Contact Front #1 Drop Trooper

by Rick Partlow

  “That son of a bitch.”

  The words slipped out and with them slipped away any trace of coherent thought. I knew where Cunningham’s simulator was in the even rows of oval, man-high pods and I stalked over to it without a moment’s hesitation and ripped the hatch open.

  Cunningham blinked at the sudden glare of the lights and, before his eyes could refocus from the simulation to my face, I pulled the plugs out of his head, hit the quick release on his restraints and hauled him out of the pod.

  “Alvarez?” he squawked, too shocked to even pretend to be outraged. “Hey, wait a minute…”

  I slammed him up against the wall, jaw aching from how hard my teeth were grinding together.

  “Is that what you’re gonna do in real combat, Cunningham?” I’d meant the words to be a low, threatening growl, but they came out as bull-bellow. “You gonna buddy-fuck me and let the Tahni do what you didn’t have the balls to do yourself? Is that the plan?”

  “I was just messing around, man!” he raised his hands in surrender. The fucker was scared, and he should have been. I was watching myself from over my shoulder, not under control, not even trying. “It was a joke! I’d never do it for real!”

  My right hand hurt, and it took me a second to understand it was because I was clenching my fist so tightly, my arm cocked backward, ready to slam into his face.

  “You were messing around?”

  I almost thought I’d said the words, so disconnected was I with my own actions, but then a hand so much stronger than I’d imagined yanked backwards on my shoulder and I was pulled back a step from Cunningham. Gunny Guerrero was easygoing for a platoon sergeant, but his face was a mask of rage, and if I looked half as angry as he did, I didn’t blame Cunningham for being scared.

  “You were fucking messing around?” Guerrero repeated, finger poking into Cunningham’s chest. “Do you think this is a fucking game? Do you think we’re here playing? This shit is to teach you, to keep your sorry ass alive! This is a fucking war! Tell me something, you stupid fucking moron, what do you think Top would do if she was here? What do you think the fucking Skipper would do? Do you think he would slap you on the back and buy you a beer and tell you how funny your fucking joke was?”

  “No, Gunny,” Cunningham said, his voice squeaking.

  “You’re Goddamned right he wouldn’t. He’d have you in the fucking brig! He’d have your ass up on charges! Do you want me to bring Top down here? Do you want her to involve the Skipper in this?”

  “No, Gunny!” He was more enthusiastic about the answer this time, standing up straight, eyes going wide.

  “Then I fucking suggest you apologize profusely to Lance Corporal Alvarez and then get your ass back into that pod and do your fucking job!” He snarled, his lip curling back over yellow teeth. “And we’ll take care of your punishment later, on a platoon level.”

  Cunningham nodded, turning to me, his mouth working as if he didn’t know what to say.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, finally, what might have been honest shame alongside the fear in his eyes, the knowledge he’d gone too far. “I don’t like you, but I wouldn’t do that to another Marine if it was real, you gotta believe me.”

  I was about to say something about how he’d run out on the bar fight and left us to rot, but the Gunny interrupted.

  “Now, Alvarez,” he said, grinding his teeth as he forced a smile on his face, “why don’t you tell Cunningham you accept his apology and we can fucking get back to training?”

  I didn’t want to. I wanted to tell him exactly what I thought of him and then smash him in the face until my knuckles bled. But to do it now, I’d have to fight Guerrero, too. I saw Scotty Hayes walking up behind him, a concerned frown dragging down his normal, cheerful expression.

  “Yeah, fine,” I muttered. “Let’s get back to it.”

  Guerrero hitched a thumb back at Fourth squad’s pods and Cunningham scurried away like a rat spared the trap. I started to turn away myself but Guerrero stopped me with a hand thumping against my chest.

