Johnno looked back to us again, and beckoned for us to follow on. We crawled the remaining distance, just as Jimmy had done, keeping our heads low and resisting the urge to take a look over the top of the plateau to whatever lay in store for us on the other side.
I could see the top of a rocky escarpment that ran parallel to the ridge half a kilometre away, and I presumed that a valley of some sort ran in between, snaking its way up toward Rottenberg in the distance. The escarpment caught my eye because the rock had a strange green tinge to it, but I didn’t take the time to admire the strange coloured rock. I was far more interested in getting my section out of view from it. If I were the enemy, I knew that I would certainly put positions on the escarpment, and I would ensure that they could mutually support the pillboxes on the ridgeline.
As we rounded the pillbox I realised it was connected to another by a hundred metre long trench. Both of the pillboxes shared dominating vantage points over the top of the ridge and onto the low ground to the west. Mr Moore was right, the defensive position was definitely protecting something to our east, perhaps something within the valley beyond.
We slid into the trench behind the first pillbox, and I took a quick look inside. A rebel lay dead in a pool of blood. Beside him sat some kind of ration pack, probably Chinese judging by the writing on the box. One of the packets had been opened and its contents spilt all over the ground.
Jimmy’s point man had seen the open entrance to the pillbox, and dropped in from the edge of the trench while the unsuspecting rebel ate his breakfast. Before he even managed to turn around, the trooper had stabbed him several times in the back. The hapless rebel’s respirator was still pulled back from his face to allow him to eat without his straw, and a spoon lay discarded beside him where he fell. There is nothing dignified about death, I thought to myself, but war was never meant to be dignified.
‘There’s some simple surveillance equipment in here,’ Johnno observed from within the pillbox, pointing out to me an array of gadgets spread in a disorderly manner across the floor, ‘I doubt this bloke even knew how to use most of it, not that he was even paying attention anyway.’
‘They were relying on their little trap outside the tunnel,’ I replied.
‘Looks that way,’ Johnno agreed. His brow furrowed in puzzlement, ‘Still, you would think they would have this place set up a little better. It all looks a bit rushed. This guy’s all on his own and armed only with a rifle. It’s like somebody just dropped him off and said ‘Stay there, mate, see you in a few days.’’
I looked away from the pillbox to see where the rest of the platoon were. Jimmy had spread his section along the trench, leaving two of his men watching out of the pillbox slits, covering the rear. I looked for Two section, but I couldn’t see them anywhere. I assumed that they were somewhere further along the trench, about to push into the second pillbox.
It wasn’t long before the message came back for me to push forward, and I led my section along the trench, squeezing past Jimmy’s section in pursuit of the boss. Jimmy gave me a friendly nod as I passed him, evidently relieved to have reached and cleared the pillbox without coming under fire. If he had, then I doubted he would have taken the pillbox without taking heavy casualties, despite the fire support that we would have given him. Jimmy’s point man glanced up at me as well, fixing me with a cold-hearted stare. I saw that his visor was spattered in droplets of blood, and a tiny piece of flesh hung from his bayonet. He was as young as I was, but he had already seen far more than his fair share of death.
I finally arrived behind Mr Moore, and I took a knee beside him whilst I waited for further instructions. Ahead of us two section had left a link man on a corner in the trench, as it would have done all the way along its advance. Since we couldn’t use our net, link men were required to pass messages back.
The signaller and EW operator eyed me warily, before returning to scanning the frequencies for any sign of enemy activity. Westy gave me a wink.
I glanced back at Okonkwo, who crouched five metres behind me. His eyes darted nervously along the edge of the trench. We would often stand troopers up so that they could protect us from any enemy wishing to attack from above the trenches, but if we did that then we risked being seen along the ridgeline.
‘You alright?’ I asked.
‘Not really,’ he admitted, ‘I’d only just got used to fighting in enclosed spaces, then we end up out here! We should call for the company, it’s proper dodgy doing shit like this on our own.’
