Orphan Brigade

by Henry V. O'Neil

  The lead soldier raised his arm, a hand signal that halted the others, and they sank to a knee as one. The Sims in the rear turned their backs to the rocks, protecting the others, and Mortas was thankful for the low whistle of the breeze. Most Sim infantry didn’t have devices enabling them to see at night, but that was reputed to be the reason they were such excellent infiltrators. Not relying on technology to warn them of danger, they were supposed to have developed hypersensitivity to both sound and smell.

  This bunch was not infiltrating, though. Their suicidal decision to walk out in the open made little sense, but its purpose became somewhat clearer when the lead man rose and the others imitated him. Still five hundred yards out from the beginning of the incline, they turned and began to walk parallel to the rocks. The Sim in the center, the one who appeared to be in charge, made some more hand signals. The troops farthest out sidestepped even more, but he had to perform the same silent command a second time before they attained the spacing he desired.

  Mortas grabbed Daederus’s forearm through his fatigue shirt, feeling dried dirt crumbling from the sleeve. The ASSL looked at him, and Mortas cupped a hand over his mask before speaking as softly as possible. The enemy was already well away, but he didn’t want to take any chances.

  “They’re checking the ground to see if it can support vehicles. They just spread out to compute the distance between the rocks and the bog.”

  “Oh, baby.” Daederus sounded like a teenaged boy seeing a naked woman for the first time. He began a hushed message, telling the other ASSLs and fire controllers on both the ground and in the air that he suspected the enemy was scouting out a route for a larger force. One with wheels or tracks and, in either case, armor.

  The message was relayed through the company to battalion, then to brigade. Noonan came up on the radio just once, to ask if they could estimate the width of the route the enemy was establishing, the distance between the rocks and the impassable mud. Again Sergeant Smashy came to Mortas’s rescue, this time with one raised finger in the gloom.

  “Maybe a thousand yards.”

  Berland, to the west, spoke in a mutter. “Just passed us, pushed out even more. They’re definitely checking the ground. Agree with thousand yard estimate.”

  Daederus had been in a steady conversation with the fire control ­people, but his voice began to rise in anger and Mortas grabbed his arm again to quiet him. The ASSL gave him an exasperated look.

  “As usual, somebody in orbit thinks he’s smarter than we are.”

  “What, about the distance? How could they tell from there?”

  “Naw, they’re saying this is just routine patrolling. They haven’t seen any buildup anywhere near us, so they won’t divert the assets.”

  “You mean we’re not covered?”

  “Oh, we’ll have help if we need it, but they think this is just gonna be a scouting party. A few armored cars at most.” He went back to the argument, and Mortas went back to scanning the emptiness to their front. He searched his memory of the classes at Officer Basic, when they’d been taught the enemy’s most common practices. Diagrams flew through his mind, different echelons depending on the size and type of an attack, and the distances between them. Scouts of some kind always came first, but this was such an unusual situation that he couldn’t imagine what would come next or how long it would take for them to get there.

  The tense minutes passed, then turned into a dull hour where nothing new appeared. In the meantime, the enemy dismounts had passed in front of First and Second Platoons’ zones and were about to leave B Company’s surveillance entirely. By prearranged command, any enemy reconnaissance that didn’t move up on the high ground was supposed to be ignored unless they got so far west that they left the area covered by the infantry. In that case, they would be destroyed by a drone gunship because that had been adjudged the least likely weapon to indicate human presence near the passes.

  “No, I’m saying don’t take them out at all!” Daederus hissed to someone. “They’re walking that route for a reason. Something is coming behind them, and we want to see what it is.”

  A similar discussion was taking place on the battalion command net. The commander of A Company, to the west, was insisting on killing the Sims while Captain Noonan was arguing to leave the enemy dismounts unmolested.

  “If they were worried about the passes, they’d be checking them out. This is something different. They don’t know we’re up here, or they wouldn’t be acting like this. Let’s see what comes next, once they call back the go-­ahead.” Noonan’s voice was tight, and Mortas noted the same timbre of anticipation he’d heard from Daederus.

