Off World- Ragnarok

by J. F. Holmes

  “And what, Captain? Miss out on more contractor food that makes actual fast food taste good? Not have my hair cut and my laundry done by a Pakistani transvestite? I’d pine away.”

  “Hey, now, First Sergeant, Paki trannies do the best hairstyles. You could use some nose hair trimming, too. You ain’t twenty anymore.”

  “Bite me, Sir.” Both soldiers were comfortable with each other, coming as they did from similar backgrounds. Captain Santos was two decades younger than his right-hand enlisted man, but was also a product of the slums of Los Angeles. In his case, though, Santos had managed to get an ROTC scholarship, while 1SG Camacho had enlisted to get away from the gang life. The two sat quietly, talking in Spanish and eating their fake chicken, until Camacho’s sharp eye caught something on his NCO radar.

  In a flash he was out of his seat, headed like a Javelin missile about to do a top-down attack on the deck of an enemy tank. Santos grinned and sipped his Sprite as the soldier in Top’s sights continued to try to chat up a civilian female. He’d leaned his M-4 rifle up against the Taco Bell trailer as he stood in line, and had left it sitting there as he tried to catch the girl’s attention, walking away from it. Though they were technically off duty, everyone who was military carried their weapon with them at all times.

  Instead of confronting the errant private, Camacho made a course correction and picked up the rifle just as the one of the soldier’s friends saw him and made an ‘Oh Shit’ face. The first sergeant walked back to the table and set the rifle down in front of him, first inspecting it. Sure enough, there was a round in the chamber—condition one—in the middle of the base. The kid had dropped the magazine after coming in from patrol, but had failed to clear the chamber. He showed the weapon to Captain Santos, who smiled ruefully. “That’s NCO business right there, Top.”

  “I know, and thank you, Sir.” The private, warned by his friends, hurried over to the table where the two were sitting, assuming a position of parade rest.

  Before he could speak, Camacho held up his hand and yelled over to the private’s friends, “Go tell your team leader and squad leader to meet me in the company orderly room in fifteen minutes.” He turned to the soldier, whose name tag read ‘BAIRD’. “You’re with our Scouts, aren’t you?”

  “Y-y-yes, First Sergeant! Team Two!” the young private stuttered, quaking in his boots.

  Camacho shook his head. “I expected better of them. You just got here as a replacement from Earth, right, son? What, three weeks ago?” The kid nodded, afraid to say anything else.

  “Well,” he started gently, almost fatherly, then shifted his tone and volume, “THIS ISN”T EARTH AND THIS ISN’T THE FORT BENNING SCHOOL FOR BOYS!” The first sergeant launched into a blast that would have blistered the paint off an M1 tank. Santos tried to hide his smile, but Top was right, this wasn’t Earth, and this wasn’t school.

  Abruptly Camacho shut off and put an arm around the young man’s shoulders. “Now, Private Baird, as bad as you felt that ass chewing was, it’s nothing compared to what your NCOs are going to get. Isn’t that right, Captain?”

  Santos mumbled, “Not my business,” through a mouthful of mashed potatoes.

  Camacho handed the private his weapon back and said gently, “Now you run along and start patrolling the walkway in front of the orderly room. I’m sure your NCOs will have a nice chat with you when I’m done with them.”

  As he hurried away, Camacho sat back down. The captain eyed him, but said nothing. Neither did his first sergeant until he’d had eaten another chicken leg. Setting it down, he sighed. “You know, I really did expect better. The Scouts are our top dogs. Gina’s slipping.”

  “No, I don’t think so, Top. It just takes time for some people to adjust to the reality here, and that kid hasn’t even been outside the wire yet. An orientation patrol through the farm lands, that’s it. You remember how green I was when we got dropped into the pot in Mawari in the P.I.?”

  “Yep, that was a hell of a baptism.” They both laughed at their experiences, as terrifying as it had been.

  “To absent comrades,” said Santos, raising his Sprite.

  “Via con Dios, brothers,” answered Camacho.

