by Rick Partlow
“Kreis,” I told the Fourth squad leader, “you take point. Cross open spaces in groups of two and vary your spacing by ten seconds between you. Every third group hit the jets and take it high. Majid, I’m between Fourth and Third. I want you to bring up the rear and if anyone gets hit, take them back behind cover.”
“Yes, sir.” The two men spoke so close together that they might have rehearsed it.
I held my breath as Fourth squad crossed from the fabrication center to the storage tanks, each group chased by a burst of KE gunfire. After the second team crossed, the bunker turrets began hosing the gap with a firehose stream of tantalum darts, just like I thought they would, and the next group jetted across about ten meters off the ground. If we’d done it too many times, they would have figured out the pattern, but we managed to cross without anyone taking a hit.
“If nothing else,” Cronje said, turning in his Vigilante to wave a left-handed salute at me as I passed, “you’re gonna wipe out their ammo supply. We’ll lay down some covering fire once you’ve diverted their attention.”
Freddy’s platoon was moving away from the storage tanks, stepping carefully to avoid gaps in the cover, and I could tell from the transponder when he led them up behind my Third squad.
“We got your back, Cam,” he assured me.
Which was fine and everything, but it wasn’t my back I was worried about.
Crossing from the storage tanks to the building beside it was the hardest part, but thankfully by that point, Alpha Company was splashing plasma flares against the armored facing of the gun turrets, drawing their fire for the few seconds it took us to get through the gap.
“What’s the plan, sir?” Bang-Bang asked me, not even bothering with the NCO’s gentle chewing out for a junior officer taking too many chances. Maybe he’d already heard too much about me to bother.
“I believe the entrance to that bunker is in the warehouse at the end of the park,” I told him. “Captain Cronje has voluntold us to go investigate. Fall in behind us with First and Second squads.”
“Remind me to send the captain a thank-you card.”
We swung out wide of the last structure on the right. I couldn’t tell what it was from the appearance, not yet an expert on Tahni industrial architecture despite how much of it I’d blown up in the last four years. If I’d had to guess, I would have said a chemical production plant, from the cylindrical tanks lined up across the back of the building and the arsenic level warning from the external sensors. Whatever it was, I didn’t want to be too close to it when an energy weapon hit those storage cylinders.
And maybe the Tahni would think we were bugging out, just trying to get away or go for help. But who the hell knew what the Tahni thought about anything? I’d tried to put myself inside their heads more than once, but they weren’t human. Would humans still be sitting in that damned bunker after the deflectors fell, after they lost aerospace superiority and the end was all but inevitable? Would we sit there, trying to kill every enemy we could until they found a way to root us out?
I remembered Brigantia and decided maybe the Tahni weren’t that different from us after all. This was their world, and in their eyes, we were worse than invaders, we were blasphemers. It was hard for me to think that way, probably hard for anyone raised on Earth. No one on Earth believed in anything as much as the Tahni did. Not enough to die for it. Even the gangs didn’t believe that hard. But I’d learned a lot of history during my time in the Marines, and gained a perspective not just on how people used to live in the past but how they still lived out in the colonies, where belief still counted for something.
And I believed it had worked. They’d stopped shooting at us, whether because they thought we were bugging out or because they couldn’t see us anymore. I was sure they had spy cameras out here, but this place had been pounded by EMP when the deflector dishes went down and I doubted if any electronics not shielded by military-grade insulation could have survived it.
At least I didn’t have to worry about mines or booby traps. That was one area where the Tahni believing so hard hurt them. Their religion didn’t allow automated weapons. Life and death were the purview of their version of God, and God worked through them, his chosen people, to give life and to take it. We were far enough ahead of them in computer engineering that I think we could have disabled or hacked anything they could set up for us even if they didn’t have the screwy belief system, but it would have taken time we didn’t have. And again, was it really so screwy? After all, we didn’t go for automated weapons either, and if we justified it by bad experiences in the past, was that any more logical than saying “God doesn’t like it?”
