Direct Fire #4 Drop Trooper

by Rick Partlow

  Top sounded as if she were out for a family picnic instead of leading a light platoon through the enemy capital in the biggest invasion in human history.

  “We are inbound to Objective One,” I told her. “What is your status? Over.”

  “What’s taking you so long?” she asked, the hint of a grin in the words. “We’ve been here for three mikes. It’s dead as a church social here, but I have a feeling the Gomers are waiting for us to move on the objective before they come out to play. Over.”

  “Tell them to hold the party till we get there. The Gomers promised Delta the first dance. Out.”

  Now I knew what the starships had been targeting with those proton blasts.

  The Tahni Imperial Palace was nearly a kilometer on a side, its base an octagonal wall twenty meters tall, with a half-dome structure rising from the base, the opposite side of the curving dome a sharp, downward angle etched with arcane designs no human had been able to decipher. It was widely recognized as the grandest, most ornate single-purpose building ever constructed, the wording tortured into a shape that excluded the mega-cities on Earth so academics and popular journals could have a catchy headline.

  It didn’t seem so grand anymore. There had been, I remembered from the briefing, anti-aircraft turrets and ground defense bunkers all around the perimeter wall, and the cruisers had left not a one of them intact. Sections of the wall dozens of meters long had collapsed into charred cinders, the main entrances to the palace buried under tons of rubble. The half-dome had spider-web cracks running up the curve of it from the damage to its supports and huge sections of the top had fallen inward. It didn’t seem as if anything inside could have survived, but I knew that the Emperor’s living quarters and the military command center were deep underground.

  We’d been within sight of the palace for nearly ten minutes, and it had taken every second of that to reach the rendezvous point. Top was there waiting for us, the Boomers set up in a defensive perimeter, using the corpses of dozens of armored personnel carriers destroyed in the orbital bombardment as cover. The Force Recon element was there as well, sensibly behind cover, but there weren’t as many as I’d thought there’d be. A company at most, counting all the scattered elements, though maybe there were more around the other side of the palace.

  Top wasn’t behind cover at the moment, standing beside a Force Recon officer who my IFF display told me was a Lt. Medupe and a man in some sort of weird camouflage suit. It didn’t look like armor, exactly, but it shifted colors when he moved, as if it were actively trying to fit into the background. He was tall and jacked like one of the bare-knuckle fighters from the illegal fight clubs in the Underground and wasn’t wearing any sort of helmet, which seemed like a damned reckless thing to do in a war zone. His tightly-curled black hair was cut short but not buzzed like a Marine’s and there was something…I don’t know, regal about his bearing, the sort of thing generals tried to imitate unsuccessfully.

  He was carrying something that looked like a cross between an issue Gauss rifle and the plasma gun attached to my suits, something that looked impossibly heavy for a human being to carry without the benefit of a battlesuit.

  And he had no IFF signal whatsoever.

  He was a spook, and I had the immediate flash of insight that he was one of those mythical Fleet Intelligence commando types who’d taken out the fusion reactor.

  “Sir,” Top told me, “Lt. Medupe here is the CO of the Force Recon element that’s going into the palace. And this other fella here…well, God only knows who he is and neither one’s about to tell me.”

  “My people,” the tall man said, “will be taking Lt. Medupe’s Marines inside the palace through different ingress points. We can handle anything inside, but we need you and your Drop-Troopers to prevent enemy reinforcements from entering behind us.”

  “Are there any?” I asked him, using my external speakers. “Reinforcements coming, I mean?”

  I hadn’t seen any, and Geiger hadn’t mentioned them, but if this guy was a spook, he might know more about it than us average grunts. His lips thinned out and I had the impression that this was as close to a smile as he ever gave anyone.

  “The cruisers have been taking out any concentrations of troops in the open,” he told me, “but there’s an underground bunker at the military base north of here. Your Alpha Company has been keeping an eye on it, but they’ve been hunkered down up till now. Our intelligence estimates that, once we enter the palace itself, they’re going to push outward and come for us.”

  “Why not just take out the bunker from orbit?” I asked him.

