“How’s the boo-boo?”
“Right arm’s on vacation,” she says. Her voice sounds tired. “I’ll be fine. Just give me a second to catch my breath.”
“Anyone home in there?”
“If they are, they’re smart enough to stay inside. I’m not in a super social mood right now.”
The left side of my face hurts as I smile. Our armor is lined with thermal bandage modules that automatically attempt to seal wounds and stop blood loss, but the helmets lack that lining, and the blood streams down my cheek unhindered. I make my way down to the alley where the rest of my squad is holed up. My rifle is pointed at the edge of the roof across the street as I move, ready to put a flechette into any heads popping up behind rifle sights, but if there’s anyone left up on that roof, they have the good sense to keep their heads down.
“Grayson, you got any trauma packs left?” someone asks as I turn the corner to the alley. My squad is hunkered down behind yet another trash container, and several of them are laid out on the ground.
“Yeah, I have two,” I respond.
“Bring ‘em over here.”
Two of my squad mates are tending to Sergeant Fallon, who is sitting with her back to the wall. There’s a pool of blood under her right leg, and as I get closer, I see that the lower half of her leg is badly mangled. I crouch down next to the troopers who are working on the sergeant, pull the trauma packs out of my right leg pocket, and hand them over.
“She dragged Stratton out of the road, and caught a round in the leg,” Jackson says next to me. I glance over to the two inert bodies next to the dumpster, and look at Jackson in question.
“Stratton’s gone, man. So’s Paterson. Right through the fucking armor, both of them.”
“Fuck,” I say, and Jackson nods in agreement.
“That ain’t no welfare riot,” she says. “Heavy belt-fed guns? Where the fuck did they get those? That’s military hardware.”
“I shot a guy who had an M-66,” I say. “And I guarantee you that fucker on the heavy machine gun had magnified night vision. He was right on fucking target with the first round.”
“Whoever it is, they fucked us up,” Sergeant Fallon says. Her voice is slurred, undoubtedly because of a healthy dose of injected pain killers. I try not to look at the mess that is her lower right leg, but I can’t help glancing at it. It looks like someone stuck a small explosive charge into her calf muscle. I can see shattered armor, pulped flesh, and shards of bone.
“What the fuck do we do now, Sarge?” Baker asks.
There’s movement on a rooftop overhead, and a moment later, a bottle with a flaming rag stuffed into its neck comes sailing down from above. It hits the edge of the trash container, and bounces off into the street, unbroken. As it rolls away from the trash container and into the gutter, it leaves a trail of burning fluid. Jackson rushes over, seizes the bottle with a gloved hand, and hurls it down the street, where it finally shatters and ignites. Baker and I get up and rush to the opposite side of the alley to get a bead on our attackers. We don’t see anyone, but a moment later, two more bottles come sailing over the edge of the roof. One of them falls a little wide and cracks open in the middle of the alley, but the other is dead on. It clears the edge of the roof just barely, and then falls straight down into the group huddled behind the garbage container.
“Get out of there!” Jackson yells. The troopers behind the container don’t need the invitation—the bottle cracks open and spews burning liquid, and everyone scrambles to get out of the way. Someone drags the motionless forms of Stratton and Paterson away from the container. Behind me, Baker fires his rifle at the edge of the roof above.
“”We need to get the fuck out of this alley,” Sergeant Fallon says into the squad channel. Her voice sounds calm and relaxed, which probably has more to do with the chemicals in her bloodstream than her state of mind.
“The building is clear,” I say. “Hansen’s inside already. Let’s hole up and get out of the rain here.”
We make our way out of the alley and back to the entrance door where I left Hansen a few minutes ago. Every trooper who’s still able to walk is carrying or dragging another who isn’t. Jackson and I are dragging Stratton, who has two neatly stenciled half-inch holes in the chest plate of his battle armor—one in the abdomen, and one right in the center of his sternum.
“Hansen, we’re coming in,” I say. “Mind your muzzle.”
“Copy,” she replies. “Don’t slip on the blood.”
The building is a low-rise apartment tenement, ten units per floor. There are never any vacancies in a PRC. Even for these shitty shoeboxes made out of paper-thin concrete, there’s a long waiting list. The residents are undoubtedly pressing their ears against their doors as our TA squad barges into the ground floor hallway, and I know that at least a few of them will be on their Net boxes in a moment to ring the neighborhood alarm.
Here they are, come and get them.
We lay down the dead in a corner, and the wounded in the center hallway, away from the entrance door. Sergeant Fallon is severely mauled and doped up. Stratton and Paterson are dead, and every other member of the squad has at least a minor injury. I finally take a moment to pull off my helmet, and wince when the liner on the left side pulls itself loose from the wound to which it was glued with congealing blood.
“Got yourself a beauty mark there, Grayson,” Baker says. “That’ll leave a scar, I think.”
“Yeah, well, I’ll worry about that later,” I say.
“They’ll have to blow off his head before he’s as ugly as you,” Hansen says weakly from a few yards away.
“With the way things are going right now, they just might.”
“Bravo C2, this is Bravo One-One,” Sergeant Fallon says into her helmet mike. C2 is command and control—the people at Company who are calling the shots and relaying orders from the boss down to the platoon and squad leaders.
“First Squad is holed up half a klick from the admin building. We have extracted the pilot and crew chief from Valkyrie Six-One, but we have two KIA, and most of the rest are wounded. Got anything you can send our way here?”
Sergeant Fallon listens for the response from C2, and everybody sort of listens in without being too obvious about it.
“That’s a negative, C2. No way can we walk that distance, with half the city on our ass out here. Two of my guys are dead, and three of us can’t walk. We barely have enough people to carry all the casualties.”
There’s another delay, and then Sergeant Fallon lets out a chuckle that sounds genuinely amused.
“Look, guy, I’d love to comply with that order, I really would. My squad is combat ineffective . You make us all walk back through Indian country right now, you’ll be picking up our pieces in the morning. Send the replacement drop ship our way once they get here, and we’ll evac from here. They can land in front of the building, and cover our egress.”
The response from C2 makes Sergeant Fallon roll her eyes.
“The machine guns are gone. Six-Four got the first one on their strafing run, and one of my guys blew the hell out of the other one with a MARS. That drop ship can take a whole lot more small arms fire than we can, chief.”
She waits for the reply, and by now we’ve all given up trying to be subtle about listening in.
“Copy that, Lieutenant. If I lose another trooper on the way, you can be sure that I’ll pay you a visit as soon as they stitch me back together. Bravo One-One out .”
She taps the comm channel button on the inside of her wrist with emphasis.
“We are to exfil to the civic plaza for medevac, on foot. They don’t want to risk another bird. ETA on the drop ship is ten minutes.”
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