by Rick Partlow
Scores were already dead, scorch marks on the concrete floor and scattered bits hardly identifiable as having once been part of a human body the only hint they’d ever existed. That wasn’t going to happen while I was here. I hit the jets and angled forward, the roar of the turbines painfully loud even inside the suit, reverberating back at me from the walls and ceiling, and shot across the interior of the building, ignoring the fact that I was making myself a target.
Three High Guard troopers were stepping off the top of the ramp and one of them swung his electron beamer toward me. There was no way I could get my plasma gun up in time, but I was in a perfect position to fire a missile. It couldn’t get target lock this close, less than fifty meters away, but I didn’t have to. He was so close, I couldn’t miss. The warhead had just enough time to arm, and the detonation ripped the Tahni trooper into twisted, charred chunks of metal with enough force to knock the two suits beside him off their feet.
Someone, I wasn’t sure who with the chaos and bedlam all around me, killed one of the two with a plasma shot and I pulled up and swung my suit around upright three meters over the other downed High Guard suit and then cut the jets. I pistoned my legs downward, smashing my spiked footpads into the suit’s chest with a concussion that traveled up my legs and rattled my teeth. The armor over the enemy suit’s chest was tough, but force always equals mass times acceleration and my Vigilante had a shitload of both. The High Guard suit’s chest plate caved in and crushed the trooper inside and I barely registered his death in a desperate attempt to avoid my own.
Twin bursts of actinic ions sought me out from lower down the ramp and the only reason I wasn’t killed instantly was the angle—they’d had to aim high to clear the downed battlesuits and their electron beams flared off the ceiling in coronas of vaporized metal. I barely had time to get my feet under me and was trying to shuffle back around the cover of the door frame, knowing even as I did that I wouldn’t be in time, when a barrage of plasma blasts set the very air on fire.
I jerked backwards, convinced at first, that the starfire was another attack from enemy troopers behind me, but the fusillade pounded into the next rank of High Guard suits instead, forcing back the ones it didn’t destroy outright. I risked a glance backwards as I shuffled behind cover and saw the IFF transponders lighting up on the Vigilantes of Sgt. Kreis and Third squad clustered around the bunker hatch, the emitters of their plasma guns glowing red.
“Thanks for the save, Kreis,” I told him, then took the moment’s respite to check on the rest of the battle.
First squad was still engaged with two of the enemy battlesuits just outside the cargo doors to the dome, and Sgt. Carson and Private Jha’s transponders were already blinking yellow from damage. Only a few hundred civilians were left inside the building, and Oz’s Recon Marines were escorting some of them out the side exit while others simply ran in panic through the chaos of the combat at the freight doors. There were more bodies on the floor than I wanted to try to count, scores of them, maybe hundreds, and quite a few were wearing Recon armor.
“Scotty!” I said, noticing his transponder just outside the cargo entrance. “What’s going on out there? How’s Delp?”
“He’ll be okay,” Scotty told me, his voice calm despite everything, “but he got a pretty bad burn and the suit has him too doped up for combat. I sent him into the woods to cover the civilians. There…,” he trailed off, sucking a breath in past his teeth. “There aren’t many of the Recon troops left to go with them. And the militia is down to about a squad of effectives.”
“If you have a line-of-sight, tell that crew with the bomb to get their asses in here while we still control this door!”
“Roger that. They’re heading your way now.”
Well, what took them so fucking long? I wanted to ask but didn’t. I knew they’d been waiting until they had a clear shot through the main entrance and that made sense. They were our one shot at ending this. A flicker of motion caught my eye from the edge of my display and I saw the team escorting the cart past the burning wreckage littering the cargo doorway, their Gauss rifles held at their shoulders, looking for something they could actually hurt with the popguns. Colonel Oz was at the head of them. I’d been surprised when he told me he would be taking the bomb into the bunker instead of out leading his people in the assault.
But I suppose it would have been hard to ask anyone else to do it.
“Shit, here they come again!” Kreis said.
