Decisively Engaged (Warp Marine Corps Book 1) (30 page)

“Yes, I am familiar with your wise words, Teenu. I’ve read your book plenty of times. Do you have a spare copy you could leave with me? It is too dark to read in here, but I could use its pages to wipe my arse.”

“You are angry.”

“My men are dead. Are you going to bring them back? Are you going to give me back my guns, my troops? I suspect you are not. So say your piece and leave me be.”

“In two days, we attack the Star Devils, using some of their own devices against them. This will be the decisive moment. If we fail, we will not have the resources to attack again. We will be reduced to mounting a long siege and waiting for our new allies to arrive and finish off the Star Devils. Which they will do, for a price. Our esteemed ally made it clear that if we cannot win by ourselves, our current agreement will be modified accordingly. We will once again be reduced to servitude, dependent on our new masters to protect us.”

“You knew it was madness to go to war with the Americans,” Neen said, feeling exhilarated for the first time in years. To be free to speak his mind at last was a heady experience. “Even if we kill every Star Devil on the planet, our fate is wholly contingent on whose ships will next appear over our skies. If it is the Americans, we are doomed. If it is the Lahn Arkh, we will bow our heads to them, and from everything we’ve learned, they are unlikely to be a better choice.”

“All you say is true,” Seeu admitted. “I have given orders to capture alive as many Americans as we can, if we win. If need be, we can use them as hostages should their fleet be the one to appear next.”

“We promised the Lahn Arkh we would kill all Americans on the planet.”

“What is one more broken promise? They can be disposed of easily enough if the Lahn Arkh arrive.”

“What a weak reed we are, to bend this way or that, as the wind blows,” the former colonel said.

“We
are
weak, Neen. I have played this game as well as I could, just as you did. You executed the ambush perfectly. It is not your fault that the enemy was strong enough to break free and turn on you. Sometimes the game is lost before it begins.”

To hear himself exonerated brought warmth to Neen’s entrails even after all the dishonor and indignities heaped upon him. He began to regret his harsh words.

“You honor me, Grand Marshall. Here you stand, discussing strategy with a former soldier, now a condemned captive. I am curious as to your reasons for doing this.”

“I note with gladness that you have remembered some of your manners, Neen. I am here to make you an offer. I will make similar offers to several other prisoners. One must plan for defeat as well as victory. If I win the day, I swear to you, I will use whatever influence I earn from my triumph to have you released and restored to your offices.”

That was more than Neen had ever dreamed of. A smell ember of hope began to burn in his liver.

“And if I lose, I will need your help,” Seeu went on. “Your help, and that of the others, for we will face desperate times, and the Kingdom’s survival will require desperate measures.”

“Whatever happens, the old Kirosha will be gone,” Neen said; he was beginning to understand what the Grand Marshall had in mind. “You do realize that, I hope.”

“Change is fraught with danger. It is sometimes necessary. Even Ka’at is not immutable.”

Neen should have felt elated at the prospect of escape and possible revenge. Instead, he was suffused with sadness and a quiet sense of purpose. He squatted down, hands held in a sign of obedience.

“Lead me, Grand Marshall.”

* * *

“It’s a kludge, all right,” Sergeant Seamus Tanaka said as Fromm walked around the end product of weeks of frantic work, not to mention the expenditure of precious materiel and fabber time.

A normal warp catapult looked like a flat circular surface, dull gray in color, surrounded by a rim of brass and gold gravitonic circuitry, with a gluon power plant underneath. The Marine thieves had carefully sectioned off the launching pad, along with the circuitry rims; the power plant had been destroyed or proved to be too massive to transport and conceal. Tanaka, several engineers from Caterpillar, two Wyrm Savants and a retired Oval warp-drive designer had busted their asses to reassemble the pad, hook the rebuilt device to a Wyrm power plant, and graft an Oval computer to the whole thing to coordinate the wildly fluctuating energies involved in creating two warp points on a planetary surface.

The improvised power plant and computer clashed horribly with the catapult’s human design. The whole thing looked as if a not-particularly-smart child had taken three toys from different manufacturers and welded them together. But the simulations said it would work, and the Oval computer would hold things together much better than a human model, turning the possible ten percent loss rate into a much-less-suicidal half of one-percent. Given that the pad would only be able to launch twenty-five people in total, there was a good chance nobody would die in transit.

