Aegis Memoirs Part I

Aegis Memoirs: Desolation

By Isaac Lee Brand

    To the reader: hello, my name is Isaac. I have been asked about what it was like to be trained in the Aegis program, so I figured the easiest way to tell this to everyone was to write it down. I am terrible at writing, true, but this should answer most everyone’s questions, and the ones it doesn’t...well, I suppose we will get to those. Anyways, on to the story.

    I think the question I get most often asked whether or not I knew, going into the military, that I would be trained into Aegis. The answer to that question is most definitely no. I did not even think that the military would be something that I would continue to do much past my first enlistment. I joined the Army in 2075 as an infantry troop. Really, I had no other option, I was two years out of high school, and even though I had decent grades, college was never going to be an option. My family really didn’t have the money to move away from the Fire Line (or Minimum Radiation Safe Distance, if you are so inclined) and it took a toll on us. Knowing that, living in Biloxi, my choices were to join the military or die of thyroid cancer eventually, I chose the former.

    When I got in, I found that I was actually pretty well off. The work was dangerous, sure, but really, all it took to set myself up as a leader, even as a PFC, was to really give a rip about the guys around me...a trait that was surprisingly hard to find in others. I made Sergeant my first try in 2078, and heard about a new (at the time) technology called an NC suit, and my superiors wanted me to be one of the first to test it out. They told me that it was a new type of CBRN suit, and I figured that that meant that I was either going to be helping with the cleanup efforts after the Exodus attack, or stationed at one of the bases near the Indo-Pakistani quagmire of a war.

    I was very thankful that the latter did not happen immediately. Of course, a man in a suit of armor would have stood out like a sore thumb, and if these things worked anywhere near as well as advertised, I told myself, I was sure nuke number 17 would be placed squarely on my head and detonated, and I was not in any particular hurry to die. No need to be a target.

    I remember when I first saw it, my suit, I mean. It was an Armorcorp Chariot, one of their first models. 23 sensors built into the whole suit would measure every one of my movements, and the suit would go with it, they told me. When I asked how well it would hold up to gunfire (a reasonable question, as the suit looked somewhat rubbery), the quartermaster pulled a .50 and shot it six times, four in each limb and two in the chest. The bullets just lost their speed and fell to the ground, and the indentions they left filled in quickly, leaving it looking just as new as it did before. I was convinced.

    It is difficult to describe exactly what it was like, putting the suit on. There were no buckles, straps, or buttons, because the carbon nanotubes formed a seamless seal after the pieces were put on. I could hear the clanking of metal after it did so...a little steel was all it took to make these things bulletproof. I was told it was somewhat like scale armor, interweaved with the nanotubes. It was heavy, that was all I knew for sure. But when I put all the pieces on, and they locked together, it felt very different. It was still heavy, but it moved easily. The weight felt like my own.

    I ran, I walked, I jumped, I even did a few backflips. This thing was incredible. In no time at all, I forgot about the weight, and they had to calm me down a bit so that I could actually test the suit. It felt natural, and it felt fun.

    A few weeks of field testing ensued. What we found was that the suit did not make me that much stronger or faster (I could run five miles at around 18 miles an hour, and bench about 275, once we found a bench that could hold up under the added weight), but everything I did felt easier after a while. The suit was bulletproof and CBRN qualified, and though it was a heavy thing, it did not limit my movement, it was like another layer of skin.

    My first assignment after receiving the suit was near the remains of Albuquerque, NM. I was understandably concerned about going behind the Fire Line, but hey, orders were orders.. I was always kinda curious as to what the area behind the Fire Line looked like, but we really didn’t see anything the entire way there. It was a very uncomfortable ride, pretty much strapped to the side of the jet the whole way. Cleaning the ground was somewhat simple, they told me, just scoop the dirt and seal it. But cleaning the air was a different story. We had to fly giant jets equipped with air scrubbers, which caught as much of the radioactive particles in the air as they could. That was like trying to stop a plague of locusts with a small bug net.

    Our ride didn’t stay at the airfield very long after our bumpy touchdown and short stop. We put our helmets on and sealed them tight. Ahh, pure oxygen. They took just enough time to empty the radioactive materials storage tank, then were gone as quickly as they arrived. Didn’t want the jet to pick up too many radioactive materials.

