by Rick Partlow
CONTENTS
WHAT’S NEXT IN THE SERIES?
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Epilogue
WHAT’S NEXT IN THE SERIES?
Also by Rick Partlow
FROM THE PUBLISHER
About Rick Partlow
DIRECT FIRE
©2020 RICK PARTLOW
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WHAT’S NEXT IN THE SERIES?
CONTACT FRONT
KINETIC STRIKE
DANGER CLOSE
DIRECT FIRE
HOME FRONT
1
Why do I do this to myself?
I should have been going over battle maps, reviewing the operations order, hell, just staring at the inside of my helmet. Anything would have been better than tying my suit optics into the visual feed from the dropship. I couldn’t do a damned thing to affect the battle, could barely tell who was winning it. All I could see were flashes of light in the darkness at the extreme range of the dropship’s optical cameras, the visible remnants of invisible struggles, missiles being intercepted by other missiles or lasers, our assault shuttles and missile cutters or their dual-environment fighters and corvettes dying unspectacular deaths in the dreadful silence.
Just one stray missile, one well-aimed laser or coil gun round and we’d be dead. The dropships were armored as well as they could be, enough to save us from the fragments of a surface-to-air missile, maybe enough to take a shot or two from a ground-defense laser without coming apart, but the main gun of a Tahni corvette would obliterate us like we’d never existed.
The planet swelled in a false promise of safety at the left edge of my view; blue, white and green, and welcoming, but it was all a disguise. Port Harcourt was a hornet’s nest and we were about to stick our dicks in it.
Of course, the battalion briefing had tried to dress the operation up with smiles and unicorns and rainbows…
The battalion leadership was jammed into the main dining room of the best and biggest restaurant in the capital city of Dolabella, and by inference, the biggest and best on the whole Silvanus colony. It was a nice place, decorated in what I was told was mid-Twentieth-Century European style, with lots of hand-polished wood and brass. I felt out of place, and not just because of the décor. Everyone was staring at me, or at least that was what it seemed like. I was the guy who’d gotten six of his own Marines killed, who’d let his platoon sergeant make the sacrifice play to save everyone because I’d been too badly wounded to do it myself. I was the only Officers Candidate School platoon leader in my company while the other four were Academy grads. I was the street kid, the petty criminal, the guy who had to join the Marines or go to jail. The loner.
But not alone. Not anymore.
Vicky Sandoval shot me a smile from the table beside us, at the outer edge of Alpha Company as I was at the outer edge of Delta. It was a comfort having her back from OCS, even if we were in different companies now. I’d even gotten used to her hair being shorter. She didn’t have it cut clear of her interface jacks the way a lot of Drop-Troopers did, letting brown strands drift over the implant receptacles instead. She’d had a buzz cut when I’d first met her, when we were both PFCs, but she’d let it grow out until OCS, then chopped it down to just above her collar. Her face had leaned out, the pain and the stress adding lines beside her eyes and at the edges of her mouth, but the smile was the same, the intelligence and determination in her eyes.
I’d expected her to be there. I hadn’t expected the man beside her, the new platoon leader for Fourth Platoon of Alpha Company. He was tall and lanky, almost gangly, his grin boyish and enthusiastic. I’d met Freddy Kodjoe at OCS and never expected him to be assigned to my battalion, but the war was changing and units were being shuffled to meet needs.
“I like this planet,” he said, projecting his voice to be heard over the gabble of the collected officers of Fourth Battalion, 187th Marine Expeditionary Force (Armored). “It reminds me a lot of Nigeria. What about you, Cam?”
I assumed he meant it was the city of Dolabella that reminded him of Nigeria and not the restaurant and tried to answer in kind.
“It definitely doesn’t remind me of Trans-Angeles,” I told him, shrugging. “And it’s nothing at all like Tijuana, at least not since they cleaned up the battle damage from the Tahni occupation. So, it has that going for it. I guess it’s nice, except I already have three Marines in my platoon who’ve been busted for drunk and disorderly.” I ran a hand across the back of my neck, feeling a weariness that was more spiritual than physical. “Not to mention the four that want to get married to locals. It’s enough to make a guy miss Hachiman. I mean, your pee would freeze before it hit the ground in the winter, but at least there were no civilians for the Marines to assault, batter, or impregnate.”
I’d laughed at the stories my barracks-mates had told when I was an enlisted man, rolled my eyes at them as a squad leader, and somehow had never expected just how much less funny they would be, how much trouble they would cause me as a platoon leader. The Marine Corps might cut an officer some slack for breaking regs to win a battle, but God forbid if I was late filing a report on military dependents.