  “There is nobody to our west! What are you suggesting we do?” A Company’s commander objected. “Just let them walk all the way through and disappear?”

  “Hold on.” Colonel Alden’s voice. “Where are they now, and what are they doing?”

  “Still walking, just about to leave B Company’s zone.”

  “All right. A Company, keep watching them, but do not engage unless approached. I want to hear if they stop, if they move away from the high ground, or if they do anything except keep walking west.”

  “What do we do when they reach the end of our zone?”

  “If they get that far, we’ll have to kill them. But not until then. I want to know what they’re up to.”

  An hour passed in relative silence. Although he was in constant communication with the four soldiers covering the rear of the observation post, Mortas slid down the embankment to check up on them personally. He moved in the hunched-­over posture that was becoming second nature for the Orphans in that part of the brigade sector, calling ahead as he approached each two-­man team.

  The first security position was manned by Ladaglia and a veteran member of Smashy’s rocket team, a corporal named Arrow. They’d found a clear space in the middle of a clump of tall bushes, and thinned out the weeds at its edges in order to observe the area around them without being seen. Like so much of the rest of the platoon sector, the ground they faced rose in front of them and was crisscrossed with stony wrinkles and depressions. Dak’s squad was to their northeast, farther uphill and closer to the pass.

  Mortas had checked the spot several times before, rotating men in and out of it, so he got down and crawled under low-­hanging branches to enter the position. The two soldiers inside were on their stomachs facing in two different directions, their boots touching so they could silently alert each other to danger. Mortas crept over the human V, feeling the bushes scrape the top of his helmet. He opened the front section of his camouflage cover so he wouldn’t be lying on the magazines for his Scorpion, and lowered himself to the dirt between the two men.

  “Everything’s quiet, Lieutenant,” Arrow whispered. “If anything’s headed our way, it’s gonna come from the plain where you saw those Sammies.”

  “That seems to be the consensus. So far nothing’s followed them.”

  Mortas rested his chin on his hands, staying back from the edge of the team’s hiding spot. Weeds stood up dark and tall in front of his goggles, and it took him some time to focus beyond them on the slope ahead. Too much ground for so few men, in terrain that badly restricted their fields of vision. And fields of fire.

  “How far are they with the clearing operation, sir?” Ladaglia spoke without moving, and Mortas experienced a sensation of unreality at not knowing which of the two men in goggles and masks was which.

  “It’s picking up speed. They’re almost to A Company’s area.” Remembering Ladaglia’s standard joke. “Think we might win the war right here?”

  “God I hope not. They might make us garrison the place, or even colonize it. What a shithole.”

  The three men enjoyed a brief, quiet chuckle before Mortas slid back out and went to check on the other security team.

  At the second position Private Jute, the veteran from Mecklinger’s squad
, was paired with one of the new men whose name Mortas couldn’t recall. The older man nodded at him from behind helmet, goggles, and mask when Mortas lowered himself onto his stomach between the two soldiers.

  They’d picked a spot in the middle of three round boulders that rose five feet from the broken ground. Facing uphill, they were covering the rear approach to the observation point that was closest to Testo’s squad.

  “Any idea what those Sim dismounts were doing, sir?”

  “They looked like they were checking the ground to see if the mud had gotten this far. It hasn’t, so we’re expecting more guests, maybe scout cars.”

  “Is it true Command’s thinking about not coming up here at all?” Mortas couldn’t tell if Jute was hopeful, or still focused on the uncertainty surrounding the operation.

  “I heard that rumor too. We’ll have to wait and see. But the lane clearing is starting to cover some ground, so every moment that passes without trouble gets us closer to the finish line.”

  “Think they’ll pull us out of here once the lanes are open?”

