by Rick Partlow
Tahn-Khandranda, capital city of Tahn-Skyyiah and literally “the Spirit of the Empire” in their language, was an impressive sight from the air, particularly when so many people down there were trying to kill us. I’d tied my helmet HUD into the exterior cameras on the nose of the lander, and I could see the missiles rising up from launchers that had been concealed in the city under supposedly civilian buildings. Gauss cannons on the cruisers in orbit spoke each time a launch site fired, pounding buildings into ash and dust, but the missiles still rose, from one launcher after another, to seek out hundreds of Marine landers and dozens of assault shuttles.
Most of the landers carried battlesuited troops; this one and a dozen others like it carried Recon Marines, bound for one mission or another that required our unique talents. The ground-pounders were supposed to land in a perimeter around the city and move inward. Recon was coming in right on top of it, to do what we did. And a hell of lot of those missiles were coming straight at us.
Countermeasures launched from under the lander’s wings, filling the camera view with a haze of electrostatically charged chaff surrounding magnesium flares, and I felt my stomach coming up through my throat as the aerospacecraft jinked wildly, rolling and banking in an evasive course. I’d taken the anti-nausea meds before the flight, but I still had to clench my teeth closed and tighten my stomach muscles. You did not want to throw up inside a battle helmet.
Finally, we shook the missiles and straightened out, the view stabilizing enough for me to see the late morning light gleaming off of the spires and spheres of the city. At least we didn’t have to worry about ground lasers; someone had taken down the fusion reactor just a few minutes ago, right before we’d been cleared for launch. I would have taken a bet that I knew who those someones were.
“Jesus Christ,” I heard Sanders muttering, obviously either forgetting or not caring that he was on an open channel. “Can we not do that again?”
“Stop whining, Sanders,” I admonished him, sympathizing but having to think about morale. “You’re a Recon Marine, not a ground-pounder puke. This is what we get paid for.”
“Ooh-rah, Sgt. Munroe,” he responded with what was probably fake enthusiasm. That was okay. If you faked something long enough, it became real.
I heard the “ooh-rah” echoed by the rest of my squad and grinned privately. If nothing else, our little escapade on Loki had convinced them their squad-leader was not to be fucked with, and that had proven more useful than I thought it would be. If your boss was a badass, that meant you wanted him on your side when the shit hit the fan and you’d do what he said without questioning.
“Third Platoon,” I heard Lt. Medupe’s voice in my helmet, even though I couldn’t see him; he was on the row of seats that faced the lander’s opposite hull, “remember the drill: when we touch down, take up cover and concealment in the buildings of the intersection. Once the lander is away, we’ll move to the link-up a kilometer to the north, towards the Imperial palace.”
We’d heard it before, but like the bravado, it was a necessary tool for morale. Leaving aside that any one of us might have to take over and implement the plan if the Marines ahead of us in the chain of command fell, hearing the details again made it seem more likely to succeed, made the troops more comfortable with it.
“Any word on who we’re linking up with, LT?” That was Sgt. Morenz, First Squad leader. She was a steady, thoughtful leader, if a bit talky for my tastes.
“Intelligence assets is the only word we have,” Medupe said, and you could almost hear the helpless head-shake that went with need-to-know shit.
“DSI spooks I bet,” Morenz speculated. “I hate those guys.”
“We’ll find out when we get there,” Gunny Prochaska growled. “This is the big show, boys and girls. Stay focused and don’t fuck up.”
“Wheels down in thirty seconds,” Medupe announced abruptly, probably getting the info from the pilot on a command channel. “Third Squad on point, First on drag.”
I felt a shudder go through the lander, heard a stuttering roar and I knew it was from the chin cannon. I linked back up with the nose camera and saw the flare of rocket-propelled grenade rounds shooting downward into an intersection of two main roads through the Imperial City. An armored vehicle was down there, with a squad of the Tahni home-world defense militia, their heavy KE turret pointed up at us along with each soldier’s individual weapon.
