by J. N. Chaney
Nix, Tanu, and then the lieutenant arrived.
“Pelletier, move forward fifty meters and stand by. We don’t need anyone creeping up on us.”
Rev wanted to stay and finally get confirmation on their actual target, but an order was an order. He’d find out soon enough.
With a barely suppressed sigh, he went farther into the forest, taking a position behind the bole of a large tree. He had decent observation and adequate fields of fire, even if they weren’t very deep.
“Now, what the hell’s a ghillie suit?” he asked his AI.
21
“I’ve got it now,” Rev told Tomiko.
She gave him a sloppy salute, then stood to the side as he moved back to point. Two hours was enough of a stress bomb for anyone to take.
Fatima—no last name, just Fatima—stood to the side, a condescending smile on her face as she watched them switch positions. The woman was an enigma. Rev didn’t know if she was a civilian or an Omega Division agent. Whoever she was, she gave Rev the heebie-jeebies.
She was also their guide to their objective, and she’d been walking alongside Tomiko, her ancient shotgun slung over her shoulder as if on a Sunday stroll in the park. More than that, she seemed to think the Marines were overdoing it.
Lieutenant Omestori, however, insisted on full tactical movement. He’d joined the team only two weeks before the deployment, and as with Tomiko and Rev, this was his first combat. Rev couldn’t tell what the gunny thought of having to turn the team over to the boot butterbar, but he, for one, was glad they were not taking it in casual-mode. Better to be too alert than too complacent.
Fatima held her arm out, palm up in a mock invitation to move out. He could see her sense of superiority in her posture. Rev had a sudden desire to take her down a notch. He was an augmented Marine, and she massed fifty kilos at most. But she was their guide to their objective, and if she was OD, then she might be packing augments of her own, if there was any truth to the rumors.
Besides, they were all on the same side, right?
Rev started down the hillside, making his way around huge boulders that looked like they’d been strewn about by giants playing some sort of board game. He wished he knew where he was going, but Fatima either couldn’t—or wouldn’t—download the location. So, instead of just pushing forward, looking for any Centaur sign, he had to keep glancing at her to make sure they were on track. It made him feel vulnerable, and he didn’t like that.
Focus, and quit whining, Rev.
He shook his head as if to clear it and continued to push forward. This was pretty country, looking like lightly populated areas north of Swansea. Take away the puffballs, and he could be trekking the Brecon Beacons back home. The presence of flying alien creatures shattered that notion, though, especially when the puffballs let out a dolorous trill unlike anything he’d heard before.
That shouldn’t be too surprising. Wygate had terraformed a good portion of the Perseus Union, and it probably had done Preacher Rolls as well as Safe Harbor. They’d have used the same blueprints, planting the same trees, releasing the same wildlife.
But he wasn’t on Safe Harbor now. He was on an enemy-held planet and had to keep his guard up.
He turned to make sure Sergeant Nix was still behind him. The team designated sniper, the sergeant was carrying the Dykstra. Rev hadn’t taken to the Dykstra during training, but the round was big enough and still carrying enough of a punch at close range to at least gain a Centaur’s attention, not like his M-49.
He and Fatima reached a dry creek bed, and the woman started stepping quicker, moving ahead of him. Rev reached out and stopped her.
“Don’t get ahead of me,” he hissed.
“Then don’t drag your ass,” she snapped.
“I can’t cover you if you go racing off.”
“Look, soldier boy. I don’t need you to cover me, and we’re getting closer.”
Rev took a deep breath. He was not going to get into a fight with this woman, but he’d tackle her if necessary, any special augments she might have be damned. Let the lieutenant figure out what to do with her.
“All the more reason to take it easy.”
“Don’t they teach you shit in soldier camp?”
“Marine, not soldier,” Rev said automatically. “And teach us what?”
She rolled her eyes as if astounded by his stupidity. “The closer to any Centaur weapons system, the more active the drone-eyes and ground sensors. The longer we dawdle along, scratching our asses, the more chance of being spotted. So, if you’ll let go of my shoulder, can we continue?”
