Ash: Rise of the Republic (13 page)

“Captain on deck!” shouted Legs, arranging
his strange body into a clumsy salute. He had recently begun
inserting naval jargon into his pronouncements, to the Captain’s
great irritation. Mason, Grumps, and Casper rose as one from their
seats nearby, drunkenly waving leveled palms near their faces.

”At ease, assholes,” the Captain replied,
his sour mood suddenly draining away at the sight of his inebriated
troops. He grabbed the bottle of whiskey from Legs’ clenched fist
and savored a generous pull.

“Legs, I will never forgive myself for
suggesting that book to you.” He said, the fiery draught already
warming his blood. “We’re not on a ship goddamit! Is the rest of
the troop nearby?”

“Yessir,” slurred Mason, “Everbody else is
sleepin it off for now. Want me to wake them up to fall in?”

"Hey! Siddown you big lout, I'm tha
corpal...corpral...cor-por-al here, hic, eff anywon's gonna fallem
in, s'gonna be me!" mumbled Legs as he turned unsteadily to face
the big grunt.

“At ease rangers.” McLelland waved them into
their seats. “Let ‘em sober up. I’m just looking for the wife.”

“Sheeze upstairs drillin th'new
r'cruits.”

“I’ll leave you to it then, but go easy.
Remember we move out in two days. Don’t tie one on that you can’t
get loose of by then.”

“Aye aye Cap’n!” The three young men grinned
and repeated their sloppy salutes as the Captain walked up the
stairs, shaking his head. The rangers were not officially part of
the army; they were considered a separate autonomous entity, part
military and part law enforcement. The special status allowed them
more freedom and saved them from participating in the general
inspections that the Colonel was so fond of.

He found his wife on the third floor. She
was kneeling by a window and holding a battered pair of binoculars
to her eyes. At the next window, two forms were crouched under a
camouflage net. One was folded around a huge rifle, the other
peered into an enormous spotting scope. The Captain paused a moment
at the top of the stairs to watch them work.

“Blue Jay” said Deb, softly, keeping her
binoculars raised.

There was a soft muttering from under the
lump of camouflage. The spotting scope tracked slightly and
stopped. After another soft murmur the barrel of the rifle moved to
point at the same spot. A moment later, the big gun coughed a
muffled crack around its silencer.

“Thats a hit. Nothing but feathers.
Outstanding girls!” Deb was smiling now. “Let’s take a break now;
my husband just clomped up the stairs.”

The sniper team peeled back the netting they
were hiding under, both turning to look back at the Captain. The
two blond girls, Sam and Lee, were sisters, the newest members of
the ranger company. Like the rest of his troop, their short lives
had been filled with heartache and tragedy. Their mother had died
when they were toddlers, a victim of the last big diphtheria
epidemic. Their father had taken it hard, squeezing himself into a
bottle and drinking himself and the girls out of a home. By the
time he had answered the muster call two weeks before, the three of
them had been living on the road, passing a few days at a time in
various gambling towns. When they had arrived on Campus, their
father had left them at their assigned barracks and disappeared to
find a drink. When he still hadn’t returned the next morning, they
set out to drag him out of whatever dive bar he had crawled into,
just like they had a thousand times before. This time was
different. They found him on his back at the base of the stairs in
front of their building, his neck broken.

A week later, Deb had come across them
scrounging for food behind one of the mess halls and had taken them
under her wing. The troop needed a new sharpshooter, and the girls
had kept their small family alive for weeks at a time by shooting
squirrels, rats, and birds with their father’s old single shot .22.
They took to the larger rifle quickly.

“You two are getting good with that thing.”
The girls always seemed to make the Captain cheerful. “Are there
any birds left on campus?”

“No sir, that was the last one!” said Lee
with a wink.

“Well we’d better find some outlaws so you
can keep practicing.”

“Girls, go stretch your legs, I want to have
a word with the Captain,” said Deb.

The young sniper team obediently rushed down
the stairs. Deb frowned at her husband.

“I think we should leave them here when we
deploy. They’re so young,” she began.

