Crimson Worlds: Prequel - The Gates of Hell

by Jay Allan

  “You can supervise the rest of the loading for me, can’t you general?” He was standing next to Worthington, staring across 20 meters of wet yellow sand, watching more wounded being loaded onto an evac boat. The operation was just beginning, and the enemy was throwing everything at the Marines, trying to breach their lines and wipe them out before they could complete their evac. Holm was grateful that at least some of his people would get off the Godforsaken planet, but his thoughts were still grim, the dead face of Danny Burke staring back at him from the dark recesses of his mind.

  “No.”

  It took a few seconds for Worthington’s unexpected reply to sink in. Holm turned toward the general, his surprised look hidden by his visor. “Sir, we need to hit them now…or they’ll overrun us before we complete the evac. I have to go, sir…or it will be too late.”

  “No, Elias.” Worthington’s voice was strangely calm. “You stay here and see that your people get on those boats and get out of here.” He paused for an instant, turning to look at the wounded being helped onto the transports. “You owe them that. We owe them.” He turned back toward Holm. “I’ll lead the rearguard. That’s my job.”

  Holm started to argue, but Worthington put his hand up. “That’s an order, captain.” He stood still for a few seconds, staring at Holm, and then he turned and began walking toward the perimeter. He stopped about 50 meters away and turned back briefly, facing toward Holm. “Good luck, Elias. Your Marines were lucky to have you here. I can’t begin to tell you how I respect and admire the job you’ve done.”

  Holm started to speak, but Worthington raised his hand again and turned back, marching off to the front line. Holm just sat in stunned silence and stared…until the general walked up over a hill and out of sight. Then he turned back and focused on getting his people loaded onto the transports.

  Holm had listened to the whole thing on the com. He hadn’t expected many of the rearguard to make it back, even when he was planning to lead it himself. But he’d never imagined anything like the savage counterattack General Worthington had launched with 50 volunteers. It was insanity…it had no chance to work. But it did. At least for the few moments it had to.

  The general had held the line for over an hour, repelling attack after attack as the waves of landing ships swooped down into the LZ, picking up the battered Marines and ferrying them up to the fleet. He kept weakening his line, sending units back to board the waiting shuttles. Finally, he was alone with his 50 hand-picked veterans. There weren’t enough of them to hold the line…so Worthington put himself in the front and ordered an attack.

  The enemy had been caught by surprise. There were 50 Marines, charging across the shattered landscape, directly into the maw of a force ten times their numbers. Holm listened to them on the com, screaming as they charged at the stunned Janissaries. They had no chance to win, no hope of defeating the enemy. But all they wanted was time…time for the last of their comrades to board the shuttles and get off the ground.

  Holm was listening when he heard it. “The general’s down!” He never knew which one of Worthington’s fifty said it first, but he could hear the horror in the voice. His stomach clenched, waiting, listening. When the words finally came they didn’t seem real. “He’s dead. General Worthington is dead!”

  Holm wanted to drop to his knees and vomit. He couldn’t believe it. The general was dead? How could that be? Worthington had been a hero since Holm had been a raw cherry doing garrison duty on a dustbin of a planet out on the rim. Now he was dead. The fighting heart of the Marine Corps was gone.

  “Take off…now.” Holm snapped the order to the shuttle pilot and jumped back, out of range of the backblast. The Marines were finally off Persis…all except Elias Holm and the survivors of Worthington’s force. There was nothing Holm could do for Worthington now…nothing but take care of his people. “All personnel…retreat to the LZ immediately. All other units have successfully evac’d.”

  He knew they’d have a hard time breaking off. The surprise had worn off, and the enemy was fighting them hard. Half of them were down already, and the survivors had half a klick of open ground to cross.

  Holm stood out in the open, ten meters from the last shuttle, watching the Marines running toward the shuttle. “C’mon,” he screamed. “Move your asses!” He watched them approach, the enemy in pursuit, firing. He saw one fall…then another. Five in all, but 18 survivors made it into the LZ, running toward the ship.

