by Rick Partlow
The one I’d blocked aside gathered himself visibly, cursing at me loudly and incoherently before he rushed in. The third guy hadn’t gotten involved yet and didn’t seem in any itching hurry to make a move now. He just stood off to the side, anger in his expression but uncertainty in his eyes, mouth half-open as if he hadn’t expected a real fight. I took a chance and focused on the one coming at me.
He wasn’t any better at this kind of thing than Cunningham and I thought neither one of them had bothered to pay attention in unarmed combat training. Most people in my class hadn’t. We were armor troopers, who cared about being able to wrestle with a Tahni? But I’d spent most of my life getting beat on by people bigger than me, and the Tahni were much bigger than these asshats.
I stepped back perpendicular to his rush and my foot came out of the flip-flops. I slipped backwards and still managed to keep my balance, but I’d lost a second, and a lost second was enough to give someone not quite as good as me but a couple centimeters taller and five kilos heavier just a bit of an edge. He swung wildly and his knuckles grazed my cheek hard enough for a dull ache to spring up behind my eye. I stepped into his guard and smacked my shin into the side of his thigh, bare beneath his shower shorts, the sound as loud as a gunshot.
“Fuck!” he declared and went down as if I’d chopped his leg off below his hip.
There was a big nerve there, the common peroneal. I’d learned about it long before Marine Corps unarmed combat class, way back when I’d been in the very last group home, the one I’d wound up running away from. Getting kicked right where the nerve ran up the side of the thigh was like having a hot knife stabbed into the muscle and twisted. I’d felt it before, more than once, and I was happy to be on the delivery end this time.
Bald Dude Number One was down and not likely to get up anytime soon, clutching at his leg and moaning, but Cunningham had gotten over his shock from the broken nose, at least enough to be angry about it. He tackled me low, around the hips. I didn’t know if he did it on purpose or just lucked out, but it was just the right place for a takedown, and I’d been too distracted to try any sort of defense. My back smacked against the cold, wet tile of the shower compartment hard enough to make me see stars, and that was where Cunningham’s luck ran out.
If he’d known what he was doing, that might have been it for me. He could have controlled my hips with his own, mounted me and started pummeling me with one punch after another and there wouldn’t have been a damned thing I could do about it. But his face was red with blood and flushed with rage, and he just hauled back for a haymaker, not paying any attention to my legs. I hooked one of them up around his arm and tossed him backwards off me.
He didn’t know how to fall, either. His head bounced off the ground when he hit and he came up cursing and groaning. I jumped up to my feet, ready to kick the shit out of him.
“What the hell?” Scotty Hayes’ exclamation sliced through the fog over my thoughts and I stepped back, glancing over my shoulder at him but still keeping one eye on my opponents. “What the fuck is going on here?”
Hayes was dressed for duty, in utility fatigues, not for the showers, and I wondered if he’d just been passing by or if someone had heard us fighting and called him.
“Your boy here got my friend Tommy killed!” Cunningham’s voice was comically distorted by the broken nose, and blood was flowing from it again after his fall. “I’m not going to let him get away with it!”
“Yeah, Wade,” Hayes said, cocking an eye at the Lance Corporal’s battered face, “you look like you’re really teaching him a lesson. Want me to save some time and call a cas-evac unit to the showers for you, or can you make it to sick bay on your own?”
“If your fucking L-T had any balls, she’d have him up on charges!” Cunningham sputtered, blood from his nose flecking off his lip and mixing with his spittle.
“Shut up and go cool off, Wade,” Hayes said, his normally relaxed expression going hard. “Or I’ll finish what Alvarez started. And then I’ll mention to Top that you’ve been swinging your dick around again and sit back and watch while she cuts it off.” He looked at me and jerked a thumb toward the hatchway. “Come on, let’s get out of here.”
I grabbed my towel and my errant flip-flop and followed him out into the passageway. I thought he’d say something to me then, but he led me out of the crew quarters and past the ship’s mess. I became suddenly self-conscious of the smacking of my flip-flops on the deck and the soaked-in water stains on my shirt. Finally, though, Hayes pushed open a hatch and poked his head through, checking carefully before waving me in behind him.
