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

by Richards, Phillip

  I laid down on the red soil as we waited for the dropship to lift off. Despite the alien sun rapidly falling toward the horizon, it felt warm against the back of my legs, rapidly drying my wet body. My visor display read a temperature of seventeen centigrade, a high summer temperature for that part of the planet. As my body began to relax I became conscious of the water in my boots and the dried mud that caked my gloved hands. My arm was sore but hardly worth seeing a medic over, they had far more important things to deal with, I figured. My armour had returned to normal. The sleeve sagged around where the dart had penetrated despite the gel, exposing a deep gouge in my skin that had been sealed by a white substance, which was the clotting agent released from within the fabric of the armour. The rest of my combats were scratched and torn and speckled with blood, some my own, but mostly other people’s. Friends and foe alike, mixed together in one colour of red almost identical to that of the soil of New Earth.

  The dropship rose a metre above the ground, and then it was gone, throwing clouds of dust in the air as it shot over the edge of the hill and beyond. Like the rest of the company that perched on the high ground overlooking Jersey City, we were left to fend for ourselves once more. Even the gravtanks were elsewhere.

  Smart launchers were again trained to the sky, silently searching for more of the dreaded Chinese saucers. After the devastation they had brought down upon us, I would never underestimate the Chinese unmanned craft. The thought of them strafing along that ditch, sending limbs and gore into the air like confetti still sent a chill down my spine. That anybody could have survived it, let alone me, was nothing short of a miracle.

  ‘We’re just waiting here while engineers dig in a position for us to occupy,’ Westy announced on the intercom from where he knelt in the centre of our circular formation, ‘Sam, get forward to the sergeant major with a few blokes to sort out ammo.’

  ‘Yeah, roger, mate. I’ll take just one, mate.’

  There was a pause on the intercom. There were so few of us that if Sam took more than one trooper away there would only be half a section left. ‘Yeah, take one.’

  ‘Roger.’

  I heard footsteps behind me, and a boot tapped my ankle. I turned to look at Sam who had crouched over me.

  ‘Come with me, Moralee.’

  We ran across the high ground between several other sections before locating the company sergeant major and his work party huddled around a pile of ammo crates left behind by his dropship. Corporal Evans was there in front of the CSM, both of them were kneeling, holding a quiet discussion. I couldn’t tell what was being said as we approached, even with my headphones magnifying any non-background noises, but Corporal Evans was nodding a lot as he was being briefed. The sergeant major patted Corporal Evans on the shoulder gently, and then passed something to him. Corporal Evans cradled the object in his hand as the CSM stood, as if unsure of what to do with it.

  As we arrived by the pile of ammo I caught the CSMs last grim words to Corporal Evans before he turned and walked away, ‘Congratulations, Sergeant.’

  I realised that the object in his hand was a set of Velcro sergeant stripes, that of a platoon sergeant who had met his end, no doubt. They were dirty, but with the colour of the New Earth mud it could easily have been blood. He must have felt our stare, because he turned and looked directly at us, at me. I averted my gaze, unable to hold eye contact with the man I felt I had disappointed beyond words. I knew he was wondering why me and Brown had survived and not Joe Mac, or Rawson or any other one of his better troopers. Me, a snivelling excuse for a crow and Brown, an arse-licking bully. He must hate us both for it, I told myself.

  A nearby explosion broke the pause, causing us all to crouch and look. It was the engineers a few hundred metres away mounted on lightweight buggies, driving around ‘explosive digging’ a defensive position for us all to move into overlooking Jersey City and the valley on one side of the high ground and the vast expanse of rolling terrain out to the north.

  Corporal Evans looked down at the stripes in his glove and then back to us, ‘Close in, Sam.’

  We moved over to our new platoon sergeant as he changed his Velcro rank badge on his upper arm.

  ‘What’s your ammo state?’ he asked, tapping his wristpad. If he realised I was there he gave no sign of it.

  ‘Seventy-one mags, half a grand of mammoth.’

  Sergeant Evans tapped the screen as he entered the figures, ‘Forty mil?’

