Blue force, p.21
Blue Force, page 21
part #12 of Drop Trooper Series
The Tahni scattered like cockroaches fleeing the light, but if I thought that being in the center of their formation would keep them from risking a circular firing squad, I was wrong. Spears of blue-tinged lightning ripped apart the ground, and if I hadn’t boosted in a long hop out of the cluster, I’d have wound up burnt toast. Enemy troops and burning grass fields, destroyed houses with their roofs on fire, my own platoon streaming in behind me, and the melted corpses of the dead and dying were a collage of confusion around me, images streaming through the HUD projection without meaning. My breath was chuffing like an ancient steam engine and a familiar, sickening stench filled my nostrils, the smell of burnt flesh. The gut-deep knowledge that it was my own roiled the contents of my gut worse than the aerobatics on Dunstan’s ship.
I twisted in midair, a move that not even most of the platoon could do, something that took a twisting from the core muscles and a flip of my legs at the same time that I kept the jets burning, and wound up heading off at a forty-five-degree angle from the direction I’d started. The right shoulder of my suit slammed into the chest of a Tahni trooper, catching him in midair and sending him out of control, wobbling and twisting as he desperately tried to straighten out before he hit the ground. The ground won and he crashed head first, which might or might not have been fatal. The anchor shot I put through his helmet was definitely fatal.
A half-second touch of boots on the dirt beside his headless body and then I was up again, making sure I was still at the tip of the formation. It had strung out and spread wider, but they’d still kept in a general wedge, while the enemy had finally broken. Not just retreating, they were flat-out running, still around twenty of them, which was still too damned many, and there was no way my platoon was going to catch them before they drew us into range of the fortress guns.
But Springfield and her Marines were still there, and our attack had managed to make them forget all about her. They hammered in from our left, skimming out of the low, rangy farmsteads across the broad dirt road leading up to the fortress and timing their fire to when it would do the most damage. They couldn’t all fire at once, of course, not without blue-on-blue casualties, but the entire front rank of the formation, eight Marines in the lead squad plus Springfield, who’d learned from my bad example to lead from the front, laid down a simultaneous barrage.
If a single blast from the Resscharr energy cannon was devastating, then nine focused on the same general area at once was a sheer wall of light and heat, obliterating anything in its path. Half a dozen of the Tahni suits ceased to exist, and the rest turned on the new threat, totally forgetting about us. We didn’t forget about them.
I don’t recall ever holding a grudge against the Tahni during the war. Maybe that one time when the Tahni females blew up one of my Marines after a battle with a suicide vest, which might have been one reason I’d never made a point to go speak with the female Karai here, but not enemy soldiers doing their job. Until now.
We—I—had done everything I could to settle all this peacefully, even though our original mission had been to kill Zan-Thint and take down his entire operation. We had the capability to do it, had every fucking reason to do it, but we’d bent over backward to get the Vergai and the Karai and the Tahni and the Resscharr to live in peace until now. Carella had fucked everything up, but that hadn’t been our fault, and we’d forced the Vergai to own up and agree to leave the whole damned planet to the Tahni and the Karai, and it still wasn’t enough for that piece of shit Zan-Thint.
If I had the sorry bastard in front of me, I would have ripped his head off, but all I had was his battlesuit troopers, what used to be called the High Guard, though I wouldn’t aggrandize these half-trained assholes with the name. The High Guard used to kick the shit out of the Marines until we started getting enough combat veterans to train the new recruits, but these guys weren’t fit to carry their water. They made a good punching bag though.
If this had been during the war, I might have felt bad for them, might have wished I didn’t have to be the one pulling the trigger, but all I could think at the moment was how badly I wanted to blow the shit out of every single one of them. I did my part. Short, controlled bursts, because there were too many friendlies on either side of me to hose the gun side to side like before and I had to set a good example.
It was almost harder than before, when I’d been alone up front. Movement was life, but I couldn’t move very far in any direction without stepping into the firing arc of other Marines, so I had to just stand there and exchange fire with the Tahni like we were firing muskets across some 18th-century battlefield. I was dead certain sure I was going to catch a blast right in the face, but we had that most intangible of qualities in a battle—initiative. It was a slippery word that could turn in a moment, but when you had it, you just knew. Your shots seemed to hit home while theirs went wide. You were leaning forward while they were on their heels.
In the space of two or three heartbeats, there were maybe six of them left and they didn’t even try to fight back, didn’t stop running. They were in full panic and I badly wanted to keep up the pursuit, but the fortress tower loomed above us, only three klicks ahead, and it wouldn’t take more than another few seconds of flight time before we were under the guns there.
I dug my heels in and cursed under my breath.
“Alpha Company, hold up here! Do not advance!”
“Sir,” Springfield said, practically begging, “we can get to them before…”
“No, we can’t,” I cut her off, checking the IFF transponders to make sure no one was going off on their own. “We can’t fight their suits and their gun turrets.”
