Direct Fire #4 Drop Trooper

by Rick Partlow

  “Sit down, Delp.”

  I fell into my chair behind the desk, a larger and more opulent one than I would ever have back on Inferno. Hell, back on Inferno, my office would have been a closet. But I’d never seen it, since I’d gone directly from OCS into the field. And I likely never would. This one would do. Though I’d had to take the former occupant’s photos off the wall and put them respectfully in the desk drawer, because I hadn’t felt comfortable with her husband and kids staring down at me.

  Delp folded his skinny frame into the mismatched, plastic folding chair across from the desk and let his hands hang at his sides, finger fidgeting with his existential discomfort at being here.

  “What the hell is bothering you lately, Vince?” I asked him. Using his first name was, I admit, a tactic. I was trying to disarm him, bring down his barriers and get the truth out of him. “You’re a hell of a Marine…in the field. Then we get to Vistula and you got into a dust-up with that local….”

  “He was asking for trouble, sir!” Delp insisted, leaning forward in his seat like he was about to jump up and argue his case. “He thought he was hot shit because he’d taken a potshot at the Tahni during the occupation, like he could have kicked them out without our help.”

  “Those people were living in a nightmare for months,” I reminded him. “Think how pissed off and humiliated you’d be if that happened to you.” He squirmed in his seat as if really considering the notion for the first time.

  “Yes, sir. I guess you’re right. But I was pretty drunk at the time and so was he.”

  “And you were drunk last night, too.” I sat back, folding my hands over my chest ,and regarded him down my nose, another tactical trick I’d learned, not in OCS but from Top. “You were drunk when you started dancing with that girl—that seventeen-year-old girl, by the way.”

  He winced.

  “I didn’t know they’d let girls that young into that kind of place, sir.”

  “You’re not that much older yourself,” I observed. “You’re from Earth, Greater Boston. I know you’d be too young to drink if you were back home.”

  Not that it had stopped me. In the Underground, you could always find someone willing to sell you liquor…or whatever. But I’d read Delp’s file and he’d been something of a straight-arrow, at least as far as his juvenile record knew. No apparent gang affiliation, no detentions, no reformatory sentences. Just a kid who wanted out of the rat maze.

  “I never drank before Vistula,” he confessed. He’d been meeting my eyes, but now his gaze went to something far away, a ghost of a memory.

  “Yeah.” I didn’t elaborate. It wasn’t something I could talk about.

  We’d caught the last of the Tahni element on the colony right after they’d executed their hostages. They’d tried to surrender, and Delp and Joanna Carson had burned them down where they stood. I hadn’t taken part, but I’d done nothing to stop it. I hadn’t told anyone what had happened, and I wasn’t going to talk about it now. I’d thought it was done and over.

  “Do you need to talk to a therapist, Vince?”

  He glanced up sharply, seeming as shocked as if I’d suggested he marry his sister.

  “I went to see one, after,” I confessed, and I think he may have been even more shocked at that. “She helped. It could help you, too.”

  “I don’t know if I could talk to someone who wasn’t a Drop-Trooper, sir.” He shook his head. “They wouldn’t understand.”

  “Private Delp,” I said, putting an edge to my voice, “I would rather not make it an order.” I tilted my head to the side and regarded him. “You broke that guy’s arm and busted up the bar in the process. You’ve been arrested by the MP’s on both of the last two colony worlds we’ve liberated. You can either seek behavioral counselling or I will have no choice but to give you an Article 15.” Which was non-judicial punishment, not a court-martial, but still…

  “I’ll take the Article 15, sir,” he insisted, the set of his mouth mulish.

  “It’ll delay your promotion to corporal,” I told him. “Do you want to be a squad leader? A platoon sergeant? Because this could hurt your chances of either.”

  “I’m best at running point, anyway, sir.”