I received the warning from my targeting sensors almost at the same time as the one the Third squad leader shouted, just a mass of reactor signatures coming up from the bottom of the ramp. I tried to line my plasma gun up for where I thought they’d come clear of the overhanging roof and was about to order volley fire when the world exploded.
Or at least that was what it felt like to me when more missiles than I could count blasted up from the bottom of the ramp, fifty meters below, and shot past us with a physical concussion of superheated air, strong enough to make even my Vigilante stagger backward. They didn’t hit me, didn’t detonate near the entrance, just kept soaring upward until they hit the roof of the dome just to the left of the cargo entrance.
A chain-fire detonation splashed gouts of flame through the building and the shockwave slammed downward like the hand of God, just ahead of several tons of debris.
26
I had a flashback to the collapse of the cliffside on Valius, but this artificial landslide didn’t bury me or Third squad. It cascaded onto the flooring just inside the entrance, the closest chunk of reinforced concrete twenty meters away from the line we’d taken up at the bunker entrance, sending up huge clouds of white dust to join the smoke billowing outward from the massive new hole in the ceiling.
Second and Fourth squad, though…where were they? IFF transponders were flashing red in scatter patterns to either side of the door, and what I’d thought were lumps of concrete on the floor were my troops, their Vigilantes covered by grey dust. Some were moving, and I was pretty sure most of them were alive.
But the bomb…
The cart had overturned, one of its wheels smashed by falling debris, but the warhead itself was intact, though the once-shiny surface of the cylinder was scratched and gouged. The Recon Marines who’d been escorting it were buried under chunks of rubble, unmoving.
Shit, Colonel Oz was with them.
And suddenly, I had more important things to worry about, because all those missiles had come from High Guard suits, and all those Tahni troopers were rushing up the ramp, covering their assault with a salvo of electron beam fire. Kreis took the first hit, a subatomic scalpel slicing through his right arm at the shoulder, his scream warbling inside my helmet, and I couldn’t even take the time to check if he was still alive.
“Fire, Goddammit!” I snapped, throwing my Vigilante onto its side, shooting from the prone. “Scotty, Carson, get in here!”
Someone was listening to me, because when the Tahni thundered up the ramp, they were met by a volley of shots, but not enough, and there were just too damn many of them.
“Break contact!” The order was bitter in my mouth, an admission of failure, and yet I had to give it. If we stayed here and slugged it out with them, we’d be overwhelmed. There was half a brigade down there and we’d started out as a platoon. “Pull back past the entrance!”
We could still make it. The civilians were gone, that part of the mission was accomplished, I just had to go get that bomb. Scotty and I had the communications code to activate it programmed into our ‘links as a failsafe. I could get the bomb and take it down that ramp and if I didn’t make it out, well…maybe I knew how Oz had felt. Who the hell else would I order to go kill themselves?
“Scotty, Oz is dead. I’m taking the bomb into the hatch.”
He was yelling something at me, but I couldn’t hear him over the cacophony of battle and the roaring inside my head. I pushed to my feet, fired one last round at the High Guard suits pushing past the burning hulks of th
eir brothers-in-arms and began falling back. The bomb was fifteen meters away, and I kicked the Vigilante in the ass with a burst from the jump-jets, boosting myself the distance in a second.
I grabbed at the bomb blindly, feeling around with my left hand while I kept my eyes on the High Guard troops coming up the ramp. I still had missiles and God alone knew whether I could accurately target anything with them at this range, but they weren’t going to dock my pay for using them, so I fired them off, one after another, not aiming at anything in particular, just sending them through that hatch.
More explosions shook the foundations of the dome, more debris rained down, trailing fairy-dust sprinkles of plaster lit up by the sunlight through the shattered roof. People were dying. I saw two transponders go black and didn’t want to read the names beside them. I didn’t want to take their names with me to the afterlife, if there was one.
“Get those doors shut behind me, Scotty!” I yelled, taking a step onto the ramp.
