C.R.O.W. (The Union Series) (19 page)

‘Calm down,
mate, you’ll be alright,’ one of the medics hushed, while the other tried to
restrain the casualty. He had a sucking chest wound, a round had passed through
his chest armour and through one of his lungs, causing air to enter the cavity
and preventing what was left of his lungs from being able to inflate. The
medics would have to treat the wound with a chest seal, and they would have to
be fast.

‘Come on,
stay with us, you’ll be fine,’ the medic repeated, ‘Come on, Peters!’

It was
Peters, my friend from training. Horrified, I stooped over my friend to help
him, ‘Not you too, Peters!’

‘Get away,
mate,’ one of the medics warned, ‘We’ve got this, get back to your section.
He’ll be fine. Go. Go now.’ 

Backing away,
I tripped over a dead man’s leg and crashed into the mud. I looked up and
realised to my dismay who it was that I had tripped over - it was Sergeant
James. His clouded visor hid his face from view, but the markings on his helmet
confirmed it.

‘Christ!’ I
exclaimed, staring in disbelief at the body of such an important platoon
figure.

A hand
suddenly grasped me by the daysack and tugged me backwards and I yelped.

‘Where have
you been, you idiot?’ I recognised the voice speaking to me, it was Sam.

‘Looking for
Chammy,’ I replied quickly, ‘Westy told me to.’

Sam released
his grip on me and gestured toward a dropship that hovered nearby, ‘Hurry up
and get over there, we’re out of here.’

I made to go,
then hesitated, the cries of the wounded and the shouting of panicked medics
cutting through me. A man wailed as a medic yanked on a tourniquet to stem the
flow of blood out of his amputated leg. ‘You found Chammy?’

Sam’s face
darkened, ‘Yeah. We found him.’  

The clouds
were beginning to part as we prepared to load back into the drop ships,
revealing a brilliant turquoise sky. I stared bleakly at its beauty as we
waited for our dropship to touch down. The sun beamed through the breaks in the
cloud, casting long shafts of golden light through the clearing smoke. It was
almost a biblical moment, as if God himself was reaching down to show us the
beauty of the land upon which we were fighting. But beneath that near perfect
sky, wrecked craft still burned across the blackened hill in amongst wilted crops
and smashed greenhouses, and muddy troopers carried the dead and wounded away
and searched the ruined bodies of their comrades for ammunition and salvageable
supplies. Hill Bravo would one day be recognised as a battle honour for the
battalion, where a battered company of drop troopers were beaten but did not
know it, and instead fought on against a Chinese onslaught. But I remember that
battle for what it really was - butchery.

Westy closed
us together and counted us in, there were only six of us. I expected him to
become irritated wondering where everyone was, but when he didn’t I realised
that we were all that was left.

‘Is Greggerson
okay?’ I asked Sam, suddenly remembering my friend. He was the only friend I
had left.

Sam nodded,
‘He’s one of the lucky ones,’ he said sadly. Greggerson would be somewhere in
the medical chain by then, probably in a hastily constructed field hospital
somewhere within our
landing zone. I took small
comfort knowing that one of my friends was okay, and then grew jealous when I
realised that for him the war was probably over.

‘Somebody
shoot me in the arm so I can get out of this hole,’ Stevo said, thinking the
same as me out loud.

‘Shut up,
Stevo,’ Westy snapped, and Stevo looked to the ground.

‘Westy,’ a
voice called. It was Corporal Evans who emerged from the ditch, his arms soaked
with blood, ‘Get your blokes loaded mate, me and the boss will ride together.’

Westy nodded,
‘Roger,’ he said and waved our dropship down. It lowered itself until its ramp
gently touched the ground, and we loaded ourselves into its tiny crew
compartment, strapping ourselves back into our seats. I looked about me, at
Brown and the other troopers in the section. Wide-eyed fear had been replaced
by the troubled gaze of men who had seen and experienced the horrors of war. We
were no longer the same inexperienced young drop troops who had loaded up on-board
Challenger and her sister ships high up in New Earth orbit a few hours ago. We
were already the survivors of one of the bloodiest battles fought during the
New Earth landings, and we knew there would be more.

