“Loss of Signal, sir,” Delp reported with an air of I-told-you-so to the words.
The drone’s small, weak antenna couldn’t burn through the jamming, and laser line-of-sight wasn’t useful when we didn’t have a direct line of sight. And if we had been afforded a direct line of sight, we wouldn’t have needed the fucking drone and I felt like an idiot again.
I shrugged. It had been worth a shot.
“Sgt. Morrel, Sgt. Medina,” I said, wanting to rush ahead and help the Skipper but knowing I was just as likely to get everyone killed without a plan, “when we hit the hub, I’m guessing the Tahni are going to be on the far side of the circle, close to the surface entrance tunnel. That’s going to put the bulk of whatever’s left of Delta between us and them. Bang-Bang, I want you to take First squad and circle counter-clockwise. Kreis, you follow the hub wall clockwise, and both of you lay down suppressive fire for the rest of the platoon. I’m going to take Second and Third squads straight across, if possible, and break through the enemy position. Any questions?”
“None that wouldn’t get me in trouble,” Bang-Bang murmured.
“Yeah, I know it’s nice and vague,” I admitted, “but the alternative is to send in a couple scouts to get shot at and hope one comes back alive to tell us the enemy is expecting us and we’re fucked. So, again, any questions?”
There were none.
“Delp,” I told the point man, “when you hit the hub, don’t stop moving. Not for a second, not until and unless you reach cover or get behind our lines.”
“Gotcha, sir,” he assured me, not sounding very confident at all. “At least I won’t have to worry about the Article-15’s.”
“Look at the bright side, Vince,” I assured him. “I’ll be right behind you, so there probably won’t be anyone left to press charges anyway.”
15
The power plant’s hub was something I might have expected to find on a starship, a vertical passageway, open to the sky, extending right through the center of the tokamak’s torus, the shielding grey and massive around the magnetic coils just a few levels below us, and through the center of it, reaching upward from the bottom of the fifty-meter drop into the middle of the coils, the central solenoid that powered the fields. Around the edges of the passage, a service walkway curled like a strand of DNA, the ramp wide enough to allow cargo jacks to haul freight capsules from the warehouse to replace parts of the reactor at need.
We emerged near the top of the hub, just eight or ten meters from the rain shield, a plastic awning on thin, metal struts that was the only thing separating the open roof from the outside weather. The opaque awning seemed to block out the air battles above us as well, conspiring to confine our reality to the few hundred square meters of hell beneath it.
This was the battleground, the place where all that was left of our comrades and our enemies had retreated to or advanced toward, and I don’t believe I had ever seen so many battlesuits crammed into so small of a space. Captain Covington wouldn’t have chosen this place, not if he’d had options. He would have recognized it for the chokepoint it was, would have seen how it totally negated the maneuverability and versatility of the suits. But this was where the objective was, and if it was where the enemy was, too, well…the mission came first.
I nearly stumbled over the torn and smoking corpses of two Vigilantes before I’d taken three steps into the hub and didn’t even have the time to run their transponders to see who they were before one of my own had joined them. It wasn’t Delp. He’d done what I said, kept moving, even in the face of a blinding firestorm of raw energy, a wave of overwhelming heat. But Muller, the Alpha fire team leader, had paused at the first of the dead Marines. It was forgivable…by me, but not by the gods of battle. An electron beam lanced through his chest and he was dead in the space of a second.
The reality of our situation hit me like an intuition, laying itself out in a mental leap. The enemy was concentrated two levels below us, just above the base of the solenoid, taking cover behind a half a dozen freight containers abandoned on the walkway, still mounted atop cargo jacks, their caster-style rollers blown out from beneath them either during the battle or on purpose beforehand. The Marines were up one level from the Tahni, and if they had the high ground, that was more than balanced out by the fact that they had no cover and their numbers were down to less than platoon strength.
“Move!” I screamed at the others, wanting to take the time to explain our position but knowing we’d all be dead in the seconds it would take. “Hit your jets and follow me!”
This was the part where we could all get killed between one heartbeat and the next, and the wrong decision could cost us the battle and our lives, and I had to make it in a fraction of a second. I could have led them into a charge directly at the enemy, counting on surprise to let our inferior numbers overwhelm them, and maybe I should have, but instead, I took them into our lines, supporting the position of the Marines who were already there just from an instinct that they wouldn’t figure out who we were in time, that they’d catch us between their fire and the Tahni.
I snapped off a shot in mid-air as I jetted down to
