Warp Marine Corps- The Complete Series

by C. J. Carella

  The troops came out of their vehicles and got to work setting up a hasty defense. The LAVs retreated back a ways and positioned themselves hull-down, only the tops of their turrets protruding from view. Fromm thought about using camo netting to hide the company, but dismissed the idea. He wanted the area force fields deployed and working, and they would be detected right away by the Vipers. The first ambush had been risky enough, keeping their energy shields down until the enemy was nearly on top of their positions, and that kind of trick was unlikely to work twice. The alien assault troopers might be dumb, but the expert systems leading them were smart enough to learn from their previous mistakes.

  His troops had just enough time to dig in and prepare to receive the enemy. Strips of explosive ‘diggers’ did most of the work, blasting holes into the rocky soil that the soldiers improved with their classic entrenching tools. A mile behind them, a company from the Volunteers were working on a secondary line of defense. Fromm hoped they wouldn’t need it. Their current position was the narrowest point in the pass, barely wide enough to deploy a squad in a line, the place where his company could concentrate the most fire, where the enemy would have to concentrate and take fire from up high for pretty much the entire length of their formation.

  It was still a matchup between a regiment and a company. Fromm concentrated on the positive. It was a lightly-armed regiment. This particular group only had three field generators in support, and no heavy weapons other than their rocket launchers. Their lasers outranged his Marines’ small arms, but that wouldn’t matter here; the twisting pass wouldn’t allow direct fire from more than three, four hundred yards. And he had two artillery batteries backing him up.

  The Vipers’ fireflies began to shoot down drones as the enemy force approached. Somewhere ahead of him, the main gun of one of the LAVs opened up, the stream of gravitons making a thunderous sound as it warped space-time on its way to the target.

  The battle was joined.

  * * *

  The ETs’ lasers were like a rainbow.

  At least that was how they looked to Russell; his imp turned the normally invisible energy streams into lines of red, yellow and green, color-coded to indicate how close they were to his position. Red was the worst, of course. And there was a lot of red.

  When the red lines became dots, it meant they were aimed straight at you, and you ducked, even if you had three force fields between you and them, because you never knew if one of those beams was going to punch through them and punch your ticket. The alien bastards were going continuous beam at the moment, pouring it on in other words, massive amounts of energy concentrated on a point a couple millimeters wide, and the area force fields started to flicker and sparkle when multiple beams converged on them. Somewhere down the line, the status icon of a trooper from First Platoon went yellow. Morales, one of the boots. The poor bastard hadn’t remembered to duck and gotten tagged. He wasn’t dead, but your icon didn’t go yellow from a first-degree burn or a scratch. Somebody had put a hurt on him.

  The detached part of Russell that dealt with such things processed the information and set it aside. The rest of him was busy servicing targets in between ducking lasers, shooting at designated aiming points just like the Vipers were. Aim at the virtual dot and fire when ordered: his 20mm shield buster hit the Viper’s area field at the same time as a grenade from Nacle, opening a temporary breach that Gonzo filled with a long burst from his ALS-43. Most rounds were wasted on the shield, but a handful made it through and potted an ET who’d stepped out of cover, and that was enough to send him to hell, personal force field or not.

  Fucking ETs. Behind their area field, it took an entire fire team to get one of them, more like two when you were talking about regular Marine infantry. Russell and his team were more heavily armed than the average leatherneck, but chewing through the enemy defenses still took some doing.

  First Squad’s LAV opened up over their heads, firing behind a massive boulder that added its bulk to the vehicle’s own force field and composite armor. Its 30mm grav cannon was part of a volley aimed at a Viper field genny. Knocking those out would make killing the ETs a lot easier. There was no big boom among the scurrying scaly critters filling up the pass, though; no joy this time.

