Stars & Empire: 10 Galactic Tales Page 20

  Caught in the crossfire, with half their troops already in flight, the rest of the enemy troops broke and ran. We had pretty much lost visibility in the slushy ammonia mix that was now falling, but we still had some scanner contact. I ordered Jax to take a platoon and pursue, linking up with Frost and taking overall command on the surface. I took the rest of Rijis’ company and Sanchez’ crew and headed to the central bunker. We were going underground.

  I gave Jax the battalion heavy weapons—they wouldn’t be much use in the tunnels anyway—and told him to keep the enemy off-balance, but to be very careful. I didn’t want our troops getting strung out all over the place in conditions like these. But I also didn’t want these enemy troops on the surface to reform and come down into the tunnels behind me.

  There were two large, reinforced plasti-crete structures. Both seemed to be access points to the underground complex. I sent Sanchez to one with his company, and I went to the other with half of Rijis’ crew and the battalion auxiliaries.

  There were half a dozen guards in each building, so we had a quick firefight as we pushed our way in, suffering 4 more casualties before we wiped them out. The access points appeared to be large hatches over circular shafts about 4 meters wide. The shaft was about ten meters deep, and there was a large chamber at the bottom. There were 4 metal ladders, one at each compass point. It looked like there was also a bank of three lifts, but I wasn’t about to trust to the enemy to keep the power on while we took the elevators. I lined up a section at each of the ladders, and ordered Sanchez to proceed the same way in his building.

  We popped about a dozen grenades down the shaft to disrupt anyone waiting there—I didn’t want any fire as we climbed down—and then the sections went over the edge. The first troopers got to the bottom quickly, climbing about halfway down and then jumping to the ground. The area at the bottom of the shaft was a large round chamber about 50 meters in diameter, clearly an assembly point for ingress and egress. There were large pipes along the ceiling with what looked like high powered air and water jets, probably for removing toxic, radioactive residue from armor and protective gear before entering the main complex. I’m afraid we were rude houseguests, though, and didn’t stop to wipe our feet.

  I commed Sanchez for a report, and it seemed like the chamber below the other bunker was similar but considerably smaller, probably an emergency or secondary ingress/egress point. I told him to proceed with caution. We’d killed a lot of their troops in the firefight, and even more of them were disordered and fleeing on the surface, cut off from at least these two re-entry points. But we still had no idea how many more troops they might have down here, and I wasn’t taking any chances on either of our groups getting cut off and trapped.

  The bank of lifts was along the wall not far from the ladder. They appeared to be large freight-sized elevators, and we had no idea how far down they went. We didn’t need the enemy using them to bring troops up in our rear, so I had one of the rocket teams blast them. The cars were all somewhere on a lower level, but the explosions did more than enough damage to make the things unusable.

  There were four doors leading out of the large chamber. One exit was a large set of double doors near the lifts, which appeared to be access to the mining areas. The other three were clustered on the opposite end of the chamber.

  I checked with Sanchez, and his room didn’t have the lifts or the large doors, just two smaller ones. I ordered him to move forward and clear one, leaving a strong guard on the other in case the enemy sallied out. I did the same thing on my end. I set up one of the SAW teams covering each door, and left a platoon in the chamber. Then we blasted open the door on the left and headed down the corridor.

  The tunnel appeared to be bored out of solid rock and covered with a white, plasti-crete coating. There was a long lighting track running down the center of the ceiling, but it looked like they’d cut the power. I had the lead troopers turn on their suit floodlights so we could get an actual look at the corridor and not just an infrared reconstruction. The tunnel had no branches, and we had no enemy contacts at all. We ended up in a single large room with rows of armor racks along the walls. There were half a dozen suits hanging, but the rest of the racks were empty. That didn’t mean anything on its own—even if there was a whole army down here waiting for us, they’d be suited up by now.

