Kinetic Strike (Drop Trooper Book 2)

  Contents

  WHAT’S NEXT IN THE SERIES?

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  WHAT’S NEXT IN THE SERIES?

  Also by Rick Partlow

  FROM THE PUBLISHER

  About Rick Partlow

  KINETIC STRIKE

  ©2020 RICK PARTLOW

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  WHAT’S NEXT IN THE SERIES?

  CONTACT FRONT

  KINETIC STRIKE

  DANGER CLOSE

  DIRECT STRIKE

  1

  I was a Titan, my footsteps hammer-blows against the dirt trail, echoing off the hillside at my right shoulder and down through the twisted, gnarled trees on my left. Billows of dust rose at my passage, remnants of a dry season nearly gone with the advance of Inferno’s orbital precession, and the afternoon glare of 82 Eridani sliced through the clouds in one last hurrah of brutal punishment, a reminder of who was in charge.

  The star’s wrath meant little to me, encased in two tons of BiPhase Carbide, wrapped in the cold embrace of the WF4100 Vigilante battlesuit. Chill air washed across my face and even the heat of a star too close for this world to truly be called hospitable couldn’t penetrate my armor. I could just as well have been floating in the saltwater weightlessness of a full-immersion virtual reality tank, watching someone else’s life play across the display inside the suit’s helmet. Nothing stirred on the overgrown dirt road ahead, not as far as I could see, two full kilometers to the next curve. I could have been alone on this whole imagined world.

  Lt. Ackley’s voice in the headphones of my helmet reminded me I wasn’t.

  “Alvarez,” she admonished, just a hint of dry humor in her tone to let me know she wasn’t seriously angry. “You’re a squad leader, let someone else run point.”

  Spoilsport.

  “Aye, ma’am.” I toggled to a private channel with a flick of my forefinger on the controls inside the suit’s left glove. “Henckel,” I transmitted to the man behind me in the extended file formation, “get your ass up front.”

  “Roger that, Sergeant,” PFC Thomas Henckel said. He was trying to sound cool and unaffected, but he still retained the excitement of the unblooded, the thrill of battle, even a make-believe training battle, undiluted by the reality of the death and loss it represented.

  Jesus, I sound old.

  I wasn’t even twenty-one yet, and sometimes I thought I had no right being an E-5 staff sergeant or a squad leader, but that’s what happens when half the NCOs in the company get themselves killed in one giant cluster-fuck of a battle. I suppose the question wasn’t whether I was prematurely old, but whether I had ever really been young.

  Henckel passed by me with long, bounding strides, his Vigilante armor a mirror image of my own; broad-shouldered and barrel-chested, matte grey and faceless and three meters tall, a hunched-over giant burdened down with an angular, boxy backpack. The backpack wasn’t a hindrance to our armored infantry, though, it was what kept us going. Shielded isotope reactor, jump-jets, ammunition stores, it was all in there, everything that kept the Vigilante from being an obscenely expensive piece of lawn art.

  “We’re coming out into the open in another three klicks,” I warned Henckel. “The objective is another two klicks after the road opens up. I know Fourth Platoon is supposed to be treating this like they don’t know we’re coming or what our target is, but let’s get real.”

  “They’ll be set up and waiting for us.”

  Henckel didn’t seem at all upset about the prospect. And I suppose I wasn’t, either. Fourth was full of themselves after taking the top score in the virtual reality pods two months running. We’d all been looking forward to showing them the differences between reality and a computer game.

  And of course, the fact this would be our last training mission on Inferno made it all that much more significant.

  “They will,” I confirmed Henckel’s assumption. “Or at least, I would be.”

  Something moved just off the road, and I nearly swiveled around with a gunfighter’s instincts, ready to put a plasma charge—or, in this case, a harmless targeting laser—through it, before I saw the analysis from the suit’s tactical computer. Biological, non-humanoid. Inferno had some nasty megafauna, most of it cold-blooded and scaly, nothing I’d want to encounter outside my suit.

  “You think the lizards are scouting for Fourth Platoon, boss?” Henckel teased. I’d barely moved, but he’d noticed it, even on the very edge of his suit’s visual display. I should have been surprised, but I wasn’t. Henckel didn’t miss anything.

  “What I think,” I told him, “is that the Skipper doesn’t want us to act like we know they know we’re coming because he wants to see how well we react to an unavoidable ambush. So, we can’t count on Lt. Ackley letting us deviate from the route or change the travel formation.”

