Wombat Prime, page 2
“Somehow Second Platoon managed to tunnel into an armored cavalry unit’s bivouac area, disabled fourteen armored vehicles, and left a pile of shit on the command track’s turret. Unless a human trooper managed to press his own turds into perfect octahedrons, that had to be Corporal Gnad.”
“Um, yes Sir, that was me.” Gnad blushed again. He didn’t dare make eye contact with the company commander.
Captain Rogneby had a tangential thought. “I thought wombat poop was cuboidal, Gnad. How is that yours is shaped like Dungeons and Dragons dice?”
“It’s the additional cartilaginous plates they bio-engineered into us, Sir,” Corporal Gnad explained, blushing slightly. “Changes the shape of the… spoor… as it were.”
“It’s also a signature, Corporal. It marks you as the culprit as surely as a photograph of you at the scene. Like tunneling from the tree line some forty meters into their bivouac. Only an uplifted wombat could do that.”
“It wasn’t that far, Sir, and I had help.”
“I’ve seen human troops use entrenching tools,” Rogneby continued, warming to his subject. “Hell, I’ve been that human trooper with an entrenching tool. We are neither inclined nor physically capable of tunneling that far in only six hours.”
“Our men are well-motivated, Sir,” Sergeant Humphres replied, deadpan.
“I also noticed that Second Platoon was the only unit with tarps and tent heaters. Tarps and tent heaters are not in our TO&E.”
“They should be.” Brian’s mouth ran away with him.
“THAT’S NOT THE GODDAMN POINT!” Rogneby thundered furiously, pounding his desk. Lieutenant Curtis flinched, but Corporal Brian Lee Gnad was unbowed. “YOU CAN’T JUST STEAL WHAT YOU THINK – ”
“Sir, were any tarps and tent heaters reported stolen?” Brian interrupted.
Captain Rogneby stopped and stared at him incredulously, then shook his head. “As a matter of fact, there have - ”
“Sir, I respectfully suggest that any units who reported missing or stolen equipment should conduct an immediate inventory. Perhaps they will find that the items were merely misplaced.”
Rogneby sunk back into his chair and stared at him for a long moment. Finally, he chuckled and shook his head.
“Tell me how you had the pig roast, Corporal,” he ordered. “Give me that much.”
“A suppressed carbine, firewood and a few shavings of C4,” Gnad shrugged.
As far as you know.
“The point being, gentlemen,” Captain Rogneby sighed, “is that we – all of us – are under the microscope, most especially you, Brian. General Olsen will protect us all he can, but if you get caught on one of your midnight requisitions, you’ll be court martialed and thrown out of the Army. The old guard will call uplifted troopers a failed experiment, and I’ll be forced to roll a river of shit down onto Lieutenant Curtis and Sergeant Humphries for letting it go on. Do I make my point?”
“You do, Sir,” Gnad and Humphries agreed. Lieutenant Curtis merely looked uncomfortable.
“Something to add, Lieutenant?” Captain Rogneby cocked an eyebrow.
“Well, I was going to ask you earlier, but now it doesn’t seem like such a good time.”
“Spit it out, Lieutenant,” Rogneby ordered.
“Well, um…” Lieutenant Curtis stammered. “I was going to ask if… I mean, I think he’d be deserving of… Sir, I’d like to promote Corporal Gnad to sergeant.”
Task Force Righteous Fury
Mittagong, New South Wales
December, 2203
First Lieutenant Brian Lee Gnad held up a fist, the universal sign to halt and freeze. Behind him, the men of Squad Three knelt, watching him. The action swept through the rest of the platoon like a ripple as the flank and reserve elements saw the platoon leader come to a halt. They too knelt, with their weapons and eyes trained outward.
Something was wrong.
Lieutenant Gnad commanded Third Platoon, of which there were four squads. Squad Three knelt behind him, Squad Two protected his left flank, Squad Four his right, and First Squad with his radioman provided rear security. They had a drone up, but its camera couldn’t penetrate the forest canopy, and the drone’s thermal imaging was the 23rd century version of the ancient McDonald’s ice cream machines; still on the menu, but always broken.
Today was one of the broken days.
