Fire Base (Drop Trooper Book 6), page 13
I had her. I’d come in beneath her torso and grabbed her arms and hit the jets. The full weight of her suit slammed into mine, a kidney-punch hard enough to drive the breath from me. It wasn’t enough, of course. If we’d been able to squeeze engines powerful enough to lift two Vigilantes into the backpacks of the suits, they wouldn’t just be air-droppable, they would have been miniature aircraft just chucked out of orbit straight from a cruiser. But it slowed her descent and mine, and I’d already had time to think about what was next.
“Wade!” I tried to yell the name but it came out a gasp. “Grab her from the back!”
There was very little time. Three hundred meters sounds high up when you’re about to jump out of the back of a shuttle, but not so much at all when the length of that fall is equal to your life expectancy. Wade could have mis-timed his burn, could have got caught in an updraft, could have just decided the hell with the two of us and he was going to make sure if anyone landed safe and sitting pretty, it was going to be him.
He didn’t. He probably didn’t even have time to think about it, probably was already jetting over to do the same thing before his conscious mind had even registered my words. The roar of his own suit jets added to my own seemed to square the decibels and the vibration rather than just adding their sums together, but our descent slowed, and ground that had been rushing inexorably up at us slowed.
And it was ground. That had been the other thing my unconscious mind had decided on without my say-so. The water might have broken our fall with less unyielding solidity than the rocks of the beach, but Vigilante armor didn’t float, and I knew better than anyone how chancy a proposition it was to try to eject from your armor underwater.
“Cam, you idiot!” Vicky screamed at me, and I knew she was royally pissed at the thought that I was going to get myself killed trying to save her.
And then we hit. I’d been in a car crash, been in hard landings more times than I wanted to remember in a Vigilante, and the concussion of impact was no stranger to me, yet somehow every time seemed fresh, like the first time I’d been punched. The breath gushed out of me as pain speared up through the soles of my feet through my hips and stars flared in my eyes, but the jets had done their job. We were on the ground and not under it, and despite the flares of yellow warning lights in my Heads-Up Display, my suit was basically working.
“Status?” I snapped even as I stumbled forward to keep my balance. “Are you okay?”
I’d been mostly talking to Vicky, though I wanted to make sure Wade was unhurt as well. But he’d been highest up and I figured he’d be the least damaged of the three of us. He was first to answer, though.
“I’m good.” For someone who was ‘good,’ his voice sounded strained and filled with intense discomfort. “Got a couple yellows on my knee actuators, and it feels like someone just kicked me straight in the nuts, but I’ll live.”
“Keep on alert, Wade.” I turned around slowly, just in case Vicky’s suit was using mine for balance.
It wasn’t. But it was locked up. I could tell that by the stance. I’d seen it before, a damaged suit with an injured or stunned operator automatically locking its joints, leaving the Vigilante stiff, straight up and down like it had been called to attention on the parade ground.
“Vicky, can you hear me??”
Nothing. I took a second to tap into her suit’s diagnostics and breathed a sigh of relief. She was alive and I didn’t see any immediate indications she was badly hurt, no sudden drop in blood pressure or heart rate. Which didn’t mean she didn’t have a concussion or even a brain bleed. We’d hit hard, and if I hadn’t slammed my head into the cushioning lining the helmet, it was only because I’d had enough foresight to tuck my chin into my chest. It was the recommended crash position and Vicky had been trained in it just as I was, but I’d gotten a head-start. The only adult who’d taught me anything useful in the group homes in Trans-Angeles had been Mr. Omar. He’d taught me how to take a punch, and part of that was tucking my chin into my chest when I waded into a fight. And usually lost it.
“Cam,” Wade said, his voice quiet, subdued. “We got a problem.”
