Direct Fire #4 Drop Trooper

by Rick Partlow

  “Sir,” I blurted, “there is no fucking way I’m going to let you…”

  I don’t know what clever and assertive remark I’d been about to make, but I didn’t get the chance. The battle above us spilled down into our laps and I threw myself over Covington’s prone form as a High Guard suit crashed down only meters away, trailing fire. Two more were heading for us and I fired at one of them reflexively, but they went down to plasma fire from above, and two Vigilante suits touched down beside us. Their IFF transponders announced their identity bright and clear, yet I had trouble believing it.

  One was Vicky Sandoval, and the other was Captain Cronje.

  “Come on, Alvarez, Phillip,” Cronje snapped at Covington and me, gesturing with one hand, the other aiming a plasma gun upward. “Every fucking High Guard and Shock-trooper in the city is heading for this reactor. We have to get the hell out of here now.”

  “My God, sir,” Vicky gasped, finally seeing Covington’s legs. “Come on, Cam,” she urged me. “Help me grab him. Together, we can fly him out of here.”

  “You two get him,” I told her. “My jets are damaged. Read-out says they might be usable again once the turbines cool down, but I’m ground-bound until then. Get him out of here and I’ll try to get out on foot.”

  A missile struck the wall only ten meters overhead and cement and insulation sprayed out in a gout of fire, spattering our armor with flaming debris just ahead of a cloud of dust. The only reason I wasn’t thrown to the ground was because I was already leaning over Covington, sheltering him with my armor, but Vicky was on her side and Cronje’s back had gone up against the shielding of the solenoid. He pushed himself up, firing back at the High Guard troopers on the service walkway above us. If it had extended all the way down here, getting out wouldn’t have been a problem, but it ended ten meters up, disappearing through the wall into another section of the plant.

  “Come on!” Cronje said. “We’re getting out of here now, Sandoval! That’s an order!”

  “What about Captain Covington?” Vicky demanded. “We can’t leave him and Cam down here!”

  “Then you stay with them, you crazy, worthless bitch!” Cronje screamed back at her. “The rest of us are getting the hell out of here!”

  I should have been shocked when he boosted out of there, not even stopping to help fight off the Tahni troopers, just heading straight out through the ruined awning. I should have been outraged at a Marine officer leaving his troops behind. Instead, I was numb, unsurprised. This was the end, the one I’d been expecting.

  “Get out of here, Vicky,” I told her. “You have to make it.”

  “No,” she told me, the words flat and broaching no argument. Another Tahni battlesuit dropped down on us and she stood her ground in the midst of a lightning-storm of electron fire and returned it with her plasma gun. “You think I risked my career to get that piece of shit Cronje to come rescue you just to leave you down here? If you stay, I stay. That’s how it’s going to be.”

  “Jesus,” Covington murmured, pushing himself up on his hands, getting what was left of his feet beneath him. “Get a room, you two.”

  Then he hit the jets and flew straight at the central solenoid, and I knew exactly what he was going to do.

  “Vicky, in here!” I yelled, grabbing her armor by the shoulder plastron and shoving her toward the narrow opening in the far wall, concealed in the shadows even from my thermal and infrared, absolutely no light shining through it.

  She nearly tripped over the bodies of Marines, but turned the stumble into a lumbering run, and disappeared into the darkness. I was right behind her, the narrow walls like the mouth of a great beast swallowing us both, and a claustrophobia I had never felt before clawed at my gut, but I didn’t look back. I didn’t even look back when light brighter than a sun exploded behind us, flooding the maintenance tunnel with an impossible, shadowless glare that seemed to penetrate even the blind face of my helmet.

  The concussion hit just as we emerged from the other end of the tunnel and into what might have been a pump room for the water coolant system. I say might have, because I had about one second to notice the details of the chamber, to take note of the water pipes and other equipment before the blast tossed me across the room. I hit the opposite wall and I hoped the crunch I heard was concrete breaking and not my bones. The stars, though, they were all mine, floating in front of my eyes, blocking the much less interesting view of bits of the roof collapsing down around us.

