[personal profile] hwrnmnbsol
Me and the rest of the 71st Rifles Platoon jogged into the hangar. Sergeant Hibbett called a halt and a parade rest. I stood with boots spread apart and my needle rifle over my shoulder. I was breathing heavily; we were all wearing full combat armor. 71st Rifles was about to go into the meat grinder.

Lieutenant Csonka joined Hibbett at the front of the hangar and surveyed the four squads of his platoon critically. He listened to a woman in a white coat who whispered in his ear, then checked his watch.

"Okay, ladies," grunted Csonka. "We've got less than five minutes before the TWIG opens. Ours is a serious mission – very dangerous, very difficult – but survivable if we're smart and don't fuck up. So listen up, because here's how it's going to go down."

Hibbett unfolded a laminated map. "The far end of the TWIG opens here, at the top of Hill 246. Lightly wooded area, slopes down over three quarters of a mile to here – a single story masonry block building where the Zhizhi Generator is housed. It's well defended; they've got a full company and they're dug in. We'd love to mass troops but there's no time; we've got to hit them with what we have on hand, and that's you. Everybody we know, everything in the universe, is counting on our success."

Everybody knew the score. It was the 23rd century. A rogue state had sent agents back to the 22nd century to trigger a global war, effectively changing the future. This orphaned the 23rd century that I lived in, effectively separating us from the timestream. We only had a short period of time to go back and repair the gap, or the unraveling of time would propagate forward and write us out of existence.

The trouble was, that same rogue state had set up a Zhizhi Generator ten years after the global war. The Generator made it impossible to travel through time to any period before it; some sort of time-space interference screwed up the carrier wave that supported a Two-Way Interchronal Gateway, or TWIG for short. There was only one thing we could to: travel back to where the Generator was and destroy it. But there wasn't much time.

"Now listen," said Csonka sternly. "I'm not going to shit you, this is a killer mission. Two other platoons have gone through before us. The medics pulled out all their bodies and shipped them back in caskets. There weren't any survivors. But hear this: they weren't us. They weren't smart. Those dumbshits ran right into the shooting gallery; naturally they got chewed up and spat out. We're not going to do that. We're going to give those bastards a little challenge. We're going to wear them down, and maybe when the next unit comes through they can help us concentrate fire. We just have to chip away at them. We throw enough rifles at them, and we'll take out that Generator."

Lights began to flash in the hangar. "All right, bitches!" barked Hibbett. "Get back to attention and get ready to move! As soon as we're through we're going to be in hostile territory, so wake the fuck up!" He paced up and down the lines, snarling and shoving until the platoon was alert and ordered as he desired.

The hangar doors opened, cracking down the middle and sliding apart. A warm white glow filled the hangar – a glow marred by dark shapes at the heart of the gateway, shapes that grew and resolved as we watched them. The TWIG was a two-way gateway; as we were going to go down it, others were coming up.

"Move! Move! Move!" shouted Hibbett and began jogging into the gateway. Squad A followed him, and then me and Squad B, and then C and D; Csonka brought up the rear. We ran into the seamless glow of the gateway, a solid surface under our feet but no discernable walls or ceiling, just endless pearly whiteness. The hangar doors faded out behind us.

Men were coming the other way, men pushing and pulling other shapes. The men swam into view – combat medics wearing the red armband, each straining at carts laden with boxes. Long, man-sized boxes.

"Shit," whispered Hockley to me. "It's the last platoon."

We passed the line of coffins going the other way. All of us goggled silently at the dead that we passed. The coffins were standard issue military, unmarked and impersonal; nothing on them indicated who was in them or how they had died. We were all prepared for the risk of death, but seeing the mission's suicidal potential so vividly was sobering.

"Look, that one took some fire," I hissed to Hockley. One coffin on top of a cart's stack had a ragged baseball-sized hole in the tail end and the wood was splintered.

"Don't use coffins as cover, check," grinned Hockley. From behind the cart, the medic pushing the stack shook his bowed head and bore down on his heavy load. Hibbett appeared out of nowhere, as usual, and grabbed Hockley's earlobe.

"Is something funny, assholes?" he said softly, jogging next to us as he pinched Hockley's ear. "Do you find your honored fallen brethren to be, in some way, humorous?"

"No, sergeant," I said.

"No, sergeant," echoed Hockley in a strained voice.

"Good," said Hibbett, "because we're almost through. The time for ha-has is over. Joke on your own time; now you're on the clock, and the job is kill or die." He jogged back to the front of the line.

"Kill or die," I mused.

"Yeah," said Hockley, rubbing his sore ear.

