On the other hand, when the war was done, things would calm down a lot. He’d been shot at during peacetime, but that’d been pretty tame stuff: primmie aliens who didn’t get the idea that messing with the US was a quick form of suicide, or pirates who usually gave up as soon as they realized who they were fighting. He could handle that stuff. It was fighting Starfarers that was getting downright hairy. There’d been too many close calls in the last three years or so, more than in the previous twenty. You rolled the dice enough times, and sooner or later they’d come up snake-eyes.
No sooner did he have that thought that the alert went up. They were under attack.
Russell, his fireteam and about half of First Platoon, the guys who’d been off-duty, all scrambled back to their prepared positions. He noticed a new sound while he moved: a faint buzzing, growing louder by the second. By the time he’d lined up his Widowmaker, his link with the drones orbiting the area was up. Thermal sensors looked right through the canopy and showed him a moving blob at a two hundred and fifty meters, seeping through the mushroom-trees like a cloud as it moved towards the burned-out section around the valley. Not a cloud: a swarm. He zoomed in and saw thousands of flying critters, about two or three inches long, flying their way.
The bugs in the swarm had eight legs, two set of wings like a dragonfly, big mandibles flanked by a pair of pincer-hands and a scorpion stinger. Sure as hell nothing Russell would want crawling on his skin. He and the rest of the Devil Dogs were in sealed armor and should be safe enough – although ‘should’ often turned out to be an outright lie – but the bubbleheads and civvies were in simple bodysuits which probably weren’t up for the job.
“Shit,” Gonzo said. “They hurt one of the Normies!”
Russell had missed that. A quick check showed him Gonzo was right. Some bugs had crawled over one of the tanks flying patrol overhead and knocked out a couple sensors. Sensors that were supposed to be proof against small-arms fire. That meant they were all at risk, body armor or not.
“Engage on my mark,” Sergeant Fuller said. The grunts on either side of the Weapons squad were already firing their IW-3s’ grenade launchers: little plasma clouds appeared among the bugs, incinerating a few dozen at a time. That wasn’t going to cut it.
“Bugs,” Grampa said. “Why did it have to be bugs?”
If the Guns squad had been using standard-issue ALS-43s, their 15mm plasma area munitions could have filled the forest with hellfire. But Charlie Company was carrying advanced alien weaponry; their Alsies had been replaced with portable grav cannon that packed as much punch as a tank gun, and they’d gotten two Widowmakers per fire team, giving them about a lot more firepower than they’d had before. Problem was, a grav beam, even with a lethal footprint a meter wide, wasn’t as effective against a swarm of bugs as a string of plasma mini-grenades. Not on its normal fire mode, at least.
“Switch to wide beam,” Sergeant Fuller ordered. Russell and Gonzo followed suit. They were ready by the time the leading edge of the swarm had gotten to within two hundred meters. Make that swarms. The overhead view from the recon drones showed half a dozen insect clouds were converging on their position. Each of them held tens of thousands of the nasty-looking bugs or other kinds of insect that didn’t look much nicer.
“And be careful swinging that thing around. Lethal radius is gonna be three times bigger.”
“Copy that.”
Grampa was the designated loader; he’d set his Iwo on the ground and had a power pack in each hand, ready to replace the spent ones that would eject from their backpack housing when Russell and Gonzo shot themselves dry. Training had shown that happened after thirty seconds or so on continuous beam mode. Going wide was supposed to drain the weapon at the same rate, but they hadn’t really tried it for real, and simulations didn’t always measure up to reality.
“Engage at one hundred, that’s one-zero-zero meters,” Sergeant Fuller ordered. The spacers and civvies had retreated to the camp proper or were huddled in the pit around the black building, protected by a thin line of Marine engineers with light weapons. If the bugs got through they’d have nowhere to run. Nasty way to go, stung to death. Not that there really were any nice ways to go, come to think of it. Even dying of a stroke at age three hundred, with a hooker by your side and a bottle of hundred-proof in your free hand would still suck.
“Fire!”