Well, they just said, ‘Go find the enemy and kill them, Lieutenant,’ Gnad fumed silently. Don’t let little things like being understrength, sketchy intel, and half your equipment inoperative stop you.
Task Force Righteous Fury had been tasked with sweeping rebel ARM forces from Mittagong and surrounding areas, with middling results. The Australian 4th Armored Cavalry Regiment (ACR) had committed two troops to the task force, but with orders from the brass to avoid destroying the infrastructure, the tanks and armored scout vehicles had been rendered toothless. What Task Force Righteous Fury (immediately and predictably dubbed by the troops as Task Force Righteous Indignation) had left were 16 armored vehicles: eight ASLAV III light armored scout vehicles, four Bushmaster VI APCs and four positively ancient American Bradley IV infantry fighting vehicles. Against the guerilla warfare tactics of the ARM, the vaunted Royal Australian Armored Cavalry had been reduced to an expensive and unwieldy taxi service.
Not that I wouldn’t mind a couple dozen Abrams V main battle tanks sweeping the area ahead of us, Gnad mused. Mittagong is a shell anyway. They’ll have to rebuild the entire bleedin’ city before they can repatriate anyone…
Still, Lieutenant Gnad was uneasy. Something had gotten his attention, and not knowing what gnawed at the edges of his consciousness. He reflexively flexed his glutes, a subconscious response to stress, and the cartilage over his hamstrings grated together. His right hand tightened on the grip of his 6.5mm caseless assault carbine, dubbed by the Army as the Light Utility Carbine, Model 12. The troops, of course, shortened the LUC12 to simply “Luck,” as in “Luck won’t save you in a firefight.”
He peered into the bush and saw nothing but shadows lengthening in the late summer afternoon. He sniffed the air but was met only with the miasma of the Australian bush, a riot of soil, jasmine, lemon myrtle and animal dung. The sun had been hot that day, and he could smell his troopers as the wind swirled about him. His hearing picked up nothing unusual.
Behold the amazing, uplifted wombat, a triumph of national will and technology. A sentient ball of kick-arse, combining a human’s intelligence with the superior senses and animal cunning of a wombat… except that my vision is no better than the rest of my troopers, and my hearing ain’t much better. And how the fuck am I at any advantage when the people we’re fighting bloody BELONG here?
Lieutenant Gnad would never admit to his men that he was at no more skilled than any of them at detecting an ambush. It was unusual enough that a lieutenant walked point on patrol, and he got away with it because his human comrades – brass and grunts alike - believed that animals had superior senses, and Lieutenant Brian Lee Gnad wasn’t about to disabuse them of that notion. If his troops believed that they had a tactical advantage because their platoon commander was a bloody dangerous, riggin’, diggin’, shootin’, lootin’ combat wombat, then so be it. Besides, Gnad devoutly believed that a commander should never ask anything of his troops that he wasn’t willing and able to do at least as well.
Something’s out there, his senses told him, and it ain’t just that feral Jill wombat in estrous, but how in bloody Hell should I know what the *something* is? I can smell every bleedin’ plant in a hundred meters and each individual member of the patrol, every single place that Jill wombat has overturned soil…
Soil. That was it. The smell of fresh earth had been far more pungent than it should have been. Gnad turned his head this way and that, sniffing the air in front of him. The ground had been broken at regular intervals starting fifty meters in front of him on the south side of the Mittagong-Wombeya Road, an ancient highway frequently plagued with washouts and mudslides. When the war broke out, its maintenance had been abandoned entirely.
Even though he was only a lieutenant, Gnad wasn’t stupid enough to follow a road, even one gone to seed 65 years ago. His patrol picked their way through the bush 50 meters south of the old roadbed, following the general direction of the road as it wound its way northwest from Mittagong to Wombeya Caverns. When the ARM had bugged out of Mittagong they had fled this way, and it was the job of Task Force Righteous Fury to run them all to ground.
Gnad pondered a moment, then consulted his map. The road turned hard west 100 meters ahead, and the terrain sloped downhill steeply to the Wollondilly River at Goodmans Ford, three kilometers away. The old roadbed was to their right, with Squad Four ten meters to the right and behind, Squad Two ten meters left and to the rear, and Squad One ten meters behind them all. If they continued on their planned route, the entire platoon would bend westward and cross the river south of the road.
