Columbus Day (Expeditionary Force Book 1)

by Craig Alanson

  While we waited, I had people police the area, after we triggered off the Zingers we needed to run back into the conduit immediately, and not waste time picking up things we'd dropped. Shit, I should have left the access hatch to the conduit open, not waste time spinning that big heavy wheel. Too late now, lesson learned.

  "Whales!" Wayne shouted, and waved his arms. Pope had the binoculars to his eyes, and waved one hand excitedly. Wayne held up a fist and two fingers, then palm open face up with two fingers. Two Whales, escorted by two Vultures. We couldn't hear them yet, they must have been approaching at high altitude. Then we could hear them.

  "This is it, people!" I shouted. "Do not fire until I give the order! We've got two Whales; people on this side target the first Whale, people on this side, you're with me on the second Whale. Stay under the roof for now." I was so keyed up that I forced myself to double check my Zinger's safety was on. As the screaming sound of Whale jets got louder, I shuffled close to the edge of the concrete pad. What did we know about Whales, I tried to recall? They were well protected for a dropship, with multiple defensive particle beam turrets. With fifteen of us ready to fire Zingers at only two targets, from close range, we had a good chance to get a hit. At low altitude and slow airspeed, I was hoping a stricken Whale wouldn't have time to recover before slamming into the mountainside, and crashing down the slope.

  I stuck my head out from under the roof to see where the Whales were. They were close, they would pass slightly to the east of us rather than directly overhead. Neither of them had their active stealth engaged. "Get ready," I ordered loudly and stepped out from under the roof, "arm seekers!"

  With the safety off, the targeting display lit up, I centered the crosshairs on the rear of the trailing Whale, on the rear portside jet. The jet was angled almost fully down, providing more lift than forward thrust, as the Whale was on final approach. The most vulnerable point of its flight profile. Low and slow.

  "Does everyone have a target acquired?" I shouted, then repeated the question. We needed to shoot soon, with fifteen of us standing in the open holding Zingers to our shoulders, we were sure to be spotted by the escorting pair of Vultures soon. Fourteen people acknowledged they had solid locks on target.

  "Ready, ready, shoot!" I toggled off my Zinger, and fourteen other missiles leapt from their launch tubes. The Zinger launched from the disposable tube with a magnetic pulse, so the backblast from the rocket wouldn't kill the user, the rocket didn't kick on until the missile was fifty meters away. Then the rocket motor kicked on, and I almost lost sight of the missiles as they went into super acceleration. It all happened so fast, I don't know how many of our Zingers were diverted, disabled or killed outright by the Whales' defenses. What I do know is both Whales staggered in the air, as front and rear portside jets on both Whales exploded and were torn off, other missiles ripped into the bellies of the two unlucky ships. The Whales have belly jets and the ability to hover on them alone, that feature didn't help them that day.

  I had a recurring nightmare of that moment, what I think, I hope, is a false memory; something I could not have seen, something that could not have happened, yet I have an incredibly vivid memory burned into my brain. The passenger/cargo compartment of a Whale does not have any windows, windows are weak points in the structure of an aircraft, and the structure of a Whale needs to go up and down to orbit hundreds, even thousands of times over its life. There are tiny windows in the side doors, for some reason there are a pair of small windows on both sides at the back near the ramp, and there are windows in the cockpit. The cockpit windows are like those of a commercial airliner on Earth, big enough for pilots to see out, not big enough for anyone to see much of the interior from outside. And the Whales must have been a half mile, maybe, from us, plus slightly above our position. Yet, I have a vivid, haunting memory of the Ruhar pilot of the second Whale, the one I'd fired at, turning to look at where the missile threat was coming from, and just as the first missile impacted and slewed the Whale's nose toward me, the pilot for a brief second looked directly at me. Not just at our position, not just at a group of human soldiers, not just at a particular human soldier.

  At me.

  Me, like he knew me, like he was asking why, since our species had grown on different planets, thousands of lightyears apart, and we'd lived completely different lives, why had our paths crossed like this? Had it come to pass that the only time in our entire lives we met, I fired an alien missile and ended his life? Why? He wasn't asking the universe, he wasn't asking karma or fate or whatever divine being he worshiped, he was asking me.

  That haunted me for a long time.

