I took my own advice and fired my missile load as well, one after another, the weapons kicking free of the launch tube on puffs of inert coldgas before the main rocket engines ignited and they streaked away, the first still in the air as the last came out of the tube. We followed our missiles into battle, tromping forward with First squad in the lead and I fell in just behind them and in front of Second, while Gunny Morrel brought Third and Fourth along beside us and slightly behind, each squad forming into a wedge.
The enemy hadn’t launched first because they were still trying to figure out who they should be firing at, with our battlesuits spread out over about three kilometers, but once we sent our barrage their way, the choice must have become clear. Their missiles crossed ours in mid-air, the crisscrossing vapor trails spider-web filaments a hundred meters overhead, and there was suddenly no other choice.
“Jump!”
Someone should, I thought, try to come up with jump-jets that wouldn’t overheat so damned easy. It was probably harder than it sounded and I was sure there was a military R&D lab somewhere working on it and they’d likely announce a fix right about the time the war ended, but it would have been so much more convenient. The main reason we couldn’t just fly the suits around like miniature spaceships was that the jets built up heat way too damn quick and all sorts of bad things could happen when you superheated turbines spinning at thousands of revolutions per second.
But the jets were plenty to get us across the kilometer and a half that separated us from the enemy, and to do it fast enough to get us out from under their flight of missiles before they could adjust the targeting. Missiles corkscrewed out of the air, some self-destructing as they lost their target lock, others simply plowing into the pavement. Of course, that left the Tahni with exactly the same choice, and there were a lot more of them than there were of us.
“One volley by squads and then hit the ground,” I instructed. “Remember the drill.”
I didn’t have to tell my platoon to open fire because none of them were idiots. I led by example and fired my own plasma gun because this battle was way too big to try to live by the old axiom about how an officer shouldn’t have to fire their weapon if they’re doing their job right. Whoever had said that had never had hundreds of Tahni battlesuits flying at them, shooting electron beamers.
Our plasma guns packed a heavier punch than their electron accelerators, enough to take one of them out with a single shot, but the downside was, our capacitors took longer to recharge between shots and hanging in the air waiting to take a second shot was a particularly stupid form of suicide. The drill I’d mentioned was one we practiced in live fires and simulations constantly, though it hadn’t come up all that many times in actual combat because we’d never been stupid enough to try to invade a Tahni core colony before. We fired together, each squad targeting a rank of the incoming enemy, then cutting their jets and hitting the ground running.
Ten steps, maybe twelve before the capacitors recharged and each squad took to the air again, flying a slightly different angle of approach and firing a second time before touching down. It put us a half-second ahead of the electron beams trying to seek us out, white-hot probes of energy, surgical scalpels looking to excise the cancer of us human invaders from their sacred territory.
We still would have wound up dead in moments, taking on that many enemy suits alone, but thank God and Captain Covington, we weren’t alone. The rest of the company had launched missiles as well, and there were just too many incoming warheads for the Tahni countermeasures to take them all out. They tried, though, and the distraction cost them their lives. Star-bright bundles of plasma crossed the hundreds of meters between us in a fraction of a second and metal burned.
It was times like these I really came to appreciate the armor, not just for the protection it offered or the massive weaponry it could carry, but for the separation it provided from too much reality. Outside, I knew the air was crackling with static discharge, sparking off the skin of my Vigilante battlesuit like I was some ancient thunder god brought to life, and filled with toxic fumes and heat that would have been fatal for an unarmored human. Artificial lightning tore rents in reality all around us and fireballs of hyper-ionized hydrogen burst in gouts of hellfire. Even inside the Vigilante, I was pouring sweat, rivulets streaming down my scalp and the small of my back beneath my skinsuit, the stench acrid in the close confines, almost enough to pull me out of the immersion into the suit interface and remind me I was sitting inside a metal coffin.
If I had been just staring out at the nightmare hellscape of the battle through a clear visor, I would have been overwhelmed by the sensory input, lost, unable to fight an instinct to find the nearest cover and curl into a ball behind it. But the helmet of the Vigilante was a faceless sheet of armor, and the Heads-Up Display projected inside it was more a computer construct than it was a visual image, one or two steps back from reality. Everything made sense, everything was in its place.
A Tahni battlesuit turned to retreat and I shot him in the back, targeting him by unthinking instinct while still concentrating on the fact that the enemy was pulling back in the face of one platoon after another of Marine Vigilantes dropping out of the sky. They weren’t running, because Tahni didn’t run and especially not on one of their own worlds, but even these fanatics knew they had to regroup.
We
