“How’d you get your hands on the rover?” I wondered. “I thought Brigade had all the ones we brought down locked up.”
“Don’t ask questions when you’d be better off not knowing the answers, Lieutenant,” Top told me, pulling open the driver’s door and sliding behind the wheel.
I got in the back and I expected the Skipper to climb up front with Top, but he clambered into the rear with me, then smacked the back of the front seat. Top didn’t acknowledge it, but she hit the accelerator and peeled away from the repurposed Tahni military base in a spray of gravel.
“Hey, slow down!” an MP NCO yelled at us, his whiney voice audible through the open windows over the hum of the motors.
Top sped up.
“That backstabbing, self-centered little prick,” Covington muttered, and I was fairly sure he wasn’t talking about the speed-conscious cop. “I can’t believe he’s pulling this shit after you pulled his balls out of the fire. He totally fucked up that operation, getting his people pinned down by the fixed defenses on that bunker. If he’d properly scouted the situation, he could have called in an airstrike before the drop-ships cleared the zone.”
I didn’t want to question Alpha’s performance on the objective because Vicky Sandoval and Freddy Kodjoe had both been part of it, and blaming Cronje would rub off on them, so I kept my mouth shut.
“Then to try to do this to one of my platoon leaders…,” he trailed off, jaw clenching. I don’t believe I’d ever seen him this angry before. He was a man who rarely showed emotion, and I sometimes thought it was because he’d seen everything you could experience in the Marines and nothing surprised him enough to make him truly angry. Not this time, though.
We were driving out of the secure area now, through what had been designated, for some reason, Route Tampa, a road from the military base, through the edge of the Tahni government sector to the industrial district and the spaceport. I didn’t understand the reference and hadn’t had time to look it up. There were young Tahni males out along the road, not quite of military age but close, the ones who’d have been going through their version of basic training within a year or two. They lined the route, hands filled with bits of cement block and bricks.
Through the ridged brows and the flattened nose and ears, through the shovel-like jaws and everything that made them different than us, the universal look of adolescence shown through, the smoldering fire of kids on the verge of adulthood who thought they were so much tougher than what life had to throw at them. I saw myself in those dark and angry eyes.
Top handed me a pulse carbine back over the top of the seat.
“If any of those fuckers start throwing rocks at us, shoot at their feet,” she told me.
I nestled the weapon into my shoulder and checked the safety, then propped the emitter in the open window. I hoped it didn’t come to that, because I wasn’t at all confident enough in my aim with the carbine to be sure I would miss them.
“They’re too stupid to know when they’ve been beat,” Top added, jerking the wheel to the left to avoid one of them who stepped partway onto the pavement. She slowed down as they crowded into the road, trying not to hit them.
“So are we, sometimes, Ellen,” Covington said quietly. I was a bit shocked to hear him use Top’s first name. It seemed akin to a child walking in on their parents having sex. “Maybe that’s why we wound up fighting each other.”
Something banged hard against the left side of the car and I twisted backwards, trying to find the one who’d thrown it, but it seemed like a signal to the others and debris began to rain down, most of the missiles bouncing off the pavement.
“Goddammit,” Top bit off, “I gotta turn this thing back in.”
I didn’t try to aim, just jammed down the trigger pad and swept the emitter sideways in a line about three meters from the side of the rover. The carbine shuddered against my shoulder, the HiPex chemical hyperexplosive cartridges igniting in the chamber and pulsing their heat energy through the lasing rod. The pulses themselves were invisible, but the intense energy ionized the air around them into a crackling tube of plasma, like miniature forks of lightning. The light show did nothing, but the bursts of focused light blew spectacular holes in the road surface, spraying white-hot bits of debris backwards into the wayward juveniles.
They cried out, their yells sounding like someone had recorded a group of human teens shouting and then played it back at half-speed. The group scattered, rushing away from the roadside, some of them with their clothes still smoking from the splash of vaporized pavement. Top goosed the accelerator and the rover leapt like it had been shot out of a cannon, taking advantage of the opening. She stuck her head out of the open window and looked back down the side of the vehicle, swearing into the slipstream.
“Little bastards scratched the paint. Now I’m going to have to sneak this thing back into the motor pool at night and exfil tactically instead of just walking out like I signed the car out and was dropping it back off.”
“You know you were going to sneak it back anyway,” Covington told her. He hadn’t said anything during the incident with the rock-throwing juveniles, nor had he taken a shot with his carbine. “Makes you feel like you’re still a private walking point.”
I blew out a breath and settled back in the seat, switching on the safety. There was a pouch full of spare magazines on the floor, and I ejected the partially-spent one and reloaded.
“Do you think I did the right thing?” I asked, still staring at the road.
“You didn’t kill any of
