Warp Marine Corps- The Complete Series

by C. J. Carella

  She shared her insights with her fellow pilots and received their feedback like a warm wave of thought and emotion. The other conscious humans inside the ship felt vague echoes from that communication, especially the carrier’s navigators, who were also communing with warp space, although at a lower level than fighter pilots. Most of them mistook the overheard thoughts as normal warp-induced hallucinations. Once again, she wondered what she and the others had become. Their neural pathways had been rewritten and changed irrevocably: after the pilots’ last physicals, the higher ups had been downright terrified; scuttlebutt was that they’d almost shut down the program before the fighters had proven their worth during practice runs. They couldn’t afford to toss aside a weapon that might turn the tide, however, so they’d buried the truth under a sea of euphemisms.

  Bad odds.

  There was a chorus of agreement, tempered with bravado and punctuated with oorahs and a smattering of hooyas from the former Navy personnel in the Space Wing. She sent out an oorah of her own. Between her stint as a ground-pounder and the past year’s ordeals, she was a Marine now. And Marines laughed at bad odds.

  Emergence.

  Reality felt cold and full of sharp edges. Even the air she breathed had an acrid aftertaste. The sense of communion with her fellow pilots died down but didn’t disappear. Every time she went into warp with them, it grew a little stronger.

  “Wing meeting scheduled for 0530 hours,” her imp reminded her. Fifteen minutes from now. A final briefing before they went to war.

  She was ready. Eager even.

  They all were.

  Parthenon-Three, 165 AFC

  Yet another ambush worked like a charm.

  The Viper infantry chasing Fromm’s troops outran its support vehicles and blundered into overlapping fusillades from two concealed platoons on their flanks. Fromm ordered an about-face; a dozen combat vehicles reversed course and shredded the disorganized and demoralized Vipers with direct fire, scattering them. A squad of Hellcats emerged from hiding and ran down the survivors, mowing down any groups that tried to rally or stand their ground.

  The vat-grown assault troops had literally been born yesterday, or at most a couple days before that, and their implanted neural programming wasn’t enough to instill anything but a crude understanding of tactics. Their computerized commanders only held a limited repertoire of decision trees in their data banks, and they couldn’t anticipate every possible eventuality. In this case, they’d decided that maintaining contact with the mobile force tormenting their southern flank was more important than waiting for support vehicles to catch up with the pursuers. The result had been entirely foreseeable: several enemy companies had been savaged without inflicting any losses on the Americans.

  On the other hand, the Vipers had troops to spare, and two regiments were following the doomed vanguard, pouring through every possible pathway. Water doesn’t have to be smart to fill all available crevices, and the aliens only needed to be smart enough to keep coming until they managed to pin down and destroy Fromm’s units.

  His mortar section put a hundred-plus bomblets between the aliens and his dismounted troops, allowing them to get back into their vehicles and retreat. It would have been nice to have some real artillery to hammer the aliens, but all the available tubes were at Miller’s Crossing, trying to stop the main attack. Fromm’s forces had relieved some of the pressure on the defenders in the north, and he hoped that this last counterattack would convince the Vipers to send even more troops after him. One could argue they weren’t doing much good at all, that the aliens had enough troops to conduct a full-scale assault on the eastern gap while retaining enough surplus forces to chase down his two-company force. On the other hand, he was tying up more aliens here than he would from inside a trench line in the northeast end of the valley.

  After breaking contact, Fromm sent his drones forward to keep an eye on the enemy, mindful he only had a few of them left. The flying ‘bots stayed out of swatter range and managed to survive the few fireflies still in play to keep him appraised of the situation. If the Vipers stopped chasing him, he would go back and hit them again. It’d be risky, and even the dumb AIs coordinating the enemy might manage to mousetrap his force. But that was part of the job.

