by Rick Partlow
“Oh, that’s all,” I said, rolling my eyes at him and the hell with his rank. “This is a fucking suicide mission, sir.”
“Son, you’re talking to a guy who’s spent the last year fighting a whole brigade of Tahni troops with a company of Marines and a few hundred half-trained civilians. You want talk to me about suicide missions?”
“I got orders,” I insisted, “to avoid becoming decisively engaged. This, sir….” I jabbed a finger at the bomb, “…is pretty fucking decisively engaged. You could put a video of this in the fucking dictionary right next to the term ‘decisively engaged’ and use it in a military textbook.”
He started to say something and I waved it off.
“Look, sir, if there were communications open, I wouldn’t even listen to this shit. You’re not in my chain of command, you know that, right? But it all comes down to this: I can’t even think about doing this unless you can get word to the rest of the invasion force. Because if this shit goes sideways and we get wiped out, we’re leaving them with two fucking battalions of High Guard sitting there ready to bite their ass.”
The lines around his mouth hardened and I thought for a second he was going to try to punch me in the face, but he sucked in a breath and nodded.
“I understand. We do have a one-man flyer, homemade job someone used to take out as a hobby back before the war. I could send one of my people back to Van Trak to carry a recorded message from you.” He shrugged. “I can’t promise he’ll make it through. There’s a lot of anti-aircraft between here and Van Trak. But he’ll get there faster than any of your people.”
The man’s expression shifted, as if he’d given as much ground as he intended.
“And I’m gonna be straight with you, kid,” Oz told me, “I’m carrying off this assault with or without your help. You may not be in my chain of command, but I’m in solid command of my people, and we move out in an hour. It’s your call whether you’re part of the plan or not.”
I stared at Colonel Oz, wondering if spending a year leading the resistance here had left him as desperate and unbalanced as those civilians back at the table, as the ones on Demeter. Was I letting a madman talk me into a suicide mission? Or was I just as crazy as he was?
What the hell was Scotty going to think about all this?
“All right, sir,” I said. “Send the messenger. And then get your people ready. We have to do this now.”
Before I come to my senses.
25
“You have got to be shitting me.”
It was, I thought, about the fourth time Scotty had said the same thing in the last hour, and I couldn’t honestly blame him for it.
“They’re just gonna charge ‘em right out in the open?” he demanded.
“That’s the idea.”
I could see him, but just barely. The platoon was spread out behind two warehouses less than a half a kilometer from the dome, way too close for my comfort, but Oz had assured me that they’d tapped into the hardwired cameras days earlier and were running a looped image from an hour ago, and the jamming would prevent any drones from transmitting a signal back. I wasn’t sure whether I believed him or not, but we didn’t have time for anything more complicated, so I pretended I did.
The plan was simple. The militia was going to distract the troops guarding the civilians with a frontal attack, draw them out while Oz’s Force Recon Marines snuck in behind them and freed the hostages. And like most simple plans, it was also going to be insanely difficult, because getting four thousand people out of that building was going to take time, and the enemy was going to notice. That was where we came in, and that was going to be cutting it awfully Goddamned close.
The part that had offended Scotty this particular time was the frontal assault, because as distractions went, it was pretty damned blatant. The civilian militia was driving up-armored cargo trucks straight down the road, jury-rigged with splinter shields and crew-served KE guns stolen from the Tahni forces over the course of the last year of raids and insurgency. The engines were old-fashioned internal combustion, fabricated from patterns two centuries old and running on home-distilled alcohol, growling with effort as their knobbed tires threw up clouds of dust and clods of dirt behind them. There were seven of them, running with a lead vehicle about fifty meters ahead of the next two, then two by two after that, spread out at intervals so each had a clear field of fire.
In the beds of the trucks, huddled behind the improvised armor shields, the civilian militia clutched stolen KE rifles and laser carbines just slightly oversized for human arms, in armor adapted to their smaller frames from the Tahni. It made them look like children playing dress-up in their parents’ clothes, if their parents happened to be genocidal alien religious fanatics.
And while the militia rumbled down the street and we waited behind the factory buildings, Oz and his people were on foot, double-timing around the far perimeter of the industrial district, just inside the tree line of the nearby woods, and with them, on a motorized all-terrain cart, was the bomb.
“Any second now,” I said, still on the private channel with Scotty.
The lead truck was a hundred meters from the semicircular freight entrance at the front of the dome, looking as if it might reach the building unopposed, when the double doors slid aside. The Tahni hadn’t built bunkers around the outside of the dome to guard it because it was bait and they wanted the enemy to walk into the trap, but neither was it undefended. Portable turrets, protected by heavy shielding and mounted on round wheels like powered casters, rolled into position as the doors parted, and heavy, crew-served KE guns opened up on the lead truck.
Sparks rang off the snowplow-style armor across the engine compartment of the truck as tantalum slugs dug craters into plating four centimeters thick. The armor even covered the cab windshield, the drivers steering using external cameras hardwired into the monitors mounted above the steering wheel, which was rare foresight for which I credited Colonel Oz. The gunner in the back of the truck returned fire, the hum-snap-crack of the electromagnetic weapon audible even from five hundred meters away, like a mosquito buzzing around inside my armor.
