How many shots does this weapon’s battery hold, sir?”
A lot. Stop thinking. Keep shooting. He hoped that she wouldn’t question that too hard.
Enemy fire began returning on their position, and she shifted her weight to protect herself and get a better angle. She stumbled suddenly and almost fell on him. “Ah!” she winced.
Are you hit?
“Negative. Just my ankle when the rocket knocked me down.” She maneuvered into a better position that took the weight off of her left ankle and fired off another burst toward the enemy. The Major sent a rifle pulse with each pull of the trigger.
Focus on firing, soldier. Don’t stop, he repeated. Make them scared to even look our direction.
While she hunted out targets, he carefully reached out with his mind and found the center of pain in her foot. Two partially torn ligaments. He laid his hand on the heel of her boot, hoping it was subtle, and then began to leech the pain out of her body. It hurt him just as much as it hurt her, but the longer he kept at it, the more he felt it and the less she did. Just keep your mind off distractions, he reminded her.
She didn’t respond this time. Two more trigger pulls. Two more plasma beams. Two more bodies dropped. She was in the zone.
There wasn’t much time left, the Major felt. He would stop breathing within a few minutes. He only hoped that with that time, they might terrorize the enemy enough to… He wasn’t sure. His head throbbed with pain. It was hard to plan. Or speak. Or breathe.
The return fire from the enemy resurged and came far closer to the Sergeant’s head than before. She ducked down behind cover as pulverized rock pinged off of her helmet. The Major felt an extra burst of adrenaline course through his blood. “Counter-snipers!” she called out.
He began searching for their psychic signatures with his mind. “They’re hiding behind the trees,” he realized out loud.
“Which ones??” she yelled back.
He stretched his mind, his eyelids fidgeting with concentration. “…The ones on fire,” he said at last. They’re betting on the flames to give them concealment.
The Sergeant spun on her heel back into her firing position, and somehow didn’t notice the sprain in her ankle this time. She furrowed her brow as enemy rounds impacted the rock near her shoulder and exploded small chunks of stone into her view. Her eyes found the counter-snipers’ hiding place and sent three rounds through each tree trunk at shoulder level. Two riflemen slumped over from behind the burning trees, their chest-plates glowing orange with molten holes through them.
There’s one more, he told her. Two o’clock. He’s trying to flank.
The Sergeant lifted her face to get a visual, but the rock was too tall. She planted one hand on it and lifted with her legs until she had an angle over the top of the rock to her right, and hefted the pulse rifle to her shoulder. She leaned her weight against the stone in front of her and put both hands on the rifle, zeroing in.
The hair by her neck suddenly split in two as a bullet whizzed through it. She didn’t react. She hunted the target.
A chill of vicarious fear surged through the Major as he watched; the enemy’s next shot wouldn’t miss. Sergeant, he warned.
But it didn’t matter. The next shot didn’t come from the enemy or the Major — it came from her. The hostile sniper fell with a smoldering hole in his helmet the instant her brain made the decision to fire. At the exact moment of synapse.
Without her trigger finger, or the Major, doing anything.
“Whoa,” she breathed. He could feel her mind reeling from the new sensation — the ‘brain drain’, as psions termed it. “That felt really weird.”
The Major knew exactly what had happened, but it was becoming increasingly more difficult to conceal it from her. Difficult to conceal his surprise, too. Experimental weapon, he explained quickly. Reacts to the thoughts of the user. And then, as an afterthought, he added: It’s good if it does that. Don’t be alarmed.
The Sergeant slid back down the rock to her better-concealed firing position and returned to shooting before he could yell at her again. “I heard about these commando guns,” she said between trigger pulls, “but I always assumed you had to be psionic to use them.”
The Major didn’t say anything to that. Pretended that his ragged breathing was preventing a response.
The enemy force was in a panic, now. They knew exactly where the sniper was, but the wedge of the rock gave them only a minuscule window through which to hit the Sergeant. She had a 90-degree open spread of the battlefield from her position. She could see everyone plainly; they could barely see her. Every glint of a marksman’s scope was rewarded with near-instant death from her weapon.
And she was getting better with the rifle. He could tell because it was taking less concentration from him to keep the weapon firing. Now that she knew what kind of feeling to expect, every fifth shot or so was coming from her own mind instead of his. Like she was becoming one with the weapon.
One with the gun, he remembered. That was the phrase the first class of psions had coined during training at the Ranch.
The Sergeant fired a rapid burst at a moving enemy, and then stopped. The Major could tell that something was wrong — her cortisol levels were spiking.
“I just fired around a corner!”
Hm, thought the Major. This was going to be harder to explain.
“I missed, but it curved and hit the target anyway! You said it fires straight!”
I never actually said that, he countered. I only said that it reacts to the thoughts of the user.
So, it shoots what I want it to shoot, independent of the sights? she asked, not consciously realizing that she was talking to him with her mind again.
If you concentrate. Only if you get used to the gun, and only if it gets used to you.
After another moment of stunned silence, she resumed chasing enemy infantry with the rifle while her mind churned in confusion. “…This is basically science fiction,” she said at last.
Basically, he thought back.
Their only advantage as a fireteam was that they both had cover while the rebel forces had only concealment. There was nothing bulletproof to hide behind in the marshland. The enemy was faced with the unenviable decision of charging the hill directly and becoming instant casualties or attempting to remain hidden and fire back from the grass. The Sergeant’s eyes kept finding them eventually, anyway.
