by Rick Partlow
Unless he’s disposable and they don’t actually give a shit about Demeter. The dark thought passed through my mind and I pushed it down. Maybe it was true, but I couldn’t let that wear on me right now. I had to believe he’d take care of the civilians; I had to believe he understood that, even beyond the fact that protecting civilians was our duty, we needed more people for the fight. We were pretty much using every viable fighter for this attack, and if we had sizable losses, we were screwed.
I heard the deep-throated hum from the hydrogen-fueled tankers powering up, and saw the first one in line begin to lurch forward as the driver tried to line up its loading port with the chute coming out of the tanks.
“Hey!” I heard a human voice calling, saw an older woman approaching, well dressed for a captive worker and plump enough that I knew she wasn’t missing any meals. “What are you doing with that truck?”
I knew who she was; it wasn’t that hard to get intelligence on these places when they sent out shipments every day. Her name was Veronica Martin, and she was as close as the Tahni let any human come to being a collaborator. She kept the food moving, made sure no one was stealing, reported anyone she thought was working with the Resistance; and, in return, they kept her fed and comfortable.
Damn it. I’d been hoping we wouldn’t run into her. There wouldn’t be any bluffing her, not geared up like we were.
“Ma’am,” I said, amplifying my voice to make it more authoritative as I stood from my crouch. “I’m with the Commonwealth Fleet Marine Corps and you need to come with me.”
I saw her eyes go wide as she finally noticed us, and our weapons and armor, and she stumbled backwards a step, which was a natural reaction. Then I saw her hand reach for the communications link she had affixed to her shoulder in the Tahni manner.
“Victor,” I said, and it felt as if I were hearing someone else say the words. “Take her out.”
The high-pitched hum-snap of the KE gun wasn’t as loud as my Gauss rifle would have been, and its ammo could be replaced via the Tahni. I concentrated on that and not the sound her body made when it hit the ground.
“We are go!” Chang said, like he’d been waiting for Martin to finish falling before he spoke.
“Team one, go!” I yelled into my helmet mic, then took off at a loping run across the parking lot towards the processing plant.
We hadn’t made it more than a few steps before I heard an alarm. This was a human alarm, I noted, left over from before the occupation and probably used then for more prosaic emergencies like water leaks or fires. Its jangling whoops were jolting after months of listening for the deep howls of its Tahni equivalent. The meaning was clear, though: we’d been spotted.
“Keep going!” I yelled, kicking into a sprint.
I heard the unmistakable report of Gauss rifles from out near the fence and had about a half-second to realize that the cover team had engaged the Shock-Troops before a flare of ionized atmosphere flashed less than a meter in front of me and I threw myself down without thinking. My helmet targeting system identified the source and put a red triangle in a spot on my HUD in line with one of the service entrances to the algae farm dome. An unarmored Tahni was standing there, a laser carbine raised to his shoulder and another blast of light and plasma passed just over the head of Kurt as he fell heavily to the ground in an awkward dive.
I didn’t remember touching the trigger, but the recoil pad kicked against my shoulder and the Tahni disappeared in a spray of blood that spattered across both sides of the doorway. A human screamed---in fear, I hoped, not pain---but I was already up and moving again, not waiting to see if anyone followed me. Speed is life, speed is victory, my Recon instructors had drilled into me.
The processing plant had four entrances: two personnel entrances in the front and back, and two cargo entrances, one on either side and both kept open in good weather. I didn’t bother with the smaller doors; they were bottlenecks. I headed straight for the closest cargo door, a wide-open gap five meters across and just as high. I slung my rifle and pulled out my handgun, knowing there would be humans inside.
It was shadowed in there, dark compared to the late afternoon glare outside, but my helmet optics evened the light out and I could see the rounded mass of the chemical baths, their outlet pipes running into the furnaces, and then to the driers before finally terminating in chutes that ran the twenty meters out to the storage tanks. In between all of it was a maze of maintenance walkways and metal frame stairs leading up to catwalks surrounding the drying chamber and furnace, and in that maze I could see movement.
