C.R.O.W. (The Union Series) (3 page)

I doubt that
Tony Berezynsky felt the same; he looked like he was losing it.

‘Tony you’ll
be alright, mate,’ I offered him encouragement. It was a pretty empty gesture,
but something is always better than nothing I liked to think.

Tony shook
his head, ‘This is crazy!’

‘You’re right
there, mate, this is mental!’ Climo shouted. The vulcan was going berserk and
we were slowing down rapidly:  Party time.

It wasn’t
just mental, it was unreal. Here I was, sat in a marvel of science and
engineering turned into a weapon of war, on an alien planet light years from
Earth, about to go into battle. How do you explain that to your kids? If you
make it that far that is?

My elation
was all but gone, and for the first time in my life I made a prayer to God.

‘Twenty
seconds!’

Dear Lord,
please don’t let me die
.

‘Okay, okay!’
Corporal Evans hurriedly answered to the pilot on the intercom, then turned to
us, ‘Lads, when you exit, you go left! There’s a ditch you can get in. Left,
Berezynsky you got me?’

Tony would be
the first man out, ‘Yeah I got you!’

If you let
me live I promise Ill change
.

‘Ten
seconds!’

I’ll
believe in you. I’ll go to church. I’ll never pick up a weapon again
.

‘Five! This
is it, lads!’

My stomach
lurched for the last time as the dropship  came to an abrupt standstill. My
straps disengaged automatically and I reached for my rifle by instinct. Light
poured in as the rear ramp began to fall.

It was
raining on the surface of New Earth.

The noise
outside was deafening even with my earphones on. The  dropship was unleashing
everything it had to cover our exit.

‘GO, GO, GO!’
Corporal Evans screamed, but Tony hesitated.

‘GO, you
knob!’ Climo shoved him out the door, and I followed.

2: One month Ago: New Arrivals

I probably
wouldn’t have felt the gradual return of gravity and the gentle thud of the
shuttle mating with Challenger’s airlock had I been asleep like the others. I
had been comfortable enough, the shuttle was far less cramped than a dropship compartment
and the zero-G was quite relaxing once you got used to it. But I hadn’t found
myself able to fall asleep during our ten hour voyage into deep space, instead
I had passed the time staring at a tiny green computer screen at the far end of
the compartment, our only illumination since the pilot had turned off the
internal lighting. For the best part of the journey it had flashed on and off,
with a single message, ‘NO INTERFACE.’ At times during the journey I had
pondered over its meaning, but coming up with no answers I had long since given
up and simply watched it blinking on and off. Like a clock ticking, it counted
the seconds to our arrival.

I never could
sleep during shuttle journeys, not necessarily through fear or excitement, but
rather through anticipation of whatever I might encounter at my destination. My
mind raced through scenarios of what might happen when we stepped aboard Challenger
for the first time, wondering if the reception would be frosty or friendly and
if the ship would be vast and awesome like the troopship that had taken me to
Uralis for my training, or cramped and uncomfortable like the warrens of Fort
Abu Naji, deep beneath the Uralian surface.

It would be
my second time aboard a ship of the Union Navy. Well, it would be my third, but
the second time didn’t really count - we had flown up from the surface of
Uralis by dropship, docked with an old decommissioned warship and then dropped
only fifteen minutes later - we never even left the crew compartment. The thing
that made Challenger different was not to do with the ship itself, it was who
was on it. Challenger was a troopship with a formidable cargo, it was home to A
Company of the 3
^rd
Battalion English Dropship Infantry, a company of
fully-trained and combat-hardened drop troopers and it was preparing for war.
Onboard the comparatively tiny transport shuttle there were only fifteen of us,
the rest of the platoon I had trained with had been split up into the flotilla
of troopships that orbited silently, high above the brown and white surface of
Uralis. Soon we - the fresh meat - would be the minority, instead of the
majority as we had been in training. Challenger carried two hundred and fifty
men, a hundred of whom were drop troopers.

I remembered
the final words of wisdom from my section commander, the man who had trained
me, before we nervously boarded the shuttle to leave Uralis for the last time,
‘Be the grey man. Do what you’re told and never answer back. Keep your head
down and eventually you will be accepted.’ I told myself I would follow his
words to the letter.

Suddenly the
compartment lights switched on, blinding me with their intensity. I covered my
face with my hands as the shuttle AI spoke over the intercom with an almost
mockingly cheerful voice and a strong German accent.

‘Ladies and
gentlemen, welcome aboard challenger! The time onboard is 0400 hours. Please
wait while the docking procedure completes, this may take a few minutes.’

The
compartment filled then with the groans of troopers unimpressed by their rude
awakening, straining against their straps in an attempt to stretch their limbs.

