In the Valley
Authors: Jason Lambright
In the Valley
Jason Lambright
Paul Thompson, an officer in the armored infantry, fights a counterinsurgency in humanity’s far-flung worlds. He is a member of a Pan-American Force Advisory Team who encounters worlds, cultures, and conflicts that are both strange and familiar. His experiences prove that the more things change, the more they stay the same—people remain people, even as they spread throughout the galaxy.
His mission sucks, but as Paul would say, you just have to lace your boots a little tighter and put one foot in front of the other. Will he be able to both accomplish his mission and keep his sanity while chaos reigns around him? Will the Baradna Valley, the scene of a vicious struggle, crack him up or kill him?
If he can overcome his shaking hands, untrustworthy allies, and murderous enemies, he’ll find out.
Copyright © 2014 Jason Lambright
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 1499307063
ISBN 13: 9781499307061
Library of Congress Control Number: 2014908234
CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
North Charleston, South Carolina
To the men and women who guard over us at night so that we may lie peacefully in our beds.
In the Valley
is a work of fiction. Names, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Counter-Explosive-Hazards Patrol on Foot
Paul, on the Ship Headed to Hyades
Paul Struggles at Camp Kill-a-Guy
Paul in Interregnum, OCS, Mumbai 3
P
aul Thompson had had enough. He tapped another near-cig out of his crumpled pack and surveyed the scene around him while his halo crackled garbled messages in his head. The breeze smelled like marijuana and greasy smoke; the cerulean sky screamed out the dawn overhead. Occasional pops, like firecrackers tossed by careless kids, sounded from the stone-upon-stone village nearby.
Only, the pops Paul was hearing weren’t firecrackers; it was gunfire. He and his merry band had just cleared the village of a dissident cell. Their mortal remains lay at his feet. The clearing was still continuing, and—joy, oh joy—the provincial police had finally shown up to assist.
His ad hoc company of advisees (Paul was an advisor) had surrounded the village before dawn, in a slinky movement of cursing, stumbling men. He had joined the men on foot, unarmored. In the parlance of the forces infantry, it had been a “basic dismounted movement to contact.”
Doing stuff the old-fashioned way impressed the locals, and gaining their respect and covertly leading them was his job. It was kinda tough to do that when he was cocooned in his two-meter-odd-tall armored suit. Had Paul been so equipped, he could have rolled up this cell, flattened the village, and taken
on a brigade of Old Earth panzers. But the situation dictated that he take an old-fashioned, unarmored approach.
Cupping a near-cig in his left hand, he lit it with a bit of burning pot plant. He inhaled and wiped his eyes with the filthy sleeve of his locally adapted multicams. The villagers supplemented their income with the vast field of ganja he had just fought through. The unpleasant experience of bullets clipping off choice buds overhead while he fought for his life in the dark was not one he would care to repeat anytime soon. He swore he would never be able to smell ol’ Mary Jane again without the ball-tightening feeling of impending disaster—namely, a slug hitting him in the face. Even the trauma-weave cams he wore wouldn’t help much with that.
Some kids were wailing over by a stony wall. Damn, it was hard to think over their screaming. Paul’s best guess was that they must be the families of the recently departed and exquisitely butchered dissidents in the field. The ringing in his ears and the lamentations of the children were working together to block out thought. However, Higher was calling with questions.
“Two-Three” was Paul’s call sign. There was nothing cool for him, like “Devil” or “Maverick.” His handle was just a naked number. But then again the colonel’s call sign was “Five”—the colonel was a low-profile kind of guy. Usually soldiers of his rank would call themselves “Powerhouse Six” or something else dumb like that. That’s not how the colonel rolled. Paul, being a fellow who had come up through the ranks, respected that.
“Two-Three, how many shitheads did you roll up down there?” His halo—the colonel’s proxy—was trying to drown out the screaming kids again. Paul took a breath, scanned the tree line, and answered, “We got five.” Paul added, “Five, do you have a visual on my position?” Paul would be happy if that were the case. The popcorn gunfire was getting on his nerves. Any additional security, like the overwatch from an armored suit, would be quite welcome.
