Direct Fire #4 Drop Trooper

by Rick Partlow

  “Can we shake them?” That was the transport’s captain. I’d never seen her, but I recognized her voice from the announcements she made over the speakers periodically.

  “Probability is pretty low, ma’am. Bravos are heading our way to try to take them out, but they’re too close.”

  “Secure for micro-Transition one light-second ninety degrees from galactic north. Ten seconds.”

  An alarm began whooping, a distant, mournful sound that barely made it through the drop-ship’s fuselage, though thankfully not in my earphones.

  “All personnel, secure for micro-Transition. All emergency barriers up, all damage control teams to independent air sources.”

  “Shit,” I moaned, then switched to the company net and tried to imitate the calm of the ship’s tactical officer. “Hold on. We’ll be fine, but it’s not going to be fun.”

  It wasn’t. The feeling reminded me of when I was ten and got my ass kicked by a couple of teenage boys who decided I had looked at them wrong. I ached all over and couldn’t understand why. Marines were cursing in one ear and Fleet crews were cursing in another and something was flashing yellow with the warning that there was an atmosphere leak in the Marine quarters. Which was no big deal since none of us were occupying them at the moment. Hell, most of us didn’t even have any personal effects on the ship because we’d lost them all on the Iwo. The Hermes wasn’t a home, it was just a ride.

  “We’re clear.” The tactical officer was equanimous, as if it hadn’t mattered to him either way. “The Alphas aborted. Bravo Squadron Three falling in for escort.”

  I was breathing hard and I had to bring it under control before I could address the company again. Thrust pushed me into the back of my suit, a steady two gravities, not exactly comfortable but not painful.

  “We’re good,” I told them, perhaps trying to reassure myself. “Everyone okay?”

  A chorus of “ooh-rah” came from the officers, who probably hadn’t had time to even check their platoons but didn’t want to admit any of them had puked inside their suits.

  “Status report, Delta?” Geiger asked almost before the echo from my platoon leaders had died.

  “We’re good, ma’am.” No, we have fifty percent casualties and all our suits are down. What did she expect me to say?

  “Revised ETA to our separation point is fifteen mikes. Pass it down to your Marines and run final checks.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Fifteen minutes sounded like forever. I passed it on to the platoon leaders, the words tumbling out on automatic, barely registering in my own ears. Except Kovacs. I made sure to get him on the line because he was my XO and would be in charge of the other two platoons until we touched ground.

  “Francis,” I told him, “separation in fifteen mikes. You remember the link-up plan, right?”

  “Yeah, I got it,” he insisted. “If we drop too far separated for visual identification, I take my section of the company to the open square just to the west of that funky Washington Monument-looking building on the east end of the city and wait for you there until 1700 local time. If enemy activity forces me off that area, the backup rally point is the industrial parking lot behind the fusion reactor complex.”

  Well, he mostly had it.

  “The Washington Monument-looking building is the Civil Government Central Planning Headquarters,” I told him, “but close enough. And if we don’t link up by 1700, you’re to…” I trailed off, waiting for him to finish it.

  “I take First and Second Platoons and go link up with Battalion in the public square outside the Imperial Palace,” he said, sounding exasperated I was making him go over it again.

  “Right. Go ahead and start the final checks on your bird.”

  I had checks of my own to make, redundant but also required, because if anything did go wrong and I had neglected to make the final checks, only one Marine would pay the price. One of my training NCO’s at Officers’ Candidate School had told me officers were human shit-collectors. In the military, shit rolled downhill and if it wound up hitting the NCO’s who did all the real work, why then, the Marines would fall apart in a day. That’s why they had to have officers like me, to catch the shit before it could hit the NCO’s and take all the blame when things went wrong.

  I hadn’t been an officer all that long, but I still hadn’t had a single experience that would have disproven the theory.

