by B. V. Larson
Graves gave me a blank look, but his eyes slid once toward Deech, then back again. I knew exactly what that meant. It was her idea to go in without armor. Probably, Graves had asked for heavier equipment and been denied.
Deech, for her part, looked like she smelled manure. But she wasn’t shooting me down—not yet.
“You see, sirs,” I continued, “I’ve benefited from several engagements with this enemy. I think belchers and armor are essential to defeating them. You couldn’t have known that when you fought them, just as I didn’t know I’d get fried on an electric needle when I first met up with these nasty little midgets.”
Graves glanced toward Deech.
He wasn’t playing my game. I’d wanted to keep talking to him like he’d made all the previous mistakes. But he’d brought her back into it by looking at her for a response.
“Go on, McGill,” she said, rubbing her temples. “I’m listening.”
“Well… that’s pretty much it. We’ll march in with a full unit of armored heavies, taking along techs and weaponeers to back us up. We’ll clean them out even if we have to use force blades to stick every last one of them.”
Deech sucked in a breath and let it out again. “Disaster,” she said. “We’ll perforate the hull and the core for sure. You do realize that a warp drive system is delicate, don’t you, McGill?”
“I can only assume it is. But this time, we’ll hit them from a fresh angle, with better gear. It can’t miss!”
They both looked at me curiously. “What’s this about a fresh angle, Centurion?”
“Oh… didn’t I mention that part? I want to play the same trick I did here on this ship: I want to drill in through the hull. I’ve been looking at the schematics—”
“No!” Deech said. “You’ll rupture the cooling jacket for sure.”
“Now, hold on. I had Natasha take a look at the blueprints, and there are a few ways through the unshielded part.”
She blinked at me. “Those blueprints are classified.”
“Uh…”
“Never mind,” she said, “let’s say I give you the troops, the armor, and Primus Graves here approves the plan. Can you guarantee me we’ll have our ship back and with a working engine?”
I clapped my gauntlets together so loudly they made an ear-splitting pop that caused Deech to jump in her seat.
“Hot damn!” I said. “Of course I can, sir. Are we on for Operation B?”
“B? What was Operation A?”
Tilting my head, I indicated Graves. He gave me a wry look in return.
“Oh… right,” Deech said. “Primus Graves, I’m going to give you a second shot. You’re in command of this attempt to regain your reputation as the best of the best. Work with McGill. Take that engine room back for me.”
“That’s right, sirs,” I said excitedly. “Use me like a spear. I’ll prong these flea-sized devils right off our ship.”
Graves rubbed his right temple briefly, but he nodded. “Of course. I’ll personally take operational command. McGill, you’ll march into the lion’s den.”
“One thing,” Deech said, giving me a stern look. “No explosives. No using your morph-rifles with armor-penetrating rounds for anything. Nothing can pierce those walls, McGill. The cooling jacket can’t be ruptured, or we’ll all die out here.”
“I wouldn’t dream of doing anything dangerous like that, Tribune. You have my solemn word.”
We landed aboard Nostrum a few minutes later, and Graves hung back as Tribune Deech strode away toward Gold Deck.
“She marching out of here so fast,” I commented. “If I didn’t know better, I’d think her butt was on fire.”
“McGill,” Graves said, “did you really have to throw me under the bus like that?”
“Damn-straight I did. I even had to back my rig over your corpse a few extra times, to make sure. Did you notice?”
“I did, now that you mention it.”
“You see, sir, I think I’m getting a handle on old Deech. She wants her wins to come clean, and her losses to come even cleaner. She’d never have approved this operation if she thought there was a snowball’s chance in Hell she’d ever get the loss of Nostrum attached to her career.”
He looked me over suspiciously. “You don’t think that’s a realistic possibility, do you?”
I did a shocked act, throwing back my head and putting up my hands.
“Why, no sir! No way. That’s not even in the cards. Never was!”
