Decisively Engaged (Warp Marine Corps Book 1) (18 page)

Some Ruddies started to make it through, though. There were only three hundred-mike-mikes in the section, and reloading them after they’d fired their wad took some time. The 0341s manning the guns were spacing their shots so at least one mortar was firing at any given time, but they just couldn’t sweep the entire front with constant fire.

The first ET Russell saw came limping from around a corner. Russel used his scope to take a closer look and kept his finger off the trigger when he saw the poor bastard was trailing half his guts behind him. No sense wasting a bullet on the already-dead. The Ruddie took one more step and then went down face-first; he wouldn’t be getting up.

The bunch that came on his heels were lively enough, though.

The ALS-43s and LML-10s engaged them first. The gunners fired three- and four-round bursts of 15mm anti-pers down the street, lashing the Ruddies with fragmentary rounds that didn’t pack as much punch as mortar bombs but were plenty enough to send dozens of Ruddies to their final reward. The mini-grenades made little puffs of dark smoke as they went off slightly above head height, sending running figures tumbling. You could tell the wounded from the dead easily enough; the dead hit the ground flat, as if someone had dropped a chunk of meat on the ground. The wounded rolled and twisted around, grabbing at the spots where they’d been slashed or perforated. Either way, they stopped showing any interest in moving forward.

The Light Missile Launcher teams had been assigned to the streets outside the ALS-43s’ fire lanes. They used high explosive rounds on the buildings closest to the cleared ground surrounding Embassy Row. Each HE missile had the power of a thousand pounds of TNT; the first salvo turned the buildings into rubble and lashed the Ruddies on the street with shockwave-propelled pieces of brick and masonry. Their second volley used plasma rounds, unleashing fireballs that enveloped everything within ten yards from the point of impact and set the Ruddies on fire at twice that distance.

“That’s gonna leave a mark,” Russell muttered. He wondered how many civvies had been in those buildings. Just about everyone had left for the protection of the Embassies or, if locals, had moved onto greener pastures, but there were always some poor bastards who didn’t get the word, or hoped things would turn out for the best. They’d be telling their tale to Jesus just about now.

Ruddies stopped coming into sight; either they’d wised up or they were all dead. Mortars kept dropping on something for a few seconds, then stopped while a new flight of micro-drones went on another suicide run. Russell wondered how many they had in storage, and how quickly the fabbers could turn out more, along with more of everything else they would need. He hadn’t fired a shot yet, but he didn’t expect that would last.

He watched the video feed for as long as he could. They’d wasted a couple thousand Ruddies, and the rest had gotten cold feet and were milling around outside the kill zone while their leaders tried to raise their morale by yelling and using some metal whips on them. Fucking officers sucked in every planet. A string of mortar bombs burst overhead and turned the rally attempt into a slaughter.

Just before the feed went out, Russell saw the massive forms of tanks coming into view.

Year 163 AFC, D Minus Three

“Switch to Anti-Vehicle rounds, Martin,” Fromm said as he managed the battle from one of the rear bunkers. Sending out anti-vehicle mortar rounds instead of frags and plasma would take the pressure off the Final Blow fanatics, but he didn’t want the advancing tanks the drones had spotted to reach the lines. The AV rounds mounted cameras as part of their sensor systems, so sending them up would also provide him with more data without spending any more drones; they had only two dozen or so left, enough for four sorties before they ran out. A fabber was cranking them out at a rate of one every three minutes, but that wasn’t enough to keep up, and the other matter-printers were busy making more ammo and other consumables. He could build bigger drones with integral force fields, but they would take ten times the time and materials to produce and would only survive for a minute or two before the swatters burned through their defenses. The game of drones was one of attrition, and fought at battalion or higher levels; he didn’t have the resources to play it in the face of swatter tech.

Whoever had gifted the Ruddies with high-tech gear had picked the perfect weapon system. Swatters could even knock mortar rounds out; it took a few seconds to do so, which wouldn’t affect the bombs at short and medium ranges, but he couldn’t have them hovering in the air, which robbed him of many options. He shrugged. He’d play the hand he’d been dealt, as best he could.

