Danger Close #3 Drop Trooper

by Rick Partlow

  “Shit,” or some variation thereof seemed to be the most popular response to the news. It was a useful word, packed with all sorts of varying emotional content, from fear to excitement to disbelief.

  “The planet has three major cities and our brigade is going to hit all three at once, but that’s just the main event. Before that, we got an opening act, and like most opening acts, it’s bound to be smaller, shorter and probably disappointing.”

  I didn’t have a huge holographic projector like McCauley, so I settled on the tiny screen on the compartment wall showing them the star system. I centered the image on the gas giant and traced the moon around to the front of it. It was mostly white, covered in ice caps that stretched from the poles more than halfway to the equator and the rest was mostly ocean-blue with just narrow strips of green and brown.

  “This is Valius, the largest moon of the gas giant Dionysus. And it is large, as big as Mars. The scientists think it used to be a planet in its own right, but some big game of cosmic shuffleboard happened and it was knocked free of its orbit and wound up being captured by Dionysus’ gravity. Whatever, it’s there now and it’s at least partially habitable. The part that’s not completely covered in ice. But habitable don’t mean comfortable, and you’re going to be damned glad you’re wearing armor. The Force Recon guys we’re following in aren’t going to be nearly as comfortable.”

  I touched the screen again and brought up a computer simulation of two dropships.

  “We’re going in during a bombardment, which will be carefully calculated to be just enough for their deflector dishes to protect against, but this time we don’t need to worry about taking out the deflectors. In fact, we want to keep them doing their thing as long as possible, to cover us doing ours.”

  I traced a line and the dropships followed a nap-of-the-earth course through a mountain range until they came to a pass and dropped dozens of tiny figures.

  “We’re going to cover the Force Recon infiltration team as they head through a mountain pass and down into the valley where the industrial facility is located and they’re going in to bust free the civilian workers being held there.”

  “What kind of an industrial facility is it?” Kreis asked me.

  “Some sort of chemical separation,” I said. “It’s in the detailed notes in the op order you’ll all be getting via your ‘links. There’s not much of a human presence in the plant, about fifty of them at last report, but higher wants them all busted free and taken out on the dropships. Our job is to take out any High Guard presence, provide fire support for the Force Recon units when they bring out the civilians and guard the LZ when the dropships come in. If possible, we’re to wipe out as much of the Tahni military presence at the facility as possible, but the main goal is to evac the civilians.”

  “This seems like a lot of trouble to go to for fifty people,” one of the team leaders in Third squad, a corporal named Cronin said, scowling. “I mean, I know they’re humans and we want to save them if we can, but isn’t this a lot of risk for a handful of industrial workers?”

  “It’s all part of a clean sweep through the outer system,” I explained. “We’re just a small part of it, one platoon. The rest of the company will be hitting the orbital gas mines around Dionysus and believe me, we got the better end of that deal. At least here, if your armor takes a hit and you survive, you can breathe the atmosphere.”

  Cronin shuddered. He was young, younger than me, but he had a pale, sallow face like he was already middle-aged.

  “Anyway, we pull this off, everyone else pulls off their part of things, while, at the same time, God willing, the Fleet is taking out the Tahni Imperial Navy destroyers and corvettes, and clearing out the inner system. Then we evac all the civilians and ride the troop carriers in close to Silvanus and get briefed along the way on our next target.” I shrugged. “I’ve got a list of possible operations we might be running in the op order, but nothing is going to be decided until we get more intelligence from the planet. For now, we’re going to be doing a few simulator runs that are programmed with the terrain and conditions we’ll be facing.” I checked the time. “It’s an hour till lunch. Everyone meet up in Simulator Bay Three immediately after lunch. No later than two hours from now or we’ll lose our spot to Fourth Platoon. You got me?”

  “Yes, sir!” The response was spirited for all the doubts they’d shown earlier.

  “Dismissed then.”

