Captain Max Bennett, separated from his squad, standing far down the slope stabs himself in the chest with his Black Blade and screams at Dickey as he falls to his knees blending with the prone already there; a good point well made. His promotion and decorations appear on the POX screens with his past profiled in a fast-rolling banner at the bottom.
To the east a Correspondent Tank detail backs up slowly and heads this way, the tiger stripe tanks buck as their big guns fire depleted uranium into the tree line and the jungle beyond. The screens show briefly the feed from a shell hurtling forward and then the lurching feed from a tanks eye, cross hairs splitting Dickey premature. The tanks low shapes of man-made muscle in the mist, straight barrels of machine death pointing accusingly without appeal.
‘Hold fire, cocks!’ Shouts Blood Major Andy McNesbit into his shoulder radio. His voice crackles out of the PA over the slow heave of breathing soldiers and the high whine of feedback and hardware clinking on hardware.
‘Hold. We’re out of Dickeys range. Stand by.’ He climbs down from the Thatcher. I reload and light a cigarette to put in my gas mask. The green Go light flicks on but I kept my finger still. Horrible downtime but for the Correspondent Tanks getting some and giving some, Dickeys liberation at hand, great feed for screens I stare at. Light Entertainment Units put down screaming wounded.
‘Johnson, you cock!’ Said the Blood Major.
‘Sir!’
‘You have leave due, Carnage Captain.’
‘Turned it down, sir!’
‘Good man, Johnson. You can never go home again, son.’
‘No sir.’ Everyone turns leave down. Leave is not about going home; leave is thirty horrible minutes laying in the noisy dark of a Breeding Church, like the Human-Shield or the newer Mandela, waiting for your downers to kick in with uppers in your sweating palm ready for when your time is up. Female soldiers on duty in there conceiving noisily with young soldiers not yet affected by the pills or with Generals who have access to better ones. Other female soldiers on leave giving birth even louder. I can’t remember the last time I went on leave. Or went to sleep. Not since Washington.
‘Couldn’t take the down time, myself, Johnson.’
‘No sir! I’m here to fight and die sir!’
‘We all are, soldier, we all are.’ Everyone fights and everyone signs up, everybody kills and everybody dies. We are the 101st Fodder Infantry of the Frontline Liberation Corporation. A no frills outfit, the 101st Fodder Infantry, we don’t sleep. We are Gods temporary masterpiece alive and on fire with singular purpose.
‘Life is Frontline sir!’
‘Good cock, Johnson, you said it boy!’
Life is Frontline. The Frontline is a fat green stripe of wheeled city, edging forwards on huge tracks and sliding heavily on fat pillows of air. Supply lines plundering the past straggle behind like filthy green tentacles, stretching back to disappear from sight in the dismal clouds of fallout raining ill on conquered land. Hospitals on tracks lumber ten stories high, flat helipads on their roofs relentless activity of Choppers and flares and plumes of coloured smoke whirling in tight circles. POX Babel Towers and NBCBN Media Centers great hovercraft controlling the feeds to the great screens doubling as silos and rocket batteries. Magazines and munitions production crafts all earth hugging metal dinosaurs, Masters at Arms flying between them and the 101st on the ground in Jetpacks signaling with coloured smoke and firing red tracers. This city a great fluctuating wave across the width of the continent and spilling into the sea on both coasts, all operated by invalid survivors stripped of rank and Gods glory; choppered back from the hostilities decorated and declared dead.
‘No one to visit back there, Johnson, no cripples to go see?’
‘No sir!’ The old joke still doing the rounds in horrible downtime. The blinded and wheelchair bound forgotten and nameless working in the massive storerooms and magazines, running the mechanized production lines and great batteries. The incontinent and incompetent maintaining the round spinning arrays and aerials swinging and twitching, pointing to heaven. Those with prosthetics and those shell-shocked stupid work behind the POX and NBCBN screens on the sides of all the big craft on Frontline. The anchormen are the only ones we see huge and commentating on the carnage, perpetual Warnage Reports, on the slope here and elsewhere down the hundreds of miles of the Frontline Liberation Corporation.
‘What’s the delay, sir?’ Retreats, always short, are rare. Policy is get stuck in; get some and give some; liberate.
‘NBCBN got a transmission problem with the Khyber Pass, Captain; they don’t want to lose out on pictures. No big deal. All going to plan.’
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