Decisively Engaged (Warp Marine Corps Book 1) (16 page)

“For many years, our honored guests from beyond the stars have brought us gifts, wealth, new ways of doing things. And how do we repay them? Do we cherish them? Do we honor them, welcome them to our homes, offer them liquors and fine viands? No. We raise angry fists. We curse the names of their ancestors. We strike, burn, slay them.

“Shame.”

Some of the noblemen were in tears at the sight of their monarch abasing herself in front of foreigners.

“We can never make full amends for the crimes some fools committed in the name of Kirosha. Let this be a first step on the path to contrition.”

Heather heard a strange sound coming from the rear of the audience chamber. Whimpers, getting closer, as if a group of sobbing children were joining the reception. She tried to peer past the gathered noblemen; she was taller than the average Kirosha, but their elaborate headdresses and coiffures made it difficult to get a look at whatever was coming into the audience hall. It wasn’t until the closest courtiers saw what was being wheeled into the chamber and recoiled in surprise that she was finally able to see.

Grim-faced servants pushed six wheeled contraptions, flat wooden boards tilted at a sixty-degree angle. Four men and two women were attached to each board by nails driven into their wrists and forearms. They hung limply from their pierced limbs. Gags and tight straps around their necks made speech impossible; all they could do was keen softly, and most of them couldn’t draw enough air into their lungs to do even that much.

Their legs had been severed above the knee, the stumps crudely tied off to avoid a quick death by blood loss. The weight of their unsupported upper bodies prevented the victims from taking full breaths, slowly asphyxiating them. Bright orange blood seeped through the stumps, running down the table and pooling into receptacles set at the bottom of the boards to keep the fluids from staining the marble floors.

Mrs. Llewellyn leaned forward and was noisily sick.

Her husband whooped.

That was the only way to describe the sound. Not quite a shriek or a howl. A whoop. It nearly startled Heather into laughter despite her own shock and revulsion. The ambassador and his wife held each other like terrified children. Not too far away, Deputy Norbert covered her mouth with her hand, suppressing a scream. Rockwell looked pale but kept his composure. Heather noted all of this, feeling vaguely disassociated from the reality of the situation. As long as she concentrated on analysis, she didn’t have to deal with the mutilated victims being paraded in front of her.

“This is how we punish those who bring shame to our name,” Virosha the Eighth said. “These are the people responsible for the attack on our honored guests. We offer you their deaths as a small token of respect.”

As soon as the Queen uttered the word ‘deaths’ the attendants moved to the rear of the boards and started turning levers that tightened the straps around the prisoners’ necks. Their whimpers turned to strangled gasps for breath as the straps strangled them, speeding up their demise.

It took a minute or two. It wasn’t pretty.

The Llewellyns’ near-hysterics were over, thanks to a quick infusion of sedatives via their nano-meds. The courtiers had watched their outburst with impassive expressions that did little to conceal their contempt. The ambassador held on to his wife and watched the executions quietly.

After the last of the prisoners died, the Queen nodded and the servants wheeled the six corpses away, leaving an acrid odor of blood and feces behind. Another set of servants sprayed a flower-scented mist to disguise the unseemly stench.

“Their heads will be delivered to your embassies, two to each of our guests. It is lucky there were six of them, or we would have to divide them up into smaller pieces.”

The Wyrashat Emissary watched the proceedings impassively, only a slight widening of her nostrils betraying her displeasure. The new Vehelian Envoy went slightly pink around his ridges, bothered by the casual display of brutality but also hiding it well. Neither of them spoke.

Llewellyn did.

“This is barbaric,” he blurted out in Kirosha.

Heather blinked.

Did he just say what I think he said?

“Barbaric!”

RSO Rockwell was using his imp to scream at the Ambassador privately; Heather could pick up the transmission although their security systems prevented her from eavesdropping. Llewellyn shook his head, dismissing whatever advice he got.

“How could you expose us to that… To that display?” he said, in English this time, but his words were rendered into Kirosha by a court translator almost as fast as an imp would have. “Civilized people don’t do that kind of thing.”

The man had snapped. Whether he was trying to compensate for his panicked reaction or had been overwhelmed by a mixture of adrenaline and the sedatives in his system, it didn’t matter. He’d just publicly insulted the leader of an absolute monarchy.

