It was like being in warp space. Scratch that. It was exactly like being in warp space, except he wasn’t going anywhere. But he was watching bits and pieces of his life. His first kill. Getting blown to hell on Parthenon-Four. Sex. Death. The highlights of existence. It seemed to last forever, but took no time at all.
She let of go of his hands and he slumped on the chair, blinking back tears, feeling worse than that time he’d tried some alien drugs that he’d been told were ‘better than peyote’ and had almost killed him.
“Interesting,” she said.
“What the fuck are you?” he said, but in a tone of voice far softer than the words themselves. His normal reaction to something like that would have been to bury the emotions and memories she’d woken up under a tsunami of violence. Not now, though. Now he wanted to know what she thought of him, after seeing what kind of man he was. For some reason, he wanted to know that very badly.
“My old naval designator was 6611,” she said. “Warp Navigator.”
“Holy fuck.” That explained a lot. Warp-Navs were all a bit nuts. It came with the job of having to hold things together while they made sure their ship came out of the other end of warp transit. They usually worked in teams of no less than three in military vessels, two in civilian ones, because they tended to burn out, sometimes without warning. In theory anybody with a brain could help the nav systems lead a ship through FTL, but it took someone special to make it work a hundred percent of the time. Warp-Navs were special, but a lot of them ended up with…
“… a medical discharge,” she completed the thought. “You see, what our normal senses perceive as reality is just the tip of the iceberg. Accessing warp lets you see deeper into the reality spectrum, as it were.”
“And now you can do magic,” he said. He should be worried, the way you’d feel when you realized the person you’d been chatting with was totally insane, but he wasn’t bothered by this conversation.
“I can see things a little differently, that’s all. There’s quite a few people like me. The dumb ones end up in glorified insane asylums. The rest of us, we learn to smile and say the right things, and they let us go in peace. Out here in the colonies, you can be weird and most people leave you alone. At first, I hid from everyone, but I helped someone out, and that led to someone else asking for my advice, and so on. Most of my neighbors have come to appreciate my services, although they prefer not dealing with me except when they need something.” She shrugged. “That’s fine with me. I prefer to be alone.”
“Yeah,” he said. He would have agreed with her if she told him the local star was made of nacho cheese.
“But I do get lonely sometimes,” she added. The smile was back, along with the glimmer in her eyes. “And you are a not a good man, but you aren’t rotten in the middle. A hard man. Good to those you think deserve it. Those happy few. The rest of the world doesn’t really count. Not a great way to live, but it’s what you are. It doesn’t bother me. And I do get lonely sometimes.”
No, he wasn’t bothered at all.
“You only have two hours or so, so better make them count, Marine.”
He didn’t know what she meant about the two hours, since his liberty didn’t expire for another forty-eight, but right now he didn’t care.
They lunged at each other, knocking the table to one side.
* * *
Afterwards, he didn’t fall asleep or grab his shit and head out, the way he always did, especially the latter, because falling asleep next to some stranger was a great way to end up broke or dead. He lay next to her instead. There was something he wanted to say, and he wasn’t sure how to say it.
The actual words were easy enough. He’d whispered them to plenty of chicks along the way, whenever paying for it was beyond his means or too much trouble. Not that the ‘good girls’ didn’t get paid. The coin was different: dinner and presents, yeah, but above all, lies. Let’s do this again. I really felt a connection, baby. Didn’t you? I think this could really be something. You’re different from anyone else I’ve been with. He’d said all of those, and more. It was the coin of the realm when you dealt with amateurs.
And now he couldn’t make himself say them.
“You’re sweet,” she said. “But you’re going to be too busy to worry about that. Your two hours are just about up.” She grinned and threw his jumpsuit at him. “They were two very nice hours, granted. But you better get dressed.”
Before he could open his mouth to ask what the fuck she was talking about, a FLASH message came through his imp.
