The Plastic Age (Second Edition)

The Plastic Age

So, let’s sit down. The plastic chairs are comfy once you've sat in one for twenty years. Just sit and give what I’m saying some thought.
Imagine a clockwork mechanism. Imagine it being large and clunky. Huge and clunky, even. All those small gears the size of a tooth, large cogs the size of a wheel, miniscule this and that that all, for some reason, work.
But not really. Some parts don’t. Instead of transferring the momentum, like all goodie-goodie clockworks do, they just make noise, which is more than nothing, but in the end isn’t very far away. The engineers know about that, but they don’t give a fuck, because repairing the cogs is tricky, while telling the branch clockwork manager the mechanism works is easy and pays just as much.
Not the whole mechanism works that way: some parts work just fine, but could use some oiling (which doesn’t pay any extra), some work perfectly, but many, many more never worked to begin with and are just... there, too old for the engineers to remove (because that may cause unnecessary “why did you remove the boss’s favourite useless cog” inquiries).
Have a picture in mind?
Great.
That’s how the Army of the Republic works nowadays.
Mostly, it doesn’t.
Now imagine a huge can of sardines that falls out of the sky.

While flying down, the can separates into smaller, personal cans, each can packing a single sardine, all juicy, smelly and ready to die again. That’s the average spaceborne infantry drop pod, one per squad, disposable, orbit launched.
My drop pod has no sardines. It only has me and nine disembodied sardine heads, all calling me “sarge”. I don’t even get the full fishies.
I get huge watery eyes, brains the size of a peanut and and a white piece of a broken spine.
"PREPARE FOR SEPARATION, YOU FUCKING SPACE MONKEYS! WE’RE BREACHING IN TEN SECONDS FLAT!"
I get my bread’n’butter, the “YES SARGE”, and calm down. Separation in five second means that in twenty seconds, half of my squad will land. In another ten, the whole squad is boots on the ground. In fifty, almost everyone of those shitheads will be dead.
And I’m stuffy-sargy MacDuffy, all locked in a dimmed, ceramics-laden motoarmour, leading a one man charge away from the battlefield, to places where the cogs of the Military Machine wouldn’t expect me to grind myself down.
All in all, agreeable.

Sounds easy, but it’s not. I don’t like the idea, to be honest, but being alive the next morning to not like it even more kindles my heart quite a bit. The holopad shows me a vidprayer, but I ignore it, too busy staring into the plastic walls of my pod. Making plastic capable of surviving spaceflights and political corruption is the greatest achievement of my century. Might as well stare into it. There are small red lights, all meaning something incredibly techy, and release clamps, and composite metal stronglines, and resin suspenders, and holopads, but they’re as bland as the plastic while being flashy and irritating.

The small period between atmospheric breach (or launch, because some space bodies lack atmospheres) and pod separation is called “The Flashback”. It’s incredibly short, half a minute max, but that’s quite enough time to ask yourself a lot of questions and not answer a single one of them. Why is the Titan Republic dropping thousands of tin men on the god forgotten barrens of Deimos? Why do we fight wars at all, being all advanced and stuff? Why is modern porn so bland? Why are tickets to the old mother Earth so expensive? Why is the prayer so boring? Why is the food so bad?

There’s a load of question to ask, but I don’t even try to answer them. Mind you, I can. I’ll do that, just for you.
Deimos is important strategically. The Martians control it, but not really well, because the Martian Space Lifts are shit. The capships are busy pummeling everything military-looking from orbit, but the capships have the incredible ability to bomb everything non-military instead while keeping the small and heavily armed marts fine and kicking and ready to tear us a new one. That’s for the “Why Deimos” part and “Why us” part.
Wars are cheap and easy. Building a motoarmour costs nothing. Ammunition is cheaper than air. Spaceships are made of plastic, synthmets and dog shit. But living spaces? Political levers? Diplomatical poker chips? Those are priceless. Everybody wants them. Everybody is just dying to have them. And many of that “everybody” die quite literally. That covers the “wars”.
The porn is bland because we’re too good at it. We had porn forever. We tried everything, from making it virtual to adding girls with thousands of dicks. We’ve seen it all. We’re lost. Every soldier in every army waits for the Porn Messiah more than he waits for discharge. At the very least discharges actually happen.
Tickets are expensive because Mother Earth is a beautiful piece of DMZ, nice and green, with air that actually feels like air and gravitation that feels right. Earth feels right, that’s the word. Like the place you belong to. Of course you’d fucking hog any penny on every fucking ticket for this wonderful place. That’s capitalism for you.
The moment I see an engaging prayer, it’ll mean the Porn Messiah actually delivered himself to thine. That’s a dumb question, you landie.
And the food's bad because the food was never good. You need something more than hard-producing chemplants to make good food. Agriculture, for one. Or cattle. Or a good chem factory instead of the ones we get on Her Icyness Of Titan. Maybe a one with someone who knows the difference between salt and sugar.
This means I answered my questions, you know. This also means it’s time for Dispersion.
And the dispersion began.

