I grimaced. This was the old good news-bad news joke. The good news was, we had comms again, which meant I could call in and direct fire support and coordinate with the rest of the brigade. The bad news was, now Geiger could micromanage me again. I thought about pretending I didn’t receive the transmission, but then sighed and keyed my microphone, trying to remember our official comms call signs. None of us used that shit when we were talking via line-of-sight because it was incredibly unlikely the enemy could intercept it and, more importantly, what would they do with it if they did? It’s not like they could send kill teams to find our families or access our military records and blackmail us. Most things the military does are done because they’ve always been done that way.
“Zero Four Actual, this is Delta One Actual. I have linked up with Delta One Bravo and Two Bravo and we are inbound to Objective One, ETA ten mikes, over.”
“Copy that, Delta. Zero Four Hotel is at Objective Two with Alpha and Charlie.” Which was a military base three kilometers from the palace, Objective One. “Enemy jamming still exists, but drone relays are in place at all major objectives. Foxtrot elements are in place at Objective One and waiting on you before proceeding. What is your status? Over.”
“No casualties,” I reported. “Still have not linked up with Delta Hotel elements. All others are combat-effective.”
“Keep me updated, Delta. Zero Four Hotel, out.”
Oh, yeah, I’ll keep you updated. But since comms were working…
“Delta Hotel Actual, this is Delta One Actual. How do you copy? Over.”
It was still a long-shot. The drones might not cover the whole city and I had no idea where Top and Headquarters Platoon was. I heard nothing but the scrape-bang of my feet pounding into the pavement for a long moment before I tried again. Second time was the charm.
“Delta One Actual, this is Delta Hotel Actual. I copy five by five, over.”
Top sounded as if she were out for a family picnic instead of leading a light platoon through the enemy capital in the biggest invasion in human history.
“We are inbound to Objective One,” I told her. “What is your status? Over.”
“What’s taking you so long?” she asked, the hint of a grin in the words. “We’ve been here for three mikes. It’s dead as a church social here, but I have a feeling the Gomers are waiting for us to move on the objective before they come out to play. Over.”
“Tell them to hold the party till we get there. The Gomers promised Delta the first dance. Out.”
Now I knew what the starships had been targeting with those proton blasts.
The Tahni Imperial Palace was nearly a kilometer on a side, its base an octagonal wall twenty meters tall, with a half-dome structure rising from the base, the opposite side of the curving dome a sharp, downward angle etched with arcane designs no human had been able to decipher. It was widely recognized as the grandest, most ornate single-purpose building ever constructed, the wording tortured into a shape that excluded the mega-cities on Earth so academics and popular journals could have a catchy headline.
It didn’t seem so grand anymore. There had been, I remembered from the briefing, anti-aircraft turrets and ground defense bunkers all around the perimeter wall, and the cruisers had left not a one of them intact. Sections of the wall dozens of meters long had collapsed into charred cinders, the main entrances to the palace buried under tons of rubble. The half-dome had spider-web cracks running up the curve of it from the damage to its supports and huge sections of the top had fallen inward. It didn’t seem as if anything inside could have survived, but I knew that the Emperor’s living quarters and the military command center were deep underground.
We’d been within sight of the palace for nearly ten minutes, and it had taken every second of that to reach the rendezvous point. Top was there waiting for us, the Boomers set up in a defensive perimeter, using the corpses of dozens of armored personnel carriers destroyed in the orbital bombardment as cover. The Force Recon element was there as well, sensibly behind cover, but there weren’t as many as I’d thought there’d be. A company at most, counting all the scattered elements, though maybe there were more around the other side of the palace.
Top wasn’t behind cover at the moment, standing beside a Force Recon officer who my IFF display told me was a Lt. Medupe and a man in some sort of weird camouflage suit. It didn’t look like armor, exactly, but it shifted colors when he moved, as if it were actively trying to fit into the background. He was tall and jacked like one of the bare-knuckle fighters from the illegal fight clubs in the Underground and wasn’t wearing any sort of helmet, which seemed like a damned reckless thing to do in a war zone. His tightly-curled black hair was cut short but not buzzed like a Marine’s and there was something…I don’t know, regal about his bearing, the sort of thing generals tried to imitate unsuccessfully.
He was carrying something that looked like a cross between an issue Gauss rifle and the plasma gun attached to my suits, something that looked impossibly heavy for a human being to carry without the benefit of a battlesuit.
And he had no IFF signal whatsoever.
He was a spook, and I had the immediate flash of insight that he was one of those mythical Fleet Intelligence commando types who’d taken out the fusion reactor.
“Sir,” Top told me, “Lt. Medupe here is the CO of the Force Recon element that’s going into the palace. And this other fella here…well, God only knows who he is and neither one’s about to tell me.”
“My people,” the tall man said, “will be taking Lt. Medupe’s Marines inside the palace through different ingress points. We can