  “Which leaves just trying to shoot faster than the other guy.” Now Henckel did sound disgruntled. It may have been practice war, but it was the only kind he’d had so far, and I knew he didn’t like to lose. His stride changed ever so slightly, pounding his feet into the dirt with just a bit of extra force, the armor responding to his tension.

  “Not quite,” I said. I stared at the faded outline of the map overlay and it sharpened under my gaze, the lines brightening, the labels becoming clearer. The dirt road curved through the hills until it flattened out onto the river valley. Our target was a
mock-up of a deflector dish on the other side of the river, in the lee of a notional fusion reactor that piped the river water in for cooling.

  The easiest place for an ambush, the one where Fourth Platoon probably thought we’d be on the lookout, was just the other side of the river. They could take cover behind the pre-dug bunkers and hit us as we came down. I was confident they wouldn’t set up there, though maybe they’d leave a couple decoys for our long-range sensors. They’d want to hit us just as the road widened, where they’d still have plenty of concealment.

  If I was in charge of Fourth Platoon, I’d split my force to either side of the road and try to catch us in a crossfire while our attention was on the river. The plan wasn’t without risk, but after months of going against Fourth, I had Lt. Costas, their platoon leader, pegged as a gambler. The ground on the right would be higher, with more cover among the rocks, and I figured he’d have three squads up there, the fourth in the low ground to the left in the copse of trees the map showed.

  I highlighted the spot on the map with a piercing glance and a flick of my thumb, then cast it over to Henckel’s suit via our line-of-sight comms.

  “You seeing what I’m seeing?” I asked.

  “You want me to go right or left?” he responded, and I grinned.

  We were moving pretty fast and we only had a couple minutes before we came off this hill. Beg forgiveness or ask permission?

  “Scotty,” I said, targeting Gunner Sergeant Scott Hayes with a private transmission, “do you trust me?”

  Scotty didn’t object to the nickname as long as there was no brass listening in, or at least he hadn’t when he’d been squad leader and nothing seemed to have changed since he took over the platoon. We were still friends, despite the difference in rank.

  “You’re about to do something that’s going to get us yelled at by Top, aren’t you, Cam?” The words sounded ominous, but their tone was playful. Scotty was wary of Master Gunnery Sergeant Campbell, our Top, or company first sergeant, but he knew as well as I did, she never came down hard on troops showing initiative.

  “Probably,” I admitted. “You gonna let me do it anyway?”

  “If it means kicking Fourth’s ass, I am.” He snorted derision. “I lost forty bucks to Gunny Surio on the last round of simulator pod scores.”

  I could see blue sky ahead, through the gap in the hills. We were almost there.

  “Pick up the pace, Henckel,” I told the point man. “Make ‘em think we’re just running in blind and eager, like a private on his first leave after Basic.”

  He put on a burst of speed, the legs of his suit swinging like pendulums, ripping up huge clods of dirt and collapsing craters into the desiccated dirt, and I followed, closing the gap between us. The blue icons on my helmet’s Identification Friend-or-Foe display that represented the rest of the squad accordioned backward before they caught back up with us, then the rest of the platoon did the same.

  “Alvarez,” Lt. Ackley’s mild, unflappable voice said into my ear, “you’d better know what the hell you’re doing.”

  “Your lips to God’s ears, ma’am.”

  She said nothing else, and I felt a warmth spreading in my chest at the realization that she had as much confidence in me as Scotty Hayes.

  “Graciano, Linebarger,” I told my team leaders, “we’re going to break right and hit the jets on my signal. Suspected enemy ambush ahead. Charge right into them, get inside missile range and cut them off from mutual fire support. Got me?”

  “Yes, Sergeant,” came the antiphonal chorus from the two Lance Corporals. They were both older than me, but there was an unmistakable respect in the words, either for the Bronze Star I’d reluctantly accepted after Brigantia or the combat experience it represented.

  The road was softening up, less clay, more mud, and I knew we were getting close to the river. I pushed the map overlay down and concentrated on the tactical display. Two hundred meters. Henckel and I would be vulnerable before then, but Fourth would want to wait until they had at least a couple squads of us out in the open before they hit. I drew a phase line in the dirt with my mind, intending to tell the point man to jump when he hit it.

  Henckel’s backpack jets ignited the second my mouth opened, the screaming whine of the turbines reaching even through the armor of my suit. Air was sucked into the isotope reactor and superheated, then expelled out through the bottom of the backpack jets in a wavering heat-mirage haze and a spray of baked dirt. Henckel launched like a missile straight into the hillside and I followed him before I’d even registered the flashing red of the alarms from the suit’s sensors, warning me of the threat from both sides of the path.

