Outside the hut, the wind howls like a Rickenbacker overdriven through a battalion of tube amplifiers. Protected from the touch of the wind in his heavily thatched hut, Gabriel Thomas Hunter lies in bed and stares at the ceiling listlessly. He hates night-time storms. Not only does the thunder keep one awake, but Gabe could never seem to shake the persistent worry that somehow an errant tidal wave, waterspout, or lightning bolt might strike, and end it all. In short, he is paranoid.
It isn't as if he thinks he can do anything should Mother Nature (An overbearing mother in law if ever there was one) choose to erase him from existence. It's just that he doesn't want to face "The End" unaware. His family had always been funny like that. His grandfather Adam Hunter, who fought in Korea, had once gained minor renown among the medical corps for having an obscene tolerance to any sedatives.
His father had been a chronic insomniac—not for the sake of work or caffeine, but simply because he had always feared he might miss something while being asleep. Jacob Hunter had slept perhaps once a month, if he was lucky. The Brass had nearly dismissed him from service on account of this, but rescinded after noting that Jacob Hunter was indeed, the best damn shuttle pilot in the fleet. Sometimes people have quirks, and an organization that couldn't use those quirks to its advantage was both incompetent and foolhardy. The UN Spacy, for all its bureaucracy, had been neither. Gabe had inherited the insomnia, but had always counted himself a lucky man to regularly manage at least a good six hours of sleep every night.
But tonight, being a light sleeper was unbearably annoying. He could have ignored the storm and the whistling of the wind outside his hut had the thunder not awoken him with its obnoxious crackle. He looks over to the other side of the bed to see familiar strands of blond hair strewn loosely over a pillow next to him. The night is hot and humid. He gazes at his wife, her distinctive pale Zentraedi features highlighted by errant bursts of lightning. Damn she's beautiful. Softly, as to not wake her, Gabe slides out of bed. Teyna could sleep. It wouldn't do to disturb her. She had been infantry before they met and had once fought Invid Shock troopers and inorganics on the ground…Gabe rather liked his testicles where they were.
Barefoot, he padded from the bedroom in the small hut he and his wife shared, to what could more or less be called the living room. He could still hear the wind and the rumble of the thunder. With a quiet sigh, he seated himself in one of the rough hewn chairs situated about the room, sinking into the thick embroidered cushions he had traded from a Gyp. The price had been fair. If all it took was an easily forgettable album from some obscure singer named "50 Cent" to cushion Gabe Hunter's ass, then he would gladly trade it away.
Yawning, Gabe slipped on a pair of headphones and began to wait out the long night, serenaded by the Leningrad Symphony. Minutes ticked by. Gabe's eyelids became heavier and heavier. Sometimes a flash of lightning, filtered through a shuttered window would wake him. Other times it would be the thunder that startled him into wakefulness, but Shostakovich had done his work well. Sleep besieged him, battering away at his senses. Valiantly his waking mind tried to fend off this 'Wehrmacht' that would spirit him away to the land of dreams, but by the third movement Gabe had fallen fast asleep in his chair.
"Wait for it, wait for it." His observer scanned the surroundings with a pair of binoculars. Gabe held the rifle close, finger a short distance from the trigger. Third Division had been stationed here for at least two month among the rolling hills of Southwest Pennsylvania, headquartered in Pittsburgh. Although the probing assaults from the UEG had become less frequent since the destruction of Space Station Liberty about a year and a half ago, the EBSIS-aligned Northeastern Federation of American States, could hardly afford to be less vigilant.
Years away through the scope of a rifle Staff Sergeant Gabe Hunter could make out a column of ASC men and women making their way along the edge of a thicket of trees about six hundred meters to the north of his position. After the first battle of Pittsburgh, the Southern Cross had been taught the folly of moving large groups of around an area crawling with heavy infantry.
In the first large scale assault some six or seven months ago, the forces of the Southern Cross—mostly young and inexperienced soldiers, had been smashed when Brigadier General Adams' infantry had quickly flanked the hover-tanks and armored vehicles leading the assault, and instead attacked the supply lines, siezing several truckloads of Protoculture cells. Over the next few weeks, Adams' had his forces harry the remaining soldiers, denying them rest or relief, directing them where he would.