The survival chances of twenty-five infantrymen suddenly dropped in the middle of a Kirosha multi-regimental evolution was another thing altogether.

They would be the best-equipped twenty-five soldiers possible, at least. Their Starfarer allies had contributed weapons and equipment. The force would have to be one hundred percent human, of course, being the only species able to endure warp space with only the protection of a pressurized suit. At least a third of the personnel of a Marine combat unit had to be warp-drop rated, even now that warp drops were almost as rare as paratroop operations back in pre-Contact days. All his warp-capable men were going on what promised to be a forlorn hope.

“It ain’t pretty, but it’ll work,” Tanaka said.

“I’ll bet my life on it, Sergeant.”

The important thing was, it was finished, and not a moment too soon. All indications were that the Ruddies were massing for another general assault. They would attack soon. Another couple of days, tops. The Ruddies had brought another army into the capital, and they were gleaning the best units from them and assembling the biggest assault force yet. They might win the day even without a force field.

A QE telegram had announced that a combined American and Wyrm fleet was meeting a Lamprey force at the Paulus star system, twenty warp-hours from Lahiri – and seventeen hours from Jasper. Whoever won that fight would be in position to send ships to the system and decide who lived and who died. If it was the Lampreys, nothing Fromm did would matter, but if things went the other way, all they had to do was stay alive a little longer.

Just a little longer. They’d fought off an entire country for almost four weeks already. Food was running out. Water was strictly rationed, even with a set of recyclers converting waste into potable water twenty-for seven. If it hadn’t rained for the better part of a week, they would have been screwed. Their feedstock and common material stockpiles were almost gone, too. Even if they won the upcoming battle, they might not be able to fight a second one.

He couldn’t let the big picture overwhelm him. He had to face each crisis in turn.

One step at a time.

Year 163 AFC, D Plus Twenty-Seven

Heather McClintock checked her IW-3 one more time. It’d been a while, but some things stayed with you.

“We’re not that short of riflemen,” Lieutenant Commander Zhang said one more time. “You’ve been doing a lot of good work in Intelligence.”

“For the next twenty-four to forty-eight hours, there’s no need for spook work. The Kirosha are going to come knocking today or tomorrow, and we’ve got to keep them out until the jarheads give them a good warp-borne butt-fucking.”

“Crude, Petty Officer, but accurate,” the younger woman – and her superior officer – said with a grin. “Have I mentioned how much I hate ground-pounder crap?”

“Once or twice, I think.”

Heather had come to like the Navy officer. She suspected that Zhang’s confidence had bordered on arrogance before the loss of her ships had shaken her certainties to the core, but if so, the experience had proved salutary. The LC had helped unify the naval personnel in the compound; leading the charge that drove the Kirosha back from a breach in the lines had cemented her reputation, and her administrative skills had played a major role in keeping things going. Fromm trusted Zhang enough to leave her in command when – or if – he went forth to lead the warp assault on the Kirosha force field.

Maybe it wouldn’t be necessary. Heather had played with all available sensors, calibrating them so even a twinge of space-time distortion would be instantly picked up, and nothing had shown up since the first alleged force field test. She held on to the hope that Spacer Ortiz had been wrong after all, or that the force field generator had been too damaged to function after that one try. She hoped for the best and prepared for the worst.

“Let’s go,” she told her platoon: except for four security crewmen, they were cooks, clerks and techs, none of whom had held a rifle since Basic, long before ending up stranded on picturesque Jasper-Five, home of a hundred thousand murderous maniacs with swords, tanks and rocket launchers, oh my. The platoon’s former officer had broken his neck tripping and falling into a trench, hitting the hard-packed dirt with just enough force to kill without triggering his personal force field. You could die in the stupidest ways. Heather hoped that her own run-in with the Grim Reaper would be somewhat more dignified, maybe a heroic last stand ending in a fusillade of lead, cutting short what might have been a long and fruitful career as an intelligence officer.

Not that it matters, when it’s over and the monitor lines go flat
. Humans could live for centuries – so far there were a few dozen double centenarians running around – but in the end everybody went, gently or hard.

Heather set aside the morbid thoughts and led her troops towards the trenches.

Year 163 AFC, D Plus Twenty-Eight

“
Force Field activation detected. 3.5 km, coordinates attached
.”

“This is it, people,” the skipper called out through the command channel.

