Spec Ops Squad: Deep Strike by Rick Shelley

Author:Rick Shelley [Shelley, Rick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-936535-41-5
Publisher: JABberwocky Literary Agency, Inc.
Published: 2002-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

TWO MEALS. THREE SHORT PERIODS OF SLEEP. Noon came and went; the afternoon started dragging. We were still stretched out along the north bank of the river that marked the northern boundary of the capital of Olviat, under cover of the trees and bushes behind the shore. As the day warmed up, getting near sixty degrees by the time the sun was overhead, I found it harder to stay awake when I was supposed to. I occasionally made the rounds, moving behind the positions of my men, making certain that the people who were supposed to be awake were. That was as much to help stay awake as to make sure the others were.

I found myself wondering if command had forgotten us. The general and his staff certainly had enough to worry about keeping all the facets of the battle in focus. A few dozen men on the side wouldn’t have been important. Not that I objected to every possible hour of sleep and relative safety. I was never a fanatic. I would fight when I had to, but I wouldn’t look for ways to volunteer for anything I didn’t have to. I had already had one man killed in my squad on this operation. When I closed my eyes I could still see Jaibie lying on the street, life signs gone. I didn’t like the fact that we had been forced to leave him behind, but there had been no chance to bring him along—not without risking more lives. If he had merely been wounded, we would have done everything possible to bring him out with us, but we wouldn’t risk lives for a corpse. Later, we would go back to recover our dead. After the fight. Of course, if we lost, there was little chance that we would be able to recover anyone.

I got up to make another of my periodic rounds, staying low, out of sight of anyone across the river. We were far enough back in the trees that it wasn’t difficult. I slipped into the slit trench next to Nuyi. Divotect tend to be sluggish when the weather is cool, a remnant of their reptilian ancestry, so I made a point of checking on him more frequently than I did the others. He lifted his head and turned it as I came in, showing me that he was awake.

“How long do we lie here, Sergeant?” he asked.

“Until they tell us to do something else.”

“I cannot see how we contribute to the effort here. We should be over there, somewhere, helping to defeat the tonatin.” The war had started when tonatin invaded a couple of divotect colony worlds, and the divotect casualties had been extreme. There were rumors that the tonatin were on a genocidal quest to eliminate the only sentients who had not descended from mammals. That was probably why all the member worlds of the Alliance of Light had so quickly responded to the initial attacks by the tonatin who controlled the rival Ilion Federation.

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