“Heather?”
She blinked; Dad had paused the game and everyone had greeted her – and she’d somehow spaced out through all of it.
“Happy Thanksgiving,” she said lamely.
“Great to see ya, Hetty,” Peggy McClintock said; her welcoming smile was genuine enough. Heather’s sister looked happy but also a little tired; she’d taken two decades off to raise her children, and she was only on her seventh year of motherhood. “Been too long.”
“I know. How are things?” Peggy hadn’t been home last time Heather came to visit; she and the husband and kids been on vacation in the wilds of mostly-uninhabited Great Britain.
“You know, the usual. Sometimes I think we should have podded the kids and went on with our lives.”
“I know you’re kidding,” Peggy’s not-so-better half said, moving to stand by his wife’s side and shake Heather’s hand. Howie Dupree was, much like Heather and Peggy’s father, a big, broad-shouldered guy with the aggressive can-do attitude that had led both men to great things. In Howie’s case, it’d helped him become Senior Vice President of Orbital Manufacturing. The job took him to Mosser’s facilities in Low Earth Orbit and the Moon far more often than Peggy liked, not least because she suspected Howie was having an affair with someone during his frequent off-planet trips. Heather had heard the tearful story five years ago, the last time she made the mistake of spending some face time with her sister. They were still together, so Heather assumed they’d worked things out, one way or another.
Peggy beamed at her husband. “Of course I’m kidding. I wouldn’t pod our kids. It’s not natural.”
Heather could agree with her on that, at least. The current fashion among the well-to-do was to place their newborn babies in a sealed life-support pod and raise them via virtual-reality interface, ensuring that their little darlings weren’t exposed to any actual dangers while they grew up in the strictly-controlled environment. Podding was expensive and controversial; the process had only been around for twenty years or so, and the first generation of pod-babies were just beginning to emerge from their virtual environment into the real world, with mixed results.
She shook her head at the thought of children growing up in a constant state of hibernation, never risking a skinned knee or elbow, their only inputs being what their parents chose for them, their only friends other pod children linked through a virtual network that strictly managed their interactions while their bodies rested comfortably in a fluid solution and nanobots ensured they remained in perfect health until they were finally decanted on their eighteenth birthday, when their parents no longer had the legal right to keep them inside the artificial wombs. That just couldn’t be good for anybody.
“So how’s life treating you at State?” Howie asked her.
“You know, it’s pretty busy, what with a war going on and all.”
“I know. We’re working three shifts just to keep up with the military contracts. A bunch of our people got reactivated, too, so they’re back in uniform and we’re having a heck of a time trying to replace them. We’re getting retirees coming back, but they want more money to interrupt their vacations from life. It’s a big mess.”
A soldier jumped into the trench; Heather barely deflected his bayonet thrust with her Iwo and countered with a kick to the balls and a brutal blow with the gun’s butt that broke the alien’s jaw and spun him to the ground, where a point-blank burst finished him off.
Heather forced herself to nod and smile politely. You have no idea what a big mess looks like, Howie, she didn’t say out loud. The big guy, just like her father, had done his four Ob-Serv years on Earth, his only hardships consisting of sore feet and back during Basic and having to live under military discipline while taking college-level courses.
“Dad’s thinking about coming out of retirement, too,” Peggy added, gesturing towards the elder McClintock, who was hovering nearby and dividing his time between looking at his prodigal daughter and glancing at the frozen game, clearly wondering if it’d be rude to switch it back on.
“Good for him,” Heather said, turning towards him. “Good for you, Dad.”
He looked at her and shrugged. “Guess we all have to do our part for the war effort.”
Yeah, because going back to work at a hundred and fifty grand a year plus bonuses is the same as venturing off-planet where you can get your ass shot off.