  ‘Erm...,’ Sam stared at his own wristpad and frowned as he deciphered the numbers, ‘Seventeen.’

  ‘You got both grenade launchers?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Sam patted the grenade launcher mounted beneath his rifle. Like Rawson and Chase, he had carried it as a mark of his growing seniority, although Sam was nowhere near as senior as they had been, ‘Westy has taken the other.’

  Sergeant Evans nodded, ‘Good. Mammoth?’

  ‘Only got the one. Got half a grand for it. The others in bits.’ The owner of it was too.

  ‘Grenades?’

  ‘Twenty-one.’

  ‘Smoke?’

  ‘Twenty-two.’

  Sergeant Evans looked down at the figures and seemed happy, ‘Good. See the piles of ammo over there, ours is on the right,’ he pointed and sure enough the ammunition had been divided by the CSM into platoon piles to be taken away.

  ‘Roger, how much have I got?’

  ‘Take two crates of darts, another grand for the mammoth and…..’ he paused as he checked his numbers, ‘Thirteen more forty-mil. Puts you on thirty. Happy?’

  ‘No dramas, Sergeant. Come on, Moralee.’

  I was sure Sergeant Evans was watching me as I followed Sam over to the ammo pile, where two other work parties from the two new sections were already busy collecting their share. I wished that he would speak to me, just even to acknowledge me. I wanted to tell him I was sorry for the men we lost and tell him of the guilt I felt for still being alive.

  ‘That’s gotta be pump, mate,’ one of the blokes commented to another, nodding his head in the direction of our new platoon sergeant, ‘He gets his whole section smashed, then he gets to fill a dead man’s boots.’

  I said nothing. We collected our ammo and left.

  #

  We ended up sat an underground bunker or ‘burrow’ the Chinese had probably used as a shelter from overhead bombardment. It wasn’t really a bunker, more a hole. A single long tunnel had been cut out of the rock, maybe twenty metres deep and angled so that we could crawl in and out and then a spherical cavern had then been made in which a section or two could take refuge. A second tunnel had lead from the cavern deeper into the hill, probably connecting with the Chinese warren. Engineers had ‘plugged’ it with explosives and placed vibration sensors to detect if the Chinese tried to tunnel back out. It was hard to imagine but there was a battle still raging beneath us that might spill to the surface at any moment. Sat in the middle of the cavern and angled up through the entrance was the smart launcher, assembled on its tripod ready to launch in the event of an attack from the air. Across the entrance we had placed thermal sheeting to conceal our thermal signature from above. If we fired the smart missile, it would take the sheet with it.

  The sky had become dark, and barely any light entered the chamber. Our respirator visors automatically set themselves to a mixture of thermal imaging and light intensifier so that we could see inside the man-made cave as clearly as we could by day, not that there was an awful lot to look at anyway.

  I huddled against the wall of the artificial cavern, close to Brown and the boys of my new section. Westy was away receiving orders, leaving the remaining five of us alone in the dark. We pressed our bodies against each other to share body heat, rather than freeze in the sub-zero night time temperatures. We couldn’t heat our food, or produce any unnatural heat of any kind, lest we give off a heat signature that would identify us to Chinese warships, despite our thermal sheeting.

  The Union navy were engaged in another great battle far abov
e us, word had got round that several of our warships had been destroyed. The threat of the Chinese securing control of orbit over Jersey Island and turning their guns down upon us was very real, and terrifying.

  Somewhere beneath us the 2nd and 4th Dropship battalions were clearing through more of the Chinese warrens, while we waited in a ring of steel around the smouldering city. We weren’t ready to take Jersey City yet, not without clearing out the warrens.

  Filaments within my armour worked hard to keep me warm without letting heat escape. They were failing miserably. I had wrapped a bandage around the gouge in my arm, and a further one over the top of the armour to try to keep the cold air out for what little help that did.

  ‘I’m freezing,’ Brown whispered. We were all shivering.

  ‘Yeah,’ I replied woodenly.

  ‘Must be what, minus ten?’

  I glanced at my visor display. ‘Three degrees above.’

