CHAPTER 1 - Steel Rain

The artillery shells started after the snipers picked off our C.O.. I was still wiping his lifeblood from my hands. It was caking and combined with the dust, had made my hands dirty and uncomfortable. I had tried to save his life and I had failed. I wiped my hands once again on my fatigues and saw how it played out again in my minds eye.

As the 2IC in the unit, it was now on me to get the group through this alive and fighting fit. The battle medic had declared him dead almost immediately. A shot to the throat will do that to you. I had felt the bullet that killed him whisper past my neck on the way to Captain Picks. I had seen his confusion as the bullet tore a hole, exposing his trachea, the cartilage pieces stark white as they exploded away with his flesh. The true damage though, was his severed carotid artery. The crimson spray from his still beating heart creating a mist around his contorting face. I was still recovering from my own flinch, diving to the deck. Self-preservation instincts were hard to control in the best of circumstances, but here, in possibly the worst of situations, they were all that you could rely on. That and the hand of Lady Luck. Captain Picks had used up his luck today, or maybe Lady Luck’s gaze was elsewhere. Now the next phase of the ambush we had gotten ourselves into switched into full gear.

You could only hear the first few shells in the last few hundred meters as they screamed into our positions. The whizz-whomp sound barely a moment apart. The last few seconds of peace shattered with the whine of projectiles designed to explode on impact and destroy whatever they hit. Some few were designed to bounce first before exploding to increase the chance of casualties. All exploded with a thump of noise that was felt first before it was heard, and it left the mind completely devoid of any thoughts other than pure terror.

Hunkered down in my foxhole, absolutely every muscle clenched. Eyes tightly closed and prayers on my lips, I screamed. With the incredible noise reverberating around, I couldn’t even hear my own voice. With hands covering my ears, holding my bucket down tightly I cringed and flinched with each vibration, waiting to be vaporized next.

The rest of the platoon were with me. The foxhole extending a full thirty meters in a rough line from my position. We had been digging for the better part of an hour to secure this sad outpost. The dusty and rocky terrain made digging almost impossible, but when your life depended on it, you found a way, so we were all of half a meter deep when the first call to “Take cover” washed out over us before the rain came.

People use the term “Bring the rain” for lethal payloads from aircraft. The slang term for a bomb drop. Artillery was no different, besides the method of delivery. Devastating and unstoppable, we called it steel rain.

Shit! Those Afgan T-man asshats sure knew how to spring a trap. Artillery shells were truly directly from the Devils own Cookbook.

“God, I hate the Sandpit!” My ringing ears betrayed me from truly knowing if I had even said that out loud or if it had just been a throaty croak. These desert scrublands in the Middle East were hardly worth the effort. Why were we even here? The people didn’t want us here. The few goats and subsistence farms were hardly the Delta of the heartlands back State-side. W.T.F. were we doing dying here? The people fighting for this place wanted it, the T-men wanted it, I say let them have it. They deserve every stinking dry inch of it.

“God, please! God, deliver us from evil. Thy will be done.”

I repeated it over and over. Next to me, along the line of the foxhole, the translator Abdul’s arm disappeared, only to be replaced by that familiar crimson stream of gushing blood. Arterial blood I thought abstractly as trained responses kicked in. I reached down to grab my IFAK but my hand found the space empty on my webbing. Damn it! I had used the trauma pack on Captain Picks, to try staunch his neck wound. I had a spare in my pack, but my pack was still in the Sandcat.

I crouched lower as the explosions marched with deadly efficiency across our makeshift defenses. Shrapnel and rock, dust and body parts were cascading all around me. I lost all sense of self, all sense of anything except the butt-clenching terror that one feels when events are beyond your control and Death sweeps his scythe with brutal abandon.

A bright flash took my vision and I struggled to see anything. When I could open my eyes I felt the tunnel vision. As if the world was receding into the distance. I gasped inwardly. Was this it? Was I dying? What was happening?

“Deliver us from Evil.” My unfinished prayer echoed into nothing.

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“Core” protocol initializing…..

Are you well Lieutenant Streak? A soothing voice echoed into my consciousness.

“…what? What is happening? Where am I?

The voice continued, “….You are here. I do not know the parameters to define here, but here you are.”

