Terms of Enlistment

Chapter 12

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.

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.

I stuff the pistol back into the harness, and shoulder the MARS. The machine gunner in the distance has switched to very short bursts, two or three shots at a time, undoubtedly to preserve ammo while making us keep our heads down. My TacLink display shows Hansen moving further into the hallway to my left, and the rest of the squad huddled in a side alley thirty yards ahead. More than half their number are out of the fight, according to the symbols on my screen.

The operation of the MARS launcher is dead simple. We’ve drilled the deployment of the MARS a dozen times, and for some odd reason, I hear Sergeant Burke’s voice in its unforgettable drill instructor twang as my fingers perform the necessary steps to ready the launcher for action.

I point the center of the reticle at the muzzle flashes of the heavy machine gun in the distance, near the top floor of the high rise a third of a mile away, and pull the trigger.

The rocket leaps out of its launch canister with shocking speed. The tail end of the rocket glows with the heat of its internal booster, and the whole thing shoots off into the distance only a little slower than a tracer round. I expected to see the rocket leisurely rise skyward like the Sarissas we used back at the embassy a few weeks ago, but the MARS streaks downrange in a blink, covering the distance between us and the machine gun position in just a few seconds.

My aim was a bit off. The rocket hits the building two floors below the machine gun that is still spitting tracers our way. There’s a bright flash that cuts through the hazy night sky, and then the thunderclap of the explosion rolls across the PRC.

When I grabbed the rocket launcher, I took a high explosive and a thermobaric warhead out of the rack, and loaded one of them into the launcher to be less encumbered. The one I loaded was the thermobaric missile.

The MARS launcher fires ninety-millimeter rockets. It’s designed to take out enemy fortifications and reinforced structures. A high-rise tenement is a very light structure. It’s a steel skeleton with thin modular concrete sheets for walls.

The missile hit twenty feet below the window with the heavy machine gun, but the bunker buster warhead is rather forgiving of aiming errors. The front of the floor around the impact point erupts outward, windows and walls turned into millions of bits and shards by the overpressure. The explosion is much more dramatic than the one caused by the thermobaric rifle grenade I fired into the building with the sniper during the embassy evacuation. Over by the high rise, the sky is filled with flaming debris as the pressure of the explosion radiates outward. Then the entire front of the building above the point of impact collapses with the tortured groan of fatigued metal and concrete. I watch in morbid fascination as the four or five floors above the explosion pancake into each other. More concrete slides off the face of the building, this time in bigger chunks. When the rumbling stops, there’s a dust cloud above the high rise that reaches hundreds of feet into the sky. The side of the building that’s facing us now has a massive wound in its upper half, a smoking gash that’s five floors high and three quarters of a floor wide.

Part of me realizes that I just blew up twenty apartments, with everything and everyone within. Mostly, however, I am just glad that the heavy machine gun has stopped raining death onto my squad.

I get down on one knee and work the fastener for the now-empty cartridge husk at the rear of the launcher. As I drop the expended hull and pick up the second cartridge, someone starts shooting from the rooftop across the street again. I feel something hitting the side of my armor right underneath my arm. The impact is hard enough to make me drop the launcher tube in surprise. Hansen’s rifle is half a foot to my right, and I scoop it up and work the bolt. The grenade launcher is empty, but the magazine is still half full.

The shooter on the roof is a woman. She’s dressed in baggy and shapeless clothes, but I can clearly see her long hair, and her feminine features underneath the bill of the cap she is wearing. She’s down on one knee, right by the edge of the roof, and she’s holding a rifle with a wooden stock. As I watch, she works a lever at the bottom of her rifle to load another round into the chamber. She performs the motion without taking the weapon off her shoulder, and her eyes never waver from the sights.

I stare at her, this woman that looks like a dozen I’ve known back home, just a hood rat in too-big clothes, and I want to wave her off, shout a warning, or both—anything to keep her from shooting at me, so I won’t have to shoot her in turn. Then she pulls the trigger on her rifle.

