Terms of Enlistment 01.2: Measures of Absolution (6 page)

But she doesn’t have her own squad, just these eight scared privates.

“What are we going to do?” Private Kelly asks her. Kelly is a young woman who looks like she just barely made the height and weight minimum for infantry. She’s the only other female in the squad.

Jackson ponders her reply for a moment. Of course, there’s no real choice, not for her. If Sergeant Fallon were here, she would have potted the comms console with her rifle the second the other guy mentioned surrender.

“We’re Territorial Army,” Jackson says. “We do our jobs, Private Kelly.”

She looks over to the closest elevator bank.

“Kelly, Pearson, cover that. Anyone steps out with a gun, you punch their ticket. No warnings.”

Kelly and Pearson look at each other, then obey. They move up to a cluster of planters ahead and train their rifles on the elevator doors.

“Everyone turn off your TacLink,” Jackson orders. With their data links compromised, they’ll have to go the old-fashioned way, voice and hand signals. Not having that almost omniscient TacLink awareness is a huge disadvantage, but letting the enemy—whoever they are—see through the squad’s eyes would be an even bigger one.

Jackson looks around for a way off this floor that doesn’t involve a ride in a computer-controlled elevator. There are staircases, but they’re at the corners of the floor, reachable only through corridors that can be sealed off piecemeal remotely by the security office. And they can’t all rappel down to the atrium ninety-nine floors below. They would have been better off in the staircase back under the roof.

Jackson curses herself for that tactical blunder. She led them in here, and now there’s no way out.

Then there’s movement to her side. Across the chasm of the central core, on the other side of the gallery, armed civilians are coming out of hallways and quickly taking cover in the gallery. There are two layers of polyplast security barrier between Jackson’s squad and these armed civvies, so she can’t engage. She signals her squad to take up covering positions and watches the force across the chasm as they take their own cover behind planters and low walls, every bit as efficiently as her own squad. There are a lot of them—three, four squads, and more coming out of the shadows of the hallways beyond, all converging on the gallery. Jackson knows her squad can’t take on that many, not in the confines of this rat maze.

“Last chance,” the enemy commander’s voice comes over the public address system. “Surrender your weapons, or we’ll come and take them.”

Across the core, a lot of rifles are aimed in Jackson’s direction now, and a lot of them look like military hardware.

But they don’t have battle armor,
Jackson thinks.

None of the civvies have the sealed armor to go with those stolen military rifles, and she wants to bet they’re a little short on augmentation too, because nobody over there seems to be wearing a helmet.

“Launchers,” she tells her squad in a low voice. “All gas grenades. Lob ‘em over the barrier and onto the other side. Give me a volley on my mark.”

Her squad obeys. They take buckshot shells out of launchers and replace them with riot gas canisters. Kelly almost fumbles her reload, then readies her grenade launcher and looks at Jackson with wide, fearful eyes.

“Left side shoots left, right shoots right,” Jackson orders. “Kelly, shoot straight across with me. On three. Two. One.
Fire in the hole!
”

Nine launchers thump in a short, stuttering drumroll. Two of the gas grenades clatter against the polyplast barrier on the other side of the chasm and careen off, then fall down into the core spewing smoke. The other seven grenades drop into the gallery space beyond and burst apart. Within a few seconds, the other side of the gallery is blanketed with riot gas.

To a trooper in sealed armor, a gas grenade is just a minor inconvenience. The helmet keeps out the chemicals, and the augmented vision from the sensors cuts through the smoke. To an unprotected civvie, however, it’s like getting your face doused with alcohol and set on fire.

Instantly, there are screams of anger and pain coming from the far side. Jackson can see people hunching over or dropping to their knees in the noxious white cloud her squad just conjured with their launchers.

“Flank and flush,” Jackson orders. “Southeast corner, doubletime.”

She rushes her squad to the corner of the gallery, then turns left to cover the stretch of garbage-strewn concrete that is the south side of the gallery. Then she’s at the southeast corner. She looks around the edge of the concrete retaining wall to see the armed civvies retching in the chem cloud. The stuff is pretty persistent, but it won’t keep them suppressed for more than a few minutes. Until then, they’re blind and in no shape for fighting.

