C.R.O.W. (The Union Series)

by Richards, Phillip

  We rummaged through the kit of our dead mates for ammunition, while balls of fire fell from the flickering red clouds to the surface of New Earth as the Union navy began a fresh bombardment.

  13: The Counter Attack

  Nothing wakes you up to the realities of life in space better than dragging the sorry remains of a fellow trooper unceremoniously through the red mud, a pool of blood sloshing about inside his respirator. Me and Brown slid Climo’s body over the bank of the ditch and into the growing stream of water that flowed along it. We sifted through his kit for his magazines and grenades and I tried not to look at my friend’s face, or what little was left of it. The dart that killed him had passed straight through his nose, and had taken flesh and bone with it. It was so gruesome I began to gag and I lifted my respirator just in time to vomit down my armour.

  Brown stopped what he was doing, ‘Don’t breathe in. Get your respirator back on.’

  I hated Brown. He was the absolute opposite of Climo, a bully and an arse-kisser. He had helped Woody to make my life on Challenger a complete misery. But he was right, and begrudging doing what he told me to I swallowed what bile was left in my mouth and replaced my respirator. I waited for the filters to do their job before finally breathing again.

  ‘Poor bastard,’ I finally said.

  Brown packed Climo’s mammoth ammunition into his daysack, slung it onto his back and offered the rest of what he found to me, ‘Yeah,’ he agreed grimly.

  My eyes were wet, partly because the stench of my own vomit still clung to my nostrils, but mostly because I realised one of my best friends in the platoon had died. Climo was gone, and my friend Greggerson was severely wounded, possibly dead too. Gilbert and Kane had never even made it to the ground, and Berezynsky had shared a similar fate with Climo. I felt as though every one of the few people that mattered to me had been taken, and all I had left was Brown, a man I despised. Why had he not died instead?

  I took the ammo without a word and we moved up after Sergeant James who was a hundred metres along the ditch. Corporal Evans was gone, he had moved forward to make himself useful elsewhere. One section, one platoon were no more. We would now be used by Sergeant James as part of his work party, tasked with collecting casualties and prisoners as and when required, moving ammunition or re-enforcing sections if they lost too many men.

  The platoon was static, having pushed forward a few hundred metres since our section had met its demise. Another couple of platoons had moved through us, taking the battle further up the hill and toward its summit. We were organised into a defensive position whilst we waited to be re-tasked elsewhere on the battlefield.

  The Chinese had withdrawn back into the warren and trench system dug deep into the hill. Bombardment from high above and the ferocity of our offensive had driven them back into cover, but it was unlikely to be for long. The battlefield was strangely hushed, but distant explosions reminded us that the war was far from over. The Chinese would not give up their warrens without a fight, and we would have no choice but to dig them out. We all dreaded the thought of fighting underground.

  Fighting in Warrens and Caves, or FIWAC as it was abbreviated, was known for being chaotic and violent to the extreme. Depending on the nature of the warren’s construction, it was possible for engagements to be so close they often turned to hand-to-hand fighting. Warrens were a common feature of the modern battlefield, particularly when the enemy had the time to dig himself in and fortify. With the devastating effect an orbiting warship could have on ground forces the only option available to a defender was to dig himself underground, often to great depth. Even with today’s technology no ship could detect anything underground, and the most sophisticated of weapons could only penetrate so deep. As for nukes, no side dared risk starting a nuclear war that could spill over back on Earth.

  The Chinese were believed to have occupied and extended the existing Union warrens, stretching for kilometres in all directions. Tunnels were capable of moving vehicles and troops rapidly, with some even equipped with maglev trains. The thought of fighting in the pitch black, claustrophobic tunnels made me shudder.

  ‘Think we’ll go in?’ Brown asked when we took a knee behind Sergeant James’s two smart launchers, as if he had read my mind. Mitch spared us a worried glance and then went back to concentrating on his smart launcher’s optics.

  ‘Dunno,’ I replied curtly. We waited in silence for something to happen, while the two smart launchers scanned the skies for enemy aircraft.

