“Corporal Jackson,” he says. “We are relocating. Please follow along and don’t give anyone a reason to shoot you. Trust me when I tell you that most of them would be glad for an excuse. Let’s move out, gentlemen.”
They rush through a maze of corridors and vestibules, Lazarus’ men keeping a wary eye on her every time she strays close to one of them. Jackson’s side hurts, and she feels something stabbing into her chest every time she takes a breath, but she knows it would be pointless to ask them to slow down.
Then someone in front throws open a set of doors, and they’re outside.
It’s nighttime, and Jackson sees that they’re in the middle of a residence block. There’s a droning noise in the air, and the reason for the sudden rush becomes clear when she sees a Hornet-class drop ship coming out of the night sky and circling around the top of a nearby high rise tower. The dirty nighttime sky is ablaze with the searchlights from more drop ships. Whatever TA unit is making a drop onto this block right now, they’re coming in force, maybe an entire battalion dropping at once.
“They’re on Tower Thirteen,” Lazarus says into the earpiece he’s wearing. “Don’t engage. Let them have it. Second platoon, fall back to the atrium and take the rabbit warren down to the admin center. We’ll meet up with you there.”
They’re a hundred meters from the admin building in the middle of the square when another Hornet swoops out of the sky and thunders down toward the square. Jackson sees the skids of the drop ship lower out of the belly armor as the Hornet swings around to claim a landing spot. There’s rifle fire in the distance between two residence towers, and a moment later, an explosion blooms up in the same spot. The sound of the detonation rolls across the plaza like the rumbling thunder of an approaching storm.
“TA squads on the ground between Thirteen and Fourteen. Also in Blocks Five and Six. They’re all over the place, sir,” one of the troopers says, listening to the comms in his own headset.
There are civvies on the plaza, most of them without weapons and moving away from the spot where the drop ship is descending. It settles on the landing pad at the top of the admin center, a hundred meters away. Then the tail ramp opens with a low whine, and a platoon of TA come rushing out. They take up positions at the edge of the roof. Behind them, the drop ship guns its engines and lifts off again, raising the ramp in mid-air. It rises into the night sky, position lights flashing in the haze. The TA troopers file into the rooftop staircase one by one, weapons at the ready.
“We have a TA platoon on the ground at the admin center,” Lazarus says into his headset. “Second platoon, don’t engage them. Pass through and make for the fallback.”
Another drop ship weaves its way between two of the residence towers ahead and thunders over the plaza at low altitude before banking and turning to the right. They’re so low that Jackson can see the decals on the helmets of the pilots as the ship roars directly overhead.
“Told you they’d come back,” she says to Lazarus. He turns around and glares at her.
“They’re not coming for you. They’re coming for their gear. They’re here to send a message, you dumb shit.”
There’s rifle fire coming from the inside of the admin center now, short staccato bursts of automatic fire. A muffled explosion follows, then another.
“Sir, Second Platoon is engaged in the admin center.”
“Goddammit,” Lazarus says. He looks over to Jackson, then points at Olsen and the other civvie who escorted her from the room earlier.
“Olsen, Lepitre. Take our guest here over to the warren at Tower Eleven. Head for the spider nest. Don’t stop for coffee. The rest of you, with me.”
Lazarus leads off to the admin center, and most of the troopers move out with him as ordered, covering corners and sectors like a seasoned TA infantry squad. Olsen points out the way for her with the barrel of his rifle, back toward the tower they just left. She obeys and follows Lepitre.
They’re back inside the basement hallway when the overhead illumination switches from white to the dim red emergency light. The change is startling without helmet augmentation to compensate for it.
“What the fuck,” Lepitre says ahead of her. On the floor directly above, there’s gunfire, the hoarse chattering of flechette rifles interspersed with the lower single booms of cartridge guns.
Two more troopers appear around a bend in front of them. In the dim light, it takes Jackson a second or two to realize that the newcomers aren’t civvies in partial battle gear, but TA troopers in full armor, M-66 rifles at the ready.
Everything happens at once.
Lepitre up ahead shouts something at the TA troopers, but whatever he’s saying is drowned out by the booming warning coming from the troopers’ suit amplifiers.
“DROP YOUR WEAPONS AND GET ON THE GROUND! DROP…”
Lepitre goes for his sidearm, but he’s either too slow or too fast for the TA troopers. They both open fire, and Lepitre twitches once and falls to the ground. Behind Jackson, she hears the creaking of the plastic on Olsen’s rifle as he brings it to bear.
Jackson stops cold and drops to the ground. Olsen’s rifle spits out a full-auto burst, and both TA troopers go down in the hail of flechettes, half a magazine dumped at maximum cadence. Olsen is right behind her, less than half a meter away, and she rolls around and kicks his legs out from underneath him. He goes down, still clutching the rifle, and squeezes the trigger again. The burst hits the wall next to them and peppers Jackson with concrete chips and flechette fragments. She tries to wrestle the rifle away from him, but he’s holding on to it with a death grip, and he’s stronger. He tries to aim the rifle at her, but she’s on top of him, and in those close quarters, there’s no space for a sixteen-inch barrel between them.
Jackson drives an elbow into Olsen’s face, then his throat, as hard as she can thrust it down. He gurgles and lets go of his gun to clutch his throat. Jackson seizes the M-66 and backpedals, aims the muzzle at Olsen, and squeezes the trigger. The burst takes him in the side of the chest. He stiffens, groans, exhales. Then he stops moving. Jackson has seen enough KIA to know even in the dim light of the emergency illumination that he’s dead.
She gets to her knees and checks the condition of the rifle. Without a helmet display, she has to eject the magazine and count the rounds through the witness strip on the side. A quarter of the magazine left, so maybe sixty rounds. Olsen isn’t wearing an ammo harness. Dumb fuck ran around without reloads. If he was a vet, he wasn’t infantry, she thinks.
The TA troopers are down as well, both drilled with at least fifty rounds from Olsen’s full-auto magazine dump. They have magazine pouches, of course. Jackson doesn’t have a harness, but the too-big fatigues she’s wearing have roomy pockets, and she fills them with magazines as quickly as she can pry them out of the pouches of the dead troopers.
Up ahead in the hallway, a door opens, and another TA trooper appears.
He’s less than twenty meters from where Jackson is tugging at the harnesses of two of his dead comrades. She knows instantly that he will not shout a warning, that there won’t be time to put-up her hands and explain the situation, tell him that she’s Corporal Kameelah Jackson, 365th AIB GODDAMNIT DON’T SHOOT ME
He brings up his rifle, she grabs hers. She shoots from the hip, not wanting to take the time to use the sights. The M-66 in her hands roars and spits out the rest of the magazine at the dumb-ass high rate of fire Olsen dialed in manually earlier.
Her burst almost goes high, but some of the fifty or sixty flechettes find their way into the visor of the TA trooper’s helmet. He drops instantly, like someone turned off his power switch. His rifle clatters to the concrete.