Chains of Command (37 page)

We have more computing power in the drop ships’ tactical integrated neural network computers than existed on the entire planet fifty years ago, and somehow mission planning goes better when you’re outside in the fresh air and drawing diagrams and maps into the dirt with a pointy stick.

“Two reinforced platoons,” Sergeant Fallon says. “We pad First and Second with the combat-ready squads from Third. We’ll leave the wounded here with a squad to take care of them. If we pull this off, we’ll send for them later. If we don’t, they’ll wait for
Portsmouth
to reach the pickup azimuth and then do maximum-power burst comms to let them know what went down here.”

“That’s five full squads per platoon, plus an extra squad in reserve.”

“We’ll have full boats on the way in,” Lieutenant Dorian says. “Almost sixty troops per ship.”

Halley squats in front of the diagram of our target zone and points to the rock representing the admin building.

“It’s a standard colonial Class IV hard shelter. Steel doors and reinforced concrete vestibules up front. We’ll come in from here”—she scratches flight paths into the dirt—“and blow open the doors with MARS antiarmor loads. I don’t want to waste whatever I have left in the cannon cassettes just to play master key.”

“Wingtip launchers?” I ask, and she nods.

“Wish we had some pylon racks. With the MARS tubes on the wingtips, there’s no space for Tridents. It’s one or the other.”

“First Platoon clears the building. Second Platoon takes up firing positions here on the building corners. Squads here, here, and here.” Lieutenant Wolfe marks the positions for his men.

“Second Platoon will hold the perimeter,” Sergeant Fallon says. “Things get too hot out there, they will fall back to the building entrance and defend from within while First Platoon does their business inside. I don’t intend to drag this out until their reinforcements show up, but you never know. And if you see any Mules, you take those fuckers out. Last thing we need is an armor platoon running interference and picking us off with 35mm fire.”

“Have no fear,” Halley replies. “We see any from the air on ingress, they’re priority targets.”

“No word from the major and the SEAL platoon?” Lieutenant Dorian asks, and I shake my head.

“Not a thing.”

“Fuck the SEALs,” Sergeant Fallon says. “We don’t need ’em.”

We spend the next fifteen minutes drilling the battle plan—simple as it is—until everyone knows the sequence from top to bottom. We get up to spread the word to the troops, and Halley erases our dirt-drawn diagrams with her boot sole.

“It’s Friday,” I say to her when Sergeant Fallon and the other officers are out of earshot. “We could be in the RecFac on Luna right now. Or back home in the living unit.”

“Drinking shitty soy beer and waiting for the world to end,” she says. “Instead, you may get a chance to put a bullet into the former president of the NAC. Be a part of history.”

“Or be a part of the local soil.”

She laughs. “It’s a shit plan, but it’s the least shitty option we have right now. I’m happy to be a part of it.”

She walks over to me and puts a hand on the chest plate of my armor.

“Quit your worries, Andrew. Even if we don’t make it, I’ll be fine with it. Because you’re here with me, and we get to go on our terms.” She pauses for a brief moment. “And if you call me ‘sappy,’ you’ll be going into battle with a fat lip, Lieutenant Grayson.”

She touches her fingers to her mouth and then presses them lightly against my lips.

“Break a leg,” she says. Then she turns around and walks off toward Blackfly Two.

Over by Blackfly One, First Platoon is gathered by the tail ramp, and forty troopers are looking over toward me expectantly. I draw in a long, slow breath of cool forest air and let it out with equal leisure. Then I walk over to my men to let them in on all the ways I will risk their lives again today.

CHAPTER 28

“Fifteen percent fuel,” Lieutenant Dorian says from the cockpit in his usual calm voice. “One way or the other, this will be a one-way trip.”

We are at five hundred feet and five hundred knots, as low and fast as the hilly terrain will allow. The cargo hold of Blackfly One is wall-to-wall with SI troopers in heavy battle armor. We ditched the food and supply pallets and the body bags back at the staging point with the wounded and the guard squad, so there’s a bit more space in here than before, but the extra dozen troopers from Third Platoon have managed to fill it right up again.

“I hate going heavy,” Sergeant Fallon grumbles from her jump seat to my left. “All that shit just slows you down when you’re in a hurry.”

“You’ll be glad for it once we get incoming fire,” I reply. “I love going heavy.”

Our battle armor is modular. We can add or subtract armor protection as required by the mission. We usually go with the medium kit, which is hardshell only. The light kit is the same thing, only with the leg and arm protection removed. The heavy kit is the hardshell with added ballistic trauma plates, quarter-inch-thick laminate panels that can stop anything you can shoot from a handheld weapon, and some of the light crew-served stuff besides. The downside of the heavy kit is the extra thirty pounds it adds to your load, and the increased bulk of the armor.