I didn’t see the shot that hit me. It was lost in a haze of dazzling afterimages, overwhelming the filters of my helmet optics, turning everything into a white blanket of static and I couldn’t even separate our fire from theirs until a lance of pure, unadulterated agony speared into my left leg at the hip.
I’d experienced pain before and I thought I knew it, thought we were old acquaintances on speaking terms, that I knew its ins and outs like a veteran. But I hadn’t known pain until now. Fire clawed at my body with talons of pure, white-hot metal and I was falling, unable to put a single coherent thought together other than “they’re coming.”
And they were. I could see them, even though my addled brain couldn’t make sense of the images. Three…six…ten…I couldn’t count any higher, just one after another of the dull grey golems stalking upward from hell, wielding swords of fire.
The pain fell away and my brain began working for the space of a few seconds before it began to go numb again under the influence of the drugs the suit was injecting into my veins. Some of the Tahni troopers had made it out the front doors, while others were going down, tumbling across the legs of our own dead and wounded, and the rush stalled for just a moment. That was when I saw Scotty.
I knew it was him, not just from the IFF transponder display. I knew it was him because he was prying the bomb out of my suit’s clawed hand, grabbing it in his own, firing his plasma gun so close to me the heat was stultifying and I nearly passed out.
“Majid,” Scotty said, “get the LT out of here. Portnoy, Bodhi, get on those doors and shut them when I tell you.”
“Scotty, no!” I was surprised I could say anything coherent. The words came out slurred and I wasn’t sure if he understood, so I repeated them. “Fall back,” I told him. “That’s an order!”
“There’s too many,” he said, dismissing both my authority and my estimate of the situation, loping down the ramp. “Portnoy, Bodhi, get your shoulders into those doors!”
“No, damn it!” I screamed the words, but they seemed to be tiny, far away, and I realized I was farther away as well. Sgt. Majid had hold of my suit by the evacuation handle on the backpack and he was pulling me toward the entrance. “Scotty, don’t do it!”
“Get that hatch closed, then get the hell out of here,” were his last orders, as he ignored mine.
Scotty kept moving, firing his plasma gun as he disappeared into the hatchway. I don’t know if Portnoy and Bodhi understood what they were being told to do, but they were both privates and didn’t question their platoon sergeant. They slammed the doors shut and even through the explosions and the thunderclaps of energy weapons going off in the enclosed space of the dome, and the beat of my own pulse in my ears, I could hear the massive thump, like the lid of the universe’s largest coffin closing.
“No…,” someone was sobbing, and I was pretty sure it was me.
We were outside, though it took me a moment to register because the sunlight had disappeared behind grey clouds roiling in from the horizon, as if called in by the smoke pouring off our battlefield in some sort of ancient, pagan ritual. It was raining. Somehow, amidst the chaos, the lightning-strike flare of electron beamers and the supernova blasts from our plasma guns, I noticed the rain.
Majid had let go of my casualty handle and was standing over me like a guardian angel, his plasma gun sending a shot out every few seconds as if on a timer, his last missile popping out of the launcher on his back and streaking off to find a target I couldn’t even see. There was at least a company’s worth of High Guard troopers who had made it out of the bunker and against the remains of my platoon, those numbers were no contest. We were all dead.
The ground shifted beneath me, rolling like a wave, as if the very planet had rebelled against our war and was trying to shake us off. The dome collapsed in on itself, crumbling like a sandcastle, and the warehouses and fabrication centers around it began to shake themselves to pieces. Majid stumbled to the side, throwing out his arms for balance, like a surfer riding a swell, but the shaking was too much and he was thrown off his feet, crashing to the ground beside me.
The nuke was low-yield, designed to funnel energy through a lasing module and pierce spaceship armor with a single-use laser because nukes were an inefficient weapon for space combat, since there was no atmosphere to propagate the shockwave. The lasing module had been left behind with the wreckage of the corvette, but the nuke was plenty big enough to bring the whole bunker complex down, and maybe us with it.
