by Rick Partlow
There were buildings between sections of the port, maintenance, emergency services, storage, whatever any spacefaring race needed to have next to the field where landers and cargo shuttles and dual-environment spacecraft needed for their takeoff and landing. A Fleet pilot would probably know all the details, but to me, they were just obstacles and potential hiding places for enemy troops.
Not that I expected any enemy troops to be hiding in isolated buildings, given the utter, devastating violence rolling off the center of the spaceport. The terrain wasn’t quite flat, and, together with the curvature of the planet, I didn’t have a good look at the battlefield until we were just a hair over two klicks away. When I saw it, I almost ordered Delp to stop where he was and turn the whole fucking company around.
“Oh, sweet mother,” Delp murmured, either forgetting he was on the general net or not caring. “That doesn’t look good at all.”
I didn’t bother yelling at him and I wasn’t paying enough attention to notice if his squad leader did, because I was too busy agreeing. The enemy defense was arrayed around the main spaceport facility, but the buildings themselves were important only in the overhead cover and likely the localized power generator they gave to the anti-aircraft turrets. Coil guns and missile launchers scanned back and forth with each pass of an assault shuttle overhead, their sensor dishes following the action like a fan at a tennis match.
By themselves, the turrets would have been insanely vulnerable to ground attack. Even with the bunkers dug into their flanks, covering those approaches with KE gun turrets, a platoon of Drop-Troopers could have taken them down in a half an hour.
I suppose that’s why they had the mecha.
Sweet Jesus, I hated those things.
Imagine if an assault shuttle and a Vigilante battlesuit made sweet love and had themselves a mutant child, and that’s not even half as bad as the reality of a Tahni mecha. It was the Tahni version of mobile artillery support, only in their minds, mobile meant walking on two legs. I don’t know why that made it more intimidating to me than if it had been a tracked vehicle, but it did. The thing was powered by an antiproton reactor and bristling with weapons: long-range missiles, a coil gun, multiple KE turrets to take out infantry, and the capper, a proton cannon that could smack an assault shuttle right out of the sky. Right now, it was aiming lower, the actinic flare of the proton cannon smashing into the dirt of a retaining wall about a kilometer away from the spaceport facility, doing its part to smash it to powder, right alongside the KE turrets of the bunkers, making sure anything that showed itself above the wall would be no more than a fond memory.
It took me a second to pick out the Marines, even though they were a kilometer closer. A light company of Vigilantes was huddled on the other side of the retaining wall, following the shallow curve it described around the grass courtyard at the front of the spaceport, separating it from the pavement of the landing field. They were clearly visible on thermal, not at all on optical in the dim, grey light of dawn, all of them covered in dirt, huddled as low as they could crouch in the armor. I could feel their fear from a kilometer away. Or maybe that was just me.
Something else moved between the Vigilantes, something smaller and crouching lower, lacking any clear thermal signature and only visible from the movement. I wouldn’t have spotted them at all without the IFF transponders glowing over each of their positions like a giant arrow pointing downward. They were Force Recon Marines, and what the hell they were doing here, I had no idea, but I felt for the poor bastards. Deltaville was a screaming nightmare for me wrapped in a Vigilante, and I couldn’t imagine going out into it with nothing but light body armor and a tiny peashooter of a Gauss rifle.
“What the fuck are we gonna do, Cam?” Kovacs asked, the horror in his voice matching my own.
Then High Guard battlesuits flowed out of a cargo entrance on the right-hand side of the main spaceport building, heading up a service road out to the edge of the grass courtyard. They were trying to flank the Marines and even if there weren’t enough of them to take out the Drop-Troopers on their own, all they had to do was force them into the open and the mecha and the bunker turrets. And the decision was made for me. There was no way I could let them be slaughtered.
“Vicky,” I said, both because I trusted her more than Cano or Kovacs and because I trusted Delp to run point, “stay low, stay fast…and take us in.”
We ran toward the sound of the guns.