That wasn’t entirely fair, of course. Without civilians producing the beans and bullets the armed forces needed, the war would be lost as surely as if nobody fought it. But it wasn’t the same. She looked at her brother Donald, a near-clone of Howie and Dad, and his wife, currently working as a college professor and saving up for her turn at maternal leave. They all seemed as alien to her as the natives of Jasper-Five. More alien, perhaps: the Kirosha had understood what war meant. She downed the rest of her pinot, and got ready to go back for seconds. It was going to be a long holiday.
I should have gone to Parthenon.
Six
Parthenon-Four, 165 AFC
“Another column is on the move, sir.”
Fromm’s imp marked the hostile formation on the virtual map hovering on one side of his field of vision. He opened another display next to it; this one piped in the visual input from the recon drones orbiting the area, and it showed a few hundred armed natives. The war band was moving in loose order through the relatively open spaces between the massive old-growth trees that dominated the forest. The dense canopy that made satellites nearly useless did little to stop the swarm of insect-sized robots at his command from spying on the enemy.
The Big Furries on the vid-feed were armed with a mixture of trade rifles, medieval weapons and a handful of Viper lasers. They were large humanoids, covered in shaggy gray-white pelts, averaging seven feet in height and weighing over four hundred pounds; their body plan resembled a bear more than a hominid, and their hunched postures suggested they’d only recently become full bipeds. The marching warriors were clearly angry, if their body language was at all similar to humans; every once in a while they stopped walking and howled at each other, working themselves into a good frenzy. They had good reasons for their rage: Fromm had condemned their people to death or exile. This particular clan had chosen death, just for the chance to take some of the hated invaders with them.
He’d done what he had to. His company’s mortars and the Army artillery assets in his sector had laid out several carefully-targeted fire missions. In a few days, he had destroyed the crops and food stores of every Big Furry village within a week’s walk of the Terraforming Center he’d been tasked to protect. Casualties among the tribesmen had been minimal, but now the locals had three stark choices: travel away from the human facilities to beg, borrow or steal food from untouched villages further out, starve, or march towards Fromm’s forces, where they could be slaughtered in a series of set-piece engagements. Most of the natives had gone for the first option, and they were no longer Fromm’s problem. The die-hards moving forward were.
He sent the grid coordinates to Lieutenant O’Malley, who was overseeing the mortar section personally. “Fire when ready.”
“Aye-aye. Anti-pers on the way.”
A few seconds later, the three 100mm mortars from Charlie Company’s weapons platoon began their fire mission. The self-propelled anti-personnel bomblets took longer than they would have in a simple ballistic trajectory, but they maneuvered through the forest quickly enough, detonating over the Furries and showering them with a lethal downpour of shrapnel. Dozens of locals fell, their greenish blood spattering everywhere. The survivors pressed on at a dead run. The mortars fired a second volley, a third, each set of air bursts scything down a tenth or more of the aliens.
The fourth and last volley struck the leaders of the band, who had foolishly clustered around a war banner of sorts, the skull of some great beast mounted on a pole and painted bright green. The mortar bombs tore the banner apart, not that there was anybody living to pick it up once the barrage was over
. Of the three-hundred-strong war band, less than half remained, most of those wounded. Those hale enough to run away did so. The rest bled and called for their mothers or begged for water, as dying warriors had since the beginning of time. Fromm didn’t need to hear their words as they writhed on the blood-stained ground to know that. Alien or human, some things never changed.
“Check fire,” Fromm ordered before the mortar section could exterminate the runners. It would waste ammo, and hopefully the remaining warriors would head home and spread the word that advancing towards American territory was nothing but suicide.
He could have slaughtered every village in range, but then the Viper operators would have simply contacted their neighbors further out, and they would have moved into the vacant territory and resumed hostilities. The Big Furries generally didn’t fear death in battle. Now, however, the tribes would spend their time warring against each other for food and territory instead of hampering the evacuation process. The Vipers would find very few volunteers for their proxy war.
Not that he intended to give them a chance to try any new tricks.
* * *
“A little fresh air will do ya good, Nacle,” Gonzo said in a cheerful tone.
Nacle shook his head and kept quiet.