Grav weapons were nasty mothers. The conditions inside the beam loosely corresponded to what happened inside the event horizon of a black hole. The resulting ‘devil’s corkscrew’ tore through force fields and composite armor and mangled flesh and bone like nothing else in the universe. On wide beam, the effects were even weirder. Russell felt the oversized cannon buck in his hands like a pneumatic drill as a swirling stream of greasy darkness poured out of the ten-centimeter muzzle. He played the weapon like a hose disintegrating anything in a three-meter radius around the beam. Any bugs up to three hundred meters downrange didn’t have a chance; they were sucked into the darkness and reduced to scattered molecules.
Russell hosed down the bugs for the full thirty seconds. By the time the spent power pack auto-ejected, the forest beyond the clearing had been erased, along with any living thing in it. Problem was, there were more bugs beyond the area of effect. Bigger things were also coming their way, but the shuttles and tanks were blasting them long before they got into range. The bugs were still getting closer, though.
Grampa slapped his back, letting him know he was loaded up just as the weapon read-out went green. He waited for the second wave of bugs to get to within seventy-fire meters before letting them have it. The First Platoon guys had switched their grenades to the rear of the bugs, thinning their swarms before they came in. The Hellcats from Fourth had reached their own high ground and hosed the area below with more grenades. The mortar section was doing a much better job: a quick peek at the overheads showed him they were burning down entire swaths of forest at a time. Question was whether they’d run out of ammo before the swarms ran out of bugs.
It was a tie, sort of.
His fireteam’s standard combat load was eight power packs per Widowmaker. They went through half of them before a squadron of assault shuttles got into the game and leveled several square klicks of forest with heavy weapons. And a few bugs still made it through.
“Motherfucker!” Gonzo shouted. Two critters had landed on him, and their stingers were secreting some acid shit that was eating through the armor plates protecting his chest and head.
“Hold still,” Russell told him. He slapped one bug off his buddy’s helmet and crushed it under his boot. More smoke came from the sole of his size-eleven as some acid got on it. Cursing, he scraped it on the dirt until it stopped sputtering. Meanwhile, Gonzo had gotten the other one and crushed it in his fist. He avoided squeezing the stinger, and that was where the acid was, so he didn’t damage his glove.
All in all, of the million or two bugs that had attacked their dig, only a dozen or three of them made it to their lines.
From the screams Russell heard coming from the pit as he finished off the ones going after his buddies, that was more than enough.
* * *
“Wide beams! Low-charge, you idiots!” Heather shouted as her imp scanned every weapon among the civilians while the Marine engineers above them opened fire on the swarms of alien mini-fauna headed their way. Her special implants overrode the civilians’ weapon settings and changed them into something that wouldn’t kill them as surely as the approaching creatures.
Five of the twelve civilians in the pit with her were armed; below average for any gathering of Americans outside big cities, but that was to be expected from sissified academics. The sidearm of choice was the tried-and-true particle beam pistol, which had a non-lethal neural disruptor setting that would temporarily disable most sophonts and a lethal one that would punch a fist-sized hole on unshielded targets. The pistols could also fire a wide, short-range cone of energy that would shred vermin while only inflicting nast
y skin burns on larger targets.
The Navy personnel working on the surface had been largely unarmed; security was the Marines’ jobs. Only petty officers and warrants had been carrying beamers; they were in the outer perimeter, helping the Marine engineers there. The dozen Spacers next to the civilians were equally helpless; many of them hadn’t handled any energy weapons since Basic, many years ago.
Everyone with any sense had already switched their beamers to the right setting. Doctor Munson, Professor Bell and Doctor Samuels all did: that left two idiots for Heather to do it for them.
“Put up your shields!” she told a different set of idiots who were too busy panicking to activate their defensive system. All members of the expedition had been ordered to wear personal field generators, ignoring complaints about being forced to lug around an extra thirty pounds on their backs in addition to their pressurized suits and air filtration equipment. While the shields wouldn’t stop slow-moving insects, they would minimize any injuries when someone inevitably shot a friendly by mistake.
