by JCH Rigby
The escort commander’s quick off the mark, and the carriers open fire in all directions. The carriers start to deploy, trying to pass the burning vehicle, the boggy ground defeats them and a couple get mired in. We leave them for later, and use Irwin’s heavy cannon and more missiles to take on the movers first. They aren’t going anywhere, but it all adds to the confusion, and we can kill the infantry more easily when they’re all cooped up together inside. Let them out, and they become a danger.
The Rangs are scurrying about, yapping and shrieking; a couple of them are crushed by a reversing carrier. Ragged fire comes toward our heat decoys from a few survivors in the platoon positions; they obviously haven’t realized how close to them we are, and the decoys draw their fire harmlessly.
The chaos is total. The undamaged vehicles are trapped, hemmed in by the burning wrecks at each end. Foliage and small branches cascade down everywhere as fire strips the trees. A snarl of rotors announces the return of the heli, surveillance drones whizzing around in search of something to engage. King smacks the heli down with a mini-SAM and the machine drops, blazing into the stream, blades still thrashing. Our own remotes take on the surveillance machines and fry them.
By now the surviving escorts are debussing, and Keegan tells us the troops from the rear are fighting their way up the column, under fire from her, Irwin, and Yu Ling. The Fundi infantry is disciplined enough to go after the assets rather than chase us through the trees. Shame.
I take on the forward elements with the remotely-fired guns, while beside me Kirov is busy stoking the mortar, high explosive rounds cracking into the air every few seconds. They rise to 100 meters and plummet back down, scattering bomblets that explode at face height.
<
It takes another seven minutes before the answering fire ceases. In front of me, six of the APCs are blazing, and two of the missile transporters are on fire as well. Both banks of the stream are littered with broken bodies, Rangs and Fundis alike. Keegan reports there’s nothing happening down her end.
I zoom in on the injured and the burning vehicles, and study them minutely. So much is ablaze the infrared picture is incomprehensible; spilled fuel from a ruptured tank has spread out across the road, and now it catches fire as well. In a few moments the undergrowth will be alight, so I flick back to visual range before Mahmoud and I cautiously stand up.
I’m straining for any warning sounds, but all I can make out is the crackle of the flames, and the moans of the wounded. Mahmoud and I dash forward, the others covering our move. I drop into a ditch alongside the trail while Mahmoud slithers right into the stream itself, submerging and reappearing on the opposite bank. He scans back and forth as I start to check the vehicles for signs of life.
A driver hangs from the hatch of the nearest carrier, chest ripped by a massive cavity, his entrails sliming the ceramic armor. A few meters away a Rang sprawls half in the ditch, shrieking and poking with its stubby fingers at the line of bullet wounds across its torso. The Fundi platoon commander has been flung against the side of a carrier, face charred and bloody; his hair is smoldering. Injured and dead lie all around me, but no sign of a threat anywhere.
A big convoy, well worth a hit. In addition to the carriers there are sixteen missile transporters in total, a fire control system, and four launchers. Force Intelligence was right for once, it seems, so all that remains is to destroy the detonation assemblies and the warhead re-entry guidance systems before the Fundis get some reinforcements back here. I give Mahmoud a call on datalink.
<
Barclay acknowledges and starts down toward us. I’m still scanning up and down the wrecked column, thinking about the extraction; we’re going to have to move fast through 200 kilometers of Fundi territory to reach the pick-up point. We’re all tired from the insertion, and I’m not convinced Command will give us much dreamtime before recommitting us.
Barclay and Mahmoud are talking, bent over her backpack and fiddling with the charges. Kirov and Irwin are packing away the heavy weapons, so I give cover while the other three are still loping up the trail toward us. I prowl up and down the column, watching as they start to place the charges on the warheads. The wounded are sobbing and whimpering, but we don’t have time to do anything much for them. I give the worst ones a shot from my morphia spray.
Motion catches my eye, and I turn back to see a figure rise behind Mahmoud and Barclay. It’s the platoon commander, and he’s barely living. Hair smoldering, face a scorched, bloody mess, he totters toward them, hands outstretched in supplication. I come up into the aim, but I’m going to have to move if I’m needed; Mahmoud and Barclay’s bodies are shielding him from me. I start to move, but the guy needs help, not shooting. Mahmoud steps toward him, pulling his own spray from his smock.
From nowhere comes a blast of sound, and Mahmoud is flung back into the ditch. We all take cover and I find myself flat against the side of a burning carrier, my back immediately uncomfortable from the heat. I’m looking for the threat. It’s not the officer; he’s on his knees, sobbing with the pain of his burns.
A mad, eerie shrieking fills the command net, and datalink is going crazy with meaningless codes and pictograms. I peer around the vehicle, in time to see Barclay firing burst after burst into another one of the wounded Fundis. His body jerks as the rounds hit, and he slumps back over the light cannon he’s fired.
