Orphan Brigade

by Henry V. O'Neil

  Sergeant Dak answered the question. “Everybody watch out! Sammy’s got somebody adjusting his fire!”

  Infiltrators. Somehow, perhaps coming all the way through the brigade’s undermanned sector from the north as Dassa had predicted, Sim soldiers had gotten into position where they could observe the lanes. They wouldn’t be alone, and the priority of the infantry with them would be the removal of ASSLs and any human outposts in a position to direct fires onto the plain. It was time to put Dassa’s plan into action, but he needed to pull his security teams in to do that.

  “Jute! Jute! Do you hear me?”

  Nothing. He called the second pair of Orphans manning the tiny perimeter around his observation point, and Ladaglia answered. Mortas ordered him and Corporal Arrow to move to the depression, then scrambled backward, down the incline, coming to a crouch, slapping the dirt off his Scorpion, and moving quickly to the depression that had been their sleeping area. Hunt was there, waiting for the security men to join him, prone behind a large rock and covering the rear with his Scorpion.

  “I’m going to go see what happened to Jute’s position.”

  “You’re not going alone, Lieutenant.” Hunt was on his feet, bent over and clutching a grenade in the hand that wasn’t holding his rifle. A sack of the deadly missiles hung over his shoulder, and Mortas simply nodded before heading out through the rocks. Unable to see more than a few yards because of the broken terrain and the eddying cloud. Fearing the worst for Jute and the other man with him, dreading the artillery that could start landing on them at any moment. Hearing the other observation points adjusting, pulling their security teams back. Hunt’s voice, terse words.

  “Slow down, sir.”

  Forcing himself to pause, dropping to a knee in the now-­familiar cut that would take them to the silent security position. Dirty goggles sweeping the looming hillside and the nearest boulders, all of it so close, so confining.

  “Jute. Jute. Do you hear me?” Waiting, then glancing momentarily in Hunt’s direction. “You know the name of the troop who was with him?”

  “One of the new guys, didn’t talk much. I dunno.”

  “Okay. They’re not much farther.” Just beginning to rise when Hunt’s hand seized him by the shoulder armor and pulled him backward, falling to a sitting position, the Scorpion banging against the rock with a loud crack.

  “Grenade!” Seeing Hunt’s small bomb flipping through the air, up, over the next turn, then scrambling across the ground on his buttocks to get behind the cover of the rocks. Fighting his way back up into a crouch, waiting, counting the seconds, then the grenade detonated. The dampers in his helmet snugging down, the gray cloud blossoming with the shock wave from the other side of the obstacle.

  Eyes unbelieving, seeing a gray figure rushing toward him. Amazed by the detail. Bald head, formfitting shirt, every inch covered in gray soot, the blackened blade of a fighting knife appearing and then disappearing as the figure hurtled toward them.

  And then the wraith was gone, thrown backward, its chest erupting and the Scorpion was at Mortas’s shoulder, jumping as he fired. The Sim smashed into the rocks, going limp, collapsing. Mortas feeling his mouth starting to open, shock and surprise at what he’d done, what he’d managed to do, then Hunt’s strangled scream from behind him and turning to see another one of them, all gray, a phantom, the knife already punching downward into the base of Hunt’s neck.

  Too close to swing the rifle around, the Sim pushing Hunt’s convulsing body toward him, Mortas’s hands letting go of the weapon and his bent legs throwing him forward. Gray skin, blue eyes, a roar of angry chirping, but then his hands were on the face, fingers spread, feeling the knife scoring his armor, legs pumping, then the weight shifted and he was driving the Sim backward.

  Slamming the head against the rock, the knife stinging his left arm just once, then gone, the body collapsing, but still he kept pounding, the sickening crack of the skull hitting the stone, and it was only the thought that there might be more of them that made him stop.

  Kneeling. Eyes flashing in all directions because he was alone, but always coming back to the ground in front of him. The three rocks that had sheltered Jute and the other Orphan so new to the unit that Mortas hadn’t learned his name. The artillery landing in the pass, so close its concussions slapped the air around him.

