The pseudo-apes weren’t alone. Sleek predators like long-legged crocodiles were running besides herds of rhinoceroses’ analogues and two-legged feathered raptors. Hunter and prey were moving as one, converging on the valley from dozens of klicks away. And floating over their heads were swarms of winged insects of assorted sizes and species.
“Bugs. Lots of them.”
Fromm opened another virtual window just in time to see the small fliers rising above the canopy and heading for the pair of tanks above them.
“Pull back and open fire,” he ordered.
The Stormin’ Normies rose up in the air, faster than the insects chasing them: volleys of 15mm area-effect plasma grenades met the fliers and consumed them by the hundreds. Other sensors showed more swarms getting even closer. Some of them had crawled on the ground and waited until they were close to the valley before taking flight. Those bugs were going to reach the valley long before their larger counterparts.
“All Charlie elements! Engage the hostiles!”
Fromm sent a set of coordinates to his mortar section. The first string of 100mm bomblets was on its way moments later. He also contacted the shuttles with their own fire mission.
There were hundreds of kilometers of jungle all around their position. If he had to, Fromm would burn every last bit of it down to the bedrock.
* * *
As it turned out, watching other people digging holes was only slightly more fun than digging the holes yourself.
Digging holes and filling them back in was as natural as breathing to any jarhead in the universe; it almost felt unnatural to let others do it. They’d been watching bubbleheads and Marine 1371s do all the kinds of hard labor for a few days. Sooner or later someone would figure out they could use the grunts’ strong backs for something useful, and put them to work. For now, Russell and his fireteam were off-duty, with nothing better to do than smoke and look around the valley, where the tip of a big-ass black building poked out of the ground. Word was that the rest of that thing was about fifty times bigger. It’d been buried since long before the Pyramids of Egypt were built, or anything else on Earth for that matter, but it looked shiny and new. That bothered him a bit.
“They’re taking their own sweet time,” Gonzo commented as the engineers used a plasma cutter on the round wall. They’d been at it a good while, but the spot they were cutting into hadn’t melted. “You’d think they’d just use some demo to blast a hole in the damn thing and go in.”
“They are being meticulous, that’s all,” Grampa said. “They want to take a good look at it before they smash it open. Basic archeology stuff. It’s nothing like them Indiana Jones movies.”
“Indiana who?”
“Before your time. Old movies; that franchise sort of died after First Contact, not like the Star Wars stuff.”
“They had Star Wars before First Contact?”
“Woogle it.”
Russell tuned out the friendly argument and checked the clearing. The engineers and some Navy pukes with earthmoving equipment had piled the charred remnants of burned-out trees against the gaps in the surrounding hills, fencing them in. They’d also cleared another hundred meters or so around the exterior. That was a little too tight for comfort, since beyond the clear ground visibility turned to shit after about twenty meters even with enhanced sensors. There hadn’t been enough time to set up a proper killing ground around the valley. There were too many trees, big bastards, each with a thick trunk or stem that went up as high as thirty meters, topped with a mushroom-like circular cap, about five to ten meters wide, which was covered with a leafy kind of fur. The plants were clumped closely together, touching cap to cap. In between the trees were shorter mushrooms, except these ones didn’t have the leafy fur and didn’t seem to need sunlight to live, because they were completely shaded out by the big ones.
The Hellcats doing patrol duty among the valley had reported some of the big mushroom trees would drop lianas down on anything that got to close, long flexible limbs that would tighten around their victims, stabbing them with hundreds of poison-filled thorns. Against the four-legged Hellcat battlesuits, protected with a good three inches of armor around their five-hundred pound bodies, the tactic hadn’t worked out too well. The ‘cats had cut down all the grab-ass trees. They hadn’t had the time and personnel to do the same to every other plant in the area, though.