It was a storage closet for the mess, packed high with barrels of soy paste and powdered blue-green algae, the staples the military ran on, and there was a space barely wide enough to stand between the rows. Hayes pulled the hatch shut and rounded on me, a look on his face I couldn’t quite read.
“Cam, I need you to tell me what happened out there.”
“In the shower?” I asked, frowning. “Cunningham was angry and I was an easy target.”
“No,” Hayes clarified. “I mean down on Bluebonnet. What happened with Tommy Kurita?”
“I have no fucking idea,” I admitted. “I was up front, first one off the bus, you know that. My comms were damaged by a beamer and I didn’t even know Tommy was down until the battle was almost over. Gunny said he got hit by enemy missiles but I haven’t even seen the footage.”
“I have,” Hayes said, his voice grim. There was something in his eyes I couldn’t quite read in the dimly lit storage room, something I thought might have been envy tinged with bitterness. “I’ve never seen anything like it. You fired off your plasma gun just as the High Guard suits launched their missiles and you made them shoot wide.” He snorted disbelief. “Somehow. And they missed you…but they hit Tommy.”
“Shit.” I squeezed my eyes shut. I suddenly felt drained and my hands were starting to shake, and I didn’t know if it was the post-adrenaline-dump letdown that always happens after a fight. I leaned against one of the storage shelves for support. “I didn’t know, man. I was just running on auto-pilot. I thought Tommy was supposed to watch my back, but I felt like I was out there alone.”
“You weren’t alone, though, Cam. None of us are. We have our battle buddy, and our fire team and our squad and our platoon, and we’re supposed to watch out for each other.”
I opened my eyes again, squinting at him, wondering if he was for real.
“I was up front,” I said. I wasn’t trying to sound sullen and resentful, but I could hear the tone in my voice, as if it was someone else was speaking through me. “I didn’t have any comms and I didn’t have time to look back.”
Hayes looked as if he wanted to argue with me, to tell me off, and his jaw clenched visibly. There was a battle going on for self-control, playing across his features.
“You’re probably right.” I could tell that wasn’t what he’d been about to say, but he had better self-control than I did. Maybe that’s why he was a sergeant. “The fact is, none of us had seen real combat before and we all made some mistakes. That’s probably what the Skipper and the platoon leaders are talking about right now. And I’m not telling you that you did anything different than any other PFC would have done. But Alvarez, you are not just any PFC. You have to know that.”
“Yeah, I’m all sorts of weird,” I acknowledged, laughing sharply.
“You are at home in that suit,” Hayes told me, not letting it go. “You destroyed six enemy suits, Alvarez. Six. By yourself. How many people you think could have done that?”
“A lot?” I guessed. “The Tahni troopers don’t seem that impressive.”
“Don’t you read the scansheet reports?” he wondered, spreading his hands like he was pleading with me. “Intelligence puts them out every week, the parts that aren’t classified.”
“I haven’t had time.” I really hadn’t even heard of them but I didn’t want to admit it to him. He looked skeptical, but he didn’t call m
e on it.
“There have only been four skirmishes between Fleet Marine Drop Troops and Tahni High Guard since the Battle for Mars. Not really full-scale battles, just shit like this. Every single time, we’ve got our asses kicked.” He shrugged. “Oh, you know, that’s not how the reports read. The military likes to put smiley faces on everything. But if you read the numbers, we’ve taken four casualties for every High Guard battlesuit we’ve taken down.”
My eyes widened and dull pain blossomed in my cheek where Cunningham had slugged me.
“Seriously?”
“And that’s with veteran armored troops,” he insisted, “Marines who’ve been training in Vigilantes for years. Most of us….” He waved a hand inclusively. “…have been in the Drop Troops for less than a year, except a few like Top and the Skipper. You’ve got a feel for the suit, something we can’t really teach. We all saw it in the simulator, but lots of people are simulator heroes.”
