Deathtrap

by Craig Alanson

  It was… a tree? What was a tree doing in the sky-

  Then the Buzzard crashed.

  The pilots, or the automated guidance system, made the best of a bad situation. The Buzzard came down over a heavily-forested area, with even the narrow and fast-running rivers covered with an overhanging canopy of branches. There was only one gap in the trees, where a river went over a broad ledge and water backed up, forming a broad and dark pool. The pilots aimed for that gap, knowing a belly landing in water was better than the aircraft and passengers being torn apart by thick tree trunks. It was a good idea, made less useful by the wide pool of the river being too short for the Buzzard to lose its forward momentum before the river bent to the north.

  The aircraft hit the water hard and bounced once, twice, three times, throwing up fountains of water that came in through holes in the cabin as pressurized jets, choking Jesse and rattling his already overloaded brain. After the third bounce, the Buzzard skidded across the water until one wing clipped a tree and that engine broke off, sending the craft spinning to the right and rolling before lurching back onto its belly, skipping sideways across the water. The sideways motion saved Jesse’s life, by bleeding off kinetic energy before the Buzzard slammed into the trees lining the bank where the river bent to the north.

  He had a second of terror as his head snapped back, then his forehead smacked into his knees.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  The fight for the planet Feznako did not begin with large forces on each side of a defined border, conducting a well-planned set-piece battle. With starships in orbit able to rain hellfire down on any position, the key to ground warfare was to use stealth fields and sensor jamming to avoid being targeted, and to never gather a large enough force in one area that the force became a worthy target for the big guns and missiles of a starship. The old military principle of concentrating force against an objective was turned on its head, when an enemy could control the ultimate high ground.

  There were no lines of artillery dug in on each side of the border. There was no border. The fighting began with small-unit actions breaking out simultaneously all around the planet, coordinated by the Kristang with a simple signal over the planetary communications system. With the Kristang having discarded their original plan to split the Legion by placing Keepers in dire peril, then having to move up their revised attack schedule not once but twice, almost no offensive units were in the proper position when the attack signal was given. Units in the field had to improvise, an action that was not a strength of the Kristang warrior caste’s top-down command culture.

  Some units did follow as best they could the original plans they had been given, only to find those plans woefully outdated, as Legion forces had either moved or never yet arrived at those targets. The Alien Legion and their Ruhar leaders were in as much in confusion and chaos as their enemy, the evacuation schedule having been revised so many times that no one was sure which version was current.

  The attack on the convoy wasn’t planned, because the convoy was a last-minute decision by General Ross. He had been scheduled to fly out to a regional command post, but then the Buzzard developed engine trouble during the flight and was forced to land, Ross decided to continue the journey by truck rather than wait for the aircraft to be repaired. Air assets were still in short supply, and he could not justify pulling a frontline aircraft off its assigned duties to fly him around on an inspection tour.

  Also, if the general was being completely truthful, he wanted an opportunity to drive a truck instead of being chauffeured around everywhere by a staff officer.

  Perkins had been skeptical when Ross ordered the inspection party into a pair of trucks, but she kept quiet after he said he wanted to experience what it was like to patrol an area the Legion had declared as ‘pacified’. There were no cities and only a few towns along the route, without any dangerous choke points where an ambush could have been prepared for them. The regular patrol that morning had not encountered any trouble, indeed the patrol reported seeing very few Kristang, the mostly civilian population seemed to be keeping quiet and out of sight.

  The first indication of trouble was a confused report received by one of the soldiers in the back seat of the truck. He held his zPhone to one ear and a hand pressed tightly to the other ear, evidently having trouble hearing despite the almost silent electric motors of the truck. “Say again,” Perkins heard the man say. “Air warning? Where? Send the data to me.”

  “What’s the problem?” Perkins turned around to look at the staff officer in the back seat.

  The man kept the phone pressed to his ear, holding up an index finger to ask for a moment before replying. Then he lifted the phone away from his ear, squinted at it in surprise, and pressed buttons. “I don’t know, Colonel. It was garbled. I’m calling HQ now.”

