The Infinity Brigade #1 Stone Cold Read online

  Mission parameters stated we had forty-eight hours to accomplish our goal. No matter how we worked the numbers, we could not figure out a way to get our railgun to where we needed it in time to do us any good.

  “I’m stumped,” I admitted to our planning group. Gretchen and the newly promoted Sergeant JJ Hammond had joined Sergeant Cochran and me in the Alpha’s B-TOC. Because I had held the rank of Ensign first, Gretchen offered and agreed to let me take overall command of the operation. That is not to say I didn’t occasionally have trouble working with her. Her very presence was a distraction… in a very pleasant way.

  Gretchen got up and stretched. Did I mention she was a fine looking recruit? I shook my head. I was mentally worn out. The last thing I needed was to be distracted by my hormones. Gretchen fetched the pot of coffee and brought it back to our ops planning table. She poured herself a fresh cup and then offered to fill others. I gladly accepted.

  JJ took that moment to speak up. “The rules for this little dust up say we can use anything we can find around camp… correct?”

  “Correct,” I agreed. “But we have done a physical inventory of the camp. Unless you are seeing something I’m not… there are no transportation assets here besides two platoons worth of Mark One feet. The only weapons are our pointers and a few dozen M78 Claymores.”

  JJ shook his head. “We can use anything we can find around camp… did anybody define what was meant by ‘around camp’?”

  Tommy Cochran took a sip of coffee. “The meaning seems pretty clear to me,” he said.

  Gretchen started to laugh. I must have been really tired because I didn’t pick up on what was funny. I was about to say something when what they were thinking finally worked its way into my single functioning neuron. The X-34. I started to laugh as well. Poor Sergeant Tommy Cochran must have thought we were all suffering from oxygen deprivation. After a few minutes of gut-busting laughter I broke down and told him about my dead uncle’s LandSpeeder parked not fifteen kilometers from Camp Beta.

  It would still take two trips but all of a sudden we had a way of getting our big gun to where we needed it! The enemy wouldn’t know what hit them!

  ***

  The trip was longer and harder than any of us anticipated. As best we could tell it was a thirty six hour hike to get our troops into position. Given that we only had forty two hours left to accomplish our mission that left us with a very narrow window for engagement. Of course our enemy could do the math as well. We were counting on it. What they didn’t know was that the LandSpeeder effectively changed the math. Not only could we transport the railgun to the top of an adjacent volcano, but we could also transport troops. It would take us a total of eight round trips… even using cargo nets tied to the LandSpeeder for ten recruits to hold on to.

  Still, we had our main weapon and personnel in place within twelve hours. My biggest concern was not whether or not we would win. That was never a question in my mind. No my biggest worry was how would the Drill Sergeants react? I shared this thought with Sergeant Cochran and Corporal Banks.

  “You know we are supposed to loss this round,” I said as we did a final inspection in preparation for our assault.

  “How so, Sir?” Tommy asked.

  “Think about it. We are given a weapon that can clearly win this fight but no means to get it to a place where we can use it. If we attempt to haul it physically to where we need it… we run out of time. On the other hand, if we forgo the railgun and just attack the hill directly we are wiped out by the enemy’s better armaments and superior position. It’s a no-win scenario. The Drills know this. So that begs the question…”

  “What are they really after,” Sergeant Cochran finished by way of agreement.

  Corporal Banks just shook her head. “If you ask me… and I note you didn’t… ya’all are over think’n this. We go in. We kick ass. We get out. It’s that simple.”

  I smiled despite myself. “I suppose we will find out soon enough. Do we have all our spotters in place?”

  “Affirmative that,” Sergeant Cochran said.

  I told my suit’s AI to open a channel to Ensign Highmark. “Gretchen, this is AG. Is Beta in position?”

  “That we are. You were right. With over twenty four hours left in the exercise they barely have patrols out. By their way of thinking we won’t be here for at least another twelve hours. I can’t wait to see them crap themselves.”

