by Rick Partlow
But there was a time for it, and a tactic, and we learned it as well as they did. The lager. It went back to a day when settlers in wagons had to defend themselves against more mobile bands of warriors, and their best defense was to circle the wagons and form a ring, making sure they had a 360-degree field of fire. I saw it coming, saw the first of the electron beamers begin to hit us. IFF signals winked out, each stripping off bloody flesh from my soul, but the cold, calculating veteran instincts operated my brain like I operated the suit, and gave orders independent of the spiritual and emotional pain running through my gut.
“First and Second, wheel left and volley fire. Third, follow me into the hole.”
Another risk, a damned big one. The Tahni were still flowing out of the hole in the pavement, up from a ramp leading into the bunker, revealed by the shaped charge, and it was very possible there were more of them in there, more High Guard troops still rushing to join the fight. Taking a platoon inside might get us all killed. But standing out in the open with three platoons and trading broadsides with the better part of two companies of enemy would definitely get us all killed. I had to get some of the troops to cover, be able to draw enemy fire away from the others.
I was first into the hole as I’d been first to charge into the enemy because when I’d made the decision to disobey direct orders and throw away everything I’d worked for these last five years to save Vicky, I’d also decided that if I was going to do it, I was going to run point on it. If there were enemy in that hole, they were going to kill me first and maybe give the others more time to deal with it.
There were enemy in that hole. But they weren’t High Guard. Shock-Troops were swarming up behind their battlesuited big brothers, dozens of them, God alone knew how many because they were still coming up a ramp through a tunnel down into the bunker complex. I blasted the front ranks with a shot from my plasma gun and a good five or six went down with the one round, huge chunks of their bodies simply vaporized, the attenuated globe of ionized hydrogen scorching through the armor of another row behind them.
“Third, lay down suppressive fire on the battlesuits.” I squeezed the words out, flinching as four separate KE guns opened up on me, the tantalum darts ricocheting off my chest plastron, my helmet, leaving craters in the armor where it hit. I couldn’t stand there and take it—the rounds would penetrate eventually.
I waded into them, swinging my arms like a mad titan scattering normal humans from him in a Greek myth. Impacts travelled up through the armor, jolting me through the padding, spears of pain coming from wrenched muscles and joints. Shock-Trooper powered exoskeletons were an improvement over regular infantry, but nowhere near the power of a battlesuit. I outweighed each of them three or four times over and each blow from my isotope-reactor-powered byomer muscles smashed helmets, crushed chests, sent the ones it didn’t kill scattering, with no time to coordinate their fire to take me down.
Still, there were too many, and I would have been overwhelmed eventually, a full-grown man taken down by an army of toddlers, had it not been for a second Vigilante suit stepping up beside me, firing their plasma gun to clear out another six or seven, giving me the time to charge up for another shot. The last star-bright ball of plasma seemed to convince the ones who were left that they weren’t going to get past us. They retreated back into the bunker and whether they tried to escape to fight another day or just committed ritual suicide was all the same to me.
“You’re a company commander, you idiot!” Vicky told me, smacking my suit on the shoulder with her articulated left hand. “What the hell are you doing out front?”
“Everything wrong,” I admitted, smiling at the fact she was still alive. “If you have anyone who can fight, follow me.”
The skirmish against the Shock-Troops had taken seconds, yet the tides of this battle seemed to change with each heartbeat. Without the suit’s display, it would all have been a blur of light, a wash of heat and a clamor of impossible noise, rending metal and evaporating concrete, and I would have been lost, just another target fighting blind. With the display and without the experience I had, I would have been in the same position as Sarrat, barely able to keep myself alive with no chance of leading a squad, much less a platoon.
But I knew things and I couldn’t have told anyone exactly how. I didn’t remember seeing them, surely didn’t have the time to read them, but I knew. Third Platoon was laying down volley fire by squad from the cover of the shallow end of the ragged hole in the street, ducking down into a niche just over two meters deep, while First and Second had circled around to the opposite end of the scrum. The lager wasn’t going to work, and the Tahni were losing troops faster than we were, and while they had more to lose, just killing us wasn’t their aim—their intent was to defend the palace, which meant they had to kill us and live through it.
This was the test of a leader. If the Tahni were poorly led, if they had a Cronje in charge, they’d double-down, charge the hole, try to mix with Third Platoon and what was left of Alpha and Battalion HQ to keep First and Second from shooting at them. It would buy time, help them attrit our numbers, but it wouldn’t accomplish their mission. A good leader, a Covington, would break contact under fire, hit the jets and try to put buildings between them and us, then circle back around to the palace. Which would work just fine for us, too, since I’d left the Boomers there.
These poor bastards were poorly led and charging straight into us, which also meant we were all likely going to die. Fucking Cronje was still haunting me from beyond the grave.
28
“Hit the jets!” I ordered, reflexes and instincts still pulling my strings like a marionette. “Delta, Alpha, all Zero Four elements, hit the jets! Get out of the hole and clear the area!”
I’d heard the static in my headphones just a moment before I gave the order, the distant echo of a preternaturally calm voice, the tone of a combat pilot in an assault shuttle.
