Ash: Rise of the Republic (19 page)

We ducked for cover as bullets hummed past
us. Jones and his men unleashed a storm of covering fire while Deb
and I worked our way to flanks of the panicking, desperate men.
Suddenly released from his captors, the reverend sprang up and
shouted a challenge. He saw me creeping to his right and drew a
rusty machete from the belt of the soldier nearest him. He charged
at me, waving the blade over his head, screaming a fiery bible
passage.

His eyes were wild, his face smeared with
soot and ash and blood. I let him get close before I drew the
pistol and calmly pulled the trigger. The reverend’s bodyguards
moaned in despair as he slumped to his knees. Blood trickled slowly
from the small hole in his forehead. He fell forward, revealing the
ghastly exit wound. His brains were spread on the ash behind him in
a wide fan of pink and red. His right leg thumped a sickening
tattoo in the loose ash for a few seconds.

I stared at the twitching corpse for a
moment, transfixed. Jones was already detaining the surrendered
bodyguards by the time I remembered the boy. I peered into the
blizzard of ash frantically, hoping for a glimpse of the fleeing
pair. I shouted in frustration for Deb and the others to join me.
We searched for hours. We never found him.

Chapter 8

June, 31 PC (2046 AD)

*

“
The volunteer armies of the RNT,
though rarely capably led, were usually superbly equipped and
always enthusiastic. Given the right commander they were frequently
victorious.”

-Robert Thibideaux, ‘Armed Citizenry: The Armies of
the Republic’; RNT University Press, 48 PC (2063 AD);

*

The first day of the march brought them to the gates
of Navasota. The small settlement, once a farming community, was
now a hardscrabble gambling town. The brothels and saloons,
catering to outlaws and homesteaders alike, outnumbered more
wholesome businesses ten to one. The town was clustered between the
banks of the old divided highway. Its boundaries, north and south,
were palisades of roughly hewn pine logs stretching beneath
towering concrete overpasses. The town guard, themselves barely
better than the outlaws who frequented the filthy town, kept watch
from the guardrails above the gates.

All afternoon they had watched a dusty cloud
of ash inch toward them. When the first Bradley Fighting Vehicle
crested the low hill in the distance, they followed their
instructions and sent for the Mayor.

The Mayor, flanked by a party of the town's
more affluent citizens, all dressed in their finest clothes, waited
patiently in the middle of the road for the vanguard of the dusty,
lumbering column.

The two rumbling armored vehicles squealed
to halt a few yards in front of the welcoming party. Their tracks
were caked in leaden ash. The sleek, business-like Stryker rolled
up between them on its huge tires. The wide hatch at its rear
slowly descended. The Mayor and his entourage coughed at the cloud
of dust which slowly enveloped them.

A squat man, grossly fat, waddled down the
ramp made by the open hatch with two be-medalled staff officers in
tow. He ponderously trudged toward them, swollen feet throwing up
white puffs of newly fallen ash. He was clearly out of breath when
he arrived, so the Mayor spoke first.

"Good evening Colonel, we would like to
welcome you to Navasota. Captain McLelland let us know you would be
arriving today, but we expected you much earlier. I'm truly sorry
sir, we had planned for a more elaborate welcome, but unfortunately
the band has gone home."

"Yes, well, there were unforeseen
difficulties this morning. You know, my good man, sometimes there
are kinks in the logistics that must be worked out at the beginning
of an expedition of this scale."

The Mayor did not know, but he nodded his
head knowingly.

"Please, the Army of the Republic of New
Texas is always welcome in our modest community. I'm sure your men
are tired, we have arranged quarters and board for all of them.
I’ve reserved our finest establishments for the use of the
officers.

"Excellent, my good man. We will, of course,
have to station guards at the rest of the taverns. I wouldn't want
the boys to get too loose tonight, we've a long march tomorrow.
Plus I’m sure you don’t want these ruffians running wild in the
streets.”

The Mayor would actually have loved to have
the rich Campus soldiers running wild through his town, but he held
his tongue and nodded genially. "Of course sir, follow me."

