Portal Wars 1: Gehenna Dawn

by Jay Allan

  Nobody could remember how the use of handles and had become so widespread in the UN forces on Erastus, but the tradition seemed to date back almost as far as the original expedition. Sooner or later, nearly all the veterans picked up nicknames. It didn’t take too long, usually just a couple months. A new guy would survive a few battles, make a few friends…then someone would pick something out - a personality or physical trait - and pin a new name on him. Most of the time it stuck. It was OK to call someone at or below your rank by his handle, even in combat. In camp you could usually call an enlisted superior by his nickname, though generally not in the field. It all depended on the non-com. Things tended to be much more relaxed among the real veterans, guys who’d been onplanet two years or more. With first year casualties averaging over 80%, that was a small group.

  Taylor reached the end of the rough tunnel leading from the barracks area to the infirmary. The field hospital was several levels lower than the main base, in the most secure section of the facility. The 213th was lucky…they shared their HQ with the battalion hospital. The other strike forces had only rough aid stations. They had to get their serious casualties evac’d to Base Delta, which was anywhere from 20 to 50 klicks from the other strike force HQs.

  There was a rough metal ladder built into the stone wall, leading down through an opening. UN Forces Erastus didn’t waste time on anything fancy. Everything needed for the war effort had to come through the Portal, and it took a dozen nuclear reactors on Earth to power the thing. Casualties brought in from the field came through a larger tunnel that ramped down from the surface, but lightly wounded grunts making their own way from the barracks had to climb.

  Taylor reached out and grabbed the first rung, wincing as he felt the predictable pain shoot through his chest. There were 36 rungs leading to the infirmary level, and every one of them was going to hurt.

  “I told you to stay off-duty, didn’t I?” Doc Evans had what was generally considered to be the least original handle on Erastus. He’d been there for a long time, so long that no one Jake had ever met could remember a time when Doc wasn’t the battalion surgeon. His handle was so ubiquitous, Jake wasn’t even sure he’d ever known Evans’ first name. If he had, he’d forgotten it.

  Jake made a face. “It’s a damned good thing I went, Doc.” Evans was a captain, an exalted rank that should have precluded a sergeant like Jake from using a nickname. But everybody called Evans “Doc.” Everybody. “Somebody really screwed the pooch on that one. We’re lucky anybody made it back.”

  Taylor sat on an examination table, gritting his teeth while Doc slid the bone fuser across his back. The fuser didn’t hurt, not exactly. But it was an unpleasant feeling, sort of a cross between electric shocks and bugs crawling across your skin. It was worth it, though. One short session was as good as a month’s normal healing.

  Jake had been in a lot of pain since the battle, but he’d stayed away from the infirmary for over a day. He’d always believed the first day was for the seriously wounded. He couldn’t stand the idea of sitting around the hospital whining about his sore ribs, while his boys where having their guts sewn back together.

  “Yes, I know you’re indispensable, Jake.” Evans smiled. He had a pleasant disposition; even his sarcasm was gentle. He was condemned to spend the rest of his life on Erastus, just like all the grunts he put back together, but it never seemed to bother him. Doc was the most liked guy Jake Taylor had ever known. In five years, he’d never heard a negative word uttered about the battalion’s surgeon. “But still, you should listen to your doctor once in a while.” He paused, his smile broadening. “Just to be polite.”

  “OK, Doc.” Taylor didn’t mention he was dragging his section out for unscheduled maneuvers in a little over 14 hours. “I’ll try to take it easy.”

  Evans nodded, but he looked unconvinced. He’d known Jake Taylor for a long time, and he didn’t expect his suggestion would accomplish much. Still, he figured, at least I tried. Doc had dealt with a lot of the old timers on Erastus, and they were all pretty much the same. He wasn’t sure if they thought they were invincible, or they just didn’t care. But not one of them listened when he told them to take it easy.

  Taylor sat quietly while Doc finished up. The light in the treatment room was glaring, the strips on the ceiling augmented by several focused spots. It wasn’t as bright as Erastus’ two suns at high noon, certainly, but it was an unpleasant change from the welcome dimness of the rest of the base.

