Direct Fire #4 Drop Trooper

hard-edged. “They haven’t taken down the jammers yet. I can’t get a signal through to the satellite relays and trying to get out into the open for a chance at laser line-of-sight is suicide with those turrets shooting at anything that moves.”
I scanned my long-range sensors and picked up aircraft on thermal but he was right, there was no direct line-of-sight opening to contact them, and that was even assuming the communications laser from a battlesuit would reach them with the particulate scatter in the humid, smoke-filled atmosphere. I turned my scan downward and leaned out far enough around the corner to see the bunker. A heavy KE gun swung toward me and I pulled back just ahead of a burst of tantalum darts. Shit.
“There’s gotta be some other way into that thing,” I reasoned, still on the frequency with Cronje. “They didn’t climb in through the gun turrets. There’s an underground entrance to the bunker.” I leaned out again, tempting fate but needing to see. A quick scan of the buildings surrounding the bunker, then back. This time, the burst came closer, coating the shoulder of my Vigilante with dust from the pulverized concrete.
“Are you trying to get yourself killed?” Vicky demanded on a private line between us.
I didn’t answer, reading the scans from my impromptu recon. There were no thermal signatures in the buildings on either side of the bunker, at least none that looked like Tahni. The warehouse at the far end had a massive jumble of Tahni-size thermal readings on the bottom floor, all clumped together.
“There are Tahni civilians in the warehouse down there,” I said, motioning straight down the concourse from the storage tanks, past the bunker.
“Yeah, we know,” Cronje said, sounding even more impatient now than he had been before. “We checked in there first but we didn’t see any armed troops.”
“Why?” I shot back. “Why would they put dozens or hundreds of civilians in a warehouse? It’s not particularly safe and it’s not like they don’t have underground shelters for their civilians. Did they look like workers who maybe got trapped here?”
“How the fuck should I know?” Cronje demanded, but Vicky cut him off.
“My platoon checked the building. They were older males. Too old to be soldiers.”
“But not too old to be retired soldiers,” I said. “The Tahni don’t have anti-aging treatments. They don’t believe in them, remember? So, once a male gets too old to be a soldier, they retire him. And if they needed some civilians to put in a building to conceal the entrance to a bunker…”
“…they’d probably use retired soldiers,” Vicky finished for me.
“It’s your idea, Alvarez,” Cronje declared. “You and your people can check it out.” It sounded more like a punishment than a compliment. “Kodjoe, your platoon will go back them up,” he added, apparently deciding they had nothing better to do.
“Kreis,” I told the Fourth squad leader, “you take point. Cross open spaces in groups of two and vary your spacing by ten seconds between you. Every third group hit the jets and take it high. Majid, I’m between Fourth and Third. I want you to bring up the rear and if anyone gets hit, take them back behind cover.”
“Yes, sir.” The two men spoke so close together that they might have rehearsed it.
I held my breath as Fourth squad crossed from the fabrication center to the storage tanks, each group chased by a burst of KE gunfire. After the second team crossed, the bunker turrets began hosing the gap with a firehose stream of tantalum darts, just like I thought they would, and the next group jetted across about ten meters off the ground. If we’d done it too many times, they would have figured out the pattern, but we managed to cross without anyone taking a hit.
“If nothing else,” Cronje said, turning in his Vigilante to wave a left-handed salute at me as I passed, “you’re gonna wipe out their ammo supply. We’ll lay down some covering fire once you’ve diverted their attention.”
Freddy’s platoon was moving away from the storage tanks, stepping carefully to avoid gaps in the cover, and I could tell from the transponder when he led them up behind my Third squad.
“We got your back, Cam,” he assured me.
Which was fine and everything, but it wasn’t my back I was worried about.
Crossing from the storage tanks to the building beside it was the hardest part, but thankfully by that point, Alpha Company was splashing plasma flares against the armored facing of the gun turrets, drawing their fire for the few seconds it took us to get through the gap.
“What’s the plan, sir?” Bang-Bang asked me, not even bothering with the NCO’s gentle chewing out for a junior officer taking too many chances. Maybe he’d already heard too much about me to bother.
“I believe the entrance to that bunker is in the warehouse at the end of the park,” I told him. “Captain Cronje has voluntold us to go investigate. Fall in behind us with First and Second squads.”
“Remind me to send the captain a thank-you card.”
We swung out wide of the last structure on the right. I couldn’t tell what it was from the appearance, not yet an expert on Tahni industrial architecture despite how much of it I’d blown up in the last four years. If I’d had to guess, I would have said a chemical production plant, from the cylindrical tanks lined up across the back of the building and the arsenic level warning from the external sensors. Whatever it was, I didn’t want to be too close to it when an energy weapon hit those storage cylinders.
And maybe the Tahni would think we were bugging out, just trying to get away or go for help. But who the hell knew what the Tahni thought about anything? I’d tried to put myself inside their heads more than once, but they weren’t human. Would humans still be sitting in that damned bunker after the deflectors fell, after they lost aerospace