by Rick Partlow
More muted laughter, this time with a tone of disbelief. He was right, I realized. His people did think he was immortal…or, at least, so much better at this than they were that the thought of outliving him seemed absurd.
“All right, follow your superior’s instructions and get your shit together because everything is moving double-time from now until we’re loaded on the ship. Coffee is your friend, chow will be meal packets eaten while you work, and sleep will be a rumor. If you’re going to complain, complain to God, or the Commonwealth Space Fleet, whichever you think is likelier to respond.” He took a breath and came to attention. “Company!”
“Platoon!”
“Attention! First Sergeant, post!”
Top returned to the front with the precision of a Vigilante suit striding across a battlefield and exchanged salutes with Covington before turning to face us.
“Platoon sergeants, see me immediately after formation!” she instructed. “Company! Dismissed!”
“You all hang here until I find out what’s up,” Guerrero cautioned us, heading over to First Sergeant Campbell. I looked around for Lt. Ackley, but she’d already vacated her spot behind us. Probably had her own after-formation meeting to go to.
“What’d you think?” Hayes asked me quietly from beside my shoulder.
“I think I should have made time to get a shower.” I still stank from hours breaking down suits with Mutt. Hayes rolled his eyes.
“No, I mean what did you think about the Skipper?”
“Oh.” I considered my words. Hayes wanted to be my friend and I didn’t want to alienate him. Nothing pisses people off quicker than saying something the wrong way about their heroes. “He’s a dangerous motherfucker.”
“I’ve been called worse.”
Shit. There was no mistaking that voice and a glance out the corner of my eye told me Hayes was already bracing to attention. I stood straight and still and kept my mouth shut. It was dark out, but I didn’t know how I’d missed him circling around behind us.
“Take it easy, Alvarez,” Captain Covington said, coming around to the front of me where I could see him. He was taller than he’d seemed out in front of the company. “I’m not the Devil, walking about as a roaring lion, seeking whom I may devour.”
“First Peter five, verse eight,” I said automatically.
“You read the Bible, Alvarez?” he asked, and I knew I’d surprised him.
“Momma used to read it to us, sir,” I told him, “when I was little.”
“Not a lot of people around today read anything.” He sounded wistful, nostalgic, as if he’d been around when they did. I wondered how old the man really was. He shook his shoulders as if he was shaking off an unwelcome memory. “Welcome to Delta, Alvarez. I usually try to have a meeting with every new recruit eventually, but I’m afraid we won’t have the time before we head out.”
“It seems like I got here just in time, sir.” I laughed softly, despite the man’s intimidating presence. It was just too funny not to. “Another couple days, and I’d have missed the boat.”
There was something predatory about Covington’s return smile.
“Which might have been our loss, Private, but perhaps your gain.”
“No, sir,” I assured him. “I knew I was going to see combat when I joined up. It’s just as well it starts now.”
“Like I always say, son,” he told me, tossing a wave as he walked away, “you only live once…might as well get it over with.”
12
“Separation in three, two, one…launching!”
Acceleration pushed me into the padding of my suit as the words echoed in my earphones and my stomach lurched, wanting to stay on the Iwo Jima instead of rocketing free with the dropship. I clenched my teeth against the mouthpiece hanging on a plastic wand from an attachment at the right side of my head, not from the pressure of the launch but mostly from nerves.
I was young still, but I felt old. There were a lot of things I’d experienced that most people never would. I’d had men try to kill me, and I’d tried to kill them back. I’d lived with nothing between me and the street but a stolen blanket. I’d travelled through Transition Space in a starship, twice now, and I’d done a drop in a battlesuit…but I’d never done a Balls-In.
The official term was a Ballistic Insertion, and what it meant in practice was, the troop ship drops out of Transition Space as close to the target planet as hyper-dimensional physics would allow, then starts boosting at about six gravities to build up momentum, not trying for orbit but instead flying as if they meant to plow right into the damned planet. Then, when they’d built up enough velocity, they’d cut their drives and launch the landers.
The math was complicated and even though I’d tried to learn what I could on my own since I hadn’t been able to absorb anything in the group homes except how to survive, I’d never been very good at anything more complicated than multiplication and division. But I got the general idea that the landers were traveling fast enough that we could barely survive entry into the atmosphere without burning up, in order to get us drop troops to the ground without giving the enemy too much time to shoot us down.
Oh, and just to make sure we didn’t get motion sickness inside our closed suits, someone in Fleet had the brilliant idea of piping the external camera view to our helmet displays. Which meant I could see the Iwo disappearing behind us on the half of the screen with the rearward facing view, an armored box with fusion drives at one end and shuttle launch bays at the other, with the living quarters between. We’d spent two long weeks jammed into boxes and oh my God, did I miss that private room I never got to use. Not that I’d spent that much time in my berth, since we’d spent nearly every waking minute running one scenario after another in the virtual reality training pods. Captain Covington’s admonition not to spend our off time watching porn had somehow morphed into the officers and NCOs simply making sure we didn’t have any free time.