  “Get out,” I croaked, not even able to see Vicky through the flares in my vision, much less tell if she was even conscious, much less on her feet. “The building’s coming down.”

  “This way,” she said, but I couldn’t even make out where she was to follow until I squeezed my eyes shut for a second and tried again to focus them.

  She was heading for a cargo door, sealed with some sort of rolling, metal curtain. I whispered a prayer that it wasn’t too well-built, and for once, God seemed to be listening. Vicky’s battlesuit ripped through the thin metal as if it wasn’t there, strips of it peeling away in her wake and I could, at last, see the grey light of dawn. And a slightly brighter glow from behind us, from the west.

  We lumbered out on a gravel road and I turned around to look. Where the central hub had been was a column of glowing smoke rising into the air, beyond a fire, not quite a nuclear explosion or we wouldn’t have survived it. The plasma had vented catastrophically and taken the central reactor tokamak with it.

  Taken Captain Phillip Covington with it.

  “He’s gone.”

  The words hissed out of their own volition, like the air escaping a balloon. They seemed to take a part of my soul with them.

  “The Skipper’s gone.”

  16

  “Lt. Alvarez.”

  The voice crackled in my headphones, distorted and staticky, and I knew, on some level, that it wasn’t the first time I’d been called. I still didn’t reply, staring at the rising cloud from the explosion, trapped in a mental loop. There were certainties in the universe, laws that couldn’t be violated. The speed of light in a vacuum in real-space, the inverse-square law, the conservation of mass…and the immortality of Captain Phillip Covington.

  Nothing could kill him. He’d outlive the heat-death of the universe, just a few basic particles, radiation, and Phillip Covington. Everyone knew that. And now he was dead. He’d done it himself, so maybe the truth was that the Skipper was the only one who could kill the Skipper.

  “Cam,” Vicky said, and I could almost feel her hand on my arm, even though it was impossible.

  Her voice broke the spell, and I blinked, reality coming back into focus. We were still standing on the gravel service road, still facing the roiling black cloud that was Covington’s tombstone, but it wasn’t just the two of us anymore. A Vigilante suit was standing at the top of the earthen wall separating the service road from the rest of the reactor complex, faceless and anonymous yet I knew from the IFF it was Sgt. Manley. He must have come with the rest of the force under Cronje, but I wondered why he hadn’t pulled out when the captain had ordered him to.

  “Lt. Alvarez,” he said again. “Are you all right?”

  “Yeah,” I rasped, staggering as I tried to turn and face him, the weight of the day, of the death, of the many times I’d almost died all catching up with me at once. “What are you still doing here, Sergeant?” I hadn’t meant for it to come out so harshly, like an accusation.

  “We were all looking for you, sir,” he said, as if that explained everything.

  “We?” I repeated.

  I hadn’t noticed the other two suits pounding over the hill behind him, but I knew who they were instantly.

  “Cam,” William Cano said, relief heavy in his voice. “Thank God. I thought you’d bought it in the explosion.”

  “Where’s the Skipper?” Kovacs wondered. “Did you get to him before everything blew?”

  “The Skipper…,” I trailed off, the words fighting and clawing to stay
inside my chest, unwilling to come out. I forced them, knowing it had to be said. “The Skipper was the explosion. He overloaded his suit reactor to take out the solenoid. The rest was the plasma breach once the electromagnetic field shut down.”

  “The Skipper?” Kovacs put such utter devastation into the question that I felt bad about all the things I’d thought about him.

  “Captain Cronje,” I said, fighting down the flare of anger the name invoked. “Did you see where he went?”

  “He just yelled at us all to get out,” Cano told me, “then he was gone. He took his company with him, I think, but we weren’t leaving till we found out what happened to you and the Skipper.”

  “Fucking bastard,” Vicky muttered and I checked to make sure it was on our private circuit. “He took my platoon with him.”

  “Where is everyone?” I asked. “How many effectives do we have left?”