The heartpod automatically starts projecting flares, both digital and physical, and shoots us, me and my squad, that being squad four in company nine and some other organisational shit that’s written on my frontal plate anyway, in every fucking direction like a pretty, pretty flower.
AA takes a sardine immediately. Just poofs the unlucky sod the moment he starts descending on brakejets.
This shit of an army has a squad tactic I’m supposedly required to uphold. I’ll tell you about it, for the giggles.
A ten person squad of space monkeys, that being spaceborne motoarmoured infantry, is expected to be the primary unit of an advancing dropforce made up of two or more divisions. The squad is divided into two five-man fireteams, each commandeered by a different sergeant; one of the sergeants, that being me, is also responsible of being the company command joystick in this fun game of war. To compensate for the fact that war is bloody, terrifying and messy, every motosuit has a personal zero niner (or, as the techies call them, a generation zero point nine artificial intelligence) used for field coordination and quick response; in practice, this means a cheery female voice explains you what’s going to kill you in the next five seconds.
Going back to the tactics, the average squad is built around the typical heavy gunner/anti armour pair. Monkeys are usually fitted with flechette-launching gauss rifles (typically called “His Jammesty”) and some other stuff like wrist-launched airbursters, but two incredibly important monkeys are issued with either a heavy gauss, which is basically the same as the usual gauss but does it in much longer bursts, or the Clearwater Railfin.
The Rail is capable of taking down armoured infantry in a single, quick, satellite and wetwork assisted shot. Flechettes can rip your armour eventually, grenades can fry your transmission and motors, but the Rail kills you, right here, right now, and you’re afraid of the Rail. You can’t hide from the Rail. The armour won’t help you. Why would you expect some cover and rubble to manage to do it? The Rail makes you afraid to move from cover and makes cover useless. I love the Rail. Every soldier from Titan learns to love the Rail.
And the martians?
They’ll learn to hate it.
And then I land.
With a loud sizzle and a louder roar, the pod snaps, launching forward a plate of plastic and metal, giving birth to Staff Sergeant Catherine MacDuffy, the greatest survivor.
"LEG IT, YOU MONKEYS, DO YOU WANT TO ROT IN TINS FOREVER?!"

Deimos is a rock. That’s about all you can say about it: it’s a piece of fucking stone that some larger than reality garçon left in the black soup of space to irritate Mars.
It was apparently even more of a rock before the martians took to enlarging it and employing a pulldowner to give it some gravity. Apparently, it wasn’t even a sphere. It was an “irregular” shape or some shit. What a joke.
"WAIT FOR THE HEARTPOD TO LAND! I WANT THE RAIL UP AND RUNNING THE MOMENT IT TOUCHES THE GROUND!"
Deimos is hardly ten klicks in diameter. No atmosphere, grav’s all artificial, no particular use, really, other than sticking a huge metal box with enough sensors to tell what underpants the martian president's wearing today. You could also stick in a Rail, but bigger and capable of lobbing airburners right in Red Planet’s backside, but that’s the second stage of command’s grand plan, and the way it looks down here, it’s a pretty daring plan.
I toss orders over the wetwork, and the fishes take cover. We’re stuck between two hills, right in the middle, and a heavy laz right in front of us colors the black sky red with beams, burning drop pods before they disperse, setting the overcans ablaze.
When the heartpod drops, we rearm. You can’t fit the Rail in a personal pod, so you have to drop it with the main structure; same goes with any additional equipment above the standard load, and without his satchels, a spaceborne isn’t a spaceborne. This system is shit: if the heartpod goes down, you’re stuck with a Jammesty with limited ammunition, but there isn’t much of a choice. Not for the engineers, not for us, because the alternative is a solid pod, no dispersion, alternatively known as “The Ten Man Flying Grave”.
In ten secs, we get the first order from D-TACCOM; I scream something inspiring over the comm while listening to the non-inspiring order of taking down a triple-A nest, the one in front of us. We dim our camo to the neutral gray-brown of Deimos’s sands and move out, some private murmuring something about how a chav from the squad died just a minute ago and nobody gives a damn.
Wait, somebody died?
The squad command interface confirms it.
Weird. Anyway, we move - not much time left, the way it looks.

