No Marine Left Behind

by JR Handley

  No Marine Left Behind

  — A Sleeping Legion novelette —

  Copyright © J. R. Handley 2017

  Cover image by Ricky Ryan

  Developmental Editor: Corey D. Truax

  Copy Editor: Thomas Weaver

  Published by Human Legion Publications

  All Rights Reserved

  HumanLegion.com

  — Preface —

  No Marine Left Behind is a standalone novelette by JR Handley set in the worlds of the Human Legion and Sleeping Legion novels. There is no need to read either of those series to enjoy this gripping tale of Marines caught behind enemy lines, which plays to the strengths of the novelette format. For those not familiar with novelettes, they fit in the size scale above short stories yet smaller than novellas. They are short reads, perfect for lunchtimes, the daily commute, or an evening in, but allow for more depth and narrative length than short stories. When Sashala Kraevoi reaches the end of this novelette, you know at a visceral level that she’s had to battle hard against many obstacles, because the novelette length means you’ve battled with her all the way.

  Although you can enjoy this story independently or at any point in your journey through the worlds of the Human Legion, I know from the comments on humanlegion.com that some of our super-fans will want to know more detail on how this fits into the series. So here goes:

  From the point of view of The Sleeping Legion series, the events of No Marine Left Behind fit neatly between The Legion Awakes and Fortress Beta City. Its starting point, though, is the raid on Beta City that I published two years ago in Renegade Legion, the third Human Legion novel. For me, it is an honor and a privilege to see a great writer such as JR Handley take events and characters I sketched out in a handful of paragraphs and make them his own.

  But that’s for completists. All you need to do now is take a deep breath, make sure you won’t be disturbed, and get ready to turn the page.

  Tim C. Taylor – Human Legion Publications, March 2017

  — 2568AD —

  — No Marine Left Behind —

  In the air above Beta City

  The Stork shuttle zipped over the Serendine landscape while explosions and carbine fire erupted below. Marine Sashala Kraevoi clung to the cargo netting she was strapped to as the pilot banked and throttled the Stork so erratically that she worried it might rip in two. Sashala was impassive about the precarious nature of their mission, Phase Guinshrike, despite the intrinsic danger it presented.

  Unlike those around her, she didn’t complain about being an aerial distraction for their Hardit enemies below. The younger Marines voiced concern during the pre-mission briefings, but Sashala was from an earlier era, having been thawed during their time of need. These “moderns” didn’t understand: When orders come down, good Marines do what they are told.

  It had been less than a week since she was pulled from her icy slumber. The politics didn’t matter. If Marines were part of a “Human Resistance,” so be it. If this Human Resistance was to ally with the Human Legion, that was fine, too. She donned her armor, strapped on her knives, and reported for duty. Sashala was a weapon; she just needed a target.

  The only thing she hated was being stuck in the Stork. As an expert in hand-to-hand and bladed combat, Sashala thought it seemed a waste of her skills to be so far removed from the Hardit enemy. The hairy aliens looked like a cross between a monkey and wolf. The drenting beasts had allied with a rebel White Knight faction that managed to win. Their reward was control of Tranquility-4, and the humans on the planet became slaves.

  The Stork dropped its nose, and Sashala felt weightless. Then the pilot overcorrected, and the g-force made it feel like she might be crushed. Looking around, she knew the bigger Marines, Pak and Vanderman, were likely hurting more than she was. Because she was five-foot-four and all of one hundred thirty-five pounds, Marines often expected Sashala to be an easy mark during combat exercises. She used the misconception to her advantage. Speed and agility beat brawn in open combat, and these modern Marines didn’t know squat about how to use a blade.

  She was mentally planning on using those skills against the pilot, Dock, who seemed intent on killing them with his reckless maneuvering.

  “Ensign Dock,” said Sashala via her helmet comms, “what the frakk are you doing up there?”

  “Stow it, Marine!” Dock replied. “Just make sure your rigs are secure.”

