The Royal Marine Space Commandos- RMSC Omnibus

by James Evans

  “No, sir. We have no enemy in sight yet.”

  “Roger that, Captain Idol. You have some time to prepare for their arrival. Make sure your company keep their heads down and their eyes peeled, and watch your flanks. Remember, they use snipers so if you sit around with your head on display, that’ll be your first sign that they’ve arrived,” advised Atticus. “We have Marine patrols out hunting them, so don’t shoot the wrong teams and don’t advance from your position without orders. Confirm.”

  “Confirmed, Captain. We’ll hold here, and I’ll remind everyone not to get shot or shoot your people,” Idol said, grinning at his command team sergeant, Charles Adams. This was certainly different from their day jobs as botanists working on atmospheric regulation.

  Sergeant Adams used his HUD to send instructions to the company to stay out of sight because the aliens were on the way. The three lieutenants under Captain Idol acknowledged the message. Then Adams turned and rolled his eyes at Idol, reaching up to tap his fingers on the top of his helmet.

  Idol looked to his right and realised he had shifted his legs to a more comfortable position. Most of his head and neck were now above the line of the shattered window. He dropped to his bottom and felt the warmth of a profuse blush rise up his neck as he mouthed “Fuck” at the smirking Adams.

  They were on the first floor of a building that had once been Ashton’s main brewery. Not that it looked much like a brewery at the moment. Most of the equipment had been removed and shredded, ready to be fed into the fabricators and turned into weapons and equipment. Despite the spirited arguments of a number of people, Governor Denmead had concluded that beer wasn’t a priority.

  To be fair, the lack of beer was more than balanced by a ready supply of gin, as the governor had been quick to point out. The early fears that the entire colony’s stock of spirits had been destroyed in a collapsed building during the initial invasion had proven unfounded. A volunteer rescue team, working in hazardous conditions, had been able to pull multiple crates from the cellars despite the wanton destruction inflicted as the combatants had fought their way across New Ashton.

  “We need to watch out for this,” said Idol, waving vaguely at the windowsill. “If I’m in charge and can’t get it right, we have to assume some of the others will forget as well. I’ll visit C platoon, you talk to B, and on the way we’ll check in with the rest of A platoon, right? Make sure people are watching the drone feeds and everyone actually does have their heads down.”

  “Yeah, probably sensible. B platoon is mostly geologists,” said Adams with mock horror.

  “What, the rock people? I didn’t realise we’d been lumbered with them!” Idol exclaimed, feigning protest. The rivalry between the botany teams and the geologists had evolved from simple professional competition into a friendly variety of sports matches and quiz nights, during which they mostly failed to demonstrate sufficient skills to overwhelm the ‘enemy’.

  “Yeah, I doubt they understood the orders, they’re always so dense,” said Adams as he moved off in an uncomfortable looking crouching run.

  Bloody hell, thought Idol, do we all look like that? It seems natural when the Marines do it, but we must look a right bunch of prats.

  He shuffled away self-consciously. Keeping his head down and his dignity intact seemed like an impossible balance as he crawled below the blown out windows.

  Better than getting your head blown off though, you vain old sod. Lots better than that.

  13

  They had a few minutes’ warning, no more. The techs had set up sirens at key points around the city, but it was mostly deserted with only a few teams still working to clear supplies and equipment.

  Everyone froze, just for a moment, as the sirens wailed and personal communicators pinged increasingly desperate warnings of imminent doom. Then things started to move as tasks and machinery were abandoned and the teams rushed to clear the impact sites.

  “Kinetic bombardment,” said Atticus in a matter-of-fact tone as he reviewed the stream of updates coming in from the ground-based monitors they’d been able to set up over the last few days, “at least, I hope it’s kinetic.”

  They had discussed contingency plans for other forms of attack – nuclear, biological, chemical, high-explosive and the old favourite, boots on the ground – but kinetic bombardment from orbit was always the most likely option, now that the Deathless knew they were opposed.

  “Simple, cheap, effective and with little lasting environmental impact,” Warden had said as he summarised the advantages of dropping high-velocity asteroids on the city, “and there’s bugger all we can do to defend against it.”

  And now it looked like Warden had been right. The monitors had found several fast-moving missiles heading towards Ashton but there were bound to be others, possibly hundreds of others, that wouldn’t be spotted until they struck the ground.

  Atticus and Denmead made their way to the designated lifters, chasing the last of the salvage teams from Government House as they went. The people were surprisingly calm given what was happening but the atmosphere was one of tense excitement. After days of fevered work under horrible pressure, the time of preparations was now over and, soon, the real fighting would begin.

  “Is that everyone?” yelled, Atticus, standing up in the lifter to get a better view. “Come on!” he yelled at a pair of stragglers who were moving slowly under the weight of an archive crate.

  “Leave it,” screamed Denmead, the delay now starting to disturb her. The pair struggled a little further then one tripped, pitching over onto the road and dropping the crate.

  “Shit,” said Atticus, springing down from the lifter and sprinting across the open ground. This Deathless body had a few advantages over the standard human combat clones and speed was one of them. He covered a hundred metres in a few seconds, shouting at the two salvagers to forget about the archive drives that had fallen from the crate.

