C.R.O.W. (The Union Series)

by Richards, Phillip

  ‘Ship’s crew, continue under your own arrangements,’ he ushered the crew away, leaving only the troopers and the jacks behind.

  ‘Stand the men at ease, please, Sergeant Major,’ a dropship major walked into view, as elegantly dressed as the sergeant major, but with a glistening ceremonial sword sheaved at his side. He was the OC, the highest ranking drop trooper on board challenger. It was he who would lead the company on its drop to the surface and hopefully would lead us back again. He was stocky in appearance, with an almost apish gait that I wouldn’t normally expect of an officer. When he spoke he was clearly well educated, which sounded strange coming from a man who wouldn’t look out of place on the streets of Portsmouth. His name was Major McColl, and he was known for being a no-nonsense commander and a shrewd tactician.

  ‘You’ve heard enough from the captain,’ the OC said, smiling knowingly at us all, ‘I will speak with all of you in due course. I should like to speak with all three platoon commanders after this parade. The remainder are to prepare for jump. Let’s get this done,’ I wasn’t sure if the last sentence was referring to us preparing to jump to the rendezvous or the invasion of New Earth itself.

  We were brought to attention one last time whilst the officers left the hall, and then finally the company sergeant major ordered us back to our accommodation. Breakfast would have to wait, I guessed.

  #

  I could never hope to fully understand how Challenger worked. Strange ghostly noises echoed about the ship as we sat in our rooms, with the bulkheads sealed against decompression, locking us into our tiny room like a tomb. She was preparing to ‘jump’, her previously dormant space drive, powering up with immense surges of power generated by the fusion reactor deep within her core. Incomprehensible calculations were being created by the ship’s array of navigational computers before being checked laboriously by a dedicated team of navigators. System checks would be methodically carried out by the crew and all unoccupied sections would have their atmosphere pumped out to reduce the risk of a ‘blow out’ - a sudden and catastrophic decompression which could cause a chain reaction that would destroy the entire ship.

  I sat nervously on the end of my bed, ignoring Woody’s legs which swung obtrusively over the edge of the top bunk, most likely with the intent to wind me up. Brown and Climo looked equally on edge, and sat waiting anxiously for something to happen.

  ‘I hate this bit,’ Brown said to break the silence. It was rare for him to speak, I had noticed, he barely ever said much more than a single sentence, especially not to me.

  ‘Why?’ Woody asked from above me, ‘Nothing happens.’

  ‘I just don’t like it.’

  Nobody likes making a jump, but Woody was right, nothing ever did happen. Challenger’s space drive didn’t work within the confines of the rules that governed us and not even the slightest of G-forces would be felt, mainly because she wasn’t accelerating or decelerating as you or I might imagine. The only way I ever knew about a jump having been made was the announcement system telling me that it had. But it wasn’t what did happen that freaked us out, it was what could happen. Power overloads, incorrect calculations or faults within the space drive itself could all lead to the terror of decompression or God only knew what else.

  Alone in our thoughts and our fears, we waited in silence for the ship to jump; A Company was going to war.

  8: The Jump

  It was gone ten ship’s time when we finally made the jump to the rendezvous. We would arrive in deep space after a relatively ‘short’ two-day jump, we were told by the platoon commander, after our bulkheads were unsealed, and there we would marry up with the remainder of the fleet.

  ‘I know no more than you do at this stage,’ the boss said, as the platoon crowded anxiously outside their rooms to listen, ‘Anything I could say right now would be pure speculation and nothing more.’

  ‘Well, what are your speculations, Boss?’ Corporal Weston, one of the section commanders - who was a young, stocky looking Welshman - appeared irritated at the lack of information. The three corporals were huddled together in their own little group at the far end of the corridor with Corporal Evans in the middle. The ‘screw club’ as it was known amongst the lower ranks, was completely exclusive, and even the most senior lancejack was an outsider, however well he might be regarded.

  The platoon commander sighed resignedly, ‘At a guess, the OC believes that we will enter Alpha Centauri in a month’s time. For those of you who don’t know, the system is composed of three stars, two of which harbour nothing more than a few small rocky planetoids and a single gas giant. The first fleet is likely to be used to secure those outlying worlds with support from the marines, leaving the third fleet - us - to deal with Alpha Centauri Alpha and the capital planet. We are the senior unit in the fleet and likely to be one of the first to drop.’

