by Marko Kloos
“Where’s the kaboom?” Stratton says into the silence. “There was supposed to be an earth-shattering kaboom.”
Sergeant Fallon starts a reply, but then there’s a strange sound in the distance, like someone opening a huge container of carbonated soda, and the filters built into my helmet cut the audio feed completely.
Even with the active efforts of my electronic gear to preserve my hearing, the explosion of the drop ship stabs my eardrums. I can feel the shock wave from the detonation radiating through me as it moves away from the source at the speed of sound, and it feels like someone has thrown me to the ground and then jumped on my chest. For a moment, I think that the drop ship must have had some low-yield nuclear ordnance on one of its pylons, and I’m convinced that Sergeant Fallon has just blown up half the PRC, and us along with it. I’m vaguely aware that I’m prone on the ground all of a sudden, knocked off my feet by the impulse of the shock wave.
For a while, I can see and hear nothing. My polarized visor only slowly returns my vision, and my audio feed remains muted. I’m blind and deaf in my armor cocoon, rendered senseless by the built-in technology to save my hearing and eyesight.
As the world come back into focus, I see my squad mates scattered on the ground all around me, everyone in a similar state of disorientation. I get to my knees, pick up my rifle, and check its status on my helmet display. I’m so used to seeing the electronic overlay in my field of vision that it’s disorienting to see nothing at all, no symbols and numbers listing my active TacLink channels, the loading status of my weapon, our squad’s waypoint markers, or even the colored carets marking friendlies and hostiles. All I see is the green-tinged visual feed from my helmet sensor, void of any tactical interpretation by the tactical computer built into my armor. Other than the low-light enhanced vision, I’m no better off technologically than the people who are shooting at us.
Then my computer resets itself, recovering from the massive knock that has upset its digital equilibrium. I see the familiar code sequence of a system initialization flashing on the helmet-mounted screen, and five seconds later, I can see and hear properly once more.
I toggle my TacLink into the squad channel, and clear my throat.
“First Squad, comm check. Anyone copy?”
“Yeah, we’re back,” Baker replies. “Boy, that was a bit of a rattle, wasn’t it?”
“No shit,” Hansen says. “I haven’t heard anything this loud since that floor party in my senior year.”
“Perimeter, people,” Sergeant Fallon admonishes. “Get up, and mind your sectors.”
Her order seems a bit pointless for the moment—anyone caught in this stuff without the benefit of battle armor or integrated helmet systems will be blind and deaf for a while. Still, I check my rifle once more, pick up the MARS launcher, and take up position by the side of a trash dumpster, to cover the mouth of the alley.
The entire alley is covered in debris that wasn’t there just moments ago. There are shards of polycarbonate everywhere, and as I look up at the buildings that make up one side of this alley, I realize that every single window in the building has been blown out by the pressure wave, dozens of inch-thick polycarb panes shattered like thin ice on a puddle. In the street beyond, I see flaming debris.
“Grayson and Hansen, head over to the end of the alley and sneak a peek,” Sergeant Fallon orders.
We dust ourselves off and trot to the mouth of the alley, back to where we stood just a few moments ago.
“Holy shit,” Hansen says as we turn the corner.
The street in front of us looks nothing like it did when we ran up to the drop ship a few minutes ago. The intersection where the wounded ship crashed is no longer a tidy, mappable feature in the cityscape. The road ends seventy-five yards in front of us, and a smoldering crater marks the spot where the drop ship blew up. The buildings that flanked the intersection are simply gone. From our spot at the corner of the alley to the ruined houses at the edge of the explosion radius, there’s not a single window left intact on the street. There’s debris everywhere—bits of building material, shards of polycarb window panes, and chunks of pavement. The drop ship has disappeared entirely, and I can’t see a single identifiable part of it anywhere.
“What the hell do they stuff into those demolition charges?” I ask.
“Fuel-air explosive,” Hansen answers. “Field-improvised. The tanks are rigged so the remaining fuel gets vaporized into the ship. They also light off whatever ordnance is still on the racks.”
“Holy hell. This neighborhood is fucked up now.”
