1st to Fight (Earth at War) Read online

  Instead, I just threw more lasers, sawing back and forth with the machine gun and watching that damn reticle pass over Jambo like twenty times and wondering how many shots it was going to take to bring the son of a bitch down.

  Then he stopped, joints freezing up, and the momentum he’d built up from the run sent him pitching forward, landing on the ground face first.

  “Shit!” I squawked, lowering the machine gun and keying my radio with desperate haste. “Jambo, you there? Are you okay, man?”

  Nothing for a few seconds. I tried to watch for movement, touching a switch to toggle the zoom feature of the goggles, but of course, he wouldn’t be moving whether he was conscious or no, not with six hundred pounds weighing him down and the joints of his armor frozen.

  “Yeah, I’m good,” he replied, finally. His tone was flat, and I wasn’t sure if he was pissed off or embarrassed. “The chest armor kept my face from getting busted open. But I ain’t going anywhere until you get your ass down here and use the admin key to unfreeze my fucking suit, so if you don’t mind?”

  “I’m on my way,” I promised, feeling much more gratified than I should have to finally get a kill on Jambo.

  This was a kid’s game. I was playing fucking Cowboys and Indians with a Delta operator wearing a high-tech set of superhero armor and getting paid for it. A little. I wasn’t sure if that was the most awesome statement about my life ever, or the most pitiful. What was it Allie had said about me when she’d left? Something about me being an overgrown adolescent, among other, more serious accusations?

  I hesitated at the top of the steep trail down the hillside, trying to figure out how the hell I was going to traverse it without tumbling to the bottom and breaking this incredibly expensive armor as well as, possibly, my neck. Simply walking down would require me to lean backwards so far, I likely wouldn’t be able to see my feet, which wasn’t going to work. Or, I could walk backwards, leaning forward, but I still wouldn’t able to see where my feet were going.

  Damn it, Clanton, you moron. You forgot the first rule of climbing: have a plan to get down before you climb up.

  I scanned right of the path and saw a section of the cliff outcropping where part of the face had collapsed in on itself, leaving behind a series of steps spaced at about ten or twelve feet, one below the other, terminating in a pile of rubble near the bottom.

  I could jump. Theoretically, the armor could take it, could absorb the shock. It seemed incredibly reckless and dangerous and a horrible way to treat expensive, experimental equipment, and the only argument I could make for it was fuck it, why not? So, obviously, I did it.

  It had been my experience in a life full of doing stupid and reckless things that the best way to approach them was to run into them head-first and at full speed, since hesitation was usually worse than recklessness. I jumped from the edge of the cliff, yelling—because yelling seemed to be the thing to do when you jumped off a cliff, but it turned into a pained grunt when the soles of my boots smacked into the first of the steps. I was stumbling forward, about to lose my balance, and I was forced to turn it into a leap, bringing my legs up and leaning in, trying not to go head over heels.

  On the second jump, I didn’t have my breath back yet, so I didn’t try to yell, just sort of wheezed. Cold wind slapped at me and the twelve feet seemed like thirty or forty, and when I hit again, I bit my lip and tasted coppery blood in my mouth and still couldn’t stop. Stopping would mean falling, and jumping was better than falling.

  The third jump was easier, the drop not quite as far, the landing not quite as rough, and the rock platform was a bit flatter and much broader, enough that I was able to scrape my soles against the dirt-covered rock and stop myself. One last hop, only about six feet, and I’d be back on the ground and have some valuable data for Dr. Henckel when we got back to the lab. The exoskeleton had held up fine and I hadn’t broken any bones.

  I stepped down and absorbed the impact on bent knees…and then something went “crump” and I smelled acrid fumes coming from the battery pack on my back. I tried to straighten up, but the armor was frozen in place and lights were flashing red all across the system display ocular.

  “Oh, shit,” I muttered. I keyed my mic, hoping at least the radio was still working. I guess it must have been hooked up to a separate battery system than the suit servos, because it crackled to life. “Jambo,” I transmitted, “I got a problem here. Another blown battery pack.”