  Both Whales rolled on their sides after they lost their port jets, one of them briefly managed to get a semblance of control before they both plunged almost straight down into the mountain jungle slope, tumbling over and over, braking apart amid secondary explosions. What we should have done is retreat into the conduit immediately after triggering off our missiles, instead we stood watching, mouths agape or cheering, which is what happens when a thrown-together squad is led by an inexperienced sergeant. Wayne brought me back to focus when he and Pope sprinted across the road to us. "Time to go, Sergeant?" He asked, eyes wide.

  "Yes. Yes, go, Amaro, get that hatch open!" One of the Vultures had soared vertically high above us, the other had swung in a circle toward us and was looking for a target to kill. Looking for us. Without thinking, I unstrapped my second Zinger, glad now that I'd carried the extra thirty pounds, got a lock on the Vulture, and squeezed the trigger. The Vulture's defenses zapped my Zinger before it got close, I still accomplished my objective because the Vulture veered away and zoomed off at high speed, buying us precious time to get back into the conduit.

  It turned out that the efforts of our thrown-together squad weren't needed, that all the Ruhar aboard the two Whales we shot down had died for nothing. It wasn't even an hour later that a Kristang task force came back, and the Ruhar ships jumped back away, abandoning their forces on Paradise. By that time, I'd retreated my squad to the plasma generator, holing up in a place I figured the Ruhar wouldn't risk damaging. After the two Whales crashed and burned and the surviving Ruhar on the ground got over the initial shock, a pair of Vultures buzzed around like angry hornets, weapons pods exposed and occasionally strafing something on the ground with laser fire. They knew where we were, I could imagine the Vulture drivers shouting for clearance to blow my squad to hell, and being told not to risk damaging the vital Launcher machinery. I figured our best chance for survival was to take cover someplace defensible that the Ruhar couldn't blast with heavy weapons, and buy time. The plasma generator complex seemed a good bet. All we had left was rifle ammo, AT4s, a couple Zingers, some grenades and a sense that we'd done the best we could to avenge our dead. We found an auxiliary control room that was underground and it didn't have any windows, so we had to use cameras that the Ruhar oddly had forgotten to disable. From one camera, we had a view of the still steaming crater where the DFAC had been. I wondered whether the people in the DFAC had any idea of trouble before the railgun round vaporized them, had they known, a few seconds before impact, that Ruhar warships had jumped into orbit? I hoped not. Better, in this case, for the blissful ignorance of listening to a UNEF general drone on in a boring speech, daydreaming pleasant thoughts and not realizing you'd been killed until you woke up in the afterlife. No such luck for people at the airfield and motor pool, they'd had time to see the DFAC disappear and have debris raining down on them before smart missiles dropped clusters of submunitions on them and destroyed everything that could drive or fly. The Vulture gunships that had ignored us had strafed scattered survivors, while there was a lot of confusion, UNEF estimated six hundred seventy dead, of the roughly nine hundred humans stationed at Fort Arrow that day. That was a stark lesson in future combat; if you didn't control the high ground you were as good as dead, and the high ground in this case was orbit and above. Digging in didn't help much when a railgun round could penetrate up to three hu
ndred meters into the ground, if the launching ship seriously cranked up the muzzle velocity. The Ruhar had ships dedicated to orbital bombardment, the briefing packet I'd seen depicted a long, thin railgun barrel with fusion reactors at the far end and nothing much else to it. Who needed dirty nukes when a railgun dart could provide ten kilotons of hurt on a target, and ships could pump one dart after another until even the hardest target was a cloud of atoms?

  Considering the nature of future combat, what the fuck were humans even doing out here at all?

  Amaro noticed the change of situation first, she'd been monitoring a camera, and called for me when she saw that the pair of hamsters who had been watching our personal fusion reactor set down their weapons and stand up so they were in full view. We toggled the view from one camera to another, and the scene was repeated all over the base, hamsters laying down their weapons and walking away, toward the airfield. Vulture gunships coming in to land, crews getting out, leaving the doors open, and walking away. We barely had time to speculate what was going on before all our zPhones beeped at once. The cavalry had returned. Our allies the Kristang were back in command of space around Paradise, and the Ruhar forces on the ground had surrendered. For now, anyway.

  CHAPTER SEVEN COLONEL

  UNEF flew in a half dozen Buzzards a couple hours later, we’d spent the time searching for survivors and assisting the wounded. To my relief, we found an Army captain who took command, and I went back to following orders.

