Direct Fire #4 Drop Trooper

by Rick Partlow

  “What the hell do you mean ‘if’ you’d gone through what he has?” Top spluttered, half a laugh and half a snort of disbelief. “You’ve gone through twice as much as that kid. And it wouldn’t matter if you hadn’t. There’s something my father used to tell me, Lt. Alvarez. Life, he would say, is a grindstone. Whether it grinds you down or polishes you up depends on what you’re made of.”

  I shrugged, uncomfortable with the implications of that.

  “Maybe so,” I allowed, “but we don’t get to choose what we’re made of, do we? Delp has done the best he can for us when he’s in the suit. I’m going to make sure he gets help the minute this whole thing is over.”

  “That’s bad luck, you know,” she reminded me. “Talking about the war like we’ve already won it.”

  “I know,” I admitted. “But I’ve been thinking a lot about it lately. And if we don’t, if I wind up dead…well, at least it’ll be a surprise. But if this is the end of the war, I need to decide what I’m going to do after.”

  “Let me guess. General McCauley gave you his spiel about being Commandant of the Marine Corps.”

  I guess I must have looked shock, because she laughed, a remarkably burbling chuckle for someone I’d never thought of as particularly good-humored.

  “Oh, yeah, he’s pulled that one out of his ass before. Tried to use it on the Skipper once or twice until he gave up. The man sells the Corps like it’s a multi-level marketing scheme.”

  Whatever that was. I didn’t ask, figuring it was another one of those dated references to the old days.

  “He’s not wrong, though,” she said, frowning as though she found the admission distasteful. “You’re going out of this war with a shitload of fruit salad on your chest. You might not make Commandant of the fucking Marine Corps, but you could probably wear a star someday…if that’s what you want. Is it?”

  “A star?” I shook my head. “I don’t know. The Skipper told me generals were mostly politicians and I never saw myself as a politician. But staying in the Marines….” I tilted my head to the side like I was trying to look at the question from another angle. “If you’d asked me a year ago, or even three months ago, I would have said no.”

  “And now you’re not so sure. I thought you and Sandoval wanted to go live on a farm and make babies.”

  I didn’t miss the mockery in the words, and I wondered if she would have had the same thoughts back when she was raising her own kids. Maybe a long life would make a cynic of all of us, in the end. Those who got the chance at one.

  “And I still do want that.” I raised my hands in surrender. “All right, I give up. Give me the fucking Tahni, Top, they’re easier to understand. Was there anything else?”

  “The new Second Platoon is doing well in the simulators. Gunnery Sgt. Nichols seems competent and if her squad leaders are a little on the green side, they at least follow orders well enough. What do you think of Lt. Sarrat?”

  “She’s right out of OCS,” I mused, “and was a corporal before that, so I won’t be expecting too much when the real guns start shooting, but she’s done okay in training.” I shrugged. “What training we’ve had time for, anyway. And she managed to keep her Marines from shooting each other on that one patrol she pulled before we left Point Barber, so that’s a plus. She’s a bit by-the-numbers, but I think we can work with her. Maybe keep her paired with Cano’s platoon when we’re on the ground.”

  “Sanderson seems to be doing well with First Platoon. At least he’d seen combat before Point Barber.”

  “Honestly, I’m more worried about Third. I’m starting to think there’s a reason Lt. Verlander lost his platoon in Deltaville and it wasn’t just bad luck.”

  Top chuckled, eyeing me sidelong.

  “You sure that isn’t just the old Third Platoon leader being jealous of the man taking over his old outfit?”

  I scowled at her accusation.

  “Is it jealousy that made him run Third squad into an ambush in that last simulator run?” I countered. “Because to me, it looked a lot like an Academy ring-knocker who doesn’t know their ass from a hole in the ground.”

  “You’ve got Gunny Morrel riding herd on him,” she said with a shrug, sounding more philosophical about it than I was feeling. “I’ll talk to Bang-Bang and make sure he knows he’s going to have to keep a close watch. That’s assuming he doesn’t already know. You sound worried. What happened to Mr. The-war-is-over-I-have-to-start-planning?”

