by Rick Partlow
“By date of rank. But that won’t mean anything unless we make it to the ground. Listen up, Francis, we have to be ready for an early drop.”
“That could kill us all,” he reminded me. I didn’t need the reminder, but he hadn’t been around for Brigantia.
“So could staying on this bird if she gets shot out of the sky. Point Barber is a little under Earth standard. I think we could get most of us down and operating if we don’t drop before 500 meters, so let’s plan on that, right?”
“Right.” He sounded relieved to have someone else to give orders, which I also couldn’t blame him for.
“Get with your platoon sergeant and get your people ready. Don’t let them think about the Iwo or the rest of the flight to the planet. There’s nothing they can do about it except panic, and we don’t need panic.” More panic, I added silently.
“Will do. Thanks, Cam.”
I focused on the front camera feed, allowing myself just a few seconds to consider how close all those explosions seemed, how many enemy ships were in front of us, trying to kill us. Then I switched over to Bang-Bang and told him what I’d told Kovacs.
“You dropped early once,” he said. I was impressed. He must have looked up my history. It was a very platoon sergeant thing to do. “Didn’t go so well for the other people in your bird.”
“And it’d be worse this time, with a planet crawling with enemy and a not a single human colonist to be found within twenty light years. Improvise, adapt and overcome, though.”
“Ooh-rah, sir.”
“Third Platoon,” I said to the Marines, “listen up.”
They needed calming, I thought, but they needed me to be honest with them, too. I’d let Bang-Bang give them the details, but they needed to hear from me, if for no other reason than to let them know I wasn’t gibbering like an idiot.
“We’ve lost the Iwo. She took an anti-ship missile.” I paused, knowing they’d be cursing inside their helmets, not wanting them to miss the next part. “But we have nearly the whole battalion intact and all of Delta. I can’t promise you for sure we’re going to make it to the planet—that’s up to the Fleet boys running interference for us. But I can promise you that if we do, the operation is still a go, and we are just the Marines to pull it off. Gunny Morrel is going to give you some last-minute guidance on what to do if we have to drop early, and I want you to listen to him like your life depends on it, because it does. Are we clear?”
“Clear, sir!” Kries yelled it out first, then the rest echoed it.
Warmth spread through my chest, not just at the trust they were showing in me but at the balls it took not to give in to the fear. And it was quickly replaced by a sick feeling. I was giving them false hope. But it was the only kind I had available, and it would have to be enough, because all I had left to do was stare out at a battle I couldn’t affect, at the very finger of chance writing her twisted tale through the fire and destruction around us and hoping she’d miss me.
“Uh-oh,” Abanks said in my ear. It’s never good when your pilot says something like that. “Everybody hold on back there.”
Like we had a choice.
I tightened the muscles in my gut even more than they already were and the six gees turned into zero, followed by a thunderous hammering against the hull, the sound of the maneuvering thrusters changing our trajectory. And then God stomped me into a paste and I blacked out.
I don’t know how long I was out, but I woke to the sound of someone retching over their suit comm pickup, then two more someones who couldn’t take the sound and I was lucky I wasn’t one of them. We were accelerating again, though not as hard, and somewhere, an alarm blared, letting us know we were taking laser fire. The ship went into a spin on a staccato chain-fire of steering jets and the angular momentum of the spin didn’t just add to the three or four-gravity acceleration, it squared it or maybe cubed it. I was never very good at math, and worse at it when my inner ear was screaming obscenities at me and swearing to kill me if we both survived this.
I had no concept of what had happened or how hard we had wound up boosting, and I wasn’t about to press the flight crew for information while we were spinning to try to keep a long-distance shot from a laser from burning through our armor. We were running from something I couldn’t see, and couldn’t have focused on even if I’d found the right camera to watch it. Light flashed around us and something exploded, and I just had to clench my teeth and hope to hell it wasn’t the ship coming apart.
