Direct Fire #4 Drop Trooper

by Rick Partlow

  Usually in space, the enemy is too far away to see except on sensors, but in the atmosphere, it’s a different thing. Electromagnetic jamming rendered missiles nearly useless, so everything was a knife fight at beam weapon range. The Tahni dual-environment fighters were daggers cutting through the sky, aimed right at our hearts, but our assault shuttle escort moved to intercept and we got the hell out of the way.

  It’s hard to imagine a ship over a hundred meters long and nearly as wide going into a barrel roll, and it felt nearly as unimaginable as it sounded. There was a reason I was in the Marines and not a Fleet pilot, and it wasn’t just because I hadn’t had a chance at the Academy. My stomach rebelled after about ten seconds of pitching, yawing, and rolling, and abandoned me somewhere around ten thousand meters up, and I had to clench my jaws shut to keep down breakfast.

  It would have been nice to shut my eyes, but that would probably have made the airsickness worse, so I was forced to deal with the chaos of the air battle, with the actinic lightning-bolt flares of proton cannons, and the scintillating plasma sheaths of lasers, and all of it seeming way too damned close to us. I don’t even know if I was scared of dying in a fight anymore, not after working so much instinct into my movements, but I was petrified of dying in the dropship. I’d had one shot out from around me on Brigantia and it was every nightmare I’d ever had squeezed into a neutron-star mass and dropped into the bottom of my gut.

  I’d talked to a psych counselor about it, but she’d just told me it was the most common fear of all Marines and I’d have to deal with it. Which seemed awfully easy for her to say, since she’d never once set foot on a dropship, much less left one involuntarily.

  Something exploded off to our left, a starburst of white light hundreds of meters across and I wondered if it was one of theirs or one of ours. There were so many aerospacecraft packed into the sky that I couldn’t have kept them straight if I’d been tied into the sensor readouts, and no one would bother to tell me unless it was something that affected our mission, like another Delta Company platoon burning in, or maybe one of our supporting companies. That was something of a relief, since I was fairly sure it wasn’t Vicky or Freddy.

  Another explosion and we were rolling again, banking left away from it, seeking temporary safety in some unoccupied portion of the sky, if such a thing existed. Everywhere I looked was an enemy aircraft or the dazzling signature of an energy weapon, and I felt a dread certainty deep in the pit of my stomach that this was the drop where my luck would run out.

  Sometimes, when I was feeling philosophical, usually after a few shots of tequila, I would consider the concept I’d read about in one of the Continuing Education courses they forced OCS-commissioned officers to take in order to maintain their rank. This course had been on quantum physics, and the concept had involved the Many Worlds Interpretation, the idea that every event from the quantum level on up both occurred and didn’t occur, and that both those realities existed, separate and parallel. The virtual instructor had suggested, only half-seriously, that maybe each one of us is living in the reality where we didn’t die in all those opportunities we had to die, that maybe each of us was immortal in our own separate timeline.

  I wished I could believe that, particularly in times like these.

  And maybe it was true. I hadn’t died yet. But the day was still young.

  “Ten seconds to drop,” the crew chief announced, and I blinked. He had to have called it at two minutes and then again at thirty seconds, and I’d been so wrapped up in the gut-wrenching maneuvering that I hadn’t noticed.

  “Ten seconds,” I echoed to my Marines. “Follow your squad leaders, stay in formation once we’re down.”

  “Ooh-rah, sir!” Bang-Bang enthused, and the others echoed it. I wondered if any of the rest of them twigged to the fact that he was being ironic.

  “Drop!” the crew chief said, a warning light in my HUD mirroring the command.

  “Drop!” I ordered. “Drop! Drop!”

  The drop control for the suit gantry was manual. To this day, I still don’t know the real reason it’s not an automatic function controlled by the pilot or the crew chief. I’ve had instructors tell me it’s because last-second faults can develop before the system has a chance to detect them and we didn’t want to drop a malfunctioning suit into the shit. I’ve had officers insist it’s for morale reasons, that the high command wanted Marines who went into battle to have to make a conscious decision to go, that it helped to keep them focused, which sounded as good as any other reason.

