No berthing, no space for our gear, an unarmed ship, and now, no coffee. This is going to be a frigging great transit!
ELYSIUM
Chapter 29
The air tore at Esther’s wingsuit as she descended into the planet’s atmosphere. There were none of the acrobatics she’d enjoyed the first time she’d dropped from a Space Guard cutter. This was business, and it was a night jump.
She’d been grateful that she’d already had a cutter jump. This was the first time for three of her team, and considering how small the cargo compartment had been—barely able to hold all eight members of the team—and jumping at night, it had been beneficial to already know what to expect.
The transit on the Manta had been uncomfortable, but as she’d thought about it, she realized it had been a smart move. The old cutter was small and unarmed. She doubted that any watchers would think she had any combatants on board. If the team was supposed to be clandestine, then using the Manta for the insert gave them a pretty good start to the mission.
Now they were on their own. There was no one there for support if things went to shit. And she had to admit there was a very reasonable possibility that it could.
Esther watched her display. Jumping over water at night made determining altitude by visual means almost impossible. There were no references on the water for scale, so she didn’t even try.
She couldn’t see any of her team, but their avatars showed up on her display. Everyone was close enough to rendezvous after landing, but not so close as to constitute a danger of collision either while in flight or after their chutes deployed.
This jump was a HALO, or High Altitude, Low Opening. They’d jumped at 15,000 meters, and with the wingsuit’s ability to cover ground, they’d have flown close to 50 klicks to just offshore. If anyone had been tracking the Manta as it entered the atmosphere to land at the spaceport Patra, there would little be reason to connect it to the island of Naxos, the team’s destination.
At 1,500 meters, Esther deployed her chute. By instinct, she looked around to make sure her team’s chutes deployed, but of course, she couldn’t see a thing in the darkness, which was the whole idea of dropping at night. Below and in front of her, she could see the darker mass of the island in the distance as it rose from the sea. She was already about even with the top of Mount Zeus, the highest peak on the island.
At 100 meters above the surface, Esther unlocked her harness and dropped her pack, which was still attached to a 25-meter long equipment line. Ten seconds later, first the pack hit the water, then she hit. As soon as her feet touched the surface, she lifted her arms and slid forward, freeing herself from the chute which drifted down behind her to settle in a heap.
Esther was still in her drop helmet. She was not planning to submerge more than three meters, so it would do as diving gear. She needed mobility, though. With quick, sure movements, she stripped off the “wings” between her arms and her side and between her legs, then pulled the fins off her back and put them on her feet. She hauled her equipment strap, pulling in her pack, and deflated the small air bladders allowing her to submerge the pack and attach it under her chest. Finally, she removed the tiny impellor motor from its hook and oriented herself to the shore.
Esther couldn’t see any of the rest of the team, but their avatars moving toward her was reassuring. The jump wasn’t particularly dangerous, but any jump at altitude had risk. No one had broken radio silence, and that was a good sign.
It took almost 20 minutes, but finally, the team was in their diamond formation. Esther keyed her impellor, and it slowly started to pull her through the water. Within moments, all of the team was moving along at a steady 3 knots. The ocean had been seeded, so Esther’s body was illuminated with bio-luminescence, but at three knots, it wasn’t too severe, and at three meters down, she didn’t think any of it could be picked up from the surface.
The trip to shore was frankly boring. It was hard to keep alert while simply staring into the void. The impellor kept pulling her along, and she only had to make occasional corrections with her fins to keep her position steady.
Fifty-two minutes after starting out, Chris, who was the point of the diamond, stopped. He’d touched bottom. Once everyone followed suit, Esther started forward again, this time at one knot. Together, the eight Marines crept towards the shoreline. One-hundred meters out, Esther gave her clicker two sharp squeezes. The simple piece of metal clicked, something that could be heard under water for up to 200 meters. The four in the rear of the diamond stopped while the front four Marines kept moving ahead. Esther followed their progress as they reached the shore and exited the water.