  “Get to the armory,” Scotty snapped before they could start to disperse. “Run a maintenance check on your suits. Shouldn’t take more than half an hour, so you’ll have time before you head to eat.” There was a chorus of moans and complaints but Scotty scoffed at them. “Yeah, yeah, what else were you gonna do? Go back to your racks and download porn? Get going!”

  He watched them go, smiling fondly, like he was their schoolteacher. I wondered how he did it.

  “They’re not bad Marines,” I said after the last of them was clear of the compartment and out of earshot. “But not a one of them is better than mediocre in a Vigilante except Delp, and he’s no Henckel. I’m just not seeing any more Marines like Henckel coming to this company, Scotty.”

  He grinned with that same knowing, school-teacher expression.

  “Or like you, you mean,” he assumed.

  “Me, Vicky, Top, the Skipper.”

  “What?” he asked, laughing. “Not me?”

  “Scotty, you are one hell of a platoon sergeant,” I told him, “and a great NCO. There’s no one else I’d want as Gunny on my platoon.”

  “But I’m not a natural with the suit the way you are,” he finished for me. “The way Henckel was. And you know what, Cam, if Henckel hadn’t gotten himself killed, he’d probably be an officer himself right now, because he and you are just what the Corps is looking for to send to OCS. You don’t see Marines like him because they all get kicked upward.”

  “I’m not sure that’s a good idea.” I shook my head and stared at the flat viewscreen on the bulkhead. It was turned off and all I could see in it was my reflection.

  “Just because someone’s good in a battlesuit doesn’t mean they’re going to be a good leader.”

  18

  I was in the mess, eating alone at the officers’ table when she ambushed me.

  “You’re Alvarez.”

  I twisted around in my chair and looked up at the woman…and then up some more. She was tall, a few centimeters taller than me, and didn’t have the look of a low-gravity native either. There were muscles under her fatigues, and the combination of her build and something oddly girly about the cut of her red hair held a strange appeal. She was, I saw by her rank markings, a 2nd lieutenant.

  “That’s me,” I admitted.

  “I’m Palmer,” she announced as if that explained everything, sticking out a long-fingered hand. “I’m the PL of the Force Recon platoon going in with you on Valius.”

  “Oh, yeah, nice to meet you.” I stood quickly, shaking her hand. Her grip was firm, testing, and I tried to give it my best, although most of us Drop Troopers didn’t spend quite the same amount of time in the ship’s fitness center as the Force Recon types. There wasn’t as much call for bulging muscles when you had a two-ton metal suit to do your dirty work. “Did you and your people want to schedule a joint walk-through before we drop?”

  “Naw, it’s pretty straight-forward,” she said, slashing negation as if she were chopping the idea in the throat. “My boys and girls can handle it if yours can. We got the hard part anyways—all you got to do is stand around and look pretty.” She grinned and I couldn’t tell if it was friendly, mocking or a come-on. She looked me up and down in frank appraisal, and I still couldn’t tell. “You ain’t bad for a jackhead. We got twenty hours till Transition. Want to grab a drink? I brought the good stuff along, not the homemade hooch the enlisted smuggle aboard.”

  And I did. I did want to and it was maddening. It was as if God and Satan had got together one more time after deciding they’d had so much fun tor
menting and tempting Job, and arranged an encore for me. I was not God’s gift to women and rarely the target of anyone looking for a cheap thrill. The relationships I’d had in the Underground, if relationship wasn’t too strong a word for them, had been fueled by a mutual and transitory need for protection and warmth and they’d only lasted until one or both of us got arrested.

  There’d been Maria, of course. I tried not to think about the brief time we’d had together, not least because it hurt too badly to remember what had happened to her, but also because it hadn’t felt real. We’d been wrapped in a bubble of unreality and we’d known it wouldn’t last.

  But now, when I had someone I’d tried to commit to, I couldn’t turn around without someone propositioning me.

  “Thanks,” I said, “but I have duty after dinner. Maybe after the mission.” And no, I didn’t mean it, but I figured it was easier to lie than to try to explain the real reason.

  “Maybe,” she said with a shrug that seemed to be carefully calculated to be indifferent. “Or maybe not.”