“No shit we got a problem,” I snapped back, still concentrating on Vicky’s medical readings, wondering if I should instruct the suit’s medical systems to administer a stimulant. It was risky. If she did have a brain bleed, it could kill her. But standing here doing nothing wasn’t much safer. “Vicky, come on, talk to me, those fucking Russians are going to have seen us drop. If they get those coil guns trained on us and your jets are out, we’re done.”
“I’m trying to tell you, Cam,” Wade said, “we got trouble, but it’s not the Russians.”
His words finally got through and I checked my sensors. My blood froze. They were all around us, behind the trees, pinning us in the rocky cove. But they weren’t Russians. They weren’t dismounted troops of any sort. Only one thing made that sort of thermal signature and I knew it as well as I knew my reflection in the mirror.
They were Tahni High Guard battlesuits and there were eight of them, a full squad. A hundred meters out and pushing inward as much as the trees would allow. If we had all three of us in working suits and with the advantage of surprise, we could have taken them. Even without surprise, it was possible. Not for most Vigilante drivers, but for Vicky and me, and that wasn’t me being egotistical. We’d proved it in combat, in a war where Marine drop troopers had been dying four to one against the Tahni High Guard when we’d enlisted, and that ratio hadn’t changed for two years after, but we’d survived and killed a shitload of them.
But we didn’t have three working suits…or three working Marines. And we couldn’t even run. Well, I couldn’t.
“Gardeck,” I transmitted. “Do you copy?”
If I could get the shuttle back here, Wade could jet up and get away. I wasn’t going to leave Vicky.
“Gardeck?” I repeated.
No answer. Either we were being jammed, which was likely, or Luz had taken over the shuttle at gunpoint, which was also likely. Because there was no doubt whatsoever in my mind that Vicky’s suit had been sabotaged by Luz Vazquez…and if there were Tahni soldiers here, there was only one man who I could think would have had the ability and the opportunity to set us up.
“Wade, I want you to jet out of here.” The calm in my voice surprised me, because my guts were roiling with anger and frustration. Not only had Luz backstabbed us, but he was going to get away with it. Or, at least, I wasn’t going to be the one who made him pay.
“How the fuck would I even do that?” Wade asked, backing toward me, Gatling laser raised, pointing at the trees. “You can’t get the bird back here in time, even if he was answering the radio.”
“Jet out to the north,” I said, searching my memory for the map of the area Luz had shown us. “There’s a sand bar out there that should be above water right now. After that, there’s a chain of islands just a kilometer or two apart from each other. You might run close to overheating, but the ocean is pretty shallow between them so even if you go down, you should be okay.”
“I can’t just leave you two here!” And he might have meant it, or he might have been saying what he thought a brave man would say. Either way, I appreciated it.
“You have to,” I told him. “Luz set this up and if I can’t be the one to go hunt the fucker down and kill him, you’re going to have to do it. Do it for us. Semper fi, right?”
“Ooh-rah,” he murmured, seeming unconvinced.
“Go now,” I urged. “I’ll hold them off you as long as I can.”
“You mean we will.”
Her voice was weak, woozy, wavering with obvious pain, but it was the sweetest thing I’d ever heard. Vicky’s armor relaxed into a natural stance, though I noted it was dragging its right foot, and she tucked her elbow against her side, levelling her Gatling laser at the squad of Tahni.
“Get going, Wade,” she told him. “We got this.”
I stood shoulder to shoulder with Vicky and wished I could kiss her. I thought about telling her but she would have laughed at me for being sentimental in a fight.
“Are you okay?” I asked instead. It was just as inane, but it got across what I was feeling.
“I’m not going to keel over and die before I get the chance to take a couple of those pig-eyed sons of bitches with me.” She paused. “I’d tell you to go with Cunningham but I know you’re too big of a dope to do the smart thing. And I love you.”
“Love you, too.”
Wade hadn’t made a move to go, though, which was ruining our whole last-stand goodbye.
“What the hell are you waiting….” I stopped, my eyes travelling upward.