  Perkins pulled out her own phone and was about to contact her own headquarters, but the icon for connection strength blinked out. She instinctively held the phone outside the truck window as if it were a cellphone and she was still on Earth, when the screen lit up with a jamming alert. “We’re being jammed!” She shouted, stuffing the phone back into a pocket and drawing her rifle from its mount inside the door.

  The jamming was her first notice that war had broken out across Fresno. The second notice was a crackling buzz like a nest of angry hornets, as the maser turret on the truck in front of them fired at something in the sky. A bright spot bloomed in the clear morning sky, a missile or artillery shell exploding as it was intercepted by the air-defense maser beam. The maser fired again, this time there was no flare in the sky, instead the truck shook and she heard a loud CRUMP sound of a warhead striking the ground off to the left side of the road.

  Ross stomped on the accelerator pedal and stuck a hand out the window, waving for the truck ahead to move faster. Perkins slapped the dashboard to get the general’s attention. “Sir! We need to turn around!”

  “No,” Ross shook his head without taking his eyes of the road. “We’ve got a clear shot along this road to the checkpoint at the crossroads. Going back, we have to drive through a town and that is a sure ambush site.”

  “The checkpoint is thirty-two kilometers, back to base is only twelve. That extra twenty klicks is a lot of exposure. That checkpoint is only manned by two squads, they can get overrun easily,” she kept her tone neutral because she had argued against scattering small teams at checkpoints, where they were too vulnerable. “That checkpoint team has standing orders to RTB if fighting starts. Sir, they won’t be there when we arrive.”

  “Fair point, Perkins,” Ross let off the throttle slightly, his eyes still scanning the road to each side.

  “We can go around that town behind us. I checked the fields as we drove through, we can go cross-country and avoid the town.”

  “The fields to the north were freshly planted,” Ross replied, subtly telling his subordinate that she was not the only person who had paid attention as they drove through the alien countryside. “Perfect spot to plant mines. To the south, those fields are crisscrossed with irrigation ditches. A lot of mud.”

  “This type of truck can handle mud, even ford deep streams and climb riverbanks. We can make it.”

  Ross hesitated, unconvinced.

  “Sir, there’s a dozen soldiers in these trucks who are in danger because we are here,” she said pointedly. “They’d be safer if you and I got out and walked home.”

  “I hear you, Colonel. All right,” he hit the brakes and the truck ground to a halt, then he began cranking the steering wheel hard to get the truck turned around. Ahead of them, the other truck had also stopped and a soldier was leaning out a window, tapping his helmet to indicate he had lost communications. “We go back to base. I’m not risking lives just to-”

  CRUMP!!!

  The maser turret atop the lead truck fired nearly simultaneously with an artillery round impacting the road ahead, throwing up a fountain of road and burnt ash. The maser fired twice more and the truck was rocked by mid-air explosions
, the second warhead being detonated so close that both vehicles were pelted by shrapnel. Emily felt a burning streak across her right cheek and when she touched her face, it came away with bright red blood.

  Ross looked at her with alarm as he continued to get the truck turned around on the narrow road. “You’re hit.”

  “It’s nothing,” she responded, feeling a thin tear along the skin. “Letting it bleed will flush the wound out until I can-”

  “Medical kit. Now, Colonel. That’s an order. And get these windows up. That’s my fault, I was sightseeing.” The windows rolled up and some sort of energy field engaged to reinforce the integrity of the see-through composite, making the view shimmer slightly. Ross now wished he had a Hamvee with armor panels that could swing up to cover the windows. Hamvee drivers could steer by viewing sensor data in their helmet visors. “Button up,” he ordered the two soldiers in the back seat. They had Ruhar skinsuits while Ross and Perkins had standard UNEF combat uniforms, augmented by vests with armor panels and Ruhar field helmets. The helmets had a visor that could be lowered to provide synthetic vision and targeting data for rifles, but did not offer the full protection of a skinsuit bucket.