  ‘You mean the least upgraded, and so the most expendable,’ the third Corporal, Corporal David retorted sourly. Jamo shot him an angry glance but said nothing.

  The platoon commander pursed his lips, ‘Right. Any other questions?’

  One of the more senior privates raised a hand, ‘Is it true, Sir, that the Chinese have a laser battery built on the surface that can shoot a ship out of the sky?’ A few troopers murmured their agreement to the story.

  ‘Shut up, Rawson, you moron!’ Jamo finally snapped, silencing the platoon.

  The boss, who appeared amused at the question, raised a hand calmly, ‘I can assure you that if lasers made an effective alternative to guided shells and missiles from atmosphere to orbit or vice versa, then Challenger would be equipped with them by now. Any other questions?’

  ‘That aren’t stupid,’ Jamo added angrily.

  ‘No? Good. I will pass on any further information as it comes. In the meantime we will begin training in preparation. We have the range booked after lunch. Sergeant James, carry on, please.’

  ‘Sir,’ the platoon sergeant stared blankly at the boss.

  ‘Right. I’ll be going, then,’ the boss took the hint and exited the accommodation toward his own quarters.

  ‘Here we go,’ Climo whispered under his breath.

  ‘Listen in, you bunch of cretins,’ the platoon sergeant’s face contorted with rage as he stalked amongst us, ‘First the Chinese will have giant lasers; next they’ll have nanites that eat you from the inside out and genetically enhanced bodies that heal gunshot wounds in seconds - rumours - just stupid rumours. If I catch you making up stupid rumours I will punch a hole through you, do you understand?’

  ‘Yes, Sergeant,’ we answered.

  He glanced across at Corporal David, ‘That goes for all of you,’ he said, and the corporal looked down. Corporal Evans said nothing, but looked back to the platoon sergeant as if he weren’t bothered by his withering glare. ‘Where is Greggerson?’

  Woody pointed toward the small trooper with a grin, ‘There, Sergeant.’

  Jamo walked toward Greggerson, his fists clenched, ‘Face or gut?’ He demanded.

  Greggerson blanched, ‘Sorry, Sergeant?’

  ‘Face or fucking gut?’

  Fear spread across Greggerson’s face as he realised what was meant, and he mustered courage to speak, ‘Gut, Serg…, oof!’ Jamo’s punch threw Greggerson to the wall with a thump. The hapless trooper crumpled as the platoon sergeant walked away.

  ‘Discipline! Discipline is what will keep us alive on New Earth! It’s gonna be ugly down there, and people are gonna die. Some of you lot…,’ He pointed around at us each in turn, ‘…Will die! It’s a fact of life. You need to have the discipline to respect rank and orders, to carry out drills correctly as you’re taught and not be idle! You need to stand in the face of the enemy and not run, because it’s the only way that we as a platoon stand a chance to survive. Stand still on parade, don’t spread rumours, respect your superiors or I swear I will make this journey even more miserable than it has to be. Do you understand me?’

  ‘Yes Sergeant.’

  �
�DO YOU UNDERSTAND ME???!!’ We all jumped.

  ‘YES, SERGEANT!’

  ‘Do one to your breakfast before I lose my temper, Ev - ensure they make it to the simulators straight after.’

  Corporal Evans nodded without a word and the platoon bundled out into the circumference corridor to grab their missed meal.

  I hesitated and went back to crouch beside Greggerson who still lay gasping on the floor whilst the accommodation emptied, ‘You okay, mate?’

  He wiped tears from his eyes, ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Not the luckiest two, you and me, eh?’ I chuckled sombrely.

  ‘No,’ Greggerson replied, finally sitting up with my help.

  ‘You alright?’ a familiar voice asked with concern. It was Climo.

  Greggerson stood up, ‘I’ll survive,’ he replied gravely.

  ‘Making some new friends, Climo?’ Woody sneered as he passed us. He laughed, and behind him Brown laughed too.

  ‘Get on after your boyfriend, Browner,’ Climo replied, loud enough only for Brown to hear.

