by F. E. Arliss
“All the same. Please don’t take any unnecessary chances. Promise me,” Leo said gruffly, looking at her steadily.
“I won’t do anything you wouldn’t do,” Chloe said with a grin.
“That’s what I’m afraid of,” Leo stated, pulling her into his arms again.
Chapter 16
Prep
Chloe bounded down the hall toward the women’s quarters. She’d commed each of the women who volunteered and asked them to meet her in the women’s social room. The social room as they called it, was nothing more than an empty bunk room that they’d pulled the bunks from the walls and stuffed a bunch of old chairs in. They were to meet her there and then they’d be addressed in another hour by Major Donji, who would then push them on in their training in one of the cargo bays.
Each woman had been asked to not mention the mission to any of the other Women’s Corps members. They wanted to keep this first mission as low key as possible to prevent worry and speculation.
As Chloe entered the Social Room, five sets of eyes turned her way. Some seemed eager, such as Katyia Rustalov, the tall, athletic-looking, blonde Russian medic who’d volunteered previously. Her green eyes were sparkling with anticipation. The two engineering assistants seemed in high spirits as well, as they bet each other who would be able to fix the most components on the mission. Their names were Betsy Dune and Johanna Van Hausen. They looked as opposite from one another as possible. Betsy was a short, stocky, milky-skinned, brunette farm girl from Nebraska. While Johanna was a tall, pear-shaped beauty with dusky features and long wild black curls from South Africa. She normally bound her hair up into a regal coronet on top of her head while working. Although, Chloe had seen her hair down on more than one occasion, and loved the long, gleaming black corkscrews that seemed to have a life of their own.
The cook’s assistant and housekeeper were more stoic. Selina Alvarez and Andrea Martinez were both from El Salvador. Chloe couldn’t tell if they were excited or not. They had short stout frames and lovely dark brown eyes and hair. They often spoke Spanish with each other and seemed used to hard work, and a hard environment. They’d settled in rapidly and had been among her most reliable and flexible corpsmen. Both were friendly, and took their work very seriously as they had extended family that they were supporting with their salaries. They had a lot of people relying on them and she wondered at the reason they would volunteer for a forward assignment. Forward deployments were incentivized, so she supposed the extra money might come in handy to the huge families they supported. She often took instructions to the comm center for pay to be sent from their accounts to family in South America.
After going over some of their worries and concerns and giving them as much support and opportunity as possible to express their needs and get support, the door chimed and Major Donji entered.
“Ok ladies, how would you like to be addressed?” he asked with a polite nod to the women. “By rank, job title, or name?” This earned him a few slight smiles, though Katyia eyed him with disdain.
After an appraising glance over the women, Chloe said, “I think we’ll stick with Corpsman and name," at smiled back at him.
For the next two hours Major Donji drilled them on who they’d be reporting to, duties, provisions, protocol, jump procedures, and defensive strategies. It was a quick and dirty briefing, and Chloe hoped it would be enough. They’d all had basic CPR, self-defense, fitness and survival training in the weeks before deploying. The Major had even taken them down to cold storage and showed them the remains of several of the Arachnians that had been killed in the recent incursion. He explained that he didn’t want them freezing up upon seeing their first enemy. The women were encouraged to touch the dead alien and to understand its weak points. It made sense to her, even if it was pretty gross. The women seemed to take it in stride. She hoped they were ready. It was going to be a baptism of fire. Please Heavens and Stars, let them be ready and return unharmed. She dismissed them and they all hurried toward that quarters to prepare and pack.
The jump ship was incredibly uncomfortable. Chloe had no idea how the soldiers around them were able to sleep. Or at least, they appeared to be sleeping. She looked over at the five women accompanying them. They’d all been introduced to the sections they were to help with. The two engineering assistants were helping a lanky Ensign Bob Garfield, whose greasy brown hair sticking up in all directions from running his fingers through it when he thought, practically shouted his profession. For all his unctuous appearance, he seemed friendly enough and grateful for the extra help.
Katyia and her two medic assistants had met their assigned Medical Officer an Ensign Toby Cook. He’s been reserved but polite, and had gone over his expectations for them with precision and clarity. Katyia, Selina, and Andrea had all seemed satisfied with his directions.
