“I ain’t hit that bad, junior…,” she began, but I cut her off.
“I know you could tough through it,” I assured her, “but someone has to stay and look out for the wounded, and I figure you’re the best to do it. Am I acting company commander or not?”
Her sigh was a burst of static in my headphones.
“Goddamnit,” she murmured. “All right, you win.”
“But where are we going?” Kovacs wanted to know. “I mean, what the hell are we going to do now?”
I grabbed at patience and made sure I was on the private command net before I answered.
“You did read the fucking Op Order, right, Francis?” I asked him. “The jamming is still in place and we don’t have air superiority yet, right? So, we’re supposed to hook up with Battalion at the Tahni spaceport and give them support. If they’ve already taken it, then we get further orders from there”
“Oh, yeah,” he said, abashed. “Right. But I thought Battalion all died when their drop-ship got hit.”
“They did, but someone will take over,” I told him. “Just like someone had to take over here.”
“Yeah. I guess so.” He didn’t seem convinced.
“We got you, boss,” Cano assured me, or maybe he was trying to reassure Kovacs.
“Bang-Bang,” I said to Gunny Morrel. “Top is staying here with the wounded. That means you’re acting First Sergeant.”
And God, how badly I wanted it to be Scotty. Not just for my sake, either. He should have had the chance.
“Copy that, sir,” Bang-Bang said with more confidence in his acceptance than I had in the decision.
“Get the company reorganized into three platoons,” I told him. “We move out in five mikes.”
It was nearly ten kilometers to the spaceport from the fusion plant, and it might as well have been on another planet. The power plant was an isolated pocket of dead calm in the midst of the storm, protected from the chaos of the overhead fight for air superiority by anti-aircraft batteries we hadn’t even tried to take out. There were too many of them and we didn’t have the troops for it. The assault shuttles would spare some missiles for them once the jamming was down and Force Recon could target the batteries with laser designators.
Outside the cover of the missile batteries, the clash overhead was a constant roll of thunder and the city was afire, and thank God we didn’t have to march through it. The road from the power plant to the spaceport was largely empty, a few smaller industrial storage buildings popping up here and there without any real rhyme or reason to their placement, just another of the mysteries of Tahni city planning. The Fleet pilots hadn’t even bothered to blow them up, having better things to shoot.
The road was nice and broad, allowing the company plenty of room to spread out into a tactical travel formation, multiple, mutually-supportive wedges, the only obstacles abandoned vehicles, the only visible surface threats the storage buildings. I could have sent a squad into each of them to check for concealed enemy, but I opted for speed over excess caution and we pressed on, not flying or hopping, but running at a steady thirty kilometers an hour.
Pavement cracked under the steady drumbeat of our footpads, one after another of us stomping down onto the same spot, and it was easy to let the rhythm hypnotize me, to fall into it like I was a private again and all I had to worry about was my own ass. I missed those days, the days when I didn’t have anyone beyond myself to be responsible for, when my world ended at the tip of my nose. It had been lonely, sure, but it had also been comfortable. People could die and I wouldn’t especially care, wouldn’t mourn them beyond a passing gratitude that it hadn’t been me.
People were still dying. People always died in war, and nothing you could do would stop that. But now, I cared about them. Now, I hurt. Now, I worried. Vicky was a hundred meters away from me, leading my platoon, and I had to accept the fact that she could die at any second, and I wouldn’t be able to do anything to save her, and I knew just as surely that if it happened, part of me would die with her. I also knew I’d keep on fighting because that had become who I was. I was a Marine now. I’d been a loner, an outcast, an outsider, a criminal…and now I was a Marine. I couldn’t go back, and yet I wondered if there was still a way I could go forward.
After the war, I reminded myself. First things first.
The illusion of separation from the battle began to dissolve as we neared the spaceport. If none of our assault shuttles had struck the targets there, it wasn’t for lack of trying. One of them tumbled in while we were still three kilometers away, a coil gun round knocking it out of the sky. The explosion when it hit was nearly anticlimactic compared to the halos of light, the flights of missiles, the staccato beat of gunfire and the sharp, intermediate thunder cracks of energy weapons constantly rolling out across the flat pavement of the chains of landing fields.
There were buildings between sections of the port, maintenance, emergency services, storage, whatever any spacefaring race needed to have next to the field where landers and cargo shuttles and dual-environment spacecraft needed for their takeoff and landing. A Fleet pilot would probably know all the details, but to me, they were just obstacles and potential hiding places for enemy troops.
Not that I expected
