MERCS: Crimson Worlds Successors (3 page)

The ground beyond Petersburg was mostly lowland plains, boggy in a few places, and wide-open everywhere.  There was no place to hide, no way to even try to evade pursuit.  The whole thing was a waste of time.  If the damned Karelians would just surrender instead of trying to run, they might make it back to their families.  If they insisted on putting up a fight, Reaves knew his troops would wipe them out in a heartbeat.  His people just wanted to wrap up the operation; they weren’t out for blood.  This was a job to them, nothing more.  But the Karelians were so scared shitless, they probably expected the Eagles to massacre them.

Reaves’ best guess was they were chasing eighty enemy troops, maybe a hundred tops, one of three or four forces that size the enemy still had in the field, all that was left from maybe 5,000 half a day earlier.

“We’re half a klick from the river,” he snapped into his com.  “Squad B, push forward and make contact with the water.  When you get there, turn and start moving in.  I want one team on point, the other in support 500 meters back.”  He looked out in the direction of the enemy.  “Squad A, with me.  We’re going to move in slowly at an angle and link up with B Squad’s forward team.”

It was dark now, and visibility was for shit.  Karelia didn’t even have a moon, and the starlight was next to useless.  It was only a minute or two before Squad B disappeared into the darkness.

“Corporal Weed, pop a recon drone.  I want to know where these fuckers are.  Exactly.”

“Yes, sir.”

Reaves knew Corporal Weed thought it was a waste of an expensive piece of hardware—and their cuts would be calculated after the costs of the expedition were deducted—but he didn’t care.  Better safe than sorry, and if it saved one of his troopers it was worth ten times the cost.  Besides, General Cain had charged a king’s ransom for this job, and they all stood to make a pretty pile for a battle that looked like it wouldn’t last longer than a day.

A few seconds later, Reaves heard the popping sound of the drone’s engine igniting, and the watermelon-sized device shot off into the night sky, leaving a trail of fire and smoke in its wake.

“Alright, let’s move.”  He pushed forward, his pace slow and cautious now.  “Drone input to my display,” he snapped to his AI.  An instant later, a handful of small gray ovals appeared on the inside of his visor—the Karelian troops, exactly where they were supposed to be.  And something else too.  “Sergeant Ving, what do you make of…”

His com unit crackled with feedback.  “Outside jamming has interdicted all communications, Sergeant.”  The cool, even voice of his AI reported before he could even ask.

“Increase power to the com.”  Reaves had his assault rifle in hand, and a quick glance around confirmed his troopers were on alert as well.

“Negative, Sergeant,” the AI responded.  “Your power plant in incapable of producing sufficient power to override the jamming.”

“But that’s impossible…”  Reaves’ voice trailed off. 
What the hell is going on?

“It is unlikely, certainly, given all intelligence regarding Karelian military capabilities, however the fact that we are indeed being jammed proves it is possible.”

Reaves opened his mouth, but he closed it again without saying anything.  He’d argued with his overly literal AI more than once, and he knew it was the very definition of futility.  He had more important things to worry about now.  Like who the hell was jamming his com.

“Open visor,” he snapped to the AI.  An instant later there was a loud popping sound, and the front of his helmet retracted.  Mission parameters called for closed suits even with breathable atmospheres.  The protocol protected against radiation and undetected chemical and biological weapons, but right now Reaves had to communicate with his people.

He gestured, moving around to show them all his open helm.  One by one they popped their visors and moved in closer.

“What is happening, sir?  Can this be the Karelians?”  Ving was the first to ask what they were all thinking, and the rest stayed quiet and listened.  The Eagles were too disciplined to start talking over each other.

“I don’t know, but I don’t like it.”  He turned toward the section’s scout.  “Corporal Kyle, go after B Squad.  I want them back here ASAP.”  Reaves didn’t know what was going on, but he didn’t like it.  Not one bit.  And he wanted his people all together.

“Sir!” the scout replied, and he turned and disappeared into the inky blackness.

“I want everybody on alert.”  He moved his head, looking at each of his soldiers in turn.  “We don’t know what’s going on, but I’m betting it’s not good…so nobody gets surprised, you got me?”