  Brown tutted irritably, ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘Says it on your visor display, you’ve just got to…..’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, I remember,’ he interrupted sourly, ‘Nobody likes a smart-arse.’ I ignored the rebuke, knowing that Brown would be embarrassed for not knowing such a simple visor function.

  ‘How long have you been in Drops?’ Sam leant forward to look at Brown.

  Brown sighed, ‘Long enough.’

  ‘Shouldn’t you know how to use your respirator by now?’ He mocked.

  I realised that Sam hated Brown almost as much as I did for his connections with Woody, and relished the opportunity to attack Brown, ‘That’s not all of it,’ I piped up without thinking, ‘Ask him if it smells good in his respirator!’

  I couldn’t make out Brown’s face, but his voice conveyed menace, ‘Be careful, Moralee.’

  Ray sniggered, ‘You puked in your respirator, didn’t you?’ He laughed at Brown’s reluctant nod.

  ‘Ray, you can’t say nothing, you shat yourself!’ Sam added.

  ‘Nice one telling everyone, mate!’ Ray said sarcastically.

  I listened to Sam and Ray laugh and joke and share stories of each other’s exploits in the bottom of the cave as the smart launcher sat in wait. Sometimes we would stop and reflect on things that had happened. It was how we coped, I guess.

  I told the boys of Two section about our near annihilation at the hands of the Chinese. I left out hiding and various other acts of cowardice. Not the best way to introduce yourself to a new section, I thought, and I think Brown probably agreed because he said nothing.

  ‘Mate, that gravtank saved you, man!’ Ray exclaimed, ‘We couldn’t get to you. Should have seen how many pinkies there was, they almost had all of us. They was all moving toward us through the greenhouses, had us pinned. Westy wanted to come get you, but the boss said no.’

  ‘Did he?’ I was shocked; the boss had stopped Two section from attempting to rescue us.

  ‘Mate, I’m telling you, they were coming for us, man! They were gonna kill all of us, if we left that position, we’d be over run in a minute.’

  Sam mused, ‘I don’t know if he made the right choice, but I know I wouldn’t want to have to make that decision.’

  I remembered the boss’s face as he looked at the bodies strewn across the ditch, and then at Corporal Evans, ‘I couldn’t……. sorry.’

  ‘This is one messed up war,’ Brown said.

  We sat in silence for a few minutes, the only sound coming from the tiny motors in the launcher’s optics and distant gunfire from another battle far away, echoing across the valley.

  I thought about the battle being fought deep in the Chinese warrens and took small comfort in being far away from it, even though I knew that it wouldn’t be long before we would be called forward again.

  I then felt a pang of guilt return like a blade in my heart when I thought of Climo, dead in the mud of that ditch. If I had fought harder, fought better, then maybe he would have survived. How could I take more comfort in knowing that other troopers would again be dying instead of me?

  ‘Do you think we’re winning?’ Ray was the first to finally break the silence.

  ‘Westy said we’re winning,’ Sam said, as if that were enough, but a loud tut came from the other side of our huddle.

  ‘Well he’s probably not gonna tell you if we’re losing is he,’ Stevo said scornfully. I wasn’t surprised at his defeatist attitude, Stevo had practically decided the Chinese had won before we even left Uralis. I hated Stevo as much as I hated Brown, he too was a bully who sided with Woody. But at least Brown wasn’t afraid to do the dirty work himself. Stevo was a senior bod who liked to hide behind Woody for protection, but without him he wasn’t nearly as intimidating.

  ‘So, what you think we’re losing?’ Ray asked.

  ‘If them pinkies get those ships above us, we’re done. They smashed us off this crappy little rock once, what’s to stop them doing it again?’

  ‘Yeah, alright, Stevo, we get it,’ Sam snapped.

  ‘If them pinkies get those ships above us, we’re done!’ Ray mockingly exaggerated Stevo's words into a high pitch.

  Everyone laughed as Ray got up and made an impression of a child having a tantrum, stamping his feet, ‘I didn’t sign up for this, I want to go home!’ I was surprised that Ray had the nerve to mock a senior trooper, he had been pretty quiet on Challenger and I barely knew him. Now it was as if all of the fighting had caused him to come out of his shell.

