“Give him another,” Zimmer ordered. The gennie might still be salvageable; no sense giving the tangos a chance to fix it later.
“On the way.” No force fields attenuated the second shot, and the generator’s power plant let go, the strange matter inside it reacting with the environment to produce a detonation that shook their two-hundred-ton tank from a mile away.
“I felt that,” PFC Jessie Graves commented from the driver’s compartment.
“We’ll reap your souls!” Mira sang. “We’ll drink your BLOOD!”
“Back up!” Zimmer told Jessie as the tank’s threat designator sent an alarm. “Hull-down!”
“Hull-down, aye.”
The tank darted behind a ridge, exposing only its turret. Jessie finished the move as quickly as he could, but a Viper self-propelled gun tagged them a couple of times, its 25mm laser beam making their frontal force field spark in a furious multitude of colors.
“Target!” Zimmer called out, marking the energy cannon.
“Hit!” Scratch one self-prop gun.
The platoon broke contact behind a hill while Charlie Company plastered the Vipers’ vanguard with more mortar-delivered thermobaric goodness, just like Mama used to make. That was good, because Fimbul Winter’s gunnery pack was just about empty and the brief lull in combat would allow its internal stores to cycle a new 50-shot pack into the base of the gun. Their second and last 50-shot pack, as a matter of fact. After you fired all hundred 250mm death-rays in your twin power packs, you needed to head back home and replace them, or wait three hours for the tank’s gluon power plant to recharge one of them. Either way, you’d been busy enough to deserve a break.
Damn, this is beginning to feel like work.
They’d been playing tag with the Vipers for a good four hours, poking them, making them chase the tanks into ambushes set up by the Marine crunchies, and when the aliens were taken care of, going out and doing it all over again. The canyon separating the alien landing zone from Forge Valley was filled with corpses and busted vehicles. Mostly alien, although a fire team from Charlie Company had zigged when they were supposed to zag and eaten a laser volley that hadn’t left enough of the four poor bastards to bury. Other than that, though, the Marines had things go mostly their way, and a Turtle company and half a battalion of infantry had gone to whatever second-rate Valhalla they deserved. Fimbul Winter and her crew had accounted for a good many of the dead.
But the Echo Tangos were getting smarter. A second mini-tank company with a regiment of infantry and self-propelled guns in support was on the job now, and their mobile artillery was making ambushes a lot riskier. Those guns were meant to engage fortifications, but they made fairly effective tank destroyers. Butcher and Bolt, the platoon’s lead tank, had taken a direct hit when a heavy laser got through her shields, and there was a still-glowing crater the size of a dinner plate on its front armor. Its normal 500mm thickness was down to maybe three or four inches on that spot. The next Viper gunner who took a shot at the Normie would make that crater its aiming point. The B & B needed to RTB and get that hole patched, pronto, or her crew would end up on the express train to Valhalla.
With more enemy troops pouring into the hills, the chances that one of their units would end up getting cut off and surrounded were going up fast. Assuming the task force’s commander’s head wasn’t up his ass, he should see that soon.
“We’re breaking contact and returning to base,” Lieutenant Eddie Morrell said through their imps. “The Viper fleet is coming back. A second wave of landings is likely.”
“Roger that.”
“Reap their souls,” Mira sang softly, but her heart clearly wasn’t in it anymore.
They’d all known more ETs were due to arrive; the force they’d been harassing was clearly set up to receive reinforcements. Chances were they would drop enough troops to stop screwing around and finish the job. The casualties the Marines had inflicted had done very little to change the odds.
“We’ll just have to kill more,” Zimmer said, trying to sound confident and just barely pulling it off.
Fourteen
Parthenon-Three, 165 AFC
“The replacements are here, sir,” First Sergeant Goldberg said. “We got four guys from Logistics and one from the engineers, all of them former ‘03s who switched MOS their second time around. “I’ve worked out where to put ‘em, pending your approval.”
