by B. V. Larson
“Two sides…” I explained. “This is no free-for-all. Manfred said it’s blue against red. All the humans are on the blue side.”
Harris frowned, reading further down. “We’re facing… Blood Worlders? Hundreds of them? When did this turd drop onto your tapper?”
“This morning, I guess.”
“You knew about it? And you didn’t tell us?”
The truth was I hadn’t bothered to read it at all. But that wouldn’t be a good thing to tell anyone now. Harris needed to believe in me just as much as the rank and file did.
“It’s no big deal,” I said. “It’s just a bigger op, because we have a bigger deck to play on.”
“But… Blood Worlders? What kind of Blood Worlders are we talking about?”
The truth was I didn’t know—I hadn’t skimmed down to that section yet.
“All I know is that they’re already in there, setting up camp in the center.”
“They get a fort?” Harris demanded. “That’s totally unfair, sir! We should protest.”
“Complain to Primus Graves all you want. I hear he loves whining.”
Harris grumbled. “So, we’ve got to dig them out? We’re expected to overcome an entrenched force?”
“That’s right. You all done crying now? What matters is that we win. Now, get to your platoon and keep them organized. They’re the core of this formation.”
Grumbling, Harris moved to his line of heavy troopers and began examining each kit in person. When he found something out of place, he cursed, cuffed and generally abused the soldier in question.
I shook my head. In his platoon, his noncoms didn’t have much to do. He was still a veteran at heart. I guess decades of doing one job made it stick with a guy, promotion or no.
We were standing under the big blue dome light by now. The door stayed closed for about two minutes after we got there, which gave me just enough time to talk to all of my adjuncts and get them organized.
A buzzer sounded while we were still shuffling around. The light went green, and the big door slid away, vanishing silently into the walls.
“Unit, advance!” I shouted.
Immediately, Barton’s team jogged off to the left. They were moving fast and stepping smartly. I could see Barton was already having an effect on them. What’s more, she was at the head of her platoon, not hanging back in the rear ranks. Noob troops really appreciated a visible leader.
The thickest trees turned out to be there on our left, and I was glad for that bit of luck. It appeared like I’d planned for the lights to take immediate cover—but in truth, it was happenstance.
“Harris, advance at a walking pace. Barton, report a deer with the shits if you see one.”
“Roger that,” both said in my headset.
We were on tactical chat, which was normally pretty lively, but the troops were quiet today. They all knew some of us were about to die. Knowledge like that tended to maintain discipline without a lot of effort from the officers.
Harris’ armored troops formed a double line, walking about three meters apart. They kept a ragged formation and moved slowly but deliberately. Each carried a morph-rifle, which had many different modes and capabilities.
After the armored troops had advanced perhaps fifty meters, I pinwheeled my arm, signaling for Leeson to follow.
He did so in good order. His weaponeers encircled the other specialists, walking with their oversized belchers in their hands.
Belchers were plasma weapons with a lot of variability. They were line-of-sight, but they could be used to fire a powerful narrow blast that could take out an armored vehicle or a broader beam that could incinerate a squad of infantry all at once. Created originally for larger beings, our weaponeers tended to be very muscular males.
In the middle of the weaponeers were our most vulnerable troops, a knot of bios and techs. This last team busied themselves by flying small drones called buzzers everywhere, searching for the enemy.
Normally, Leeson’s group would have a few 88s with them—but not today. No artillery was allowed on Green Deck. I guess someone was afraid of a hull breach in flight, which could theoretically take out the transport and kill the entire legion.
As we marched forward, I had the chance to scan more details of the exercise on my tapper, including my assigned role.
Frowning, I read the final words.
Remember officers, this exercise is designed to train and build morale. It is therefore weighted in favor of the Blood Worlder troops, as they have they greater need for reassurance in our leadership. They’re meant to win this conflict, so don’t be surprised when the inevitable outcome materializes.
Graves had signed the bottom.
“That cold-hearted prick…” I muttered to myself.
-16-
I don’t mind telling you, I was a mite pissed.
Graves often set up bullshit exercises like this. It seemed to be his specialty. But even so, this shit-cake took the prize.
He’d set up a whole cohort of human troops—his cohort, no less—to take a deadly fall. He actually expected us to fail, and that’s why he’d given the Blood Worlders a head start to fortify the center.
My mind churned. I didn’t like the situation or the circumstances. Most of all, I was wishing I’d read the mission details when they’d first come to my tapper mailbox—but I’d decided to let that wait until this morning. Then… I’d never quite gotten around to it.
Switching to officer’s chat, I contacted Manfred.
“Hey, Centurion,” I said. “Are you marching straight in?”
“No frigging way,” was his immediate response. “Let me guess: You want to commit suicide real quick to protest this cluster, is that it, McGill?”
“Nah,” I said. “I want to win.”
Manfred laughed. “That ain’t happening.”
“What if we all charge—all at once? If we could talk the other centurions into an early rush—”
“McGill?” Graves broke in.
I wondered right off if he’d been listening. As our primus, he had the permissions to break into any conversation on this channel, private or not.
“Yessir!” I answered promptly.