We raided the well-stocked armory of the Blackfly for armor panel modules and ammunition, and every single trooper in the cargo hold is carrying at least twice the usual ammunition load. I traded my usual M-66C for a PDW, which is sitting in the arms bracket next to my seat. The PDW is not as powerful as the carbine, but it’s easier to maneuver with one hand and in tight quarters. I can also carry an obscene amount of ammunition for it. The magazine pouches on my armor are stuffed with ten of the long and skinny five-hundred-round PDW magazines, and there are five more in the dump pouch on my side. If I die today, it probably won’t be from a lack of shooting back.

“Double-check the ammo,” I tell the squad leaders. “I want everyone to carry at least four HEAT grenades and two thermobarics. Gonna be a lot of closed hatches in that place once the shooting starts.”

“Five minutes to drop,” Lieutenant Dorian announces. “Ten klicks out.”

Sergeant Fallon unbuckles herself from her jump seat and stands up. Then she raises her visor and signals “eyes on me.” Every set of eyeballs in the cargo hold swivels toward her.

“Rules of engagement,” she shouts. “If they hold a weapon, you shoot them. If they fire at you, you shoot them a lot. If they don’t do what you say right when you say it, you shoot them. Do not give them the benefit of the doubt, because they won’t return that favor.”

She pats her carbine grimly.

“These people have sold out their species to sit here and set up Pleasantville for themselves. They have no incentive to surrender. And they don’t have a bit of honor in their bones. Because if they did, they wouldn’t be here. You want to go home? You hit them so hard they have no time to think straight. Show them what happens when rear-echelon garrison troops go up against hard-ass grunts with nothing to lose.”

The troops let out a cheer.

“Make it hurt. Make them pay. Let’s do this and go home. I’m tired of fucking around with these people.”

“I do love your motivational pep talks,” I send to Sergeant Fallon on a private channel when she sits back down. She doesn’t reply directly. Instead, she scratches the side of her helmet with her middle finger.

I shift my attention to the tactical screen and transfer the feed to my helmet visor. We are approaching Arcadia City from the west, away from the patrolling Shrikes that are still combing the mountain range far to the east for us. The wide loop around the city cost us most of our remaining fuel, but with any luck, they’ll never even suspect we’re there until we put skids down right in front of the admin center and blow their doors wide open.

“Two minutes,” Lieutenant Dorian says. “Shrike search radar eighty klicks out from bearing one-one-zero, moving south. No active radar at the settlement.”

On the optical feed, I can see the first colonial housing units through the green-tinted low-light magnification. The sun set an hour ago, and now the only light outside is the ghostly glow of nearby Leonidas c, painting the landscape in luminescent blue. Other than that unusual tint to the night sky, the place looks so much like Earth that it hurts.

“One minute.”

To our right, Halley’s Blackfly Two is gliding across the landscape behind and slightly below us, a hundred meters away. The polychromatic armor renders the ship all but invisible, and the only way I can even be sure she’s in formation with us is the ID tag my computer has put over the spot where her ship seems to fade in and out of existence. I know that she is practically one with her ship right now, fully in her place of competence.

Our ship pops up a few dozen feet to clear the tall perimeter fence of the settlement. Then we settle back down to worryingly low altitude. The domed houses of the settlement fly by underneath and beside us, and it seems we’re clearing the top of the low-slung buildings by only a few feet. I can see people in the streets below, streetlights illuminating intersections, and light vehicles in the roads.

“Ten seconds,” Lieutenant Dorian shouts over the intercom, and the red light above the tail ramp starts blinking. Up ahead, the large three-story admin building looms in the darkness, the antenna farm on its roof blinking its red anticollision lights. Our pilot pulls the drop ship up sharply to scrub speed, then whips the tail around, spinning the ship around its vertical axis until we are facing back the way we came. Then we are hovering above the plaza in front of the admin building. To our left, Halley’s Blackfly Two performs the same maneuver at the end of the block, less than a hundred meters away. Our crew chief hits the button for the tail ramp, which starts opening with a hiss.

“Firing HEAT,” Lieutenant Dorian announces.

The MARS launchers on the wingtips disgorge their payloads with their characteristic pop-whoosh report, and four HEAT warheads streak toward the reinforced entrance doors of the admin building at supersonic speed. The rockets tear into the laminate steel of the doors and blow them apart in a bright explosion that spews shrapnel and concrete dust outward into the plaza in a huge, angry plume. Some of the debris comes back far enough to pelt the cockpit armor of our drop ship, where it deflects with a sound like hail on a steel deck.

The light above the ramp jumps from blinking red to green.

“Follow me,” Sergeant Fallon shouts, and rushes down the ramp. In her wake, First Platoon follows, then the rest of Third Platoon. I unbuckle my safety harness, grab my PDW from its clamp, and work the charging handle to chamber a round. Then I set the selector switch to full-auto fire and follow my troops down the ramp.

“Hold is clear,” I hear the crew chief bellowing behind me when I’ve cleared the bottom of the ramp, and Blackfly One’s engines increase their pitch again as Lieutenant Dorian wastes no time getting his ship off the ground once more.

Up ahead, black smoke billows from the open entrance vestibule of the admin building. From inside, I can hear the base alarm blaring.