I was flattened out on the ground, strangely disconnected from reality, understanding what I was seeing but somehow not afraid. The ground was caving in beneath the wreckage of the dome, swallowing up the remains of the dead, memorializing them under columns of black dirt and dust. The crumbling edge extended outward, ten meters, twenty, seeking me out, trying to bury me with the dead. I welcomed it, knowing my family would be there waiting.
The collapse ceased at the edges and instead, the crater deepened, caving in at the middle again as the bunker’s underpinnings gave way, flattening out, opening up a hole dozens of meters deep.
Scotty’s down there. But I had to correct myself. No, Scotty was atomized. There’s nothing left of him.
My head swam, my thoughts scattering away with every gust of the wind. The Tahni High Guard troops had been knocked off their feet just like my platoon, but they were getting up, rolling to the side and pushing themselves off the ground like turtles flipped over onto their backs. I wanted to tell the others, tell Majid, yell at them to get on their feet and fight, but I couldn’t put together the thought, couldn’t make myself speak over a whisper.
There was still a roaring in my ears, but it sounded different, like it was coming from outside my helmet. Something buzzed distantly and I thought maybe someone was trying to talk to me. I concentrated, narrowed my eyes and forced them into focus.
Aircraft. The sensors were warning me there were aircraft incoming.
Majid was up, shooting, spinning to the side to avoid an electron beam and I wanted to help, wanted at least to pay attention, but I just lay on my back and watched the black dots growing into massive lifting body shapes, kept in the air by sheer power.
Dropships.
Those were our dropships. The flyer had gotten through.
A swathe of scintillating laser pulses chopped into the ground and slewed across a cluster of High Guard suits, sparking halos of sublimated metal disguising the fiery, horrible deaths of the Tahni troops inside. I watched them die without exultation, without relief for myself, only grateful that I hadn’t gotten my whole platoon killed.
I felt so damned tired, ready to just sleep, and I knew it was the suit. It had hit me with another dose of painkillers and I wasn’t going to be able to keep myself from passing out.
“Majid,” I hissed, my voice barely audible. Somehow, though, he heard me.
“Just stay still, sir,” the squad leader said, raw emotion tearing at his voice as he stood over me. “You’re going to be okay.”
How badl
y hurt was I? The suit simply showed a solid red glow over my hip, critical damage to me and the mechanism, but it didn’t tell me whether I had a leg left below the hip. I wasn’t sure if Majid was broken up over how mangled I looked or because he knew what had happened to Scotty.
“Take care of the platoon, Christian,” I told him, blackness creeping up on me, ready to smother me like a blanket. “You’re in charge.”
I laid my head against the cushioning in the back of my helmet and surrendered to the darkness. I knew it wasn’t permanent, wasn’t death coming to claim me. But I wasn’t afraid of death. I was afraid of what I would face when I opened my eyes again.
27
My eyes fluttered open and the round, pleasant face of an older man wearing white Medical Corps scrubs cohered into sharp relief in the harsh lights overhead.
“Welcome back to the land of the living, Lieutenant,” he said, tapping something into the tablet he held down at waist level. “I’m Major Hollingsworth.”
I tested myself, tensing one muscle after another from my neck down to my feet before I tried to move. There was a slight tension to my right leg at the hip and I felt like my foot had been asleep and was just waking up. Nothing hurt, though, and I sat up in bed. I was, no surprise, in a sick bay. I wasn’t sure which sick bay, but there was gravity. I took a deep breath and tasted just a bit of the tang of a living atmosphere, subtly different from shipboard air even inside an air-conditioned building.
“I’m still on Silvanus.”
“Very good,” Hollingsworth said, miming applause. “I guess I can skip the cognitive tests since you obviously seem to have your faculties about you. Yes, you are still on Silvanus and to answer the question that always comes next, you’ve been kept under for the last one hundred and ten hours.”
I blinked, trying to do division in my head.
“That’s like four and a half days, right?” I said. I looked down at my right leg. I was dressed in a short hospital gown and my legs were bare, so I could see that there was something…off about the right one. It took me a moment to realize it was that there was no hair on my right thigh. “How bad was it?”