Chains of Command (39 page)

“Incoming infantry,” I shout into the Company channel, even though my information gets transmitted to everyone as soon as it pops up on my screen, and my verbal warning is entirely redundant. “Second Squad, cover the building entrance.”

The situation is slipping out of our hands. We have the building mostly under our control, but the Shrikes are dominating the space outside the building, and the squads in those Mules are going to tie us down once they make it into the building, and there’s not a damned thing I can do about it with what I have at my disposal.

Outside, the second Shrike homes in on Halley’s ship. It barrels across the town at rooftop height, fire-control radar locked on to the Blackfly. Halley drops her ship down to what looks like an impossibly low level. She’s racing down the settlement’s main north–south street with just a few feet of air between the belly armor of the ship and the concrete of the road surface. The burst from the Shrike’s cannons mostly passes over her ship, but two or three grenades glance off her dorsal armor in bright showers of sparks.

“Son of a bitch,” she sends, almost conversationally. Then she pulls her Blackfly up in a near-vertical climb. The drop ship shoots up five, six, seven hundred feet into the night air. At the apex of its climb, Halley hits the rudder and flips it around on the ship’s wingtip, then shoots back toward the ground in the opposite direction. Another burst from the Shrike fails to anticipate her sudden change in direction and rakes a row of buildings below and behind her.

I know how this will end. There are three Shrikes on the plot, homing in on one very exposed drop ship. Halley is a superb pilot, likely the best drop ship jock in the Fleet, but bravery and skill will only tilt the odds so far. She bobs and weaves, dips down into the shelter of the city streets and changes direction almost as quickly as an ATV on the ground, but I know that she can’t fight off three Shrikes at once forever.

Outside, the gunfire picks up. Second Platoon is engaged with the garrison troops from the Mule platoon, and the flat and featureless plaza outside does not make for a drawn-out and tactically flexible firefight. It’s just two groups of rifle-armed grunts shooting it out at under a hundred meters of distance. Another one of the Mules brews up from three simultaneous MARS rocket hits. The fourth Mule backs up at full speed, running over a few of its own troops, spewing grenades from its roof-mounted autocannon. On my screen, a third of Second Platoon’s troopers are off the grid, dead or wounded. We are holding the line, but paying dearly.

In the entrance vestibule, human silhouettes emerge in the smoke and dust. They don’t correspond with any of the friendly icons on my TacLink screen. I aim my PDW around the corner and cut loose with a long burst of automatic fire. One of the silhouettes stumbles and drops to the ground. Then there’s return fire peppering the strikes to my left, and I withdraw around the corner.

“Second Squad,” I shout. “Building entrance, now.”

Outside, the two remaining Shrikes chase down Halley, bracketing her drop ship with bursts from their cannons. She changes direction and altitude, but the Shrikes have the speed advantage, and they have latched on to her with their fire-control radars. They use their cannons indiscriminately now, sending tracers into the settlement below with every burst they miss.

On the other side of the hallway intersection, some of the troopers from Second Squad have answered my call. Corporal Ponton and his fire team take up position and unload their rifles toward the entrance in short bursts. One of the troopers puts a rifle grenade downrange, which arcs through the corridor and detonates just in front of the vestibule. The return fire slacks off. Then the Mule outside contributes its 35mm cannon to the conflict. The armor-piercing grenades scream up the hallway and pulverize the staircase behind us. The trooper who fired the rifle grenade catches one of the cannon rounds between helmet and chest armor, and bits of armor and tissue spray everywhere in a grisly explosion of laminate and viscera.

“Fall back!” I shout. “Get out of that line of fire. Re-form the line at the end of the corridor.”

I scramble backward, away from the smoking corpse of Second Squad’s trooper, and eject the empty magazine from my PDW. I pull a fresh one from the mag pouch on my armor and slap it into the weapon on autopilot.

“We’re about to lose the ground floor,” I send to the rest of the platoon.

