Direct Fire #4 Drop Trooper Page 14

  “Strike Cover,” I called, just a prayer into the night wind, “this is Strike Delta Three-Zero, need air support. Do you read? Over.” I even used proper comms procedure, which we didn’t bother with much suit-to-suit, because the Fleet types were sticklers for it.

  Nothing.

  Yeah, I didn’t think so. I could have tried to launch a commo drone to get a line-of-sight linkup with one of the assault shuttles, but the odds of it surviving more than a couple seconds once it climbed up a hundred meters were almost nil.

  Plasma blasts chased the High Guard troops back to cover, and it looked as if Cano and Freddy wanted to pursue as well, caught up in the momentary victory and thinking they could run the enemy to ground if only I set them loose. But I couldn’t. I knew better.

  “All Delta elements,” I said, the words seeming to come from somewhere outside my body, “pull back to the defensive lines now.”

  “We got them, Cam!” Cano insisted. “They’re on the run!”

  I shuffled to a halt, aware again of my motions and position, my conscious mind finally catching up with my instincts, and stood for just a moment, staring at Billy Cano.

  “They’re on the run now,” I told him. “If we go running headlong after them, they’ll make a stand and we’ll be strung out and bent over. Now get back to the defensive lines until some other stupid bastard volunteers to take charge of this bunch of yahoos.”

  “Right, okay,” Cano said, his tone going meek, as if he understood what he’d been about to do.

  I didn’t fly the kilometer up to the earthwork, as tempting as it was to save time. The Tahni were out of sight from the ground, but there was no use tempting them with an airborne target. Sod crumbled under my steps, and I had the unreasoning fear the whole side of the hill might collapse under the weight of us. It was nonsense, the whole thing was built up around the walls of the fusion plant, the dirt anchored by age until it would have taken earth movers to rip it out, but it was the sort of fear that took hold when I let my mind wander away from the mission, the abject terror that I’d missed something, that something would go wrong and kill us all and it would be my fault.

  I topped the hill and found myself staring into the yawning muzzles of half a dozen coil guns for just a moment before the Boomers shifted their aim. The raised wall of dirt had been crystalized to glass by the heat of the electron beamers, and the brittle surface crunched under my feet, the slivers sharp enough to slice through flesh, and I was grateful mine was shielded by the armor.

  “I’m Lt. Alvarez, Third Platoon, Delta,” I announced to no one in particular, lacking the time and the mental energy to read through all the IFF transponders scattered across nearly a kilometer along the earthen step. “Who’s in command?”

  I was hoping like hell it was the Skipper, because I was just so ready to not be running Delta, but even more I was also just wishing it was someone superior to me in rank, because I was not even going to try to command what amounted, in sheer numbers, to a light battalion. I should have remembered that old saying about being careful what you wish for.

  “I am, Alvarez,” Captain Cronje said, and if he didn’t snarl the words, it might have been because he was too damned relieved at having the siege on his position lifted. “Not surprised to see you scurrying out of the rubble. Cockroaches are born survivors.”

  His IFF shone like a demonic halo as he shuffled across the crystalized dirt, cracking off shards that glittered by the light of the fires, the flashes of artificial lightning in the sky. I wanted to snap something very insubordinate at him, but one of us had to be a responsible adult and it wasn’t going to be this asshole.

  “Did anyone from Delta Headquarters make it?” I asked, instead, maybe from sound tactical thinking, maybe from sentiment, or maybe just the desperate hope someone here was higher in rank than Cronje.

  There was a pause, a hesitation that was harder to detect when the other person was inside a helmet and I was only hearing their voice instead of seeing their face, but I caught it just the same.

  “Captain Covington and First Sergeant Campbell took Lieutenants Burke and Patel with them, along with the Delta Company Boomers.” His rasping sigh shouldn’t have made it past the static filters, but it did. Or maybe I just imagined it. “He left the rest of us here to hold off the Tahni High Guard while they went into the reactor complex to finish the mission. And that’s exactly what I intend to do.”

