I would have died in the next few seconds, unable to dodge that many of the energy blasts, if it hadn’t been for Third Platoon…if it hadn’t been for Delp. They heard my order, or understood it, at least, and a rain of missiles flashed out of the sky into the mass of High Guard troopers. Chains of explosions crackled back and forth across the clusters of enemy suits, knocking some out of the air as they tried to jump, slamming others into the ground with the force of their detonation.
We could, conceivably, have taken out half of them in one stroke if there’d been the time or any method to make sure we each targeted a different enemy trooper. Unfortunately, that wasn’t what happened. Everyone hit the front lines because they were the closest, and ninety-seven plasma blasts and somewhere north of 375 missiles all went into the same two dozen High Guard suits. It killed the shit out of them, of course, and bought us seconds, and I worked with what I had.
I didn’t see it so much as I sensed it, a combination of the instinctive feedback from the interface jacks and the winnowing down of the wave of data in my HUD to something understandable that only came from years in a suit. There wasn’t time for a complicated strategy, wasn’t time for more than the most basic of orders, the simplest of tactics.
“Wheel left and volley fire, then across their lines on the hop!”
The last word left my mouth just as my suit touched down on the shattered pavement, only meters from the gaping holes leading downward. I described an arc to my left, trying to keep the enemy suits targeting us constantly turning, trying to bring the weapons mounted along their right arms around in time to take another shot at us, trying to make it impossible for them to get a target lock with their missiles.
My capacitors had recharged and I fired my plasma gun again. I cut the arc short and fed power to the jump-jets, cutting across the enemy’s line of travel. The lot of them had tried to stop, tried to spread out to face us, but that was easier said than done with a reinforced company, well over a hundred suits all rushing in the same direction, trying to overwhelm Geiger and Vicky and the rest of the Vigilantes before they could recover from the explosion. Electron emitters that had been trying to swing across bodies to the left suddenly had to try to track me upward, overhead, back the other direction, and before they could, the rest of my Marines were wheeling and firing and flying.
It was another tactic that, had it continued to be successful, would have wiped the Tahni force out. It couldn’t, of course, and I knew that. Because the Tahni, for all their failings, weren’t stupid, and their High Guard was the best of them. It took them precious seconds and cost them precious lives, but they finally began to laager. It wasn’t a formation I’d seen in actual combat before, because the battles I’d fought in with Tahni High Guard had been more dynamic, more individual. The suits were designed for their mobility and versatility and most of the time, neither side wanted to waste those capabilities by grouping them all in one, big mass and trying to organize a defense.
But there was a time for it, and a tactic, and we learned it as well as they did. The lager. It went back to a day when settlers in wagons had to defend themselves against more mobile bands of warriors, and their best defense was to circle the wagons and form a ring, making sure they had a 360-degree field of fire. I saw it coming, saw the first of the electron beamers begin to hit us. IFF signals winked out, each stripping off bloody flesh from my soul, but the cold, calculating veteran instincts operated my brain like I operated the suit, and gave orders independent of the spiritual and emotional pain running through my gut.
“First and Second, wheel left and volley fire. Third, follow me into the hole.”
Another risk, a damned big one. The Tahni were still flowing out of the hole in the pavement, up from a ramp leading into the bunker, revealed by the shaped charge, and it was very possible there were more of them in there, more High Guard troops still rushing to join the fight. Taking a platoon inside might get us all killed. But standing out in the open with three platoons and trading broadsides with the better part of two companies of enemy would definitely get us all killed. I had to get some of the troops to cover, be able to draw enemy fire away from the others.
I was first into the hole as I’d been first to charge into the enemy because when I’d made the decision to disobey direct orders and throw away everything I’d worked for these last five years to save Vicky, I’d also decided that if I was going to do it, I was going to run point on it. If there were enemy in that hole, they were going to kill me first and maybe give the others more time to deal with it.
There were enemy in that hole. But they weren’t High Guard. Shock-Troops were swarming up behind their battlesuited big brothers, dozens of them, God alone knew how many because they were still coming up a ramp through a tunnel down into the bunker complex. I blasted the front ranks with a shot from my plasma gun and a good five or six went down with the one round, huge chunks of their bodies simply
