The United Federation Marine Corps' Lysander Twins: The Complete Series: Books 1-5

by Jonathan P. Brazee

  “Of course, the invitation stands,” he said hurriedly as his brain finally slipped into gear. “But why the change of heart?”

  “Well, as it turns, out, my situation here’s changed. All for the good,” she said quickly when she saw the concern cross his face. “But as I’ve got the time, well, I’d love to spend it with you in Bangkok. Or anywhere,” she added, surprising herself.

  Jim started to say something, then stopped as he realized what she’d just said. His mouth gaped open, undoubtedly trying to say something clever.

  But for once, he didn’t have a snappy comeback, as he simply said, “Ess, I’d truly welcome your company.”

  As a Marine, Esther was comfortable with the friend zone. Was she ready for something else? Something more?

  Well, I guess you’ll find out, Lysander.

  BLOOD UNITED

  CORVALLIS

  Prologue

  Esther

  The explosion shook the ground, sending smoke and debris into the air 50 meters to her left. Immediately, the avatars for three of Third Platoon’s Marines grayed out, and four more shifted to light blue, indicating three KIA and four WIA. More pertinent to the company as a whole, the round had opened a gap in the line, and from the influx of data hitting her, it looked like the Amals were massing to prosecute the gap.

  “Lieutenant Chambers, shift Second Squad left,” Captain Esther Lysander, UFMC, shouted into her command net.

  “Staff Sergeant Avalon, prepare to give me . . .” she started, then paused to pull up the mortar section’s remaining rounds. “Prepare to give me eight rounds on three-oh-two and three-oh-eight.”

  “That will only leave me with eighteen, Skipper,” the staff sergeant responded.

  The mortar section leader, who’d been attached to Golf for three weeks now, had seemed to treat the section’s combat load as his personal possessions, hoarding the rounds like a miser. Eighteen remaining rounds were nothing if it came to the FPF[38], so he had a point. But if the Amals were able to penetrate Golf’’s line, then they could roll up First Platoon easily, then turn and take on the rest of the company. It was imperative that they be stopped, therefore, even if they had to use up every last one of their remaining rounds.

  “Understood. My orders remain the same,” she said curtly and leaving it at that.

  She switched off the company command net and onto the battalion fire control net, asking, “Jerol, where we at? I really need that air.”

  “I’m trying, Esther,” the harried battalion fire support coordinator told her. “Badger-One’s still hard down, and Badger-Three’s supporting the landing.”

  Esther didn’t need to ask about Badger-Two. The Wasp had been shot down two hours ago supporting Bok Kim and India Company.

  “I need something, Jerol. Things are getting puckering here. I’m down to 78%, and the Amals are massing. What about that armor?”

  “I’ve got Beltzer with the landing force, trying to confirm that. No one knows if the armor landed or if it did, where it is.”

  “Come on, Jerol! That’s bullshit! You can’t just lose an armored column. Do your job and get me something! Adder-Six, out!” she passed, cutting the connection.

  She was pissed, and she knew the Jerol Tympany was doing the best he could. At the moment, however, his best he wasn’t good enough. Facing her 157 remaining effective Marines and sailors was something along the lines of 4-500 Amals who may not have the force-in-depth as the Navy-Marine task force, but were outfitted with the best that Amalgamation Sunset, Corp, could provide.

  And that clusterfuck of a landing wasn’t doing her any good, either.

  It should have been much easier, she knew. This was the United Federation Navy and Marines doing what they were supposed to do best—land a fighting force on an enemy planet.

  Not that Corvallis was technically an enemy planet. It was nominally neutral, and the Federation was not at war with the planetary government. The operation was a punitive raid against Amalgamation Sunset’s vast holdings on the planet to drive the corporation to the negotiating table. It wasn’t working out that way, though.

