by Rick Partlow
“Hook a left, Betancourt,” I told him, just in case he’d lost track of which way north was.
I watched his movement with a critical eye, unimpressed. His Vigilante ambled with an awkward, broad-legged gait, like a toddler just learning to walk. They wouldn’t have passed him through Armor school if he had that much trouble handling a suit, so I figured he was just nervous. I switched my comms to a private channel with him.
“Betancourt, relax a little. Stop overthinking it and just pretend you’re walking to formation. The interface will do the work.”
“Okay, sorry.”
I wished the guy didn’t sound so deferential. It was making me start to feel even more self-conscious. But his stride became more natural, which I guessed meant he was listening to me. The left turn on the imaginatively-labelled Third Street took us back behind a line of apartment buildings, the sort I would have associated with upwardly-mobile Surface Dwellers back in Trans-Angeles but were considered standard working-class housing in the colonies.
If I live through this war, they’ll settle me on one of the colonies.
The thought scared the shit out of me and I didn’t really know why. Maybe because it would be so totally different from the life I’d known. So was being in the Marines, of course, but that had a sort of temporary feel to it. Everyone talked like it would be temporary; wars didn’t last forever, or at least they never had before. Then I’d be dumped on a world I’d never even visited, stuck with a bunch of strangers who’d never been to Earth. And doing what? Working on an algae farm or a construction company?
Cheer up. You’ll never live through this, anyway.
The pavement vibrated like the skin of a drum under the feet of my suit and I wondered how anyone with ears couldn’t know we were coming.
“Turn right in two hundred meters,” I instructed Betancourt. “Up at that next street.”
Hayes had told me some people actually got lost in the streets here, but I couldn’t understand how. The place was laid out straight and square and open, and anyone who couldn’t find their way around it would have curled up and died if they’d ever tried to get anywhere in the favelas of the Trans-Angeles Underground. I glanced at the map, noting the layout of the constabulary building. We’d be coming out on the far north end of the building, and although Hayes hadn’t specified, I assumed he wanted us to pass from north to south on our sweep to draw fire.
“They’re gonna open up on you right after the turn,” I predicted, including the whole team on the transmission. “I want each of you to launch a missile at the enemy positions, airburst at ten meters up, and follow up with a plasma blast as each of you cuts south, to the right. Remember Bravo is going to be shooting across south to north, so stay out of their firing arcs.”
“Yeah,” Rodriguez said, her tone caustic, “I’ll try real hard to remember not to get shot by our own guys.”
I bit down on my response. Betancourt was at the turn and I didn’t need to be arguing with her in the middle of a firefight. I was thirty meters behind Rodriguez and she was the same distance from Betancourt, so I was still looking at the side of an apartment building when the backblast from his missile flared, lighting up the shadows along the sidewalks. I called up the image from his helmet camera in a corner of my display and saw the front of the constabulary, squared off and fortified like a castle, with massive battlements hanging over the ground floor.
Anti-aircraft missile launchers squatted on wheeled carriages at the north end of the building behind concrete barricades, and the Tahni troops manned a pair of heavy KE-gun turrets in their shadow. Not actual Tahni and not even human Op-For with Tahni gear. This was a live-fire exercise, which meant remotely-controlled target drones. Bipedal and humanoid-shaped, they were molded to look as close to Tahni troops as possible. Real Tahni shock-troops wore powered exoskeletons to carry heavy armor and more of a weapons load, but the drones’ armor was plastic, their servomotors cheap, recycled pot metal. And their weapons were just laser designators, thankfully. I wasn’t sure if one of their heavy KE guns could penetrate a Vigilante’s armor and I didn’t want to find out the hard way.
Rodriguez’s missile was in the air before Betancourt’s struck and the two merged into a fireball a hundred meters across, and that was with warheads running on reduced charges. I turned the corner just as the fireball was rising into a miniature mushroom cloud, and I could already tell the plan had worked. Target drones were pouring out of the front entrance to the building, pushing heavy weapons turrets ahead of them, each with a splinter shield at the front of its three-wheeled dolly.
I put a missile into the middle of them and Taylor shot in the same place without being told, which made a nice change. I couldn’t detect anything past the inferno of the explosions, but I fired my plasma gun into the general area of the front entrance anyway. The plasma gun was such a cool weapon and I didn’t want to pass up a chance to live-fire it. The wall ten meters on either side of the constabulary entrance was crumbling, chunks of it vaporizing from the heat of multiple plasma burns, and the colonnaded portico covering the entrance had already collapsed, consumed by roiling flames.
But enough of the drone troops had emerged to start returning fire, and my tactical computer registered their targeting lasers as tantalum darts shot out at thousands of meters per second by their electromagnetic coils. A warning flashed yellow at the corner of my vision, telling me I’d been hit twice in the right thigh, hard enough to crack the BiPhase Carbide armor there. A scrawl cautioned me that the armor might no longer be airtight and I shouldn’t take it into a vacuum. I uttered a silent but solemn vow to stay away from space until after the battle.