  The drones orbited the hilly terrain on the southern edge of the Valley. The two enemy regiments were being reinforced by what appeared to be an entire brigade, more than enough troops to block every route north. Fromm didn’t see many mobile force fields and only a company of Turtle light armor in support. His forces had the edge in mobility and local firepower, and he’d apparently provoked the aliens into committing troops they might need for their primary assault. The half a division the Vipers were sending off to chase him had been removed from the main event as surely as if he’d shot them all dead.

  Shooting them all dead would be even better, of course. Pity he was too outnumbered and outgunned to do that.

  No matter. The enemy had taken the bait, and he was going to make them bleed every inch of way.

  * * *

  “Shit, those are Turtles,” Russell said, watching the view from their LAV’s sensors. The little alien tanks had crested a hill and were on the platoon’s left flank. The Land Assault Vehicles turned their turrets towards them and engaged the unexpected targets at twelve hundred yards. Problem was, the Turtles were shooting, too.

  “Those clown cars can’t hit shit, Russet,” Dragunov replied. “Keep your…”

  That was when they got hit.

  He’d been through it too many times already, but you never got used to waking up after getting fucked up by enemy incoming. Russell could see out of a huge hole where the LAV’s turret used to be. A bunch of missile contrails flew overhead. His whole body felt numb; the last time he’d felt like that, about thirty percent of his body mass had been gone. He was scared to run his diagnostics app.

  Someone was moaning nearby; that got him moving.

  Russell sat up while he queried his imp. His bio status was nominal for a change, just a few bruises when the LAV plowed into the ground at a good eighty mph. He checked the fire team next while he turned towards Bozo, whose icon was yellow fading into red.

  Nacle’s status icon was black. Russell forced himself to ignore that. Black was beyond help. Yellow-red wasn’t.

  The LAV had eaten a burst of high-caliber railgun rounds, dense metal traveling at hypersonic speeds, five or six rounds hitting within a fraction of a second from each other. At least one of those had hit the main engine; the rest had blown off the turret and the poor bastard manning it. Sheer luck that none of the rounds had gone bouncing around the compartment; that would have killed everyone. As it was, a third of the squad was down. Lots of red and black icons.

  Bozo had been sitting quietly for a change when a fragment had ripped off his left arm at the shoulder. Even his nano-meds weren’t enough to staunch the flow of blood from the wound; he was going fast. Russell fumbled around his belt and came up with a first-aid ‘glue gun.’ He sprayed a thick coat of coagulant gel over the spurting hole. Bozo whimpered and passed out, and for a moment Russell thought he’d lost him, but the icon stayed red; out of commission, but alive.

  Time to check on the others. The LAV’s driver was dead; two railgun rounds had gone through him like a chainsaw. Staff Sergeant Dragunov had bought it too; a fragment had blasted a hole in his helmet big enough to put a fist through. Two other guys from the squad were down for the count but stable. And Nacle was gone from the waist up; Russell only knew it was him after identifying everyone else inside the LAV. That left six guys who’d gotten knocked around but were still functional.

  The deaths were just data points right now. They had a mission, and he was the highest-ranked fucker left standing.

  First, figure out what was going on. A dead LAV was a big target, but they weren’t taking fire at the moment, so maybe they were out of sight for now. Sooner or later, they were going to have to get the fuck out; a stopped vehicle was a bullet magn
et. Russell peeked outside via his imp. The combined take of any drones still alive and observation posts back at their rally point gave him a clear picture of what was going on outside the smoking ruins of the vehicle. The view plain sucked.

  The LAV had fallen into a ravine between two hills, which was about the luckiest thing that could have happened under the circumstances. They were out of line of sight from the battle, which was raging a good half a klick from their current position. The company and the Army dog-faces had pushed the Vipers back and were making sure the survivors didn’t get any bright ideas. The Turtles that had fucked them up were gone. The only alien mini-tank Russell could see was engulfed in fire. The enemy had scattered but was regrouping. The American counterattack had taken a big chomp out of ET, but they were going to have to pull back or risk getting enveloped. Two companies just couldn’t cover enough frontage even on these narrow gaps, and more Vipers were coming.

  “Get the wounded out,” he told the squad’s survivors. “We’ve got a ride coming.”