Jackson draws first blood. In the mouth of a hallway ten yards in front of her, two of the armed civvies are still alert and on their feet, at the far edge of the chem cloud. They see her and raise their rifles. She shoots first, letting her computer select the burst length as she sweeps thecivvies with her muzzle and holds her trigger down. The M-66 pumps out two three-round bursts, and both civvies fall over. Their rifles clatter to the floor as they die silently.

When Jackson looks to her left again, the remaining civvies have retreated into the vestibules and hallways of the floor beyond the gallery again. She wishes she had some HE or frag grenades to bank off these walls and bounce after them, but the ammo loads for the mission were limited to nonlethal and buckshot for the launchers. Nobody anticipated having to use high explosives for a simple public safety sweep assist. The world seems to have gone nuts since last week.

She has never missed that heavy, unwieldy piece-of-shit MARS launcher more in her life. With armor-piercing rockets or thermobarics, she could crack these walls like eggshells, blast a hole into the exterior wall, radio the drop ship, get out of this mess.

“Back to the hallway,” she tells her troops and points at the wide main hallway on the south side. The fire-proof door isn’t down yet, and the main hallways lead straight to the main staircases. They rush over to the south side, trying to cover in all directions.

Just as they reach the mouth of the hallway, the elevator bank nearby chimes, and the doors open. Jackson and her squad are maybe fifteen meters away as the elevator disgorges a squad or more of civvies with weapons. They see her group and raise their guns just as Jackson’s squad bring up theirs.

She wants to stop time at that moment. She knows what is going to happen, but she’s powerless to avoid it. It’s that freeze frame of mental acuity when that trigger has been pulled and the striker is racing toward the primer of the cartridge. The civvie in the lead starts to shout something, but Jackson can’t understand it, and it doesn’t matter in the end anyway.

Oh, shit.

Then everyone opens fire seemingly at once.

Jackson dives out of the way to the left, into the hallway and away from the elevators. She fires her rifle from the hip, into the tightly packed group of civvies coming off the elevators. As fast as she gets out of the way, a burst of flechettes still rakes her arm and right side. Behind her, the squad is out in the open, without the time to get to cover.

At a short range like this, a firefight between two squads with automatic rifles is like a knife fight in a boot camp locker. People scream and fall. Flechettes are piercing armor and flesh, ricocheting off hard surfaces and spraying apart in tiny splinters. Eighteen, twenty rifles firing in rapid cadence. Jackson has never been in the middle of such a hail, not even back in Detroit.

Her rifle’s target reticle disappears from her helmet display. She pays it no mind, just keeps firing her rifle from the hip. Hard to miss at this range. People are on the ground, others are madly scrambling for distance and cover. This isn’t holding the line. This isn’t a heroic last stand against the odds. It’s naked, bloody slaughter.

Jackson’s rifle stops firing. She automatically ejects her magazine and reaches for a new one on her harness, reloads, keeps firing.

She catches the movement above out of the corner of her eye. Reflexively, she throws herself backward. Overhead, the heavy steel-and-ceramic fire door of the main hallway entrance comes down quickly and silently. It slams into the concrete floor in front of her with a resounding crash that makes the floor shake. One meter to the right, and she would have been bisected by the hatch that locks into place not five inches from her right boot.

She is alone in the dark. Everyone else, her squad and all their enemies, are on the other side of the fire door.

Jackson screams in rage and frustration. She slams the unyielding laminate of the fire door with her fist. On the other side, the gunfire sounds muffled now, but rifles are still firing on full auto, and people are still shouting and screaming. Her people, her squad. Her responsibility.

“I’m locked in,” she shouts into the squad channel. “Covering fire, and retreat to the breech we made.”

Nobody replies. She pounds the fire hatch again, and this time there’s a sharp pain in her hand that shoots all the way up to her elbow. She examines her hand in the green-tinted augmentation of her helmet’s sensors. One of the flechettes from the enemy fire hit her armored glove and shattered. A shard of it must have pierced the armor and gone up her forearm. She can feel the blood running down the inside of the suit even as the armor’s computer works on stemming the blood flow with its integrated trauma kit.

