Decisively Engaged (Warp Marine Corps Book 1) (8 page)

“Fucked if I know, Gonzo. Ruddies got a hard-on for us all of a sudden.”

His imp ran the numbers off the corner of his eye. There were two hundred and seventy-nine ETs massing up ahead, mostly armed with spears and swords, the poor bastards. Gunny Obregon was shouting something at them via his loudspeaker implants, but despite the fact he was talking Ruddy at them, they didn’t seem to care.

“Hold fire,” Obregon said over the command channel. “I’m firing a warning shot. All hands, hold fire.”

The Gunny leaned out of the van’s window and fired a single round into the ground somewhere between the Marine vehicles and the mob of Ruddies a hundred yards away. The exploding bullet melted a hole in the asphalt-covered road and the concrete below, plasma sparkling like a Roman candle.

The crowd took it in for a moment. Then some dickhead with a flag or something attached to his back started shouting and the Ruddies surged forward, waving their swords like this was yet another remake of
Braveheart vs Henry V
.

“Fuck it,” Obregon said, sounding disgusted. “We’re going through them. Engage the hostiles.”

That was all that Russell was waiting to hear. He stood up in his seat gave the ETs a three-barrel salute, firing alternate blaster and grenade rounds after dropping a 20mm anti-pers care package on their laps. Gonzo cut loose with his squad gun. One burst apiece from the heavy weapons in each vehicle, plus one from each grunt who wasn’t driving. The plasma bullets were rated to go through a foot of hardened steel and they turned each Ruddy they hit into a bomb. The anti-personnel grenades were worse, detonating overhead and showering the ETs with fragmented ceramic shards. The dumb fucks should have known better than to bunch up; they’d had automatic weapons for a good while in this planet. But the assholes charged forward, packed together shoulder to shoulder, the stupid motherfuckers, and got massacred. Maybe they expected the Marines to use tear gas or some other non-lethal shit. Dumb fucks. Marines weren’t cops.

The street had been wide enough for all three vehicles to shoot, and by the time they checked fire, the enemy counter off the corner of his eye read sixty-three. That’s how many Ruddies were still lively enough to pose a threat. Not that they were, not really; the sixty Eets who weren’t dead or hollering on the ground were running as if their lives depended on it. Which they did.

Ruddies sounded like little kids when they screamed. It made him feel bad.

After the shooting was over, Rover Force’s biggest problem was rolling through the pile of corpses ahead of them. The van got stuck a couple times and people had to unass and move bodies from under it. The Jeep and the truck mostly drove over the crunchy bumps beneath them. A couple of times they stopped to drag living Ruddies off to one side. But mostly they just drove on and ignored the sounds the live ones made when they got crunched.

They’d lost too much time already.

* * *

Heather handed Fromm the laser and took the Vehelian area effect weapon. She’d never seen one in the flesh, but their specs had been part of her courses in Starfarer tech. Its security locks were slightly more intricate than the laser’s, but she got through them easily enough, leaving her with the decision of how to use it.

The cylinder in her hand was self-propelled, able to travel for up to two miles before its batteries burned off. It had two settings, one non-lethal, the other outright deadly. Both relied on using light pulses to overload their target’s nervous systems, sending anybody caught in its area of effect into convulsions, unconsciousness and, at the higher setting, a nasty death.

Heather opted for the non-lethal setting. Some victims would die nonetheless; as many as one percent of the targets, depending on the species’ sensitivity to light and sheer bad luck; a simple fall from a standing position could be lethal enough. The rest would be incapacitated for half an hour or longer without lasting ill effects. The weapon glided gently out of her hand and flew to its optimal detonation height.

“Everyone turn back and close your eyes!” she shouted into the defender’s imps. Some of the civilians outside might not react in time, which was the main reason she’d picked the non-lethal setting. Heather followed her own advice, hunching down against the wall.

The flash was still noticeable from her protected position; it must have been like staring into a supernova for those outside. The gunfire hitting her position stopped with abrupt suddenness, except for one long burst fired when someone’s clenched hand locked onto the trigger mechanism of his weapon, emptying it in a few seconds.

She took a quick peek out the window. Every Kirosha within a block radius was down, some lying perfectly still, others writhing in galvanic convulsions, the few lucky enough to have been behind some cover staggering blindly around, functional except for their temporarily overloaded optic nerves. Everyone attacking the walled garage was unconscious, dead or blind.