  I devoted one ear to the preparations of my platoon leaders, spying on their inter-platoon nets, double-checking their double-checks, another to listening to the tactical feed from the ship. I couldn’t keep track of the threats and I wasn’t sure they could either. As we approached Tahn-Skyyiah, they were piled too thick and the cruisers running interference for us were bulling through them, counting on their shields and their weapons to get them through the gauntlet. I winced with every missile that struck, every railgun round that glanced off their deflectors, dreading, waiting, expecting one of them to explode into a supernova. Once, I’d thought of the big ships as invulnerable, wished I could be on one of them instead of the vulnerable troop ships. I’d had that illusion shattered at Point Barber.

  “You doing okay, sir?”

  The question took me by surprise. Of all the questions, all the demands for status reports, no one had asked me that. It was Top. She wasn’t on my drop-ship, of course. She and the Headquarters platoon had to go down separately because the Boomers couldn’t drop. They’d land in an LZ secured by assault shuttles and get off near the edge of the city, then make their way in and try to link up with us.

  “I want to be off this fucking ship, Top,” I told her, thinking it would be useful to be completely honest with someone. “I feel like I’m sitting in a target range while everyone comes up and takes a shot at me.”

  “The enemy always has a say, sir,” she reminded me.

  “I’m talking about our own side. How are the Marines doing? I hear all the rah-rah bullshit, but how are they really doing?”

  “Just like you, ready to get off this ship, ready to shoot at something.”

  “Separation in one minute.”

  The announcement caught me by surprise. Had it already been fifteen minutes?

  “You get that, Alvarez?” Geiger asked and my eyes bugged out from keeping my jaws clenched. I tried to remind myself this was her first time, too.

  “Yes, ma’am. Passing it along.”

  I said something inane and banal, the sort of thing I’d always found so redundant when I was enlisted, reiterating the announcement that they’d already heard. I was still talking when the drop-ship’s crew chief interrupted me to repeat the same thing, except it was happening in ten seconds.

  “Good luck, Delta,” I said. “See you on the ground.”

  The two-gravity thrust had been good practice, because now the real punishment began. Six gees, I guessed from the tunnel vision and the way the sounds in my helmet earphones faded away into the background. I didn’t try to follow the external cameras because I couldn’t have focused on them if I’d wanted to.

  “Well, you got your wish.” I don’t know how Top managed to talk under the pressure, but there were a lot of things about Top I didn’t know. Like how she knew just how to wring the last second of connection we’d have to the troop transport’s comms before the drop-ships were out of range. “We’re off the fucking ship.”

  She always got the last word.

  25

  I missed the flood of data. It had been overwhelming, but at least it had been something to grab onto, a measure of control. In the drop-ship, there was nothing. I was separated from half my company, and couldn’t keep track of their bird even if I could have overcome the punishing boost long enough to concentrate on the feed from the sensor suite. This close to the planet, the ECM jamming was thick enough to slice for sandwich meat, and the drop-ship’s laser line-of-sight comms were being dedicated to the assault shuttles running interference for us. I couldn’t even gather the breath to talk to the people in my own bird, and if there
was any upside to the isolation and the crushing acceleration, it was that I didn’t have to listen to Major Geiger’s constant demands for status reports.

  I think I must have greyed out. My eyes snapped open to a hypnic jerk, but this one wasn’t waking up from a dream, it was regaining consciousness after having the blood pushed away from my brain for too long. The boost had cut off abruptly and I sucked in a huge breath, trying to take advantage of the moment of weightlessness to get air and blood flowing, and almost didn’t register the flashing warning that we were about to experience a violent maneuver.

  It was my favorite, a barrel roll at high gees, not just for the way it threw my stomach into a blender but for the knowledge of why we were doing it. A Tahni corvette, a dual-environment fighter, or orbital platform was trying to focus a weapons laser on us from long distance and the drop-ship pilots had thrown us into a roll to keep the enemy from hitting the same spot on the fuselage long enough to burn through. And if us passengers in the back didn’t like it, well, we’d like breaking apart and floating helplessly in high orbit even less.

  “When are we gonna drop?” Cano asked, sounding as if he was desperately trying to keep his stomach contents down.