  Ahead of us Two section and the section sent to re-enforce the platoon concealed themselves amongst tangled greenhouse frames and burnt crops. I later learnt that the new section were the sole survivors of their platoon, the rest of them had never made the drop like our own ill-fated Three section.

  I shivered, my legs were soaked. The people who designed my gel armour had clearly decided against making it waterproof. At least my feet were almost dry, and the rain had stopped at last. The clouds still obscured the sky, though, and wind blew bitter and cold against my soaking wet body. The orbital barrage had stopped, presumably our ships had momentarily turned their attention onto something else. Above the blackened greenhouses smoke still rose from Jersey.

  ‘I’m freezing,’ I said.

  ‘Me too,’ Brown replied, and I think he might have been glad that I spoke, the silence was deafening. ‘Where do you think Ev is?’

  I gestured into the crops above the ditch, ‘He’s up with the boss, I think.’

  We lapsed back into silence. What could we possibly talk about? Hiding behind a fallen comrade while a man stands alone to fight the enemy? Or perhaps about dragging our comrades remains through the mud like pieces of garbage, one of whom Brown hated and I had come to call my best friend?

  Guilt haunted the back of my mind - a guilt I fought to ignore. My mates had died, and I hadn’t, quite likely due to my own cowardice. Brown’s survival was very little, if any consolation, and if I’m honest I think I almost resented it.

  The silence didn’t last for much longer.

  The two smart launchers bleeped furiously.

  ‘Contact! Fast air!’ Mitch cried in alarm.

  I froze for a second, before realising what he was telling us. ‘Fast air’ was trooper speak for fast moving aircraft. Something not particularly friendly had broken through into our airspace and had been picked up by the launchers.

  Me and Brown dove for cover, there was fat lot we could do against a fast moving aircraft.

  The smart launchers were set up to launch in seconds. Sergeant James crouched low beside them, shouting orders.

  ‘Quick boys, get em up! Get em up!’

  ‘Firing!’ The first smart missile launched.

  ‘Firing!’ The second followed close behind.

  Smart missiles were an old weapon that had evolved over centuries. Each missile was equipped with a state of the art computer that allowed it to track its target, anticipating its moves and disregarding decoys. But an individual smart missile was ineffective against modern aircraft equipped with gravity drives; they didn’t have the speed or manoeuvrability to keep up with them, especially if you consider that fighter aircraft were unmanned and had virtually no limit on the Gs they could achieve. Smart missiles were normally employed against ground targets, but they made an effective deterrent to aircraft, in fact they were the only air defence that dismounted infantry had.

  More missiles fired from across the hill, leaving white vapour trails in their wake as they veered across the sky toward their target.

  ‘Reload then, you lizards!’ Sergeant James spat with clenched fists and the smart gunners frantically reloaded new missiles into their launchers. The weapon was deceptively light, but it was still cumbersome and took precious seconds for even the most experienced operator to reload.

  It was then that a series of explosions a few hundred metres to our left announced the arrival of the enemy aircraft. In a blur of silver metal it moved impossibly fast, almost like a flying insect would
dart forward and backward but much faster. It was indeed an unmanned aircraft, dubbed the ‘saucer’ for its shape. Saucers were built like upside down dishes to allow them to be aerodynamic in all directions, and were common in virtually all modern armies. They made lethal ground attack aircraft.

  ‘Down!’

  I hugged the ground as the saucer shot overhead, strafing the earth with its twin cannon.

  ‘Shit the bed!’ Brown cursed.

  ‘Firing!’ Another missile was up to join the wolf pack. The sky was becoming filled with missiles on the chase, leaving vapour trails that tangled through the sky like spaghetti. The air became thick with vulcan cannon fire from the dropships and gravtanks across the valley.

  ‘Two more saucers inbound!’

  ‘Two section is in contact!’ A shrill voice spoke across the platoon net, it was the platoon commander and he sounded worried, ‘Contact enemy dropships!’

  Enemy dropships were inbound, and with them would come crack Chinese dropship infantry.

  ‘They’re attacking!’ Brown shouted from where we lay. No shit.

