Orphan Brigade

by Henry V. O'Neil

  Unfortunately, Mortas had become separated from the men on either side of him and couldn’t see anything but a wall of green. Struggling to his feet, he rushed forward with helmet bouncing, Scorpion rifle across his chest to part the grass, and hoping he wasn’t going to end up in front of the advancing troops.

  Two rubberized doughnuts abruptly pressed down around his ears, one of the reasons that the infantry helmet was referred to as a “grip” by the veterans. Dak’s voice came over the radio inside the twin mufflers, telling Berland to shift the machine guns’ fire to the far side of the position. Although every member of the platoon could communicate using the helmet radios, the veterans had explained to Mortas that they attempted to stay off the net as much as possible. If everyone began talking, important messages and commands could be lost. Mortas had decided this was a gentle way of telling him that the squad leaders and team leaders could maneuver their men without excessive direction from their new lieutenant.

  Dak’s message to Berland indicated that at least one squad had reached the closest enemy fighting positions, and so Mortas leapt up and bulled forward. He knew the grass stopped short of the hilltop, and was telling himself to just get to where he could see something when the blades parted abruptly and he spilled out into the open.

  It was as if he’d been thrust into a completely different world. Tan-­colored ground rising in front of him for another hundred yards, mostly open with patches of low weeds. Machine gun noise that seemed far off because the dampers in his helmet had snugged down again to protect his ears from the explosions and rifle fire. Twenty yards to his front a dark, ugly slit in a hump of rock, the firing ports of the first Sim emplacement. Light blinking from inside, continuous ripping sounds, a line of small eruptions in the dirt to his right and more water drops on his face. Bracing the Scorpion against the dirt, firing into the slit, ridiculously exposed, but then smoke was blossoming right in front of the bunker.

  Snug against his cheeks, his goggles automatically adjusted so Mortas could see through the cloud. Mechanical movement, the enemy gun traversing, then the image was gone, replaced by a flash of light that would have blinded him if the goggles hadn’t reacted. An instant later he registered the blast of a rocket launcher (“boomers” in troop parlance) and knew where the searing light had come from. Turning to his left to see troops from Dak’s squad, prone at the edge of the grass, functioning smoothly. The smoke had been provided by one of the grenade launcher men, known as “chonks” because of the sound their weapons made. The rocket team, needing to reload, rolled back deeper into the bush while Dak and several others began the alternating rush toward the disabled enemy position.

  Dirt leapt up and slapped his cheek, and Mortas jerked his head to the right in wonder. More of the simulated rounds were being directed at him, and he finally made out the very edge of another bunker, farther up the hill. Rolling, jumping to his feet, boots kicking up more dirt as he ran, looking for something to hide behind and only seeing the edge of a rock the size of a human head, then he was down behind it, firing uphill at the new threat.

  More movement to his left, Dak’s men. Body armor, helmets, the dark goggles hugging their faces, impossible to tell them apart. They seemed to hop and skip as they rushed, then Mortas remembered that he was actually supposed to be in charge here and where the heck was Mecklinger’s squad?

  “East Team, East Team, get up here! Knock out that bunker on your side!” His voice rasped from the effort and the heat and the smoke that now drifted over him. The designation of the two assault teams was a First Platoon convention utilizing the points of the compass. Dak’s squad, to his left, was on the western side of the objective while Mecklinger was on the east. The labeling was a good reminder of areas of responsibility and zones of fire, particularly important after they’d captured the position.

  As if by magic, a salvo of chonks coughed from his right. More smoke rounds to blind the enemy gunners, but then a remarkable shot, low angle, that skipped an explosive round straight through the firing port. Again the goggles protected him, but Mortas saw a momentary snort of flame burst forth.

  Up again, more rifle sounds, seeing that half of Dak’s ­people were already past the first emplacement while the other half provided covering fire. Regardless of the rocket strike’s effects, an unidentified soldier armed a grenade and tossed it into the position that they were now using for protection. Mortas, running toward it, heard the shouted warning of “Grenade!” and threw himself facedown in the dirt just as the explosive detonated. He imagined a gust of wind passing over him, an invisible wave of air carrying lethal shrapnel at titanic speeds.

  Figures to his right now, camouflage fatigues, helmets and armor, the thick tube of a rocket launcher, and then he was at the base of the first bunker. Watching Mecklinger’s ­people heaving grenades into the position farther up the hill, some prone while others fired over the canted sides of the low emplacement. Coming to a crouch, spitting dirt off his tongue, just peering around the side of the captured fighting position when Dak’s voice came over the radio.

  “All clear! All clear!”

  Realizing that the machine guns had all stopped firing, Mortas looked up and over the enemy position to see that the third and last bunker had been captured by Dak’s ­people. Facing in the opposite direction, it had been the easiest one because it had been attacked from the rear. More voices on the radio, team leaders reporting casualties—­none in this case—­and squad leaders already shifting the assault force into a defensive perimeter. The Sims were famous for counterattacking lost positions almost immediately, and with heavy forces.

  Berland’s voice came over the net, breathing heavily, rushing to bring up the machine guns.

  “Support team comin’ in! Support team comin’ in!”

