“Third, lay down suppressive fire on the battlesuits.” I squeezed the words out, flinching as four separate KE guns opened up on me, the tantalum darts ricocheting off my chest plastron, my helmet, leaving craters in the armor where it hit. I couldn’t stand there and take it—the rounds would penetrate eventually.
I waded into them, swinging my arms like a mad titan scattering normal humans from him in a Greek myth. Impacts travelled up through the armor, jolting me through the padding, spears of pain coming from wrenched muscles and joints. Shock-Trooper powered exoskeletons were an improvement over regular infantry, but nowhere near the power of a battlesuit. I outweighed each of them three or four times over and each blow from my isotope-reactor-powered byomer muscles smashed helmets, crushed chests, sent the ones it didn’t kill scattering, with no time to coordinate their fire to take me down.
Still, there were too many, and I would have been overwhelmed eventually, a full-grown man taken down by an army of toddlers, had it not been for a second Vigilante suit stepping up beside me, firing their plasma gun to clear out another six or seven, giving me the time to charge up for another shot. The last star-bright ball of plasma seemed to convince the ones who were left that they weren’t going to get past us. They retreated back into the bunker and whether they tried to escape to fight another day or just committed ritual suicide was all the same to me.
“You’re a company commander, you idiot!” Vicky told me, smacking my suit on the shoulder with her articulated left hand. “What the hell are you doing out front?”
“Everything wrong,” I admitted, smiling at the fact she was still alive. “If you have anyone who can fight, follow me.”
The skirmish against the Shock-Troops had taken seconds, yet the tides of this battle seemed to change with each heartbeat. Without the suit’s display, it would all have been a blur of light, a wash of heat and a clamor of impossible noise, rending metal and evaporating concrete, and I would have been lost, just another target fighting blind. With the display and without the experience I had, I would have been in the same position as Sarrat, barely able to keep myself alive with no chance of leading a squad, much less a platoon.
But I knew things and I couldn’t have told anyone exactly how. I didn’t remember seeing them, surely didn’t have the time to read them, but I knew. Third Platoon was laying down volley fire by squad from the cover of the shallow end of the ragged hole in the street, ducking down into a niche just over two meters deep, while First and Second had circled around to the opposite end of the scrum. The lager wasn’t going to work, and the Tahni were losing troops faster than we were, and while they had more to lose, just killing us wasn’t their aim—their intent was to defend the palace, which meant they had to kill us and live through it.
This was the test of a leader. If the Tahni were poorly led, if they had a Cronje in charge, they’d double-down, charge the hole, try to mix with Third Platoon and what was left of Alpha and Battalion HQ to keep First and Second from shooting at them. It would buy time, help them attrit our numbers, but it wouldn’t accomplish their mission. A good leader, a Covington, would break contact under fire, hit the jets and try to put buildings between them and us, then circle back around to the palace. Which would work just fine for us, too, since I’d left the Boomers there.
These poor bastards were poorly led and charging straight into us, which also meant we were all likely going to die. Fucking Cronje was still haunting me from beyond the grave.
28
“Hit the jets!” I ordered, reflexes and instincts still pulling my strings like a marionette. “Delta, Alpha, all Zero Four elements, hit the jets! Get out of the hole and clear the area!”
I’d heard the static in my headphones just a moment before I gave the order, the distant echo of a preternaturally calm voice, the tone of a combat pilot in an assault shuttle.
“This is Assault Four-One. I read your IFF as Delta, Fourth of the One-Eight-Seven. Do you need air support? Over.”
Oh, fuck yes, we need it!
“Assault Four-One, this is Delta One Actual. Airstrike at my transponder coordinates, danger close, now! Over.”
“Delta One Actual, I confirm, airstrike at your current coordinates, danger close. Assault Four-One out.”
Vigilantes were pouring out of the hole, burning away on jump-jets, all of them following my orders despite the fact that I was only technically in command of two platoons of them, and I held back, firing in support, trying to keep the Tahni pinned down just a few seconds longer, keep them firing at me.
It worked. The electron beams converged on my position and it would have been suicide to hit the jets, so I ducked down instead, waves of heat washing over me, through the armor, singeing my exposed skin. The assault shuttle was coming. I could see its IFF signal in my helmet display. It would be firing in just seconds and I would still be here because there was nowhere left to go.
And I was okay with it.
I’d read a short story once, at the Skipper’s behest, called Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge. It was about a spy who was caught by the other side and was about to be hanged off the side of a bridge. The rope breaks and he takes off running, having all sorts of progressively weirder experiences until at the end, you find out the whole thing was a hallucination he had in the seconds before the rope strangled him to death.
I felt as if my life these last five
