“Those ain’t tanks, kiddo. Infantry fighting vehicles.”
“Whassits?”
“They carry soldiers,” Morris explained gruffly, resisting an urge to tell her to get back inside, to shout that the sight of those vehicles meant death was on its way. Scaring the girl would accomplish nothing, and she’d been through too much pain already.
He flashed back to a conversation from a little over a year ago. “Honey, your Dad and Mom were in an accident, a really bad accident…” Explaining to a child her parents weren’t coming back had been as hard as anything he’d done in the Corps. He might as well let the sight of the gracefully gliding behemoths bring a smile of wonder to her face.
Morris softened his voice and went on. “The real tanks are even bigger. The box on the top, that’s called a turret by the way, is twice that size on a tank, and the tube coming out, the main gun, is almost as long as the entire vehicle. The beams it shoots can hurt a starship in orbit, that’s how big the gun is.”
“Wow,” Mariah said.
And when one of those big suckers blows up, there’s nothing left of the crew but a smear on the wreckage. And they may be tough, but they ain’t invulnerable. There’s no can so big a can opener to handle it can’t be found.
Death came for everyone. His son Otis and his wife Ruth had been driving home from a barn dance in Davistown when one of the local critters had made them swerve and drive off a cliff. That’s all it took.
Sure, one could blame their deaths on the fact that most colonists in Parthenon-Three had to make do with cars only slightly better than what folk had used before First Contact. All the fancy graviton engines and force fields went mostly to the military or the uber-rich; the latter stuck around big cities like Henderson, New Burbank and Sunnyvale and wouldn’t be caught dead driving on the plasticized-dirt roads of Forge Valley. He shrugged. Might as well blame the pseudo-lizard that had stepped in the path of his son’s car. In the end, looking for someone to blame was useless. Sometimes shit just happened.
Some serious shit was about to happen right here.
While Mariah watched the five maneuvering IFVs before they got out of sight, Morris glanced over his property: fifteen thousand acres of prime farmland that he and his son and daughter-in-law had managed until the accident left him alone in charge of both farm and granddaughter. Robots did most of the hard work, along with temps hired from Davistown or nearby farms who could spare a son or daughter come harvest or planting season. Managing the property was a lot of work, but he didn’t mind. He’d been happy here ever since he plowed his savings and his twelve-year pension into the dirt-cheap property nearly fifty years ago, back when Parthenon-Three had been an up-and-coming colony with less than a million inhabitants on the whole planet and terraformer engines were still ironing out all the kinks needed to turn the near-goldie world into a full one.
He'd been happy so long that he’d forgotten how all of it could be taken away at a moment’s notice.
“A tank! A tank, grampa! That is a tank, isn’t it?”
“That it is, sweetheart,” he said after taking a glance at the massive follow-up vehicle. One of the new Stormin’ Normans by the looks of it. During his idle time, he still perused military sites. His feelings for life in uniform didn’t extend to the hardware. The Marines got the best toys, of course. His militia unit was mostly logistics and they drove wheeled trucks and a handful of halftracks; even ground-effect vehicles were beyond their budget. The fighting/security element of which he was part of was light infantry, a euphemism for relying on the Mark-One Shank’s Mare or clambering on whatever truck had spare room for a squad of grunts. The Army and National Guard formations stationed around the big cities and the Planetary Defense Bases were better off, but not by much.
The Corps had the best tech, but lacked the sheer numbers they were going to need to hold Parthenon-Three against an attack. And his land was likely going to become a battlefield.
Beyond the fertile plateau of Forge Valley loomed a ring of mostly-impassable mountains. The aliens would likely land near the western mouth of the valley and push their way towards the nearest PDB nestled within another mountain range some ninety miles away, on the eastern end. And opposing them would be whatever the Marines could bring to the table – he’d heard a battalion plus attachments – plus the local Army, Guard and Volunteer units.