  “Dumbass!” he snapped, and I frowned at him in confusion. “If you could have kept your shit together, I’d have had a perfect excuse to get that fucking moron out of our platoon,” Guerrero growled low enough that only I could hear him. “Now, if I take this shit to Top, your ass will be swinging right next to his. Do you know you get a for-sure Article 15 for fucking with another trooper’s simulator pod without authorization? And that shit would go on your record and never come off.” He tapped a finger against one of my ‘face jacks and I flinched away instinctively. “This shit is wired into your fucking brain, dumbass! That operation is not cheap! You fuck with it wrong, they have to go back in there and fix it, you think the one who cost all that money isn’t going to spend some time in the brig?”

  “Oh.” The anger had expanded far enough out of me to fill the whole room, but now it shrank back inside and back into the little box at my center where I kept it locked away. “Shit.”

  “Yeah, shit is right!” Guerrero spat, throwing up his hands. “Now I gotta call in every favor I got stored up with the Warrant in charge of the simulator and get the whole thing erased from the tapes and all I can do to fucknuts over there….” He motioned over at Cunningham. “…is make him clean the barracks floor. And we’re gonna be back on the Iwo in three fucking days! Jesus help me…” He shook his head. “If you can’t keep your fucking cool, Alvarez, I don’t care how good you are, I am busting you back to PFC.”

  He turned back to the rest of the platoon, all of them out of their pods and staring, and began shouting orders, but I was too numb to hear.

  Hayes blew a breath out the side of his mouth and stuffed his hands in his pockets like he didn’t know what else to do with them.

  “Cunningham is a prick,” he told me. “But you’re from the city, Cam. You had to have run into a lot of pricks there. How’d you deal with them?”

  “I usually ran away,” I admitted, “and hid someplace small and dark.”

  “Well, we got the small and dark covered,” Hayes said, motioning at the pods and the battlesuits they represented. “But there ain’t no running away. When we hit the drop, we’re all each other has. Learn to deal.”

  Fourteen Years Old:

  “Cameron,” Mr. Portillo sighed the name, sitting back in his chair, hands clasped across his knee like the useless poser he was, “you have to learn to deal.”

  I sat on the edge of the uncomfortable folding plastic piece of shit he’d pulled out of the closet for me, my feet flat on the floor. I’d rather have stood, but Portillo had insisted. He’d wanted to talk to me “man to man.” I wondered who he was going to bring in to carry off his half of the arrangement.

  “Deal,” I repeated, my tone flat and unyielding. “You want me to deal with Tony and Valdemar pimping out twelve-year-old kids to the gangs?”

  I said it like I was so immeasurably older and more mature than the twelve-year-old kids, which maybe I wasn’t, but at least I could defend myself against the two ringleaders of the group.

  “You want me to deal with them beating up anyone small enough to not fight back, stealing anything they have, or making them their slaves? You think that’s something I should deal with instead of you?”

  Portillo sighed heavily, dramatically. He always did that, and I wanted to wrap my hands around his pencil neck and strangle him every time I heard it.

  “Cameron, I’ve told you and the rest of the staff here have told you, you can’t just go around making these sorts of accusations. It’s disruptive to the good order of the facility.”

  I felt my eyes go wide at his sheer balls.

  “And letting a couple small-time gangbangers run this place is just fine for the good order?”

  “If you have any evidence of any illegal behavior against Tony or Valdemar, you should present it to me and Ms. Neymeir or anyone else on staff and we will see to it that they are investigated by the proper authorities.” He was smug and self-satisfied, as
usual.

  “How do you think I’m going to get evidence against them?” I was wasting my breath; I’d known that before I’d come in the room. But I had the conviction of a teenager that if I just presented the facts in a passionate and clear enough way, I’d win the argument. “You guys have the security monitors. You’re telling me you’ve never seen any of this?”

  “I am a duly empowered officer of the City of Trans-Angeles, Mr. Alvarez,” Portillo told me. His lip twisted into a half-smile and in that moment, I was sure. “If I ever saw any illegal activity, I would be required by law to report it to the Juvenile Crimes Authority.”

  “Yeah,” I murmured, leaning back against the cheap plastic, hearing the creak as it threatened to give way beneath me. “I suppose you would.”

