Homeworld: A Military Science Fiction Novel (20 page)

Crazy Enough to Work

Admiral Clarkson marched into the command room and tossed a stack of vids he had been shuffling through on the table occupying the middle of the room. While one part of his brain was amused that an Infantryman, while taking heavy fire, still found time to write reports. He had to sift through the other part and didn’t like what those reports added up to. Infantry Bases around the planet were reporting that they were badly outnumbered and it was getting worse. They were also soon to be outgunned. Here at Alpha Base it was worse than at the other Infantry Bases as more than twice the number Coalition forces were arriving to try to batter down their gates than had been reported elsewhere. It seemed to Clarkson that someone up the Coalition chain of command had decided that Alpha Base had to be taken at all costs and using all resources necessary.

Clarkson new he didn’t have the firepower or the manpower to withstand the assembled Coalition ground forces just outside their defensive perimeter, and besides, there was nothing stopping the Coalition fleet overhead from just launching a Kinetic Impact Assault straight down on Alpha Base. Clarkson assumed that the only reason that hadn’t been done was the demoralization of Earth Republic Infantrymen that would occur if they knew that their main H.Q. had fallen to enemy hands.

The Creator knew the Infantrymen had enough to be demoralized about already. Their president killed and whose body was probably floating, even now, in frozen bite-sized chunks in deep space. A stray bullet killed their General, and to add insult to that, an Admiral of the Fleet was now leading them. “Well,” thought Clarkson, “as it seems all the Earth Republic Infantrymen are still fighting after all of that, I suppose we can risk losing one more symbol.”

As Clarkson looked up from the scattered pile of vids he had been staring at as he finished his compiling his strategy, he was surprised to see both Colonel’s Miller and Rainer at this briefing. This was strange, because usually only one or the other could attend due to the other being on the front lines with his fellow Infantrymen doing their damnedest to ensure that Alpha Base remained secure and in Republic hands. “Must be a lull in the fighting,” thought Clarkson and as he listened. It did seem quieter outside.

If you make your living as an Admiral of the Earth Republic Fleet, you have to able to think faster than most. You have to be able to process information faster than most, otherwise your crews would be dead and you’d be buried alive under a pile of unread vids. So all of this musing and observing had only taken a matter of seconds.

Therefore, before either of the Colonels could react to his entrance into the room and the thump of the vids on the table, Clarkson walked up to Miller, who was closer, and took the automatic rifle he held from his hands. Clarkson jerked back its bolt and let it slam home, readying the weapon.

Clarkson couldn’t help being silently amused as Miller immediately reached down to fondle the grip of his sidearm. Apparently, a true Infantryman felt naked without his rifle. Which was good, Clarkson wanted both of them unsettled by his actions and looking at their faces, he could tell they were surprised by his action and paying attention.

Clarkson began, “I don’t want to hear any more crap, gentlemen.” He held the rifle braced against his shoulder, its muzzle pointing at the ceiling of the room as if he were at ease. “We’re not doing anyone any good here,” he nodded in the direction of the base’s main entrance where the greatest concentration of Coalition forces was positioned. “We have to try to break though those lines or this place will be the death of every last one of us and we will have accomplished nothing with that sacrifice or I would be happy to do it. There comes a time when the willingness to stand and defend your ground becomes plain thick headedness and you lose sight of the big picture, which is to hurt the Coalition as hard and as much as we can.”

Clarkson now began to march around the table as he talked forcing the Colonels to turn and follow his movements. “Now we’ve proven through a trial by fire that the best we can do using conventional methods is hold them to a standstill and if we do that long enough they might get tired of waiting for victory and just launch a Kinetic Impact Assault on every major Infantry base still holding out. Which, you may be pleased to hear is all of them. However, that being said, we’re not going to be of any help to our fellow civilian citizens if we’re blown to bite-sized pieces across a hectare of destruction by the strike of an orbital bombardment.”

