by Leo Champion
Mullins unslung his pack and dumped it on one of the wire seats in the waiting area. A few people had lit cigarettes, and that didn’t seem to be such a bad idea – you couldn’t smoke anywhere near transit terminals on Earth, but people gave less of a shit about that kind of thing in the colonies. Certainly he couldn’t see any no-smoking signs, where there’d have been one every fifteen feet in an Earthside airport or space terminal.
He took his pack out, offered it around to the guys he was with. Mondragon shook his head, ‘Red’ Callaghan – a tall blond man from Northern Australia – took one with a nod of thanks, while Corporal Giovanni-Paolo Pantaleo shook his head but drew his own pack. Mullins lit his then handed Callaghan his lighter.
“Where the hell are we, anyway?” Callaghan asked.
“Adam’s World,” said Pantaleo, a little guy from Boston’s North End. So far as Mullins understood his family had been in the States for hundreds of years, but his accent made him sound like he’d just gotten off the shuttle from Italy. As though the European Federation made it easy to leave, nowadays.
“I got that part, Corporal,” Callaghan said. “I mean where on Adam’s World?”
Pantaleo shrugged. “We gonna be here long enough to care?”
“Some of us have a bit more intellectual curiosity than that,” said Mullins and took out his phone. Hit Maps and – very helpful. It showed a marker on a blank screen, meaning the Adam’s World map hadn’t been downloaded.
Mullins sighed and began the configuration sequence.
“I might have a better idea,” said Mondragon. “Hey you guys!”
He was calling out to four men in Legion uniform except for the helmets. Instead they wore wide-brimmed rainproof hats, and thin plastic ponchos over their uniforms. Three of them had M-25s slung in front of them; the fourth had a long-barreled weapon that looked for all the world like a miniaturized, slimmed-down MPRL, Multi-Purpose Rocket Launcher, right down to the three-cylindered rotating magazine.
“Yo,” said one of the men. “Who you with?”
“Fourth Battalion, Fourth Brigade, First Div. You?”
“First Battalion, Third Brigade, Fourth.”
Through their transparent ponchos, Mullins saw the divisional patch on the men’s right shoulders: a sharp-double-moustached, sharply-goateed copper-colored man in a point-topped helmet. The Mongols.
“Port security?” Pantaleo asked.
“That and perimiter security. Jungle grows like a mother out here,” said the man with the miniaturized MPRL. There was a stripe and a rocker on each shoulder; lance-corporal. “And there’s some bad shit in there.”
“Dinos, I hear,” said Mullins.
“Not as fun as it sounds. Nasty pieces of shit with no fear, even the little ones.”
“We were wondering where on Adam’s World we actually are,” said Mullins. “Someone messed with the orbital transfer station so we’re stuck down here waiting for our next leg.”
“You fish really need to stop giving a shit about things that don’t matter,” said Pantaleo. He looked at the Fourth Division guys for confirmation. “Right?”
The team leader, a corporal himself, shrugged. “Never hurts to know,” he said in an accent that might once have been Russian.
That man turned back to Mullins. “Welcome to New Darwin.”
“That clock up on the wall says it’s ten past six,” said Mullins. “What time’s sunset around here?”
The corporal shrugged. “Seven thirty or so.”
“Hey, Mongol man,” Pantaleo said. “These fish don’t know the right question to ask. I got something to ask: where can we score a drink around here?”
Callaghan nodded in agreement.
“Don’t know if your officers would approve of that,” said the lance-corporal.
“Linz, shut the fuck up. He was asking me, not you. No bars in this terminal; there’s a place in Terminal One if your command lets you go there. Or maybe we could hustle something. Shit our man brews doesn’t taste good, though.”
“Does it fuck you up?” asked Callaghan.
“Damn straight.”
“That’s all I care about.”
* * *
“Yeah, Senior Lieutenant,” said the acting battalion commander. Major Ramos was a short stocky man with a peasant’s build, but he affected a Mexican-ruling-class flowing moustache and goatee anyway.
Only got to rise in the world once he left his home country, Croft had thought upon first seeing the guy. But it wasn’t the place of junior lieutenants to judge majors.
