“This is very embarrassing,” the Deputy Administrator admitted, breaking the depressing silence. Compared to primitive humans, Ruhar soldiers were supposed to be super warriors, with advanced weapons and enhanced biology through genetic engineering. “My military advisors tell me our troops, and our training, are not coping well with ground warfare. We may have become too reliant on air power; our forces have been slow to adapt to combat that is restricted to the ground.” She held her hands palms up. “You must understand, warfare where neither side has orbital bombardment capability, or air power, is highly unusual in this conflict. The Kristang have a slight advantage in this type of combat; because of their constant fighting between clans, they practice ground combat frequently. Fighting between clans often happens in crowded urban areas, where neither side can risk using air power or heavy weapons.”
Marcellus looked at Bailey, who tilted his head. “Administrator Logellia,” Marcellus offered, “we may be able to help you. Our forces are very well trained in ground combat-”
“Bart,” Bailey interrupted. “Can we talk privately?”
“Excuse us for a moment, please,” Marcellus asked Logellia, before he and Bailey walked out into the corridor.
Keeping his voice low, though aware the Ruhar could listen if they really wanted to, Bailey shook his head. “I thought the official UNEF position is we are neutral in this battle?”
“That ship sailed over the horizon, when a bunch of dumb-fuck Keepers joined the Kristang and killed Ruhar,” Marcellus explained. “If we don’t demonstrate that the Ruhar can trust UNEF, at least trust UNEF HQ, we’re going to be in big Goddamn trouble.”
“And if we do throw ourselves into the fight on the side of the Ruhar, and the Kristang take this planet back?”
“Nick, we are thoroughly fucked anyway if the lizards take Paradise,” Marcellus declared. “Helping the Ruhar now won’t make the lizards hate us any more than they already do. But it might make a big difference in how the Ruhar treat UNEF once the fighting is over. All I’m talking about for now is a few human observers riding along on a Ruhar raid. See how the Ruhar fight, maybe we can give them advice. Hell, fighting desperate ground battles with inadequate resources is the US Marine Corps specialty, isn’t it?”
“Ooh-rah,” Bailey muttered. “All right, if you can persuade HQ to allow us to ride along, I’m in. Damn, I’d love to see Ruhar troops in action. All I’ve seen of Ruhar combat tactics so far is sims provided by the Kristang. Now that we know the lizards are lying MFers, I don’t know if anything they told us is true.”
The next night, Staff Sergeant Surmacz and his team approached a small village, small even by the standards of UNEF on Paradise. The village had been planned to be larger, but the nearby river flooded out the first planting of crops, and it had been decided moving the residents was easier than building a flood control barrier. Now only four people stubbornly clung to the huts they had constructed, tending the fields farthest from the river. The UNEF security patrol stopped in that village only because it was conveniently located at the point where they had to turn around at nightfall, and because the empty huts provided a convenient place to sleep without having to set up tents.
Sergeant Surmacz had been directed to the village because the UNEF security team was known to stop there overnight. With the village being on the edge of UNEF territory, the patrol team was casual about security at night, according to a rumor heard by a Keeper. Surmacz was counting on that rumor being true, and he was counting on human nature. At the end of a long, boring day on patrol, and in the middle of nowhere, the temptation would be for the security team to not make a lot of effort to lock their weapons away. They would likely bring some weapons into the huts with them, but keep the other weapons in their hamvees. To get into a locked hamvee, Staff Sergeant Surmacz had homemade explosives; supposedly enough to blow a hole in a window so someone could reach in and unlock a door. Supposedly the explosive was also not powerful enough to blow up the hamvee and its powercells; Surmacz had to trust the chemist’s word on that. To grab the weapons out of a hamvee quickly after blowing a window, his team needed to be close to the hamvee when the explosive detonated. They would not have a large margin for error, and no backup. “After we get the door open, we grab whatever weapons we can find. Priority is heavy weapons, I don’t have to explain that to you. If this goes south, we split up and meet at the rendezvous point sundown tomorrow,” Surmacz reminded his team. If the operation were to fail, Surmacz thought his team might be hunted from the air by Ruhar aircraft equipped with sensors that could see right through the jungle canopy. According to the Kristang, the massive air battle that was already being called The Great Paradise Furball had destroyed most of the Ruhar’s airpower, and neither side had starships in orbit at the moment. Surmacz, and the entire Keeper leadership, were counting on the Ruhar not being willing to assign their precious remaining air assets to tracking a few troublesome humans in the jungles of Lemuria.
