Red company invasion, p.21
Red Company: Invasion, page 21
We started off by stacking the sandbags even higher than before. We set up small artillery and rapid-fire railguns, which were capable of showering an immense number of accelerated projectiles over a vast distance. Once we’d finished the basics, we were left waiting for the enemy to approach. We had a good vista on three sides, while allied ships were parked behind us.
Once we had our defensive base built, our weapons all in place and our supplies hauled up to the hilltop, the waiting began. That was always the worst part before a major battle, especially one that might wipe out thousands of civilians who were huddling in fear behind you.
I wondered if this is how certain mutant groups that we’d annihilated in the past had felt: surrounded, cut off and yet determined to defend their civilian population to the last. It made me feel regretful about some of our past campaigns. Now that we were facing true aliens bent on the annihilation of humanity, all our conflicts over resources and the like seemed petty in comparison.
Sergeant Cox came to complain at me as dusk fell over the hilltop. “We don’t have enough men,” he groused.
I looked around. Counting heads, Red Company had around forty frontline fighters, plus officers and a few support personnel. I shrugged. With several squads of fighters at the wall and one squad that was setting up small artillery—which consisted of machine gun nests and mortar batteries—I figured we filled out Firebase 7 rather well.
“What else do you think we need?” I asked.
“Look at Teklution over at Firebase 1,” Cox said. He pointed to the next hilltop, which was a bit lower and off to our west.
“Yeah, so?”
Sergeant Cox rudely made a blatting noise with his mouth. “They’ve got twice our number at least. We need more guns on this here wall of sandbags, that’s what we need,” he told me, pointing to our front lines.
I did agree with him in principle. More men were always better than fewer. I shrugged. “What can we do about it? Bitch amongst ourselves?”
Sergeant Cox muttered something about me being useless and then wandered off to complain to Quinn. After that, he brightened and came back to me again.
“Good news,” he said. “We’re not going to get our asses shot off up here all alone. We’re getting some support.”
“How’s that?”
He beckoned and I followed. We walked to the opposite side, the side of Firebase 7 that faced down toward the Mars City dome itself. There was a long line down there, single file, winding up to the hilltop where we’d stationed ourselves.
The approaching group were in spacer suits, with no real insignia or even a guy with a flag leading the way. They carried random firearms, but nothing about them looked impressive to me.
“Who the hell are they?” I asked.
Cox laughed. “You never pay attention, do you, Starn?”
He rapped his knuckles on my faceplate, like I was a dumb recruit or something.
I suppressed the urge to grab and crush his fingers in my bigger fist. I slapped his glove away instead.
“Don’t tell me…” I said. “They’re conscripts? Militia from inside the dome?”
“Exactly that,” Cox said, laughing. “What’s the matter? Think they’re going to shoot you in the ass when it comes down to it? Is that it?”
“Something like that,” I admitted.
Cox and I had had plenty of experience with green troops. Their turnover rate among the lower ranks in Red Company was rather high. Most men served for only a year or two. By that time, if they were still breathing, they usually quit while their luck was still holding out. Signing onto a combat unit in space wasn’t the safest job a man could choose for himself.
If you lasted long enough and were tough enough, you got to a certain level of competency eventually. Our true veterans tended to last a lot longer. Red Company boys either learned all those little things that kept a man breathing despite the odds—or they didn’t.
But our fresh fish... they tended to screw up. Unlike a force that was at land or sea, you didn’t get to make a lot of mistakes in Red Company.
The main reason for this was we lived and trained much of the time in a vacuum. One small hole in your suit could easily be fatal. Running out of air, running out of fuel, running out of power to keep your suit heaters or air conditioners going—any of those things could kill a man.
Sometimes in space it was as hot as boiling water outside, and sometimes it was colder than the frozen hell of Antarctica back down on Earth. There was never any air, any water—nothing. If anything went wrong, you pretty much died. Or at the very least, you were in serious trouble.