As if
anticipating what the lads in the compartment would surely attempt next, the AI
added, ‘Please may I remind all personnel that it is not permitted to remove
your safety harness until the docking procedure is complete.’

‘Yeah, thanks
for that one,’ somebody moaned sarcastically, followed by the sound of buckles
being unfastened.

‘Somebody
tell that robot to ram it, I need a few more hours!’

‘Yeah, let’s
do a lap round the planet or something.’

I smiled at
the absurdity of the last comment. Of course we had no choice in the matter,
not anymore anyway. Sign up to the dropship infantry and you choose not to have
a choice.

A chime and a
light at the far end of the crew compartment announced that we were allowed to
remove our straps and I quickly unbuckled myself, flexing unused muscles and
massaging aching joints. Uralis had added years onto my body, and sometimes I
felt more like a middle-aged man than an eighteen-year-old boy. We stood and it
felt good to feel gravity working against my bones again, even if I did know
that it wasn’t the real thing - like on Earth. Although I had learnt to handle
zero-G without puking all over the place, it always reminded me how far from
home I really was.

‘Ladies and
gentlemen, we are successfully docked with Challenger, please ensure you
collect your equipment when you disembark, or you will not see it again.’

‘No ladies on
here!’

‘No gents,
either!’

I ignored the
moans and rants of the other recruits, disconnecting my sausage bag from the
straps that held it in place beneath my seat, straps that  prevented it from
bouncing around the compartment in the event of decompression. I had always
thought it quite ridiculous, none of us were given suits, so decompression -
however unlikely - meant certain death anyway. Who gave a stuff about things
bouncing around or shooting out of the crew compartment?

I slung the
bag over my shoulder. It could be no heavier than 10 kilos, the maximum
permissible weight a passenger could bring aboard a military shuttle. It had
been weighed to the milligram, and searched thoroughly for bacteria somehow
smuggled accidentally from Earth - or worse – contraband goods. Heaven forbid I
be in possession of beer or pornography before I go to my death, and how I
would have gotten it to Uralis anyway was beyond me!

I carried
very little in my sausage bag, most of the kit and equipment I had used in
training had been taken off of me on Uralis before I left. A new set of
equipment would be issued to me aboard Challenger, equipment more specific to
where we were going. I travelled light, as was the norm in the Union military.
To be exact, I carried 8.4529 kilograms. That was the weight of everything I
owned, minus the clothes I wore on my back.

‘Nervous?’
Peters, a London lad who had been in my section in training, picked up his own
sausage bag from where it had sat next to mine.

‘Nah,’ I
lied, ‘Can’t be any worse than Uralis!’

Peters raised
an eyebrow and chuckled, ‘I sure hope you’re right, man,’ he patted my arm, ‘Hopefully
we end up in the same platoon.’

I nodded, and
I hoped beyond hope he was right. Peters was the only lad from my training
section who had been sent to Challenger, the others had all been sent
elsewhere. There was nobody else on the shuttle I knew or got on with quite
like Peters. Even though we were from different cities, him from London and me
from Pompey, we had similar personalities, likes and dislikes, and so were
mates since the very beginning. Having a good friend nearby to talk to, I knew,
would really make a difference on board Challenger.

‘You think
anyone’s up?’

I shook my
head, ‘I doubt it, reveille’s probably at six I would have thought.’

‘Yeah, fair
one. I wouldn’t wanna get up early to check out a bunch of new guys anyway.
Hopefully we get an hour’s extra head down.’

Without
warning the crew compartment’s airlock door slid open silently, revealing the
airlock that led into Challenger. Within the two stood a figure dressed in a
suit, its helmet tucked under its arm. For a second I blinked at the figure,
who was bathed in blinding white light.

After couple
of seconds it spoke irritably, ‘Come on then, you lizards, let’s go!’

That was the
first greeting I had on board Challenger.
Was I ever in for a treat
, I
thought as one by one we filed through the airlock, past the rather grumpy
looking airlock technician. I couldn’t quite figure out what her problem was -
it was her job to maintain, check and cycle the airlock after all - but then I
wasn’t in a position to say anything.

Challenger’s
lock room wasn’t the enormous cathedral sized room I had entered on board the
Fantasque, the enormous troopship that had taken me and hundreds of other
recruits from Earth to Uralis, and neither was it tiny or cramped, in fact it
wasn’t really much at all. Apart from a few suits hanging from hooks along the
walls, the room was completely bare and not very interesting to look at. If I
could describe my first impression aboard Challenger with a single expression,
it would have to be ‘anti-climax’. Or as most troopers would say – ‘pump’. We
formed up into three ranks with hands clasped behind our backs, sausage bags at
our feet, which were shoulder width apart in the correct position of ‘at ease’.
Rarely had we practiced any form of drill on Uralis, most of that was done on
Earth during basic training, but old habits never die, and we were eager to
please our new unit.

