Measures of Absolution

Chapter One Detroit

For the first time in her military life, Corporal Jackson thinks that she may not make it through to the end of her service after all.

The mobs on the streets of Detroit have done what none of the world’s third-rate militaries and insurgents have been able to do—kill or injure almost everyone in her squad. Without air cover or armor, it’s just a running gun battle. They’re slugging it out with ill-equipped locals, but there are many more of them than there are TA troopers on the ground tonight.

And the locals are about to win.

The bullets clang against her armor so frequently now that she has stopped counting the impacts. The rioters are using mostly old cartridge weapons, and few of those shoot anything powerful enough to pierce the ultra-tough laminate of military battle armor, but there’s more modern stuff in the mix as well. Jackson lets the computer pick her targets, but she needs to shoot with one hand because she’s carrying the crew chief of the downed drop ship they rescued a little while ago. She needs to shoot burst fire to make up for the imprecise one-handed aiming, and that wastes ammo she can’t afford to burn.

In front of her, Grayson and Priest set up a covering position on a street corner. Their rifles start chattering the moment they get sight of the intersection beyond. Corporal Jackson sees a hundred hostile icons popping up, but they start blinking out of existence on her helmet visor screen rapidly as Grayson and Priest are thinning out the rioters’ numbers with ruthlessly efficient rapid fire. Dozens fall. Then the others break and run, and the intersection is clear.

“Go, go, go!” Priest shouts and waves her along. Jackson renews her grip on the unconscious crew chief and drags him across the street into the next inadequate cover.

Just as she lowers the crew chief to the dirty concrete of the crumbling sidewalk, there’s the familiar chatter of an M-66 salvo coming from the corner of a nearby intersection. Behind her, she hears Grayson groan. When she turns around, he’s on the ground next to Sergeant Fallon. Corporal Jackson brings up her rifle and looks for the source of that rifle fire. There’s a small group of rioters over by that street corner. Two are armed with old cartridge guns, but the third has a military-issue M-66. Grayson is trying to pick up his rifle, but he’s moving slowly, as if in a trance. Jackson puts the target reticle of her gunsight on the shooter and snaps off a three-round burst. The rioter takes all three rounds to the chest. He stumbles backwards and lands on his ass, dropping his rifle in front of him. She moves the reticle up a hair and fires another burst. This one hits him in the face. He drops backwards and doesn’t move again. His buddies do an about-face and retreat into the darkness of the unlit street behind them.

“Grayson, you okay?” Jackson calls out over the squad channel. She gets a gasping groan in reply.

“Priest, go check on Grayson,” she orders. The intersection is clear again, but she needs to make sure. She runs over to where the man she just shot is sprawled on the ground.

When she is next to his prone figure, she can see that it’s not a he at all. The rifle next to the body is a standard TA issue M-66 flechette rifle. She can see the armory marks on the polymer shell, rack and slot numbers written down in waterproof red marker. She picks the rifle up and ejects the magazine. It’s still mostly full, and she sticks it into one of the empty pouches on her armor. There’s a round still in the chamber, and she aims the rifle down the road and pulls the trigger. It spits out a high-velocity flechette with a sharp little bark. All TA rifles have DNA locks coded to the individual soldier and his fellow squad members. She shouldn’t have been able to fire that gun, but fire it did.

The dead woman’s last expression looks mildly surprised, maybe even annoyed. The flechettes from Jackson’s three-round burst all hit within ten centimeters of each other, right in the triangle formed by her eyes and the chin. There’s a familiar-looking ball chain around her neck. Corporal Jackson reaches into the collar of the dusty sweatshirt he’s wearing and pulls out the chain. She finds two military dog tags at the end of it.

Up ahead in the darkness, there’s movement again. Her low-light augmentation shows another group of armed rioters, a hundred meters away, dashing from cover to cover and closing in on the intersection. Jackson seizes the dog tags and yanks the chain off the dead woman’s neck. Then she stuffs the tags into one of her empty magazine pouches. She aims her rifle at the approaching rioters and fires a quick series of single shots that send them ducking for cover. Then she gets up and dashes back to where her squad—what’s left of it—is hunkered down.

“More incoming,” she shouts to the others. “Where’s that goddamn drop ship?”

“We’ll never make the civic center,” Priest says.

“Sit tight. Make every shot count,” Jackson replies. “We defend the wounded until we can’t.”

“Copy that,” Priest replies grimly.

The incoming fire picks up again, a discordant cacophony of reports from dozens of different weapons. Priest and Baker move in front of the wounded, and Jackson joins them to form a final defensive line.

Jackson aims at muzzle flashes, sends out flechettes in bursts of three and five. More rioters fall, but others pick up their weapons and take up the fight. She empties her magazine and ejects it from her rifle. When she searches for a new one, the only ammunition she has left is the partial magazine she took from the dead woman with the military dog tags. She loads the magazine into her weapon and chambers a fresh round. Her visor display updates her ammo count: 121.

“I have half a mag left,” she shouts to the others.

“I’m just about dry,” Baker replies. Priest is too busy shooting people to reply, but from the way he picks his targets off with careful single shots, she can tell that he doesn’t have much left either.

She eyes the oncoming crowd and glances at the combat knife she wears on her harness.

They’re not wearing armor, she thinks. I bet I can get a dozen before they take me down.

Someone up the street opens up with an automatic weapon. The fusillade kicks up dust and concrete chips next to Jackson. Baker cries out in pain and anger.

“I’m hit,” he shouts.

They’re everywhere now, shooting from alleys, rooftops, windows. Dozens, maybe hundreds of them, all armed and out for blood. Jackson dishes out what’s left in her rifle, but they’re not dropping fast enough, and there seem to be two more joining the fight for every one she kills. She has never seen such determination and tenacity from the welfare rats.

She shoots down another rioter, then another. Her rifle’s bolt locks back on an empty feedway again. Now there’s only Priest’s rifle returning fire. As if they can smell the weakness of their adversaries, the rioters increase their fire, emboldened.

That’s it, then, Jackson thinks.

She tosses the empty rifle aside and pulls her combat knife from its sheath.

The first indication of their salvation is a burst of autocannon fire high above their heads, the long and ripping thunder of a multi-barreled drop ship turret. The high explosive shells pepper the street in front of the squad, where the attackers have advanced almost to rock-throwing distance. Jackson sees bodies disintegrate under the hammer blows of the cannon shells. Overhead, the drop ship descends out of the dirty night sky and settles in a hover right above the intersection.

The rioters are smart enough to see that they’ve lost. They retreat like a wave pulling away from the shore at ebb. Some brave souls shoot at the drop ship, but they don’t have any heavy machine guns nearby now, and the small arms fire pings off the hull like rain off a tin roof. The drop ship’s gunner responds in kind. In just a few moments, all the rioters Jackson still sees on the street are either dead on the ground or running away.

Jackson puts her knife away. The profound relief and gratitude she feels make her knees shake.

At Thermopylae, the Three Hundred held back a hundred thousand Persians. Everyone learns about Leonidas and his Spartans in boot camp. One of the epic last stands in history.

Tonight, Corporal Jackson doesn’t believe the Spartans went down as heroically as the historians claim. She’s pretty sure some of them pissed themselves before the end. Unless they were insane, or inhuman.

Epic last stand stories are such bullshit.