Danger Close #3 Drop Trooper Read online

  “Wow, look at you, sir,” he said, grinning. “Goddamn, I remember the day you walked in the door as a PFC and now I gotta salute you!”

  “Jesus, Scotty.” I let out a long, hissing breath. “I’m glad you’re still here. It’s hard enough taking charge of a bunch of strangers three days before we ship out, without having to break in a new platoon sergeant!”

  “You mean without your platoon sergeant having to break in a new butterbar,” he corrected me, arching an eyebrow.

  “Hey now,” I warned him, less than half serious, “don’t try that all-second-lieutenants-are-dumbasses thing with me. I was an NCO just a few months ago so I’m not some fucking green-horn Academy grad.”

  “And thank God for it, sir,” he assured me.

  It was so weird Scotty calling me sir. For as long as I’d known him, over two years now, he’d been my superior, first my squad leader and then my platoon sergeant. But then, of all the things that had changed for me since I’d joined the Marines, Scotty was the one thing that had not. He was an open-faced farmboy from Hermes, his hair as blond as the flax in his family’s fields, still with the same “aw-shucks” accent as he’d had the day that I’d first met him.

  And yet it hadn’t seemed to be a problem for him as a platoon sergeant. Most gunnery sergeants I knew came across as complete hardasses, whether it was honest or them putting on a show for the troops, but Scotty never changed who he was and still made it work.

  “What do they know about me?” I asked him, nodding toward the direction the squad leaders had gone.

  “If you mean what did I tell them,” Scotty replied, shrugging, “then just that you’re the best I’ve ever seen in a Vigilante and you were the best squad leader I had before you got it into your head that you wanted to be an officer. What they’ve heard from the grapevine, well, I don’t know for sure, but everyone knows about Brigantia and the infiltration mission on Ambergris. Hell, you got the Silver Star. They don’t hand those things out like good-conduct medals, you know?”

  “I suppose it helps if your LT has a bit of awe and mystery connected with him,” I mused. “Of course, that means I can’t slip up and act like an idiot in front of them.”

  Scotty squinted; his expression dubious.

  “Not sure you can go that long without looking like an idiot, sir.”

  We both laughed, because it was either that or yell at him for being overly familiar with his new platoon leader, and I was neither enough of a hardass or a dumbass to yell at my platoon sergeant.

  “Did you get back in time to talk to Vicky?” he wondered, sounding like he’d been reluctant to bring it up first.

  “I did.” I very purposefully did not sigh. “She’s going to make a great officer.”

  “Wish she was coming along with us on this one,” he said. “We haven’t had a combat mission in three months. If I didn’t know better, I’d say the Skipper told them to hold off until you got back!”

  “Well, of course he did, Scotty,” I told him, deadpan. “What would you guys do without me?” More laughter, and suddenly it felt as if I’d never left. “Come on, let’s go to my office while I still have one and you can tell me all about the platoon.”

  “Yes, sir.” He took a step to lead me toward the office, but paused and offered a hand. I shook it. “It’s good to have you back, Cam.”

  9

  “Drop! Drop! Drop!”

  It was a familiar feeling, the world falling out from beneath me, utter darkness giving way to the flashes of light I couldn’t separate into lightning strikes, missile warheads, proton cannons and the inevitable explosions of inbound ships. The city was a distant glow near the horizon, a couple dozen kilometers away, while our target was much closer, squatting in the shadows of night.

  Demeter might have been a beautiful world, full of natural wonder and antique architecture, a paradise of long-extinct animals living in harmony with their new ecology, but I’d never know it. I was falling into a world where the sun had set and everything alight beneath me was glowing with thermal energy and had to be destroyed.

  I wasn’t sure if I should have been happy or disappointed that they didn’t drop our platoon with the rest of the company into Amity City. We’d received intelligence when we transitioned into the system that an enemy High Guard platoon was holed up at one of the tourist resorts outside the city, dug into fixed positions and just waiting for the Marines to come get them. Contrary to earlier reports, they had apparently gathered together the last of the human prisoners and were holding them in the resort facility as human shields to prevent us from simply bombarding the resort from orbit or calling in an air strike.