    That was the first time I had seen a city affected by a nuclear blast. Buildings were simply pushed over, flattened into the ground. Where once a colorful city once stood, now there was only rubble, colored the same as the sand that surrounded the city. If you did not know that this was a thriving city before, you would not have believed it if someone told you. Realizing that so much life was extinguished right here, and that so many skeletons were probably just sitting underneath the rubble, made me wish very much that I was somewhere else, not just because I didn’t want to touch a long-dead body, but because here, there were so many lives lost, so many families torn apart by destruction who would never find closure.

    Kirtland AFB was one of the first bases to be reinforced after the Exodus attack because of all the nuclear weapons there. The attack left a huge section on the U.S.’ border with Mexico unsecured, allowing anyone with enough radiation protection to enter. The enemies of the U.S. jumped at the opportunity to hit while we were weak, and it has been a constant battle to keep them from just entering as they please. It didn’t help that the air scrubbers were 650 foot tall towers with giant vacuums at the top, and made great targets for anyone with an RPG.

    Defense being the primary goal, and cleanup being the next, it was no picnic. We alternated, eight hours on patrol, eight hours on cleanup duty. I cannot really explain how miserable that work was. The patrol was actually worse than the cleanup, because during the cleanup, our eyes were mostly on the ground, scanning for radiation spikes and putting the dirt into huge barrels, so we really didn’t see much else. When we were on patrol, though, it was our job to look around, to take in everything. You really got the full effect of the destruction while you were out there.

    And that was the best case scenario. Enemies were managing to get across the Mexican border, roaming the Midwest in technicals (old pickup trucks with machine guns mounted to them). We would get huge swaths of them headed towards us, and we had no choice but to gun them down.

    By far, the worst day out there was June 2, 2079. The sun was coming up, which made it difficult to see anything to the east. A terrorist cell took advantage of this by loading up 53 technicals and heading straight towards us. Seeing them coming from about a mile away, we sounded the alarm at the base, and took defensive positions, weapons pointed at the trucks headed our way. No one said anything, but everyone understood that 25 men against 53 trucks was not good odds.

    We got a little more nervous when RPG’s started to fly past us, exploding behind us.

    “Wait until they get in close,” I heard our OIC say. Inwardly, I could only ask how much better of a target they were asking us to make ourselves. When several more RPG’s impacted right in front of us and onto one of our fortified positions, killing two of our men, many of us (not myself) opened fire without orders. Our OIC was right to tell us to hold fire, as they emptied their clips quickly, only hitting two trucks, and revealed our position to the enemy.

    They responded by opening fire themselves, raining bullets and rockets our way. They were still a good thousand feet away, but four of us fell with that first salvo. Our OIC was understandably frustrated.

    “We need armored support, now!” He said over his radio, calling HQ. I knew those tanks wouldn’t arrive soon enough. They were right on us now, circling some of our foxholes and spraying us with gunfire. We couldn’t wait for orders anymore. I told the other guy in my foxhole, SPC Tucker, that we had to run out to one of the crashed technicals and use its machine gun, since our assault rifles weren’t going to do enough damage. He agreed, and we ran towards one of the trucks that crashed into the sandbags of another foxhole.

    They had not seen us running, so I knew that we could make this one count. I cleared the weapon, as a few bullets had snapped off the links, while Tucker pulled the ammo from the cans and helped me load it into the PKMS machine gun. We waited until they got closer and opened fire, killing the driver and the gunner. The truck accelerated rapidly and smashed into another technical, t-boning it and flipping it to its side. We continued shooting until an RPG exploded nearby, not close enough to injure us, but close enough to knock us from the truck. We moved to another truck and did the same thing, at least three times.

    It’s easy to lose track of what happens in stressful situations. I didn’t look around to see if anyone but Tucker and I were able to fight. Truth be told, we were lucky to survive, with all the hasty movement we did. I breathed a sigh of relief when I heard the sounds of AT4 rockets and an M2 machine gun, the sign that the tanks and reinforcements had finally arrived. What was left of the technicals, about 15 working vehicles, scattered and headed to the southeast. Our tanks kept taking pock shots at the technicals until they were out of range.

    It was only after all of this was done that I looked around to see the damage. Of the 25 of us that went out on patrol, only six survived. All told, the battle, which felt like an eternity, only lasted eight minutes. They later told me that Tucker and I were the only ones able to effectively engage the terrorists, and that others had tried, but were gunned down soon after.

