by Rick Partlow
And they’d be spun up, waiting for us. The base was dug into the wall a kilometer ahead, an artificial cave probably carved with a high-powered construction laser, or maybe enlarged from a network of natural caverns. The opening was huge, two hundred meters across and fifty high, and even a kilometer away, the shuttles stored under the overhang were already visible, their vertical stabilizers nearly scraping against the ceiling. Rows of them, at least a dozen, and behind them stacks of cylindrical cargo crates in racks stacked just as high. This place was serious and I had a bad feeling they hadn’t just left it with a crew of janitors to watch over things.
The suit was sinking half a meter into the mud with each step and I knew I was going painfully slow, but the concrete pad the Tahni had poured into a ramp and landing pad at the end of the overhang was only a few dozen meters ahead, tantalizing. The anti-aircraft turrets at the edge of the pad were scanning back and forth in aggravated futility, searching for targets they couldn’t see past the interference of the angry, swollen deflector shields, their missiles and lasers couched in hungry restlessness.
I took the last step out of the mud up onto the pad, boosting myself with just a microsecond burst of jump-jets, and there they were. They’d come out sooner than we’d hoped, but that was how this sort of shit went down. The enemy had their own plans. I’d seen them in simulators, but they were uglier in person, subtly different than our Vigilantes, less overtly humanoid and articulated and more akin to a bipedal robot, with cylinders for arms, ending in the gaping emitters for electron beamers. Their legs were unnaturally short, the knee joints covered with a jutting vambrace of armor sticking up from the lower leg, the base broad and octagonal.
Eight of them were flying out of the entrance to the base, jetting on shimmering columns of superheated air and firing as they came, their particle accelerators ripping up huge divots from the concrete pad in explosions of violently liberated water vapor. One of the beams came so close it blanked out my sensors for nearly a second and damage sensors flashed red, though I couldn’t tell what was damaged and the suit kept running.
“Contact front!” I called instinctively. “A squad of High Guard!”
Slow is smooth, my gunnery instructor had said, and smooth is fast.
I targeted the closest of them and squeezed the control for the missile launch tube running up and down the right side of my suit’s reactor shroud. Cold gas popped the missile from the tube, just far enough for the exhaust of the solid-rocket motor not to hit my own armor, and then it was streaking out across the hundreds of meters between us in the space of a second, nearly going hypersonic before it hit the enemy trooper.
I tried not to focus on the hit, knowing how little time I had and how much attention I’d just drawn to myself, but I caught a crimson flash on the targeting screen at the corner of my display, the indication of a thermal bloom that was supposed to mean complete destruction. I had my own missiles inbound and all sorts of ECM systems and a counter-battery rocket launcher on the left side of my back to protect me from them, but I was too close and I knew it.
My plasma gun was pointed right along the path of the incoming missiles and I had just enough time to pull the trigger. The packet of super-ionized gas held together and propelled by an electromagnetic field, shot out at thousands of meters per second and pushed a wall of superheated air ahead of it. The actual plasma blast hit one of the missiles, almost miraculously given how fast it was traveling, but the wall of heat did the real work, the turbulence kicking the other four incoming missiles aside just enough. They were guided and could have corrected, but we were way too close and by the time they curved back around, I’d be in the middle of the enemy.
Blasts rocked the concrete behind me, shaking me all the way up through the BiPhase Carbide of the suit, but I was too busy to worry about what the warheads had hit instead of me. I wasn’t thinking, not at that speed. The interface made it easy to not think, to just act and react, like in a fight on the street. Back then, I’d been used to being outnumbered, and the key was always to get in close and keep them from ganging up on me, make sure they couldn’t take a swing at me without hitting one of their own.
I hit the jets for just a half-second, a boot in the ass carrying me forward a bit faster than the suit’s legs could have, and I was suddenly in the midst of the Tahni troopers, too close for missiles. Electron beams ripped apart the air itself only meters from me, their aim lagging just a fraction of a second behind my movements. They scattered at my approach, out of my line of fire, ignoring the other suits coming in behind me, and I hoped the rest of the squad would take advantage of it. I had my own problems.
