Contact Front #1 Drop Trooper by Rick Partlow

Author:Rick Partlow [Partlow, Rick]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Aethon Books
Published: 2020-04-27T14:00:00+00:00

15

“Taylor, watch your interval,” I snapped. “If you like Rodriguez that much, get her ‘link address and call her after the war.”

“Sorry,” the quiet man said, his Vigilante backing off another ten meters in the Ranger-file line formation we were running through the city center.

I didn’t really blame him for getting distracted. MOUT City was creepy, especially at night. Leave it to the military to find the most extravagant way to spend taxpayer money. Never mind that we had realistic virtual reality pods that could simulate any terrain, the Marines had built themselves a complete dummy city on Inferno a hundred kilometers outside the capital of Tartarus. I mean, right down to the business names on the marquee and the parking stickers on the windscreens of the cargo trucks parked at the curb. And furniture inside, for all I knew. Military Operations in Urban Terrain, an acronym older than the Commonwealth, or so I’d been told.

Someone had told me there were construction bots on call after every training run to rebuild any of the buildings that got damaged, which kind of made me want to smash into a couple of them just for shits and giggles, but I restrained myself. I was in a leadership position and, even if I wasn’t too happy about it, I wasn’t going to fuck it up on purpose.

I’d thought about it. Maybe, I’d figured, if I messed up bad enough, they might be forced to demote me back to PFC and put someone else in charge of the fire team. I still wasn’t sure why I’d decided against it. It wasn’t because I was afraid that they’d kick me out and I’d wind up in hibernation. I already knew they were too desperate to let any warm bodies get away and I’d also come to accept I was very good in a Vigilante, which they also wouldn’t have wanted to lose.

But I couldn’t do it to Scotty Hayes. He’d taken a chance on me and he really seemed to think I was worth it. I don’t know why I felt like I owed him for that, particularly when I didn’t want the job, but he was trying to be my friend, and it was more than anyone had done for me in the last ten years.

“First squad,” Hayes said over the squad net, his voice calm and steady, “we got a frag-o based on a report from the drones. There’s a company of Tahni infantry dug in at the constabulary. That’s our target. We believe they’re holding civilian hostages in the sub-basement cells, so we can’t just bombard the building or call in an air strike. We have to draw them out and give Force Recon a chance to get inside and free the civilians.”

I made sure my mic was turned off before I sighed in exasperation. The odds we’d ever get any useful intel from drones in real combat were somewhere between slim and none. If we could get drones past the Tahni

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