Decisively Engaged (Warp Marine Corps Book 1)

by Carella, C. J.

  And some of them had been POGs when they’d been in uniform, and were trying to make up for it by carrying guns and acting like a pack of badasses. He noticed a lot of motto tattoos on some of them, which could mean they’d been overeager boots before reality had knocked some sense into them, or they were wannabe operators who’d been 6800s or some other useless MOS. Russell kept his thoughts to himself; no sense making Gonzo feel worse.

  “How about the ETs?” Nacle asked. “Don’t know if it’s a good idea, working with ETs. Even if they say they’re on our side.”

  The aliens in question were a pack of Ovals, their big bald heads looking like they were about to hatch something big and nasty. There were about a dozen of them, and they were loaded for bear, their body armor studded with enough force field generators to protect a tank, each of them packing a heavy laser, two disposable rocket launchers, and half a dozen grenades, plus a couple personal weapons: heavy pistols, knives and, in one case, a big-ass axe. Ovals didn’t fuck around.

  “They’re okay, Nacle.”

  The ignorant shithead wasn’t dumb, but he’d grown up in New Deseret, and aliens just didn’t visit New Deseret. No reason to; all the planet produced was assorted foodstuffs and ultra-orthodox Mormons, the kind that really wanted to stick to the old ways and thought the Presidency and Apostles on Old Earth were a bunch of radical near-heretics. Over in New Deseret, they thought aliens didn’t have souls. They certainly wouldn’t send their people to do missionary work among non-humans. To each their own, Russell supposed. As long as they paid their taxes and did their Obligatory Service, the feds basically left them alone. You could get away with a lot, as long as you paid your taxes and did your part to defend the country. There was even a People’s Star of Chippewa, full-fledged commies who paid their taxes, did their military service and tried to run their planet the way they liked it. People kept leaving Chippewa, though; that was the other thing the Feds cared about: you couldn’t keep people on a planet if they didn’t want to stay. Voting with their feet, they called it, the only form of democracy that always worked as advertised.

  “The Ovals are good guys,” Russell went on. “Almost as nice as the Puppies, and who doesn’t like the Puppies?”

  “I don’t know about them hound dogs, Russet,” Nacle said. “They kinda abandoned us a couple times.”

  “Yeah. There is that. In the end, everyone looks after their own first. But the Ovals over there, they ain’t got nowhere to run. We’re rescuing their people, too. If they want to survive, they got to play ball, fair and square.”

  “I suppose.”

  “Worry about the fuckin’ Ruddies,” Gonzo said. “They’re the ones who’re gonna skin your pale ass while you’re still alive, if they catch you. You hear me, choirboy?”

  “I hear you, Gonzo.”

  Russell ignored the byplay and finished his checkup. His Iwo was as ready as it could be; he spent a few seconds patting all the pouches on his suit. Plenty of grenade clips, extra mags, combat knife, spare water bottles, couple rat packs in case he got the munchies, and other sundries. Good to go. He had over a hundred and fifty pounds of equipment on him, but his suit’s exoskeleton carried most of that, and they’d be driving both ways. Despite all that, he had a bad feeling about the mission.

  Overconfidence. That’s what worried him. So far the Ruddies had obligingly attacked piecemeal, with next to no weapons at all, coming in dumb. That couldn’t last forever. They’d probably killed most of the stupid Ruddies in the last couple engagements. Sooner or later, one of the smart ones was going to take over. Maybe not tonight or tomorrow, but the ETs had time. The Navy wasn’t coming for weeks, if ever.

  Obregon walked past him. The Gunnery Sergeant didn’t look worried, but Russell knew that was an act. The Gunny’s demeanor helped calm him down, though. Whatever happened, Obregon wouldn’t take it lying down. He’d adapt, overcome and kick ass. That didn’t mean they couldn’t get killed, but they’d get killed getting shit done.

  “All right, people,” the Task Force leader said, his words relayed via their imps, and also translated for the ET contingent. “Do one last gear check and mount up. We’re rolling in five.”