  “So was I, Delp.” I cocked an eyebrow. “I still am. I’m not bragging when I tell you that I’m better in a suit than anyone else in this platoon. Hell, anyone else in the company besides the Skipper.” And maybe Top, but I wasn’t sure. She was too busy riding herd on everyone else to do much fighting. “But the Marines need leaders, or at least that’s what they told me. They need people who are the best to teach others to be good enough. I thought maybe you could do that, eventually. But not if you keep this up, the drinking, the fighting.”

  “I won’t, sir,” he insisted. “I swear, no more drinking. I won’t even go out.”

  “Not any time soon,” I agreed. “You’re restricted to base for the next thirty days.” I jabbed a finger at him in warning. “And if I hear you’ve been drinking on base, you’re heading to the brig, and then to a therapist, whether you like it or not.”

  I stood and he leapt to beat me to it, coming to attention.

  “Dismissed,” I barked at him.

  When he’d closed the door behind him, I sank heavily into a chair that should have been comfortable, but wasn’t. And I wasn’t sure if it ever would be.

  Delp had been as good as his word, and I thought that being away from human colonies might be good for him. He’d used the confinement to put in more time in the simulators, and I could see that he’d gotten better, smoother, though still not as much of a natural in the Vigilante as me, or Henckel.

  Volley fire was a tricky thing, involving intricate timing to make sure a third of the platoon was firing constantly while the rest let their capacitors recharge. It was hard to do even in training and ten times as difficult when we were under fire, which was why I’d made sure the whole platoon worked on it every opportunity we got during the train-up for the invasion. In practice, if done right, it was devastating.

  They did it right.

  If a single discharge from a plasma gun was like taking a slice of the sun and shoving it into the enemy’s face, volley fire was a firehose stream of unrelenting hellfire with no respite, turning everything that it touched into molten, smoldering wreckage. The Tahni ranks in front of us had no chance to organize a counterattack, no response beyond sporadic, barely-aimed burst from electron beamers. First squad took some hits and I could see flashes of red in the damage-control reports beside their names on the IFF transponder displays, but no one was out of the fight.

  We’d pushed the enemy back into the support columns for the deflector dishes, massive stanchions three meters around, sunk deep into the ground. They huddled there, using the supports for cover, leaving dozens of their number lying helpless on the pavement, some obviously dead, others with huge chunks blown off their armor, the ends melted, hiding the physical devastation inside. I tried not to think about how they must feel, crawling away from impending death, fear warring with agony, their legs burned away and the rest of their body scorched by the heat that had made its way into their suits. I’d been there and I wouldn’t even wish it on a Tahni.

  “Boomers firing in five,” Lt. Xander, the XO announced. He was technically the platoon leader for the Headquarters Platoon, though the Skipper commanded it in practice, but Covington must have decided to let the man have his chance at running the Fire Support Team.

  Boomers wasn’t their official nomenclature of course, the military lacking in flair and imagination as usual, but sometimes the unofficial nicknames were the ones that stuck. And so, the Vigilante XB Fire Support Suit become the Boomer. If the Vigilante could be described as a metal gorilla, the Boomer was a gorilla playing a pipe organ. The regular suit had a single missile launcher, built flush into the side of the suit’s backpack, but the Boomers had twin launchers, one at each side, protruding nearly a meter above the head of the suit. Flanking the launchers were another set
of paired weapons, fat and cylindrical, extending back a meter behind the Boomers’ shoulders and forward another meter. They were coil-guns, slow-firing and too cumbersome for general use and they made for a big-ass target, but devastating and handy for the special weapons team.

  And especially handy for blowing up big, tasty targets like deflector dishes.

  There were eight Boomers in the Fire Support squad and sixteen coil guns fired as one, the concussion from tungsten slugs the size of my hand being expelled at hypersonic velocities enough to throw my Vigilante sideways a step. Debris and smoke rose from the pavement as if in appreciation of the show of power, braiding into twisted funnels in the wake of the projectiles, but the reaction of the support columns was even more impressive.