17
“You don’t see us,” I chanted under my breath, a prayer, a command, and a wish all in one. “You don’t see us. You don’t see us.”
There was nothing else to do, no strategy to take. We were out of missiles, out of time, out of options. If that mecha caught sight of us while we were too far away, while we were running across the open plain with no cover, no chance at dodging, it could wipe out half of us in seconds.
My only hope was that the Tahni were too focused on what was happening in front of their noses, too concerned with the flanking charge to check their long-range sensors. And it seemed as if they were. Five hundred meters passed by in seconds, and we were halfway to the wall, and it looked so damned close. But we couldn’t run straight at it. Vicky’s platoon, what had been my platoon, curved to the right to meet the incoming threat. I wanted to scream at them to just get to cover, but I couldn’t because she was doing the right thing.
And then they noticed us. We were too close to ignore, but close enough, gracias Dio, that the mecha couldn’t target us with its missiles. But that fucking proton cannon…
The Tahni mecha pilot depressed the weapon as far down as it could go, but it was intended for air defense use, so the blast of charged particles smacked into the edge of the earthen retaining wall first, which was the only thing that kept it from wiping out all of Third squad, Third Platoon. Instead, it just killed Sgt. Manley. One instant, he was running full tilt, the next there was nothing left of him except a blackened scar and a burning haze of sublimated metal.
“Move!” I yelled, useless and redundant but I couldn’t help it. The word burst from my lips and I couldn’t think of a single order to give that would save the rest of us.
At least not one I could give to someone else. I hit the jets, just hopped a couple dozen meters up, high enough to get the damned mecha’s attention the only way I knew how, by shooting at it. The plasma burned away a centimeter of armor over its chest, but it had centimeters to spare and it returned the favor with a tantalum slug the size of my fist.
I could have died right there. Most Drop-Troopers would have. But there was a feeling I’d developed, a sense of where I should be, and it told me to give the jets an extra half-second burst before I headed down. The slug from the coil gun passed centimeters beneath my feet, where I should have been if I’d just let the natural arc of the blast take me back down.
I touched down already running and didn’t feel the slightest twinge of fear from the near-miss. I wondered if that was because I’d just been overloaded with adrenaline in the last hour—had it even been an hour, yet? It hadn’t been much, but it had bought us extra seconds, and a second in combat was forever. The company was behind the cover of the wall now, and more importantly, the mecha couldn’t take any more shots at us without risking hitting his own troops.
It had been stupid and reckless, and I couldn’t take chances like that anymore as a platoon leader, much less a company commander and blah, blah, blah. Fuck it. If they were going to stick me with this many Marines and tell me to keep them alive, I was going to do whatever it took.
“Stay low,” I ordered, probably repeating what the platoon leaders were already saying but not caring. “Don’t let them force you over the wall. Curve wide if you need to, but don’t go up.”
Delp was the first one to hit them, the first sign the High Guard troopers had that we were there. I was too far away with too many troops in-between us to have a good view of the contact, but I saw the flare of his plasma gun. An electron beam slashed wide and then the
rest of First squad was curving around Delp, firing their plasma guns in a rolling volley as they went.
Four of the enemy went down in as many seconds, and the rest broke. I hadn’t expected them to run, given how fanatical the High Guard had been at the reactor, but maybe having the mecha and the bunkers as a backstop was enough to make them feel confident that they could withdraw and still win this battle. It wasn’t a bad assumption. We were hitting them with everything we had, throwing every force available into this attack, but the margin for error was thin and it had already been cut to the quick. Let the battle for Deltaville drag on too long, give the defense ships time to organize a counterattack in orbit, and the war would be over, all right. We’d lose it.
The quickest way to end a war is to lose it. I couldn’t remember who had said it, but I remembered hearing it at OCS, along with a lot of other pithy quotes on the subject.
“Don’t pursue,” I cautioned Vicky, not that I expected her to. “Delta, fill in the lines beside the rest of….” The rest of who? I hadn’t even figured out who we were relieving. The IFF signals were all over the place, but I thought it was Bravo Company, by a narrow margin, and Captain Geiger was the only officer present above second lieutenant. “…the battalion,” I finished, though it seemed an exaggeration.