We get spotted by a drone, and I thrash it. It’s a shame there’s nothing to hear on a stone with no air, because the gaussgun has a really nice sound. It slashes the air, tears it in half. Not here. Here it just makes iron rods fly. Space is dull.
The drone gives us a bright red flash before falling down with it’s jetties in pieces; I double tap it and scream something about licking the ground. We take cover, and we do it in time, because a jetmortar shell hits us right as we hug the ever dry dirt.
Those fuckers are a godsend, the jetmortars. Not for us right now, but for soldiers in general. It works in any gees, it doesn’t need an atmosphere to wreck shit, and it fits with all squad tactics. The only difference when using one on Earth from using one on Deimos is limited range. A small munition, roughly five kilos plus warhead. is launched upwards either on a piston or by it’s own jetty. It flies high and stops itself, does a really pretty air-roll and chooses some motherfuckers to kill.
Then it launches itself downwards. Just like now.
Someone dies, catching a direct hit. Died instantly, explosion shock. Thank God his satchels were locked in ceramic, we take them and run before another shell pummels us into dust.
By the time I see the triple-As, heavy laz dischargers buried into foxholes and connected with direct wiring to a command-and-control station (plus some light plastshields set up as cover and a load of light motos ready to eat my guts for breakfast), I get into the specific state of aversion from my branch of armed forces, the Aerospace Fleet.
For example, the typical fleet CAS tactic is based on small crafts, like AIMs and aerospace hybrids and whatnot providing strafing runs and missile runs on targets lit by earthbound squads. However, until the combat zone is cleared of automatic and semi-automatic AA, you get jack shit for CAS and fuck you for dessert, because the main fleet itself “can’t provide support on demand in fear of damaging the natural satellite”. Initial runs with small, low impact, high precision shells are basically about taking out everything that is capable of scratching the warships and having the droppies (that being us) deal with everything else.
I don’t like dealing with fortified positions with huge guns capable of horizontal fire.

I don’t like fighting martians in general. They’ve got the most refined optical and chemical production in Sol, Mother Earth not included. That means they’ve got enough old-tech plants to produce cheap, infantry-issued laz dischargers, semi-auto, loaded with one-shot chargecells, shooting beams hot enough to occasionally take upon a moto in a single frontal shot.
And Deimos isn’t making anything better.
It’s small. Intolerably small. If I send those fuckers to die under fire, I can’t just turn back, hide and drink a carbonated protein drink, the one you get in the motosuit’s feedtubes, until some fuckers take me home or some other fuckers take me prisoner. It’s not like on Tethys, where you can hide in the rubble on the shores of some tropical floatcity.
It’s Deimos, appropriately called. We’re invading, and we’re doing it badly.
If they get me, they’ll kill me.
If the invasion fails, it wouldn’t be here to take me back.
So fuck it. I release the safety and give my fishes a look.
"CHECK YOUR GUNS AND PRIME YOUR SACHIES, YOU FISHFUCKS, WE’RE MAKING A POINT AND SCOOT ASSAULT!! TACCOM WANTS SOME SMASHED GUNS AND WE’LL DELIVER HIM SOME!"