There was a chorus of yessirs, and the troopers turned outward, staring off into the darkness, rifles in hand.

Reaves squinted, trying to see anything at all in the direction of the enemy.  His eyes darted up to his display, but the jamming had knocked out scanning too.  He felt a chill, a cold sweat dripping down the back of his neck.  It was quiet, almost eerily so, and he couldn’t see anything. 
Something’s out there
, he thought, straining to listen for anything at all. 
They’re not jamming us for nothing
.

He heard a shot, and an instant later he spun around to see Ving down, a hole the size of a grapefruit in his chest.  “We’re under attack,” he shouted, almost instinctively.  Then all hell broke loose.

Chapter 2

Erik Cain walked silently up the stone steps from the beach.  It was deep into the long Atlantian night, and he hadn’t slept at all.  Not for the first time, he wondered about the wisdom of an insomniac settling on a world where night was a good hour and a quarter longer than on Earth.  Cain’s sleeping problem was nothing new, though it had gotten worse over the years.  It was just one of the wounds from a lifetime spent at war, one he suspected he would carry to his grave.

He’d taken to going on long walks at night.  Atlantia’s Cape District was one of the most beautiful areas he’d ever seen on any of the planets he’d visited.  The coast was long and rocky, with small outcroppings perched between white, sandy beaches.  Atlantia’s single continent was shaped like a multi-pronged star, with a series of long, winding archipelagoes extending hundreds of kilometers into the planet’s great ocean.  It was the closest thing to a perfect place Cain could imagine, and when he’d chosen Atlantia as his new home, he’d hoped he would find the calm and peace he craved.  But his demons had followed him, even into paradise.

Cain wondered if there came a time when a man had simply seen too much evil, too much death.  When he’d looked into the eyes of too many friends and watched them slip away, pouring their lifeblood into the sands of an alien world.  When he’d held the hands of grizzled veterans as they breathed their last, and pimply-faced kids trying to hold their guts in with bloodsoaked fingers.  Cain had enough material for a lifetime of nightmares.

He looked up at the moonless vista above, hypnotized as he often was by the sheer beauty of the night sky.  He’d made a hobby of identifying the stars visible from Atlantia’s northern hemisphere, but even that small joy had been marred when he realized half a dozen of them had planets on which he’d fought.  He’d been surprised how many of his battlefields were visible with the naked eye.

His lost comrades sometimes visited him on his walks, though tonight they had been silent.  Cain had a few surviving brothers in arms too, James Teller and Augustus Garret among them, but he had buried most of his friends.  Darius Jax, Elias Holm, Terrance Compton, William Thompson—the list was long.  And he felt guilt about surviving too, always asking himself the question, “Why am I alive, when they all died?”  Cain didn’t wish that a bullet had found him on one of his battlefields—it was a far more complex feeling than that.  He was grateful he had survived, but there was a loneliness to it he sometimes found almost unbearable. 

He took a deep breath and listened to the sound of the waves crashing against the shore.  It was one of the few things he found truly relaxing, and he often sat out on the rocky point and listened for hours.  It didn’t put him to sleep, but it did quiet the inner turmoil, at least a bit.  He sat for a few minutes, breathing deeply, savoring the cool ocean air.  It was a couple hours before dawn, and generally, if he was going to get any sleep at all, that was when it came.  Especially after a bracing walk in the cool night air.  He was just about to head back when he heard soft footsteps on the gravel pathway.

“Out here again?”  Sarah walked up behind him, putting her hand gently on the back of his neck as she so often did.  “I’m starting to think I’ve lost my appeal.  It’s getting harder and harder to keep you in bed.”  She smiled and sat down next to him on the low stone wall.  “I understand,” she said teasingly.  “I’m as big as a house.”

He returned her smile.  After all the years they’d been separated, thrust in different directions through decades of brutal warfare, she was the one thing in his life that had never changed.  Both Marines, they had been compelled by duty to answer the bugle first and foremost.  But even when they’d been apart for years, the instant they were reunited, it was as if no time at all had passed.  She was the one good thing that had come from his life at war. She’d been his doctor, and she had somehow managed to put him back together after he’d strayed recklessly close to a nuclear explosion.  He often wondered what his life would be like without her, how lost and alone he would feel.