Chloe’d been given the crusty once-over by the now extremely focused Major Donji, whose jovial and patient demeanor had fallen away with the eminence of the jump. He’d been to the point and basically told her to stay out of the way, and oversee and aid the other Women Corpsmen. Which is what she’d thought she’d be doing anyway. Chloe kept reminding herself that she could react as needed to any given situation. Holy Heaven’s she hoped she could anyway.
Deciding to give her Corpsmen a good example, she settled further into the webbed straps of her seat and tried to meditate. Regulating her breathing she concentrated on the idea that she was able to control her fear and respond to any situation. Repeating this as a mantra over and over in her mind, Chloe fell asleep to the continual thrum of the engines.
Chapter 17
Launched Forward
Chloe woke when the engines slowed. Her whole body felt stiff from the awkward position of the super uncomfortable web seat she was slung in. Stretching slowly, she saw that the soldiers around them were beginning to prepare and guessed this slowing of the engines meant that their landing was fast approaching. Glancing over, she saw the other five women had woken at the sudden change of engine noise as well.
Ensign Garfield, the engineer on the mission came forward and beckoned for Betsy and Johanna, the engineering assistants, to come with him. Chloe gave them both a big grin and a thumbs-up as they followed Garfield down the jump ship and disappeared out of sight down a ladder access into the belly of the ship.
Seconds later Medical Officer Toby Cook came for Katyia, Selina and Andrea. “They’ll come with me for the airdrop ma’am. We’ll be in the last ship to drop. I’ll make sure they come down safely with the med equipment. Don’t you worry. We’ll all be tip top. Won’t we Medics?” he asked with a cocky grin. “Yes, sir. We will, sir,” the three women chorused back with a thumbs-up to Chloe. She smiled tremulously back at them. “Godspeed Corpsmen,” she called back, returning their thumbs up. Chloe couldn’t help her lurching stomach as she watched them follow Officer Cook away, leaving her seated alone in the aft section of the jump ship.
Chloe supposed she ought to find Major Donji and get her instructions for the drop. She knew that staying on the ship wasn’t her best option, as she knew nothing about engineering and would be more helpful on the surface. Standing, and moving on stiff legs down the aisle, Chloe tried to keep from whacking other soldiers with the laser, leg-strapped pistol she’d been issued. She found Major Donji conferring quietly with several Lieutenants towards the front of the ship. He gestured for her wait for him and then turned as the other officers departed towards the rear. “You will be jumping with me Lieutenant.”, the Major stated. He gave her an appraising stare, and motioned for her to follow him.
As they returned to the rear of the ship, she could see soldiers lining up with weapons strapped on tight. The Major stalked to the rear of the huge ship and motioned for her to follow him up into smaller squat ship. “We jump from these smaller craft for low level entries,” he stated. “Put these on,” he said, indicating a heap of equipment and some thruster-boots soldiers were strapping on their feet. All wore similar gloves, thin face masks with wh
at looked like built in breathers, and padded elbow and knee coverings.
“We’ll be dropping from a distance of 200 meters. The thruster boots will deploy automatically upon approach. Try to keep your knees bent and your hands slightly forward. If you start to fall the glove thrusters will fire, absorbing most of the impact. Understood?” Donji snapped.
