by Leo Champion
“So,” Evanston said wearily. It was all going to be bad news, but she had to hear it. “Brief me.”
One of Chalmers’ aides handed him a tablet, and the presentation began.
Bridges blown. Infrastructure torn up. Nomad hodes rampaging over the countryside killing and destroying left and right.
Rural Chongdin Qings had fled for the cities, and the roads had become jammed with refugees. Nomad hordes had overrun some cities, killing humans along with Chongdins, and were threatening others.
The big cities, and Chongdin had industrialized heavily in the seventy-five years since US arrival, were relatively safe – from nomads. The invasion seemed to have set off every ante-Chongdin loyalist, Chinese saboteur and secessionist criminal in the Empire, not to mention two thirds of the Varren Province guerrillas and borderland raiders in the southwest.
Not helped by how the nomads, who were apparently being paid bounties for destroying important stuff, were sneaking infiltrators with satchel charges in amongst the refugees, who were fleeing in such numbers that searching them all would have been difficult even with five times the number of troops she had.
Bridges, power lines, pipelines and aqueducts were being blown all across the Chongdin Empire, Chongdin Qings were dying by the hundreds of thousands, and the forces Evanston through Chalmers had to work with… was pitiful.
Oh, there were far more troops in American Chongdin than had been on, say, New Virginia during the rising there a few months ago. That was because Dinqing was a shared planet, and not the kind where the different powers had simply taken different continents.
A shared planet with meaningful land borders – not just with Europe across the wastelands, but with the independents along the southern coast – was going to have more troops for that reason… but not in the expectation they’d be used!
The border passes had fallen, or at any rate communications with them had been lost. The US forces on Dinqing had been scattered around Chongdin; some simply in garrison, more of them running public works, anti-bandit patrols, that kind of thing. They’d been all over the place and some units had been overrun.
The rest had fought piecemeal actions back to the nearest bigger cities, where a number of them were now involved in riot control. In some of the better-organized cities – almost entirely the fresh-built industrial ones, built not over millenia but over decades, on planned grids – the Colonial Guard had been able to keep order, and the military proper were being sent out to clear the roads.
Chief of Staff Tribolo moved into her field of vision, making the hand-sign that meant ‘attention now’.
“What is it, Leah?” Evanston asked.
“Ma’am, you asked to be informed the minute any ship entered the system. One just came out of A-Space from Adam’s World.”
“That was fast,” Chalmers observed. “If it’s reinforcements.”
It was seven days via the fastest ship to Adam’s World, the nearest.
“No, sir,” said Tribolo. “This liner’s regularly scheduled, the Darling; they’d have left Adam’s World before news could possibly have gotten there. But the manifest does say it contains troops.”
* * *
“Looks like we arrived at a bad time,” Master Sergeant Chin-ho Rhee muttered to Captain Cormac Faden in one of the Darling’s conference rooms. Viewscreens were showing English-language news channels picked up from the surface, and showing nothing good on any of them.
Faden was a sandy-haired Irishman in his mid-twenties, although something in his eyes made him look a decade older. Seven years in the Legion would do that to you, the last three of them spent as an officer. So would multiple serious injuries, the last of them incurred just weeks ago in desperate hand-to-hand fighting, taking a bastion of the alien castle of Bergschloss on New Virginia.
Rhee, Bravo Company’s squat late-thirties first sergeant, had practically been gutted in the same brutal fight, hurt so badly the field medics hadn’t expected him to live. But he’d fought through, and been released from the coma tanks only a couple of days behind the company commander.
Transport schedules, waiting for liners with space to align time-wise, had gotten about forty or so One-Four-Four men onto the Darling, ready to rejoin the battalion. About a dozen of them were Bravo Company, including Private Pedro Alhambre and PFC Hesh Gul, a wiry, whip-lean Afghan. Most of those men, more showing up now, were in this mess room of the liner watching the video feeds.
“Looks like we arrived at an interesting time, Master Sergeant,” Faden replied dryly. He was the highest-ranking officer – and Rhee the highest-ranking enlisted man – in the group, and he was well aware that most of the men, a goodly number of them junior enlisted on their way back from their first serious injury, were paying attention.
“Sir,” came a member of the ship’s crew. “Encrypted call for Captain Faden in one of the booths, please.”
“Sounds like orders,” Faden remarked to Rhee and the three lieutenants in the conference room, who’d gathered by him as well.
He followed the blue-uniformed crewman down the corridor to the nearest booth, where he firmly closed the door and then swiped his military ID against a reader. He looked into a camera and pressed his right finger to a pad.
Authentication complete, the touchscreen on the side of the booth switched to a blue ‘WAITING’ screen for a few moments.
Then a file photo of Lieutenant-Colonel Hall appeared. He was a handsome brown-haired man only a couple of years older than Faden, in his late twenties. Faden had heard the man was a hotshot, an example of West Point’s best.
“Faden. Good to see you back.”
1/4/4’s commanding officer was only using the voice aspect, which implied he was out in the field. That would explain why it had taken a couple of hours from arrival for the commander to get to him, too. That and the nomad invasion that seemed to be consuming Chongdin.
