by P. R. Adams
“You’ve already determined our targets?” Meyers’s eyes narrowed, and his nostrils flared.
“I would consider it a rough framework.” Rimes dimmed the target highlights. “It’s not inflexible. I certainly don’t consider it finalized. I don’t think that’s uncommon or unrealistic, is it?”
Gwambe, apparently more awake and aware of the tension between the two now, glanced at Meyers. “Are these numbers from the reconnaissance, Colonel?”
“They are,” Rimes said. He kept his voice low and even; his eyes only wavered from Meyers’s long enough for a quick acknowledging glance at Gwambe. “Banh and Dunne feel very confident about the composition, placement, and operational behavior. I’ve built everything you see off their intelligence. You’ll see the patrol patterns in red, manpower concentrations are marked with numbers, and what I would consider our optimal targets are marked in green. This is just my interpretation. Obviously, I need yours for this to work.”
Gwambe dragged the city display around and drilled down to detailed views of the streets and troop concentrations. His finger movements were subtle and quick, but he repositioned the perspective with exceptional accuracy. “The images, they are…new, Colonel?”
“Live. Captain Meyers got the Hawkeyes up. They’re integrating the recon imagery and extrapolating it now. It’s going to be a little dicey with this heavy rain. Once they get some more video of their own it’ll tighten up. What you’re seeing there is close to real-time, especially in areas where we know they’re hunkered down.”
Gwambe squinted at the display. “You have highlighted the bridge as your primary target? Do you plan to destroy it?”
“Not immediately. It’s something of a problem for them, though, and it’s one I think we can exploit.”
Meyers’s face reddened. When he spoke, his voice rose. “You want to funnel them onto the bridge and pin them down.”
Rimes nodded.
“Then what? Blow the bridge while they’re on it? Ignore any offers of surrender?”
“No need to blow it.” Rimes ignored Meyers’s real point. “We can burn it, salvaging most of the structure. Howard Plains has significant fertilizer reserves. Dariusz is very confident this can be converted into an effective incendiary substance. The way I figure it, they could have it fully operational again within a month. As to surrender, I don’t see that as a likelihood, considering all the war crimes they’ve committed. Do you?”
Meyers stared at the display. “They need to have an opportunity, Colonel.”
For just an instant Rimes closed his eyes. When he could focus on the struggle his thoughts were clear, focused. It was a science free of emotion and connection: objectives, tactics, logistics. When things became personal, as Meyers was now making them, the detachment was harder to maintain. Memories of the dead crashed against the defenses Rimes had erected, threatening to destroy his resolve and overwhelm him.
He rubbed at the scar on his temple and bit back a challenge he told himself was Kwon’s. Then, Rimes looked into Meyers’s steady gaze. “They’ll have the same opportunity for surrender Lieutenant Irvin and Major Pearson had. We’ll treat them with the same respect and decency they’ve shown their civilian prisoners. Is that adequate, Captain?”
“Maybe…” Gwambe swallowed loudly. “Maybe you could explain your idea, Colonel? Once we know the details, maybe there are some alternatives we could see. The idea, it sounds good, Captain Meyers?”
Meyers nodded curtly.
“That’s a good thought, Sergeant,” Rimes said. Details. Focus. “Simplicity is sometimes our best ally. In this case our enemy has established our objectives and approach for us. They have six concentrations of force: the governor’s mansion, the airport, the police station, the shipyard, the hospital, and the prison. Total number: under three hundred. They have two gunships operational, a few missiles each. They’ve been cannibalizing the third gunship to keep the other two going. It’s not a threat. The closest any of these forces are to another is a bit under a klick, so they’re relatively isolated. They have six repurposed police and security crawlers, two modified with machine guns off the cannibalized gunship. Any one of these forces would be a problem if we assaulted it head-on. We need them to crawl out of their shells. We need them moving, unsure and confused. Our assets are very clear. Sergeant Gwambe’s squad is at full strength. Sergeant Honig’s squad is close to full strength and should be here within the hour. Corporal Dunne’s team will work with Captain Meyers. We have Lieutenants Headey and Gyan on alert with fully armed shuttles. Ensign Foltz is waiting on word from Sergeant Bo at Howard Plains. Once Howard Plains has been purged, Foltz will airlift Bo’s squad into Delta City. Our shuttles can’t go up against those gunships, so we take the gunships out ourselves or this operation is a no-go. The easiest solution is to cripple the remote piloting capability. That would be your task, Captain. Once you knock out the remote piloting system, Dunne will pin down the force at the airport, and the operation will begin in earnest.”