Fromm went over the files. The new troops had been moved from non-combat positions in the 101st support units to take the place of the company’s dead and maimed. A moment’s bad luck had cost him five men, an entire fire team, and he wouldn’t have the time to write emails to their families until after the battle for Parthenon-Three was over, not that any mail was moving off-planet at the moment. Between these losses and the casualties suffered during the fight for the southern pass, he was down a squad’s worth of troops and getting enough replacements to fill less than half those empty slots.
“It all looks good to me,” he said, knowing it wasn’t good. Newcomers wouldn’t be welcomed with open arms by soldiers who had lost their buddies. Goldberg had shuffled people around to reform the destroyed fire team and used the replacements to fill in the vacancies he’d created in the process. Each newbie would be paired up with two to four regulars, which would hopefully minimize the inevitable disruption and loss of effectiveness. They’d be seeing combat soon, and combat had a way of increasing unit cohesion – assuming all its members survived, of course.
Under ordinary circumstances, he would have preferred to wait on replacing his losses until current operations were over, but given how desperate the situation was, those extra warm bodies might make the difference between losing more men, or preserving his command. They were spread very thin as it was, and the main event had yet to begin.
The Viper fleet had received reinforcements, including ten more planetary assault ships, and was advancing on Parthenon-Three at a leisurely sub-light pace, daring the Navy to come back and try to stop them. Sixth Fleet wasn’t taking the bait; it hadn’t been reinforced yet, and the outcome of a second round of fighting would risk its total destruction. Which meant the enemy would soon launch a massive ground attack, possibly with orbital support. ETA for the invaders was less than two hours. Fromm had been lucky the news had arrived in time for his company to break off from the running fight and head back to their FOB. Being caught on his own when the second wave landed would have been unfortunate.
“Anything else, Sergeant?”
“Lieutenant O’Malley, sir.”
“I know.” Third Platoon’s commander continued to be the weakest link in the company. He’d gone from leaning on his platoon sergeant to basically dumping the running of the unit on Gunny Wendell’s shoulders. Since most of the weapons platoon had been spread out to support the infantry elements of Charlie Company, O’Malley’s lack of initiative hadn’t been obvious at first, but his handling of the mortars section had made it clear that his promises to mend his ways had been a big load of Bravo Sierra. The supporting fire had been sluggish; Gunny Wendell had been out with the rest of the units, leaving O’Malley in charge, and the lieutenant seemed to be unable to stop dithering at the worst possible times.
Goldberg waited quietly, letting him make up his mind.
“All right,” Fromm finally said. “I’m having O’Malley reassigned to act as our liaison with the militia. Lieutenant Hansen will take over Third Platoon.” Which would leave him without an XO, but he would do better without a second in command than Third Platoon under an officer that couldn’t act in a decisive manner. After this was over, he would make sure O’Malley’s days in the Corps were numbered. But for now, he probably wouldn’t do a lot of harm lording over the militia regiment providing support for his Marines.
Probably.
* * *
“It would have been a whole three minutes out of our way,” Russell groused.
“It’s a hard life, Edison,” Staff Sergeant Dragunov said. “It must
suck to find out the squad’s LAV isn’t your personal vehicle. My heart bleeds for you. Did you actually think we were going to take a detour so you could check on your girlfriend? I oughta give you an NJP just for asking!”
“You are right, Staff Sergeant. No excuse, Staff Sergeant.”
“Damn right. I never expected this kind of bullshit from you, Edison. Now get busy or I’ll make you busy. Get out of my sight.”
Russell had known it’d been an idiotic thing to ask pretty much from the moment the words had come out of his mouth. They’d been moving to their new positions when it’d occurred to him they would be passing mighty close to the witch’s house. So he’d asked to make a pit stop there, with utterly foreseeable results. The rest of the squad would never let him live it down. Russell Edison, the guy who never shouted a girl’s name while fucking, because chances were he’d utter the wrong name, had gone and fallen for some woman. About the only thing that was normal about the whole situation was that he didn’t know the woman’s name.
