Into the Maelstrom

by Loren L. Coleman

  There was no end of the empire’s own people who had fallen victim to high levels of radioactive contamination, and the Neo-Soviet military pressed them into service for their hardy nature and ability to withstand the chemical and radiological weapons so commonly employed. Rad Troops were fearless, taking pride in their final sacrifice for the empire. They branded themselves with the trifoil insignia commonly used to mark nuclear material. No great tacticians, they made up for it in determination. Armed with stripped-down Nagant 7.76s, a cheap-production rifle prone to breech jams, they fired steel-jacketed slugs tipped with hot uranium. Every bullet that shattered against hillside rock spread radioactive debris, and any nonlethal hit promised complications caused by internal contamination.

  Even now return fire spanged bullets off the rock facing, showering the area around Tousley with stone chips and splinters. Many shots passed overhead with sharp cracks of hypersonic velocity. Tousley ducked and rolled into a nearby shallow dry wash, fetching up against the legs of PFC Brad Williams.

  Williams carried one of the squad’s two Bulldog support rifles, the over-and-under combination that relied on the same 5.56 millimeter as the Pitbull, but included as well an M-81 20-mm grenade launcher. With the assault rifle the young PFC could punch a hole through a silver dollar at better than one hundred meters. The colonel had wanted to steal him away for sniper assignment, but Tousley refused to let him go and ’Becca had backed him on that one. Sainz could go poach from someone else’s squad.

  “How many you reckon?” Tousley asked, shuffle-crawling up beside the PFC. Williams never lost his cool in a firefight, and had a situational awareness Tousley admired. He noticed the new crease to the side of William’s helmet. A very near miss.

  “I saw yours go down. I accounted for two more, and Jerry picked off one. So no more than four is my guess.” Williams shook his head. “And no sign of Hastings,” he said, naming the scout Tousley’s squad had been backing.

  Tousley silently cursed Raymond Sainz for establishing a half-kilometer operations range for the Seventy-first’s forward scouts. That the colonel had been the one to set a backup, and that the scouts had actually requested a wider range while searching for the Black Mountain facility, didn’t matter. The fact remained that the sergeant had been too far back to render immediate aid. Corporal D.J. Hastings had radioed in nearly twenty minutes prior, frantically yelling through undiagnosed interference something about the sky “breaking open.” Shortly afterward, his voice weak but the strange static fading as Tousley’s squad zeroed in on his location, Deej had warned of contact with a patrol of Neo-Sov Rad Troopers. Then silence.

  Williams seemed to read his mind. “He’s been quiet too long. Think he bought it?”

  “Some Rad Troops have been known to home in on radio frequencies. If he’s still too close to them, he’d stay quiet.” At least, Tousley hoped that to be the case. “He’s not under orders to die this mission,” he said. The Union army’s traditional pledge was to keep searching so long as any doubt remained of a soldier’s condition. “And we can’t let this patrol report back in. We can only hope that whatever interfered with our comms has prevented them from getting through to Noril’sk.”

  Williams nodded, then checked his clip and swapped it out for a fresh one. “Call it,” he said.

  Tousley nodded. “Go!”

  The young PFC rolled to his right, up to the edge of the wash, and snapped off a new burst of fire. As the Nagant 7.76s tracked in on his position, Tousley rose to one knee and sighted down the slope. The fire had spread among the small pines, and a gray haze hung over the valley floor. He held his ground for several long heartbeats, daring a Rad Trooper to spot him. Finally, he picked out a new muzzle flash. His time spent, he cut loose with a single, long burst of fire before dropping back down.

  Williams quickly rolled back, chased by a hail of ricochets. “We missed. The smoke is getting thicker down there.” His voice gave away his frustration.

  “Not your standard Rad Trooper tactic,” Tousley agreed. It showed a bit more creativity than most Union soldiers gave Neo-Soviet mutants credit for. Still, the smoke likely didn’t bother them, and it did offer a decent camouflage. “It works both ways, though. They’ve got to come out of the smoke to spot us.”

  Putting it in words helped Tousley recognize what had eluded him before. “Deej set that fire!” he said. “He’s making his way up that stand of pine, and started the blaze down low to cover his path.”

