Warp Marine Corps- The Complete Series

by C. J. Carella

  The hover-truck came to a reluctant stop when Morris planted himself in its way with an upraised hand. The driver raised him on his imp a moment later.

  “This is priority cargo, Staff Sergeant.”

  “Just need to wait a minute, son. Soon as the buses make it through, you can go right ahead.”

  “No need, Sergeant. I got this.”

  It took Morris a second to figure out what the Guard driver meant, and by then it was too late. His shouted warning was lost in the roar of the truck’s fan nacelles as the Guardsman gunned his engines for all they were worth, raising his vehicle fifteen feet off the ground and allowing him to go over the obstructing slow-moving buses.

  In most other places, that would have just been a bad idea. The asshole kid managed to veer to Morris and Lemon’s left, sparing them from the torrent of pressurized air that would have crushed them to the ground, but he was still risking damage to the buses and their passengers. The driver was counting on crossing the road quickly enough to avoid it, but that was how accidents happened.

  The other, more important problem, was that this particular crossroads was on a slight rise, only barely masked from enemy fire by a nearby hill. The fifteen-foot climb put the truck clear over the top of the terrain obstacles that kept the road in defilade and relatively safe from direct fire.

  Even so, what happened next took a lot of bad luck. Bad luck that a Viper gunner scanning the area through the sights of a hi-power laser cannon spotted the sudden motion from six or seven miles away. Worse luck that the ET made a snapshot during the two-second window before the truck dipped down out of sight. Morris’ father had been fond of saying ‘Bad luck is the universe’s way to let you know your limitations.’ The Guard kid never got to find out just how unlucky he’d been. He had just cleared the Post Road, managing not to do more than scratch the paintwork on one of the buses, and begun to descend when his truck got hit.

  Morris was still shouting after him when a blinding flash of pure white washed over him.

  He found himself lying on his back with no idea how he’d gotten there. His ears were ringing but he thought he could hear the roaring-crackling sound of a big fire. There was a salty-metallic taste in his mouth. Everything hurt. The smell of burning things got through his helmet’s filters: diesel fuel and electrical fires and something else, something that he feared was the stench of seared human flesh.

  When he opened his eyes, he saw thick columns of greasy black smoke drifting in the wind. He ran a quick diagnostics check before moving; his headset was still working properly, and he’d kept up on his imp’s MedAlert software. A few seconds later, he got the results: two cracked rib that were going to hurt like a mother as soon as he tried to get up, a sprained ankle, and a bad case of whiplash. His nano-meds were already flooding his bloodstream with painkillers; he’d be able to move and even fight, but he was going to really feel it in the morning.

  Someone was screaming not too far away. Time to get off his ass and help.

  Struggling to his feet hurt as much as he’d expected, painkillers or not. Seeing the true extent of the disaster was worse than any pain.

  The Guard driver had been telling the truth. His fifteen-tonner had been carrying something important. Artillery shells, maybe. Most explosive ordnance was designed not to go off until you wanted it to go off, but a hi-power laser could make all kinds of stuff go boom. The ensuing explosion had occurred a little under five meters above the road. One of the buses had been between Morris and the detonation, which had spared him from the worst of it.

  Three passenger vehicles were off the road, one lying on its side where either the explosion or a sudden swerve had knocked it down; the other’s nose was crumpled around a tree its driver had rammed when he panicked. The bus that had saved Morris’ life had flipped over and was on fire.

  The handful of Volunteers that had been directing traffic were all down, but nobody was seriously hurt, at least according to their status icons. Morris ignored them while he limped towards the burning bus. The wounded and dying civilians inside needed his help.

  Trying to run on a sprained ankle just didn’t work. Climbing over the roof of the overturned vehicle, now effectively a vertical wall but the only way to get to the passengers, was no picnic either. By the time he made it, he was panting under the weight of his battle-rattle.

  Flames were erupting from shattered windows. He felt the heat even under his gloves, and the smoke was overpowering his air filters. He peered through an unbroken window, and thought he saw movement there, although it could just as easily have been more flames. It was hard to see; thermal sights were useless.

