LANCEJACK (The Union Series)

by Richards, Phillip

  ‘Two of the LSVs are on fire,’ Konny replied grimly, and my heart sank, ‘And it looks like the platoon have occupied a building.’

  ‘Well, we need to get to them,’ I insisted, not caring if I further insulted Konny. His inaction had risked annihilation at the hands of the enemy and I didn’t want a repeat performance.

  Konny said nothing, continuing to watch the unseen battle around the corner of the alleyway.

  I grew impatient, ‘Can you talk to them?’

  We didn’t have the platoon net, but we still possessed something gloriously effective; the human mouth. I wondered if Konny had forgotten that.

  ‘Hey!’ Konny shouted across the street, ‘Oi!’

  I could almost have laughed. The section and platoon net were so advanced that they made even the most chaotic battlefield simple to control - from managing casualties and ammunition - to indicating enemy positions for other troopers to engage. Take it away and the result was, on the modern battlefield, comically simplistic.

  ‘Oi!’ Konny shouted again.

  Finally, my headset magnified a nearby voice against sporadic gunfire, ‘Yeah?’

  ‘It’s Konny!’

  A pause, ‘Wait, I’ll tell the boss!’

  ‘Fuck that,’ I said, ‘Tell him we’re coming over now.’

  Almost reluctantly, Konny nodded, knowing that I was right. There was no way we were going to sit around and wait for the boss to think about what to do with us. We had already killed God knows how many enemy in our alleyway and there was no telling how many more there might be coming for us.

  ‘We’re coming over!’ Konny shouted. He looked back to the section, who were spread out along the alleyway watching and waiting anxiously, ‘Prepare to move!’

  As I ran back to the stretcher the section repeated the message, looking almost visibly relieved to get out of the alleyway and back to the platoon.

  ‘Prepare for rapid!’ Somebody shouted from across the street. The platoon, now knowing that we were about to break cover, would provide covering fire. Whether Mr Moore wanted us to come over or not, he wasn’t going to risk us all being shot. I gripped the stretcher by the handles and braced my muscles for one last burst of speed.

  ‘Rapid fire!’

  ‘Let’s go!’ Konny shouted, and we ran.

  Spurred by the fear of death, we ran out of the alleyway and up the street as fast as we possibly could. There were now four of us carrying the stretcher so that we could move quickly, but my muscles still screamed in protest. After carrying the stretcher for so long it felt as though I might dislocate my shoulder, but I willed myself on, using my free arm to bring my rifle to bear.

  The platoon was a good fifty metres up the street, occupying a building beside the junction they had been holding before NELA had attacked. Sure enough, two LSVs burned fiercely, their armour warped and blackened, and the sight of such powerful machines in ruin reminded me of how dangerous our situation really was.

  A trooper leaned out of the entrance to the building and beckoned us toward him furiously, and my visor identified several troopers in the windows above firing at unseen targets. We didn’t have time to see what they were firing at, we just kept our heads low and ran.

  ‘Come on lads, hurry up!’ The trooper virtually threw us one-by-one into the open doorway, and I realised as he grabbed me by the shoulder and followed me inside that it was Johnno.

  We were inside some kind of entrance hallway that was as grand as the buildings were outside. In a different situation I would have stopped to admire the beautiful paintings that adorned the walls or the intricate mosaic that covered the entire floor. The hallway echoed with the sound of tens of weapons firing throughout the building, as well as our heavy breathing.

  Johnno looked me up and down in concern, ‘How many casualties, Andy?’

  ‘Two casualties,’ I told him, and I ordered the stretcher to be placed down, ‘Patterson has concussion and has taken a lot of shrapnel. Konny has taken a minor flesh wound to the arm.’

  ‘Is he still able to command?’

  I wanted to tell Johnno that he was a bag of shit, but it wasn’t the time or place. If I undermined the command structure at my level, where did it stop? The battlefield was not the place to argue about who was in charge, though if Konny acted up again I would have no choice but to relieve him.

  ‘I’m fine,’ Konny said before I was able to say a word, ‘What’s going on?’