“Is this Delta?” I knew the voice, with or without the IFF transponder. Captain Geiger didn’t come out to meet me, no less intimidated by the threat of the mecha than anyone else, but she moved over to offer me a spot behind cover when I arrived. There was a habit Drop-Troopers developed after a while. At first, I thought it was just me, but Scotty had assured me it was universal. When I talked to Geiger, I didn’t see her suit’s featureless grey helmet, I saw her face as if it was projected over it.
“Where’s Captain Covington?” she demanded.
“I’m afraid he’s KIA, ma’am,” I told her. “So’s the XO. I’m acting company commander for the moment. Delta took down the fusion plant and since the jamming hasn’t lifted, I brought us here hoping someone would be carrying out Battalion’s primary mission.” I hesitated. “Have you seen Captain Cronje? He still has most of Alpha with him, last I saw.”
“No, I haven’t,” she told me, and I wasn’t sure if the bitterness dripping from her words was because of the news of the Skipper’s death or disgust with Cronje’s absence. “Besides us, you’re all I’ve seen of the battalion.” She motioned with her suit’s left hand at a line of Force Recon troops hugging the side of the retaining wall, nearly buried under loose dirt. They looked more scared than I had ever been. “We picked up most of a platoon of straight-leg Recon troops who barely got out of an emergency landing in their drop-ship, and that’s it. And this is a major clusterfuck, Alvarez. We’re never going to take out that fucking mecha without air support and we’re not getting air support until we take out the anti-aircraft batteries.”
“And we’re not taking out the anti-aircraft batteries with that mecha there,” I finished for her.
“Exactly.”
“We’re here for you, Captain,” I said, the shoulders of the Vigilante shrugging along with mine. “What’s the plan?”
“We have three Boomers left,” she told me, motioning down the line to my left, where the fire support suits were kneeling awkwardly, their coil gun tubes digging into the dirt as they tried to stay behind cover. “I’ve been holding them back, but now that we have you, I have no choice but to try.”
She hesitated and I knew I wasn’t going to like what she said next.
“I’m going to send everyone over the top,” she decided. “It won’t be pretty, and we’re going to lose a lot of people, but it’ll give the Boomers time to target the mecha.”
“Shit.” I hadn’t meant to say it aloud, but there it was.
“I know,” she admitted. “But I’m all out of ideas.”
I was about to agree, but then I discovered that I wasn’t.
“The reactor. We took out the main fusion plant,” I said, talking myself through it as much as explaining it to Geiger. “That means the air defense turrets are being powered locally. Probably something right in that building.”
“So?” she demanded, stress and impatience turning her voice ragged.
“So, we can take out the local reactor and shut down the anti-aircraft turrets, then let the shuttles take out the mecha.”
“There’s no time for that! The longer we fuck around here, the more likely they’re going to lose patience, take their chances and just send that Goddamned thing walking this way and pound right into our lines!”
“No, they won’t,” I assured her. “If they had the will to take those sorts of chances, the High Guard wouldn’t have retreated when we hit them. They would have sent the mecha in right then. They’re happy to sit there and wait us out, because they think time is on their side.”
“And you think it’s not?”
“Just give me a few minutes,” I pleaded. “I have a guy who can help with this.”
“You have five mikes to give me a plan,” she said. “After that, we’re going over the top.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
I fought against a pre-military instinct to run to William Cano and lean in close for a private conversation. It wasn’t necessary with the armor and private, line-of-sight comm nets, but it was still hard to resist.
“Cano,” I said, “you were training as a reactor tech before you got in the Academy, right?”
I didn’t have to see his face to imagine the confused frown dragging down his rounded, pudgy features.
“I was,” he admitted, “but I’d only been taking classes for a year. I wouldn’t be able to work on one.”
“And I don’t need you to,” I cut him off. “I just need you to tell me what they have powering those air defense turrets and how to find it and take it out.”
