Probably.
* * *
“It would have been a whole three minutes out of our way,” Russell groused.
“It’s a hard life, Edison,” Staff Sergeant Dragunov said. “It must suck to find out the squad’s LAV isn’t your personal vehicle. My heart bleeds for you. Did you actually think we were going to take a detour so you could check on your girlfriend? I oughta give you an NJP just for asking!”
“You are right, Staff Sergeant. No excuse, Staff Sergeant.”
“Damn right. I never expected this kind of bullshit from you, Edison. Now get busy or I’ll make you busy. Get out of my sight.”
Russell had known it’d been an idiotic thing to ask pretty much from the moment the words had come out of his mouth. They’d been moving to their new positions when it’d occurred to him they would be passing mighty close to the witch’s house. So he’d asked to make a pit stop there, with utterly foreseeable results. The rest of the squad would never let him live it down. Russell Edison, the guy who never shouted a girl’s name while fucking, because chances were he’d utter the wrong name, had gone and fallen for some woman. About the only thing that was normal about the whole situation was that he didn’t know the woman’s name.
She put some voodoo hex on me, he thought sourly while he headed to his tent. Warp navigators were crazy, everyone knew that. But this chick was in a class of her own. Unless the other warp-navs simply were better at hiding their true natures; she’d claimed that was the case. He wasn’t sure either way, but he knew he’d never invite one of those spooky bastards to a card game.
The woman still haunted his dreams, three nights later. He’d looked for her, tried a bunch of different ways to get her name, and nothing had worked. The bartender who steered Russell her way was gone, evacuated to New Burbank, and he wasn’t taking any calls. There’d been no liberty since the landings began, so he couldn’t go visit her. Besides, she’d probably had been evacuated with the non-combatants. The disturbing little house where he’d met her would be empty now.
All he had to do now was stop thinking about her.
“I’m sure she’s all right,” Nacle said. The kid was trying to reassure him, confirming Russell’s fear that he had finally hit rock bottom.
“Yeah, sure she will,” Private First Class Bozeman added in the tone of voice of someone who didn’t give a shit. Gonzo’s replacement had been in the infantry a long time ago, and he’d never worked in a weapons platoon before. “Uh, Lance,” he went on. “Do I really have to carry all this crap? This load is like twice what I used to tote back in the day.”
He was bitching about the extra ammo and power packs he would be lugging as soon as they unassed their LAV. The third member of a Guns section fire team got to play cargo mule; that had been Nacle’s job before Gonzo got WIA, and he’d done it without whining about it. Russell couldn’t wait until his buddy was back in action and they could send this FNG somewhere else. Unfortunately the injuries he’d sustained had been too nasty to send him back to the grind, not quite yet.
“Call me Russet, Bozo.”
Bozeman clearly didn’t care for his new nickname, but even on short acquaintance he’d learned that messing with his team leader wasn’t a good idea.
“That’s your job, lugging extra mags and pows” Russell went on. “So load them up, don’t drop them, and help keep the Alsie fed. Your armor will do most of the lifting for you, as long as we got power packs to keep them running. Which we will ‘cause you’ll be carrying them. Understood?”
“Understood.”
“And listen to Nacle; he knows what he’s doing.”
The new guy had a couple more years in the service than Nacle, but after a short stint as an 0311 he’d switched to Logistics, which made him a POG at heart. He’d be fine carrying stuff around, but Russell wasn’t sure how well he’d do when shit got real. He had a bad feeling that Bozo’s real MOS was 1369.
Bozo shrugged but stopped bitching, which was good enough for now. They were setting up on yet another hill; this one overlooked a big patch of forest that the aliens were going to have a hell of time traversing. For a plateau, this valley sure had a lot of hills, Russell though while he made sure their position had a good field of fire and wasn’t exposed. In all fairness, though, most of the valley’s terrain was flat; they just avoided fighting in those spots because flat terrain was just another name for a kill zone unless you improved it via entrenching tools, digging strips and lots of sweat.