“This is Assault Four-One. I read your IFF as Delta, Fourth of the One-Eight-Seven. Do you need air support? Over.”
Oh, fuck yes, we need it!
“Assault Four-One, this is Delta One Actual. Airstrike at my transponder coordinates, danger close, now! Over.”
“Delta One Actual, I confirm, airstrike at your current coordinates, danger close. Assault Four-One out.”
Vigilantes were pouring out of the hole, burning away on jump-jets, all of them following my orders despite the fact that I was only technically in command of two platoons of them, and I held back, firing in support, trying to keep the Tahni pinned down just a few seconds longer, keep them firing at me.
It worked. The electron beams converged on my position and it would have been suicide to hit the jets, so I ducked down instead, waves of heat washing over me, through the armor, singeing my exposed skin. The assault shuttle was coming. I could see its IFF signal in my helmet display. It would be firing in just seconds and I would still be here because there was nowhere left to go.
And I was okay with it.
I’d read a short story once, at the Skipper’s behest, called Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge. It was about a spy who was caught by the other side and was about to be hanged off the side of a bridge. The rope breaks and he takes off running, having all sorts of progressively weirder experiences until at the end, you find out the whole thing was a hallucination he had in the seconds before the rope strangled him to death.
I felt as if my life these last five years had been just that sort of hallucination, that I’d actually chosen the Fridge, gone into punitive hibernation, and this was all a dream I was having in stasis, too good to be real. It was a dream where I had friends and family and a father figure who welcomed me, and a lover who wanted to make a life with me, and above all, a home.
And now the dream was going to end, and I wasn’t sad or angry, because all dreams end.
Then I wasn’t alone, and it wasn’t a dream. There were three Vigilantes beside me, laying down suppressive fire. Delp was beside me, standing strai
ght, firing his plasma gun into the incoming horde of High Guard suits, ignoring the electron beams ripping up dirt and pavement and rock all around him, ignoring the charred, smoking groove through his left shoulder pauldron that had to have hurt like a son of a bitch. On my other side was Vicky, pulling me up by my left arm, and behind them was…Top? What was she doing here?
And it wasn’t just them. Even the three of them couldn’t have held the High Guard off long enough to get me out. Coil gun rounds were slicing giant wedges through the lines of Tahni battlesuits, fired from almost a klick away, and I realized that Top had brought the Boomers with her.
The scream of turbojets penetrated the din from way too close overhead.
“Dammit, Cam!” Vicky yelled. “Jump!”
And I did.
Something smashed me in the face and the world ended in brilliant light.
Except it didn’t. Not for me.
I couldn’t hear, I couldn’t see anything but bright flashes of color, couldn’t move. But I knew I was alive. I don’t know how I knew. I was a Catholic, sort of, and I guessed somewhere deep down, I still believed in an afterlife. So, I don’t know why I was so sure that I was alive rather than a spirit about to leave my battered body behind and ascend into Heaven, but I was.
Maybe it was the idea that I didn’t believe a spirit would be feeling this much pain.
I waited for the armor to tell me what was wrong, what was broken, what was burned, but it said nothing, showed me nothing. I sucked in a breath, held it, tried to get my heart rate and respiration under control. Hyperventilating wouldn’t accomplish anything. I felt around for the emergency release and yanked it downward, freeing the catches of the chest plastron, sending it swinging outward. A convection-oven heat sucked the breath from my lungs and I nearly passed out, sagging against the interior padding for a few seconds before I could manage to gather up enough strength to pull myself out.
The suit was on its side, resting on the left shoulder, and most of the heat was coming from the exterior metal. It had been scorched black, none of the markings and stencils visible anymore, and it looked as if the joints at the elbows and knees were partially melted. I jumped out with ginger, hesitant motions, trying not to touch the outside of the suit, cringing with pain despite my best efforts as just being within centimeters of the hot metal made blisters rise on my hands.
I cursed and just jumped out, trying to get clear, landing hard on my shoulder and side because I didn’t want to try to catch myself with my burned hands. They weren’t the only thing burned. My combat fatigues weren’t melted away, but that was more a testament to their construction than my condition. Black scorch marks ran from my thighs down to my ankles and I could feel the dampness beneath my clothes where blisters had risen and burst and the only reason I wasn’t in unspeakable agony was the pain-killers the armor had dosed me with before it had lost power.
The pain was a dull ache, just below the point of tolerable, but I ignored it. I had more important things to worry about. My Vigilante had come to rest in the lee of a collapsed building, and the haze blowing across at street level made it difficult to tell anything else for a good ten seconds. Then a hot breeze washed away the smoke and I saw the hell the airstrike had left behind.
I was a good five or six hundred meters from where I’d started the jump, and I couldn’t have sworn as to how much of that was my jump-jets flying me there and how much was me being carried by the blast. The ragged hole in the road hadn’t been enlarged all that much by the missiles from the assault shuttle, but the rubble had been shifted and where there had once been chunks of broken cement, now there were bits of burning metal and the scattered corpses of High Guard battlesuits. Dozens of them, pieces of dozens more, littered the square, along with similar but slightly different shapes that had to be Vigilantes.
How many of us had died before the strike? How many during?