Meyers shook his head. “They have nearly fifty men at the airfield. You expect Dunne’s team to keep them engaged? For how long?”
“Our window of opportunity is thirty minutes,” Rimes said. “Any longer than that, we can’t stand up to their numbers.”
“Nearly ten to one.” Meyers shook his head. “I don’t think we can stand up to those numbers, period.”
“Not in a sustained firefight, no, we can’t.” Rimes let out a quiet sigh. His voice had been rising in volume, his words close to running together. He needed to pull back, to calm down, but he couldn’t stop himself. “What I need from you, Captain, is not a focus on tearing apart the very idea of even having this plan but on the potential weaknesses of the plan itself. Asymmetric warfare was our purpose and design. It’s what we trained for going back to our days with the Commandos. We’ve executed this exact sort of operation in the last two weeks.”
“Exactly,” Meyers said. “We’ve been conducting these operations nonstop. Our squads are worn down. They’ve been pushed too hard. They’re not operating at their peak, and that means they’re taking a lot of unnecessary risks.”
“By ‘they,’ do you mean ‘me’?” Rimes’s voice was calm and cool again.
Meyers said nothing, but the answer was clear in his eyes. Gwambe ran fingers around the neck of his armor.
“Have we lost anyone?” Rimes finally asked. Reason, not emotion. I need him on my side. He lost someone too. He’s just in denial. “Have we failed in any of our missions?”
“Failed? No. But they weren’t crisp and sharp like they could have been. We need rest. You haven’t slept—”
“I’ll sleep when this is all over,” Rimes said, his eyes closing for just a moment, giving voice again to the lost souls haunting him. You’ll have your justice. When he opened his eyes the fire within burned hotter than ever, but it was controlled, harnessed.
“We’ve suffered casualties we didn’t need to suffer.” Meyers seemed to be struggling to match Rimes’s calm. “Civilians have died. These are all painful things we could have avoided if we’d taken this just a little slower and been more cautious.”
“And more civilians could have died while we took our time.”
“I don’t think civilian deaths are what’s driving your decisions.” Meyers’s voice rose dangerously, and his face was flush.
“That doesn’t make it any less true. The enemy is still in orbit up there, but no one is coming to rescue these mercenaries, and they don’t have enough gunships to make a run for it. They’re stuck here, and they aren’t about to surrender. That leaves us with one option: We have to eliminate them.”
“That’s been the only option from the start, hasn’t it?” Meyers leaned closer, his face centimeters from Rimes’s.
“Hasn’t it?” Rimes pointed toward Delta City. His voice was even, but there was no hiding the intensity burning within. “They created this situation. It’s not as if this is something we can just wish away. They orche
strated this attack. They killed innocent civilians. It can’t end until they’re gone. Anything else, and it just repeats itself at some point. You know that. Or have you convinced yourself otherwise?”
Meyers merely blinked.
“Is this all just my imagination? Am I somehow assigning blame incorrectly here? What happened to Kara? Was that an accident, some sort of misunderstanding? Tell me, Lonny. Tell me we’re fighting against rational human beings who simply have a disagreement with us, and all we need to do is dig a little bit harder to find some brilliant solution to end all this peacefully. Tell me this is all just a bad dream or a delusion I’m suffering and they’re not inhuman, depraved monsters.”
Meyers looked away. “What are we, then?”