Security was paramount. They could not be seen emerging from the ocean. There was less than an hour before daybreak, though, so they couldn’t dawdle. Esther watched the time tick by, anxious to get moving. She felt vulnerable. She had a meter or so of water over her head, but the waves were rocking her, and she was afraid of a larger one pushing her forward and breaking the surface.
It was a full twenty minutes before the welcome triple click that indicated a clear beach. With a sigh of relief, Esther swam, then crawled to the surf line. With Doc, Merl, and Bug, the four waited until they saw the tiniest of flashes, something less than a firefly. All four got up and hurried across the beach and into the brush.
Chris was already out-of-sight somewhere forward of them, but Tim and Lyle had already dug a hole in the sand. The chutes and wingsuit strips would disintegrate in the ocean within hours, but the fins and O2 cylinders were more permanent. Esther’s orders were to remove all trace of just how they’d arrived on the planet. The fins and cylinders went into the hole, followed by the wingsuit skeletons. Within moments, the cache was covered, and the team looked as if they could have arrived by any means. Nothing connected them to the cutter or the ocean.
Chris was waiting for them on the narrow coastal road, another 100 meters inland.
“No traffic.”
“That doesn’t mean we’re not under surveillance,” Esther said. “Stay alert, but we need to move.”
The faint lightening of the sky to the west gave urgency to the need to move. The team split on either side of the road and headed west, towards the coming dawn. Using the road was not secure, but time was of an essence. They only had 20 minutes to reach their objective.
Esther had thought that the planet, which was one of the rare ones that rotated clockwise, would be more disconcerting. But as she watched the sky turn from black to gray, while she knew she was facing planetary west, her brain simply interpreted it as east.
The speed at which dawn approached, though, was surprising. The western sky was already turning shades of dark red-yellow when they reached the small, dilapidated concrete building on the high ground alongside the road. Within moments, her team had it surrounded, four of them oriented in to it and three facing outwards.
Time to get it over with. We’ll just see how it plays out.
Esther dropped her pack and slung her M114 over her shoulder before leaving the cover of the brush and casually walking up to the front door of the squat building. She could feel the crosshairs on her back, and her hands kept twitching as if they wanted to take the weapon off her back and hold it ready.
She stopped in front of the door, took a deep breath, and pushed it open.
“Captain Blue, I assume?” a voice called out from inside.
“That’s me,” Esther said. “And you are?”
A tall, lanky man stepped out from the shadows wearing one of the oddest uniforms Esther had ever seen. The tunic was somewhat ordinary for a planetary militia. Under that, the man wore tight white leggings of some sort with black bands just below the knees. On his head was a red, brimless and featureless cap. And older version of Esther’s own M114 hung from his shoulder.
“I am Lochagos Constantine Stavropoulis, First Hellenic Brigade. Welcome to Elysium.”
Chapter 30
“OK, let’s have it,” Esther told Chris.
Al
l members of MARSOC teams were operators, but for a team to have the capabilities to complete their missions, all team members had secondary or tertiary skills. Staff Sergeant Chris de Brittan was the team’s armorer/weapons expert, and Esther had assigned him to inventory the weapons of the “First Hellenic Brigade.” She had to know just what they had.
“‘Brigade is rather a lofty title,” he said.
“No shit,” Merl said, which Esther ignored.
“We’ve got 87 soldiers. Fifteen are officers, and I think six are SNCOs and 13 are NCOs.”
“No, I told you,” Lyle interrupted. “That ‘lochias’ rank, what you’ve got as staff sergeant, well, there’s two kinds of them. One had two upside-down chevrons, and the other’s got two of those chevrons and two upside-down rockers. The first one is a non-rate, and the second is a SNCO.”
“Wait, they’ve got two ranks with the same name?” Esther asked.
“Affirm on that. I even had them write it out. L-O-C-H-I-A-S.”
How did I miss that in my briefing file? Esther wondered.
