RECCE II (The Union Series Book 5)

by Phillip Richards

  I imagined the powerful war machine slowly gliding over the treetops, scanning the area for targets. A single gravtank could make short work of a platoon like ours - unless we got it with a smart missile first. Hopefully it wouldn’t come to that, though, for it was likely that the gravtank came with some form of additional support. The Loyalists were far more professional than their Militia counterparts, and they weren’t stupid enough to risk such a high-priced weapon on its own.

  ‘It’s turning slightly toward us,’ Wildgoose reported, repeating information fed to him over the network. Richelieu was providing us with a live feed, the data concealed within the usual traffic it sent back to Paraiso so that Europa didn’t become suspicious. An electronic war would now be raging across the heavens, as the rogue province tried to hack into the Union ships and weapons platforms orbiting above them. Fortunately for us, the Loyalist hackers weren’t nearly as good as those on New Earth.

  Myers looked at me. ‘Shall I get the launcher out?’

  I nodded. ‘Get it out, but leave it switched off for now.’

  ‘Roger.’

  Myers gently slid the launcher out from his daysack, then placed it on the ground in front of him. He set it up as far as he could without activating it, avoiding creating an electronic activity spike that the distant gravtank might detect if it came closer.

  ‘Still steering toward us . . .’ Wildgoose said, the tone in his voice rising.

  ‘How far away is it?’ I asked.

  ‘Six hundred metres.’

  Myers’ hands rested upon his launcher, poised ready to snatch it up to fire.

  I held up a hand for calm. ‘If you fire from here, it’ll shoot the missile out of the air and cut us to ribbons.’

  ‘It’s stopped,’ Wildgoose announced. ‘Turning around . . . it’s going again.’

  There was a moment’s silence whilst everyone held their breath, willing for the gravtank to continue on its way.

  Finally, Wildgoose lifted his head from amongst the ferns. ‘Stand down.’

  We breathed a collective sigh of relief. I turned my head up toward the canopy, thanking the heavens that the unseen menace had moved on. If I was going to die, I didn’t want it to be at the hands of a faceless gravtank gunner.

  Myers began reconditioning his launcher. ‘Fuck my life . . . that was too close for comfort.’

  ‘Well, get used to it,’ I replied, picking myself up. ‘I doubt this’ll be the last time.’

  He stopped, looking up nervously. ‘Do you think they know we’re here?’

  ‘Probably not, but this is their border, and the FEA aren’t far away . . .’

  ‘What’s left of them,’ Wildgoose finished gloomily.

  We had no idea what had happened to the FEA battalions abandoned on Hill Kilo, but it was doubtful that they could do anything other than stay where they were and pray for the Militia to withdraw.

  ‘Fair one,’ I admitted, ‘but we should still expect the border to be defended by a little more than just sensors and automated guns.’

  The two troopers fell silent, knowing that I was right. We were well and truly behind enemy lines now, and the appearance of the gravtank had shown to us how easily our mission could be brought to an abrupt end.

  ‘Tell Puppy to get the lads into routine as soon as possible,’ I said, changing the subject. ‘I’m going to see the sergeant major.’

  Myers nodded. ‘Roger.’

  I left the sentry position, heading into the centre of the harbour where the sergeant major was sitting on his daysack, totally engrossed in his datapad. His signaller sat amongst the ferns close by, tinkering with random pieces of electronic equipment.

  ‘Alright, sir?’ I asked in greeting, taking a knee.

  The sergeant major glanced up at me briefly. ‘I will be once I’ve got my head down.’

  ‘No shit,’ I agreed. We were all shattered, having survived on barely any sleep for days. Unfortunately, that didn’t mean that we as commanders could simply wriggle into our thermal bags and sleep, we needed to plan.

  ‘Have you looked at our orders?’ the sergeant major asked without lifting his head from his datapad.

  ‘Not really,’ I replied. Ordinarily such a statement would be considered obscene by any right- thinking NCO, but this wasn’t an ordinary situation. I’d barely had the time to even look at my datapad, let alone study a full set of orders.