  “Shit, Top, the war is over. The Tahni aren’t going to give up as long as their Emperor is still alive, but there’s no way they can win this and they know it. We know it. But that doesn’t mean a lot of people aren’t going to get themselves killed proving it.”

  I stared at the screen of the tablet, trying to organize my thoughts, trying to decide if I wanted to record this at all. I sucked in a breath and hit the button to start the video.

  “Dak,” I said, “I don’t know when this is going to send. I’m on a troop ship heading for the Tahni home system. We won’t be setting up any Instell ComSats until after we’ve secured the system and God only knows how long that’ll take. But I didn’t answer your last message and I wanted to do it now, just in case.”

  I didn’t say in case of what. He knew, and despite what I’d told Top, I did sort of believe in luck.

  “Congratulations on getting married. I’m glad you found someone. I’ve been thinking lately how hard it is to be happy, and how much harder it must be the longer you live. I’ve been ready to die since I was a little kid, but now that I’m ready to live, it’s starting to scare me, and I’m getting worried I’m going to let it scare me away from being happy. I wonder if I’m scared of being happy with Vicky and I’m letting that make me want to stay in the Marines after the war. Or maybe I’m just scared of having to deal with the memories of what’s happened to me without the framework and structure of the military. That might be it.” I rubbed at my eyes. I was feeling tired now, and I had to get up in four hours. “There’s a guy in my platoon who’s already having that problem. He’s a hard-charger when we’re in battle, but he’s falling apart the rest of the time. I think I’m afraid that’s going to be me, that I’m going to drown myself in a bottle to stop the memories. I’m afraid I’m going to let Vicky down…that I’m going to let you and Maria down, too. You believed in me, not as a Marine, as a man. And I’m not nearly as worried about fucking up as a Marine as I am fucking up as a husband, or a father.”

  I smiled, tugging the corners of my mouth up against a ton of exhaustion and emotional inertia.

  “I think I know what you’d say to that. You’d tell me I’m doing the same thing I always did, putting up a wall because I’m afraid of what’s on the other side. That I just gotta go ahead and face the thing I’m afraid of. That’s what….” I trailed off, my throat closing up as a memory stuck there. “That’s what my mother would say, when I came to her at night, afraid to go to sleep in my room because it was dark. She’d take me into my room and show me every corner of it with the lights on, and she’d tell me there was nothing there with the lights off that wasn’t there when they were on. She’d tell me what I was really afraid of was just the not knowing, and the only cure for not knowing was believing.”

  I laughed softly, shaking my head.

  “It’s funny, I talk to other guys and they can’t remember shit from when they were that little. Little things here and there, a birthday or a trip to a park. But I remember every little bit of it. Maybe because I put so much effort into forgetting everything that came after.” I opened my mouth, closed it again. “I think that’s all I got right now. I might not send this. If I make it through. I might just come and tell you all this in person. So, if you get this, I just wanted to say thank you. I wouldn’t have been able to do any of this without you and Maria. I owe you just about everything I am right now. I hope I don’t let you down.” I reached for the screen to stop the recording, but paused.

  “One other thing. I signed over my mi
litary insurance and my colony-world stake to Vicky. I’d like to give her one other thing in case I don’t make it. I’m gonna send her to you. She wants her own life away from Earth, some land to call her own, a chance to forget all this. I’d like you to help her with that. I’d like you to do for her what you did for me, give her a home. If you could do that, it’d mean a lot to me.”

  I touched the button and the recording ended. From there, it was a complicated series of menus to scroll through to set up an automatic send at the first opportunity and still give myself the option to cancel it.

  There. I’d done what I could for Vicky if I didn’t make it. I turned the light off and slumped back on my rack. Five days and a wake-up and we’d be there. For me, one way or another, this war was going to end.

  24

  I was drowning in data.

  As a platoon leader, I’d been overwhelmed by the available tactical information available to me in battle, and had to relearn how to stay on top of it. We were still ten light-seconds out from Tahni-Skyyiah and I was already lost in the incredible flood of information the helmet’s HUD was throwing at me.

