Solid, certain staccato of clicks came from the weapons all around the room.
“Now pull the foregrip back and push it forward again. Good. Now pull the trigger. You have just performed your first function check. Now do that ten more times on your own and hold your Eliminator at port arms so I’ll know you’re done.”
I did six function checks and held my weapon at port arms. Ten times seemed excessive to me. I suppose the rest of the troops felt the same way, since I was nearly the last one done. A couple more troops stopped after another check, likely not doing all ten but not wanting to be too far out of tolerance with the group.
The civilian said, “Bullshit. Whatever, okay we’ll move on to loading. Take three dummy rounds and shove them into the tube magazine. Insert the tip of the round into the opening in front of the trigger guard. Work the action to chamber a round, engage the safety and then insert the fourth dummy round.”
We did.
“Good. You troopers are pretty smart. As you may be aware, this weapon employs caseless rounds so there is no ejection port. To remove the dummy rounds, aim the weapon at the floor, release the safety and pull the trigger; the entire dummy round should slide out onto the floor.”
The troopers hesitated. Nearly all of them were combat veterans and were accustomed to having the pulling of a trigger of a loaded weapon to result in a loud noise and great destruction and grievous bodily harm. And they were in an enclosed environment with no legitimate targets.
The ship security woman said, “Don’t be scared, it’s just dummy rounds. Point the weapon at the floor, release the safety and pull the trigger. Then jack the other three dummy rounds through the cycle. It’s too easy. Do this now!”
I did. The rounds fell to the floor and tried to roll away but I stepped on them. I felt very uncomfortable, dry-firing a weapon that was pointed at my feet. But I did it, and picked up my dummy rounds and was finished about halfway before everyone else. Then a couple of minutes of troops picking up and passing around dummy rounds until they all had four again.
The security woman and the civilian were talking quietly during this process. Then she raised her voice and said, “All right. Dump the dummy rounds into the box on your left as you exit this room. Keep your weapon and bring it with you to all other training sessions. Dismissed.”
I ducked out the door and made my way toward the lounge. A group was in there still getting training on the Eliminator, so I doubled back toward the lift. As I passed by the rec center, I saw another group heading in.
“Sergeant Slaughter!”
I spun around. It was Corporal Parks. “What’s up?”
“Not much to do with all the common areas locked for training.”
I nodded. “I’m headed to my room. Gonna watch a vid or something.”
Parks said, “Have you been to the observation blister? I think its open.”
I shrugged. “Why not?”
Parks led the way. We got on the lift and went up four levels, then up a hallway toward the front of the ship. He pushed on double doors on sprung hinges and entered the observation blister. It was a domed area about thirty meters across and ten meters high. The dome was clear, allowing a view of the stars and the space between them. The nearest stars, if I stared long enough, I could tell they were moving. The area was not being used for training and only a half dozen troops were there, gazing out.
Parks said, “Check this out.” He went all the way to the back and leaned against the wall and looked up and pointed. “Look.”
I stood next to him and just above the skin of the ship was the crest of a yellow orb, the corona of the sun of Tumbler. Headed straight for it. “Awesome.”
“Sometimes you can make out the planet. Depends on the time. When we get closer…”
“I’ll be back.”
Trooper Caldwell came in. “What are you two doing?”
I pointed up. She looked. “Cool.” She stepped back to the wall to see just a little more.
More troops came in. I decided to leave. Looked to me like Parks and Caldwell would finally hook up and I didn’t want to be in the way. In the hallway I met Emily. She carried her Eliminator. “Hello.”
She said, “Hi.”
I took her hand and led her into the dome and pointed out the sun.
There were about thirty people there now, competing for space at the back wall. One said, “Look! To the far left.”
To the far left was a bright, shining disk, tiny but brilliant. A planet certainly.
Voices amongst the crowd, “Tumbler?”
“Maybe.”
“No, it’s the second planet.”
“Maybe.”
“I like it.”
I took Emily’s hand again. “To my room?”
“Sure, why not.”
We left, down the hall, down the lift, down another hall and to my room at the end. I turned on the vid and picked a mindless comedy show about teens producing their own show. I muted the audio.
“Got any food?” she said.
“Yup. Watch your feet.” I opened the big single drawer under the bed and pulled out two field rations. “Spag or Ham Loaf?”
“Spag.” She grabbed the spaghetti pack. I lifted the panel just below the vid screen to level and pushed it back about three centimeters. It was a fold-away desk that took me about two hours to find and figure out the first time. Its far end came to the very edge of the door opening. Under there was also nestled a fold-up chair. I pulled it out and set it up. “Sit here if you want.”
“Okay. Heat this up?” She handed me the spaghetti pack from the opened ration. I pulled the heat tab. The pack expanded a bit, then was hot to the touch. I set it on the desk for her. Then I pulled two water bottles from the underbed drawer and handed her one before I sat on the bed to eat.
She said, “You ever think about after, when you leave the service?”
“Nope.” I chewed the ham loaf.
“How long you been in?”
“Twelve years.”
She spooned spaghetti into her mouth, eyes smiling at me.
“I’m on my first hitch. Probably get out after this.”
