Cherubim's Call, page 9
“You’ve been away from Tara for so long that right arm of yours is looking fit as the other,” she laughed.
Kodiak rolled his eyes. “My arm looks fit because Tara broke it off.”
Moreau sat down next to him in the field and put on a concerned face, but he read the sarcasm on it. “You poor thing. Little Tara has gone and run off. Now who are you going to settle down with on the great plains of Texas?”
Moreau had gotten pretty good at imitating Kodiak’s Texan drawl. Whenever she broke the accent out, he always had to laugh. “Actually, she sent me a Dear John vid. Apparently, me going into the military didn’t fit into her grand scheme of things. I guess Randy did.”
Moreau put her arm around Kodiak and it felt different from her usual sarcastic replies. “Ahh, hell, I’m sorry to hear that, Bear. Truly, I am.”
“Thanks, Moreau,” was all he managed back.
“Hey, look at it this way—it’s better you found out now rather than a year or two from now. Could you imagine buying a ring just to find out she was giving a handy to Randy behind the market?”
“Moreau!” Kodiak laughed.
She put her hands up in surrender. “I’m only playing with you, but you have to admit, I am right.”
“That you are,” he sighed. “That you are.”
Chapter 11
Hall
Fort Cassidy, Luna
Aiden Hall had graduated basic training alongside a lot of men and women he would call friends, especially Kodiak, Moore, and Moreau. Now they were all gone, whisked away to other units for further training. Hall wasn’t even being trained by Drill Sergeant Muleskin anymore, and if he was being honest with himself, he kind of missed the man. Hall had been the only mortarman in their training cycle and because of that, he’d gotten shipped off to another training unit on Luna.
Last he’d heard from Kodiak and Moreau, they’d continued advanced infantry training all over the place. He’d received videos from them on various different stations, but every time a new one came in, he had just missed them on either Luna or one of the many space stations that dotted the stars around the Sol System. He had heard from Moore as well, but rarely. It seemed every time a new video did come in, his hair had turned grayer and his eyes were a little more tired from the stresses of his medical training. Regardless, he talked about how much he loved it, which made up for the sleepless nights spent studying for the next exam.
As for Hall, he was having a blast, literally. He got the feeling from the others, at least Kodiak and Moreau, that training had become more lax since basic. For him, it definitely had. He was being trained not by a drill sergeant but by the NCO that would be his section leader when he was finally transferred to his first unit after completing his training.
Staff Sergeant Marcus Locke was a big, dark-skinned man with a bald head, zero body fat, and a hard demeanor. That was what Hall had seen in him when they’d first met; however, once he’d gotten to know Locke, he’d grown to like the man and his cool attitude toward almost everything. He’d also made some good friends in his mortar section. Kelly Fitzgerald was an Irish girl with fiery red hair that they affectionally, but not so imaginatively, called “Red.” She acted as his gun crew’s assistant gunner and would be the one who dropped the rounds in the mortar tube when he had leveled the sights, and she was fast.
The other member of his crew was a man from Kentucky named Gunner Jackson. The crass Southerner had a mouth to go with his wild attitude, but had already proven in maybe one too many bar fights that he was someone you wanted on your side, even if there wasn’t much working between the ears. As Hall’s ammunition bearer, he would prepare the rounds before handing them off to Red to be dropped into the tube. Together they were a crack team—so far, the best in training—and Hall, who was surprised to be named the gunner for the crew, wanted to make sure they carried that teamwork to their unit.
Privates Leslie Smart, Edoardo Giovanni, and Aurora Green made up the other gun crew and they were good in their own right, but even though they were in the same section, a healthy rivalry was beginning to form between them.
“Crews to the line,” Staff Sergeant Locke bellowed as he prepared to start the timer on his data pad.
The heads-up display on Hall’s helmet fed him information from Locke as well as the sight connected to the mortar system. The azimuth and directional information were blank, but soon they would be sent to him by the section leader when they began setting up the system. The moment the timer started, his crew would run to the setup points and begin putting the system together.
In many regards, the concept of the mortar systems hadn’t changed that much since the Republic had become a spacefaring army. You still had an assistant gunner who carried the bipod, the ammunition bearer had the baseplate, and Hall would carry the tube itself. What had changed was the technology used to make the system work.
Hall was fascinated by the history of this tool of warfare and how it had evolved into what it was today. The mortars of the past weren’t all that complicated. You had a standard elongated, bulbous shell that came in a few different varieties depending on the need. Near the base of the shell along the stem were the charges used to hurl the mortar towards its target. Adjusting the rounds consisted of modifying the elevation of the tube and adjusting the charges on the stem to give it more or less oomph in order to hit targets at various distances.
While the concept of the mortar was the same, the new system Hall and his team would use was a radical departure from the legacy systems. Where the old systems used steel tubes, the new one had tubes with walls consisting of magnetic coils, which acted as the charge that would hurl the round out of the tube once activated. The distance the round traveled was now controlled by the velocity at which it left the tube instead of explosive charges. What made the mortar systems of this age more deadly and accurate was the AI targeting module that turned what had previously been an untargetable dumb munition into an almost kamikaze-like micro drone.
