by Ian Whates
He didn’t say so, being the hardnosed old bastard he is, but we knew it anyway, from the expression in his eyes, and that fold of his lip. He read us what we had to know – not much – and then we got loaded into the shuttles like so many cubes of cargo. This fussy little squirt from the cruiser pushed and prodded and damn nearly got his head taken off at the shoulders, ’cept I knew we’d need all that rage later. Rolly even grinned at me, his crooked eyebrows disappearing into the scars he carries, and made a rude sign behind the sailor’s back. We’d been in the same unit long enough to trust each other at everything but poker and women. Maybe even women. Jammed in like we were, packs scraping the bulkheads and helmets smack onto the overhead, we had to listen to another little speech – this one from the cruiser captain, who should ought to’ve known better, only them naval officers always think they got to give Marines a hard time. Rolly puckered his face up, then grinned again, and this time I made a couple of rude gestures that couldn’t be confused with comsign, but we didn’t say anything. The Navy puts audio pickups in the shuttles, and frowns on Marines saying what they think of a cruiser captain’s speechifying.
So then they dropped us, and the shuttle pilot hit the retros, taking us in on the fast lane. ’Course he didn’t care that he had us crammed flat against each other, hardly breath-room, and if it’d worked I’d have said fine, that’s the way to go. Better a little squashing in the shuttle than taking fire. Only it didn’t work.
Nobody thinks dumb Marines need to know anything, so of course the shuttles don’t have viewports. Not even the computer-generated videos that commercial shuttles have, with a map-marker tracing the drop. All we knew was that the shuttle suddenly went ass over teakettle, not anything like normal re-entry vibration or kickup, and stuff started ringing on the hull, like somebody dropped a toolshed on us.
Pilot’s voice came over the com, then, just, “Hostile fire.” Rolly said, “Shut up and fly, stupid; I could figure out that much.” The pilot wouldn’t hear, but that’s how we all felt. We ended up in some kind of stable attitude, or at least we weren’t being thrown every which way, and another minute or two passed in silence. If you call the massed breathing of a hundred-man drop team silence. I craned my neck until I could see the captain. He was staring at nothing in particular, absolutely still, listening to whatever came through his comunit. It gave me the shivers. Our lieutenant was a wetears, a butterbar from some planet I never heard of, and all I could see was the back of his head anyway.
Now we felt re-entry vibration, and the troop compartment squeaked and trembled like it was being tickled. We’ve all seen the pictures; we know the outer hull gets hot, and in some atmospheres bright hot, glowing. You can’t feel it, really, but you always think you can. One of the wetears gulped, audible even over the noise, and I heard Cashin, his corporal, growl at him. We don’t get motion sickness; that’s cause for selection out. If you toss your lunch on a drop, it’s fear and nothing else. And fear is only worth-while when it does you some good – when it dredges up that last bit of strength or speed that we mostly can’t touch without it. The rest of the time fear’s useless, or harmful, and you have to learn to ignore it. That’s what you can’t teach the wetears. They have to learn for themselves. Those that don’t learn mostly don’t live to disagree with me.
We were well into the atmosphere, and dropping faster than my stomach liked, when the shuttle bucked again. Not a direct hit, but something transmitted by the atmosphere outside into a walloping thump that knocked us sideways and halfover. The pilot corrected – and I will say this about the Navy shuttle pilots, that while they’re arrogant bastards and impossible to live with, they can pretty well fly these shuttles into hell and back. This time he didn’t give us a progress report, and he didn’t say anything after the next two, either.
What he did say, a minute or so later, was “Landing zone compromised.”
