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

by Richards, Phillip

  As I stared in dismay, my headphones registered the sound of darts passing over above the ditch, but otherwise there was a stunned silence. Then a single voice called across the intercom.

  ‘Get up! The pinkies are coming!’

  I looked around me for Brown, smoke had reduced my visibility to ten or so metres.

  ‘Brown,’ I called quietly. I hated him, but for that moment I desperately wanted to find him, he was all I had left of my section and for some reason that made him terribly important to me. I staggered to where he should have been, but he was gone.

  ‘Brown!’ I called on the intercom. I wondered if he thought to change channel to that of our new section, and so I shouted his name again so that he might hear me without the intercom.

  ‘Here they come!’ The voice warned again. My battle shocked mind struggled to identify the voice, it sounded familiar to me but I couldn’t put a finger on who it was.

  Something dragged me back into reality. I looked up over the ditch into the smoke and my visor flicked to infra-red. They really were coming.

  The Chinese were upon us, a brilliantly timed airstrike by several saucers had devastated our position, right in time for them to close for the kill. The company line was broken and soon the battalion would be in disarray. Its brief hold on New Earth soil would not be enough to secure a safe landing for 4th Battalion and the Union would potentially be unable to take Jersey.

  ‘Death before dishonour, boys! Death before dishonour!’ I recognised the voice. It was the company commander. The OC was speaking on the platoon nets, to all of us.

  I had survived my section’s last stand, but this time it was the entire company that stood at the brink of annihilation. A few tens of survivors with their rifles and bayonets were all that stood in the attacking enemy’s way.

  ‘For the Union!’ Somebody called.

  I raised my MSG-20 and crouched low in the ditch, checking that my bayonet was still correctly fitted. It was stained red with blood.

  My headphones amplified the sound of feet trampling close by in front of me as the enemy bore down upon us. Wherever Brown was now, he would have to wait. I set my rifle to automatic.

  I crouched with the survivors of B Company as the shadow of the Chinaman came over the top of the ditch. He emerged from the swirling smoke, breathing heavily as his boots pounded in the mud.

  He was ready to fight, his rifle raised to fire, but he was not ready for me to be crouched at his feet. He didn’t even see me as I struck, thrusting my rifle up at his torso. The bayonet penetrated his gel armour and into his flesh with almost no resistance, blood squirting through the blood channels.

  The Chinaman yelped in pain, but his inertia took him into me, sending us tumbling down into the wet mud at the bottom of the ditch as more of the enemy met the Union line.

  My bayonet was still inside him, and with an animal strength I threw him over me. He was squealing, almost like a pig.

  I was possessed with a rage that sent my body berserk. As the ditch erupted into battle, I stabbed at the man repeatedly until he was dead.

  Those of us who hadn’t died in the airstrike fought like demons as the Chinese charged through the smoke at the top of the ditch. We stabbed and we shot and we threw grenades over the bank in our desperate fight for survival.

  I was knocked to the ground by the hulking frame of a charging Chinaman as I picked myself up from my victim.

  He screamed a blood curdling battle cry as he raised his rifle to butt stroke me in the face. The giant Chinaman’s visor concealed his face, and only reflected back my own look of terror. But he was never able to bring his rifle close to me, because Brown emerged as if from nowhere and smashed his mammoth butt onto the Chinaman’s head with so much force his visor cracked.

  The Chinaman fell on me without a sound, knocking the air out from my lungs. I struggled from beneath him but his weight had me trapped to the ground. God, he was heavy, I could hardly breathe!

  ‘Get this stroker off me!’ I gasped.

  Brown fired a burst of darts into the melee, and then rolled the Chinaman away. If he wasn’t dead, he certainly wasn’t going to be getting up for a while, but I slung his weapon over the ditch just in case.

  ‘I know they said some Chinese soldiers could be big - but he takes the piss!’ I joked grimly, getting back to my feet.

  Two gravtanks passed over our ditch. The air hummed as they soared past us, their mighty rail guns firing into the parting smoke.

  The ditch was still ours, although at a terrible cost; the bodies of the dead and horrifically injured were plain for all to see.

