by Rick Partlow
I didn’t bother to answer. All gunfire had ceased, not just in the hall but outside as well. Gunny Moore and the rest of the platoon were probably on their way back to the trucks. We didn’t have any more diversions and we needed to get out of here now.
“Napier,” I said, “take point and get us down fast.”
Unlike me, the kid knew how to follow orders and it was all the beat-up Delta team could do to keep up with him as he took the stairs two at a time. The ground floor had seemed deserted on the way in, but this time, it had a haunted air to it, fraught with menace lurking in every shadow. But we lacked the time to check those shadows or clear the apartments and all we could do was get past them as quickly as we could. I held my breath the whole way to the exit and even when we came out, I wasn’t quite ready to let it go. I couldn’t shake the feeling there was someone trailing behind, waiting until we dropped our guard to open up on us.
But no one was, and we rounded the curve heading back to the alley with the trucks unopposed, the streets as silent as a graveyard, our pounding footsteps grinding into broken glass on the pavement obscenely loud.
I’d figured we would be the last to arrive, but Gunny Moore and his two squads were just jogging up the street from the other direction by the time we made it to the alley, some of them panting with exertion.
“Problem?” I asked my platoon sergeant.
“Oh, the fucking A-gunner dropped his fucking sidearm,” Moore growled, casting a stinkeye at the assistant to the company machine gunner. The man shrank under the attention and tried to hide behind the side of the lead truck. “We had to go back to our original positions to recover it because I’ll be damned if some EPV thug is going to kill one of our people with a gun from my fucking platoon.”
“Where’re the targets?” Jambo demanded, scanning back and forth, his NVG’s making him look like some sort of predatory insect.
“Right here, Master Sergeant,” Gregory spoke up, emerging from between the trucks, pulling Laura Martijena out by the arm. The woman had a field bandage tied over her mouth and her face was twisted with fury. Her son was hanging off her belt, as if he was terrified to let go of her, but Chamberlain was just behind him, keeping watch on him.
“What’s the deal?” Jambo asked, looking back and forth from Gregory to me. “Why is she cuffed?”
“Martijena was lying,” I told him. “She wasn’t kidnapped, she’s an EPV sympathizer. She was here for Major Stevie.” I spared a frown for Gregory. “But what’s with the gag?”
“She kept yelling and giving away our position,” Gregory explained, shrugging.
“We kept the trucks safe, sir,” Chamberlain told me, managing to somehow look both smug and resentful all at once.
“Good fucking job, Chamberlain,” I told him. “Where’s Peterson? We got wounded.”
“Later,” Jambo insisted. “When we’re on the choppers. For now, we need to get the hell out of here.”
Several things happened at once. The first thing was the sound. An RPK light machine gun sounds very much like an AK since it fires the same round, and I didn’t immediately know which it was, but I knew it was the enemy and I knew they were shooting at me. Or close enough. I’d been looking at Chamberlain, speaking to him, so I saw when he threw himself in front of Laura Martijena and her son, Paulo. It might have been training, might have been instinctive, or it might have been just who the kid was, but he put himself between the civilians and the threat.
And he died for it. The bullets punched through his throat, just above his SAPI plate and blood sprayed out the other side, splashing Laura Martijena in the face. She screamed through her gag and ran. Gregory had been holding her arm, but he’d taken a bullet as well, the round slapping into the center of his chest. I couldn’t know it just then, but it had been stopped by his vest, though it hit him hard enough to make him let go of the woman.
I don’t know if she was trying to get away from us and didn’t even think about her son or if she just panicked, but she ran. I lunged for her but she was past and the boy was trying to follow. I grabbed him by the leg as I hit the ground and he fell flat, stretched out in front of me with his fingers scrabbling.
The Delta operators reacted first, because of course they did. I had just spotted the EPV soldiers coming out of the alley we had cut over to the apartment building in, three of them, though the one doing the damage was firing a drum-fed RPK from the shoulder. The stutter of the Delta M68’s was deeper-throated than either AK’s or our carbines because they were firing a heavier round with more powder behind it, the 6.8mm. Most of them had the carbines, but two had the light machine gun versions, drum-fed like the RPK, and they chopped into the EPV troops, spraying back and forth until all three were down.