  I squinted and angled my head to the side and tried to focus on just one part of it and the best I could tell was that we were winning. Sort of.

  The Fleet tactical channels were open to my probing and I tried listening to them, but the captains, helm officers, and tactical officers spoke their own language and I hadn’t had the opportunity to learn it.

  “I read four deltas at point oh-nine, pulling three gravities. Targeting with Alphas. Bravo Three, run interference for me.”

  “Copy that, Trafalgar, Bravo Three will pave the road.”

  And the visual accompaniment to that multimedia military poem was a starfield of blue icons heading inward toward the green and blue of a living planet, our path headed not through particles of red opposition but a cloud, a nebula of red stretched across the space between.

  I thought I knew what the words meant, though I was mostly filling in the details through guesswork. Deltas might mean destroyers. Alphas, I thought, had to be Ship-Buster missiles and I thought the Bravos were the missile cutters. The Trafalgar was launching Ship-Busters at the destroyers, but the missiles were vulnerable to active and passive defenses and the Tahni would send their corvettes to try to destroy them en route, hopping in and out of Transition Space to take shots at them. The Attack Command missile cutters would run interference for the Ship-Busters, taking out corvettes and enemy anti-missile missiles and hoping like hell one of the damned things would make it through.

  Fleet warfare was a game of patience, and thank God someone else was in charge of it because I didn’t have any. I wanted to scream, already tired of the three-gravity boost crushing me into the cushioning inside my suit, ready to be off this ship, thinking about the last troop ship I’d been on, about the way it had come apart around us. And the only distraction I had was Major Geiger asking for status reports every ten minutes, as if somehow Delta Company’s status had changed while we were sitting in our drop racks.

  Oh, and the Frag-O’s. If I’d thought Frag-O’s were bad when I’d been a squad leader and one filtered down through the platoon a couple times before a launch….

  “Alvarez,” Geiger’s voice crackled in my earphones for the twentieth time since we’d loaded in the drop-ships. I’d counted. “We have a fragmentary order coming through from Brigade. Change to Situation: Weather. Current orbital probe drones indicate a possible tropical storm forming in the gulf outside Tahn-Khandranda.” Jeez, that was a tongue-twister. Every other Tahni planet and city, we used our own designators, but the command insisted on using the Tahni language names for this world and its cities, just to show us how momentous it all was. As if we couldn’t figure that out for ourselves. “The approach pattern for the drop-ships has been adjusted to the northwest to compensate. The targeted drop zone remains the same, but be aware if there’s an early abort, you’ll be three kilometers farther northwest of the target.”

  “Copy that, ma’am,” I told her as the same data scrolled down the lower left portion of my helmet’s HUD. Then I noticed something. “Ma’am, that’s going to put our early abort smack in the middle of Assault Squadron Four’s air support targeting pattern.”

  “Shit,” she spat. “Goddamnit, wait one.”

  I rolled my eyes, grateful she couldn’t see the exasperation on my face. The suits were nice and private. I couldn’t imagine working on the bridge of a Fleet cruiser, where everyone could see every disgusted expression I made. Years in the Vigilante had, I was sure, made me a shitty poker player.

  “Sir? Are you busy?” That was Sarrat, right on cue. I’d learned she was absolutely dependable. I could count on her to come to me with something she should have been able to figure out on her own at least once an hour. Unless we were in combat, and then it would be three times an hour.

  “Of course not, Lieutenant,” I told her. “It’s Marine policy that all company commanders be left strictly to their own devices during combat so they can be available to their platoon leaders at all times.”

  I thought, for a second, that she was going to actually buy that one, but when she spoke again, I could hear the embarrassment in her voice. Too bad. It would have been funnier if she’d bought it.

  “Oh, um, sorry, sir. But I just got the new Frag-O and….”

  “And you wanted to let me know that our early abort path runs right through the fire support targeting plan?” I anticipated, my estimation of her tactical intelligence going up a notch. “Good catch, but Battalion knows and they’re working on it.”