  “Just move,” he yelled. He gave one a shove then grabbed the half-full crate, hefting it easily. The two men sprinted away and Atticus loped easily along behind them, crate tucked under one arm.

  “Hurry,” shouted Denmead, one eye on the sky as the time ticked down.

  The two men scrambled into the lifter and Atticus tossed the crate in behind them before leaping up onto the flatbed.

  “Go, go, go,” yelled Denmead and the driver needed no further encouragement. She punched the controls and the lifter pulled away, slowly at first but accelerating all the time.

  “Fifteen seconds,” said Atticus, shouting to be heard across the sound of the rushing wind. “Five seconds, everybody down.” He ducked down as low as he could and closed his eyes, pulling one of the salvage men and Governor Denmead down as well.

  Then there was a flash of light so bright it was clear even through closed eyelids. The earth rumbled beneath the lifter and then the noise arrived, a great, long, rolling boom that seemed to go on forever. The lifter shook and rocked as the blast wave passed over them and then it was gone.

  Atticus looked back at Government House but could see only dust. Then it started to rain stones. They pinged off the body of the lifter and bounced from the bodies of the humans that sheltered within it. A rock the size of a fist caught Atticus on the shoulder and knocked him down. For a moment it looked like they were going to be buried alive under a shower of rock but then they were clear, and the way ahead was open. The lifter shot forward, heading down a road that would take them past the cloning facility.

  Too late, Articus realised the danger and shouted at the driver to turn off the road. Even as she looked back to see what was going on, Atticus’s HUD lit up with a warning of incoming projectiles. The captain had only enough time to register the warning before the missile landed, striking directly at the cloning facility just as the lifter was passing by.

  This time the flash and the shock wave arrived at the same time. The lifter swerved wildly across the street as the blast struck, engines screaming as they tried to hold the driver’s cour
se. Then it struck a low wall and bounced into the ruined forecourt of a school.

  The engines failed, dumping the lifter on the ground as the noise finally passed. It skidded across the courtyard, spun around in a slow circle, and blasted through the remains of the school’s front door to end up wedged against a staircase.

  14

  “Umm, we’re done with quadrant P7, Captain,” said Luke.

  Priscilla looked up and smiled cheerfully. Luke still looked a little nervous around her, which was an improvement on the sullen grunts she’d received in the days after Ten’s first visit.

  “Thanks, Luke. Anything we need to tell the Marines about?”

  He shook his head. “Nothing, everything was clear. There’s no sign of recent activity but the drop pods are still there and the whole area’s a mess, just like they said,” he grimaced, as if he’d tasted something unpleasant. “Don’t let any of the younger ones see the footage. There are still bodies. I flagged it restricted.”

  “Are you okay? Was it bad?” she asked sympathetically. She’d forgotten that quadrant held the site of one of the fights between the Deathless and the militia. It had been a bad one, judging by the gossip.

  “Yeah, it was pretty gross. After we had a bit of a look, we pulled all the drones back and stayed away from anything that looked messy. It was like watching a programme on surgery while you’re eating,” he said, shivering. “I think the younger ones might have nightmares.”

  “Thanks,” said Priscilla, “but look after your team. If anyone seems upset, we’ll ask Mrs Robinson if one of the doctors can chat with them. They’re not going to tell their mums they’re having nightmares, are they?”

  He chuckled, the first time he’d done that in her presence for a long time. “Yeah, I can’t see Billy telling his mum he saw a dead body and now he’s scared. So what’s our next area? P8?”

  “I was thinking maybe we should launch a long-range probe out to here, she said, highlighting S13. P8-11 are mostly barren and flat. But the area in and around S13 has hills and ravines and maybe caves, so it’s more likely the Deathless might hole up there. What do you think?” she asked.

  “Sure. You want us to set up an operating area out there?”

  “Yup. I thought with all those hills you could get the long-range drones out there by the end of the day and probably find a nice roost, then we could send more first thing tomorrow morning? It’s almost your lunch break so you could take that early if you want and then spend the afternoon sorting it out?”

  Luke nodded. “I’ll tell the team to knock off early and we’ll start after lunch. I’m sure they’ll find that area more interesting. Thanks, boss.”

  He turned and left, apparently completely happy. Priscilla smiled and put her attention back into piloting her drone. Having guided it to a new area, she flicked the drone back to autopilot and returned her attention to the huge vidscreen mounted on the wall of the room. ‘Cave’ would be a more accurate description, but it was hard not to think of it as a room, even if the walls weren’t smooth and the ceiling was crusted with stalactites.

  There were thirty desks, arranged in three long rows facing the largest wall. Each desk had a curved vidscreen to give the pilot a wide angle view from their drone’s cameras, but the ones on the wall were for what Corporal Wilson called ‘a strategic overview of ground operations and reconnaissance data with real-time mapping and target acquisition overlays’. Priscilla and the pilots called it ‘the Grid’.