  Holm stood alongside the shuttle. “Let’s go…get onboard.” He stepped to the side, grabbing his assault rifle and firing at the pursuing enemy, blazing away on full auto. He watched Worthington’s survivors climbing onto the shuttle until the last one was aboard.

  Elias Holm snapped his last clip in place, firing as he fell back, grabbing onto the handholds on the shuttle. He was the last live Marine on Persis, and he grabbed on and pulled himself aboard. “Let’s go,” he screamed to the pilot, and a second later he felt the g forces as the ship’s engines blasted hard, lifting them off the planet…on the way back to the fleet.

  The Battle of Persis was over.

  Excerpt from the memoirs of General Elias Holm, Commandant, Alliance Marine Corps:

  I survived my journey through hell on Persis, though barely a third of my Marines came through with me. Those men and women were some of the finest I’ve ever been privileged to lead. It was a tragic, brutal battle that never should have happened, but it has entered into a proud and revered place in the history of the Corps…an example of the tenacity and brotherhood of the Marines.

  Third Battalion was destroyed as a fighting force; its survivors would be dispersed to other formations and the unit’s colors cased, retired. Some of us who survived would go on to new battles…the God of War was not done with us yet. But most of the men and women who’d fought at my side and bled with me through those fateful days had seen enough of war. Peace had come, however foully achieved, and with it, most of the surviving Marines of the Third Battalion mustered out to seek another kind of life, one where they could share the opportunities their sacrifices had for so long defended.

  News from the Caliphate came quickly. The lords and generals who’d been so afraid to present the Caliph with the treaty terms now had to explain how they’d been unable to wipe out a small contingent of Marines, despite suffering over 2,000 casualties in the effort. They chose an alternate route, one less likely to end badly for all of them. Caliph Mehmet was strangled in his bath and succeeded by his six-year old son, a pudgy child who had shown no signs yet of the rabid insanity that had so ravaged his father’s judgment. The nobility and military quickly forgot about the disaster on Persis and took solace that they now had a leader who promised to be far easier to control.

  The peace held, despite the fact that the Alliance had reneged on the terms Dutton promised. The truth was a stark one. Neither the Caliphate nor the CAC had the capacity to continue the war. The failure of the Janissaries to crush an outnumbered and beleaguered force of Marines sapped the already shaky morale of the Caliphate military. The elite soldiers themselves were unbowed, aching for a rematch, but the colonial nobility and the line troops were demanding peace.

  The Alliance was in rough shape too, but not as bad as its enemies. The war would have ended on Persis anyway, even without the twisted bargain that sold my Marines’ lives to the enemy. Dutton’s devilish deal had done nothing to change the outcome…except to sacrifice 500 veteran Marines…and to fracture the bond between the Corps and the government back home. That suspicion and distrust would grow over the years, and the Marines would slowly shift their loyalty to the colonies they defended closely and not the Earth government they would come to distrust more and more. That process culminated in the colonial rebellions, when the Corps would side with the insurrectionists, but that was more than 30 years after Persis, and another story entirely.

  The joy of peace was bittersweet. We had paid heavily, both in the war itself, and in emotional impact of the disgraceful affair on
Persis. We had all lost so many friends and comrades, it was difficult to focus on the benefits of the war’s end, at least initially when empty chairs and absent voices were so noticeable. The treachery of it all was profoundly disillusioning. To me, it was Persis we lost our innocence. Until then, the Corps considered itself the space-based ground force of the Alliance. But afterward, the colonies began to think of themselves differently, and so did the men and women of the Marines. We had crossed a Rubicon, one that would be decades in realizing its full effect, but a profound change nonetheless.

  General Worthington’s death had been a shock. He’d sacrificed himself to save what was left of the battalion. On a spreadsheet of military effectiveness, his life was a bad trade for the tattered remnants of one shattered unit. But as tragic as his loss was, I can’t imagine a better way for a Marine to die…saving the lives of hundreds of his men and women. He’d only have faced court martial and disgrace if he’d returned, and I can’t imagine a more tragic injustice. Dying a hero was a better end, at least for his legacy…and I think for the man too. Being stripped of his rank and ejected from the Corps – that would have hurt him far more deeply than those hyper-velocity rounds that ended his life. They killed his body on Persis, but the horror of being paraded around as a traitor would have killed his soul.

