Warp Marine Corps- The Complete Series

by C. J. Carella

  War was death and mutilation, most of its victims guilty of nothing worse than doing their jobs or being at the wrong place at the wrong time. Heather hated war. But being in one, she intended to do her best to win it. The only thing worse than a battle won was a battle lost. Some general had said that; she reminded herself to Woogle it later.

  “Pelican One inbound for pickup. Hunker down, boys and girls. Danger close. Repeat, danger close.”

  Pelican One looked like an ordinary orbital cargo shuttle, the ubiquitous craft able to maneuver in and out an atmosphere and ferry passengers and as much cargo as it could fit inside its three-hundred-ton displacement. This particular stubby, ugly ship had hidden attachments for weapon and shield mounts that gave her almost as much protection and firepower as an assault shuttle. It lashed the area around the Satrap’s Office with a storm of plasma and hypervelocity missile fire. The starship missile barrage that immolated the Doklonian heavy weapons had felt like a distant earthquake; the sharp impacts of the shuttle’s weaponry were like thunderbolts. Windows shattered and flames rose over the edges of the building, drowning out the natives’ small arms fire.

  First Squad reached the LZ a few seconds before the shuttle arrived. Everyone was there, but two operators were being carried in. Heather did a quick status check: their wounds were critical but the men would likely survive until they reached the Narwhal and its well-outfitted sick bay.

  The platoon poured into the ship in hurried order and it lifted off before its cargo hatches were fully closed, regaling Heather with a first-hand look at the capital city. Whatever it’d looked like before the American raid was impossible to tell: everywhere she looked was filled with uncontrolled fires, overturned vehicles, and patches of darkness between the flames: one of the missiles must have hit the local power plant, causing a blackout, or maybe the locals themselves had turned the lights off.

  Gunboat tourism. No fun for anybody involved.

  She hoped the contents of her computer were worth all the carnage and chaos she’d helped inflict.

  Four

  Aboard the USS Mattis, 164 AFC

  Heinlein-Five has fallen.

  That wasn’t what the news reports said, of course. The AP newsfeed merely asserted that ‘heavy fighting against the Nasstah invaders continues throughout Heinlein System.’ Problem was, none of the stories mentioned Fifth Fleet, which had been tasked to protect the system. You learned to read between the lines; if Fifth Fleet was still around, it would have been featured in the reports. Which meant it wasn’t around anymore: destroyed or fled, it didn’t make a difference for the system. Heinlein-Five wouldn’t last very long without a fleet covering it. The planet wasn’t heavily fortified: a handful of Planetary Defense Bases wouldn’t hold off an armada that had eliminated or run off a major naval formation.

  The commander of the 101st MEU had announced an impromptu meeting of all company and attachment commanders, fifteen minutes from now. Fromm would get the real story then. It was probably worse than he expected.

  We are losing.

  Heinlein-Five was a large US colony, and its fifteen million inhabitants made it one of the largest outer settlements of the country. Barely thirty percent of the US population had settled beyond Earth and a handful of core planets, despite all efforts to stimulate colonization. Most people preferred to stay home and be fat and comfortable in the great cities of Sol, Wolf 1061 and Drake. Those likely dead colonists were a huge loss to the country. And worse, a ley line connected Heinlein directly to an even larger system: Parthenon, with two habitable systems and a combined population of over thirty million, not to mention being a major warp nexus that led towards the heart of US space. If Parthenon fell, the Vipers could cut off half a dozen systems, to be taken at their leisure, and threaten Wolf 1061, one of the core worlds, with a population in the half-billion range and the second largest industrial base in the US. Lose that system and the war would be just about lost. And Earth itself was a mere thirty warp-minutes away from Wolf 1061.

