“That shit?” I asked, waiting for him to look at me again before I finished. “
That
is the least of your problems. Don’t even worry about that stuff. I’m just glad you finally got laid.”
By three a.m. we were ready to move out, and the tanks coughed to life, although there were clearly fewer of them now and about half as many APCs as we’d started with. The exhaustion had gotten so thick that I couldn’t see straight. Someone explained the tactical situation: Popov had raced due south through western Uzbekistan in his bid to cut us off, but to move quickly they could bring only infantry and APCs, which explained why we had made such progress—no Russian tanks. Still, we wore down. Before sunset I had taken off my helmet and vision kit, and saw the dust and sand that had caked to everyone’s armor, turning it a matte tan. We had to kick each
other’s suit vents every so often to knock the crud loose and allow fresh air through the filters. And my muscles hated me. I lifted Sophie in the darkness and she cried out, but it barely registered, because my arms and back had fused into a burning mass, threatening to spasm out at any moment.
Lightly armored Marine units moved to our north and south, but during the last bits of daylight, most of the remaining French armor had been transferred to our area, in the center, so that we massed in a last effort to break through Popov’s line. Beyond him was open desert; beyond that, about two hundred klicks southwest, was the city of Mary, and then the Iranian border. I was thinking about the ocean, how it would feel when we got to Bandar, when we saw the air-attack warning beacon blink on and dove to the sand, but then a flight of our fighters swung in to take care of the Russian drones, so we stood again and moved out, a little more quickly, to mix with Russian units and hopefully avoid their aircraft in the process. Still, it made you feel good. Friendly airfields operated somewhere to the west, close enough to keep up the support, and it took the edge off an increasing feeling that we were the only people on the planet.
We had just crested a low dune when multiple rockets flared up on my infrared, streaking out from the desert. The APC in front of me opened fire immediately. Its computer tracked the incoming projectiles and spun its turret wildly in an effort to knock out the inbound, but two made it through and punched through the vehicle’s front armor. Its reaction seemed delayed. Slow. At first the APC jumped a little, and then, a second later, every hatch blew out in jets of flame, and the rear ramp flew past me, less
than a foot by my head, with a
whup-whup
sound, followed by the explosion’s shock wave.
We
fired obscurants this time. For a moment, though, before getting lost in the haze again, Popov’s APCs saw clearly enough to send a volley of plasma rounds in our general direction, and I fell to the sand again, burying Sophie underneath me and ignoring her pleas to get off. We waited for the smoke to gather and then rose.
The kid screamed in front of me and the haze lit briefly from the backwash of his rocket launcher, and then a few seconds later I dropped into a Russian trench. The kid was on my right, and the Brit on my left. Nobody moved. It was as if the world had gone silent. I heard Sophie’s helmet click against mine, but only just barely, because my sixth sense had kicked in to let me know that things weren’t normal, that something was off, but I hadn’t yet been able to put a finger on it. Then four Russian genetics rose in front of us from the sand, which cascaded off their powered armor, and I don’t remember screaming until long after the terror of hearing powered armor for the first time. When I was this close to them, they seemed inhuman—awkward nightmares that clunked and hissed as they moved in our direction at the same time they raised grenade launchers and opened up.
One of the kid’s rockets burned a hole through the closest Russian, and then the Brit launched a salvo of grenades, covering another in thermal gel. The thing’s hydraulic lines burst, sending the Russian to the sand, where it just lay there. But the other two continued forward.
“I’m jammed,” said the Brit, and the kid shouted back, “Reloading.”
Sophie yelled for me to get down and I looked at her in
confusion, wondering when I had dropped her, until I saw that she had found a Russian grenade launcher and now pointed it at my head.
“Don’t shoot me,” I said.
“Get down!”
As soon as I dropped, she opened fire. I couldn’t see the impact, but I heard it and then heard the scraping of metal on metal until one of the things finally slid over the trench lip, causing the sand to pour on top of me so that I lay partially buried.
