Direct Fire #4 Drop Trooper

by Rick Partlow

  It had become second-nature to me, which was why I was able to run full-out while letting my attention wander to the sensor readouts in my helmet, why I saw the thermal signatures just before Delp yelled out on the platoon net.

  “Battlesuits!” It was a mix of the panic of encountering the enemy, and the eagerness for a fight every good Marine felt when the real guns started firing.

  But these weren’t the enemy, and I knew it from their heat signature even before the IFF transponders began registering.

  “Hold fire!” I commanded, pushing forward to the front of the formation in just a few steps. “Hold fire! Those are ours!”

  The two platoons of Vigilantes faced each other at the intersection of the two streets, plasma guns still raised and at the ready, mute, inexpressive visages showing no recognition. It reminded me of cleaning robots colliding where their routes overlapped, neither willing to yield to the other.

  “Cam?” Francis Kovacs said, a familiar voice in my headphones. “Is that you?”

  “Of course, it’s me,” I shot back. I stepped closer to the First Platoon leader, by useless instinct. He could have heard me just as well twenty meters farther away. “Glad you made it down. We’ve got one Marine MIA, might have been taken out by ground-to-air fire. You?”

  “We lost two.” Kovacs’s tone was grim with a plaintive note to it, as if he was asking God why this would happen to his platoon. “Did you see where the others landed?”

  “No. We didn’t even know we’d find you here. We were heading for the rally point. It should be just one more street over. You want us to take point?”

  “Sure, yeah.”

  I hadn’t really needed to ask. Kovacs wasn’t a coward, but he was more than happy to let another platoon do the heavy lifting. I wondered if it was because he didn’t have confidence in his ability as a combat leader, or if he thought taking casualties would look bad on his record. But I might have been letting my own bias against Academy grads cloud my judgement of the man.

  “Okay, then. Staggered file until we hit the courtyard, then staggered wedge formation. Move it out, Third.”

  I knew something was going down at the rally point before Delp hit the intersection. There was a constant background crackle from the air battle raging above us, but the sonic sensors on the Vigilante were sensitive and sophisticated enough to differentiate the concussive reports reverberating off the curved faces of the buildings surrounding us from the blasts overhead. I opened my mouth to give Delp a warning, but shut it again. He knew what to expect just as well as I did. Instead, I moved up again, wanting to get a look at the situation before the rest of the force stepped in it.

  The courtyard was separated from the residential and small business district by a wall, curving and twisting adobe four meters tall, broken in places by gaps big enough to let in pedestrians or small vehicles. Actinic flares of light flashed through the gaps, tiny windows into what was happening on the other side, and I knew if I tried to maneuver two platoons through, I was funneling them into what might be pre-registered firing arcs.

  “Third!” I commanded, running just a few meters behind Delp as we approached the wall. “Over the wall! Hit the jets and follow me!”

  Delp went first, probably trying to make sure I didn’t take over his position at point, but probably regretted it when an electron beam came just a few centimeters from spearing through his helmet.

  “Shit!” he blurted, firing out into the blackness at the source of the shot.

  We’d jumped into chaos, a raging firefight that surged and swirled and tossed like waves against a rocky coastline, and information flooded in at me faster than I could process it. I let my consciousness go slightly out of focus, allowing the important details to penetrate the filter while the rest washed over me, ignored.

  The courtyard was huge, bigger than I’d thought it would be from the maps we’d been given, probably three kilometers on a side. Paved paths described a spiral course through swathes of tall grass, or something similar to grass that filled the ecological niche on Tahni worlds, while odd, geometric sculptures sprouted up seemingly at random. On the far side of the square, probably four or five klicks away, the fusion reactor complex rose above the curvature of the ground in a series of geodesic domes surrounded by gigantic water pipes for cooling. The whole thing was lined with a retaining wall and surrounded by bunkers, bristling with KE gun turrets and looking fairly unassailable. Beyond it were the massive, concave dishes of the deflector shield generators protecting the military base and the spaceport, crackling plasma energy surrounding the dishes in a halo of raw power climbing into the sky to meet the proton bombardment from the cruisers in orbit.

