Too far.
The cargo tunnel seemed to go on forever, and really did stretch for over a kilometer, putting us beneath the dome of the reactor, maybe beneath the edge of the tokamak. We reached the cargo loading area and found the scene of the next battle, a bigger one. The space was huge, almost a kilometer on a side, and two more cargo trucks were parked side by side in the middle of it. Freight containers were stacked fifteen meters high at the outside walls, and had been much further in, I deduced from the rows of them that had been toppled like the dominoes the old folks used to play in front of the bars in Tijuana. Some still burned, struck in the crossfire, while others were simply scattered across the cavernous chamber as if kicked there by a titan.
And more bodies. Always more bodies. Ours and theirs, and if there were more of theirs than ours, twice as many littering the cement floor of the storage chamber, well, they could afford to lose more. This was their world, and we’d had to bring everything and everyone with us we were going to have.
It won’t be enough.
The thought nagged again at the frayed edges of my thoughts, a dolorous conviction that this was it, the place where my luck ran out, where my solipsistic theory fell apart. This world was not centered on my existence, and I would make that discovery suddenly and violently.
Just the way most of Second Platoon had. They had, I figured, been left back as a rear guard, to allow the main attacking body to press on to the objective. That was the only reason I could think of why every wrecked and smoldering Vigilante I scanned came back as from Second Platoon. Except Lt. Bradley. He was the company Executive Officer, a First Lieutenant. He’d been a friendly guy with an easy smile and I barely ever saw him. The few times I had, he was complaining how he was buried in clerical work and felt more like a file clerk than a combat Marine. I guess he’d felt like one at the last.
He’d probably volunteered to lead Second after Burke went down. He’d probably volunteered to stay behind with them, too.
“Any survivors?” I rasped the words, my mouth dry. I took a sip from the water nipple beside my chin and it didn’t seem to help.
“I don’t see any, sir,” Bang-Bang said. “Not all of Second is here, but…I don’t know how many survived the drop.”
“Keep moving, Delp. All of you, keep your intervals. I know we all want to bunch up down here, to feel like we’re all protecting each other, but that’s not how it’ll work if they ambush us. Ten meters minimum, and spread out across the tunnel as far as you can.”
I was an idiot, a school teacher lecturing children on fire safety while the building burned down around them, but every superior officer, every trainer at OCS, every NCO I’d had always insisted shit like that was necessary, that it calmed the troops. It had never done a damned thing for me, and I thought maybe the whole thing as a mutually-agreed-upon practical joke foisted on platoon leaders by our trainers.
I moved forward, past the trailing fire teams of First squad and even with Sgt. Medina, not so much from lack of trust as impatience. I wanted the show to kick off, and it would happen sooner for me if I were near the front. While I walked, I called up the plans for the fusion plant we’d been issued with the Op Order. They weren’t the actual blueprints, of course, just a generalized layout extrapolated from similar facilities we’d seen on other Tahni worlds.
They were surprisingly big and primitive compared to Commonwealth plants, and their weakness, the one spot we knew we could take them out with conventional hyper-explosives or even the coil guns from a Boomer, was the central solenoid for the magnetic field coils. Everything else was buried too deep inside the shielding, but the solenoid could be reached even by something the size of a Vigilante. And reaching it meant going straight ahead until this tunnel hit the central service hub, a vertical passage that stretched from the shielding over the tokamak to the cooling pumps near the surface.
That was where Captain Covington would be headed, and the Tahni knew it. It would be the logical place to leave their main force, and I expected, when we reached it, we’d either find the battle still raging or maybe that we’d already lost. If that were the case, I’d have to hope he had, at least, whittled down the enemy numbers and do my best to carry out the objective myself.
I got my answer before we even reached it. The suit’s sonic pickups were more sensitive than my human ears would have been if they’d been unencumbered by so many centimeters of BiPhase Carbide armor, and they were flashing red in frantic warning hundreds of meters before we reached the hub.
“We got fighting up ahead, sir,” Delp told me, redundant but trying to be helpful.
“Send out a spy drone,” I told him.
I couldn’t see his face when I gave the order, but I was willing to bet he’d rolled his eyes. We all carried a couple of the tiny, remote-controlled quad copters, but we rarely had the opportunity to use them for anything useful. Most of our operations were too dynamic to let the comparatively-slow spy robots do their work, and in the ones that weren’t, jamming was a constant issue.
But we had them, and doctrine dictated I try to use them. And for once, I was willing to give doctrine a shot.
The drone separated from the
