“Not enough. Never do an enemy a small injury. As far as I’m concerned, they can all go compare notes with the Snakes down in Hell.”
“And if we look like enough of a threat, other Starfarers may decide to join the Alliance. It is pretty clear that our victory at Parthenon worried the Vehelians enough to go from being a friendly neutral to an unfriendly one.”
Tyson clenched his jaw at the reminder. The O-Vehel Commonwealth (a.k.a. the Ovals) had been a friend of sorts, a trade partner (and occasional rival) who’d had no problems doing business with America even after the war started. The Ovals’ sizable navy had made the Galactic Alliance wary of trying to force its way through the Commonwealth’s territory, in effect protecting an entire sector from invasion. Things had changed, however. The Ovals had suddenly become hostile, seizing hundreds of thousands of humans in Vehelian space and granting the enemy free passage through their territory. Only the fact that the Imperium was taking its own sweet time moving forward had prevented that betrayal from turning into a catastrophe.
“We’re scaring everybody,” Chappelle went on. “Too many civilizations already view us as some sort of bogeyman, and if we appear to be too barbaric to deal with, they might decide that the Alliance is the lesser of two evils.”
“Or they might also decide to leave us the hell alone if they don’t want us burning down their cities,” Tyson countered.
“There’s a fine line between impressing them enough to be cautious, and driving them into the enemy’s arms. The warp fighters haven’t helped us there, either. More and more people are referring to us as ‘demons.’”
Tyson glanced at Al. The President had been sitting quietly, letting his two chief advisors argue freely. This would be a fun bull session, except for the fact it might determine whether or not humanity would live to the end of the second century After First Contact.
“Everyone’s a critic,” Tyson went on when POTUS turned down the unspoken invitation to pipe in. “I suppose the galactic community would have been happier if we’d just rolled over and died quietly. Then they would mourn us poor humans. I’d rather we were hated than pitied, especially when that pity’s likely to be posthumous. Without those warp fighters, the Vipers would be burning down our cities, and they wouldn’t have stopped to listen to any counteroffers, or pleas for mercy for that matter. Fuck them.”
“I’m going to take the deal, Ty,” Al finally said.
“You’re joking.”
POTUS shook his head.
“I’m going to demand more in the way of reparations because that will weaken them as much as destroying Hades has and also because, well, we really need the money, especially now that the Ovals have shut off about twenty percent of our galactic trade. But I’m taking the deal.”
Tyson bit off his initial response – you didn’t curse out POTUS, especially not with an audience – and waited silently for an explanation.
“Geoff is right: if we wipe out sixty billion aliens without even attempting to negotiate, we might turn the triple alliance into a Galactic League. Always leave an enemy an avenue of retreat. It might even help us with the Imperium. If we give them a way out of this mess, maybe they’ll take it. Leaving us to deal with the Lampreys.” His expression hardened. “They are the worst of the bunch, have had it in for us since we wiped out their Snake flunkies. They’ll probably have to go.”
“I think you’re making a mistake,” Tyson said, sounding a lot calmer than he felt. “The Alliance’s openly-stated objective is genocide. To offer them anything less in return is not proportionate. It sends the message that it’s all right to try to eradicate us, because the consequences of defeat aren’t severe enough to deter them. Maybe making an example of the Lampreys might be enough, but I doubt it. If anyone raises their hand against us, we have to cut it off.”
“There is also a practical aspect involved,” Chappelle interjected. “Can we physically exterminate the Vipers, let alone the entire Alliance? Yes, we wiped out the Snakes; they were a minor polity, only about twice the size humanity is now, and it took everything we had to put paid to them. Sixth Fleet is already over-extended; keeping it supplied that far out is taxing our logistics to the max, and every warp transit they make deeper into enemy territory increases the chances they’ll outrun their supplies and be cut off and overwhelmed. We put everything we had into that offensive. Push too far and we could still lose everything. We also need those fighter pilots back, to provide cadre for the new squadrons we’re building.”