  Perkins took a second to rip a medical patch out of the medical kit and slap it to her face, feeling the nanotechnology gel in the patch numb the area before it went to work stopping the blood flow and knitting the wound together. She knew Ross had been right to insist she take care of the wound because with the amazing technology of Ruhar battlefield medicine, it took only seconds to ensure the wound would not reduce her combat effectiveness. “Good thing we decided not to continue forward,” she said with a wry smile, wincing when the smile stretched the fast-healing slice across her cheek. As the dust cleared, she could see the warhead had taken a big chunk out of the road. The crater was deep and steep-walled, difficult for the trucks to drive across.

  Ross shook his head. “I think the lizards don’t want us going forward. They’re making us go backwards. That crater wasn’t made by artillery, there was an IED under the road. I was watching, the explosion happened before the maser turret engaged.”

  “Shit,” Perkins stuffed the medical kit back in its cubby under the dash and flicked off her rifle’s first safety. Looking in the side mirror, she could see the lead truck was having trouble getting turned around. The road in that area was a narrow dirt lane, cut through rolling terrain. On each side, an embankment rose four to six feet. The embankment could be climbed by even the larger lead truck, but it would be a slow process. If it was an ambush spot, the enemy had chosen well. Ross might be correct, the enemy could be steering them back to a prepared ambush site. Although, it did not make sense. Why bother going through the trouble to set up an ambush, and then not spring the trap on the regular morning patrol that had rolled through less than two hours before? Plus, the enemy could not have known that two senior Legion officers would be on the road that morning, Ross himself hadn’t planned the trip.

  What puzzled her most was the timing. It was mid-morning. The sky was clear. Why not launch the attack in the middle of the night? Something had forced the Kristang to scrap all their plans and launch the attack early. That worked in the Legion’s favor.

  “Sergeant,” she turned to the soldier who had heard the initial message. “You heard about an air warning? What was it?”

  “Hard to say, Colonel,” the man replied while looking out the side window, scanning the thin screen of trees that lined the road between fields of whatever the Kristang were growing. “It was garbled. All I understood is a Buzzard was fired on by MANPADs and escaped.”

  She turned her attention to the other soldier. “How long until we can have comms back up?”

  “Don’t know, Ma’am. The secure comm gear is in the lead truck.”

  Shit, Perkins cursed to herself. She should have insisted that she ride in the lead truck. The Ruhar had instructed their human allies that the comm gear typically took up to forty minutes to analyze the jamming and break through. That was way too long. Now the commander of the human half of the Alien Legion, and the leader of the Mavericks, were stuck in the middle of nowhere, with no ability to affect the outcome of the battle or even know what the hell was going on. “This is bullshit,” she muttered through gritted teeth.

  Ross knew what she was thinking. “My fault, Colonel. I never should have gone sight-seeing without having a scramble-proof communications set with us.” He pounded the steering wheel with a fist in anger at himself. The Buzzard had a secure communications system, he should have stayed with the aircraft and had replacement parts flown in. “Ok, the lead truck is straightened out.” He stepped on the accelerator and the truck surged forward. “There’s no room on this section of road for them to get past us. We’ll have to take lead until-”

  The first couple rounds struck Emily’s side of the truck, making her door window go opaque and rocking the vehicle. “Go go GO!”

  Dave stepped off the Buzzard, ducking down and hurrying because the aircraft’s turbines were spooling down to idle and kicking up dust. As he trotted across the field, he passed a line of Indian soldiers jogging past him up the ramp of the Buzzard. With the Legion still struggling to bring their supply of second-hand Ruhar aircraft up to flightworthy condition, those birds capable of operation were being flown constantly, and time on the ground was time wasted. The terms of the occupation agreement required the Kristang to disarm their own aircraft, but did not allow the Legion to use native aircraft or ground vehicles except in an emergency. Technically, the Legion was free to use any equipment left behind in a sector the Kristang had been evacuated from, but Dave knew the lizards would disable or burn anything useful before they pulled out of an area. That was why the Ruhar government relied on contractors to bring the planet’s facilities up to standard for a hamster colony, and why that lead contractor Glabosor was so eager to secure major facilities like power generation and water supply.

