Into the Light

by David Weber

  “Why … why do they say they work then?” he finally asked.

  “Probably to give you breathers some hope,” the blonde said. “Unfortunately, there isn’t any.” She smiled, and her incisors grew down over her lower lip. “You’re mine.” She blurred, and Lohrman was slammed backward into the wall. A bolt of incredible agony went through his chest, and nothing in his body seemed to work as he slid to the floor. The last thing he saw as his vision grayed out was the blonde, holding his heart. She quirked an eyebrow at him and dropped it to the floor, her hand still a virgin white. There wasn’t a drop of his blood on her, he realized almost calmly, and he carried that thought with him down into the darkness.

  “Always have to go for the dramatic, eh Cecilia?” the dark-haired woman asked.

  The blonde shrugged as she waded back through the ankle-deep shredded bodies, and the brunette turned to look at Cervantes. “There are certain things we’d like to know,” she said. “I don’t suppose you’d like to be reasonable about this, would you?”

  . XXIII .

  FORT SANDERS, NORTH CAROLINA,

  UNITED STATES

  “Well, this should be fun.”

  First Sergeant Quintrell Robinson’s sour tone and equally sour expression might have suggested to some that his sentiment was less than genuine, Major Robert Wilson decided.

  “Gosh, aren’t you a little ray of sunshine?” he inquired as he gazed at the LZ through his binoculars. “Get a lot of invites to emcee kids’ birthday parties, do you?”

  “What I do every weekend, Sir.” Robinson hawked up a glob of phlegm and spat it out. “Right after I get done stealing all their candy.”

  Wilson chuckled without lowering the binoculars. They weren’t like any he’d had before the invasion—he thought of them as his present from Luke Skywalker—and they were even better than his Hegemony-level contacts. At the moment, they were showing him a razor sharp, incredibly detailed view of … nothing in particular. It was, in fact, an empty, pine tree–surrounded field on the grounds of what had once been Fort Bragg and was now Fort Sanders, North Carolina.

  Although, to be fair, it wasn’t really empty.

  Or the pines weren’t, anyway.

  The day was gray, drear, and humid, and a raw, cold wind sighed around his ears while heavy cloud cover rolled in from the west. The temperature had fallen four degrees in the last hour and the weather satellites promised heavy rain, turning into freezing sleet and then snow late tonight. For the moment, though, nothing was falling out of the skies on him, and he considered that a plus.

  “And here I thought you were a fine, upstanding Marine,” he told Robinson.

  “Oh, but I am, Sir. Or I was, anyway, when I was an honest Gunny. Don’t know about this new ‘Space Marines’ crap, though.”

  “You and me both, Top,” Wilson sighed. “You and me both.”

  Robinson was nine years younger than he was, but Wilson understood the other man only too well. Robinson had been an active-duty E-7, otherwise known as a gunnery sergeant, when the Shongairi arrived. Wilson had been long retired by then, but even after he’d made master sergeant, he’d always thought of himself as a “gunny.” Now he was a major, and that was just … wrong, in so many ways.

  It wasn’t that he’d objected to going back into the Corps. Not really, although as Robinson had just pointed out, it wasn’t the “Corps” in which he’d served for twenty-plus years. It was that Wilson was a noncom, not a frigging officer. He’d never been an officer, never wanted to be an officer, and was totally unqualified to become an officer. He’d been very clear about that. Indeed, he’d fought the good fight with all his might.

  Unfortunately, neither President Howell, nor General Landers—nor Dave Dvorak, damn his traitorous, black heart—had seemed to care what he thought about the whole idea. Worse, he never had learned how to say no when someone uttered the fatal words “the country needs you.”

  He had to work on that.

  He had managed to wring at least one concession out of the pushy bastards before he went down to defeat, though. And so one-time Master Sergeant Wilson found himself not simply Major Wilson, but also CO (designate), 1st Battalion, 1st Brigade, Space Marines, Continental Armed Forces.

  The man beside him had never learned to say no either, he thought now, which was how one-time Gunnery Sergeant Robinson found himself First Sergeant Robinson, and about to become Sergeant Major Robinson and the senior noncommissioned officer of the aforesaid 1st Battalion, 1st Brigade, Space Marines, Continental Armed Forces.

