1st to Fight (Earth at War)

by Rick Partlow

  The Ranger team was clustered near the nose of the thing, and I was so happy to see the shuttle and the Rangers, I almost didn’t notice the thermal signatures burning in across the plains to the north.

  “Time for sight-seeing later, bro. You’re on point, show the boys how it’s done.”

  My breath was coming short now, and it had nothing to do with running all the way here at thirty-five miles an hour. I hadn’t been in real combat since Venezuela, not counting watching Jambo execute the Russian muscle at the gas station. And he was putting me on point. Oh, it made sense. I knew more about the suit than anyone except him, and he was the team leader and had to sit back and manage the team.

  “Quinn,” he said, “stay up with the shuttle. If the flight crew doesn’t get on board, you’re the last line of defense. Don’t let these fuckers get to it.”

  I think Quinn responded, but I didn’t hear him. I couldn’t hear anything but my own breath inside the helmet, the pulse in my ears, the pounding of my boots on the dirt. I raised the M900 to shoulder level and the targeting reticle flickered to life in my HUD, jerking fitfully with each galloping stride until the targeting computer realized what I was trying to aim at and synched the servos in my arms with the motion of my legs. The range to the lead vehicle in the column was nearly a mile, and even the computer simulation couldn’t give me a good rendition of the vehicles, just a red and white mass of engine heat on thermal, but there wasn’t any award for coming back with unfired ordnance, so I squeezed the trigger.

  To be more accurate, I touched the trigger. It was electronic rather than physical and had no pull, no break, no reset. The slug had next to no drop at this range, either, not at the muzzle velocity the electromagnetic coils imparted to it.

  I hit the target. At least I thought I did. I was fairly sure from the spray of white on the thermal imaging display, the characteristic sign of a depleted uranium slug penetrating vehicle armor and heating the powdered metal to a plasma. But the vehicle kept moving and I cursed, figuring I’d missed anything vital. I fired again, but the enemy wasn’t stupid and they’d realized with the first shot they were being attacked.

  I knew what the white-hot flare from the top of the vehicle was before the helmet computer helpfully warned me of the incoming missile and reassured me it would take care of things. The bangs from my backpack shouldn’t have surprised me, but I flinched anyway, despite the dozens of times I’d heard and felt the countermeasures launch in training. They were grenade launchers, or perhaps light mortars if you wanted to get technical, but the rounds they kicked free had their own small rocket motors as well, taking the 40mm warheads in a lazy arc directly into the path of the oncoming missiles.

  The warheads burst in clouds of electrostatic chaff a half-second before the small thermite charge backing the chaff exploded in fireworks sprays of white light. It was the trifecta of countermeasures. The chaff would fool radar, the thermite would distract heatseekers and the smoke would block a laser designator. I’d seen it work in training against real missiles with dummy warheads and I was one hundred percent confident in it. The gritted teeth and the effort it took to keep from closing my eyes was just nerves.

  The missiles corkscrewed out of control and plowed into the ground a couple hundred yards away from me, throwing up clouds of dirt and smoke. I’d been moving forward the whole time it took for the exchange of fire, and so had they. I could see them now, the front vehicles in the column.

  I’d been thinking about what sort of vehicles they might have while I ran, about whether they’d risked a trans-polar flight of supply planes to drop actual Russian military APCs and tanks or if they would rig up something with civilian vehicles, up-armored cargo trucks with missile launchers and crew-served weapons mounted. I hadn’t expected Brads.

  The M2 Bradley Fighting Vehicle had been the main Army APC for decades before time and the shifting battlefields had left it on the scrapheap. The Russians had rescued it from that scrapheap, perhaps quite literally. I didn’t know where they’d procured them, but a company-sized column of the old battlewagons was coming straight up the valley, and one had just demonstrated to me that their TOW missile launchers still worked, and I wasn’t about to doubt their 25mm chain guns did as well.