Three weeks later, the remainder of the 4th Armored Tactical Division had been trapped in a small valley some distance south of Pittsburgh. The General had asked them—and only once for a surrender. Low on power and ammunition, the trapped tankers refused. An hour later, their pride cost them everything as the Third Infantry Division's mortar crews turned the valley into an abattoir, sending three thousand men & women to Hell. There were no survivors, and General Adams' victory sent shockwaves through the United Earth Government. His infantry, armed with 'primitive' weapons had bested the pride of the Armies of the Southern Cross—their armor
However the mortar crews were far from invulnerable. The Southern Cross had adapted its tactics, and begun sending infantry to ambush the mortar crews. Since last December, several of the mortar crews had been butchered by Southern Cross. That was why Gabe was on this hillside, about to blow some poor bastard's head off. His company had been assigned to locate, and counter any infantry assaults the Southern Cross might make in a 20 mile section of land a bit south of Independence, and west of Hopewell. As one of the two staff sergeants, he had been chosen to lead a squad of about twenty four men on an advance patrol.
Western Pennsylvania was critical to the Federation. Not only did it supply much of the food of the Northeastern Federation, it also prevented the ASC from flanking the artillery batteries placed along I-90. Should those batteries fail to stop them, the ASC could walk its freshwater navy through the great Lakes and all the way to New York City.
Gabe's crosshairs floated over the group again. Damn, most of those 'infantrymen' couldn't be any older than sixteen. "Hey Asada," Gabe raised his voice. "Take a look at this."
Corporal Neal Asada, Gabe's observer looked through his binoculars again and softly swore. "Who the hell does the UEG think they are? Those aren't soldiers down there. Those are fucking children..." A discontent murmuring spread through the Confederates hidden on the hillside as news of the child soldiers carried from ear to ear.
Gabe's crosshairs floated over the group. He could see the nervous expressions the uniformed teens wore. Still, they carried Gallant rifles, and Gabe didn't want to be on the receiving end of one of those things. The laser rifle could slice through any body armor the Confederates possessed like so much water, and a lucky shot might even disable some of the outdated armored vehicles the Federation found itself using. Children or not, they had to die.
"What do you think Sergeant?"
"Get Corporal Bernard to call up Charlie Base, see if he can get us some mortar fire. They've got Gallants. I don't want to get into a shooting match with these Crocks without someone covering our ass."
Neal nodded and began the slow, twelve meter uphill crawl to where 'Flag', also known as Corporal James Bernard, the squad's communications officer sat underneath the boughs of a cedar tree, his transmitter's antenna hidden among the branches. Painstakingly, he crawled through the high grass that separated his fire-team from the rest of the company. A thorn slapped him in the face. He swore softly and continued moving, a thin snake of blood wriggling down his cheek. If the Crocks saw him now, crawling up the hillside, he was SOL.
Corporal Asada kept crawling, slowly but steadily, matching his pace with the breeze. When the wind blew and the grass fluttered, Neal would crawl a few feet. When it died down, he would stop, becoming as still and unmoving as a corpse. At six hundred yards away among moderately tall grass, it was unlikely that anyone would readily see –him- using Mark One eyeball, but moving too fast would reveal his position as the human eye is quite good at picking out sudden, erratic movements.
Six yards to go now till he could slip behind some dense brush and walk the rest of the way to Flag's position. The wind died down. Neal looked back. The Southern Cross soldiers were now about only four hundred yards from Gabe's position. He could count them now—at least a platoon. He cleared the final few yards and ducked behind the brush, nearly running. The Southern Cross troops, moving alongside a wooded copse, were now almost within his Sergeant's engagement-range. Neal knew that Gabe had thirteen other men with him fanned across the hillside. The Crocks had an entire company. If the mortars didn't start firing soon, they were all fucked.
Private Tseng Lynn chewed gum as his squad made their way across the valley, hugging a thin line of trees that had grown up around some farmer's barbed wire fence. The late summer sun made him feel –almost- sleepy, and the birds in the trees hardly helped. If it weren't for the fact that the hills of southwestern Pennsylvania were "thick" with Confederate Infantry, Tseng could have pretended that he was on a camping trip. They had been marching southeast from Richmond with orders to seek out and destroy the Confederate mortar crews infesting that portion of the state. Richmond had been six days ago.
