Heather and Guillermo exchanged a glance but remained silent.
“It is Boma’s alleged conclusion that warp hyper-capable species are a plague that must be exterminated early in their development. The current alliance is meant to stamp it out.”
“And what do you think, Proxy?” Heather asked.
“I think a few fragmentary records are meaningless: none of them are less than a hundred thousand years old, and all are woefully incomplete. The last such upheaval happened nearly a million years in the past. The Princeps and his followers are being foolish, that is what I think. Boma is over a thousand years old, one of the lucky few who has evaded death that long, and at that age certain mental peculiarities begin to show themselves.”
“Would the rest of the Imperium go along with a madman’s crusade?” Guillermo said. “Maybe spreading this information could change things.”
Another negative gesture. “Whatever Boma’s reasoning, he has convinced the Troika. The Proxy Assemblies cannot countermand the three Principes, and in any case they have been convinced, bribed or intimidated into acquiescing. Only a severe reversal in the course of the war would induce them to reconsider.”
“Guess we’ll have to kick the Imperium’s ass, then,” Guillermo said glibly.
Heather wished she could feel so confident. So far, there had only been a few skirmishes with Imperium ships; they were ponderously massing their forces, mostly on the Wyrms’ borders. The US Third Fleet had been sent to buttress Earth’s only ally in the war so far. The reports their agent had just handed them would reveal just how bad the odds facing them really were, but everybody already knew they were horrible. The Imperium by itself outweighed the Wyrashat and US combined. Throw in the other two members of the Tripartite Galactic Alliance into the mix and things went from bad to impossible.
At least we know more, Heather thought. She would make sure Guillermo added Septima’s rumors to the rest of the data. Amazing how gossip learned from a perverted traitor might end up affecting the fate of nations.
Knowledge might not help much, though. Knowing you were hopelessly outnumbered only meant you went into the fight with no expectation of victory.
Eight
Groom Base, Star System 3490, 165 AFC
“FNG-4, front and center!”
Call sign namings had been a long-held tradition among small craft pilots, and Tenth Squadron was going to carry it on. The main difference here was that everyone except the squadron commander – Lieutenant Colonel Jessup a.k.a. Jester – was Fucking New Guy/Gal; everyone else was all getting a call sign tonight.
You didn’t give yourself a handle; that was up to the rest of the pilots. The results would likely be hilarious; learning to live with them could be a bit of an ordeal.
FNG Number Four – Lieutenant Mark Giovanni – stepped back into the room. They’d appropriated one of the base’s briefing rooms for the ceremony. Each pilot was forced to wait outside while the rest of the squadron deliberated. Alcohol was being consumed in copious quantities, adding to the solemnity of the occasion.
“Do you have any suggestions, FNG-4?” Captain Jaime Van Allen – now forever known as Belter – asked, slurring his words a little bit.
“I was hoping for Marksman,” Giovanni said hopefully.
“I bet you were. What say you?” Belter asked the rest of the squadron. Boos and catcalls filled the room. “Sorry, Number Four. After careful deliberation, your call sign has been deemed to be… drum roll, please…” Everybody pounded on their tables. “Goober!”
“Goober?”
“Get used to it, Goober. FNG-Number Five, step out of the room, please.”
That was Lisbeth’s number. She dutiful walked out into the corridor. The door to the briefing room shut off the laughter and shouting on the other side, leaving her alone in the sudden quiet.
It was all official. Twenty-five squadrons were rated to fly missions. Two hundred and fifty plots, about a hundred a fifty from previous classes, the rest from Lisbeth’s own band of volunteers. The two-hundred-plus candidates that had started out with her had been pruned down to less than half that number. Five of the washouts had been fatalities; six more were no longer fit for service, or much of anything else, at least until the shrinks figured out how to put their minds back together. And now the rest were heading out into harm’s way, where they would find out what pesky little details the simulations and training had missed. Testing new weapons technology by using it in combat rarely went off as expected, and there were very few good surprises.
