by Leo Champion
Right now they didn’t have that time. Certainly not at this moment.
Lennon dropped prone, sighted in on another of the charging Qings and took his shot, allowing instinctively for drop and deflection.
It fell – but there were dozens of them!
“Theron! Gun! Now!” he shouted as he sighted in on another.
* * *
Mullins was dazed, shaken and burned from the crash-landing; the charred sleeves of his uniform – damn, that could have been my skin, the only reason he’d kept his sleeves rolled down was the fierce Dinqing sun – evidence to the fire he’d narrowly escaped.
And now Jorgenson was pointing. He knew enough to trust the medic’s judgment and, dazed and hurt as he was – hopefully his right ankle was only banged and not broken – he turned from his staggering run.
Oh, hell.
Qing nomads were emerging from a gully a couple of hundred yards away, and from the way their jezzails and blades glinted in the morning sun their intentions weren’t friendly.
“Run!” shouted Newbauer. “Go!”
Mullins had been trained too well for that. The way they drilled you on Chauncy to deal with oncoming eaties was to stand your ground and open up, because you had better firepower than them.
Blasts of thick white smoke erupted from the aliens’ blackpowder jezzails as they fired. Mullins sighted on the lead one, who waved a glinting sword high. Then it fell a half-instant before Mullins had pulled the trigger; he aimed for and shot down the one behind it.
Boom, came from behind. From the direction of Lennon’s team. Boom.
The tall lean exoskeletal aliens fell. But they were covering ground way too fast.
Lead balls pounded into the ground around Mullins’ feet.
* * *
I have a sidearm, thought Cramer. The unwanted weight at her belt, which regulations required her to carry in the field.
With unpractised hands, and only because a bullet – musket-ball, they were all the same thing to the doctor in this context – had taken her assistant through the leg and they couldn’t run further – she pulled it out of its holster. Raised it, aimed it at the center of the group of charging aliens, no more than a hundred yards away from them now.
More of those white gunpowder explosions bloomed from their guns.
Technical Sergeant Josephson was screaming. Every micron in her brain wanted to go to the help of her assistant, who was badly hurt a few feet away. But she was armed and they had to deal with the immediate threat.
She pulled the gun’s trigger and nothing happened.
Oh. Safety off.
She found the catch, as the two experienced Legion soldiers took long bayonets from alongside the barrels of their rifles and with what looked like long-practiced ease fixed them.
She fired again, and again nothing happened.
What the fuck is wrong with this gun!
She was a doctor, not a soldier. She’d only signed up to pay off her med school loans and maybe see a bit of the galaxy while she was about it. To practice medicine in exotic, unfamiliar and yes, reasonably uncomfortable environments.
Not to violate the Hippocratic Oath and kill sapient beings.
Even if those sapient beings were charging at her with every intent, from their blasting muskets and waving blades, of killing her.
What had they told her at Officer Acclimatization Training, the course every certified doctor, nurse and lawyer had to go through before getting their commission?
Oh yes. Not just safety catch, but you had to bring a round into the firing chamber. You did that by bringing the slide of the back of the automatic pistol, back. Then letting it go forwards, which would push a round from the magazine into the firing chamber.
She did that as she thought about it, and the gun boomed. It was a harder kick and a louder noise than she’d expected, but the gun reset itself and she fired again and again into the charging nomads.
Hippocratic Oath be damned for now, she thought. Josephson, her long-time aide, was hurt and the aliens would kill them both if she didn’t do her part to defend them.
She fired again and again.
* * *
One individual less hesitant to open fire was Chief Warrant Officer Two Senechal, who was as shaken as the rest of them – maybe a bit more, he’d been in the cockpit when the impact had been mostly frontal – but well-trained and, after the loss of his chopper, pissed off.
He drew his sidearm, pulled the slide back with his left hand as his right thumb turned the gun’s safety off. They were charging, and the two Legion men were firing effective bursts at the group. But Qing nomads were lean and fast and they covered the ground rapidly.
And there were a lot of them.