  “Oh, Jesus tapdancing Christ,” he moaned, the sound filled with static. “I know this shit is alien and all, but can’t they make one of the things that lasts more than four operational hours without blowing up?”

  “We better call in the chopper to pull us both out of here,” I said.

  “Great. I’ll just lay here on my belly like a drowned rat until then.”

  “Jambo,” I said, settling against the restraints holding me inside the exoskeleton and trying not to let my leg muscles cramp up from the bent over position, “if you knew what position I was in, you’d be thanking your sweet and fluffy Lord you were on your belly. These assclowns really need to work out some sort of quick release to let a guy get out of this shit on his own before it goes into mass production.”

  “Yeah, I’ll make that suggestion,” he said, laughing humorlessly. “Right after I tell them to go fuck themselves.”

  ***

  “I don’t know why the hell you guys insisted we go to Medical,” Jambo said, a bit too loud and plaintive, still pissed off from the morning’s fiasco. “Neither of us got hurt, unless you count butthurt, which, if you do, Andy here might have sprained his ass.”

  The Medical Building was all we called it. Nothing here had an official designator and nothing was named after some dead guy from World War Two, because nothing here was official. The buildings had been in place but they were cleaned up—barely, and repurposed. I don’t know what the Medical Building had once been, but it was cement block covered by cracked and crumbling stucco, three stories tall and featureless but for the American flag flying outside.

  Inside was a different story. The walls had all been lined with white plastic, the floors tiled, and I’d seen at least four isolation labs since I’d been here, one of them fitted with some sort of ceiling to floor transparent tanks filled with pink liquid. I’d half-expected to see disembodied brains floating in them, but as far as I could tell, they were all empty except for the pink soup.

  I couldn’t have told you the name of any of the technicians or doctors who worked in the place except for Doc Reed and his staff in the first-story Wellness Lab. Yeah, I know, but that’s what they insisted on calling it. Jambo and I reported there on arrival, when it seemed like we’d been the only people on the base, and the Doc had given us the once-over, right down to MRIs and CAT scans. Since then, we hadn’t been back, splitting our time between the Armor Lab and the training grounds, except for the few hours a night they left us to sleep. I suppose the furnished house they’d loaned me to stay in was nice, but I couldn’t have described an inch of it to anyone besides the bedroom and the shower. I certainly hadn’t cooked a single meal there, though I could have written a research paper on the chicken-fried steak they served in the chow hall.

  We’d stepped through the doors into the Wellness Lab expecting to see Doc Reese, his salt-and-pepper hair tied in a ponytail and bouncing on the back of his lab coat, or maybe Nurse Glenda with her bleached-blond perm. Instead, we nearly ran straight into Colonel Olivera and Julie Nieves.

  “Holy shit,” I said, my mood brightening immediately, at the presence of Julie if not Olivera, “what the hell are you guys doing here?”

  Olivera looked very much like the last time I’d seen him, down to the mottled grey Space Force utility fatigues, but now Julie was dressed in the same uniform, her hair a touch shorter, a subtle difference in her appearance that I couldn’t quite put a finger on, something less sloppy and civilian. She was wearing the full bird on her collar, what would have been a captain’s rank in the
Navy but a colonel if she was in the Space Force, as the tab on her chest advertised, and I belatedly realized that I myself was only a newly-minted Marine Corps major and should perhaps have greeted both officers with a bit less informality.

  “Hey Andy,” Julie said casually, not taking offense. “Yeah, I don’t know why we’re here either. I was testing shuttles at Edwards when Mike came to pick me up in a V22 and brought me here.”

  It took me a moment to process that when she said “Mike,” she was referring to Colonel Olivera, then another second to remember the two of them were the same rank.

  “Well, spill it, sir,” Jambo said to Olivera, as at ease with the senior officer as he had been with the generals and admirals I’d seen him around since I’d been reactivated. “What’s the secret? Have we all been exposed to some alien herpes or something?”

  “I’d tell you if I knew, Mr. Bowie,” Olivera said.

  I looked around the Wellness Lab’s waiting room and saw no one, not even the dull-looking, pinch-faced tech who hadn’t said a word to us the first time we’d visited.