“Order,” Rimes said quietly. “Justice. Revenge. Executioners. Purifying fire. We’re the fucking gun they loaded and put to their temple the second they murdered all those innocent civilians. Take your pick. You can’t question our role or actions. They did this to themselves.”
Defeated, Meyers leaned back. The tension gripping his body made his discomfort with the situation obvious. If he had points, he apparently had no way to articulate them beyond voicing his opposition to Rimes’s decisions. That apparently shook Meyers. “We can’t become what they are.”
Rimes closed his eyes and felt the horror of the metacorporate actions compress into a concentrated burst. “No, we can’t.”
20
25 December, 2173. Plymouth Colony.
* * *
Status symbols blinked in a variety of colors across Rimes’s BAS display. The display defined his world at the moment: his hopes, dreams, and desires. He released a pent-up breath, thunderous and raw inside the helmet that held everything together.
He shifted his weight, pushing himself deeper into shadows, then took another quick look out the window of the office he’d broken into. Flickering light revealed the jail across the street. The front entrance was fourteen meters away. A chair propped the front door open, probably to deal with the heat and the stench. It was dark inside. He’d located three of the five guards and tagged them with his BAS; he had no idea where the other two were.
They’ll have to wait. The battlefield matters now.
At the moment, the battlefield was defined in two separate views, each alternately displayed as the main view or a thumbnail in the left corner. Scanning the current primary display, Rimes could see Gwambe in position near Silvestri Highway, the six-lane road that ran all the way from the northeastern edge of the city to Marder River Bridge, then picked up again in District Seven. Gwambe’s squad was split in two, half deployed to the Booth Legislature Building across from the governor’s mansion, half deployed amongst the construction supplies outside the shipyard storage facility. Honig’s squad was similarly split between a burned-out commercial building overlooking the police station and an apartment complex next to the Weatherby Hospital. The metacorporate vehicles were rigged to blow.
Everyone was in place but Meyers.
Come on. We’ve got too much riding on you, Lonny. You can do this.
Minutes dragged on. Rimes passed the time by checking his weapons and searching for the missing guards. Finally, with the four o’clock hour approaching and a decision on whether or not to abort imminent, Meyers showed up on the BAS. A moment later, Dunne’s team registered as well. They were in position across from the maintenance hangar.
The first hints of twilight were showing in the eastern sky. It was a weak glow, an insignificant influence on the odds of success. Another twenty to thirty minutes, though, and the glow would intensify enough to close the window of opportunity Rimes had emphasized. He looked over the troop placement again.
It’s going to be tight, but we can do it.
Rimes gave the “go” signal and rose from his crouching position, moving out the office door and into the hall. He was through the building’s north door and sprinting quietly across the street when Meyers signaled that the mercenaries’ remote piloting capability was down.
The gunships were disabled.
Immediately, gunfire broke the quiet. Dunne’s team had opened fire on the airfield garrison.
We’re committed.
As drafted, once the gunships were disabled the plan called for Dunne to open fire on the hangar where the airfield force was dug in. That would set the rest of the teams into action, with Rimes and Gwambe attacking their targets simultaneously. Honig’s team would hold fire until Gwambe signaled.
Plans last up to the point when the human element comes into play. To succeed we have to minimize that element.
Rimes reached the jail’s east wall and crouched. Then, he edged south toward the open door, carbine at the ready. He had an armor-piercing load, something he’d gone back and forth over. With the mercenaries’ lack of discipline, it was entirely possible they would be unarmored when he encountered them, making the armor-piercing rounds much less effective. He had two magazines of regular ammo ready in a thigh pouch, just in case.
A form stepped from the doorway, draped in shadows. Rimes froze. It was one of the guards, unarmored, assault rifle gripped in his right hand. The guard turned to the south and rested his assault rifle on his right shoulder, apparently drawn out by the gunfire.
