Chapter 13: Murphy’s Law

Evan sat on a collapsed mound of soil, his XMR in his lap as he kept watch through the crenelations. The Trogs had been underground for a good hour now, and they still hadn’t come up yet. Sappers had been brought in to clear out more of the dragon’s teeth from the clearing, and the captured fort was surrounded by tanks, meaning that the Marines had little to do other than sit around now.

He noticed Jade approaching from the trench to his left, Evan popping open his visor to greet her. Foster and Collins were in her path, and she paused to talk to them as she passed by, but they made a show of ignoring her. She remained cheerful anyway, leaving them with a smile on her face, though Evan couldn’t hear the exchange.

“Nice to have a little downtime,” she said, taking a seat on the mound beside him. “The coast still clear?”

“I think the seventy-ton tanks have it covered,” he replied.

“You doing okay?” she asked, watching him with those expressive eyes. “After everything that’s happened, I thought that maybe...”

“Nah, I’m fine,” he replied. “I was scared that I’d freeze up when I saw a Drone again, but it felt pretty cathartic to be able to fight back. Lying there in the debris after they ambushed the convoy ... I felt so powerless. I was just waiting to die. I guess I needed to be reminded of what it feels like to fight back, to win. Sorry,” he added, chuckling to himself. “I don’t know why I’m laying all of this on you. We only hung out that one time.”

“I suspect that Hernandez isn’t the best listener,” she replied, eliciting another chuckle from him. “Besides, I asked, didn’t I?”

“You did,” he conceded. “What about you? Does it weird you out, having to kill Bugs? I know you said that you consider them a separate species entirely, but they do look like you.”

“It’s what I was made for,” she replied with a shrug. “Conflict between hives is the driving force behind Betelgeusian evolution. It’s probably what propelled them into space, what made them the way they are. I guess what does weird me out is seeing a little piece of them in myself.”

“How so?” Evan asked.

“I’m a hybrid,” she began. “Part of me is like them, part of me is like you. If I had been born one generation earlier, I would have been entirely like them, just a cog in a machine.”

“Didn’t you tell me that Bugs are sentient?” Evan added.

“Ferals are sentient, sure,” she explained. “They’re thinking, feeling creatures, but they have very little agency. They’re given almost no opportunities to act of their own volition, and they’re not taught to think critically. I firmly believe that our heritage doesn’t make us who we are – our choices do. What are you if you can’t make any choices? A feral can never refuse an order, the concept wouldn’t even occur to them. They can never change, they can never become more than what they already are. I love that I have a purpose in life, that I was made for a reason, but I like that my choices make me a distinct person. I’m not just a Drone, I’m Jade, and there isn’t another Drone exactly like me. If I want to find my own purpose one day, I have that option. It’s up to me.”

“The more time I spend with you, the less I see you as a hybrid,” Evan added. “Like, you have four arms and a carapace, sure. Everything else about you is human, though. I guess that’s why they say that you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover.”

“Thanks,” she replied with a smirk. “You would know, being a human.”

“It’s one of my few areas of expertise,” he joked, Jade’s feathery antennae wiggling in what might be amusement. “Being nice to people who don’t deserve it is a very human quality.”

“Why wouldn’t you deserve it?” she asked, cocking her head.

“No, I’m talking about Foster and Collins,” he explained with a nod in the direction of the two surly Marines. “Nobody would blame you if you gave them a piece of your mind, you know.”

“All it would take is one instance of me losing my cool and lashing out for them to label me as dangerous,” she replied. “I have to be on my best behavior at all times, even when people try to get a rise out of me, because giving them what they want only serves to confirm their biases.”

“Damn,” Evan muttered. “That has to get old fast. Maybe a perfect performance is expected of Jarilans, but we humans have to blow off steam every now and then.”

“I suppose,” she conceded. “That’s why there are bars on the carriers, right?”

“Right,” he replied with a smile. “You know, I’m happy to keep paying for peach schnapps in exchange for some good company.”

“You don’t have to bribe me if you want to hang out when we’re off-duty,” she replied, giving him an affectionate punch on the arm. “I do like peach schnapps, though.”

“Hey, we’ll have something to celebrate when we get back to the Omaha, right? Any day that ends with everyone still breathing is a good one.”