  A piece of dust worked its way into his right eye, forcing Mortas to slide the goggles up to dig it out. He rubbed his eye hard, longer than it took to dislodge the particle, for the simple reason that he hadn’t thought that far into the future. As far as he knew, no one had.

  “Maybe. Not sure. Even with the mines removed, somebody’s got to secure the high ground around those passes.”

  “You might want to ask about that, sir.” Jute’s voice was neutral, but he suspected the veteran was working hard to keep it that way. “Sam likes his artillery, and as soon as the first tank comes out of those passes he’s gonna rain it down all over this ridge. Can’t dig in, and if we’re still here when that happens, it ain’t gonna be fun.”

  Mortas stared ahead, noticing the gravel and cracked stone all around, the remains of the shelling this area had suffered sometime in the not-­too-­distant past. Imagining the huge explosions blasting the rock into lethal chips, throwing the fragments in all directions.

  “Thanks, Jute. I mean that.” He looked over at the new man, who had said nothing yet. “When are you supposed to rotate to the center, get some shut-­eye?”

  “Another hour. Doesn’t matter; I wouldn’t sleep anyway.”

  “All right. I gotta get back out there.”

  They both mumbled some kind of goodbye, and he slithered backward before rising to a crouch and shuffling away. Down to the depression where the men who’d come off watch would sleep, quite suddenly feeling the tug of his own fatigue. No one was there right then because of the enemy movement, and Mortas was considering reducing the position’s security status to get the sleep rotation going again when Daederus spoke on the radio.

  “Two thousand yards southeast. Looks like three vehicles, coming this way.”

  His mind sharpened by the alert, Mortas carefully moved up the slope until he saw the prone figures peering over the lip. Crawling on his belly, slipping into place as naturally as a lizard. The familiar scene of the plain, drenched in gray and green inside the goggles, the towering cloud to his right and three olive blobs to his left.

  Hearing the muttered words, the more clearly enunciated answers from farther back or farther up, as the message and description were passed. Unable to keep from staring, the pulsating cones of heat growing larger as they rolled toward him. A triangular formation, one vehicle in front and two others back on either side.

  “Scout cars,” Daederus observed.

  “How do you know?”

  “Uniform heat signature. Light armor, all around. If they were tanks, the frontal armor would block a lot of it; looks like a floating green doughnut.” Mortas remembered Major Hatton’s story about something the troops had labeled the “doughnut resupply” somewhere else, sometime in the past. Now hearing the engines, a low humming, and unable to believe that there had ever been a time or a place other than where he was right now.

  Berland’s voice in his ear. “You know the drill. Fingers off the triggers. Let ’em go by.”

  The blobs resolved into something Mortas had seen firsthand on Roanum, the image of a Sim armored car. Big wheels, a nose like the prow of a boat, and a revolving turret with a gun barrel. Mortas expected to see heads and even upper torsos protruding from the hatches, but just before the lead vehicle began the turn he registered that all the hatches were closed.

  The dust. They’d come from the south, where the ash storm was no doubt more severe, and so they were completely buttoned up. Individual Sim infantry didn’t have night-­vision devices, but Sim vehicles did, and so the occupants of the scout cars were driving on instruments. As if thinking the same thing, Daederus and Smashy both began sliding backward. Mortas followed suit.

  Imagining the human troops all along the high ground, watching the vehicles, pressing themselves down into the rock to avoid showing up on the enemy’s scopes. The humming was loud now, mixed with the crunching as the huge tires rolled across the hard, flat terrain. Only his helmet and the very top of his goggles above the level of the grass and the dirt and the stone, the nonarmored parts of his body feeling a part of the very soil.

  The three armored cars rolled by quickly, aware that they were offering their profiles to high ground that had not been scouted. As soon as they passed, all three men wriggled back up to the edge and looked out. The heat from the rear engines showed up almost white in the goggles, and when Mortas turned to look back out on the plain it took a moment for his eyes to adjust. There was nothing there.

