Danger Close #3 Drop Trooper

by Rick Partlow

  “What about the Recon platoon?” I asked him. “Does anyone have eyes on them?”

  I gave another wrench to the left, digging my right foot into the dirt or rock or whatever it was wedged up against and finally I was free.

  “Negative, sir,” Scotty said. “There’s too much dust in the air, no one can see shit.”

  I pushed my suit up to its feet, climbing up a pile of rocks nearly as tall as the Vigilante, almost falling again when part of the stack gave way and banged against the back of the right leg. Scotty was right, everything was a grey haze of dust, but it was thinning out and thermal imaging began to show me the isotope reactors of the battlesuits all around me, displaying distorted images of vaguely humanoid shapes struggling to dig themselves out of the rockslide.

  I scanned farther back, trying to find the Recon Marines. They’d started out behind us, but some of them had move to the sides, trying to show us they could keep up with the suits. Rock and dirt were piled up nearly three meters deep across the trail for a good fifty meters on either side of our formation. Another aftershock hit while I was turning in a full circle, trying to find any sign of them, and I nearly went down again. Smaller swathes of dirt tumbled down off the hillside, but the largest rocks had already fallen and there weren’t any left to add their weight to the pile.

  “Palmer,” I tried again. “Anyone in Force Recon, please reply.”

  She was right there, about thirty meters behind me. I could see her IFF transponder pinging. But where it said she would be, there was only a pile of granite and loose soil. I stepped carefully, trying not to lose my footing and trying not to step on anyone who might be trapped. She was at my feet. Somewhere.

  What we really needed was a Search and Rescue team, but we weren’t going to get one, not until we took out those Tahni. Hell, I couldn’t even call for one without bringing down a missile strike on our heads. I dug into one of the larger rocks with the articulated claw at the end of my Vigilante’s left hand and tossed it aside, the servomotors whining in protest at the weight. In standard gravity, it would have been a good 500 kilos, and even here it weighed well over 200. I had to be careful not to throw it on top of one of the other reported positions, and I wound up heaving it a good ten meters. It landed in a cloud of dust and fragments and I tried to look through the gap its absence had created, tried to find her beneath the ton of rocks and still saw nothing.

  “Palmer, can you hear me?”

  Her IFF signal went black.

  Shit.

  “Sir,” Scotty asked me, “what do you want us to do?”

  I thought hard and thought fast. If we tried to dig them out ourselves, we could wind up killing them. If they were still alive when we dug them out, we couldn’t do a damned thing for them because we didn’t have the medical supplies to treat internal injuries and multiple broken bones. And if we called for help, they were dead. There was only one choice and it sucked hard.

  “We can’t get them out ourselves,” I decided. “We have to go take out the Tahni troops occupying the base and call for Search and Rescue once the area is clear.”

  “But Cam…sir,” he corrected himself quickly, “what about the civilian workers? How’re we gonna get them out from inside the barracks without the Force Recon troops? If we crash in there with our Vigilantes, they’ll just as likely as not execute them all, and even if they don’t, plasma guns and grenade launchers ain’t very discriminating type of weapons, you know?”

  “No, they aren’t,” I agreed. “But we each have a pulse carbine in our ditch kit.”

  Scotty didn’t say anything for a second, just moaned in almost physical pain as he realized what I meant.

  “Tell me you aren’t saying what I think you’re saying, LT.”

  “I am. It’s what we’re going to do because anything else I do sacrifices other people’s lives.”

  “Sir, we ain’t Recon Straight-legs. We ain’t trained for busting in doors.”

  “We’re not, Scotty.” I swallowed hard and bared my soul for him. He deserved it straight. “Listen, this is beyond the op order and it’s my call. But if you think it’s stupid, tell me. I’m not perfect, I might be fucking up.”

  I heard the hiss of his breath, long and thoughtful.

  “They won’t be top of the line troops,” he reasoned. “Likely they’re just the REMFs left behind to guard the prisoners. They wouldn’t waste Shocktroopers way out here, I don’t think. We could do it. We’re fucking Drop-Troopers.”