“He ain’t gonna make it,” Scotty opined, something more than disdain but not quite despair in his voice.
And it looked as if he was right. The armor at the front of the truck was being chewed away and the gunner was missing more than he was hitting since aiming from the back of a moving truck was harder than aiming from a fixed position. But the truck wasn’t alone, and the formation they’d chosen hadn’t been by accident. The two makeshift armored personnel carriers on either side of the lead truck were firing as well, walking streams of penetrator darts up from puffs of dirt to sprays of concrete as they touched the paved courtyard at the front of the dome, and then to sparks of metal on metal.
The Tahni gunner was single-minded and concentrated his fire on the lead truck, and it paid off for him when the vehicle’s turret went up in a globe of fire that had to be the gun’s power cell catching a round and discharging catastrophically. The truck swerved but pulled back into line with the entrance and my fists clenched when I realized what he was about to do. Militia fighters dived out the back of the vehicle, rolling out of control as they hit the ground at sixty kilometers an hour, ditching at the very last second before the driver slammed the truck straight into the mobile turret.
I hadn’t been part of the planning session, hadn’t heard how the trucks were equipped or what the plans were, so I didn’t know if the explosives had been his idea or something the militia had come up with on their own. But the second the truck hit the turret, it went up in a blast that could only have come from at least a kilo of hyper-explosives.
It was a huge risk. The explosion could have killed hostages, could have brought down the whole front wall of the building, but the armor of the turret seemed to contain it at the front entrance, the concussion reflecting backwards to blow the doors off their tracks and send them crashing to the ground.
Billows of
smoke poured up into a mushroom cloud and like cockroaches streaming out from a nest, Tahni Shock-troopers charged out through the gap where the doors had been, pouring streams of KE gun fire at the trucks still approaching the entrance. The powered exoskeletons were an old design, predating the High Guard battlesuits, almost obsolete on a modern battlefield against front-line Commonwealth troops, but still effective against the ragtag militia. Hitting a stationary target from a moving vehicle had been hard for a half-trained resistance fighter; hitting a man-sized figure running through smoke with servomotor-assisted speed was near impossible.
The trucks skidded to a halt and the militia fighters jumped out under fire, trying to use their own vehicles for cover while the turret gunners hunted through the black smoke for the Shock-troopers. Enemy KE guns answered and the fight began to bog down outside the entrance. Normally, I would have been concerned, but this had been the plan. Not my plan, but the one I’d been handed. More troops were pouring out the front, dozens, maybe over a hundred, and the whining hum of KE guns merged with the constant crack of their rounds breaking the sound barrier to create an insistent background static I wished I could shut out.
“Damn it,” Carson snapped, “they’re going to get slaughtered! Should we help them, sir?”
“Negative,” I told her, though the urge was strong for me, as well. “This is a distraction to give Colonel Oz time to free the hostages. If we charge in now, their own battlesuits will come after us and the civilians will be caught in the middle. Maintain position and wait for orders.”
Which was exactly what I should have been doing, but I didn’t point that out and Scotty had the good grace to keep his mouth shut. At least in front of the platoon, he did. He’d given me an earful when I’d briefed him on what we were doing, particularly the part about the nuke.
“Didn’t you come close enough to a court-martial on Valius?” he’d asked, almost yelled at me. “And don’t think you’ll get off with just being busted in rank and reassigned! If we fuck this up and live through it, you’ll spend the rest of the war in a cell! And that’s if they don’t just stick you in punitive hibernation and misplace your damned file!”
“You’re one hundred percent right,” I’d told him. “And we’re doing it anyway, because everything else I can think of to do is so much worse. And because Oz will do it by himself, whether we help him or not.”
That had brought him around, and I knew it would because the same line of thinking had convinced me.
“They’re moving in,” Scotty said, like the announcer in a soccer game.
It took me a second to spot Oz and his Marines through the smoke and fire and death and chaos playing out in the street. The stealth coating on their body armor was still intact even after a year cut off from the supply chain, which reduced their thermal signature to close to the background heat, but the furtive hints of motion between the trees gave them away, showed me where to look. They darted out from the concealment of the woods, not becoming embroiled in the pitched battle outside the entrance, simply slipping past it under the shroud of the drifting smoke.
“Get ready,” I warned the squad leaders. “Right now, the Tahni think they’re winning. But once you see the civilians heading out, the High Guard is going to notice and intervene. If they let those people get away, they’re giving up the only asset they have and the Fleet can drop a salvo of railgun shots on them at their leisure.”
I was repeating myself, because I’d explained all that before, but that was what you did right before a fight. You reminded the troops of things they should have already known because when the adrenaline started flowing, people forgot the things they were supposed to remember.
It couldn’t have taken more than a minute, but a minute was forever during a fight and dozens of the civilian militia had to have died in that time, throwing down their lives to buy it, sacrificing themselves for the ones who hadn’t had the chance to fight.
