fireball that consumed Private Naglie lasted less than a second. I swore, but gave thanks too, knowing his death would give the team another surge of adrenaline. Adrenaline they needed to survive.
A buzzer buzzed, and my heads-up display (HUD) indicated the tool heads were coming out to meet us. The gunny confirmed it.
“M-dog two to M-dog one. We have four-zero, repeat, four-zero T-heads outbound our sector. Over.”
Wamba had a command freq that could override the rest of us. He used it. “B-dog one to M-dog one. Team two owns twenty right. You take twenty left. Team three will cover. Over.”
I switched to the team freq. “M-dog one to M-dog team. Twenty right belong to us. Three will cover. Mark ’em and take ’em. Over.”
Though not supposed to take an active role, I had no desire to watch while my team fought. I picked a blip, marked it as my own, and checked to make sure that the rest were accounted for.
The tracking tone went off. A missile was headed my way. I dumped chaff, hit the electronic countermeasures (ECM) booster switch, and did a backward flip.
Bodmods Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of General Dynamics, makes one helluva battle suit, but Krupp “We arm business so they can do business” Industries makes some top-of-the-line antipersonnel missiles. One of them followed me down. I spent a fraction of a second wishing I had a suit with more offensive weaponry, realized it was a waste of time, and launched a decoy.
The decoy was the size and shape of a pocket stylus and had been programed to radiate heat, radio, and radar signals identical to those emitted by my battle suit. My onboard computer dumped ninety per cent power and waited to see what would happen. The missile bought it, chased the decoy, and exploded.
Thus freed, I entered the battle sim, checked to make sure that my team had held its own, and searched for my target. He or she was busy pushing a deactivated M-dog suit up the seam between Daw’s team and mine. They might have been trying to fool us, or shield themselves from attack, or who knows what. My battle sim informed me that the suit belonged to Private Kim, a tough little troop who’d been brought up in the lower levels of the London Urboplex, and played folk songs on the harmonica.
Using Kim’s body as a shield pissed me off, and I fed the T-head’s coordinates to one of our free-floating missile racks. They had been ejected at the same time we were, and mounted four missiles each. I knew the rack would draw fire the moment I launched, so there was no point in conserving ordnance. I put two missiles on the tool head, one on a blip I wasn’t sure of, and one on T-12’s antenna farm. I knew the strikers would destroy the fourth missile long before it reached the asteroid’s surface, but knew the effort would cost them two or three missiles. Missiles they wouldn’t be able to launch at me or my team.
I gave the order to fire. The missiles left the launcher and made dotted lines across my sim. Both the tool head and what remained of Kim’s body vanished in a cartoonlike ball of flame. The enemy suit, a ridiculous-looking stick figure, disappeared a fraction of a second later. The launch rack, plus the last two missiles it had fired, were destroyed moments after that.
I switched to the big picture. The first thing that jumped out at me was that most of the strikers were dead. They were pretty good for amateurs, but we were pros, and that makes a difference. Or so the company hopes. Most of their suits, or what was left of their suits, had started the long, slow drift to nowhere. But five or six of the bastards had taken refuge behind a large chunk of free-floating rock. I saw a missile explode against the boulder’s outer surface and push it towards the asteroid beyond. The tool heads answered with a crew-served laser cannon, and the battle continued.
I frowned. The team should have bypassed the rock rats and pushed for the asteroid itself. Daw’s squad was damned near there. I checked, saw the gunny’s light had gone out, and understood what had happened. The gunny was dead, and it was payback time. I chinned the mike.
“M-dog to M-dog team. Break, I repeat, break. You know the objective. Take it. That’s an order. Over.”
Sergeant Habib had filled the gap left by the gunny…or had tried to. He knew things were out of hand and said so.
“M-dog five to M-dog one. Sorry, sir. Breaking now. Over.”
The battle sim took twenty cubic miles of space and compressed it to a single 3-D image. I saw the team break, re-form, and arrow towards the target. It looked as if they were inches apart, but at least a half-mile separated them.
I switched freq’s, called the Loot, and applied full power. The team would land on T-12’s surface in nine, maybe ten, minutes. I wanted to arrive at the same time they did. The Loot had survived, so far anyway, and sounded solid.
“Dodger-one to M-dog one. Shoot.”
“I have five or six bad guys hiding behind a rock. Over.”
“Roger that, M-dog one. Light the rock. Over.”
I checked to make sure my team was clear, “lit” the rock on my sim and knew the Loot had it too. The response came right away.
She came out of the sun, fed the strikers a missile, and pulled out with a pair of surface-to-air (SAM) missiles hot on her tail. I wanted to watch, wanted to see her escape, but kept my eyes focused on the target. The Loot’s ship-to-ship ordnance was a hundred times larger than the little squirts we used, and the explosion was bright enough to darken my visor. The gunny would be happy. It wasn’t much as trade-offs go, but it was better than nothing.
The asteroid was closer now, close enough to fill my vision and block the star field beyond. The rock had some spin, but not a lot, so the landing would be soft.
But staying down, especially during combat, would be more difficult. Just one overenthusiastic leap and I’d be orbiting T-12 like a target balloon. Yeah, I could blast my way down, but that would take time. Time enough to track my ass and blow it clean off. Another unpleasant thought.
The strikers were out in force. Strafing runs by the Loot and a buddy softened the bastards up but antipersonnel missiles, laser beams, and bullets stuttered up to meet us nonetheless.
The major lit a sector and ordered us to converge on it. Daw’s team would arrive first and have the dubious honor of securing the landing zone (LZ).
We were closer now, close enough for an honest-to-god visual, and I didn’t like what I saw. Roughly half my team, about fifteen effectives, had made it through. One of them, a trooper named Raskin, took a hit and spun out of control. A vapor plume outgassed and disappeared as the suit sealed itself. A buddy called him.
“Hey, Raskin! Can you hear me? Pull out, pull out or you’re going to…”
Raskin hit the ground, bounced, and came apart as the strikers hit him with everything they had.
I swore, added my fire to that generated by the rest of the team, and cut power. We drifted in like those puffy things that dandelions produce in the spring. Fountains of dust spurted upwards as our boots hit, paused for a moment, and drifted sideways.
Fire lanced in from three sides, and what was left of Daw’s team did their best to cover us. I slo-moed my way to a crater and resisted the temptation to pull the edges in around me. I had elbowed my way to the rim and was peeking over the edge when something nudged the side of my helmet. A voice filled my ears. “Maxon?”
I damned near jumped out of my skin before I realized Wamba had arrived and placed his helmet next to mine. The sun reflected off his visor and his eyes. “Sorry, sir. You scared the shit out of me.”
I felt Wamba grin. “Serves your ass right for sleeping on duty. Gather your team. We came to take T-12, and we’re going to do it. Capish?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good. You lost about fifty per cent of your team, ditto for Daw, but about seventy-five per cent of my people made it through. We’ll attack the dome. You hold the LZ and have the coffee ready when we get back.”
I looked, saw he was serious, and shook my head. “Sorry, Major. No damned way. We’re coming with you.”
Wamba looked me in the eye. “Captain, am I to understand that you’re refusing a direct order?”
I nodded. “Yes, sir. You sure as hell are, sir.”
Wamba grinned. “That’s what I thought. You’re a dumb shit, Maxon, but a brave dumb shit, and what more can the share owners ask? Come on. The dome awaits.”
There was a reason why the major was a major and not a captain like me. He had smarts, lots of smarts, and knew how to use them. He had analyzed the defensive fire, identified three sectors where it was relatively light, and