“You’re just being overprotective,” the
Captain replied. “Look, they can shoot better than either of us.
Plus, after the life they’ve led, all those gambling dens, I bet
they can take care of themselves. Didn't I see Legs teaching them
some knife play yesterday?”

“I know, but they’re just so young. Sam is
only twelve for fuck’s sake. Every time I look at them I think of
poor Mol.”

“Well I’ll let you make the call. We’re
leaving in two days, if you feel like they’re not ready just give
me the word. I’m sure Beal can find some use for them with the
Guard until we get back.”

“Maybe I’m just getting soft.” Tears began
to well up in Deb’s eyes.

“Maybe we’ve both seen too many kids die,”
said the Captain, moving to wrap his wife in a comforting hug. “Our
plump Colonel has called for another general inspection in a few
minutes over on the drill field, want to join me?”

“No, you go, I want to keep working with the
girls.”

****

The camp became swollen with tough, grimy, drunken
men. They still stumbled in every day in small bands, each more
excited than the last to join up, eager for a share of the wealth
that was being raked from the villages and homesteads. Between
raids they grew bored and restless in the close confines of the
camp. The proximity of so many independent, untamed men spawned a
number of savage fights.

The Chief’s justice was swift and violent.
Two men caught fighting would be dragged before him for trial.
Invariably he would sentence them to be tried by combat, and
invariably he would be their judge. He would square off with each
doomed man, both stripped to the waist, both armed with long
knives. Invariably they would fight him, and invariably they would
lose.

A dozen men died screaming on his knife,
steaming blue ropes spilling from their sliced bellies. To quell
the boredom and stop the fights while he waited for more men to
join his cause, he sent his cloaked strangers out in search of
entertainment.

Hundreds of prostitutes descended on the
unruly cluster of huts and tents. The men, flush with the loot of a
dozen plundered villages, cheered their Chief’s wisdom. The whores
grew rich.

****

The Republic’s small army was arranged neatly on the
soggy drill field when McLelland arrived. There were nearly a
thousand men standing bored on the torn grass, though only two
hundred were regular soldiers. They had been arranged into two
battalions, each with four companies of eighty or so men.

The two hundred soldiers on loan from the
Campus Guard were evenly dispersed amongst the fresh recruits. The
volunteers had little military experience, but most of them were of
the same hardy, reliable stock that could be found on any backwoods
homestead. Just like the salty greenhouse farmers around the
Refinery, the men from the homesteads and villages of Central Texas
were all survivors of a harsh life. The majority of them were not
crack shots or accomplished brawlers, but they could be relied upon
to endure hardship and strife without complaint. They were willing
to suffer, even to lay down their lives to give their glimmer of
civilization a chance to flourish into something permanent.

Most were middle-aged, and many had been
outlaws themselves when they were young. Plenty of them had enjoyed
the freedom and excitement that came with a savage, chaotic life,
but boys grow into men, they marry and have children. It is
difficult to feed and clothe a family on nothing but chaos and
savagery. Food and clothing require civilization. So now they
marched to protect not only their wives and children, but the
civilization that kept a blissful domestic life possible.

Having arrived early to the drill field, the
Captain bypassed the reviewing stand from which the Colonel and his
senior officers would inspect the troops, many of whom he knew from
his travels through the region. He walked slowly down the ranks,
stopping occasionally to speak with a platoon commander or inspect
a weapon. He spoke softly, stern but encouraging. Words of praise
were few but well deserved. A dirty rifle or a missing piece of kit
earned a soldier a disapproving glance, but a man who showed
discipline and attention to detail received an inspiring nod or a
proud smile.

The hastily assembled army bore a variety of
weapons. A few of the volunteers had brought their own guns, many
of them old AR-15s, the ubiquitous civilian version of that
pre-pillar, US military standard, the M16. In order to simplify
logistics, the Campus ammunition factory only produced two
different rounds, the old NATO standard 5.56mmx45 and 9mm
parabellum. For those volunteers who had shown up with weapons
chambered in other rounds, or no weapons at all, the state provided
new rifles. Manufactured on Campus, the R1 was not much more than a
steel barrel and a plastic stock. For reliability and ease of
manufacture, the engineers had forgone the complicated actions and
mechanisms of most pre-pillar weapons and employed a tried and true
bolt action design. They were dubbed 'muskets' by the Campus Guard
veterans due to their primitive design, but in reality they were
practical weapons. Their simple actions kept them reliable despite
the ash, and their slow rate of fire conserved precious
ammunition.

