Orphan Brigade

by Henry V. O'Neil

  Even with the two companies side by side, there was simply too much ground. The lane was roughly twenty miles in length, but the understrength Orphans couldn’t cover that entire distance and so their zones left the westernmost five miles uncovered. The clearing operation would be responsible for securing the high ground on either side of them for those first five miles, and was projected to cover that distance in a matter of hours once the Orphans were all in place.

  With First Platoon in the lead, Mortas was able to get a good feel for the terrain throughout the company’s zone of responsibility. Much of it was solid rock, and there were so many folds and small ridges that the slowly diminishing company was able to stay concealed with only a few minor detours. In addition to the hidden route, the scouts had identified several stretches of ground that could be traversed using small multiwheeled vehicles known as Armadillos. The Armadillos were a mainstay for walking infantry units in rough territory, both for resupply and casualty evacuation.

  Mortas added the scouts’ markings to the map display inside his goggles, pointing out the places where the segments were separated by ground or obstacles the Armadillos couldn’t traverse. In one case he was able to find a way around a small stone ridge that blocked the way, and in another he marked the dimensions of a rockslide that could probably be cleared without explosives. Unfortunately, there were three more locations that would have to be cut in some way for the Armadillos to drive the length of B Company’s southern positions.

  It was vital that they create that path, because without air support the Orphans would be hauling all their supplies and evacuating any injured soldiers manually. The Armadillos had low silhouettes and high clearance, and they could carry a surprisingly large amount of supplies or evacuate up to three men on stretchers. The assumption regarding actual combat casualties was that once any shooting broke out, all of the Force’s air assets would immediately come into play.

  “All right.” Captain Noonan knelt, facing Mortas, Berland, and Captain Daederus. The platoon was in a loose circle around them in a large, bowl-­shaped rock formation in the center of the platoon’s zone. “Take your time doing this. There’s no way to put bodies all the way across your sector, so the trick is to identify a few spots that will give you observation across your frontage.

  “You’ve got the southeastern edge of this ridge, so you have to be able to see east as well as south. Captain Daederus, you know how to cover an area like this one, so I’m not going to tell you how to do your job. Lieutenant Mortas, Sergeant Berland, each of your observation points has to have enough ­people to pull all-­around security at all times, and to defend itself if the Sims send infiltrators up here to see what’s going on.

  “We have to remain unseen, and we’re shorthanded anyway, so I leave it to your discretion just how much defensive patrolling you do. While you’re choosing the locations for these observation points, identify fallback positions that will still allow us to serve as the brigade’s eyes and ears. If we get hit with artillery, mortars, or rockets, our only option is to move to a different spot.

  “I’ll be back in two hours to see how it’s going. Do frequent radio checks with your observation points and report your status to me every hour. Any questions?”

  The three men shook their heads, and Noonan stood. “Everybody above us seems to think the fight is going to continue far to the south and that Samuel’s never gonna even know we were here. Let’s hope that’s not the case. See you in two hours.”

  Mortas was awakened by a low, insistent beeping in his ear. He knew, somewhere in the state between sleep and waking, that he’d set the alarm for an hour before dawn. His eyes opened to a dull grayness, but that was just the power-­saving mode for the goggles. One of his hands absently reached up to scratch his nose, but the filter mask was in the way. Fumbling, Mortas came to full awareness of where he was.

  The torso armor made sleeping on his side almost impossible, so he was stretched out on his back with his helmet resting on the base of his rucksack. His feet were cold inside his boots, but not from the outside temperature; the lack of movement had robbed them of their heat, and he chided himself for not having wrapped up in his field blanket.

  The goggles came alive when he sat up, showing him the rising height of the ridge to the north and the depression in which he’d been sleeping. Hunt, the platoon medic, was rolled up in a field blanket just a few feet away, as was a junior member of one of the platoon’s rocket teams. Mortas brought his Scorpion rifle up and across his knees before raising his arms and stretching. The stress and toil of his first day on a real operation had taken its toll, and his muscles responded with an uncustomary achiness.

  Taking hold of the rifle, he rolled over on all fours and rose to a crouch, mindful of the low rock berm that shielded the observation post. Looking south, Mortas saw the boots of three men on their stomachs, heads peering over the hump of broken ground. The boots belonged to two members of the boomer team and Captain Daederus. After scouting out the ground in their assigned zone, he and Berland had decided that they would have to separate the platoon into five positions that roughly broke out into the three squads and two augmented rocket teams. The squads had received the platoon’s machine gun crews with their powerful weapons in exchange for some of their riflemen and chonk gunners, and so each the five positions was manned by roughly the same number of soldiers.

  Dak and Mecklinger had their reduced squads on the eastern and western edges of the platoon zone respectively, and the boomer team positions flanked Testo’s squad in the very center. Captain Noonan had blessed the arrangement late in the day, and they’d begun their vigil on the cloud-­covered plain to the south and east. The thick gray cloud had shown no signs of abating, and the mud field beneath it had continued to grow.