  I yanked the lever and light flooded the drop gantry and I was falling. Below, a whole world wanted to kill me.

  2

  It was madness. There was no other word to describe dropping out of a spaceship at four hundred meters above an enemy city in broad daylight.

  Sure, there were reasons for it. Day was no different than night when everyone has enhanced optics, and there wasn’t any hope of catching anyone asleep when the space battle had already been raging for hours before we hit atmosphere. And we were coming in from the east, backlit by the primary star, which might throw off their targeting.

  I knew all that, and yet there I was, my ass hanging in the wind, the broad, fusion-form pavement of a spaceport landing field stretched out beneath me, two gigantic deflector dishes facing opposite directions like inverted mushrooms, with a forest of anti-aircraft turrets in their shadow, bristling with coil guns and electron beamers, ripping apart the morning air with static discharge and shock diamonds. They weren’t particularly aiming at us—their targets were the assault shuttles screaming from one side of the sky to the other, probing the deflector shields with one proton blast after another, the actinic bolts of man-made lightning coruscating into glowing halos of static electricity when they met the electromagnetic fields.

  The knowledge that a single stray tantalum slug, a single off-target electron beam could have ended my life with the snap of a finger should have been terrifying, should have dropped my heart into my stomach. But it didn’t. Instead, my thoughts churned with the details of the operations order, the timing of the assault, the spacing of my platoon. It was too much to think about to be afraid of dying, too much to worry about to allow any concern for my life to intrude.

  My platoon was spread out in a chaotic, scattershot pattern, constantly bobbing and weaving as we dropped to make it harder for anyone on the ground to discern a pattern of motion or a formation which they could use to target us. Back when I’d first enlisted, I’d heard stories about company commanders and platoon leaders who tried to get their people into formation during the actual drop, like flocks of geese in neat V’s across the sky. And the enemy had picked them off just like those geese and that had been the end of that.

  The drop consumed the space of a few seconds, yet it seemed to drag on forever, as if my suit was filled with helium, lighter than air, floating with the wind currents. And then the ground was rushing up with incredible speed and I gritted my teeth, some part of my animal hind brain sure I was going to hit too hard and break my legs or damage the suit and wind up stranded there, waiting for the medics or the enemy, whichever came first, while my platoon fought without me. Neither happened, of course, as I knew it wouldn’t from dozens of drops in combat and training, and the landing was a solid thump up from the soles of my boots into the core of my gut.

  Data flooded my HUD, the positions of my Marines, the positions of the other platoons in our company, the positions of the companies flanking us, the sensors readings of possible enemy positions ahead of us, a wash of information that no one person could possibly pull together into a whole. But there was an art to it, to letting the non-essential bits flow past me like a wave on the beach and just catching what I needed, building a sandcastle that reflected everything I needed to know.

  It coalesced into a whole before my eyes, the data shaping itself into an image of the reality around me. First squad was up front with Sgt. Medina, the new squad leader who’d come in to replace Joanna Car
son. She’d been a good person and a passable Marine, but not the best squad leader in the Corps by any means, and Medina was already doing a better job. Second was behind me, already setting up the rear guard of our perimeter under Sgt. Sung, a competent enough leader. Third and Fourth were on the flanks and everyone was set like a runner at the starting blocks, just waiting for the gun to go off and send us in the right direction. Waiting for me.

  Off to the left, Second Platoon was just touching ground, their jump jets kicking up dust devils across the flat expanse of the landing field, nearly empty of ships, all of the enemy vessels put out to sky or space to oppose us. First and Fourth were still in the air, with Headquarters coming up last with the Skipper and Lt. Xander, his XO, and Top. And the Boomers. They were the key to this operation and no one was taking any chances with them.

