C.R.O.W. (The Union Series) (2 page)

At that
moment I imagined our troopship Challenger and the rest of the fleet, painted
black as space itself, soaring toward the planet New Earth at incredible
speeds. I imagined the epic battle being fought between the two great navies of
the Union and the Chinese somewhere ahead of us. I imagined stricken ships
belching gases in their last throes of death as they hurtled down into the
atmosphere of New Earth, and then I imagined others, powerless, drifting out into
space all alone in the dark. I shook off the thought.

‘Lads, this
is it,’ Corporal Evans met our gaze one at a time as he looked around the crew
compartment; ‘I’m not a big man for speeches. All I’m gonna say is do what
you’ve been taught, do as you’re told, by me or the senior toms,’ he was
looking to me and Tony when he said that, we were the newest members of the
section, ‘Do that and you will get out of this alive. When we hit the deck, as
soon as your seatbelt undoes itself you debus. You run into cover and then you
fire. You keep firing until I give you a fire control order. Understand?’

‘Yes
Corporal!’

A voice
uttered something unintelligible from Corporal Evans’s respirators, and I knew
it would be the pilot on the intercom. He held it close to his ear, his face an
expressionless mask. I wondered what he was being told. Something clicked from
within the dropship and the electrical hum was then accompanied by a high
pitched whirr that increased in noise and pitch, growing louder and louder until
it became too much for me to bear, and so I slipped on my respirators and
clipped it around the back of my head. The in-built headphones cut out the
noise automatically, only allowing in sounds that they deemed worth my hearing.
The rest of the section followed suit moments later. I knew that Corporal Evans
was being told that it was nearly time and a fresh wave of fear passed through
my body, it jangled every nerve from my very core out to my fingertips.

I looked up
at Berezynsky at the same time as he did at me and for a moment we both gazed
into each other’s eyes from across the tiny compartment. We were so close to
each other that our knees touched. Tony barely ever said a word to anyone, and
I realised that even though we had been in the same platoon for weeks I barely
knew a thing about him. I wondered if Tony was feeling the same fear as I was,
then I wondered if he was wondering the same about me. Tony looked away.

‘We’re coming
into orbit, lads,’ Corporal Evans briefed us, ‘Chinese warships have been
driven away, but we’re receiving heavy anti orbital fire from the surface. It’s
going to be a rough ride down, in other words.’

We knew that
anyway. The Chinese had spent the past two years since defeating the Union and
its Russian allies preparing for the inevitable counter attack. New Earth was
worth too much to both sides to be given up without a fight, but the Union had
never anticipated a Chinese invasion. Our enemy would not repeat the same
mistake with us.

I had spent
weeks during our voyage being lectured on the scale of the Chinese forces
garrisoned on New Earth, and it was sobering:  hundreds of battalions of
infantry and artillery, hundreds of warships ranging from tiny gun boats and
orbital weapons platforms, to mighty battleships and carriers stocked with
robotic aircraft. Again I imagined the battle that raged around us outside our
tiny little compartment, and it made me feel very, very small and defenceless.

Suddenly the
lights switched from bright white to a dim blood red. We all knew what that
meant - it was time.

‘Helmets on,
lads! Let’s do this!’

As one, we
put our helmets on over our respirators, clipping them under our chins. With
the last part of my body covered except for a few square inches of my neck I
began to sweat profusely. The respirator automatically made its best attempt to
keep my face cool, its tiny fans whirring madly, but it was never quite enough
and this time was no exception.

‘One minute,
lads!’ Corporal Evans warned over the intercom, just as the artificial gravity
generated by Challenger disengaged. The sudden feeling of weightlessness turned
my insides and I resisted the urge to puke. The dropship was moving, I could
feel it. The launch bay had depressurized and we were being moved by a robotic
arm into position, ready to fall from Challenger for the last time. The bay
doors above us would be gaping open, and I knew that we were hanging upside
down over the red surface of New Earth kilometres below.

‘Thirty
seconds!’

