Columbus Day (Expeditionary Force Book 1)

by Craig Alanson

  We drove quietly for a while, me scanning through reports, Parks and Olafson occasionally whispering to each other in the front. Our position as the third vehicle in the convoy meant we alternated between rolling the windows up to keep out the dust, and rolling them down to let out the heat. The morning had been cool, now the temperature was heating up rapidly as we drove across the flat farmland. Our destination was an area recently evacuated by the Ruhar, where we planned to strip the remains of their abandoned crops out of the ground, prepare the topsoil, and plant our own seeds. Recently evacuated, and grudgingly evacuated. The area had been the responsibility of the Indian Army; according to the reports I was reading, they'd had to physically remove hamster families from their homes, and there had been a firefight in which an Indian soldier died and two were seriously injured. The whole situation on Paradise was precarious; the Kristang still held the high ground, although with only one destroyer and a frigate upstairs. Ruhar were still evacuating offworld, often resisting, with increasing incidents of sabotage against UNEF. There was crowding at the elevator base station, UNEF had to set up a refugee camp there, and the logistics of keeping hamsters supplied and under control were driving UNEF HQ to distraction. Ruhar transport starships were still arriving at the top of the elevator to take their people away, arriving late, no longer on a regular schedule, and in fewer numbers, escorted by a thin screen of Kristang warships and loading frantically, hurriedly along by the Kristang who were wary of another Ruhar raid. On the ground, UNEF was more concerned about survival, specifically our food supply, than about getting every last hamster offworld. Hamster communities had gone from cooperative, to grudging, to active resistance and sabotage. The sabotage went beyond disabling trucks that were supposed to be used to evacuate hamsters from their villages; bridges were blown up, making it difficult or impossible to evacuate by land. UNEF began using barges, figuring no one could blow up a river, but river transport was slow and took a roundabout route, requiring more supplies for the longer journey. Flying hamsters around was an expensive option, and with increased flights, aircraft needed more down time for maintenance, which created a downward cycle of aircraft availability. The reports I read didn't have any good answers about what was the best way to continue the evac mission, other than that UNEF needed to keep the hamsters moving steadily along, as quickly as possible. The more land was cleared of hamsters, the more UNEF could concentrate forces and exert tighter control over the remaining Ruhar population.

  Equipment maintenance schedules and availability. That was something I'd never had to concern myself with before, now that I was an officer, a senior officer, I was supposed to know this shit. Know it, consider it, think about it, come up with solutions and implement them. Me.

  I wasn't only a publicity stunt, I was a real colonel in the US Army. With a real colonel's authority and responsibility. I needed to be a real colonel.

  "Park, Olafson, you've been stationed here long?"

  "Since we got here, sir." Olafson said.

  "Give me a sitrep."

  "A sitrep, sir?" Park asked from the driver's seat. I could see her eyes in the mirror.

  She knew what a sitrep was, so I made my request more clear. "What's been going on with the hamsters around here?"

  Olafson turned awkwardly in his seat, so he could look at me while we talked. "Not much, sir. Low-level stuff; some sabotage, dragging their feet on the evac schedule, but no real trouble, no violence. We used to get along pretty well with the natives, until, you, uh," he shot a glance at Park, "knocked their ships out of the sky, sir." He said that last with a look of such clear admiration that I was embarrassed.

  "I didn't do squat, Olafson. There was a team of soldiers who defended the Launcher. That wasn't the only hot spot around the planet that day."

  "Uh, no, sir. It was kind of quiet here that day, there's nothing much strategic 'round here worth fighting over. If we hadn't heard chatter about the raid on our zPhones, and seen action going on upstairs, it would have been a normal day for us."

  Park nodded from the driver's seat. "Straight up, sir. We got into full battle rattle and hunkered down that day, but nothing happened, then we got the all clear. This part of the planet is the back of beyond, really Bum Fuck Neptune. Now, up ahead, where we're going to plant potatoes or whatever, hamsters gave the Indian Army a boatload of trouble. No fire fights right here, nobody killed on either side, but the fucking hamsters," I could see her flinch in the mirror.