  “Because the collateral damage would kill somewhere on the order of five thousand civilians.” He shrugged. “It’s not my call. We’re heading in. The mission is to find and capture or kill the Emperor, which will, effectively, end this war. We show him or his corpse to his generals and political and religious leaders, this thing is over. We won’t have comms once we’re inside, so you’re our last line of defense.” He inclined his head toward me. “Don’t let us down.”

  “Right,” I said, then added, “sir. I guess. I mean, I have no idea what your rank is.”

  That half-smile again.

  “I’m Major M’Voba. Do your job here, Lt. Alvarez, and you’ll never hear my name again.”

  He turned and left us there, and the Force Recon straight-legs followed him.

  “Don’t seem fair, sir,” I said privately to Top, watching them go, “that we fought all the way here and all we get to do is watch them fire the last shots.”

  “Oh, don’t be worrying about that, sir,” she said, laughing softly, without humor. “I have this feeling we’re all gonna have an excellent opportunity to get shot.”

  27

  “Zero Four Actual, this is Delta One Actual,” I called, feeling like I was back at Armor School. “How copy? Over.”

  Nothing moved in the city around us, not so much as a stray bit of debris carried on the wind. No civilians flocked to the palace to save their beloved Emperor, apparently convinced their version of God would prevail. Delp was out farthest, which seemed natural, a good two hundred meters from the ruined remains of the front entrance way. Stone columns had collapsed into the center of the broad passage, some sort of performance-art commentary on the fate of the Tahni Imperium.

  “This is Zero Four Actual,” Geiger responded on my third try. The damn drone relays kept getting blocked by clouds of smoke drifting from parts of the city that were on fire. “What’s your status, Delta? Over.”

  “We’re dug in like a tick on a dog, Zero Four,” I said, using a phrase I remembered from Scotty. Gunnery Sgt. Scott Hayes had been a farmboy on Hermes and was full of more down-homey bullshit sayings than I’d heard on the dumbest parodies of colony-dwellers on the ViR-net back in Trans-Angeles. I missed hearing them, sometimes. I missed Scotty all the time. “Heavy assets deployed high and low.” By which I meant I’d stationed a couple of Boomers on top of intact sections of the palace’s support wall, tucked into the niches between the wall and the half-dome. “Intelligence sources tell me you should expect a significant breakout attempt from Objective Two. Over.”

  “Haven’t heard that one, Delta,” Geiger said, uncomfortably close to a blithe dismissal. “We’ve called in air support for a push on the bunker entrance, but we’ve been put on hold. Will let you know when we’re clear to proceed. Over.”

  “Copy,” I said, trying not to grind my teeth as I said it. Vicky’s company was with Geiger. “Do you need me to split out a platoon to reinforce your position? The threat will likely come from there and I think we can handle anything here with three platoons and the Boomers. Over.”

  “Negative, Delta, we can handle it. Hold your position. Over.”

  “Copy, Zero Four. Out.”

  I made sure I’d logged off the command net before I swore. But I swore loud, maybe loud enough to be heard by someone standing beside my armor. Like Top. The two of us were side by side up on the parapets next to one of the Boo
mers, looking out over what we could see of the city from here.

  “Problem?” Top asked me.

  “Don’t know yet,” I admitted. “I guess that depends on who’s right about how many troops are in that bunker.”

  “Major Geiger is….”

  Whatever Top thought of Major Geiger, it was lost in the distant explosion. There’s a sequence to an explosion, and you can see it all in order if you’re far enough away that it doesn’t all seem to hit you at once. First, there’s the flash. It’s moving at the speed of light, so of course it comes before anything else, and in this case, it shone through the intervening buildings like the primary star glinting off glass and reflective metal, not the second sun of a nuclear device, but a big conventional blast.

  “What the fuck?” Delp asked on an open net.

  As if in answer, the shockwave came next. It wasn’t huge, wasn’t enough to bring down buildings, just a hot wind passing through along with the crack-rumble of the sound, something gut deep, vibrating up through the ground, sending a cloud of dust and debris floating upward in its wake. By the gap between the flash and the shockwave, I knew exactly how far away the blast had been. Three kilometers.

