Juliet on the radio

storm_petrel

Cougar wakes up with a low tone buzzing in his earpiece. The control lights in his helmet faceplate brighten as he shakes himself back to alertness, reporting vital stats on the world outside. It's still a high-nitrogen atmosphere, not enough O2 to breathe for more than a minute or two before higher brain functions start shutting down. The second sun is rising, burning off the sulphur-coloured mist. It’s a beautiful morning, relatively speaking, on Fulbright 2.

The planet’s got another name, but nothing pronounceable by the mouthparts Cougar’s currently sporting. Maybe he’ll be a Bug in his next life, and then he'll have a hope in hell of clicking his way through it. His brief train of thought is interrupted when his earpiece buzzes again.

He toggles it, moving very gently, carefully, because the armour should have warned him if something tried to sneak up during the night, but Cougar hasn’t survived this long as an Operational Specialist in the Mobile Infantry without learning a few cautious habits. No one around to save your sorry hide when you’re working the solo jobs, except—

—and speak of the devil, because there’s a stream of code, military-signal grade that he parses quickly, and says, “Acknowledge, countersign, Cougar-alpha-niner-six-Buenos-Aires,” and the code resolves into Standard, apparently mid-sentence.

“—and these goddamn codes, I swear, the Bug larvae could probably break ‘em in their little buggy cribs, because these code keys should be cycling through a Markov encryption chain but no one ever listens to me. Hi there, MI Operational Specialist A96-BA, designate Cougar. I’m your new Operator. Callsign Juliet.”

Cougar smiles, because inside the helmet, no one can see. “Don’t sound much like the last Juliet,” he says, and it’s true, because his last Juliet was a smoky-voiced woman who got married and rotated out last week. This one’s decidedly male, some kind of North-Atlantic accent. Sounds young.

Juliet groans, and says, “Believe me, there was no box on the form that I checked saying, Hey you want a girl’s nickname?” He sighs, a little defeated-sounding, and Cougar pictures a recruiting-poster Operative Technician, all wired up in his little alcove on the Carrier-class ship up in orbit, shifting through all the data the armour sends back and somehow managing to run combat intel, target cartography, field logistics and personnel monitoring through one singular human brain. It takes two to run the armour, Specialist and Operator, one on the ground, one in the sky. A ship's crewer once told Cougar that the Fleet Service used to screen out the best multitaskers from the applicant pool, nanowire up their brains ‘til the neurons fired like the Tokyo launch pads at night, and then hang them on hooks in Operator alcoves to keep them from vibrating out through the ship's hull. Cougar thinks that’s almost definitely a lie. The Fleet Service probably wouldn’t spring for hooks.

Juliet’s voice again, a little happier this time. “So, Cougar of the better callsign than me, there’s a little Bug fuel depot 17 degrees north of your position that’s just itching to explode spectacularly. What say we get on that?”

It’s a beautiful morning on Fulbright 2, and MI Operational Specialist A96-BA, Carlos Alvarez, callsign Cougar, strides out into the rising sun, with a new target in his sights and his new Juliet’s voice rising gleefully in his ear.