He went over his assets automatically. His infantry and weapons platoons were all concealed and dug-in, including their combat vehicles. His own command vehicle was also under cover, a thousand meters back from the firing line, along with his Hellcats, which he was keeping as a mobile reserve. So far the battalion’s FDO was letting him keep control over his mortars, for what that was worth: most 100mm munitions wouldn’t punch through the Viper’s force fields, and the ones that could were in short supply. If he sent them in slowly enough to bypass the shields, they’d be easy meat for the swarm of fireflies the enemy would have floating over their heads, not to mention their swatters, which were already doing a number on the battalion’s fleet of recon drones. He’d hold off on using the mortars until the ETs were well and truly stuck in.
As always, the hardest part was the waiting. He’d done everything he could do. Once again, he was playing defense, a role that went against his instincts. Fromm didn’t like having to wait on the other guy to make the first move.
Although, come to think of it, his troops would be making the first move this once.
* * *
Vipers had eight multi-jointed limbs, arranged symmetrically around a long-tailed body similar to an alligator’s. The scaly bastards had originally been tree-climbers, so they had hands at the end of every set of arms/legs, although the lower two pair weren’t good for playing the piano or similar fine control stuff. The ugly bastards moving towards Russell’s position were using their lower four limbs to trot at a good clip, occasionally using a couple of their other four arms to add a little extra speed or support while their long torsos twisted in an up-and-down fashion that was like nothing that’d ever evolved on Earth. Watching them move made Russell feel a little queasy. There was something wrong about the way the four to six leg-things worked.
Well, pretty soon he’d be doing his damnedest to make sure they stopped moving. And his damnedest was usually pretty good.
The ET assault troopers weren’t wearing body armor, although their scaly skins were tough enough to turn light shrapnel. They had force field harnesses that Woogle claimed were about fifteen percent better than what he was wearing, and their heads were completely encased in helmets that allowed them to breathe the local air without dropping dead. Their power packs providing juice for their weapons, shields and breathing system were on their backs, and they were good for a week of combat ops. Fucking ETs always got the best toys.
Toys like their 2mm laser rifles, which were better than Lamprey models, about as good as what the Ovals used. Russell had seen Oval lasers in operation back on Jasper-Five, and he’d gained a great deal of respect for them. He didn’t want to be on the receiving end of those. And the Vipers’ primary support weapons were even nastier: four-tube 30mm launch systems, each tube holding ten stacked rounds that could be shot individually or ripple-fired; the latter option meant forty guided explosives would sally forth in quick succession, each one perfectly capable of ruining a jarhead’s day or putting a big ding on a LAV. Taking down the alien rocketeers was their top priority.
Russell watched the advancing ETs without having to poke his head up, courtesy of the dwindling swarm of drones overhead and the tiny eyeball-wires they’d placed ahead of their line. The little sensors sent their feeds via fiber-optic cables and were nearly undetectable. The alien horde was still over two klicks away, but he could see them coming as if they were at arm’s length.
They weren’t coming in dumb like so many primmie barbs, either. They were doing a classic bounding overwatch advance, rushing from cover to cover and watching over the next batch coming forward. Their point men were well ahead of the main groups, and they were moving in an open order formation to minimize casualties when the fireworks started. Interspaced among them were little floating cars, open-topped and barely big enough for one or two ETs apiece. Some were gun platforms, heavy lasers or grav guns meant to take out tanks and IFVs with a couple of shots, but also good to dig out entrenched grunts. The other floaters were support units, projecting area force fields and sending out pressure waves that exerted as much pressure as an infantryman or vehicle would, designed to detonate any mines the Americans might have placed in their way. Gadgets like that were the main reason the battalion’s engineers hadn’t placed any mines in front of them. They had some behind the ambush, though, the kind that didn’t go boom when you stepped on them but went off when activated via a laser signal. The Vipers would be making their acquaintance soon enough.