  “—­all things considered, that was not a bad iteration.” Sergeant Berland was finishing his assessment of the platoon’s performance in the live-­fire assault. The troops were seated in front of him in a dirty cluster, some of the men swigging from canteens. They’d all removed their helmets, and some had taken off the goggles as well. The flat eyepieces could be slid upward on the face-­hugging frames to allow normal vision, and Mortas and many of the others had done just that.

  “Of course, this objective was a simple one because we’ve got some new men, and because our last assignment took us away from practicing this kind of mission.”

  The veterans in the group laughed or whistled at this. Mortas, seated in the rear with his rifle across his knees, smiled when he heard a few of the comments.

  “Fuckin’ rat hunt.”

  “Hump over all those hills, get in a shoot-­’em-­up for thirty seconds, then hump some more.”

  “Never thought I’d be so happy to see a fake Sim bunker.”

  Berland quieted them with a patient stare. “As I was saying, this one was easy. No mines, no obstacles, no defensive patrols. In other words, nothing like the real thing. Yes?”

  One of the green troops had raised his hand. “Sergeant, is it true that their barbed wire will reach out and grab you, then tighten up until it cuts you in half?”

  The question brought out some scattered laughter, but not as much as Mortas would have expected. Watching, he saw some of the veterans shaking their heads just a bit, and one exhaling through puckered lips as if trying to blow away a bad smell.

  “I see some of the older men have been telling you new guys a few stories.” Berland smiled paternally. “That’s close, but not quite right. You already know that the Sims have a reactive form of obstacle wire, attracted by the electrical field put out by humans. If it’s not nailed down, or was blown into pieces, it will actually snake across the ground at you, and the barbs will latch on. The stuff emits a bright light when it comes into contact with us, and in low visibility the Sims are trained to shoot at that light.

  “We do have some countermeasures, but we won’t be training
with any of that for a while. Let’s focus on what we did today, and get the hang of that first.” Berland cleared his throat. “Sergeant Dak, what happened with the abandoned Sim machine gun?”

  Mortas had no idea what Berland was talking about, so he straightened up a bit. His torso armor shifted, and loose dirt tickled as it went between his fatigue top and his back.

  “When we were assaulting the third bunker, half my squad provided a base of fire while I took the other half with me. We passed a dropped Sim machine gun in a shallow ditch, but we were so focused on the next target that we didn’t take it with us.”

  Mortas suspected that one of the new additions to Dak’s squad had missed the enemy weapon, but Berland addressed the correction to the group.

  “This is important, men: never miss an opportunity to add firepower—­ours or the enemy’s—­to the platoon. Machine guns, boomers, chonks, bags of grenades. Especially when we’re assaulting a position like this one. When the Sims lose important terrain, they counterattack as fast as they can with as much as they can. The veterans will tell you that we’ve ended more than one fight firing mostly enemy weapons because we were out of ammunition for our own. So keep your eyes open, and grab it as you go by.”

  The barrel-­chested NCO raised his narrow eyes to Mortas. “Anything you’d like to add, sir?”

  Caught off guard and still embarrassed from having fallen behind in the grass, Mortas simply responded, “No, Sergeant Berland. I think you covered everything.”

  “Okay, squad leaders go ahead and take a few minutes to talk with your ­people about what you saw.” The platoon broke up into smaller groups, and they moved off in different directions while Berland approached Mortas.

  “How’d you like it, sir?”

  “Honestly? I felt like a spare part.”

  Berland gave him a gentle smile. “I know. I put up a ­couple of dragonflies during the assault. Wanna have a look?”

  Cringing inwardly, Mortas reached up and slid the goggle lenses down over his eyes. They made a slight clicking sound upon mating with the frames that pressed against his cheeks, and he watched Berland do the same.

  The platoon sergeant triggered a video of the assault that had been shot from overhead by tiny flying robots called dragonflies. Every man carried several of them, each in a straw-­like tube from which the aerobot was launched by blowing into one end. The dragonflies flew for only a few minutes, but their miniscule cameras provided overhead footage that went directly into the goggles. Every dragonfly in the air synched up with every other dragonfly, so it didn’t take many of them to cover a wide area.

  Inside the advanced vision devices, Mortas saw dirt erupting around the three enemy positions when Berland’s machine gun position had started firing. The view widened, presumably when another dragonfly had added its feed, and he watched in chagrin as Dak’s and Mecklinger’s squads easily pushed their way through the grass. In the middle of the undulating row of men, Mortas saw himself fighting his way through the vegetation with increasingly frenzied movements.

  The soldiers to either side of him reached the edge of the clearing and began firing rifles and chonks at will, but his armored figure kept struggling forward for several more seconds. It was only after his frantic form fell out of the grass into the open that Mortas noticed he’d had a much greater distance to travel than the others. The vegetation in the center bulged outward into the clearing for several more yards, and he now remembered feeling hemmed in by bodies when the assault team had been arranging itself at the lower edge of the grass. He stopped the transmission and slid the goggles up to see Berland’s waiting eyes.

  “They did that on purpose. They worked it out so I’d go through the worst part of that shit.”