The Guard troops were outfitted with the
standard battle rifle of the NRT, the R2. These were also made on
Campus, but were significantly more advanced. The design was
cobbled together from a variety of pre-pillar weapons. Drawing
together the best features of weapons like the M16 and the AK-47,
the engineers had produced a formidable rifle. Its select-fire
capability from single shot up to fully automatic, straight line
design, and light weight made it popular with the troops. Its loose
design tolerances and direct impingement gas system kept it
reliable in the harsh post-pillar environment.

A new feature, the ash cover, had recently
been implemented. It was basically a plastic case with statically
filtered air intakes. The only unfiltered opening in the case was
the muzzle. Spent casings were collected in an integral hopper
which could be emptied through a trap door activated by a small
lever. The case served two vital purposes. Most importantly, the
gun could breathe without ash accumulating in the mechanism.
Secondly, bullet casings could be retained and recycled. The R2 was
considerably more complicated and therefore more time consuming to
produce and difficult to use than the simpler R1, so only the
veterans were equipped with them.

In support of these individual armaments,
every company had its own weapons platoon consisting of two light
machine guns and a number of the new rocket launchers. The
launchers were newly produced in one of the Campus factories; rough
copies of the old Soviet RPG. They had not been tested in battle
yet, but the hope was that they would give the green troops a much
needed advantage against the seasoned cutthroats they were up
against. The machine guns were relics found in one of the National
Guard armories. They were complicated and therefore unreliable when
the ash was in the air. The engineers were in the process of
designing an ash cover for the old guns, but until it was produced
the weapons’ effectiveness in battle was dubious.

Though their weaponry varied, every soldier
was issued a standard uniform, the ash suit. The ill-fitting
coveralls were not particularly impressive to look at. They were
dyed the same leaden gray as the thick cloud cover, and the
wearer’s limbs seemed perpetually lost in the baggy sleeves. The
lumpen garments gave the army the appearance of a legion of grim
warrior-janitors. All they lacked were their battle brooms and they
could sweep the enemy from the highway with prejudice. The Captain
chuckled at the thought as he passed through the ranks.

Despite the suits’ unimposing appearance,
they were ruthlessly practicality. They were constructed from a
lightweight, breathable, and waterproof fabric, the result of the
most recent advances in textile manufacturing. They were perfectly
suited for the harsh environment.

The most impressive feature was a thin panel
near the waist powered by flexible photovoltaic panels on the back.
This allowed the wearer to control a variable static field
generated in the mesh of thin wiring woven into the fabric. The
soldiers could, at the push of a button, cause their suits to
collect ash from the environment and then arrange it in different
patterns for camouflage. Then, if needed, they could reverse the
polarity of the charge and instantly repel even the most stubborn
ash particle. The control panel also featured commands which would
statically seal the sleeves, pant legs, and integral hoods to the
standard issue gloves, boots, and filter-masks. Each soldier also
wore a standard equipment harness and a large rucksack. The suits
were a source of pride for the troops of the NRT. No other state
produced such advanced equipment.

The technology was derived from the repellor
fields which kept corrosive ash from damaging vital electronic
components in the power plants and the factories. The repellors
were also employed to keep the ubiquitous and annoying ash from
entering the doors, windows, and air vents of most of the buildings
on Campus.

RNT engineers had worked out the technique
for generating the static fields nearly twenty years before. Until
recently, it had been a closely guarded state secret. The repellors
had been essential to the Republic’s growth in industry and
science. Sophisticated electronics and machinery had proven to be
extremely vulnerable to volcanic ash and were therefore exceedingly
difficult to maintain without the protective static fields.