Portal Wars 1: Gehenna Dawn Read Online Free Page A

unimaginative and
tactically weak, but they were highly organized and uniquely able
to move rapidly to exploit an opportunity. And the 213th had walked
right into an ambush. It had been a poorly planned op from the
start. Too far from base, inadequate support, and a long march that
practically telegraphed the objective. It wasn’t Lieutenant
Cadogan’s fault…it was Battalion that screwed the pooch. They sent
a crack strikeforce into an unwinnable situation with insufficient
intel…and now it was all shot to hell.
    It was without a commander too. The 213th had
suffered just under 50% casualties, and those losses included the
lieutenant. He wasn’t dead, not yet at least. But he was in bad
shape…or at least that was the rumor going around.
    Taylor was on his way to the infirmary. The
pain in his chest had migrated to his back. He was pretty sure he’d
broken at least one of the cracked ribs, and he figured he’d have
to deal with it sooner or later. He was also hoping to get some
info on the lieutenant.
    Cadogan was the only man in the 213th who’d
been on Erastus longer than Taylor. Jake looked like he’d make a
poor soldier when he first stepped out of the Portal into the
searing heat of Erastus. The skinny kid almost passed out, and he
certainly didn’t look like he had what it took to survive. But
Cadogan had been the same when he arrived, and he saw something in
Taylor, something that wasn’t obvious on a cursory glance.
Then-Sergeant Cadogan took the shaky new private under his wing,
teaching him how to survive, and later, how to lead.
    Like most of the guys who’d been around a
long time, Cadogan had a nickname…Scholar, though it had largely
fallen into disuse as his original peers died or moved on to other
units. Taylor certainly never dared to call him that, though
Cadogan was fairly tolerant of informalities around base. The
lieutenant himself never called any of the men by their nicknames
either, usually referring to them by their ranks and surnames. When
he wanted to be more informal, he used first names, but almost
never handles.
    Cadogan had been a teacher of some sort; Jake
knew that much. He’d been older than most of the recruits when he
first got to Erastus, and highly educated too. It was a mystery to
everyone how he ended up in the off-world military. As far as
Taylor or anyone else seemed to know, Cadogan had never talked
about it. At all. There were plenty of guesses, but no real
facts.
    His age was another frequently discussed
topic. There were rumors – never spoken of in his presence - that
the lieutenant was over 30 years old. Most of the recruits who came
to Gehenna were 19 or 20, and some were even 16 or 17. Not many of
them survived their first year, and lasting a decade was unheard
of. The UN supervisors and appointed senior officers were older, of
course, but a 30 year old combat soldier was rare indeed.
    Jake was 25 himself, which made him pretty
old too, at least on Erastus. He’d picked up the handle Mad Dog not
long after he arrived. No one seemed to know why…it didn’t match
his personality at all. But the mystery would remain
unsolved…whoever hung that tag around Taylor’s neck was long dead,
and Jake himself wasn’t talking.
    Except for the lieutenant, no one had been
onplanet as long as Taylor. He was a Five Year Man. He’d been
wounded three or four times and had a few close calls, but no
Machine had been able to put him down for good. At least not
yet.
    Nobody could remember how the use of handles
and had become so widespread in the UN forces on Erastus, but the
tradition seemed to date back almost as far as the original
expedition. Sooner or later, nearly all the veterans picked up
nicknames. It didn’t take too long, usually just a couple months. A
new guy would survive a few battles, make a few friends…then
someone would pick something out - a personality or physical trait
- and pin a new name on him. Most of the time it stuck. It was OK
to call someone