The 18th Race: Book 02 - In All Directions

by David Sherman

  “Aye aye,” Lance Corporal Cafferata said. He and the two PFCs moved into the clearing.

  The ground was barren except for slight traces of green where growth was starting to come back. Sunlight filtering through the treetops dappled the ground, making it more shaded than sunny. Martin examined the canopy and found it denser than he’d supposed, which could explain why this bivouac hadn’t been spotted by a visual search. But an infrared search should have found it; it looked large enough to be the staging location for the entire force that had attacked Camp Zion three days earlier.

  “Do you think these are scratches?” Mackie asked. “From their claws, I mean.”

  Martin nodded. “That’s what it looks like to me.” He took images of the scratches from multiple angles and heights.

  “They cook their food.” He recorded a rectangular scorch mark. “If this was a human site, I’d say this is where their kitchen was.” Off to one side a muddy area bore circular gouges. “Dish washing,” he hazarded.

  A little farther and they found rows of two centimeter diameter holes, evenly spaced about a meter and a half apart side to side, three meters going deeper.

  “Holes for tent posts maybe?” Mackie said.

  Martin shrugged. “Could be. Or maybe they sleep on roosts. They are kind of bird-like. Let’s see how many there are.” He started giving orders immediately. “Cafferata, come here. Mackie, take your other men and find the far end of these holes. Count the rows. Cafferata, you go that way until you run out of holes. Count them, starting with that one.” He pointed to the hole he wanted Cafferata to start counting on. “I’ll go this way. Questions?”

  “No,” Mackie said. Cafferata shook his head.

  “Let’s do it.” Martin stepped off

  “Orndoff,” Mackie said when he reached his men, “see the rows of holes? Count them, beginning with that one.” He pointed at the first row beyond where Orndoff stood. “The first number is seventeen. Got it?”

  “Start counting there, first number is seventeen. Got it.”

  “I’ll take your flank. Move out.”

  It didn’t take long to count the holes. Multiply the rows by the number in a row, and there were 576 holes. They also found three more scorched rectangles, each accompanied by a muddy area. More kitchens?

  “All right,” Martin said on the squad freq, “we either have 144 tents or 288 roosts, and four possible kitchens. Mackie, stay in place until Cafferata joins you. Then split in pairs and check the perimeter, see if you find any latrines.”

  Cafferata and Orndoff went one way, Mackie took Horton the other.

  “Whew!” Horton exclaimed before they reached the corner.

  “I smell it too,” Mackie said. “It’s like ammonia.” He followed his nose to a stretch of disturbed dirt. There were a pair of holes at each end of it. Did the Dusters have a roost mounted over the latrine, like Humans used a platform with holes in it?

  “Looks like they covered it over,” Mackie said. “Let’s go, this shit is burning my eyes.”

  “Mine too,” Horton said.

  They found three more along the side.

  “We found four probable latrines,” Mackie reported when they rejoined Martin.

  “So did we, four of them,” Cafferata said. “Real stinkers.”

  “What about tracks leading in?” Martin asked.

  “Nothing like a beaten path, nothing that would indicate several hundred Dusters arriving in a formation. I did see some paths that looked like they’d been used recently.”

  “There was a bigger one that might be leading to Camp Zion,” Cafferata said.

  “Come with me,” Martin said after a moment’s thought. “I want to get vid of one of the latrines. And the bigger path you saw.” That last was to Cafferata.

  “We don’t have to dig one up, do we?” Mackie asked.

  “Not without orders from higher-higher. The science people might want to dig one up, though.”

  After getting vid of the supposed latrine, “Too bad we can’t capture the smell,” Martin observed. He called in a report describing what the squad had found, and sent the vids and other images he’d taken. His report concluded with, “It looks like they filtered in from multiple directions. There’s no sign of whatever was in the postholes.”

  Captain Sitter took hardly any time to think before he ordered them to follow the bigger path, to see if it led to the Marine base. “I don’t want just one squad to investigate the infiltration paths, that’s a job for a larger unit, or for Force Recon.”

  The large path led to within half a kilometer of Camp Zion, where the Dusters appeared to disperse to take positions for their assault.