  “And since you have no evidence, the only choice you have here is to learn to deal with your fellow occupants in this facility, until such time as someone adopts you or you become a legal adult and are allowed to move out on your own.” He pursed his lips, trying to seem authoritative and intimidating but only succeeding in making himself look like more of a tool. “I trust we understand each other.”

  “Oh, yeah,” I confirmed, not looking away from his dark eyes. “I understand completely.”

  “Then I suppose we have nothing left to discuss.”

  I didn’t slam his door behind me, but it was an effort. The hallway outside Portillo’s office was dimly lit and cloaked in shadows, but I saw Valdemar waiting for me at the top of the stairs, saw his perfect white smirk. He was good-looking and he knew it, which made him even more of a douchebag.

  “You tried to narc on us, Alvarez,” he said, arms crossed over his chest. “What do you think’s going to happen to you now?”

  He wasn’t expecting the shoulder to his chest, definitely wasn’t expecting to cannonball down the winding stairwell. I heard the crunch of breaking bones, but I didn’t look back to see how badly he was hurt. I ran, not stopping for the cries and shouts and commands behind me, not stopping to grab anything from my room. There was nothing here I needed or wanted.

  I ran and didn’t look back.

  18

  “This is the big one, boys and girls.”

  Captain Covington’s face was unreadable, exuding the same cool reserve whether he was angry, excited or depressed. I’d hate to have played poker with the man. But I thought I detected just a hint of enthusiasm behind his words, as if the novelty of the coming operation had lit a fire in his jaded soul.

  He paced back and forth across the Iwo Jima’s docking bay, a caged lion, watching the rest of us with hungry eyes. We weren’t at attention, weren’t even in any real formation. This was as informal as it got for the Skipper, and I could see from the scowl on Top’s face that she wasn’t crazy about it. If she’d been running the briefing, we’d all be at parade rest. Or maybe in the push-up position, depending on her mood.

  There wasn’t as much room in a troop carrier’s hangar bay as I’d thought before the first time I’d been in one. The drop-ships and assault shuttles were nestled into hollow recesses folded into the ship’s hull, stored in the vacuum, only their airlocks accessible through the hangar bay docking umbilicals. But the main passageways were broad and usually kept clear to allow cargo to be loaded onto the drop-ships, which meant there was barely enough room for all of Delta Company to gather, and hope to God we’d all showered.

  Rodriguez had, but I wasn’t sure about Betancourt.

  “This isn’t some staging base,” Covington went on, “or an isolated ammo dump with a platoon guarding it. We are going to be making the first attempt at retaking a human colony world from Tahni occupation.”

  Nods all around, as if everyone had been waiting for this, eager for it. Me, I was thinking we’d have lost a trooper hitting one of those isolated ammo dumps with just a platoon of enemy.

  “It’s not a mainline Commonwealth world, just a small, squatter colony out on the Periphery, a place called Brigantia.”

  Top had tasked a couple of “volunteers” to haul a portable holoprojector from the ship’s conference room to the hangar bay and it snapped to life at Covington’s tap on his ‘link, bringing up a star map showing the established Commonwealth. The former Neutral Zone with the Tahni was highlighted in a deep purple, which seemed to be a lot of trouble given how useless and irrelevant it was now.

  The Skipper ran his thumb across the screen of his ‘link and the image zoomed in to a star at the edge of the Neutral Zone, marked with the letters and numbers of an astrographic notation but no colloquial name, a sign of how unimportant the place was even to the mapmakers. Closer in and five planets manifested out of the darkness, an ice ball at the farthest edge, a pair of medium-sized gas giants, a burnt husk of rock in the nearest orbit to the G-class star…and the only habitable in the system, Brigantia.

  “It’s close to Earth-normal, nine-tenths of the gravity, about three-fourths the density, so it’s a bigger planet. Dryer than Earth, at least on the surface, a lot of water trapped underground. The capital city….” He snorted as if at a joke, though no smile crossed his graven-image of a face. “…Hell, the only real city is a place maybe five kilometers by either, mostly industrial fabrication and trade centers. Called Gennich, after one of the founders of the colony. Big enough it has its own fusion reactor and a defense laser the Fleet was kind enough to build for them at taxpayer expense.”

