Direct Fire #4 Drop Trooper

by Rick Partlow

  Or close enough.

  Where the cargo truck had been was a crater, billowing smoke and still raining debris. Where Freddy’s fire team had been was nothing. Something wet and biological smacked down on the pavement beside me, and I tried not to look at it.

  The Tahni civilians…where were they?

  The ones who’d been near the truck were gone, of course, blown to pieces no larger than the ones that had just rained down near me, but there’d been dozens, hundreds more inside that warehouse. My eyes began to focus and I saw the Tahni hundreds of meters away from the truck, picking themselves off the pavement and standing there in a daze, the juveniles clinging to their fathers.

  “What the fuck is going on?” Cronje bellowed in my ear. I was still on the Alpha Company net, which was overflowing with one transmission after another stepping on each other until Cronje used his command override. “Kodjoe, what the hell is happening over there?”

  I rolled my suit onto its side and clambered to my feet, ignoring a bunch of damage warnings telling me I shouldn’t do that. Freddy was just a couple dozen meters away from me, sprawled on his belly, his articulated hand clawing at the ground to gain purchase.

  “Jericho!” he yelled, his voice breaking at the end. “Corporal Jericho, report!”

  I wasn’t certain, but I intuited that Corporal Jericho must have been the team leader. I wanted to tell him they were gone, but it wasn’t my place.

  “Kodjoe, you’d better fucking report!” Cronje again. He wasn’t that far away. Why didn’t he just come over here himself and figure it out?

  I turned to face the direction we’d come from, just about ready to tell Cronje what had happened myself, but Freddy finally got his shit together.

  “Sir, it was a VBIED,” he said, his voice still shaky. “A bomb on a cargo truck driven by civilians. I think….” I could hear his swallow. “Sir, I’ve lost four Marines, Alpha team from First squad. What…what are your orders?”

  There was nothing for a moment, and I wondered if Cronje was out of line-of-sight range, if the jamming was silencing him. But when he spoke again, his tone was deliberate enough that I was sure he’d been considering his words.

  “Take the rest of your platoon,” he told Freddy, “and clean them out. All of them.”

  “Clean them out, sir?” The question could have been disbelieving, could have been from a man looking for clarification because he didn’t like the sound of an order and wanted to make sure he’d heard it right. But it wasn’t. It was the question of a man who was hoping the order was the way it had sounded.

  “They’re insurgents, Lieutenant,” Cronje growled, his voice causing distortion in the microphone. “Kill them.”

  Hackles rose on the back of my neck, a haze of disbelief that I might have blamed on the concussion but was more just a wanting it not to be true.

  “There are children in that group!” I said. I tried to take a step forward, but my right hip actuator gave out and I collapsed to a knee. “You can’t!”

  But Freddy’s platoon was flying in, touching down beside him, fanning out to pin the civilians between them and the explosion crater and the fierce heat still emanating from it. I couldn’t hear his commands to them because he was using their platoon net and I wasn’t authorized to listen in on it, but their left forearms rose high, elevating the grenade launchers built into the suit there, our auxiliary weapons for use against infantry.

  I still didn’t believe they’d do it, or perhaps I’d convinced myself they wouldn’t so I wouldn’t have to do anything about it.

  They fired as one, the grenades arcing up into the air twenty or thirty meters and coming down at the clusters of civilians out in the open. The waves of heat streaming off the bomb crater saved some of them, altering the flight of the grenades just enough to keep them out of the center of the group, hitting near the edges instead.

  The explosions were tiny, audible only as soft crumps, their ignition a supernova flare of HiPex turning sintered metal into plasma spears that sliced through the front rank of the Tahni, sending a score of them crumpling to the ground like marionettes with their strings cut.

  “No, Goddammit!” I yelled.

  Since I couldn’t walk, I hit the jets and came down beside Freddy, slamming my shoulder into his and nearly knocking him over.

  “Stop this!” I yelled at him. “There are fucking children in there, man!”

