Contact Front (Drop Trooper Book 1)

by Rick Partlow

  “You got that shit working?” Maria demanded, all hard edges and bluff now, her own armor back in place, maybe for my benefit or maybe for the gunner in the seat beside her. He’d looked way too young and way too scared to be doing this. “That bombardment’s going to kick off pretty soon and it’s not like we can call the Fleet and ask for a time-out.”

  “As well as it’s going to.” I winced. I hadn’t meant to sound that harsh. “I’ll make it work,” I assured her. “How much farther?”

  “Just a few minutes till we hit the end of the draw.”

  I tried to remember the map she’d shown me earlier; the suit’s mapping software was useless without a satellite lock. If I recalled right, we should be no more than six kilometers from the base, heading up a draw that would dump us out onto the flat plain outside Gennich. Three kilometers of open killing ground, and if the Tahni didn’t believe in automated weapons turrets for religious reasons, they made up for it with the sheer number of manned positions they dug into their perimeter.

  And I knew exactly how they planned to get me through that killing ground. I wanted to ask her to drop me off at the end of the draw then turn around and go back, wanted to make her promise not to charge across the open field in the truck to draw fire away from me, but I knew how little good that would do.

  A flare sparked out in the darkness, like far-off lightning just outside my field of view, then a peal of thunder rolled across the hills above the draw. Another, louder, and the flashes grew brighter, reflecting off the clouds. It was no storm.

  “Show’s starting,” Maria announced. “Be ready to jump.”

  The sides of the draw were getting closer, and I steadied myself with the broad palms of the armor’s hands as the truck swerved sharply around trees and rocks. The thunder was getting closer too, adding a new timbre to the vibration of the truck bed beyond the uneven dirt and gravel of the path. It blended together, a single, bass note reverberating off the narrowing walls around us, just as the sporadic lightning became a constant glow, a fire blazing across the sky and turning night to day.

  I rose to a crouch, feeling the suspension of the truck bed shift beneath the weight of the suit, the gyros keeping it balanced despite the wild swerving like one of the surfers I’d seen on livestreams back in Trans-Angeles. The wave of terrain we were riding arched upward sharply and the armor’s footpads scraped against the metal of the truck bed. I grabbed instinctively at one of the struts of the cargo frame, the metal bending under the claw-like fingers of the armor’s glove. The whole strut began to pull loose from the frame, ripping free of the canvas with a tearing sound I could hear over the engine, the tires, and the thunder of laser weapons burning down through the atmosphere.

  Then we were over the top, out of the draw and onto the flats, and I let go of the strut and slid backwards off the truck bed, with Maria’s redundant yell of “go!” ringing in my ears. The truck was going fifty kilometers per hour when my armor finally went out the back, and I hit the ground running at nearly the same speed. Tufts of grass and clods of dirt flew up around the Vigilante as the foot pads ripped into the soil; the hip actuators screamed in protest and yellow warning lights flashed in the periphery of the HUD, but I kept the suit on its feet, slowing down gradually until it reached a speed I thought the suit could handle without ripping apart.

  The truck pulled away, its rear end jostling and bouncing over the ruts in the dirt and gravel road, and suddenly everything was laid out in front of me, a surreal tableau of the end of the world. The Tahni base stretched out before us, still over two kilometers away but large and looming for all that. It was a utilitarian square a kilometer on a side, glowing with the crackling, sparking static of the deflector shields rising from dish-shaped projectors at the perimeter of the featureless outer walls, trying to absorb gigajoules of energy from the proton cannons spearing down through the atmosphere, pounding at its defenses. Air heated to plasma around the microsecond pulses and the plasma forked in bolts of lightning, visually impressive but harmless compared to the raw, actinic energy of the particle beams, and the super-ionized air formed a dome over the boxy lines of the enemy base, outlining it in fire.

  God Himself pounded down on the Tahni redoubt with a judgement from Heaven that couldn’t be contested, only endured. Until the answer came, blasting from a concealed emplacement at the edge of the shield coverage, a laser fed directly from the fusion reactor buried a hundred meters beneath it, rending reality itself with the raw energy it embodied, tearing the night apart with a flare brighter than the naked sun.

