Decisively Engaged (Warp Marine Corps Book 1) (10 page)

Risshah losses were already five times higher than the most pessimistic estimate had predicted, and no enemy vessel had been destroyed, or even heavily damaged.

“We will devour their young,” the Admiral hissed.

The battle turned into a complex dance, humans turning to keep their impregnable front quadrants – and, in the case of their cruisers, their rear ones as well – between their hulls and the Risshah’s fire, while the Armada maneuvered to attack from as many different directions as possible. The Risshah forces had to scatter to do so, which meant their ability to offer mutual support and protection was degraded. The Americans’ tight formation enabled them to concentrate their fire on single targets and combine their point defense systems to wipe out entire missile barrages. After every frigate was destroyed, the battlecruisers were targeted next. They were much harder eggs to crack, but even they could not withstand the pounding of dozens of heavy graviton guns and hundreds of plasma and laser emitters fired at point-blank range.

If the humans had fielded more than a handful of cruisers, the outcome might have been in doubt. The Armada had too many ships of the line, however; it took the combined fire of at least three enemy cruisers to destroy a battlecruiser, and the dreadnought and battleship force fields could survive anything the humans threw at them for any practical length of time. Sooner or later their enemies’ unprotected underbellies would be found and torn open. The Armada’s losses would be dismayingly high, but the end result would be the same.

The Admiral’s newfound confidence was proven right a moment later, when one of the tiny cruisers was caught between the
Sunspot
and the battleship
Death Coil
. A missile barrage struck an unprotected quadrant and tore into the inferior vessel’s shields and armored hull. The ship became a glowing cloud of expanding debris.

You fought well, for prey. Better than the fur-faces ever did.

But now it is time to die
.

* * *

“I’m a little teapot, short and stout,” Tactical Officer Johansson sang as he tried to claw his eyes out. Two security officers Tasered him into submission and carried his limp form towards the infirmary.

Commander Givens nearly giggled at the sight, but suppressed the urge at the last moment. That was fortunate, because any signs of insanity were being met with non-lethal but painful force. She blinked away ghost-images of her dead brother, looking just like the terrible night when she’d found his body, after a gang of draft-dodgers had killed him for his clothes and shoes. For some reason, she found the look on her dead brother’s face utterly hilarious.

Several things helped people resist warp-induced madness. Meditation. Assorted drug cocktails. Prayer. Statistically, prayer worked best. Givens had been raised Presbyterian, but hadn’t had much use for religion until joining the Fleet. Multiple exposures to warp space had turned her into a bit of a non-denominational Bible-thumping zealot.

“Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil,” she muttered as she worked the controls of her station. A Snake frigate had managed to pepper the
Roosevelt
with a close-range graviton volley before being blown to smithereens, and the ship’s force fields were down to thirty percent on one quadrant of the ship. The warp shields had worked like a charm, but the cruiser could only generate two of them at once, leaving a lot of hull protected only by standard force fields, its rather inadequate armor plating, and God’s grace. “I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me.”

They were kicking ass and taking names, but it wasn’t going to be enough.

“The assault ships are in range, finally.”

It was up to the Devil Dogs now.

* * *

USMC Lance Corporal Adam David was a reluctant patriot.

His father had been a civil rights attorney before the ETs burned down half the world, an attorney who’d made the mistake of getting in the way of the new world order that followed and ended up in a work camp for his troubles, doing hard manual labor alongside banksters, tenured professors, assorted former government officials and employees, survivalists who hadn’t gotten along with the program, journalists and other undesirables. By all accounts, life in the camps had been no picnic, even in post-Contact America, where the old and the infirm had dropped dead in droves. People there had been last in line for everything, from food and medicine to toilet paper, and they’d died in droves, too. Adam’s dad had been one of the lucky ones.

After his release a few years later, the former attorney had settled down in a small farm in Minnesota, raised a family – that’s where Adam was born, the fifth and final child – and kept his opinions to himself. The stain of being a convicted troublemaker and traitor stuck to his children, however. Young Adam had been picked on incessantly in school, until he’d loudly and publicly denounced his father and everything he stood for, and pretended to be a true-blue all-American patriot, yee-haw and Ay-men, you betcha.

Along the way, he’d discovered a sad truth; if you pretended to be something long enough, the role became reality. He hardly ever thought about all the constitutional violations the US government committed on an almost-hourly basis. He certainly wasn’t thinking about any of that shit now, as he cradled the M4 carbine/grenade launcher he would wield during this historical event. All he cared about was killing as many ETs as possible.

Everything that had happened to him and his family had been the fucking aliens’ fault, after all.

Adam made sure his sealed helmet was screwed in correctly, and all the attachments on his chest armor, gloves and boots were air-tight. He was about to enter not one but two hostile environments, and a hole in his pressurized suit would kill him. The grunts in the weapons platoon had been issued personal force shields, but the rest of Alpha Company would have to make do with Kevlar, carbon nanotube field fatigues and plain dumb luck.

“I got a bad feeling about this,” another Marine said behind him.

“Shut the fuck up, Carl,” Adam said, concentrating on not looking down. He’d done seven drops already, and he’d hated each one a little more than the last. This would be his first combat drop.

If only they could just teleport some nukes aboard the Snake ships and be done. Neat idea, except for two things. First, warp catapults only worked on people. You needed a living, thinking being to get in and out of warp; they’d tried using animals, and even smart ones like dogs and dolphins couldn’t make the trip on their own. And second, warships had internal force fields that would prevent nukes from doing too much damage. The fields wouldn’t stop troopers from walking through them, though. And forget about opening a warp hole too close to a ship’s grav reactor, because you couldn’t. No idea why.

