by Rick Partlow
I touched a control on my wrist and the carbon fiber wings on my backpack snapped out into position. I felt the air catch them and my stomach lurched as I popped upward and began soaring forward as well as down.
"Echo Five wings deployed," I reported, my voice sounding strained and breathless. In my HUD, I could see the green icons of the others in Third Squad, my squad, arrayed in a vaguely V-shaped formation with Gunny Anderson at the center. Ahead of us was First, with Lt Yassa at its hinge point.
"All Echo units deployed," Anderson said, his voice as rough and gravelly as a pre-Collapse highway. Every time he talked, I fought a sympathetic reflex to clear my throat.
"All Alpha units deployed," I heard Lt. Yassa's pleasant contralto announce in counterpoint. "On my mark, fire thrusters. Three, two, one...mark."
I felt a rumbling whoosh from the compact jet engine on my backpack, then a hard and insistent push against my harness. The twin Vs in my HUD readout shifted across the map screen kilometers at a time, though you couldn’t have proved it by what I could see. The lander was long gone, gliding through the thick clouds with its engines shut down to avoid drawing attention to us.
The jets on our flight harnesses went bingo fuel in less than five minutes, but we’d built up a pretty good velocity by then and the atmosphere was thick enough under the wings that we were moving forward a lot faster than we were descending. By the time we came out of the cloud cover, we were only ten or twelve kilometers from the objective and about three thousand meters up. It was night on this side of the moon; the Fleet had timed the attack for that, but I could still see the outline of the mountains in the distance on IR.
My visor darkened automatically as a defense laser ripped apart the night only a few kilometers away, ionizing a corridor of air on its way out of the atmosphere. I gritted my teeth, trying not to imagine what would happen if I came too close to that superheated plasma. Then I fought not to jerk away as proton beams answered the laser, stabbing downward with actinic blasts of lightning, creating shockwaves I could feel buffeting me even from kilometers away. I felt like we were ants caught in an argument between the gods.
“All Alpha and Echo units,” Yassa’s voice sounded in the headphones of my helmet, “cut loose wing-packs.”
I reached over my shoulders with both hands and found the quick-release toggles, grabbing them both and yanking forward simultaneously. The wing-pack, together with the propulsion unit and empty fuel tanks, fell away backwards and I barely remembered to extend my arms and legs to stabilize myself for free-fall. Now the only thing keeping gravity from having its way with my puny pink body was my parachute, which seemed like a silly damn thing to trust with your life but was still the stealthiest way down.
I tried not to stare at the altimeter readout in my HUD, but it was decreasing pretty fast and I was starting to wonder if Lt. Yassa hadn't forgotten about the part where we had to manually open the chutes. But just before the counter crawled past 300 meters, she gave the order.
"All units deploy parachutes."
I pulled the rip-cord before the last word was out of her mouth and felt a satisfying wrench backwards as my canopy filled with air. I looked up to check it and saw that it was properly inflated, then looked around at the others. All good chutes, it looked like.
"All Echo chutes deployed," Anderson reported.
"All Alpha chutes deployed," Yassa said, very business-like for a young officer on her very first combat operation, I thought. Then I laughed silently at my own hubris. This was my very first combat operation, too, and she'd been in Recon two months longer than I had. "Retrieve weapons and cut loose your packs. Touchdown in thirty seconds."
My backpack was slung between my legs, hooked to my harness to make room for the wing setup and parachute, and my Gauss rifle was strapped across the top of it. I reached down and unlatched the straps that held it in place, tucking the stock under my right arm before I hit the release that sent my backpack unreeling down a three-meter-long strap to swing pendulously beneath me.
I could see the ground now, could see the scaly surface of the local equivalent of trees approaching, and I pulled down on the chute's steering toggle to correct my descent. Then the clearing was below me, shockingly close, and I pulled down on both toggles of the glider chute and touched down on the soles of my boots, tip-toeing across the hard, rocky soil until I dug my heels in and dragged them to a halt.