  Pac and Vanderman chuckled through the comms at this exchange. They were both strapped into the black nylon gunner’s rigs running adjacent to the open cargo doors of the Stork. Their job was to scan the unfolding chaos below and create a little chaos of their own. All eyes needed to be in the sky because the Human Legion, of which Dock was a member, was sneaking an assault team into Beta City.

  Groaning, she started counting backwards to ten to keep what remained of her peace of mind. Sashala wanted to give the frakking Spacer some credit: Dock cared for his bird in much the same way a Marine viewed a carbine. Unfortunately, most Stork pilots would’ve taken their human cargo into consideration. Dock seemed to care only for the mission and his bird.

  Glancing around at the pristine white compartments dotted with wires, cords, and stored gear that she couldn’t name, Sashala noted Dock must have cared for his Stork greatly. Thinking of the Spacer’s dedication to his machine, Sashala could only admire this. Knowing that it was her ass in the sling with his piloting, she hoped that his love for his bird kept them alive.

  Dock’s sudden maneuvering caused her to blanch momentarily as she fought to keep the contents of her stomach down. Marines couldn’t throw up, since they didn’t have a vomit reflex, but that didn’t mean their stomachs were iron kettles. The feeling was worse than anything she could remember, even the hours of orbital re-entry they’d endured as novices and Cadets. Being rocketed out of the shoots of frakking Spacer transports into the void for orbital combat didn’t compare to what she was enduring as Dock’s passenger. Just when she thought she’d kept her lunch down, Dock tried to destroy her pride again.

  The sound of gagging echoed through the comms line and made Sashala burp. The gas came from the lower portion of her stomach and filled her helmet with the smell of coffee and protein bars. Vanderman was hunched over in his rig, cursing loudly and holding his stomach.

  “Does someone have a tummy ache?” Pak taunted his friend.

  “Shut up, Pak. Vanderman can’t help it that his mommy didn’t breast feed him. If you were suckled on a male cholba, you’d be a little touched, too,” Sashala told him while struggling to contain her mirth.

  Vanderman lurched to his feet and popped his helmet off with a hiss. When his head was free, he sucked in fresh air and coughed.

  “Get your helmet back on, Vanderman!” Sashala yelled. Keeping a helmet on your gourd was as basic as not leaving your rifle in the dirt. Sashala mentally wept for this new breed of Marines.

  Vanderman grabbed one of the fire extinguishers from its wall mounting and chucked it at Pak. It clanked as it hit the ceiling of their compartment, then began spraying the white foam everywhere. Most of it, Sashala noted with glee, covered Vanderman in a slippery and sticky mess.

  “Marine! You will refrain from destroying the inside of my Stork,” said Dock. The pilot had a camera that allowed him to observe what was happening in his cargo hold.

  Vanderman ate floorboards as Dock turned the Stork on its side. The only thing stopping him from flying to the back of the Stork and smashing into the back wall was the gunner’s rig tethering him near the bay opening. The last volley of missiles Pak had fired into Beta City to garner attention had achieved their purpose, and glowing anti-air rounds burned through the sky toward them.

  “Jade, give me targeting
directions,” said Sashala.

  Jade, her AI, didn’t respond. Instead, Sashala’s helmet reticle filled with targets. Jade used the lines of incoming tracers and small ordnance to calculate areas of origination. With this information plotted, Jade would then adjust fire to the movement of the Stork.

  When the targeting boxes turned from red to green, Sashala and Pak unleashed sabots and tube-fired grenades on the targets. When the targets fizzled out of their range, they both looked over to Vanderman, who was uselessly trying to stand, but kept slipping on the mess he had created with the fire extinguisher.

  “By Horden’s Arse, if you don’t get your helmet back on, I’m going to beat you senseless with it, Vanderman!” Sashala yelled back toward the flailing Marine.

  “Frakk!” Dock’s voice buzzed over the speakers in the Stork. “Hold on tight!”

  The concussive sound of rockets whistling out of the launcher tubes far below sat heavy in the air. Sashala and Pak scanned the area outside for where the deadly rockets came from, but they jumped backward as the bay doors slammed shut in front of them.