  Three days later, in the morning there was a violent thunderstorm while I was working on a clean-up crew, after the rain stopped and the sun came out to raise steaming clouds off the airfield tarmac, a private found me and said that I had orders to report to Major Perkins at the admin building. Major Perkins? What the hell was she doing here, she’d told me she’d been assigned to the Indian sector. My thought that this couldn’t be any good for me.

  "Sergeant Bishop reporting, ma'am." I was a bit out of breath from running up the stairs.

  Major Perkins looked at me a moment in surprise. "You couldn't have cleaned up? What have you been doing?"

  I glanced down at my soiled and sooty clothes, and my dirty hands with blackened fingernails. "I was told to get here on the double, ma'am. I was helping move, uh, debris off the runway." Debris that included shattered Buzzards with human remains still aboard.

  "Oh, hell, Bishop. I didn't intend for you to run all the way here, dammit. Sit down.” She looked as tired as I felt. “How you feeling?”

  “Numb, ma’am,” I answered honestly. “Like you told me, I was laying low here, on convoy duty, and then, blam, all hell breaks loose.” I shuddered involuntarily, thinking of the crater that was the DFAC. “Why the hell did they hit the DFAC? A couple minutes different that morning, and I would have been there.”

  Perkins looked out the window, which gave a good view of that crater. "The Ruhar commander of the attack here, we interrogated her, she says the strike on the DFAC, the main barracks and the admin building were deliberate, and they thought the DFAC and the barracks would be mostly empty in mid afternoon. If General Gupta hadn't been visiting, the DFAC would have been empty, and there's no way the Ruhar fleet could have known that before they jumped into orbit. She said it was bad luck the DFAC was packed with people, that they didn't want to cause casualties unless they needed to. I don't know whether to believe her or not, G2 will be the judge of that. Or the Kristang, we're handing her over to the Kristang tomorrow. That's why the Ruhar are so pissed about you shooting down those two Whales, they each had almost five hundred troops aboard, plus the crews. The Ruhar apparently didn't realize they'd killed half that many at the DFAC, it's a crater and they weren't taking time to examine it for remains. To the Ruhar, until we told them about casualties at the DFAC, your actions needlessly escalated the conflict here, at a time they were offering a cease fire."

  "It didn't look like that when their gunships were strafing every human in sight, ma'am." I said hotly.

  "Understood, Bishop, keep in mind our people here were shooting at them, so let's chalk it up to the fog of war. I have no problem with your actions, in fact, I put you in for a commendation. Our, uh, friends upstairs had a different idea. They want UNEF to promote you." She got a sour look on his face, like she didn't agree with the idea.

  "First sergeant? I've only been a sergeant for-"

  "Bishop, we're not making you a first sergeant." The look on her face was impossible to read; I assumed she meant the Kristang wanted to make me a first sergeant, but UNEF wasn't going to do it, because I wasn't ready. A sentiment I agreed with completely, I still wasn't sure about the sergeant thing. Maybe Division had sent Perkins here to soften the blow, because we'd worked together before. "The Kristang promote almost entirely based on success in battle, there are political considerations, and rivalries within the clans, but in their system promotions are done on the basis of combat success, which they define as killing the enemy. Between those two Whales, and the casualties on the ground when the ammo aboard exploded, your actions killed well over a thousand Ruhar. The Kristang are impressed. They're pissed that most human units didn't do much while the Ruhar were here, never mind there wasn't much we could do while we're dirtside and the Ruhar could pound the entire planet from orbit. You killed a whole lot of Ruhar, while most of UNEF, especially senior officers, didn't do a damned thing, according to the Kristang." Senior officers included Major Perkins, it wasn't tough to see how she felt about that. "The Kristang want us to, oh, hell, here."

  She took a small box out of a pocket, considered it distastefully, and abruptly snapped it open. Inside were a pair of silver insignia, an eagle clutching arrows and an olive branch in its claws, with the head of the eagle turned toward the arrows. The War Eagle insignia. The US Army hadn't issued those since WWII.

  Those eagles were the insignia of a full colonel in the Army, Air Force and Marines, or a captain in the Navy. "Wow, ma'am, they're bumping you up two grades?" I was impressed, Perkins was a major, and the rank above major was lieutenant colonel. As far as I knew, nobody went straight from major to being a full bird colonel.