The bullet hits me right above the eyebrow, on the ridge that forms the upper edge of the face shield. It feels like being beaned with a well-thrown fastball. I stumble backwards and fall on my ass. My helmet display blanks out momentarily from the shock of the impact.

This was a killing shot that just barely missed. She shot at my armor to get my attention and make me turn around, and the second shot was aimed right at my visor, the weakest point of my battle armor. My sensors restore my low-light vision just in time for me to see the woman on the roof complete another stroke of the loading lever on that antique rifle of hers. My right hand is still wrapped around the grip of Hansen’s rifle, and unlike my opponent, I don’t have to bring my rifle up into my field of vision to aim it.

We pull our triggers at the same time. Her bullet cracks into my visor, right at the seam between the clear face shield and the reinforced ballistic shell of the outer helmet. It’s another near miss, but an improvement over the last one. I feel a sharp jab of pain right underneath my left eye that radiates out to my ear, as if someone had sliced the side of my head with a sharp knife.

My rifle sends not just one, but half a dozen rounds in return. They hit the woman on the roof dead center in the chest, the perfect aim of a computer. She doesn’t cry out or flinch. Instead, she just falls forward, and there’s nothing between her and the street below to break her fall.

From the way she falls, limbs flailing without any semblance of control or coordination, I know that she is already dead when she hits the ground. Still, I feel the urge to run the twenty yards to where she is now splayed out motionless on the dirty asphalt.

I seize her by the collar of her jacket and turn her around to get a look at her face. Her eyes are open, but unfocused in death. There’s no pain in her face, no surprise or distress. She looks about thirty, maybe a few years younger. Her ball cap fell off her head when she fell off the roof, and her hair is held together in a loose ponytail. I can’t tell the exact color of it with my augmented night vision, but it’s dark hair, brown or auburn.

“Grayson, if you’re still standing, get your ass over here,” I hear over the squad channel, the first time someone has used the voice network since the machine gun opened fire. The identifier tag on my helmet screen marks the speaker as Corporal Jackson, but she sounds odd, like she’s speaking slowly through clenched teeth.

“Copy,” I respond, and check her location on the map. The bullet that pierced the side of my visor missed the monocle of the data computer, and I still have a data feed in my field of vision. The left side of my face feels like it has been worked over with broken glass. I can feel warm blood trickling down my cheek.

The squad is huddled together in the alley ahead and to my left. I reload Hansen’s rifle with a fresh magazine.

“Hansen, do you copy?” I ask into the squad channel.

“Yeah, I’m here,” Hansen replies. “I’m at the end of the entrance hallway, right before the bend. Mind your trigger finger when you come in.”

“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.”

I look around at the remnants of our squad. We have two dead bodies, Sergeant Fallon and the drop ship pilot can’t walk, and the crew chief is still unconscious. Hansen won’t be carrying anyone, either. The five of us who are still on our feet will each need to carry someone. We’re in no shape for a fight anymore.

“Well, let’s get to it, then,” Corporal Jackson says. She shoulders her rifle and bends down to pick up the unconscious crew chief.

“Grayson, you take the sergeant. Let’s get going. If we miss this ride, we’re well and truly fucked.”

I don’t want to go back out into the street, but I don’t want to stay here, either. Once the PRC comes alive after sunrise, and people start collecting the bodies of their friends, any soldier in the area will be fair game for a public barbecue.

“Ten minutes,” Sergeant Fallon says as I help her up and drape her arm over my shoulder. “Don’t be stopping to smell the flowers.”

“Don’t worry about that,” I say.

Encumbered by Sergeant Fallon’s armored bulk, I am out of breath at the end of the first block. We’re running down the street that leads straight back to the civic plaza, stopping on every intersection to catch our collective breath and check the cross streets for enemy presence.

