Kombatt's Trial

By John W Partington

Lieutenant Mars Nathanial Kombatt is being tried for murdering his commanding officer while deployed on a mission with the Terran Commonwealth Cavalry. The Prosecution paints a picture of Mars as a drug addicted, psychotic, enemy collaborator. While the defense agrees that the Lieutenant has some flaws, it’s all a matter of prospective. Join a combat section of armoured cavalry entrenched deep in the middle of the Second Interstellar War as they fight, not to defeat the enemy, but to protect one of their own.

• Language: English
• Publisher: John W Partington
• Release date: Jun 21, 2022
• ISBN: 9781989973325

John W Partington

I have been writing for most of my life: as a child, as a soldier, and now as an independent author. My favourite colour is purple. I have two cats, who choose to annoy me most when I am trying to write. I'm a middle aged white dude suffering from psychosis, but with medication am perfectly stable (except for singing to my cats).

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Kombatt’s Trial

John W Partington

Published by John W Partington

https//JohnWPartington.ca

© John W Partington 2022

Cover Art © https://www.123rf.com/profile_grandeduc

ISBN: 978-1-989973-32-5

This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favourite book retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Acknowledgments

Author’s Note

Testimony 1

Testimony 2

Testimony 3

Testimony 4

Testimony 5

Testimony 6

Testimony 7

Testimony 8

Interlude 1

Testimony 9

Testimony 10

Testimony 11

Testimony 12

Testimony 13

Testimony 14

Interlude 2

Testimony 15

Testimony 16

Testimony 17

Testimony 18

Testimony 19

Testimony 20

Testimony 21

Testimony 22

Interlude 3

Testimony 23

Testimony 24

Interlude 4

Testimony 25

Testimony 26

Testimony 27

Testimony 28

Testimony 29

Testimony 30

Interlude 5

Testimony 31

About the Author

Other Books by John W Partington

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my editing team: Lori Holloway, Leah Levert, Corrin Lewis, and Gerry Kroll. This was a difficult task with the multiple first-person narration, military jargon, and a lot of characters running around doing pretty much the same thing. That’s the military: run around, do the same thing over and over again until it’s instinct.

Author’s Note

This story was originally written thirty years ago. I was a brash, young Corporal studying psychology in college, living away from home, and devoting too much of my time to the pursuit of sex. Neuropsychology fascinated me. So much can be done to the brain with the subtle addition or subtraction of neurotransmitters and chemicals. That’s how I envisioned the army one day in the far distant future: disposable biologic units controlled by a military pharmacy. We’re not there, and hopefully never will be. Now that I’ve travelled along the path of war and come out the other side, wounded mentally and morally, I hope humans never lose their humanity.

It should also be noted that this story is part of a story-arc. This is neither the beginning nor the end, but somewhere in the middle of a time period in speculative fiction. One day I’ll write the complete arc, which chronicles the rise and fall of the Terran Commonwealth, and the greatest fighting force ever: the Terran Commonwealth Cavalry. Also known as the Terrors. Soldiers are pretty much the same throughout all time and history. Only our equipment changes, and slowly, very slowly, attitudes change too. We’ve got a long way to go, but by the time we’re woke enough that we no longer need a military, someone less woke will come along and start breaking our tea kettles.

Testimony 1 – Lieutenant Kombatt

LT, the Major wants to see you, now.

Thanks, Fredricks, I said as I eased off the rock I had been lying on. I looked across the bivouac site to the command tent two hundred meters distant; I had chosen this spot because I was relatively concealed and it would take a few moments for anybody to locate me. But I had forgotten about Fredricks. I scowled at him as I started across the biv, and he backed away in mock fear.

Corporal James Fredricks, battle scout. Cocky little bastard, but he knows his stuff. Fredricks is the best scout we have; he can find any hidden LP, OP, hard point, anything. Maybe the reason Fredricks has such skill is because he will sit and wait for hours in a forward position and just lie there, waiting for something to move. Maybe it's because he's a lucky fuck. I could not help looking at his armour as I marched past him. He had painted it standard slate grey and then written the names of musical bands and his favourite lyrics across the armour in shades of white, black, yellow, and orange. Every time I look at him I wonder why he ever joined the military. He would seem more at home as a concert promoter or the manager of one of the bands he listens to. He carries about him a totaly unmilitary bearing, he was not a six-foot goliath or even a particularly rugged-looking individual, but the thing that really threw people was his hair.

It is common practice in the armoured cavalry to shave our heads to the scalp or reasonably close, but there is no official regulation regarding the length of hair. A soldier must keep their hair out of their eyes and away from their ears so that they can see and hear without obstruction. I've been told that back in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries that it was necessary for males to keep their hair short while females could wear theirs long. That was determined to be sexist, so females were also required to shave their heads. My understanding is that the women did not like the idea that much so the order was changed, and males were allowed to have longer hair provided they wore it in a proper military fashion.