“You all know what to do?” Surmacz asked and everyone nodded agreement. They had gone over the plan two dozen times so each member of the team knew their assignment. “Excellent. Remember, we don’t want any casualties unless absolutely necessary. Anyone fires a shot or an arrow without my order, they’ll be left behind. Got that?”
The team advanced through the almost pitchblack jungle, with Surmacz cursing their complete lack of night vision gear. The Ruhar had taken away all the combat-capable toys provided to UNEF by the Kristang, and even had collected the crude night vision gear UNEF had brought from Earth. The various types of zPhone all had a night vision capability but, of course, they couldn’t use zPhones for fear of being tracked.
The team advanced, single file, as stealthily as they could manage while stumbling through dense jungle undergrowth in almost complete darkness. Their only guide in the night was a single light outside a hut in the village ahead. When Surmacz judged they were less than fifty meters from the clearing, he had his team spread out. “Choi, Martinez, you take point-”
“Nobody move!” A woman’s voice rang out from the jungle to their left, followed by a single round fired into the air for emphasis. Bright lights clicked on around them, blinding Surmacz’s team. Shading his eyes with one hand, Staff Sergeant Surmacz counted six lights, possibly mounted under M4 rifles. “Do not move from where you are!” The unseen voice ordered. “Drop your weapons now, do it now.”
“Do what she says,” Surmacz ordered.
“We’re just going to give up?” Markey protested.
“We’re going to live to fight another day, you idiot,” Surmacz snapped as he dropped his bow and arrow. “We’re surrounded by at least a half dozen people armed with M4s at least. They may have this area seeded with Claymores.”
“That’s a good guess,” the voice acknowledged.
“It’s what I would do,” Surmacz said with grudging respect. “Everyone, do what the woman says. Drop your weapons and put your hands above your heads. This fight is over for us. For now.”
Other than collecting their backpacks, spears, bows and arrow, knives and other crude weapons, the UNEF security team didn’t do anything to restrain Surmacz’s team. They didn’t have to, for without the food in their backpacks, they were totally dependent on UNEF for survival. After they were herded into the village, the Keeper team could see they had been ambushed by a British UNEF security team, led by a female lieutenant.
“If you don’t mind compromising operational security, how did you know we were coming here?” Staff Sergeant Surmacz asked hopefully.
“Don’t mind at all,” the lieutenant answered with a grin, her teeth shining brightly in the artificial light. “We didn’t know you were coming here, until you passed by the only other places you might target.”
“You tracked us,” Surmacz said with disgust.
“The whole way.” She lifted a boot. “Tracking sensors in our boots, your boots. The hamsters probably have trackers and other sensors in our clothes, but they know we can
’t go far in this jungle without boots.”
“Shit,” Surmacz groaned. He had wanted to make footwear, even had a design sketched for wood soles and canvas uppers, but Keeper leadership told him there was no time, they needed to seize the brief window of opportunity while the Ruhar did not have control of the sky. “We had no chance, then.”
“No,” she shook her head, “you didn’t have any chance at all. Thank you, Staff Sergeant, you did provide my team with entertainment and a training exercise; things have been rather dull around here. This will make you feel worse, so I am going to enjoy telling you. Your whole mission was a waste of your time and energy. Shortly after you left, the lizards landed aircraft in several Keeper villages and flew away with volunteers. The lizards are not only short on airpower, they are thin on manpower. They took on volunteers, that’s what they called them, to help secure projector sites the lizards are trying to reactivate, and to attack projector sites held by the Ruhar. That’s what the lizards said, anyway. UNEF Command reports your fool Keeper brothers are being given light weapons and thrown into hopeless ground assaults against projector sites controlled by the Ruhar. The one assault they conducted so far was a slaughter; almost all the Keepers dead or wounded, and the Ruhar still hold the position.”