And so was Laura Martijena.
I let out that breath I’d been holding with a feeling like none would ever replace it.
Chapter Fourteen
“The fucking Helta,” Lance Corporal Ryan Quinn told me earnestly, “build their trucks just too damn sturdy.”
As if to punctuate the statement, he fired off another two rounds at the incoming construction vehicle, sparks flashing as the tungsten slugs punched through the cab and down into the undercarriage. There were two dozen holes already through the front of the vehicle and yet it crawled on at about ten miles an hour only a few hundred yards from the wall. But this time, Quinn got lucky and the heavy vehicle ground to a halt, smoke pouring from something below it, either the electric drive motors or the power plant.
I shifted, trying to stay balanced on my perch atop the loading claw of the Helta earthmover, and put another round through the body of the truck, hoping I’d catch one of the Helta soldiers inside. We’d already killed the two who’d been crewing the plasma gun they’d mounted on the roof at the rear of the cargo compartment, but they’d pulled the weapon down inside and they were close enough now that….
“Fuck, they’re bugging out!” I yelled to Quinn and the other Rangers who’d climbed up on the earthmover Pops had used to block off the wall. No one else would care because they had their own targets.
The Tevynians had brought out a dozen of the things and we’d taken out the front rank, four of them, but it had brought them to within a hundred yards of the walls. Close enough for the infantry inside to make a run at us. They weren’t tactical geniuses and had precious little discipline, but they understood the concept of cover thanks to the Helta and when they un-assed their vehicle, they headed for the only cover available, a low, sod wall separating the city from the landing field, limiting entry to the paved road.
There had to have been close to twenty of them squeezed into the cargo box of the vehicle and they scattered like cockroaches from the light, making it hard to decide on one target. I took down two and saw three more dropped by the Rangers, but the others threw themselves behind that wall and I cursed, thinking there had to be at least forty of the enemy soldiers hunkered down there now.
Lasers speared from behind the wall, most of them passing yards over our head, but a couple of the steadier shots sent sparks and flares of burning metal off the side of the earthmover. I leaned over the edge of the bucket, raised just high enough for us to clear the wall, and fired down on the trench behind the barrier, sending sprays of dirt flying upward and Tevynians diving for cover.
“Gunfighter One, do you copy?” The signal was distorted and weak, but clear enough to make out the words. “Gunfighter One, this is Jambo, do you copy? Over.”
It was the communications officer whose name I couldn’t ever recall so I wound up calling him Uhuru half the time.
“Good copy, Jambo,” I replied. “Glad to hear your voice. Over.”
“Gunfighter, we have taken out two of the enemy cruisers and we’re playing a waiting game with the third, but we may be able to get you some orbital fire support. Over.”
“The enemy is right on top of us,” I told him, “and with their ECM jamming, I wouldn’t want to try missiles. Are you in contact with
the other shuttles? Any chance we can get some reinforcements in here? Over.”
“Not anytime soon. They are still decisively engaged with the fighters. They’re making headway, but no ETA on reinforcements. Anything else we can do? Over.”
I scanned the plain, seeing the cyclopean walls of the enemy base rising over it and I smiled.
“Yeah, you think you could drop a low-power impulse gun round right on top of that Tevynian base? Over.”
There was silence and I thought maybe I’d lost them, but then I considered that perhaps they were simply boggling at the brilliance of my idea. Or something. When the reply came, it wasn’t Uhuru, it was Olivera.
“That’s awful damn close, Andy,” he told me.
I was distracted by the conversation, so I didn’t notice the crew-served plasma gun being pushed up over the wall until it was already pointed our way.
“Look out!” Quinn yelled, opening fire on the gunner just a split second too late.