The dropship
lifted and threw our bodies against the straps as it accelerated toward our
next objective.

The remains
of the battalion were moving to the recently seized peak of Hill Bravo, where
we could look onto Jersey City as over watch, as well as providing protection
while the 4
^th
battalion began to clear deep into the Chinese warrens
beneath us. We would be called upon again, there was no doubt of that, but the
battle group needed time to re-group and re-organise itself whilst others took
over the fight. The 4
^th
battalion was fresh, and had suffered far
fewer casualties on their drop than we had but the warrens were deep and
everybody knew that fighting underground was brutal.

I wondered if
the rest of the Union invaders had succeeded in their landings, after all
Jersey Island was only a small land mass not much bigger than England itself.
Across the planet the many armies of the Union would be fighting their own
battles. We could only hope that they had been more successful than us, or the
fight for New Earth would last for much longer than the couple of days we had
originally expected.

‘How many
mags have you two got?’ Sam asked me and Brown, ‘I need an ammo state.’

I paused to
think how many magazines I had used. I knew that I must have changed magazines
during the battle, several times, but it had been such a blur that I could not
remember. A magazine change is a drill, it’s instinctive, plus I must have
picked up tens of magazines off the dead. I checked my pouches and counted.

‘Twelve
mags,’ I reported.

‘Five hundred
for the mammoth,’ Brown added.

‘What else
you got?’

Sam nodded as
we told him how many grenades we still carried, smoke, claymores and so on,
making a note on his wristpad. It was smeared with blood, and Sam was clearly
struggling to get to grips with using it, gingerly padding the screen with a
gloved finger as the dropship threw us about. It would have been the wristpad
of Two section’s 2ic, Chammy, with additional functions for commanders. Chammy
had lost both his legs. The section senior trooper would then have to step up
into his shoes, but in this case it happened to be Sam, and not Stevo. In
theory a private was one dart away from becoming the section second in command,
and only two away from becoming section commander. It wasn’t uncommon on the
battlefield for that to happen.

Sam looked to
Westy, ‘We’ve got seventy-one total, plus a grand for the mammoth. Seventeen forty
mil grenades, twenty-one grenades and twenty-two smoke.’

‘Okay,’ Westy
nodded, ‘What about Jimmy’s ammo? Did you grab that?’

‘No,’ Sam
answered.

‘Well, why
not?’

Sam bristled,
and his response was curt, ‘Couldn’t find any on him.’

‘What do you
mean “I couldn’t find any on him”?’

Sam snapped,
‘I said I couldn’t find any, alright?’

Westy stopped
his enquiry, and his voice softened, ‘Alright, Sam. Alright.’

Jimmy was Two
section’s second MAM-G gunner; he had been with them all the way up to the
Chinese counter-attack. Sam later admitted to me that they had found Jimmy
before we loaded onto the dropship, but that they didn’t want to take his ammo.
Nobody wanted to dig through the gory pulp that was once their good friend.

In our tiny
crew compartment, we sat in silence. Somebody in the far corner had begun to
cry. The trooper’s sorrow made me think of Climo, Peters and the friends that I
had lost. It caused my eyes to become wet, so I shook the thought away.

Nobody ever
did tell me the total of troopers we lost that day, and I never asked. I didn’t
want to know the grisly truth in figures, even though the sight of dead friends
and comrades would haunt me forever after. The company had barely enough
survivors to man two downsized platoons, which would mean cannibalizing its
third platoon in the process. Jamo had died along with half of his platoon
sergeant’s party, killed by the Chinese saucer as me and Brown made our dash
into battle. He didn’t die straight away, apparently his last words to the
medics trying to save his life were ‘Go to hell,’ though that may have just
been a myth because I never met that medic to confirm it. Our platoon sergeant’s
death had left our platoon with so few men that we had ceased to be a platoon
at all, and how its only section would be used I didn’t know.

14: The Burrow

Gravel
crunched beneath our boots as we debussed from the dropship back onto the
surface of New Earth and the rocky peak of Hill Bravo, far above the farmland
and the carnage. This time, out of contact, we ran outward of the craft, forming
into a circle around it in order to give ourselves all around protection from
any possible attacks.

