We'd been on the planet for about forty-five minutes by the mission counter when Lieutenant Weber came on the 'com. "Gentlemen, the spaceport is held. We will now move to secure it against counterattack, and prepare to reinforce Lieutenant Rodgers if necessary. 2nd squad, in the 'port. 4th and 5th in a wide patrol sweep around the 'port, out to eight miles west, east, and south. 4th, I want you to send your scout elements to 1st, 5th, to the 3rd. One weapons squad each with the 1st and 3rd. My 7th squad will stay on the main highway, ready to reinforce either position."

That's what the old man said should happen, so that's what happened. The heavy weapons boys brought up their toys and set 'em up (the artillery went in the spot DiMaglio had scouted), and defensive positions around them became 1st squad's job. Now, you may find it strange that I keep talking about the 'heavy weapons squad' when I just mentioned that Bright had blotted out an anti-air site with a nuclear warhead. A little one, admittedly, but still a nuke.

Well, these boys have some weapons that make our rifles look like plucking a chicken in a stiff wind. And the other thing they've got is precision. In spades. Sure, Bright can light up a hillside with a shoulder-mounted nuke, but that's just the problem; it's a whole hillside. If he'd wanted to take out a single city block at that range, he'd've had no chance. These guys do, because most of 'em are that good. If you point out a house for them, they'll ask "Which room?"

So DiMaglio and I found ourselves baby-sitting the artillery piece, along with two other privates in marauder suits. Bright had taken to guarding the mortar, and he had the other four men in the squad with him, so I have myself my own little 'command' under my watchful eye. I told DiMaglio and the other two to entrench while I sat myself next to the cannon and watched the techies play with it. Now, 'entrenching' is a strange thing to say about a cap trooper, too. I mean, the point of the suit is that you can move, and when someone shoots something big at you, you're not there when it hits. So why would a cap trooper ever entrench? The term's something of a misnomer these days, so 'entrenching' is just jargonese for 'wander around and get acquainted with the landscape'. Troopers will entrench in a particular chunk of land and get to know it, so that when they do have to move, which they inevitably will, they'll know where to move to.

But rank hath its privileges and I have my obsessions, so I sat around to watch them put together their cannon instead of 'entrenching'. A heavy weapons squad has two heavy weapons with three techs each, and three spare troopers around for ordnance and logistics work. Ordnance and logistics is a nice way of saying 'ammo gopher'. The three men stationed with me were headed up by Lance Corporal McGeorge, who waved a friendly 'hello' to me as he and his two mates leapt up over the ridge.

"Hey there!" I called on the short-range wideband. Each of the three was in a standard marauder suit, but carrying a few less weapons than me or any other average mudfoot. And each had a chunk of their cannon with them.

"Hey Dean. That the spot?" Cpl. McGeorge asked, waving toward the outcropping. I clicked an affirmative, and the three bounded over and dropped their loads. With a little suit-mounted welder and a few other tools, they'd slapped together a gun with a fifteen mile range in under two minutes. Amazing things us humans can do these days. And two minutes after they'd finished putting it together, two of their ordnance boys show up, drill holes in the rock, and mount the thing to reduce recoil. They took care to mount it using explosive bolts, but left a drill just in case.

So now we held the spaceport, we were pretty well entrenched along our northern front, and we had a nice wide patrol to catch anything south of the Alps. Weber's Wombats were doing fine, and it seemed like Rodgers' Raiders weren't holding up their end of the deal. Turns out, they really weren't.

I spent about two hours up on that ridge with nothing to do except watch whatever I could get on the tac readouts. Our platoon 'net wasn't tied in to the Raiders', so I couldn't get any direct information. But Lt. Weber had given 1st platoon the scouts from 4th platoon, so Bright had eleven men to play with. Each squad had two men in scout suits, which are a little quicker on the draw, carry less weaponry, and allow for extended stays in the same location, quietly. I don't know how they do it exactly (the force-feedback in my own suit took me enough skull sweat to understand) but something electromagnetic in a scout suit helps block its electromagnetic emissions. A buffer, or a damper, or something. Either way, more is less with scout suits, and they tend to be quieter – in all ways – than your normal marauder.

