The War for Profit Series Omnibus (63 page)

I got on a treadmill, the weapon laid on the floor in front of it. Thirty minutes elapsed and I was smoked so I went back to my room and stowed the Eliminator with the rest the weapons in the drawer under my bed. A throwing dagger, two boot knives, a saber, a bayonet, a five point seven millimeter automatic pistol, a ten millimeter submachine gun, and the eight millimeter hunting rifle I’ve had since I was twelve years old. You can never have enough weapons. I keep meaning to get a crossbow but never seem to have the time.

The warning came over the intercom. Zero G in two minutes. I put my stuff away and strapped myself to the bunk. The ship stopped braking toward Tumbler and began accelerating toward Tumbler. Reason being, the acceleration needed to provide gravity would hit up against light speed if maintained for too long and this ship wasn’t built for that. So a series of flips. Annoying but not really that bad. Only thirteen more days of this crap.

Finally, D-day came. Not sure what the ‘D’ stands for. Dirt? Debarkation? Drop Day? I don’t think anyone knows. I do know it’s the day subsistence pay stops and contract share pay kicks in. After breakfast I went to the observation blister and met Emily. We looked up at the sky. The sun was below the ship, Tumbler above, huge, filling a full third of the viewport. Ice-bound at one end, a ring of brown and green in between, across the equator, a barren wasteland of light brown and gray at the opposite pole, the pole facing the sun at that time. The generation ship of the employer hung in orbit. It was huge, the largest ship I’ve ever seen. Meant to serve as a home for well over two million people on a two millennia-long quest for a new home, the first generation long dead by the time their descendants arrive. But it didn’t work out that way. During the trip the impatient crew of the generation ship learned how to exceed light speed just a tiny bit, inadvertently had time come to a near standstill inside their ship, arrived here about two hundred years ahead of schedule only to find the planet had already been settled. Settled by colonists sent by the old Terran Empire, settlers using jump point technology, instantaneous travel. Tumbler was now inhabited by nomads, managing herds of beef-buffalo animals up and down the latitudes as their scorching sun made its two-year trek from pole to pole.

The employers, the ones on the generation ship, we’ve been calling the French because they speak French. And the people on the planet we’ve been calling the Indigs because they got here first. But the French came from Canada, and the Indigs are certainly not indigenous. Not here, anyway. But we have to call them something.

I stood next to Emily. We didn’t talk. She gave me a hug and left. I waited a few minutes and then went to my room and put on my full war gear and stuffed my bag and went down to my tank and stowed my gear and sat in the cupola. I had to put my hunting rifle in the rear tool box, to make room for the new Eliminator in the weapon mount on the left side of my seat. At first I thought the Eliminator was a piece of crap, but after a few training sessions I started to like it. The very strong magnetic field of Tumbler made sensitive electronics a little squirrely. The plain sights and simple rounds of the Eliminator would work well. The primary ammunition was a caseless round weighing five hundred and twenty grams. The initial charge of propellant was just enough to send the round five meters past the muzzle of the smooth bore, to reduce the effect of recoil on the troop firing the weapon. Then stabilizing fins deployed as the round’s rocket motor kicked in. On Tumbler, it would accelerate to 2,200 meters per second and had a penetrator and a shaped charge that would penetrate and detonate inside the armor of the indig’s powered battle armor. There were also slug rounds and buckshot rounds for engaging more conventional targets at close range. The slow rate of fire and limited magazine capacity would be worth it. The bandolier hanging across my chest held twenty five rounds. Five buckshot, five slugs and fifteen armor piercing. I’d load the weapon after we landed.

“Hey, Sergeant Slaughter.” Caldwell arrived, climbed into the driver’s seat. Parks was with her. He opened the auxiliary gunner’s hatch and settled in, closed the hatch, powered up the main and coaxial guns and performed built-in tests. Caldwell brought the drive motors on line. I ran my own checks and ran each system into and out of commander’s override. All good. I checked the time. I became weightless, the ship now in orbit. I sent ‘green’ status to higher.

Caldwell and Parks started humming some tune. In love, I guessed. Good for them.