The plasma blast was a second sunrise, blinding and dazzling, impossibly close and unbearably hot even through the protection of my armor, and if it had hit within two or three yards of me, I would have been crisped, broiled inside the metal Svalinn stewpot. It didn’t. Instead, it hit the Rangers on the far end of the earthmover and erased them from existence. The catastrophic conversion of the metal in their suit and the moisture in their body into superheated gas was a concussive thundercrack, a wave of pressure that tossed me off the edge of the bucket and sent me tumbling to the ground fifteen feet below.
I twisted in midair, barely getting my feet beneath me before I hit. The suit’s servomotors absorbed most of the shock, but I bit my tongue and tasted blood and my eyes were filled with a fireworks show of stars.
“Yeah, it’s fucking close,” I snapped at Olivera, looking at what was left of the Ranger, “but if you don’t do it, we aren’t going to last until the shuttles can land.” I stumbled backwards, only the suit’s automatic functions keeping me on my feet. “Over.”
“Roger that, Gunfighter. Give us a couple minutes.”
Another plasma blast barely missed Quinn, but he didn’t fall off, one hand gripping the side of the earthmover, the other firing off one burst after another from his rifle.
“I’ll give you a couple minutes,” I murmured, not bothering to transmit it. “I don’t know if the Tevynians will be so accommodating.”
“Sir,” Pops called from the top of the next construction vehicle, further down the wall, “we’re running low on ammo. We ain’t Winchester yet, but the whole team is down to its last drum.”
“Major Clanton,” the Ranger squad leader Sgt. Miller radioed, sounding right on the edge of panic, “we have a KIA, sir! Specialist Nunez is dead, sir!”
He was on the last of the three vehicles, the farthest down the wall, and I suppose Quinn had reported the casualty to him.
“I know, Sergeant,” I told him, keeping any impatience I might have felt out of my voice. To me, the Ranger was just another soldier, but to him, he or she was a friend. “I was right there. Any other casualties? How’s the ammo situation in your squad?”
I jumped up onto the side of the earthmover, climbing back up to my firing position, as precarious as it had been.
“We got three Rangers with laser burns, sir, but nothing serious. But except for me and Specialist Crowder, everyone is on their last ammo drum.”
“Single shot only,” I ordered. “Don’t fire unless you have a clear target. Don’t target the vehicles until they’re within three hundred meters, and aim for the wheels.”
The view I got when I reached the top again was much more depressing than the one I’d left so abruptly. The vehicles were closer, advancing in a line in what wasn’t a blinding tactical revelation for anyone who’d studied armor tactics but seemed downright innovative compared to what I’d seen from the Tevynians so far. They knew we had something that could take out their vehicles, something they hadn’t seen before, but they weren’t scared of it, or of anything else from what I could tell. Dying didn’t bother them, and sending other people to die bothered them even less, but they wanted to win and they’d figured out that they could get closer by spreading out our fire to different targets.
“Sir,” Quinn said to me. I glanced over, saw him still firing his rifle, speaking to me on a private frequency without looking away from his targets, “I don’t think we’re going to be able to hold them here.”
Plasma splashed over the next construction vehicle over and one of the Delta team spun backwards, falling to the ground like a sack of shit, not even trying to get his feet beneath him.
“Yeah, I think you’re right, Quinn,” I admitted. “We’re going to have to grab the Helta shipwrights and pull back to the other side of the enclosure, force the enemy to dismount and come meet us.”
Which wouldn’t change the fact we were low on ammo. But we couldn’t just stand around here and get our asses fried. At the very least, I should send the flight crew and the shipwrights back away from the
“Gunfighter One, do you copy?” It was Uhuru again. “Over.”
“I copy, Jambo. What’s your status? Over.”
“Gunfighter, you need to hunker down. Thirty seconds to impact.”
I didn’t bother to respond to the comms officer, instead switching to the command frequency.
“Everyone, get down!” I yelled, less for volume than to get their attention. “Hit the dirt and hold on!”
