I turned to face the direction we’d come from, just about ready to tell Cronje what had happened myself, but Freddy finally got his shit together.
“Sir, it was a VBIED,” he said, his voice still shaky. “A bomb on a cargo truck driven by civilians. I think….” I could hear his swallow. “Sir, I’ve lost four Marines, Alpha team from First squad. What…what are your orders?”
There was nothing for a moment, and I wondered if Cronje was out of line-of-sight range, if the jamming was silencing him. But when he spoke again, his tone was deliberate enough that I was sure he’d been considering his words.
“Take the rest of your platoon,” he told Freddy, “and clean them out. All of them.”
“Clean them out, sir?” The question could have been disbelieving, could have been from a man looking for clarification because he didn’t like the sound of an order and wanted to make sure he’d heard it right. But it wasn’t. It was the question of a man who was hoping the order was the way it had sounded.
“They’re insurgents, Lieutenant,” Cronje growled, his voice causing distortion in the microphone. “Kill them.”
Hackles rose on the back of my neck, a haze of disbelief that I might have blamed on the concussion but was more just a wanting it not to be true.
“There are children in that group!” I said. I tried to take a step forward, but my right hip actuator gave out and I collapsed to a knee. “You can’t!”
But Freddy’s platoon was flying in, touching down beside him, fanning out to pin the civilians between them and the explosion crater and the fierce heat still emanating from it. I couldn’t hear his commands to them because he was using their platoon net and I wasn’t authorized to listen in on it, but their left forearms rose high, elevating the grenade launchers built into the suit there, our auxiliary weapons for use against infantry.
I still didn’t believe they’d do it, or perhaps I’d convinced myself they wouldn’t so I wouldn’t have to do anything about it.
They fired as one, the grenades arcing up into the air twenty or thirty meters and coming down at the clusters of civilians out in the open. The waves of heat streaming off the bomb crater saved some of them, altering the flight of the grenades just enough to keep them out of the center of the group, hitting near the edges instead.
The explosions were tiny, audible only as soft crumps, their ignition a supernova flare of HiPex turning sintered metal into plasma spears that sliced through the front rank of the Tahni, sending a score of them crumpling to the ground like marionettes with their strings cut.
“No, Goddammit!” I yelled.
Since I couldn’t walk, I hit the jets and came down beside Freddy, slamming my shoulder into his and nearly knocking him over.
“Stop this!” I yelled at him. “There are fucking children in there, man!”
“Get away from me!” he snapped back, punctuating the demand with a shove that sent my crippled armor sprawling. “What the hell is wrong with you, Cam? Those are the enemy!”
“Kreis!” I said, praying the man was close enough to get the laser line-of-sight transmission. “Get your squad in front of those Goddamned civilians right now! Block those grenades! That’s a fucking order!”
A second barrage of grenades fell, these course-corrected by the shooters or perhaps the targeting computers in their suits, and thirty or forty more Tahni fell as they ran back toward the warehouse. Some of the bodies were small, a head shorter than the others.
I snarled and jumped, the boosters kicking me in the pants, jarring muscles already sore from the shockwave of the explosion. I landed on one leg and tried to balance, standing a hundred meters ahead of Freddy’s platoon, staring out at them, putting myself between them and the Tahni civilians.
“You have to stop this shit!” I yelled on the general net since I didn’t have their platoon frequency. “This is a fucking illegal order! You can’t do this!”
“Get out of the way, Cam,” Freddy insisted.
Another flight of grenades launched, but I’d set my suit to target them as hostile fire and my own grenade launcher popped rounds to intercept. I fired my plasma gun into the path of the barrage and the rush of superheated air set most of them off, a firework show at mid-morning. And that would have been it, as much as I could have done. Another fusillade would have gone past me and the civilians were still in range, half still trying to head back to the warehouse, half just running hell-bent for leather away.
What came out over the open stretch of pavement wasn’t another flight of grenades, though. It was Kries and Fourth squad, answering my call. They landed beside me and faced back towards Freddy’s platoon; plasma guns levelled. I blew out a breath, frankly amazed they’d done it.
“What the fuck are you doing?” Freddy was screaming now. “Those motherfuckers killed my Marines! You’re letting them get away!”
“The one who killed your fire team died with the bomb, Freddy.” I was pissed off, not at Freddy but at Cronje, and I knew I couldn’t let it through in my voice, not if I wanted to reach him. I kept my tone as steady as I could, firm but not strident. “And if there are more insurgents with that group, we should have arrested them and let Fleet Intelligence take care of it. Killing unarmed civilians is against the UCMJ.” The Uniform Code of Military Justice dated back to before the Commonwealth, and it had changed quite a bit through the centuries, but some things had been illegal from day one right through to the end of the 23rd Century.
Things were quiet for a few, long seconds, and I thought maybe I had gotten through to Freddy, but when a group of Vigilante battlesuits came