    Here, I found the limits to what the NC suit could do. Where once I felt like Superman, that day, I was just an ordinary man, trying to survive the onslaught. Each man killed had been hit by no less than eight bullets, most of them hitting weak points in the joints of the armor. It was a sobering reminder that no amount of technology could make us truly invincible.

    They did eventually send me to Tibet, nearby both Pakistan and India, as part of a group of troops ready to enter the battle zone, should anything happen. All of us were equipped with NC suits, and only then did I find out how many variants of the suit there were. The fact that we all had them should have alerted me to the fact that our higher-ups expected trouble.

    I will never forget Friday, April 12, 2080. The locals called it Dark Dawn after the fact, and it was a fitting name. We saw bombers taking off across the border, which was a common sight in this Indo-Pakistani piss fest. It looked like a swarm of bees...loud, ancient metal bees. What we did not expect, however, was for those bombers to catch fire and plummet to the ground just a few minutes after takeoff. The alarms sounded and we all headed for cover from what we would later learn was a well-planned sabotage. The bombers got airborne, then developed shorts in the engines that ignited their fuel.

    I had seen a nuke go off at a distance before. It’s bright, and it shakes the ground from a great distance. But I had never seen anything like this: the light from the nuclear explosions poured through our shelter doors, and the shelter looked as though it would collapse on us (it was a simple earthen cellar...Tibet, remember). We decided that we stood a better chance outside, or at least that somehow, death by radiation would be better than starving to death under boulders we could not lift.

    It didn’t look like you might expect, that is, a massive fireball in the distance. They did not all go off at the same time, so one nuke threw dust into the fireball of another. The whole area was pitch black, like a really dark rain cloud that stretched for miles.

    But we couldn’t just stand there twiddling our thumbs. Being the NCOIC, I decided to go ahead and take my team across the border, something we had been ordered not to do. Things had changed. We loaded up into our IFV’s and headed into the cloud. We told ourselves we would check for survivors, but I think we all expected to find nothing but a parking lot.

    We were basically driving blind. Thermal sensors don’t do you a whole lot of good when the air is literally burning. We could feel the heat coming through our suits, but only slightly...so far, they were doing their job well. My suit’s HUD told me the radiation levels in the area, but that information is still classified. Don’t even bother asking me or anyone in Washington, the government of India has the rights on that information. Needless to say, however, stepping outside would have killed a normal man.

    That said, stepping out of that IFV, I saw some of the most horrible injuries I had ever seen in my life. There were bodies that simply ended at the waist, some of them still burning. The ones who were still alive, well, they understandably screamed in pain. I cannot describe what the pain scream of someone who is literally burning inside out is like...but I can’t shake that sound, either. Most of the people we passed, we could not save. We did not have medical support, as they refused to come with us. We could only fit a few into our IFV’s, those we thought had the best chance of survival. Most of the ones we could not save simply faded away as we prepared to leave. My heart wrenched as we closed the doors and the air cleared.

    A couple of us did speak Hindi, but there are so many dialects of it that we could only understand one of them. He thanked us, and refused to expose how much pain he was actually in. All of them were incredibly strong...I would not want to face the death they all faced. Only one of them made it even four days, his body weakened by burns and radiation.

    I don’t think any of us were our normal selves for a while after seeing that. The fact that we stayed in the suits for weeks did not help, either. No one slept much, and supplies were slow to make their way to us. Battles were going on all around us, but we did not receive any orders to aid anyone, either in a fight or medical evac. I guess our higher ups decided that these guys would slaughter each other from here till doomsday, and gave us the order to pack up and head out. Another win for indecision.

    It was with this terrible taste in my mouth that I received the invitation to train into the Aegis Battalion. They told me that it would be the Joint Special Forces Training Division’s finest group of soldiers, and that I showed an “exceptional aptitude for leadership with an outstanding use of issued equipment,” which basically meant that I had survived in nuclear war zones more than most soldiers.

    I honestly wanted nothing of it, at first. I was tired of war, and I just wanted to go home. But I took a few days of leave to make my decision. During that leave, all I saw was how terrorists from other nations were pouring over the Mexican border, and establishing bases between the Fire Lines. I thought of my family back in Biloxi, knowing that if a bunch of somebodies failed to do something, I would not have a home to return to. With that in mind, I accepted the invitation...and prayed. I would at least see what this was all about.