  He could look at the damned tactical readout just as easily as I could, I grumbled silently. Then I realized I hadn’t looked at it in minutes. I assumed it was minutes. It felt like hours, but I’d done this enough times to realize that meant it had actually been minutes.

  I couldn’t make sense of the optical cameras because everything in the picture was spinning crazily and so was I, and every time I tried to force the image to hold still, I felt as if I was going to pass out. I concentrated on the altitude reading instead, at least trying to get an idea if we’d entered the atmosphere.

  “Holy shit,” I whispered.

  We weren’t just in the atmosphere, we were at 3,000 meters and I hadn’t even noticed the transition from the plasma drives to the turbojets. And then the roll ceased, the boost from the rear cut back to almost nothing and the belly jets roared their defiance of gravity.

  Every organ in my body dropped into my lower intestines and tried to push their way out, and I was certain I heard something in the superstructure of the drop-ship crack and all I could do was hope it wasn’t something they needed to stay in the air. The vibration from the belly jets firing rattled my teeth in my skull as they pulled our nose up, bringing us to a near stop and letting a pair of assault shuttles shoot past us, their exhausts an angry red, shock diamonds stretched out behind them.

  Proton cannons struck out with the fury of an ancient, angry god, splitting the sky apart, their thunderclaps audible even kilometers away through the fuselage of our drop-ship. I couldn’t see the enemy fighters the assault shuttles were targeting, couldn’t pick the incandescent fury of their deaths from the rest of the endless chain of explosions in the air, but the shuttles banked away, their job done.

  Ours was about to begin. I recognized the terrain beneath us, the incredible scope of the capital city of Tahn-Khandranda. It was nowhere near as large as Trans-Angeles, was home to less than a quarter of the population of that hive of humanity, and yet I found it terrifying; huge and intimidating in a way I had never thought of Trans-Angeles. I suppose it was the concept of taking on a whole planet that hit me in that one instant. We’d fought the Tahni on colonies they’d settled, worlds they’d conquered, outposts they’d set up against the howling wilderness, but this was their home. It was like landing in Capital City and trying to conquer all of Earth. It was impossible, ludicrous, and yet here we were.

  Monoliths and twisted spires and steppe pyramids were arrayed in ways that made no sense to my human eyes, yet still displayed a pattern, something deep beneath the surface, designed by an inhuman imagination. And at the center of it all were the brilliant white spheres of the temples. The Three Temples of the Faith was what the intelligence briefing had called them, the foundation of the Tahni belief system, wrapped up in some complicated process of incarnation and reincarnation, where their god, their Spiritual Emperor, inhabited the mortal body of their physical Emperor. The ceremony was solemn and respectful and, if the briefing was to be believed, ended in the suicide of the old Emperor to allow the new civil, military and spiritual leader of the Imperium to become the sole possessor of the spirit of the deity. Their belief was, as long as the temples stood and their Emperor inhabited the palace, the Tahni Imperium could never fall.

  We were here to test the prophecies, I supposed.

  “Drop warning!” the crew chief bellowed into the PA speakers. “Drop warning! Drop in sixty seconds!” She sounded as if she’d be happy to see us go, probably so they could fly off somewhere to comparative safety and wait out the last battle of the war.

  Fleet or Marines, Drop-Trooper or Force Recon, no one wanted to be the last one killed in the war.

  “You’re leading us off, Third,” I reminded them, particularly Verlander. Maybe Top had it right, maybe it bothered me that some marginally-competent Academy grad who’d gotten his last platoon killed was in charge of my platoon. “We don’t expect there to be a huge concentration of High Guard in the city. Intelligence says they sent most of their battalions to Point Barber. But there’ll be a shitload of Shock-troopers, and even if they’re smaller than us, you get enough of them together, they can bring you down. Don’t get decisively engaged. We can’t fight a whole city. We have to remember our objective.”

  “Yes, sir,” Bang-Bang said. “Ooh-rah!”

