C.R.O.W. (The Union Series) (17 page)

As we hit the
deck, Climo fired a burst in response, his mammoth’s high powered magnets
shrieking in terrible fury.

The section
returned fire as more pink camouflaged soldiers appeared. They were close; soon
we would share the fate of the section we had killed only minutes ago.

‘Boss, this
is Ev,’ Corporal Evans was straight on the platoon intercom, we were in
trouble, ‘Contact, wait out!’

‘They’re
gonna flank us!’ Joe Mac had abandoned Chase, and was now shouting to Corporal
Evans. Rawson fired a string of grenades blindly over the greenhouses. The
grenades soared almost lazily into the air, and then darted toward the ground
and detonated as they identified targets that my visor couldn’t.

‘Come on,
then, you bastards!’ Climo was stood now, strafing the crops with his MAM-G.
Chinese scattered from the spray of supersonic darts that ricocheted from
greenhouse frames and hacked the ground and tossed clods of earth away into the
air.

A Chinaman
shot Climo straight in the face. He was dead before he even hit the ground.

The remaining
five of us crouched low in amongst the crops in our desperate last stand, our
weapons spitting death.

It occurred
to me that I was about to die. The Chinese had fixed us in position, and were
moving around the greenhouses to our right flank for the kill. The gravtanks
and dropships were either destroyed or otherwise engaged, because no help came.
Two section were nowhere near and no doubt had their own problems, and Three
section, who would have been our reserve, had never even seen the surface. In a
world where travel between the stars was the norm, we were on our own, no
further than fifty metres from friendly forces. The feeling of helplessness was
overwhelming.

‘Keep
firing!’ Corporal Evans’s voice boomed over the intercom, ‘Keep firing or we
all die!’

Rawson yelped
and dropped to the ground in a spray of blood. ‘Man down!’ The section echoed
the alert that struck at my heart like a knife.

‘My call sign
is overwhelmed,’ Corporal Evans called to the boss over the platoon net, ‘Four
times casualties, enemy in section plus strength. I am withdrawing!’ He was
still in control. Despite suffering two deaths and two casualties his voice
never gave the slightest hint of fear or defeat. He threw a phosphorus grenade
toward the enemy and at the same time Joe Mac threw another. They exploded in
great puffs of smoke and phosphor, momentarily concealing us.

‘Joe, Brown,
move!’

‘Moving!’ Joe
and Brown grabbed Chase and Rawson. Rawson was screaming, creating a sound that
I had never heard before, and hoped never to hear again. I couldn’t describe it
to you, only to say that it curdled the blood and sent shivers up my spine. His
agony was absolute; his arm had been severed clean off at the elbow. His gel
armour had automatically tightened an inbuilt tourniquet above the stump, stemming
the flow of blood. They ran toward the ditch and Two section beyond, while me
and Corporal Evans fired through the smoke to give cover for them as they
moved. The hot smoke interrupted my visor’s thermal display, making it almost
impossible for me to pick up targets, but that meant the same for the Chinese
which was what we needed in order for us to escape. It was impossible to guess
how many of them there were out there, but I imagined that they were close,
moving through the crops and battered greenhouses. The air was thick with their
fire, but thankfully it was inaccurate.

Joe Mac and
Brown dragged their casualties into the ditch and then took up positions on the
bank to give us covering fire.

‘Moralee,
prepare to move!’ Corporal Evans called.

Safety catch,
pouch…. The drills that had been forced into my head on Uralis took over. I
looked at the bodies of Climo and Berezynsky. Climo’s face was in pieces.
Exposed cartilage and bone glistened in the New Earth rain. Climo had been a
true friend, one of the few troopers in the platoon who had accepted me into
its ranks. Now he was gone.

‘Move!’

Rounds
whizzed past my head as I ran back with Corporal Evans toward the relative
safety of the ditch and Two section beyond. Corporal Weston’s section appeared
to be stuck in their own battle with an enemy to their front, but I saw that
one of them was firing grenades over our heads to cover our retreat.
Detonations thumped behind me but I didn’t turn to look.

I struck
something hard with my upper arm, enough to send me stumbling. I glanced around
me, but nothing was there. I zigzagged toward the ditch, adrenalin spurring my
body forward.

‘Down!’

We dropped
into the ditch beside the others. I fired a volley of shots into a pink soldier
emerging from the smoke fifty metres away. He disappeared behind a greenhouse
and I never saw him again.

‘Joe, keep
eyes on up that ditch!’ Corporal Evans pointed in the direction we had been
originally travelling. I saw that the ditch was empty, but we were horribly
exposed in that direction with all four of us focusing toward the enemy
advancing through the greenhouses to our right flank.