  Taylor didn’t utter a word about Cadogan until Evans was almost done. Then he worked up the courage to ask what he’d been wondering, what all the guys had been wondering. “How’s the lieutenant, Doc?” There was a nervous edge to his voice. Taylor had been hesitant to ask for a number of reasons, not the least of which was that he wasn’t sure he was ready for the answer.

  Doc let out a long sigh. “He’s not good, Jake.” His eyes met Taylor’s. “There’s a decent chance he’ll pull through, but even in the best scenario he’s looking at a long recovery. At least a year. Maybe more.” The surgeon paused again, his eyes dropping, looking down at the floor. “And I doubt he’ll ever be 100% again. Without a miracle, he’s done in the field.”

  Taylor sat quietly for a few seconds before he slid off the table and started getting dressed. It just wasn’t right. He hated casualties…despised the whole bloody slaughter…the waste of good men. He blamed himself for his own KIAs, reviewing every aspect of each mission over and over, trying to figure what he’d done wrong, or what he hadn’t done…why his soldiers had died. It wasn’t entirely rational, and deep down he knew it. But it didn’t matter. That was just who he was.

  Jake was lost in his thoughts, and he almost walked out without another word. He caught himself at the door and turned. “Thanks, Doc.” He swung his arm around. “It feels better already.” He paused. “And let us know about the lieutenant, will ya, Doc?”

  “Sure thing, Jake.” Evans’ voice was soft…sympathetic and sad. “But I doubt anything will change for at least a few days.” Doc was looking down at the table, slowly putting away the instruments he’d used. “But Cadogan’s a tough old bird.” The lieutenant was old to the grunts he commanded, but Evans was at least ten years older still. “He’ll make it.”

  Taylor nodded and ducked through the door into the hallway. The lieutenant wasn’t his responsibility, and he didn’t blame himself like he did with his own men. But Steve Cadogan was one of the best combat officers he’d ever known, and it twisted him in knots to think of such a good commander – such a good man - going down because of a botched assignment. He could reconcile with losing someone like Cadogan in a straight up fight, but he knew that’s not what the combat on Blackrock Ridge had been. The whole thing had been one administrative fuck up after another, and Taylor knew no one would be held responsible. Cadogan might die, but the planning staff officers would cover for each other. They weren’t lifers on Erastus like Jake and Cadogan…or even Doc. They were UN permanent staffers doing two-year rotations onplanet. They had return tickets through the Portal and political patronage and careers waiting back home. None of them were about to let the deaths of a few footsoldiers interfere with any of that.

  Jake knew why there were men fighting on Erastus. He hated the pus-sucking Admins from New York and Geneva who treated the combat troops with callous disregard, but deep down he believed in their cause. The Machines, and the Tegeri who built and commanded them, were mankind’s enemies, a deadly alien menace who would destroy or enslave humanity…unless men like Jake and his brothers stood in the breach and barred the way. The methods UN Central employed to conscript soldiers or blackmail them into volunteering sickened him. But he couldn’t blame them for the war. He even had to acknowledge that, however imperfect the methods had been, the UN Consolidation had saved Earth from invasion, mankind from defeat. The individual nation-states could never have stood against the Tegeri, as a united mankind had done. Wars between nation states were a thing of the past. All the resources an
d production of human civilization were pooled together against the common enemy.

  There were 8 known Portals on Earth…8 transit points to other worlds, and none of these had fallen. Men were fighting and dying on more than three dozen worlds, but not on Earth itself. The Machines were fighting Taylor’s men, and thousands like them, on distant Portal Worlds, not in the streets of terrestrial cities and towns. The enemy wasn’t rampaging through helpless villages, ravaging farmhouses like the one Jake had called home for most of his life. They weren’t murdering civilians and helpless children or destroying the civilization it had taken man millennia to build. And for that, Jake would hold back the anger and the bitterness, the resentment over his own treatment and the tragic fate that had been his lot. He would take his place in the field, pick up the rifle…and he would protect those he’d left behind.

