CHAPTER 2
TWELVE DAYS LATER WE HEARD THE NEWS THAT 2nd Combined Regiment had landed on Argent—a biraunta colony world that had only recently been captured by the Ilion Federation—with several allied units, and the invasion force was facing heavy resistance from the Ilion occupation army. Unlike the enemy armies we had faced, 2nd was up against a force that included two human battalions and a porracci regiment as well as two tonatin regiments. Four days after that, before we had heard any more recent news from Argent, Ranger Battalion, 1st Combined Regiment, was dropped into the Transylvanian Alps for our first extended field exercise since Olviat.
We were to be the “aggressor” force, sent in to see how well a mostly European regiment—only eight weeks “old”—was doing in its unit training. The exercise should have been a snap for us, since our battalion had been around for nearly a year, and we still had enough veterans to keep the newer men from screwing up too often or badly. The exercise didn’t work out the way the brass planned it. We started out badly. Two shuttles carrying men from D Company collided during the landing. Only three men were killed, all from the shuttle crews, but most of the men in two platoons were injured. Thankfully, most of the injuries were minor, and after four hours all but one of the injured soldiers were fit for duty.
After that, one thing after another went wrong. There was a technical foul-up in communications channels that made it impossible for us to use our electronic maps to track movement of forces. One squad in C Company got lost and wasn’t located for hours because of the breakdown in the system. A new man in A Company managed to set off a land mine by accident and lost both arms above the elbows. If the rest of the squad hadn’t acted quickly to get tourniquets on the stumps, he would have bled to death. Two other men in his fire team received minor injuries from the explosion. A platoon from the European unit surrounded fourth platoon from B Company, forcing the platoon sergeant to surrender. Oyo, the biraunta in Souvana’s fire team, managed to break a leg when a tree limb he swung to broke and he couldn’t grab another. That put him in a medtank for three hours.
That was all in the first six hours of the operation. Things went downhill from there.
The exercise had been scheduled to last until after dawn Friday. It was canceled before sunset Tuesday, and we were lifted back to Kentucky. The mission critique for sergeants and officers was not a pleasant session.
THE NEXT FEW WEEKS WEREN’T PLEASANT EITHER, for anyone in the regiment. The army general staff leaned on General Ransom, commander of 1st Combined Regiment, who leaned on Colonel Hansen, commander of Ranger Battalion. Hansen leaned on his staff and the battalion commanders, who leaned on their company commanders, who leaned … Well, you get the picture. Pressure flows one way in the military, and it’s those at the bottom who don’t have anyone to scream at. Our days became longer, and we were given less time to rest between sessions. There were more frequent night exercises. On, and on. General Ransom and Colonel Hansen seemed determined to get us back to peak performance if it killed every last one of us.
With all the heat pouring down the chain of command, men made more mistakes. Even scores on the rifle range declined by 3 percent. There were accidents. Men were hurt in hand-to-hand combat training. More than a dozen men in the battalion suffered recurrences of post-traumatic stress disorders and had to be treated in the hospital. One biraunta in C Company was affected so badly he was sent home. The doctors despaired of being able to return him to military effectiveness.
Our next extended field exercise was more modest in its goals, and closer to home. It involved Ranger Battalion and one of the line battalions, and we only went as far as central Tennessee for that, up on the Cumberland Plateau. It lasted two days. While it wasn’t wildly successful, at least there were no major foul-ups; no one was killed or seriously injured.
A little of the heat was lifted from us, but we knew the brass was still watching us closely.
EVEN THOUGH FEWER THAN A QUARTER OF THE soldiers in the regiment were human—and those divided among all of our major religions—we stood down from training for ten days for Christmas, from noon on the twenty-third of December to Reveille on January 2. There was furlough for anyone who had time coming and wanted to use it. Naturally, it was mostly the humans who took advantage of the holiday break. I was a little surprised at the long stand-down, and at the fact that we weren’t required to keep a hefty portion of the regiment on duty through the holidays. In a war like the one we were in, nothing said that the Ilion Federation couldn’t attempt something as hazardous as an invasion of Earth. From what I’ve seen of the tonatin—and they absolutely rule the Ilion Federation—I wouldn’t have put it past them to attempt something as ballsy as that. I didn’t think they could succeed, but they might cause enough damage to make a lot of Earth people lose any support for the war.
I didn’t bother taking leave time, but Tonio pulled me a three-day pass for the end of the holiday. I went to Nashville for New Year’s Eve, getting there a day early. I made the rounds of country music bars, drinking quietly amidst the bedlam of holiday revelers. Half the time, I don’t think I even heard the music. I wanted noise, and I wanted alcohol. I got both. And I paid a holiday premium for the attention of a professional lady after all the fireworks and noisemakers went silent.