  "No, Bishop, you dumbass." Perkins said with irritation. "You. They're for you. The Kristang want UNEF to make you a colonel."

  "Holy shit."

  "Yeah, holy shit is about right. Colonel is a rank below what the Kristang wanted, they expected UNEF to make you a general. A fucking general." She shook her head in disbelief. “Can you believe that shit?”

  “Ma’am, I can’t believe they’d make me a colonel, forget about general.”

  “Bishop, don’t let this go to your head. You’re a reasonably smart soldier, you’re flexible, you adapt to situations, and you’ve shown ability to take initiative on occasion. The fact is, you’re not any more smart or flexible or innovative than the Army expects of any soldier.”

  “Yes, ma’am”, I agreed, because it was true.

  "Anyway, you won’t be a general, we told them the role of generals in our armies is mostly administrative, that colonel is the highest rank directly involved in combat. True enough. They understood that, so they're satisfied with you being a colonel. That rank," he nudged the box with the silver eagles, "is high enough to show that UNEF values success in combat as much as the Kristang do. It's important to keep our allies happy."

  "Uh," I mumbled, mesmerized by those pretty silver eagles. Damn. Before the Ruhar attacked, all I wanted from my military service was to pay for college somewhere, and get out. Now there was a pair of silver eagles sitting in front of me. "I'm not good at writing letters and stuff."

  "Letters?"

  I broke my gaze away from the eagles to meet her eye. "You know, thank you, this is a great honor but I can't accept, the US Army doesn't work this way-"

  "Sergeant, I'm not getting through to you, so I'll break it down for you Barney style." She spat with exasperation and not even a hint of a smile, so I knew she wasn't using 'Barney' ironically. "This is the last time I can give you an order anyway, before yo
u outrank me. UNEF doesn't want you to politely refuse the promotion. We need you to accept eagerly, accept the promotion as your right for killing a lot of Ruhar. We need you to tell the Kristang that you're only sorry you couldn't have killed more hamsters. Be confident, be bold, be bloodthirsty. Be what the Kristang want humans to be, because garrison duty on Paradise may be a shit job, but it's the job we agreed to, and our allies are our only ride home. And our only source of food."

  "Holy shit." I repeated. I didn't know what to say.

  Me. A colonel.

  A fucking bird colonel.

  Me.

  "What am I going to do? As a colonel?" A colonel in the US Army could be commander or deputy commander of a brigade, that was thousands of troops. No way in hell was I qualified to do that.

  Major Perkins shrugged and avoided my eyes. "Damned if I know. UNEF will figure it out."

  Shit. It hit me. UNEF was going to use me as a publicity stunt, trot me out for the Kristang as an example of the ideal warrior human, while behind my back, all the humans would be laughing at me. I couldn't keep the disgust from showing on my face.

  "Bishop, UNEF needs this. You don't have to like it, you do have to do your duty." Major Perkins admonished.

  "Sure. I'll wear medals on my chest, talk to the troops and maybe sell some war bonds. Shit." A promotion was supposed to be a good thing. "Am I going to be the only puppet UNEF is promoting?"

  "No, there's a Chinese Army major they're promoting to lieutenant colonel. The Kristang were also pleased with the actions of a US Army captain, two Indians and one from the French. They all died in battle, so only the two of you are alive to receive the honor."

  "This Chinese guy, he's only getting bumped up one grade? Why?" Hell, I was going straight from the lowest type of sergeant you could be to a full colonel.

  "His unit defended a warehouse complex that used to belong to the Ruhar and UNEF is now using as a supply depot, apparently the Ruhar left something important behind when the Kristang took over, and they wanted back in there real bad. They couldn't risk damaging whatever is in the warehouses, so they landed troops and fought it out on the ground. This Major Chang was still in control of two warehouses when the Kristang fleet came back to chase the Ruhar away, but he lost eighty percent of his men. Including, rumor has it, the son of a high-ranking Chinese government official. That's why he's only getting one bump in grade. Look, Bishop, this will be what you make of it, you got that? You're a damned good sergeant, you did a good job with your EOT in Teskor, and no one is going to say you didn't earn some sort of a promotion by your actions here. This is good for humanity, we must have the Kristang thinking human troops are valuable."