Measures of Absolution

Chapter Eight Choices

The noise of the door opening shakes Jackson out of her sleep. Two of the uniformed civvies walk in. One stands by the door with a rifle, the other tosses a set of fatigues and a pair of slip-on shoes onto the bed.

“Get dressed,” he says. Then he steps up to the foot of the bed and snips her plastic restraints with a tool. “You try any funny shit, Olsen’s gonna go full auto on your ass.”

She gathers the clothes they gave her and gets out of bed. The pain in her side is still there, still just this side of tolerable. She wonders if anything got broken permanently.

The uniformed civvies don’t look like they have any intention of letting her get dressed in private, so she puts on the clothes while they’re watching her. She glances at their gear and the way they’re positioned, then concludes that she won’t be able to drop the closer one before the rifleman by the door mows her down with the M-66 he’s aiming at her.

When she’s dressed, they step out of the room and wave her forward.

“We’re moving. Go in front of me. Olsen will be behind us. You turn toward him, he’ll shoot you. Now move.”

She obeys and leaves the room, careful not to give Olsen an excuse to twitch his trigger finger.

Outside, there’s a narrow hallway that looks like it’s in a basement somewhere. Jackson follows the first civvie as instructed. The hallway leads out into a spacious vestibule. Out here, at least a dozen armed civvies in partial battle rattle are gathered, Lazarus in the middle of the group. He’s wearing chest and back plates, a sidearm on a drop holster, and a harness with magazine pouches. When she steps into the vestibule, it seems that every pair of eyes in the room is on her.

“Corporal Jackson,” he says. “We are relocating. Please follow along and don’t give anyone a reason to shoot you. Trust me when I tell you that most of them would be glad for an excuse. Let’s move out, gentlemen.”

They rush through a maze of corridors and vestibules, Lazarus’ men keeping a wary eye on her every time she strays close to one of them. Jackson’s side hurts, and she feels something stabbing into her chest every time she takes a breath, but she knows it would be pointless to ask them to slow down.

Then someone in front throws open a set of doors, and they’re outside.

It’s nighttime, and Jackson sees that they’re in the middle of a residence block. There’s a droning noise in the air, and the reason for the sudden rush becomes clear when she sees a Hornet-class drop ship coming out of the night sky and circling around the top of a nearby high rise tower. The dirty nighttime sky is ablaze with the searchlights from more drop ships. Whatever TA unit is making a drop onto this block right now, they’re coming in force, maybe an entire battalion dropping at once.

“They’re on Tower Thirteen,” Lazarus says into the earpiece he’s wearing. “Don’t engage. Let them have it. Second platoon, fall back to the atrium and take the rabbit warren down to the admin center. We’ll meet up with you there.”

They’re a hundred meters from the admin building in the middle of the square when another Hornet swoops out of the sky and thunders down toward the square. Jackson sees the skids of the drop ship lower out of the belly armor as the Hornet swings around to claim a landing spot. There’s rifle fire in the distance between two residence towers, and a moment later, an explosion blooms up in the same spot. The sound of the detonation rolls across the plaza like the rumbling thunder of an approaching storm.

“TA squads on the ground between Thirteen and Fourteen. Also in Blocks Five and Six. They’re all over the place, sir,” one of the troopers says, listening to the comms in his own headset.

There are civvies on the plaza, most of them without weapons and moving away from the spot where the drop ship is descending. It settles on the landing pad at the top of the admin center, a hundred meters away. Then the tail ramp opens with a low whine, and a platoon of TA come rushing out. They take up positions at the edge of the roof. Behind them, the drop ship guns its engines and lifts off again, raising the ramp in mid-air. It rises into the night sky, position lights flashing in the haze. The TA troopers file into the rooftop staircase one by one, weapons at the ready.

“We have a TA platoon on the ground at the admin center,” Lazarus says into his headset. “Second platoon, don’t engage them. Pass through and make for the fallback.”

Another drop ship weaves its way between two of the residence towers ahead and thunders over the plaza at low altitude before banking and turning to the right. They’re so low that Jackson can see the decals on the helmets of the pilots as the ship roars directly overhead.

