Marko Kloos - Terms of Enlistment

“ Go, go, go !”

The tail end is a disconcertingly exposed position. I can’t overtake the two pairs of squad mates carrying the drop ship crew, since I’m supposed to be shielding them. That makes me just as slow as they are. We run over to the mouth of the alley designated by Sergeant Fallon, most of us encumbered in some way.

The alley is a hundred yards from the stranded drop ship. It takes our gaggle of armor-clad troopers and entourage thirty seconds to cover the distance. When we reach the mouth of the alley, I look back over my shoulder. Sergeant Fallon and Stratton are dashing out of the rear hatch, and I drop to one knee and exchange the MARS launcher for the rifle to cover their run. Next to me, Hansen crouches down, rifle pointed downrange. Beyond the drop ship, on the other side of the intersection, there’s some movement in the shadows of the building overhangs as the local crowd advances on the drop ship again, more cautious than before. Our air support is gone, off to play air ambulance for Second Platoon’s wounded, but we have a little bit of time before the natives figure out that we’re on our own. I see an outline as someone advances down the street in the distance, and my low-light imaging sensors clearly show the outline of a rifle. I take aim, and squeeze off three quick shots. The silhouette flinches back behind cover.

Sergeant Fallon and Stratton dash past, rifles clattering against hard battle armor.

“Get your asses behind cover, now ,” the sergeant yells without bothering to toggle into the radio channel. We back-step into the alley in a hurry, rifles aimed and ready to engage threats until the last possible moment as we round the corner. Then we turn and run, away from the danger zone. Our squad mates have set up a hasty perimeter near a pair of huge trash containers. We catch up with the rest of the squad, and pause to catch our breath.

For a moment, it’s eerily quiet—no gunfire, no shouting, no engine noise overhead, just the heavy breathing of nine TA troopers who just covered a hundred-yard dash in forty pounds of weapons and armor.

“Where’s the kaboom ?” Stratton says into the silence. “There was supposed to be an earth-shattering kaboom .”

Sergeant Fallon starts a reply, but then there’s a strange sound in the distance, like someone opening a huge container of carbonated soda, and the filters built into my helmet cut the audio feed completely.

Even with the active efforts of my electronic gear to preserve my hearing, the explosion of the drop ship stabs my eardrums. I can feel the shock wave from the detonation radiating through me as it moves away from the source at the speed of sound, and it feels like someone has thrown me to the ground and then jumped on my chest. For a moment, I think that the drop ship must have had some low-yield nuclear ordnance on one of its pylons, and I’m convinced that Sergeant Fallon has just blown up half the PRC, and us along with it. I’m vaguely aware that I’m prone on the ground all of a sudden, knocked off my feet by the impulse of the shock wave.

For a while, I can see and hear nothing. My polarized visor only slowly returns my vision, and my audio feed remains muted. I’m blind and deaf in my armor cocoon, rendered senseless by the built-in technology to save my hearing and eyesight.

As the world come back into focus, I see my squad mates scattered on the ground all around me, everyone in a similar state of disorientation. I get to my knees, pick up my rifle, and check its status on my helmet display. I’m so used to seeing the electronic overlay in my field of vision that it’s disorienting to see nothing at all, no symbols and numbers listing my active TacLink channels, the loading status of my weapon, our squad’s waypoint markers, or even the colored carets marking friendlies and hostiles. All I see is the green-tinged visual feed from my helmet sensor, void of any tactical interpretation by the tactical computer built into my armor. Other than the low-light enhanced vision, I’m no better off technologically than the people who are shooting at us.

Then my computer resets itself, recovering from the massive knock that has upset its digital equilibrium. I see the familiar code sequence of a system initialization flashing on the helmet-mounted screen, and five seconds later, I can see and hear properly once more.

I toggle my TacLink into the squad channel, and clear my throat.

“First Squad, comm check. Anyone copy?”

“Yeah, we’re back,” Baker replies. “Boy, that was a bit of a rattle, wasn’t it?”

“No shit,” Hansen says. “I haven’t heard anything this loud since that floor party in my senior year.”

“Perimeter, people,” Sergeant Fallon admonishes. “Get up, and mind your sectors.”

Her order seems a bit pointless for the moment—anyone caught in this stuff without the benefit of battle armor or integrated helmet systems will be blind and deaf for a while. Still, I check my rifle once more, pick up the MARS launcher, and take up position by the side of a trash dumpster, to cover the mouth of the alley.

The entire alley is covered in debris that wasn’t there just moments ago. There are shards of polycarbonate everywhere, and as I look up at the buildings that make up one side of this alley, I realize that every single window in the building has been blown out by the pressure wave, dozens of inch-thick polycarb panes shattered like thin ice on a puddle. In the street beyond, I see flaming debris.

“Grayson and Hansen, head over to the end of the alley and sneak a peek,” Sergeant Fallon orders.

We dust ourselves off and trot to the mouth of the alley, back to where we stood just a few moments ago.

“Holy shit,” Hansen says as we turn the corner.

The street in front of us looks nothing like it did when we ran up to the drop ship a few minutes ago. The intersection where the wounded ship crashed is no longer a tidy, mappable feature in the cityscape. The road ends seventy-five yards in front of us, and a smoldering crater marks the spot where the drop ship blew up. The buildings that flanked the intersection are simply gone. From our spot at the corner of the alley to the ruined houses at the edge of the explosion radius, there’s not a single window left intact on the street. There’s debris everywhere—bits of building material, shards of polycarb window panes, and chunks of pavement. The drop ship has disappeared entirely, and I can’t see a single identifiable part of it anywhere.

“What the hell do they stuff into those demolition charges?” I ask.

“Fuel-air explosive,” Hansen answers. “Field-improvised. The tanks are rigged so the remaining fuel gets vaporized into the ship. They also light off whatever ordnance is still on the racks.”

“Holy hell. This neighborhood is fucked up now.”

“It’s not like it was a vacation spot before,” Hansen chuckles.

I scan the area with my low-light vision. There are hundreds of little fires in my field of view, flaring bright green on my helmet screen. I wonder how many people were blown up with that drop ship, or had their houses come down on top of them. Would anyone have stuck around after the crash, and the firefight? I’m trying to think about what I would have done, back home in the PRC, and I conclude that anyone who decides to stick around when a drop ship falls out of the sky next to their house deserves to get blown sky high.

“Keep a watch,” Sergeant Fallon says. “We’re coming out. Let’s clear the area while the cockroaches are stunned.”

Sergeant Fallon has elected to take the most direct route back to the civic center. We’re walking out of the place the same way we walked in, on the main road that leads straight back to the plaza. The side streets and alleys offer more cover, but that would benefit our opponents more than us.