by Rick Partlow
“I am so disappointed in you guys,” he said, hands on his hips as the MPs unlocked the cell door. “I can’t believe you’d get involved in a bar fight! It’s so damned irresponsible!”
“Tell me you’re here to get us out, Scotty,” Sandoval begged, “and not just to gloat.”
“Yeah, you’re sprung,” he confirmed, motioning toward the door. “Hurry up before the MP Watch Commander changes her mind.”
I stumbled and had to catch myself on the door frame and the female MP gave me a dirty look.
“Don’t let me catch any of you at that bar again,” she warned, stepping close enough to shove me back a centimeter with the shoulder plastron of her armor.
“You won’t catch me again,” I promised. She seemed satisfied at first, then frowned as the comment sank in, but I was already past her and heading for the exit.
It had stopped raining, anyway, though it was still as humid as the inside of a shower stall when we stepped outside. I looked both ways down the street and realized I had never been to this section of Tartarus before.
“Where the hell are we?” I asked, slowing from the urgent stride I’d been using to exit the police station as quickly as possible.
There were no other military headquarters offices around the MP garrison as far as I could see. It was out among beat-up and worn-down warehouses and covered storage lots filled with cargo trucks and a few armored personnel carriers that probably hadn’t seen use in decades.
“Utility and storage district,” Hayes informed me, “or, as we like to call it, Bartertown. About as far from the brass as possible, because none of the admirals and generals want to see how the sausage is made.”
“Which bus do we catch to get out of here?”
Hayes laughed and Sandoval’s low chuckle was a counterpoint.
“The busses don’t run out here.”
“Then how did you get here?” I asked him.
“The same way we’re getting back. Shank’s Mare. The Shoeleather Express.”
I frowned at him, uncomprehending, and at least this time, I wasn’t the only one.
“Did you get hit in the head too, Scotty?” Taylor wondered.
Hayes laughed again, gesturing down the road.
“We walk,” he elaborated. “And before any of you miserable pukes complains, kindly remember that I had to walk both ways and then get on my knees to beg Gunny Schmidt to release you all into my custody.”
“I’m sure she enjoyed that,” Sandoval said, rolling her eyes before following him down the street.
“I’d like to know where the hell Cunningham is,” I said, rubbing at the side of my head, not feeling any pain from the blow I’d taken but still feeling the resentment. “He’s the one who started all this. He should have stayed and got busted like the rest of us.”
“Like the rest of us except Scotty,” Sandoval amended, still digging at the squad leader.
“There’s very little justice in life,” Hayes lamented, though whether he was speaking of Cunningham’s escape or his own, I wasn’t sure. “If there were, I wouldn’t have to spend one of my rare nights off bailing your asses out of jail instead of getting drunk and getting laid.”
“At least you can be relatively sure you’d have got drunk,” Rodriguez said, joining in on the fun.
“We aren’t going to get in any trouble, then?” Betancourt piped up, apparently still unable to grasp the situation.
“Not officially,” Hayes corrected him. “I’m not going to say anything, but that was most of the platoon in there, and someone is going to blab. And if I know Top, she’ll have her own way of making sure her own version of justice gets done. You can fucking count on it.”
Why the hell did Hayes always have to be right?
“All right, motherfuckers,” First Sergeant Campbell barked at our platoon, lined up outside the company area in the rain, all by ourselves on what was supposed to be an off day. “Since you seem to think having time off is an excuse to go bust up a bar and get yourselves picked up by the MPs, I guess this platoon won’t be getting any more liberty!”
I didn’t dare look to the side, not while we were at attention, not in the mood Top was in this very early morning. But I wanted to. I wanted to glare back at Fourth squad and give Wade Cunningham the death stare for getting us all into this.
“Now, normally,” Top went on, “I would have you painting fucking rocks and sweeping dirt for the rest of the day, but there’s a complication.” She snarled and rain ran down from her cover into her face. “And I don’t mean the fucking weather. You would have heard this at the same time as the rest of the company, but they didn’t act like a bunch of idjits, so they’ll hear it when they get back from liberty. But you’re getting the news first. We’re shipping out again in three days.”
