RECCE (The Union Series Book 4) Read online

  We stopped beside the LSV, and the eldest of the three troopers checked over his shoulder cautiously.

  ‘Any news on the fleet since this morning?’ he asked one of the escorts, lowering his voice.

  I raised an eyebrow, suddenly taking an interest in their conversation. What fleet?

  The escort looked around. ‘No. The whole garrison around Paraiso is on lockdown. Everyone is confined to barracks.’

  ‘I knew it,’ the elder trooper said. ‘They were never gonna sit up there on Hades forever - especially now Edo are back on their feet!’

  The door to the LSV lowered to the ground gently, and we loaded into its rear compartment one by one.

  ‘The Alliance must be laughing at us,’ the older trooper continued, as he buckled himself into his seat. ‘We’ve been arming their own province for them while they were away!’

  ‘Keeping it warm for them,’ a tall, stocky trooper agreed, sourly.

  The ramp closed with a gentle thud, and the escort tapped his datapad to inform the LSV that we were ready. The robotic vehicle set off immediately, rumbling away from the hospital and back toward one of the many underground warrens dotted around the city. Ordinarily, the LSV computer would sync with our respirator visors, the walls of its crew compartment seemingly becoming invisible as we were connected to its outer cameras. Without our respirators, however, we had nothing to look at other than a couple of small monitors. I took little interest in the view outside anyway. I was far more concerned about the situation being discussed by the troopers sat around me.

  What the hell was going on? Were they talking about an Alliance fleet?

  ‘When do you think we’re gonna tell the locals?’ the tall trooper asked.

  The older trooper chuckled. ‘When the first bombs start falling, probably!’

  ‘Do you think they’re gonna invade?’

  ‘Damn right, they are! You don’t pull in a fleet like that unless you’re gonna use it!’

  Another trooper shook his head dismissively. ‘What? And get spanked off the planet again?’

  ‘I’ll bet the Chinese were saying that about us, just before we dropped in on New Earth …’ the elder trooper retorted. He jutted a finger skyward. ‘The Alliance can hit us whenever they want, without warning. There’s tens of thousands of those belters up there, just waiting for the green light to drop, and we’re just sat here like mugs, busy sending all our kit to Edo so they can stick the knife in – ’

  ‘Sorry,’ I butted in, unable to contain my curiosity any longer, ‘what are you guys talking about?’

  The older trooper sitting across from me raised an eyebrow inquisitively. ‘Have you been out of it for a while?’ he asked.

  ‘Five days, I think,’ I replied.

  Several of the troopers exchanged glances, surprised by the length of my stay in hospital.

  The older trooper finally nodded. ‘Fair one. An Alliance fleet has arrived on the edge of the system over the last few days.’

  ‘Shit,’ I exclaimed - there was already a large Alliance presence on the nearby planet Hades, a rocky world that was believed to serve as a staging post for any potential invasion.

  He nodded gloomily. ‘Yeah. A hundred ships. Maybe more.’

  ‘I heard it was a thousand,’ one of the escorts corrected.

  I seriously doubted that the Alliance could field a thousand ships in the same part of the galaxy all at once, but I humoured the comment anyway. ‘That’s a lot of ships! Where are they now?’

  ‘Just on the edge of the system, last time I heard,’ the escort answered.

  ‘They’re gonna invade,’ the older trooper said, with conviction. ‘We’ve gotta pull out of the Bosque …’

  ‘What the hell are we doing there in the first place?’ the escort asked, angrily, ‘And why are we sat around the biggest city in the continent … about to get bombed?’

  I sat in silence, listening to the fearful discussion between the troopers packed into the LSV. I didn’t believe everything they were saying, of course. Troopers loved to exchange stories and rumours, so I had no doubt that a large part of their information had been twisted and exaggerated. I still remembered the rumour concerning the Chinese before we had faced them during the invasion of New Earth - that they were all robots manufactured in Chinese factories - I had learnt the hard way that that wasn’t true.

  Something was up, that was obvious, but there was more to the situation than the simple interpretation made by my comrades in the LSV. The Indo-Japanese Alliance wouldn’t reveal its fleet for no reason, but if they intended to invade, then they wouldn’t show their hand and then simply sit around and do nothing, waiting for the Union and its Russian allies to mobilize their own fleets in response. No, the Alliance wanted us to see their fleet, but they didn’t necessarily intend to use it. Perhaps it was a message, and a powerful one at that.

  ‘So how did you end up in hospital for five days?’ one of the escorts asked, snatching me back to reality.

  The troopers in the LSV all waited curiously for my answer. Considering the fact that Paraiso Hospital could heal a broken bone in under a day, they all wondered how I could become so badly injured that I’d needed five days to recover, especially when the vast majority of the Union Army was sitting idle.

  I regarded them all, deciding how much to tell them.

  ‘I was hit by frag from a grenade,’ I said, finally.

  There was a pause whilst the information sunk in.

  ‘Who are you with?’ the elder trooper asked me.

  ‘Recce Platoon.’

