Direct Fire #4 Drop Trooper

and so much more professional looking than my dinky little pulse carbine. I couldn’t see their faces through the visors of their helmets, but I had to imagine they were looking at me with disdain, the same way I looked at them when I was in my battlesuit and they were tiny and breakable by comparison.
I stared at them as they passed and nearly ran right into Vicky.
“Oh, um, hi,” I said, trying to smile.
She didn’t.
“What the fuck, Cam?” she said without preamble, arms folded, a glaze of frost across her features. “You pull this shit with Cronje and then you don’t even come talk to me?”
“I didn’t want to make trouble for you,” I told her, spreading my hands helplessly. “It’s not exactly top-secret that you and I are…you know. Cronje seemed pretty pissed off at me and I didn’t want you catching any of the heat.”
“You could have at least called me,” she insisted, slapping my shoulder hard with her right palm. “I’m hearing all sorts of shit second-hand from Freddy and the other platoon leaders and I don’t have any idea what’s going on! They’re saying you protected the insurgents who killed Freddy’s fire team!”
“The Tahni who killed his fire team were suicide bombers,” I told her, trying not to give free rein to the anger roiling in my gut. “They died in the explosion. If Cronje had ordered Freddy or me or anyone to secure the civilians inside the warehouse, I would have done it. He ordered them all killed.” I bared my teeth in a snarl I couldn’t hold back. “He was out of control.”
“Shit.” She rubbed a hand across her face and rasped a sigh. “This is bad.”
I glanced around, trying to see if any other drop-troopers were watching us. We were alone, so I grabbed her hand in mine.
“You shouldn’t hang around with me for a while,” I told her. “Let things die down. Maybe once we’re off this planet, everyone’ll just forget about it.”
“And you think that’s what they should do?” she asked me. “Just forget about it? You want to let Cronje get away with this? It’s not right.”
“It’s a war.” I shrugged it off with a casual dismissal I didn’t actually feel but wanted to convince her I did. “I’ve done and seen a lot of things I didn’t like.” I stared at the ground but saw something light-years and a lifetime away, saw my mother on the dusty ground, the life draining from the wound in her chest. “I’ve seen a lot of things I didn’t like before the war, and no one ever paid for any of them.”
She darted in and kissed me, her hand slipping off my arm as she passed.
“Be careful.”
I felt as if everyone was staring at me as I walked under the overhang of the vehicle park where we’d set up our Battalion HQ, but I shut them out and kept my eyes straight ahead, focused on our company area. Covington was standing in the midst of a cluster of seated enlisted men and junior NCOs, their noses buried in haptic holograms.
“I don’t care which colonel ordered those replacement turbines,” Covington was pacing as he spoke into the audio input of his ‘link, “we have three Vigilantes with deadlined jump-jets and they need to be up for our scheduled security patrols. If you don’t get them to us, I will give your ‘link address to the Battalion Sergeant Major and let him deal with you.” He paused both in speech and mid-step, then nodded. “Good. I appreciate it. I will expect them to be in our maintenance area by 0900 local time tomorrow.”
He looked up at my approach.
“Alvarez. Do you have your schedule set up for the patrols yet?”
“Yes, sir,” I told him. “I uploaded it to the company servers before I headed over here.”
“Good. Come over here and sit down.”
He led me to a makeshift conference room, compartmentalized from the rest of the headquarters by soundproof panels surrounding a ring-shaped table positioned around a portable holographic projector. Folding chairs were clustered around the table and he motioned me into one of them, then sat down beside me, close enough that it made me slightly uncomfortable.
“We need to talk about what happened.”
I very deliberately did not sigh heavily or roll my eyes, though I very much wanted to.
“Sir,” I said, “I put everything that happened in my report. I’m not sure what else I can tell you.”
“Don’t be obtuse with me, son.” The Skipper raised an eyebrow. “This isn’t something you can just stick in an after-action report and forget about it. You’re going to have to do one of two things: either amend your report, or contact the Judge Advocate General and file charges.”
“I don’t want to file charges, sir,” I said immediately. “I don’t need to make a big deal of this.”
Covington snorted.
“Too late for that. Greg’s already pitching a shit-fit.” At my curious look, he amended. “Greg Cronje. He came storming into Battalion Headquarters about ten minutes after we finished setting it up and demanded I write you an Article 15 for insubordination. I told him to go fuck himself, though you didn’t hear that from me.”
I chuckled under my breath.
“I’m sure he was happy about that. But honestly, sir, if you think I should drop the whole thing, I’ll leave it out of my report.”
“That might be for the best, though God knows, he deserves to get his dick slapped for this. Not just for the illegal order but letting it happen to begin with. He knew there were civilians in the warehouse and didn’t bother to detail anyone to secure them.”
“Maybe I should have done it, sir,” I admitted. “I was right there next to Freddy…Lt. Kodjoe. I could have sent a squad to go pin them in.”
“You already saved their asses from the bunker,” he pointed out. “Did he want you to hold his dick for him, too? It was his company, his responsibility.” He waved the subject