Galen turned to leave and Bier closed the door. Troop Bier was a great driver but a bit of problem when off-duty. A wiry man who looked about twenty but was closer to thirty, a man who never really grew up. And Corporal Wine, a trouble maker in his own right. Fifteen years in the Brigade and had just now completed a third drug rehabilitation program, declared fit for duty less than a week before. Galen’s gunner and driver.
Sure, the Brigade Commander’s tank crew was supposed to be the best of the best. But then they weren’t supposed to receive any promotions or privileges faster than what other troopers would normally receive, to avoid any appearance of favoritism. Galen picked these two for his crew because he knew he’d never have to grant them any promotions or privileges. He also liked their names, Wine and Bier. But they were good in the field; it was everything else that got them in trouble. With a Colonel breathing down their necks they should be able to stay out of trouble long enough to complete this contract.
Galen checked his own compartment, secured the drawer below the bunk and then climbed the ladder up to the gangway that led to the cockpit. He sat behind the co-pilot and bucked his lap belt.
The pilot said, “Welcome aboard, sir.”
“Thank you. You can take off when you’re ready.”
The co-pilot got up and went to the cargo bay and checked everything one last time, closed the cargo ramp and then returned to the cockpit. He sat in his seat and said, “All secure.”
The pilot cut in front of the third chock and taxied to the end of the runway. He trundled along for two hundred meters and then lifted off the ground and retracted the landing gear. Then the ship tilted up at an eight hundred mil angle and blasted at four Gs. Its wings pulled in incrementally each time it passed through a Mach, its wings completely retraced by the time it passed through Mach Five. Then it escaped the atmosphere and then Mandarin’s gravity.
Weightless, the pilot tiled the ship so that the jump point was directly above. He then deployed the propulsion nacelles from their compartments in the belly of the ship and began thrusting toward the jump point at half a G. Galen undid his lap belt and stood and stretched. He said, “I’ll be in my cabin. Wake me on the other side.”
The pilot said, “Yessir.”
Galen hated space travel but was slowly getting used to it. He lay on his bunk and strapped himself to it with a couple of sturdy elastic cords, one across his thighs and one across his chest. He removed an auto-injector from his breast pocket and removed the cap and injected a powerful sedative into his thigh. He replaced the cap and put the expended injector in his right cargo pocket and drifted off into unconsciousness. He had too; he was among that tiny minority of people who would be locked in a seeming eternity of nothingness, existing as mere consciousness while passing through a jump point. He’d done it once. It gave him perspective and wisdom beyond his years. But he’d nearly gone mad and was lucky to recover from it at all. He’d never do that again.
The transport ships waited for the drop boats to dock. The drop boats backed into bays and locked down to the decks that were perpendicular to the thrust of the transport ships. Then the ships closed their bay doors and attached docking collars to the boats so that the troops in the boats could move to the passenger areas of the ships. The zero-G made that movement faster. Finally all five ships were loaded and moved as a group to the jump point where a jump ship waited. The five transport ships and three war ships attached themselves to the jump ship.
The jump ship began rotating to create the axial rotation necessary to ensure it passed through the point at the correct vector. Then its generator created a point and all the ships passed through as a single unit. Galen’s command jump ship went through after them. The ships then detached from the jump ship and began a three day convoy toward Fairgotten. They accelerated at one G until they approached light speed, then flipped around and decelerated at one G. Several flips later they arrived and went into orbit around Fairgotten. The drop boats left the ships and dropped down to land at a space port on Fairgotten, near the coast but safely within Northern Republic territory.
The drop boats disgorged their cargo and took off, back to their transport ships. The ships left the area, tasked to perform other duties. Space Fleet was a separate entity from the Brigade, hired only to carry them from Mandarin to Fairgotten. The Brigade assembled in a marshalling yard near the space port and then convoyed to the sea port and stood by to load on Northern Republic surface fleet ships. The Brigade’s twelve aerospace interceptors and eighteen Helos parked at the adjacent Naval Air Station of the Northern Republic’s navy, prepared to support the Brigade from there.