Corporal Fredricks managed to maintain what he thought was cool hair and at the same time maintain military regulations. The man kept his black hair, less the sideburns, in neatly trimmed four-inch dreadlocks. The Major hated it but I personally thought it gave a good accent to his green eyes.

Armour is a very personal thing in the cavalry. Each man’s horse as we call it, is individual self-expression. Some are gaudy like Fredricks's and others are more subdued, like mine. My command suit was painted olive drab with blotches of black, brown, dark green, and grey. Painted in the traditional camouflage of the early battle armour years, it did not do much to actually hide the three tones of plasteel I was walking around in. The only aberration in the pattern was a bright red blotch under my left shoulder.

I entered into the biv site from where I had been hiding, I mean, waiting in a sentry position. Just because I was not scheduled for picket does not mean that I cannot take it upon myself to maintain extra duties; an officer has to set a good example.

…Okay, so I was hiding.

There was a group of men sitting around a Matrix field stove. The stove was being used to heat tea drink packets: little foil envelopes that contained sterilized water and artificial weed flavouring. I'm not a big fan of tea.

Want a bag, LT? asked Flank Sergeant Cummings as he leaned back and exposed three red blotches across the chest of his slate grey armour.

No thanks Nick, I got to go see the big man, I answered. Flank Sergeant Cummings just shrugged his shoulders and peeled open the packet and started to slurp the sticky fluid inside.

Nick was a little older than the rest of us, but that was only because he joined the cavalry a little later in life than most soldiers. Originally a colonial, after his tenure on Sparta was finished he signed up for the Marines. He was then referred to a real unit, and ended up in the cavalry. Still in good shape Nick, was the section’s Dad because until Major Preacher arrived, Nick was the oldest member of the unit, having reached the ripe old age of twenty-nine. Nick had features that were not remarkable. He had everything that he needed, two eyes, a nose, and a mouth. His cheeks were slightly rounded and he kept his hair shaved to a quarter inch. Seeing as the most any of us saw of anybody else was the neck up except when on leave, I find it hilarious that Cummings is always worrying that he is going to develop a blubber belly now that he is almost thirty.

Cummings was one of those men who is in a position that he really should not be in. As a Flank Sergeant he was a valuable member of the section because he had a great deal of field experience. He was also one of the original members of the section, so he was able to work with the rest of the original members without any problems. What I found peculiar was the fact that FSgt Cummings was our dead-man.

Dead-man was the nickname given to the unfortunate individual who was responsible for carrying all the long-range and space communications equipment. It was a thankless job because in a firefight the dead-man usually finds himself without anybody standing anywhere near him. Being the one that can call in fast air or aero-space strikes, he was the enemy’s favourite target. It is a military truism that if you deprive the enemy of his comms he is basically stranded. I felt somewhat sorry for Nick because he was in a position that was generally regulated to a lower rank but I could not help thinking somebody has to carry the uplinks and better him than me.

Beside the rad op was Private Klaus Storm. After the battle at Fallingbrook the surviving members of sections that could not be maintained were orphaned to other units. Storm was one of those orphans and was in my squad.

A grenadier by trade, Storm was originally a member of Philip's Bangles and had painted his armour in the tradition of his original section. The armour was yellow with a series of black and orange stripes painted in bands around the body, left arm, and legs. His right arm was deep blood red.

Storm never said much, probably because he was new to the section, but he was always willing to engage in group activities such as killing Angor storm troops. You could tell by looking at his head that somewhere in Storm’s lineage one of his relatives was a clone. Clones and any of their offspring for about three generations are incapable of growing hair. In fact, clone descendants only grow hair if there is a birthy somewhere in their past. His features were the hard, stone-like features of a clone-related man. There was no fat, only thick layers of muscle. It gave Storm a slightly tense expression but only because the skin was tight without any fat to flesh it out.

Storm had been the only member of the Bangles to survive Fallingbrook, and even then, his right arm was prosthetic. One of the newer direct feed robotic limbs. He seemed to enjoy the skull crushing force that it held, not that the rest of him was any less lethal. Clones are good for that.

The mortar pods on his shoulders twitched back and forth as he scanned for targets and fiddled with his control sticks. That is the one thing that frightened me about him: he was constantly ready for action. In fact, I have never gotten closer than fifty feet without him knowing I was there. That's why I like to put him on late sentry, he still sleeps but if anything comes within a hundred feet of camp he's awake. It still scares the shit out of me. The fact that he is also six feet tall and built like an ox does not offer much comfort to the psychotic paranoid.

Put those things on safe, Storm, I don't want a motar explosion in the biv by accident, I said.