Inside the entrance vestibule, things are a mess. The HEAT warheads from the MARS launchers have blown apart the doors and wrecked the hallway beyond. Burning debris is littering the floor fifty meters into the building. As I cross the threshold of the entrance vestibule, gunfire erupts in the hallway ahead.

“Contact left,” Sergeant Humphrey sends from the front of the group. Instantly, everyone’s TacLink screens update with red icons that show the locations of the spotted hostiles. Through Humphrey’s camera feed, I see the outlines of SI troopers in fatigues down the hallway, firing at First Squad with M-66 rifles. First Squad returns fire, and the volume from our guns is considerably higher than that from the defenders. The hallway up ahead reverberates with the reports from a dozen weapons on automatic fire.

“We’re in,” I send to Lieutenant Dorian. “Making our way to the control center.”

“Second Platoon is in position,” Lieutenant Wolfe sends. “Do not take your time in there. We’re going to have Shrikes overhead before you know it.”

“First Squad, left hallway,” Sergeant Fallon shouts. “Second Squad, right hallway. Third and Fourth, follow me upstairs.” Then she turns on her suit’s PA system and barks out an announcement that echoes through the entire building.

“Commonwealth Defense Corps,” she bellows. “Drop your weapons and raise your hands. All armed personnel will be shot on sight. There will not be another warning.”

To my left, there’s movement in one of the rooms. Then a targeting laser streaks across my helmet visor, and I drop and roll to my left just in time to avoid a burst of rifle fire. I aim my PDW at the doorway from my awkward position on the ground and fire a long burst into the room beyond. In front of me, one of First Squad’s troopers, Private Carr, comes back around the corner of the hallway and brings his own weapon to bear. He sends three short bursts into the room, then thinks better of it, and pulls a grenade off his harness. He activates it with his thumb and then chucks it around the corner of the doorway and into the room with an almost casual motion. The grenade explodes with an earsplitting boom, sending debris and dust out into the hallway toward us.

“You okay, LT?” Carr asks, and I give him a thumbs-up. Then I pick myself off the rubble-strewn ground and point my weapon at the doorway again.

“On three,” I tell Carr. “You take right. I take left.”

He gives me a thumbs-up of his own and takes up position to the right of the door.

“One. Two. Three.”

We both enter the room simultaneously, weapons raised and ready. I turn to the left and cover that side of the room, and Carr moves to the right. The room is an office—shelves of reference material, a desk, framed pictures and certificates askew on the walls or shattered on the floor. There’s a weapons rack on the far wall, and I know even before we see the dead bodies that this is a security office.

“Clear,” Private Carr says.

The two colonial constables are lying in pools of blood in the corner of the room where they had taken up firing positions behind an overturned desk. One of them has a rifle next to him, an M-66C carbine. The other is clutching a pistol. We take the guns, clear them, and throw them to the other side of the room. I look around the room before we leave it, at the personal and professional artifacts strewn all over the place by the explosion and the gunfire, and I have a brief flashback to Constable Guest’s office on New Svalbard, which was laid out almost exactly like this one.

First and Second Squads advance down the hallways on the ground floor of the admin building, clearing rooms one at a time. Upstairs, automatic weapons fire and grenade explosions punctuate the progress of Third and Fourth Squads, who are doing the same on the upper floor. They may have a garrison platoon in this building, but they are dispersed and not prepared for the fight we brought right into their sanctuary, and my reinforced platoon pushes their advantage without mercy.

“We are at the ops center,” Gunnery Sergeant Philbrick reports. “No casualties so far.”

“Breach it and use flash-bangs,” I send. “We’ll need the comms gear in there.”

“Copy that. Going in soft.”

The flash-bang grenades are by design much louder than our antipersonnel grenades. When Philbrick and First Squad breach the ops center hatch and toss a pair of them into the room, the detonation is so loud that it feels like the walls of the hallway are bowing out from the sonic energy. None of the troops we have faced so far are in fully sealed armor, and without the benefit of an automatic hearing filter, anyone in that room still alive is going to have permanent hearing loss once they regain consciousness.

“Ground force, Blackfly Two,” Halley sends. The transmission is weak and full of static, even though I know that Blackfly Two is overhead and at the most a few kilometers from us. The walls of the admin building are thick ferroconcrete, which doesn’t like to let radio waves through.

“Blackfly Two, go ahead,” I reply.

“We have active radar from Shrikes coming in from the north and south,” she says. “I can’t engage at range, so we are going to stay in the weeds until you need us. I’d say you have ten minutes before they are on top of us.”

“Copy that, Blackfly Two. Keep low and good luck. Rogue Three, did you copy that?”

“Loud and clear,” Lieutenant Hanscom says from his blocking position outside the building. “We’ve warned off the civvies. There’s plenty of them out here, but they’re staying away from the building. We have Trident teams up on the northeast and southwest corners.” In the background of the transmission, I hear the colony’s alert sirens wailing.

“Keep our backs clear for just a few minutes longer. We’re taking control of the ops center.”

I sprint down the corridor to my left to catch up with Gunny Philbrick and First Squad.

“Fallon, this is Grayson. How is it going up there?”