“That’s a good idea,” Ramos went on. “Have your guys load up. Diodorus?”
“Sir?” came the supply officer.
“Can you check with the local unit and try to get an ammunition resupply? I’m authorizing seventy rounds per man for weapons familiarization purposes, and I’d like – repeat, like, do not require – to get back to a full load before they re-board.”
“You got it, boss,” Diodorus said. He gave Ramos a casual salute and headed off.
* * *
“All right, you guys! Rifle time!” shouted Senior Sergeant Williams. “Put your damn ponchos on because it looks like rain, leave the rest of your packs but it’s time to see what these M-25s can really do!”
“That mean we get to go dino hunting?” Private Johnny Montague asked. He was a wiry little shaven-headed black man from Jamaica.
“Means that if any of ‘em are dumb enough to wander into your sights, you can feel free. But focus on your targets. Chow afterwards. Now get your shit together and move out!”
* * *
Bravo Company had a book strength of about a hundred and seventy men, but only about a hundred and thirty were trooping out into the brutal humidity outside the spaceport terminal, wearing transparent light-plastic ponchos with their rain hoods slung up over mostly helmetless heads. The big M-25 rifles were slung in front of them; a light rain was beginning to fall.
Following one of the locally-stationed Legion troops, they headed across the grey concrete to the cleared area by the port perimiter. Not to the nearest point – rather, they headed diagonally across the concrete toward one of the bulldozer-led work crews they’d seen from the terminal’s observation windows.
As they drew closer, the yellow bulldozer looked to have an armored cab. Steel gratings had been welded across the doors and windshield, given a casual dose of yellow painting. So it probably wasn’t rifle fire the thing was armored against.
Nearby, on the edge of the concrete pads, were a pair of open-backed five-ton trucks, ‘FL’ stencilled on each door. Like the bulldozer, the trucks’ windows had been crudely protected with welded-on steel gratings.
A four-man Legion team stood watching about twenty men in black trousers and orange reflective vests as they followed the bulldozer, which was slowly making its way across the edge of jungle, mowing trees and ferns down. Some of those men themselves turned to look as Bravo Company came up.
“Get your asses in gear, fuckups!” another man shouted. Mullins thought he saw a whip flash onto one of the men’s backs. A moment later, from how the man flinched and howled and turned back to the log he was cutting up, he was sure of it.
Black Gangers. He’d seen the Legion’s penal troops before, worked with them on a similar job clearing brush for a road on New Virginia. Labor gangs, under the eye of a Goldneck – a Legion military policeman – and a fire-team of guards. The guys driving the bulldozer and the trucks might have been Legion, might have been some kind of local employees. The fact that somebody had bothered to put protection on the cabs of the vehicles made it highly unlikely that the guys driving them were Black Gangers.
Not far from the bulldozer and its supporting Black Gang, at the edge of the jungle they were probably about to clear, someone had placed a line of disposable plastic plates that might have come from a cafeteria. Maybe thirty of them, spaced about a yard apart.
“Platoons!” Senior Lieutenant Gardner shouted. “Into platoons! Get b
ehind the cones!”
A line of bright orange traffic cones, witches’ hats, had been placed on the concrete, about thirty feet from where the pads ended.
The experienced men knew what was going on. Williams and the sergeants gestured Third Platoon into line.
“The rifles should already be sighted in for a hundred yards,” the platoon jefe announced. “But now is time for you to check. The distance from here to the plates at the treeline has been measured at exactly a hundred yards. Each man will go to prone and fire a single aimed shot at the center of the plate nearest them, one at a time, to confirm this.”
Soon it was Mullins’ turn; he let others go first, seeing that most of the rifles were shooting true. The M-25 had a louder bang than the old rifles had, and more of a kick; more propellant in each of the caseless rounds, although they individually weighed less.
“You will now fire three-round bursts into the jungle.”
Mullins noticed that the Black Gangers and their guards had pulled back, to be away from any stray shots. The vehicles they’d left where they were at the treeline.
The light rain had picked up to a heavy drizzle, growing stronger in heavy gusts; thunder cracked somewhere in the distance.
