Friendly Planet
By
UCSBdad
Disclaimer: I own neither Castle nor planets. Rating: K. Time: After my story Deadly Planets.
Castle whirled around. One of the grey clad soldiers was on his feet, holding a rifle. But the rifle's barrel was badly bent. If he fired it, it would blow up in his hands. He looked at the rifle barrel until a Scot came up to him and took the rifle away.
"Go ahead, kill me then. Death could not be worse than this."
"We're nae gonna kill ye, ye dozy chile." Said the Scot.
"You aren't?" he said suspiciously. "Everyone else wants to kill me."
By that time Castle was there.
"No, we don't want to kill you. Look around. We recruit people, we don't kill them. Who are you?"
"Rifleman Hu, Replacement draft 15 for the Fourth Kansu Volunteer Rifle Regiment."
"You volunteered for the army?" Castle thought he had heard of Kansu before and thought it might be a part of China, or it might not be.
Hu laughed.
"No one volunteers. The village headman keeps a list of people he wants to get rid of for when the conscription officers come around. Then, before you know it, he has you thrown in chains and you're out on a train and off to the front."
"Why was the headman eager to get rid of you?" Castle wasn't sure he wanted a troublemaker in his company.
"I was studying to be a priest."
"What religion?"
"Zoroastrianism. We believe in a unitary God. We…"
"I don't need a sermon right now. Why was the headman mad at a would-be priest?"
Hu smiled.
"Headman Wu had a lovely daughter, Min. She was very pretty and a bit wild. One night we were caught in a compromising position, so to speak. I thought Wu would just have his people give me a beating and swear me to silence. I had no idea that he'd send me to the army."
Castle thought for a moment. Rifleman Hu wasn't the first person to get into trouble because of overactive hormones. He wouldn't be the last.
"What happened here?"
"We had gotten off the train and were marching to the front when all of a sudden, we were here. No one had any idea of what had happened. Then we were attacked by armored vehicles. There were four of them. One had a gun that moved in a turret. It fired one cannon round that killed ten men. Then it used its machine guns on us. There was an armored car. It had a cannon mounted, but just used its machine guns. There were two vehicles with tracks, but wheels in front. They carried infantry. They fired machine guns and rifles at us. The man in front of me was hit and knocked me down. I decided to stay down. The enemy examined our weapons and gear but thought it was no good. Then they left. I was asleep when your men came."
"You really aren't well equipped." Castle said.
"True. The war against the pagans has lasted for many years. We, Kansu, are not that rich. And the officers…"
"The officers?" Rick prompted.
"They sell our food, clothing and even weapons and ammunition."
"Why don't you desert?"
"If we desert to the pagans, they will kill us. I've seen what they do to our prisoners they catch. If our army catches us, we're executed."
"Okay, Rifleman Hu do you want to join us? We hope to get off this planet to somewhere safe. But then again, we may all die here."
Hu shrugged.
"I may as well."
Hu went about reequipping himself from the possessions of the dead. He got a pair of boots from a dead officer, a blanket, a backpack, some rice, a new rifle and all the ammo he could carry.
Sergeant La Pierre, the Marine, came up to Castle.
"Sir, I've been looking at the vehicle tracks around here. I'm pretty sure he's right about the tank. The tracks are narrower than on modern tanks and not as far apart, but still, it's a tank. The armored car looks like it has eight wheels, from what I can tell. That's a pretty big one. I picked up some expended brass from where the half-tracks were set up. Looks like submachine gun ammo and battle rifle ammo. We have some anti-armor weapons, but I'd hate to run into these guys."
"Me, too, Sergeant. Me too."
The next morning when the supplies arrived, there was a new set of cammies and a full set of gear, along with an assault rifle for Rifleman Hu. In talking to Hu, he found out that he'd had little training, so he put him with Rifleman Than and Anber in hopes they could teach him enough to stay alive.
They marched for another two days. Once they saw a group of a dozen horsemen on a small hill. Using his binoculars, Castle decided they were horse archers. The riders watched for a few minutes, then rode down the far side of the hill and were gone.
The valley they were in widened out to over a mile across. An hour before sundown on the second day, they found a small gully.
"We'll stay here for the night." Rick said. "Do your cooking now. I want no light after dark. We don't need to attract any more attention than we have to."
Rick had trained himself to wake up every two hours to check his sentries. He woke up around midnight and made a quick check. He approached one sentry post containing Dalla of Farlost, a bounty hunter from an Anarchistic society and one of the Dalits. The Dalits were alien female versions of ninjas. Experts at assassination, seduction, sabotage and any number of useful skills. He could hear them whispering.
"Is there a problem?' he asked, sliding next to one of the Dalits.
"We're picking up hear sources in the trees on top of the far hill. Just intermittent, like maybe they're blocked when they go behind a tree or something."
"Are they headed this way?"