‘I’ve got it,
Ev!’ It was Chase. He had managed to prop himself up against the bank and was
pointing his rifle up the ditch. Beside him Rawson wailed, but it looked like
his tourniquet had stopped most of the bleeding. He would have to wait. Chase’s
armour had swollen around his injured leg to immobilize the break.

Corporal
Evans was back on the platoon net, ‘Boss, this is Ev, we can’t hold this flank!
I need re-enforcing!’

I heard the
hiss of rounds passing close to my head, and my visor told me it had come to my
left. My eyes widened, the enemy were in the ditch with us.

‘Contact
left!’ Chase screamed, just before he died.

We fired up
the ditch with everything we had, filling it with smoke, sparks and lumps of earth.

‘Boss,’
Corporal Evans screamed into the platoon net, enraged, ‘I cannot hold! Where
the FUCK are you?!’ He swore a string of curses as we fired in all directions.
We were finished. Despite the initial surprise the Chinese had gained the upper
hand, we were under attack from along the ditch and from the greenhouses and
the situation was desperate.

There was
only one option left to save the section, ‘Joe, prepare to withdraw!’

‘Joe’s down!’
Brown replied over the din. There were only three of us left.

‘Shit!’

My arm was
aching from where I had struck it, so I reached to rub it and my hand came away
wet with blood. I had been shot.

‘I’ve been
shot!’ I cried.

‘We’re gonna
die, we’re gonna die!’ Brown cowered behind the bodies of Chase and Rawson, both
of whom were no longer moving. Chase’s eyes stared lifelessly toward the
heavens, unaware that his body was being used for cover.

I took cover
with Brown, throwing my body into the bottom of the ditch behind the dead. It
sounds wrong to hide behind a comrade, even now as I say it, but by then I
think my survival instinct had properly kicked in, I was little more than an
animal, desperately trying to survive. The super high velocity ammunition of
the modern battlefield wouldn’t be stopped by flesh and bone, but behind two
sets of gel armour I had a chance.

‘Get up you
stupid little shits!’ Corporal Evans had not given up. He cursed and picked up
Chase’s rifle and grenade launcher, holding it in his left hand with his own
rifle in his right. He fired both simultaneously. Empty cases from the grenade
launcher scattered to the floor at his feet.

It was at
that moment then that I stared in awe at my section commander’s last stand from
where I lay at the bottom of the ditch. Coated in a mixture of blood and mud,
he stood tall, proud and undefeated, his teeth bared like an enraged animal. He
was the living embodiment of everything that made the Union army the fearsome
foe that it was. I realised at that moment that although wars were fought with
weapons, they were won by men like him.

Then it came,
the inevitable assault from the Chinese. The battlefield exploded into noise as
tens of rifles fired simultaneously and I closed my eyes.

But it wasn’t
the sound of rifles, I realised, and I opened my eyes. Corporal Evans had taken
a knee beside me, but he wasn’t dead.

Above us the
mighty gravtank hovered, its vulcan cannon roaring as it cut a swathe across
the greenhouses. Any Chinaman above the ditches would have been cut to ribbons
by the onslaught.

A section of
troopers whose helmets identified them as three platoon came charging past us,
splashing us with red water as they jumped over the bodies of my dead comrades.
The platoon was back on the attack with its new found support.

The boss and
his radio op were the next ones to pass, and he stopped to look at Corporal
Evans who now knelt amongst the sorry remains of his section.

‘Ev… you okay…,’
the boss began. The radio op was tugging at his arm, with some important
message to pass on. His eyes were wild, because he held the burden of knowing
everything about the battle around him.

Corporal
Evans said nothing. His eyes burned with hatred, and I knew that he blamed the
boss for not re-enforcing him soon enough.

‘I couldn’t…,
sorry,’ he backed away two steps from us and our dead, and then he was gone, up
the ditch and into the battle. Something exploded a few hundred metres up the ditch,
and gunshots sounded from amongst the greenhouses. Another section passed us,
and as if satisfied that things were back in our favour, the gravtank shot away
from the hill.

Corporal
Evans looked down and regarded me and Brown like a lion would a pair of mice. I
became self-conscious that I was still curled into a foetal position next to
Rawson’s body and quickly picked myself up. The ditch was littered with bodies.
Chase had been shot again fatally, and Mac lay in a crumpled heap, his head and
arm missing. Only his rank insignia could identify him.