The Captain and his troop had been firmly
ensconced in one of the smaller saloons for hours. They were on
their way to being thoroughly drunk by the time the Colonel entered
the town.

The night before, in the final briefing,
Captain had objected to a portion of the Colonel's plan. In
retaliation, Garza had him report on the supply and logistics
situation in great detail. Though McLelland's plans were perfectly
adequate, the Colonel had torn them to shreds. Supply stores were
shifted, shipping schedules were reorganized, and transport
responsibilities were shuffled. The last minute changes had
resulted in mass confusion.

The army, like every army in history, was
entirely dependent on an efficient supply chain. The Captain had
gone to great lengths to establish that chain over the previous
week. The Colonel, in a petty tantrum, had managed to rip that
delicate chain apart in a matter of minutes.

The army had orders to march from the Campus
gates at dawn. While it was still dark, the men gathered in their
companies, ready for a hard day's march. There they waited as the
sun rose behind slate clouds. The Colonel's hasty re-organization
of the supply companies had left a gap. No one knew who was
responsible for fueling the three armored vehicles, so the three
armored vehicles went unfueled. Panic ensued when the engines
wouldn’t turn over. Mechanics were summoned and a team of them
swarmed over the machines for two hours before one of them thought
to unscrew a gas cap.

Even without the diesel fiasco, the army
would have been late through the gates. Their intrepid commander,
the rotund Colonel Peter Garza, forgot to set his alarm clock. His
aides, fearing the fat man's lightening quick temper, had let him
sleep, assuming there had been a change of plans.

By the time the Colonel had roused himself
and the APC's had rumbled to life, the Captain and his small ranger
troop had gone on ahead in disgust at the delay. The sun was
already climbing the sky, though no one could see its orb through
the thick grey clouds.

The rangers had made Navasota by noon. They
found the town deserted. The taverns and brothels, normally vibrant
with gamblers and prostitutes, were silent. Commerce had been
chased from the region by the festering cancer to the Southeast.
The growing outlaw army, raiding deeper into civilization every
day, was burning homesteads and villages indiscriminately now. The
gamblers, Navasota's lifeblood, had fled the scourge for safer
towns like Waco and Bastrop. The prostitutes, their trade
interrupted, either followed the horde of gamblers or went south to
squeeze their living from the growing mob in the wastelands.

The troop, glad to find the town devoid of
trouble for once, settled in to wait for their army. A few of the
older, more adventurous rangers perused the thin selection of
whores who remained after the exodus, but the bulk of the company
were satisfied with copious drink and the odd game of cards.

By the time the first MPs were stationed at
the doors of their saloon, the troop was thoroughly soused. The
Captain and his wife were still sober enough to bribe the guards
with a secreted bottle. The pair stood at the saloon's grimy window
and watched as the army marched through the gates.

One of the tracked APCs was in the lead, its
pair followed close behind. The two Bradleys were, unlike the
cobbled together helicopters, in excellent repair. They had been
found a few years before in covered storage at a National Guard
armory, along with a multitude of spare parts. The boxy dual TOW
launchers had been removed due to a lack of rockets, but the
ammunition factory had been churning out explosive shells for its
25mm cannon. The Stryker came next. There was a fifty caliber
remote control turret on the roof, slaved to the targeting reticle
on the gunner's helmet. The gun rotated smoothly right and left as
the man standing free of one of the hatches took in the sights.

The Colonel had commandeered the Stryker as
his command vehicle, despite the superior armor and firepower of
the tracked Bradleys. He claimed it was due to the Stryker's higher
top speed, but the Captain suspected the real reason was that the
troop compartments of the Bradleys were notoriously cramped. The
good Colonel needed room for his prodigious gut.

The infantry followed a good distance
behind. They were weary and dusty from a full day's march. Soon
after they departed they had been forced to don their masks and
statically seal the collars and cuffs of their suits. The recent
ashfall had yet to be cleaned from the long highway, and the
armored vehicles trundling slowly ahead of them had quickly churned
up a choking cloud of the gritty dust.