He shook his head. Most of the militiamen were kids fresh from their obligatory service who liked playing soldier a few times a year, along with a smattering of old-timers, most of whom had never seen combat. Morris spat again. You couldn’t stiffen a bucket of spit with a handful of buckshot, and second-rate buckshot at that. The militia was unlikely to be asked to hold the line, that much was true, but he also knew how quickly the rear could become the front. Those summer soldiers could well be put to the test, along with Morris himself.
And they would likely fail. They said there was no ‘fail’ in the Corps, but he wasn’t in the Corps anymore.
* * *
They had some big-ass cities here, but the way things were going Russell would never get a good look at them. The 101st had ended up deployed in the boondocks yet again, just outside the miles-wide force fields protecting Planetary Defense Base Twelve, and to get to anywhere fun, they would have to make a two-hour drive to New Burbank, the only big town nearby. And that was if they ever got leave and could beg, borrow or steal transport there. The only civvie settlements in the valley were tiny farming villages, the kind of place where everybody knew everybody and strangers weren’t welcome. Russell had thought about trying his luck with some of the local farmers’ daughters, but the communities around here were mostly Orthodox Catholics or Reformed Mennonites, which meant you could look but never touch, and on second thought you couldn’t look, either.
Oh, well. The Skipper and the higher ups from the battalion were keeping everyone too busy to think about having fun. The Eets were coming. Any day now, or so they’d been saying for nearly a month since they deployed here. Another combat mission, but unlike the last couple ones, they weren’t going to fight primmies with a few borrowed toys. They were up against the ET varsity now. Russell had never run into the Vipers, but from what he’d seen in the training simulations, they were no fun at all.
“Edison, move your team to the next ridge,” Staff Sergeant Dragunov ordered. “And keep your heads down, fuck-socks! We ain’t fighting barbs no more.”
We ain’t fighting nobody, Russell groused silently, but he understood the purpose of the exercise. Charlie Company had spent the better part of a year hunting Big Furries, and you started to develop bad habits after a while. They needed to be ready, just in case the shit hit the fan for real.
“You heard the man,” he told his fire team. “Move it!”
They rushed forward, making sure to stay in defilade the whole way. They were practicing a movement to contact evolution against a notional enemy company. Their imps projected fake energy discharges straight into their eyeballs and blasted their ears with the appropriate sounds, adding realism to the maneuver. He saw and heard laser beams crisscrossing the air overhead as they reached their objective. They looked and sounded just like they did in real combat.
Russell dropped the portable force field he’d been lugging right on the reverse slope of the ridge; Gonzo and Nacle joined him, and they slowly crawled the last few feet to the top, pushing the shield ahead of them. A flight of drones made a pass overhead; most of them were (administratively) swatted down before revealing anything useful, but enough survived to provide them with some targets: a crew-served laser a klick and a half away.
Russell designated the target. “Let ‘em have it!”
He opened up with the 20mm launcher while Nacle and Gonzo cut loose with grenades. The range was a bit long, but it was worth a try, plus the mortar section was busy with other targets and the exercise assumed all other heavy weapon assets were not available at the moment. The battalion’s attached tank platoon was supposed to swing
by, but it hadn’t yet. They were out on the sharp end with near fuck-all in the way of support, in other words. Russell hated that kind of no-win scenario, Well, supposedly you could win them, if you did everything perfectly, but you mostly didn’t.
The pretend volley hit a pretend force field without doing damage, and then it was the pretend Vipers’ turn. The portable shield sizzled and crackled as it was overwhelmed by a direct laser hit. A second later, Russell’s sensors went white and his armor’s power cut off. The sudden weight of over a hundred and fifty now-inert pounds of battle-rattle and gear dragged him down as surely as if his brain had been vaporized by a real laser.
“You dead, Russet,” Gonzo said. “Forgot to duck?”
“Go duck yourself,” Russell growled. His commo was still working even though he was a notional casualty. Gonzo chuckled.
“What now?” Nacle asked.
“Now we hunker down and wait for support,” Gonzo replied. “And here come the tanks!”
“Tanks for nothing,” Russell said. He normally wasn’t big on puns, but it was better than just lying there. The whole thing felt a little too much like the last time he’d gone down for the count.