There are more holes in her armor, on her right side. Jackson isn’t in pain, but her side feels numb, which is bad news. It means she’s wounded badly enough for her suit to numb her up. Still, she has her legs, arms, and hands, and everything still works.

There’s no way through that hatch except for blowing it up with a MARS rocket, which she doesn’t have. Jackson checks her rifle—180 rounds remaining—and her spare magazines. Three left, plus the one in the gun. Maybe enough to fight her way out of here.

The corridor behind her is deserted as well. A whole floor of a welfare high-rise, and it’s empty. Jackson wonders how far down they’ve evacuated. The floor below, five floors, ten? Where did all those people go? And how did these welfare rats become so organized?

On the other side of the fire door, the muffled sounds of automatic rifle fire cease. She tries the squad channel again. No reply.

Jackson replaces the partial magazine in her rifle with a full one and tucks away the partial in one of her magazine pouches. Then she moves down the hallway, away from the heavy fire door that traps her in this section.

The dark hallways of the apartment floor are eerily quiet and empty. Jackson clears the corridor, doorway by doorway, eighty meters of grungy rat warren without any rats inside.

At the end of the next hallway, there’s an escape door to a stairwell. The green fire escape sign glows in the dark like a dim beacon. Jackson walks up to the door and pushes the panic bar down to open it. It doesn’t budge.

There are two buckshot grenades left on her harness. She stuffs one into her launcher’s chamber, steps back, and blows the lock assembly to scrap with a thousand grains of polymer-coated tungsten shot. Then she kicks the door open.

The staircase is dark and empty. It’s 99 floors down to the atrium level, and she doesn’t really want to go down to where her whole platoon just got bagged by the locals without firing a shot, but there’s no other way out of this trap. She could hole up in one of the empty apartments and wait for them to come and find her, but she will not be pried out of a hiding hole like vermin.

The pain in her side is burning through the local anesthetic. The suit’s autodoc is keeping her from bleeding out, but she knows that she needs to get to a medical center soon.

She makes it almost ten floors down before she hears fire doors slamming open above and below her. It’s a trap, and she has walked into it willingly.

Jackson retreats to a corner of the stairwell and brings up her rifle. The optic on top of her M-66 is shattered, probably taken out by the same burst of flechette fire that tore up her side. The IR aiming laser still works, though. She puts the green dot of the laser on the first silhouette to appear on the staircase above, and pulls the trigger for a burst, then another. The silhouette disappears. The civvies carry high-powered weapon lights on their rifles, and the beams tear through the dark, casting harsh shadows on walls and ceilings.

Then she takes fire from the staircase below. She replies in kind, sending a few bursts downstairs. The ammo counter readout on her helmet screen goes from 250 to 210 in a blink. The civvies above her pop off a few bursts of un-aimed fire, holding their rifles over the railings without sticking their heads out.

Two grenades come flying down the stairs. They clatter on the concrete, bounce off the floor and walls, go in two different directions. Jackson rushes for one, kicks it down the stairs, knows that she doesn’t have the time to reach the second one. But she tries anyway.

She kicks the second grenade, and it flies off and hits one of the steel posts for the handrail of the staircase. It deflects at an angle and lands in the space to her right, where she can’t reach it without running right in front of the guns of the civvies down the stairs. It never comes to rest before it explodes.

Jackson is thrown backwards against the unyielding concrete of the staircase wall. Then she’s on her side down on the dirty concrete of the sub-landing. She gropes for her rifle, but it’s gone, blown from her hands. She feels the air leaking out of her, takes another breath, can’t get her lungs to respond the way they should. There are footsteps above and below her in the dark. She gives up her search for the M-66 and fumbles for the knife strapped to her harness even as she feels her consciousness slipping away. Then there’s just silence and darkness.

Chapter Seven

Lazarus

Jackson wakes up and immediately wishes she hadn’t.

There’s a bright light above her head that’s hurting her eyes, and she is thirsty, thirstier than she has ever been in her life. She turns her head sideways to avoid the painful glare of the light above. She’s in a room with unwashed floors and unpainted walls, dirty concrete. The merciless glare from the light fixture on the ceiling makes the place look inhospitable, pointing out every pockmark in the walls and mold spot on the ceiling as it does.