  “We got everyone in a defensive perimeter at the front of the power plant,” Cano said. “Our platoon sergeants are getting a head count and checking everyone’s suits. We came to find you and…,” he trailed off. “You know, the Skipper.”

  I sighed, the weight of a thousand worlds settling onto my shoulders.

  “Show me.”

  It wasn’t as bad as it could have been. The reactor battle had been a knife fight in a closet and I was surprised so many had survived it. Though from the looks of it, not everyone had. The perimeter was a semi-circle extending out nearly a kilometer from one side of the main entrance of the reactor, around to where the main road curved toward the city and then back to the other side, but there wasn’t more than three platoons’ worth of suits in the line.

  More were clustered near the yawning half-oval that was the plant’s main entrance, and one of them was Bang-Bang Morrel.

  “God damn, sir,” he said, loping away from the pack when he saw me and the others approaching. “I thought sure you’d bought the farm.”

  “It was a near thing,” I assured him. “What’s the butcher’s bill? For my platoon and the whole company,” I amended.

  “Well,” he said, some of the relief going out of his voice, “it’s not good. We lost Majid, Muller, Kim, and Villanueva.”

  Shit. Each name was a punch in the gut. They’d trusted me. The fact that we’d had a job to do and no choice in the matter didn’t make anything about it better.

  “Garcia and Hewson are going to make it, but they’re out of action.” Bang-Bang motioned at the half a dozen suits near the entrance. A couple of them were standing, but the rest were seated, and the only reason for a Vigilante to be sitting down was if its legs were damaged. “We got a few others who have minor injuries or burn-throughs, but they can Charlie Mike.”

  Continue the Mission. I knew the phrase, but it was old-old military slang, something before even Top’s time.

  “The rest of the company…,” he began, but a familiar voice interrupted him.

  “The rest of the company ain’t much better,” Top said.

  She was one of the suits that was standing, but I thought it had to be a near thing. Her Vigilante looked like some near-sighted High Guard trooper had been using it for target practice, and if there was more than twenty square centimeters of her suit that didn’t have a crack or burn or crater in it, I couldn’t find it. I didn’t know how bad it was for her inside the armor, but at least she sounded more coherent now than when the pain-killers had first hit her.

  “You have three full-strength platoons if you shift some things around,” she told me, “and only two platoon leaders for them.”

  “But there’s three of us, Top,” Kovacs said, sounding as if he thought the pain meds were clouding her thoughts. “Me, Cano and Alvarez.”

  “No, Francis,” Top said, using the officer’s first name in a deliberate shot at his thick-headedness. “There’s two of you, because Lt. Alvarez is now acting company commander.”

  “How did you know?” I asked. I hadn’t been looking forward to breaking the news to her.

  “He’s been my boss for almost five years,” she reminded me. “You didn’t think I’d know?”

  The delivery of the words was flat, emotionless, but I knew the hurt was there, even if she wouldn’t let herself feel it yet.

  “He accomplished the mission,” I told her.

  “I know. He always did.”

  “You’re wrong, Top,” Vicky said. I turned physically at the pronouncement, even though it made little sense in the suit, wondering what she was saying. “There’s three platoon leaders,” she clarified. “Cronje took my platoon with him, and I’m not inclined to go chasing him down on my own.”

  “Okay,” I said. “You take Third platoon. Manley can fill in as squad leader for Majid. We’ll sort things out, rearrange what we need. Top,” I turned my attention back to the First Sergeant, “you ain’t going anywhere until your suit gets patched up.” And you with it, I thought but didn’t say. “How about you stay here with the other wounded and damaged and set up a perimeter. As soon as I can get a call out to the air cover, I’ll call in a dust-off for you.”

  “I ain’t hit that bad, junior…,” she began, but I cut her off.

  “I know you could tough through it,” I assured her, “but someone has to stay and look out for the wounded, and I figure you’re the best to do it. Am I acting company commander or not?”

  Her sigh was a burst of static in my headphones.