  And that was why Dave had flown two hours in a noisy, shaking Buzzard. His job that morning was to provide ‘guidance’ to a mixed Legion team that was tasked with securing a large hydropower dam. A group of human and Verd-kris engineers would be inspecting the dam inside and out, making sure it was structurally sound, and checking for sabotage including explosive devices. Dave hoped the job would not require him to go down in any dark, narrow tunnels to look for explosives, he had enough of that out in the asteroid belt of another star system.

  “Czajka?” A voice called out from behind him, a voice Dave knew was speaking through a translator because he heard the original muffled Kristang words a split-second before the English version came through the earpiece. Having even a microsecond delay in translation took some getting used to, that and the speaker’s lips not matching what he heard. But he had been using one or another type of zPhone translator since he started training on Camp Alpha and it now seemed normal to him. He even recognized the voice, as the sophisticated translator used the same tone and voiceprint of the speaker.

  “Surgun Jates?” He asked even before he turned, and he had to stop his right hand halfway up in a reflexive salute. Dave Czajka was a civilian now, he needed to remember that. His title was not ‘Sergeant’, it was ‘Mister’ or ‘Czajka’ or sometimes just ‘Dave’ and that took some getting used to. He wore the same combat uni as human Legion soldiers, even with the ‘Mavericks’ patch, except without rank insignia. His nametag also had a blue border and below his name was ‘SecCorp’ to indicate he was now legally a civilian contractor, which he thought was better than being called a mercenary. If the shit hit the fan and the local Kristang fought back against the occupation like everyone expected they would, he would be wearing a Ruhar combat skin, carrying a rifle and putting his sorry ass on the front line like any soldier.

  Being a civilian did not make a big difference in what he did, but it did make Legion soldiers look at him differently and sometimes treat him differently.

  That bothered him a lot.

  Jates had started to re
turn a salute that Czajka had not given, and the Verd’s arm froze halfway up. The awkwardness hung in the air before Jates lifted a thumb. “You squared away, Czajka?”

  Dave returned the thumbs up. “Yes, Surgun. I didn’t know you would be here.”

  “It was Colonel Perkins’ idea,” Jates flashed a toothy grin that Dave still found more than a little disturbing. “I am to observe the security detail in the field.”

  “Babysitting, you mean?” Dave grinned.

  Jates grunted. “Let’s get moving.”

  Dave led the way to the base motor pool, and slung his pack into the back of a sort of dune buggy. In UNEF terms adopted by the Legion, it was a Tactical Ground Reconnaissance Vehicle provided by the Ruhar Federal Army, so of course the humans referred to it as a ‘Tiger’. Dave simply thought it was cool and he had been itching to drive one, his only experience had been a brief familiarization drive back on Paradise. The vehicle could seat four occupants, with the front seats each having driving controls. A Tiger was mostly a frame of oval-shaped tubes; on the outside were hung thin armor panels that could only protect the passengers from small-arms fire and shrapnel. The Tiger’s best protection was its speed and maneuverability, and Dave considered driving a Tiger in enemy territory the closest he would get to being in a Mad Max world.

  Dave and Jates secured their rifles to rugged clips on the backs of the front seats and climbed in over the side panels, tugging the straps tight. When Jates pressed the button to allow power to flow to the wheels, Dave followed procedure by placing his hands firmly in his lap, demonstrating he wasn’t touching any of the controls. Some Tigers were equipped with a nose-mounted rifle, or rockets or even anti-aircraft missiles in an overhead pod, but the vehicle they had was unarmed. Proper procedure was the same no matter how the vehicle was equipped, and Dave acted automatically under the watchful eye of the Verd-kris Surgun.