It all fell apart when two bullets finally threaded the gap between the rocks and hit the Sergeant in the chest, knocking her backward. The Major felt her stop breathing — and then sharply inhale again as she stumbled and almost fell onto her rear. Her chest-plate had stopped the bullets and distributed their kinetic force over her entire torso, saving her life.
“Ow,” she gasped.
And then the Major suddenly sensed it in the sky.
Sergeant, twelve o’clock high!
She snapped back to a firing position as best as she could, aiming at the clouds, wondering what she was aiming for.
Grenade launch, he told her. It would be a golf ball-sized target traveling at 200 feet per second, coming towards them in a high arc in order to reach them behind cover and then explode. Once fired, it was not possible to stop such a grenade.
The Major understood all of those facts instantly, and he told her none of them. What he told her was:
Don’t think — shoot!!
Her trigger finger squeezed manically as she pointed the rifle at the sky, her optic nearly useless against the glare of the sun. The weapon dutifully fired a rapid stream of plasma in a shotgun-burst pattern, saturating the sky above them with dozens of independent beams — one of which finally found the grenade. It detonated twenty yards above their heads, and the rifle fell silent.
That’s a good shot, the Major admitted. The Sergeant’s mind had instinctively told the rifle to fire a forked burst to maximize the chances of hitting a tiny, fast-moving target. And it had obeyed.
The rebels on the other side of the rock were now truly desperate; the Major could feel it. They knew there was something wrong with this army sniper they were facing. Something singularly dangerous. Nonetheless, their commanding officer had determined to push up the slope, and his men were afraid to disobey his orders.
The Major gave her a reassuring pat on her leg, the only part of her he could reach. They’re coming for us en masse, now, he explained. They want this hill.
The Sergeant didn’t move, except to realign her rifle back into the crevice and resume firing. “Orders, sir?”
The psion exhaled, considering the sheer numbers of the enemy. Three or four hundred still remained, spread from their hill to the horizon. After all that had been said, he didn’t want her to die.
He gave her his answer.
…Make them suffer.
“Wilco, Major, sir.” Her mind was iron.
The Major laid his head back against the rock as he listened to the gunfire increase from both sides. She had taken the reins. It felt good. Felt like he could trust her to see this last stand through to the end, for both of them. He was proud of her.
He lifted one hand away from his gut and felt around on his thigh for his army datapad. Grabbed it and pulled it from its pouch. Tried to find the power button, but he couldn’t see anything clearly anymore. Black fog had overtaken his peripheral and his eyes could barely focus on anything that wasn’t right in front of his face. He tried lifting the datapad to his nose and found that it was too much effort. His blood already covered most of the screen anyway.
“Voice rec, confirm,” he stated as loudly as he could.
The datapad pulsed once under his fingertips and a female voice piped back. “Voice recognition confirmed; state access.”
“Major Alfred Getty, US Army. Alpha Alpha niner Zulu five. Emergency protocol.”
“Emergency pro—” the computer tried to protest.
“Victor one-one-one. Bypass Whiskey Foxtrot.”
The machine suddenly understood. “Bypass recognized. State command.”
The Major was finding it hard to think, now. He closed his eyes and tried to focus. “Uh. Sergeant. Sergeant Pella Fought, US Army. 97th Airborne Battalion. Access records.”
“Records retrieved. State command.”
“Force credentials; PSICOM authority. Subsume serviceman into PSICOM chain of command.”
“Confirm transfer request,” the computer demanded flatly.
“Confirmed,” he breathed. Running out of blood. Running out of time.
The computer began to explain a whole slew of martial code that he didn’t have time for. “Emergency protocol; skip,” he ordered.
The computer hummed an affirmative tone. “State command.”
“Force command. Field promotion.” His throat was dry. He gulped. It didn’t help. “Second lieutenant,” he managed.
“Acknowledged. State command.”
“Force… ah, something…” He gasped for air, but in vain. He was losing his focus. “…PSICOM authority.” He had to cough something wet out of his lungs, and then sucked in one more breath. “Assign serviceman to… S-O-F task group. Attach special classification to serviceman.”
“Acknowledged. State new classification.”
The Major closed his eyes and tried to find the breath to finish this one last thing. His hands and arms were trembling with cold. Somewhere vaguely in the distance, he could still hear the unique report of the psi-rifle punching holes in enemy targets. But he no longer felt it draining him.
He was sure.
“…Psion,” he said at last.
“Acknowledged,” the computer replied. “State command.”
The Major didn’t say anything. To his left, the Sergeant continued to fire as rapidly as she could find targets, trying not to flinch at every bullet that impacted the rock near her head.
After ten seconds, the datapad repeated itself. “State command.”
The enemy tried firing more grenades at their position; with desperate nerves, she shot each of them out of the sky.
“State command.”
The gunfire spiked in intensity and raged on for another ten seconds.
“Session terminated,” the computer concluded. “Data synchrony awaiting network.”
The battle lasted only a few minutes longer. By the end, the Sergeant had taken more than ten rounds in the arms and chest before she finally stopped firing. The rebels had lost almost one quarter of their fighters trying to capture the hill.
When at last the rebel forces had retreated with their wounded, she found the Major’s body sitting exactly where she had left him. The datapad in his hand was coated with his blood, the screen dark. The only thing left for her was silence.
It wasn’t until the medevac transport retrieved them both from the ridge that she learned of her new assignment.
(Happy New Year.)
The Science of Good Sci-Fi 