I grinned, ’It could be worse…’
‘How could it possibly be worse?’
‘Keep the noise down,’ the boss hissed back at us angrily, ‘Two section should be going into the assault any minute now!’
We waited for ages, but nothing happened. The pillbox remained silent, and there was no sign of any of our second section along the length of the trench. I began to wonder if something had gone wrong, but then I reminded myself that if it had, then surely I would have heard something.
I turned my attention back to the lip of the trench.
As I did so something caught my eye, a dark green patch on the wall beside me, as if it had been painted. I reached out a hand and touched it with my finger. Little flecks of green came off on my glove, and I ground them curiously between my fingers, watching them crumble into dust.
‘What is it?’ Okonkwo asked, seeing me inspecting the strange patch.
Surely it couldn’t be, I thought, everybody knew that nothing could survive on New Earth, we had been told enough times, ‘It’s lichen…!’ I whispered.
‘What’s lichen?’
I spoke slowly, disbelieving my own words, ‘A kind of plant…’
The link man from Two section suddenly cocked his head to hear a message being passed to him by somebody further up the trench.
He turned back to the boss, ‘Position clear. One enemy dead. One enemy captured. Corporal Matthews says he needs to speak to you about the prisoner.’
We all exchanged surprised glances, and Mr Moore made his way up the trench.
‘Tell Konny to hold the section here,’ I told Okonkwo, and I followed, keen to find out what concerned Corporal Matthews about his prisoner.
‘He was already dead,’ Matthews explained when we arrived in the pillbox, pointing at a rebel who lay on the ground with a knife in his back, ‘Then we found this guy with his hands up saying “Don’t shoot!”’
We all looked at the other rebel. He was being searched by a trooper from Two section, who ran his hands over the rebel’s clothes in search of a weapon. He was short and slightly built, hardly the sort of man I would have expected to find on the battlefield. He wore virtually no equipment other than his respirator and a small utility belt about his waist. Despite being surrounded by several blood-red, fully-kitted troopers he glared back at us defiantly, fixing us all with a steady gaze that caused us to take notice. I noticed that one of his hands was dripping with blood.
‘I’m not one of them!’ the man said in a thick German accent, flicking his head toward the dead rebel.
‘Everybody seems to be saying that these days,’ Mr Moore replied.
Undeterred, the man went on, ‘I killed him, but there are more, many more.’
Westy peered out of one of the pillbox slits, seeing how it overlooked its twin position where Jimmy’s section had assaulted, ‘Looks like this guy may well have saved our bacon.’
‘Hardly,’ the boss rebuked, ‘They’re not exactly well armed!’
‘You know what I mean.’
The boss ignored Westy’s reply, switching fire to the prisoner, ‘Who are you?’
‘Klaus Gaertner,’ the man replied warily, ‘I am a friend of the man you’re after, James Evans.’
I couldn’t contain my excitement, ‘You know Ev?!’
‘Yes,’ Klaus replied, ‘He is a good man. We have known each other since the war ended. You knew him also?’
I pointed to myself and Westy, ‘We were in his platoo
n.’
‘Let me see,’ Klaus looked to the ground thoughtfully, ‘You are Andy and Westy?’
‘Yeah,’ Westy replied for us both, ‘We served with him…’
‘…During the war,’ Klaus finished Westy’s sentence, ‘Yes, I know. He spoke of you many times. He told me that you were here on New Earth. He saw you in the city and went to save you from an ambush.’
‘So he was one of the rebels,’ Mr Moore concluded smugly, ‘How else would he have known about the ambush?’
‘Ev wanted nothing to do with the rebellion,’ Klaus replied, and his vehemence silenced the boss, ‘They forced themselves onto this place, and he tried to stop them. We came here to find peace, not war.’
‘Peace?’ The boss made a show of looking around himself, ‘All I can see are trenches and pillboxes! Oh, and that man you just killed. You’ll find no peace here.’
