“In this reality, at least. But yes, let’s make it count.”
They headed towards their quarters, hand in hand.
Parthenon-Three, 165 AFC
Davistown was burning.
Morris Jensen absently noticed the general store’s collapse in a cloud of smoke while he scanned Main Street for targets. The Marines were retreating by echelon, half of them moving while the other half covered them. The Vipers were still too far for Morris to engage; for the time being he and the rest of the platoon were simple spectators. And the show sucked.
Remembrance Park was on top of a shallow hill overlooking Davistown, lined with Earth trees and decorated with stone and metal plaques listing the town’s dead sons and daughters, the honored fallen of a dozen conflicts from the past seventy years. Several of the monuments had been blasted into rubble. The Viper’s heavy weapons were hitting their positions with enough energy ordnance to punch through the area shields every other minute or so. An Army fire team had been on the receiving end of a graviton blast. The lone survivor had lost an arm and leg; everyone else had been turned into something that looked like a modern art sculpture made of metal, plastic and flesh.
Above and behind Morris’ position, a 70mm mortar team emptied its five-shot clip in rapid succession; the light weapon lacked the authority of the Marines’ hundred-mike-mikes but they would kill aliens well enough. Somewhere near the town, a gap in the enemy field coverage had provided a target of opportunity: plasma explosions went off over the heads of a handful of aliens caught in the open. A few ETs went down. Not enough. Never enough.
Morris wanted to hope they could halt the Vipers here, but he couldn’t delude himself. Might as well hope for Santa and the Easter Bunny to show up, wielding light sabers and kryptonite. You couldn’t feel any hope when you had access to a battle map and could see what the situation was.
The enemy forces were steadily pushing forward, undeterred despite taking over triple the casualties they inflicted. Only the presence of Copperhead Rapids to the south and the sheer walls of Mount Kenner to the north kept the enemy from outflanking a lone platoon of the 101st and a few Army units supporting it. Like all towns on Parthenon-Three, Davistown had been planned with defense in mind, and the aliens had been forced to make head-on attacks against prepared positions to gain their objectives. But you could crack the toughest nut if you didn’t mind paying the cost.
Morris switched screens to check the casualty rosters. There were too many yellow, red and black icons there. Hundreds, thousands. Now that there was no room to maneuver, the casualty exchange rate was a lot less one-sided, and the enemy had troops to spare.
Two more Army divisions were digging in at the other end of the valley, blocking the direct path to the Planetary Defense Base. The Marines were buying them time to deploy with their lives; one company was somewhere to the south, conducting hit-and-run attacks on the flanks of the advance, but it hadn’t made a difference. The original defense plans had assumed it would take a month for the Vipers to reach the end of the valley. The aliens had made it in a week, thanks to the loss of PDB-12 and the fact they had brought more troops than anyone had thought possible. Aliens didn’t have enough warp-rated people to transport entire armies, but that didn’t matter if you brought millions of fertilized embryos, accepting the deaths of nine-tenths of them during transport, and fast-grew the survivors in-system.
A quartet of Marine LAVs darted towards the hill, their turrets firing to their rear. Morris spotted the four-legged shapes of half a dozen Hellcats running between the armored personnel carriers. And further back, he saw the looming pyramidal shape of a Viper land battleship. More than enough to crush all resistance if they couldn’t take it down quickly.
The combined fury of several Marine and Army artillery batteries engaged the Dragon, unleashing sheaves of shield-piercing missiles in staggered waves. Air-defense lasers caught half of them in mid-flight, but the rest slammed into its force fields and, eventually, armor. The giant vehicle disappeared behind multiple explosions. When the smoke drifted off, its pyramidal shape was missing several large chunks, and the massive fighting vehicle had stopped moving or fighting. Call that a hard kill, and that was the last super-heavy tank the Vipers had brought to the game.