We jogged through another gate into an oversized shipping container. Its outer doors were open, and we continued right out into a twilit wasteland. This 'lightly wooded' area still had a few standing shards of tree-trunks, but all foliage and most of the limbs were gone. Craters pock-marked the surface of the hillside and the air smelled of ozone and cordite. We formed up into lines as Csonka consulted with a cluster of medics.

"Okay, ladies," said the Lieutenant, "these are Temporal Command's triage men. They'll pull you out if you fall, patch you up if you can be patched, and box you up if you need that too. We got one per squad. Boys, be nice to them. Medics, stay the fuck out of the way."

One of the medics approached me at the head of Squad B's line. "Second Lieutenant Tully," he said. He looked tough for a medic, with big strong hands, and eyes that were flat and dead. I nodded.

"Corporal Goode," I replied. "We're gonna go kill some bad guys, sir."

"Yeah," said Tully. There was something strange about him. I realized he was slightly translucent, and when I looked down at his boots, I saw they weren't really touching the ground.

"What the fuck?" I said.

"We're out of phase," said Tully. "Exactly orthogonal to this dimension. We can't interact with it and it can't interact with us. You're a little off from me and a little off from this dimension; you and me can interact, but as far as this place is concerned, I'm a ghost." He grinned mirthlessly. "Should come in handy when I'm pulling your dead bodies back to the gate."

There was no warmth to the man. He went to the back of Squad B's line. Csonka started barking out orders.

"We're sending A and C to probe around the sides, left and right," he said. "You'll press forward carefully until you contact the enemy, then hold position, seek cover and wait for orders. D, you'll proceed down the middle until you have decent sighting and range on the target, and then you'll set up mortars. B will take rear guard. Go!"

We jogged. There was enough light to see obstacles and not break your neck falling into a crater, but there was a kind of haze blanketing the land that made it impossible to see our objective. I slowed the pace of my rifle squad and took up the rear. I indicated for my men to fan out and we watched the rest of our platoon disappear into the mist in front of us.

Tully drifted alongside, scaring the piss out of me. "I expect we'll start to catch some heat in a second here," he advised.

"Oh, yeah?" I asked. "Why do you say that?"

"Because that's how far the last platoon got," said Tully.

As if on cue, a high-pitched chatter sang out from the woods ahead and to the left. A scream pierced the air, mercifully short, followed by barked commands.

"Cover!" I shouted. My men crouched behind trees or threw themselves flat into hollows on the ground. A moment later two explosions rocked the ground, coming from dead ahead of us; clods of earth rained down.

"Shit," I said. "They have their own mortars, and they have our range,"

"Yes," said Tully somberly. He was standing out in the open, completely unconcerned about seeking cover. "Csonka is repeating the same mistakes as the last bunch. You're sitting ducks here."

"We have to fall back!" I shouted.

"No time!" snarled Tully. "Even now the taproot that secures our future to the past is withering away! We have to throw what we have at that fortress NOW, or all is lost!"

A line of tracer fire whizzed overhead. Somebody was firing at us without really having a target. "Shit!" I shouted. "Shit shit! Men, advance!"

I began belly crawling down the hill. To my left, a grenade hit Scotia dead on; she was cut in half and died immediately. Whistling morbidly, Tully picked up both halves of her and began drifting back to the rear. I cursed him and pressed on.

Somewhere along the way Culberson had the bright idea to return fire. "No, asshole!" I shouted, but it was too late. Culberson sprayed needle fire into the haze, possibly firing on friendlies, definitely giving away his position with his muzzle flash. The enemy found him and shot him to pieces. I crawled over to him; he was bleeding out in half a dozen locations. "Tully!" I screamed. "Patch him up, Tully!"

"Yeah, yeah," growled Tully, coming back. He surveyed Culberson critically.

"Unsalvageable," he said. Culberson slipped into shock. I boggled as Tully picked up one of his ankles and dragged him off, dying but still alive, bumpity bump bump.

"Where the fuck are the forward units?" screamed Hockley.

"Probably grease stains!" I replied. I saw ghostly forms drifting through the woods; I figured they were the medics pulling people back from the other squads, but the haze was thickening and it was impossible to tell.

"We have to get out of here!" said Hockley, a panicked look in his eye.

"No, forward!" I replied. "It's the only way we're getting out of here!"

My men crawled on their bellies for several hundred yards. We came into a clearing with newly torn-up sod and ground. There were no bodies, but military gear was scattered around. Clearly the enemy had hit some of us here.

I saw a mortar tube lying in the middle of the clearing. I pointed it out to Hockley. "This is the remains of Squad D," I said. "They took out our guys while they were lining up for a shot. It looks like that mortar's intact; hell, it may even be ranged correctly. I'm going to take a group around to some cover in the trees and shoot rifles; maybe we'll draw fire. You get out there and shoot that mortar. One lucky hit and we could be out of here."

