Direct Fire #4 Drop Trooper

by Rick Partlow

  Delp tossed the electromagnetic weapon to the pavement, then aimed his grenade launcher into the gap he’d left in the roof and fired a burst through it. Dust and smoke billowed out through the firing ports in the APC and it began to drift aimlessly across the road. Delp jumped down and sauntered away from the thing, and if a Vigilante’s face could have had a smug expression, it would have.

  “Stop showing off, Delp,” Bang-Bang told him, sounding unimpressed.

  “Enough distractions,” I said, not waiting for Verlander to get his shit together. “Move out, Delta. We have a deadline and we ain’t gonna be the company that was late to the Imperial Palace.”

  Civilians. There were so many damned civilians here.

  On their colonies, the farther out from Tahn-Skyyiah we’d been, the quicker the civilians had gotten their asses to shelters, stayed out of the way. It wasn’t that way here. They stood in the streets or on rooftops and watched us as we lumbered by, some of them simply staring with dark, sullen eyes, others throwing rocks or pieces of concrete, none even coming close. Males, all of them, old men and adolescents, except for a few prepubescent girls still young enough to live with their male relatives. The females moved to their own enclaves when they hit puberty, and we were going to do our damnedest to steer clear of them, according to command guidance.

  It was morning here. It took me a second to remember. The primary star was concealed behind the ever-present overcast, and my optics showed me everything in bright daylight no matter what the current mood of the day, but it meant these people should have had plenty of warning to get to shelter. Yet here they were, acting as if this was a parade.

  “Want me to launch a few grenades into the middle of the street?” Delp wondered from up front. “Get them back inside?”

  “Not unless they start shooting at us with something big enough to cause trouble,” I declared. He might not have been talking to me, but I was the one who was going to be held responsible for that decision and I was damned well going to be the one who made it. “Don’t get decisively engaged.”

  Nightmare images of Port Harcourt and Confluence flashed across my HUD like the suit’s threat computer was displaying them for me, of civilians killing us, us killing them, of them swarming us and leaving us no choice. But I first had a sense that trouble was coming when the civilians started to fade back into their houses, the oldest first, then the younger males. A few still watched, but crouched from behind cover, waiting for the show. I was about to warn Verlander when Delp warned me, first.

  “Something’s coming.” He sounded damn calm about it. “Aircraft inbound, one o’clock, nap-of-the-earth.”

  The civilians had called ahead a warning. I’d known they would, and nothing short of slaughtering them all would have stopped it. The dual-environment fighter was a fragile thing, lacking much in the way of armor, just an Scramjet aircraft that could make orbit, barely. It lacked the heavy armament and thick armor of an assault shuttle and counted mostly on numbers to overwhelm opposing aerospacecraft.

  But it could sure kill the shit out of us.

  “Scatter!” I ordered. “Take cover behind the buildings!”

  I waited until the last, ignoring Billy Cano’s pleading to move, making sure no one froze and stood in the middle of the street. I’d seen it happen back in the Underground, a bunch of young kids trying to work a heist at the train station and someone had called the Transit Authority Police. The TAP’s had barged down the center aisle of the station, shouldering the crowds aside with their big, armored bulk and the threat of their sonic stunners and someone had yelled for us all to run. And we all had, except this one kid, a thirteen-year-old everyone called Ginger because of his red hair. He’d frozen in place and let them come and bowl him over and put him in restraints, and that was the last we’d ever seen of Ginger.

  We apparently lacked any Gingers in this half of the company, since everyone got the hell out of the way, and I found myself the last one still standing in the street, watching the fighter line up to make its run down the residential street.

  Unless that means I’m the Ginger.

  “Sir, for fuck’s sake!” Bang-Bang yelled at me and I finally gave in and loped forward and to the right, ducking into a gap between buildings.

  I didn’t retreat all the way back, partially because the alley was littered with trash and debris, depressingly like any human alleyway I’d encountered, but also because I needed to see. That was the part about being a leader that fit in with my personality, the need to know, the need to see for myself. It would have been easy to bury my head and wait until someone called the all-clear, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I didn’t want to die from a threat I didn’t see coming.

