"Shit!"
Karsang Dawa Chiawa didn't know exactly who the strangled shout came from, but it summed up his own feelings quite nicely. He'd seen flash-bangs detonate on training exercises before, but only in ones and twos. He'd never been this close to a dozen of them, all going off at once, and the paralyzing effect of the sudden visual and audio assault was far worse than he'd ever realized it could be.
Then he saw the flashing lights as the training harnesses reacted to the lethal patterns of pellets the old-fashioned claymore-style mines the flash-bangs were pretending to be would have sent out in real life.
"Cover!" he shouted. "Get everyone under cover before -"
"Ouch," Gregory Hilton said mildly, watching the chaos into which the leading half of the militia company had abruptly disintegrated. "That's going to leave a bruise," he added in tones of profound professional satisfaction.
Alicia nodded in agreement, watching the hapless militia bumbling about. At least half of the people whose harnesses were telling them they'd just become casualties seemed too stunned and confused even to realize they were supposed to sit down and play dead.
They got the message a moment later, though. She could see the instant at which the training harnesses' built-in processors realized their wearers weren't responding properly and activated the tingler circuits. People twitched as the harmless but most unpleasant neural stimulators reminded the "casualties" that they had abruptly become deceased. Alicia had experienced the same sensation-once-in a training exercise at Mackenzie. Once was all it had taken for her to resolve to never ignore the initial warning signals from her own training harness, and she winced in sympathy as the militia men dropped their weapons and sat down abruptly.
"My, my," Hilton murmured. "I wonder if they're going to be as enthusiastic about borrowing frontline equipment for the next exercise?"
Chiawa swore as his battered eardrums registered the yowls of indignant anguish coming from his tardier people. He didn't have very long to think about it, though. Because, suddenly, his own harness was flashing at him. He looked down at the light on his chest for just a moment, then sat down quickly, before the harness decided to admonish him.
Salaka was a bit slower, and despite himself, Chiawa felt a sudden mad urge to laugh out loud as the lieutenant squawked and abruptly clapped both hands to the seat of his trousers. Salaka danced in place for a heartbeat or two, then flung himself to the ground a few meters from Chiawa's own position.
The captain hardly noticed. He was looking beyond Salaka, watching as his remaining personnel's harnesses began to flash.
Alicia watched harness lights spring to life all across the valley floor. For the exercise, Major Palacios had made at least one concession to the "guerrilla" status of her Marines and forbidden them to use their helmet sensors or synth-link driven HUDs, but she didn't really need them for this. Her own eyes-and their enhancement processors, or course-were more than enough as she watched Medrano walk the simulated fire of his plasma rifle methodically down the length of the stalled militia column. He had the simulator attached to his rifle set to maximum dispersion, and each shot set off every harness in a circle almost twenty meters across. The technical term for what she was seeing, she thought, was probably "massacre."
"Whups," Hilton said conversationally. "Looks like we're going to get some business after all, Larva. Keep an eye out to the right."
"I'm on it," Alicia confirmed, focusing her own attention on the rapidly disintegrating main body of the militia column. What looked like one of the militia's outsized squads was coming almost straight at their position from the left, but that was Hilton's responsibility. Her job was to see to it that no one interrupted him while he dealt with it.
Exactly what the approaching squad had in mind was impossible to say. It was remotely possible that whoever was in charge of it had figured out where the plasma rifle ripping their column apart was located, in which case he might actually be moving to flank Medrano. After all, Alicia and Hilton were where they were precisely because it was the only practical way to get from the valley floor to Medrano's position. It was more likely, she thought, that it was simply a case of any port in a storm, since the militia men were also headed for one of the few spots Medrano couldn't target directly from his perch high up on the cliff.
Unfortunately for them, Gregory Hilton had no such problem. The senior rifleman settled himself comfortably, bracing his combat rifle on the rest he'd carefully built when he first dug his hole. Then he squeezed the trigger.
The belted blanks from the ammo can clipped to his M-97 were there to provide the visual and audio clues which might have allowed someone to spot his position when he fired. In this case, though, the clues were strictly pro forma, because none of his targets had time to react to them. The rifle's laser range finder was capable of doubling as a target designator for precision guided munitions … or for activating the sensors on a training harness.
Hilton swept his "fire" across the oncoming militiamen, who stopped abruptly, staring down at the flashing lights on their chests in astonishment. Some of them looked up again, as if trying to figure out exactly where the fire had come from. Most of them, however, were otherwise occupied in getting themselves and their posteriors into contact with the ground before their harnesses goosed them.
"Remarkably good hunting around here, Larva," Hilton commented, looking up from the dozen-plus militia he had just encouraged to become features of the local landscape. "Especially for some," he added with a grin as he watched Medrano's fire, coupled with a judicious sprinkling of "grenades" from Zigair's launcher, finish what the flash-bangs had begun.
The simulated carnage was as complete as it was sudden, and Hilton shook his head, surveying the "body"-littered valley.
"Next time, train harder," he told the hapless militiamen. "We be serious out here."
"Don't be ridiculous, Cusherwa!" Colonel Sharwa said impatiently. "Even if Chiawa were right-which he isn't-just how do you think a dozen obvious foreigners would get all the way into the city without any of our people spotting them?"
Sharwa snorted in disgust. He supposed it was at least partly his own fault. His favorite restaurant's wine list had been known to entice him into extending his lunch hour often enough, but he really shouldn't have let it do it today. Not when there was an exercise underway. And especially not when, as Cusherwa's account of his conversation with Chiawa made abundantly clear, his subordinates were prepared to jump at imagined shadows without his firm guiding hand to keep them focused.
"Now," the colonel said, "the first thing to do is -"
"Excuse me, Colonel."
Sharwa looked up, scowling at the interruption.
"What?" he barked.
"I'm sorry to interrupt, Sir," the communications tech said, "but we're picking up some confused traffic from Captain Chiawa's company."
"What do you mean-confused?" Sharwa demanded.
"We're not certain, Sir. It's only snatches from their short-range coms, and we aren't getting much even of that. But it sounds like they might be under some sort of attack."
"There!" Sharwa glared at Cusherwa. "See? This is what happens when an officer-a junior officer-in the field lets himself get distracted from the task in hand by wild fantasies!"
"Now," Sergeant Metternich said, and the Marines of Alpha Team, Third Squad, Second Platoon, climbed out of of their borrowed van. They moved without any particular haste, calmly, as if they had every reason to be there. They were three-quarters of the way from the van's curbside parking slot to the building before any of the militia men even glanced in their direction.