They still had plenty of mobile guns and missile launchers, though. They raked Remembrance hill with dozens of heavy weapons, from hypervelocity missiles to grav guns. The hill began to come apart, some impacts carving out divots of earth and stone wide enough to fit an assault shuttle. The ground shook under Morris’ feet as he fired at the lead Viper infantrymen, moving with the abrupt motions of striking reptiles as they entered Main Street. They’d brought an area force field, but each shot that hit the invisible force bubble would weaken it and hopefully allow a heavy gun or missile to do some actual damage. The LAVs and Hellcats were adding their fire as well.
Not a single building stood in the town’s Green. The churches and City Hall were smoking craters or flaming husks. No humans remained there.
The Vipers kept coming.
“I think it’s time to bug out, Gator,” Nikolic said.
“They’ll tell us when it’s time to go,” Morris said while he sent five plasma grenades downrange. Half a dozen Vipers who’d gotten ahead of their shields went down; only four got up again and scurried for cover. Counter-fire made the miliatmen duck into their fighting holes and keep their heads down for a bit.
“What’s the point in running when all you’ll get is a field court martial and a bullet in the head? Or end up in the city and get burned to a crisp?”
“I suppose no point at all,” Lemon admitted. “Unless we head out into the wild. Hunker down somewhere, wait out the war.”
“If the Vipers win, they’ll hunt us down. If we win, the Army’ll find out we deserted and it’s back to the whole court martial thing. You were a Marine, Lemon. What the fuck’s wrong with you?”
“Dunno.” Nikolic was quiet for a second. Enemy shots were going overhead, but neither man paid attention to them. “I was never yellow, back then. They didn’t call me Lemon ‘cause I was yellow.”
“I know,” Morris said, hoping Nikolic would shut up. Hell of a conversation to have with the enemy less than a klick away and rolling closer by the second.
“I’m just tired, Gator. Never been this tired before.”
“I know. Just keep it together, all right?”
“Yeah.”
Lemon started shooting again, pausing only to switch mags. Morris erased the private channel conversation. That kind of record was never really erased, not unless you knew more tricks than he did, but it would take a lot of court orders to unearth it. Hopefully none of Lemon’s idle talk would see the light of day. By rights he should report Nikolic for plotting to desert, but he wasn’t about to rat on his friend. Not for a momentary lapse, at least.
Something made the air shake a few feet over his head. The trench force field glowed for a second before it shut down. Morris was showered with debris from behind. He looked back and saw that a couple of the few remaining trees had been turned into kindling by the near miss. A hundred inches lower and he and Gator and everyone in between would have become ground chuck.
As Morris rushed to replace the portable genny’s power pack, he reflected that Lemon’s defeatism mattered about as much as last season’s Little League scores. Cowards and heroes, the just and the unjust, they were all probably going to die horribly before the day was over.
Sixth Fleet, Parthenon System, 165 AFC
“Warp emergence in fifty-three minutes. Contacts identified as Task Force 43.”
“About goddam time,” Admiral Givens said.
She had spent much of her time reading the just-declassified briefings on the new ship classes and trying to figure out what to do with them. Since enemy sensors would identify all of them except the Nimitz as Marine Assault Ships, her plan was to place them among those vessels, which were arranged to provide point defense, the only thing th
ey were good for, now that their troop holds were empty. The Vipers tended to ignore the troop transports as long as there were higher-value targets around. Hopefully the carrier vessels would be similarly dismissed. The Nimitz would also be mixed in among the transports; her lack of offensive capabilities would probably make her another low-priority target.
Rear Admiral Burke, the commander of the first-ever space carrier fleet, had drafted a detailed set of proposals on how to use his ships and fighters. She remembered the man as a solid officer, a pre-Contact Wet Navy man who had made the transition to space relatively well, although his career had stalled after being passed over by newer generations of spacer-born commanders. If he thought there was something to this Star Wars nonsense, Givens would give him plenty of leeway and concentrate on the ships she was used to, the ones that would trade broadsides with the enemy at ninety thousand miles, the way it'd been done for millions of years.
