The Marines' mortars would have been recognizable even to someone from pre-space Terra, but they were far more capable than the unsophisticated metal tubes of their remote ancestors. They were magazine-fed weapons, although they could also-and often did-fire individually hand-loaded rounds. Now, both tubes ripped through a full ten-round carousel magazine each. They got the entire twenty-round fire mission off in under ten seconds, and the individually guided rounds tracked in on their preselected targets mercilessly, blanketing them in a deadly stormfront of explosions and antipersonnel flechettes.
"Go!" Lieutenant Kuramochi barked as the thunder ended as abruptly as it had begun, and Alicia swung herself up and out of her position.
Her pulse hammered harshly, and everything seemed preternaturally clear, harder-edged and sharper than even her augmented senses should be able to account for.
Ahead of her, Hilton disappeared into the billowing smoke and dust of the mortar bombardment, but only for a moment. Only until she followed him into the smoke and her helmet visor switched to thermal-imaging mode. The helmet computer converted the thermal images into knife-sharp, clear imagery and dropped it directly into her mind through her synth-link. Aside from the fact that it was black-and-white, it might have been the normal input of her optical nerves, and she saw Hilton turn slightly to his left.
His M-97 snapped up and ripped off a sharp, precise three-round burst, and she heard a high-pitched, choked off scream.
It wasn't the only scream she heard, either. The handful of survivors from the hapless insurgents caught in Lieutenant Ryan's fire support mission were beginning to recover from the paralyzing shock of the totally unanticipated carnage. There weren't very many of them, and most were wounded.
Alicia had never heard anything like the sounds of the wounded and dying people around her. She saw one of them, shrieking as he tried vainly to hold his eviscerated abdomen closed. Another-a calliope gunner, rising from the seat behind his multi-barreled automatic weapon-held his arms raised in front of him, screaming as he stared at the blood-spurting stumps of his forearms. Yet another -
She made herself stop looking. She didn't stop seeing, didn't stop the automatic search for still viable threats, but she made herself step back from the immediacy of the human wreckage strewn about her. She had to. She couldn't allow it to distract her, not when the rest of her fire team needed her where she was, doing her job while they did theirs.
Her own rifle rose, tracked onto a figure rising out of a deeper foxhole than most with a weapon in his hands. The helmet computer dropped the red outline of an unidentified potential hostile onto the figure, and she took in the civilian clothes, the lack of any militia uniform. He had no helmet, and it was obvious that the mortar bombardment's smoke and dust had him at least two-thirds blinded. A tiny corner of her brain told her that his handicapped vision gave her a grossly unfair advantage, but even as it did, she heard her grandfather's remembered voice.
Combat isn't about 'fair,' Alley. Combat is about shooting the other guy in the back before he shoots you-or one of your buddies-in the back. You aren't some hero out of a holo-drama, and you're not out there on some field of honor; you're on a killing ground. Never forget that.
Her finger stroked the trigger. The combat rifle recoiled, and the target took three rounds, dead center of mass.
I remembered, Grandpa, she told Sergeant Major O'Shaughnessy as the man she'd just killed went down.
Chapter Ten
"Where's Kuramochi now?"
"Just about to cross over into the Mall, Ma'am."
Serafina Palacios nodded in satisfaction, then looked back at the general situation map.
The pressure on her own perimeter had started to ease. She was glad of that. The first couple of times it had been threatened, her dug-in Marines had been able to drive the rioters back by firing over their heads and into the ground in front of them, without inflicting casualties. After that, the pressure behind the ones in front had changed the context. There'd been so many bodies pushing them forward that they'd had nowhere to go but onward, straight at her outer line. She doubted that they'd wanted to do anything of the sort, but that hadn't changed what they were doing or the fact that most of them were armed and worked up to a killing frenzy. When they'd begun shooting at her Marines, she'd had no option but to order her people to return fire.
Which was why there were now well over two hundred and fifty bodies sprawled outside her forward positions. At least the battalion's corpsmen, assisted by the spaceport rescue teams, had been able to bring in the wounded. Captain Hudson, the battalion's doctor, along with his medics and the dozen or so civilian doctors inside the spaceport, had done all they could, but from reports, it sounded as if they were probably going to lose at least a half-dozen more in the end.
Still, it looked as if the riot, or insurrection, or whatever this thing actually was, had decided the spaceport was best left alone. The mob was amusing itself burning down a goodly percentage of the rest of Zhikotse and hunting down "Empie collaborators," instead. Most of the "collaborators" were nothing of the sort, of course-merely people whose relative affluence, or accent, or clothes had singled them out as one of the "oppressors of the poor." Most of the real "oppressors" had possessed the resources to get out of the riot's path, but mobs had never been noted for the clarity of their logic.
What happened to some of those poor devils was enough to turn Palacios' stomach, and after fifteen-plus years in the Imperial Marines, it was no longer a stomach which turned all that easily. But there wasn't a lot she could do about it. She simply didn't have the manpower. Any quixotic rescue attempts she might have mounted into a city the size of Zhikotse would have been absorbed the way a sponge absorbed water, and that was that.
Now, if it had simply been a matter of killing all the rioters, that would have been different.
Unfortunately-or, perhaps, fortunately, depending upon how one chose to look at it (and at the moment, Serafina Palacios was definitely in two minds about it)-standing imperial policy, as she'd explained to Jongdomba, called for the minimization of collateral damage and incidental civilian casualties, even in a situation like this one. Simply killing the people who'd surrounded the Mall would have been a relatively straightforward proposition. It might have taken a while, but she could have lifted the siege of the Presidential Mansion any time she chose to, if she'd been willing to turn Lieutenant Ryan loose. It might have used up a substantial percentage of her mortar ammunition, but she could have done it, especially if she'd sent in one of her companies behind the barrage to sweep up the bits and pieces. These poor pathetic rioters had no idea how truly lethal her Wasps could be, and she hoped they'd never find out. Although Brigadier Jongdomba had made it perfectly clear that he thought she should be showing the mob exactly that.
And if I have to, in the end, I will, she thought grimly. But only if I have to. We need to contain the situation, not create an atrocity that produces martyrs in job lots for the next version of the GLF to come along. Aubert's right about that. She smiled without much humor. So instead of killing people who've taken up arms against my Emperor-and their own locally elected government-I'm putting my people's lives at risk in order to hold civilian casualties down. And doesn't that just suck?
She snorted as she realized she'd been deliberately dwelling on just about anything she could think of in order to avoid what she really ought to be doing.