Direct Fire #4 Drop Trooper

by Rick Partlow

  “Negative, Sergeant Manley,” I told him. “Back out of here and do not fire. Get the platoon back and set up a perimeter fifty meters from the entrance. Now.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  I could hear the skepticism in his tone, but he followed orders just the same and chivvied the loose collection of Marines back into their positions. I stood just outside the door, watching the females get closer, their ranks surging forward like a wave on the beach, slowly advancing. I took a hop backwards out of the doorway and aimed my plasma gun at the pavement just outside, firing before the civilians could rush after me.

  The blast melted the pavement into black, steaming tar, heat rolling off of it, sending the Tahni females retreating from the exit despite their furor, religious or otherwise. It should keep them back for a few minutes, I thought. And a few minutes was all I needed.

  “Cam!” I heard Vicky’s voice before I noticed the incoming Vigilantes on the IFF screen, and relief flowed through my chest like a cup of hot coffee on a Hachiman night. “Thank God you’re here!”

  She’d brought most of two Alpha Company platoons with her, and the other, I noted, was Freddy Kodjoe’s. He was there, near the middle of their tactical movement formation as they jetted in, touching down in the center of the park, but he said nothing to me.

  “Vick,” I sighed the name. “I thought maybe we were all that was left of the battalion.”

  “Not yet,” she said, her relief at finding me turning into urgency, “but we may be soon if we don’t get to the reactor complex.”

  I didn’t think it was possible for a Vigilante battlesuit to fidget, but she was proving me wrong, shuffling from one foot to another, her plasma gun pointed off in the direction of the power plant.

  “What do you mean?” I asked her. “Why would they be at the plant already?”

  I had a sudden, cold panic at the thought I’d gotten the timing wrong for the rally point, been late for the battle.

  “Just about the whole battalion mis-dropped,” she told me. “Half of Alpha Company, most of Bravo and the Headquarters platoon for Delta all landed right on top of the fusion reactor complex. They’re pinned down by a whole battalion of High Guard and at least that many Shock-Troopers. We have to get there now!”

  I blew out a breath and shook my head. This whole thing was turning into a giant clusterfuck.

  “I got good news and bad news, Delta,” I transmitted to the rest of the company. “The good news is, we don’t have to wait the whole ten minutes…”

  13

  It seemed as if every Tahni High Guard trooper in the whole universe had decided this was the hill they wanted to die on. The reactor complex was built on a rise, or perhaps the Tahni had piled dirt and sod over the underground parts of the complex and let the hill grow around it, surrounded by raised steppes, either from natural erosion over the decades since its construction, or by design for defense or aesthetics.

  Or religious, cultural, or sociological reasons, I silently completed the words of every intelligence report I’d read about Tahni culture. They did a lot of shit we didn’t understand and rather than admit we had no idea what their real reasons for, the junior officers who wrote the reports always included that caveat.

  Whatever the reason for the steppes, they were the only thing keeping the Marines who’d dropped into the complex alive against the hundreds of Tahni battlesuits swarming over them, flying in from every side, hornets to the hive. Well, the steppes and one other thing.

  The coil gun rounds burst out from the ranks of the Marines clustered together in their natural earthwork fort, splitting the air with the sheer force of their passage, sending out visible shockwaves like the ones I’d seen at the tail of aerospacecraft flying supersonic in an atmosphere. Plasma guns were impressive weapons, but their effective range was short by comparison, a shotgun blast versus a hunting rifle, to put it in terms Dak might have used. The coil guns mounted on the Boomers were weapons meant for assault shuttles or the point-defense turrets of a warship, and being this close to one of the smallest and least fearsome of such armaments gave me a brand-new appreciation for how insanely powerful the main gun of a cruiser was.

  Thunder rolled out over the plain, the eponymous signature of the Boomers, and tungsten slugs the size of my fist obliterated two or three Tahni battlesuits with one shot. And the projectiles didn’t stop for the effort, either plowing meters into the ground if aimed downward or, if shot upward into the High Guard troops jetting in from all around, blasting straight over the horizon to land in parts unknown.