Of course, the chances of a positive outcome for Sixth Fleet in a conventional battle were less than twenty percent. Only if they did everything just right and the Vipers made every possible mistake could she hope to eke out something that could be called a victory, and even then there wouldn’t be enough hale ships to call her formation a fleet. Maybe Burke’s wonder carriers would save the day, but she doubted that.
Not that there was any choice but to meet the enemy in battle.
* * *
All off-duty personnel usually went under sedation for warp jumps lasting more than thirty minutes, but none of the pilots of Carrier Space Wing One bothered. Warp transit no longer disturbed them.
Lisbeth Zhang watched a flow of impossible geometries with something other than her eyes as the USS Nimitz navigated through them. Somewhere ‘ahead’ lay their destination, if such terms had any meaning in a place where distance didn’t exist, a place that couldn’t be sensed or even conceived by a normal human mind. In some ways, warp transit was a form of time travel. They currently existed in the moment before universal expansion began, when all points were superimposed and all matter and energy in the universe were more closely-knit together than the deepest core of an atom. But even that was nothing but a crude metaphor, because time inside warp was as irrelevant as space. Neither physicists nor mystics had the vocabulary to describe it, let alone comprehend it.
She shared her insights with her fellow pilots and received their feedback like a warm wave of thought and emotion. The other conscious humans inside the ship felt vague echoes from that communication, especially the carrier’s navigators, who were also communing with warp space, although at a lower level than fighter pilots. Most of them mistook the overhead thoughts as normal warp-induced hallucinations. Once again, she wondered what she and the others had become. Their neural pathways had been rewritten and changed irrevocably: after the pilots’ last physicals, the higher ups had been downright terrified; scuttlebutt was that they’d almost shut down the program before the fighters had proven their worth during practice runs. They couldn’t afford to toss aside a weapon that might turn the tide, however, so they’d buried the truth under a sea of euphemisms.
Bad odds.
There was a chorus of agreement, tempered with bravado and punctuated with oorahs and a smattering of hooyas from the former Navy personnel in the Space Wing. She sent out an oorah of her own. Between her stint as a ground-pounder and the past year’s ordeals, she was a Marine now. And Marines laughed at bad odds.
Emergence.
Reality felt cold and full of sharp edges. Even the air she breathed had an acrid aftertaste. The sense of communion with her fellow pilots died down but didn’t disappear. Every time she went into warp with them, it grew a little stronger.
“Wing meeting scheduled for 0530 hours,” her imp reminded her. Fifteen minutes from now. A final briefing before they went to war.
She was ready. Eager even.
They all were.
Parthenon-Three, 165 AFC
Yet another ambush worked like a charm.
The Viper infantry chasing Fromm’s troops outran its support vehicles and blundered into overlapping fusillades from two concealed platoons on their flanks. Fromm ordered an about-face; a dozen combat vehicles reversed course and shredded the disorganized and demoralized Vipers with direct fire, scattering them. A squad of Hellcats emerged from hiding and ran down the survivors, mowing down any groups that tried to rally or stand their ground.
The vat-grown assault troops had literally been born yesterday, or at most a couple days before that, and their implanted neural programming wasn’t enough to instill anything but a crude understanding of tactics. Their computerized commanders only held a limited repertoire of decision trees in their data banks, and they couldn’t anticipate every possible eventuality. In this case, they’d decided that maintaining contact with the mobile force tormenting their southern flank was more important than waiting for support vehicles to catch up with the pursuers. The result had been entirely foreseeable: several enemy companies had been savaged without inflicting any losses on the Americans.
On the other hand, the Vipers had troops to spare, and two regiments were following the doomed vanguard, pouring through every possible pathway. Water doesn’t have to be smart to fill all available crevices, and the aliens only needed to be smart enough to keep coming until they managed to pin down and destroy Fromm’s units.