“Come on, it ain’t even all that cold outside.”
“Ease up, Gonzo,” Russell said. “We’re unassing in five, so look sharp.”
They’d been short of warm bodies – the local grunts weren’t worth shit – so the Skipper had sent out most of Third Platoon out with the rest of the company, everyone except the mortar section, which was in the rear providing fire support and also keeping an eye on the Army arty to make sure they didn’t fuck up. That meant that Russell and his fire team got to play infantryman, backing up the regular 0311s with their heavier weapons. Russell was cool with that, but both Gonzo and Nacle were a bit tense. They hadn’t enjoyed their time at Jasper-Five, which had been a bit harder work than usual, and assaulting a fortified position manned by a mix of Viper operators and bloodthirsty natives wasn’t going to be a lot of fun. But that was why they got paid the big bucks.
The LAV shuddered for a moment, its armored hull ringing like a giant bell under a massive impact that shifted its sixty-ton weight.
“Motherfuck!” Gonzo growled.
“Hypervelocity missile,” Russell said. The troop carrier didn’t stop, though, so the direct hit had knocked out the force field but hadn’t penetrated the LAV’s armor. If it had, spalling fragments would have turned at least some of the Marines inside into ground chuck, body armor and personal shields or not.
This wasn’t going to be much fun at all.
The LAV stopped behind a rocky outcrop and lowered the rear exit ramp. Russell could hear the thunder of Charlie Company’s mortars and local yokels’ arty, pasting the enemy positions. They obviously hadn’t suppressed the ETs enough to keep them from lobbing heavy ordnance against the Marines’ vehicles, and it was going to get a lot worse, now that they were out in the open.
“Go, go, go!” shouted Staff Sergeant Dragunov. The squad poured out of the assault vehicle, their imps drawing them virtual pathways to follow as they scrambled out into the snow-covered mountainside. Their objective was a fortress built around a cavern complex, a stone warren protected by area force fields and an unknown number of Viper heavy weapons. Taking the place was going to be a bitch and a half.
Russell rushed to his designated spot while the LAV rose just high enough above the outcropping for its turret to engage the fortress. The crack of its 30mm grav cannon was loud enough to make his teeth vibrate as he reached a snow-capped boulder and knelt behind it. Gonzaga was right behind him, his ALS-43 at the ready. Nacle arrived a second later.
“Be careful,” the Mormon said. “They got a firefly over there.”
“Shit.”
The floating mirror balls could fire dozens of laser beams every second; they weren’t powerful enough to penetrate their personal force fields, not with one hit, but fireflies never hit you once. Their primary purpose was to shoot down artillery and mortar shells, but a grunt would do if they didn’t have anything better to blast.
“Gonzo, try to take it out.”
“Copy that.”
The gunner lifted the ALS-43 over his head, using the weapon’s sight system to aim it without exposing himself. It wasn’t the best way to shoot the weapon, fancy sights or not, but it was a lot safer than poking up your head and eating a laser. He fired two bursts.
“Miss,” he said.
“I’m going to pop a 20-mike-mike to get its attention. Try again when I do.”
“Roger that.”
Russell fired a 20mm self-propelled missile. The firefly tagged it before it’d risen more than fifty feet, which would have detonated its warhead and regaled the Marine fire team with a self-inflicted dose of hell – except Russell hadn’t armed the missile before shooting it.
Gonzo fired another burst. Russell, watching through the weapon’s sights, saw the tell-tale bloom of energy that meant at least one of the 15mm plasma rounds had found the pesky floating ball and taken care of it
“All right, let’s move.”
The world narrowed into a series of mad dashes for cover. The occasional laser crackled overhead, but most of the incoming was from the trade rifles some asshole smugglers had sold the natives. To make things worse, some of those rounds were plasma-tipped: the Vipers had contributed to the cause by handing out explosive bullets, just like the ones in Russell’s Iwo, except four times bigger. A direct hit with one of those and that’d be all she wrote.