New recruits, just like the guys winding up the hill toward us, they were the ones most likely to make that kind of mistake.
“We owe it to these guys to teach them the basics,” I said.
“Oh, don’t worry about that. The governor assured us he’s trained them all, probably personally,” Cox laughed again. It was more of a dirty chuckle than a real laugh.
“Cox…” I said, “we’re going to have to train them as best we can—at least until the aliens show up.”
He grumbled at this idea and kicked at a few rocks. He sent them bouncing downslope toward the struggling line of conscripts. Rocks on Mars bounced quite a ways when you kicked them downhill. The gravity was lower here, making the rocks lighter and our kicks relatively more powerful.
“All right,” he said at last. “If they’ll take some instruction from us, I’m willing to give it.”
“Good enough. Maybe they won’t shoot us in the ass in the morning.”
“The morning?” Cox said. His laughter had faded away.
“That’s right. I’ve been involved in some of those planning meetings, remember?”
He snorted. “More like you’ve been massaging Captain Hansen’s toes for her. Or sucking on them, maybe…”
I scowled at him. False rumors about the captain and I having a personal relationship always seemed to get back to Freya and piss her off. I thought about yelling at him for it, but passed on the idea. Denials would only crank up the heat on these whispered accusations.
“Reports say some of our factory workers are quick-marching it out here,” I told him. “They’re driving our carryalls and tractors—that kind of thing. An army is coming our way.”
“Tomorrow…?” he said in dismay, gazing out at the Martian desert that filled our view to the west of the hilltop. “Are they going to attack us the minute they get here?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe. They’ll probably just encircle us. Maybe they’ll wait until they have more numbers before they do anything crazy. Don’t wet your pants.”
Cox nodded, but he seemed disturbed. He was no longer thumping on my helmet or making jokes about me sucking on the captain’s toes.
When the slow-pokes from the dome finally got to our hilltop, Lt. Quinn summoned us for a little meet-and-greet. We flanked Quinn as the militia leader approached.
He was marked with the insignia of a captain. That made my heart sink a bit. Would we really have to listen to some nobody civilian from the dome? He seemed winded just from the uphill climb.
His name was Captain Biles, and he saluted Lt. Quinn—at least when Quinn saluted him. Cox stood on Quinn’s right, while I stood on Quinn’s left.
Neither one of us smiled at the bullshit captain. We both looked grim and business-like. That came naturally, but it was also a natural attempt on our part to intimidate this so-called officer.
I could tell just by the way Biles’ eyes were flicking back over the three of us that it was working.
“Lt. Quinn, Red Company,” Quinn identified himself.
Biles slapped some dirt away from his epaulets. This showed his rank more clearly.
“Captain Biles, Mars Militia,” he said. “I’m in charge, here. I’m taking command of this firebase.”
“Taking command, huh?” Quinn asked, unimpressed. He put a couple of fists on his hips. “Have you ever served in a military before, Captain?”
Biles drew himself up. He was a bit shorter than Lt. Quinn and a bit rounder around the middle, but he looked like a serious enough fellow.
“In my younger days, I served as a marine just like you,” he said, “aboard the Gallant.”
“Ah…” Quinn said. “A good ship—but she blew up, didn’t she? Something like five years ago?”
“Out at Saturn, yes,” Captain Biles shrugged. “By then, I’d retired my commission.”
“Yeah, right… I get it.”
Lt. Quinn’s attitude softened somewhat. Cox and I relaxed as well. At least this guy knew something about fighting in vacuum.
“All right,” Quinn said. “What can we do for you?”
Biles waved over his shoulder. “I’ve been out of this game for years,” he admitted. “I’ve been serving as a police chief down in Mars City, running 3rd Precinct. Anyway, none of that matters anymore. There’s not going to be a 3rd Precinct if the aliens have their way. I need your help, Quinn, to get these men into fighting shape as fast as possible.”
