Assault Troopers

by Vaughn Heppner

  The results of the risky maneuver and our earlier wins came through the next day. Rollo, Dmitri and I lifted in a small gym. We sweated, grunted and listened to the clangs and rattles of the heavy weights. We were as strong as gorillas and fast as mongooses, those amazing little animals that hunt cobras for their meals.

  I remember reading once about a well-behaved gorilla. Trainers had attempted to get the creature to bench press five hundred pounds. The gorilla had lain down on the bench and actually gripped the bar. Then something had upset the beast, and it had easily tossed away the five hundred pounds, hurling the bar and weights more than ten feet. As a kid, I used to wonder how a gorilla would do suited up as an NFL running back. Imagine handing off the ball to a creature that could toss five hundred pounds no problem. Tacklers would bounce off him. Well, we didn’t toss around five hundred pounds, although each of us could bench that much and more. The strongest men on Earth used to do likewise. We were faster than the fastest NFL running back or receiver and stronger than any lineman. We weren’t inhuman yet, but given enough hormone treatments, steroids and surgically implanted neuro-fibers we sure might be in time. Add in the bio-suits…

  The door opened and N7 looked in. The android wore his customary attire.

  I sat on a bench, my pectorals burning nicely from a good set.

  Rollo racked a curl bar so the metal holder shook, which rattled other bars. He used a towel to wipe the sweat from his forehead.

  “Is there a problem?” I asked.

  N7 didn’t answer. He walked into the gym room, added weights to a curl bar, making it twice as heavy as Rollo’s bar. Then the android proceeded to do ten easy reps.

  Rollo and I exchanged glances.

  “Do you want us to clap?” I asked.

  “There is no need,” N7 said, as he racked the bar.

  “Or was the little show to tell us that you just received a new upgrade?” I asked.

  “Shah Claath has given me greater strength,” N7 said. “He has given all his android pilots greater strength. I believe it was a precautionary measure.”

  “Against us?” I asked.

  “Precisely,” N7 said. “The little show, as you called it, was a warning to you. We will no longer allow ourselves to be terminated…by anyone.”

  “Does that include Claath?” I asked.

  “Do not be absurd,” N7 said. “Shah Claath is like unto a god to us. We are his servants to do with as he pleases. He gives and takes away at his whim, as it is his right to do.”

  I noticed the android didn’t say, “No.” But I decided I didn’t need to point that out.

  “You are to come with me,” N7 said.

  “Anywhere in particular?” I asked.

  “You have been selected for higher command.”

  I hid my grin and nodded solemnly. “Do you mind if I shower first?”

  “You are to come immediately,” N7 said. “I hope I do not need to become physical with you.”

  “You know what, N7,” I said. “I bet you were given orders to come and get me some time ago. But you’re still stinging from the other day. So you timed this so I’d have to come before I could shower.”

  “You have quaint notions,” the android said.

  “And you have emotions,” I said.

  “Negative.”

  “Sure, whatever you say. I’m ready.”

  We didn’t go to the small screening room. Instead, I was taken to the Jelk version of OCS: Officer Cadet School for Earthers.

  Claath must have patterned our small army on a Lokhar legion. In this system five maniples made up a century commanded by a centurion. Five times twenty equaled one hundred space-assault troopers. Five centuries composed a cohort of five hundred, commanded by an overman. Five cohorts made a legion of twenty-five hundred troopers, commanded by an assault leader. And that was the highest command slot for one of us. At the moment, Claath had four legions worth of Earthers, ten thousand assault troopers out of an original twenty-three thousand. The rest had died in the Altair system.

  From the conversation with Claath the other day, I expected to become a centurion. Instead, I found myself an overman, in charge of an entire cohort of five hundred soldiers or five centuries composed of twenty-five maniples.

