by Rick Partlow
“Any survivors?” I rasped the words, my mouth dry. I took a sip from the water nipple beside my chin and it didn’t seem to help.
“I don’t see any, sir,” Bang-Bang said. “Not all of Second is here, but…I don’t know how many survived the drop.”
“Keep moving, Delp. All of you, keep your intervals. I know we all want to bunch up down here, to feel like we’re all protecting each other, but that’s not how it’ll work if they ambush us. Ten meters minimum, and spread out across the tunnel as far as you can.”
I was an idiot, a school teacher lecturing children on fire safety while the building burned down around them, but every superior officer, every trainer at OCS, every NCO I’d had always insisted shit like that was necessary, that it calmed the troops. It had never done a damned thing for me, and I thought maybe the whole thing as a mutually-agreed-upon practical joke foisted on platoon leaders by our trainers.
I moved forward, past the trailing fire teams of First squad and even with Sgt. Medina, not so much from lack of trust as impatience. I wanted the show to kick off, and it would happen sooner for me if I were near the front. While I walked, I called up the plans for the fusion plant we’d been issued with the Op Order. They weren’t the actual blueprints, of course, just a generalized layout extrapolated from similar facilities we’d seen on other Tahni worlds.
They were surprisingly big and primitive compared to Commonwealth plants, and their weakness, the one spot we knew we could take them out with conventional hyper-explosives or even the coil guns from a Boomer, was the central solenoid for the magnetic field coils. Everything else was buried too deep inside the shielding, but the solenoid could be reached even by something the size of a Vigilante. And reaching it meant going straight ahead until this tunnel hit the central service hub, a vertical passage that stretched from the shielding over the tokamak to the cooling pumps near the surface.
That was where Captain Covington would be headed, and the Tahni knew it. It would be the logical place to leave their main force, and I expected, when we reached it, we’d either find the battle still raging or maybe that we’d already lost. If that were the case, I’d have to hope he had, at least, whittled down the enemy numbers and do my best to carry out the objective myself.
I got my answer before we even reached it. The suit’s sonic pickups were more sensitive than my human ears would have been if they’d been unencumbered by so many centimeters of BiPhase Carbide armor, and they were flashing red in frantic warning hundreds of meters before we reached the hub.
“We got fighting up ahead, sir,” Delp told me, redundant but trying to be helpful.
“Send out a spy drone,” I told him.
I couldn’t see his face when I gave the order, but I was willing to bet he’d rolled his eyes. We all carried a couple of the tiny, remote-controlled quad copters, but we rarely had the opportunity to use them for anything useful. Most of our operations were too dynamic to let the comparatively-slow spy robots do their work, and in the ones that weren’t, jamming was a constant issue.
But we had them, and doctrine dictated I try to use them. And for once, I was willing to give doctrine a shot.
The drone separated from the top of Delp’s backpack, hovering just above him for a moment before it shot forward and around the slight curve in the tunnel. I tied into its signal, whispering a prayer for clear images and useful intelligence. Murphy, as it turned out, is an atheist.
“Loss of Signal, sir,” Delp reported with an air of I-told-you-so to the words.
The drone’s small, weak antenna couldn’t burn through the jamming, and laser line-of-sight wasn’t useful when we didn’t have a direct line of sight. And if we had been afforded a direct line of sight, we wouldn’t have needed the fucking drone and I felt like an idiot again.
I shrugged. It had been worth a shot.
“Sgt. Morrel, Sgt. Medina,” I said, wanting to rush ahead and help the Skipper but knowing I was just as likely to get everyone killed without a plan, “when we hit the hub, I’m guessing the Tahni are going to be on the far side of the circle, close to the surface entrance tunnel. That’s going to put the bulk of whatever’s left of Delta between us and them. Bang-Bang, I want you to take First squad and circle counter-clockwise. Kreis, you follow the hub wall clockwise, and both of you lay down suppressive fire for the rest of the platoon. I’m going to take Second and Third squads straight across, if possible, and break through the enemy position. Any questions?”