  ‘This bombing campaign is planned to last two days,’ he said. ‘Before that, there’ll be no aircraft, no troopers, nothing.’

  I nodded, having expected such a strategy. The Union was in no hurry to put boots on the ground, the plan was to break the Loyalists long before the first dropship even entered the atmosphere.

  ‘Our orders don’t contain much in terms of the overall plan for invading Europa, but we haven’t been asked to site any landing zones in our area, so I suspect the dropships will be coming in further north. We wouldn’t want them to drop anywhere near Edo just in case the FEA end up shooting at them as well as the Loyalists.’

  The sergeant major was right, of course. It made sense for our dropships to avoid entering what remained of Edo’s anti-orbital defence ‘bubble’.

  ‘So we’re not the main effort . . .’ I deduced.

  ‘No,’ the sergeant major admitted. ‘If I’m honest, I think we’re simply here to free up other units to focus on targets elsewhere.’

  ‘Special Forces?’

  ‘Most likely. I’ve no idea what assets we have on the ground here, or how long they’ve been here.’

  We knew very little about our Special Forces or what they did on Eden. Stretched across the Union’s colonial empire, they were far too small a number to be noticed, even if they wanted to be.

  The sergeant major drew in a breath, preparing himself to change the subject with bad news. ‘You’ll need to leave a little earlier than the four-hour forced rest I originally imposed . . .’

  My brow raised. ‘How soon?’

  He paused, trying to work out a rough timeline in his head. ‘In order to meet with Yulia, you’ll probably need to move out in the next three hours.’

  That meant my men would need to reveille in two hours, giving me enough time to deliver a brief set of patrol orders and carry out last-minute inspections. Worse still, it meant that I would have barely have any sleep at all, since I still had to plan the patrol in the first place.

  ‘I appreciate you’re pretty licked,’ the sergeant major said, ‘but I wasn’t happy sending you off with her until I knew we could safely cross the border.’

  ‘I understand.’

  He proffered his datapad to me, and I connected mine to his. He sent me two grid markers - the location of the farming community, and a rendezvous location he had shared with Yulia before she left us. I could see that the rendezvous wasn’t far from the old laboratory complex, sited on a junction between an old maglev rail and a wide river.

  ‘Captain Kristov agreed this rendezvous with me,’ he explained. ‘It’s the most obvious location I could think of, and she assured me she could find it without any trouble in the dark.’

  Without a datapad or paper mapping, Yulia was entirely reliant upon her knowledge of the local area to navigate. Because of this, the sergeant major needed to ensure that any rendezvous was easy to find in the dark.

  ‘I’ve told her you’ll be there at zero six hundred hours,’ he continued, ‘which should mean you’ll beat the sunrise. Once you’re with her I want you to soak up as much information as you can. I want to know about enemy strengths and locations, but I also want to know who these friends of hers are and what they bring to the table. Can we somehow use them to enhance our recce capability? Are they armed? Do they have other affiliated groups on this side of the border, etc., etc.? We need to assess whether or not these people are useful to our operation, and if so, we need to utilise them. On the other hand, make sure you don’t give away too much to them. If you smell a rat - even the slightest whiff - bug out immediately.�
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  I nodded. ‘Roger.’

  He held up a warning finger. ‘Remember, consider the threat from both inside and outside, and organise your men appropriately. You don’t want to appear untrusting, but you need to keep your backs covered. Understood?’

  ‘Understood.’

  ‘Good.’ He paused for a moment, as if something else was on his mind. ‘How are you?’

  I hesitated, slightly taken aback by the question. The sergeant major often asked how my men were, but he never asked how I was. ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘Listen, Corporal Moralee, I know you feel responsible for what happened in the valley.’ The sergeant major’s voice hardened as he confronted my guilt head on. ‘You’re looking at it from the wrong perspective. Those civilians didn’t die because you shot them, they died because they were sent by the Militia with the intention to trick you into shooting them. They played on our humanity, and turned it into a weapon to be used against us. God only knows what methods they used to make those civilians walk to their deaths, especially the ones strapped with explosives . . .’