When he was satisfied, Russell glanced up just in time to see it was rainingt aliens again: thousands of contrails filled the sky. Maybe half of them got shot down before they reached the ground, but there’d been a lot of pods in that wave, and some had been big. Shuttles or dropships, able to carry heavy vehicles and plenty of spares. He glanced around, where Second and Third platoons waited for Echo Tango to show up again. They were deploying a lot deeper into the valley, pretty close to Davistown, because even with more Army pukes moving forward, trying to hold the western portion against a multi-divisional force was a little too suicidal even for Devil Dogs. The new plan was to try to sucker the leading Viper units into a series of ambushes leading up to Davistown, which was being turned into a stronghold by the 101st engineer platoon, with lots of local help.
Russell wouldn’t have minded fighting inside nicely-prepared positions with lots of boresighted heavy guns in support, but the battalion landing team would continue to ‘conduct mobile defense operations,’ playing tag with the tangos in other words, which was fun until they caught you. The Army and Guard would get to fight in town. Which was fair enough; their vehicles were a lot slower, so they couldn’t run rings around the aliens.
Of course, if the shit hit the fan and the dogfaces got it stuck in, it’d be the Marines’ job to extricate them. That was how life in the Suck went. You learned to love it, or at least live with it.
* * *
After the skirmish at Lover’s Leap, playing traffic cop for a while suited Morris Jensen just fine. He told Lemon that being bored beat being shot at by a country mile just minutes before their routine job turned into a matter of life and death.
“Yeah,” Lemon agreed. “That fight was a bit much.” The two old-timers were probably the only members of the squad who knew how lucky they’d been, getting into a close-range firefight with high-tech aliens without losing anybody.
At the moment, he and the rest of the squad were keeping the steady stream of trucks delivering war supplies to Davistown flowing in an orderly fashion. It normally wouldn’t be all that difficult, since there was only one highway connecting the town with New Burbank, but the supply units were making use of every country lane, dirt road and game trail wide enough to accommodate their cargo vehicles, and when those secondary roads converged, you started getting traffic jams. And traffic jams required someone to unsnarl them.
“Yeah, too much like old times,” Morris said, picking up the conversation where they’d left off after he waved through a mini-convoy of U-hauls that somebody had drafted into service. Transport, whether it was wheeled, GEV or grav-engine, was in short supply. The Army and National Guard were pushing in a division’s worth of troops into the valley, with two more digging in at Miller’s Crossing. That many troops required a lot of supplies, and it had to be delivered by ground. All air travel had been suspended, courtesy of Viper energy cannon placed on some of the mountains bordering Forge Valley. Anything that poked its head too high up was inviting a laser or graviton blast.
“No casualties, though.”
“We got lucky.”
The Viper infiltrators at Lover’s Leap had been caught at the worst possible time, and someone on higher had been on the ball and hammered the ridge with artillery while the militia kept the aliens fixed in place. A squad of Marine snipers had joined the fray shortly afterwards, setting up and firing their 10mm lasers from three klicks away, and their accurate and lethal shots had killed more tangos in five minutes than Morris’ squad had managed in ha
lf an hour. By the time the aliens had withdrawn, they’d left some fifty bodies behind, and none of the Volunteers had gotten so much as a scratch, except for Sebastian Wilkes; the dumbass had faceplanted while trying to switch positions and ended up with a concussion despite having his helmet screwed on tight. If those aliens had managed to get organized, they would have eaten his squad for breakfast.
“Hope it’s the last time.”
“Me too,” Morris said, but he wasn’t counting on it. He glanced up; the last big landing swarm had arrived a few hours ago, but you occasionally saw a fresh bunch of pods coming down. Earlier that morning, he’d seen an actual enemy starship, and that had scared the ever-living crap out him. It hadn’t been very big, maybe a frigate or destroyer, but damn if it didn’t look huge up in the sky. It’d opened up on the PDB at point-blank range, and broken off, trailing flames and smoke after return fire tore it a new one. The spectacle before the alien boat vanished back into the stratosphere had been awe-inspiring. It’d hammered in the fact that an entire enemy fleet was orbiting Parthenon-Three. The only reason those ships hadn’t turned the whole planet into a close approximation of Hell was that it was against the laws of the Galactic Elders, which Starfarers treated as if coming from the Almighty Himself.
