Machinery whined as his head nodded up and down. “I thought not. You were one of the craziest and most insubordinate officers I ever had the pleasure to command. And you’re, well, different somehow. Changed in ways I can’t quite put a finger on. What do you remember?”
I looked to Sasha for help, but her one good eye was focused on a spot three feet over Wamba’s head. She made no attempt to help or interfere. “Nothing. Nothing prior to my discharge, anyway.”
Wamba nodded as though he had expected as much. “Let me tell you a story. A story about the last time I saw you. We drew a mission, one with lots of hair on it, and were headed for a research station known as T-12. It was right in the middle of the asteroid belt and very well defended. There were three boats in all. We drew straws. You pulled the first, Captain Daw drew the second, and I came last. You led us in…”
My head began to throb, a door creaked open, and the dreams returned. Wamba’s voice droned on, but I was somewhere in the past, living it, feeling it, being it.
The ejection tube worked the way it was supposed to and blasted us away from the ship. Stars whirled, then stabilized as I brought the battle suit under control and oriented myself to the target. It looked like a mountain that had been plucked from the Himalayas and set free in space. Sunlight rippled across the planetoid’s surface as it tumbled end over end. I saw light glint off metal and felt something heavy fall into my stomach. Even the best suits leak heat, and I could damned near feel their missile launchers swivel in my direction. I triggered the command freq and gave the command.
“Go!”
The team arrowed in like sharks in search of fresh meat. I was vaguely aware that Daw and Wamba had cleared their ships and were headed in the same direction. It made damned little difference, though, since we were committed. The Loot would extract us if she lived long enough to do so, or we’d wait for relief. Not a pleasant thought.
A fire requires oxygen, and a battle suit contains damned little thanks to the endless vacuum around it. So the 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.