Meridien K - Chapter 5: The Routine

A dropship speeding low over trees, then lush grassland, then sparse woods, then yellow, weather-beaten plains. A dizzy kaleidoscope no different than stateside training runs.

             

All strapped in. Barely able to move when the guys up front jerked the ship one way or another, contour-flying for the hell of it, trying to scare us because they knew some of us were scared, didn't know some of us didn't even know what fear meant, not in an arm-wrestling testosteronic way, but we simply couldn't process it, like the people who can't feel pain and bite their tongue every time they eat. But the guys up front, they weren't us. They were just our ride. They wore the uniforms of the regular Forces, what we all came to refer to as capital-R Regular Forces, then Reg Forces, then just Regs. The Regs weren't like us. They had unit patches, rank insignia, commanding officers, digicamo fatigues, as much equipment they could fit on their load-bearing harnesses, sometimes as heavy as their whole body.

             

We wore long-sleeved black shirts and black pants. We didn't have the reverse flag on our left shoulder. At most, we had a map in our pockets, a knife, a few extra mags for our AP rifles, and however many days of compressed MREs were needed. Some had communicators with the mic stuck to the scragpads near their collarbone and the earpiece snaked over their non-firing ear. Six-Four, across from me, had a full-sized headset, a mic big and fuzzy as a scotch egg, dialing through the channels on the wristband, fiddling with the earpiece and the elastic band that encircled his skull to keep it in place.

             

Our first combat drop, idle as training but there might be real bullets incoming this time, and Six-Four was playing with his damn radio. Typical Six-fucking-Four, in love with the sound of his own voice; only a year In and we all knew our Ticks.

             

Caf tapped my shoulder, held up one finger as he relayed the signal from the hotshots up front. I tapped Mars and kept the chain going, though by the time it reached Chronos and the seasick-green Candy in the back, the ground swam up and looked on a sure collision course as the pilots let the ship drop a good ten feet before it hovered inches above the grass. I was halfway out of the ship in moments, but I still could hear them laugh.

             

Just as we had done hundreds of times at The Base With No Name and its ghost grounds. A quick sprint and the fan-out to natural points of cover. My field of vision was fractured, stuck in that phenomena of trying to reconcile the differences between on-the-ground sight, topographical maps studied for hours, satellite photographs, then myself, so insignificant as I scrambled under the cover of a boulder near the quarry's edge of the drop.

             

I hit cover before a lot of the other guys and watched the rest of them find their places and disappear. They checked their weapons and ammo, and I found myself mechanically handling my AP, yanking on the tight mag, working the bolt and feeling the machinery feed a long brass shell into the chamber, staring out the long Cyclone barrel of the AP, just waiting for a target to wander into my iron sights or my off-kilter, parallax-corrected scope.

             

Six-Four was nearly on top of me, trying to squeeze into my shadow. His rifle was inelegantly snagged on his shoulder. He pressed his comm mic really close to his lips.

             

"This is Six-Four, Unit Seven-Sixteen, repeat Unit Seven-One-Six. Arrival at dropzone, I mean, uh, delta zulu… No contact."

             

I envisioned his digital recorder on his desk back in our prefab at Tent City, clicking on when he transmitted, rigged to intercept and save everything he sent back; myself, then, not sure if it was for posterity, or, worse, vanity. I also pictured the perpetually-empty desks at the CP, 716's monitoring stations unmanned, while on the other side of the dim dusty space, littered with PX wrappers, some too-young Regs were busy raining fire from the latest-and-greatest remote drone dreamed up by the techs at any of the DoD's well-tanned R&D arms.

             

And there we were, stuck on the ground with no transport but our feet, heading out to a vague objective, a vague mission, and the overall doubt of whether or not we were actually fighting a war, a small part of it, or maybe out there and, hell, no war at all.

             

Pointman checked his compass; so elegant for basic parts thrown together that've been the same since the turn of the century. Since the last century. I felt the weight of my rifle and, minus the scope and its optics, recoil calibration, all the rail attachments to make a trigger-pull so certain it'd cut straight center… it, too, hadn't changed much since the advent of Modern Mechanized Warfare.

             

I looked up at the moon and saw the spidery black lines of the Rim reaching out from it, all the way to the horizon, like the sky was cut in half. Two polar opposites: Boots on the ground with very little firepower, and the missile bases and the waystation up in LEO, low earth orbit. The moon was bright even in daytime, and I thought about something my dad used to say whenever he'd see a clear midday moon: "It really makes you feel like you live on a planet out in space, doesn't it?"

             

It sounds like the kind of thing from a stoned junior-high memory, but when my father said it, he meant it.

(Chapter 6 coming Monday, November 28, 2011.)