“Hey, we’re on VOX. Don’t make me cut you.” I said that because the comms were set so that all traffic was monitored by net control during drops. Their helmet mikes were on ‘voice activated’ and I’d have to cut them out of the net if they didn’t shut up. Which wasn’t a big deal, unless they had something important to say during the drop, something the net control station needed to know about.

The landing boat separated from the ship and got in line behind two others. The boats were coming down in a column of twos to skid-drop us on a wide open plain covered in a carpet of thick, greasy grass. The boat glided into the atmosphere. My monitor was showing the boat pilot’s view. Vapor and smoke roiled from the surface of the boats ahead, the vapor obscuring my view. After ten minutes the screen cleared and I could see the ground below. I felt the gravity, the inertia of deceleration pushing me into my harness. The boat leveled off and moved to fly to the left rear of the boat ahead, the forty boats arranged in a wedge formation. The cargo ramp behind me extended, the doors folded up into the overhead. The pallet holding my tank slid backward, the drag chute was caught by the wind and my tank slid out and fell three meters. The pallet slid across the greasy grass, then the breakaway straps holding the tank to it gave way and we raced ahead at top speed, slowed and got into formation with the vehicles to our left and right and we slowed to a crawl. The pallet of supplies slid off the landing boat and stopped and my platoon parked around it.

The landing boats closed their cargo ramps and doors and angled almost straight up and blasted away, sonic booms announcing their departure. Loud as hell, even through my tank’s armor. Any indigs within fifty klicks were probably deaf, and certainly they knew by now they weren’t going to be fighting a bunch of chumps.

I switched comms, putting my crew on platoon push and myself on the company net. The short-range line of sight comms processor showed a full bank of green lights, the other stuff, mostly blinking amber lights and a couple of solid red ones. I popped my hatch and looked up. To the southeast the generation ship hung there in orbit, ghostly white, as wide as my thumb when held at arm’s length. We received a perimeter sketch over digital and I had
Caldwell move us into our designated spot. ORF-2 parked to our left and the mechanics who had been operating it dismounted and walked off to help set up their maintenance shelter. I left Parks to mind the tank and Caldwell helped me connect the slave cable from ORF-1 to ORF-2 so that he could control the weapons of both tanks. Me and Caldwell walked over to the Battalion TOC location and helped set up. The three tracked command post carriers parked as three points of a triangle, thirty meters between them. We set about snapping the frame of the dome together, and then raising it up, a synthetic canvas over the frame. After that, staking down the outer edges and then putting together the meter-square sections of the rubbery snap-down flooring. Took twenty minutes but seemed a lot longer, and I was sweating profusely when the job was done. Not completely done, TOC personnel were still setting up work stations and monitors and a briefing screen, under the direction of Captain Blythe.

But that wasn’t my territory. I was just there to provide muscle for the initial setup. Me and Caldwell went back to the ORF tanks. I relived Parks and he dismounted and he and Caldwell set up our tents behind the tanks. Normally we’d just put up one tent but they put up the second one just for me. Guess they wanted some privacy later. I liked having my own tent anyway and this way I didn’t have to set it up myself. Love is a wonderful thing.

As I sat at the weapons station I received a text from Emily. “ : ) ”

I sent back “ ; -) ”

Then a series of local data, weapons setting mods for the current weather, general reports, data was pulled from my end, and sector established positions and movements of patrols. Finally I got a confirmed link to the troop transport ship. It was direct laser comms, a tiny weak beam aimed at their receiver, their beam back to my receiver. And that’s all the connection I’d have with them. Tumbler’s magnetic field was a beast. That was my job, to get data interpreted and packaged up and made presentable. For now. The TOC would get hold of that job when they finished setting up. My job then would switch to watchdog, tracking them from here to make sure they did it right. Best job in the world.

After a couple of hours, Parks came and relived me at the weapons station so I went for a walk around the perimeter. The two armored recovery vehicles were positioned at the entry control point, and fifty meters behind them were three command post carriers, all their gear stowed, trailers attached, a skimmer hull-down at each end.

“Hey Slaughter!” Emily stood behind the laser gun of the second skimmer.

I walked over to her. “How you doing?”

She pointed. “My tent. All alone.”

I looked at my communicator. “How’s your schedule? Mine’s pretty busy.”

“I’m sure we can work something out.” She checked hers. “We have a brief in twenty minutes.”

I gestured toward the vehicles. “What’s all this crap?”

