Portal Wars 1: Gehenna Dawn (4 page)

Taylor sat quietly while Doc finished up. The
light in the treatment room was glaring, the strips on the ceiling
augmented by several focused spots. It wasn’t as bright as Erastus’
two suns at high noon, certainly, but it was an unpleasant change
from the welcome dimness of the rest of the base.

Taylor didn’t utter a word about Cadogan
until Evans was almost done. Then he worked up the courage to ask
what he’d been wondering, what all the guys had been wondering.
“How’s the lieutenant, Doc?” There was a nervous edge to his voice.
Taylor had been hesitant to ask for a number of reasons, not the
least of which was that he wasn’t sure he was ready for the
answer.

Doc let out a long sigh. “He’s not good,
Jake.” His eyes met Taylor’s. “There’s a decent chance he’ll pull
through, but even in the best scenario he’s looking at a long
recovery. At least a year. Maybe more.” The surgeon paused again,
his eyes dropping, looking down at the floor. “And I doubt he’ll
ever be 100% again. Without a miracle, he’s done in the field.”

Taylor sat quietly for a few seconds before
he slid off the table and started getting dressed. It just wasn’t
right. He hated casualties…despised the whole bloody slaughter…the
waste of good men. He blamed himself for his own KIAs, reviewing
every aspect of each mission over and over, trying to figure what
he’d done wrong, or what he hadn’t done…why his soldiers had died.
It wasn’t entirely rational, and deep down he knew it. But it
didn’t matter. That was just who he was.

Jake was lost in his thoughts, and he almost
walked out without another word. He caught himself at the door and
turned. “Thanks, Doc.” He swung his arm around. “It feels better
already.” He paused. “And let us know about the lieutenant, will
ya, Doc?”

“Sure thing, Jake.” Evans’ voice was
soft…sympathetic and sad. “But I doubt anything will change for at
least a few days.” Doc was looking down at the table, slowly
putting away the instruments he’d used. “But Cadogan’s a tough old
bird.” The lieutenant was old to the grunts he commanded, but Evans
was at least ten years older still. “He’ll make it.”

Taylor nodded and ducked through the door
into the hallway. The lieutenant wasn’t his responsibility, and he
didn’t blame himself like he did with his own men. But Steve
Cadogan was one of the best combat officers he’d ever known, and it
twisted him in knots to think of such a good commander – such a
good man - going down because of a botched assignment. He could
reconcile with losing someone like Cadogan in a straight up fight,
but he knew that’s not what the combat on Blackrock Ridge had been.
The whole thing had been one administrative fuck up after another,
and Taylor knew no one would be held responsible. Cadogan might
die, but the planning staff officers would cover for each other.
They weren’t lifers on Erastus like Jake and Cadogan…or even Doc.
They were UN permanent staffers doing two-year rotations onplanet.
They had return tickets through the Portal and political patronage
and careers waiting back home. None of them were about to let the
deaths of a few footsoldiers interfere with any of that.

Jake knew why there were men fighting on
Erastus. He hated the pus-sucking Admins from New York and Geneva
who treated the combat troops with callous disregard, but deep down
he believed in their cause. The Machines, and the Tegeri who built
and commanded them, were mankind’s enemies, a deadly alien menace
who would destroy or enslave humanity…unless men like Jake and his
brothers stood in the breach and barred the way. The methods UN
Central employed to conscript soldiers or blackmail them into
volunteering sickened him. But he couldn’t blame them for the war.
He even had to acknowledge that, however imperfect the methods had
been, the UN Consolidation had saved Earth from invasion, mankind
from defeat. The individual nation-states could never have stood
against the Tegeri, as a united mankind had done. Wars between
nation states were a thing of the past. All the resources and
production of human civilization were pooled together against the
common enemy.

