Fire Base (Drop Trooper Book 6), page 12
Shit. She’d worked that angle just right, and from the smirk on Luz’s face, I would have been willing to bet he’d been the one to put the thought in her head.
“If that’s what you want, Mama Bindy,” I told her, “then that’s what we’ll do. But tell me, is it what you want, or is it what he wants?” I nodded toward Luz. “Because I don’t know that he wants the best for this family more than he wants us out of the way.”
I was putting it out on the line for her, and that was nearly as risky as going through with the mission, but I felt it was worth it. More than anything else, I didn’t want Luz Vazquez on our shuttle.
Mama Bindy eyed Luz sidelong, and I thought perhaps I had gotten through to her, but she just shook her head.
“That is as may be, and yet Luz is my right hand and you must learn to work with him despite any animosity you may have for each other.”
There was one other route I could have taken, another option that might have gotten us out of this. I could have asked her to let us out. We’d accomplished our purpose for infiltrating Kurotong, found out what their connection was to the Tahni, and if I could get her to simply allow us to quit, we could carry out our mission and she’d never even have to know what happened.
But the other possibility was that she and Luz would decide the three of us were too dangerous to allow to live after we’d inserted ourselves in their business and had a chance to snoop around.
You were an officer, Cam. They paid you to make decisions like this.
“And what would you think of us,” I ventured carefully, “if we decided you were asking too much?”
“I would think,” she responded, just as circumspect, “that you are far too smart a young man to believe such a thing.”
And that settled that. I forced a smile. Time for Plan B.
“When do we leave?”
12
“You know,” Baker Gardeck said, staring at Luz and the squad of cartel gunners filing up the lander’s belly ramp, “shit like this is why I slept in the shuttle.”
Which had been fairly obvious when we’d boarded. He was still folding up his hammock, wrapping it in the straps he’d rigged to cargo tie-downs and hadn’t even gotten around to cleaning up the remains of ration packets littering the deck beneath where it had hung.
“I’m not crazy about the situation myself,” I told him, speaking quietly enough that I doubted the sound would carry down the steps to the main passenger compartment forward of the cargo bay. “But we gotta put up with it for the time being.”
I glanced out of the corner of my eye, trying to make sure Luz Vazquez wasn’t looking my way. The Kurotong enforcer seemed to be busy getting his troops positioned in the acceleration couches, under the watchful eye Vicky and Wade, who stood with their backs to the Vigilante racks, arms folded, as if daring any of the Kurotong goons to touch our shit.
“We’re going in to take out an operation on one of the nearby islands by a rival cartel, and once we’ve eliminated their heavy weapons, you’re supposed to drop these clowns in on the site for intelligence collection.”
The corner of his mouth turned up and I knew he’d caught the edge to my tone.
“So, what are we really gonna do?”
“As soon as they’re off the bird, you take off and we’ll jet up and meet you in the air, then go straight from there to Pinatubo. We’ll be all over the Tahni before Kurotong can warn them. And once we get our hands on their artifact, we load it up and head for orbit.”
“Kurotong has its own pickets up there,” Gardeck warned me, though he kept his expression neutral. “They ain’t Fleet cruisers, but they’ll sure as hell tear through this bird.”
“Which is why we’re going to call in the cavalry,” I agreed.
“Shit,” he sighed, turning the word into three syllables. “Dunstan’ll never let me forget that he saved my ass. But that sounds better than sitting around here for another week, eating protein bars.”
“Let’s get this done and get off this rock,” I said, clapping him on the shoulder.
I said it, and yet I wasn’t certain I was telling the pilot the truth. Not that I would miss Luz and the intrigue with Kurotong, but there was something about Bathala…or maybe, about Mama Bindy. I’d run into a lot of gang leaders in Trans-Angeles and I’d figured she would be just like them, bullies who ran things by force and by fear. She was different than I’d thought, and so was Isabella. And while I didn’t feel any guilt for screwing up her deal with the Tahni, I did feel some for leaving her with a snake like Luz.
