Incursion Vector

047

[▲] INS Robert A. Heinlein, Lalande Repair Yards

The kids were good.

In the first five minutes while Rafalski stealthed out and laid down his traps their snipers had taken out Roswell. Admittedly it had been her own fault for failing to maintain cover and the headshot was a good reminder why she needed to keep her ass concealed if she wasn't in her mech. Vincent's VTI had extrapolated the trajectory of the shot that took her down and he had Keita and Tait hammer the area with a few mortars to no avail. The sniper had smartly repositioned the instant after the shot went out and was back lurking in the pouring rain and howling wind, biding their time until the next kill.

Naturally following the volley their second sniper—Vincent couldn't imagine it would have been the same marine as the trajectory was from the complete opposite side of the arena—had used that exact tactic to take Tait out of commission with a gut shot. For the next five minutes he was as good as dead on the field while the triage protocols went through the motions of patching him up, deciding based on a random number generator whether he was fixable or paralyzed from a bullet through the spine. Still, even if the RNGods decided he was paralyzed Keita would drag him back to cover their flag, so he would still be somewhat useful.

He had spotted tracks in the mud and knew at least two of the kid marines were lurking on their side of the arena's midline. It was around the seven minute mark of the sim, meaning they had trapped their sides and now were at work sapping what Rafalski had laid out. Before he could hunt them down a simulated explosion went off and Kedrov was removed from the field, taken out by what the man said was a Bouncing Betty even though that design of anti-personnel mine hadn't seen use in six centuries.

It was at that point, down two or possibly three men and still without any idea where the little bastards were, he decided to take Colonel Redloader's warning seriously. The people pitted against them weren't the kids they looked like. They were each highly skilled Interstellar Navy Marines who had lived and worked together for nearly six years and been fighting as one unit for just over two. They hadn't been trained to win and call it good, they had been raised to secure unquestionable victory then get up do it the next day as a matter of course. Anything less and they would have washed out of the University Frigate System and wound up at a less demanding institution—one that hadn't seen dozens of kids commit suicide at its inception because of the ridiculous physical and mental demands of a baseline program that currently required dozens of legal waivers and psychological clearance merely to test for entry.

Vincent had never really paid attention to the gossip about the UFS aside from what Kip related to him while they were bullshitting during maintenance duty. Floating military academies seemed somewhat stupid to him; one really bad accident in space or some really persistent pirates with enough firepower and black hat support and there went a few hundred kids and a skeleton crew of officers and support personnel. Plus he wasn't all that sure about the starting age. When he was ten years old he still wanted to be an inventor. He hadn't considered the military until he found out just how expensive it would be to enter an academic university and discovered what a clandestine and backstabbing war it was to get a job in the civilian sector without Alliance citizenship. Luckily he actually liked what he did for a living due in large part to most of the war thing being completely out in the open.

It didn't seem possible anyone could know exactly what they wanted to do before they even hit puberty. Even so, he couldn't deny that even if they didn't know what they wanted to be, what they were was extremely good at what they were doing.

He just hated the fact that most of them were barely the age of majority. One of their squad was just sixteen years old. If they got their asses kicked by a bunch of kids who couldn't go out and drink a beer afterward no one anywhere was going to let them live it down. The 332 would not only be the unit that got the shaft in carting the whining bitches of Senate projects all over the galaxy, they'd be the unit which had their noses run into the simulated mud by a squad of brats with fresh diplomas.