Tango down drop trooper.., p.1
Tango Down (Drop Trooper Book 11), page 1
CONTENTS
ALSO IN THE SERIES
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Also by Rick Partlow
ALSO IN THE SERIES
FROM THE PUBLISHER
About Rick Partlow
TANGO DOWN
©2023 RICK PARTLOW
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ALSO IN THE SERIES
CONTACT FRONT
KINETIC STRIKE
DANGER CLOSE
DIRECT FIRE
HOME FRONT
FIRE BASE
SHOCK ACTION
RELEASE POINT
KILL BOX
DROP ZONE
TANGO DOWN
BLUE FORCE
1
“That’s the worst smell in the history of bad smells,” Kyler Dunstan declared, not trying to keep his voice down but muffling the words nonetheless because of a protective hand shielding his nose and mouth. “Holy shit!”
“Stow it, Dunstan,” Vicky warned him, and from the way Dunstan yelped, I figured she’d kicked him under the mess hall table. She nodded toward the Tahni flight crews shuffling into the compartment and heading for the food processors. “They’re going to hear you… and some of them understand English now.”
“Yeah,” I agreed between bites of my sandwich. “It’s taken us months just to get us all to the point where we can eat in the same compartment without anyone starting a knock-down, drag-out fight. Besides, those are their corvette crews, and they’ve been stuck in those little pieces of shit for a couple weeks now without a bath.” I frowned. “Do Tahni take baths?”
“Not enough,” Dunstan said with conviction, and I couldn’t hold back a sharp laugh.
It hadn’t been that long ago that I’d found Dunstan annoying and vapid, back when we’d first met him flying a cutter as a mercenary for the Corporate Security Force. He’d saved our lives when we were working undercover for Fleet Intelligence, infiltrating the CSF at the behest of Top and Colonel Hachette. But he’d pulled our asses out of so many tough situations now, I’d even come to appreciate his sense of humor.
Had it been that long? It surely didn’t feel like it. It could have been yesterday that Vicky and I were back on Hausos, trying our hand at farming, giving up our lives of war and violence for a chance at a new start. That had worked for a year or so, until a gun-running bandit had decided to use our colony as a depot for his cargo… including a Skrela seed pod. That was all it had taken to draw us both back into this nightmare. Wade Cunningham and Ellen Campbell playing on our old semper-fi, oo-rah Marine sensibilities.
They were both dead now. So many people were dead, friends and fellow Marines and innocent civilians, that I had trouble naming them all. Dave Clines, Wade, Ruthie Amendola, Karen Fargo, Captain Solano, and now Top—Command Sgt-Major Ellen Campbell, perhaps the finest Marine I’d ever known. All gone. Dropping off one by one, until I wondered why it hadn’t been me.
“What?” Vicky asked, her dark stare discerning. She’d recognized the funk I was falling into. We’d been married three years and two of them had been spent killing and trying not to get killed, but she knew me better than anyone. Knew me better than I’d let anyone.
“I ever tell you,” I asked her, “about that guy I knew back in Alpha Company who thought he was immortal?”
“Probably,” she guessed, leaning on the table with her chin propped on a fist. “But tell me again anyway.”
I laughed at the combination of dry humor, strained patience and, beneath them, the ever-present compassion she tried so hard to conceal, as if showing it was a sign of weakness.
“Okay. This guy Svenson in First Platoon used to talk all the time about alternate realities and Quantum theory. According to him, there are infinite worlds out there, realities where I got killed in the desert and my dad and brother lived, where I got killed and Tommy Kurita lived in that first combat we saw. And since I’m the one who’s experiencing this particular reality, it only makes sense that I’m the one who survives it. If someone else is experiencing their own reality, they’d be the one who lived and I’d have gotten killed already. That’s what Svenson used to say, except about himself.” I shrugged morosely. “He got killed on Brigantia. Burned in after his shuttle got hit.”
“Well, that only makes sense,” Vicky said, snorting a humorless laugh. “After all, you’re seeing it from your version of reality, so you can’t die.”
I tried to chuckle but couldn’t muster one.
“Y’see, Svenson, he thought the whole idea was comforting, that it meant he couldn’t die, that he’d live through everything. It was his own perfect world.” I sighed, tossing down the last couple centimeters of processed soy and spirulina disguising itself as a chicken sandwich. “But I think it’s more like Hell. If it’s true, we all get to see our friends and relatives and loved ones die around us, picked off by blind chance while we stay behind, maybe hurt, maybe scarred, maybe in pain, alone and, even worse, knowing that any new friends we make, any new love, is going to end with their death. And maybe if you and I were still farmers, or running a fabricator service shop on Eden, with everyone living a safe, staid life and an auto-doc available within minutes if anything bad did happen, it wouldn’t be so bad.”