  “What’s going on, Dock?” said Sashala.

  “Hold on, just hold on! Some sort of missile defense just targeted us. I’m trying to evade.”

  Vanderman was tossed around on his tether as the Stork did barrel rolls. The second roll knocked him unconscious, and blood began streaming from his head.

  “Oh, shite! Vanderman!” Pak yelled.

  “We’ll get him in a moment,” said Sashala. “Stupid frakker shouldn’t have taken his helmet off.”

  A slurry of curse words worthy of a Marine training sergeant flowed from Dock. He had left the comms line open. Sashala judged he was a superior pilot, so this mistake on his part made her realize the severity of whatever issue he was trying to circumvent. Jade had linked into his pilot console and was giving Sashala a play-by-play. It appeared a cluster of missiles had locked onto the Stork, and a few were still trailing.

  Jade kept giving Sashala a running commentary and analysis of the events, so she knew when they went weightless that Dock had put his bird into a nose dive. This exposed the vulnerable underbelly of the Stork to the missiles. When the anti-air threat took the bait, Dock activated his Fermi Defense Field. The missiles, having their computer cores scrambled by the defensive electromagnetic field, struck the Stork but didn’t explode.

  Though the missiles didn’t detonate, the bay doors ripped open at the force of the missiles hitting the bulkhead. While they weren’t high enough to deal with sudden depressurization, the reverberations of the Stork being jarred snapped Vanderman’s tether. His unconscious body slid right between Sashala’s and Pak’s legs and partially out of the open bay door.

  Sashala lunged forward, trying desperately to pull him back into the bird. She grabbed the emergency dead-man’s handle built onto the back of his armor. This handle was normally used to pull wounded toward cover. She was almost torn out of the shuttle as she felt the harness she was strapped in pull taut. Pak added his strength to the mix. They tried desperately to hang onto Vanderman despite the jerking maneuvers of their pilot, but the slippery oil coating his armor ultimately won.

  Sashala and Pak watched Vanderman fall. He’d descended with his back toward the tree line. Sashala gasped when she saw Vanderman’s eyes flutter open, growing wide in a sudden panic. The birdlike flailing of his arms did little to slow his fall, and in his confused state, he didn’t think to use the maneuvering capabilities of his assault thrusters. The echo of his screams seemed to hang in the air. They were cut short by branches impacting his back.

  Jade linked into Vanderman’s armor and streamed biometric information to Sashala. The initial impact knocked him unconscious, though he was still alive. He continued to fall, bouncing off several more branches on the way down. The force of his impact sheared off some of the weaker limbs. The farther down he fell, the more solid the branches, and the worse his sensors said his health was.

  Vanderman’s fall had been horrific, catastrophic, as far as Sashala was concerned. Jade informed her that the trees, which littered the countryside around Sarpedona Island, may have saved him. While he would likely end up being a cripple, he could still be alive. A lack of signal from Vanderman’s ACE-2 Combat Suit wasn’t very reassuring, but they couldn’t just leave him without knowing.

  “Sash, I see frakking Hardits scurrying around. We have to land. We can still save him,” Pak screamed to be heard over the noise.

  Pak didn’t need to scream. He was wearing his helmet, which cancelled out noise, but Sashala recognized that his panic was concern for his friend. She hoped her calm demeanor would influence Pak, because hysteria kills more Marines on the battlefield than sabots. She offered a quick note of understanding in her voice as she acknowledged him.

  “Roger. Let me handle this, Pak,” she said.

  Knowing that Vanderman would die without medical attention, Sashala demanded that her shuttle pilot, Ensign Dock, perform an emergency landing. They’d already completed their primary mission, having distracted the enemies in and around Beta City, so she knew that they had the latitude to rescue their fallen Marine before finishing their secondary mission. When the ensign denied the request, saying the current danger to the Stork made this action inadvisable, Sashala became more forceful.