I forgot about Cunningham, my mouth falling open just a bit. I tasted rain and shut it again.
“That’s right. So, I’m going to do you sorry sad-sacks a favor and let you have some extra training in the virtual reality pods. All damn day long until dinner. You can eat packaged meals for lunch, so Gunny Guerrero, you’d better go grab some now!”
It wasn’t as bad as it could have been. I’d frankly been expecting the whole painting rocks in the rain thing, so a day jacked into the pods was a step up. Gunny Guerrero wasn’t happy because we’d made him look bad, but on the good side, Lt. Ackley was otherwise occupied with the Skipper and the other platoon leaders, so at least we wouldn’t have to watch her be embarrassed for us.
It was a typical setup, a night drop onto a colony world occupied by the enemy. There were a lot of those, lately, but this one was fairly barren, a single city surrounded by smaller settlements, each of them surrounded by smaller farms. The Tahni had taken the city and fortified it, putting their base at the outskirts next to the fusion reactor and re-channeling its power into their deflector screens and the ground defense laser, then surrounding it with air defense missile turrets.
The Op order came in over the pod’s helmet simulator display, simple and direct: drop twenty klicks away from the city, work inward on foot by platoons and infiltrate by squads to the deflector dishes and take them down with a missile strike to the power feed lines while the Fleet pounded from orbit with proton cannons. Just one shot would be enough. Under stress from the orbital bombardment, the feedback from a single lost circuit would collapse the whole thing catastrophically.
“First squad,” Gunny Guerrero ordered, still sounding disgruntled at having to run all this himself when he hadn’t even had the chance to go out and get drunk, “since you’re so talented at deflecting charges for disorderly conduct, you’re going to hit the deflectors. Since fourth has so many people who prefer to sit back and watch other Marines do their fighting for them, they’ll take up an overwatch position and cover your approach. Second and third, you’ll hit the anti-aircraft batteries to open things up for Fleet air support.”
Ouch. I couldn’t see Cunningham, but I knew that had to hurt, even for a blockhead like him.
“Alpha team,” Hayes said, almost stepping on the echo of Guerrero’s words, “you’re up front. Alvarez, that means your team is up front, not you personally. Got it?”
“Roger that,” I said, muting my mic for the sigh that followed. It seemed like such a waste. I knew what I could do, knew I could count on myself.
“We drop in thirty seconds,” Guerrero announced.
The pod shook slightly, simulating the motion of the aero-spacecraft we were notionally flying in. Having flown in a drop-ship, I could finally testify that this was one of the things the simulators didn’t do a great job at. Actually riding a drop-ship into combat was much more of a gut-wrenching, head-spinning roller-coaster ride than anything I’d experienced in the simulator pod, but I guess there was a limit to how much physical motion they could work into a line of virtual reality booths only two meters tall and a meter wide. The feed from the exterior cameras helped with the illusion, though.
The horizon
was flat and distant and I couldn’t see any sign of the city itself, but the bombardment was a coruscating arrow of lightning running down into the half-sphere of a deflector shield, an arrow on a giant map telling us which way to go. It was visible from hundreds of kilometers away, interrupted only by the curvature of the planet, but we’d inserted from orbit just a few dozen kilometers away. Or that was the idea, anyway. The truth was, they didn’t want to waste a lot of time on simulated suborbital flight when it wasn’t pertinent to our training.
I snorted. It might have been the first time I’d ever experienced the government worried about wasting something.
“Drop!”
Again, something the simulation couldn’t quite duplicate, the reason we still had to do live drops and live-fire drills. Here in the pod, it was a gentle shaking, a roar of jets, with none of the visceral, hind-brain panic of free-fall or the almost-pain when the jets first kicked in from the spinal compression.
