C.R.O.W. (The Union Series) Read online

  Combat Replacement Of War

  Digital edition first published in 2012

  Published by The Electronic Book Company

  www.theelectronicbookcompany.com

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this ebook with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this ebook and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author. This ebook contains detailed research material, combined with the author's own subjective opinions, which are open to debate. Any offence caused to persons either living or dead is purely unintentional. Factual references may include or present the author's own interpretation, based on research and study.

  Copyright 2012 by Phillip Richards

  Cover Art by Panagiotis Vlamis.

  http://weaselpa.deviantart.com

  CONTENTS:

  The Author

  Acknowledgements

  1: The Drop

  2: One Month Ago: New Arrivals

  3: Reveille

  4: PT

  5: The Tour

  6: True Colours

  7: The Call to Arms

  8: The Jump

  9: Training

  10: Happy Birthday

  11: Alpha Centauri

  12: The Ditches

  13: The Counter Attack

  14: The Burrow

  15: Descent into the Warrens

  16: Battle in the Dark

  17: Return to the Surface

  18: The Trenches

  19: Jersey City

  20: The Emerald Sea

  Also by the Author

  The Author

  Phillip Richards was born and raised in Chichester, south England. He joined the Infantry at the age of seventeen, where he has remained ever since. During his service he has taken part in two operational tours in Kosovo, four in Iraq and a further two in Afghanistan. He is now a Sergeant, and this is his first science fiction novel, which has been significantly influenced by his experience within the Army. This story and all of the characters within it are entirely fictional, however, so if you know him and think that you recognise yourself for good or bad reasons, you are mistaken!

  Acknowledgements

  Thank you to Panagiotis Vlamis, ‘Weaselpa’, for producing the exceptional artwork for my cover. It has been a joy to work with you.

  Thank you, mum, for reading and finding all the silly errors in my work that I hadn’t noticed!

  Thank you especially to my wife, for her support over the last few years. You stood beside me during my darkest hour time and time again. When I walked through the valley of the shadow of death, it was you who walked with me.

  Lastly, and so very importantly, thank you to all of those who I have had the honour of serving with, who made me laugh when I should have cried, who kept me alive when I should have died. It is because of you that I am here to write this book.

  ‘War is delightful to those who have no experience of it.’

  Desiderius Erasmus

  Language: UK English Edition

  Combat Replacement Of War

  1: The Drop

  You can’t ever be fully prepared for your first drop. You can train in simulators, practice drills for hours on end and sit in a million classroom lessons, but nothing ever comes close to the real thing.

  I still remember my first drop, clear as day, from high above the atmosphere of Uralis, home of the Infantry. I remember wondering if it really was necessary that I had to be strapped in so tightly, I remember the nausea I felt when the troopship disengaged her artificial gravity ready for release, and I remember the intense anticipation of what lay ahead. But most of all I remember the fear, a fear so powerful it felt as though a storm raged within my bowels. I feared the unknown - for there were no windows in a dropship - its designers had decided that it was better for us that we couldn’t see out, and so all I could do was imagine what was going on outside the tiny eight man crew compartment. A million questions raced through my mind; what would it feel like to fall from space? Would the landing be hard? Would I be sick and look like a coward in front of my mates? Would I even survive the drop at all? Even in training, the odd mishap was inevitable. And mishaps at speeds I could barely imagine all came to the same obvious conclusion.

  Of course I survived that drop, and the many that would follow it during an intensive final exercise that lasted several weeks.

  But this time was different.

  A bead of sweat ran down my forehead and slowly made its way down my nose. You would think, with all the millions of Euros it had cost to make a single dropship, and with all the technological wizardry that my section commander in training could only describe with a shrug, that it would be capable of keeping its human cargo cool.

  ‘Just be glad you’re not melting, the engine works at over five hundred degrees, and its right above you,’ a loadee flicked his head upward as he checked our straps were secure. Nobody answered, but I knew we were all thinking the same thing… Cheers for that bit of useless information, mate!

  The loadee walked between our two rows of seats, double checking that we were fastened tightly enough by tugging roughly at the straps across our chests. His white naval uniform contrasted starkly against our blood red combats, designed to camouflage us once we landed on the surface of New Earth. He wouldn’t be dropping with us; he would stay on board Challenger and face the enemy in orbit. I listened intently as he went to speak to my section commander, who was sat beside me at the rear of the closest the ramp exit.