“Roger that, sir,” Chloe snapped back, mostly due to the stress roiling in her gut. She bent and started strapping on the boots he’d showed them in their briefing. Moving slowly, she tried to recall each step as he’d gone through them earlier. Finishing with the boots, she started on the gloves and other equipment. Finally, checking over once more all the awkward feeling equipment and deciding that all her gear was in place, snugly and securely, she looked up. The entire bay of soldiers seemed to be staring at her. Chloe raised one eyebrow at them behind her mask, shrugged nonchalantly, gave them a thumbs-up, and turned her back to them to line up behind the Major. Despite trembling with fear internally, she couldn’t let it show. No blood in the water from her, she counseled herself. No letting the sharks circle. Little did she know that that small sequence of actions earned her their respect. The girl was feisty. She was ok
Chloe could feel the lurch as the smaller drop ship left the cargo bay and lowered toward the planet below’ What seemed like only a few seconds later, a green light began whirling overhead. The small, safety line she was attached to, tugged her forward on Major Donji’s heels, as the rear door slid open. Atmosphere swirled about her and she was glad of the goggles that protected her eyes and covered part of her nose and mouth. Bets were that all her breath would have been snatched away without the protective headgear. One minute the Major was in front of her, the next he disappeared into a black void. Closing her eyes, Chloe took one huge step forward as she’d seen the Major do, felt the safety hook unsnap and then she was plummeting toward the planet. It was night, but she could see the slight glow of the landing zone that had been set up with minimum light crystals. The heavy weight of the thruster boots, were keeping her upright and in the correct angle of descent to the landing zone coordinates, she realized. A second later the boots deployed and she remembered to bend her knees and get her arms in front of her. Chloe came down on the hard ground in an ungraceful heap. Nothing had been broken, she thought. But her adrenaline was so high, she’d probably only feel it later.
Collecting herself and trying to stand took the next few seconds. Once on her feet, Chloe glanced around and saw other soldiers stripping out of their boots and gloves. She did the same, then began looking around for either her medics or Major Donji. Later she would discover that she was the first woman to enter an Orbit Guard forward mission. The medics jumped after her. She’d been told that, but forgotten in the rush of the situation.
Locating Major Donji, Chloe jogged over to him. “Where the hell is sonar Specialist Glack?” barked the Major. “Sir, he’s twisted an ankle on the entry,” answered an Ensign. “Looks like you’re up Lieutenant Sedgewick,” Donji snapped. “Just about any idiot can read a sonar. Pick it up and let me know if any blips appear,” the Major said, gesturing to a small tablet with heavy black rubber edging that was attached to the side of one of the large crates that were being un-peeled from a heavy coat of camouflage foam.
Chloe jogged over, picked up the tablet, searched the side for an operational switch and flipped it on. A low green light illuminated the screen. Looking up she saw Major Donji, motioning for one of the comms engineers. He ran over and inserted a small comm device in her ear. “It’s tuned to the Major’s channel ma’am,” he said, and disappeared just as quickly as he’d come. Chloe repositioned the comm in her ear, looked at the device in her hand, and said, “No contact at this time, Major,” Donji chirped, “Affirmative,” in her ear.
She took the next few minutes to familiarize herself with the sonar device. It had scales judging distance that scrolled along the sides of the screens. One for longitude and the other for latitude. There were different colors for different things it seemed. Life signs looked to be a bright reddish orange, while metal objects showed up blue on the green background. So fa,r all that was registering on the device were biological signs. Chloe had a terrible thought, “Major, do the Arachnians show up as biologicals or life signs?” she asked trepidatiously.
The Major snorted in her ear, “The device is coded for Arachnians as life signs, Lieutenant.” “Copy that, sir,” Chloe replied with a sigh of relief. “Still clear.” Falling in behind the Major at about twenty feet, Chloe began to follow Razorback Guard through the underbrush. They seemed to move incredibly fast and Chloe had all she could do to keep up and keep track of any movement on her sonar device. At one point, panting heavily, she caught signs of metallic objects coming up on their right. “Inanimate objects 200 meters on the starboard, sir,” she huffed. “Affirmative," Major Donji acknowledged, not sounding even slightly winded. Clearly her time on the treadmills was not going to be sufficient if she kept this type of mission up, Chloe thought. It was darn embarrassing to be gasping like a beached whale and they hadn’t even gotten to the target yet. “Let me live through this, Lord, and I promise to work-out harder," gasped Chloe. There was a chorus of hushed snickers through her headset, as she realized that she’d said it outloud. “Sorry, sir," she whispered through the comm.
Five minutes later, they approached the buildings. She’d hit massive, heavy dark objects on her sonar, and a troop of life signs that she’d reported to Donji just seconds after her embarrassing faux pas. Later, Chloe’d discover that the Major was also getting real-time relay from the ship orbiting above them. Her tablet was just a backup in case the ship took damage. With each of her statements, Donji would simply reply, “Affirmative.”
