The Lord’s Little Fobbits
Part of “Join the Corps, See the Galaxy”
It took a few hours for the full complement of our beamship to get shuttled down from the orbitals. Once groundside we were marshalled on a football field as a full regiment. My squad was in Foxtrot Company of Battalion 193, 372nd Infantry, which was a subsidiary of the 186th division, XXIII Corps, in ascending order. My own basic family unit was a four-person fireteam that included myself, a loudmouth from Newark by the name of Pete Harvoni, a quiet country boy from Texas named Tommy Gorton, and an Angelino of Korean extraction who went by “Hoops.” Told us she’d been a high school basketball star back home in South L.A.
A lot of the newbies got a kick out of our new combat shells. Training or no training, I’d always been a scrawny, pale Puerto Rican from the Bronx. On Calypso, I found myself a newly-minted two meter bronze god with reflexes to match. My squadmates laughed at the difference. Only Riviera seemed a natural in his new body. He’d been in a few others like it before, of course. A lot of the NCOs and officers had seen at least some action in the Draco Crisis. We all thought that would be a good thing for us.
The battalion C.O., a short Yorkshire man named Lieutenant Colonel Nicholson, was an exception. He’d been in logistics command during Draconis, and only transferred to the infantry after the last war with the Alliance. The Corps offered pretty decent incentives to experienced officers who transferred to combat arms commands, especially infantry. Sergeant Riviera seemed skeptical of the Commander, so we were, too.
Nicholson briefed us on the mission ahead: we were to be deployed by companies to the Di Kahn province, where the Alliance had been attacking friendly security forces for the past two local years. Our task, simply put, was to seek them out and eliminate them. Nothing more or less. I think I can speak for a lot of the newbies in saying we were eager to get to it already. Harvoni said as much to Sergeant Riviera, who just sighed and shook his head. Looking back, he must have been thinking, careful what you wish for.
We never got to see much of Walcott City, where we’d landed on Calypso II. The road out of the city was sheltered from the urban sprawl by tall concrete barriers. The only sight any of us really got of the locals was a handful of glimpses out the back of the trucks, as we went under bridges where civilians had gathered to see us pass by. A few waved flags, fewer still smiled. Most just seemed relieved we were finally there.
It was the countryside that really caught our attention. The closest to anything Earthly had to be Iceland, according to a Staff Sergeant from another platoon who’d grown up there. Grand mountains stretching across the horizon. Rocky, moss-carpeted plains that more closely resembled Mars or Titan than Terra. Then there was the plant life. Everything from the moss on up was part of some near-fungal alien family, which Hydeck said was actually unlike anything on Earth. Nunez said this meant we’d get to see some exotic alien life at last. We cackled at that, until Hydeck said the local plants were also hypertoxic to human biology.
The convoy took our company to a ramshackle little FOB far out from Walcott at the edge of Di Kahn province, which looked like it had been plucked out of some old sci-fi movie maker’s idea of a scenic alien setting. It had it all, from rocky hills to ten meter purplish fungal bodies that looked a lot like the mangrove trees in my granny’s backyard in Louisiana.
Forward Operating Base Diamond Dog was a mile-square complex of bunkers either hacked into the volcanic rock of the Kahnian plain, or squatting above it in clumps of modular armored boxes. The whole place was surrounded by a double line of thick concertina wire, a minefield in between, and auto-turrets laying defilading fire on all the approaches. The only road in or out was watched over by a pair of twenty-meter watchtowers with affixed missile launchers. We figured we’d be safe there for a while.
The FOB C.O. was a Major named Amical, who had a crisp Van Dyke mustache and beard that my squadmates thought was pretty funny for a combat arms ground-level commander. We learned later that he was a local, born on nearby Calypso III, and a member of the Proventura sect. That meant the facial hair was more a religious statement than a rebellion against grooming standards. His combat record more than proved his loyalty to the Corps. I didn’t know it at the time, but he’d lost two brothers and a sister during the last two wars fought by the ICA. Three siblings out of seven, all of whom had served at one time or another.
His voice was curt as he addressed us that day. Told us that we’d be replacing the last company stationed there, and start going out on probing patrols by week’s end. We watched them climb aboard the convoy to head back to Walcott City, where most of them would be re-jumped into their original bodies, back wherever they came from. They seemed really tired and beaten-down, regardless of their near perfect shells. They looked like they’d been there almost the whole two years since the Alliance had arrived.
Then Amical told us they’d been there only nine subjective months. That shut us up and quick. He told us that after almost a year in the field, we probably wouldn’t look much better. No one argued otherwise.
We spent the first week acclimating to life on the FOB. That means lots of filling sandbags to you non-spacer folk. Rocket attacks were spotty in those early days, almost like the Militia was giving us a break on our first week. It wasn’t until day six that we got a picture of the shape of things to come.
The evening of our fifth day two squads from third platoon were sent on a recon patrol out to a ridgeline about ten klicks out from the wire. They left at twilight to begin their hike, while the rest of us were just hunkering down for the evening. About a day later, we got a call-in from the OpNet — they were in a jam about two klicks short of the ridge. Major Amical himself volunteered to lead the QRF headed out to retrieve them. My squad got left behind to guard the FOB. That pissed us off but we weren’t about to complain.
