Danger Close #3 Drop Trooper Read online

  “Not yet,” he said. “It’s the same one you just came in on. She leaves in your shuttle in….” He checked the wrist display connected to his ‘link. “…four hours.” He smiled thinly. “Don’t worry, son, I’ll get you back in time to say goodbye.”

  “Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”

  The town had grown since I’d been gone, which was ironic since now they were ripping it apart again. Not all of it, of course. The admin buildings and the Fleet base would stay, because the Fleet always needed waystations for their Attack Command ships and carriers where they could pick up supplies and fresh crew. But the Marines were pulling out and I didn’t know if we’d be back. Fleet Corps of Engineers troops were everywhere, stripping down all the gear we didn’t want to leave behind and loading it onto the backs of cargo trucks for the short drive out to the spaceport, where the trucks would wait in lines, sometimes for hours, sometimes for days, for a cargo shuttle to come free.

  The farther out into the Marine section of the base we got, the more stripped and naked it felt, until all that was left were a few bare, buildfoam domes, barracks buildings and storage huts and a couple of armories where we kept the Vigilantes. Those were being hauled out, too, some walked out by the troopers assigned to them, some on maintenance racks, carried by load-lifters, one exoskeleton in the arms of another. Which made no sense, but this was the military and things didn’t usually need to make sense.

  The driver, a corporal I didn’t recognize, dropped us off in front of a line of barracks and stuck around long enough for me to grab my bags from the cargo compartment before he tore away, gone on some other errand.

  “Alvarez,” Covington said, raising a finger. “Leaders meeting in two hours in the Company area. Don’t be late.”

  “Roger that, sir.”

  I slung the duffle over my shoulder and ran through the centimeters-thick mud, ignoring the insistent suction trying to drag the boots off my feet, heading for her barracks room. I hoped she hadn’t changed with someone else since I’d left, or I was going to bust in on the wrong Marine. I should have been introducing myself to my platoon, should have been checking in with Scotty, my platoon sergeant, should have been packing the shit I’d left behind in my barracks room, but I didn’t even consider it.

  I had to see her before she left.

  There were other members of her platoon wandering through the halls of the barracks, some carrying duffle bags, taking their belongings out to one of the cargo trucks, others cleaning and scouring and doing all the shit that was irrelevant because we were vacating the premises anyway. God forbid we leave a bare buildfoam floor dirty for the next poor assholes who moved in here after us, because the first thing their NCOs would make them do is to clean those same fucking floors over again.

  Her door was closed, and I wondered if I should have called and told her I was coming from the spaceport, but I’d kept thinking, what if she didn’t want to see me before she left? What if she wanted to break things off clean and keep her head clear? Why was I so damned scared?

  I knocked on the door.

  “Just a minute.” It was her voice. I hadn’t heard it in person in months and I nearly collapsed at the realization she was on the other side of a few centimeters of plastic. I knocked again. “Damn it, I said just a minute, I’m packing here!”

  Vicky Sandoval yanked the door open and I nearly fell inside. Her eyes went wide and she froze in place, a curse half-formed on her lips.

  “Oh, my God!” she whispered, then grabbed me by the lapels of my jacket and pulled me into a kiss.

  Her lips were chapped by the wind, and her mouth tasted of coffee and this morning’s breakfast and I just didn’t give a shit. I pulled back against her and squeezed her against me, drinking her in like the first taste of water for a man who’d been dying of thirst. One of us closed the door. I wasn’t sure who and didn’t care, but I heard it close.

  I didn’t remember taking my clothes off and wasn’t sure if she had undressed me or it had been the other way around, and the next hour was a blur of warmth that vanquished the chill spring air of Hachiman. When I could think again, we were tangled up together on the bare mattress of the bed and she was crying. I think I was, too.

  “I didn’t think you’d make it back in time,” Vicky said, sobbing, burying her face in my shoulder like I’d just arrived and we hadn’t spent an hour in bed together. “I thought I was going to leave and I’d never see you again. That if one of us didn’t die, we’d lose touch and that would be it and I’d spend the rest of my life wondering what had happened to you.”