“I’m sorry if I woke you.  You should be asleep.”  He looked at her and smiled again.  “Especially now.”

Sarah leaned back, stretching uncomfortably.  She was pregnant—very, very pregnant.  Indeed, she was due any day.  Erik had tried to take her to the hospital in Eastport for a scheduled delivery a few days before, but she’d nixed that idea and declared that she would have the babies—she was carrying twins—when they came naturally.  It was hard to argue a medical matter with the best trauma surgeon in the history of the Corps, but that didn’t mean he didn’t try.  But Sarah was one of the few people who had ever been able to get her way in a debate with Erik Cain.  Over twenty-five years together, she hadn’t prevailed in every struggle, certainly—nothing close.  But she’d won her share, including this one.

Indeed, when they’d decided to have children, her medical colleagues had expected her to artificially inseminate and use an AI-controlled crèche to carry the child to term.  As a Marine on reserve status, she had access to state of the art healthcare.  But she’d shot that idea down immediately, declaring she was going to do this old style—every step of the way.  She was fifty-eight years old, but the Corps’ program of rejuv treatments had slowed the aging process throughout her adult life, and she was the physical equivalent of a healthy, fit woman in her mid-thirties.

After a quarter century of almost non-stop war, Sarah had declared her intent to slow down and experience a life that didn’t involve constant stress and bload-soaked rituals under the harsh lights of the operating room.  She’d seen enough shattered men and women to last a lifetime, and then some.  All she wanted now was to live like a normal Atlantian, a peaceful life by the sea, with a family she could hold onto.  Erik knew her memories of childhood were as nightmarish as his own, and he was determined that she would finally have the peace she craved.

“I’d never have married you if sleeping through the night was that important to me.” She laughed softly.

Cain looked at her and smiled.  They’d been together twenty-five years when they’d finally gotten married.  Erik hadn’t cared one way or another.  He intended to spend the rest of his life with her, and that was all that mattered.  Most rituals and social customs meant very little to him.  Cain judged people on their actions and behaviors, and he placed almost no value in society’s artificial constructs.  But many of the colony worlds, newly freed from the yoke of their parent Superpowers, had begun to revive old social customs, and Sarah was determined to become a normal Atlantian any way she could.

Their wedding had been a simple affair, with only a few friends.  General Gilson had wanted to bring them to Armstrong so the Corps could host a massive celebration, but they had politely refused.  Cain’s thoughts were already on empty chairs, places where old friends should have been, but weren’t.  He had a way of seeking out the dark side of even the happiest occasions, and he didn’t want to feed that tendency.  In the end, it had been a good day, and virtually everyone Erik and Sarah cared about had come.

“Well, you certainly knew what you were getting by then.”  He leaned back and closed his eyes.  She had her hand on the side of his neck.  Her touch still had the same effect on him, even after thirty years, driving away the demons, at least for a little while.

“I certainly did.”  She smiled for an instant, and then her eyes widened and she moaned softly.  She put her hands on her belly and turned and looked over at Erik.  “Ah, not to interrupt the conversation…but, in my expert medical opinion…it is time…”

Cain leapt to his feet.  “I knew we should have had you in the hospital,” he stammered, putting his hand on her arm and leading her up the path.  He was nervous, tense.  His combat reflexes were responding, and he could feel the adrenalin pumping through his blood.  “Let’s go.”

She laughed softy.  “Relax, General Cain.  This isn’t a Marine operation.  People have been managing this for a long time.”  She turned and walked slowly back toward the house.

Erik followed closely behind.  Through all the years at war, he had never imagined this day would come.  In a few hours he would be the father of twin boys.  He thought about what they would be like, who they would become.  He imagined many men dreamed of their sons following in their footsteps, but that was Cain’s worst nightmare.

Please,
he thought. 
Let them be doctors or scientists or engineers…or let them drive a truck.  But not a life of war, a life like mine.  Anything else.