  ****

  The meeting in the orderly room was short. Staff Sergeant Giamatti walked out the door into the alphalight, shaking her head. She was followed by Sergeant Johnson, who looked just as pissed off. The two stood and conferred for a minute, with both throwing glances at Private Baird. The noob, for his part, did his best to continue his ‘patrol’, back and forth in front of the building, rifle held at port arms, trying to ignore them. Giamatti walked away; Johnson strode over, fury in his eyes. “Come with me, fuckhead,” he stated flatly. Though he was only two years older than the private, just turned twenty, he’d spent more than a year on NT, and carried himself as a hardened soldier.

  Knowing he’d royally screwed up, Baird said nothing. They walked quickly toward the warehouse where the Scouts kept their equipment. It was Saturday, and only one other soldier was there, using the free weights to get a workout in their small gym.

  “Crane,” said Johnson to the sweating soldier, “go round up the guys, we’re going across the bridge. Three days rations, full ammo load.”

  The other man said nothing, but shot Baird a nasty look, and the kid wilted. “You,” said his squad leader, “go get that other dipshit who came in with you, and both of you bring all your field gear.” Baird stood there for a second, mouth open, until Johnson yelled, “GO!”

  Specialist Crane knocked out a few more reps, put the weights back, sighed, and sat up. “What’s this all about?”

  “I screwed up. Giamatti told me to get these kids ready ASAP, and I figured I’d give them a week or two just to get settled. I mean, shit, they’re school trained, you know, at least on the basics, and we have a month before we assume forward defense.”

  “Dropped his dick in the dirt, huh?” said Crane, picking up his gym bag.

  “Right in front of Top and the Old Man. Couldn’t have planned it better if he’d tried.”

  Crane chuckled. “Maybe they should move him over to the G-3 Plans if he’s that good.”

  “Fat chance. My fault anyway, I failed to impress on him just how serious this business is. Left his rifle WITH a round in the chamber at Taco Bell.” Johnson shook his head. “You guys are getting fat anyway. Time to take a walk.”

  “How far?”

  “Over the bridge, twenty klicks into Gvit territory, up the pass, make sure they’re keeping to the armistice, and back.”

  His subordinate groaned. “That’s twenty K over a mountain range.”

  Johnson laughed and said, “They’re small mountains. Maybe two thousand meters high at the most.”

  “Yeah, but we can’t go up the main road, obviously.”

  “Well, at least it’s summer. We could be freezing our asses off.”

  Chase threw his sneaker at him, scowling. “What do you know about freezing, Alphie?” he said, using the slang for someone who had been there for more than a year.

  “I grew up in Maine, dickhead. You can’t tell me shit about being cold. One hour; I’ll go arrange transport to Rorke’s Drift.”

  “Can’t they at least take us across the bridge?”

  Johnson sighed; he was human, after all, and the treaty neutral zone extended three clicks past the bridge to the first turn of the great road as it headed over the mountains. “Yeah, screw it. To the OP on the far side. Then we walk.”

  Chapter 9

  Davis Highlands, 1-9 Infantry Scout Team 2

  “Only two thousand meters high, my ass,” muttered Crane five hours later. They’d started up the steep slope of the mountains, similar to where the Hudson River on Earth cut through the mountains north of New York City. Not so much mountains as highlands, but steep enough when you’re carrying a fifty-pound pack. That, water, and a weapon made being in the infantry a young man’s (or woman’s) game.

  Beneath them, winding its way throug
h a series of switchbacks that crested five hundred meters below them, the Great Road lay invitingly. Their climb wasn’t brutal, but any slope with a pack can be hard. The alternative, though, was to be watched by any passing Gvit or Chak. The whole idea behind the Scouts was to be unseen.

  “You know, Sarge, they could just do this shit with a helo or a drone and save us all the trouble.” PFC Alvarez was leaning into the slope, a big man carrying a Squad Automatic Weapon, and he was sweating like a pig, as usual.

