Interregnum (Children of Steel Book 2) Page 7

  6

  Five days later, we broke orbit. The survivors were all being bunked on the second crew module, the one that had carried their replacements. Our trip out was going to be a bit slower this time, but not enough to be an issue.

  Once we had things squared away, the captain briefed us all on our next stop. As there wasn't anyone in the system any possible spies could talk to, he didn't bother to wait for us to enter jump.

  We were all seated at our duty stations, which for me was the flight deck, when the captain came on the ship's network for the briefing.

  "As many of you know, during the last war there were companies and other concerns that for one reason or another supported our enemy," he began.

  "We will be hitting one of those companies next."

  I thought I heard a small cheer, and then realized it was me and I shut my mouth embarrassed. Of course looking around the flight deck, I could see I wasn't the only one who felt that way.

  "Timing is going to be very important on this operation, which is why we couldn't haul as much ore out of Tualatin as I would have liked. We will be meeting up with a cruiser, a frigate and a troop carrier, at a staging point. Then we will all jump in together. This is going to be a hostile takeover of assets. Other units will be attacking all the other assets of the target company simultaneously, throughout known space. Some of those units will be ours; some of them belong to our allies.

  "When we are done, Capital Mines will cease to exist as a company, as all of their assets will have been seized. Now Colonel Johnson will brief you on the ground operation."

  What followed next was primarily for the ground troops, which would be all of the 2nd Heavy Infantry, and about three hundred of the Astra's security forces. When I had first joined the Astra, it shipped with a standing crew of around three hundred, which was pretty small for a ship of its size. During the war that crew had increased in size to over five hundred, all of those extras were security members, or more precisely, troops. They did have other jobs onboard as well, and it made general maintenance a little easier on the rest of us, though more people onboard did mean more maintenance, so it mostly balanced out.

  There were also instructions for us flight crews as well. We would have to move over a thousand people to the ground, and with only six assault shuttles and two cargo shuttles, that would take a while.

  Of course that was when we found out that the small shuttle bay on each of the troop modules had two drop ships in it, and that we'd be moving over a hundred troops onto the frigate when it showed up, as it was carrying two drop ships as well.

  That meant we'd be able to put almost half of the forces on the ground in the first wave. The drop ships would all fly back to the Astra to reload for the next wave, which meant about two more sorties for them until all of the ground troops were deployed.

  The assault shuttles would start flying combat support after the first wave hit, and only two of them would reload with troops after that, unless we won the air war sooner, in which case more would be assigned into the troop deployment role.

  There would be two more assault shuttles launching from the frigate, which was the Eagle. They would also come back to the Astra for rearming, as our assault shuttle bay was large enough to turn around several shuttles at once. Our rear shuttle bay would handle the drop ships, which wasn't that much different than handling the cargo shuttles.

  The troop ship was carrying the 1st Heavy Infantry. It carried ten drop ships, also of a new design, and they would HALO the 1st H.I. in one pass, then load up with extra ammunition, food, and other supplies and land once a safe landing zone was established. As for the Cruiser, it would be supporting us with ten of the company's new attack fighters, as well as an impressive array of armaments, including orbital to ground batteries.

  As for the bane of my combat existence, the cargo shuttles, they would not launch until the air war had definitely been won, and would be ferrying heavy military equipment after that. When I found I would not be expected to fly any of those sorties I almost danced.

  When the main briefing finished, they turned us all over to our individual section chiefs to find out the details for our own group.

  "How many people are we going up against, Chief?" I asked.

  "Estimates put the total number on the ground to be between eight and twelve thousand."

  "And we're hitting that with only two thousand?"

  "Two thirds of the defending personnel are human, so we really don't expect much of a fight out of them as they're mainly technicians, miners, or administrators. Of the four or so thousand that are animen, most of them are grunt labor. Intel puts their fighting force at probably two or three thousand, of which two thirds are again, human."

  "They have human fighters?" Jeb asked surprised.

  "Well, they were in league with the Humanist Front, so we're not really surprised by that," Chief Shandour said. "This group used to be fairly well connected politically back on Earth, so they were untouchable. Well, guess what?" He smiled and looked at all of us. "With what came out from the war, and with everything I hear is playing on the news back on Earth, their political connections have all suddenly dried up and they've gone from 'untouchable' to 'very tempting targets.'"

  There were more than a few laughs at that.

  "So, we've got a lot of pictures, maps, and other intel on the target, their defenses, and the general layout. The techs are programming the sims and tonight we'll start running basic drills and take some time to learn the terrain. Tomorrow we'll start practicing the mission. Any questions?"

  "How good is the intelligence?" Sharon, one of the other WSO's asked.

  "Corporate sent a couple of spies in six months ago. We'll probably have an update from them once we launch our attack as well. Anything else?"

  There were a few more questions, but they were related to the training schedule. I went and got my copy of the information, then sat down with Dave and started going over it. We had eight weeks until we met up with the other units, and then another week or so until the attack.