“Well, if that’s the case, then I’ve got, uh, let me see, only four SNCOs. Heck, they’ve got almost as many officers as NCOs and SNCOs combined. As far as weapons, they have 38 Dierdres in good working order with about 50 rounds apiece.”
“‘About?’” Esther asked.
“They’re thrown loose in five crates. I was just guesstimating.”
“OK, go on.”
“Let me see. Quite a few of them have brought hunting rifles. I counted 52 of them, and probably 52 different makes. They have two Gentry 12.4 heavy machine guns with 5000 rounds between them, ten 20mm grenade launchers, an old Gentry MRL firing 15mm anti-armor rockets, and get this, a 40mm field gun that they made themselves. I’m not sure I’d want to be standing next to it when it’s fired, but it looks wicked cool.
“That’s about it for major weapons. They’ve got grenades, side arms, and demo gear, that I’ve forwarded to you. And oh, yeah, the Locha . . .lacho . . .”
“Lochagos, but he said to call him “captain,” Esther said.
“Yes, him. He’s got a sword. He showed it to me, all proud and stuff.”
“Hah! He’ll chop up any Hands who show up,” Lyle said.
“Chop the hands off of the Hands,” Merl said with a laugh.
Staff Sergeant Merl Miller, their explosives expert, thought himself a comedian. Esther ignored his interruption, afraid to encourage him, even if he usually could draw a laugh from her.
“No energy weapons at all?” Esther asked.
“No, none.”
“So, we’ve got 87 poorly armed and untrained soldiers, and I use that term facetiously, to train to defend this crazy planet. Easy-peasy,” Tim said.
Esther understood his point. This mission, which had seemed so clear when it was given, was rapidly falling down the rabbit hole.
The facts were straightforward. Elysium was a second-gen world, settled by Athína. It already had a barely breathable atmosphere and existing oceans, but Athína had got it on the cheap due to its lack of heavy metals and more importantly, to its extremely rapid rotation. Each planetary day lasted just over 13 hours, well beyond the range where terraformers could bring its rotation in line with the Earth-standard 24-hour interval.
The terraformers arrived and sterilized large portions of the main continent so that the native toxins wouldn’t kill the modified crops the first settlers brought, they tweaked the atmosphere to make it more palatable to humans, and stocked the oceans with fish and mollusks. On land, native vegetation was dominant where humans hadn’t taken over, but in the oceans, nothing could compete with Terran sealife.
The first wave of pioneers was from Athína, but the 13-hour days proved to be too much for many, and the numbers of volunteers dwindled. Anxious to recover their costs, the Athína assembly opened up the planet to immigration, and a second wave arrived, only to peter out within a decade.
Two hundred years later, the population stood at barely 15,000,000 souls. The original ethnic Greeks from Athína occupied the top rung of society, almost as a noble class. The rest made do, mostly with agriculture and fishing. Athína still provided some material and financial support, but the planet relied primarily on self-sufficiency.
That support was why Esther had to bring in her team in secret. Athína was a fiercely independent world, often at odds with the Federation within the UAM.[21]
Normally, Elysium and the Federation wouldn’t cross paths. But the Right Hand of God changed that. Elysium was a large, sparsely populated planet. As the RHG expanded, it needed places of refuge, places to call home. Elysium had seemed a likely target for some of them. But the planet fought against humanity and Earth plants. Outside of the sterilized regions, growing crops was a losing battle. So, to survive, the “Hands” who’d arrived took to small-level raiding of Elysium farms and settlements.
The Elysium assembly requested assistance from Athína, but the patron world didn’t think the problem was serious enough to send more resources to the planet. As the raids became bolder, the Elysium speaker prime travelled to Earth and petitioned the chairman of the government that was taking the strongest stand against the RHG: the Federation.
The Council was not about to send combat units to another government’s world, but it was not above improving its influence, particularly when it might eventually stick a finger in the eye of an annoying little planet. So, it agreed to send, in secret, a team of trainers to both survey the military needs of the planet and to train the trainers, creating a cadre that could upgrade the planet’s existing military.