There were 8 known Portals on Earth…8 transit
points to other worlds, and none of these had fallen. Men were
fighting and dying on more than three dozen worlds, but not on
Earth itself. The Machines were fighting Taylor’s men, and
thousands like them, on distant Portal Worlds, not in the streets
of terrestrial cities and towns. The enemy wasn’t rampaging through
helpless villages, ravaging farmhouses like the one Jake had called
home for most of his life. They weren’t murdering civilians and
helpless children or destroying the civilization it had taken man
millennia to build. And for that, Jake would hold back the anger
and the bitterness, the resentment over his own treatment and the
tragic fate that had been his lot. He would take his place in the
field, pick up the rifle…and he would protect those he’d left
behind.

From the Journal of Jake Taylor:

We try to help the new guys. Most of
them don’t last long. Just surviving on Gehenna is hard, and
fighting the Machines is like something out of a child’s nightmare.
They are meticulous, and you need to be cool and deliberative to
counter their attacks. Their tactics are mediocre, but there is an
inhuman relentlessness to them. If you lose your focus they will
tear you apart. It’s hard for the rookies to stay cool under fire,
and a lot of them hesitate, give in to fear. They panic. And they
die.

I was different when I got
here…calm, resigned to my fate. I can’t really explain why. I was
bitter, of course, mourning a life that had been taken from me. All
I’d ever cared about had been stolen away – home, family, love,
writing. But for all the wrong that had been done to me, I’d always
clung to the thought that it was not entirely in vain…that my
sacrifice had been made to a good cause. I was protecting Earth,
standing between others like me, like I had been, and the doom of a
relentless alien horde bent on destruction. That was a powerful
salve, one that kept me going for years.

Then there were the vids. They
showed them to us when we got to training camp, the records from
the first colonies. Peaceful little towns, outposts on new and
untamed worlds…and adventurous families blazing a trail into the
frontier. The first expeditions had been before the Consolidation,
and the colonists were national heroes, citizens with the courage
to leave Earth behind and help build mankind’s future.

Then the Machines came. They swooped
down on the tiny settlements, slicing through their meager defenses
and slaughtering everyone. The videos showed it all…the hideous
creatures, manlike but grotesquely different too, rending the
helpless civilians, feasting on the flesh of the children. After a
few minutes, we all wanted to run from the room, but they made us
watch. They made us watch it all. By the time we left we were
consumed with rage, straining to get at these inhuman monsters…to
kill them, to tear them apart as they had done to the
colonists.

Our hatred drove us, and our sense
of duty…but it was still an odd feeling, fighting to protect
something you knew you’d never see again. This was no old-style
war, where the boys would come marching home after a glorious
victory. For us, it was a one-way trip. We were soldiers for life.
Sending someone through a Portal took an enormous amount of energy,
and a return trip was far too costly for us footsoldiers. There’d
be no parades for my comrades and me, no ribbons tied to trees, no
sweethearts waiting for us to come walking through the front gate.
We were dead to our loved ones, already mourned and gone
forever.

“That was pathetic.” Taylor’s voice was
angry, scolding. He knew the troops were still tired from the fight
at Blackrock, but that was no excuse. Not for such a lackluster
effort. “We’re gonna do this again. We’re gonna do it as many times
as it takes you to get it right.”

He looked out at the downcast faces, dripping
with sweat. Bear stood in front of his team, his drenched fatigues
plastered to his massive body. He looked like he was about to fall
over, but Taylor knew the big man was tough as nails. Chuck Samuels
would stand under the heat of Erastus’ two suns for as long as Jake
told him too.

“I’m hot and tired just like all of you.” And
my fucking ribs are throbbing too, Taylor thought but didn’t say.
“But I don’t want to watch a fucking Machine put you down, and
that’s exactly what’s going to happen if you continue to let them
outperform you in the heat.” He was speaking to the new guys,
mostly. The vets knew already…and they’d heard it a hundred times
before. But a reminder never hurt.

“So I better see some rapid improvement from
all of you, or we’re going to be out here all day…and all night
too.” He panned his eyes across the entire assembled section. “You
think I’m kidding?” His voice was growing louder, harsher. “Don’t
fucking try me.”

There was a brief pause. It was eerily quiet,
not a sound but the wind whipping through the valley. The breeze
was a welcome relief from the oppressive heat, but the air felt
like it was coming off a blast furnace. It helped, but not
much.