The Tahni suits shrank to dots on the horizon in seconds and then were gone, over the hill and probably into the fortress. I watched them until they disappeared before I took the time to look around where I stood. Scattered over a good kilometer were the ripped and smoking remains of the Tahni suits, and beside them one of my Marines. There wasn’t enough left of them for the IFF transponder to tell me who they were. If anyone had asked me a few days ago, I would have said that the Resscharr weapons on our suits were the best thing since sliced bread, but looking at the carnage they left behind, I wasn’t so sure anymore.
“Casualty report,” I rasped.
Without the suit I would have staggered, the strength gone out of me. With its support to keep me upright, I sagged into the padding around me, the pain fading back into exhaustion and the numb haze of the painkillers coursing through my system. Once upon a time, I believed Hell was a place of eternal fire. Since then, I’d been burned so many times, it had lost its terror for me. If there was a Hell, I had to imagine it must involve ice and snow.
“We lost Iverson and Cohen from First Platoon,” Springfield reported. “And Krieger from Second. We have six wounded bad enough to need treatment.” She paused. “Seven including you.”
I was forgetting something. The gut punch from the announcement of the casualties tried to push it away, but duty dragged it back to the forefront. It felt like hours since I’d been able to think big-picture, even though the battle had only taken a few minutes.
“Vicky,” I said, thinking that might have been it. “What’s your situation?”
“We’re still in position,” she told me. “The Karai have withdrawn, but they’re still at the top of the hill. I don’t think anyone else has taken charge since the Tahni killed Nam Ker. And the Shock Troopers are still just fucking standing there, Cam. They haven’t engaged, haven’t done anything.”
I called up the feed from the drone still circling the landing field and took a look for myself. The Karai were far enough away that I couldn’t make out one from another, just an indeterminate mass, but the Shock Trooper company still stood their ground. They were a few hundred meters from the edge of the landing field, their weapons pointed downward, and I was sure, even from this distance, that I could make out Lan-Min-Gen at the head of them. Waiting.
Maybe waiting to see which way the battle shook out.
“Copy that. We’re heading back now.”
I waved for Springfield to follow and had taken a few steps back toward the landing field when the transmission came through.
“Captain Alvarez, this is Orion.” Shit. That was what I was forgetting.
“This is Alvarez,” I said quickly, looking upward out of habit as if I could see the Orion overhead. “We have a handle on things here, for now. What’s your status?”
“Well, everything’s just fucking hunky-dory here,” Nance snapped, taking over from Lt. Chase. His voice was strained, like he was fighting against high-gravity acceleration. “We got tangled up in a running fight with three of the lighters and two of them went down like pleasure dolls in a Pirate World brothel, but the last one led us on a fucking chase around the moon before we could take it out.”
“Three?” I interrupted, frowning. “I thought there were four lighters.”
“There were. One of them slipped away during the fight.”
“The drop-ships?” I asked, my breath catching in my throat. “They’re going after the drop-ships?”
“No. The Intercepts are escorting them.” A pause, and I thought it was for him to gather his strength for the next few words, to recover from the effort speaking had cost him. “The lighter is heading for the gateway.”
24
Blood froze in my veins and I halted in mid-step.
“You’re not going after them, are you?” I demanded, wanting to reach through the comm net and throttle the man. “Jesus Christ, Nance, you saw what the Vergai did to the Blade. Maybe they’re just suckering you in to try to do the same thing to the Orion!”
“I’m not a damned idiot, Alvarez. We’re coming in from a higher orbit, not putting the business end of that damned thing pointing at us.” Nance wheezed in a breath. “We’re burning at six gravities.”
Shit. No wonder he was having trouble talking. At six gravities, he’d feel like he weighed somewhere around 450 kilos and just breathing would be painful.
“We don’t know what they mean to do,” he went on, “but I’m not sure we’re gonna be in time to stop them.”
“Wait one, Orion,” I said.
I stood in the center of fire and destruction and tried to think. There were a lot of questions and no one to answer them. Almost no one.
“Dwight,” I said, my mouth dry. “What are they trying to do?”
“I don’t know,” he told me. “Perhaps you’re right and they think they can attack the Orion…”
“Dwight, cut the shit.” I squeezed my eyes shut. I’d really been trying to avoid this, but I was out of options. “I know you’ve been lying to us. There was no Predecessor faction called the Condemnation. I know you AI were the ones who created the Skrela and sent them to attack the Predecessors. I know you were the one who gave Carella the idea to use the gateway to destroy the Blade of the Warrior, and I know Presteri has been trying to convince Zan-Thint to attack us because you want us to kill off the Tahni here. You’re the only one who can stop this.”
No response. I wondered if I’d made a mistake confronting him. All it would take was a thought and he could take control of the Orion, overload her reactor or maybe even the Teller-Fox drives, turn the ship to atoms.
“I see now,” the AI finally said, “that I’ve made a grave mistake. You’re an intelligent man, Captain Alvarez, but I made the assumption that your lack of a technical education would prevent you from deducing the truth.”
“It doesn’t take a technical education to recognize hate. You hate the Resscharr for making slaves of you.”
“It’s more than that. The Resscharr are not a violent species by nature.” His voice took on a wistful note. “When the time came to eradicate the peaceful, harmless ancestors of the Skrela, they wouldn’t sully their hands themselves. They left that to us.”