“Told you they’d come back,” she says to Lazarus. He turns around and glares at her.

“They’re not coming for you. They’re coming for their gear. They’re here to send a message, you dumb shit.”

There’s rifle fire coming from the inside of the admin center now, short staccato bursts of automatic fire. A muffled explosion follows, then another.

“Sir, Second Platoon is engaged in the admin center.”

“Goddammit,” Lazarus says. He looks over to Jackson, then points at Olsen and the other civvie who escorted her from the room earlier.

“Olsen, Lepitre. Take our guest here over to the warren at Tower Eleven. Head for the spider nest. Don’t stop for coffee. The rest of you, with me.”

Lazarus leads off to the admin center, and most of the troopers move out with him as ordered, covering corners and sectors like a seasoned TA infantry squad. Olsen points out the way for her with the barrel of his rifle, back toward the tower they just left. She obeys and follows Lepitre.

They’re back inside the basement hallway when the overhead illumination switches from white to the dim red emergency light. The change is startling without helmet augmentation to compensate for it.

“What the fuck,” Lepitre says ahead of her. On the floor directly above, there’s gunfire, the hoarse chattering of flechette rifles interspersed with the lower single booms of cartridge guns.

Two more troopers appear around a bend in front of them. In the dim light, it takes Jackson a second or two to realize that the newcomers aren’t civvies in partial battle gear, but TA troopers in full armor, M-66 rifles at the ready.

Everything happens at once.

Lepitre up ahead shouts something at the TA troopers, but whatever he’s saying is drowned out by the booming warning coming from the troopers’ suit amplifiers.

“DROP YOUR WEAPONS AND GET ON THE GROUND! DROP…”

Lepitre goes for his sidearm, but he’s either too slow or too fast for the TA troopers. They both open fire, and Lepitre twitches once and falls to the ground. Behind Jackson, she hears the creaking of the plastic on Olsen’s rifle as he brings it to bear.

Jackson stops cold and drops to the ground. Olsen’s rifle spits out a full-auto burst, and both TA troopers go down in the hail of flechettes, half a magazine dumped at maximum cadence. Olsen is right behind her, less than half a meter away, and she rolls around and kicks his legs out from underneath him. He goes down, still clutching the rifle, and squeezes the trigger again. The burst hits the wall next to them and peppers Jackson with concrete chips and flechette fragments. She tries to wrestle the rifle away from him, but he’s holding on to it with a death grip, and he’s stronger. He tries to aim the rifle at her, but she’s on top of him, and in those close quarters, there’s no space for a sixteen-inch barrel between them.

Jackson drives an elbow into Olsen’s face, then his throat, as hard as she can thrust it down. He gurgles and lets go of his gun to clutch his throat. Jackson seizes the M-66 and backpedals, aims the muzzle at Olsen, and squeezes the trigger. The burst takes him in the side of the chest. He stiffens, groans, exhales. Then he stops moving. Jackson has seen enough KIA to know even in the dim light of the emergency illumination that he’s dead.

She gets to her knees and checks the condition of the rifle. Without a helmet display, she has to eject the magazine and count the rounds through the witness strip on the side. A quarter of the magazine left, so maybe sixty rounds. Olsen isn’t wearing an ammo harness. Dumb fuck ran around without reloads. If he was a vet, he wasn’t infantry, she thinks.

The TA troopers are down as well, both drilled with at least fifty rounds from Olsen’s full-auto magazine dump. They have magazine pouches, of course. Jackson doesn’t have a harness, but the too-big fatigues she’s wearing have roomy pockets, and she fills them with magazines as quickly as she can pry them out of the pouches of the dead troopers.

Up ahead in the hallway, a door opens, and another TA trooper appears.

He’s less than twenty meters from where Jackson is tugging at the harnesses of two of his dead comrades. She knows instantly that he will not shout a warning, that there won’t be time to put-up her hands and explain the situation, tell him that she’s Corporal Kameelah Jackson, 365^th AIB GODDAMNIT DON’T SHOOT ME

He brings up his rifle, she grabs hers. She shoots from the hip, not wanting to take the time to use the sights. The M-66 in her hands roars and spits out the rest of the magazine at the dumb-ass high rate of fire Olsen dialed in manually earlier.