All in all, though, the unarmed civilians and spacers huddled next to the Black Tower behaved fairly well. Only a couple huddled down in the fetal position, sobbing in terror as their imp links to the sensors above the pit showed them the approaching clouds of alien pseudo-insects pushing past the storm of fire the Marines were pouring into them. Sometimes having too much information was as harmful as too little.
Heather got the armed members organized, forming them in a loose outward-facing circle around those who couldn’t or wouldn’t defend themselves. By the time she was done the bugs were getting very close; the jarheads had mowed down well over ninety-nine percent of them, but when hostiles started out in the seven-figure range, anything below a hundred percent wasn’t enough.
“Holy shit, I see one!” a grad student yelled as he opened fire.
PB weapons were damn easy to shoot: they had minimal recoil and even a civilian cyber-implant could project an aiming point right into its owner’s retina. The Gal-Arch student managed to scatter dirt all up the wall of the pit without hitting a single bug. Doctor Samuels did slightly better and managed to fry the target before it could reach the bottom.
Heather watched their imp feeds off one corner of her field of vision while she kept most of her attention on her own sector. A bug flittered into sight, and she tagged it with a single wide-beam shot; she got the next three herself even as the professors and students around her filled the air with poorly-aimed fire, thankfully nowhere near any humans. The Marines outside the pit were out of the line of fire, and their force fields would easily handle even a full-bore beamer discharge.
Then the first bugs got through and things stopped being easy.
“Shit!” The screamer tracked a bug as it darted to the center of the pit and fired three shots right into the backs of his companions on the other side of the circle. Force fields sparkled as they shed the energy charges. Amidst the fortunately harmless blue-on-blue hits, the bug sizzled and fell apart.
Nothing she could do other than try to keep the alien critters off the group. There weren’t many of them, but hitting them at close range wasn’t easy even with wide beams.
“Fucker,” Lisbeth Zhang growled as she swung her beamer like a club and batted one of the fliers out of the air. The ten-legged thing didn’t have a chance to fly away before the Marine took it out with a shot. Heather took care of another two during a few more frenzied seconds. Somebody shot her from behind; her force field dropped to ninety-five percent. She didn’t even bother cursing out the shooter, although her imp identified who it was, for when there was time to make some pointed comments.
People were screaming in terror or disgust, but one impossibly-loud howl stood out among the rest. Heather turned towards it.
A bug had reached one of the unconscientious objectors in the middle and landed on his head. People were shooting at it, but now the critter was protected by the same force field that kept the screaming student from getting fried by friendly fire. Lisbeth Zhang pushed her way through the civilians but by the time she used the barrel of her beamer to slap the bug aside, it had already stung its victim, piercing the tough synthetic fiber of his bodysuit and the skull underneath.
Sizzling smoke rose from the puncture. The young man’s screams turned into shrieks of agony, his body convulsing and his hands gripping his face as if trying to squeeze the impossible pain away. Heather’s t-wave implants caught his final thoughts.
No-no-hurts-hurts-not-like-this-NO!
By the time they pried his hands away and sprayed the wound with cell-repair gel, his convulsions had turned into mindless muscle impulses. The sting’s chemical secretions had bored a hole clear through skin and bone; Heather could see a dark brown mass beneath, brain tissue turned into digested mush. She turned away and kept shooting. Everybody was firing as fast as possible, and thankfully they only had to deal with a handful of the creatures. Soon enough, they were all gone.
Only one bug made it through and managed to sting a victim. For that victim, one had been too much.
Eight
Star District Hoon, Lhan Arkh Congress, 167 AFC
Seventh Fleet’s Special Attack Force emerged into real space half a light-second away from the Lamprey Star District’s main planet, its arrival as sudden and unexpected as a bolt of lightning from a clear sky.
Kerensky watched the holotank display intently. All thirty-three ships had made their second transit safely and were moving into formation. The SAF was comprised by the Odin, two battleships, ten battlecruisers, two fleet carriers and twelve destroyers. It was an all-teeth formation, meant to savage the closest Lamprey system it could reach. None of the ships were operating at one hundred percent (the most charitable average would put the SAF’s readiness at seventy percent), but time had been of the essence. Kerensky had waited for basic repairs – and for extra doses of Melange, the wonder-drug given to fighter pilots, to be prepared and distributed to the attack force’s crews.
