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GWOT III - Horatius
GWOT III - Horatius
The three of us were wanted by Homeland, which was the same as a death sentence. Or worse if you got captured.
Poor Echo 18. He'd submitted to arrest. I hoped for his sake that he'd managed to get himself killed. I didn't like to think about what was happening to him if he hadn't.
So Sarah and Betty and I had literally hiked out for the hills, dropped off by a convoy truck with what we could carry on our backs.
In my case, not much. My back hurt constantly, but I dared not drag my load with a travois. Instead we rigged up bicycle parts into a hand pull cart.
Sarah had never stopped being weepy, not even months after she had been rescued. But she never, ever complained.
One time she cut herself on a piece of barbed wire and without thinking about it, I reached across to apply direct pressure.
She flinched back, saying firmly "NO" and clapping her hand over the wound.
"Pathogen," she said briskly.
I blinked as she waited for the wound to clot.
"Are you ..." I stopped speaking as I realized that I was implying that she was an idiot.
"The doc burned a blood test on me. Yes, I'm very sure."
And there was no such thing as retrovirals any more. It was a case of adding fatality to intimate injury.
Betty, on the other hand, complained quietly and constantly. She was a licensed clinical psychologist, not a commando. Or a soldier. Or a ditch digger. Or a butcher, when I knifed and hung up a deer. But she ate venison with the rest of us.
Finally, after a day of hiking in rough terrain, Sarah interrupted Betty by casually slapping her across the mouth.
Betty reached down to her belt to discover that Sarah already had her rifle sling in her hand. One turn, one touch, and no more former clinical psychologist smart remarks forever.
I considered them both.
"I don't want to be alone out here," I said calmly, "but if one of you kills the other, I will be."
I saw the hamsters spinning in cages in their eyes as each parsed this out.
Somehow the incident tightened us up. We were a Resistance cell. We had a mission, to observe movement on this isolated net of country roads. Also just to stay alive and in being. Sometimes to move information or small equipment.
We easily avoided patrols. Homeland hesitated to operate out of sight of their lovely armored vehicles, and there are a lot of place in these hills that heavy armor just means sliding over the edge.
We slowly built up our arsenal. Careful meetings, fraught with peril, brought us both explosives and grenades. I carried a single disposable anti-armor rocket.
Twice we carried out wet work. A notorious Homeland sympathizer liked to visit his mistress in the eastern hills.
His security team found him drowned in the pool and the mistress apparently drunk.
They executed her on the spot, which foreclosed toxicology that would have revealed what we'd dosed her with, to get to him.
The other wet work was nastier. But it was war, and we did it.
We planned obsessively. Where to rest, where to move, where not to stop ever, and how to ambush a force anywhere on a road.
This last required us to preposition caches of weapons. Our biggest protection was the ability to blend in with the remaining population. But the biggest threat to us was that same remaining population, taking advantage of the standing reward for turning in insurgents.
I had just finished digging yet another hole for yet another cache when Sarah showed me the encrypted message on the comm.
"Horatius team, enemy movement on Road 187. STOP AT ALL COSTS. Red trousers."
The last was our authenticator, which changed at each contact.
Road 187 was one of a handful of roads that crossed from the Central Valley into Silicon Valley, that was not a metalled freeway and thus constantly patrolled.
The next morning, I watched through binoculars as the convoy snaked carefully down the one lane track.
Gun track. MRAP. MRAP. Trucks and trucks and trucks. Bringing up the rear, another gun track.
We could see the columns of smoke in the Valley and the occasional distant crackle of gunfire echoing. Something was up. And the convoy was clearly intended to sneak up and reinforce.
Three women against over a hundred troops. Only one a trained soldier.
Marine. That would be me.
I coldly considered the mission.
It was worth losing a cell over.
I planned the ambush.
Betty would be under my personal eye at the front.
Sarah would be alone at the rear flank. She was obsessed with carrying grenades. This would serve the mission well.
I made sure my plan appeared to have an escape route for her. She wouldn't use it.
Betty asked about our escape route. I lied, told her that we would retreat in good order.
Betty would be a briefly useful addition to my firepower, and a pack mule before that.
I initiated the ambush by sneaking down ahead of the convoy and using first a sledge to knock two wedges out of pre cut notches in two trees, then a brief touch of the electric chainsaw to the kerf to drop them across the road.
Seeing the trees fall, the convoy deployed.