“Yes. The Joint Chiefs have made those points as well,” Tyson had to admit.
Funny how the Navy had changed its collective mind about the ‘fighter boondoggle’ after the Battle of Parthenon. Now they all wanted a fleet of carrier vessels to command. Not to mention taking the actual fighters off the Marines’ hands. Al had stomped all over the latter idea, given that making a full switch would take time the US didn’t have, not in the middle of a war. For now, the gyrenes would be doing most of the flying, with Navy squadrons being added as production and training allowed.
“We’re buying time, Ty,” the President said. “Time to get more fighters into action. Time to build up. The Imperium is the largest Starfarer civilization in the galaxy, and they haven’t begun to fight, not really. Removing the Vipers from play will let us prepare for the main event.”
“Looking at the short term, you’re both right. Long-term, though, I think this is going to bite us in the ass. I think being brutal now will keep us from having to be even more brutal down the line. I don’t want to hand our children a situation where the only way they’ll ever be safe is if they are the only technological species left in the galaxy.”
President Hewer actually shuddered at the thought. Chappelle looked vaguely ill as well.
“I hope you’re wrong, Ty, but I have to think about the present. Beating the Vipers was tough enough. Destroying them is likely beyond our means. We’ll squeeze a few extra concessions out of them, and keep a close eye on them so they aren’t tempted to stray. Let seven billion dead be enough.”
Will anything be ever enough? Tyson wondered, but kept the thought to himself.
“Moving on, I want to discuss the communique from Xanadu System. On the face of it, the deal they are offering might improve our strategic position enormously.”
“It sounds too good to be true, Al. So it obviously isn’t true.”
POTUS grinned. “Always a regular Pollyanna, aren’t you? Sec-State is basically twiddling her thumbs. I think this might be worth her time. It can’t hurt to at least engage in negotiations, can it?”
Guess we’ll find out.
Tyson had learned never to trust aliens bearing gifts. Even the Puppies had always managed to hide a few strings in them. And the Xanadu aliens were a secretive bunch. Which was another word for shady.
They would all find out, but it would be the poor bastards going there who’d pay the price if Al was wrong.
One
New Parris, Star System Musik, 166 AFC
“No good deed goes unpunished,” USWMC Captain Peter Fromm said after he had First Sergeant Markus Goldberg sit down.
“We’re being sent on detached duty,” he continued. He grimaced at the words. His last such deployment hadn’t been any fun at all.
“We, sir?”
“Charlie Company. We get to accompany a State Department mission as a combination honor guard and walking dog and pony show. Grunts and guns only. No vehicles or heavy equipment. I asked to let us bring all the weapons platoon’s TOE along, on the grounds that it’s better to have it and not need it than the other way around. Colonel Brighton is working on it. He’s not happy to see us go, but if we go, he doesn’t want to send us out naked and depending on the kindness of strangers.”
“Isn’t all this kinda irregular, sir?”
“Irregular as hell,” Fromm agreed. Protecting diplomatic missions was in the hands of the Bureau of Diplomatic Security, and when the DS needed a few leathernecks to supplem
ent its own agents, it normally went to the Corps’ Embassy Security Group, which made the necessary personnel decisions. Embassy duty was a plum assignment, hardly the kind of thing handed down to a line company that was still in the process of refitting for duty after a brutal year-long deployment. “And it’s all my fault.”
Goldberg was a short, dark-complexioned, intense man with thick eyebrows that formed an almost-continuous furry line across his forehead. They went up quizzically for a second before he figured it out by himself.
“Jasper-Five?”
Fromm nodded. “Jasper-Five. Turns out both State and War have turned that fiasco into a propaganda coup. Some Nullywood studio released a flick about it, as a matter of fact. I haven’t seen it myself.”
“I have, sir. Thirty-One Days at Kirosha. Knox Pitt is playing your part. A few of the guys have been gaming in the interactive version, and that’s caused a few problems. The Marines who were there mostly don’t think very highly of it.”