Humans were mixed with Tahni, both races confused and unsure what was happening, neither making things easy for us… I paused just inside the doorway.
“All Commonwealth citizens!” I blared out through my PA speakers, risking becoming a target. “This is Sergeant Munroe of the Fleet Marine Corps! This facility is about to be destroyed! Evacuate immediately!”
I was moving before the last word was out, catching a glimpse of a Tahni with a pistol in his hand, aiming at me. I shot him between one step and the next, aiming carefully because I didn’t have either the time or the luxury of trying to guide the round in. His head snapped back and he fell heavily against the side of the chemical vat, leaving a red stain as he slid down the surface of it. The shot seemed to work better than my announcement; most of the humans started running, at least a half-dozen of them, rushing for the opposite cargo entrance.
Most, but not all. One man lunged for the Tahni’s fallen gun in a wild spray of unruly, shoulder-length blond hair; and two more, both women, tried to tackle another Tahni soldier up on one of the catwalks, grabbing for his gun as he tried to pull it from its harness. I couldn’t get a clear shot at him and I was too far away to be there in time to help, so I moved on and put a round into the back of an enemy soldier who was trying to make it to one of the personnel exits. He fell to his knees and then a burst of tantalum needles from a KE gun blew him in half at the waist.
I turned and saw the rest of the team coming in behind me, spreading out to clear the building. I looked back to where the women had been wrestling with their captor up by the furnace and as I did, he pushed one of them away, sending her sprawling on her back, freeing up his hand to finish drawing his weapon. I shot him through the eye, taking the time to guide the round, and he fell like a cut tree, dragging the other woman down with him as she tried to struggle free.
“Clear on this side!” Victor called from the far end of the building. Outside, I could still here the firefight at the fence-line. An explosion rattled the walls from a hundred meters away.
“Cover the exits!” I yelled. “Cortenza, get over here!”
Cortenza Diamante was a short, stout woman in her mid-thirties who’d helped her mother run a restaurant in downtown Amity before the Tahni came. Now, she twisted her Tahni laser out of the way and stripped off her backpack, handing it to me.
Inside was about a third of the load of chemical HyperExplosives that Chang and Kibaki had brought down with them in their drop pod and hauled on their backs on foot for thirty kilometers through the wilderness to get to us. Time to find out if it was worth it.
“Munroe!” It was Ortiz, the man I’d put in charge of the cover team. He was a good man, steady under fire, but I could hear the stress in his voice. “We’ve lost two people, we have to pull back!”
“Negative,” I snapped. “Hold position, I’m sending help.” I switched to my speakers and waved at Kurt, who was guarding one of the entrances. “You and Victor take Annalise and help Ortiz! The Shock-Troopers are about to break through and we need time to set these charges!”
The brothers didn’t question me, just sprinted outside followed by the slight, pale, dark haired girl who had joined my team just a couple weeks before. I knew her name and not much else except that she was a good shot with a Tahni KE gun and never slowed us down.
I wanted badly to go out myself and deal with the Shock-Troopers, but these charges had to get planted a
nd even though I’d taught everyone the basics of how to do it, I knew I should be the one to place them. Sgt. Gomez would have done the same thing, and he was about as high-ranking an example as I was ready to emulate right now, since Captain Kapoor or Lt. Yassa wouldn’t have even fired a shot and wouldn’t have been leading from point.
I grabbed the first block and jogged over to the chemical bath, trying to remember the schematic Chang had shown me. The chemicals weren’t explosive, but if you took out the injection unit and blew them into a cloud that filled the building, then blew the furnace, you could get a very nice fuel air explosion and take the whole place out. I peeled off the adhesive backing from one side of the block and stuck it at the juncture of the main input pipe, then used the keypad on my forearm to link with the detonator and set it for five minutes.
“Go shut the cargo doors,” I told Diamante. We’d need a good seal for this to work. She nodded and headed for the far door, and I moved on to the furnace. I glanced over and saw the three civilians still here, one of the women bleeding from a cut on her cheek and the man cradling the Tahni sidearm like it was a baby. “Get out of here!” I snapped at them. “Get to the trucks back at the storage tanks!”