  “Ooh-rah. Get them moving. We’ll split up at the rally point on the other side of the pass. And move fast.” Something twitched in my cheek. “We don’t have to hold back anymore.”

  20

  The refinery was an ugly thing, built for maximum output on a world where the stress loads weren’t as crucial, which meant struts and supports and overhangs everywhere you looked. From what I’d seen of Tahni military bases, the architects who’d designed this facility would have fit right in. It was also huge, at least fifty meters high and two hundred on a side, poured from raw buildfoam and then insulated by processed stone powder mined locally. Bulbous metal tanks rose high above the flattened metal roof at the rear of the place, where train tracks led from the refinery the short distance down to the coast to the spaceport.

  I could see every detail lit up with a searing light brighter than any mid-day sunlight would ever shine on this moon, coruscating in polychromatic fury from the proton cannons raining down hell on the deflector dishes. Crackling blue and white energy forked off the electromagnetic dome of protection the dishes cast over the refineries, man-made lightning crackling out into the hills surrounding the hollow. I winced as a lance of rogue energy burst against a rocky outcropping only a hundred meters away from the crest of the hill where we were sheltered.

  Below the dome of fire, it was eerily empty, with cargo trucks parked in front of the freight entrance to the refinery and not a soul wandering around outside. They didn’t know we were coming, but they suspected someone was. Cruisers didn’t hammer your shields with proton batteries just to send a message.

  I shuddered as I backed down the rise out of sight, partially because of the deserted, haunted feeling I got from the industrial facility, and partially because I was freezing my ass off. I put a gloved hand up against the skin of my Vigilante, its chest yawning open like a clamshell where I’d climbed out, then pulled my fingers away again quickly when the painful cold radiated into my flesh.

  “Third squad is ready, sir,” Ernst Kreis told me, his square jaw set in determination, not giving into the biting wind coming down through the pass.

  The NCO held his pulse carbine like someone who’d actually fired it, which was one reason I’d picked his squad to lead the dismounts. I’d discussed it briefly with Scotty in the privacy of our armor and after much verbal sparring, I’d made it clear to him I was going inside with the dismounts and he was staying with the armor and that was the end of it. It wasn’t that I didn’t trust Scotty, but of the two of us, I was the one who’d had any experience going up against the Tahni with just a rifle and my swinging cod. I’d actually killed a few with that rifle, which was more than anyone else in the platoon had done.

  Third and Fourth were coming inside the crew barracks with me, while Scotty kept First and Second out for the distraction attack which would, hopefully, draw the Tahni troops’ attention away from us and draw out any High Guard battlesuits they might have stationed here.

  Would have stationed here. The Tahni had three destroyers in this system and I hadn’t seen more than one during any battle I’d been present at for the last three years. They wanted to keep this system and they weren’t fucking around.

  The only question was, had they seen us yet? I didn’t think so. There would be no reason for them to hide if they had. They wouldn’t be able to run spy drones with all the electromagnetic static in the air from the load on the deflectors, and no one was going to stand outside to keep an eye out when a burn-through could send a fatal
flash of radiation through and cook them where they stood.

  The same thing, of course, could happen to us, so I hoped the gun crews on the cruiser knew what they were doing.

  “Scotty,” I said, grateful the laser-line-of-sight communications still worked despite the static charge in the air, “give us twenty minutes to get into position, then jet down there and hit the trucks in front of the cargo entrance with a missile launch. If the High Guard troops are hunkered down near the crew barracks, that should get their attention.”

  “Yeah, I remember the plan,” Scotty said, still sounding a bit dubious about the whole thing. “Not crazy about it, but I remember it.”

  “Come on, Sgt. Kreis,” I said to the Third squad leader. “Follow me.”

  And yes, I was walking point and no, Scotty hadn’t much liked that, either.

