1st to Fight (Earth at War)

by Rick Partlow

  That would be Colonel Shockley. I’d met him a grand total of once and couldn’t have picked him out of a lineup with a gun to my head.

  “Great,” Jambo sighed. He tapped the dashboard of the sedan, full of spastic energy now that we were here.

  I envied him, wishing I was full of any sort of energy. I was wiped out after driving nearly twelve straight hours, with a fucking fistfight, a gun battle and getting tased sandwiched in. Plus, we’d stopped a grand total of once for gas on the way back, which was awesome mileage for the hybrid sedan, but it meant I had to pee like a Russian racehorse in heat. More than anything, I just wanted to be out of the fucking car.

  And we weren’t even at the real entrance yet, the fortified one where they’d stop us and search the car and run our biometrics. This was just the road gate, four miles from that one because everything in Idaho was like fifty miles from everything else.

  I put my head back against the headrest and might have dozed off, because the next thing I knew, the guard was knocking on my window again.

  “The duty officer wouldn’t wake up the Colonel,” he said, “but he did call down to the training center and someone who called themselves Ginger vouched for you, so you can head up the road to the internal security entrance.”

  “And then we’ll be someone else’s problem,” I added for him after the window was shut.

  The security floodlights at the front gate faded into blackness quickly and only the mottled glow of the sedan’s headlights preceded us down the rough, pitted road. A pair of glowing eyes regarded us from somewhere off the road near the trees, probably a coyote. I’d heard them yipping and howling at night all the time. There was no moon for them to howl at tonight, though, just total blackness. Someone had told me wolves were moving into this part of Idaho, and when they did, it would be bad news for the coyotes. Predators don’t like competition.

  The street gate had been well lit and obvious, but the actual main entrance was dark and shadowy, nearly invisible until we’d almost reached it. They didn’t need lights. The guards here had night vision and crew-served weapons and they saw us long before we saw them. I slowed down to about ten miles an hour and coasted up to the solid metal gate, acutely aware of the Browning 50-cal staring me in the face from the right side of the road, behind a reinforced concrete bunker.

  “Just stay cool,” Jambo told me. “These guys should have their shit squared away.”

  They had it squared away enough for the MP who approached the driver’s side of the car to be carrying an HK M27 carbine at low ready, his night vision goggles giving him a bug-eyed appearance. I rolled down my window and kept my hands on the wheel.

  “Thumbprint,” the MP sergeant demanded curtly, holding up a small reader connected to the security system back inside the hardened guard shack.

  I pressed my left thumb to the scanner and when the light went green, the MP pulled it away and glanced down at the screen, the barrel of his rifle raising slightly lest either of us get any ideas while his eyes were turned away. The corners of his mouth turned down, but at least he lowered the rifle and seemed to relax just a bit when he glanced back up.

  “Major Clanton,” he said, nodding. “You’re cleared for entry, but you should have returned before the base was sealed. Did you have orders authorizing your absence from the base during the lockdown?”

  “We were investigating a possible security breach,” Jambo said. The MP’s eyes narrowed and he circled around to the passenger’s side and let Jambo identify himself.

  “Master Sergeant Bowie,” the MP read off the ID, then paused as he reached the Delta operator’s authorizations. “Oh, yes, sir. I see you’re cleared for access at any time.” He frowned again. “But sir, it says here you left in an issue CUCV. Where is it now?”

  “Had some overheating issues.” Damn, the guy didn’t even miss a beat. Wish I could think on my feet like that. “Look, Sergeant, we need to speak to Colonel Shockley. It’s pretty much life or death that we get the base on alert and get all available forces ready to move. Can you get his office on the horn and…?”

  “Sergeant McCrae!” The yell had come from the guard shack, from a young Spec 4. I couldn’t see much of his face with his night vision goggles on, but his voice had the tinge of desperation. “The radar is showing multiple airborne targets inbound!”

  “Oh, shit,” Jambo said mildly. “Too late.”

  “Open the gate!” the MP guard, Sgt. McCrae yelled, then waved me forward. “Get that thing inside!”

