The Vipers had shot their bolt, and Sixth Fleet still stood. Even better, the enemy’s battle line had been brutalized, and hers had just begun to fight.
“Our turn,” she said. Then, in her command voice:
“Fire at will!”
Parthenon-Three, 165 AFC
The area force field burned out with a final cyan flash. A moment later, a second missile volley slammed into the fighting holes where soldiers and Marines were making their last stand.
Multiple impacts hammered into the smaller and weaker portable shields protecting the dug-in infantrymen. Some held, but those that didn’t allowed an entire trench section to be washed over by plasma explosions that broiled alive everyone inside. Seven personnel carats went from green to black in the space of a second.
“We have to fall back!” Captain Kruger said over the commander channel.
“Hold in place,” Fromm ordered curtly. “Send your reserves forward and plug the gap as soon as the area force field is back online. I’m sending you reinforcements. Repeat, hold in place.”
“Hold in place, roger.” The Army captain’s voice had a distant quality; the man was in shock and relying on his training to get through it. Robot-like obedience was better than panic, but Fromm shouldn’t expect much from the officer; the continuing losses had essentially broken him. That was the only explanation for the pointless plea to retreat.
They were surrounded. There was nowhere to go.
Destroying the trapped Viper battalion had been surprisingly easy. Its controlling computers had been destroyed at some point; nobody had been in charge of the hapless vat-grown troopers. Caught in a narrow cul-de-sac and too tightly-packed to deploy, the aliens hadn’t been able to defend themselves from point-blank LAV and Hunter fire that wiped out the entire unit while Second Platoon’s dismounted Marines kept a relief force from reaching the killing ground in time to do anything except dispose of their dead.
The maneuvers required to escape in the aftermath had cost them their last few drones, however. Without the ability to keep an eye on the enemy, it was only a matter of time before they stumbled into more trouble than they could handle. Fourth Platoon’s Hellcats had run into what they mistakenly thought was a Viper company. In the ensuing firefight, they discovered the hard way they were tangling with a reinforced battalion, and while trying to extricate the mobile infantrymen, the entire formation had found itself cornered. Only about a squad’s worth of Hellcats were still functional; half a dozen pilots had been forced to abandon their damaged battlesuits and become lightly-armed infantrymen.
His two companies, now down to about four platoons of effectives, had managed to gain the heights of a hill, one flank anchored by Copperhead Rapids, the other protected by a sheer cliff. There was a ravine leading out of the hill, but it led to an open area that would be harder to hold against an attack, and which would likely end up invested by other Viper forces. Breaking contact without taking massive casualties would require artillery assets he didn’t have. In the course of the running battle, they’d been forced to abandon most of the support platoon’s vehicles; those rear echelon troops were holding their pistols and carbines and readying themselves to fill the fighting positions being vacated by the wounded and dead.
The Viper battle computers would soon divert enough forces to overrun the American position. The enemy couldn’t make their numbers count at first, but after a while they organized their rocketeers into groups. Their coordinated volleys from beyond small-arms fire were overwhelming their shields and their few anti-air defense assets. The steady bombardment was slowly but surely grinding them down.
Fromm sent out Lieutenant Hansen and the dismounted Hellcat drivers he’d kept in reserve to bolster the Army’s position. That left him with a handful of walking wounded, a couple of squads of truck drivers and loaders, and the company communication specialists as his last uncommitted forces. The temptation to grab a rifle and rush into the fight was strong, but he knew that he would only be allowed that luxury when the battle was well and truly lost.
They’d found their death ground. The only option left was to fight.
Sixth Fleet, Parthenon System, 165 AFC
It’s chasing us, Lisbeth thought. It’s getting closer.
As a child, she’d sometimes had nightmares about being pursued by something so terrible she didn’t dare to look back. Whatever was happening inside warp space was worse. Whatever she and her fellow pilots had woken up was becoming more active and aware with every sortie they launched. She didn’t know what would happen if it caught them, and she didn’t intend to find out.
Her War Eagle emerged five thousand miles from a missile cruiser, moving at an angle that was increasing the distance between her and the target by thousands of meters per second. She adjusted course and opened fire, noticing the ship’s point defense was shooting back. Her warp shield absorbed most of the incoming, but a few near misses reduced her force fields by thirty percent in the time it took her to fire a single shot into the target and flee back into warp.
She almost hesitated before jumping, even though to stay in normal space was certain death. Flight B had lost one fighter already: Goober had lingered a moment too long, and a Viper frigate had scored a hit from twenty thousand klicks. It hadn’t taken long for the aliens to realize what was happening, and to re-task light vessels to scan for small warp emergences and target them with their main guns. They no longer could afford to fire their full ordnance load between jumps. It was shoot and scoot time, and even then they were taking losses.
Transition.
A feeling of pure dread washed over her. She and the other pilots were sharing warp space with something else. The presence chasing her was getting closer. In the few seconds she spent there, she became certain it was gaining on her, even though a chase should be impossible in a place where neither time nor space mattered.
