RECCE II (The Union Series Book 5)

by Phillip Richards

  The enemy didn’t want to kill us, it seemed. There was no need to risk a head-on battle with such a heavily armed and well-trained opponent. Instead, they were merely blocking us, using the civilians to enhance their barrier.

  My stomach slowly twisted as I thought of how effective that civilian barrier had been. We had all seen what horrors the people of Eden were capable of inflicting on one another, but none of us had seen innocent human beings used as a weapon before.

  ‘Bastards,’ I whispered under my breath. ‘Fucking bastards.’

  Myers glanced at me for a moment, having heard my whisper, and then turned back to the forest. We waited in silence.

  It wasn’t long until Two Section took their position on the southern bank of the valley, another two hundred metres behind us. The sergeant major then gave me the order and I extracted my section again, scrambling back down the slope. He was there waiting for us again, but this time he led us rearward, since there was nobody left behind for him to worry about.

  ‘It wasn’t your fault, Andy,’ Yulia said to me as we doubled through the undergrowth in pursuit of Abs and the casualties.

  I didn’t reply. Ignoring her attempts to ease my guilt, I fixed my eyes onto the route ahead. I didn’t want her sympathy, or anyone else’s. I rightly deserved my misery.

  ‘They’re not following us,’ I called after the sergeant major.

  He looked over his shoulder. ‘They don’t need to.’

  We stopped our slow leapfrog withdrawal, opting for a more rapid extraction to take advantage of the lack of enemy follow up. The sergeant major joined Two Section on the high ground to provide a mobile overwatch, whilst my section was tasked to relieve Abs and his small work party of one of the stretchers.

  ‘Take Thapa!’ Abs ordered as we approached, pointing toward the stretcher that carried our comrade. ‘Lads, put it down!’

  The troopers already carrying the stretcher looked exhausted, but they still took care to place it down gently. Heavy as he was, Thapa was one of us, making him the most precious cargo of all.

  ‘Let’s get four men on this stretcher!’ I shouted, taking one of the handles by Thapa’s head. I’d be damned if I wasn’t going to help carry the load, especially considering the casualty on the second stretcher was my fault.

  My fire team joined me, taking up the handles whilst the stretcher still lay on the ground.

  ‘I’ll give us a bit of protection to the rear,’ Puppy said. ‘Let me know when you need to swap.’

  ‘Will do!’ I then addressed my fire team as we braced, poised to lift the stretcher as one. ‘Three . . . two . . . one . . . lift!’

  We stood together, sharing Thapa’s weight equally. Advanced materials made his equipment light, but that simply meant we carried more of it. He weighed a tonne.

  ‘Let’s go!’ Abs ordered, slapping the shoulder of one of the men carrying the civilian. They set off first, closely followed by us.

  There’s nothing worse than carrying one of your own men as a casualty, especially when their injuries were as severe as Thapa’s. It didn’t matter how many times I did it, it always felt awful. This time was torture. Not only did I have the weight of Thapa in my hand, tugging at my arm every time we clambered over something, but I had the sight of the wounded woman ahead of me, tormenting my soul. Thankfully the painkillers administered by Weatherall had reduced her screams to anguished moaning - though that hardly helped.

  The OC of B Company had agreed to extract the civilian along with Thapa. If she hadn’t been injured through friendly fire then I doubted he would have made the same decision, but I think he understood our guilt.

  As we neared the casualty exchange point marked by Abs, a single dropship swooped low over the trees, before descending into the valley with its rear ramp already lowered. It used its weight to crush the bushes beneath it, creating its own landing site amongst the foliage.

  A pair of medics waited within the crew compartment, ready to receive the casualties.

  ‘Come on!’ I panted. Pulling the stretcher handle I powered with my legs, dragging my men after me. ‘Last effort, let’s go!’

  The two medics stepped down onto the ramp, beckoning with open hands as the stretchers came near.

  The woman was first to go on, the two medics helping to slide her stretcher in between the dropship seats. One of them set about strapping it down so that it wouldn’t be flung around in flight, whilst the other leant out to receive Thapa.

