Decisively Engaged (Warp Marine Corps Book 1)

by Carella, C. J.

  “Anti-pers, aye. Firing when ready, aye, aye.”

  Fromm focused on the take from the micro-drones and his imp’s dispassionate analysis of their data. As riots went, this wasn’t very large; there were about three thousand Ruddies involved, including what appeared to be two or three Army companies, which gave the rioters some three hundred rifles and a couple dozen rocket launchers. No machineguns, artillery or heavy weapons; those were held at the brigade level in their own units, and none of those had joined the rebellion. Infantrymen were recruited mainly from among the largely illiterate peasants in the hinterlands, much like the secret society members they’d decided to support; artillery and heavy weapon units came from what passed for the Ruddy middle class, the kids of merchants and artisans, and their sympathies wouldn’t be with the rioters.

  Fromm matched the list of targets with the assets he had to engage them. The 100mm mortars could fire fifty self-guided rounds each before their internal magazines had to be reloaded, a process that would take some thirty seconds. Three guns; a hundred and fifty bombs. That should be enough.

  The mortar section opened fire, the discharges too distant to be noticed from where he crouched, especially since the newest batch of Ruddies were both shooting and screaming at the top of their lungs, their high-pitched voices adding a disturbing note to the whole thing. His imp projected the path of the self-propelled rounds as they engaged their miniature motors and headed towards their designated targets: every major enemy concentration that could threaten the civilians with him or Obregon’s rescue force.

  Given that they were fighting unarmored, unshielded enemies, Fromm had opted for a wide spread. The mortar rounds were spaced some twenty-five yards apart; each bomb exploded fifty feet off the ground, lashing the area below them with thousands of ceramic shards traveling at supersonic speeds. The frangible shrapnel would shatter harmlessly on walls and roofs, though God help anybody looking out a window when the shells detonated. Against cloth-clad humanoids in the open, the effect was devastating.

  Ruddies stumbled and fell, bleeding from dozens of wounds. Entire groups were mowed down to the last man, charging warriors turning into lifeless corpses so suddenly the whole thing looked like a clumsily choreographed dance. A six-round stonk hit the group attacking the walled compound. Those bombs went off a mere ten feet off the ground, too low to damage the human and Oval civvies in the compound, but still perfectly able to turn hundreds of aliens into bleeding, quivering meat. The attackers’ shouting was silenced by the multiple explosions; when the last echoes abated, only a handful of scattered cries could be heard.

  Fromm forced himself to watch the scene. There were maybe a dozen Ruddies still on their feet, and they were on the run. The rest of the attackers in the last wave were down, along with the poor bastards who’d been unconscious or stunned when death came calling. Most of the fallen lay unmoving on the ground, with a few ghastly exceptions. He saw a Ruddy trying to stuff a coil of intestines back into his body cavity before appearing to fall asleep. A uniformed soldier, his legs gone, crawled toward a nearby canteen and died right after taking a final swig of water. There were a few similar scenes up and down the corpse-strewn street, but only a few. Most of the tangos were dead.

  Americans had learned the hard way that in the game of war you played for keeps.

  He raised Gunny Obregon. “Road should be clear now.”

  “Yes, sir. Biggest problem now is driving over all the bodies. Might damage an axle. Wish we had grav cars.”

  “Beggars, not choosers, Gunny. Good work with those technicals, by the way.”

  Obregon’s face twisted in a grim smile. “Thank you, sir.”

  Fromm knew he’d just passed a test. Some commanding officers, even in the Marines, would have come down on the Gunnery Sergeant for militarizing civilian transport on his own initiative, and likely against the Embassy’s guidelines, if not direct orders. Fromm might be an asshole, but he wasn’t that kind of asshole. When out in far-foreign, or on the green hills of Earth herself for that matter, you did what you had to in order to fulfill your mission.

  “ETA?”

  “Two, three minutes.”

  “We’ll be ready.”

  He turned to McClintock, but she was already heading down the stairs to start preparing the civvies for evacuation. She must have been eavesdropping on his subvocalized conversation. Not something he would normally approve of, but she had her own mission to carry out, and he wasn’t going to second-guess her.