Behind them came another nine-millimeter bang as Warrant One Kennedy got his shit together and started to fire.
Others fell as someone else, probably the guards of that work crew they’d come to inspect, opened up. But there were dozens of the fuckers!
* * *
A heavy thump fell into place next to Lennon as – he saw with a quick glance left – bearded, long-haired Gypsy PFC Theron fell in with his bulky M-255 squad gun.
“Four hundred and fifty yards,” the team leader told the squad machine-gunner.
“Got it,” said Theron and squeezed off a stammering burst that ate up a fifty-round belt of the machine-gun like snap.
Charging nomads fell like tenpins.
There were two Legion men with M-25s, and what looked like two or three more – one was on the ground – others around the blazing wreckage of the helicopter, with another person fleeing the scene, running furiously toward the fire-team and the Black Gangers who’d already fled.
“Where’s Reuter? Where the fuck is your loader?” Lennon yelled.
“Here, Corp!” Lennon fell into place to Theron’s right and fed another belt to the M-255.
“Good job.”
Theron opened up with another burst and then another, and more of the nomads died. The M-25 was barely effective at four hundred and fifty yards; the M-255 was designed to kill at half a mile and at under half its intended maximum range the big, bulky gun was absolutely lethal.
Nomads were cut down like ducks in a shooting gallery. The weapon’s designers had given the big gun a big scope as well, suited to the ranges it was intended to operate at; Theron didn’t just have the ability to hit at range, he had the means to aim effectively at that range as well.
Reuter was doing his job and feeding Theron belts from the ergonomically-designed sack on his back and the pouches linked to his belt and harness. The M-255 fired caseless rounds chained together by thin plastic links that resembled millimeters-long fractions of zip-ties but were profoundly magnetic; a receptor in the gun’s intake produced a counter-magnetic field that actively repelled the links.
It was easier than a hard-mechanical mechanism to physically boot them out; due to the negligible weight of the magneticized plastic, the fifty-round belts weighed almost a quarter-pound less apiece than the old chain-linked ones. Quarter-pounds meant little individually, but when you were Reuter or Theron, carrying a stack of ammo alongside kit and personal defense weapons, it added up.
It didn’t matter right now. Reuter snapped, making sure the positive and negative charges of the belt-links matched, a new stick of caseless 5.56 into the one the machine-gunner was emptying into the nomads. Through his scope Lennon watched the bastards fall.
Most were dead.
Not all, as a few got within range of the survivors from the chopper.
Fire bloomed again and again from a close-in gun one had been firing. Blades flashed.
“Halt fire!” Lennon shouted. “You’ll hit our guys!”
* * *
There were less than a dozen nomads remaining as they reached point-blank to Mullins – less than half a dozen less one, Mullins thought, as he gunned the nearest one down with the last round in his M-25’s magazine.
Jorgenson shot another o
ne down, but others were going for the doctor and the chopper crew. But it was too late for him, dazed and in pain still from the crash, to worry about other people, as a nomad with a heavy black missile slung across his back came charging in with a long sabre.
“Zakhak son of Arzin!” the nomad cried as he brought his heavy saber down on Mullins.
Mullins knew the pidgin, had spent the last week and change memorizing it.
“Paul son of Simon!” he yelled back.
He brought his bayoneted M-25 up to block Zakhak’s blade. There was a heavy clang and the rifle in Mullins’ hands shook heavily. And then he struck back, sticking the nomad through the chest – there was the sound and feeling of exoskeleton breaking, then his blade found emptiness and the nomad slumped.
“And you’ll have no more sons, you son of a bitch,” he breathed as he pulled his bayonet out of the eatie’s body.
Mullins turned to check on Jorgenson, who’d instinctively moved to cover Mullins’ back just as Mullins had Jorgenson’s. Even if the two hadn’t been good friends, Legion looked out for fellow Legion before anyone else. But the medic had taken care of his own two eaties with the last of the rounds in his gun, and Mullins turned to check on the others.