After half an hour of shouting at each other in the road, just out of effective rifle range as their machine gunners uselessly scanned the slopes, they sent forward a scout platoon.
They found the trees.
Then one found the grenade I'd taped in the upper branches.
Boom.
Two screaming casualties.
Delay was fine with me. I had all the time in the world.
We froze once when a Homeland fixed wing traced the road. But they were dependent on optics, and we were well concealed. Their electronics could detect our electronics, but we had none. We buried our communicators after each use, and dug them up to check messages.
Finally, with much cursing and afternoon starting to cast shadows. an MRAP snuck past the gun truck, had a tow cable hooked to a tree, and started backing up to drag it out of the way.
It was time.
I took a knee in plain sight on the treeline, no one saw me, and leveled the tube over my shoulder.
I would only get one shot.
I only needed one shot.
I sighed a name as I touched the trigger and a WHOOSH roared over my shoulder to reach out and touch the MRAP right between the front left wheel and the body.
It brewed up nicely, but I was too busy running to notice, discarded tube behind me.
I reached the first cover point, uncovered the camo tarp over the light machine gun, and emptied all hundred rounds in the belt, gifting the gunner on the gun truck and the exposed troops that had been working on the obstacle. Walking the rounds, as an expert machine gunner does.
Dropping that, heart racing, I sprinted to the second cover point where Betty waited.
She and I both had rifles. This was a skill that Betty had picked up, however weakly, and our slow steady aimed fire started harvesting its crop in the target rich environment.
Faced with a visible foe and what appeared to be a squad worth of resistance, the Homeland commander quite properly ordered a dismounted advance to roll us over, under heavy fire of the gun truck.
That's when Sarah started lobbing grenades from the two boxes she had next to her, in her concealed spider hole halfway up the draw.
The gun truck, under control from inside the armored cab, spun away from us and towards Sarah.
That was all I needed.
I snugged up against the butt of the heavy anti-material rifle.
I would only get one shot.
But that's all I needed.
Gun trucks couldn't carry that whole heavy mount and be armored.
My shot disabled the radiator, which spewed white smoke.
Two disabled vehicles, they would need hours to get them out of the way.
They would not have time before dark, in hills they now believed to be alive with insurgents.
I turned to Betty, to tell her she could go now.
Her sightless eyes stared back at me.
She had already left. No bullet stops to ask who it is about to hit.
I stopped hearing explosions. Sarah had stopped throwing, which meant she was disabled or dead.
I chambered another round in the rifle with a practiced movement.
Then I stood and took it to my shoulder.
No reason not to go in style.
Homeland command officer. Torso exposed in the turret of the second MRAP. Arms on the spade grips of his heavy machine gun.
Not a fair fight.
I'm a Marine, asshole.
The HMG spun into the air, spraying tracers in a high unaimed circle as the officer's arms and torso parted company.
The sledge hammer struck me in the gut.
The convoy had plenty of riflemen. One had waited their moment.
The sky grew dark suddenly.
It wasn't the sky.
It was the spreading pool of red pumping out among the greasy shit-smelling snakes that moments before had been my intestines.
I wouldn't live much longer.
Perhaps a few heartbeats.
Not long enough to do much.
Perhaps a breath.
###
I pressed the bandages to my belly, but only after tightening both tourniquets. Grenade duels cut both ways, and I'd been sliced by hundreds of hot fragments. Some had found veins. Not arteries, or I'd be feeling nothing any more forever.
I welcomed it.
I heard a wild scream.
It was Brooke.
And it was her last.
My own death would not be long in following.
I laid on my belly to press the bandages, buying a little more time.
This exposed my buttocks to the Homeland troops advancing carefully on both sides of my spider hole.
"Hey..." called one.
"Shut the fuck up!" snarled another.
"Sir, possible prisoner."
"Show me your hands!" they shouted.
I couldn't. They were under my belly.
"I call dibs," said one.
I waited as I heard them get closer.
When I heard a boot scrape on the rock above me, I showed them my hands.
Every finger had a ring on it.
And there was still a half full box of grenades next to me, too.
"SHIT!" one screamed in terror as he threw himself off the edge, realized his mistake, and fell thirty feet to broken bones and probable death.
"BITCH!" shouted another as he brought his rifle up.
Too late.
Grenades with pins pulled and spoons lifted skittered at my injured feet and fell down the slope.
I could feel one still under my belly, a hard little hot nub.
My last lover. His ring on my finger.
And I had lots of love for everyone.
