CHOP Line Read online

  Dedication

  This book is dedicated to the graduates and instructors of the

  Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California,

  past, present, and future,

  but especially my classmates in the Mandarin Chinese course

  1992–1993

  Epigraph

  CHOP Line: Naval term derived from the phrase “change in operational control” indicating the boundary between two commands at sea. In the space war against the Sims, the CHOP Line separates the war zone from the rest of the galaxy.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Henry V. O’Neil

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Chapter 1

  Lieutenant Jander Mortas leaned the back of his head against the wall of the personnel carrier, feeling the vibration as the vehicle fell from the sky. A stabilizer puffed twice on the outer hull, keeping the armored box upright as it coasted toward the planet’s surface. All around them, other chariots of war were riding the energy tunnel that Human Defense Force ships had cut through the atmosphere all the way to the ground. Known as cofferdams, they were a relatively new invention in the decades-long war against the Sims.

  The carrier lurched, sending the boots of the seated men up off the steel plates for a worrying instant before dropping them back down. Even in the low light, the boots showed a reddish discoloration earned on a planet which they’d left only two days earlier. Looking at the familiar faces seated across from him, Mortas felt no surprise to see that most of them were asleep.

  Though tired himself, he couldn’t summon the serenity to drop off. A year in the war zone fighting as part of the walking infantry had made him leery of its mechanized cousins. The armored personnel carrier felt like a giant coffin, trapping him, blinding him, putting him at the mercy of its driver and commander. The harness crisscrossing his torso armor didn’t help; it had snugged down as the vehicle had dropped into the cofferdam, so tight that he couldn’t move. Seated on the webbing of a long bench folded out from the APC’s bulkhead, loaded down with grenades and ammunition, Mortas was eager for the touchdown that would release him.

  Oddly enough, the torso armor had become like a second skin, and he barely noticed its presence at all.

  His rucksack was jammed under his seat, and Mortas now wished he hadn’t left his helmet and goggles strapped to it. An earpiece and throat mike allowed him to communicate with his troops and the APC’s commander, but the goggles would have provided him with imagery for the operation to come. Though fully briefed, he wanted to review it yet again.

  Twisting inside the body armor, he worked a thumb and forefinger into a cargo pocket and pulled out his handheld. Activating the device, he called up the map of their landing zone. It was too close to the enemy spacedrome for his liking, but the Sims had chosen a difficult location for their string of recently discovered settlements. The terrain was quite restrictive, with dense forest on a maze of hills, leaving only a few open spaces large enough for cofferdam touchdown. As this was a division-sized assault against three spacedromes many miles apart, the first wave in each of the cofferdams needed to hit the ground and get out of the way.

  Narrowing the focus on the handheld, Mortas was studying a wooded ridge near their landing zone when a finger appeared in front of his face. Startled, Mortas looked up to see a man who looked like a bug. Darkened goggles protruded from a bulbous plastic communications helmet, and the rest of the soldier was clad in a green coverall. This was one of the personnel carrier’s crewmen, a member of the riding infantry. The space inside the behemoths was too cramped for torso armor and canteens, and so the mechanized troops didn’t wear them.

  “Put it away, Lieutenant.” The mouth beneath the goggles moved, and the voice came over his earpiece. “Messes with our communications.”

  The weight of the last few weeks abruptly pressed down on Mortas, and anger pushed back against it. He outranked the man giving him this order, and also knew that his handheld posed no threat to the carrier at all. His Scorpion rifle was clipped over his head, far out of reach, but it wasn’t his only weapon.

  His left hand took hold of the man’s shirtfront, yanking him down while his right came up holding a long black dagger. The point pressed against the flesh near the soldier’s windpipe, and for a moment Mortas remembered the first time he’d used the weapon.

  “You know what this is?” he asked.

  “Human Defense Force regulations place every passenger in this track under the command of the crew, regardless of rank,” the man stammered. The mechanized unit to which Mortas’s platoon had been attached was from Tratia, where quoting the rules always won the argument. “You are in violation—”

  Mortas put more pressure on the knifepoint, and the words stopped.

  “This is a Spartacan fighting knife. Heard of the Spartacan Scouts? Rough boys. This knife belonged to one of them. He died saving my life.” Mortas drilled angry eyes into the darkened goggles. “He used it to kill an HDF major who’d gone nuts on us. You starting to get the picture?”

  “I’m going to report you to my commanding officer.”

  “I’m a lieutenant in the Orphan Brigade. Your CO’s not an Orphan, so I don’t care what he thinks.” A buoyant whoop sounded in his earpiece, and he saw that the confrontation had awakened his men. Expressions ranging from amusement to outrage lined the opposite wall. “This operation here is our third back-to-back mission. So why don’t you fuck off?”

  Another hand appeared, this one from the Orphan strapped in next to Mortas. That was Prevost, a savant with the grenade launcher known as a “chonk” because of the sound it made. Prevost took hold of the Tratian’s arm, pulling him away. Mortas lowered the knife, knowing what was coming, and studied the evil blade as Prevost shoved the man across the floor plates.