  The LSV compartment fell silent for a while. Nobody wanted to ask me about what was going on in the Bosque; they knew I wouldn’t have answered any of their questions anyway. They also knew that Recce platoons were virtually Special Forces, bound to secrecy by the nature of our tasks.

  The Union had proper Special Forces on Eden, of course - shady units that I barely knew existed - but it had to deal with a conflict that spanned entire planets. There simply weren’t enough Special Forces to handle the demands of Eden Joint Command - the military wing of Eden’s ruling Russo-European coalition government - and so battalions used their Recce platoons to plug the gap.

  Our recent operations in the Bosque were kept secret to those outside the military, and even the troopers of my own battalion had a very small understanding of our involvement on the ground.

  It wasn’t just secrecy that caused the troopers to fall silent, however. During their conversation about the emerging Alliance fleet, it was pretty obvious what the rest of the army thought about our work in the Bosque: they didn’t believe in what we were doing, and who could blame them? We were helping Edo, supplying them with weapons and equipment to aid them in their fight against the Loyalists, all the while knowing that the province would turn upon us the second the first Alliance dropships broke into the upper atmosphere. It was almost as if somebody in EJOC was playing out some kind of big, twisted joke, with the punch line written out in blood.

  Eventually the conversation resumed, turning to booze and women. The corner of my mouth turned into a smile as I half-listened to their stories, marvelling at how troopers could so easily put their fears to one side and talk instead about nights out in town. Though they sat idle around Paraiso, many of them were veterans of New Earth, I reminded myself. They had already been forced to find ways to overcome their fears, and accept that their lives were a privilege rather than a right which could be taken from them at any moment.

  The LSV took us to a warren on the far side of the city, driving down into a sloping tunnel guarded by armed troopers and several automated guns. I watched the LSV monitors as we passed large murals that had been painted onto the tunnel walls, each one depicting the symbol or badge for a unit that had been based in the warren. I recognised some of them, but there were many which I didn’t - French, Polish, Italian - units from every state in the Union seemed to have been represented in the long floodlit tunnel, their images serving as a striking
reminder of the length of time that Eden had required a military presence.

  There was something crushingly futile about the arrival of the Alliance fleet, I realised, as I studied the murals. After all of the deployments that those murals represented, after all the fighting and all the killing, and even after what my platoon had recently been through in the Bosque, the war still hadn’t been brought to an end. Despite our best attempts to appease the Alliance, they still threatened us with invasion, demanding that their lands be returned. Instead of soothing the conflict, we had merely helped to stoke the flames of hatred that raged across the planet, threatening to consume it once more.

  I didn’t say a word to the other troopers when I departed the LSV and their company. It was almost midday, and they were far more interested in getting back to their own warren before they missed their scoff.

  Turning my back on the LSV as it rolled out of the vehicle park and headed back toward the surface, I made my way through the rows of vehicles toward the nearest airlock. There was no need for the warren to protect its inhabitants against the atmosphere contained within Paraiso’s mighty glass domes, but the airlock doors were still large and heavy. If the Alliance did decide to attack, then the domes would be the first targets for their bombs, and the warrens would be the first targets for their infantry.

  Above the airlock door hung a massive Union flag, and a metal sign that bore the name of the company based there: Z Company, 1st Battalion, English Dropship Infantry. Z Company, or Support Company as it was often known, was the company to which my platoon belonged - even though I barely knew anyone in it. It was comprised of a mixture of specialist platoons, from Air Defence Platoon to Railgun Platoon, all of which were regularly split up and sent to support individual companies as and when they were needed. Because of this, Support Company rarely ever worked as a single entity. Since my platoon had answered directly to brigade throughout our two-year tour of Eden, we had very little involvement with our original company other than for administrative purposes. They secured the kit we didn’t need and accommodated us when we weren’t on operations - that was about it.

  Most warren accommodation followed a similar layout, and it didn’t take me long to navigate my way into its depths, stopping at the armoury along the way to check that my rifle was there. Sure enough, the datapad mounted onto the wall next to the armoury hatch confirmed that my weapon was indeed present, and that it had been handed in by Sergeant Major Davies on the same day that I had been hospitalised. Several other weapons had been handed in by him at the same time, all belonging to those that had been injured during our last battle in the Bosque. Frankie’s was there, as was the weapon belonging to Private West - one trooper who hadn’t made it. The weapons would remain in the armoury before eventually being issued to another trooper to use as his own. I scrolled through the recent history of our platoon weapons, noticing that the weapons belonging to the remaining injured troopers had all been taken out two days ago, presumably as they were discharged from hospital and returned to the field. I also noticed that the sergeant major’s weapon was still in the armoury, indicating that he was somewhere in Paraiso.

  Connecting my datapad with the warren network, I checked to see if accommodation had been arranged for me. Sure enough, I had been allocated a transit room, right in the depths of the underground fortress. I quickly negotiated the hive of tunnels, stairwells and elevators to find my room, tucked away in an empty corridor, away from curious eyes and ears.