The
technician emerged from the lock, having checked that nobody had been left
behind. Seemingly unimpressed by our smart parade ground formation, she counted
us with an outstretched finger. The Navy loved to count things, I had learnt. I
presumed she was counting us in case somebody had been left behind, which I
would have thought would have been highly unlikely. Either that or she just
wanted to appear more important than she really was, which I thought was
probably more likely.

‘Just waiting
for your lot to come get you,’ she finally said, jabbing a thumb over her
shoulder, ‘I just work the lock.’

We said
nothing, unsure of the rank of the woman addressing us. We didn’t fight in
vacuum, that was what the marines were for, and so we didn’t work closely with
navy personnel, they were simply our means of getting to where we were going.

I listened to
the new sounds of the ship, the rush of air being circulated through her
network of ventilation ducts and the faint hum of powerful and exotic machinery
deep within her bowels, echoing through the metal superstructure that
surrounded us. Even though I had never seen how awesome a ship like Challenger
was from the outside with my own eyes, I could imagine from images I had seen
that she was an incredible thing to behold, a glorious machine half a kilometre
long, her harsh angular lines and bristling weaponry revealing her true purpose
as a machine of war with the ability to project the Union’s power across the
cosmos.

We waited for
five minutes, fidgeting awkwardly while the technician busied herself resealing
the lock, until finally somebody came to collect us.

The grey
haired Lance Corporal held up a tablet and read our names aloud, ‘Jones!’

‘Here,
Corporal.’

‘Rai!’

‘Here,
Corporal.’ He continued down the list of fifteen names. Satisfied, the Lance
Corporal lowered the tablet and returned it to his pocket. I assumed he must be
a store man or something; he was too old to be fighting within the sections.
The aging process could be slowed or almost stopped in our day and age, but we
certainly weren’t rich enough or worth enough in the eyes of the Union to
receive treatments worth more than our own equipment. If troopers didn’t
promote fast enough in the dropship infantry, they were either honourably
discharged (which is basically the same as being dishonourably discharged!) or
found themselves in a simple job that nobody else wanted - if they even lived
that long of course.

I read the
Lance Corporal’s name badge sewn onto his fatigues shirt, it read ‘Stokes’.

Lance
Corporal Stokes sighed deeply and rubbed one eye, ‘Right then, fellas. It’s
four in the morning, I’m tired and you’re tired, so we’ll get this done quick.
You will be split equally into the three platoons. When I take you to your
rooms get your heads down, reveille is at
0600
hours. Happy?’

We nodded,
and chorused, ‘Corporal.’

‘Good, coz I
want to get back to bed. Follow me.’

We followed
Stokes through a bulkhead door and into the ship. It slid open and closed
behind us with a deceptively quiet hiss. We were told that in the event of
catastrophic decompression the doors were designed to close so fast and with so
much power that they could crush a man’s body beneath them and still achieve a
perfect seal. I wouldn’t want to find out if that was true.

We walked
along a wide corridor, lined with even more closed bulkhead doors. Every ten or
so metres another door would slide open, and behind us another would close
automatically. Decompression could cause the entire ship to ‘blow out’ in less
than a few seconds, I had been told. To prevent this from happening, the ship
was divided by hundreds of bulkhead doors. The philosophy was - better to lose
a section of the ship and a few good men - than have the entire ship blow out.

‘This is the
main access corridor,’ Stokes explained as we walked, his voice echoing against
the metal, ‘It runs the full length of the ship from the bridge to the lock
room, where we just came from. You can pretty much find whatever you need along
here, and it keeps you away from headquarters, they tend to use their own
access corridor. Stay clear of headquarters unless you’re specifically told
otherwise.’

Somewhere
below us a line of gravity generators created an Earth-like gravitational field
along the length of the ship, and we lived in a cylindrical world that
surrounded them. There were several access corridors like the one we walked
along, each running from aft to stern. What I found really weird were the
circumference corridors. There were ten in total, each equally spaced along the
ship like the ribcage of a gigantic monster. Each one was a good three hundred
metres long, and curved around the ship to end where it began. The first time I
walked around one I almost wanted to vomit, the sense of vertigo it gave me was
overwhelming what with the horizon only a few tens of metres away. I found the
best way to overcome it was to imagine as I walked or ran that I was rotating
the massive cylindrical world with my feet, rather than going around it upside
down or whatever. It was much easier to imagine that you were always up, and
everything else was below you, rather than the other way round.