I led by example, throwing myself down a second time, braced so I didn’t repeat the painful and annoying cut in my tongue. I wanted to go down on my belly and cover my head, but I had to keep an eye on the others and make sure no one had been so wrapped up in the battle that they didn’t hear my order. And sure enough….
“Miller, get the fuck down!”
Maybe he had been up there trying to make sure he was the last of his squad down, but Jesus, what did he think now meant? This time he listened and obeyed, hopping down off the digging machine. I was so busy watching him, I almost missed the impulse gun strike. I’d just turned back to the front. A glowing white line had sprung to life while I looked away, connecting the heavens and the earth for the space of a second, the judgement of a vengeful God, something straight out of one of my father’s hellfire and brimstone sermons.
A dome of light rose into the sky above the wall, and though I couldn’t see, I knew it had to be from the Tevynian military base. The light lingered for a moment, as if this truly was some otherworldly vision and not constrained by the laws of physics, but I knew that was an illusion and we were just waiting for the speed of sound to catch up with the speed of light.
And catch up it did. The shockwave slammed into the wall, cutting off the road to the city with a sound like a freight train running into the side of a mountain. Wood cracked and splintered and bits of rock blew outward, raining a vicious, spiteful hail down around us. The construction machines lurched and wobbled and tilted at the impact, and my stomach dropped at the thought of them toppling over sideways and burying us all underneath tons of steel, but they gradually settled back down on their globe-shaped wheels, shifting back and forth fitfully, as if they weren’t quite sure it was all over.
“What the fuck was that?” Rodent asked, awe mixed with confusion in his voice. “Did we nuke them?”
“Up!” I yelled, jumping to my feet and grabbing the side of the earthmover, clambering up its side. “Over the top! Now! Before they have a chance to recover!”
I didn’t hang back to lead from the rear, not just because that wasn’t my style, but also because it didn’t matter if no one followed, this had to get done now. The Tevynians would be stunned, disbelieving, not understanding what had hit them because they’d never seen the impulse gun in action before. But whatever else they were, they weren’t cowards, and they wouldn’t stay stunned forever.
It was hard getting over the wall, mostly because there wasn’t much left of it, but what was left was leaning against the construction
machines we’d parked there, propping it up just the way we’d meant to as a defense against the enemy. It was the third fucking time I’d had to jump off the top of the damned earthmover’s bucket and I was getting pretty sick of it. My knees hurt despite the shock-absorbing pistons in the hips and knees of the suit, and my teeth clacked together hard enough I thought I tasted bits of enamel ground off of them.
My only consolation was that the Tevynians inside the cargo trucks were worse off. The shockwave had lifted vehicles up and flipped them end for end, scattering the soldiers out the back and sides, tossing them yards away, leaving most broken and twisted. And above where the base had been, rising out of the horizon like a tombstone, was a black mushroom cloud, not a nuke despite what Rodent had thought, but with the sheer kilotonnage of a tactical nuclear weapon just the same. And we were, I thought not without some melancholy, the first to ever use it on a planet.
Regrets later. First, I had some assholes to kill.
The base was gone, the vehicles were trashed, but the Tevynians who’d taken refuge in the ditch behind the turf wall could still be alive and kicking. They’d been buried under a few inches of dirt and debris, but some of them were digging themselves out even as I touched ground, pulling their laser rifles from beneath clods of soil. I switched the selector of my weapon to full-auto, dialing back the muzzle velocity to the minimum needed to penetrate their armor, and swept across the trench directly in front of me.
Thank God for those helmets. The helmets meant I didn’t have to watch their eyes when the light went out of them, didn’t have to see their faces contort when the electromagnetically-launched slugs chopped through their flesh and bone. I still would have done it. I couldn’t have sworn that any of the individual Tevynians were bad people. They might have been kind to children and small animals, devoted to their families and faithful to the tenets of their religion, sterling examples of the best their people had to offer. But they were stuck in the Iron Age, flying starships and wielding lasers but no more advanced ethically than Attila the Hun, and if we didn’t kill them, they’d sure as hell kill us.