  ‘Remember, listen to the intercom and..,’

  My section commander waved the loadee silent, ‘I know the score, mate, cheers.’ One word from Corporal Evans was enough to stop a man in his tracks. His voice boomed with authority, and his words carried a confidence that could lead young men into the gaping jaws of hell itself. Corporal Evans was a giant of a man, at least half a foot taller than me, with broad shoulders and a chiselled jaw. The platoon worshipped him as a god, he was one of the few veterans left of the war on Eden, and had completed several combat drops during his ten-year service, including one on New Earth two years ago during the infamous Betrayal. I wondered what he thought about returning to the war torn Alpha Centauri system once again, but as ever, his hard eyes betrayed nothing.

  The loadee nodded and left the compartment, and as he did so the rear ramp raised. We peered through the closing gap as our home - or what we had almost come to call home - disappeared for the last time. Challenger was one of the countless troopships sent through the stars to wage war on the Union’s. It had been a hell for me, but it couldn’t be anything worse than what was in store for us all kilometres below. The door closed with a loud dull thud, like the door to a tomb. We might die in that this very day, we all knew it. Everyone knew the statistics. Only two in three made it down. An electrical hum sounded somewhere above us, which I assumed meant the engines were warming up or something.

  ‘Check your kit, lads, you won’t get another chance,’ Corporal Evans ordered.

  All eight of us checked over ourselves. We had already done so a hundred times already, but there was a simple saying in drops, ‘Check, check and check again, because you can’t check when you’re dead.’

  I went over my kit like a drill. I always checked my respirator first, because there wasn’t much use in me having a rifle that was loaded and comms that worked if I was choking to death. New Earth’s atmosphere was a toxic mixture of chemicals that could kill a man breathing unaided in a couple of minutes.

  I placed the respirator over
my face and looked through the visor. An amazing piece of equipment, the respirator visor was an advanced targeting system, and could give me a near perfect image by night. A microphone was built into the mouthpiece, as well as a headset that could receive transmissions from my section and protect me from noises that might otherwise deafen me.

  The next most important thing to check was my personal weapon, which in my case was the MSG-20. The staple weapon of the armies of the Union, the MSG-20 had been in service long before I joined up. It was a super high velocity weapon system which used a series of magnets to drive steel darts sharpened at a molecular level to supersonic speeds. They could punch through armour and flesh at ranges of up to two kilometres, depending how good a shot you were, of course. The weapon could communicate with my visor display via a wire that ran up my sleeve, which allowed me to fire without the need to look along the length of the barrel to aim, although the weapon was said to be far more accurate fired from the shoulder. In addition rounds could be angled as they left the barrel by the magnets to effectively ‘steer’ them towards targets identified by my visor, thereby correcting my aim.

  I checked my rifle was fastened into its rack beside me securely, so that it didn’t then bounce around the cabin as we dropped, breaking every bone in our bodies. I then checked its battery still read ‘full’. It would last for days of constant battle though before it would lose its charge.

  I checked my magazine pouches. I carried ten magazines around my waist, with two on my weapon. Each held a total of sixty five darts, which gave me a grand total of seven hundred and eighty; enough for me to fight a small war by myself, I liked to think. I also carried a belt of six grenades which were strapped to my body, as well as an assortment of smoke grenades, flares and anti-personnel mines that I carried in the daysack strapped to my back.

  I finished off by checking myself, making sure everything was secured correctly, pouches were clipped shut, my water pack was full and my helmet was ready to put on when ordered. Satisfied, I sat back and waited for the others to finish.

  It was waiting that made it worse. If I had something to focus my mind on I found that I could almost forget what was going on around me, and I wouldn’t be afraid. But as soon as I stopped, my mind raced and my heart pounded against my rib cage: I was so scared I wanted to be sick.

  Corporal Evans appeared to know that we needed to be kept busy, ‘Let’s do a quick comms check, again then, lads.’

  We made sure our respirator earpieces were seated properly over our ears.

  ‘One at a time, then,’ Corporal Evans called each of our names over our section intercom.

  ‘Moralee.’ That was me; Private Andrew Moralee, a new recruit fresh out the factory by a few months.

  I stiffened by instinct, ‘Corporal!’

  ‘Berezynsky.’

  ‘Corporal!’ Tony Berezynsky was sat across from me. He’d joined not long before I did, plucked out of the slums of southern England as the colonial wars intensified. Like me he was a young nineteen-year-old trooper of average build and height, with boyish features. I didn’t know much about him except that he was a quiet lad who kept himself to himself, still trying to find his place within the section.