  Russell got another target, and he and his buddies dutifully tagged it. The Viper staggered but made it behind cover, and his alien pals’ lasers got through the platoon’s big shield before being stopped by the squad’s portable one; everyone in the fire team ducked before that. The aliens were getting closer, down to three hundred yards. Some artillery would be nice just about now, but Russell hadn’t seen any explosions overhead for a while. Things must be getting livelier on the other side of the valley, where a couple alien divisions were chasing the rest of the 101st all over the place. He’d chanced a peek during a lull in the action and he’d watched some short-lived drone footage. The second wave of Vipers had included a company of Turtles. Light tanks, small and not even as tough as a LAV, let alone a Stormin’ Norman, but a lot more dangerous than the leg infantry they’d mostly been fighting so far. That wasn’t going to be any fun.

  He ducked as multiple red dots joined together towards him. The portable force field dissolved in a shower of colorful sparks and a chunk of rock over his head exploded as a laser superheated it and turned it into a good imitation of a hand grenade. Fragments peppered everyone, but their personal shields kept them in one piece.

  The squad’s portable shield didn’t come back.

  “Drained battery,” Gonzo said while he fired a short burst before ducking for cover.

  “I got it,” Nacle called out; the Mormon started crawling towards the genny, a boxy contraption they’d set on the ground some five yards behind their position. It would take him about a minute to grab a power pack from the supply box and replace the spent one, and Russell and Gonzo couldn’t hunker down and wait that long. The squad’s fire computer was calling out more targets; they were going to have to do without a shield and start shooting. All in a day’s work.

  “Ready?”

  “Ready,” Gonzo said, sounding as happy as Russell felt.

  Tango at two-fifty meters. Another rocket-launching mother lover. Russell and Gonzaga leaned out and let him have it, full bursts and a 20mm plasma round that reached out and tore the fucker apart – just as he ripple-fired a full load of missiles their way. Russell had just enough time to see a wall of flame blossoms smash against the platoon’s area force field before a leaker got to his unprotected fighting hole.

  The world turned white, then black.

  He was on his hands and knees, blood filling his mouth, clogging his nose. Everything hurt. He hawked, snorted and spat until he could breathe again, ignoring the bloody phlegm dripping on the inside of the helmet and running down his chin. It took him a moment to remember who he was and what was going on, and another moment to query his imp and get a status check. Green. Well, greenish. He had a mild concussion, but the nanomeds were on the job. Nothing else was broken, other than his Iwo: the infantry weapon had taken the brunt of the explosion, and it was no longer functional.

  Russell checked on the rest of his fire team next. Gonzo’s icon was yellow. A piece of his own body armor had spalled under the explosion. The fragment of highly-refractory carbon-ceramic alloy had stabbed him in the chest and perforated a lung. The wound was being serviced by the nanomeds but it was going to take a full regen tank to fix. Nacle had been knocked silly by the overpressure but was back on the job. By the time Russell regained his bearings, the squad’s force field was active again.

  Two bubblehead corpsmen put Gonzo on a static lift stretcher and crawled away, the stretcher floating an inch off the ground. He’d be all right, assuming their position didn’t get overrun.

  “Nacle, check on Gonzo’s Alsie,” Russell ordered. According to his imp, the ALS-43 was in working order, but it was best to be sure.

  “On it.” Nacle crawled to the spot where the Automatic Launch System had been flung aside
when the Viper missile volley had blasted their position. The fighting hole had been chewed up to hell; Russell and Gonzo were lucky to be alive.

  “It looks good, Russet,” the kid said after a quick manual check. They’d all cross-trained on the squad’s weapons, just for occasions like this.

  “All right. Hand me your Iwo. The All-Good’s yours for now. You know what to do.”

  “Kill bodies, oorah.”

  “Yep.”

  At some point, the Vipers’ leading field genny had been taken out, and the Vipers had been showered with 100mm mortar munitions. There was at least a company’s worth of dead ETs in front of Russell’s sector, and the live ones were all hunkering down while the last alien field projector reached them. He picked out a tango who wasn’t as well-covered as he thought, and he and Nacle sent him to hell, followed by another, and another. They scored five stepped-on kills and half a dozen probables before the rest were saved by their replacement shield. They weren’t the only ones reaping aliens, either. The Vipers were having a pretty bad day.

  There were five yellow, two red and two black icons on the company’s roster, though, and those guys were having the worst day you could have.

