Danger Close #3 Drop Trooper

by Rick Partlow

  A chest-deep concussion of sound shook the ground and jerked me out of a nightmare. One blast followed close on another, the light from the explosions flooding the night, reaching all the way into the alley between buildings where we were hiding.

  It was Scotty. The attack had begun.

  Now came the moment of truth. When I’d gone over the mission with Lt. Palmer, I’d asked her about getting through the side doors, whether they’d need some sort of cracking program to override the security locks and she’d laughed in my face. Why, she’d asked me, would anyone bother with computer locks or any other sort of lock on the outside of communal housing on a moon where no one lived except Corporate Council workers? And why would the Tahni bother to lock them in when the only place they could go was to work, which was exactly where the enemy wanted them? This was when we’d find out if she was right.

  Maggert glanced back at me and I shot her a thumbs-up. The dark-eyed woman nodded to Meyer, then twisted the lever and pushed the door open, sending the point man rushing inside. Dim light shone from inside the door, but I didn’t have time to note any details before Maggert led the rest of the team through and I followed. Loose dirt turned to a thick, cloth mat and then a bare, cement floor. The light I’d seen came through the crack beneath and interior door about five meters away. We’d come into some sort of utility room stacked with clothes washers and dryers, squatting in sullen disuse, some of the lids hanging open. A set of grey coveralls hung out of one of the washers, still dripping wet.

  And it was warm, so wonderfully warm here inside, out of the wind. I took a moment just to breathe it in, just to let my lungs heat up to a temperature where every inhale didn’t make them freeze solid.

  Meyer was standing beside the door out of the washroom, pressing his ear to it, while Maggert and the others stood with their backs against the walls, looking tentative and uncertain. I grabbed Maggert by the shoulder and spoke quietly in her ear.

  “Go tell Sgt. Kreis to bring the rest of Third squad in and stack on this door. Leave Fourth outside with Sgt. Majid and tell him not to come in unless I call for him or until he hears the shit kick off in here.”

  Mostly because there wasn’t enough space for them inside the utility room.

  A few seconds later, Kreis cat-footed inside with exaggerated care, Bravo team behind him. I chivvied them into the correct positions, or at least as close to a correct position as I could remember, spread around the walls beside the door. If I remembered the plans we’d been shown correctly, which was an iffy thing since they’d been part of Palmer’s mission and not mine, the other side of that door would take us into a central rec room full of entertainment consoles, pool tables, poker tables and a wet bar. At the center would be a staircase leading to the top two floors, while leading right and left would be the hallways to the first-floor quarters and a few admin offices.

  The rec room might be totally unoccupied, or crawling with Tahni or packed with hostages, but all I knew for sure was that there was a light on inside. I was going to have to go with my gut because there was no time for anything else, and my gut told me that the Tahni would stay on the ground floor because it was more secure against the bombardment, and I’d have been willing to bet they’d have the hostages close by.

  If the Tahni were waiting there in the rec room, guns at human heads, then a lot of innocent people were about to die. But I also knew there’d be more humans than Tahni here, and the enemy, as overconfident and dense as they could be when it came to letting their religion and worldview get in the way of good tactics, wasn’t stupid enough to think desperate people wouldn’t try to swarm over them if they gathered them all in one place and basically dared them to. And while the outside door to the utility room didn’t lock, the doors to the individual apartments would, because you didn’t want fellow workers going through your shit while you were working and they were off.

  My gut said the humans would be locked in their rooms and the Tahni would likely be gathered in the rec room, where they’d be able to keep an eye on all four entrances to the building. Heavy, crew-served weapons? Maybe, but I’d have been willing to bet they’d save those for the front entrance. If I was wrong on that, a lot of my people were going to die. Maybe me, too.

  I slapped Meyer on the shoulder and he threw the door open.

