Homeworld: A Military Science Fiction Novel (15 page)

After the Storm

Dinah regained consciousness and immediately wished she hadn’t. She began coughing uncontrollably. Spasm after spasm racked her body as it desperately tried to pass up what felt like sand from her lungs. With each cough, her head lanced with searing pain. Finally, she drew in a deep long ragged breath. Dinah wondered where she was and why there was so much sand around and on top of her?

She sat up disoriented and dizzy, and looked into the blank expression of Infantryman Simmons. Simmons was the unfortunate young man who had the honor of attracting Sergeant Turner’s attention on their first day of Initial Training. Simmons seemed to be missing two legs and half an arm. Misshapen stumps of blood and bone had replaced them. Dinah stared at the ragged strips of flesh that were all that remained of his left leg and traced the shatter shard of what remained of his femur. Dinah stared for a long time shocked and unbelieving as the thought suddenly occurred to her that Simmons had gone to a place where the wrath of Sergeant Turner could never reach him again.

Then the terrible memories came flooding back to her. There had been the two coal black Coalition combat cars which had screeched around a corner at incredible speed and tore through the partially constructed barrier her squad had been ordered to erect. Stopping momentarily in front of the barrier, they had rained down a hot molten hell of shrapnel and bullets and then quickly raced away. She remembered diving for cover behind a pile of sandbags when she first recognized what the two vehicles had been. She had heard agonizing cries of pain coming from all around here and then there was a sharp pain on her forehead and everything had gone black.

Dinah felt something warm and wet on her forehead and reached up with her right had to see what it was and immediately wished she hadn’t as the searing pain told her that had been a really bad idea. Again, she reached up this time more tenderly and discovered that she had a three-inch gash just below the hairline on her forehead and based on the amount of blood slicking warmly down her face and cheek it was bleeding heavily.

With the instinctual training that that had been drilled into her, she reached into her right shoulder pocket and retrieved her field first aid dressing. She rapidly ripped open the external packaging. The black dressing inside basically looked like a Band-Aids bigger, meaner cousin on steroids. It had a thick dressing made of gauze in the middle and long lengths of a durable cloth hanging off of it on both sides.

Dinah applied the gauze dressing to the injured area, wrapped the long strips of cloth around the back of her head, and then again over the dressing pressed against the wound. She made sure there was good firm pressure as she tied off the tails of the dressing just in time to lean over and show herself what she had for breakfast that morning as wave after wave of dizziness washed over and through her body. “Great, an open head wound and a concussion to go with it,” Dinah thought as she reached around looking for her rifle.

Her left hand brushed the black stock of her P-200 machine/rifle and she pulled her most trusted friend out from under the sand to ensure that it was ready to greet any more unexpected company. Then, Dinah using her rifle to brace herself, stood up from the ground and surveyed the area and what was left of her squad, looking for any casualties she might be able to help.

Her gaze fell on Staff Sergeant Raol’s battered and bloody body whose head had gotten tired of sitting on his shoulders and had apparently gone off to find a better place to be. “Nothing to do for him,” she thought as she slowly began to walk through the debris looking for the rest of her squad mates. Again, the vomit came pouring out both from the dizziness and the fact that as she looked around her, it was as if someone had chucked several grenades into a tank of vat-grown meat. Only this meat had been her fellow Infantrymen of Tau squad. With no one to render first aid, Dinah lost her focus and staggered to the middle of the road, into the midst of the carnage. She stood there in a daze with her rifle at low ready but her brain at full off.

Dinah didn’t know how long she stood there staring off into nothing. She noticed her ears were ringing and her head was spinning. She slowly turned in circles looking at the carnage left behind by the Coalition. She had not known most of them long, only a few weeks, but because they had gone through the hell of Initial Training together, she felt as if she had known some of them better than members of her own family.

As the ringing in her ears started to fade, she caught her reflection in a large jagged chunk of glass from a shattered storefront window. To her surprise, she had been weeping. Her tears had left streaks of relatively clean marks on the quickly drying blood that covered most of her face. Her urban camouflage grey Earth Republic Infantry armor, which she had been so proud to put on, was scarred and pitted from the many impacts it had sustained. The combination of her armor and diving behind the sandbags had saved her life but what was she to do now that she was alive and everyone else was dead?