The metal gratework of the steps clanked under my boots, a heartbeat rhythm, and I met Luz’s eyes as he stared at me coming down from the cockpit. His people—men, I noted, not a female among them—were strapped in except for the one I recognized as his lieutenant, or maybe chief muscle was a better word. Tall for a local, easily a head taller than me, his head was shaven and a bushy, black beard accentuated his broad shoulders and thick neck. Like the others, he wore solid black, as close as they came to a uniform, but unlike their compact carbines, he had an assault gun slung across his back.
“You might want to stick that in the equipment locker,” I told him, trying to make myself sound friendly, all full of comradery and teamwork. “If we have to do any evasive maneuvers, it’ll ricochet around here like a pinball and smack the shit out of all of you.”
For which I was sure I would cry bitter tears.
“Don’t worry about it,” the big man rumbled like a distant landslide on a mountainside. “She ain’t going nowhere as long as I’m holding onto her.”
“You should worry about yourself, Alvarez.” Luz wasn’t exactly glaring, but if he’d pulled a gun and tried to shoot me right there, it wouldn’t have been a shock. “You think you can get away with talking me down in front of Mama Bindy? When we get back, you think I won’t challenge you in front of the whole compound, let them watch while I pound you into the dirt?”
“Uh-huh. That’s a brilliant thing to say to a guy who you’re counting on to wipe out the opposition so they don’t shoot the shit out of you.”
I brushed past him, yanking the control to open the chest plastron of my Vigilante, not waiting to hear his response. The interface cables unspooled easily at my tug and I jacked into the Vigilante’s control system, ignoring the look of disgust from the Kurotong crew. I guess they considered us freaks, though given their penchant for tattoos and piercings, I found that ironic.
Vicky was already halfway into her armor, but Wade was backed up against his, still watching Luz and the others as if he was guarding our back. I appreciated the sentiment and didn’t have the heart to tell him how useless he or any of us would be if the whole group of gunmen decided they were going to take us down.
I felt better when the plastron clicked shut, knowing nothing they were carrying could penetrate our armor. It would be nice if they didn’t try, since trying to fight them in mid-air could do nasty things to our ride. I waited until Vicky and Wade were sealed up, then opened an intercom channel to the cockpit.
“We’re secure,” I told Gardeck. Well, we were secure. I didn’t check and didn’t care if Luz was belted in or was about to go bouncing around the cargo bay. “Take us up.”
“Roger that. Gonna be a short flight, distance-wise, but since we’re looking at possible anti-aerospacecraft fire, I’m going to come in on a low spiral just above the water. You’ll be jumping out low and fast, so be ready.”
“Oh, joy.”
The turbines had been spinning up for a few seconds, and as if my proclamation had been the confirmation he’d been waiting for, they erupted with a teeth-rattling roar and the cargo bird began creeping upward. I tapped into the external cameras and was rewarded with a cloud of dust that obscured the details of the spaceport, turning the neatly-delineated edges of the slip walls into a haze of nebulous white.
White turned to blue as the jets cleared their throat and reached deeper into their chest voice, accompaniment for our rise into the morning sky. Nothing else was flying, not even a hopper, and I wondered if that was Mama Bindy’s doing. And if she’d thought through the implications of it. If the Russians had eyes in the town, which they would if they weren’t totally incompetent, grounding all other air traffic while just one shuttle took off might set off some alarms.
I tried to shrug, though the armor arrested it. Whether or not they were warned of our takeoff, they’d know we were coming eventually. I was just hoping they wouldn’t know about the suits. The one time we’d used them was pretty far away from any habitation, but the workers might have talked or someone inside Kurotong might have blabbed. Weston had known we’d asked Bindy about the Tahni and that had been a private dinner.
