Russell was like that, too. He’d made it all the way to E-5 before he’d been caught trying to catch a ride back to base while naked, drunk as a skunk and in the company of a couple of bug-eyed tentacle-waving aliens – he never found out what species – who were also drunk. The details of the escapade remained hazy (he’d disabled his imp’s recorder at some point and whatever he’d taken had done a number on his short-term memory), but it’d earned him several Ninja Punches, including a demotion back to Private First Class.
Overall, the gun club had been good for him, though, non-judicial punishments and all. He’d put in twenty years already, starting at age sixteen, when he’d left his former life as a gangsta in the Zoo and used his Obligatory Service Term as a springboard into the fleet. Once he figured his way around the bullshit and discovered that the Corps valued his talent for killing people and breaking things, he realized he had found his calling.
His plan was to put fifty years in, which guaranteed him a twenty-five-year pension. That and a few shady dealings on the side would allow him to buy a bar and spend a couple or more decades having fun. Unless things got boring enough to make him want to go back to the Corps. Or the twenty-five-year pension ran out and he needed another source of income. Nobody was sure how long humans could last, now that they’d worked out most of the kinks on life-extension meds. One of the first casualties of life-ex had been lifetime pensions. Now you got back half the time you put in. Maybe he’d end up serving another fifty years in the Corps after taking two decades off.
Or maybe he’d switch outfits. Some people ended up serving in every branch of the service, from the shit ones like the Army or Coast Guard all the way to the Navy. Russell didn’t know how well he might do as a bubblehead – he hadn’t met many bubblies he liked – but you never knew till you tried.
“They’re burning down the slums,” Russell said, setting aside his plans for the future. “Not our problem. Enclave’s the safest place to be in the damn planet, other than the Ruddy Queen’s bedroom.”
He didn’t mind that the guys were worried about what was going on outside the Enclave. Worried grunts made stupid bets, which meant he might be able to get out of the hole he’d dug for himself. A hundred bucks in the red so far, which was a good half a week’s pay for a lowly Lance. Sure, a dollar went pretty far Ruddy-land, a.k.a. Jasper-Five, but if you ended up with zero dollars in your pocket you were screwed until the next payday. Twenty years in, and he had less than two hundred bucks in his savings account. Booze, smokes and hookers; all his money always ended up split three-ways between them. Russell had a big score in the works, selling some combat-lossed high-tech equipment to a notorious smuggler passing through Jasper-Five, but it’d be a while before he collected his cut, and hookers and booze couldn’t be bought on promises, even if his word was good enough to cadge a few smokes.
“Guess you’re right, Russet,” Corporal Harold ‘Rocky’ Petrossian said after he ponied up the small blind; when the dealing was done, he looked at his hand, and clearly saw something he didn’t like. Rocky was good people but if he looked unhappy, that was because he’d gotten a lousy hand. Rocky couldn’t bluff for shit.
“I know I’m right,” Russell replied absently, glancing at his hand: pocket sixes. Good enough to stay in the game.
“You shoulda been in New Lancaster when the Lizards torched their own town before we could get to it,” Gonzo told Conroy. “It spread out all over the forests around it. Flames all over the horizon, far as the eye could see. They had these trees, they were full of this gummy paste, and man, did that shit stink when it caught fire. Suit filters couldn’t cope with the fucking stench.”
“Yeah, that was nasty,” Rocky said. “We kicked ass, though.”
“Kill bodies,” Gonzo agreed.
Flop came out. An ace, a six, and the other six. Russell’s expression didn’t change an iota as his mind started figuring out the best course of action.
He never got a chance to work out the angles, though. His imp chimed in his ear – everybody’s imp did. Priority call.
“Stop whatever the fuck you’re doing, fuck-socks,” Gunnery Sergeant Miguel Obregon said through the command channel. “The new CO is on his way from orbit, should arrive in about an hour. I want y’all out on the yard, field unis and gear, looking sharp, in forty-five minutes, or y’all gonna be on police call all over the embassy grounds. Acknowledge and get moving.”