  William’s answering grin and nod supported the idea, and Tousley quickly checked the positions of his squad. He picked out locations simply by sound. There was no mistaking the higher-pitched report of Union assault rifles against the heavy discharge of a Neo-Soviet-manufactured weapon. His people also relied on short, rapid bursts while the Neo-Sovs preferred steady but slower fire. He counted seven locations besides Williams and himself, fixing them in his mind.

  Tousley reached up to his left ear, toggling the commlink built into his helmet. “Awright, list’nup,” he said in good battlefield address, slurring those first words together. It didn’t matter if the Rad Troopers gained a fix on his position by comms. They already knew where he was. “We think Deej is lying low in that stand of pine stretching toward the rim, but that fire is crawling up his backside fast. So by numbers, we’re going to swing that direction and downslope, getting him the support he needs and putting down those mutes for good. Ready? Even numbers cover and odd numbers advance. Go, go, go!”

  On his own command, the sergeant belly-crawled forward to the cover of a large rock while Williams popped up to spray the lower valley with a good burst from his Bulldog. The PFC also let fly with a grenade. Tousley then slipped off to one side. He glanced back up the wash at Williams, making sure he was unhurt, then set himself to provide the next burst of protective fire from between his cover and an adjacent boulder. The Rad Troopers were sniping in close on his position, so he wedged his Pitbull between the rocks, using the support to be able to fire one-handed his next few rounds. Leapfrogging, Tousley hoped to pick up Corporal Hastings and then make the valley floor to finish off the Rad Troopers. Preferably without losses, though he knew he would probably lose at least one of his squad.

  He couldn’t have known how prophetic that thought would be.

  Tousley’s next command, for even numbers to advance, was interrupted by a throaty snarl and then a loud scream. He whipped his head around, back toward Williams. A red-skinned canine stood over the soldier, left-side claws gouged into the PFC’s back and fanged mouth buried in his shoulder. The dog was lean to the point of emaciation, its bones standing out in sharp relief and its muscles bunched and quivering beneath the tight-drawn skin. Open sores festered on its right shoulder, with pus running down its leg. A metal plate had been bolted down over the creature’s head, capping the skull with some armor protection and shielding the eyes. A mertvaya sobaka—death dog.

  Known as rad-hounds because they so often supported Rad Troopers, the mutant canines were lethal trackers. Steel-trap jaws could bite through protective gear and crush bones. They also sensed energy waves across a wide spectrum. No need for eyes, which was why the unreliable organs were capped beneath the metal shield. From background radiation alone rad-hounds bounded over the most broken terrain in perfect form. Mutant handlers often commanded them by radio signals. And they could be trained to hunt certain frequencies, such as the ones used by the Union squad.

  Tousley cringed at the crunch of bone mixed with the muffled growls of the rad-hound. His Pitbull wedged forward, Tousley pulled his Pug ten millimeter from its chest holster and trained it on the hideous animal. All he could think of was freeing his man from the deformed jaws. As the Pug’s laser sight spotted a tiny red dot just back of the metal cap, Tousley remembered at the last moment the collar device. All rad-hounds came equipped with some type of explosive device slung under their wide metal collars. It allowed their handlers to direct the hound into an enemy formation and then detonate the bomb. If Tousley
killed the creature, it would detonate regardless.

  Right then he knew there was no saving Williams.

  The knowledge settled over him with a cold detachment. His teeth clenched tight enough to hurt his jaw, Tousley drifted his laser sight down from the rad-hound’s head, across Williams’s shoulder and to the man’s just-visible chest. The red dot traced over one of the weaker points of the Kevlar flak vest, at the base of the neck and just off the shoulder. He caressed the trigger, twice, mercifully ending his man’s terror and agony. The dog ignored the death of its victim, continuing to worry at its prey like some game it had run down in a hunt. The red dot swept again over the metal cap protecting its head, finding an unarmored spot just back of the skull.

  His comms still open for the abandoned advance, Tousley gave his people one heartbeat’s notice. “Everyone ground and freeze,” he said in casual tones. He pulled the trigger and rolled to one side, taking cover around a bend in the wash as he abandoned his Pitbull and brought his arms up to protect the sides of his head.