  ‘We’re gonna slide him onto the seat!’ the medic explained, reaching to take the handles as we stepped up onto the ramp. Once he had the handles, I stepped out of his way and helped to slide the stretcher onto the seat at the side of the dropship compartment where troopers would normally be sat. The medic manipulated the stretcher, tugging and pulling at it until he had it where he wanted it. Then he set about rigging the straps to hold it in place. Dropships had never been intended for casualty evacuation, so the arrangement wasn’t perfect, but it worked.

  Once they had been loaded, the heavily armoured craft rose into the sky again, shooting off over the trees before the ramp had even finished closing.

  We watched as the dropship disappeared, rooted to the spot.

  Suddenly Abs’ hand darted to his visor as if he were reaching to cover his mouth. ‘Shit!’

  I looked at him. ‘What?’

  ‘I forgot to take his kit off him!’ Abs then launched into a furious tirade, rebuking himself for having allowed Thapa to leave along with all his equipment.

  In our haste to extract our casualties, against the backdrop of such human depravity, we had sent our comrade back to Paraiso along with all his ammunition and other pieces of critical equipment that were better kept with us. On the battlefield it was a mistake that could easily result in further loss of life.

  The sergeant major came down the slope from the south, with Yulia and his signaller in tow. ‘What’s wrong?’ he asked, noticing Abs’ anger.

  Abs looked pained as he broke the news to the sergeant major. As a far more experienced senior NCO, I doubted he would have made the same mistake.

  The sergeant major cut him short, waving a hand dismissively. ‘Let’s not worry about that now.’

  Everyone stared at him in surprise.

  ‘Let’s get the platoon moving,’ he ordered. ‘Three Section will lead, followed by Two, then One.’ He looked down at his datapad, inspecting his map.

  ‘What are we doing?’ I asked.

  The sergeant major didn’t look up from his datapad. ‘We’ll withdraw back to Hill Kilo and extract,’ he said simply.

  ‘What about the boss? What about the missiles?’

  ‘We can’t continue anymore,’ he said. ‘Our mission has just changed dramatically.’

  I frowned. ‘What’s changed?’

  The sergeant major turned his head up toward the heavens. ‘That has . . .’

  We all followed his gaze, searching the clouds for whatever it was the sergeant major had seen. Then my jaw fell. As I watched, several balls of fire broke through the clouds, arcing down toward the horizon tens of kilometres to our north. Somebody was dropping bombs from orbit.

  Puppy gasped. ‘What the hell . . .?’

  There was a faint, distant thumping sound, as the molten shells struck the ground somewhere within the Europa province.

  ‘The Alliance?’ I asked.

  I couldn’t believe it. Our entire operation was intended to prevent the Militia from using captured orbital missiles to goad the Alliance into bombing Europa. Any attack on the Loyalist military junta would be enough to provoke Russia into pulling out of the deal. Had the Alliance played into our enemies’ hands and simply unleashed their bombs anyway?

  The sergeant major shook his head. ‘No. The bombs are ours.’

  8

  New Mission

  To contents page

  The bombing continued as we marched back through the forest on our return to Cellini village. It wasn’t anything close to the apo
calyptic bombardment I had witnessed on New Earth, but it was unrelenting. Every minute the canopy was lit by another salvo falling from the heavens, each bomb delivering the power of a small asteroid toward its intended target with pinpoint accuracy.

  None of us knew what had caused the Union Navy to begin dropping bombs on Europa. I sensed that it was as much of a surprise to the sergeant major as it was to us. B Company’s OC must have had some prior warning, though. I remembered what he had said during our fateful advance to contact, when talking about Richelieu and the assistance she was providing us on the ground. “Be aware, she has competing tasks elsewhere now, so her assistance might become limited.”