  The Grid displayed various depictions of New Bristol on different screens around the cave. One screen showed a large chunk of the planet, with the ‘fog of war’ as the pilots who played a lot of games called it, obscuring the parts of the planet they’d not flown drones over yet. Another showed a relief map, with buildings and roads highlighted. Another displayed power grids and there was one that showed a split-screen view of all the areas they were operating in. Still more screens were available to display any particularly interesting drone footage.

  All the pilots wore their HUDs of course, although they’d been issued upgraded versions that had some limited options to interface with the Marines. They couldn’t look at Lieutenant Warden’s view from his HUD but they could send him a message if they needed to, or provide him with updated information from the drones.

  The back wall of the cave was where the drone assembly benches had been set up. Above them were more vidscreens displaying the less vital information from the Grid system. Turning around wasn’t ideal, but there were so many different views it was still easier than turning off the main map display to look at an updated tactical map showing where the Marines or militia were.

  They had constructed a range of different drones for the Marines to use and for them to carry out their surveillance tasks. Each had a specific purpose and their own strengths and weaknesses.

  A few miniature airship drones were floating at extremely high altitude on autopilot to provide low-resolution imagery over a few thousand square kilometres of New Bristol. They had been simple to make, didn’t require much piloting time and were quite unobtrusive. They were mostly watching for large-scale disturbances on the ground, raising alerts to allow the pilots to investigate with other drones if necessary. Corporal Wilson said a column of vehicles would kick up enough dust that the algorithm monitoring the images would spot it and, if it did, they should contact the duty officer immediately.

  The techs had placed big red buttons under plastic covers around the cave. They were linked to an alarm that would summon help if the teams spotted anything important. One of the boys, Jacob, who wasn't part of Luke's crew of reprobates and thus hadn’t been present at Ten’s now infamous bollocking, had flipped open a cover and hit the button to see what would happen.

  Both Corporal Wilson and Ten had arrived at speed, ready for action. They had been distinctly unimpressed to discover they’d been tricked, and had set a punishment duty to remind everyone that this wasn’t a game. Jacob had spent the rest of the day digging an emergency latrine trench, much to the rest of the team’s amusement. By late afternoon, Ten had decided the trench wasn’t really needed, so Jacob spent the next couple of hours filling it back in again, lest someone fall in. Nobody played with the alarms after that.

  And now that the teams had been flying drones for most of the week, they had a lot of data to display on their overview screens. The high-altitude airships were roaming far and wide, updating the pre-war maps of the area around Ashton and identifying areas that needed closer inspection.

  The teams had been using the data from the airships to set sweep and monitor paths for the long-range drones, which were now flying regular patterns, watching anything of value. The information the drones gathered was collated with everything the Marines had seen with their HUDs to produce maps that were at least as good as those the colonists had used before their geostationary satellites were destroyed during the first invasion.

  But it was the Marines’ specialist drones that were the most fun to build and fly. They were completely different to the normal racing drones and were designed for endurance, stealth or out and out mayhem. To general groans of dismay, the pilots had been told early on that they would only be building, not flying, the large combat drones that the Marine tech specialists used in firefights to surveil and attack the enemy.

  Corporal Wilson had said that after the invasion was done, they might disarm some of the drones and let the pilots try flying them. Some of the boys and girls had pleaded with him, but he’d said that he was under orders and suggested that, if they thought that was unfair, they could talk to Governor Denmead. That had dampened interest fairly quickly.

  That left two main types of drones for Priscilla’s team of about thirty kids to build, pilot and maintain. The first were similar to the combat drones: long-range, fast, laden with cameras and sensors, about the size of a breakfast tray and completely unarmed.

  At first, they’d flown them around the local area. Then they’d thoroughly investigated New Ashton,
the area around Fort Widley and then all the major settlements, farms, solar plants, storage depots, manufactories, mining operations and atmospheric processors that surrounded the city for miles around.

  Then the Grid had marked new areas for them to explore at mid-altitude, setting the teams an area to cover in each shift. That had taken them into the wilderness beyond the city, pushing out in long, probing sweeps. Interesting at first, the pilots had quickly automated these flights to avoid the awful boredom of watching kilometres of empty desert, and now one pilot could manage several drones.

  Priscilla had settled everyone into a routine of regular shifts. The bio-bracelets worn by all the kids on New Bristol monitored sleep patterns and general health, so the medical team had been able to confirm who rose early risers and Priscilla had tailored the shift plans accordingly.

  The adults had been interested at first but now they mostly left them to it, although there was always someone near at hand in case anything interesting happened. The caverns weren’t so spacious that the citizens of New Bristol had room to spare, but the pilot’s rooms were comparatively spacious even though they were so deep in the system that it took twenty minutes to walk to the outside. Mrs Robinson came by every day to make sure they had cleaned up after themselves.

  Priscilla’s favourite models to fly were the micro-drones. Just like the long-range drones, they were powered by high-efficiency solar cells. Their size – barely the length of her finger – meant they didn’t do well in high winds, although you could let the wind carry them if that was convenient and you liked the challenge of landing them somewhere safe.

  Piloting the micro-drones in normal weather was a joy, though, and Priscilla relished the opportunity to investigate a new cave or one of the colony’s outlying facilities for signs of Deathless activities. That was their major function: get in close, observe and report.