Most of the Tahni had scattered, but one of them had decided to stick with me, swinging around his twin electron beamers, firing burst after burst as I circled just ahead of him. It was a him, that much I knew for sure; the Tahni didn’t let their females fight, for some reason. I couldn’t remember if it was biological or religious or whatever, but I suppose it was a relief. Momma had always told me never to hit a girl.
I hit the jets, twisting sideways to angle the exhaust away from the direction I’d been running and arcing over the top of the Tahni High Guard trooper. He tried to swing his weapons around to follow me, but the angle was wrong and his suit’s shoulders didn’t have the range of motion.
And he was dead already. I fired my plasma gun downward through the top of his helmet and then I was down again, not daring to stay on the air too long for fear of becoming too tempting of a target. The feet of my Vigilante thumped solidly into the concrete and I kicked it into a run for the opening of the base entrance. Behind me, the Tahni battlesuit stayed upright, immobile, reminding me of one of the statues at the entrance to the Marine base on Inferno, smoke pouring from the gaping, jagged rent in its helmet where the plasma had burned through the honeycomb boron-ceramic armor there.
I charged forward, knowing the second wave of High Guard was coming out before I actually saw them on the sensors. This first squad had been their ready force, the ones sitting in the hangar bay at the front, waiting for us, or whoever was coming. What came next would be everyone who was left, because there’d be no point to holding back. They couldn’t fight with the suits much deeper inside, not effectively. Something three meters tall and two wide needed space to operate, and if they were going to throw their lives away on an Alamo, they might as well try to take as many of us with them as they could. At least that was what I would have done.
There were more this time, but they were strung out, coming in ones and twos and I wasn’t going to give them the time to get organized. I launched one missile after another, emptying the magazine, locking each on a target in fire-and-forget mode. The fourth and last blasted out of the tube before the first had reached its target, and enemy missiles were streaking outward, but none of them were heading for me. I was a single suit and I had the intuition I was far ahead of the rest of the platoon.
Something whispered a doubt in the back of my mind, inserting the idea that the rest of them were gone, that they’d abandoned me and I was the only one left fighting by myself. It was insane, irrational. If nothing else, the Tahni High Guard were shooting at something behind me. But no one was giving me orders, and they should have been. Had Ackley frozen up? But Hayes would have been telling me what to do…
I didn’t have time to think about it and I shoved it aside, concentrating on the enemy in front of me. Eight…nine…eleven…an even dozen, their sensor icons popping up all across the opening to the storage hangar. The green spikes of my missiles were already intersecting the red avatars of the enemy suits and blooming white on the thermal sensors, so I ignored those targets and fired my plasma gun at the closest of the rest.
The blast took him in the right hip and the High Guard suit stumbled between one step and another. And then the fuckers noticed me. Electron beams sought me out and I hit the jets for microbursts, taking giant steps in one direction and then another, trying to stay ahead of their aim. I was at the
edge of the entrance now, past the main body, but more suits were coming out and I knew they had to have a full platoon stationed here.
It was too many, and the sheer inertia of being out front that had carried me this far was beginning to fade into the certainty of impending death. Retreating would leave me out in the open, far enough away for them to target me with missiles. I had to move forward, but I had to get out of the fucking way and get to some cover, and the only cover handy was the shuttles.
The helmet display combined infrared with optical and thermal, and combined it all into a computer-generated image as bright as broad daylight even on the cloudiest midnight, but somehow I could tell when the light changed from the coruscating lightning of the deflectors to the harsh overhead lamps and I knew I was inside without looking up. The jump-jets carried me centimeters over the scaly grey skin of the Tahni shuttles and I dropped down between two of the craft.
They looked a lot like ours, because physics trumped cultural differences if you wanted something to fly in an atmosphere, but the landing gear was more like furniture casters, solid spheres nearly as tall as my suit, and they were very effective cover. Electron beams lashed into the nose gear I had selected for cover and the fuselage shuddered at the expulsion of sublimated metal.
