The river commando force was their surprise element, and Michi though the plan was brilliant. No one would expect an underwater assault from a free-flowing river. But what the Marines didn’t know was that the NIP had a number of commercial divers within its ranks, and with the heavy deep-sea suits they had been able to acquire and the firm bottom at the river’s bow, even non-divers could simply walk across the river. The commando force would enter the river at a small lagoon that was out of sight to anyone at the refinery and would already be on its way, trudging the 500 meters to reach the first set of algae tubes at the leading edge of the river bank.
Michi looked around at those of her force who were in sight. They had stopped in the trees stopped well short of the broad expanse leading up to the refinery’s front gate. Two Marines in combat suits were manning it, according to the reports coming in. Inside, there were probably 120-130 more Marines. The night patrols had already returned and were probably sacked out, and the day patrols had left. They would be non-factors in the coming assault. The NIP outnumbered the Marines fifteen-to-one, and from what she had been told, an attacking force only needed a five-to-one advantage to succeed.
“You ready for this?” Hannrahan asked her.
“I was born for this,” Michi replied.
“Just remember, don’t go charging off. We are here to attract their attention and fix the Marines in place so our commandos can breach the defenses. Only then, will we actually go into the attack ourselves.”
“I understood that the last fifty times you told me” Michi muttered under her breath.
She glanced at her watch. They had fewer than five minutes to go. Her warrior spirit was clamoring for attention, and it was about time to let her out. She realized that she was still somewhat of a figurehead, but if she was getting into the fight, she could accept that.
She checked her rifle. It had still been packed when she got it, and she had felt like she was opening a Christmas present as she ripped away the plastic storage wrap. It was beautiful, a two kilojoule Leung Min pulse rifle. It didn’t have as much range as that of most of her soldier’s weapons, but it was simple to use, and within 15 meters, it was deadly. Aiming was not vital—a simple point-and-shoot was all she would need to shut down any Marine in her path. She had one extra powerpack, so she was good for about 100 shots, but the fight should be over before she could exhaust the rifle’s charges.
Hannrahan was absorbed with his watch. He held up his other hand, then still looking at his watch, brought the free hand down in a chopping motion.
“OK, tell the arty to open up,” he told her.
She flipped on her throat mic, cleared her throat, and gave the command that committed the people of Kakurega to war. “Donaldson team, commence fire.”
Behind her, the three Donaldsons opened up, the outgoing rounds a sharp report. They were only 1,000 meters back, so within seconds, there were explosions to Michi’s front as the rounds hit the refinery. The war was on!
She counted five outgoing volleys, and before Hannrahan could tell her, she shouted into her mic, “Assault force! Up and at ’em.”
Michi had gone over in her mind what she might say when the time came, but in the end, decided that she didn’t want anything too flowery, just a simple command.
She jumped up, pulling down on the bottom of her body armor, getting the collar off of the base of her throat. It was uncomfortable, didn’t fit right, and restricted her breathing, but the command staff had insisted on it. Every piece of body armor they possessed had been passed out, with all of the first wave of the assault force getting it along with some of the second wave.
Hannrahan was speaking into his throat mic as he moved just to her front. Anger flared in Michi as she realized that he was controlling at least part of the assault. This was her command, not his! She pushed her anger down for the moment—she would confront him on that after the refinery was taken.
There was an explosion just off to Michi’s left. Michi felt the shock wave, but didn’t see anything through the trees. She was momentarily startled, but then pushed forward. Of course, the Marines wouldn’t just let them waltz in. They were professionals, after all. But if the Marines were firing at them, then her assault force was doing its job by fixing the Marines in place. Within moments, the river commando breaching force would be hitting them through the algae farm.
Coming out of the trees, still some 300 meters from the front gate, the first rank ran up the slight bank of the roadbed for Highway 2. This was the major highway that ran along the river to the south to Gaberson and points beyond. Four lanes wide with a grassy median, it could be a kill zone if they let it. That wasn’t going to happen. They wouldn’t cross it in force until the Marines were focused on the breaching force. But to give that force a chance, the assault force had to act the part, and that was going to result in casualties.
The open area from the T-intersection to the refinery’s gates was almost 400 meters wide and 300 meters long, with the river on the south side and trees on the north. The refinery sat like an ancient fort on the west side of the open area.
As Michi crested the roadbed and sprinted across the highway, she only had a glimpse of the front gates before all hell broke loose. Several explosions sounded just in front of her with plumes of smoke and dirt erupting into the air. The sound of gnats zinged past her ear, and she saw one of her men stumble and fall.
“Now!” Hannrahan yelled from a few meters off her side.
“Fall back!” she screamed, turning and running back to the far side of the highway and diving for the ground where the roadbed offered her slightly less than two meters of protection from direct fire.
She got up on an elbow and looked up and down the edge of the road. She had gone over the road with about 400 soldiers, and it looked like most of them had made it back. A body hurtled down the depression fifteen meters away from her, the soldier’s neck half-torn open, blood spurting wildly several times before tapering off.
