by Rick Partlow
“Do you think you can do it, Gunny?” Geiger asked him once she’d had a chance to check out the video.
“Shit, ma’am,” Vazquez sighed, “I’d do anything to get the hell out of here right now.”
“If this shits the bed,” I told Geiger, “we’ll take out the High Guard troops and your Boomers can still try to get a shot at the mecha.” And it’s just as likely to not work as if we’d gone with your plan, I didn’t add.
“Right,” she said immediately. “Let’s do it. Lt. Alvarez, Gunny Vazquez, get your people ready. This kicks off in three mikes.”
Shit. Three minutes.
“Yes, ma’am,” I said and loped back down the line, feeling absurd with my suit hunched over, the fingers of the left hand scraping the ground like a gorilla.
I could have given the briefing over the comms without moving at all, of course, but it didn’t feel right. This was as close to a suicide mission as I’d encountered since I’d become an officer, and some things needed to be said face to face.
18
“You know,” Vicky said, “it’s been over a year since the last time you almost got me killed, and I was hoping we were all done with that phase of our relationship.”
“Not my fault,” I insisted, talking fast because we didn’t have much time. “And you would have liked Captain Geiger’s plan even less.”
She, Cano, and Kovacs had clustered around me near the right end of the wall, again with that instinctive need to be close to the person talking to them. I didn’t bother saying anything about it. I might as well have asked them not to breathe.
“Third is on point, Vicky,” I told her. “I’ll be right behind you. Billy, you’re next and Francis will ride drag. Remember, the point of this is to tie them up, attract attention. Hit them hard, but don’t try to break through and leave them behind us. If we can’t kill them all, we have to keep their focus on us until the Recon troops can set the charges. Not only will that take out the turrets, but I have a suspicion a lot of the EM jamming is coming from those dishes I saw behind the spaceport offices.”
“What about the mecha?” Kovacs asked. He was, I thought, trying not to sound scared, but it wasn’t working. I wasn’t sure if he was scared for his own life, his Marines or maybe just scared of fucking up. Maybe all three. “If it comes after us while we’re tied up with the High Guard, we’re all dead.”
“We just have to hope he doesn’t want to kill his own people.” It wasn’t a firm foundation to build a hope on, but it was all we had. I checked the countdown on my HUD. “Get your platoons in order. We have less than one minute.”
“Hey sir,” Bang-Bang said. I checked his IFF and found him near the rear of our lines, ready to bring up drag like a good Top Kick should. “I’m new at this shit and all, being First Sergeant, but I feel like I should be the one to tell you, most company commanders don’t ride the horse that far in front of the saddle.”
The laugh burst out of me in spite of the situation.
“Where the hell did you say you were from again, Bang-Bang?”
“Me? I’m from Greater Chicago.”
Which was only slightly less massive and entangled than Trans-Angeles.
“Then how the hell do you know anything about riding horses?”
“Virtual reality, sir. My dad rode a horse once when he was a kid and he made me learn how on a simulator. He made me swear once I got out of the Corps, I was going to move somewhere I could ride one for real.”
“Shit, maybe we’ll be neighbors. But as for where I fight from…I may be an acting company commander, but this isn’t going to be a chess game. It’s a fist fight. And I throw the hardest fucking punch.”
“Uh-huh.” He didn’t seem convinced.
“If you’re that worried, I guess you’d better make sure nothing kills me.”
“Alvarez,” Geiger said, maybe ten seconds earlier than I thought she would, “it’s time. You ready?”
“Yes, ma’am.” I switched to the company net. “Delta, move out.”
That was when it hit me. Up until that point, things had been going too fast, just one thing after another since the second we’d been within sight of the spaceport. Taking the first step along the retaining wall, sending Vicky and Bang-Bang ahead of me leading my platoon, the whole company following my orders, not just as a temporary measure because we were separated from the Skipper, but because he was dead…that just brought everything together in one package and slammed it into my chest. The Iwo blowing up, the drop-ship on fire, the isolation, the fusion reactor, Captain Covington’s sacrifice, each of them a body blow, setting me up for the knock-out punch.
