1st to Fight (Earth at War) Read online

  Shaddick looked at me wide-eyed, obviously shocked I knew about it. I shrugged.

  “I write science fiction. I don’t just pull everything out of my ass, I do some research.” I actually did a shitload of research, not that you could tell it from the TV show. “Anyway, Mr. President,” I went on, “since the Helta had to have come from Earth originally, or their genes did, I’m inclined to believe the rest of their story. But that’s all academic at this point.” At his questioning look, I expanded. “They have star travel, they have fusion power, they have artificial gravity, they have force fields. That one ship could destroy our whole civilization, pretty much end all life on Earth. While I believe what they’ve told us, what I don’t know and am not willing to guess at is if they’re telling the truth about how altruistic they are, particularly towards people who look just like the ones trying to kill them.”

  I shook my head, the strength of my conviction leaving me in a bleak sigh.

  “If they’re being honest about their intentions, about who the good guys and the bad guys are in this, then we need to help them, because these Tevynians will get around to coming here and taking us on eventually. And if they’re not being honest… Well, we have to at least pretend to go along with them until we get enough of their technology to keep them from destroying us.”

  “Good point, Mr. Clanton. Okay, for the sake of argument, say we accept their deal. Kristy, what’s the fallout likely to be?”

  DuPont looked like she’d rather chew nails than consider us accepting the deal, but she was a professional, even if she was a State Department mealy-mouth just like the ones I’d hated with a passion when I’d been active duty.

  “China will squawk and scream and threaten,” she said, “but I don’t think Xiang would be willing to risk outright military action, particularly once we have the Heltan technology. Most likely, he’ll bide his time, try to get his spies in our manufacturing centers and get his hands on whatever of the technology he can the old-fashioned way.”

  I found myself nodding, and so was the President. The Chinese had built their economy on industrial espionage for decades, and there was no reason to think they’d give it up now.

  “This is going to divide Europe, politically,” she warned, her fingertips tapping the surface of the table in a nervous tic. “If I had to bet, I’d say Britain will throw in with us and provide troops in exchange for a share of the goods. Davidson has proven a bit of a hawk in Venezuela.” She shrugged. “It’s not exactly Europe, but we can probably count on Australia as well. But Germany and France.” More tapping. “They’ll be reluctant. They have serious internal issues, socially and economically. I’m not sure how much they could offer even if they were of a mind.”

  “Is there anyone else we can count on?” Crenshaw wondered.

  “Poland,” she declared without hesitation. “They’ve been trying to work their way closer to us, putting troops into the peacekeeping force. They aren’t exactly cutting edge, but they won’t need to be, just willing. Japan is already worried about China, so I’m sure they’ll take advantage of the opportunity to bolster their economy and their military.”

  “No one else?” Caldwell asked, sounding surprised.

  “Well, Israel, of course, though I’m nearly as worried about industrial espionage with them as I am with China. Various small countries who might contribute personnel, eventually, but no one who I would consider a key ally.” She closed her eyes for a moment, as if gathering her thoughts before she went on. “The biggest threat isn’t going to be China, though. It’s going to be Russia.”

  Nods all around at that, but the first one who spoke, to my surprise, was Jambo. He’d sat at a corner of the table, silent as a churchmouse, probably feeling as out of place as I was.

  “We beat them to the Selenium,” he said. “And we beat them to the alien ship. They’re gonna take this shit personally.”

  A dozen pairs of eyes turned towards Jambo and the big man seemed to shrink a bit under the attention.

  “It’s always personal with the Russians,” he insisted. “They won’t let it go, and even if you bring them into this at some point, they’ll still hold a grudge.”

  “Mr. Bowie is correct,” DuPont acknowledged. She frowned, squinting at Jambo. “Is it Sergeant Bowie? Captain Bowie? Major?”

  “Mister is fine,” Jambo told her, enigmatic as always. Unless of course he was a Warrant now, in which case, technically, he would be Mister.

