by Rick Partlow
“Ooh-rah, sir!” Kreis said, and the others echoed it as they left the compartment.
“Scary, isn’t it?” Scotty said to me after they’d gone. I didn’t have to ask what he meant.
“Yeah. I’m not ready for this.”
He laughed and headed for the hatch.
“No one ever is.”
24
Dolabella had looked quaint and picturesque in the op order images, a throwback to a simpler time. Seen in the stark light of day from the industrial road circling the city, it looked more like a ghost town.
“Where the hell is everybody?” Scotty wondered, seeing the same images I was on the long-range optics.
Deep green shingles baked in the mid-day glare and what looked like real glass windows winked reflections at us, but not a soul walked the streets and no thermal signatures shown from inside. Audio sensors that could pick up a voice from a kilometer away registered nothing but the creaking of hinges from open doors swinging in the warm, summer wind.
We’d dropped near the edge of the entertainment district on the main road out through the industrial district. It eventually led to the spaceport about a hundred klicks away, centrally located between the two largest cities, but there could have been a pitched battle happening there and I never would have seen it. Or heard anything about it.
“You picking up anything, sir?” Scotty asked me. I suppressed an urge to snap that he would have heard any signals coming through at the same time I would. He was nervous, and if Scotty was nervous it was because there was a good reason to be.
“No communications relay drones or dropships overhead right now for line of sight comms,” I told him. “And the jamming is shutting down all indirect EM signals still.”
The Tahni transmitters were out there, somewhere, bouncing their jamming signals off automated drones. If we found them, we could take them out ourselves, but how often had that happened on any mission I’d ever been on? They hid the things well.
The drop, at least, had been uneventful. The pilots had told me that the Tahni air defenses had been concentrated around Van Trak, the larger of the two cities, and there was a hell of a dogfight happening over there between our assault shuttles and the Tahni dual-environment fighters that the flight crew was quite happy to be missing. We hadn’t seen a missile, hadn’t detected a single incoming round from launch to drop and I was starting to entertain hopes we could keep up the streak through the whole mission.
I couldn’t remember the last time I’d dropped into a combat zone without firing a shot, and I wouldn’t have minded giving up the chance at more war stories to tell for some down time. But I wasn’t going to hold my breath waiting for it.
“First squad,” I said. “Lead off.”
Delp was getting better, I thought. Maybe there was just some things the simulator couldn’t teach, because with each combat mission, it seemed as if he was picking up the tricks of walking point, things I’d tried to pass on to him that just hadn’t seemed to take. There was a certain intuition you had to have to walk point, not just an intellectual knowledge of the terrain features and how they related to tactical movement, but a sense of how the rest of the platoon would have to move behind you if you went along a certain route.
The industrial park was a good three kilometers from the edge of town, far enough away that the purists who had moved to Dolabella for the architecture wouldn’t be forced to bear the pragmatic plainness of fabrication centers, warehouses, and automated assembly bays while they basked in vaguely European anachronisms. The city was built in the gently-rolling hill country to the south of the largest continent, and the tree-dotted rises between the city and the industrial areas assured their visual isolation, and assured we would have to move through the perfect place for an ambush along the way.
I felt an itch between my shoulder blades with each step and almost ordered Delp to hit the jets and get us an overhead view, but refrained for the same reason I didn’t want to try to launch an aerial drone. The enemy knew we were in the area, but they didn’t know which way we were coming, and I felt like it would be a bad idea to advertise our avenue of approach.
We were bypassing a rise, moving through the saddles between two hills, ripping up chunks of shrubbery with each step, when the line suddenly stopped.
“Sir,” Delp said, urgency in his words, “I spotted something.”
Instinct urged me to run up to his position and see it with my own eyes, but training kept me rooted at the end of First squad, letting the laser line-of-sight relay from around the curve of the hill feed the images from his suit cameras to my Heads-Up Display. The industrial park was visible past the next hill, stretched along both sides of the main road, the one we’d been studiously avoiding on our approach. Stark white sheet metal walls glowed painfully bright in the mid-day light, almost drowning out the details of cargo trucks parked in lots beside loading bays and a flatbed train car sitting in desultory isolation on an otherwise empty track running behind the line of buildings on the right-hand side of the road.
I scanned through the images, both visual and sensor, and was about to ask him what he was talking about when I saw it, too. Just a flicker of an image on thermal, almost invisible against the heat collected in the sheet metal from a full day under the summer glare of the system primary, but I noticed it nonetheless. Bipedal, less than two meters tall, the suit’s analytics informed me. And, after a moment’s consideration to build a larger data set, they also informed me it was likely human rather than Tahni.
“Everyone else stay in place,” I ordered. “Delp, go up and investigate. It could just be some frightened industrial worker the Tahni have kept out here until the last minutes, trying to work his way home, so try not to look threatening.”
“I’m in a big, black, metal suit bristling with weapons, sir,” Delp reminded me. “I don’t know how to look anything but threatening.”