What she said made sense. But moving quicker also took away from stealth, and Raiders relied on evading detection.
The lieutenant had said she was in charge, however, at least during the movement to the objective. Rev weighed his options, and his orders won out. He released Fatima, who shrugged her shoulders and started off again.
Rev looked back thirty meters, and Sergeant Nix gave him the interrogatory hand sign. Rev waved him off and turned to follow Fatima.
This is what is stupid, not me.
Fatima hurried farther down the creek bed another sixty meters, then made a hard left to climb up the next rise. Rev rushed after her, snaking between scrub oak as he made his way up. Two magpies scolded him as he passed underneath.
He blinked up a map overlay. They were climbing to a broad finger, almost a mesa. The far side dropped off to the plains below. The high ground would have a direct line of sight to the regimental objective, the city of White Horse, as well as clear fields of fire to the airspace above the entire valley.
The Centaur Navy was technologically more advanced than any human navy. Their mirror ships were almost impervious to human energy weapons, and in deep space, battles were extremely lopsided. But it was almost as if they’d forgotten about more primitive kinetic weapons. A strike from even a frigate’s quantum railgun could be enough to shatter one of their ships.
In deep space battles, where the distances were in the hundreds or thousands of kiloklicks, the Centaurs could simply maneuver out of the way of kinetic rounds. But inside star systems, the distances were far shorter, and there was less time to maneuver. Around individual planets, the advantage shifted to the humans, as the Centaurs learned the hard way. This was perhaps the only time humans had an advantage, and the Centaurs tended to keep their ships out of star systems, preferring the vast reaches of deep space.
But that didn’t mean that they were simply ceding space around planets to the humans. They didn’t need to bring in their capital ships when ground stations could do the job as well. These were extremely powerful ground-based meson cannons that could knock down landing craft with ease, and even with the beams attenuated by the planet’s atmosphere, they could reach into orbit and destroy ships. Not as quickly, perhaps, but no human ship could ignore them.
And that was the team’s target. They had to take out the Centaur cannon before the assault, or the slaughter would be horrendous before orbital monitors could return fire and destroy it.
Rev didn’t know the missions of the other three teams in the platoon, but he wouldn’t be surprised if it was the same. The Centaurs wouldn’t have just one cannon deployed.
He checked the time. They still had almost two hours before they were to take it out. The cannons were not normally manned, but the Centaurs had to know if they were destroyed, so a coordinated assault on each one of them, just forty minutes before the assault, was their best chance of success—while still giving the assault commander enough time to cancel if the Raider teams failed.
It had happened before.
Fatima crested the slope onto the high ground, pausing a moment to look back at Rev when there was a crack of ionized air, and a flash of light hit her in the back. She collapsed bonelessly to the dirt.
Rev reacted without thinking, going to one knee and raising his M-49. He located the drone-eye swooping in, thirty meters and closing, when it fired on him, the laser-like beam
frying leaves and glancing off his combat suit’s left shoulder as he dove to the right, rolled, and came up firing in one smooth motion.
The M-49 fired compressed hyper-velocity darts that expanded to eight-millimeter rounds when they hit a target. Within half-a-second, over a 150 of the darts crossed the closing distance. At twenty meters, the darts would still be traveling at over two kilometers per second. One, two, maybe more of the tiny tungsten-tipped darts impacted on the little drone-eye, and at that speed, they were deadly. The drone-eye disintegrated.
Rev didn’t give it another glance. He scanned the area, trying to spot another drone-eye coming in for the kill. Sometimes, the Centaurs deployed them in waves, and other times, there would be one or two. There seemed to be neither rhyme nor reason to that, so it was better to always assume the worst. He couldn’t see anything. That didn’t mean that another wasn’t out there, and he longed to go into active-scan mode, but he kept discipline.