Other than a couple of narrow footpaths the Hellcats used to get in and out, the only way out of the valley was up, via shuttle. Russell didn’t like being hemmed in like that. Granted, the LAVs and all their other vehicles had anti-grav and could float away, but Russell was used to enemies that could engage anything that poked its head out of cover from klicks away. Flying made you into a target, and even the Stormin’ Normie tanks they’d brought along weren’t invulnerable. He’d seen just how not-invulnerable they were at Parthenon-Three. It didn’t matter how tough your can was; there was always a can-opener big enough to do you in. That’s why he preferred being leg infantry; grunts could hide.
He shrugged, the motion all but invisible under his body armor, and puffed on a cigarette to pass the time until it was time report for duty. It sucked, the way you could be both bored and tense on the job. You couldn’t relax when you knew you could be killed without warning. He’d gotten too many oak leaf clusters on his Purple Heart, and a few of those had nearly put him in the ground for good. Nineteen-year-olds fresh from Ob-Serv might think they were invincible, but Russell was old enough to know better. Old enough to wonder why the hell he was still putting himself in harm’s way.
After this war is over, I’m done. That wasn’t the first time he’d had that thought. His original plan had been to do a full fifty years so he could enjoy a twenty-five-year pension, but that had been several Purple Heart oak clusters ago, including four times where he’d been knocked out cold – not at all like in the movies; when everything went black it was because something really bad had happened to you – and come back with fewer bits and pieces than he’d started out with. The docs had put him back together every time, but he still had scars to remind him how close he’d been to never waking up at all. It was getting old.
On the other hand, when the war was done, things would calm down a lot. He’d been shot at during peacetime, but that’d been pretty tame stuff: primmie aliens who didn’t get the idea that messing with the US was a quick form of suicide, or pirates who usually gave up as soon as they realized who they were fighting. He could handle that stuff. It was fighting Starfarers that was getting downright hairy. There’d been too many close calls in the last three years or so, more than in the previous twenty. You rolled the dice enough times, and sooner or later they’d come up snake-eyes.
No sooner did he have that thought that the alert went up. They were under attack.
Russell, his fireteam and about half of First Platoon, the guys who’d been off-duty, all scrambled back to their prepared positions. He noticed a new sound while he moved: a faint buzzing, growing louder by the second. By the time he’d lined up his Widowmaker, his link with the drones orbiting the area was up. Thermal sensors looked right through the canopy and showed him a moving blob at a two hundred and fifty meters, seeping through the mushroom-trees like a cloud as it moved towards the burned-out section around the valley. Not a cloud: a swarm. He zoomed in and saw thousands of flying critters, about two or three inches long, flying their way.
The bugs in the swarm had eight legs, two set of wings like a dragonfly, big mandibles flanked by a pair of pincer-hands and a scorpion stinger. Sure as hell nothing Russell would want crawling on his skin. He and the rest of the Devil Dogs were in sealed armor and should be safe enough – although ‘should’ often turned out to be an outright lie – but the bubbleheads and civvies were in simple bodysuits which probably weren’t up for the job.
“Shit,” Gonzo said. “They hurt one of the Normies!”
Russell had missed that. A quick check showed him Gonzo was right. Some bugs had crawled ov
er one of the tanks flying patrol overhead and knocked out a couple sensors. Sensors that were supposed to be proof against small-arms fire. That meant they were all at risk, body armor or not.
“Engage on my mark,” Sergeant Fuller said. The grunts on either side of the Weapons squad were already firing their IW-3s’ grenade launchers: little plasma clouds appeared among the bugs, incinerating a few dozen at a time. That wasn’t going to cut it.
“Bugs,” Grampa said. “Why did it have to be bugs?”
If the Guns squad had been using standard-issue ALS-43s, their 15mm plasma area munitions could have filled the forest with hellfire. But Charlie Company was carrying advanced alien weaponry; their Alsies had been replaced with portable grav cannon that packed as much punch as a tank gun, and they’d gotten two Widowmakers per fire team, giving them about a lot more firepower than they’d had before. Problem was, a grav beam, even with a lethal footprint a meter wide, wasn’t as effective against a swarm of bugs as a string of plasma mini-grenades. Not on its normal fire mode, at least.