Chapter Five
Munifex (private) Mike Stovall was inside his battle car with the rest of his contubernium (squad) and sat on his BOS (back pack, or Bag Of Shit) wearing full battle rattle (light powered battle armor) and felt the roll of the sea. He checked the load on his assault rife and ensured the safety was engaged. The weapon had a bull pup stock design and fired caseless rocket ball ammo. The round had a primer imbedded in its base that provided enough pop to move the round down the barrel and ignite the solid propellant that was at the core of the bullet. Once past the muzzle, the rocket propellant would accelerate the round until it burned out at eight hundred meters. At shorter ranges, the propellant would explode on impact. Optimum engagement range for penetration followed by an explosion was two hundred meters.
Loaded on a troop ship, Stovall’s Century was getting closer to shore, closer to making its amphibious landing. The whole Legion was landing that night, to clear the area before sunrise, to allow the heavier units of the Panzer Brigade to make their landing during daylight hours.
Stovall’s parents left over-populated Terra for Langston when he was an infant. His grandmother was black, which made him black enough to join the Legion. He ran his tongue across the inside of his front teeth and felt the dished-in areas. His father was part native North American, that’s where the spoon-shaped front teeth came from. An honorable five-year term of service in the Legion would grant Stovall full citizenship on Langston, provided he could pass the genome test. Provided it showed he was indeed one fourth black. He would have taken the test before joining the Legion, if the test weren’t so damned expensive. But the Legion would pay for it later, when he applied for citizenship.
The door of the cargo bay lifted and sea water flowed in to become a few centimeters deep. The battle car lifted on a cushion of air and slowly moved toward the water. Fresh water; the seas of Fairgotten weren’t salty at all. Stovall looked up. The battle car was an open-topped hovercraft. The driver and squad leader sat in the front and a 20mm grenade launcher was swivel-mounted between them, in travel-lock at the moment.
“Stand up, gear up!”
The Munifex stood and shrugged on their BOS. Stovall’s held extra rocket ball ammo, grenades, two kilos of explosives and one field ration and a bundle of first aid packs. He looked up and as the battle car cleared the ship he saw a clear, starry sky above. The car made its way to the shore, two hundred meters distant. To the right and left, as far as he could see, battle cars skimmed across the water, occasional splashes as they busted across half-meter tall waves. But the ride was smooth, smooth as silk.
His battle armor gave him the strength of three men; made him three times as strong, anyway. Stovall unhooked the armor’s charging cable from the vehicle. There were some men who were naturally stronger than him and his suit. His suit was modified; the arms were shortened a few centimeters. His arms were normal length on Terra, but not as long as your average Langston black man. And the neck, and the…
Not that it mattered now. Stovall was plenty capable and had no trouble keeping up during training. And his BOS was the heaviest, a full twelve kilos heavier than the next heaviest BOS in the contubernium. And he was last in the order of battle, at the end of the file. It was a place of honor, a place for the Munifex who would keep up and could be trusted to do his job without direct supervision, all while carrying the heaviest BOS.
The battle car tilted up a bit as it made its way onto the beach. Stovall flipped down his visor and things brightened as the night vision display kicked in. The car stopped and the assault ramp fell to the rear and the contubernium stepped off, first fire team in the lead, the leader and his assistant next, second fire team following, Stovall in the back. They ran in singe file up the beach to the woods and entered, got on line and slowed their pace. Stovall took his spot a couple of steps behind his fire team leader. A long line of Legion troops, a full ten Centuries, moved forward and quietly picked its way through the woods.
On the beach, the Legion headquarters snuggled up against the edge of the woods and set up its command post and mortars and air defenses and its aid station, prepared to provide full support.
The line stopped. Stovall’s team leader waved him forward. Stovall grounded his BOS and lay down his rifle and crouched, crept forward, knelt and then disabled a ground motion detector. He saw that it was set to ignore the disturbance of stray animals, of a single person. Stovall then popped open its case and reset it to minimum sensitivity. It wouldn’t report motion unless something the size of a heavy tank ran over it, but would continue to report itself as functioning normally. Sure, some tanks would pass through that area later that day but by then it would be useless information for the defenders, if there were any defenders left by then.
