Jay Allan - Tombstone

Things were hot on the line when they got hit, so I didn’t have time for grief or guilt. But a few hours later the situation calmed down for a while and I just sat on the ground in shock. My stomach clenched, and I wretched, though there wasn’t much in my stomach to come up but a little foam. My suit’s systems tried to clean up inside my helmet, doing a fairly reasonable job.

It was my fault; I knew it was my fault. I didn’t want to betray Harden’s confidence…I wanted to be a good friend. So I didn’t tell anybody he was too unnerved to go back into the line. I didn’t do anything.

Harden died thinking of me as a friend, but I failed him when he needed me. We were more than friends; we were comrades in arms. I owed him more than he got from me. He was my brother, and I didn’t have his back. He thought I did, and I thought so too, but that was superficial. I could have saved his life, but I didn’t. A live Harden who hated me the rest of his life would have been a thousand times better than a dead friend.

I never forgot the lesson I learned that day.

We were in the middle of the third day of the biggest battle ever fought on Tombstone. Our estimates of enemy strength on the planet turned out to be wildly inaccurate. My distrust of intelligence services, which would continue to increase at an exponential rate over the years, started that day. It wasn’t the last time I’d see bad intel, but it was the last time I’d believe it.

Not only were we facing more enemy troops than should have been possible, but we were also up against a tac-force of Janissaries. We’d been outnumbered all along on Tombstone - we knew that - but we’d had the qualitative edge. My battalion was an elite assault unit, one of the best in the Corps. Most of the enemy troops were colonial troops, well-equipped, but definitely second line. One on one they had never been a match for us.

But the Janissaries were front line troops, every bit as elite as we were. They were the only fighting force with even more training than we had, since they were essentially bred as soldiers and raised from childhood in the barracks. Worse, they were fresh, and we’d been fighting for two and a half days, beating back every conscript and colonial regular they could throw at us. We had half our total strength on the whole planet deployed, but I still wasn’t sure we’d be able to stop them.

But stopping them wasn’t an option; it was a necessity. If we’d fallen back before the battle we could have fortified the surrounding hills and maintained a strong defensive line. But if we pulled out now, broken and beaten, we’d compromise our control over the entire sector…and lose the most productive mines on the planet. A defeat here could be enough to shatter the stalemate on Tombstone. I wasn’t up in the chain of command, but I didn’t have to be to know our orders. Hold at all costs.

I was back almost exactly where I’d been for most of the last three days…nearly dead center in our line. The fighting here had been fierce on the first day, and it looked like it had been just as intense while we were in reserve. The dead and wounded had been pulled back, but from the shattered pieces of armor and equipment I had a pretty good idea the fighting had been brutal.

We weren’t back long before we were attacked, but we beat it back without too much trouble. That’s when we lost Harden and Quincy. When they went down I shifted over, covering a larger frontage. Corporal Vincennes and I were the only ones left in the fire team. We tried to get Harden’s auto-cannon set up, but it had also been hit. It might have been repairable, but not in the field, so it was useless to us. The corporal set me up just left of where the cannon had been, and he headed 200 meters to the right.

We were a laughable defense. Any serious attack would have cut right through us, but fortunately the enemy didn’t hit us before we were reinforced. The corporal and I had held that forlorn hope for about ninety minutes before the lieutenant came jogging over with reinforcements. The captain had sent up the last of the company reserve, and he cut the frontage our platoon had to cover. The lieutenant took advantage to pull some strength from other sectors to strengthen our weakened center.

He brought the platoon weapons team with him, though only one of the original crew of three remained. Langon, the platoon’s technician, was backing up Private Glenn, and they were handling the thing a man short. The medium auto-cannon was a double-barreled hyper-velocity weapon that put out three times the firepower of Harden’s lighter version. They set it up right where we’d had the SAW, though they had to clear some of the rock out to make enough room. Fortunately, Langon had the plasma torch, so it only took a few minutes to dig in. When they were done, it was in a great spot, in good cover and able to direct fire on either side of the rocky spur.

The lieutenant also brought Graves, the sniper, and he placed him in a big rock outcropping just behind our line. He had the marksman’s weapon of choice, the M-00, AI-assisted sniper’s rifle. It was longer than our infantry weapons and fired a single shot at even higher velocity and greater accuracy. The AI interface helped compensate for weather, visual irregularities, even projected movement of the target. An expert sniper could score a hit as far away as ten klicks.

I’d trained on the weapon at Camp Puller, and I’d been fast-tracked for sniper school based on my performance. Snipers were all veterans though, so I couldn’t go right into the training program from Puller, and I’d been stuck on Tombstone since then. I expected to go after this campaign, though things would turn out differently, and I’d never end up being a sniper. But I always respected the effectiveness of well-utilized sharpshooters.

After he’d deployed everyone, picking out their exact positions himself, the lieutenant settled in directly on my left. He gave us a few short instructions and a little pep talk, but mostly he left us alone. We knew what we were doing, and we knew what was coming. The Janissaries would be here soon, and we’d be waiting for them.

This was the first time I’d faced veteran, elite troops, and it was a lot different that the colonial regulars we’d been fighting. They started out with a heavy bombardment, blasting our entire ridge with rockets and frag shells. We had good cover, and I doubt they expected to inflict a lot of casualties. But they knew we were tired, and they wanted to rattle us as much as possible. They also directed some of the bombardment behind our line, creating a complication for any troops redeploying or reinforcements moving up.

We returned fire, but we had a lot less ordnance then they did, and I doubt we accomplished anything but a superficial show of defiance. Still, I cheered like everyone else when the captain ordered the company’s mortars to open fire. I was still enraged about Harden and Quincy…the guilt would come, and when it did it would be severe, but right there on that battle line I wanted blood, I wanted vengeance.

They didn’t fire for long, and about half an hour after they’d opened up they stopped. Their lines were silent for a few minutes and then shells started impacting the plain in front of our position. The Janissary mortars were firing smoke shells. It wasn’t real smoke of course, though that’s the name we gave it, but a dense radioactive steam used to shield an attack. Opaque, it blocked visibility, and the radiation and chemical makeup interfered with scanners. The heat of the steam clouds made infrared and temperature-based scanning useless as well, so the stuff was very effective at screening an advance. It was a powerful tool, and I never understood why we didn’t use it.