  An Army ambulance was heading their way, moving as low as its ground-effect engine allowed, and darting from cover to cover. Russell approved; there were no rules against shooting at medevac vehicles. By the time the ambulance arrived and they’d loaded up the wounded, Charlie and the Army pukes were heading back the way they’d come, leaving a trail of dead Eets on their wake. They’d poked the aliens, and now they were getting poked back. Russell knew there were a couple of ambushes waiting for the ETs if they kept following them.

  Problem was, it looked like the Vipers were sending enough troops their way to absorb the losses and keep coming.

  Seventeen

  Parthenon-Three, 165 AFC

  The Tangos were breaking through.

  Morris had been in enough fights to have a feel for when things were going to hell. The mad scramble down I-10 after the loss (and destruction) of Davistown had been the next best thing to a rout. He remembered the ride on the back of an open cargo truck only as a series of flashes: broken-down vehicles scattered on both sides of the road, where they’d been towed or pushed out of the way. Dead cattle lying on an open field. A family of six making their way on foot, baggage slung over their heads, waving desperately at the vehicles that passed them by without stopping. A trio of Buford tanks going towards the fighting; those poor bastards were probably goners by now.

  He and the rest of the Volunteers had gotten three hours to rest and then they’d been put back on the line. Ten minutes after they’d assembled at their fighting positions, the Vipers had come a-knocking.

  The ETs didn’t have much artillery in play, but what they had was pounding on their lines, and enough leakers were getting through the shields to produce a steady trickle of casualties. And a lot of the troops in the fighting positions next to Morris weren’t doing much fighting.

  Morris had replaced his Iwo with an ALS-43 its previous owner no longer had any use for, and was laying down a steady stream of armor-piercing and explosive rounds on the Vipers crowding the slope below his entrenchment, some less than five hundred yards away. A battery of four-barreled anti-tank lasers not too far behind him was also in the game, and most of the Volunteers’ platoon as well, even Lemon, who was making up for his skedaddling talk by fighting like hell. Units whose experienced NCOs were kicking people’s asses into shape were doing okay. But too many positions were only generating sporadic fire, effectively unaimed, grunts lifting their guns over their heads and aiming through their imps without exposing themselves. Which was fine if you were using a beam weapon, but Iwos generated recoil, and if the guns weren’t properly braced against your shoulder their shots would scatter all over creation.

  Too many weekend soldiers had joined the Guard and the militias only for the tax breaks and treated training like a joke, because they’d been certain that a core planet was never going to be invaded, not as long as there was a Navy to keep the aliens away. Granted, Morris had moved to Parthenon believing the exact same thing, but even so he’d made an effort to be ready for the worst, because life had a way to turn your expectations into a bitter joke. Too many hadn’t, and they were paying for their lack of imagination with everyone’s lives.

  “Damnit,” he muttered as he switched targets and hit an advancing bunch of Vipers on its flank. Two or three of them went down for good and the rest scrambled for cover like so many cockroaches. He used his imp to identify the platoon of slackers manning that stretch of the line, and broke into its command channel. “Listen, assholes!” he shouted at them. “You stand up and start pouring it on, or I’m going to walk up and machinegun your asses into hamburger! Do you fucking copy?”

  “Who the fuck is this?” someone shouted back. It was a lieutenant – a fucking Marine lieutenant –huddled in the trench along with a bunch of Army troops, all rear echelon assholes that had somehow been thrown into the line. Someone must have thought a Devil Dog officer would be just the thing to motivate those troops, but this happy asshole – he ID’d him as one Randolph O’Malley – was hunkered down with them, not even firing his weapon. Morris had masked his call sign, a trick that would only work as long as an O-3 or higher didn’t get involved, but in a few minutes none of this would matter. Except he would be damned if he was going to let those cowards hide in their hole like scared children while there were aliens to kill.

  “I repeat, identify yourself,” the chickenshit El-Tee said.