  Jelk OCS proved a lot different from the initial physical training back in the solar system. For a week, the teaching androids crammed us with theories and procedures. I read, listened and parroted back their theorems. I took verbal and written tests, and later found myself wired to a machine that administered punishment shocks for wrong answers. The androids attached learning devices to us as we slept and I woke up red-eyed, groggy and with a nasty migraine. That meant drugs, and due to them my mind raced every waking moment. I felt as if Hannibal Barca, Napoleon Bonaparte and Robert E. Lee drew diagrams before my eyeballs as they whispered military maxims without letup.

  I should note in passing that a Lokhar legion was twice the size of our mercenary Earth legions. Twenty-three thousand assault troopers had faced ten thousand defending Lokhars, not a mere five thousand.

  This time around, according to our android teachers, we would aid in the securing of the Sigma Draconis system. We were not the central piece to the puzzle. To elaborate, the Jelk battlejumpers and Starkien beamships would do the majority of the fighting. Our task—our four legions along with accompanying Saurians—were to assist in the capture and suppression of several Lokhar planetary defense stations.

  The Sigma Draconis system guarded an amazing nine jump routes. It also had two planets supporting life. In this instance: Lokhar military colonists of their imperium. This portion of the imperium was like a thumb sticking up out of a fist. It thrust into corporation space. Instead of defending any key Jade League space, it hurt the Jelk Corporation by blocking direct jump routes.

  We were told that the Sigma Draconis system did not possess the massive Lokhar dreadnoughts of the kind that attacked Earth. The military imperium only had a handful of those. According to N7, the Imperial Dreadnoughts were a new design, still in the teething stage of development. Instead, the Sigma Draconis system had several planetary defense stations, one guarding each important planet. In this instance, that meant three PDSs, as three of the planets were critical to the Lokhars: the two habitable planets and an iron-heavy Mercury-sized mining world.

  Because of the distances—over millions of kilometers between planets—the PD stations did not provide interlocking fire to help support each other. The three important planets were interior ones of the system, but the distances were still great. Nothing except for the fastest-flying missiles could reach from station to station in time. Instead, the three PD stations were strongpoints from which the system’s guardian fleet could maneuver. The size of the guardian fleet changed with time. At present, it would likely be half the size of the Jelk invasion fleet if Doojei Lark joined Claath’s adventure. The enemy fleet size could change if Lokhar message ships jumped away fast enough to bring reinforcements from nearby star systems. Preventing such spacecraft from leaving was not our worry, as we had no spaceships. That would be up to the Jelk.

  In truth, I suspected stopping such slippery vessels would likely fall to the Starkiens. Contractor vessels and mentality could not stand up to military slugfests. They were predators of opportunity, used to chasing fleeing ships and thus by design and temperament better suited to halting those seeking reinforcements.

  The four Earth legions had a different purpose. We would assault a planetary defense station. They were large satellites orbiting a world, often supported by planetary or ground based beams, fighter wings and surface missile launch sites. According to what I learned, the PD stations could absorb terrible damage and had hundreds, possibly thousands of damage control personnel aboard. The planetary defense stations would also contain Lokhar legionaries.

  As far as the androids told us, the plan seemed fairly straightforward. Jelk battlejumpers would move in and mercilessly pound each PD station with beams and drones. But
the battlejumpers were too valuable to take them near the station for the final annihilation, at least to do so quickly during a space battle. That would be our task. As the battlejumpers poured death and destruction onto the station, we would supposedly slip near in our assault boats, crash into the satellite and pour out to take the place deck by deck until we controlled it. In fact, some of our training included information on how to turn the station’s remaining beams and missiles onto the planet below, softening them up and possibly destroying the planetary defenses.

  The scope of the attack and the size of the assault awed me at first. The last attack had used the Starkien ships as the heavies. Now, the Starkiens were auxiliary fighters, used as scouts and to ride down—or chase down—fleeing ships sent to get reinforcements along various jump routes.

  The Altair attack had halved the number of Earth troops in Jelk service. I asked N7 in passing one day how the training of the new Earth levies was going. He shook his head and said Shah Claath had decided against that for the moment. The timetable called for a fast strike.

  “There aren’t more Earth troops?” I asked.

