Judgment day, p.5
Judgment Day, page 5
part #2 of Holy War Series
Lance Corporal Hoyt was one of the new troops, a solid, competent woman who didn’t talk much but did her job without complaint. Ryan figured if she worked out, he’d make her Alpha team leader if and when he could get rid of Franks.
“Roger that, Sergeant,” she said. She was even smart enough not to call him “Sarge.” It was heaven.
“Guide her in, Kusama,” he said, taking control of the small joystick at the front of the sled.
The thing was magnetic, suspending itself above the deck with an automated give and take between varying polarities, but the front edge of the loading dock was broad, allowing multiple sleds to funnel in one at a time to a system of rails that would take them into storage cradles where their magnets would mate with the storage magnets.
And when a mommy magnet and a daddy magnet love each other very much…
The joysticks in the front and back allowed them to adjust the thing left and right, while the second person was in place to hit or release the brakes, which were also magnetic. Simple, hard to screw up. Which was probably another reason Packard was worried, because Marines were experts at screwing up things that were supposedly hard to screw up.
“There you go…right there. Now stop. Stop the fucking thing, I said!”
Packard sounded as if he might have an aneurysm any second. Ryan sighed and double-checked Hoyt had locked the brakes, then threw a physical lever to lock the sled into place. No touch screens out here in the vacuum. Everything had to be pushed or thrown or switched. There was something viscerally satisfying about it.
By the time he’d triple-checked it just so Packard wouldn’t come along behind him and find something he’d missed, the other squads had their sleds in place and locked down. Dornan was hovering above it all, scanning the squads, ready to swoop in if anyone looked as if they were screwing up too badly. He hadn’t said a word, though, just let Packard be the mother hen.
Smart. Maybe not fair to the Gunny, but smart.
“All right, my children,” Dornan said once the sleds were in place and Packard had checked each of them, then double-checked them. “Now you get to see what all this has been about. Alpha Company has been volunteered to be the tip of the spear in the invasion and liberation of the Brigantia colony, to commence in approximately two hundred hours.”
The butterflies in Ryan’s stomach danced a jig. He should have known it was coming, and it was, perhaps, not as bad as it could have been. He’d been expecting the LT to say they’d be hitting Aphrodite, which would have been a massacre.
“And since we’ll be the first in on this op,” Dornan went on, obscenely cheerful, “we get the privilege of being the Guinea pigs for testing the latest and greatest piece of equipment the Commonwealth Fleet Marine Corps has to offer.”
He locked himself into place beside one of the cargo crates and worked the oversized latch free, throwing the lid off. Inside was….
“What the fuck?” Franks murmured.
At first glance, Ryan had thought it was a spacesuit, maybe the armored sort that was used for EVA work, but the lines were too clean for that, the armor streamlined for work in gravity, the joints flexible to allow the thing to be used in the prone. But that armor was thick, and had to be way too heavy to run around in while in combat. And what was that backpack? And what were those metal braces along the sides of the arms and legs?
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Dornan went on with the flourish of a salesman, “may I present to you the Aegis Six. That’s an acronym, by the way, for those keeping score—armored exoskeleton general infantry suit.”
“Powered exoskeletons?” Ryan blurted. “You mean like that shit the Tahni were using on Eden?”
“Very much like that shit,” Dornan acknowledged. “The program has been under development for decades now, but our encounter with the Tahni gave it that last kick in the ass into production. It does have some advantages over the Tahni model. Theirs is less flexible, while the Aegis is fully capable of allowing the Marine wearing it to fire from the prone position. Also, ours is less likely to overheat and has a smaller thermal signature because ours uses rechargeable capacitors rather than an isotope battery pack.”
“Rechargeable means it can run out of juice,” Steve Torrey commented, his tone sounding as if he’d just bitten into a lemon. Torrey was second squad leader, and while he and Ryan shared a rank at E5, Torrey actually had him by a few months in the service. Those extra months must have been bad ones, because he was the most cynical, bitter NCO Ryan had ever met. “And who wants to bet it’ll run out of juice right when we need it the most?”