  To make the lack of progress even worse, Esther’s Second Battalion, Eleventh Marines had been on the planet for over a week now, landing on commercial liners, and bussed, for God’s sake, to assembly areas in support of the coming landing. Esther’s mission had been to secure the communications relay station on Bremmerton Peak, knocking out the Amals off-planet comms.

  “We’re not getting air,” she passed to First Lieutenant Ogilvy, her XO, on the P2P.

  “Shit. We need it, Skipper.”

  “It’s not coming, and they don’t know about the armor, either.”

  “They don’t know?”

  “Yeah, they lost a tank platoon.”

  “Mother and Child, how could this get any more screwed up?”

  “Doesn’t matter, Sam. Whatever their problems are, this is on our shoulders now. We need to fight our way out of it.”

  There was a fusillade of fire from the right side of the line. Esther paused, waiting for a report while pulling up her command display. No more Marines had been hit, and First Lieutenant Larry “Dispilly” Williams, the platoon commander, wasn’t reporting in, so she shifted her mind to the problem at hand. She needed a sounding board, so she pulled up the first sergeant to join her and the XO.

  “Tell me if I’m missing something.

  “One: our mission was compromised, and we were ambushed by a battalion-sized unit that somehow escaped all of our vaunted Navy surveillance.

  “Two: the landing force has been thrown into chaos by some yet unknown electronic countermeasures.

  “Three: we are out on our own, out of artillery range, without air support, and with a tank platoon the LFC[39] graciously lifted out to us lost somewhere.

  “Does that sum it up?”

  “Yes, ma’am, but at least our position is pretty defensible,” First Sergeant Lowell Watson said.

  More by luck than anything else, Esther had to admit to herself.

  When they’d been hit by the much larger force, Esther had ordered the company into a hasty defense, their backs against a butte that jutted up three klicks from the base of Bremerton Peak. By refusing their flanks, the company was able to focus their firepower to the front.

  As if the Amals were listening in, a rocket shot across Second Platoon’s lines to slam into the rock face of the butte, sending showers of debris down behind them. Esther barely noticed it. It was merely harassing fire, designed to keep the Marines’ heads down while they maneuvered for the upcoming assault.

  Looking at the AOR[40] readout as it played across her face shield, she thought that assault wouldn’t be long in coming. Right at that moment, what looked to be a platoon-sized unit appeared 800 meters in front of Third Platoon’s position.

  “Shit,” she heard the XO say over the P2P, and she knew he was monitoring the overall picture as well.

  Not that the avatars were the ground truth. Electronic countermeasures and spoofing were in full force, and the display shifted from one minute to the next.

  The Amal platoon, if it was even there and not a spoof, were in defilade, out of the reach of the company’s direct fire weapons.

  Not wanting to waste mortar rounds, she passed to First Lieutenant Steven Cline, her Third Platoon commander, “Get someone to hit two-two-six with a couple of M505 rounds. Let’s see if those are real bodies out there.”

  “Roger that,” Cline responded.

  Esther ached to initiate the coming assault. She was not temperamentally suited for sitting in the defense, giving the initiative to the enemy. As she tried to come up with an idea, however, nothing made tactical sense. They were outnumbered, and their position was about as good as could be hoped for. The textbook solution was to let the assault be cut down by the disciplined firepower of the Marines.

  The only problem with the textbook solution, though, was that it included air, naval gunfire, and arty, none of which she ha
d at the moment.

  The soft thunks of outgoing “Dunker” rounds reached her, and she paused her thoughts, mentally counting out the time to target. Her display blossomed with three hits, right in the middle of the Amal platoon—which didn’t react. Either they were pretty well disciplined themselves, or the avatars were a spoof. A moment later, the avatars disappeared, either taken offline by the Amals or jammed by one of her ECM drones that hovered high overhead.

  “Knew it,” the XO said. There’s no way they managed to get to that position undetected.”

  Unless they did and were cutting off their signatures to convince us they weren’t real.