Halley’s drop ship is still running from the Shrikes, but she’s out of space and altitude. A burst of cannon fire connects with her tail section and blows off one of the vertical stabilizers. The ship yaws violently, but then rights itself only a few feet above the ground. I don’t want to watch her die, but I can’t take my eyes off the TacLink display, even though there are hostile troops just twenty yards from me around the corridor bend, and I’m not likely to live very much longer myself.

Blackfly Two’s end comes just a few seconds later. Halley rights her stricken ship and pulls it up in a forty-five-degree ascent to gain altitude, and the two Shrikes home in on her like sharks smelling blood in the water. She dodges the first burst from the cannons again, but the second hits her bird square amidships, blows off one of the wings, and explodes the starboard engines.

“Bailing,” she announces.

Then the icon for Blackfly Two winks out of existence, a thousand feet above Arcadia City and two kilometers from where my platoon troops are fighting for their lives, and I feel like I’ve just caught a round from an autocannon to the chest myself. My visual feed from Blackfly Two ends abruptly and with finality.

I want to charge around the corner and empty my PDW, engage the enemy until I too wink out of existence. Instead, I work the charging handle and stumble backward, toward the sanctuary of the ops center, where Philbrick and his squad have set up their fighting position. Then someone else is grabbing me by the arms from behind and pulling me backward. A human shape in battle armor appears around the corner, and I raise my PDW to bring the targeting laser up, but before I can pull the trigger, there’s a burst of weapons fire behind me, and the figure in front of me falls to the ground in a hail of fléchette impacts.

“Fall back,” Sergeant Humphrey shouts behind me. “Fall back to the next section.”

“That Mule is murdering us,” I say.

Outside, Second Platoon is fighting a fierce close-range action against the platoon that disembarked from the Mules a few minutes ago. The plaza is mostly clear—our squads have sought the shelter of the streets and alleys on the far side of the admin plaza to get out of the line of fire of the Mule’s autocannon. I scan the spot on the TacLink map where Halley’s ship got blasted out of the sky, two kilometers away, but there’s nothing. Either her emergency transponder broke, or she didn’t make it out of the ship before it blew up around her. But even if she’s on the ground, she’s too far away, and there’s a platoon of hostile troops between us and her.

“Fire in the hole!” I hear on the Company channel.

Below us, there’s a dull and powerful explosion. It’s coming from one end of the building, from the basement underneath the admin center, and it makes the dust and rubble on the floor jump.

“The fuck was that?” Corporal Giddings exclaims.

“Fallon, this is Grayson,” I send. “What the hell is happening up there? We are locking horns with the garrison company down on the ground floor.”

“Top floors are clear,” she replies. “We got a bunch of them, but some got away. There’s an elevator at the back of the building. We jacked the doors and tossed about five kilos of boom down the shaft just now.”

“Did you get the boss?”

“That’s a negative.”

Outside, one of the Shrikes makes another attack run. It comes thundering up the east–west road and rakes a street corner with its cannon. Another blue icon on the screen goes out, this one labeled 2/1-5 WILLIAMS T. Another one of Second Platoon’s troopers is gone, and three more icons in the same spot flash WOUNDED/MEDICAL. Three seconds and a hundred rounds from the Shrike’s cannon, and an entire fire team is out of action, half a squad gone. Somewhere else nearby, a Trident streaks into the sky and gives chase. The Shrike pilot banks hard right, but the submunition darts can pull much higher acceleration in a turn, and he’s too fast and low for evasive action. All three darts strike home. The Shrike cartwheels into the streets below, exploding and spewing burning fuel and wreckage for two blocks. I should be horrified at the carnage this battle is causing among the civvies down here, but I have no sympathy left for these people.

Let the bastard burn
, I think.
Let it all go to hell
. If I could order a kinetic strike from orbit onto this city right now, I would do it with grim joy.