“What? W.T.F. speak clearly man, where the hell am I? Who are you? Why can’t I see you?” I was getting frustrated.

“I am a mental probe AI. My job is to determine if you are to be inserted as a core or as a infiltrator. Do you remember what happened and who you are?

I struggled to grasp what was going on. I had no shape or form that I could discern and only these words had echoed out of the nothingness around me.

“Yes, of course I know who I am… I am Lieutenant Jasper Streak, Special Troops Battalion, 173rd Airborne Brigade, US Army. Service number US-74 678123, Born 1 February 2030. Am I with friendlies or a P.O.W.?” I was getting desperate now, I could not feel my body.

“…. You are not in danger. You were recovered from the battlefield in Afghanistan. At least parts of you were. Your body has been destroyed but your Restore chip was recovered.”

“According to your last will and testament, you requested to become part of the “Core” upon your incapacitation. Your original body is unrecoverable and needs extensive rehabilitation, treatment and recovery to prepare a new one. Meanwhile as your consciousness is now part of the “Core” you have a choice to be a puzzle, or part of the solution? A Core or an Infiltrator. What will it be?”

I realized abstractly that my existence situation was solved. I had been killed on the battlefield and my “Restore chip” recovered. It was a relatively new device, introduced to save copies of a person’s brain like a backup storage device. Upon death or grievous bodily harm, the chip could be removed and inserted into a quantum computer matrix, which would replicate your consciousness, and once a suitable body host had been grown in the genetic vats, the AI would upload you to a new chip, and restore you to the new body.

 In-between the long periods of rehabilitation and recovery, the Army had devised a way to keep troops fresh and entertained instead of catatonic and doped up while waiting for the body refresh. The CORE concept was not new, there had been many Dungeon core games out over the years and all worked on the premise that a being would control a dungeon, using finite consumable resources to prepare a defense against adventurers insertion attempts. The ‘Core” took it one step further and allowed one to create military installations to prepare against waves of progressively more advanced and difficult enemy infiltrations.

Being a “Core” was much more than being a dungeon though. It was the embodiment of the military code. You had to prepare for assault from any medium and any direction. I wasn’t sure what level I would start at, but even if it was with stone throwing minions, the difficulties would escalate quickly. It was an insidious way to hone our skills but then so was Chess, and this beat the crap out of playing chess non-stop for several months.

I reflected on the miracle of the Restore Chip and considered how it was a kind of immortality. Not precisely what I had wished for when I thought of everlasting life, but certainly a big step-up from the alternative of death. I questioned though, if the real me, the one originally in my body and not this copy that I was now, had it or rather had I moved on to an afterlife? And if so, would the new me, the one I was now, also be allowed into the halls of Valhalla, or would the God’s only be accepting one of me?

It was a stupid random thought, but I was still in shock from discovering I had been slain. From my perspective, moments had barely passed from the time of being in that awful barrage of indiscriminate steel to my wakeful awareness now. My thoughts began to spiral as I relived those dreadful moments. I needed to calm down.

I didn’t know quite how to feel about it all. Firstly, to die in an artillery barrage was bad enough. My body most likely blown to bits, and I was just lucky they could find my head and the chip embedded inside. Fortunately there had been enough genetic material preserved so that they could grow me a new body, otherwise they wouldn’t have bothered restoring my consciousness. Should I feel lucky that they wanted me back? The circumstances had been traumatic to say the least.

Secondly, I didn’t know what happened to the rest of my guys. We had been a close-knit group and losing all those people in one badly conceived mission was not my idea of a good day. Hopefully other chips had been recovered.

I snapped out of my unwarranted trip down memory lane and focused on the words floating in the nothingness before me.

Core

X

Infiltrator

X

In this case “X” marked the spot. Ironic I thought, since that was exactly what the Commander-in-charge of our disastrous mission had marked on our map, placing us in mortal danger.

I focused on the Core ‘X’ and my world faded to black.

“Welcome to the Core” a voice reverberated across my mind.

I smiled inwardly; it was the only way I could smile since I didn’t have a corporeal body. From the Army Corp to the “Core”, what could be more ominous than that?

I thought then of the old Chinese curse; “May you live in interesting times”. My smile became a hearty laugh as I released my pent up emotional stress into the monotone world my existence had become.

That was all about to change….