“Hey, we’re just the support, right?” I pointed out. “Let Captain Cronje worry about them. Get all our people outside and into a defensive perimeter and I’ll go ask him if he needs us for anything else.”
“Now that we did his fucking job for him,” Bang-Bang added, and I chuckled…right after I checked to make sure he was using our private net.
Freddy Kodjoe was outside the warehouse door when I emerged, and I stopped beside him while Kries led Third and Fourth squad out behind me.
“Nice job in there,” Freddy told me. “You saved us a lot of heartburn.”
“You still got heartburn to go,” I warned him. “There’s a shitload of civilians inside the building, older males mostly with a few dozen juveniles, too.”
“Yeah, your Platoon Sergeant told me. Captain Cronje wants my platoon to go find some place to secure them until the Fleet lands more troops.”
“Who the hell is going to be responsible for occupying this place?” I wondered. “Not us, I assume. And there just ain’t enough Force Recon to do that kind of work.”
“Jesus, man, you don’t read the monthly briefs from Commonwealth Command?”
“Not lately,” I admitted. “I’m still getting used to the whole officer thing.”
“You and me both,” he reminded me. “We graduated the same class. But there’s a whole brigade of troops coming in behind us, right out of training. Guys who couldn’t cut it in Force Recon and didn’t have the simulator test scores for Drop-Troopers. They’re like glorified janitors if you ask me, but their official name is the Security Command. They’ll be pulling in as we pull out.”
I gazed out at the city, smoke rising high above it, buildings on fire, assault shuttles pounding enemy positions with lightning raining out of their proton emitters.
“Good luck to the poor bastards.”
Kodjoe’s Marines were filing into the entrance as ours exited and I noticed a commotion even before I switched to his platoon’s net and heard the shouting voices.
“They’ve started up one of the trucks!” someone was yelling. “They’re trying to drive out the other side.”
“Shit!” Freddy hissed, hitting the jets and heading over to the opposite end of the warehouse.
“Kries!” I said, rocketing away into a jump right behind him. “On my six, and bring Alpha team with you!”
The situation at the freight entrance on the other side of the building was, in the language of the Marine Corps, a clusterfuck. Civilians were streaming out on foot, the older males holding the hands of the younger, and at the head of them was one of the massive cargo haulers, its two-meter-tall, knobbed tires crunching pavement beneath it. Several of the older males were crammed into the cab of the vehicle, visible through its transparent windscreen, while a score of others had climbed onto the flatbed. There was something else on the bed with them, a cargo cylinder identical to the others stacked inside the warehouse, but this one secured with straps.
A fire team from one of Freddy’s squads was already moving into the path of the truck, yelling warnings at the driver in amplified Tahni, but I knew as I arced downward toward them that they couldn’t see the civilians in the back of the truck, pulling open a small hatch in the side of the cargo cylinder, doing something in there.
A warning flash popped into my HUD, telling me it had detected the Tahni version of HiPex…chemical hyper-explosives.
“Get out of there!” I bellowed on the open net. “It’s a bomb!”
I was too late.
Something swatted me out of the air and I was tumbling for all of about five meters before my shoulder smacked into the pavement and my teeth clicked together. I tasted blood and saw stars, and didn’t see much of anything else.
I couldn’t have been out for more than a few seconds because the buzzing of damage warnings and the flashing of IFF transponders brought me back to alertness almost immediately. I squeezed my eyes shut for a moment against a dull pain in my head, the remnants of the concussion I’d received even through my armor from a combination of the shockwave from the explosion and the five-meter fall. When I opened them, I was in hell.
Or close enough.
Where the cargo truck had been was a crater, billowing smoke and still raining debris. Where Freddy’s fire team had been was nothing. Something wet and biological smacked down on the pavement beside me, and I tried not to look at it.
The Tahni civilians…where were they?
The ones who’d been near the truck were gone, of course, blown to pieces no larger than the ones that had just rained down near me, but there’d been dozens, hundreds more inside that warehouse. My eyes began to focus and I saw the Tahni hundreds of meters away from the truck, picking themselves off the pavement and standing there in a daze, the juveniles clinging to their fathers.
“What the fuck is going on?” Cronje bellowed in my ear. I was still on the Alpha Company net, which was overflowing with one transmission after another stepping on each other until Cronje used his command override. “Kodjoe, what the hell is happening over there?”
I rolled my suit onto its side and clambered to my feet, ignoring a bunch of damage warnings telling me I shouldn’t do that. Freddy was just a couple dozen meters away from me, sprawled on his belly, his articulated hand clawing at the ground to gain purchase.
“Jericho!” he yelled, his voice breaking at the end. “Corporal Jericho, report!”
I wasn’t certain, but I intuited that Corporal Jericho must have been the team leader. I wanted to tell him they were gone, but it wasn’t my place.
“Kodjoe, you’d better fucking report!” Cronje again. He
