The courtyard was separated from the residential and small business district by a wall, curving and twisting adobe four meters tall, broken in places by gaps big enough to let in pedestrians or small vehicles. Actinic flares of light flashed through the gaps, tiny windows into what was happening on the other side, and I knew if I tried to maneuver two platoons through, I was funneling them into what might be pre-registered firing arcs.
“Third!” I commanded, running just a few meters behind Delp as we approached the wall. “Over the wall! Hit the jets and follow me!”
Delp went first, probably trying to make sure I didn’t take over his position at point, but probably regretted it when an electron beam came just a few centimeters from spearing through his helmet.
“Shit!” he blurted, firing out into the blackness at the source of the shot.
We’d jumped into chaos, a raging firefight that surged and swirled and tossed like waves against a rocky coastline, and information flooded in at me faster than I could process it. I let my consciousness go slightly out of focus, allowing the important details to penetrate the filter while the rest washed over me, ignored.
The courtyard was huge, bigger than I’d thought it would be from the maps we’d been given, probably three kilometers on a side. Paved paths described a spiral course through swathes of tall grass, or something similar to grass that filled the ecological niche on Tahni worlds, while odd, geometric sculptures sprouted up seemingly at random. On the far side of the square, probably four or five klicks away, the fusion reactor complex rose above the curvature of the ground in a series of geodesic domes surrounded by gigantic water pipes for cooling. The whole thing was lined with a retaining wall and surrounded by bunkers, bristling with KE gun turrets and looking fairly unassailable. Beyond it were the massive, concave dishes of the deflector shield generators protecting the military base and the spaceport, crackling plasma energy surrounding the dishes in a halo of raw power climbing into the sky to meet the proton bombardment from the cruisers in orbit.
And beneath the battle raging between the gods in heaven, demons and angels fought for control of the world below. Faceless, metal beings breathing fire, tangling and running and leaping in a fatal ballet out of some reimagining of Dante’s Inferno using 23rd-Century technology, Vigilantes taking the place of the heavenly hosts for my purposes, while Tahni High Guard battlesuits stood in for Satan’s hordes.
The IFF signals were all over the place, dribs and drabs from every company in the battalion. How they’d wound up here was testament to the truth of that old saying about battle plans and how long they survived after enemy contact. But I recognized some. Most of Fourth Platoon was there, and Cano was in the midst of them, and if he wasn’t exactly leading or directing, he was doing a damned good job of fighting for his life.
There were at least two companies of High Guard facing them, pouring into the square from the direction of the fusion plant, some jetting in even as I watched, outnumbering the Marines nearly two to one before First and Third joined the fight. And if we didn’t exactly even out the numbers, we certainly evened the odds.
“Third Platoon,” I ordered, my brain working separately from my instincts, my finger touching the trigger and blasting a High Guard suit in the chest with a gout of plasma, sending it tumbling backwards away from the Marine it had been about to finish off. “Volley fire, target the incoming enemy suits with your missiles! Now!”
We couldn’t use the missiles against the closest of the enemy. They were too tightly engaged with our own people, and while the weapons had a fail-safe against fratricide and would disarm automatically if a friendly IFF signal was detected, even an on-target hit against an enemy suit could damage the Marine engaged with them. But there were two more platoons of High Guard suits jetting in from the power plant, and they were handy targets.
I had picked out an enemy suit before I even touched the pavement, and I braced there for a split-second, giving the missile a nice, fixed platform to launch itself from before I touched the jets again. I squirted off the spot just as a pair of electron beams bracketed me, throwing up a steam explosion of dirt and rock, chunks of debris pattering off the helmet of my Vigilante, and barely registered the impact of my first missile before I tapped down on one flat, rounded foot and launched another.
Two platoons of battlesuits launching their complement of missiles in volley fire is an impressive sight, and not one most Tahni get to see twice, certainly not the ones trying to join the fight in the courtyard. A chain-fire line of explosions lit up the edge of the courtyard and nearly two dozen of the enemy battlesuit troopers tumbled to the ground in sprays of torn-up sod or pinwheeled out of the air, their jump-jets failing catastrophically.
Our arrival proved too much for the Tahni force and the suits began to disengage, pulling out of the skirmish and jetting back toward the reactor complex, leaving behind nearly two-score of their dead and disabled. And at least ten or twelve of ours. I scanned through the IFF signals of the dead, not just to figure out our strength but in a desperate search to make sure none of them were people I knew.
It was selfish, but I wasn’t so long away from the disaffected PFC fresh off the streets who had