  Space war depended on defense in depth. You wanted to control all the warp pathways leading to your core worlds, the planets containing the bulk of your population and economy. The best way to do that was to establish colonies or bases on all known connecting points, providing supplies and rallying points for your defensive fleets. Most Starfarers’ central systems lay dozens of warp jumps away from their nearest neighbors, requiring attackers to overwhelm the defenses waiting for them every step of the way. To get to that point took centuries or even millennia of expansion, however. Earth had a bit over a century to spread out; it wouldn’t take too many defeats before an enemy fleet could make it to Sol System.

  Given all that, Fromm had a good idea where the Mattis and the rest of Sixth Fleet were heading. The only question was how bad things were going to get once they arrived.

  The officers and NCOs in the briefing room all looked like attendees at the funeral of some beloved relative. Smiles were rare and seldom lasted more than a few seconds. Most people were sitting down quietly. Fromm nodded at Lieutenant Hansen and sat down next to him as the rest of Charlie Company’s leaders arrived. They didn’t have to wait long.

  Colonel Marvin Brighton stepped up to the podium. He had been in the Corps for close to a century, and in charge of 101st MEU for a good twenty years, and in the months since joining the unit, Fromm had learned he was a practical, no-nonsense leader, concerned primarily with results; a fighter and doer with little interest in rising any further in the ranks.

  “The stuff you’ve been hearing is partly true,” he said. “The Vipers kicked us out of Heinlein System. Fifth Fleet gave them a hard time, but in the end it had to withdraw. They had no choice: if we lost the fleet, the Vipers would have had a straight shot to Parthenon. As it is, we lost a lot of ships, maybe more than we could afford. But forget about the rumors that the fleet was destroyed.”

  Fromm felt a surge of relief. Even a badly-mauled fleet was better than nothing.

  “They are going to have to pull back to refit, however, so we are going to take their place. The GACS’ full Space Defense Force is relieving us at New Jakarta so we can proceed. Our mission is simple: we must hold Parthenon against all attacks. As long as we have forces in the system, the Vipers cannot spread to the rest of American space; if it falls, our situation will become critical. Our orders are to hold at any cost.”

  Parthenon-Three was a ‘full-goldie’ planet with thirty million inhabitants spread around a couple dozen cities and a hundred towns and villages, protected by twenty-four heavily-armed Planetary Defense Bases as well as a ring of orbital fortresses and an impressive fleet of monitors. Parthenon-Four, on the other hand, was too cold and dry for human tastes. Only some two hundred thousand humans dwelled there, concentrated around four terraforming stations and a handful of lesser facilities.

  “The hundred-and-first and the rest of Landing Squadron Three will be deployed to Parthenon-Four to protect and assist the evacuation of all American personnel there. When that mission is complete, we will relocate to Parthenon-Three to supplement the local garrison.”

  Some of the Marine officers sneered at that. The local defense forces would be Army and National Guard formations, recruited mostly from non-warp capable humans born in-system. Their training wasn’t bad, although most Corps officers would disagree, but their equipment would be largely outdated, and their logistics wouldn’t be great. There just wasn’t enough money for everyone, and most federal and state funds were allocated to the PDBs and space fortresses. If it came down to ground combat, the Corps would be expected to do most of the heavy lifting. However, the Marines just didn’t have the manpower to defend an entire planet; Sixth Fleet could field about one division equivalent of ground troops, hardly enough to cover the twenty-four PDBs that were all that stood between Parthenon-Three’s millions and a fiery death.

  People often forgot that the Warp Marine Corps’ combat forces only comprised some two hundred battalions and a handful of formed briga
des and divisions, a little over four million troops all told, compared to fifty million Navy personnel and about thirty-five million in the other branches of the service, including the Guard, volunteer militias and so on. Marines could launch strikes and seize relatively-small patches of ground, but to hold or defend entire planets, you needed the Army.

  Fromm discreetly used his imp to fill in the details while Colonel Brighton went on. The planet’s defensive forces included six Army divisions (mechanized infantry for the most part), five National Guard divisions (mostly support), and ten militia brigades; the latter were volunteer weekend warriors, loosely-organized and poorly equipped. Over a hundred and eighty thousand troops, of which some twenty thousand would be actual fighting soldiers, the rest being in support roles.

