by Rick Partlow
The other platoon leaders had been upbeat and talkative on the way back to the barracks, like we were planning a vacation outing instead of a battle, and I’d had to remind myself that the drop on Demeter had been the first combat experience Cano and Kovacs had ever had, and only the second for Burke and Patel. All four were Academy grads, which made them about my age and yet, somehow, so much younger.
“Hey,” Burke had piped up when we were nearly to the barrack building, “I heard the locals re-opened one of the bars in town and have it stocked with home-made moonshine. We got tonight off. Anyone want to check it out?”
“Oh, shit yeah,” Cano had enthused. “I haven’t had anything to drink in like two months. Maybe I could find one of the local girls who wants a roll in the sack. Been even longer since I got laid.”
Dark, vengeful eyes and the smell of newly-turned earth had teased at my memory.
“I’d be pretty fucking careful about messing with any of the locals. They’ve been living on the edge of a knife for over a year and they’re not going to be too receptive to some jackhead Marine coming in here with clean clothes and a full belly, expecting gratitude.”
I had been, I’d realized a couple seconds too late, using my NCO voice. When they’d warned us about that in OCS, using our NCO voice instead of our officer voice, they’d mostly been worried about presenting ourselves in our new identity to our troops, but I discovered that it was just as important when dealing with my peers.
“Yeah, okay, man,” Cano had said, his voice suddenly subdued. The others had seemed reluctant to meet my eyes, and when they’d gone out to that bar later in the evening, I had not been invited along.
Lesson learned.
Scotty wasn’t going to say it, so I did.
“Keep the channel clear, Carson.” I hesitated. They should at least get the explanation I got. “The moon is important for the same reason this mission is more dangerous than you think. There are humans down there, being held prisoner by the Tahni. That means we can’t just pound the base from orbit, then walk in with a broom and sweep up the pieces. We have to slog our way in from the outside and do our best not to kill the hostages, which gives the enemy the chance to kill as many of us as possible. And we’re jumping into that shit in about five minutes, so button up your shit and get your head in the game.”
“Yes, sir,” Carson said, her voice subdued.
I cursed in the privacy of my helmet. That was my NCO voice again.
Another shudder wrenched the dropship, more violent this time and I gave in to curiosity, tapping into the external video feed. Once upon a time, I’d had to run a backdoor program and sneak into the feed without authorization, using a trick I’d learned from the company armorer. Now, as an officer, I just had to touch a control.
I really shouldn’t have bothered. It was black as coal outside, except when lightning crashed through the clouds and the lifting body shape of another dropship was silhouetted from kilometers away. That was spitting distance for spacecraft flying down through the atmosphere, but the target was small and so was the drop zone. If we didn’t pack the flight path, we had the choice of dropping the troops over too big an area and having them take longer to reach the target, or sending the ships in a few at a time and not concentrating our force on the enemy.
“What do you see out there?” Scotty asked me on a private channel. The corner of my mouth turned up at how well he could read me.
“Two things,” I told him. “And Jack just left town.”
“Going in blind with no orbital prep. I like it, I love it, I want more of it.”
I grunted an unwilling laugh at his use of the age-old response of a Boot Camp recruit to the announcement that it was time for more physical training.
“One minute to drop,” the crew chief’s voice echoed inside my helmet.
Scotty would be telling the platoon, giving them last-second warnings and assurance. I found myself missing the days when there’d been someone to do that for me. I didn’t even get a pep talk from the Skipper, not with a dropship only capable of carrying a single platoon. All I had was my own doubts swirling around inside my brain, which was exactly as depressing as it sounds.
I didn’t remember hearing the crew chief announce it was time to drop, barely realized I was echoing the command, and had no clue I’d yanked the drop lever until I was falling into the night, still unable to see a damned thing. The clouds were low and thick and full of moisture, ideal for killing thermal and lidar, and all the radar could tell me was there was a shitload of other Vigilantes in the air, all heading for the same place.
Thanks, I never would have figured that out on my own.
At least the mapping software was still working, using dead-reckoning rather than any reliance on sensors. The one useful thing the Scout Service had been able to tell us about this place was that the minute our ships had appeared from Transition Space, the Tahni troops had begun chivvying the human settlers out of the single, boxy housing unit where they’d been keeping them and distributing them into hardened bunkers scattered around the fabrication plant. And each of those bunkers housed a heavy, rapid-fire coil gun that could knock a dropship out of the air, much less turn a Vigilante battlesuit into so much shrapnel.
Other companies were assigned to taking down the spaceport and the cargo-handling facilities, each of which had its own bunkers and its own human hostages. Delta had been given the plumb prize, the fabrication plant right at the center of town, twenty kilometers downriver from the spaceport. Estimates were that between twelve to twenty thousand human settlers had lived in Vistula proper before the war, and the Intelligence analysts who’d been parsing the data from the Scout Service drones had told us they estimated half of them were still alive.