“You heard the man. Time to dance,” Russell said as everyone geared up. They hadn’t been in the trenches for days, but precious little of that time had been spent on R&R. Instead, they’d had to familiarize themselves with the gear their ET friends had provided for their raid, and made sure all the new toys worked properly. Their armor had extra force field mounts and power packs, enough to make them damn hard – but not impossible – to kill. Most of the grunts had switched their Iwos for heavy lasers. After playing with the unfamiliar weapons for a bit, they’d had to admit the ET gear had better penetration and stopping power than their customary 4mm plasma rounds. Much lighter, too, which allowed them to carry even more stuff. In addition to the lasers, they were packing as many self-propelled grenades as they could fit, a couple of pistols apiece, and anything they could think of, including entrenching tools, just in case they needed to send somebody to Jesus up-close and personal. Those little shovels worked really well as battle-axes. Russell had personally used them on a couple people: one ET and one bubblehead asshole that nobody would miss.

Of course, if it came down to hand-to-hand, they were certainly fucked. Then again, they were very likely fucked any way you looked at it.

The four squads – two from the assault section, and two from Russell’s guns section – were assembled and ready to go; each squad was short a guy, casualties or just left behind to help bolster the line. Twenty-four enlisted and Captain Fromm commanding. The rest of Third Platoon would keep things together while they went out and took care of business. Their orders had been drafted a couple days ago, and they’d run several exercises in different simulated areas, since they didn’t know where the Ruddies would deploy their force field until it happened.

Well, they knew now. Russell’s imp displayed a column of tanks and self-propelled tracked artillery moving forward, dismounted infantry marching in blocks between the vehicles, all under the umbrella of the force field. Tens of thousands other ETs were advancing in all the other sectors as well, guys with spears walking next to tanks and riflemen. Some of the uniforms looked different from the Guard and Army units he’d seen. New units, probably. He wondered how far they’d had to march or drive just to get killed here.

It looked like the biggest attack yet, maybe big enough to get through with or without the force field.

Nacle was praying as they waited for their turn on the catapult. Russell wished he could join in.

The catapult was a smallish model, allowing fifteen or so people to step into its circle at a time. They would be going out in two waves. They couldn’t land on top of the generator; warp holes and gluon power plants couldn’t coexist in close proximity to each other. They would aim at the location of the power plant, and would emerge between fifty and a hundred feet from its location; each group would land some fifty feet apart. It didn’t matter what was at the landing point, since the warp aperture would suck anything in range just before dropping the Marines in, which would be bad news for the poor bastards on the spot.

Captain Fromm and two squads went out first. The skipper was loaded for bear himself, with a heavy grav cannon they’d borrowed from the Wyrms, its power pack strapped to his back; the assault squads were likewise equipped. The captain shouldn’t be running around doing sergeant’s or lieutenant’s work, but Russell figured Fromm had decided to play hero. Russell didn’t like heroes: in his experience, heroes were born when someone had fucked up.

The warp catapult activated.

Russell had watched dozens of jumps, but they never got old. Something that wasn’t light or smoke but something between the two belched up, filling the platform and swallowing the people on the platform. A moment later it was gone, along with its passengers.

“Second wave, step in!”

They walked onto the platform and arranged themselves in a circle, outer rank kneeling down, the troops behind them standing up, weapons ready. It was going to be a hot drop.

Transition.

You didn’t see warp space, not really. Your brain just made shit up to compensate for the fact you were in a place where light and sound either didn’t exist or didn’t work the way they did in the real world. The only thing that interacted with that place was the brain. Everybody was affected in their own way. For Russell, it was like being in a dark room until a spotlight started revealing people from his past. It was never someone pleasant, none of the call girls he remembered fondly, or the drinking buddies he’d partied with. Nope. It was always people he’d rather never see again.

Some sanctimonious bastards said warp space was Hell, and every time you dipped your toes in Hell you were asking the Devil to come claim your soul.

The first person Russell had killed dropped by for a visit. Some kid from the projects in the Zoo, as Kepler-Three’s New Chicago was not-so-affectionately known. He didn’t even know the kid’s name, just that he and his friends weren’t from the neighborhood, which made them the enemy. The dead kid’s throat was still slit open just the way it’d been after Russell and his straight razor had finished the job. The living corpse grinned at the Marine, and blood ran down his mouth, staining his teeth.