“God, you’ve become a cynical bastard.” Freddy nudged my arm. “What happened to that idealistic officer trainee who risked it all to improve our OCS training class?”
“That trainee became an actual platoon leader,” I shot back. “Yo
u know the drill, man. I’ve spent twice as much time filling out and filing personnel forms and incident reports as I have organizing tactical training.”
“These are the easy days, my friend,” Freddy said, nodding as if he had suddenly become the aged, sage philosopher of the group. “You’ll miss this place when we’re gone. Enjoy it while you can.”
“Well, don’t get too attached to it,” Vicky warned us, nodding toward the front entrance to the dining room, “because I think we’re about to get our marching orders.”
The door was as old-fashioned and anachronistic as anything else in the restaurant, and its brass hinges squeaked as it opened. The first Marine through was the Skipper, Captain Covington, my company commander. He was lean and rangy, not particularly imposing physically, and you could almost overlook the man until you caught a glimpse in those eyes. They were killer’s eyes; the eyes of a man who knew death on a first-name basis.
I was primed to push myself up from the table, waiting for the call to attention, but it didn’t come for the Skipper, because there were other captains in the room. Technically, I suppose he had them on time in grade—he’d been in the Fleet Marine Corps since the Pirate Wars over twenty years ago—but that wasn’t going to bring a room full of officers to their feet.
The woman following behind him did. She was tall and commanding, with an arch to her eyebrow that always made me wonder if I was in the middle of fucking up and she was the only one who could see it.
“Attention!” Captain Cronje, Vicky’s company commander, did the honors. His voice was a little on the high-pitched side and he always seemed a little manic for my tastes, but she insisted he was well-respected and not a bad guy to work for.
“At ease,” Colonel Voss told us, striding purposefully across the room, the soles of her boots clomping on the hard wood floor as she claimed her table at the front of the cluster of Marine officers.
Her XO, Major Lundy, followed behind, clutching a tablet in his right hand as if it contained the secrets of the universe. I was sinking back into my seat when Covington slid into the chair beside me, nodding a greeting.
“Show’s about to start,” he said. I wasn’t sure if he meant the briefing or the next phase of the war. Or both.
“Sir,” I asked the question softly enough not even Vicky could hear it, “just how come you’re not up there?” At his narrowed eyes, I went on. “I mean, how come you’re not a battalion commander? Or a general for that matter? I mean, you’ve been in longer than anyone I know except for Top.”
The Skipper didn’t smile much, but he did now.
“The hardest battle I have ever fought,” he confided to me, just as quietly, “was to avoid getting oak leaves pinned on my shoulders, Alvarez. I joined the Marines to fight, not to manage. If I’d wanted to be a manager, I’d have gone to business school and got a job in the Corporate Council.” He nodded toward the battalion commander. “Listen up, this is going to be…interesting.”
Colonel Voss had the pinched face and perpetual look of disapproval of one of the primary school teachers I’d been foisted upon when I’d first arrived in Trans-Angeles. I’d never liked her and had no reason to respect her because I’d never seen her do anything more substantial than brown-nosing the brigade commander, but I was curious about what she had to say. She touched a control on her ‘link and the image of a planet snapped to life near the ceiling, projected from the holotank installed there. It was a living world, a temperate one from the look of it, not a steaming hell-hole like Inferno or an iceball like Hachiman.
“This is Port Harcourt,” Voss said, her tone dramatic, perhaps intentionally so. “That isn’t what the Tahni call it, obviously, but their name is pretty much unpronounceable, so we’re going with Port Harcourt.”
A low roll of chuckles at that, though not from me.
“Port Harcourt is the outermost of the Tahni core worlds, their oldest and most heavily populated colonies. It’s our first steppingstone in the campaign to take down the Tahni Imperium.”
“Ooh-rah!” The exclamation came from several of the officers, but the closest was Cronje, and he added a postscript. “Time to kick their asses, ma’am!”
“Ooh-rah!” she agreed, and somehow made the battle-cry sound pretentious and academic. “This is a key objective in our campaign. It’s vital that we gain control of its resources to stage supplies for the push toward Tahn-Skyyiah, their home system. And more than that, we need to make sure we close off avenues of attack to prevent the Tahni from making an end-run assault on the Solar System to try to draw our forces away.”
She traced a line on her ‘link and bits of space lit up in red.