  I wasn’t a trained Recon Marine, but I knew enough not to just walk straight down the trail to the center of the refinery courtyard in plain sight of God and radar. We hugged the rocks, making our way around the hill on the north side of the refinery, a slog with one arm and sometimes another foot braced against the rocks and dirt on the downhill slope. The dip in the trail where we’d halted was less than half a kilometer from the refinery, but it was a good two-kilometer hike around the edge until we descended the hill along a steep trail that came out on the western end of the complex.

  My breath was a fog billowing out, the exertion freezing my lungs and threatening to make me cough uncontrollably, but I held it inside. Someone let out a soft, grunting hack ten meters behind me and I scowled but didn’t say anything. It’s not easy being stealthy when all you’ve trained for is smashing shit with a two-ton metal gorilla. I think having our faces bare to the elements might have helped. One of the biggest parts of the training for Force Recon is how to integrate input from their helmet sensors while they’re moving at top speed and shooting on the run without allowing themselves to feel detached from their surroundings. It was a lot easier to avoid feeling detached with the wind slapping us in the face and every shadow at the corner of our vision or scrape of rock on dirt a possible enemy.

  Not that I would have minded a helmet. Or just a hat. The field jacket in our armor’s ditch kit had a hood, but it did nothing to keep my cheeks and nose from going numb in the face of the freezing wind. I felt totally naked, vulnerable not just because of the lack of armor but because of the strangeness of it. There were smells and tastes to a battlefield I never experienced inside my Vigilante. Ozone was strong in the air from the electricity arcing overhead, leaving a metallic taste in my mouth, warring with the grit in my teeth from the dirt carried on the breeze. I tried to spit it out, but I lacked the saliva for it.

  I paused and hugged the cement block wall at the west end of the refinery, waving for the others to do the same as they scrambled down the dirt trail off the hill. Still no indication we’d been spotted, but I couldn’t sit around and wait to make sure. I counted my little strike force, marking each with a finger on an imaginary slate in front of my face, paranoid as hell about losing track of one of them with no IFF transponders or thermal sensors to do the scut work for me.

  Once I was sure I hadn’t left someone up on the hill by accident, I circled around the back of the refinery at a swift jog, slightly bent over at the waist, more out of instinct than any sort of training. The web sling of my carbine yanked at my neck with each step, the spare magazines in the pouches of my tactical vest slapping against my ribs. There was probably a way to adjust or secure them better that would have prevented that, but I had no idea how to do it. I was lucky I had qualified with the damned gun just a couple months ago or I might have forgotten how to operate it.

  Don’t shoot me in the back, I thought hard at the Marines behind me. I wanted to say it out loud, but it would have just made them more nervous than they already were.

  The giant cylindrical tanks loomed up tens of meters above us as we passed around to the rear of the building, and I idly wondered what was in them. I was sure there was some note in the op order about what this place actually made, but I’d seen so many mines just like this one that they all tended to blur together in my mind. It was something the Tahni wanted, either on principle or out of some pragmatic need and it was my job to deny it to them and free the workers.

  Oh, come on, Alvarez, don’t bullshit a bullshitter. You can tell Scotty it’s just your job, but you know as well as I do that what you really should have done is taken the whole platoon back to the emergency rally point on the other side of the mountains and waited there for the dropship to make the low pass over the mountains and tried to signal them. It was right there in the op order under emergency procedures.

  Yeah, and all I would have had to do was leave the trapped Recon Marines dozens of kilometers back with no hope at all of rescue, and abandon the civilians being held hostage. I tried to imagine going back to Brigantia after the war and telling Dak Shepherd I’d done that and withering under the glare he would give me.

  I was surprised by how quickly I’d grown used to the constant background crackling and the rolling peals of thunder overhead from one proton blast after another striking the shields, but they no longer registered, no longer wrung a flinch out of me with every distant boom. Nothing else made a sound on the storm-wracked night, at least no sound loud enough to be heard, and not even a transplanted weasel showed its face as we approached the crew barracks.

  The building was large, a communal housing bloc three stories tall, about a hundred meters wide at the front and twice that in length, well insulated against the constant chill, its windows narrow and broadly-spaced. Through them, I could see a hint of light somewhere deep inside, leaking through closed doors, but no movement.