Tony Black had been looking at Taylor, but
now he turned back toward the massed troops behind him. “You heard
the sergeant.” His voice was higher pitched than Jake’s but his
volume was a match any day. “Get your asses moving. I want you
reset for the exercise in five minutes or I’ll beat the sergeant to
it and rip off your heads and crap down your fucking necks. I shit
you not.” Black had the foulest mouth in the section. Where he’d
come from, that little speech would have been a sloppy wet
kiss.

The troops moved quickly, scrambling across
the sand, taking positions facing each other. The section was split
into two forces, and they were fighting a simulated meeting
engagement. They were a little over ten klicks from base, and
they’d marched the whole way in the blazing sun. They’d be marching
back too, but at least it would be closer to twilight then. Erastus
was never comfortable, but it was marginally less unbearable when
only one sun was in the sky.

Jake stood and looked out at the troops
getting ready to run the maneuver again. Black’s team, and most of
Bear’s too, were already in place. They were the veterans, the guys
who’d been onplanet awhile and learned to survive. But 3rd and 4th
teams were mostly rookies, and they moved slower. If they’d been
under fire, he thought, half of them would be dead already.

It wasn’t by design that Taylor’s veterans
and recruits were so segregated. The Machines had accomplished that
a month earlier…just before the entire 2nd Battalion was
transferred north, out of the steaming equatorial jungle. Denny
Parker had been part of Taylor’s inner circle and the section’s
exec before Blackie took his place. A corporal on the cusp of
becoming a sergeant, he and almost half the section were cut off by
a sudden enemy attack. By the time Taylor and the rest of the men
broke through, there were only 2 survivors. Parker wasn’t one of
them.

Taylor’s first thought was to reorganize the
section, balancing out the experienced troops. But he didn’t do it.
The 8-man teams were extremely close knit units. The men of a team
fought together, bled together. They shared out their rations,
listened to each other’s stories. They were families, the only
families any of these men would ever have again. When Taylor first
arrived on Erastus, scared, angry, and desperately lonely, it was
the men of his team that pulled him through it. Some section
commanders would have moved names around a roster sheet, but not
Jake Taylor. He bumped Karl Young up to team leader and moved him
from the 1
^st
Team to the newly reconstituted 3rd, but
otherwise he left his guys where they were. He owed them that
much.

Young was screaming at his team now, berating
them for their sluggish efforts. “What part of move your asses
don’t you people understand?”

Taylor was too far away to get a good look,
but he knew Frantic well, and he could practically see the vein
bulging on his neck as he urged his men on. The corporal sounded a
little like a martinet, shouting at his soldiers, asking them to do
the impossible. Taylor knew better. Young acted like he was crazy,
but there was no one you wanted at your side more in a desperate
fight. Jake had found that out a few months earlier, when he went
down during a routine patrol. Young killed two Machines about to
finish him off, and he carried the wounded Taylor 7 klicks in the
midday sun. It wasn’t until they got back to basecamp that Taylor
realized Young had also been hit – twice - and he’d carried his
stricken CO all the way back, wounded and bleeding himself.

“Alright, Blackie…” Taylor spoke softly into
the tiny mic on his helmet. “…let’s do this again.”

“I’m going to hear from Battalion again,
Blackie.” They’d been back a few hours, and most of the section was
sacked. Taylor had authorized a double water ration for his
troops…in addition to burning through 85,000 practice rounds during
his exercise. Water was scarce in the desert zones of Erastus, and
even in the jungle belt where it was plentiful, it was so infested
with aggressive pathogens it cost a fortune to purify. And
ammunition was worse…it had to come through the Portal. Some of the
other worlds had onsite production facilities, or at least that was
the rumor. But Erastus didn’t…not yet. And bringing crates of
ammunition through the Portal was expensive.

Taylor took good care of his men, excellent
care. That usually translated into issuing them more rations and
burning through ammunition on unscheduled training exercises. There
had been two formal inquiries about excessive use of supplies, but
Lieutenant Cadogan had appropriately “filed” them. One of these
days, he figured, UN Command Erastus would get tired of being
ignored, and pursue things more aggressively. But it hadn’t
happened yet. And his boys had earned that extra ration.