Lisbeth knew all those things, but they didn’t seem to matter. It was time. She wanted to go into warp space knowing the enemy waited at the other end.
The door opened.
“FNG-Number Five, front and center!”
She went back inside.
“Do you have any suggestions, FNG-5?”
“Nope.”
“Good answer. It is our considered opinion that from now on, you will be known as, drum roll, please…”
Lamia? I’m getting call-signed after mythological half-woman, half snake thingie?
“Lamia!”
The rest of the squadron thought her shocked expression was prompted by her call sign, rather than her knowing what it was before they said it.
Parthenon-Three, 165 AFC
“Who are those people in the big cars, Grampa?”
“Marines. Motorized platoon,” Morris Jensen said, all but spitting the words in distaste. He scratched his close-cropped, mostly-white hair, feeling old. He looked it, too. Even well-to-do farmers had better uses for their money than spending it on the full rejuv package; his innards were mostly in good working order, but his face was wrinkled and weathered, and his joints ached whenever he pushed himself too hard. Keeping your internal organs from the ravages of time was expensive enough, unless you were rich or served multiple tours of duty in the armed forces. He’d never been wealthy, and his (unpaid) membership in the local militia was as close as he ever wanted to get to the military. He’d done his time in hell, and he was done with it.
“Marines. Like you used to be, right?” Jensen’s granddaughter asked. Mariah Jensen was eleven, and was intently watching the advancing vehicles from the front porch of the farmhouse. There were few surprises around this neck of the woods, and the floating IFVs driving past his property were definitely a new sight.
“Yes, Mar. Like I used to be.”
Like I never want to be again. Once a Marine, always a Marine, they said, but he was all too glad to be a former jarhead.
His time in the Corps hadn’t been a happy time. Twenty-five years. Fourteen deployments. He’d seen too many of his buddies die. That had been the war against the Horde, and those fuckers played rough. His company had taken two hundred percent casualties in three years, hunting down guerrillas in Hawkins-Two. Sure, most of the dead had been boots who hadn’t known what they were doing, but not all of them. When your number came up, even the most experienced grunts couldn’t hold out on the reaper.
The sight of the sleek graviton-propelled fighting vehicles brought back memories. Back in his day, grav engines were too expensive to waste on ground-pounders, so his outfit had made do with ground-effect hover vehicles, but the basic lines were similar enough. Small turret on top, two side box launchers, bow and coax machineguns. The newer versions would be tougher and faster than the ones that’d carried him through fetid alien jungles, looking for insurgents to kill, but he bet the enemy would know just how to take them out. The enemy always did.
His gloves began to melt in the flames, the skin and flesh beneath blistering, but he didn’t let go of Jim’s limp form. He pulled him out of the burning wreck before he realized most of his friend’s lower torso had been left behind. He’d burned his hands to the bone hauling out half a corpse.
Morris shook his head. Goddammit. He was in the Volunteer militia and spent a weekend a month in uniform, but those uniforms didn’t trigger the bad memories. He hadn’t thought about Ji
m’s death in decades, even while playing war with his fellow Volunteers. But all it took was the Corps coming to town, and he was back in the jungle, the hideously appetizing smell of burning human flesh filling his nostrils. No sleep for him tonight. When he found himself back in the Suck, the only way he could bear to go to bed was after he’d downed a fifth of whiskey, maybe two. And he couldn’t do that now, not with his granddaughter under his roof and him the only one left to take care of her. So no sleep for him; he’d just lie there in the dark staring at nothing. Goddammit to Hell.
He spat as the four-vehicle formation sped past his fields. Harvest was already in, but even if it weren’t, those fancy anti-gravity personnel carriers wouldn’t have disturbed the crops.
For the time being, that was. The Marines wouldn’t be on Parthenon-Three if some big damn disturbances weren’t on their way here.