There had been six or seven. Mullins had killed one, perhaps the leader from the skins and gold that adorned the gutted corpse. Jorgenson, two more. The chopper pilot and co-pilot had accounted for two more, Lieutenant-Colonel Newbauer had vanished, and the other two had paused in front of the doctor, who herself was standing in front of her wounded, possibly dying, assistant. Pleading.
“He is a wounded man.” Cramer knew a bit of the pidgin herself, it seemed.
“No good as a slave, whore,” one of the eaties was saying, twenty feet from Mullins. “Nor you, whore.”
The Qing nomad raised a blade. The doctor, whose own gun was drawn but must have been empty, didn’t seem to notice it.
Mullins had instinctively reloaded a new magazine into his M-25. Now he shot both of the threatening eaties down, in the back from fifteen feet away.
So much for – what was it, Zakhak son of Arzin’s – crew.
The doctor collapsed to her knees.
“You shot them in the back,” she said in what might have been shock.
“They were about to kill you and your friend,” said Mullins, who had no time for this shit. Field intelligence duties said he needed to ascertain the safety of everyone – well, that was just a general duty – and then, more importantly, check out that weapon the nomad leader had been carrying.
He wasn’t a qualified medic. Jorgenson, who seemed fine, was.
Jorg outranked him by two pay-grades, but Mullins had a job to do.
“Doc, the Air Force captain. Check her and her friend out,” Mullins snapped.
“You got it, Muls,” Jorgenson replied. He fired a single-shot into the head of a nomad Mullins supposed hadn’t been quite definitely dead, then went over to attend Cramer and the physician’s assistant.
Mullins went to the corpse of Zakhak son of Arzin, a corpse that was laden with medallions of gold sewn into tough, thin skins. A brace of flintlock pistols were in a belt above the loincloth of the well-decorated eatie chief’s side.
Over his back, on a sling that was distinctly an Earth-like nylon, the missile was slung. Mullins pulled the hand unit – as distinct from the handset, which was on the other side – of his radio. He began taking 3D-scanned photos of the thing as it lay on the eatie’s body.
Then he slung it off the exoskeletally-thin corpse and began taking close-in photographs; of the mouth, of the trigger mechanism. Robinson, or since he was out in the field MacGallagher and S-2, would appreciate these; so might even Vazhao. This might get him kicked up to lance if he was good, if this was timely.
He flipped the weapon over and began taking more close-ups. If there were reloads, Zakhak son of Arzin wasn’t carrying them anywhere. Maybe this was a single-shot weapon?
Every good-available shot taken, he hit Transmit on the scanner and sent a bundled digital load of data up to the satellite, to higher-ups. To Hubris and Vazhao.
He went over the corpse and found what looked like a pager, which he photographed. Fiddling up and down its buttons – there was only an up-frequency and down-frequency – he found only two preset numbers, 188.1 and 191.1, which he photographed and Transmitted both of.
For good measure, in case there was data on it he’d missed, he stuck the pager in his belt. He examined the rocket launcher, which seemed heavy. He’d already photographed it extensively from every direction; did he need to carry it with him?
Not with the nearest friendlies hundreds of miles away he didn’t. He couldn’t afford the weight and who was there to take it to?
And right now he had other things to attend to.
He’d done his job, the easy part.
* * *
Cramer got up, unable to believe it.
“He’s dead. Oh my God, he’s dead.”
Josephson had no pulse. The blood on the sand was more proof than she needed as to why. The eaties had burned her assistant, badly. Then they’d shot him, right through the femoral. The Legion men up front – the medic, Jorgenson his name was, and Mullins the signalman – had absorbed the brunt of the attack, but they wore kevlar in their blue shirts as a matter of course.
Cramer didn’t wear body armor. She was a rear-area Air Force doctor. And Medical Technician First Class, Technical Sergeant, Josephson had no body armor. And no pulse.
He hadn’t even gotten to touch the gun at his belt, like the empty and apparently useless weapon Cramer had dropped from her right hand before.