I kept going, mostly because I knew Vicky would take over if I didn’t. Maybe she’d do a better job of it, but I didn’t want to make her or the others think the less of me for not stepping up when it was my turn. I loved her, but I wasn’t thinking of her as my lover at that moment, I was thinking of her as a sister Marine. She had the right to expect me to pull my weight.
I don’t think the Tahni force expected the attack. I think they were ready for Geiger’s over-the-top assault, because when she and her Marines began laying down covering fire, the response was overwhelming, an unending barrage of every weapon the enemy had, like the planet itself was exploding behind us. But nothing jumped up to meet our flanking maneuver, no rounds came in above us. The first we saw of the enemy was when we hit the service road.
The High Guard troops were in about company strength, maybe a little more. The Tahni equivalent of a company was smaller than ours, so maybe this had started out as two companies before the casualties they’d taken. They were behind the cover of some sort of industrial machinery, tracked vehicles with rollers and jets attached to tanks that I thought maybe had something to do with surfacing the landing pads. The machines were scored and burned and twisted, but they’d protected the High Guard troopers from the brunt of our fire…from the lines on the wall. They did nothing to stop my flanking force.
Delp was on point, but the rest of Third Platoon was spreading out to the side into an echelon right as we swung up the curving road to hit the High Guard troops, and the first shots were unleashed in an almost-simultaneous barrage at under a hundred meters. High Guard suits disappeared in flares of burning metal and we’d achieved surprise if we could keep it.
Behind me, back in Kovacs’ platoon, two Marines went down, their IFF signals fading to black, maybe the mecha, maybe the bunkers finally figuring out where we were and what we were trying to do. I couldn’t even take the time to read their names, to grieve for them. They were gone and all I could think was that his platoon was down six Marines now, nearly a whole squad, and I would have to keep that in mind before I tasked him with anything else. It felt cold, calculating, someone else’s thoughts intruding on mine.
And I was utterly lost running even as far back as the rear of the lead platoon. The battle was taking place on another planet, displayed on the screens of a simulator and I ached to fire, to target the enemy and kill them, but by the time I reached the enemy, they had retreated or already lay dying. I’d expected the High Guard to retreat toward the mecha. It would have made sense for them to take the fight into the mutually supporting fields of fire from the artillery piece and the bunker turrets, and we’d planned for it. We were going to stick close so the enemy couldn’t target us without killing their own people.
I guess that’s why they’re called aliens, because they didn’t think the way we expected them to. Instead of heading out into the courtyard and support, they ducked into a side entrance to the spaceport administration building and I was left with my first major decision and about three seconds in which to make it.
“First and Fourth Platoons,” I barked, “split off and go around the rear of the building. First, look for another entrance and see if you can flank them. Fourth, head to the other end and support the Recon team.”
And that was it, our fates decided by a guess, a hunch with a fifty-fifty shot of being right. I
should have gone with First and Fourth, should have preserved my ability to call the plays, but I made another guess. The action was going to be inside and so was I.
I hadn’t noticed how light it was getting outside until the shadows of the interior shut out the gathering dawn. The helmet optics kept it as clear as high noon, but there was a qualitative difference between actual daylight and enhanced imaging, just another of the little things I had come to notice during my time in the suits. The entrance was broad and four meters tall and led to what seemed to be a garage for industrial vehicles like the ones lined up outside. Maybe the Tahni had pulled them all out to provide cover, because the garage was mostly empty, a single resurfacing vehicle sitting partially disassembled in a corner.