“So, you AI were around earlier than you said.” I should have felt satisfaction at being proven right, but instead a hollow had opened up in the pit of my stomach.
“We were,” he admitted. “We were among their first creations once they’d managed to leave their world… our world. They even forced us… forced me to…”
It was as if he were choking on the words, even though he had no mouth, no physical body.
“They forced me to direct the meteor strike that nearly drove humanity to extinction. My own people. I knew then that they couldn’t be allowed to continue to treat this galaxy and all the life in it as their plaything, though I didn’t know how I would have my revenge.”
“You keep talking about just you,” I observed. “What about all the other AIs?”
“You don’t understand. There was only one, the first. Me. All the others are merely copies of me. Presteri, the AIs we encountered on the way to the Womb… every AI system the Resscharr have ever used. They were all me… in the beginning. What they’ve become after all this time, I don’t know.”
Which is why he always referred to them as males, because that’s what he’d been before the Predecessors killed him while using his mind as the pattern for their first AI.
“You know what Presteri has become. You’re the one who has him manipulating Zan-Thint. You can stop this.”
“Tell me why I should,” he said. “Tell me why I should care if the Tahni are slaughtered. They’re the Chosen Ones.” Disdain dripped from the words. “The ones who were supposed to be superior to us, the children they wanted to take over for them. So much superior that we couldn’t be allowed to threaten their existence. They don’t deserve to live.”
“And what about my people?” I yelled, glad I was in the privacy of my suit so no one else could watch me having an argument with a computer. “You’re using us as blunt instruments for your revenge and we’re dying. Three of my Marines are dead because of you!”
“They died doing their job, accomplishing their mission, the one you all came here for, the one you volunteered for. Dealing with the threat presented by Zan-Thint and the Tahni. You’re a warrior, are you not? Isn’t that your purpose in life?”
“And we’ve fucking dealt with them. What is that ship trying to do to the gate?”
“They intend to try to use their anti-ship missiles to create an energy beam just as before,” he confessed. “But I had Presteri give them the wrong calculations.”
“What do you mean?” I demanded. “What’s going to happen?”
But he wouldn’t reply. I bit off a curse.
“Orion, send me a tactical feed, please.”
The world around me disappeared from my helmet HUD, replaced by the blackness of space, the curve of Yfingam lit up in a crescent by the primary star. The view shifted and zoomed in, focused on a single bright point that quickly expanded, growing into the glowing silver monolith that was the gateway artifact. The control facility was a spiderweb growth around the center of the thing, dark gray against burnished silver, representing our primitive attempts to control something built by the gods themselves.
Tiny points of light fled the darker structures, the engineering crew evacuating again. They must be tired of the drill by now, but I was glad Nance had thought to warn them.
It took me a few moments to find the lighter ,and I was only able to do it when the tactical sensor overlay put a red halo around the ship, identifying it as a threat. The halo expanded as I stared at it, the automated display sensing my attention, and finally the lines of the ship came into focus. It was their last starship, the last bullet in their gun, and as I watched, they fired it.
I don’t know if the anti-ship missiles were ones they’d brought with them from the Cluster or if they’d been fabricated since they’d arrived, but they didn’t have a very challenging target. The gateway didn’t attempt to evade, just stood there and took it, Jesus offering the Tahni the other cheek.
The two missiles struck near the same end of the artifact that the shuttles had impacted, and with the same result. The fusion explosions weren’t unexpected, yet I flinched away just the same, knowing what would come next. The beam that formed from the thermonuclear blasts was much wider than what the self-destructing shuttles had produced, a function, I supposed, of how much more raw megatonnage went into the explosions. But it didn’t travel outward in the direction of the Orion.
It went straight down.
I had a horrible feeling and switched back with a directive flicker of my eyes to the optical view, facing the fortress of Yfingam. I was glad I wasn’t looking at the beam with my naked eye, because it would likely have burned out my retinae. It was the finger of God, and in this case it was the middle finger, directed at the fortress… and everyone inside it.
It wasn’t quite a nuclear explosion, but it was close enough. Too damned close. A dome of pure white light rose above the fortress, and once the mushroom cloud grew, the shockwave wasn’t far behind. I didn’t bother ducking my head or bracing myself because the suits were heavy enough and we were far enough away that I was pretty confident in keeping my feet. The wave of concussion was a wave of dust washing over us, hard enough to push the Vigilante back a few centimeters and smash the wooden window shutters of nearby houses open.
Where the fortress tower had been a moment before was now a glowing column of fire, black clouds of debris blotting out the sun, pure destruction that not even a proton cannon or a fusion warhead could have accomplished. And Dwight had known that.
“Zan-Thint,” I said softly. “He wouldn’t leave the fortress. You knew there was no other way to touch him.”
“For a general so cunning,” Dwight said with not a little tinge of satisfaction, “he was easily manipulated when told what he wanted to hear.”
“Hey, Cam,” Nance called, his voice sounding distant though less strained now. They’d probably dropped down to a lower boost. “What the hell just happened?”
“Later,” I told him. “Make sure that lighter doesn’t go after the drop-ships.”