###
The Homeland sergeant braced the convoy's survivors, in the lee of the as yet undamaged MRAP.
"We stick together. We hold what we got. We move out in the morning."
It was good advice. It was their best chance.
But he had reckoned without the raw fear of desperate, undisciplined people who had signed up to be paramilitaries and genocidaires. Not soldiers.
The pistol spoke and the sergeant toppled.
"Fuck y'all. Everyone for themselves."
And in no way equipped in any sense to fight what lurked in the growing dark.
That was their enemy. She had proclaimed it with her last scream.
"MARINES!"
The three of us were wanted by Homeland, which was the same as a death sentence. Or worse if you got captured.
Poor Echo 18. He'd submitted to arrest. I hoped for his sake that he'd managed to get himself killed. I didn't like to think about what was happening to him if he hadn't.
So Sarah and Betty and I had literally hiked out for the hills, dropped off by a convoy truck with what we could carry on our backs.
In my case, not much. My back hurt constantly, but I dared not drag my load with a travois. Instead we rigged up bicycle parts into a hand pull cart.
Sarah had never stopped being weepy, not even months after she had been rescued. But she never, ever complained.
One time she cut herself on a piece of barbed wire and without thinking about it, I reached across to apply direct pressure.
She flinched back, saying firmly "NO" and clapping her hand over the wound.
"Pathogen," she said briskly.
I blinked as she waited for the wound to clot.
"Are you ..." I stopped speaking as I realized that I was implying that she was an idiot.
"The doc burned a blood test on me. Yes, I'm very sure."
And there was no such thing as retrovirals any more. It was a case of adding fatality to intimate injury.
Betty, on the other hand, complained quietly and constantly. She was a licensed clinical psychologist, not a commando. Or a soldier. Or a ditch digger. Or a butcher, when I knifed and hung up a deer. But she ate venison with the rest of us.
Finally, after a day of hiking in rough terrain, Sarah interrupted Betty by casually slapping her across the mouth.
Betty reached down to her belt to discover that Sarah already had her rifle sling in her hand. One turn, one touch, and no more former clinical psychologist smart remarks forever.
I considered them both.
"I don't want to be alone out here," I said calmly, "but if one of you kills the other, I will be."
I saw the hamsters spinning in cages in their eyes as each parsed this out.
Somehow the incident tightened us up. We were a Resistance cell. We had a mission, to observe movement on this isolated net of country roads. Also just to stay alive and in being. Sometimes to move information or small equipment.
We easily avoided patrols. Homeland hesitated to operate out of sight of their lovely armored vehicles, and there are a lot of place in these hills that heavy armor just means sliding over the edge.
We slowly built up our arsenal. Careful meetings, fraught with peril, brought us both explosives and grenades. I carried a single disposable anti-armor rocket.
Twice we carried out wet work. A notorious Homeland sympathizer liked to visit his mistress in the eastern hills.
His security team found him drowned in the pool and the mistress apparently drunk.
They executed her on the spot, which foreclosed toxicology that would have revealed what we'd dosed her with, to get to him.
The other wet work was nastier. But it was war, and we did it.
We planned obsessively. Where to rest, where to move, where not to stop ever, and how to ambush a force anywhere on a road.
This last required us to preposition caches of weapons. Our biggest protection was the ability to blend in with the remaining population. But the biggest threat to us was that same remaining population, taking advantage of the standing reward for turning in insurgents.
I had just finished digging yet another hole for yet another cache when Sarah showed me the encrypted message on the comm.
"Horatius team, enemy movement on Road 187. STOP AT ALL COSTS. Red trousers."
The last was our authenticator, which changed at each contact.
Road 187 was one of a handful of roads that crossed from the Central Valley into Silicon Valley, that was not a metalled freeway and thus constantly patrolled.
The next morning, I watched through binoculars as the convoy snaked carefully down the one lane track.
Gun track. MRAP. MRAP. Trucks and trucks and trucks. Bringing up the rear, another gun track.
We could see the columns of smoke in the Valley and the occasional distant crackle of gunfire echoing. Something was up. And the convoy was clearly intended to sneak up and reinforce.
Three women against over a hundred troops. Only one a trained soldier.
Marine. That would be me.
I coldly considered the mission.
It was worth losing a cell over.
I planned the ambush.
Betty would be under my personal eye at the front.
Sarah would be alone at the rear flank. She was obsessed with carrying grenades. This would serve the mission well.