  I turned back to the others and held up a fist, bringing them to a halt just before we cleared the back corner of the refinery. My hand was shaking and I tightened the fist, going down to one knee and then flat. I checked behind me and made sure the others had followed the signal, knowing most wouldn’t have practiced dismounted hand signals since Boot Camp. Once I was satisfied everyone was down, I began high-crawling forward, my carbine cradled in my arms, scuttling on elbows and knees. There wouldn’t be drones and probably not remote cameras, but a hardwired security system was possible, and some asshole standing by the window at just the wrong time was even more possible, as Murphy’s Law attested.

  The ground was hard, fusion-form pavement, created by the simple expedient of having a construction reactor dump plasma onto the ground before any of the other equipment had been flown in. It would have started out glass-smooth decades ago, but the wear and tear of winter after winter on this frigid moon had left it pocked and cratered and I didn’t have the luxury of the body armor the Recon troops wore. I felt blood welling at my knees after fifty meters of the stuff and I heaved a sigh of relief when it gave way to a layer of dirt blown in by the winds and never cleared.

  I reached the nearest wall of the barracks a few seconds later, cracked and patched and cracked again from expansion and contraction through the seasons, and turned right, keeping my left shoulder against it, staying below the windows. Light flickered down from the coronal discharge of the shields and threw shifting shadows in every direction, trying to draw my eyes away from the front with the promise of phantom enemies, but I just moved faster. The only way out of this was through it.

  Another glance back and the others were still coming, a little strung out as some crawled faster than others, but everyone keeping their heads down and their asses out of the air, which was the best I could hope for. When I hit the side entrance to the building, I stopped, putting my back against the wall and waiting. Kreis scuttled up beside me, edging around his nominal point man, Private Meyer, and coming close to my ear.

  “How do you want to do this, sir?” he wondered.

  In other words, who’s going through the door first? Honestly, I wanted to do it. It was still true that none of them was experienced at this and probably none were as g
ood with a carbine, but I couldn’t do it. Scotty would have yelled his head off at me and he would have been right. I might have been useful as a tactical asset on this operation, but someone had to lead it, and I didn’t trust Kreis to be able to take up the slack if I went down.

  “Send Meyer through first,” I told him, having to speak up over the background hum. “The rest of his fire team right on his heels. I’m going in after them, and I want you to wait at the door until one of us comes back and tells you it’s clear.”

  I was tempted to simply have them stack and pile in right behind us, but if I’d misread this and there was a trap on the other side of that door, someone had to survive and get the word to Scotty.

  “If you hear gunfire,” I spelled it out for him, “and none of us make it back out, pull everyone back behind the refinery and wait on Sgt. Hayes to hit the front, then try to head around the side and get back to your armor. Do not come in after us unless one of us comes back and signals you. Clear, Sergeant?”

  “Clear, sir,” he promised, and I believed him. Kreis wasn’t a coward, but he was no fool, either.

  “Get going, then. Get everyone ready and tell Sgt. Majid what I told you.”

  In thirty seconds, Meyer was in place, back against the door, carbine held at high port. He was a skinny, big-eyed younger man but he’d scored well in the last range work and shoot-house simulators we’d done with the carbines, which meant he was as qualified as any of the rest of them. Alpha team, led by Corporal Maggert, went to either side of the door, and at least they weren’t sweeping each other with their muzzles.

  And then we waited, because none of this would work without Scotty distracting them away from this entrance. I checked my ‘link and swore softly. I’d thought I was cutting things too close when I’d ordered him to give us twenty minutes to get into position, but we still had four minutes left. It dragged out into forever and I found myself looking back and forth over and over, staring at the same shadows, my imagination trying to turn them into enemy assassins sneaking up on us through the piles upon piles of discarded cargo boxes cluttering the rear of the housing block. Probably food, I thought. No more would have been delivered during the occupation and I wondered if they’d run out, if I’d find more living skeletons inside like on Demeter.