“But we’re Marines,” Vicky finished for me.
“And we’re out here on our own,” Dunstan added, jumping into the conversation whether I’d intended to include him in it or not. “No one to help. And it feels like every time we turn around, someone else gets skragged.” He sucked down a gulp of his drink, then shook his head. “I’m gonna miss you guys when I’m the last survivor of this whole shitshow.”
“And we’ll miss you too,” Vicky said, toasting him with her juice bulb. “Be sure to teach us how to fly a starship before you die, okay?”
“Oh man, I don’t know.” He shook his head, trying to look grim and serious but unable to pull it off. “Just because you guys have the ‘face jacks doesn’t mean you can handle an Intercept. I mean, you’re like… Marines, you know?”
And that was more than any of us could handle, even me in the current mood I was in. We descended into soft laughter… and caught the side-eye from people at the other tables. Fleet crew, not Marines. Marines would understand. We’d mourned Top in our own way, the way she would have wanted us to. Not everyone mourned like we did though.
Colonel Marcus Hachette shuffled into the mess hall like a drunk fresh off a four-day bender. And he might have been. I didn’t know how much alcohol the man had brought on board with him or whether he’d finagled a food processor to manufacture more for him, but it seemed as if every time I visited his cabin, it smelled of cheap gin. Not that I’d made that many visits. Hachette had struck me as a ramrod-up-his-ass STRAC Jack recruiting poster the first time I’d met him, and all the times we’d butted heads since then, it had been because he was still thinking of this whole mess from the point of view of a Fleet Intelligence colonel while I had regressed into my civilian days.
The Marcus Hachette that walked through the mess hall entrance bore little resemblance to that man. He hadn’t bothered with his typical, sharp-cornered dress uniform, instead pulling on wrinkled, unwashed utility fatigues, their gig line so far out of regs that any self-respecting sergeant-major would have dropped him for fifty pushups out of sheer
Hachette mumbled responses to the few crewmembers who greeted him, barely acknowledging their presence, and God alone knew how the man would have reacted if any of them had dared to offer their condolences for Top. The fact that the two of them had been involved was perhaps the worst-kept secret on a ship full of Fleet Intelligence spies, but the fiction that it had been their own business and no one else had known about it was perhaps the only thing keeping Hachette on this side of sanity.
The colonel stepped ahead of three others in line and grabbed a cup of coffee and a pair of glazed donuts, not offering an apology or so much as a look in the eyes before he shambled to a vacant table and swiveled the seat outward, falling into it heavily.
“Jesus,” Dunstan murmured, and I could see in the eyes of the crew at a dozen other tables people whispering similar sentiments. “Someone’s gotta have a talk with the dude.”
“We already tried,” I reminded him. “Two weeks ago. We were lucky he snapped out of it enough to give Captain Nance the order to set course.”
“We Transition in a few hours,” Vicky said, nudging my shoulder. “You should go ask him what his orders are for security.”
I’m not sure whether my face reflected the annoyance behind it, but I knew my voice did.
“Are you kidding?” I motioned toward the man. “This is the first time he’s come out of his quarters in three days.” I was about to say it was a good thing he had a shower in there, but it was obvious he hadn’t been using it. “You think he’s in any mood to hear me talk about security deployments? We don’t need him for that anyway. We know how to get our Marines ready for a Transition.”
“Of course we do,” she agreed. “But Hachette needs to feel engaged if he’s ever going to pull his head out of his ass. Go make him believe we need him, that he’s letting us down if he doesn’t do something… that he’s letting her down.”
I squeezed my eyes shut, rubbing at the sudden ache in my temples.
“Oh, good. Why don’t I just go slap him in the face while I’m at it?”
“Hey, dude,” Dunstan said, shrugging, “whatever works.”
I sighed, biting down on a curse. Didn’t want to attract any more attention than I had already. Hachette didn’t look up at my approach, staring intently at his coffee as if the mysteries of the universe were floating in shifting patterns on the pale brown liquid. I waited a second for acknowledgment, then figured the hell with it and just sat down across from him.
“Evening, sir,” I said with fake geniality.