Even that wouldn’t save them if Sixth Fleet didn’t come back and booted the aliens from the system.
“What’s this happy horseshit?” Lemon growled, snapping Morris out of his funk.
A second bunch of U-hauls were stopped on Rural Route 3 while several school buses filled with refugees from the outlying areas went northeast on the Post Road, headed to I-10 and New Burbank. It was slow going; the buses were old, in poor repair, and overloaded, so they were rolling on at a bit over twenty miles an hour. But what had prompted Lemon’s comment was a ground-effect fifteen-ton truck, painted Guard olive-green; the lone military vehicle had gone off-road and was speeding along RR-3, hovering over the recently-harvested fields in a way ordinary wheeled transport could never hope to do without getting stuck. That was well enough, but whoever was in the driver’s seat would still have to wait until the buses had gone past the intersection.
The hover-truck came to a reluctant stop when Morris planted himself in its way with an upraised hand. The driver raised him on his imp a moment later.
“This is priority cargo, Staff Sergeant.”
“Just need to wait a minute, son. Soon as the buses make it through, you can go right ahead.”
“No need, Sergeant. I got this.”
It took Morris a second to figure out what the Guard driver meant, and by then it was too late. His shouted warning was lost in the roar of the truck’s fan nacelles as the Guardsman gunned his engines for all they were worth, raising his vehicle fifteen feet off the ground and allowing him to go over the obstructing slow-moving buses.
In most other places, that would have just been a bad idea. The asshole kid managed to veer to Morris and Lemon’s left, sparing them from the torrent of pressurized air that would have crushed them to the ground, but he was still risking damage to the buses and their passengers. The driver was counting on crossing the road quickly enough to avoid it, but that was how accidents happened.
The other, more important problem, was that this particular crossroads was on a slight rise, only barely masked from enemy fire by a nearby hill. The fifteen-foot climb put the truck clear over the top of the terrain obstacles that kept the road in defilade and relatively safe from direct fire.
Even so, what happened next took a lot of bad luck. Bad luck that a Viper gunner scanning the area through the sights of a hi-power laser cannon spotted the sudden motion from six or seven miles away. Worse luck that the ET made a snapshot during the two-second window before the truck dipped down out of sight. Morris’ father had been fond of saying ‘Bad luck is the universe’s way to let you know your limitations.’ The Guard kid never got to find out just how unlucky he’d been. He had just cleared the Post Road, managing not to do more than scratch the paintwork on one of the buses, and begun to descend when his truck got hit.
Morris was still shouting after him when a blinding flash of pure white washed over him.
He found himself lying on his back with no idea how he’d gotten there. His ears were ringing but he thought he could hear the roaring-crackling sound of a big fire. There was a salty-metallic taste in his mouth. Everything hurt. The smell of burning things got through his helmet’s filters: diesel fuel and electrical fires and something else, something that he feared was the stench of seared human flesh.
When he opened his eyes, he saw thick columns of greasy black smoke drifting in the wind. He ran a quick diagnostics check before moving; his headset was still working properly, and he’d kept up on his imp’s MedAlert software. A few seconds later, he got the results: two cracked rib that were going to hurt like a mother as soon as he tried to get up, a sprained ankle, and a bad case of whiplash. His nano-meds were already flooding his bloodstream with painkillers; he’d be able to move and even fight, but he was going to really feel it in the morning.
Someone was screaming not too far away. Time to get off his ass and help.
Struggling to his feet hurt as much as he’d expected, painkillers or not. Seeing the true extent of the disaster was worse than any pain.