I wouldn’t have been that sorry to see the Iwo Jima fall away in the rear display if not for the view of what awaited in front of us.
The planet had been designated Bluebonnet by some Fleet planner with a cutesy sense of humor and too much time on their hands. It was a cold place, in the middle of an ice age, and what wasn’t brown and dead was buried under a blue-white icecap, with only a thin swathe of green across the equatorial section of the main continent. The seas were blue-green with algae and shallow, and I imagined it wouldn’t be a very nice place to live, particularly since the Tahni had constructed their base under the ice at the edge of the northern wall.
The Fleet had gone in first, of course. That was their job and I was more than willing to let them do it. We didn’t have too many cruisers left after the debacle the government had tried to rebrand as the Battle for Mars, but two of those we had left were on this mission, That should have been a hint to how important the Commonwealth thought it was, since they could have been back in the Solar System, keeping Earth safe. They hung in high orbit around Bluebonnet, shining silver monoliths connected to the surface at intervals by streaks of coruscating white lightning.
The cruisers alternated fire, cycling their proton cannons as quick as they could, pouring gigajoules of energy into the shields around the base and watching from this distance, I was sure there was no way anything could survive the rain of pure hell. Wishful thinking.
“You’re going to look at the proton bombardment,” Captain Covington had told us just before we sealed up in the training pods our first full day in T-space, “and you’re going to think the fight’s over, that the Tahni will be nothing but cinders when we reach the ground. It’s been the same since the first time siege cannons laid down fire into a castle in the Middle Ages, but soldiers are good at ducking into any hole they can and digging as deep as they need to, and there’s always a fight to be had once the cannons have stopped firing.”
His words and Ackley’s and Top’s and Guerrero’s and even Scotty Hayes’ bounced around in my head from a dozen
briefings starting with the first reading of the operations order right down through the last fragmentary addition, what the military called a “frag-o.” There seemed to be a lot of frag-o’s, like the command structure couldn’t wait until the plan was finished before they got it to us, just in case we somehow defied physics and arrived early at the target.
“Their base is underneath an ice shelf,” Top had told us, “right at the edge of a wall of the shit a kilometer high, just to make it harder to get to. Their deflector dishes are arrayed around the entrance and, from what we can tell, they’ve dug out a huge cavern in there, big enough to store all the troops, armor, food, spare parts, assault shuttles, landers, and whatever the hell else they’d need for another attack on the Solar System.” She’d been counting off each of the items on a finger and had to go to her other hand at the end. She’d frowned, as if somehow annoyed by the inconvenience.
“Anyway,” she’d continued, addressing us all as we’d packed into the cargo bay of the Iwo, just after the jump into T-space, “that means that, once the attack commences, we won’t have any aerospace support. It’s just us down there against whatever troops they got. And we don’t know for sure how many that is. They could have left just a token garrison for maintenance, or they could have left enough troops to attack tomorrow. The only way we’re gonna find out is by sticking our proverbial dicks into the bear trap.”
Well, proverbial in your case, Top. I was kind of worried about my literal dick getting shot off.
“Third platoon,” Ackley had told us later, squeezed into our tiny platoon area, “we are the tip of the spear. We’re going in first once we touch ground and our job is to tie up any enemy armor until the rest of the company can get inside and support us.”
And then, finally, the rest of the wonderful news I hadn’t wanted to hear, this time from Hayes.
“First squad,” he’d said, with all eight of us barely able to pack into his and Kurita’s shared compartment, “we are going to be running point for the platoon.”
At least he hadn’t seemed any happier about it than I was. Sure, we were going into combat, and yes, I expected to get shot at, but I’d have been more than happy for someone else to soak up the attention and enemy fire before I went in. I’d clenched my teeth and consoled myself that at least I wouldn’t be the first trooper in…and then I’d noticed Hayes looking at me.
Oh, shit.
“Kurita, your team is up front, and Cam is going to be out of the gate first.”
That I didn’t actually blurt out “what the fuck?” was a small miracle, because it had built up in the back of my throat like a tidal wave. I just stared back at Hayes, my jaw hurting from keeping it shut.
“Yeah, I know,” he’d admitted, a bit apologetically. “You’re just out of training. But you’ve got the reflexes and I want someone up front who’ll shoot first.”
“Don’t fucking worry about that,” I’d assured him. “I may be shooting before I get out of the fucking dropship.”
Everyone had laughed like they’d thought I was joking.
“Don’t worry,” Kurita told me, “I’ll be your battle buddy. I’ll be next out and I’ll stay right behind you.”
Which would have made me feel so much better if they weren’t in the process of growing his last battle buddy a new spine.
Bluebonnet was growing larger in the front view, the curve of the planet no longer visible, just a solid swathe of white. I didn’t start to get really, down-to-my-toes scared until I couldn’t see the cruisers anymore, just the actinic lightning-flashes of their massive proton cannons. I fully expected the dropship to fly right into the path of the beam and blow up, and for everything to end for me abruptly and ridiculously, killed by friendly fire before I got the chance to even see the enemy.
