The temporary lull in combat gave him some time to think about what was ahead. The aliens weren’t dumb; they wouldn’t have unmasked all of their heavy weapons. Maybe the battalion’s artillery should soften up the area before the infantry moved forward. Problem was, he wasn’t an officer. Officers got paid to think about that sort of stuff. Grunts followed orders and hoped the bosses didn’t screw up. His father had been an officer; Matthew wanted to follow in his footsteps but had chosen to do it the hard way first – five to ten years as a grunt, then apply for OCS and re-enter the service as a second loot who’d been there and done that. Mustangs weren’t uncommon in the Corps, but from what Matthew had heard it took some work to unlearn some of the stuff they’d picked up during their enlisted time. He was looking forward to it.
Several minutes of tense boredom passed. No new targets offered themselves as the Marine battalion moved forward. After reaching its initial objective, Matthew’s squad got new orders. The LAVs came up and they got back in. Bravo Company was going to advance until it made contact with the enemy. There was a whole brigade of E.T.s somewhere among the rocky hills and the 192nd Marine Expeditionary Unit had to clear them out. Assaulting prepared positions manned by three times as many aliens as there were Marines sounded crazy, but the fact was, the aliens were the underdog in that fight.
The LAV lurched, not from a hit but from its own weapons firing. The stealth drones orbiting the formation had spotted something. The vehicle kept moving after firing a single burst, so whatever it’d been, it wasn’t there anymore. American troop carriers could slug it out with alien tanks and come out ahead. You could almost do away with the infantry inside. Almost.
Something blew up close enough to push the vehicle to one side. Even strapped in, Matthew felt the impact, followed by more of the same when the LAV hit the ground at two hundred kph, bounced, and hit again, this time hard enough to kill its force field and regale its passengers with the full impact of its hull smashing into the hardpan covering the hilly valley. The armor’s inertial dampeners saved people from whiplash and concussions, but nobody enjoyed the jarring shock.
“Holy shit!” LCL Brock yelled, his voice weirdly distorted. “I bit my fucking tongue off!”
Matthew ignored the complaint and concentrated on the fainter sound of multiple laser bursts impacting on the LAV’s hull. The sound was a bit like raindrops but with a crackling tenor that reminded him that this sort of rain would eventually peck through the composite alloys protecting them.
“We’re taking fire!” Sergeant Kinston said. “Everyone out!”
A couple of the squad’s boots hesitated as the rear ramp descended. The harsh ringing of an HVM hitting the LAV got them moving. A grounded vehicle attracted fire like a wounded whale attracted sharks. Sooner or later something would crack it open and turn the troop compartment into a slaughterhouse.
Matthew came out facing to his left as his imp indicated. Some two hundred meters away, another LAV was burning with a bluish fire intense enough to be dazzling even through the polarized sensors in his helmet. Those poor bastards had never gotten the chance to get out. There were lasers everywhere. His personal force field kept sparkling as he was hit half a dozen times. The shield counter on the left corner of his field of vision kept running down. It was down to twenty percent by the time he reached the cover of a crater and dropped out of sight. Kinston and Corolla jumped in next to him.
“They’ve got an antishipping artillery battery somewhere out there,” the sergeant growled. “Big mothers. Thirty inchers or worse.”
Brock cursed colorfully. His nanites must have fixed his tongue already.
Matthew looked for his fireteam. In the mad dash out of the LAV, the other three men had ended up behind a boulder about fifteen meters away. All the squad members’ status icons were green, but the crew of the LAV hadn’t been so lucky. One of the drivers was wounded – his icon blinked yellow – and the other had bought it while getting out of the damaged vehicle. Drivers didn’t get powered armor, and their light force fields couldn’t survive the firepower being poured into their position. Bravo Company had stuck its collective dick into a beehive.
