by Rick Partlow
“I love you, too, Munroe.” The response was so quiet I almost didn’t hear it. “Don’t go getting yourself killed.”
***
It’s a simple plan, I repeated to myself the same reassurance I’d given the others. It wasn’t working.
The gravel road scraped and bumped under the wheels of the cargo truck and I struggled to keep it from fishtailing as I took a curve too fast. I wasn’t used to driving; I hadn’t manually driven a vehicle since Gramps let me take out one of his antique Humm-Vee’s at his ranch in Arizona. I hadn’t argued with the Glory Boys or the DSI about the need for me to be the one driving the truck because I hadn’t wanted to seem like I was afraid to lead from the front, but I was questioning the hell out of it now.
The theory was, whoever was driving had to be qualified to give the word when to kick off the attack and apparently, they trusted me to do that but not any of the local civilians. So, I was wearing a loose, baggy jacket over my armor and had my helmet and rifle tucked under a canvas covering on the floor and my pistol under my leg and this just wasn’t going to fucking work!
Renn-Tan had supposedly cleared the delivery in the system, but this place was guarded by Shock-Troops who knew what we’d done at the farms, and I was a human and a well-fed one at that. There were still collaborators around, of course…which was the reasoning they’d used to get me to do this. But the guards were going to insist on searching the truck before they opened the gate and when they did, we’d all be fucked because the crew-served KE guns in the guard towers would cut us to pieces.
Then we rounded the final corner, clearing the hundred-foot oaks that lined the road to that point, and the fifty-meter-high dome of the fusion power plant loomed above us before we could even see the perimeter security fence. It was two kilometers from the city limits as the crow flies, but a good five or six over the roads because it was across the river. The only way reinforcements could get here quick was by air, and the shuttles were grounded by a “computer glitch.”
The sun had set less than an hour ago, and a faint, orange glow still lit up the horizon behind the dome; but as we came closer, I could see the harsh, yellow glare of searchlights reflecting off its white-grey surface. The Tahni were big believers in searchlights. There was a guard bunker every couple hundred meters around the perimeter fence, and each one came equipped with a searchlight on a metal framework tower, and a crew-served weapon behind a shield of duralloy.
The raw fury of the light violated the road as it approached the gate, laying it, and us, bare to the yawning muzzles of the KE cannons. They were going to end me, I was as sure of that as I ever had been of anything. I wasn’t so much afraid as I was frustrated; we were so close. The Fleet missile cutters would be Transitioning soon, might be coming out of T-space right now, heading for orbit. They’d be fine. Chang and Kibaki would see to that with their failsafe operation; it was us and the civilians who’d be dead if our attack failed, us immediately and the people still being held in the city in a few hours, after the radiation got to them.
Shut the fuck up and do your job, Munroe.
I slowed the truck about a couple dozen meters from the cargo gate in the perimeter fence, obeying the motion of an armored Tahni Shock-Trooper, as he raised one hand and held the muzzle of his heavy KE gun steady with the other. Past him, inside the wire mesh fence, I could see more Shock-Troops patrolling, while others manned the bunkers, all of them disgustingly alert and bristling with weapons.
I fished out the pass where it hung around my neck and held it out the window as the gate guard approached. The barrel of the KE cannon in the nearest bunker swung around to cover the truck as the guard ran a scanner over my pass with his free hand. This close, I could hear the slight grind in the joints of his exoskeleton, gone too long without replacement parts, and I could see my reflection in the mirrored surface of his helmet’s visor. I looked scared.
“The Emperor rules us all,” I greeted the soldier with the pass phrase the human collaborators were taught, in as good an imitation of Tahni as I could come without a voice-box evolved to speak it.
He said nothing, just tossed the pass back at me through the driver’s side window, his negligent motion showing what he thought about traitors of any species. He shoved his scanner back into a pouch on his thigh, and I thought for one, shiningly hopeful moment, that he might actually wave me through. Then he touched a control on his chest and a pre-recorded phrase played from a speaker there in English.
“Step out of the vehicle and prepare to be searched.”