Betancourt hooked a right at the end of the street, where it ended in a T-intersection with the constabulary, and disappeared from view behind a parking garage. Part of my mind still boggled at the thought that there was any place where personal vehicles were so ubiquitous the city had to put up an entire building just to hold them.
“Third platoon!” Ackley’s voice sounded urgent in my headphones. “We have an incoming High Guard squad, approaching airborne from the north at two kilometers! First squad, they’re yours.”
“Roger, L-T,” Hayes acknowledged. “First, break off your attack and intercept. Alpha, take point.”
I was at the corner of the parking garage, with Betancourt and Rodriguez already around the corner and Taylor behind me. I was the team leader, but I was closest…
Fuck it.
“Alpha, follow me.”
I figured if Hayes had a problem with me running point, he’d say something. He didn’t and I took his silence as tacit approval and thundered down the street, trying to catch the incoming squad on the suit’s sensors. It would be more drones, but these were bigger and more elaborate, not truly armored and carrying no weapons, propelled by battery-powered turbofans, but they had actual missiles with dummy tagging warheads, and targeting lasers that my suit would register as electron beamers.
There they were, glowing bright on thermal, their signatures pumped up artificially by their onboard systems. There were always eight to a squad, same as us, though that was more a coincidence than anything else. Our Force Recon squads were larger, but everything in the Tahni society was organized around the number eight. Lt. Ackley had told us that in one of her little teaching sessions on the return flight from Bluebonnet. She’d said the Intelligence types figured the number eight had some religious significance, but she wasn’t sure she bought it because that’s what the analysts always said when they didn’t know the reason for something.
They were only a kilometer out. I hit the jets and rose to meet them, knowing the others would follow my example. Urgency burned inside my chest brighter than the fires consuming the front of the constabulary, not a bit dimmer in intensity than what I’d felt on Bluebonnet, and I wondered if that meant I got too keyed up during training or not keyed up enough in real combat. The pressure coming from below with the boost of the jets was countered for a half-
second by the ejection of a missile from my launch tube, then a second, each locking onto a different enemy thermal signature.
“Incoming!” Hayes warned, but I’d seen it already.
The spread of missiles was unnaturally uniform, more even and precisely timed than a Tahni squad could have managed in combat, synchronized by the drone controllers, each of the weapons launched aimed at a different target. My countermeasures activated automatically, their computer systems faster than my human reaction times, and three small, unguided rockets loaded with warheads full of electrostatically-charged chaff launched from the left side of my reactor shroud within a half a second.
I paid no mind to their missiles. Either they would hit or they wouldn’t, and there wasn’t anything I could do to stop them. I was more concerned with the fate of the ones I’d launched, and I cursed as their indicators winked out on the targeting screen, showing me that they’d been neutralized by the enemy’s ECM. Whether they would have been in a real fight, I wasn’t sure, but they didn’t make things too easy in training.
One of our missiles hit. I wasn’t sure whose, but it knocked a High Guard simulator drone out of the air in an expanding globe of white gas and smoke. One down.
I was thirty meters up and moving forward at top speed, plenty close enough for guns, and the targeting reticle was glowing green in my helmet display, inviting me to take the shot. But something distracted me, a flashing on one of the IFF transponders, enough to draw my eyes to the name. Betancourt had taken a hit from one of the enemy missiles and…
“I’m going down!” he squawked, his suit jets automatically setting him down safely.
In a real fight, he’d have been dead, or so badly injured they’d have to haul him up to orbit and throw him into a nanite vat for a month. But the training program wasn’t nearly so accommodating, making sure to list him as wounded, his armor as simply disabled, which meant we’d have to take care of him.
“Taylor,” I snapped, annoyed with the newbie and with the need to deal with his ineptitude, “break off and watch out for Betancourt. Rodriguez, stay with me.”
The delay had taken seconds, but it was seconds too many. The drones opened up on us with their targeting lasers and an alarm screeched shrill warnings of damage to my left leg, of penetration and radiation burns and emergency medical systems activating. I twisted and danced in mid-air to try to avoid the incoming simulated electron beamer fire and my Vigilante behaved sluggishly, limited by the computer’s stubborn assertion that I was being medicated and my reflexes would have been slowed down had this been for real.
I was barely fifty meters from the nearest of the drones now and curving around behind their formation, near enough to notice how fake the drone battlesuits looked close-up. And to remember how light they were. Light enough that I wouldn’t actually have to hit them to make them go down. I was spinning and twisting still, trying to avoid their questing targeting lasers, way too unstable to get a fix on them with my plasma gun. But I fired anyway, simply pointing it in the general direction of the cluster of drone suits.
The coherent packet of ionized gas tore apart the night, lightning and thunder and terrible heat accompanying its discharge. The wave of hot air was even more effective in the thick atmosphere of Inferno than it had been on Bluebonnet, and two of the drone suits tumbled out of control, their turbofans completely inadequate to the task of correcting from the bloom of thermal energy and the turbulence it had created.
We were only thirty meters off the ground and that wasn’t nearly enough time for them to pull out of the stall. The impact of the lightweight plastic and ceramic drones was disappointing, a clatter against the pavement and a shower of broken pieces pinwheeling down the street.