  The initial punctures weren’t much to look at; ragged holes about the size of the projectiles, four in each of the columns facing the spaceport, but the mass of the deflector dish did the rest, shredding the metal at its weak points. Hundreds of tons of metal collapsed in on itself, the electrostatic field discharging as the power feeds were ripped away, making the hair on my arms stand up even through the insulation of my suit.

  The Tahni were buried where they stood, and not even centimeters of armor could save the ones caught under the weight of that much metal. Clouds of dust rolled away from the wreckage, enveloping us hundreds of meters away, and everything in my helmet display turned plasticky and unreal as the computer was forced to simulate the picture from thermal sensors alone.

  “Shift fire!” Xander snapped, sounding very proud of himself, like he’d personally invented the Boomer and pulled every trigger himself. “Target second dish and fire!”

  I don’t know how the hell they could see it. They were farther back than we were, so maybe the dust cloud hadn’t obscured their field of view as much as it had ours, but all I heard was the chest-deep thump of the coil guns discharging again, then the agonized shriek of rending metal. I’m sure the second dish coming down was just as impressive as the first, but you couldn’t have proven it by me.

  “Both targets serviced, sir,” Xander reported, making the announcement over the company band rather than a private one with Captain Covington, which I thought was pushing things a bit too far.

  “We’re not Fleet pilots, Lieutenant,” Covington chided him, his tone so dry two of the words could have started a fire if rubbed together. “We don’t ‘service targets.’ We’re Marines and we blow shit up. And I will allow you blowed that shit up real good.”

  I barked a laugh, making sure my mic wasn’t hot.

  “First and Second,” Covington went on, his tone turning businesslike. “Proceed to secondary objectives and secure the spaceport facilities. Lt. Kovacs, you’re in command.”

  “Yes, sir,” Kovacs said. “Come on, Marines, let’s move out!”

  He was a good officer, but I didn’t like him. He reminded me too much of the popular kids at the group homes in Trans-Angeles, the ones who thought being the big fish in that small of a pond meant something.

  “Fourth Platoon,” the Skipper went on, including all of us in all of his orders as a matter of course, because, as he liked to remind us, any one of us might have to take command at any time, “you’re with me and Headquarters. We’re heading east to support the Force Recon units landing at the military barracks. Third,” he said to me, “hook up with Alpha and act as a reserve for them at the industrial park. Once they’ve secured the area and Captain Cronje turns you loose, report back to me at the military barracks.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  And thank God. At least that would get us out of the dust cloud.

  Overhead, turbojets were screaming and proton beams were raining fire onto air defense turrets and troops strongholds throughout the city. I let myself draw in a deep breath. We had aerospace superiority. The Tahni didn’t know it, but they’d already lost the battle. Maybe Port Harcourt wasn’t going to be as bad as I’d thought.

  Famous last words.

  3

  Things hadn’t gone quite as well for Alpha, that much was obvious the second we jetted in behind their lines. Two of the smaller buildings in the industrial park, what might have been business offices if this were a human world, though God only knew what the Tahni did in them, were already burning fiercely, and most of the company had taken cover behind a series of storage tanks. The tanks probably held raw materials for fabricators, since I didn’t think even Cronje would be stupid enough to hide behind something volatile while electron beams and coil guns took shots at him through it.

  At the center of the ring of warehouses and fabrication plants was a bunker at least fifty meters across, its roof curved and covered with soil, bristling with gun turrets on all sides. They were firing nonstop at the Marine positions, smoke and steam billowing away from the massive, globular storage tanks with every shot.

  “Bang-Bang,” I said to my platoon sergeant as we touched down half a kilometer behind the ring of buildings, “take Third and Fourth squad and go around the other side of the perimeter. Let’s see if we can get that thing in a crossfire.”

  “Yes, sir,” he growled, sounding dubious about the order. “Though I don’t think we got anything that’ll touch that bunker.”

  “Medina, Kreis, you’re with me.”