“None that wouldn’t get me in trouble,” Bang-Bang murmured.
“Yeah, I know it’s nice and vague,” I admitted, “but the alternative is to send in a couple scouts to get shot at and hope one comes back alive to tell us the enemy is expecting us and we’re fucked. So, again, any questions?”
There were none.
“Delp,” I told the point man, “when you hit the hub, don’t stop moving. Not for a second, not until and unless you reach cover or get behind our lines.”
“Gotcha, sir,” he assured me, not sounding very confident at all. “At least I won’t have to worry about the Article-15’s.”
“Look at the bright side, Vince,” I assured him. “I’ll be right behind you, so there probably won’t be anyone left to press charges anyway.”
15
The power plant’s hub was something I might have expected to find on a starship, a vertical passageway, open to the sky, extending right through the center of the tokamak’s torus, the shielding grey and massive around the magnetic coils just a few levels below us, and through the center of it, reaching upward from the bottom of the fifty-meter drop into the middle of the coils, the central solenoid that powered the fields. Around the edges of the passage, a service walkway curled like a strand of DNA, the ramp wide enough to allow cargo jacks to haul freight capsules from the warehouse to replace parts of the reactor at need.
We emerged near the top of the hub, just eight or ten meters from the rain shield, a plastic awning on thin, metal struts that was the only thing separating the open roof from the outside weather. The opaque awning seemed to block out the air battles above us as well, conspiring to confine our reality to the few hundred square meters of hell beneath it.
This was the battleground, the place where all that was left of our comrades and our enemies had retreated to or advanced toward, and I don’t believe I had ever seen so many battlesuits crammed into so small of a space. Captain Covington wouldn’t have chosen this place, not if he’d had options. He would have recognized it for the chokepoint it was, would have seen how it totally negated the maneuverability and versatility of the suits. But this was where the objective was, and if it was where the enemy was, too, well…the mission came first.
I nearly stumbled over the torn and smoking corpses of two Vigilantes before I’d taken three steps into the hub and didn’t even have the time to run their transponders to see who they were before one of my own had joined them. It wasn’t Delp. He’d done what I said, kept moving, even in the face of a blinding firestorm of raw energy, a wave of overwhelming heat. But Muller, the Alpha fire team leader, had paused at the first of the dead Marines. It was forgivable…by me, but not by the gods of battle. An electron beam lanced through his chest and he was dead in the space of a second.
The reality of our situation hit me like an intuition, laying itself out in a mental leap. The enemy was concentrated two levels below us, just above the base of the solenoid, taking cover behind a half a dozen freight containers abandoned on the walkway, still mounted atop cargo jacks, their caster-style rollers blown out from beneath them either during the battle or on purpose beforehand. The Marines were up one level from the Tahni, and if they had the high ground, that was more than balanced out by the fact that they had no cover and their numbers were down to less than platoon strength.
“Move!” I screamed at the others, wanting to take the time to explain our position but knowing we’d all be dead in the seconds it would take. “Hit your jets and follow me!”
&n
bsp; This was the part where we could all get killed between one heartbeat and the next, and the wrong decision could cost us the battle and our lives, and I had to make it in a fraction of a second. I could have led them into a charge directly at the enemy, counting on surprise to let our inferior numbers overwhelm them, and maybe I should have, but instead, I took them into our lines, supporting the position of the Marines who were already there just from an instinct that they wouldn’t figure out who we were in time, that they’d catch us between their fire and the Tahni.
I snapped off a shot in mid-air as I jetted down to the Marine position, and a dozen more followed it, a volley perfected in endless training, the rain of starfire pinning the Tahni down, suppressing their fire long enough for us to make it across the gap and touch down alongside the Marines. As I did, I noticed I’d been wrong. The Marines did have cover, of a sort. The remains of seven Vigilante suits were piled in front of their position, a fortification built from our own dead. They’d taken one hit after another until they were almost fused together into a solid mass of metal and flesh and it was all I could do to tear my eyes away from them and scan the IFF transponders of the ones left alive.