  I had Hector do an analysis the number of suit racks and estimates of the surface force we had engaged. His answer confirmed my initial guess. Most or all of the troops who’d suited up here were in the surface force. Of course, for all we knew there could be ten more rooms like this down here.

  We were at a dead end, and I was about to get everyone turned around and head back to the main chamber when I got started getting urgent reports. They had audio and scanner contacts on the other side of one of the doors. They were covering the entry with a SAW, and there was a squad against the wall next to the door.

  I got everyone turned around in a hurry, and started back. I hadn’t gotten 20 steps when I got the update. The door had been blown, and troops swarmed into the chamber. But the ID transponders flashed a warning to everyone, and at the last second no one fired. It wasn’t the enemy, it was Sanchez’ people pouring out of the doorway.

  I commed him immediately for a report. It turns out the entry he’d taken his people through was in fact a secondary ingress/egress point. There were some storage areas directly under, but the only tunnel led straight back to the access chamber we were occupying, which was now crowded with both forces.

  I sent Sanchez and one of his platoons down the middle corridor to check it out, but my gut said the double doors by the lifts were more important. While Sanchez was scouting I checked in with Jax for a surface report. The rout had continued, with small clusters of enemy troops rallying and fighting back, but most trying to escape. Jax estimated that there were less than 100 enemy troops left alive on the surface. He’d formed a command post and was sending search and destroy teams out to finish them off.

  Good. Leaving Jax in charge of something was as good as seeing it done yourself. I also got an update from fleet command. Tyler Johnson’s battalion had landed near the second planetary objective. Hopefully our reports would help them out. I had just signed off with fleet, when Sanchez commed me. The central corridor led to an extensive complex, which seemed to be mostly living quarters. They hadn’t searched the whole place yet, but so far everywhere they’d been was deserted. It could take hours to go through every corridor and room in a complex that housed several thousand workers and troops. I wanted Sanchez back here before we went into that mine.

  “Sanchez, have Sergeant Ho and one section systematically search the place to confirm it is deserted. Meanwhile, you get back here with the rest of your crew. We’re going into the mine in ten minutes.”

  “Yes sir. On the way.”

  I started to get the troops organized for entering the mines while two of the engineers prepped charges to blow the doors. When Sanchez got back we blasted our way in and started moving down the tunnel in three waves.

  We might as well have walked through the front door of hell. For the next nine hours we fought step by step, level by level through the gigantic mazelike mine against a fanatical enemy determined to fight to the death. We made our way through booby traps and past hidden snipers. Our scanners and communication with the surface were out, the effect of the concentrations of super-heavy elements in the surrounding rock structures.

  In one large chamber we found the bodies of the mine workers, the poor souls sentenced to this hell for one infraction or another. They were little better than slaves, and my first thought was someone decided they couldn’t be trusted in this fight, and had them disposed of. But after looking I could see they’d been dead for quite some time.

  The troops defending the tunnels were Mubarizun, elite Caliphate special forces that we certainly didn’t expect to find there, and they fought us with suicidal determination. The combat was beyond savage, as bad or worse than anyth
ing during Achilles or Columbia, but in confined spaces deep underground. They collapsed tunnels on us and utilized their familiarity with the mazelike complex to try and outflank us. We fought with every weapon we had, and in the tightest areas the battle came down to blades and even armored fists.

  I sent a runner to call down Jax’s troops after they’d cleared the surface, and Ho’s group as well for reinforcements. Trying to direct an entire battalion strung out through kilometers of twisting tunnels is virtually impossible, even when your com is working. The sergeants and corporals earned their pay taking the initiative when orders from higher up couldn’t reach them. By the time we’d cornered the last group and wiped them out we were exhausted and near the end of our endurance. I’d never seen troops fight more bravely than those I led that day, but I also knew the battalion was nearly broken.