ENEMY WARP EMERGENCE DETECTED. THIS IS NOT A DRILL. ENEMY WARP EMERGENCE DETECTED. ELEMENTS OF NASSTAH FLEET HAVE ENTERED PARTHENON SYSTEM. ALL LEAVES ARE CANCELLED. ALL PERSONNEL REPORT TO DUTY SOONEST.
His personal orders came through. He and Gonzo were going to have to drive their rented piece of junk as fast as it could and get back to the FOB.
“You are a fucking witch,” he said as he scrambled back into his field grays.
“Depends on your definition, I suppose.”
“Will I see you again?”
“Maybe. If you want to. If we both make it through what’s coming.”
Russell almost asked her if she knew what was coming. If they’d both make it. He rushed out instead. Gonzo had already left and had the car running.
He wasn’t sure he wanted those questions answered.
They’d been driving for almost an hour before he realized he’d never gotten her name.
Sixth Fleet, Parthenon System, 165 AFC
“Eight dreadnoughts, all with multi-missile boxes. Fifteen battleships, five of them also missile platforms. Eighteen battlecruisers and forty cruisers; twelve of the latter are volley ships, the rest are fast-attack models, light on armament and shields but capable of exceeding .001 c by some five to ten percent. Seventy-five fast-attack frigates, outfitted likewise; fifty standard frigates, and fifty destroyers. Plus thirty planetary assault ships and the usual support elements.”
“Hey, we outnumber them in destroyers,” Admiral Givens said, eliciting a chuckle from everyone in the Tactical Flag Command Center. “They’re serious this time,” she went on, her calm tone belying her true feelings.
The disparity in tonnage was even more hideous than the ship numbers indicated. Their destroyers alone were thirty to fifty percent more massive than the American equivalents. The US Navy had faced worse odds and come out victorious, but the Vipers were using weapons and tactics designed to counter their normal advantages. They’d all but crushed Fifth Fleet, and now it was her turn to find out just how effective the ETs’ new toys were.
“Execute Attack Plan Epsilon.” There were grimaces among the crew at the orders, but everyone did as they were told.
The two forces played the elaborate dance that preceded a space battle, selecting a place to fight and meeting each other there. The Vipers armada’s final emergence point was one light-minute away from Parthenon-Three. Sixth Fleet met them there.
Standard operating procedure was to appear in normal space at half a light second away from the op force, taking it under fire before the ETs had fully recovered from transit. Most alien species needed a minimum of thirty to sixty seconds to fully overcome even a short jump. That was a long time to rely only on automated systems that couldn’t be very sophisticated or they, too, would be affected by FTL travel’s unavoidable side effects. The ability to strike after emergence with near-impunity had been the key to multiple American victories.
The enemy had emerged from warp in a vertical formation forming a wall of ships that launched thousands of missiles as soon as Sixth Fleet came out of W-space. The volley, travelling at around 1/100 of c, would have taken less than a minute to reach its targets, had the Americans appeared at the usual range. They hadn’t.
Sixth Fleet emerged two light seconds from the enemy formation, sacrificing its normal advantage to quadruple the time the missile storm would take to reach her formation. Givens knew they were going to need every bit of tho
se extra two or three minutes to avoid sharing the fate of Admiral Kerensky’s ships. There were a lot of missiles. Even after being whittled away for their entire two light-second trip, some were bound to get through. At least the Viper fleet would be too far away to pile on with beam weapons after they recovered from transit.
Admiral Givens realized she was grinding her teeth together hard enough to hurt. She forced herself to unclench her jaw.
The next few minutes would tell if she’d been right challenging the enemy in deep space, or whether her fleet would be too badly mauled to help defend Parthenon-Three.
Whatever happened next, it was going to be a long day.
Parthenon-Three, 165 AFC
“Sixth Fleet is engaging the enemy, trying to cut down their numbers as it falls back towards Parthenon-Three,” Colonel Brighton said. “They aren’t going to stop them unless we’re luckier than we deserve. The Vipers will get here sooner rather than later. Best estimate is sixteen to eighteen hours from now, but they could make another warp jump and drop in on us within minutes.”