My only excuse for not noticing the sensor warning earlier was the fact that I was trying to figure out Vicky’s condition. But there was no way to miss the shadow across the sun. My first thought was that it was Gardeck coming back for us in the cargo shuttle, and elation and relief briefly surged inside my chest.
But this wasn’t our lander, wasn’t any human-designed craft. Not that the shape was totally foreign, since there were laws of aerodynamics to be obeyed, but we and the Tahni had gone a different way in our thoughts of what made a dual-environment aerospacecraft, and their version tended less toward air-breathing jets and more along the lines of a box with wings and big-assed rockets. The thing hovered a hundred meters above us, twin coil-gun turrets aiming downward, ready to turn us into so much scrap metal, and I knew it was over.
But Marines didn’t give up.
“Make a run at the High Guard suits,” I said. “They won’t be able to fire on us if we close with their troops.”
I wasn’t being totally honest either with them or myself. The Tahni had been known to fire on their own troops to get at us, and I had no reason to believe this group put any more value on their individual lives than they’d shown during the war. But the words were automatic, just the next step in the battle, delaying the inevitable, planning to survive for the next thirty seconds, and letting the thirty seconds after that and the one after that, bide on their own until they became more pressing.
And then suddenly, they were.
“I know you are prepared to die, Cameron Alvarez, Vicky Sandoval.” The voice had a haunting quality, something just on the edge of human but not quite there…and it was also hauntingly familiar. “But I don’t think that will be necessary quite yet.”
I hadn’t noticed the other turret beneath the nose of the Tahni because I’d been so totally focused on the coil-guns, and because of its strangeness. At first, I’d dismissed the dish-shaped protuberance as some sort of sensor apparatus, but when it swiveled toward us, I knew I was mistaken.
“Move, now!” I yelled and tried to put myself in front of Vicky.
I needn’t have bothered. When the pulse hit, it cut through all three of us at once. The inside of my suit went black and the Vigilante froze in mid-motion, immobilizing me right along with it. It was more than a systems malfunction, more than a power failure. Everything was dead, right down to the auxiliary battery that should have kept the emergency menu on in my Heads-Up Display. I didn’t panic, mostly because I knew exactly what had happened.
You didn’t see EMP weapons in combat for a lot of reasons, first and foremost because they didn’t work at anything except close range. Military gear was EMP shielded, but the shielding could be overloaded if you put enough power behind the pulse—which meant firing at close range and holding almost completely still, neither of which were practical in combat. Unless you had a fucking assault shuttle and you were facing three idiots in surplus Vigilante battlesuits.
The suit’s systems would reboot in thirty seconds, but if I knew that, I was sure the bad guys did, too, and they wouldn’t be waiting around to make things more sporting. I twisted my left hand around and yanked at the emergency release lever, but nothing happened and I cursed softly. It had a battery built into it but the whole system had been overloaded. I couldn’t move, I couldn’t get out and I couldn’t talk to the others. All I could do was wait those thirty seconds.
Maybe twenty had passed when the chest plastron of my armor lifted out and up, opened manually from the outside, the safeguards deactivated along with everything else by the EMP. Light flooded in from the primary star almost directly overhead and I squinted against it until my eyes adjusted. When they did, they focused on the muzzle of a Tahni KE rifle before they travelled back to the broad, flat face of the Tahni soldier holding it. He was dressed in light armor with an open helmet, and I figured he and the others with him must have come in behind the High Guard, because the shuttle wouldn’t have had time to land and get them here before our suits rebooted.
The soldier motioned for me to get out. The Gyroc pistol weighed heavy in my chest holster, tempting me to go out in a blaze of glory, but out of the corner of my eye, I saw Vicky and Wade being pulled out of their suits, and both of them were staring at me. Waiting.
I sighed and raised my hands. The Tahni reached in and grabbed the pistol from me, and another yanked me out by the arm. I stumbled and strong, unyielding hands grabbed me by the shoulders and forced me to my knees, a rifle barrel digging into the back of my neck, the sharp rocks of the shore grinding against my knees even through the pads built into my uniform trousers.
