First Strike by - (reading e books .TXT) 📕

training to complete before joining a squadron, but with the war going so badly, anything was possible. She could already be on the front line serving on a fighter carrier for all he knew.

An unpleasant odor wafted through the night air. Instantly, Sheridan’s heart began to race. He looked out into the dark. His hands clenched his rifle tight.

Cole walked over and was about to say something when he saw the tense look on Sheridan’s face.

“What’s wrong, sir?”

“I think the bear’s back.”

“Crap, not again. Where is it?” asked Cole as he brought his rifle from his shoulder.

“I don’t know, but there’s something moving around in the dark. I can smell it.”

Cole slowly flipped his weapon’s safety off. “How far away would you say it is?”

“I don’t know,” replied Sheridan. 

Cole looked over his shoulder and calmly said, “Garcia, bring Tartov’s bloody socks to me.”

Garcia thought the order was odd, but did as she was told.

“When I tell you to, throw them just outside of the cave,” Cole said to Garcia.

“Yes, Sergeant,” answered Garcia nervously.

“Now!” said Cole.

The socks flew out and fell to the ground. A split second later, a loud blood-curdling roar tore through the night as the bear leaped down from a tall rock overlooking the fire. Its eyes glowed red in the light of the bonfire. It bent down to smell one of the bloodied socks.

Without hesitating, Sheridan depressed the trigger on his rifle and emptied a one-hundred round magazine into the beast. He might as well have fired his weapon up into the air. Not a single bullet penetrated the animal’s thick fur and skin.

With an enraged roar, the bear looked over at Sheridan and got up on its hind legs, towering above the people huddled near the fire. 

It was Cole who finished off the animal. At point-blank range, he fired a high-explosive grenade into its exposed stomach. The deadly projectile detonated, tearing the bear’s midsection apart. It staggered backward. Its eyes rolled back up into its skull and with a bloody froth coming out of its mouth, it fell over to the ground, dead.

Agnar was up on his feet. He drew his knife, ran out of the cave to the dead bear’s carcass and began to cut at the exposed meat. With a smile on his face, he looked back at everyone staring at him and said, “Fresh meat for supper.”

Cooked over an open fire, the bear meat was greasy, but after eating rations for days on end, the food tasted better than any served in a five-star restaurant back on Earth. Everyone ate until they could eat no more.

Agnar wiped his bloodstained hands on his clothes and smiled over at Garcia. Sheridan saw her smile back. Fraternization was heavily frowned upon in the combat units, but he was a realist and decided to ignore their growing friendship. They could all be dead tomorrow; who was he to put an end to their attachment?

“My beard is driving me crazy,” observed Obermman as he scratched at his whiskers.

Sheridan grinned and then found himself scratching at his as well. He had never tried to grow a beard before. He doubted that it was coming off anytime soon.

Cole walked in from outside. “Okay, I’ve booby trapped the bear’s remains. If another one comes sniffing around tonight, it’s going to get an awful surprise. Agnar, you’re on sentry.”

Agnar acknowledged the order and moved to the entrance of the cave.

With a deep sigh, Cole sat down on the dirt floor. He looked over at Sheridan. “Sir, it’s quiet out there . . . way too quiet. I’d expected to hear the Kurgan’s big guns pounding the capital by now.”

“I was thinking the same thing. The answer, I believe, is the same here as it was on Illum Prime. They didn’t nuke the city from orbit because they want it intact. Kurgans hate the cold; a winter campaign is the exact opposite of what they want. During the last war, the Kurgans conducted a lightning-fast campaign through our space to seize as many habitable planets as they could. I suspect that they’re going to surround the capital and then try to force it to surrender.”

“I take it that history was your favorite subject at the academy.”

“Correct. My major was history, and my minor was in Kurgan studies. I had a great-grandfather who fought in the first war. For generations stretching back to the first colonies, there has always been a Sheridan in uniform.”

“I don’t know my family history that well,” said Cole. “My father was in the service, but my grandfather was a teacher, and as for his father, I don’t know. My dad didn’t talk about our family tree too much.”

“In a way, you’re lucky. Tradition runs deep in both my father’s and my mother’s families.”

“Sir, Kurgan, can you speak it?”

Sheridan chuckled. “Yeah, I’m actually not too bad with it.”

“Sir, I’ve never asked this before, but is your father Admiral Sheridan?”

“Yes, he is. Why do you ask?”

“I suspect he’s wondering where you are. When the Churchill fails to report in, he’s going to be told that you’re MIA.”

Sheridan had been so focused on keeping himself and the people with him alive that he hadn’t thought about what would happen after they were reported missing. “Well, Sergeant, he and a lot of other parents, unfortunately, are in the same boat. Tens, if not hundreds of thousands of civilians and soldiers have already been lost, and this war has barely begun.”