“I don’t understand,” I said. “You want me to kill Tahni, I’ll do it all day for you.” Until they kill me. “Put me at point every operation if you want, I don’t care.”
“Cunningham was right about one thing,” Hayes said. “Something he said back on Inferno. You can kill Tahni all day and they’ll keep coming. We don’t just need people who can kill Tahni, we need leaders. And sometimes leaders have to leave themselves vulnerable to watch out for the other guy.”
“I ain’t a leader, Scotty. I don’t want to be responsible for anyone but myself.”
“You already are,” he told me. “We all are, no matter what rank we wear. And now, I’m going to make it official.”
“What do you mean?” I demanded, not liking the tone of his voice or the thin smile that passed across his face.
“Your fire team needs a team leader and you’re it.”
“I’m a fucking PFC!” I objected, straightening, pushing away from the storage shelf. “I can’t be a team leader.”
“Not anymore. I already talked to Gunny Guerrero and Lt. Ackley and she passed it up to Captain Covington. As of 1200 hours tomorrow, you are Lance Corporal Cameron Alvarez, leader of First squad, Alpha team.” He winced just slightly. “You’ll be getting a new recruit to fill out the team to replace Kurita.”
My stomach was dropping out of Transition Space and back into zero gravity far behind us and my mouth was dry.
“You just got through saying how I wasn’t watching out for the other Marines in my squad and now you’re putting me in charge of a fire team?”
Hayes clapped me on the shoulder on the way to yank open the storage room hatch, as if the matter had been settled and there was nothing left to talk about.
“The best way to make someone learn how to do something,” he told me, sounding awfully self-satisfied, “is to hold them accountable for it.”
15
“Taylor, watch your interval,” I snapped. “If you like Rodriguez that much, get her ‘link address and call her after the war.”
“Sorry,” the quiet man said, his Vigilante backing off another ten meters in the Ranger-file line formation we were running through the city center.
I didn’t really blame him for getting distracted. MOUT City was creepy, especially at night. Leave it to the military to find the most extravagant way to spend taxpayer money. Never mind that we had realistic virtual reality pods that could simulate any terrain, the Marines had built themselves a complete dummy city on Inferno a hundred kilometers outside the capital of Tartarus. I mean, right down to the business names on the marquee and the parking stickers on the windscreens of the cargo trucks parked at the curb. And furniture inside, for all I knew. Military Operations in Urban Terrain, an acronym older than the Commonwealth, or so I’d been told.
Someone had told me there were construction bots on call after every training run to rebuild any of the buildings that got damaged, which kind of made me want to smash into a couple of them just for shits and giggles, but I restrained myself. I was in a leadership position and, even if I wasn’t too happy about it, I wasn’t going to fuck it up on purpose.
I’d thought about it. Maybe, I’d figured, if I messed up bad enough, they might be forced to demote me back to PFC and put someone else in charge of the fire team. I still wasn’t sure why I’d decided against it. It wasn’t because I was afraid that they’d kick me out and I’d wind up in hibernation. I already knew they were too desperate to let any warm bodies get away and I’d also come to accept I was very good in a Vigilante, which they also wouldn’t have wanted to lose.
But I couldn’t do it to Scotty Hayes. He’d taken a chance on me and he really seemed to think I was worth it. I don’t know why I felt like I owed him for that, particularly when I didn’t want the job, but he was trying to be my friend, and it was more than anyone had done for me in the last ten years.
“First squad,” Hayes said over the squad net, his voice calm and steady, “we got a frag-o based on a report from the drones. There’s a company of Tahni infantry dug in at the constabulary. That’s our target. We believe they’re holding civilian hostages in the sub-basement cells, so we can’t just bombard the building or call in an air strike. We have to draw them out and give Force Recon a chance to get inside and free the civilians.”
I made sure my mic was turned off before I sighed in exasperation. The odds we’d ever get any useful intel from drones in real combat were somewhere between slim and none. If we could get drones past the Tahni ECM, we could have put missiles and guns on them and not have to send live humans in battlesuits and assault shuttles and fighters, but they had to have some excuse for a last-minute fragmentary order just to make everything more interesting for us.