  "It's all right, Park, you're a soldier, damn it, you can talk like one."

  "Yes sir. The hamsters resisted every way they could. Equipment was sabotaged, so the Indians couldn't use anything here, all their gear had to be brought in from outside, or rebuilt. Water supplies were contaminated, the hamsters would move around so they'd screw with the evac schedule. It got so bad the Indians had to put the whole region on lockdown, house arrest, like, and when the buses pulled up to drive hamsters away, they wouldn't leave their houses. Sat down on the floor and had to be carried out, and loaded onto the buses. Slowed everything way behind schedule, the liz-, the Kristang wanted to vaporize a village from orbit, so the hamsters would get the message they couldn't mess with us beyond a certain point. UNEF figured if the Kristang had to step in, they'd see our mission here as a failure, so the Indians pulled in a British battalion as reinforcement-"

  "Ha! That was a kick in the ass, huh, sir?" Olafson grinned. "Brits under Indian command?"

  I nodded silently. UNEF stressed the importance of international cooperation, and officers were sternly instructed not to encourage, or allow, nationalist rivalries, but such orders had practical limits. "Goes to show, we're all humans down here." I said, in a lame attempt at following the spirit of the rules.

  "Uh huh," Park said, "between them, they got the place squared away on schedule, but that played hell with the schedule in the British sector, so now they're playing catch-up." The evac schedule accelerated as we approached E-Day, the day the last hamster would take a trip up the space elevator. As more and more of Paradise was cleared of Ruhar, we could concentrate our forces, and rush the hamsters along. The schedule at first had looked illogical, giving evac priority to some thinly-populated areas of the planet, and UNEF had speculated the Kristang wanted those areas cleared first so Kristang crops could be planted. But, the lizards made no move to prepare the abandoned farmland, and only sent down small teams of lizards to inspect the areas. A rumor went around that those areas were thought by the lizards to contain relics from the Elder ancient super civilization, relics which were the real prize worth fighting over for control of Paradise. Otherwise, the whole planet was generic farmland, of which there was plenty in the Orion Arm of the galaxy. Maybe. All that mattered to UNEF is the Kristang told us to get those areas cleared out first, so we did.

  "Coming up on Habitrail, sir, that's it straight ahead." Olafson pointed. The road crested a rise, ahead we could see a broad shallow river valley, with the road going over a bridge in front of us, and a fair-sized town spread out along the road beyond. Typical patches of farmland, some bare dirt from being freshly harvested, some tinted the golden yellow of the wheat equivalent the hamsters planted, and towering grain silos. The thin bright ribbon of railroad tracks went arrow-straight southeast to northwest, angling across our path, and in the distance were parked an electric locomotive and a dozen freight cars. The small train was stranded there; saboteurs had ripped up or undermined tracks, and blown up or weakened rail bridges across the region. UNEF's original plan had relied on railroads to transport large numbers of hamsters quickly. Trouble was, the hamsters figured that out right away, and every rail line on the planet had been rendered useless in a couple weeks.

  "Habitrail?" I laughed.

  Olafson grinned. He wasn't so awed or intimidated by me anymore. "The hamster name sounds like hah-bah-tahlin, so the first jokers here put up a sign 'Habitrail'. The hamster mayor here was pissed when he learned what a Habitrail is, back on Earth." Olafson wasn't sympathetic. "Sc
rew him."

  There was a muffled sound from my zPhone, something like “Planter, this is Stinger Lead.”

  “Planter here,” I responded, after I got my zPhone out from under the pile of body armor I’d buried it under. Planter was my current callsign, it had been designated by some joker in UNEF HQ, and my part time aide got pissed about it and tried to get it changed to something cooler sounding, but I liked it. Planter, if the hamsters were listening to our comms, and I had to assume they could, was a nice, friendly, non-aggressive callsign, which hopefully emphasized the peaceful nature of the missions I was assigned. We only planted on land the hamsters had already been evacuated from, our missions didn’t take any resources away from them, and we avoided contact with hamster populations whenever we could. Which wasn’t today, because our convoy had to drive through Habitrail, it lay on the only road to our destination. “Go ahead, Stinger Lead.” Stinger, my briefing packet for the mission said, was the callsign for the two-ship escort that would provide air support as we drove through Habitrail. A pair of fully-armed Chicken gunships were supposed to deter any hamsters from getting adventurous as we drove by. Me, if I saw a pair of our own gunships now being used against us, I’d be more likely angry than intimidated. Angry enough to act, if payback was certain? Probably not. Either way, it felt good to have a pair of gunships supporting us.