There was a disturbance further down the trench, Evan leaning past Jade to see that the Trog team had returned to the surface. He was shocked to see that their heavy armor plating was covered in plasma burns, crisscrossed with scoring from what might be knives or chitin blades. There wasn’t a man among them who had come out of those tunnels unscathed. The last two to emerge were dragging their fallen comrades behind them, a pair of limp bodies hooked to their belts via carabiners. It looked like they had marched all the way back to ground level while pulling them along like sleds. Even in the low gravity, that was a feat.

The nearby Marines rushed to help them, medics tending to the injured, but it looked futile from where Evan was standing. One of them had been crushed, only his suit keeping his broken body together. One of the medics asked a nearby Trog what had caused the injuries. The man lifted a gloved hand, hitting the panel on the side of his bulky helmet to raise his narrow visor, a pair of icy eyes peering out from beneath his sweat-drenched brow.

“They had a Warrior down there,” he replied. “Fucker slammed Larsen into the tunnel wall before we had a chance to fry it.”

“Couple of minutes on the clock, boss,” another member of the team added.

“Looks like they had a hell of a time down there,” Jade said, watching as some of them began to remove pieces of damaged armor. One of them raised a canteen to his lips, taking a long, deep draw from it.

“I wonder if this is standard fare,” Evan added.

“I’m surprised that a team so small could get the job done,” she replied. “We tried to develop strategies for tunnel clearing back on Jarilo, but it was a battle of attrition. We couldn’t figure out a way to do it without overwhelming numbers. Not to mention that there are security doors that have to be breached along the way, sections of tunnel that are flooded to prevent chemical attacks from spreading through the network, booby traps.”

The ground suddenly shook beneath them, more sections of the damaged crenelations collapsing as they were rattled loose. Evan reached out to grip Jade’s shoulder in alarm, releasing her when his mind caught up with his reflexes. That must be the explosive that the Trogs had planted. After a moment, the rumbling subsided, Evan and Jade exchanging a glance.

“I guess the job is done,” she said. “That must have been one hell of an explosion if we could feel it all the way up here.”

Evan’s helmet radio buzzed in his ear, Simmons’ voice coming through with a crackle.

“The weapons depot has been destroyed. Get back to the Puma, we’re heading out.”

“Sarge says we’re leaving,” he said, rising from his seat. He extended a hand to help Jade up, and she hesitated for a moment before taking it, almost as though it was a novel concept to her.

“We’re going back to the Omaha already?” she asked.

“Hit and run,” Evan replied. “That’s the plan, as I understand it. We hit their infrastructure hard and fast, then we bug out before they can muster a response. Gotta stay a step ahead of them if they outnumber us fifteen to one.”

They made their way back through the trench, the rest of the Marines leaving their posts, moving back to the IFVs. When Evan arrived, he saw that they were slowly driving back in the direction they had come, a team of sappers trying to dig out the two at the front of the pack that had plowed through the defensive wall. Delta-seventeen was one of them, soil covering its prow where it had smashed through the resin that covered the sloping structure, its wheels stuck in the mud that had resulted from the collapsed crenelations. The rest of the squad soon arrived, standing around as they watched the men dig.

“If we had a team of Workers, they could dig it out in a couple of minutes,” Jade lamented. She shrugged off her pack, holding it in her lower pair of arms as she rummaged inside with the upper pair, pulling out a collapsible shovel. “Come on,” she said, extending the tool as she turned to address her companions. “We all have shovels, so let’s help them out.”

Evan shrugged, reaching for his pack, Hernandez grumbling to himself as he did the same. Brooks and the rest of his friends joined in, as did the two Borealans, the felines digging with their massive hands instead of using the comparatively tiny shovels. Collins and Foster stood apart from the team, looking to Sergeant Simmons for confirmation.

“You heard her,” the sergeant chided, his tone shifting to that of a drill instructor. “Get to it, Marines!”

After digging out the IFV, they drove back to the clearing where they had originally touched down. The small command post and the four CIWS turrets had already been removed, leaving only indents in the underbrush where they had once been. The artillery company, too, had been evacuated prior to their return. There were several landers already loading Kodiaks, the tanks driving up the open ramps, locking into place on the trolleys that were waiting for them inside. The four downward-facing engines of the craft idled, creating waves across the low shrubs and bushes that dominated the staging area, Evan able to hear their roar even from inside the Puma.