  An asshole, sure, but not that kind of an asshole.

  * * *

  “Casualties first,” Heather McClintock told the gathered travelers. There were no objections.

  Nobody had died, thank Random Chance, but some Kirosha rebels had tossed spears and throwing axes over the wall, and several people had ended up with cutting and stabbing wounds, some of them serious enough to require first aid. Luckily, the bus had a med-kit. All the injured had gotten a shot of nano-meds, and the microscopic robots were busily repairing damaged tissue and speeding up the creation of new blood cells. The process drew a great deal of energy from the victims’ metabolism, which meant they could barely stand up, let alone walk. Heather rounded up volunteers to put them in the bus.

  The gate had been damaged, but a few strong backs got it open, just in time for the arriving Marines and their improvised combat vehicles. Getting out took some doing. The bus drove slowly out onto the street while some hastily-drafted volunteers dragged or kicked corpses out of its way. Fromm squeezed himself into the van, sandwiched between a Gunnery Sergeant and another soldier. Heather ended up in the rear of a four-wheeler, along with three Marines.

  “Welcome to Leatherneck Taxicabs, ma’am,” the Lance Corporal in charge of the car said. She brought up his official files: the image of a ratty looking man – Russell Edison; numerous commendations, and much more numerous non-judicial punishments – popped up in her field of vision.

  “Thank you,” she replied, making room for herself in the rear seat, which was filled with ammo boxes and other equipment. Russell sent her a friend request on Facettergram, which she summarily rejected.

  “We’ll have you back to the Enclave in a jiffy, ma’am,” Edison went on as the three-vehicle convoy began rolling. “I think the Ruddies ain’t got no fight left in ‘em.”

  The car took the lead, the two Marines not busy driving ready for action, one standing behind a pintle-mounted heavy gun, the corporal holding his assault weapon ready. Heather herself was cradling the Vehelian laser – by rights she should have handed the weapon over to one of the survivors of the delegation, but she felt better with it at hand. The last hour had taught her to relish firepower in a way none of her previous training had.

  “Mofos,” the driver said, startling her out of her reverie.

  “Yeah,” LCPL Edison agreed.

  She checked the drone feeds. Up ahead, forming up between them and the walls of the Enclave, stood several Kirosha tanks.

  * * *

  “Pleased to meet you, Gunny,” Fromm said to his platoon sergeant.

  Neither man saluted; you didn’t do that in the field. Obregon led the way to the van he was using as the task force’s command vehicle. Fromm could see where force field generators had been attached to the Ruddy van, and smiled when he saw the simple but effective cupola they’d welded to its roof.

  “That must have cost you a pretty penny,” he said as they squeezed into the driver’s compartment; the rear was taken up with several civvies, people they hadn’t been able to fit into the bus because of the wounded taking up extra space. Among them was McClintock’s driver: Locquar was still wielding his submachinegun, and none of the Marines had given him any trouble about it, which meant they knew and trusted the local.

  “Ain’t that many places to spend your pay around here, sir,” Obregon explained as the vehicles moved towards the Enclave. “Plus a third of the men are Mormons or Star Baptists, and they don’t drink, don’t gamble and don’t whor
e around all that much. We passed the hat around and it came back full.”

  “You’re getting a commendation for this, by the way.”

  “Thank you, sir. We made it here in one piece, that’s the important thing, and God willing we’ll make it back likewise.”

  Fromm nodded.

  “Sorry we didn’t meet you at the port ourselves, sir.”

  “You had your orders. Things are going to change after this, however.”

  “Yes, sir. Nobody expected them Ruddies to come at us like this, or our Ruddies to let them. They usually come down hard on troublemakers around here. Thieves and murderers get tortured to death. Rebels get it even worse. Letting those assholes come after us like that, it kinda worries me.”

  “It worries me too, Gunny. I guess I’ve got to hit the ground running. How’s the unit?”

  “In general, it’s fine, sir. Got a dozen boots just before we deployed, but they’re shaping up okay. Everyone else has been round the block and know what’s what. Been keeping everyone busy, mostly PE and virtual field exercises. Between that and a steady dose of field days, they’ve mostly stayed out of trouble.”