The Goldneck crew chief, identifiable by his bright red – instead of blue, or orange-vested black – shirt and the half-moon gold gorget that hung high on his chest, the cause of the military policemen’s nicknames – had a heavy transparent poncho, as did the men of the guard team. The twenty convicts, though, had nothing to keep the rain off, not even headgear. Some of them had plastic capes that looked like they’d been scavenged from pallet wrap; most of them had jack-all. They huddled and, despite the heat, shivered a bit as the rain came down on them.
Poor bastards, Mullins thought.
He turned his rifle back to the treeline and let off a three-round burst. More recoil than his old gun had had. He fired again, shooting up the treeline.
Out of the corner of his ear he heard the senior man of the guard team make a comment to Williams: “Appreciate this, Senior. Flush out anything in the area we’re about to work on. Or kill it, anyway.”
Two of these guys had the miniaturized rocket launchers, Mullins had noticed. The other two had M-25s.
Suddenly, as the men of Third Platoon intermittently emptied bursts and single-shots, and a few longer-burst instances of full-auto, through the now-pounding rain into the thick green treeline, one of the guard team looked up from the phone that had been in his hand.
Phone or monitoring device? Were there sensors out there?
Apparently.
“Sarge, markers just picked up something big.”
“Fire must have drawn it,” said the team leader. “Rockets up and ready!”
Fuck, thought Mullins. The counter on his magazine said he had five left; he emptied those into the jungle and changed magazines, something he’d practiced with empty ones on the Star of Dantilus. Others – the men of Third Platoon were combat veterans, after all – had noticed something. The fire slackened off.
“Get those gangers back! You visitors, be ready to open the hell up and get the hell back! Get the hell back all of you!”
Whatever’s out there can’t stand up to a Legion company, thought Mullins. But this sergeant knew what kind of firepower a Legion company, even a depleted one like Bravo, had. And he was taking this dead seriously. His two men with the rocket launchers had dropped to kneeling firing positions and were looking through the weapons’ scopes.
“Cease fire!” Williams, Croft and now Master Sergeant Ortega was shouting. “Hold your ammo and get back. Something’s coming!”
The other platoon sergeants and officers, followed by the more junior NCOs as they took up the call, were spreading the word and gesturing. The men scurried back, weapons nervously pointed at the treeline. Something bad was coming, and Mullins could see the treetops shaking, see motion in the trees—
Then it burst out of the treeline, a green raptor-like thing fifteen feet high on two powerful hind legs. There was a low yellow crest on the top of its head above a wide-open mouth with huge teeth. The legs powered it snarling forward faster than Mullins thought anything alive could move and he froze, terror overriding—
Terror, and training, made him bring his rifle up and open fire. To Mullins’ left the rocketeers fired their weapons; the first stage sent the two-inch rockets flying out of the launchers. A few feet out of the tubes secondary charges ignited on the rockets, lancing them at the charging dinosaur. One missed, as hundreds of 5.56mm bullets ripped into the charging beast to no apparent effect. The other hit it in the chest, exploding in a blaze of gore.
“On me and defend the rocketeers!” came Sujit Janja’s voice. “On me and hold fast to protect our firepower!”
The former Rajput lieutenant had command authority in his voice, and he’d thought faster than any of the company’s real officers or senior NCOs. Against his better judgment Mullins found himself edging sideways toward the two kneeling men with the rocket launchers.
The direct rocket hit had torn a gaping, bleeding cavity out of the charging beast’s chest, but the monster itself didn’t appear to have noticed it. Bullets ripped into its head as, massive jaws gaping, it bore down on the men. Someone screamed, and Mullins could hear others running.
More rockets tore into the beast as it closed to within thirty yards of the nearest Legion troops. The Black Gangers and their Goldneck crew chief had fled, dropping their tools. Mullins had the strong feeling that most of Bravo Company was behind him.
“Hold to defend the rocketeers!” Janja shouted.
The raptor-like thing could tell where the pain was coming from, and – its jaws snapping – it charged the pair of guard-troop rocketeers and the knot of men, including Janja, Mullins and gorilla-huge Dashratha, guarding them.
