C.R.O.W. (The Union Series) (14 page)

‘Yes, Sir.’

‘Don’t think
that this is the end of it,’ the CSM warned, jabbing a finger at me, ‘If I ever
have you in my office again, for even as much as wasting a drop of water, I’ll
have you in that brig without a seconds thought, is that clear?’

‘Yes, Sir.’

He waved a
hand, ‘Go on, then. Get out.’

I hesitated,
‘Sir? Will Climpson be in the brig until…?’

The CSM
looked up at me irritably, ‘I’m sorry, have we just become friends? What’s it
got to do with you? Get out.’

#

I could only
wish that Jamo could have been as lenient with me as the CSM had been, but then
I guess the CSM knew that he would deal with me and so hadn’t bothered. There
was only one thing you could do when a man like Jamo gave you a debriefing,
stand there and take it. He sprayed me with saliva in an angry rant that told
me all I needed to know of how little he thought of me, the rant ended with me
on the deck of the platoon corridor clutching my gut. And that wasn’t the end
of it. Jamo knew that the platoon were waiting in their rooms for him to leave.

Half the
platoon hated Woody, but for every man that hated him there was one who either
liked him or at least knew that he was a senior private, not to be attacked by
some jumped-up new lad. They came from their rooms, cautiously at first in case
there were NCOs to see or hear, and then I got my punishment.

‘No head
shots,’ Stevo ordered the ten or so troopers who had come to take their revenge
upon me. Rawson was amongst them, I saw.

It didn’t
matter if I broke a bone; it was nothing the infirmary couldn’t fix rapidly for
the invasion. I took the beating like I was in a dream, my mind shut off the
pain and I allowed myself to be thrown around the corridor like a rag doll. I
thought the NCOs might notice what was going on in their lines, but they
weren’t there, or at least if they were then they were turning a blind eye to
it. After all what goes on ship stays on ship.

Happy
birthday
, Moralee.
Not long now
.

11: Alpha Centauri

Final
preparations began several days prior to Challenger entering the Alpha Centauri
system. We worked tirelessly; kit was packed, inspected and re-inspected. Ammunition
was loaded onto the dropships along with our kit,
so that all we had to do on the day was jump on board with the kit we
were wearing. Then once everything was packed into the dropships we would have
our kit checked all over again. Nothing could be left behind; once the
dropships left the ship there was no going back, not because they weren’t
physically capable of returning themselves to orbit, but because the Chinese
anti-air defences would make it hard enough to land , let alone take off again.
For at least the first few hours and most likely several days afterwards
anything that dropped to the surface wasn’t going back up again.

Climo was
released from the brig after only a week of solitary confinement, we would need
every man to fight and so his crime was overlooked. Brown stayed in the
section, much to my dismay, though he was moved out of my room to prevent
further bloodshed. He glared at me whenever we saw each other, but never went
near me for fear of being punished. Woody was still in intensive care, though
he was rumoured to be rapidly on the mend. Climo assured me that there was no
chance he would be returned to one platoon, and I hoped to God he was right.

Nobody
touched Climo, though the NCOs made sure he spent most of his time on fatigues
as punishment. It seemed none of the blokes wanted to take their chances with
the man who managed to put Woody in the infirmary, and Climo seemed to enjoy
the notoriety. Unfortunately it was that very notoriety that earned him the
MAM-G, which had been Woody’s weapon. The ‘mammoth gun’ as it was known was
simply a larger version of the MSG-20 rifle, which was fed by a drum of three
hundred rounds and was designed to be fired on fully automatic. We all knew how
to use it but it was a heavy weapon, despite modern materials, and a pain to
carry around.

‘There you
go, tough boy,’ Joe Mac had sneered when he handed Climo the weapon at the armoury
for the first time. He had never appeared to be best friends with Woody, but he
clearly resented me and Climo remaining within the section while one of the
senior bods was in the infirmary.

Climo hefted
the cumbersome weapon, ‘Bastard,’ he uttered, though whether the utter was
directed at Joe or the weapon I didn’t know.

Corporal
Evans remained aloof over the whole situation which had unfolded within his
section, and allowed Joe Mac to discipline us as he saw fit, and to be fair,
between Jamo, Mac and the CSM’s galley duties, I don’t think I could have taken
much more punishment anyway!

‘Ev saves his
anger for when he needs it,’ Climo said, ‘And to be fair I don’t think he likes
Woody, but when he does get mad, dash and get down!’

Corporal
Evans took one of the platoon’s three spare troopers from within headquarters.
Jamo wasn’t happy, as he had planned to use the spare troopers as a work party
to help him move casualties and ammunition, and he was quick to point it out to
me and Climo.

‘If we run
out of stretchers, blame these two,’ he said to the platoon.