  “Gator, get the fuck outta there! It’s gonna blow!” Lemon shouted at him through his imp at max volume, the only reason Morris could hear the words over the crackling fire. He kept looking around, desperately trying to find someone, anybody to save. There’d been children in that bus, children and oldsters too poor to afford rejuv treatments or who’d turned them down for religious reasons. Noncombatants. The people he was supposed to protect.

  “Gator!”

  He crawled over the burning bus, ignoring the way the skin under his knees began to blister. Was someone trying to climb out? By the time he got to that window, only flames waited for him. He thought he heard pounding coming from below, but he wasn’t sure.

  Somebody grabbed Morris from behind and bodily flung him off the bus. The impact made his cracked ribs flare up in pure agony and he blacked out for a bit. He dimly felt himself being dragged on the ground while someone cursed up a storm. Lemon.

  The explosion when the bus’s gasoline tank ignited was muted in comparison to the cargo truck’s immolation, but he heard it clearly. He tried to get up despite the pain, but Lemon held him down, obscuring the view from the road. They both knew that if he saw the burning bus he would rush back towards it.

  “Let it be, man,” Lemon said. “It’s over. Let it be.”

  “Fuck you,” Morris growled. In his mind, he saw Mariah in that bus. He knew she was already safe in New Burbank, but those children in there had been someone’s Mariah.

  “Nothing you coulda done, Gator.”

  The fire continued to crackle and pop. There wasn’t screaming or any other human sounds coming from it.

  He’d never felt so old.

  Sixth Fleet, Parthenon System, 165 AFC

  “PDB Twelve is down, ma’am.”

  The report was five minutes old. At the rate bad news were coming in, Parthenon-Three was probably down to twenty defensive bases instead of twenty-one. The population centers closest to the destroyed PDBs had lost their coverage and had been interdicted and put to the torch. New Caledonia, Lebanon and Balboa: three sleepy colonial towns, mostly involved in farming and light industry, with a population of under a hundred thousand apiece before refugees seeking safety had doubled their numbers. Half a million civilians were now burning to death inside the Viper force domes that had encircled them. A few thousand had managed to escape when the last surviving remnants of the 87th MEU managed to breach one of the domes long enough to allow a lucky few to leave the perimeter, but now both Marines and refugees were being hunted down by the Viper ground forces that had destroyed the local defenses. They weren’t likely to survive very long.

  Another two hundred thousand civilians had been killed by orbital bombardment or ground attacks. The Vipers didn’t dare use their missile swarms or heavy energy salvos on the planet’s surface, but even the sporadic fire allowed under Starfarer conventions would occasionally immolate a building or an entire city block. Those murders would pale in significance as soon as more death domes came online and proceeded to commit genocide in an environmentally-conscious manner.

  The aliens were playing it smart, not risking their capital ships but instead sending destroyers and frigates to support the planetary assault ships while they deployed more troops. The vat-grown semi-sentient clones didn’t take very long to grow, program and send out to fight; the main constraint o
n the attack force was the number of landing pods it could deploy, which appeared to be more than enough to do the job. The enemy armada had made another resupply run a couple of days ago and come back with full bunkers and magazines. Sixth Fleet hadn’t even tried to interfere. Her orders didn’t allow her any discretion in that matter and she understood why. Another hundred-thousand-plus missile volley would inflict irreparable damage on her formation. Sooner or later, though, the Vipers would come to her.

  Probably after the planet was depopulated.

  The thought filled Sondra Givens with rage. Civilians had never been massacred on her watch. That was only supposed to happen over her dead body. The few times when her ship or fleet had arrived too late to prevent such mass killings had been bad enough. To hold a position nearby while human cities burned was a new experience. New, and quickly becoming intolerable.

  “Warp emergence anticipated, ma’am,” Space Watch Specialist Morelos said. “Fifty-three minutes from now. Contact is a single vessel, tentatively identified as a courier.”