Fromm stopped firing the Vehelian laser. There was no need, at least for the time being.

“Not bad for a remfie,” he told her.

“Who’re you calling a remfie, jarhead?” she growled back; they were both smiling.

“Ovals have the nicest toys,” Fromm said, peering over the window frame. “Wish we could get them.”

“It’ll be another couple decades before we can,” Heather said.

“Too bad. We could use them. As in right now. We’ve got more trouble coming.”

She accessed the video feed from the micro-drones overhead.

Two more large groups were out and about. One was busily setting barricades between them and the approaching Marine relief force. The other was rushing towards the garage. Both groups were several hundred strong, and about a tenth of them were Army assault troops with full combat gear.

They weren’t out of the woods yet.

* * *

“Those rat bastards.”

A new bunch of Ruddies had shown up. They’d blocked the main street with a pile of overturned carts and cars, and many of them were armed with rifles and rocket launchers. They engaged Rover Two the second it turned the corner. Bullets hit the frontal force field, sparkling pinpricks of light as they flattened against the solid but invisible surface and hanged on for a second or two before sliding down like so many dead flies. Lots of dead flies. An RPG round flashed overhead and hit a storefront behind them as Rover Two frantically backed up the way it’d come.

“Gotta go around,” Obregon said. “But let me say goodbye first.”

He hadn’t used any rockets yet, so he fired off a spread of four 20mm missiles from the box launchers on the van. The drone cameras showed him the results as the salvo detonated right above and behind the barricades, turning dozens of ETs into ground chuck. It wasn’t enough, though. Rover Force might smash through the barricade and kill everyone there, but it would take time and keep them in one place long enough for more enemy forces to converge on their position. They didn’t have time to spare. Or ammo. His imp politely pointed out they’d already gone through ten percent of their basic battle load.

Better to stay on the move.

“Follow me,” he told the other two Rovers as he directed his van towards one of the side streets. Kirosha was an old town, built long before motor transport was even a glimmer in the eye of some engineer, and most of its streets reflected that. Come to think of it, Obregon had read that the handful of big straight avenues in the city had only been built after gunpowder was discovered; the broad streets were designed to allow muzzle-loading cannon to shoot straight into any rampaging mobs who dared disturb the High King’s Peace. They certainly had helped his troops mow down the current crop of rioters.

The side streets were narrow and twisty, following even minor terrain features rather than cutting through them. The Rovers could only negotiate them single file; without the micro-drones helping navigate they would have gotten lost in short order. Luckily most Ruddies had decided staying indoors was the thing to do, so the Marines had the streets mostly to themselves. At least at first.

Smaller groups of insurgents kept trying to catch up with the three technicals. A tall Ruddy wielding something like a big can opener at the end of a stick jumped in Rover Two’s path. The van was moving at a good thirty miles per hour when it hit, too slowly to trigger the force fields; the impact with the welded-on metal grill on its front sent the wannabe warrior flying, the big axe-spear thing still in his hands when he hit a wall and bounced off it.

“Someone’s shooting at us,” Hendrickson said. More tiny points of light appeared wherever a Ruddy bullet hit the force fields around the van. They were taking fire from above. Houses were so packed together that you could get around jumping from one rooftop to the next, and some enterprising Ruddies with guns had done just that.

“Take ‘em out.”

Hendrickson complied as Rover Two kept moving. The ALS-43 stuttered a long burst into the sniper’s building. Armor piercers: the big plasma rounds, designed to spear through force fields and composite armor plate, sawed through the third level of a four-story structure, tearing through support beams, walls and anybody unlucky enough to be inside. Hendricks drew a line of bright explosions as he traversed the weapon on its improvised mount. The top floor staggered before neatly collapsing into the shattered ruin of the third floor; a rifleman was tossed out of the building, screeching like a crying baby before the impact with the ground shut him up. A moment later, the entire building crumbled, scattering bodies and brickwork everywhere.

The shooting stopped.

“I think that did the tr…”

A Ruddy RPG hit the front of the van. The superheated gases of the shaped-charge warhead flattened against the force field, giving Obregon a close look at the fiery core of the anti-tank weapon’s detonation. It was a bit like looking at what awaited all sinners in the end. The deafening sound washed over him and made his teeth vibrate painfully even under his helmet. No damage, but the front shield’s power supply was down fifteen percent. He kept driving. They all knew that if they stood still they’d just make a better target.