Russell dutifully sent an ‘Acknowledged’ signal from his imp, which would show in the platoon display as a green light. A yellow light meant the Marine in question had failed to acknowledge, and Obregon would track the miscreant down and made him sorry he’d ever been born. With an imp right inside your skull, your only excuses not to acknowledge a command were death or a situation where taking a second to answer a call was worth your life.
The skipper had already screwed Russell over and he hadn’t even shown up yet. Fucking officers.
The card game broke up as everyone’s imps transferred their wins or deducted their losses from their accounts. Russell tried not to think about his depleted savings as he took a quick shower and put on his field ‘long johns’ back on. They wore the skin-tight gray-green bodysuits most of the time; the material was self-repairing, self-cleaning, breathed better than most civvie clothing, local or American, and was tough enough to resist knife slashes, something that Russell could attest to from personal experience. He clamped his back-and-breast clamshell armor over the long johns, followed by the articulated knee, elbow and wrist pads that, along with his helmet and the force field projectors built into them, made each infantryman invulnerable to explosive fragments and most civvie and primmie small arms, and highly resistant to modern weapons. Russell had been on the receiving end of arrows, spears, blunderbusses, bucketloads of plasma, grav beams and Lamprey lasers rifles, spread over seven different engagements in two wars and three minor conflicts, which had earned him a three-star Combat Action Ribbon and a Purple Heart with three oak leaf clusters. Considering he’d also bled like a stuck pig, shit and pissed himself, and endured more pain than he’d thought possible, he would have happily declined the honors, not that the fucking ETs trying to kill him had given him a choice in the matter. His armor was one of the reasons he was still around to bitch about it. Dumb luck and being a sneaky sumbitch were the other two.
The helmet closed around his head with a hiss as it pressurized its interior. The thin eye-slit provided fuck-all peripheral vision and little enough frontal vision, but his imp made up for it, projecting the take from his helmet sensors right into his brain. As far as his peepers were concerned, it was like he wasn’t wearing a helmet at all. Nanowire filaments sneaked out from the clamshell breastplate until they connected to the armor pads and his boots, creating a network of artificial muscle that allowed him to carry a hundred and fifty pounds of weapons and equipment with almost zero strain and fatigue, although it took training to overcome the momentum you generated while running under a full load.
A quick check showed that the two power packs mounted on the back of the clamshell armor were fully charged. One was dedicated to the force fields; the other kept the suit’s systems running for up to twenty-four hours, give or take, depending on how active those hours were. You could divert power from one pack to the other at a pinch, at the risk of running out of juice for the shields or the suit. It almost never came to that, but there’d been exceptions, and then it became a race between the force fields going down or having to move under a hundred and fifty pounds of weight while trying to see out of the little slit in your helmet without the benefit of your sensors. If both packs ran out, you ditched the armor and prepared to have a really bad day.
He and the other Marines emerged from their barracks – a converted warehouse behind the American legation buildings – and headed for the armory, a makeshift structure made out of three starship cargo containers welded together into a ‘U’ shape. Gunny Obregon was there, overseeing the weapons issue personally, probab
ly to make sure nobody tried to walk away with more than their allotted stuff.
As the leader of a fire team, Russell’s issue weapon was a triple-barreled IW-3a – his Iwo, as all Infantry Weapons were affectionately called in the Corps. He checked the gun – his gun, there were many like it, but this one was his – to make sure it was the one he’d lovingly maintained and cleaned as if his life depended on it, because it did.
The IW-3a fired 4mm explosive bullets from a 50-round magazine, 15mm grenades from a 10-round tube, and a single-shot 20mm self-propelled projectile that came in a variety of flavors. Ordinary grunts made do with an IW-3 that only fired the 4- and 15mm stuff. Gonzaga was the fire team gunner; he got an ALS-43 burp-gun with more firepower than the rest of the team combined. Russell was happy enough with his Iwo, though. He went over the gun as if greeting an old friend.
