Release point drop troop.., p.7
Release Point (Drop Trooper Book 8), page 7
And I was just as quickly under fire.
“Contact, left!”
“Contact, right!”
“Contact, front!”
The reports came in from every side, and if there was no contact to the rear, it was only because the external wall was behind us. Data crashed over me in waves and instincts honed in years of combat picked out the bits of it that were vital to me staying alive for the next few seconds. Only one platoon was on the ground, but the rest were coming, and the last to make it down would be the Boomers. They were carrying more weight with the heavy coil guns and they’d been outfitted with expendable, detachable retro-rockets to get them down safely. We hadn’t used those in the war, simply landing them with the drop-ships, but despite what Fargo had implied, there had been some advances since the conquest of the Tahni homeworld.
That left the rest of us on the ground, surrounded by enemy troops. Not High Guard suits, though. If there had been battlesuits waiting for us at the bottom, we would have lost a squad before we could have even tried to return fire. These were Shock-Troopers, rushing out of corridors leading deeper into the facility, their stride long and awkward, like toddlers wobbling their first steps. Their heavy KE guns were hosing us down with streams of tantalum darts, the hypersonic rounds digging craters out of my armor, dull, metallic thuds like someone was knocking on my chest plate, trying to get in.
Individually, they were no match for us, but they were a swarm of bees and it was impossible to target them all…and while those darts couldn’t penetrate our armor, they could ablate it, and enough of them would eventually wear it away and they’d nibble us to death like the insects they were. So, I applied a little insecticide.
The missiles weren’t meant for anything this close, nor anything this small, but they were also self-programming and did as they were told. I launched two of them the second I hit the ground, and I wasn’t the only one. Vicky had the same instincts as me, honed as an enlisted Marine under the same leadership, and I knew she was doing the same thing. I wasn’t sure who else had fired, but at least four pairs of smoke trails arched upwards, almost to the gaps in the roof, before they reached their perigee and streaked down into the rear of the oncoming horde of Shock-Troopers.
The air-burst explosions were carefully calculated by the computers in the warheads to spread the spears of incandescent plasma wide among the designated targets, and even the armor the Tahni powered exoskeletons could haul around wasn’t thick enough to resist the pencil-thin lances of ionized gas. Wedges were cut through the enemy ranks like wildfire spreading through fields of prairie grass, and as if the warhead blasts were a cue, plasma bursts ignited from two dozen emitters, a platoon and a half of volley fire, and the charge was broken.
There were three corridors running out of the landing platform like sunbursts, and the charred and battered remnants of what had to be a full company of Shock-Troopers was straggling back along them, chased by more plasma blasts. I’d fired my own gun twice and didn’t remember the second time, though my HUD assured me I’d actually done it.
I sucked in a breath and paused for a beat, checking my IFF board and sensors. All of HQ and First was down, as was Captain Solano, and there were no more enemy in sight. The landing platform was empty of Tahni shuttles and was only occupied now by the wreckage of the airlock.
“McReady,” Solano ordered, putting it out over the general net because that was how he did things, making sure every one of his Marines knew all the orders so any one of them could take over in an emergency, “keep the Boomers here and secure this platform for our extraction. I’m taking First and our special guests with me through the central corridor.” He pointed with the maw of his plasma gun to the middle of the three concourses leading out of the landing platform, the broadest one, obviously meant to haul cargo through the facility. It curved downward out of sight, hiding the troops that had retreated down it and God alone knew what else.
“Alvarez,” Solano said, and I noted that, this time, he’d pared the transmission down to just the two of us, “how would you feel about your team taking point?”
I didn’t laugh, though I wanted to. I had the sense that Solano didn’t too much care for Vicky and Wade and me playing secret agent, nor did he especially care for Fargo being foisted upon him, and having a captain walk point was probably his way of putting us in our place. I could have said no. I’d been informed in no uncertain terms by Colonel Hachette that I could use my own best judgment when on the ground. But in all honesty, I felt most at home up front.