  He roared back at him in his sergeant’s voice: “I’m the guy who’s gonna kill every last one of you! I got a platoon of Marines doing morale sweeps. If we don’t see you going up and at ‘em in ten seconds, we’re gonna light you up and use your bleeding corpses as footrests! Do you fucking copy?”

  That got them moving. More bullets and grenades started coming from that section, some of it actually hitting the enemy.

  It wasn’t much, but every bit helped.

  * * *

  “Our position is becoming untenable,” Captain Kruger said.

  Fromm could hear growing panic and shock in the officer’s voice. It started when two Hunters had been caught by the same Turtle platoon that had destroyed one of Fromm’s LAVs along with the Army vehicles. It wasn’t easy to lose men and women under your command, and the first time was also the hardest. Kruger wasn’t afraid for himself; his command car had been on the lead of the counterattack that wiped out the Viper armor and pushed their infantry back. But he cared for his troops, and didn’t want to sacrifice them.

  Even if Kruger was right, however, there was nowhere to run. Their planned escape route along the river had been cut off. Fromm’s LAVs could fly over the mountains, if they didn’t mind becoming a target for every Viper heavy gun in range, not to mention abandoning the Hellcats. The Army ground-effect vehicles didn’t even have that option. They might try running via a few mountain trails that would eventually become too narrow to accommodate their vehicles, or take their chances on foot. Neither was a good option when dealing with enemies who could outrun them in broken terrain. Alternatively, the combined force could attempt to break through the encircling troops and try to flee towards Miller’s Crossing. They’d just have to fight a few divisions of aliens standing in their way. Staying where they were and fighting a battle of maneuver was probably the most survivable course of action.

  “I disagree, Captain,” he told the Army commander. “We will proceed with the plan. An enemy battalion has fallen out of contact with the rest of the opforce; we will engage and destroy it. Carry on.”

  Kruger didn’t protest any further. Just as well.

  They were taking heavy losses, but they were doing their job. The Vipers attacking Forge Valley’s eastern mouth had lost all of their armor. The tank company Fromm’s people had destroyed might have played a decisive role in the northeast; now they were just more scattered debris among the mountains. It’d been worth losing a squad from Third Platoon, even though most of the dead and maimed were men he’d come to know personally during the Battle of Kirosha. Those Marines ha
d survived a brutal fight in Jasper-Five only to fall in yet another planet, light years away from their homes. Fromm knew those losses would come back to haunt him, assuming he survived the day, but he was too busy to mourn now.

  As the combined task force maneuvered to take out the lost Viper battalion, he took a moment to check on the larger battle going on to the northeast. That had turned into a simple slugging match, alien light infantry wasting itself in head-on assaults against prepared positions. That kind of suicide attack only worked with overwhelming numbers, but it was beginning to bear fruit. Two times, the enemy had reached the final protective lines of the blocking force and nearly overrun them before being slaughtered by the combined fire of every unit in range. The second time, a Guard company had broken ranks and tried to flee to the rear, until ‘friendly’ artillery fire had herded it back to its fighting positions. Colonel Brighton hadn’t been bluffing about that. There probably were a number of one-star Generals screaming about it just about now. General Hamill, who commanded the Marine ground forces, would tell them to pound sand; he’d already fired two of the Army’s top brass, with the endorsement of Admiral Givens, who was in overall command of Parthenon System’s defenses.

  Sooner or later, the line would break, as it had done around too many PDBs already. When that happened, Fromm’s command might survive a bit longer than the rest of the 101st, but only for as long as the Vipers pulled back from the ruins of PDB-18 and New Burbank and hunted him down for good.

  He couldn’t worry about that, either. He had aliens to kill.

  Sixth Fleet, Parthenon System, 165 AFC

  Lisbeth Zhang went over the checklist a final time as she waited for clearance to launch.

  Sixth Fleet had jumped a few seconds ago, emerging in the vicinity of Parthenon-Three and engaging the alien armada. It was time for Project Langley show the universe what it was worth.

  “Lamia, you are cleared for launch.”