I fucking knew this would happen! Nobody ever listens to the Marine…
My right hand moved under my leg to grab the butt of my pistol. It’d be tricky; I’d have to put the round right through his visor. And then the guard tower would turn me into a paste…
“I was told the pass was authorized by Colonel K'tann-len-Renn-Tan, himself,” I said meekly, probably butchering the Tahni intonations.
The trooper didn’t move, didn’t speak, just pushed the button on his chest again and motioned with his gun barrel.
“Step out of the vehicle and prepare to be searched.”
I was a heartbeat from pulling out my pistol and putting us both out of my misery when an alarm began to howl from a guard tower in the rear of the plant, back towards the river, and I heard the rippling hum-snap-crack of a KE cannon firing on full auto.
Shit, that’s got to be Chang and Kibaki, I thought as the guard confronting me spun, taking the muzzle of his weapon off of me for an instant.
“Cowboy, now!” I yelled as I stuck my pistol out the window and blasted a round at point-blank range through the Tahni’s faceplate.
I didn’t wait to watch whether or not he fell, I just jammed my foot into the accelerator and held onto the wheel as the truck raced across the twenty meters to the gate and impacted it with a rending, shrieking scream of tearing metal and a jolt that sent me slamming into my restraints. The truck hung up for a heart-stopping space of a half-second, but then the powerful hydrogen turbine under the hood whined with effort and we were through, scraping the two halves of the gates on either side, ripping and gouging at the tough plastic of the cargo box. Even as the tail end of the truck pulled free and it surged into the open flats beyond the fence, I knew the crew-served KE gun in the guard shack was spinning towards us and unless Cowboy had heard me, we were all going to wind up chopped to pieces.
A streak of light trailed a ball of fire blazing like a star as it shot from the rear of the cargo box and speared into the bunker and exploded with a flare of vaporized metal that washed out the floodlights. Thunder cracked and reverberated across the field and off the concrete walls of the reactor complex and battered my ears, but I kept my foot on the accelerator.
The truck bounced on its suspension, lurching across the space between the gate and the cargo dock of the reactor with a desperation that matched my own; we had to get out of the line of fire of the other bunkers, we had to get around the corner of the dome’s base, to the shelter of the cargo dock. It was all I could think of, and I didn’t give a damn what was in the way. The tractor was fairly small, meant to haul cargo off the big trucks and up the ramp into the dock, but it was solid, and I tasted blood when we slammed into it. The front of the truck crumpled and the rear end fishtailed around wildly and the small part of my brain that could do anything but scream was dead certain sure we were going to roll.
But the truck settled onto its suspension with a restless bounce and we were in the shelter of the dock, out of the line of fire of the other crew served guns. Of course, that didn’t mean the other Shock-Troopers couldn’t shoot us. I heard the whine of their KE guns, close, way closer than the earlier shooting had been, and managed to get my brain into gear. I had to get out of the fucking truck.
I tried to hit the quick-release for my restraints, but it was jammed and I didn’t have time to fuck around with it. I reached under the jacket, pulled my combat knife out of its sheath on my thigh and sliced th
rough the webbing of the harness with a flick of the laser-honed blade, then lunged towards the floorboards and grabbed my helmet and rifle and scrambled out the passenger’s side door into the cover of the wrecked loading tractor.
I ripped the jacket off of me and shoved my helmet on, sealing it to my neck yoke, only then realizing that there wasn’t anyone shooting at me. About half the force of Tahni Shock-Troopers had answered the alarm from the area where Chang and Kibaki had been operating, and the rest were shooting at the tree-line to the right side of the road, aiming at the source of the withering barrage of Gauss rifle, KE gun and laser carbine fire that was slicing through the fence and gouging divots out of the hardened metal shields of the bunkers.
The crew served KE cannons were slicing chunks out of the trees and I knew there wasn’t anything in those woods that would stop the heavy tantalum spikes from penetrating. Sophia was out there.