“Fucking arty’s hardly scratching ‘em,” Gonzo groused. Most explosions were going off overhead and bouncing off the big force shields acting like giant umbrellas for the ET horde coming their way. Here or there one shell made it through and knocked down a couple of bastards. The bad thing was, they often got back again and kept walking. Those personal shields were good.
“Don’t worry about it,” Russell said. “We’ll scratch them plenty once we’re inside their field perimeter.”
Which would happen when the ET lead troops, which marched outside the area field’s edge, had gone past the ambushers’ position, which would lead to all kinds of fun stuff. There were only two ways to deal with area force fields: you could overwhelm them with enough ordnance, or tried to get inside them by walking past them or hiding until it moved past your position. The second way meant a short-range firefight, just as exciting as a knife fight inside an elevator.
They’d set up the ambush accordingly, digging in on top of a natural ridge with a ravine on the left side and a steep trail on the right. The enemy point would have to take those paths unless they wanted to scale the nearly sheer wall from which Russell and the rest of First Squad waited to begin the dance. The rest of Charlie Company was similarly positioned and camouflaged, getting ready to hit the leading enemy formations from inside their force fields.
The Vipers got closer, taking a few casualties, but not many, thanks to their damned force fields. Russell’s imp estimated it would take a good five or six hits with his Iwo’s 4mm plasma rounds to take out a tango. Even a 15mm grenade had a fifty-fifty kill chance. Only the twenty mike-mike in his IW-3a was a guaranteed one and done. Fuck. They’d gotten spoiled fighting primmies. This was going to be rough.
“Dibs on the field gennie up front,” Gonzo said.
Russell checked. “The assaultmen have tagged it already. Go for the missile guys.”
“Copy that.”
Off to Russell’s left, Nacle was softly humming some tune he didn’t recognize at first. After a few bars, it came to him: it was a Toby Keith song, an oldie from pre-Contact days, not that the old bastard’s style had changed much; he was pushing two-fifty and still playing large venues all over American space. And “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue” was as applicable as it’d been back in olden times, even now when there were seventy-nine stars on the flag.
Russell wasn’t a big flag-waver – he’d seen too much shit, done too much shit, to care much about that sort of thing – but the idea of those motherfuckers with their too-many legs and nauseating way of walking depopulating this planet just made the carnage he was about to unleash feel more than just enjoyable. It felt right. Righteous., even.
He wondered what the witch-woman would have made of the thought. And he hoped she’d gotten to somewhere safe. Things had been too busy to try and get in touch with her, and he couldn’t find any way to reach her with his imp. This would be the first time he’d go into combat thinking about a woman. He hoped it wouldn’t get him killed.
The tangos were less than a klick away. That put them in range of most of their weapon systems, but still on the wrong side of their force fields. Russell kept watching them as they came closer and closer. This was the kind of situation where you needed hardened combat veterans. All it would take to turn the ambush into a disaster would be one asshole opening fire too soon. Everybody on his fire team was steady. Staff Sergeant Dragunov had told a couple of the boots in the squad to remove their guns’ magazines, just in case, and the s
ame had probably been done to a handful other guys in the company, but only a handful. The rest would keep their cool and fire when ordered to, because they knew that trusting their buddies and their officers was the only way they had a chance to make it out alive. It took a lot of work to create that sort of trust, and it didn’t take much to undo all of it, either.
The lead Vipers got to within a hundred yards. Fifty. Twenty-five. He ignored the up-close tangos as they started going around their position, taking the path of least resistance, just as expected. There were other Marines further back, tasked with dealing with them.
“Shit,” Gonzo muttered. “One of them is climbing the ridge.”
“’S okay,” Russell said through gritted teeth. “I got ‘im.”
He sent out his suggested solution to higher. Captain Fromm approved it and sent out an instant fragmentary order with the changes; the whole thing took ten seconds, long enough for the Viper to get halfway up the ridge. Russell would open up the festivities. That was an honor he would have happily declined.
“Back away,” he told his buddies. “This is gonna be fucking danger close.”