  “Getting hot in here,” Russell muttered as he opened up on the next target.

  Sixth Fleet, Parthenon System, 165 AFC

  “Instruct Sixth Fleet to commence warp transit,” Admiral Givens said, nearly choking on the words.

  For two days, her ships and Parthenon-Three’s defenses had traded salvos with the Viper armada. Losses had been high on both sides, but they were becoming unsustainable for the Americans. All the STL monitors had fallen; the orbital defense ships were tough, but they lacked warp shields and they’d been taken down one by one. One orbital fortress had broken apart under the Vipers’ relentless hammering and the remaining five were all heavily damaged.

  Sixth Fleet hadn’t fared much better. Three battlecruisers were gone, along with one third of her frigates and destroyers. The fact that the enemy had lost three times as many ships did little to change the realities of the situation. To stay any longer meant to die in place, and her orders were to preserve Sixth Fleet as a fighting force. She’d pushed things to the limit, and perhaps a bit beyond it.

  The Fleet Operations crew grimly followed her orders. They knew they were leaving Parthenon-Three to the aliens’ tender mercies. Each Planetary Defense Base packed as much firepower as a dreadnought, and they would keep the enemy fleet at bay, but only until the alien ground forces took them out.

  Sixth Fleet entered warp while under fire for the second time in a few days. Two destroyers were lost in the process. More deaths on Givens’ conscience. Warp ghosts howled at her for a brief eternity before she and the rest of the formation emerged one light minute away, far enough to be safe from enemy pursuit, and close enough to remain a threat and block any attempts to reach the warp valleys that would let the enemy attack other systems.

  The enemy spent two hours blasting another orbital fortress into a burning ruin before they executed their own warp jump, heading back to a rendezvous point where they would meet their supply fleet. Another milk run, Givens realized. They would make repairs, reload their massive missile boxes, and come back. Their new weapons and tactics were more logistics-dependent than normal. Something could come of that, although she couldn’t risk trying anything fancy at the moment. Sixth Fleet would have to lick its wounds while it waited for reinforcements.

  And if those reinforcements didn’t come in time, Parthenon-Three would fall. Givens didn’t think she could abandon thirty million people to their fate. The temptation to launch a warp-kamikaze attack was strong, but she knew it would be worse than futile. Unlike the Lampreys at Melendez, the enemy here would not be caught off-guard. And the useless sacrifice would doom every world down the warp-chains leading out of Parthenon System.

  Admiral Givens left the TFCC and headed towards her cabin.

  She needed to scream and break something, and she couldn’t do it where the crew might see.

  Parthenon-Three, 165 AFC

  The Vipers finally got tired of dying and broke away.

  Retreating while stuck in a decisive engagement was tough, but the aliens performed the maneuver as well as anybody Fromm had ever fought, using their dwindling supplies of fireflies to keep the Marine drones at bay and pulling back to where artillery could no longer be efficiently targeted on them. In so doing, they abandoned the pass without achieving anything other than filling it with their corpses.

  Charlie Company hadn’t budged from its starting position. His own butcher’s bill hadn’t been very high under the circumstances: ten casualties, including two dead; five of the wounded would be back on active duty within twenty-four hours. The aliens had lost well over four hundred KIA. Most combat units would lose cohesion after that sort of rough handling, but the Viper assault troopers were stubborn.

  Fromm shook his head. He was getting tired of fighting suicide troops. The Lampreys would have never kept coming into the pass once they realized surprise had been lost. From what he’d heard about the Imperium, it also wasn’t in the habit of shoving troops into meat grinders. That sort of warrior culture was usually found among barbarians, usually pre-Starfaring ones.

  Or humans, he conceded. CRURON 56 had proven that at Melendez System. By the same token, if holding the pass required him to endure those losses, he would do it, and his Marines would stand by him. It helped when the only alternative to fighting was death, of course. The Vipers didn’t take prisoners.

  He was still watching the last enemy forces as they disengaged, taking more casualties along the way, when a FLASH message arrived. The news helped explain the sudden decision by the Vipers to pull back. Sixth Fleet had been pushed away. The enemy would be able to operate closer to the planet, and to drop more troops. No sense in taking losses when they would soon be able to storm the Marines’ positions in overwhelming force.

