Danger Close #3 Drop Trooper

by Rick Partlow

  “You told me you didn’t think Carson was ready,” I reminded him. “She would’ve….”

  “Would have walked into a trap?” he interrupted. “Tell me, sir, what would have gone down differently if you’d been outside and Carson had gone in alone? Would anyone have died who didn’t? Or would you have been outside where you could control the situation better?” I wanted to argue, but I couldn’t. He was exactly right.

  “I’m sorry, Scotty,” I told him. “I’ll do better next time, I promise.”

  “I know you will, sir. Everyone makes mistakes.” His tone softened. “This ain’t your first. But you always learn from them, which is why you haven’t let me down yet.”

  “I know it’s policy to always send an OCS grad back to a different platoon than they served in before,” I told him, “but I’m glad they sent me back to this one. It would sting pretty bad to get my ass chewed like that by a stranger.”

  “Always happy to help, sir.” I couldn’t see his grin, but I could hear it. “That’s why God made platoon sergeants.”

  11

  It felt very odd to be walking on what had just hours before been a battlefield without my suit on. The armor insulated me from reality, from the ugliness of it, but now I was naked to the casual brutality of it, seeing through my own eyes, unfiltered by the impersonal display of my helmet screen.

  In the harsh light of the morning, Amity was the smoking, shattered remnants of a nightmare, the ruins of the downtown area jagged talons raising up from the charred pavement. Tahni High Guard battlesuits stood like memorials to the battle, frozen in death. I shivered and pulled my field jacket hood up over my ears, walking only meters past one of the blackened and burnt armor suits as I headed for the temporary command center. It was a grand name for a tent stretched over steel anchors driven into the pavement of the city’s central square.

  Force Recon Marines were guarding the perimeter of the square, against what I wasn’t sure. The Tahni were dead. They hadn’t run, hadn’t surrendered, they’d just fought to the last and died in place. And I suppose I understood. They’d been here without resupply or reinforcement for a year. They’d known no help was coming and they’d known the choice would be between an uncertain future as a prisoner of war or the comforting certainty of death. I couldn’t say I would have done anything differently than they had.

  I smelled smoke and blood in the air. The city was depressing, a mutilated corpse dumped by the side of the road. The whole planet felt dead and I wondered if we had arrived too late to do anything more than finish off the last of the enemy and bury the bodies.

  The tent flap was hanging closed and I ducked through it, grateful for a barrier from a world I didn’t want to see anymore. Inside was the comforting familiarity of a military field station, communications and sensor gear, holographic displays, and a swarm of clerks and technicians, performing whatever arcane tasks they were assigned. A single Force Recon Marine stood guard near the entrance, his Gauss rifle cradled in his arms, the visor of his helmet thrown back, revealing a face etched with exhaustion and boredom.

  “Captain Covington?” I asked him.

  “You got me, sir,” he said. “They just told me to stand here and don’t let any civilians through.”

  I snorted and brushed past him, scanning back and forth as I zigzagged through the interior of the tent, squeezing between quantum computer cores and holographic projectors, until I finally found a cluster of officers gathered around a tactical display, a holographic terrain table showing the area around the city along with avatars representing our deployed units.

  A colonel was finishing a briefing and I held back, not wanting to act like I was crashing their party, barely catching the end of his summary.

  “…don’t think we’re going to need more than a few companies of Fleet Engineers and a medical support unit, and maybe a couple platoons of Force Recon as guards.”

  “Guards against what, sir?” The one who’d asked was a captain, and from the lack of interface sockets in his temples, likely Recon himself. “I’d heard there weren’t any Tahni left.”

  “There aren’t. But this occupation was….” The colonel hesitated. “Well, to call it rough would be an insult to those who survived. And many of the locals who made it through are going to have trouble adjusting. I’m not saying they’re crazy or violent, but the possibility exists that some might tend that way. I don’t believe it would be wise to neglect the security of the Engineers and Medical Service technicians. If nothing else, there are the wild animals to think of, at least until we can get the sonic barriers repaired.”

  He paused and surveyed the officers gathered around the table.