And it worked.
The nine-hour warp jump had gone through shockingly well; very few ghosts or hallucinations had tormented his crews. There’d been none of the usual casualties from a transit of that length. All Kerensky had experienced during transit was the oppressive presence that had confronted him on his previous jump, but he’d ignored it and concentrated on what was to come.
Retribution was at hand.
The SAF had arrived on the edge of the system, recovered in record time, and made the final jump a mere five minutes after their first emergence. The Lampreys had no warning they’d been invaded until the multicolor display announcing the second emergence appeared over the night sky of Hoon-Six like a harbinger of doom.
Enemy contacts appeared in the tactical displays as fast as Odin’s sensors detected them. Determining the exact classes and tonnages of the vessels and orbital facilities around Hoon-Six would take a few minutes, but Kerensky wasn’t planning to wait that long. If this was to be done, it must be done quickly.
“Fire at will.”
Every ship had been assigned a target ‘basket’ and any vessel – military or civilian – unlucky enough to be within the basket was engaged by main gun batteries as soon as the Weapons Department crews had targeting solutions for them. The battlecruisers’ twenty-inch graviton cannon – a hundred and twenty guns in total – struck at eighty-three contacts, most of them civilian freighters and equally helpless military support vessels, the cargo and factory ships which provided the lifeblood of the Lhan Arkh task force that had joined the Imperium fleet and sailed to its doom less than thirty hours ago. Single main gun blasts were more than powerful enough to cripple or kill the massive but thinly-protected targets. A dozen escort destroyers were arrayed around the Lamprey support elements like so many sheepdogs; they survived one or two hits apiece before joining their charges in hell.
Hoon System’s outer defenses were not spared, either. Odin and the battleships engaged twenty planetary defense monitors – heavily a
rmed ships without warp drives – and fourteen space facilities, six of them orbital fortresses, the rest civilian docking stations and orbital habitats. A hundred and eighty fighters struck those contacts from all angles almost simultaneously. In less than a minute, all the soft targets had been destroyed, and the military ships and bases had taken heavy damage.
The Special Attack Force advanced relentlessly towards the planet, engaging any surviving vessels or installations with its full firepower. The fighter wings continued hammering the orbital defenses as the warships’ secondary guns went into action. Plasma and lasers completed the work graviton batteries had begun. Depleted force fields gave way, and hulls burst open under the steady fire. The startled Lamprey spacers didn’t have time to go into battle stations before being obliterated. Within ten minutes, only scattered debris shared Hoon-Six orbital lanes with the invading force. Then it was the turn of the ground defense bases, which had just begun to fire at their tormentors.
“Caught you napping,” Kerensky said in the tone of a judge passing a death sentence.
It had been a risky move, leading this retribution raid into Lhan Arkh space, but he had bet that the raid, coming thirty-six hours after the ET fleet’s destruction, would take the enemy by surprise. The extermination of over a hundred enemy vessels made for a nice payoff, although the full play had yet to be resolved. He only wished he could be visiting this destruction on the Galactic Imperium instead, but the Gimps were protected by distance: over ten warp transits separated New Texas from the nearest District Capital, most of them through Wyrashat space. The repulsive Lampreys were closer, and killing them might be less satisfying, but equally necessary. All enemies of humankind must be dealt with.
As it was, his ships had to enter Paulus System, officially open to all comers but still under the control of the Wyrashat Empire. The startled Wyrms hadn’t done anything to prevent the SAF from reaching the inner orbits around the star and making transit into Lamprey territory. No Imperium forces had been at Paulus; they must have fled as soon as the surviving enemy ships had returned, fearing something like what had happened. It appeared the Gimps hadn’t bothered to warn their Lhan Arkh allies of the disaster at Capricorn, allowing the SAF to surprise them. It was time to make the bastards understand they were in a fight, not conducting an execution.
In Dread Silence (Warp Marine Corps Book 4) Page 18