  14

  “How long ago?” I asked him, glancing aside at the looming curve of the power plant’s central dome as if I could see them, as if I could make out the external signs of their attack over the chaos and the flames and the explosions rising up all over Deltaville.

  “Five minutes. Not nearly long enough to have reached their objective.” His tone was scolding, preemptively so, as if he was trying to justify his decision before announcing it. “He thought we could hold off the enemy long enough for him to get there, but I saw a force of High Guard and Shock-Troopers bypassing our position to the south.”

  “I could take the rest of Delta Company and reinforce him,” I said immediately, taking a step as if to go right now, urgency pulling at me. Five minutes was an eternity in combat, despite Cronje’s dismissal.

  “Negative,” he said, the denial flat and broaching no argument. “We’re going to do just what he said and stay here in a good, defensive position.”

  “Sir,” Vicky said, and I finally noticed she’d moved up onto the steppe beside us, “Captain Covington ordered me to go out and find the rest of the battalion in order to complete the mission. He’d clearly taken command of the battalion in the absence of Colonel Voss and the XO. He never said anything about keeping the Marines here.”

  “And he’s gone, Lieutenant!” Cronje reminded her. I couldn’t see his face, but I could picture it, soft-edged, round, and florid. “He left me in command here, and my orders are for the entire battalion to maintain a defensible position until such time as we can contact the Fleet for air support. Leaving this position without air cover is suicide!”

  “You aren’t seriously going to let Captain Covington die out there with no reinforcement, are you?” I blurted. It was stupid, I knew it even as the words tumbled out. I wasn’t going to accomplish anything by antagonizing him. But some things can’t be kept inside.

  “I know you’re a worthless hood rat from the Underground with a problem taking orders from your superiors, Alvarez,” he replied, anger and disgust dripping from his tone, “but I’m in command and no one is going anywhere! Unless you’d like to try again for the court-martial you deserve.”

  I stared in silence at the optical display on my helmet’s interior screen, my guts seething, the muscles in my shoulders bunched up as if I could reach through the suit and punch the asshole in the face. I did nothing, said nothing for a long second. Somewhere to the east, I thought I saw a lightening on the horizon that might have been the approaching dawn, or could just have been part of the city on fire.

  “Lt. Sandoval,” I said, finally, broadcasting on the battalion net so every single Marine could hear it, “what were Captain Covington’s last orders before he sent you out to find us?”

  “He told me to bring in any battalion elements I could locate,” she said without hesitation, “and bring them to his location so we could complete our assigned mission.”

  “It doesn’t matter what…,” Cronje tried to interrupt, but I cut him off. He probably didn’t think I could do it, that he had the command override on his suit that would let him take control of the battalion comm network, but I’d learned the secrets of the Vigilante from the best, from a Warrant who knew them better than the men and women who’d designed them.

  “Lt. Kodjoe,” I went on, finding Freddy Kodjoe on the IFF overlay a few dozen meters away from our position, “do you concur that these were Captain Covington’s last orders?”

  That was a risk. Freddy hadn’t given me any indication he’d changed his attitude toward me or what had happened. I was ma
king a bet with myself that the Freddy Kodjoe I’d known at OCS wouldn’t lie, no matter what he thought of me now.

  “That’s what the captain said,” he confirmed, proving me right. He added, “It’s all going to be in the mission recordings on our suits,” as if he was trying to apologize to Cronje for agreeing with me.

  “Alvarez…,” Cronje began, but I cut him off again.

  “I’ll just take my platoon,” I volunteered, hating myself for it, for having to bend over for Cronje, for putting my platoon at risk and letting him sit here in relative safety. “You’ll still have plenty of troops to hold off the High Guard.” Plenty of troops to keep your ass safe, I didn’t say but thought as loud as I could.

  He didn’t answer immediately, and I imagined I could see the gears grinding in his brain, considering if this was his best chance to be rid of me once and for all.

  “Go,” he told me. “If you want to commit suicide, I won’t be the one to talk you off the ledge.”