  Assuming the Continental Armed Forces in general—and the Space Marines, in particular—ever got themselves up and organized, that was.

  You’re being unfair, Rob, he told himself. Under the circumstances, Landers’ boys and girls are actually doing a good job. Not as good as they think they are, maybe, but good. And their screw-ups aren’t really their fault, either. Too damned many of them are making it up as they go along. Hell, all of us are making it up as we go along!

  Truman Landers had grabbed every surviving military vet he could find—and who could be spared from civilian jobs in the massive reconstruction effort—to staff his CAF. It was just Rob Wilson’s bad luck to have been within easy reach when the grabbing started.

  “Seriously, Sir,” Robinson said, “this here’s gonna be a cluster fuck.”

  “That pessimism isn’t helpful, Sar’major,” Wilson pointed out.

  “Hell, Sir. Calling it a cluster fuck’s being optimistic!”

  Wilson snorted, but Robinson probably had a point. And he’d certainly earned the right to express an opinion. He’d spent most of the invasion in his home state of Alabama, picking off Shongair patrols. He was only about five-five, with skin a shade or two lighter than Wilson’s friend Alvin Buchevsky’s, but he was built like the proverbial fireplug. He’d spent several years as a DI at Parris Island, and Wilson couldn’t imagine the recruit who hadn’t crapped himself the first time Robinson got in his face for real.

  At the moment, though, what bothered Wilson the most was his certainty that Robinson was right and that Landers’ bright and shiny new planning officers were wrong. Or maybe it would be better to say that they were way, way, way too optimistic. He hoped he was about to be wrong about that. The possibility, however, struck him as … remote.

  Hard to blame ’em, I guess, he thought. The neural educator’s still a bright, shiny new toy. That almost has to make them overestimate it, all by itself. And the fact that they really need it to work as well as they think it will only makes that worse. Course, most of ’em haven’t spent nearly as much time with it as I have, now have they?

  Well, it was time to see if—

  “Here they come,” Robinson said in a suddenly much more serious voice, and Wilson nodded as the Black Hawk helicopters pretending to be Starfire assault shuttles swept in over the North Carolina pines with Lieutenant Palazzola’s 1st Platoon and Lieutenant Samuelson’s 3rd Platoon.

  They didn’t have real Starfires because none had been built yet, and they didn’t have a Starlander they could use instead because they were all too busy on rescue operations. But that was fair, because they didn’t have any real powered armor yet, either. The “Space Marines” aboard those helicopters had been outfitted with rudimentary exoskeletons which would duplicate many of the capabilities of the armor being designed as part of Project Heinlein—where movement was concerned, anyway—and the visors and backpack sensor pods they wore were designed to give them at least a rudimentary version of the ultimate armor’s HUD and sensor suite. By the same token, they carried modified M-16s fitted with laser training units instead of the notional railgun rifles still being designed, but that was fine. Today wasn’t really about the equipment; it was about the training with it in small unit tactics, and simulators would work just fine for that.

  Aleandro Palazzola, commanding the “assault force,” had exactly zero experience as a Marine or even an Army puke. He was only twenty-five, and he’d been a North
Carolina state trooper for less than two years before the invasion. Jeff Samuelson, a Raleigh city policeman before the Shongairi arrived, was only a year older than Palazzola, with no more military experience than he had. Both of them were, however, very, very smart, and their lack of previous military experience was rather the point of today’s exercise, because not one of their troopers had any formal pre-invasion military training. Like them, every one of their men and women had been neurally educated for their new duties.

  Unlike 1st and 3rd Platoons, Lieutenant Elinor Simpson’s 2nd Platoon was already on the ground, prepared to provide the “hostiles” for the exercise under the direct supervision of Captain Brian Hilton, Alpha Company’s CO.

  Hilton was the only person involved today who’d actually been an officer before the invasion—in his case, a lieutenant in the South Carolina National Guard, who’d spent the invasion working in tandem with Sam Mitchell. While Mitchell supplied weapons and coordination over the entire state, however, Hilton had led one of the most effective guerrilla bands making the Puppies’ lives miserable in the ruins of the Downstate.