  I watched her go and once she’d left, my meal didn’t seem so appetizing. I tossed it into the recycler and stalked back to my compartment. Having a room to myself was one of the perks of being an officer, or maybe one of the downsides, because it forced even more isolation onto an isolating job. I don’t know what I’d intended to do once I got there, but what I wound up doing was pulling out the tablet again, setting it up on its stand and priming it for another video message.

  “Hey Vicky.” I waved at the screen, unable to smile. “Okay, I’ve been doing some thinking since last time. I told you…well, I was going to tell you I thought we should end things in the last message, if I’d had the nerve to send it. I’d been so damned tempted to run off and have some fun with a local girl and I’d barely stopped myself. Today, just now, I had to turn down what might have been an innocent drink with a Force Recon platoon leader, because I thought it might have turned into something else and I felt like I couldn’t say no if I went along with it.”

  I paced in front of the camera lens and I could see the dome-shaped ocular following me with each step.

  “And I had to ask myself, why did I say no? If I really think we’re not going to last, that you’re not coming back after you get your platoon, why would I say no? I’m about to be part of the biggest military operation of the war and the odds are, I won’t be coming back from it. Why would I turn down a little fun when it might be my last time, when it doesn’t really mean anything?’

  I stopped and sat down on the bunk in front of the tablet.

  “And I think I know. You give me hope. Somehow, knowing you believe I could live through this makes me believe it, too. It’s the only thing that does. I know the kids coming in now believe they’re immortal, but I never thought that. I knew I was going to die, because everyone close to me had died in front of me. I was expecting it, welcoming it even. Until I met you. You didn’t just give me something to want to live for, you gave me a reason to think I might actually survive. And I’m not ready to give that up.

  “This job, being an officer, it’s claustrophobic in a way being inside a Vigilante never was for me. You’re more alone than you ever have been, with no real authority but shitloads of responsibility. You’re a human shit-catching machine, that’s what one of the NCOs at OCS told me. NCOs, she said, are the real backbone of the Corps, and when shit happens and things go wrong and everyone starts throwing the blame around, well, shit rolls downhill. But they can’t let it roll down all the way to the NCOs because they need them.” I grinned despite the gnawing feeling in my guts. “So that’s why God made 2nd lieutenants, to block that shit before it can hit the NCOs.” I snorted. “You should have heard Scotty laugh his ass off when I told him that one.

  “Anyway, you’re going to find out about that, but I hope when you do, I can be there for you, so you won’t feel as isolated as I have. But right now, you’re the only thing keeping me going. Maybe it’s selfish, maybe it’s stupid, but I can’t let you go. I can’t let us go. And I’m not going to. I love you. And I’ll still be here if you come back to me.”

  I didn’t hesitate this time, just deleted it. These messages weren’t for her, I’d realized that. They were for me. I was going to work through this without dropping it all on her shoulders while she was trying to get through OCS, through the transition to being an officer.

  I thought about recording another, more innocuous message like the others I’d sent, but decided against it. She’d be graduating soon and God knows if it would catch up with her before she left for whatever unit she was going to report to.

  And I…I was going to get some sleep. Because we did Transition in twenty hours and there wouldn’t be a spare minute for it after that.

  “I don’t mind Transition, I really don’t,” Scotty said, his voice a buzz in my ear. “But I really wish I didn’t have to go through it every fucking time in the suit.”

  “You don’t,” I reminded him. “You just sleep through it every other time. I wish I could. Because I do mind Transition, even when we aren’t jumping into the middle of a battle.”

  “Oh, sorry, sir,” he chuckled. “I didn’t mean to whine at my superior officer or anything.”

  He was right, though, it did suck riding out the Transition inside the guts of a dropship, wrapped in a battlesuit.

  “Ten seconds to Transition,” the crew chief told us.

  I didn’t try to count it down in my head because I always wound up psyching myself out. Instead, I just let my thoughts drift and when the universe twisted itself inside out and took me with it, it came as a surprise. I ground my teeth the way I always did, trying to wrest back a concept of self from a microscopically brief sense of being spread out through the entirety of creation.