We all close in, but Barclay won’t let us near Mahmoud. She’s standing over him protectively, minigun swinging back and forth. Eyes of steel challenging anyone to defy her. Keegan needs to power Mahmoud down for casevac, but Barclay won’t let her through, and we can all see he wouldn’t make it anyway; the cannon shells have near enough cut him in half. He lies in the ditch, writhing and howling till Kirov and I grab Barclay securing the minigun. Yu Ling rushes forward emptying the morphia spray into him.
Mahmoud settles immediately, both datalink and command net quiet down. Barclay’s face is rigid.
“Don’t power him down, you bastards. Keegan, let him alone!” She struggles to get away from us, then relaxes. “For God’s sake, Arden, he’s going to die. You tell her; she’ll listen to you. Leave the guy something; don’t just switch him off.”
IT TOOK MAHMOUD ANOTHER five minutes to die. Barclay sat and watched, face blank. Keegan kept pacing back and forth, worried about a counter-attack. The Fundis would have sent a contact report, and reinforcements would be on their way but she kept us on the go, preparing the demolitions. Fair enough; none of us wanted to leave the job half done, not now, but we were all feeling useless and desperate.
The end came quite suddenly. Mahmoud had been starting to moan again as the pain from his wounds overcame the morphia, he tried two or three times to speak. It must have been too much for him, because he gave up and cut in on datalink and command net together.
<
The signal faded to static.
Barclay flung her head back. A howl emanating from somewhere deep within her, rocking where she sat, wailing and gasping. Keegan crouched down in front of her, arms open to hug her. They pulled in tight to each other, but I could imagine the tension Keegan felt to get moving. Barclay pulled back putting a hand out to Kirov who handed over the minigun with a moment’s hesitation.
“What can I do for him?” Barclay demanded. “I can’t even fucking well cry, can I?”
PART VII
ORCHARD 2450
“A wise prince should establish himself on that which is in his own control and not in that of ot
hers.” – Niccolo Machiavelli
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Need to Know
Chambers took a bike, sitting back without even the slate in his hands, sipping tea as the machine carried him here and there, humming briskly along the broader highways, nosing around in small towns, peering curiously at new industrial units, swerving abruptly into side lanes whenever the whim took him. The bike was a neat little machine, and absolutely everything on it seemed to work unobtrusively well. Another conundrum.
Chambers had to admit, Orchard looked all the better for the money which had been spent on it, wherever the hell it had come from. The villages all looked clean and in good repair, as he’d thought on the day he went skimming stones. Bright new harvesters fed crops into chaser wagons; drills were sowing seeds in every other field he passed; neat orchards stretched geometric lines of trees away up the curve; stooping vines, heavy with tomatoes, were strung across vast greenhouses. Great spindly crop sprayers towered above many of the fields. The roads carried a lot of traffic – buses, taxis, light wagons, load haulers dragging cargo pods to the railheads, rent-a-bikes like his own. Orchard was busy doing business.
Chambers heard himself make a little noise of distress when he saw one of the load haulers crossing the rail track. New trains, all the road systems working, the roads themselves in good shape. New pods on the local trans lines, huge new processing sheds with expensive-looking handling equipment. New, new, new. The bike’s sound system fed him music and news stories that it thought might interest him. All the media channels were full of excited reports about contracts and job vacancies. It looked and felt like full employment, and that was something Chambers hadn’t expected to find on Orchard, whatever was going on elsewhere.
In the little town of Penty, around 100 kilometers from home, he told the bike to slow down as they passed the municipal sports fields. Above the stands, a screen was flashing with a sponsor’s logo which he didn’t recognize, boasting about opportunities in ship building. Ship building on Orchard! That was a new one on him.
Chambers asked the bike. It halted, and asked him to explain. Once it understood what he wanted, it flashed him a screen full of information, Chambers tapped a command and the bike filtered out all the commercial propaganda and gave it to him straight.
There was a hell of a lot more money slopping about than he’d realized. Something was seriously different about his home, but he couldn’t yet see if there was a connection between all this and the story that was building up inside him, desperate to be told. Was he imagining it?
It was time to look a little deeper, then. He’d sat still for long enough. If he stayed back in the apartment he’d learn nothing. He needed to know more, to talk to people, to get a feel for what was happening in his home. He had to find out more about this. He needed help.
###
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Glossary
Abgemacht: German, fair enough.
Air Space Troop: A specialist element of a special forces unit.
APC: Armored personnel carrier.
ARTOK – Anglo Russian Trading and Operations Conglomerate.
ARTOK Spetsnaz: Special forces unit of the ARTOK Company’s military forces
Autogun: Autonomous machine gun, capable of some limited movement.
Baba Yaga: Slavic mythology – a witch with iron teeth, who travels in a mortar and lives in a log cabin which moves around on a pair of dancing chicken legs.
Belters: Informal name for people from the Asteroid Belt.
Border Security Force: government militia of Dennison State.
Cheff: A gingery-tasting drink, originating on the planet of Parnassus, made from the fermented sap of an airborne plant known locally as arbent.
Clavius: One of the largest crater formations on the Moon.