  He said it respectfully, as if I’d just delivered the best speech of my life, but I knew him well enough now to know he was telling me to shut up, that I was droning on with rah-rah bullshit. I shut up.

  “Drop! Drop! Drop!”

  I echoed the words without thinking, from instincts honed during thousands of hours of practice, and they echoed through the platoon leaders to the platoon sergeants to squad leaders, and for what was probably the last time, we dropped.

  The fact we were able to make it to the ground without dying was a miracle not from God but from the hallowed halls of Fleet Intelligence. And the fact that Fleet Intelligence had planned anything that actually worked might just have been a miracle from God, come to think of it.

  The city had massive air defenses, just as anyone would have expected from the capital of the homeworld of a militaristic empire, but the one weakness Fleet Intelligence had determined was the centralization you’d expect from a city of this size. Unlike their colonies, where things were spread out and power systems were localized, Tahn-Khandranda’s air defenses were all powered by a massive fusion reactor at the edge of the city’s industrial zone, or as much as the place could be said to have an industrialized zone.

  And the fucking Fleet Intelligence boys had taken it down before we even set boots on the ground. How was being kept deliberately vague, and we’d been told not to ask, which of course, had everyone guessing. The rumor I’d heard was that it was some sort of top-secret special operations unit, something that had been around for years but no one had ever officially acknowledged its existence. That sounded like a load of barracks-room bullshit to me, but I couldn’t come up with a better explanation, so I decided I’d raise a toast to the super-commandoes the first chance I got.

  I’d almost forgotten what it felt like to not be shot at during a drop, and I kept swiveling my head from side to side, checking the sensors, waiting for someone to call out the contact, but no one did. I touched down on the pavement a hundred meters back of Private Vince Delp, able to watch Third Platoon spread out in a textbook wedge formation by squads. Verlander, I reflected, hadn’t yet had the chance to fuck up all the good work I’d done.

  The only thing that had gone wrong so far was that Kovacs and the other half of Delta Company was nowhere to be seen. They should have dropped right next to us, but that was always the plan and it almost never happened. We’d hook up with them at the rally point. I hoped.

  There was a difference to the streets of Tahn-Khandranda fro
m the other Tahni worlds I’d seen, and it wasn’t just the sheer number of them here, or the age. There seemed to be a care taken with the construction of this city, right down to the sweeping curve of the low walls separating the paved roads from the grass and well-tended shrubs of what looked like a cross between a green belt and a city park. It was all smooth and neat and established, lacking the raw, rough-hewn nature of their colonies.

  Which made the armored personnel carriers all the more jarring when they pulled out from an intersection, flattened and angular and rolling on rounded, caster-style wheels, heavy KE guns spitting tantalum darts at thousands of meters per second. Orders swelled in my throat, trying to bust their way out with an instinct to take charge of the platoon, to micro-manage right down to the squad level, but I pushed the words down and let my people do their jobs.

  Verlander might have shouted something, but no one needed his orders any more than they needed mine.

  “Contact, front!” Sgt. Medina snapped. “Enemy vehicles! Delp, Calhoun, take them out!”

  And even his orders were redundant, because Delp was a walking ball of nerve and instincts, and if he wasn’t quite as good as Henckel had been, he was close enough for government work. He was in the air before the lead vehicle had completed its turn onto the main road, firing a blast from his plasma gun down through the roof of the APC just fore of the KE turret. A spear of plasma that could burn a hole through the chest of a High Guard peeled the lighter armor atop the vehicle like a can opener and turned the crew compartment into a blast furnace.

  He should have waited for Calhoun to take out the other APC. It would have been the sound tactical decision, even though it would have meant waiting an extra second, giving the enemy another chance to take a shot at us. Delp went another way, went the way I might have gone if it had been me. He gave his jets another burst and landed on top of the second vehicle, grabbing the emitter of the heavy KE gun with his suit’s articulated left hand and yanking backward. The Vigilante ripped the weapon off its gimbal mount, leaving power cables torn and sparking, sending tantalum darts scattering over the roof of the APC.