My helmet's external microphones picked up the stomping of combat boots and the rasp of discarded parachutes catching on the thorny brush, but no speaking and no breathing; all that was inside our helmets, constrained and guarded. I went to my position on the defensive perimeter, ten meters away from Johnny on one side and Sgt. Gomez on the other and pointed my Gauss rifle out into the night.
I couldn't see anything but the thorny, scaly tree-things, even on infrared and thermal. I didn't really expect to; the mission brief said this moon didn't have any animal life larger than a few centimeters long, and most of those lived underground. And I sure didn't expect to see any Tahni troops out and about on patrol, not in the middle of an orbital bombardment.
Behind us, Gunny Anderson and Lt. Yassa did the sort of stuff that Platoon Sergeants and Platoon Leaders do while they keep grunts waiting, and the rest of us kept a careful watch of the pseudo-trees.
“Sgt. Gomez and Third Squad,” I heard Lt. Yassa’s voice in my ear, “you’re with me. Sgt. Kane and First, you’ll follow Gunny Anderson to the LZ and clear it for the lander. Let’s move out. Maintain communications silence unless I say different or we come into contact with the enemy.”
This was it, I thought as our fire team moved out with Gomez in the lead, with the LT in-between us and the other team. We were actually doing it. It was a pretty straightforward op as these things went. This moon was what was left of one of the staging bases for the attack on Mars, one the Tahni hadn’t cleared out yet, probably because they figured it might come in handy for a future attack on the Solar System, maybe even Earth itself. The Scout Service had found out about it and figured it would be an easy win, as well as a nice target for some intelligence gathering, which was where we came in. While the Fleet was attacking the picket ships and orbital defenses, Force Recon was being sent in to acquire prisoners and preserve intelligence.
Us. We were being sent in. My platoon. I want to say I was psyched, that finally being in real combat was a rush. Honestly though, I was scared shitless. Scared of dying, scared of killing, but mostly scared of fucking up. This wasn’t practice, this wasn’t Virtual Reality training, this wasn’t a walk-through. This was the shit.
I tried to shut out the fear and doubt and concentrate on doing my job. From the mapping program in my HUD, I could tell we were two kilometers from the Tahni base, and normally I would have been worried about tripping security sensors, but one look at the blackened and splintered trees and the smoking craters blown into the dirt all around us told me there wouldn’t be any sensors left functioning. Proton beams were all that were coming now, but Fleet had spent an hour bombarding everything up to three kilometers around the base with Gauss cannons. The base itself was buried under three meters of dirt, powered by an underground fusion reactor and had electromagnetic shielding, but we hoped we were at least keeping them looking up.
I nearly stumbled as another laser probed the sky, and a proton cannon answered it like the hammer of a titan, shaking the ground even though it had impacted kilometers away. The footing was tricky through the wasteland, and our formation kept stretching out and bunching up as we moved around one ragged crater after another, over churned dirt and rock and the splintered remnants of trees. If it hadn’t been for the navigation screen guiding us, I know we’d never have found the base; even then, I wasn’t totally confident that the Scouts’ estimates of where the entrances were located was accurate.
I was itching to ask Sgt. Gomez if he thought the mapping program was wonky, trying to figure out a way to do it without getting the LT mad at me for breaking co
mms silence, when I saw Lt Yassa's fist raise to halt our advance. She sank to one knee and the rest of us did the same, and I started hunting the surroundings for threats. Then she went to the prone, bringing her weapon to her shoulder.
Oh, shit .
I went down to my belly, grateful that the armor kept the rocks and other debris from digging into my chest and knees, and brought my Gauss rifle around to point outward, careful to note the position of the other members of my squad from their IFF (Identification Friend or Foe) transponders. I still couldn't make out a damn thing: there were more and more fires the closer we came to the base, and the bombardment, and everything was a haze of glare and smoke on thermal and infrared. But she had to have seen something...
There was a flash of movement, barely perceptible, off a bit to my right, almost toward Johnny's position. Just a shadow cast by the fires against the smoke, and I couldn't pin down its source at first. Then it lengthened and cohered and I could see that it was almost straight ahead...no, it was to the right. Shit , it was straight ahead and to the right!