  ‘I’ll be alright, Climo,’ Greggerson insisted, but Climo was already gone, the bulkhead to the circumference corridor closing behind him. I wondered if he was afraid to hang around us for too long.

  ‘This crow shit is really starting to wind me up,’ I said, and Greggerson nodded.

  ‘Do you ever feel like you’ve made a terrible mistake?’ he asked as he regained his composure, ‘Ever wished you stayed with the conscripts?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said with feeling, ‘All the time.’

  #

  The usually loud and boisterous queue for scoff was subdued into concerned murmuring that morning as the hundred or so members of the company began to openly discuss the impending operation, and New Earth was the hot topic around the tables, spiced up by the inevitable and sometimes downright outrageous rumours.

  ‘I heard it’s true about that laser battery,’ Climo said as he stabbed at his food with a plastic spoon. He had offered me and Greggerson a chair at his table, to the barely concealed surprise of the troopers already sat with him. What had prompted his decision to include us I didn’t know, perhaps it was guilt or empathy from seeing how we were being treated or perhaps he was simply making an effort to befriend a new addition to his section. Although battle loomed on the not too distant horizon, at least for that moment it felt good to be a little closer to being accepted.

  One of the troopers sat with us was a Southampton lad called Sam Wakefield, who rarely chose to acknowledge our presence, instead speaking only with Climo and the others. Now he blew a raspberry and rolled his eyes in mock disbelief, ‘And who did you hear that one from, mate? Stevo?’

  Climo’s hesitation to answer gave Sam the confirmation he needed.

  ‘Mate, don’t listen to that stroker, he’s the platoon gossip monger. Plus the bloke has less spine than a jellyfish,’ the comparison brokered a laugh about the table and I joined in, even though I didn’t really know Stevo.

  ‘Stuff like that ain’t gonna come from nowhere, is it?’ Climo said defensively.

  ‘Mate, that’s exactly where it’s come from; nowhere.’

  Rumours were rife in the dropship infantry, as I’m sure they were in any other front line unit. Rumours, religion and superstition were an everyday aspect to many trooper’s lives, perhaps because we lived so close to death, and whatever waited beyond.

  ‘Who’s Stevo?’ I asked.

  Climo jabbed a thumb towards the senior bods table, where the top boys talked loudly and laughed with the lancejacks, ‘See the bloke with the air brake ears?’ Stevo, I saw, was the lad who had asked me what I knew about our deployment when I had first visited the ablutions on Challenger, which kind of fitted his description as a gossiper. He did have rather large ears, with a chubby rounded face like Woody’s but he lacked the build of the larger senior trooper. Stevo was sat beside Woody, with Brown sat across from him.

  ‘Near enough all of the rumours on this ship come from Stevo,’ Climo said, ‘But nobody says a word, because he’s the platoon senior bod and Woody’s lapdog.’

  ‘He loves a bit of gossip, Stevo does,’ Sam agreed, ‘That’s why his ears are so big!’

  ‘He’s a tube,’ Climo said.

  ‘Go and tell him then,’ Sam challenged and Climo shrugged.

  I looked back to the senior table, where Chammy was working everyone into a frenzy of laughter with his jokes.

  I wondered aloud, ‘How long until you become senior?’

  Climo thought about it, ‘Dunno, just depends I guess.’

  Sam frowned, and for the first time he spoke directly to me and Greggerson, ‘You don’t want nothing at all to do with them clowns anyway,’ he said bitterly, ‘Bullies, kiss-arses and idiots who are just waiting for the Union to let them go. That’s all they are. Being a senior trooper should be all about ability but instead it’s just time served. It’s ridiculous that some of them have some sort of God-given right to tell us what to do. Trust me, that’ll all change in a month’s time…..’ He sounded ominous.

  Climo laughed, ‘Chill out, mate!’

  Sam shook his head, his rant was in full flow, ‘True though isn’t it? See them two there,’ he pointed discreetly at two uninteresting looking lads at the end of the senior table, ‘Mitch and Harmes - the platoon smart launcher crew. They make out they’re the masters at firing smart missiles. You just point and fire, point and fire - it’s not hard - the missiles themselves are smarter than those two.’