Her immediate commander and the rest of her squad lay in scattered chunks and pieces around her. Then a long, soft and slow moan emanated from under a pile of rubble off to her left. Dinah tried to run over to the pile of debris that used to be sand bags and concrete barriers, but when the world started to twist and turn in funny directions, she stopped and took in several deep breaths until her vision cleared. Then slowly, she started to walk over to the source of the moans that were getting louder and sounding more, irritated?

“Hey! Is anyone alive out there that doesn’t want to kill me?” Abigail’s yell came through, though the detritus that covered her muffled it.

“Yes! Yes, it’s me, Dinah! Hold on, I’m coming!” Dinah shouted back with relief that someone other than herself had survived, even it was her annoying, pain in the backside, old bunkmate.

“Well, would you kindly, get me out of here, Ridge? I’m pinned like a ribbon on a general’s chest?”

Dinah gently lowered herself to her knees and began remove the rubble as fast as she could.

It was hard work and Dinah didn’t want to make it worse by causing the rubble to shift and possibly kill or injure her last squad mate, but eventually, she caught a glimpse of Abigail’s silver hair amongst the rubble.

Abigail, with Dinah’s help, crawled from the piles of debris. “Well, that was a hell of a thing. Blast and damn it all. I never even caught a chance to get a shot off. Did you?” Abigail asked, pointing at Dinah with her right arm. Dinah shook her head no but pointed back at Abigail’s arm which was dripping dark red blood.

Just above the dark blue armor plating that protected Abigail’s forearm, a small piece of scorch blackened metal stuck out at a forty-five degree angle. Abigail’s eyes went wide as her mind registered the injury “Aaargh, thanks for pointing that out Ridge now it hurts like hell,” Abigail groaned, looking at the offending piece of metal that had produced the puncture wound.

“Let me get your dressing and I’ll wrap it up, and then we can have a medic remove it once we get EVACed back to a field hospital,” Dinah said as she started reaching for Abigail’s shoulder pocket.

“Frag that,” Abigail said as she grasped hold of the protruding end and yanked it out with a cry of pain and anger as she staggered to one knee “Bloody hell. That hurt,” she cursed.

“And probably only made it worse, you thick headed grunt,” Dinah said, kneeling beside her and yanking out Abigail’s field dressing from her right shoulder pocket. She then began wrapping it about the wound in the hopes of staunching the now pulsing, bright arterial red, blood flow.

As Dinah hurriedly worked to staunch the flow of blood, Abigail took a good look around and laughed through the tears of pain in her eyes. “I honestly don’t think things can get any worse right now, Ridge,” she said in her usual sardonic tone. After Dinah had finished wrapping her forearm and checking for any other wounds on her fellow Infantryman, they both stood to their feet.

Dinah swept the area with her rifle. Now that some semblance of her senses had returned, she did not want to be caught unawares by the next wave of Coalition grunts. Meanwhile Abigail strolled over to the body of Corporal Teves and retrieved his rifle to replace her own, which was still buried under the wreckage that had been the barrier they were working so hard to erect. Abigail also took his field dressing, as he obviously wouldn’t need it, having died losing a leg and catching shrapnel in the neck.

Dinah covered her as she rolled the corporal’s body over to retrieve his extra magazines and grunted and then quickly gagged. Dinah looked over to see what had caused the reaction and saw where Staff Sergeant Raol’s head had decided to go. The head’s eyes seemed to look up at Abigail and the stump of his torn and mangled neck had some of Raol’s spine poking out the bottom.

Dinah walked over to Abigail and knelt down to fumble through the corporal’s gear to see if the squad’s radio had been destroyed. They would need it if they were going to be EVACed. “What now?” Abigail asked inspecting Dinah’s handiwork with the pressure bandage on her arm.