I made sure my plan appeared to have an escape route for her. She wouldn't use it.
Betty asked about our escape route. I lied, told her that we would retreat in good order.
Betty would be a briefly useful addition to my firepower, and a pack mule before that.
I initiated the ambush by sneaking down ahead of the convoy and using first a sledge to knock two wedges out of pre cut notches in two trees, then a brief touch of the electric chainsaw to the kerf to drop them across the road.
Seeing the trees fall, the convoy deployed.
After half an hour of shouting at each other in the road, just out of effective rifle range as their machine gunners uselessly scanned the slopes, they sent forward a scout platoon.
They found the trees.
Then one found the grenade I'd taped in the upper branches.
Boom.
Two screaming casualties.
Delay was fine with me. I had all the time in the world.
We froze once when a Homeland fixed wing traced the road. But they were dependent on optics, and we were well concealed. Their electronics could detect our electronics, but we had none. We buried our communicators after each use, and dug them up to check messages.
Finally, with much cursing and afternoon starting to cast shadows. an MRAP snuck past the gun truck, had a tow cable hooked to a tree, and started backing up to drag it out of the way.
It was time.
I took a knee in plain sight on the treeline, no one saw me, and leveled the tube over my shoulder.
I would only get one shot.
I only needed one shot.
I sighed a name as I touched the trigger and a WHOOSH roared over my shoulder to reach out and touch the MRAP right between the front left wheel and the body.
It brewed up nicely, but I was too busy running to notice, discarded tube behind me.
I reached the first cover point, uncovered the camo tarp over the light machine gun, and emptied all hundred rounds in the belt, gifting the gunner on the gun truck and the exposed troops that had been working on the obstacle. Walking the rounds, as an expert machine gunner does.
Dropping that, heart racing, I sprinted to the second cover point where Betty waited.
She and I both had rifles. This was a skill that Betty had picked up, however weakly, and our slow steady aimed fire started harvesting its crop in the target rich environment.
Faced with a visible foe and what appeared to be a squad worth of resistance, the Homeland commander quite properly ordered a dismounted advance to roll us over, under heavy fire of the gun truck.
That's when Sarah started lobbing grenades from the two boxes she had next to her, in her concealed spider hole halfway up the draw.
The gun truck, under control from inside the armored cab, spun away from us and towards Sarah.
That was all I needed.
I snugged up against the butt of the heavy anti-material rifle.
I would only get one shot.
But that's all I needed.
Gun trucks couldn't carry that whole heavy mount and be armored.
My shot disabled the radiator, which spewed white smoke.
Two disabled vehicles, they would need hours to get them out of the way.
They would not have time before dark, in hills they now believed to be alive with insurgents.
I turned to Betty, to tell her she could go now.
Her sightless eyes stared back at me.
She had already left. No bullet stops to ask who it is about to hit.
I stopped hearing explosions. Sarah had stopped throwing, which meant she was disabled or dead.
I chambered another round in the rifle with a practiced movement.
Then I stood and took it to my shoulder.
No reason not to go in style.
Homeland command officer. Torso exposed in the turret of the second MRAP. Arms on the spade grips of his heavy machine gun.
Not a fair fight.
I'm a Marine, asshole.
The HMG spun into the air, spraying tracers in a high unaimed circle as the officer's arms and torso parted company.
The sledge hammer struck me in the gut.
The convoy had plenty of riflemen. One had waited their moment.
The sky grew dark suddenly.
It wasn't the sky.
It was the spreading pool of red pumping out among the greasy shit-smelling snakes that moments before had been my intestines.
I wouldn't live much longer.
Perhaps a few heartbeats.
Not long enough to do much.
Perhaps a breath.
###
I pressed the bandages to my belly, but only after tightening both tourniquets. Grenade duels cut both ways, and I'd been sliced by hundreds of hot fragments. Some had found veins. Not arteries, or I'd be feeling nothing any more forever.
I welcomed it.
I heard a wild scream.
It was Brooke.
And it was her last.
My own death would not be long in following.
I laid on my belly to press the bandages, buying a little more time.
This exposed my buttocks to the Homeland troops advancing carefully on both sides of my spider hole.
"Hey..." called one.
"Shut the fuck up!" snarled another.
"Sir, possible prisoner."
"Show me your hands!" they shouted.
I couldn't. They were under my belly.
"I call dibs," said one.
I waited as I heard them get closer.
When I heard a boot scrape on the rock above me, I showed them my hands.