  I have only come to respect Charles Worthington more over the years. We’d all looked to him for strength for so long, we never considered the toll it took on him. I would come to know that strain myself, the constant pressure of command that hollows you out day by day, year by year, until there is nothing left. But that was still years ahead of me, and it would take another war, larger and more terrible even than the one just concluded, before I truly understood. I’ll always be grateful to General Worthington and will revere his memory for the rest of my life…as a true hero of the Corps and one of the best men I ever knew.

  Colonel Thomas survived his wounds, and he retired to a new colony world settled primarily by Marines mustering out of the service. They’d named the place Tranquility, and I’ve never been sure if that was supposed to be a hopeful prediction or just an inside joke in the Corps. I never knew exactly what transpired with Thomas after the battle and, even years later, I never asked him. I know the Commandant had intervened with Alliance Intelligence and the government on his behalf. In the end, his part in Worthington’s actions cost him his career. But he was discharged honorably and avoided prosecution. And the general’s reputation was intact, his insubordination – treason to some –washed away in the sanitized records. Alliance Gov had more to gain from the worship of a dead hero than the memory of a disgraced traitor.

  Admiral Clement had rounded up a hundred Alliance Intelligence operatives and held them captive while he launched the rescue operation. I know there was talk of prosecuting him, but nothing ever came from those rumblings. I suspect Dutton would have like to see Clement punished, but it simply wasn’t worth the trouble. The admiral was old, and as disillusioned as we were by what had happened. He served another year, mostly overseeing the mothballing of part of the fleet and the return to a peacetime footing. Then, sure his retiring naval personnel had received the benefits they’d been promised, he also mustered out, immigrating to a beautiful new colony called Atlantia. It was peaceful world that resembled his original home along the Maine coastline…or at least what that had been like centuries ago, before mankind had ravaged her natural beauty. Near the end of the Third Frontier War, I got word that he had died, at home and of natural causes. He’d spent the nearly thirty years of his retirement walking the rocky coastlines and exploring the peaceful blue oceans of his adopted homeworld. Clement had been a sailor his whole life, whether he navigated the salty ocean spray of Atlantia’s seas or the frozen blackness of space.

  But my clearest memory of Persis…the face I will see for the rest of my life, the true image of the brutality and disillusionment of those days in hell, is that of Danny Burke, crying in agony, calling to me in bewildered fear as his lifeblood poured out through the breeches in his suit and into the yellow sands of an enemy world.

  He died young, far from home, terrified and in pain. I remember the feeling of futility, the miserable lack of comfort I had to offer that boy. I will have those memories until the day I die. For me, that lost private will be an eternal reminder of the darkest side of what we do…of the horrendous cost of holding the line, so our people back home can live their lives and watch their children grow on a hundred different worlds. If mankind is to have a new beginning among the stars, it will not come cheaply, for we are our own enemy and bring our demons with us as we have done throughout history. The forces of conquest and oppression will always be there, wearing down the resolve of men, creatures so easily led and manipulated. When that line is held; when civilians sit in their homes and enjoy the freedom so dearly bought, I hope they think of Danny Burke and the thousands like him, at least occasionally while they build their lives and families…that they appreciate the sacrifices that other men and women make every day to preserve all they value.

  But whether they do or not, we will guard that line, my brothers and sisters and I, and all those who come after us; it is not for gratitude that we do what we do. I came close to retiring myself in those terrible days after Persis. I was disillusioned and angry, despairing of truly making a difference. It was Sam Thomas who convinced me to stay. My work wasn’t done, he said simply. I had more to give, and it was my obligation to those Marines who had come before me, who had given their all on Persis and a hundred worlds before that, to stay the course, to follow my destiny.

  The Corps Forever.

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