The new
addition was pretty senior, but thankfully not of the Woody variety. Chase was
a lean trooper with a chiselled jaw, who was often referred to as ‘chase the
face’ for his good looks that supposedly left Uralian women weak at the knees.

Although
Rawson had been involved in my violent punishment for attacking Woody, he had taken
mine and Climo’s presence in the section remarkably well, in fact he appeared
more than happy with the trade-off for Chase, who he clearly got on well with.
I didn’t think he would ever admit it, but Rawson found Woody’s personality
tiresome.

Berezynsky
remained as quiet as ever within the section, barely saying a word to anyone
unless spoken to, which had begun to cause other troopers to ask if he had
mental issues. As for the other new lads within the platoon, we had all found
our own places within our sections, and even though we were at the bottom of
the pile, we began to be treated like human beings at last. Woody’s stooge
Stevo had withdrawn himself since losing his protection, and the platoon began
to feel balanced, even if it still wasn’t always pleasant. Perhaps we were all
beginning to finally realize that when the time came and we dropped into the
New Earth atmosphere, it wouldn’t matter who we were or where we came from or
how long we had served. In the end we would all fight and die side by side up
against the full force of our enemy.

The might of
the Chinese was sobering - endless holographic briefings with the boss in the
galley detailed the known weapons in their arsenal - and their estimated
numbers.

The Chinese
possessed a conscripted ground force in excess of two hundred thousand men,
much like the sand bag fillers who trailed behind our invasion fleet. They,
like our conscripts, were more about quantity rather than quality, but
sometimes in war quantity had its own kind of quality, and two hundred thousand
was a lot of men. They would all be dug deep into warrens, with a mind to turn
the surface of the planet into chaos as soon as we hit the deck.

They had an
estimated thirty dropship battalion based mostly on the surface, which roughly
translated into an additional twenty-five thousand fully trained volunteers who
would move rapidly by dropship and act as shock troops, striking at units
bogged down by the conscripts.

Chinese
soldiers were supposedly similar to us, but uniformed in a light pink
camouflage with a visor that was black and hid their faces.

‘Despite
popular belief that the enemy soldiers are all robots,’ the platoon commander
smirked at the absurdity, ‘The Chinese visors are black for reasons simply
within the design.’

‘That’s what
they want us to think, Sir,’ Rawson pointed out with a hint of humour in his
voice. One of Stevo’s latest rumours was that the Chinese soldiers were ‘Cyborgs’,
the very word sent shivers down trooper’s spines. Cybernetics was taboo,
reserved for the rich and the depraved, and what it could render men capable of
was unknown to us. And all troopers feared the unknown.

‘Well, why
don’t you prove it to me when we get down there,’ the boss said challengingly,
and we laughed.

Chinese
dropships were larger and squatter in appearance than ours, as were their
gunships, which were their answer to our gravtanks. They were designed much
more like aircraft than our low profile ground hugging craft but their basic
capabilities were much the same.

Chinese
soldiers on the ground outnumbered us significantly; we had only twenty-six
dropship battalions to their thirty and only one hundred thousand conscripts to
take over the ground we captured. We were relying upon our navy to provide us
with orbital supremacy and for our unmanned fighters to outmatch theirs and
keep control of the atmosphere.

If the
numbers we had were anything to go by - and where they came from I would never
know - then the Chinese were outnumbered by our fleet as we brought with us an
impressive sixty warships to their forty, but for unmanned aircraft we were
only at best the Chinese equal. Chinese robotic fighters were the scourge of
the Union army and we feared them, but none as much as the ‘saucer’.

Amusingly the
saucer was once seen by our ancestors as a spacecraft flown by creatures from
elsewhere in the universe, and it invoked terror that transcended generations.
The real thing made its debut on the battlefield years ago, piloted by a
computer like many modern aircraft and manufactured by factories on human
colonies. It too created terror, but a terror far worse, for this saucer was
real, and it carried guns. The saucer was an unmanned aircraft that used a far
more advanced propulsion system than our dropships did, and because it was
unmanned it was barely limited to the speeds it could go up to or how rapidly
it could change direction. If a man were inside it he could be turned into
mush. It was so shaped in order to make it aerodynamic in all directions, which
helped make it far harder to hit because one second it would be going one way
and then the next. They were mostly used by modern armies as atmospheric fighters,
but they also made devastating ground attack aircraft and the Chinese knew this
all too well. A Chinese ground attack saucer was equipped with banks of smart
missile pods, and a twin twenty millimetre cannon that could turn a platoon
into mincemeat before they even saw the thing. We were scared of the saucers,
and all desperately hoped that our lives wouldn’t be brought to an abrupt end
by one.