The video feed from the seeker warheads wasn’t as good as the drones’: the viewpoint shifted too fast for the naked eye to follow, and it had to be processed by his imp. What he saw during the second or so it took the first three missiles to fly up, acquire a target and plunge toward them was good enough. A tank company was lumbering towards Embassy Row, twelve antiquated Mark IIs from the Army rather than the more sophisticated Dire Wolves from the Royal Guard. The three missiles broke up into fifteen sub-munitions, each one exploding five feet above their designated targets and sending a self-forged metal dart plunging through the turrets of the tanks. Fromm could imagine the carnage as the interior of each vehicle was filled with sublimated metal gases and bouncing solid fragments; at least it would be over before the crew knew what was happening. A series of explosions in the distance told the rest of the story. Scratch one tank company.

The brief respite in the mortar bombardment had allowed another Ruddy wave to get into range of the trench line. Once again, the ETs were slaughtered by the heavy weapons before any Marine riflemen had the chance to fire a single shot.

“Stop, you stupid motherfuckers,” he muttered. “Stop making us kill you.”

He couldn’t call that slaughter a battle or anything resembling a fight. It had been a massacre, plain and simple, and its victims might as well have been holding flowers in their hands for all the good their weapons had done them. His imp estimated the aliens had suffered nearly three thousand casualties in a matter of minutes.

No more Ruddies came through. Off to the north, the Vehelian Embassy’s defenders checked fire as well, their lasers falling silent for lack of targets. They’d done for about as half as many Ruddies as Fromm’s men. The Wyrms hadn’t had to fire a shot, being masked by the other two Starfarer compounds.

Some civilian was trying to reach him on his imp. He took advantage of the temporary lull to ID the caller. Hiroshi Delgado, from Black River Security; the commander/CEO of the largest military contractor on Jasper-Five.

“What can I do for you, Mr. Delgado?”

“I want to offer my support, Captain. I’ve got a platoon with me. You know our specs.”

Fromm did. Nothing fancy: M5 carbines, their 5mm plasma rounds slightly less effective than an IW-3’s, and likely firing a mixture of explosive rounds and inert bullets. Decent body armor but light personal force fields, which meant they’d take more casualties in a close-range firefight than his Marines. Their heavy weapons consisted of M-71 railguns; they’d be more than effective enough against the current enemy forces.

“All my boys are ready to roll,” Delgado said. “They’re all long-service vets, Navy or the Corps. Not a single Army fucker among them.”

Fromm would have chuckled under different circumstances. The Army was the hind-tit service, most of its personnel stuck on Earth and a couple of the larger worlds. If the Air Force still existed, instead of having been folded back into the Army, it would be the only US military branch lower on the totem pole.

“I’ll have to run it by the RSO, but I’ll endorse the recommendation, Mr. Delgado.”

“You won’t regret this, Captain.”

“Have your people ready. I’ll send you orders when I have them.”

Fromm called the RSO next. Rockwell looked rough, and something in his expression told Fromm something had gone down inside the embassy while his Marines were busy outside.

“I’m up to date on your status, Fromm. Got anything new to add?”

Fromm ran the military contractors’ offer by him.

“Approved,” Rockwell said. He made no mention of having to consult with the ambassador first.

“Uh, is there anything I should know, sir?”

“Oh, yes. Ambassador Llewellyn has resigned from his post, citing poor health. He suffered an accident in his office. Fell down. Repeatedly.”

Rockwell scratched his nose, and Fromm noticed that the knuckles on his hand looked somewhat bruised.

“I see,” Fromm said. Hell of a way to run a railroad, but he could read between the lines. Llewellyn had either punked out or broken down, and Rockwell had to take over. There would be plenty of fallout to follow, but Rockwell had to be alive to go to trial for assaulting an ambassador, and the best way to stay alive was to keep Llewellyn from making any more decisions.

He knew where Rockwell was coming from. Knew it intimately.

“Anything else, Captain?”

“No, sir.”

“Carry on, then.”

Astarte-Three, Year 163 AFC

Laser beams were invisible to the naked eye, but the sensors in Lieutenant Fromm’s suit turned them into colorful lines of red light as they flashed towards his position. Wherever the crimson lines touched anything solid, they transmitted enough energy to shatter stone, melt metal or rip through flesh and bone.

The ‘rebel base’ First Battalion, 73
rd
Marines had attacked was supposed to comprise some four hundred effectives armed with small arms and a handful of heavy weapons. Instead, the Marines had stumbled into a
regiment
of heavily armed troops, including two dozen grav-tanks that had taken the Marines’ LAVs by surprise and annihilated them in a brutal short-range firefight. Bravo Company had dismounted already; most of its personnel had survived the destruction of their vehicles, but they were now pinned down by the eight enemy tanks still left-standing and some two hundred or so laser-wielding infantrymen fighting alongside them. More enemy forces were massing behind them. What had started as a support operation for a US client had turned into a desperate battle.