“If it does,” Lt. Dornan said, seeming unwilling to take the bait, “there’s this.” He leaned over the suit of armor and flipped up a metal cover from the shoulder, revealing a lever. “Emergency ejection switch. You yank that and the exoskeletal frame….” He ran a finger along the metal framework on the outside of the arms and legs, leading to the backpack. “…splits off, taking the backpack and the arm and leg plates with it, leaving you with perfectly serviceable chest-and-back protection and a helmet.”
That was greeted with silent appreciation for a few seconds.
“Not bad,” even Torrey had to acknowledge. “As long as you don’t wind up stuck there standing like a statue, it might work.”
“One thing, though,” Dornan cautioned them. “If you jettison the exoskeleton, you’re not taking your primary weapon with you.”
He clomped from one sled to another, his magnet-anchored gait stiff and comical. The next crate he opened revealed not more armor but stacks of rifles set into protective foam inserts. Dornan pulled one of them out, and Ryan could tell by the careful, measured way the platoon leader moved with it that it carried quite a bit of mass with it. The weapon was over a meter long, and its barrel was shrouded with a thick, cylindrical jacket.
Cooling jacket. Liquid nitrogen?
“This will be your new best friend, Marines. The M790 Gauss rifle. Fires a 10mm tungsten slug out of a two-hundred-round drum at three thousand meters per second, semiautomatic, rate of fire of sixty rounds per minute—so make every shot count, because this is not spray and pray. It will, however, provide effective fire out to a thousand meters and cut through the Tahni Shock Trooper armor like it’s not there.”
“Shock Trooper?” Ryan repeated.
“Yes, well, that’s one of those high command code names that they hope will catch on. It’s what they’re calling the enemy’s powered exoskeletons. I’m sure you all recall how much trouble we had penetrating their armor with our rifles. Those of you who aren’t replacements for our casualties.”
“I like the heavier weapons,” Stamberg, the Third squad leader admitted. “I like the range and the penetration. I’m not crazy about all the reliance on shit that can run out of power in the middle of a fight.”
“The rifle’s power source is inside the drum magazine,” Dornan told her. “You swap batteries when you swap mags. Besides the rifle, each Aegis is going to come equipped with a gimbal-mounted grenade launcher that’ll swing out from your shoulder, though those are going to have to be retrofitted by the armorers en route. Worst-case scenario and you eject from your armor and can’t lug around the 790, you can dismount the grenade launcher. It only weighs eight kilos, so it’ll provide an adequate defensive weapon for a while.” He slid the Gauss rifle back into the cargo crate and closed the lid. “That’s it, that’s the surprise. Don’t say I never got you anything. Any more questions?”
“Yes, sir,” Ryan said, sighing in resignation. “When do we start training with them?”
Ryan couldn’t see Dornan’s grin through his polarized visor, but he could hear it in his voice.
“A man after my own heart, Hendrix. The ship is getting under way in four hours. We’ll be transitioning the jumpgate in the Belt soon after, then it’s going to be a couple day’s burn in Proxima to the next jumpgate. We’ll start training at the beginning of the one-gravity burn. You should all go secure your gear and yourselves. It’s going to be a short two hundred hours, and there won’t be much time to do anything but train, study, eat, and sleep.”
“Eat, sleep, train, and study,” Ryan murmured, “for tomorrow we die.”
It didn’t quite have the same ring to it.
Interlude: Brigantia
Johann tried again to work the bolt cutters between the taut wire and the wooden framework, but his eyes kept filling with tears, blurring his vision. It was the smell. That was what he told himself. Just the smell.
It wasn’t the bodies. He’d seen worse. These were, at least, basically intact. Killed cleanly, one shot to the head each. Not with those electromagnetic guns the Tahni used though. One of those would have blown the head right off of a human, and these wounds were clean. He could still make out the blue eyes in the little boy’s face, though the dried blood masked most of his features. He couldn’t have been older than eight or nine. Johann hoped his parents had died first. Not that it wouldn’t have been hell for a child to see his parents executed, but it would have been so much worse for the man and woman hanging off the makeshift crosses if they’d had to watch their son die before them.