  If it had been me, or any other Marine charging into that sort of artillery, I would have pulled back, strategized, come up with a new approach to bypass the guns. But the Tahni were defending their home, a world near the heart of the Imperium, and they threw themselves into the fire with no regard for their lives like the elite soldiers they were. High Guard, so I had been reminded before by Captain Covington, didn’t refer to the altitude at which they operated, but their status as warriors. They were the best the Tahni had to offer.

  And most of us were hood rats, the dregs, the ones so desperate to avoid a sentence in punitive hibernation, or a death sentence by the gangs or just desperate to get out that we were willing to let the government implant jacks into our brains and send us past the edges of human space to do something as insane as fight an interstellar war.

  Yet here we were, on their turf, coming down their throats. It was enough to make even a cynic like me a little patriotic.

  We’d been running, our rounded, spiked footpads digging divots into the pavement with each step, leaving tracks behind us that would take industrial equipment months to repair, but once we’d cleared the last line of buildings, we could see the enemy and I knew it would be a matter of seconds before they saw us.

  “Hit the jets!” I ordered, somehow in charge of all this. Whose brilliant idea had that been? “Third, you’re the tip of the spear!”

  Which meant First squad was the point of the tip, and Private Delp was the…well, he was the poor son of a bitch who was going in first. And it should have been me. I felt it every time, but more now than ever. I should have been the one going in first, the one running point. But someone had to be in command, and I’d been stupid enough to volunteer, so I ran behind Third Platoon, still too far up for the book recommendation for someone commanding the equivalent of a light company, but as far back as I could allow myself.

  Cano and Kovacs were just behind us and to either side, Vicky and Freddy behind them and Manley bringing up drag, the whole lot of us roaring into the air in a formation like a gaggle of geese heading south for the winter.

  “Don’t shoot at us!” I yelled into the general brigade net. “Check your IFF! Drop-troopers on the hop!”

  Which wasn’t at all dignified, but incoming friendly fire always has the right of way and I would have looked damned silly getting killed by my own people after surviving the second hairiest drop of my career.

  I wasn’t sure if the warning worked or the defenders were just too busy shooting at the hordes of bad guys to even notice us, but the coil guns didn’t kill us and I considered that a win.

  “Target at your discretion,” I directed, watching the battleground pass below me like I was taking a virtual tour of it, “and volley fire.”

  Volley fire on the hop was about a hundred times harder than on the run, but I figured there were enough Tahni troopers out there, any missile we launched was bound to hit something. I had two missiles left after our last fight, and I was so absorbed trying to direct the battle that I wasn’t conscious of firing them, was just suddenly aware of the ammo indicator flashing red at me to let me know they were gone.

  I definitely noticed the effect they had. We had five platoons, more or less, nearly a hundred suits firing at once, and the results were spectacular. I’d watched a time-lapse video of a field of wildflowers blooming somewhere in the Rocky Mountains on Earth, somewhere I’d never had the chance to visit and probably never
would. The field had been barren, rocky, lifeless, and then sprouts of color had flashed to life, here and there at first, but eventually covering the entire expanse of what had been dirt.

  The chain of explosions blossoming across the side of the steppes reminded me of those flowers, beautiful and miraculous and short-lived, though not as short-lived as the Tahni High Guard troopers at the heart of the blasts. The enemy knew we were here now, and staying in the air would, I suspected, prove to be a bad idea.

  “Down,” I snapped. “Take them on the run.”

  Electron beams were burning out at us, starting high and arcing downward with the trajectory of our flight, just a fraction of a second and a few meters behind, hounds baying at our heels. We had the Tahni in a crossfire and our plasma guns were adding to the destruction, bits of the heart of a star burning through whatever they touched, and yet it wasn’t enough. I felt like I was killing a High Guard suit every other second, knew the others had to be doing the same because there were just too many to miss, but too many to miss also meant too many to beat. The knowledge rubbed against the soft skin of my mind, a burr stuck in my shoe on a long hike, that I couldn’t take the time to remove because this section of trail was too dangerous.