“You’re not to hit the central fort for three more minutes. You got that? Set a timer on your tapper.”
“It’s as good as done, Primus.”
He grunted and left the channel.
“There’s your answer,” Manfred said. “Seems like you’ve got a guardian angel listening to your every thought.”
“Yeah…” I agreed, and I closed the channel.
We trudged forward toward the center of the field, but before we made it very far scattered fire began peppering Harris’ line.
“Snipers!” Harris roared. “Take cover!”
Everyone scattered and ducked. I couldn’t even see the enemy yet—but I did see a structure ahead. Gray puff-crete walls encircled a building that looked like a pile of large blocks with dark, slit-like windows.
Enemy fire poured out of these windows with increasing frequency. They weren’t just shooting at us, fortunately, but at all the advancing units as blue team emerged from the bush.
The quick-growth trees were taking a beating all around us. The leaves jumped and slapped at their trunks. The foliage itself was kind of tropical in nature. Mostly palms with big fronds and fat trunks.
As the incoming fire died down, we counted our casualties.
“Six wounded, two dead,” Leeson reported.
His bio specialists crawled over the landscape, administering aid or quick death as was required. It was their job to make sure any soldier who couldn’t fight anymore was sent to Blue Deck for a quick revival.
During this interlude, the sky darkened. I was surprised when it began to rain.
“That’s new,” I muttered, looking up.
The artificial sky was gushing raindrops. Soon, the hot landscape began tossing up curls of steam. Could this be what fighting on the target world was going
to be like? I suspected it would be even worse.
“Adjunct Barton!” I shouted on tactical. “Advance under cover, find good firing positions, and keep the enemy honest. Make them duck with your rifles in sniper-mode.”
The firing out of the thick copse of trees to my left began almost immediately. Barton must have been anticipating my order.
“No wonder Victrix recruited her,” I muttered to myself. Not for the first time, I wondered why she’d been kicked out of that elite group.
Our two sides traded fire, and both scored a few hits. One heavy trooper slid off the battlements and did a facer in the mud.
That’s when I noticed the mud. It was growing in depth as the rain soaked in. I got onto the officers’ chat channel immediately.
“3rd unit is requesting permission to attack,” I said.
“You want to die early, McGill?” Graves replied.
“No sir, but there’s a growing mud puddle all around the central fort. If we don’t go for it soon, we’ll be mired in soup up to our assholes.”
There was a few seconds of quiet, then Graves came back on the line. “I see that now… All right, most of the units are in position, and the fight is getting dull. Time to kick the show up a notch. I’ll contact each of the units and get back to you.”
I heard a chair creak over the com channel, and I frowned. Just where was the primus? I suspected he was watching from somewhere safe, perhaps with a foamy beer in his hand.
Leeson had crawled over to my position, and he was listening into the chat channel. Adjuncts could hear the traffic, but they weren’t supposed to talk much unless offering up critical information. Otherwise, it would be chaos on the shared voice line.
“McGill,” Leeson said, shaking my armored shoulders.
“What?” I demanded.
He pointed upward. I followed the gesture—and then I saw it.
A cupola, circular in shape, sat above us. It was an observation booth. Windows went all the way around, and I could see figures up there, watching us.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” I said. “Just like a private suite at a football game.”
“Use your zoomers,” he said. “You won’t believe it.”
I did as he suggested, and my faceplate lit up. It zoomed sickeningly, and I could see the figures in the observation booth.
Every primus in the legion seemed to be up there, along with other fellows I didn’t recognize. After a moment, I realized they had to be commanders from the enemy legion, the Blood Worlder leaders.
“Is that a friggin’ squid?” I demanded aloud.
Incensed, I stood up and shook a fist at them.
A few stray rounds popped nearby, and Leeson tugged at me. At last, I let him pull me back down.
Feeling a fresh surge of anger, I decided it was about time to take unauthorized action. After all, if you couldn’t innovate on a fake battlefield, when could you?
To start with, I muted my microphone. Graves was obviously listening to my line directly. I would have to talk to my troops the old-fashioned way.
“Leeson,” I told my top adjunct, “get all of your weaponeers to focus fire on the base of that turret over there.”
I pointed to a nearby corner of the fortress walls. It was something like two hundred meters off—close enough for a point-blank gush of plasma to do some serious damage.
Leeson looked at me. “Graves hasn’t ordered us to attack yet, Centurion.”
“I know that. When he does, he’ll probably tell us to charge the walls. But we’re not going to die in the mud for nothing. Get every beam you’ve got, tightened down to the narrowest setting to hit that corner. Have Sargon coordinate the op. He’s to fire the second he gets lined up.”
Leeson trotted away, bent over double to avoid sniper fire. He didn’t look happy, but I didn’t care about that.
Sargon was a senior noncom who’d spent a lot of years as a weaponeer. I trusted his judgment. While he squirmed the men into position, I talked to Harris privately.
“Switch every morph-rifle you’ve got over to grenade fire,” I said. “When they come out of that castle, let them have it.”
“Why the hell would the enemy give up their advantage?” he asked me. “They’d be crazy to come at us.”
