“Are you sure this is the smart play?” he asked. He was making it sound canny, like the question of an old Marine NCO trying to check his platoon leader’s foolishness, but I was a former NCO myself and I knew the tone. Bang-Bang Morrel was scared.
“If there was some point in my life where I might have decided to make the smart play,” I assured him, “it would have to have been before I volunteered for the Marines. Ooh-rah, Bang-Bang.”
“Ooh-rah, sir.” And if there wasn’t enthusiasm in that voice, at least there was acceptance.
“Over the hill, Marines!”
The fusion plant, seen from the top of the tiered hill, reminded me of the images I’d studied in my history classes at Officer’s Candidate School of ancient, walled cities like Constantinople. Instead of spires and towers and vaulted cathedrals, though, this alien fortress was a collection of domes and spheres and a power transmission column, crackling with the raw energy of a star held in a dungeon somewhere within the depths of the Earth. Cooling pipes two meters tall ran from outside the city, bringing water in from inland seas, and if we could have sabotaged them, it might have been the easiest way to disable the plant. But they were centimeters thick, and probably had a short-term liquid-nitrogen backup system, and we just didn’t have that kind of time.
In the midst of the fairy-story city surrounded by the crenelated retaining walls lay the gap the invaders had used to infiltrate, a cargo entrance at the end of a broad, paved road passing through a natural canyon carved from the surrounding hills. Cargo trucks were lined up on either side of it, some of them with empty beds, others piled with freight. I couldn’t tell what it was, wouldn’t likely have known even if this had been a fusion reactor on a human colony. I knew what the twisted, humanoid metal shapes scattered on the road alongside the trucks were, though. Too small for battlesuits, they were the remains of Tahni Shock-Troopers, probably stationed at the facility as guards. They might have been an effective deterrent if Force Recon had hit it, but the Skipper and his half-company had ploughed right through them and left at least two dozen of the armored infantry dead behind him.
“Go,” I urged Delp. “Kreis, set your squad up around the entrance and pull security until we’re inside.”
Waiting on the side of the artificial hill, suit down on one knee, while Kreis deployed his people and Medina probed cautiously into the yawning cavern of an entrance, I felt startlingly alone. Not just because we were one platoon against a whole planet, but because of who wasn’t with us. I wasn’t sure what I had expected. I suppose I’d had some fantasy about the rest of the platoon leaders seeing what a fucking coward Cronje was being and defying him to come with me to complete the mission. I suppose I should have known better.
“Clear!” Sgt. Medina called from the mouth of the tunnel.
I was happy to get out from beneath the writhing, war-torn sky.
The entrance bore the marks of a battle, with more of the Shock-Troopers lying dead just inside. Light panels on the walls and the ceiling still sparked where the impact of Tahni KE gun rounds or our own plasma blasts had blown them out of their frames and left live wires exposed. The malfunctioning panels threw strange, shifting shadows across the unfinished cement walls of the tunnel, five meters tall and ten wide, large enough to allow two cargo haulers abreast.
I’d felt horribly exposed a minute ago, and now I felt just as horribly confined, and I almost missed the distraction of having to control a company now that I was back to a platoon.
“We got a casualty up here, sir,” Medina told me.
“Hold up,” I ordered, slipping through the tight formation we’d been squeezed into by the confines of the tunnel.
It curved just ahead, and around the curve, the battle had grown fiercer. The enemy had been waiting there. Not Shock-Troopers but High Guard. Their dead were stacked high, one atop another, as if the Skipper’s force had piled them to the side so they could pass. Metal was ripped and burned and sheered away, had melted and reformed into something wavy and surreal, and I couldn’t tell where the metal ended and the burned flesh beneath began.
The Tahni suits were stacked like rubbish, but the one Marine Vigilante had been left where it lay, respectfully. An electron beam had pierced the helmet, leaving a twisted mass of metal, and mercifully, I couldn’t see what was left inside. The IFF transponder was dark, but I could still read the ID. It was Lt. Cassandra Burke, the Second Platoon leader.
I barely knew her, less than I knew Cano or Kovacs. She’d seemed pleasantly gung-ho about the Marines and the war, like a fan at a soccer game, and the few times we’d talked, she’d never mentioned anything personal, just reminisced about her days in the Academy, as if it had been the crowning moment of her life. I thought I’d heard her say once that she was from Australia, and I vaguely knew where the continent was. They had kangaroos there, I thought.
Did she have a boyfriend in Australia? Parents? Brothers and sisters?
“Get going,” I told Medina. “Hurry, but keep your eyes open.”
If this had been the first skirmish, it almost assuredly wouldn’t be the last. Cronje had told me he’d seen a sizable force heading up the road around them, and I knew this wouldn’t be the only entrance into the reactor facility, just the easiest one for us to use. The enemy would have come in the other side and sent a scouting force ahead to look for us. Covington had met them here, and he