Would there be memorials for them after the war? For the ones who didn’t pull the final trigger but were willing to die rather than give their world up? For people like Dak and Maria? They were the ones who deserved it. We were just doing our jobs; jobs we volunteered for knowing the risk. All these people had wanted was a simple life on a colony world without Earth holding their hand, and when bad things had happened, they took their defense into their own hands. That was admirable. That was worthy of a statue.
“There they are.” Scotty spotted them first, probably because he was watching closer than anyone, nervous as a mother hen. “Coming out of the west side.”
The entrance on the north was for freight, equipment and the High Guard battlesuits to pass through, but the Tahni had built a smaller, personnel exit on the west, a very human thing, I thought. No human would want to keep opening and closing the ponderous cargo doors just to go in and out of the bunker and it seemed the Tahni were just as impatient and concerned with convenience as we were. Which was also convenient for us.
People streamed out of the western door in clusters of five and six at first, then by the dozens, and I zoomed in with the suit’s optics to get a better look at them. They weren’t hungry, weren’t ragged, showed no signs of deprivation, but they did look desperate and for that, I didn’t blame them. Fear was written across their faces, lips drawn back from clenched teeth as if they expected a shot in the back at any second. Oz’s Marines escorted them, herding the lot of them toward the woods, possibly to safety but even more importantly, to a place where they couldn’t be used as human shields. Dozens, then hundreds of them, and then more of the Marines were coming out behind them and joining in the fight on the side of the civilian militia and I knew any second….
I flinched, even though I knew it was coming, the crackling thunder of the electron blast lighting up the interior of the dome, static discharge sending forks of electricity into the metal tracks of the sliding doors. I couldn’t see where the shot hit, but I knew what it had to be from.
“Move out!” I ordered. “Jump, now!”
Delp must have been waiting with the jump controls half-pressed because he burst out from behind the factory like he’d been shot out of a cannon before I could finish saying the words. The rest of Carson’s squad followed him a half-second behind, arcing over the roof of the fabrication center, the superheated exhaust of their jump-jets quivering in the air below them. I waited a full second before hitting my own jets, the boost pushing my chin down into my chest.
Data crashed into my Heads-Up Display, IFF transponders, thermal readouts, targeting symbols, threatening to overload my senses, and I was forced to shed it like water off a duck’s back, ignoring the Christmas-tree lights and focusing on what was inside that building. The unmistakable thermal signatures were popping into existence as if by magic, emerging from a shielded tunnel somewhere beneath the dome, just as desperate to stop the exodus of civilians as the hostages were to leave.
Delp reached the freight entrance at the same time as the first of the High Guard battlesuits, the discharge of their primary weapons so close they merged into a single, coruscating globe of white light, so blinding on optical and thermal sensors, I couldn’t make either of them out through its glow. It faded in the two seconds it took me to touch the ground only fifty meters from the entrance to the dome, and Delp’s Vigilante staggered backward, smoke pouring off charred BiPhase Carbide armor and the suit’s left arm burned away at the elbow.
The enemy battlesuit had collapsed forward, the heat pouring off it from the plasma strike making the metal around the hole in its destroyed chest glow white. Carson and the rest of First squad thundered across cracking pavement, disappearing into the shadowed recesses of the dome, leaving Delp leaning against the wall beside the entrance. I wanted to check on him, but his IFF signal said he was stable and the suit diagnostics were flashing yellow, which meant he was still up and running, and I couldn’t hold up at the door, not with what was going on inside.
“Scotty, check on Delp!” I called, and then the
madness under the dome swallowed me up.
It reminded me of the Shoot-house simulation, a special challenge round we ran sometimes in the pods. The computer just threw everything at you: Shock-troopers, infantry, High Guard suits, civilians, friendly troops and every distraction you could think of. You didn’t play to complete the mission because it wasn’t possible; the computer just kept sending more and more enemy troops at you until you finally went down. The competition was to see who could survive the longest.
It helped me to think of it like that, to see the shredded bodies of the militia members as a collection of zeros and ones in a computer simulation rather than real men and women who were leaving behind grieving husbands or wives, parents, children. It helped me to ignore the scintillating electron beams crisscrossing the smoke-filled interior of the dome and the sun-bright plasmoids answering them, to think of the triphammer beat of tantalum darts from the Shock-troopers’ heavy KE guns as just the computer fucking with me, trying to distract me.
I restricted my focus to only two things: the hostages and the High Guard suits. The Force Recon Marines had the pens open and they were standing in there despite the blistering heat of the beam weapons discharging and the capricious death on the hunt, shepherding the civilians out of the broad, high-ceilinged dome and taking casualties to do it.
The High Guard troopers were pouring out of a hole in the concrete floor, a ramp heading downward to the bunker, huge, shielded double-doors hanging open. The sheer size and weight of them explained why the response had taken so long. Just opening the damned things must have taken nearly a minute all by itself. But they were yawning wide now, and the High Guard suits were pounding up the ramp three abreast, all of them trying to get at the hostages, to stop the Marines from freeing them by the simple and ruthless expedient of killing enough of the ones trying to escape to frighten the others back into their pens.