  The Skipper hadn’t been sure if he bought the new intelligence, but it wasn’t something we could ignore, so he’d sent Third in to check it out. In a way, it was exactly what we needed, a platoon-level live-fire training exercise. The only difference being the live-fire was two-way and we could get killed. But the isolation, the separation from the rest of the company, felt strange and unsettling at a time when I was already unsettled enough about my first combat operation as an officer.

  Deal with it, Alvarez. Watch the big picture.

  The resort was huge, a giant building built from whole logs thirty meters tall, stripped and polished, with the base filled in with bleached white limestone. The roof was sloped and shingled with green-tinted slate tiles, and each room had its own window of hand-blown glass. Captain Covington had told me it was built on the pattern of national park lodges on Earth, particularly Old Faithful, and I had no idea what the hell that meant, but it was pretty and probably way too expensive for me to afford a night’s stay, much less the ticket for a voyage to Demeter, if the Fleet hadn’t given me a ride free of charge.

  First squad had taken point out of the dropship, Sgt. Joanna Carson’s squad, with a promising young corporal named Delp on point. Scotty had said the kid reminded him of Henckel and that was high praise coming from anyone who’d served with Henckel. Carson, Scotty hadn’t been so sure of, which was why I was positioning myself just behind her squad in the drop.

  The white glow of jump-jets was a giant target on the cool, dark night, but there was nothing to be done about it. I didn’t believe the enemy would take potshots at us while we were in the air, not if they wanted to force us to come to them and dig them out, take as many of us with them as they could. That was the Tahni way. They didn’t surrender. It wasn’t in their nature, wasn’t part of their cultural psychology. Instructors at OCS had compared them to the Imperial Japanese Army from World War Two with a good dash of Egypt under the Pharaohs thrown in for good measure. I’d had to take their word for it since most of what I knew about military history I’d learned from the Marines.

  But I knew if they wanted to draw us in and get us too close to use missiles, they’d wait until we were on the ground to attack. I’d talked about that with the Skipper, about how to approach without springing any traps they might have set up.

  “It’s your call, Cam,” he’d told me. “You’re the leader on the ground. But given what I know of the Tahni, I’d think they expect you to form up at a distance and advance carefully in formation.”

  Since the Skipper was almost always right, I had First squad drop right through the fucking roof.

  “Firing!” Carson announced when all eight of them were still fifty meters up.

  Missiles streaked away from the launchers on the shoulders of their Vigilante battlesuits and hammered into that beautiful, deep-green slate roof, ceiling tiles, and wooden cross-beams disappeared in a row of fireballs, one beside another all along the west wing of the giant hotel.

  It had been a risk. If the Tahni had been keeping their hostages on the top floor, I could have been responsible for the deaths of dozens of innocent civilians. I’d been worried about that, too, but the Skipper had been grimly pragmatic.

  “If they’re still in Tahni hands at this point,” he’d said, “it’s a choice between maybe being killed by us or definitely bein
g killed by the enemy…or starving to death. Do what you have to do.”

  Do what you have to do. How was that going to play in my nightmares? The playlist was already long and varied, the faces haunting me a mixture of Marines and civilians, people I’d loathed and those I’d cared about. What’s a few more?

  Delp dropped into the billowing smoke of the burning roof, the weight of his Vigilante smashing the weakened building material beneath him, the fire nothing compared to the punishment the suit was constructed to take. This was where it got really tricky. First was going to drop into a suite of hotel rooms and smash their way down from the top, while Second and Third came in through the front and Fourth hit the rear freight entrance. Someone was going to hit the ambush. I could have better command and control from the outside, with Second and Third, but I needed to know what First was hitting and I needed to see it with my own eyes.

  Carson went in between fire teams, and I dropped through the biggest of the four smoking, shattered holes in the gabled roof just behind the last of them. Once again, I was swallowed up, awash in flames for a moment before I dived into smoke so thick my sensors were nearly useless.