His mortar section put a hundred-plus bomblets between the aliens and his dismounted troops, allowing them to get back into their vehicles and retreat. It would have been nice to have some real artillery to hammer the aliens, but all the available tubes were at Miller’s Crossing, trying to stop the main attack. Fromm’s forces had relieved some of the pressure on the defenders in the north, and he hoped that this last counterattack would convince the Vipers to send even more troops after him. One could argue they weren’t doing much good at all, that the aliens had enough troops to conduct a full-scale assault on the eastern gap while retaining enough surplus forces to chase down his two-company force. On the other hand, he was tying up more aliens here than he would from inside a trench line in the northeast end of the valley.
After breaking contact, Fromm sent his drones forward to keep an eye on the enemy, mindful he only had a few of them left. The flying ‘bots stayed out of swatter range and managed to survive the few fireflies still in play to keep him appraised of the situation. If the Vipers stopped chasing him, he would go back and hit them again. It’d be risky, and even the dumb AIs coordinating the enemy might manage to mousetrap his force. But that was part of the job.
The drones orbited the hilly terrain on the southern edge of the Valley. The two enemy regiments were being reinforced by what appeared to be an entire brigade, more than enough troops to block every route north. Fromm didn’t see many mobile force fields and only a company of Turtle light armor in support. His forces had the edge in mobility and local firepower, and he’d apparently provoked the aliens into committing troops they might need for their primary assault. The half a division the Vipers were sending off to chase him had been removed from the main event as surely as if he’d shot them all dead.
Shooting them all dead would be even better, of course. Pity he was too outnumbered and outgunned to do that.
No matter. The enemy had taken the bait, and he was going to make them bleed every inch of way.
* * *
“Shit, those are Turtles,” Russell said, watching the view from their LAV’s sensors. The little alien tanks had crested a hill and were on the platoon’s left flank. The Land Assault Vehicles turned their turrets towards them and engaged the unexpected targets at twelve hundred yards. Problem was, the Turtles were shooting, too.
“Those clown cars can’t hit shit, Russet,” Dragunov replied. “Keep your…”
That was when they got hit.
He’d been through it too many times already, but you never got used to waking up after getting fucked up by enemy incoming. Russell could see out of a huge hole where the LAV’s turret used
to be. A bunch of missile contrails flew overhead. His whole body felt numb; the last time he’d felt like that, about thirty percent of his body mass had been gone. He was scared to run his diagnostics app.
Someone was moaning nearby; that got him moving.
Russell sat up while he queried his imp. His bio status was nominal for a change, just a few bruises when the LAV plowed into the ground at a good eighty mph. He checked the fire team next while he turned towards Bozo, whose carat was yellow fading into red.
Nacle’s status icon was black. Russell forced himself to ignore that. Black was beyond help. Yellow-red wasn’t.
The LAV had eaten a burst of high-caliber railgun rounds, dense metal traveling at hypersonic speeds, five or six rounds hitting within a fraction of a second from each other. At least one of those had hit the main engine; the rest had blown off the turret and the poor bastard manning it. Sheer luck that none of the rounds had gone bouncing around the compartment; that would have killed everyone. As it was, a third of the squad was down. Lots of red and black carats.
Bozo had been sitting quietly for a change when a fragment had ripped off his left arm at the shoulder. Even his nano-meds weren’t enough to staunch the flow of blood from the wound; he was going fast. Russell fumbled around his belt and came up with a first-aid ‘glue gun.’ He sprayed a thick coat of coagulant gel over the spurting hole. Bozo whimpered and passed out, and for a moment Russell thought he’d lost him, but the carat stayed red; out of commission, but alive.
Time to check on the others. The LAV’s driver was dead; two railgun rounds had gone through him like a chainsaw. Staff Sergeant Dragunov had bought it too; a fragment had blasted a hole in his helmet big enough to put a fist through. Two other guys from the squad were down for the count but stable. And Nacle was gone from the waist up; Russell only knew it was him after identifying everyone else inside the LAV. That left six guys who’d gotten knocked around but still functional.
No Price Too High (Warp Marine Corps Book 2) Page 27
