Merkiaari Wars: 02 - What Price Honour (57 page)

Newlove tensed as he passed below a hundred metres, and winced at the impact of his seat hitting the ground. He thumped his chest to release his harness, and sprinted away from the area and into dense trees. He ran blindly at first, he had no choice. It was pitch dark and he had no point of reference to get his bearings, but he had to clear the area before the Merkiaari came to investigate. His compass would put him on the right course, but should he head south now or wait where he was for rescue? With so many of the enemy in the area, all he wanted to do was hide, but that was no guarantee of safety.

He chose to head south along the valley.

* * *

Approaching Camp Charlie Epsilon, Child of Harmony

Gina stepped off the trail to watch her people wearily trudging by in the rain. “I can’t promise you hot showers,” she said in halting Shan. “But there will be hot food at least.”

The tired and bedraggled looking warriors raised a ragged cheer at that, but it was half-hearted at best. They were completely done in, and were marching for pride alone.

Gina felt fit to drop herself. Mud caked her legs up to her thighs, and her feet squished in her waterlogged boots. Her armour, that had looked like new a few short weeks earlier, was now scorched and battle scarred. She was soaked to the skin and chilled to the bone. Her rain cape did little to help the situation. She could only imagine what the unenhanced Shan felt like. She wasn’t sure if they realised how remarkable their effort to keep up was. Did they really understand what the black battle dress uniform meant? James said they did, but she had her doubts. No unenhanced Human soldier could have kept up in such conditions, and knowing their limitations, they wouldn’t have tried. Not so the Shan. After working with them the last few weeks, Gina had come to know and admire them for their courage and resilience. They didn’t know what the word limitation meant.

Gina took off her helmet and raised her face skyward. The rain fell like there was no tomorrow, and the clouds looked set to stay. She swept her hair back, and let the rain wash her face. It refreshed her a little. While she stood there, the warriors continued on their weary way, following the trail blazed by Cragg and Takeri. Gina was lucky to have them. They were all that remained of Hiller’s squad. Hiller himself had only recently returned to duty after a prolonged stay in sickbay aboard
Grafton
. He had been leading a patrol much like this one, though without the large number of natives that she commanded here it had been of much smaller size, when he was hit. It had been touch and go there for a while. He had been hit in the throat, and only Zack Gordon’s quick thinking had saved his life.

Alpha Company was in a sorry state these days with, in some cases, squads containing only three units attached to squads containing five or six. Gina had to patch and rearranged things as best she could. Sergeant Hiller wasn’t the only one who found himself assigned to another squad. Of the one hundred and sixty viper units assigned to her company at the beginning of the operation, only ninety-six remained. Thirty-six units were either dead or out of commission for the duration of the mission. Twenty-eight had been temporarily reassigned to Charlie Company as reinforcements to help replace the losses incurred at the battle of Kachina Eight. Bravo and Delta had also donated men and equipment.

The fighting within the Keep had been brutal, resulting in the worst casualties so far inflicted on the regiment. Charlie Company had been smashed with most of its officers dead or wounded together with many of its NCOs. The Colonel himself was now in direct command, and would remain so until they left for home. The losses among the people sheltering in the Keep, had been simply catastrophic. On the plus side, the loss of Kachina Eight and its inhabitants, and the later attacks on Kachina Six and Seven had galvanised the Shan as nothing else could have. Knowing that even the Keeps were no longer safe, people numbering in the hundreds of thousands had decided to take their chances against the enemy under the open sky rather than in holes in the ground. They had boiled out of the Keeps seeking to link up with the dwindling Shan military. Alpha Company, and the other Human units on Child of Harmony, had benefited enormously when many of them decided to fight alongside humans instead of their own people.

Gina pulled her helmet back on, and watched the last of the natives trudge by followed by the rear guard. The rear guard consisted exclusively of Marines in mechanised armour. Of all those here with her, they were in the best shape. Cocooned in their mechs, they were shielded from the bad weather, and their mechanical ‘muscles’ took much of the strain of the long march off the Marines themselves. She had ordered them to cover her Shan warriors from the rear while her vipers did the same from the front. In that way, the weakest members of her now greatly augmented company (at least in sheer numbers) were sandwiched between professionals with high tech detection systems.

Gina watched the mechs striding by, and decided it was high time to re-take her place at the front of the march again. With her rifle angled down and safely under her rain cape, she pushed herself into a run and overtook first the Marines and then the Shan. A minute or two later, she was splashing passed waterlogged vipers.

“Anything?” Gina said, slowing to march beside Sergeant Hiller.

“Cragg says all clear.”

“Good. I like killing Merkiaari, but I prefer it when the sun is shining.”

Hiller grinned. “Me too.”

Camp Charlie Epsilon was the forward most camp in the frontline. It had been set up after the enemy declined to engage, and retreated into a complex of hills and valleys where they had thus far managed to remain concealed from surveillance. Gina’s patrol was one of many sent into the area looking for them.

Gina signalled the closest observation post about her intention to approach the camp, and then led her people through the fixed defences surrounding it. The bulky shapes of APCs, Shan field artillery, viper self-propelled howitzers, sentry guns, mortars, and rocket launchers came and went as they moved deeper into camp.

Gina dismissed her men to find something to eat and a long deserved rest. It would be a little while yet before she could do the same. She had to make her report first. The General’s CP (command post) was basically a hole in the ground roofed over with heavy logs and sod. A lot of the camp was like that. It was hastily constructed of local materials, and wouldn’t survive a direct attack by arty or aircraft, but that was why the General had the navy flying round the clock air patrols. The interdiction zone around Charlie Epsilon kept them safe from air attack, and regular patrols kept the Merkiaari at a distance on the ground. At least that was the theory.