  In Wilson’s opinion, that meant Hilton was probably better qualified than he was to command the battalion (assuming they ever got it stood up), but he was also barely thirty years old. His experience fighting the Puppies made him the perfect person to command Palazzola’s “op force,” however, and Simpson—like Sergeant First Class Consuela Curbelo, Hilton’s senior NCO—was actually a vet. Curbelo, a tough-as-nails little Texan who described herself as “Tex-Mex and meaner’n a snake,” had been an E-4 and a Marine, whereas Simpson had been an E-5 and Army, but they obviously liked and respected one another. Unlike either of them, Staff Sergeant Jacqueline Walsham, Simpson’s platoon sergeant, was another Space Marine with no prior military experience. She’d been a first-grade teacher, of all damned things. Until, that was, the Shongairi shot up a fleeing school bus that failed to stop at one of their early roadblocks. They’d killed almost all of her students that afternoon … and turned her into their worst nightmare. She’d become the best bomb-maker her resistance group had, and she’d also been their interrogation specialist.

  For some reason, every prisoner she’d ever spoken to had told her exactly what she’d wanted to know. Eventually.

  By the standard of any pre-invasion infantry platoon, Hilton’s op force was definitely top heavy with females, Wilson thought, but that was just fine with him. Once the Heinlein armor was up and running, all the old arguments about upper body strength would become thoroughly moot. Besides, he’d known plenty of tough, competent military women even before the invasion, and all three of these had fought under Hilton’s direct command after the invasion. The three of them had needed a lot less neural education to get a handle on their duties, which was the other reason Wilson had picked 2nd Platoon as the opposition force.

  Might be you’ve stacked the deck just a bit, you think? he reflected now, as the Black Hawks raced closer, and then snorted in amusement. Of course he had, and for damned good reasons, too. If this whole NET approach had any bugs, better they find out about them early.

  The helicopters swept overhead, then flared and settled into a ground hover, and the men and women of 1st and 3rd Platoon vaulted out of them.

  The first bit went well, Wilson thought. Of course—

  * * *

  “GO!” ALEANDRO PALAZZOLA snapped over the platoon’s com net, and watched the men and women of the assault force bound directly away from their landing points towards the pine forest surrounding the clearing. They should have looked clumsy in their bulky exoskeletons, but they didn’t. Their biofeedback skin suits activated their synthetic “muscles” almost as smoothly as if they’d been naked.

  He and Staff Sergeant Cunningham were perfectly placed at the midpoint between the expanding semicircles of 1st Platoon and 3rd Platoon as the helos lifted away. His people raced outward, moving in the two-man “wing” fire teams the new doctrine specified, then went to ground, covering a three-hundred-sixty-degree perimeter from prone firing positions, and he nodded in satisfaction.

  “So far, so good,” he murmured to Cunningham over their dedicated link.

  “Tempting fate, there, Sir,” Cunningham muttered back. The staff sergeant—two inches shorter than Palazzola, with a thin mustache and a scarred right cheek—took a perverse pride in his role of platoon pessimist. “Always room for something to—”

  The explosion was less than eight feet behind Palazzola.

  It wasn’t actually all that violent an explosion, he realized later. In fact, it was no more powerful than the “flash-bangs” he’d used himself when he’d run the NC Justice Academy’s Regional SWAT In-Service Training program before the invasion. It was, however, totally unexpected, and he lurched forward, going to his knees while red damage codes flickered at the corner of his visor’s HUD.

  The backpack sensors flashed an identifier in his visor. A mortar round?! What the hell were the defenders doing with a frigging mortar?!

  “Mortar!” Corporal Niedermayer announced … rather unnecessarily in Palazzola’s opinion.

  “Where’s it coming—?” Palazzola began, then winced as a second “mortar bomb” exploded. This one was only about three feet away, and it felt as if someone had just clubbed him across the back of the head.

