14
Matt Burke:
We fall together, pretty much right out of the still-dark sky into the courtyard. The rappeller cable jerks hard at the armor as it puts the brakes on. Still, the landing hurts.
The rest happens in just a few seconds.
Dropping into the middle of them would be a suicide move if it weren’t for the armor and the AI. Even with, it still may be. The general idea is to draw their fire inside the complex rather than encouraging them to fire outwards into population. That means we’re basically targets. It also means that we’ll be relying on Dee to ensure that we don’t send any wild rounds out into the world, and to keep our own backup from hitting us in the resulting crossfire.
Fire control goes live before I even hit the ground. Dee dumps us in a rough triangle and points us at what it reads as motion. I realize I’ve finally gotten used to squeezing down on the ICW reflexively, because the thing cycles and spits a handful of rounds through a doorway before I have any idea what I’m shooting at. I only see the Terahertz image of the body drop after it’s done, see the outlines of an assault rifle drop with it.
Michael and Ibrahim are sweeping behind me, peppering the buildings all around us. Then flashes of fire come out of some of the windows and I almost get taken off my feet by something heavy that smacks me in the upper chest. Then another shell punches me in the back—it almost compensates for getting knocked backwards—but I get a good half of my wind kicked out of me and I want to just spin around and hit back in all directions but fucking Dee is controlling my gun and wants me to keep to my quarter or third or whatever. Then I catch a flash of a shadow popping up over a second floor balcony and I see a thick tube on his weapon and Dee is flashing me to
“Move!!!” I yell as I dive and roll hopefully in the right direction. I realize my weapon already perforated the shooter, but he squeezes off a 40mm grenade at us before he drops. The blast goes close—even with the helmet, I can’t hear anymore—and I get knocked sideways and feel my knee go pop and my helmet rattles my brains as I hit ground…
When my visor clears I’m looking at a graphic of the VTOLs hitting the complex. I hear glass breaking and grenades go and then more ICW spitting, but now it’s from upstairs: Manning and Ivan and Abbas just dropped in to catch them from behind, slung like human yoyos from their dropships as they swept in low and quiet, blowing in through the second-floor windows. And I’m just lying on my back as I watch Dee coolly click off kills on my visor. And I’m idly thinking that if they had a nuke or something they haven’t used it yet. Then I catch a blur of gray with a black bug of a head and realize Michael’s up and on the move.
“…Burke! Major Burke!”
My body feels crushed all over and my ears feel like they’re full of water. For some reason this makes me remember that someone was taking a shower or something.
Grayman Book One: Acts of War Page 46