  “Guess you thought this deployment would be easier than Romulus-Four.”

  Obregon’s Third (Weapons) Platoon, Charlie Company, Third Battalion, 53rd Marine Regiment, had seen action against the Lampreys during yet another ‘police action,’ something very similar to what Fromm had faced at Astarte-Three. What had begun as a raid on a pirate base had devolved into a pitched battle when the pirates turned out to have sizable contingents of Lamprey ‘deserters’ armed with mil-spec gear. Those two battles and a space skirmish that led to the utter destruction of a ‘rogue’ Lamprey squadron had made the ETs cry uncle, pay reparations and withdraw from several disputed star systems. Nobody thought that was the end of it, though, or at least nobody with a brain did.

  “Romulus-Four was no picnic,” Obregon said. “But we had three Marine regiments on the ground, battlecruisers orbiting overhead and plenty of support. If we hadn’t been rescuing hostages we could have blasted them from orbit. Here, it’s just us: a platoon plus a couple squads’ worth of attached personnel, including the worthless sumbitches in the Embassy Detail. We had to blast our way out of the Embassy, sir.”

  “I noticed. I’ll be having words with Sergeant Amherst when we get home. The RSO will give you a pass. I’ll see to it. But let’s try to avoid this sort of incident in the future.”

  “Absolutely,” Obregon said; the words sounded heartfelt. He started to say something else but froze when he saw the same thing Fromm did.

  While they talked, both of them had kept the visual feed from the micro-drones up on one corner of their field of vision, so they both noticed when several Ruddy tracked military vehicles exited their revetments and started moving.

  Moving towards the gates of the Enclave. And they were going to get there before the convoy arrived.

  “Looks like a blocking force, sir,” Obregon said.

  “So it seems.” Fromm was thinking furiously while he spoke. That was a tank platoon rolling into position; three tanks, one mobile gun that could serve as a tank destroyer or artillery piece, and two light infantry fighting vehicles. Not the most efficient unit organization – the mobile gun was both slower and less well-protected than the tanks – but it was deadly enough. The tanks in question weren’t too bad for the local tech level, with seventy millimeters of sloped armor on its front and turret and a 79mm main gun that would batter through the improvised shields protecting the Marine vehicles after three or four shots. The tank destroyer mounted a 93mm cannon on its turretless chassis, and a HEAT round from that monster would probably blow up any of the three Rovers with a couple of shots. The IFVs mounted heavy machineguns and two recoilless rifles on open-top turrets, which made them a minor danger but nothing to laugh about, either.

  “A burst from an Iwo will open up those bitches, easy,” Obregon said, focused on the tactical rather than strategic picture. “We can wipe them out if we hit them on the move. Or just have the hundred-mike-mikes drop some AV rounds on them.”

  “That’s not the problem, Gunny. Problem is all the other Ruddy units in-theater. And if that isn’t enough, their First Army is only a couple days away. As in field army.”

  “They can’t be that crazy,” Obregon said. “That’d mean war, no-shit war, and one our corvettes could turn this town into rubble, or every town, city and village on the fucking planet, even if it doesn’t drop bloomies on ‘em. Hell, an assault shuttle would eat this whole planet’s lunch. They got nothing to stop an orbital attack. They’re worse off than Earth was during First Contact!”

  “Yeah. None of this makes sense. Which means either the Ruddies are bugfuck insane, or they know something we don’t.”

  “So what now, sir? We’re about to come into their line of fire.”

  “Going to call higher first. Full stop.”

  “Yes, sir.” Obregon didn’t sound happy as he issued the order to the rest of the convoy. Stopped vehicles were easy targets.

  Fromm reached out to the Embassy. The RSO’s face came into view once again.

  “We see them, Captain,” the security officer said. “We’re still unable to reach anybody in the Royal Court. Nobody with the authority to do anything about this, at least.”

  “We’ve stopped. There’s no immediate threat but the drones are picking up movement on the outskirts of the city. We may have more armed mobs headed our way.”

