by Mark Kalina
"I doubt those refugee gangsters... and let's be clear Colonel, that's what they are... are going to be able to do the job we've assigned to our infantry," the general said instead. "Don't mistake this for a show-of-force operation. It will take more than warm bodies in Peace Force uniforms to make this work.
"As for the drone combat vehicles, you want us to depend on the Arcadians not being able to jam our remote control systems? Remember, if they jam a reconnaissance mini-drone, all that is lost is some sensors data. But if we rely on drone combat vehicles, drone tanks, and they succeed in jamming those, Colonel, then what is lost is the whole battle."
Using drone combat vehicles sounded tempting, Bannerman admitted to himself; no manpower issues, no worries about the political cost of casualties. But if the drones were remote-controlled, then the control link became a single point failure source; an invitation to disaster. And if the combat drones were left to operate autonomously... well, it had been proven again and again that drones could not match human-operated vehicles in real, unscripted battle. Drones couldn't improvise, couldn't try anything new, and once a human enemy knew what he was up against, drones fell for every ruse.
"There was no indication of the Arcadians being able to jam us seven years ago, sir," the Colonel said, sounding somewhat diffident.
"And we're still using the same technology now as we did then," Bannerman replied. "Do you think, just because we haven't upgraded our technology, that the Arcadians haven't upgraded theirs? Are you willing to gamble the outcome of the most expensive UEN Peace Force operation in history on that position?"
"Ah..."
"Besides, it's far too late to change the order of battle. We go with what we have. And pray that it will be enough. I've spoken to some of the officers who led the fight against the Arcadians in '70. Their words did not make for reassuring listening."
"They are not reliable sources of information, General," the Colonel protested.
Bannerman said nothing in reply. There was no point arguing with a man like Mbala. Again Major Hafez looked sideways at Bannerman, and again Bannerman gave a minute shake of his head. Colonel Mbala had a reputation for executing clearly given orders without fail... which was why Bannerman has asked for him in the first place. So long as he managed to do that, it would be enough.
Meanwhile both men watched as the two dozen enormous Glorious Prosperity class launch vehicles were steadily loaded. The giant rockets were cone-shaped, almost 80 meters high, and almost as wide at the base as they were tall. Clusters of a dozen booster-rockets were mounted around the base of each of the launch vehicles, making them appear squat and massive.
The Victorious Red Morning launch facility that the rockets stood upon was enormous on a scale that only the Chinese could manage; a patch of hard-baked desert almost a hundred square kilometers in area, paved over in reinforced concrete strong enough to take the exhaust of the world's biggest rockets. The world's biggest parking lot, it had been called; the world's largest launch facility was what it was.
It had been built to allow twenty-five of the giant Chinese orbital cargo ships to launch, one after the other, without needing to take time to refit the launch site. It had been built to ensure Chinese victory in case of an orbital satellite war. In such a conflict, the ability to replace shot-down satellite with that sort of speed would have been decisive. No satellite war had ever been fought, but the facility was still here.
It had been General Bannerman who had realized that this same capacity meant that the field could launch twenty-five of the giant boosters all at once, if it had to. Looking back on it, that realization had been the genesis of the plan. His superiors at the UEN had not told him how much the Chinese were charging for the use of the launch facility, but given the cost of renting the launch vehicles, Bannerman expected it to be enormous.
And in a way the huge cost of the operation was an advantage. In purely economic terms, the operation made no senses. Even if the Arcadians did hear of it, they might well dismiss it as a false rumor. After all, why would the UEN spend so much money to recapture a colony that wasn't worth it.
Bannerman doubted that the Arcadians knew anything about it, though. Locked on their side of the gate, with contact limited to once a week through a known entry point, it was easy to control what they saw and heard. But if they did hear of it, he devoutly hoped they would limit themselves to economic analysis and reject the rumor.
The reasons for the mission had little to do with economics, though. Arcadia had defeated the UEN, and broken away from UEN control. Since that day, the tone of even the most loyal member nations had become less respectful. The fact was, Arcadia had to be recaptured no matter what the cost. Because in a very real way, the power and prestige of the UEN depended on it.
