I had to guess the Tahni didn’t get too many briefings from their battalion staff about avoiding collateral damage, because this asshole put those missiles directly into the first floor of the line of rowhouses across the street from me, only a hundred meters away. Now I ducked, barely in time. Heat washed over me, prickling my skin even through the armor, and I crouched low, knowing what was coming next. The concussion didn’t knock me over, but only because the buildings took the brunt of it. And the civilians inside.
The wave swept outward in an expanding circle of destruction, buildings collapsing where it touched them, their façades engulfed in short-lived gouts of flame where dust burned away before the fire-resistant material beneath it extinguished it. The ground conducted the rumbling vibration into my suit and through it into my bones and I knew the building I hid behind was about to collapse, maybe forward into the street, maybe sideways right on top of me, but I stayed behind its cover until I caught a glimpse out of the corner of my optical camera’s view of the fighter banking and ascending, pulling out of its run.
Was he going to come back for Battle Damage Assessment and maybe a second strike, or was he too busy with other targets? We couldn’t sit around here with our thumbs up our ass, so I’d have to hope he was too busy. I left the alley.
The row housing hadn’t been anything fancy, maybe the equivalent of the Surface Dwellers in Trans-Angeles, not the poorest, working taxpayers. They had shops on the lower floors of those houses, I recalled from the briefings. Fabricators of the Tahni sort, metal workers, craft shops. They lived above them with their children, sometimes with their older male relatives, six or seven individuals to a house. On a block like this, there’d be maybe four or five hundred Tahni civilians.
Nothing was left. Not one building was intact. A few were still standing, their supports teetering precariously, but the interiors were piles of rubbish, smoking, sometimes burning. There were bodies inside, but I couldn’t see them for the haze and didn’t want to.
“Cano, Verlander, I need a casualty report.”
It sounded like someone else’s voice, someone who hadn’t just been in the middle of an enemy airstrike, someone who wasn’t engulfed in roiling black smoke. Debris littered the street, some of it still burning, crunching under my feet as I wobbled slightly on the uneven surface. But there were things I had to know, and things they had to tell me, and they had to stay calm to do it. I had to be their example on how to stay calm when everything’s going to shit.
Nothing. Someone coughed on an open circuit, which was psychological since none of the dust, smoke or particulate cloud was going to make it through our airtight armor.
“I said, casualty report!” I snapped. “Cano, Verlander, did we lose anyone? Any damage?”
I could read the IFF. They were all lit up and flashing red, but it meant nothing once I read down in the small print of the report. Their signals were being partially blocked by the haze and smoke and probably by a few hundred kilos of debris in some cases.
“Working on it, sir!” Cano told me. There was anger in his voice, maybe at me for rushing him, but that was okay. It was better for him to be angry at me than afraid. Anger could focus the mind if you kept it under control.
“Third has no…,” Verlander began, then spluttered and tried again. “I mean, sir, we don’t have any KIA. I’ve got a couple people buried under this housing unit, but Gunny Morrel is trying to get them out.”
The motion caught my eye, barely visible on optics, a hazy red and yellow on thermal, fifty meters down from me and twenty meters into the rubble. The row houses were built as narrow as an Underground Housing Block apartment in Trans-Angeles but three times as deep. Three Vigilantes were digging into the rubble, tossing aside meter-wide sections of concrete to try to free the battlesuits buried beneath it. I wanted to run over and help, but I wasn’t a strong back anymore and if Bang-Bang needed more strong backs, he’d ask for them.
A chunk of concrete smacked into a pile of debris near the street and scattered it. Beneath was a body. A very small one. My world shifted, the ground turning at an angle, and I threw out an arm to balance myself and stumbled a step.
“You okay, sir?” Cano asked. By the tone of his voice, it wasn’t the first time.
“Yeah,” I said, squeezing my eyes shut for a moment, but unable to erase the sight of the dead child.
I didn’t kill them. It wasn’t me. They killed their own people. Yeah, and I just ordered my Marines to take cover behind civilian homes, knowing the Tahni didn’t give a shit about the lives of their civilians.
“Fourth is good to go, sir,” Cano told me. “Couple guys got shook up, might need some maintenance work later, but nothing that’ll keep them from completing the mission.”
“Lt. Verlander,” I said, “are we close to having those Marines dug out?”
I could have looked for myself, but I wasn’t going to. I didn’t want to see what else they might dig up.
“Yeah. I mean, yes, sir.” He sounded distracted, paying too much attention to the job in front of him and not to his situation. A sergeant could get away with that, but not a platoon leader. “We’re up, we’re good to go.”
Delp broke in, his