  “Get away from me!” he snapped back, punctuating the demand with a shove that sent my crippled armor sprawling. “What the hell is wrong with you, Cam? Those are the enemy!”

  “Kreis!” I said, praying the man was close enough to get the laser line-of-sight transmission. “Get your squad in front of those Goddamned civilians right now! Block those grenades! That’s a fucking order!”

  A second barrage of grenades fell, these course-corrected by the shooters or perhaps the targeting computers in their suits, and thirty or forty more Tahni fell as they ran back toward the warehouse. Some of the bodies were small, a head shorter than the others.

  I snarled and jumped, the boosters kicking me in the pants, jarring muscles already sore from the shockwave of the explosion. I landed on one leg and tried to balance, standing a hundred meters ahead of Freddy’s platoon, staring out at them, putting myself between them and the Tahni civilians.

  “You have to stop this shit!” I yelled on the general net since I didn’t have their platoon frequency. “This is a fucking illegal order! You can’t do this!”

  “Get out of the way, Cam,” Freddy insisted.

  Another flight of grenades launched, but I’d set my suit to target them as hostile fire and my own grenade launcher popped rounds to intercept. I fired my plasma gun into the path of the barrage and the rush of superheated air set most of them off, a firework show at mid-morning. And that would have been it, as much as I could have done. Another fusillade would have gone past me and the civilians were still in range, half still trying to head back to the warehouse, half just running hell-bent for leather away.

  What came out over the open stretch of pavement wasn’t another flight of grenades, though. It was Kries and Fourth squad, answering my call. They landed beside me and faced back towards Freddy’s platoon; plasma guns levelled. I blew out a breath, frankly amazed they’d done it.

  “What the fuck are you doing?” Freddy was screaming now. “Those motherfuckers killed my Marines! You’re letting them get away!”

  “The one who killed your fire team died with the bomb, Freddy.” I was pissed off, not at Freddy but at Cronje, and I knew I couldn’t let it through in my voice, not if I wanted to reach him. I kept my tone as steady as I could, firm but not strident. “And if there are more insurgents with that group, we should have arrested them and let Fleet Intelligence take care of it. Killing unarmed civilians is against the UCMJ.” The Uniform Code of Military Justice dated back to before the Commonwealth, and it had changed quite a bit through the centuries, but some things had been illegal from day one right through to the end of the 23rd Century.

  Things were quiet for a few, long seconds, and I thought maybe I had gotten through to Freddy, but when a group of Vigilante battlesuits came trotting up behind him, I realized he’d merely been on comms. The IFF transponder showed the identity of the Marines inside the suits, but I would have recognized them by the insignia on the chests. It was Alpha’s Headquarters Platoon, led by Captain Cronje, and he wasn’t happy.

  “Lt. Alvarez!” he exploded, advancing until he was nearly chest to chest with me, as if that somehow increased the clarity of our suit comms, since neither of us could see the other’s face. “You are disobeying a direct order!”

  “In fact, I was not, sir,” I told him, unable to keep the loathing out of my voice as hard as I tried. “I received no orders. I merely tried to keep another platoon leader of the exact same rank and date in grade as me from carrying out an illegal order.”

  He raised the left hand of his suit, and for a second, I thought he was going
to hit me. I noticed Kries’ plasma gun track just slightly to his right, covering Cronje. I think Cronje must have seen it, too, since he lowered his hand.

  “It’s not your fucking job to interpret orders, Lieutenant!”

  “Sir, I was taught from Basic all the way through OCS that it is every Marine’s responsibility to refuse to obey illegal orders. The order to kill unarmed civilians is illegal. The order to kill unarmed children isn’t just illegal, it’s morally reprehensible.”

  While we spoke, the rest of my platoon arrived, led by Bang-Bang. The platoon sergeant didn’t take the time to question me as to what was going on and why we were facing down other Marines, he just formed them up beside me, arrayed in a semicircle. Other drop-troopers were flying or walking in as well, the rest of Alpha Company, all watching us. Did they know what was going on? Were they uncommitted or just confused?