  So that’s what her “competing tasks” were, I thought to myself. Richelieu had been busy queueing up targets far away from our relatively small battlefield, no longer interested in a tiny stockpile of anti-orbital missiles. As Myers had said in the sewers, the Loyalists had thousands of missiles poised to fire, but the difference between them and the Militia was that theirs were already loaded into launchers, and they knew how to use them. If the Union was going to attack Europa, then the Loyalists would no longer hold back from unleashing their arsenal. The stolen missiles no longer mattered, and so Richelieu’s priorities had shifted immediately.

  We hooked around the western side of Hill Bravo, making sure the dominating ground feature was between us and the village before we broke out of the treeline, not far from where we had emerged to assault the hill the night before. Now, as the sun dipped toward the horizon and the light faded, the hill cast long shadows across the open ground, its darkened slopes flickering each time another bomb broke through the clouds.

  The order to open fire must have come from Eden Joint Command, I decided. Even our brigade didn’t have the authority to call orbital fire down onto the Europa province. The situation was too political. Far away from the conflict raging within the Bosque, EJOC had decided to turn our guns onto the rogue nation. I doubted that Russia would have accepted the decision lightly. They seemed to be very protective of Europa even though it was technically supposed to be a Union province. The bombing would never have happened without their agreement, however, since EJOC was as much Russian as it was European. Nevertheless, I expected their support was reluctant.

  As the long line of troopers began to climb the hill, those ahead of me began looking and pointing to the north.

  Once we were high enough to see above the tree canopy, I could see what was drawing my comrades’ attention. The horizon flashed continuously as bombs rained down from all across the sky, dropped by multiple ships, and I realised that the orbital bombardment was far more widespread than I had originally thought, its full magnitude having been obscured by the trees. In response, scores of missiles streaked up to the heavens as the Loyalists returned fire with their anti-orbital arsenal.

  The situation had changed completely. Everything that we had known in the conflict so far, everything that we considered to be “normal”, had dissolved into something totally different. We were no longer engaged in a secretive “military intervention”, providing assistance to the embattled Edo army. We were at war.

  ‘It’s about time somebody put them bell ends back in their box,’ Myers said, summing up the view to the north.

  ‘Yeah . . .’ I replied gloomily.

  Seeing our bombs pounding the Europa province gave me no satisfaction. I hated the Loyalists. I hated their Militia and the sickening depths of their depravity. But I also hated Bhasin, and the “inner circle” pulling the strings within the Guard. I hated the politicians back in Paraiso who were suspected of playing a part in our mission’s downfall. Bombing Europa didn’t deal with them, and it didn’t deal with the complexities of the conflict raging across the Bosque, a conflict I was only now beginning to comprehend. But the worst part of it was that it signalled a total shift in the Union’s focus . . . away from us. We were no longer important, and neither was the boss and his men.

  Our friends were gone, never to be seen again.

  The top of Hill Bravo was strangely silent, broken only by the odd, sporadic shot being fired from somewhere on its eastern slope. A stillness had gripped the hill, as all eyes turned north to watch the distant light show with grim fascination.

  One by one we filed into the trench system that networked the hill plateau, making our way toward a blue crosshair created by the OC to mark his location at its centre.

  As I followed the sombre precession up to the trench, I saw that it was occupied by a platoon of Union troopers. Some of them were stood up and covering outward, whilst the vast majority were kept down, huddling together in small groups for warmth. I could hear their whispers and quiet chuckles from amongst the trenches as they tried to make the best out of a bad situation, but there was still an air of nervous apprehension amongst them. They had no idea how the escalating conflict might affect them.

  ‘Alright, mate. . .?’ A trooper greeted me cautiously as I slipped into the trench beside him.

  ‘Yeah.’ My answer was abrupt. I didn’t even acknowledge him with a look as I passed him.

  The trooper didn’t say a word. If he’d taken offense at my frosty response, he knew not to express it.

  I was in no mood to exchange pleasantries with the B Company troopers. It wasn’t that I blamed any of them for the suffering my platoon and I had endured - far from it - but a part of me automatically resented them for not having shared in our hardship. I had seen the phenomenon many times before, where a barrier formed between units that hadn’t shared the same experiences. I had even been subjected to other troopers’ hostility when the positions were reversed. It was unreasonable to develop animosity toward our brothers in arms, but our isolated war had caused us to develop a sense of “us” and “them”, with a vast chasm that separated us. At that moment, the B Company troopers might as well have been Union conscripts shipped in from the cosiest warrens in Paraiso.