“Those tanks are big,” Mariah said. “Bigger then a combine!”
“Those ain’t tanks, kiddo. Infantry fighting vehicles.”
“Whassits?”
“They carry soldiers,” Morris explained gruffly, resisting an urge to tell her to get back inside, to shout that the sight of those vehicles meant death was on its way. Scaring the girl would accomplish nothing, and she’d been through too much pain already.
He flashed back to a conversation from a little over a year ago. “Honey, your Dad and Mom were in an accident, a really bad accident…” Explaining to a child her parents weren’t coming back had been as hard as anything he’d done in the Corps. He might as well let the sight of the gracefully gliding behemoths bring a smile of wonder to her face.
Morris softened his voice and went on. “The real tanks are even bigger. The box on the top, that’s called a turret, but the way, is twice that size on a tank, and the tube coming out, the main gun, is almost as long as the entire vehicle. The beams it shoot can hurt a starship in orbit, that’s how big the gun is.”
“Wow,” Mariah said.
And when one of those big suckers blows up, there’s nothing left of the crew but a smear on the wreckage. And they may be tough, but they ain’t invulnerable. There’s no can so big a can opener to handle it can’t be found.
Death came for everyone. His son Otis and his wife Ruth had been driving home from a barn dance in Davistown when one of the local critters had made them swerve and crash into a tree. That’s all it took.
Sure, one could blame their deaths on the fact that most colonists in Parthenon-Three had to make do with cars only slightly better than what folk had used before First Contact. All the fancy graviton engines and force fields went mostly to the military or the uber-rich; the latter stuck around big cities like New Burbank and Sunnyvale and wouldn’t be caught dead driving on the plasticized-dirt roads of Forge Valley. He shrugged. Might as well blame the pseudo-lizard that had stepped in the path of his son’s car. In the end, looking for someone to blame was useless. Sometimes shit just happened.
Some serious shit was about to happen right here.
While Mariah watched the five maneuvering IFVs before they got out of sight, Morris glanced over his property: fifteen thousand acres of prime farmland that he and his son and daughter-in-law had managed until the accident left him alone in charge of both farm and granddaughter. Robots did most of the hard work, along with temps hired from Davistown or nearby farms who could spare a son or daughter come harvest or planting season. Managing the property was a lot of work, but he didn’t mind. He’d been happy here ever since he plowed his savings and his twelve-year pension into the dirt-cheap property nearly fifty years ago, back when Parthenon-Three had been an up-and-coming colony with less than a million inhabitants on the whole planet and terraformer engines were still ironing out all the kinks needed to turn the near-goldie world into a full one.
He'd been happy so long that he’d forgotten how all of it could be taken away at a moment’s notice.
“A tank! A tank, grampa! That is a tank, isn’t it?”
“That it is, sweetheart,” he said after taking a glance at the massive follow-up vehicle. One of the new Stormin’ Normans by the looks of it. During his idle time, he still perused military sites. His feelings for life in uniform didn’t extend to the hardware. The Marines got the best toys, of course. His militia unit was mostly logistics and they drove wheeled trucks and a handful of halftracks; even ground-effect vehicles were beyond their budget. The fighting/security element of which he was part of was light infantry, a euphemism for relying on the Mark-One Shank’s Mare or clambering on whatever truck had spare room for a squad of grunts. The Army and National Guard formations stationed around the big cities and the Planetary Defense Bases were better off, but not by much.
The Corps had the best tech, but lacked the sheer numbers they were going to need to hold Parthenon-Three against attack. And his land was likely going to become a battlefield.
Beyond the fertile plateau of Forge Valley loomed a ring of mostly-impassable mountains. The aliens would likely land near the western mouth of the valley and push their way towards the nearest PDB nestled within another mountain range some ninety miles away, on the eastern end. And opposing them would be whatever the Marines could bring to the table – he’d heard a battalion plus attachments – plus the local Army, Guard and Volunteer units.