  Berland was obviously trying not to laugh. “I’d take it as a sign that they accept you, sir. They usually ignore the lieutenants they don’t like.”

  Mortas shook his head, but soon saw the humor in the prank. “I guess I have a lot to learn, don’t I?”

  “That’s all right, sir. You’re not the only one. Like I said, this objective was really basic. Gotta get the newbies comfortable with the bang and the boom before they can start focusing on their jobs. Just wait ’til we do this in darkness; with the goggles on, you can see the rounds going by, and it’s pretty scary the first few times . . .”

  Berland’s voice trailed off, and he looked past Mortas. Turning, the lieutenant was surprised to see several big-­wheeled military movers rolling toward the hill.

  “What’s that about?”

  “I think we might not be able to continue training today, sir.” Berland slid his goggles back down. All across the hilltop, the troops were noticing the transports. Mortas fumbled with his goggles, but the message was there when he got them in place.

  A tiny red dot was blinking in the corner of one lens, and the text of a prep order began scrolling in front of his eyes:

  All B Company units are ordered to return to the battalion area. Draw jungle camouflage fatigues and accessories. Prepare to receive mission orders.

  The words appeared on the squad leaders’ goggles as well, and the effect of the message on the platoon was immediate.

  “Jungle camouflage. Fuck.”

  “This shit again?”

  “Oh, you greenies are gonna love this one!”

  Mortas gave Berland a quizzical look, but the platoon sergeant was already calling out orders for the men to collect all their gear and move to the transports. When he was done, the veteran quietly explained.

  “There’s a planet not far from here, one of the Habs that isn’t really a Hab. We took it from the Sims a long time ago, but it’s covered in jungle and the water’s basically muck, so there aren’t many humans posted there. It’s mostly a few retransmission sites and a ­couple of planetary-­study stations, but there’s a bunch of Sammies left over from the fighting who keep screwing with them.

  “Because we’re close by, whenever the Sims get out of hand one of our companies gets sent to chase ’em through the bush for a while. The whole place is really hot, the terrain’s a killer, and the Sims there have gotten really good at planting booby traps.” Berland gave him a shrug. “I guess break time’s over.”

  The next hours were a blur of activity, and Mortas was relieved to see that everybody else seemed to know what to do. Issue points manned by troops from the other companies had already been set up back in the battalion area when they rolled in, and in no time at all he’d received two sets of jungle fatigues as well as covers for his body armor in the same pattern. The fabric was lighter than the woodland camouflage he’d been wearing, and its color was a dark green, striped horizontally with black and brown.

  A host of details had to be sorted out before their departure, but the Orphans were familiar with this particular job. The rocket teams exchanged the bulky boomers for rifles because there would be little use for them on this mission, and the understrength squads needed the extra bodies. For the first time, Mortas realized that the entire brigade was well below its authorized strength and would remain so even with the eventual return of the hospital cases. He was also surprised to see the length of the line when he went to receive a full complement of immunizations along with the other new men.

  The sun was setting as he strode along the walkway toward the battalion headquarters with Captain Noonan and a veteran lieutenant he’d never met before. All of B Company’s platoon leaders had been hit during the brigade’s last mission, and only one of them was still on MC-­1932. The platoon leader of Third Platoon, Wyn Kitrick, walked with a limp. His troops had sprung him from the nearby hospital when the prep order had come in, and Noonan had been visibly pleased to see him.

  As they walked, Mortas noticed a group of soldiers packing up B Company’s rocket launchers for transport. He was about to ask the obvious question when Kitrick answered it without looking.

  “If the
rest of the brigade gets alerted while we’re gone, we’ll have to meet them en route. So anything we leave behind has to be ready to go—­especially the boomers.”

  There was a brisk air of purpose when they entered the building, and Mortas was surprised to see so much woodland camouflage among the hurrying bodies. Every deployable member of B Company had been wearing tiger stripes for the last few hours, and the sudden discrepancy hit him like a physical blow. He was actually going in harm’s way.

  Seeming not to notice the heightened activity, Noonan led them up the stairs and through the operations section. Home of the battalion’s chief planners, Operations was a buzz of voices talking on radios and conferring over lit map screens as they finalized the mission order. The three officers passed into a large conference room, and Mortas was relieved to see several tiger-­striped uniforms amid the throng. Most of B Company’s senior NCOs were already present, and Berland gave him a reassuring nod from the back of the room.

  The wall at the opposite end of the conference table was taken up with a lit display screen. It showed an overhead photo of what Mortas could only assume was one of the threatened stations on the jungle planet Verdur. Standing atop a tall, almost cylindrical mountain, it consisted of several heavily reinforced buildings surrounded by a double wall of antipersonnel fencing. On all sides the ground dropped away like a brilliant green waterfall into dense foliage.

  Captain Noonan and Lieutenant Kitrick had already taken seats at the table, and Mortas was about to join them when a hand took his arm. He half expected it to be Berland, and so was surprised to see it was the battalion intelligence officer. The smiling face from the previous night was gone, and Mortas only had a second to wonder what could be wrong. Pappas spoke in a low voice.

  “Jan, did you see Captain Follett last night?”