“It’s not like it was a vacation spot before,” Hansen chuckles.
I scan the area with my low-light vision. There are hundreds of little fires in my field of view, flaring bright green on my helmet screen. I wonder how many people were blown up with that drop ship, or had their houses come down on top of them. Would anyone have stuck around after the crash, and the firefight? I’m trying to think about what I would have done, back home in the PRC, and I conclude that anyone who decides to stick around when a drop ship falls out of the sky next to their house deserves to get blown sky high.
“Keep a watch,” Sergeant Fallon says. “We’re coming out. Let’s clear the area while the cockroaches are stunned.”
Chapter 12
Sergeant Fallon has elected to take the most direct route back to the civic center. We’re walking out of the place the same way we walked in, on the main road that leads straight back to the plaza. The side streets and alleys offer more cover, but that would benefit our opponents more than us.
I am once again on rear guard duty. The two pairs of troopers carrying the pilot and crew chief are shielded by two pairs of unencumbered troopers in the lead and rear. Hansen and I are keeping an eye out on the road behind us, but the street scene is eerily quiet once more. Every once in a while, I see movement in a doorway or alley mouth, but nobody’s shooting at us. For my part, I’d gladly call it a night, and as we leapfrog back in the direction of the plaza, I hope that the other side shares that sentiment.
Overhead, Second Platoon’s drop ship descends out of the dirty night sky to land on the plaza once more. I hold my breath as they pass over the tall apartment building where one of the heavy machine guns was raining down armor-piercing rounds onto Valkyrie Six-One a little while ago, but the drop ship passes over the roof of the building without incident.
“Third of a klick, people,” Sergeant Fallon says. “Almost there. I don’t know about you, but I’m good and ready for a shower and a stress fuck.”
“Amen to that,” Stratton chuckles.
“It’s gotten too fucking quiet,” Jackson says from the front. “They all pack up and go home, or what?”
I open my mouth to comment on Jackson’s entirely too cliched interjection, when something catches my eye up ahead. There are flashes of light coming from the apartment building in the distance, and I realize the source of those flashes just before the booming reports of heavy gunfire reach the acoustic sensors on my helmet.
“Incoming!” I shout, and dodge to the left, where a doorway offers some cover. My helmet display flashes as the computer updates threat vectors and enemy positions on the tactical map.
“High rise at twelve o’clock, three or four floors down from the top!”
The tracers reaching out from the building look like laser beams in the darkness—the fake red beams of old science fiction movies, not the invisible high-energy pulses of real laser weapons. The first burst rains down right in front of our squad, skipping red-hot tracers off the asphalt.
In front of me, the squad dashes for cover, but there is precious little to be found on this block, and nothing that will stop a heavy machine gun round. The gunner must have tracked us for a little while, and opened fire only when we were away from any alleys, with nothing but building walls flanking the road on both sides of us. The nearest alley mouth is a few dozen yards ahead, far enough that it might as well be a mile away.
Sergeant
Fallon drops to one knee, sights her rifle, and fires back at the source of the incoming rounds. The high rise is almost half a kilometer away, which is about as far as our rifles will reach. Her M-66 sounds weak and tinny compared to the thunderous reports of the heavy gun in the distance. Next to the sergeant, Stratton and Jackson follow suit and return fire.
The heavy machine gun stops firing for a moment, and then opens up again. This time, the burst is right on target. I watch in horror as the stream of tracers reaches out and touches Stratton, who falls backwards.
I catch movement out of the corner of my eye, and turn to see a rifle barrel poking over the edge of a roof to our rear. There’s movement on that rooftop, people shuffling into position, and my guts contract as I realize that the locals aren’t done fighting after all. It’s a crude ambush, but we ambled right into it.
The heavy machine gun in the distance opens up again. The gunner has good fire discipline. He fires his weapon in short bursts. Whoever is working that weapon isn’t new to the task. Hansen pushes me into the doorway to my left, and then piles in after me, just as the new flight of tracers from the distant machine gun rakes the pavement in front of us. I bump into the entrance door of the building. The impact of my armor-clad bulk rattles its polycarb panes. The MARS launcher slides off my back, and I land on top of it. We scramble away from the curb as the tracer rounds whiz by just a few feet to our right. One of the tracers hits the corner of the doorway and knocks off a chunk of concrete, which rains down on us in bits and pieces.