“Lieutenant Sedgewick stay hunkered down with missile- launcher, Bauer,” Donji barked over his comm, motioning to an Ensign on the ground behind a large rock at the tree line ahead of them. “Affirmative, sir,” Chloe replied and hurled herself down next to the rock.
Chloe and Bauer watched as the squad spread out and surrounded the outpost. Not wanting to speak for fear her comms were broadcasting to everyone, Chloe simply waited and watched. She wondered where the medical team was. So far, they hadn’t engaged the enemy, so she hoped all the Corpsmen were safe.
Thirty seconds later it was still quiet. Bauer reached over and squeezed her hand briefly before turning back and leveling the launcher toward the compound. Chloe watched her sonar carefully. “Enemy approaching on Port side, sir. Contact in twenty meters,” Chloe whispered, frantically double checking her measurements. “Affirmative,” Donji came back.
Ten seconds later all hell broke loose. Multiple explosions rocked the compound seeming to come from the densest objects on her sonar. Several groups of life signs engaged. A score of life signs blipped out slowly. The Arachnians seemed to Chloe to be a far lighter shade of red then the human life signs. To her they were easy to tell apart. Most of the fading signs seemed to be Arachnians, but several of the reddish orange life signs were fading to yellow, not the pinkish that the Arachnians seemed to be.
Chloe could see from her tablet that most of the dense objects were destroyed. She was assuming they were some type of craft, though she and her Corpsmen had been given only the barest of information about the mission and the target. The human life signs were coming their way with a few of the paler Arachnian signatures in pursuit. Bauer stood and launched several missiles behind them to cover their retreat. The blast knocked the Arachnian life signs off her tablet. The hot smell of the launcher stung her eyes and the fumes made her cough. Rechecking her device Chloe could see to her right about fifty meters, two life signs had met and both were fading. One was definitely human. “Major, we’ve a fading human life sign starboard side fifty meters out," Chloe stated firmly. “Roger that, Sonar,” replied Donji. “Pull back to the pick-up site. We’re on your six and will swing out to cover that situation.” Chloe and Bauer, bending low, scrabbled to their feet and ran back into th
e cover they’d come through on the way out.
On the way back to the pick-up site Chloe did nothing except occasionally check her sonar screen, and concentrate on picking her feet up. One stumble and she’d be down and might not be able to get back up. Her lungs burned, and she couldn’t really feel her legs. The spot on her back where her pack hung was knotted into a painful cramp. Checking her screen one more time showed a human life sign converging on the fading ones. The Arachnian sign blipped out. Then the fading human signature and the brighter human one merged. Satisfied that they’d swung over for the wounded soldier, Chloe plunged forward on Bauer’s heels. In her mind, she tried to count the life signs that had blinked out. As morbid as it was, it kept her from thinking about her lungs or her legs. She’d seen about a two dozen of the alien life signs on her screen. None existed now. The heavy black masses had been blown into small chunks of debris showing as a paler blue. She’d seen five of the human life signs fade out. Six seemed to be going orange with tinges of yellow, but were flanked by brighter signs. Guardsmen carrying others, she concluded. The one she’d notified Donji about had merged with another active sign, so she didn’t know the status of that soldier.
Back at the pick-up site, she followed Bauer at a run up the ramp of a ship she hadn’t seen before. She would later realize that this was the troop carrier and med ship. When her engineers and medics had left her on the drop ship, they’d gone into the belly of the larger ship and deployed onto this one. As the ramp leveled off into the main bay, she saw Andrea and Betsy handing out hydration and protein packs to the incoming troops. Chloe greeted each one with relief, checking on their welfare. Betsy let her know that she and Andrea were fine, but that Chloe herself looked like shit. Chloe was so tired she could only give the thumbs up and stumble after Bauer and into one of the web slings farther forward. Pulling off her goggles. She slumped back gasping. Bauer pulled his off and gave her a grin. They were both covered in dirt, ammo powder from the launcher, and sweat. Chloe was breathing as though she’d never get enough air, but Bauer just laughed at her and gave her a slight bump on the shoulder. “Not a bad job for a rookie,” he said laughingly. Chloe gave him a tremulous smile and patted his arm in thanks.