Several courtiers began to move towards Llewellyn. None were armed, but they looked ready to tear the American apart with their bare hands. The Royal Guards on the edges of the chamber were just as ready to cut down the Star Devil and everybody around him. The ambassador spotted the advancing noblemen and he cringed from them, his anger replaced by a new wave of panic.

“Do something!” he shouted at Rockwell, as if expecting the RSO to pull out a gun and start blasting away. Rockwell was looking around, trying to come up with a plan of action, and failing.

“No!” the Queen shouted, stopping everyone in their tracks.

“There will be no violence here,” she continued. “Ambassador Llewellyn Javier, son of Ricardo. You respond to our kindness with insults. You are no longer welcome in this court. Take your servants and leave.”

Llewellyn put an arm around his wife and all but ran for the exit. The courtiers reluctantly parted before him. The rest of the human delegation followed.

They rushed into the grav-limo and left. Heather let out a breath of relief.

“Sir…” Rockwell began to say.

Llewellyn started to sob uncontrollably.

* * *

No matter how many times he thought he’d hit rock bottom, Harry Routh always found it surprising how easy it was to dig himself a little deeper.

He’d already betrayed his country, his people, his very species. Committing an act of war against them was just another step down the road he’d chosen.

“We are finished, Great One.”

Harry turned towards the speaker, a fat Ruddy clad in a Sub-Magistrate’s robes of office. The alien tilted his head towards the workers who had been busily assembling the diverse components smuggled into Jasper-Five over the past several weeks. The last shipment had arrived on the
GACSS 1138
, where Harry was first mate. His years in the US Navy had earned him that position, despite the fact that the largely-Korean crew despised him. He didn’t care if they liked him or not; they needed him too much to space him, although they saddled him all kinds of shit details, like this particular job. It wasn’t just tedious and beneath him; if he was caught, the best he could hope for was a swift trial and execution in the US.

He looked at the devices that filled the factory floor. The previous three days’ production had been taken and stored in a large warehouse after Harry had used his imp to inspect them. He did an inspection of the latest batch, knowing what the results would be. The Ruddies had done their best, but their best was shoddy by Starfarer standards, even though the components had been designed to be put together by primitives. His imp suggested failure rates in the thirty to forty percent range. Harry shrugged. He could hardly order the ETs to go back and reassemble their new toys, which would likely result in just as many defective pieces. Besides, as long as half of them worked as advertised, the Ruddies would be happy with the results. A fabber could have done the work of all fifty aliens, and done so faster and at higher tolerances, but smuggling a fabber and its operators into Kirosha would have been nearly impossible.

He’d earned every last cent of his blood money. There was only one thing left to do before he and the
1138
left this benighted planet and the fruit of his labors behind. By the time all the toys he’d helped put together were used, his ship would be light years away. That would be good, because by the time it was all over, there would be no living humans left on Jasper-Five.

“Take those outside,” he ordered, pointing at the largest devices the Ruddies had built. There were only ten of them, each about twelve feet long and weighting almost a ton apiece. Their combined worth was about a hundred million Galactic Currency Units, enough to buy a corvette, and slightly under half the estimated Gross Planetary Product of Jasper-Five. The mercenary part of Harry had considered betraying his employers and stealing those components instead: the grav drives alone were thirty million GCUs, about a hundred million dollars, an amount of money he could barely comprehend.

You didn’t betray the Lampreys and live to tell about it, though. The idle thought had never become more than that. Harry had been shown videos depicting the fate of those who’d taken the Lampreys’ thirty pieces of silver and then tried to renege on their deals. He still had nightmares about what he’d seen.

Moving the black cylinders outside took two forklifts and the efforts of every Ruddy worker in the building. The stupid aliens dropped one of them halfway through the process. The massive weight rolled over one of the workers, crushing his legs. The ET screamed like a child in agony until the Sub-Magistrate gave a curt order and the screamer got smacked with a crowbar until his skull was crushed, which quieted him down right quick. Ruddies were nowhere near as bad as Lampreys, but they didn’t exactly place a high value on life, either.

Harry could have engaged the devices’ grav drives and had them float out into the yard, but he didn’t trust his imp to maintain anything resembling precise control over them. One miscalculation and he might send them flying off at speeds that might actually damage the damn things. Better to have the Ruddies risk life and limb; dropping the cylinders wouldn’t do anything. He didn’t exactly place a high value on the Eets’ lives, either.