  “Very good. Then let us ‘Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war!’” I said quoting Shakespeare with a grin. It was time to have some fun and ruin somebody’s day!

  ***

  The first several times we shot our railgun we had our range wrong. The AI built into our railgun analyzed the impact points and determined that variations in atmospheric density and movements, tenuous though they were on Mars, where causing our KEWs to drift northwest by 0.03 percent. Given that the line-on-sight distance between us and our target was just under four hundred and fifty kilometers, this made the flight path of our little surprise packages closer to six hundred kilometers with the rise and fall of the travel arc figured in. This introduced an eighteen kilometer variance between where we were aiming and where we were hitting. The AI made the necessary adjustments.

  KEWs fired from ground-based guns like our railgun exit the barrel of the linear accelerator at about nine thousand kilometers per hour. On Earth this is roughly Mach 7. On Mars, especially at the elevation and atmospheric temperatures on Tharsis Montes, it was closer to Mach ten or eleven.

  It’s worth noting… sounds on Mars act very differently than on Earth. Every elementary student on Mars learns that the distance between molecules of air are about a hundred and twenty times greater on Mars than on Earth. This means two things to the average Marine wannabe conducting an assault on an opponent who is in a superior position and who has better weapons.

  First, sounds travel much slower. Second sounds don’t travel nearly as far. The best scream a soldier might muster on Mars might travel at best about sixteen meters. On earth the same sound would travel twelve hundred meters!

  Our incoming KEWs would be easy to hear had we been in a thick Earth-like atmosphere… but we were not. Even as our ranging shots were landing within a few kilometers of the enemy camp, they remained blissfully unware of their impending virtual doom.

  For training purposes our railgun fired twenty kilogram dummy rounds. Now a Kinetic Energy Weapon is essentially a big rock. They are pretty dumb to begin with. In one of the great ironies that seem to crop up in the armed services on a regular basis, to make a dummy KEW… you actually have to make it smart.

  In our case, the KEWs were actually smart missiles that used hyperfield momentum attenuators to shunt their kinetic energy into n-dimensional space. I’m a smart guy but I didn’t even begin to understand the physics behind what was going on. The long and the short of it was that when our KEWs actually arrived on target they soft landed and transmitted impact coordinates that our training AIs would use to selectively disable everyone in the predetermined casualty zone.

  I had hoped to catch the majority of the Delta/Echoes asleep in their bunks when the first dummy KEWs landed in their camp. They were certainly close enough. If one of the dummy missiles even soft-landed on top of a B660, it was part the Delta/Echo B-TOC.

  Alas, despite my ambitions for utter shock and awe, fate had other ideas. It seemed one of the Ensigns assigned to Delta/Echo, I never knew which one, had initiative. They ordered a significant part of their forces to deploy along our expected approach. The idea was to bleed us heavily before we even got to play our little ‘Top of the Rock’ game.

  Personally I thought that it was rather poor sportsmanship on their part but I made a mental note to myself to try the same thing at some point… back to that ‘It’s all fair in love and war’ thing.

  When our simulated KEWs landed in the enemy’s camp we took out most of their leadership and about a third of their troops. The men and women in the B-TOC knew immediately what had befa
llen them as their AIs reported that the atoms that had comprised their bodies where now circulating in the upper Martian mesosphere… carried there by a small virtual mushroom cloud formed as a result of the impact energies released by our kinetic energy weapons.

  The Delta/Echo troops that had been taking the opportunity to catch a few hours of sleep were in worse shape. They suddenly found themselves trapped in whatever B660 they happened to be in without access to their Stark suits… as those suits now refused to come online. For safety reasons there was an override on the suits should a legitimate need for them arise but from the perspective of the ‘Top of the Rock’ exercise these guys were done.