Finally, he wedged the blade of the cutter around the metal wire and squeezed, snipping through it. The little boy descended slowly, lowered with respect and care by the woman who’d grabbed his legs. Her name was Pryanka, and Johann thought he’d heard her talk about her own children, how they’d been killed in the landings. They’d been eating dinner, she’d said, both of them just sitting at the table with her husband while she took the dog outside. One of the colony’s assault shuttles had gone up to meet the Tahni incursion and been shot down. It had struck ground three houses down from Pryanka’s, then rolled and tumbled and taken a whole city block with it in its death throes.
What was she thinking as she held this boy in her arms? Did her hate burn brighter than his for the depth of her loss?
It was a contest he didn’t want to win. He looked away from the bodies, but the rest of the ranch house was no better. The Tahni hadn’t been content to simply punish the family, they’d exercised their wrath against the buildings as well, razing them to the foundations. He couldn’t tell what they’d used. Maybe missiles from one of their fighters, maybe from the missile launchers on one of their armored vehicles. It didn’t really matter. For all he knew, they could have taken target practice on it with their electromagnetic projectile weapons and pulverized the masonry blocks to powder.
“They didn’t have to do this,” Dak said.
Johann glared at him. The tall man was watching the road, the horizon, as if the devastation didn’t interest him, his rifle cradled in his arms. The horizon was blood red with the sunset, as if stained by the death around them.
“They didn’t have to invade the fucking planet,” Johann snapped. Dak spared him a baleful glance.
“You’re not stupid, Brugger. You know what I’m talking about.”
“They were punishing the Kalinowski family for working with us.” It hurt saying their names. If he hadn’t named them, they wouldn’t have seemed so real.
“This is more than punishment. This…” He waved a hand in an encompassing gesture. “…is a message. A warning. To us. To the colonists. So far, they’ve avoided executions. They’ve killed anyone who’s bore arms against them, but they haven’t executed anyone as an example. This is a threat to start. You oppose them, whether by shooting or just giving aid to those who have, and you’re going to die.”
“We killed them,” Johann choked out, looking at the ground because he couldn’t meet Dak’s eyes and couldn’t look at the bodies again. “We shouldn’t have let them help us.”
“This is a war, son…a guerilla war. The dirtiest kind, and it doesn’t get any cleaner because the other side is aliens and we’re on another planet. And the hardest part of any war isn’t the enemy you kill, isn’t the chance of getting killed yourself, it’s watching other people die, the ones you couldn’t save. If you can’t deal with that, you need to let me know right now, and you can head on back to the canyon and start repairing trucks.”
“They gotta be watching us,” Mike McClung said, coming up behind Dak, his eyes darting back and forth as if he could see the Tahni soldiers behind every bush and tree. “Drones, satellites, something.”
“They probably are,” Dak agreed, seeming unconcerned. “But they won’t hit us right now. They want us to see this. They want us to tell everyone else, spread the fear.”
“How much fucking longer can we keep this up, Dak?” Johann asked him. He’d meant it as an angry demand, but he lacked the energy for it and it came out as desolate, despairing. “How long before there’s just no one left?”
“We keep it up until they come.” Dak motioned into the darkening sky.
“And what if they don’t? What if they’ve just given up on us?”
“If you’re looking for an excuse to give up, Johann, you’ve got it.” Dak’s eyes bored into him. “There’ll never be a better chance to quit. Say the word.”
The man was daring him to leave, and fury roiled inside Johann’s gut.
“I’ve fought alongside you this whole time. You think I’m scared?”
“I think,” Dak told him, his tone growing softer, “that you’re losing hope.”
“I never had fucking hope!” Johann exploded. Heads turned, but he didn’t care. He didn’t have anything to prove to any of them. “I just want to kill them for what they did to Franz!”
