“Holy God, sir…all those people….” His armor was still smoking, like condensation on a cold morning as he stared into the wreckage, looking at something I didn’t want to see.
“That’s what they get for narcing on us,” Verlander snapped, no remorse at all in his voice. “Morons.”
“Lieutenant,” I told him quietly and privately, “shut up and move out.”
26
“Goddamn, Cam, it’s good to see you,” Francis Kovacs said, sounding as if he was about to collapse with relief. “I didn’t know how long we’d be able to stay here.”
For once, I didn’t blame Kovacs for being overdramatic. The rally point was a public square, or as close to one as a Tahni city came, an open courtyard a kilometer on a side, with strips of pavement alternating with long, straight stretches of what passed for grass, and vaguely phallic marble…statuary? Or whatever they were. For all I knew, they could have been the Tahni equivalent of road signs. A low wall that might have been decorative enclosed the concrete dick-statues, two meters tall and twice as thick at the base as it was at the top.
That was how the square had been when we’d seen the few stealth drone shots the Scout Service had managed to get. Now, it was scarred and burned, charred black in great swathes of destruction, and painted in blood. It was impossible to tell how many enemy troops had died in the square because what was left of them was in pieces. At my best guess, there had been well over a hundred. Their armored personnel carriers sat half-melted, still smoking at the eastern edge of the square, where the main road ran into it, eight of them, the Tahni equivalent of a company.
Behind us, a monolith a hundred meters at the base and narrowing to a pyramid capstone two hundred meters above us loomed over the carnage like a gravestone, probably the tallest free-standing building I’d seen.
“How long have you been here, Francis?” I asked him, staring out at the devastation.
“Ten minutes,” he said, breathing the words out like a prayer. “Ten fucking minutes.”
“Casualties?” I hadn’t noticed any on the IFF display, but I asked anyway.
“Some suit damage, but nothing that would affect function. No injuries. Their weapons,” he said, pointing out at the dead Shock-Troopers with his plasma gun, “can’t penetrate our armor unless we sit around and let like four of them shoot at the same spot at once. But the crazy bastards just kept coming anyway….”
“Have you seen any other allied forces?” I interrupted. He sounded like he was going to drift on me and I needed him focused.
“Just them,” he said, gesturing overhead.
The overflights of the assault shuttles were nearly constant now, their missiles and proton blasts heading mostly downward, which told me the Tahni fighters had been taken down. I flinched as a lightning bolt shot out of the sky and touched something off to our west, a massive fireball rising above the skyline of the city.
“And more of that, too,” Kovacs added. “Lots of that.”
We’d seen it too on the way in. The Fleet was taking advantage of the lack of outgoing defense laser fire to pound the city, taking out concentrations of enemy with proton blasts from orbit, which was akin to swatting a fly with a sledgehammer.
“But I tell you what, boss, there’s more of them coming.” He waved at the dead Tahni. “Every time we send a drone camera up, we can see them moving. I ain’t seen any High Guard yet, just Shock-Troopers, but they’re everywhere, thousands of them.”
“We need to get to the palace,” I said, “and hope Top is already there.” I turned until I saw Delp’s IFF signal. He was at the east end of the square, crouched down in the cover of the burning APC’s, watching outward. It was so easy to see past the armor, to picture the man inside it down on one knee, holding a rifle, to see the tremble in his hand and the tic in his cheek like I’d seen him in the back of the MP vehicle back on Point Barber. Best not to let anyone sit around stewing for too long.
“North, Verlander,” I instructed. “Just another three or four klicks along the main road.”
I dropped in behind Third Platoon and adjusted my pace to theirs, a slogging, cautious shuffle, an itching in the middle of my back screaming at me that we were moving too slowly. I wanted to run on the hop, to bounce off the sloping faces of the buildings lining the broad, paved road, to get us there in five minutes instead of fifteen. But it wasn’t just me, wasn’t even a squad or a platoon. Leading a full company meant adjusting to the pace that the least competent leader was capable of keeping up without losing his grasp of the situation. It wouldn’t help us to run faster into an ambush. But it sure would have felt better.
Every building we passed felt like a sniper hide and I began to wonder why more of them weren’t. The Tahni hadn’t seemed shy about using their civilians for cover on colony worlds, and certainly hadn’t seemed reluctant about blowing them up if they got in the way. I wondered if the difference here was merely a matter of the same sort of differences I’d noticed between city-dwellers on Earth and citizens of the colonies, the lack of initiative and self-sufficiency, the reliance on the government that urbanites everywhere seemed to share.
They called the cops on us and the cops wound up burning down their neighborhood.
That was the old Outsider talking, the Trans-Angeles street kid who resented authority. Now, I was authority.
A signal crackled in my earphones, staticky and weak at first, then getting stronger as if the drone relay passing it on had just made its way overhead.
“Delta One Actual, do you read? This is Zero