On my tactical screen, I see two more of our squad icons flash brightly with the icon that shouts “Medic Needed”. Our squad medic, Patterson, is one of the medical emergencies. The rest of the squad is moving forward, toward the mouth of the nearest alley, but the machine gunner has our little group dialed in now. The next burst drops another one of my squad mates.
Hansen is back up on her feet, exchanging fire with someone on a rooftop out of sight.
“Grayson, open that fucking door,” she says conversationally, nodding to indicate the entrance door to my left.
I don’t have any buckshot grenades left, and using a HE round would mean that we’d have to step out into the road to avoid getting caught by the blast of the explosion. The rubber rounds will just bounce off the inch-thick polycarb door panels. I switch my rifle to manual fire, set the selector to “continuous burst”, and aim at the center of the door as I pull the trigger. The muzzle flash illuminates the doorway as my rifle burps out the contents of its magazine at two thousand rounds per minute, thirty-three needle-pointed high density tungsten flechettes per second. The storm of flechettes chews into the polycarbonate with ease, and after two or three seconds, the entire upper panel of the door disintegrates in a shower of plastic shards. With the window panel gone, I can reach through the door frame and activate the emergency unlock. I shoulder the door open, and turn around to see Hansen on her back, pushing herself further into the doorway with her heels. Her rifle is on the ground next to her. I reach over, grab the back of her helmet, and pull her up into the doorway, out of the line of fire. She weighs close to two hundred pounds with the armor and all her gear, but I am so pumped on adrenaline that I yank her into the dark hallway of the building without ever letting go of my rifle with the other hand.
“You okay?” I ask, and she groans in response. There’s a hole in her armor right by the joint between the chest plate and the shoulder pauldrons.
“Get my rifle,” she says. “I can still shoot with the other arm.”
“Sit tight,” I tell her. The magazine in my rifle is nearly empty again, and I eject it and insert a new one from the stash tucked into the side pocket of my leg armor. Then I hand the rifle to Hansen.
“Take this one for a minute.”
I step back out into the doorway and pick up the MARS launcher. Out in the street, I hear the hammering of the heavy machine gun again. My tactical screen shows nothing but blinking carets, flashing in alternate shades of blue and red—medical emergencies. Across the street, there are a few heads poking over the edge of the roof. I hold the launcher with my left, and pull the pistol I had stuffed into my harness back in the drop ship. The sidearm feels odd and unfamiliar in my hand—I’ve only ever fired one back in Basic, during small arms familiarization—but the computer in my armor immediately recognizes the weapon, switches sighting modes, and displays the remaining ammo count at the bottom of my screen. The pistol only holds twenty-five rounds, a tenth of the rifle’s magazine capacity, but at short range, it beats fighting with bare hands. I draw a bead on one of the heads on the rooftop, and squeeze the trigger. The pistol barks a sharp report, and the head underneath my aiming reticle disappears suddenly. There are shouts on the roof, and another head pops up, this one behind the barrel of a rifle. I briefly register that the weapon aimed at me looks a lot like a military-issue M-66. I squeeze off three more rounds in rapid cadence, and the rifleman on the roof disappears. His weapon tumbles from the rooftop ledge onto the street below, where it lands with a hollow clatter. For the moment, there are no more heads coming up on that roof.
I stuff the pistol back into the harness, and shoulder the MARS. The machine gunner in the distance has switched to very short bursts, two or three shots at a time, undoubtedly to preserve ammo while making us keep our heads down. My TacLink display shows Hansen moving further into the hallway to my left, and the rest of the squad huddled in a side alley thirty yards ahead. More than half their number are out of the fight, according to the symbols on my screen.
The operation of the MARS launcher is dead simple. We’ve drilled the deployment of the MARS a dozen times, and for some odd reason, I hear Sergeant Burke’s voice in its unforgettable drill instructor twang as my fingers perform the necessary steps to ready the launcher for action.