The 50mm rocket grenades burst on the pavement between the troops, obscuring them in a spray of cement shards and metal fragments before the cannon-fire walked its way to the vehicle. The on-board guidance and payload computers in each round switched the loads to armor-piercing and a spray of plasma and molten metal flared off the vehicle. The turret ceased traversing and everything was still except for the drifting smoke.
“LZ is hot,” Medupe announced, a bit redundantly for anyone paying attention to the camera feed, but not everyone would be. “I say again, Landing Zone is hot! Ten seconds.”
The lander lurched to the left, then righted itself, and then the belly ramp began lowering with a whine of servos and a roar of jet engines.
“Go! Go! Go!” It was hard to tell if it was the LT or the Gunny yelling, or maybe they both were. Then I was yelling it myself, yanking the quick-release on my seat restraints and pulling my Gauss rifle away from my chest on its retractable sling and heading down the ramp.
“Wheels down” turned out to be a slight exaggeration; we were hovering about two meters off the pavement, the hot wash of the jets off the street below turning the rear ramp into a convection oven. I let Sanders and his fire team Alpha drop first, watching them scurry to cover in the lee of the buildings around us like cockroaches fleeing the light of an open door. Then I stepped out, bending my knees to absorb the impact and still having to shoot out a hand to catch pavement and keep my balance. I’d had a position in mind since I saw it on the lander’s nose camera, and I gathered my legs beneath me and ran towards it.
The Tahni buildings shared certain utilitarian features with any human structure, forced on them by the common realities of the effects of gravity and the physics of load-bearing walls. While there were myriad aesthetic differences, walls were still more or less basically straight and corners were corners. The building I headed for was several stories tall and octagonal in shape, the alleys between it and the next street over blocked off by low walls. I tucked into the corner of one of those walls and the side of the building, about ten meters away from where I could see Sanders and Alpha Team spread out under an overhanging eaves across the alleyway.
I turned back to the lander and saw the last of the platoon exiting the hovering ramp, and then the pitch of the engines changed and the exhaust from the variable thrust nozzles at the belly turned white hot and lifted the craft back up over the rooftops. The armored vehicle across the intersection was still burning and the bodies of the soldiers lay twisted around it in pools of their blood.
Shit like that might have bothered me, once. Now I was just glad it was them and not us.
“Third squad,” the LT broadcast over our platoon ‘net. “Move out.”
I motioned to Sanders and he led the platoon away from the cluster of buildings at the eight-way intersection. The street was broad, wide enough for three of their cargo trucks to drive abreast, and my Marines spread out across it in a wedge that went from one side to the other.
There were no civilians on the street. I hadn’t thought about it at first, as I watched for threats and shepherded my squad into the correct interval and formation, but I hadn’t seen a single Tahni civilian the whole time I’d been following the nose camera view. Maybe they were all in shelters; that would certainly make things simpler. They’d had enough warning; our Fleet had Transitioned into the system days ago.
Or maybe, I thought with a cynical pragmatism, they were all huddled in their homes, waiting this out. And hundreds of them, maybe thousands, were dying as our Gauss cannons sought out the Surface to Air Missile sites thei
r own government had scattered around those homes.
Did they deserve that? How much say did they have in the wars their government fought? Any more say than the chawners in Trans-Angeles? Any more than I did?
I tried to feel bad for them, tried to work up some empathy. Every time I did, though, I thought of the stick-figure survivors from Amity or Jotunheim and discovered that my empathy was pretty well used up. They’d sewed the wind and they were reaping the fucking whirlwind.
The farther inward we travelled, the taller the buildings became; I’d seen in the briefings that they decreased in height from the Imperial Palace as if the city itself were bowing to the Emperor. I could see the twin, needle-thin spires of the Imperial Center towering high above the sprawling octagon of the palace, surrounded by the glistening white spheres that were the Three Temples of their faith.
We saw two more patrols of the homeworld defense militia pass by on parallel streets, but they didn’t spot us and the LT instructed me to keep the formation moving while he called their positions in for airstrikes. I heard the sonic booms of assault shuttles roaring by overhead more than once, but I didn’t know whether or not they were heading for our targets.
