Primary Targets (Earth at War Book 2)

by Rick Partlow

  There were other buildings around the refinery, small enough to be housing but built on platforms and surrounded by local trees like my dad built for the neighborhood kids when I was eight years old. I assumed they belonged to the Helta, but the Tevynians were pouring out of them now, rifles in hand, a swarm heading for bunkers kludged together from local materials, scrap metal, parts of other buildings and even vehicles. I counted eight of them on our banking pass around the refinery, guarding every approach to the facility, as if having it taken away was their biggest fear.

  To the west of the refinery, a landing field stretched at least a mile, paved with the same material as the streets. It was mostly empty, now that their fighters were so much wreckage in low orbit. There were still four stub-winged shuttles at one end of the field, but no one was trying to get to them. I suppose they’d heard what had happened to the rest of their ships and didn’t see the point in being a target.

  Then they really shouldn’t have jumped into those bunkers.

  Another incandescent beam sought us out and our banking arc slewed sharply, , throwing me against my restraints. I tapped a control on my wrist and patched into the shuttle’s comm systems.

  “Ranger Flight,” I transmitted, “this is Gunfighter One. I want all birds to make a strafing run on the bunkers. I want those laser emplacements taken out before we attempt to land troops.”

  “Roger that, Gunfighter,” Captain Holden replied. She was the head of Ranger Flight, the shuttles carrying Brooks and her detachment. “We’ll follow you in.”

  “Weapons free, Captain,” I told Lee. “Give me some suppressive fire.”

  “Aye, aye, sir,” Lee said, the corner of his mouth curling upward with the gibe at my Marinehood. “Select for incendiary, Mayfield.”

  Lee cut into a tight turn, taking us back around the south side of the refinery, and I had a brief glimpse of the dormant volcano rising high over the foothills before a screaming, rumbling acceleration pressed me back into my seat and the scenery blurred. I don’t know how Lee was able to keep us steady enough to line the nose up with a fixed target on the ground, but that’s why he was behind the controls and I was holding a rifle.

  Mayfield touched the trigger and the shuttle seemed to stand still in midair and streaks of fire connected us with one of the bunkers for a full second, like the blasters from a cheesy science fiction movie. These weren’t bad Hollywood science, though, they were something our best weapons designers had come up with in tandem with the Helta engineers. The coil guns were variable ammo weapons, able to feed from multiple hoppers for different purposes. Spacecraft and armor got standard tungsten penetrators, but for softer targets, we carried incendiary ammunition, slugs of sintered metal converted to a plasma pulse by an energy burst just past the end of the coil.

  The white-hot blasts of burning metal stitched through the sides of the bunker, sending gouts of flame pouring through the gaps and Tevynian soldiers tumbling out ahead of them.

  Another sharp bank, another blur of green and blue and gray and we were so damned low, maybe fifty or sixty feet up, lower than the upper sections of the refinery. Something hit us and a wave of heat washed over me, but Mayfield was already firing again, returning coherent light with hyper-ionized metallic gas at 10,000 feet per second. Sections of the bunker blew apart, the water vapor trapped in concrete and rock and wood superheating and bursting like a covered pot left on the stove too long.

  “Take us down now, Lee!” I ordered, feeling the flow of the battle, sensing the time was right, the distraction and confusion at their height.

  I thought the pilot might argue with me, but instead, he chastised me in a more direct way, by feeding all the power to the belly jets and bringing us nearly to a halt in midair less than a hundred yards from where we’d been when I’d given the order. Thrust pushed me into the seat restraints and pressed armor plating into my chest and shoulders and I gritted my teeth and tried not to grunt from the pain.

  The belly jets were roaring, or maybe it was the blood rushing in my head and I jerked against the safety harness again when the ship’s tractor landing gear slammed into the pavement with much more force than I would have imagined we could survive. And yet we did, the shuttle springing back upward on its suspension.

  I sprang with it, yanking the quick release on my seat restraints and hopping up from the acceleration couch. Showtime.

