Cano and Kovacs were just behind us and to either side, Vicky and Freddy behind them and Manley bringing up drag, the whole lot of us roaring into the air in a formation like a gaggle of geese heading south for the winter.
“Don’t shoot at us!” I yelled into the general brigade net. “Check your IFF! Drop-troopers on the hop!”
Which wasn’t at all dignified, but incoming friendly fire always has the right of way and I would have looked damned silly getting killed by my own people after surviving the second hairiest drop of my career.
I wasn’t sure if the warning worked or the defenders were just too busy shooting at the hordes of bad guys to even notice us, but the coil guns didn’t kill us and I considered that a win.
“Target at your discretion,” I directed, watching the battleground pass below me like I was taking a virtual tour of it, “and volley fire.”
Volley fire on the hop was about a hundred times harder than on the run, but I figured there were enough Tahni troopers out there, any missile we launched was bound to hit something. I had two missiles left after our last fight, and I was so absorbed trying to direct the battle that I wasn’t conscious of firing them, was just suddenly aware of the ammo indicator flashing red at me to let me know they were gone.
I definitely noticed the effect they had. We had five platoons, more or less, nearly a hundred suits firing at once, and the results were spectacular. I’d watched a time-lapse video of a field of wildflowers blooming somewhere in the Rocky Mountains on Earth, somewhere I’d never had the chance to visit and probably never would. The field had been barren, rocky, lifeless, and then sprouts of color had flashed to life, here and there at first, but eventually covering the entire expanse of what had been dirt.
The chain of explosions blossoming across the side of the steppes reminded me of those flowers, beautiful and miraculous and short-lived, though not as short-lived as the Tahni High Guard troopers at the heart of the blasts. The enemy knew we were here now, and staying in the air would, I suspected, prove to be a bad idea.
“Down,” I snapped. “Take them on the run.”
Electron beams were burning out at us, starting high and arcing downward with the trajectory of our flight, just a fraction of a second and a few meters behind, hounds baying at our heels. We had the Tahni in a crossfire and our plasma guns were adding to the destruction, bits of the heart of a star burning through whatever they touched, and yet it wasn’t enough. I felt like I was killing a High Guard suit every other second, knew the others had to be doing the same because there were just too many to miss, but too many to miss also meant too many to beat. The knowledge rubbed against the soft skin of my mind, a burr stuck in my shoe on a long hike, that I couldn’t take the time to remove because this section of trail was too dangerous.
Why am I thinking in hiking metaphors? I never hiked once in my whole fucking life until Basic. I blamed Scotty. He used to go on and on about how his dad would take him and his brothers hiking in the Bloodmark Mountains back on Hermes until I felt like I’d been there myself.
I missed his ramblings about Hermes, missed having him as a sort of cool older brother for the platoon. Bang-Bang was more of a typical Gunny, loud and harsh and overbearing in a fatherly sort of way, and he was good at his job, but he wasn’t Scotty. There wouldn’t be another Scotty. And I could have really used Scotty right now, could have used a Marine I trusted implicitly to lead Third in combat while I tried to direct this impromptu group of dribs and drabs, someone I wouldn’t have to check because I would know exactly what they were doing.
Bang-Bang was doing the right thing, keeping the platoon in formation, keeping their fires focused and their lines as clean as possible as we all touched down, doing a better job than Manley or Kovacs, one of whom should have known better. Kovacs’ platoon was bunched up at the center like scared kids huddling for support, and there wasn’t time for their platoon sergeant to straighten them out, much less their half-assed company commander. They paid for it, though, before I could even open my mouth to warn them, two of them dropping almost as their feet touched the ground, lit up like torches in the night by the atomic sledgehammers of the Tahni electron beamers.
My gut tightened at their deaths, at the IFF transponder signals going dark in a remote corner of my IFF display, and heat kissed my skin as if it were me burning up at the blast of heat and hard radiation.
“Fucking spread out!” The words burst out of me like the plasma blast I fired without consciously aiming. “Close with them and limit their arc of fire!”
If we could get close enough, the whole mass of them couldn’t shoot at us without hitting their own people. And if that didn’t stop them from trying, it would still mean more dead Tahni, less for us to have to engage.
“Manley, Kovacs,” I ordered, the words and the decision behind them taking up the better part of my conscious thought, the plasma gun firing as if on its own, its flare surprising me nearly as much as the impact of the blast on an enemy suit, “hit the jets, fall in behind the defenders and bolster their lines. Cano and Morrel, curve around the left flank, Sandoval and Kodjoe go right and squeeze them between us.”
I had to get Manley and his rag-tag platoon somewhere he wouldn’t have