  Sixth Fleet was delivering ten MEUs to the system, about thirteen thousand Marines and five thousand Navy personnel, some ten thousand of whom would be expected to carry a gun, drive or operate a weapon system, and go kill the enemy, which would nearly double the combat strength of the local forces in actual firepower and mobility. To say nothing about the difference in experience: most of those planet-bound soldiers had never fired a shot in anger. How they would fare when a host of Viper dropships and landing pods came calling was anyone’s guess. Still, Fromm thought the eye-rolling from his fellow officers wasn’t smart: they were going to need the locals’ help when the proverbial manure smacked against the rotating blades, and they should be thinking about how to improve their effectiveness rather than looking down on them.

  It wouldn’t be his problem, at least not at first. He would be busy in Parthenon-Four, which had four battalions in place, all regular Army, and those two thousand soldiers had plenty of combat experience fighting natives. Parthenon-Four had developed intelligent life, and the locals were primitive but fiercely hostile. They had managed to pick up some dangerous weapons in the seventy years since their First Contact, enough to make themselves a regular nuisance. A month didn’t go by without some violent incident somewhere near the terraforming stations, and the evacuation would provide the locals with plenty of chances for mayhem.

  There was no telling how soon it would be before the Viper invasion force arrived, but he and Charlie Company were unlikely to be bored before then.

  Parthenon-Four, 165 AFC

  “I hate the cold,” PFC Hiram ‘Nacle’ Hamblin said.

  “Better get used to it,” Gonzo said. “Cold as balls, twenty-four seven, twice as cold come Christmas.”

  “It ain’t that bad,” Russell broke in, trying to smooth things over. Nacle was feeling a bit sensitive after the whole deal at the whorehouse, and Gonzo still hadn’t figured out how far he could push before things got out of hand. “Average temp is only like fifteen degrees below Earth-normal.”

  “Yeah. A whole forty-five degrees. Frozen water on the ground eight months a year except ‘round the equator. And big-ass Abominable Snowmen roaming everywhere, ready to bite your head off.”

  “I ain’t scared of no ETs,” Nacle said. “Just don’t like the cold is all.”

  Funny how people were about things, Russell thought. The cold wasn’t going to kill anybody, unless they decided to strip naked and frolic around at night, when temps usually got within spitting distance of freezing even in the equator. Their field uniforms, let alone their full battle-rattle, were designed to trap enough body heat to make exposure unlikely unless they went far enough north to hit perma-zero temps and their batteries ran out, Freezing to death wasn’t something to worry about.

  The local critters, on the other hand, could kill you dead. The place, cold as it was, was teeming with hostile life along the warmer bits in the middle, including a species of intelligent tool users. The natives had some fancy scientific name but were commonly known as Big Furries. They were massive grey-and-white super-gorilla analogs, although the Woogle article claimed their innards were more like a dolphin or whale back on Old Earth. They were also smart enough to mine and work iron, and more recently some asshole had decided it’d be fun to sell them guns, so they were big tough monsters with guns.

  All in all, this deployment was going to suck. The terraforming facilities had bars and whores, but word was their prices were high and they would soon shut down as the evacuation got underway. They were going to spend their time chasing giant snow apes with nothing to do in between.

  The combat shuttle lurched before the groundside grav-grapples took the boat and lowered it the rest of the way. The view from the sensor feed was nothing to write home about: vast expanses of dull-red forests, with patches of lighter orange-leafed trees here or there. No snow on the ground, at least, which made sense since they were on the tropics, such as they were. When he zoomed in on the trees, he saw they were covered in bristles or spines; they kind of reminded him of pines back home in New Illinois, where most the plants and animals were Earth imports. Not that he’d ever seen many trees growing up in the giant slum known as the Zoo.