  Chapter Three

  “Move it out!” I yelled, vaulting down the steps from the cockpit into the passenger compartment.

  The belly ramp was already lowering and a haze of smoke and dust billowed up through it as if someone had thrown a smoke grenade to cover our arrival. The Delta team was up even faster than me, and my irrational annoyance that I couldn’t move faster than them and I’d basically designed the damned armor flared.

  Sgt. First Class Moses McCormick—we all called him Ginger—was the first one down the ramp, which was his job so I didn’t begrudge him the position, but Pops went second just because he got up faster than I could. Gus tried to shoulder past me, but I angled sideways and shot down the ramp, the soles of my boots a drumbeat on the hollow metal. We were about two hundred yards from the refinery and over a hundred from the nearest of the bunkers. A cloud of black smoke was billowing from the flaming wreckage, drifting away from the refinery and helping to cover our approach. I wasn’t certain what the Tevynian forces here had for optics, but I knew the Helta didn’t go much for thermal or infrared sights because their natural night vision was better than ours, or the Tevynians. Whether it was the lack of thermal sights to penetrate the drifting smoke or the confusion and panic from the strafing runs, none of the wild shots from the Tevynian soldiers came near any of the team and we took cover behind the remains of a cargo truck.

  All that was left of the wrecked vehicle was the rear compartment, and most of that had been chewed up and cooked black by plasma. The only reason I could tell what it had originally been was the rounded, polymer wheels still mounted in a tricycle formation on the back end of the undercarriage. I hugged the side of one of the casters and brought my rifle to my shoulder, hunting for a target. A laser flashed from an exterior staircase, coming uncomfortably close, and I answered it with a tungsten slug. The Tevynian was wearing Helta body armor, black and segmented and very maneuverable, but more suited to dispersing laser energy than defeating a kinetic attack, and my shot punched through, center mass. The black-clad enemy trooper pitched off the open upper platform, hitting the pavement with a thump that was audible even over the snap-crack of the lasers and the roar of shuttle engines.

  The Rangers were landing in waves a few hundred yards to the rear of our position, two shuttles setting down at a time and disgorging a couple platoons each then screamed away on VTOL belly jets. Brooks’ troops moved with the practiced synchronicity of a ballet company on the biggest stage in the galaxy, one squad sprinting ahead while the other laid down suppressive fire. Once enough of the Rangers were on the ground laying down a base of fire, the laser bursts slowed, one after another of the enemy troops falling to the KE rifles.

  I ducked around the edge of my cover and checked this side of the refinery, wary of another sniper, but the enemy forces were falling back. They hugged the sunken walkways lining this side of the refinery complex, scuttling like cockroaches away from the light.

  Did they know this was the end for them, that their space assets were gone and help wouldn’t be coming? Would they surrender if we cornered them, or would they pull a Thermopylae and run from bunker to bunker, redoubt to redoubt, reforming what they had left until we were forced to kill every last one of them? We’d debated the questions over and over, back on Earth, during the voyage out here, right up to the last second, and we still didn’t know.

  “Pops, check the bunker,” I transmitted. “Find us a survivor.”

  “On it.”

  If the Rangers were a ballet company, the Delta team was a wolf pack, the moves less choreographed and more naturalistic, something
wired into their instincts. Two at a time they filtered forward, moving through a smoldering gap in the makeshift bunker left by an incendiary round, out of the noonday glare and into pitch black darkness without hesitation. I was good in the armor, damned good by now, but nothing substituted for years and years of intense training together as a unit. I’d done the best I could to integrate with them but still didn’t have the innate sense of where everyone else would be and how they would react that Pop or Ginger or Gus or Dog or the rest of them had. I let Pops take them through before I followed.

  The darkness swallowed me, but all I noticed was a flicker in the view through my visor, the half-second it took for the computer system in my helmet to integrate the input from the thermal and infrared filters and the sonic sensors into a coherent simulation of bright, even light. I fought a gut-level paranoia that I wasn’t really seeing what was there, just a software interpolation of it, that an enemy could be lurking only feet from me and some glitch would leave them invisible, a serial killer in one of those old slasher flicks sneaking up behind me.