  I was going over the results of our initial barrage when Ensign Highmark called from one of her forward teams. They had picked up a surge of encrypted chatter after we took out the main camp. That could only have meant we had missed some of the Delta/Echoes. We still didn’t know about the enemy’s overly ambitious ensign at this point. I asked Gretchen to forward the traffic to our position at the base camp on the Sothern Spot. I still had the encryption code intelligence we had captured earlier. With any luck the Delta/Echoes still would not realize we had it and would be using codes we could crack.

  It seemed the enemy was not nearly as paranoid as I would have been and the existing encryption protocols had remained in place. In a few seconds I had a complete transcript of their message stream. It was completely one sided. Apparently the Ensign leading the attempted ambush had just reported that there was no sign of our troops advancing to their position. This had them somewhat confused.

  Of course this was our intent. Our forces were coming up the Center Spot hill on the far side where my uncle’s X-34 LandSpeeder had dropped them off. The Ensign asked if the main base could run an active sensor sweep of the area. When there was no response the forces lying in wait for the Alpha/Betas began to get nervous. This was understandable as the communication between the two forces had broken off mid-sentence.

  In short order, the ensign in question had his troops running back up their hill from the south side. Meanwhile Gretchen was already racing her forces to the top of the same rock but from the north side. She would get there first.

  I did a quick estimate of the possible position of the enemy forces. I reasoned I could safely lob a few rocks in their general direction without risking friendly fire. I instructed the troops manning our crew-served railgun to repoint it and attempt to take out returning defenders. We had no idea if we were hitting the enemy because we had no eyes on their exact location. Not for the first time I wished we had been graced with a few surveillance drones but alas we were not so blessed by the demi-gods known to us a Drill Sergeants.

  Ultimately, I hoped the enemy would provide us with the intelligence assets we needed. I had the boys manning the railgun continue to lob simulated KEWs at the same point just off of the top of the southern-most side of our objective. This would keep Ensign Highmark’s troops safe while at the same time providing a warm and welcoming environment for the returning defenders from Delta/Echo. Once they were taken out I expected a sudden decrease in their ongoing encrypted chatter.

  I send a micro burst to Gretchen so that she knew what was going on. She actually asked me to stop the bombardment. I questioned her as to why and she explained that I was hogging all the fun. She wanted her boys and girls to be able to get in on some of the action. Had this been actual combat I would have flat out refused and continued what I was doing. That said, had this been actual combat she would have never made the request. In actual combat, the best kills where the ones you could make while the enemy was not in a position to fire back.

  I gave the order to cease firing and to load up the LandSpeeder. We were going on a little road trip. Time to see the sights… meet the locals… and shoot them.

  Gretchen’s crew managed to secure the ‘Top of the Rock’ and the crew-served M4000 smart machine gun. They used this last to say hello to the returning defenders in a way that I’m sure will leave a lasting impression.

  Chapter 17: Boot Camp – Shock and Awe…

  My concern about how the Drill Sergeants would react to our victory turned out to be well founded. We were not supposed to win.

  The entire leadership team from each platoon as well as the entire cadre of Drill Sergeants were gathered in the Drill Sergeant’s B-TOC. Their B-TOC was configured in a pentagon shape complete with the central dome. We were meeting in that dome. The purpose was for a day long After Action Review. The AAR was, from my perspective, one of the more interesting things we did in boot camp. Our exercises were like moves on a chess board. It was always instructive to review the moves made against the moves that might have been made and compare the results. Call it a failing… but despite being an adrenaline junkie, I enjoyed gaming out the scenarios.

  This was not a universally held attitude. My friend JJ Hammond was my polar opposite in this regard. He would as soon watch paint dry on the underside of a dead cow then sit through an AAR. Gretchen had explained to her Sergeant that his presence was required and that we all had to make sacrifices for the service. The cow would have to wait.

  As we took our seats Senior Drill Sergeant Harris stood and walked to the lectern. His eyes scanned the entire room but ultimately found and rested on mine. I wondered if I slumped slowly enough if I could slip under the table unnoticed… probably not.