  ‘What’s going on now, then?’

  Brown regarded me for a moment, as if deciding whether or not I was worth a response, then he stole a glance over the top of the ditch, ‘Looks like another company is attacking from the right, the pinkies are being smashed,’ he said flatly.

  Sure enough, with dropships and gravtanks in close support a company of troopers were sweeping through the remaining Chinese. The assault on their right flank must have halted their advance, and now with no sign of their saucers they were completely outgunned. As if to confirm the return of Union air superiority, two of our own robotic fighters streaked overhead.

  A cheer passed up and down our ditch as we watched the Chinese attempting to withdraw. Brown glanced skywards, grinned and pointed, ‘Here they come!’

  I turned my head to the heavens to see a shower of flaming objects breaking through the clouds and plummeting toward the ground several kilometres up the valley behind us. Flecks of light sparked around the objects. Surrounded by sprays of vulcan and escorted by an armada of robot fighters the 4th battalion was fighting its way through the sky toward the safety of the planet surface, the tiny sparks were the only indication of the distant battle. It would be less than five minutes before the fresh battalion would arrive to push through us and take the battle further up the hill and into the tunnels beneath it. We watched in awe at the spectacle.

  ‘Oi, you two!’ A welsh voice called from further up the ditch, bringing me back to the reality of the carnage around me. Corporal Weston tapped his helmet, the hand signal for ‘Come here’, and shouted ‘Hurry up!’

  We ran over to the section commander.

  ‘Brown and Moralee, yes?’ The stocky Welshman asked harshly. His visor display would have told him as much; but I didn’t think it the right time to point that out. ‘You’re Two section, now. Understand?’

  ‘Yes, corporal,’ I answered automatically.

  ‘Brown, get yourself and that gun back up on the bank and observe. Be aware there’s friendlies moving to our front, now, so don’t shoot unless you’re one hundred percent happy what you’re shooting at. Go,’ Brown was gone and Westy turned his attention to me, ‘Moralee, go find the 2ic and help him with the casualties.’

  I gulped. In amongst the smoking, cratered ditch there were many casualties and they weren’t pretty. The responsibility of having to deal with one and having his life potentially in my hands was almost as terrifying as facing the enemy himself. I became ever more aware of the screams and moans of the wounded.

  ‘You want me to find Chammy?’ I asked stupidly. I had been in the platoon long enough to know who the different 2ics were.

  ‘Yeah, Chammy. He can’t be far,’ Corporal Weston replied distantly. He was busy scanning the ditch, trying to take stock of what manpower he had at his disposal and what to do with it. I could only count thirty able bodied men along the full length of the bank and fewer moving about amongst the dead and wounded at the bottom of the ditch. There had been at least two platoons of us there originally, sixty men in total.

  ‘Where will I find him?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t know, do I?!’ The section commander snapped, ‘Look around you. It’s a fucking……’ He trailed off, lost for words. A fucking gruesome mess, that’s what it was.

  ‘I’ll find him, Corporal,’ I promised, and I went.

  I had searched for Chammy
, but I never found him. His locator wasn’t working, so I couldn’t find him using my visor. Instead I made my way back toward where I hoped Brown and Westy would be.

  A battle still thumped and rattled just over the brow of the hill whilst I walked as if in a dream amongst the dead and the wounded. A pair of medics worked frantically on a man who fought with them in the mud. He was trying to remove his respirator, making terrible rasping sounds with every laboured breath.

  ‘Calm down, mate, you’ll be alright,’ one of the medics hushed, while the other tried to restrain the casualty. He had a sucking chest wound, a round had passed through his chest armour and through one of his lungs, causing air to enter the cavity and preventing what was left of his lungs from being able to inflate. The medics would have to treat the wound with a chest seal, and they would have to be fast.

  ‘Come on, stay with us, you’ll be fine,’ the medic repeated, ‘Come on, Peters!’

  It was Peters, my friend from training. Horrified, I stooped over my friend to help him, ‘Not you too, Peters!’

  ‘Get away, mate,’ one of the medics warned, ‘We’ve got this, get back to your section. He’ll be fine. Go. Go now.’