  The heavy metal leaves of the gate seemed to crawl away from each other and I stuck my head out the window and craned it around, searching for the threat in the pitch blackness. I heard it before I saw it, a chorus of distant, shrilling whines barely audible over the grind and scrape of the opening gate.

  “What the fuck?” I said, looking over at Jambo, eyes wide. “They don’t have jet fighters, do they?”

  “Too small for manned fighters,” the MP Spec 4 said, still half in and half out of the guard shack door as his sergeant passed by to check his readings. “Gotta be unmanned drones.”

  “Inside!” the sergeant yelled at me, sticking his head out and snarling in impatience. “Hurry!”

  He didn’t have to tell me. I’d just been waiting for the gate to open wide enough and I wasn’t sure it was yet, but I didn’t give a shit about the paint job on the government sedan so I jammed the accelerator to the floor and barreled through. Something smacked against the side-view mirror on the passenger’s side and it folded in, but I didn’t slow down.

  The spiteful chatter of M27s drowned out the car’s engine as the gate guards opened fire behind us, seeing something with night vision that I couldn’t. The sedan leapt away from the gate before it could close again and the rifle fire faded to a background mutter, but a deeper, angry thudding still reached us, vibrating the car windows. That was the 50-cal taking its turn, still speaking with ultimate authority over a century after the round had been developed by God’s own prophet, John Moses Browning himself.

  “Don’t they have signal jammers out at the fence line?” I asked Jambo, fishtailing as I fought to keep the sedan on the road.

  “They do,” he replied, still calm, his SIG in his hand, pointed out the window. “And I assume the Russians know that, too. I’d imagine these drones are autonomous.”

  Something exploded at the gate, nearly a mile back now, and a flare of light brightened the darkness just for a heartbeat. A curse died on my lips stillborn when I nearly ran straight into a column of Striker armored vehicles rumbling down the road in the opposite direction and taking up most of it.

  I jerked the wheel to the right and hit the dirt and grass field beside it going at least sixty miles an hour. The steering wheel did its best to bury itself in my chest and my foot slipped off the accelerator as the ruts and holes in the terrain pounded the chassis of the sedan and threatened to rattle the car to pieces before I could bring it to a safe stop. The sedan bounced on its suspension and I fought to regain my breath, hands trembling as I steered it back toward the road. The Strikers were still passing, a dozen of them hell bent for leather to intercept the threat at the front gate. I couldn’t see them very well with just the headlights for illumination, but I thought I caught a glimpse of a SAM battery mounted on the back of at least one of them.

  “Get us back on the road,” Jambo told me, urgency just barely edging into his tone. “This is a feint.”

  “How can you be so sure?” I asked, trying to keep the adrenaline trembles out of my voice as I steered back onto the blacktop.

  There were lights up ahead, the first sign of the facility, telling me we were about three miles from the headquarters building.

  “Because they wouldn’t launch the drones this far ahead of a ground attack if they were hitting the front gate,” he said. “They’re drawing away our infantry reaction force.”

  “Well, shouldn’t we, like, tell somebody?” I tried not to shriek the words, but it wasn’t easy,
not with the fucking Russians attacking.

  “That’s where we’re going, Andy. Cell phone ain’t working, ain’t got no satellite phone or radio, and I don’t think those boys in the Striker would turn around on our say-so, not with drones shooting missiles at them.”

  “The Strikers are all heading that way,” I protested, jerking a thumb behind us. “And the Rangers are on the Truthseeker with their armor! All we got is the one shuttle waiting to take us up with the rest of the gear and I don’t even think it’s armed yet! Who are we gonna warn?”

  “Not everybody’s upstairs,” Jambo told me, grinning tightly. “There’s still us.”

  ***

  “Boss!” the Delta op I knew only as Gus yelled as he clomped out of the armory in full Svalinn armor, an M900 cradled in the crook of his arm. “What the hell’s going on? Should we head for the gate?”

