by Rick Partlow
The High Guard suit coming straight at me could still fire, and did, and a crackling electron beam hit my suit in the lower leg and I screamed. Heat flooded the suit and I was suddenly trapped inside a convection oven, the breath stolen from my lungs, sweat baked away before it could cool me, and searing pain shot up from my right foot. I couldn’t stop to figure out how badly I was hurt; however bad it was, it wasn’t as bad as dead, which was my destination if I hesitated. I forced my eyes back into focus, swerved at just the last second, then spun and slammed the suit’s left fist into the side of the High Guard trooper’s helmet.
The concussion nearly sent me tumbling out of control in the air, but it did worse to him. His suit went spinning head over heels, the jets pinwheeling him into the ground and burying his armor half a meter into the mud. I knew what that would do to him because I knew what it would have done to me, and I knew if he wasn’t dead from a shattered spine, he certainly wouldn’t be rejoining the fight.
All I could concentrate on was a narrow space around me, and another suit popped into it, coming into view as I swung my legs around and decelerated. We fired at the same time and I wasn’t sure where his electron beam went but my plasmoid took him directly through the chest. The Tahni soldier inside was incinerated and the blast of super-ionized hydrogen passed right through and spent the balance of its kinetic and thermal energy in the isotope power pack worn like a rucksack behind the suit’s shoulders. The reactor died and the battlesuit’s jets sputtered out a microsecond later, sending him downward with sickening certainty.
And then it was over, just as quickly as it had begun, and there were no more High Guard suits, just burning hulks on the ground. And a few of ours were burning down there with them. I’d killed two, maybe three, and disappointment at the middling performance warred with disappointment at breaking my own rules and getting involved in the fighting.
I checked the IFF transponders as I descended, before I even checked my own damage, running down through each squad and finding…
Shit.
“Majid!” I called to the Fourth squad leader. Fourth was still back behind the lines of the bunkers, not close enough to have been part of the assault and one of the transponders had gone black. Maybe it was a malfunction. It was possible. I touched the ground and my leg didn’t give way, which was a good sign.
“Majid!” I repeated. “Where’s Valentine?”
“Sir….” Christian Majid’s voice was hoarse, like he’d swallowed cotton, and I wasn’t sure if he was going to finish the thought. “One of the missiles, sir. It just…she’s gone, sir.”
I limped toward him, not willing to accept it, needing to see for myself. It was hard to believe it was the same ground I’d passed over only a couple minutes before. Everything was on fire, buried under layers of white smoke, and the ground was torn to shreds, as if an excavator had begun prep work for some big construction project. The remains of the dropship were burning fiercely, lighting the whole place up like mid-day and throwing eerie shadows from the concrete domes of the bunkers.
The bunkers were cracked and crumbled and pouring smoke, and civilians were shuffling out of a couple of them, barely able to walk with their ankles hobbled by plastic straps. I felt like someone should cut them free, but that was precision work for something three meters tall with one articulated hand and the fingers on that six centimeters wide. I wasn’t about to tell one of my troops to get out of their armor yet.
I didn’t want to look at Valentine. I’d been letting my eyes wander about the battlefield, willing to take in all the other ugliness, all the death and destruction, but she was one of mine. She would be the first casualty under my command. I didn’t want it to be true, and if I could put off knowing it, put off seeing it, maybe it wouldn’t be real. But life didn’t work that way, and I should have known. I’d never seen my father’s body, or my brother’s, never wanted to look at them, but they’d both been just as dead.
So was Private Sera Valentine. The missile had hit her just right, center mass, and there was nothing left of her suit’s torso but twisted, burning metal. The arms and legs had blown off and were scattered in the cardinal directions and I was grateful I couldn’t see whether her own limbs were still inside.
I tried to say something to Majid but my mouth was dry and I couldn’t get the words out.
“Mark the spot,” I managed to tell him. “We’ll come back and…take care of her.”
