by Rick Partlow
She quickly stood and backed away and all of us in the fire team swung our rifles around to cover the hatch as it began to swing open. A halo of pale light leaked out as the opening yawned wider, and I linked the sight of my rifle to my HUD and stuck the barrel into the hatch. The view from the sight camera filled half the display in my helmet, and it showed me an odd-looking staircase/ladder combination that led from the hatch opening down several meters to a large chamber, bare-walled and featureless except for a few scattered plastic cases. I didn’t know what they’d held, but they were empty now, their hinged lids open.
“It’s clear as far as I can see,” I reported, pulling my weapon back up and tucking it into my shoulder.
“You and Pacheco head down and pull security,” Yassa said, motioning towards the hatch as it reached a ninety-degree angle and ground to a halt.
I leaned over the edge of the hole, keeping my rifle ahead of me, trying to get a better look at the set-up the Tahni used in place of a ladder. It involved a weird combination of alternating recesses and ledges built into the wall and I finally just shook my head and swung my legs out into the hole, keeping one hand on the rim of the hatch and the other pointing my Gauss rifle downward. It was hard to see my feet that way, but I caught one of the ledges with a toe then brought my hand down to the one in front of my face.
This was awkward. I figured the gravity on this moon was maybe three quarters Earth normal, so I thought, the hell with it and dropped straight down. It was about three meters and I felt a twinge in my knees as they bent to absorb the impact. I stumbled forward, catching my balance and turning it into a jog towards the chamber’s single exit, a wide corridor angling just slightly downward. It was dimly-lit and deserted at the moment, but it curved a dozen or so meters ahead and I couldn’t see beyond that.
I heard a loud impact behind me, the noise punctuated by a pained grunt and knew that Johnny had pulled the same stunt I had, but with less aplomb. He staggered up beside me, cursing softly, and took up a position on the other side of the entrance to the hallway.
“We’re in place, LT,” I reported, redundant, since I knew she would be monitoring the feed from our helmet cameras, but instinctive.
“Stay there,” she told me. “We’re coming down.”
Lt. Yassa led them down at a more sedate and careful pace, and I could see her coming up behind us with Gomez while Moon and Abdi crouched at the bottom of the ladder and kept an eye on the open hatch.
“Munroe, you’re on point,” she told me, slapping me on the shoulder. “Sgt. Gomez, bring up the rear.”
“Aye, ma’am.” I said, feeling my chest get a bit tighter as I moved through the doorway.
On point, heading underground into an enemy base, praying their shields held up so we didn’t get skragged by our own Fleet. This was so much better than being a pampered Corporate Council stooge.
Then I had to laugh because I realized I wasn’t being sarcastic.
The corridor descended as it curved, and the lighting grew brighter and more garish as it went downward. My visor filtered it out after a moment, but it was enough to remind me of a lecture I’d received on Tahni anatomy in Recon training. They saw slightly higher into the spectrum of light than humans, not dramatically different but enough that their artificial lighting looked odd to us, and ours was nearly painful to them. There were dozens of little differences we’d been lectured on: their fingers had more joints than ours, their toes were longer and wider, and while their organs were similar to ours, they were in different places and configurations. And yet it was the similarities that baffled all the scientists in every article I’d ever audited. They could eat our food, breathe our air, and make sounds similar enough to ours that we could basically, with a few modifications, speak to each other.
That was way too close to be a coincidence, or at least most people thought so. A lot of people thought the Predecessors had interfered with Tahni evolution way back when, and not all of those people were crackpot conspiracy theorists or Predecessor Cult nutcases. I kind of bought it; the fact we were so close to each other biologically was probably the reason we wound up fighting each other. We wanted the same habitable planets, but in their case, it was like a religious imperative…if only anyone really understood their religion.
I stopped thinking about religion and anatomy abruptly, when I rounded the corner into a level straightaway and nearly ran into the back of an unarmored, uniformed Tahni soldier. His arms were full with a stack of the plastic storage bins like the ones I’d seen empty back in the entrance chamber, and I had a sudden flash of intuition that was exactly where he was coming from.