  Details emerged, probably realized in hindsight and filtered through my memories with a false sense of having perceived them in real time when in fact, they were microsecond-old ghosts of perception. I was acting on instinct before my brain knew what it was facing. Fourth Platoon’s Vigilante battlesuits were identical to ours, but the tactical display identified them as Tahni High Guard armor, going so far as to alter the images coming over the helmet cameras to match the alien gear.

  The appearance of the armor might be Tahni, but the tactics were standard Marine Drop-troop training. Costas had deployed his troops in a pair of half-circle arcs, one above the other as the hill sloped upwards, stadium seating for our firing squad. They opened up immediately, but even the targeting suite in the Vigilante’s helmet hadn’t expected the ballistic trajectory First squad described right into the midst of them.

  Targeting lasers weren’t nearly as impressive as plasma guns, but their effect on this battle was just as disruptive. Not one of the opposing force had the time or the distance to deploy their backpack missile launchers, so this was all in beam range, a knife fight in a storage closet as Captain Covington liked to call it. I didn’t give orders and heard none given to me, either because of the auditory exclusion of the adrenaline dump or perhaps because Ackley was smart enough to know my squad had its hands full.

  The simulated grimacing golem of a Tahni High Guard battlesuit was only ten meters away when I slammed into the hillside, barely getting the Vigilante’s legs beneath me. We fired simultaneously, but his was a hurried, panicked shot while mine was premeditated. He missed. I used his wreckage as cover, giving me the few seconds that the training program told my systems they needed to wait for the capacitors to recharge, then ducked around the paralyzed bulk of his armor and began shooting again.

  One of them had been trying to hop off the hillside, probably on his own initiative because I didn’t envision Lt. Costas sending his people out into a possible crossfire with his forces spread on both sides of the trail. I nailed him with the laser designator and felt an immediate surge of annoyance as the helmet’s computer-enhanced training display insisted on showing a big, splashy plasma blast and the battlesuit tumbling backward to the ground, bathed in sunfire. In reality, the Vigilante just touched down safely and automatically before the systems totally froze up, and besides distracting me from the actual fight, all the computer-generated fireworks did was make things seem less realistic and more like the simulator pods.

  The rest of the squad was swarming in around us, filling in the gaps, and I knew it was my job to keep track of them, but things were too tight and my sensors were overwhelmed by static discharge and thermal blooms. It was all I could do to keep my people behind me and the enemy in front of me and hope I didn’t get shot in the back by accident. And either by dumb luck or by virtue of the training we’d been running through incessantly, I didn’t.

  I fired and moved, feet scraping metal over dry stone, bursts of jump-jets keeping me upright and moving forward, and the only one in my squad I could manage to keep track of was Henckel, because he was keeping even with me and only ten meters away. Jump-jets screamed and more and more of the enemy tried to escape the hill they’d picked for their trap, but laser designators disguised as plasma blasts picked them out of the air and I knew that meant the rest of the platoon had arrived
to back us up.

  One of Fourth Platoon’s troopers was distracted enough by the mid-air explosions that he didn’t notice me until I was bounding over the rock outcropping just in front of him, and by the time he did, I’d already shot him straight in the face. Unfortunately, that left me only a few steps away from the very last of the platoon formation, the oversized rifle shape of his plasma gun aimed right at my Vigilante’s chest and my weapon’s capacitor still needing three seconds to recharge before I could fire again.

  A reflexive curse was forming on my lips, but before I could spit it out, Henckel slammed into the side of the Fourth Platoon trooper with the dull, metallic clunk of a sledgehammer pounding home a steel spike. The computer might have tried to dress the Fourth Platoon Vigilante up as a Tahni High Guard suit, but I knew who it was. Lt. Costas always stayed at the hindmost spot whenever his platoon was arrayed in a fixed position. I’d heard him arguing about it once with Lt. Ackley, insisting it was the best place to direct fire. I didn’t like the guy. I got the impression he thought he was a future general, God’s gift to the Marine Corps, so there was some satisfaction from seeing Henckel swing a backhand punch into Costas’ chest, driving him back a step. He’d given me the time I needed for my capacitors to recharge and I took advantage of the opening to put Lt. Costas out of his misery. I knew it was impossible, but I could have sworn I heard the junior officer cursing from inside his armor.

  “Index, index, index.”