Since then his unit had made steady progress, moving forward cautiously. But the going had hardly been unpleasant. Three nights ago, he had cajoled one of the female members of the company, a Private Ann Summers, to share a bed with him—not in keeping with Southern Cross battlefield regulations of course, but when two lusty young people are lying close together under the stars on a warm summer night, regulations—like clothes, tend to get cast away. Furthermore, Tseng was absolutely certain that his immediate superiors knew about his and Ann's affair and didn't give a rats' ass. Still…making love to the doe eyed brunette for the past three nights had been fun, if anything. He looked ahead. She was walking about six meters in front of him, Gallant rifle held at the ready. Damn, that was sexy.
Tseng smiled. She glanced back and returned the smile, fluttering an eyelash at him. Then something hit him in the chest, and Tseng fell to the ground.
"Tseng!" He could hear her voice. Strange, it was muffled. Why couldn't he move his legs? There was a ringing in his ears. How had it suddenly gotten so dark? He felt tired.
"Medic!"
It was useless, Tseng thought. He couldn't move a muscle—paralysis. There was a warm feeling around his neck, and his lungs burned. In marksman school they had taught him to aim for a "triangle" formed by the tip of the target's chin and the collarbone. His killer had made a textbook perfect shot. As the company Medic appeared over him, Private Tseng Lynn fell fast asleep, drifting off into eternity. Perhaps his Ann would follow, and they could meet again in another life…
"Shit." Gabe swore and fired, his first bullets ruining the throat of a young man, probably no more than seventeen years old. The youth dropped to the ground like a sack of rocks. On his cue, the rest of the men on the hillside opened fire. The two SAWS on Gabe's patrol rained hot lead on top of the Southern Cross troops, scattering them.
Private Ann Summers had no time for grief as machinegun fire caught her squad out in the open. Haphazardly, she jumped over the barbed wire fence that her group had been follow. Her fatigues ripped on the rusty wire. Some cover, any cover would do. Looking down the hedgerow she could see that many of her squad had done as she had done and found gaps in the fence to clamber through. The small trees might not have been much cover, but some cover was better than being caught in the open.
Adrenalin pumping, she assessed the situation. Eight soldiers, including the company medic and…fuck, Tseng had been cut down in the initial volley. He had been good in the sack too. Unlike -some- of her squad-mates, Private Summers was hardly under the impression that this was a game. People died in war; as a soldier in the Army of the Southern Cross it was her job to make sure that they were someone else.
She rose to a firing position. There, she could see the machine gunner on the hill, he was directing fire along the copse of trees that her group had been moving along. Her rifle's sight centered on him, the optics telling her all she needed to know. The gunner was covered in a ghillie suit, firing a SAW down the hill. A burst of bullets raked her position. Now was not the time to be hesitating. Ann's finger caressed the trigger.
A few meters to Gabe's right there was a flash of light as a beam of light sliced one of his SAW gunners in half. Damn. They weren't supposed to be returning fire just yet, but perhaps he had underestimated the soldiers of the Southern Cross. Gabe adjusted his scope and scanned the fencerow. There, crawling along the fencerow! Three rounds later, the figure stopped moving.
A burst of laser fire scorched the hillside a few meters behind Gabe's position. Good. They thought his men were in the trees. But losing that SAW gunner, Weiss, was dire enough. Above the din of the gunfire he heard Neal shout something. Good…he had gotten through. Gabe kept firing. Shoot…shoot…shoot…reload. There was an inhuman scream as a blast from one of the rifles cut down Asada. Damn. Gabe kept firing for what seemed like an eternity.
"Impact in Five, Four, Three, Two…" That was Flag shouting.
The mortar fire fell upon the advancing Southern Cross infantry like the wrath of God. Multiple simultaneous airbursts flung men into the air like toys, shrapnel ripping their bodies to bloody ribbons. Gabe's men stopped firing and watched the carnage. There was no point in anything else.
Ann had taken cover from the machine gun fire behind a rock. It was a good rock—a sixteen ton slab of sandstone that provided ample cover. Every so often she would slip around one side of the rock and take a shot at the men on the hillside. Apart from the SAW gunner, she had killed at least two others. Bullets flew and bounced off the rock she had sought cover behind, but nothing short of an anti-armor round could pierce it. If she could just kill –enough- of these Confederate bastards, then maybe she might get out of southwestern Pennsylvania alive. Suddenly a great roaring filled her ears. A giant hand lifted Ann off the ground and tossed her into the air like a rag doll. She came down again and was slammed into the ground. It was dark. Evening came
After the mortar-fire stopped and Flag gave the "all-clear" sign, Gabe stood up. He motioned for his men to follow. In the twilight, the remainder of Gabe's squad made their way down the slope, looking for any sign of movement. There was nothing but charred and broken bodies. Gabe stepped in something. It went squish. He didn't look down. One of his men did—and lost his lunch as well as yesterday's dinner.