  Alpha Company was already down, beginning to form up on our right, heading inward toward an industrial park at the edge of the spaceport where we suspected there might be a concentration of enemy troops.

  And two kilometers ahead of us, coming out from beneath the cover of the deflector dishes, was wave after wave of High Guard battlesuits, Tahni front line troops, the best they had to offer. I’d asked the Skipper once why they were called the High Guard since they were just about the same thing as us Drop-Troopers and spent most of their time on the ground, and he had said it was a direct translation from Tahni. It wasn’t a reference to their ability to deploy quickly from landers via jump-jets, it was a statement of their place in the military hierarchy. The Commonwealth Marines tended to put their best troops into Force Recon, but the Tahni took the opposite approach. Battlesuits were expensive and complicated to produce and they put the absolute best soldiers they had into them. Which was why they’d kicked our asses for so long before we managed to get our shit together.

  I felt exposed out there, a bug on a plate, waiting for the giant hand to slap me down, and I wanted to move, wanted to get the platoon into the fight, but I knew I had to wait for the Skipper’s order. That big picture I’d gotten used to seeing was still a smaller one than his, and he might see things differently.

  “Third Platoon,” Captain Covington’s voice buzzed in my ear, “engage the enemy. Keep them off us until we’re down.”

  Or he might see things exactly the way I did.

  “Target enemy suits and launch missiles,” I ordered. “Free volley, empty your racks and advance by squads while they deal with the incoming.”

  I took my own advice and fired my missile load as well, one after another, the weapons kicking free of the launch tube on puffs of inert coldgas before the main rocket engines ignited and they streaked away, the first still in the air as the last came out of the tube. We followed our missiles into battle, tromping forward with First squad in the lead and I fell in just behind them and in front of Second, while Gunny Morrel brought Third and Fourth along beside us and slightly behind, each squad forming into a wedge.

  The enemy hadn’t launched first because they were still trying to figure out who they should be firing at, with our battlesuits spread out over about three kilometers, but once we sent our barrage their way, the choice must have become clear. Their missiles crossed ours in mid-air, the crisscrossing vapor trails spider-web filaments a hundred meters overhead, and there was suddenly no other choice.

  “Jump!”

  Someone should, I thought, try to come up with jump-jets that wouldn’t overheat so damned easy. It was probably harder than it sounded and I was sure there was a military R&D lab somewhere working on it and they’d likely announce a fix right about the time the war ended, but it would have been so much more convenient. The main reason we couldn’t just fly the suits around like miniature spaceships was that the jets built up heat way too damn quick and all sorts of bad things could happen when you superheated turbines spinning at thousands of revolutions per second.

  But the jets were plenty to get us across the kilometer and a half that separated us from the enemy, and to do it fast enough to get us out from under their flight of missiles before they could adjust the targeting. Missiles corkscrewed out of the air, some self-destructing as they lost their target lock, others simply plowing into the pavement. Of course, that left the Tahni with exactly the same choice, and there were a lot more of them than there were of us.

  “One volley by squads and then hit the ground,” I instructed. “Remember the drill.”

  I didn’t have to tell my platoon to open fire because none of them were idiots. I led by example and fired my own plasma gun because this battle was way too big to try to live by the old axiom about how an officer shouldn’t have to fire their weapon if they’re doing their job right. Whoever had said that had never had hundreds of Tahni battlesuits flying at them, shooting electron beamers.

  Our plasma guns packed a heavier punch than their electron accelerators, enough to take one of them out with a single shot, but the downside was, our capacitors took longer to recharge between shots and hanging in the air waiting to take a second shot was a particularly stupid form of suicide. The drill I’d mentioned was one we practiced in live fires and simulations constantly, though it hadn’t come up all that many times in actual combat because we’d never been stupid enough to try to invade a Tahni core colony before. We fired together, each squad targeting a rank of the incoming enemy, then cutting their jets and hitting the ground running.