Stovall moved back and put his BOS back on, picked up his rifle, waited. All along the line, teams located and disabled sensors. Soon the line was moving again. It narrowed and halted again and Stovall’s Century halted and formed up as a column behind the line. It prepared to take down the first objective, the hill that rose out of the forest right in front of Stovall and his contubernium. Time to go to work.
First fire team took off their BOS and dug out wire pliers and duck tape. They high-crawled forward and then met the first string of barbed wire, triple-strand concertina at the base of the hill, bare ground beyond. An inverted triangle of thin metal hung on a steel stake inside the wire. It said, “Danger! Land Mines! Do Not Enter!”
First team rolled onto their backs and used their wire pliers to cut strands of wire part way through at first, then wiggled the wire back and forth until it separated, held the ends close together so they wouldn’t snap way. Stovall and the troops from his fire team assisted; they slowly lifted the wire away and duck taped it back. They worked to clear four lanes through the wire, four little openings a meter wide and a meter high. Stovall’s team grounded their BOS and crawled through, probing for mines with their bayonets. They found mines and marked them with infrared spray paint, visible only through night vision gear. First team followed fifty meters behind, crawling, bringing all the BOS with them.
After crossing two hundred meters of uphill open ground they met a chain-link fence. They moved to the right fifty meters and found a spot not monitored by sensors and used wires with alligator clips at one end and grounding stakes at the other to allow the high voltage current of the electric fence to flow around. Then they carefully cut a hole, careful to not rattle the fence. A single hole, a meter wide and half meter high. They crawled through and then passed all the BOS through and stacked them. Stovall removed a block of explosive from his BOS and moved up the hill at a low-crawl.
He found the bunker at the top of the hill, an observation post. He crawled around it and rolled into the trench that led to its back door and waited. The rest of his team was in the trench right behind him. First team and the contubernium leader and his assistant went along the trench away from the bunker to find the guard shack. The order “fix bayonets” came across Stovall’s face piece as a text message. He quietly affixed his bayonet onto his rifle, ensured the firing safety was engaged. He crawled to the bunker door and rose to his knees and slowly, carefully, quietly felt the door knob and turned it, pulled the door open just a millimeter. Unlocked!
He set the explosive aside and looked back and gave a thumb-up. “Do it” appeared on his face piece. He stood and his fire team stacked on him and he felt a tap on his shoulder and he swung the door open forcefully and entered the bunker. He skipped the closest defender, leaving him for the rest of the team to deal with. He was a Batistian soldier who was playing a game on his personal communicator; he dropped it and stood at attention. In the low light of the bunker’s interior he must have mistook Stovall for a supervisor or commander making a surprise inspection.
The second defender was leaned back in the seat of the bunker’s pulse laser gun. He sat up as Stovall approached. Stovall stabbed him in the neck and withdrew the blade. Then Stovall realized the defender wore no body armor and could have been stabbed a little lower. The defender arched his back and then fell to his right. Stovall kicked him to roll him onto his back and stabbed into his heart, to ensure he was dead. Stovall looked around, then back to his left rear. The first defender was dead, the team leader wiping his bayonet on the uniform of the dead defender. Stovall did the same.
A troop further behind disconnected and then field stripped the bunker’s pulse laser and strew the pieces on the floor, stomped the control module under the heel of his boot and it shattered into a dozen pieces. The rest of the Century came up and established a defense at the top of the hill. The Centurion came and checked each contubernium, made slight adjustments to their positions and lanes of fire, set security at fifty percent. He called up to higher to tell them that the objective was closed out.
