Merkiaari Wars: 02 - What Price Honour (62 page)

“Dragon this is Sword. I have a situation here. The goddamn Shan are advancing independently. They’re charging straight in. I can’t hold ‘em!”

Papandreou checked his sensors. It was worse than Sword had reported. “Hold your position. Repeat, hold your position.”

“Copy.”

He checked his sensors again. Shan warriors were pulling ahead of his mechs. Not just those accompanying Sword, but
all
of them. All over the map, thousands upon thousands of them dropped to all fours and streaked away. He stared at his display in disbelieving silence. They were advancing upon Charlie Epsilon at a flat out run. They would engage the enemy scattered and unsupported. He could feel a disaster looming. He had only two options. Advance at flank speed in foolhardy support of the crazy bastards, or retreat and leave them to die.

“Oh shit…” Papandreou whispered, making his decision. He opened a channel. “Throttle up Marines!”

Papandreou and his Marines charged into battle.

* * *

Camp Charlie Epsilon

Repairs complete.

Diagnostics: Unit fit for duty.

Deactivate beacon… Done.

Initiate reactivation sequence…

Gina awoke covered in soil and debris not sure where she was or what had happened. Her chest hurt… no it didn’t. It was just the memory of pain. Her hand wandered over her armour and paused at the hole it discovered. She probed through it and felt smooth skin. Her uniform ended in a burnt and tattered hole that matched her armour in its shape, but her body was whole. Healed? Her chrono said that she had lost time. How much time? Hours at least. She lay quiet looking up at the sky and listening to the silence. Why was it so quiet, was she deaf? Not according to her diagnostics. According to her processor, she was one hundred percent operational.

She frowned and tried to remember what she was doing. She had fought beside James and his people for a time but had moved on to Cragg… was that right? She didn’t have time to consult her log, but she thought that was right. The time legend on her display was telling her hours had gone by since then. Long enough for reinforcements to join them? Possibly, but where the hell were they?

She staggered erect pulling her rifle free of the mud as she did. For as far as she could easily see, there were Merki corpses lying in heaps. It was as if a bunch of hills had reared up out of the ground. The landscape was utterly different to what it had been. Craters dotted the ground. Trees and smashed vehicles still burned and smoke hung thickly upon the leaden air.

Gina turned in a circle trying to get her bearings. Everything looked different. She stooped to drag a half buried and broken rifle out of the bloody soup the soil at the bottom of her trench had become. She ejected her empty magazine and replaced it with the half spent one from the broken rifle. She didn’t know who it had belonged to. She didn’t want to know. He was most likely dead. That was the only way to separate a viper from his or her weapon.

She dropped the useless thing, and dragged herself out of the trench only to throw herself flat at the sound of gunfire. Her rifle was up and ready, but the noise died away again. It was simply someone finishing off a wounded Merki. She struggled tiredly to her knees, and then back to her feet trying to orientate herself. There were a number of craters with the mangled remains of Shan field guns still jutting into the air just ahead of her.

“If that crater is… was Battery 201, and for some reason I think it was, then that means…” she muttered to herself trying to match what she was seeing with the map glowing in front of her eyes. “That must be the CP then.”

She made her way toward the greatest concentration of people and smoke.

As she walked, more and more people began struggling out of their dugouts some of which had collapsed in upon them. Many of the trenches were full to the brim with corpses. She had no idea how many vipers lay among them. During the battle, communications had become fragmented as more and more squad leaders fell off the net leaving individual vipers to fight on alone. She hoped time would prove that many of those now silent units were only wounded. With their squad and platoon leaders out of contact, individual vipers had fought and died holding whatever line they could. She had done her best to keep everyone fighting as a unit by assigning at least one viper to each battalion to relay her orders, but it was only partially successful. Sometimes it seemed that almost as soon as she put a unit in charge of a position, he would go offline and she had to begin again.

According to her sensors there were still Merkiaari alive both within and without the camp’s perimeter. None of them were fit to fight, and slowly the red icons inside the perimeter disappeared as the surviving warriors sniffed them out and killed them. She couldn’t care less about the Merkiaari. She was more concerned with the blue viper icons that her sensors had picked out and were displaying. Most of them were blinking on and off denoting a unit either dead or in hibernation awaiting recovery. She was willing to bet that she had been one of them not long ago.

If they were dead… she refused to believe so many could be dead, but if they were dead, then the battalion had been reduced to a single company of effectives, and her company to almost zero. She refused to believe that—categorically refused.

Gina wanted to know where the General was. She wanted to know if he was all right. She wanted to know if Eric was alive and all her friends. Was James dead, was Rutledge? What about Gordon and… she took a deep breath and stopped where she was. She had just survived one hell of a battle. She wasn’t going to pieces now.

She watched the survivors picking through the debris and tried to formulate a plan. There were Shan frantically digging among the wrecked dugouts and pieces of equipment. As she watched, they pulled out those lucky enough to be alive and hurried them to the field hospital for medical attention. Marines in mech armour dragged themselves out of craters and began assembling. So, the Marines had made it after all. This couldn’t be all of them. She turned to the north in speculation. It was the logical place for them to be.

If Major Papandreou had arrived to push the enemy back, there would be fighting to the north. She couldn’t see any sign even with her sensors at max range, but that didn’t mean much. He might have pushed them all the way back to Maseru by this time. It wasn’t impossible. She would check the satellite feeds, but later. She sighed in relief when she began seeing vipers wandering around the camp.