  The explosion bucked the ground, shaking loose several small slides and hurling a gout of dirt, small rock, and bloody gobbets into the air. The bloody stump of one mertvya sobaka leg landed in front of Tousley’s face, two of the diamond-sharp claws still set into the large paw. The rain of light debris pattered against his back—small rock chips and burnt earth. The caustic scent of the explosives wafted around on a pale gray smoke.

  Spitting out dust, breathing shallowly of the acrid air, Tousley inventoried all body parts present and accounted for. His Pug had been protected as well by the wall of the wash, but the Pitbull assault rifle had been mangled when the explosion’s force had channeled between the boulders where he’d left it. He abandoned it there.

  “Shake it off,” he transmitted to his squad. As if to underscore the order, a bullet careened off a rock ledge above. The report of the shot and the ricochet itself was eerily soft after the deafening roar of the rad-hound’s explosive device.

  “The mutes down below haven’t forgotten us, and we sure aren’t forgetting them. Jerry and Maria, I want you to work your way back upslope and guard against another rad-hound sneaking down behind us. If you see its handler, I want him dead. Everyone else, we frog it straight to the valley floor. You burn down anything not wearing Union military issue.” No Neo-Sov unit was going to cost him a man and live to tell about it.

  “We’ll locate Hastings and collect Williams on our way out. Keep heads low and off-numbers lay down a good suppressing fire. No slips.

  “The price has already run high.”

  * * *

  Major Rebecca Howard knelt next to her commanding officer at the head of one body bag. Colonel Sainz shrugged uncomfortably, as if feeling Tom Tousley’s glare burning into his back, though she actually doubted he was even aware of the sergeant’s anger. His attention was reserved for the lost soldiers. Three of the black containers lay on the ground in the shadow of a Trojan supply carrier—two showed that they held full forms, while the third was half-filled with pieces. The assault group’s first casualties for the operation. Unlikely to be the last.

  Howard pulled back the flap on the bag holding Corporal D.J. Hastings, though positive identification was only possible from his dog tags. The two officers stared at the blackened flesh, charred and cracked as if flash-burned. The burnt-pork smell turned Howard’s stomach, though she weathered it. This wasn’t the first burn case she’d seen in her Union army years.

  The scout’s uniform was little more than tatters, all of it singed black. Only the helmet had survived mostly intact, left on to avoid peeling away any more of the ruined skin. The wide, staring eyes showed a touch of madness.

  “He’s cold?” Sainz asked quietly, pitching his voice for a private conference, though several dozen men and women stood in a circle not ten meters around.

  Howard nodded. “The CBR boys took their readings, and I watched. Whatever did this wasn’t nuclear. And it wasn’t a forest fire either.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “I was in the Two-oh-seventh Defense Force before joining the Seventy-first. We helped fight the Montana inferno, straight labor mostly, and then worked with cleanup crews. Fire victims are rarely burnt so uniformly across the body. And the alpine forests up here could never generate a blaze hot enough to do this kind of damage.”

  She lifted the flap back a bit more, pointing to three areas across the lower chest where charred flesh had been split and caked with the glossy red-black of dried blood. “This is where the Rad Troopers drilled Corporal Hastings, after the burns were inflicted and before the small pine fire swept over his location.”

  The colonel’s brown eyes sought out hers. They reflected a small measure of the pain his man must have experienced. “You’re saying he lived through this?”

  Her voice was rough but pitched soft. “It looks that way.”

  Sainz pulled the flap back up, covering the body. “Log this as an unexplained incident, then. And clear Sergeant Tousley of any negligence in the deaths.”

  That surprised her. Rebecca Howard had been the one to debrief the squad when they brought back Hastings and their own two dead. She’d placed Tom Tousley on notice right then that he faced possible charges for his reckless charge down the valley slope. Better she prepped him for it than for him to get it straight from Sainz. “He broke up his squad in the face of enemy opposition. It cost them a second casualty.”