The original plan was for the troops to ride
in the canvas covered beds of a fleet of transport trucks, but the
fuel situation was desperate. The fledgling Republic could not
afford to run the trucks, so the men were forced to march to battle
in a long column. They walked in a column of four files like an
army out of the nineteenth century. Like those hardy ancestors, who
had shouldered muskets and marched in column down hot dusty roads
to bring battle to their countrymen nearly two hundred years
before, these rough men were not fazed by hardship. Not a word of
complaint was spoken all day as they had trudged through the dense
cloud of dust, sweating. They were here to do their duty.

The Captain had spoken with the Mayor when
he arrived. He had arranged billets for the army, four or five men
to each of the small homes which were packed between the palisades
at the tops of the highway embankments. Two of the Colonel's staff
officers headed off each company as they marched into town and
assigned groups of men to these temporary billets. The small army
filled the town to bursting. A careful guard was placed at each
saloon, tavern, or brothel to keep the men from sampling the town's
offerings.

As the last of the companies were receiving
their instructions, the big supply trucks roared through the gates.
As part of his last minute reorganization of the supply logistics
the night before, the Colonel had decreed that they would only have
enough fuel to run three of the trucks, rather than five. An
annoyed sergeant had kept his squad busy all night rearranging the
loads so that it would all fit. Somehow they had managed to squeeze
all of the spare ammunition, equipment, food, and fuel for the
small army into the three truck beds. They were each piled high
with a jumble of ammunition crates and fuel cans, pallets of
rations and jugs of water.

The six vehicles were parked in a line on
the main street, facing the south gate. A careful guard was set on
them; the inhabitants of the small, rough town had an unsavory
reputation amongst the men from the big city. Most of the men in
the army had, at some point in their lives, walked or ridden the
twenty five miles of highway to try their luck at the gaming tables
or spend a relaxing weekend with the whores. More than one had been
forced back to campus with his tail between his legs, pockets
picked and penniless, sometimes even pantsless.

Navasota was not considered as bad as
Huntsville. That dank thieves' den had been founded and was still
inhabited by the former inmates of the now-defunct state prison. No
respectable NRT citizen, unless he had nothing to lose, would throw
his life away by attempting a weekend of pleasure and gambling in
Huntsville. Even the Captain avoided the place.

The show over, the Captain left his troop
under Deb's watchful eye, nodded amicably to the MP's as he stepped
into the street, and set off to find the Colonel. It was time to
find out if the Governor's fat son had really learned his lesson
after his last disastrous expedition.

Three years before, Governor Garza had
arranged for an trade expedition to open relations with the various
settlements and small city states which clustered in the ruins of
the Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex. He had scraped together three
hundred soldiers, placed them under his son's command, and ordered
McLelland's ranger troop to guide them north. It had been a
disaster almost from the first day. The younger Garza had largely
ignored the advice of the more experienced men in the party at
every turn. His poor decisions left them stranded in unfamiliar
country, low on food and water, and under constant threat from
outlaws. Morale plummeted as the men starved and suffered constant
harassment from bandits in the night. They never reached their
destination. Those few who had not deserted had straggled back to
campus more than a month after their triumphant departure. Captain
McLelland, knowing disaster was imminent, had finally deposed the
blundering Garza and led the starving, terrified men to safety.

His son's incompetence had nearly cost the
Governor his next election; he won by a razor thin margin.
Determined that Peter would become a great general, the elder Garza
had paid for private instruction in military history, strategy, and
leadership. The boy had taken to the material with enthusiasm,
desperate to please his powerful father. There was a rumor
circulating that the Governor had promised his son a generalship if
this campaign was successful.

The Captain had spoken with the Colonel's
tutors the week before. The three ancient men, experienced and
respected scholars in their respective fields, assured McLelland
that the boy had turned a new leaf. He had studied hard, made
impressive progress, and was definitely ready for the pressures and
intricacies of command. The Captain had grunted, doubting the fact
but reserving judgment until he saw Garza in action.