  Instead of looking at his stuff yet one more time, Russell studied the rest of Task Force Able. His fire team would be in the original Rover Three, the up-gunned truck they’d used during their first combat mission in Ruddy-land. In this case, the cargo space was empty; they’d fill it with spaceport personnel and anything else they could fit in. Fabber stock would be on the top of the list; you could feed dirt to a fabber, but only if you wanted to make simple tools and didn’t mind the wait while the gizmo separated useful materials from the rest of the crap. The fancy stuff required lots of special ingredients. The only thing keeping the aliens off their backs was massive firepower, and they’d need all the ammo they could make. Word was they’d start issuing non-explosive Iwo rounds to save on feedstock.

  Not for this mission, though. Only the best stuff would do, when you sent a short platoon to do the job of a regiment.

  Five of the other eight vehicles belonged to the Black River mercs. Six wheelers, three-man crew plus a borrowed Marine manning a ALS-43 on a pintle mount on top. The cars also mounted a railgun with a short traverse on the hood, in case the driver or whoever was riding shotgun got bored. The 3mm rounds the railgun fired wouldn’t penetrate shields or heavy armor, but would do a number on hordes of ETs wearing silk bathrobes or field khakis. They had shield generators on the front, sides and back, giving them as much protection as the technicals Obregon had cobbled together, and their six-wheeled drive was much better than any local vehicles. Russell wished he was on one of them; his truck had some off-road capabilities, but ‘some’ was usually a way of saying ‘not enough.’ If they had to go cross-country at any point of the trip, Rover Three wasn’t going to make it home.

  The Ovals were on two ground-effect hovercraft. The squat turtle-shaped vehicles were currently resting on their metal skirts. When activated, eight fans would blow enough air to lift and propel them over just about any terrain. Hovercraft were lousy platforms for anything with a recoil, but the ETs used lasers, so that wasn’t an issue. The hovers were converted cargo haulers, with brand-new shield generators and three heavy laser mounts. They’d provide Task Force Able with a lot of firepower and cargo space, since each of them could fit ten tons of personnel or materiel in its hold. Rover Three sucked shit by comparison.

  Obregon would lead the task force from his brand-new command car, which had started out as the ambassador’s overpriced grav-limo before being requisitioned and refitted. Its overpowered gluon power plant provided enough juice for a full set of field generators, giving it as much protection as a tank; they’d outfitted it with one of their 100mm mortars and two graviton cannon the Wyrm embassy had generously donated to the rescue effort, which gave it as much firepower as anything on this planet. That bastard could chew its way through a Ruddy tank battalion; its existence was the only reason Russell didn’t feel even more anxious about the trip.

  They were bringing out their A-game. Russell figured they could ride roughshod over anything smaller than a brigade equivalent, and outrun and outmaneuver anything else.

  He still worried.

  * * *

  “These things are magical,” Colonel Neen Reeu said, not for the first time, as he watched over the dispositions of the 103rd Kirosha Artillery Regiment, the pride of the First Army. He knew that his three anti-tank batteries, twenty-four tubes in total, were hidden in the hills overlooking the only road leading to the spaceport. He still couldn’t see them, despite being on an observation post above them, and despite the fact he was using a pair of Starfarer binoculars on multi-spectrum mode.

  When he’d been told his regiment was getting a shipment of blankets from their Star Devil benefactor, he’d scoffed. But these were very special blankets.

  “The material not only blends with the background, making anything under it invisible, it will also
defeat the advanced sensor systems the Americans use,” Captain Jeenu said, his enthusiasm making him sound younger than his twenty-nine years. Jeenu was a member of the Modernist faction and a technology enthusiast. Only Colonel Neen’s patronage had saved his young aide-de-camp from being purged in the last few days. Praising otherworldly technology was not safe anymore.

  “Yes, the Star Devils like their little tricks, but in the end, good planning and courage will carry the day,” the colonel said, his narrowing eyes wordlessly warning his aide. The captain nodded in understanding.

