Decisively Engaged (Warp Marine Corps Book 1) (20 page)

The Ruddies’ singing increased in volume, if not in quality. They were working themselves into a proper berserk rage.

“Movement on all sides,” CPO Donnelly reported.

The second round had begun.

* * *

“They ain’t stopping for shit this time,” Russell said. He had to turn up the volume on his imp to make himself heard through the hammer of the hundred-mike-mike explosions.

He could watch the feed from the Wyrm tower, thanks to the Navy NCO handling commo and intelligence, and the vid wasn’t pretty. About two, three times as many Ruddies as last time were pouring in through the gate and heading towards them at a dead run, and their flag-men were doing a good job directing traffic and getting them moving through half a dozen different streets. The mortars – only two of them were covering that side – couldn’t spread out their fire enough to stop them all.

“I got ‘em,” Gonzo said, opening up with the ALS-43 and filling his sector of fire with plasma and frag rounds. Further down the line, an LML turned a pack of Ruddies into crispy critters.

And they kept on coming. He had to hand it to the fuckers, they didn’t quit. And they were in range. Russell leveled his IW-3a and sent a 15mm grenade their way. It wasn’t as impressive as the mortars or the ALS-43, but the little frag sent a few Ruddies tumbling to the ground, and that was A-Okay. He tagged others with single shots, his imp painting one target after the next. It was as easy as could be; nobody was shooting back, at least not yet. His Iwo’s plasma rounds blew the poor fuckers apart.

Some of them could shoot back, though. His imp tagged a Ruddy with a rocket launcher; the ET was trying to aim it but other bastards kept bumping into him before he could get it right. If he finally fired the rocket, anybody behind him would get barbequed by the back blast. He didn’t get the chance, though.

“Nope,” Russell said as he put a round through the rocketeer. The plasma jet speared right through the Ruddy – and into the two spare rockets in his backpack. The ensuing explosion swallowed up the charging aliens in a cloud of smoke and flames.

“Gotta love them sympathetic detonations,” the Marine muttered as a couple Ruddies emerged from the smoke. One of them was on fire, the next one out was missing an arm. Putting them down was a mercy.

More of them kept coming.

Off to his left, a rocket corkscrewed towards the trench line, leaving a trail of white smoke behind. It hit the embassy’s force field and blew up against it. One rocket wouldn’t scratch the shield. Three or four might, if they hit close enough together. Russell set aside his concerns and kept servicing targets. Stick to your fire sector; anybody who stepped into the kill box was a fair target. With his imp, he hardly could miss; technically you were expected to hit targets with ninety percent accuracy, but when it was for real and the fuckers were shooting back it was usually closer to sixty percent. With near zilch return fire, he was getting a much better score than that.

The Ruddies had come into the open at around a hundred yards; his rangefinder dutifully informed him he was dropping targets at under fifty yards now. The kill zone was littered with bodies, but more Ruddies were coming and getting much closer.

There was an explosion somewhere to his right, and it’d come from inside the perimeter.

“Grenades!” someone shouted.

Fuck. A tossed grenade would fly right through the area force field. Their personal fields would probably handle the blast and shrapnel, but that was a little too much like hard work for Russell’s taste. He started turning his attention to the Ruddies who didn’t have swords or spears, on the grounds they were most likely to be harboring grenades. His suspicion was confirmed by another sympathetic detonation that cleared his sector for several seconds.

More RPGs were coming into play, too; some Ruddies fired in groups, three, four at a time. The high-explosive warheads blew up harmlessly against the area force field; it looked like even a mass volley wasn’t enough to punch through. None of the rocketeers lived to fire more than one round apiece. But the big-eyed bastards were getting closer. The fastest or luckiest ones lived to reach the coils of concertina wire stretched some ten feet off the edge of the force field. That’s where their luck ran out: the razor edges of the wire cut or snagged their clothes and skin, and they died there, trying to hack through it with their swords or climb over it, which only got them a bit of extra suffering before they got shot.

Russell emptied his 15mm launcher over the concertina fence, filling his sector with dead and wounded ETs, but more Ruddies came behind the fallen and started to throw their own grenades. Others had Molotov cocktails; they hunched down while they lit the wicks running into glass and ceramic containers filled with flammable liquid, then jumped up and flung them towards the trenches. Most of them got shot or fragged before they could finish, but not all.

Something slammed into him from behind. Grenade. His force field had stopped the fragments but enough kinetic force had seeped through to shake him. Russell cursed and went back to work. More bomb-throwers had arrived, and shooting them kept him too busy to stop the ones trying to jump over the wire. Some smart fuckers had two or three buddies grab them and fling them
over
the concertina barrier. Maybe not to smart, as two of the four who went over didn’t clear the wire and got caught in the thick of it, but the other two made it. Russell shot them both, but some asshole on the other side of the wire nailed him with a Molotov cocktail while he was busy.