I swallowed, “Then do what?” I took another bite.
“Hmm. Nothing. I have enough money to go home and live okay for the rest of my life.”
“Hmm. Me too. But I don’t want too. This is a good life. Can’t see myself as a civilian.”
She drank, opened the peaches cup, sipped away the juice. “Yes. Maybe…”
“The poet said, ‘You can never go home again.’ ”
She chewed a peach slice. A fleck of yellow was at the corner of her mouth. “You don’t know me at all. What if we…”
I shrugged. “You’re a Battalion Training, Tasking, Schools and Movement NCO, just like me. Everybody hates you but has to be nice to you, and you have no friends. Just like me.”
“Do you think I’m pretty?”
“Yep.” I reached out and picked the peach speck from the corner of her mouth and licked it off my finger. “Taste good, too.”
She stuffed the lunch litter into its original bag and rolled the top down and tucked it in tightly. I did the same with my trash, took her bag and along with mine took it into the bathroom and shoved it into the recycle chute. Then I sat back down on the bed. She put away the chair and desk and changed the vid to a movie about some steam-age epic about a country that had gone to war with itself. Large land armies marching on foot, some on horses, used black-powder weapons. Some handheld, some bigger ones hauled around on two-wheeled carriages behind horses. Sometimes a soldier had a saber to hack at enemies… but mostly it was dialogue and romance, civilians doing their thing behind the lines. I fell asleep after an hour, snuggled up with Emily.
The vid was over when the alarm went off and I changed into Physical Training clothes and grabbed my Eliminator and made my way to the fitness center. Captain Thews was at the entrance.
She pointed at my Eliminator, “You too, Sergeant? I tho
ught you’d know better.”
“The instructor said to bring it to all training sessions, Ma’am.”
“I know. Their training sessions, not my PT. Go ahead and start, thirty minutes cardio and you’re done for today.”
I got on a treadmill, the weapon laid on the floor in front of it. Thirty minutes elapsed and I was smoked so I went back to my room and stowed the Eliminator with the rest the weapons in the drawer under my bed. A throwing dagger, two boot knives, a saber, a bayonet, a five point seven millimeter automatic pistol, a ten millimeter submachine gun, and the eight millimeter hunting rifle I’ve had since I was twelve years old. You can never have enough weapons. I keep meaning to get a crossbow but never seem to have the time.
The warning came over the intercom. Zero G in two minutes. I put my stuff away and strapped myself to the bunk. The ship stopped braking toward Tumbler and began accelerating toward Tumbler. Reason being, the acceleration needed to provide gravity would hit up against light speed if maintained for too long and this ship wasn’t built for that. So a series of flips. Annoying but not really that bad. Only thirteen more days of this crap.
Chapter Five
Finally, D-day came. Not sure what the ‘D’ stands for. Dirt? Debarkation? Drop Day? I don’t think anyone knows. I do know it’s the day subsistence pay stops and contract share pay kicks in. After breakfast I went to the observation blister and met Emily. We looked up at the sky. The sun was below the ship, Tumbler above, huge, filling a full third of the viewport. Ice-bound at one end, a ring of brown and green in between, across the equator, a barren wasteland of light brown and gray at the opposite pole, the pole facing the sun at that time. The generation ship of the employer hung in orbit. It was huge, the largest ship I’ve ever seen. Meant to serve as a home for well over two million people on a two millennia-long quest for a new home, the first generation long dead by the time their descendants arrive. But it didn’t work out that way. During the trip the impatient crew of the generation ship learned how to exceed light speed just a tiny bit, inadvertently had time come to a near standstill inside their ship, arrived here about two hundred years ahead of schedule only to find the planet had already been settled. Settled by colonists sent by the old Terran Empire, settlers using jump point technology, instantaneous travel. Tumbler was now inhabited by nomads, managing herds of beef-buffalo animals up and down the latitudes as their scorching sun made its two-year trek from pole to pole.
The employers, the ones on the generation ship, we’ve been calling the French because they speak French. And the people on the planet we’ve been calling the Indigs because they got here first. But the French came from Canada, and the Indigs are certainly not indigenous. Not here, anyway. But we have to call them something.
I stood next to Emily. We didn’t talk. She gave me a hug and left. I waited a few minutes and then went to my room and put on my full war gear and stuffed my bag and went down to my tank and stowed my gear and sat in the cupola. I had to put my hunting rifle in the rear tool box, to make room for the new Eliminator in the weapon mount on the left side of my seat. At first I thought the Eliminator was a piece of crap, but after a few training sessions I started to like it. The very strong magnetic field of Tumbler made sensitive electronics a little squirrely. The plain sights and simple rounds of the Eliminator would work well. The primary ammunition was a caseless round weighing five hundred and twenty grams. The initial charge of propellant was just enough to send the round five meters past the muzzle of the smooth bore, to reduce the effect of recoil on the troop firing the weapon. Then stabilizing fins deployed as the round’s rocket motor kicked in. On Tumbler, it would accelerate to 2,200 meters per second and had a penetrator and a shaped charge that would penetrate and detonate inside the armor of the indig’s powered battle armor. There were also slug rounds and buckshot rounds for engaging more conventional targets at close range. The slow rate of fire and limited magazine capacity would be worth it. The bandolier hanging across my chest held twenty five rounds. Five buckshot, five slugs and fifteen armor piercing. I’d load the weapon after we landed.