  Weapons, goggles, and ammunition all gone. Spirited away by the infiltrators, hidden so the humans couldn’t use them. Both men on their backs, throats torn out, trousers pulled down and groins a mass of red. The gray mist flowing all around, as if he had already followed the two dead men into the next world.

  Knowing he should get out of there, already having passed the warning about the infiltrators and the death of the platoon’s medic. Coming back up into the hunched-­over locomotion, bouncing forward with his eyes searching the fog. Squatting next to Jute, looking into the blank eyes, remembering the man’s all-­too-­accurate prediction.

  Excited voices on the radio. Third Battalion, farthest north, under sudden close attack by hordes of enemy infantry. Sharp, short explosions far on the other side of the pass. Grunted reports that the enemy was going right through Third’s thinly defended zone.

  Daederus, the ASSL, spoke to the platoon. “Okay, here it comes! Get the dragonflies up and keep on spittin’ ’em!”

  A rush surging through Mortas, a giant hand clenching inside his chest. They were coming. Lots of them.

  The brigade commander’s voice, loud but not shouting. “Latch onto ’em, Orphans! Bite down hard and do not let go!”

  The brigade-­wide message briefly left the channel open for a response, and Mortas heard dozens of male voices, young and old, from all over the ridge. Punctuated with explosions and rifle fire, the rattle of machine guns and the roar of the boomers.

  “Orphans! Orphans! Orphans!”

  Bent over on one knee, Jander Mortas gritted his teeth inside his filthy mask. He gently slapped Jute’s chest. “You were right, buddy. It’s a clusterfuck. But I’m gonna get ’em back for you.”

  He half stood, then hustled back the way he had come.

  The artillery was hitting Second and Third Battalions when Mortas got back to the edge. Ladaglia and Arrow had already reached the depression and were facing uphill, sacks of grenades at the ready. A glance toward the plain showed Daederus and Smashy, the ASSL on his chest at the edge while the boomer man waited just below, the big-­bored weapon loaded to fight the armor.

  Mortas switched the goggles to see the image presented by scores of dragonflies circling over the brigade. It was jumpy, flashing out of focus even inside the fog, and Mortas decided the small recon robots’ engines were being clogged by the dirt. As one fell out of the sky the others adjusted the imagery, quilting the picture together until they too plummeted to the ground.

  They presented an appalling sight. Long, thin clusters of glowing dots, all headed south. Briefly bunching up when they hit the northernmost passes, looking like ants that had encountered a stream, spreading out east and west to find a spot to cross. Explosions rippling the cloud, dashed lines appearing as the sensors picked up the heat from the machine gun rounds fired by the Orphans to the north. The Sim infantry was bypassing the positions in Second and Third Battalions’ areas, obviously bent on seizing the ground that faced the plain. First Battalion’s ground.

  Mortas spoke while moving. “Okay, you see ’em! Pull everybody back to the south and keep launching the ’flies! As soon as Sam crosses our lane, hit him with everything we have!”

  Berland’s voice took over, coordinating the machine guns, chonks, and boomers. His directions then shifted to a sequential launching of the dragonflies, which were being knocked out of the air in alarming numbers by the choking particles.

  Skidding to the ground in the depression, Mortas flipped open the top of his rucksack and reached all the way to the bottom. First he pulled out a small rol
l of dark cord, then he took out Cranther’s fighting knife. Drawing it from its sheath, he remembered the Banshee’s note that had been concealed inside the scabbard.

  Paranoia is healthy, Lieutenant. Nurture yours.

  Cutting two lengths of cord, he stuffed the roll back into the rucksack and quickly tied the sheath to his calf. He was sliding the long blade back into its home when he saw Arrow regarding him curiously.

  “You nailed the infiltrators, sir?”

  “Yeah.” A brief, involuntary shake of his head. “But I was too late. For Jute, for Hunt, for the new guy.”

  “Forget that shit, sir. Now we get to kill ’em.”