  And beneath the battle raging between the gods in heaven, demons and angels fought for control of the world below. Faceless, metal beings breathing fire, tangling and running and leaping in a fatal ballet out of some reimagining of Dante’s Inferno using 23rd-Century technology, Vigilantes taking the place of the heavenly hosts for my purposes, while Tahni High Guard battlesuits stood in for Satan’s hordes.

  The IFF signals were all over the place, dribs and drabs from every company in the battalion. How they’d wound up here was testament to the truth of that old saying about battle plans and how long they survived after enemy contact. But I recognized some. Most of Fourth Platoon was there, and Cano was in the midst of them, and if he wasn’t exactly leading or directing, he was doing a damned good job of fighting for his life.

  There were at least two companies of High Guard facing them, pouring into the square from the direction of the fusion plant, some jetting in even as I watched, outnumbering the Marines nearly two to one before First and Third joined the fight. And if we didn’t exactly even out the numbers, we certainly evened the odds.

  “Third Platoon,” I ordered, my brain working separately from my instincts, my finger touching the trigger and blasting a High Guard suit in the chest with a gout of plasma, sending it tumbling backwards away from the Marine it had been about to finish off. “Volley fire, target the incoming enemy suits with your missiles! Now!”

  We couldn’t use the missiles against the closest of the enemy. They were too tightly engaged with our own people, and while the weapons had a fail-safe against fratricide and would disarm automatically if a friendly IFF signal was detected, even an on-target hit against an enemy suit could damage the Marine engaged with them. But there were two more platoons of High Guard suits jetting in from the power plant, and they were handy targets.

  I had picked out an enemy suit before I even touched the pavement, and I braced there for a split-second, giving the missile a nice, fixed platform to launch itself from before I touched the jets again. I squirted off the spot just as a pair of electron beams bracketed me, throwing up a steam explosion of dirt and rock, chunks of debris pattering off the helmet of my Vigilante, and barely registered the impact of my first missile before I tapped down on one flat, rounded foot and launched another.

  Two platoons of battlesuits launching their complement of missiles in volley fire is an impressive sight, and not one most Tahni get to see twice, certainly not the ones trying to join the fight in the courtyard. A chain-fire line of explosions lit up the edge of the courtyard and nearly two dozen of the enemy battlesuit troopers tumbled to the ground in sprays of torn-up sod or pinwheeled out of the air, their jump-jets failing catastrophically.

  Our arrival proved too much for the Tahni force and the suits began to disengage, pulling out of the skirmish and jetting back toward the reactor complex, leaving behind nearly two-score of their dead and disabled. And at least ten or twelve of ours. I scanned through the IFF signals of the dead, not just to figure out our strength but in a desperate search to make sure none of them were people I knew.

  It was selfish, but I wasn’t so long away from the disaffected PFC fresh off the streets who had taken months just to make friends among my platoon. I’d seen too many of them die already and I had to make sure Vicky wasn’t in one of the mangled
, twisted, vaguely humanoid metal shapes on the steaming ground. But she wasn’t among the living or the dead, and I had to hope she’d landed somewhere closer to our objective and. . .

  “Cam, Francis!” I heard William Cano’s voice before I picked his suit out from amongst the shambling mess left after the attack. “Goddamn, I am glad to see you guys. When I saw your dropship go down, I thought all of you were dead.”

  “I was kinda convinced of that myself,” I told him. “Who’s in charge of this clusterfuck?”

  “We got half a squad from Charlie, three separate fire teams from Third Battalion, and Marines from all over the freaking place. I think the highest ranking is Sgt. Manley from Fourth Battalion and he’s a squad leader. But it’s most of a platoon.”