  I took a second to grab the Glock I’d taken from the Russians out of the center console of the sedan before I ran after Jambo, leaving the car in the middle of the street outside the fortified building.

  “Negative,” Jambo said, his tone shifting from calm and laid back to commanding as if he’d changed gears in the car. “It’s a red herring. If I had to guess, I’d bet on the approach up the river valley from the training ground. Nice and flat, and once the Strikers are all the way out at the gate and decisively engaged with the drones, even if they set off the perimeter alarms, there’ll be no one to stop them.”

  Ginger came out behind Gus, still trying to get his helmet sealed, and a short, painfully skinny older man I’d heard the others call Pops followed him, looking bigger than he ever had before bulked up inside the powered exoskeleton. Jambo eeled past him, waving for me to follow and I nearly ran into another Delta operator in full armor, then four more after that one, all with their visors down.

  “Make a hole, make it wide!” I barked in decades-old habit and they moved just as instinctively to let me through.

  Jambo already had both our suits unlocked from their charging cradles and was unstrapping the chest plate on his, the helmet laying on the floor at his feet. I jammed the Glock into the thigh pocket of my utilities and let automatic reflexes take over, honed by hours of drills putting on and taking off the armor. We’d been the ones to teach the drills to the Rangers, so we had to know them first, and Jambo insisted we know them better, which I had, in fact resented at the time. I hadn’t argued though, because one of the first things you learn as a brand-new second lieutenant is that you never argue with your senior NCO.

  This wasn’t the first time I’d discovered the wisdom of the lesson, but it certainly was the most dramatic. I had my armor on before Jambo, though I’d been forced to remove my right thigh covering to get the damned Glock out of my pocket before I sealed up again. I sealed the helmet and the HUD flickered to life, showing me the IFF transponders of all twelve of the Delta team…and another five avatars, somewhere off to the east, near the landing field.

  “They’re going for the shuttle,” I told Jambo, and the others, since I had the general net open. “It’s packed with Svalinns, M900s, heavy weapons, and it’s already crammed with Helta tech. And all we got guarding it is a leftover Ranger fire team.”

  I was moving while I spoke, grabbing my M900 out of the open rack on the wall, left unlocked by the first Delta ops to hit the armory. I checked it automatically, linking the weapons sight to my helmet, then finding a loaded drum and slapping it home before I jammed two others into the pouches on my harness.

  “Good thinking,” Jambo said, tilting up his visor so he could look me in the eye. “That’s where we need to be. You know how fast these things can run, Andy. You’re on point.”

  Joy.

  I paused before I left the armory, grabbing that stupid Glock off the ground and sliding it into one of the empty pouches affixed to my chest plate. I don’t know why I bothered, maybe just because it bothered me to leave a loaded weapon behind.

  I did know how fast these things were, though, and they were faster now than the early prototypes we’d tested, despite carrying twice as much armor. It was pitch-black past the armory, most of the buildings totally shut down, even to the external lighting due to the base lockdown, but for me, it might as well have been mid-day. I’d used night vision gear almost constantly in the Marines, but it was nothing like this shit. Night vision goggles had been improved a lot in the last few years, but the image on the issue gear like the MPs had been wearing was flat and monochrome. The computer processors the Helta had given us took light-intensifying filters, infrared filters, thermal imaging, sonic echo detectors and some sort of miniature Lidar and put it all together into a seamless, three-dimensional, full-color picture, then overlaid the mapping program on top of it and the IFF transponders on top of that.

  I jogged, then trotted, then ran, then outright sprinted and hoped the Delta boys could keep up. Pavement concussed under the hammer-blows of my boots as I followed the roads, knowing it would be faster going than trying to cut cross-country.

  “Ranger security team,” Jambo broadcast, including me in on the transmission. “This is Master Sergeant Bowie, do you copy?”

  “Roger that, Master Sergeant,” a familiar voice returned almost immediately. “This is Corporal Quinn. We’re pulling security for the shuttle. Do you want us to go help at the front gate? No one’s gotten ahold of us, but I heard the alarm…”

  “Stay there,” Jambo interrupted him. “We’re coming to you. Do you know the location on the shuttle flight crew?”