I hear some roars on the comm, and that’s all I need. Some orders over the wetwork and we leg it, all huddled up, all ready to win any war and fuck up any mart we see. I look upwards, away from the dull grayness: space is slightly more dull without an atmosphere to make it nice to look at. Even space engagements are dull to look at. One star shooting a lot of ship-killer class stars at some other star. It’s much nicer when you’re close, but save me the grace of being close to a ship in combat.
When on Deimos, my zero-niner will tell me what’ll kill me.
In space, I’ll just die.
As soon as we get in range I order a Rail shot; one fish stays with the Railman to keep him the fuck out of danger, and the rest of us move quickly, plastic boots hitting the ground like hammers. I don’t see the shot ripping time and space to hit some fucker whose only mistake was to like red and white uniforms, but I feel it. You learn to feel when the Rail shoots. It’s like a sign from god.
I see a martie blown apart by the hit, plastic, meat, metal and fabric going up like fireworks, and a few seconds later I see red beams, because I’m not the only one to see the pink bits flying around.
We start firing, spraying on the run, trying to reach cover; a second rail shot takes off a heavy gunner, and by the time we hit the ground near some terrain irregularity we still aren’t dead.
The heavy gauss gets set up, and we immediately vault over and run again. I don’t like what I see; I see an AA laz turning itself to face us, empty lens and overcharged emitters, and I almost scream.
- BREAK UP, TWO TEAMS! TWO FUCKING TEAMS, TWO FUCKING SIDES! FLANK EM’!
The Rail takes a shot at the AA laz, but the fucker doesn’t even budge. They cover the fucks in armaplast-ceramic composite sandwiches, same stuff they wrap tanks and gravgliders in.
So it fires. Just fires, beam after beam. Nothing I could do.
Not at me; not at the pair of sardines who chose to go after the commander, like good fishies.
I don’t have time to look, but my sidecams have. Triple-As are designed to take down aircraft, and when one of those hit a moto in an no-air environment...
It ain’t pretty. Pretty clean, though. It just cuts him in two halves, a bit of legs downwards, some shoulders and a head upwards. I see a gauss rifle with the stock melted off falling down to the grey ground.
The stupid fuck. He didn’t have a lot of use for his torso, now did he? He was a useless little fish in a plastic box.
No, he wasn’t any good. A stupid little fuck.
But for now, he was my stupid little fuck.
I am upset.
Not stopping my run, not stopping my spray, I rip a satch off my back. The cask autoejects.
I take a second, barely evading an accurate laz shot, and I throw it forward.
Then I rip another satchel charge.
Then I run.

The thing with laz dischargers, be it large or small, is that they’re really sensitive to where you shoot them. You see, if you’re using a laz discharger, let’s say on Earth, you better be shooting in two-rounders and not further than 500 yards. A two rounder will shoot two beams in less then 0.004 seconds, if my 'pedia isn’t lying, fast enough for the first beam to clear some airspace for the second beam. That way, it deals damage.
Without an atmosphere to wreck the beam, you can shoot in semi at any fucking target within visual range with minimal power loss.
Deimos hasn’t got any atmosphere. Laz dischargers are the kings here. The ultimate weapon.
But one thing Deimos has in buckets: gray fucking sand.
The satchel lands three yards away from the foxhole. The marties get down, the triple-A faces away to protect the lens, and the charge explodes in a blue flash, raining down fragments and dirt.
A lot of dirt. A whole cloud of it. Slowly descending, pulled down by the joke that is Deimos’s gravity.
The marties don’t wait: they get up, the set to full-auto, they spray at me, they want to kill me, but fuck them, fuck them all, because I made them some dirt-based atmosphere to suck off. Beams hit me, melt the outer armalayer, forcing my zero-niner to fill my ears with warnings, but I don’t give a fuck, because they don’t penetrate. And when I’m close enough, I set the second satchel to airburst and throw it.
I may be smiling.
I’m not sure.

When the dust clears, we regroup. We get together, we check ourselves. Squad interface is borked for some reason, so I check on analogue. We’re down to five men. The Rail got pummeled by a mortar. It survived, but the fish that was supposed to cover the Railman died. Two died under fire. It’s a shame, now that I think about it, but I’m glad I can actually think about. We scavenge their remaining satchels, again, and take cover in the foxhole near the torn remains of the triple-A; it’s a good position, albeit heavily scarred by the satchel, and we set up the armaplast shields to face a potential enemy. We do it in time.
In a minute we’re counterattacked by a raider team, light motos with high mobility and fast-firing dischargers. We hold up neatly - most of us. My gauss jams immediately, misfeeding the flechette to the coil chamber, and I have a fun time trying to unjam the plastic fuck of a gun.
The Rail saves us, though. The godsent gun just shoots, one time, then another, and they retreat, leaving two lacerated corpses behind. I smile, and this time I’m quite sure I smiled.
We check the perimeter; when I’m sure it’s clear, I order a quick rest.
Not much to do, resting. Being a moto means you don’t really have to anything but make pressure points react to limb movement. You’re not tired after hours upon hours of combat. You’re just... strained. When it all stops, you’re kinda lost. You’re waiting for it to continue, but instead, you just get a protodrink and some silence.
Some silence is nice, though. Five minutes of silence is a lot. I don’t get more than five, though.
TACCOM sets up a new drop zone nearby; we get a new order: we get some light armour, some new fishies to put in the cheery tactical barrel we are, and then we assault the local HQ, taking down some strongpoints in the process.
Spitting in the moto is forbidden, and I fucking hate that regulation.

