by Rick Partlow
Unfortunately, the projection gear built into the walls made them too thick and too well insulated for my helmet's thermal sights to penetrate or for the audio pickups to identify any tell-tale sounds deeper into the room. So, I did it the way they'd taught us our first week in Recon training: the old-fashioned way, slicing the pie at every corner. If I'd had another Marine along, or even someone I'd had the time to train, I would have done it differently, but...
I'd made it about halfway into the room when the Tahni showed just how little they thought of my room-clearing techniques by nearly taking my head off with a wild burst of laser fire. White hot plasma made the air crackle with static electricity as each multi-kilojoule pulse of coherent light ionized a slice of atmosphere around it, blowing charred and smoking holes through the walls and coming only centimeters from doing the same to me.
I heard a yell from somewhere behind me, but I couldn't stop and find out who it was or if they'd been hit. I wasn't thinking at that point, just reacting from hours and days and weeks of training. I threw myself forward into a prone position and brought my rifle to my shoulder, touching the trigger of the grenade launcher before my elbows hit the ground, feeling it punch free of the launcher with a jolt of coldgas propellant.
I'd adjusted the grenade settings before we'd entered the building, based on our earlier recon and the intell Braun had imparted. The guards in here didn't wear Shock-Troop armor; they were the second or third-line soldiers, as evidenced by the fact they were using laser carbines instead of KE guns. No line soldier would use a weapon with that kind of thermal signature, but they were very effective against untrained civilians.
The grenade's rocket motor kicked in a few centimeters from the barrel and it punched through the walls in front of me with a smack and a cloud of buildfoam particles. Somewhere on the other side of the maze of walls, the grenade's sensors detected movement and the warhead blew with a sinus-shaking crump and a sun-bright flare, spears of vaporized metal exploding like a halo around it.
Tahni screams were deeper and more resonant than human screams. I'd find that out better later, once I'd had more experience; but even then, I knew that there was something truly alien about the sound. I scrambled to my feet and ran forward, chancing that none of them would be in a position to shoot me and because I knew it wouldn't do a damn bit of good to wait. I found the first of them alive; he'd been lucky. The halo of plasma jets was directed by baffles inside the grenade to avoid blowing back at the shooter, and this guy had been just the right side of the safe zone to be knocked off his feet by the concussion but not get skragged.
Well, he was lucky until I put a 10mm tungsten slug through his head. Then his luck ran out. I kicked the laser carbine away from his twitching hands and kept moving, following the last hole through the last curving section of wall.
The room smelled like cooking meat and the walls were splashed with blood. Armored vests were scattered on the floor, spilling off of a rack crudely affixed to the wall by adhesive, and a locking metal cabinet hung open, revealing rows of laser carbines and stacks of spare power crystals for them. Five of the Tahni guards had been hit by the blast while trying to get to those weapons and three of those were clearly dead, with holes the thickness of a stylus burned through heads or necks or torsos. Another two were rolling on the floor, wailing their inhuman screams from throats that could produce sounds humans couldn't hear, their carbines abandoned and forgotten in the throes of agony. But the last two hadn't been killed and hadn't been incapacitated and still had their guns in their hands and I tried to move and shoot and knew I was fucked.
I knew where the round I fired went. I could see the Tahni jerk when it caved in his chest. He was short for a Tahni, and a little chubby, like a rear-echelon desk jockey, and maybe that's what he was. The other one was skinnier and taller and had his carbine aimed at my center-of-mass and I should have been dead right there. But he wasn't shooting; he was dying, with his neck and shoulder exploding from a pair of hyper-accelerated 10mm slugs. He spun to the floor, his weapon falling, and I jerked around to see Sophia standing beside me, her Gauss rifle still at her shoulder. Her face was pale but the set of her jaw was determined.
I wanted to say something, but there was no time. Instead, I pulled my handgun out of my chest holster and put a single round through the heads of the two wounded, then jogged back the way we'd come, heading back for the stairs. None of the others had followed me into the armory; I found them still waiting on the landing outside of it, all of them red-faced and breathing hard. The older man looked embarrassed, but honestly, I didn't care; it was better that the one person who'd come with me was the one who could keep her head.
"Come on," I urged them, heading up to the last floor. This was where I'd need their help.
I pulled the flash-bang from my vest as I ran; it was the last of those I had, too. I was running out of stuff already, and this was just one firefight. Shit.
The last landing ended in a mural of grasslands running into forest with mastodon grazing, hand-painted on the wall by a local artist. It didn’t look like the Tahni had touched it, but through the opening to the right of that mural I could see what they’d done to the office suites that had been inside. Whatever partitions had been there had been ripped out, and none too gently from the bare, cracked sections of the walls that showed where they’d been. In their place were twin rows of wire mesh pens with a clear aisle running between them, each pen stocked with four prisoners each, the only accoutrements being a pair of covered plastic bucket toilets.
The set-up reminded me of footage I’d seen in old documentaries about primitive farming, when chickens and pigs used to be kept in tiny little cages before they were eaten. The people in these pens weren’t being fattened up, though; in fact, their ragged clothes hung off of them like none had eaten well in weeks.