  “No satellite for the bigger drones, and radio interference from the primary fucks with the medium sized ones, plus the wildlife gathers on radio signals and swarms anything that transmits. You know that,” answered Johnson. “And they aren’t going to waste a helo on us.” While he said it, he walked backward, making sure Baird and Orson were paying attention. She, Pvt. Orson, seemed to be on the bounce, but Baird was watching a dragonbird pass overhead instead of paying attention to his surroundings.

  “BAIRD!” he hissed. The private’s head shot around, and he saw his sergeant glaring at him. “Listen kid, get your head out your ass, or you’re off the Scouts and down to a line platoon.”

  “Uh, yes sir. I mean Sarge. It’s just, well, this is all really new to me. I mean, what the fuck was that bird?”

  “That’s the reason we can’t use small drones. They ruined our budget.” The dragonbird was a small dragon or lizard with wings, and seemed to be a particularly vicious hunter. The size of a bald eagle from back home, it delighted in knocking UAVs out of the sky as they homed in on their radio waves.

  “And what about those goddamned precious helicopters?” groused Alverez.

  Crane laughed and said, “You bitch more than a specialist.”

  “Hey, I get mine next month…” he said, then froze in mid-sentence. They’d all heard the two clicks on the squad radio. Everyone halted where they were, the more experienced soldiers looking left and right to cover their sectors.

  A hundred meters out front, Corporal Running Lance had stopped as soon as he saw movement and keyed the radio twice. Specialist Cobb didn’t turn her head to look at him, she merely sank slowly down and scanned to the right, her sector. Only after she’d seen no movement did she look to her left, watching out of the corner of her eye as Running Lance crouched down to look at something ahead, further on in the gloom of the mountain forest.

  “All clear,” he called over the radio after a minute of watching, “two herbivores grazing.”

  “Check,” called back Johnson. “Charlie Mike. Be careful, we’re coming to the saddle. Angle left.” There was no answer; although the Gvit weren’t even close to having radios, it made sense to conserve battery power. That, and the damn bugs were already homing in on the weakly powered squad radios. He swatted them away, used to the annoyance. Overhead several dragonbirds circled, looking for the radio source. Fuck them.

  “What did he mean, ‘herbivores’?” asked Orson. She was quick to pick up on things like that; Johnson felt the former lacrosse player would be one of the few women who’d actually succeed in the infantry. She had a blunt farmgirl face, and legs like tree trunks. Both were an asset in the infantry; pretty girls like Specialist Cobb had men on them like flies on shit. Then again, so did the plain ones.

  “Invasive species, also known as white tailed deer,” said Crane. “Someone ‘accidently’ sent a herd of them across the bridge as a goodwill gesture to the Gvit. Problem is, the rhinos suck in the woods, and there’s no equivalent to wolves on this side of the river. Rabbits, too, though there’s some smaller predators that keep them in check.”

  “How do you know all this?” asked Private Baird. “All they taught us in infantry school was maneuver and fire.”

  “We study our asses off to get to know the environment we work in,” said Johnson. “That’s how Scouts survive.”

  Baird’s heart sank. The Off-World bonus money he’d signed up for was beginning to sound less and less like what his recruiter had described to him. “You’ll get to kick ass on some fucking aliens, son! Chicks dig it,” had been his exact words. The pop-up targets had gone down easily enough from the light M-4 rounds, even if you had to hit them twice. His only class on Alpha Centauri had described it as a tropical paradise, and here he was, thousands of feet up the side of a mountain, sweating his ass off, his pack digging into the small of his back in the higher gravity, his team leader on his ass, and already having made a bad first impression on the company leadership.

  Seeing the look on his face, Alvarez leaned over and said softly, “Don’t worry, noob, you ain’t doing too bad.”

  The look on Baird’s face brightened and he said, “Really?”

  “Yep. Last replacement stepped in a hole and got his leg bit off three hundred meters past the bridge. So far, so good!”

  Crane snickered, and Sergeant Johnson motioned them forward to join the point men at their next check point.

  ****

  Sometimes down was harder than up. No, every time. Going up, you can lean forward with the weight of your pack, take the weight on your shoulders, though it killed the legs. Going down, you had to lean back or risk tumbling forward. And you zigged and zagged your way down, walking unevenly to minimize the slope. It killed the ankles, and a fall was likely to break a bone.