He had noticed that he was getting jumpier by the day, playing old-school infantry games with the lovely inhabitants of Juneau 3, on this his third combat
rotation and by far the liveliest. The other two tours, while scary and challenging at the time, were a joke compared to this ball buster of a tour.
He had once thought it sucked to patrol a potentially hostile wasteland on, say, Roodeschool 5 at forty klicks an hour in a suit. Ha! If he had only known then what he knew now. Paul had been beating the boonies on foot on the “June-bug” while trying to mind meld with a bunch of stinky settlers, most of whom were dissidents. There was nothing like holding hands with a bomb maker you
knew
was trying to kill you, the secret hidden behind his smile.
Maybe Najibullah the Bomb Maker wouldn’t be so cheerful if he knew that force intel had a listening worm implanted in his cheapo halo. And Paul had to maintain the façade—his mantra had become “Hold on.” Hold on one more day, one more mission. Put one foot in front of the other. Cherish each suited-up mission; silently dread the basic dismounted ones. When his teammates weren’t looking, Paul’s hands shook like leaves. He fantasized hourly about pulling his pistol, looking Najibullah in the eyes, and taking his life. One problem: Najibullah was a provincial police major. Paul was under direct orders not to kill him.
Paul wondered when his halo would dime him out as “combat stressed” to the colonel’s command unit. Maybe his headset was broke, the diagnostics gone haywire. It had to be, as hot as the fear and hate burned in his chest and as sick and cold as he felt in his heart.
He had humped all over this backwater in the name of peace and the universal brotherhood of man. He snorted in self-derision. There was no brotherhood, and there surely was no peace—not now, not in the Stone Age, and certainly not after some bright boys and girls had invented the Glimmer FTL Drive in the mid-twenty-first. Turns out there were an awful lot of worlds within striking distance of old Sol that were in solar sweet spots and had some small chance of habitability by human spawn. Old Earth had a surplus of people and plenty of crazies, like, oh, a certain Paul Thompson, born and raised in Hopefield, Ohio, in the Pan-American Federation.
So here he was, and there was the colonel with a simple answer: “Roger.” That’s mil-speak for
yes
. He was still scratching himself as to the obscure origins of the word. Roger…Who the hell was Roger? And why did a man’s name mean
yes
? Paul would be damned if he knew. He loved hearing “roger” now, though. His guardian angel was on station over the unholy mess.
He threw the near-cig down and ground it out—not that he was concerned with starting fires. After all, a man’s head was burning up in a brush fire not two meters in front of him. The gesture was just the force of habit. Maybe he ground the butt a little bit too hard, out of sheer disgust.
The colonel, unlike Paul, was wearing a suit, and Paul was damn glad he was on the ridgeline overlooking Pashto Khel. That was the name of the village he and his merry men had just thoroughly perforated, penetrated, and pilfered. So all the better that the colonel could see Paul’s position and be in place just in case Paul needed to call in the wrath of the gods on this miserable hole.
The local head honcho on the op, Bashir, called Paul over. Bashir was a powerfully built, dark-haired man with an incongruous potbelly. He spoke no Spanish and had just a little English. Paul only had a smattering of phrases from Bashir’s lingo. The translator program in the mil-grade halo in his helmet covered most of the gaps. It wasn’t perfect, but you couldn’t expect a halo from Earth to know all the local Farsi-derived slang.
Bashir said, “These men—they must die.” He was agitated, all hopped up on adrenaline and probably, if Paul’s guess was right, the local version of the venerable opium plant. If pushed, the seemingly unarmed Bashir would produce a P-39 pistol like magic, and someone would perish. Keeping Bashir on the team was important for everyone’s health.
Paul looked at the quivering mass of humanity at his feet. Three dissidents lay like broken toys in various positions of unlovely death. “His” men (they were actually Bashir’s Second Company) had done well. During the predawn firefight by the distant wall to the north, the dissident cell had been persuaded
to make a run for it. In doing so they had run through the rich, pungent marijuana and smack into Bashir’s blocking force to the west. They died as they thought they were reaching a safe haven, gunned down and exsanguinated from two sides.