Stars & Empire: 10 Galactic Tales Page 9

  It was Code White recall, which was a directive to withdraw immediately to the extraction area. I knew what to do from training, but I’d never actually experienced a Code White command. It wasn’t a rout. Not quite. But it was close enough.

  “Alright Marines, we’ve got a priority withdrawal order. Code white. We’re going to move back through the town, using those buildings as cover just like we did on the way up.”

  We snaked our way through the town, single file, at ten meter intervals. We lost Tonnelle, who got hit by an enemy sniper just as we passed the main section of the refinery. My readouts said he was dead, but I sent the rest of the troops on ahead and crawled back to doublecheck. Yeah. Dead.

  I knew that sniper was still active, so I stayed low and hugged the buildings as I worked my way back to the outskirts of the town and into the trench line we’d assaulted just a few hours before. Jax was there along with one of his men, Russell. The two of them were the only ones who made it back from team two, and they’d had to abandon the auto-gun.

  The battle computers running command and control continually adjusted the communications echelons to account for casualties, and they automatically routed messages accordingly. Apparently we’d lost enough officers to bump me onto the main command channel.

  “Attention all command personnel, this is Colonel Wight, provisionally commanding Strike Force Achilles. This is a priority one evacuation. We have hostile naval units inbound from the Vesta warp gate. The fleet is bugging out before it can be engaged by superior enemy forces. You have 30, that’s three zero, minutes to get your troops back to the staging area. Command control will download evac specific locations to your AIs. Get your troops there on time, because in 60 minutes the last shuttle is launching, and anyone left here is SOL.”

  Colonel Wight? She must have been six places down on the command chart. Seven, my AI reminded me without my asking. So things hadn’t been any easier on the high command than they’d been on the rest of us. Actually, I found out later it was mostly communications failures that put her in temporary command. General Everest was killed, and Brigadier Simonsen was wounded, but most of the rest of the top echelons made it through.

  The colonel’s voice continued, firm but strained. “Reports indicate that the enemy is putting pressure on us at all points. It looks like the hostile ground forces knew the relief was coming. We hurt them pretty badly, and it doesn’t look like they have a lot of strength left, but it’s probably going to be a fighting withdrawal for us. If we leave rear guards they’ll never make it back in time to evac, so we’re just going to fall back as quickly as we can, fighting the whole way. Do the best you can, and let’s get home.”

  As soon as she finished, my AI chimed in and advised that I’d received our specific rally coordinates. They automatically popped up on my holo display. Hmmm, not far from where we’d started from a couple days ago. I got my little band up and out of the trench and across the field we’d advanced over a few hours before. We were lucky again, and we didn’t see much enemy fire. The troops on our right—our original left, since our front had changed 180 degrees—seemed to be taking the brunt of the attack.

  I kept checking my chronometer and the distance to the extraction point. We were OK, barely, but we didn’t have any time to waste. I didn’t even pause at the original trench line. We just hopped over and headed back the way we’d advanced to the front.

  The ground was torn up even worse than it had been a couple days before, and even in armor we lost time as we scrambled in and out of craters filled with neck-deep water and muck. The strength amplification of the armor lets you power your way through the mud, but it doesn’t stop you from sinking in with every step or sliding down the slick edges of a crater.

  Twice I had to halt the group so we could turn and engage enemy militia who had caught up to firing range. Both times we hosed them down with heavy fire, and they broke and ran. It didn’t cost us much time, but every minute counted. I knew those deadlines were real. If the fleet was really in danger they weren’t going to risk it to pick up the shattered remnants of a strikeforce. It was brutal mathematics—Marines were cheaper and easier to replace than battleships. They’d stay as long as they could … and not a minute longer.

  I was surprised that we’d managed to retreat back to the staging area without losing anyone. I’d been waiting for the enemy to hit us hard. If they’d have launched a major attack while we were all retreating, none of us would have gotten off-planet. But the truth is, we had just about won the land battle when the recall orders came. The enemy wasn’t hitting us while we retreated because they didn’t have anything left to hit us with. For all the missteps and enormously heavy casualties, Achilles was failing because we couldn’t hold the space above the planet, not because we couldn’t take the planet on the ground.

  The rally area was a confused mess, with units straggling in from all directions and loading on whatever ship was available. Our group got hustled onto a tank landing shuttle that launched a few minutes after the hatches slammed shut behind us.

  It was a rough ride to orbit. The ship wasn’t built to hold infantry, and we were just hanging on however we could. The hold was silent. We all knew what a disaster the operation had been and, while none of us knew exactly how this defeat would affect the overall war, we had a pretty good idea it was bad.

  We were right. It was bad. But I don’t think any of us realized just how bad.

  CHAPTER 5

  AS Gettysburg

  En route to Eta Cassiopeiae system

  I was one of the 14.72% of the ground troops in Operation Achilles to return unwounded.

  Technically speaking, I didn’t exactly return, because the Guadalcanal wasn’t as lucky as I was. She’d taken a hit to her power plant during the initial approach, and she was still undergoing emergency repairs when the withdrawal order was issued. There was no way she could outrun the enemy fleet on partial power, so she offloaded all non-essential personnel and formed part of the delaying force, holding off the attackers long enough to evacuate most of the surviving ground forces.