The Guard driver had been telling the truth. His fifteen-tonner had been carrying something important. Artillery shells, maybe. Most explosive ordnance was designed not to go off until you wanted it to go off, but a hi-power laser could make all kinds of stuff go boom. The ensuing explosion had occurred a little under five meters above the road. One of the buses had been between Morris and the detonation, which had spared him from the worst of it.
Three passenger vehicles were off the road, one lying on its side where either the explosion or a sudden swerve had knocked it down; the other’s nose was crumpled around a tree its driver had rammed when he panicked. The bus that had saved Morris’ life had flipped over and was on fire.
The handful of Volunteers that had been directing traffic were all down, but nobody was seriously hurt, at least according to their status carats. Morris ignored them while he limped towards the burning bus. The wounded and dying civilians inside needed his help.
Trying to run on a sprained ankle just didn’t work. Climbing over the roof of the overturned vehicle, now effectively a vertical wall but the only way to get to the passengers, was no picnic either. By the time he made it, he was panting under the weight of his battle-rattle.
Flames were erupting from shattered windows. He felt the heat even under this gloves, and the smoke was overpowering his air filters. He peered through an unbroken window, and thought he saw movement there, although it could just as easily have been more flames. It was hard to see; thermal sights were useless.
“Gator, get the fuck outta there! It’s gonna blow!” Lemon shouted at him through his imp at max volume, the only reason Morris could hear the words over the crackling fire. He kept looking around, desperately trying to find someone, anybody to save. There’d been children in that bus, children and oldsters too poor to afford rejuv treatments or who’d turned them down for religious reasons. Noncombatants. The people he was supposed to protect.
“Gator!”
He crawled over the burning bus, ignoring the way the skin under his knees began to blister. Was someone trying to climb out? By the time he got to that window, only flames waited for him. He thought he heard pounding coming from below, but he wasn’t sure.
Somebody grabbed Morris from behind and bodily flung him off the bus. The impact made his cracked ribs flare up in pure agony and he blacked out for a bit. He dimly felt himself being dragged on the ground while someone cursed up a storm. Lemon.
The explosion when the bus’s gasoline tank ignited was muted in comparison to the cargo truck’s immolation, but he heard it clearly. He tried to get up despite the pain, but Lemon held him down, obscuring the view from the road. They both knew that if he saw the burning bus he would
rush back towards it.
“Let it be, man,” Lemon said. “It’s over. Let it be.”
“Fuck you,” Morris growled. In his mind, he saw Mariah in that bus. He knew she was already safe in New Burbank, but those children in there had been someone’s Mariah.
“Nothing you coulda done, Gator.”
The fire continued to crackle and pop. There wasn’t screaming or any other human sounds coming from it.
He’d never felt so old.
Sixth Fleet, Parthenon System, 165 AFC
“PDB Twelve is down, ma’am.”
The report was five minutes old. At the rate bad news were coming in, Parthenon-Three was probably down to twenty defensive bases instead of twenty-one. The population centers closest to the destroyed PDBs had lost their coverage and had been interdicted and put to the torch. New Caledonia, Lebanon and Balboa: three sleepy colonial towns, mostly involved in farming and light industry, with a population of under a hundred thousand apiece before refugees seeking safety had doubled their numbers. Half a million civilians were now burning to death inside the Viper force domes that had encircled them. A few thousand had managed to escape when the last surviving remnants of the 87th MEU managed to breach one of the domes long enough to allow a lucky few to leave the perimeter, but now both Marines and refugees were being hunted down by the Viper ground forces that had destroyed the local defenses. They weren’t likely to survive very long.
Another two hundred thousand civilians had been killed by orbital bombardment or ground attacks. The Vipers didn’t dare use their missile swarms or heavy energy salvos on the planet’s surface, but even the sporadic fire allowed under Starfarer conventions would occasionally immolate a building or an entire city block. Those murders would pale in significance as soon as more death domes came online and proceeded to commit genocide in an environmentally-conscious manner.
No Price Too High (Warp Marine Corps Book 2) Page 24