Now, all we had to do was kill the Tahni who were using them as shields without killing the humans.
The platoon was spread out over nearly half a kilometer, the point of the company spear once again, the others coming in along our flanks, surrounding the bunkers, trying to keep them from having a single, massed target. The coil guns were firing. I knew it in my gut, even if I couldn’t see them, couldn’t detect anything even with the radar. Somewhere in those thoughts we don’t want to admit we have, I hoped they were shooting at the dropships or the assault shuttles and not us. I felt guilty about that, but I still hoped.
God had been listening, though, and just to show me what a shitheel He thought I was, he arranged for me to be in the perfect position to see the dropship go down. It had been burning a high-g boost upward, out of the drop dive, having divested itself of its load of Marines, but it hadn’t gotten away in time. The coil gun round took out its port turbines in a spray of fire and it went into a spin as the thrust all came from one side of the craft for just a heartbeat before the computers shut the other engine down.
If they’d had another three or four hundred meters, they might have pulled out of it, but the ship was too big and ungainly and unresponsive for that. I couldn’t even see the ground yet, but I heard the roar of the explosion, felt the gust of wind from the shockwave jolt me in mid-air, felt the heat from the flare of the blast even a kilometer away. The crew might have ejected. At least I told myself that.
Then the clouds parted and we were looking straight down the magnetic coils of the weapon, yawning like a cavern despite only being about 10mm across and nearly a kilometer away.
“First squad, take out that damned gun!”
Carson, for a change, didn’t need to be told twice. Or maybe it was Delp acting without orders, simply out of self-preservation, the way I would have if I could get away with running point. Missiles launched at the same time as the gun fired. It didn’t hit me or anyone in front of me, and my soles slammed into the ground with a jolt of reality, like the Skipper slapping me in the back of the head and telling me I wasn’t dead and needed to get to work.
The coil gun erupted in plumes of sublimated metal and ten-meter-long sparks of static electricity coming off the shattere
d superconductor cabling running along the inside of the electromagnets. A cold knife plunged into my guts at the thought of what the blast would do to the human captives inside the bunker, but the coil gun had been mounted on a gimballed turret near the rear of the reinforced concrete dome, and the force of the explosions had blown it backwards. Powdered concrete filled the air with a white haze and chunks of it carpeted the hard-pack dirt around the fabricator plant, but most of the dome was intact.
It was too much, too many details. I was watching IFF transponder signals in my HUD, keeping track of the rest of the company to make sure we weren’t drifting into their firing arcs, trying to keep my own position, trying to keep an eye on the sensors and the urgent messages coming in via text alerts. It was only a few seconds, but that was an eternity to be standing still in combat, and I didn’t see the Shock Troops pouring out from the hole in the back of the bunker until one of them shot me in the face.
I cried out, half a curse, half an incoherent shout at the pain of the gong-like ringing in my ears from the burst of tantalum darts punching into the armor of my helmet. I had often wondered why they didn’t put an actual visor on the front of the helmet, just in case the power went down or the sensors were damaged. Now I knew. If I’d had a transparent visor, no matter what it was made of, no matter how small it was, I would have been dead. Instead, my visual display flickered as a few of the micro-cameras built into the surface of the helmet died under the barrage, but the other sensors remained alive, and so did I.
I jerked the trigger of the plasma gun and the Tahni Shocktrooper disappeared in a star-bright explosion, the top half of his body disappearing, heavy infantry armor that might take an off-center hit from a Gauss gun no match at all for super-ionized hydrogen travelling at tens of thousands of meters per second. The exoskeleton the Shocktroopers used to move around the heavier armor, and what was basically a crew-served KE gun, kept the lower body standing despite the disintegration of everything above the hips, like some absurdist art piece in one of the more upscale parks in Trans Angeles.
The plasma shot had blown through the point-blank target and gone on to strike two more of the Tahni heavy infantry behind him, not quite achieving the same dramatic effect on them but still managing to burn through their armor and send them spinning to the dirt and mud. The Shocktroopers were schoolchildren trying to tackle full-grown adults, a good meter shorter than the Vigilante suits, lacking the isotope reactor, the heavy weapons and the massive armor that made us devastating in a fight. They were designed to fight the last war, when the best we’d had was powered armor that was the equivalent of theirs, and now they had High Guard suits to fight us and the Shocktroopers were obsolete and even a tactical liability with their thermal signature and lack of mobility, but the military is the military, no matter the species and when the military has that much gear sitting around, well, hell, they might as well use it.
The plasma gun’s capacitors were recharging and I was too close for missiles, even if I would have wasted one on the metal midgets, so I swung with my armored left fist and smashed two of them aside as if they were nothing. And abruptly, there were no more of them in front of me, the balance of the troops who had swarmed out of the damaged bunker charred into cinders by the fire of a platoon’s worth of plasma gunfire.