The shooting starts again when we’re a block and a half away from the building where we had holed up. Up ahead, at the nearest intersection, someone leans around a corner and starts popping off shots at our ragged little column. I’m in the lead with Sergeant Fallon, and her bulk on my right side prevents me from using my rifle to shoot back on the run. I sway to the side and lower the sergeant to the ground in the cover of a doorway, but by the time I have my rifle in my hands, the shooter at the corner has disappeared. Then I hear gunshots behind us, from the intersection we had just cleared a few moments ago.

“Watch the corners,” Corporal Jackson shouts.

I sight my rifle and fire back. My flechettes are kicking up concrete dust, but the shooter disappeared around the corner as soon as I brought my rifle to bear. If we’re going to be harassed like this all the way back to the civic plaza, we’ll get there in a few hours at best. They know where we are and where we’re going, and they’re smart enough to avoid a stand-up fight.

“Shoot on the run,” Corporal Jackson says. “Switch to full-auto and hose down the corners when they pop their heads out. Monitor your ammo, and reload when we pause to take a breath.”

Our progress along the street is painfully slow. Sergeant Fallon is doped up, but conscious, and she’s assisting me by using her rifle with her unencumbered right hand. Others in my squad are carrying dead weight. We go from block to block, rushing across intersections as fast as we can, and pausing after every dash to reload our weapons and rest for a few seconds. I parcel out the spare magazines I have left from Lieutenant Weaving’s stash to the rest of the squad. Firing bursts makes the enemy keep their heads down, but our ammo stock is dwindling fast.

As we get closer to the civic plaza, the shooting gets more intense. Where before there were individuals taking potshots at us, now there are groups of three and four working together, like infantry fire teams. It seems that everybody with a working firearm is out on the street tonight, and they all know which way we’re going.

I’m in the front for a change, stumbling along with Sergeant Fallon by my side. We’ve turned into a symbiotic organism, a slow-moving creature with three working legs and two rifles. As we come up on the intersections, she covers the right side of our frontal arc, and I cover the left. Without the aiming marker projected onto my helmet display, I wouldn’t be hitting anything. As it is, I’m not wildly accurate firing my rifle from the crook of my arm as we’re ambling along, but it’s enough to make the other guys duck back behind corners. I’m firing three-round bursts, and my rifle is down to a hundred rounds, with two magazines remaining in the pouches on my harness.

“Quarter klick to go,” Sergeant Fallon says over the squad channel as we hunker down for a rest after dashing across yet another intersection. Whenever we walk up to the intersection, people shoot at us from alley mouths and building corners, and every time we cross a major street, the fire from our left and right gets twice as dense as we offer the crowd a clear line of fire from four sides. Standard infantry practice is to pop smoke grenades before dashing across, but we’ve popped our last smoke a few hundred yards back. Now we’re just relying on the laminate of our battle armor, and the knowledge that most black market small arms can’t pierce our suits easily.

In running shoes, I can cover two hundred and fifty meters in well under a minute. Right now, it might as well be two hundred and fifty miles. We’re taking fire from every alley and side street along the way. I fire a burst at a building corner up ahead where someone with a rifle just popped off two shots at our column. The shooter pulls back the moment he sees my muzzle swing towards him, and my salvo hits nothing but dirty concrete. Still, I mash the trigger again, and again, sending two more bursts into the space where his head was just a moment ago.

“Grayson, you got any grenades left?” Sergeant Fallon asks. Her voice sounds weak.

“Just two rubber rounds,” I say.

“Well, fuck. I’m just about out, too.”

As she says this, she aims her rifle at an alley mouth to our right, and pulls the trigger. I didn’t even see anyone there, but as her burst tears into the darkness, I hear a cry of pain, and a shouted exclamation. Then the bolt of Sergeant Fallon’s rifle locks back on an empty magazine.

“Sling it, and take this,” I say, and pull the pistol out of my harness. She lets go of the rifle, which remains suspended muzzle-down by her side, and seizes the pistol.

“Where’d you get that cap gun?” she asks.

“Drop ship armory,” I reply. “I’ll reload your rifle when we’re across the intersection.”

“Good man.” She hefts the pistol. “Shitload easier to use with one hand.”