“Not a problem,” I assured him. I wished I could look him in the eye. “But if I’m up front, I’ll be making the calls as to which way we go.”
He hesitated just a beat, just long enough for me to know he’d understood.
“Sure, no problem.”
And I could believe that as much as I wanted to. I switched to our team net and shut Solano out.
“We’re up front,” I told them. “I’m on point.”
“The fuck?” Vicky exclaimed. “You’re a captain! Solano does remember that, right?”
“I think it slipped his mind. I’ll remind him later, but right now, we’ve got work to do. Follow me.”
The walls were too far apart. It had been a long time since I’d felt agoraphobic, and I’d never had the fear inside a Vigilante, but this corridor…the walls felt kilometers wide to my gut, though I knew in my head they were only about thirty meters apart. Big enough for cargo loaders, though I didn’t know what they’d be bringing into this place. Weapons? But why? Why would they bring heavy weapons into this base when they’d be using them from their ships? Food? Supplies? This place would have been big enough for thousands of Tahni and we knew he didn’t have that many soldiers.
It shouldn’t have mattered, but it did. It nagged at me when I should have been concentrating on what was down at the bottom of the ramp. This place was supposed to be his bolt hole, his last stand, but why did Zan-Thint need a last stand? I stopped thinking about it abruptly when the ramp downward ended in a massive set of doors…well, what passed for doors among the Tahni. This had been built by them and the cargo portal was three-lobed, coming together in the middle like an iris.
“This thing looks pretty thick,” I told Solano, knowing he’d be observing ahead through the feed from my helmet, even though he was still a hundred meters behind me. “I’m gonna go out on a limb and say my plasma gun isn’t going to burn through this.”
“We have a couple shaped breaching charges,” he said. “I’m sending them up.”
Chartres was the Marine he sent up with the charge. I didn’t know her well, but Vicky and I had run into her on the Orion, and she struck me as someone who loved her job.
“Hey, Lt. Alvarez,” she said, lumbering up, the footfalls of her Vigilante eerily silent in the vacuum, though I felt a hint of a vibration through the soles of my boots. She hadn’t, I figured, been briefed about our recent promotions. “Need a couple of door-knockers up here?”
“It’ll have to be a hell of a set of knockers, Chartres,” Wade told her. I couldn’t actually smack myself in the forehead, not while I was in the armor, but I wanted to.
“Oh, Jesus,” Vicky groaned. “You’ve been waiting to use that one, haven’t you?”
“Don’t worry, Lt. Sandoval.” The Marine swung her plasma gun up out of the way, using both hands of the suit to pull the charge packs off her back. “These are the only knockers I plan to show Sgt. Cunningham, barring a galactic apocalypse that leaves us the only two humans left to propagate the species.”
“So,” Wade interjected, and I could hear his broad smile in the words, “you’re saying there’s a chance?”
Chartres laughed and kept on setting the charges. I wanted to believe the joking around meant Wade was back to normal, but I realized I didn’t know what normal was for him anymore.
“Everybody back!” Chartres warned us, toddling backwards in armor not really meant for it. “This shit isn’t supposed to have any backblast, but that depends on how thick this fucking door is!”
“Back how far?” Wade demanded. “There ain’t exactly any cover in here!”
“Hundred meters maybe?” Chartres suggested. “Hell, I don’t know! I’ve never done this shit in a vacuum before. You can stick your damned dick against the door for all I care, Cunningham.”
I don’t know if it was a hundred meters, but I stopped when we were far enough back up the ramp that I could see the rest of the company waiting, just up the curve from the door.
“Hit it, Chartres,” I told her.
“Fire in the hole!” she called.
I couldn’t hear the blast, of course, but the vibrations rang through the floor and the walls like a gong, strong enough to rattle my teeth. There was no concussion, no blast of heat, no shock wave, because there was no atmosphere to conduct it. I took off the second I felt the vibration, counting on the others to follow without me having to tell them.