A rocket slammed into the side of the dinosaur’s head and exploded in another spray of gore, blowing most of the monster’s jaw away as it cleared the pads. But with half its head left, like a decapitated chicken, it kept coming.
Mullins fired at it and prepared to run.
Dashratha threw down his rifle, picked up one of the Black Gangers’ thrown-aside axes, and charged. He was six foot five, Dashratha, and Mullins had seen him fire a fully-automatic ten-gauge shotgun with no more ill effect than a regular man could handle an M-25.
Now he charged the dinosaur from its side, his boots pounding across the concrete, and two-handedly swung the axe into the dinosaur’s reversed knee-joint.
The beast howled and, with half a head, bit at him.
“Hold fire!” Janja was yelling. “You’ll hit my man, hold fire!”
Mullins had no choice; he’d only had the two magazines loaded up and he was empty on both.
With a single move, Janja had drawn his bayonet from its sheath at his belt, affixed it to its mount on the front of his rifle and charged to join Dashratha. After a moment Mandvi followed, not bothering to fix the bayonet to his rifle. The former untouchable from Delhi was a small lean man, and he wielded the long bayonet like a sword.
The raptor-like creature bit with half of a headless mouth down at Dashratha, but the former Rajput was almost as fast as he was massive; he ducked and then buried his axe into the joint between the thing’s thigh and its main body.
Then Janja and Mandvi were on the other side, cutting and slashing at the other leg. But Dashratha’s second axe stroke had removed its ability to balance; it toppled down, still thrashing, to the ground. Mandvi slashed its throat open, his blade followed a moment later by Janja’s and then by Dashratha’s axe.
It thrashed and howled, and Mandvi shouted something. The three men backed off; the beast clearly wasn’t going anywhere now.
It still took another minute to die, and even after its head had been effectively severed from its thick neck there was twitching and movement.
Mullins drank from his canteen and then offered it to Mandvi, breathing hard. Everyone was. Mandvi took a deep s
wig from the canteen and handed it back with a grateful nod.
“That happen often?” Williams asked the guard sergeant, who nodded. His rocketeers were reloading their triple-cylindered magazines, other men with rifles raised pointing them nervously out at the treeline.
“The big ones, not so much. It was probably drawn by the noise of the shooting. But a couple of the little ones got two of our convicts last week. Snuck up and ripped their throats out.”
The Black Gangers had fled but not too far, and now they were being herded back through the torrenting rain by their Goldneck team chief, who was slashing his whip around in the air as he shouted.
“You fuckers think that crap is going to load itself into the trucks? You worthless assholes really fucking think that? Get back to work, you lousy assholes.”
Mullins exchanged looks with Mandvi. Mandvi raised his eyebrows: Oh?
Mullins slowly shook his head: No, this is not how you effectively manage people.
Slowly, reluctantly, with the shaken guard team moving in toward the treeline to protect them, the Black Gangers picked up their tools and headed back.
“Bravo Company! Bravo Company!” Senior Lieutenant Gardner shouted. “You’ve had your target practice, now head back in to the terminal for lunchtime chow. Check in with Supply for your food vouchers.”
Yeah, thought Mullins, that shooting had drained him. He knew it was late evening this-place-on-the-planet time, but speaking personally for himself? Lunch couldn’t happen soon enough.
Lunch and air conditioning again.
* * *
Sergeant Joe Hill sat at one of Terminal Two’s seats, no-longer-fish Private Charlie Murdoch to his left and scrawny Private Roccio to his left. They were all chowing down triple-beefed Super Megas from the local Burger Master; dinner by the evening timezone of this layover world, lunch for Hill and his guys.
Hill was thirty-four years old, five foot eight but very muscular, with short-cropped dark red hair. He’d been convicted of – well, a robbery had gone wrong but he hadn’t meant to associate with killers, and he did feel bad for that poor dumb security guard who’d tried to play hero – but he liked his hometown of Chicago. Damned if he’d end his days on some damn planet as a colonist, he’d do two hitches and get his citizenship back.