Hendrickson’s reaction to the explosion was much livelier. “Motherfuckers!” he screamed, swiveling the ALS-43 around and laying down a storm of fire. He walked a series of bursts towards the rocket team’s position around a corner. The café they were using for cover blew apart in a conflagration of hot plasma and superheated brick and mortar. The launcher and the burning upper torso of one of the rocketeers rolled out into the street. Rover Two drove over the body; Lance Corporal Edison in Rover One leaned out and destroyed the launcher with two point-blank shots from his gun.

All of which was well and good, but the micro-drones had spotted several more groups of armed men rushing out into the streets. They were going to have to fight for every inch of ground between them and the people they were trying to rescue.

“Gunny?” PFC Kowalski said from the passenger’s seat.

“Yeah?”

“Hope the new skipper’s worth all this trouble.”

“Me too, Kowalski. Me too.”

Year 163 AFC, D Minus Ten

“Got ‘em cocked and loaded, Captain,” Sergeant Martin said.

Less than a minute. Which could only mean Obregon had ordered the weapons deployed before Fromm thought about it. Having a good NCO made all the difference when commanding a platoon; despite his promotion to O3, Fromm’s instincts were still geared towards platoon command, which was good at the moment because that was all he had.

“Well done,” Fromm said. “Marking targets. Load anti-personnel rounds. Fire when ready.”

“Anti-pers, aye. Firing when ready, aye, aye.”

Fromm focused on the take from the micro-drones and his imp’s dispassionate analysis of their data. As riots went, this wasn’t very large; there were about three thousand Ruddies involved, including what appeared to be two or three Army companies, which gave the rioters some three hundred rifles and a couple dozen rocket launchers. No machineguns, artillery or heavy weapons; those were held at the brigade level in their own units, and none of those had joined the rebellion. Infantrymen were recruited mainly from among the largely illiterate peasants in the hinterlands, much like the secret society members they’d decided to support; artillery and heavy weapon units came from what passed for the Ruddy middle class, the kids of merchants and artisans, and their sympathies wouldn’t be with the rioters.

Fromm matched the list of targets with the assets he had to engage them. The 100mm mortars could fire fifty self-guided rounds each before their internal magazines had to be reloaded, a process that would take some thirty seconds. Three guns; a hundred and fifty bombs. That should be enough.

The mortar section opened fire, the discharges too distant to be noticed from where he crouched, especially since the newest batch of Ruddies were both shooting and screaming at the top of their lungs, their high-pitched voices adding a disturbing note to the whole thing. His imp projected the path of the self-propelled rounds as they engaged their miniature motors and headed towards their designated targets: every major enemy concentration that could threaten the civilians with him or Obregon’s rescue force.

Given that they were fighting unarmored, unshielded enemies, Fromm had opted for a wide spread. The mortar rounds were spaced some twenty-five yards apart; each bomb exploded fifty feet off the ground, lashing the area below them with thousands of ceramic shards traveling at supersonic speeds. The frangible shrapnel would shatter harmlessly on walls and roofs, though God help anybody looking out a window when the shells detonated. Against cloth-clad humanoids in the open, the effect was devastating.

Ruddies stumbled and fell, bleeding from dozens of wounds. Entire groups were mowed down to the last man, charging warriors turning into lifeless corpses so suddenly the whole thing looked like a clumsily choreographed dance. A six-round stonk hit the group attacking the walled compound. Those bombs went off a mere ten feet off the ground, too low to damage the human and Oval civvies in the compound, but still perfectly able to turn hundreds of aliens into bleeding, quivering meat. The attackers’ shouting was silenced by the multiple explosions; when the last echoes abated, only a handful of scattered cries could be heard.

Fromm forced himself to watch the scene. There were maybe a dozen Ruddies still on their feet, and they were on the run. The rest of the attackers in the last wave were down, along with the poor bastards who’d been unconscious or stunned when death came calling. Most of the fallen lay unmoving on the ground, with a few ghastly exceptions. He saw a Ruddy trying to stuff a coil of intestines back into his body cavity before appearing to fall asleep. A uniformed soldier, his legs gone, crawled toward a nearby canteen and died right after taking a final swig of water. There were a few similar scenes up and down the corpse-strewn street, but only a few. Most of the tangos were dead.

