"During World War II when the US basic training was, as they say, accelerated, topics were covered in a single day that had taken weeks. The true education of war came on the battlefield for most of those men. Even so, military forces have been aware for as long as militaries have been around that there are valuable soldiers, and there is fodder. It's not something that is spoken of bluntly, instead it's hidden behind aptitude tests and rank, and a slew of other things. But it's always there in the back of a commander's mind. For instance, during that accelerated training when topics were covered for a single day, the exercise and importance of aiming at a machine gun when it opened fire was paramount. The army spent five whole days drilling into the new recruits that if automatic fire opened up on them every single soldier was to concentrate fire on that position until the machine gun stopped firing. Then after five days of intense drills, the brass would drive out in a jeep with a heavy machinegun mounted in the rear, fire it into the sky and shout, "Which one of you bad-ass motherfuckers wants to learn how to shoot this!" Now you might be thinking, who the fuck would want to shoot that? Surely the other side has had the same training we have and they will fire upon whomever is shooting it? Congrats, you aren't fodder. The reality is that thirty percent of soldiers would not only raise their hands, but compete with each other, often doing pushups to exhaustion, to be the first to be trained."
Excerpt from John Englewood's speech, "The realities of choosing members for scouting parties."
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"Danger!" Max all but screaming in my head.
I looked left to see the entire building highlighted in red with orange and black clouds near the corners where bricks were being crushed and popping.
"The building is falling."
I saw Sara's head snap left as well as a large number of the contingent of PMCs.
"Help!" I said. Sara spun and sprinted at me.
"Buy whatever! Save lives!"
Sara wasn't a big woman. Petite was an apt word for her, yet she ducked as if she would tackle me, only to wrap her right around around my waist, and drive on through me. I saw car shaped something in black appear and the air filled with dark black grenades. They were spread out over a grid a few yards on a side. I don't even know if they had a moment to fall before they popped into giant exploding balls of soapsuds.
My ears popped and it felt like I was being hugged from all sides, and then there was a sort of snap. It reminded me of those instant heat pads I used for my back. The ones that were liquid until you snapped the little metal thing inside and then they sort of solidified and got really hot. Except we in the foam and it solidified.
I had just enough time to start to panic when my face started to get wet and the tentacles from a model four tried to force itself into my mouth.
"Remain calm. Oxygen tubes will arrive shortly. You will be rescued shortly there after. Remain clam." Max's voice, but there was some quality that made me understand it was a general broadcast.
"Counters," I said, though I knew I wouldn't be able to do much of anything.
A few lines appeared showing of the seventy-two personal in the foam how many were being supplied oxygen. The bar was moving fast. That big thing must be full of hoses.
Confirmed dead showed two by the time the rest had air.
The spray the hose could spit out melted the foam, but the resulting air was not something you wanted to breathe.
"How do we get them out?"
"Sewer?" Sara asked. She was still tangled up around me.
"That would work. The position has been over run with model three and fours and model fives are setting up sniping ranges. The sewers are not clear though."
A few waves of bombing drones and then more of the expanding foam and there was a pocket of space in the sewers we could move into.
"Arriving Samurai advise not to use the sewers. They have scans of diggers laying in wait. There is a proposed solution attached to the message."
It was fairly simple. Huddle up in the center of the foam pile while he killed everything outside and then extract to a vehicle that looked like a turtle shell with the turtle's arms and head and guts removed.
One of the dead was able to be revived with some of the Samurai tech while the other was pulped under a ill-positioned I-beam that punched through the foam, and his head. Then we waited in the world's worst igloo, crawling though tunnels the tube's spray had made, until we were all mostly together.
When we got the all clear the spray made an exit and we ran out weapons ready, but with nothing to shoot as we boarded the transport turtle. It lifted off so quickly we were all slammed onto the floor and a gun went off. Half a minute later it was reported to be an all clear. The weapon discharge had shot someone in the back. Someone wearing the armor I'd bought at some time in the night.