  Protective filters in my helmet were all that saved me from immediate and perhaps permanent blindness, and I hoped the goggles I’d noticed Maria wearing would be enough to preserve her vision. She kept the truck more or less straight, and I ran in the perceived concealment of the dust cloud billowing out from its tires, the Vigilante’s footpads striking the ground like hammer-blows.

  The turrets could be shooting at us by now, if they’d seen us. I thought maybe that was a sign the sniper teams were working, at least distracting the Tahni if not actually hitting them. I had no way to tell. The Tahni KE guns had little thermal signature and I wouldn’t be able to see the snipers firing unless I was looking right at them. Whether they were doing the job or not, the only direction worth going was forward.

  The interface wrapped my mind in a protective skin of raw data, highlighting possible targets, selecting weapons systems, calculating distances. I buried myself in the information, trying to ignore the certainty of death gnawing at my hindbrain, the expectation of the enemy slug, missile, or beam that would seek me out and end me…or end her. The sensor readings were a fireworks show, energy flooding them in every spectrum, and I knew the others were out there, charging across the open plain in all-terrain rovers, four-wheelers, dirt-bikes or trucks, but I couldn’t make them out through the heat and the lightning and the smoke rising from the charred ground at the edges of the deflector shields.

  I couldn’t make out the Tahni defensive positions either, couldn’t detect any incoming fire, and I dared to hope for just the space of a few seconds that even if the snipers hadn’t gotten them, maybe the enemy troops had retreated underground to ride out this battle of the gods. We were less than a kilometer away from the windowless, grey ramparts, close enough now that I could see our target, a dish antenna just to the two o’clock from our angle of approach, huddled in a niche in the wall…that was when the Tahni saw us and the KE turrets opened fire.

  Tantalum darts launched by an electromagnetic coil gun at 3,000 meters per second tore into the dirt to my left, then sliced across the front of the truck; it slewed to the right, the tires digging in, then it was yawing leftward, time stretching out as it slowly went over under a hail of gunfire. It tumbled in a barrel-roll, bits of the chassis flying away like rats abandoning a sinking ship, and I was only two steps from crashing right into it and being swatted away.

  I jumped. If the Vigilante’s jets had been operational, it would have been a two hundred-meter arc landing me all the way at the InStell antenna, but with just the byomer muscle fibers and a pair of wonky hip actuators, I cleared the rolling cargo bed of the truck by only centimeters. And landed nearly on top of the Tahni weapons emplacement.

  There were three Tahni Shock Troops inside the clamshell cover of the half-buried bunker, all in powered armor a head shorter than my battlesuit and a quarter of the weight. The opening in the front of the bunker was just large enough to operate the crew-served KE gun; I grabbed the emitter of the weapon and yanked it out, ripping it off its pintle mount and tossing it behind me. The gunner nearly went with it, letting loose at the very last second, while the loader and the security trooper tried to bring up their laser carbines.

  I stuck half of his suit’s right arm into the opening where the KE gun had been and fired a pair of grenades out of the launcher affixed to the armor, then jumped again. I didn’t need to see what came next; the flare of thermal energy on my rear cameras told the
story. I wondered if they screamed. I’d never heard one scream, never seen the faces inside those mirrored helmets except in the pictures they showed in mission briefings.

  I came down with just a hundred meters to go, and one more line of defenses to get through to do it. They were already firing at me from the last bunker off to my right and fifty meters away. I bounded back and forth like a skater on the ice, feeling the tantalum darts zipping by me more than seeing them. The armor moved with grace and power, connected directly to my thoughts via the interface, and I reveled in the feeling of being truly whole again for the first time in days.

  I swept my right arm around, aiming not with my eyes but with the instinctive feel of pointing a finger, and fired the plasma gun with the whisper of a thought. The packet of super-ionized gas speared through the weapons port just millimeters above the crew-served KE weapon and exploded when it contacted the gunner. White glare filled the darkness of the bunker for just a fraction of a second, then the weapon fell silent and there was no movement.