  They exchanged tight nods, then he was back on his stomach, between Daederus and Smashy. The artillery blasts to their north were getting closer, the Sim guns trying to sweep the human observers off the high ground before the armor came out into the open. The darkness out on the flat was somehow thicker, and so he flipped the goggles to see what the ASSL was seeing. The ground beneath them began to shake as the enemy high explosives came their way again.

  Dragonflies circled across the platoon’s front, stitching together a seamless picture of the plain. At first it was nothing but a gray smudge, but then he shifted the view as far out as he could and saw everything he didn’t want to see.

  Tiny red bugs were beetling forward, far down under the fog, coming in staggered rows. Two armored groups, debauching from the high ground to the south and to the east, beginning to spread out and move into assault formation. The dragonflies got a fix on the heat signatures, and began designating each dot with tiny crosshairs that also identified the target as a tank or an armored personnel carrier.

  The picture began to flicker, then to hiccup, and finally to fragment as enough of the circling aerobots choked to death and fell from the sky. He and Smashy both pulled fresh dragonflies from the sack at their feet, and across the front other Orphans spit the vital insects into life.

  The image was reduced to a small portion of the ground before the new eyes got into position, but then the picture expanded and came back into focus. Mortas noted the proximity of the lead vehicles to the mine belt, then switched the goggles back to standard vision.

  “And . . . found ’em!” Daederus shouted. Mortas, confused, flipped back to the aerial view but only saw the vehicles that he’d seen before. He switched to the fire-­control frequency and heard a voice from orbit.

  “—­tracked the flight of the rounds to point of origin. Rockets on the way.”

  Just behind them, an artillery round impacted. Stone chips flew through the air, one hitting him in the buttock. It felt like someone had just kicked him, hard, but when he reached back there was no blood. Another blast, then another, feeding his anger even as the concussion fluttered his uniform and the rock splinters rained down on him.

  “Here it comes! Check it out!” Daederus was beside himself, whooping and pointing at something invisible in the gloom. It didn’t stay invisible, however, as a tunnel of light suddenly raced down through the dust and dark to disappear behind the high ground to the west. A rock smacked the back of Mortas’s helmet, jolting him, but then he saw it for just a second. The outline of the ridge across from them, impossible to make out until the rockets from the orbiting ships exploded behind it. A volcanic spray of fire, a horizontal flash of light that silhouetted the distant promontory, then echoing booms. More tunnels boring down, then a succession of flashes, and the explosions grew to a syncopated rumbling.

  “Oh yes, baby! Yes!” Daederus was pounding his arm, sending a burning sensation from where the Sim knife had cut him, but Mortas was beyond caring. Another salvo of rockets from above, and he finally noticed that the Sim artillery had stopped landing.

  “That is fucking beautiful!” he hollered, unrestrained joy and utter gratitude blending together in a tidal wave of relief. Other voices joined his, curses, taunts, and thanks, then Berland came up.

  “Calm down! Calm down! Three-­sixty defense! Sam’s infantry has gotten through Second Battalion! Dragonflies and grenades! Dragonflies and grenades!”

  Mortas changed the view to see that most of the aerobots had died while the Orphans had been hugging the ground under the shelling. Reaching out, blind, grabbing several of the thin tubes and jamming them into the spaces behind his ammo pouches. Spitting one up into the air, now seeing the aerial view again, the enormous number of red bugs scuttling across the flat. Small, subdued bursts of light in front of the beetles, imagining the heavy cannon firing as the tanks charged, then realizing it was the mines detonating.

  Behind him, the platoon’s machine guns sputtered into life, then chattered a sustained roar. Chonks lofted grenades high over the brush, exploding among the dots of light that were the Sim infantrymen who had finally reached the platoon’s area. For the briefest of moments the wave of heat signatures hurtled forward, unstoppable and uncountable, then intersecting dashes of light found them. Dassa’s plan working almost perfectly, the dragonflies guiding the machine gunners as the deadly streams of heated slugs ate into the dots of light. Many of the dots seemed to freeze where they were and moved no more.

