Second and Third squads split off left and right just through the door, spreading wide and opening up fields of fire for themselves. The Tahni weren’t quite as practiced. They’d narrowed their front by using the opposite door of the garage for cover, but that also meant only two of them could fire on us, and two electron beamers versus eight plasma guns abreast was no contest. A Marine in First squad took a hit, and their damage flashed red on the IFF display, but the High Guard suits simply disappeared, along with half the doorway.
On the other side of it was…something. I couldn’t have sworn what the Tahni used the rooms for, but they were broad and open, and my brain wanted to call them business offices, for all that they bore little, if any, resemblance to the business offices I’d seen on Earth or the colonies. It could have had, I reflected with a snort of dark amusement, religious, cultural, or sociological significance. Right now, what it had was a platoon of enemy battlesuits huddled in the corners of the room behind furniture comically undersized for their bulk, as if they were all searching for someplace to sit.
They were spread out more this time, and our front lines had another full second before their capacitors recharged, but this was something else we’d practiced and no one had to give an order, not Vicky or Bang-Bang or me. First squad ducked to the side as they entered the room and Second moved forward, firing their plasma guns then moving to the opposite side of the room. If we’d been Force Recon, we’d have been diving for cover, but there was no cover to be had here for us. Electron beams would have cut through anything in this building, including the walls. Another hit on another Marine, not fatal, not disabling, and four Tahni troopers died in the space of three seconds, while the rest retreated out of the building.
And I couldn’t help but wonder what their endgame was. They were giving up lives to buy time, but to buy time for what?
We all got our answer to that question when the front wall caved in and the Tahni mecha waded into it like a toddler crashing through a house made from building blocks. And I knew immediately I had fucked up, had forgotten that part about them being aliens. What made sense for us didn’t make sense for them. The mecha should have stayed out front and concentrated fire on Geiger and her people. Any human would have. But they didn’t. They took their biggest weapon to what they considered the most imminent threat, and they’d mousetrapped us in the middle of a building, willing to risk killing their own people and destroying their own facilities to get us.
It was my fault, and I’d be the one to set it right.
“Get everyone out of here!” I yelled at Vicky, and I hit my jets.
The mecha was leaning forward, its weight on its front foot, slightly off-balance because it had never been built for agility, just enough brute force to carry around an antiproton reactor and a shitload of weapons. I rammed my shoulder into the thing’s trailing leg, my teeth clacking together with the impact, and ran the jets so far into the red I could almost hear them screaming for mercy.
It didn’t knock him over. I hadn’t thought it would. I just wanted to buy time, and that I did. He lost balance and had to slam his trailing foot to the ground, which, unfortunately, took me to the ground with it. The armor was tough. It could take a huge beating and keep working, but unfortunately, us humans had to be inside it.
Every time we got a new guy in the platoon, they would always wind up asking why we had to be in the suits, why the Marines didn’t just put an AI program in the suit computers and let it do the fighting, and someone would have to repeat the same explanation that Captain Covington had given to the platoon leader who had given it to everyone else. It was the old story about how automated weapons had been tried during the Sino-Russian War and had turned against their own side. It might have just been because the computer systems weren’t sophisticated enough back then, but no one with the power to change things had ever trusted them again, so us poor, vulnerable humans still had to pull the triggers.
When my back hit the concrete foundation of the building, I could really have come up with some great arguments for automated weaponry. I’d had cracked ribs before, and I was fairly sure I had them again. The pain sucked the breath right out of my chest, replacing it with white fire, and I wanted more than anything else to just lie there on the ground and rest, to let someone else do the rest of the fighting.
That wasn’t an option for a few reasons, the main one being that if I stayed on the ground, the mecha was going to squish me flat. The massive oval of its foot pad hovered above me and I punched the jets again, sliding through oceans of debris but getting out of the way of the stomp. The mecha’s foot pad cracked the floor beneath it, shaking me right through the BiPhase Carbide of my armor. I had to get up, and even though the Vigilante would do the work, the only way it could react was by me using the muscles that I would have needed if I’d been just trying to move my own body and not the three-meter suit of armor. And moving fucking hurt.
I rolled to my feet, screaming into the privacy of my helmet, knowing no one would hear, and turned to face oncoming death. Instinct screamed at me to