I point the center of the reticle at the muzzle flashes of the heavy machine gun in the distance, near the top floor of the high rise a third of a mile away, and pull the trigger.
The rocket leaps out of its launch canister with shocking speed. The tail end of the rocket glows with the heat of its internal booster, and the whole thing shoots off into the distance only a little slower than a tracer round. I expected to see the rocket leisurely rise skyward like the Sarissas we used back at the embassy a few weeks ago, but the MARS streaks downrange in a blink, covering the distance between us and the machine gun position in just a few seconds.
My aim was a bit off. The rocket hits the building two floors below the machine gun that is still spitting tracers our way. There’s a bright flash that cuts through the hazy night sky, and then the thunderclap of the explosion rolls across the PRC.
When I grabbed the rocket launcher, I took a high explosive and a thermobaric warhead out of the rack, and loaded one of them into the launcher to be less encumbered. The one I loaded was the thermobaric missile.
The MARS launcher fires ninety-millimeter rockets. It’s designed to take out enemy fortifications and reinforced structures. A high-rise tenement is a very light structure. It’s a steel skeleton with thin modular concrete sheets for walls.
The missile hit twenty feet below the window with the heavy machine gun, but the bunker buster warhead is rather forgiving of aiming errors. The front of the floor around the impact point erupts outward, windows and walls turned into millions of bits and shards by the overpressure. The explosion is much more dramatic than the one caused by the thermobaric rifle grenade I fired into the building with the sniper during the embassy evacuation. Over by the high rise, the sky is filled with flaming debris as the pressure of the explosion radiates outward. Then the entire front of the building above the point of impact collapses with the tortured groan of fatigued metal and concrete. I watch in morbid fascination as the four or five floors above the explosion pancake into each other. More concrete slides off the face of the building, this time in bigger chunks. When the rumbling stops, there’s a dust cloud above the high rise that reaches hundreds of feet into the sky. The side of the buildin
g that’s facing us now has a massive wound in its upper half, a smoking gash that’s five floors high and three quarters of a floor wide.
Part of me realizes that I just blew up twenty apartments, with everything and everyone within. Mostly, however, I am just glad that the heavy machine gun has stopped raining death onto my squad.
I get down on one knee and work the fastener for the now-empty cartridge husk at the rear of the launcher. As I drop the expended hull and pick up the second cartridge, someone starts shooting from the rooftop across the street again. I feel something hitting the side of my armor right underneath my arm. The impact is hard enough to make me drop the launcher tube in surprise. Hansen’s rifle is half a foot to my right, and I scoop it up and work the bolt. The grenade launcher is empty, but the magazine is still half full.
The shooter on the roof is a woman. She’s dressed in baggy and shapeless clothes, but I can clearly see her long hair, and her feminine features underneath the bill of the cap she is wearing. She’s down on one knee, right by the edge of the roof, and she’s holding a rifle with a wooden stock. As I watch, she works a lever at the bottom of her rifle to load another round into the chamber. She performs the motion without taking the weapon off her shoulder, and her eyes never waver from the sights.
I stare at her, this woman that looks like a dozen I’ve known back home, just a hood rat in too-big clothes, and I want to wave her off, shout a warning, or both—anything to keep her from shooting at me, so I won’t have to shoot her in turn. Then she pulls the trigger on her rifle.
The bullet hits me right above the eyebrow, on the ridge that forms the upper edge of the face shield. It feels like being beaned with a well-thrown fastball. I stumble backwards and fall on my ass. My helmet display blanks out momentarily from the shock of the impact.
This was a killing shot that just barely missed. She shot at my armor to get my attention and make me turn around, and the second shot was aimed right at my visor, the weakest point of my battle armor. My sensors restore my low-light vision just in time for me to see the woman on the roof complete another stroke of the loading lever on that antique rifle of hers. My right hand is still wrapped around the grip of Hansen’s rifle, and unlike my opponent, I don’t have to bring my rifle up into my field of vision to aim it.