Terms of Enlistment (19 page)

For a while, I can see and hear nothing. My polarized visor only slowly returns my vision, and my audio feed remains muted. I’m blind and deaf in my armor cocoon, rendered senseless by the built-in technology to save my hearing and eyesight.

As the world come back into focus, I see my squad mates scattered on the ground all around me, everyone in a similar state of disorientation. I get to my knees, pick up my rifle, and check its status on my helmet display. I’m so used to seeing the electronic overlay in my field of vision that it’s disorienting to see nothing at all, no symbols and numbers listing my active TacLink channels, the loading status of my weapon, our squad’s waypoint markers, or even the colored carets marking friendlies and hostiles. All I see is the green-tinged visual feed from my helmet sensor, void of any tactical interpretation by the tactical computer built into my armor. Other than the low-light enhanced vision, I’m no better off technologically than the people who are shooting at us.

Then my computer resets itself, recovering from the massive knock that has upset its digital equilibrium. I see the familiar code sequence of a system initialization flashing on the helmet-mounted screen, and five seconds later, I can see and hear properly once more.

I toggle my TacLink into the squad channel, and clear my throat.

“First Squad, comm check. Anyone copy?”

“Yeah, we’re back,” Baker replies. “Boy, that was a bit of a rattle, wasn’t it?”

“No shit,” Hansen says. “I haven’t heard anything this loud since that floor party in my senior year.”

“Perimeter, people,” Sergeant Fallon admonishes. “Get up, and mind your sectors.”

Her order seems a bit pointless for the moment—anyone caught in this stuff without the benefit of battle armor or integrated helmet systems will be blind and deaf for a while. Still, I check my rifle once more, pick up the MARS launcher, and take up position by the side of a trash dumpster, to cover the mouth of the alley.

The entire alley is covered in debris that wasn’t there just moments ago. There are shards of polycarbonate everywhere, and as I look up at the buildings that make up one side of this alley, I realize that every single window in the building has been blown out by the pressure wave, dozens of inch-thick polycarb panes shattered like thin ice on a puddle. In the street beyond, I see flaming debris.

“Grayson and Hansen, head over to the end of the alley and sneak a peek,” Sergeant Fallon orders.

We dust ourselves off and trot to the mouth of the alley, back to where we stood just a few moments ago.

“Holy shit,” Hansen says as we turn the corner.

The street in front of us looks nothing like it did when we ran up to the drop ship a few minutes ago. The intersection where the wounded ship crashed is no longer a tidy, mappable feature in the cityscape. The road ends seventy-five yards in front of us, and a smoldering crater marks the spot where the drop ship blew up. The buildings that flanked the intersection are simply gone. From our spot at the corner of the alley to the ruined houses at the edge of the explosion radius, there’s not a single window left intact on the street. There’s debris everywhere—bits of building material, shards of polycarb window panes, and chunks of pavement. The drop ship has disappeared entirely, and I can’t see a single identifiable part of it anywhere.

“What the hell do they stuff into those demolition charges?” I ask.

“Fuel-air explosive,” Hansen answers. “Field-improvised. The tanks are rigged so the remaining fuel gets vaporized into the ship. They also light off whatever ordnance is still on the racks.”

“Holy hell. This neighborhood is fucked up now.”

“It’s not like it was a vacation spot before,” Hansen chuckles.

I scan the area with my low-light vision. There are hundreds of little fires in my field of view, flaring bright green on my helmet screen. I wonder how many people were blown up with that drop ship, or had their houses come down on top of them. Would anyone have stuck around after the crash and the firefight? I’m trying to think about what I would have done, back home in the PRC, and I conclude that anyone who decides to stick around when a drop ship falls out of the sky next to their house
deserves
to get blown sky-high.

“Keep a watch,” Sergeant Fallon says. “We’re coming out. Let’s clear the area while the cockroaches are stunned.”

Sergeant Fallon has elected to take the most direct route back to the civic center. We’re walking out of the place the same way we walked in, on the main road that leads straight back to the plaza. The side streets and alleys offer more cover, but that would benefit our opponents more than us.