“We’re getting flanked, sir,” Staff Sergeant Gruenwald said over the sound of multiple laser impacts.

Fromm consulted the grid map his imp projected into his eyes, along with the blue and red icons marking the position of friendly and enemy units, respectively. Bravo had made a stand at one end of a narrow gorge, the one place in the area where it could hold with some hope of not being overrun in short order. Even so, their line was thin and they’d been forced to screen the north side of the gorge – his left flank – with only a couple of fire teams. The Lampreys – it was Lampreys on the other side, he was sure of it – had found the weak spot and were making their main push there, trying to infiltrate enough laser troops to roll up the thin defensive line thwarting their advance.

His platoon was fully committed; he had no reserves left. Behind him, a couple thousand yards away, the rest of the battalion, or rather the survivors of the initial clash, was digging in and consolidating. Bravo Company needed to buy them time. Fromm selected a squad and sent it off to reinforce the left flank, knowing he was weakening the rest of the line too much to resist a determined assault. Third Platoon, entrenched behind the front line, was keeping the Lampreys busy with mortars and missile fire, but they were concentrating on the center of the line, leaving the forces facing the left flank free to maneuver.

His platoon was doing everything it could, but it needed more support. Fromm tried to raise Captain Chastain, and discovered Bravo Company’s commander was not taking calls. “The fuck?” Fromm all but screamed, remembering at the last second to keep his cursing off the general channel.

“Take over, Gruenwald,” he told his platoon sergeant. “I’m off to see the captain.”

“Good luck, sir.”

Neither Fromm nor Staff Sergeant Gruenwald had any confidence in Captain Terry Paget Chastain. On a data screen, the officer’s stats looked great. Plenty of commendations, including a Silver Star for being the sole survivor from the Ushtun debacle, where an entire Marine company had been slaughtered by a tribe of headhunting ETs. After serving with the man for a couple of years, however, Fromm had eventually realized Chastain was a consummate and cunning coward, always contriving to be in the safest possible spot at any given time. In this case, he was well to the rear, behind the weapons platoon, on the reverse slope of a shallow hill, ostensibly to have a good view of the tactical situation. It might even be somewhat true. Imp systems, including sensors, were being jammed at random intervals by the enemy, yet another indication of how shockingly well-equipped they were. Eyeballs on higher ground couldn’t be jammed. It also conveniently put the captain as far away from the fighting as one could be without deserting.

And now Fromm would have to leave his men behind to go talk to him face to face.

He crawled through the network of trenches – excavated by laying strips of ‘digger’ explosive charges on the ground – and dashed through a ten-yard span of open ground. A Lamprey scored a couple of hits on his back, and he felt the temperature inside the clamshell breastplate rise noticeably when some residual heat got through the force field and the armor beneath. Fromm dived for the next trench line; the rough landing hurt him worse than the laser hit.

“Watch it, domass!” a Marine growled when Fromm almost landed on top of him. “Sorry, sir,” the man hastily added when his imp identified Fromm as an officer.

“My bad,” Fromm said. “Carry on.”

The Marine went back to reloading his ALS-43 while Fromm resumed his crawl towards the captain’s position.

One more desperate run around the hill – a near-miss peppered him with shards of rock when it superheated a boulder and turned it into a good imitation of an artillery shell – and he was out of the way of direct fire, able to walk the rest of the way. He found the captain cowering at the bottom of a covered entrenchment, alone.

As it turned out, the reverse slope of the hill hadn’t been as safe as Fromm and the captain had thought. The Lampreys had sent a guided missile towards it, and the duplex round had punched through the portable force field protecting the position had killed everyone on the hill except Chastain.

The captain had taken off his helmet and was applying a clotting agent to a scalp cut that that poured blood over his face an eyes. He looked at Fromm with a wide-eyed, terrified expression the gore only made more apparent. The man was panicking.

“What the hell are you doing here, Fromm?”

“I needed to talk to you, sir, and you weren’t responding. I need you to shift fire to cover the left flank. We’re in danger of being overrun.”

“Forget the left flank. We’re breaking contact and retreating.”

“We can’t break contact, sir. The Lampreys will slaughter us if we leave the trenches. And follow us and do the same to the rest of the battalion.”