Accompanied by a team of fishmen, a Grenadier gets dropped. As a spaceborne, you learn to like the company of Grenadiers: a nine feet moto is large target, but when you replace the fish inside with a one point four AI, you suddenly get a whole fucking lot of free weight and inner space. Suddenly, more than two hundred pounds of passive armour and seventy pounds overweight of applique add on armour appear out of nowhere, all neat, all porcelain-12 and armaplast. All added up, you get a large, very well armoured target, and god protect the motherfucker who’ll assume that the Grenadier is slow. It’s like a bear. All huge, all burly, until it suddenly runs at you at fifty miles per hour. It adds up. People shoot at the Grenadier, and the Grenadier survives, and people don’t shoot at us, and we kill with newfound efficiency. God bless modern tech.
I integrate the Gren into the wetwork and check the command panel; all works fine, surprisingly, and we hold position until an equipment pod drops, bringing some ammo, some wristers, a cannon. A 30mm cannon. Grenadiers get all the coolest weaponry, I tell you. Gauss assisted, belt-fed, recoil-mitigating, with external aiming available in any environment. It’s not as accurate as the Rail, but it’s large, scary, shoots shells that explode and is otherwise unnerving. It’s also much better at taking out armour: two-stage HVAP are considerably better at penetrating sandwiches than most pure-kinetic weapons, and the Rail is as pure and kinetic as ladies get.
We leave the foxhole as soon as we rearm, quickly moving towards a small hill nearby for a better vantage point.

I constantly eye the sky for mortar shells, but it’s clear. It’s not trying to kill me for once. What a fresh feeling. TACCOM shows that we actually succeeded in dropping some medium armour two clicks away; they’re moving towards the martie HQ, and they’re moving very, very successfully.
Combat turns into a routine very quickly. I hear a soldier murmur about his dead comrades, and I stop him. I don’t want to - let him murmur, let him compare how dead the dead are to how alive he is - but I have to, because that fish brain will miss a fucking engagement. I’ve seen hundreds of spaceborne like him. They build a wall made of fear around their own senses, and if you don’t break that wall, they die.
We get into combat every now and then, nothing big, quick fire exchanges between piles of gray dirt. When you’re accompanied by a mech with a built-in heavy gauss and an automatic cannon, marties tend to shorten engagements to “see the enemy, shoot at them once and run like fucking solar wind”. We’re playing it safely, relying on the Gren as much as we can; the mechanized giant just mows down everything he sees, maximum accuracy, minimum flinching. I like to watch autocannons fire; in the weak gravity of Deimos, spent casing fall down slowly, spinning like drunken ice-dancers, falling until they hit the ground. We take on a triple-A nest in less than a minute; in ten minutes, we’ve taken out every minor target we’re supposed to take.