DiMaglio was in a scout suit, and Bright had the other with his unit, but the two we'd borrowed were working their way north through the mixed residential and commercial districts between the Alps and the beginning of K'Lai proper and its accompanying larger buildings. PFC Claybaugh, one of 1st squad's borrowed scouts, was close enough that we got little bits of the action. That, combined with talking to some Raiders back on the Eisenhower, let me piece together what ended up happening.

The Raiders came down pretty much on the button, or as close to it as you can when you're landing fifty-four armored men who've just been shot out of a cannon. Because of all the skyscrapers around – quite a few above sixty stories – some squads had members who were a hundred yards away on the x/y grid, but add in the z dimension and they were all spread out. Plus, just because of the spin of the orbit we were coming in on, the Wombats got out to tubes first, then the Raiders. So we landed on our cushy assignment with the element of surprise, and the Raiders came down to a little surprise of their own.

Like I said, suits are wonderfully mobile things, and they're wonderful when they are mobile. But in a city, with buildings sixty stories high, they're not very mobile. They're pretty much restricted to the same highways and byways that a groundcar would follow, because even with jumpjets, no cap trooper's going to be leaping buildings that tall in a single bound. That means that there's a lot fewer point B's you can go to from point A. And there's more of a chance for some infantryman with a grenade or an RPG to get lucky. And get lucky they did.

The Raiders began taking light casualties from the beginning, but that was to be expected in guerilla-style urban fighting. Rodgers found, occupied, and fortified a command post from the get-go, and the wounded began coming in there to be treated and have their suits patched up. But the city guard and the Skinny military had plenty of presence in K'lai, and for that first hour every Skinny casualty seemed to be replaced by two more. As soon as one Skinny unit was on the run, another one had just formed up and marched in. So the Raiders ended up fighting an enemy that kept coming back from the dead. I found out later that Weber wanted to go in and help out (hell, all the Wombats would've gone in if we'd known) but the two Eggheads along with his squad wouldn't allow it, saying that we didn't know what the Skinnies' force disposition was, and the spaceport was still the primary objective. I guess they were right, in the big picture. But it's real hard for an MI to know his fellow's in trouble and not go in to help. I'm glad I didn't really know, not like I know now, anyway.

Round about touchdown plus two hours, just when I was getting really bored, the Raiders got up to their necks in it. They'd been having mobility troubles because of the terrain as it was, but then the Skinnies released their heavy infantry. At this point in the war, the Skinnies and us hadn't shared all our secrets about the military. So while the Terran Federation had the MI, which was pretty much the only infantry type in the military, the Skinnies had two types. There were the standard ground-sloggers, who carried around pretty light arms and wore unpowered, thin armor. They weren't much different than Terran soldiers before suits. And then the Skinnies had their heavy infantry, which was big 'mechs that mounted scaled-up sensor arrays, hand weapons, and everything else.

Now, 'mechs really aren't much of a match for MI. One-on-one, an MI is just too quick and fights too dirty for a lumbering sixty-foot-tall robotic oaf. Five MI to one, the only contest is to see who can disarm it the quickest. And since it takes about as much effort to make five or six mechs as it does to outfit fifty or sixty MI, the destructive force is really pretty uneven. But mechs do carry large weapons, and they do carry a lot of them. And the same rules of statistics applied as with the infantry's grenades. They got lucky. And they were carrying quite a few back-up shots in case they didn't get lucky the first time. So the Raiders found themselves trying to hide from the mechs, while staying on the move from the infantry, while trying to inflict maximum military casualties with minimum civilians casualties, while protecting their Old Man and the wounded. No wonder they didn't tell us, we would've charged straight in.

But our Old Man figured out a way we could get some glory for ourselves, and a brief break for the Raiders at the same time.

"Look, Weber, you need to hold that spaceport," Rodgers insisted for the fourth time.

"I know, but we've got it well in hand, and I can send in just a few . . ."

"No, you can't and you know it. If we fall here, you're gonna need your whole platoon to hold 'em at the Alps."