As I took my
position I was awed at the view from the top of the hill. Alpha Centauri Alpha
was setting, casting long shadows across the farmland landscape below us, which
was scorched black and littered with craters and wrecked vehicles. The valley,
gouged deep into the rocky landscape by an ancient glacier, widened as it ran
down toward the Emerald Sea where Jersey City smouldered. You could see why the
Emerald Sea was so-called, in the clearing turquoise sky and setting sun it
shimmered like it was made entirely of jewels. If I ignored the devastation
wrought by man in the foreground, it was the most beautiful thing I had ever
seen. Away from the valley to the north the surface of New Earth rolled away in
hills and jagged mountains, brilliantly red in striking contrast to the
turquoise sky. Distant wind turbines turned lazily in the fresh breeze that
blew across the mercilessly rugged landscape, occupied by occasional buildings
and farmland. On the horizon, explosions marked the on-going orbital
bombardment, which I could only assume - and hope - was from Union ships.

I laid down
on the red soil as we waited for the dropship to lift off. Despite the alien
sun rapidly falling toward the horizon, it felt warm against the back of my
legs, rapidly drying my wet body. My visor display read a temperature of
seventeen centigrade, a high summer temperature for that part of the planet. As
my body began to relax I became conscious of the water in my boots and the
dried mud that caked my gloved hands. My arm was sore but hardly worth seeing a
medic over, they had far more important things to deal with, I figured. My armour
had returned to normal. The sleeve sagged around where the dart had penetrated
despite the gel, exposing a deep gouge in my skin that had been sealed by a
white substance, which was the clotting agent released from within the fabric
of the armour. The rest of my combats were scratched and torn and speckled with
blood, some my own, but mostly other people’s. Friends and foe alike, mixed
together in one colour of red almost identical to that of the soil of New
Earth.

The dropship
rose a metre above the ground, and then it was gone, throwing clouds of dust in
the air as it shot over the edge of the hill and beyond. Like the rest of the
company that perched on the high ground overlooking Jersey City, we were left
to fend for ourselves once more. Even the gravtanks were elsewhere.

Smart
launchers were again trained to the sky, silently searching for more of the
dreaded Chinese saucers. After the devastation they had brought down upon us, I
would never underestimate the Chinese unmanned craft. The thought of them
strafing along that ditch, sending limbs and gore into the air like confetti
still sent a chill down my spine. That anybody could have survived it, let
alone me, was nothing short of a miracle.

‘We’re just
waiting here while engineers dig in a position for us to occupy,’ Westy
announced on the intercom from where he knelt in the centre of our circular
formation, ‘Sam, get forward to the sergeant major with a few blokes to sort
out ammo.’

‘Yeah, roger,
mate. I’ll take just one, mate.’

There was a
pause on the intercom. There were so few of us that if Sam took more than one
trooper away there would only be half a section left. ‘Yeah, take one.’

‘Roger.’

I heard
footsteps behind me, and a boot tapped my ankle. I turned to look at Sam who
had crouched over me.

‘Come with
me, Moralee.’

We ran across
the high ground between several other sections before locating the company
sergeant major and his work party huddled around a pile of ammo crates left
behind by his dropship. Corporal Evans was there in front of the CSM, both of
them were kneeling, holding a quiet discussion. I couldn’t tell what was being
said as we approached, even with my headphones magnifying any non-background
noises, but Corporal Evans was nodding a lot as he was being briefed. The
sergeant major patted Corporal Evans on the shoulder gently, and then passed
something to him. Corporal Evans cradled the object in his hand as the CSM
stood, as if unsure of what to do with it.

As we arrived
by the pile of ammo I caught the CSMs last grim words to Corporal Evans before
he turned and walked away, ‘Congratulations, Sergeant.’

