Embedded Read online

  We cover from a distance:

  Embedded in the unit, not part of the unit. Observers who occasionally get an arm slammed across their chest like a three-year-old about to run into traffic. We see all, understand little, and report next to nothing.

  Welcome to the life of the embedded reporter.

  I thought it’d be so glamorous. Sixteen tours later, five wars, thirty war zones, I’ve seen nothing glamorous. I’ve seen a lot of dirt, dust, blood. Too many severed limbs and even more severed lives. Lost lots of friends; lots of personal enemies, too.

  Got pelted with shrapnel, nearly lost my own arm, held a colleague while she died screaming in pain. Then left that war zone to go to a bloodless conflict fought by computers and robots, and thought I’d go mad from boredom. Games are more exciting: even though they’re pretend, they at least have virtual blood.

  I realized I wanted to see blood. Real blood. Then I worried that I had gone blood mad.

  And then, ironically, I arrived here.

  ***

  I’d heard about LaDucci in a sideways kinda way. Men were taken out of Basic and sent to LaDucci training. Not too terribly unusual: soldiers were taken out of Basic all the time and rerouted to more specialized training. Not even the gender specificity was unusual: some conflict zones suited some genders better than others.

  Women take down the Enfelz with almost no effort, but men get no traction at all. Something to do with the biological makeup of both species. Men were part of the attack force heading to Enfelz, but only in support positions.

  Just like men and women were in support positions for the Hanen, where the gender neutrals who preferred to remain in that twilight between the gender they were born with and the gender they should’ve been born with, fought with a ferocity (and a success rate) not equaled in any other field of battle.

  Men got the LaDucci, and the rumor was that it was because men partnered better, but I’d never seen that. Humans were humans—some partnered with other humans just fine and some sucked at working with another.

  I sucked at working with someone else, which is why I usually embedded and usually went into the unit alone. With that system, I got the backup of a military unit without the pain in the ass of dealing with another reporter. I even did my own filming and uploading, learned how to use all the equipment from driving trucks to flying low-to-ground vehicles to piloting my own orbit-to-ground ship. Heck, I can even pilot a small spaceship if necessary, although I do mean small. I’ve trained on two-person ships, but I’ve flown ten-person ships—badly, but I’ve done it.

  I took LaDucci like I’ve taken every assignment for the past eight years—vowing it would be my last. Each was a step down in the war zone ladder. I went from the wars that the folks back home cared about to the wars they didn’t care about but had to focus on to the wars they’d never heard of but might care about to wars they’d never care about no matter what happened.

  Technically, LaDucci was my first non-war—a conflict that someone else was fighting but with our help. In the as-yet-unwritten histories, LaDucci will get mentioned only if we have severe casualties in some unplanned military action that goes wildly out of control.

  Otherwise, LaDucci will remain one of those and we sent support troops conflicts, the kind that gets a half-sentence mention in any history of modern warfare until some enterprising historian decides to focus her entire thesis on the conflict, publishes the account, and gets fêted for finding lost stories of war. That’s at least a hundred years out, and thank whatever god I’ll never live to see it.

  Maybe my imaginary future historian will find this little document. I wonder what she’ll make of it.

  Wish I could accompany it into the future, and assure her that it’s all true.

  Because there are times when I have trouble believing it myself.

  ***

  LaDucci had devolved into a ground war over some frozen tundra on the northernmost continent of a backwater planet in the Scrarart System. The war—excuse me, conflict—had started when the Milwans wanted to depose some genocidal dictator who was screwing up their trade plans in the region.

  We got involved because the Milwans had a treaty with the Keylen Alliance who got their military backup from the Mars Union who always partnered with troops from Northern Earth.

  Hell, our people were knee-deep in weird grayish-green snow before our leaders even knew we’d become involved in LaDucci. And by then, it was too late. Too much money, too many lower-level promises, too many alliances at risk to pull out.

  The politicians had been assured this was mostly a clean war—fought with computers and tech (other groups’ tech)—and in the beginning it had been. But about the time those assurances happened, the first troops hit the snow, and by the time someone wanted out, entire training units had developed for troops to send to LaDucci, because it took a specialized kind of human fighter, and once the politicians learned that, they hemmed and hawed and decided that we needed to learn to fight alternative wars, and they labeled LaDucci one of those, and once I saw that memo float past my daily feed, of course, I had to get involved.

  I mean, what the heck is an alternative war?

  I embedded in the next unit heading to LaDucci, thinking I would get to see a snow-conflict firsthand.

  Instead, I got weird-ass shit right from the very beginning.

  ***

  The embeds get decided up top. I’m not sure how far up top, but farther away than some Podunk war in some backwater system. So when I arrived at SC3RT15, the main base for the LaDucci Action (as it’s officially called), I got sent to the Corps Commander, which never happens. Usually I arrive, head to the press office, get assigned a unit, get a dressing down from Whoever Runs The Thing—all of it involving stupid rules that (in recent cases) I knew before Whoever was born. Heck, some of those rules were put into place after I did something that convinced the military that they needed a new rule to prevent anyone from doing that something again.