  Three kilometers in that direction was the military base.

  “Zero Four!” I yelled into the mic. “Zero Four, what’s your status? Do you copy? Over!”

  A black cloud was rising into the sky, huge and ominous, the sort of cloud I would have expected from an orbital strike. I repeated my call, waiting, hoping someone would answer.

  “Even if they’re able,” Top pointed out, “the debris cloud is going to block the line-of-sight link to the drone relays.”

  How the fuck, I wondered, was she so calm?

  “What are we gonna do, Cam?” Kovacs asked me. He was a quarter the way around the other side of the palace, across the square, guarding the open hatchway the Intelligence spooks had used to enter on that side. It had been a concealed emergency exit, but no one had tried to use it. Yet.

  It was a damned good question.

  “That’s Alpha,” Cano said from down below my position, off to the right, tucked in behind the burned-out APC’s. “We have to go help them.”

  Cano knew who was in Alpha, knew what Vicky and I were to each other. And I thought, after all this time, that Billy Cano was finally my friend.

  “We got our orders,” Verlander insisted. “We’re supposed to stay here and keep the enemy out.”

  “Keep them out?” Cano repeated, disbelieving. “They’re gonna be coming from that fucking military base, Verlander!”

  They were both right. Lt. Sarrat said nothing, too new to her rank, her position, and this company to feel comfortable voicing an opinion, I supposed. Not that it would have mattered. This was my decision.

  It struck me between the eyes, freezing time in a blinding revelation, and I just knew. This wasn’t just a command decision; it was a personal one. It would define who I was and what I did from this point on, and I had seconds to make it. Like every decision I’d had to make in my life.

  “Francis,” I said to Kovacs, my XO, the words pouring out without conscious thought, “I’m leaving you here with Cano and Fourth, and Top and the Boomers. Sarrat, Verlander, Sanderson, we’re going to relieve Battalion.”

  I took a step off the parapet and gave my suit a burst of jump-jets to deposit me safely on the ground below.

  “Follow me, Marines.”

  Three kilometers. It didn’t sound like much, not in battlesuits that could run at thirty klicks an hour, could fly faster than that for short hops. But it stretched out like one of those endless hallways in a nightmare, where you can never quite reach the end. Dust and smoke swallowed me up after a kilometer and not even the IFF signals from the friendlies behind me could penetrate, much less from the ones ahead. Thermal was nearly useless since everything seemed to be on fire, and the only sensors that told me a damned thing were the sonic detectors.

  My biological ears couldn’t make out much more than the loping crash of my own footfalls, but the suit’s computer systems were able to absorb everything; the sounds, their echoes, the interval of the echoes, pinpoint the direction they came from and assign it a likely source, then project that source on my Heads-Up Display in very lifelike computer animation.

  What it showed me was a big, fucking hole. I didn’t need to guess what the explosion had been, I could see it, sort of. The military base wasn’t the usual thing we’d seen on so many Tahni worlds, not a collection of pragmatically-designed boxes at the edge of town, surrounded by empty space, maybe bordering on a spaceport that doubled as a landing field for fighters and cargo shuttles. No, this was something old, something pre-spaceflight maybe, a complex, steppe-pyramid type structure right at the center of the city, at the terminus of a broad road that came right through the heart of the place all the way from the spaceport.

  The pyramid was gone now, smashed into powder by a railgun projectile from orbit along with buildings a couple hundred meters on either side of it, and that still hadn’t been enough to take out the underground bunker beneath it. Or, apparently to set off the shaped charges under the street. There had to have been dozens of kilos of the stuff, enough to blow a hole outward, to collapse the broad thoroughfare into the passage below for nearly two hundred meters from the wreckage of the ziggurat. Enough to take nearly a company of Vigilantes down into the hole with it.