  “Your CO’s right through that hatch. Guys, help him get there.”

  A dirty boot kicked the Tratian in the buttocks just as he stumbled into range, and then he was propelled down the two rows of seated Orphans, being shoved or slapped as the harnesses permitted. He ended up on his hands and knees, and disappeared into the tiny compartment containing the driver, gunner, and the company commander.

  Mortas slid the knife back into its sheath, nestled among the magazines strapped to his chest. It had been a long time since he’d thought of Corporal Cranther, the knife’s previous owner. The desolate planet where they’d been mysteriously marooned with two others. The conscientious objector Gorman, the best of the unlikely quartet, who’d died only a short time after Cranther. The alien that had impersonated Captain Amelia Trent, a Force psychoanalyst captured and murdered so that the shape-shifter could take her place. Though little more than a year in the past, it seemed a lifetime ago.

  “That true, sir?” The words didn’t come over the earpiece. Prevost had switched off his throat mike, and whispered the words from Mortas’s shoulder. “About your Spartacan buddy killing a major?”

  The question startled him. Mortas had never told anyone about that episode, fearful of Force discipline, and had pushed much of the event from his mind. The fo
ur maroons had encountered the major and his ragtag command purely by accident. The Sims had attacked the disorganized band shortly after that, but the major had somehow survived. Mortas recalled the man’s crazed accusations, and saw again the Scorpion rifle pointed at him while enemy parachute flares lit up the night sky.

  He considered telling Prevost that he’d been joking, but after fighting alongside the man for so long he simply couldn’t lie to him. Mortas switched off his mike.

  “It is. He’d gone insane, and was about to shoot me.”

  Prevost gently bounced a fist on Mortas’s thigh. “Well fuck him, then.”

  Mortas returned to the handheld, watching the first phases of the assault. The Sims had established this colony on the previously unoccupied planet UC-2147, while the Force had been distracted by other matters. The human civil war on the planet Celestia had caused the recall of most of the Celestian units from the war zone, and operations had been chaotic since then.

  Overhead imagery showed Mortas the steady bombardment from orbit, the warships pumping rocket after rocket into the enemy spacedromes and the surrounding settlements. The enemy, known as Sims because of their physical similarity to humans, had become expert in digging shelters far beneath the surface of the habitable planets which were the prize in the interstellar war. Even so, they were taking quite a pounding and Mortas saw that the spacedrome closest to his cofferdam had been virtually destroyed. Circular clouds burst into life with each rocket’s impact, and numerous fires generated streaming tendrils of smoke.

  Manned HDF spacecraft were now entering the fray, racing back and forth over the target area alongside drone gunships. Here and there a bright dot moved across the ground, the heat signature of a Sim vehicle trying to escape. Rocket and cannon fire quickly knocked the dots off of the settlement’s unimproved roadways.

  With growing concern, Mortas noted the absence of the flickering specks that would have indicated individual Sims. Whether fleeing the carnage or trying to help their fellow colonists, there should have been more evidence of enemy personnel. Going back to the cofferdam’s landing zone, he studied the curved, wooded ridgeline that was simply too close for comfort. He remembered the Tratian intelligence officers assuring the Orphan leadership that the ridgeline had been under electronic surveillance for days. His battalion commander, Major Hatton, had warned Mortas and the others not to take that assessment at face value.

  No heat signatures showed anywhere on the ridge, despite the presence of the cofferdam’s gigantic energy column. The shaft would be visible for miles, and should have attracted any enemy who could reach it. Cofferdam descent took a considerable amount of time, and the Sims knew their only chance was to destroy the assault force as it touched down. Concerned, Mortas shifted the view to a wider resolution. The string of settlements bordered a valley surrounded by weaving escarpment and dense woods. Three open areas had been selected for the cofferdams, all of them offering relatively flat corridors for the tanks and APCs to strike the different spacedromes. There would have been more of them, allowing the force to spread out, except these were the only suitable sites anywhere nearby.

  “Air assault touching down. Air assault touching down.” A mechanical voice alerted the entire force that two flights of personnel shuttles had flown in and landed. The Orphan Brigade’s commander, Colonel Watt, had tried to get his troops assigned to that mission, shuttling in from orbit before the armor arrived. It was a job much more suited to the Orphan infantrymen, but instead they’d been assigned to accompany the mechanized units of the Tratian division.

  Mortas watched the shuttles landing at the bases of two ridges to the north and west of the colony, the black rectangles disgorging groups of swiftly moving dots. The heat signatures of the infantrymen spread out almost in a line, and then began rushing up the slopes. Their job was to establish blocking positions on the high ground that would prevent the Sims from escaping north or west once the armored units had landed to the east and south. The lead dots made good progress while tiny clusters fell behind, probably groups of men humping heavy weapons toward the crest.

  Mortas flipped the view back to his own cofferdam, pleased to see that the first vehicles would be touching down in less than a minute. Coasting a half mile below him, they would drive hard as soon as they landed in order to get out from under the next arrivals. Outside, the APC’s stabilizers fired simultaneously, the first of several decelerations that would hopefully bring them to the surface with no more than a hard jolt. The lights in the compartment gradually brightened, and Mortas felt the restraining bands of his harness start to ease up.