"No. They look like they're headed over the hill. Maybe we could send a patrol out."
Castle shook his head.
"On this planet, we usually find that anyone out there is someone who wants to kill us. Best just let them be on their way. But keep an eye on them and let me know if anything looks bad."
When Castle woke up the next morning, Dalla reported that they had seen nothing and none of the other sentries had either.
A day later, the Morean women were the point squad. The point woman suddenly stopped as she went up a rise, dropped to a knee and held her arm up. The company stopped and Castle ran forward.
"What is it?" he asked.
"Take a look for yourself, sir. It's a hill that's been entrenched. I don't see that anyone's home, but you can never tell."
Castle looked over the hill with his binoculars. It appeared deserted, but it was definitely entrenched. He could see bunkers in addition to the trench lines.
"Sniper Herftood this is Castle. Get up here with your drones. We have something to check out."
Herftood and his sniper team looked like they might have been descended from some sort of cats, but mountain lions, not housecats. They were the only team that Castle had encountered that were technologically more advanced than Earth. Heftood used an X-ray laser sniper rifle that was deadly out to four thousand meters. After that, its energy fell of rapidly. At five thousand meters you might notice a slight warming of your skin. Probationary Sniper Perrizon was in charge of their very small but very advanced drones. He flew a drone towards the entrenched hill. He checked every inch of the trenches and every bunker. It was empty.
"I don't see any barbed wire, but they did make some punji sticks." Rick said. "If they had spare explosives, they might have made mines. I'll go first and see."
When he got up, Kate rose with him.
"Kate, you're staying here."
"The hell I am."
"Sergeant Major, you'll carry Kate once I've made sure there are no mines."
"Of course, sir." Kanakredes replied with a smile.
"Put me down you overgrown furball." Kate screamed when he picked her up.
Castle had only taken two steps when he was picked up and tossed over Kanakredes' shoulder.
"Sergeant Major, put me down."
"Of course, sir." Then he bellowed. "The company will follow our illustrious leader and his lovely wife. I'll take very small steps so stay in my footprints." With both Rick and Kate yelling, Kanakredes took off for the hill.
"Put me down, dammit." Castle yelled as they dropped into a trench.
"There you are, sir." Kanakredes said, putting both down gently.
"You disobeyed my orders!" Rick yelled.
"I did, sir? But I did put you down. You can see that I did."
"I meant put me down when we headed for the hill!"
"Dear me. I must have misunderstood you, sir. I'm so sorry."
Rick was about to explode, but he saw that Kate was laughing hard as were the others coming into the trenches.
Rick just shook his head.
"I'll have to be more careful in how I phrase my orders in the future."
Castle and his troops checked out the trenches.
"Somebody fought here." Sergeant La Pierre said, picking up a spent brass shell casing from a pile on the ground. "Looks like our 7.62 mm rounds. Maybe a bit shorter."
There were piles of spent brass every few yards.
"They had at least one machine gun." Said Sergeant Grant.
"How do you know that?" Rick asked.
"This." He held up a strip of canvas with loops sewn into it. "Before someone thought up disintegrating links to hold machine gun ammo together, they used cloth belts. The rounds went into the loops. And there's a really big pile of spent shells here."
"Okay, look around and see if there's anything else here."
They found very little. There was an empty can with writing on it that no one could read and a clear plastic bag with nothing on it.
"Any sign of any dead or wounded? Graves, bloody bandages, evidence of cremation?"
No one found anything like that.
"All that shooting must have killed someone. Are here any signs of dead bodies in front of the trenches?"
There were none.
"I'm not sure how long these rounds have been here, sir." Kanakredes said. "They appear to be somewhat corroded. We don't know enough about this planet to know how long these have been here."
Castle walked to the top of the hill and looked around.
"Okay, were on a hill in a valley about three miles across. The valley is covered in grass, giving anyone approaching us very little cover. We've been marching a while, so I suggest we stop here for a day or two and get some rest. Let's just hope whoever attacked this place, or whoever defended it doesn't show up."
Everyone relaxed a bit and made dinner. People who had been saving their favorites from their rations brought them out to have a feast.
When the sun went down, Castle and Kate snuggled down together in a bunker. He had just put his arms around her when he heard it.
"Drums?" He said, sitting bolt upright.
"Damn. I'm afraid so."
Both of them put on their boots and ran into the trenches. Quite a few people were there already.
"Get back under cover. And we'll double the sentries tonight. I'll have Sergeant Major Kanakredes make a duty roster."
Anber, whose large, flexible ears were very sensitive came up and stood by Castle.
"The sound is from across the valley to the north, sir. I can't tell how far away they are, though."
"Not far enough."
"In the films, when they hear drums in the night, it's a bad thing." Sergeant Grant said. Several people muttered agreement.
"I doubt it's the Great Game Cotillion and Fish Fry." Rick said. "We'll find out who and what that is soon enough."
TBC