  Ten steps, maybe twelve before the capacitors recharged and each squad took to the air again, flying a slightly different angle of approach and firing a second time before touching down. It put us a half-second ahead of the electron beams trying to seek us out, white-hot probes of energy, surgical scalpels looking to excise the cancer of us human invaders from their sacred territory.

  We still would have wound up dead in moments, taking on that many enemy suits alone, but thank God and Captain Covington, we weren’t alone. The rest of the company had launched missiles as well, and there were just too many incoming warheads for the Tahni countermeasures to take them all out. They tried, though, and the distraction cost them their lives. Star-bright bundles of plasma crossed the hundreds of meters between us in a fraction of a second and metal burned.

  It was times like these I really came to appreciate the armor, not just for the protection it offered or the massive weaponry it could carry, but for the separation it provided from too much reality. Outside, I knew the air was crackling with static discharge, sparking off the skin of my Vigilante battlesuit like I was some ancient thunder god brought to life, and filled with toxic fumes and heat that would have been fatal for an unarmored human. Artificial lightning tore rents in reality all around us and fireballs of hyper-ionized hydrogen burst in gouts of hellfire. Even inside the Vigilante, I was pouring sweat, rivulets streaming down my scalp and the small of my back beneath my skinsuit, the stench acrid in the close confines, almost enough to pull me out of the immersion into the suit interface and remind me I was sitting inside a metal coffin.

  If I had been just staring out at the nightmare hellscape of the battle through a clear visor, I would have been overwhelmed by the sensory input, lost, unable to fight an instinct to find the nearest cover and curl into a ball behind it. But the helmet of the Vigilante was a faceless sheet of armor, and the Heads-Up Display projected inside it was more a computer construct than it was a visual image, one or two steps back from reality. Everything made sense, everything was in its place.

  A Tahni battlesuit turned to retreat and I shot him in the back, targeting him by unthinking instinct while still concentrating on the fact that the enemy was pulling back in the face of one platoon after another of Marine Vigilantes dropping out of the sky. They weren’t running, because Tahni didn’t run and especially not on one of their own worlds, but even these fanatics knew they had to regroup.

  We couldn’t give them time for that.

  “Delta,” Captain Covington ordered, “press the attack, put their backs against those deflector dishes. First and Second, circle around
to their right flank and try to force them away from the industrial park and out into the open landing field. Fourth, stay a kilometer back in reserve. Third, you’re the tip of the spear. Drive it into their hearts.”

  I chuckled in the privacy of my helmet. Here we were in the most advanced pieces of technological hardware in the history of human warfare, yet the commands we gave wouldn’t have seemed alien to Alexander’s troops marching across Eurasia nearly three thousand years ago.

  “Third Platoon.” I passed the command down the line, “pursue and maintain volley fire. First squad, you’re on point.”

  Which meant Private Delp was on point. An image of his pale, thin, death’s-head of a face floated through my vision, agitated, annoyed, sweating, the way I’d seen him that last day on Silvanus.

  “Close it behind you, Delp,” I said, some of the impatience I felt leaching into the abrupt flick of my finger toward the ancient, oak door in its hand-worked frame.

  We were in what had been the offices of some shipping firm before the invasion. If the owners were still alive, they hadn’t objected to us taking over their old business. There wouldn’t be any commercial shipping until after the war, most likely, and I hoped the residents were turning all their energy to construction. Or reconstruction, rather.

  Delp pushed the door shut a bit too hard and it closed with an echoing bang. I speared the younger man with a glare I’d learned from the best, Captain Covington, and his already-pale face lightened a shade.

  “Sorry, sir,” he said, and it sounded as if he meant it.

  I considered bracing him, making him stand at attention while I yelled at him, the NCO instinct I hadn’t yet shaken off despite OCS and a few months in rank, but decided against it. He seemed stressed and annoyed, but not at me, I thought.