  21

  I burst through just behind Meyer, every detail of the rec room crashing in on me like a wave. I had experience with sorting through an overwhelming flood of data and everything formed into a coherent picture in the back of my mind long before conscious thought could list the details in words. It was frozen like a Renaissance painting, each subject caught in mid-motion at a single moment.

  There were fewer Tahni than I’d expected, probably the REMF’s Scotty had thought they were, Rear Echelon Mother Fuckers, their supply clerks and cooks and repair techs and everyone whose job wasn’t to point a weapon at the enemy. I could always tell them from the regular line soldiers by the poor fit of their armor, as if the Tahni military procurement system decided these guys weren’t going to be fighting so they weren’t going to bother tailoring their gear to their size. Their weapons were similar to ours, laser carbines, though ours fired pressure pulses from hyperexplosive cartridges feeding their thermal energy through a lasing rod, while theirs were a bit more complicated, using some sort of disposable charging crystal. Neither was ideally suited to ground combat, with high thermal signatures and poor penetration against heavy armor, but they had no recoil and were easy to aim and operate for personnel who weren’t trained for it.

  The difference between us was, we were ready to shoot and they weren’t. There were forty or fifty of them that I could see, about half of them already crouched behind overturned furniture, more of the cargo crates, machinery I couldn’t tell the purpose of, all of it hauled in and stacked across the front entrance hallway, blocking it off from the rec room. The rest had been covering the side entrances, but had abandoned them once the explosions had come from the front, scrambling across the room, heading for the barriers at the front hallway. Which was tactically unsound, but just what we’d been hoping for.

  Meyer was ahead of me, but I grabbed at his shoulder and rushed past him, knowing what we had to do and having no way of communicating it to the others in time except to show them by example. Fifty bad guys against twenty of us was still high odds, and surprise would only count for so much. The safe thing would have been to duck down behind the cover the Tahni had left behind at the side entrance and use it as a fire base, but that would have left my guys firing across the room while the enemy was shooting at them and I just didn’t have that sort of confidence in their marksmanship.

  No one had turned our way, yet. No one seemed to know we were there. The Tahni were all dressed in dark grey uniforms, not that far from the color of our own ditch kit jackets, and in the dim lighting and panic of the moment, our buzzcuts would probably pass in peripheral vision for the close-cropped mohawks the Tahni wore.

  I ran between the two forces, between the group that had been set up facing the front and the remainder trying to stream in from the sides, so close I could smell a peculiar, musky scent coming off them. I wondered if it was their natural odor if they all wore some sort of cologne or grease in their hair to make it twist into the queue down their back.

  I didn’t fire until they noticed me. It took a while, because viewed out of the corner of their eye, I could have been just another slightly-short Tahni soldier running for the barricades, and I was nearly two-thirds of the way across the room when the first of them turned his head my way, skin crinkling around his eyes as they opened wider in realization.

  He grabbed at his laser carbine and I shot him. The laser didn’t recoil, of course, but there was a vibration from the reaction chamber as a trio of hyperexplosive cartridges ignited in quick succession. The product of their sacrifice was a burst of invisible, infrared energy, the photons marching in lock-step like some ancient company of Swiss pikemen. The lase
r beam might have been invisible, but its effects were not. The air between us flashed to plasma at the extreme energy ripping through it, Zeus tossing a thunderbolt in the old myths, and whether it was the plasma or the laser that had birthed it, the Tahni soldier fell forward to his knees, clutching at the hole burned through his chest, not even able to cry out to the others.

  Not that he had to.

  The rest of Third squad opened up just after me, and I was gratified to see that at least most of them had actually followed my lead, weaving between the groups of Tahni and firing at the group running for the barricade at the front entrance.

  The results were everything I could have hoped for. There were twenty Tahni soldiers in the group rushing from the side entrances to the front hallway and they went down like wheat before one of the huge automated threshers I’d seen in the fields on Brigantia, most of them not even realizing who we were until it was too late. The few who actually got off a shot jerked the rounds high, the laser blasts impacting down the hallway toward the front entrance, setting wallboard afire and lighting up the darkened passage.