  I considered mentioning that one of the people I had killed was little more than a child, but my lips failed to move, as if my body was holding back the words and the emotion that would follow with them. Like a kettle threatening to boil over, I shook, but no words escaped me. I lowered my head shamefully.

  The sergeant major sighed. ‘Most of the senior NCOs in this battalion have been to Eden before, but none of us like to talk about it, barely even to each other. Now you know why. It sucks you in, corrupts you.’

  A lifetime ago, back on Challenger when I was a young, fresh trooper about to go to war, I would have sat bolt upright to listen to such a rare insight into the sergeant major’s past experiences on Eden. Now, though, it didn’t make a difference. After all I had been through on New Earth and now on Eden, I finally understood, and all I wanted was to go back to being that young boy again.

  ‘So you feel guilty for having accidentally killed civilians,’ the sergeant major said harshly. ‘Good. That means you’re still human. It means this place hasn’t yet beaten you, it hasn’t taken your humanity.’

  I looked back up at him. ‘Do you still feel guilt?’

  He stared at me blankly, then went back to studying his datapad. ‘Go get some sleep. You’re going to need it.’

  I stood. ‘I’ll try, sir.’

  ‘For what it’s worth,’ he said finally, ‘you still have my faith.’

  ‘Sir.’

  10

  Copehill

  To contents page

  We crept alongside the maglev rail, following the instructions given to us by the sergeant major in order to make sure that we met with Yulia. Suspended a few metres above the ground by metal struts, the rail ran through uneven, rocky terrain, virtually consumed by the tree branches that grew around it. I guessed that the line hadn’t been used for a long time, perhaps a decade or longer, judging by its state of disrepair. Panels had been stolen from its underside, and the contents stripped to leave the rail hollow and utterly useless. The wide gravel path that once kept the rail clear of the forest had given way to weeds and roots, and had been virtually buried in dead leaves and other debris.

  I wasn’t too happy following the rail. Though clearly disused, it still presented an excellent navigation tool to the enemy - just as it did us. Though Europa had plenty of roads for its vehicles and soldiers to follow, the threat of attack from the air would have rendered those roads off-limits. In the face of such a threat, a great deal of their movements would be through the forest, and linear features like old maglev rails provided a lazy navigator with a handrail to lead them where they wanted to go.

  We had no option but to stick to the maglev rail, for fear that we might miss Yulia somehow as we approached the rendezvous agreed between her and the sergeant major. A hundred metres ahead of us was the small river which the maglev crossed, and it was at that junction that she would supposedly meet with us.

  Without any instructions from me, our pace naturally slowed as we drew near to the rendezvous. Weapons slowly raised, and troopers scanned their respective arcs more frequently as they became more aware of the potential threat. Through our own design, we were being channelled into an obvious location that could be anticipated by our enemy. For all we knew they were there already, waiting for us to arrive.

  I trusted Yulia, perhaps more than I should. It was a gut feeling, I suppose, but one which the sergeant major now shared. He had highlighted an important issue that arose from co-operating with her, however, one which was now beginning to concern me. Though I could trust her, I didn’t know anything about her “friends” in the farming community. Had they received her well? Or had they simply handed her over to the Militia?

  ‘Halt!’ a female voice suddenly ordered through the darkness, stopping me dead.

  We all froze.

  I kept my weapon still, not daring to move it in case it was misinterpreted as a sign of aggression. I knew that it was Yulia I heard. I had worked with her long enough to recognise her voice, and I doubted that there were many English-speaking women wandering about in the forest. She didn’t necessarily know it was me, though, and a sudden movement could result in us being shot by our own ally - presuming that she had acquired a weapon.

  My visor display couldn’t identify anything in the dark, despite the close proximity of Yulia’s voice. She was somewhere ahead of us, beyond where Myers stood.

  ‘Who is that?’ she demanded.