  What we didn’t at that time know was that high above us the Union fleet was being engaged by the Chinese. In a co-ordinated counter offensive, they were hitting us in orbit, then using the distraction to launch an offensive in the atmosphere and on land that couldn’t be hindered by our ships. It was this level of co-ordination that made the Chinese an opponent that couldn’t be underestimated.

  From our position of cover in the ditch, I could see troopers amongst the greenhouses ahead of me firing at the enemy. Pink painted dropships were disgorging their cargo into the fray a few hundred metres beyond.

  The battle that followed would be far more intense than that of our initial drop. The Chinese had been on the back foot, not knowing where to expect us to land. Now they would attempt to regain the initiative.

  In our favour though, was our experience and our cunning. Although nobody could doubt the Chinese technology or fighting spirit, they had many flaws that the Union knew to exploit.

  Gravtanks, evolved from lessons learnt in combat against the Indo-Japanese Alliance on Eden, darted about the battlefield in and out of cover. Their low profile hulls enabled them to hide almost as low as the troops they supported, unlike the larger bulky designs of Chinese anti-gravity vehicles which were designed to fight like aircraft. Their vulcan cannon sprayed the skies with a million tiny darts and their rail guns took on the enemy dropships.

  Somewhere within our secured perimeter, newly established electronic warfare teams began to hack into the Chinese communications and robotic vehicles. The unseen electronic battlefield was a crucial aspect of modern warfare, robotic craft could be turned against their masters, communications could be blocked or changed and even computerized maps turned upside down. The technologically superior Indians and Japanese had not anticipated the strength in Union electronic warfare capability, a weakness that was to be their undoing on Eden, with the help of some old fashioned Union steel.

  You could hack into comms and robot aircraft, though, but you still couldn’t hack into soldiers, and there were a lot of Chinese soldiers out there. The hill became alive with gunfire.

  ‘We’re fighting for our lives now, boys!’ Sergeant James bellowed to us over the noise, ‘Brown, Moralee, join Two section up front, you’re no more use to me here, get going!’

  We scrambled over the banks of the ditch as the platoon sergeant continued to control his two smart launchers. He would manage the platoon’s air defence whilst we got on with the fight on the ground.

  We zigzagged between the greenhouses, leaping over battered frames and crashing through smouldering crops. I hoped the smoke and flames would help make us unlikely targets to the enemy.

  Behind us, there was a huge explosion that almost sent me off my feet, but I didn’t turn to look. Clods of earth rained down at my feet and bounced off my helmet.

  Two section were just in front of us in cover in another ditch. To their left and right other platoons had moved to help repel the attack. The Chinese were only fifty metres away, I reckoned there must have been more than a company’s worth of them. Several Chinese dropships lay stricken on the ground, their ugly bodies scorched from impacts from rail gun shells.

  Rounds whizzed overhead as we ran as deep into a crouch as our thigh muscles allowed. I took little comfort knowing I probably wasn’t the target; there were so many enemy that the air was thick with their fire. An intense animal fear finally overrode my muscles and I dove for the ground.

  ‘Brown, get down!’

  We had covered a good thirty metres in our mad dash, but in retrospect we were right to have taken to ground. There were so many Chinese in front of us, and the fact that we hadn’t been shot deliberately or by a stray round was nothing short of a miracle.

  But not entirely a miracle, as we would later realise. The electronic battlefield was a weird and wonderful thing, and as it turned out we had another little trick up our sleeves. After our shameful defeat two years earlier, the Union had identified a fatal flaw in the Chinese integrated soldier technology. Their weapons communicated with their visor targeting system via a wireless link, unlike ours which instead incorporated a wire which connected our visors to our rifles. Our electronic warfare teams had found a way to jam the signal, and even feed it fake ones. In effect they were now either firing rounds wildly off target, or they would have to fire using the sights like a normal rifle. Rumour had it the Chinese were terrible shots without their visor targeting system.

  We crawled toward Two section with every ounce of strength our bodies could muster. You would be surprised how fast two men can crawl if their lives depend on it! I slid my body into the safety of the ditch. Several sections lined the far bank, firing rapidly into the enemy, the magnets of so many weapons screaming in a noise so loud I swear I could feel it vibrating through my body, even if my headset didn’t allow me to hear it through my ears.