Rodriguez was on point, with Taylor to her right rear and me and then Betancourt on her left and I was tracking them in the IFF and trying to look through their sensor signals to the world beyond. There was no sign of enemy forces yet and I was sure there wouldn’t be, because the simulators seemed to think the Tahni would just “hunker in the bunker” under orbital fire. It had happened once or twice and it was automatically the way it would be. I wasn’t so sure of that, but it made beating the simulators easier when I didn’t have to worry about armored patrols during a drop.
We came down in seconds, pushing the edge of survivable braking thrust, both because it was necessary to avoid detection and, admittedly, because it was a simulation and our bodies wouldn’t have to pay the price for the hard hit.
“Nineteen klicks to Objective Delta Sierra One, First squad,” Hayes told us.
He was nestled in-between Alpha and Bravo teams, and Fourth squad was just now deploying from the drop-ship behind us. I’d read the op order and if we stuck by it, Gunny would come out after Fourth, at the center of the formation. Watching him wasn’t part of my responsibilities though, thank God. I shuddered at the thought of being Lt. Ackley, just a few months out of the Academy, only a few years older than me and responsible for the whole platoon and all our equipment. Too damned many lives and too much money. All the responsibility and none of the authority. I’d almost rather have been in Captain Covington’s spot. Yeah, he had the whole company on his shoulders, but he also had real power to go with it.
I snorted again. I didn’t even feel ready to lead a fucking fire team and I was day-dreaming about being a company commander.
No way in hell.
The run in seemed short and I wondered if the simulator was fucking with the clocks. Hayes had told me it did that sometimes, when we were going to be crossing long distances with no opposition scheduled. The suit had a clock counting up from the drop, or sometimes a countdown to a deadline, and the simulator program would speed up the clock and the passage of landscape beneath you while recording the same speed you were traveling at, just to get you to where the action was.
I’d asked Hayes if he thought it was a feature or a bug, but he’d just shrugged it off as one of the eccentricities of the Drop Troopers. Me, I was starting to think, with the benefit of one whole combat drop under my belt, that anything taking away from realistic training was probably a mistake.
No one asked my opinion in whatever objective time it took us to get into position near the Tahni base. We were walking up a draw through a seasonal riverbed, the water only centimeters deep under our feet. It was nighttime and I wondered why we bothered attacking at night. We had thermal, sonic, and infrared, and the computers to mesh them all together in a coherent simulation of day, and so did the Tahni. Their sensors wouldn’t be any more compromised by the proton bombardment at night than in the day, the ECM would be no less effective, and I had to think the reason was psychological. Maybe in the sense that their physiology would be more sluggish at night or maybe in the sense that we felt more hidden by the darkness.
There was no darkness at the base. It was lit up like the Central Square at Christmas time by the incoming proton blasts, one artificial lightning bolt after another slamming into the deflector shield so close together it could have been a continuous beam. Return fire would spear upwards when the capacitors recharged, a crackling tunnel of static electricity and ionized air that was the visible signature of a huge defense laser buried in the ground, firing up through thick focusing crystals. I’d never seen a laser that large fire in real life, and I wondered if it was actually this impressive or if they were exaggerating it for effect in the simulation.
I fought against its distraction, fought against the glare and the digital noise in my sensor display and tried to find the target. The deflector dishes were easy to find, I just had to look directly beneath the big glowing hemispheres of roiling energy, but the power feeds were short and heavily shielded, with as little of the connection above ground as possible. The helmet display highlighted them in red and I knew where they were but still couldn’t see them, even on thermal.
“Hold where you are, First,” Gunny Guerrero called just as we were about to emerge from the draw into the valley where the city and the Tahni base were located, about three kilometers away. “Fourth, get into cover position.”
Rodriguez skidded to a halt, water spraying around her suit’s legs. We’d fallen into a tight wedge in the draw and I was at the edge of the riverbank, the soft dirt giving way under my right foot with each step as I pounded to a halt. The security halt seemed to drag on longer than the terrain march to the objective and I wondered if the rest of Fourth squad was as thick-headed as Cunningham and his friends. Sgt. Saleh was the squad-leader and he seemed like a competent NCO, but as the saying goes, you can’t make chicken salad out of chicken shit.