I clenched my jaws to keep from yelling out their positions; Lt. Yassa obviously knew they were there, and the others probably saw them, too. My HUD was blinking a warning now, putting a threat icon over each of the three...no, four figures emerging from the smoke. They were Tahni Shock-Troops, brawny and oversized in their power-assisted armor, the servos at the joints letting them carry more weight at the expense of being more prone to breakdowns and requiring a lot more maintenance than regular infantry. Their visored helmets scanned back and forth robotically, their hands filled with the fat cylinders of their rapid-fire KE guns.
The fuckers had actually sent out a patrol in the middle of an orbital bombardment. It was probably the right call, but it was also pretty damned ruthless. My HUD told me they were only thirty meters away and I was screaming in my head so loud for Lt. Yassa to give the order to fire that I almost didn't hear when she did. My finger worked on instinct though, overriding my conscious mind, and pressing against the trigger pad as the target reticle floated over the closest Tahni in my HUD.
I'd fired tens of thousands of rounds through a Gauss rifle at the range and in live-fire exercises, but there was something different about this time. The kick felt harder when that 10mm tungsten slug left the barrel, propelled by an electromagnetic coil at 3,000 meters per second, and the shock-trooper didn’t just fall down the way the targets had at the range. I hit him center mass, right where his armor was the thickest, but at this range, he may as well have been naked. The slug created a jet of plasma as it sliced through the alloy breastplate, blowing a hole through his torso the size of my fist, but he stayed upright, propped up by the servos in his exoskeletal armor supports, staring at me like one of the robots the Tahni religion wouldn’t let them build.
I put a second round into him without intent, because my conscious brain hadn’t yet processed why he hadn’t fallen, and this one took off the top of his helmet, and most of his head with it. By the time I’d been able to force myself to shift targets to another of the Shock-troopers, they’d all been taken out by the others, one of them practically dismembered by multiple shots.
“Cease fire,” the LT’s voice said firmly but calmly inside my helmet. “Gomez, take a team and set up security fifty meters up. Munroe, Pacheco, you’re with me.”
I took a second to get my breathing back under control, then made sure my rifle was on safe before I used the buttstock to lever myself up off the ground, following Lt. Yassa as she carefully approached the enemy troopers. Two of them had fallen, toppling because they were caught between strides by the gunfire, while the other two still stood like grotesque, bleeding memorials, forced into service after death.
The LT checked each of them while Johnny and I kept a look-out, but I snuck a glance every few seconds. Their armor was thicker than ours, but also less flexible and harder to camouflage: anything that used that kind of power couldn’t be concealed well from thermal sensors without cooking the guy inside it. Their KE guns used electromagnetic coils like our Gauss rifles but their superconductors needed lower temperatures than ours, so they were fitted with a fat, cylindrical cooling jacket full of liquid nitrogen. They didn’t shoot big slugs like ours either, opting instead for rate of fire, propelling hundreds of tantalum needles a second at obscene velocities.
It was a different philosophy, and I guess that was fitting, since they weren’t human for all they were humanoid. We knew so little about them, despite having been at war with them twice now, with a decades-long cold war between. All we knew, we'd gleaned from prisoners we'd captured, and not much from them. Gramps had told me we'd never managed to get any significant intelligence assets on their homeworld, Tahn-Skyyiah, not so much as a micro-probe.
Johnny looked over as Lt. Yassa yanked the helmet off of one of the two who'd been propped up standing by their armor. The face inside the helmet was frozen in death, the light gone out from the dark, liquid eyes half-buried under boney ridges, the square, shovel-like jaws slack. His nose was flat almost to the point of nonexistence, and his head was depilated except for a strip from the brows back to the nape that grew out into a pony-tail long enough to wrap around his neck.
"I don't think they managed to get a signal back to their base," Lt. Yassa decided, after examining the Tahni radio equipment. "The jamming seems to have worked."