  “Planter, be advised my wingman has a power drop in one engine, and needs to RTB.” Without the voice coming from under a layer of body armor, I could now hear the pilot was female, with a Midwest American accent. I expected her to say ‘you betcha’.

  “Roger on the Return To Base, Stinger, can you cover us through checkpoint Mike Two?” That was the map designation of Habitrail.

  “Affirmative, Planter, I’ll cover you bridge to bridge, over.” She meant from the bridge on this side of Mike Two, to the bridge on the other side of town. Beyond the second bridge was open farmland, the potential danger spots where we might need air cover were the chokepoints of the two bridges, and the town itself.

  “Affirmative, Planter. I’ll make a low pass over the town to wake them up.”

  “Roger that, Stinger. Planter out.” UNEF had been debating whether it was more effective for convoys to arrive in towns unannounced, or for air cover to do a flyover first. The debate about the subject had been short, because a convoy driving on dirt roads across flat farmland could hardly expect to sneak up on anything, the plume of dust in a convoy’s wake stuck out like a sore thumb, visible for kilometers.

  The first bridge we drove over was an ugly concrete lump, built by the Kristang when they first occupied the planet. Two soldiers from the local security squad waved us on, they were stationed at the bridge to assure nobody had messed with it since it was last inspected. That was the situation we faced; anything the hamsters could sabotage, they would. Take your eye away for a couple hours and a bridge would be blown up or weakened in some way to render it useless, a river barge would sink, communications towers would fall, unattended vehicles had their engines fried. To my surprise, we got through the town without any incident, not even a hot-headed hamster kid throwing a rock, or clod of mud, or lump of manure at us. Usually we could count on that now, it happened so often, and both sides were so used to it, that kids felt emboldened because they'd learned from experience that our soldiers had orders not to shoot at children. Unless they were shooting at us, which so far hadn't happened that I knew of.

  The town was more rundown than such places used to be, I guess before the attempt to recapture the planet, the local hamsters were hoping their fleet would chase the Kristang away, and everything would go back to normal. Normal, except for a large force of pesky humans in residence. After the raid failed, the hamsters saw that they had lost the planet for real, that they were being forced to leave and weren't coming back, and they were no longer interested in maintaining in good order anything that would be left behind for the Kristang to use. Instead, they were resentful, which I could understand, and clearly planned to trash the place a bit before the evac was over. Major infrastructure like the Launcher and the space elevator and fusion reactors were off limits, under the strange rules of engagement that seemed to be in force by both sides. After all, blowing up the Launcher would be an admission the Ruhar were never even going to try retaking Paradise, and that couldn't be good for hamster morale.

  We were through the populated area of town, and approaching the western bridge, in what felt like a few minutes. I'd been keyed up for something to happen, the body language of Park and Olafson told me they'd been ready for trouble too, but it was all quiet. The western bridge was an elegant, delicate looking structure, much longer than the eastern bridge. It was built by the Ruhar, but on the piers of an earlier Kristang bridge. I felt exposed driving across it, and we all exhaled when we went feet dry on the other side. Sticking my head out the window, I looked back at our convoy, until the last truck cleared the bridge. According to the map, and what I could see, there was nothing but fairly flat farmland for kilometers in all directions.

  "Planter, this is Stinger."

  "Thanks for the escort, Stinger, you're clear to RTB."

  "Roger that, Planter, you have fun now, grow us some tasty food. Stinger out." She flew the Chicken over us in a wide circle, then retracted the weapons pods, powered up and climbed to the east. Watching it go, I thought that our pilots, who got to fly cool advanced aircraft on Paradise, must be loving this mission. While the rest of us got M4s. It didn't seem fair. Why couldn't us ground pounders use captured Ruhar rifles, the way our Airedales flew captured Ruhar aircraft? I settled back in my seat.