The remaining vehicles established a secure perimeter as the fleet of landers came and went. Eventually, there were only five vehicles left on the ground – Delta-seventeen, three other Pumas, and one of the Kodiaks.

“Our ride should be arriving right about now,” Simmons said, checking his wrist display idly as they waited in the IFV’s troop bay. Even watched the sky through the external cameras, admiring the flowing auroras and the swirling bands of cloud that streaked across the face of the gas giant. A glow of flame appeared as one of the landers descended, still baked by the heat of reentry.

It quickly grew larger, its engines burning as it decelerated, the other four vehicles appearing behind it like falling stars. As it came to a hover, one of the Pumas pulling away from the other vehicles in preparation for loading, the routine maneuver was interrupted.

A missile streaked out from between the trees at the edge of the clearing, sailing straight over the vehicles on a plume of chemical flame. The lead lander emitted a shower of bright flares, pulling up violently, its engines struggling to move its bulk. The projectile veered away as it chased one of the heat signatures, exploding into a ball of green plasma, the blast close enough to rock the vehicle. When the smoke cleared, it was left relatively unscathed, a black smear covering the heat tiles on its forward left engine housing. Its boosters burned brighter as it began to rise again, drifting away across the canopy, popping another stream of flares that sent a second missile streaking wide.

“Fuck!” Simmons growled, putting a finger to his ear. “The landers are taking fire – they’re bugging out!”

“I thought we killed ‘em all?” Hernandez protested, lifting his rifle from the rack beside his seat. “The fort was a ghost town when we left!”

“The bastards must have been hiding in the woods, biding their time,” Brooks replied. “They probably knew they couldn’t take the whole company, so they waited until there were only a few vehicles left on the ground.”

“Can’t be a large force if that’s the case,” Jade added. “Maybe they saw the assault on the fort and withdrew.”

“I’ll bet they have standing orders to attack targets of opportunity,” Evan said, terminating the external camera feed. “They know the logistical challenges of invading a planet – they’ve done it themselves – and they’ll know that even small losses will whittle us down.”

“I’ve called in CAS support, but they’re a good fifteen minutes out,” Simmons said as he rose from his seat. He switched off the safety on his rifle, then turned his helmeted head in the direction of the cab. “Driver, get that ramp open! We’re going to hold those fuckers off until support arrives.”

“On our own!?” Collins protested. “There are only five vehicles on the ground!”

“You got another suggestion?” Simmons snarled, marching over to the Marine. He reached down with one hand, holding his rifle in the other, unfastening the man’s harness. He gripped him by one of the straps on his chest rig, hauling him out of his seat. “Get your ass out there, Marine! I see so much as a scratch on my Puma, I’m holding you personally responsible.”

Sunlight bled into the bay as the ramp opened, the team piling out, their boots and claws thundering on the metal. They took cover behind the IFV relative to where the missile had come from, Evan noting that Jade had opened the slots on her helmet and was shaking out her antennae like a woman might shake out her hair.

The four IFVs had formed a kind of crescent-shaped barrier, parked nose to tail in the open field. The Kodiak rolled up to their left, keeping its forward armor towards the trees, its long canon rotating into place. The other squads had dismounted along with them and were taking cover behind their vehicles.

A helmeted head appeared from the cupola atop the Kodiak’s turret, staying behind the ring of reinforced glass as he peered out at the rest of the company. He switched to the local channel, Evan hearing his voice come through on the radio.

“Get some mortars into that treeline, flush the fuckers out!”

With most of Delta off the ground, it seemed that the tank commander had the highest rank, which put him in charge.

The Pumas began to fire into the forest, their shells shaking the branches as they exploded above the treetops, showering the area below with molten shrapnel. They followed up with suppressive fire from their railguns, cutting through the stout trunks like buzz saws. The tank rocked on its tracks as it fired a HE shell into the trees, flames and shrapnel toppling them, the mortar that was mounted on the commander’s blister joining the rest. The two gun pods hooked up to the attachment points to either side of the turret opened up shortly after, Evan marveling at the amount of tungsten the thing could throw downrange. The company pulverized the area, but without knowing exactly where the missiles had been fired from, it was little more than a delaying tactic.