"Well, we've got to be able to do something," Weber demanded.

"Distract 'em, or kill 'em from there, but I'm not letting you move, that's an order."

"Yessir," Weber agreed stonily.

"That being said, any distraction should come quickly. We're down to our last fallback position before my headquarters here, and as soon as we're backpedaling from there, I'm going to signal a full tactical withdrawal to a pick-up twenty miles west, toward the ocean."

"Understood. Do you have an uplink to Ike, or should I relay it for you?"

"We've got it, Weber."

Lieutenant Weber withdrew the suit jack from the mobile 'com station. The two eggheads – military consultants, but not MI – were hard at work at the other points on the station, trying to make sense of the Skinny data and chatter that was flowing back and forth across the airwaves. Weber turned to them and broadcast.

"Gentleman, I need some non-military, non-essential targets."

The eggheads looked up, and one smiled. "What did you have in mind, sir?"

"Just a little counter-insurgency," Weber said with a smiled. He jawed his radio over to the broadcast channel for his artillery units' gunners.

"Okay, boys," Bright cut in. "The Lieutenant is giving some fire coordinates to the gunners, and he thinks that might bring some Skinnies knockin' on our door. So let's spilt up, entrench, and look alive. Suits to full stealth." An MI suit has got variable stealth, with the higher settings having no immediate effect on a suit. But a suit that's run on full stealth for a long time will see a lot more downtime for general maintenance, and we're usually moving so quickly that stealth doesn't matter. But we can lay a bit low when we need to.

I reviewed my HUD for a moment, then opened the channel to my little ½-squad. "Alright everyone, I want you to meet up for a second to plug into the beacon for silent communication, then we'll spread out to individual entrenched spots. Artillery boys, you just do your thing."

They started doing their thing just about when I told them to, with a great roar of the gun. I don't know what they were targeting, or if there were other things firing, but I saw something big explode about five seconds after they fired. Then again, there were quite a few explosions by this point.

All the 1st squad Wombats met at the beacon and jacked into the physical communications ports on it. Suits normally communicate through short-wave and tightbeam laser, but laser is line-of-sight, so you can't use it when you're hiding in valleys, and short-wave is broadcast, so bad guys can zero in on it. So suits came with thin, easily-broken cables that could be used to jack directly together, to let you communicate silently, without broadcasting anything. The beacons that we use to mark locations have on-board communications, so they can tie into the platoon 'net, and as an added bonus they can act as a hub. So we all plugged in and then gingerly moved back out to our positions. After a quick check to make sure everyone could hear, it was all silent except for the roar of the artillery piece, explosions, and other sundry warfare background noise.

"Dean, plug everyone into your beacon, then get set to receive a jack-in from mine," Bright told me.

I let myself smile a bit before I jawed him back. "Already plugged in. Have your man jack into our beacon."

"Alright. Nice work, Dean," Bright said, then clicked off.

I didn't know it at the time, but Claybaugh and the other scout we were borrowing were about a half-mile north of our position, spotting likely municipal targets that wouldn't inflict too many casualties. The rest of the freed-up scouts were spread out just like them, with Weber's squad's scouts as far as the Himalayas, all looking for the most expensive-looking architecture they could find. Claybaugh told me after the mission that he was watching as our artillery boys put a shell through the dome of what looked like a municipal building. It was a flash-bang (and flash-bang artillery does quite a bit of both) and they managed to put it into the dome, and they'd gotten the distance just right so it exploded inside the dome. He said half of the top-floor windows blew out, but the dome stayed up, and nothing lit on fire. Now that, my friends, is persuasive.

Well, it didn't take very long of this kind of treatment before the commanding officer of the Skinny defense started resenting our presence. Claybaugh reported some infantry and ground vehicles were coming down the western road toward the Alps, and Kristoff's squad had the same experience down the eastern road. Then someone reported the first 'mech, and we were pretty certain at that point that we'd gotten their attention.

"Freeze," Bright ordered, and we froze. Cap troopers are great at freezing. We can do it for hours, in any situation, in any climate, in any condition. We did it a whole bunch in basic. So we did it now. Nobody moved, and I'm pretty sure that Claybaugh and the other scout were frozen, too. "Prepare countermeasures," Bright ordered, and I flipped through the firing options of my Y-rack menu on my HUD.

