We were here to test the prophecies, I supposed.
“Drop warning!” the crew chief bellowed into the PA speakers. “Drop warning! Drop in sixty seconds!” She sounded as if she’d be happy to see us go, probably so they could fly off somewhere to comparative safety and wait out the last battle of the war.
Fleet or Marines, Drop-Trooper or Force Recon, no one wanted to be the last one killed in the war.
“You’re leading us off, Third,” I reminded them, particularly Verlander. Maybe Top had it right, maybe it bothered me that some marginally-competent Academy grad who’d gotten his last platoon killed was in charge of my platoon. “We don’t expect there to be a huge concentration of High Guard in the city. Intelligence says they sent most of their battalions to Point Barber. But there’ll be a shitload of Shock-troopers, and even if they’re smaller than us, you get enough of them together, they can bring you down. Don’t get decisively engaged. We can’t fight a whole city. We have to remember our objective.”
“Yes, sir,” Bang-Bang said. “Ooh-rah!”
He said it respectfully, as if I’d just delivered the best speech of my life, but I knew him well enough now to know he was telling me to shut up, that I was droning on with rah-rah bullshit. I shut up.
“Drop! Drop! Drop!”
I echoed the words without thinking, from instincts honed during thousands of hours of practice, and they echoed through the platoon leaders to the platoon sergeants to squad leaders, and for what was probably the last time, we dropped.
The fact we were able to make it to the ground without dying was a miracle not from God but from the hallowed halls of Fleet Intelligence. And the fact that Fleet Intelligence had planned anything that actually worked might just have been a miracle from God, come to think of it.
The city had massive air defenses, just as anyone would have expected from the capital of the homeworld of a militaristic empire, but the one weakness Fleet Intelligence had determined was the centralization you’d expect from a city of this size. Unlike their colonies, where things were spread out and power systems were localized, Tahn-Khandranda’s air defenses were all powered by a massive fusion reactor at the edge of the city’s industrial zone, or as much as the place could be said to have an industrialized zone.
And the fucking Fleet Intelligence boys had taken it down before we even set boots on the ground. How was being kept deliberately vague, and we’d been told not to ask, which of course, had everyone guessing. The rumor I’d heard was that it was some sort of top-secret special operations unit, something that had been around for years but no one had ever officially acknowledged its existence. That sounded like a load of barracks-room bullshit to me, but I couldn’t come up with a better explanation, so I decided I’d raise a toast to the super-commandoes the first chance I got.
I’d almost forgotten what it felt like to not be shot at during a drop, and I kept swiveling my head from side to side, checking the sensors, waiting for someone to call out the contact, but no one did. I touched down on the pavement a hundred meters back of Private Vince Delp, able to watch Third Platoon spread out in a textbook wedge formation by squads. Verlander, I reflected, hadn’t yet had the chance to fuck up all the good work I’d done.
The only thing that had gone wrong so far was that Kovacs and the other half of Delta Company was nowhere to be seen. They should have dropped right next to us, but that was always the plan and it almost never happened. We’d hook up with them at the rally point. I hoped.
There was a difference to the streets of Tahn-Khandranda from the other Tahni worlds I’d seen, and it wasn’t just the sheer number of them here, or the age. There seemed to be a care taken with the construction of this city, right down to the sweeping curve of the low walls separating the paved roads from the grass and well-tended shrubs of what looked like a cross between a green belt and a city park. It was all smooth and neat and established, lacking the raw, rough-hewn nature of their colonies.
Which made the armored personnel carriers all the more jarring when they pulled out from an intersection, flattened and angular and rolling on rounded, caster-style wheels, heavy KE guns spitting tantalum darts at thousands of meters per second. Orders swelled in my throat, trying to bust their way out with an instinct to take charge of the platoon, to micro-manage right down to the squad level, but I pushed the words down and let my people do their jobs.
Verlander might have shouted something, but no one needed his orders any more than they needed mine.
“Contact, front!” Sgt. Medina snapped. “Enemy vehicles! Delp, Calhoun, take them out!”
And even his orders were redundant, because Delp was a walking ball of nerve and instincts, and if he wasn’t quite as good as Henckel had been, he was close enough for government work. He was in the air before the lead vehicle had completed its turn onto the main road, firing a blast from his plasma gun down through the roof of the APC just fore of the KE turret.