We split up. My men painstakingly crawled where we had a little bit of cover. We could dimly make out the squarish outlines of the target up ahead. "All right, kids," I said to the three I had selected. "Let's see if we can make out some targets."

We took a few potshots at the fortress. Again our muzzle flashes gave us away, but the return fire revealed a few enemy positions as well, spaced out behind berms. Two of my men fell, but I think we knocked a few of them down as well.

"Good," purred Tully as he claimed the corpses. "You're chipping away at them. That's very good. You only have to wear them down a little at a time. They have no reinforcements; we do. Eventually we can kill them all, bit by bit by bit."

"Fuck you," I said. Just then Hockley got the mortar going. A shot hit the roof of the fortress. A second later I saw half a dozen return mortar shots from the enemy positions.

"Incoming!" I screamed, and threw myself flat. The world shook itself around for what seemed like a million years.

When I got up, I was the only member of my squad still alive. I was bruised up but intact. Fear had crawled up inside me and broken me. Tully loomed in front of me as I sat with my back to a tree stump.

"I'm done," I croaked. "Stick a fork in me."

"You're not done, soldier," said Tully without feeling. "Your world needs you. Crawl into that clearing and take another shot with that mortar."

I shook my head. "Mortar fell over," I said. "It would have to be resighted. No chance of a hit."

"Not no chance," said Tully. "Some chance. That's all we need, a lucky hit."

"I told you. I'm done," I said. I had heard of soldiers breaking. It felt strange to experience it. It didn't feel like terror; it felt like nothing at all.

Tully pulled a sidearm. "Soldier," he said evenly, "you are going to crawl into that clearing, set up that mortar and take a shot, or I am going to kill you."

I peered up at him. "You're no medic," I said.

Tully shrugged. "I guess I'm mostly an accountant," he said. "We have to keep the numbers even. With the Zhizhi Generator so close, it's very hard to hold the TWIG open. We can only sustain so many people on this end of the gate."

"There aren't going to be any reinforcements," I said.

"Sure there are," said Tully. "Just not at the same time as you. As soon as you go out, the next batch comes along. But to get the next batch, I have to close out this one."

"Meaning: kill or die," I said, nodding.

"That's right, soldier," said Tully. "So what's it going to be: kill, or die?"

I lashed out with my boot and was gratified to hear him grunt as I connected with Tully's crotch. He fell into a fetal ball. I grabbed him by the collar and dragged him back towards the gate. By some miracle nobody shot at me as I retreated.

I could see other medics milling around the gate. They had a load of coffins already stacked up on carts. I hunkered down with Tully to watch them. They looked impatiently at watches and shouted Tully's name. Finally they could wait no longer, loaded up their batches and pushed them into the gateway entry. I dragged Tully up to the collection of coffins remaining and propped him up against them.

The lid on the top coffin hadn't been strapped on yet. Hockley was in it, dead as a doornail. He had some shrapnel wounds, but what had killed him was a small caliber bullet to the temple, such as from a lieutenant's firearm.

I slapped Tully around; he groggily returned to consciousness. "You killed Hockley," I accused him. "He wasn't going to die from those wounds. You killed him."

"I told you," slurred Tully. "We don't have time to mess around. He was unsalvageable, useless in the fight."

"You could have sent him back through alive," I said. Tully shook his head.

"And let him tell everybody else what a meatgrinder this place is? No way," he said. "Kill or die, all the way, until we win."

"Kill or die?" I said hysterically. "Kill or die? Fuck you." I fired his pistol to the side of his head. I only meant to scare him, but I wound up holing the coffin he was propped up next to. The hole was baseball sized, and near the toe of the coffin.

I stared at that hole. I had seen it before.

"The coffins we saw when we came through," I said. "Those weren't the bodies of the previous platoon. Those were our bodies."

Tully stared at me with those cold, dead eyes. "We couldn't support both a live platoon and a dead one on this side," he explained. "It was the only way."

"The only way," I replied, "is to kill or die."

I shot Tully between the eyes.

**

I stuffed his body into the coffin that had been meant for me. Fortunately Tully's clothes fit me pretty well. I wore his cap low over my eyes, and none of the other medics noticed the switch when we pushed the bodies back down the gate. We walked past the 71st Rifles on our way back up. I remembered to shake my head when me and Hockley joked as the coffins went past.

I wish I felt bad about deserting when my world needed me most. But, as I said, I wasn't feeling anything at all. I only knew I had to get away from that terrible place where men died, again and again, never knowing that they were already dead. If the price of that cowardice was for the entire universe to unravel and fade away, well, that kind of end beat the alternative.
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hwrnmnbsol

September 2012

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