We've got some electronic countermeasures that can look a whole lot like a suit when they try, and those are useful when you're trying to convince someone there's more of you than there really are, or that you're someplace where you really aren't. In this particular instance, Bright waited on the order to fire, and I wasn't too sure why. I understood in the next couple seconds, though.

I flipped down my snoopers and peered north from the little knoll I was hiding behind. Even when it's not moving, a 'mech throws off a lot of heat from its fusion plant, and the friction from movement means that they're even a little painful to look at with snoopers. Heat sinks throw big plumes of hot air out of their shoulders, and you can just watch for those like smoke signals if you're ever looking for one. I watched while the first two came south, one on each of the highways. They were little guys, with back-jointed legs, built for speed and stability in turns. Scout 'mechs. Next came two mediums, humanoid things with hand-held weapons, or shoulder, torso, or head mounts. They split up, one on each highway, just like the scouts. That meant our squad and Kristoff's had equal responsibility. Then a heavy fella stomped out from between two skyscrapers, and he shifted toward the west highway. That meant us.

Suddenly a brighter light flared in my snoopers and I flipped them up before the light hurt, then zoomed in with the standard view. My passive sensors gave a tentative contact to a few missiles coming out of the western medium-sized 'mech. I felt my stomach clench while my HUD warned me that the missiles were sweeping radar over me, but chances are bad that they would lock on a still, stealthed suit at that distance, and they didn't. They were, however, chasing after the artillery piece.

One of the heavy weapons squaddies fired off two ECM rounds from his Y-rack to confuse the missiles, and then they set about moving their piece right quick. They blew the bolts and picked the whole thing up, dragging it with jump-jets to a few yards away where they started pulling it apart. Well, at least we knew that they'd spotted some of us, anyway.

The mechs came marching on, moving south at the speed of the slowest – the heavy one bringing up the rear. Bright came on the 'com after a few moments and addressed the squad. "Alright, the eggheads with the Lieutenant came up with a firing pattern for our ECM. Here it is," the file slipped into my suit's computer and automatically linked up with the Y-rack firing software, "and fire in three, two, one, mark." The Y-racks on everyone's suit fired two decoys each, in a pattern they'd been told by the file one of the eggheads had programmed. This is yet another thing that works and I don't know how, but it's something like this: they take what they know of the Skinnies' locations, their radar capability, and the terrain, and then program the counter-measures into a disposition that makes the decoys look just like the real thing, and makes us happen to be just where a radar echo would be hiding. So, in effect, the decoys were put in places that made it so that we were just where the Skinnies would be looking for decoys. I dunno if it worked, but I didn't get shot, and that's good enough for me.

None of us got shot, actually. The mechs kept on coming, cautiously once the light mechs reached the foothills, but were getting a little too close to our position for my liking. By this point, our front lines were past each other, because the light mech on our side had strolled right past Claybaugh and his friend, and the medium mechs were closing to within a few hundred yards. I was wondering how long Bright was gonna wait to make an order, but we were still in a freeze and I had no reason to break it.
Bright was talking to Kristoff at this point, syncing up their battle plans, before he came back on our com. The silent line over the beacon lit up, and Bright said, "Okay, our mortar's gonna go after that big fella. Nobody fire, I'll use a conventional warhead on the small mech. Everyone stay in cover. Claybaugh, you just lay low out there." The line went dead, then my personal line lit up. "Dean, you keep an eye on Claybaugh. If he breaks cover, be ready to give him a hand."

"Is he frozen?" I asked, wondering if the scouts were in 1st squad's net.

"My beacon's been tight-beaming to him. He knows the orders." I clicked, and Bright hung up.

The light 'mech had just crossed into extreme range of our rifle-mounted grenade launchers when my suit gave me a 'ping' to warn me of a new contact, and an echoing tone from the 'net told me everyone else had noticed it too. I hazarded a glance up.