  This time, I didn’t go to the press office. I was sent directly to the Corps Commander.

  I’d never encountered her before, but I knew her reputation. I also knew that this posting was a demotion for her, particularly since the rules of engagement stated that no women should fight on LaDucci for “species interaction” reasons. In other words, she could be in charge of the whole fight—from space, far away from the action.

  She’d been pretty once, although she’d probably kick my ass for saying that. The pretty had disappeared into a tight-lipped expression that raised lines around her narrow mouth and suspicious eyes.

  “Can’t have you here, Khalil,” she said. “You’re male.”

  I rolled my eyes. Of all the reasons she could have chosen, she chose the one I knew was false.

  “C’mon, Commander,” I said. “The guidelines say men only in LaDucci.”

  “Only men can serve in the LaDucci campaign,” she said. “Reporters and support staff need to be female.”

  I couldn’t resist. “You’re support staff?”

  She gave me a preoccupied smile. “Nice try, Khalil. You can’t sidetrack me here.”

  “Honestly, I’m not trying to. They sent me, I’m officially embedded, I get to go where my unit goes.”

  She studied me. She knew I was right. Once a reporter’s name was attached to a unit already involved in a conflict, the reporter owned that story.

  “If you stay, you’re going to regret this one, Khalil.”

  My turn to flash the preoccupied smile. “Commander,” I said, “I regret each and every one of them.”

  ***

  When the conflict doesn’t matter to you, war zones differ only by environment. Hot, cold, one sun, five suns—it doesn’t matter. What changes is how you dress and how you deal. Sometimes you wear full environmental gear so the entire experience of combat is accompanied by the amplified sound of your own hollow breathing, and sometimes you wear partial gear to combat the actual elements—the sand, the heat, the wind, the bugs.

  That’s what I hate the most about warm places. Doesn’t matter where they are, doesn’t matter what planet they’re on, doesn’t matter how different the topography: all warm places have hideous bugs. It’s as if that old Earth Goddess, Mother Nature, became Mother Universe and declared that heat and insects went hand-in-tentacle.

  Cold is actually easier to combat. Some cold places are so desolate they needed full environmental gear, including helmet and hollow breathing. But some are not considered hazardous (unless the soldier got careless) and you can go out wearing a thermal jacket and pants, along with skin coverings over your hands and face.

  After a while, most of the troops on LaDucci went without the coverings altogether. The bracing air had a higher oxygen content than Earth Standard, and that elevated mood. The cold made you feel alive—or it made me feel alive, anyway—and it reminded me that I was someplace real instead of that constant parade of battleship, orbit-to-ground vessel, base, suited maneuvers, base, ground-to-orbit vessel, battleship, new posting.

  The weapons were different here too. Laser rifles had to be used sparingly: they melted the ice-coverings over the tundra, and sometimes released avalanches so severe that we’d taken out some of our own equipment before we realized what we’d done.

  Yeah, I say “we.” Language isn’t as precise when you’re embedded. It’s us against them, me versus the enemy, the good guys fighting the bad guys. Your brain gets hardwired that way, which is why embedding is a bad idea and why no real reporter should ever do it, and yet we do it all t
he time.

  If we didn’t, we’d have no access to war zones at all.

  The only hope that we have is that after we’re done with our active years, we compose some kind of memoir that tells the “real” facts. Only most of us don’t survive to the memoir—and those of us who do have lost interest in the overall conflicts long ago.

  Cynical doesn’t begin to cut it. Cynical is where we start. We end up somewhere long past bitter, beyond hopeless, in a place as bleak as LaDucci on a cold winter night.

  What I’m writing here doesn’t count as memoir. I’m not organized enough for memoir.

  This is just a document. Because someone has to write this shit down.

  And that someone may as well be me.

  ***

  I have to admit: I liked the LaDucci posting.

  I liked the quiet.

  At first, I thought I was just tired and in need of rest. You can’t spend your life traveling from place to place, with no real home, and not have some low-level exhaustion dogging you all the damn time.

  I didn’t sleep much—I never sleep much—but I didn’t feel that underlying layer of panic each and every moment of each and every day.

  Our post was at the edge of an ice field, about one hundred klicks from any fighting, nearly five hundred klicks from the major fighting. We had to follow the action the way the ships in orbit did: using our computers, filtered through whatever layers the military had set up.

  It felt odd to be on land, using in-space information gathering tools. Usually when I was on solid ground, I saw things with my own eyes, learned whether those information-gathering tools were accurate, and tried, as best I could, to report honestly on what was really happening.

  I always add “as best I could” because so much of what I would want to report was forbidden: even the stuff from my very first posting, decades ago, remains classified.

  The post, which we knew only by its service number, LD69A2, was bigger than I’d been led to believe. Not too long before, someone had built two barracks, a separate mess, and an officer’s quarters, none of which were in full use.

  Clearly the military or the government (ours or Mars Union or maybe even the Keylen) had plans for this area after they conquered it. Because I had little else to do, I started researching what could make this part of LaDucci so very valuable.