Something massive broke out from the ground, making the Marines in the crater bounce up and down. Matthew peeked through the surviving recon drones’ sensors and caught a glimpse of a gigantic metal sphere rising from its hiding place. Seven hundred meters in diameter and bristling with weapons, its force fields burning bright as every Marine in range took it under fire. Kinston had been wrong; the tangos didn’t have an antishipping battery in there, they had a freaking starship! Couldn’t be anything bigger than a destroyer to enter a planet’s atmosphere and live to tell about it. But that was more than big enough.
The Imperium battle globe turned its weaponry on the Marines below it. Matthew had time to empty a power pack into the floating sphere before the world flared white and then sunk into darkness.
* * *
Dying sucked. Even in a simulation.
FIELD EXERCISE OVER.
Matthew blinked as his armor came back to life. When you were administratively ‘killed,’ the training battlesuit shut down, leaving the wearer trapped in an inescapable metal coffin. No VR, no comms, nothing but darkness and your own rank body odor to keep you company. Real combat suits didn’t have that feature, for obvious reasons, but Marine trainer armor was designed to make death as uncomfortable and painful as possible. Used to be that ‘dead’ Marines would get to enjoy some free time while the exercise went on, time they could use playing games or catching up with their social media. Not anymore. Someone had figured some people would try to get killed early to enjoy the downtime. Now everyone avoided training deaths as if they were the real thing.
He sat up and removed his helmet, savoring some non-canned fresh air. Well, kinda fresh, that was. The atmosphere on New Parris, a.k.a. Marine Planet, was breathable but barely so. The air was both thin and hot, but it was better than what he’d been inhaling in the hour since he’d gotten notionally blasted by a goddamned starship. The scenery looked pretty much the same, except with none of the smoke and battle damage the training simulation had projected into his helmet.
“That ain’t right,” Brock groused next to him. “Who the fuck buries a ship to spring an ambush? Nobody, that’s who.”
“Stow it, Brock,” Kinston said.
The non-com’s helmet was off as well, revealing blonde hair in a high-and-tight cut. Jason wasn’t sure if the woman was attractive or not, since he’d only seen two expressions on her face: a cold ‘I’m gonna kill you’ stare and a smile that was even scarier than the killing look. Word was that Staff Sergeant Lori Kinston had shot a dozen E.T. pirates while still in pre-school and that her biggest regret was missing fighting in the Great Galactic War because she wasn’t done killing aliens, not by a long shot.
She was smiling now. “As a matter of fact, numb nuts, this field-ex is based on captured orders the Gal-Imps issued to several colonies. Bury some light starships that would only get killed in a space action and use them as mobile artillery. They wouldn’t have lasted long, but they’d have done some damage before dying. Gotta respect that.”
Matthew nodded. If you had to die, best you could do is make sure you took some of the bastards with you. ‘Git yerself an honor guard on the way to Valhalla,’ was how one of his father’s friends, another retired Marine, had put it.
“Not fair, setting us up for a fight we can’t win,” the grunt persisted.
“Shee-it, Brock,” Kinson said. “Who told you life’s fair? Besides, we won the field-ex. The tank platoon blasted the enemy starship out the sky fifteen seconds after it came out of hiding. Their three-hundred-mike-mikes grav cannon will punch through anything lighter than a battleship.”
“Didn’t help us any.”
“Achieving the objective comes first. The survival of your miserable carcass – or mine for that matter – is a distant second.”
The Marines put their helmets back on
and formed up while their LAV – back in working order – opened their ramps to let them in. Time to get back and catch some z’s; the next week would be spent analyzing the results and going over everyone’s actions while coming up with ways of doing things better. Matthew could already think of a couple things the squad could have done that might have saved his miserable carcass and even helped achieve the mission.
“I’m gonna miss y’all,” Kinston said as they sat down. “Even you, Brock.”
Word was the non-com had been selected to join some special unit. Not the Raiders, but something even more elite. Nobody was sure and Kinston wasn’t telling. Matthew would miss her, too. She’d been a good sergeant; her replacement would have some pretty big shoes to fill.