“Third Platoon, do you read?” It was Covington, and the fact he was able to talk to me meant he was within line of sight. I found his IFF signal and picked him out of the Headquarters Platoon, just now descending from their drop, the coil-gun-toting Boomers strolling in like a police tactical team back in the Underground, always too late to do any good.
“This is Third Platoon.” I almost didn’t recognize my own voice, so dull and lifeless was its tone. “We have our section of the perimeter secured. One KIA, Private Valentine.” I finally noticed the damage report on my own suit. The Tahni electron beam hadn’t actually touched flesh, just burned off a few centimeters of the suit’s footpad, but I did have second-degree burns from the knee down. I shrugged it off. “No serious WIA. Some minor suit damage. We have multiple civilian dead and badly wounded and need Search and Rescue in here ASAP.”
“They’re on their way,” he assured me. “I need you to move into the fabrication center and root out any conventional infantry the Tahni might have still holed up in there before they get the idea of taking the civilians out before we get to them.”
“Too late,” I told him, more cold-blooded and matter-of-fact than I’d meant to. “Yes, sir, on it.” I switched nets back to the platoon. “Carson, take First squad, head up to the second floor and make entry through the busted-out windows. Grenade launchers only unless you spot more High Guard troopers inside. Scotty, you stay with Second and Third and bust through the front cargo doors. Careful for demo charges. Use plasma guns to take down the doors before you enter.”
“Roger that, sir,” Scotty acknowledged.
“What about Fourth, LT?” Majid asked me. He still sounded shaken by Valentine’s death and I was tempted to have him sit this out, but Fourth had already been held in reserve during the initial assault and still managed to take a casualty.
“Follow First squad through the upper windows,” I told him, “and maintain position on the upper floors as overwatch.” Which, I thought, sounded better than “stay back in case we need you, because I don’t trust that your head’s in the game.”
I’d already given the order, and I had resigned myself to restating it to get Carson moving, but she surprised me again by taking the initiative and moving her people ahead without having to be told. Delp rocketed upward through the shattered polymer windows of the fabrication plant’s upper floor, with the rest of his fire-team close behind. I waited for the Bravo team and Carson to disappear through the lingering clouds of smoke and into the giant windows, gave it a silent count of three, then hit my own jets and followed.
“Second and Third, move in,” I called from ten meters up, just before I hit the hole.
Smoke and dust refracted stray shafts of light from what was left of the ceiling lamps, fighting a losing battle with the deep shadows inside the place. The upper floor of the plant was a catwalk surrounding the slapdash, cobbled-together machinery of the industrial fabricators, built from spare parts by the wildcat settlers and expanded as they’d acquired more pieces. It had extended outward and upward and they’d added the catwalk as an afterthought to service the parts that were too high to reach even with maintenance gantries. I landed on the wooden floorboards gingerly, fearing the weight of the Vigilante would send me crashing through, but it was sturdy enough to support me and I took a step toward the edge.
Below, on the factory floor, the machinery was a cold blue on thermal, and my troops were red-hot, moving through it, maintaining their formation as best they could among the obstacles in their way. My gut clenched, expecting the stacks
of fabricators to be rigged with explosives like the roof supports back on Demeter, but perhaps I’d given this particular Tahni garrison more credit for fanaticism than they deserved. I tried to put myself in their place, abandoned, left without support or guidance, but not quite as desperate as the troops on Demeter. No civilian resistance to speak of, no sabotage, nothing to make them bitter and enraged.
Yet they’d tried to execute the prisoners anyway, were using them as shields. Maybe the Tahni didn’t need to be desperate to massacre our civilians. Maybe they knew better than we did just what sort of war this was.
