As soon as she finished, my AI chimed in and advised that I'd received our specific rally coordinates. They automatically popped up on my holo display. Hmmm, not far from where we set out a couple days ago. I got my little band up and out of the trench and across the field we'd advanced over a few hours before. We were lucky again, and we didn't see much enemy fire. The troops on our right - well, actually our left I guess, since our front had changed 180 degrees - seemed to be taking the brunt of the attack.
I kept checking my chronometer and the distance to the extraction point. We were OK, barely, but we didn't have any time to waste, so I didn't even pause at the original trench line. We just hopped over and headed back the way we'd advanced to the front.
The ground was torn up even worse than it had been a couple days before, and even in armor we lost time as we scrambled in and out of craters filled with neck-deep water and muck. The strength amplification of the armor let you power your way through the mud, but it didn't stop you from sinking in with every step.
Twice I had to halt the group so we could turn and engage enemy militia who had caught up to firing range. Both times we hosed them down with heavy fire and they broke and ran. It didn't cost us much time, but every minute counted. I knew those deadlines were real. If the fleet was really in danger they weren't going to risk it to pick up the shattered remnants of a strikeforce. It was brutal mathematics - marines were cheaper and easier to replace than battleships. They'd stay as long as they could…and not a minute longer.
I was surprised that we'd managed to retreat back to the staging area without losing anyone. I'd been waiting for the enemy to hit us hard. If they'd have launched a major attack while we were all retreating, none of us would have gotten off-planet. But the truth is we had just about won the land battle when the recall orders came. The enemy wasn't hitting us while we retreated because they didn't have anything left to hit us with. For all the missteps and enormously heavy casualties, Achilles was failing because we couldn't hold the space above the planet, not because we couldn't take the ground.
The rally area was a confused mess, with units straggling in from all directions and being loaded on whatever ship was available. Our group got hustled onto a tank landing shuttle that launched a few minutes after the hatches slammed shut behind us.
It was a rough ride to orbit. The ship wasn't built to hold infantry, and we were just hanging on however we could. The hold was silent. We all knew what a disaster the operation had been, and while none of us knew exactly how this affected the overall war, we had a pretty good idea it was bad.
We were right. It was bad. But I don't think any of us realized just how bad.
Chapter Five
I was one of the 14.72% of the ground troops in Operation Achilles to return unwounded.
Technically speaking, I didn't exactly return because the Guadalcanal wasn't as lucky as I was. She'd taken a hit to her power plant during the initial approach, and she was still undergoing emergency repairs when the withdraw order was issued. There was no way she could outrun the enemy fleet on partial power, so she offloaded all non-essential personnel and formed part of the delaying force, holding off the attackers long enough to evacuate most of the surviving ground forces.
The way I heard it, the old girl wrote quite a final chapter for herself, taking out two enemy cruisers and damaging a third before she got caught in converging salvoes and was blown apart by a dozen missile hits.
I'd been on the Guadalcanal for three years, and it was surreal to think that she was gone. Captain Beck, Flight Chief Johnson, even that short little tech who used to play cards with us…I can't even remember his name. All dead.
But those losses seemed distant, theoretical, not quite real. We had plenty of empty places right in our own family. My battalion had landed with 532 effectives. There were 74 of us now.
The major was dead. Lieutenant Calvin was the only officer still fit for duty, so he took command of the battalion, a promotion tempered by the fact that he commanded only 24 more troops than he did when he'd led his platoon down to the surface just over a week before.
Captain Fletcher was wounded. I'd been bumped to sergeant the day after we embarked, and I was in temporary command of the company…all 18 of us. Getting missed has always been a good way to advance through the ranks.
We were loaded onto the Gettysburg with various remnants of a dozen other units. It was a different world. The Guadalcanal had been a fast assault ship designed to carry a company of ground troops and their supplies. She'd carried about 60 naval personnel in addition to the 140 or so ground troops.
Gettysburg was a heavy invasion ship, carrying a full battalion along with a flight of atmospheric fighters, combat vehicles, and enough supplies for a sustained campaign. At least when fully loaded she did. Over a kilometer long, she was ten times the tonnage of the Guadalcanal.
But now she was carrying 198 troops, the remnants of 3 full assault battalions, along with a vastly depleted store of supplies and two surviving fighters - one hers and one from another carrier.
The fleet managed to escape with serious but not crippling losses, and once we were through the warp gate the massive assemblage started to break up, as assets were redeployed to meet various crises in different sectors.
And there were plenty of threats to deal with. We were on the run, and the enemy knew it. We'd stripped everything bare to mount Achilles, and now the enemy was trying to exploit our weakness.
It was obvious things were pretty bad, but we really knew the situation was desperate when we were rushed to the Eta Cassiopeiae system without any rest or even resupply. Eta Cassiopeiae was vital to us, a nexus with 5 warp gates, three leading to other crucial Alliance systems. Columbia, the second planet, was a key colony and base, and the moons of the fifth and sixth worlds were mineralogical treasure troves.
If they were rushing exhausted fragments of units there without refit, they were expecting the enemy to attack. Soon. So the troops got 48 hours to recover from the Slaughter Pen, while the 2 lieutenants and 6 sergeants available to command them worked out a provisional table of organization and discussed the best training regimen to get them fit for combat again in short order.
I ended up with 23 troops plus myself, divided into four normal fire teams and one three man group with a portable missile launcher, normally a company-level heavy weapon.
The ship was less than half full, so there was plenty of room in the gym and training facilities. We put everyone on double workout sessions, which caused a lot of grumbling. But it also kept everyone busy, without too much time to think - either about where we had been or where we were going.
Just like the Guadalcanal, the Gettysburg's training areas were near the exterior of the ship where the artificial gravity was close to Earth-normal. The deep interior of the vessel, which was close to a zero gravity environment, was dedicated to storage and vital systems.
A spaceship is far from roomy, even with half the normal number of troops present, so it was just as well to keep everyone busy whenever possible. Our expedited itinerary meant lots of extra time strapped into our acceleration couches with nothing to do but think and try to breath while you were being slowly crushed. So, when the troops were out of the couches, I was just as happy to have them working up a sweat as crawling off somewhere to brood on defeat.
Eta Cassiopeiae was three transits from Tau Ceti, and it took us about 6 weeks of maneuvering between warp gates before we emerged at our destination and another ten days to reach the inner system and enter orbit around Columbia.