Storm looked up and gave a weak smile, but the pods stopped rotating. I looked at the armaments he was carrying. The chest pod had the standard 40mm shells and the shoulders each carried 60mm shells.

No eighties? I asked.

No Sir, responded Storm and then stared intently at his combat helmet that was resting in the lap of the man beside him.

Sergeant Christopher Fuzzy Manxx. Best fucking tech that I have ever worked with. The man was amazing. He could fix any problem in a suit, modify anything to work the way you really wanted it to work, or design new equipment on the spot and build it out of empty casings and coolant covers. The only real problem with Fuzzy was that if you put something down you had better be prepared to find it missing when you went back.

Manxx was also the Panthers’ heartthrob. Whenever we went on leave and Manxx was out of uniform it was almost like art. Manxx is a meagre five foot ten inches and not heavily muscled. Instead, he is lean with good muscle tone and has a swagger when he walks. He has large blue puppy dog eyes that he uses to maximum advantage, more than one woman has fallen prey to his innocent boyish charm and then find out that he is the incarnation of Caligula back at the barracks. The nickname fuzzy comes from his short blond hair that he keeps cropped to a half-inch. It feels like velvet when you rub his head. Rubbing Manxx's head before a firefight is considered good luck, not that it saved half the section from dying at Fallingbrook but because it's a tradition. Manxx has been in my Squad since the beginning of the unit.

Manxx was sitting cross-legged on the ground with Storm's combat helmet in his lap. Manxx's armour was unique in the fact that instead of painting it he had welded or glued on bits of metal, scraps of circuit board, construction parts and other things that he considered useful. His theory was that if he needed spare parts, he could take them off the outside of his armour and in the meantime it would break up his outline. I really think that he has some sort of mechanic fetish. The Sergeant had his micro welding torch and gaff wrench in his hands and was busy attaching a blast shield to Storm’s helmet.

Cavalry power armour is one of the most destructive form of weapon that Terrors have ever built. The armour looks like a combination of medieval armour and football padding. Standard cavalry armour, and hard point armour which is only a variant, is three inches thick. The inside is filled with what could be described as gelatine bags that conform to the user’s body and then harden. The bags maintain a perfect fit and absorb shocks from falls or explosions or bullets, or any of the other variant forms of hostile death. A horse is fitted to the rider when issued and then they use that particular suit until the suit or the soldier is destroyed. Fitting takes about four hours because of compensations for height, weight, reaction speed, location of neural jacks, and dozens of other measurements. After all that is done final fittings take place.

There are two mounds on the back of the suit with a little valley in between. The power or energy that is used to operate the armour comes from the left mound, the power plant, which is powered by Verinium. I'm not exactly sure how the process works, but I know that if you get exposed to pure Verinium you die.

The second mound is the coolant and fuel tower. The power plant runs at extremely hot temperatures and there is coolant constantly circulating through the system. The cooling process creates a large amount of steam that can be used to give limited thrusting effects from the ankle boosters. The steam is compressed in the coolant tower and then shot down the legs and out steam vents in the lower leg. This can be used to slow falls when deploying from a drop ship or to get a little higher jump when running on a planet’s surface.

The recess between the two towers is usually covered by a compartment that can be used to hold extra ammunition or other items. Our artillery and grenadier use it for ammo, the rail gunners and long rifle bitch have no choice because that is where their ammo feed is located. Our techs use the space to carry their tools and Sheryl keeps her instruments and medical supplies there. The scouts usually do not carry ammo because it is too heavy. Instead, they carry comfort items for the rest of the section, things like food, the occasional book or video-view.

Inside the armour the rider is totally naked, but you can't really tell because there is not much space between your body and the gelatine bags. It feels like you're totally exposed because the inside of the armour is kept at body temperature and automatically heats or cools as necessary to maintain that level. In the days when humans first started using power armour the soldiers only wore it during combat. When in a biv or base they would step outside because they could not live inside constantly.

With modern armour we never have to step outside. There is a catheter brace that fits around your waist and allows you to take a shit or piss anytime you want, it also fulfils other arousal functions, if you get the drift. The armour also absorbs sweat and then processes it into the cooling system for jump fuel.

Armour even provides food. The combat helmet has a tube that you can suck on to get a concentrated protein/mineral solution that tastes like apricots. The food supply is located in a small tube placed horizontally across the lumbar region of the back. Most guys like to take a few extra hard rations that they hide away because while nourishing, the paste is not very filling.

Despite all the wonderful advances in cavalry armour it is not without its defects, and the major one is the armour weak points. The armour is thinnest under the arms and between the thighs so that the limbs may be brought in close to the body. The joints also have weaker armour, particularly the waist and ankles. This is because the armour has to be designed to move in several different directions, unlike the knees that only bend one way.

A rider has to get used to