  It wasn’t the water or the minerals. For a while, I toyed with the idea that it was the location itself.

  But I didn’t have enough information to know what made the location valuable—from a military standpoint or a governmental standpoint. And so far, no one was talking.

  Still, it was a strange bit of land to be fighting over.

  The tundra, the ice fields, the snow glazes were all so fragile that sending probes from vehicles in orbit would often trigger avalanches and destroy the probes. The first troops that came here were considered support, and they were researching the area, to see what kind of tech we could use to fight with.

  Then they learned that the land itself was a factor in the fighting—that avalanche thing could be used to our advantage.

  It took some kind of scientific knowledge of stresses and ice flows and the way pressure applied from above (or below) could predictably send an avalanche cascading toward the enemy. Or make the ice flow shatter at a point where the enemy could not retreat and save itself. Or make the tundra crumble, sending fumes toxic to the LaDucci into the environment.

  It took a diabolical mindset, a combination of science, engineering, and a gleeful childishness that reveled in finding the most creative way to crush an enemy force.

  Not that any enemy force ever made it all the way to LD69A2, or as the troops here sometimes called it, “Laid 69. Ate, too.” And then they’d chuckle as if they’d made up a particularly witty and original joke.

  I’d laughed the first time, groaned the second, and pretty much ignored it from that moment forward. That joke, and its constant reiteration, actually made me think of the Corps Commander’s prediction that I’d regret coming here.

  Decades in war zones left me wired for battle. I didn’t mind the boredom that any posting held, because it was always punctuated with moments (sometimes days) of sheer terror, followed by joy that I was alive—and pressure to complete some kind of story that would make it past the censors, be interesting, and be informative.

  But here, I’d reported all I could on the young men who got here, the naïve hopeless dreams, the long days, and the even longer nights. I couldn’t mention the cadre of engineers gleefully making models of the snow fields to blow it up, and I couldn’t talk much about the occasional suicide squads that would show up at the very edges of our post, supposedly to make us all a little more on edge and a little more afraid.

  Reports from those tiny conflicts would come back, and they were always a bit mysterious: the squads would die long before they arrived at their planned targets. Their vests would malfunction or they’d fall through some ice (without the help of our engineers) or they’d get poisoned by the gas released from the crumbling tundra.

  I could and did report on that first gas release, because it surprised all of us, but I couldn’t do the follow-up on the way the engineers glommed gleefully onto that detail to plan even more diabolical strategies to be used closer to the actual conflict.

  Because that’s pretty much all this base did: after it finished modeling various scenarios, it would send a group of engineers to another unit, and they would set traps for the enemy—or try to. It was hard to get enough purchase in an active fighting zone to lay under-ice charges that would ripple through the battlefield.

  Those charges generally had to be set ahead of time.

  Honestly, it was sheer boredom that got me to accompany one of the engineering teams as they went out to get some readings on the edges of the ice flow.

  And it was sheer stupidity that allowed me to see that there was more to the LaDucci conflict than it seemed.

  ***

  When you embed, you travel with the troops. You go where they go, do what they do, hang back when they tell you, and run like hell when they scream, “Get outta here!”

  I’m used to that.

  I wasn’t used to a squad of engineers, who giggle like schoolboys and talk in numbers and acronyms I truly did not understand. I knew they were going to measure the length and depth of the ice flow. I hadn’t realized they were also going to measure its thickness and maybe see if some tundra lurked below.

  They might, they said with twinkling eyes, set off a small avalanche, just to see if they could do it.

  They never said stay close. They never said don’t wander. They never said stick to the trucks.

  Not that these were regular trucks: we had hovercraft here, low-level trucks in grayish white, so that they seemed invisible over the snow and the somewhat filthy ice. Hovercraft always made me a bit seasick, so I never remained on board if I didn’t have to.

  The engineers did tell me I could watch if I wanted to, but after a few minutes, all I saw were holographic renderings of ice layers floating above the probe’s entry point, the light of the holograph slightly dimmed so it was impossible to see from a distance.

  There was more talk about numbers and temperature differentials and stability and all sorts of things that floated by me like ice chips on the increasing cold breeze.

  I wandered away, although I didn’t wander far. In fact, in my defense, I followed a set of footprints to the place where the footprints stopped, overlooking a ridge that rippled into a valley that connected this part of the ice flow to the closest fighting, a hundred klicks away.

  I stared at the valley, wishing I could walk it and get away from all this, craving some kind of action, some kind of change, when I realized I wasn’t alone.

  He sat on a snow mound, curved up from the ridge by a no-longer existent wind. One leg touched the ice shelf, the other bent and resting on the snow mound, one arm wrapped around his knee. He looked like he was posing for the Iconic Image of LaDucci: soldier, in shadow, staring at the distant war, freezing his ass off.

  I didn’t recognize him, but that didn’t entirely surprise me. So many soldiers processed through LD69A2 that I sometimes barely noticed them before they got sent elsewhere.