  “Sgt. Manley,” I said to the NCO, “I’m Lt. Alvarez, Third Platoon, Delta Company. We’re going to designate this gaggle Fifth Platoon and you’re the acting PL. Until we can get all of you reconnected with your units, we’re going to drag you along on our mission to take down the primary power coupling for the Deltaville fusion plant. You cool with that?”

  “Since I can’t call anyone to complain,” Manley said, “I guess I’ll have to be cool with it.”

  “Designate your squads and squad leaders. Our No-Later-Than time to move out from the rally point to the fusion plant is in ten minutes from now, according to the op order.”

  “Are you taking over the company, Alvarez?” Kovacs asked. I bit back a curse when I saw he’d asked it on the general net, where all of them could hear it. I switched to our company’s command net before I answered.

  “I’m listed as next in command after the XO on the op order,” I reminded him, then shrugged, though neither of them could see it. “Either of you want to do it? Honest, guys, I have no idea which of us has more time in rank, but I have more combat experience than anyone else in the company except Top and the Skipper. If you got a problem with this, tell me now…or at least sometime in the next ten minutes.”

  “No, no problem,” Cano said. “As far as I’m concerned, you’re in charge until we find the Skipper or Lt. Bradley gets back.”

  That seemed to decide Kovacs. I couldn’t see his face, but I’d served with the man long enough now to know how his mind worked. The Academy grad was resenting the idea of following the orders of an OCS officer, but the part of him who wanted a spotless war record to further his career was calculating how much of a liability it would be if he insisted on leading our company and then fucked it up, either by a failing of his own skills or just from blind chance. If Cano had expressed any doubts, I think Kovacs might have objected, but now the die was cast.

  “Yeah,” he said, though the words lacked conviction. “If the Skipper doesn’t show up in the next ten minutes, I’m fine with having you take over.”

  “All right, then,” I told them. “Francis, go ahead and get your platoon into a defensive perimeter on the other side of the wall.” I pointed back toward the decorative barrier between the courtyard and the residential district.

  I searched the opposite direction for anything that could be used as cover and discovered a parking area just the other side of the courtyard, filled with what I thought were industrial machinery, though I couldn’t have told you their purpose from just a cursory glance. But they were heavy and metal and looked to be thick enough to stop an electron beamer.

  “Billy,” I told Cano, using the nickname he hated but that everyone still used anyway, “take Fourth Platoon to the other side and use those big, green metal things for cover, watch any approaches from the industrial district.”

  That covered the north and south approaches. East dead-ended into a lake, maybe two kilometers in diameter and perfectly round enough that I thought it had to be some sort of big retention pond. The Tahni could attack from that direction, but they’d have to ride their jump-jets the whole way, which would make them sitting ducks for our missiles.

  “Bang-Bang, set up watch on the lake over there, missile launch pattern in depth if anything tries to come that way.”

  “Good copy, sir.” If Gunny Sgt. Morrel was rattled by the exploding drop-ship or the changes to the operation, it certainly wasn’t evident in his voice. He seemed as calm as if he was escorting the platoon to session in the simulator pods.

  As for west, that end of the park or courtyard or whatever it was to the Tahni, butted up against a large, dome-shaped building I couldn’t identify from its location or construction, but I knew it needed investigation. It was probably three hundred meters in circumference and streets or walkways radiated out from it in a 180-degree arc opposite the courtyard.

  I switched over to the general net, remembering that Sgt. Manley wasn’t keyed into our command net. “Manley, your platoon is coming with me. We’re going to check out that building. Detail two squads to guard the western approaches and send two in with me.”

  “Will do, Lieutenant.” Manley might have taken offense at the detail, but his reply was mild and business-like.

  No one bothered to ask why I was going with them, and why I hadn’t just stuck Manley’s hodge-podge platoon to guard the eastern approach, because they knew the answer. I didn’t trust the NCO yet and wasn’t planning on counting on him and his Marines to carry out any combat operations until I’d vetted them. And there was ten minutes’ worth of vetting to be had.