I am once again on rear guard duty. The two pairs of troopers carrying the pilot and crew chief are shielded by two pairs of unencumbered troopers in the lead and rear. Hansen and I are keeping an eye out on the road behind us, but the street scene is eerily quiet once more. Every once in a while, I see movement in a doorway or alley mouth, but nobody’s shooting at us. For my part, I’d gladly call it a night, and as we leapfrog back in the direction of the plaza, I hope that the other side shares that sentiment.

Overhead, Second Platoon’s drop ship descends out of the dirty night sky to land on the plaza once more. I hold my breath as they pass over the tall apartment building where one of the heavy machine guns was raining down armor-piercing rounds onto Valkyrie Six-One a little while ago, but the drop ship passes over the roof of the building without incident.

“Third of a klick, people,” Sergeant Fallon says. “Almost there. I don’t know about you, but I’m good and ready for a shower and a stress fuck.”

“Amen to that,” Stratton chuckles.

“It’s gotten too fucking quiet,” Jackson says from the front. “They all pack up and go home, or what?”

I open my mouth to comment on Jackson’s entirely too cliched interjection, when something catches my eye up ahead. There are flashes of light coming from the apartment building in the distance, and I realize the source of those flashes just before the booming reports of heavy gunfire reach the acoustic sensors on my helmet.

“Incoming!” I shout and dodge to the left, where a doorway offers some cover. My helmet display flashes as the computer updates threat vectors and enemy positions on the tactical map.

“High rise at twelve o’clock, three or four floors down from the top!”

The tracers reaching out from the building look like laser beams in the darkness—the fake red beams of old science fiction movies, not the invisible high-energy pulses of real laser weapons. The first burst rains down right in front of our squad, skipping red-hot tracers off the asphalt.

In front of me, the squad dashes for cover, but there is precious little to be found on this block, and nothing that will stop a heavy machine gun round. The gunner must have tracked us for a little while, and opened fire only when we were away from any alleys, with nothing but building walls flanking the road on both sides of us. The nearest alley mouth is a few dozen yards ahead, far enough that it might as well be a mile away.

Sergeant Fallon drops to one knee, sights her rifle, and fires back at the source of the incoming rounds. The high rise is almost half a kilometer away, which is about as far as our rifles will reach. Her M-66 sounds weak and tinny compared to the thunderous reports of the heavy gun in the distance. Next to the sergeant, Stratton and Jackson follow suit and return fire.

The heavy machine gun stops firing for a moment, and then opens up again. This time, the burst is right on target. I watch in horror as the stream of tracers reaches out and touches Stratton, who falls backwards.

I catch movement out of the corner of my eye, and turn to see a rifle barrel poking over the edge of a roof to our rear. There’s movement on that rooftop, people shuffling into position, and my guts contract as I realize that the locals aren’t done fighting after all. It’s a crude ambush, but we ambled right into it.

The heavy machine gun in the distance opens up again. The gunner has good fire discipline. He fires his weapon in short bursts. Whoever is working that weapon isn’t new to the task. Hansen pushes me into the doorway to my left, and then piles in after me, just as the new flight of tracers from the distant machine gun rakes the pavement in front of us. I bump into the entrance door of the building. The impact of my armor-clad bulk rattles its polycarb panes. The MARS launcher slides off my back, and I land on top of it. We scramble away from the curb as the tracer rounds whiz by just a few feet to our right. One of the tracers hits the corner of the doorway and knocks off a chunk of concrete, which rains down on us in bits and pieces.

On my tactical screen, I see two more of our squad icons flash brightly with the icon that shouts “Medic Needed”. Our squad medic, Patterson, is one of the medical emergencies. The rest of the squad is moving forward, toward the mouth of the nearest alley, but the machine gunner has our little group dialed in now. The next burst drops another one of my squad mates.

Hansen is back up on her feet, exchanging fire with someone on a rooftop out of sight.