  I hoped the Attack Command pilots handled it better than I did, because they were truly in the shit. I’d tapped into the Iwo’s tactical feed the minute we came out and playing out across the display of my helmet’s HUD was what might have been the most hellish nightmare of a space battle I’d seen in my three years fighting this fucking war. Wave after wave of missile cutters boosted away from the Transition point, a new starfield made up of hundreds of fusion drives, diving into the teeth of the enemy.

  “Here we go,” Scotty said, an uncharacteristic excitement for the carnage in his tone. I glanced to my left, where I knew his suit was, even though I couldn’t see him. I wasn’t used to that sort of bloodthirsty voyeurism from the backwoods farmboy, but then he didn’t usually get to watch the battles. I’d tapped his suit into the feed because he’d bugged me about it for the last three days.

  The Tahni’s primary interstellar interceptor was a bulbous, utilitarian craft they called something unpronounceable and we called, for some weird reason involving old water-navy terminology, a corvette. Unlike our missile cutters, the corvettes weren’t meant to fly in an atmosphere and their lack of aerodynamics gave them an ungainly ugliness that only made them seem more dangerous. They were cheap and easy to produce and the Tahni turned them out by the thousands and threw them at us like the three-person crews were expendable, little better than living robots.

  I’d never seen as many of the things in one place as I saw gathered around the orbit of Dionysus. The image seemed incredibly close, but I knew it was actually millions of kilometers away and minutes old, the feed from the external cameras of one of the missile cutters transmitted back to the Iwo. The Attack Command boats had come along tucked into three of their skeletal star carriers, and the kilometers-long vessels usually stayed out at the very edge of the system, lacking any armament and all but the barest hint of armor. Their only means of defense was escape, so it stayed far enough away that it could spot incoming threats and just jump out of the system if it needed to.

  The carriers were vital, not because the missile cutters couldn’t have come this far on their own but simply because the trip inside the tiny vessels would have worn on the flight crews without a chance to stretch the
ir legs, exercise and breathe something beside their own body odor. And they were right behind us, just a million kilometers back, spitting distance in cosmic terms, tempting targets just hanging there in space.

  Our cutter crews went in fresh and that was about the only obvious advantage we had. The numbers were on the Tahni side, anyone could see that just by the sensor readout, by the swarms of red avatars all over our blue ones. Tinier signatures separated from the red and blue, ejected outward like confetti before streaking out towards the enemy lines on high-g boosts from quick-burnout rocket motors.

  Out there, beyond visual range even for the Attack Command cutter who was our eyes and ears in the battle, countermeasures warred with wave after wave of missiles, fighting a battle so evenly matched that I often wondered why our forces didn’t make some sort of deal with theirs to just skip the missile launches altogether and save all that time and money. Here and there, a burst of gamma rays accompanied one of our ships popping into Transition space and coming out just a few million kilometers away, avoiding a missile that wouldn’t be fooled by electrostatic chaff, or destroyed by oversized shotguns spreading out high-speed ball-bearings in the paths of the warheads.

  And then the fight began in earnest, with squadrons of cutters jumping in unison, popping back into existence in beam range of globular formations of the Tahni corvettes and cutting loose with volley after volley of proton cannons. Lasers and coil guns responded and flares of sublimating metal winked in the night. It would have been fascinating to watch if I hadn’t known men and women were dying with each of those sparks, like a ballet played out across tens of millions of kilometers, in and out, through another reality and back.

  The missile cutters fascinated me. The larger ships like the Iwo or the star carriers couldn’t make the short hops through Transition space, or so I’d been told by the Fleet pilots who I’d encountered at bars bragging about their rides. The power requirements to create the rift into Transition space increased exponentially over a certain diameter, which was one of the reasons the Fleet hadn’t deployed their massive star cruisers at the cutting edge of the war front. You didn’t commit something that huge and expensive and packed with human crew to a knife-fight without the ability to jump back out if things got too hot.