Americans had learned the hard way that in the game of war you played for keeps.

He raised Gunny Obregon. “Road should be clear now.”

“Yes, sir. Biggest problem now is driving over all the bodies. Might damage an axle. Wish we had grav cars.”

“Beggars, not choosers, Gunny. Good work with those technicals, by the way.”

Obregon’s face twisted in a grim smile. “Thank you, sir.”

Fromm knew he’d just passed a test. Some commanding officers, even in the Marines, would have come down on the Gunnery Sergeant for militarizing civilian transport on his own initiative, and likely against the Embassy’s guidelines, if not direct orders. Fromm might be an asshole, but he wasn’t that kind of asshole. When out in far-foreign, or on the green hills of Earth herself for that matter, you did what you had to in order to fulfill your mission.

“ETA?”

“Two, three minutes.”

“We’ll be ready.”

He turned to McClintock, but she was already heading down the stairs to start preparing the civvies for evacuation. She must have been eavesdropping on his subvocalized conversation. Not something he would normally approve of, but she had her own mission to carry out, and he wasn’t going to second-guess her.

An asshole, sure, but not that kind of an asshole.

* * *

“Casualties first,” Heather McClintock told the gathered travelers. There were no objections.

Nobody had died, thank Random Chance, but some Kirosha rebels had tossed spears and throwing axes over the wall, and several people had ended up with cutting and stabbing wounds, some of them serious enough to require first aid. Luckily, the bus had a med-kit. All the injured had gotten a shot of nano-meds, and the microscopic robots were busily repairing damaged tissue and speeding up the creation of new blood cells. The process drew a great deal of energy from the victims’ metabolism, which meant they could barely stand up, let alone walk. Heather rounded up volunteers to put them in the bus.

The gate had been damaged, but a few strong backs got it open, just in time for the arriving Marines and their improvised combat vehicles.  Getting out took some doing. The bus drove slowly out onto the street while some hastily-drafted volunteers dragged or kicked corpses out of its way. Fromm squeezed himself into the van, sandwiched between a Gunnery Sergeant and another soldier. Heather ended up in the rear of a four-wheeler, along with three Marines.

“Welcome to Leatherneck Taxicabs, ma’am,” the Lance Corporal in charge of the car said. She brought up his official files: the image of a ratty looking man – Russell Edison; numerous commendations, and much more numerous non-judicial punishments – popped up in her field of vision.

“Thank you,” she replied, making room for herself in the rear seat, which was filled with ammo boxes and other equipment. Russell sent her a friend request on Facettergram, which she summarily rejected.

“We’ll have you back to the Enclave in a jiffy, ma’am,” Edison went on as the three-vehicle convoy began rolling. “I think the Ruddies ain’t got no fight left in ‘em.”

The car took the lead, the two Marines not busy driving ready for action, one standing behind a pintle-mounted heavy gun, the corporal holding his assault weapon ready. Heather herself was cradling the Vehelian laser – by rights she should have handed the weapon over to one of the survivors of the delegation, but she felt better with it at hand. The last hour had taught her to relish firepower in a way none of her previous training had.

“Mofos,” the driver said, startling her out of her reverie.

“Yeah,” LCPL Edison agreed.

She checked the drone feeds. Up ahead, forming up between them and the walls of the Enclave, stood several Kirosha tanks.

* * *

“Pleased to meet you, Gunny,” Fromm said to his platoon sergeant.

Neither man saluted; you didn’t do that in the field. Obregon led the way to the van he was using as the task force’s command vehicle. Fromm could see where force field generators had been attached to the Ruddy van, and smiled when he saw the simple but effective cupola they’d welded to its roof.

“That must have cost you a pretty penny,” he said as they squeezed into the driver’s compartment; the rear was taken up with several civvies, people they hadn’t been able to fit into the bus because of the wounded taking up extra space. Among them was McClintock’s driver: Locquar was still wielding his submachinegun, and none of the Marines had given him any trouble about it, which meant they knew and trusted the local.

“Ain’t that many places to spend your pay around here, sir,” Obregon explained as the vehicles moved towards the Enclave. “Plus a third of the men are Mormons or Star Baptists, and they don’t drink, don’t gamble and don’t whore around all that much. We passed the hat around and it came back full.”