Clarkson stopped at the far end of the table and held the rifle at low ready before continuing. “So we’re going to break through their lines and leave Alpha Base. They can have their symbols. Our men have proven that their fighting for their home world not some ritualistic claptrap. They have the steel in their bones and the fire in their bellies to do this and we need to lead them through it. Our Fleet should be inbound soon and they will be able to provide some relief as they wipe what remains of the Coalitions “armada” out of the stars. Then we can clean up down here, but for now it’s time to throw caution and conventional thinking to the wind!”

The smirk of agreement Rainer wore was priceless. He had been recommending a similar course of action all along. As Clarkson remembered he said, “We’re just sitting here bleeding waiting for the sky to fall.”

Miller however stared at him with an expression of concern. “Do you really believe that’s a wise course of action, sir?”

“Do you have a better plan, son?” Clarkson said earnestly, returning the rifle to his shoulder and standing at ease while he gave the Colonel his full attention. “Because if you do, now is the time to present it, because I’d love to hear it. Honestly, the plan I have is going to cost us dearly in equipment and the blood of Infantrymen. So spit it out, Colonel Miller. Please tell me you have something better in mind?”

Miller was silent for about a half second and then conceded, “No, Admiral Clarkson, I do not have a better plan.”

Clarkson slung the rifle over his shoulder and said, “Then let’s get to work on this one,” Clarkson said as he spread vids across the table for all to see, “because the longer we wait on ground reinforcements that are not coming, the more advantage the Coalition gains. If we wait much longer, we're going to die one way or the other, for damn sure. Now, I don't know about you two, but I’d rather go out fighting and taking as many of these Coalition bastards as I can, instead of sitting here, covering my head with one hand while I have my thumb stuck up my ass with the other, waiting on some Coalition grunt to come put a bullet in my head.”

“I agree that we need to try to break out and abandon Alpha Base,” Rainer grinned. “The question though is how? They have gained the upper hand in numbers out there from simple attrition and our firepower’s fairly evenly matched at this point. Just rushing at them head on won’t work. We’ll be cut to pieces before we even get close to breaking through.”

“No, Colonel Rainer, that’s exactly why it will work. They won’t be expecting it and we’ll have a nasty surprise for them on top of it. We’ll send the tanks we have left ahead of us, but they won’t have our men inside of them as they won’t be truly engaging the enemy. We’ll send them crashing into the Coalition lines at their maximum speed with their fusion bottles rigged to blow. That ought to make for a rather nice hole for us to exploit, wouldn’t you say?”

Excitement lit Miller’s face. “You know, Sir, I think that’s just crazy enough to work.”

Clarkson noted that was the first time Miller had called him sir instead of Admiral Clarkson.” Maybe this son of a bitch was starting to come around to why he had earned his rank in the Fleet. Clarkson couldn’t help grinning, but covered it with his right hand as he got himself and his odd sense of humor under control.

Miller punched some keys on the table they stood around and the holographic display of the base shifted to focus on its northern wall. “The weakest point in their defense is here, and I honestly doubt they would have a chance of stopping our tanks before they could reach them.”

“We’ll pull all but a skeleton defense force back and mass everyone right here,” Clarkson pointed at a spot on the map not far from Miller’s chosen target. “Once the tanks go, we’ll charge them just like our old warrior ancestors would’ve done in trying to take a hill with bayonets and bullets. Sure, we're going to take some losses, but between the chaos and damage caused by the tanks and the element of surprise, they’ll be overrun before they even fully realize what’s happening. Hopefully by that point, we’ll have reached the city streets, break into small squads and fade away to rendezvous at a predetermined location.”

“What of those left behind, Sir?” Rainer frowned.

“They’ll be on their own just like we’ll be when we break through, but I’m not asking them to commit suicide so that we can live. While it’s too small for us all to fit through fast enough, we do have a large enough sewage tunnel that will take them to one of the main filtration facilities. If we set a charge here,” Clarkson pointed to a vid that showed an overhead view of the base and the maze of pipes below the city. “Then they’ll be able to access it. My guess is that the Coalition won’t be guarding the recycling centers just yet and while they may need a bath afterwards, they’ll be alive to rejoin us.”