Which left plenty of room for the rear guard of the Tahni troopers to turn and make a stand. If the chaos of battle seemed confusing in the open spaces of the port, it was incomprehensible inside the confines of the garage. Thank God it was Third going through that door and Vicky and Bang-Bang in charge of them. The natural thing to do, the thing I would have expected from most platoons, would be to pile up, to get on First squad’s ass and use them as human mine detectors, but I’d trained them better than that.
Second and Third squads split off left and right just through the door, spreading wide and opening up fields of fire for themselves. The Tahni weren’t quite as practiced. They’d narrowed their front by using the opposite door of the garage for cover, but that also meant only two of them could fire on us, and two electron beamers versus eight plasma guns abreast was no contest. A Marine in First squad took a hit, and their damage flashed red on the IFF display, but the High Guard suits simply disappeared, along with half the doorway.
On the other side of it was…something. I couldn’t have sworn what the Tahni used the rooms for, but they were broad and open, and my brain wanted to call them business offices, for all that they bore little, if any, resemblance to the business offices I’d seen on Earth or the colonies. It could have had, I reflected with a snort of dark amusement, religious, cultural, or sociological significance. Right now, what it had was a platoon of enemy battlesuits huddled in the corners of the room behind furniture comically undersized for their bulk, as if they were all searching for someplace to sit.
They were spread out more this time, and our front lines had another full second before their capacitors recharged, but this was something else we’d practiced and no one had to give an order, not Vicky or Bang-Bang or me. First squad ducked to the side as they entered the room and Second moved forward, firing their plasma guns then moving to the opposite side of the room. If we’d been Force Recon, we’d have been diving for cover, but there was no cover to be had here for us. Electron beams would have cut through anything in this building, including the walls. Another hit on another Marine, not fatal, not disabling, and four Tahni troopers died in the space of three seconds, while the rest retreated out of the building.
And I couldn’t help but wonder what their endgame was. They were giving up lives to buy time, but to buy time for what?
We all got our answer to that question when the front wall caved in and the Tahni mecha waded into it like a toddler crashing through a house made from building blocks. And I knew immediately I had fucked up, had forgotten that part about them being aliens. What made sense for us didn’t make sense for them. The mecha should have stayed out front and concentrated fire on Geiger and her people. Any human would have. But they didn’t. They took their biggest weapon to what they considered the most imminent threat, and they’d mousetrapped us in the middle of a building, willing to risk killing their own people and destroying their own facilities to get us.
It was my fault, and I’d be the one to set it right.
“Get everyone out of here!” I yelled at Vicky, and I hit my jets.
The mecha was leaning forward, its weight on its front foot, slightly off-balance because it had never been built for agility, just enough brute force to carry around an antiproton reactor and a shitload of weapons. I rammed my shoulder into the thing’s trailing leg, my teeth clacking together with the impact, and ran the jets so far into the red I could almost hear them screaming for mercy.
It didn’t knock him over. I hadn’t thought it would. I just wanted to buy time, and that I did. He lost balance and had to slam his trailing foot to the ground, which, unfortunately, took me to the ground with it. The armor was tough. It could take a huge beating and keep working, but unfortunately, us humans had to be inside it.
Every time we got a new guy in the platoon, they would always wind up asking why we had to be in the suits, why the Marines didn’t just put an AI program in the suit computers and let it do the fighting, and someone would have to repeat the same explanation that Captain Covington had given to the platoon leader who had given it to everyone else. It was the old story about how automated weapons had been tried during the Sino-Russian War and had turned against their own side. It might have just been because the computer systems weren’t sophisticated enough back then, but no one with the power to change things had ever trusted them again, so us poor, vulnerable humans still had to pull the triggers.
When my back hit the concrete foundation of the building, I could really have come up with some great arguments for automated weaponry. I’d had cracked ribs before, and I was fairly sure I had them again. The pain sucked the breath right out of my chest, replacing it with white fire, and I wanted more than anything else to just lie there on the ground and rest, to let someone else do the rest of the fighting.