  Maybe the incoming boat would announce that the long-promised reinforcements were finally on their way. Admiral Givens didn’t feel very optimistic, though. The possibility that she would be ordered to withdraw and abandon Parthenon – and dozens of worlds further down its linked warp chains – loomed large in her mind. Those fifty minutes went by slowly, the waiting interrupted only by further bad news. No more PDBs fell, but they were all taking damage and the Vipers were landing more troops, sending them down as quickly as they were force-grown to adulthood. Their losses were gruesome but the aliens saw assault troops as no less fungible and expendable than power packs.

  “Emergence detected. Contact identified as courier ship.”

  The tiny corvette, its class demoted to mail-carrying duties many decades ago, appeared within Sixth Fleet’s formation. Its burst transmission uploaded several encrypted missives along with the regular mail, everything from personal messages for crewmembers to the Nebraska Times’ weekly crossword puzzle and newest YouMake uploads.

  “I’m sure it’ll be brimming with good news,” she said glibly. “Promotions all around, maybe even news that this whole thing was a big misunderstanding and we’re at peace with the whole universe.”

  Her comment elicited a few chuckles in the TFCC. Gallows humor was the only source of amusement left.

  She mentally opened the Fleet communiques, dreading what they would contain but making sure she looked detached, even bored as she did. Sobbing uncontrollably and tearing out chunks of her hair would be bad for morale.

  The news was bad enough she wished she could do both those things. The President and the JCS had decided to send a freaking Carrier Strike Group her way, brand-new – experimental – weapon systems whose existence she was hearing of for the first time. There’d been rumors about some wild-eyed project along those lines for quite some time, but nobody had thought it was anywhere near completion.

  Givens read the fighters’ technical specs and mentally added a metric ton of salt to the incredible claims. They sounded much too good to be true. She’d use them, of course. Even if the little fighter craft proved to be only a nuisance, the strike group’s modified assault ships and their destroyer escorts would add to her point defenses, and she needed every last bit of those. She noted they’d even butchered a battlecruiser to serve as the group flagship. What a waste.

  The rest of the reinforcements in the force designated as Task Force 43 were conventional. An obsolete battleship, the last of the Planet-class vessels, which was larger than one of her battlecruisers but had less firepower, armor and shields. Eight light cruisers detached from a so-far peaceful sector, not ideal ships for the massive slugfest to come, but at least their crews were experienced and used to working together. About a dozen light ships, newly-commissioned frigates and destroyers, well-armed and fitted, but crewed by a mixture of reassigned veterans and green spacers that hadn’t had a lot of time to learn the idiosyncrasies of their vessels. A quick review of their stats showed their performance was barely adequate, and would likely be even worse when energy beams started flying in earnest.

  All in all, though, she’d have traded the carriers for the same tonnage of destroyers and frigates, or even assault ships. Boarding actions were forlorn hopes nowadays, but if most of her Marines hadn’t been on P-3, she’d have used them against those missile cruisers, just in case the Vipers had tried to save space by reducing the security complements on their ships. Unfortunately, she didn’t have enough warp-rated troops for even one boarding party, let alone the dozens needed to make a difference.

  The relief force was twenty-four hours away. One more day she’d spend watching a planet die, and hoping there would be something worth saving when she finally took action.

  Fifteen

  Parthenon-Three, 165 AFC

  “Look at them kitties,” Bozo said in near-awe.

  “I see them. Slick, aren’t they?”

  Russell was less impressed with the video feed from the drones orbiting the forward edge of the battle area but Bozeman had never seen the Hellcats in action before. The four-legged war machines hadn’t been around when the new guy in the fire team had been a grunt. They’d only been deployed a couple years ago, and most units still hadn’t gotten them. The 101st’s kitty platoons had arrived after the BLT had been reconstituted last year. After training with them for several months, Russell thought they were neat, but all in all he’d rather be a ground pounder.

  They sure could run fast, though.