“Catapult ready,” an impersonal voice announced through the mike in his helmet. “Launch in ten, nine, eight…”

The big disk on which the platoon was standing began to vibrate. Adam closed his mouth tightly, clenching his teeth. He’d bitten off the tip of his tongue the first time he’d dropped into warp, so now he always made sure his jaws were locked in place, even if he ended up cracking a tooth, which he’d also done. Twice.

He fucking hated warp drops.

“Six…”

“Hold on to your cocks, here it comes.”

“I said shut the fuck up, Carl,” Adam said through clenched teeth and hoped the fucker bit his tongue off.

“One.”

It started with a fall, or at least a feeling like you were falling. The first thing they taught you during drop training was to fight the urge to flail uselessly against the false sensation. The first time, despite all the lessons and meditation techniques and all that crap, Adam had shit his pants and bit off his tongue. Now he merely closed his eyes and prayed. His father had been born Jewish but had lived life as a staunch atheist; Adam had picked up his prayers from his Catholic neighbors; his other choice had been the LDS but he and the Mormons hadn’t gotten along even after he’d turned into a flag-waving good ole boy.

The Lord’s Prayer did the trick. He kept saying it over and over; he always tried to keep track of how many times he recited it during a jump, but he always lost count somewhere around the seventh or eighth time.

The ghosts were the worst. Dead people, live people, people he didn’t know. They capered all around him, and he saw them even though his eyes were tightly shut. They whispered in his ears and made him want to flip open his helmet and let the wild energies of warp space rip his face clean off. He prayed silently instead.

Deliver us from evil, deliver us from evil, for thine is the kingdom, deliver us from evil, please, please God
.

And it was over, all of a sudden, the horrors receding from his memory like fragments from a forgotten dream. They said you only remembered a little bit of what you saw in warp, and Adam was fine with that, because what he could remember sucked ass. They had landed in a dim corridor, all black shadows and sickening blue and red lights. Snakes breathed all kinds of toxic shit, so a breach in his suit would mean a Deep Regret vid-mail to the folks at home. His father would probably dance on his grave.

“
You didn’t have to become a Myrmidon
.” Those had been Dad’s last words to Adam.

“Sound off,” Sergeant Jimenez ordered, his harsh voice cutting through the haze in Adam’s head. Everyone did. They’d all made it. So far, nobody in Adam’s company had died during a drop, although you heard stories about people who had died, or worse, who hadn’t made it out the other side. Nobody wanted to talk about what happened to you if you ended up stranded in warp space. Adam sure as fuck didn’t. At least he was back in the physical universe, where the worst that could happen to him was death or dismemberment.

“Let’s move, people.”

Their arrival had torn a big hole inside the Snakes’ ship – their fucking dreadnaught, that’d been their target – but it was all interior bulkheads, so it didn’t matter. They followed the HUD displays on their helmets towards their target, the Engineering section. They made it through a good hundred feet before they saw their first Snake.

The Risshah had scaly skin just like their namesakes, but its body plan also included bits and pieces of octopus and spider. Its center of mass was like a boa constrictor’s, a big twisting tubular shape about as wide as a basketball, ending in a prehensile tail. Sixteen tentacle limbs sprouted from the central trunk, and in turn bifurcated into thirty-two smaller tentacles, each of which could serve as a hand or a foot. Its head was bulbous, with big beady eyes and a mouth filled with fangs; it was the ugliest thing Adam had ever seen. The Snake was wearing a purple t-shirt, which made it a petty officer equivalent. It wasn’t armed: Starfarers rarely engaged in boarding actions.

Sergeant Jimenez took care of him. A short burst from his M4 did the trick. The 5.56mm bullets had plasma-filled tips that blew the hideous alien into bloody chunks.

“Fucking-A,” Adam said. He’d never felt as happy as he did watching the ET fuck off and die. At that moment, surrounded by his fellow Marines, he felt right at home.

“Let’s roll. Things to do, ETs to kill.”

They rolled on.

* * *

“Engineering is under attack. Secondary control room is under attack. Troop quarters…”

“Are under attack,” the Admiral said. “Prepare to repel boarders.”

The dreadnought had three cohorts of Spaceborne Infantry amongst its crew, but they’d never been meant to be deployed inside the ship. One loaded troops into shuttles and sent them out to board crippled vessels or to attack targets on planets or large space installations. One cohort was in their quarters, without their weapons; the other two had been detached to assist damage control units – also without their weapons, lest they accidentally damage the ship. To arm themselves, the troops would have to reach the central armory – which was also under attack.

Demons. We are fighting demons
.

Those were its last thoughts before a warp bubble erupted into the bridge, killing it and most of the crew. The few survivors had just enough time to behold their executioners before a storm of explosive bullets wiped them out.

“Ugly motherfuckers, aren’t they?” a Marine second lieutenant said after the last Risshah crewmember had stopped twitching. His voice broke into an adolescent squeak in mid-sentence, which embarrassed him to no end.

“Come on,” he said gruffly. “Let’s clear up the rest of this nest.”

* * *

It worked. It freaking worked!

Commander Givens barely resisted the urge to jump up and down in glee as the last Snake battlecruiser blew up on the screen. Total wipeout.

A quick glance at the tactical screen quenched her elation. The
Lincoln
was gone; the
Eisenhower
and
Bush
were drifting, engines down, life support barely hanging on, most of their other systems off-line and a good one-third to half of their crews dead or wounded. The Assault Ship
Chosin
had also been destroyed, all hands lost, along with a Marine Expeditionary Unit. The casualties among the fleet’s frigates were still to be tallied up. The Snakes had kept fighting even after losing their dreadnought, two battleships and seven battlecruisers to Marine boarding actions. Even with the new warp shields, it had been a close-run thing, as Captain Carruthers would no doubt say at some point.