She put some voodoo hex on me, he thought sourly while he headed to his tent. Warp navigators were crazy, everyone knew that. But this chick was in a class of her own. Unless the other warp-navs simply were better at hiding their true natures; she’d claimed that was the case. He wasn’t sure either way, but he knew he’d never invite one of those spooky bastards to a card game.
The woman still haunted his dreams, three nights later. He’d looked for her, tried a bunch of different ways to get her name, and nothing had worked. The bartender who steered Russell her way was gone, evacuated to New Burbank, and he wasn’t taking any calls. There’d been no liberty since the landings began, so he couldn’t go visit her. Besides, she’d probably had been evacuated with the non-combatants. The disturbing little house where he’d met her would be empty now.
All he had to do now was stop thinking about her.
“I’m sure she’s all right,” Nacle said. The kid was trying to reassure him, confirming Russell’s fear that he had finally hit rock bottom.
“Yeah, sure she will,” Private First Class Bozeman added in the tone of voice of someone who didn’t give a shit. Gonzo’s replacement had been in the infantry a long time ago, and he’d never worked in a weapons platoon before. “Uh, Lance,” he went on. “Do I really have to carry all this crap? This load is like twice what I used to tote back in the day.”
He was bitching about the extra ammo and power packs he would be lugging as soon as they unassed their LAV. The third member of a Guns section fire team got to play cargo mule; that had been Nacle’s job before Gonzo got WIA, and he’d done it without whining about it. Russell couldn’t wait until his buddy was back in action and they could send this FNG somewhere else. Unfortunately the injuries he’d sustained had been too nasty to send him back to the grind, not quite yet.
“Call me Russet, Bozo.”
Bozeman clearly didn’t care for his new nickname, but even on short acquaintance he’d learned that messing with his team leader wasn’t a good idea.
“That’s your job, lugging extra mags and pows” Russell went on. “So load them up, don’t drop them, and help keep the Alsie fed. Your armor will do most of the lifting for you, as long as we got power packs to keep them running. Which we will ‘cause you’ll be carrying them. Understood?”
“Understood.”
“And listen to Nacle; he knows what he’s doing.”
The new guy had a couple more years in the service than Nacle, but after a short stint as an 0311 he’d switched to Logistics, which made him a POG at heart. He’d be fine carrying stuff around, but Russell wasn’t sure how well he’d do when shit got real. He had a bad feeling that Bozo’s real MOS was 1369.
Bozo shrugged but stopped bitching, which was good enough for now. They were setting up on yet another hill; this one overlooked a big patch of forest that the aliens were going to have a hell of time traversing. For a plateau, this valley sure had a lot of hills, Russell thought while he made sure their position had a good field of fire and wasn’t exposed. In all fairness, though, most of the valley’s terrain was flat; they just avoided fighting in those spots because flat terrain was just another name for a kill zone unless you improved it via entrenching tools, digging strips and lots of sweat.
When he was satisfied, Russell glanced up just in time to see it was raining aliens again: thousands of contrails filled the sky. Maybe half of them got shot down before they reached the ground, but there’d been a lot of pods in that wave, and some had been big. Shuttles or dropships, able to carry heavy vehicles and plenty of spares. He glanced around, where Second and Third platoons waited for Echo Tango to show up again. They were deploying a lot deeper into the valley, pretty close to Davistown, because even with more Army pukes moving forward, trying to hold the western portion against a multi-divisional force was a little too suicidal even for Devil Dogs. The new plan was to try to sucker the leading Viper units into a series of ambushes leading up to Davistown, which was being turned into a stronghold by the 101st engineer platoon, with lots of local help.
Russell wouldn’t have minded fighting inside nicely-prepared positions with lots of boresighted heavy guns in support, but the battalion landing team would continue to ‘conduct mobile defense operations,’ playing tag with the tangos in other words, which was fun until they caught you. The Army and Guard would get to fight in town. Which was fair enough; their vehicles were a lot slower, so they couldn’t run rings around the aliens.
Of course, if the shit hit the fan and the dogfaces got it stuck in, it’d be the Marines’ job to extricate them. That was how life in the Suck went. You learned to love it, or at least live with it.