I realised
that the object in his hand was a set of Velcro sergeant stripes, that of a
platoon sergeant who had met his end, no doubt. They were dirty, but with the
colour of the New Earth mud it could easily have been blood. He must have felt
our stare, because he turned and looked directly at us, at me. I averted my
gaze, unable to hold eye contact with the man I felt I had disappointed beyond
words. I knew he was wondering why me and Brown had survived and not Joe Mac,
or Rawson or any other one of his better troopers. Me, a snivelling excuse for
a crow and Brown, an arse-licking bully.
He must hate us both for it
, I
told myself.

A nearby
explosion broke the pause, causing us all to crouch and look. It was the
engineers a few hundred metres away mounted on lightweight buggies, driving
around ‘explosive digging’ a defensive position for us all to move into
overlooking Jersey City and the valley on one side of the high ground and the
vast expanse of rolling terrain out to the north.

Corporal
Evans looked down at the stripes in his glove and then back to us, ‘Close in,
Sam.’

We moved over
to our new platoon sergeant as he changed his Velcro rank badge on his upper
arm.

‘What’s your
ammo state?’ he asked, tapping his wristpad. If he realised I was there he gave
no sign of it.

‘Seventy-one
mags, half a grand of mammoth.’

Sergeant
Evans tapped the screen as he entered the figures, ‘Forty mil?’

‘Erm...,’ Sam
stared at his own wristpad and frowned as he deciphered the numbers, ‘Seventeen.’

‘You got both
grenade launchers?’

‘Yeah,’ Sam
patted the grenade launcher mounted beneath his rifle. Like Rawson and Chase,
he had carried it as a mark of his growing seniority, although Sam was nowhere
near as senior as they had been, ‘Westy has taken the other.’

Sergeant
Evans nodded, ‘Good. Mammoth?’

‘Only got the
one. Got half a grand for it. The others in bits.’ The owner of it was too.

‘Grenades?’

‘Twenty-one.’

‘Smoke?’

‘Twenty-two.’

Sergeant
Evans looked down at the figures and seemed happy, ‘Good. See the piles of ammo
over there, ours is on the right,’ he pointed and sure enough the ammunition
had been divided by the CSM into platoon piles to be taken away.

‘Roger, how
much have I got?’

‘Take two
crates of darts, another grand for the mammoth and…..’ he paused as he checked
his numbers, ‘Thirteen more forty-mil. Puts you on thirty. Happy?’

‘No dramas,
Sergeant. Come on, Moralee.’

I was sure
Sergeant Evans was watching me as I followed Sam over to the ammo pile, where
two other work parties from the two new sections were already busy collecting
their share. I wished that he would speak to me, just even to acknowledge me. I
wanted to tell him I was sorry for the men we lost and tell him of the guilt I
felt for still being alive.

‘That’s gotta
be pump, mate,’ one of the blokes commented to another, nodding his head in the
direction of our new platoon sergeant, ‘He gets his whole section smashed, then
he gets to fill a dead man’s boots.’

I said
nothing. We collected our ammo and left.

#

We ended up
sat an underground bunker or ‘burrow’ the Chinese had probably used as a
shelter from overhead bombardment. It wasn’t really a bunker, more a hole. A
single long tunnel had been cut out of the rock, maybe twenty metres deep and
angled so that we could crawl in and out and then a spherical cavern had then
been made in which a section or two could take refuge. A second tunnel had lead
from the cavern deeper into the hill, probably connecting with the Chinese
warren. Engineers had ‘plugged’ it with explosives and placed vibration sensors
to detect if the Chinese tried to tunnel back out. It was hard to imagine but
there was a battle still raging beneath us that might spill to the surface at
any moment. Sat in the middle of the cavern and angled up through the entrance
was the smart launcher, assembled on its tripod ready to launch in the event of
an attack from the air. Across the entrance we had placed thermal sheeting to
conceal our thermal signature from above. If we fired the smart missile, it
would take the sheet with it.

The sky had
become dark, and barely any light entered the chamber. Our respirator visors
automatically set themselves to a mixture of thermal imaging and light
intensifier so that we could see inside the man-made cave as clearly as we
could by day, not that there was an awful lot to look at anyway.

