Direct Fire #4 Drop Trooper

trotting up behind him, I realized he’d merely been on comms. The IFF transponder showed the identity of the Marines inside the suits, but I would have recognized them by the insignia on the chests. It was Alpha’s Headquarters Platoon, led by Captain Cronje, and he wasn’t happy.
“Lt. Alvarez!” he exploded, advancing until he was nearly chest to chest with me, as if that somehow increased the clarity of our suit comms, since neither of us could see the other’s face. “You are disobeying a direct order!”
“In fact, I was not, sir,” I told him, unable to keep the loathing out of my voice as hard as I tried. “I received no orders. I merely tried to keep another platoon leader of the exact same rank and date in grade as me from carrying out an illegal order.”
He raised the left hand of his suit, and for a second, I thought he was going to hit me. I noticed Kries’ plasma gun track just slightly to his right, covering Cronje. I think Cronje must have seen it, too, since he lowered his hand.
“It’s not your fucking job to interpret orders, Lieutenant!”
“Sir, I was taught from Basic all the way through OCS that it is every Marine’s responsibility to refuse to obey illegal orders. The order to kill unarmed civilians is illegal. The order to kill unarmed children isn’t just illegal, it’s morally reprehensible.”
While we spoke, the rest of my platoon arrived, led by Bang-Bang. The platoon sergeant didn’t take the time to question me as to what was going on and why we were facing down other Marines, he just formed them up beside me, arrayed in a semicircle. Other drop-troopers were flying or walking in as well, the rest of Alpha Company, all watching us. Did they know what was going on? Were they uncommitted or just confused?
I could identify with their confusion. I didn’t know what the hell I was doing or why. But I’d made the decision and it was too late to go back on it now.
Cronje’s helmet scanned back and forth, an instinctive motion since he didn’t actually need to move his helmet or his head to see what was going on around him. His left hand rose again, the claw-like fingers clenched into a fist, but then he lowered it.
“Kodjoe,” he said over his company net. “Pull out of here. Go search for remains of your fire team.”
“But sir…,” Freddy began to protest, but Cronje cut him off.
“Do as you’re fucking told, Lieutenant.”
“Yes, sir.”
Freddy turned back to his platoon and began directing them away from the warehouse, out toward the crater. But Captain Cronje still faced me, still less than a meter away from me, his rage seething like the heat pouring off the blast site.
“Don’t think this is over, Alvarez,” Cronje hissed at me, and I could see on the HUD that he was speaking on a private channel between us. “Don’t think I’ll forget you took their side and betrayed your fellow Marines. You’re going to regret the day you were promoted from PFC.”
“Believe me, sir,” I assured him, my voice steadier than my stomach, “I already do.”

5
The pulse carbine dragged at my shoulder by its webbed sling, awkward and out of place. I felt like an idiot carrying it, like a child playing soldier. And yet simultaneously, I felt incredibly exposed on the streets of Port Harcourt, the carbine completely inadequate to deal with a city, a world filled with enemies who wanted me dead.
I was being imprecise, calling the city Port Harcourt rather than the world, but since we weren’t staying here long, I hadn’t bothered to learn the Tahni name for the place, and the official Fleet reports just called it “the Capital,” which was a commentary on lack of imagination in the military structure. There were two dozen other cities on the world, which seemed simultaneously far too many for us to take and far too few for a whole planet. But the Tahni didn’t tend to spread out, preferring to live in clusters, so there were no small towns or outposts here.
Not too different from Earth, but a departure from human colony worlds. Even on the core colonies, we liked our elbow room, liked have some space between us and our neighbors. It was a commentary, I thought, on the type of people willing to leave Earth in the first place. Anyone happy crammed into a mega-city could have stayed behind.
That didn’t include me anymore. I wasn’t happy at all crammed into this particular city, even on the outskirts in the industrial district where the Marines had established their base after the Security Command had landed and began setting up their new structure to govern the planet. Half the industrial district had burned to the ground in the battle, and what was left was ragged and strewn with debris, but we’d made do with worse. Our company had set up a hooch city in the same empty warehouse where we had the maintenance gear for our suits, which made them easier to guard, but by some quirk of planning, the suits, our cots, hammocks, and cooking gear were almost two kilometers from the battalion headquarters.
And we sure as hell weren’t going to walk around here unarmed, whether it had been required or not, so out came the pulse carbines from our suit bug-out kits and we all wandered around with them slung on our shoulders like we actually knew what we were doing with a shoulder-fired weapon. I was one of the few drop-troopers I knew who’d actually used one in combat, and even I would freely admit I was little better than a novice with the thing. But no one wanted to admit we were going to depend on the Force Recon pukes to protect us.
I passed by a Force Recon security patrol, the straight-legs looking a lot taller and more intimidating when I was out of my Vigilante, their Gauss rifles heavy and imposing