Good point.
“Just keep your plasma gun pointed down, okay?”
“Yes, sir.”
At least Delp was getting the smart mouth of a point man down pat. That was something else you could only learn by doing.
I tapped into Carson’s view and watched Delp approach the building slowly, arms at his sides, and I worried for a moment that it might be a trap until the man stepped out into the open. I switched back to Delp and saw immediately that the man was dressed in the armor of a Force Recon Marine, a Gauss rifle tucked under his arm. He pulled off his helmet to reveal a weathered, lined face with skin the color of café au lait and dark hair cut within a centimeter of his scalp.
“I’m Colonel Daniel Oz,” the man said. “I need to speak to your commander.”
“I’ve heard a lot about you, sir,” I said, shaking the colonel’s hand. His grip was firm through his glove, and I had the feeling he was a hard man even before he’d spent a year fighting a Tahni invasion from the inside. “After we lost comms with you and the resistance, I was afraid maybe the Tahni had finally managed to pin you down.”
“That’ll be the day,” he said with a snort of dark amusement that was echoed by the other men and women gathered around the small, folding table.
It was hard to make out their faces in the dim light of the single, glowing strip-light on the wall. No daylight made it past the blackout curtains hung on the windows of the business office built deep in the bowels of a fabrication plant, and from the thermal blankets piled against the walls, no heat or sound would escape it.
Not all of the people at the table were Marines, I could have told that even without the difference in equipment. The Recon troops who’d come here with Oz were a rough group, a hollow, gaunt cut to their faces, something dark and nameless in their eyes, but their gear had been kept in tip-top shape, and if there were some patches holding together the junctions of the armor, they were made carefully and neatly. Their weapons were as uniform as their armor, the standard-issue Gauss rifle of the Recon Marines, and I was a little surprised they’d managed to keep them
supplied with ammunition after all this time.
The civilians, though, were a more motley lot, wearing stolen Tahni body armor, some taken from conventional infantry or rear-echelon troops, some salvaged from Shock-trooper powered exoskeletons and repurposed. Their hair was long, the beards on the men shaggy, and there was a feral glow to their faces, one I’d seen before on the resistance on Demeter. There was something that happened to a civilian, someone who’d never even considered joining the military or going to war when they were forced into a situation where they had to fight or die. A flip got switched and it was like they went from victim to victimizer without the benefit of a military trainer to break down their old life and ease them into the new one. I wondered if they’d ever be the same again.
I glanced over at the door, as if I could see what was on the other side. The platoon was out there, hunkered down under thermal blankets, except for Delp, who was still outside on watch. The rest of Oz’s force was out there, too, and when I’d come in, I’d estimated there had to be at least two civilians for every Marine.
“Is this all you’ve got left?” I wondered. I felt naked, sitting there without my suit, but it hadn’t seemed politic to refuse a colonel’s request to un-ass my armor and talk face-to-face.
“No, I left most of my people back at Van Trak to coordinate with the main effort there.” He scowled. “That was when I realized something was wrong. Those Tahni bastards pulled a fast one on me.”
“Where are they?” I asked him. “We haven’t detected a damned thing, not even from orbit. And where are all the people?”
The place didn’t have a holographic display and even the old-style flatscreen monitors in the office looked broken and useless, but one of the civilians had set up some sort of makeshift projector screen on the table by virtue of leaning a meter-wide piece of wallboard against a cement block. Oz took out his ‘link and set it on the table, then pushed a control on it and an image projected out onto the wallboard, an aerial view of the road we were on.
“This is where we are,” he said, pointing at a rectangular building near the edge of the industrial district, on the side closest to the town. “It used to be a tractor assembly building where they’d take the parts the fabrication plants spat out and put them together into auto-harvesters for the farms.”
Which seemed a useless bit of trivia to include, but the guy had been here on his own for a year, so I wasn’t going to throw the first stone. He traced a line down the road, past rows of nearly identical buildings, to…something. A dome, but I couldn’t tell if it was buildfoam or local concrete, and a really big one. Judging by the size of the building we were in, I estimated the dome had to be at least two hundred meters across. And I didn’t remember seeing it in the layout we’d been shown of the place before the drop.
“The bastards built this dome a couple months ago,” he said, “right on top of a bunker system left over from the first war with the Tahni. It was built for the civilians to hunker down if the enemy started bombarding the planet from orbit, but the first war never reached this far and most people forgot it existed. But the Tahni garrison commander found out about it a few months ago.”
“How many of them are down there?” I asked.
“All of them.” The disbelief washing over my thoughts must have been plain to see on my face, because he expounded. “Oh, they left their REMF troops along with a couple battalions of Shock-Troopers back in Calliria to distract us, slow us down. But every single one of their High Guard battlesuits is in that complex. Two full battalions, and there’s plenty of room for them.”
“How big is this place?” I demanded, perhaps forgetting a bit of military decorum since he was a colonel, but still…
He grinned, not seeming to blame me for it.