“Oh, yeah!” Abanks crowed, and steering jets took us out of our spin as if the drop-ship was celebrating with its own drumbeat. “Thank you, Assault Flight!”
He whooped and then so did I as a dagger-sharp assault shuttle burned past our right wing, another on our left. And then we were in the clouds. I hadn’t even noticed because it was a coal-black night over Deltaville and only the absence of stars had provided a clue we’d entered the atmosphere, but the clouds shut out the nightmare battle and I almost thought we were safe.
But the presence of an atmosphere was a cruel trick by God to make it even plainer exactly how much danger we were in. Lasers weren’t invisible threats only revealed by distant alarms, they were sheaths of crackling fire rising up through the clouds like reverse lightning, seeking us out and finding something, if not our bird. The cumulonimbus lit up, not with the violence of a thunderstorm, but with the death of a human flight crew. I could only pray it wasn’t one of the drop-ships, and felt like shit doing it, because that would mean it was one of the assault shuttles that had just saved our asses.
More lightning crackled downward, our own birds striking back, followed by the firecracker flare of igniting rocket engines as missiles streaked out of a weapons bay and sought out enemy defenses, or maybe hunted down a Tahni dual-environment fighter.
This is insane. How could anyone hope to survive this?
I couldn’t stop thinking it, over and over. They’d sent us into this knowing what could happen, knowing how much it would cost. Who’d made the decision? Had it come from the High Command, Generals and Admirals who hadn’t heard a shot fired in anger since the Pirate Wars, or maybe since the First War with the Tahni? Or never?
Had it come from President Gregory Jameson, that slick-haired weasel puppet of the Corporate Council? The man had never spent a day in combat, had never so much as set foot on a colony world, much less a military ship. I was half convinced he didn’t exist, that he was an AI simulation, a long con run on the few citizens who bothered to vote by the people who held the real power.
Would anything change from this war? Would Earth pay any more attention to the colonies now? Would the people who buried their nose in the scansheets as they walked from their train to the Zocalo in Trans-Angeles even give a shit who had won? Would they even know or care about the Marines and Fleet pilots and crews who’d died today?
And I could only afford to wallow in that self-pity for about five more minutes until I had to lead a bunch of kids who had no dreams beyond living through the day into the biggest infantry battle on another world in human history, and try to pretend I could make that dream come true. How the hell did the Skipper do this? How had he done it for decades? Top had been doing it even longer, but all she had to do was teach the kids to survive. He had to lead them into hell and pretend they’d come out the other side.
Turbulence tossed us like a feather on the wind and I couldn’t be sure if it was the incredible heat and ionization of the air or if we’d felt the concussion of a missile warhead, and wasn’t sure if I cared. Belly jets roared and pushed us into a trajectory no airframe was meant to follow, and only the incredible power of the fusion-fed turbines kept us in the air.
How much longer? Mother Mary, how much longer?
I should really learn to keep my mouth shut. Another concussion, closer this time, and just above the roar of the rush of superheated air, the patter of something smacking against the hull rang through, like hail on a roof. The bottom fell out from beneath us and left
my stomach somewhere a thousand meters higher, and we were in a spin and I couldn’t tell which way was up.
“Drop!” Abanks screamed in my ear. “Emergency drop!”
“Emergency drop!” I echoed the order without thought. “Third Platoon, drop now!”
I didn’t have time to check altitude or position. I just yanked the lever and the ship spat me out like a watermelon seed into a night afire with explosions, engine flares and the actinic glare of energy weapons. The plane had been in a spin and now I was, cartwheeling into the sky with very little idea of where the ground was or my position in relation to it.
Luckily, the suit knew, and the jacks implanted in my head shared the knowledge with me as if it was something I’d known all along, like an instinct I’d been born with. I hit the thrusters and cried out at the pain of the sudden cessation of the spin, the deceleration pounding me into the suit’s padding with bruising force.
The suit’s jets slowed the drop, but I couldn’t make out a damned thing through the helmet’s optics through the sea of static discharge and particulate haze, so I checked the altimeter and the dead-reckoning map instead.