Harvoni was my battle buddy, and we shared a shelter hut near the inner edge of the perimeter. We listened to the running situation reports for at least four hours that night. About midnight we could hear the attack craft vectoring in over the hills to the north, angling to drop their ordnance on the unseen enemy encircling the patrol. The sound of artillery booming to our rear kept us awake into the early morning.
The QRF convoy rolled back up to the outer perimeter a few hours before both suns were up. The fifteen vehicles which had left were now only fourteen, and another two of those were being pulled by one of their comrades each. Harvoni and I stood dumbstruck as the dozen-plus LRVs and LATVs rolled into the FOB. Each one had been chewed up by small arms fire and shrapnel from more explosive munitions. We were part of the detail that offloaded the wounded from the LATVs at the middle of the pack. Out of two dozen spacers, almost half had been injured. A few of them looked pretty gnarly at that.
One came back wrapped in a poncho. We heard later that he’d taken a nearly direct hit from a smart mortar. His squadmates had to spend twenty minutes looking for all the parts, and that was in the middle of a firefight. We also heard that the kid in question had just turned back in the world we’d left. His first tour turned out to be his last. No one was particularly moved by this, at the time. Neuro-inhibitors kept most of the trauma deflected from serious thought. It helped, at least in the moment.
We also knew then that he was one of the lucky ones — his brain had been spared the damage that shredded his body. That meant his scan could be reuploaded and stored for return to duty. This meant he’d probably be fucked up for life, though. Living through your own death can do that to you.
As for the rest of us, we still had a year to go on our tours. Sergeant Riviera told us at least ten times a day that our turn under the hammer was coming. No one seemed as keen on that anymore.
Turned out that my squad had to wait a few more weeks for our chance at making our bones. As we waited, unsure of just how eager to be for that first taste of combat, we kept getting used to the routines of frontier life, and life on a FOB. We were literally at the bleeding edge of the war, and we knew it. Problem was, so did Major Amical. At first he’d seemed a more or less even-keeled officer, it became clear week by week that he might have been touched by the war in more ways than we could tell by looking.
This facet of him showed itself in a kind of religious zeal he felt toward the whole approach to war. He wasn’t a fanatic by any means, but he was certainly an ICA loyalist in every sense of the word. Liked to give pep talks every morning, making the rounds to our shelters with a cup of tea held in one hand and the other resting on his service sidearm. You had to look close but you could tell from looking in his eyes he was loving it out there.
A few of his support staff were NCOs who’d been with him for a year or more. Some of them seemed even more affected by the environs than Amical was, but none was so clear about it as Staff Sergeant Federico. He was a local, having grown up only a few provinces over. He was also short and stocky, compared to our clone shells anyway, and had a manic air to him that you could almost feel when he walked near. Something about the war had gotten under his skin, and made him just a bit…off.
He was also a devotee of the Proventura religion that Major Amical subscribed to. He didn’t seem a true believer, really, but he certainly clung to the zealous warrior aspects. He used to refer to the rest of us as the Lord’s Little Fobbits. We couldn’t be sure if the Lord part referred to God or to Amical.
Another little bit of the creeping shittiness of life out at FOB Diamond Dog was the food. We could get used to the weather, always shitty though it was, and the increasingly frequent rocket attacks. What we couldn’t sit with was the almost Spartan accommodations in the area of meals. Amical’s henchman told us it was because the supply lines out to Di Kahn were being hampered by constant Alliance harassment.
They also said that air supply was touchy at best because the whole region was within the range of enemy air defenses across the series of ridgelines where our sister platoon’s members had been headed early in the tour. This left us to eat ten year-old freeze-dried rations left over from the last war.
Most spacers in my unit put up with it for the first couple of weeks. We figured that a certain amount of hardship was to be expected from frontline duty. But as we got closer to the second standard month at the FOB, these easy going feelings began to strain. So people started to grumble. As they do. Amical was among those who took it to heart. Apparently he took his anger with him to a regimental staff meeting at the end of our first month on Calypso II. Whatever was really said there we never knew. Enlisted grunts almost never get to know what higher command gets up to above their heads. That’s just how it is.
What we do know is that this meeting is where Operation Backblast got its start. Looking back it’s clear it wasn’t planned just to make better food available. But at the time, we were just a little stir-crazy. Tommy even said he’d be willing to put together a scouting party to steal enemy rations. Riviera somehow neglected to take that offer up the chain of command.
The first big op our company would take part in was designed from the ground up as a sweep and clear mission across the ridgelines of the Serena Chain. Our company, along with three others in the regiment, would move out in force and with plenty of fire support to locate the Militia where they’d holed up in the highlands to the north. Once we found them, we would smash them into bits. Simple enough.
My squad was riled up for action, too. Even though we’d been out on a few patrols of our own by the end of the first month, we’d still made no hostile contact. The worst trouble we’d dealt with had been turning back a procession of farmers’ vehicles when they’d blocked our own path of travel.
That doesn’t mean we hadn’t had our share of spookiness. No siree. There were a handful of close-calls, and a lot of weird feelings. Like we were being watched. That was an almost constant feeling while we were out on the trail, anywhere. One time, when we were headed back down toward the FOB after a few days of recon, smart mortars landed on the path headed off to the west when we’d taken the one to the east. That spooked us a bit. Riviera said we might not be so lucky next time. We didn’t argue otherwise.
To be continued…