  The thirteen surviving ‘cats in Fourth Platoon were conducting a fighting retreat, half of them holding the line while the other half moved to the next fallback position and provided cover for the next dash back. The rear guard greeted the pursuing Vipers with a storm of 15mm rounds and mini-missiles. The snake-spiders dived for cover and returned the favor with their lasers and rocket launchers. For a few furious seconds, a lot of terrain got rearranged without any casualties for either side. Russell knew that happy state of affairs wouldn’t last for long.

  “Any second now,” he muttered; you learned to time the enemy’s reactions after being on the receiving end enough times. “Kitties better start moving.”

  They did. The front line abandoned their positions and bugged out just before the Vipers peppered the area with a short barrage of 89mm mortar bombs. The tangos were still short of real artillery but the third landing force had brought plenty of mortars with them, and they were nasty mothers. The little puffs of smoke and flashes of light going off at thirty feet over their targets looked harmless enough from two klicks away, but Russell had recently learned how nasty the rain of shaped-charge plasma penetrators and hypersonic shrapnel really was at close range. If the Hellcats had waited too long, they would have taken losses, heavy force fields and armor notwithstanding.

  You had to know when to walk away, and when to run, as the old song went. True in war, love, business and gambling. In life, in other words.

  The Eets wasted no time making a forward rush under the cover of their mobile area shields, but the second half of Fourth Platoon was set up and waiting for them. A coordinated volley took out their field genny; and sent a few luckless Vipers to Hell. A moment later, Charlie’s own mortars added to the kill count. The surviving aliens went to ground once again. Russell was willing bet they wouldn’t be so eager to chase the ‘cats next time.

  It would have been great if one of the 101st’s tanks had been around to help out, but the three Normies still running were some ten klicks away and had problems of their own. There were never enough tanks to go around. The Corps fielded a whole three Marine armored brigades, and Russell had never been deployed with any of them. He had no idea what the brass ever did with them. Maybe parade them around New Parris so they could tell themselves what tough sumbitches they all were. An additional seven or eight hundred tanks were scattered in platoon- and company-sized bits among assorted units, and that was it. Which meant Charlie had no armor support at th
e moment.

  “Fuck. Their armor’s rolling in,” Bozo said.

  The enemy had brought its own tanks to play.

  Russell switched his sensor feed to take a wider look and spotted them. Four of the little Turtles, which had turned out to be a joke, and two Dragons, which were anything but.

  The gliding metal mountain coming their way weighed in at some three hundred tons, a tetrahedron roughly thirty feet tall. Its bulk and huge profile made it a dream target. Except said dream target had battleship force fields and armor plating. Only a Normie’s main gun could hope to put a hole on that monster with a single shot. The Dragon also had a dozen weapon systems distributed among weapon pods on each of its three sides, including a souped-up version of a firefly that could destroy dozens of shells or missiles per burst and three 333mm grav-cannon, each of which would punch right through a Schwarzkopf’s glacis plate. Plus a mortar battery’s worth of indirect-fire tubes per side. The Vipers had landed six of those monsters with their last wave. One had gotten caught by a full regimental artillery barrage the day before; it was still burning merrily some fifty klicks west, the thick smoke rising from its funeral pyre visible in the distance. That left five unaccounted for. And they’d found one of them.

  “Designating priority target,” Lieutenant Hansen said over Third Platoon’s channel. Third Platoon’s new CO sounded cool as a cucumber, which helped a bit. The old El-Tee, O’Malley, would have been pissing his pants and probably arguing with higher about conducting a retrograde maneuver just about now. “We’ve got to hit that thing with everything we’ve got. Fire on my command.”

  Everyone acknowledged. Specific weapon and targeting instructions followed. It looked like three of the four platoons in the company were going to throw everything at the Dragon, up to and including the kitchen sink, bad language and evil thoughts. The good news is that no enemy area field generators seemed to have survived to tag along. The bad news was that the Dragon carried his own area shield projector as well as close-in and internal shields. Digging their way into its mechanical guts was going to be a job of work.