Vignette:Relief Patrol
Relief Patrol
- Lock Item, USAF Battery Blue, Henson Crater SW Rim, South Pole, Luna
Guardiamarina Alejandro Navarro, Mexican Navy
November 27th, 2062, 15:43 hours
av hopped off of Lock Item's checkered aluminium patio onto the fine grey regolith. Private First Class Schuster stumbled out right after into a drawn out fall, taking four full strides to catch himself. As the new guy and technically the platoon’s junior radiotelephone operator (RTO), he hefted the patrol’s long-range radio—a large backpack encased in a white tarp to keep the dust out and mounted over his already large life support system. Quite top-heavy.
"You need help, Shoey?" Nav asked.
"No, sir. Just a bit dizzy."
Nav didn’t know what to expect a real space suit to feel like, but he never got used to it. Operating the U.S. Air Force’s “Field Security Full-Pressure Suit, Limited Actuation, Type A/P22S-9” felt less like a suit and more like a tin foil balloon filled with vaseline. Each step had a slosh to it as the shin gradually compressed the gel-lined walls into motion. There was a lag and rubberbanding to every motion as the gel queued “actuation assist”. The wearer’s movements were multiplied at the joints to make action more deliberate and squeeze out any dexterity they could out of what was essentially a man-sized spaceship. However, the assist was usually half-a-second to a full second late in the older models. That combined with one-sixth gravity and no air resistance often led to very sharp overcorrections and frequent falls. While the Marines had to go out to service remote sensors and calm the installation commander's unrealized fear of Soviets infiltrators, protection against the ground was a much bigger priority than stopping incoming rounds.
Nav hopped over to straighten Shoey out and wipe off some of the powder. Greying was inevitable over the course of the patrol, but you didn't want to let it start caking—especially around the joints. Shoey was Nav's partner for the shift. They'd rarely be fully alone together, but if one had to carry a sensor back to the patrol's handcart the other would be fixed by the hip. Tripping over unseen rocks was an extreme hazard. Shoey had just arrived from Infantry Training Battalion the previous month so was new to the patrol depth chart. Nav wasn’t much of an English conversationalist, but even he noticed Shoey’s eyes pinned to the ground in the suit-up room. He was apparently still in the aftermath of a thrashing the senior Lances gave him once they discovered he packed his high school yearbook to the Moon. Shoey spent his 18th birthday sleep deprived at a Recruit Depot, so the Friday night lights were just yesterday for him and Battery Blue was as remote as deployments come. However, some aspects of youth were desirable to the Marine Corps while others were not. At least that’s how the Sergeants justified letting it go. Boredom and the universal past-time of boys beasting those barely their junior were the more convincing reasons.
Nav flicked the radio mounted to his hip. Its cable fed into a flexi-electrical panel embedded over the small of his back, which connected to his Snoopy cap’s microphones and earpieces. He was meant to do a comms check before leaving the suit up area but the scared Private suiting Nav and Shoey up was too rushed to run them through the entire checklist.
“Whippet 1-7, this is Whippet- Eh… 1-6. Eh… Radio check, over,” Nav said. His enunciation was a bit drawn out and still shaky as he remembered back to the abridged English radio etiquette course some tired old 1/24 Marine gave the 12 foreign exchangees back at the Detroit armory in June.
"'Ober' or 'out', but neber 'ober and out'!" he remembered the dusty Master Guns yelling in sync with punches to a high school teacher's desk at eight in the morning.
Nav barely ever talked on these patrols so never really got good at it.
“Whippet 1-6, Whippet 1-7. Roger, out,” Platoon Sergeant Romano replied, humoring him a bit.
On patrol they just called Nav “sir” or “L-T”. He had become 1st Platoon’s de facto Assistant Platoon Commander in the realm of office work and going out on patrols—basically everything First Lieutenant Afonso didn't want to do and couldn't get Romano to do. Nav’s main jobs other than being an extra body for suit work were investigating squad bay incidents that made it up to the Series Commander’s desk and chasing up lost property.
“Whippet Main, this is Whippet 1-7. Red shift is departing for RV Keller. Over.”
