Terms of Enlistment (16 page)

To my left, a group of shouting rioters come around the concrete pillar I’m using for cover. One of them carries a clunky-looking handgun. He sees me, and raises his gun just as I bring the rifle up to my shoulder and press the trigger.

There’s a mighty shove coming from my right, and suddenly I find myself on my back and skidding across the pavement. I bring my rifle up and turn to face my attackers. Someone seizes the muzzle of my M-66. As I feel the rifle getting wrenched out of my hands, I trigger the grenade launcher with the buckshot round in it. The attacker lets go of my rifle as he catches the full blast of the grenade, four thousand spherical pieces of shrapnel that are spread out to a merely fist-sized group at this range. His midsection erupts into a bloody mush, splattering blood and tissue onto the face shield of my helmet.

Around me, there’s the stuttering of fire from multiple M-66 rifles in fully automatic mode. Next to me, three or four people are on top of Corporal Baker. One of them has seized Baker’s rifle, and he swings it around to bring the muzzle to bear on Stratton, who is struggling with his own pack of rioters a few feet away. I aim my own rifle without thinking, and shoot the rifle-wielding rioter in the back. The rest of Baker’s attackers are busy trying to pin the Corporal to the ground, and I pluck them off his back with single shots one by one. Baker scrambles to his feet, looks around, and then picks up his weapon.

“Who’s firing live rounds?
Who’s firing live rounds?
”

The shout comes over the all-platoon channel. It sounds like our platoon leader, who is holding down one of the not-so-busy corners on the other side of the building with Third or Fourth Squad.

“Bravo One, we need you over here,” Sergeant Fallon toggles back. “We’re getting our asses kicked, in case you haven’t noticed.”

The tactical display is lousy with red carets. We are surrounded by a few hundred very pissed-off rioters. I’m out of buckshot grenades, and the magazine in my rifle is almost empty. I eject the disposable magazine block, and pull another one out of the pouch on my harness with clumsy fingers. It takes me three tries to line up the new magazine with the well at the bottom rear of my rifle. In training, my reloads are always smooth, but right now, it feels like threading a needle with winter gloves. I slap the magazine home and smack the bolt release with my palm. The bolt of the rifle snaps forward and chambers a fresh round, and the little counter on the lower left corner of my tactical display changes from “31” to “249”. The computer keeps track of my rifle’s ammunition status, to let me know when it’s time to reload, and to tell my squad leader through the TacLink when I’m running low. What it doesn’t monitor is how scared I am, how many times my armor has been struck, how much I feel like puking, and how badly I want to be back at the base right about now.

I pick out a new target, sight my rifle, and shoot. Then again, and again. There’s no shortage of targets out there. I have stopped thinking of them as people. They’re just silhouettes in my gun sight now, one squeeze of the trigger each. Our squad is huddled together in a cluster, everybody covering a sector in front, just like in training. For a few moments, all I hear is the steady chatter of our rifles, spitting out death at a few thousand rounds per minute. We fire our rifles methodically, steadily, like we’re in a live-fire exercise at the base range at Fort Shughart.

And then the natives have had enough.

The remaining rioters must have changed their minds about the odds, because the forward surge of the crowd suddenly dissipates, and with it all the angry energy that has motivated the leading ranks to charge soldiers in modern battle armor with nothing but ancient small arms and home-made hand grenades. The formerly amorphous mass of people turns into hundreds of individuals scattering in as many different directions, anywhere but toward the muzzles of our rifles.

I take a ragged breath. It feels like I haven’t filled my lungs properly since the shooting started. I look around to see all of my squad mates still standing, weapons at the ready, and scores of bodies on the street before us. There’s a layer of white stuff in front of our position that looks like a dusting of snow on the ground, and it takes me a moment to realize that those are the discarded plastic sabots of our flechette rounds, stripped from the tungsten darts after leaving the barrels.

Ten yards to our right, the grunts from Third Squad come around the corner of the building at a run, with the platoon leader in front. Lieutenant Weaving takes one look around, and flips up the visor on his helmet.

“Holy shit, people. That’s going to look awful on the Network news.”