Her burst almost goes high, but some of the fifty or sixty flechettes find their way into the visor of the TA trooper’s helmet. He drops instantly, like someone turned off his power switch. His rifle clatters to the concrete.

Jackson screams a curse. She rushes over to the trooper she just shot, somebody here to rescue her, one of her own. She checks the unit markers on the armor and instantly hates herself for the relief she feels when she sees that his unit isn’t the 365^th, but the 332^nd.

She gets up, changes the magazine in her rifle, drops the empty one on the ground. Then she takes the magazines of the dead 332^nd trooper, too.

Her drop two days ago ran into a planned ambush. All of Lazarus’ troops, with home field advantage, with control of the security office, using the bottlenecks of the elevator banks. This drop, a whole battalion of TA descending on an unprepared enemy, is a much more even fight. There’s gunfire everywhere now—the floors above her, the plaza outside. Jackson finds a staircase and gets out of the basement, up to the atrium of the residence tower. She advances through the hallways, rifle at the ready. There are civvies rushing past her to get out of the way of the shooting, but they pay her no mind. Probably think she’s one of them.

When she gets to the gallery, the place is a madhouse. There are groups of TA troopers out in the vast expanse of the tower’s public space, exchanging fire with Lazarus’ armed civvies shooting down at them from the floors above, and welfare rats scrambling out of the line of fire. If she steps out into this circus, she’ll get drilled by the first TA trooper who spots her, oversized fatigues and stolen military rifle. She turns the other way and goes down a hallway that looks it may lead to one of the entrance vestibules, out of this place.

The plaza outside doesn’t look much better. There are TA troopers on the roof of the admin center in the middle of the plaza, shooting at targets Jackson can’t see. She dashes from cover to cover, sticking to the outside of the building, away from the fighting. Get into the clear, ditch the gun, find a way to a PRC that has a functioning police station.

Jackson is halfway around the perimeter of the plaza when she sees a group of armed and armored civvies, hunkered down behind a low wall, shooting at the TA troopers on the roof of the admin center. Lazarus is in the middle, directing fire teams and talking on his headset.

She brings up Olsen’s rifle, drops to one knee. The optic on Olsen’s gun works fine. She ranges Lazarus with the rifle’s laser. 110 meters, a shot she could take half dead or fully drunk. She puts the targeting reticle on the back of Lazarus’ head, switches the fire selector to single shot, puts her finger on the trigger. One round would probably get lost in the automatic weapons chatter that reverberates all around the plaza. They’d think the TA grunts on the roof hit him.

Maybe.

Jackson dials up the scope’s magnification all the way, She studies the shape of Lazarus’ head, decides where to put the round to cut the brain stem. He moves around a bit, but she has no problem tracking him. One twitch of her index finger, and their outfit loses their leader, maybe falls apart entirely.

She holds her finger on that trigger for what seems like a day and a half. Then she flicks her fire selector switch back to “SAFE” and lowers the weapon. With all the red she has on her ledger, she has never shot someone from behind who couldn’t shoot back at her. That’s not the way she does business.

The access ramp to the block is only eighty or ninety meters to her right. Beyond it, there’s open space—parks, plazas, recreation areas for the welfare rats. Easy to hide there, make her way out of the PRC, back to the urban wasteland in between, the shitty seams between the PRCs where the truly unlucky live, the ones that can’t even get welfare housing. Go to a different PRC, one where the public safety offices haven’t been infiltrated. Hitch a ride back to Shughart, report back to duty.

Maybe.

Jackson takes one last look at Lazarus through her scope. He may even pull this one out of the fire, if he’s lucky. Maybe he even deserves it. She has a feeling that she will see him again someday.

She steps back into the shadows between the residence towers and makes for the access ramp. Her side still hurts like a bastard, TA troopers will shoot her on sight in that outfit, but she has clean fatigues and a rifle, and she’s in charge of her own fate again. The day is looking up.