"Hell of a day sir!" the older man from the All Bright PMC said kneeling near me on the ship. Everyone still had areas where hard bits of foam clung to them.
"Saved a lot of lives."
"Is my brain still being repaired?" I asked Max subvocally.
"Yes."
"What's the, umm when will that be finished."
"I'll need roughly four hours while you are unconscious or sleeping. Four uninterrupted hours."
I shuddered. It sounded like dying to me.
The next eight hours were filled with long stretches of small tasks. Helping the heavy machinery offload on the rez side of the river and cross. Then helping the PMC prepare.
Iron Fist had taken control of the area. He and two others were extracting survivors still, while Piledriver, a Samurai I'd at least heard of before, was attacking the hive. This had the added effect of drawing a lot of the mobile units back. I still had control of the PMC drones and my own, and Max was still coordinating observation from on high. Max spotted a flare, traced it back to a window and was able to get six more people evacuated.
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I watched on the screen Max popped up in front of me as the turtle people mover hover thingy raced out there, gently, but firmly, pressed against the side of the building, and the people tumbled in. They had two parrots.
We were less than a day from incursion and huge transports and corporate vehicles busing in employees were arriving.
I asked what was going on and got several different answers. In short, they were all scavengers of one kind or another. Some legal, some quasi legal, some clearly little better than looters. All of them though would take pictures of faces and finger prints if they found dead humans. There was a Samurai that had killed one hundred and fifty people only two years ago. Hacked into feeds and displays everywhere. He had some name before the incident, but had taken for himself the name Judge afterward. He claimed he would put up no fight should Samurai come for him, but that he was done answering to the rest of humanity with their petty morals. He killed them all on air, one after another. Most had left injured instead of helping. Others had killed witnesses to their crimes. Others had simply walked by the dead, without tagging or identifying them.
He had made it very clear what would be acceptable post incursion and what would not be. According to Sara everyone that showed up had been required to watch it before they were hired.
The big car-sized drone with the weird hose appendages helped locate and remove bodies. It had hovered all the way back to the forward base without being attacked.
I was standing in a tent, removing jewelry from a woman's body who had been half eaten when Sara arrived. The woman's right arm, half her torso, and her head remained. I dropped the jewelry in an envelope and handed it to the exhausted volunteer behind me. The volunteer waited for her handheld scanner to beep and print out a label before pulling the strip off the end and then affixing the label and slotting the envelope into a crate that was already full of them.
"Help me with, um, Mrs. Johnson?" I asked Sara. Of all the things Max could do, the one I found most useful was the name appearing near people's faces.
We lifted up on the molded plastic stretcher and carried her outside the tent, down four more tents and then up onto a table. Two men were seated in folding chairs. They'd lift the bodies into the incinerators when there was room.
"All Bright is going back out to collect your turrets and mobile platform." I blinked at her.
"They mean to keep it all of course," Sara added.
"Ah. And I shouldn't allow that?"
"Not for free, and likely not at all," Sara said.
"Let's go have a conversation with them."
"Almost all of the armor and guns you gave the soldiers are already gone." I nodded.
"Captain Miller," I said reading off the name that Max provided. The old man saluted me.
"I'm told you are going out to retrieve the mortars and turrets and what not?"
"Headed out to collect the dead, track down fourteen suspected KIAs and yes, to retrieve equipment."
"Max pass him the list of tier two tech please," I said out loud. Miller blinked.
"This material will be collected and returned to me. The rest of the equipment your company can keep with my compliments. We can discuss an ammo printer as well at a later date assuming you keep in good relations with the rez authorities and don't cause too much trouble."
"Of course sir," Miller said.
"I'm fairly new to the Samurai business Captain Miller. As such I suspect your people will go through my history and someone will decide that they can risk keeping or losing a piece of equipment on that list. I would give you a long winded speech about a man doing his best in the world with little power or recourse might look like a man you can walk all over, but I'll just be blunt. If any of the equipment on that list is not returned to me I will go through your company man by man torturing and killing until it is. Do I make myself clear?"