  "Sir?" Olafson's voice broke my reverie. "You met Kristang, right? We heard you went up to their station when you got the promotion."

  A grimace flashed across my face before I put on what I hoped was a neutral expression. Olafson caught it, because his eyebrows went up. "There was a ceremony at the station, yes. I, uh," scrambled to cover my mistake, "my stomach didn't do well with the food they served." True enough, though what made me sick was what the Kristang had said, and that I'd had to swallow my pride and keep my mouth shut.

  "What're they like. sir? If you don't mind me asking. I've never seen one for real." He must have sensed my discomfort that the question. "Forget I asked, sir, that stuff is above my paygrade-"

  I never saw anything coming. A soldier in the second to last truck says he saw a streak just before the impact, I think that was his imagination. It could have been a railgun, or some kind of silent artillery, or a truly smokeless rocket that left no exhaust plume. Whatever it was, one of them hit the cargo trailers of each truck, destroying the precious soil conditioner and seeds, all irreplaceable items. The warhead was something new, also, it generated more heat than blast effect, likely calculated to burn out our seeds and the microorganisms in the soil conditioner. Scattered seeds we could have picked up, burned seeds were no good for anything.

  It was the seeds they were after, to deny humanity the ability to sustain ourselves on Paradise, to force the Kristang to expend scarce resources for bringing in more seeds, or bringing their pet humans back home to Earth. No one in any of the trucks was killed by enemy fire, our only death was one soldier in the front seat of the hamvee behind the last truck; their vehicle slammed into the suddenly stopped truck trailer, injuring the driver when her head hit the steering wheel. The soldier in the passenger seat took a piece of metal debris through his skull, killing him instantly. I don't think the hamsters intended to kill anyone, which was scant comfort to the dead and wounded.

  We were out of our vehicles fast, taking cover, looking for hostiles and helping the wounded. We never found out what type of weapon hit us, because Stinger reacted immediately and sent a pair of high-velocity missiles to hit the spot the attack was launched from. Those explosions sent us scrambling for cover again, then Stinger screamed overhead, weapons pods extended and ready for trouble.

  "Planter, Stinger here, no hostiles in view, over."

 
"Roger, Stinger," I replied, slinging my M4 over my shoulder, "the attack was probably triggered remotely."

  "And guided." Park added, scanning the horizon with the scope on her rifle. "Somebody targeted our trailers and nothing else."

  She had a good point. There was either an observer concealed somewhere, or the weapons had cameras. Even super-advanced alien smart weapons need to be told what to hit. I was about to uselessly tell Stinger to be on the lookout for an observer, which she was already doing, when an alert popped up on my zPhone. The attack on our convoy hadn't been the only incident, nearly simultaneous attacks had been launched across the continent. I called my CO and gave him a quick sitrep, he cut me off halfway through my report as we were fine for the moment, and other units were not. From the noise in the background, all hell had broken loose at HQ.

  A text message from the local airbase told me a medevac Buzzard was on its way, they wanted me to confirm the landing zone was secure. Shit, it had looked secure to me the second before we got hit, and it looked secure now. The place was peaceful farmland, if you ignored the plumes of black smoke rising from our burned-out trailers, and the Chicken orbiting the area with weapons pods hot, looking for trouble and hoping to find it. Other than that, the LZ was secure. I reported in the affirmative, and ordered people to spread out, far enough we weren't a single target, close enough that we could support each other in a fight. The Buzzard arrived and flew out five wounded, the rest of us got our hamvees turned around, so we could head back toward Habitrail. Stinger was still flying high cover, she didn't buzz the town this time, and reported she could see hamsters assembling in the playing field of a school. Those hamsters didn't have weapons visible, there were no more than a dozen of them. Even if hamsters in Habitrail weren't involved in the attack, they must have known something happened, our trailers were still burning and sending black smoke high in the sky.