* * *
After the skirmish at Lover’s Leap, playing traffic cop for a while suited Morris Jensen just fine. He told Lemon that being bored beat being shot at by a country mile just minutes before their routine job turned into a matter of life and death.
“Yeah,” Lemon agreed. “That fight was a bit much.” The two old-timers were probably the only members of the squad who knew how lucky they’d been, getting into a close-range firefight with high-tech aliens without losing anybody.
At the moment, he and the rest of the squad were keeping the steady stream of trucks delivering war supplies to Davistown flowing in an orderly fashion. It normally wouldn’t be all that difficult, since there was only one highway connecting the town with New Burbank, but the supply units were making use of every country lane, dirt road and game trail wide enough to accommodate their cargo vehicles, and when those secondary roads converged, you started getting traffic jams. And traffic jams required someone to unsnarl them.
“Yeah, too much like old times,” Morris said, picking up the conversation where they’d left off after he waved through a mini-convoy of U-hauls that somebody had drafted into service. Transport, whether it was wheeled, GEV or grav-engine, was in short supply. The Army and National Guard were pushing in a division’s worth of troops into the valley, with two more digging in at Miller’s Crossing. That many troops required a lot of supplies, and it had to be delivered by ground. All air travel had been suspended, courtesy of Viper energy cannon placed on some of the mountains bordering Forge Valley. Anything that poked its head too high up was inviting a laser or graviton blast.
“No casualties, though.”
“We got lucky.”
The Viper infiltrators at Lover’s Leap had been caught at the worst possible time, and someone on higher had been on the ball and hammered the ridge with artillery while the militia kept the aliens fixed in place. A squad of Marine snipers had joined the fray shortly afterwards, setting up and firing their 10mm lasers from three klicks away, and their accurate and lethal shots had killed more tangos in five minutes than Morris’ squad had managed in half an hour. By the time the aliens had withdrawn, they’d left some fifty bodies behind, and none of the Volunteers had gotten so much as a scratch, except for Sebastian Wilkes; the dumbass had faceplanted while trying to switch positions and ende
d up with a concussion despite having his helmet screwed on tight. If those aliens had managed to get organized, they would have eaten his squad for breakfast.
“Hope it’s the last time.”
“Me too,” Morris said, but he wasn’t counting on it. He glanced up; the last big landing swarm had arrived a few hours ago, but you occasionally saw a fresh bunch of pods coming down. Earlier that morning, he’d seen an actual enemy starship, and that had scared the ever-living crap out him. It hadn’t been very big, maybe a frigate or destroyer, but damn if it didn’t look huge up in the sky. It’d opened up on the PDB at point-blank range, and broken off, trailing flames and smoke after return fire tore it a new one. The spectacle before the alien boat vanished back into the stratosphere had been awe-inspiring. It’d hammered in the fact that an entire enemy fleet was orbiting Parthenon-Three. The only reason those ships hadn’t turned the whole planet into a close approximation of Hell was that it was against the laws of the Galactic Elders, which Starfarers treated as if coming from the Almighty Himself.
Even that wouldn’t save them if Sixth Fleet didn’t come back and booted the aliens from the system.
“What’s this happy horseshit?” Lemon growled, snapping Morris out of his funk.
A second bunch of U-hauls were stopped on Rural Route 3 while several school buses filled with refugees from the outlying areas went northeast on the Post Road, headed to I-10 and New Burbank. It was slow going; the buses were old, in poor repair, and overloaded, so they were rolling on at a bit over twenty miles an hour. But what had prompted Lemon’s comment was a ground-effect fifteen-ton truck, painted Guard olive-green; the lone military vehicle had gone off-road and was speeding along RR-3, hovering over the recently-harvested fields in a way ordinary wheeled transport could never hope to do without getting stuck. That was well enough, but whoever was in the driver’s seat would still have to wait until the buses had gone past the intersection.
Warp Marine Corps- The Complete Series Page 56