  Why am I thinking in hiking metaphors? I never hiked once in my whole fucking life until Basic. I blamed Scotty. He used to go on and on about how his dad would take him and his brothers hiking in the Bloodmark Mountains back on Hermes until I felt like I’d been there myself.

  I missed his ramblings about Hermes, missed having him as a sort of cool older brother for the platoon. Bang-Bang was more of a typical Gunny, loud and harsh and overbearing in a fatherly sort of way, and he was good at his job, but he wasn’t Scotty. There wouldn’t be another Scotty. And I could have really used Scotty right now, could have used a Marine I trusted implicitly to lead Third in combat while I tried to direct this impromptu group of dribs and drabs, someone I wouldn’t have to check because I would know exactly what they were doing.

  Bang-Bang was doing the right thing, keeping the platoon in formation, keeping their fires focused and their lines as clean as possible as we all touched down, doing a better job than Manley or Kovacs, one of whom should have known better. Kovacs’ platoon was bunched up at the center like scared kids huddling for support, and there wasn’t time for their platoon sergeant to straighten them out, much less their half-assed company commander. They paid for it, though, before I could even open my mouth to warn them, two of them dropping almost as their feet touched the ground, lit up like torches in the night by the atomic sledgehammers of the Tahni electron beamers.

  My gut tightened at their deaths, at the IFF transponder signals going dark in a remote corner of my IFF display, and heat kissed my skin as if it were me burning up at the blast of heat and hard radiation.

  “Fucking spread out!” The words burst out of me like the plasma blast I fired without consciously aiming. “Close with them and limit their arc of fire!”

  If we could get close enough, the whole mass of them couldn’t shoot at us without hitting their own people. And if that didn’t stop them from trying, it would still mean more dead Tahni, less for us to have to engage.

  “Manley, Kovacs,” I ordered, the words and the decision behind them taking up the better part of my conscious thought, the plasma gun firing as if on its own, its flare surprising me nearly as much as the impact of the blast on an enemy suit, “hit the jets, fall in behind the defenders and bolster their lines. Cano and Morrel, curve around the left flank, Sandoval and Kodjoe go right and squeeze them between us.”

  I had to get Manley and his rag-tag platoon somewhere he wouldn’t have to make any more leadership decisions, and Kovacs was already down four Marines, and probably wouldn’t have been much use in this dynamic a battle-space anyway.

  Goddammit, I said ’battle-space’ again. The Skipper would kick my ass for that.

  I trusted Vicky, of course, and I was going to keep an eye on Third because, whether Bang-Bang was competent or not, they were my Marines. Cano…well, Billy was Billy, and if he wasn’t the best platoon leader I’d ever encountered, he was going to have to be good enough. And Freddy was competent, if uninspired, and I at least trusted him enough to let Vicky watch out for him.

  If the makeshift company didn’t split exactly like a well-choreographed dance routine, they at least managed to make the move close enough to each other that the enemy wasn’t able to focus fire on any one element. And I found I couldn’t focus my eyes on any one of the enemy suits in particular. They faded to ghosts in my peripheral vision, a secondary problem beside the movements of my own Marines.

  Was this what the Skipper saw when he led Delta into combat? Because it was uncomfortable as hell, something akin to that mild feeling of motion sickness that tugged at my gut when I was travelling fast in one direction and looked aside just far enough to where my peripheral vision could pick up the forward motion while my eyes were mostly fixed to the side. I had the terrible intuition it would fade if I gave too much thought to it, so I just shoved the mild nausea aside and let the image form an active map in front of me, using the data from the display and the feedback along my interface jacks, the intuitions that were actually data flowing back along the lines into my brain.