The Brit leaned over. “You alive, mate?”
“Yeah.”
“Brilliant! Stay here, we’re going hunting.” He vanished with the kid and I did my best to brush the mounds of sand away, freeing my legs one at a time.
“You almost shot me,” I said to Sophie.
“The only danger was your slow reaction. I would not have shot you.”
“What if you had?”
“I would not have. I love you.”
One of the Russians, the one the Brit had brought down using thermal gel, popped his armor with a hiss. Sophie targeted him, and just before he slid from the shell, she fired a grenade. He fell, limp, into the sand, where he bled out in front of us.
“I still think you might have hit me by accident,” I said.
“Then you don’t know me well enough.”
At first the sounds of battle were everywhere—men screaming and the noise of rockets and grenades slamming into metal. But slowly it all went away. I knew from my heads-up that we hadn’t been left behind, because our
main force had gathered only about a hundred meters beyond our trench, but it still felt eerie. The obscurants had drifted off ten minutes earlier, and far overhead the moon was visible, not full anymore. We scrambled from the trench to begin crawling westward toward the bulk of our units, and neither of us had to explain it to the other: being alone was
too
creepy.
There was something about Sophie, and Bridgette had had it too. Even injured and in armor, I could tell who she was and wanted to have her, then and there, in the open desert, because she managed to look sexy just by moving the way she did. Sophie crawled slowly and had to rest every once in a while, and I waited for her. At one point I linked to her personal coms and whispered.
“I want you.”
“I want you too.”
“No, I’m serious. I think you’re beautiful, even in armor, and I know this sounds really stupid but you need to just listen, because I don’t know how much longer I’ll be willing to say this. I really want to live. With you.”
She stopped and didn’t speak for a second but then whispered back. “Don’t leave me.” We kept going then and got to about twenty meters away from the closest friendly when everyone went nuts.
At first I thought they were all screaming in pain, and dropped my head, waiting for rocket or grenade fire, but then it came into focus. They were happy. Something had happened and I stood, helping Sophie to her feet before lifting her onto my back again, and we jogged forward for the last few steps. A second trench line stretched north and south, and scattered around it were the wreckage of about twenty APCs and what looked like hundreds of
dead infantry, their armor still steaming. It took a few minutes but I found the kid and the Brit.
“They bugged out,” the Brit said.
“Excuse me?”
“No shit,” said the kid. “It looks like Popov packed his gear yesterday during the lull and retreated to the north. This was just a token force, left behind to scare the crap out of us.”
“Which it did,” I said.
The kid snorted. “I’m too sick to feel scared.”
Everything refused to register. I knew this was one of those occasions that I’d remember forever, but the significance wouldn’t seep in and needed to be absorbed slowly, one bit at a time. The war was over. Nothing stood between us and Bandar now, and for the moment there wasn’t any thought of Russian kinetics dropping out of space to end us before we had time to react. After the retreat from Pavlodar, I had been too wasted, too high to grasp the significance of a time like this, but as it began to take hold this time, the enormity made me put Sophie down gently so I could then slide to the trench floor and pop my helmet. It had gotten hard to breathe. Before I knew what was happening, I started sobbing, and there wasn’t any thought of embarrassment even though I knew the three of them were just staring at me. Then Sophie lowered herself to my side and wrapped her arms around me. She didn’t say anything. Her presence made it better and worse at the same time, so I lost it completely, and when she asked me what was wrong, there wasn’t any way to explain—that I was happy and sad and terrified, all at the same time. Happy because I’d never have to look at this place again. Sad because of everyone I’d lost. And
terrified because I still had to get her out somehow, and also because it wasn’t clear what the real world held for me anymore and I didn’t know if I’d hack it. How did you explain that kind of crap? So instead I mumbled that everything was fine and I just needed a minute.
The Brit handed me a cigarette. “It won’t be long, mate. You’ll be right.”
