‘You two can swim if you want!’ the captain hissed again.
I was looking forward to a downer-induced speed crash and then sedation in orbit. Natural sleep was a thing of the past, too many drugs, too much shit in the subconscious. Ahead of us we could see assault shuttles taking off, making their way to the fleet in orbit. In the pale Sirius B sky we could just make out the flashes of light. The 6th Fleet was catching hell in high orbit from Their fleet. As we approached the evac point we could see lines of soldiers waiting for transports. Waiting as the more valuable personnel and equipment was evacced first. I’d long ago stopped feeling angry about this. After all we were special forces so we were quite valuable.
‘Douglas?’ Amar Shaz, our signalman and hacker, said over our encrypted tactical comms link. He came from somewhere in the Midlands from a Sikh family. He‘d not been particularly religious before he‘d become a signalman, but now of course he’d found religion in the net. His faith renewed, he’d started attending virtual temple regularly, grown a beard and even started wearing a turban and carrying a vicious-looking, sword-length kirpan on patrol. The turban was made of ballistic mesh. In true squaddie style he’d come to us with the nickname of Sharon already firmly in place.
‘Yeah?’ I asked, not even bothering with comms discipline.
‘Orders to report to SOC,’ Sharon told me. He hadn’t done this over the communal band. He wanted me to be the bearer of bad news. There was no way we could go out again. The firebase we were using as an evac point was an hour or two away from being completely overrun. What did they want from us? I relayed the good news to the rest of the squad.
‘Fuck this,’ Mudge said, in front of me on the hover scout. ‘I’m not in this fucking army. I’m a journalist. I’m out on the first shuttle.’ I knew he’d be there with the rest of us.
We pulled the vehicles up just in front of the Special Operations Command bunker. I recognised the two figures stood there. Major George Rolleston was SBS, the Royal Marines equivalent of the SAS. They were a good regiment, the equal of our own, not that we’d ever admit it, but Rolleston was an arsehole. A black ops svengali who’d killed a lot of operators. His insignia-less uniform was rumpled but not dirty, so he hadn’t left the bunker, though he had the trademark Spectre subsonic, suppressed gauss carbine slung across his chest. He was our immediate superior at SOC and responsible for the deaths of a lot of Wild Boys, as far as I was concerned.
Stood behind him and to one side was a legend in the special operations community, Private Josephine Bran, the Grey Lady, a sniper and assassin who’d come up through the Marine Commandos and the SBS. Everyone knew her reputation and she made me very nervous. It was probably her presence that had stopped Rolleston from getting fragged years ago. Nobody could figure out why she protected Rolleston – the normal conclusion was that they were lovers – but I think there was more to it than that. Her fatigues were a mess and the marks of camo paint and the huge bags under her grey artificial eyes told me she‘d been working.
I climbed off the hover scout and stretched my legs. I felt like a zombie. I was so tired that much of what was going on didn’t seem to be making sense to me.
‘What do you want?’ I asked Rolleston. The relationship between officers and enlisted was very casual in the special forces community but my insolence was pushing it. Rolleston let it go.
‘I have a job for your Wild Boys,’ he said, pronouncing our troop’s, now our patrol’s, nickname with contempt. Every troop earned a nickname. Whatever our troop had done to earn the name Wild Boys had happened so long ago that by the time I’d joined nobody was left alive that could remember. Now Gregor and I were the two oldest surviving members and we didn’t know, but it stuck with us. Still, I’d heard worse names.
Someone had once told us that the name came from a pre-Final Human Conflict story about a group of homosexual assassins. Spinks had beaten the shit out of him – I could never work out why, must’ve been an Essex thing. Maybe he didn’t like being called an assassin, though we were, sometimes. Oh yeah, Spinks was dead, I suddenly remembered. Rolleston was looking at me expectantly.
‘What?’ I demanded.
Rolleston cleared his throat and looked at Mudge, who was bobbing up and down gently on the hover scout.
‘George, do you mind if I call you George?’ I asked. He said nothing. ‘We’ve been out raiding for eight days straight, trying and failing to do anything we could to slow this fucking push of Theirs. I am so tired that I can’t think fucking straight, so anything even remotely subtle is going to fly right fucking past.’
‘Get rid of the journalist,’ Rolleston ordered.
‘Go and fuck yourself, he’s one of us,’ I told him. I’d heard this before but couldn’t be bothered with it right now. Rolleston and I glared at each other for a while. I could hear the squad shifting behind me, just in case things turned nasty.
‘Fuck it,’ Mudge said. ‘Tell me later.’ He gunned the hover scout and headed off.
‘You will insert by stealthed gunship-’ he began.
‘Wait. Insert where? What are you talking about?’ I began. Something was beginning to nag at the back of my skull. I’d assumed that we were going to provide a security element for the evacuation. Instead of answering, Rolleston gave me a grid reference. It was more than twenty miles behind enemy lines.
‘This is a fucking joke, right?’ Ashley Broadin, the bullet-headed driver of the other Land Rover asked in her harsh Birmingham accent. Rolleston pushed on with his mission brief.
‘You will patrol that area attempting to avoid contact with Their forces…’
‘And how will we do that if we fucking land in the middle of them?’ Ashley demanded.
‘Ash,’ I said, and the tough Afro-Caribbean Brummie lapsed into silence.
‘We have reason to believe that one of Their elite assassin caste bioborgs is operating in the area, hunting the remnants of a Foreign Legion behind-lines raiding party.’
‘Bait,’ Bibby Sterlinin, the other railgunner in the squad, muttered to herself.
‘You are to capture the assassin bioborg and call for evac,’ Rolleston finished. SOC had been making up shit on the spot throughout the war and we’d gone out on some pretty hazy mission briefs. This was the vaguest and the dumbest.
‘We’ve saved you some ammunition, food and water. Resupply and I want you ready to move in twenty minutes – that is assuming you still want to catch a shuttle off when you‘ve finished.’ None of us moved, none of us said anything. Rolleston waited, looking expectantly at us.
‘What?’ I asked. ‘You expect us to take you seriously? Leaving aside the fact that Dog 4 is lost. Leaving aside that we’re about to be overrun. Leaving aside that we ‘re dead the moment we hit the landing zone. Leaving aside that we are all so tired and wired we don’t know what we ‘re fucking doing any more, and leaving aside that more than half the troop is dead. Going after a Ninja? We haven’t captured a Berserk alive yet, what chance do you think we’ve got with one of those things?’
‘You have your orders, Jake,’ Rolleston said.
‘Those aren’t orders; it’s a death sentence,’ Gregor said in his soft Highland burr. ‘Personally I don’t think we’ll get near the Ninja even if there is one out there. We’re dead the moment we touch down. Besides, even if we were at full strength, well rested and on top form, we’d struggle to take one down.’ We’d all heard about the Ninjas. They were Their answer to special forces, except one of them was worth a patrol of ours. Ninjas were known to have chewed up two SEAL squads, one SBS patrol and one of Germany’s Kommando Spezial Kraefte squads.