I blinked. Yeah, it had been a private dinner. And who was there at the breakfast that would have motivation to sell us out to La Sombra? Not Bindy or Isabella. I might have been wrong, but I didn’t think they were the type to make a deal with La Sombra.
Unless they wanted to avoid a full-scale war and offered us up as sacrificial lambs.
No. I didn’t want to believe it. I wanted to think they cared more about their own personal honor than that. Maybe Rodrigo? I didn’t know the kid, hadn’t said two words to him since we’d arrived. Maybe he was a talker, got drunk with his friends and blabbed the whole thing. Or maybe he was the one who’d been afraid of a cartel war and sold us out.
But I didn’t have to look that far. Luz was a much more believable target. He’d been pissed at us for questioning the deal he’d backed and he knew exactly who would have a motive to take us out while assuring him plausible deniability. Even if the stupid bastard couldn’t remember how to say it.
“Vicky, Wade,” I said over a private net to the two of them, realizing this was close as we were going to get to being able to talk with no worry of anyone spying on us. “I think Vazquez is the one who sold us out to Weston and La Sombra.”
Silence for a long moment, and I wondered if the internal comms weren’t working.
“Might be,” Wade acknowledged, finally. “He sure wasn’t happy with us for asking about the Tahni.”
“Does it change anything?” Vicky asked.
I was ready to tell her that of course it did, when I realized she was right.
“No. After we cut out and leave him on the island, I guess it doesn’t. But it bugs the hell out of me that we’re letting him get away with it.”
“What?” she wondered. “Do you want to send a message to Mama Bindy before we break orbit, tell her Luz betrayed her? After we betray her right under her nose and take out the Tahni, do you think she’ll believe us?”
I frowned. She was right, but did she have to be so right?
I sulked and let myself believe I wasn’t responding because the shuttle was hitting the inside of a tight curve, the belly jets pushing my guts up into my chest while the boost from the rear engines mashed me into the back of my suit. I’d cut off the optical feed from the shuttle, not wanting to entertain the stomach-twisting visuals that I might have enjoyed in simpler times, and concentrated on checking my suit’s systems.
I’d checked them when we’d landed back at the spaceport after the attack on the skim-house, and no one had touched them since then so far as we knew, but you checked things even when you just knew they were right because it was a good habit. The hoppers had been topped off with cartridges for the Gatling laser, the drums replaced for the Gauss rifle and I was as well-armed as I was going to be until we could convince the CSF to spring for a plasma gun or some Fire-n-Forget missiles. They could have slapped a missile launcher together on a fabricator, scavenged Hyper-Explosives out of laser cartridges or industrial blasting charges for the warheads, and used off-the-shelf tech to produce a guidance system. It would have worked on the cartel soldiers, but we didn’t need it for the cartel soldiers.
And a cobbled-together, half-assed missile would have been worse than useless against Tahni High Guard battlesuits. My only consolation was that, so far as we knew, they didn’t have any missiles, either. What they did have was more than three battlesuits, which was why surprise was going to be key to this battle.
The shuttle smoothed out of the bank and levelled off, though I could feel the huge cargo lander shuddering, so close to the waves that it was catching updrafts.
“You jarheads drop in thirty seconds,” Gardeck warned us. “Time to cut loose and get in position.”
“Good copy,” I told him. “We’ll be ready.”
I didn’t have to tell Vicky or Wade what to do, which was both a relief and a burden in and of itself. Giving orders, whether as an NCO or an officer, had been a way to order my own thoughts, make sure I was mentally ready for what was coming. It hadn’t started out that way, had developed more as a coping mechanism to help me transition from only having to worry about myself to being responsible for a fire team, then a squad, then a platoon, and finally a whole company. The responsibility was gone, but the coping mechanism had vanished with it.
I compensated by giving orders to myself, being very specific as if I was riding the case of a habitual fuck-up with no attention to detail.
Use your left hand, Private Alvarez, to disengage the magnetic cargo locks and set your Vigilante loose from the restraint cage. Your other left, Alvarez!