  And the fog of war did the rest. I didn’t realize this in the heat of the moment, of course—things just happened and I reacted. But in retrospect, it was clear as crystal. The Tahni rear-echelon soldiers weren’t used to anyone shooting at them and the ones already manning the barricades were entirely focused forward. So, when their fellows behind them started screaming and dying and firing forward, well, those guys just assumed the threat was in front of them and they started firing down that hallway too…and if nothing fired back, that was just because there was too much smoke and too much fire to see it, wasn’t it?

  It almost went perfectly, would have if Majid hadn’t burst through the side door with Fourth squad firing as he went. The laser bursts came perilously close to hitting us, and what didn’t plow into the flooring did exactly the wrong thing and hit beside the Tahni troops who’d been facing forward. They turned, and laser fire turned with them like they were squirting it from a hose.

  “Shoot them, Goddammit!” I snapped, practicing what I preached and spraying a long burst across the back of the line of Tahni soldiers.

  Not long enough, though, because my magazine ran empty and it took me a good two seconds to realize it. I dropped to a knee and fumbled for a reload out of the pouch on my vest, then had to look down at the magazine well because it was narrow and I couldn’t fit the damned thing in, and damn it, this is taking too long!

  I was three long steps away from the front line of Tahni troops and I went with a gut instinct that I was running out of time and just threw myself forward into the closest of them, swinging the carbine like a club. The Tahni are, on average, taller and heavier than a human, and one of their front-line soldiers could have probably kicked my ass on his worst day, but they gave the rear-echelon jobs to the older ones, the warriors gone to seed who couldn’t make the cut anymore. This guy was old and out of shape and I slammed the carbine’s stock into his face with an impact that travelled up through my shoulders, and he went down. I kicked him, kicked him over and over in the face, ignoring the shots flaring up in gouts of flame on either side of me until his hands went slack and his carbine slipped out of them.

  And then everything went silent in the rec room, the sounds of the battle outside sounding distant and irrelevant, and the Tahni were down. I looked down and saw that I somehow still had the spare magazine in my left hand. I slid it home and chambered a fresh round before I quickly scanned the room. A Tahni soldier stirred, trying to crawl across the blood-stained, charred floor toward his laser. I shot him through the head.

  “Are there any casualties?” I demanded, my voice sounding dry and raspy. “Squad leaders, report!”

  “We’re good!” Kreis reported, sounding confident.

  Majid’s head was whipping around like a mother trying to keep track of her children, but finally he nodded to me, swallowing hard.

  “Yeah, we’re good, sir. No casualties.”

  “Kreis,” I ordered, “go check on the hostages. Check all three floors and make sure you get them all. Majid, your people set up a perimeter down here and make sure nothing comes in the damned doors but us. And Kreis, watch for any more Tahni hiding out in here!”

  I made sure each of them acknowledged the order before I hobbled on a knee that I hadn’t remembered hurting down the passage to the front entrance. More barricades had been set up to block the door there and I slung my carbine and hauled a couple of them out of the way enough to pull open the door.

  A cold wind blasted through the gap and I gasped at the physical impact of it, taking a moment to blink my eyes shut at the sudden rush of tears. I squinted at the refinery and saw that the fight there was close to over.

  Back on Ambergris, I’d witnessed a battlesuit fight from this vantage point, naked and helpless without my Vigilante, and I hadn’t liked it much. This was slightly better, because the Tahni were the ones outnumbered and getting their asses kicked. I could see from the High Guard battlesuits burning fiercely in the center of the refinery courtyard that there hadn’t been more than a squad of the enemy armor stationed here, which they probably thought was more than they needed. They’d been wrong, because when you assume, you make an ASS out of U and ME, as my old Drill Instructors used to say.

  The last two of the High Guard troopers went down in the refinery entrance under a hail of plasma fire and the heat from the blast banished the chill of the wind for a good ten seconds. If they had a few battlesuits fighting each other with energy weapons here all the time, it might have been a comfortable place to live.