His fire team moved slowly forward, pausing only to send back some explosive love. Russell went through half of his 20mm loads. Most of the smart rounds ended up splattered against the enemy force fields, or blasted by other fireflies back behind their lines, but at least one of them hit something important, triggering a massive explosion less than a hundred yards away. He felt the shockwave from behind a big-ass rock he was using for cover; the Vipers and their Furry pets must be hurting.
“Hold one,” Russell said while he sent out a status report and checked for new instructions.
No new orders from higher; Lieutenant O’Malley usually left people alone, maybe a little too much. The objective was the same, and a quick check with his imp showed him the company was two-thirds of the way there. They’d taken a few casualties; no KIAs, but a couple of Hellcats had been disabled, and five grunts from Second Platoon were down with serious injuries. It’d been simple bad luck; they’d been caught by some ET with a heavy laser and the balls to keep the beam on target long enough to chew through force field and armor alike. A quick check of the tape showed the Viper gunner had paid the ultimate price for being a badass when he got a sheaf of mortar bombs dropped on his position. Now the bastard was comparing notes with Alien Jesus.
The surviving scalies had pulled back after that, letting the Furries hold the perimeter while they rallied deeper inside the cavern. Russell had only caught a few glimpses of the Vipers; they weren’t pretty, eight-limbed and sort of like a snake and a spider had gotten drunk enough to make some babies. The enemy were down to one area force field, too, and had run out of swatters; Russell could tell because he was getting a full panoramic view of the battlefield, without the interruptions that meant a bunch of recon drones had been clawed out of the sky. From overhead, the fight didn’t look like much, other than occasional explosions; just a bunch of grunts moving through narrow passes between rock outcroppings, trying not to slip on icy patches and only pausing long enough to shoot or lob grenades. He couldn’t see very far into the cavern, other than a double handful of Big Furries with rifles. They would pop up behind cover to take a shot, duck back to reload, rinse and repeat. Even with the area force field, most of them had the sense not to fire from the same spot more than once. The lone exception ate a 20mm mini-missile that opened a hole in the force field and took his head clean off.
After a minute or two, Sergeant Dr
agunov sent new vectors to everyone, paths forward where most of the enemy fire couldn’t bear. Russell passed the info along to the fire team and they started moving again. Time to crawl now. At least it looked like any mines or booby-traps the ETs had set up had been cleared up by the mortars. He saw a couple of places where chewed-up rocks marked the spot where a mine had been detonated before it could hit the advancing Marines. That was good news, as long as the mortar section hadn’t missed any –
A sudden threat warning triggered reflexes developed over years of training and personal experience. Russell rolled off to one side as fast as humanly possible, away from the spot an enemy anti-personnel device had marked for destruction.
He was almost fast enough.
Technically, the explosion that smashed his body against the rocks like the hand of an angry god didn’t come from a mine, but rather a single-shot rocket launcher. The weapon was fairly simple: a short-range missile mated to a motion-sensing low-power laser, dropped alongside a likely path. The ambush weapon had been hidden from view under a lightweight, extruded foam cover shaped to look like a random rock. It was simple, hard to detect, and its warhead was powerful enough to pulp a Marine even under full shields and body armor.
Overwhelming pain gave way to cold numbness, which scared Russell even more. Agony meant you were still alive; feeling nothing could mean your nanomeds had kicked in, or that you were on your way out.
“We got you.” Gonzo’s voice seemed to be coming from far away, but hearing it made all the difference in the world. He wasn’t dead. He was still there. “We got you, buddy. Hang on.”
He could see the sky, broken here and there by rocky outcroppings. Gonzo and Nacle were dragging him back. “Get a medic here right the fuck NOW!” Nacle was calling through his imp, and that scared Russell again, because the Mormon only swore when things were well and truly FUBAR.
Numbness everywhere. He couldn’t move his arms, his legs. He tried to crane up his head to see the damage, but Gonzo gently pushed him back down.
Warp Marine Corps- The Complete Series Page 42