He walked away shaking his head. I followed.
“How long do you need to prep for another assault?” he asked.
“Well sir… looking at the estimates, I’d say we could be ready to go in six hours.”
“You’ve got ninety minutes. At that point, according to Blue Deck, all your troops will have been revived. Don’t waste it.”
“Excellent! Thank you, sir. Thank you. You won’t regret this at all, that’s my heartfelt promise.”
“Stow it, McGill. Save it for the ladies.”
He walked away, and I got down to work. I had a lot to do, and nowhere near enough time to pull it off.
-26-
Harris glowered at his load out. I’d just informed him each of his troops was going to have to carry a grenade.
“But Centurion,” he said, “my people are trained to be light troopers. We’re not demolition experts.”
My hands came up, making a cautionary motion. I gave him a shushing noise as well.
All this only served to make him glower more. He smelled a big Georgia rat, and we both knew he was right.
“Look,” I said. “We’re not going to even mention these grenades to anyone. We’re just going to carry them. Your light troops will go in first, all at once. When we get inside, I’ll be right behind you with my heavies to mop up.”
Harris’ face was unhappy looking most of the time, but today his expression had reached a new low.
“You’re asking me to suicide my platoon, aren’t you, sir? That’s the bottom line, isn’t it?”
I heaved a sigh, looked at the ceiling for a moment then looked him in the eye.
“Yes,” I told him. “The weaponeers will drill through the hull. Your lights will bounce down there, bypassing the traps in the central passages. But I’m assuming we’ll hit hard resistance, and—”
“Excuse me,” Harris said, “but I didn’t really hear anything you said after the word ‘yes’. That kind of threw me down the well.”
“I understand, Adjunct,” I said, “and I wouldn’t be asking you for this sacrifice if I thought there was any other way.”
He stared at the computer scroll we’d ironed out between us. The blueprints glowed with force-lines and planned angles of attack.
“All right,” he said, “I’ll do it. But I’m going to turn state’s-evidence on you when this turns into the shit-show I’m expecting.”
“Not good enough.”
“Say what?”
“This is bound to be a mess,” I said. “I want you to keep your mouth shut—by which I mean handing in a candied-up after-action report, if we retake the ship.”
He stared at me with squinting eyes for a second. “All right… IF, and I mean IF, this damned ship can still fly us out of here afterward—I’m down for lying my ass off.”
“Good enough.”
We didn’t shake on it. We didn’t even smile. We just parted ways, both of us muttering about what a dick the other guy was.
But I didn’t care. This whole thing was a hail-Mary op to begin with. If I didn’t retake this ship, I had the feeling Deech was going to climb aboard that tiny captured vessel with a few of her biggest ass-kissers and all our whiskey. She’d let Nostrum blow up or turn into a museum full of legionnaires and ditch Varus entirely. No doubt when she got back to Earth, I’d be given the starring role of the village idiot in her deposition.
I’d been set up before by people who were better at it than Deech, and I had no intention of taking it quietly this time.
Seventy-
eight minutes after our little talk aboard the shuttle, I found myself exiting a hatchway and clanking over the aft hull toward the engines.
Behind me, over a hundred others followed. They were pretty sullen, even for Legion Varus troops. They knew the score. They’d been taken out of the revival machines and thrown right back into the grinder.
Normally, after a hard battle, a unit was allowed twenty-four hours for R&R before they were placed back into the pit. There were only two possible reasons for such an unusually quick redeployment. One, it was a punishment by the higher-ups for failure. Two, the unit commander was crazy.
They’d all selected option number two, and I wasn’t even bothering to deny it.
“All right,” I said, “Adjunct Harris, distribute the special devices.”
Glumly, he began pulling plasma grenades out of a huge extra pack he’d been lugging along. He handed these out, one at a time to each of his light troopers.
Sarah, a girl I’d gotten to know rather well back on Rogue World, stared at hers in dismay.
