Free Terms of Enlistment 01.2: Measures of Absolution by Marko Kloos Page B

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.