  Backing away, I tripped over a dead man’s leg and crashed into the mud. I looked up and realised to my dismay who it was that I had tripped over - it was Sergeant James. His clouded visor hid his face from view, but the markings on his helmet confirmed it.

  ‘Christ!’ I exclaimed, staring in disbelief at the body of such an important platoon figure.

  A hand suddenly grasped me by the daysack and tugged me backwards and I yelped.

  ‘Where have you been, you idiot?’ I recognised the voice speaking to me, it was Sam.

  ‘Looking for Chammy,’ I replied quickly, ‘Westy told me to.’

  Sam released his grip on me and gestured toward a dropship that hovered nearby, ‘Hurry up and get over there, we’re out of here.’

  I made to go, then hesitated, the cries of the wounded and the shouting of panicked medics cutting through me. A man wailed as a medic yanked on a tourniquet to stem the flow of blood out of his amputated leg. ‘You found Chammy?’

  Sam’s face darkened, ‘Yeah. We found him.’

  The clouds were beginning to part as we prepared to load back into the drop ships, revealing a brilliant turquoise sky. I stared bleakly at its beauty as we waited for our dropship to touch down. The sun beamed through the breaks in the cloud, casting long shafts of golden light through the clearing smoke. It was almost a biblical moment, as if God himself was reaching down to show us the beauty of the land upon which we were fighting. But beneath that near perfect sky, wrecked craft still burned across the blackened hill in amongst wilted crops and smashed greenhouses, and muddy troopers carried the dead and wounded away and searched the ruined bodies of their comrades for ammunition and salvageable supplies. Hill Bravo would one day be recognised as a battle honour for the battalion, where a battered company of drop troopers were beaten but did not know it, and instead fought on against a Chinese onslaught. But I remember that battle for what it really was - butchery.

  Westy closed us together and counted us in, there were only six of us. I expected him to become irritated wondering where everyone was, but when he didn’t I realised that we were all that was left.

  ‘Is Greggerson okay?’ I asked Sam, suddenly remembering my friend. He was the only friend I had left.

  Sam nodded, ‘He’s one of the lucky ones,’ he said sadly. Greggerson would be somewhere in the medical chain by then, probably in a hastily constructed field hospital somewhere within our landing zone. I took small comfort knowing that one of my friends was okay, and then grew jealous when I realised that for him the war was probably over.

  ‘Somebody shoot me in the arm so I can get out of this hole,’ Stevo said, thinking the same as me out loud.

  ‘Shut up, Stevo,’ Westy snapped, and Stevo looked to the ground.

  ‘Westy,’ a voice called. It was Corporal Evans who emerged from the ditch, his arms soaked with blood, ‘Get your blokes loaded mate, me and the boss will ride together.’

  Westy nodded, ‘Roger,’ he said and waved our dropship down. It lowered itself until its ramp gently touched the ground, and we loaded ourselves into its tiny crew compartment, strapping ourselves back into our seats. I looked about me, at Brown and the other troopers in the section. Wide-eyed fear had been replaced by the troubled gaze of men who had seen and experienced the horrors of war. We were no longer the same inexperienced young drop troops who had loaded up on-board Challenger and her sister ships high up in New Earth orbit a few hours ago. We were already the survivors of one of the bloodiest battles fought during the New Earth landings, and we knew there would be more.

  The dropship lifted and threw our bodies against the straps as it accelerated toward our next objective.

  The remains of the battalion were moving to the recently seized peak of Hill Bravo, where we could look onto Jersey City as over watch, as well as providing protection while the 4th battalion began to clear deep into the Chinese warrens beneath us. We would be called upon again, there was no doubt of that, but the battle group needed time to re-group and re-organise itself whilst others took over the fight. The 4th battalion was fresh, and had suffered far fewer casualties on their drop than we had but the warrens were deep and everybody knew that fighting underground was brutal.

  I wondered if the rest of the Union invaders had succeeded in their landings, after all Jersey Island was only a small land mass not much bigger than England itself. Across the planet the many armies of the Union would be fighting their own battles. We could only hope that they had been more successful than us, or the fight for New Earth would last for much longer than the couple of days we had originally expected.