  Our notional Fifth Platoon moved out with the sloppy, awkward confusion I expected from Marines who’d never trained with each other, and Manley lumbered out ahead of them, trying to lead from the front because he was a squad leader and not any sort of officer. I let him because I didn’t have the time to turn him into one.

  “There’s an entrance over here, sir,” Manley told me, gesturing with his plasma gun toward an oval doorway set in the side of the dome.

  I’d been surprised at how similar some of the Tahni architecture was to ours. Doors were doors, and if they had little touches like kick plates to open them with a foot instead of a hand, they still served the same purpose and swung inward or outward or sometimes withdrew into a niche in the wall. There must have been a practical reason why they didn’t construct them to dilate like a pupil or slide up into the ceiling or something weird like that, and I was sure some university egghead would get a government grant someday to launch a multi-year study into the socioeconomic significance of Tahni architecture, because that was the sort of thing the Commonwealth liked to waste money on instead of useless things like reforming the foster care system or trying to rebuild the squatter cities.

  This particular door would no doubt cause much consternation for my notional researcher because it was reminiscent of every depiction of a medieval castle door I’d seen in fantasy stories or historical epics, oval at the top, squared at the bottom, constructed from wood planks banded by metal. All it lacked was the big metal ring at the center to pull it open, since the Tahni liked to open doors with their feet. This one was four meters tall and nearly as wide, so I had to think the kick plate at the bottom was an electronic switch, but I did my part to show my respect for a different culture and slammed the flat of my suit’s right foot into the door.

  The mechanism didn’t have the chance to do the polite thing and open the door for me, because my kick knocked it off its hinges and sent it tumbling inward. Light spilled out from inside the dome, and I took a step through the entrance. And stopped in my tracks.

  I would have figured the dome would be divided into dozens of separate rooms, given its size, but it was a single chamber, huge and cavernous. The light came from panels stretched out across the ceiling in a fractal pattern, and beneath it, bathed in its amber glow, hundreds of Tahni females danced.

  Well, it looked like a dance. If it had been humans, I would have said they were dancing. The sounds they were making seemed like a chant, and though some of them broke off their dance and their chant at our intrusion, others kept it up, as if they were lost in some sort of trance. The chant had no rhythm that I could recognize, but it did repeat,
and the dance spun and leapt and lunged with it, bare feet kicking up spray of something that could have been sand or sawdust. The females wore clothing woven of multihued strips and the strips whipped around with their motion, turning each of them into a kaleidoscope of motion and color.

  “What the fuck is this shit?” Manley blurted, squeezing through the door behind me.

  The rest of the ad hoc platoon was stuck behind us, shuffling in place, their spiked, metal foot pads scraping against the pavement. I could feel their impatience but I stood in place. Either this was a trap of some sort or it was exactly what it looked like, a shitload of young Tahni females doing some sort of communal dance, and either way, I didn’t need thirty battlesuits busting through the door into the middle of it.

  “Is this some kind of religious ceremony, sir?” Manley asked me.

  I wished he could have seen the look I gave him, because he deserved it.

  “How the hell would I know, Sergeant?” I replied. I was scanning the interior of the dome while I spoke, and the display told me exactly what I expected. Other than four hundred and thirty-two Tahni females, there was nothing in the chamber.

  Then something changed. The females who had kept dancing and chanting despite our entrance finally seemed to notice us, and their waving, spinning motion took on a particular focus, heading our way. I thought of the females who had attacked us on Confluence and began to back away.

  “Out,” I told Manley and the others, my voice taut. “Back out now.”

  “I’ve heard about the Tahni females, sir,” Manley said. “They’re worse than the males. We should burn them all down before they can try anything.”

  Looking at the black eyes shining with feral rage, coming ever closer, I could sympathize with the sergeant’s fear. But I couldn’t let myself be controlled by it. That was why they’d put the bars on my shoulders, or at least that’s what I told myself.