  “That’s just strange,” I opined, spreading my hands. “Why would they want us four in particular here?”

  “How did you sprain your ass?” Julie asked me, frowning. “What sort of alien probing do you two have going on at this bumfuck base anyway?”

  “I spent an hour and a half stuck in my exoskeleton, bent over when the damn battery pack exploded this morning.” I didn’t try to keep the disgruntled tone out of my voice. “I hope your shuttles are coming along better than our powered armor.”

  “Powered armor?” She cocked an eyebrow. “Are we talking battle suits like Starship Troopers?” She made a face. “The book, of course, not the abomination of a movie.”

  “The less said about the movie, the better,” I agreed. “But no, it’s not Starship Troopers, it’s the same Goddamned exoskeleton DARPA has been working on for the last thirty years.” I shrugged. “They actually have the setup working pretty well, as long as you plug it into the wall, or a diesel generator. But with the new battery packs the Helta helped us design, they’re actually practical now, along with a bunch of other stuff we’ve just been waiting for a way to power.”

  “They would be anyway,” Jambo interjected, rolling his eyes, “if the damned things stopped burning out. The techs keep saying it’s just a matter of a few adjustments, but I’ll believe it when I see it. I’m not sure I trust this alien shit yet.”

  “Well, I hope I can change your mind about that, Mr. Bowie.”

  I recognized the voice, though it had been months since I heard it. Jack Patel wasn’t in uniform, nor was he in a lab coat, just a black polo shirt and khakis, but he’d been drafted into this as well. I figured they probably hadn’t wanted anyone who’d been on the alien ship free to talk to conspiracy-theory podcasts or scandal websites. They’d shanghaied those of us who still had military commitments and bribed the rest with high-dollar, important-sounding jobs, and Dr. Patel was one of the latter.

  “Hey Doc,” I said, shaking his hand. “Have you been hauled out here with the rest of us suspects, or are you the detective who’s about to tell us why you’ve brought us here today and announce the real killer?”

  Patel stared blankly, like I’d just asked him what color Tuesday was, and I sighed.

  “Never mind, I guess you’re not a fan of old murder mysteries. Do you know why we’re here?”

  “Of course!” He grinned, snapping back to his perpetual good mood. He waved behind him at an assistant I hadn’t noticed before, a very serious young woman carrying a locked plastic case in her left hand with a holstered SIG on the opposite hip. “Open it up, would you, Ms. Gennaro?”

  She set the case down on a low table across from the ratty couch in the waiting room, then tapped a code into the lock. It popped open with a curious pneumatic hiss, revealing a row of opaque plastic vials and an injector gun. I regarded Patel with narrow, suspicious eyes.

  “Are we getting vaccinated against some mutated bug from the Helta?” I demanded. “Because I’ve been worried about that. If they were engineered from Earth life, we could catch their diseases…”

  “Something much better than that,” Patel assured me, fitting one of the vials into the gun. “Although I guess that’s coming, eventually. But for right now, you get to be the Guinea pigs for the very first piece of medical technology the Helta have shared with us.” He raised the injector gun like a pistol at high ready. “So, who wants to be first?”

  “Back up a second,” I told him, holding up a hand. “Guinea pigs for what?”

  “It is so cool,” Patel enthused. “It’s a tailored bacterium, biological nanotechnology, really, designed to retelomerize your cells and gradually rejuvenate them.” He shrugged. “Theoretically.”

  “Retelo…what?” Julie asked. “What the hell are you saying?”

  I felt the hairs stand up on the back of my neck.

  “Oh, shit,” I murmured. “I think I know.”

  “You know what a telomere is, right?” Patel asked us, then frowned as he saw that at least a couple of us didn’t. “Okay, well, a telomere is a region of repetitive nucleotide sequences at each end of a chromosome, which protects the end of the chromosome from deterioration or from fusion with neighboring chromosomes, you see…”

  “In fucking English, Doc,” Jambo interrupted, sounding as if his patience was beginning to wear thin.