  We clambered up onto the bank to join in the fight. As I did so I switched my intercom to Two section’s channel.

  ‘My God!’ I gasped as I stole my first proper glance at the enemy on the attack. There were loads of them, and they were advancing.

  ‘We’ve gotta hold em, boys!’ Corporal Weston shouted from off to my right, ‘4th Battalion are about to drop in, and they know it! We’ve gotta hold on to this rock!’

  ‘Who are you?’ a trooper to the left of me and Brown asked between shots.

  ‘One section!’ I answered.

  ‘Well lads, welcome to the party…’

  ‘Ray, shut up,’ Corporal Weston cut in, ‘Rapid fire, rapid fire! Chammy, get me more ammo up here!’

  ‘I can’t, mate!’ Corporal Weston’s section second in command replied on the intercom, ‘Jamo’s comms went dead, and everybody is pinned. What you got is what you got!’

  ‘Shit!’

  The enemy were closing fast, using smoke to cover those moving whilst others covered, in much the same way we would. Their weight of fire was heavy, but it was not enough to keep us from returning fire. Both sides were receiving massive casualties.

  The Chinese knew that our battalion had secured a foothold on New Earth soil, but we were weakened by losses sustained in the drop and the battle that followed. If they broke us here, the 4th battalion would land with no support. If they didn’t defeat us here, they were in trouble.

  I fired into the advancing enemy, catching one Chinaman in the leg and sending him crumpling to the ground. Lumps of mud flicked at me as darts struck the soil to my front, and an unknown trooper next to Ray was flung from the bank without a sound. I didn’t need to look, he was probably dead. Even if he wasn’t, I had to leave him to the medics to deal with. Right at that moment every man was needed up and firing to repel the onslaught.

  Rail gun rounds sent shockwaves through the air as they struck the enemy dropships. There were tens of them, all over the hill, unleashing their cargo and then speeding away as fast as they could, chase
d by missiles and tracer into the air. The Chinese were undeterred; they were coming for us now. The nearest enemy section was not more than twenty metres away. They were moving and they were exposed, but there were more of them than us.

  I looked left and right at the other troopers firing on the bank. Some were shot but still fighting, the only people not fighting were either dead or severely and traumatically disabled. Medics dragged the injured down into cover to be treated, prioritising those they thought they could save, and leaving those they couldn’t to die.

  Nobody was going to hide now, because we all knew what would happen if we did. The only chance at living was up there on the bank of the ditch. I remembered a saying as I continued to fire into my foe, ‘Look up and down in desperation, look left and right for inspiration.’ Nothing inspired a man to fight more than his own comrades. Corporal Evans, wherever he was now, had stood against everything that was thrown at him, almost surely to die, not for the Union, maybe not even for us, but because he was a trooper and that’s what he did. It was my turn to do the same.

  Voices screamed across the net.

  ‘Incoming!’

  ‘Take cover!’

  Then the saucers strafed down our ditch.

  Explosive rounds detonated on the ground, ripping apart bodies and tossing limbs and organs into the air like confetti. Nobody had a chance to move or take cover, it happened in an instant. Then the next saucer passed over. I clutched at the ground crying out in terror, my fingers clawing at the earth. If I could have burrowed into the ground with my own fingernails I would have done. Once again my whole body was gripped with an animal fear that paralysed me, and this time rightly so.

  As suddenly as it had begun, the attack from above stopped. I looked up at the smoking devastation, still in shock. I was relatively unscathed, but what I saw filled me with horror. Bodies lay strewn, some together, others scattered in pieces. Organs littered the cratered earth, some mixed together so that you could tell which part belonged to which corpse. Injured troopers cried for help, clutching at severed limbs and bleeding wounds. One trooper was frantically removing his dead comrade’s respirator to replace his own, blood gushing from his head where shrapnel had hit him. Other shell shocked but unharmed troopers staggered, like me, through the smoke. It was like a terrible nightmare that I couldn’t wake myself from. I fought my body’s reflex to gag.