Rev gave the enemy contact signal to Nix, then hurried over to Fatima. She’d been burned through the chest. A tiny wisp of smoke curled up from the hole in her back, and Rev was glad for the filters in his nose.
When a Marine was killed, his nanos went into preservation mode, secreting chemicals that essentially froze the nervous system and key organs in place. It wasn’t really a true stasis, which remained beyond human capabilities, but it was close enough for government work. If the body could be gotten back to a medical facility within about twelve hours, the Marine might be saved, albeit with a year or more of rehab ahead of them.
Rev didn’t know if Fatima had the same medi-nanos. Even if she did, he wasn’t sure if they’d have an opportunity to medivac her out before it was too late.
“What do you got here?” Sergeant Nix asked.
“Drone-eye. Got the civilian.”
“You drop it, or is it still patrolling?”
“Dropped it.”
Despite the shock of seeing Fatima killed, it was starting to dawn on him that he’d just knocked out a Centaur drone. It wasn’t an actual Centaur, but still . . . it was combat. It was real.
He looked down at his M-49. He’d resented carrying it, but maybe the Marine Corps actually knew what it was doing. Sergeant Nix’s Dykstra would have been pretty useless against a drone-eye, needing a miracle shot to take the thing down. With Rev’s enhanced reflexes, coordination, and eyesight, and coupled with the M-49’s ability to send a lot of rounds downrange, the Centaur weapon had been at the disadvantage.
Around him, the rest of the team was moving forward and spreading out. More drone-eyes, or even a Centaur, could be out there waiting.
Rev tried to scan the area for another drone-eye, but his eyes kept straying to Fatima’s limp body. He had known he’d probably see a dead human while serving—that, or get killed himself first—and the woman was his first. But he hadn’t imagined that body would look like this. She looked like she was asleep. The beam had cauterized the wound, and the hole had closed up as her tissue settled. The air that made it through his filters smelled hideously of barbecue and singed hair. Rev’s gorge rose, then he found his self-control and exhaled, sadness washing over him as he scanned the dead woman.
Fatima hadn’t been a Marine, and she’d been something of an asshole, but she’d been serving the cause, and it didn’t seem right to just leave her where she was. With a sigh, he tore his gaze away and started visually scanning the area again.
“How often are unmanned Centaur weapons systems guarded by just one drone?”
Which meant that there is . . . wait a minute.
“What percentage of times are there no drones covering the unmanned weapons systems?”
Rev knew that the reported instances were the kicker. Maybe when there were more drone-eyes, all the Marines were killed, and it was never reported. Still, he liked the odds. And that seemed to hold this time as almost twenty minutes later, with no sign of drones, the lieutenant ordered them forward.
Sergeant Nix shouldered his Dykstra and took Fatima’s shotgun. As old as it was, it would be better than his big sniper weapon against another drone-eye. Rev gave Fatima’s limp body one last glance, then stepped off. This time, however, he wasn’t on point. The team moved out in a modified Squad W, with Rev, Tomiko, and Corporal Dean-Ballester on line with each other and leading, the others behind. Each of the three were armed with the M-49. The formation gave them more coverage up front, and it also allowed them to cover more territory. They may have known that the cannon was on the finger, but without Fatima, they didn’t know where.
Moving out on the same heading Fatima had them on before, they’d only covered 160 meters when Tomiko gave the signal to halt. Rev faced outboard, as he was trained to do, giving flank security, but his mind was on Tomiko and the lieutenant coming up to join her. His hearing was far better than it had been, and the docs had told him it would continue to refine over the next two years, as they said, but with twenty-five meters between them, he couldn’t pick out what they were whispering.
It was obvious, though, when Staff Sergeant Montez moved up. With Hussein missing, she was the team’s only grenadier, carrying the bulky, slow, but powerful MM-37 Mantis. The Mantis wasn’t even a Union weapon. It was essentially a flying shape charge, developed by the Frisian Host during their war against the Miners’ Rebellion and designed to take out heavily fortified bunkers. It had been taken out of mothballs during the first terrible year of the war, and it had proven effective against unmanned Centaur targets, its lack of electronics and odd-shaped nose able to withstand Centaur anti-personnel weapons. It had been distributed in limited numbers to the other militaries. The Union Marines tinkered with it—pride probably wouldn’t let them use it as is—and gave it the Mantis designation.