  I switched the KE gun’s cyclic rate with the helmet menu, brought it tight against my shoulder and held down the trigger. My upper body tried to twist away from the recoil of the M900, but I held firm and thirty of the darts sought out the juncture of the gun turret and the chassis of the lead Bradley. A halo of burning gas formed a glowing ring around the turret and while the Brad didn’t stop, it did drift off to the right in an aimless arc until it nosed into a ditch and stuck there, its treads digging in deeper with every turn.

  “Alpha Team,” Jambo ordered, “spread out echelon left and swing in on them before they get up the hill. Andy, I’m covering your right flank.”

  The team stretched into a wide line keyed on Jambo, angled forward and to the left of the Bradleys’ approach, and I took my place just to his left, still eating up ground. The line accordioned in and out with the terrain and I lagged behind, leaping over ruts and rocks, then surged ahead when the ground was clear. Five hundred yards separated us from the Brads and I wondered if they were having trouble seeing us, or perhaps simply trouble believing what they saw. I wouldn’t have blamed them. Thirteen man-sized figures glowing bright on thermal from our battery packs, running at twenty miles an hour wasn’t something they’d expect.

  They were quick learners. The Brads peeled out of their column and split out wide to meet our charge, their chain guns barking and spitting flame. I winced at the reports rolling over the plain of the river valley, not knowing for sure how my chest armor would stand up to a 25mm round and definitely not wanting to find out. I mean, we’d done ballistics tests and theoretically, the chest plates could keep the round from penetrating, but the pure concussion of the hit might be enough to kill the wearer outright. Or might not.

  The others were firing, and I didn’t want to feel left out. It was easier now that they were close enough to make out the details of the APCs. I targeted the left-hand tracks of a Brad no one else seemed to be shooting at and squeezed off thirty more rounds. Depleted uranium tore through the treads and the entire track came apart at the joint, spilling off the rollers and forcing the APC to a grinding halt. The turret still worked, though, and it swung toward me, the 25mm already chuffing big, slow chunks of metal in my general direction before they’d even figured out where I was.

  I’d done a lot of training in the suit, but the instincts learned in the Marines were older and ingrained deeper into my subconscious. I threw myself forward into the prone…and slid about ten meters on my belly before a large rock stopped me abruptly. I whispered thanks to a God I hadn’t talked to in years for the blessings of groin armor. He might not have been listening, but it’s best to be polite.

  The impact of the rock against my forearms was hard enough to bruise even through the armor, but the servomotors keeping my fingers closed on the M900’s grip weren’t impressed by personal suffering and did their job. I didn’t thank God for them, though, since I figured they were working for the government and just doing their job. I did mine, propping the barrel of the KE rifle on the offending rock and settling the aiming reticle on the turret of the immobilized Bradley. One shot for maximum penetration, aimed for the base of the chain gun. I touched the trigger pad and the M900 kicked against my shoulder, bucking harder than it had when I was standing.

  The barrel of the Bushmaster 25mm cannon separated at the base with a spark of metal on metal and pinwheeled through the air, landing a good twenty yards away in a puff of dust.

  Damn good shooting. What I wouldn’t have given for one of these things back in the day…

  “On your feet, Andy!” Jambo nagged in my ear like my mother trying to get me ready for school in the morning. “We’ve got the rear platoon splitting off to the left, and if they can’t steal the shuttle, they’
ll probably just blow the fucker up.”

  I’m glad he could keep track of what was happening, because the threat display in my HUD looked like a first-person shooter in tournament mode. Blue icons were mixing with the red ones the helmet computer had determined had to be enemy because I kept shooting at them, and streaks and clouds and plumes of white and yellow and red kept erupting on the thermal imaging. I assumed that signified gunfire and explosions and missile launches, but there were eighteen of us, counting the Rangers, and fourteen Brads…well, less than that operational now that we’d been shooting at them for a while, but at least nine were still moving, and I thought two of the one not currently in motion were at least still firing.

  I pushed myself up to my feet, the motion smoother and easier than it had been since I’d hit my forties, and tried to figure out what the hell was going on. I could see the ones Jambo had been talking about, the last four in the column, where the command group would have been if this had been an Army company from the 1990s. They’d let the rest of the vehicles keep us occupied while they slipped up a draw to the east and tried to make it up the hill and get control of the shuttle.