The Vigilante lurched forward, no longer moving in concert with every lurch in sway of the shuttle, and I took a broad step to seize balance, the motion putting me between Vicky and Wade as they stepped out of their cargo frames.
Stop showing off, Alvarez! So, you can walk! So can a two-year-old baby!
“You guys good?” I wondered. “All systems check out?”
“Everything green,” Wade told me, not seeming to take offense even though he was technically in charge.
“This old-ass piece of shit is as ready as it’s going to be,” Vicky replied, lacking the momentous and self-consciously military reverence of Wade’s answer, but certainly more honest. “Let’s get this charade out of the way and go do our real job.”
“Open the ramp, Gardeck,” I told our pilot.
Air began whistling around the edges of the belly ramp as the motors pushed against the air flowing by outside, winning the battle only through brute strength. The shrill sound was a counterpoint to the roar of the jets, taking us as low and slow as we dared, and the same visceral, seat-of-the pants
We clomped toward the belly ramp, and out of the corner of my eye, I caught sight of Luz Vazquez twisted around in his seat, watching us go. He was smiling. He knew something we didn’t. The realization hit me as I stepped off the end of the ramp and into nothingness, but it was too late to do anything but align my suit and hit the jets and hope the others were doing the same. The ocean was three hundred meters below us, the ground another two hundred meters farther forward, and from this height, hitting either one would be just as deadly.
“Guys,” Vicky said, her voice incredibly calm, “I have a complete propulsion failure.”
The words came down like a death sentence.
She was falling.
13
There’s a psychological condition called “tachypsychia.” It’s a mental state where everything appears to slow down and you seem to have minutes to consider every choice, to see every angle. It’s an illusion, of course. What’s really happening is that you’re acting, or reacting, on pure instinct, sometimes born of training and experience, milliseconds ahead of any conscious thought. The sense of preternatural clarity, of an eternity to examine the situation and make a choice, comes because you’re seeing the image a microsecond late, a delayed reaction built into the human brain likely for some evolutionary advantage. You’ve already made a decision, probably already begun to act on it, but your brain has convinced you that you’re still thinking about it and came to the decision from pure logic and reason.
I’d experienced it a few times before I found out in OCS what it was, exactly, and when I did, I hadn’t been happy at the knowledge. I’d firmly believed I was special, that I was just so good at what I did that time went slower for me in combat. I thought that once I knew what was really going on, that it would be like the old story of the centipede who someone asked how he could walk with all those legs and once he’d thought about it too much, he couldn’t. I thought I’d be frozen with indecision because of the knowledge that my freedom of choice was an illusion.
That didn’t happen. Instead, the knowledge gave me a certain freedom, the realization that I’d already made my decision and now was the time to think two more decisions down the road.
So, when I shifted the angle of my jets and rocketed down at an angle towards Vicky’s suit, I didn’t question my sanity, didn’t wonder what I intended to do, didn’t agonize over whether it would work. I just did it.
And while I acted, the details of my surroundings washed over me in a flood of data, as if they were the product of my own eyes and ears and nerve endings rather than the distilled product of my suit sensors presented in a pre-digested form to make it easier for me to understand under stress.
The morning sun was climbing into a sky hazy and stained with soot from the rumblings of a nearby volcano, and it was hard to discern where the clouds ended and the smoke began. Would it be dangerous, long-term, breathing the sulfur fumes and drinking water contaminated with the toxins of the volcanos? Did people just keel over and die from it here, or was that something else their Firefox weed helped prevent?
Below us, the waves were crashing against the rocky shores of Jolo, the promontory jagged with volcanic stone, a natural barrier against anyone docking a boat on this side of the island, though it wouldn’t have deterred us. Where the rocks ended, the jungle growth began, choking off any approach but also making this side of the island worthless for positioning Triple-A emplacements. I could see why Gardeck had chosen this direction for his approach. The man knew his stuff.