  “You’re not going to just send one platoon, are you, sir?” Freddy asked, something between disbelief and horror in his voice.

  “Shut up, Kodjoe,” Cronje snarled at the man. “Get your platoon arrayed on the defensive perimeter. That’s a fucking order.”

  Vicky and Freddy were still talking, arguing with Cronje, but I didn’t wait around for him to change his mind, switching to the platoon net and shutting everything else out.

  “Third Platoon,” I ordered, “follow me on the hop. We’re staying low and hugging the side of the hill until we’re over the top.”

  Maybe I was leading them to their deaths, and to mine, but one of my first trainers had told me, the mission always came first. The mission, he’d said, the troops, and then you. And if the troops and I had to sacrifice to accomplish the mission, well, that was why we were Marines in the first place.

  “First squad, you’re in the lead,” I went on. “And remember, Delp—no electron beams to the face. That’s an order.”

  “Sir,” Bang-Bang said, something hesitant in his voice. I checked the feed and saw it was private between us.

  “What is it, Gunny?” I stepped to the inner edge of the steppe, ready to launch, ready to get away from Cronje before he could try to stop me.

  “Are you sure this is the smart play?” he asked. He was making it sound canny, like the question of an old Marine NCO trying to check his platoon leader’s foolishness, but I was a former NCO myself and I knew the tone. Bang-Bang Morrel was scared.

  “If there was some point in my life where I might have decided to make the smart play,” I assured him, “it would have to have been before I volunteered for the Marines. Ooh-rah, Bang-Bang.”

  “Ooh-rah, sir.” And if there wasn’t enthusiasm in that voice, at least there was acceptance.

  “Over the hill, Marines!”

  The fusion plant, seen from the top of the tiered hill, reminded me of the images I’d studied in my history classes at Officer’s Candidate School of ancient, walled cities like Constantinople. Instead of spires and towers and vaulted cathedrals, though, this alien fortress was a collection of domes and spheres and a power transmission column, crackling with the raw energy of a star held in a dungeon somewhere within the depths of the Earth. Cooling pipes two meters tall ran from outside the city, bringing water in from inland seas, and if we could have sabotaged them, it might have been the easiest way to disable the plant. But they were centimeters thick, and probably had a short-term liquid-nitrogen backup system, and we just didn’t have that kind of time.

  In the midst of the fairy-story city surrounded by the crenelated retaining walls lay the gap the invaders had used to infiltrate, a cargo entrance at the end of a broad, paved road passing through a natural canyon carved from the surrounding hills. Cargo trucks were lined up on either side of it, some of them with empty beds, others piled with freight. I couldn’t tell what it was, wouldn’t likely have known even if this had been a fusion reactor on a human colony. I knew what the twisted, humanoid metal shapes scattered on the road alongside the trucks were, though. Too small for battlesuits, they were the remains of Tahni Shock-Troopers, probably stationed at the facility as guards. They might have been an effective deterrent if Force Recon had hit it, but the Skipper and his half-company had ploughed right through them and left at least two dozen of the armored infantry dead behind him.

  “Go,” I urged Delp. “Kreis, set your squad up around the entrance and pull security until we’re inside.”

  Waiting on the side of the artificial hill, suit down on one knee, while Kreis deployed his people and Medina probed cautiously into the yawning cavern of an entrance, I felt startlingly alone. Not just because we were one platoon against a whole planet, but because of who wasn’t with us. I wasn’t sure what I had expected. I suppose I’d had some fantasy about the rest of the platoon leaders seeing what a fucking coward Cronje was being and defying him to come with me to complete the mission. I suppose I should have known better.

  “Clear!” Sgt. Medina called from the mouth of the tunnel.

  I was happy to get out from beneath the writhing, war-torn sky.

  The entrance bore the marks of a battle, with more of the Shock-Troopers lying dead just inside. Light panels on the walls and the ceiling still sparked where the impact of Tahni KE gun rounds or our own plasma blasts had blown them out of their frames and left live wires exposed. The malfunctioning panels threw strange, shifting shadows across the unfinished cement walls of the tunnel, five meters tall and ten wide, large enough to allow two cargo haulers abreast.