  Stop being a technophobe. You came here on a ship that goes through a reality humans can’t even see using physics no one really understands and you’re worried about a computer in your fucking helmet?

  I heard the mental admonition in Jambo’s voice, and I realized that had been happening a lot lately.

  Stop woolgathering and fucking pay attention Andy, before you get yourself killed.

  The inside of the bunker was smoky blackness pierced in places by streaming lines of white daylight where the overhead protection had been perforated by the strafing runs. I had a vivid flashback of following a high-value target into a partially-collapsed grocery store in Caracas and only the security blanket of the Svalinn armor kept it bay. The slightly plastic-appearing view through the visor helped me to push back the memories and pretend I was playing a video game. The armor reinforced the illusion, and when Master Sergeant Douglas Calhoun—Dog—fired his KE rifle through an overturned table and a Tevynian tumbled out, his laser rifle clattering to the pavement, I could almost believe it wasn’t real.

  “We want prisoners,” Pops reminded him, sounding annoyed.

  “Tell them that,” Dog countered. “Not like they’re lining up to surrender.”

  The enemy soldier writhed on the ground, dead already from the hole in his chest but not realizing it yet, his fingers clasping blindly for his weapon. Dog jerked backward and put another round into him and the Tevynian collapsed. Other bodies, or sometimes parts of bodies in black armor were scattered beneath the burn-throughs, but a handful of survivors were trying to make their way out through the opposite end of the bunker, some stumbling, some crawling.

  “Ginger,” Pop said, eyeing the fleeing enemy troops, “concussion grenade.”

  “Got it.”

  The tall, red-headed man let his rifle swing downward on the gimbal mount while a grenade launcher swung up from his backpack on powered swivel. A muted thump sent fragmented echoes bouncing off the walls of the bunker and the grenade ricocheted off the pavement about three yards behind the trailing group of fleeing Tevynians before it blew. It went against years of training not to duck before the grenade blast, but in the Svalinn armor the concussion blast was a dull punch in the chest and a kettle-drum rattle.

  Unfortunately, the enemy was armored too, though not as heavily as we were. Two of the trailing Tevynian soldiers went down, but the rest staggered or stumbled but kept going toward the sliver of daylight at the other end of the bunker. I didn’t have a shot at them myself, not with the team in the way, but…

  “Don’t let them get out the back,” I told Pops. “Take them down.”

  It didn’t exactly feel like an execution, not after what I’d seen—and done—in Venezuela, but it still wasn’t pleasant to watch. The four Tevynian soldiers jerked and spun and died under a hail of electromagnetically launched slugs, the last one dropping only feet from the exit.

  “Cease fire, cease fire!” Pops snapped. “Gus, Dog, secure the prisoners! Ginger, take the others and watch the exit!”

  I moved with Gus and Dog to two Tevynians still on the ground, one of them motionless, the other rolling back and forth, clawing at the fastenings of his helmet. Dog and Gus pounced on them, predators on the kill, kicking their laser rifles out of reach, twisting their arms behind their backs and securing them with flex cuffs, then doing the same for their legs.

  “Get their helmets off,” I instructed. “Make sure we got a live one.”

  We knew how their gear worked because it was all pilfered from the Helta, and the Delta ops had the helmets stripped off the Tevynians in seconds.

  “This one ain’t breathing.” Dog sounded disgusted, like he would spit on the ground if he hadn’t been wearing his visor down.

  I moved around the big man to get a look. The one who hadn’t been moving never would again, though I didn’t think the concussion grenade was to blame. It was a woman, her blond hair tied in twin braids flopping loose without the helmet to contain them, and her face was ghostly pale from blood loss. Closer now, the fist-size wound in her shoulder was obvious, a plasma burn-through. That it hadn’t killed her immediately was a testimony to her mental toughness and willpower, but the concussion blast had robbed her of the adrenaline rush that had carried her this far.

  “I got a live one here,” Gus announced.