The 101st MEU was having a final officers’ meeting before the inevitable arrival of the ETs. It was a virtual meeting, relying on imp-generated holograms; everybody was already at their assigned posts, and nobody wanted to be shuttling back and forth when the Vipers could make landfall at any time.
“Based on the correlation of forces involved, Sixth Fleet will attrite but not destroy the enemy formation. Parthenon-Three’s defenses will add their firepower to the mix once the Nasstah reach orbital engagement range. That may be enough to destroy or successfully repel the Vipers, but our estimates are they will not. Once they reach Parthenon-Three, the enemy will deorbit land forces with the purpose of reducing the twenty-four Planetary Defense Bases protecting the planet. Their secondary objective will be to destroy all major cities’ force field systems, in order to allow the deployment of starship-launched genocide weapons.”
Images of burning Detroit danced in Fromm’s mind.
“The Hundred-and-First’s primary mission is to defend PDB-18 and the cities of New Burbank and Henderson, working in conjunction with Army, Guard and militia units in-theater. In addition to Marine assets, we will be assisted by two divisional-sized forces, including a field artillery brigade. Additional units are being mobilized and assembled in New Burbank, but they will take as long as two weeks to be ready for action.
“Our primary theater of operations will be Forge Valley,” Brighton went on, reviewing the battle plans they’d all been working on in the past couple of months. The holographic display provided a detailed 3D rendition of the central plateau, a roughly football shape surrounded by mountains and running on an east-west axis, wider around the middle and with two main gaps at each end. At the end of the eastern opening – Miller’s Crossing – lay PDB-18. Two villages – Davistown and Paradise Creek – and several hundred square miles of farmland filled most of the valley proper, broken up by expanses of hilly terrain and a mix of native and imported forests. A chain of hills nearly tall enough to be called mountains divided a third of the eastern side of the valley into two distinct regions; the villages were on opposite sides of the range. The other major terrain features in the plateau were two rivers – White River and Miller’s Stream – running west-to-east until they came together at the end of the dividing hills, near Miller’s Crossing, and then flowed towards the south. Five bridges spanned them at different points, and Fromm figured most of them would end up going down; orders were to blow them as soon as enemy forces came within a mile of them. Hills and rivers presented little obstacle to anti-grav vehicles, but Viper assault forces consisted mostly of light infantry; they would be severely inconvenienced by both.
On the other hand, there was a lot of terrain to cover, and not that many troops to do the job. Given the width and length of the valley, and assuming the enemy landed on the next plateau over, on the western side, a Marine battalion and attachments, plus two ad-hoc divisions and other dribs and drabs weren’t enough to plug either gap, let alone the plateau between them. The western pass was the worst one; it was wider and too far away from the planetary defense base to expect any support from it. The conservative play would be to evacuate the entire valley and make a stand on Miller’s Crossing, the eastern pass, which was narrower and far more defensible. But surrendering the plateau to the enemy would give them the chance to concentrate and hit the human defenders with everything they had, at a time of their choosing. You didn’t want to surrender the initiative to the opposing force; waiting passively for an attack was a last resort and an admission of weakness or sheer incompetence.
“The 101st and attached units will engage and destroy any enemy forces entering Forge Valley. If the landings’ strength makes that unfeasible, we will conduct a retrograde operation, using maneuver and movement to disrupt and slow down the enemy’s advance while we gradually fall back in an easterly direction. In that case, our primary goal will be to attrite the enemy through ambushes and counterattacks. We will maintain contact with the alien forces while avoiding a decisive engagement unless local conditions favor us.
“Once we reach the strongpoints at Miller’s Crossing, we will revert to a fixed defense, with mobile elements remaining in play to threaten the enemy’s flanks. At that point, our orders are to hold until relieved. Local commanders have latitude in ordering tactical retrograde maneuvers, but their units must not move beyond the outermost force field perimeter of PDB-18 unless such movement is approved by higher.”