The lieutenant gave the rally sign, and the team retreated to the edge of the drop-off. With over an hour until they were supposed to take out the cannon, they’d remain there until it was time. Staff Sergeant Montez would move forward alone until she had a clear shot, erect her small blast shield, and fire.
If all went well, they’d retreat to their secondary position, taking on a more reconnaissance mission of covering the regiment’s main effort, watching for any sign of Centaur reinforcements. Tanu would carry Fatima’s body with him in the hope that one, she had military-grade medi-nanos, and two, that they could somehow medivac her before it was too late.
The end of the mission was anticlimactic, at least for Rev. With fifteen minutes to go, the staff sergeant moved forward. Rev watched the timer tick down. Exactly at zero, there was the Mantis’ weird chuff-sound as she fired it, and almost immediately, the blast of the Centaur cannon’s anti-personnel mine. Rev felt the concussion, and dust and smoke rose into the air ahead, but that was it.
“Huh. Thought it would be—more. Just more,” Rev murmured, looking hard for evidence of a kill.
Rev wasn’t alone in anxiously staring ahead. The Mantis was not foolproof, and the cannon might still be operational. The staff sergeant might have succeeded but not been able to escape the cannon’s anti-personnel system. Whatever had happened, the team’s mission would not be over until the damned thing was knocked out.
Two minutes later, a dusty staff sergeant emerged from the trees, a shit-eating grin stretched across her face. She didn’t have to give them a thumbs-up to let them know the cannon was goners.
And that was that. All this way, all the effort, and all it took was a single Host-made Mantis.
The Marines moved out to the secondary mission, and the only thing Rev could think of was that he’d never even seen the cannon.
22
“Think we’re winning?” Tomiko asked, looking out over the valley where the signs of war were evident.
Dust and smoke rose over the city, and flashes lit up the sky. Tiny dots, too small for even his augmented eyes to make out, were descending.
He didn’t need to see them clearly, though. They were Drop Marines, the first wave of the attack.
Raiders and Recon might have the highest mortality rate in the Corps, but Drop Marines were not far behind. Their drop eggs were essentially hunks of reflective armor, but they were terribly exposed, and the Centaurs had a lot of weaponry at their beck and call. Half of those little specs might be little more than coffins by now, their passengers dead.
Sharp cracks reached out to the two Marines—Navy monitors providing space-to-ground support. With the mirror ships hesitant to engage human navies in-system, the Navy would have localized superiority of orbital space.
“We did what we could to help. Now, it’s on them.”
“Semper fi,” Tomiko said quietly to herself. “Well, you need to get positioned.”
“Keep your head down, OK?”
“Sure thing. You, too.”
Rev continued down the line, jumping down a low dropoff, then pushing through the dense vegetation until he had somewhat of a clearing. He checked his line of sight in various directions and decided it would have to do. Rev was the last man in the line, and while the position wasn’t perfect, he was told not to exceed fifty meters from Tomiko.
With their primary mission completed, the team was now moving into a straight reconnaissance mission. Spread across a natural avenue of approach, they were to hunker down and keep their eyes peeled for Centaur reinforcements heading into the main battle. Intel had all of the Centaurs on this land mass around White Horse, which made sense as most of the rest of the continent had been scorched, but it had been wrong before.
Rev gave the far-off battle one last glance, then deployed his multi-tool into spade mode. The soil here was soft and loamy, making for easy digging. He carefully cut a plug, replete with low forest plants, and set that aside. With his augmented strength, he made short work of the spiderhole itself. Three feet down, he juked over, leaving a shelf, and digging down another two feet. He didn’t know how long he was going to be there, so he wanted to be able to sit.