“All right, First,” Guerrero finally said on our squad net. “You’re up.”
“Move ‘em out, Alvarez,” Hayes told me. “Take it slow and quiet and we’ll be on ‘em before they figure out we’re here.” He sounded confident and I wished I was.
Static electricity was thick in the air, crackling off our suits, curling up the ends of the tall grass in little tails of smoke, and I wondered how long an unarmored soldier could survive in these kinds of conditions. There had to be some serious residual radiation from the deflectors, not to mention the heat, and maybe a man could live through it but I wouldn’t have wanted to be the one to try. I’d leave that shit to Force Recon.
This is going to work. We’re going to pull this off.
The thought came with a sense of wonder. No simulation was ever this clean. Something had to go wrong or they wouldn’t bother. I was looking for it, so I wasn’t surprised when it popped up about a kilometer into the sprint across the open field. We hadn’t seen them because of the interference from the field, but there were three armored bunkers spaced out across the front of the installation, dug halfway into the ground, their heavy KE gun turrets sticking out the front.
“We got defensive gun turrets,” Rodriguez said before I could get the words out. “I don’t think they’ve seen us yet.”
That was the advantage of the bombardment. It made it hard for us to see them, but it would fuck with their sensors, too, and we weren’t huge thermal targets just running across the field nearly two kilometers away. We were still moving, quick and steady.
“We can do it, Scotty,” I told Hayes. “If we can get within a klick of them, we can hit the jets and be over the top of them before they adjust.
“Go,” Hayes decided, not hesitating. “Keep moving, keep cold as long as you can.”
We were low to the ground, hunched over, our profile small and cold as long as we didn’t push it over a certain speed.
We can do it.
One klick to go…
The ball of glowing plasma flashed by in slow motion, a bolide meteor streaking across the sky. It burned itself out in the armor plating at the front of one of the bunkers, charring the metal
black and searing the dirt covering the lower half into polished glass. It didn’t penetrate through, but it did a great job of letting the Tahni know we were there.
“The fuck!” I blurted, disbelief freezing my decision process for a half a second…which was a half a second too long.
The heavy KE gun was a rapid-fire electromagnetic weapon, shooting tantalum darts the size of my little finger at thousands of meters per second, at a cyclic rate of a dozen a second. That weapons-stat data card from Armor School flashed through my head along with the knowledge the three or four centimeters of BiPhase Carbide armor I was carrying wouldn’t be enough to stop it.
“Jump!” I ordered, but the word came out too late.
I didn’t feel the impact, of course. There was a flash of a red warning light and then my helmet display went dark and I was back inside the simulator pod, the controls as dead as I notionally was.
Cursing in three different languages and a couple of obscure dialects I’d picked up in the favelas, I yanked the leads out of my ‘face jacks and smashed the flat of my hand against the pod release and pushed the hatch open, squinting at the light flooding in from the simulator room. A technician glanced over at me, smirking just slightly, obviously amused at my outrage.
“Hey, is there any way I could see a replay of the last thirty seconds of the simulation?” I asked him, biting down on my initial response to his unsympathetic expression.
He was a Technician Second Class, what the Fleet calls a Tech 2, which is the equivalent to a Marine PFC, so I technically outranked him even though I wasn’t even in the same service, much less the same chain of command. He shrugged and waved me over to a small monitor set in the wall.
“Let me guess,” he said, still smirking, “you want to see the part just before you got killed, right?”
I responded with a silent glare and he cowed just a bit, running his finger across the touch-screen to scroll back in the video. It was a 360-degree view, since the whole thing was simulated, and all I had to do to get a look at the forces behind us was brush a fingertip against the screen. The plasma shot had come from off to the right. I’d figured that when it first happened. It wasn’t from our squad, it was from Fourth, from the overwatch position. And I had a gut-feeling I knew who it had come from before I even checked the IFF.