Quinn shook his head. “I can’t really do that for you, sir,” he said. “It’s just not going to happen. The enemy’s not going to give us that much time.”
Biles stared at the men struggling up the slopes behind him. Some were struggling just to climb a hill under light Martian gravity.
“Yeah…” he admitted. “Half these boys are from street gangs on the bad side of town. The rest are volunteers—accountants, AI-prompters—softies who sit at a desk all day and wear VR goggles all night.”
Quinn laughed quietly.
“All right,” Biles said, turning back to the three of us, “we don’t really have much time to train them. You’re right about that. They’re going to get their training facing an unknown alien menace. How should we place them on this hill, so they can do the most good?”
Quinn thought about that seriously for a moment. “To be honest,” he said, “my first thought is to set up a front line farther down the slope, maybe with a new sandbag wall we’ll have them build tonight. Then, essentially, my Marines will be upper tier, firing over their heads.”
Right away, Biles got it, and he laughed. “You don’t want these jokers to shoot you in the back of the head. Is that it?”
Quinn shrugged. He couldn’t deny the charge. “Yeah…”
Biles nodded, surveying the hilltop. “Yeah… that’s actually a good idea. There’s more of us than of you. You guys are the real fighters. I’ll put my men on the front line, string them out as pickets. That way, they’ll do something—even if they just play the part of targets.”
Lt. Quinn loved the idea. The two men soon walked off to their respective groups, shouting orders.
By this time, I was impressed with Captain Biles. Say what you would about the guy having some years and a paunch on him—he was a realist. He hadn’t turned the situation into a pissing contest. He hadn’t started a fight with Quinn. He’d listened to Quinn’s advice, and he’d glommed onto it as if it was an idea pulled from his own brain.
Although the militia men groaned a bit, they immediately began filling sandbags and carrying them down to the lower ridgeline, a dozen yards further west and below our own hilltop circle.
These guys had no artillery, no big weapons—just rifles. They weren’t laser carbines either, but rather a hodgepodge of various gear. Many of them had old-fashioned gunpowder cartridges, the kind of rifles they’d used back on Earth a century ago.
Quinn ordered me and my squad to join in and provide aid, shoring up the defensive fortifications on the lower ridge. We followed the contours of the land the best we could, but it was far from perfect. In places, there was outright exposure, just some sheer rock without much of a place to dig a defensive line at all. As a result, there were gaps in our half-assed wall.
By midnight, despite all the problems, we had a two to three-foot high barrier all the way along the ridge line with a ditch dug behind that. There was room for a hundred and twenty men to park in the ditch directly behind the sandbags. While standing, it was easy to direct fire downslope while your body was protected—for the most part. It was the best defense we could throw together in the time allotted.
With the riflemen and their gear strung all along this lower wall, Red Company scrambled back to the hill’s crown to finish our preparations. We’d set up multiple sophisticated strong points with good vantages. Large machine guns were placed here. These weapons had tripods and liquid cooling. They fired depleted uranium bolts with the hammering power of railguns. Each nest had an excellent field of fire that commanded the view of many miles of open land in front of it.
Food was passed around when sunset came. The men were allowed to retreat from the lines in shifts. When my turn came, I headed to the huddle of bubble tents at the back of the firebase. Here, you were allowed to relieve yourself—or even take a shower. Men could eat, talk, and relax for an hour before being sent back out to the line.
When it came to sleeping, however, the accommodations were nowhere near as nice. We slept in ditches behind our primitive walls. There weren’t enough tents—much less bunks—for all of us to sleep comfortably.
Besides, there was no point to it. The lead enemy units were due to be arriving within a few hours. The time for rest and relaxation had come to an end.
Chapter 27: Sudden Onslaught
Dawn on Mars was a different thing than it was on Earth. It started off blacker, for one thing. Due to the thinner atmosphere, the clouds were thin and wispy. The sky overhead was star-filled and pitch black.