He looked down at the display showing the scheduled loadings. The Aerospace Command's technicians had managed to certify one more of the huge rockets, which meant that they would have all twenty five. Chinese light infantry troops were all he could find to fill the last one, but every little bit of military force would help.
The heavy vehicles were loaded already; two battalions of modern T-66 tanks, and one battalion of the latest Korean K19s, perhaps the most modern armored fighting vehicle in the world. Along with that, there were mobile laser air-defense installations, infantry-frame carrier vehicles, utility trucks large and small, ammunition and supplies...
There was even a pair of FRS-59 battle-aircraft; "ghosts" their crews called them. They were hideously expensive, but potentially crucial. Together with the UEN Aerospace Command's orbital warship, the OSV-11 Yang Liwei, the "ghosts" would be the best hope for aerospace superiority. With the prevalence of anti-air lasers, that didn't mean as much as it once had, but it would still be a major advantage if they could secure it.
Last on the loading schedule... three days from now... were the crews for the vehicles and the actual infantry troops. Two battalions of frame infantry and another of light infantry. Almost two thousand men and women altogether would be loaded into the huge launch vehicles.
All in all, it was going to be the biggest military force ever launched into space.
12.
The mournful ping of the linkage to the rear-most trailer failing was just loud enough to hear from the driver's cab of the mover. Private Cal Piper cursed as trailer rolled to a stop amid a dissipating cloud of dust.
"We've lost the rear trailer!" he called into the comm system.
"Stop the train," came the reply from Dave, up in the gun cab, and Cal applied the brakes, slowly cutting speed. Dave had warned him that the ATV-train handled like a giant, angry, pregnant pig. Not that Cal had ever seen a giant, angry, pregnant pig, but Dave's words had a certain resonance even so.
The mover was a simple enough thing to drive; a big all-terrain tracked utility vehicle. It was the addition of four trailers, linked one by one behind the mover, that was the problem. Stop too fast and they'd crash into the back of each other and jack-knife all over the desert.
Or rather, three of them would. The last one had broken loose and was now a couple of hundred meters behind the ATV-train.
"What now?" Cal asked into his comm.
"Now we get out and haul that bastard back up here, fix the link, and drive on," Dave replied.
"Can I try to back up so we don't have to pull a ten ton trailer a quarter klick?" Cal asked.
"No chance. Backing an ATV train just doesn't happen, unless you're on smooth, paved stone. No, we have to do this the hard way. We disconnect the mover, drive it over to the last trailer, fix the link, tow the last trailer up to the other three, then push it into place and get the mover back in front. Figure about two, three hours."
"Shit," Cal said.
"Welcome to the Auxiliary Corps," Dave replied cheerfully.
It took Cal and Dave about half an hour to disconnect the mover and drive it over to the "lost" trailer. It would have been faster, but Dave insisted that one of them keep a gun in hand and one eye on th
eir surroundings as they worked.
"We're within twenty klicks of two camps. Their scroungers could have seen us. It's not like they usually shoot on sight, but there's no sense in getting careless," Dave had said.
Which meant, for the most part, that Dave stayed in the gun cab with the 6.7mm MG-61 light machinegun, and Cal had to work with heavy equipment under the searing hot desert sun.
The jingle of chains gave the ambush away.
Cal was trying to fix the hitch linkage; the metal had sheered right off, but Cal figured a few loops of carbon-fiber through the center of the linkage would be enough to hold it for a day or two. That meant getting out the plasma cutter and burning a hole through the steel, but there wasn't another way to do it... not that he or Dave could think of.
The sound of the plasma cutter was an electric hiss, loud enough to hide anything short of a shout or a gunshot. Maybe that's why Cal hadn't heard the gun-boys get close as they moved towards him, darting from rock to rock.
But when he shut the cutter off and set it down to cool —the little fucker got hot— the sudden jingle of chains from behind a big rock, about fifteen meters to his left, caught his attention.
"Hey Dave, what's that noise?" he asked into his helmet comm-link , pointing towards the sound.