  “It is possible,” he began, “to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not a weakness… that is life.”

  He walked to the Smart Paper white board that extended half the length of one wall. I knew from experience that it would be filled and wiped clean several times today. He drew a big zero on the board. It was easily half the size of a man.

  “Ensign Stone, do you know what this zero represents?”

  I nodded. I had known from the first moment when we had been given the mission parameters. “Senior Drill Sergeant, that zero represents the probability that we would have been successful in our mission to take the ‘Top of the Rock’.”

  “And why is that do you suppose?”

  “Our orders were inconstant with the resources we were given access to in order to accomplish the mission.”

  Harris smiled. It was not a cruel smile… it was just an ‘I’m so frustrated with you’ smile. “And yet succeed you did. What is your assessment of my opening statement… ‘It is possible…’”

  “…to commit no mistakes and still lose,” I finished for him. “Senior Drill that statement presupposes a ‘no-win’ scenario. I don’t believe in the no-win scenario.”

  “Then I suppose we will have to arrange to change your thinking on the issue,” Senior Drill Sergeant Harris said with a grin.

  Now a normal person would have been intimidated by such a comment. In my defense, I have been called many things in my life but normal is not one of them. I viewed the Senior Drill’s comment as some type of challenge.

  Have I mentioned before that I like a challenge? You and me against the world! Let’s attack! …and all that there good stuff.

  The rest of the day went pretty much as expected. There was the usual grumbling that my side had cheated but the Drills pointed out to the honored opposition that doing what you can in the face of the enemy to secure victory is part and parcel to being a combat marine.

  The next round of exercises would reverse our roles. Here is where it got interesting for us. Since the Alpha/Beta platoons had done what no other platoon in the history of the Galactic Coalition’s Marine Corps’ training program had ever managed to do… namely, ‘Knock the Top’, we were going to get a chance to defend our conquest.

  Happily we would be given access to all of the same munitions that the previous owners had been given. We would even be allowed to keep the LandSpeeder. It seemed simple. I knew better.

  The Delta/Echo platoons would now be split. Delta would take the North Spot and Echo would take the South Spot. Further, each would be given access to their own railgun. The rail gun would be located
not at the bottom of Valles Marineris like ours had been but instead would be delivered in fully functional form to the aggressors to the top of their respective volcanos. Either one could and would decimate our position on top of the Middle Spot with little trouble whatsoever. It seemed the Senior Drill was attempting to teach me about this fictional concept called the ‘no-win’ scenario.

  He was selling… but I still wasn’t buying. What can I say… I was cocky as a youngster.

  ***

  “So,” JJ said, “we are in a right pickle. Any clue as to how we might extract our arses from this stink pot we find ourselves in?”

  Sergeants JJ Hammond and Tommy Cochran, as well as Corporals Nella Banks and Robert Johnston, had joined Gretchen and myself at our planning table. We had less than four hours before the exercise began. I think the Drills were afraid of giving me too much time to pull a rabbit out of my hat.

  I wagged my finger at my friend. “Oh ye of little faith,” I said. “We have three railguns at our disposal do we not?”

  “Ah,” JJ mumbled. “The last I counted… and it wasn’t all that long ago… they had two and we had one.”

  “Details,” I sighed. “Imagine a scenario in which we would fire our railgun to take out one of our enemy’s railguns. What do you suppose would happen?”

  “Their other railgun would take out ours… then our base shortly thereafter mate,” he answered thoughtfully as he tried to figure out my angle.

  I smiled. “So what it we took out their other railgun first?”

  “It would make no difference,” Gretchen said. “The same thing would happen… only the bad news would come from the other direction.”

  “Exactly,” I said, “But let me ask you this… How many shots will it take them to hit our Railgun?”

  Gretchen paused. Sergeant Cochran answered first. “In all probability at least two…possibly three. It will depend on how fast they realize they need to tweak for atmospheric conditions.”