by J. N. Chaney
“Stop dancing,” Tomiko said.
“You can never be too careful.”
“Ten seconds. Prepare for launch.”
The kick, when it came, really wasn’t much. A few seconds of G’s, and then weightlessness until the landing craft’s engine kicked in ten seconds later. The pilot turned the shuttle and started descending to the planet’s surface.
The assault on Alafia had begun.
It wasn’t an assault like any of Rev’s others. Without a viable naval threat, the task force had full control of space and air. The first two shuttles came in hard and fast, debarking teams from the Landing Support Battalion and a security element. Ten minutes later, Rev’s shuttle landed at the Reginald Tyson Spaceport as if it were a commercial liner shuttle, bringing day tourists to spend their credits buying cheap trinkets made on Harmony.
The ramp remained closed for a good three minutes, the Marines anxious to debark and wondering if there was a surprise and something had gone wrong. But the ramp finally lowered to reveal two Marines, small red patches on the outside of their knees indicating that they were from LSB, standing on the dark apron. Neither had their face shields in place, which was a good sign.
“Raiders, follow me,” one of the Marines passed over the comms, raising a hand so they knew who was talking.
“Alpha Marines, on me,” the other said.
“Glad we’ve got comms,” Rev told Tomiko on the P2P.
“First time, right?”
“Yeah, first time. It’ll sure make things easier.”
“You’re in Condition Delta,” the red-patcher told them as they came down the ramp.
Rev immediately retracted his shield, and the warm, humid air hit him in the face with the smells of . . . he wasn’t quite sure. It was definitely not something he’d experienced before. Vaguely plantlike, but with a musty undertone. It tickled his nose, and he felt an urge to sneeze before his nanos rushed to the scene.
Not everyone’s nanos were so quick. Several Marines behind him sneezed as the air swept into the shuttle.
Rev hurried down the ramp and onto the tarmac. He immediately looked up, scanning the night sky, but there was nothing. No Witch’s Broom Nebula, to his disappointment.
“Hey, where’s the nebula?” Hussein asked from behind him.
“You can’t see it with your naked eye,” Yazzie told him. “It’s just gasses, and widely distributed at that.”
“Is that true?”
“But the brief?” Hussein said.
“Different filters. I read that you can get glasses here to see it, but if you switch to your RC-3 filter, you should . . .”
Rev tuned the rest of Yazzie’s words out as he ordered his face shield closed and the filter activated.
“Holy shit,” he said, with that or the like repeated by the rest of the platoon who were now bunched behind their shuttle.
Arrayed across the entire width of the sky was a show that put the aurora borealis back on New Hope to shame. Vivid red, pinks, and blues covered them like a canopy. Rev had always heard that something or the other was so beautiful that it took your breath away. Now he knew what that meant. This was the most amazing thing he’d seen in his life.
He turned off the filter, and it all disappeared. Activating the filter again was almost painful, the colors were so bright.
“OK, let’s move, Raiders,” the red-patcher passed on the net.
“You heard him,” the gunny came on. “Column of twos, and let’s get off this tarmac. This is a combat zone, boys and girls. Remember that.”
“Not like any combat zone I’ve seen,” Tomiko passed over the P2P.
Rev tore his gaze away from the sky for a second. They were heading for the terminal, a modern building with “Welcome to Natividad” in lights above the gates. If it weren’t for the auto-cannons on either side, then more ringing the landing pad, he wouldn’t have guessed there was a state of war at the moment.
“No, not like any combat zone I’ve seen, either.”
It might be peaceful now, and the Angel shits might have been surprised at the landing, but they weren’t just going to stand by and be rounded up. Of that, Rev was sure.
This was going to turn nasty real soon.
15
It didn’t take long. An hour later, Rev was part of a line around Natividad’s Municipal Center, which had been taken over as the Marines’ command post, as protestors showed up. A klick and a half away, the second lift of landing craft was bringing in more Marines, including the heavier mech and armor forces.
“Get out, Imperialists,” was one of the least offensive things shouted at them. The rest were more along the lines of blasphemers and traitors and for them to do things that were probably not physically possible. Colorful, but not possible.
“I sure didn’t expect to be doing this,” Tomiko passed to him.
With the ease of landing, neither had Rev. But the people had reacted quickly despite the zero-dark-thirty hour. They must have known something was coming. The kapos and quislings on Tenerife were no secret, and the Angel shits had to be expecting some reaction, just not when. So, while the initial landing all across the planet had taken them by tactical surprise, they had been ready for the possibility.
“Not for much longer. As soon as the CRA troops get here, they’ll take over,” Rev said.
“Yeah, on the third lift.”
Marines, based on the millennias-old policy of posse comitatus, had no real authority over civilians, and for the moment, the people on the planet were not combatants. No one expected that to last, especially once the Civil Reaction Authority troops started arresting folk. When they started fighting back, the colonel commanding the CRA force would officially request assistance from the admiral, thereby deputizing the Marines and Navy until the waiting Perseus Union Directorate could issue a formal declaration of war. Rounding up and/or fighting the Angel shits would shift to the responsibility of the military, while the CRA troops would take over the handling of both detainees (Prisoners of War, but the Marines had been instructed not to use that term for the duration) and displaced persons.