The fireworks gave me a few bad minutes. I knew they were coming. It’s a New Year’s staple. But when they started popping, I felt a tightness in my chest, an instinct to duck for cover. Maybe I came close to a combat flashback. Afterward, I needed something extra to settle me down, and the lady in question did do that.
I almost slept through the hotel’s normal checkout time the next morning, but since I was a soldier and the hotel manager on duty was a veteran, they gave me an extra hour. It was past sunset on the first when I got back to camp, feeling a little more mellow than I had since the start of the war. I guess I had needed those days off more badly than I had realized.
EVEN BEFORE I CHECKED IN AT B COMPANY’S orderly room, I heard the news. A biraunta junior lieutenant in A Company had been found dead in his room in the BOQ—bachelor officer quarters—an apparent suicide. I didn’t really know the dead JL, only who he was and where he belonged. He had just transferred in a month or so before.
Suicide is not exactly unknown in the army, even in peacetime. But what made this one notable was that it was an officer who swallowed his gun—as the idiom goes. He had stuck the muzzle of his needle pistol in his mouth and used a small wedge to make sure the pistol kept firing until the magazine was empty. That turned his brain into paté and sprayed it all over the walls of his room. Behind alocked door in a third-floor room. No one heard the pistol; needle guns make very little noise, and there weren’t many people in the building at the time. When no one could get a response from him late in the morning of New Year’s Day, they broke the door open. The autopsy determined that he had been dead for twelve hours before he was found.
The JL was a combat veteran. He had seen combat on two campaigns with a biraunta unit and earned himself a medal for heroism. He did not leave a suicide note. Neither the sergeants who served under him nor the other officers in his company had noticed any unusual behavior. There was no doubt it was a suicide. The circumstances precluded murder or accident. In any case, none of the men under his command had had time to get to hate him enough to waste him.
The suicide was the talk of the camp. That’s about all I heard in the mess hall, then in the NCO club afterward. To get away from it all, I finally went to the library—not one of my usual haunts. I sat there watching old comedy videos for an hour or so, then headed back to my room in the barracks.
The squad bay was empty, which suited me. And I had the latrine to myself, so I took a shower, then retreated to my private room before any of my men checked in. I put a sleep patch on and slept straight through until just before Reveille the next morning.
There were three men in Ranger Battalion unaccounted for at Reveille the morning of January 2. It wasn’t until the next day that we learned what had happened to the missing men. One had simply been AWOL. He hadn’t returned to base on time; it was near noon on the second when he checked in. The second man had been jailed on a drunk and disorderly charge in Clarksville; the authorities there turned him over to the MPs, military police. The third man, an abarand private from D Company, had killed himself in a hotel room in Gavin City—the business area right across the road from Fort Campbell.
Captain Fusik spent fifteen minutes talking to the company—mentioning both suicides. It was part pep talk and part making sure that everyone knew that there were alternatives, a pretty sophisticated support system for anyone who had problems. There were plenty of people to talk to, and mechanisms for getting help. After the formation, the captain held a meeting for the officers and sergeants in the company and gave us more of the same, reminding us to watch our people carefully for any sign of potential problems.
“You’ve all had classes on how to handle this,” Captain Fusik reminded us. “Sometime in the next few days, I’ll bring someone in from base HQ to give us all a refresher. But we can’t wait for that. The danger time begins now. Things like this can be contagious. Talk with your men. Watch them for anything unusual. All of them. You can’t assume that some people are safe. It won’t hurt to be a little paranoid about this. If we’re going to make mistakes, let’s make sure they’re on the side of caution.”
IT WAS A WEEK BEFORE WE STARTED TO GET PAST the tension of those first days of the new year. Our concerns about suicide pushed aside some of the concentration on training. We were tiptoeing around each other, looking over shoulders, wondering about hidden meanings in comments. It can make you almost paranoid, and I found myself wondering if too much of that kind of observation might make the problem worse. When we went to the rifle range, there were more safety officers behind the firing line, extra people at the ammunition supply point, and we were all a lot more careful than usual making certain no one took any rounds off the range with him.
There was war news, more good than bad for a change, but no one was ready to start planning a victory celebration. The Ilion Federation had given no sign that they were losing their will to fight. There had been some costly battles.
Both sides had lost a lot of soldiers. Maybe we were all getting more cautious about choosing new battlegrounds.
Closer to home, we learned that two more combined regiments were being created. A few officers and noncoms from the first two would be transferred to leaven the new units. We didn’t know yet who might be leaving from our regiment. I kept my fingers crossed for Lieutenant Colonel Wellman to be one of them, but I doubted that my luck would be that good. I had used up all the luck I had coming on Olviat. I wasn’t going to hope for another miracle.
Nothing had been said yet about how long it might be before 1st Combined Regiment went into battle again. When the regiment was formed, we were promised four months of training and didn’t get that much. After Dintsen, we were again promised four months of training before we were committed to battle … and that’s about what we got. This time, there had been no promise of four months or anything else. All we were told was that training would continue until we were told differently.