  Johnno regarded us both and shook his head, ‘Who knows? They knocked out the net, then we came under fire from all directions. They even turned the LSVs on us!’ I gasped. I had been told that NELA could make our electronic warfare teams look amateur, but turning our own weapons against us? That was some pretty scary stuff.

  ‘See the boss, mate, he’ll tell you more,’ Johnno flicked his head upwards, ‘He’s upstairs. Leave your section here with me so I can sort your casualty out.’

  Konny ran up a flight of stairs halfway along the hall as Johnno led us with our stretcher into an open door. Inside was a pleasantly decorated apartment, once the home of a New Earth civilian and now turned into a place for the platoon to centralise casualties. Medical waste, including bandage wrapping and expended auto injectors lay strewn across the blood stained carpet.

  There were three other casualties arranged into a neat line in the middle of what I presumed was the lounge, each with injuries of varying degrees of severity. The worst was a man who had lost his foot, who strangely sat bolt upright on his stretcher and appeared not too bothered by his injury. He clutched at his rifle as though to prove that he could still do his duty. I hadn’t seen such a response to a traumatic amputation before. It must have been the result of either his own body’s adrenaline, the morphine, or a mixture of both.

  ‘Lie down, Mathers,’ Johnno said, and he gently pushed the trooper back down. He indicated for us to put down the stretcher in line with the others, ‘Place him down with his head next to theirs. That way they can talk to each other.’

  ‘I don’t think Patterson’s talking to anyone,’ Geany said as we placed the stretcher down, and Johnno shot him the look of thunder.

  ‘Shut up, Geany, you tube,’ I scolded.

  Geany caught my eye and initially appeared angry at the rebuke, but he knew that he had gone too far, ‘Sorry.’

  Johnno sighed, ‘Go strap Mathers properly into his stretcher and check his tourniquet. He’s doing my head in!’

  Whilst the section rallied around their injured comrades Johnno gave me a quick update on what had happened whilst we had been away. The enemy had attacked only moments after our section had been ambushed, and the LSVs were instantly rendered useless. Fortunately for the platoon, Mr Moore had already ordered them to occupy the building before the rebels managed to reprogram the LSVs to actually attack their own side.

  ‘It was a good call,’ Johnno said with feeling, ‘Those things have got some serious firepower. You should see what damage they did to the other end of the building! We took them out with the smart launchers.’

  Thank God for the smart launchers, then, I thought. Every platoon often carried at least two smart launchers, a relatively low-tech launcher that fired a missile which troopers often joked was more intelligent than they were.

  ‘What about the other one?’ I asked cautiously.

  The platoon had started out with four LSVs, and presuming that our own vehicle was back in Eindhoven and out of the picture, that still left one more. I wondered how many more of them might be running rogue.

  Johnno shrugged, ‘Gone. It disappeared before we could get it, probably into one of the other city domes. NELA know we can take it out with a single smart missile, so they won’t want to waste the vehicle until the situation goes back in their favour.’

  Johnno’s unwavering optimism was admirable. I would have said that the situation was completely in favour of the rebels already, but he didn’t see it that way. We had no comms but we were together and in good order. The enemy had far gr
eater numbers, but we were fully trained and equipped dropship infantry. They might have our LSVs, but a rifle platoon equipped with a couple of smart missiles could be murder to a vehicle in a close quarter environment like Nieuwe Poort.

  ‘Well what’s the sketch now, then?’ I asked, ‘Are we just gonna sit here?’

  Another shrug, ‘I dunno, mate. I doubt it. I wouldn’t…’ he added the last part with a slight smile.

  ‘Where are all the civvies?’

  ‘We ordered them down to the cellar,’ Johnno chuckled as if he were remembering the incident, ‘They weren’t gonna argue with all the shooting going on! I doubt they’ll be happy when they see the mess we made!’

  It was a miracle that no civilians had died, but then I wondered if the rebels had thought to clear out the buildings for their ambush earlier. If they hadn’t, there was a strong chance that we might have killed somebody who was innocent. I reminded myself that if that was the case, it was the rebels fault for not clearing them out and not ours, because we were merely defending ourselves. They would have a job convincing the well-educated city population otherwise.