  “A telomere is the shit in your chromosomes that makes your cells regenerate,” I said, deciding an interpreter was needed. “You know your whole body replaces its cells regularly, right? Well, as you get older, your telomere chains get shorter, and you can’t replace your cells anymore. That’s why we age.” I swallowed the lump in my throat, unwilling to say the next part, but knowing they needed to hear it. “If the Helta have a way to renew the telomere chains…”

  “No shit,” Jambo breathed, his eyes going wide.

  Julie’s mouth dropped open, but I thought from the expression on Olivera’s face that he at least had suspected what we were talking about.

  “If this works,” Patel said, his smile growing even wider, “we’re looking at a very extended lifespan.”

  “And the Helta already have this?” I asked him.

  “Oh my, yes,” he said, nodding so hard I thought he might pull a muscle. “Joon-Pah is nearly two hundred of our years old, and he’s considered barely middle-aged. His medical staff told me the oldest recorded Heltan back on their homeworld is over three hundred, which is when they developed the treatment in the first place, and that guy looks as young as Joon-Pah.”

  And who the hell knows how young a fucking koala bear looks?

  “So, if we take this shit,” Jambo said, nodding toward the injector, “we’re gonna be immortal?”

  “Not exactly immortal,” Patel corrected him. “You can still die from disease or, of course, violence or accident. But this should greatly expand your natural lifespan. Probably not indefinitely, but certainly by at least a century, probably more.”

  “Well, hell!” Jambo said, yanking up his right sleeve. “Put that shit right here, Doc!”

  “Jambo,” I began, “are you sure…”

  But Patel had already pressed the injector against the big man’s arm and thumbed the trigger. The device hissed with an almost sinister sibilance and the deed was done.

  “So, when will I know if it works?”

  Patel regarded the big man with a critical eye.

  “If you have any degenerative conditions,” Patel said, “you can expect tissue regrowth in a few weeks. You’re still in your forties, and I don’t see any gray hair yet, so you may not notice any blatantly obvious external signs for quite a while.” He grinned. “But in ten years, when you still look basically the same as you do now, you’ll know for sure it worked.”

  Jambo scowled, obviously a bit disappointed and pulled his sleeve back down.

  “Who’s next?” Patel asked, extracting the expended cylinder and
grabbing another.

  “Is this a directive from higher up, Dr. Patel?” Olivera asked, looking at the injector gun the way a Marine drill instructor might look at an unmade bunk.

  Patel chewed on his lip as if considering how to answer that. “Let me put it this way, Colonel. At this point, it is being strongly encouraged. But, everyone included in the crew for the mission will have to receive all injections deemed necessary by the President’s Leadership Council.”

  “Mission?” Julie repeated, raising an eyebrow. “What mission? What crew?”

  “Oh, goodness,” Patel said with a nervous chuckle, “look at me, I’ve said too much. Sorry, my bad, really not supposed to talk about it.”

  “Well, fuck me,” Olivera sighed, unzipping his fatigue jacket and pulling it off, then pulling back his T-shirt’s sleeve. He stopped Patel with a glare before being injected. “If this works and doesn’t kill us all, I need to know my wife and kids will have a chance to get it, too.”

  “Assuming everything goes well,” Patel assured him, “and we have every reason to believe it will, this will be a standard medical treatment available to the entire population within the next five years. And, of course, the families of service members will have priority.”

  Olivera grunted his skeptical reluctance, but offered his arm. Julie said nothing, but took off her jacket and let the researcher give her the injection. She looked good, I thought, and wasn’t much older than me, and I had to remind myself she was a superior officer and I was back in the Corps.

  Then every eye turned my way and Patel held up the last vial of serum, teeth bared in a smile.

  “Hey look,” I protested, raising my hands palms out, “I don’t mind a little gray. I think it’d make me look more distinguished, you know?”

  “Think of the mission, Andy,” Jambo urged me. He shrugged. “Whatever it is.”

  “I don’t want to be on any mission!” I insisted. My voice was getting a bit shrill and I reined myself in a little. “I’m really happy just helping to develop the Infantry Weapons System, honest.”