“Whippet 1-7, this is Whippet Main. Roger, over. Break. All stations, Whippet Main. Blue to red changeover is in 15 minutes. Over.”
Nav and Shoey joined Romano and Corporal Salamanca out on the dusty courtyard leading out towards the perimeter fence. White walls and steel catwalks towered over them on three sides, while the fourth—straight ahead—faced straight into the black-white horizon. Their well-used white “mobility kits” were stained grey from moon dust. Salamanca towed a cart stacked with replacement batteries for the remote sensors that Red shift would come across on their eight hours of walking. Their bulbous helmets were shrouded by mesh bags to break up their silhouettes, although it did nothing for their conspicuous amber visors that caught the sun at every angle. Anything less and their field of vision, especially up close, would be cut from terrible to nil. Their backs were also all draped in neon orange signal panels for safety, but no one would bring up a uniform contradiction to the Detachment Sergeant Major. The suits were a bit more “tactical” than those worn by their civilian counterparts in that they had they could kneel and probably wouldn’t tear anything from a low speed fall, but seeing and moving was still a frustrating affair.
Each Marine carried a rifle specially designed to be operated with bulky pressure suit gloves and interface with their suit’s gel system to ease the trigger pull. It handled like a hollow plastic toy in lunar gravity, which made it even more tricky to be mindful enough to not accidentally grip a steel component with pent up energy. Radiator fins protruded far from the barrel to disperse the heat as best as possible in a vacuum, although the amount of sustained fire they could get out of them was still not stellar. In theory they could take advantage of a barrel-change system when stationary, although the armorer at Battery Blue pinned the barrels in place. The only shots that had ever been fired on the installation were negligent discharges and each patrolman only carried two magazines anyway. Nav though, not yet qualified on the American rifle when wearing a full-pressure suit, only carried a holstered sidearm.
“Alright gents, be on the lookout for ghosts and don’t fuck with the wildlife,” Romano said. “And Salamanca, if you flip the cart again we’re shooting you in the knees.”
"Big Sar'nt, I’d pay you to do that right now.”
Romano hopped and spun around, lofting a bit in the low gravity, and locked on Nav. The helmet was fixed to the torso of the suit so there was no head turning. Nav couldn’t see anything past the glass, but he knew the Platoon Sergeant’s stare was behind it.
“It’s the long route again, sir. No tapping out,” Romano said.
“Aye, aye.”
“L-T, you’ll be amazed by how sweaty your legs and dry your eyes can get,” Salamanca chimed in.
“Sally, I’ve been out three times a week for the past 6 months. You’ve been there for a third of them.”
“And yet I’m amazed everytime, sir.”
The four set off with Henson Crater to their backs and the perimeter fence to their left. Every step felt like stepping in marshmallows as the gel layer under the soles of their feet redistributed. The muffled crunch of fine powder lightly vibrated suits, like walking on the beach with your ears plugged. Before each patrol Nav told himself it wasn’t so demanding—at least the impact forces weren't, and it wasn't like they were wearing these bulky suits under Earth gravity. That was just a coping strategy though. Hopping around up and down hill for 8 hours would take its toll regardless and everything below chest level became terribly sweaty inside the skintight body glove.
Any wonder Nav felt during his first weeks out on the lunar surface—seeing the Earth for the first time in third person and a world as alien as the crater pocked south pole of Luna in the same frame—was beaten out of him by these exhausting patrols without so much as a crisis to break up the monotony. All there was for them was endless grey and endless black, every other day until they were rotated back to terra firma. The military was good at squeezing all enjoyment out of childhood dreams if you let your guard down. The fact that the bluff's Marine Detachment wasn't resourced buggies to motorize their checkups on nothing like their US Air Force Field Security counterparts was testament. Just as well, the country boys in 2nd Platoon would probably wreck them on boulders in the first week after trying to whip them around like their hovertracks back home. Perhaps the feeling of being victimized by the other branches was easier to swallow than the Marine Corps not trusting its Marines. Sometimes the fairest of calls hurt the most.
