Free Big Pete (Privateer Tales Book 4) by Jamie McFarlane Page B

tall building and appeared to have exploded on contact. The fire lit up the night sky like a giant torch.
    Open comm. Corporal Earnest , I said to the AI.
    Corporal Earnest is deceased .
    Frak. She’d been on the tail end of the transport where we’d taken the most damage.
    Try Corporal Yeong.
    Corporal Hwa Yeong is deceased .
    Frak. Open comm with remaining squad . Finally, I heard the reassuring chirp of communication being established.
    “Charlie One-Two report in,” I said.
    “Mulehog, Methane and Patch on ground. Good to hear your voice, Sarge,” Mulehog responded.
    I sighed in relief, knowing they were together. “What’s your sit-rep?”
    “Patch is pretty busted up and I’m not going to be doing any dancing anytime soon. We got bogies on top of us. Any chance for an extraction?”
    “Roger that. Hunker down. I’ll call it in.”
    Establish comm with transport one-two pilot .
    Lieutenant Irawan is not available for communication .
    That was interesting. If there was one thing the AIs were good at, it was being precise. Irawan was alive but incommunicado, which could mean anything. She wasn’t in armor so she’d have been in a light vac-suit.  Good enough for the vacuum of space, but crap for bullets.
    Get me a location on Irawan .
    A translucent, blue, three-dimensional arrow popped up, superimposed onto the scene in front of me. It flew away from my current location to where I’d seen the transport ship go down, a contrail of blue smoke left in its wake.

LIMITED COLLATERAL DAMAGE
     
    I pulled up the controls in my HUD and sent a SITREP back to the Platoon Commander, complete with the combat data streams from each of our suits. We’d lost six, including my team leaders, Corporal Earnest and Corporal Yeong. I requested immediate danger close fire support for what remained of Bravo Fire Team.
    Almost immediately, I received a response from a very unhappy Lieutenant Stick-In-The-Ass (this might not have been his name). Fire support was denied and we were to make our way to an exfiltration zone and were under strict orders to limit collateral damage. I wondered if Lt. Stick-In-The-Ass (SITA) had reviewed the part of the combat stream where I’d installed fresh air ventilation on the hundred fortieth floor of this office building.
    I was still looking out at the crashed transport when I heard automatic fire and explosions a kilometer away. Frak!
    Show tactical display from Mulehog .
    My HUD showed two dozen lightly armed enemy combatants trying to close in on my men. We always traveled with a full load-out, so unless some real armor showed up, it would be a stalemate and some of these locals were going to bleed. I needed to change the geometry of the fight, but I was a hundred forty stories and three city blocks away.
    Establish squad comm , “Take defensive positions, immediate fire support denied, I’m en route.”
    “Copy that,” Mulehog responded.
    If we were lucky, I figured we had less than twenty minutes before the Skampers, the bastards we were tussling with over this god-forsaken city, rolled out some armor. At that point, things were gonna get real ugly. A couple dozen squishies (non-armored combatants) were something we could deal with. A squad of armored Skamper grunts would open us up like so many cans of tuna.
    One thing at a time. Right now, I needed to get over there without attracting any new attention. I ran over to the elevator bank and saw what I was hoping for. The building’s elevators were an anti-grav design which meant there were no cables. I looked into the shaft which was painted bright white with large black numerals. The closest set read one-thirty-six.
    I pulled the grenade tube off my leg armor and snapped it in place beneath my slug-thrower’s stock. The reassuring clunk of my suit’s auto feed assured me an explosive round had just been advanced into the tube. I stood back as far as I could, but I wasn’t messing around. I needed to get going right now.
    A grenade