The highest-ranking of the survivors was Top. First Sergeant Ellen Campbell had taken more than one hit, and her suit was coated a carbon black over the matte grey. God alone knew how badly she was hurt inside it, but she limped over to me, unfazed by the electron beams impacting the wall behind us.
“Alvarez,” she rasped, her voice matching the battered condition of her suit, “about time you got here.”
“Sorry I’m late, Top. Where’s the Skipper?”
“Down there.” She pointed to the base of the solenoid with her plasma gun. “He took the last two Boomers down there about three minutes ago to try to destroy the solenoid. We laid down suppressive fire, but the Tahni managed to get suits down to take him on and I ain’t heard a thing from him since.”
“If they got the Boomers,” I said, “how the hell are we going to take this thing out?”
“Plasma guns ain’t gonna do a damned thing to it,” she agreed. She was slurring her words. Not a lot, just enough to let me know she was hurting, maybe already woozy from pain meds. This wasn’t good. “It’s designed to handle plasma.”
I could barely hear her, even with the volume in my earphones turned up all the way. My Marines were crowded into a space barely thirty meters across, their plasma guns blasting every few seconds, the volleys timed with the rest of Delta to keep a solid wall of fire going toward the Tahni. The concussion of the constant wave of superheated gas going outward along with the lightning-crack of the occasional answering electron beam was like trying to hold a conversation in the center of a thunderstorm.
“I’ve got to get to him,” Top told me, shuffling forward, her armor half-toppling like she was drunk. “I’ll pull him out of there…”
“Top,” I said, putting my Vigilante in front of hers, blocking her way. “You’re in no condition to go down there, and neither is your armor.”
“We going in to get the Skipper?” Bang-Bang asked, huddled beside me, crouching down slightly to stay behind the dead Marines.
“Negative,” I told him. “We aren’t going anywhere. You are going to stay up here and lay down covering fire. I’m taking one fire team with me down there to relieve the Skipper and carry out the mission.”
“Sir!” he protested. “You’re the only officer here!”
“And the mission is shutting down this fucking reactor, Sergeant,” I reminded him. “I’m not needed up here directing fire against a distraction, I’m needed to finish the fucking mission. That’s why the Skipper was down there instead of up here.” I motioned at the Tahni. There were about three platoons of them over across the hub, maybe sixty or seventy meters away, equal our strength. “When I say, I want you to…”
The sky exploded.
That wasn’t what actually happened, of course, but at the time, it was close as I could come to understanding it. One second, the white, plastic awning stretched across the top of the reactor hub, and the next, it was sheathed in flames, burning fragments raining down around us. And on the heels of the burning awning were High Guard battlesuits, and a wave of missiles aimed not well, but in our general direction.
I had less than a second to act and no time at all to think, and the only coherent thought blaring in my head was not to be caught sitting there.
“Jump!” I bellowed on the general net, not wanting to leave out anyone who might have tagged along from another company.
I took my own advice and hit the jets, heading straight up into the teeth of the Tahni force, firing my plasma gun as I flew, all thoughts of taking out the reactor forgotten in a desperate attempt to just survive the next few seconds. In retrospect, it must have been a missile. They were crashing down on top of us, hitting the service walkway, blowing burning fragments out of the concrete walls, and one must have detonated just a bit too close.
Red flashed in my visor, useless warnings telling me what I already knew. I’d been hit, my jets were out, and I was falling.
It was nearly fifty meters down, way too far to survive, and I was going to hit hard enough to shatter my spine and fracture my skull, and there was no way in hell anyone was going to get me to a stocked medical bay on a ship in time to save my life. But something was just beneath me, something grey and metal, with the face of a golem, boosting up on reactor-powered jets. It was a Tahni High Guard battlesuit, one from the two platoons who had been just below us. He’d launched himself to strike at us before we could attack the incoming force, and I caught him in mid-air, arms going around his thick neck, the articulated claws on my left hand digging into the softer metal at the thing’s shoulder joint and hanging on with every ounce of energy my suit had.