  “I would never let that happen,” I said, sniffing. My face was wet, and the tears could have come from either of us. “I made a promise, didn’t I? Have you ever known me to break one?”

  I ran my fingers down her cheek, brushing away moisture, moving a stray hair out of her face.

  “I have to get ready,” she moaned, sounding miserable. “I have to leave for the port in an hour!”

  “I know,” I told her. “The Skipper told me. He met me at the admin building and drove me here.”

  “He knows about us?” she asked, sitting bolt upright in bed, the blood draining from her face. “Oh, shit!”

  “That ship has sailed, honey,” I assured her, laughing softly. “In another hour, you’re going to be gone, and if I see you afterward, we won’t be breaking regulations anymore, will we?”

  “He knows and he didn’t care?” There was wonder and disbelief in her voice.

  “He doesn’t care now that it doesn’t make any difference,” I corrected her. “And maybe he knew before but only cared that we kept it quiet. Who knows, between Top and the Skipper? I doubt there’s much you could get past either of them. But right now, I’d throw myself in front of a missile for him, because he got me back to you in time.”

  I grabbed her hands in mine.

  “We’ve said all the words we need to say,” I declared. “I just wanted to get here before you left so you could go to OCS without worrying about us. We’re good. I will be here for you when you get back, no matter how long it takes. That’s a promise. And I always keep my promises.”

  Vicky pulled me into a hug and I reveled in the warm softness of her, could have held here there forever.

  “I have to go get a shower,” she said, the words plaintive. “Do you want to go with me to the spaceport?”

  “I wish I could. I have a company leaders meeting.” I shrugged. “And maybe it’s better to say goodbye like this, anyway.” I grinned, tracing a line down her bare back with my fingertips. “Anything else would seem…anticlimactic.”

  “Shit, someone has a pretty high opinion of themselves.” She yanked at my chest hair and I winced. “Is that something that comes with the gold bar?”

  “It’s standard-issue,” I agreed. “When you get back, you’ll hardly be able to fit your head into your suit’s helmet.”

  I was laughing, but the smile didn’t go any deeper than my eyes. She was leaving. I’d just got back and she was leaving. I’d known it would be this way, if I was lucky enough to see her at all, tried to prepare myself for it, but it hadn’t helped at all.

  “Go,” she told me, pushing against my chest as if she could read what I was feeling. And maybe she could. “Get your clothes on and get to your meeting. If the Skipper knows about us, then this is just as much a test as any you took at OCS. You can’t be late, not even for me.”

  You don’t spend three years in the Marines without being able to get dressed in a hurry, and it was less than a minute before we were both standing at the door, me with my duffle slung across my shoulder. She kissed me one last time, and then shoved me out the door.

  I think I said “I love you” before it closed, but I might have just thought it.

  8

  “The target,” Captain Covington said, “is Demeter.”

  The hologram shifted behind him, the view rushing past a dozen other labelled star systems in an image that was an amalgamation of stock foota
ge from Scout Service probes and computer simulations and zooming in on a star much like the sun, though just a touch brighter. It was labelled “Delta Pavonis” and it was a bit under twenty light-years from Earth, according to the readout. I don’t know if I’d ever heard the name of the star before, but everyone knew its only habitable planet. The view shifted again, closer now, as the star grew so large it dominated the screen and then faded off to the side to make room for the planets orbiting it. There were six of them, a lifeless, charred rock close in, and its frozen twin at the outer edge, a pair of ice giants and a gas giant a bit smaller than Saturn.

  And then there was Demeter.

  “The colony was settled about forty years ago,” the Skipper went on, pacing across the front of the double line of folding chairs, “after a century of terraforming.”

  He paused to jab a finger toward one of the other platoon leaders, one of the many new faces in the company since I’d left. I’d introduced myself before the briefing had begun, but I couldn’t for the life of me remember…

  “Yes, Lt. Cano?”