Another medium 'mech was dropping out of the sky just behind our light 'mech, coming down on full jumpjets and backpack-mounted thrusters. Wonderful. That meant 1st squad now had a light, two mediums, and a heavy to deal with. Not too hard if we could move, but our first shots would be from cover, and we didn't have much hope of taking them all out. The 'mech landed and started looking around, mighty predatory if you ask me.

"Well, great. On my mark," Bright said. I checked my HUD to see where Claybaugh was, and it looked on the map like the northern medium 'mech was stepping on him. I zoomed in visually on the big monster just in time to see the two borrowed scouts pull off one of the more masterful ambushes I've ever seen. You know that trick where you walk behind someone, and when their foot is off the ground, you kick it so it gets caught up behind their other one? Well, Clay wasn't supposed to be moving (we were in a freeze after all) but everyone in the squad could feel the 'mark' coming, and the mech's foot was in just the right place even if it was the wrong time. Claybaugh and the other scout both dove from cover with their heads down and gunned their jump jets, slamming their shoulders into the big robot's foot. It was already swinging forward, and got caught up in its other leg, and started tumbling down.

Well, I never saw it hit the ground, because Bright called 'mark' and the doors blew off the place. We opened up with our launchers on that little mech, and the thing almost disappeared under eight well-placed grenades. One leg got blown off, and what was left of its torso toppled over to one side. Bright and another of the squad were up and moving even as the grenades were exploding, and DiMaglio and I moved too.

None too soon, either. I don't know if it was lucky, or someone locked us up that quickly or what, but two missiles slammed into the hill below that outcropping – about where I'd been – right after I left. The four of us were hellbent for that newcomer medium mech, but Bright got there first. The Skinny was flailing around, letting loose with a shoulder-mounted autocannon and a hand-held gauss rifle, but not really picking targets very well. Bright gave a good jump, blew open the cockpit with his assault rifle on the way up, then landed on the thing's head, lobbed in a grenade, and jumped.

The grenade went off with plenty of time for Bright to have gotten clear of the blast and landed well. But the grenade explosion wasn't the problem; the fusion plant let go, and that mech turned into a little star for a second there. The shockwave hit bright in mid-air, and there's no way a suit's gyros can put up with that. He started flipping end over end and dropping straight for the ground.

A couple things went through my head at this point. One, Bright's suit was almost certainly damaged, and Bright himself might be damaged too. Two, I was in charge of 1st squad. And three, a glance at the HUD told me there was still a heavy mech to deal with, plus all and sundry of the ground forces Claybaugh had told us were moving south from the city.

I kicked over to wide-band and broadcast on full. "1st squad, Bright is down, I am in command! Advance in pairs, with covering fire, and watch for infantry!" I surprised myself even as the orders sang out. I said "Roger, Wilco, Foxtrot," the suit's command overrides, to no-one in particular, and my suit's 'comm channels suddenly realigned with me as the commanding officer of 1st squad. A new line between the higher-ups cut in, right in the middle of Rodgers giving his location. There was my 'superior' channel to the Lieutenant, and there was my 'neighbor' channel to the other squad leaders. Kristoff was the only one I was interested in, and I singled him out.

"3rd squad, report!" I called out, bouncing down the hill with me eyes peeled and my rifle ready. DiMaglio was sticking close, a hundred yards away on my left flank, and another 1st squad was on my right. I clicked through the arithmetic in my head and figured that with two guys on my flanks and Bright out of action, that left five men to carry out my orders. I hollered to the man on my right, Jonesy, to get back there and pair up, then Kristoff got back to me from 3rd squad.

Kristoff's been in the service for a while, so he didn't waste any time with stupid chat like "where's Bright?" He knew where he was as well as I did, and he launched right into it. "Meeting strong resistance. Will advise." There was definitely rifle chatter in the background.

I clicked my tongue and jawed over to the Old Man channel. "Sir, Bright is down, I'm commanding 1st. Heavy mech still operational, infantry and ground vehicles expected momentarily. I'm searching for Bright, moving the perimeter up to point designated Bravo on 1st squad's 'net."