‘Ev,’
Sergeant James greeted our section commander as he slid into the ditch, with
his work party and the smart launchers in tow. The platoon sergeant stooped
over our dead and checked their vital signs on their wristpads to ensure that
they read the same as his own. They were all dead. Finally satisfied he looked
up at Corporal Evans and for the first time his face softened. ‘It’s not your
fault, mate.’

Corporal
Evans said nothing.

‘Strip their
ammo and follow on up. Moralee, patch that gash up on your arm when you get a
chance, and stop feeling sorry for yourself. Welcome to the real world.’

I remembered
the wound on my arm. My armour had swollen tightly around it and administered a
clotting agent that had already stopped the bleeding. My wristpad told me that
the wound was superficial and didn’t require medical treatment, and soon my
armour would return to normal to allow me to dress the wound properly. I felt
ashamed, ‘Yes, Sergeant.’

Chase’s cold,
empty eyes stared up at me.

With nothing
else to say, Sergeant James was gone, following up the boss and the rest of the
platoon to the top end of the ditch, where a new battle was being fought.

Corporal
Evans looked at me and Brown again.

‘It’s not
over, get their ammo.’

Our section
had taken advantage of a chance encounter and succeeded in destroying a Chinese
section, but in doing so we had then been counter- attacked by a numerically
superior force. Despite our aggressive defence, there was no reserve section to
come to our aid and we had quickly succumbed. We had lost five of our brothers
in arms, Chase, Berezynsky, Climo, Rawson, and our section second in command,
Joe Mac. I had received a glancing blow from a stray round and was lucky to
still have my arm.

We rummaged
through the kit of our dead mates for ammunition, while balls of fire fell from
the flickering red clouds to the surface of New Earth as the Union navy began a
fresh bombardment.

13: The Counter Attack

Nothing wakes
you up to the realities of life in space better than dragging the sorry remains
of a fellow trooper unceremoniously through the red mud, a pool of blood
sloshing about inside his respirator. Me and Brown slid Climo’s body over the
bank of the ditch and into the growing stream of water that flowed along it. We
sifted through his kit for his magazines and grenades and I tried not to look
at my friend’s face, or what little was left of it. The dart that killed him
had passed straight through his nose, and had taken flesh and bone with it. It
was so gruesome I began to gag and I lifted my respirator just in time to vomit
down my armour.

Brown stopped
what he was doing, ‘Don’t breathe in. Get your respirator back on.’

I hated
Brown. He was the absolute opposite of Climo, a bully and an arse-kisser. He
had helped Woody to make my life on Challenger a complete misery. But he was
right, and begrudging doing what he told me to I swallowed what bile was left
in my mouth and replaced my respirator. I waited for the filters to do their
job before finally breathing again.

‘Poor
bastard,’ I finally said.

Brown packed
Climo’s mammoth ammunition into his daysack, slung it onto his back and offered
the rest of what he found to me, ‘Yeah,’ he agreed grimly.

My eyes were
wet, partly because the stench of my own vomit still clung to my nostrils, but
mostly because I realised one of my best friends in the platoon had died. Climo
was gone, and my friend Greggerson was severely wounded, possibly dead too.
Gilbert and Kane had never even made it to the ground, and Berezynsky had
shared a similar fate with Climo. I felt as though every one of the few people
that mattered to me had been taken, and all I had left was Brown, a man I
despised. Why had he not died instead?

I took the
ammo without a word and we moved up after Sergeant James who was a hundred
metres along the ditch. Corporal Evans was gone, he had moved forward to make
himself useful elsewhere. One section, one platoon were no more. We would now
be used by Sergeant James as part of his work party, tasked with collecting
casualties and prisoners as and when required, moving ammunition or
re-enforcing sections if they lost too many men. 

The platoon
was static, having pushed forward a few hundred metres since our section had met
its demise. Another couple of platoons had moved through us, taking the battle
further up the hill and toward its summit. We were organised into a defensive
position whilst we waited to be re-tasked elsewhere on the battlefield.

The Chinese
had withdrawn back into the warren and trench system dug deep into the hill.
Bombardment from high above and the ferocity of our offensive had driven them
back into cover, but it was unlikely to be for long. The battlefield was
strangely hushed, but distant explosions reminded us that the war was far from
over. The Chinese would not give up their warrens without a fight, and we would
have no choice but to dig them out. We all dreaded the thought of fighting
underground.