  “Whether we go through with this or not,” DuPont said, “the Russians will hold it against us.”

  “You bet your ass they will,” Caldwell agreed. “Which is why we should shut them out of it. We try to let them in as junior partners or some such shit, it’ll bite us in the ass.”

  “Then I need the two of you,” Crenshaw said, pointing at DuPont then Caldwell, “to work up a tactful way of presenting the idea to Congress, because we’re going to need to get a declaration of war plus a treaty with the Helta.”

  “We’re going to need a lot more information to present if we’re going to pull that off, sir,” DuPont warned him. “I’m talking holographic video, statistics, names and maps and whatever they can get us. Strawbridge, that’s your responsibility.”

  “Yes, ma’am. I already explained that to Joon-Pah and he promised to transmit something to me within the next couple days.”

  “I’ll have Nathan schedule an emergency meeting with the Speaker, plus the chairs of the Intelligence and Defense committees later today,” Crenshaw said, almost as if he were making a note to himself.

  I figured he meant Nathan Fulton, his Chief of Staff, but the inside-baseball stuff was making me feel out of my depth again.

  “Which brings me to how we’re going to incorporate the technology the Helta have promised us,” Crenshaw continued. “That’s where you come in, Daniel.”

  Daniel Gatlin’s suit was worth more than the advance I’d received for my last book, and of all of us, he looked the most at home in the White House. I knew he’d entertained running for the office, but decided he could accomplish more for the country and the world with the power of his industrial dynasty behind him. I wondered if this business would change that sentiment, eventually.

  “Gatlin Aerospace will be in charge of integrating the new propulsion systems into existing airframes for space use,” Gatlin said, sounding more as if he were dictating the terms instead of merely sharing them with the others at the table. “Other technologies will be parsed out to a few subsidiaries and a handpicked list of firms I feel we can trust, with priority given to the fusion power generators the Helta have already agreed to help us build, and to the new weapons systems we can implement using their power storage technology.”

  “This is something else we’re going to have to push through Congress,” the President said, sighing as if he found the task daunting. “It’ll go against policy, just handing all this over to pre-chosen companies rather than opening it up for competition, but this technology is beyond sensitive and we have to be able to control its dissemination, at least at first.” He shrugged. “As time goes on, we’ll begin releasing some of it to open source, beginning with those technologies that have peaceful applications, such as to agriculture or medicine.”

  He nodded toward Dr. Shaddick and Dr. Patel, who had taken seats about as far from him as they could, probably hoping he wouldn’t notice them.

  “You two are going to be on the task force to adapt Heltan medical and biotechnology for human use, by the way.” He grinned. “So, don’t make any other plans for the next three or four years, assuming I win reelection.”

  His eyes flickered toward me and Julie Nieves. She was sprawled in her chair like she owned the place, and I envied her nonchalance.

  “You two either. As of today, you’re both being reactivated from the Reserves for the duration.”

  Julie grinned like she’d been expecting it, but my reaction was a bit less matter-of-fact. Memories of Caracas streets blocked off by barricade
s of burning tires, of the man next to me pitching backwards, his blood splashing my face before the crack of the sniper’s round reached my ears streamed though my mind. I shook the ghosts of wars past out of my head in time to catch President Crenshaw’s next words.

  “Captain Nieves, you’ll be training on the new dual-environment fighters and shuttles Gatlin Aerospace will be building, so your actual job description won’t be changing much, just the source of your direct deposits.”

  “And their size,” she murmured with a veteran’s skepticism.

  “What about me, sir?” I asked. “What am I going to be doing?”

  Jambo laughed softly and I glanced over at him, wondering if he, like Gatlin, had been in on the planning for this meeting before the rest of us.

  “Funny you should ask that, Andy…”

  Chapter Seven

  Have you ever run downhill so fast it seemed your legs were moving on their own and you didn’t dare stop or even try to slow down because you knew you’d fall and tumble so hard, you’d break your neck?