I didn’t wait to see if they followed my orders; I’d done my part and they’d have to take care of themselves for the moment. The damn charge would go off in five minutes. Five minutes was forever, but I still felt the time ticking away in my head, just one more added pressure. I tried to shut out the sounds from outside, the hollow whine of the KE guns, the occasional explosion that sent dust spalling from the walls and the metallic scraping as Diamante closed the cargo doors. I fought against the urge to radio Ortiz and ask for a situation report and concentrated instead on the exact spot I’d been instructed to plant the charge on the furnace.
There was a blower fan just under the heating element and I had to place the charge at a spot where it would turn that heating element into red-hot fragments just a half second after the chemicals vaporized. I’d pre-programmed the timing differential into my suit’s ‘link and I went ahead and armed the detonator even before I affixed the thin lump of HpE to the intake vent of the blower.
Four minutes and thirty-five seconds. We had to be pretty damn far away from here by then.
Diamante was at the other cargo door now, the one we’d come in, her palm pressed against the button, her lip twisted impatiently as the segmented aluminum shutter clattered downward.
“Tanker crews,” I radioed the truck-drivers, “you have four minutes to be heading out that fence. Finish up and be moving in three.”
“Roger that,” the leader of the group responded in an easy drawl. “Tankers are almost full. We’ll be moving out in two, if you can keep the gate clear.” He paused a second. “Things ain’t looking too good out there.”
“Diamante!” I yelled to her and she looked over at me. “Get everyone out to the truck and get the hell out of here! I’m heading out to the fence!”
I ran to the nearest personnel exit and kicked it open, hesitating a heartbeat before ducking through it. Outside, everything looked like one of the worst-case scenarios from a Marine ViR combat simulator, with threats on three sides and friendlies bunched up everywhere and gunfire coming from every direction. I couldn’t sit still to get a better look at everything or I’d make myself a stationary target, so I processed everything on the move as best I could. Most of it was subconscious, things I did on instinct from repeated and ingrained training and didn’t realize till a fraction of a second later, when my thoughts caught up with my actions.
The closest concentration of enemy was a group of the remaining Tahni uniformed soldiers who’d clustered up in the cargo doorway of the dome, ducking behind the cover of a small tractor and firing bursts of laser-fire and tantalum needles at the human workers huddled behind one of the outbuildings. Two of the humans were down already, torn apart by laser-fire in the middle of the road, and I could see that at least one of the others was wounded.
I had one option to help them and I took it without conscious thought: I aimed my grenade launcher at the tractor and fired off the anti-armor round I already had loaded. The warhead blasted through the tractor’s electric motor and exploded out the other side with a spray of plasma and a chorus of eerie Tahni screams, but I was already past, sprinting for the fence-line.
My hands worked automatically, pulling another anti-armor grenade from my vest and loading it without looking, by feel, just as I’d done so many hundreds of times at Boot Camp and Recon training. Ahead of me, I could see the disaster unfolding: the Shock-Troops had a crew-served KE gun mounted at the end of their bunker and it was chewing up the earthen berm my team had been using for cover, forcing them lower and lower. Two were already dead, ripped to pieces by the heavy, tantalum darts; and the others didn’t dare raise up to return fire. This had freed up most of the Shock-Troops to flank them, and they would have done it already if it hadn’t been for Victor, Kurt and Annalise.
The three of them had taken cover behind one of the water pipes that ran into the algae farm, and from there they were pouring KE gun fire at the Shock-Troops, pinning them down behind a rise just the other side of the fence. But they didn’t have a shot at the bunker from their position, and this standoff wasn’t going to last much longer; already I could see one of the Tahni armored soldiers moving back from the rise and heading to the road, trying to circle around.