  Some sort of squirrel-monkey critters were leaping around the trees or gnawing at pinecones. Russel wondered if they were edible and if so, what they tasted like. Some of the tastiest critters he’d found were ETs. Sure, they often had the nutritional value of chewing tobacco, and sometimes it took a Marine’s full nano-med suite to clear out the toxins in their juices, but they were tasty nonetheless.

  The video feed blurred as the shuttle landed.

  “Well, here we are.”

  Out they went, by the numbers, not as quickly or organized as if they were on assault mode, not when they were in their field grays and carrying their rucksacks, but not off by that much, either. It wasn’t that cold, with a morning temp of fifty-three-F. According to his imp, it was going to get up to the sixties by the afternoon. The only snow he could see was on top of some impressive mountains peeking over the horizon. Not too bad, for an ice planet. Although even an ice planet was bound to have nice spots, and only a moron would pick anywhere but those spots to live in.

  The landing pad was a little bit off the main terraforming facility. As he walked down the ramp with the rest of Third Platoon, Russell saw three big gas cyclers looming ahead like artificial mountains, five hundred feet tall and nearly as wide, each designed to spew a mix of greenhouse gases meant to warm up the planet. Only one of them was working; a thick column of putrid-looking smoke rose from its top. Operations were winding down; the brass had decided holding Parthenon-Four wasn’t worth the effort.

  A loud detonation interrupted his sight-seeing. Russell didn’t waste any time; he was down on the ground, his service pistol out, before his mind fully processed what had happened.

  “Oh, no!” Nacle shouted, looking up from his own prone position. Russell took a peek through the private’s imp just in time to see a second missile slam into a descending shuttle, smoke coming from the point where the first hit had penetrated its shield.

  Fuck. That could have been us.

  The second missile sparked a fire in the shuttle’s rear cargo hold, but it looked like nothing vital had been destroyed, although any poor bastard in the way of the explosion would probably disagree. The shuttle spun in place and spat out a stream of laser and 25mm plasma-tipped rounds, searching for the rocket team. A moment later, a volley of guided artillery erupted from one of the Army positions surrounding the facility. Looked like at least some of the local GIs weren’t asleep at the switch. A series of explosions went off in the distance: air bursts. He didn’t need to see them to know what the effect of those blasts would be like: 200mm shells made a mess of anything they hit.

  There were no more missile launches.

  “Clear the area!” Staff Sergeant Dragunov shouted. “Move it, people!”

  Off to Russell’s left, Gunny Wendell took Lieutenant O’Malley firmly by the arm and helped him lead the way. The platoon’s CO looked a bit dazed and confused; instead of hitting the ground like the rest of the troops, O’Malley had only gone down on one knee while he tried to figure out what was going on. The officer’s s
luggish reaction just confirmed his suspicions that the El-Tee didn’t know what the fuck he was doing. Too bad; it made Russell miss the time when Captain Fromm had been in direct command of the platoon. The skipper was a damn good officer, even if he’d gotten a bunch of them killed at Jasper-Five.

  The platoon cleared the landing zone fast as the damaged shuttle made its final descent. The grapples grabbed it and gently lowered it to the pad. By then everybody except the corpsmen and emergency techs was safely behind the blast shields that would keep the shuttle’s possible destruction from spreading the damage.

  The shuttle didn’t blow up. There were a couple of WIAs inside, but the missiles had hit mostly supplies, and none of it had included explosive ordnance. They might be short some commo equipment, rations and blankies, but nobody had died.

  Still, it was one hell of a way to start a deployment.

  * * *

  “What the hell is going on here?”

  “No idea, sir. Locals have taken potshots at aircraft before, but never with SAMs.”

  Fromm’s shuttle shuddered in mid-air as the pilots raised its force fields to maximum power. It’d been sheer luck that the hit on First Platoon’s shuttle hadn’t destroyed anything vital – or filled its passenger compartment with fire and death. His own transport was next in line, carrying him and the command element of Charlie Company.