The refugee gun-boy rose up from behind the rock and leveled a blocky-looking black rifle from the hip, and all Cal could do was stare in utter, horrified surprise.
The man was dark-skinned, his face covered in swirling tattoos, dressed in a vest layered with thin steel chains. His teeth, barely lighter colored than his skin, were bared in a mad, triumphant rictus.
"En poola chappu, you DF okkala-oli! Die!" screamed the man, and opened fire.
The rifle went off with a shattering roar and bullets kicked up pulverized desert dirt all around Cal. Something tugged for a fraction of a second at his loose uniform tunic. Bullets slapped the air all around him and pinged violently off the trailer behind him. A bullet smashed into the cutter at his feet, sending the tool spinning.
For a long second, Cal was too horrified to even remember the G60 rifle slung over his shoulder. Then he began to fumble for it.
The gun-boy was still shooting, not even fifteen meters away, screaming in an incomprehensible language, eyes wide in a face twisted by a grimace of rage or shock.
The sound of a burst hammered from behind Cal, almost lost in the thunder of the gun-boy's fire. Three or four puffs of dust rose from the gun-boy's chest, as if he was an old rug that had been hit hard with a stick, and the gun-boy crumpled to the ground.
Cal had his G60 in his hands now, but there was suddenly no more shooting.
"Holy shit!" shouted Dave from behind him. "Are you hit? Are you OK?"
"Holy shit!" Cal shouted.
"Fuck! Are you hit, man? Are you hit?"
"Uh, no. I don't think so," Cal managed to say. There was no pain, and a quick look down at himself showed no blood, no injuries.
Dave let go of the grips of his machinegun and jumped down from the gun cab, fumbling with the sling of his own G60 as he ran over.
"Let me look at you," he shouted, patting at Cal's chest.
"Fuck... me," he said at length. "You didn't get hit."
"Yeah," Cal managed to breath.
Dave was shaking his head in amazement. "The fucker missed you from less than twenty meters. He just missed you. Or... wait. No. Shit," Dave said, pointing to Cal's tunic.
Cal looked down to where the tunic had been neatly cut open by a bullet, less than a centimeter from his left side. Suddenly he could feel a crawling sensation in the skin over his ribs.
"Fuck," Cal breathed.
"Yeah," Dave agreed. "Remind me to never play cards with you, man. I didn't know anybody could get that lucky."
"He... he was trying to kill me."
"Well, yeah. That's why we carry these rifles. Dumb fuck, though. I guess he didn't seem me in the gun cab. Figured you were alone, or something."
"I..." Cal started to say, and stopped, suddenly feeling more than a little sick to his stomach.
"Hang on," Dave added, "let me take a look."
Perhaps unwisely, Cal followed him.
The gun-boy was still alive, but dying messily. Blood was pooled on the hard-packed desert ground all around him. The man's chest was bathed in red gore, but Cal could see bubbles forming in three distinct spots as the man tried and failed to gasp for air.
The dying man met Cal's eyes for a second, and then went still, eyes glazing over.
"Fuck," Dave said.
"Oh, god," Cal said.
"It's cool, man," Dave said, putting a hand on Cal's shoulder. "It's cool. Take it easy."
"I..." Cal started to say.
"It's cool," Dave repeated. "Man, it's normal to feel sick... it's ugly, but it turned out OK. You spotted the bad guy and pointed him out to me. You did OK. Bad guy's dead; good guys are both alive. It's all good, OK?"
"Yeah," Cal managed to say, sucking in deep breaths to keep a sense of nausea from rising.
"Just hold on while I take a look around," Dave said, holding his G60 ready. "Might be more of the fuckers hiding. If you see something again, sing out, man, OK?"
Cal nodded and tried to keep his own rifle ready, trying to watch in all directions as Dave jogged out at an angle to get a look behind several of the larger rocks close by.
It had happened so fast, Cal thought. So fast. One moment, nothing except the hot, hard work that he can come to expect from his time in the Defense Force, and the next moment, someone was trying to kill him; bullets coming so close to him that he could hear them buzz past. So fast.