The lookouts at the warehouse weren’t automated, though. They were civilians, old males, dressed in the strange arrangement of braided and woven strips of cloth Tahni of both sexes wore. There was a certain look about them, a sturdiness across the shoulders and a straightness to their backs that told me I was right, that they were old soldiers. They disappeared back into the rear doors of the warehouse at the sight of us and I knew we were running out of time.
“Hit the jets!” I said, then threw myself forward, not waiting to see how quickly the rest of the platoon obeyed.
We were two hundred meters away from the side door to the warehouse, oval and segmented and big enough for three of us to pass abreast if we wanted, and it took a good three seconds of flight to reach it. Kries was a good leader and a good follower too, and his squad hit the doors first, but I was right behind them, probably too close, but I had to see. The civilians retreated before us, skittering back across the open causeways through the stacks of cargo containers spaced about four meters apart and rising up twenty meters high to the curved ceiling overhead. I had been worried they might have weapons, might try something stupid, but they were playing it just right if their aim was to convince us they were harmless refugees, just trying to sit out the battle. Their eyes, though, were sharp and watchful, and not nearly scared enough.
“No females,” Kries commented, entering the building with a slow, healthy caution, his rounded footpads scraping against the concrete.
“Not unusual,” I told him, scanning the cargo containers before I followed Fourth squad inside. “The females live apart from the males once they reach sexual maturity. Apparently, and no, I’m not making this up, the Tahni males go into heat and can’t control themselves around females.”
“Yeah, I remember being a teenager, too.” He paused about ten meters into the building. “I ain’t seein’ no enemy troops in here, boss.”
“And you won’t,” I assured him. “That’s the point. Watch my back.”
I advanced and kept one eye on the civilians as I scanned the floor. Solid concrete as near as my thermal and sonic sensors could tell, all the way through the first sixty or seventy meters of stacked containers. Nothing in the containers, either, no heat sources, no chemical signatures, no sound. The males moved back as we moved forward, but only to a point. They clustered around a dull-grey dome of poured concrete near the center of the warehouse.
I’d seen them before, had been told by people who claimed to know that they were intended to store valuable goods, things that were easy to steal. I wasn’t sure if I believed that. The Tahni were so fanatical, so devoted to their belief system, it was hard for me to grasp the concept of one of them stealing, but maybe I was idealizing the enemy. Captain Covington had warned me that was a problem some militaries had faced in the past when fighting someone outside their own culture, the temptation to either write them off as subhuman animals or to put them on a pedestal as some sort of warrior ideal.
But I didn’t think the dozens of retired Tahni soldiers huddled around the five-meter-tall concrete dome were there to take advantage of the attack to loot it. I levelled my plasma gun and aimed it at the center of them.
“Move,” I ordered, and my public address speakers translated it into Tahni, a consonant-heavy trip-hammer of a language. “Move now or I fire.”
The
y still looked reluctant, but they slid aside as if they’d rehearsed the motion and I grabbed the handle for the heavy, metal door with my armor’s articulated left hand and yanked it open. The interior was empty of cargo, empty of any goods the Tahni or anyone else might want to steal. It was full of children.
Juveniles, to be precise. Tahni males who had hit puberty and gone to live with their fathers and uncles and grandfathers and great uncles and etc... Thirty or forty of them, all crouched like animals ready for fight or flight, their faces just a bit more human than the adults, with their brow ridges less pronounced, their jaws narrower, not like the steam-shovels of the adults, their eyes slightly less sunken into their sockets. It was easy to mistake them for human teenagers at first glance.
“What the fuck?” Kries wondered.
Yeah, what the fuck? Them being in here didn’t make any more sense than the other civilians. Except…behind them, nearly flush with the floor of the storage dome, was a hatch. I missed it at first with the young Tahni males shifting around over it, trying to hide it with their bodies.
“Get out!” I told them, yelling it this time, the translation echoing off the interior walls. “All of you, get out!”