Colonel Brighton leaned forward; the holographic projection showed the lines of tension marring his face. “I am not in the habit of giving suicide orders. If the situation becomes well and truly untenable, I will order a retreat and evacuation towards New Burbank, the closest city in the area. I will be the sole judge of what I consider to be an untenable situation. To make things abundantly clear, any unit that falls back beyond their assigned final protective line without my personal approval will be denied force field coverage and artillery support, and, if deemed necessary, will be engaged by our own artillery in order to close the gap in our defenses created by their unauthorized retreat. Make that clear to everyone under your command. To run means death. Is that understood?”
There was a chorus of imp acknowledgments. Fromm didn’t like the directive, but he realized it was aimed mostly at the Army, Guard and militia units that would be providing the bulk of the manpower for the final defensive battle. After months of joint training exercises, it’d become clear that many of those formations could best be classified as ‘shaky.’ Parthenon-Three had been a peaceful, prosperous world for far too long; the state government had grudgingly supplemented the federal funds needed to maintain the defensive installations on and in orbit around the planet, but had done the bare minimum to support the ground forces that were supposed to defend them. The Guard was poorly equipped and supplied; even worse, their training left a lot to be desired. The volunteer militia was a hodgepodge of units ranking from useless to somewhat better than the average Guard ones. The federally-funded Army was only in slightly better shape. The previous few months had not been enough to make up for those deficiencies, and there were serious doubts as to how well they would fare when exposed to combat, in most cases for the first time.
“A relief fleet is being assembled at Wolf 1061, comprising elements from Fifth Fleet deemed fit to return to action, alongside reinforcements from other sectors and newly-commissioned vessels. It will come to the system’s defense when it is ready, but the most optimistic estimate calls for no less than twelve weeks.
“We cannot afford to lose Sixth Fleet, so if it is facing annihilation, it will retreat from P-3’s orbit and assume a blocking position next to the warp valleys leading out of the system. At that point, it will be up to the forces on the ground – to us – to make sure that there is something worth saving when the fleet is reinforced and comes back.”
Before First Contact, human strategists and science-fiction writers had ass
umed an enemy who gained control of a planet’s orbitals would enjoy total supremacy. Ground defenses could do little to prevent orbital strikes that would utterly wreck a world’s biosphere; dropping large rocks on its surface would do the trick. The realities of Starfarer combat were different, however. Because of the simple but strictly-enforced rules imposed by the Elder Races, space-borne attackers had a limited choice of weapons they cold deploy against a planetary target. ‘Dinosaur-killer’ asteroids, nuclear or kinetic devices above one kiloton in yield, and energy weapons beyond certain numbers and intensities were all outlawed. Those rules put starships at a disadvantage when exchanging volleys with ground installations, which had many fewer restrictions. The best way to handle those installations was to send troops down to take them out.
Without Sixth Fleet providing cover, and even after its orbital fortresses were destroyed, Parthenon-Three and its twenty-four Planetary Defense Bases could hold off the Viper fleet. For a while, at least, assuming the ground forces protecting them did their duty.
“That is all.”
Someone shouted “Oorah!” Others echoed the battle cry, but Fromm remained silent; his mind was too busy mulling over things. Terrain, fields of fire, logistics, the men and women he would send out to do or die. The basic tools of war.
Concentrating on the details made it easier to ignore the big picture, especially when the big picture was almost too terrible to contemplate.
Eleven
Sixth Fleet, Parthenon System, 165 AFC
From a merely human perspective, space combat is silent and lonely. Even in ‘tight’ formations, ships are too far apart to be seen with the naked eye. Missile launches are all but invisible even in the infrared spectrum, and beam weapons for the most part produce brief bursts of illumination, when they produce anything at all. An outside observer would be unable to tell a battle was happening – until the enemy volleys started impacting on his position, producing a far more impressive – although still deathly quiet – show.
Warp Marine Corps- The Complete Series Page 49