“Thanks, sir. Looks like we arrived at a busy time. How’s Gardner been doing with Bravo Company?”
Hall paused before replying, enough of a pause as to give Faden a bad feeling.
“You’d have been updated on the – uh, disciplinary issue – that got them transferred out of Vazhao.”
“Guarding Black Gangers,” Faden said. He’d received periodic email updates about the company, automatically-generated when something defined as a ‘major event’ triggered them.
A horrible thought crossed his mind.
“It was to an engineering project,” Faden said slowly. “Called the ‘Central Territories Improvement Program’. And it wasn’t the center of Chongdin.”
Which meant the center of something else. Of the continent, probably. The wastelands the nomad invaders were coming from.
“Captain,” said the battalion commander slowly, “we completely lost all radio contact with Bravo Company and associated elements two weeks ago. Four hundred miles into the wastelands. Faden, I’m sorry to be the one to tell you this? But you and Rhee have probably returned to a company that no longer exists.”
Faden shook his head dumbly.
“Lost contact with” did not mean “annihilated” when everything was being jammed anyway. It simply meant they were being jammed.
You’re in denial, a part of him told himself. Because the alternative, his company wiped out to the last man in his absence, when he should have died with them… was unthinkable.
“There’s a chance, right?” he asked, hoping to keep the desperation out of his voice.
“You heard what I said, Captain. I’m sorry.”
That contact had been lost, Faden thought. And only that.
“Then sir? We’ll see.”
* * *
Lieutenant-Colonel Robert Hall put the handset down sadly.
“How did he take it?” Major Ramos, the battalion XO, asked.
The two were in a tent on a hill overlooking a four-lane suspension bridge not far from Vazhao. Alpha Company and the battalion HQ company had been defending it for the last
several days, shooting at the nomad waves that tried to get across. So far they’d held, but the waves had been increasing in strength and he’d lost men.
But the cost of reconstructing the bridge was, apparently worth less to the Governor’s office than the cost of a few Legion lives. Well, orders to Hall didn’t have to make sense, they just had to be obeyed.
“About as well as he could have, I suppose.”
Gunfire clattered behind them as nomads made another try at the bridge. It was a major bridge and Hall could understand not blowing it, but the nomads didn’t seem to sleep. His people were under harassment or attack twenty-four hours a day. It wasn’t if the bridge would fall, but when.
But he’d been specifically forbidden from blowing it – although they’d already lost the west side – without permission. The brigadier-general at Vazhao Military District command, a man Hall considered way out of his depth in this crisis, had outright told Hall “It’s better to risk letting the bridge be taken than to risk blowing it by mistake. Retaking the bridge is easier than rebuilding it, after all.”
Hall strongly suspected that at some level the general had thought he was giving orders to a full line battalion, instead of just Alpha and HQ Companies. Some of the men in this fight were intelligence analysts and supply clerks, not riflemen past the extent to which every Legion man was.
Bravo Company had been out of communications since the start, presumably lost. Charlie Company was being employed on riot control in Vazhao, dealing with the millions of refugees who’d fled to the sprawling neo-industrial city.
Delta Company, in the Vasimir Pass, had remained in contact for a couple of days longer than Bravo, due to having a jamming-impervious landline of communication. Captain Numminen’s last communication had been to the effect that they were still holding but starting to run low on ammunition.
That had been two days after the jamming had started. Then someone had cut the fiber optic cables on them and contact had been lost like it had with Bravo. Half his battalion, lost.
Hall sighed.
“Time to tell Numminen’s XO his new assignment’s probably gone before he arrived,” he said. An easier task than the first one, but better than doing it in person. Worse than writing regret-to-inform-you letters to men’s families, something Hall had done plenty of in his five years since West Point.
“Decided where to put those guys?” Ramos asked. Men coming back to the half of 1/4/4 that had been written off the books.
“Fit them in where we can,” Hall said. “And I told you, we’re not going to completely give up on Bravo and Delta. Not just yet.”
* * *
“Sir,” Master Sergeant Kowalski reported as the men carefully trudged down a mountain path. “Point guard have a report.”
There were about a hundred and ten effectives left of Delta Company, plus thirty or more wounded who’d live. With them were fifty or so Colonial Guard stragglers in their brown uniforms and stiffly-peaked caps – although a few had managed to pick up helmets now – and seven Army logistics personnel whose vehicle had busted an axle at exactly the wrong time.
A sizeable group, Captain Olli-Pekka Numminen thought, but not what you’d call a fighting force right now. That was something he was hoping to change. He’d hated having to abandon his positions and flee into the mountains, but they’d been starting to run low on ammunition and the tide of nomads had already been flowing through the pass around them.
“Tell me they’ve got news,” Numminen said to his first sergeant. “Or found us some ammunition.”
The big man shook his head.
“No, sir. But they’ve found a telegraph wire.”
The nomads had been cutting all of those as they came through, ripping down telephone and fiber optic wires. With radio jamming in full effect across the area – Sergeant Raymond, his signals chief, had suggested going for the nearest jammer and trying to shut it down, but that had been the west side of the mountains and he’d been taking the company east, toward Chongdin – he’d been completely out of contact for twelve days.