“You’re getting a commendation for this, by the way.”

“Thank you, sir. We made it here in one piece, that’s the important thing, and God willing we’ll make it back likewise.”

Fromm nodded.

“Sorry we didn’t meet you at the port ourselves, sir.”

“You had your orders. Things are going to change after this, however.”

“Yes, sir. Nobody expected them Ruddies to come at us like this, or our Ruddies to let them. They usually come down hard on troublemakers around here. Thieves and murderers get tortured to death. Rebels get it even worse. Letting those assholes come after us like that, it kinda worries me.”

“It worries me too, Gunny. I guess I’ve got to hit the ground running. How’s the unit?”

“In general, it’s fine, sir. Got a dozen boots just before we deployed, but they’re shaping up okay. Everyone else has been round the block and know what’s what. Been keeping everyone busy, mostly PE and virtual field exercises. Between that and a steady dose of field days, they’ve mostly stayed out of trouble.”

“Guess you thought this deployment would be easier than Romulus-Four.”

Obregon’s Third (Weapons) Platoon, Charlie Company, Third Battalion, 53
rd
Marine Regiment, had seen action against the Lampreys during yet another ‘police action,’ something very similar to what Fromm had faced at Astarte-Three. What had begun as a raid on a pirate base had devolved into a pitched battle when the pirates turned out to have sizable contingents of Lamprey ‘deserters’ armed with mil-spec gear. Those two battles and a space skirmish that led to the utter destruction of a ‘rogue’ Lamprey squadron had made the ETs cry uncle, pay reparations and withdraw from several disputed star systems. Nobody thought that was the end of it, though, or at least nobody with a brain did.

“Romulus-Four was no picnic,” Obregon said. “But we had three Marine regiments on the ground, battlecruisers orbiting overhead and plenty of support. If we hadn’t been rescuing hostages we could have blasted them from orbit. Here, it’s just us: a platoon plus a couple squads’ worth of attached personnel, including the worthless sumbitches in the Embassy Detail. We had to blast our way out of the Embassy, sir.”

“I noticed. I’ll be having words with Sergeant Amherst when we get home. The RSO will give you a pass. I’ll see to it. But let’s try to avoid this sort of incident in the future.”

“Absolutely,” Obregon said; the words sounded heartfelt. He started to say something else but froze when he saw the same thing Fromm did.

While they talked, both of them had kept the visual feed from the micro-drones up on one corner of their field of vision, so they both noticed when several Ruddy tracked military vehicles exited their revetments and started moving.

Moving towards the gates of the Enclave. And they were going to get there before the convoy arrived.

“Looks like a blocking force, sir,” Obregon said.

“So it seems.” Fromm was thinking furiously while he spoke. That was a tank platoon rolling into position; three tanks, one mobile gun that could serve as a tank destroyer or artillery piece, and two light infantry fighting vehicles. Not the most efficient unit organization – the mobile gun was both slower and less well-protected than the tanks – but it was deadly enough. The tanks in question weren’t too bad for the local tech level, with seventy millimeters of sloped armor on its front and turret and a 79mm main gun that would batter through the improvised shields protecting the Marine vehicles after three or four shots. The tank destroyer mounted a 93mm cannon on its turretless chassis, and a HEAT round from that monster would probably blow up any of the three Rovers with a couple of shots. The IFVs mounted heavy machineguns and two recoilless rifles on open-top turrets, which made them a minor danger but nothing to laugh about, either.

“A burst from an Iwo will open up those bitches, easy,” Obregon said, focused on the tactical rather than strategic picture. “We can wipe them out if we hit them on the move. Or just have the hundred-mike-mikes drop some AV rounds on them.”

“That’s not the problem, Gunny. Problem is all the other Ruddy units in-theater. And if that isn’t enough, their First Army is only a couple days away. As in
field
army.”

“They can’t be that crazy,” Obregon said. “That’d mean war, no-shit war, and one our corvettes could turn this town into rubble, or every town, city and village on the fucking planet, even if it doesn’t drop bloomies on ‘em. Hell, an
assault shuttle
would eat this whole planet’s lunch. They got nothing to stop an orbital attack. They’re worse off than Earth was during First Contact!”