But the Fleet knew what it was doing, much as I hated to admit it. The dropship shuddered at the atmospheric turbulence from the incredible energies crackling through it, but the blasts were dozens of kilometers away and we slipped past them unscathed. We followed them down, descending low enough to see the incandescent glow of the deflector shields even before the detail of the ground became clear. Blue and white haloes expanded upward, the shields of the angels my mother had always told me about, guarding the gates of Eden after Adam and Eve were expelled.
They grew with each orbital strike, seeming to draw strength from the power projected against them. That was an illusion, and even a Marine grunt like me knew it. The deflectors were straining, every erg of the fusion reactor under the base being poured into them in a desperate attempt to keep the proton beams away, to diffuse them in sprays of static electricity.
And it was all a ruse, a gigantic, incredibly expensive distraction, designed to keep the enemy’s attention focused above, to keep their deflector dishes pointed upward, while the real threat came in from ground level. From us.
I’d thought the turbulence coming through the upper atmosphere had been bad, but it was a gentle breeze compared to the hurricane-force gusts swirling closer to the ground, closer to the massive thermal blooming spewing up from the deflector shields. St. Elmo’s fire crackled off the hull of the dropship and the image being projected in the interior display of my suit helmet shook and jerked and tilted wildly and I wondered if I was going to throw up. I’d seen the inside of a suit helmet covered with vomit before, at AOT. They’d forced my whole squad to clean it out when one of our guys had puked during a nap-of-the-earth run in a dropship. We’d all looked at Greene a little differently after that, as if he were something less than a Marine, and I clenched my jaws shut, wanting to avoid that fate.
“Drop in thirty seconds.” That was Ackley. There was only room for a single platoon per dropship, and the Skipper and Top would be on the second and fourth bird, respectively. I wasn’t even worried about Lt. Ackley anymore, because I honestly didn’t believe I’d ever reach the ground. With her announcement, the video feed from the dropship cut out and the view from the suit’s exterior cameras showed me the metal struts of the chute and the bare surface of the bulkhead in front of me. Everyone else had a suit in their front view, proof someone else would be going in first. Not me.
“Ten seconds.” Whoa. Where had the other twenty seconds gone? I shook myself and concentrated on making sure the suit’s systems were all active and I hadn’t missed any yellow or red warning lights.
Nothing. All green.
“Five…four…three…two…one! Drop! Drop! Drop!”
All drops were manual. I’d asked in training why they didn’t have automated ejection to make sure everyone dropped at just the right time. The explanation by the training NCO had been that there had to be manual controls because there was always the possibility of a suit malfunction, a dropship getting hit at the last minute and going off-course, unforeseen enemy aircraft or a dozen other things that might require a manual control. Me, I’d put it down to the gut-deep stubbornness and resistance to change that seemed to characterize the military. But now, slamming my right heel into the drop control, I thought I knew. They just didn’t want anyone falling out of the dropship who didn’t have the will to go and fight.
Yeah, I was probably wrong, but it made me feel better.
I dropped into the storm, battered and tossed like a rag doll, and hit the jets immediately. We’d been going fast, right at the limit of the suit’s braking abilities, and I’d need every second of boost to stick the landing. My spine compressed with the sudden, violent deceleration and I silently thanked whoever had come up with the idea of the mouthpiece for the helmet, because I would have cracked my teeth without it.
The ground was rushing up to meet me and I reminded myself of the fact that the gravity here was nearly Earth-normal, so there’d be no fudge factor when I hit. I tried to get a sense of my surroundings, but everything was a kaleidoscope of crackling static electricity and rutted, boulder-strewn, glacier-shaped dirt filled with meltwater puddles and cracking ice and it was all I could do not to close my eyes and pray to a God I ha
dn’t trusted in ten years.
The jets roared with all their might, sending clouds of steam billowing up around me and blinding most of my sensors for a moment. I was sure I was about to break my neck but then I touched down light as a feather.
I cut the jets automatically, on instinct built from hundreds of hours of training in the simulators and dozens more in real suits. I was alive, and on the ground, and the enemy was ahead of me.
I ran to meet them.
13
The scene would have been beautiful if I’d had the time to appreciate it. The ice wall was incredible, like something I’d seen in virtual reality fantasy games, and I half-expected a dragon to fly off the ledge, but instead only a stream of meltwater coursed over it. The deflectors were shedding heat in every direction and, according to the Vigilante’s exterior thermometer, the temperature out there was heading quickly into the twenties, probably the warmest this planet had seen in a thousand years.
The deflector dishes were a tempting target, but they weren’t my target, or Third Platoon’s. We were here to smoke out the High Guard, the Tahni version of our drop troops, sort of. They were in battlesuits similar to ours, but they didn’t generally do Ballistic Insertions, preferring to land their troopers the more conventional way. I knew more about their suits than I did the aliens inside, but I guess they don’t waste enemy psychology courses on junior enlisted.