  “If there are no other questions, I’ll leave you to your duties. We haven’t been assigned a new permanent base yet, so we’re going to take at least ten to fourteen days here to repair and refit. I’ll need a rotation from you all to send troops through guard duty and to help with constructing temporary shelters for the civilians. Get those to my ‘link within twelve hours.”

  The meeting broke up and I caught Captain Covington’s eye before he headed back to whatever else he’d been doing.

  “Lt. Alvarez,” he said, nodding. “Glad you caught me before I headed out.”

  “I ran into Top over at the spaceport, sir,” I told him. “They’ve set up repair racks there. She said you wanted to see me.”

  “I won’t keep you long,” he assured me, seeming almost solicitous, which worried me. “I heard you found the hostages. I saw them after Search and Rescue turned them over to the Medical Service units.”

  “It was…unimaginable, sir,” I confessed. “I hope to God I never see anything like it again.”

  “Tell me how it went.” I knew he wasn’t still talking about the hostages, and I didn’t bother to pretend I didn’t know what he meant.

  I glanced around me to make sure no one would overhear, but all the rest of the officers who’d been gathered at the terrain table had scattered.

  “Sir, I feel like I may have reached the level of my incompetence.”

  I expected him to agree, or possibly to get upset and tell me to get over it and stop feeling sorry for myself. I didn’t expect him to laugh.

  “And I suppose you believe you’re the first brand new platoon leader who’s ever said that to me.”

  “Probably not,” I admitted. “But sir, I felt so at home as a squad leader…I don’t know if I ever felt I was out of my depth or didn’t know what I was doing. After last night….” I shook my head. “You must have audited the report. I made the wrong call on just about everything.”

  Covington leaned back against the terrain table and regarded me with crossed arms.

  “Tell me,” he prompted. “Lay it out for me.”

  “I should have gone in the rear with Fourth squad,” I told him without hesitation. I’d thought about this quite a bit the last few hours. “Going in with First through the roof was removing myself from the command equation and limiting my ability to respond to a changing battlespace.”

  “Changing battlespace?” Covington repeated, snorting amusement. “Someone’s been playing buzzword bingo at OCS. You mean the fucking building blowing up.”

  “I should have expected they’d rigged the building,” I insisted. “Hell, sir, I did expect them to rig the building, and I still went in through the roof. I was thinking like a door-kicker, not a platoon leader.”

  “It was a mistake,” he agreed, his tone casual. “One I believe I might have made a time or two myself back when I was a platoon leader. The first time around. But it wasn’t fatal, not for any of your Marines. You accomplished the mission, freed most of the hostages alive and killed the enemy. And if the hotel needs to be rebuilt, well, we don’t work for the Demeter Tourism Administration. We’re Marines. Our job is to kill the enemy and break shit.”

  “It was only blind luck it wasn’t fatal, sir.”

  “Was it?” The question was sharp, the crack of a whip, and it startled
me into coming to attention. “Tell me something, Cameron, if you hadn’t ordered First squad to skip the intervening floors and go straight to the lobby, what do you suppose would have happened when the supports blew?”

  “Some of them would have been caught in the collapse, sir.”

  “And likely gotten themselves killed. So yes, perhaps you should have stayed with Fourth squad and retained more control over the platoon, but you went where your instincts told you to go.” He closed his eyes for a moment and let out a slow breath, as if forcing himself to calm down. “Your problem isn’t the decisions you made, Cameron. Your problem is, you’re still thinking bottom-up. You didn’t trust Carson to make the calls she would need to make if she’d gone inside alone, so you went with her. But if you didn’t trust her, why put her squad inside at all?”

  “Because Delp is our best running point, sir,” I said, not quite understanding.

  “And that’s exactly what I’m talking about. That’s squad leader thinking. Bottom-up thinking. You are an officer now and you need to be thinking top-down. If you need to be outside, you send a leader you trust inside, even if their troops aren’t the very best in your platoon. Because, in the end, a good leader will save more lives than a good gunfighter. You get what I mean?”

  “Yes, sir,” I said, “I think I do, now.”