Hall’s instructor explained how when a round left the tube, a series of steering and stabilizer fins deployed. This allowed the round’s AI targeting module to better utilize its velocity and adjust its downward trajectory to hit its intended target. What gave it the ability to function in different levels of gravity was the handful of tiny jets firing compressed gas. The use of steerable fins and micro jets made the weapon particularly useful in low or zero-gravity environments where you couldn’t rely on a planet’s gravity to achieve the arc trajectory profile that allowed a round to fall on top of a defender.
Having grown up in poverty on the streets of Chicago, Hall was mesmerized by the technology used in modern warfare—particularly how the military had found a way to allow a centuries-old weapon to function in the low to zero-g environments they might have to fight in. Hall found the use of the baseplate especially ingenious. Since the tube used magnetic coils to eject the mortars, a magnet at the base of the tube could be used to essentially pull the round down to the firing stud.
Hall’s instructors explained how the firing stud performed two critical functions. Built into the baseplate, which also contained the power cells for the tube’s magnetic coil system, was the fire control system or FCS. When a fire mission was received, the data was sent to the FCS, which synced the mission with the mortar team’s HUDs. When the mortar connected with the trigger stud, the FCS transferred the targeting data to the round’s AI module. Fractions of a second later, the coils activated and hurled the round out the tube towards its target.
While all this occurred, the AI module in the nose took control of the process. It deployed the fins along the sides of the shell first. As it arced through the atmosphere, or the low or zero-g environment, it used the fins and, if necessary, the jets to keep it on target.
Next came the evolution of the mortar rounds themselves and how they had transitioned from the dumb rounds of old to high-tech smart munitions. If they were targeting a bunker or building, the round would slam into the target and detonate once it penetrated the walls or roof. There was also a smoke round variant able to lay down large clouds of IR and thermal inhibiting smoke should a ground unit need a cover and concealment mission. Similarly, like the dumb rounds, the HE or high-explosive round could detonate on impact with the ground or airburst for maximum shrapnel dispersion. What truly made this a smart round was its steering feature. Lastly, their instructors told them about a final feature that allowed them to turn the mortar round into an autonomous drone-like weapon. Once the round reached the kill zone assigned to it, the AI leveraged a programmable library of targets to scan the kill zone until it found a high-value target. If it couldn’t locate an approved target, it self-detonated.
After months of classroom instruction and simulator training, Hall and the others graduated to live-fire training. During the training, they generally used inert rounds, meaning they still functioned like the real ones except that they didn’t have the explosive charge built into them. As they neared the end of their training, they got to fire a few live rounds to demonstrate their knowledge of how to program and use the different features.
Once Hall’s team graduated from the first phase of training, they transferred to Fort Cassidy for the final phase—learning how to use the rounds in low to zero-g environments.
It was here at Fort Cassidy that Hall’s mortar team got good. Like a well-oiled machine, they each performed their duties with flawless precision and speed and quickly rose to become the best team in their training class. They were down to less than ten seconds to get their mortar system set up and ready to fire. The only thing that could hold them back was having to wait on the fire mission and coordinates to start dropping rounds.
*******
Range 29
Standing on the lunar surface of Range 29, Hall’s team waited with bated breath for their instructor to yell go. Once he did, the timer started.
The voice of their instructor spoke in their helmets. “All right, you’ve all done this training a few times. It’s time to show me what you got. Go, go, go.”
With the order given, Hall dug his heels into the ground and immediately read off the elevation and deflection data being sent to his heads-up display. The rest of his crew shouted acknowledgments and repeated the information back to ensure that what they heard was what he said.
Reaching the firing pit, Red and Jackson were perfect. They got the baseplate and bipod into position so when Hall arrived, all he had to do was snap the tube into place. While Red tightened the tube to the bipod, Hall manipulated the sight on the weapon itself until both the elevation and the deflection on his HUD blinked green and matched the fire control system on the baseplate.
“Hang it!” Hall shouted, and the others mirrored him.
Red took the mortar round in her hands and placed it into the tube, the bottoms of her palms hovering just over the metal.
“Fire!”
The mortar round fell into the tube as Red pushed her arms down and away and ducked below the muzzle. A blur spewed from the barrel as the round was hurled out and sent on its way. Some loose dust and moon rock near the baseplate shook briefly and floated all around them. In the absence of an explosive propellent, you didn’t have to worry about the baseplate digging into the ground or kicking up dirt and muck around you. The new anchoring studs attached to the baseplate held the unit in place regardless of the gravity on a particular surface.
The no-gravity environment meant the mortar round had to rely a lot more on its onboard navigation system to find the target than on Earth. If you watched carefully, you could easily see the cylinder glint off the sun as it raced towards its objective.
Aiden Hall loved watching the rounds impact on the moon’s surface. All you’d see was a puff of dust and tiny fragments glinting in the sunlight as they spiraled in different directions. He took a step back and looked over to Staff Sergeant Locke. His section leader continued to look at the clock, timing them. Hall realized the second gun’s crew hadn’t fired their round yet. Turning to look at what was taking them so long, he heard a shout that caused him to tense up.