"Huh. Man, look at this," Dave said. He'd come back to crouch next to the dead body and now stood up, lifting the dead man's rifle.
Cal didn't respond.
"Hey, Cal! Take a look, man, this is important, I think."
"What?"
"The rifle, man. Look at it."
Cal looked at the gun that had almost killed him. It was a compact, black weapon, polymer framed and lethal looking, not too different from his own G60, save in details.
"Do you know what model this is?" Dave asked.
"No..."
"It kinda looks like... wait a minute..." Dave said, looking at the side of the weapon. "No markings, but I'd swear it looks like a Beretta AR-250. That's... weird."
"What?" Cal asked.
"This is a modern gun, man. The shit-for-brains didn't know how to shoot it, but this looks like a UEN standard issue light infantry rifle. They adopted it a few years back and we got a briefing file sent out on it on the Defense Force data-cloud."
Cal managed to nod, though none of it made sense to him.
"Hey, man, are you good to go? 'Cause we have to get this trailer linked back up and get these supplies up. Tell you what, Cal. I'll finish the link-up, and you sit in the gun cab for a bit. But keep an eye out, man. I think this guy was probably stoned off his ass and wandering alone, but we can't be sure of that. Let's get this rig fixed and get the fuck out of here, huh?"
"Oh, yeah!" Cal replied, walking back to the mover and trying to climb up the strut-ladder into the gun cab. He could feel his hands trembling and shaking on the ladder rungs, hard enough to almost make him fall. It made him blush with shame in the face of Dave's calm, matter-of-fact manner, but he couldn't stop himself.
Dave finished the jury-rigged repairs and Cal climbed back out of the gun cab and into the driver's cab, pulling the trailer back to where the other three trailers were waiting. Getting it back into its proper place in the train took another fifteen minutes, less time than Cal would have guessed.
"Hey, Dave?" Cal asked as they finished connecting the trailers to the mover and began to climb back to their respective cabs, "what do we do with the... you know, that guy?"
"He's dead, man. We do nothing. If some intelligence types want him, we can tell 'em where to find him. He'll still be here. Meanwhile, we push on. But when we get to where we're going, we'll
tell those Armored Corps guys about this."
"Right," Cal said, trying to get a grip on himself.
"Hey," Dave added, "you did OK, Cal. It's cool. Getting shook up when someone shoots at you is normal, man. Just don't try counting on that sort of luck again, OK?"
***
The man who called himself "Ren" —and whose actual name was UEN Peace Force Special Operations Sergeant Li Ziming— cursed as the newly-made anti-tank rocket clicked and failed to fire. The enemy ATV and its trailers started up and began to move off. Ren reset the firing controls and tried to shoot again. Again a click.
He thought about using his rifle, but the ATV looked at least somewhat armored and its machinegun would give it a massive firepower advantage over him if it came to a firefight.
Silently, he cursed. He cursed himself for taking so long to track down the idiot who'd stolen the rifle; he cursed the defective rocket and the substandard field-manufacturing gear that had produced it; he cursed the drug-addled idiot who'd stolen the rifle and gone out on his idiotic would-be one man raid. Last and most emphatically, he cursed the mission that had put him here, trying to turn these useless gangsters into irregular soldiers.
He'd worked with even worse before, he admitted, in Africa and in Central Asia. But then he'd had his whole twelve man team with him. This time he had only a three man team; just him and two others, and it wasn't enough to keep the gangsters in line.
This, he thought, was bad. The Arcadian Defense Force soldiers had found one of the newly made rifles, and now they had escaped. If they brought the weapon to someone clever, they might deduce things from it that would make the mission much harder.
On the other hand, it was unlikely that they would deduce what was about to happen to them. And in any case, there were only a few days left before it would be too late to matter.
13.
From fifteen kilometers away, the glare of the twenty-five launching Chinese boosters was brighter than the sun. The thunder was deafening even inside the control bunker. It was the biggest space launch in human history, and Major General Jose Salvator Bannerman was in charge!