  ‘I never said that, Ray made it up!’

  The joking wasn’t harmless, it was an attack on Stevo. Everybody had hated him on Challenger, but Woody was gone and half the platoon were dead or injured and so his position as senior trooper in the platoon didn’t count for anything. Just as Sam had said, I realised.

  ‘I’ll tell you what lads, we’re battering these bastards,’ Sam jumped in, ending Rays display, ‘They wanted a go at us, and now they’re gonna be sent home, crying like Stevo here.’

  ‘Screw you, Sam.’

  ‘Likewise. We proved it today in the farmlands, lads. It don’t matter how much funky kit you’ve got, in the end it all comes down to cold hard steel,’ Sam patted the blade of his bayonet, ‘They haven’t got the fight in them like we have.’ I wasn’t so sure of that, the Chinese looked like they had a lot of fight in them to me when they were closing in to kill the remainder of my section.

  We sat in silence for another few minutes, listening to our respirators click and whir as they worked to scrub the air for us to breathe. They would also extract heat from our exhaled breath, in order to minimise heat loss, which not only lead to us getting colder, but made us easier to spot from above. A warship looking in the right place at the right time could spot even the slightest source of heat.

  Westy slid down into the cave.

  ‘Alright boys?’ He asked his section, rubbing his hands together in mock enthusiasm.

  ‘Alright Westy, we’re fine,’ Sam replied, ‘Bit cold.’

  Corporal Weston crouched close to us in the dark, looking to check his section were all okay, ‘There’s nothing I can do about that, boys,’ he said softly in his thick Welsh accent, ‘We’re all cold, me as well. Soon as they get the all clear from orbit we can get some heat going and get some hot food down our faces.’ We never would get the all clear.

  ‘What’s going on, then?’ Sam asked what we all needed to know.

  ‘The pinkies are putting up a good fight. There’s at least a couple of battalions of them dug in across this area, hoping to go back onto the offensive if they regain top cover. Jersey Island is garrisoned with another two battalions, which we believe are also connected to the warren network. Combat in the warrens is going to continue through the night, and then into the best part of the day. There’s a possibility that a company may get grabbed to form battlefield replacements, but it’s just speculation right now.’

  ‘Battlefield replacements?’ Stevo snorted, ‘Everybody’s gonna be a battlefield replacement…,’

  Sam punched S
tevo full in the gut, and I gasped in surprise, ‘Shut up, you lizard!’

  Stevo rolled onto the floor gasping for breath.

  ‘Get that waste of oxygen sat back down,’ Westy growled. Sam hauled Stevo roughly back up against the wall, holding him by the arm. He wheezed, trying to speak. Sam had knocked the air out of his lungs despite his body armour.

  ‘I tell you what, Stevo,’ Westy stooped up close to Stevo, as Sam tilted the trooper’s head back by his helmet. Their visors touched. ‘You need to get a grip of yourself. I am sick of your constant whining. Frankly, I’m sick of you and your weak attitude. You’re not a senior trooper, I barely even class you as a human being. You gob off one more time, you cower in the face of the enemy, you do one more thing…,’ His silence said everything.

  ‘I’m sorry Westy, I’m sorry,’ Stevo squirmed in Sam’s grip. Tension amongst us all was high, but I hadn’t realised it had been that high.

  ‘You’re a waste of a respirator, Stevo and this is a war zone. It would be very unfortunate for you to lose it. But things happen out here, don’t they Stevo,’ Westy’s words filled with menace. I wondered what Stevo had done to make Westy hate him so much, clearly the original lads from Two section were hiding something. I remembered cowering at the bottom of the ditch when we first landed, then hiding behind my fallen comrades and the thought filled me with shame. Perhaps what Stevo had done was worse, but I doubted I would ever be told. I hoped Brown would never tell anyone about what we had done - or Sergeant Evans. Although my night vision couldn’t show it, I could imagine Westy’s face contorted into hateful rage.