  I came close to not making it out myself. I ended up separated from my troops and surrounded by 4 of the enemy. They’d have taken me down for sure, but just in time two of them went down under a pair of blades slashing so quickly my eyes couldn’t follow them. PRC troops carried a blade in each arm, not just the one, as we did. Their military maintained a tradition of fighting with the blade, and Aoki Yoshi was an expert. I whipped around and sliced one of the enemy troopers nearly in half, then spun and shot the other one in the head. That was how my liaison officer, Captain Aoki Yoshi, saved my life on Eridu despite the fact that I had told him ten times to stay out of the fighting.

  When we hobbled out of the tunnels, now absent any living creature but us, and climbed slowly up the ladders to the surface, less than half of us were left standing. The survivors slowly gathered around the rally area, waiting silently for the shuttles to land, while the medics did what they could for the wounded in terrible conditions. Sanchez wasn’t one of the survivors. He died fighting half a dozen enemies with his blade while his troops pulled their wounded back to safety. He’d be decorated posthumously, I would see to that. For all the miserable good it would do him.

  As soon as I realized what we were up against, I’d sent runners back to the main chamber to contact fleet command so they could warn Major Johnson and his battalion before they went in. Unfortunately the warning was too late. The complex on the other side of the planet was a copy of the one we attacked, and it was also full of Mubarizun. Johnson’s troops there were beaten back, and the general had to send in another battalion to reinforce them, which played havoc with the org chart for the rest of the campaign.

  We boarded the shuttles and rode back to the ship in almost total silence. Everyone was in a dazed stupor, and after we docked I just left everyone alone for a few days. No reports, no training, no drills. I let them mourn our dead in their own ways.

  In the days after the battle we managed to piece together what had happened. It seems there had been a rebellion among the workers that shut down production. Shortly before my strikeforce took the station at Gliese, the Mubarizun expedition had been dispatched to support the garrison, which had not been able to take the mines back from the rebels. The elite troops quickly wiped out the rebellious workers, but they couldn’t withdraw because we now controlled the Gliese 250 system. So we blundered into a prepared and fortified force of elite troops where we’d expected only garrison. And we’d paid the price in blood.

  The garrison troops had Mubarizun units embedded with them, which explains why they fought so hard on the surface. In the end there were no prisoners at all, and even if they’d tried to surrender, after the losses we’d taken I doubt any of us would have accepted it. When a battle reaches a certain point, when the cost has been too high, it becomes a struggle to the death.

  So I’d been in another fight where my troops suffered 50% casualties, with a very large percentage of those killed. More ghosts to share my fitful and restless sleep.

  Johnson’s battalion got hurt even worse, with casualties over 70%. In the end the general had to rescue them with a reserve battalion, which itself took 20% losses. Tyler Johnson would have plenty of time to think about his own ghosts. His men pulled him out of the mines still alive, but barely. Now he would go through the ordeal of growing two new arms and two new legs, among other treatments. He was a good officer, but I didn’t know if he’d ever be the same again. I wanted to see him before he was shipped back to Gliese, but he was heavily sedated and kept in medical isolation, so it wasn’t possible.

  The task force set a course around 79 Ceti toward the warp gate leading to HD 44594, while the battered Marines onboard licked their wounds and tried to reorder themselves. There was still one fight left on this campaign, though none of us really had the stomach for it.

  The Lafayette, one of the large transports, was detached back to Gliese with the wounded as the rest of us pressed on. My battalion had 540 men and women at full strength. The day we went through the warp gate to HD 44594 we had 252 fit for duty. Sanchez was dead, and Rijis was wounded and en route for Gliese, so two of the three companies were without their commanders. Most of the platoon leaders were on their first campaign in that post, and I really didn’t want to put a green lieutenant in command of a company, even a seriously shrunken one. I transferred most of the battalion auxiliaries to Frost’s company to bring it up to strength, and I combined Sanchez’s and Rijis’ companies and put Jax in charge. It wasn’t a demotion for Jax, but I needed a solid company commander more than an exec right now. I kept two heavy weapons teams under my direct command as a battalion reserve.