"Yes sir!" he said with a salute.
"And if you suspect any of your higher ups are side stepping the very thorough orders I suspect you will be giving your men, you contact me before there is a problem. I don't want to chase this equipment down."
"And if the equipment is actually unrecoverable sir?" he ventured to ask.
"You already know the answer to that."
I turned around and walked away. I walked and turned a few times in the tent city. Then pushed into one of the tents and dry heaved. Sara produced one of the juice boxes I'd teleported in at some point.
"It's a hard decision but Class Two items should not be given out lightly," Sara said.
I stared at her.
"It was a bluff," I snapped.
I'd intended to have a conversation with him. But when I saw the number of class two devices that I'd abandoned in the field, weapons humanity couldn't even make, I'd panicked. Too much media pointed at having to establish yourself as tough or strong in prison or situations like this. I'd acted without thinking and now everything was spiraling.
What if he called my bluff? Or couldn't find things and committed suicide instead of face my wrath. Or what if they took the things and I did nothing and it became known that I was a push over?
I started pacing.
"I'm in over my head," I said. Sara said nothing, which I took to mean she agreed with me. Then I remembered Smith's words way back when I was in college and apprenticing under him at the law firm. It was his last day. They'd been out for his hide for a year and he hadn't said a thing about it to me. I asked why? Assuming that it meant we weren't as friendly as I thought.
"It's simple," he said, "You protect your people. You're one of my people and right or wrong, I felt like keeping you clean of the politics of this was protecting you."
"But I could have helped!" I'd pleaded. Looking back I really couldn't have. But I'd felt helpless in my need to act.
I stopped pacing. I needed to give Sara something to do. Then I needed to make a four hour window so that my brain could finish being unscrambled. Every time I thought about it, and I pulled away from thinking about it every time I started, I felt a void open up in my stomach and the ground shift.
Max had explained it of course. I'd done the sacrifice thing. I was evaluated and found worthy. Max was deployed. In the time it took to scan my brain, evaluate it, and transport in a super-AI, that brain's physical hardware had changed.
The model three, the dog like things, had bit and ripped at my arm, then it had gone for my skull, crushing it and jabbing teeth into the left side of my head, puncturing skull and brain a like. The AI mapping didn't go well and she was recalled. There was another scan, some changes made to the AI, and she was redeployed. Then using every single loop-hole in the books and some that weren't in them, items were purchased to kill the xenos and to keep us alive.
The crushed skull wasn't a small thing. When I saw a freeze frame image of my head from Sara's aug feed. I was floored I'd survived at all. I looked worse than Troy, who literally had half the skin on his head torn off.
I removed the prosthetic glove that covered my left hand and looked at it from elbow to the finger tips that remained. I looked like a burn victim. No flesh to speak of under the twisted scar tissue on the arm. Badly scabbed wounds over my missing thumb and fingers.
I looked up, surprised to see Sara waiting silently.
"I need you to make sure the medics aren't carting away any unused meds," I said as I pulled the glove back on. It had been the cheapest option when I asked how to go about getting a thumb back. "Take four or five of the PMC people, but grab an equal number of the rez security people as well. If there are options to help the wounded use them up. Let them know whatever isn't used I'm keeping when done. Make sure we get the medical scanner drone thing. That's all I can think of that was tier two."
"Here is the list of Class Two items purchased for the medical staff," Max said, "Would you like me to send it to Sara."
I nodded. "What's a predictive AI?" I knew from the words it was an AI that took in some dataset and made predictions, but I had no idea how a class two predictive AI was helping with medical stuff.
"Triage calculations. Combined with the scanner and camera feeds it helps medical personal decide on which wounds to deal with first to save the most lives."
I sure it did help, but that was damn near the plot of every conservative ad that ran against the horrors of letting AI into medical decisions. "Do YOU want death panels!" I could still remember the big fat guy in the commercial. I smiled and looked around.
Sara was already gone.