It was all theater, trying to give a veneer of working within the law. The truth, and every Marine and sailor knew it, was they were there to crush the Angel shits, nothing less. Across human space, similar actions were being conducted on other centers of mass of Children of Angels, while smaller groups and even individuals were being sought out wherever they were.
A rock came hurtling out from behind the crowd, hitting the staff sergeant in the chest. Not that a rock was going to do anything to him, but it showed the people were getting more aggressive.
None of the Raiders had been trained in riot control tactics, so this was new turf for them. The infantry in their PAL-3s would be more imposing, but they were providing security for the spaceport, so the Raiders, Sappers, and Recon Marines had been shanghaied to protect the CP.
“Stupid move to occupy this thing now, before the rest of us land,” Rev told Tomiko.
“Optics, Rev. We’re in charge and all that.”
“At least we could have waited for the mechs. Can you imagine Udu facing these yahoos?”
Tomiko laughed and said, “She’d zero the lot of them and ask permission later.”
“Save us some time, at least.”
“Probably the right thing to do, though. I mean, we all know what’s gonna happen here. In a couple of hours, maybe as long as until tomorrow, we’ll be in combat with these fuckers. I swear, orders or not, if even one of them looks at me funny, I’m gonna drop him.”
“Wait one,” Rev said, cutting the comms and connecting with Yazzie.
“T2, keep it tight. Don’t drift forward.”
“Sorry,” she said as she took a step back into line.
“Keep an eye on her,” he passed to Tomiko on their P2P circuit again. “I think the excitement is getting to her. All we need wou
ld be for her to get snatched.”
During the grand total of thirteen minutes of the frag order, they’d been told three times about the danger of getting snatched and dragged away by the mob. Rev wasn’t going to let that happen, ROI be damned. Tomiko was right. In an hour, in a day—soon, for sure—this was going to devolve into a shooting war. No question about it. And he’d be damned if one of his element was going to be killed just so the task force could play-act that they were not there to crush the Children of Angels.
This was the calm before the storm. When daylight came, things were going to get hot.
Rev looked to the horizon to try and gauge when dawn might arrive. There might be the slightest hint of rose over the eastern mountains. It was nothing compared to the Witch’s Broom. He quickly switched his filter, and the sky lit up gloriously. It was a shame that something so special was being tainted by traitors. He stood there and stared for a long moment before he sighed and switched his filter back.
The night sky turned to black, and the harsh lights around the Muni Center placed the angry crowd into stark relief.
16
Two hours later, as dawn lit up the sky, an armed mob attacked the Twenty-first Marines in Briarton, the next city to the west. This had turned into a shooting war, which was expected. The Children of Angels were fanatics, willing to do whatever it took to bring humanity to the next level. They weren’t going to let the little fact that they hadn’t the training nor equipment to take on the Perseus Union Marine Corps with augments from three other military forces get in the way of their perception of reality. They were doing the angel’s work, so they couldn’t fail.
Rev didn’t think that was a good bet. Unfortunately, none of the Children of Angels cared one whit as to what he thought.
“Move out,” Staff Sergeant Delacrie ordered.
Yazzie turned to look at Rev, who nodded. She was on point, her first offensive combat action.
No better way to break her in.
True, it wasn’t on a mission for which any of them had been trained, but it was absolutely within the Raiders’ general mission statement. It was just that there hadn’t been much call for a snatch operation against a Centaur, so that particular mission had been shelved. Until now.
With hostilities open, there was a planet-wide operation to arrest a long list of persons of interest with the hope that by cutting off the head of the snake, the body would die. Intel gave that probability at twenty percent. Worth a shot, because even if the body didn’t give up with the head gone, there was over a ninety-percent chance that their combat capabilities would be diminished without their leaders.
A snatch mission was done quickly with an aggressive use of force, hopefully shocking the target with the speed and ferocity of action. Raiders were particularly suited for this type of operation. There were only five Raider teams with the regiment—the four normal teams and the attached Frisian Host flight—however, so they were assigned the most vital targets with recon and infantry picking up the slack.
Third Team’s target was Helen Yesterday. Rev had no idea why she was such a high-priority target, and the Intel part of their operations order hadn’t really delineated the reasons. It didn’t matter, though. She was their target, and so they’d bring her in.
The spaceport was being converted into a Marine camp with the command post abandoning the muni center, and they had to pass through a hastily erected gate, manned by four infantry Marines with two mech Marines in support, standing like statues and hopefully cowing the Children of Angels. Yazzie led the patrol through the gates where half-a-dozen people watched silently.
“They’re giving away our position,” Tomiko passed on the P2P.
“Probably.”
“The grunts should round them up.”
“Agreed,”
“Oh, you’re a gabfest, aren’t you? ‘Probably.’ ‘Agreed.’ That’s all you can say?”
“Not much we can do about it now with the ROI as it stands. But you heard the lieutenant. Pretty soon . . .”
“If we’re still around by then.”