“Hey, Sergeant Slaughter.” Caldwell arrived, climbed into the driver’s seat. Parks was with her. He opened the auxiliary gunner’s hatch and settled in, closed the hatch, powered up the main and coaxial guns and performed built-in tests. Caldwell brought the drive motors on line. I ran my own checks and ran each system into and out of commander’s override. All good. I checked the time. I became weightless, the ship now in orbit. I sent ‘green’ status to higher.
Caldwell and Parks started humming some tune. In love, I guessed. Good for them.
“Hey, we’re on VOX. Don’t make me cut you.” I said that because the comms were set so that all traffic was monitored by net control during drops. Their helmet mikes were on ‘voice activated’ and I’d have to cut them out of the net if they didn’t shut up. Which wasn’t a big deal, unless they had something important to say during the drop, something the net control station needed to know about.
The landing boat separated from the ship and got in line behind two others. The boats were coming down in a column of twos to skid-drop us on a wide open plain covered in a carpet of thick, greasy grass. The boat glided into the atmosphere. My monitor was showing the boat pilot’s view. Vapor and smoke roiled from the surface of the boats ahead, the vapor obscuring my view. After ten minutes the screen cleared and I could see the ground below. I felt the gravity, the inertia of deceleration pushing me into my harness. The boat leveled off and moved to fly to the left rear of the boat ahead, the forty boats arranged in a wedge formation. The cargo ramp behind me extended, the doors folded up into the overhead. The pallet holding my tank slid backward, the drag chute was caught by the wind and my tank slid out and fell three meters. The pallet slid across the greasy grass, then the breakaway straps holding the tank to it gave way and we raced ahead at top speed, slowed and got into formation with the vehicles to our left and right and we slowed to a crawl. The pallet of supplies slid off the landing boat and stopped and my platoon parked around it.
The landing boats closed their cargo ramps and doors and angled almost straight up and blasted away, sonic booms announcing their departure. Loud as hell, even through my tank’s armor. Any indigs within fifty klicks were probably deaf, and certainly they knew by now they weren’t going to be fighting a bunch of chumps.
I switched comms, putting my crew on platoon push and myself on the company net. The short-range line of sight comms processor showed a full bank of green lights, the other stuff, mostly blinking amber lights and a couple of solid red ones. I popped my hatch and looked up. To the southeast the generation ship hung there in orbit, ghostly white, as wide as my thumb when held at arm’s length. We received a perimeter sketch over digital and I had Caldwell move us into our designated spot. ORF-2 parked to our left and the mechanics who had been operating it dismounted and walked off to help set up their maintenance shelter. I left Parks to mind the tank and Caldwell helped me connect the slave cable from ORF-1 to ORF-2 so that he could control the weapons of both tanks. Me and Caldwell walked over to the Battalion TOC location and helped set up. The three tracked command post carriers parked as three points of a triangle, thirty meters between them. We set about snapping the frame of the dome together, and then raising it up, a synthetic canvas over the frame. After that, staking down the outer edges and then putting together the meter-square sections of the rubbery snap-down flooring. Took twenty minutes but seemed a lot longer, and I was sweating profusely when the job was done. Not completely done, TOC personnel were still setting up work stations and monitors and a briefing screen, under the direction of Captain Blythe.
But that wasn’t my territory. I was just there to provide muscle for the initial setup. Me and Caldwell went back to the ORF tanks. I relived Parks and he dismounted and he and Caldwell set up our tents behind the tanks. Normally we’d just put up one tent but they put up the second one just for me. Guess they wanted some privacy later. I liked
having my own tent anyway and this way I didn’t have to set it up myself. Love is a wonderful thing.
As I sat at the weapons station I received a text from Emily. “ : ) ”
I sent back “ ; -) ”
Then a series of local data, weapons setting mods for the current weather, general reports, data was pulled from my end, and sector established positions and movements of patrols. Finally I got a confirmed link to the troop transport ship. It was direct laser comms, a tiny weak beam aimed at their receiver, their beam back to my receiver. And that’s all the connection I’d have with them. Tumbler’s magnetic field was a beast. That was my job, to get data interpreted and packaged up and made presentable. For now. The TOC would get hold of that job when they finished setting up. My job then would switch to watchdog, tracking them from here to make sure they did it right. Best job in the world.
After a couple of hours, Parks came and relived me at the weapons station so I went for a walk around the perimeter. The two armored recovery vehicles were positioned at the entry control point, and fifty meters behind them were three command post carriers, all their gear stowed, trailers attached, a skimmer hull-down at each end.
“Hey Slaughter!” Emily stood behind the laser gun of the second skimmer.
I walked over to her. “How you doing?”
She pointed. “My tent. All alone.”
I looked at my communicator. “How’s your schedule? Mine’s pretty busy.”
The War for Profit Series Omnibus Page 61