Clarkson began to pace back and forth as he continued, “Now remember when this works and those of us not taking a bath in sewage are running for our lives in the city, we will have to scatter fast into small groups, disappear into the city, and regroup at a predetermined rally point. If we stay together, we’ll make far too large a target and be picked off from the air in no time at all.

“And if this all works, what then?” Rainer pressed.

“Then we bring the war to them in a decidedly dirty manner. There are occupied spaceports to both the west and the north. We can retake one of those and go from there,” Clarkson answered with a greater confidence than he felt.

In truth, he hadn’t thought that far ahead, but he could not let his men know this information. He paused to gather his thoughts. “So how soon can we be ready to put this plan into action?”

“An hour tops,” Rainer answered.

“Maybe less,” Miller corrected him.

“Well, let’s be about it then,” Clarkson ordered as he walked over and thrust Miller’s rifle back into his hands. “Ask for volunteers for the skeleton defense, but if no one steps up volunteer a few. I don’t want to make a man bathe in filth if he doesn’t want to. Personally, I’d rather bathe in the gore of my slaughtered enemy as we charge their line," he said with a grin.

As the Colonels stood up, Clarkson noticed a determined grin on their faces. Well, maybe this might work after all thought Clarkson who while he couldn’t admit it to his men felt way out of his depth leading a ground war.

Traveling With the Enemy

“Lord help us,” Dinah muttered as she lay on her stomach next to Drake. She didn’t need binoculars like the ones Drake was using to see the staggering mass of Coalition troops gathered around Alpha Base. The view from the rooftop they were on was clear enough as she stared into the seemingly impossible army of them. There had to be thousands if not ten thousand surrounding the base and she could see a dozen or so tanks just on the two sides of the installation that were in her line of sight.

Abigail wasn’t with them. They had left her on the ground floor of the building rather than attempting to lug her up the stairs with them.

The power was out across most of the city now. It was a telling sign of just how badly the Coalition had already ravaged it. There were so many redundancies built into any Earth city’s power grid that a wide spread blackout like this was nearly unimaginable.

Dinah wasn’t a medic but Abigail seemed to be stable. She had regained consciousness for a brief moment on their way here and tried to claw Drake’s eyes from their sockets before Dinah had been forced to shoot her up with an injector of sedatives, from her first aid kit, to keep her and Drake from killing each other.

Dinah couldn’t help but be impressed by Drake’s skill in patching and stitching human flesh. If she had been all Abigail had to rely on, she may have bled to death. There was also the fact that this enigma of a man, who had saved their asses, patched them up and then helped her lug what was supposed to be an enemy across seven klicks of enemy held terrain only to get them back to an Infantry Base. Several questions ran through Dinah’s mind. “What was his motivation? Why had he turned traitor? Could she trust him?”

“Your people in the base are getting ready to try something,” Drake announced.

“What? How can you tell?” Dinah asked with surprise showing in her voice.

“There’s a lot of activity near the Northern wall. I would wager they’re about to try to break out.” Drake offered her his binoculars.

“I’ll take your word for it,” she said, waving them away. “What does that mean for us?”

“Depends on whether they get lucky or they get massacred.” Drake set about checking over his rifle while they talked. “All we can do right now is to wait and see what happens. If, and that's a mighty big if, they are able to break out of the siege, I think it should be fairly easy to join up with them. If they don’t,” Drake shrugged, “I guess we start considering other options on how to get you two back where you belong.”

Breaking the Line

The Coalition was gunning at the approaching tanks with everything they had outside Alpha Base’s Northern wall, but it just wasn’t enough.

No sane commander could have expected Admiral Clarkson’s plan of blowing a hole through the wall themselves and sending every functional tank Alpha Base contained on a maximum speed collision course with them.

