“It looks good, Russet,” the kid said after a quick manual check. They’d all cross-trained on the squad’s weapons, just for occasions like this.
“All right. Hand me your Iwo. The All-Good’s yours for now. You know what to do.”
“Kill bodies, oorah.”
“Yep.”
At some point, the Vipers’ leading field genny had been taken out, and the Vipers had been showered with 100mm mortar munitions. There was at least a company’s worth of dead ETs in front of Russell’s sector, and the live ones were all hunkering down while the last alien field projector reached them. He picked out a tango who wasn’t as well-covered as he thought, and he and Nacle sent him to hell, followed by another, and another. They scored five stepped-on kills and half a dozen probables before the rest were saved by their replacement shield, and they weren’t the only ones reaping aliens. The Vipers were having a pretty bad day.
There were five yellow, two red and two black carats on the company’s roster, though, and those guys were having the worst day you could have.
“Getting hot in here,” Russell muttered as he opened up on the next target.
Sixth Fleet, Parthenon System, 165 AFC
“Instruct Sixth Fleet to commence warp transit,” Admiral Givens said, nearly choking on the words.
For two days, her ships and Parthenon-Three’s defenses had traded salvos with the Viper armada. Losses had been high on both sides, but they were becoming unsustainable for the Americans. All the STL monitors had fallen; the orbital defense ships were tough, but they lacked warp shields and they’d been taken down one by one. One orbital fortress had broken apart under the Vipers’ relentless hammering and the remaining five were all heavily damaged.
Sixth Fleet hadn’t fared much better. Three battlecruisers were gone, along with one third of her frigates and destroyers. The fact that the enemy had lost three times as many ships did little to change the realities of the situation. To stay any longer meant to die in place, and her orders were to preserve Sixth Fleet as a fighting force. She’d pushed things to the limit, and perhaps a bit beyond it.
The Fleet Operations crew grimly followed her orders. They knew they were leaving Parthenon-Three to the aliens’ tender mercies. The Planetary Defense Bases each packed as much firepower as a dreadnought, and they would keep the enemy fleet at bay, but only until the alien ground forces took them out one by one.
Sixth Fleet entered warp while under fire for the second time in a few days. Two destroyers were lost in the process. More deaths on Givens’ conscience. Warp ghosts howled at her for a brief eternity before she and the rest of the formation emerged one light minute away, far enough to be safe from enemy pursuit, and close enough to remain a threat and block any attempts to reach the warp valleys that would let the enemy attack other systems.
The enemy spent two hours blasting another fortress into burning ruin before they executed their own warp jump, heading back to a rendezvous point where they would their supply fleet. Another milk run, Givens realized. They would make repairs, reload their massive missile boxes, and come back. Their new weapons and tactics were more logistics-dependent than normal. Something could come of that, although she couldn’t risk trying anything fancy at the moment. Sixth Fleet would be meet up with its own supply vessels and lick its wounds while it waited for reinforcements.
And if those reinforcements didn’t come in time, Parthenon-Three would fall. Givens didn’t think she could abandon seventy million people to their fate. The temptation to launch a warp-kamikaze attack was strong, but she knew it would be worse than futile. Unlike the Lampreys at Melendez, the enemy here would not be caught off-guard. And the useless sacrifice would doom every world down the warp-chains leading out of Parthenon System.
Admiral Givens left the TFCC and headed towards her cabin.
She needed to scream and break something, and she couldn’t do it where the crew might see.
Parthenon-Three, 165 AFC
The Vipers were breaking off.
Retreating while stuck in a decisive engagement was tough, but the aliens performed the maneuver as well as anybody Fromm had ever fought, using their dwindling supplies of fireflies to keep the Marine drones at bay and pulling back to where artillery could no longer be efficiently targeted on them. In so doing, they abandoned the pass without achieving anything other than filling it with their corpses.
Charlie Company hadn’t budged from its starting position. His own butcher’s bill hadn’t been very high under the circumstances: ten casualties, including two dead; five of the wounded would be back on active duty within twenty-four hours. The aliens had lost well over four hundred KIA. Most combat units would lose cohesion after that sort of rough handling, but the Viper assault troopers were stubborn.