Gina found the General in the CP standing with Commander Heinemann, Colonel Flowers, and Major Faggini, listening to a report relayed to them from orbit. They looked very grim, and Gina was unwilling to disturb them. She looked around the dim interior of the bunker for someone else to report to. She found Captain Penleigh of Delta Company and Captain Elliot of Bravo. They were standing together next to the map table that had been set up on one side of the bunker. Its glowing multi-coloured surface threw both men’s features into shadow; she could not tell what they thought of the General’s demeanour.

She went to join them, carefully stepping over the naked power leads leading to the comm station and map table. “What’s going on?”

“Trouble at Masaru,” Captain Elliot said, and nodded at Heinemann where he spoke with someone on the comm.

Penleigh nodded. “Heinemann is trying to get a sitrep from
Sutherland
now, but it doesn’t look good. We lost contact with all our fly boys shortly after their bomb run.”

“All of them?”

Elliot nodded.

Penleigh manipulated a control on the map table, and the current view changed to the countryside surrounding Masaru. “You can see why the Merki’s First Claw chose the city for his base when he pulled back from our advance. The natives stopped him cold when he tried to break west, and the mountains to the north are impassable on foot. Gravsleds don’t operate well at high altitudes, and often have trouble on broken ground; especially when the slope is greater than forty or forty-five degrees.”

Gina nodded remembering similar problems she and Major Stein had on manoeuvres. “The Marine’s ground effect vehicles are no better.”

“Agreed,” Penleigh said. “That’s why the regiment uses wheeled or tracked vehicles exclusively. Remember that time on Faragut?”

“God yes, what a nightmare,” Elliot said, but then realised Gina didn’t know the story and explained. “This happened a couple of years after the war remember. Things were still tight for a lot of people. Industries and cities had been smashed, and entire planetary populations were still on the move. On many planets, the cities were abandoned in favour of the countryside where, if you were tough and clever enough, you could survive by farming or hunting. These people had no idea how to survive cut off from the mall and their autochefs, but the only alternative was starvation. The Fleet struggled to cope. They had too few ships, too few resources to forefill their obligations. I’m afraid the Border Worlds were left to fend for themselves for a long time. They do have some justification for their current resentment you see?

“Anyway,” Elliot went on. “Fleet shipped in supplies where it could. They saved a lot of lives, but for many they were too slow. Those abandoned people had to take matters into their own hands if they were to survive. On Faragut, that meant hijacking a supply ship, which they did almost too easily. The Fleet was stretched thin, and they hadn’t expected an attack by their own people. They lost not only the supply ship, but also its entire escort. We were sent in to rescue the crews of the ships, which for the most part were unharmed but imprisoned. We did that all right, but the only place not in rebel hands was a city clear across the continent through a mountain pass. We chose to load up on a bunch of hover trucks and drive there. It was a bloody disaster. We could have walked faster than those damn trucks would go over the pass.”

“We did walk in the end,” Penleigh said. “I spent most of my time hauling on a rope trying to stop the trucks sliding down the slope.”

Elliot nodded. “I felt like a mule or something. Gawd, my back still hurts thinking about it.”

Gina smiled.

Penleigh laid a hand on the glowing map table. “This is us at Charlie Epsilon.” He moved his hand to another location. “This is Masaru, and
this
,” he circled an area south of the city, “is where our fly boys were jumped. All twenty-four birds were shot down. We think there might be as many as ten or twelve downed pilots still alive. It’s just a guess, but we heard at least that many eject. They might make it for a while.”

Gina frowned at the map. “What are we going to do about it do you know?”

Penleigh shrugged. “Maybe nothing, it depends on what George decides.”

“Or on what the Admiral thinks about it,” Elliot added. “The thing is, the terrain is bad. You can see it on the map. There are hundreds of valleys, any one of which could be full of Merkiaari. We have no idea where the pilots are. They might be scattered over any of a dozen hills and valleys in the target area.”

Gina nodded. “What about their transponders?”

“We picked them up for a few seconds after they landed, but then one by one they went off the air. Dan thinks that means they’re dead, but it might simply be caution on the part of the pilots. We just don’t know.”

Gina pursed her lips thoughtfully, and reached for the map controls. She scrolled the map, and pointed out the valley that her patrol had just finished investigating.

“We found zip. According to this, the valley opens out a couple of klicks further on, and links up with another running north south. If we got into
that
one undetected, we could follow it almost all the way to Masaru. We would have good cover all the way.”

“So would the enemy,” Penleigh warned.

“Well, yes, but I’m pretty sure a small group could get in there undetected. Give me a squad of our people, and one or two of James’ best scouts, and I could do it. I did something just like this a couple of years ago—an op against smugglers.”

Unbeknown to her, the General had come up behind Gina while she was making her pitch. “Who would you take?”

Gina stiffened and turned to salute.

“At ease, Captain,” Burgton said. “Who would you take?”

“Any one of my people could handle it, sir, but if I was given the mission, there are a few exceptional people I would take along. I would want Hiller, Cragg, and Takeri with me for certain. I would like Zack Gordon too, if Colonel Flowers could lend him back to me. Ricky Strong and Sue Lyons of Bravo Company are really good—”

“Damn, Gina!” Captain Elliot said in outrage. “They’re two of my best.”

“I know, that’s why I want them,” Gina said with a brief grin. “I want at least two of our Shan scouts. None of mine are fit to go out again so soon, but there is one I particularly remember from the fight at Zuleika.”

“Oh?” Burgton said. “His name?”

“Her name was Shima, sir. She was one of Professor Wilder’s team leaders.”

Burgton nodded. “I remember her. She’s the one with the visor.”