It was bad, I decided in that split-second, but it could have been worse. We were about ten kilometers off-target of our drop zone and more importantly, just over 550 meters up. Which meant a painful, potentially damaging landing but not a deadly one. At least if we could avoid being blown up on the way down.
“Third platoon!” I said, counting on laser-line-of-sight to reach them, since no microwave transmission was going to make it intact through the static charge crackling in the air, sending yellow halos off the metal of my suit like St. Elmo’s Fire. “Form on me! Execute Emergency Landing Fall on impact!”
The ELF was something we trained with rarely and never used. Until today. The theory was, if one of us had an emergency drop that wasn’t at some impossible altitude like the one we’d faced on Brigantia, but something just over recommended safe drop, we were supposed to hit in the ELF form. It was based on the way our predecessors, the paratroopers of hundreds of years ago would try to land, the appropriately named Parachute Landing Fall, or PLF. Balls of the feet, side of the calf, side of the thigh, side of the hip, side of the back, to spread the impact out over as great a surface area as possible. For us, it meant avoiding critical damage to the armor before we took it into battle.
I had no fucking idea if it would work in practice, because it wasn’t something you could practice to full effect. No one wanted to drop a Vigilante at a hundred meters over optimum altitude, then let a clumsy Marine break their legs and damage an expensive piece of military hardware in the process, so all practice was done either at recommended drop height or in a simulator.
I always did great at it in the simulator.
I’d thought the fog would clear as I dropped lower, but it went all the way down to the street and I had to make last-second shifts in my suit’s attitude to keep from bouncing off the side of a two-hundred-meter-tall building, something shaped vaguely like a wedge of quartz I’d seen as a hallway decoration in the Marine Headquarters on Inferno. I blew out a breath, thinking I’d cleared it, but I abruptly realized the thing broadened out substantially as I neared the base and I had to dodge again, losing track of my altitude and nearly slamming into the ground flat-footed.
The Emergency Landing Form was not as easy to pull off in real life as it was in the simulators, mostly because the Vigilante’s feet were very flat, and it took a shitload of effort to make the damned thing topple over sideways. I pulled off something close to textbook…well, in the general area of the textbook, anyway. As long as that included skipping the whole leg part and falling straight on my armored ass.
Stars filled my vision and other yellow flashes I thought might have been residual effects of the hit turned out to be my armor’s damage control systems informing me I was a moron who shouldn’t do that again. But when I rolled to my feet, the suit worked, and I guess that was as much as I had a right to expect.
The rest of the platoon came down in the street around me, some of them remembering to do an ELF, some just hitting flat-footed and falling to their knees. Where First Platoon had come down, I had no idea and probably wouldn’t find out until we reached the objective.
“Squad leaders, status,” I snapped, feeling the temptation of taking a minute to simply revel in disbelief at our own survival or descend into terror at what we had passed through and realizing we had the time for neither.
“First squad,” Valerie Medina reported, her words clipped and precise, “all Marines present, all suits operational. Delp has minor damage to his left hip actuator, Slattery has a warning light in her right knee motivator.”
“Second squad, all Marines present, all suits operational, sir.” Bradley Houghton was the youngest of the squad leaders and he sounded a bit shaky. He also didn’t offer any more details, but that was all right, I’d never remember the exact damage to everyone’s suits, anyway.
“Third squad…,” Christian Majid trailed off, his voice breaking. “Sir, we lost Private Carroll. He dropped but then…something hit him. I couldn’t see what it was. He went offline a few seconds ago and I’m not picking up a transponder, so he must have landed somewhere out of line of sight.” He sucked in a ragged breath before he continued. “Umm, all others present and operational.”
Shit. There was nothing we could do about it. Carroll could have come down anywhere, and going to search for him now would kill the mission.
“I’ll let Search and Rescue know as soon as we have comms again,” I said, because what else was there to say?