  ‘It’s Andy,’ I whispered. It was just as well she knew me, since we had never thought to give ourselves a password. She would be just as wary of us being enemy as we were wary of her.

  There was a moment’s pause before Yulia spoke again. ‘Walk forward, Andy.’

  I turned around and held up a hand, telling the rest of my section to stay where they were. Then I walked slowly toward the sound of her voice, keeping my rifle low so that she could see I wasn’t a threat.

  My visor picked up Yulia as I advanced, marking her with a red crosshair as if she was a target. She was hiding behind one of the maglev rail support legs, surrounded by dense foliage.

  She stopped me again, this time when I was no more than five metres away from her.

  She must know it’s me, I thought, isn’t she getting a bit carried away?

  Then, for a moment, I wondered if she had indeed been captured by the Militia, and that they knew about our rendezvous. We had all witnessed first-hand how torture could prize information from even the most fanatical Guardsmen. But torture wasn’t even necessary when it came to getting information out of prisoners, not if you had the right equipment. Using devices similar to our simulators, you could steal information right out of somebody’s mind, just as we downloaded data from each other’s datapads. The Militia might not have such equipment, but the Loyalists probably did.

  Was somebody pressing a pistol into the back of Yulia’s head as she spoke? I wondered. I suddenly felt increasingly uneasy as my mind began to race.

  ‘How many in your patrol?’ she asked quietly.

  ‘Seven . . .’ I replied with caution. ‘Including me.’

  I considered her question, and its deeper implication. Yulia was checking that we weren’t being followed by an imposter, an unlikely yet extremely dangerous possibility. Unless she was about to count us all, she probably already knew how many troopers were within our patrol because somebody else had already counted us.

  ‘Come out so I can see you,’ I instructed.

  There was a moment’s hesitation, then Yulia stepped out into full view. My eyes flicked across her, noting that she was now armed with some form of long-barrelled weapon, presumably given to her by her contacts within the farming community. She had also replaced her old bubble respirator with a facemask version that covered her mouth and nose, and now wore a separate visor. There were others somewhere out there in the dark. I could sense their presence somehow. The hairs rose on the back of my neck as I f
elt their weapons trained onto me and my men.

  ‘It is good to see you, Andy,’ Yulia said finally. ‘We must check you have not been followed.’

  ‘We?’ I asked with a raised eyebrow.

  ‘There are four of us,’ she replied. ‘Do not worry, we are all friends. The people of Copehill only fight against those who would do them harm.’

  ‘Copehill?’ I repeated the name.

  ‘It is the name of the laboratory,’ she explained. ‘They are happy to receive you as their guests, and share with you their knowledge of the Loyalists.’

  ‘Were you following us?’

  She shook her head. ‘No. We have been waiting for you to come to us.’

  ‘OK . . .’

  I tried to work out how Yulia and her hidden comrades had remained undetected. Despite our state-of-the-art scanners, the targeting systems in our visors and the audio enhancement capability of our headsets, they had somehow managed to move around us, counting our number and then passing that information without a signal or sound.

  ‘I have good news for you,’ Yulia said, changing the subject.

  I cocked my head. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘The people of Copehill have one of your friends.’

  I stared at her for several seconds, trying to figure out what she was talking about. ‘One of our friends?’

  ‘A trooper,’ she said with a nod. ‘You lost him several days ago.’

  My jaw worked as the cogs in my mind slowly turned, trying to work out who she was referring to. It couldn’t be . . . could it?

  ‘Butcher?’

  ‘He calls himself Butch,’ she confirmed.

  I looked back at my section, scarcely able to believe what Yulia was saying. We had taken such a punishing over the past few days, it was hard to comprehend the sudden good news.

  Wildgoose strode over to Griffiths and gave him a reassuring pat on the shoulder. We all knew Butch and Griffiths were friends, having been moved across from our sister platoon in the 6th Battalion Welsh Dropship Infantry as casualty replacements. The third of their number, Sanneh, had already met a grisly end at the end of Helstrom’s knife, and the platoon all thought that Butcher would suffer a similar fate.