  “Coming up,” he muttered, the inside of his mouth covered with a gummy grit despite the filter mask. Two of the prone figures glanced backward, and then Mortas was down among them. Much of the rock in this area was covered with a coarse sand and tough surface weeds, and he felt them under his palm as he settled in.

  “Haven’t seen a thing, and nobody else has either,” Daederus whispered, the voice eerie because it was uttered right next to him but came through the earpieces of his helmet. Mortas studied the revolving cloud and the open ground to the south for a long time, pleased that the grumbling of the distant battle had died out. On a whim he slid the goggles up inside his helmet, seeing the gray darkness and feeling a breeze on his cheeks. It smelled acrid, rotten, and before long bits of ash or dirt or dust got into his eyes and made him bring the goggles back down.

  “How’s the fight going?” He’d already switched the view to the schematic of the battlefield, but it seemed little changed.

  “Looks like both sides are a little tired. Bringing up supplies and wondering just how far south that bog is gonna go.”

  The mention of logistics reminded him of the main reason he was up ahead of schedule. Mortas increased the resolution of the schematic, and once it had reduced the size of the area in his view the imagery changed over to an aerial photo marked out with unit positions and boundaries. The supply path picked out by the scouts was still there, annotated with his notes concerning the barriers, and at those points he now saw the military symbols for engineers. They were rigging explosive charges on the rock obstacles that couldn’t be removed any other way, and a ruse had been set up to hide the sound when they detonated the charges.

  “Here comes the noise.” Daederus rolled over on his back, and Mortas did the same. Moments later he felt the ground trembling through his armor and switched the goggles over so he could see again. The vibrations got louder, then he heard the rumbling of a powerful engine approaching from the north. The nearest crest of the mountains to his rear stood out dark and menacing against a sky filled with stars, and just then the machine roared overhead. A massive, triangular shadow that seemed to be only a few yards above him, its
engines shook the ground hard enough to actually move his body just a bit.

  To the west, on cue, several explosions erupted as one when the engineers blew the charges. Although he’d been listening for them, Mortas was barely able to distinguish the sharp blast from the heavy grumbling that was now heading out, over the plain.

  “Supply bird. The bad guys will think it’s headed for the battle, maybe took a wrong turn.”

  Back to the photo in the goggles. Seeing that the rest of First Battalion was in place, A Company to the west and C Company to the north on the other side of the pass the battalion was guarding. Miles farther to the north, Second and Third Battalions were spreading out on either side of their lanes, but it was impossible to know if the mine clearing had begun anywhere.

  Just then Mortas remembered the ASSL’s more powerful radio, and Daederus’s reputation for knowing what was going on everywhere.

  “Hey, ASSL. Have the sappers started work yet?”

  “Yep, but it’s slow going. Finding the mines, exposing them, then disarming them by hand. It’s a mixed bag of our stuff and Sammy’s, some of it’s pretty old with lots of antihandling devices. I still say they should send the disposal robots through, setting off every one of those things.”

  “Gotta figure the noise would attract attention.”

  “But it would be quicker, and for all we know there aren’t any Sammies close enough to distinguish it from the rest of the fight. We’re gonna be rooted to this spot way too long, doing it this way.”

  Looking at the rocky terrain that surrounded them, Mortas suppressed a shudder.

  Later that day the first Armadillos drove the entire length of both A and B Companies’ zones with supplies. The improved path was rough going for the squat vehicles, but their low profile allowed them to stay out of sight the whole way. Mortas noted that this development raised the spirits of both veterans and newbies alike when he visited his platoon’s positions. He took it as a sign of a commonly held concern that they might be just a little too far away from help. There had been no enemy activity in the day they’d been in place, and as more Orphan units filled the tree-­covered slopes to the north, the chance that they would get infiltrated from that direction lessened markedly.

  Captain Pappas, the battalion intelligence officer, arrived at Mortas’s position late in the day. He’d been ferried up by Armadillo, and walked the rest of the way with Captain Noonan. They’d signaled ahead, and so Mortas met them at the end of the trail where several large boulders allowed them to stand erect.

  “We’ve been staring at that plain for a night and most of a day now, and haven’t seen anything except that monster cloud.” Mortas finished his report to the two captains. “Anybody figured out what it is?”

  Pappas spoke from behind goggles and mask. “The mud field is still growing, but it’s only expanding to the south. Obviously a munition that turns dry ground into mud messes with the composition of the soil on a fundamental level that may even be molecular. Honestly, our ­people still don’t know how a thing like that could be possible, much less how it functions.

  “The enemy’s been forced to shift a lot of their units far to the south, where they’re only just getting back into the fight. That means the Sims were as surprised as we were, which suggests that this new wonder weapon can work very differently on different planets.

  “So to answer your question, we don’t know what that cloud is. It’s a dry dust, and so far the best we can speculate is that it was separated from the rest of the soil when the mud was created.” He looked at the top of the nearest boulder, at the boiling cloud in the distance. “The field’s getting bigger, the cloud’s getting bigger, and if I had to guess, I’d say there’s something going on under the ground that hasn’t yet run its course.”