  “Baird, why aren’t we using that trail?” asked Sergeant Johnson.

  The hapless private looked desperately around; as far as his feet were concerned, he’d been walking over nothing but boulders and tree roots for hours. “Uh, what trail, Sergeant?” he finally asked.

  The exasperated NCO sighed and pointed to an extremely faint track, one Baird had to really look hard at to make out. Not that he could. “THAT trail. It’s a track made by deer going up and down the mountain to get water. Where are you from on Earth, kid?”

  “Texas, Sarge.”

  “I thought everyone in Texas grew up tracking illegal immigrants and shooting mountain lions.”

  “Uh, I’m from Austin. It’s a big city, and guns are banned there,” Baird sheepishly replied.

  The Maine born and bred sergeant, who’d never left the Canadian border before joining the Army, said, “You’ve gotta be shitting me! No guns in Texas?”

  “Nope! My dad said about thirty, forty years ago, a whole buncha people moved there from California and set about ruining his city. It’s called Los Austino now.”

  Johnson grumbled to himself and swore out loud. “Sergeant Giamatti asked the S-1 to give us people that had a hunting background. I’m going to choke the shit out of those fat ass pogues when I get back to the base.”

  The marched on quietly for another few kilometers, the two new privates trying to learn everything they could. The environment was strange to them, though Orson had grown up in the woods of West Virginia. NT life somehow had the same base DNA as Earth, generating an endless internet argument that covered everything from bacteria drifting in space from one system to another, to ancient aliens. It did mean that everything was familiar, but strange. Like being on a different continent than another planet.

  “OK, real careful now,” said Johnson. “You four stay here; Injun Joe, me, and Crane are going to check out our patrol base.” The scouts knew the area fairly well, and cached in a small cave about a thousand meters above the plains were the heavy binoculars and other surveillance equipment they used. It was easier to just bring the batteries in each hump. The problem was, they never knew what else might be in the hole. Food supplies were never left there, after a disastrous first return. Shelter was shelter, though, and the NT equivalent of a bear—something like it, but a lot scalier—lived in these mountains. A favorite sport of the Gvit was going off alone into the woods and fighting ‘werebears’ hand to hand. It was a loss, more often than not.

  This time they were lucky. Nothing showed, and Crane called the rest of the team in. They dropped their packs and took the weight off their feet, though Alverez stayed on guard.

  “From here we go to random overwatch positions,”
briefed Running Lance, his bronze Cherokee features impassive as always. “Two men on OP, two men on guard, two men resting. One man gets a long shift to rest. We each pull four hours of sleep, followed by two on watch, two on OP, and rotate the odd man. Either myself or Sergeant Johnson will be awake at all times. Questions?”

  Baird had a million, but he didn’t ask any. His feet hurt, and there were burning sores where his pack had rubbed his skin. He sat back gratefully in the cool darkness of the small cave, but Running Lance tapped him on the knee. “Get up, we’re on first OP.”

  With a groan, the private stood and adjusted his load bearing vest. At least the Scouts don’t wear armor, he thought, wincing when his shirt peeled off the sticky friction burns on his back. He picked up his rifle and followed Running Lance back out into the dim red Proximalight.

  Chapter 10

  Baird settled himself into the hide position next to the laconic Running Lance. The corporal said little, just mounted the camera system on its tripod and turned it on. He sat and scanned the plains below, starting first with the road.

  “What do you see?” asked Baird. In reply, Running Lance moved aside and gestured ‘go ahead’ to him. Baird crawled over and put his eye to the scope.

  “Start in close, clear the area, look for any dangers, then work your way outward. The thermal scanner can see Gvit-sized figures out to thirty klicks. Don’t worry about counting or anything, it’ll all go on video and be analyzed by the G-2. Just give me your impressions.”

  “Uh, not a lot of traffic on the road, and the area directly below us is clear.”

  “I saw that. Always close-in recon first; the computer AI will screen out anything that’s not a Gvit warrior. Then we need to get population counts on the towns, any organized patrol movement, whatever.”