“Grayson, open that fucking door,” she says conversationally, nodding to indicate the entrance door to my left.

I don’t have any buckshot grenades left, and using a HE round would mean that we’d have to step out into the road to avoid getting caught by the blast of the explosion. The rubber rounds will just bounce off the inch-thick polycarb door panels. I switch my rifle to manual fire, set the selector to “continuous burst”, and aim at the center of the door as I pull the trigger. The muzzle flash illuminates the doorway as my rifle burps out the contents of its magazine at two thousand rounds per minute, thirty-three needle-pointed high density tungsten flechettes per second. The storm of flechettes chews into the polycarbonate with ease, and after two or three seconds, the entire upper panel of the door disintegrates in a shower of plastic shards. With the window panel gone, I can reach through the door frame and activate the emergency unlock. I shoulder the door open and turn around to see Hansen on her back, pushing herself further into the doorway with her heels. Her rifle is on the ground next to her. I reach over, grab the back of her helmet, and pull her up into the doorway, out of the line of fire. She weighs close to two hundred pounds with the armor and all her gear, but I am so pumped on adrenaline that I yank her into the dark hallway of the building without ever letting go of my rifle with the other hand.

“You okay?” I ask, and she groans in response. There’s a hole in her armor right by the joint between the chest plate and the shoulder pauldrons.

“Get my rifle,” she says. “I can still shoot with the other arm.”

“Sit tight,” I tell her. The magazine in my rifle is nearly empty again, and I eject it and insert a new one from the stash tucked into the side pocket of my leg armor. Then I hand the rifle to Hansen.

“Take this one for a minute.”

I step back out into the doorway and pick up the MARS launcher. Out in the street, I hear the hammering of the heavy machine gun again. My tactical screen shows nothing but blinking carets, flashing in alternate shades of blue and red—medical emergencies. Across the street, there are a few heads poking over the edge of the roof. I hold the launcher with my left, and pull the pistol I had stuffed into my harness back in the drop ship. The sidearm feels odd and unfamiliar in my hand—I’ve only ever fired one back in Basic, during small arms familiarization—but the computer in my armor immediately recognizes the weapon, switches sighting modes, and displays the remaining ammo count at the bottom of my screen. The pistol only holds twenty-five rounds, a tenth of the rifle’s magazine capacity, but at short range, it beats fighting with bare hands. I draw a bead on one of the heads on the rooftop and squeeze the trigger. The pistol barks a sharp report, and the head underneath my aiming reticle disappears suddenly. There are shouts on the roof, and another head pops up, this one behind the barrel of a rifle. I briefly register that the weapon aimed at me looks a lot like a military-issue M-66. I squeeze off three more rounds in rapid cadence, and the rifleman on the roof disappears. His weapon tumbles from the rooftop ledge onto the street below, where it lands with a hollow clatter. For the moment, there are no more heads coming up on that roof.

I stuff the pistol back into the harness and shoulder the MARS. The machine gunner in the distance has switched to very short bursts, two or three shots at a time, undoubtedly to preserve ammo while making us keep our heads down. My TacLink display shows Hansen moving further into the hallway to my left, and the rest of the squad huddled in a side alley thirty yards ahead. More than half their number are out of the fight, according to the symbols on my screen.

The operation of the MARS launcher is dead simple. We’ve drilled the deployment of the MARS a dozen times, and for some odd reason, I hear Sergeant Burke’s voice in its unforgettable drill instructor twang as my fingers perform the necessary steps to ready the launcher for action.

I point the center of the reticle at the muzzle flashes of the heavy machine gun in the distance, near the top floor of the high rise a third of a mile away, and pull the trigger.

The rocket leaps out of its launch canister with shocking speed. The tail end of the rocket glows with the heat of its internal booster, and the whole thing shoots off into the distance only a little slower than a tracer round. I expected to see the rocket leisurely rise skyward like the Sarissas we used back at the embassy a few weeks ago, but the MARS streaks downrange in a blink, covering the distance between us and the machine gun position in just a few seconds.