Landing zone compromised can mean any of several things, but none of them good. If someone’s nuked the site, say, or someone’s got recognizable artillery sitting around pointing at the strip, or someone’s captured it whole (not common, but it does happen) and hostile aircraft are using it. What landing zone compromised means to us is that we’re going to lose a lot of Marines. We’re going to be landing on an unimproved or improvised strip, or we’re going to be jumping at low level and high speed. I looked for the captain again. This time he was linked to the shuttle com system, probably talking to whatever idiot designed this mission. I hoped. We might abort – we’d aborted a landing once before – but even that didn’t look good, not with whatever it was shooting at us all the way back up. The best we could hope for was an alternate designated landing zone – which meant someone had at least looked at it on the upside scanners. The worst—
“Listen up, Marines!” The captain sounded angry, but then he always did before a landing. “We’re landing at alternate Alpha, that’s Alpha, six minutes from now. Sergeants, pop your alt codes …” That meant me, and I thumbed the control that dropped a screen from my helmet and turned on the display. Alternate Alpha was, to put it plainly, a bitch of a site. A short strip, partly overgrown with whatever scraggly green stuff grew on this planet, down in a little valley between hills that looked like the perfect place for the Gerin to have artillery set up. Little coloured lines scrawled across the display, pointing out where some jackass in the cruiser thought we ought to assemble, which hill we were supposed to take command of (that’s what it said), and all the details that delight someone playing sandbox war instead of getting his guts shot out for real. I looked twice at the contour lines and values. Ten-metre contours, not five … those weren’t just little bitty hills; those were going to give us trouble. Right there where the lines were packed together was just about an eighty-metre cliff, too much for a backpack booster to hop us over. Easy enough for someone on top to toss any old kind of explosive back down.
And no site preparation. On a stealth assault, there’s minimal site preparation even on the main landing zones – just a fast first-wave flyover dropping screamers and gas canisters (supposed to make the Gerin itch all over, and not affect us). Alternate strips didn’t get any prep at all. If the Gerin guessed where alternate Alpha was, they’d be meeting us without having to duck from any preparatory fire. That’s what alternate landing sites were like: you take what you get and are grateful it doesn’t mean trailing a chute out a shuttle hatch. That’s the worst. We aren’t really paratroops, and the shuttles sure as hell aren’t paratroop carriers. Although maybe the worst is being blown up in the shuttle, and about then the shuttle lurched again, then bounced violently as something blew entirely too close.
Then we went down. I suppose it was a controlled landing, sort of, or none of us would have made it. But it felt, with all the pitching and yawing, like we were on our way to a crash. We could hear the tyres blow on contact, and then the gear folded, and the shuttle pitched forward one last time to plough along the strip with its heatshield nose. We were all in one tangled pile against the forward bulkhead by then, making almost as much noise as the shuttle itself until the captain bellowed over it. With one final lurch, the craft was motionless, and for an instant silent.
“Pop that hatch, Gunny.” The captain’s voice held that tone that no one argues with – no one smart, anyway – and Rolly and I started undogging the main hatch. The men were untangling themselves now, with muttered curses. One of the wetears hadn’t stayed up, and had a broken ankle; he bleated once and then fell silent when he realized no one cared. I yanked on the last locking lever, which had jammed in the crash, just as we heard the first explosions outside. I glanced at the captain. He shrugged. What else could we do? We sure didn’t have a chance in this nicely marked coffin we were in. Rolly put his shoulders into it, and the hatch slid aside to let in a cool, damp breath of local air.
Later I decided that Caedmon didn’t smell as bad as most planets, but right then all I noticed was the exhaust trails of a couple of Gerin fighters who had lef
t their calling cards on the runway. A lucky wind blew the dust away from us, but the craters were impressive. I looked at the radiation counter on the display – nothing more than background, so it hadn’t been nukes. Now all we had to do was get out before the fighters came back.
Normally we unload down ramps, four abreast – but with the shuttle sitting on its nose and the port wing, the starboard landing ramp was useless. The portside hatch wouldn’t open at all. This, of course, is why we carry those old-fashioned cargo nets everyone teases us about. We had those deployed in seconds (we practise that, in the cruisers’ docking bays, and that’s why the sailorboys laugh at us). Unloading the shuttle – all men and materiel, including the pilot (who had a broken arm) and the wetear with the bad ankle – went faster than I’d have thought. Our lieutenant, Pascoe, had the forward team, and had already pushed into the scraggly stuff that passed for brush at the base of the nearest hill. At least he seemed to know how to do that. Then Courtney climbed back and placed the charges, wired them up, and came out. When he cleared the red zone, the captain pushed the button. The shuttle went up in a roiling storm of light, and we all blinked. That shuttle wasn’t going anywhere, but even so I felt bad when we blew it … it was our ticket home. Not to mention the announcement the explosion made. We had to have had survivors to blow it that long after the crash.