  “I’m going to speak with the ambassador. Don’t do anything else without running it by me first.” His face disappeared.

  Fromm decided to do some intelligence gathering of his own while he waited.

  The Ruddies had learned about modern communications only recently – most of their radio sets were human-made trade models, cheap electronics that didn’t use the far more reliable grav-wave transmitters Starfarers relied on. They hadn’t even developed the telegraph on their own, relying instead on long chains of semaphores and heliographs that spanned their continent. Upon making Contact, the Kirosha had fallen in love with wireless communications. Radio antennas had sprouted like so many mushrooms throughout the Kingdom, serving both civilian and military needs.

  The Embassy routinely recorded all radio traffic in the continent; accessing it was just a matter of entering his security signature into the American intranet system. Deciphering and translating the last six hours took hardly any time. Massaging the data into a useful summary took a little longer, but the whole process lasted a couple of minutes. If only his other problems could be solved that easily.

  Bottom line was, the Ruddies didn’t know what the fuck was going on, either.

  Orders and counter-orders had flown back and forth over the airwaves all day long, some properly coded and encrypted, others sent out in the clear. Units had been instructed to mobilize, then to return to barracks, then to muster out and march away from the capital. Officers had been promoted, only to be arrested hours later. Generals had been countermanded by Magistrates, Magistrates by the Prime Minister himself, the Prime Minister by the High Queen herself. The left hand didn’t know what the right hand was doing, or was actively trying to sabotage it. This was a cluster-fuck of epic – no, mythological – proportions.

  The tank platoon sitting bestride Fromm’s escape route had been ordered there by the colonel in charge of protecting the Foreign Enclave. Its orders were to prevent anyone from leaving or entering the area. Fromm couldn’t tell if the instructions were meant to protect the Starfarers in the Enclave or to get in the way of the ongoing rescue attempt. For all he knew, it was designed to do both.

  On the other hand, he had someone he could talk to. Or have someone talk to him; his imp could translate English to Kirosha, but there would be a noticeable time lag and the software would likely make mistakes, since Kirosha wasn’t a widely used language. His imp would eventually work out any kinks in translation, but doing so while having a life-or-death conversation probably wa
sn’t a good idea.

  Fromm contacted McClintock and briefly explained the situation.

  “I know Colonel Loor,” she said when he was done. “He’s a political appointee. Comes from one of the bureaucrat clans in the capital; only reason he’s in the military is that his family couldn’t find him a better sinecure.”

  “Great, a Rat in uniform.” Dealing with Rats always grated on Fromm. Military Rats were worse still.

  “I’ll talk to him,” McClintock said. “Let me run it by RSO Rockwell first.”

  She did; Rockwell agreed to her plan. McClintock tried the Ruddy’s personal phone line. She got through after a few rushed words with the officer’s secretary. Fromm listened in as she exchanged greetings with Colonel Loor.

  “I am speaking to you on a matter of some importance and urgency,” McClintock said formally. “I and some guests of the Crown are trying to return to the Enclave. There has been some unpleasantness, and we are concerned about the military forces blocking the main gate.”

  “I hear Americans have used artillery against royal citizens,” Colonel Loor said. “This is a violation of the Star Treaty, and a grave offense against the Queen and People of Kirosha.”

  And we should give a shit because? Fromm thought; he kept the comment to himself, though. At the moment the Kirosha’s opinion had a lot more weight than it would when a starship arrived in system and explained the facts of life to the locals.

  “Such determinations are to be left to those greater than you or I,” McClintock replied levelly. “I wish to return to the Enclave. Will your men prevent us from doing so?”

  There was a pause before Loor replied. “I have no orders to hinder you. You and yours may pass through the gate. I will issue direct orders to that effect.”

  “I hear you and accept your words.”

  Once the call was over, McClintock’s virtual icon turned to Fromm. “I think Loor is fence-sitting. Not sure which faction to back. A Modernist would have helped us out wholeheartedly, while a Preserver might have pushed the issue. Guess his family feels the same way, or someone would have given him definite marching orders.”