  ‘Climpson.’

  ‘Corporal!’ Climo was senior to me and Berezynsky by a year. He was still barely twenty, but his small build hid a ferocious temper that had earned him respect as one of the most dangerous men in the platoon. I wouldn’t pick a fight with him, that was for sure, but fortunately for me he was a friend who had stood by me - at great cost to himself. Although he hadn’t experienced combat, his reputation had landed him with the MAM-G, or ‘Mammoth’ as we called it, for its brutish size. It was essentially a much larger version of the MSG-20, capable of far greater rates of fire at similar ranges. The funny thing about heavy weapons is that everyone wanted to fire them, but nobody wanted to carry them. Even though it was seen as a privilege and a mark of respect in a trooper’s ability to carry such a weapon, Climo and many others would still grumble about it. In his case it had been given to him as a punishment for violence, which had already seen him do time in Challenger’s claustrophobic brig.

  ‘Brown.’

  ‘Corporal!’ Brown, heavily tattooed and muscular in build had landed himself the MAM-G like Climo due to his growing seniority in the platoon and his reputation of being one of the tougher - though by far not the toughest - members of the platoon. Unusually, I think he actually really liked carrying it. It was a symbol of status amongst the blokes, you didn’t give the support weapons to any common idiot, and Brown was one of those troopers who desperately wanted to climb the platoon ladder to become a ‘senior private’, the first step to becoming a Non-Commissioned Officer; NCO. I didn’t like Brown, and he had made it blatantly obvious that he didn’t like me either, and he especially hated Climo for humiliating him days before and almost leaving him in hospital.

  ‘Rawson.’

  ‘Yeah.’ Michael Rawson had served for several years, and had completed a couple of drops during the Eden campaign. In his mid-twenties, he was ready for promotion, but had been taken away from his promotion course on Uralis to join us in the fight for New Earth. He was essentially a lance corporal in waiting, and because of this he carried an automatic grenade launcher attached to the underside of his rifle. A trooper had to really know what he was doing in order to use such a weapon effectively, and not kill all his mates with a badly launched grenade. Mike was the section joker, always good for a laugh, and although he had never been friendly with me - no senior trooper was ever friendly to a new bloke or ‘crow’ as they were known - he had never given me any trouble.

  The last of the privates to be called was Chase, another lance corporal in waiting, affectionately known as ‘Chase the Face’ for his extraordinary good looks. Supposedly he could leave Uralian women weak at the knees without even removing his respirator! He also carried a grenade launcher, and had been attached to the section after another senior trooper, a bully named Woody (who had tormented me since arriving to the platoon), had been beaten half to death in the last few days of our voyage.

  ‘Joe, you got me?’

  Lance Corporal Joe Mac was a massively muscular man in his mid-twenties with a big nose and so many tattoos I’m surprised he hadn’t died from ink poisoning. He gave Corporal Evans a thumbs up from where he sat furthest from the rear door. He was the section second in command. My section, like every other was divided into two fire teams, Charlie fire team commanded by Corporal Evans and Delta fire team commanded by Joe Mac. Overall control still went to Corporal Evans though. Joe Mac also dealt with ammunition resupply, casualty evacuation and the general administration of the section both in and out of combat. When Corporal Evans came up with a plan, it was Joe who enforced it and made it happen. Being section second in command was no easy task, plus if Corporal Evans took a dart, he would step up to take command. I hoped that would not be necessary.

  We all removed our respirators after the comms check; we always left them on until the last safe moment. They weren’t particularly uncomfortable, but I’d still rather not wear mine if I had the chance. I wiped more sweat from my brow with a gloved hand.

  ‘Right then, lads,’ Corporal Evans spoke in his powerful voice, instantly seizing our attention. He was listening to the intercom through his respirator earpiece, something that only the section commander could do. It was so that he could tell us only what we needed to hear and leave out irrelevant information about the bigger battle that might confuse us - apparently. I suspected the real reason was probably so that he could keep us from hearing bad news like a fellow being shot down on entry. ‘We’ve got a few minutes until we drop. Challenger is already preparing for entry into New Earth orbit. The fleet vanguard has encountered heavy resistance in the northern hemisphere, but is already reporting success, so with any luck, we should be pretty safe until we enter the atmosphere.’

  At that moment I imagined our troopship Challenger and the rest of the flee
t, 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.