Russell ignored him. There’d been plenty more after that, some while working for Uncle Sam, others while on personal business. The next ghost belonged to a pimp in Saint Martin’s star base; that fucker had thought a drunken horny Marine would be easy prey and had ended up out an airlock for his troubles. The dead pimp looked angry. Russell couldn’t blame him: he’d had a mean streak when he was young, and he’d taken his time before sending the bastard on his way.

The ghosts gave way to daydreams. He watched several close calls turn out differently. The kid in the Zoo gouged Russell’s eyes out; the pimp cracked his skull and sent his dead body out the airlock. Those weren’t so bad; the daydreams were lies, and lies had no power over him.

This was a short jump; it only felt like five, six minutes of Hell.

Russell blinked, seeing light again. There were Ruddy bodies and equipment scattered all around them. Warp holes made a mess of their arrival point. There were also live Eets in his sights: a platoon of tank-grenadiers in open-topped half-tracks, the soldiers inside beginning to turn around in response to the explosive arrival of the Warp Marines.

Sucked to be them. Russell set his laser on continuous beam and drew a diagonal line with it. Men and weapons were bisected and fell apart as the laser cut through two half-tracks and found their fuel tanks. He rocked on his feet as a some of explosion’s force got through his shields; pieces of metal, wood and charred bone rained all around him. Gonzo and Nacle were firing as well, reaping their share of ETs. The neatly-ordered army dissolved into chaos as survivors scattered away from the murderous bastards that had materialized in their midst.

Russell’s imp painted an objective for him: a burned-out building which would provide some cover. He directed his fire team there. They had to keep the Ruddies behind them busy while the Captain and his crew hunted for the field generator.

They moved while engaging any targets that got in their way. A Ruddy tank came into view. Its turret was trying to bear on them, but Gonzo’s laser butt-fucked it before it could, the energy pulses punching through the thin rear armor and setting shit on fire. The turret stopped swinging, and the tank commander and gunner scrambled out of the smoke-filled interior. Nacle cut them down before they got very far.

Russell thought he recognized the street they were in, but he wasn’t sure. Mortar shells and raging fires had completely rearranged the landscape. All the houses had been gutted; their objective could have been a residential building, a coffee house or a whorehouse; now it was just a few bits of wall that could be used for cover and concealment. They ran towards it. A Ruddy rifle squad took them under fire, but another Marine team took care of them. Russell got hit a couple of times; he only knew that because his imp reported the impacts; his new shields soaked up bullets like so many raindrops.

They set up behind a knee-high wall section that gave them a good field of fire; the guys with the grav guns started picking off vehicles while the others threw grenades. The smart bomblets took flight towards the targets their imps had highlighted, blowing up as soon as they reached their optimal blast distance. Plasma and ceramic fragments tore into packed Ruddy formations.

It was a slaughter, murder pure and simple. In short, it was what a properly planned and executed combat mission should be.

Russell knew the good times wouldn’t last. The Ruddies would pull their heads out of their asses and rake them with heavy weapons until something gave. The only question was whether it would happen before the raid could fulfill its objective.

Hopefully the skipper knew what he was doing.

* * *

“There’s the force field,” Timothy said to himself. He saw a trio of mortar rounds blow up against the curved surface before the mortar team switched their focus towards targets it could affect. The force field was moving towards his section of the trench. Lucky him.

Nothing we have here can punch through the field, except maybe the heavy lasers
. The feeling that the assault rifle in his hand could do nothing to stem the tide was bad. The creeping certainty that all the death and destruction of the past weeks had been for nothing was much worse. The memory of Jonah’s sudden death hit him again.
He was a good man, a brave man, and in the end none of it mattered
. His companion was with Heavenly Father now, but the knowledge did not bring him as much comfort as it should.

The enemy came into view, tanks and infantry, soldiers marching confidently between the tracked vehicles. Timothy’s platoon opened fire; even from three hundred yards away, he could see spots where their bullets sparkled off, creating little points of light as the force field shed the impacts without any noticeable effect. Behind and above him, the Vehelian lasers struck. A pulse burst did nothing; a continuous beam made the field fluoresce brightly, followed a moment later by a breach: three Kirosha soldiers were pierced by the beam and fell, clutching at the bloodless wounds where the light beam had left a tiny through-and-through hole and cooked them from the inside. That was all the laser achieved before it ran out of power. The force field closed up once again.