His jets weren’t powerful enough to keep us both airborne, and we began to descend, slower than the fall had been but just as sure. He thrashed and tried to shake himself free of me, tried to smash his back up against the wall and scrape me off, but I threw the weight of my suit to the opposite side and dragged him away from it. We fell and the shadows descended to swallow us up. I had fleeting glimpses from above, frozen images of High Guard suits fighting Marine Vigilantes, and what I saw made no sense to me.
There were too many Vigilantes, seemingly as many as the High Guard, and there couldn’t have been. I glanced at the transponder readout and saw an IFF signal from Vicky’s platoon, guessed at that instant what had happened. The Tahni force Cronje had been fighting had bypassed his position and headed here, and at least Vicky’s platoon had pursued.
We weren’t alone, but I was still riding a Tahni battlesuit to the ground floor. He managed to toss me away just before we hit bottom and I crashed to my back, the wind going out of me despite the cushioning inside the suit. It bought him a second, maybe two before I could move, and it would have been enough. He had the emitter of his electron beamer lined up with my head and would have ended me,
Except a plasma blast from my right ended him first. His head vanished in a supernova of burning gas and he stayed upright, frozen like a statue, his gun still pointed at me, his dead finger probably still on the trigger.
“How the hell did you get down here, Alvarez?” Captain Covington asked.
He was leaning against the far wall, both his legs burned off above the knees, surrounded by a pile of our dead and theirs.
“Jesus Christ, sir,” I hissed, looking at him. The suit’s legs were longer than ours, of course, but his own had to have been taken off at least somewhere near the top of the shins, and the thermal bloom would have cooked him higher than that.
“Don’t worry, son,” he said, his voice sounding curiously detached, like he was watching all this from orbit and relaying a transmission down to a remotely-piloted suit. “The pain-killers in this thing are pretty powerful. Not feeling a thing.”
“Is there another way out of here, sir?” I asked, stumbling over to him, trying not to trip over the dead
.
“There’s a service tunnel back that way,” he said, motioning with his off hand to our left. I peered down that way and noticed a slight lightening of the stygian darkness. “But it doesn’t matter, I’m not walking anywhere. We need to take down this reactor. From what’s going on up there, I’m not sure how much time we have left.”
“Take it out with what, sir?” I wondered. “The Boomers are gone.”
I flinched at a thunderous detonation just a few dozen meters overhead, edging closer to the overhang that protected the Skipper’s position. It had been cramped and close down here before a dozen battlesuits had been trashed and scattered in every conceivable place I could put a foot down flat. I was nearly standing right on top of him, and I tried not to look at what was left of his legs, afraid I would see through the ragged, melted armor into the ravaged flesh beneath it.
“Take it out with me,” he said, not a note of concern in his voice for the chaos above us.
“What are you talking about, sir?” The pain-killers could be getting to him, I thought.
“Remember Warrant Officer Mutterlin?” he asked me, seemingly apropos of nothing. “Mutt, back on Inferno? In the armory?”
I did, of course. He’d taught me everything I knew about the inner workings of a Vigilante, and he’d probably saved my life a dozen times over, though he’d never know it.
“Yes, sir, but what….”
“It’s a shame we couldn’t bring Mutt with us,” he went on, rambling a bit, I thought. “But the man got severely space-sick, not a damned thing the drugs could do about it. But he probably did better teaching new Drop-Troopers the secrets of the suit than he would have repairing damaged Vigilantes after a battle. And of course, if he’d been on the Iwo, he’d be dead right now. But he taught me something he didn’t tell too many Marines, something that could have got him in big trouble.” He chuckled with just a hint of insanity behind the sound. “You see, Cam, this isotope reactor we wear on our backs, well…it’s quite the little firecracker. It wants to explode and the R&D teams had to spend quite a few years figuring out ways to keep it from exploding. So, if you know the way around all those safety procedures, it’s not impossible to make the damn thing explode.”