“Oh, uh, well…,” he dithered and I bit back an impatient curse. We didn’t have time for this, but I knew pressuring him wouldn’t help any. “It would be fairly small, like the size of the reactor on a shuttle. Most of it would be underground, but the cooling system would have to be at least partially above ground. Probably liquid nitrogen and they’d need a hook-up outdoors where they could refill it. Hold on a second.” There was inspiration in his voice and I wanted to encourage it, so I stayed silent and let him do his thing.
His thing, as it turned out, was launching a spy drone. It rose from his backpack like some sort of oversized, prehistoric mosquito, and I was about to tell him it would get shot down in a heartbeat, but Cano surprised me with his ingenuity. He flew the quad-copter parallel to our lines, using the retaining wall for cover, taking it off to the left, the opposite way from the service road the High Guard had come down. I tied into its feed, hoping to get something useful from it before the troops in the bunkers saw it and wasted a KE gun burst to take it out.
The retaining wall ended at a drainage ditch, maybe two meters deep and the same across, and he kept the drone beneath the edges of the depression, riding the concealment as far as he could until the thing had to pop up at the left corner of the building. Cano gave it a burst of speed, trying to get behind the cover of the wedge-shaped walls, but I thought I caught just a half-second glimpse of three huge transmission dishes out beyond the left edge of the building. The place was a mix of the pragmatic lines of a Tahni military base with the artistic designs of their cities, angular and curved in ways that made no practical sense to my human aesthetic, broad at the base and narrowing sharply at the roof in what seemed to me to be a huge waste of space.
One thing made sense, though, rising above aesthetics and art, rising out of the pavement at the rear, left-hand corner of the building. There was a wire fence around it, probably for safety, to keep someone from accidentally running into it with a cargo loader since the Tahni didn’t seem to worry about crime or vandalism. I wasn’t a technician, nor had I even taken a few classes in it like Cano, but I could still tell the machinery was some sort of high-pressure valve meant
to deal with something super-cooled and potentially dangerous.
“There it is,” Cano said, and if he could have pumped his fist without looking like an idiot, he would probably have done it, from the tone of triumph in his voice. “There’s the liquid nitrogen fill valve.”
“And no one’s guarding it,” I mused. “All right, bring the drone around the other side of the building. When they notice it, I want them to think we were trying to spy out the positions of the High Guard troops.”
I didn’t wait to see. I’d had five minutes and about four and a half of them were up.
“Captain Geiger,” I said, “do any of these Recon troops have demolition charges?”
The question was nearly cut off by a proton blast that ploughed a furrow a meter deep in the top of the wall, spraying molten dirt ten meters behind us. She didn’t answer me immediately and I assumed she was either stunned by the explosion or was busy finding out, the question not having come up before. One of the straight-legs high-crawled the few meters from his position on the wall to come to a knee beside us. I couldn’t see his face through his helmet’s visor, but he was tall and rangy and his IFF transponder told me he was Gunnery Sgt. Eduardo Vazquez, platoon sergeant for Fourth Platoon, Alpha Company, Third Battalion, 187th Marine Expeditionary Force (Recon), for all the good that did me.
“I’ve got a demo pack,” he said, his voice rough and hoarse, as if he’d been screaming orders for hours and had little left to give. He hefted the shoulder bag to show me exactly which pack was the one in question. “What do you need?”
Heavy KE turret fire showered the Gunny with dirt and he didn’t even seem to notice after the concussion from the proton blast.
“Captain,” I said, “here’s what I want to do. My company is going to head right, charge straight into the High Guard positions while you and your armored troops lay down suppressive fire. That should distract the mecha, the battlesuits and the turrets in the bunker long enough for Gunny Vazquez to take his demo pack around the other way and set the nitrogen fill valve to blow. Once the liquid nitrogen tanks for their reactor flush, it’ll shut down automatically.” I touched a control by my left hand and sent a copy of the drone video to her and Gunny Morales.