Ever since they’d arrived to Jasper-Five, Marines not on guard or maintenance duty had been ordered to leave all their weapons – even their personal ones – at the armory. The order had come from the ambassador himself, relayed through the Regional Security Officer; Lieutenant Murdock had no choice but to go along. After Murdock got run over by a car, Gunny Obregon had done the same, even when things started heating up during the last few days. Russell had availed himself of a new set of personal hardware – a switchblade, a revolver and a holdout two-shot derringer, both .41 caliber, all of Ruddy manufacture – soon enough, but he’d much rather have some good American gear at hand instead. He was worried he might need it.
There was a lot to worry about. Third Platoon shouldn’t be here, out of contact with Charlie Company and the rest of the battalion some fucking Rat had broken up to save a buck or two. A weapons platoon wasn’t meant to operate by itself. The pogues in charge had stuck them in an embassy, enough grunts to cause trouble but not enough to defend shit, and if anything happened he and the rest of the unit would be expected to do the impossible. The platoon wasn’t in bad shape – even the boots that had come along for the trip had gotten a clue, thanks to the Gunny’s constant training – but if it was expected to protect the Enclave by itself, they were fucked.
He’d been in the shit often enough to tell when he was about to take another dip in the brown stuff.
Of course, he didn’t expect it to happen quite so soon.
His first hint that something was going on was a distant crump sound he recognized immediately. That was an explosion: either one of the fires had lit up something volatile, or someone had detonated some military-grade ordnance. A second one followed mere seconds later. Ordnance it was; you rarely got explosions that closely together unless someone was making them happen.
Obregon stepped away from the armory and started talking into his imp. Russell couldn’t overhear the conversation – the NCO had engaged his privacy filter – but his furious arm gestures made it clear he was having a violent argument with someone. Probably some Embassy puke.
The Gunny was getting the take from the swarm of micro-drones flying over the city, so he knew exactly what was going on out there. Obregon didn’t get excited easily, so whatever was happening wasn’t good.
“What’s the deal, Russet?” Gonzaga asked him; the short private had his ALS-43 Automatic Launch System slung over his shoulder; the big gun was almost as tall as he was, which made him look slightly ridiculous, but Russell knew some very lethal things came in stupid-looking packages.
“We’ll find out soon enough, Gonzo,” he said. “But don’t stray too far from the armory, because I think…”
“Gun Squads One and Two!” Gunny Obregon shouted on the priority channel. “Grab a combat load! We’ve got to extricate civilian and military personnel under attack. We’re rolling hot in five! Martin, you’re in charge till I get back. Organize a perimeter defense and break out the mortars, on my authority. The Ruddies have gone wild.”
“I knew it,” Russell muttered as he and the rest of the Guns Section squads followed Obregon’s orders and geared themselves up for the real thing. For combat.
Fifteen of them, without proper vehicles, out in the big city, which last time he’d checked held some two million ETs.
He didn’t need another oak leaf cluster, but life sure as fuck was doing its damnedest to get him one.
* * *
The initial flash was warning enough. Fromm slunk down on the passenger seat before the lead car’s gas tank exploded. The shockwave from the ensuing conflagration washed over the embassy’s vehicle. The oversized four-wheeler shook but wasn’t flipped over; no hot air – or flames – filled the inside of the car, so its windshield had held.
“They are coming,” Locquar said from the driver’s seat.
The ambush had hit the convoy at an intersection, where a small road cut across the main street they’d been using. The rocketeer must have fired from the rooftop of one of the three- and four-story buildings lining both sides of the street.
Dozens of armed Ruddies were coming at them from both sides of the smaller street and from a plaza next to the tail end of the motorcade. Fromm saw them all clearly, thanks to the micro-drones following the convoy from a hundred feet up, recording everything with their artificial eyes. The crowd had erupted from several houses where they’d been hiding until just now. They were armed mostly with spears and swords, but a couple of the black-tunic wearers had rifles with straight box magazines in front of their triggers. Standard-issue Kirosha Army assault weapons, firing .29-caliber chemically-propelled slugs from a twenty-round magazine, capable of selective fire.