“We’re heading in,” Cowboy said, and I turned away from the fence-line and saw he and Kel slipping out of the back of the truck and running silently into the cargo dock, blending into the shadows so quickly that they might have been invisible. “Keep them off our backs.”
I wanted to yell at them to stay here and help us, but I knew I was being an idiot; this was the mission. I went to the open door to the cargo box of the truck and saw the rest of my team, Victor, Kurt, Annalise and Ortiz, still trying to get to their feet; they’d been tossed around pretty hard in the collision.
“Get out!” I yelled to them over the din of battle, my external speakers booming inside the plastic enclosure of the cargo box. “Get to cover now!”
I grabbed at Kurt’s arm, since he was the closest to me, and yanked him out of the truck. The big man stumbled as he hit the ground off balance, and he caught himself against the side of the concrete ramp with one hand, the other holding the carry handle of his KE gun. His brother hopped down after him and I waved them towards the corner of the loading dock.
“Lay down fire at the bunkers!” I told them.
Ortiz and Annalise were climbing out now, but I didn’t wait for them. There just wasn’t time. I went to the ground just back from the corner of the building, the square base on which the dome of the reactor facility was set, then high-crawled across the gravel and dirt until I had a view, and a shot.
The Shock-Troops were all huddled behind the duralloy walls of the weapons emplacements, taking shelter from the incoming fire and letting the crew-served guns do the work. I touched the control on my rifle to activate the targeting link for my grenade launcher; I had, after all this time and no resupply, two anti-armor grenades left. Since there wasn’t any bonus for turning them back in at the end of the war, I figured I may as well use them.
The bunker’s shielding folded around the weapons emplacement in an octagonal wall that spread wide at the back to allow others to take shelter. There were four Shock-Troops in the cover of this one, along with the two crewing it, and I set the warhead for narrow forward dispersal with flick of my thumb on the grip control.
One of the Shock-Troopers looked back at me as I fired, and I saw his KE gun begin to move towards me just a fraction of a second before the grenade exploded a half a meter from his head. The plasma spear that flared out from the blast was all directed forward by the internal baffles, and the stream of tantalum darts ceased as the gunner went down, a fist size hole burned through his spine. The trooper who’d looked back at me stumbled as the concussion battered him, inadvertently stepping out of the shelter of the bunker walls for just a moment. A burst of electromagnetically accelerated needles from outside the fence took him in the shoulder and spun him away from me before a second one fired by Victor cored his helmet. Kurt was firing now, too, I saw out of the corner of my eye, and the others were crouched behind them, leaning around the corner to get a shot at the backside of the bunker.
I switched my helmet targeting link from the grenade launcher to my rifle and added the punctuation of 10mm tungsten slugs to the hail of tantalum needles they were laying down. The rest of the Shock-Troops in the bunker were stunned, deaf and blind, their natural and technological sensors overloaded by the grenade blast, and they fell easily to our combined fire, half of them frozen in place by their exoskeletal servos.
I rolled back towards the corner, knowing intuitively that I’d spent too long firing from one position, and that residue of training was the only thing that saved my life. A cloud of dirt and gravel exploded into the air from the high-velocity KE gun burst coming from behind me, and the warning I was about to yell was still in the back of my throat when that burst walked sideways and chopped across Annalise Bua’s back.
She was just a bit older than me, a university student like Sophia, studying genetics before the invasion. She’d been a dancer since she was six and moved like one, and I hadn’t known until about a week ago that she and Cortenza Diamante were a thing. Her blood splattered over Alejandro Ortiz and her eyes rolled up in her head as she collapsed forward.
“Get inside!” I bellowed at the others, throwing myself up against the side of the ramp next to Annalise and opening up with my rifle before I even had a clear target.
I knew who it had to be before I saw them: the Tahni troopers who had gone off to respond to the alarm triggered by Chang and Kibaki at the rear of the facility. They’d either decided that we were the main attack and the alarm at the rear was a diversion, or they’d already killed the DSI agents.