The Tahni guards looked well-fed though. They looked like the same rear-echelon types I’d seen downstairs. Two of them were waiting for me, or whatever threat presented itself, standing by the open door in front of God and radar---as Gramps used to say---like their soft armor and laser carbines made them invulnerable. Another was standing just behind them inside, yelling something into the communications link affixed to his armored vest near the shoulder, while the last two were moving back to the prisoners, carbines pointed their way with no good intent.
I threw the flash-bang, yelled over my speakers at maximum volume, “Close your eyes!” and opened fire.
I hoped the humans had listened to me, because that grenade was going off either way. I ignored it as it rolled clattering down the row between the pens, drawing the attention of the two guards who’d been threatening the prisoners, and then it erupted in a blinding, coruscating flash and a screeching ululation specifically designed to disorient and confuse the Tahni nervous system. It wouldn't do the humans any good either, but my helmet's filters shielded me from the worst of it, and I could still see the targeting reticle in my HUD.
I didn't target the two closest Tahni first, even though I wanted to; instead, I shot the two who'd been heading for the prisoners, because this was all a damn waste of time if they all wound up getting killed. The first one was reeling, blinded and deafened and confused, when the round passed through his neck and through the far wall, too. I didn't watch him collapse because the other soldier was firing wildly, the laser pulses from his carbine flaring into the ceiling as he spun, trying to hit something even if he couldn't see. The people in the wire pens were screaming and covering their heads and probably didn't even notice when his skull exploded and he slumped to the floor.
Then our luck ran out. I was moving forward and slightly to the side, shifting to the Tahni who'd been talking on his 'link when one of the two guards up front stumbled blindly into my path and started shooting. I saw flares of ionized gas, heard the crack as they rushed at supersonic speed into the evacuated corridors the laser had cut, and felt a searing pain across my left hip that sent me staggering off balance. I swore in t
he privacy of my helmet, jerking the trigger of my own rifle and firing off two rounds when I only meant to shoot once. I was looking at the ceiling, then the floor, then finally steadied myself, still moving because standing still was death.
Humans were screaming and I didn't know if they'd been screaming the whole time or if I'd just noticed it. The Tahni soldier who'd shot me was down, his carbine on the ground beside him as he twitched spastically with his spine blown out and his torso nearly severed at the waist from the two hypervelocity rounds that had gone upward into the ceiling after killing him. I had a sense that someone was hit behind me, but there was too much going on to look.
Someone else had fired and the second door guard was falling, a hole centimeters across through his stomach and I had to get that last guy before he called for help.
"Hold your fucking fire!" The shout was more like a shriek than I'd intended, bellowing out through my speakers loud enough for the painful banshee-cry of feedback to fill my ears.
I was a meter from the guy now, and he was still out of it, clutching at his head, his eyes squeezed shut under his ridged brows. I didn't shoot him; I was getting paranoid about where the rounds might go when they passed through him. Instead, I reversed my Gauss rifle and slammed the butt-stock into his face. The impact rolled back into my shoulders and I felt a fresh flare of pain in my hip, but the Tahni officer flopped backwards, his face a bloody ruin. I finished him off by stomping on his throat as hard as I could.
"Get them out!" I yelled back at the others, waving at the prisoners.
Then I saw that the woman, the one who'd been pleading with the guard at the service entrance about her family's food rations, was down. She'd taken a laser to the chest and was shaking violently, blood pouring out of her mouth as her hand grabbed desperately at the shirt of the older man who'd been telling her to let the others go ahead of her. They'd been play-acting, but from the look on his face, I thought maybe he was her family.
I stumbled over to him, feeling my left leg begin to go numb from the painkillers my suit was injecting into the area. The woman was dead now, motionless, her fingers gone limp against his chest. His eyes were wide and disbelieving, blood smeared across his shirt from her hand. I shook his shoulder.
"I'm sorry," I said, trying hard not to yell at him, "but she's gone. Get her weapons and get these people out of their cells or we'll all be dead and this will be for nothing."
Where the hell had this guy come from, I wondered suddenly as I listened to my own words echoing in my head. When had I become all hardened and callous at the ripe old age of twenty-one?
I guess it worked though, because the guy nodded, slinging the woman's rifle over his shoulder, then grabbing the spare she'd been carrying on her back from where it had fallen. Sophia and the others were already inside the detention center, working at the locks, trying to hunt down the key cards that the Tahni used.
I saw them on the shoulder harness of the one I'd stomped to death, hooked together by a plastic ring, and stooped to grab them.
"Here!" I called to Sophia. She looked back and I threw the keys to her underhand. "Hurry! We have to be downstairs in two minutes!"
I felt an urge to run inside and shoot the locks out, but I fought it down and turned to stand guard at the stairs. This was when we'd be the most vulnerable, trying to get the prisoners down to the street. If any of the troops who'd gone to the spaceport came back early...
"Come on!" I heard Sophia's voice barking out, loud and strong but tinged with a bit of desperation. "Larry, help Joanna! Rajesh, take a rifle!"