The next intersection is a major one, two main roads crossing. I stop at the forward edge of the corner building, and aim the rifle around the corner with my left hand. The M-66 has a built-in uplink to the TacLink computer, and we can use our rifles as remote cameras, to snoop around corners without exposing ourselves to fire. As soon as my muzzle clears the edge of the building, I see a bunch of red carets on my tactical map, all advancing on the intersection from the left. There are at least a hundred people coming down the street, and the closest one is less than fifty yards away.

“Hold,” I yell into my mike.

“I see it,” Jackson says behind me. “If only half of ‘em got guns, we’ll never make it across.”

“I’ll stay at the corner with the Sarge and cover. You get across, and then cover us.”

“You got ammo left?”

“Two mags,” I say. “Hurry the fuck up, will you?”

I lower Sergeant Fallon to the ground, and replace the partially empty magazine in my rifle with a full one. Sergeant Fallon holds out her hand, and I pass her the other full magazine. I drop to one knee, lean around the corner, and commence firing.

The closest gaggle of people is twenty yards away when I drop them with single shots, one round each. The crowd behind them scatters. Some dash for cover in the nearest alley, some turn around and run the way they came. A few shoot back, and they go down next. I have low-light vision, computer-controlled weaponry, and ballistic armor. They have outdated weapons, and battery-powered flashlights. For once, they’re caught in the open, and I have no remorse about exacting payback.

Behind me, the rest of the squad rushes across the intersection. Jackson has the crew chief, Philips has the dead Paterson over his shoulder, Priest is carrying the drop ship pilot, and Baker and Hansen are both carrying Stratton’s body. We’re a rifle squad in a combat battalion, with state-of-the-art equipment, and we got reduced to a limping pack of walking wounded—and two dead—in just a few moments of battle, fighting against our own people, in the middle of one of our own cities.

At this range, it’s hard to miss. I center the reticle of my gunsight on the silhouettes ahead of me, and pull the trigger of the rifle methodically. A scrawny guy with a scoped rifle dashes toward the mouth of the alley, and I aim just ahead of him and nail him with a single shot that sends him sprawling across the concrete. A girl passes him and bends down to pick up the rifle he dropped, and as soon as her fingers touch the rifle stock, I shoot her, two rounds right into the middle of her hunched-over silhouette. Sergeant Fallon is firing her rifle from the prone position, adding the contents of her magazine to the carnage.

Just as the squad is across the intersection, I hear gunfire from my left. I turn to locate the source of it when something hits the side of my armor. It’s a rather unspectacular impact, barely enough to make me sway, but there’s a sudden intense pain in my side, and I know that the round has pierced my battle armor. There’s another blow, this one lower than the first. It feels like someone sticking a red-hot needle into my side and driving it home with a hammer. Then I find myself on the ground next to Sergeant Fallon. My lungs feel like all the air has been sucked out of them in an instant. I want to shout a warning, but I can’t work up the breath for anything beyond a groan.

There’s a small group of rioters at the corner of the intersection we just passed a little while ago. One of them is kneeling and aiming a familiar-looking rifle at me. I recognize the twin muzzle arrangement of an M-66, topped with a standard military combination sight. My own rifle is on the ground in front of me. I reach for it, but the whole thing seems to have tripled in weight all of a sudden. The shooter with the M-66 takes aim again, and I know that I won’t be able to lift my own gun before he curls his trigger finger and exerts the nine pounds of pressure necessary to launch another flechette round.

Then I hear a burst of fire from behind me. The shooter falls on his butt with an almost comical look of consternation on his face. For a brief moment, he sits on the street, his legs stretched out in front of him, his rifle still in his hands but aimed at nothing in particular anymore. Then there’s a second burst of fire, and the shooter takes all three rounds in his face. He falls back, still holding on to his rifle. His two comrades dash out of the line of fire and disappear behind the corner of the building.