I needed to move, but fear nailed my feet to the ground, fear I hadn’t let myself indulge in when I was standing out in the open and freezing up would have killed me. The shuttles were nice and big and protective, and I felt safe squeezed between them, unwilling to give up the shelter. I might have stayed there for the duration of the fight if one of the High Guard suits hadn’t gotten a wild hair up his ass and followed me.
He almost got me. I was distracted by the beamer firing at the other side of the nose gear, my sensors blinded by the mass of the shuttle and the flare of heat coming off the disintegrating metal, and the only thing that saved me was my audio analyzers picking up the scream of the suit’s jets. I rocked backwards, the only way the suit could look up, and saw a massive, backlit titan dropping down from over the fuselage of the shuttle, his twin particle accelerators swinging toward me.
There was nowhere to run. The other side of the shuttle was still under fire, going up would take me straight into the bore of his guns and I’d never be able to back up in time. The realization I was about to die took half a second, and before it had time to bounce from one side of my brain to the other, a missile moving at hypersonic speeds slammed into the Tahni battlesuit’s torso and swallowed it in flames. The concussion was enough to knock me onto my back, leaving me rolling back and forth helplessly like an overturned turtle for several seconds.
I had just managed to get a leg beneath me when a Vigilante suit soared over the top of the shuttle and landed only meters from the fiercely burning wreckage of the Tahni trooper. The suit was faceless and silent and I realized for the first time what the insistent damage report blinking red at the corner of my display was telling me. My comm antenna had been damaged and I wasn’t getting either radio or laser line-of-sight transmissions.
I tapped the side of my helmet with one of the articulated claws on my suit’s left hand, the universal symbol for a dead radio and the other suit’s helmet rose up on powered gimbals as the chest plastron cracked open a hair. Inside was Gunny Guerrero. I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I was holding and hit the control to crack open my own suit.
I’d been sweating since the drop started, but it all evaporated away with the blast of cold, dry air flooding in from the open hangar bay. Other things came in with the cold, the smell of burning plastic and sublimated metal and the sounds of pinging metal as it cooled and contracted.
“Are you all right, Alvarez?” he asked, his voice a low growl, the look on his face dark and utterly unlike the easygoing manner he’d shown before.
I nodded, then paused and took a sip of water from the nipple coming over my shoulder from a bladder stored behind my helmet.
“My radio’s skragged, Gunny,” I rasped. “And I’m Winchester on missiles, but I’m okay. Did we get them all?”
“We got them all,” he confirmed. “You killed five of them all by yourself.”
Damn. I didn’t know how I should feel about that, but in the moment, I felt pretty good. I’d taken out nearly a squad of enemy suits.
“Second platoon is heading deeper in,” he went on. “They’re escorting Intelligence analysts and Fleet Security deeper into the base.” He gestured upward. “The bombardment’s stopped and we took out the air defense weapons, so our drop-ships are landing now. Go ahead and hook up with your squad. I’ll let Hayes know your comms are down.”
His tone, the set of his eyes, the tight clench of his jaw all told me something was wrong.
“What is it, Gunny?” I asked him. “Did we take casualties?”
“We did, Alvarez. Your team leader, Lance Corporal Kurita.”
Oh, shit. No wonder I didn’t see him behind me.
“Is he…?” I trailed off, not wanting to say it.
“He took two Tahni missiles pretty much the minute the enemy opened up on us.” Gunny’s mouth worked, as if the words were hard to get out. “He was killed instantly.”
I hadn’t known him that well. There just hadn’t been time, not the way we’d trained during the flight from Inferno. He’d been quiet and competent, that was all I could remember. I felt like anything I said would sound stupid and insincere, so I said nothing. Guerrero seemed disappointed somehow.
“Get going,” he told me, and his helmet began to descend, covering his troubled expression with the dead glare of the suit. “This fight’s done.”
And I’d lived through it. The thought struck me even harder than Kurita’s death. I’d lived through it.