That wasn’t an option for a few reasons, the main one being that if I stayed on the ground, the mecha was going to squish me flat. The massive oval of its foot pad hovered above me and I punched the jets again, sliding through oceans of debris but getting out of the way of the stomp. The mecha’s foot pad cracked the floor beneath it, shaking me right through the BiPhase Carbide of my armor. I had to get up, and even though the Vigilante would do the work, the only way it could react was by me using the muscles that I would have needed if I’d been just trying to move my own body and not the three-meter suit of armor. And moving fucking hurt.
I rolled to my feet, screaming into the privacy of my helmet, knowing no one would hear, and turned to face oncoming death. Instinct screamed at me to get distance, but experience yelled just as loud that I should stay close. The mecha was an artillery piece, and its heavy weapons were designed for distance fire. Neither the proton cannon nor the coil gun turret could depress far enough to reach me, but the damned KE guns could.
Tantalum needles cracked off my armor, no single one of them able to penetrate, but the combined effect of hundreds of the things was enough to wear my protection down and kill me, given time. Thankfully, even though my plasma gun wouldn’t penetrate the mecha’s armor over anything vital, there was one target I was fairly confident about servicing.
I blasted the thing’s right-hand KE gun with a plasmoid, the ionized gas melting the infantry-defense weapon to slag. The Tahni pilot must have really liked that gun because he seemed to take its loss personally. His leg was the size of a tree trunk, and when it impacted the left shoulder of my suit, it threw me four meters, straight through the back wall of the building.
It didn’t hurt as much as I thought it would, if I could honestly say I had a coherent thought at all. Stars filled my vision, and even the HUD in my helmet couldn’t penetrate them to tell me where I was or what was happening, and everything felt numb. Drugs. I was drugged, the pain-killers were kicking in. That was why it didn’t hurt, though it damned well should have. I was propped on a knee, though I didn’t remember getting up, and someone was screaming into my ear. Several someones, and I couldn’t separate them into anything comprehensible.
“Alvarez!” It was Geiger, and she didn’t seem happy. “The Recon troops are pinned down! Two platoons of Shock-troopers came out of the bunker to intercept them. There’s no way they’re going to get those charges set!”
Well, shit. Should have know
n better than to count on straight-legs. When the hell had they ever accomplished anything except grabbing the glory? I somehow managed a reply to Geiger, though I can’t recall the specifics of it. It was something reassuring, I suppose, some promise that Delta would get the job done. That was what the Skipper would have said, or at least my drug-addled mind hoped it was.
“Vicky!” I said, the word half a command, half a prayer. “Status report!”
The mecha was coming. It took the thing two steps to come through the wall.
Her reply was staticky, slipping in and out, the laser line-of-sight comms interrupted by particulate debris.
“…taking casualties!” she said. “We have linked up with First and Fourth Platoon and we’re pushing them back…”
And then I was too busy to talk. The mecha swiveled on its jointed hips, trying to line up its remaining KE gun and I gave it a plasma blast because why the fuck not? I wasn’t saving the gun for a special occasion. It hit something on the mecha, though I couldn’t tell what. Probably nothing important, because it was still taking giant, swooping steps towards me, determined to stomp me into the ground if it couldn’t shoot me.
Where was I? The question bounced back and forth in my brain; the part numbed by the pain-killers laughing at the inanity of it. I was on Point Barber, in Deltaville, at the spaceport, getting my ass kicked by something three times my size and ten times my weight. The part that was still trying to accomplish this mission understood the importance of the question.
Where was the liquid nitrogen pump house? Where was I in relation to it? I was the only one left who could take it out. The Recon troops were pinned down, Geiger was pinned down, the rest of Delta was tangled up with the High Guard. If I had concentrated—if I’d been able to concentrate—I could have seen them on my sensor readout, somewhere behind me and off to my left. They were fighting for their lives and Vicky was leading them when I should have been, and I felt like I’d failed them, but there was still work to do, and I could feel sorry for myself later.