Sergeant Fallon starts a response on the squad channel, then catches herself, and walks over to Lieutenant Weaving. When she’s in front of him, she flips up her helmet visor as well.

“Something wrong with your TacLink, Lieutenant?”

“Negative,” he replies.

“Well, you may want to get it checked out when we get back, seeing how it failed to show you the five hundred people trying to overrun us.”

Lieutenant Weaving’s posture tenses, but then there’s a sound like a piece of hail hitting a tin roof, and he stumbles sideways and falls over. A sharp crack rolls across the street, the report of a high-powered rifle.

“Sniper,” three or four of us call out at the same time over the squad channel, and everybody ducks for cover. Sergeant Fallon bends over and grabs Lieutenant Weaving by the arm to drag him to safety.

“Little help here,” she says. I leave the relative safety of my concrete pillar, dash over to her position, and grab the lieutenant’s other arm. Together, we drag his limp bulk over to another concrete pillar.

“Ell-tee is down,” Sergeant Fallon toggles into the platoon channel. “Valkyrie Six-One, this is Bravo One-One. Get your ship down in front of the building for a medevac, pronto.”

“Valkyrie Six-One, copy. ETA two minutes,” I hear in response. Valkyrie is the call sign for our drop ship flight, and Six-One is our platoon’s ship.

“Pop me some smoke, and find that sniper,” Sergeant Fallon orders. Priest and Paterson pull smoke grenades out of their harnesses and throw them into the street in front of our position.

The distant rifle cracks again. There’s a puff of concrete dust as it smacks into the pillar in front of us.

“Shoot the fuck back already,” Sergeant Fallon says.

The smoke grenades explode with a muffled pop, covering the area in front of us in thick, white smoke. The sniper is undeterred. He fires again, and the bullet strikes one of the windows behind us with a slap. Finally, someone gets a computer fix on the most likely trajectory of the sniper’s rounds. The TacLink updates everyone’s displays, superimposing a faint target caret over the sniper’s suspected position a few hundred yards down the street, and the two squads around me open up with their rifles.

“Grayson, with me. Sergeant Ellis, mind the shop for a minute. Grayson and I are going to carry the Ell-Tee back to the square and get him onto the bird. The rest of you, cover our asses.”

“Affirmative,” Sergeant Ellis replies. He’s the squad leader of Third Squad, and nominally equal in seniority to Sergeant Fallon at this point, but our squad leader is so high in the company’s pecking order that any NCO lower than the company sergeant usually defers to her.

The lieutenant is out cold. The bullet has torn the partially raised visor from his helmet, and then nailed him in the forehead at an angle. His face is covered in blood, and his forehead looks like someone’s given him a glancing blow with an axe, but he’s still breathing, and the round doesn’t seem to have penetrated the bone. Sergeant Fallon removes his helmet, drops it on the ground next to her, and then holds out her hand.

“Give me a trauma pack, Grayson.”

I reach into the side pocket of my ICU pants and pull out a bandage packet. I pull open the plastic seal, shake out the bandage, and hand it to Sergeant Fallon. She places it on the lieutenant’s forehead. The thermal bandage instantly adheres to his wound, sealing the gash in his head.

“He’ll live to collect his Purple Heart,” Sergeant Fallon pronounces. “Help me get him over to the ship.”

We each grab one of Lieutenant Weaving’s arms to haul up his bulk, which is considerable. He’s a tall guy, a hundred and ninety pounds at least, and the battle armor weighs another thirty pounds on top of that.

“Grab his rifle, too,” the sergeant says. I stoop down to pick up the lieutenant’s M-66. I notice that he still has four full magazine pouches, and my computer informs me that his rifle is still loaded with 250 rounds.

“Valkyrie Six-One, ETA one minute,” I hear over the platoon channel. “Keep your heads low down there.”

We head to the main entrance of the building at an awkward short-step run, with Lieutenant Weaving’s inert mass hanging between us. There are still rioters all over the place, but they’re mostly busy avoiding us, now that we’ve demonstrated that we’re willing to use our live rounds.