They didn’t move, so I did. The kids were brave, insanely brave if they’d been humans, but when a three-meter-tall metal giant stomps into a closed room with any kid, human or Tahni, they’re going to run. They were chickens fleeing the henhouse at the entry of a thieving dog, flapping around the edges of my Vigilante with a fluttering of stripped cloth. I wondered how hot the metal skin of my suit was after all the fighting and flying I’d done in the last few minutes since drop. God, had it only been a few minutes? It felt like hours.
“Kries,” I said, “get in here and bring a fire team.”
I didn’t wait for him. The Tahni would know we were coming and I didn’t want to give them any more time to get ready. The hatch was locked, but the hinges and the lock were visible and I didn’t even hesitate, blasting the lock with my plasma gun. Heat flooded the suit, making my skin crackle like I’d been lying out in the sun at mid-day in an Inferno summer, and it was a damned good thing the kids had run away because they would have died in an instant from flash burns. The lock was manual, old-fashioned and clunky, and it had melted away from the blast, letting the hatch fall inward.
Inside it was a ramp sloping gently downward, a broad tunnel heading under the courtyard, out to the bunker. And swarming up at me were row upon row of Tahni Shock-Troopers, clunky and broad-shouldered in their powered exoskeletons but still a meter shorter than my Vigilante and hundreds of kilos lighter. Tantalum darts ricocheted off my chest armor, leaving cracks and craters but not quite powerful enough to penetrate, even at this range.
There was no room for the grenades from my suit’s launcher to arm down here, and I wasn’t one hundred percent certain they would be enough against the Shock-Troopers’ armor, so I gritted my teeth and fired my plasma gun again. It was as if the entire tunnel had ignited, and my breath caught in my throat from the wash of searing heat.
It was worse for the Tahni. A blast that could burn right through the chest-plate of a High Guard battlesuit melted the outdated Shock-Trooper armor to slag, cutting down a full rank of the onrushing soldiers and sending the others rocking back on their heels. I didn’t wait for the gun to recharge, instead wading into the next rank standing and swinging my left arm like a giant war club. I was a medieval knight fighting children who were playing at war in suits of cardboard armor. My first blow smashed one of them into the side of the tunnel, crushing armor and flesh and bone and cracking the concrete, and when I swung away, he sank to the floor, his chest caved in.
A helmet crunched under my fist and wobbled off to the side at an unnatural angle, an arm bent backwards and then my capacitors were recharged and I fired again. More heat, more sweat pouring off me, and when I grasped at the nipple of my helmet’s water bladder and tried to force moisture into my cotton-packed throat, the water was scalding hot. I drank it anyway and as the smoke and haze cleared ahead of me, I could see the Tahni running.
It made no sense. There was nowhere for them to go, but panic had taken hold and whether they were human or not, every animal behaves the same when the panic sets in.
Kries was beside me now and he fired less than a second after I did, adding to the inferno, leaving another handful of armored Tahni bodies lying on the floor, burning fiercely. Crates of ammo were stacked by the walls of the bunker, narrowing our path even as the walls broadened out. The gunners had abandoned their turrets, unarmored and unable to stand the stultifying heat, trying to cram against the far walls alongside the last of the Shock-Troopers.
“You can surrender,” I told them. “You don’t have to die down here. If you surrender, you’ll be treated well…”
A burst of KE gunfire greeted my offer and Kries and his Alpha team leader Corporal Chelimo shot simultaneously, a half-second before me. It was enough. When the haze had cleared, none of the enemy troops were left alive and the remote controls for the turrets were melted and sparking wildly.
“You know better than that, Lieutenant,” Kries told me. “Tahni don’t fucking surrender.”
“Well, they’re going to have to,” I told him, “unless we want to kill every single one of them.”
4
“Sir,” Bang-Bang told me, waiting just outside the entrance to the concrete storage hut, left fist braced against his armor’s hip like a disapproving teacher watching a misbehaving student return from recess, “you gotta let someone else do that shit. You know that, right?”