  Chapter 3

  From the Journal of Jake Taylor:

  We try to help the new guys. Most of them don’t last long. Just surviving on Gehenna is hard, and fighting the Machines is like something out of a child’s nightmare. They are meticulous, and you need to be cool and deliberative to counter their attacks. Their tactics are mediocre, but there is an inhuman relentlessness to them. If you lose your focus they will tear you apart. It’s hard for the rookies to stay cool under fire, and a lot of them hesitate, give in to fear. They panic. And they die.

  I was different when I got here…calm, resigned to my fate. I can’t really explain why. I was bitter, of course, mourning a life that had been taken from me. All I’d ever cared about had been stolen away – home, family, love, writing. But for all the wrong that had been done to me, I’d always clung to the thought that it was not entirely in vain…that my sacrifice had been made to a good cause. I was protecting Earth, standing between others like me, like I had been, and the doom of a relentless alien horde bent on destruction. That was a powerful salve, one that kept me going for years.

  Then there were the vids. They showed them to us when we got to training camp, the records from the first colonies. Peaceful little towns, outposts on new and untamed worlds…and adventurous families blazing a trail into the frontier. The first expeditions had been before the Consolidation, and the colonists were national heroes, citizens with the courage to leave Earth behind and help build mankind’s future.

  Then the Machines came. They swooped down on the tiny settlements, slicing through their meager defenses and slaughtering everyone. The videos showed it all…the hideous creatures, manlike but grotesquely different too, rending the helpless civilians, feasting on the flesh of the children. After a few minutes, we all wanted to run from the room, but they made us watch. They made us watch it all. By the time we left we were consumed with rage, straining to get at these inhuman monsters…to kill them, to tear them apart as they had done to the colonists.

  Our hatred drove us, and our sense of duty…but it was still an odd feeling, fighting to protect something you knew you’d never see again. This was no old-style war, where the boys would come marching home after a glorious victory. For us, it was a one-way trip. We were soldiers for life. Sending someone through a Portal took an enormous amount of energy, and a return trip was far too costly for us footsoldiers. There’d be no parades for my comrades and me, no ribbons tied to trees, no sweethearts waiting for us to come walking through the front gate. We were dead to our loved ones, already mourned and gone forever.

  “That was pathetic.” Taylor’s voice was angry, scolding. He knew the troops were still tired from the fight at Blackrock, but that was no excuse. Not for such a lackluster effort. “We’re gonna do this again. We’re gonna do it as many times as it takes you to get it right.”

  He looked out at the downcast faces, dripping with sweat. Bear stood in front of his team, his drenched fatigues plastered to his massive body. He looked like he was about to fall over, but Taylor knew the big man was tough as nails. Chuck Samuels would stand under the heat of Erastus’ two suns for as long as Jake told him too.

  “I’m hot and tired just like all of you.” And my fucking ribs are throbbing too, Taylor thought but didn’t say. “But I don’t want to watch a fucking Machine put you down, and that’s exactly what’s going to happen if you continue to let them outperform you in the heat.” He was speaking to the new guys, mostly. The vets knew already…and they’d heard it a hundred times before. But a reminder never hurt.

  “So I better see some rapid improvement from all of you, or we’re going to be out here all day…and all night too.” He panned his eyes across the entire assembled section. “You think I’m kidding?” His voice was growing louder, harsher. “Don’t fucking try me.”

  There was a brief pause. It was eerily quiet, not a sound but the wind whipping through the valley. The breeze was a welcome relief from the oppressive heat, but the air felt like it was coming off a blast furnace. It helped, but not much.

  Tony Black had been looking at Taylor, but now he turned back toward the massed troops behind him. “You heard the sergeant.” His voice was higher pitched than Jake’s but his volume was a match any day. “Get your asses moving. I want you reset for the exercise in five minutes or I’ll beat the sergeant to it and rip off your heads and crap down your fucking necks. I shit you not.” Black had the foulest mouth in the section. Where he’d come from, that little speech would have been a sloppy wet kiss.