  “You think it’s gotten away from them? A chain reaction of some kind?” Captain Noonan could have been sitting in a classroom, for all the concern he showed.

  “Fits, doesn’t it? The mud field was supposed to reverse itself within hours of deployment, and instead it’s stayed wet and gotten much bigger. My personal suspicion is that it would have come this way as well except there’s so much rock. But that cloud’s not dissipating, and the bog itself is expanding, so I’m concerned about what’s going on down below. For all we know, there’s an ocean of mud under this plain . . . or maybe a rock shelf holding it up that’s almost chewed through.

  “I mean, what if this thing suddenly creates a sinkhole miles wide? Or simply shifts to our east? That could jam up our big counterattack—­and don’t think Command doesn’t know that. I’m already hearing little things that say they’re rethinking this whole pass-­clearing operation. They’ve diverted an extraordinary number of air assets to the fight down south.”

  “You think if we got into trouble, the air support might not be there?”

  “No, nothing like that. I’m more concerned with the orbital assets not paying enough attention to the ground just a few miles east of here, not giving us warning. I’m really surprised that we haven’t seen any Sim infantry up here. Even with the passes cleared this isn’t armored country at all, but when they pushed our line back that left this ground open, and it isn’t like the Sims not to get some troops up here.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “Make sure you keep your eyes open. It’s not gonna stay quiet here forever.”

  Pappas was proven right just after the midpoint of nighttime on Fractus. Mortas was on watch with Hunt, the platoon’s medic, and the leader of the boomer team, an NCO known as Sergeant Smashy. Smashy’s skill with the rocket launcher was almost legendary, and the short, muscular man’s real name was almost unpronounceable. Mortas had increased the security around their tight position based on Pappas’s concerns about infiltrators, and he’d spent much of the night moving among the three tiny groups of men who made up the most complete perimeter he could form.

  “Yeah, the earlier antipersonnel round for the boomer was tough to work with.” Although they were shoulder to shoulder on their stomachs and communicating through their headsets, Smashy was whispering anyway. “It was basically a canister of nails, but if the range estimation was off even a little bit, it wouldn’t burst close enough to hurt anybody. Sure scared ’em, and you never saw Sam run faster, but the new stuff has got sensors that know exactly when it’s over a bunch of the Sammies. One time I blew down an entire squad . . .”

  The words stopped, and Mortas immediately refocused his attention on the open terrain below them. The surviving shrubs on the final slope before the plain were sharply defined in his goggles, but the particles from the dust cloud began to break up the image soon after that. Despite the interference, far out in the gray-­green world of his goggles he made out four white slivers. Tiny, like stars against a night sky back on Earth.

  “Dismounts. Moving in this direction,” Smashy observed. “What are they doing out there in the open like that? Sitting ducks.”

  The radio came alive with reports from First Platoon’s other observation points, whispered words of warning.

  “Okay, so everybody sees them. Cut the chatter.” Berland spoke from his position on the other side of Testo’s squad. “Everybody hunker down and stay real quiet. Do not, I say again, do not engage.”

  Mortas bumped Hunt’s arm. “Wake up Daederus.”

  The medic slid backward down the incline, toward the sleeping aerial support man. Mortas switched to the company radio frequency and reported the sighting to an NCO who answered in place of Captain Noonan. The company commander’s voice came into his ear a minute later, probably just having been awakened.

  “Dismounts? No vehicles?”

  “They’re all on foot. Counting six of them now, still a good—­” Mortas was about to check the range when Smashy held up two fingers in front of his goggles. “Two thousand yards, coming toward us.”

  “Make sure no one fires un
less they start climbing.” Noonan’s voice took on an edge of excitement. “Tell me everything they do.”

  Daederus crawled up on his other side, maskless, a tight grin on his lips. He began a whispered conversation with the other ASSLs, and Mortas was sure he felt the man’s arm vibrating through the barrel of his Scorpion. The white slivers in his goggled vision had grown in size, taller and slightly wider because they were wearing the bulky Sim battle smocks, still too far out to distinguish weapons.

  “Everybody take a good look around you; don’t get stuck on these guys,” Berland warned. “Rear security, stay awake.”

  Mortas felt a tiny pain in his right hand, and realized he’d been clutching the stock of his rifle as if it were the last handhold over a thousand-­foot drop. He pressed his dirty palm against the dirt, feeling the muscles beginning to relax but grateful for the pain. He was wide-­awake, fully aware of his surroundings, and because they’d planned ahead he knew exactly what to do. An unfamiliar thrill passed through him as the approaching enemy resolved into six Sim infantrymen with long Sim rifles.

  Mortas opened his mouth and let out a long, silent exhale inside his mask. He wondered if this was the same sensation hunters felt when they spotted their prey. His eyes began to smart from staring so long through the goggle night vision, but he had difficulty closing them, even for the few seconds it would take to tear up and moisten the tissues. He did it finally, but only after reminding himself he would have to be able to shoot at them if they kept coming, up the slope.