“The Tahni are quite aware of this, and the system is heavily defended in the area around Port Harcourt.” A baleful glare scanned over us. “This is going to be the most heavily fortified system we’ve hit so far, be forewarned. However, the Fleet is fully committed to this mission and will be bringing along three cruisers and every available carrier for the assault.” She spread her hands. “They’ll clear the way for us as best as they can, but the approach is still going to be a nightmare. Even after we drop, there’s going to be significant enemy air assets to get through. All five battalions of the 187th Expeditionary Force will be involved in the operation. There is no other military target, we are all in on this one, ladies and gentlemen.”
“Question, ma’am.” Captain Geiger, Bravo Company commander. I didn’t know her other than her name, but she had a steady, thoughtful demeanor. “I understand we need control of the system, but have you been given any guidance as to why we’re not bypassing the planet altogether? As you said, it’s a huge commitment of troops and once the Fleet has taken out their space assets, what’s the strategic importance of controlling the population?”
I forced myself not to cringe, but I wanted to, not because it was a bad question but because it was a good one, which usually made it a forbidden one. It was an old debate I’d heard over many a burn barrel and after-hours round of beers. Ground troops had been needed to retake our occupied colonies because we had to think about the lives of the captive colonists. But ever since we’d taken the last of them back, the world we were standing on, the talk had begun again.
“We should just wipe all of them out,” Cronje declared, not quite loud enough to reach Voss.
“The decision has been made,” Voss said, resorting to that old passive voice officers used when they didn’t want to blame stupid decisions on the high command or, worse yet, the President, “that it’s crucial to the prosecution of this phase of the war for the Tahni populace to truly accept their defeat. The last thing we want is to fight this war again in another twenty or thirty years. If we leave their population with their ground defenses and their pride intact, with humans never setting foot in their cities, they’ll never believe they’ve been beaten.” She shrugged. “Of course, the alternative would be to simply devastate their cities from orbit, and there have been calls to do exactly that, but so far, anyway, the President has resisted any such suggestions because it would be against the rules of war to kill noncombatants.”
“No Tahni is a noncombatant,” Cronje muttered, apparently unconcerned whether his subordinates heard him doubting higher command. “They’re all a bunch of fucking fanatics.”
And I couldn’t really disagree. But…
“If we bombard their planets,” I said softly aside to Vicky, “they could do the same thing to ours, and then there’d be nothing left for either of us.” I shrugged. “And I don’t know if I could live with myself being part of slaughtering a bunch of civilians.”
She regarded me with an expression flatly cool, not as if she were angry with me but more that she considered what I’d said to be irrelevant to her.
“I’m more worried,” she declared, “about my Marines than I am their civilians.”
I couldn’t really disagree with that either. It seemed even more reasonable burning in hot at six gravities of boost, with hellfire burning all aro
und me.
“Two minutes until orbital insertion,” the dropship’s crew chief contributed, always trying to be helpful.
Not drop, just orbital insertion. At least then, we could stop worrying about possibly catching a round from the space defense satellites and start thinking about the fighters flying to intercept us, and air defense turrets shooting at us from the ground. That would be so much better.
I switched to the platoon net and said something just to hear myself talk. Well, and also because it didn’t hurt to remind them all of the objective just in case their leadership got themselves killed and one of them had to step up. I was living proof that wasn’t impossible.
“Remember,” I told them, “our target is the deflector dishes at the spaceport. We take them down and the assault shuttles have a clear shot at their defense turrets and can provide us with air support. Our job is to clear the way for the company Boomers to come in and blow the shit out of them. Fourth Platoon is securing our left flank and Alpha Company is on our right. We got no reserves unless and until we take out those deflectors, so the objective comes first.”
“In other words,” Bang-Bang said, breaking in on my monologue, “don’t be looking for someone to hold your fuckin’ hand if the going gets rough. This is our fuckin’ job and we’re gonna do it.”
I snorted a quiet laugh. Gunnery Sgt. Bernie ‘Bang-Bang’ Morrel had stepped into the platoon sergeant’s spot in my unit after Scotty Hayes died and it hadn’t been easy to get used to someone other than Scotty helping me run the platoon. But Bang-Bang hadn’t tried to be Scotty. He’d just been himself and the difference was enough to make it easier to deal with Scotty not being there.
“Hold on,” the crew chief warned us. “We got incoming fighters. The assault shuttles are engaging, but we might have to do some evasive maneuvering.”
“Oh, great,” I murmured, making sure my mic was off. “Evasive maneuvering is my favorite thing.”
I must be a glutton for punishment because I tied back into the external cameras. The curve of the planet took up the whole screen, only the slightest tinge of black indicating we were coming in from orbit. Blue atmosphere wrapped us in it embrace, the primary star an early morning warmth just passing the terminator. The Tahni reception wasn’t quite so warm.