  I could identify with their confusion. I didn’t know what the hell I was doing or why. But I’d made the decision and it was too late to go back on it now.

  Cronje’s helmet scanned back and forth, an instinctive motion since he didn’t actually need to move his helmet or his head to see what was going on around him. His left hand rose again, the claw-like fingers clenched into a fist, but then he lowered it.

  “Kodjoe,” he said over his company net. “Pull out of here. Go search for remains of your fire team.”

  “But sir…,” Freddy began to protest, but Cronje cut him off.

  “Do as you’re fucking told, Lieutenant.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Freddy turned back to his platoon and began directing them away from the warehouse, out toward the crater. But Captain Cronje still faced me, still less than a meter away from me, his rage seething like the heat pouring off the blast site.

  “Don’t think this is over, Alvarez,” Cronje hissed at me, and I could see on the HUD that he was speaking on a private channel between us. “Don’t think I’ll forget you took their side and betrayed your fellow Marines. You’re going to regret the day you were promoted from PFC.”

  “Believe me, sir,” I assured him, my voice steadier than my stomach, “I already do.”

  5

  The pulse carbine dragged at my shoulder by its webbed sling, awkward and out of place. I felt like an idiot carrying it, like a child playing soldier. And yet simultaneously, I felt incredibly exposed on the streets of Port Harcourt, the carbine completely inadequate to deal with a city, a world filled with enemies who wanted me dead.

  I was being imprecise, calling the city Port Harcourt rather than the world, but since we weren’t staying here long, I hadn’t bothered to learn the Tahni name for the place, and the official Fleet reports just called it “the Capital,” which was a commentary on lack of imagination in the military structure. There were two dozen other cities on the world, which seemed simultaneously far too many for us to take and far too few for a whole planet. But the Tahni didn’t tend to spread out, preferring to live in clusters, so there were no small towns or outposts here.

  Not too different from Earth, but a departure from human colony worlds. Even on the core colonies, we liked our elbow room, liked have some space between us and our neighbors. It was a commentary, I thought, on the type of people willing to leave Earth in the first place. Anyone happy crammed into a mega-city could have stayed behind.

  That didn’t include me anymore. I wasn’t happy at all crammed into this particular city, even on the outskirts in the industrial district where the Marines had established their base after the Security Command had landed and began setting up their new structure to govern the planet. Half the industrial district had burned to the ground in the battle, and what was left was ragged and strewn with debris, but we’d made do with worse. Our company had set up a hooch city in the same empty warehouse where we had the maintenance gear for our suits, which made them easier to guard, but by some quirk of planning, the suits, our cots, hammocks, and cooking gear were almost two kilometers from the battalion headquarters.

  And we sure as hell weren’t going to walk around here unarmed, whether it had been required or not, so out came the pulse carbines from our suit bug-out kits and we all wandered around with them slung on our shoulders like we actually knew what we were doing with a shoulder-fired weapon. I was one of the few drop-troopers I knew who’d actually used one in combat, and even I would freely admit I was little better than a novice with the thing. But no one wanted to admit we were going to depend on the Force Recon pukes to protect us.

  I passed by a Force Recon security patrol, the straight-legs looking a lot taller and more intimidating when I was out of my Vigilante, their Gauss rifles heavy and imposing and so much more professional looking than my dinky little pulse carbine. I couldn’t see their faces through the visors of their helmets, but I had to imagine they were looking at me with disdain, the same way I looked at them when I was in my battlesuit and they were tiny and breakable by comparison.

  I stared at them as they passed and nearly ran right into Vicky.

  “Oh, um, hi,” I said, trying to smile.

  She didn’t.

  “What the fuck, Cam?” she said without preamble, arms folded, a glaze of frost across her features. “You pull this shit with Cronje and then you don’t even come talk to me?”