“Switch to wide beam,” Sergeant Fuller ordered. Russell and Gonzo followed suit. They were ready by the time the leading edge of the swarm had gotten to within two hundred meters. Make that swarms. The overhead view from the recon drones showed half a dozen insect clouds were converging on their position. Each of them held tens of thousands of the nasty-looking bugs or other kinds of insect that didn’t look much nicer.
“And be careful swinging that thing around. Lethal radius is gonna be three times bigger.”
“Copy that.”
Grampa was the designated loader; he’d set his Iwo on the ground and had a power pack in each hand, ready to replace the spent ones that would eject from their backpack housing when Russell and Gonzo shot themselves dry. Training had shown that happened after thirty seconds or so on continuous beam mode. Going wide was supposed to drain the weapon at the same rate, but they hadn’t really tried it for real, and simulations didn’t always measure up to reality.
“Engage at one hundred, that’s one-zero-zero meters,” Sergeant Fuller ordered. The spacers and civvies had retreated to the camp proper or were huddled in the pit around the black building, protected by a thin line of Marine engineers with light weapons. If the bugs got through they’d have nowhere to run. Nasty way to go, stung to death. Not that there really were any nice ways to go, come to think of it. Even dying of a stroke at age three hundred, with a hooker by your side and a bottle of hundred-proof in your free hand would still suck.
“Fire!”
Grav weapons were nasty mothers. The conditions inside the beam loosely corresponded to what happened inside the event horizon of a black hole. The resulting ‘devil’s corkscrew’ tore through force fields and composite armor and mangled flesh and bone like nothing else in the universe. On wide beam, the effects were even weirder. Russell felt the oversized cannon buck in his hands like a pneumatic drill as a swirling stream of greasy darkness poured out of the ten-centimeter muzzle. He played the weapon like a hose disintegrating anything in a three-meter radius around the beam. Any bugs up to three hundred meters downrange didn’t have a chance; they were sucked into the darkness and reduced to scattered molecules.
Russell hosed down the bugs for the full thirty seconds. By the time the spent power pack auto-ejected, the forest beyond the clearing had been erased, along with any living thing in it. Problem was, there were more bugs beyond the area of effect. Bigger things were also coming their way, but the shuttles and tanks were blasting them long before they got into range. The bugs were still getting closer, though.
Grampa slapped his back, letting him know he was loaded up just as the weapon read-out went green. He waited for the second wave of bugs to get to within seventy-fire meters before letting them have it. The First Platoon guys had switched their grenades to the rear of the bugs, thinning their swarms before they came in. The Hellcats from Fourth had reached their own high ground and hosed the area below with more grenades. The mortar section was doing a much better job: a quick peek at the overheads showed him they were burning down entire swaths of forest at a time. Question was whether they’d run out of ammo before the swarms ran out of bugs.
It was a tie, sort of.
His fireteam’s standard combat load was eight power packs per Widowmaker. They went through half of them before a squadron of assault shuttles got into the game and leveled several square klicks of forest with heavy weapons. And a few bugs still made it through.
“Motherfucker!” Gonzo shouted. Two critters had landed on him, and their stingers were secreting some acid shit that was eating through the armor plates protecting his chest and head.
“Hold still,” Russell told him. He slapped one bug off his buddy’s helmet and crushed it under his boot. More smoke came from the sole of his size-eleven as some acid got on it. Cursing, he scraped it on the dirt until it stopped sputtering. Meanwhile, Gonzo had gotten the other one and crushed it in his fist. He avoided squeezing the stinger, and that was where the acid was, so he didn’t damage his glove.
All in all, of the million or two bugs that had attacked their dig, only a dozen or three of them made it to their lines.
From the screams Russell heard coming from the pit as he finished off the ones going after his buddies, that was more than enough.