‘Those are just old relics from the war, you will find them everywhere. As for him,’ he indicated the dead man, ‘I did what I had to do. I am trying to help you.’
‘Was it you who switched off the gun back at the tunnel?’ I asked.
‘Yes, Ev said that you might come. He said that you were our only hope to stop this madness before many people die. So I have waited here for you. Many of us turned to the rebels, thinking that they are the only way for us to free ourselves from Earth, but not me. The rebels think that I am one of them, but I do not want them here, this is not a place of war, it is a place of peace.’
I looked down at the bloodied corpse of the rebel Klaus had killed, and I had to question his idea of peace.
‘What are you doing here in this valley, if you aren’t part of the rebellion?’
Klaus smiled as though he was remembering something wonderful, ‘We are growing a garden. A beautiful garden. That was before the rebels came.’
‘Right,’ the boss nodded patronizingly, ‘So what you’re saying is that Sergeant Evans abandoned his post, came here and took up a hobby gardening in a greenhouse.’
‘There are no greenhouses in this garden,’ Klaus replied, not rising to the bait, ‘Here we do not need them.’
The boss had already had enough, ‘What are you talking about, you idiot?’
I realised what Klaus was trying to tell us, ‘You’re genetic engineers?’
Klaus nodded, ‘Yes. But we are more than that. I like to think that we are artists, and the garden we have made is our masterpiece. Soon we will show it to the entire planet.’
‘So you grow plants,’ the boss said, trying to run the facts through his head until they made sense, ‘And you mess around with them so they can grow on New Earth without a greenhouse?’
‘Yes,’ Klaus agreed, ‘But they do more than that. The plants we have created breathe in the poisons and turn them into a harmless by-product. They clean the air! Terraforming!’
‘So why are the rebels interested in some damn garden?’
Klaus laughed harshly, ‘They don’t care about the garden! They are like you, even though they claim that they’re not. Their leaders only want power, and their followers are too blinded by their hatred of Earth to see it. The garden offers the rebel leaders nothing, if anything it offers to remove the power from government. Imagine a green New Earth, where nobody had to worry about where their air or food came from…’
The boss stopped him, ‘So if it is possible, why hasn’t anybody done it here before?’
‘The Union doesn’t want New Earth to be green, neither did the Chinese. The atmosphere gives them total control over the population, so that they can use them to make the weapons they need to continue their war.’
‘So what you’re saying is that this garden of yours, if it exists, is illegal,’ the boss concluded, ‘It must be pretty small if our ships haven’t noticed it.’
Klaus smiled, ‘Your ships cannot see it. That is why the rebels want this place.’
17
The Garden
Klaus explained that the garden had been a project cooked up in the minds of students and lecturers displaced from their university on Jersey Island by the war. They wanted to smuggle themselves onto the mainland, to find somewhere isolated where they could carry out their research. Somehow this led to their meeting with Ev, who was himself on the run after deserting my old battalion. He listened to the students’ idea to build a green world and he had been enchanted by it.
‘He knew a lot about how to get past Union security in the chaos after the invasion,’ Klaus recalled, ‘He knew where your men would be looking, and where they weren’t. There were not many of us then, maybe twenty, but no more. The Union were more interested in rounding up the Chinese and their supporters, so they didn’t care about us.’
I remembered the aftermath of the invasion, hopping from one location to another in our dropships in an effort to restore order. It was a huge task. There were thousands of us, but there were fifty million people living on New Earth, of which twenty million lived in Chinese provinces that had never been under Union rule before. Nobody would have noticed a deserted trooper and a small band of students making their escape from Jersey Island.
‘Even then it was difficult to make the crossing, but Ev had got to know somebody in the military who was sympathetic to our cause who could help us…’
I nodded, of course… ‘Ruckheim.’
‘Yes. He had been based on Jersey Island. He helped to forge documentation that allowed for us to make the crossing.’