The day
before we would arrive in Alpha Centauri I heard word from Greggerson that
Woody had been released from the infirmary and would indeed make the drop.

‘How can they
be releasing him so soon?’ I asked as my heart plummeted down into my stomach,
‘The bastard died several times didn’t he?’

Greggerson
shrugged, ‘He had ops on his brain too, apparently. He’s gone to two platoon.’

Damn
trooper’s rumour
, I cursed silently, knowing that there was no way Woody
could recover to combat fitness that quickly if his brain had indeed been
operated on and he had been in a critical condition for days. Modern medicine
could do it, but drop troopers weren’t worth enough to warrant such expensive
medical equipment. After all, there was one advantage to infantry that ensured
that we never became obsolete. We were cheap.

‘Who told
you?’ I asked.

‘Stevo,’
Greggerson answered, ‘I wasn’t talking to him, I overheard him saying it,’ he
quickly added as if I would be disgusted at him talking to the senior tom.
People in the platoon liked Stevo less than Woody, who he often hid behind. He
was also full of shit, but this time I somehow knew that Stevo wasn’t making up
another one of his random false rumours. Woody was out, and surely he would be
wanting his revenge.

Entering the
Alpha Centauri system was an anti-climax, there were no sirens, no sudden
shudders through the superstructure, just a chime on the ship’s announcement
system at four in the morning whilst me, Climo and our new room-mate, Chase,
slept in our bunks. The sound woke me and I knew what it meant, we were there,
and I waited for the captain to speak. The announcement system remained silent
and after several minutes I realised that it would remain so. There was no need
to wake us early, because we would not arrive at New Earth for another twenty-four
hours at least, and we had already been briefed what we needed to be briefed.
Besides, it would take the Chinese hours before they even realised we were even
inside the Alpha Centauri system, and far longer before any contact would be
made between the two mighty navies.

We were to be
given a lie in that morning, until zero-nine-hundred. Bliss, given that our
average sleep was only seven hours long, and a chance for us to recharge
depleted batteries for what lay ahead for us.

I tried to
get myself back to sleep, tossing my body to and fro across the bed to get
comfortable again. Eventually I resigned to staring at the shadow of the bunk
above me where Chase slept, unaware of our arrival and snoring loudly. Nothing
had changed on the ship, the room remained the same, and the air vent continued
to blow its light breeze against my face as it always had done. But something
had changed, because somewhere out there in the unseen void was the enemy, and
we were no longer alone.

There was also
something else very different that morning though, as we washed and dressed for
breakfast, instead of our dull grey ship’s fatigues we wore our dark red gel
armour that we would soon be fighting in. We were quiet, subdued even, and the
NCOs barked orders and hurried us along and tried their best to keep us
motivated.

‘This time
tomorrow you’ll have a pinkie on the end of your bayonet!’ Westy, the Welsh corporal
in command of Greggerson’s section grinned from ear to ear as though he
relished the thought of the killing that came his way, and his section cheered
enthusiastically on their way to breakfast.

Passing
Corporal Evans in the corridor to the galley I thought maybe me and Climo might
receive our own encouragement from our section commander, but he simply nodded.

‘Carry on,
lads,’ he said, and we scurried away.

‘Do you think
he doesn’t like us?’ I asked Climo.

‘Nah, he’s
like that with everyone. Trust me, mate, if there’s a section to be in, it’s
his.’

I hoped to God
that he was right.

Through the
day we were fed tiny bits of information about what was going on outside
Challenger’s metal shell. The Union fleet had completed its jump successfully,
and was moving toward New Earth and Centauri Alpha’s four other worlds, which
were either scorched wastelands or cold gas giants. The vast majority of the
fleet moved toward New Earth, the primary objective of the operation, and just
after mid-day we detected the first of the Chinese ships. It wouldn’t be long
until the first laser banks began to fire, and combat would commence.

We sat in the
galley together as a company, and listened while the ship’s captain and the OC
made their speeches, and the captain told us that whoever our God was we should
take him with us and that he would protect us, or something like that. I looked
for Woody amongst the crowd that huddled close around the two officers, fearing
for reprisals, but I couldn’t see him and besides I had far worse things to
worry about. Two hundred and twenty-five thousand Chinese soldiers, to be
precise. Nobody spoke a word, we listened as though those words would be the
last we would ever hear, and maybe they were. We tried to appear calm, but you
could feel the tension amongst the company, the air was thick with it. We were
scared. Sure we had volunteered to do our duty, but none of us wanted to die.
We wanted adventure, we wanted purpose, we wanted money, we wanted guts and
glory - there were so many things that made us chose to serve at the tip of the
blade of the Union spear - but none of us wanted to die, and now on the verge
of all-out war, we were scared.