Hills on the left, open ground and road to the right, hills on the far side of the river. If I were trying to set an ambush, I’d hit us here.
Gnad held up his left hand, palm out, and rotated his arm clockwise horizontally, then pointed at the ground beside him. Technically, he should have made eye contact with his squad leaders individually and beckoned them to his position with the “Leaders Up” signal, but he was reluctant to take his eyes off the bush in front of his position. Brian Lee Gnad was scared, and he was afraid it would show.
When the squad leaders had gathered at his position, he whispered, “Ambush ahead.”
“Where?” Corporal Kevin Baker, leader of Squad Four, wanted to know.
“Ahead, at the bend of the road.” Gnad jerked his chin in a vague direction towards their 10:00 position. “I smell ‘em.”
Normally such a statement would have garnered raised eyebrows and skepticism, but they were perfectly willing to believe that Lieutenant Gnad could literally smell an ambush.
Gnad lay his map on the ground and pointed with a long claw. “Road bends 90 degrees west up ahead, crosses the river about three klicks up. They’ll have shooters up the slope on our left flank, probably mines or another line of shooters across the river.”
At least, I hope so. I hope this whole exercise isn’t the product of abject fear and an overactive imagination.
“What do you want to do, Lieutenant?” asked the leader of Squad Two. Corporal Keith Duke was 5’6” tall, wispy thin, and the next time he shaved would be his first. He looked about fourteen years old. The naked trust he displayed in Lieutenant Gnad made him uncomfortable.
“I’m going to take Squad Three left, up the hill above them. Baker, stay here with Squad Four and your machine gun as a blocking force. You’ll take care of any leakers. Squad Two, take my left flank on the north slope of the hill, with your eye on the river. They’ll likely have either mines or shooters there.”
“Get above ‘em?” Baker grunted approvingly. “Piss down a little hate and misery on their heads?”
“That’s the idea,” Gnad agreed. “It’ll take me about an hour to get into position. Oughta be full dark by then.”
“What are we supposed to do?” Corporal Reed, leader of First Squad, asked plaintively. “Stand around with our dicks in our hands?”
“We need you in reserve.”
“My bloody arse!” spat Reed. “Lookit, Leftenant, if you’re right, we may have stumbled on the only unit in the whole bloody ARM that’s competent. What if they catch you sneakin’ up on ‘em?”
“What’s your point, Rob?” Gnad asked tersely. He didn’t like the answer.
“Give ‘em something to keep their attention on what’s in front of ‘em,” Reed suggested. “I’ve got the only set of NVG’s in the platoon. There’s a ditch on the southern edge of the road. We stay in that; we’re defiladed from fire on the slope. We creep in, maybe make a little noise but not too much, see? Keep ‘em lookin’ downhill while you hose the bloody wankers from above.”
Gnad shook his head. “I don’t like using you as bait.”
“Bait that bites back, Leftenant,” Reed insisted. “If any of ‘em squirt downhill, we pop up and hose ‘em. Just don’t come down the hill after ‘em.”
Gnad considered it. Finally, he nodded, “Okay, do it.” He checked his watch. “It’s 1845 now. I should be in place by 2000 latest. Start moving through the ditch around 1930. Go slow; make some noise but not too obvious.”
“Roger that, Leftenant.”
“Just keep your bloody head down, Corporal.”
After an hour of painstakingly slow movement, the last 50 meters at a belly crawl, Lieutenant Gnad and Third Squad were in position. They had moved far left of their original course, up the hill where they suspected the ARM guerillas were hiding, just below the military crest of the hill to avoid skylining themselves against the setting sun.
He had first detected movement ten minutes into his crawl, and was amazed to discover that the fear he felt sure would seize him was replaced by exhilaration and… relief?
The bloody wankers are down there, just where I thought they’d be, he exulted. Twelve of ‘em, by my count. That’s less than I thought we were pursuing. I wonder where the others are.
His silent reverie was cut short by two clicks in his radio earpiece, signifying that Sergeant Patterson was in place. There followed a chorus of other clicks as the rest of Third Platoon relayed their readiness. Squad Three would fire down onto the would-be ambushers, with Gnad anchoring the left end of the line and Patterson the right, with the rest of the squad strung out between them. Squad Two was on their left, over the crest of the hill, facing north. Corporal Baker and Squad Four were to their right, effectively setting up their own L-shaped ambush.