  The shooting had stopped, I suddenly realised. We both looked up toward the ceiling instinctively, though I couldn’t tell you why because we couldn’t see anything.

  ‘Looks like they’ve given up,’ Jackson suggested.

  ‘Maybe,’ Johnno said, ‘Andy keep your boys here as a platoon reserve, mate, I’m gonna go up and chat with the boss.’

  ‘No worries.’

  ‘All the casualties are stable, just have your boys watch over them. I’ve got sentries out on the entrances to the lower floor, so don’t worry about that. I’ll want to know your ammo state when I get back.’

  ‘Okay.’

  Johnno left, and I looked about me for somewhere to sit. My legs were exhausted from carrying a casualty for hundreds of metres and now that I had the opportunity to calm down they had begun to ache. I found a chair that had been tucked under some kind of expensive looking hologram desk, pulled it out and took a seat.

  I sighed deeply, ‘That’s better.’

  I saw Okonkwo’s massive shoulders shaking and realised that he was laughing at me, ‘I wish we could take pictures of stuff, coz you look quality on that chair!’

  That was the first time that I had seen Okonkwo smile. I looked down and realised how ridiculous I looked. Dressed in full combat gear and camouflaged blood red from helmet to boot, I couldn’t have looked more out of place sat on the ornate, expensive looking chair. The people of Nieuwe Poort knew how to live like kings.

  ‘I do look pretty stupid,’ I agreed.

  I looked down at my datapad. I needed to record my new ammo state manually, since it was no longer being updated by the section net. I should have done so earlier, but getting out of the ambush and back to the platoon had been my topmost priority.

  ‘Was it like that before?’ Jackson asked, sat cross-legged beside Patterson, throwing me off my train of thought, ‘When you were up against the Chinese?’

  I realised that he was asking me to compare the ambush to the invasion. I thought back to the carnage of the ditches I had fought through during the landings, and the vicious hand-to-hand fighting through claustrophobic warrens that cut deep into the rock. The faces of my old friends came back to haunt me, and so I shook the memories away.

  ‘No.’ The ambush had turned into quite a fire fight, and it could have been a slaughter, but it had not been. I looked back down to my datapad.

  ‘Oh,’ he opened his mouth again as though he wanted to ask me another question, but a stern look from Okonkwo told him not to. He shut his mouth firmly.

  ‘Thank you, Corporal,’ Okonkwo said suddenly, and I raised an eyebrow.

  ‘For what?’

  ‘For saving our lives.’

  I frowned, ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘We all saw what you did back there,’ Okonkwo said, looking around at the other members of the section for support, ‘You got us out,’ there were a few nods, ‘We’d be dead if it wasn’t for you.’

  I remained silent, knowing that Okonkwo was perilously close to openly admitting that Konny had failed in his duty to the section. Geany watched me closely, perhaps waiting for me to follow down that route so that he could tell the section commander.

  I ended the silence by tapping my datapad, ‘I need an ammo state, lads. What have you got?’

  7

  Bloodbath

  ‘Stand to!’ Somebody called out from the floor above, and I stopped tapping ammunition quantities into my datapad. The message echoed about the building as every man in the platoon repeated it.

  There hadn’t been a shot fired for several minutes, not since Johnno had gone upstairs to have a face-to-face brief with the boss.

  ‘Police!’ Somebody shouted from our floor, ‘The police are here!’

  Geany laughed, ‘Well, that’s that, then, lads. We’re nicked!’

  I shook my head in disbelief as I stood from my chair, ‘I’m going to have a look.’

  ‘Tell them I ain’t saying nothing!’ The section roared as I left the apartment and made my way to the building entrance. A trooper crouched in the shadow cast by the door, and he regarded me warily before returning his attention to the street outside.

  ‘Did you say the police are out there?’ I asked.

  The trooper nodded, ‘There’s four police wagons, just across the road.’

  ‘Let’s have a look, mate.’