  I could, theoretically, have used a camera drone, but there wasn’t enough time and the ECM jamming crackling in the air would make it impossible for me to do anything but line-of-sight, anyway. So I stuck my head out around the corner of the building, my shoulder pauldron scraping stucco off the surface, and watched the missiles cut loose from the fighter’s hard-points.

  I had to guess the Tahni didn’t get too many briefings from their battalion staff about avoiding collateral damage, because this asshole put those missiles directly into the first floor of the line of rowhouses across the street from me, only a hundred meters away. Now I ducked, barely in time. Heat washed over me, prickling my skin even through the armor, and I crouched low, knowing what was coming next. The concussion didn’t knock me over, but only because the buildings took the brunt of it. And the civilians inside.

  The wave swept outward in an expanding circle of destruction, buildings collapsing where it touched them, their façades engulfed in short-lived gouts of flame where dust burned away before the fire-resistant material beneath it extinguished it. The ground conducted the rumbling vibration into my suit and through it into my bones and I knew the building I hid behind was about to collapse, maybe forward into the street, maybe sideways right on top of me, but I stayed behind its cover until I caught a glimpse out of the corner of my optical camera’s view of the fighter banking and ascending, pulling out of its run.

  Was he going to come back for Battle Damage Assessment and maybe a second strike, or was he too busy with other targets? We couldn’t sit around here with our thumbs up our ass, so I’d have to hope he was too busy. I left the alley.

  The row housing hadn’t been anything fancy, maybe the equivalent of the Surface Dwellers in Trans-Angeles, not the poorest, working taxpayers. They had shops on the lower floors of those houses, I recalled from the briefings. Fabricators of the Tahni sort, metal workers, craft shops. They lived above them with their children, sometimes with their older male relatives, six or seven individuals to a house. On a block like this, there’d be maybe four or five hundred Tahni civilians.

  Nothing was left. Not one building was intact. A few were still standing, their supports teetering precariously, but the interiors were piles of rubbish, smoking, sometimes burning. There were bodies inside, but I couldn’t see them for the haze and didn’t want to.

  “Cano, Verlander, I need a casualty report.”

  It sounded like someone else’s voice, someone who hadn’t just been in the middle of an enemy airstrike, someone who wasn’t engulfed in roiling black smoke. Debris littered the street, some of it still burning, crunching under my feet as I wobbled slightly on the uneven surface. But there were things I had to know, and things they had to tell me, and they had to stay calm to do it. I had to be their example on how to stay calm when everything’s going to shit.

  Nothing. Someone coughed on an open circuit, which was psychological since none of the dust, smoke or particulate cloud was going to make it through our airtight armor.

  “I said, casualty report!” I snapped. “Cano, Verlander, did we lose anyone? Any damage?”

  I could read the IFF. They were all lit up and flashing red, but it meant nothing once I read down in the small print of the report. Their signals were being partially blocked by
the haze and smoke and probably by a few hundred kilos of debris in some cases.

  “Working on it, sir!” Cano told me. There was anger in his voice, maybe at me for rushing him, but that was okay. It was better for him to be angry at me than afraid. Anger could focus the mind if you kept it under control.

  “Third has no…,” Verlander began, then spluttered and tried again. “I mean, sir, we don’t have any KIA. I’ve got a couple people buried under this housing unit, but Gunny Morrel is trying to get them out.”

  The motion caught my eye, barely visible on optics, a hazy red and yellow on thermal, fifty meters down from me and twenty meters into the rubble. The row houses were built as narrow as an Underground Housing Block apartment in Trans-Angeles but three times as deep. Three Vigilantes were digging into the rubble, tossing aside meter-wide sections of concrete to try to free the battlesuits buried beneath it. I wanted to run over and help, but I wasn’t a strong back anymore and if Bang-Bang needed more strong backs, he’d ask for them.

