“I’ll take the Article 15, sir,” he insisted, the set of his mouth mulish.
“It’ll delay your promotion to corporal,” I told him. “Do you want to be a squad leader? A platoon sergeant? Because this could hurt your chances of either.”
“I’m best at running point, anyway, sir.”
“So was I, Delp.” I cocked an eyebrow. “I still am. I’m not bragging when I tell you that I’m better in a suit than anyone else in this platoon. Hell, anyone else in the company besides the Skipper.” And maybe Top, but I wasn’t sure. She was too busy riding herd on everyone else to do much fighting. “But the Marines need leaders, or at least that’s what they told me. They need people who are the best to teach others to be good enough. I thought maybe you could do that, eventually. But not if you keep this up, the drinking, the fighting.”
“I won’t, sir,” he insisted. “I swear, no more drinking. I won’t even go out.”
“Not any time soon,” I agreed. “You’re restricted to base for the next thirty days.” I jabbed a finger at him in warning. “And if I hear you’ve been drinking on base, you’re heading to the brig, and then to a therapist, whether you like it or not.”
I stood and he leapt to beat me to it, coming to attention.
“Dismissed,” I barked at him.
When he’d closed the door behind him, I sank heavily into a chair that should have been comfortable, but wasn’t. And I wasn’t sure if it ever would be.
Delp had been as good as his word, and I thought that being away from human colonies might be good for him. He’d used the confinement to put in more time in the simulators, and I could see that he’d gotten better, smoother, though still not as much of a natural in the Vigilante as me, or Henckel.
Volley fire was a tricky thing, involving intricate timing to make sure a third of the platoon was firing constantly while the rest let their capacitors recharge. It was hard to do even in training and ten times as difficult when we were under fire, which was why I’d made sure the whole platoon worked on it every opportunity we got during the train-up for the invasion. In practice, if done right, it was devastating.
They did it right.
If a single discharge from a plasma gun was like taking a slice of the sun and shoving it into the enemy’s face, volley fire was a firehose stream of unrelenting hellfire with no respite, turning everything that it touched into molten, smoldering wreckage. The Tahni ranks in front of us had no chance to organize a counterattack, no response beyond sporadic, barely-aimed burst from electron beamers. First squad took some hits and I could see flashes of red in the damage-control reports beside their names on the IFF transponder displays, but no one was out of the fight.
We’d pushed the enemy back into the support columns for the deflector dishes, massive stanchions three meters around, sunk deep into the ground. They huddled there, using the supports for cover, leaving dozens of their number lying helpless on the pavement, some obviously dead, others with huge chunks blown off their armor, the ends melted, hiding the physical devastation inside. I tried not to think about how they must feel, crawling away from impending death, fear warring with agony, their legs burned away and the rest of their body scorched by the heat that had made its way into their suits. I’d been there and I wouldn’t even wish it on a Tahni.
“Boomers firing in five,” Lt. Xander, the XO announced. He was technically the platoon leader for the Headquarters Platoon, though the Skipper commanded it in practice, but Covington must have decided to let the man have his chance at running the Fire Support Team.
Boomers wasn’t their official nomenclature of course, the military lacking in flair and imagination as usual, but sometimes the unofficial nicknames were the ones that stuck. And so, the Vigilante XB Fire Support Suit become the Boomer. If the Vigilante could be described as a metal gorilla, the Boomer was a gorilla playing a pipe organ. The regular suit had a single missile launcher, built flush into the side of the suit’s backpack, but the Boomers had twin launchers, one at each side, protruding nearly a meter above the head of the suit. Flanking the launchers were another set of paired weapons, fat and cylindrical, extending back a meter behind the Boomers’ shoulders and forward another meter. They were coil-guns, slow-firing and too cumbersome for general use and they made for a big-ass target, but devastating and handy for the special weapons team.
And especially handy for blowing up big, tasty targets like deflector dishes.
There were eight Boomers in the Fire Support squad and sixteen coil guns fired as one, the concussion from tungsten slugs the size of my hand being expelled at hypersonic velocities enough to throw my Vigilante sideways a step. Debris and smoke rose from the pavement as if in appreciation of the show of power, braiding into twisted funnels in the wake of the projectiles, but the reaction of the support columns was even more impressive.
The initial punctures weren’t much to look at; ragged holes about the size of the projectiles, four in each of the columns facing the spaceport, but the mass of the deflector dish did the rest, shredding the metal at its weak points. Hundreds of tons of metal collapsed in on itself, the electrostatic field discharging as the power feeds were ripped away, making the hair on my arms stand up even through the insulation of my suit.
The Tahni were buried where they stood, and not even centimeters of armor could save the ones caught under the weight of that much metal. Clouds of dust rolled away