I had maybe two seconds before one of them spotted me, and I didn’t waste it. I dropped to a knee to steady my aim, then targeted the crew served weapon and fired the grenade launcher. The heavy KE gun had a splinter shield, but it was turned along with the gun to target the team and there was a gap of maybe ten centimeters on my side. The targeting link between my helmet computer and the grenade wasn’t fazed by the challenge; it slipped through with room to spare and hit the Shock-Trooper crewing the gun in the neck.
There was a flare of plasma and the Tahni’s helmeted head separated from his body with a puff of steam from vaporized blood, and the gun fell silent. They didn’t believe in automated weapons for the same reasons they didn’t believe in genetic engineering or anti-agathics: their god had made them perfect and nothing else in the whole universe could have the power of life and death other than them, and by extension, their god.
Maybe the guy with no head could discuss the matter with him personally.
With the let-up in fire, Ortiz yelled for his team to storm back over the rise and they bolted for the gate, coming around the flank of the Shock-Troops and dropping to the prone to open fire on them. They moved well, just like they’d been drilled…by me. I was so caught up in that fact, I almost forgot to help them. By the time I got moving, running through the gate to back them up, it was almost over. The Shock-Troops were caught in a cross-fire and, while their heavy armor could stop a few tantalum needles, it couldn’t protect them from dozens every second.
Three of the heavily-armored Tahni fell before I got there, chewed apart by the barrage, and two of the remainder ran, trying to get back to the bunker, while the last two actually used their fallen comrades for cover and tried to return fire. I targeted the ones running. It took two rounds to get the closest one: the first sliced through his backpack with a snap of shorting circuits and a haze of black smoke as it took out his power pack and nearly immobilized his exoskeleton, while the second cracked his helmet like an egg. He died on his feet, frozen like he’d met the eyes of the gorgon.
The other Tahni almost made it; they could run fast in that powered shit. I shot him in the left knee and he tumbled forward ass over tea-kettle, as Gramps liked to say. Dust rose in clouds around him as he rolled, and I thought maybe I wouldn’t have to bother with another round; besides basically having his lower leg amputated, he should have broken his fucking neck. But I saw him start to push himself up so I finished him off with a shot to the head and he went down for good.
I turned back to Ortiz and his group and saw that they’d polished off the las
t of the Shock-Troops and were getting to their feet. Victor, Kurt and Annalise were jogging out from the cover of the dome, and I heard Kurt give a whoop of victory, shaking his KE gun over his head.
We had three minutes. I started running towards them, waving a hand over my head.
“Get the truck!” I yelled it into the radio, ignoring the feedback in my headphones. “The factory’s going to blow! Get the civilian workers on it and get out!”
I saw Kurt’s eyes widen as he realized what I was saying, then he was turning and running back down the road past the algae farm, heading for the parking lot. It was only about a hundred and twenty meters away, but it’s surprising how far that seems when a few kilograms of HpE is about to explode in your lap. Victor followed him and I didn’t try to stop him; it would have been a waste of breath.
The two of them disappeared around the corner and I saw the others looking ready to run after them, but before they had the chance, the tankers started filing up the dirt road, engines whining, their huge tires rasping on the hard-pack dirt and sand as they struggled up the slight hill with their huge loads.
“Get on!” I yelled to the others, gesturing at the step boards and grab-handles on either side of the cab.
Annalise was closest to me and she jumped up on the running board lithely, like a dancer, followed by one of Ortiz’ group. The others followed suit as the tankers rolled past, not slowing down, but Ortiz hesitated, looking back at his dead.
“Shouldn’t we bring them?” His words were full of agony and I knew the pain he was feeling, but the answer remained the same.
“There isn’t time,” I told him, feeling like a total shit. “Get on the last tanker and get going, that’s an order.”
He looked like he wanted to argue with me, but he hopped onto the cab of the truck just before it drove past, cursing softly.
That left me alone, and I was about to run back to the parking lot and see what was taking the others so long when I saw the cargo truck rumbling up around the corner, Diamante in the cab between Victor and Kurt. The back doors were creaking as they swung open and I grabbed at the hands sticking out of them, let them pull me inside.