“Shift fire!” Xander snapped, sounding very proud of himself, like he’d personally invented the Boomer and pulled every trigger himself. “Target second dish and fire!”
I don’t know how the hell they could see it. They were farther back than we were, so maybe the dust cloud hadn’t obscured their field of view as much as it had ours, but all I heard was the chest-deep thump of the coil guns discharging again, then the agonized shriek of rending metal. I’m sure the second dish coming down was just as impressive as the first, but you couldn’t have proven it by me.
“Both targets serviced, sir,” Xander reported, making the announcement over the company band rather than a private one with Captain Covington, which I thought was pushing things a bit too far.
“We’re not Fleet pilots, Lieutenant,” Covington chided him, his tone so dry two of the words could have started a fire if rubbed together. “We don’t ‘service targets.’ We’re Marines and we blow shit up. And I will allow you blowed that shit up real good.”
I barked a laugh, making sure my mic wasn’t hot.
“First and Second,” Covington went on, his tone turning businesslike. “Proceed to secondary objectives and secure the spaceport facilities. Lt. Kovacs, you’re in command.”
“Yes, sir,” Kovacs said. “Come on, Marines, let’s move out!”
He was a good officer, but I didn’t like him. He reminded me too much of the popular kids at the group homes in Trans-Angeles, the ones who thought being the big fish in that small of a pond meant something.
“Fourth Platoon,” the Skipper went on, including all of us in all of his orders as a matter of course, because, as he liked to remind us, any one of us might have to take command at any time, “you’re with me and Headquarters. We’re heading east to support the Force Recon units landing at the military barracks. Third,” he said to me, “hook up with Alpha and act as a reserve for them at the industrial park. Once they’ve secured the area and Captain Cronje turns you loose, report back to me at the military barracks.”
“Yes, sir.”
And thank God. At least that would get us out of the dust cloud.
Overhead, turbojets were screaming and proton beams were raining fire onto air defense turrets and troops strongholds throughout the city. I let myself draw in a deep breath. We had aerospace superiority. The Tahni didn’t know it, but they’d already lost the battle. Maybe Port Harcourt wasn’t going to be as bad as I’d thought.
Famous last words.
3
Things hadn’t gone quite as well for Alpha, that much was obvious the second we jetted in behind their lines. Two of the smaller buildings in the industrial park, what might have been business offices if this were a human world, though God only knew what the Tahni did in them, were already burning fiercely, and most of the company had taken cover behind a series of storage tanks. The tanks probably held raw materials for fabricators, since I didn’t think even Cronje would be stupid enough to hide behind something volatile while electron beams and coil guns took shots at him through it.
At the center of the ring of warehouses and fabrication plants was a bunker at least fifty meters across, its roof curved and covered with soil, bristling with gun turrets on all sides. They were firing nonstop at the Marine positions, smoke and steam billowing away from the massive, globular storage tanks with every shot.
“Bang-Bang,” I said to my platoon sergeant as we touched down half a kilometer behind the ring of buildings, “take Third and Fourth squad and go around the other side of the perimeter. Let’s see if we can get that thing in a crossfire.”
“Yes, sir,” he growled, sounding dubious about the order. “Though I don’t think we got anything that’ll touch that bunker.”
“Medina, Kreis, you’re with me.”
We approached the storage tanks at a cautious trot, darting between the buildings to avoid attracting fire until we reached an Alpha Company platoon huddled in the lee of what looked like a fabrication center. The IFF transponder told me it was Vicky’s platoon and I lumbered up to her Vigilante. It wasn’t until I could see around her and the suits beside her that I noticed four troopers sprawled out on the ground beside the wall of the building. One was clearly dead, most of the armor’s chest plastron melted away by an electron beam, and if the others were alive, it was only barely.
“You guys got a problem here?” I asked her, the question not as light and bantering as it would have been a few seconds ago.
A coil gun round bit off a corner of the fabrication center, spraying us with fragments of concrete and a shower of dust, and I ducked out of instinct.
“Gosh, you think?” she snapped. “Those turrets were concealed under thermal masking panels. They caught us right in the open and took down half of Third squad before we could get to cover. There are more casualties over behind the storage tanks.”
“Shit,” I muttered, spotting the downed suits hidden in the shadows of the globular tanks as Vigilante battlesuits shuffled back and forth, searching for imagined safety. “Hold on a second.”
I switched to Cronje’s frequency, struck by the realization that he’d been pinned down here while we were taking out the deflector dishes.
“Captain Cronje,” I said, stepping over his argument with a platoon leader that I pretended not to hear. “This is Lt. Alvarez from Delta. I’ve been sent over by Captain Covington to provide support for your objective. We took down the deflectors and the assault shuttles are already hitting the air-defense installations. You might be able to call in an air strike on this bunker by now.”
“Already tried it.” Cronje’s response was terse and