  “Oh, no, sir, I hadn’t noticed that.” Of course not. “I just had, well, maybe this is a stupid question….”

  “There are no stupid questions, Sarrat, only stupid people who ask questions. Go ahead.”

  “It’s just that the new Frag-O says that there’s a tropical storm coming in over the gulf outside the Tahni capital city, sir. And the Tahni are already going to be using a shitload of ECM jamming, right, sir? So, I was wondering how the assault shuttles are going to target at all? Because they won’t be able to use IFF transponders and if there’s a huge storm, they won’t have visual.”

  Damn. That was a good question.

  “The answer is, I don’t know, Sarrat. And while that is, indeed, a troubling question, it’s not one that they’re going to give us an answer to, because that’s Fleet’s problem. If we don’t have air support, well, neither will they. And to be honest with you, that’s about the way it’s been in every battle I’ve seen since this war started, not counting the patrols we ran against insurgents after a planet was occupied.”

  Which was the only combat Sarrat had seen, so I understood her concern. She was used to being able to call in a shuttle for a gun run whenever there was entrenched opposition.

  “Lt. Alvarez?” Oh good, that was Lt. Verlander. I was sure his question would be much more intelligent.

  “Yes, Verlander?”

  “I was looking at that Frag-O and if they shift our emergency drop zone, we’re gonna be right in the path of the fire-support targeting zone, sir!”

  Breathe. Count to ten. Keep your voice down.

  “Thank you, Lieutenant. I’ll pass that along to Battalion and see what they have to say about it.”

  “Okay, Alvarez,” Geiger said, exasperation in his tone, “Frag-O number four. Execution, Tasks to Combat Support, Fire Support. Assault Squadron Four’s fire support targeting plan has been shifted southeast in the case of emergency drop. I should have noticed that, damn it.”

  “Ma’am,” I told her, “you’re probably ten times as busy as I am and I’m barely keeping my head above water.”

  “We’re all learning on the job,” she sighed. “You wanna know the big picture? They told me, for all the good it’s doing me.”

  “Hit me, ma’am.” We’d all received a situation briefing on the trip from Point Barber, but it had been damned hard to get detailed intelligence reports out of the
Tahni home system and I had a bet with Cano on how close the enemy strength estimates would be to reality.

  “It’s not as bad as Point Barber,” she said, “but there was no way it could be. We knew they threw almost everything they had into that system. There’s maybe half the destroyers on station here, and only a quarter the number of corvettes, at least that we’ve detected so far, but they make up for that with nearly three times the static defense platforms. We could basically walk on the anti-ship missiles coming in from the defense platforms, and I’ve been advised to expect a couple of micro-Transitions to get us past them.”

  “Micro-Transitions?” I repeated. “On a fucking troop transport?”

  “That’s what they said,” she told me. “They didn’t say we’d like it.”

  There was a reason the Attack Command missile cutters had been so successful for the Fleet in this war: they were small enough to pull off multiple micro-Transitions in a battle without ripping themselves to pieces. I couldn’t have explained the physics of it with a gun to my head, but for some reason, the more mass a ship pulled, the more energy it required to enter Transition Space and the more stress on its physical structure it endured during the Transition. Trying to jump in and out of T-space within the space of a couple seconds could damage the molecular structure of a ship as big as a troop transport.

  It doesn’t matter if we lose a transport. This is the last stop.

  The realization was cold in the pit of my stomach. We were burning our ships behind us like Cortes. Well, maybe not quite as dramatic as that, but it was a sign we weren’t saving anything for the trip home.

  In the corner of my HUD dedicated to the tactical feed from the Hermes, something disappeared in a halo of white, a new nebula in the darkness and I changed my mind. Maybe it wasn’t so much determination to win as a fear that going anything less than balls-out was suicide.

  “We have multiple Alphas inbound,” one of the bridge officers announced, as calm as if he were telling his coworkers lunch would be chicken today. “Deploying ECM’s and targeting with laser batteries.”