“Is it?” he mumbled in a wash of bad breath.
“Yeah.” I let the word out slowly, with more syllables than it deserved, using the time to control my temper and come up with the best way to broach the next subject. “We have like six hours until we make our first Transition in this sector… in this Cauldron of Creation place.” I rolled my eyes. “Who came up with that damn name anyway?”
“Records indicate that, although we learned of the existence of the star cluster from the Khitan, the name is likely Resscharr in origin.”
I looked around instinctively before I could stop myself. It wasn’t some crewmember listening over my shoulder, it was Dwight buzzing in my earpiece, as usual. The Predecessor artificial intelligence usually stayed silent in the background, but any direct question that he considered in his purview would bring an answer, wanted or not. We’d discovered that the quickest way to let him know a conversation was private was to simply ignore him. I wasn’t sure if the answer had been for my ears only or if Hachette had been a recipient as well, but he didn’t seem to take notice, not looking up as he took another drink.
“Anyway,” I went on, “I just wondered if you had any thoughts as the disposition of my Marines and the Intercepts for security when we arrive. Do you want us suited up and in the drop-ships, or should we stay strapped in for possible high-g maneuvering?”
Hachette finally met my gaze, but only to roll his eyes.
“Seriously?” His laugh was harsh and cutting. “Don’t give me that shit, Alvarez. You need advice from me on how to deploy a Drop Trooper company like I need your opinion on how to cultivate HUMINT assets in a hostile zone.” Hachette scowled over at the table with Dunstan and Vicky, and Dunstan offered an awkward wave. “Did Sandoval send you over here to try to drag me out of the sewer?”
“More or less,” I admitted, which was easier since I didn’t want to be there in the first place. I rubbed again at my eyes. “Look, sir, if anyone understands what you’re going through, it’s me.”
“Is that so?” He tilted his head, regarding me from a new angle, eyebrow cocked upward. “Is this where you tell me about your tragic childhood and how it allows you to empathize with everyone who ever had a loved one killed?”
Once upon a time that would have really pissed me off, enough to risk striking a superior officer. But there’d been a lot of water under that bridge and now, I felt more annoyance than fury.
“You wanna know what I think, sir?” I replied, settling back in my chair and returning his stare. “I think you’ve had a pretty cushy life. Your father is a Commonwealth colonial administrator, your mom is a physics professor at Capital City University, you got into the Academy on your first try after being accepted to every school you applied to, got your first choice of branch and assignment, and got promoted to colonel faster than anyone in the last ten years, even during the war.” His mouth opened soundlessly, consternation in his knitted brows. “Yeah, I can read a personnel jacket just as well as you can. You got a chest-load of medals in the war without ever once seeing combat, without once having to watch your friends get killed around you, without once having the conviction down deep in your soul that this was it, that you’re going to die.” Okay, maybe I was angry after all. “I think that when everyone else was getting forced out of the military after the war or getting stuck on sentry duty on Tahn-Skyyiah, you got a plum assignment, chasing down a war criminal with a crack crew.” I spread my hands and smiled thinly at his growing outrage. “And then everything just went to shit. Which is the secret of being in combat, sir. Everything always goes to shit. And you’ve done pretty damn good with it. You made the tough decisions and you’ve had a few lucky breaks, but this time, it hit home and it hit hard. It’s not just you that lost someone, you know?” I motioned over at Vicky. “For the two of us, we lost a mentor, a teacher, a guide. You lost the woman you loved, and that sucks. But crawling into a hole—or a bottle—isn’t going to make it feel any better. I tried it for a solid year.”
I thought for a second that Hachette was going to take a swing at me. He had that look, the tension around his eyes and mouth that spoke of fury boiling just beneath the surface, ready to blow up. A Tahni saved me.
“Colonel Hachette.”
The pronunciation was indescribable, coming from vocal cords never designed to speak any of our languages, from the steam-shovel jaws of a Tahni. And if we knew now that the Tahni had been engineered from hominids taken from Earth hundreds of thousands of years ago, that still didn’t make them human. I couldn’t have told one Tahni from another at the start of this mission, but time had bred familiarity and maybe a little less contempt. The uniform, the designs in the multicolored stripes that denoted rank, plus the size of his brow ridges told me this was Lan-Min-Gen, the commander of the Tahni Shock Trooper platoon assigned to our ship for this voyage. If we hadn’t gotten a good start to our relationship, it had improved after our experience with the Khitan.