Then, quite suddenly, the darkness began to be tinged with a reddish light. This grew and swelled over time, finally transforming into the orangey haze of day.
Long before that, Red Company was up. Men were stretching and relieving themselves by opening up their suit pouches, which had filled with liquids down around their shins. These liquids steamed and bubbled into the sands of Mars. I liked to think we were doing our small part to terraform this frozen planet by whizzing on it all the time.
“Sergeant Starn!” Lt. Quinn boomed.
“Here, Lieutenant!”
Quinn was banging the drums, and he was doing it early. He came marching down into the trenches, kicking boots and legs that got in his way. He harangued any man whose kit wasn’t prepared for battle at a moment’s notice.
“They’re out there,” he told us as a group, pointing to the west. “They’re close, and they’re coming in fast.”
“How can that be, Lieutenant?” Ledbetter had the guts to ask. “They’re just a bunch of freaky converted miners on foot.”
“No,” Quinn said. “That’s an inaccurate description of this enemy. We left a lot of gear out there, a lot of machines, and they’ve built more. They’ve taken our carryalls, our tractors, our dirt-haulers, everything we used to use out there to mine ice and ore. They’ve converted it all into a mechanized force.”
There were some sounds of scoffing and disbelief. I had to admit, it sounded rather incredible even to me. Quinn glared around at the circle of us.
“You might not believe it, but they’ve done it. These aliens, they’re resourceful. They’ve bastardized our technology. They’ve converted our machines and bent them to their will. They’ve stolen countless devices built by us for benign purposes and transformed them into transports to carry their troops to war.”
I thought this over, and I found it alarming. It did seem like this enemy, unlike any we’d ever fought before, was exceptionally good at taking the technology and even the organic flesh of their victims and transforming it to a purpose of their own devising. They’d converted our men into an army of soldiers. Apparently, in just such a fashion, they’d stolen all of our vehicles and transformed them into personnel carriers.
What was terrifying was how fast they’d accomplished all this. These aliens were bizarre, and their technology seemed to be centered upon the bastardization of anything they came upon.
“Not since the Golden Horde of Genghis Khan,” Lt. Quinn was saying, “have humans faced a force like this.”
Ledbetter’s hand was up, and the fingers in his glove were waggling. Reluctantly, Quinn called upon him.
“But sir,” he said, “Genghis Khan, if I remember my ancient history, was a human, wasn’t he?”
“Yes, of course he was, you idiot.”
“Corporal…” I growled, stepping forward. Ledbetter had somehow offended the lieutenant, and he needed a smacking.
But Lt. Quinn waved me back. “Let me explain. Back somewhere around 1200 AD, there were countless cultures, kingdoms, principalities and nations strung all across the nation known as Russia. Mongolia, leading what they called the Golden Horde, swept across the entire continent and all the way into Europe. They destroyed everything they ran into. They essentially erased countless peoples. Many say that that region of the earth never recovered, not from that day to this.”
I frowned, thinking about it. It was a bizarre thought to think we were facing a scourge that was so dangerous that it could be compared to the greatest conquerors in Earth’s history.
“The Golden Horde… “ Lt. Quinn continued, mostly to baffled looks from my troops.
Not one of them had ever studied the military history of old Earth—not one.
I counted myself among the ignorant, to be honest.
“The Horde was made up of the very peoples they’d conquered. The Mongols themselves, by the time they got to Europe, were few and far between. They were essentially only the officers, the men with the whips driving slaves in front of them. It was a vast horde of half-assed peasant troops who were so terrified of their masters, so conquered and weakened in will that they would assail any wall. They risked their lives and operated in a frenzied fashion as the frontline troops of their Mongol masters.”
Quinn eyed us, and he must have seen a lot of baffled faces. “My point is, that’s exactly how this enemy is behaving today.”
Ledbetter’s hand was up again. I really felt like smacking it down, but I didn’t. Without him being called upon, he began to speak.