  Inside my room I found a single bunk with a pile of neatly folded bedding stacked at its foot. All of my combat equipment was arranged in one corner, carefully laid out as if ready for an inspection. I smiled, knowing that it was the work of the sergeant major. A true perfectionist, he would undoubtedly have rifled through every item of kit I had when I was evacuated to hospital, taking everything of use to the platoon, and replacing everything I had that was damaged or worn. I could see that all of my combats and armour were new, the old ones having been pocked with holes and caked in my own blood. Even my helmet and respirator had been exchanged just in case they had been damaged by the grenade that had exploded only metres from my face. They had worked fine for the remainder of our operation, but it was better to be safe than sorry. The Union could afford new helmets.

  I skipped scoff and spent the next hour inspecting my equipment, double-checking that everything worked and that nothing was missing. Though the sergeant major would have diligently checked everything, it was still my responsibility to check again - even he would tell me that.

  The only things that were missing were my rations, water and ammunition. Ammunition could be collected along with my weapon when I left the warren, but the rations and water were better collected early. I doubted the sergeant major would be happy to wait for me to stock up on supplies when he came to collect me; he would expect me to be prepared. Recce troopers weren’t watched and controlled as carefully as troopers in a regular platoon, but were expected to be able to take care of themselves.

  It didn’t take me long to replenish my supplies, filling my water reservoir under a regular sink and collecting fresh bags of processed rations from the warren stores. The duty store man handed over the rations without question, more interested in a conversation he was having with one of his mates. Once I was finished, I found the gym, managing to complete a solid hour’s workout with enough time to spare for a shower before dinner.

  The showers were empty, like the rest of my accommodation. I stood in front of one of the sink mirrors, studying my body under the cold florescent lights. Despite the technology of Paraiso Hospital, I still bore the marks of my injuries, including one deep, ragged scar that ran across my chest. They were more interested in getting me fixed quickly and out of the bed than removing my scars. I guessed the Union would have had to pay for that.

  War had really left its mark on me now. Every time I looked at myself in the mirror, my face grew harder and my eyes grew darker, but something else had changed in the face of the man staring back at me, I realised. Before, there had been nothing but despair in my eyes, but now there was something more - an intensity in my stare that I hadn’t seen in years. It was as though a flame had been reignited within my soul, fuelled by a new sense of purpose found out in the misery of the Bosque.

  The war on Eden was nothing short of awful. Every side had blood on their hands - even the Union for having turned a blind eye to the slaughter taking place right over the border with Paraiso. But in the midst of all that pain and suffering, I - my platoon - had done something incredible: ignoring the wishes of our masters at brigade who watched from afar, we had intervened in the senseless killing of innocent civilians. I didn’t care if the sergeant major agreed with what we had done that day, or if anybody agreed at all, all I knew was that I had used the great power bestowed upon me to do something just, something right. That one act hadn’t exorcised my demons, or rested the dead comrades who haunted my sleep, but it had reminded me that I still had a purpose, a reason for being.

  The event had also shown me that not all of the people out in the Bosque were evil. Captain Kristov – Yulia – had displayed incredible courage by defecting from the Guard, attacking her own comrades as they tried to kill her people.

  Yulia. I had thought about her a great deal throughout my time in hospital. She too had been troubled by war, though I knew little of her experiences before she had been employed as a liaison officer between my section and the Guard hierarchy. She had been cold, even hostile, during the short period of time we had worked together, but the barriers between us had broken down as we came to realise the similarities between us. We were both troubled by war, having lost our faith in humanity, but we had rediscovered that faith together in one explosive moment.

  I knew that it was almost certain that I would never see the ex-captain again. Even if the Presidential Guard didn’t find and execute her for mutiny, then she would have been forced into hiding somewhere within the vast forest that covered much of the conti
nent … but that didn’t stop me wanting to meet her again. I felt a kinship with her, a connection that spanned our cultures. For much of the time we had known each other, I had seen her as a potential threat to be guarded against, knowing her only for her harsh demeanour and apparent indifference to the hardships of war, but now I saw her as something far more than that.

  I still remembered the way her face shone when she smiled at me for the one and only time before we parted ways, and the touch of her lips against mine as I lay on my stretcher waiting to be evacuated; I wanted to see her again.

  Shaking the memory from my mind, I stepped into the showers, tilting my head backward as I took a moment to enjoy the hot water running over my body. To most of the troopers and conscripts based across the province, a hot shower was meaningless. Even the most remote of underground bases were well established and packed with creature comforts. To the troopers who served in Recce Platoon, though, a shower was a luxury to be cherished.

  I turned around slowly under the shower nozzle, allowing the jet of water to massage the muscles in my shoulders. Suddenly I saw a man standing in front of me, and I jumped backwards, almost slipping over on the wet tiles beneath my feet.

  ‘Jesus …’ I hissed in surprise.

  It was the sergeant major, dressed in his combat equipment, with his helmet and respirator tucked under his arm.

  ‘Are you ready?’ he asked, his dark eyes burning into mine.

  I nodded, regaining my composure. ‘Yes, sir. My kit’s all packed. Good to go.’

  ‘Come on, then, let’s get a shift on.’

  He spun on his heel, and was gone.

  I stood in the shower for a moment, waiting for my heart rate to return to normal. Was that man purposefully trying to freak me out?