Not that it mattered much. Marines saw very little action nowadays. The occasional scuffle with primitive or crazy E.T.s or pirates who got too big for their britches. Nothing like what his father had faced. Peter Fromm rarely spoke about those times, but Matthew had Woogled plenty of information. He’d even played that old classic, Thirty-One Days at Kirosha, trying to get a feel for what his father had gone through, commanding a reinforced platoon of Marines and facing tens of thousands of murderous aliens. Even though he knew that the peace he and all Americans enjoyed was exactly what his father had fought and almost died for, a part of him felt obscurely disappointed for not having to face similar ordeals.
“Won’t miss your stink, Brock,” Kinston said. “But I’ll miss the easy-ass deployment y’all are getting.”
Word was the 192nd was headed to Camp Puller in Starbase Malta, where it would be attached to Third Fleet, possibly the most prestigious assignment in human space besides the forces guarding Earth itself. Camp Puller had the best training facilities in the Corps and, best of all, was in a base with millions of people in it, with all the attractions of a big city. Matthew’s only issue with the deployment was that his mother lived and worked in Malta. That meant he was going to spend at least some of his leave time visiting with her, which he wouldn’t have minded except for the fact the other Marines would give him a hard time for it. No big deal, though. He’d keep training, and in a few years, he’d apply to OCS and make the transition from enlisted to officer.
Preparing for war was the best way to ensure peace was the only logical option for the rest of the galaxy.
Four
Starbase Malta, Xanadu System, 197 AFC
Funny how this place still manages to surprise me.
Heather Fromm-McClintock looked out her office window and enjoyed the spectacular view. It’d been four years since she’d been back, but Starbase Malta was something that took a lot of getting used to. The largest artificial facility in the known galaxy had once belonged to an ancient, reclusive and rather depraved alien species until an American diplomatic mission had seized the place – in self-defense, admittedly – and claimed it for the US. A lot had changed in the three decades since the system had become an American Star State, but the decadent beauty of the moon-sized station remained the same.
The gorgeous floating sculpture continued to dazzle in a multitude of shapes and colors; a three-thousand-kilometer-long structure that resembled something out of a jeweler’s table instead of a functional structure that currently served as the home of eighty million people. Gold and silver predominated, interspaced by detailed mosaics of stained glass. Animatronic statues depicting long-extinct alien species performed complex movements you could watch for hours before they began repeating themselves. Even after years of watching the station, you could find new and wonderful views along its length.
The station was a major trade hub between the US and several dozen Starfarer nations, as well the largest shipyard in existence. A few kilometers from Heather’s window, thousands of workers and machines labored on a Founding Father-class starship; the USS Benjamin Franklin and its brethren were the largest combat vessels ever assembled by human hands. The three-kilometer long ships didn’t quite have the displacement of the defunct Galactic Imperium’s infamous super-dreadnought classes, but they possessed three times their firepower even before adding their hundred-and-forty-four starfighters to the equation. When all ten Founding Fathers dreadnought-carriers were up and running, the US Navy would have no equal.
We’re the meanest, toughest so-and-so’s in the Known Galaxy, Heather mused. Problem is, too many people have forgotten that pride goeth before a fall.
The end of the Galactic War had left the United Stars of America in an unassailable position, but only if one didn’t consider that a nation of three billion was still woefully outnumbered by the one trillion-plus other star-faring aliens in the local branch of the Milky Way galaxy. And that a strong plurality of that fifteen hundred billion hated humans with a passion and an overall majority wouldn’t mind seeing humanity go extinct. The fate of the three empires that had conspired to destroy humankind had made everyone else too scared to give rein to that hatred, but after decades of relative peace the lessons of that war were being forgotten, not least by Americans themselves.
There should be twenty of those ships showing the flag across American space, she thought bitterly. As it is, the initial order of fifteen has been pared down to ten. Only eight have been completed and construction of the last two has slowed down because the Navy’s budget keeps shrinking.