  I tilted back the suit’s upper torso and looked up. The deflector shield was a star, stretched and flattened, and hovering only a few hundred meters above me, holding back the fury of the primary laser batteries of two Fleet cruisers firing from orbit, but only just. It was a domino waiting to be tipped.

  The antenna was just over a hundred meters away, the dish at a slight angle, aimed for one or another of the system’s Transition Hubs, the only way to send messages faster than light other than sending them on a starship. It would have been more efficient to use a satellite, but Fleet could shoot those down as fast as the Tahni put them up. I could see the armored cables running from the base of the transmitter through conduits under the walls, leading all the way down to the reactor…almost point-blank distance.

  The missile launchers swiveled into place, rotating forward from a vertical position on either side of the nonfunctioning jump-jets to lock horizontally over both of my shoulders with a solid, metallic clunk, a coffin lid closing. Warnings flashed in the HUD, repeating the list of targeting malfunctions I’d already seen, and I ignored them, scrolling down to manual guidance and activating the laser designator built into the helmet.

  When I fired, if things worked out the way I hoped they would, the shields would collapse in seconds, and anyone out in the open within a kilometer or so of the base would likely be dead. Including the resistance fighters keeping the Tahni defenses occupied.

  And they all knew it when they volunteered. Just like I did.

  I wished I could look away, but I had to guide the laser designators; I stared down my fate with eyes wide open. The battlesuit rocked back on its heels as both missiles shot from their launchers at once, covering the hundred meters in less than a second, and everything was light and sound, pressure and confusion. I was on one knee, my other leg stretched out behind me, the suit’s torso low to the ground as the shockwave from the blast of the warheads passed above me, and I had no idea how I’d gotten into the position.

  The suit must have done it, I thought dully, watching the fireball climb into the sky, spreading out across the deflector shield as it rose…

  Got to move.

  I pushed himself to my feet and turned away, wanting to witness but knowing it would be the last thing I ever saw. There wasn’t time to get to a safe distance, but I ran anyway, as fast as the suit would go, ignoring the warnings of failing actuators, trying to ignore the scene above me even as it teased at my eyes in a projection on the upper right corner of the HUD. The deflector shield was flickering, and I had only seconds…

  She was there, at the truck, staggering, blood streaming down her face and soaking the side of her jacket. Two thoughts collided in my brain like the clash of cymbals.

  Maria.

  And,

  The bunker.

  Only a couple hundred meters away from the walls of the Tahni base, it was still far too close, but it was half underground and hell, there’s no better idea.

  I grabbed her with my left arm across her waist and swept her in front of me, too rough for her condition but there was nothing else to be done. And there was the bunker, the entrance seeming way too small, but I pushed her ahead of me and squeezed through with the scrape of metal on metal that set my teeth on edge, and there was just no time…

  The world ended in fire.

  25

  “Gunnery Sergeant McIntire?”

  My eyes fluttered, then squeezed tightly shut at the harsh light.

  “It’s all right, Gunny, you’re going to be okay.”

  “Ain’t no Gunny,” I murmured, my voice sounding harsh and raspy, my throat sandpaper. “I’m a fucking Lance-Corporal.”

  I forced my eyes open just a slit, saw the habitually concerned face of a med-tech hovering over me, backlit by glowing ceiling panels. Inside. I was inside, somewhere. A hospital? A plastic cup was brought up against my lips. I tried to move my hand to grab it, but I didn’t seem to have any strength in my arms. The water was heaven, washing away the cotton in my mouth and soothing my dry throat.

  “Your armor’s ID said you were Gunnery Sgt. Alan McIntire,” the soft-edged face said, slowly withdrawing the cup. The guy was young, maybe as young as I was, with hair cut to a fuzz that barely showed up against his pasty skin and the unmistakable white duty uniform of a Fleet medical technician.

