Murder Major Singh, moustache flapping in the flustered artificial winds, shouts ‘fall back...back to the ridge. All going to plan. Just fall back.’ into his PA two stories up his Media Command Tank, the FLC Thatcher. His voice sounds metallic, his image huge on the screens behind me, blood visible in his eyes. Skull General Motoyoto next to him pats him on the back and flies off east in his POX Jetpack letting off blue flares and firing red tracers as he goes. Generals always on the move. Broadcast Tanks and Mk 8 Workhorse jeeps buck and back up, struggle round the sudden debris of Frontline, wide as the continent, and Special Report half-tracks turn and rumble, limp backwards, foot soldiers stick close sheltering in their bulk, backing up under heavy cover like parasites feeding off great green beasts.
‘With me!’ I yell to my squad and I get up and run back towards the ridge. Can see my image huge on the POX screen on the FLC Gandhi, a Silo Master on the ridge. Grim mouthed and dirty faced eyes all steel. Jr. Lt. Jr. close on my heels our boots splashing in mud that is too red. The NBCBN screen on the FLC Grenada shows howling monkeys deserting the trees below, trying to carry their wounded with them, fear and tears on wise faces; great pictures from a low flying Chopper. I stop once and turn to rake the tree line, because I know it will look good, because there was murder to be done, because I was Gods Terminal Masterpiece, because I had hard steel hot in my hands and a job to do. I see Private Krychek run down by a Light Entertainment half-track and Lt. Hipowitz behind him takes a flying engine block in the chest. I run the last meters to the ridge and hit the dirt, turn on my elbows and knees, pose perfect, my rifle ready, jumping with short bursts covering the short and brief retreat. Retreats always short and brief. My depleted squad hits the ground around me.
The shallow slope littered with dying and dead, struggling and survivors, machines and men, torn feeds bleating static. Heat, meat and metal; meat, metal and murder; like emptying God’s handbag out, all as it should be, duty and job.
These scenes visible on the great screens on the flanks of the POX Media Tanks and NBCBN Broadcast Centers, big craft like green steel office blocks, an eternal backdrop to battle. De-mobbed cripples inside choose between millions of live and recorded camera feeds. Feeds from helmet cams and Electrolux Media rifles, feeds from the Sky Choppers and silver Media Jets, feeds from rifle rounds and huge Correspondent Tank shells; current live real time feeds split screen with classics and favorites from the archives. Classics like the Special Report in Washington.
Laboured breathing from single minded and angry soldiers echoes over the ridge selected and amplified by cripples stripped of rank and broadcast live and haunting over the plastic PA speakers, crackling like the fire in the tree line and heaving like we all breath as one hungry beast.
A silver Sky Chopper comes down low over me, whop-whop-whopping. Killing guns rattle and whine violence and bright white fire at the tree line as the crew picks through the wounded on the ground getting great pictures. Smoke is thick and heavy out there, black, white and gray tugged all ways in the eddying winds of war. Countless flares lay cast around; rainbows of colours mingling and diffusing tainting the overcast murk. Fierce fire flickers in rough raw craters smeared red with soldiers flattened by concussion smashed into mere leaking meat. Bent burnt and burst deathware punctuates the slope; guts spilled soft and hard out here. Man broken with mans broken toys caught by discreet remote eyes on the living and the dead and the mechanized; Gods terminal masterpiece played out and laid out to satisfaction.
My squad lock and load, prepare for the next run. McManus stops our half-track in front of a POX Babel Tower, the FLC Kissinger, and Alf Laden sits in the lee of a Media Tank, the hot metal clicking. Murder Sergeant Baps McFadden hits the dirt next to me her baby slung on her back. Her face is blackened and alert, short bursts bark from her rifle close in to her cheek, she pants small gasps into the mic. Jr. Lt. Jr. crouches here too, his young eyes bright, his smooth jaw tense as he quickly strips his Electrolux, screaming to Master at Arms Steinstein for new main springs as he throws bombs down the slope destroying abandoned deathware and silent wounded. New rivers run red.
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.
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