  Chapter 3

  Troy Space, Partway From the Wormhole to the Semi-Autonomous World Troy

  Amphibious Ready Group 17 wasn’t dead; on life support would be a more accurate descriptor of its condition. Five of the fifteen troop ships in the ARG had been destroyed by the Duster missile attack, as had two of the four support ships. Five of the other transports were injured—three would need to be towed to Troy orbit, the other two could limp in on their own. Only five of the transports remained whole after the attack.

  Five troop ships whole, five injured, five destroyed. Nobody in the amphibious ready group found solace in the symmetry.

  The fast attack carrier NAUS Rear Admiral Isaac C. Kidd was the only remaining warship of the detachment from Task Force 8 that had been deployed to escort ARG 17. Her space fighters had retrieved the surviving pilots of the SF6 Meteor interceptors that had died defending the ARG from the attacking missiles, and recovered the bodies of those pilots who hadn’t.

  Shuttles from the surviving troop ships were making their way from killed ship to wounded ship to killed ship seeking survivors. On every vessel there were some soldiers or crewmen who’d made it to stasis units in time. In a few cases, entire platoons remained intact. It took several days to locate all the survivors and transfer them to viable quarters on their wounded ship, or onto others that had space. Once everybody was rescued and bodies recovered, the remnants of ARG 17 and its escort would group into a rough formation and began the slow limp to Troy orbit, and the elevator ride planetside. The exception was the undamaged NAUS Diamunde, which filled with ready units and headed for Troy.

  Company commander’s office, Alpha Troop, First of the Seventh Mounted Infantry, NAUS Juno Beach

  The amphibious assault ship Juno Beach had been sorely injured in the missile attack, and needed to spend months undergoing repairs in a shipyard before she could join another ARG. Still, she was able to make the short trip to Troy under her own power. Returning to the shipyards of Earth would require a tow from an uninjured ship.

  Half of the troops who had embarked on the Juno Beach and survived the attack were still aboard her; the other survivors had been transferred to other ships that had made it through the one-sided battle. The units transferred included Alpha Troop, First of the Seventh Mounted Infantry, and the battalion’s command group, which went to the Landing Platform, Shuttle, NAUS Diamunde.

  Second Lieutenant Theodore W. Greig, commander of second platoon, Alpha Troop, and his platoon sergeant, Sergeant First Class Alexander M. Quinn, stood in front of their company commander’s desk. They weren’t quite at attention.

  “You didn’t lose a single man?” Captain Henry C. Meyer asked incredulously.

  “That’s right, sir.” A hint of pride was audible in Greig’s voice. “No one was killed, not a single soldier of mine was even injured.”

  Meyer slowly shook his head. “Amazing,” he said softly, and turned his head to look at the company’s top dog, First Sergeant Powhatan Beaty.

  Beaty’s head dipped marginally in nod. “Second was the only platoon to come through intact, sir,” he said. He bestowed a look of approval on Greig and Quinn.

  “Lieutenant, Sergeant,” Meyer said, turning back to them, “When we make planetfall, I’m going to rely heavily on you—at least until I get replacements for the
other platoons’ losses.” He grimaced. Eight dead and seventeen wounded out of his 150 officers and men, before they could even make contact with the enemy. Before they could see them even. Well, at least most of his officers and men had made it to stasis units before the ship was holed and most of her atmosphere vented into space. He twisted his shoulders to loosen them from the tension that suddenly hit when he thought of his losses.

  “The Diamunde is taking us to the geosync elevator station. Second platoon will be the first element of the battalion to make planetfall. Once there, you’ll be under the command of the senior Army officer planetside.

  The Diamunde will be in orbit around Troy before ship’s dawn tomorrow. I need you to have your platoon at the debarcation station for transit to the elevator at 0530, ship’s time. The enlisted mess will begin serving at 0430, so your platoon will have adequate time to eat before you board transfer shuttles. Personal items are to be stowed in containers with each man’s name and army ID number. All weapons and field equipment will be carried into the shuttles by each man. That includes company-level crew-served weapons. Right. Did I mention second platoon will be reinforced by a mixed weapons squad? Well, you are. Sergeant Gumperts is leading it, he’ll join the two of you once he finishes organizing his squad.