  Cano was a short, round-faced man a little younger than me, fresh out of the Academy if I’d had to guess. He wasn’t exactly pudgy but he had the look of someone who could turn that way quickly when he went out into the civilian world.

  “Sorry, sir,” he apologized. “Terraformed it?”

  “I was being approximate,” Covington admitted, the barest hint of a tug at the corner of his eye showing he was irritated at being interrupted for something irrelevant to the mission. “It was already habitable, but the ecosphere was basic, not much more than algae and bacteria. The Commonwealth decided to use the world as a test case for introducing a full, Earth-based ecosystem from the ground up.”

  “That’s where they introduced all those extinct animals,” Kovacs, the First Platoon leader chimed in. “They cloned them from tissue samples, right? Like saber-tooth cats and mastodons and shit.”

  “Yes, Lt. Kovacs,” Covington replied, his words so dry a man could have died of dehydration just hearing them. “They cloned mastodons and shit. Researchers from several Earthside universities maintained watch stations sprinkled around what they called Revenant Forest, a huge track of woodland a few dozen kilometers outside the capital city of Amity. They were underground, connected by tunnels, designed to monitor all the Earth species, but especially the revenants. Apparently, the local militia and some Intelligence spooks have been using them as hidey-holes so they can pop out and sabotage the Tahni.”

  “We’re gonna count on a civilian militia to back us up, Skipper?” Cano asked, sounding dubious about the proposition. I wasn’t Cano’s biggest fan so far, but I had to admit I shared the concern.

  “They’re not backing us up, Lieutenant, they’re doing the heavy lifting. Here’s the situation, at least so far as Fleet Intelligence is relaying it to us, for what that’s worth. Things are bad on Demeter for everyone, but they’re almost worse for the Tahni than they are for our people. The Imperium has withdrawn most of their ships from the occupied systems to defend their core colonies from the sort of strikes the Attack Command and us have been making, which means the Tahni troops they left behind aren’t getting resupplied and have no hope in sight of relief. They’ve basically been abandoned and they know it.”

  The thin smile that spread across his face was not at all sympathetic to the plight of the Tahni, and I mirrored it.

  “The Tahni aren’t human, and I think we’ve fought them enough to know how motivated they can be, but something like this has to fuck with even the most motivated troops out there. They’re coming apart at the seams and the militias are taking advantage of it. It’s all coming to a head in less than two weeks, and we’re gonna have a ringside seat. Some Intelligence spooks, a special operations unit I understand, though they decline to be more specific than that, is going to lead the militia in a strike against the fusion reactor to cut off power to the planetary defense laser outside Amity. With most of their fleet withdrawn from the system, that laser and a few orbital platforms are the only space defenses they have. They don’t even have deflector dishes built, because they were counting on us not being willing to bombard a city while they were using the colonists as human shields.”

  A distant rumble of jets shook the walls of the buildfoam dome we’d used for two years as the company conference room and offices, starting low and chest-deep and climbing in pitch as the shuttle ascended. And took my heart with it. I wanted to look up, but I kept my eyes on Covington, and I thought I saw recognition in his face of what was happening.

  “Their regular infantry’s going to be tied up with the militia,” Covington went on. “From the intelligence passed along to us, their heavy infantry Shock Troopers have had their numbers badly attenuated by sabotage and ambushes and shouldn’t be a factor. What they do have is a full battalion of High Guard battlesuits, and if we can’t suppress and destroy them, the militia is going to get slaughtered. So, we’re going to take a major risk and insert our dropships right at the No Later Than time and not wait to confirm they took down the reactor. And if we’re wrong, they’ll slice us right out of the air.” He shrugged. “If we’re right and they take care of business, it’ll be a straightforward armor-on-armor fight. Don’t expect any air support, though, because we still have civilians in the area and we’re trying to minimize collateral damage.” His eyes flickered back and forth between his platoon leaders, all five of us, First through Fourth and the Special Weapons platoon. “Any questions?”