“I’m calling a fire mission to allow us to move. Warn everyone while I set it up; it’s going to be danger close.” The captain turned away and used his imp to call for artillery.

Fromm’s map overlay showed him the coordinates the captain was sending out, and he realized Chastain was calling for fire right on top of the outer trench line. That wasn’t ‘danger close,’ that was murdering half of Bravo Company so the other half could run away. Fromm couldn’t believe the Regiment was going along with it, but he quickly realized that the Lampreys’ jamming was making it difficult to see where the platoon was. They didn’t know the storm of plasma, fragmentary-case and self-forging penetrators they were about to unleash would be hitting friend and foe alike.

“Sir, belay that fire mission!” Fromm shouted, using his imp to break into the channel and step on the captain’s coordinate relay.

“Fuck you, Lieutenant! It’s the only way!”

No time to argue. The hysteria in the captain’s voice told Fromm only action would suffice. Before the company commander could reach the target acquisition officer again, Fromm punched him, his heavy gloves lending almost as much weight to the blow as a set of brass knuckles.

Chastain’s head rocked back from impact. He looked at the lieutenant with disbelief, blood spurting from his broken nose. “You…”

Fromm hit him again. And again. Knocking someone out took work. He ended up slamming the captain’s head into a piece of rock until he stopped struggling. At the end, Fromm was panting heavily, not so much from exertion as from the fear and rage driving him. He knew both officers’ imps would be recording the entire thing, and that Article 90 of the UCMJ called for the death penalty for his actions. A court-martial was all he had to look forward to. But you had to be alive for one of those.

When it was over, he contacted the TAO. “This is Lieutenant Fromm. Captain Chastain is down. Sending you new set of coordinates. Belay the previous fire mission.” Just in the nick of time.

Somewhere behind the lines, four Multiple-Launch Rocket System vehicles swung their launch boxes and sent a hundred and twenty supersonic missiles soaring into the air. They were all struck multiple times by air-defense lasers, but their force fields held long enough for them to reach their targets and detonate. A line of fireballs bloomed over the advancing Lampreys. Fromm watched a grav-tank’s turret rising majestically into the air on top of one of the fireballs, its barrel twisted like a corkscrew by the detonation that had torn it from its main body.

Bravo Company could hold out a little longer now. Maybe long enough for the battalion to regroup.

Fromm might have lost his career and soon enough his life, but at least he hadn’t allowed the asshole to kill his men.

* * *

“Sit down, Lieutenant.”

Colonel Macwhirter’s office was unusually Spartan, with few of the pictures and holographs that would comprise a typical ‘I-love-me’ wall. Most of the mementos Fromm could see marked some eventful moments in the colonel’s life: a picture of a young Captain Macwhirter leading a warp assault on a pirated passenger starship; a holographic display of a battle in Vega-Eight, where Major Macwhirter had been wounded and nearly killed. And so on. Hardly any pictures of the officer paling it up with other VIPs.

Fromm sat down. Normally, meeting with the regiment commander would have been a nerve-wracking experience. At the moment, he was too numb to care. He’d spent the wait outside the colonel’s office writing letters to the families of the dead. In the end, he hadn’t saved his platoon. All of them had ended up as casualties; almost half had been killed.

“It appears that your implant’s records were irretrievably lost when you were wounded. Same thing happened to Captain Chastain, strangely enough.”

He couldn’t think of anything to say to that, so he stayed silent.

“The Captain had an… interesting history, you might say,” Macwhirter went on. “Some people thought he walked on water. Others had some reservations but nothing solid to base them on. The fact that he married the granddaughter of one of the wealthiest men on Earth didn’t hurt, either. In any case, it’s been decided that to look further into his demise will do nobody any good. Which leaves us with the question of what to do with you.”

Remaining quiet seemed to be working, so he kept at it.

“For now, it means a promotion,
Captain
Fromm. Your actions saved most of the regiment, even if it cost you half of your platoon. Far better than anything that cowardly piece of shit would have managed, beyond saving his own sorry ass.” The expression in Macwhirter’s eyes told Fromm the officer had watched both imps’ feeds before they were ‘lost.’

The Colonel’s eyes bore into Fromm’s. “You’re getting away with murder, Captain. Almost literally. The question is, what will you do now? Maybe you’ll decide you’re invincible, and fuck up until you get yourself and your command killed. What do you think you’ll do with your free pass?”

“My duty, sir.”

“Good answer. You better mean it. Now get the fuck out of my office. I need to think of a good place to put you.”