Fromm shook his head. He was getting tired of fighting suicide troops. The Lampreys would have never kept coming into the pass once they realized surprise had been lost. From what he’d heard about the Imperium, it also wasn’t in the habit of shoving troops into meat grinders. That sort of warrior culture was usually found among barbarians, usually pre-Starfaring ones.
Or humans, he conceded. CRURON 56 had proven that at Melendez System. By the same token, if holding the pass had required him to endure those losses, he would do it, and his Marines would stand by him. It helped when the only alternative to fighting was death, of course. The Vipers didn’t take prisoners.
He was still watching the last enemy forces as they disengaged, taking more casualties along the way, when a FLASH message arrived. The news helped explain the sudden decision by the Vipers to pull back. Sixth Fleet had been pushed away. The enemy would be able to operate closer to the planet, and to drop more troops. No sense in taking losses when they would soon be able to storm the Marines’ positions with overwhelming force.
A virtual meeting with all company and attachment officers was scheduled for the morning. Fromm hoped they would be able to hammer out a plan that wasn’t doomed to failure.
Death he could handle. Failure was unacceptable.
New Washington, District of Nebraska, Earth, 165 AFC
The JCS were getting a little riled up.
Tyson Keller watched the assembly in stony silence. Nobody shied away from his gaze, a big difference from the cabinet meetings he usually attended; the Joint Chiefs of Staff were made of sterner stuff, and they might respect Tyson but weren’t scared of him. They were all fighting commanders who’d gotten their stars the old-fashioned way, even the Army Chief, who was the low man on the totem pole, given that the universe belonged to the Navy and the gyrenes. Hell of a thing, in Tyson’s opinion, but what could you do? In any case, even the Army Chief of Service wasn’t really afraid of him; you didn’t make this far without a full set of balls, even if two of the JCs were female.
“This diversion of resources could be disastrous, Mister President,” the Vice Chairman said. Admiral DuPont had started out in the wet navy before First Contact, and, ironically enough, had been one of the few carrier guys who’d adapted to the Space Navy’s battleship tactics. Ironically, because he was now arguing against the introduction of carrier operations to space combat. Tyson figured that a hundred and fifty years of active service later, he was too hidebound to even consider carriers something other than an antiquated, useless concept, about as applicable to modern warfare as galleys had been in the 20th century.
“You are talking about re-tasking the better part of three support squadrons at the last minute, and hoping an untried combat platform will perform as advertised,” DuPont continued. “Which is highly doubtful. Sir.”
“I strongly disagree,” the Marine Corps Commandant said. He was another Pre-Contact Ancient who’d distinguished himself at Fallujah back in the day. “The fleet exercises have all been successful and exceeded even our most optimistic estimates. I think the Lexington Project is a go, if we give it enough support. All the elements are in place, except for logistics, and, frankly, two more battlecruiser squadrons, which i
s what we’d be replacing with the Carrier Strike Group, are not going to make a crucial difference.”
The rest of the JCs looked askance at the lone Marine; they usually tried to present a united front when meeting with the Commander in Chief. But the Lexington Project had been the Marines’ show, mostly because the Navy had given up on it early on Things would change as soon as the new tech proved its worth, of course, but Tyson and the President would help keep the ensuing turf wars down to a dull roar. This wasn’t the time for that kind of bullshit, not when the human race was two, maybe three defeats away from being exterminated like so much vermin.
The Chairman spoke up. “Mister President. I agree with General Forsythe that Project Lexington looks promising. On paper. It even appears as if we might be able to deploy the… Starfighters, I guess, deploy them in enough numbers to make a difference. But I don’t know if Parthenon-Three is the right place to deploy them.” Admiral Carruthers’ opinion was always worthy of respect, of course. The man had fought and won the first two conflicts against Starfarers. “The Navy has a tradition and a future,” he quoted. “If Lexington is indeed successful, we should try to use it to our maximum advantage, to extract as much benefit from it as possible. After we use the carriers in combat, strategic surprise will be lost.”