There weren’t more than four of them, about half a Tahni squad, but they were laying down a swathe of suppressive fire that was chewing the remains of the truck and the tractor to pieces, and we were next. I waited till my targeting reticle was on top of one of their visors then touched the trigger. The rifle kicked against my shoulder, but then something smacked into the side of my head hard enough to make me spin away backwards, behind the cover of the edge of the ramp.
Stars filled my vision for a moment, and as they cleared, I realized that my HUD was gone, and so were my infrared and thermal filters. I was still alive, so I figured I’d taken a needle to the helmet that had just missed spreading my brains all over the gravel.
Looking around, I saw that the others had scrambled up into the loading dock, and I was stuck and alone, with a hail of tantalum needles chewing up the concrete of the ramp centimeters behind my head. I was fucked…except for that one, last grenade. I pulled it out of my tactical harness, twisted the rocket motor off the end of it, pushed down the manual safety disengagement and tossed it high over my head, aiming it back to where I guessed the three remaining Shock-Troops would be by now.
I had counted to three when it detonated. I’d never tried that before with an anti-armor grenade and I had absolutely no idea how well, or if, it would work; but I knew it was the only shot I had. I pushed myself up onto the ramp and dug the spikes of my boots into its rough surface, feeling my quads burning as I sprinted up, expecting the kill shot at any second and not even able to see if it was coming. My helmet had once felt like a window that opened up more of reality for me; now it felt like a damned blindfold.
No kill shot took me on that desperate lunge up the ramp and I threw myself down behind the first cover I sensed, a powered cargo jack for moving pallets around the bay. I yanked loose the latch of my helmet yoke and pulled it off, tossing it negligently on the floor with a hollow, metal clunk, and sucking in a relieved breath. I looked down at myself, checking for wounds I hadn’t felt, but I saw nothing. Then I glanced around me.
Victor and Kurt Simak both looked numb under their refitted Tahni helmets, the visors removed because the electronics wouldn’t synch with our gear. They didn’t seem to be wounded, but they weren’t moving, just crouching in the shelter of a pallet of plastic-wrapped machine parts. Alejandro Ortiz was crying, sobbing openly, his teeth clenched in rage. They’d all been very tight with Annalise, had been in the same squad as her for months now. I hadn’t. I hadn’t been her friend, just her leader---her officer, really, though I was technically an NCO.
I’d wanted to go to the Academy, wanted it more than anything. I’d wanted to be a Marine officer and lead troops into combat.
Careful what you wish for, a little voice whispered in my ear, years too late to do any good.
“Snap out of it!” I used my best imitation of a Drill Instructor voice and I saw their eyes come back to reality. “Cover me.”
I rolled out from behind the cargo jack, staying low and remembering to bring my rifle’s electronic sight up to my eye level now that I had no HUD targeting reticle. I twisted around the corner and saw two of the Shock-Troops getting back to their feet, charred and blackened spots on their armor. The one I’d shot was dead, face down with most of his helmet and the head that had been inside it blasted away. Another was on his back, writhing with plasma burn-throughs in both legs from the grenade.
I pumped three rounds into one of the two standing, seeing the shadow of the spray of blood from the slugs exiting his back under the harsh glare of the floodlights. He hadn’t quite straightened up and he crashed forward, motionless. I shifted aim to the only one of the four left who wasn’t wounded or dead, then realized the blinking red icon in the sight warning me that the magazine was empty.
Shit.
Chapter Nineteen
I pulled back just as the Tahni opened fire and a spray of powdered and fragmented concrete followed me to the floor; I blinked my eyes frantically to clear them and they did clear just in time to see the grenade. Well, we called it a grenade, but it was really more of a backpack-launched missile. Each Shock-Trooper carried two of them, but they didn’t use them much against us since they were mostly designed as anti-armor or anti-vehicle weapons. They could be laser-guided by a targeting beam from the Shock-Trooper’s helmet, but he couldn’t see us so I knew he wasn’t doing that. They could target radio signals, but I knew he wasn’t doing that, either, because we weren’t using radio and their side was. They could be heat-seekers, but they went for a hotter signature than a human body produced.