We needed prisoners for interrogation, and this seemed about as best a chance as we were going to get. We’d prepared for this before the mission: the grenade launcher under the barrel of the Gauss rifle was loaded with a stunner. My fingers went to the trigger automatically, reaching ahead of the Gauss rifle’s power pack and sliding off the safety, then yanking back on the launch lever. The projectile popped out of the launcher with a puff of coldgas and smacked into the middle of his back with a loud slap. There was an electrical hum that I could hear through my external microphones and the Tahni soldier jerked and spasmed, the tubs falling from his hands to crash on the floor way too loudly. The Tahni followed the boxes, collapsing face-first with a meaty thump on the concrete floor.
“Moon, Abdi,” Yassa snapped from behind me, “take the prisoner back to the entrance chamber. Restrain him and hold him there until the rest of us come back.”
“Roger that, ma’am,” Moon replied as the two of them moved forward to grab the Tahni by the back of his uniform and drag him back the way we’d come. I kept watch down the corridor, with Johnny beside me. It was empty and there were no other doors for as far as we could see before it hit a T-juncture and split in two.
"Move out, Munroe," Yassa told me.
"Just the four of us," Johnny muttered. I expected Yassa or Gomez to slap him down, but they didn't respond.
I moved quickly down the hallway to the junction, not wanting anyone to get a jump on us with only one avenue of retreat. I paused there and took a quick look both directions, keeping back far enough that I wouldn't be spotted by someone farther down. To the left, the corridor ended after about thirty meters in a fortified and secured metal door, a lock panel set in the wall next to it, while on the right it curved around and inclined downward again.
"That'd be the armory on the left," Lt. Yassa said. "Go right."
To the right, we began passing other rooms, their doors oval and with plastic boards set at foot level for kicking; it was how they announced they were coming in. I thought it was odd we hadn't seen that many people yet, but then I thought about what a bunch of Marines and Fleet people would be doing if we were under orbital attack by the Tahni: anyone not on duty at a crucial task would hunker in a bunker. The one we'd captured had probably been retrieving food or supplies for the others. We were looking for the commo room, which would probably be crewed, but hopefully wouldn't be guarded.
I picked up the pace, balancing the decreased reaction time with the need to get this done and get the hell out, and Yassa didn't object to it. The hallway turned into a ramp and descended at an even steeper angle, and I scraped my boot soles against the rough concrete to slow myself down enough to maintain control. When it leveled out again, I was at a Y-junction, with broad and brightly-lit hallways stretching out in either direction and I suddenly felt exposed as all hell.
This time, Lt. Yassa came up beside me, carefully looking down each direction. They both looked identically unappealing to me, just randomly spaced doorways and some sort of cleaning sink built into one wall on the right-hand side.
"Go left," Yassa decided quickly, pointing with her rifle. "Sinks like that are outside their chow halls, and their living quarters are always around their chow halls. Technical stuff will be to the left."
I couldn't argue with her logic, so I just hoped she was right and went left. Our
luck couldn't hold out forever, and it didn't; a door opened up just after Johnny and I had passed, about even with Sgt. Gomez, and a Tahni in what I thought was an officer's uniform stepped out, nearly colliding with my squad leader. I'd seen it in my peripheral vision and I skidded to a halt, turning on my heel and trying to bring around my weapon, but Gomez was already moving.
Gomez didn't shoot the guy, he reversed his Gauss rifle and butt-stroked the Tahni across the face, knocking him back into the room. Gomez followed the falling alien into the room, and Yassa was right on his heels, while Johnny and I backed towards the door, watching the corridor for enemy. Behind us, I could hear the wet smack of a buttstock on flesh and I knew Gomez was beating the Tahni to death. I felt my gut clench at each of the rhythmic impacts; I knew they were coming as sure as my next heartbeat, but I still flinched at each sound. The sounds finally, mercifully stopped and both he and Yassa came out of the room, closing the door behind them.
