In the Valley by Jason Lambright Read Free Book Online

firebase was stirring quietly. Pashto Khel was only five klicks away, and the villagers might have someone watching this primitive base of operations.
    Quiet preps, violent action, and deception were prerequisites for success.
    Firebase Atarab was on the side of the Baradna River Valley, perched on the side of a hilly ridge. Where Paul slept was at the base of a hill, and he had sensibly made camp in the bottom of a bomb crater next to a ground-truck. Looking across the flat—the battalion’s assembly area—he could see antlike columns of Juneau Army soldiers coming down off the other hills. Each company had taken a hill as their area of operations, and the flat step at the bottom of the hills was the assembly area and the area where the advisors slept.
    The night before the intel had come down that a group of shitheads under a certain Commander Mohammed were going to be staying in Pashto Khel. Apparently the group wanted to stir up a little trouble, and a little mouse in the village had passed word to the Juneau Army soldiers about the coming meeting. The rat had spurred yesterday’s furtive meeting with the good colonel Fasi.
    Paul’s counterparts wanted to kill Commander Mohammed. It only took so many bombings and other attacks to rile up the locals. Heck, he’d kill Commander Mohammed himself if he had the chance.
    The show was about to start; Paul’s clock said 0154. He took another drink of coffee. Today, he and Third Battalion, 215th Juneau Army Brigade, would raid Pashto Khel and kill some bad guys. The colonel pinged Paul’s halo, and Paul saw him suit up. What good were the lessons of the Fort Sill armorer to Paul now?

T he Armorer spoke in a loud singsong voice. “This is the M-15 Armored Combat Suit, the trooper version. It stands 2.25 meters tall, weighs 135 kilos empty, and is .76 meter wide at its widest point. It has six subcompartments: one each for the major body areas of a human with standard morphology. It is internally adjustable to accommodate humans from 1.5 meters to 2.1 meters in height. It has a weapon attachment point on each arm, the shoulders, and the back. It is rated at carrying 300 kilos of operator and equipment for unlimited periods. It can lift a rated maximum of 750 kilos, given suitable bracing, and can travel at speeds up to fifty kilometers per hour in an Earth-standard gravitational environment.”
    He seemed to say that all in one breath. There was more.
    “The trooper suit is equipped with mil-grade frequency-hopping burst transmissions with a nonmicro retrans capability out to seventy-five kilometers line of sight. With a micro drone, a soldier in his suit could theoretically have worldwide transmission capability, both voice and cloud. The trooper suit can speak to a nearly unlimited number of halos simultaneously, and it monitors its own power usage. In sunny environments, the trooper suit’s energy reservoir is not a concern, as it gets most of its recharge from solar arrays embedded in the Plastlar skin. In conditions of zero sunlight or other solar emissions, the suit can operate in field-duty conditions for forty-eight Earth-standard hours before requiring recharge.”
    If not for the excitement of finally seeing a real suit and then being trained in its use, Paul would have fallen asleep. Since coming to his advanced infantry training, it seemed that for sixteen hours a day all he had done was exercise, eat, and form up in the field for troop movements.
    And now here he was, in a windswept pavilion by an ancient block building on a range at Fort Sill. He had yet to get a pass to see Lawton. When he did, he didn’t know what he’d do with the freedom. Maybe he’d send his parents a halo shot of the town or drink a watery beer. Whatever it was, it had to be better than sitting there Indian-style with his fellow trainees in a semicircle. His M-74 was perched next to him—butt down, bolt locked open.
    The instructor continued his little speech. Bastard, Paul thought