  Every day of the last two months had felt like that, and every day seemed to go by faster than the last, and somewhere at the bottom was a hard ending, but I couldn’t stop. Movement was life.

  The morning sun was painfully bright, yet the chill in the air was a slap in the face. I could see my breath puff on the exhale as each three-meter stride slammed the armored soles of the exoskeleton’s boots into the brittle, frozen earth. It was spring in western Idaho, but you couldn’t have proved it by me. There was still snow at the tops of the mountains in the distance, still a shining haze of frost on the grassy hillsides, and every morning when the Army driver picked me and Jambo up from base housing in a beat-up, old, camo-painted CUCV with no working heater, and took us out to the proving grounds, I had to huddle inside a field jacket with polypropylene snivel gear under my combat utilities. Luckily, the armor was well insulated, though I was sure I was going to regret that come summer.

  It had taken some getting used to, running in the stuff. There was the tiniest bit of lag between the twitch of my muscles against the five hundred pounds of Kevlar and ceramic armor, servomotors and battery pack and the actual movement of the exoskeleton. It wasn’t much, just enough to make me question my balance and nearly go face first into the rocky ground over and over for the first week trying to use it.

  Carrying the machine gun felt even stranger. It was a standard M240B 7.62mm light machine gun, though the enclosed double drum feed system was new, as was the sight. Heads-Up Display sights had been tried with infantry weapons before, of course, but they’d run headlong into the dual roadblocks of reliable power sources and a nasty tendency to break down in real-world conditions. We had the power source licked, thanks to our Helta friends, and we were going to find out the hard way if the shit still had a tendency to break in the field.

  For now, the targeting reticle was being projected onto the lens of the goggles I wore under my helmet, but the plan was to work the HUD into the full-face visor of the final production model…the one that would go into space. That model probably wouldn’t have MILES gear and a machine gun equipped with a blank adapter either, but we were still in the early stages. So early, there was only the two sets of the shit. And the other one was out there somewhere in the hills, hunting for me.

  I followed the old creek bed between the hills, my steps carrying me at a speed of somewhere around twenty miles an hour despite requiring no more effort than a light jog. For the test, I had a hundred-pound ruck and the machine gun with a 200-round drum full of blanks and a spare in a special harness, ready to switch out. I didn’t have a great deal of confidence in the weapon’s ability to burn through that many blanks without jamming, but one problem at a time.

  The pressing problem at the moment was James Bowie and how much fun he seemed to be having killing me each and every single day. Simulated, of course. I’d expected it at first. Even with the new technology and the exoskeletons, tactics were tactics and combat skills translated to any format, and Jambo had more experience in combat in any one deployment than I had my entire military career. But it was becoming a matter of pride: he was Army and I was a Marine and damn it, I had to hold up my end for the Corps.

  I tried to think while I ran. I couldn’t really crawl into a hole and hide, not in this stuff. Maybe once we started screwing around with the thermal insulation and camouflage, we could design one of these suits to actually blend into the surroundings instead of standing out like a bonfire, but for right now, I had to run.

  Jambo was a consummate professional in the art of violence, but even he began to show some tendencies over time. Every day so far, he’d circled wide and worked his way to the center in a shrinking spiral. I’d tried to slip in behind him, tried slicing across the center of the Area of Operations, even tried running a circle in the opposite direction and nothing worked because he was just a more natural shooter than I was, especially on the run.

  I slowed to a trot, my eyes going to a jagged outcropping of rock a bit over a mile away, on the edge of our training area…or, if I was being honest, maybe just a couple hundred meters outside our mapped training area. Maybe I should try getting to the high ground and making him come to me.

  It’s for the test, I told myself. That was why we were out here, right? To test the suits, figure out tactics, probe their operational limits. That was what Dr. Henckel kept telling me back in the lab, anyway.