“Alpha Leader to any active unit,” she said over her comm and watched as every viper she could see paused to listen. “Has anyone seen the General?”

No one spoke up.

“Okay. Rendezvous with me at the CP. We need to organise ourselves and figure out who we have left. I’m going to call
Grafton
and evac the wounded.”

She ignored the acknowledgements to contact
Grafton
. With the
Wolfcubs
on the way, she was about to join the others when a familiar voice startled her.

“Gina?”

She spun back toward the trees in disbelief. “Shima?” she whispered in shock as her friend wandered out from among the trees. She was on all fours and in a pitiful state. “Shima!”

Gina ran to her friend and threw herself to her knees before her. Blood and dirt was matted in Shima’s fur and her visor was missing. She still had one of her beamers in its holster but the other was gone.

Shima hung her head wearily. “I wasn’t sure it was you, Gina. Your scent among so many Merkiaari… I wasn’t sure I could find my way back. I… I’m blind. Ancestors help me, I’m blind!”

“Shush, it’s okay, Shima. We’ll find you another visor. Hell, we’ll make you one.”

“It’s not that. I threw the cursed thing away after it happened.”

“After what happened? I don’t understand.”

“When you left, I had to hide until I could get away without being seen. I jumped off the transporter as soon as I could and went to ground. I didn’t dare climb the ridge to follow you… not while the Murderers remained so near.”

“I understand. You did the right thing.”

“It was all I
could
do,” Shima said bitterly. “I waited in hiding until your people attacked the Murderers from the air like we planned. I’ve never seen anything like it.” Her jaw dropped in amusement at that. “I’ll certainly never see such again. The explosion was like the end of the world. The ground leapt beneath me it was so big. There was a really bright light. It was so bright… and that’s the last thing I saw. There was a wind and I heard trees crashing all around me. One knocked me down, but only the branches caught me. When I crawled out, I started to climb up the hillside and into the next valley. I was lucky “I found your scent and followed you here.”

Gina knew what had happened. Shima had been flash blinded by the blast unleashed upon the Merki reinforcements by Admiral Meyers. Her heart went out to her friend. She knew how much Shima had feared her encroaching blindness.

“Well, you’re among friends again now, Shima. My people can grow you a new pair of eyes as good as your old ones… no,
better
than your old ones.”

Shima’s ears struggled fully erect. “Truly? Your people can do that?”

“They can do it for humans. I can’t see why they can’t do it for you. Even if they can’t, you can have a pair like mine. I promise, Shima.
I promise
.”

Shima reached out to clutch Gina desperately. “Thank you, oh by the harmonies, thank you.”

* * *

Aboard Grafton, in orbit of Child of Harmony

Gina stepped tiredly off the ramp of the shuttle into
Grafton’s
boat bay. She snapped to attention and saluted when she recognised the General approaching her.

“At ease, Captain.”

She relaxed slightly.

“I just wanted to say you did a hell of a job at Masaru.”

“Thank you, sir, but Cragg deserves a lot of credit.”

Burgton smiled. “Yes, he’s performing well.”

Gina nodded. Cragg had temporarily taken her place as Lt for Alpha Company’s First Platoon, just as she had taken Hames’ slot from Richmond. “Have you new orders for me, sir?”

“They can wait, Gina. I know you want to see how Katherine is getting along. I won’t keep you. There’s a briefing at twenty-two hundred at the port.”

“I’ll be there, sir,” she said and saluted.

Burgton returned her salute then mounted the ramp to board the shuttle.

Gina found her friend in the infirmary chatting with Zack Gordon. Richmond was sitting up in bed when she came in. Gordon was sitting nearby with his leg propped up gesturing at the wall screen. Gina glanced at it and found a live feed of Masaru. She paused to assure herself that her people had everything under control.

Red icons still outnumbered blue by a significant amount, but the green of Shan forces outnumbered both by far. Blue icons were leapfrogging forward in a planned manoeuvre intended to take out the enemy as quickly as possible while also giving the units involved maximum cover and support. Green icons ringed the area slowly closing in and compacting the enemy into a smaller and smaller area where they could be taken down on mass.

Gina clenched a fist as the leading viper units suddenly stopped, and their icons flashed the yellow of light to moderate damage. She waited with baited breath, but released it in a whoosh as each unit’s processor reported in. She read the light codes flashing beside each icon and relaxed.

The damage was not too bad.

“…some company up here,” Gordon was saying.

“I could wish for less of that kind,” Richmond said slurring the words. She turned to Gina. “Good to see you,
Captain
.”

“Likewise,
Captain
. How are you feeling?”

Richmond shrugged. “Decidedly unenhanced.”

She snorted. Richmond’s processor was too badly damaged for a quick fix. She had taken a lot of punishment at Zuleika and it had been touch and go whether she would live. The left side of her face was paralysed, and it often caused her to slur her words. Her left eye was gone as well. The empty socket stared at Gina amidst the wreckage of a once handsome face. Richmond was no longer pretty. The thick heavy scarring pulled her wry smile off centre almost turning it into a sneer. She wouldn’t be her old self for quite a while. The equipment necessary to replace her damaged processor was only to be found on Snakeholme. Richmond needed major reconstructive surgery.

Gina glanced at Gordon. “How’s it going, Zack?”

He patted his new leg. “I’m outa here tomorrow. Have you left me some?”

“That’s the last big concentration on Child of Harmony,” she said nodding at the screen. “We have a few mopping up operations to do; the Marines are taking care of that mostly, but the General did promise Papandreou we would back him up on the tricky ones.”