“Alpha,” Hayes went on, “at Phase Line Delta, you’re going to break north and approach from the front, get their attention but don’t get too decisively engaged. Bravo, I want you to hold back and pound any of the shock-troops we draw out. The rest of the platoon is heading around the rear of the building to the cargo entrance to bust through and take out the barricaded opposition and open things up for Force Recon. Be careful. We don’t want to shoot through the building and frag our own guys. Everyone got that?”
“Roger, Scotty,” I said.
After months of armor school pounding it into me to use proper communications procedure with callsigns and codewords and all that shit, it felt strange to just call everyone by their names, but it kind of made sense. We were using laser line-of-sight comms when we were close to each other and quantum frequency-hopping for the microwave signals, and if the Tahni could intercept that, we were pretty much screwed anyway. All the comms discipline was a holdover from wars between humans, when someone could check social media and intelligence reports full of stolen personnel records and put names together with units and use the data to strike at families and blackmail individuals. It was all pretty much a waste of time when we were fighting aliens. But the military ran on tradition, so we still used it when we were talking to anyone above company level.
“Betancourt,” I said to the newbie, the guy who’d replaced me after I’d replaced Kurita, a recent AOT grad who was even greener than I was, “you’re up at point.” Might as well see whether the guy could cut it now, before we headed back out for another mission. Which I’d been told was coming up soon, and I could believe that as much as I wanted to.
“Go light on the jets,” I cautioned the others. “We want to attract attention, but they might just waste an anti-aircraft missile on us if we give them the chance.”
I was trying to sound authoritative, which meant I was just repeating what Lt. Ackley had told us when she’d read the Op order three hours ago. It sounded lame inside my head, but Hayes had assured me it was a good fallback when I didn’t have any idea of what to say.
“It’s what they’ll expect,” he’d told me. “Lt. Ackley is just repeating what Captain Covington said to her. It’s how things work.”
“Boost for a few seconds to stay out of their targeting screens if you have to,” I
continued, “but I don’t want anyone over twenty meters up and keep a clock running in your head. Three seconds up, three down. Got it?”
“Yes, Corporal Alvarez,” Betancourt said obediently, as if I wasn’t the same age as him with a grand total of about two months’ more experience.
The other two murmured agreement but I could tell they weren’t too crazy about this arrangement. Everyone had liked Kurita and a lot of people still thought I’d let him get killed…including maybe Rodriguez and Taylor.
This is a horrible idea. Scotty, what the fuck were you thinking?
I didn’t know MOUT City very well yet. They didn’t use it for Armor school, so this was only my second pass through the place since we’d returned to Inferno after the raid on Bluebonnet. But I remembered from the briefing that Phase Line Delta was just past the pretend industrial district of the fake city, and even if my helmet display hadn’t shown the divider as a red highlight across the map, it would have been obvious. The factories and warehouses and fabrication centers were big, squared-off, and stereotypical, while the government sector was decorated with buildfoam replicas of Greek columns and facades of red brick.
“Hook a left, Betancourt,” I told him, just in case he’d lost track of which way north was.
I watched his movement with a critical eye, unimpressed. His Vigilante ambled with an awkward, broad-legged gait, like a toddler just learning to walk. They wouldn’t have passed him through Armor school if he had that much trouble handling a suit, so I figured he was just nervous. I switched my comms to a private channel with him.
“Betancourt, relax a little. Stop overthinking it and just pretend you’re walking to formation. The interface will do the work.”
“Okay, sorry.”
I wished the guy didn’t sound so deferential. It was making me start to feel even more self-conscious. But his stride became more natural, which I guessed meant he was listening to me. The left turn on the imaginatively-labelled Third Street took us back behind a line of apartment buildings, the sort I would have associated with upwardly-mobile Surface Dwellers back in Trans-Angeles but were considered standard working-class housing in the colonies.