Portal Wars 1: Gehenna Dawn Read Online Free PDF Page B

that was no excuse. Not for such a lackluster
effort. “We’re gonna do this again. We’re gonna do it as many times
as it takes you to get it right.”
    He looked out at the downcast faces, dripping
with sweat. Bear stood in front of his team, his drenched fatigues
plastered to his massive body. He looked like he was about to fall
over, but Taylor knew the big man was tough as nails. Chuck Samuels
would stand under the heat of Erastus’ two suns for as long as Jake
told him too.
    “I’m hot and tired just like all of you.” And
my fucking ribs are throbbing too, Taylor thought but didn’t say.
“But I don’t want to watch a fucking Machine put you down, and
that’s exactly what’s going to happen if you continue to let them
outperform you in the heat.” He was speaking to the new guys,
mostly. The vets knew already…and they’d heard it a hundred times
before. But a reminder never hurt.
    “So I better see some rapid improvement from
all of you, or we’re going to be out here all day…and all night
too.” He panned his eyes across the entire assembled section. “You
think I’m kidding?” His voice was growing louder, harsher. “Don’t
fucking try me.”
    There was a brief pause. It was eerily quiet,
not a sound but the wind whipping through the valley. The breeze
was a welcome relief from the oppressive heat, but the air felt
like it was coming off a blast furnace. It helped, but not
much.
    Tony Black had been looking at Taylor, but
now he turned back toward the massed troops behind him. “You heard
the sergeant.” His voice was higher pitched than Jake’s but his
volume was a match any day. “Get your asses moving. I want you
reset for the exercise in five minutes or I’ll beat the sergeant to
it and rip off your heads and crap down your fucking necks. I shit
you not.” Black had the foulest mouth in the section. Where he’d
come from, that little speech would have been a sloppy wet
kiss.
    The troops moved quickly, scrambling across
the sand, taking positions facing each other. The section was split
into two forces, and they were fighting a simulated meeting
engagement. They were a little over ten klicks from base, and
they’d marched the whole way in the blazing sun. They’d be marching
back too, but at least it would be closer to twilight then. Erastus
was never comfortable, but it was marginally less unbearable when
only one sun was in the sky.
    Jake stood and looked out at the troops
getting ready to run the maneuver again. Black’s team, and most of
Bear’s too, were already in place. They were the veterans, the guys
who’d been onplanet awhile and learned to survive. But 3rd and 4th
teams were mostly rookies, and they moved slower. If they’d been
under fire, he thought, half of them would be dead already.
    It wasn’t by design that Taylor’s veterans
and recruits were so segregated. The Machines had accomplished that
a month earlier…just before the entire 2nd Battalion was
transferred north, out of the steaming equatorial jungle. Denny
Parker had been part of Taylor’s inner circle and the section’s
exec before Blackie took his place. A corporal on the cusp of
becoming a sergeant, he and almost half the section were cut off by
a sudden enemy attack. By the time Taylor and the rest of the men
broke through, there were only 2 survivors. Parker wasn’t one of
them.
    Taylor’s first thought was to reorganize the
section, balancing out the experienced troops. But he didn’t do it.
The 8-man teams were extremely close knit units. The men of a team
fought together, bled together. They shared out their rations,
listened to each other’s stories. They were families, the only
families any of these men would ever have again. When Taylor first
arrived on Erastus, scared, angry, and desperately lonely, it was
the men of his team that pulled him through it. Some section
commanders would have moved names around a roster sheet, but not
Jake Taylor. He bumped Karl Young up to team leader