  After we emerged into the HD 44594 system, I shuttled over to the general’s ship for a conference. We could have done it over the communications grid, but after the fight on Eridu, I think he just wanted to meet with me in person. I could immediately tell he felt guilty for the bad intel and the losses we’d suffered as a result. General Holm had his own retinue of ghosts, and it was even bigger than mine.

  He told me he was going to try to keep my people out of the next fight, but that he might need us for reserves. I told him we were ready to drop in front of an enemy division if that’s where he needed us. He transferred the remnants of Johnson’s shattered battalion to me, and I organized most of them into a third company. I took the snipers and heavy weapons teams and added them to mine to beef up the battalion reserve. We were still below strength, but a lot better off than before.

  Johnson’s troops were on the Iwo Jima, and it wasn’t practical to move them over to the Belleau Wood, so we’d assemble the battalion on the ground if it came to that. I thought Johnson’s men would need some attention, though, so I requested permission to shuttle over to their ship on my way back. The general agreed completely and even decided to go with me.

  The visit had a tremendous impact on the troops, whose morale had been sorely battered. Major Johnson had been very popular, and the battalion had taken horrific losses fighting in almost impossible conditions. We gave them an update on the major—he was going to survive, and he would eventually report back to duty. Then I welcomed them to my battalion and told them I was proud to have them join us. The general gave them a somber but inspiring pep talk that seemed to help somewhat.

  As it turned out, we did see more action on the campaign. The third planet of the system was a world just like Earth, and if it hadn’t been situated in a remote dead end in space, it would have attracted enormous colonization interest. As it was, it served mostly as an agricultural world, producing food for export to nearby colonies, which were mostly nightmarish worlds useful for their mineral resources. It had been colonized by a group of religious extremists too fanatical even for the Caliph’s tastes. So he accommodated them by giving the group their own planet, and in doing so got them off of Earth and secured a food supply for his Rim colonies.

  Great. More fanatics. One of these days I wanted to fight a sane enemy. There were no regular troops posted on the world, which they had named Aroush, but the entire civilian population would likely fight to the death. Where there weren’t farms, the planet was covered with deep pine forests, giving a guerilla f
orce a lot of places to hide. The entire battle consisted of a series of search and destroy actions to hunt down the locals. We ended up having to rotate in and relieve some of the units from the initial wave.

  Our wounds were still fresh, and we were in no mood to be gentle with any enemy, particularly a bunch of suicidal religious crazies. I’ve never seen troops under my command act so much like grim executioners, and we swept entire areas, killing everyone we found.

  It was three weeks before we’d eliminated the last holdouts and General Holm declared the campaign completed. The savagery of the whole thing had been beyond anything we had expected. Two of the three worlds we had invaded were now uninhabited graveyards. The Mubarizun had massacred the rebellious population on Eridu, and were themselves wiped out in the battle with us. On Aroush we’d systematically hunted down and killed every occupant of the planet, all of whom had taken up arms to fight us.

  I managed to arrange to have the troops from Tyler Johnson’s old battalion transferred to the Belleau Wood when we re-embarked. They’d meshed very well on the ground, and were well on the way to becoming a full-fledged part of my battalion, a process I intended to see completed on the long trip back to Gliese 250.

  We’d had a hard campaign, but I wanted us to be back to total readiness as soon as possible. Rumors were rampant that General Holm would be mounting another campaign from Gliese, this time against the outer rim, and I was sure my battalion would be part of it.

  I would be saying goodbye to my liaison officer, who was heading back to PRC headquarters before being posted to a new command. Aoki wasn’t even going to the station at Gliese, but would be shuttling directly to an outbound PRC cruiser. There was an informal black market on ships, and even throughout entire fleets, where liquor, food, and other rarities were obtainable. I did a little trading myself and managed to secure a few pounds of good ground beef. We had a little going away party on Aoki’s last night with us, complete with very rare burgers.