I didn't look back, just gave her the space to do her job; and in just a few seconds, people began to file past me. They seemed even skinnier and more ragged close up, and I had no doubt they would have smelled as bad as they looked if I hadn't had my helmet on, filtering the air. They were younger than I'd initially thought, but worn down with months under enemy occupation, and there was a feral look to their eyes. One man had an almost inhuman set to his face, a snarl that split his grey-shot beard and pulled at a red-tinged bruise next to his eye; he held the rifle he'd been given as if he wanted to kill something more than he wanted to get free.
There were thirty of them in all, but we only had guns for a dozen and many of them looked like they could barely walk, much less fight. I shrugged the thought away. If we got into a firefight with real troops, we were probably all dead anyway.
"Get them downstairs!" I waved to Sophia, then began jogging down ahead of them.
My hip was tight and I could feel the skin splitting where it was burned, even through the numbing agents, but I compartmentalized the pain the same way I'd learned to do when Gramps and I were backpacking in the mountains. If you had a blister on your heel but you had five kilometers to go to get to your campsite, you sucked it up and kept going. This was a bit more than a blister, but I only had a hundred meters or so to go.
I kept my head on a swivel on the descent to the ground floor, trying to concentrate hard to make sure the pain meds didn't dull my senses, but the building was empty except for the Tahni we'd killed on the way up. As I cleared the service entrance, I could hear another explosion in the distance; Braun was still keeping them busy. Good man, I thought. He was doing a better job than I figured he would.
It was darker outside now than it had been when we'd entered; the sun was lower and the clouds were thicker. I sidled up along the exterior wall and peeked out into the main street. A few people had risked coming out of their work stations or bunkhouses to stare out at the smoke rising in the distance towards the spaceport. I saw a Tahni officer step out into the middle of the street and begin yelling at them in unspeakably bad English, telling them, I thought, to get back inside.
Then he stopped and stared down the street to the south, towards the sound of a heavy-duty hydrogen-cell truck engine. I saw his hand wandering towards the 'link on his shoulder and I pulled my handgun and shot him without a thought other than that I didn't want to risk collateral damage using my rifle. The whoosh of the rocket-propellant and the crack of the bullet breaking the sound barrier barely drowned out the thump of his body hitting the pavement.
People turned and stared at me, mouths dropping open, but then their faces and everything else on the street disappeared behind the tan-colored bulk of a heavy cargo truck, a flatbed with fold up side panels that they used around here for hauling supplies from the port into town and from town to the Tahni base or the fusion reactor complex. From the passenger's side door, a man I’d been introduced to as Gray Woodington flashed me a thumbs-up and a smile.
"No problem at all," he told me enthusiastically. "The Tahni were mostly heading for the port. We'd better hurry though; I don't think Carl has too many mortar shells left!"
They were coming out behind me now, led by Sophia, and she and the others began lifting those who needed help into the back of the truck. At the rear of the gaggle, I could see the older guy carrying the dead woman's body out of the service entrance. She wasn't a small woman and he didn't look that strong; but he didn't ask for help, not until he reached the back of the truck and looked up at the bed with tears streaming down his face.
I didn't say anything, just slung my rifle and held out my arms. He nodded gratefully, passing her off to me and climbing up. She was a sack of sand, limp and shapeless in death, and I felt bile rise in my throat, but I clenched my teeth against it and managed to hold myself together until I handed her up to him. She lifted away from me but I felt like her dead weight was still hanging on me, like it would be added to mine forever, a debt that I could never pay.
Sophia offered me a hand, bracing herself against one of the side-panels, and I took it. The truck began moving before I was all the way in.
Chapter Nine
I crouched on one knee in the back of the truck, readying my rifle in case we were pursued. The surveillance drones could see us now, but the Tahni watching them could only pay attention to so much at a time, and that was why we had a diversionary attack.
Unless we happened across a patrol, we should be able to make it into the forest before they reached us.
"You're hurt," I heard Sophia yell next to me over the wind and the engine noise.
I looked down at the blackened, blood-stained hole burned through my armor over my hip. It wasn't as bad as it could have been if I'd taken a KE-gun round; my armor was pretty good protection against their small-arms lasers.
"I'll be okay," I told her.
The people around us seemed like they wanted to be elated at the rescue, but were too wary to let themselves feel it; they were waiting for the other shoe to drop. I saw some of them glancing at the dead woman, some with sympathy but others with the obvious fear that her fate was what awaited them, too.
"I can't believe we got them out," Sophia admitted, a hint of a smile on her face. She was pretty, I decided. I hadn't really noticed before.
I wanted to tell her that we hadn't gotten away yet, but I couldn't stop looking at her face. She had high cheekbones and a spark of life in her eyes that hadn't been extinguished by what she'd seen. She had what I decided was the look of slightly-flawed nature to her face that appealed to me since I'd spent my life surrounded by people planned from the genes up.
I made myself look away, keep a watch out for threats, but I thought I saw her notice me noticing.
"You did good in there," I told her, looking back at the city as we passed through the gates in the wire fence the Tahni had set up. Gray and the driver had opened them by hand, according to the plan, and there’d been no one around to close them again. "You kept your head when none of the others did.”