It took us nearly twenty minutes to make it to the road intersection where the link-up was scheduled. We settled in along opposite sides of the streets and I was grateful that Tahni architecture didn’t go for windows on the ground floor; it was one less thing to worry about. I was still beginning to get antsy, sitting out there in broad daylight in the middle of the Tahni capital city, and I was about to say something to the LT about trying to get some people inside the buildings to make sure the roofs were clear when he radioed me.
“The Intelligence assets are here,” he said on a private ‘net with me, which I found odd when I saw it on the readout. “And they want to talk to you.”
Oh, shit.
I found the LT’s position with his IFF transponder and fell back to the stone thing that might have been a statue where he and Gunny Prochaska were taking cover. Crouching there in chameleon camouflage combat suits, their hoods pulled off, were Cowboy, Kel, and two others who I hadn’t seen since the rendezvous on that vacuum moon a year and a half ago. One was a short but athletic-looking woman with spikey hair and a pleasant, heart-shaped face; the other was a man, almost cartoonishly broad-shouldered and square-jawed, like something from a recruiting poster, with blond hair buzzed close to his scalp. All of them carried weapons that looked too heavy for me to lift, much less carry through the streets.
“Hey there, Munroe,” Cowboy said, nodding. Kel threw me a one-finger salute. “You know our sourpuss Okie here. Maybe you remember Holly and Brian from our little palaver before Demeter.”
“Sir, ma’am,” I said politely, making the assumption that these people were all officers, despite the fact they didn’t look much older than me. I hadn’t seen Cowboy for almost two months, since our deal on Loki. He’d been true to his bargain, though. When I’d returned to Inferno with my unit, there’d been no DSI or CSF waiting to arrest me.
“We’re heading for the palace,” Cowboy declared, pleasantries out of the way. “We’re going for the Emperor himself.”
“Fuckin’ A,” Lt. Medupe blurted, and I had to laugh. Privately, of course.
“It’s a big structure,” Cowboy went on, ignoring the interruption, “so we’re splitting up into four groups, one with each of us.” He indicated that “us” meant the four of them, the Glory Boys. I idly wondered if the female minded being referred to as a “Glory Boy?”
“I can adjust the squads,” Medupe said with a nod. “Gunny, take three Marines from each squad and form a provisional squad, and you’ll lead it. I’ll stay with Second Squad,” he added. Though he didn’t say why, I thought it was because he didn’t quite trust Sgt. Anton, the Second Squad leader.
I noted that also left me by my lonesome, and I felt a bit of satisfaction that Medupe trusted me that much, particularly after Loki.
“Munroe,” Cowboy said, “your squad is with me.” He grinned. “Guess I’m just used to havin’ you around.”
“Lucky me,” I muttered. Why the hell couldn’t he just leave me alone for a change? Maybe, I thought bitterly, he was protecting his investment.
“Get your shit together, ladies and gents,” Cowboy said, pulling on his hood. “The war ends today.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
Getting into the palace was almost absurdly easy. The surrounding blocks of ground defenses had been reduced to rubble and smoldering ashes by Gauss cannon and proton gun strikes from orbit and assault shuttles, and it looked surreal, like a magical, eight-sided castle surrounded by a black, blighted wasteland. Whatever troops had remained outside were buried under that rubble or vaporized, and the biggest challenge was finding an entrance not blocked by debris. We’d split our forces and spread out around the kilometers-long perimeter, and I was feeling very, very alone with just the nine of us humans in sight and a city full of hostile aliens surrounding us.
“The air defenses are down,” Sanders said, kicking over a tilted stone column and watching it crash and shatter into pieces. “Why didn’t they just pulp the whole palace?”
“Because, kid,” Cowboy told him, his voice lacking the usual scorn as he scanned the blackened cement fragments that had been covered by the fallen column, “the Tahni think the Emperor is a god. If we nuke this place, they’ll assume he’s still alive somehow, somewhere. We don’t just need him dead, we need his body. If we don’t show it to them, they’ll never surrender.”