Despite their successful escape onto the mainland Ev knew that the Union would never allow for the planet to be terraformed, and so he had taken them into the mountains. Having a vague understanding of the Chinese defences in the province, he knew that there were many abandoned positions there, and it hadn’t taken the group long to find the site for their garden. During that time, Ev had become their leader, for even though he lacked any scientific knowledge, he made up for it with his charisma and his thorough understanding of Union global strategy.
‘The most important thing was to make ourselves invisible to them,’ Klaus said, poking his finger up toward the sky, ‘So we found an old Chinese electronic warfare centre down in the valley below.’
The valley was perfectly sited. It couldn’t be seen unless a craft passed directly overhead, but it still caught the rays of the sun throughout most of the day. Ev used his growing friendship with Ruckheim to their advantage, relying upon him for supplies and equipment, and somehow the major managed to keep all of the Union saucers and patrols away from the area. He took great interest in the garden project, often meeting with Ev in Archer’s Post to discuss their progress.
Eventually the major had himself posted to Nieuwe Poort so that he could have even greater influence over any Union operations near to the garden, removing any chance of a trooper accidentally chancing upon it during his patrol. The students and Ev believed that Ruckheim too dreamed of a beautiful green planet without borders. But the major wasn’t interested in the garden itself.
Klaus continued, ‘We knew that we couldn’t do anything unless we made ourselves invisible to your ships. We spent many months hiding in the electronic warfare centre, using the data created by the Chinese when they attempted, and failed, to hack into your ships. We saw that the Chinese had already done the hard work, identifying the layout of Union code and how and when it was sent. In effect, they had identified the door, but they hadn’t managed to open it.’
I didn’t like where this was going. Our ships were supposed to be impossible to hack, we had been told so enough times. They sported the most advanced super computers known to man, and crewed by some of the brightest, hand-picked electronic warfare teams in the Union.
‘And then what?’
Klaus shrugged, ‘We couldn’t get the door fully open, naturally. If we had done then the Union would have noticed and we would have been blasted into atoms. Instead we opened the door by a fraction, and simply dropped a tiny piece of code in the right place to keep us unnoticed. We have done so ever sin
ce, to every ship that has ever passed over us.’
‘What is this code?’ The boss demanded.
‘It is very simple. It causes the ship to duplicate a small area that it sees and superimpose it onto another. You see, there are two separate programmes working when the ship scans the ground below it, one that compiles the data received by the sensors, and one that assesses it for anything worth highlighting to the crew. All we are doing is changing the data on the first programme, before the second one sees it. Does that make sense to you?’
‘Wow,’ I said, considerably impressed and alarmed at the same time, ‘And nobody ever noticed, all this time?’
‘Why would they? What we were doing was so small, none of the ship’s crew would have ever seen it. Ruckheim became more and more interested in our programming. He even visited once or twice. We thought he just wanted to see the garden. Then a few months ago the rebel fighters started moving in, using the tunnels beneath us to move to and from Nieuwe Poort, and we realised that Ruckheim was not at all what he seemed.
‘Many of us did nothing, but when the fighting started Ev tried to stop it. He stole access codes to the computers in the EW centre and kept them on a disc hidden out here in the mountains, so that the rebels couldn’t tamper with our programming. He then followed Ruckheim to Nieuwe Poort using the tunnels in an attempt to end the madness.’
Mr Moore looked as though he was trying to piece the story together, ‘So the rebels just want to control this place so they can make themselves invisible to our ships? They’re using this place as a staging point to attack the city?’
Klaus shook his head gravely, ‘No, they want to do much more than that. They only want to control this place because it holds the key to the door.’
‘Stop talking in damned riddles!’
‘It gives them access to your ships.’
‘Hold on, you just said that the ships will notice if you do anything too big. If the rebels tried to access them, they’d just rain bombs down on this place until it’s flat. Game over.’
LANCEJACK (The Union Series) Page 26