The edge of the area force field slid over their position just as the Viper scout made it to the top of the rock wall, which had turned out not to be sheer enough. The ugly motherfucker touched the camo netting and realized it didn’t feel anything like the stone surface it looked like.
Russell shot him in the face with a 20mm plasma round.
He’d had to do some fast reprogramming via his imp to get the warhead to go off at that range; the mini-missile usually wasn’t armed until it’d traveled a good five yards away from the muzzle; five inches was a tad close.
The Plasma Armor Piercing round hit the alien’s personal force field and went off, spewing a jet of superheated matter that tore through the energy barrier and the high-density allow of the helmet beneath it. The alien’s head disappeared.
A backscatter of plasma, sublimated metal and vaporized Viper brains and bone hit Russell hard, just as he’d expected. His own force field handed the diffuse impact well enough. It still wasn’t pleasant; about as much fun as being lightly steamed, not to mention getting hit by a hefty pillow wielded by someone with muscle enhancements. He was nearly bowled over, but he held on and was up and firing a moment later.
“Shit, I felt that,” Gonzo said as the headless corpse fell off the ridge. He was shooting as he spoke, along with the rest of Charlie Company.
The world narrowed down to Russell’s field of fire. As soon as he recovered from the explosion, he found a target and fired. One of the rocketeers took a burst of 4mm and one AP grenade at fifteen yards, fucking knife-fighting range. The tango went down, but his ammo load didn’t blow up like Russell had hoped. Fuck it. Next target. A burst and two rapid-fire 15mm grenades. Miss. He tried to lead a scurrying alien but wasted another grenade without scoring a hit, the last one in the tube magazine. Shit. Something big blew up somewhere, the flash of light intense enough to get his attention. He glanced around while he reloaded the 20mm launcher and saw the Viper force field gennie going up in smoke. Its power plant had gone off, doing more damage than a ground-bursting 200mm artillery shell. A bunch of Vipers nearby were down, and several of those weren’t going to get up again.
The enemy froze for a second or two, plenty of time for the Marines to put a good hurting on them, but they reacted soon enough, going to ground, returning fire, and maneuvering around the unexpected obstacles. Their little floating fireflies spat out laser beams, detonating grenades in mid-flight and targeting the grunts firing them. The puny lasers didn’t do any damage to their human targets; they were all behind their own portable shields, the kind of gizmo you could set up in place but couldn’t walk around with. Just one of the many bennies of playing defense.
Russell spotted another fucker with a rocket launcher, leaning out behind a falling tree and taking aim. He hit him with a 20mm round, and this time he got a nice sympathetic detonation as at least some of the ET’s forty-missile load blew up.
One of the platoon’s LAVs fired down the path to the left of Russell’s position, its 30mm graviton cannon turning a squad of Vipers into a twisted mass of metal, plastic and meat. Artillery and mortars hit other enemy concentrations; the tangos had been left high and dry by the destruction of their field generator. Other gennies were floating forward to fill the gap in the defenses, but one of them was taken under fire by a beautifully-coordinated LAV and mortar volley that knocked a hole through its shields and destroyed it.
The Vipers were slower on the uptake than Marines, but they had numbers and enough training to fight back. Rockets and lasers began to hammer Charlie Company’s position, and their mobile guns were moving up. The fallback order went out.
First Squad backed up from the ridge, crawling and dragging their portable field gennie along while 100mm mortars blasted the unprotected aliens on the other side, forcing them back and allowing the Marines to break contact. A minute or so later, they were inside their squad LAV and headed back to their secondary position, one comfortably behind their own area energy bubble.
“Like the man said, I love it when a plan comes together,” Russell said.
“What man?” Nacle asked.
“Some pre-Contact grunt.” He’d Woogled the phrase a ways back, but he didn’t feel like checking it again. “John or Joseph Smith, I think. Or maybe it was the elephant guy, Hannibal.”
“Joseph Smith?” Nacle said, awe in his voice.
“Fucker sure got around,” Gonzo said.