“Over here,” Hohenthaner called, waving us over to where she squatted in a pile of broken stone, its surface burned black and splintered by the orbital bombardment. We all jogged over to where she waited about a hundred meters from the palace walls, much farther back than the rest of us had been looking. Whatever had been destroyed above had revealed an entrance ramp below, yawning open about four meters wide and three tall, dark even to the thermal and infrared optics of my helmet.
“I’ll go first,” Cowboy offered. “Munroe, your people follow me at a ten-meter interval so I can scan for traps.”
And with that, we became the first humans to ever enter the Tahni Imperial Palace. At the time, I didn’t feel much except scared.
The ramp led down at a steep slope about thirty meters, then levelled off but didn’t get any wider. I thought it had to have been some sort of secret, emergency entrance or exit, hidden under some other structure that had collapsed around it, which might mean it was unguarded. There certainly wouldn’t be any fatal booby-traps, since the Tahni didn’t believe in killing except with the hand of a sentient being, which was a handy thing since it meant they didn’t use armed drones. It hadn’t stopped them from coming up with some kick-ass electronic counter-measures that pretty much kept us from using them, too, however.
The tunnel wasn’t narrow, but it began to give me claustrophobia once we’d left the light of the Tahn-Skyyiah morning behind us. I couldn’t see shit on IR or thermal and couldn’t risk an IR illuminator, and the only data my helmet was giving me was sonic analysis return that painted a picture with the sounds echoing back to it. It was enough to keep us from running into each other, but not much else.
We’d gone a hundred meters before I began to see a hint of light up ahead, which turned out to be leaking through the seams of an oval door made of local stone a slightly different shade than the blocks of the walls around it. Cowboy took a few seconds to examine it, then put his shoulder against the door, dug his feet into the rough stone of the tunnel floor and pushed. There was a scraping and a squeal of little-used hinges and the door swung open, revealing a block wall several centimeters thick. I felt my eyes go wide as I realized how heavy that door must have been and how easily Cowboy had handled it.
Beyond it was a dimly lit storage room, filled with the various sized cylinders the Tahni used as containers. Everything was coated with a fine film of dust and I had the sense that this room was rarely used; the only l
ight came from a panel, probably powered by a chemical reaction, built into the wall near the door. This door was less sturdy, but it was locked with a fairly simple, low-tech mechanical lock with physical bolts at the top and bottom. I half-expected Cowboy to kick it in, but instead he gestured to me for someone to shoot the bolts out.
I waved the others back and did it myself. The tungsten slugs ripped through the door, the bolt and the frame, throwing up a spray of plastic splinters and cement dust and sending the cracked and splintered plastic door swinging outward. There were identical holes in the stone wall across the hall from the door where my slugs had kept going, and I wondered for a moment where they’d stopped. I swung the barrel of my rifle upward as Cowboy ducked out to scout the other side. He was gone ten seconds before he pulled the door open wide and waved for us to follow.
The storage room was at the end of a long corridor, twisting in ways that made little sense, the same as a lot of Tahni architecture outside their military bases. I assumed it had some sort of religious significance, but it could just be that they were aliens and their aesthetic was different than ours. We followed it and Cowboy for a few minutes, and as it wound around it grew lighter and wider and finally opened up on some sort of atrium, with sunlight streaming down into the eight-sided chamber from an open skylight fifty meters above us.
The huge chamber was supported by eight columns, each an elongated cone wider at the top than the bottom, and they met at the center of the atrium in a sort of combination of structural support and statuary, though of what I couldn’t tell. It was huge, and rounded and curved and brightly colored and it seemed to want to draw my eyes into the complexity of it.
“We’ve got electronic surveillance in here,” Hohenthaner announced as we moved close to the central support.
“Oh, I’m certain of it,” Cowboy agreed, standing nonchalantly in the center of the room, his plasma gun held at his side in one hand as if he considered it a small matter. “They’ll be on us soon. Question is, which way should we be going? You’re the expert on the Tahni, Munroe. Whaddya’ think?”