  ‘Good.” He clapped me on the arm and I blinked, not used to him being quite so comradely before. “Because it only gets harder from here, son. This….” He waved a hand around him. “…was a cakewalk. The enemy was barely holding on by their fingernails. You probably heard the colonel. We have ten days here.” He rolled his eyes. “Theoretically. You know how that goes; it could be anywhere from twenty-four hours to a solid month. But while we’re here, I want to take advantage of the terrain and the lack of an enemy threat and do some field training. Simulators are fine if that’s all you have, but they’re no substitute for actually operating your suit.”

  “Ooh-rah, sir.”

  Shit. I winced at the fake enthusiasm, something else I’d learned at OCS. Covington laughed again.

  “Get your suits running,” he told me, then give your people a twenty-four-hour rest. And you,” he emphasized the word, pointing at me, “turn off your ‘link and get a solid eight hours sleep. That’s an order, by the way. Grab a sleeping pill from the medics if you need it. Then get me a training schedule for the rest of the week by no later 1200 local tomorrow.”

  “Yes, sir.” I turned to go but hesitated. “Sir, the way the Tahni treated those people….” I squeezed my eyes shut against an unbidden image of the living skeletons, starved so nearly to death. “Is that what we’re going to be seeing from now on?”

  “I don’t know,” he admitted. “Supposedly, things here were about as bad as it gets. Guerilla warfare, assassination, atrocities on both sides, retaliation, infighting between factions of the human resistance and the Tahni command….” He shook his head as if to clear it of the ugliness. “I’m hoping it’s the worst we’ll see, but you know the old saying. Hope in one hand….”

  “…and shit in the other,” I finished for him. “And see which one fills up first. Yes, sir.”

  “It’s a war. Despite anything you might see in the movies, it’s never clean and rarely noble. And if it’s ever heroic, it’s not because men and women are determined to be heroes, it’s because they care about their brothers and sisters more than they care about themselves. You know that as well as anyone. It’s always been true, and it’s twice as bad when you’re fighting an enemy who isn’t even human.”

  He motioned at the door.

  “Go get some rest.”

  I walked out of the tent and pointed myself back toward the spaceport. The Fleet engineers and the Marine techs had dropped most of the gear from their cargo shuttles there and left it to make another run up to orbit, and until we got the trucks from the civilians or load-lifters from the Iwo or the other ships, any and all repairs were going to be done at the spaceport.

  It was a long walk and I suppose I could have waited for a vehicle, but I was zoning out and by the time I blinked and realized where I was, I’d already gone a good three kilometers and I was passing the perimeter fence the Tahni had set up on the outskirts of town. Most of it was torn to shreds, ripped apart either by the civilian militia or the other Drop-Trooper companies hitting the city.

  The primary star was higher now and it was warming up, the mist burning away, and as it withdrew, an image clarified off to the side of the road, as strange and spectral as if I had stumbled onto a ghostly apparition. A group of civilians were gathered by the side of the road, digging into the sodden ground with hand tools. I stopped in mid-step and stared at them, wondering what the hell they were digging holes for, before I noticed the body bags.

  They were digging graves. It seemed even stranger once I understood that. Why would they be burying their dead on their own? Why wouldn’t they let us do that for them with machinery? Then I noticed the Gauss rifles stacked off to the side, barrels supporting each other with the butts planted into the ground, very professional, the way a Marine squad would have done it.

  I looked closer at the civilians. Their clothes were mended and patched over and over, but they weren’t ragged or torn. They were lean and hard, but not painfully skinny or starving. Their hair was cut short and a few were still wearing bits and pieces of what I recognized as Tahni armor. Their faces were hard, one or two marred by long-healed scars.

  This was the resistance, the civilian militia. The ones who’d done the dirty work. Which was why they were burying their own dead.

  One of them, a dark-haired young woman close to my age, who would have been beautiful if it hadn’t been for the case-hardened set to her face, stared back at me with eyes so dark they were nearly black, burning with a lingering rage like the smoldering ruins of yesterday’s fire.

  “You a Marine?” she asked me.

  “I’m Lt. Alvarez. Cam.”

  “Sophia,” she returned. I didn’t know why she’d decided to talk to me, but I felt compelled to fill the awkward silence.

  “Are those your friends?” I asked, gesturing to the bodies. “People you fought beside?”