Dinah pulled the radio out of the corporal’s pack and was glad to see that it appeared undamaged. “We’ll try to raise command for an EVAC. Our squad is gone, and you and I aren’t exactly in top condition,” Dinah answered while powering up the communications gear.

“This is private first class Dinah Ridge of Tau squad attached to Omicron Company. Is anyone receiving this transmission? Clearance code,” Dinah paused as she ripped off Corporal Teves Earth Republic Infantry insignia off his uniform and read the back before continuing, “Alpha, Mike, Oscar, zero, five, seven. Again, is anyone receiving, over?”

The only response she received from the high-powered com gear was the steady hiss of static. “Frag it all,” Dinah muttered looking over at the face of Abigail. “The Coalition must be jamming communications and I’m not familiar enough with this equipment to try to work around the jamming. Are you?” she asked with a hopeful look in her eyes.

“Nope,” said Abigail, spitting blood into the dirt beside her as she stood to her feet. “I guess it’s time to give ourselves orders and I hereby order me to find the Coalition bastards who did this and return the favor in spades!”

Dinah stared at her squad mate with a confused expression. Either the head wound she sustained hadn’t allowed her to hear that right or Abigail was proving she was as crazy as she always sounded.

Deciding that, given what she knew of Abigail, the latter must be true. She began saying, “You can’t mean that. There are only two of us. We have no idea where the Coalition grunts who hit us are by now and we’re both injured. We need to find someplace to hold up, a place to shoot at passing Coalition forces if it will make you feel better. But until we can get in touch with command, we need to await new orders.” Dinah finished, knowing that the wisdom of her words had fallen on deaf ears because Abigail’s face contorted with anger.

“Frag that!” Abigail snarled at her. “We’re either going to find the bastards that did this and kill them all, or find another group of Coalition ground forces to decimate.”

“Abigail. . .” Dinah started to protest.

Abigail met her eyes. “Listen, girl, we’re Infantry now. The Coalition has landed here on Earth. Earth, “Abigail repeated, “you know our home world? That means our job is to stop them here and now, and not hide like a couple of scared schoolgirls. So why don't you shut up, stand up and salvage whatever we can carry to make that happen or I’ll leave you here to wait for your momma to come by and make it all better!”

“You really are a damned crazy bitch,” Dinah said, using language her momma most certainly wouldn’t have approved of, while extending her left hand. “Give me a hand up then.” She was surprised by the relieved smile that crossed briefly across Abigail’s face as she hauled Dinah to her feet.

“Good, I didn’t think one member of Tau Squad would be enough to send those coalition bastards back to the hell they spawned from but now they’re going to have to face two of us. How bad off are you, anyway?” Abigail asked, reaching bending down to reach into the corporal’s backpack and pulling out a field first aid kit.

“I’ve got a three inch gash to the forehead and a concussion to keep it company,” Dinah said as she swept the area again for hostiles.

“Right, two reds and a blue it is,” Abigail said, opening pill bottles and handing three pills to Dinah. “As for me, I think this little puncture wound has earned me three reds,” the silver haired girl said, popping the pills in her mouth and taking a swallow from her canteen. Then she snapped the kit closed and stowed it back in the corporal’s pack before yanking it off his shoulders and shrugging it onto her own.

Noticing that Dinah still held the pills in the open palm of her left hand, Abigail said in an imitation of a grandmotherly voice, “Take your pills, dear. The blue will cover the effects of the concussion and the reds will dim the pain but not your senses.”

“When did you learn to be a combat life saver?” Dinah asked, still having not taken the pills offered.

“Never did get around to taking that course, but my mom was a Doc before the Coalition blew up her medical transport frigate out of spite. I picked up a few things around the house. Now take the pills or you’re going to be no good in a fight,” Abigail said with a smile and handed Dinah her canteen.

Dinah slugged back the pills with the proffered water and handed back the canteen. “So, what’s the plan? She asked?”

“Step one, we rob our dead. Find another pressure bandage, because I doubt that’s the last booboo you’ll be getting today and then cram as many useable mags as you can carry into your pack and pouches,” Abigail said briskly, as she started move around the bloody mass of flesh that used to be their squad.