Flag, one the only two surviving NCO's in the section followed. Fairly quickly they found the remains of the enemy's Com. Officer. The mortar fire had imbedded the man's radio in his head, or what Flag thought was his head. There would be barely enough to bury, but his Gallant rifle seemed undamaged. Flag looked at Gabe, Gabe nodded. Corporal James Bernard, 'Flag' to anyone in his unit reached down and picked up the dead man's rifle.
"…You know Sergeant, we really ought to keep these. They could come in handy if we run into any Battloids." He shouldered the rifle.
Gabe nodded. "You heard Flag" he addressed the four or so men who had accompanied him and Corporal Bernard down the hill. "Pick up anything that looks useful—but don't touch any personal stuff, otherwise I'll have your ass court-martialed so fast you won't know it till the prison rape begins. We don't loot the dead."
A few minutes later, they found another Southern Cross soldier's corpse. It hung on the fence like a scarecrow, riddled with bullets. The ground beneath what had once been a human was stained red with blood.
"Looks like Weiss got this one early" Private Kearny, the only surviving micronized Zentraedi in Gabe's squad spoke, picking the remains of a shattered laser rifle off the ground. He felt around the butt of the broken rifle and found a latch. Giving it a twist, a small cylinder popped out, falling to the ground before he could catch it. A Protoculture cell! Kearny bent down and picked it up, wiping it on his fatigues to remove some of the blood and the dirt. This might be useful later.
A few feet away Flag scrabbled in the dirt for a moment and then stood back up, holding up a set of Southern Cross "dog tags" in the fading light. He looked at the name and memorized it, whispering something that Kearny couldn't quite hear. He then lowered his hand, placing the dog tags in a small satchel. As communications officer, it was also his superior's task to count the dead—both friendly and foe. Private Kearny didn't understand why, but as they moved from corpse to corpse, Flag seemed to repeat his ritual.
"Corporal Bernard!" That was Andrew.
"Yeah?"
"This one's still breathing."
"Tell Sergeant Hunter about it." Flag reached down and picked up another set of bloodied tags. These were the thirty seventh. He read the name, and uttered what might have been a prayer.
Andrew Simonsky, a man barely of twenty years rushed over to where Gabe stood scanning the area for any more Southern Cross infantry.
"Sergeant Hunter, Sergeant Hunter!" One of his men rushed over to Gabe, sounding disturbingly similar to a small child that has just made a poo in the toilet for the first time.
"What is it, Simonsky?"
"I've located one that's still alive."
"Alive?"
"Well…she still has a pulse sir."
Gabe sighed. Prisoners were troublesome things.
Years later, he abruptly sat up in his chair and blinked at the sunlight seeping through the open door of the hut. "What a pain in the ass" Gabe said aloud, not noticing for a moment that he wasn't in Pennsylvania anymore. The blue Tahitian sky winked at him. Realization dawned. It had been a dream—no, a memory.
"Who's a pain in the ass?" That was Teyna. Typical of her, she was already up and about. It was shaping up to be a good morning.
"No one" he shot back. "Just talking in my sleep."
Gabe rose to his feet, yawned, and stretched, reveling in the cracking noise his joints made. It was a Wensda—no, that was yesterday. That would make today Thursday, the day to eschew the broadcast and attend to more pressing needs, such as gutting fish, mending the thatch, and gardening. Bruce would be bringing the Parino in from Norfolk today, hopefully with the generator parts Gabe had requested, and work would need to be done offloading the seventy foot hydrofoil. He walked outside.
Authors note:
Radio Free Earth started as a one-shot piece of fanfiction. But after I published the first installation, and really began to think about it (And I read 'Dandelions'), the creative juices started to flow. I might contradict actual Robotech Canon in the future, not having read the novels, but those things are rather hard to find—even at the used bookstore. If I make any glaring errors, feel free to point them out. I've got a general idea of where I want to go with this story, so expect it to continue. I love reviews.
-Steelblade