I huddled
against the wall of the artificial cavern, close to Brown and the boys of my
new section. Westy was away receiving orders, leaving the remaining five of us
alone in the dark. We pressed our bodies against each other to share body heat,
rather than freeze in the sub-zero night time temperatures. We couldn’t heat
our food, or produce any unnatural heat of any kind, lest we give off a heat
signature that would identify us to Chinese warships, despite our thermal
sheeting.

The Union
navy were engaged in another great battle far above us, word had got round that
several of our warships had been destroyed. The threat of the Chinese securing
control of orbit over Jersey Island and turning their guns down upon us was
very real, and terrifying.

Somewhere
beneath us the 2
^nd
and 4
^th
Dropship battalions were
clearing through more of the Chinese warrens, while we waited in a ring of
steel around the smouldering city. We weren’t ready to take Jersey City yet,
not without clearing out the warrens.

Filaments
within my armour worked hard to keep me warm without letting heat escape. They
were failing miserably. I had wrapped a bandage around the gouge in my arm, and
a further one over the top of the armour to try to keep the cold air out for
what little help that did.

‘I’m
freezing,’ Brown whispered. We were all shivering.

‘Yeah,’ I
replied woodenly.

‘Must be
what, minus ten?’

I glanced at
my visor display. ‘Three degrees above.’

Brown tutted
irritably, ‘How do you know that?’

‘Says it on
your visor display, you’ve just got to…..’

‘Yeah, yeah,
I remember,’ he interrupted sourly, ‘Nobody likes a smart-arse.’ I ignored the
rebuke, knowing that Brown would be embarrassed for not knowing such a simple
visor function.

‘How long
have you been in Drops?’ Sam leant forward to look at Brown.

Brown sighed,
‘Long enough.’

‘Shouldn’t
you know how to use your respirator by now?’ He mocked.

I realised
that Sam hated Brown almost as much as I did for his connections with Woody,
and relished the opportunity to attack Brown, ‘That’s not all of it,’ I piped
up without thinking, ‘Ask him if it smells good in his respirator!’

I couldn’t
make out Brown’s face, but his voice conveyed menace, ‘Be careful, Moralee.’

Ray sniggered,
‘You puked in your respirator, didn’t you?’ He laughed at Brown’s reluctant
nod.

‘Ray, you
can’t say nothing, you shat yourself!’ Sam added.

‘Nice one telling
everyone, mate!’ Ray said sarcastically.

I listened to
Sam and Ray laugh and joke and share stories of each other’s exploits in the
bottom of the cave as the smart launcher sat in wait. Sometimes we would stop
and reflect on things that had happened. It was how we coped, I guess.

I told the
boys of Two section about our near annihilation at the hands of the Chinese. I
left out hiding and various other acts of cowardice. Not the best way to
introduce yourself to a new section, I thought, and I think Brown probably
agreed because he said nothing.

‘Mate, that gravtank
saved you, man!’ Ray exclaimed, ‘We couldn’t get to you. Should have seen how
many pinkies there was, they almost had all of us. They was all moving toward
us through the greenhouses, had us pinned. Westy wanted to come get you, but
the boss said no.’

‘Did he?’ I
was shocked; the boss had stopped Two section from attempting to rescue us.

‘Mate, I’m
telling you, they were coming for
us,
man! They were gonna kill all of
us, if we left that position, we’d be over run in a minute.’

Sam mused, ‘I
don’t know if he made the right choice, but I know I wouldn’t want to have to
make that decision.’

I remembered
the boss’s face as he looked at the bodies strewn across the ditch, and then at
Corporal Evans, ‘
I couldn’t……. sorry
.’

‘This is one
messed up war,’ Brown said.

We sat in
silence for a few minutes, the only sound coming from the tiny motors in the
launcher’s optics and distant gunfire from another battle far away, echoing
across the valley.

I thought
about the battle being fought deep in the Chinese warrens and took small
comfort in being far away from it, even though I knew that it wouldn’t be long
before we would be called forward again.

I then felt a
pang of guilt return like a blade in my heart when I thought of Climo, dead in
the mud of that ditch. If I had fought harder, fought better, then maybe he
would have survived. How could I take more comfort in knowing that other troopers
would again be dying instead of me?