I swallowed as I saw the blood-spatter that stained his gloves and the butt of his rifle, trying not to imagine what the Tahni’s head looked like now.
“That was a sensor monitoring station,” Yassa told us. “They only had one troop in there because their sensors can’t see shit right now with the shield up and their satellites down. Commo has to be right around here. Check every door.”
Johnny and I went to the next room down the hallway and I waved at him to hit the control to open the door while I stood just to the side and got ready to enter. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Yassa and Gomez getting ready to check the one across the hall from ours. Then the door slid aside and I rushed in, moving to the side of the entrance and crouching low, rifle at my shoulder. The room was dark and unoccupied, filled with some sort of equipment I couldn’t identify except that it didn’t look like the communications gear we’d been briefed about.
"Nothing," I reported to the LT, scrambling out of the room with Johnny behind me. "Moving to the next one."
"Us too," Gomez said. I saw flashes of their progression to the next door on their side but didn't let it draw my attention away.
"You open it," Johnny told me, taking a position to enter.
I moved out of the way and was about to hit the control when all hell broke loose.
There was an insistent snap-crack with an undertone of an electric discharge that I immediately recognized as the report of one of their KE guns, followed in succession by shouts over my helmet radio, the hard smack of impacts against concrete and the chest-deep metallic thump of one of our Gauss rifles. I spun around and saw Sgt. Gomez stumbling backwards, left arm dangling limp and bloody. Lt. Yassa had stepped in front of him and was in the middle of crouching down as she returned fire into the room he'd been about to enter, her Gauss rifle pushing hard against her shoulder.
I plucked a grenade off my vest and primed it one-handed before I reached her, then tossed it through the door and ducked away.
"Grenade!" I yelled, but she was already throwing herself over Gomez’s prone form.
The walls shook and a snare drum pounded in my gut, but I forced myself to rush the room before the echoes had died, ready to shoot anything that had survived the blast.
Nothing had. There’d been two Tahni soldiers in the room; what was left of them was splashed against the walls or scattered on the floor, burned and bloody and barely recognizable as two separate humanoid forms. The KE gun one had been firing was on the floor between them; it was smaller and less powerful than the backpack-fed models that the Shock-Troops used, which was probably why Gomez’s arm hadn’t been completely blown off.
“Clear!” I called out, then took a second look at the consoles and holographic projectors around me and felt something click in my head. “This is the commo room, ma’am.”
“I know,” she grunted, and I saw her and Johnny dragging Gomez through the door. “Keep a watch on the hallway.”
Between the adrenaline and my heart pounding and my breath chuffing and the auditory exclusion you get in combat, it took me a second to hear the alarm warbling out in the corridor.
“Ma’am…” I began.
“I know ,” she ground out and I glanced back to see her pulling a computer penetration module from her belt, kneeling in front of a console and examining the input ports there closely. “Keep them off of us for a second. Pacheco, look after Sgt. Gomez.”
“I’m okay, ma’am,” Gomez said, his voice strained but coherent, as Johnny pulled a smart bandage out of his thigh pocket and began wrapping it around the NCO’s arm.
I forced myself to look away from what they were doing and watch the hallway. At first, there was nothing, just the echo of the eerie, inhuman alarm that sounded like nothing else so much as a wolf howling out on the prairie. Then there was a patter of booted feet on concrete coming from farther up the corridor and I sank to a knee, bracing my Gauss rifle against the door frame.
“Company,” I announced, surprised at how calm my voice sounded. I pulled an anti-personnel grenade from my vest and loaded it into my under-barrel launcher. “Lots of ‘em.”
“I need a couple minutes,” Lt. Yassa told us. “The module has broken their security, but to transmit it to the Fleet ships, I have to realign their remote antenna. If they get in here before that’s finished, they can still stop the data from being sent.”
“Get over there,” Gomez said, and I saw him getting to his feet, pushing Johnny away. “I’m okay.”