“Misfire, misfire!”
Slowly, methodically, and without being told to, Hall observed them as they went through their misfire procedures. For whatever reason, the coils in the tube had failed to activate, leaving the round stuck at the bottom. When a round didn’t fire, you had to remove it and bring it to a location on the range called a “dud pit.” What made the job dangerous was the possibility of the round exploding. Once the FSC had transmitted its targeting information, the round became active and could not be remotely turned off. This was a built-in feature to make sure they couldn’t be jammed on final approach to an enemy target. Placing the round in the dud pit until EOD arrived to handle things was the safest way to deal with a misfire.
While the other gun crews moved away from the team with the misfire, Hall watched in amazement as Staff Sergeant Locke showed no visible fear and walked towards the misfire. He calmly talked the crew through the misfire procedure. Demonstrating the procedure himself, he moved to the front of the tube as they detached it from the bipod and the baseplate, cupping his hands over the barrel. Two of the crewmen, Giovanni and Green, helped lower the tube flat and nervously held it in place.
Once the tube was flat, Locke pulled out a small magnetic device used for just this purpose. He placed the device down near the base and then slowly moved it along the length of the barrel. As he neared the edge of the barrel, he momentarily stopped. He handed the device to Giovanni, telling him to slowly move it past the barrel’s exit.
With the device in Giovanni’s hand, Locke placed another in front of the barrel. Moments later, the round emerged from the tube. Locke explained the importance of grabbing the round by the side and staying away from the top. It was a live round and any sudden pressure around the nose could trigger it. With the round in hand, Locke proceeded to carry it towards the dud pit.
“And that, kids, is how you handle and remove a misfire. Now I’m going to take it to the pit while we wait on EOD to come over and render it safe,” Locke said with all the confidence in the world.
Hall had to marvel at his bravado. He was holding a live round in his hands as he talked with them. For all the benefits of a mortar tube using a magnetic coil, there were some downsides, namely the difficulty of removing a misfire from the tube. Watching Locke use the specially designed disk to pull it out was nerve-racking. He learned why it took a few minutes to do. It was a live round you were extracting. Hall suspected if it hadn’t been for their armored suits, their limbs would’ve been burning as they held the tube flat like that.
Hall wondered if he could handle the situation the way Locke did. He was nearly to the dud pit at the fire side of the range. Hall felt it had to be an anxiety-inducing walk, which was likely why Locke insisted on doing it himself and not forcing the crew to handle their misfire. He was a soldier-first kind of leader, and Hall counted himself lucky to have someone like that as his first proper NCO.
Staff Sergeant Locke walked into the dud pit and slowly placed the round on the surface. As he was preparing to leave the pit, he called out, “All right. All clear. Let’s call EOD.”
Locke had taken a couple of steps away from the pit when something happened. A blast occurred. There was no concussive blast wave or sound wave that hit them, but they felt the ground beneath their boots reverberating from the blast.
Shouts of shock and horror erupted over his comms, but all Hall could do was stare helplessly at the spot where Staff Sergeant Locke had just been standing. One minute, his section leader had been telling them to call the explosive ordnance disposal team, and the next, a cloud of moon dust and red vapor covered the entire area. Hall blinked a couple of times to snap himself back to his senses. He looked at the site again, focusing on what he was seeing. An arm and piece of a leg floated near the pit. In a matter of seconds, Staff Sergeant Locke was gone and Hall didn’t know what to do.
Chapter 12
Moore
Doss Station
In Orbit Around Earth
“My word. That’s awful, Hall, I’m so sorry that happened.”
That was all Oliver Moore could think to say at that moment. He had been about to head out for the training simulator when Hall had video messaged him. Despite being in orbit above the moon, there was a bit of a delay in their transmissions, so he just sat and waited to see if Hall wanted to talk about the incident more.
Even with a complete screwup like Skaggs in basic training, they hadn’t had anyone die, let alone a seasoned soldier. Moore had heard the stories and rumors all throughout training about so-and-so dying on the range years ago, but none of it held any substance. Now he was hearing from someone he trusted who had witnessed someone getting killed—and not just someone, but his own section sergeant. He could see how badly Hall was taking it and he wished he could have been there or had the time to really talk to him, but every time he looked away from the screen, he found his roommate staring daggers at him.
“Listen, Hall, I’ll either call or leave you a message when I get back from training and we will talk about this more”—he emphasized “will” to make sure he knew he was serious—“and we can work through this together, OK?”
Hall stared back at him for a few moments, his eyes finally dropping to the floor. “Of course, man, go save some virtual lives. I’ll talk to you later.”
The video feed ended, and Moore’s eyes wandered from the now-empty screen to the window that looked down towards the moon’s surface. He watched as the crater-filled landscape slowly drifted below the station he was on. Shift work in the military could create some strange schedules. Even though he floated just above where Hall was on the lunar surface, his day was just beginning, and Hall’s was ending.