There was smoke from the explosion, but it didn’t rise, just clung to the floor like a fog for a few seconds before it dispersed into diffuse vapor and faded as if it had never been there. The door had been thick, but not thick enough to resist two shaped charges with ten kilos of HyperExplosives each. What was left of them was twisted metal, glowing red and white in the darkness of the tunnel. There’d been lights before, built into the walls, but they were gone, smashed by fragments from the blast, and I was glad we’d backed up. The armor might have protected us, but I would rather not have found out the hard way.
What was on the other side of the doors was just as dark, too shrouded in shadow for me to see, even with the infrared filters in my helmet optics. No light reached here from the surface and I wasn’t ready to use the suit’s infrared illuminators. That would be too much like shining a spotlight and yelling, “Please shoot me!” Not that whoever was down here hadn’t already realized we’d arrived after we’d blown the door, but knowing the enemy was coming and knowing exactly where to shoot were different things.
What there hadn’t been when we’d blown the doors was a flush of air. Whatever was on the other side, they’d already had it in a vacuum before we attacked. That worried me. It meant they’d had time to prepare, which was exactly what we’d been hoping to avoid. That absence bothered me, but what concerned me more was the other absence…of everything. The chamber on the other side of the door was empty.
“What the fuck is going on in here?” Vicky demanded.
“There’s nothing here, Cam,” Wade reported. “I’m up against the far wall.”
I was about to tell them to keep moving when I found…another door.
“Solano,” I called immediately. “Hold up where you are. Something’s happening here. We got another door. I think this whole chamber is some kind of cargo airlock.”
“You want me to send up more breaching charges?”
I opened my mouth to tell him yes, but something drowned out my transmission. It wasn’t on our comm net, of course—that would have been impossible. But it was on a general net, broadwaved with enough power behind it to reach every single Marine in the company. And definitely enough to echo inside my helmet.
“Lt. Alvarez, how nice to see you again.”
The voice was a Tahni speaking English. There was no mistaking the indescribable accent of vocal cords not evolved to speak any human language trying to pronounce one of the hardest, most complicated languages in human history. Once heard, it wasn’t easily forgotten. And this particular voice was familiar. Hackles rose on the back of my neck, and my breath caught in my chest.
I switched to the general net with numb fingers, still staring at the bare metal of the wall. I should be backing out. I knew it, knew there was no way this wasn’t a trap, but that was my job as point man…to spring traps. And I just had to know.
“General Zan-Thint.” I tried to sound casual. “I expected to find you here, but I’m not so sure how you expected me. By the way, it’s ‘Captain Alvarez’ now.”
“Congratulations on the promotion. I suppose you earned it after your exploits on Bathala. I would have been willing to wager my entire army that neither you nor your wife would have survived the Skrela outbreak. In fact, I was prepared to believe it would be the end of the entire planet, and perhaps your entire Commonwealth.”
“Wishful thinking, General. Seems like it’s the major failing of the Tahni as a species. It’s why you lost two wars, and why you’ll lose this one too.”
Yeah, I was being cocky, taunting him even. But I wanted him to talk, because while he was talking, I was triangulating. That transmission was close.
“Alvarez!” Solano snapped on the command net. “What the hell’s going on? Is that actually Zan-Thint?”
“It’s not fucking President Jameson,” I shot back, annoyed with the man for his failure to grasp the obvious. “Get me those charges. I’m trying to backtrace his transmission and I need to get through this fucking door.”
I switched back to the general net, but Zan-Thint was already bloviating.
“You may have been right about the Imperium, Captain Alvarez. But I am not the Imperium, and I didn’t survive the war by wishful thinking. I survived by being prepared.”
The comm gear in my helmet was on the command net, which meant I had access to the feeds from everyone else in the company, and I was using their positions to triangulate the source of his transmission. It had to be microwave because there was sure as hell nowhere for a laser to come from in the bare walls, and if it was, it could be traced.
“You were prepared for this?” I asked, not trying to be too clever, concentrating on the shrinking circle on the comm display in the corner of my helmet screen. He was on the other side of the door, I could see that already, but I couldn’t tell how close. “If you were prepared, why didn’t you just move the whole damned thing somewhere else before we got here? And you still haven’t told me how you knew I was coming.”