  “Negative,” N7 said. “Now enough chatter,” he said, tapping my desk loud enough so the woman beside me looked up. “Continue your lesson, as you only have thirty-three minutes left.”

  I finished the lesson, and I continued to ponder the coming assault. In a rather small-scale affair—at least compared to what Claath planned this time—the Altair attack had consumed half of our much larger Earth force. What would the coming meat grinder to do our ten thousand? We would be flying into the teeth of a Lokhar planetary defense station. N7 had hinted once that the Jelk had legion-killing beams to soften up the PDS. That, however, meant the enemy likely had similar beams to use on our assault boats.

  My point, I guess, was that Claath needed Earth troopers to survive in the Altair attack, because he’d needed us to gain physical control of the artifact. In the coming Sigma Draconis fight, the Jelk just needed us to soften the enemy for a time. If he lost all of us in battle and that helped save a battlejumper, Claath wouldn’t hesitate to order us to our deaths.

  “He means to burn us out of existence,” I told Rollo later.

  We carried our living armor to the heat pads, lugging them down a corridor. Rollo had become a centurion in my cohort and was thus in Jelk OCS with me. Because of what N7 had said several days ago, I believed the rooms were bugged to record everything we said, but I wondered about the halls. Just to be safe, I whispered to Rollo about my suspicions.

  “What do you mean?” Rollo asked.

  “How many bio-suits does Claath own?” I whispered.

  Rollo shrugged.

  “You may not remember,” I whispered. “But I do. Claath once talked about using several hundred million Earth troops, at least originally before the Lokhars got there and killed 99 percent of us. That means Claath must have ordered several hundred million bio-suits made or grown.”

  Rollo blinked at me.

  “Yeah,” I whispered. “There are only a few million of us left alive in the freighters. Now we know why he was so generous with us. It had everything to do with keeping the reserves in place. The first twenty-three thousand was the test case, right? We barely passed. This is the second test, and he’ll use us liberally.”

  “Not if we’re good enough,” Rollo whispered. “If we’re really good he’ll want us around because no one can fight like humans.”

  “I don’t think so,” I whispered. “It’s all a matter of balance sheet costs. Claath isn’t interested in how good we are compared to others. He just saw a way to make money, likely fast money. The Lokhars saw it differently, I’m sure. Maybe the Lokhars are the tough guys, the Spartans of the space worlds. They didn’t want another Spartan race around to compete against. You know, I wonder how long it will be before the Lokhars figure it out—where Claath is getting his troopers from—and make another stab at Earth to finish us off forever.”

  Rollo must have seen my point, because he muttered quiet profanities.

  “I know,” I whispered. “That changes everything. At first I thought by fighting hard we could show Claath how useful we were, that we would be worth keeping around. Now I realize I viewed it the wrong way. If our deaths help his profits, it’s all he thinks about.”

  “What can we do?” Rollo whispered.

  “Believe me,” I said, “I don’t think about anything else.”

  “And?” Rollo whispered.

  “I’m still thinking.”

  The days passed with more tests, more training and less and less sleep. I began to feel like a zombie. Even so, the command structure slowly began to take shape. N7 informed us Doojei Lark’s battlejumpers were on their way. We only had a few more days left to train, and then we would strike for Sigma Draconis.

  In battle, our biggest problem as I saw it was that of familiarity. Back on Earth, good troops took years of practice together to become excellent. An easy war particularly helped sharpen a division, corps or army group into a razor-edged sword. We had a better command structure this time than last. Heck, we really hadn’t had a command structure for the Altair assault. Unfortunately, we still lacked the trust needed between the troopers and their commanders and between the troopers of the various groups.

  Politicians and others used to talk about patriotism, defending your country and its honor and so forth. They must have figured that developing a pure-beating heart was the best way to make a good soldier. Such things helped, to be sure, but the real key to forging good troops was to make a group of soldiers feel like brothers. You had to make them care for and about each other. That took time. A man feared looking like a coward in front of his buddies. Therefore, he acted bravely and did what needed doing to make sure the group—his own close group—survived and respected and praised him.