"Very good, Dean," the old man answered immediately. If it had been anyone but him, I would've called him a liar and said he hadn't actually heard a word I said, but Weber can look after fifty-three youngsters in addition to himself, and I know it. "I'm sending 4th and 5th to reinforce the Alps. Keep me appraised of casualties." Pretty light on actual instructions, if you ask me, but at least he told me what I needed to know to do my job. And I guess everyone I was trying to chatter at did have better things to do than to make me feel better.

Some elements of my squad who were in the leapfrog pattern sang out 'contacts!' and I spared more than a glance at my HUD while trying to negotiate a tricky landing and a trickier jump to clear a line of trees. Red contacts littered both sides of the highway, and faint signatures of tanks and heavier ground vehicles were moving south along the highway as quickly as they could. I opened my 'com to 1st squad and ghosted a channel to the Old Man. "1st squad, full force authorized. Repeat, all ordnance authorized." That just meant that we could use everything we'd brought with us, but didn't change the rules of engagement any – if someone decided to use a pee-wee nuke in a heavily populated area, they'd still be strung up by their toes.

I landed, with one more jump to go until I reached where I thought Bright had hit ground. I kicked my radar to full sweep, but what with the buildings in the way, I couldn't really pick out a suit. His beacon obviously wasn't working, or he would've been shining on my HUD. Something big enough to jar me smacked into my suit, and I swung up to see four Skinnies deploying around the corner of a building and a fifth pointing something automatic and hand-held in my direction. I spared them two seconds and a grenade, all the while berating myself for getting stuck daydreaming, looking for Bright. It wouldn't do to lose the assistant squad leader on the way to finding the squad leader.

"DiMaglio, tighten up and cover my left flank," I said, and heard the affirmative click even as I was jumping for the top of the little three-story building I was next to. I jumped a bit high and ended up sailing over instead of onto it, but it was all the same, Bright was down, ten feet from the wall of the next building over. No telltales on the HUD, but lights on his suit. A good sign. The way he was sprawled, not a good sign.

I clicked through 1st squad's manpower again – how do CO's keep track of so many troopers! – and realized I'd totally forgotten about the borrowed scouts. Stupid! When Bright had told me, specifically and personally, to look after their behinds. Ah, well, I could use them in perimeter duty. I jawed over to the full squad again and started rapping out orders. "I found Bright, map point designate Charlie. DiMaglio and Claybaugh," no, dammit, both scout suits, "Scratch that, DiMaglio and Jonesy, take the west, strongside. 4th squad scouts, one of you take weakside to the east and set up flank. The other bounce west then come in south against the infantry lines, break 'em up, use plenty of grenades. The rest of you, I want two to keep them pinned against the south of the highway, and the rest to swing west and come at 'em from the side." I realized that I'd somehow managed to use twice as many words as Bright ever did, all to shepherd half the people. Stupid again.

Claybaugh checked in with me after I'd finished the orders. "Sir, we took care of the medium, should we try for the heavy? He's gonna give us some trouble if he can get missile lock on anyone."

They were good, but that trick wouldn't work again, and no reason to send two scout suits up against a heavy mech with armor and infantry support. "Negative, thanks but no. Orders stand." Claybaugh clicked and signed off.

There are two times when the Mobile Infantry aren't mobile. One is when someone's injured, like with Bright. Then they become something of a liability, until someone can get over there, pop open their suit, and carry them out like a babe-in-arms. The other is when they're out of power. Bright had already caused 1st squad to become somewhat immobile because of that first eventuality. We were rapidly and unknowingly approaching that second eventuality.

Weber cut into the platoon-wide 'comm line in the middle of a conversation with someone else. ". . . Definitely ballistic, unknown warhead. Could be EMP. Okay. Wombats, freeze!" And we froze. Good thing to. It probably saved some lives, because if anyone had been in midair when that thing went off they would've landed in a less than stylish manner, like Bright had. As it was, I froze in a half-crouch.

The Skinny nuke squeezed off its critical mass about eight miles above the city, which was enough. The pulse shockwave knocked out everything; communications, power lines, energy-fed weapons. And our suits. And a suit without power turns into a big, heavy, person-shaped coffin.