  “You will put this bird on the ground so we can rescue Vanderman, or I will give you a scar to remember this day by,” she said as she unhooked her harness and used her assault thrusters to get to the pilot station. Her speed, and the blasts of air coming from her armor, propelled her to the forward part of the Stork in seconds.

  The door to the pilot console was an airlock, but Jade overrode the controls, and it hissed open. Dock was still arguing pointlessly over the comms when Sashala leaned forward, slid one of her black combat knives to his crotch, and applied pressure.

  “I’ve never castrated a man before, but I’m told the process is simple enough. If I do it right, you won’t even bleed to death. Least that’s what I’ve heard. Care to test it out, or should we land, hmm?”

  While she spoke, she applied an ever-increasing pressure to her blade, knowing his thin Spacer flight suit offered little protection against the razor edge. Between her sudden appearance in the pilot station, the knife, and the threat, Dock appeared dismayed.

  There were a few moments of silence while Dock’s eyes scanned the area below. Sashala pressed a little harder, and his face lost all color. If he’d put on the helmet of his flight suit, she’d have missed it. While fiddling with the ridiculous scarf he insisted on wearing and visibly gulping, Dock grunted his agreement before replying.

  “No idiot, I mean Marine, left behind. I get it. Once I land, and you disembark, you’ll have fifteen minutes to get to the rendezvous location. I’ll circle around, and if you’re not there, I’m gone. Understood?”

  For all his tough words laced with bitterness, Dock’s voice held a slight wobble when he answered. Sashala withdrew her knife from his crotch, and the pilot let out a gasp of air.

  Dock brought the Stork into a steep nose dive before pulling up at the last minute. This caused Sashala to tumble backward out of the pilot console. Trying to regain her feet, she heard the door hiss shut again. The Stork banked, and Sashala continued to tumble, cursing her lack of harness. Before she could shout into the comms, the Stork lurched to its side, and she slid out the bay doors and fell.

  “That frakking Spacer piece of—”

  Sashala landed flat on her back after falling about twenty-five meters. The combat armor took the brunt of the hit. From her back, Sashala watched as Ensign Dock left her and Pak, who unclipped and landed on his feet, alone in enemy territory. Sashala was grateful for the chance to save her comrade, so she put the Spacer out of her mind and focused on the mission at hand.

  “Rendezvous point has been uploaded to your Aimee,” said Dock into her helmet speaker. “You got fifteen minutes before I submerge. After that, it could be hours before I get to you. Thank
s for flying Legion Air.”

  Sashala, perhaps threatening the pilot with castration was a poor choice, Jade chimed in her ear.

  “Frakk him,” said Sashala. “I’ll deal with him later.”

  She sat up and noted that her impact had created a small indentation in the dark brown soil of the island. The lack of direct sunlight created a gloomy atmosphere, and the decomposing leaves that lay everywhere around her only enhanced the feeling of foreboding.

  Struggling to regain her footing, Sashala was temporarily unsteady, but then the fog cleared from her mind. She began checking her gear while brushing the dirt and grit off her carbine. A lifetime of yelling sergeants had conditioned her to care for her weapon before worrying about herself. She could fight without a leg but not without her precious carbine.

  “Frakk me,” Sashala spit out as she realized that her SA-71 had jammed in the fall.

  Taking a knee, Sashala performed her basic corrective actions to restore functionality to her carbine. She worked quickly, her skill born from a lifetime of practice, but her attention was on the sounds around her. Her helmet prevented her from smelling anything, but her sight and hearing were amplified by her advanced combat armor.

  She processed everything around her, noting the sound of a trickling stream behind her, the movement of fleeing wildlife, and an unnatural stillness. She was being watched. Nothing on her sensors told her this, but she knew. She looked around, searching desperately through the shadows created by the leafy canopy above her, but couldn’t find it.

  While she scanned, she finalized her carbine repairs and performed a functions check. It was ready to roll, so she put her full attention to her scan of the wooded glen in which she'd landed. Even though it was the middle of the day, the dense woods and broad canopy cover limited her field of view and almost completely negated many of the enhancements her ACE-2 Combat Suit provided.