  The punch and counterpunch were almost mentally overwhelming at times, and for a moment, Esther longed for the “clean” combat she experienced as a junior Marine. It was see the enemy, kill the enemy, and leave the chess game of the modern battlefield to the officers. Now, she was that officer, and it was up to her to put her Marines into position where they could prevail.

  “I still don’t like that blind spot by the spring,” the first sergeant said. “I think I can take Porter and Jiminez and—”

  The sound of concentrated fire from Second Platoon cut him off for a second. Esther switched to D-3, her Dragonfly III microdrone that overlooked the platoon’s frontage. Two bodies 300 meters to the platoon’s front were clearly visible, whatever countersurveillance the mercs had that had blocked their visibility now destroyed by Marine fire. There were flickers of movement retreating back through the dense brush, but nothing clear.

  “Diane, what did that look like?” Esther asked her Second Platoon commander.

  “Just a probe. We got two before they could duck back. I think they wanted to verify the gap,” she passed.

  Which was probably correct. While not technically a gap at the moment, it was painfully clear to Esther that it was thinly held. But just as the Amals were trying to screw up the Marine’s battlefield detection systems, so too were the Marines jamming and spoofing the Amals’ systems. They knew where the Marines were, of course, but they probably couldn’t be assured of each Marine’s position. They tried to get real eyes on the lines and test the Marines’ fields of fire, and that cost them two soldiers.

  They probably now knew that the gap they’d created was at least partially covered. Esther wished she knew what how that knowledge would affect the decisions of her opposing commander.

  “Skipper?” the first sergeant asked. “About that blind spot?”

  “OK, take those two, but no hero stuff. Only if it’s needed.”

  “Hell, Skipper, you know me. Mamma’s favorite boy better come back home. I don’t need no medals.”

  For someone with a Silver Star to his name, that was pure BS. Esther didn’t want to let the first sergeant get too focused on a specific threat, though. He was there to keep the Marines operating at full efficiency and with maximum lethal intent, but he had a point about that small area by the spring, protected by an overhanging rock face. If an Amal sniper team got in there, for example, they could wreak havoc among Third Platoon. Esther was running thin on bodies, so she agreed to let the first sergeant assume that particular responsibility.

  Esther’s combat AI whistled a warning in her ears, and she dropped to the ground as a surge of power amped up her shielding. A split second later, the familiar half-whistle of the Amal Beta-Hawks reached her. These nasty little anti-personnel rockets had seeker scanners in their noses. If they passed within 10 or 12 meters of a Marine, the fuze oriented and fired a load of accelerated buckshot at him or her with enough power to penetrate the Marine’s body armor. Their best defense was to overwhelm the Beta-Hawks’ scanners with a concerted blast from their shielding projectors. The blast was power-hungry and could deplete each Marine’s shielding system within 20-30 seconds, so the waves of Beta-Hawks could be intended to kill Marines—or to simply make them expend energy and leave them vulnerable to further assaults.

  Esther held her breath as one of the rockets passed right over her, seemingly close enough that she could have reached up and grabbed it. Her shielding won the battle though, and the rocket continued on its way, looking for Marines where they were none. Five more Marines were not as fortunate, though.

  Esther’s power output dropped to normal, and she started to get up when the whistle sounded again. A second wave of over 50 more Beta-Hawks was on its way.

  Shit, how many of the damned things do they have?

  The rockets were not particularly expensive in comparison with other munitions, but still, they’d expended close to 400 so far, and they had to be reaching the end of their combat load.

  None came close to her from this wave, but when the third wave was launched, Esther knew this was the real deal. The assault was on.

  “This is it,” she passed on the command net. “Heads up, and let’s crush them.”

  “Staff Sergeant Avalon, get ready for those rounds,” she passed to her mortar section leader. “The command’s coming from Lieutenant Ogilvy or me. I’m going to want them on target as soon as they’re called for.”

  “Roger that. But I’ve got a 17-second flight-time.”

  “Understood. You just fire on command.”