  I ran the mile faster than I’d ever managed it during a Marine Physical Fitness Test and could have done it even quicker if I hadn’t had to keep my eyes open for rocks and chuckholes. The armor wasn’t loud, but the servomotors had a tell-tale hum that increased in volume the faster I moved, and the reinforced boots thumped into the hard-pack ground with a Samba beat and the whole thing began to remind me of the last time I’d been dancing at D-Edge in Sao Palo. The beat slowed as I approached the narrow, winding path up the rise, eyeing it with the sort of calculation I would have used for a free climb.

  Going uphill in the exoskeleton was tricky, not because of the effort involved of course, but because of the balance. It might have felt like I was jogging in shorts and a tank top, but in reality, I was carrying about half my weight on my back and it was very possible for me to tip over backwards and wind up stuck there like a turtle in the sun. I had to lean into the climb and the damned backpack rose up so high behind my back that I couldn’t tilt my head back far enough to see anything except the ground in front of my nose.

  It would have been a great opportunity for Jambo to snipe me from long distance and laugh his ass off when the laser hit my MILES receiver and tripped the shutoff for my suit. I would have been frozen in place, bent over at the waist, looking like I was about to take a dump. Bastard would probably have taken a picture of me, too, even though he wouldn’t be able to post it online until all this was declassified. Hell, there was probably some top-secret, tier-one operators’ Facebook page where he could put it up and let SEAL Team 6 and the Nightstalkers laugh at me.

  Yeah, I was rambling, but what else was there to do when you’re shuffling up a hill like an arthritic armadillo? If Jambo was watching, he must have been laughing too hard to get a clean shot, because I made it to the top of the hill without dying. I wasn’t out of breath, of course, because my muscles weren’t doing the work, but I was sweating despite the chill morning breeze.

  The hill was rocky and barren and way too slick, and I moved cautiously toward the edge in a sort of skating motion, careful to keep my center of gravity over my feet. I wasn’t exactly scared of heights, just terrified of looking like an idiot, and tumbling off the side of the hill to my death was perhaps as stupid a death as I could currently imagine.

  It was beautiful up here, despite my worries about embarrassment and death by misadventure. It reminded me a bit of my adopted home outside Vegas, though the rocks were a different color and it probably got colder here in summer than it did in Vegas in winter. But the skies were just as blue and the
land just as open and Goddammit, there’s Jambo.

  He was skirting the creek that traced the southern edge of the training area, about a mile away at a guess. I raised the machine gun until the reticle projected in my goggles settled on him and the built-in rangefinder told me I’d overestimated the distance. It was one point two kilometers, which worked out to about three quarters of a mile.

  I should really learn to start thinking in metric. Once we’re out there, everything’s going to be in metric.

  But damn it, why? We’d won the space race and now we were going to the stars! It wasn’t like the Helta used meters and kilograms and all that shit. We should have made them convert to inches and miles and pounds and to hell with the rest of the world.

  But the military was in charge and they already used metric, so that battle was lost. The thought pissed me off enough I thought about trying the shot at three quarters of a mile. Theoretically, the targeting computer should be able to correct for drop and windage…

  Or fuck, you know what? A MILES laser doesn’t even have drop or windage, so I’m going to just shoot him.

  Yeah, it was cheating, sort of. But as my old platoon sergeant, Gunny Swoboda used to say, “if you ain’t cheatin’, you ain’t tryin’.”

  I settled the aiming reticle on the tiny, fast-moving stick-figure of James Bowie, led him by a few degrees and held down the trigger. There was no recoil, of course, not with blanks, but the M240B chattered hoarsely and a fountain of brass cartridge casings spilled from the right hand side of the weapon, tinkling on the bare rock at my feet. I knew I’d missed—Jambo kept moving, faster if anything, trying to make it to the cover of a lonely stand of skinny trees, which wouldn’t have saved him from 30-caliber bullets but would be quite effective against the laser designator. I would have cried foul, but living in my glass house, I refrained from throwing stones.