“Carson, check the bunker.”
But I could see Delp’s IFF transponder already inside, near the hole we’d blown in the back where the coil gun had been mounted, anticipating my order and Carson’s relay of it. The kid was good. If I could just make sure he didn’t wind up getting killed like Henckel, he might wind up a squad leader himself.
“Clear of enemy in here,” Delp reported. “But we got some civilians and they’re in pretty bad shape.”
I loped around to the other side of the bunker, keeping an eye on the display, watching Second and Third squads carry out the plan and push forward to the fabrication plant with Scotty riding herd on them. Fourth hung back and watched our six, staying in reserve in case Covington called on us for help. The other platoons were dealing with their own bunkers, and I pushed down an instinct to send people to help them, or go myself.
Follow the op order. Fight to the plan.
The hole in the wall of the bunker was big enough, the ceiling high enough that I could fit my armor through if I scrambled over some fallen concrete. I had steeled myself to the civilians inside being injured by the heat of the missile strike, even some being buried by rubble, but that wasn’t the problem.
I had also prepared myself for them being starved almost to death, the way the captives had been on Demeter. They were skinny, but not skeleton-thin, not malnutrition-thin. They’d been eating regularly, though clearly not as much as they would have liked. Their clothes were dirty and patched, but they didn’t hang off their bodies, and they had jackets and boots, so they hadn’t been left exposed to the elements.
They’d been shot.
It was clear what had happened from the divots in the walls, the blood spatter behind them. There’d been twenty, maybe thirty of them pushed against the far wall, their hands bound behind their backs, feet hobbled. The attempted execution had been hasty, performed with a long burst of fire from two or three of the Shocktroopers firing their heavy KE guns, and it had been far from efficient. Ten or twelve of the captives had been killed outright, torn apart, taking the brunt of the bursts of tiny, tantalum darts, but there were at least as many wounded, some of them horribly. I saw white bone and missing fingers and someone holding their insides with their hands before I pulled out and closed my eyes and still couldn’t get the image out of my head.
“We need Search and Rescue down here,” I called on the general campaign net and heard nothing in reply. We were still being jammed. Dammit.
“What should we do, sir?” Delp asked. There was anguish in his voice.
“There’s nothing we can do right now,” I told him. “Search and Rescue will come down here once we’ve secured the place, so that’s the best thing we can do for them.” I found Carson on the IFF overlay and turned toward her. “First squad, leapfrog Second and Third and…”
I’d been working it out in my head, keeping the big picture in mind, doing everything I’d been told to do, and everything seemed to be going according to plan. For once. I should have known it wouldn’t last.
“We got High Guard!” Scotty called from somewhere ahead of us, closer to the fabrication plant. “Company strength!”
He was still talking but I could see it for myself, the battlesuits bursting through the upper-floor windows of the fabricator plant on jump-jets, shrouded in the launch-trail smoke of their missiles and I wanted to lead, wanted to direct, and there was absolutely no time and the only thing I could say, the only thing I had time to think of, was two words.
“Assault through!”
13
I’d just ordered the entire company to attack.
I had, I realized in a horrified flash of insight, been switched over to the company net, ready to report the attack to Covington. It made sense and it was probably the correct call, and I don’t know if it made a difference since there wasn’t anything else to be done, but I could see the IFF transponders of the whole company surging forward behind my platoon.
We were outrunning the missiles by flying straight into them, a tactic I’d learned from Lt. Ackley. Their warheads, like ours, had a minimum arming distance, and unlike ours, they were manually guided by an ocular inside the helmets, because of that whole business of a Tahni having to personally be responsible for every life they took. Which meant that charging into a swarm of missiles wasn’t actually insane, it just looked that way.
It certainly felt that way, watching firefly swarms of rocket engines heading straight for me, but all I could do was open the throttle for the suit’s jets and…
“Fire!”
I’d been giving the order to my own platoon, but the whole company followed it, a barrage of plasma lighting up the whole front wall of the fabr
ication plant like a false sunrise for just a fraction of a second. Not all the shots hit home because we were jetting in at maximum thrust, the acceleration pushing us into the bottom of our suits, chins buried in our chests. The enemy was careening headlong into us and the missiles were only a few dozen meters away…but where they didn’t hit, they distracted, which was the point.
Tahni missiles went corkscrewing out of control, or slammed into the ground with flares of impotent rage and if any of them hit, they didn’t hit my people.
And then I began to break the rules. There was no way to keep track of my Marines, not in the madness and chaos of the melee, and I concentrated on just surviving the next few seconds. I’d fired my plasma gun and I wasn’t a hundred percent certain I’d hit anything with it because there were so many enemy suits and so many of ours firing, but I knew I couldn’t fire again for two seconds, and that was eternity.