Michi stared at him. She knew some people would be killed, but seeing a man who had followed her into battle, trusting her to lead him to victory, die right before her eyes brought the seriousness home to her. This was not a lark. This was life and death.
“Send up a count,” she heard someone call out.
“I’d hoped we could have gotten farther,” Hannrahan said beside her.
“Arinomamade,” she said quietly, looking up and down her line.
“What?” he started, but Michi waved him off, and he continued, “But I think this still might do the trick.”
“Are they going to mortar us?” Michi asked.
“We’ll find out pretty quickly, won’t we?” Hannrahan said, sounding dismissive of her question.
One of the assumptions of the assault was that the Marines’ ROE would not let them damage Highway 2. The company needed it to reach the cities and facilities to the south. Her first assault rank relied on that fact. The hope was that as the Marines knew they were there, and as they had acted like a disjointed force without the courage and fortitude to continue, the Marines would organize some sort of counter-attack. If that happened, the rest of the 1,100 assault force would pour from the forest into the attack. If the timing was right, the breaching force would be hitting the Marines from the rear at the same time. The Marines would be caught in a pincher and be destroyed.
Michi looked back to where the bulk of her force was hidden. Direct fire rounds were flying over their heads, the occasional clods of dirt and grass raining down on them. But something was missing, and it took Michi a moment to figure out what it was.
“Where’s our arty?” she asked Hannrahan.
“Good question,” he said, and without even pretending to go through her, he got on his throat mic.
The throat mics relied primarily on subvocalizations, so Michi couldn’t hear more than a murmur, but from lip-reading, she could see him trying to raise the gun teams. He gave up and looked to Michi, shaking his head.
“Dam
n pieces of shit probably broke down,” he said. “I told Jessep to get the KU-300’s from Gentry.[13] But he wanted to save a few credits, and look now. Well, it is what it is, and we may not have any supporting arms.”
“Do we need them?” Michi asked.
She swore Hannrahan was about to roll his eyes, but he answered, “No, we don’t need them. But casualties will be higher without them.
The head count came back to Michi then. Only 348 men and women had made it back to the depression that protected them now. Michi gulped. That mean 59 people had not made it. They were just over the lip of the road bed, wounded or dead.
A sudden thought hit her. “Will they be shooting our wounded? They’re still firing!”
“Wouldn’t put it past the bastards,” Hannrahan conceded.
“Well, shouldn’t we do something?” she asked with concern.
“Do what? Get more people hit? That’s a kill zone there, just like we knew it would be. Let our river team get in before we sacrifice anyone else.”
Michi looked at her watch, then asked, “But shouldn’t they already be assaulting?”
Hannrahan looked at his watch as well. “Yeah, they should. But walking on a river bottom can be tricky. You can’t see anything, so it’d be easy to get turned around,” he said.
He put his hand to his throat mic, though, and contacted someone. Michi wasn’t even upset anymore about him bypassing her. She just wanted answers.
“Uh, we’ve got some garbled messages from the breaching team. Command is trying to find out what’s going on, and they’ll get back to us in a moment.”
“But they should have gotten in at least to the algae farm, right? The Marines won’t attack in there.”
“No plan lasts beyond the first shot in a battle. We have to be ready to improvise, and I’m guessing we’ll be pulling back about now,” he said.
“Pull back? But what about the Marines?” she protested.
“The fucking Marines are why we might have to pull back. If the breaching team failed, we can’t conduct a frontal attack.”
“Don’t give me can’t, colonel!” Michi screamed at him. “We’ve got almost 2,000 soldiers who came here to win, not to slink away with their tails between their legs! And if you don’t have the balls to take the Marines on, I sure do!”
She stood up, ignoring the round impacting on the edge of the roadbed and showering the two of them with dirt.
On the far south side of her line, firing broke out. She slowly turned to look and saw a dozen or so combat-suited Marines emerge from the river, firing their weapons at her soldiers. She could see some of her men and women firing back, but only those at the very end of the line could fire without fear of hitting the others.
“Well, colonel, do you have any balls?” she asked before turning and starting to run down the line towards the fight.
“Follow me!” she screamed, her anger mounting. She would crush the Marines, then focus on the refinery.
Alongside her, soldiers were jumping up and running, a mass of unstoppable humanity. More of her men and women started pouring out of the forest to join them. There had to be 600 or more of them rushing down the 40 meter wide open area between the road and the edge of the forest.
Something hit her in the arm, knocking the rifle out of her hand and almost spinning her around, but she regained her feet and continued to run. Soldiers were falling around her, but she led the charge. They would close with and destroy the enemy. It was their destiny!
Suddenly, Michi was lifted into the air, heat and sound enveloping her. The sky, her soldiers, and the road rotated several times in her vision before the ground filled it one last time as she slammed down, and all went dark.
Chapter 32
A burst of pain forced its way into Michi’s consciousness, pulling her from the depths to which she had descended. She struggled to make sense of her world, and another blow almost knocked her back into nothingness.
“Hey, the bitch’s back with us,” a voice registered.