Joe Mac
pumped his fist, ‘Come on, boys,’ his bared teeth were visible through his
visor as he leant forward to see us all, ‘Let’s get angry! We’re gonna have
these bastards!’

The intercom
filled with our personal battle cries. I couldn’t think of anything good, so I
just screamed out, ‘Wooooo!’ Better than doing nothing at all I guess, and
surprisingly it made me feel a lot better.

‘Ten
seconds!’

We were in
frenzy; blokes were shaking fists and screaming obscenities I couldn’t possibly
repeat.

I did think
of something to say then, something that at the time I felt would be inspiring
to myself and the lads sat around me, but then I couldn’t remember what it was
I was - good job - because I never got the chance to say it.

We suddenly
dropped.

We fell from
Challenger toward the surface of New Earth and G-forces tore at my body as the
dropship began its violent manoeuvres to achieve an optimum entry, and it was
then that I was glad there were no windows to see out of. Again I fought back
the urge to be sick. Everything happened so fast and violently, I’m not sure I
was even able to breathe!

All I could
do was hold Berezynsky’s gaze. I don’t know why I did it, but I always ended up
locked into eye contact with one of the lads sat across from me. I guess
without anything else to look at, it was the only thing to keep me from losing
it. Tony’s eyes were wild and terrified and I’m pretty sure that mine were too.

Dropships
were at their most vulnerable during the entry stages of their drop,
particularly from missiles and ground fire. Speed was one of their primary means
of defence during that stage, and therefore instead of slowing to a more
acceptable shuttle entry speed, they just kept going. Underneath a  dropship
was a patchwork of tiles designed to absorb the extreme heat created by the
friction between the ship and the atmosphere on entry, initially at speeds as
high as thirty thousand kilometres per hour.

Everything
shook as the  dropship entered the New Earth atmosphere, tilting backward to
allow the tiles to do their job. High above us, Challenger and the other
troopships would be firing us in, using an assortment of missiles and orbital
artillery to cut through the enemies air defence and soften the objective for
our landing, as well as making it difficult for enemy anti-air batteries to
distinguish between dropships and ordinance.

There was one
single fact that terrified me, a point made again and again during my training
to prepare me for the reality of a ‘Hard’ drop.
Not everybody  would make
it.
On previous operations against the Indians, the Japanese and the many
other enemies of the Union, statistically one in three dropships were destroyed
by enemy fire during their perilous landings. And there I was, sat in one of
those very dropships, strapped in so that I could hardly move, one missile away
from becoming a statistic. The maddest thing about it all was that we were all 
troopers voluntarily; in fact we were one of the few arms in the Union military
that
were
voluntary. In a world where freedom was only for the wealthy,
we had made the only choice we were ever allowed to make; we had chosen the 
infantry.

I pictured
phalanxes of missiles speeding toward us from every direction, blasting our
mates out of the sky and sending molten metal streaking across the upper
atmosphere, and then my fears intensified even more. The initial shock of the
drop and the atmospheric entry were gone and my conscious mind began to
contemplate what was happening. Despite what I was taught, every muscle in my
body tensed and my heart felt like it was about to hurtle through the top of my
skull, never mind it pumping! Some people had been known to soil themselves
during a drop, and I think during training one of my mates actually did,
although he always denied it.

We fell from
the heavens at impossible speeds, slowing rapidly as the atmosphere thickened.
The dropship would have to sacrifice its speed in order to enter the lower
atmosphere without burning up, or splatting us onto the surface of New Earth
like a bug on a windshield. In order to counteract the loss of speed it would then
substitute with daredevil manoeuvres and more importantly use its twin vulcan
cannon, capable of firing thousands of rounds a minute. Since our straps
prevented our bodies being thrown about the crew compartment, our vital organs
just threw themselves about inside our rib cages instead.

I felt the
dropship dip  its nosecone  - enabling the vulcan to fire. No sooner had it
done so then the crew compartment shook. It didn’t take the brains of a
scientist to know that the vibrations were caused by the vulcan firing, and
that meant enemy missiles. Anti-air missiles of all types and sizes, which
could not hope to hit us before, would now be in their element as we slowed in
the lower atmosphere.