  A virtual meeting with all company and attachment officers was scheduled for the morning. Fromm hoped they would be able to hammer out a plan that wasn’t doomed to failure.

  Death he could handle. Failure was unacceptable.

  New Washington, District of Nebraska, Earth, 165 AFC

  The JCS were getting a little riled up.

  Tyson Keller watched the assembly in stony silence. Nobody shied away from his gaze, a big difference from the cabinet meetings he usually attended; the Joint Chiefs of Staff were made of sterner stuff, and they might respect Tyson but weren’t scared of him. They were all fighting commanders who’d gotten their stars the old-fashioned way, even the Army Chief, who was the low man on the totem pole, given that the universe belonged to the Navy and the gyrenes. Hell of a thing, in Tyson’s opinion, but what could you do? In any case, even the Army Chief of Service wasn’t really afraid of him; you didn’t make this far without a full set of balls, even if two of the JCs were female.

  “This diversion of resources could be disastrous, Mister President,” the Vice Chairman said. Admiral DuPont had started out in the wet navy before First Contact, and, ironically enough, had been one of the few carrier guys who’d adapted to the Space Navy’s battleship tactics. Ironically, because he was now arguing against the introduction of carrier operations to space combat. Tyson figured that a hundred and fifty years of active service later, he was too hidebound to even consider carriers something other than an antiquated, useless concept, about as applicable to modern warfare as galleys had been in the 20th century.

  “You are talking about re-tasking the better part of three support squadrons at the last minute, and hoping an untried combat platform will perform as advertised,” DuPont continued. “Which is highly doubtful. Sir.”

  “I strongly disagree,” the Marine Corps Commandant said. He was another Pre-Contact Ancient who’d distinguished himself at Fallujah back in the day. “The fleet exercises have all been successful and exceeded even our most optimistic estimates. I think the Langley Project is a go, if we give
it enough support. All the elements are in place, except for logistics, and, frankly, two more battlecruiser squadrons, which is what we’d be replacing with the Carrier Strike Group, are not going to make a crucial difference.”

  The rest of the JCs looked askance at the lone Marine; they usually tried to present a united front when meeting with the Commander in Chief. But the Langley Project had been the Marines’ show, mostly because the Navy had given up on it early on. Things would change as soon as the new tech proved its worth, of course, but Tyson and the President would help keep the ensuing turf wars down to a dull roar. This wasn’t the time for that kind of bullshit, not when the human race was two, maybe three defeats away from being exterminated like so much vermin.

  The Chairman spoke up. “Mister President. I agree with General Forsythe that Project Langley looks promising. On paper. It even appears as if we might be able to deploy the… Starfighters, I guess, deploy them in enough numbers to make a difference. But I don’t know if Parthenon-Three is the right place to deploy them.” Admiral Carruthers’ opinion was always worthy of respect, of course. The man had fought and won the first two conflicts against Starfarers. “The Navy has a tradition and a future,” he quoted. “If Langley is indeed successful, we should try to use it to our maximum advantage, to extract as much benefit from it as possible. After we use the carriers in combat, strategic surprise will be lost.”

  President Hewer stared steadily at the top brass as he spoke. “We have next to nothing to put up against the Vipers’ thrust at Parthenon. Four warp transits from our doorstep, Admiral. Do we have enough conventional forces to stop them? What good is preserving strategic surprise if we lose the whole damn war?”

  Carruthers looked down. Everyone knew the score. They were throwing every hull they could scare up into the relief force, the so-called Seventh Fleet. They were even going to commission the first Pantheon-class superdreadnought, the Zeus, which was less than eighty-percent operational. At this point, if it could maneuver and it could fire at least some of its guns, it was considered good to go. But you couldn’t assemble a fleet from scratch. The new ships’ crews were mostly reactivated veterans riding herd over the current conscript class. And Fifth Fleet, which was supposed to serve as the core of the new formation, was still in terrible shape. Most of those warships were too heavily damaged to return to combat in time to make a difference.