Read C.R.O.W. (The Union Series) Online
Authors: Phillip Richards
C.R.O.W. (The Union Series)
Combat Replacement Of War
Digital
edition
first
published
in
2012
Published
by The Electronic Book Company
www.theelectronicbookcompany.com
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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.
CONTENTS:
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!
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
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.’