  And streaming out of that gigantic hole in the street were High Guard battlesuits. Dozens of them, maybe two companies of them. They had to be the last of the things in the city because the Fleet had pounded every collection of enemy forces they’d seen and the Tahni had no defense against it, no deflectors, no anti-ship lasers, nothing. Their orbital platforms had been destroyed before our drop-ships had even made atmosphere. This was their last full measure, the final stone they had to throw, and they were throwing it at me. And I couldn’t call in air support without killing our own people.

  “Launch full complement of missiles, then volley fire and peel off on the hop!”

  I didn’t have any expectation that the transmission would get through, even with laser line-of-sight, through the clouds of smoke and particulate haze, but Third was behind me, and even if they couldn’t hear me, they’d be able to detect what I was doing and imitate it. At least I hoped Delp would, since I didn’t have that much faith in Verlander.

  I targeted four Tahni at random and launched my missiles one after the other, as fast as they could load, each of them kicking free with enough of a jolt to make me miss a step. When the last one had kicked free, I fired my plasma gun at the closest of the High Guard troopers, the first one out of the hole, then hit the jets.

  I wasn’t sure how sophisticated the sonic sensors were in the High Guard suits, so I didn’t know if they’d detected me before, but they sure as hell saw me now. Electron beams cut through the smoke like lightning in a midsummer storm on Inferno, seeking me out, and I couldn’t quite clench my jaws against a scream as one of the beams of high-energy particles brushed against the armor over my right thigh. It didn’t penetrate, though flashing yellow warned me it had sublimated away a surface layer nearly a centimeter thick, but the heat transfer left a second-degree burn on my leg.

  I would have died in the next few seconds, unable to dodge that many of the energy blasts, if it hadn’t been for Third Platoon…if it hadn’t been for Delp. They heard my order, or understood it, at least, and a rain of missiles flashed out of the sky into the mass of High Guard troopers. Chains of explosions crackled back and forth across the clusters of enemy suits, knocking some out of the air as they tried to jump, slamming others into the ground with the force of their detonation.

  We could, conceivably, have taken out half of them in one stroke if there’d been the time or any method to make sure we each targeted a different enemy trooper. Unfortunately, that wasn’t what happened. Everyone hit the front lines because they were the closest, and ninety-seven plasma blasts and somewhere north of 375 m
issiles all went into the same two dozen High Guard suits. It killed the shit out of them, of course, and bought us seconds, and I worked with what I had.

  I didn’t see it so much as I sensed it, a combination of the instinctive feedback from the interface jacks and the winnowing down of the wave of data in my HUD to something understandable that only came from years in a suit. There wasn’t time for a complicated strategy, wasn’t time for more than the most basic of orders, the simplest of tactics.

  “Wheel left and volley fire, then across their lines on the hop!”

  The last word left my mouth just as my suit touched down on the shattered pavement, only meters from the gaping holes leading downward. I described an arc to my left, trying to keep the enemy suits targeting us constantly turning, trying to bring the weapons mounted along their right arms around in time to take another shot at us, trying to make it impossible for them to get a target lock with their missiles.

  My capacitors had recharged and I fired my plasma gun again. I cut the arc short and fed power to the jump-jets, cutting across the enemy’s line of travel. The lot of them had tried to stop, tried to spread out to face us, but that was easier said than done with a reinforced company, well over a hundred suits all rushing in the same direction, trying to overwhelm Geiger and Vicky and the rest of the Vigilantes before they could recover from the explosion. Electron emitters that had been trying to swing across bodies to the left suddenly had to try to track me upward, overhead, back the other direction, and before they could, the rest of my Marines were wheeling and firing and flying.

  It was another tactic that, had it continued to be successful, would have wiped the Tahni force out. It couldn’t, of course, and I knew that. Because the Tahni, for all their failings, weren’t stupid, and their High Guard was the best of them. It took them precious seconds and cost them precious lives, but they finally began to laager. It wasn’t a formation I’d seen in actual combat before, because the battles I’d fought in with Tahni High Guard had been more dynamic, more individual. The suits were designed for their mobility and versatility and most of the time, neither side wanted to waste those capabilities by grouping them all in one, big mass and trying to organize a defense.