Once they were lined up on the courtyard, he used his imp to activate the devices. The weapons lifted themselves off the ground, to the awe and delight of the gathered Ruddies. The ten cylinders flew up into the night sky, vanishing from sight in under a second. The workers cheered. They had finally struck a blow against the hated Star Devils.

You poor stupid bastards
, Harry thought. All the Ruddies had managed to do was exchange one Star Devil for another. They wouldn’t know that for a while, however. Might as well let them enjoy their ignorance.

He sent a message to the anonymous comm ID he’d been given by the captain of the
1138
. All he got back was a curt text acknowledging that the job was done. The Asian freighter would collect payment once they reached Primrose-Seven, the Wyrm warp-hub that, unknown to them, was being used as a staging ground for the Lampreys.

There was a good chance the butt-ugly ETs might decide to silence the crew of the
1138
instead of paying them off, of course. At this point, Harry wasn’t sure he cared one way or another.

Year 163 AFC, D Minus Six

Shortly after breakfast, Jonah and Timothy joined several others at the mission’s library for their customary two-hour Scripture study. They weren’t the only ones using the facilities. A number of Kirosha students were there, taking advantage of the library’s old-style books as well as the equally old-fashioned computers there. LDS tradition favored using traditional paper books for study; the Kirosha were not the only ones enamored with following the ways of their ancestors. In this case, tradition had helped the mission in reaching the Kirosha, whose own books were surprisingly similar to Earth’s.

The Kirosha students wandered around the stacks or sat by one of the reading tables or computer desks in the common room. Timothy smiled when he spotted a youngster intently poring over a translation of
Tom Sawyer
. The book had been annotated to help make it more accessible to the local culture, but judging from his expression the kid was obviously struggling with it.

Timothy and his companion sat down with their copies of the Testaments. Mere minutes after they started, however, a commotion outside broke through the library’s placid silence. People were crying out in pain and anguish. They were Kirosha: their high-pitched voices were unmistakable. He stood up and looked out of a window.

There were dozens of people just outside, filling the courtyard. Many were pupils at the school – he recognized several of them – but others were older and seemed to be their parents and relatives. There were wounded among them, their orange blood staining crude bandages or flowing from unattended cuts. What on Earth had happened to them?

He could hazard a guess, but he wanted to know for sure. Timothy was far from the only one who rushed out of the library, but he was one of the first to get to the door. Mission President Jensen had just arrived and was trying to find out what was happening, which was difficult with half a dozen Kirosha talking loudly at the same time.

“Brethren!” President Jensen shouted over the confused babble. “Brethren, please! One at a time. We will do what we can for you, but please, tell me what’s happened to you.”

An older man came forward, dressed in an expensively-stylized version of common laborer clothes. Timothy recognized him: Kroonha Veen, one of the wealthiest Jersh in the city, who owned several fertilizer plants that employed several hundred fellow caste members; he was the most prominent LDS convert on the planet. He was among the injured; dry blood was caked over his left temple, and the eye on that side was bruised and swollen. He waved the rest into silence, wincing at the pain the sudden move cost him, and turned to address President Jensen.

“Illustrious Mission President, brothers, sisters, we come here begging for protection!”

A familiar smell made Timothy look towards the city proper. The fires, which had disappeared in the last few days, had come back; he could see distant smoke rising once again, and this time he thought some of it was coming from inside the city rather than its suburbs.

“Of course, brother,” President Jensen said. He was a solemn man whose tall, lanky frame and homely features reminded Timothy of a clean-shaven Abraham Lincoln, and the resemblance had never been so evident as it was at this moment. “Our doctors will be here soon. Can you tell me what happened?”

“The Final Blow Society,” Kroonha said, confirming Timothy’s suspicions. “They came at dawn, dozens of them, knocking down our doors, throwing us out of our homes and workshops, and setting them ablaze. They came for all converts, Catholics and Baptists as well as us. They knew who we were; each leader had a list of names. We were betrayed by our own neighbors. They watched us be expelled from our own homes, the miserable forni…” He checked himself and shrugged. “They will find little enough to rejoice about. An angry mob will not separate Christians from nonbelievers but will torment both. So will the fires they set. All Jersh will suffer.”