  Parts of the trench system were now occupied by formed bodies of FEA soldiers, who seemed to be sharing its security with their Union counterparts. They took far greater interest in the bombardment than the troopers did, their trenches lined with helmets as every soldier stood to stare. They were all so young that they probably couldn’t remember the last time they saw so many Union bombs falling at once. Excited murmurs spread along their lines as they realised that the tide had truly turned against Europa.

  The platoon came to a halt nearby to the blue crosshair created by the OC, finding a relatively wide section of trench in which to group together away from everyone else.

  ‘Close right up,’ the sergeant major ordered, beckoning each new arrival toward him until the entire platoon were closed up in a huddle. Troopers groaned and sighed painfully as they collapsed to the ground, taking the moment to rest tired muscles and aching joints.

  Yulia was stood next to the sergeant major, looking slightly awkward now that she no longer had any obvious use to us. She caught my eye as I closed into the huddle, and I quickly looked away. I didn’t want her to see me so low.

  There was none of the usual banter in the platoon, no laughter, not even a smile. We had failed. Our violent excursion had achieved nothing, leading only to the death, loss and injury of almost half our number. But to make it all worse, the sudden Union bombardment was like twisting the knife inside the wound. Our mission wasn’t just a failure, it was an utter waste of time. Nobody cared about the missiles we had fought for. They were no longer relevant.

  I didn’t sit down with my section. I couldn’t rest, couldn’t relax. As soon as I did that, I knew my mind would be free to wander, remembering the harrowing images of the civilians I had killed, both knowingly and unknowingly.

  I turned back to my 2ic, just as he arrived. ‘Puppy, let’s get a consolidated ammo state, mate.’

  Puppy looked as though all he wanted to do was slump on the ground like everyone else, but after a short pause he nodded. ‘Roger. Mags out, lads! Get it all out so we can see what we’ve got left. Don�
��t rely on your datapads, let’s physically check everything.’

  I was about to make my way to the sergeant major, when he stood up tall and raised his voice to address us all.

  ‘Listen in, men!’ he shouted.

  All heads turned to him. Any troopers who were still standing, crouched in the mud so that those behind them could see. I moved to the edge of the trench, keeping out of the way.

  ‘I know we’ve all been through a lot,’ he started, his dark beady eyes glaring intensely as he regarded every one of us. ‘But we need to stay focused. We’re not done here yet . . . not if that’s anything to go by . . .’ He flicked his head upward, just as another salvo of bombs arced across the sky.

  ‘What about the boss and his boys?’ Griffiths demanded, causing a couple of troopers to glance at him. Though he was a man of few words, when Griffiths spoke he did so with a vehemence that could stop a conversation dead. He, like all of us, was no longer interested in the mission. He just wanted to rescue our comrades, despite not even knowing them himself.

  The sergeant major scowled at the Welsh trooper for his interruption. Then his eyes flicked between the rest of us, realising that Griffiths had only asked the question on everybody’s minds. To hell with all this . . . what about our friends?

  His eyes lowered slightly. ‘I don’t know,’ he said, a trace of sadness in his voice. ‘Let’s wait and see what the OC has to say. I don’t know what’s going on above our heads, or what EJOC is planning next.’

  As if on cue, the OC appeared over the top of the trench, crouching low so that he couldn’t be seen by the Militia in the village below.

  ‘Sergeant Major,’ he quietly acknowledged as he slid into the trench, apparently on his own. His command group were nearby, but he had obviously told them to stay away so that he could talk to us alone.

  ‘Sir,’ the sergeant major responded, stepping slightly back to allow the OC to take centre stage.

  The OC faced us all like a speaker at a funeral. Though he wasn’t directly involved in our chain of command, as the senior officer present he probably felt that he needed to say something after all we had been through.