  “For the big picture, Troy has two continents, Shapland and Eastern Shapland.” He shook his head. “Not real big on imaginative place names here. Anyway, the Army’s area of operations is Shapland. The Marines are on Eastern Shapland. In addition to us, the NAU Forces headquarters is on Shapland, and some Navy fighter squadrons and a couple of Marine squadrons are there to provide close air support for us.

  Questions?” he finished with a wry twist to his mouth. If he’d already told them everything he knew about the mission, he couldn’t answer any questions.

  “Yes, sir,” Greig surprised his company commander. “What are the Marines doing? Do they have the situation under control?”

  “The last I heard, and this isn’t necessarily the latest intelligence, is that the Marines have beaten off enemy attacks and it’s pretty quiet. They’re just conducting mop-up operations.” He gave the lieutenant a look that said, Please don’t have any more questions.

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “If that’s all, you’re dismissed.”

  Greig didn’t exactly come to attention, but he did salute Meyer before turning about and leading Quinn out of the captain’s small office.

  “So what do you think, sir?” Quinn asked when they were far enough that Meyer couldn’t overhear.

  “If the Marines say all they’re doing now is mopping up, it’s probably fairly hot planetside.”

  Well deck, Landing Platform, Shuttle Diamunde

  “Close it up,” Bo’sun’s Mate Thomas Gehegan called out. “Belly to back, back to belly. Keep ‘em close and stay between the yellow lines!”

  “Right, ‘belly to back,’“ third squad’s PFC Richard J. Gage said to PFC Nicholas Boquet, the man to his front in second platoon’s line. “Only a swabbie would want men to line up belly to back.”

  “Just make sure you keep your distance, Gage,” Boquet said. “If I feel anything poking me, it better be your gear.”

  “What kind of gear you talking about?” PFC Jacob Sanford asked from his position behind Gage.

  “The hard kind,” Boquet said.

  “There’s hard and then there’s hard,” Sanford said with a laugh.

  “Let’s have some quiet in the line,” Gehegan called out again. “Pay attention. Back to belly, belly to back, stay between the yellow lines.”

  “I still say only a swabbie would say that,” Gage softly repeated. Boquet and Sanford laughed quietly.

  Not all the soldiers were in spirits as high as Gage, Bouquet, and Sanford. They’d breakfasted on steak and eggs. Some in the troop had enough of a sense of history to know that steak and eggs was the traditional breakfast the Navy served to Marines and soldiers about to make a landing against an entrenched enemy.

  “Knock off the chatter, troops,” Staff Sergeant Albert O’Connor shouted.

  There was little more chatter as second platoon trooped single file between the yellow lines under the watchful eyes of several bo’sun’s mates whose job it was to keep anybody from wandering off and getting lost among the plethora of orbit-to-surface and intra-orbit craft that filled the well deck.

  “Tighten it up, troops,” Sergeant First Class Quinn shouted when the platoon filed into an intra-orbital shuttle. Not that they needed to cram in; the shuttle could accommodate half a company, so there was plenty of elbow room for one reinforced platoon. Quinn’s order was more force of habit than necessity.

  The shuttle’s hatch was closed and sealed when the last soldier was aboard, and it trundled to the sally port that was used when only one shuttle was launching, so that the entire well deck didn’t need to be evacuated and then atmosphere pumped back in after the launch. The sally port was an airlock large enough to hold a single shuttle. Seal the sally port’s hatch behind the shuttle, pump out the air, open the outer hatch, and a piston ejected the shuttle with enough force to propel it a hundred meters in a few seconds. At that safe distance, the coxswain piloting the shuttle would fire its engine and aim it at the elevator.

  The-ship-to-elevator trip took half an hour. Once there, the shuttle docked at the elevator station and station crew sealed the egress tunnel to the shuttle’s hatch. Bo’sun’s mate James Byrnes “swam” through the egress tunnel to the hatch and opened it to enter the shuttle. Three more sailors followed him.