  “It has been done as you instructed, Colonel. We made sure of it. All radios were disabled. All orders were delivered via non-electronic means.”

  The regiment’s commander tilted his head in acknowledgement. The original order had come from Grand Marshall Seeu. The Star Devils could listen in on radio communications; it was only natural, since it was they who had provided the technology to the Kingdom. But their ability to overhear their enemies’ orders had made the aliens complacent. For centuries, Kirosha armies had maneuvered and communicated through a complex system of flags, semaphores and heliographs, as well as runners and written instructions. The old ways had not been forgotten, and the regiment had been moved into position without broadcasting a single message. His troops now lay in ambush, hidden by the stealth blankets their Lhan Arkh ally had provided.

  The aliens’ vehicles would be protected by their invisible shields, but Neen’s troops had been issued new shells for his 93mm pieces to deal with them. Each gun had five enhanced two-stage explosive shells, and twenty sabot-discarding tungsten armor-piercers. The duplex rounds used Starfarer technology designed to punch through their vaunted force fields. A direct hit had a thirty percent chance of penetrating the best protection the devils were likely to have, a chance that grew with successive shots. The tungsten rounds were less effective: their chance of penetration was a mere fifteen percent, but there were more of them.

  Occupy a strong position on a path the enemy must follow. That was one of the Grand Marshall’s many aphorisms. Colonel Neen had a small-print copy of the latest edition of The Book of Martial Sayings tucked in his tunic’s front pocket.

  Sometime tonight, the Americans and their running dogs would come, and his regiment would be waiting for them.

  * * *

  Task Force Able raced towards the South Gate under cover of night.

  Gunnery Sergeant Obregon kept his attention on a map projection with all the players marked with bright-colored icons. Friendlies in blue, hostiles in red, civvies in light purple that would turn red at a moment’s notice. He knew that those icons didn’t tell the whole story: without their drones, his imp was limited to using all the information gathered by the task force soldiers and the sensors in their suits and vehicles. They were bound to miss things, and any one of those things might pop up and bite them in the ass. But you used what you got, and if that wasn’t enough they carved your name and dates of birth and death in the massive Marine Memorial Wall in New Parris.

  The status icons of the flying column’s vehicles were all nominal, as well they should be, mere seconds after kickoff, but Obregon had seen the Dark God Murphy in action, and he wouldn’t have been surprised if one of the vehicles broke down without warning right out of the gate. None did. Not yet.

  The South Gate was smaller and narrower than the main one to the west. It didn’t see much traffic, as it led towards largely uninhabited marshes and a non-navigable branch of the Keelu River, the main waterway of the region. It also led towards a modern road, however, which made it good enough for their needs. More importantly, it wasn’t guarded by heavy forces.

  As soon as Obregon’s command car turned a corner and entered the broad street leading towards the gate, about a hundred yards away, he sent a signal and the two mortars left in the embassy compound fired a single round each.

  “Brace for impact,” he relayed to the column as it continued its advance.

  The two guided bombs hit the gate a fraction of a second later. Their thermobaric warheads sprayed a thin mist of highly volatile chemicals and ignited them in another fraction of a second.

  Night turned into hellish day.

  The fireball that engulfed the gate, walls and battlements consumed every living thing in a hundred-foot radius. The same volume was also exposed to over ten pounds per square inch of pressure. The wood-and-metal gate and stone walls, never meant to resist such forces, shattered into a million pieces. Fragments peppered the command car’s frontal force field as it led the way towards the smoking remains of the wall.

  “Police the gap,” Obregon told Hendrickson. The driver increased the density of the force field and turned it into an invisible bulldozer spade, pushing aside any debris that might impede the wheeled vehicles of the task force. Only a gluon power plant had the juice to pull that kind of trick, and only briefly. The lead vehicle went past the Enclave wall at a steady thirty miles an hour, clearing a path for the rest of the column. Nobody fired or otherwise reacted to their passage. Anybody who had survived the apocalyptic explosion was either too stunned to do anything or had better sense than attracting the attackers’ attention. Smart of them, Obregon thought. Nobody in the task force was willing or able to take prisoners. Anybody who got in their way was dead.