  I’d felt horribly exposed a minute ago, and now I felt just as horribly confined, and I almost missed the distraction of having to control a company now that I was back to a platoon.

  “We got a casualty up here, sir,” Medina told me.

  “Hold up,” I ordered, slipping through the tight formation we’d been squeezed into by the confines of the tunnel.

  It curved just ahead, and around the curve, the battle had grown fiercer. The enemy had been waiting there. Not Shock-Troopers but High Guard. Their dead were stacked high, one atop another, as if the Skipper’s force had piled them to the side so they could pass. Metal was ripped and burned and sheered away, had melted and reformed into something wavy and surreal, and I couldn’t tell where the metal ended and the burned flesh beneath began.

  The Tahni suits were stacked like rubbish, but the one Marine Vigilante had been left where it lay, respectfully. An electron beam had pierced the helmet, leaving a twisted mass of metal, and mercifully, I couldn’t see what was left inside. The IFF transponder was dark, but I could still read the ID. It was Lt. Cassandra Burke, the Second Platoon leader.

  I barely knew her, less than I knew Cano or Kovacs. She’d seemed pleasantly gung-ho about the Marines and the war, like a fan at a soccer game, and the few times we’d talked, she’d never mentioned anything personal, just reminisced about her days in the Academy, as if it had been the crowning moment of her life. I thought I’d heard her say once that she was from Australia, and I vaguely knew where the continent was. They had kangaroos there, I thought.

  Did she have a boyfriend in Australia? Parents? Brothers and sisters?

  “Get going,” I told Medina. “Hurry, but keep your eyes open.”

  If this had been the first skirmish, it almost assuredly wouldn’t be the last. Cronje had told me he’d seen a sizable force heading up the road around them, and I knew this wouldn’t be the only entrance into the reactor facility, just the easiest one for us to use. The enemy would have come in the other side and sent a scouting force ahead to look for us. Covington had met them here, and he hadn’t killed them all. Some had to have retreated back further into the complex to tell the others, to get them ready to meet the Marine force. And we were several minutes behind, ten or twelve at a minimum.

  Too far.

  The cargo tunnel seemed to go on forever, and really did stretch for over a kilometer, putting us beneath the dome of the reactor, maybe beneath th
e edge of the tokamak. We reached the cargo loading area and found the scene of the next battle, a bigger one. The space was huge, almost a kilometer on a side, and two more cargo trucks were parked side by side in the middle of it. Freight containers were stacked fifteen meters high at the outside walls, and had been much further in, I deduced from the rows of them that had been toppled like the dominoes the old folks used to play in front of the bars in Tijuana. Some still burned, struck in the crossfire, while others were simply scattered across the cavernous chamber as if kicked there by a titan.

  And more bodies. Always more bodies. Ours and theirs, and if there were more of theirs than ours, twice as many littering the cement floor of the storage chamber, well, they could afford to lose more. This was their world, and we’d had to bring everything and everyone with us we were going to have.

  It won’t be enough.

  The thought nagged again at the frayed edges of my thoughts, a dolorous conviction that this was it, the place where my luck ran out, where my solipsistic theory fell apart. This world was not centered on my existence, and I would make that discovery suddenly and violently.

  Just the way most of Second Platoon had. They had, I figured, been left back as a rear guard, to allow the main attacking body to press on to the objective. That was the only reason I could think of why every wrecked and smoldering Vigilante I scanned came back as from Second Platoon. Except Lt. Bradley. He was the company Executive Officer, a First Lieutenant. He’d been a friendly guy with an easy smile and I barely ever saw him. The few times I had, he was complaining how he was buried in clerical work and felt more like a file clerk than a combat Marine. I guess he’d felt like one at the last.

  He’d probably volunteered to lead Second after Burke went down. He’d probably volunteered to stay behind with them, too.