President Hewer stared steadily at the top brass as he spoke. “We have next to nothing to put up against the Vipers’ thrust at Parthenon. Four warp transits from our doorstep, Admiral. Do we have enough conventional forces to stop them? What good is preserving strategic surprise if we lose the whole damn war?”
Carruthers looked down. Everyone knew the score. They were throwing every hull they could scare up into the relief force, the so-called Seventh Fleet. They were even going to commission the first Pantheon-class superdreadnought, the Zeus, which was less than eighty-percent operational. At this point, if it could maneuver and it could fire at least some of its guns, it was considered good to go. But you couldn’t assemble a fleet from scratch. The new ships’ crews were mostly reactivated veterans riding herd over the current conscript class. And Fifth Fleet, which was supposed to serve as the core of the new formation, was still in terrible shape. Most of those warships were too heavily damaged to return to combat in time to make a difference.
On paper, Seventh Fleet looked pretty good, with enough firepower to save the day. On paper. When the chips were down, Tyson knew the green, untrained formations would be lucky to perform half as well as they should.
“Well?” Hewer said when Carruthers took too long to answer.
“Even if we lose Parthenon, the war is far from lost, Mister President. We could still fall back into a defensive posture. Trade space for time.” From the look on his face, Carruthers found that proposition barely more palatable than suing for unconditionally surrender.
Going defensive was the smart play: abandon Parthenon System and have Sixth and Seventh Fleets make their stand at Wolf 1061. Doing so meant giving up over a dozen other systems down the other ley lines emanating from Parthenon. Most of those were smaller colonies which wouldn’t be able to defend themselves from even a single enemy cruiser. None of the larger colonies were as heavily fortified as P-3; the aliens would have them for breakfast. There would be no way to evacuate those planets. A hundred million Americans would be left out in the cold. The smart play involved trading those lives for time.
“Abandoning Parthenon is not acceptable,” Hewer said. “The American people won’t stand for it. I won’t stand for it. What are our chances if we send everything that is ready this minute to support Sixth Fleet?”
“Lower than fifty percent, Mister President. And our losses even if we win are likely to be severe. Perhaps even catastrophic. We would likely lose all the worlds we’d be trying to protect, and weaken Seventh Fleet enough that we couldn’t guarantee the safety of Wolf 1061 against further attack. Even Sol System wouldn’t be safe in the aftermath.”
“As I see it, and please correct me if I’m wrong, we have three choices,” the President went on. “First, order Sixth Fleet to fall back to Libertas System and protect the warp chain leading to Wolf 1061, abandoning the other chains to the Vipers, while we finish readying Seventh Fleet. Which will take… how long?”
DuPont began to speak, but Carruthers interrupted him. “Two more months, Mister President.”
The latest estimate claimed five weeks, but Carruthers knew better than blow smoke up the Prez’s ass.
“Yeah, that’s what I thought. Two months, plenty of time for the Vipers to depopulate all the systems along the other four warp chains leading out of Parthenon.”
Nobody had anything to say to that.
“Second option, throw every ship that’s combat-ready into the fray, and hope the reinforcements are enough to make a difference. That, as you said, has a fifty-fifty chance to succeed, maybe less, because the Vipers are likely being reinforced even as we speak.”
Carruthers nodded.
“And finally, divert enough support to the carrier task force to make it operational, and send it forward to reinforce Sixth Fleet along with anything else we can send. Which will increase the timetable to ready Seventh Fleet by how long?”
“At least another two weeks. Maybe three,” Admiral DuPont said. “And it would reduce the number of conventional reinforcements we can send immediately by two battlecruiser squadrons, nearly half the ready force. If the carriers don’t work as advertised, the odds of success go from fifty-fifty to about one in ten.”
“We’d be betting everything on those carriers making the difference,” Carruthers concluded.