  “They were racking out in the guest officers’ quarters, Master Sergeant. As far as I know, they’re still there, unless someone stuffed them in a shelter.”

  “Send one of your privates to go hunt them up and tell them to get that damned thing ready to fly. We’re pretty sure it’s the primary target and we can’t let the Russians have it.”

  “The Russians?” Quinn repeated. “The Russians are attacking us?”

  “It’s a working theory. If you capture any of them alive, you can check for passports.”

  I was trying to concentrate on running, but I had a thought. The armor the Training Command wore, unlike the stuff we issued to the Rangers, had secure log-ins with base security. I wasn’t sure Jambo remembered it, since the computer stuff wasn’t his strong suit, so I risked a flicker of my eyes toward the communications display, focusing on the correct menus until the screen read my eye movement and connected to the security system.

  A dozen alarm codes streamed down the right-hand side of the display, all of them connected with the attack on the front gate, the lack of radio communications in the whole area and thermal readings indicating multiple explosions in that direction. But down at the bottom of the list, neglected and nearly unnoticed, was a single report of a faulty perimeter sensor out in the proving grounds, exactly where Jambo had said the attack would come from.

  I checked the time stamp. The alert had come through a full ten minutes after the drones had hit the front gate. Enough time to draw the Strikers out and make sure they were decisively engaged before anyone noticed the force sneaking in the back door.

  I nearly slammed into the side of a parked HEMMT cargo truck and cursed, putting my full attention back to navigating the streets. Off to my left, lit up like a golden sunrise, a coyote watched, curiosity glowing in its eyes.

  “Jambo,” I called, my voice the slightest bit breathy from the exertion. My own biological muscles might not have been moving the mass of metal, but my arms and legs were still in motion, and pretty damned fast motion at that. “They breached the proving ground eight minutes ago. Aircraft, do you think?”

  “Aircraft would set off the perimeter radar. Even nap-of-the-earth would kick up too many alarms. They used airborne drones for a distraction, so the main attack is on the ground.”

  It wasn’t fair. He didn’t sound out of breath at all, and we both ran the same number of miles a week for the last three months.

  “Four-wheel-drives coming up the trails
from the river,” Gus interjected, his tone as calculating and cerebral as always, like he was playing chess with Pops instead of running at thirty miles an hour down the main street. “Let’s say twenty miles an hour in the slow sections. If they go straight for the landing field and the shuttle, they should be there within eight to ten minutes.”

  “What’s our ETA, Andy?” Jambo asked me. I felt a vague irritation that he would make me do math in my head when I was trying to blaze a trail for us, but that was Jambo, always testing and pushing even in combat.

  I checked the map overlay, estimated the distance on the route I was taking, then worked out the time and somehow didn’t trip over a garbage can that had rolled out into the road in the alley between two buildings.

  “Eight minutes,” I decided. It was actually eight minutes and something, but I didn’t have a calculator, so a rough estimate was as good as he was going to get.

  “Andy.”

  “Yes?”

  “Go faster.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  I hadn’t actually seen the shuttle before. All the work to assemble them had been done out at Edwards Air Force Base and they’d flown in and loaded up and shipped out the first one while I was on my quixotic quest to Oregon. So, the view from the hilltop beside the old basketball courts was the first time I caught sight of the thing.

  I don’t know what I expected. Maybe something akin to the old space shuttle SSTO orbiter except with rocket engines. It wasn’t that. The design was reminiscent of a hammerhead shark, if you took out the tail fins and replaced them with reaction drives. I say reaction drives instead of rockets because calling them rockets would have been a disservice, a crude estimation of something decades or even centuries farther advanced than what I’d ridden into orbit with Daniel Gatlin.

  And the thing was huge. Easily a hundred yards long, maybe one-twenty, and at least fifty yards across at the widest spot on the fuselage, not counting the stubby, swept back wings. It was a jack of all trades, cargo ship, orbital transport, troop lander and dual-environment fighter all wrapped into one.