Every finger had a ring on it.
And there was still a half full box of grenades next to me, too.
"SHIT!" one screamed in terror as he threw himself off the edge, realized his mistake, and fell thirty feet to broken bones and probable death.
"BITCH!" shouted another as he brought his rifle up.
Too late.
Grenades with pins pulled and spoons lifted skittered at my injured feet and fell down the slope.
I could feel one still under my belly, a hard little hot nub.
My last lover. His ring on my finger.
And I had lots of love for everyone.
###
The Homeland sergeant braced the convoy's survivors, in the lee of the as yet undamaged MRAP.
"We stick together. We hold what we got. We move out in the morning."
It was good advice. It was their best chance.
But he had reckoned without the raw fear of desperate, undisciplined people who had signed up to be paramilitaries and genocidaires. Not soldiers.
The pistol spoke and the sergeant toppled.
"Fuck y'all. Everyone for themselves."
And in no way equipped in any sense to fight what lurked in the growing dark.
That was their enemy. She had proclaimed it with her last scream.
"MARINES!"
Dr. Rize
My head hurt and I couldn't see, but I didn't move.
I didn't dare.
My nose told me that someone had been killed, violently, close to me. Blood and feces.
My ears rang and somehow buzzed. I realized that the buzzing was not my ears, but the flies.
I couldn't see because it was dark. That's right, no moon. Brooke had made us memorize the basics of being a soldier, over and over again, even when we were sick of it.
"Always! Always know the phase of the moon! Your life depends on knowing when there will be a little light at night, and when there will not."
There was no light. But I could hear whispers and mutters.
Homeland troops, in the dark.
I listened carefully.
They were scared.
It was like a revelation.
They were scared.
Scared of me.
I smiled without opening my lips. No reflections off my teeth.
I made myself open my eyes, ignoring the splitting headache and the crust of blood on my scalp.
My eyes started to adjust.
We were still in the trench. No one had come up to check it out.
Brooke was dead. What I was smelling, was her.
"Take stock of yourself, first and foremost. What you have is what you've got. Drink water. Piss. Shit when you get a safe chance. Sleep, only when it is safe."
My teammates were dead. It would never be safe for me to sleep again. And being knocked out did not count as sleep.
I slowly reached down to my belt. The pistol. The knife. The canteen.
It was so heavy in my hand as I lifted it and took a drink.
The water tasted like a vision of ... peace.
But this was not peace.
This was war. And however unwillingly, I was a soldier. However unskilled, I was the last of our cell in this fight. And with the example of loyalty unto death literally in front of me, I could do no less.
I stretched my arms and legs. Touched my scalp carefully. Gained my bearings.
Moved forward. Found my rifle by touch in the dark. Fingers ran down to the safety. It was off safe. I touched it again, to be sure.
I could still hear Brooke in a low growl at me, a week ago as I sat blindfolded with my rifle in my hands.
"Touch it, slut! Touch it! Know every part better than you know your rotten crotch!"
I heard scrabbling on the slope below.
This could not be a fight. If there were more than one, I would have to fire more than once. The others would converge and I would die. Or worse, be captured.
Fortunately the scrabbling was just one person.
No helmet, just like me. A face streaked in sweat.
Sarah and Brooke were dead. So that meant she was an enemy.
To be dealt with as wolves are.
She cursed as she came up, ready, with the pistol in her hands. I don't think she realized that she'd said anything, and thus betrayed her position.
"They're not soldiers!" Brooke reminded me. "They're pussies. Pumped up police. More guns than brains, and no balls at all."
I thought about my rifle.
I carefully, so slowly, laid it down by my leg.
I drew my knife.
I could see in the dark.
Echo 18 had taken me out trench-killing one night. He'd terrified me out of all sense.
But I'd learned. If you can see in the dark, and they cannot, you can kill in perfect safety.
I waited, not moving. The eye detects movement at night.
I could see her.
She could not see me.
Nor did she see me when I put one hand over her mouth and the blade of my knife in her right armpit, above her armor.
She thrashed and struggled and I rode her down into death, my knife hand covered with hot pumping wetness as I twisted to be extra sure.
That was one.
I heard more noise below. If any of the others heard her come up, and didn't come back... they would have to make their own decision.
If there was another, I still had the knife.
If there was more than one, I had at least one rifle. A second if I could reach Brooke's.
The copper stink of her blood carried on the wind.
I heard a low moan from below.
That's right.
Fear us.