Overhead, I hear the engines of the descending drop ship. They’re coming in at high speed, a combat landing with emphasis. As we turn the corner to the main civic plaza, I flinch at the sight of more bodies on the ground, easily twice as many as there are in front of First Squad’s position. Second Squad didn’t hold back.

“Bravo One-One, this is Bravo One-Two. We have three casualties that need to go out on your ship.”

“Copy that, Bravo One-Two. Bring ‘em up, and don’t dawdle,” Sergeant Fallon responds.

The drop ship makes a dramatic entry. It breaks out of the low clouds, banked in a tight final turn. For a moment, a primal fear grips me at the sight of that huge, lethal-looking war machine. Whoever designed the Hornet drop ship didn’t spend a moment considering aesthetics. It’s all angles and facets, bristling with multi-barreled cannons and ordnance pods. It looks like someone’s fever-induced idea of a cross between a hornet and a dragonfly, blown up to massive size and clad in laminate armor.

As I watch, the landing gear of the drop ship extends, and the ship slows down for a vertical touchdown. At the last moment, the pilot turns the Hornet to make the tail
and loading ramp face the administration building, and the weapons arrays point in the direction of the threat. I can see the cannon in the nose turret swinging side to side as the gun system automatically scans for targets. Then the main gear touches down, and the Hornet settles in a low crouch. The cargo ramp at the rear opens with a hydraulic whine.

“There’s your ride,” Sergeant Fallon tells the unconscious Lieutenant Weaving.

We carry the lieutenant into the plaza. The tail of the drop ship is a few dozen yards from the building. The crew chief steps out onto the ramp formed by the lower half of the cargo door, and waves us on.

We’re thirty feet from the ramp when the thunder of heavy automatic weapons fire rolls across the plaza. I look around for a threat, thinking that the chin turret of the drop ship is engaging a target. Then I see that the tracers are coming in rather than going out.

“Hit the deck,” Sergeant Fallon shouts, and we do, taking Lieutenant Weaving down to the ground with us.

Ahead of us, there’s a noise like hail on a metal roof as the drop ship starts taking hits.

“Where the fuck is that coming from?” someone shouts over the platoon channel.

“The rooftops,” someone else replies. “They got guns on the rooftops, right and center.”

Ahead of us, the drop ship pilot gooses the engines and picks the ship off the ground. The crew chief in the hatch holds on for balance, and then retreats back into his armored ship. I wonder why the chin turret isn’t firing back. The streams of tracers come from the rooftops of two tenement buildings, one on the right side of the plaza, and one at the far side, directly opposite the civic building. Both buildings are standard welfare shoebox stacks, thirty floors high, and I realize that the gun turret of the drop ship can’t deflect that high.

The guns on the rooftops fire in bursts, maybe twenty rounds at a time. Sergeant Fallon and I are in the open, between the relative safety of the building, and that of the armored ship. The hatch of the drop ship is much closer than the concrete overhang of the civic building, but the drop ship is already three feet off the ground, and it doesn’t look like the crew feels like waiting around while their ship is getting sprayed with incoming fire.

“Where the fuck did these people get heavy machine guns?” Sergeant Fallon asks. She pulls a smoke grenade out of her harness and motions for me to do the same. We chuck our grenades out into the plaza, and a few moments later, our position is obscured in thick smoke.

“Let’s get the hell out of here,” Sergeant Fallon suggests. We seize the still unconscious lieutenant by the arms once more and start our dash back to the building. Behind us, the machine gun rounds keep hitting the armor of the drop ship in a steady staccato.

Suddenly, the pitch of the engines changes, and I can hear right away that something essential just broke. The steady howl of the turbines turns into a tortured shriek. I look over my shoulder and see smoke pouring out of the starboard engine. Another stream of tracers comes down onto the drop ship, which is now fifty feet above the plaza. As they impact the armor, they throw up red and yellow sparks, the tell-tale signature of armor-piercing rounds hitting a hard surface.

“Don’t stop to sight-see, moron,” Sergeant Fallon yells. We finish our dash to the safety of the overhang in front of the building.