Except at Port Harcourt. Except at that warehouse, at the bunker.
I shoved the thought aside, pushed back the images of dead Tahni juveniles, following their fathers, brothers, and uncles into harm’s way, trying to act as living shields for their military. When had they started doing that? Had they figured us out, figured out that we didn’t like killing their noncombatants?
Well, some of us don’t like it.
Maybe Cronje had been right, maybe I’d just been falling for their trick, letting them get away with it. But those kids hadn’t volunteered to be living shields, even if their adult male family members had. And for me, it all came down to Demeter. We’d been furious with the Tahni for deliberately slaughtering civilians at Demeter, but if we did the same thing, how could we blame them?
And yet…civilians died in war. Any war from the beginning of time right up until the latter half of the 23rd Century.
Something moved down a side street to my right, and I barely kept myself from roasting it. It was an animal. Something furry, about the size of a sheep, wearing some sort of harness around its shoulders. It saw us and ran back the way it had come, letting out a high-pitched squeal.
“What do they call those things?” Bang-Bang asked me.
“Kuwari or quori or something like that,” I told him. “They’re like pets or service animals, I think. Someone from Charlie told me they taste really good grilled.”
I checked the mapping display and tried to force my thoughts back to the mission. Recriminations and regrets were a luxury for after the battle.
“We’re two streets over from a sort of central courtyard,” I announced. “That’s the Delta Company rally point. If everyone else made it down, that’s where they’ll be. And if there are already Marines there, they might be under fire, so don’t blunder right into an electron beam or a coil gun round, Delp.”
“Yes, sir,” the Marine walking point affirmed. “No wandering into electron beams today.”
“Cut the chatter, Delp,” Bang-Bang snapped, not so much in anger but from habit. He was a platoon sergeant, after all.
I snorted dark amusement. Just a few months ago, he’d been a raw nerve, a kid snatched out of a regional detention center in Toronto after an adolescence spent in one petty crime after another had culminated in something serious enough to make enlisting seem the lesser of two evils. He’d shown something of a natural talent for the Vigilante, but he’d been skittish and uncomfortable around officers in general and me in particular, maybe because of my reputation. Now, he wasn’t afraid to yank my chain a little, which was an improvement, though it didn’t make up for his propensity to let the local girls buy him too many drinks and then getting into fights with their boyfriends.
“Take a right at the next cross-street, Delp,” I said. “Then right again.”
This would have been faster if we’d hopped a block at a time with the jump-jets, but I was running totally blind, with no idea where the enemy was deployed, and nothing says ‘shoot me’ quite like a platoon of battlesuits flying through the air over an enemy city. So, we walked. Or rather, we loped, the overpowered artificial musculature of the Vigilantes taking us four meters at a stride, the pounding of our footpads on the pavement a chorus of jackhammers. It wasn’t exactly subtle, but it was fast enough, and with practice, we’d developed a talent at holding formation while galloping at full-speed.
It had become second-nature to me, which was why I was able to run full-out while letting my attention wander to the sensor readouts in my helmet, why I saw the thermal signatures just before Delp yelled out on the platoon net.
“Battlesuits!” It was a mix of the panic of encountering the enemy, and the eagerness for a fight every good Marine felt when the real guns started firing.
But these weren’t the enemy, and I knew it from their heat signature even before the IFF transponders began registering.
“Hold fire!” I commanded, pushing forward to the front of the formation in just a few steps. “Hold fire! Those are ours!”
The two platoons of Vigilantes faced each other at the intersection of the two streets, plasma guns still raised and at the ready, mute, inexpressive visages showing no recognition. It reminded me of cleaning robots colliding where their routes overlapped, neither willing to yield to the other.
“Cam?” Francis Kovacs said, a familiar voice in my headphones. “Is that you?”
“Of course, it’s me,” I shot back. I stepped closer to the First Platoon leader, by useless instinct. He could have heard me just as well twenty meters farther away. “Glad you made it down. We’ve got one Marine MIA, might have been taken out by ground-to-air fire. You?”
“We lost two.” Kovacs’s tone was grim with a plaintive note to it, as if he was asking God why this would happen to his platoon. “Did you see where the others landed?”
“No. We didn’t even know we’d find you here. We were heading for the rally point. It should be just one more street over. You want us to take point?”
“Sure, yeah.”
I hadn’t really needed to ask. Kovacs wasn’t a coward, but he was more than happy to let another platoon do the heavy lifting. I wondered if it was because he didn’t have confidence in his ability as a combat leader, or if he thought taking casualties would look bad on his record. But I might have been letting my own bias against Academy grads cloud my judgement of the man.
“Okay, then. Staggered file until we hit the courtyard, then staggered wedge formation. Move it out, Third.”
I knew something was going down at the rally point before Delp hit the intersection. There was a constant background crackle from the air battle raging above us, but the sonic sensors on the Vigilante were sensitive and sophisticated enough to differentiate the concussive reports reverberating off the