STRATCOM is mostly inaccessible to small fries like me, but we do get some semblance of a bigger picture. The fleet tackles what it can and drops what it can, but that’s not much, because the martian long-range sensors are still up. This is a bad, bad thing, because once you get close to Mars, it shoots high-precision Beyond-Individual-Sensor-Range missiles at you, and they will fuck you up, and you will lose, so you gotta form up some SEAD as soon as possible. Deimos holds a high-resolution P-band sensor array, other than being a potentially useful rock, and it’s just far enough from Mars to keep you safe against most BISR launchers. Smaller arrays are located on the orbital connector ring of Mars, and a whole fucking load of individual sensor sputniks are orbiting Mars all the time. If Deimos is taken out, you get a hole in the BISR shield, just enough to assault the orbital ring.
It would seem logical to attack the launchers directly, but, as far as I know, they’re set up in incredibly thick CIWS nets, just enough to obliterate any extreme-range SEAD breach-missile we’ve got, while the BISR monitors orbiting Deimos were a much easier target, so command decided to begin the assault from the natural satellite using drop infantry...
Blah-blah-blah. I quit reading that bullshit and check His Jammesty once again.
We’re close to the HQ. I can tell by the read beams and “Fire Needed!” requests over the TACCOM.
The Deimos HQ is a great big fucking bunker, built out of construction foam, metal composites, ceramic strongboards and plastic plates. It looks like a dim, grey pancake with broken surfaces here and there; it looks unimpressive, to be honest, but I know too well that really, really good military installations all look unimpressive. They’re too busy being ten clicks deep in the ground, surrounded by spaced walls and seismic balancers. Cities and bunkers are the death of us. They make me paranoid. The unimpressiveness scares me a little bit more than the remains of the martian unit, desperately holding the entrance, spending what little ammunition they have.
I’m pretty sure they’ve got ten times the amount of soldiers, all buckled up in the small, dark corridors of the H fucking Q.
I connect with the 11th and 19th squads; the lucky fucks haven’t lost a single sardine, but I’ve got a mech in my squad so they can go fuck themselves. As we move forward I see a pair of mortars being set up in a burned-our foxhole; as we advance forward and engage the remaining forces, shells start falling down - and for once in this fucking battle, not on me.
We take cover at a heavily damaged plateline, returning fire from time to time. I order the Gren to take cover behind a knocked-out gravtank - some light martian model - because the marties got a whole lot of intact recoilless guns, and I enjoy the company of my ten foot angel of death well too much.
Stupid martians. There’s a golden rule of thumb when you’re planning to successfully integrate gravtanks into your doctrine: you don’t use them on low-gravity worlds. At, fucking, all. You overaccelerate a little bit, and the grav will get the “skids”: too much inertia is gained during movement while the natural loss if inertia is too low, so once you’ve started moving, it’s much, much harder to stop. But you’ve gotta stop eventually, and a vehicle desperately trying to stop moving is a vehicle you destroy.
All in all, the situation is bright. When you get infantry, armour and light artillery all together, you call them “combined arms” and send them rolling down the road and rolling down anything they see. If something is too large and scary to roll over, you scream at the mortar guys until they dealt with it, and then you continue your roll. Everyone likes combined arms, from TACCOM to grunts, and we like it for a reason: it gives results, and in ten minutes of active fighting (my gauss didn’t even jam) we get a green light from TACCOM - perimeter secured, well done, paper medals for all of you stupid fucks, we’ll reach the presidential palace at Terra Rossa sometime around tomorrow noon.
For most sardines it means it’s time to have some rest and, potentially, load on some troop transport, get on some assault ship and potentially get some sleep on some resin fucking bed. For me, however, the meaning behind the words is quite unpleasant, because I see a new order on my command interface.
In ten minutes, we’ll rearm, we’ll get some applique installed, we’ll hear a stupid fucking prayer, and we’ll go down the large armoured hatch into the large fucking bunker without any fucking support.
I grind my teeth.

Shaped charges and red thermite lines thrash the five-inch armoured door in mere minutes. It all falls down with a flash. It looks nice. Melted metal is beautiful. My dad worked on a metal refinery, and I got to look at huge ceramic pots with liquid metal in it. It was like lava, but hotter, meaner and with a potential to turn into doorknobs. I liked doorknobs. I used to open doors just to touch doorknobs. Most doors were plastic with sliders, and doorknobs were rare. I liked them.
I don’t know why.
I’m having the flashbacks again, aren’t I?
I am.
Time to get ready.
We get add-on armour installed to increase survivability in close combat. My personal opinion on CQB amounts to “burn em’”, but command has a sweet spot for martian tech, so they send an assault team down. Five moto squads, two assault E-Gs, one heavy moto squad. Heavy fucking motos. They require special, double-sized personal droppies, so you only get five H-motos per squad; they’ve got motorized rollers on their legs, and that’s 30m/h while maintaining accurate fire and being decently armoured. The only sardine to roll in a H-moto is a cool sardine that passed an SSE evaluation with a decent mark.
I didn’t, so instead of rolling, I walk. Add-on armour is a solid way to ersatz a med-moto into an assault model, but you never feel like the real deal.
You’re way too slow.
At least we get decent weapons. Well, “decent”. An overcharged gauss is a cool weapon in a compact package, a slick, powerful death machine that removes any opposition like a fat man removes frankfurters. All in all, pretty good, and the quick projectile speed drop isn’t a problem when you’re fighting in CQ. Sounds nice?
Problem is, you get a barrel meltdown in five hundred shots, so you are outright issued a pack of three barrels for quick change.
Coils tend to bake down in a thousand and a half shots, and exchanging a coil module is much more tricky than sliding in a new barrel.
The plastic furniture, especially the handguard, tends to turn into soup after prolonged fire.
But you know?
When you’re in a two by two corridor, and there’s a fucker in front of you, and you’re both armed, it feels quite good to be the final motherfucker to keep standing.
I’m sad you can’t fit a Rail in a tunnel. You could clear corridors with a single shot. Just bang, and it’s christmas, and there’s dead, bloody goose all around.
TACCOM blinks with a two-minute readiness. I sigh and scream over the comm.
- GET HERE, YOU FISHFUCKS, IT’S TIME TO GET INTO THE BARREL!! WE GET DOWN! WE CLEAR THIS NEST DOWN! WE GET BACK! WE GET A MEDAL! HUP HUP HUP!