Peace had reigned in the galaxy for the twenty-odd years since the end of the Great Galactic War. Granted, there had been some mop-up operations to tamp down on some recalcitrant Viper and Lamprey ‘pirates’ and a handful of incidents before the Medusas’ Enlightened Circle learned not to impinge on American and allied space. For two decades, the US Navy and the dreaded Warp Marines had fought a few minor skirmishes, but the majority of the current crop of spacers and Marines had never heard a shot fired in anger. About half of the rank-and-file troops had been born after the end of the Great Galactic War; the rest were older and hopefully wiser but were shrinking in numbers as the temptations of civilian life lured them into retirement. The situation was even worse among civilians, who in the past decade or so seemed to have forgotten the armed forces’ role in keeping them safe and prosperous. And they’d been electing people who had also forgotten, or at least pretended to.
Heather hadn’t forgotten a damn thing, which was the main reason she’d accepted the Central Intelligence Agency’s offer and returned to duty after a long retirement, which she’d spent raising a family and building a business alongside her prior-service husband. She hadn’t spent all that time rusticating, though; she had done a great deal of consulting work for the Agency during that time. Her son and daughter were all grown up, though, and she wanted to get back to the thick of things, especially now that the US was growing dangerously complacent.
Her husband had understood her desire without sharing in it; Major Peter Fromm, USWMC (ret) had seen enough action – a thin euphemism for carnage and slaughter – to last him a lifetime. He’d come to visit as often as he could afford it, but he had no intention to relocate to Starbase Malta. He had led the Marines who’d seized it, and the place was haunted by the ghosts of too many fallen companions; he would never feel comfortable there.
Malta has changed a lot, though, and more so with every passing year.
When Heather had first been there, as part of the same diplomatic mission turned conquering force, the gigantic station had been little more than an ornate façade hiding mostly-empty ruins. A tiny remnant of immortal aliens had withdrawn into a world of perversions and sick fantasies and let their home decay over millennia of neglect. Under its new management, Malta had flourished. In the process, the US had gone from poor primitives to one of the most technologically-adept civilizations in known space. Nothing like finding a super-advanced species’ treasure trove to jump-start one’s capabilities.
Of course, shortly afterwards we found another species’ treasure trove, although the second one was something of a two-edged sword.
A chime from her implant reminded Heather it was time for h
er meeting with the Deputy Chief of Intelligence (Xanadu System). Time to get to work.
The DCI’s office was just a few doors down from hers; naturally, it was far larger and had an even better view of Malta. Deputy Chief Hamilton was there, alongside someone Heather wasn’t expecting. Professor Arthur Morrison sat across the DCI’s desk; he was an academic she didn’t care much for. You didn’t last long at the Agency without learning to hide your feelings, of course, so Heather smiled warmly at both men and took the last remaining seat.
Guillermo Hamilton grinned back at her. Her former fellow agent had gone far in the CIA during the years Heather had been away. Luckily, he didn’t seem to harbor any hard feelings for the way she’d ridden roughshod over him during some tense episodes while in the field. Morrison, on the other hand, just nodded absently at her, not bothering to conceal his distaste. After the usual pleasantries they got right to business. Heather still didn’t know why the Galactic historian was there, but she presented the report she’d assembled:
“First of all, I can confirm that the Lhan Arkh Congress has ceased to exist. Along with about eighty percent of the entire species. The survivors are mind-controlled slaves, except for a few thousand expatriates outside their former colonies.”
“Their last star system is gone, then.”
She nodded at the DCI. “The Fourteenth Congressional District fell three weeks ago. I have sensor records from a Hrauwah merchantman that got stranded in the system during the final attack by the Enlightened Circle. For a change, the ship’s neutral status was respected and the Medusas didn’t blow it out of the sky.”
To The Strongest Page 5