  He shut off the handheld, stuffing it back into his pocket just as the harness lock released, and happily shook free of the bonds. The Orphans around him quickly pulled their rucks from under the web seats, sliding goggles over their eyes and fastening helmet chinstraps. One of the platoon’s rocket teams was riding with him, and Mortas watched as they unstrapped the large-bored launchers known as boomers. Although they were supposed to ride to the mechanized company’s assembly area, the Orphans had to be ready to jump out and fight if the APCs encountered enemy resistance.

  His goggles came to life, and Mortas went through a series of commo checks by reflex. First check was with B Company’s commander, his immediate superior. Captain Dassa’s familiar voice responded through the ear pads in his helmet, speaking from a vehicle a mile overhead.

  “I hear you, Jan. Be ready to bail out with all your people.” Dassa had even less faith in the Tratian intelligence assessment than Major Hatton.

  Mortas called his platoon sergeant next. Sergeant Dak rode on a different vehicle so that the platoon wouldn’t lose its top leaders in one wreck, and the rest of the platoon was likewise cross-loaded across the Tratian infantry company.

  “Got ya, Lieutenant.” Dak’s words grated, as if he were standing right next to Mortas. A strong NCO, Dak was one of the relatively few Tratians in the Orphan Brigade. Tratian society was highly regulated and loaded with informants, which made most of its citizens poor candidates for a unit like the Orphans.

  After speaking with his three squad leaders, Mortas attempted to contact the commander of the mechanized company his platoon was supporting. Captain Ufert had already made it clear that he didn’t like having the walking infantry cluttering up his command vehicle, so Mortas wasn’t surprised that he had to call three times before receiving a terse acknowledgment.

  Microcameras all over the APC kicked in as they approached the ground, allowing Mortas to see the vehicles in the first group touching down. The landing zone’s tall grass had been flattened by the cofferdam’s energy field, and the tracked vehicles churned it up as they drove out of the way. He widened the view to get a closer look at the wooded ridgeline, just in time to see it explode in smoke and fire.

  One of the APCs on the ground jerked as if pulled by a towing chain, its back end sent sideways by the impact of the anti-armor round. The stubby twin cannons on its turret turned toward the ridge, but a second hit enveloped the vehicle in a bright flash as the radios all started shouting at once.

  “Concealed gun! Concealed gun! Ridgeline to the west!”

  “Get clear of the landing zone! Move out of the way!”

  “Hit! We’re hit! There’s more of them—”

  Communications protocols shut down the babble of voices in his helmet, allowing Mortas to speak to the platoon on the different vehicles. “Flatten on the floor! Be ready to dismount!”

  The Orphans all went to the deck, hugging weapons and rucksacks, and Mortas joined them. Captain Ufert now wanted to speak to him. “Mortas, we’re going to drive north and hook around the end of the ridge! Dismount your people there, and kill those gun emplacements!”

  The APC slammed into the ground before he could respond. The armored, ammo-laden infantrymen bounced into the air and then crashed back down on the plates. The track’s engines screamed, sending an earthquake vibration rattling through their bodies. Something exploded nearby, rip
pling one side of the vehicle with fragments. They sounded like incoming bullets to Mortas, but he told himself they were just rocks thrown up by a near miss. Focusing, he tried to find the end of the ridge on the map inside his goggles.

  The surging behemoth stopped with a metallic bang that echoed through the troop compartment, and he didn’t need imagery to know they’d slammed into another track. Enormous gears clashed, and then they were beetling backward. A hurricane seemed to have found the vehicle, rocking it violently as explosions burst all around.

  “Dak! Dak!”

  “Yes, Lieutenant.” The firmness of the platoon sergeant’s voice never failed to calm him.

  “I’ll mark my position when we bail out. Stay with your track long as you can—”

  The command vehicle shuddered to a halt. Ufert’s commands broke into the transmission.

  “Get your people out, Lieutenant! We’re stuck!”

  The back wall was already detaching at the top, howling winds entering. Mortas flipped his goggle setting so that he could see what he was doing, marveling at the bright blue sky that appeared as the ramp lowered.

  “Take the rucks!” he shouted, struggling to his knees in time to see that the troops were way ahead of him. Camouflaged bodies rushed for the exit, darting left and right as soon as they were clear. The sound dampers in Mortas’s helmet snugged down and stayed that way, protecting his hearing from the booming thunder of the enemy guns and the cracking explosions of incoming rounds. He yanked one strap of his ruck over his shoulder and, Scorpion in the other hand, lurched for the ramp.

  As he leapt for the grass, his body twisted in midair because of the load. His face turned up toward the sky, but it was no longer blue. Dense gray smoke billowed all around, and his goggles adjusted to let him see that it was a smoke screen, the two APCs generating the clouds while they fought to disentangle themselves. Turning, Mortas raised the rifle over his ruck while getting his bearings. The Sims dug into the ridge had shifted their fires back to the landing zone, trying to cover it with wrecks.