Marko Kloos - Terms of Enlistment

I am once again on rear guard duty. The two pairs of troopers carrying the pilot and crew chief are shielded by two pairs of unencumbered troopers in the lead and rear. Hansen and I are keeping an eye out on the road behind us, but the street scene is eerily quiet once more. Every once in a while, I see movement in a doorway or alley mouth, but nobody’s shooting at us. For my part, I’d gladly call it a night, and as we leapfrog back in the direction of the plaza, I hope that the other side shares that sentiment.

Overhead, Second Platoon’s drop ship descends out of the dirty night sky to land on the plaza once more. I hold my breath as they pass over the tall apartment building where one of the heavy machine guns was raining down armor-piercing rounds onto Valkyrie Six-One a little while ago, but the drop ship passes over the roof of the building without incident.

“Third of a klick, people,” Sergeant Fallon says. “Almost there. I don’t know about you, but I’m good and ready for a shower and a stress fuck.”

“Amen to that,” Stratton chuckles.

“It’s gotten too fucking quiet,” Jackson says from the front. “They all pack up and go home, or what?”

I open my mouth to comment on Jackson’s entirely too cliched interjection, when something catches my eye up ahead. There are flashes of light coming from the apartment building in the distance, and I realize the source of those flashes just before the booming reports of heavy gunfire reach the acoustic sensors on my helmet.

“Incoming!” I shout, and dodge to the left, where a doorway offers some cover. My helmet display flashes as the computer updates threat vectors and enemy positions on the tactical map.

“High rise at twelve o’clock, three or four floors down from the top!”

The tracers reaching out from the building look like laser beams in the darkness—the fake red beams of old science fiction movies, not the invisible high-energy pulses of real laser weapons. The first burst rains down right in front of our squad, skipping red-hot tracers off the asphalt.

In front of me, the squad dashes for cover, but there is precious little to be found on this block, and nothing that will stop a heavy machine gun round. The gunner must have tracked us for a little while, and opened fire only when we were away from any alleys, with nothing but building walls flanking the road on both sides of us. The nearest alley mouth is a few dozen yards ahead, far enough that it might as well be a mile away.

Sergeant Fallon drops to one knee, sights her rifle, and fires back at the source of the incoming rounds. The high rise is almost half a kilometer away, which is about as far as our rifles will reach. Her M-66 sounds weak and tinny compared to the thunderous reports of the heavy gun in the distance. Next to the sergeant, Stratton and Jackson follow suit and return fire.

The heavy machine gun stops firing for a moment, and then opens up again. This time, the burst is right on target. I watch in horror as the stream of tracers reaches out and touches Stratton, who falls backwards.

I catch movement out of the corner of my eye, and turn to see a rifle barrel poking over the edge of a roof to our rear. There’s movement on that rooftop, people shuffling into position, and my guts contract as I realize that the locals aren’t done fighting after all. It’s a crude ambush, but we ambled right into it.

The heavy machine gun in the distance opens up again. The gunner has good fire discipline. He fires his weapon in short bursts. Whoever is working that weapon isn’t new to the task. Hansen pushes me into the doorway to my left, and then piles in after me, just as the new flight of tracers from the distant machine gun rakes the pavement in front of us. I bump into the entrance door of the building. The impact of my armor-clad bulk rattles its polycarb panes. The MARS launcher slides off my back, and I land on top of it. We scramble away from the curb as the tracer rounds whiz by just a few feet to our right. One of the tracers hits the corner of the doorway and knocks off a chunk of concrete, which rains down on us in bits and pieces.

On my tactical screen, I see two more of our squad icons flash brightly with the icon that shouts “Medic Needed”. Our squad medic, Patterson, is one of the medical emergencies. The rest of the squad is moving forward, toward the mouth of the nearest alley, but the machine gunner has our little group dialed in now. The next burst drops another one of my squad mates.

Hansen is back up on her feet, exchanging fire with someone on a rooftop out of sight.

“Grayson, open that fucking door,” she says conversationally, nodding to indicate the entrance door to my left.

I don’t have any buckshot grenades left, and using a HE round would mean that we’d have to step out into the road to avoid getting caught by the blast of the explosion. The rubber rounds will just bounce off the inch-thick polycarb door panels. I switch my rifle to manual fire, set the selector to “continuous burst”, and aim at the center of the door as I pull the trigger. The muzzle flash illuminates the doorway as my rifle burps out the contents of its magazine at two thousand rounds per minute, thirty-three needle-pointed high density tungsten flechettes per second. The storm of flechettes chews into the polycarbonate with ease, and after two or three seconds, the entire upper panel of the door disintegrates in a shower of plastic shards. With the window panel gone, I can reach through the door frame and activate the emergency unlock. I shoulder the door open, and turn around to see Hansen on her back, pushing herself further into the doorway with her heels. Her rifle is on the ground next to her. I reach over, grab the back of her helmet, and pull her up into the doorway, out of the line of fire. She weighs close to two hundred pounds with the armor and all her gear, but I am so pumped on adrenaline that I yank her into the dark hallway of the building without ever letting go of my rifle with the other hand.

“You okay?” I ask, and she groans in response. There’s a hole in her armor right by the joint between the chest plate and the shoulder pauldrons.

“Get my rifle,” she says. “I can still shoot with the other arm.”

“Sit tight,” I tell her. The magazine in my rifle is nearly empty again, and I eject it and insert a new one from the stash tucked into the side pocket of my leg armor. Then I hand the rifle to Hansen.

“Take this one for a minute.”

I step back out into the doorway and pick up the MARS launcher. Out in the street, I hear the hammering of the heavy machine gun again. My tactical screen shows nothing but blinking carets, flashing in alternate shades of blue and red—medical emergencies. Across the street, there are a few heads poking over the edge of the roof. I hold the launcher with my left, and pull the pistol I had stuffed into my harness back in the drop ship. The sidearm feels odd and unfamiliar in my hand—I’ve only ever fired one back in Basic, during small arms familiarization—but the computer in my armor immediately recognizes the weapon, switches sighting modes, and displays the remaining ammo count at the bottom of my screen. The pistol only holds twenty-five rounds, a tenth of the rifle’s magazine capacity, but at short range, it beats fighting with bare hands. I draw a bead on one of the heads on the rooftop, and squeeze the trigger. The pistol barks a sharp report, and the head underneath my aiming reticle disappears suddenly. There are shouts on the roof, and another head pops up, this one behind the barrel of a rifle. I briefly register that the weapon aimed at me looks a lot like a military-issue M-66. I squeeze off three more rounds in rapid cadence, and the rifleman on the roof disappears. His weapon tumbles from the rooftop ledge onto the street below, where it lands with a hollow clatter. For the moment, there are no more heads coming up on that roof.