Fromm had been aware of the multimedia production but had done his best to ignore it. Unfortunately, there was no ignoring it when the Departments of State and War both decided that sending the hero of Kirosha to assist in a diplomatic mission was a great idea, especially since they rarely agreed on anything. He didn’t feel particularly heroic. All he had done was keep a few thousand humans and aliens alive during one of the many surprise attacks of the Days of Infamy. And victory hadn’t come cheap, either; he’d gotten quite a few good people killed along the way.
That last time he’d seen Gunnery Sergeant Obregon flashed through his mind; the tough-as-nails Marine had looked calm and collected as he led out a flying column of improvised fighting vehicles leavened with a few alien allies and mercenaries. Even the toughest warrior had no chance when his number came up, however. Obregon had died in combat, helping accomplish the mission despite the fact that Fromm’s plan had been deficient, failing to foresee the enemy’s dispositions and tactics.
And now Fromm was being rewarded for the sacrifice of Obregon and twenty-one other Marines by being paraded like a circus clown, along with his company.
Clown or not, he still wanted some heavy ordnance around. Kirosha had taught him how easily things could go to hell when you were out in the cold, away from support in Echo Tango Land. There was even a chance the State pukes wanted him around because they knew that when the shit hit the fan he’d do what he had to in order to accomplish his mission.
Fromm realized he’d spaced out for several seconds. Goldberg didn’t say anything; the non-com knew how that was. After you’d been on the sharp end enough times, sometimes you went back there, whether you wanted to or not.
“In any case, they want us. We aren’t parade ground soldiers, but they don’t care. So we’re going to pack our dress blues and look pretty for the alien dignitaries. Hopefully the whole thing will be boring and uneventful,” he finished, knowing he’d probably just jinxed them all.
“The Big Green Weenie strikes again,” the company’s senior NCO said. “We’ll have to find ways to keep the troops busy. You know how it is; if they get bored enough they’ll light their own asses on fire just to have something to laugh about.”
Fromm smiled. “I think our platoon sergeants will find ways to entertain them.”
“They are good people, even if Graham is kind of an asshole. I wish we had some more time to get the boots ready, though. Maybe we’ll get the chance to knock some sense into them during this deployment.”
They’d spent the better part of six months integrating their replacements into the company. Heavy fighting at Parthenon had inflicted over fifty percent casualties on Fromm’s unit, including some fifteen percent fatalities. The wounded were back in fighting shape, except for a few whose injuries were beyond even Starfarer technology to bring back to full health. The dead had been replaced by a combination of newbies fresh out of their third year of Obligatory Service Term and more experienced personnel reassigned there. All too often, the reassignments were people their previous units had been glad to get rid of, which meant some of them would be problem children. The platoon commanders and non-coms would whip them into shape, eventually. But getting to that point took work, and they weren’t fully ready yet. On the other tentacle, they weren’t going into combat. Supposedly. The last time he’d been sent ‘somewhere quiet’ he’d ended up in Kirosha.
The new commander of his weapons platoon was another newcomer, a First Lieutenant who’d transferred from another division to replace the useless coward who’d ran the unit before. His stats looked good, but then again, the gone and unlamented Lieutenant O’Malley’s fitness reports had also looked good. There were always some officers that would let people slide if they kissed enough ass. Fromm had served under one such captain, and had lost a lot of good people as a result. He had no intention of allowing another shirker, coward or idiot to stay in his company. So far, First Lieutenant Chambal had performed adequately, but it was something else to worry about.
“I’ll make the formal announcement tomorrow, after I hear back from higher about the details. But you can start getting the ball rolling with the non-coms. I’ll be briefing the platoon commanders next. We’re scheduled to depart in three weeks. Paperwork’s just about done. I guess when the War Department sticks its oar in, everyone gets cracking.”
“We’ll be ready,” Goldberg said.