Deep-throated thumps floated upward from the floor, the distinctive sound of grenade launchers, and two seconds later, the kettle-drum rattle of detonation, a rolling echo through the forest of metal. The floor cracked beneath me as I jumped over the railing and fed a burst of power to the jets, turning a leg-breaking, ten-meter fall into a stomp of spiked soles against the concrete. I resisted the urge to ask for a status report, not wanting to be one of those platoon leaders, but finding myself with a new-found appreciation of their frustration at being responsible for everything and in control of nothing.
Fabrication machinery loomed over me, from floor to ceiling, simple enough that the settlers had been able to construct it from nothing, but far too complicated for me to understand. I weaved through the maze of the machines, following the hollow bang of grenades and the spiteful crack of Tahni KE guns and lasers replying, until there was no more response.
The Tahni and their human prisoners had been squeezed into a storage room connected to the fabrication plant by a broad cargo door. There’d once been pallet after pallet of manufactured goods lined up along the walls in the room, their square outlines still present as stains on the concrete, but now the cargo crates were packed together into barricades, cover for the Tahni soldiers. A crew-served KE gun had been mounted behind one of the barricades, but its barrels were canted downward now, the Tahni soldiers who had crewed it splashed across the floor by grenade rounds. Their light armor was next to useless against modern military weapons, though I suppose it might offer protection against sidearms or the obsolete slug-shooters they still used out in the colonies.
Makeshift barricades had been bulldozed over by First squad’s Vigilantes and more of the enemy troops were buried beneath heavy cargo boxes, their weapons lying on the ground beside them. Laser carbines. I didn’t recall ever seeing one on the battlefield before. They were only issued to rear-echelon troops, the Tahni equivalent of clerks and technicians, and they were nearly useless against Drop Troopers, not even really effective against Force Recon personal armor.
They were perfect for unarmored civilians though.
There’d been probably two hundred people jammed against the far wall of the warehouse, tied and hobbled like the others. None of these had escaped. They’d had time to be thorough, to fire burst after burst of their laser carbines into the huddled mass of humanity, hundreds of rounds, maybe thousands, until the cement-block wall behind them was charred and blackened and spattered with blood. Not a single body stirred, not a single moan rose from the corpses piled on the floor. Most had been chopped to pieces.
These weren’t like the survivors at Demeter, just the young and strong. There were children, toddlers and the only reason I hadn’t descended into madness was that I couldn’t see their faces in the sullen darkness of the unlit warehouse. I checked on thermal for body heat, checked the sonic sensors for heartbeats, for breathing and found nothing. They were all dead, every single one.
The bulk of the Tahni were still alive. I’d never seen it before, but they’d laid down their guns and gone to their knees, a cluster of at least a hundred of them, maybe half again more than that. Some were wounded, but most didn’t have dirt on their uniforms. They were surrendering.
Delp stood a few meters from the front rank of them, unmoving, as if staring at them in disbelief, and the rest of the squad hadn’t even formed into a combat wedge, just standing and watching. I couldn’t see their faces, but decided if I could, they might have been as stunned as I was.
I switched on my shoulder spotlight and shone it across the Tahni. They’d taken off their helmets and their faces were clearly visible, so close to human and yet not quite there. The ridged brows, the flattened noses, the broad, cauliflower ears, those were just the external signs. The real differences were inside, and not the internal organs, which weren’t entirely dissimilar to ours, but inside those heads.
Captain Covington had told me once that he’d gotten his college degree in Ancient History, specializing in the Roman Republic. He’d said the way those humans of ancient Rome thought about life, the way they’d approached it, the way they’d believed with every fiber of their beings in gods who controlled every aspect of existence, was more alien to us today than the Tahni could ever be. But staring at them now, I didn’t believe him. The Romans would never have expected to be able to surrender after what they’d done.
“Sir…,” Joanna Carson choked off, her voice failing her. “Sir, what do we do?”
What should I do? What would the Skipper do? What would Lt. Ackley have done?
I looked back at the dead civilians, letting my light play over them. A child’s face stared back at me, about the same age as I was when my mother had been killed.