What everyone sees, in the videos of Marine landings, is the frontline stuff – the helmeted troops with the best weapons, the bright bars of laser fire – or some asshole reporter’s idea of a human interest shot (a Marine looking pensively at a dead dog, or something). But there’s the practical stuff, which sergeants always have to deal with. Food, for instance. Medical supplies, not to mention the medics, who half the time don’t have the sense to keep their fool heads out of someone’s sights. Water, weapons, ammunition, spare parts, comunits, satellite comm bases, spare socks … whatever we use has to come with us. On a good op, we’re resupplied inside twenty-four hours, but that’s about as common as an honest dockside joint. So the shuttle had supplies for a standard week (Navy week: Old Terra standard – it doesn’t matter what the local rotational day or year is), and every damn kilo had to be offloaded and hauled off. By hand. When the regular ground troops get here, they’ll have floaters and trucks, and their enlisted mess will get fresh veggies and home-made pies … and that’s another thing that’s gone all the way back, near as I can tell. Marines slog through the mud, hump their stuff uphill and down, eat compressed bricks commonly called – well, you can imagine. And the next folks in, whoever they are, have the choppers and all-terrain vehicles and then make bad jokes about us. But not in the same joint, or not for long.
What bothered me, and I could see it bothered the captain, was that the fighters didn’t come back and blow us all to shreds while all this unloading went on. We weren’t slow about it; we were humping stuff into cover as fast as we could. But it wasn’t natural for those fighters to make that one pass over the strip and then leave a downed shuttle alone. They had to know they’d missed – that the shuttle was intact and might have live Marines inside. All they’d done was blow a couple of holes in the strip, making it tough for anyone else to land there until it was fixed. They had to be either stupid or overconfident, and no one yet had accused the Gerin of being stupid. Or of going out of their way to save human lives. I had to wonder what else they had ready for us.
Whatever it was, they let us alone for the next couple of standard hours, and we got everything moved away from the strip, into a little sort of cleft between two of the hills. I wasn’t there: I was working my way to the summit, as quietly as possible, with a five-man team. We’d been told the air was breathable, which probably meant the green stuff was photosynthetic, although it was hard to tell stems from leaves on the scrub. I remember wondering why anything a soldier has to squirm through is full of thorns, or stings on contact, or has sharp edges … a biological rule no one yet has published a book on, I’ll bet. Caedmon’s scrub ran to man-high rounded mounds, densely covered with prickly stiff leaves that rustled loudly if we brushed against them. Bigger stuff sprouted from some of the mounds, treelike shapes with a crown of dense foliage and smooth blackish bark. Between the mounds a fine, grey-green fuzz covered the rocky soil, not quite as lush as grass but more linear than lichens. It made my nose itch, and my eyes run, and I’d had my shots. I popped a broad-spectrum antiallergen pill and hoped I wouldn’t sneeze.
Some people say hills are the same size all the time, but anyone who’s ever gone up a hill with hostiles at the top of it knows better. It’s twice as high going uphill into trouble. If I hadn’t had the time readout, I’d have sworn we crawled through that miserable prickly stuff for hours. Actually it was less than half a standard when I heard something click, metal on stone, ahead of us. Above and ahead, invisible through the scrub, but definitely something metallic, and therefore – in this situation – hostile. Besides, after DuQuesne, we knew the Gerin would’ve wiped out any humans from the colony. I tongued the comcontrol and clicked a warning signal to my squad. They say a click sounds less human – maybe. We relied on it, anyhow, in that sort of situation. I heard answering clicks in my earplug. Lonnie had heard the noise, too (double-click, then one, in his response) which figured. Lonnie had the longest ears in our company.