  The troops moved quickly, scrambling across the sand, taking positions facing each other. The section was split into two forces, and they were fighting a simulated meeting engagement. They were a little over ten klicks from base, and they’d marched the whole way in the blazing sun. They’d be marching back too, but at least it would be closer to twilight then. Erastus was never comfortable, but it was marginally less unbearable when only one sun was in the sky.

  Jake stood and looked out at the troops getting ready to run the maneuver again. Black’s team, and most of Bear’s too, were already in place. They were the veterans, the guys who’d been onplanet awhile and learned to survive. But 3rd and 4th teams were mostly rookies, and they moved slower. If they’d been under fire, he thought, half of them would be dead already.

  It wasn’t by design that Taylor’s veterans and recruits were so segregated. The Machines had accomplished that a month earlier…just before the entire 2nd Battalion was transferred north, out of the steaming equatorial jungle. Denny Parker had been part of Taylor’s inner circle and the section’s exec before Blackie took his place. A corporal on the cusp of becoming a sergeant, he and almost half the section were cut off by a sudden enemy attack. By the time Taylor and the rest of the men broke through, there were only 2 survivors. Parker wasn’t one of them.

  Taylor’s first thought was to reorganize the section, balancing out the experienced troops. But he didn’t do it. The 8-man teams were extremely close knit units. The men of a team fought together, bled together. They shared out their rations, listened to each other’s stories. They were families, the only families any of these men would ever have again. When Taylor first arrived on Erastus, scared, angry, and desperately lonely, it was the men of his team that pulled him through it. Some section commanders would have moved names around a roster sheet, but not Jake Taylor. He bumped Karl Young up to team leader and moved him from the 1st Team to the newly reconstituted 3rd, but otherwise he left his guys where they were. He owed them that much.

  Young was screaming at his team now, berating them for their sluggish efforts. “What part of move your asses don’t you people understand?”

  Taylor was too far away to get a good look, but he knew Frantic well, and he could practically see the vein bulging on his neck as he urged his men on. The corporal sounded a little like a martinet, shouting at his soldiers, asking them to do the impossible. Taylor knew better. Young acted like he was crazy, but there was no one you wanted at your side more in a desperate fight. Jake had found that out a few months earlier, when he went down during a routine patrol. Young killed two Machines about to finish him off, and he ca
rried the wounded Taylor 7 klicks in the midday sun. It wasn’t until they got back to basecamp that Taylor realized Young had also been hit – twice - and he’d carried his stricken CO all the way back, wounded and bleeding himself.

  “Alright, Blackie…” Taylor spoke softly into the tiny mic on his helmet. “…let’s do this again.”

  “I’m going to hear from Battalion again, Blackie.” They’d been back a few hours, and most of the section was sacked. Taylor had authorized a double water ration for his troops…in addition to burning through 85,000 practice rounds during his exercise. Water was scarce in the desert zones of Erastus, and even in the jungle belt where it was plentiful, it was so infested with aggressive pathogens it cost a fortune to purify. And ammunition was worse…it had to come through the Portal. Some of the other worlds had onsite production facilities, or at least that was the rumor. But Erastus didn’t…not yet. And bringing crates of ammunition through the Portal was expensive.

  Taylor took good care of his men, excellent care. That usually translated into issuing them more rations and burning through ammunition on unscheduled training exercises. There had been two formal inquiries about excessive use of supplies, but Lieutenant Cadogan had appropriately “filed” them. One of these days, he figured, UN Command Erastus would get tired of being ignored, and pursue things more aggressively. But it hadn’t happened yet. And his boys had earned that extra ration.

  “Tell them to suck my dick.” Blackie didn’t pull verbal punches, especially not when sitting in base shooting the shit with Taylor. “How the fuck do they expect us to keep these little baby cherries alive? Half of ‘em don’t have hair one on their balls.” Black had less respect for rules than anyone Jake had ever met, a vestige of the Philly freezone streets, he supposed. Still, he couldn’t understand how someone with no respect for authority could make such a good soldier. And Black was one of the best.