The next day, they came to the end of the pass through the mountains. As they stood on a tall hill, they looked out across a vast snow-covered plain. In the distance stood another small mountain range; nestled at the base of it was the capital city of Derra-5. However, between them and their destination was the Kurgan invasion force. It looked like a great horde spread out waiting to attack the city. They could see transport ships busily coming and going from a makeshift landing strip. Soldiers and equipment streamed from the airstrip and made their way to join the forces already in place.

Sheridan ordered them to hold up for the night. With the enemy only kilometers away, there would be no fire tonight.

As soon as it got dark, Sheridan and Cole grabbed their night vision gear, crawled up onto a rocky outcropping, and began to study the Kurgan force. Nearest to them were the enemy’s rear-echelon forces. Fuel and supply dumps ringed the airstrip. They quickly spotted an air defense regiment of guns and missiles guarding the depots. Further out were camouflaged sprung shelters that Cole guessed were being used as maintenance hangars and possibly hospitals. What caught their attention were the thousands of fires burning to the west of the Kurgans in a forest bordering a wide river that ran toward the blackened-out capital.

“What do you make of those fires?” Sheridan asked Cole.

“I don’t know, but I doubt the Kurgans built them.”

Sheridan thought back to the briefing he had read on the planet. His stomach turned at the thought of what lay before them. “Sergeant, there are three major settlements on Derra-5. The capital has about one hundred thousand inhabitants, the other two about fifty thousand each. I bet that before the Kurgans began to land, people fled the other cities seeking refuge in the capital. Those fires are probably from the people who never made it and are trapped outside of the city.”

“Jesus,” muttered Cole. “They’ll never last a winter out in the open.”

“There’s nothing our forces can do to help them and the Kurgans will ignore them and let them die. I doubt that they have the food or the inclination to feed all those people.”

“I hate to sound ghoulish, sir, but those fires light the way into the city if you ask me,” observed Cole.

Sheridan adjusted his position and studied the ground between them and the forest. Cole was right, if they were going to find a safe way to the capital, it would be there. He quickly outlined his plan for the following night. Together they crawled back off the hill to brief the rest of the survivors. Whatever happened now, they were going to have to trust in their training and hope that they didn’t run into any enemy patrols before they reached the safety of the woods. If they did, they would be cut to pieces, and they all knew it. 

Chapter 10

Like spectral figures, Sheridan’s group walked quietly through the fog clinging to the riverbank. Spread out, Sheridan and Agnar were in the lead while fifty meters back Cole brought up the rest. If the first two bumped into the enemy, the remainder would still have a chance to escape. Moving only at night, they had left the safety of the mountains and worked their way through the low-ground until they came to the river. Although the water was near freezing, Sheridan led them across to the far bank and away from the Kurgan forces. Rather than risk dumping her in the cold water, Agnar had carried Hollande on his back.

Wet, tired, and soaked to the bone, they were fortunate to find an abandoned cabin to sleep in during the day. Regrettably, there wasn’t any food to be found in any of the cupboards. Before the sun came up, they sat down and finished off the last of the meat Agnar had cut from the side of the bear. 

“How far do you think it is to the capital from here, sir?” Obermman asked Sheridan.

“It’s difficult to tell,” replied Sheridan, gnawing on a piece of dry meat. “I think it’ll take us another two to three days to reach the outskirts of the city. That’s the easy part. Getting in without being shot by the Kurgans or our own people will be the hard part.”

“Why’s that?” queried Garcia.

Cole explained, “We don’t know where our forces are located. I, for one, don’t want to blunder into a minefield or a pre-registered kill zone. Also, even if we make it all the way to our lines, we don’t know any of the passwords. In short, everything to date has been easy compared to the next few days.”

“I don’t want to die out here,” moaned Tartov. “There has to be a way in.”

“There is,” said Sheridan, tiring of the PO’s constant whining, “We just have to find it.”

Andrews asked, “Sir, do you think we might run into any Kurgans before we reach our lines?” 

“If we don’t, I’d be amazed.”

“Okay, enough chatter,” announced Cole. “Andrews, you’re on sentry. Everyone else get some sleep. We’ve got a long march ahead of us tomorrow, so get what rest you can.”

Sheridan leaned back against the wall and felt a shiver run down his spine. He couldn’t decide if it was from the wet clothes that clung to his body or something else from deep in his psyche warning him to be careful. Either way, he wished it would go away. Tired from the day’s exertions, Sheridan soon drifted off into a fitful sleep.

A hand touched Sheridan’s shoulder. 

Sheridan reached for his rifle and sat straight up. He blinked his eyes a couple of times to clear the sleep from them. 

“Sir,