She began working at something inside the helmet, twisting it this way and that. After a few seconds of curiously watching her, I couldn’t help but look at the slack features of the dead Tahni.
"Are they all dudes?" Johnny wondered.
"The Tahni don't allow females in combat," I told him. "It's got something to do with their sexual cycle; the males kind of lose control when they're in heat and it's against their religion to use any sort of chemicals to stop that."
Lt. Yassa looked over at me and through her faceplate, I could see one eyebrow go up. "I see someone's been doing their homework, Private Munroe," she said, sounding a bit impressed. She had something in her hand, something I thought she’d taken out of the helmet: it was a thin, curved plate with circuitry worked into it, but I didn’t get a good look at it before she slipped it into a pouch of her vest.
I remembered something Gramps had quoted to me. "Know your enemy and know yourself," I repeated to her, "and you need not fear the results of a hundred battles."
"And now he's quoting Sun Tzu at me," Yassa laughed, yanking the KE gun out of the dead shock-trooper's hands, pulling loose its power connection and tossing it away. "You looking to go to Officer's Candidate School, Munroe?"
"Not me, ma'am," I assured her, copying her example and disarming another of the dead Tahni. "I'm not smart enough to be an officer."
"Or maybe he's too smart to be an officer," Johnny commented with a chuckle as he tossed away the last KE rifle.
"Okay, enough chatter," Yassa said, getting serious again. "Let's move out."
I decided I liked Lt. Yassa. I knew this was her first real combat, but she seemed to be handling it like a pro, which was helping me to stay calm as well.
We found Gomez and the others laid out in the prone in a semi-circle around the edge of an impact crater; they jumped up at the LT's signal and fell back into a double wedge formation. I knew we were heading the right direction when I saw the EM projector. It looked like a gigantic dish antennae mounted on a massive column about three meters tall and four meters across, standing out against the faint glow of fires on the horizon lighting up the clouds of smoke that filled the sky, and I could feel my hair standing on end beneath my armor three hundred meters away.
"Everyone on line," Yassa told us, spreading us out as we approached the defense shield projector. "Watch for any ingress points."
"Is that a fancy word for 'door,' ma'am?" Johnny cracked from off to my left.
"Shut up, Pacheco," Gomez snapped, but I couldn't help chuckling softly to myself.
"That's an officer word for door, Pacheco," she answered, and
I thought I heard a grin in her voice.
There was a background hum that grew louder and more noticeable the closer we came to the dish, and the hair standing up turned into an almost painful tingling all over my body. The air was glowing hundreds of meters above us, where the fields from the dishes intersected and the shield turned the atmosphere into a plasma, guarding the base from incoming fire...and, conversely, making it harder for them to detect us out here. We hadn’t seen it before because of the smoke and clouds, and honestly because we were too busy watching for enemy to look up, but now I noticed the roiling, stirring fire in the clouds.
That took shitloads of power, and the fact they were still bothering with it---and with patrols---told me they weren’t wiping their data and bugging out. Which was perfect for us, if we could just find the damn ingress…
“Got something,” Gomez announced.
The LT held us up and jogged over to his position in the line while we all took a knee. I tried not to let my attention drift away from my area of the line to try to sneak a look at what Gomez had found. We were close now, and someone might come out to check on that patrol.
“Everyone over here,” Yassa ordered. “Fire-team Alpha, pull security; Fire-team Bravo, entry protocol.”
“Hoo-ah,” I grunted, standing and jogging towards her and Gomez. Fire-team Bravo was us: Johnny, PFC Moon, Lance Corporal Abdi and me. I guess she trusted us, for some reason.
There was an access hatch set in concrete in the ground, about two meters across, with some sort of electronic input panel affixed to it. It had been slate grey, I think, until the soot from the fires had coated it black. Lt. Yassa knelt down next to it and retrieved from her vest whatever it was she’d taken off the Tahni Shock-Trooper. She pulled a multi-tool from another pouch and used a utility blade to connect two terminals on the curved board, and the input panel lit up in some weird purplish color.