“Fourth squad all here,” Kreis told me. “Hoagland has a frozen ankle joint but she can still run on it. Everyone else is good to go.”
“My suit is operational, sir,” Bang-Bang told me, his voice neutral. He’d slipped into his game face and he wouldn’t be showing any emotion until the game was won.
One MIA, probably dead, and we’d just landed. But it could have been so much worse…and it probably would be before the night was over.
“First squad,” I said, “take point. Bang-Bang, you’re on drag.” I waved an arm forward. “Move out, Third. We got a war to win.”
12
The streets of Deltaville were quiet.
Above us, lightning crackled from cloud to cloud, and explosions glowed orange and white like the sun breaking through the haze here and there, but the fog was so thick, it all seemed a world away. Down among the residences and shops and temples, there was no sign of habitation at all, as if the Tahni had simply decided to abandon the planet in the face of our invasion.
I knew better than that, knew their method of operation. They’d had hours of warning that we were coming between the time we’d Transitioned into the system to the first of us setting foot on the planet. The civilians were well-disciplined enough to stay off the street, to stay out of the way.
Except at Port Harcourt. Except at that warehouse, at the bunker.
I shoved the thought aside, pushed back the images of dead Tahni juveniles, following their fathers, brothers, and uncles into harm’s way, trying to act as living shields for their military. When had they started doing that? Had they figured us out, figured out that we didn’t like killing their noncombatants?
Well, some of us don’t like it.
Maybe Cronje had been right, maybe I’d just been falling for their trick, letting them get away with it. But those kids hadn’t volunteered to be living shields, even if their adult male family members had. And for me, it all came down to Demeter. We’d been furious with the Tahni for deliberately slaughtering civilians at Demeter, but if we did the same thing, how could we blame them?
And yet…civilians died in war. Any war from the beginning of time right up until the latter half of the 23rd Century.
Something moved down a side street to my right, and I barely kept myself from roasting it. It was an animal. Something furry, about the size of a sheep, wearing some sort of harness around it
s shoulders. It saw us and ran back the way it had come, letting out a high-pitched squeal.
“What do they call those things?” Bang-Bang asked me.
“Kuwari or quori or something like that,” I told him. “They’re like pets or service animals, I think. Someone from Charlie told me they taste really good grilled.”
I checked the mapping display and tried to force my thoughts back to the mission. Recriminations and regrets were a luxury for after the battle.
“We’re two streets over from a sort of central courtyard,” I announced. “That’s the Delta Company rally point. If everyone else made it down, that’s where they’ll be. And if there are already Marines there, they might be under fire, so don’t blunder right into an electron beam or a coil gun round, Delp.”
“Yes, sir,” the Marine walking point affirmed. “No wandering into electron beams today.”
“Cut the chatter, Delp,” Bang-Bang snapped, not so much in anger but from habit. He was a platoon sergeant, after all.
I snorted dark amusement. Just a few months ago, he’d been a raw nerve, a kid snatched out of a regional detention center in Toronto after an adolescence spent in one petty crime after another had culminated in something serious enough to make enlisting seem the lesser of two evils. He’d shown something of a natural talent for the Vigilante, but he’d been skittish and uncomfortable around officers in general and me in particular, maybe because of my reputation. Now, he wasn’t afraid to yank my chain a little, which was an improvement, though it didn’t make up for his propensity to let the local girls buy him too many drinks and then getting into fights with their boyfriends.
“Take a right at the next cross-street, Delp,” I said. “Then right again.”
This would have been faster if we’d hopped a block at a time with the jump-jets, but I was running totally blind, with no idea where the enemy was deployed, and nothing says ‘shoot me’ quite like a platoon of battlesuits flying through the air over an enemy city. So, we walked. Or rather, we loped, the overpowered artificial musculature of the Vigilantes taking us four meters at a stride, the pounding of our footpads on the pavement a chorus of jackhammers. It wasn’t exactly subtle, but it was fast enough, and with practice, we’d developed a talent at holding formation while galloping at full-speed.