  A chunk of concrete smacked into a pile of debris near the street and scattered it. Beneath was a body. A very small one. My world shifted, the ground turning at an angle, and I threw out an arm to balance myself and stumbled a step.

  “You okay, sir?” Cano asked. By the tone of his voice, it wasn’t the first time.

  “Yeah,” I said, squeezing my eyes shut for a moment, but unable to erase the sight of the dead child.

  I didn’t kill them. It wasn’t me. They killed their own people. Yeah, and I just ordered my Marines to take cover behind civilian homes, knowing the Tahni didn’t give a shit about the lives of their civilians.

  “Fourth is good to go, sir,” Cano told me. “Couple guys got shook up, might need some maintenance work later, but nothing that’ll keep them from completing the mission.”

  “Lt. Verlander,” I said, “are we close to having those Marines dug out?”

  I could have looked for myself, but I wasn’t going to. I didn’t want to see what else they might dig up.

  “Yeah. I mean, yes, sir.” He sounded distracted, paying too much attention to the job in front of him and not to his situation. A sergeant could get away with that, but not a platoon leader. “We’re up, we’re good to go.”

  Delp broke in, his voice wavering, so shaken he broadcast it on the general net instead of a private one.

  “Holy God, sir…all those people….” His armor was still smoking, like condensation on a cold morning as he stared into the wreckage, looking at something I didn’t want to see.

  “That’s what they get for narcing on us,” Verlander snapped, no remorse at all in his voice. “Morons.”

  “Lieutenant,” I told him quietly and privately, “shut up and move out.”

  26

  “Goddamn, Cam, it’s good to see you,” Francis Kovacs said, sounding as if he was about to collapse with relief. “I didn’t know how long we’d be able to stay here.”

  For once, I didn’t blame Kovacs for being overdramatic. The rally point was a public square, or as close to one as a Tahni city came, an open courtyard a kilometer on a side, with strips of pavement alternating with long, straight stretches of what passed for grass, and vaguely phallic marble…statuary? Or whatever they were. For all I knew, they could have been the Tahni equivalent of road signs. A low wall that might have been decorative enclosed the concrete dick-statues, two meters tall and twice as thick at the base as it was at the top.

  That was how the square had been when we’d seen the few stealth drone shots the Scout Service had managed to get. Now, it was scarred and burned, charred black in great swathes of destruction, and painted in blood. It was impossible to tell how many enemy troops had died in the square because what was left of them was in pieces. At my best guess, there had been well over a hundred. Their armored personnel carriers sat half-melted, still smoking at the eastern edge of the square, where the main road ran into it, eight of them, the Tahni equivalent of a company.

  Behind us, a monolith a hundred meters at the base and narrowing to a pyramid capstone two hundred meters above us loomed over the carnage like a gravestone, probably the tallest free-standing building I’d seen.

  “How long have you been here, Francis?” I asked him, staring out at the devastation.

  “Ten minutes,” he said, breathing the words out like a prayer. “Ten fucking minutes.”

  “Casualties?” I hadn’t noticed any on the IFF display, but I asked anyway.

  “Some suit damage, but nothing that would affect function. No injuries. Their weapons,” he said, pointing out at the dead Shock-Troopers with his plasma gun, “can’t penetrate our armor unless we sit around and let like four of them shoot at the same spot at once. But the crazy bastards just kept coming anyway….”

  “Have you seen any other allied forces?” I interrupted. He sounded like he was going to drift on me and I needed him focused.

  “Just them,” he said, gesturing overhead.

  The overflights of the assault shuttles were nearly constant now, their missiles and proton blasts heading mostly downward, which told me the Tahni fighters had been taken down. I flinched as a lightning bolt shot out of the sky and touched something off to our west, a massive fireball rising above the skyline of the city.

  “And more of that, too,” Kovacs added. “Lots of that.”