  “I didn’t want to make trouble for you,” I told her, spreading my hands helplessly. “It’s not exactly top-secret that you and I are…you know. Cronje seemed pretty pissed off at me and I didn’t want you catching any of the heat.”

  “You could have at least called me,” she insisted, slapping my shoulder hard with her right palm. “I’m hearing all sorts of shit second-hand from Freddy and the other platoon leaders and I don’t have any idea what’s going on! They’re saying you protected the insurgents who killed Freddy’s fire team!”

  “The Tahni who killed his fire team were suicide bombers,” I told her, trying not to give free rein to the anger roiling in my gut. “They died in the explosion. If Cronje had ordered Freddy or me or anyone to secure the civilians inside the warehouse, I would have done it. He ordered them all killed.” I bared my teeth in a snarl I couldn’t hold back. “He was out of control.”

  “Shit.” She rubbed a hand across her face and rasped a sigh. “This is bad.”

  I glanced around, trying to see if any other drop-troopers were watching us. We were alone, so I grabbed her hand in mine.

  “You shouldn’t hang around with me for a while,” I told her. “Let things die down. Maybe once we’re off this planet, everyone’ll just forget about it.”

  “And you think that’s what they should do?” she asked me. “Just forget about it? You want to let Cronje get away with this? It’s not right.”

  “It’s a war.” I shrugged it off with a casual dismissal I didn’t actually feel but wanted to convince her I did. “I’ve done and seen a lot of things I didn’t like.” I stared at the ground but saw something light-years and a lifetime away, saw my mother on the dusty ground, the life draining from the wound in her chest. “I’ve seen a lot of things I didn’t like before the war, and no one ever paid for any of them.”

  She darted in and kissed me, her hand slipping off my arm as she passed.

  “Be careful.”

  I felt as if everyone was staring at me as I walked under the overhang of the vehicle park where we’d set up our Battalion HQ, but I shut them out and kept my eyes straight ahead, focused on our company area. Covington was standing in the midst of a cluster of seated enlisted men and junior NCOs, their noses buried in haptic holograms.

  “I don’t care which colonel ordered those replacement turbines,” Covington was pacing as he spoke into the audio input of his ‘link, “we have three Vigilantes with deadlined jump-jets and they need to be up for our scheduled security patrols. If you don’t get them to us, I will give your ‘link address to the Battalion Sergeant Major and let him deal with you.” He paused both in speech and mid-step, then nodded. “Good. I appreciate it. I will expect
them to be in our maintenance area by 0900 local time tomorrow.”

  He looked up at my approach.

  “Alvarez. Do you have your schedule set up for the patrols yet?”

  “Yes, sir,” I told him. “I uploaded it to the company servers before I headed over here.”

  “Good. Come over here and sit down.”

  He led me to a makeshift conference room, compartmentalized from the rest of the headquarters by soundproof panels surrounding a ring-shaped table positioned around a portable holographic projector. Folding chairs were clustered around the table and he motioned me into one of them, then sat down beside me, close enough that it made me slightly uncomfortable.

  “We need to talk about what happened.”

  I very deliberately did not sigh heavily or roll my eyes, though I very much wanted to.

  “Sir,” I said, “I put everything that happened in my report. I’m not sure what else I can tell you.”

  “Don’t be obtuse with me, son.” The Skipper raised an eyebrow. “This isn’t something you can just stick in an after-action report and forget about it. You’re going to have to do one of two things: either amend your report, or contact the Judge Advocate General and file charges.”

  “I don’t want to file charges, sir,” I said immediately. “I don’t need to make a big deal of this.”

  Covington snorted.

  “Too late for that. Greg’s already pitching a shit-fit.” At my curious look, he amended. “Greg Cronje. He came storming into Battalion Headquarters about ten minutes after we finished setting it up and demanded I write you an Article 15 for insubordination. I told him to go fuck himself, though you didn’t hear that from me.”

  I chuckled under my breath.

  “I’m sure he was happy about that. But honestly, sir, if you think I should drop the whole thing, I’ll leave it out of my report.”