  The power was out. That much was clear by the fires still burning. If there’d still been power to the resort, fire suppression would have switched on automatically. The place must have run on underground cables from the fusion reactor and when it had gone down, so had this place.

  I was in a hotel suite, or what had once been a hotel suite. Now it was a pile of kindling, what hadn’t been destroyed by the missiles had been trampled underfoot by the Vigilante suits that had come through before me. Even the hardwood floor was burning, splintered, revealing a layer of concrete beneath it, and what remained crunched under the soles of my battlesuit, sending me lurching from side to side.

  “Top floor, negative contact!” Carson was saying, her voice strident with the adrenaline of her first real fight as squad leader. Lots of firsts today. My first drop as an officer, the first step in a new phase of the war. “Moving to the next level.”

  I’d barely had time to talk to each of the squad leaders for more than a few minutes during the voyage from Hachiman. The rest of the flight had been packed with maintenance checks, simulator runs, meetings and mandatory sleep. Some Fleet types had laughed at me when I mentioned mandatory sleep, but it was necessary. If command didn’t make it mandatory, way too many officers and NCOs would have been up every single hour of the voyage trying to cram two months’ worth of work into ten days.

  In our brief one-on-one, Joanna Carson had struck me as someone floundering with her newfound responsibilities. Scotty wouldn’t come right out and say she wasn’t ready to be a squad leader and it wouldn’t have mattered if he had, because we just didn’t have enough qualified NCOs to go around. The good ones were being promoted to platoon sergeant or sent to OCS and for the rest, we’d just have to make do.

  Carson wasn’t going to be sent to OCS. She was barely twenty years old and it was obvious she hadn’t put enough time in at team leader before she’d been kicked up in rank and position.

  The doorway of the suite hadn’t been large enough to let a Vigilante battlesuit through it, but it was now, and I picked my way through it, careful not to stumble into any of the holes blown in the floor.

  “Scotty, sitrep,” I snapped, stepping through a haze of smoke and onto the interior balcony of the hotel’s upper floor, open at the center through to the ground floor courtyard.

  The central opening began narrow and widened as it descended, mirroring the hotel’s exterior appearance, and through the tiny gap at the top jutted a cluster of wooden support columns six meters across, the remains of the trunks of massive redwoods. I caught a glimpse of one of the Vigilantes on thermal disappearing into one of the hotel suites on the next floor down, but nothing below them. The lobby below was barren, deserted.

  “Second and Third squads are in position at the front, three hundred meters out. Fourth is circling around to the back now, be in place in two mikes. No sight of the enemy so far, sir. No sign of anything.” A pause. “It’s kind of looking like a dry hole. I wonder if the intel is bad.”

  “Keep your eyes open for demo charges,” I warned him. “The Tahni might have a lookout on the trigger.”

  One of the crazier things about the Tahni religion was that it didn’t allow autonomous weapons of any kind. No robots, no drones, and more important to our immediate concerns, no mines unless they were manually detonated. I think the exact words of the translation they’d given our OCS class from a fragment of their Tahni scriptures, or whatever they called them were: “no thinking being may die except by the hand of another.” The idea was that the Tahni were made in their god’s image, and only they had the right to take life.

  Which was damned convenient, since Commonwealth law also forbade the use of autonomous weapons for our side, a legacy of the sad and bloody days after the Sino-Russian War when tens of thousands of refugees had died at the cybernetic hands of automated sentry guns lining the borders of the irradiated zones. But it made some of our troops complacent. Just because the Tahni were restricted by their weird beliefs didn’t mean they couldn’t be damned clever about how they applied them. And one of those clever ways was laying down demo charges as a trap, but leaving a lookout with his finger on the trigger.

  “Negative contact on this floor,” Carson said. “Heading to the next.”

  She wouldn’t find anything on that floor, either. I don’t know how I knew, but I felt it. These guys were holding up on the ground floor, dug in like ticks to make it harder to dig them out.