Michi opened her eyes. A jack had her by the collar having pulled her to a sitting position. His arm was cocked back to hit her across the face again. She knew she wasn’t dead. She hurt too much for that. The smell of blood, sweat, and shit was too strong for that. Michi might be in hell, but she wasn’t dead.
“She doesn’t look so tough now, does she?” another jack said as he came up to stare at her.
Michi focused on the second jack’s bulging belly, which pulled open his shirt, leaving gaps between the buttons. She realized the guy’s clothing didn’t matter, but she needed an anchor on which to focus in an attempt to gather her thoughts.
“What . . . what happened?” she managed to get out.
“Ha! What happened? Derrick, she wants to know what happened!” the first jack said, the one who had slapped her face.
The second one stepped forward, and with a gloating smile creasing his face, said, “Well, Miss Red Athena, what happen was that you tugged on superman’s cape and got your asses handed to you. The current count is that over 1,300 of you fucking rebels were killed, another 600 captured.
“What, you thought you might actually win?” he asked as he saw her jerk at the news. “You never had no chance. We had loyal people who infiltrated your vaunted NIP. We knew everything you were going to do. We wanted you to attack, in fact, once we had the Marines here. That way we could get you out in the open and stomp on you like cockroaches. Hell, with all those who got zeroed, you’re lucky to even be alive.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that,” the first jack said with an evil laugh. “About being lucky and all. Now that she’s awake, she’s got some ‘splaining to do, and I don’t think that’s going to be pleasant, no I don’t. She’ll wish she had bought it with the rest before Fordyce and his team are done with her.”
“I think you’re right, there, Gunter, my man. I think you’re right. I’ll go tell Fordyce she’s ready for him.”
“Hey, ask him if we can watch!” the first jack asked his retreating friend.
He shifted his grip to Michi’s hair and pulled her head up until she was only centimeters from his face.
He looked deeply into her eyes for a moment before saying, “You fucked up, girl, and now you’re going to pay the price.”
He let go, and her head thudded back onto whatever she was lying on. Sharp lances of pain radiated throughout her body as her head bounced.
She almost cried out, but she knew that was nothing. Whatever awaited her would be much, much worse.
Chapter 33
Michi was trying not to cry. Was he telling the truth? Did 1,300 soldiers really die? All of this had been her idea, all because the company murdered Franz. But her anger had cost 1,300 more people, people who had loved ones, people who had their own lives.
When the man who had to be Fordyce finally came in the little cell in which she was held, she merely looked up at him in resignation. Whatever his plans, she probably deserved them.
“Ah, you are awake, Miss MacCailín. Good. You and I are going to have a good time, together,” he said, actually rubbing his hands together in anticipation. “I have some things to ask you, and you are going to give me the answers. I won’t lie to you, though. Whether you tell me easily or hard, it won’t make much difference to you because,” he leaned forward to whisper into her ear, “I just enjoy it too fucking much.”
The two previous jacks had evidently received permission to watch as they followed Fordyce in as did one other man. The one called Derrick had the decency to look nervous and uncomfortable, but the other three looked at her with unbridled eagerness.
Michi was lying on a metal table. Her right arm, the one that had been hit during the assault, was cuffed to one of the table supports. She didn’t struggle as the four men surrounded her.
“Chen, you and you,” he said, pointing at the other jack, Gunter, “take off her clothes.”
Both men jumped forward, hands quickly stripping her down. With her arm attach
ed to the table leg, they jerked on her shirt a few times, eliciting a gasp from her as they jarred her injured arm, before grabbing a knife and simply cutting the shirt off.
She had expected something along these lines, and she tried to ignore the growing feeling of vulnerability as the men gawked at her body. She tried to send her mind elsewhere. That worked in books and flicks, but it wasn’t doing too much for her. She was very much rooted in a small cell, naked on a cold metal table.
“OK, my dear. My first question is where is the man you call Jessep? He wasn’t captured, nor was he among the bodies. The many, many bodies, I might add. So where might he have gone?”
Michi couldn’t tell them even if she wanted to. She didn’t know. She suspected that Fordyce knew that she didn’t know, too. But he smiled, took a short, wicked looking knife, and put the tip a centimeter from her left eye. Lowering it to her cheek, he lightly traced a line down her face and neck, over her clavicle, across her breast, and down her belly. He lingered with the knife tip alongside her inner thigh, and despite her resolve, Michi flinched. He almost chuckled, and then started the knife moving again. It went down her thigh. Michi couldn’t tell if he was actually cutting her or not, but when he passed her knee, the pressure eased.
Michi let out a breath she hadn’t realized she was holding. She started to relax her muscles, which she had involuntarily tensed, when fire sunk into her calf as Fordyce plunged the small knife up to its hilt. She let out a screech of pain.
“Oops! Sorry about that,” he said with a laugh, a laugh echoed by at least two of the others. “It must have slipped.
“So, where were we?” he asked, pulling the knife out of her leg.
He moved in front of Michi and slowly licked her blood off the blade. If he was trying to unsettle her, it was working.
“Oh, I think I was asking you about Jessep. But we can come back to that. I see you have beautiful hands, and I want to play before we get to work.”
Rebel (The United Federation Marine Corps) Page 16