“I know, Sergeant,” I assured him. “Next time. I promise. Did someone tell Captain Cronje we’re clear down here?”
“Yeah, that Lt. Kodjoe sent the relay from outside.” Bang-Bang waved a hand at the civilians, who had retreated to the other end of the warehouse, huddled around the huge wheels and flat cargo beds of three freight trucks parked beside the broad, open doors at that end. “Whaddya wanna do about these jokers?”
“Hey, we’re just the support, right?” I pointed out. “Let Captain Cronje worry about them. Get all our people outside and into a defensive perimeter and I’ll go ask him if he needs us for anything else.”
“Now that we did his fucking job for him,” Bang-Bang added, and I chuckled…right after I checked to make sure he was using our private net.
Freddy Kodjoe was outside the warehouse door when I emerged, and I stopped beside him while Kries led Third and Fourth squad out behind me.
“Nice job in there,” Freddy told me. “You saved us a lot of heartburn.”
“You still got heartburn to go,” I warned him. “There’s a shitload of civilians inside the building, older males mostly with a few dozen juveniles, too.”
“Yeah, your Platoon Sergeant told me. Captain Cronje wants my platoon to go find some place to secure them until the Fleet lands more troops.”
“Who the hell is going to be responsible for occupying this place?” I wondered. “Not us, I assume. And there just ain’t enough Force Recon to do that kind of work.”
“Jesus, man, you don’t read the monthly briefs from Commonwealth Command?”
“Not lately,” I admitted. “I’m still getting used to the whole officer thing.”
“You and me both,” he reminded me. “We graduated the same class. But there’s a whole brigade of troops coming in behind us, right out of training. Guys who couldn’t cut it in Force Recon and didn’t have the simulator test scores for Drop-Troopers. They’re like glorified janitors if you ask me, but their official name is the Security Command. They’ll be pulling in as we pull out.”
I gazed out at the city, smoke rising high above it, buildings on fire, assault shuttles pounding enemy positions with lightning raining out of their proton emitters.
“Good luck to the poor bastards.”
Kodjoe’s Marines were filing into the entrance as ours exited and I noticed a commotion even before I switched to his platoon’s net and heard
the shouting voices.
“They’ve started up one of the trucks!” someone was yelling. “They’re trying to drive out the other side.”
“Shit!” Freddy hissed, hitting the jets and heading over to the opposite end of the warehouse.
“Kries!” I said, rocketing away into a jump right behind him. “On my six, and bring Alpha team with you!”
The situation at the freight entrance on the other side of the building was, in the language of the Marine Corps, a clusterfuck. Civilians were streaming out on foot, the older males holding the hands of the younger, and at the head of them was one of the massive cargo haulers, its two-meter-tall, knobbed tires crunching pavement beneath it. Several of the older males were crammed into the cab of the vehicle, visible through its transparent windscreen, while a score of others had climbed onto the flatbed. There was something else on the bed with them, a cargo cylinder identical to the others stacked inside the warehouse, but this one secured with straps.
A fire team from one of Freddy’s squads was already moving into the path of the truck, yelling warnings at the driver in amplified Tahni, but I knew as I arced downward toward them that they couldn’t see the civilians in the back of the truck, pulling open a small hatch in the side of the cargo cylinder, doing something in there.
A warning flash popped into my HUD, telling me it had detected the Tahni version of HiPex…chemical hyper-explosives.
“Get out of there!” I bellowed on the open net. “It’s a bomb!”
I was too late.
Something swatted me out of the air and I was tumbling for all of about five meters before my shoulder smacked into the pavement and my teeth clicked together. I tasted blood and saw stars, and didn’t see much of anything else.
I couldn’t have been out for more than a few seconds because the buzzing of damage warnings and the flashing of IFF transponders brought me back to alertness almost immediately. I squeezed my eyes shut for a moment against a dull pain in my head, the remnants of the concussion I’d received even through my armor from a combination of the shockwave from the explosion and the five-meter fall. When I opened them, I was in hell.