  “Cameron Alvarez, Lance Corporal, 187th Marine Expeditionary Force,” I recited. “My armor was a write-off and Gunny McIntire…” I let my head loll back against the pillow. “He didn’t need his anymore.” I tried to look down at myself, but couldn’t seem to sit up enough to manage it. “Where the hell am I? Why can’t I move?”

  “You’re at a Fleet aid station in Gennich,” the med-tech told me absently, absorbed with entering my newly-discovered name in his work tablet. He looked back up and smiled. “We took over the local hospital once we chased the Tahni out of it.”

  The smile thinned out. “And you can’t move because we had a neural block on you for the last three days to keep you under and motionless while the regen packs did their job. I’m afraid you were quite badly burned, but you’re fine now.” He held up a hand to forestall the panic he’d anticipated. I didn’t feel panic; I felt nothing. “It should wear off in a few minutes.”

  “Three days,” I repeated. I wanted to move, wanted to sit up and look around. Where was she? “There was someone else with me when…”

  “Let me check,” the man offered, cutting me short with the air of someone who’d been asked the same sort of question too many times. “I can pull up the record of when they found you.”

  He scrolled through screens on his tablet, and I could tell when he found the report by the way his eyes flickered back and forth, skimming the text. I could also tell by the way the corners of his mouth tightened against a scowl that what he found wasn’t good news.

  “I’m sorry, but the woman they found you with in that Tahni bunker didn’t survive. Only the armor saved you…and it almost didn’t.”

  I wasn’t listening anymore. I’d known, of course. On an intellectual level, I’d known she couldn’t have lived through it. But I’d held out the barest scrap of hope in the irrational recesses of a child’s brain that still believes in Santa Claus.

  I pretended to sleep, hoping the man would go away.

  “Alvarez.”

  I sighed. Couldn’t the guy take a hint?

  When I opened my eyes, the med-tech was long gone and Dak Shepherd stared down at me.

  I fell asleep. This is a nightmare…

  But the smart bandage wrapped around the old man’s left arm, the bald spots where hair had been burned away from the side of his head and the charred fringes of his shirt told another story. This was too depressingly real to be a nightmare.

  “Mr. Shepherd, I’m sorry…” I began. I tried to push myself up in the bed and this time I could; I actually had slept and for long enough that the neural block had worn off. I realized I was wearing disposable hospital clot
hes, neutral grey. My skinsuit had probably been burned off along with a few layers of the skin beneath it, but what I could see beneath the sleeves looked fine, pink and baby smooth.

  “Don’t.” The man’s face was still carved from hardwood on the side of a totem pole, but there was something else behind the dark eyes now, a pain I hadn’t seen there before. Shepherd sat on the edge of my bed, not a familiar gesture but more a near-collapse.

  For the first time, I noticed the room around him. Cheery yellow painted on local wood, a single window with the shades pulled against the mid-day sun. It was built for three, but I was alone. Not many wounded then; probably a great many dead.

  “We tried,” he said, his voice infinitely tired. “I hit one of the gunners. I could see it in the scope. The gap in the turret was just ten centimeters or so, but I hit him right in the helmet. But the damned armor was too thick. I got his attention, but I couldn’t take him out. They barely wasted a half a dozen rounds on me, and it was just about enough.” He motioned with his injured arm. “None of the other shooters made it. Delta, Johnny…none of them.”

  “Sir,” I tried to interrupt, “Maria, she…”

  “She knew she wasn’t going to make it out of there,” Shepherd said. “And somehow, she knew you would.” He peered at me closely. “How did she know that?”

  “I had less to die for.” I hoped the answer didn’t seem blithe. It was as honest as I could make it.

  The old man grunted, whether in acknowledgement or skepticism, I couldn’t guess.

  “This city, you know why it’s called Gennich?”

  I blinked at the non sequitur. “No.”

  “It was my wife’s family name.” His lip curled in what might have been a smile. “I asked Hannah if she wanted me to name it after her, but she thought Gennich was a better name for it.”

  Shit. That was over a hundred years ago. He’s older than I thought. Then, another thought on the heels of the first. Hold on a second…