  “Goddamnit,” she murmured. “All right, you win.”

  “But where are we going?” Kovacs wanted to know. “I mean, what the hell are we going to do now?”

  I grabbed at patience and made sure I was on the private command net before I answered.

  “You did read the fucking Op Order, right, Francis?” I asked him. “The jamming is still in place and we don’t have air superiority yet, right? So, we’re supposed to hook up with Battalion at the Tahni spaceport and give them support. If they’ve already taken it, then we get further orders from there”

  “Oh, yeah,” he said, abashed. “Right. But I thought Battalion all died when their drop-ship got hit.”

  “They did, but someone will take over,” I told him. “Just like someone had to take over here.”

  “Yeah. I guess so.” He didn’t seem convinced.

  “We got you, boss,” Cano assured me, or maybe he was trying to reassure Kovacs.

  “Bang-Bang,” I said to Gunny Morrel. “Top is staying here with the wounded. That means you’re acting First Sergeant.”

  And God, how badly I wanted it to be Scotty. Not just for my sake, either. He should have had the chance.

  “Copy that, sir,” Bang-Bang said with more confidence in his acceptance than I had in the decision.

  “Get the company reorganized into three platoons,” I told him. “We move out in five mikes.”

  It was nearly ten kilometers to the spaceport from the fusion plant, and it might as well have been on another planet. The power plant was an isolated pocket of dead calm in the midst of the storm, protected from the chaos of the overhead fight for air superiority by anti-aircraft batteries we hadn’t even tried to take out. There were too many of them and we didn’t have the troops for it. The assault shuttles would spare some missiles for them once the jamming was down and Force Recon could target the batteries with laser designators.

  Outside the cover of the missile batteries, the clash overhead was a constant roll of thunder and the city was afire, and thank God we didn’t have to march through it. The road from the power plant to the spaceport was largely empty, a few smaller industrial storage buildings popping up here and there without any real rhyme or reason to their placement, just another of the mysteries of Tahni city planning. The Fleet pilots hadn’t even bothered to blow them up, having better things to shoot.

  The road was nice and broad, allowing the company plenty of room to spread out into a tactical travel formation, multiple, mutually-supportive wedges, the only obstacles abandoned vehicles, the only visible surface threats the
storage buildings. I could have sent a squad into each of them to check for concealed enemy, but I opted for speed over excess caution and we pressed on, not flying or hopping, but running at a steady thirty kilometers an hour.

  Pavement cracked under the steady drumbeat of our footpads, one after another of us stomping down onto the same spot, and it was easy to let the rhythm hypnotize me, to fall into it like I was a private again and all I had to worry about was my own ass. I missed those days, the days when I didn’t have anyone beyond myself to be responsible for, when my world ended at the tip of my nose. It had been lonely, sure, but it had also been comfortable. People could die and I wouldn’t especially care, wouldn’t mourn them beyond a passing gratitude that it hadn’t been me.

  People were still dying. People always died in war, and nothing you could do would stop that. But now, I cared about them. Now, I hurt. Now, I worried. Vicky was a hundred meters away from me, leading my platoon, and I had to accept the fact that she could die at any second, and I wouldn’t be able to do anything to save her, and I knew just as surely that if it happened, part of me would die with her. I also knew I’d keep on fighting because that had become who I was. I was a Marine now. I’d been a loner, an outcast, an outsider, a criminal…and now I was a Marine. I couldn’t go back, and yet I wondered if there was still a way I could go forward.

  After the war, I reminded myself. First things first.

  The illusion of separation from the battle began to dissolve as we neared the spaceport. If none of our assault shuttles had struck the targets there, it wasn’t for lack of trying. One of them tumbled in while we were still three kilometers away, a coil gun round knocking it out of the sky. The explosion when it hit was nearly anticlimactic compared to the halos of light, the flights of missiles, the staccato beat of gunfire and the sharp, intermediate thunder cracks of energy weapons constantly rolling out across the flat pavement of the chains of landing fields.