He just hoped that the next time it happened for real it wouldn’t be so bad.
“Give ‘em hell, Shellies!” Gonzo cried out.
Russell couldn’t see much from his prone position, but he sneaked a peek through his fire team’s sensors and watched the MEU’s tanks float into position. They didn’t look like much, from two klicks away, at least until they opened up on the laser position. A 250mm graviton cannon blast looked like nothing else in creation, and even the simulated version was scary as hell. The inner core of the beam was the purest black; some egghead had explained to Russell that it was akin to looking into a black hole, not you could actually see a black hole. Black in the center, surrounded with an aura of twisted matter, space and supposedly even time. When four beams hit the laser’s position, they turned it into a crater. Or would have, if it had been for real.
He’d briefly considered going into tanks. There was something to be said about being inside a hundred-ton metal beast with near-invulnerable force fields and armor and a main gun guaranteed to go through just about anything you could find on a planet. On the other hand, whenever a Shellie showed up, everybody on the other side did their level best to kill it. All in all, staying close to the ground and being able to duck for cover was better, he decided, even if sometimes you didn’t duck fast enough.
They were sure handy to have around when the shit hit the fan, though.
* * *
“We bring you death!” Staff Sergeant Konrad Zimmer roared at the top of his lungs.
“We bring you DOOM!” chorused the rest of the tank crew as the Fimbul Winter unleashed twisted gravity devastation on the simulated targets downrange.
Zimmer had been a Kriegsmetall fan ever since he’d been a snot-nosed teenager and his older sister had grudgingly taken him to a Star Valhalla concert. He’d been lucky enough to find two kindred souls in his crew. Both Lance Corporal Mira Rodriguez and PFC Jessie Graves were war-heads. Well, Mira had been, and between the two of them they’d dragged Jessie into it. Now they marched to battle to the sounds of Star Valhalla, Molon Labe or We Own the Night, and they loved it.
Since this was a simulation and not the real thing, they could be a bit more casual about singing and fighting. Things got a lot quieter when it was for real.
“Target, three o’clock,” Zimmer called out. A Viper field gennie, floating along on a weak graviton engine while providing protection to anything inside a two-hundred-yard radius around it.
“On the way! Hit!” Mira shouted. “DOOM!” The cannon blast punctured the force field and turned the generator into a fireball.
A volley of anti-armor rockets sped towards the tank, but Jessie had been alerted by the targeting warning sensors and made the tank lurch sideways fast and hard enough to slam Zimmer against his seat with bone-bruising force.
“Motherfucker!” Zimmer shouted. His armored vest absorbed most of the damage but that was still going to leave a mark.
“DOOM!” Jessie roared. Only one of the dozen or so missiles hit the tank, and it didn’t even make an impression on its shields.
“We bring you Hell,” Mira sang. She fired without calling out the target, but Zimmer had seen it too: a Viper rocketeer, standing up in full sight of God and radar. Were the real ETs that stupid? If they were, they would share the fate of the asshole who’d dared fire on the Fimbul Winter. The graviton blast drank away the lone figure, leaving no trace of the tango behind.
Most Vipers had scrambled for cover. Mira made sure they stayed down with a long burst from the coaxial 15mm automatic launch system. Plasma and frag grenades burst over the target area, showering the ETs with fiery death.
“Your Wyrd is here!” Zimmer sang on. His cupola ALS added some extra firepower to the mix. “Valhalla beckons!”
The rest of the platoon was spread over a mile-wide front, each of the four tanks creating a bubble of destruction where no living thing could exist without their permission. They had to be careful not to blue-on-blue the ground-pounders who’d been kind enough to fix the Vipers in place so the platoon could come sweeping down their left flank. Leg infantry had its uses, Zimmer supposed. If nothing else, they helped make sure any enemy grunts couldn’t get close enough to the tanks to become a nuisance.
First Lieutenant Morrell called out the all-clear. The platoon had run out of aliens to kill.
“And Death claimed them all!” the three crewmembers went on singing, mercifully only in their vehicle channel. The rest of the platoon didn’t share their passion for metal.