I don’t know how long I stayed there, Vicky on one side of me, Wade on the other, keeping my eyes downward to avoid staring into the sun, then having to squint anyway because the reflection off the beach rock was nearly as blinding. I didn’t look up until something blocked it and covered me with blessed shade.
That something was Colonel Zan-Thint. I might not have been able to tell one Tahni from another for the most part, but his face, I knew by sight.
“I did not expect to see you again,” he said. “But it is well that I have.” He motioned to the soldiers guarding us and we were all hauled roughly to our feet. “Bring them along.”
Tahni didn’t smile, not the way we did, but there was a certain tilt to their head, an angle to their shoulders that meant vaguely the same thing, satisfaction. I hadn’t seen it during the war, but I’d studied up on them since, out of curiosity if nothing else, and I’d come to recognize the look. And Zan-Thint was smiling.
“We have much to discuss.”
14
“Do you know,” Zan-Thint said to me, his tone as close to conversational as any Tahni could manage, “that in the entire course of the war, there was only one Tahni who turned on his own people and made a deal with your government to betray us?”
I didn’t try to turn to look him in the eye. My restraints were too tight and his acceleration couch was slightly behind mine. Wade Cunningham was invisible as well, behind me and facing the opposite direction. I could only see to the front, where Vicky sat in the row of shuttle seats facing mine, bound in the Tahni equivalent of flex cuffs, a polymer strap keeping her hands tight against her sides, wrapped around the back of her neck, keeping her head slightly down. Her nose had been bleeding when they’d hauled her out of her Vigilante, but it had stopped and she looked as if she’d recovered from the haze she’d been in after the landing.
She hadn’t said anything since we’d been captured, which was probably wise, but I couldn’t keep from responding to his question.
“How do you know?”
“How do I know what?” Zan-Thint demanded. He was speaking our language, so I couldn’t tell if he was annoyed with me for answering a question with another, or if he was genuinely confused by what I was asking.
“How do you know he betrayed you?” I expounded. “Seems to me that’s something he’d want to keep quiet.”
“Because your government sought to put him in a position of power back on Tahn-Skyyiah after the war. It was part of the bargain he made. But he governed poorly and when the people complained, one of your kind gave him up, told us what he had done. He was forced to flee for his life, and we were told your government had given him a new identity. His name is an anathema, and no one may speak it. That is how deeply we detest the very idea of treason, of betrayal. Yet you humans think it nothing to turn on each other at the slightest of differences. This Luz Vazquez is the prime example. He knows nothing of what we seek to accomplish here, has no loyalty to your government. He betrayed you not because he knew why you were here, nor because he wishes vengeance against the Commonwealth. He turned on you merely because he considered you a threat to his power and position.”
It was loud inside the Tahni shuttle, much louder than even the bucket of bolts we’d been using as a makeshift dropship, and I had to strain to hear him and then had to run everything he said through my head twice in order to filter out the accent and try to make sense of what he was saying by context.
It was, I suppose, somewhat satisfying to hear my suspicions about Luz confirmed, though I didn’t know if I would ever be in a position to seek revenge against the man. Or justice, I guess, whatever you wanted to call my brilliant, carefully-considered plan to walk up and put a round through his head.
“The Tahni have been unified politically and culturally for a thousand years,” I told Zan-Thint. “We humans have only been unified, as much as you could say we are at all, for a couple hundred.”
I was making excuses, of course. Humans had been betraying each other since Caine hit Abel with a rock. But I was buying time, and if Zan-Thint was having a sociocultural conversation with me, he wasn’t throwing us out the side of the shuttle in mid-air, which I had originally thought might be a distinct possibility. Tahni didn’t torture their prisoners, but killing them in the most terrifying way possible…yeah, that sounded just like them.