  The Sim infantry, their charge broken by the concentrated fire, split up into smaller groups and hunkered down in low ground or behind fingers of rock. It did them little good, because chonk grenades and machine gun rounds arched up and over the obstacles, the gunners adjusting the fire right onto them using the imagery from the dragonflies. The chattering of the automatic weapons and the blasts from the grenades joined in a thunderous roar, and Mortas turned back to the plain.

  He now remembered a class in Officer Basic where they’d discussed different Sim techniques for breaching minefields. Tanks pushing heavy rollers in front of them, vehicles blasting the ground with compressed air cannons, and machine guns raking the dirt to set off the deadly obstacles. What had the instructor said? They had to slow down for any of that to be effective, which meant they were easy prey for antiarmor rocketry.

  Daederus was calling in the mission, and Smashy was sighting in his boomer when the first Sim grenade went off several yards away. The dirt around them began to jump with incoming rifle fire, then all three of them were rolling in different directions, frantically trying to get off the incline that made them perfect targets.

  “They’re behind us! They’re behind us!”

  “Grenades! Throw grenades!”

  “Shoot the bastards!”

  “Orphan! Orphan! Orphan!”

  The cries came from all around the platoon’s zone, then the heavy banging of the machine guns started again. Explosions from grenades, and the chattering of rifles. Mortas had scrambled downward with the first shots, and came to a knee behind a boulder that almost completely covered him. Arming a grenade, peeking out, seeing motion uphill, Sim combat smocks and flanged helmets, what was left of their infantry, rushing from rock to rock in the dust cloud.

  Throwing the grenade at the movement, reaching down and getting another. Feeling a light slap on his right and realizing it was an enemy grenade that had gone off just out of range, the idiotic thought crossing his mind that the beating from the artillery was much worse than this. Throwing the grenade, then raising the Scorpion, his goggles telling him exactly where his shots would strike, sweeping the weapon back and forth to find a target.

  Flanged helmets popping up, just for a moment, sometimes to see and other times to heave a grenade. Using the rocks to their advantage, especially the covered route that Mortas had used only minutes before. The long row of boulders, ­coupled with the folds of the ground, offered protection to what might have been an entire Sim squad. Too close for the platoon’s machine guns and the chonks.

  He lowered the Scorpion as more grenades went off, human and Sim, and was arming one of his own when a heart-­stopping boom exploded directly behind him. Pushed off balance, scraping his cheek against the boulder, the goggles knocked out of pla
ce for a moment, but not before he saw what had happened.

  The rocket sailed past him, trailing smoke and blowing the dust aside in the mere seconds it took to go uphill. It slammed into the rock wall shielding the enemy, blasting an enormous hole and sending lethal fragments flying in all directions. He was already on the ground, frantically clawing at his goggles to get them back in position, looking back to see Smashy ducking behind more rocks, the wide barrel of the boomer still on his shoulder.

  Corporal Arrow appeared next to Smashy’s rock, another round in his hands, when Sim gunfire found him. Sparks flicked at his torso armor, then struck his exposed neck, blood and shocked surprise appearing on his face as he went down. Not deciding to do it and surprised to be in motion, Mortas rushed toward the body, snatching up the fallen round and diving behind cover next to Smashy.

  More grenade blasts, the tattoo of a human machine gun at one of the squad positions, voices shouting on the radio for a medic, Smashy yanking the round out of his hands and loading the launcher. Now coming into a squatting position with the boomer on his shoulder, duckwalking toward the opposite side of the rock, hopping out and firing almost at the same moment, veteran instincts, killer instincts, the launcher’s roar punching Mortas in the chest through his armor, then Smashy was propelled toward him, the boomer falling to the ground.

  Hands grabbing at his armor, Smashy’s filter mask gone, his mouth in a rictus of pain, then he was sagging away, exposing the torn uniform and the ripped flesh and the red that was everywhere from the enemy grenade that had killed him.

  Mortas lowered the body to the ground, suddenly aware that he might be the only one from their position still alive. Looking down, surprised to see he’d brought the Scorpion with him. Snatching it up and running back out, toward the enemy.