Where was Vicky?
A battered, scarred Vigilante came down on a whining roar of jump-jets, touching down with a metal-on-concrete impact that shook the ground beneath my feet even a dozen meters away.
“Alvarez,” Top’s voice was loud and distorted over external speakers probably damaged in the fighting. “You okay?”
I hissed out the breath I’d been holding, disappointed that it wasn’t Vicky and immediately guilty for being disappointed.
“I have been better,” I admitted. I hesitated, knowing what I wanted to ask, what I needed to ask, but asking the question I was supposed to ask first. “Casualties?”
“A lot. Six dead, mostly from Second Platoon.” Which made sense. They had the least combat experience. I should have left them behind at the palace, in hindsight, but I hadn’t known if the force at the palace would need to be able to fight off the enemy and I trusted Cano and his platoon more. “I think we have about a dozen seriously wounded, but I haven’t gotten a full count. Cano already called in Search and Rescue. Major Geiger and Alpha…I don’t know. Lot of wounded, lot of dead in the explosion. Gonna take a while to sort through it.”
I blurted it out, unable to keep the words inside anymore.
“Lt. Sandoval and Private Delp were with me. Did you see where….”
“They’re over here.”
I didn’t like the way she said that.
Her Vigilante walked at a slow pace, short, shuffling steps, yet I still had to jog to keep up with her and every impact of my boot soles on the uneven, rock-strewn ground sent lances of pain stabbing upward through my legs. It wasn’t far, maybe fifty meters further down the street, where they were stretched out one beside the other, their suits as scorched as mine and Top’s, and I couldn’t tell one from the other.
“Are…,” I stuttered, unable to finish the sentence. “Are they…?”
“Their suits are offline,” she said. “I called an SAR bird in and it’s SOP to not open the suits until they arrive….”
She trailed off and a burst of static was the mic’s interpretation of her sigh.
“Fuck it.”
She went down on one knee beside the closest of them, grabbing at a particular spot on the suit’s left shoulder with the claws of her Vigilante’s left hand and twisting. The chest plastron fell open and I gagged at the scent of burning flesh. The burn-through must have been in the backside of the suit since I hadn’t seen a hole through the Vigilante’s chest. I could see the one through Vince Delp, though. His face was, miraculously, untouched, but there wasn’t much left between his shoulders and his sternum.
His eyes were closed and he seemed, for once, at peace.
“Goddammit, Vince,” I whispered. We could’ve gotten him help. He could have lived a normal life. He could have been happy.
“He was a good Marine,” Top said, the words akin to a prayer for the dead. Her feet shuffled and the massive suit of armor turned toward me, looking down like a parent at a child. “Are you sure you want to see…?”
I swallowed hard and nodded.
She moved toward Vicky’s suit, bent over, then hesitated.
“What?” I asked her.
“I just got a transmission from the palace,” she told me. “The Emperor is dead. They’ve captured the Tahni military leadership and they’re going to bring them in to witness the body.” There was something in the words, some bitter amusement that I wouldn’t have been able to understand without living her life. “The war’s over.”
I didn’t respond. It meant nothing to me. My war had ended minutes ago.
Top reached down, grabbing the catch on Vicky’s left shoulder, and twisting it. The chest plate fell open and the helmet swung backward and I didn’t want to look at what was inside, but I had to.
EPILOGUE
The utility rover pinged and ticked and clacked plaintively behind me, the metal cooling rapidly from the long drive out from the spaceport on the brisk, autumn morning. Brigantia never got that cold, but I zipped my light jacket up just the same, too used to the intemperate climes of Inferno these last three months
.
Two months on Tahn-Skyyiah helping to set up the peacekeeping operations, another month at Port Harcourt putting down a nascent insurgency, then finally three interminably long, miserable summer months of outprocessing and waiting for transport on Inferno.
There hadn’t been any thought of staying in, not after what had happened in Tahn-Khandranda. All General McCauley’s talk of sitting in his chair and being Commandant of the Marine Corps had blown away on a hot, bitter wind. The Corps might have been my home, but it was a home with too many bad memories, and every time I opened my eyes in the morning, I’d be facing them. Besides, I’d made that call the second I’d disobeyed orders to try to save Vicky. That I’d accomplished the mission was beside the point, though no one else seemed to understand that.
Certainly, McCauley hadn’t. He’d offered to put me in for a Commonwealth Medal of Valor, the highest military award, for my part in the battle if I stayed in. Since Major Geiger had died in the explosion, there wouldn’t have been anyone to gainsay it, even if she would have. She probably wouldn’t have cared. Yeah, I’d disobeyed her, but Geiger wasn’t close enough to colonel to think she was God. I’d heard they’d promoted her posthumously, though.
I shook off the memories and considered the house. I hadn’t seen it the first time I’d been here. The opportunity hadn’t come up, what with the Tahni and the battle and all. When I thought of Dak’s home, my mind always pictured the camouflaged trailer towed into the high-desert draw to hide it from the enemy. Of course, that had been an expedience. Dak Shepherd was one of the founders of the colony, the man who’d named its capital city, Gennich. His house was large and, if not opulent, at least comfortable.