A Gren clears the entrance for us, and it does it nicely. The mech just stands there, emptying a box after box of thirty millers, glittering in cannon flashes for three minutes straight; when TACCOM calls him off, the entrance is half buried in spent casings, and I really hope most of the bunker will look like that in twenty minutes max.
How do you storm bunkers?
My best answer is “don’t”. However, command isn’t happy with my answer, so they have their own.
First. you’ve got a base of fire. That’s what the heavy motos gonna do. They secure entrances, large corridors, big rooms, everything large and dangerous at the same time.
Second, you’ve got an E-Gee team. They carry the advanced explosives, they carry recon leapies, they carry tech breachers and direct-to-net overcharges. They also carry sapper kits to deal with IEDs and mines.
Third, you get us, the maneuvering teams. We clear side rooms, breach secondary doors, control cleared corridors, form up strongpoints if needed and die, die, die, die all the time because we’re doing unsafe things without enough armour to do so.
It’s a solid plan, as written by a spreadsheet warfighter.
Rock solid, until something goes wrong, and fuck all plans, because they will go wrong.
However, right here, right now, it all goes as planned.
BOFs roll in, shooting on the move, quickly engaging anything they can see with the overcharges set on full-auto. E-Gees go second; as soon as they get the moment, they drop recon rollies, funny little balls with minimalistic servos, one point two AI and a rebounder wave sensors. I like those little things: some mad genius of a guy actually wrote them a pet-based behavior program, and you can play with them for hours. They even react to petting. We had fights over them on the assault ship until the shithead of a stuffie took them away.
As soon as we get a semblance of a perimeter, my squad moves down. I don’t even have to scream at them. Tunnels are bad. It’s in a soldiers blood.
Tunnels are bad.
The heavies move forward, using the new intel, and we tromp behind, carbines up. It’s dark and cramped: the emergency lights are offline, and the only semblance of light in the visual spectrum are the IR-tags on the powerpack. I move to the overspectrum and gather up.
Once, I got lost in a service tunnel, back at home.
I shake my head. It’s not the time. Not the time.
It’s never the time.
First stop is the airlock doors. Calling two-ton composite steel a door is cute. We’ll be blowing those down, melting the stronglines. However, before you do anything, you set up a smell breacher that penetrates the door without destroying. You do that on every door.
That’s called “unsealing the herm”.
If you haven’t got a mask, you die. If you haven’t got an enclosed suit, you die.
CQB is a cruel, cruel thing.
We get in after ten minutes of waiting. Melting doors takes time. Melting SPLA 6 doors is a lot of time. Melting two SPLA 6 doors is even more.
I wait, and my sardines wait with me.
In the dark, hearing your own breath like the only sound in the world.
When the doors fall, we get up.
We get up and get fighting, because the enemy is still there.

It’s not like they’re not ready for us. A fortified bunker is a deathtrap filled with angry people, and goddamn those martians are angry. We come under heavy laz fire as soon as we melt down the second airlock door, instantly losing a stupid fucking heavy to an overcharged shot; we immediately hug every available corner and support column, returning limp fire and afraid to even breathe. That’s what's bad about tunnel fights - the moment you’ve got a large enough gun looking at a small enough corner it’s instantly 1917 again, and you’re no different from some kraut fuck with a huge mustache crouched in a trench for months. It certainly feels like months.
Thank god we’ve got E-Gees. As opposed to us, the fishmen, who get carbines, and the heavy motos, who get portable LMGs, the engineers are issued MICWs. It’s a fucking wonder. The cherub’s middle finger. The assault engineer’s second dick. A semi-automatic grenade launcher with a gauss car’ tucked on as an accidental afterthought. When shit hits the fan, an engineer is the closest thing to a mortar you’ll get.
And the engineers delivered.
In two seconds suppression was broken; in ten the H-motos were rolling forward, spraying on max speed.
We push them down a level quite fast. Really fast. I check the dead, turning bodies faces up. They’re not even soldiers, most of em. Some stupid fucks in non-protective enclosers with silly rebreathers instead of helmets. Most of us do a clearing routine; most doors are autolocked, so we simply seal them up, but some tend to hold up a deskjobby with a PDW trying to be a hero, so we breach, clear and move forward.
Rinse and repeat. Level after level. We move nicely. It goes too well. An IED collapses a tunnel in front of us, but nobody dies. What the fuck is going on?
We face a strongpoint, but we destroy it in a fish-and-chips, by-the-book pincer.
Pincers never fucking work.
A level after a level. I lose a fish, yeah, but he died because he tried to earn himself some stripes, which even luck can’t help.
In an hour we’re on level 18, clearing down barracks. I hate myself. This place is a mess. It’s not a battle. We’re clearing out rooms of pen warriors and PC rangers.
It feels sick.