I was about to yell at Rodriguez to do something, but she was smarter than I’d thought. She blasted a shot of her own between two of the drones descending only two meters apart and both of them went out of control, smacking into each other before slamming into the ground. The last four were nearly a kilometer farther out, the second wedge in the enemy formation, and there was no way we were going to be able to take them down in time. They had the distance to launch missiles and the only reason they hadn’t yet was that Rodriguez and I had been mixed in with their own forces.
“Down!” I said to Rodriguez, cutting my jets and descending just ahead of two targeting lasers.
A flight of missiles came from over our right shoulders, so fast I didn’t even register seeing them on the sensor display, just acting on the instinctive knowledge they were there. The weapons weren’t aimed at us, though. The remaining four drone suits disappeared in a wave of pressure and a wash of white light, a storm passing overhead as Rodriguez and I touched down.
“Index, index, index.”
The deep, gravelly voice wasn’t Lt. Ackley’s, it was unmistakably Captain Covington’s. I hadn’t even known he was monitoring the training, though I probably should have. And he didn’t sound happy. Which probably meant none of the rest of us would be, either.
“Did I screw up, Corporal?” Betancourt asked me. His Vigilante was standing by itself, somehow managing to look forlorn despite its featureless face.
“Not any more than the rest of us,” I assured him, waiting for the call. And right on cue, there it was.
“Alvarez,” Hayes said. “Report to the Range Control Center. Gunny wants to talk to you.”
“Of course he does,” I murmured, off-mic. Then I went ahead and keyed it, just for Hayes. “I told you this was a bad idea.”
“Yeah,” he sighed. “And maybe you were right.”
16
“Goddammit, Alvarez, what the hell am I gonna do with you?”
“I don’t know, Gunnery Sergeant,” I clipped off, still standing at ease in front of the man. “Bust me back to PFC and make me a grunt again?”
Gunny Guerrero eyed me balefully from under hooded lids, leaning back in the chair. The Range Control Center was spartanly decorated, the thick, concrete walls bare and cracked by age and baking heat. The monitors and displays were ancient, decades old and dating back to the last war, and the office furniture could have been just as old, judging by the cracked plastic and squeaking casters of the chairs. Every flaw of the room was magnified in the stark glare of lights bright enough for a medical operating theater.
“Don’t think we haven’t considered it,” he answered darkly. He sighed and sat up straighter, the chair groaning in protest. “But Scotty was right before and he’s still right now, though you’d better not let him know I said that.” He rubbed at his temples as if he had a fierce headache. “At least tell me you know what you did wrong.”
“I probably shouldn’t have taken point with the enemy suits,” I admitted.
“There ain’t no fucking ‘probably’ about it!” the platoon sergeant bellowed and I shut my mouth. “You’re a team leader. And yeah, sometimes you gotta lead from the front, but that’s in a combat situation when there ain’t no choice! Not in training when the fucking Skipper is watching!”
He blew out a breath as if he was trying hard to rein in his temper. I seemed to have that effect on people.
“Did the Skipper say anything about it?” I knew I shouldn’t ask, but I kind of wanted to know. He was someone who I genuinely believed was a badass.
Guerrero glared at me, working his jaw like he wanted to spit.
“He laughed. When you knocked the drones down like the paper airplanes they are, he fucking laughed, he called the exercise and he left without saying another fucking word.”
I opened my mouth, closed it again, thinking better of what I’d been about to say, given the Gunny’s mood.
“Okay, okay,” he said, raising his hands in a quelling motion, as if he was trying to calm me down instead of himself. “Besides running point, besides managing to get your newbie PFC killed, you also totally fucked with the integrity of the live-fire exercise. Everyone knows the drone suits are a joke, but you can’t treat them like one or they won’t let us do l
ive-fires anymore and we’ll be stuck in the damn simulators all the time!”
My face fell. I hadn’t thought of that.
“Still,” Guerrero admitted, scowling as if the words had to be yanked from his mouth like an infected tooth, “it usually takes someone five or six runs through the range before they realize the weakness the drones have. So, I guess there’s that. Look, kid, here’s the bottom line. We all know what you can do. You ain’t the best I’ve ever seen in a Vigilante, but you’re up there with ‘em. So, stop showing off what you can do and start thinking about how to get your team to act like a team.”
I grimaced.
“Does this mean you’re not busting me back down?”
“No, dammit!” he yelled, hopping to his feet and getting in my face. “You don’t get off that easy! Now get back to your team and get your shit ready to head back to the base. Tomorrow is an off day, so the quicker you finish PMCS, the faster you can all get out of my fucking hair!”
“Yes, Gunny.”
I about-faced and got out of there the back way, not wanting to parade past Lt. Ackley who I’d seen talking to Captain Covington out front. Hayes was waiting for me by the back door, arms crossed, occasionally swatting at a mosquito drawn in by the light.
“So?” he asked, shaking his head.
“I didn’t get fired,” I told him, not trying to conceal my disappointment. “But I think Taylor and Rodriguez hate me.”
“Well, I’m giving you the chance to get ‘em to like you. Tomorrow at 1900, we’re all meeting up at Myths and Legends.”
