She’d brought most of two Alpha Company platoons with her, and the other, I noted, was Freddy Kodjoe’s. He was there, near the middle of their tactical movement formation as they jetted in, touching down in the center of the park, but he said nothing to me.
“Vick,” I sighed the name. “I thought maybe we were all that was left of the battalion.”
“Not yet,” she said, her relief at finding me turning into urgency, “but we may be soon if we don’t get to the reactor complex.”
I didn’t think it was possible for a Vigilante battlesuit to fidget, but she was proving me wrong, shuffling from one foot to another, her plasma gun pointed off in the direction of the power plant.
“What do you mean?” I asked her. “Why would they be at the plant already?”
I had a sudden, cold panic at the thought I’d gotten the timing wrong for the rally point, been late for the battle.
“Just about the whole battalion mis-dropped,” she told me. “Half of Alpha Company, most of Bravo and the Headquarters platoon for Delta all landed right on top of the fusion reactor complex. They’re pinned down by a whole battalion of High Guard and at least that many Shock-Troopers. We have to get there now!”
I blew out a breath and shook my head. This whole thing was turning into a giant clusterfuck.
“I got good news and bad news, Delta,” I transmitted to the rest of the company. “The good news is, we don’t have to wait the whole ten minutes…”
13
It seemed as if every Tahni High Guard trooper in the whole universe had decided this was the hill they wanted to die on. The reactor complex was built on a rise, or perhaps the Tahni had piled dirt and sod over the underground parts of the complex and let the hill grow around it, surrounded by raised steppes, either from natural erosion over the decades since its construction, or by design for defense or aesthetics.
Or religious, cultural, or sociological reasons, I silently completed the words of every intelligence report I’d read about Tahni culture. They did a lot of shit we didn’t understand and rather than admit we had no idea what their real reasons for, the junior officers who wrote the reports always included that caveat.
Whatever the reason for the steppes, they were the only thing keeping the Marines who’d dropped into the complex alive against the hundreds of Tahni battlesuits swarming over them, flying in from every side, hornets to the hive. Well, the steppes and one other thing.
The coil gun rounds burst out from the ranks of the Marines clustered together in their natural earthwork fort, splitting the air with the sheer force of their passage, sending out visible shockwaves like the ones I’d seen at the tail of aerospacecraft flying supersonic in an atmosphere. Plasma guns were impressive weapons, but their effective range was short by comparison, a shotgun blast versus a hunting rifle, to put it in terms Dak might have used. The coil guns mounted on the Boomers were weapons meant for assault shuttles or the point-defense turrets of a warship, and being this close to one of the smallest and least fearsome of such armaments gave me a brand-new appreciation for how insanely powerful the main gun of a cruiser was.
Thunder rolled out over the plain, the eponymous signature of the Boomers, and tungsten slugs the size of my fist obliterated two or three Tahni battlesuits with one shot. And the projectiles didn’t stop for the effort, either plowing meters into the ground if aimed downward or, if shot upward into the High Guard troops jetting in from all around, blasting straight over the horizon to land in parts unknown.
If it had been me, or any other Marine charging into that sort of artillery, I would have pulled back, strategized, come up with a new approach to bypass the guns. But the Tahni were defending their home, a world near the heart of the Imperium, and they threw themselves into the fire with no regard for their lives like the elite soldiers they were. High Guard, so I had been reminded before by Captain Covington, didn’t refer to the altitude at which they operated, but their status as warriors. They were the best the Tahni had to offer.
And most of us were hood rats, the dregs, the ones so desperate to avoid a sentence in punitive hibernation, or a death sentence by the gangs or just desperate to get out that we were willing to let the government implant jacks into our brains and send us past the edges of human space to do something as insane as fight an interstellar war.
Yet here we were, on their turf, coming down their throats. It was enough to make even a cynic like me a little patriotic.
We’d been running, our rounded, spiked footpads digging divots into the pavement with each step, leaving tracks behind us that would take industrial equipment months to repair, but once we’d cleared the last line of buildings, we could see the enemy and I knew it would be a matter of seconds before they saw us.
“Hit the jets!” I ordered, somehow in charge of all this. Whose brilliant idea had that been? “Third, you’re the tip of the spear!”
Which meant First squad was the point of the tip, and Private Delp was the…well, he was the poor son of a bitch who was going in first. And it should have been me. I felt it every time, but more now than ever. I should have been the one going in first, the one running point. But someone had to be in command, and I’d been stupid enough to volunteer, so I ran behind Third Platoon, still too far up for the book recommendation for someone commanding the equivalent of a light
