Surface Detail

At the same time he swung his remaining Main Weapon Nacelle round to target the part of the hangar where he’d been earlier and where Gulton and Koviuk were now. He used the railgun, set to Scatter. Tiny hyper-kinetic rounds made a disintegrating haze out of the tipped section of floor, the bulkheads and ceiling.

As the Main Weapon Nacelle had deployed, it had roughly tracked across the location of the trooper kneeling by the body of trooper Drueser, so he’d loosed a trio of General Purpose High Explosive/Fragmentation Subscale Missiles towards them. Then he lobbed five more Subscales towards the centre of the railgun’s targeting area, cutting their engines off almost as soon as they exited the Weapon Nacelle so that they fell into the part of the target area he couldn’t see.

From the start, he had been pumping round after round of snowflake, heatseeker, emission-homing and movement-primed grenades overhead, guessing at where Different voice 2 might be, behind him in the hangar. Some of the grenades ricocheted off the ceiling but that did not really matter.

The trooper Major Q’naywa and the figure behind him disappeared in the twin explosions of the minimissiles. Unidentifiable gurgling screams might have been Gulton and Koviuk. They cut off quickly as the railgun rounds continued to eat away at the bulkheads, floor and ceiling. The Subscales erupted in the centre of the hangar, creating a billowing cloud of gasses and debris. The two troopers, one of them Drueser, who was already dead, vanished in the fireballs.

The lobbed Subscales landed in a spread in what was left of the hangar’s rear corner, filling it with a brief haze of plasma, gas and shrapnel.

He stopped firing, railgun magazine depleted by 60 per cent.

Debris trajectoried, impacted, ricocheted, fell back, tumbled, slid, became still. The gasses dissipated, mostly through the wide, curved entrance that framed the view of the big bright blue and white planet outside.

No transmissions.

The only traces of the troopers he could see were ambiguous in nature and quite small.

After nearly nine minutes he used what power he had in his single operational leg, trying to lift himself free from whatever was pinning him. The attempt failed and he knew he was trapped. He thought there was a high likelihood he had not killed the trooper who’d been somewhere in the hangar behind him, but his attempt to rise, which had caused some movement of the wreckage around and over him, attracted no further hostile attention.

He sat there and waited, wishing he could see the beautiful planet better.

Others arrived half an hour later. They were different troopers with different suits and weapons.

They didn’t have the correct IFF codes either so he fought them too. By the time he was blown out of the hangar entrance in a cloud of plasma he was completely blind, almost without any senses. Only his internal heat sensors and a feeling that he was experiencing a faint but gradually increasing force from one particular direction, once he allowed for the fact he was tumbling, told him he was falling into the atmosphere of the beautiful bright white and blue planet.

The heat increased rapidly and started to leak into his Power and Processing Core through piercing-damage channels sustained in the engagement just passed. His Processor Suite would shut down or melt in eighteen, no eleven, no nine seconds: eight, seven, no, three: two, one…

His last thought was that it would have been nice to have seen the beautiful-

He returned to the simulation within a simulation that was the Primary Strategic Situation Overview Space. In Trapeze they had discussed the initial details of plans that might end the war, one way or the other. Here they were still reviewing and re-reviewing the same old territory they had been fretting over when he’d left.

“One of your old stamping grounds, isn’t it, Vatueil?” one of the others in the High Command said as they watched the irrelevancy of the war amongst these tumbling rocks and lumps of ice replay itself. Rocket exhausts plumed in the darkness amongst the billions of orbiting fragments; munitions blazed, forces swept back and forth.

“Is it?” he said. Then he recognised it.

He had been many things in this war. He had died within the simulations many times, some failing of character or application on his part occasionally contributing to his end, more usually the mistakes of those above him in the command structure – or just the need for sacrifice – providing all of the cause. How many lifetimes had he spent waging war? He had lost count, long ago.