“According to the liars at UNEF Command,” Markey said, and spat on the ground.
The British woman gave a disdainful shrug. “You don’t need to trust the word of UNEF Command. Think for yourself; how would a small group of humans fair against a well-armed Ruhar security team?” The intel report from UNEF Command had privately concluded the Keeper assault had been much more successful than expected by the Ruhar. If the Keepers merely had another dozen soldiers, they might have overrun the projectors site and temporarily seized control of it. If they had even temporary control, they might have been able to damage or even destroy the projector. Or hold it long enough for the Kristang to reactivate the projector and prevent Ruhar starships from approaching the planet. The problem for the Ruhar, UNEF Command concluded, was they were used to relying on air power, and their skills at ground combat had been allowed to atrophy. By contrast, UNEF troops were well accustomed to improvising tactics with limited resources. Humans, especially out among the stars, were experts at dealing with limited resources. The Ruhar had already very grudgingly admitted they might be able to learn something from the primitive species from Earth.
“What’s going to happen to us?” Surmacz asked with a warning look at Markey to keep his mouth shut.
“My orders are to transport you to a holding facility-”
“A prison,” Koblenz said angrily. “You are the traitors; you should be in prison.”
The lieutenant ignored his remark. “What happens to you there, I don’t know and I don’t care. If it were up to me, I would drive you Sleepers to the end of the road,” she pointed past the village, to the edge of UNEF territory, “and leave you in the jungle. Instead, my orders are to see that you are fed and receive medical care as needed. I am a soldier, I follow orders from the chain of command. Think about that while you have nothing else to do at the holding facility. And think about the fact that the lizards threw your volunteers into a slaughter, with no hope of accomplishing anything.”
“That goes for all of us,” Surmacz said quietly.
“Staff Sergeant?” She asked.
“All of us,” he pointed to her security team. “All humans, all of UNEF, everyone who left Earth. None of us ever had a chance to accomplish anything useful out here. You have a rifle,” he pointed to the British Army L85 rifle the lieutenant carried. “The hamsters,” he pointed to the sky, “have starships. None of us can do shit out here.”
When General Marcellus suggested the Ruhar allow UNEF observers to accompany a Ruhar ground combat force, he intended to send for a hand-picked UNEF team from Lemuria. Instead, because Administrator Logellia enthusiastically embraced the idea immediately, Marcellus and Bailey found themselves hustled aboard a Ruhar combat transport within the hour. “Be careful what you ask for,” Bailey muttered under his breath to Marcellus as a resentful group of Ruhar soldiers herded the two humans up the ramp of their transport, an aircraft that had many hurriedly patched holes in its wings and hull. The Ruhar military intel group had learned the Kristang were sending at least two transports full of warriors to raid and capture a recently-discovered projector site. During the intense ground battle, the two humans were stuck inside their transport, safely tucked behind a hill. The location was only theoretically safe, because the Kristang had managed to launch a pair of antiaircraft missiles that popped up over the hill and scanned the area, searching for targets. Both missiles were intercepted by the transport’s defensive maser turrets, but warhead debris pinged off the hull like hail. The Ruhar pilots gave apologetic looks toward the humans, who both merely shrugged.
Marcellus, and even more so Bailey, chafed at not being outside with the Ruhar assault force. However, with the Ruhar providing virtual reality goggles, even Bailey had to admit he was actually better able to observe the overall battle from inside the transport. The VR goggles, connected to sensors embedded in the helmets and weapons of Ruhar soldiers, allowed the two humans a God’s eye view of the Ruhar side of the assault. They could select to see what an individual Ruhar was seeing, or zoom up and watch the battle unfolding from above, as if the dense forest tree canopy were not there.