“Big enough. It was designed to hold the whole city and then some, ten thousand people. There’s enough storage space for supplies to hold a fucking brigade of High Guard in there.”
“What’s the point, though? How long do they think they can hold up in there? Even a bunker system like that can’t stand up to railgun shots from orbit, and it’s far enough from town that the Fleet boys wouldn’t be worried about hitting the….” I trailed off, the reality of the situation smacking me square in the face. “The civilians,” I realized, squeezing my eyes shut, resting my head in my hands, elbows on the table. “They have the civilians there.”
“The whole fucking town.” That was one of the civilians, a woman with long, blond hair tied into braids. Her words were harsh, but her expression was harsher. “All the ones who’ve survived this long, who weren’t smart enough to get out while the getting was good.”
“We estimate it at four thousand people,” Oz supplied. “The Tahni built pens inside the dome and they have some of their conventional infantry up there, maybe a few Shock-troopers just to keep a handle on things.”
“And if you hadn’t been here to warn us,” I guessed, “we would have seen the thermal signatures inside the dome and gone in to free the civilians, encountered light resistance and called in Force Recon units.”
“And the Tahni would have slaughtered them and whatever armored troops you’d brought along for overwatch. And there’d be no air support, no orbital fires because of the civilians.”
“What’s their endgame though? What do they think they can do beyond killing a bunch of us?”
“They’re aliens,” Oz reminded me. “Don’t assume they think like we do. But my best guess is that the garrison commander, this royal prick named Kan-Ten, thinks he can hold off the ground forces and cause enough casualties for the Fleet to pull back until the Imperium can resupply the system, reinforce their Navy here.” He shrugged. “It might even work.”
“It won’t,” I assured him. “The Fleet brought two of the cruisers with them and they’re not going to risk those on an extended mission out here. If it becomes clear we’re not going to be able to free the civilians, they’ll bombard the bunker from orbit and consider the residents of Dolabella an acceptable loss.”
I don’t know how bleak and cynical I sounded, but even the hardened resistance leader blanched at my statement.
“Jesus, kid,” he said, “what the hell have you been seeing?”
“Too much.” I stood up, pacing around the room, trying to think. “I have orders not to get decisively engaged. What I should do is withdraw and try to get a direct beam signal through this jamming, let my company commander know what’s going on. The rest of the landing force is due in just a couple hours and they’ll notice the heat sources inside that dome eventually. We have to make sure they don’t send anyone in there without knowing what’s waiting for them.”
“If you’re right about what the Fleet’s gonna do,” the woman who’d spoken before piped in, “then the minute you tell them what’s going on under that dome, those people are dead.”
“There’s not much else I can do about it,” I told her. “I got one platoon here, and while I’d be willing to try my hand at getting the civilians out, there’s no way we can take on two battalions.”
“You might not have to,” Oz said. He shared a look with the others in his little command council. “If we’re going to use it, this is the perfect time.”
“Use what?” I asked. “Sir.”
“Follow me.”
We ducked quickly out of the door to the office, trotting down a short set of metal-grating steps. None of the others came with us and I assumed they already knew what I was about to see. He led me beneath the hood of an assembly line housing over to what looked a lot like a dome tent, formed from thermal blankets and pieces of wall board. Oz pushed aside a flap and motioned for me to precede him inside.
“What’s that supposed to be?” I asked.
It was squat and cylindrical, obviously metal and just as obviously Tahni. All of their tech had a character to it, above and beyond the whole form-follows-function effects that made a spaceship look like a spaceship. Whatever this thing’s functions were wasn’t obviou
s from its form, other than it was about a meter long and another meter in diameter and it looked heavy as shit.
“Back during the initial invasion,” Oz told me, “there was a pretty honkin’ big space battle in orbit, as you can imagine. One of their corvettes took a hit and got knocked into a reentry burn. Those things aren’t designed to enter atmosphere, you know. But I guess they were desperate, because they did their damnedest to bring that thing down. And they nearly made it, but not quite. But they crashed intact enough for my Marines to salvage this out of the wreckage.”
I thought about all the things you could pull out of a Tahni corvette and which of them would be the size of the cylinder at my feet…and which of those a man like Colonel Oz would think was pertinent to the situation. I didn’t like what I came up with at all.
“That’s a nuke,” I said, not one shred of doubt in my heart.
Oz smiled and nodded.
“At least they didn’t send me a dumbass. It’s the fusion warhead off one of the corvette’s anti-ship missiles. The only one we could get off of it, really the only useful thing left.” He gestured at the warhead. “There’s a single entrance from the bunker into the dome. If you can hold the High Guard troopers at that choke point long enough for my people to get the civilians out, we shove this damned thing right down their throats and set it off.”
“That dome won’t contain the blast,” I said, not even knowing if I was right but willing to take the guess.
“No,” Oz admitted. “But the bunker’s blast shield will. We just have to get it into the entrance, down the ramp into the storage area and close the damned door.”