  "Been a while since you've flown any live combat, feeling up to it?" Dave asked.

  I nodded, "Sure, why wouldn't I?"

  "Well, then be ready for all the crap that the chief is going to have them throw at us in the sims, because he's going to want some proof."

  I smiled, "I'm looking forward to it actually, it'll be fun."

  "This is obviously some new sort of fun that I'm not aware of," Dave grumbled.

  "Well, I need to do something to break you of all those bad habits you developed when flying with Shaun."

  "I developed no such thing," Dave said. "In fact I'm just scandalized that you would even suggest it!"

  I smirked, Shaun was a very pretty female wolf, and had been Dave's pilot for his entire tour on the Falcon.

  "Uh-huh. Well, the kiss rule just went right out the window."

  Dave looked offended, "What! No kiss? Then how am I supposed to feel motivated to do my job if I don't get a kiss for every target I destroy?"

  "I'm sorry, Dave, but I'm a married leopard, you'll just have to suffer through it somehow."

  "Next you'll be telling me you won't spend the night before the mission with me," Dave said and faked a sob.

  I just sighed and shook my head. "I know that never happened."

  "Well, it happened once," Dave grinned.

  "And once was enough?" I asked with a smirk.

  "Truth is, we were so tired the next day that we decided to save our partying until afterwards."

  "Uh-huh. Well, unless you want me spending time in your room after this shift ends, how about we start studying this stuff?"

  "Really, Raj! And here I thought you said you were mated!"

  I sighed and shook my head. Dave's sense of humor could be strange at times, but after knowing him all these years I'd at least gotten used to it.

  I was recounting some of Dave's antics to Cassandra later that night while we lay in bed and I noticed that sh
e wasn't really saying much.

  "Are you okay, Hon?" I asked pulling her closer and looking into her eyes.

  "I'm okay," she said and looked away.

  "Cassy?"

  "Yes, Raj?"

  "Please don't lie to me. What's wrong?"

  She looked back up at me and sighed, "What we saw down there reminded me quite a lot of some of the things that happened to me, to the people I was with, my coworkers, my friends."

  "Cassy, they weren't murdered by the enemy, they didn't die in the war, it was just a terrible accident."

  She growled, "It wasn't an accident! If their company hadn't been destroyed, the supply ship would have come, would have saved them."

  I sighed, I hadn't honestly thought of it that way.

  "They were murdered as sure as my friends were murdered. They were forced to eat each other, maybe not directly, but they still were!"

  She was still growling and had gone stiff against me. I started to have flashbacks to some of the fights I'd had in the past with Aruba.

  "Do you want to go down to the gym and spar?" I asked.

  "Why would I want to do that?" She growled at me.

  "Because then I get to put on protective gear before you start hitting me," I whispered and kissed her on the nose.

  She started to snarl, then broke it off suddenly and just started to cry.

  "I'm... I'm sorry, hon, I'm sorry. I... I just can't help myself sometimes."

  "That's okay, dear, that's why I'm here. I know it's tough, I know you still haven't gotten over it. I know it hasn't ended for you yet."

  "No... no it hasn't. When will it? When will it end?"

  I kissed her again, "Talk to Sharazad. If anyone knows, I'm sure she will."

  Cassandra hesitated, "I'll try. I'll try tomorrow."

  "Surely there were some good things that happened, weren't there?"

  She shook her head, "Not really. Oh, there were small things, small victories, but if we seemed happy, too many times they'd come back and look for an excuse to make us suffer. Up until you rescued me, the best thing that ever happened was when I got moved into that camp. There were so many of us there, that they stopped caring."

  I thought about that, I'd killed the commander of that camp when my men had reported finding pelts in his office that he'd skinned off of other prisoners.

  "That was the best thing?" I said shocked.

  She nodded. "They were a lot more professional there, than in any of the places I had been before. They didn't spend their time trying to break each of us, or punish us, individually. As long as we worked and produced, they only bothered us with minor harassments."

  She shivered and I pulled her closer again.

  "But some of the places we were before that, they... there were people who would delight in hurting us, or torturing us. They'd look for excuses to punish us, some didn't even need excuses. The worst was this one place we were sent to early on in the war. After we'd been there a few months working on some base they were building, they started to tell us they didn't have enough food for all of us. About once a week they'd tell us this, and they'd tell us that in order to have enough food, the last one in line would have to be ‘put down.’

  "At first we'd all scramble not to be last, and they'd laugh at us and then shoot the last person in line after telling them about how much their 'animal friends' must care for them. After a few weeks of that, people started to willingly go to the end of the line; they'd given up hope, and thought they'd save the rest of us the pain of trying to survive.

  "When the guards figured that out, they mocked us, and shot the person at the head of the line that week. After that, until we were shipped off to another place to work, it was pretty random. If you caught the wrong attention at the wrong time, that was it, you were killed."