What Bailey saw and heard did not impress him. It distressed him.
“Well,” General Bailey said with a grunt as he and Marcellus walked the battlefield after the last shot had been fired, “this sure was a full-blown clusterfuck of epic proportions. If one of my platoon commanders conducted an assault like this,” he moved to nudge the inert body of a Kristang in a powered armor suit.
“Don’t!” General Marcellus warned as he grabbed Bailey’s arm, pulling the Marine back. “Those powered armor suits are like a shark’s jaws; they can hurt you even when they’d dead. When the Ruhar determine a particular suit is really inactive, they paint it with a yellow circle,” he pointed to a yellow-painted suit ten meters away.
Bailey tilted his head. “Bart, that is something I would find useful in an intel briefing,” his tone implied that he rarely found intelligence briefings to be useful.
“Nick, I only learned about it a minute ago. A hamster had to stop me from getting myself killed,” he said with an embarrassed grin. “I’m sure that reinforced the hamsters’ thinking that we lowly humans don’t belong on any battlefield with them.”
“Are you kidding me?” Bailey snorted without humor. “You saw what I saw. The Ruhar should have kicked the lizard’s scaly asses here easily. Instead, they got thrown back three times before they broke through the Kristang perimeter,” he shook his head disgustedly. “And their casualty rate was thirty six percent. That’s shameful. If the Kristang had more than twenty minutes to prepare defenses here, the hamsters might have been sent scurrying back to their base with their furry little tails between their legs.”
Marcellus almost remarked that Ruhar did not actually have tails. Bailey had a point; the Ruhar assault had almost failed. The two overloaded Ruhar transports, with Marcellus and Bailey riding in cockpit jumpseats as unwanted observers, had landed near the recently discovered projector site only forty minutes after two Kristang aircraft landed. The Kristang had quickly overrun and killed the lightly-armed Ruhar survey team, and had been working to setup a defensive perimeter, when the Ruhar attacked. The battle had seesawed back and forth for almost an hour, with both sides acquitting themselves poorly, before the superior numbers of the Ruhar wore down the Kristang, and were able to get five soldiers behind the Kristang lines. After that, the battle became a frantic, swirling disorganized gunfight of individual soldiers fighting on their own in the thick forest. Marcellus thought he knew the answer; he asked anyway. “You think we can help our furry allies?”
“Help? Bart, supply my people with the fancy weapons and body armor the Ruhar have, and give us back our z
Phones and enhanced-vision goggles, and we could have taken the Kristang position here in one assault. Without genetic enhancements. And with a hell of a lot less casualties. Hell, the Ruhar have totally forgotten basic principles of infantry warfare; they are too reliant on airpower. Their fireteams didn’t support each other during the advance, they know nothing about overlapping fields of fire, they got bogged down behind cover way too long. We teach Full Spectrum Dominance battle tactics, but we also train our people what to do if our Airedales aren’t able to provide support. The Kristang didn’t do much better, in my assessment. They had three powered armor suits,” he refrained from kicking the nearest example with a boot, “while our Ruhar buddies only had one. The lizards should have used the advantage of those three super suits to sortie out and outflank us; they could have caused all kinds of havoc. Those MFers can run like lighting in those suits, even in a forest. Instead, they wasted those suits on static defense; that idea was a loser from the get-go. What?” While Bailey was talking, Marcellus tried to silently get the Marine’s attention, finally resorting to a slashing motion across his throat. Bailey turned around to see a Ruhar officer standing behind him; the Ruhar’s nametag read something that might have sounded like ‘Tahl’ to a human. The Ruhar must have heard most of Bailey’s harsh analysis of the Ruhar assault, for the officer’s expression was an angry glare. “Hey,” Bailey nodded. He knew Marcellus would prefer he offer an apology to the Ruhar, but Bailey’s thinking was that he had nothing to lose. “You heard what I have to say, what is your opinion of this Goddamn mess?”
Trouble on Paradise: an ExForce novella (ExForce novellas Book 1) Page 3