Fighting in
Warrens and Caves, or FIWAC as it was abbreviated, was known for being chaotic
and violent to the extreme. Depending on the nature of the warren’s
construction, it was possible for engagements to be so close they often turned
to hand-to-hand fighting. Warrens were a common feature of the modern
battlefield, particularly when the enemy had the time to dig himself in and
fortify. With the devastating effect an orbiting warship could have on ground
forces the only option available to a defender was to dig himself underground,
often to great depth. Even with today’s technology no ship could detect
anything underground, and the most sophisticated of weapons could only
penetrate so deep. As for nukes, no side dared risk starting a nuclear war that
could spill over back on Earth.

The Chinese
were believed to have occupied and extended the existing Union warrens,
stretching for kilometres in all directions. Tunnels were capable of moving
vehicles and troops rapidly, with some even equipped with maglev trains. The
thought of fighting in the pitch black, claustrophobic tunnels made me shudder.

‘Think we’ll
go in?’ Brown asked when we took a knee behind Sergeant James’s two smart
launchers, as if he had read my mind. Mitch spared us a worried glance and then
went back to concentrating on his smart launcher’s optics.

‘Dunno,’ I
replied curtly. We waited in silence for something to happen, while the two
smart launchers scanned the skies for enemy aircraft.

Ahead of us Two
section and the section sent to re-enforce the platoon concealed themselves
amongst tangled greenhouse frames and burnt crops. I later learnt that the new
section were the sole survivors of their platoon, the rest of them had never
made the drop like our own ill-fated Three section.

I shivered, my
legs were soaked. The people who designed my gel armour had clearly decided
against making it waterproof. At least my feet were almost dry, and the rain
had stopped at last. The clouds still obscured the sky, though, and wind blew
bitter and cold against my soaking wet body. The orbital barrage had stopped,
presumably our ships had momentarily turned their attention onto something
else. Above the blackened greenhouses smoke still rose from Jersey.

‘I’m
freezing,’ I said.

‘Me too,’
Brown replied, and I think he might have been glad that I spoke, the silence
was deafening. ‘Where do you think Ev is?’

I gestured
into the crops above the ditch, ‘He’s up with the boss, I think.’

We lapsed
back into silence. What could we possibly talk about? Hiding behind a fallen
comrade while a man stands alone to fight the enemy? Or perhaps about dragging
our comrades remains through the mud like pieces of garbage, one of whom Brown
hated and I had come to call my best friend?

Guilt haunted
the back of my mind - a guilt I fought to ignore. My mates had died, and I hadn’t,
quite likely due to my own cowardice. Brown’s survival was very little, if any
consolation, and if I’m honest I think I almost resented it.

The silence
didn’t last for much longer.

The two smart
launchers bleeped furiously.

‘Contact!
Fast air!’ Mitch cried in alarm.

I froze for a
second, before realising what he was telling us. ‘Fast air’ was trooper speak
for fast moving aircraft. Something not particularly friendly had broken
through into our airspace and had been picked up by the launchers.

Me and Brown
dove for cover, there was fat lot we could do against a fast moving aircraft.

The smart
launchers were set up to launch in seconds. Sergeant James crouched low beside
them, shouting orders.

‘Quick boys,
get em up! Get em up!’

‘Firing!’ The
first smart missile launched.

‘Firing!’ The
second followed close behind.

Smart
missiles were an old weapon that had evolved over centuries. Each missile was
equipped with a state of the art computer that allowed it to track its target,
anticipating its moves and disregarding decoys. But an individual smart missile
was ineffective against modern aircraft equipped with gravity drives; they
didn’t have the speed or manoeuvrability to keep up with them, especially if
you consider that fighter aircraft were unmanned and had virtually no limit on
the Gs they could achieve. Smart missiles were normally employed against ground
targets, but they made an effective deterrent to aircraft, in fact they were
the only air defence that dismounted infantry had.

More missiles
fired from across the hill, leaving white vapour trails in their wake as they
veered across the sky toward their target.

‘Reload then,
you lizards!’ Sergeant James spat with clenched fists and the smart gunners
frantically reloaded new missiles into their launchers. The weapon was
deceptively light, but it was still cumbersome and took precious seconds for
even the most experienced operator to reload.

It was then
that a series of explosions a few hundred metres to our left announced the
arrival of the enemy aircraft. In a blur of silver metal it moved impossibly
fast, almost like a flying insect would dart forward and backward but much
faster. It was indeed an unmanned aircraft, dubbed the ‘saucer’ for its shape. Saucers
were built like upside down dishes to allow them to be aerodynamic in all
directions, and were common in virtually all modern armies. They made lethal
ground attack aircraft.

‘Down!’

I hugged the
ground as the saucer shot overhead, strafing the earth with its twin cannon.

‘Shit the
bed!’ Brown cursed.