“What the hell am
I
going to do?” the kid said. “I was just really getting good at this stuff.”
“There’s always the Legion, mate.”
“I can enlist?”
“Sure,” the Brit said. “Especially if you’re an idiot. But let’s not get too happy yet, because there’s over a thousand klicks of desert between us and Bandar. We have a long trip ahead of us.”
We spent the rest of the night in the trench, and at some point I fell asleep on Sophie. It was the best sleep I’d had in ages. It worried me at first that it wasn’t clear where we’d go or how she’d get out, but exhaustion swept over those thoughts and everything went dark.
Just before dawn, we piled our wounded into APCs. Collecting them took all morning and I had to hide with Sophie in the trenches, because I couldn’t risk leaving her alone, in case someone tried to talk to her. It’s not like it disappointed me. The last thing I wanted was to carry guys with no legs or spend the day wading through wreckage and the bloating dead. On the other hand, by the time they gave the signal to saddle up, I was close to mad with the desire to just move. Sophie had gone unconscious from the drugs again, and as I was left to my own
thoughts, they quickly turned to whether the Russians would hit us with kinetics, until finally the orders to move out arrived.
There was no room inside any vehicle, so we climbed atop an APC and watched as others did the same to form a long column of vehicles bristling with men, some of whom had to ride on the sides, grasping anything just to hold on. The Legion had commandeered a couple of Pops’s APCs, but as soon as they turned the engines over, the vehicles exploded. I watched as men flew through the air. Their landings sent up clouds of sand, and a few of them got up or crawled back to the road for help, but the ones who struck the highway made a crunching sound and never moved again. Once they got things sorted out, the column started southward.
All afternoon we traveled. I popped my helmet and felt the breeze move through my beard and wondered how long it had been since the last time I’d showered, which led me to think of other things I hadn’t considered: how long it had been since I’d slept in a bed or had a real meal, and what it would be like to have a real job that didn’t involve death. Sophie slept next to me, and I was glad for the quiet. It gave me time to sort through the flood of images that our victory had unleashed, things cloistered in a dark part of my mind because for so long I never
really
thought I’d make it out. All the dead visited me in what must have been less than a minute but felt like a year, because their pictures crystallized in my head, exactly how they had looked in the last moments I’d seen them. Nobody said anything. I guessed that the Brit and the kid both were thinking the same things, because they stared into the distance but their eyes never moved. They
were seeing something that wasn’t visible to anyone except them. If the Russians had hit us with an air attack then, it would have succeeded; the will to fight had been sucked out, leaving each man in a state that resembled a human husk, barely there and dazed from having gone so long without peace. I
tried
to sleep. But there wasn’t enough room on the APC’s roof, and every time it hit a pothole or braked to avoid slamming into the vehicles in front, my eyes blinked open to make sure that we weren’t under attack. Sleep would have to come later—in Bandar or wherever else we wound up. By the time we reached the next city, Mary, we were in such a bad state that Command decided to hell with security and let everyone drop where they stood, which resulted in a highway littered with snoring men.
When I snapped awake, the suit chronometer read 0500, and the Brit sat next to me, watching whatever it was that had woken me in the first place. A group of trucks pulled alongside our APCs.
“Who are they?” I asked.
“Air Force. They were the only ones left in Mary—volunteered to stay behind when everyone else bugged out so they could give us air support.”
“I heard an explosion.”
“They’re blowing all their aircraft and ordnance in place, and for about an hour they’ve been transferring all their fuel alcohol to us, enough to get us into Iran, so we won’t have to run on plasma. Someone oughta buy these guys a drink, mate. Or something.”
“Or something.”
Another boom broke the morning silence, and to our north I saw a cloud of smoke rise, billowing flame as it
shifted in color from black to gray and then white. Everyone woke up with the noise. We took an hour to eat and gather gear before crawling back onto the APCs, where we elbowed each other for room to lie down, or to get as far from the engine vents as possible because of their heat.