  The gestalt of all that data input was like a new sense, a spatial awareness of where everyone around me was, their trajectories, their status. It forced me to withdraw from the more immediate sensations of my suit’s footpads slamming into the pavement, of the pavement transitioning to clay, then sod, and the subtle difference in the sound and vibration as the surface changed. The High Guard suits were everywhere, and if they didn’t happen to be shooting at me, it was only because they were still too involved with the group defending the earthen steppe nearly a kilometer up ahead of me, their backs to a wall of dirt and rock, their Boomers arrayed in a semi-circle like old paintings I’d seen of early settlers on the frontiers of Earth defending against raids from the natives.

  And if the endless ballet of move and counter-move on the ground and in the sky above us wasn’t confusing and distracting enough, the very air seemed to crackle with the constant discharge of energy, the static electricity of hundreds of electron beams and plasma blasts and coil gun shots crisscrossing in grid-square lines of destruction. The helmet optics did their best to minimize the flare and flash, to make them just one more bit of information rather than the apocalyptic web of death I knew from unhappy experience of a battle such as this outside my suit. But there was too much of it, too much pure energy in the air to be survivable, it seemed.

  And many didn’t survive. I saw IFF transponders blacking out on my display and forced myself to think of them only as game counters, not people I’d met, Marines I’d worked beside for months. Jurgensen went down from Third squad, Third Platoon…my platoon. I didn’t see him die, didn’t personally witness the damage the electron accelerator did to his armor, didn’t hear his final scream, but I could imagine it all. It was present in my head, a replacement for the sterile and impersonal disappearance of the vital blue line beside his name on the display.

  I was going to have to write the notification to his parents.

  Notifications. They’re not together. Cleveland Metroplex. Both of them non-workers on the dole their whole lives. But that doesn’t mean they loved him any the less.

  The thought was almost clinical, distant in a way that frightened me. I was planning out the messages in a small compartment of my thoughts, like it was a job I had to do, one more chore to be accomplished after the battle, like clean-up and PMCS. It wasn’t that I didn’t care about Jurgensen, it was simply an overload of information, too much input for me to process it all, much less allow myself an emotional reaction to any of it. Vicky could have died before my eyes in that very moment and I wouldn’t have had the luxury to grieve until the battle had ended.

  She didn’t, and neither did I. I hadn’t died yet, in this one, solipsistic reality where I wouldn’t die, whe
re I couldn’t, where all the twists and turns of reality conspired to keep me alive. It was easy to believe in the wild idea now. I hadn’t died when the wild shots from the street had hit our house, Momma had. I hadn’t died in the desert crossing, Poppa and Anton had. I hadn’t died crossing in front of that train in the Underground, the cartel enforcer had. I hadn’t died at Brigantia or in all those battles after, and maybe I couldn’t. But even in my crazy, combat-stress-induced fantasy where the universe revolved around me, I could be hurt and I knew how badly it sucked, so I still dodged and moved and hopped and shot and maybe prayed just a little.

  One of Vicky’s Marines went black, then another from Manley’s platoon just before they reached our defensive lines, but the second they did, something shifted. I’d had different trainers call it different things: the Flux, Momentum, the Tide, the Big Mo. But you could tell when it happened, when the battlefield began to tilt in one direction or another. Maybe it was just adding more guns to the base of fire at the defensive position, or maybe it was the enemy figuring out that the rest of us were going to catch them in a pincer movement, but the Tahni front lines moved back, just a few dozen meters at first, and then a hundred. They left their dead and disabled behind them, smoldering and blackened, side by side with our own, the metal coffins so melted and slagged that it was difficult to tell which side they belonged to.

  It began as an organized withdrawal, but it quickly turned into a retreat, the Tahni High Guard pulling back down the hill, seeking cover wherever they could, behind rows of cracked and crumbling buildings, lots packed with construction equipment, even behind the burning wreckage of their own aircraft. It was easy, down here, to forget the war up there, but it was still going on, the sonic booms nearly constant overhead, the night banished in the glowing aftereffects of the destruction of our aerospacecraft and theirs, of warheads detonating either at their targets or prematurely, brought down by ECM jamming or counter-missile fire.