  “Scotty!” I yelled into my ‘link, hoping the laser line-of-sight would reach him through the smoke billowing off the burning suits and the wreckage of the two cargo trucks at the front entrance to the refinery. “Scotty, do you read?”

  “Five by five, sir,” he told me. “I think we’ve got things wrapped up out here.” He pointed off to the left with the suit’s one articulated claw. “There was an anti-aircraft defense turret off to the west, but I sent a fire team from First squad over to take it out.”

  He lumbered up to my position, steam rolling off his Vigilante, more than a meter taller than me and another meter wider. I felt the heat from his plasma gun at seven or eight meters away, the prickling-skin feeling of sitting too close to a fire.

  “Any casualties inside?” he asked me.

  “Not a one,” I said, “which is nothing short of divine intervention. “Now, if the fucking cruiser would just stop with the….”

  I stopped short and looked up at the sky. The constant glow of the deflector shield, the background crackling hum had become just something I accepted, part of the landscape. I hadn’t even noticed it was gone.

  “What the fuck?” I blurted.

  “Hey LT.” Kreis’ voice was impossibly loud in my earpiece and I remembered I’d turned the volume up to overcome the background hiss of the deflectors. I cursed and touched a control on my ‘link. “We found the civilians. They were locked in the quarters but we managed to find the central security control to override the locks.”

  “Get me a count,” I told him. “And let me know how many are going to need medical attention.”

  “Roger that. There’s…,” he trailed off, a bit hesitant. “There’s only about twenty of them left, sir.”

  Shit. Twenty out of fifty.

  I heard Kreis talking to someone in the background, the voices mumbles in my ear.

  “I got one of the foremen here if you wanna talk to him.”

  “I’ll be back, Scotty,” I promised, heading through the central hallway back to the rec room. “See if you can raise the dropship and get Search and Rescue down here for the Recon platoon.”

  I nearly stopped when I reached the end of the hallway and the smell hit me. I’d been too hyped up on adrenaline before and hadn’t noticed it. The blood was pooling, rivers heading to the crimson sea at the center of the room, and the stench of it, the wafting, sic
kly-sweet odor of burnt flesh made me gag. I paused and swallowed the bile in my throat, passing through the nightmare landscape of corpses to a small cluster of humans near the rear of the building.

  They seemed to be trying to keep as far away from the dead Tahni as possible, and I couldn’t blame them for that, but the twenty civilians huddled together, shrinking away even from the squad of Marines trying to examine them, like abused dogs afraid to trust anyone. The man Kreis was standing beside was the boldest looking of the lot, his hair and beard long and unkempt, something feral behind his eyes.

  “Sir, this is George Nakamura,” Kreis said, motioning toward the older man. “This is my boss, Lt. Alvarez. Tell him what you told me.”

  “Are there any more of your people being kept somewhere else, Mr. Nakamura?” I asked him, glancing back at the little cluster of ragged scarecrows.

  “No, Lieutenant,” he told me, his voice verging on the manic side. “No, this is all of us.” A muscle quivered in his cheek. “You want to know what happened to the rest of us?” I was about to say yes, I did, but he went on uninterrupted, as if the question had been rhetorical. The feral look in his eyes was replaced by despair gone nearly all the way to madness. “There was eighty of us when they came here, over a year ago. I knew every one of them, too. Eighty good men and women, good workers. Some died when the Tahni came, killed because they tried to fight. Twelve of us that died right away and another seven from wounds they took, because the fucking bastards wouldn’t let us use our auto-docs. Said that kind of technology was against the Will of the Emperor.” He snorted a bitter laugh. “They worship their Emperor or something, I guess. I never could quite get it figured out even after a year with them here. Anyway, the rest of us, we did the work they wanted because we didn’t figure we had any choice. And I didn’t think the little bit of product we put out here would make no difference in who won the war.”