  “Guess this means we’re officially at war,” Hendrickson said as they headed towards the highway.

  “We shoulda sent them a note or something,” Obregon said.

  “They probably got the idea.”

  “Yeah.” Question was, what would the Ruddies do about the sortie? What could they do? Captain Fromm thought the answer was ‘not much.’ Most of their mobile forces were arrayed around the capital and the palace, all the way on the other side of the Enclave; the rest were scattered around; they wouldn’t be able to react before the task force reached the spaceport. The trip back would be a different kettle of fish, of course.

  All in all, though, Obregon was happy to be on the move. Sitting in one spot and waiting for the bastards on the other side to do something didn’t feel right. The Corps taught you to seize the initiative and make the bastards react to your actions, not the other way around.

  “Spaceport command, this is Able Force actual,” he sent out. “We’re on our way. ETA forty, that is four-oh, minutes. Pack up your shit, we’re coming to get you.”

  Flickering flames illuminated the ruins they left behind.

  Sixteen

  Year 163 AFC, D Minus One

  Captain Fromm paid a visit to the communications center for lack of anything better to do.

  Given the existence of neural implants and gravity-wave communications that could run unimpeded through a planet’s core and had a range measured in light-seconds, a communications room seemed unnecessary. Human beings tended to work better in groups, however, and trying to run everything through one’s imps ran the risk of information overload. Having some of the data on display somewhere other than one’s field of vision could be helpful.

  The room in question was filled with vid screens and was barely large enough to accommodate four Navy techs, their equipment and a coffee maker that clearly was in constant use. Fromm returned the techs’ salutes and poured himself a cup, choosing the local brew over imported coffee. The latter was more expensive, and the dark purple-brown tea made with Kirosha’s Ibee leaves had about three times the caffeine content and a rich, vaguely spicy flavor he’d come to enjoy. He idly wondered if Mister Crow was selling the stuff off-world while he went over the comm-techs’ work.

  The Kirosha were reacting to the attack on the South Gate, and they displayed none of the chaos of the previous days, which showed their recent housecleaning had paid off. The Guard units were readying for combat, but their posture was largely defensive and designed to prevent another breakout, especially one aimed at the nearby Royal Palace complex or the capital proper. Spotlights along the walls of the Enclave came on and illuminated the area as vehicles roared to life and sleepy soldiers f
ormed up in front of their barracks, weapons ready. Fromm kept an eye on the visual display while he watched CPO Donnelly at work.

  Lateesha Donnelly had been born in New Detroit and joined the Navy as part of her obligatory service during her junior year in high school. Her shaved head was covered with bright metal studs that starkly contrasted against her brown skin; each stud was a high-power implant with enormous processing capabilities. Very few humans could handle so many computer links, but the chief petty officer was one of them. With those enhancements, Donnelly could run an entire starship by herself, or use pseudo-AI subroutines to handle the communication services of a small city. She was clearly overqualified for a support posting on the back end of nowhere. Her official records hinted at some issues that had led to her current assignment, but Fromm decided not to delve any further into them. Whatever had brought her to Jasper-Five was turning out to be a godsend under the current circumstances.

  “The spaceport crews are all ready to go, sir” she reported after flashing him a brief, shy smile. “Two buses are filled with personnel. They’ve loaded six cargo trucks with supplies, including all the fabricator feedstock in storage and the smallest fabber on site. The other two were too heavy for transport. They have extra supplies boxed and on forklifts, ready to be loaded onto the task force vehicles.”

  Fromm nodded gratefully. With those supplies they would have enough consumables to endure a six-month siege. Throw in the extra trained personnel, and their chances would improve dramatically.

  “They have set up explosive charges around the remaining fabbers, the force field generators and all other heavy equipment,” Donnelly added. “There were no demolition-trained personnel on-site, however, and the volunteers in charge followed implant-provided instructions. They request that somebody from Task Force Able check their work.”