‘Screw the
nut!’ Climo shouted in protest at yet another sudden drop that left our
stomachs where our mouths should be. I’m still amazed he even got the words
out. 

‘Keep it
together, lads,’ Corporal Evans boomed, ‘We’ll be flat to the deck soon.
Anti-air ain’t even getting close!’

I chose to
believe him, although as it turned out he was actually lying. The Chinese air
defences had successfully taken down dozens of dropships and gravtanks from our
battle group, which had been one of the first to drop. They had also caused
significant damage to our fleet in orbit, despite being completely outgunned.
However, Dropship Infantry were organised to operate with the grim acceptance
that ships would be lost. In a modern war against a well-matched foe like the
Chinese, it was inevitable. To lose ten or so ships wasn’t actually that bad
going, believe it or not.

I could feel
us begin to level out. Dropships had a symbiosis between pilot and machine that
enabled them to fly at breakneck speeds only a few metres from the ground,
making them harder to detect and engage. Rather than just dropping straight
onto an objective, which made us an easier target, we would drop to a location
a few kilometres away and then fly in flat to the deck with the gravtanks in
support. The final stage of the drop was known as the ‘run in’, and it was just
as dangerous.

I could
imagine outside our tiny compartment the armada of ships forming up as it came
closer and closer to the ground, blasting missiles away with sprays of vulcan.

We levelled
out suddenly with a jolt, and I knew then that we were on the surface of New
Earth. The objective would be in the distance, obscured by clouds created by
smoke bombs dropped by the fleet to mask our approach. Not much defence against
the advanced targeting systems used by robotic enemy fighters and missiles, but
a smoke screen was better than absolutely nothing!

We jerked to
the left and right as the  dropship weaved around unseen obstacles, through
valleys, around hills and whatever else my imagination could cook up. We were
really going for it, even though we were only travelling at a fraction of our
entry speed, the G-forces of the final run in were easily enough to turn my
stomach a few times. We ‘leapt’ over something, and I honestly thought all my
intestines had dropped out of me.

It was then
that Brown puked into his respirator, ‘
Oh God!
’ I thought. I couldn’t
see his face, just what he’d had for breakfast smeared all over his visor. In
other circumstances, I would have considered what I saw as hilarious. I
despised Brown, but I didn’t want to see him choke before he even made the
landing.

‘Brown, sort
your life out! Now!’ Joe Mac snarled as Brown struggled to remove the respirators.

I can’t
really say that I blame Brown for puking, lots of people do from time to time,
and it’s a wonder I didn’t puke too, because I was absolutely terrified.
Imagine the maddest rollercoaster on Earth and then get thousands of people to
shoot at it, and that still wouldn’t even come halfway to a drop!

Outside we
were beginning to get into an assault formation. The company were assaulting
with two platoons up front, with one to the rear in reserve, I remembered from
my briefings. In each of those platoons were four dropships, in a box formation
with two up front and two to the rear. In front of each platoon were the
gravtanks, at a ratio of one to every two dropships. They were essentially a
dropship, but with a lower profile, more armour and a turret mounted rail gun.
Each ship would be a few hundred metres apart in order to minimise the damage
the company could take from explosive area weapons used by the enemy. From
above the formation
would look like a large
triangle, concealed in smoke and the dust and sand thrown up in its wake,
hurtling toward its target.

Brown removed
his respirator and tipped the puke onto the floor at his feet. He looked like
he was about to cry. He shook it and tried to wipe the inside on his knee.

‘No time for
that now, you lizard!’ Mac scorned, ‘Put it back on!’

Brown obeyed.
The
respirators might well stink, but it would
work, and that was the main thing.

‘Thirty
seconds boys!’

Funnily
enough I felt almost elated. I had survived the drop with all of my section.
Whatever happened when we touched down and the back door opened, at least I
would have a chance to do something about it rather than sitting there,
strapped in and ready to die.