  Esther’s position was behind a large rock behind and slightly to the right of her company lines and above them where she had a good view of the AOR. In medieval times, she might have a coterie of knights protecting her. In the 20th Century, Old Reckoning, she’d be with her radio operator and maybe some of her fire support personnel. In the modern Marine Corps, she was on her own.

  She could watch the progress of the battle on her combat display, but that seemed to separate her from the battlefield, so she inched up until she could see the company’s position. Explosions peppered the area, sending up gouts of dirt when the rounds landed, but her Marines were dug in pretty well, and no more avatars turned light blue or gray despite the incoming.

  “You might want to keep your head down, Skipper,” the first sergeant passed to her. “You’re making a tempting target.”

  Esther turned to the left where she knew the first sergeant was. He, along with Corporal Porter and PFC Jiminez, was prone just behind a slight wrinkle in the terrain. Looking across the 200 meters of ground that separated him, he raised an arm, palm flat and down, and signaled for her to take cover.

  “Can’t see what’s happening when I’m hiding, First Sergeant.”

  “That’s why you have your combat display, Skipper,” he replied before cutting the P2P.

  She did slump down just a bit. She realized that she could be sniper bait, but unless they had some high-caliber weapons out there, she was still far enough back that her helmet should be protection enough from normal sniper rounds.

  The Marines in Third Platoon opened up, the two M249’s in the platoon’s position spitting out their stream of death. Esther could see movement to the front as the Amals used fire and maneuver to advance.

  “I need that air, Skipper,” Lieutenant Cline passed.

  “We don’t have it,” she replied before switching to the battalion fire support net.

  “Jerol, tell me you’ve got something for me.”

  “That’s a negative, Esther. I’m trying. Just hold on a little longer.”

  “I can’t. They’re into their assault now!”

  Without waiting, she switched to the battalion command net, pulling up the commanding officer on the P2P.

  “Colonel Rzeminski, this is it. The Amals are in full assault mode, and the numbers don’t look good. I need fire support now, sir.”

  “I know, Esther,” Lieutenant Colonel Peter Joseph Rzeminski, her battalion commander replied. “But I just don’t have it. India’s in it big time, and the port is still a cluster.”

  Esther had been following the battle between India and the Amal main force, and she knew the CO was right. India was down to around 90 effectives, last time she checked, and the company was facing close to 1,000 Amals. Golf was almost an afterthought to what was happening ba
ck there.

  Not an afterthought to us, though!

  “Look, I’ll see what we can do, but you need to hang on.” There was a pause, then he said in a quiet voice, “Protect what you can, Esther.”

  Which means surrender if I have to.

  She understood the long-term strategic value of what he was saying. Despite the confusion the Amals had managed to sow over the spaceport, there wasn’t any possible way that they could prevail over the long term. With fewer than 3,000 troops on the planet, they couldn’t land reinforcements while the Marines could land an entire regiment, if they had to. If Esther surrendered her company, that would give the Amals some serious ammunition in negotiations, but it would also save Marine lives. The CO had essentially given her the OK to do that if she decided all hope was lost. In reality, it was her call, but he’d just reminded her of the option.

  We’re Federation Marines, damn it! We don’t surrender.

  She pulled up the XO and first sergeant, then said, “I just spoke with the CO. We’re not getting any support. It’s up to us.”

  “Typical shit,” the first sergeant said.

  “And, he basically authorized me to surrender—”

  “Fuck that shit!” the first sergeant shouted into his mic at the same time as the XO said “No way!”

  A Marine company was not a democracy, and Esther was going to be the one making the decisions, but still, she was gratified to hear that her two headquarters’ senior staff agreed with her.

  Surrendering might save some lives in the near term, but usually, the mere presence of Marines was enough to defuse a situation without rounds being fired. If the Marines started becoming known for surrendering when things got tough, then their presence would no longer be enough. There would be much more combat, and in the long run, more Marine deaths. The long-term price of surrendering was expensive, too expensive to contemplate.