  “Listen up, people,” Byrnes said loudly enough to be heard throughout the shuttle. “By now you’ve probably noticed you’re no longer under gravity. So to get you safely from here to the elevator, we’re going to clip you to a guide line. I know you’ve all done this before, so I won’t bore you with the standard safety lecture. Let’s just get you clipped to the line and haul you aboard.” Actually, he didn’t know whether or not everybody in second platoon had transited from an intra-orbit shuttle to an elevator station—in fact, most of them hadn’t. But he had orders to get them aboard as fast as possible because they were needed planetside.

  Nobody suffered more than a minor bruise getting from their seats on the shuttle, to the egress tunnel, to the platform, to the elevator cabin, to their seats. The movement was counted as a major success.

  Elevator to Troy

  Gravity was restored in the station as soon as the shuttle disconnected and began its return to the Diamunde. It was only a quarter G, but even that small amount of pull was enough to let the soldiers know beyond doubt which way was “up” and which was “down.” That prevented enough abdominal distress that nobody lost the hearty breakfast he’d eaten so recently. Second platoon wasn’t in the station for long; an elevator cab was already docked and waiting for them. Still linked together, they were escorted into the cab and strapped into seats. Byrnes looked them over to make sure everybody was properly secured, then stood by the cab’s entrance.

  “Gravity will gradually increase as you approach planetside,” he said, “until you’ll be under a full G by the time you get there. When you disembark, good hunting.” He essayed a salute before backing out of the cab and dogging its hatch. Only when the soldiers could no longer hear him he said softly, “Better you than me doing the hunting.”

  Nobody actually floated out of their seats as the cab plunged toward the surface of Troy, although several of second platoon’s soldiers later swore they were in free fall on the ride down. Lieutenant Greig took advantage of the period of inactivity to review the orders Captain Meyer had given him before his platoon left the Juno Beach.

  On landing at the McKinzie Elevator Base, outside Troy’s capital city of Millerton, the platoon would board the Marine vehicles waiting for them and be transported to a location two hundred and fifty kilometers northeast of the city where they would establish security for the battalion headquarters company, the first elements of which would follow when the Di
amunde brought them. Over the ensuing two days, the rest of the First of the Seventh would reach the surface and join second platoon and the lead headquarters elements. In the meanwhile, a compliment from the Navy Construction Battalion would begin building a forward base for the battalion.

  What he hadn’t been told in that briefing was that a platoon from 10th Brigade’s Mobile Intelligence company was also part of the initial complement, and would coordinate its activities with second platoon’s. Greig had yet to meet First Lieutenant Archie Miller, the recon platoon’s CO. The Mobile Intel platoon had already made planetfall via Navy shuttles, the same way the Marines had in the initial landing.

  McKinzie Elevator Base

  “Who’s in command there?” a gruff voice shouted as second platoon disgorged from the elevator cab.

  A soldier detached himself from the group and headed toward the Marine who’d called. “I am. Lieutenant Greig. Who’re you?”

  “I’m Gunnery Sergeant Stewart, sir. I’m the man responsible for transporting you and your do- uh, sojers to where the squid CBs are building you a base.”

  If Greig noticed the “do-” he didn’t acknowledge the “doggies” it implied, a slur on the Army.

  But SFC Quinn, who joined his officer in time to hear Stewart name himself did. He gave the Marine a hostile glare.

  Stewart looked blandly back at him.

  “How many men you got, Mr. Greig? And crew served weapons?” Stewart asked, glancing toward the elevator base and noticing a machine gun.

  “Fifty men, including Sergeant Quinn and myself. The weapons squad has one M-69, two M-40s, and two M-5Cs.

  Stewart nodded sagely. “You’ll probably need them. Especially the M-69.” The M-69 “Scatterer” was a Gatling gun-type weapon, capable of firing two thousand rounds per minute. It had already been used to good effect by the Marines. “Right over there now,” he pointed fifty meters away at a line of four skirted, armored vehicles. All of them spouted the barrel of a weapon, but two showed multiple barrels, some much bigger, “that’s your transportation. Two Hogs and four Scooters. They’re air cushioned, so the ride’ll be smooth almost regardless of the terrain.”