  ‘How many mags have you two got?’ Sam asked me and Brown, ‘I need an ammo state.’

  I paused to think how many magazines I had used. I knew that I must have changed magazines during the battle, several times, but it had been such a blur that I could not remember. A magazine change is a drill, it’s instinctive, plus I must have picked up tens of magazines off the dead. I checked my pouches and counted.

  ‘Twelve mags,’ I reported.

  ‘Five hundred for the mammoth,’ Brown added.

  ‘What else you got?’

  Sam nodded as we told him how many grenades we still carried, smoke, claymores and so on, making a note on his wristpad. It was smeared with blood, and Sam was clearly struggling to get to grips with using it, gingerly padding the screen with a gloved finger as the dropship threw us about. It would have been the wristpad of Two section’s 2ic, Chammy, with additional functions for commanders. Chammy had lost both his legs. The section senior trooper would then have to step up into his shoes, but in this case it happened to be Sam, and not Stevo. In theory a private was one dart away from becoming the section second in command, and only two away from becoming section commander. It wasn’t uncommon on the battlefield for that to happen.

  Sam looked to Westy, ‘We’ve got seventy-one total, plus a grand for the mammoth. Seventeen forty mil grenades, twenty-one grenades and twenty-two smoke.’

  ‘Okay,’ Westy nodded, ‘What about Jimmy’s ammo? Did you grab that?’

  ‘No,’ Sam answered.

  ‘Well, why not?’

  Sam bristled, and his response was curt, ‘Couldn’t find any on him.’

  ‘What do you mean “I couldn’t find any on him”?’

  Sam snapped, ‘I said I couldn’t find any, alright?’

  Westy stopped his enquiry, and his voice softened, ‘Alright, Sam. Alright.’

  Jimmy was Two section’s second MAM-G gunner; he had been with them all the way up to the Chinese counter-attack. Sam later admitted to me that they had found Jimmy before we loaded onto the dropship, but that they didn’t want to take his ammo. Nobody wanted to dig through the gory pulp that was once their good friend.

  In our tiny crew compartment, we sat in silence. Some
body in the far corner had begun to cry. The trooper’s sorrow made me think of Climo, Peters and the friends that I had lost. It caused my eyes to become wet, so I shook the thought away.

  Nobody ever did tell me the total of troopers we lost that day, and I never asked. I didn’t want to know the grisly truth in figures, even though the sight of dead friends and comrades would haunt me forever after. The company had barely enough survivors to man two downsized platoons, which would mean cannibalizing its third platoon in the process. Jamo had died along with half of his platoon sergeant’s party, killed by the Chinese saucer as me and Brown made our dash into battle. He didn’t die straight away, apparently his last words to the medics trying to save his life were ‘Go to hell,’ though that may have just been a myth because I never met that medic to confirm it. Our platoon sergeant’s death had left our platoon with so few men that we had ceased to be a platoon at all, and how its only section would be used I didn’t know.

  14: The Burrow

  Gravel crunched beneath our boots as we debussed from the dropship back onto the surface of New Earth and the rocky peak of Hill Bravo, far above the farmland and the carnage. This time, out of contact, we ran outward of the craft, forming into a circle around it in order to give ourselves all around protection from any possible attacks.

  As I took my position I was awed at the view from the top of the hill. Alpha Centauri Alpha was setting, casting long shadows across the farmland landscape below us, which was scorched black and littered with craters and wrecked vehicles. The valley, gouged deep into the rocky landscape by an ancient glacier, widened as it ran down toward the Emerald Sea where Jersey City smouldered. You could see why the Emerald Sea was so-called, in the clearing turquoise sky and setting sun it shimmered like it was made entirely of jewels. If I ignored the devastation wrought by man in the foreground, it was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. Away from the valley to the north the surface of New Earth rolled away in hills and jagged mountains, brilliantly red in striking contrast to the turquoise sky. Distant wind turbines turned lazily in the fresh breeze that blew across the mercilessly rugged landscape, occupied by occasional buildings and farmland. On the horizon, explosions marked the on-going orbital bombardment, which I could only assume - and hope - was from Union ships.