This was the life. Zimmer couldn’t wait for the real aliens to show up.
Sixth Fleet, Parthenon System Warp-Lane, 165 AFC
The courier ship didn’t bring any good news.
“That’s it?” Admiral Sondra Givens said in a soft voice. No sense scaring everyone inside the Tactical Flag Command Center, deep in the bowels of the Admiral-class dreadnought USS William Halsey Jr. Shouting would be bad for morale. Despite her best efforts, her voice rose slightly as she went on. “We know the Vipers are going to hit us here, and at any moment, and that’s all the reinforcements they send us? A squadron of Presidents almost as old as I am, and a smattering of frigates and destroyers?”
“Seventh Fleet is still coming together on Wolf 1061,” Rear Admiral Farragut said diffidently. The skipper of Sixth Fleet’s flagship didn’t sound any happier than Givens felt, despite the vain attempt to reassure the fleet commander.
Givens repressed a string of curses. Maintain an even strain; that saying was as true now that humankind had spread to the stars as it had been during the early days of the space program. This war was putting her normally-unflappable demeanor to the test. The fact that her own grandson had been killed during the opening salvos of the conflict – before the US even knew it was at war – didn’t help. She’d buried her dead, and she was more than ready and eager to bury the enemy next. But she needed the right tools for the job and she was getting a lot less than she’d expected.
Onscreen, Sixth Fleet was an impressive formation. Two dreadnoughts, six battleships, twelve battlecruisers, twenty-four light and medium cruisers that unfortunately included the six Presidential-class antiques that had just arrived and four converted Puppy light cruisers the GACS had sent along, thirty-six destroyers, six assault ships (currently mostly empty of Marines and serving mainly as missile-defense platforms) and sixty frigates.
Impressive, that is, until you considered that Fifth Fleet had been stronger in capital ships (four dreadnoughts and seven battleships) and had fielded about twenty percent more tonnage in all other vessel classes, and yet it’d been defeated and forced to run with its tail between it legs. It’d lost one irreplaceable dreadnought and three battleships, suffered even worse casualties down the rest of the battle line, and was now trying to pull itself together at Wolf 10
61 after Givens had relieved it at Parthenon. The damage wasn’t just physical; a brief talk with Admiral Kerensky had made it clear to Givens that the fleet and its commander were beaten, thoroughly demoralized after being forced to abandon a major inhabited system to the Vipers. If Fifth Fleet had to fight again anytime soon, it wouldn’t fare well.
And Sondra Givens wasn’t sure her own ships would do any better.
Kerensky was a gifted commander, forged in the same cauldron where Givens’ own career had begun, fighting the Snakes into extinction. Both admirals were fighters who had eschewed advancement beyond fleet command because they belonged out in the dark of space, trading broadsides with any alien foolish enough to threaten America. Neither of them had met with defeat in nearly a century of service, broken only by the occasional forced retirement periods meant to give others their chance to learn the tricks of the trade. And yet, despite his skill and resolve, Kerensky had failed; he was a shadow of his former self, at least for the time being.
“Seventh Fleet is expected to arrive no later than three months from now,” Farragut went on, breaking the string of dark thoughts running through her mind. “When it does, our strength will more than double.”
“Except many of those ships are still being built,” Givens said. “Their flagship, the Zeus, was still having its main warp drive assembled when we left Wolf 1061. Sure, they were almost finished when the war began and the Sol and Wolf shipyards are doing their best to get them ready, but it takes more than a launch ceremony to make a ship, and you know it.”
Farragut didn’t even try to argue the point. The fact was that putting crews together for those ships and getting them ready for action was going to take a lot more than three months, even if the paperwork was expedited. Normally a starship wasn’t deemed fit for service until a lengthy shakedown cruise to work out any kinks the engineers had missed, not to mention making sure the crew learned how to work together in an unfamiliar environment. Even if it arrived in time, Seventh Fleet’s effectiveness would be far lower than a landlubber would assume.
Warp Marine Corps- The Complete Series Page 46