I wondered why it felt like a letdown.
14
Hot water washed away soap and sweat and dirt, but couldn’t quite wash away the odd depression I’d been feeling since the end of the battle. I had the shower to myself, since my suit was with the techs being repaired and I wouldn’t be able to perform PMCS on it until they were done. Everyone else had gone immediately to maintenance checks right after we’d made the jump to T-space and got gravity back. Well, everyone except the leadership, which had AARs to go over.
I wondered if they’d consider it a success. One KIA for the Marines. I’d heard Fleet Security had lost two, and a couple of Intel guys wounded from a squad of holdout dismounts in the base control room, deep underground, but that wasn’t on us. We’d landed a company against a platoon and wiped them out, but that’s what a company should do to a platoon, right?
I turned the water off and grabbed my towel, wanting to get dried off quick and dressed while I had the place to myself. I wasn’t exactly shy, not anymore, but communal showers made me feel very vulnerable. Shorts, a T-shirt, and flip-flops went on quick, maybe even before I was completely dry and a sense of relief settled over me along with the shirt. I ran the towel over my hair one last time, blocking my ears. That’s why I didn’t hear the footsteps.
“Look who it is, boys. It’s the fucking hero.”
Not this asshole. Not now.
If anything, Lance Corporal Wade Cunningham was balder and uglier after two weeks in space than he had been back on Inferno, and the two other men with him weren’t any better. They could have started a club for ugly, short white guys with buzzed haircuts and bad attitudes. I didn’t know their names and didn’t recognize their faces, but I assumed they were from his platoon.
“You got what you wanted now, hero?” Cunningham demanded, his voice echoing back from the shower stalls. “Got to kill some Tahni and show everyone what a big man you are?”
I didn’t say anything, just kept my eyes on the three of them, edging toward the wall to keep them from flanking me. The asshole might just be talking now, but bullies always talked themselves into something. It was humid in the shower room, even with the fans running, and sweat trickled down my back, undoing all the good work the soap had just done.
> “Tommy Kurita was a friend of mine, hero,” Cunningham growled low in his throat, and the other two began to spread out.
Oh, this is just all kinds of not good.
“Kurita got hit by missiles from enemy armor.” Maybe I should have kept my mouth shut, but it was possible he didn’t know what had actually happened, and at the moment, I doubted anything I said could make things worse. “It could have happened to any of us.”
“He was your battle buddy, though.” Cunningham took a step toward me and I stepped back the same distance, eyes locked on his. “You were the one who was supposed to watch his back.”
“I was riding point.”
Useless. He wasn’t going to listen to reason. I’d said it out of instinct, but I was already scanning his stance for weaknesses. He wasn’t an experienced fighter; I could tell that much already. Most big loudmouths aren’t. They’re good at pounding someone smaller and weaker than them, but they never have to learn how to really fight. I hadn’t had that luxury.
“You let Tommy get killed,” he accused, sticking his finger in my face.
I wasn’t sure about the other two. They were along for the ride, but they hadn’t been prepared for a fight and the set of their feet told me they would try to push me around a little, maybe take a swing if the opportunity came open. I would have to bet they wouldn’t jump in and gang-tackle me, which was a hell of a thing to bet on.
I edged toward the exit as I moved away from the finger, my towel still hanging from my hand, wet and limp. I just needed a step and I could make a break for the hatchway and have a good chance of making it. But credit to the asshole, he knew that, too. He lunged at me and I whipped the wet towel into his face and made a quick cut to my right, making for the exit.
One of the Ugly Bald Club twins blocked my way, arms in the act of extending to push me back. I’d anticipated that and rotated to my left, slapping my right palm against the outside of his left elbow, not hard enough to dislocate it, just enough to shock him, send him stumbling to the side. That was something I had learned the hard way. I could hurt people bad if I wanted to, but I didn’t usually want to. Hurting people bad had a way of boomeranging on you, if the guy had friends or if he could find you again. It was important to just do enough damage to get away, maybe enough to make them hurt but not to hurt them.