Another hour?
We’re on level 30, two rearms later. We’ve worn down the remaining PDF squads to tatters. We’re moving forward, fresh and clear, we shoot in full auto, like there’s no future, and I scream some bullshit over the comm, and it looks fine. Three heavy motos died. Twelve meds, too. One E-G.
This is the final level, command and control, the tech control, the “button room”. The heart of Deimos.
I expected more, I expected a last stand, but most of them just surrender. Hands up. Slowly. They’re like civvies with nice stripes. We move them to the lifts; as soon as we’re sure that most of the “large” rooms are clear, we get to corner-cleaning, which takes time.
To save some time, we break into smaller squads; I get to go alone, because my squad doesn’t like me much, but hey, even I don’t like me very much.
In ten minutes of intensive walking, I’m standing in front of a wooden door. True to god wood. I’m amazed. Most of the motos are busy sweep-and-clearing; the intel pic shows me a single man behind a desk in a nice room with pictures and chairs for guests. An officer. Officers are a hard bunch, aren’t they?
I promise myself I’ll try to be polite. Then, I break the door.
He’s clearly old. A rebreather, a suit. A beret, of all things. I stand there for a second, expecting him to surrender, but he doesn’t. He’s proud, and so am I. He shoots a PDW at me, aiming at the head: I return fire, turning his desk into rubble. I’m a better shot. He falls slowly, flipping his chair, which is plastic and grey. I’m surprised he’ll sit on a chair like that. Those chairs are uncomfortable. You’ve gotta sit on one for twenty years until your ass deforms to fit the plastic better.
I smirk. At myself, at the old officer. I get closer to look at his face.
A second passes. It’s a long second. I look down, and my smile dies.
Very quickly, I feel stupid and upset. As stupid and upset as I ever got. I got turned down by my first highschool sweetheart. I didn’t feel as stupid then.
You double tap. You always double tap. Gauss guns have low stopping power. Flechettes are fast, but weightless.
You always double tap.
The officer smiles, the old fuck. He presses a revolver to the space between the chest and abdominal plates of my moto. A revolver. A five shooter. .357, Martian Ordnance Autorevolver.
It’s silly beyond measure. Stupid. Idiotic. Retarded. I don’t believe it.
A revolver.
Another second passes. It’s longer than my whole military service.
And then it ends.
He shoots. I hear the shot. The barrel was pressed against me, after all. There’s air to transfer the sound.
Soon...
There won’t be.
It hurts like hell.
I spray, I don’t even see where to. I just hold the trigger. I’m screaming, I’m hating this old fuck of an officer, I hate myself, I hate my drill sergeant, I hate TACCOM and STRATCOM, I hate my squad, I hate my weapon, I hate my armour, I hate it all.
Why am I so stupid?
We won the fucking battle of Deimos.
We cleared a hole in the BISR protection sphere.
We suffered considerable losses, but we proved superior to the technological marvel of Mars.
You know why I’ve been calling the spacebornes fishies?
Because in a war against Mars, you’d better stop trying to remember the faces and names of your comrades. They’re better off as sardines in a can. In the end, that’s what we are.
We die all the time.
But I never thought I’ll die like that.
I’m dying of a revolver bullet, after a battle won.
The decompression hurts more than everything. More than my shame.. My organs are a mess. It hurts. My intestines try to escape my belly. My blood squirts away like water. My zero niner tells me I’m dying.
It hurts so much that I stop thinking.
As I’m falling down, dying...
It gets easier. For some reason. I dimly feel a fall.
I think it may be for the better.
I’m not a very good lass, after all.
I lived a long life, all in all.
Thirty years is a lot.
It was fun.
God it was fun.
I had a bunny.
What a stupid bunny it was. I should've got a cat.
I came into the army with PTSD, but I cured it there.
I got stuck in a tunnel once, but in the army I forced people to be stuck in tunnels, and it helped.
I was good at what I had to do.
I survived, you see. Until this point.
I was decorated.
A silver star is a lot.
My parents are proud of me.
Dad sent me a hand-made pure steel necklace once. I have it on my neck right now.
As I make peace...
As I think of what was instead of what wasn’t and wouldn’t...
As I get ready to die...
Somebody slaps a foam block to my wound, restoring compression, and I...
I survive.
But this is an entirely different story.