Dennison State: A state on the fourth planet of Epsilon Indi (Epsilon Indi Four).
Downspin: The opposite of upspin – facing the direction of rotation.
Drollig: German, quaint.
Earth First: An armed organization fighting to prevent off-planet investment, in favor of development on Earth.
Earthie: A person from Earth.
English Air Force: Air detachment opposed to the New Settlements forces.
Enhanced / Enhancement: humans, usually soldiers, with physical and neurological upgrades providing significantly greater speed of movement and thought.
European Federation: Twenty-Second Century development of the European Community.
Feldjäger: German, military police.
Five Side: An informal expression for a habitat based at the fifth Lagrange point.
Five Siders: Informal name for people from the habitat at the fifth Lagrange point.
Flame ball: A flammable device similar to a smart grenade. Useful in bunker clearing and fighting in built-up areas.
Fogzone: A disabling weapon firing a gaseous mist which hardens on contact with objects.
Friendship City: A lunar city near Hevelius.
Frontera: A rival state on the fourth planet of Epsilon Indi.
G-Type Star: Yellow dwarf star, a category of main-sequence stars approximately the size of Earth’s sun.
Gallowglass: An armored troop-carrying military tilt-rotor aircraft, equipped with chin-mounted and underwing armament.
Grunzenfracht: German (slang), soldiers carried as cargo.
Hab: Another name for “habitat;” any constructed living or working unit, located in orbit or in deep space.
Herreninsel: An island in the Chiemsee.
Hevelius: A crater on the moon, diameter over 100 km (62 miles).
Hohenjager: German, an interceptor aircraft.
Hoplites: Autonomous armed flying military drone.
Humanity Pure: Armed wing of the Pure Bred People’s Party, also known as “Struggle Command.”
Indi: A colonized exoplanet.
L2 Heavy Zone: A high gravity area of a habitat based at the second Lagrange point.
Lagrange point: One of five locations in the Earth-Moon orbit, where the combined gravitational forces of the two large bodies create a stable position for habitats or space stations,
Lancer: A light armored military rotor-equipped aircraft, used by commanders and small specialist teams.
Leftside: The left wall of the habitat, when facing downspin.
Leszi: Slavic forest deity.
Little China: Informal expression describing the political status of new colonies, should China establish there first.
Luniks: Informal name for people from the Moon.
Mare Procellarum (or Oceanus Procellarum): A vast lunar mare on the western edge of the near side of the Moon.
Mass Driver: An electromagnetic catapult which uses a linear motor to accelerate and catapult payloads up to high speeds.
New Settlements Army: An European Federation-backed military force in the on the fourth planet of Epsilon Indi. Opposed to Dennison State.
NipponDeutsch AstraLift: A NipponDeutsch subsidiary operating faster than light starships.
NipponDeutsch corporate samurai: A special forces unit of the NipponDeutsch Company’s military forces.
NipponDeutsch: An Euro-Japanese company, ARTOK’s deadly rival. Closely aligned to the European Federation. Principal activity is the manufacture of spacecraft. Developer of the first faster-than-light spacecraft.
Orbitals Ministry: Luna government body managing the deployment of lunar satellites.
Orchard Habitat: The constructed ring-shaped habitat.
Out Systems: Exoplanet systems beyond the home solar system.
Overdrive or Neural Overdrive: A state of accelerat
ed mental and physical awareness and capability.
Over-watch: A force providing cover for a group carrying out another task.
Pietersberg: A mountain on the planet Harmony.
Polevik: Slavic, a rural supernatural creature.
ProEx: Pro Expansion, an activist group in favor of off-Earth expansion.
Psycho Drive or The Waldschmidt Drive: the NipponDeutsch FTL spacedrive.
Rang: A genetically modified orangutan capable of handling simple weapons.
Redbush tea, rooibos or bush tea: A herbal tea originating in Southern Africa.
Rheparion: A colonized exoplanet.
Rightside: The right wall of the habitat, when facing downspin.
Rusalka: Slavic, a female spirit or water nymph in Slavic mythology.
Sanctuary: A colonized exoplanet.
Scheisse: German, shit.
Schutzes: German (slang), soldier.
Schweinsbraten: Roast pork.
Second Chance: A colonized exoplanet.
Security Council: The United Nations Security Council, a function of the United Nations responsible for the maintenance of international peace and security.
Selbstladend gepäck: German (slang), soldiers carried as cargo.
Slowboat: Slower-than-light colony spacecraft with a flight time of decades.
Slows: Enhanced soldiers’ term for non-enhanced humans.
Smart grenade: Small thrown explosive device capable of limited dynamic control over its flight path.
Spidey or spider: A programmable drone used to carry webline (zipline) from a fixed point to a new location.
Spidey-gloves: Gloves equipped with controllable tendrils capable of locking onto minute surface irregularities.
Strewnfield: An area where meteorites from a single fall are dispersed.
Tangle net: A counter-insurgency and police device which is thrown or fired at suspects to entangle them in a tightening web of strands.