He shook his head. Most of the militiamen were kids fresh from their obligatory service who liked playing soldier a few times a year, along with a smattering of old-timers, most of whom had never seen combat. Morris spat again. You couldn’t stiffen a bucket of spit with a handful of buckshot, and second-rate buckshot at that. The militia was unlikely to be asked to hold the line, that much was true, but he also knew how quickly the rear could become the front. Those summer soldiers could well be put to the test, along with Morris himself.
And they would likely fail. They said there was no ‘fail’ in the Corps, but he wasn’t in the Corps anymore.
* * *
They had some big-ass cities here, but the way things were going Russell would never get a good look at them. The 101st had ended up deployed in the boondocks yet again, just outside the miles-wide force fields protecting Planetary Defense Base Twelve, and to get to anywhere fun, they would have to make a two-hour drive to New Burbank, the only big town nearby. And that was if they ever got leave and could beg, borrow or steal transport there. The only civvie settlements in the valley were tiny farming villages, the kind of place where everybody knew everybody and strangers weren’t welcome. Russell had thought about trying his luck with some of the local farmers’ daughters, but the communities around here were mostly Orthodox Catholics or Reformed Mennonites, which meant you could look but never touch, and on second thought you couldn’t look, either.
Oh, well. The Skipper and the higher ups from the battalion were keeping everyone too busy to think about having fun. The Eets were coming. Any day now, or so they’d been saying for nearly a month since they deployed here. Another combat mission, but unlike the last couple ones, they weren’t going to fight primmies with a few borrowed toys. They were up against the ET varsity now. Russell had never run into the Vipers, but from what he’d seen in the training simulations, they were no fun at all.
“Edison, move your team to the next ridge,” Staff Sergeant Dragunov ordered. “And keep your heads down, fuck-socks! We ain’t fighting barbs no more.”
We ain’t fighting nobody, Russell groused silently, but he understood the purpose of the exercise. Charlie Company had spent the better part of a year hunting Big Furries, and you started to develop bad habits after a while. They needed to be ready, just in case the shit hit the fan for real.
“You heard the man,” he told his fire team. “Move it!”
They rushed forward, making sure to stay in defilade the whole way. They were practicing a movement to contact evolution against a notional enemy company. Their imps projected fake energy discharges straight into their eyeballs and blasted their ears with the appropriate sounds, adding realism to the maneuver. He s
aw and heard laser beams crisscrossing the air overhead as they reached their objective. They looked and sounded just like they did in real combat.
Russell dropped the portable force field he’d been lugging right on the reverse slope of the ridge; Gonzo and Nacle joined him, and they slowly crawled the last few feet to the top, pushing the shield ahead of them. A flight of drones made a pass overhead; most of them were (administratively) swatted down before revealing anything useful, but enough survived to provide them with some targets: a crew-served laser a klick and a half away.
Russell designated the target. “Let ‘em have it!”
He opened up with the 20mm launcher while Nacle and Gonzo cut loose with grenades. The range was a bit long, but it was worth a try, plus the mortar section was busy with other targets and the exercise assumed all other heavy weapon assets were not available at the moment. The battalion’s attached tank platoon was supposed to swing by, but it hadn’t yet. They were out on the sharp end with near fuck-all in the way of support, in other words. Russell hated that kind of no-win scenario, Well, supposedly you could win them, if you did everything perfectly, but you mostly didn’t.
The pretend volley hit a pretend force field without doing damage, and then it was the pretend Vipers’ turn. The portable shield sizzled and crackled as it was overwhelmed by a direct laser hit. A second later, Russell’s sensors went white and his armor’s power cut off. The sudden weight of over a hundred and fifty now-inert pounds of battle-rattle and gear dragged him down as surely as if his brain had been vaporized by a real laser.
“You dead, Russet,” Gonzo said. “Forgot to duck?”
No Price Too High (Warp Marine Corps Book 2) Page 13