  “No,” she said. “Those are people who the Tahni let starve to death. They tossed them into a ditch over that way.” She pointed north along the fence line. “We just found them.”

  “They’re all dead now, you know. The Tahni, I mean. They’re gone.” I didn’t say it because I didn’t want to piss her off, but I was implying they didn’t need to keep the rifles handy.

  “I know.” The corner of her mouth twitched, like she wanted to smile but had forgotten how. “I killed sixty-seven of them in the last fourteen months.”

  “Was that enough?” I wondered. “I mean, do you think you got even?”

  Her eyes flickered toward the bodies and she shook her head.

  “Not even close.”

  12

  “What the hell was the name of this planet again?” Joanna Carson wanted to know.

  I frowned, wondering if I should be the one to tell her to keep her chatter off the general platoon net or if I should leave it to Scotty. My eyes flickered to the left, not seeing her or anything in the view from the external cameras except the bare metal of the drop rack. A shudder ran through the aerospacecraft and I wondered if we were hitting more turbulence or actually taking fire this time. I could have accessed the dropship’s tactical feed, but I was too busy trying to run through the op order in my head.

  “Vistula,” Scotty’s voice came over the line, sounding annoyed. “Like you’ve been told at about three briefings now.”

  “I know,” Carson admitted. “I just never heard of the place.”

  For that, I couldn’t blame her. I hadn’t known it even existed until about a week ago, and even the Skipper didn’t seem convinced it had any strategic importance.

  “The only reason we’re taking this planet,” he’d confided to the platoon leaders gathered aroun
d an overturned spool of superconductive cable outside the headquarters tent, “is that there are human colonists still alive on it. It’s a wildcat colony, established by an independent mining cooperative that came out here without authorization and started digging for iridium on one of the moons of the interior-system gas giant. It wasn’t habitable, but the larger moon is, and parts of it have a pretty temperate climate, so they made their home there and started breeding cattle and growing luxury crops.”

  He’d sniffed in disdain, casting a baleful glare at the holographic projection of the single—well, not city, more like a town, barely as big as the tiny section of Tijuana where I was born—hovering over the portable field display on top of the metal spool.

  “The Tahni only bothered to take it because it was the last system on the way to Silvanus and the iridium mines were handy for their fabricators to manufacture weapons and drive components for their fleet. Why they’re trying to hold onto it, God only knows. The spooks believe it’s a sort of religious imperative with them not to give up a living world once they’ve taken it, but I think they’re just guessing. They’re aliens, and what we would think of as foolishly stubborn, they might consider perfectly reasonable. We could and probably should just bypass it, but it wouldn’t look good for the politicians if they left a bunch of colonists, even outlaw colonists, in Tahni hands.”

  “There can’t be that many Tahni troops on Vistula though, can there?” Lt. Cano had asked, worry pinching folds beside his eyes. “Not by this point, right? I mean, it’s just a resupply base….”

  “There likely won’t be any starships, but I’m sure they’ll still have plenty of cargo shuttles. And they’ve been there long enough to rig up weapons for them. As for ground troops….” Covington’s eyebrow had arched in the “you-should-know-better” expression that all of us were so familiar with. “The Tahni have never been reticent about leaving their soldiers to die in meaningless rear-guard actions, and I doubt they’ll start here. There’s sure to be at least a battalion of conventional soldiers to run the resupply base and the fabrication facility, maybe as much as a full brigade. They’re sure to have Shock Troopers, but as for High Guard suits….” He’d shrugged. “None of the Scout Service drones have reported any, but they’re taking snapshots from a few hundred thousand kilometers away before Transitioning out again, so the odds are, they wouldn’t see them even if there was a whole battalion of them. As always, hope for the best, prepare for the worst. We ship out in forty hours and Transition time will be about five days subjective. We’ll use as much of that for simulator time as we can.” He’d nodded back to where we’d established the temporary barracks, in what had been the Tahni troop quarters and, before that, some government building for storing heavy machinery. There’d been a lot of dried blood inside that building and hosing it off had taken the better part of a day, but no one had minded the extra work. “Go tell your people. Give them the rest of today off, then we start loading our gear first thing in the morning.”