The wounded man paused for a second, his eyes blinking in sorrow, his expression haunted by the disaster he’d just endured. “We have lost everything. We may yet lose our lives. At first, the guards at the gates to the Enclave would not let us through. We had to bribe them, give them what few valuables we managed to carry out of our homes. We…” He couldn’t continue; his whole body shook as he sobbed, the sound so disturbingly like the crying of an inconsolable human child they made Timothy’s eyes mist over.

Like every man and woman in the United Stars of America, Timothy had spent four years of his life in uniform, doing his obligatory military service. At that moment, he longed for the feel of the standard issue Mark I Infantry Weapon he’d trained with during Basic. There must be a reckoning for this.

Timothy shuddered and set aside angry thoughts. Revenge was not his concern now. He had to help these people, not avenge them.

There were over a hundred refugees around him, and he could see more coming.

Year 163 AFC, D Minus Three

“You don’t look happy, sir,” Gunny Obregon said when Fromm came back from the Embassy.

“You want the good news or the bad news first, Gunny?”

“Is there any good news?”

“Sort of. The RSO finally convinced the asshole to call for the cavalry. Priority QE message sent, reply received. The Fleet corvettes are moving up their scheduled visit; now they are due to arrive in sixteen hours. They’ll drop off two more Marine platoons, so I’m finally getting a company. And if the Ruddy Queen doesn’t agree to disarm all hostile elements in the city, the corvettes are going to turn that big-ass flattop pyramid of hers into a smoking crater. The Mickey Mouse bullshit is over.”

“That
is
good news,” Obregon said. “So what’s the problem?”

“Llewellyn didn’t wait for the corvettes to show up. He issued an ultimatum to the Queen as soon as he got confirmation the ships were on their way. The stupid asshole. It’s like he never heard the definition of diplomacy.”

“Haven’t heard that one myself, sir.”

“Diplomacy is the art of saying ‘Nice doggy’ while you look for a big rock. Llewellyn forgot to play nice while the big rock is underway. His excuse was, he wanted to forestall the Ruddies from doing anything; he figured if they knew the fleet was on its way they’d quiet down. But that knowledge gives them a window of opportunity, if they want to be unreasonable.”

“You mean insane, sir. Nothing she does now is going to keep those corvettes from wrecking her little empire.”

“I know that, and you know that, but so far the Ruddies have been acting like they don’t know that. Maybe their culture makes it impossible to grin and take it, not after Llewellyn insulted their Queen. They haven’t attacked us, but every Ruddy convert in the city’s been herded into the Enclave. The ones they didn’t murder outright, that is.”

That was turning into a nightmare. Every fabber available had been put to work to provide shelter and supplies for the refugees, who had numbered in the thousands. Fromm had managed to keep his troops from joining in any relief operations: if an attack happened, he needed to be ready, not to have his platoon scattered all over doing humanitarian work.

And his gut told him an attack was likely. It didn’t make sense, but that was how he felt.

“Everybody’s as ready as we can be,” Obregon said, correctly gauging Fromm’s mood. It hadn’t even been a week, but it had been a very intense few days, and he and his sergeant were getting a good feel for each other. Fromm had conducted a number of virtual field exercises, first with all the platoon NCOs, and later on with the entire unit. Along the way, he’d learned the strengths and weaknesses of the men and women under him.

Obregon himself was everything he could ask for, and possibly the best platoon sergeant he’d served with. He was a thinker and a doer who wasn’t afraid to shoot down Fromm’s ideas if he thought they were bad, and who could motivate the troops and kick their ass when he had to. Fromm couldn’t have asked for a better second in command.

The rest of his NCOs were more of a mixed bag. Staff Sergeant Martin, leader of the mortar section, was conscientious but a bit of a plodder. As long as you gave him a concise set of orders he’d be fine; left to his own initiative he would follow the book, which wasn’t bad most of the time. Sergeant Buford P. Jackson of the assault section was aggressive to a fault; during the simulated exercises he’d shown he would try achieve his objectives at any cost, which made him a good man to send out to fight if you needed something done, casualties be damned, and not so good for anything else. Sergeant Antonio Muller led the guns section with a bit more caution than Fromm would have preferred, but was otherwise a fine soldier.