  “He had to put Williams down himself,” the colonel said softly, running fingers back through his dark curls. “It was a judgment call then, picking his priorities. Maybe he made a poor decision, but we weren’t there, Major.”

  Rebecca Howard didn’t buy into it. She read the tension in her commander’s shoulders and knew the early losses were disturbing him. The unit was surveying the northeast quadrant of Gory Putorana, better than four hundred kilometers from Noril’sk. Here was the last place to expect a casual patrol, unless they were close to the Black Mountain facility. But no scouting party had yet to find good indication of it.

  “There’s something else, isn’t there?” she said.

  Sainz did not try to deny it. Still looking down at the black bag, he nodded. “The shoulder tattoos Tom reported on the Rad Troopers. The Fifty-sixth Striker. That’s Colonel Katya Romilsky’s command.”

  Rebecca didn’t place the name. “And you know her?”

  “I know of her. She’s very competent. If she had a patrol out here, it’s because she had an idea something was afoot. How she divined that I’m not certain. But when that patrol fails to report, it will be enough to draw out her command to come looking for us. I think we’re in for a fight, and I don’t need one of my sergeants with a possible court-martial hanging over his head to dull his edge.” He glanced to the side, in Howard’s direction. “You think I don’t see his problems? Get his anger refocused at the enemy, Major. That’s your job.”

  “Yes sir.” Still, a nagging doubt convinced Rebecca Howard that Sainz had not divulged all of his reasons. There was more hanging over him than some Neo-Soviet colonel and the possibly early termination of the mission. More than a curious death of one of his men.

  “You know what did this, don’t you, Raymond?” she said, but it was a statement more than a question. Using his given name was a liberty she seldom took, and then only when he had first used hers. “What killed Corporal Hastings.”

  A flicker of wariness, as if careful of what might be showing on his face, showed in the colonel’s eyes. There was something there. But when he spoke, Howard couldn’t help but believe him at once.

  “No, Rebecca. I don’t know what killed Hastings.” He shook his head in frustration. “The problem is, I’m beginning to wonder if anyone does.”

  5

  * * *

  C orporal Phillipe Savoign and PFC Amanda Baker stood their post at Tower 183, one of the small elevated buildings in Union territory that was responsible for observation of over fifty kilometers of Luna’s fence li
ne. Here on the back side of the moon the Earth would never grace the pale sky, but the tower was full into its fifth day of sunlight so cold-weather precautions weren’t necessary. The two specialists stared out across the thin strip of no-man’s-land, a barren gray landscape dotted with darker rocks. One hundred meters distant, on Neo-Soviet soil, their mirrors stared back from a similar building.

  Luna’s fence line stretched around the Neo-Soviet’s semicircular territory, monitored by electronics and at infrequent points by manned stations. From the enemy’s point of view, of course, Savoign figured the Neo-Sovs saw the fence line as surrounding the Union’s position, but facts were facts. The Union controlled better than two-thirds of Luna, which included nearly all of the “live side” facing Earth. Only Point Gagarin speared over from the empire’s “dead side,” the one region left undisputed since it placed the Neo-Sov’s main communication facility convenient to Union listening posts and satellite interceptors.

  That might be a fact he wasn’t supposed to know, but keeping secrets on Luna came hard. With the two nations sharing Earth’s moon, tensions ran high, and too often survival depended on working closely with other rates.

  “Tag, I’m in,” Baker said, tapping him on the shoulder. Savoign switched out with the PFC and walked to the other side of the tower, leaving her to keep an eye on their counterparts.

  He studied a landscape that had changed little in the century and a half since the original moon landing by Apollo astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. The moon’s gravity remained one-sixth Earth standard except at Union bases and outposts with installed gravity-compensation fields. Hundreds of atmospheric processors strained to provide a breathable if low-ceilinged atmosphere, and a fixative agent had been added to bind moondust into something approximating the true weight of soil. Still, the local ground remained white-gray and would never be conducive to growing much in the way of vegetation. And then there was the problem of the moon’s fifteen-day light-and-darkness cycle that still varied temperatures by as much as one hundred degrees Celsius and created a strong, eternal wind that constantly scoured the planetoid.