  He lifted the bound man by his helmet locking collar, supporting all of his weight one-handed with the aid of the Svalinn’s servomotors. The Tevynian was square-jawed, like an old recruiting poster for the Marines, if the grooming standards had been changed to allow handlebar mustaches and swept-back hair hardened by lime and grease. The hair was so blond it had to be dyed and blue spirals were tattooed into the man’s cheeks, distorted at the moment by the agonized grimace on his face. His eyes were slightly out of focus and his mouth was open and working soundlessly. I’d seen the look before. Being on the receiving end of a conventional flash-bang wasn’t pleasant, and these were about ten times as effective.

  “Get him out of here,” I told them. “Pops, you and the team take him to the LZ and wait for the dust off. Don’t let anything happen to him.”

  “Where are you gonna be, boss?” Pops asked me. I couldn’t see his face in the shadows of the bunker, but I could almost hear his eyebrow raising. He still had this idea he needed to protect me, and maybe he did, but if I was going to be doing this for a living, I had to be able to handle things myself.

  “I’m gonna go hook up with Colonel Brooks,” I said, then winced. “Sorry, that didn’t come out right. I’m going to go hook up with the Ranger command group. We have to make the call whether this place is salvageable or if we need to evac the civilians and leave it to the Tevynians.”

  “Roger that, sir,” Pops said, sounding unconvinced. “Please be careful. I’d rather not have to explain to General Olivera how I let you get yourself killed.”

  “Of course, Pops.” I grinned, though no one could see it. “Keeping you out of trouble with the general is my chief incentive for not dying.”

  ***

  I hadn’t been in the middle of a war zone since Venezuela. The space station battle where we’d acquired the Jambo didn’t count, really. It was more of a boarding operation, a claustrophobic, isolated scuffle. This, Wellspring, was a battle. Shuttle engines ripped the air with banshee screams, and coil guns spat streams of powdered metal superheated into plasma, answered by lasers, coherent searchlights with photons in single file. Acrid smoke stained the air from things burning that shouldn’t have been flammable, and Svalinn armor suits loped by in wedge formations, firing their KE rifles on full auto.

  I couldn’t see the enemy, but that was how it went sometimes. I went three weeks once in Caracas, lost four KIA in my platoon, and never saw the enemy. We shot at muzzle flashes, at places we estimated from the report of the weapons, and maybe we hit something or maybe we didn’t, but we never found any bodies. It was one of the little things th
at slowly drove a guy insane after a few months in combat and if it was more bearable this time, it was only because I knew we’d be pulling out soon instead of being stuck here with no end in sight. And maybe it was more bearable because I was running at about thirty-five miles an hour and I didn’t think any of these bleach-blond interstellar biker assholes could hit me at that speed.

  I didn’t have to guess where Colonel Brooks was. Her IFF transponder blinked on a map projected on my HUD, leading me to the north side of the refinery, past globes and spires and cones that looked unreal from the air and seemed even more irrational and pointless from the ground. The place reminded me of the Vegas strip, if the strip had been designed by Ralph McQuarrie, but it wasn’t nearly as hard to cross the street.

  Ionized air crackled with static electricity only a couple feet away from my head and chunks of pavement blew up in a steam explosion. I fired back at the spot where the laser had originated, my estimate not nearly so rough as when I’d been trying to figure out which window an AK round came from ten years ago, because a laser was a dumbass weapon to use as an infantry rifle and because the targeting system in my helmet was a lot more accurate than what the military used to call the Mark One Eyeball.

  My rifle was set to full auto, the muzzle velocity reduced to keep it manageable, and the six-round burst was still powerful enough to penetrate the machine housing the Tevynian was trying to use for cover. I’d noticed more than once that many people mistake concealment for cover, and I guess it’s a human thing, not just an Earth thing. A figure in black armor pitched sideways and another bolted out from behind the machinery housing, firing wildly. The laser pulses were aimed so badly, they might as well have been lightning crackling out of the sky, and actual lightning might have had a better chance of hitting me.