  There were a few chuckles at that, but not from me. I had never paid taxes and didn’t expect to.

  “The Tahni grabbed the colony right about the time they bombed the squatters in the Neutral Zone. They didn’t nuke these guys, maybe on the theory that they didn’t commit the cardinal sin of violating the Truce, just took their colony and have been using it as a communications relay station.”

  He scanned the company, searching for comprehension in our eyes.

  “How many of you know about the wormhole gates?”

  The officers and the platoon sergeants all raised their hands, along with a couple of junior NCOs and maybe three or four other enlisted. I didn’t raise mine, though I’d read something about them. I knew he’d explain whether I raised it or not and I just wanted him to get to the mission brief.

  “All right, here’s the short version. We’re in Transition Space right now, I hope you all know that much.” He cocked an eyebrow, as if daring anyone to claim they hadn’t realized we were traveling through another dimension. “Transition Space runs along the gravito-inertial Transition Lines between connected star systems, but the only way we found out about it was when we discovered the wormholes. Each system that’s connected with a Transition Line has a microscopic wormhole, too small to fit a person through it, much less a ship, but big enough to transmit a signal through if you know where it is. That’s how we can communicate with the colonies faster than just sending ships back and forth carrying messages, using communications arrays positioned close to the wormhole, what we call the Instell ComSats.”

  How anyone could be in the damned Marines and not know about the Instell ComSats was beyond me, but then, Cunningham was in our platoon.

  “The Tahni use the same system, of course, but they have a choke point. The only way for them to get messages back to their homeworld from the Periphery is through the wormhole in this system.” He jabbed a finger toward Brigantia. “But they can’t use a ComSat hanging out in space, because they know we’d destroy it just as quick as they put a new one up. They use a high-power transmitter on the surface of the planet, powered by the same fusion reactor the Commonwealth built for them.” He shrugged. “Sure, they can only transmit when that side of the planet is in the right place, but there’s not a damned thing we can do to shut it down, unless we want to nuke the city…or take it back.”

  He’d mentioned nuking the world so casually, as if it was something the Fleet had actually considered. I wondered if they had.

  “Our job, first, last and no questions asked, is to take out that communications array. If everything else
goes the way it’s supposed to, the Fleet’s cruisers are going to be bombarding the deflectors with their proton cannons from orbit at the same time. The feedback from the array going down should run right back into the deflectors and bring them down, which means no more deflectors and no more Tahni barracks. Now, of course, they’re not going to sit still while we do that. We don’t know if they have any High Guard in the garrison here, but they definitely have a shitload of Shock-troops and crew-served weapons.”

  To my surprise, Sandoval raised her hand.

  “Yes, Lance Corporal?”

  “Sir, they got to have a shitload of air defense around there, probably outside the deflectors and camouflaged.” She shook her head. “How’re we gonna get through that in the drop-ships?”

  “You’re exactly right, Sandoval,” Covington said, a very thin, barely-noticeable smile creasing his face. “You may have noticed we’re carrying a company of Force Recon on this ship.”

  Oh, boy, had we ever. Top had pounded it into us with the decibel level of a sonic stunner that if any of us got into it with the Force Recon troops, she would cut our guts out with a rusty knife. And it was so damned hard to keep my mouth shut when the pricks called themselves “operators,” as if they were some sort of Fleet Intelligence spooks instead of just straight-leg foot-soldiers.

  “Yes, sir,” Sandoval said, her cheek quivering slightly, as if she was clenching her teeth not to say anything else. “I noticed.”

  “They’re going to HALO in with glider chutes and take out the air defenses to let us insert low enough to drop.”

  Shit. I didn’t say it, but I was thinking it, and I heard a couple people actually curse softly at the news.

  “At ease!” Top growled and the murmuring ceased.