‘Firing!’
Another missile was up to join the wolf pack. The sky was becoming filled with
missiles on the chase, leaving vapour trails that tangled through the sky like
spaghetti. The air became thick with vulcan cannon fire from the dropships and
gravtanks across the valley.

‘Two more
saucers inbound!’

‘Two section
is in contact!’ A shrill voice spoke across the platoon net, it was the platoon
commander and he sounded worried, ‘Contact enemy dropships!’

Enemy
dropships were inbound, and with them would come crack Chinese dropship
infantry.

‘They’re
attacking!’ Brown shouted from where we lay. No shit.

What we
didn’t at that time know was that high above us the Union fleet was being
engaged by the Chinese. In a co-ordinated counter offensive, they were hitting
us in orbit, then using the distraction to launch an offensive in the
atmosphere and on land that couldn’t be hindered by our ships. It was this
level of co-ordination that made the Chinese an opponent that couldn’t be
underestimated.

From our position
of cover in the ditch, I could see troopers amongst the greenhouses ahead of me
firing at the enemy. Pink painted dropships were disgorging their cargo into
the fray a few hundred metres beyond.

The battle
that followed would be far more intense than that of our initial drop. The
Chinese had been on the back foot, not knowing where to expect us to land. Now
they would attempt to regain the initiative.

In our favour
though, was our experience and our cunning. Although nobody could doubt the
Chinese technology or fighting spirit, they had many flaws that the Union knew
to exploit.

Gravtanks,
evolved from lessons learnt in combat against the Indo-Japanese Alliance on
Eden, darted about the battlefield in and out of cover. Their low profile hulls
enabled them to hide almost as low as the troops they supported, unlike the
larger bulky designs of Chinese anti-gravity vehicles which were designed to
fight like aircraft. Their vulcan cannon sprayed the skies with a million tiny
darts and their rail guns took on the enemy dropships.

Somewhere
within our secured perimeter, newly established electronic warfare teams began
to hack into the Chinese communications and robotic vehicles. The unseen
electronic battlefield was a crucial aspect of modern warfare, robotic craft
could be turned against their masters, communications could be blocked or
changed and even computerized maps turned upside down. The technologically
superior Indians and Japanese had not anticipated the strength in Union
electronic warfare capability, a weakness that was to be their undoing on Eden,
with the help of some old fashioned Union steel.

You could
hack into comms and robot aircraft, though, but you still couldn’t hack into
soldiers, and there were a lot of Chinese soldiers out there. The hill became
alive with gunfire.

‘We’re
fighting for our lives now, boys!’ Sergeant James bellowed to us over the
noise, ‘Brown, Moralee, join Two section up front, you’re no more use to me
here, get going!’

We scrambled
over the banks of the ditch as the platoon sergeant continued to control his
two smart launchers. He would manage the platoon’s air defence whilst we got on
with the fight on the ground.

We zigzagged
between the greenhouses, leaping over battered frames and crashing through
smouldering crops. I hoped the smoke and flames would help make us unlikely
targets to the enemy.

Behind us,
there was a huge explosion that almost sent me off my feet, but I didn’t turn
to look. Clods of earth rained down at my feet and bounced off my helmet.

Two section
were just in front of us in cover in another ditch. To their left and right
other platoons had moved to help repel the attack. The Chinese were only fifty
metres away, I reckoned there must have been more than a company’s worth of
them. Several Chinese dropships lay stricken on the ground, their ugly bodies
scorched from impacts from rail gun shells.

Rounds
whizzed overhead as we ran as deep into a crouch as our thigh muscles allowed.
I took little comfort knowing I probably wasn’t the target; there were so many
enemy that the air was thick with their fire. An intense animal fear finally
overrode my muscles and I dove for the ground.

‘Brown, get
down!’

We had
covered a good thirty metres in our mad dash, but in retrospect we were right
to have taken to ground. There were so many Chinese in front of us, and the
fact that we hadn’t been shot deliberately or by a stray round was nothing
short of a miracle.

But not
entirely a miracle, as we would later realise. The electronic battlefield was a
weird and wonderful thing, and as it turned out we had another little trick up
our sleeves. After our shameful defeat two years earlier, the Union had
identified a fatal flaw in the Chinese integrated soldier technology. Their
weapons communicated with their visor targeting system via a wireless link,
unlike ours which instead incorporated a wire which connected our visors to our
rifles. Our electronic warfare teams had found a way to jam the signal, and
even feed it fake ones. In effect they were now either firing rounds wildly off
target, or they would have to fire using the sights like a normal rifle. Rumour
had it the Chinese were terrible shots without their visor targeting system.