That January was also the coldest Fort Campbell had experienced in a century. We had more than twenty inches of snow that month, most of it coming in one storm on the twelfth and thirteenth. That month’s snowfall was greater than the area’s total snowfall for the previous ten winters combined. It only got us out of one day’s field training though, while the blizzard was in progress.
February was also colder than usual, and wet—but at least the precipitation was rain. That didn’t stop any training, but it gave us enough reasons to feel miserable.
Then we went from cold to hot. During the first two weeks of March, we were on a field exercise in the Philippines, and we went from that to a second exercise in the Australian outback; that one lasted eight days. In both cases, 1st Combined Regiment served as the aggressor force, pitted against two AustralAsian units, each of which had been augmented by battalions from offworld—porracci in the Philippines, ghuroh in Australia.
We made mistakes, but they were learning mistakes, notthe major gaffes that had put us in so much trouble a few months earlier. We critiqued each mission, then added extra training in the areas we had shown deficiencies in once we got back to Fort Campbell, near the end of the month.
ON THE THIRTEENTH OF APRIL, WE RECEIVED movement orders. As usual, we weren’t given any information about where we were going, just orders to pack up and be ready to ship out within thirty-six hours. Until then, everyone in the regiment was restricted to base.
“Where do you think they’re sending us, Sarge?” Neville St. John—he pronounced his last name Sinjin, after the British fashion—asked. Neville was the third man in the squad to ask me that question in half an hour, and I gave him the same answer I had given the others.
“I don’t have any idea. Don’t burn out your brain trying to guess. We’ll know once we’re aboard ship and burning toward our first hyperspace jump.” I tried not to be short in tone, but the inevitable question had left me feeling a little more testy than usual. At that point, I doubt that anyone in the regiment except General Ransom and his top staff officers and battalion commanders had any idea where we were headed. They take security seriously. Espionage might seem quaintly outdated, but it exists, and it was theoretically possible for word to get to an enemy before we showed up. With all the species in the Alliance of Light except divotect also represented in the Ilion Federation, there was a chance that spies might be anywhere.
Yes, I was curious about where we might be going. How could I avoid it? Wherever we were going, it was almost certainly into combat, with all its routine dangers … like getting killed. But just then, idle speculation was driving me crazier than ignorance.
We fell out with our gear at four in the afternoon—1600 hours by military time—climbed aboard trucks that took us to the spaceport on base, transferred to shuttles, andheaded up to the fleet in orbit. It takes time to move a regiment with its heavy weapons, supplies, and men. B Company, Ranger Battalion happened to be one of the first groups moved to the ships. It was past midnight before the last shuttles rendezvoused with their ships and the fleet started moving out-system.
IT TAKES GETTING USED TO, BUT YOU CAN TRAVEL between worlds faster than you can get between some places on Earth. It takes only a matter of a few hours to span hundreds of light-years, less time than it takes a company of soldiers to hike twenty miles. Once the fleet started moving out, accelerating, the ships made the first of two or three jumps through hyperspace, spending only enough time in normal space between jumps for the navigators to verify that the ships were where they were supposed to be.
That means they don’t have to equip the ships with beds for all of their passengers. You sit in seats that aren’t half as comfortable as the seats you might occupy flying from New York to Tokyo. There were enough beds for about a fourth of the men. If for some reason we had to remain aboard ship for any length of time, we would take shifts in those beds, six hours out of twenty-four, with no time for a bunk to cool off from one body before the next crawled in.
As soon as we were outbound, the officers received their mission briefing. Then they came back and passed the news to their sergeants. We gave our men the news.
“The world we’re going to is Durestal,” I said once I had my squad gathered around me. “That’s the divotect colony the Alliance tried to take back from the IFers last year, the one where we lost four-fifths of the invasion force—killed or captured. We’ve gone back in, with more men this time. There are already four regiments of Alliance troops on the ground, heavily engaged with the enemy, with enough ships overhead to make certain the enemy can’t reinforce their occupation force. We’re going in as reinforcementsbecause the force we have on Durestal hasn’t been able to do the job on its own. According to the lastest intelligence, we’ll be going in at a safe area and deploying once we’re on the ground.” I shrugged, to show that I wasn’t giving that promise full credence either. “We should know more once we emerge from hyperspace over Durestal,” I said.
I hesitated, then added, “Maybe we’ll get lucky for a change and find that our troops there have finished the job without us.”
Well, it was possible.
“There’s one other thing that makes this campaign different from the two we’ve been on before,” I said before anyone could comment on my wishful thinking. “On both Dintsen and Olviat we faced enemy forces that were virtually one hundred percent tonatin. That’s not the case on Durestal. The reports we have indicate that there is one IFer mixed regimental-sized unit that includes a battalion of humans and a battalion of porracci along with a tonatin battalion. The other enemy units on the world are, apparently, exclusively tonatin.”