  “Carson, bypass and head down to the lobby.” I ran the blueprint I’d seen of the place through my head. “There’s a storage room off to the right of the service desk on the north side. Prep it with missiles and go.”

  “Sir,” she dithered, “we could be leaving enemy troops behind us….”

  “Do it, Sergeant.”

  She relayed the orders and I let my attention drift away from the edge of the balcony, checking the IFF on the troops outside. Fourth squad had made it to the rear entrance of the hotel, skirting the low hills the back end of the place was cut into and circling to the freight entrance. My hunch was any trap would be laid there, at the freight entrance, another reason I wanted First squad on the ground floor, so they could back up Fourth if they needed it.

  The question was, where did I need to be?

  Not up here on the top floor, that was for sure. I waited until First was dropping off the balcony below me, their jump-jets kicking up sprays of dust and curling billows of smoke, then I vaulted kicked through the solid oak railing and jumped. I remembered a day when the stomach-in-my-throat feeling of falling would have immobilized me with terror, but that fear was one of the first things you lost in the Drop Troopers, right after any aversion you might have had to swearing and any taste for good food.

  I didn’t need a long burst of jets, just a couple of kicks and then a lean forward and one last goose to get me down to the fourth floor. I banged the top of my helmet casing on the ceiling as I landed and I was thankful the rest of the platoon couldn’t see it. It wasn’t painful, but it was a rookie mistake, and I made it simply because I was so busy trying to keep track of everyone on the HUD map.

  “We’re ready to go in, boss,” Scotty told me.

  I scuffled to a halt on the heart-of-pine floor, feeling it crunch under the weight of the suit. Wood flooring was as alien to me as it was to the Tahni, something only the richest of the rich could afford on Earth, with decades upon decades of conservation laws in the wake of the Sino-Russian War and the havoc the nuclear fallout had wreaked on the globe. Here, it was a mild extravagance, and yet I still felt as if I were pissing on a DaVinci painting.

  “You’re about to hear some explosions from inside,” I told Scotty. “Hit from the front and back simultaneously the second you do.”

  Which was a risk. If there was a trap, the missiles might or might not distract the Tahni l
ong enough to keep them from springing it.

  “And watch for civilian hostages,” I added, and felt like an idiot saying it. Of course, he knew to look for the civilians, but I was in command and had to make sure I reminded everyone of the obvious because if someone forgot, it would be on me.

  I jumped off the fourth-floor balcony just as First squad launched their missiles and everything slipped into slow motion inside my head. It was what the combat psychology experts called “tachypsychia,” and it was an illusion. Everything was going full speed, but my conscious mind was running a fraction of a second behind reality, instinct and habit controlling my actions and giving me the illusion that I’d thought everything through while I was watching time unfold at half speed.

  The missiles streaked away from the launchers of the lead fire team, arrayed in a wedge formation even in mid-air, converging on the double-doors of the storage room behind the check-in desk. I tensed up, anticipating the blast, but the blast that came was one I had not anticipated. The roof trees blew. I didn’t know it at the time, had to piece it together afterward, but the best I could tell, the Tahni had planted charges at the base of the support columns and when a few kilograms of Hyper-Explosives touched off, it turned tons of redwood into thousands upon thousands of pieces of shrapnel.

  The wood itself couldn’t penetrate our armor, but the concussion slammed into my Vigilante like the hammer of some ancient god and I was suddenly tumbling out of the air, my jets cutting out from my lack of concentration, the floor a black and shrouded mystery concealed by a roiling cloud of smoke.

  I tried to cry out, tried to shout a warning, tried to give an order, but the world rushed up and punched me in the face and everything went numb.

  10

  It felt as if a baseball bat the size of a building had smashed into my whole body at once, and stars floated across my vision. I couldn’t see through the flares of light, couldn’t hear past the roaring in my ears, couldn’t move past a dull blanket of pain. I tasted blood and tried to spit it out but I couldn’t make my body do what I wanted and it went down my throat. I choked and tried to spit again and a wave of fire seemed to surge out of my chest and take the glob of blood with it.