Stovall slept while his battle buddy kept watch. He slept until the explosions started. A team from Legion HQ was clearing out mines the fast, easy way: detecting them with scanners and shooting them with rifles. Stovall climbed to stand on top of the bunker and raised his visor and saw the bright glow of an imminent sunrise on the horizon where sky met ocean. Then the sea became a flash of emerald, bright for just a moment before the sun poked a crescent of itself up into view. He stood for a full two minutes and watched as the sun became a full circle of deep red above the horizon. It would be a yellow sun later, too bright to look at directly when higher in the sky, its rays passing through less air. He saw the ships of the Northern Republic fleet as they crept in closer to the shore to begin the landing of the Panzer Brigade.
He climbed down and said to his battle buddy, “Well, that was easy.”
“Bastards didn’t have a chance.”
Stovall felt bad for a moment. Sure, it was an armed enemy. Sure, it was kill or be killed. And it was his chosen profession. But he wasn’t running around killing people for fun. And anyway, nobody lives forever. He’d just shortened a life by a little bit. An entire lifetime was not even a blink of cosmic time, meaningless really. But these defenders were such amateurs. Helpless…
But given the chance, each and every one of them would kill him and not think twice about it. He wondered if the man he’d killed had killed someone before and how he felt about it. Life was cheap. Cheap? Only as cheap as you make it. He vowed he would not sell his life so cheaply. He was a fighter, a survivor, and now a killer. Their lives were cheap only because they let themselves get killed so easily. The dumb bastards didn’t even bother to lock their bunker’s back door. They could at least have made the Legion pay a block of explosives for their lives, but…
Stovall said, “Why’d you call them Bastards?”
His battle buddy said, “They’re from Batista. ‘Batistians’ is too hard to say. So, ‘Bastards.’ People from the country of Batista.”
Stovall laughed, had to laugh. Not at the funny name necessarily, but to release stress. He felt the tension leave his body and he felt more alive. Energized but also relaxed. And the other Munifex of his Contubernium laughed too. They hadn’t heard the joke but had heard his laughter. They laughed, some until they coughed, rubbed watering eyes. Stovall heard the laughter spread, heard it make its way all around the perimeter of the entire Century. Bastards…
Chapter Six
Galen stood at the bow and leaned on the forward rail of the Northern Republic Fleet’s flag ship and p
eered at the dark coast ahead. It was still dark but the sun was about to rise behind him. His personal communicator buzzed and he answered. It was a call from Tad.
“Hey, sir. The Legion reports all secure. I’m ordering the Brigade to start its landing now.”
“Thank you. Any problems, you call me. All right?”
“You got it, boss.” Tad paused.
“Jasmine Six out.” Galen ended the call.
He was alone, wanted to be alone. All his staff and subordinate commanders had things to do, were busy elsewhere. But they knew what to do. Every detail was worked out, to include alternate courses of action. Nothing for Galen to do but watch.
A crusty shellback walked up from behind and stood on Galen’s left and held a flotation vest out at arms length. “Put this on, sir, if you want to lean on my rail.”
Galen stared for a moment and then took the vest and put it on. The sailor was lean and wiry, a crusty shellback indeed. Chevrons and rockers and service stripes polluted most of the left sleeve of his uniform.
He winked at Galen. “Thankee, sir.” He then leaned on the rail and spit into the sea, stood straight and offered his hand. “Master Chief Jones at your service.”
Galen shook his hand. The hilltops beyond the coast line brightened as sunlight struck them first. The Master Chief turned and climbed a ladder well up to the ship’s bridge. Galen watched the landing craft leave the transport ships.
They were hovercraft and they each carried full armored platoons all the way up the beach to where the beach met the woods and they stopped to let the vehicles drive off. Then they went back down the beach and moved back to the transport sips to pick up more Brigade units. It would take seven trips in all, shuttling back and forth from ship to shore. The recon company and the light infantry battalion piggybacked with the light tank battalion on the first load. Always good to get the dismounted infantry out there early. The second trip, the Cav squadron. The Mechanized Infantry battalion took two trips, elements of the Brigade support battalion mixed in with it. The fifth trip was the Stallion tank battalion, followed by the Hercules heavy tank battalion.
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