The attached units were all right for the most part. Staff Sergeant Seamus Tanaka and a supply private ran were in charge of the platoon’s armory, and had done a good job so far. His communications section consisted of four Navy spacers, commanded by Chief Petty Officer Lateesha Donnelly, a smart, detail-oriented woman who’d become Fromm’s unofficial intelligence officer. Her mastery of the Kirosha language and skill at extracting information from the Ruddies’ radio and telephone traffic had already proven invaluable. He even had a company’s worth of corpsmen at his service, an abundance of riches he hoped he wouldn’t need.

And then there was Staff Sergeant Amherst, Detachment Commander of the Marine Security Guards. Technically, Fromm was the new Detachment Commander, adding yet another twist to the highly unorthodox posting, as that position was usually held by a staff NCO, not an officer. None of that would have mattered if Amherst wasn’t an asshole, but he was an asshole. After going through his record, Fromm had realized the sergeant had gotten to his current position mostly by kissing copious amounts of ass. His combat record was minimal; he’d spent most of his time in the rear with the gear. Amherst’s attempt to hinder the rescue attempt was probably enough to relieve him for cause, but Fromm needed every Marine he had, and the eight-man detachment represented two extra fire teams that might come in handy if the shit hit the fan. Fromm had kept Amherst at his post for the time being.

“At least the remfies let us dig in,” Obregon said.

Fromm nodded. The beautiful flower beds around the embassy compound had been replaced by lines of entrenched positions, protected by rolls of smart concertina wire and portable area force fields. He peeked outside via his imp, and saw several hundred Kirosha, volunteers from the refugees now crowding the Enclave, digging a fallback set of trenches.

Embassy Row, the four-block square that contained the three Starfarer legations had clear fields of fire on all sides, being surrounded by parks that provided little cover for a good hundred yards in every direction, especially after the trees lining up the streets had been cut down and used for the trenches. Beyond the cleared area there were mostly residential buildings, no more than four stories tall, all the way to the Enclave walls, about six hundred yards away. A hundred yards of open ground was far from optimal – a running man could cross that distance in under twenty seconds – but it was better than nothing. Firing from fixed positions, his Marines could inflict gruesome casualties on anyone caught in the open.

The improvised fortifications were fine; the problem was he didn’t have enough troops to fill them with. He could deploy a fire team for every two hundred feet of the perimeter, leaving him with one squad held back as a reserve. Even with modern weapons, that wouldn’t be enough to hold off a determined assault if enough rioters were allowed into the Enclave. And if the Army or the Guard went on the attack, they were screwed. He needed more manpower, or even the high-tech defenses protecting Embassy Row wouldn’t be enough.

The entire US compound could be surrounded by force fields that would withstand heavy artillery, but they were not perfect defenses. A good portion of Fromm’s combat training revolved around understanding the limits of the seemingly-magic energy shields, which apparently no Starfaring race fully understood, having been handed the technology by older, long-gone species. On their default settings, the fields would intercept fast-moving objects – anything with a speed over sixty-three miles an hour – as well as most forms of energy beyond certain thresholds. They would do so either on one or both sides of the field; you could program them to allow outgoing fire to pass through unhindered. The invisible forces could be shaped in any number of configurations, from the body-hugging personal shields generated by Marine combat armor to gigantic domes like the ones the Snakes had used during First Contact, encasing cities so they could be burned to the ground without inflicting lasting damage to the environment.

On the other hand, objects and personnel moving below the speed threshold – a charging mob of sword-wielding fanatics or a tank moving below sixty mph, for example – could cross the field with impunity. You could increase shield densities to block out everything, but the energy costs increased geometrically. Force fields required a constant outflow of power; the amount of energy spent to successful deflect an attack was directly proportional to the energy in the attack. If not enough power was available, the field would experience a local failure, creating a temporary gap in the defenses. If enough force was applied to the shields, they would go off-line and require several seconds or even minutes to be restored.

All the Starfarer embassies had one or more gluon power plants, which manipulated the ‘strong force’ to generate energy in a variety of forms, including gravitons, photons and electrons. The US had two, each capable of supplying a pre-Contact city’ every energy need. As long as one of those power plants was hooked to the force field generators, the compound was safe from anything less than a Ruddy multi-divisional artillery barrage. The Kirosha forces in and around the capital just didn’t have enough tubes to batter down the shields beyond opening small localized breaches that would close up in a second or two.