“Who do you think organized the insurgents? Who do you think fed that venomous little turncoat Ven-Wan information to pass on to your intelligence agents? There’s nothing that happens on Tahn-Skyyiah without me knowing about it. And there’s nothing that happens on this world without me being prepared for it. As for why I didn’t move my operations, well…I read of a human custom, back when you hunted predators on your world. To attract the predator, your people would tie a domestic farm animal to a stake and wait for the cat to attack. They called it a Judas goat.”
There. He was two hundred meters away, past this door…and past another. And there was something solid in the middle. A lot of somethings.
“The charges are on their way,” Solano interrupted. “Chartres is bringing them up. You sure you don’t want me to bring up the rest of the company?”
“No. He’s trying to bait us in, and I don’t want us all falling into the same trap.”
“I imagine by now,” Zan-Thint went on, sounding far too amused for my comfort, “that you’re getting ready to blow this door the same way you did the last. Let me save you the trouble.”
The door began to move aside, the grinding of its motors vibrating into the floor and up through the metal of my armor. A surge of fear bordering on panic rose out of my guts and up into my chest. This was bad. This was very bad.
“Solano! Get the fucking company out of here!” I switched to the company net. “Everyone! Get out of here!”
There was movement through the gap in the doors, skittering, like an insect but so much larger. I wanted to run, knew I should, but something about the motion teased at my memory, and I knew I had no choice but to hit the external lights. I didn’t bother with infrared because they’d be just as easily seen by enemy suits as visible, and when the white light shone through the door, it threw sinuous, wavering shadows against the far wall.
The first thing it hit was a large, fibrous pod, two dozen meters long and split open right down the middle. I knew what it was…I’d seen another just like it, back on Hausos. And skittering around it, so thick I couldn’t see the floor, were dozens of Skrela.
“Oh, boy,” I murmured. “We are so fucked.”
7
“Back! Get back!” I screamed the order, but I couldn’t follow it, not until the others got clear. I had seconds until the doors were fully open and the Skrela rushed out, and I had to use it.
I had two missiles left and I launched them both, not at any one of the things, but directly into the open pod. The blasts were twin flashes of lightning, throwing everything into stark clarity for just a moment, a light shone on a nest of cockroaches. But these cockroaches were more like scorpions the size of a draft horse.
Scorpion wasn’t an exact description. They had a tail reminiscent of one, and they had eight limbs, but these weren’t life forms engineered from Earth originals like the flora and fauna on the colonies, not even anything as familiar as the animals on Tahni worlds. The most understandable analogy I could come up with would be insectoid, or maybe arachnoid, but they weren’t strictly that either. Their legs were thick and digitigrade, the knees bent backwards, and the lower pair of arms were nearly as big around as the legs, one of them supporting some kind of energy cannon, the other armed with a large, serrated claw, while their upper set were much smaller, meant for manipulation. The heads were broad and flat, with mandibles that came together at the fore end, endlessly clicking as they moved…though I couldn’t hear it in the vacuum.
And they could live in a vacuum, which I hadn’t known before and which didn’t make me feel any better about the situation. They spotted me a second after the explosions, probably following the thermal trail of the missiles—I didn’t know that they had integral thermal sensors, but it wouldn’t be wise to assume they didn’t.
The creepiest thing about them was the energy cannon. Without it, I could have let myself believe they were nothing but mindless animals, biological robots created to kill whatever was in front of them, unable to think or reason. But they were carrying guns, and they obviously knew how to use them because they tried to shoot me. I don’t know what the things fired, but I knew I didn’t want to be in the way of one of the bolts. They shouldn’t have been visible in a hard vacuum, but shouldn’t didn’t seem to matter to these things, and when I bounced out of the way of the shot, I could see the pale blue glow of its passage, and I don’t think I was just imagining the feeling of static electricity dancing over my skin.