To fuck or be fucked, that is the question. One idiot down there is smoking, for pity’s sake. If one of my men smoked on an ambush, I’d rip him a new –
He never got a chance to finish the thought. He heard a scream and a burst of gunfire from the direction of First Squad, quickly met by an answering burst of fire and the chatter of an automatic weapon. A claymore mine detonated in a blinding flash.
Bloody Hell. There wasn’t supposed to be anyone down there!
Recovering quickly from the shock, Gnad opened up on his man with his carbine. He fired two short bursts and saw the man drop just as the rest of Squad Three opened up. The plan had been for Gnad to fire first. Gnad and Patterson were to take down their men on either end of the line, hopefully freezing the men in the middle in confusion for a precious few seconds, long enough for the rest of his squad to sweep the enemy position with concentrated fire.
At least that was the plan. The reality was a maelstrom of metal and muzzle blasts interspersed with screams of fear and pain, with Gnad doing his best to ignore the confusion while he serviced targets. One man in the middle of the ARM ambush line had wised up to the fact that they were taking fire from behind and had turned around. He fired a burst blindly up the slope that did little more than clip leaves and motioned for the man on his left to turn around.
Gnad gave him two in the chest and one in the head for his troubles, and then fired at his comrade. Both men dropped and stopped firing. In his peripheral vision, Gnad saw a handful of spectral shapes boil out of the ditch below them, where First Squad was supposed to have been. Without hesitation, Gnad lit them up.
I fucking hope that’s not First Squad down there, he thought, even as he fired his last round and changed magazines. Muzzle flashes from the ditch told him that First Squad were still in their positions, and he breathed a prayer of thanks as he sought more targets. He fired at a pair of shapes. Both men dropped, but Gnad couldn’t tell if they had been hit or simply took cover. More shapes moved in front of him, from right to left, heading toward the river. A stream of green tracers reached out from his right flank, walking the rounds into the fleeing enemy; Corporal Baker had gotten his machine gun into action. A fist-sized shape blacker than the surrounding night tumbled lazily toward him, landing just behind him and to his left. His mind barely had time to report “grenade” when there was a flash and he felt a dim sensation of falling.
Then everything went black.
Gnad came to with a ringing in his ears and an overwhelming wave of nausea. He rolled onto his side, vomited and shook his head to clear it. His mind rebooted itself slowly, one sense at a time. First came vision, and he saw no more shapes moving about. He could see muzzle flashes and tracer rounds. Hearing came next, and he could hear the reports of carbines and the chatter of Squad Four’s automatic weapon. There was yelling, but it was hard to make it out through the roaring in his ears. Cognition came last, and Lieutenant Brian Lee Gnad had trouble discerning what all those things meant, but he was certain that it was supremely important that he figure it out. He rose to his knees and looked around dully.
All the muzzle flashes are from our positions; nobody’s firing back. It’s over.
“Cease fire,” he croaked, but nothing happened. He said it louder and still got nothing.
It occurred to him then that he should use his radio, and he activated his throat mic and repeated as calmly as he could manage, “Cease fire.” That got results, and the command rippled through the platoon as his squad leaders repeated it. Everyone stopped firing.
Gnad looked down at his body armor and saw the fabric rent in several places, and blood on his left thigh. His radio earpiece dangled by its cord, and he fumbled it back into place.
“Lieutenant, you okay?” He heard immediately and recognized the urgent voice of Pat Patterson, his platoon sergeant.
“I’m okay,” he radioed back, even though he felt anything but. “All squads, status?”
“Squad Four, clear.”
“Squad Two, clear.”
“Squad Three, Patterson here. We’re all here, Boss.”
Gnad waited several moments, then keyed his throat mic again. “Squad Two, check in.” When he got no reply, he repeated it. “Squad Two, check in!”
His answer was a single shot from his left flank, and a few seconds later, a ripple of thunderous explosions a few hundred meters away. Two seconds later, Duke called in, “Second Squad, we’re clear.”