“It’s better than abandoning a hundred million Americans,” Tyson said. Nobody was happy to have the President’s Chief of Staff at the meeting, let alone having him pipe in with his opinion. He didn’t care. The ghosts of the dead wouldn’t let him stay quiet. Too many had died by his hand, simply because they had been obstructing the steps they’d had to take to keep humanity alive, in many cases with the best of intentions. He’d be damned if he allowed millions of innocents to die because it was too risky to save them.
“Even if Sixth Fleet is defeated and wiped out, it will buy us time,” he went on. “The Vipers’ losses will be severe as well. Send the goddamn carriers, send whatever else you’ve got. Admiral Givens knows the score. She’ll make the Vipers bleed at Parthenon.”
Maybe. Shoulda coulda woulda. Wars were uncertain affairs; that was why it was best to avoid them if possible. But there was no need to say that. They all knew it.
“It is a risk,” General Forsythe said. “But it provides some hope for Parthenon and doesn’t abandon the rest of the warp chains.”
There was some more arguing about the particulars before the President said he would announce his decision the next day and called the meeting to an end.
“They really don’t think the fighters are going to make a difference,” Al Hewer said when they were alone.
“’Not Invented Here Syndrome,’” Tyler said. “The Navy rejected the whole idea and the Marines ran with the ball, and even on a shoestring budget they’ve done some amazing stuff. I’ve made sure nobody’s padding the performance reports, Al. Unless I’m missing something, those little flying cannon are going to be as decisive as warp catapults were.”
“Yeah, I read the reports too. The actual reports, not the summaries. Cost me a good deal of sleep, but sleep hasn’t come easy for a long time. What worries me are the psych evals, the reports of ESP, telepathy, the sort of bizarre crap we’ve been assured by our Starfarer friends is the stuff of fantasy. Half of it sounds like mystic mumbo-jumbo, and the other half is like something from a horror movie. Did you read the brief explaining why the Imperium decided to pick a fight with us? They think we are warp demons, or demon-summoning sorcerers.”
Tyson nodded. “It’s an economy-size witch hunt. Or a crusade. And we’re the Great Satan. Not exactly the first time we’ve been called that.”
“What if in this case it turns out to be the li
teral truth? Those reports jive a little too closely to some of the weirder Starfarer legends out there. Warp demons. Save our bodies, lose our souls.”
“Kinda late to worry about your soul, Al, or mine for that matter,” Tyson said. “We’ve been baptized in the blood of innocents, you and I. All to save humanity, and America. If it turns out we’re calling forth the Dark Side of the Force, we’ll have to hope our descendants fix that. As long as there are descendants, there’s hope.”
“Heh. I hated Star Wars just as much as Star Trek. Lucas was a moral imbecile.”
“Maybe. The thing is, the dead don’t have moral agency. Survival trumps just about everything else. And I may not have much of a soul left, but I can’t have a hundred million deaths on my conscience.”
“Neither can I. There are lines that can’t be crossed. And I suppose the Lexington Project isn’t one of them. The final reports indicate they have a handle on the pseudo-telepathy and the pseudo-demonic possession, and the last batch of exercises went off without a hitch. I suppose that’ll have to be enough.”
“Made up your mind, then?”
Al nodded. “I did when I said I wouldn’t allow Parthenon to be abandoned without a fight. We’ll go with the carriers, and if they bring pandemonium to the galaxy, too damn bad. We’ll send them and everything else we’ve got to give Sixth Fleet a chance at victory, or at worst to give the Vipers a Pyrrhic victory. Should take a week if we drop everything and rush those ships out, maybe five days if everything works perfectly. Hopefully Parthenon-Three can hold on that long. It’s all moot otherwise.”
“They will.”
Thirteen
Groom Base, 165 AFC
“We probably should bring back the Air Force,” Fernando Verdi said. “Although we’d have to change the name. Space Force, maybe? Star Force?”
Lisbeth Zhang was feeling pretty agreeable; Fernando had taken her to what he referred to as ‘the heights of ecstasy’ and was now following up their lovemaking with a very thorough back massage. But there were some things she just couldn’t agree with.
No Price Too High (Warp Marine Corps Book 2) Page 21
