Juveniles, to be precise. Tahni males who had hit puberty and gone to live with their fathers and uncles and grandfathers and great uncles and etc... Thirty or forty of them, all crouched like animals ready for fight or flight, their faces just a bit more human than the adults, with their brow ridges less pronounced, their jaws narrower, not like the steam-shovels of the adults, their eyes slightly less sunken into their sockets. It was easy to mistake them for human teenagers at first glance.
“What the fuck?” Kries wondered.
Yeah, what the fuck? Them being in here didn’t make any more sense than the other civilians. Except…behind them, nearly flush with the floor of the storage dome, was a hatch. I missed it at first with the young Tahni males shifting around over it, trying to hide it with their bodies.
“Get out!” I told them, yelling it this time, the translation echoing off the interior walls. “All of you, get out!”
They didn’t move, so I did. The kids were brave, insanely brave if they’d been humans, but when a three-meter-tall metal giant stomps into a closed room with any kid, human or Tahni, they’re going to run. They were chickens fleeing the henhouse at the entry of a thieving dog, flapping around the edges of my Vigilante with a fluttering of stripped cloth. I wondered how hot the metal skin of my suit was after all the fighting and flying I’d done in the last few minutes since drop. God, had it only been a few minutes? It felt like hours.
“Kries,” I said, “get in here and bring a fire team.”
I didn’t wait for him. The Tahni would know we were coming and I didn’t want to give them any more time to get ready. The hatch was locked, but the hinges and the lock were visible and I didn’t even hesitate, blasting the lock with my plasma gun. Heat flooded the suit, making my skin crackle like I’d been lying out in the sun at mid-day in an Inferno summer, and it was a damned good thing the kids had run away because they would have died in an instant from flash burns. The lock was manual, old-fashioned and clunky, and it had melted away from the blast, letting the hatch fall inward.
Inside it was a ramp sloping gently downward, a broad tunnel heading under the courtyard, out to the bunker. And swarming up at me were row upon row of Tahni Shock-Troopers, clunky and broad-shouldered in their powered exoskeletons but still a meter shorter than my Vigilante and hundreds of kilos lighter. Tantalum darts ricocheted off my chest armor, leaving cracks and craters but not quite powerful enough to penetrate, even at this range.
There was no room for the grenades from my suit’s launcher to arm down here, and I wasn’t one hundred percent certain they would be enough against the Shock-Troopers’ armor, so I gritted my teeth and fired my plasma gun again. It was as if the entire tunnel had ignited, and my breath caught in my throat from the wash of searing heat.
It was worse for the Tahni. A blast that could burn right through the chest-plate of a High Guard battlesuit melted the outdated Shock-Trooper armor to slag, cutting down a full rank of the onrushing soldiers and sending the others rocking back on their heels. I didn’t wait for the gun to recharge, instead wading into the next rank standing and swinging my left arm like a giant war club. I was a medieval knight fighting children who were playing at war in suits of cardboard armor. My first blow smashed one of them into the side of the tunnel, crushing armor and flesh and bone and cracking the concrete, and when I swung away, he sank to the floor, his chest caved in.
A helmet crunched under my fist and wobbled off to the side at an unnatural angle, an arm bent backwards and then my capacitors were recharged and I fired again. More heat, more sweat pouring off me, and when I grasped at the nipple of my helmet’s water bladder and tried to force moisture into my cotton-packed throat, the water was scalding hot. I drank it anyway and as the smoke and haze cleared ahead of me, I could see the Tahni running.
It made no sense. There was nowhere for them to go, but panic had taken hold and whether they were human or not, every animal behaves the same when the panic sets in.
Kries was beside me now and he fired less than a second after I did, adding to the inferno, leaving another handful of armored Tahni bodies lying on the floor, burning fiercely. Crates of ammo were stacked by the walls of the bunker, narrowing our path even as the walls broadened out. The gunners had abandoned their turrets, unarmored and unable to stand the stultifying heat, trying to cram against the far walls alongside the last of the Shock-Troopers.
“You can surrender,” I told them. “You don’t have to die down here. If you surrender, you’ll be treated well…”
A burst of KE gunfire greeted my offer and Kries and his Alpha team leader Corporal Chelimo shot simultaneously, a half-second before me. It was enough. When the haze had cleared, none of the enemy troops were left alive and the remote controls for the turrets were melted and sparking wildly.
“You know better than that, Lieutenant,” Kries told me. “Tahni don’t fucking surrender.”
“Well, they’re going to have to,” I told him, “unless we want to kill every single one of them.”
4
“Sir,” Bang-Bang told me, waiting just outside the entrance to the concrete storage hut, left fist braced against his armor’s hip like a disapproving teacher watching a misbehaving student return from recess, “you gotta let someone else do that shit. You know that, right?”
“I know, Sergeant,” I assured him. “Next time. I promise. Did someone tell Captain Cronje we’re clear down here?”
“Yeah, that Lt. Kodjoe