  More codes flashed on his visor. Someone in Project Heinlein armor would be effectively invulnerable to something as feeble as a legacy, pre-invasion mortar, but that didn’t mean the armor itself was impervious to damage. Nothing short of a direct hit was likely to knock it out, but enough near misses could degrade its capabilities—especially its sensor capabilities—badly. Not to mention that even an armored Space Marine this close to a genuine 120-millimeter mortar bomb would be shaken up at least as badly as the flash bangs were managing to disorient Palazzola.

  “Find the fucking thing!” Cunningham snarled while Palazzola tried to uncross his eyes and sort out his platoons’ icons on the HUD. They showed him exactly where each of them was, but at the moment, they were a little harder to follow than usual.

  Shouldn’t have surprised us this way, a tiny corner of his brain reflected while the rest of it was still unscrambling synapses. Our sensors should’ve picked up anything the size of a frigging mortar, however hard Hilton tried to hide the damned thing!

  Except that they hadn’t looked for one. They’d been briefed to go after a group of lightly armed guerrilla fighters. No one had actually said anything about who those guerrilla fighters might be supposed to represent, although Palazzola had a few suspicions. But the briefing officer had been clear that they had reports only of legacy small arms, maybe a couple of squad light machine guns, but no heavy weapons. And a 120-millimeter mortar was about as heavy as an infantry unit’s support weapons came! So where the hell—?

  The third and fourth bombs began walking their way across the clearing, and what the hell was taking so long about back-plotting the incoming? Their sensors should make pinpointing the incoming fire’s point of origin child’s play! They’d all run through the processes without a hitch after the NET download sessions.

  But they’d been in a quiet classroom at the time. And what had been easy enough in a classroom was a lot harder out in a wet, mucky clearing, surrounded by dense pine trees, while someone dropped those nasty, disorienting flash bangs on top of them. It was so hard to think, to sort through the implanted knowledge. It was like trying to scroll through a drop-down menu in a pickup truck racing down a potholed road.

  Rounds five and six landed, and the status window at the bottom of Palazzola’s HUD indicated a twelve percent loss of function on his simulated armor.

  “Got it!” Corporal Justina Fredericks, one of Jeff Samuelson’s wing leaders barked finally, and the mortar’s coordinates and bearing appeared in yet another corner window on Palazzola’s visor. It was on 3rd Platoon’s side of the clearing.

  “Watson, Briggs—flank left! Jeffers, you and Francotti take right!” he heard Samuel
son snap, sending four of his five “wings” sweeping out to flank the mortar position. “Jake, you and Bourbeau on me!”

  He headed straight down the middle with Staff Sergeant Jacob Tyson and the fifth wing.

  “Timmons and Jolson, you hold what you’ve got,” Palazzola ordered, detailing the pair of his own wings farthest from the mortar bearing. “The rest of you, reorient to support Third Platoon.”

  His people started moving—two or three of them considerably more slowly than they had when they first exited the helicopters as their own exoskeletons reacted to the theoretical damage their theoretical armor had sustained. They moved with something less than textbook precision, as well, which didn’t surprise him one bit, but at least they were moving.

  “Wish to hell they’d included some of those frigging drones they say they’re working on!” Cunningham growled over their link.

  “Or just bothered to tell us about the goddamned mortars!” Palazzola snarled back.

  “Just slipped their minds, you think, Sir?” Cunningham said.

  “Oh, sure it did! And if you believe that—”

  “Shit!”

  It sounded like Jeff Samuelson … because it was, responding to the sudden, blinding glare his visor had just blasted directly into his eyes to simulate the impact of an M72 LAW’s four-pound shaped-charge rocket. His exoskeleton locked instantly, sending him crashing to the ground, and Palazzola swore viciously as he realized where the “rocket” had come from. Someone less than two hundred meters away on Samuelson’s left—which would put him just inside the pine trees—had been waiting for the assault team to charge the mortar … and offer a perfect flanking shot. And he wasn’t alone. Four more of the damned “rockets” came scorching in. Fortunately, they weren’t very accurate against individual, moving, human-sized targets at that sort of range, but they managed to take down Corporal Frank Barbeau, another of 3rd Platoon’s Marines.