  Again, the question of how long it would take for whatever was following the scout cars to get there. It was largely academic, given the situation, because the Sims inside the vehicles could be reporting that the ground was fit for foot soldiers and scout cars but not armor. They might also be sensibly advising against sending a major force until the forbidding high ground had been cleared.

  Or they might be radioing back that they were traveling with no opposition at all and that significant forces should follow as soon as possible.

  Daederus, once again speaking to his partners and bosses on the fire control net, stopped talking with a sudden turning of his head. His goggles stared into Mortas’s, and he seemed to be listening to something the lieutenant could not yet hear. In the gray-­green world, he raised a hand and wiggled all five fingers before pressing it into the dirt. Mortas followed suit, his eyes widening in amazement at the sensation in his palm.

  The ground was trembling, a vibration he remembered from Roanum when gigantic Sim earthmovers had approached the ravine where he and the others had been hidden. He looked back out over the plain, expecting to see the lumbering silhouettes of many Sim tanks, but at the same time wondering how they could be rattling the dirt beneath him from so far away.

  “Oh boy.” Sergeant Smashy sounded worried, and Mortas soon understood why. There was no longer a need to touch the ground to feel the tremors, which now passed through his armor. Voices came up on the net, tumbling over each other, asking if anyone else was feeling that and did anyone know what it was.

  “It’s a fucking earthquake!” Daederus shouted, but his words were barely audible above a series of booming crashes from the distant mud field. Mortas was reminded of thunder, the instantaneous explosion of a bolt that was practically on top of the hearer, then of the waves from a tropical storm he’d once witnessed, slamming into the rocks of an oceanside cliff.

  The vibration beneath him was interrupted by what felt like a kick to his armor, a subterranean burp that was followed by a long, ripping sound far out on the plain. The dust cloud was the first indication of what had happened, as it lost its serene spinning and suddenly flattened as if struck by a typhoon wind from above. Its outer edges bulged and the whole cloud shrank, covering the plain in an instant. One moment the open ground was visible for hundreds of yards and the next it was hidden inside the fog.

  M
ortas felt the breeze on the edges of his mask and goggles, the sting of tiny dirt specks moving at great speed, then the breeze was a wind and the wind was a storm and the flecks were pebbles and he got his head down just in time. Pulling his hands down under his throat, the pebbles rattling against the top of his helmet and his shoulder armor like hail on a metal roof.

  Though astounded by the event, he still remembered his platoon and how many of them weren’t facing the low ground.

  “Get your heads down, there’s all sorts of junk flying around!”

  A chorus of voices acknowledged his message with variations of “No shit!” and, despite the stone rain, Mortas found himself laughing. He lifted his head just enough to look at Daederus, and saw that the ASSL was convulsed with giggles as well. Shielding his goggles with one hand, Mortas turned to look outward and saw that the fog was almost on them, billowing, driven by unseen forces, laden with dust and dirt and rock that flew past him.

  The rock rain ceased without warning, and the others looked up in time to see the fog recede, rushing back like the tide, then even farther, as if being sucked down into a mighty hole.

  They were exchanging looks of wonder when the plain erupted, thunderclap after thunderclap, blowing a dirty gray mushroom miles into the atmosphere.

  “Yeah, it kinda sucks to be right about something like this.” Captain Pappas spoke to Colonel Alden, Captain Noonan, and Lieutenant Mortas in a rocky depression inside the First Platoon sector. The battalion commander had come down to see the devastation for himself, but to little avail; the dust cloud had engulfed much of the brigade’s zone and was particularly dense in A and B Companies’ area.

  Colonel Alden, inspecting Third Platoon’s positions, had been appalled to discover that Lieutenant Kitrick’s unhealed wound had rendered him unable to walk. Kitrick had suffered through the march to his platoon zone, but was barely able to stand when the battalion commander arrived. Over Kitrick’s express objection, the seasoned platoon leader had been evacuated. This left First Platoon as the only platoon with an officer, and so Captain Noonan had announced he would be shifting his small command group between Second and Third Platoons.