*        *        *        *        *

Augustus Garret stared out the viewscreen. 
Pershing
was a mighty vessel, a testament to the herculean efforts men could put into war.  And she had served well, in the struggle against the First Imperium, and later against Gavin Stark’s Shadow Legions.  His eyes were fixed, his mind lost in old memories, as he bid a final farewell to the vessel that had been his last flagship.

He knew three of her sister ships were out there too, but they were too far away for him to see with the naked eye.  It was a fluke that
Pershing
was the closest to the station, but Garret was grateful for a last look at her.

“Saying goodbye, Augustus?”  The voice was familiar, and Garret turned abruptly.

“Yes, I suppose.  In my own way.”  Garret nodded to Roderick Vance.  “I want to thank you for your help with this, Roderick.  “There’s nowhere else we could do this, at least no place secure enough.”

Vance looked out the viewscreen toward the hulking battleship.  “They were a great design.  Even after we built Sword of Mars and John Carter, I always thought ton for ton the Yorktowns were the toughest warships ever built.”

Roderick Vance was the head of the Martian Confederation’s spy services, and a member of its ruling council.  He’d been an ally to Garret and the rest of the Alliance military for some time, though less so with the Earth-based Superpower itself.  In the years of warfare leading up to the final battle, the Alliance’s navy and Marine Corps had grown into quasi-independent organizations, as answerable to the colonies as to the Earth government.

None of that mattered now.  The Alliance was gone, along with all the other Earth-based Superpowers, consumed in the disastrous nuclear finale of their last war.  Earth was a ruined planet, poisoned, radioactive, its cities utterly obliterated.  Vance’s people had estimated that 90% of the population had died over a 36 hour period of intense atomic warfare, a figure that had left Garret speechless the first time he’d heard it.

It was almost impossible to account for the further losses from sickness, starvation, and fighting that had occurred in the three years since, but the best estimate was one to two percent of the pre-war population was still alive—fifty to one hundred million people scattered around the globe, eeking out some type of marginal existence.  But no one thought that would be the final figure.  The population was almost certainly still declining, and only the wildest guesses could be made about the long term effects of radiation exposure on longevity and fertility.  An entire population was difficult to eradicate, but Earth was still teetering on the edge.

“I just wish we could keep more of your fleet in space.  Everybody is fought out right now, but we both know there will be new disputes.”  Vance’s voice was sincere.  He’d been an unemotional man when Garret had first met him, almost robotic in his demeanor, but the sacrifices of the last few years had changed him, and the former Alliance admiral could feel the empathy—and the pain—in his friend.

“Well, you can’t afford that now, any more than we can.  Mankind took it to the edge, and now we need to scale back.  I don’t think two-kilometer long battleships are necessary for prosperity and economic growth, and without any Superpowers to fight, they are an extravagance we simply can’t afford.”  Garret felt torn.  He was disgusted that humanity had fought one war after another, building ever greater engines of destruction to hurl at each other.  That side of him welcomed the drastic reductions in armaments compelled by the destruction of Earth’s industry.  The colonies couldn’t come close to supporting on their own the vast military organizations the terrestrial powers had built.

But he himself was a creature of those wars.  His career, his fame, even his own image of self-worth was tied up in the persona of the great Admiral Augustus Garret.  He had sacrificed everything to his duty, and now he had nothing else.  War had been his life.  That didn’t make him proud, but he couldn’t deny it.  He’d been busy seeing to the downsizing of the massive war machine he had led, but he wondered what would happen when he was done.  Would there would be a place for him with no war to fight?

Vance sighed.  “That may be true, but we certainly can’t build anything like this anymore…and I suspect it will be a long time before we have that kind of capacity again.”  His eyes narrowed, and his voice deepened, became more serious.  “And we both know there are greater dangers out there than colonial disputes.”

Garret nodded.  He knew, perhaps better than any living being.  Man’s first contact with another species had been disastrous.  The war against the First Imperium had been a holocaust, and humanity had only escaped destruction by the barest margin.  But the enemy was still out there, somewhere, and it was only a matter of time before they returned.  And no one knew what other horrors existed in the depths of unexplored space.  But, whatever was out there, men like Garret and Vance were determined to be ready.