“But sir? These aren’t generally supposed to be used in confined spaces. If we all—”
“That’s right, troops!” Harris boomed. “We’ve all got an extra special present under our pillows courtesy of Centurion McGill!”
So saying, he took his own grenade, the last one, and held it high for his entire platoon to see.
“You know what Solstice troops do with these?” he asked them. “They activate them, then dive or roll under a hard target, and BOOM!”
He grinned at them, seeming to enjoy their dismay.
“Now, now,” I said, waving them to silence. “I’m not asking for mass suicide—not exactly. But these little guys we’re about to meet up with—well, they’re tricky. I think we all know that. Some of us might find ourselves incapacitated, or otherwise in a hopeless situation. If you think you’re in exactly that kind of circumstance, I want you to get some revenge out of it.”
The light troopers looked sick. No one talked.
Carlos broke the spell. “These are butt-plugs, right sir? Maybe Harris’ light troopers should practice with them first.”
“I’m going to demonstrate on you, Ortiz!” Harris told him.
“Enough! Positions, everyone!”
We exited from the aft portal and marched over the hull of the ship. We weren’t subtle. You could have heard us clanking along on magnetic boots all the way up to Gold Deck.
When we reached the stretch of hull we were supposed to drill through, I signaled Leeson. His weaponeers lit up the spot where we were going to try to break through. Carlos took that brief delay as an opportunity to talk to me.
“These sorry bastards,” he said, “you’re really giving it to them this time, aren’t you McGill?”
“They’re light troops, Carlos,” I said. “You know the drill. They’ve got to prove themselves to rate heavy gear.”
“What you mean is: they’re expendable. I get that. But you might want to consider how they’ll remember this betrayal in the future. They aren’t total fuck-wits—at least, not all of them. They know the score.”
I looked at him. “Are you volunteering to jump down that burning hole with them, Specialist Ortiz?” I asked, pointing to the molten metal in the middle of the weaponeers. “Because if you are, mark me down as impressed. That’s mighty big of you.”
“Noooo, no, no… no!”
He backed away and stopped bugging me after that. This wasn’t the time to put doubts into the commander’s mind, but Carlos rarely understood such moments. If a thought came into his head, he was practically forced to puke it out his mouth one second later.
“Breach!” Sargon roared.
“Widen it out!” I shouted. “Harris, drop an egg!”
He tossed a grenade into the hole, and the weaponeers cursed, ducking. After the brilliant, silent flash lit up the interior for a brief second, they went back to work, burning around the edges.
When it was big enough to let a light trooper in, Harris grabbed the one standing nearest to him and tossed her inside. Then he waved his platoon forward, wildly pin-wheeling his arms.
A dozen troops rushed down and soon a full squad. He halted the flow and crouched beside me, waiting.
We saw more blue-white flashes. Two of them.
“They’re meeting heavy resistance not fifty meters from the breach,” Harris said.
I checked the casualty list in my helmet. Nine names were red already.
“Crap,” I said quietly. “Take your second squad down.”
He stood and began to signal his squad to advance, but I shook my head and gave him a kick in the butt.
When a heavy trooper nails a light trooper with a boot that weighs a good twenty kilos, it hurts. Harris got the message. He took the lead, jumping into the white-hot, spark-spitting hole. The rest of his troops followed in a rush.
The battle was on.
-27-
The moment Harris’ group was all down, I prepared to jump after them with the heavy squads, but Leeson touched my arm.
“Suggestion, Centurion: let the light people do their jobs first.”
Our eyes met in the cold glittering light of the stars. He was dead serious.
I knew what he meant. The light troopers served several critical mission roles in any legion. They were capable snipers and skirmishers in a wide open land battle,but when you were in-tight, fighting house to house or bulkhead-to-bulkhead in a boarding action like this one, well, they were best used to flush the enemy from their hiding spots. That meant they tended to die a lot, suffering the greatest casualties so that the more expensively armed heavies and specialists didn’t take the initial losses.