“Crap? I’ll have you know that’s my jump TOC.”

I understood. Both Battalion TOCs were here. One would stay in position until the other could move and come up, then the other could tear down and move. I looked all around and realized there was a consolidated ALOC. Looked more like a Brigade minus than a Battalion plus. “All right. Let’s do this.”

We compared schedules. I swapped a shift with Parks, Emily changed a couple of things. We’d be able to spend an hour together each day, right after evening chow. We walked over to the TOC dome and stood along the back wall to the right of the entrance vestibule. All the Stallion Battalion staff was there, along with the commanders and executive officers of each Company. An equal contingent from the Mechanized Infantry Battalion was there as well, and some indigenous personnel, about a dozen of them. They wore dark brown leather jackets and pants, black boots, pistol belts holding revolvers, rifles and bandoliers of bullets slung across their chests. Long black hair braided in pony tails, black handkerchiefs tied over their scalps, wind goggles and dust cloths hung around their necks.

Stallion Six entered. I yelled, “At Ease!”

He strode to the front and stood by the screen and surveyed the crowd. “Carry on!”

Those who had seats available sat. The screen changed to show Tumbler as a globe slowly rotating in front of dark, star-spangled space. “Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome. Killers, Stallions, Scouts, we have a job to do. As if you didn’t know, we have a squad of indigenous Scouts here to assists us.”

The troops turned to look at them. The Scout squad leader raised his left hand in a fist.

Six continued, “What we have here is a conflict that has shallow roots, easy enough to rip out. It has only been going on for three years and the French and the Indigs have been working things out but now there’s a big snag. At first, the French asked the Indigs to keep between these longitudes and they agreed.”

The screen changed to a still shot of the planet, longitudinal lines in red showed. About thirty percent of the planet was left for the indigs.

“But then the French asked them to tighten up a little, and took as many as would agree to come up and live on their generation ship. See, the French planned to take a lot longer getting here but their speed took them… well anyway, their aren’t nearly as many French now as there was supposed to be so they’re short-handed, and also, they are educated in all the wrong job skills for terraforming the planet. And that brings up another point. The French want everyone off the planet, and then want to start a sixteen hundred year long process of changing the planet to suit their vision of loveliness. But some Indigs like Tumbler just the way it is. And then there is another problem. The French brought human zygotes in stasis, but had nowhere to grow them. Some indigenous women went to see the generation ship habitat, to see if they wanted to live there. While their husbands were away on a hunt. Then hubby comes home to a pregnant wife, and the baby comes out blonde haired and blue eyed.”

Chuckles from the group.

“Anyway, hubby has a kid that not only isn’t his, but certainly is no kin to his wife either. And then when the family doesn’t want to re-locate to the habitat in space, the French want to take the child back. Really. So what happened not so long ago was a large number of Indigenous men took off and decided they’d keep the whole planet for themselves. They attacked a couple of the drill sites where French engineers were setting up infrastructure for terraforming complexes. The Indigs killed all the workers and razed the structures to the ground. Many of the rogue Indigs beat their wives for getting knocked up, and strangled the French infants. So now they have a reputation as marauders, wife-beating baby killers, and as far as I can tell, they like that reputation.”

Troops looked over their shoulders at the Scouts. The Scouts stared back.

“Hey, nobody cares. We’ve been to enough fights to know all that propaganda is bullshit based on maybe one incident, maybe just made up. We have a mission and that’s all. Our job is to go out, round up the Indigs who are out of tolerance and bring them back within the designated longitudes. To make that job easier I have convinced the French to go with the original longitudes they had agreed to in the first place. According to the French agents working with the Indigs, there are about eight thousand of them out of tolerance, comprised of about five thousand noncombatants and three thousand military-age males. Prepare to be challenged.”

Six looked at his wrist, at the communicator strapped to it. He paused for eight seconds. Then he strode toward the exit and said, “You now have exactly three Standard days to get your heads out of your asses, that’s when we get out of this staging area and head into Indig country.” He stopped at the vestibule and looked back. “Dismissed.” Then he turned and left the dome.

I left with Emily and noticed a collection of three-wheeled cross-country vehicles parked outside. We looked them over and I was reaching out to touch the left handgrip of one when a gruff voice came from behind.