Elysium had six “brigades,” and Constantine had assured her that the First Hellenic was the finest. Esther’s team had been on the planet for about 15 hours, and night was already falling again. In that short period of time, she’d come to the conclusion that the planet needed far more than what she and her seven men could provide.
Chapter 31
Two weeks later, Esther wasn’t sure if they even made a dent in training the brigade. The individual soldiers seemed eager enough, but they’d been treating the brigade as a dress-up social club, not an actual military organization. There was nothing to build on—she had to start from ground zero.
One of the first major roadblocks had been the so-called uniform the soldiers wore. Most of the men wore a hodgepodge of military blouses of various kinds. On their legs almost everyone wore white leggings called boudoiri and white socks called periskelides. The socks were held up by kaltsodetes, a kind of traditional garter. A handful of men and all ten women wore white blouses and skirts called foustanela, which Esther had been told too many times to count had 400 pleats, one for each year of Greece’s occupation by the Ottomans. If those weren’t bad enough, everyone wore the red fez, called a farion.
Constantine had argued when she told him that needed to change. He stressed that this was part of history, part of what bound them together. Esther had to remind him that they weren’t re-enactors. If they were going to fight the RHG, the Hands wouldn’t give a flying fart about history. And he was making it easier on the Hands by giving them nice targets with red fezzes that provide no protection at all.
It had taken three days of constant pressure, but finally, Constantine had relented. It had taken him another day to convince his troops, though. Some of the most vocal soldiers arguing had names that didn’t sound Greek, which Esther thought was odd.
The uniforms were a minor issue, however, when compared to their military skills. They essentially had none. Their idea of an assault was to charge the mighty Ottomans across an open field, shouting at the tops of their lungs, which they had shown the team on the third day.
Constantine had been rather embarrassed about their demonstration. From conversations with him, she knew he had a working knowledge of basic warcraft. But for a social club, actual tactics took a backseat to theatrics.
They weren’t total incompetents. Bob had reported that most of the soldiers were adequate marksmen
with their hunting rifles, with a few being excellent shots. Staff Sergeant Bob Burnham was the team’s designated sniper, a one-time bronze medal winner in the Federation Military Distance Shooting Tournament. If Bob was impressed, then so was Esther.
Their problem was a lack of training and proper equipment. Given a year, she could mold them into a proper fighting unit. The problem was, she didn’t think they had a year.
She’d sent back two reports. One detailed the results of the equipment survey and a request for 100 U-22’s, the gold standard of militia rifles. Made in the Confederation, the rifles were almost indestructible, and the barrel and housing could be switched between firing a standard 6.44 or 7.62 jacketless round or a 2mm hypervelocity dart. Nowhere near as accurate as the Marines’ weapons, they were never-the-less durable, easy to use, and probably more than enough for the RHG fighters. The weapons, ammo, uniforms, and other supplies were in the pipeline with an expected arrival in three weeks.
The second report was a more candid assessment of the brigade, and it was not complimentary. Included was her unvarnished opinion that she would not have accomplished the mission in the three months allotted to her.
She was aware that her mission was more of a statement of support for Elysium than anything else, but she felt obligated to leave with a unit that could not only stand off the RHG but train others to do the same.
Chapter 32
Esther lengthened her stride letting the slope of the mountain help her chew up the ground. Sergeant Lyle Jones was many things a recon Marine should be, but a cross-country runner was not one of them. Esther had paused at the top of the 800-meter Mount Zeus to encourage the soldiers as they clambered up the two-meter tall jut that created the peak and touched the cairn of stacked stones laid by years of tourists, but now on the way back down, she had her sights set firmly on the sergeant, who was Tail-End Charlie among the team.
The United Federation Marine Corps' Lysander Twins: The Complete Series: Books 1-5 Page 43