It was the rude calculus of modern warfare. In Legion Varus, troops were almost as expendable as magazines of ammo. We essentially had an endless supply of protoplasm to convert into manpower. Hell, we could even recycle the dead and churn them out to fight again.
Weapons, armor and specialized equipment was another thing. We didn’t have an easy way to manufacture more of any of that stuff.
Taking a half-step back, I waited. It was hard to do. I’d been the point man on many rough invasion missions just like the one Harris was engaged in today. Light troops always felt vulnerable and damn-near panicked when they fought in close quarters. Death was right around every corner, and if the enemy didn’t get you, your own buddy with a grav-grenade might just do the trick.
Even as I had that thought, I saw three more blue-white flashes go off silently inside the ruptured hull. Moments later more names flickered from green, to yellow, to a dull red. Half the light troopers had died in the first four minutes of fighting.
“Harris?” I called. “I can see you’re still alive down there. Report!”
“Centurion sir,” he said, “we could use some support! We’ve taken two chambers and the connecting passage, but we’re bogged down now.”
“Have you made it to the engines?”
“Negative, sir. We’re pinned by defensive fire right where—”
“Well, get yourself unpinned. I’m sending in a squad of heavies. Toro will lead them personally. McGill out.”
Looking around, I finally spotted Toro. She was looking small in the midst of her 2nd squad. I beckoned, and she tramped forward reluctantly.
“Adjunct Toro, you’re going to take point and lead your squad to support Harris.”
She looked sullen. “Harris is still alive in that shit?”
To accent her comment, another blue-white flash went off.
“He’s having tea in the aft maintenance shaft. You’ve got fifteen seconds to get your first and last man down this hole.”
Toro didn’t say anything else. She didn’t have time. She gritted her teeth and jumped into the hole. Dutifully, her heavy troopers rushed after her, vanishing one after another like an army of tin-plated gophers.
That’s what Varus troops were usually like. Surly, argumentative—but willing to die when their orders were clear
.
I’d watched other legions operate differently. I supposed it was an outfit-to-outfit cultural thing. Solstice troops, for example, were like kamikazes. They prided themselves on self-sacrifice and roughing it in general. The Iron Eagles, where Deech was from, were famously professional. They were elite, and they didn’t like to get dirty.
Varus people were the best and worst you could have with you. We were inventive, tenacious and resilient. It had been noted that a Varus unit was more likely to break than others, but at the same time, we were quicker to rally and return to the fight. I thought that had to do with our volatile, independent spirit.
After Toro was in the game, the fighting intensified. I could see casualties, troop concentrations and icons flaring when troops fired—but it wasn’t the same thing. Getting antsy, I stepped forward and led the second heavy squadron of Toro’s platoon into the breach.
They were anxious to get into the fight. I couldn’t blame them. It was hard to stand around on the roof, listening to the battle without participating.
Landing with a whirr of my motor-enhanced knees, I advanced in a crouch toward Harris and Toro. Before I could get to their positions, however, Harris’ name blinked red.
“Shit,” I said, picking up the pace.
I called for a report, but I didn’t get anything intelligible. Coming around a bend in the corridor, I saw a gruesome scene.
Harris was stretched out, face down, and dead. Half a dozen others surrounded him in a similar state, including several heavies. He had a grav-grenade in his hand, but it hadn’t gone off. Could they have hit us with some kind of EMP? I wasn’t sure.
Toro was still in the game, but she was clearly experiencing a counter-attack. A dozen gremlins with spear-like sticks were encircling her. She used her force-blades to slash at them defensively.
“McGill!” she called out, thrusting this way and that to force the gremlins to back off. “They’ve got some kind of new weapon. One touch and your armor will lock up on you.”
“Set your morph-rifles to full-auto,” I ordered. “Light rounds. Let’s hose them down.”
The heavies around me halted and adjusted their weapons.