Nomads rampaging across the Chongdin Empire, he imagined. In which case an available company would be helpful.
Orders would be helpful. Orders while they were in the mountains still not far from the Vasimir Pass, would be useful.
“Get Raymond,” Numminen said.
“He’s already on it.”
“Then today,” said D Company’s commander, “might be the day get back into contact!”
Chapter Twenty-Three
For Croft, the worst thing had become the loneliness.
Not the loneliness of command, of being where the buck stopped in charge of everyone around him. He’d been raised in the tradition of command by his father and, after Lieutenant-Colonel James Croft III had been killed when his son was fifteen, by family friends. He’d anticipated that and been groomed for it. It was hard; he’d joined the Legion to do hard things; it was simply a part of reality.
No, what got to him was the absence of information and communications. The constant jamming meant that his entire world for the last two weeks had been Ft. Hubris and the area you could see from there. He had no idea if his calls for help had been heard; with the jamming, MacGallagher had advised that there wasn’t a chance – but wouldn’t the jamming itself indicate something was wrong and draw help, or at least a communications attempt?
Likely Dunwell was right and this was just a small part of some much bigger fire. That the jamming meant trouble was happening well beyond just this part of the wastelands, that this particular horde was not the only one involved.
He didn’t know, and that was driving him crazy.
Now he looked into the communications room, where one man – this time it was bushy-red-moustached Corporal Jankowski – was always on duty.
Looked in unnecessarily. Having pulled the door open, Croft could easily hear the hissing static of the jammers. Jankowski sat with his feet on a desk, reading something. He turned when the lieutenant appeared, to stand and salute.
Croft waved the salute away. “Back at ease, Corporal. No change, I guess?”
“None, sir,” Jankowski said.
“Let me know the second anything changes,” Croft said. Aware that he’d issued the same order – although to a different man, Robinson – three hours ago.
“Yessir.”
Croft turned. Time to inspect my little world.
It was early morning – sunrise had been a minute or so earlier every day since they’d gotten here, and the difference in the day’s heat had become noticeable – but the sun was already blazing down. It made the flagstones of the courtyard hot under his boots as he passed a group of resting Black Gangers.
They looked half-starved; they were half-starved. He’d cut rations a week ago from two MREs down to one, and it was starting to get to the men. It was starting to get to him, although he tried not to show it. At least, sitting on top of a well, water wasn’t the problem it very easily could have been.
A couple of tired men casually saluted him as he headed up the stairs to the battlements, where men stood watching the nomads dig their slantwise ditches toward the fortress. They’d made good progress, and a few air-burst mortar rounds hadn’t dissuaded them too much. Back when he’d had mortar ammunition to speak of.
“I give it Thursday when they’re in jezzail range,” Williams observed. “Then they’ll be able to completely suppress our fire at their next assault.”
It took a moment for Croft to remember that weeks had named days in them, that today was Monday. That in a normal world yesterday would have been a weekend. The concept of weekends seemed like something from a past life.
He nodded at the platoon sergeant, aware of what the man was saying. The snipers who came forward, so far, mostly died. When they could snipe from a trench, there would be a lot more of them and they’d last longer. It was already risky to be exposed for too long.
“Their next assault,” Croft said. “And if we withst
and that, their next.”
There’d been two assaults since the first one; the last had been a week ago. That was when the nomads had apparently taken one of their advisers’ advice and started the trenches, which had moved with disturbing speed.
“Godfrey holds, right?” Sergeant Kalchenko asked wearily. “They held out a year and a half, it’s only been two weeks for us.”
“Two weeks in which we’ve been abandoned,” Private Andrews muttered. “We’re all going to die here, aren’t we, Lieutenant?”
Roccio and a couple of others murmured agreement.
It did feel like they’d been completely abandoned – he would have given anything to hear an outside voice right now – but you couldn’t agree with grumbling enlisted men.
“If we’re going to die,” Croft said, “then we’re going to die well. Godfrey holds.”
The sun glared down on them.
* * *
“This detour better be worth it,” Newbauer grumbled as they steadily scaled a steep hill toward the jamming station. “Fifteen miles out of our way! We could have made Kandin-dak tonight otherwise, Private!”
“Yes sir,” Mullins replied. He was with the hyperactive lieutenant-colonel in front of a tired group. This jammer – about ten miles due east of the fortress, its hill one of quite a few in a particularly, for this part of the wastelands, steep and rough area – was a bit out of their way, but according to the captured map very much the closest one to Hubris.
At first Newbauer had been curtly uninterested – “we can talk to them in person when we get there, without wasting time,” he’d said – but Mullins had pointed out that this jammer would also be blocking Kandin-dak, making it impossible for anyone in the fortress to communicate outwards for help.
“The fort is safety,” Newbauer had snapped like it was part of an incantation. Maybe in his head it had been. “The fort doesn’t need help.”
“Orders, sir. You’re going to want to give orders to the rest of the Project.”