Read Portal Wars 1: Gehenna Dawn for Free Online

and moved him
from the 1 st Team to the newly reconstituted 3rd, but
otherwise he left his guys where they were. He owed them that
much.
    Young was screaming at his team now, berating
them for their sluggish efforts. “What part of move your asses
don’t you people understand?”
    Taylor was too far away to get a good look,
but he knew Frantic well, and he could practically see the vein
bulging on his neck as he urged his men on. The corporal sounded a
little like a martinet, shouting at his soldiers, asking them to do
the impossible. Taylor knew better. Young acted like he was crazy,
but there was no one you wanted at your side more in a desperate
fight. Jake had found that out a few months earlier, when he went
down during a routine patrol. Young killed two Machines about to
finish him off, and he carried the wounded Taylor 7 klicks in the
midday sun. It wasn’t until they got back to basecamp that Taylor
realized Young had also been hit – twice - and he’d carried his
stricken CO all the way back, wounded and bleeding himself.
    “Alright, Blackie…” Taylor spoke softly into
the tiny mic on his helmet. “…let’s do this again.”
     
    “I’m going to hear from Battalion again,
Blackie.” They’d been back a few hours, and most of the section was
sacked. Taylor had authorized a double water ration for his
troops…in addition to burning through 85,000 practice rounds during
his exercise. Water was scarce in the desert zones of Erastus, and
even in the jungle belt where it was plentiful, it was so infested
with aggressive pathogens it cost a fortune to purify. And
ammunition was worse…it had to come through the Portal. Some of the
other worlds had onsite production facilities, or at least that was
the rumor. But Erastus didn’t…not yet. And bringing crates of
ammunition through the Portal was expensive.
    Taylor took good care of his men, excellent
care. That usually translated into issuing them more rations and
burning through ammunition on unscheduled training exercises. There
had been two formal inquiries about excessive use of supplies, but
Lieutenant Cadogan had appropriately “filed” them. One of these
days, he figured, UN Command Erastus would get tired of being
ignored, and pursue things more aggressively. But it hadn’t
happened yet. And his boys had earned that extra ration.
    “Tell them to suck my dick.” Blackie didn’t
pull verbal punches, especially not when sitting in base shooting
the shit with Taylor. “How the fuck do they expect us to keep these
little baby cherries alive? Half of ‘em don’t have hair one on
their balls.” Black had less respect for rules than anyone Jake had
ever met, a vestige of the Philly freezone streets, he supposed.
Still, he couldn’t understand how someone with no respect for
authority could make such a good soldier. And Black was one of the
best.
    Taylor’s background couldn’t have been more
different than Blackie’s. He was from New Hampshire, a small
farming town no one had ever heard of. Compared to most of the
guys, he’d had it good. Better, certainly than the city rats from
the squalid urban freezones...guys like Blackie. The suburbs were
pretty bad too, except for the gated sanctuaries…and you had to
know somebody to get into one of those. And none of the grunts on
Erastus had ever “known” anyone.
    The farms, on the other hand, were pretty
much left alone. They were just too important, especially to the
Admins and other privileged classes. The Blight had taken out at
least half the arable land in the world. The masses might subsist
on the marginally edible output of the huge sea-based algae fields,
but those with some level of wealth or influence wanted real food.
And the small farms were the only source of those once common but
now precious foodstuffs.
    The farmers were an odd breed, and they were
held on a looser leash than those in the more populated areas.
There were monitors, of course, but only one or two per family. It
was