  We’d seen it too on the way in. The Fleet was taking advantage of the lack of outgoing defense laser fire to pound the city, taking out concentrations of enemy with proton blasts from orbit, which was akin to swatting a fly with a sledgehammer.

  “But I tell you what, boss, there’s more of them coming.” He waved at the dead Tahni. “Every time we send a drone camera up, we can see them moving. I ain’t seen any High Guard yet, just Shock-Troopers, but they’re everywhere, thousands of them.”

  “We need to get to the palace,” I said, “and hope Top is already there.” I turned until I saw Delp’s IFF signal. He was at the east end of the square, crouched down in the cover of the burning APC’s, watching outward. It was so easy to see past the armor, to picture the man inside it down on one knee, holding a rifle, to see the tremble in his hand and the tic in his cheek like I’d seen him in the back of the MP vehicle back on Point Barber. Best not to let anyone sit around stewing for too long.

  “North, Verlander,” I instructed. “Just another three or four klicks along the main road.”

  I dropped in behind Third Platoon and adjusted my pace to theirs, a slogging, cautious shuffle, an itching in the middle of my back screaming at me that we were moving too slowly. I wanted to run on the hop, to bounce off the sloping faces of the buildings lining the broad, paved road, to get us there in five minutes instead of fifteen. But it wasn’t just me, wasn’t even a squad or a platoon. Leading a full company meant adjusting to the pace that the least competent leader was capable of keeping up without losing his grasp of the situation. It wouldn’t help us to run faster into an ambush. But it sure would have felt better.

  Every building we passed felt like a sniper hide and I began to wonder why more of them weren’t. The Tahni hadn’t seemed shy about using their civilians for cover on colony worlds, and certainly hadn’t seemed reluctant about blowing them up if they got in the way. I wondered if the difference here was merely a matter of the same sort of differences I’d noticed between city-dwellers on Earth and citizens of the colonies, the lack of initiative and self-sufficiency, the reliance on the government that urbanites everywhere seemed to share.

  They called the cops on us and the cops wound up burning down their neighborhood.

  That was the old Outsider talking, the Trans-Angeles street kid who resented authority. Now, I was authority.

  A signal crackled in my earphones, staticky and weak at first, then getting stronger as if the drone relay passing it on had just made its way overhead.

  “Delta One Actual, do you read? This is Zero Four Actual. Over.”

  I grimaced. This was the old good news-bad news joke. The go
od news was, we had comms again, which meant I could call in and direct fire support and coordinate with the rest of the brigade. The bad news was, now Geiger could micromanage me again. I thought about pretending I didn’t receive the transmission, but then sighed and keyed my microphone, trying to remember our official comms call signs. None of us used that shit when we were talking via line-of-sight because it was incredibly unlikely the enemy could intercept it and, more importantly, what would they do with it if they did? It’s not like they could send kill teams to find our families or access our military records and blackmail us. Most things the military does are done because they’ve always been done that way.

  “Zero Four Actual, this is Delta One Actual. I have linked up with Delta One Bravo and Two Bravo and we are inbound to Objective One, ETA ten mikes, over.”

  “Copy that, Delta. Zero Four Hotel is at Objective Two with Alpha and Charlie.” Which was a military base three kilometers from the palace, Objective One. “Enemy jamming still exists, but drone relays are in place at all major objectives. Foxtrot elements are in place at Objective One and waiting on you before proceeding. What is your status? Over.”

  “No casualties,” I reported. “Still have not linked up with Delta Hotel elements. All others are combat-effective.”

  “Keep me updated, Delta. Zero Four Hotel, out.”

  Oh, yeah, I’ll keep you updated. But since comms were working…

  “Delta Hotel Actual, this is Delta One Actual. How do you copy? Over.”

  It was still a long-shot. The drones might not cover the whole city and I had no idea where Top and Headquarters Platoon was. I heard nothing but the scrape-bang of my feet pounding into the pavement for a long moment before I tried again. Second time was the charm.

  “Delta One Actual, this is Delta Hotel Actual. I copy five by five, over.”