In front of us, at the main corridor intersection, someone tosses a grenade around the corner. It explodes with a sharp crack and fills the hallway up ahead with shrapnel and dust, but it’s too far away for the payload to reach us. Two, three, then four enemy troops dash into the hallway ahead, right on the tails of the explosion. I bring up my PDW and fire a long burst down the hallway. To my left and right, Giddings and Humphrey fire their own weapons. Giddings shoots a few short bursts from his M-66, then switches to the grenade launcher and lobs a grenade down the hallway without the customary “fire in the hole” warning. It arcs down the corridor and lands right in the middle of the enemy fire team. The explosion obscures my view of the hallway section briefly, and when the dust clears, the enemy fire team is down, splayed out on the ground.

“Hold this corridor,” I tell Giddings and Humphrey. “Hold it until Third and Fourth Squads come down from the top floors. We let them past that intersection, they can split us up and chew us up piecemeal.”

Giddings and Humphrey send their acknowledgments. I remove the empty magazine from my PDW, toss it aside, and reload the weapon with a fresh magazine from my dump pouch. Then I run back to the admin building’s ops center, twenty meters down the corridor.

“President and his entourage are in the basement shelter,” Philbrick reports. His armor is caked with concrete dust. “They closed the blast doors and sealed themselves in. We didn’t get to them in time.”

“Can we crack that door?”

“Not with what we have with us. HEAT grenades won’t cut it. Sorry, Lieutenant.”

“If they’ve closed the blast doors, you’ll need a pocket nuke to get in,” Agent Green says from his spot by the back wall of the ops center, where he is sitting on the ground in a row with the other prisoners. “That shelter is hardened against nuclear strikes. They have supplies and ammo in there to be cozy for two years.” He looks satisfied.

“That won’t make a bit of a difference to you,” I tell him.

“I’ve done my job. The president is safe. You fucked up yours, I think.”

The situation on my TacLink screen strongly supports Agent Green’s assessment. I’ve led the platoon into a bad spot, a windowless concrete coffin with only one way in and out. Without the command staff in our custody, we have no leverage. Outside, the Shrikes are mauling Second Platoon, and we are about to have our forces split and defeated in detail by the garrison force, and I have nothing left to stop it. All we can do at this point is to dig in and sell ourselves as expensively as possible. But there will be no escape for us from this city, or this moon, or the system. When
Portsmouth
and
Berlin
show up at the pickup azimuth in a few days, there won’t be anyone left to evacuate. The drop ships are down, a quarter of my troops are dead or wounded, and Halley is gone.

“Central staircase is a mess,” Sergeant Fallon reports. “We are coming down the east and west stairwells.”

“Copy. Have Third Squad link up with Second, and Fourth with First. We are holding the line in front of the ops center.”

The gunfire in the corridor outside intensifies. On my TacLink screen, there are two red icons for every blue one on the ground floor.

“There are more Mules rolling in,” Lieutenant Wolfe reports from outside. “Two from the north, two from the south. We don’t have enough HEAT rounds left to hold them off.”

This is it
, I think. I am out of ideas, and there are no options left other than to hold our ground and die in place. There’s another platoon of troops rolling in, too much for our dispersed squads to handle. I made a call, and it was a bad one, and I got everyone else to go along with it.

The building lights flicker once, then go dark. A second later, the red emergency lighting comes on. I open the Company-level channel.

“They cut the mains in the admin building.”

“Not just there,” Lieutenant Wolfe replies. “Whole city just went—Jesus.”

Outside, on Lieutenant Wolfe’s video feed coming in on my TacLink screen, there’s a bright sun in the sky beyond the city, even though the planetary sunrise isn’t due for another six hours. The fireball in the eastern sky is so bright that the filters on Lieutenant Wolfe’s optical feed kick in, and there’s only one thing that can make the visor filters go active at that range. Several seconds later, the shock wave from the detonation washes over the city, enough to make the floor shake under my boots even at that range. The noise from the blast is deep and infernally loud, like a world-ending beast clearing its throat.