Clarkson's lead tank reached the wall of flesh comprised of Coalition forces not able to get out of the way of the speeding tank fast enough. They were the lucky ones for what followed was an explosion so powerful that it sucked the entire atmosphere in the immediate area towards it including the air contained in the lungs of any unfortunate soldier that found himself too close to the blast. As these Coalition grunts tried to gasp in almost near vacuum the initial return of air into their lungs was a welcome cool blast, but was quickly followed by a two-hundred mile per hour freight train of flesh searing air that turned the once life breathing organs into unrecognizable bags of liquid.

The force of the blast knocked the Coalition forces farther away from the blast to the ground as they stood it began to rain burning, bloody chunks of gore that had once been men. Before they could recover from the unexpected attack other tanks quickly followed, their fusion bottles erupting like a string of nuclear fireworks as they went up one after another all along the Coalition’s line.

Clarkson did not wait for the last of the tanks to detonate before he roared over the com link, “Charge!”

Like a wave of humanity, over ninety percent of Alpha Base’s personnel rushed the reeling Coalition lines, their battle rifles chattering and spraying death.

From the rooftops, the select few snipers Clarkson had been able to cajole into "volunteering" into staying behind and providing them cover were actively engaged. With every controlled squeeze of the trigger, they were removing every target of opportunity that was unfortunate enough to slide into the field of view of their high-powered scopes.

Clarkson’s blood was pumped full of adrenaline and his fear was so intense he felt nauseous. In spite of his age and lack of planet side combat experience, he kept up with the Infantrymen running alongside him. A soldier to his right took a hit to his side that ruptured his combat armor and sent strands of red-slicked intestines flying. Then the soldier was gone, left behind as Clarkson and the others pressed forward at a full out sprint.

Clarkson was reminded of old vids he had studied where unarmored soldiers armed only with semi-automatic rifles charged across a beach to reach the enemy’s position while the enemy fired from the relative safety of a concrete bunker using machine guns. They had mowed men down as if they were wheat stalks during a harvest but the men had kept coming and had conquered. This is what Clarkson was attempting now. He had softened the enemy up as best as he could and his men had superior arms and armament but in the chaos of the charge, Clarkson reflected that the age old Earth military motto of Leave No Man Behind was forgotten in their desperate attempt at escaping the besieged base. The wounded lay screaming and their comrades leapt over or ran around them as they struggled to reach the Coalition forces and rush past them.

Clarkson’s mind worked as fast as his trigger finger and he, as one of the lead Infantrymen, sent shot after shot towards the enemy desperately trying to kill them or at least get them to duck. As Clarkson’s men reached the Coalition lines, they slammed into them like a tidal wave. Areas of intense hand-to-hand combat erupted but mostly the personnel of Alpha Base just plowed through the enemy like a juggernaut.

Colonel Miller stayed close to him as Clarkson led a group of soldiers over the remnants of a Coalition artillery battery and on into the city beyond the lines. They had made it!

Clarkson slowed and started to turn to look back to see how many of his men had done the same but Miller grabbed him and dragged him on. “We can’t stop yet, sir,” Miller yelled.

Clarkson’s old body was pushed past its limits as he and those with him kept up their initial pace for over a kilometer and a half of darting across corpse littered streets and ducking through alleyways to avoid engaging the roving enemy patrols.

Miller led them into the cover of a burnt out warehouse that was only still standing partially. Sweat poured from underneath Miller’s helmet and the younger man was breathing hard as he finally released his hold on Clarkson.

Admiral Clarkson fell to his hands and knees and promptly vomited. His body shook with heaves that rocked him to his core. When he was done, he rolled over onto his back. Miller was standing over him, a hand pressed to the side of his helmet, issuing orders over his communications system.

Clarkson looked up at the clear blue sky, visible through a massive charred hole in the roof of the factory. He murmured a prayer of thanks that they had made it this far before his eyes closed and his world went black.