  To what end?

  Did they just want to blow it up and deny it to us, or did they bring their own flight crew with the idea of stealing it? Did they really think they could get it airborne?

  They wouldn’t have tried this shit if they didn’t believe they could pull it off.

  Or would they? They’d wanted me, wanted me to get them into the base, and I had to assume it was to get on board the shuttle and try to figure out its systems and fly it out of here. Without me, without the opportunity to get access to the ship, were they still going with plan A or was this a desperate attempt to salvage something from the operation? It wasn’t just an idle debate in one of the tiny, unoccupied corners of my mind as I ran to cut off the flanking force. If they’d given up on trying to steal it, then they were here to destroy it, and they’d know they needed something more potent than a TOW missile. If they hadn’t given up on it, then they didn’t have enough troops…

  “Major Clanton!” It was Quinn. “Master Sergeant Bowie! I’m seeing something on thermal coming in from the air!”

  “Jambo!” I yelled, grunts punctuating the words as I took steps two meters long. “What was that you said about them not sending in more planes?”

  “They aren’t planes, sir,” Quinn told me, and I realized I’d transmitted on the open channel. “Too small, not hot enough. They’re not even hot enough for drones.”

  I slowed just a half-step, chancing a look upward, trying to find something man-made in the sea of stars. With the light-intensifying night vision filters in the visor, the view of the stars was even more distracting than usual out here in the mountains. Instead of thousands of stars, there were tens of thousands, most of which I wouldn’t have been able to see with the naked eye. And somewhere up among them, I saw the heat sources Quinn had spotted, blurry with distance but coming in fast, too fast to be paratroopers, and if the thermal image was of humans, then they were stretched out horizontally, like…

  Oh, shit.

  “They’re gliders!” I said and very nearly went tumbling head over heels when the toe of my boot struck a rock. I extended my other leg out far in front of me and landed with my knee touching my chest like I was posing for a superhero comic book cover. It nearly knocked the wind out of me despite the armor but I still wished someone had taken a video of it. “They’re sending in commandos on gliders!”

  “Quinn,” Jambo said, still collected and steady despite the firefight in which he was embroiled and the shit-show this was all turning into, “we’ll take the APCs, but your Rangers are going to have to handle the dismounts.”

  “Roger that, Master Sergeant.”

  The kid sounded confident, which might be because he was well-trained and just that good, or might be because he was a kid who’d likely never heard a shot fired in anger. I’d been pretty confident, too, before they sent my ass to South America. He’d get the chance to find out. I wasn’t sure if I’d be around to see it, though, because I was running headlong toward four Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicles, and one of them had just launched a TOW missile from only three hundred meters away.

  This close, the grenade launchers didn’t have a chance to even activate and I gave in to my gut feeling and ran even faster. TOW stood for Tube-launched, Optically-tracked, Wire-guided, and if these were original equipment, that meant the Russians firing them would have to look them in on me with their eye in the scope. And if I was moving too fast to follow, they were fucking out of luck.

  The Svalinn would do thirty-five on the flats, and I was going downhill. Too fast to even try to shoot, so I gave up on it and ran straight in. My legs were cramping up and I hoped I didn’t tear a muscle moving this fast but I didn’t dare slow down. The missile zipped past me close enough that I actually saw the guide wire playing out across the distance to the lead Bradley, and a second later, the crump of an explosion two hundred yards behind me told the tale of its fate.

  A second Bradley targeted me with its chain gun, the rounds chewing up dirt only meters away to my left. He was trying to lead me like a duck hunter with a shotgun, and I was running right into this firing arc, too fast to stop, too fast to even turn without totally wiping out. Something impacted my hip with the force of a sledgehammer, and suddenly, I was flying through the air, spinning out of control.

  Chapter Fifteen

  My suit reacted before I could, the safety protocols taking over just the way I had totally forgotten that we’d encouraged General Dynamics to design them, and the Svalinn’s joints all locked into place, my arms and legs going stiff and pressing together in the fraction of a second before I hit the ground, even holding my rifle straight up and down in front of my chest like I was on a parade ground.