She’d never seen battle before. She didn’t like it now.
“He’s dead, Captain,” said the Legion medic, getting up. “I’m sorry. Ma’am, your man is definitely dead. Where the burns didn’t get him the round to his leg did, and the one in his gut would have killed his ass given time.”
The two chopper crew, pistols drawn, were coming up. Newbauer was marching up, a pistol in his hand.
Cramer looked over at the Legion medic.
She’d seen men die before. Men and women. She was a surgeon and her residency, in an emergency ward at Chicago General, had been intense. She’d seen death before, but it had been on stretcher beds.
Not desert sands.
“He’s really dead, isn’t he?”
The medic didn’t look at her. Instead he called out: “Shovel, we need a shovel! A pick and a stone too! Mullins, line those up please?”
Oh yes. She remembered, those two had names.
“Got it, Jorg,” said the radio man named Mullins.
“Just what the fuck is going on here?” asked Newbauer as he returned.
“Josephson’s dead,” Cramer told him.
“Well who gives a fuck, we could all be dead. And we’re going to be unless we get our asses to Kandin-dak. Stat, as you doctors say! Stat!”
“We are burying this man first, sir,” said the medic.
“The hell we’re delaying.”
Three Legion men, one of them with a heavy machine-gun slung at his hip, showed up. They were followed by a couple of Black Gangers, one of whom – without direction, or perhaps he’d been given direction earlier – began to smash a hole into the rough ground with a pick.
“You take his dog-tags, ma’am,” the medic named Jorgenson said softly to Cramer.
Cramer nodded. There was a pair of those around Josephson’s neck, just like there were around her own. Around everyone’s here, she thought, but only Medical Technician First Class Josephson’s counted right now. She didn’t care about his official rank.
You were a good man, she thought to the limp and flatlined Josephson as more Black Gangers began to dig the grave.
“Thanks for showing up so quick, Smith,” Mullins said to the Black Ganger with the pick.
“You know my name?” That Black Ganger whirled. “Holy shit, Mullins from the Nine-Ninety-Sixth!”
�
��Dig the hole, Smith,” said Mullins. “Yeah, it’s me. Few of us here from the Nine-Nine-Six.”
“Like me,” said another of the men, draped with machine-gun belts and carrying a submachinegun.
“Fuck, Reuter?! Who else?”
“A few others here. They assigned Nine-Ninety-Sixth’s F Company to Fourth Brigade, First Division. Recruit replacements.”
“Miss you guys,” the Black Ganger said, but he didn’t stop swinging his pick. Another man moved in to shovel away the dirt he’d cleared up. Slowly a hole was opening up, as a second Black Ganger with a pickaxe joined the man named Smith, and two others helped out with shoveling.
“Just let him lie. You’ve got your dog-tag and you can write your next-of-kin letter,” Newbauer snapped.
“Sir,” said the Legion medic, glaring up at him. “We bury our man.”
“Who says so?”
“I say you do,” Mullins said to Newbauer. “Dig, Smith. Dig this guy an honest grave.”
Cramer’s eyes flicked between the Legion men and the Army colonel.
“That’s indiscipline!” Newbauer snarled at Mullins. “You’ll answer for that when we’re back at Kandin-dak!”
“When we get back to Kandin-dak, sir, you can take us all to Vazhao and we’ll answer for it. Sir. This man is getting his grave.”
Newbauer doubtless understood that he was the highest-ranking man present; without a doubt, thought Cramer.
But he seemed to also have the sense to understand that every single armed person present wanted Josephson to have the worthwhile grave that was presently being dug.
“Get digging,” said Mullins to the Black Gangers. “This man was US military. He gets his grave.”
* * *
In Binwin, Arlene Lavasseur finished reading the reports.
“Oui, oui. Field units active. How are we on signals and space?” she asked.
“Signals are ready to go, ma’am,” said the subordinate colonel on the ground.
“Space is near ready,” said the captain in orbit. “Just waiting for the last of our ships to leave orbit for A-space and we’ll go boom.”