* * *
“Wide beams! Low-charge, you idiots!” Heather shouted as her imp scanned every weapon among the civilians while the Marine engineers above them opened fire on the swarms of alien mini-fauna headed their way. Her special implants overrode the civilians’ weapon settings and changed them into something that wouldn’t kill them as surely as the approaching creatures.
Five of the twelve civilians in the pit with her were armed; below average for any gathering of Americans outside big cities, but that was to be expected from sissified academics. The sidearm of choice was the tried-and-true particle beam pistol, which had a non-lethal neural disruptor setting that would temporarily disable most sophonts and a lethal one that would punch a fist-sized hole on unshielded targets. The pistols could also fire a wide, short-range cone of energy that would shred vermin while only inflicting nasty skin burns on larger targets.
The Navy personnel working on the surface had been largely unarmed; security was the Marines’ jobs. Only petty officers and warrants had been carrying beamers; they were in the outer perimeter, helping the Marine engineers there. The dozen Spacers next to the civilians were equally helpless; many of them hadn’t handled any energy weapons since Basic, many years ago.
Everyone with any sense had already switched their beamers to the right setting. Doctor Munson, Professor Bell and Doctor Samuels all did: that left two idiots for Heather to do it for them.
“Put up your shields!” she told a different set of idiots who were too busy panicking to activate their defensive system. All members of the expedition had been ordered to wear personal field generators, ignoring complaints about being forced to lug around an extra thirty pounds on their backs in addition to their pressurized suits and air filtration equipment. While the shields wouldn’t stop slow-moving insects, they would minimize any injuries when someone inevitably shot a friendly by mistake.
All in all, though, the unarmed civilians and spacers huddled next to the Black Tower behaved fairly well. Only a couple huddled down in the fetal position, sobbing in terror as their imp links to the sensors above the pit showed them the approaching clouds of alien pseudo-insects pushing past the storm of fire the Marines were pouring into them. Sometimes having too much information was as harmful as too little.
Heather got the armed members organized, forming them in a loose outward-facing circle around those who couldn’t or wouldn’t defend themselves. By the time she was done the bugs were getting very close; the jarheads had mowed down well over ninety-nine percent of them, but when hostiles started out in the seven-figure range, anything below a hundred percent wasn’t enough.
“Holy shit, I see one!” a grad student y
elled as he opened fire.
PB weapons were damn easy to shoot: they had minimal recoil and even a civilian cyber-implant could project an aiming point right into its owner’s retina. The Gal-Arch student managed to scatter dirt all up the wall of the pit without hitting a single bug. Doctor Samuels did slightly better and managed to fry the target before it could reach the bottom.
Heather watched their imp feeds off one corner of her field of vision while she kept most of her attention on her own sector. A bug flittered into sight, and she tagged it with a single wide-beam shot; she got the next three herself even as the professors and students around her filled the air with poorly-aimed fire, thankfully nowhere near any humans. The Marines outside the pit were out of the line of fire, and their force fields would easily handle even a full-bore beamer discharge.
Then the first bugs got through and things stopped being easy.
“Shit!” The screamer tracked a bug as it darted to the center of the pit and fired three shots right into the backs of his companions on the other side of the circle. Force fields sparkled as they shed the energy charges. Amidst the fortunately harmless blue-on-blue hits, the bug sizzled and fell apart.
Nothing she could do other than try to keep the alien critters off the group. There weren’t many of them, but hitting them at close range wasn’t easy even with wide beams.
“Fucker,” Lisbeth Zhang growled as she swung her beamer like a club and batted one of the fliers out of the air. The ten-legged thing didn’t have a chance to fly away before the Marine took it out with a shot. Heather took care of another two during a few more frenzied seconds. Somebody shot her from behind; her force field dropped to ninety-five percent. She didn’t even bother cursing out the shooter, although her imp identified who it was, for when there was time to make some pointed comments.
People were screaming in terror or disgust, but one impossibly-loud howl stood out among the rest. Heather turned towards it.
Warp Marine Corps- The Complete Series Page 112