  The hit from the 25mm hadn’t registered on the pain meters yet, still concealed by shock, but hitting the ground hurt like a son of a bitch. The armor was padded, and the reinforcement of the joint locks kept me from breaking anything, but it didn’t stop my brain from sloshing around in my skull. The only thing that kept me from turning into a vegetable with multiple brain bleeds was the spin. I didn’t hit the ground flat, didn’t lose all my momentum in one, devastating impact. Instead, I rolled, shoulders thudding into the soft soil on the hillside, sending up showers of loose dirt, then hips catching as I lost momentum, then my back finally hitting as I came to a stop and the suit unlocked. I almost screamed when my arms and legs moved again, my whole body feeling like one giant bruise and a white-hot dagger sticking into my left hip where the round had caught me.

  Yellow warnings were flashing desperately for attention in my helmet HUD, trying to tell me how badly the Svalinn was damaged, maybe trying to tell me how badly I was damaged, but there just wasn’t time to deal with it now. I was maybe seventy yards from the nearest of the Brads, and I still had my gun in my hand, and everything else could wait. I shook off the haze clouding my thoughts, not able to formulate anything resembling a coherent plan but at least knowing I still had my gun…as long as it had survived the fall.

  A quick look told me it had, but the drum was gone, accidentally ejected and laying somewhere back along the nearly fifty yards I’d rolled after taking the hit. Fortunately, I’d practiced reloading so often I didn’t need to look, and it didn’t even seem to matter that my fingers were numb. The exoskeleton’s servos forced my hand to go where I told it to go, slave-masters driving my body on despite its reluctance to comply. The new drum slid home and I stumbled to my feet, my hip rebelling, my breath coming in agonized gasps.

  A 25mm Bushmaster was depressing its barrel as far down as it would go, maybe a second left before it shot me in the face and ended this wonderful second phase of my military career. I fired the M900 from the hip on full auto. It wasn’t as fun as it sounded, given the condition of my hip and shoulders. The weapon nearly tore itself out of my exoskeleton-enhanced grip, but the armor-piercin
g darts punched their way through the turret and the Bushmaster’s barrel lurched downward, blown off its mounts. I slewed the KE gun down, taking out the tracks on that side as well and disabling the vehicle.

  The first Brad in the line was still moving, trying to complete its mission, but another burst at max ROF shredded the vehicle’s right-hand treads. It spun to the left with one last, futile gunning of the engine by the driver, blocking the path of the rest of the four-vehicle column. We were only five hundred yards or so from the shuttle, too damned close, but there was no clear shot up the hill for their missiles, even if the TOWs could take it out.

  The rear Bradley revved its diesel, trying to skirt the rest of the APCs, trying to get around and make its way to its target. I took a deliberate, plodding step toward it, only on my feet because the suit wouldn’t let me fall. The helmet’s sensors warned me before I noticed, my human senses clouded by what I dimly realized was a mild concussion, but I didn’t comprehend what they were trying to tell me until the bullets began smacking into my left arm.

  I’d been shot before, over a decade ago, and back then a SAPI plate had saved my life, but I’d damn sure known I’d taken a hit. It had felt like a major leaguer had taken a full-power swing with a baseball bat into my chest. This time was different, a visitor gently knocking on the door, reminding me they were here. Only these visitors were Russian troops. Spetsnaz, I guessed, since they cared enough to send the very best, two squads of them spewing out of the open hatches of the immobilized Brads.

  The camo utilities and body armor they wore were very familiar. I’d seen it in Venezuela, seen it in Syria, seen it on the news in the Ukraine. It was state of the art before the aliens had landed, and sturdy enough to stop 5.56mm military rounds. It wasn’t much against depleted uranium darts traveling at over 4,000 feet per second and cycling at six hundred rounds per minute. I swung the M900 right to left, spraying a hundred rounds across the mass of troops rushing at me. They still didn’t know what they were dealing with and I almost felt bad for them, despite the 5.45mm rounds bouncing off my chest armor. My shots didn’t bounce off.