A Muzzie field-pulse gun opened up from a ferrocrete bunker two hundred meters ahead, sending a stream of dazzling flashes above his head. Almost automatically, Ramsey tagged the structure with a mental shift of icons on his noumenal display, which hung inside his thoughts like a glowing movie screen. His suit AI melded data from a wide range of sensory input into a coherent image. In his mind’s eye, he could see the bunker overlaid by the ghostly images of human figures inside, and the malevolent red glow of active power systems.
“Skyfire, I have a target,” he said, and he mentally keyed the display skyward, tagged with precise coordinates.
Seconds later, a voice in his head whispered what he’d been waiting to hear. “Target confirmed. Sniper round on the way.”
Several seconds more slipped past, and then the cloud deck overhead flared sun-bright, and a beam of light so brilliant it appeared to be made of solid, mirror-bright metal snapped on, connecting clouds with the bunker.
At the beam’s touch, the bunker exploded, ferrocrete and field-pulse gun and Theocrat soldiers all converted to fast-expanding vapor, blue-white heat, and a sharp surge of gamma radiation. The ground-support gunners out in Alighan orbit had just driven a sliver of mag-stabilized uranium-cladded antimatter into that gun emplacement at half the speed of light. The resulting explosion had vaporized an area half the size of a city block, leaving very little behind but hard radiation and a smoking hole in the ground.
Unfortunately, the enemy had weapons just as powerful, and as minute followed bloody minute, more and more of them were coming on-line. He needed to move … but first, this looked like a good place to leave one of his mobile weapons.
Working quickly, Ramsey pulled a KR-48 pack out of a storage compartment on his hip, extended its tripod legs with a thought, and placed the device atop what was left of the wall. Through its optics, the image relayed through his helmet AI to his brain, he checked its field of fire, giving it a clear view toward the city’s central plaza.
His 660-ABS had more than once been compared to a one-man tank, but so shallow an image wildly missed the point, and in fact was insulting to the battlesuit. In fact, tanks had become obsolete centuries ago thanks primarily to the rise of battlesuit technology. Wearing an ABS, a Marine could walk, run, or soar for distances of up to a kilometer, could engage a wide range of targets on the ground and in the air with a small but powerful arsenal of varied weaponry, and could link with every other ABS in the battle zone to coordinate attacks and share intelligence. An ABS allowed its wearer to shrug off the detonation of a small tactical nuke less than a hundred meters away, to survive everything from shrapnel to radiation to heavy-caliber projectiles to clouds of nano-D, and to function in any environment from hard vacuum to the bottom of the sea to the boiling hell-cauldron of modern combat.
In fact, any contest between a lone Marine in a 660 battlesuit and a whole platoon of archaic heavy tanks could have only one possible outcome.
What was important, however, was why, after a thousand years, individual and small-unit tactics were still of vital importance in combat. For centuries, virtual-sim generals had been predicting the end of the rifleman as the centerpiece of combat. The energies employed by even small-scale weapons were simply too deadly, too powerful, and too indiscriminate in their scope to permit something as vulnerable as a human being to survive more than seconds in a firefight.
Somehow, though, the venerable rifleman had survived, his technology advancing to extend his effectiveness and his chances of survival. The truth was, a planetary ground-assault unit like the 55th MARS could drop out of orbit, seize the starport, and hold it, where larger, faster, and more powerful AI-directed weaponry would simply have vaporized it.
Of course, by the time the Muzzies were through defending the port, most of it would be vaporized, wrecked, or otherwise rendered unusable anyway. That was the problem with war. It was so damned destructive … of personnel, of property, of entire cultures and societies. …
He completed setting up the KR-48 and keyed it to his helmet display. He switched on the weapon’s power shields, to keep it from being directly targeted by roving enemy combat drones or smart hunters, then bounded clear, making his way around the perimeter of the city plaza. Gunfire continued to crack and spit from the surrounding buildings, those that hadn’t been demolished yet, but the accuracy of the Marines’ orbital sniper fire seemed to be having a telling effect on the defenses. The instant a Marine came under fire, the attack was noted by Skyfire command and control, and the attacker would in moments be brought under counterfire, either by high-velocity rounds chucked from orbit, or from the A-90 ground-support aerospace craft now crisscrossing the skies above the port complex, or from other Marines on the ground linked into the combat net.
“Bravo one-one-five,” a voice whispered in his mind. His AI identified the speaker as Captain Baltis, his platoon commander, but he recognized the dry tones without his suit’s comm ID function. “Hostile gun position at six-one-three-Sierra. Can you neutralize it, Ram?”
He zoomed in on the indicated coordinates on his map window. The enemy fire was coming from the top of a forty-story structure two kilometers ahead. A drone feed showed the Muzzie gunners, clustered on a rooftop overlooking the plaza, clustered around a tripod-mounted high-velocity sliver gun.
“I’ll see what I can do,” Ramsey replied. “Why can’t we leave it to Sniper?”
“Because that would bring that whole tower down,” Baltis replied, “and we have civilians in there.”
Shit. The Muzzies didn’t seem to care whether their own civilians were caught in the line of fire or not. But the Marines were under standing orders to minimize collateral damage, and that meant civilian casualties.
“Okay. I’m on it.”
Rising, he bounded forward, covering the ground in long, low, gliding strides that carried him both toward the objective building and around toward the right. He was trying to take advantage of the cover provided by some smaller buildings between him and the target. As he drew closer, someone on the rooftop spotted him and swung the heavy-barreled weapon around to bear on him. He felt the snap of hivel rounds slashing through the air above his head, felt the impacts as they punched into the pavement nearby with bone-jarring hammerings and raised a dense cloud of powdered ferrocrete.
Dropping behind a plasteel wall, he connected with the KR-48 he’d left behind, using his suit’s link with the weapon to pivot and elevate the blunt snout toward the target building. On the window inset in his mind, he saw the KR-48’s crosshairs center over the top of the building; a mental command triggered a burst, sending a stream of thumb-sized missiles shrieking toward the rooftop gun emplacement.
The missiles vaporized chunks of cast stone, but the Muzzies’ armor damped out the blast effects. He’d been expecting it; he was using the weapon as a diversion, not for the kill.
Instantly, the Muzzie gunners swung their weapon back to the south, searching for the source of incoming fire. Ramsey watched the shift in their attention, and chose that moment to leap high into the air.
A mental command cut in his jump jets in midair, and he soared skyward, clearing the upper ramparts of the building, cutting the jets, and dropping onto a broad, open rooftop.
He used the flamer connected to his left wrist to spew liquid fire into the gun emplacement. The enemy troops were shielded against tactical heat, of course, but the suddenness of his appearance, arcing down out of the sky, surprised and startled them, and the torch blast melted the plastic mountings of the hivel gun and toppled it over onto its side.
Shifting his aim, he torched the floor of the rooftop enclosure, cutting open a gaping crater. Two of the Muzzie infantrymen were caught in the collapse of the roof, falling through in a shower of flaming debris; Ramsey shifted to the mag-pulse rifle mounted on his right arm and hammered away at five more Theocrat soldiers