  We approached the storage tanks at a cautious trot, darting between the buildings to avoid attracting fire until we reached an Alpha Company platoon huddled in the lee of what looked like a fabrication center. The IFF transponder told me it was Vicky’s platoon and I lumbered up to her Vigilante. It wasn’t until I could see around her and the suits beside her that I noticed four troopers sprawled out on the ground beside the wall of the building. One was clearly dead, most of the armor’s chest plastron melted away by an electron beam, and if the others were alive, it was only barely.

  “You guys got a problem here?” I asked her, the question not as light and bantering as it would have been a few seconds ago.

  A coil gun round bit off a corner of the fabrication center, spraying us with fragments of concrete and a shower of dust, and I ducked out of instinct.

  “Gosh, you think?” she snapped. “Those turrets were concealed under thermal masking panels. They caught us right in the open and took down half of Third squad before we could get to cover. There are more casualties over behind the storage tanks.”

  “Shit,” I muttered, spotting the downed suits hidden in the shadows of the globular tanks as Vigilante battlesuits shuffled back and forth, searching for imagined safety. “Hold on a second.”

  I switched to Cronje’s frequency, struck by the realization that he’d been pinned down here while we were taking out the deflector dishes.

  “Captain Cronje,” I said, stepping over his argument with a platoon leader that I pretended not to hear. “This is Lt. Alvarez from Delta. I’ve been sent over by Captain Covington to provide support for your objective. We took down the deflectors and the assault shuttles are already hitting the air-defense installations. You might be able to call in an air strike on this bunker by now.”

  “Already tried it.” Cronje’s response was terse and hard-edged. “They haven’t taken down the jammers yet. I can’t get a signal through to the satellite relays and trying to get out into the open for a chance at laser line-of-sight is suicide with those turrets shooting at anything that moves.”

  I scanned my long-range sensors and picked up aircraft on thermal but he was right, there was no direct line-of-sight opening to contact them, and that was even assuming the communications laser from a battlesuit would reach them with the particulate scatter in the humid, smoke-filled atmosphere. I turned my scan downward and leaned out far enough around the corner to see the bunker. A heavy KE gun swung toward me and I pulled back just ahead of a burst of tantalum darts. Shit.

  “There’s gotta be some other way into that thing,” I reasoned, still on the frequency with Cronje. “They didn’t climb in through the gun turrets. There’s an underground entrance to the bunker.” I leane
d out again, tempting fate but needing to see. A quick scan of the buildings surrounding the bunker, then back. This time, the burst came closer, coating the shoulder of my Vigilante with dust from the pulverized concrete.

  “Are you trying to get yourself killed?” Vicky demanded on a private line between us.

  I didn’t answer, reading the scans from my impromptu recon. There were no thermal signatures in the buildings on either side of the bunker, at least none that looked like Tahni. The warehouse at the far end had a massive jumble of Tahni-size thermal readings on the bottom floor, all clumped together.

  “There are Tahni civilians in the warehouse down there,” I said, motioning straight down the concourse from the storage tanks, past the bunker.

  “Yeah, we know,” Cronje said, sounding even more impatient now than he had been before. “We checked in there first but we didn’t see any armed troops.”

  “Why?” I shot back. “Why would they put dozens or hundreds of civilians in a warehouse? It’s not particularly safe and it’s not like they don’t have underground shelters for their civilians. Did they look like workers who maybe got trapped here?”

  “How the fuck should I know?” Cronje demanded, but Vicky cut him off.

  “My platoon checked the building. They were older males. Too old to be soldiers.”

  “But not too old to be retired soldiers,” I said. “The Tahni don’t have anti-aging treatments. They don’t believe in them, remember? So, once a male gets too old to be a soldier, they retire him. And if they needed some civilians to put in a building to conceal the entrance to a bunker…”

  “…they’d probably use retired soldiers,” Vicky finished for me.

  “It’s your idea, Alvarez,” Cronje declared. “You and your people can check it out.” It sounded more like a punishment than a compliment. “Kodjoe, your platoon will go back them up,” he added, apparently deciding they had nothing better to do.