The last car in the convoy had eaten another rocket; its smoldering remains blocked most of the right lane of the road.
“Go!” he yelled at Locquar. Standing still meant death. Moving might not save them, depending on how fast the rocket team could reload and fire, but it provided their only chance.
The Ruddy driver reacted well enough. Tires squealed on the pavement as he accelerated; they spun in place for a brief instant before regaining traction and propelling the car forward even as one of the lead attackers brought his rifle to bear.
Fromm fired first, holding his weapon in a two-handed Weaver grip.
The Colt Plasma Projectile Weapon spat a 3mm steel-sheathed bullet that left a neat hole in the side windshield on its way out. It hit the Ruddy rifleman a little high and to the left from his center of mass. On impact – the hit on the windshield had occurred before its warhead was armed – the tiny round detonated, unleashing a jet of pure plasma, half an inch wide and eight inches long. Designed to defeat body armor or damage light military vehicles, the explosive bullet’s effects on mere flesh and bone were devastating. The unfired rifle went spinning off into the air, its wielder’s torn-up arm and a piece of shoulder still holding on to it. The explosion that dismembered the rifleman consisted mostly of steam from his own vaporized bodily fluids. ETs on each side of the target recoiled as bits of bone shrapnel and burning steam hit them, along with an overpressure wave powerful enough to rock them on their feet.
Fromm fired six more times, squeezing the trigger as soon as the targeting dot slid over another target. He missed twice – firing from a moving platform wasn’t easy even with neural implant targeting – but blew four more Ruddies to Kingdom come, turning them into miniature bombs that wounded several others. The car kept going. It shuddered but did not stop when Locquar hit a couple of attackers and sent their bodies caroming over the vehicle. On the other side of the passenger’s seat, McClintock was shooting as well; the screech of her beamer was noticeable even alongside the supersonic cracks of Fromm’s weapon.
Their car sped past the burning wreck of the lead vehicle and ran clear of the charging mob. Fromm twisted in the back seat to see what was going on behind them. The two Vehelian limos were following closely, knocking down Ruddies and running them over even as swords and spears glanced off their sides. The bus followed in their wake. A couple of firearm-wielding Eets raked the vehicles as they went by, but they were firing from the hip, spray-and-pray style, and
Fromm didn’t think they hit anybody. He couldn’t see the van anywhere. Nothing he could do about that, except hope they all made it through the ambush point before the rocket launcher teams…
A puff of smoke erupted from the top of the second limo’s roof.
… reloaded.
The explosion didn’t look like much, but Fromm knew what it meant even before the limo swerved off course and drifted lazily to a stop. The missile had crashed through the top of the vehicle and shredded everyone inside. Only someone in sealed combat armor could have survived, and he doubted armor was part of Vehelian diplomatic dress code. The bus behind the dead Oval car didn’t slow down, clipping the stopped vehicle and sending it off on a spin. The horde of Ruddies giving chase fell upon the stopped limo like lions tackling the slowest member of a fleeing herd.
McClintock looked at him, a question in her eyes. He shook his head. There was nothing they could do for the passengers of the doomed vehicle. The only consolation was that the mob tearing into the car would only find corpses to desecrate. She bit her lip and checked the charge levels on her beamer. The energy weapons were as lethal as the plasma rounds his gun fired, but their effective range was measured in feet rather than yards, and their batteries only held enough power for five to seven shots, depending on the model. The Embassy spook changed battery packs. Fromm replaced his gun’s magazine with a fresh one. He’d only brought a spare magazine, never thinking he’d need more than forty rounds. Now he was down to thirty-three.
“Are we there yet?” he said, deadpan.
McClintock chuckled. “I will turn this car right around.” She went on in a sober tone: “Half a mile as the crow flies. A bit more on the road, but it’s a fairly straight shot there, unless…”
The road they were on had taken them over a slight rise on the ground. When they reached the top of the shallow hill, they saw the massed crowd it had hidden.
Several local vehicles, powered and animal-drawn, had been dragged across the street, blocking it.
Warp Marine Corps- The Complete Series Page 5