  “Do we have intelligence about where they’re keeping the civilians remaining in the city?” I asked him. It was a stretch, but apparently, we had assets on the ground, so I figured it was worth a shot.

  I’d seen Covington angry, and it was a fearful sight. But seeing his face turn despairing and melancholic was somehow so much more terrifying.

  “There are none, other than the militia. They freed as many as they could and took them into the woods, into the tunnels and other hiding places. The rest….” He closed his eyes for just a moment. “The rest starved to death. Thousands of them, minimum. Others were executed in retaliation for the resistance strikes.”

  It shouldn’t have hit me as hard as it did. I knew what the Tahni could do to a civilian population. I’d seen it first-hand. But letting them starve to death…I knew what real hunger was, and there just didn’t seem to be any worse way to go.

  Covington touched a control on his wrist display and the hologram disappeared.

  “You’ll get a detailed op order on board the transport, along with scenarios for simulator training. Right now, I need you to go tell your people what we’re heading into and make sure everyone has their shit wrapped tight. We’ve been sitting on our asses too long and I’m ready to go visit some vengeance on the Imperium. Who’s with me?”

  From another commander, the words could have been cheesy, melodramatic, easy to dismiss as motivational bullshit. But from the Skipper, they were enough to send a surge of enthusiasm and rage up from my gut, and there could be only one response, the one we call gave in an abrupt and ear-pounding shout.

  “Ooh-rah!”

  “Holy shit,” Gunnery Sgt. Scott Hayes murmured, eyes widening as I turned the corner into the platoon area, the central oval between the barracks. Then he shook himself, seeming to remember where he was. “Officer on deck!” he barked, coming to attention.

  Most of the platoon was gathered, waiting for me. I’d sent the message on the way over from the company meeting and I’d regretted on a personal level that I wouldn’t be able to surprise Scotty the way I had Vicky, but the sight of me had still rocked him back on his heels.

  He saluted, a grin breaking through his stern platoon-sergeant-serious expression despite his best efforts.

  “Welcome back, sir,” he said, after I’d returned the gesture. “Are you here to take charge of your Marines?”

  “I sure as hell am, Sergeant. At ease.”

  Forty-one sets of eyes stared at me, and
I realized with a twisting turn of my stomach that most of them were strangers. I shouldn’t have been surprised. Life didn’t sit still just because I was away for training, and the wartime military promoted fast. Men and women had been shipped to NCO school, given their own squads in other companies, other platoons, wherever the need had arisen. Some of the fire team leaders were familiar to me, but I’d known them as privates.

  It’s better this way. It wouldn’t be easy stepping back into the old platoon and expecting them to treat me like an officer when I used to be just another one of the guys.

  “I’m Lt. Alvarez,” I said, struggling to sound confident, the way I remembered Lt. Ackley sounding. “I’m your new platoon leader and I got here just in time. We leave on an operation in sixty-eight hours, and we’re barely going to have ten days transit time to train in the simulators shipboard.”

  I was talking on autopilot, matching faces and name-tapes to the files I’d been sent by Covington en route. Joanna Carson, Francis Houghton, Ernst Kreis and Christian Majid. Those were my squad leaders and I knew their faces, how they’d scored in NCO school, their service record, and not a damn thing else about them.

  “We’re heading into combat,” I warned them, “to take back one of the colonies the enemy has held for too long. You’ll get a full op order on board the transport, but I want the squad leaders in my barracks room for a short briefing at 1800, right before we head to dinner.” I held up a finger. “When you come to that meeting, I want a full report of our readiness and what still needs to get done before we ship out. We clear?”

  “Yes, sir!” Their answers were enthusiastic if not well-choreographed, and I could live with that.

  “Dismissed,” I said, nodding to them. “Go get to work.”

  They hurried off, trying to look busy. I knew because I’d been one of them not so long ago. Scotty waited until they were gone before he turned back to me, shaking his head in disbelief.