  The way I heard it, the old girl wrote quite a final chapter for herself, taking out two enemy cruisers and damaging a third before she got caught in converging salvoes and was blown apart by a dozen missiles.

  I’d been on the Guadalcanal for three years, and it was surreal to think she was gone. Captain Beck, Flight Chief Johnson, even that short little tech who used to play cards with us … I can’t even remember his name. All dead.

  But those losses seemed distant, theoretical, not quite real. We had plenty of empty places right in our own family. My battalion had landed with 532 effectives. There were 74 of us now.

  The major was dead. Lieutenant Calvin was the only officer still fit for duty, so he took command of the battalion, a promotion tempered by the fact that he commanded only 24 more troops than he did when he’d led his platoon down to the surface just over a week before.

  Captain Fletcher was wounded. I was bumped to sergeant the day after we embarked and placed in temporary command of the company … all 18 of us. Getting missed has always been a good way to advance through the ranks.

  We were loaded onto the Gettysburg with various remnants of a dozen other units. It was a different world. The Guadalcanal had been a fast assault ship designed to carry a company of ground troops and their supplies. She’d carried about 60 naval personnel in addition to the 140 or so ground troops.

  Gettysburg was a heavy invasion ship, carrying a full battalion along with a flight of atmospheric fighters, combat vehicles, and enough supplies for a sustained campaign. At least when fully loaded she did. Over a kilometer long, she was ten times the tonnage of the Guadalcanal.

  But now she was carrying 198 troops, the remnants of 3 full assault battalions, along with a vastly depleted store of supplies and two surviving fighters—one hers and one from another carrier.

  The fleet managed to escape with serious, but not crippling losses, and once we were
through the warp gate the massive assemblage started to break up, as assets were redeployed to meet various crises in different sectors. And there were plenty of threats to deal with. We were on the run, and the enemy knew it. We’d stripped everything bare to mount Achilles, and now the enemy was trying to exploit our weakness.

  It was obvious things were pretty bad, but we really knew the situation was desperate when we were rushed to the Eta Cassiopeiae system, without any rest or even resupply. Eta Cassiopeiae was vital to us, a nexus with 5 warp gates, three leading to other crucial Alliance systems. Columbia, the second planet, was a key colony and base, and the moons of the fifth and sixth worlds were mineralogical treasure troves.

  If they were rushing exhausted fragments of units there without refit, they were expecting the enemy to attack. Soon. So the troops got 48 hours to recover from the Slaughter Pen, while the 2 lieutenants and 6 sergeants available to command them worked out a provisional table of organization and discussed the best training regimen to get them fit for combat again in short order.

  I ended up with 23 troops plus myself, divided into four normal fire teams and one three man group with a portable missile launcher, normally a company-level heavy weapon.

  The ship was less than half full, so there was plenty of room in the gym and training facilities. We put everyone on double workout sessions, which caused a lot of grumbling. But it also kept them busy, without too much time to think—either about where we had been or where we were going.

  Just like the Guadalcanal, the Gettysburg’s training areas were near the exterior of the ship where the artificial gravity was close to Earth-normal. The deep interior of the vessel, which was close to a zero gravity environment, was dedicated to storage and vital systems.

  A spaceship is far from roomy, even with half the normal number of troops present, so it was just as well to keep everyone busy whenever possible. Our expedited itinerary meant lots of time strapped into the acceleration couches with nothing to do but think and try to breath while you were slowly crushed. So, when the troops were out of the couches, I was just as happy to have them working up a sweat instead of crawling off somewhere to brood on defeat.

  Eta Cassiopeiae was three transits from Tau Ceti, and it took us about 6 weeks of maneuvering between warp gates before we emerged at our destination and another ten days to reach the inner system and enter orbit around Columbia.

  Since we were reinforcing a world we already held and not mounting an attack, we were spared the rough ride of a planetary assault. It was a good thing too, because there wasn’t a single Gordon lander left on the Gettysburg. We ferried down in the two available shuttles, about 50 men at a time, landing at the spaceport just outside the capital city of Weston.

  Columbia was a beautiful planet, mostly covered by one giant ocean and dotted with numerous small archipelagos. The single major continent, where 95% of the population lived, was a small oval chunk of ground just 500 kilometers north to south and less than 300 east to west. Situated in the temperate northern polar zone, its climate was almost perfect.

  The small island chains, mostly located closer to the equatorial zone, were sparsely inhabited by a hardy breed of colonists who braved the intense heat to produce a variety of valuable products from the Columbian sea, including several useful drugs obtained from the native fish.

  It was good to get off of a spaceship and have my feet touching the ground without someone shooting at me, a pleasure that was tempered by the knowledge that, while we weren’t attacking, we were almost certainly a target.

  All my battles to date had been offensive. We were an assault battalion—that’s what we were trained for, and that’s what we did. But circumstances had put us on the defensive, and now we would get a chance to dig in and fire missiles at the enemy landers—all those things that looked so good when we were attacking. But now we had a different perspective, and sitting as a target and waiting for the enemy to hit us, when and where he chose, didn’t seem so appealing either. We were used to having the initiative, and I’m not sure trading it for a foxhole or two was such a good deal.