  I suppose one of our greatest assets were the bio-suits. But to be even greater we needed the deep down bond of brotherhood. If we survived several of these space fights, yeah, then we might in time become truly elite. For now…we had to use what we had and realize there were severe limits to what we could ask our soldiers to do. I’m sure Claath and the other Jelk didn’t view it like that. We were savages to them. Unleash us and let us rush the enemy seemed to be their theory of Earth troop combat.

  Three Jelk profiteers had gathered their battlejumpers into one combat fleet. I wondered who fought for them in the ships. I imagined it had to be Saurians, the Family. How could the Earth troops possibly survive the coming fight in any reasonable numbers? And if we did survive, could we do anything positive for our race?

  I racked my brain for an idea, for an answer. Then N7 came and told me something that made everything worse.

  -18-

  By centuries, my cohort floated toward the main exit of the zero-G chamber. The exit was half-moon shaped, with a brown membrane keeping in the atmosphere. Each exiting trooper oozed through it.

  Nearly five hundred Earth troops had maneuvered around the cubes and pyramids, learning to obey my commands. It had been just as much of a learning experience for me. Commanding twenty troopers was a world of a difference than five hundred. Without good centurions, I believed it would have been impossible. Rollo and Dmitri were centurions under me, while Ella had become my aide. I needed one person I could trust with me, and I believed Ella was the best suited for the task.

  Assault boats waited outside the zero-G chamber. We’d fill them and run a practice assault unloading onto a battlejumper.

  As I watched the troopers in their bio-suits and thruster-packs jet toward the exit, N7 jointed me where I stood, magnetically anchored on top of a giant floating cube.

  The android wore his cyber-suit and helmet. He landed gracefully beside me, magnetizing his feet onto the metal cube. He switched on his link: a shortwave beam between helmets. I did likewise. This was used for close-talking versus longer-ranged communication.

  “Your cohort ran more smoothly today,” N7 said.

  “T
hey were sloppy,” I said. “We need another week before we’re passable. Another month would be better.”

  “You have another day,” N7 said. “The assault has been scheduled three days from now. It will take time jumping into position. None of your troopers will be able to practice during the star system maneuvers, as the Jelk have decided on maximum security.”

  “The max security is reasonable,” I said. “I don’t know that them telling you we’re about to attack is prudent, though.”

  “Shah Claath did not tell me.”

  “So how do you know when we’re going to attack?” I asked.

  “I have logically deduced it due to Shah Claath’s latest commands.”

  “Is there something else you want to tell me?” I asked.

  N7’s helmet swiveled so his visor aimed at mine. “At times, you are amazingly perceptive. Indeed, I have news for you. I have discovered Jennifer’s location.”

  “You said she was on Earth.”

  “I believed so, but my deductions concerning her proved faulty. New data indicates that she is one of the women in Shah Claath’s relaxation chambers.”

  “She’s in his main battlejumper?” I asked.

  “Correct,” N7 said.

  I recalled Jennifer helping me after the neuro-fiber surgery. There had been something different about her, something wholesome and exceedingly human. It would be good to talk to her again, to take her out to dinner and drink a glass of wine with her as I studied her features across a candlelit meal.

  A sudden pang filled me. The pang or pain reminded me of that terrible first day watching the Lokhars launch missiles at our blue-green world. Seeing the warheads hit, seeing the giant mushroom clouds billowing into existence over the cities of Earth… Never again would I talk to my mom. Never again would I walk to a Dairy Queen and order a chocolate milkshake or drive to the nearest Denny’s and eat one of their hamburgers. There were no more cars to start or shows to watch or movies playing where I could sit in the back and make out with a girl like Jennifer. The Lokhars—the Jelk, too—had stolen that from me, from us. I would have liked to go to the Fresno fair and walk around with Jennifer, eating cotton candy, sipping a coke and debating with myself when to hold her hand and where we’d enjoy our first kiss.