Rev didn’t like the watchers any more than Tomiko did. But watchers weren’t just for one side. There were plenty of people on the planet who didn’t like the Children of Angels’ incursion and would just as soon have them all hauled off. And there were other CoAs who either weren’t as dedicated as the rest or liked money better than doctrine. Rev didn’t know who Intel’s canary was in this case, but Ms. Yesterday’s location had been known since well prior to the Marine landing. The woman had immediately left her home with a bodyguard for what she assumed to be a safe house, and that house was now being watched by a swarm of microdrones and several human assets.
They wouldn’t be able to directly approach the house without alerting her. But they could still achieve an element of surprise. Their target was inside a two-story building on Grant Street between North Eighth and Ninth. The ground floor was a bakery, while the second floor was an apartment. Naval surveillance had five people on the second floor with two in the basement. They couldn’t discount the two in the basement, but chances were that Yesterday was one of the five upstairs.
With Yazzie on point, the patrol moved west from the terminal on South Tenth until they hit Incarta Avenue, two blocks from Grant, then turned north. Some civilians stood on the street, watching them pass, but only a few yelled out the same things that had been hurled at them at the Municipal Center. There were far more furtive looks from people inside and peering out at them. Evidently, the good folks in Natividad had heard what had happened at Briarton, and they realized that the Marines had a pretty big bite when provoked.
“Keep scanning high,” the staff sergeant passed on the team net.
Which everyone was doing, of course. If they were going to be hit, the chances were that it would be someone on a roof or through a window.
“What’s the quantphone traffic like?”
Rev shook his head. He understood the concept. Let them talk while having AIs screen each call. The Intel guys would be having a smorgasbord of chat to listen to. But just like a real smorgasbord, there was sometimes too much from which to choose, and with so much traffic, they couldn’t analyze everything in real-time. That could put the team at risk.
The CoAs didn’t have nearly the same amount and types of weapons as the Marines did, but there were a number of things they could jury-rig that, if dropped off a roof, could mess up a Marine in a PAL-5.
Was that risk worth letting Angel shit fighters coordinate an attack on them? Rev wasn’t so sure about that.
I hope the overflight drones are on their toes.
Not all the drones were simply surveillance. They had four Tarantula Hawks that could take out a person even with the basic body armor used by police units.
The patrol made its way north, past Zero Street and into the numbered roads. They had to expect that their target knew they were there, probably getting nervous. The team members had to act as if this was a routine patrol, nothing more, nothing less.
A young man stepped out onto Incarta from North Fifth and hurled a rock at them before darting back out of sight. The rock made it halfway, bouncing to a stop thirty meters ahead.
“Should I have wasted him?” Yazzie asked Rev.
“He’s not a threat, and we’ve got a bigger fish to fry. You did good.”
Not now, at least. But later, even a young punk throwing a rock could be a valid target—if it got that far.
The team kept moving past Fifth, Sixth, and Seventh. If Ms. Yesterday was monitoring their progress, she should be shitting bricks right now and ready to bolt. They needed to convince her that she wasn’t their target, so they moved on quickly, past Eighth and Ninth, waiting for word that she was bugging out.
But the net was quiet. Evidently, Ms. Yesterday was hunkering down.
“The Buzzard is thirty seconds out. Stand by,” Sta
ff Sergeant Delacrie passed.
The Marine Corps HH-40 Buzzard was a tilt-fan chopper used for a variety of missions ranging from insertion and ground support, to CASEVACs. Used to be used, that is. They were not heavily armored, and the Centaurs swept them from the skies in early engagements. But here on Alafia, the anti-air threat was much less, so the Buzzard squadrons were getting to play.
“Keep moving,” Rev passed to Yazzie when he saw her start to slow down. They had to wait until released.
Buzzards weren’t particularly noisy, but they weren’t wraiths, either, and Rev could hear it approach from the south. If Ms. Yesterday was shitting bricks before, she had to be shitting entire houses now. But the Buzzard wasn’t coming for her, at least from all outward appearances. It landed on the roof of the nexus center, disgorging a squad of Marines.
If an invading force, say something like the Union Marines, was trying to control a city, then the nexus centers would be logical targets. Controlling comms would be an important step in any strategic plan.
Now, if Intel-Psych had a handle on Ms. Yesterday’s psychological profile, she would be relaxing, coming down from the perceived threat of the Buzzard. It was time.
“Phase Two. Go,” the team leader ordered.
Immediately, the nine Marines and Doc Paul wheeled and started running toward the building. Maxing out their augments, they covered the two blocks in less than thirty seconds. Second Element, with Hussein in the lead, crashed through the ferrocene front door, shattering it into shards. First was right on their heels.
“Up!” Rev passed, pointing to the stairway in the back by the old-fashioned ovens.
During their quick rehearsal back at the Spaceport, Yazzie was first up the stairs, but as things worked out in reality, Rev was the closest, so he charged up, shouldering the door at the top open and throwing in a stun grenade.
“Union Marines! Get on the floor now!”
Three dazed people, two women and a man, slowly got down on their hands and knees as Tomiko, Yazzie, and Doc Paul flowed around him.