I look over to the right, and see Corporal Jackson on one knee, her rifle aimed at a spot behind me. I raise myself on my hands and knees, and scoop up my own rifle. The ammo counter on my screen shows 159 rounds remaining. I’ve pulled the trigger almost a hundred times in the last minute or two.

“Grayson, you okay?” Jackson asks over the squad channel.

My left side feels like it has a pair of knives sticking out of it. The pain is so intense that it takes my breath away. I have to force myself to fill my lungs, and every breath makes the pain in my side flare to almost intolerable levels. I try to find the air for a reply, but then I just shake my head.

“Baker, with me,” Jackson says. “Whoever’s left, give us some covering fire.”

Baker and Jackson come dashing back across the intersection. Behind them, Priest and Hansen lean around the corner and start firing their rifles. I want to add my own flechettes to the covering fire, but I don’t have the strength to lift my rifle anymore. Someone grabs me by the harness and starts dragging me across the street. I see Jackson helping Sergeant Fallon to her feet, firing her rifle with one hand as she pulls the sergeant along with her. My computer informs me that I still have a bunch of rounds in my magazine, and it points out the threat vectors to the people down the road who are still standing and shooting at us, but right now, I’m just a passenger, no longer able to take advantage of all that superior technology.

Eventually, my bumpy journey across the intersection stops. I don’t remember having closed my eyes, but I open them now to see Baker bent over me, his visor raised.

“How bad?” he asks. Behind him, Hansen and Priest are still firing their rifles, exchanging rounds with the newly emboldened rioters that have decided to stick around and nail us down. Now that they’ve seen our casualties, there’s blood in the water, and the sharks are circling. Soon, they’ll get reinforcements, and our ammo is almost gone.

I lift up my rifle—barely—and pat the magazine well with one hand to let Baker know there’s still ammo in my weapon. He nods and takes the M-66 out of my hands.

“Priest, here’s another half a mag,” he says over his shoulder.

“About time. I’m just about dry.” Priest takes my rifle and goes back to his spot at the street corner.

Baker checks the damage to my armor. My left side has gone from searing hot to ice cold. I still have to expend most of my energy forcing air into my lungs, and it feels like something important is broken inside. For the first time in my life, I think that I might be dying. I suppose I should feel dread or panic, knowing that I may slip into unconsciousness at any moment and never wake up again, but I’m too tired and too out of it to care.

“You want me to shoot you up, man?”

Baker has a narcotics injector in his hand, and he makes a motion like clicking a ball pen in front of my face. I shake my head—I don’t want to numb myself and lose the ability to suck air into my lungs.

“C2, this is Bravo One-One,” I hear Sergeant Fallon. “We are down for the count here. We have more wounded than we can carry. Hostiles all over the place, and we’re just about out of ammo. Send a ship, or send a recovery detail with body bags. Your call.”

There’s a reply over the platoon channel, but I can’t quite make it out as I am drifting off. It feels like the onset of a really bad flu, that floating feeling you get in your head that makes you all woozy and shaky on your feet as you stumble into the bathroom for some medicine.

I close my eyes, and listen to the battle going on around me. The reports from military rifles are sporadic, single rounds here and there, with the occasional short burst. The gunshots from civilian weaponry are getting more frequent, and it seems like they’re coming from every direction now.

“I’m hit,” someone yells on the squad channel. I’m too out of it to recognize the voice—Baker? Priest?—but there’s nothing I can do, anyway. I barely have the energy to keep breathing.

Then there’s a new sound, a thunderous roar overhead. I smell the stench of burning fuel, and a hot gust blows across my face. I hear what sounds like a giant zipper being undone, and look up to see the welcome silhouette of a Hornet-class drop ship overhead, gun turret blazing as the hulking machine descends in a graceful hover.

I fade out again for a little while. There’s the sensation of floating away from the ground. People are talking right next to my head, but it all sounds like it’s coming through a brick wall, and I don’t even try to make sense of it. I get jostled against a hard surface, and the pain in my side flares up. I squirm, but there are strong hands holding me down, and I feel the pinprick of an injector against my neck.

Then the world turns quiet around me.