A red pennant frozen mid-flap gradually came into view—the RV Keller marker. Another four figures, positively caked in grey dust, approached from the other direction, towing their own cart full of drained batteries. They were actually about 5 miles away from the main facilities of Battery Blue on Henson’s rim—an elevator and tram brought the perimeter patrols to an annex at the base of the crater to cut down the walk.
“Our relief, took you long enough” the lead figure said.
It was Sergeant Molina from 3rd Platoon, which manned Blue shift in covering Item Zone south of the crater. They liked having 3rd Platoon (Blue) take the mornings and afternoons, 1st Platoon (Red) take the evenings, and 2nd Platoon (White) late at night everyday to keep everyone's sleep schedules consistent.
“Yeah well Yates said you guys were late to changeover this morning so couldn’t let you get off easy,” Romano said. “Anything going on?”
“We couldn’t remediate the sensor issue at Item-Five-Able, so you might need to stick around there for a while. But other than that, same old nothing.”
“Alright well, hurry back and link up with Top so they can maybe send out a replacement with White tomorrow. You might be able to catch him in the shop if you get back before 1730.”
“Fat chance, you know it’ll be a month of walking around in circles over there. Top is allergic to actually maintaining past 1200 and First Sarnt will be up our asses over it.”
“I believe the response you’re looking for is, ‘Aye, aye, Platoon Sergeant.’” Romano brought his wrist to eye level to check the watch built into his gauntlet. “Now get the fuck out of here. And fill out the goddamn patrol journal correctly this time. Last time it looked like it was filled in by a four year old.”
“Aye-”
The radio squelched. “All stations, this is Whippet Main. Hold position, over.”
“Whippet Main, Whippet 1-7. Wilco, over,” Romano said. He swept his arm down and to the side. “Everyone get in cover and heads up.”
“Man I just want to hit the sack...”
Molina trailed off and visibily craned his entire body upwards to look towards the crater. Everyone else turned to face something none of them had ever seen. Five interceptor missiles were climbing skyward from Battery Blue, fanning out north towards the far side. Two purple laser beams fired after them, rapidly flickering and changing angles.
“Does bluff do test launches?” Nav asked.
“What the fuck-" Molina's visor lit up and he leaped backwards. "Woah!”
One of the interceptors pulled a neckbreaking turn, accelerated almost perpendicular from its initial trajectory, and exploded directly over the crater. Surely they weren’t actually intercepting something? It must have been some sort of accident and a programmed self-destruction.
But then another interceptor exploded. Behind it Nav could just make out the glint of something tearing through the sky, but it was gone in an instant, lost in the black backdrop. Suddenly, the crater erupted in a blinding flash. The Marines cowered, tripping over themselves to get behind the handcart and a nearby rock while shielding their visors. Even in their suits there was an intense heat and a shock wave shuddered the ground beneath their feet. Romano's dosimeter alarmed as its dose-rate and absolute dose limit were immediately surpassed. The fan in Nav's helmet began to hiss as its outer-most layer singed, forcing a smell halfway between gunpowder and burnt hair into his air supply. His chest was bitten with a sharp cold as a reactive mixture was automatically injected into his gel layer to try and counteract the heating. As they looked backed up they were transfixed on the battle that was apparently raging without them. Another impact immediately followed, but seemed to penetrate the ground because instead of a fireball it ejected a column of dust high over the horizon. Battery Blue's last interceptor tried launching, but instead of elegantly shooting into the heavens it clumsily veered off, degenerating into a violent spiral and detonating on the farside of the crater.
A ball of terror dropped in Nav's stomach like a stone in the ocean, as if he had just watched a train plow through a car he neglected on the tracks. The logic stored in his lifepack squawked offensively to coax Nav back into respiration. Too many thoughts, too much bandwidth spent absorbing what he had just witnessed, not enough left to remember to breath or blink. It didn't even cross Nav's mind that the rock-embedded sanctuary that he just emerged from was just nuked, twice, once seemingly via a penetrator warhead. What was to be done?
“Whippet Main, this is Whippet 1-7. Mushroom Echo, Mushroom Echo. I’m seeing multiple explosions at Battery Blue and getting radiation alarms. Please advise, over.”
Silence.