* * *
Only two carats in the company roster were yellow, indicating Wounded in Action, which meant people hurt too badly to continue fighting; any lesser injury would be handled by the Marines’ nano-med packs. No KIAs, not yet. Enemy casualties were just over a hundred dead from the ambush and artillery fire combined, and maybe as many wounded, although those casualties were harder to identify. It was as good as it got, and the only problem was, it probably wasn’t going to be good enough.
Fromm watched the orderly retreat to the next line of prepared positions. The Vipers pushed through the mortar bombardment, taking another dozen casualties, and tried to mount a pursuit, only to get hit on their right flank by a surprise attack from Fourth Platoon’s Hellcats. That had knocked the wind out of the advance, allowing the ambush forces to break contact cleanly and make it to safety without taking hardly any fire.
His main concern at the moment was keeping contact with the enemy forces to make sure they didn’t pull out any surprises of their own, and to lure the aliens towards the forest to the north, where Bravo was waiting for them. The fixed sensors the Marines had left behind had been systematically destroyed as soon as the Vipers consolidated their position. The battalion’s other recon assets were being destroyed at unsustainable rates; the ETs anti-drone tech was better than they’d estimated. And all the overhead satellites were gone, destroyed during the ongoing space battle still raging overhead. Fromm supposed the Colonel could ask some of the starships or orbital fortresses to take some time off from fighting for their lives and conduct a sensor sweep of the ground below, but he didn’t think he’d get much of a response. The fog of war was alive and well on P-3. For now, he would use the Hellcats much like old-fashioned cavalry, screening the enemy advance and keeping them under observation. It was going to be hard on the mechanized kitties, though.
After a brief lull, punctuated only by a continuous artillery barrage over the aliens’ rally point, the Vipers began moving forward again. A few hundred infantrymen, along with a handful of field projectors and mobile energy cannon, dutifully pursued Charlie right into the next ambush. Fromm’s implants manipulated what he saw, making lasers visible and reducing the glare of plasma explosions to tolerable levels, but they did little to obscure the horrors of battle. Vipers collapsed under multiple hits, or were torn apart under the impact Bravo’s heavy weapons. The occasional artillery shell or missile broke through and delivered a brief moment of car
nage. The enemy’s relatively few vehicles were targeted by multiple heavy weapons. Their defensive shields didn’t last long, and they had little or no armor underneath. One by one, they fell; area force fields were knocked down, leaving two Viper companies to the mercy of artillery and direct fire. A final charge from both companies’ Hellcats wiped out the last few survivors before enemy reinforcements could arrive.
The exchange wasn’t one-sided. More roster carats turned yellow. Three of them turned red, and two of those went black when a multiple rocket volley tore through a portable force field and obliterated Private First Class Greg O’Malley and Sergeant Fernando Uzcategui from Bravo Company. The casualty ratios were terribly lopsided in the Americans’ favor, though. At those rates, the ETs would run out of warm bodies long before they could even decimate the battalion facing them. Sooner or later, that reality would sink in.
It didn’t take long. Even the low-intelligence assault troopers weren’t suicidal. When a follow-up attack was hit from both flanks, the aliens retreated in good order and took positions near the mouth of the valley while they waited for additional forces to arrive. Fromm wondered if Colonel Brighton would try to retake that position. Even after their losses – running close to three hundred now – the enemy still heavily outnumbered the Americans. The battalion’s single armored platoon hadn’t joined the fight yet, and the MBT-5 ‘Schwarzkopf’ grav-tanks were absolutely deadly. Those four behemoths would blast the hell out of the enemy’s light infantry. It looked like the enemy had underestimated the levels of resistance they would face. Maybe…
An alert signal chimed in. Fromm accepted the linked video feed and watched a new artificial meteor shower coming down. A new wave of assault pods had been launched, including dozens of larger drop ships. Once again, half of them or more were destroyed in transit. But their landing zone was now heavily protected by force fields, so artillery did little damage to the enemy once it’d arrived. The initial incursion had prepared a relatively safe beachhead for the main push.
No Price Too High (Warp Marine Corps Book 2) Page 19