Dak cocked his head at him, not quite smiling. A smile wouldn’t have been appropriate under the circumstances.
“Then what’s changed?”
Fucking bastard.
Dak Shepherd always knew the right thing to say, and it was infuriating.
“I’ll be in the truck,” Johann muttered, turning away.
“If they don’t come for us,” Dak said, pausing him in his tracks, “then we fight until the Tahni leave or until they kill us all. Because not fighting isn’t an option. And if we all die and history forgets us, then I still couldn’t think of a better way to go.”
Johann said nothing, just kept walking.
Damn him. Damn him for always being right.
Chapter 4
“Come on, Reaper,” Johannsen said, leaning back in her chair, arms crossed. “What’s the deal? When are we gonna get our operations order? I mean, the simulator ain’t my favorite thing in the world, but I wanna get some stick time on this bitch before we launch.”
The woman Joker Squadron called Raven was short and stocky, her hair as dark as a taxman’s soul, and Jessica Leer knew from painful experience that Ariana Johansen could drink any of them under the table and probably get into a knock-down, drag-out fight in the process, but she was all business in the cockpit.
“We’re waiting on the new pilots,” Leer explained, pacing around the small conference room, enjoying the one-G boost gravity while she could. “They got onboard just before the Herculean went under boost and had to get their birds checked before the maintenance crews would sign off on them. They’re on their way.”
“Hey, Raven,” Marty Haley said, leaning in a corner, sipping gingerly at a steaming cup of coffee, “I been meaning to ask you. You had a brother on the Kiruna, didn’t you?”
Leer glanced sharply at the lanky, lean-faced man. The Kiruna had been the first Commonwealth ship to stumble onto the jumpgate in the asteroid belt, and every single man and woman in her crew had died. It was an impolitic question to ask and she wanted to bite his head off for it, but Raven was already nodding casually, as if it meant nothing.
“Robert. He was a lieutenant.” Johansen shook her head. “He was…that is, he was my father’s son from a previous marriage. We weren’t close. I think I met him twice.” She hesitated. “It hit Dad pretty hard though. More so when he didn’t know, but then again when we found out. It was almost like Robert had died a second time.”
“Sorry,” Haley said. “Didn’t mean to bring you down. I was just going over the intelligence packet on the Tahni again and I saw the name, and that he was from Oslo, you know….”
“It’s okay.”
Thanks a lot, Rooster. Way to take the air out of a room.
The slurping of coffee and the creak of chairs as butts shifted in them awkwardly filled the room in the sudden absence of conversation. Leer sighed. This was probably one of those situations where she should display leadership and all that shit, but she couldn’t think of anything inspirational or disarming to say.
“Hey, Rooster,” Brad said, “can I ask you a personal question?” Leer hadn’t honestly been sure if her sensor tech was awake. He was stretched out in a chair in the corner of the compartment, foot propped up on the edge of the counter, dangerously near to the coffee dispenser.
“Sure, Portevent,” Haley said, shrugging.
“You graduated, what? About two hundred, two hundred twentieth in your class at the Academy?”
Haley’s brow furled with his scowl.
“Yeah, so what?”
“Oh, nothing, sir,” Brad said, spreading his hands, smiling. “I just thought we were going over everyone’s most unpleasant memories.”
Laughter burbled through the conference room and Leer hid a grin. Brad might have been a sensor tech, but sometimes she thought his specialty was in stress relief. She almost didn’t hear the knocking over the laughing, but the hatch swinging inward drew her eye, so she was watching when the first of the eight came through. Four fighters down in the battle at Baalbek, eight of her people dead. No wounded. There weren’t too many wounded in space fighter combat. Maybe radiation burns, but if you were close enough to a fusion blast to get them, you were generally dead.
They were a varied bunch, tall and short, dark and fair, beautiful and plain. They were of an age, though, ranging from the youngest just out of flight school to the oldest a year younger than her.
Three hundred days younger. But we were in the same class because he tested out of school early.