“Just do it.”
Grumbling, Harris shook his head, but he passed the orders along. The heavy troopers had morph-rifles, weapons that had several configurations. The trouble with them was it took at least thirty seconds to switch over. If we were caught in the middle of this operation, things would go badly.
Kivi was the last member of Leeson’s platoon I gave orders to. I told her to send every drone buzzer the techs had into the castle, over the walls, to buzz-bomb the inhabitants.
“Nail the squids,” I told her. “Any squid you see, take him down. Poke his eyes out if you have to.”
She smiled at me. “It’s about time we did something. This whole exercise is bullshit.”
Kivi didn’t hesitate or complain at all. She just talked to the other techs, passing the word to other units as well.
Soon, a flock of buzzers rose up from our lines. It looked like a bee swarm. In unison, the massed drones swept over the walls and vanished into the fort.
At about the same time, Sargon began burning a hole in the wall at the base of the nearest turret. It blackened, and the rain drops that were caught in the converging beams wisped into steam as they encountered raging heat.
It wasn’t until a few more beams began cooking the walls from various angles that the officers above us took notice. Several units, perhaps assuming the general attack was underway, were hitting the other towers the same way I was. As my tapper began to blink urgently, Centurion Manfred’s team joined in the fun, blasting the base of the nearest tower.
“McGill?” Graves’ voice boomed into my headset. “What the hell are you doing? No one ordered the attack yet!”
“Well sir,” I said, “you might want to step up the schedule a little. Apparently, some of the boys got antsy.”
As I spoke, I watched the base of the nearest puff-crete tower blow apart. The heat had become so intense and concentrated, it had vaporized a hole.
Then the unexpected happened. The tower leaned and toppled. We’d taken out the support to the structure. Apparently, it wasn’t completely made of stuff as tough as puff-crete. Either that, or we’d got a lucky hit on the central struts and melted them.
A few Blood Worlders were flung free of the structure to crash down into the mud. One slaver was among them, flailing with his tremendously long arms. Barton’s light troopers shot him to death eagerly.
The battle was on, and Graves was beyond pissed. “3rd unit! You’ve engaged without orders!”
“It was Leeson’s weaponeers, sir,” I shouted. “They’re bloodthirsty. You just can’t hold back an angry mob forever.”
“Goddammit, McGill!”
Leeson frowned at me. “That’s bullshit, Centurion,” he complained. “You can’t blame this all on me. You’re the one screwing this cat, I’m just holding the tail!”
I waved away his arguments. A moment later, Graves came onto the general chat channel, broadcasting to the entire cohort.
“Blue team, you seem to be very eager. I’m ordering a full charge on every flank. Storm that castle, and take it—now!”
A roar went up, and it rang in my ears. Light troopers stood and advanced—including mine.
The charge was suicidal, of course, but that’s what Graves apparently wanted. I gritted my teeth. It was one thing to jump the gun and fire without orders, it was quite another to disobey a direct instruction from your CO. I had no choice but to go with it.
“Barton, you’ve got the ball,” I said. “Advanced to contact, set every snap-rifle to full-auto. These Blood Worlders aren’t going to die easy.”
Even as we prepared to charge, however, the enemy beat us to it. The front gates fell open, and through the gap where the tower had been, hulking figures appeared
.
Daring to smile, I realized the Blood Worlders were taking the bait. They hated sitting inside fortifications. They liked to close with their enemy and get personal.
My smile faltered when I saw the monstrous troops they’d sent against us. These attackers were too big to be heavy troopers—they were true giants.
Standing about seven meters tall, they looked like barrel-chested men. Their heads were slightly too small for their bodies, however, and their eyes had the shared light of madness and idiocy in them.
Each wore a harness and a backpack. Their backpacks contained a power generator that fueled a beam projector and a shimmering personal body-shield for each of them.
Our light troops were just moving into the mud when the giants appeared. They paused in horror, then began hammering away with their snap-rifles. They were firing wildly, close to panic just at the sight of these approaching monsters.
Each giant’s shielding sparked and flashed around him, as if a thousand tiny gnats were hitting a bug-light.
“How’d you know, McGill?” Harris demanded. “How’d you know they’d charge us?”
“Because we used drones to nail their squids. Blood Worlders lose their minds when you take out their officers. Now, grenade these monsters!”
The battle became wild and violent after that. The snap-rifles were useless against shielding, but our light troops still served a valuable role. They caught the attention of the angry giants, who used their beam projectors to cut them down like wheat before a dozen buzzing scythes.
In the meantime, Harris and his heavies got organized and lobbed grenades at the feet of the giants. The grav-plasma charges pulsed blue and overwhelmed the enemy shielding. One by one, the giants fell.
When they’d been swept away, I was surprised to see some of my light troops still lived. Barton herself led the final seven toward the walls.
“Damn,” Harris said in surprise, “that girl is really going for it!”
“Graves said to charge. He’s ordered us all in now. Have your armored troops switch their rifles over to shock-mode, and follow Barton into the breach. Leeson, gather up Sargon’s group. We’re advancing behind Harris.”