"Do we wanna' engage or try to close the door and let 'em pass by, ma'am?" Johnny asked, sidling up next to me in the door.
"Engage as far away as possible," Yassa told us, voice tight, still focused on the console. She was manipulating some instrument I couldn't identify and I wondered if she'd actually learned to read Tahni or just memorized enough for this mission. "Keep them away from the door."
I could see them now, the first ones, about thirty meters down the corridor. The two in the lead were officers, from the way they wore their uniforms; you could tell by the arrangements of the strips of cloth that made up their tunic. They were unarmored and carrying sidearms, but I didn't want to shoot them first no matter what the LT said; that would give away our position and not do much to stop the rest of them. I waited, my finger poised over the trigger for the grenade launcher.
Then they came, like I knew they would, pounding rhythmically behind their officers, Shock-Troops in heavy armor with heavy KE guns. There were eight of them, a Tahni version of a squad or fire-team. When the last one came into view, I aimed for the first and fired. A puff of coldgas took the round clear of the launcher, then the rocket motor ignited and it shot across the distance in a microsecond and burst with a high-pitched crack. I didn't bother to duck inside; the explosion was directed by internal baffles in the warhead, sending a spray of plasma in a cone away from the point of impact.
The troop who took the brunt of the blast had a hole the size of my head burned through his chest, while the ones to either side of him took smaller, thinner jets in the neck and shoulder and slammed against the walls, tumbling as their legs tangled. Johnny fired his grenade just after mine, but I was already targeting the officers, putting a tungsten slug through the chest of each of them even as they tried desperately to halt their headlong run.
Smoke was already filling the corridor, so I didn't have to see what the slugs did to them; I knew it wouldn't be pretty. There were shouts and screams and return fire that came nowhere near us, pitting the walls and floor and throwing up a cloud of fragments.
"Suppressive fire," I said to Johnny and we both aimed through the smoke into the indeterminate figures huddling just past it and cut loose with a barrage that emptied a half a mag each. Our Gauss rifles were more powerful than their KE guns, but they had a much slower rate of fire; it took nearly a full second for the capacitors to recharge after a shot. But we practiced suppressive fire a lot . You timed your shot just after your buddy's shot, which put out a round every half second.
It worked: the return fire ceased and
the ones still mobile withdrew around the corner, leaving the dead and wounded behind. I felt like I'd been holding my breath and I sucked in air and let the shudder fighting to get free loose while I had the luxury of time.
"Almost there," Yassa said, half to herself.
Take your fuckin' time, I thought but didn't say, my stomach starting to twist at the idea of being trapped down here, unable to get away while the Fleet buried us.
"How long you think it'll take 'em to regroup and come back?" Johnny asked, something fatalistic in his tone.
"Not too long, I imagine," I answered. Whose voice was that? It wasn't the part of me that was screaming in fear inside my head.
"Okay, that's got it!" Yassa sounded jubilant, and I wondered if it was because she'd accomplished her objective or because we could leave now. "Pacheco, take point; Munroe, cover our withdrawal."
She didn’t have to tell us twice. Johnny trotted off down the hallway and I moved out to the opposite wall and crouched down, waiting until Lt. Yassa got Sgt. Gomez out of the commo room. I started backing up, keeping my eyes and my gun trained into the smoke that was drifting this way, drawn by the ventilation ducts in the ceiling. It was giving me what I knew was a false sense of shelter with its concealment. I should have remembered my instructors in Boot Camp telling me that concealment was not cover.
The rocket propelled grenade went into the commo room; they probably thought we were still inside and it was the only thing that saved me. The concussion from the explosion was still enough to knock me off my feet, and I felt a dozen pinpricks of pain on my left side from shrapnel that smacked against my armor at supersonic speed. The hallway was thick with billowing white smoke and even thermal couldn’t see shit past the blooms of heat from the explosion. I pointed my rifle in the general direction from which the shot had come and fired off a grenade, then scrambled back to my feet and ran the other way to the echoes of the blast.