Fromm knew the non-com’s confidence was warranted; the company was managed by its sergeants, who took care of training and making sure their people were doing well, and his NCOs’ quality ranged from decent to superb. Sometimes he thought the unit would do just as well without officers, although that wasn’t quite true. The commanders were there to think of the big picture, manage the broad aspects of the mission, and leave the details to their subordinates. That was how the Corps had been organized, at least since the time they added ‘Warp’ to the name. One reason was that most Marines operated in small shipboard units, company-sized or smaller. A light cruiser usually had a reinforced squad, for example. Even a dreadnought had little more than a couple of reinforced companies. Everybody in those teams had to know their jobs; they couldn’t count on a larger formation to take up the slack.
Which meant that Charlie Company would do its duty as well as could be expected, whether it was a simple babysitting mission or something more complicated and dangerous. After the last few years, Fromm was pretty sure the latter possibility was far more likely.
* * *
“Ruddies all around. Kinda brings you back, doesn’t it?” Corporal Russell ‘Russet’ Edison said before he dropped a 20mm high-explosive munition behind a peaked-roof house where some suspected tangos where hiding. The ensuing explosion was much louder and fierier than the real thing, but that was Nullywood for you. Those fucking remfies thought a hand grenade could blow up a house.
Things weren’t going well. His fireteam was already down one guy, and unlike infantry units, weapon platoons’ fireteams only had three people in them. Two grunts just didn’t do well on their own.
“I hate this fucking flick,” Lance Corporal Raymond ‘Gonzo’ Gonzaga grumbled.
“Sergeant Fuller said this would be a good team-building exercise.”
“FOS is full of shit,” Gonzo said. “But I repeat myself.”
Russell had to agree that their new squad sergeant, Bob ‘FOS’ Fuller did indeed live up to his unofficial nickname. Not a bad guy, but not too bright, and a little too ready to do all the motivational crap that some remfies always wanted to foist on the Corps.
“Never mind that. We’ve got movement ahead.”
“I got them,” Gonzo said before he opened up with his ALS-43, putting a burst of plasma micro-missiles on the virtual Ruddies that had emerged from the smoke-filled house. The Ruddies didn’t die easy; they were protected by personal force fields.
“Can you believe this bullshit? They never had fucking shields!”
“They had the one at the end.”
“Area field. Not
the same. Fucking bullshit, man.”
They were playing 33 Days in Kirosha, which was – very loosely – based on a real bad month Russell and the rest of Charlie Company’s weapons platoon had endured in a remote planet in the galactic boondocks. Of the original seventy-odd Marines who’d been there, only thirty-four were still in the unit. Some had transferred, a couple had retired, and the rest had gotten killed, at the Battle of Kirosha or the actions at Parthenon a year later. None of the survivors had anything good to say about the Nullywood production.
Russell thought the multimedia flick – available in 2-D, full virtual, and full virtual interactive, the latter being currently running through the squad’s cybernetic implants as they played at being Marines surrounded by hordes of primitive aliens – sucked ass, but he’d done what he usually did with everything and figured out some angle he could play to his advantage. Showing off his Battle of Kirosha Combat Action Ribbon had earned him quite a few free drinks and even a discount at his favorite whorehouse in the two months since the movie opened in New Parris. That would last as long as the flick was popular; he figured it’d be another month or so before the novelty wore off.
Playing this game was a pain in the ass, though. For one, the Nullywood dickweeds had gotten just about everything wrong, which was pretty amazing considering the Corps had helpfully provided them with about five thousand hours of sensor footage from drones, OPs and every grunt’s suit sensors. The explosions were too big, except the final one, which hadn’t been big enough. They’d given the Ruddies combat lasers and personal shields instead of the low-tech slug-throwers and cloth uniforms they’d had in reality. If that switch had happened for real, everyone in Embassy Row would have gotten killed. And they’d tossed in a team of Lamprey special ops types to serve as the main villains, which as Gonzo kept saying was total bullshit.
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