  I hugged her tight, what can you say to that? I didn't know any magic words to sooth her, to ease the pain. "I'm sorry, Hon," Was all I could think of to say. "It's over now and won't ever happen again."

  She nodded and buried her face in my chest and cried as I held her, until eventually, she fell asleep. I hoped this was the worst of it. It made me angry that such things had been done, but I knew there was nothing I could do about it. Most of the people who had done these things were dead now, or so far away and in hiding, that they'd never be found and punished.

  When morning came, I was surprised that Cassandra had slept through the night without waking. I guess telling me had kept any bad dreams away. She was a little quiet when we hit the showers and got dressed, but was a lot more relaxed and talkative when we got to the mess. So I was a lot less worried when we went our separate ways for the day.

  We started training on the details of the overall plan that day, or at least the details as they pertained to us. With four ships coming in, we all knew that there wasn't going to be much in the way of any surprise. They'd see us coming and know why we were there.

  The first wave was going to focus on attacking their command and control complex. We would bring the first wave into attack that while the Eagle, the cruiser Natal, and the Astra took out both orbital and ground radar, so they would hopefully not know where we were going until we attacked.

  During that initial battle, we'd start by bringing in the first wave of the 2nd H.I., and while the enemy tried to counter that, the drop ships from the troop carrier J Wayne would perform their massive HALO drop, putting the entire 1st H.I. behind the enemy's counterattack, and would hopefully roll them up.

  The next two waves, which would bring down the remaining elements of the 2nd H.I. would be directed to land them where they would do the most good. Our commander hoped at that point that we would have total air superiority and a ground based refueling and rearming station would then be set up for the attack craft and the fighters, so they wouldn't have to return to their ships to rearm.

  We would be practicing that plan until we launched the attack, as well as practicing a number of variations, including ones where things didn't go at all right. We had the time after all, and the chief had the sadism to put us through it.

  My unarmed combat classes started up again, and we started using sections of the ship to practice storming chokepoints and fortified positions. There were techniques that we'd used in Falcon block, and I taught them here. Of course we did do a couple of live-fire drills, because some things you really do need to experience in training to make sure you did it right when the bullets really were flying.

  And practicing how bullets ricocheted down a hallway meant you needed a real hallway to stand in as they did.

  I let the colonel explain that one to the captain. At least I didn't have to fix the damage that we did. The troops in the class got to help with that.

  The new people onboard, the ones who had been working for Sagert before Tri-Star took them over, didn't come out of the module they had been living in for almost two weeks. When they did start coming out, they weren't very sociable at first, and they all looked a little haunted.

  By the time of the second clan meeting, they were being a lot more sociable, there was only one leopard in that group, his name was Josu, and he was only seventeen, this had been his first assignment. He'd been born in the crèche of a crèche company, a place that provided workers for companies too small to 'grow their own' as it were.

  All the other leopards at 'Facility D' as everyone was calling it, had suicided. There had been six of them, and they'd all been older, and from what Sharazad had learned in private from the one surviving administrator, they were all afraid that they'd lose it and start preying on the others when starvation set it, so they'd been in the first group of volunteers. Josu however had been too young.

  He had one of the worst cases of survivor guilt I'd ever seen, and like everyone else here, I'd seen my fair share, and even felt a little of it myself. Kyrani had taken up with him; I suspected the hand of Balizar behind that one, because she was the closest to his age.

  Also, because she stayed right next to him, even th
ough I knew she'd been very interested in several of the males from the 2nd H.I. before we'd picked up Josu.

  I guess the other males had gotten the word as well, because none of them were hitting on Kyrani, though I did see several try to engage Josu in conversation.

  "I feel sorry for that kid," I said to Cassandra as we mingled with the others.

  "Oh?" she asked looking at me. "Why?"

  "Because he has nobody. The only leopards he'd gotten close to all went off without him, he lost his whole world in a terrible incident," I avoided the word 'accident' since Cassandra's little blowup. "And then spent two years isolating himself out of the same fears that led the others to kill themselves."

  "What about me?" She asked, surprising me.

  "What about you?" I asked looking down at her.

  "Do you feel sorry for me?"

  "If you didn't have someone who loved you more than life itself, if you didn't have a bunch of brothers and sisters, if all of your friends had died, maybe," I said hoping I had dodged all the mines in that little field.

  "Only maybe?" She said quirking an eyebrow.

  "You were a lot more experienced, and you are a lot stronger, Cassy," I said and gave her a hug. "And of course you have me!" I added and grinned at her. "But he doesn't have anybody. Kyrani's trying, but until he opens up, it's gonna be a long hard road for him."

  Cassandra nodded slowly, "Well at least he doesn't have to hide what he did, and everyone here knows what happened."

  "Maybe, but I doubt that makes him feel any less guilty."

  She nodded, "Why don't we go join them?"

  "You sure?"