Too many jumps. Every time a living mind entered warp, it broadcast some sort of signal. Do it enough times, and it would be detected and traced to its point of origin. By who or what, she didn’t know. The real warp demons, maybe. Or the thing she’d seen in that Marine’s eyes, back during training.
Emergence.
She reappeared on the other side of the enemy cruiser, a mere handful of miles away, close enough she could have seen the vessel clearly with the old Mark One Eyeball if she had a window to look out from. She took two shots while a point-defense laser fired ineffectually into her warp shield, and jumped just before a massive explosion devoured the Viper vessel and nearly enveloped her fighter.
“You do not belong here,” Goober told her. The dead pilot was sitting next to her, even though there wasn’t enough room in the cockpit for another person. None of what she was seeing was real, of course; the images were just a story her mind created to make sense of surroundings that didn’t conform to any natural law.
“Who are you?” Lisbeth asked the apparition.
Goober grinned. His face began to change, to run down like melting wax, revealing something glistening, dark and hungry.
Emergence.
She was back in the vicinity of the Nimitz, the terror of the last few moments beginning to fade away like a half-forgotten dream. Just another warp-induced nightmare, she told herself. Just because psychic powers were real didn’t mean other things were, things like monsters and demons.
Going through docking procedures in the middle of a battle distracted her enough to stop thinking about it. The important thing was the fact she’d gotten another confirmed kill, this one all of her own. They were directing individual fighters after cruisers and destroyers now, because there were no other higher-value targets left: the Viper dreadnoughts and battleships were all down. The battle had been as one-sided as pitting a 21st-century aircraft carrier group against a World War One fleet would have been.
That was her last sortie. The strike group had done enough, and its casualties were mounting unnecessarily. The ordinary vessels of Sixth Fleet now outnumbered an
d outgunned the survivors, and they were mercilessly cutting them down. The hopeless battle had turned into an enemy rout.
A few bad daydreams were a small price to pay for victory, she decided.
Parthenon-Three, 165 AFC
Bringing the ALS-43, his Iwo and ammo for both on the long hike to the top of a hill hike was a pain in the ass, but Russell didn’t want to part with any of his firepower. He was the last member of his fire team left on his feet, and he was going to make the tangos pay.
“Move it, shitheads!” Gunny Wendell growled. The non-com was in command of what was left of Third Platoon after the new El-Tee had his LAV shot to shit. Lieutenant Hansen wasn’t dead, but he was down for the count. Not that it mattered; there were a whole twelve Marines able to fight in the weapons platoon.
Everybody was loaded beyond capacity, but they kept up the pace. The assaultmen were the worst; each of them was lugging five full reloads for their Light Missile Launchers on their backs. The remnants of the Guns squad were also carrying two portable field generators, which would come in handy since they were moving beyond the area shields protecting the main force.
By the time they made it to the top of the ridge, Russell’s power supply was down to twenty-five percent. On the other hand, he had a great view of the battle below.
The Vipers were moving forward in dribs and drabs under the cover of massed laser and missile fire; Russell’s sensors turned the light beams into a beautiful lightshow. The scurrying ant-sized figures looked like scaly tarantulas. Plasma bullets from the Marines and Army dog-faces firing on the ETs flashed like fireflies when they hit their shields. The effect when they finally took down an alien grunt wasn’t very spectacular: the tango would just stop moving, or would sometimes break into two pieces. It all looked pretty tame from the top of the mountain, unless you knew what it was like down there, all swirling panic, deafening sound and sudden death. It sucked to be down there.
And it was about to suck even more. For the Eets, at least, although there was plenty of suck to go around.
Setting up the ALS-43 took a few seconds. Russell was ready long before the assaultmen were, but he held his fire. The first volley had to count. The Vipers’ sensors should have picked them up, but there was so much shit flying around that the Marine flanking force had managed to climb a small mountain without drawing anybody’s attention. It helped that most of the alien grunts were dumb as rocks, of course, and that a lot of their computer minders and their few normal-brained war leaders had been sent to Jesus, leaving the few survivors in charge of a lot more troopers than they were able to handle. All of which had allowed a squad of heavily-armed Devil Dogs to outflank a battalion-sized force. Pretty neat, until they made themselves known. He didn’t think they’d brought enough guns to take out a whole battalion.
“Everybody ready?” the Gunny asked. Everybody sent back an acknowledgement. “Let them have it!”
Twelve Marines poured it on, their coordinated volleys tearing holes in the area force fields and hitting the field generators themselves. The last two gennies went up in smoke, killing dozens of enemies and leaving hundreds more protected only by their personal shields and the grace of God. And God wasn’t in a gracious mood just about now.
The two surviving hundred-mike-mike mortars in the rear had been waiting for this. The quick-firing tubes emptied their fifty-bomb magazines in five seconds, targeting the unprotected areas with a combination of plasma and fragmentary bombs, with their last two thermobaric charges for a chaser. The pass disappeared in glowing mass of hellfire. Russell and his fellow Marines checked fire; their sensors couldn’t find targets, and dropping grenades or missiles would only waste ammo without doing much more than add insult to injury.