Delp answered the question for me. He fired his plasma gun through the front rank, killing a score of them with one shot. The Tahni screamed and tried to run, and the rest of the squad opened up on them without hesitation, plasma and grenade launchers lighting the dark warehouse up with a cacophonous firework show.
I should have stopped them, should have been yelling, screaming orders.
I turned and walked out, letting the thump of my footsteps on the concrete drown out the screams and the gunfire. Scotty met me in the doorway to the warehouse and somehow, the featureless face of his armor seemed disapproving.
“Sir,” he said, hesitant, stuttering. “Were those Tahni trying to surrender?”
I stared at the bare metal and tried to imagine his face beneath it. Was there horror playing across those farmboy features? Disbelief?
“No,” I told him, stepping past and heading back outside. “Tahni never surrender.”
14
“You want another drink, sugar?”
I squinted up at the bartender and tried to remember what planet I was on.
The bar was no sort of evidence. It was the same sort of hand-built pressed wood and brick place you could find on any of a hundred colonies, easy to put up with local materials without investing in imported polymers or settling for ugly, cheap buildfoam with no sort of character to it. There might have once been art on the walls, or pictures of former patrons, or something to give the place some individuality, some identity, but they’d disappeared during the occupation. Even though the Tahni had been gone for three weeks now and the bar was open again, the memories hadn’t returned, just left a gap, an empty hole in the heart of the world.
The woman was still staring at me expectantly, the bottle of crystal-clear vodka poised in her hand, the spout hovering over my empty glass. She was older, though she didn’t look it, not even after ten months of Tahni occupation. The people here hadn’t had it that bad, at least not compared to the colonists on Demeter or Vistula. They hadn’t been starved, and before the Fleet had jumped into the system, the Scout Service had managed to get a message to the civilians and most had evacuated the city and hid in a cave system outside their only major city, so they’d avoided the massacres others had experienced.
“Do you know,” I said to her, my voice slurred ever so slightly, whether from the alcohol or the exhaustion I wasn’t sure, “that something like ninety percent of everyone who lives on Earth will never travel more than five kilometers from the place they were born?”
The blond woman shrugged and the motion did interesting things to the low-cut blouse she wore.
“I was born here,” she informed me. “And I ain’t ever been farthe
r than the coast for the weekend with my folks. But I guess that’s more than five kilometers.”
“Almost anyone could emigrate to one of the colonies, you know that?” I went on, hearing her answer but not really processing it. “All you gotta do is volunteer and someone would ship you out to a colony on a work contract, even if you couldn’t afford to support yourself. But no one wants to go.” I shook my head. “I never met a single motherfucker from the Underground, no matter how bad they had it who wanted to leave. They didn’t want to have to work. They got a free place to live, free food, free entertainment, and if it meant living in a box three meters by three meters, well, it was a sure thing, you know? Hell,” I scoffed, “I didn’t have one of those three-meter-square boxes. I was living on the street, stealing, conning, sleeping in maintenance tunnels and if anyone had asked me if I would leave the planet and go live on a colony world, I would have said, ‘fuck no,’ because who wanted to go somewhere and work the rest of your life?”
“Well, there is the whole war thing, you know?” she reminded me, waiting patiently with the bottle. “Maybe they were onto something.”
“Nobody in the Underground knew or cared about the Tahni before Mars,” I assured her, my words gaining clarity and coherence with my own certainty. “I’d barely heard of them. They didn’t want to go—I didn’t want to go—because we belonged on Earth. That’s what we all thought. There wasn’t a damned thing for me on Earth, not a chance to be anything except another shuffling zombie, but I wouldn’t have left if they hadn’t made me go.”
“Well, this is all just interesting as hell, sugar,” she said, an indulgent tone to her voice, “but I do have other customers, so I still need an answer. Do you want another drink?”
I laughed softly and touched my ‘link to the terminal in front of me on the bar.