“Oh, sweet mother,” Delp murmured, either forgetting he was on the general net or not caring. “That doesn’t look good at all.”
I didn’t bother yelling at him and I wasn’t paying enough attention to notice if his squad leader did, because I was too busy agreeing. The enemy defense was arrayed around the main spaceport facility, but the buildings themselves were important only in the overhead cover and likely the localized power generator they gave to the anti-aircraft turrets. Coil guns and missile launchers scanned back and forth with each pass of an assault shuttle overhead, their sensor dishes following the action like a fan at a tennis match.
By themselves, the turrets would have been insanely vulnerable to ground attack. Even with the bunkers dug into their flanks, covering those approaches with KE gun turrets, a platoon of Drop-Troopers could have taken them down in a half an hour.
I suppose that’s why they had the mecha.
Sweet Jesus, I hated those things.
Imagine if an assault shuttle and a Vigilante battlesuit made sweet love and had themselves a mutant child, and that’s not even half as bad as the reality of a Tahni mecha. It was the Tahni version of mobile artillery support, only in their minds, mobile meant walking on two legs. I don’t know why that made it more intimidating to me than if it had been a tracked vehicle, but it did. The thing was powered by an antiproton reactor and bristling with weapons: long-range missiles, a coil gun, multiple KE turrets to take out infantry, and the capper, a proton cannon that could smack an assault shuttle right out of the sky. Right now, it was aiming lower, the actinic flare of the proton cannon smashing into the dirt of a retaining wall about a kilometer away from the spaceport facility, doing its part to smash it to powder, right alongside the KE turrets of the bunkers, making sure anything that showed itself above the wall would be no more than a fond memory.
It took me a second to pick out the Marines, even though they were a kilometer closer. A light company of Vigilantes was huddled on the other side of the retaining wall, following the shallow curve it described around the grass courtyard at the front of the spaceport, separating it from the pavement of the landing field. They were clearly visible on thermal, not at all on optical in the dim, grey light of dawn, all of them covered in dirt, huddled as low as they could crouch in the armor. I could feel their fear from a kilometer away. Or maybe that was just me.
Something else moved between the Vigilantes, something smaller and crouching lower, lacking any clear thermal signature and only visible from the movement. I wouldn’t have spotted them at all without the IFF transponders glowing over each of their positions like a giant arrow pointing downward. They were Force Recon Marines, and what the hell they were doing here, I had no idea, but I felt for the poor bastards. Deltaville was a screaming nightmare for me wrapped in a Vigilante, and I couldn’t imagine going out into it with nothing but light body armor and a tiny peashooter of a Gauss rifle.
“What the fuck are we gonna do, Cam?” Kovacs asked, the horror in his voice matching my own.
Then High Guard battlesuits flowed out of a cargo entrance on the right-hand side of the main spaceport building, heading up a service road out to the edge of the grass courtyard. They were trying to flank the Marines and even if there weren’t enough of them to take out the Drop-Troopers on their own, all they had to do was force them into the open and the mecha and the bunker turrets. And the decision was made for me. There was no way I could let them be slaughtered.
“Vicky,” I said, both because I trusted her more than Cano or Kovacs and because I trusted Delp to run point, “stay low, stay fast…and take us in.”
We ran toward the sound of the guns.
17
“You don’t see us,” I chanted under my breath, a prayer, a command, and a wish all in one. “You don’t see us. You don’t see us.”
There was nothing else to do, no strategy to take. We were out of missiles, out of time, out of options. If that mecha caught sight of us while we were too far away, while we were running across the open plain with no cover, no chance at dodging, it could wipe out half of us in seconds.
My only hope was that the Tahni were too focused on what was happening in front of their noses, too concerned with the flanking charge to check their long-range sensors. And it seemed as if they were. Five hundred meters passed by in seconds, and we were halfway to the wall, and it looked so damned close. But we couldn’t run straight at it. Vicky’s platoon, what had been my platoon, curved to the right to meet the incoming threat. I wanted to scream at them to just get to cover, but I couldn’t because she was doing the right thing.
And then they noticed us. We were too close to ignore, but close enough, gracias Dio, that the mecha couldn’t target us with its missiles. But that fucking proton cannon…
The Tahni mecha pilot depressed the weapon as far down as it could go, but it was intended for air defense use, so the blast of charged particles smacked into the edge of the