When the smoke cleared, most of the stick figures were gone. A third field genny in the rear was also out. After that, it was a massacre. A few Vipers tried to return fire, but the Weapons Platoon was in a perfect position to spot and engage them before they could hit anything important; the remaining survivors ran until they slammed into their follow-up forces, stalling the entire advance.
I guess we did bring enough guns for a whole battalion, Russell thought. How about that.
That had gone was well as it could have, but from that height Russell could see the rest of the Vipers surrounding their position, well over three thousand in number, which was plenty enough to go through them. His heart sank. They’d killed maybe two thousand aliens during the last two attacks, and it wasn’t going to matter. The mortars had shot off all their special munitions in that final volley and the weapons squads on the ridge had burned through two-thirds of their ammo. That was it. They were done.
“Listen, maggots. Check your new aiming vectors,” Gunny Wendell said, acting as if they weren’t all dead men walking. “When they enter the pass, we will engage their generators, just like before. Two LAVs are going to move forward and plug the gap down below, so watch out for them. Any blue-on-blue hits and I’ll fucking blue and tattoo your asses.”
That all sounded great, if one didn’t know that those LAVs were the last ones left in working order, and that they would last all of five minutes before Viper rockets hammered through their defenses and turned them into scrap. Or that the weapons platoon just didn’t have the firepower to take out another field genny. They’d blown their load and it was all over but the shouting.
Russell still sent a dutiful acknowledgement. If you had to go, might as well go with your hands around the other bastard’s throat, figuratively speaking. He spent a few seconds wishing he’d found out the name of the witch; sending her a goodbye email would have been nice, even if chances were the transmission would never be received or passed on.
The Vipers took a while to deal with the influx of survivors from the shattered attack. Some of the runners didn’t stop until they were shot down, which finally convinced the rest to rally. All their obedience got them was the dubious honor of being in the front lines of the new assault. Russell could almost sympathize with them. Life as a grunt sucked, whether you had skin or scales.
The reorganized aliens began to push forward. They didn’t have any artillery or even mortars anymore, but Russell could see plenty of rocket launchers among them. More than enough to do the job. This wouldn’t take long.
“Wait for it,” the Gunny ordered. “Wait for…”
A FLASH message stepped on the transmission. ENEMY SPACE FORCES NEUTRALIZED. FRIENDLY AIR SUPPORT INCOMING. REPEAT. FRIENDLY AIR SUPPORT INCOMING. DO NOT ENGAGE AIRBORNE ASSETS.
Airborne? Shuttles could do assault runs, but the Vipers’ rocket launchers were perfectly capable of going surface-to-air, not to mention all the heavy energy weapons scattered around the valley, which could range all the way into space. A shuttle attack would get slaughtered without accomplishing anything. What the fuck were they talking about?
A few moments later, he had his answer.
The weird-looking vehicles materialized from the twisted-space shimmer of a warp jump. A dozen of them appeared over the sky and opened fire with something bigger than a Stormin’ Norman’s main gun and a bunch of smaller energy weapons, tearing into the largest Viper concentrations around their position. The attack lasted maybe two seconds all told before the flying cannons disappeared back into warp, but that was enough. That single volley obliterated all enemy force fields and consumed half the ground forces around them.
Maybe a regiment’s worth was able to run away.
Russell didn’t know what those things were, but he cheered them at the top of his lungs. They all did.
Eigtheen
Parthenon-Three, 165 AFC
“Carrier Strike Group One,” Morris Jensen muttered, tasting each word like one would a new, exotic dish.
“Whatever the hell they are, the sure came in handy,” Lemon said as they enjoyed the rocky ride inside the wheeled truck taking them to New Burbank. The converted cabin had bleachers attached to its sides and a few straps to keep the twenty grunts inside from bouncing
from the walls, but that was about all the comfort they provided. Despite that, about half of the Volunteers inside were fast asleep. It’d been that kind of day.
“Blew the Vipers clear off the system,” Lemon went on. He’d gotten the straight dope from his buddy the former Chief, who’d survived the battle and gotten back in touch with him. The aliens had lost all their capital ships and all but a handful of cruisers, something like seventy percent of the tonnage they’d started out with when they invaded. Sixth Fleet had chased the survivors all the way into Heinlein, where a few thousand Americans still lived; it turned out the aliens had brought all the troops they’d been using there to Parthenon, figuring on coming back later and finishing the job. Now they’d been booted out of there as well. And those space fighters had been the reason why. Good old American know-how had won the day once more.
“Wonder if I’ll be able to collect any insurance,” Nikolic wondered out loud. When he wasn’t playing around in the militia, he owned and ran a hardware and small-fabber store in town. The fabbers had been requisitioned and carted away before the battle, and he’d hopefully get them back in the same condition they’d been in; the rest of his business had gone up in smoke.
“If not, there’s always grants and emergency loans.”
No Price Too High (Warp Marine Corps Book 2) Page 29