  ‘To be fair the missile is probably smarter than all of us,’ Climo pointed out, ‘You’ve got to be pretty stupid to do all this of your own free will.’

  ‘Speak for yourself,’ a tall Kentish lad whose name was Davo snapped irritably, ‘I’m not here coz I’m stupid, I’m here coz I wanna serve my country.’

  Woody and the senior table had finished their meal and passed us as they made their way to the waste chute.

  ‘Don’t forget to do the block jobs,’ Woody said, scowling at me as he went. He appeared to hate any sign of me settling in, as if it was too fast for his liking.

  ‘Yes, Sir,’ Davo hissed under his breath.

  ‘I hate that bloke.’ Climo said what everybody was thinking. It was the first time he had openly admitted his disliking of the senior private and I felt some warmth in knowing that it wasn’t just me.

  Since we were back on the subject of seniority, I decided to find out more about Woody, ‘Is he the most senior?’

  ‘Nah, that’s Stevo,’ Sam said, ‘But nobody takes Stevo seriously. If he wasn’t sucking up to Woody all the time he’d be nobody. They’re both on their last year, so they’ll be off next time we swing by Earth.’

  ‘If we do,’ Climo said, stressing the ‘If’.

  ‘Woody’s a meathead and a bully,’ Sam went on, ‘That’s about it. Nobody likes him. He likes to abuse the new blokes because they can’t defend themselves.’

  Without thinking my hand went to touch my bruised eye. It had been a day since Woody had assaulted me and still it hurt to touch the bone around the socket.

  Sam saw me and smiled, ‘Nasty piece of work, he is, with a wicked punch.’

  ‘I heard he got bullied when he first got to battalion, used to hide in the ablutions and cry,’ Climo said, ‘That’s why he’s like he is.’

  ‘I heard he bottled it on the Eden campaign.’

  ‘What happened?’ Greggerson asked. We had heard so little about Eden, it was a subject that nobody who had been there liked to discuss, but the less we heard of it the more we wanted to know. Eden, meant to be a great terraforming project that brought nations together in harmony, was a hell.

  ‘He tried to get himself out of dropping, didn’t he?’ Climo asked, closing up his horror box.

  Davo shrugged, ‘Something like that, I heard.’

  ‘He’s not as great as he makes out, is he.’ Sam said.

  ‘Is that why sergeant James is a bit funny with him?’ I asked, recalling the way his lips had curl
ed at the sight of Woody arriving late to our parade in the galley.

  Sam laughed, ‘Jamo? Jamo hates everyone.’

  ‘At least he’s consistent,’ Davo pointed out with a smile.

  ‘He definitely hates me,’ Greggerson made a show of touching his belly where Jamo had punched him.

  ‘Yeah he does hate you,’ Sam said, scrapping the legs of his chair as he stood, ‘Get used to it!’

  #

  Not more than half an hour after breakfast we were paraded back in the galley, which had been converted into a lecture hall with chairs laid out in neat rows to seat the entire company, plus the jacks, and with a hologram screen set up against the wall where the food was normally issued.

  We then received an endless series of lectures on New Earth from the ship’s intelligence officer - who was a lanky naval lieutenant with pasty white skin - the perfect stereotype of what we in the infantry knew as ‘spooks’.

  Some of the information he gave us was new to us, and some of it was old, but nevertheless we all sat and listened and watched images on the hologram intently, not wanting to miss a thing lest it cost us our lives.

  New Earth was the oldest colony ever to be established by mankind outside of the solar system, first stood upon some three hundred years ago. Like every other world that humanity would discover in its corporation driven spread into the stars, New Earth was dead, as it had always been for the several billions of years it had existed. To look at New Earth you might identify a close similarity with parts of Mars; jagged mountain ranges, gaping canyons and vast empty deserts scattered with rocks from ancient asteroid impacts. New Earth had a similar mass, temperature and composition to Earth itself, hence its name. It sported a large surface of water – eighty-percent we were told - and a weather system that included rain and even snow. Like Uralis, though, and many of the other major colonies, New Earth’s atmosphere was impossible to breathe unassisted, the deadly difference given away by her turquoise sky. Inhabitants wore respirators and lived underground, or in domes of glass or airtight buildings. We were used to such an environment anyway, so that made no difference to the way that we would operate.