Rimes quietly leaned his carbine against the wall and drew his knife. He waited for a sustained burst of gunfire, then moved, closing the distance in three silent strides. The guard turned at the last moment, his body language projecting curiosity rather than alarm. Rimes drove the knife through the man’s throat and out the back of his neck. A lift and twist, and the guard’s eyes rolled back in his head, a quiet hiss escaping his ruined throat. Blood gushed over Rimes’s hand.
It was a moment’s work to drag the guard around the north wall and out of sight. Rimes dried his hand on the guard’s corpse, then retrieved the carbine and moved toward the door. Gunfire erupted faintly to the northeast. It was Gwambe’s team, their placement more distant, the intervening space densely packed with buildings, whereas Dunne’s position was just through the newer and more sparsely populated District Seven and across the Marder River.
“Vaseem, you see anything?”
Rimes brought the carbine up while the BAS tracked the voice. The speaker was one and a half meters inside the doorway and approaching. Gambling that the guard would also be unarmored, Rimes reversed the carbine, raising the butt for a strike.
“Vaseem?”
The guard stepped through the door. He was pulling on his armor but didn’t have his helmet on. Rimes drove the carbine’s butt into the man’s jaw. A cracking sound told Rimes that the jawbone was shattered and dislocated. He followed up with another strike, shattering the man’s left cheek and the orbital region above. The guard crumpled, twitching and moaning weakly. Rimes stepped through the doorway, eyes scanning for the third guard, ears straining for any sound the BAS might capture.
Entering the dark of the prison unsettled Rimes. He flashed back to the Crabtree Correctional Center so many years back, when he’d discovered his fellow Commandos’ involvement in the X-17 heist. He’d lost his mentor and best friend, Marty, in that abandoned prison.
Another ghost.
The Delta City jail was small, a two-story structure with a few dozen cells on either level. Before the invasion it had been home to the few delinquents who couldn’t get the message from a sleepover in lock-up. Beyond the reception area through which Rimes had entered, all that remained were an administrative section, a modest emergency room, and a few isolation cells in the basement.
Rimes stepped into the southern block of offices, straining for some hint of where the remaining guards had slipped off to. The corridor was black as midnight, too much even for the armor’s night vision enhancement. Visibility was minimal, and he was toying with turning his helmet lamp on at its lowest setting. Before he could activate the lamp, he saw a reflection off a display terminal in the office immediately to his right. It was dim, barely noticeable, and it lasted only a
moment, but that was enough.
Rimes pivoted and fired into the office. Glass shattered, and he fired again. The second volley sent a vague silhouette back into a wall. After a moment the silhouette slid down and out of sight.
Rimes activated his headlamp and sprinted into the office, carbine tracking to where the form had fallen. A guard lay on the floor, gasping. Bloody foam oozed from his mouth. He was doing his best to shove his assault rifle away.
Rimes kicked the weapon and looked the wounded man over. Two rounds had struck him in the chest. Blood oozed thickly through armored plates.
Perforated lung.
It was a lethal wound unless treated quickly. Rimes listened until he was sure there were no other guards around. He grabbed the assault rifle and exited the office, ignoring the guard’s quiet gasps.
Halfway back to the main entry, Rimes stopped to listen to the communications and examine some of the video feeds. Dunne and Meyers were already having trouble keeping the airport forces pinned down. Gwambe had been a little slow signaling Honig because of surprising resistance at the shipyards, and now Honig was having problems at the police station. Nothing was insurmountable at the moment, and the vehicles had already detonated, knocking away any momentum the mercenaries had acquired. Both teams were preparing to move to their second positions.
With a curse on his lips, Rimes looked at the door leading into the first-floor prison block. He had to pick up his pace or fall behind, putting everyone at risk. Just as he committed to forgetting about the missing guards, he noticed that the door to the isolation cell staircase was ajar. He moved toward it cautiously. The stairwell was dark, abandoned. He listened, catching what might have been hushed voices echoing up the stairwell.
Cautiously, Rimes descended the stairs, flinching at every noise he imagined he made. He came to a stop at the basement door. It was also ajar. He could clearly hear voices, male and female.