This is where your average civilian would either panic and go dashing downhill through the brush to tell the captain there were nasties up there, or get all video-hero and run screaming at the Gerin, right into a beam or a slug. What else is there to do? you ask. Well, for one thing you can lie there quietly and think for a moment. If they’ve seen you, they’ve shot you – the Gerin aren’t given to patience – and if they haven’t shot you they don’t know you’re there. Usually.
It was already strange that the Gerin fighters hadn’t come back. And if Gerin held the top of this hill – which seemed reasonable even before we went up it, and downright likely at the moment – they’d have to know we got out, and how many, and roughly where we were. And since Gerin aren’t stupid, at least at war, they’d guess someone was coming up to check out the hilltop. So they’d have some way to detect us on the way up, and they’d have held off blowing us away because they didn’t think we were a threat. Neither of those thoughts made me feel comfortable.
Detection systems, though … detection systems are a bitch. Some things work anywhere: motion detectors, for instance, or optical beams that you can interrupt and it sets off a signal somewhere. But that stuff’s easy enough to counter. If you know what you’re doing, if you’ve got any sort of counterhunt tech yourself, you’ll spot it and disarm it. The really good detection systems are hard to spot, very specific, and also – being that good – very likely to misbehave in combat situations.
The first thing was to let the captain know we’d spotted something. I did that with another set of tongue-flicks and clicks, switching to his channel and clicking my message. He didn’t reply; he didn’t need to. Then I had us all switch on our own counterhunt units. I hate the things, once a fight actually starts: they weigh an extra kilo, and unless you need them it’s a useless extra kilo. But watching the flicking needles on the dials, the blips of light on the readouts, I was glad enough then. Two metres uphill, for instance, a fine wire carried an electrical current. Could have been any of several kinds of detectors, but my unit located its controls and identified them. And countered them: we could crawl right over that wire, and its readout boxes wouldn’t show a thing. That wasn’t all, naturally: the Gerin aren’t stupid. But none of it was new to our units, and all of it could fail – and would fail, with a little help from us.
Which left the Gerin. I lay there a moment longer wondering how many Gerin triads we were facing. Vain as they are, it might be just one warrior and his helpers, or whatever you want to call them. Gerin think they’re the best fighters in the universe, and they can be snookered into a fight that way. Admiral Mac did it once, and probably will again. It would be just like their warrior pride to
assign a single Gerin triad to each summit. Then again, the Gerin don’t think like humans, and they could have a regiment up there. One triad we might take out; two would be iffy; and any more than that we wouldn’t have a chance against.
Whatever it was, though, we needed high ground, and we needed it damn fast. I clicked again, leaned into the nearest bush, and saw Lonnie’s hand beyond the next one. He flicked me a hand signal, caught mine, and inched forward. We were, in one sense, lucky. It was a single triad, and all they had was the Gerin equivalent of our infantry weapons: single-beam lasers and something a lot like a rifle. We got the boss, the warrior, with several rounds of rifle fire. I don’t care what they say, there’s a place for slug-throwers, and downside combat is that place. You can hit what you can’t see, which lasers can’t, and the power’s already in the ammo. No worry about a discharged powerpack, or those mirrored shields some of the Gerin have used. Some Navy types keep wanting to switch all Marine forces away from slug weapons, because they’re afraid we’ll go bonkers and put a hole in a cruiser hull, but the day they take my good old Belter special away from me, I’m gone. I’ve done my twenty already; there’s no way they can hold me.
Davies took a burn from one of the warrior’s helpers, but they weren’t too aggressive with the big number one writhing on the ground, and we dropped them without any more trouble. Some noise, but no real trouble. Lonnie got a coldpak on Davies, which might limit the damage. It wasn’t that bad a burn, anyway. If he died down here, it wouldn’t be from that, though without some time in a good hospital, he might lose the use of those fingers. Davies being Davies, he’d probably skin-graft himself as soon as the painkiller cut in … he made a religion out of being tough. I called back to our command post to report, as I took a look around to see what we’d bought.