  We’d also be alone, totally cut off on this planet to hold it or die. When we attacked we always controlled local space, and if the battle went against us we could retreat back to the ships. Operation Achilles had been a disaster, but it still ended with almost half the troops evac’d, even if two-thirds of those were wounded.

  But the Gettysburg was heading out as soon as the landing was complete. The navy simply couldn’t mount a credible defense of the system. Not now. So the strategy was to dump as much force as possible on the planet and try to hold out until a relief force could arrive.

  We were milling about the field, wearing our armor because that was the easiest way to transport it, but with visors up and weapons systems powered down. Whatever else an attack might be, it wouldn’t be a surprise. The warp point probes and the spy satellites in planetary orbit would give us plenty of warning when the enemy was inbound.

  I knew from the briefing we’d received on the Gettysburg that the garrison commander was Colonel Elias Holm, a veteran Marine who was now fighting his second war. He’d already added two new decorations to the glittering array of medals he’d been awarded during the Second Frontier War. It occurred to me that there was a good chance we’d be helping him win his third. Holm was a high-powered commander for this posting, but he was just what was needed to take a bunch of broken, demoralized units and forge them into an iron defense.

  One of the heroes of the Corps, Colonel Holm was the subject of a number of legends and rumors, and we all expected some two and a half meter giant who breathed fire and walked on water. But the man striding our way from the command building could have been any one of us. A bit older, yes, with a head of close-cropped, thinning brown hair, sprinkled with gray. He was a touch under two meters tall, with a lean, muscular build. There was a faint scar running from his hairline all the way down the right side of his otherwise pleasant but careworn face.

  Any sense of disappointment that Hercules himself did not step forward to greet us vanished when he stopped walking and started to speak. Everything I learned about truly being a leader started that day. His voice was warm and friendly, but also firm and commanding. “Welcome to Columbia.” The man exuded confidence with every word, and just listening to him was inspiring. “I know all of you were in Operation Achilles, and you all deserve a long stretch of R & R after that clusterfuck. But the fortunes of war are not often what we would like them to be, and as Marines we do what we must. Always.”

  He paused and looked us over. He wasn’t wearing armor, just a standard gray and black field uniform, clean and neatly pressed and adorned with nothing but a simple Colonel’s eagle on each shoulder. His black boots were shiny and neatly polished, except around the bottom where they were crusted with reddish mud.

  “You Marines are all veterans. Even if Achilles was your first drop, you’ve earned that distinction now. So I’m going to give you a good idea of what we’re up against. With you and the forces the Pericles dropped off yesterday, we’ve got 1,242 regular troops, about half of which are fully-armored Marines. Most of rest of the frontline assault troops were at Tau Ceti like you, which means you’re all under-supplied, and your command structures are shot to hell. We’ve also got 1,040 planetary militia who are well-trained and equipped. Columbia is a popular retirement spot, so the militia is well-leavened with Marine vets. A lucky break. The militia also have 6 tanks … old Mark VI Pattons.”

  Ok, so we had about 2,300 troops. Probably more than I would have expected, especially considering how urgently they rushed less than 200 of us here. Of course everything depended on what they threw at us. This system was worth a considerable effort, but we just had no way of knowing what the enemy could bring to bear on us quickly or how hard they’d hit us from space before landing.

  “We’re going to get everyone billeted the best we can, and I’m going to try to give you Achilles people at least a little rest
. I just don’t know how long we have until we are attacked. It’s possible we may not even be attacked…”—yeah, sure—“… but we will assume that we are a target. We are building defensive works around all the vital installations … trenches, strongpoints, and lots of underground bunkers and tunnels. A lot of that is already in place, and we’re going to be working on the defense grid right up until the enemy starts landing.”

  So that “little rest” was going to be very little.

  “We’re going to man the positions with the militia and Marine supporting units. All the powered infantry, plus the tanks, are going to be organized into four reaction forces. We’re going to hide you underground in key spots and throw you at the enemy where you will do the most damage. You’re going to be our ace in the hole, a mobile reserve that gives us the chance to surprise the attacker and take away some of his initiative.”

  A pretty daring strategy. The powered infantry was a little over a quarter of our numbers, but we were well over half the overall strength and firepower. Pulling us all out of the fight at the start threatened to fatally weaken the defense, especially since the enemy would almost certainly be attacking with powered units themselves. But it gave us a real chance to win a decisive victory if things worked out. If the enemy fully committed to attacking the other units, we’d have one hell of a tactical surprise for them.

  “All the Achilles people get the rest of the day to themselves. We’ll get you billeted, and then I want you to grab some extra sack time. You’re going to need it. Everyone’s putting in 12 hours a day working on defenses—remember, a day here is 27.5 Earth hours—but you guys are going to do 8 with an extra 4 hours of rest. Starting tomorrow. Officers and sergeants, stow your suits and gear and report to the control center for a briefing in 30 minutes at 1300 hours.” He paused for an instant and added, “That’s all for now.” He turned and walked back toward the HQ building.