  ‘Go ahead,’ the trooper leant out of the way so that I could stick my head around the door, careful not to expose any more of my face than was absolutely necessary.

  Sure enough there were four vehicles parked across the street, not as brutish looking as our LSVs, but equally large. They certainly looked like genuine police vehicles, they were painted blue and white as they were on Earth, with a massive Union flag along their sides with the German word Polizei written in massive letters over the top of it. Blue and red lights flashed brightly upon their roofs, reflecting off the glass dome above us so that there was no hiding their presence.

  ‘Are they mad?’ I whispered to myself, forgetting that the other trooper’s headset would magnify my words for him to hear anyway.

  ‘Must be.’

  A man stepped out of what appeared to be the cab of one of the vehicles and looked across at our building. There was no mistaking his police uniform; a blue outfit not entirely unlike the combats we wore but with less armour. He didn’t wear a respirator, instead he wore a clear visor almost like a pair of sunglasses and a small headset. He had a pistol holstered at his side, but otherwise he was unarmed. On his own, at least, he wasn’t much of a threat.

  ‘Who are you?’ A voice challenged from the floor above. I recognised it instantly as the boss.

  The policeman looked up to the source of the voice briefly, as though he had never heard such a stupid question. To be fair, I thought, if he really was a policeman he probably would think the question to be pretty stupid.

  The officer then looked directly at me and the open entrance way, and suddenly strode toward us purposefully.

  ‘Stop!’ The boss shouted, ‘Or we will open fire!’

  Undeterred by the threat, the policeman strode on, as though no weapon could possibly stop him.

  ‘Fucking hell,’ the trooper beside me hissed, adjusting his rifle butt into his shoulder nervously as the man approached, ‘What do we do?’

  I stood up to make myself obvious in the doorway and levelled my rifle with the man’s chest.

  Can I really shoot a policeman, I asked myself, and could I live with myself afterwards? Surely he was the real deal, and not an elaborate ploy to make us drop our guard? Our foe certainly had some tricks up his sleeve, but could he stoop to the low of pretending to be civilian police in order to get his kill?

  The policeman was only metres from the entrance, ignoring the continued threats from above.

  ‘For God’s sake stop,’ I shouted, though it was more o
f a plea, ‘I don’t want to shoot a copper!’

  Finally he stopped, no more than a metre or two away from me. He was old, I saw, in his fifties at least, with a full head of grey hair and a thick beard. His hands remained at his side, and my finger twitched over my rifle trigger as I watched them, waiting for them to dart to his holster.

  ‘At least somebody here can see sense,’ my headset translated as he spoke, and my visor told me he was speaking Dutch, ‘Do you mind telling me why you’re running around shooting in my city?’

  He sounded like a sergeant major, preparing to deliver his ultimate telling off to a hapless young recruit.

  I kept my rifle aimed squarely at his chest, ‘Who are you?’

  ‘I am the Nieuwe Poort chief of police, David Wolfe,’ he said, and pointed behind him, ‘And this is my city. Why are you running around arresting people and shooting people, when I am unaware?’

  ‘It was NELA who started shooting first,’ I pointed out, hearing the sound of boots hammering down the stairs somewhere behind me.

  ‘I don’t care what the rebels did, trooper,’ he snapped, ‘I want to know why you are here in the first place!? Why do I not know about this? I am woken up to find half of the city communication network shut down, tens of people arrested without any legal warrant and two residential areas turned into warzones! Why has nobody spoken to me?’

  I realised that the two warzones he mentioned were the two targets on opposite sides of the city, which presumably meant that we weren’t the only ones who had been attacked. The other half of our operation had met resistance as well.

  ‘Who the hell is this idiot?’ The platoon commander had finally arrived behind me. The chief of police frowned at the insult.

  Presuming that the question was for me, I shrugged without looking back to the platoon commander, ‘It’s the chief of police, David Wolfe?’

  ‘Well I don’t recognise him,’ he answered back haughtily.

  The chief of police shouted, ‘Perhaps you might recognise me, if you had bothered to speak to me first! Where is Ruckheim, and what the hell is he up to? I want to speak to him. Who is in charge here?’