“Motherfuck!” He was on fire. His long-johns were fire-resistant, but he was still burning and more Ruddies were piling up into the wire and throwing shit his way. Another grenade went off inside the trench, close enough to stagger him while he beat at the flames with one hand and popped motherfuckers with the other. His clamshell armor’s environmental controls sent a spray of cold gas all over him; the system was meant to deal with plasma penetration, but it worked fine on the jellied booze the fucker had splashed him with. He managed to scrap off most of the burning stuff with his free hand; he never stopped shooting.

A hundred-mike-mike dropped a bomb load across his fire sector; a line of puffs of smoke appeared above the wire, each marking a dose of slashing death.

Anti-pers fragments bounced off Russell’s force field; that fire mission had been danger-fucking-close. He didn’t mind the back-scratching, though, not when the Ruddies milling around the wire went down. Russell shot a couple that were still twitching. The fire on his suit was out; no harm done. His Iwo was almost empty; he reloaded, filled up on grenades, and went back to work.

Off to his left, Gonzaga mowed down hundreds of them. He’d switched to plasma grenades, and that and the mortar bombs finally got to the next wave of Ruddies. Or maybe it was the sight of all the dead bodies scattered in front of them. They hesitated near the middle of the open field, and many of them stopped cold, doing the worst thing you could do in a kill zone. You had to run when bullets were flying and there was no cover around. You ran, forward or back, or hit the ground and crawled, but you didn’t stand still, not if you didn’t want to go down and never get up.

The Ruddies didn’t know better. They hesitated, and the Marines on the trenches sent another thousand of them to hell. That did the trick. The ETs ran back the way they came. Russell and his buddies shot them in the back, which some folk would have called unsporting, except this wasn’t a game, and any Ruddy that lived today might come back tomorrow. They killed about as many of them on their way back as they had as they came forward, and the hundred-mike-mikes sent a few more anti-pers bombs their way as a parting gift.

“My God,” Nacle said over the fire team channel after the shooting died. “Holy fucking shit. God.”

“Leave God alone,” Russel said as he changed magazines. “He’s probably busy counting all the Ruddies we just sent to Hell.”

“You…” The Mormon fell silent.

It was pretty bad, Russell had to admit. The stupid bastards had kept coming, even after seeing what the Marines had done to their buddies. These ETs might make good troops someday, if they could get them civilized enough to build their own starships and plasma guns. He figured that was why the US had been here, almost as much as for the fancy rocks they bought off the locals. The Rats in charge had tried to make allies out the Ruddies. Russell couldn’t imagine the ETs would feel like being pals after the Marines had killed them by the cartload, but who knew? Stranger things had happened.

He lifted his helmet’s faceplate. The smell was much worse without the filters, but the breeze felt good against his skin. Reaching into a pouch on his belt, he found a protein chew and popped it in his mouth, savoring the salty-meaty flavor as he closed the helmet again and turned his attention to the observation post’s video feed.

The Ruddies were in full retreat all over. The Wyrms had filled their sector with bodies as well; their security guys had cut loose with flechette guns that fired thousands of hypervelocity ceramic darts, plus heavy weapons that included graviton cannons. The wounds those fuckers inflicted were downright gruesome; the Ruddies on that part of the battle looked like they’d been chewed up and spat out by an angry wolverine, or folded by some sort of industrial machine. The observation post couldn’t see very far into the Ovals’ sector but Russell knew how nasty their lasers could be; he didn’t need visuals to picture thousands of dead Ruddies, either perforated and cooked from the inside out or cut in two by continuous beams. Ugly way to go.

“Then again, ain’t ever found a pretty way to die,” he said out loud.

“What was that, Russett?”

“Never mind, Gonzo. Just musin’ ‘bout nothin’.”

* * *

“There are three hours of daylight left. We agree to cease fire until tomorrow morning. You can retrieve your dead until dusk, but you must move to the other side of the wall before it is too dark to tell a white thread from a black one,” Deputy Chief of Mission Norbert said to the Kirosha Magistrate on the other end of the telephone line. He’d put the call on speaker, so everyone in the office could listen in.

“Agreed,” Magistrate Eereen said. “I take it you still refuse to surrender and accept the protection of the High Queen.”

“We must regretfully decline, yes.”

“Very well. The Queen will make a statement over the radio waves tomorrow afternoon. I suggest you listen to it.” The line went dead.

“Now what?” Heather wondered out loud.

“Nothing good, I’m sure,” RSO Rockwell said. “In theory, the Queen could pretend the whole thing was a terrible mistake, the actions of a bunch of rebels, bandits and traitors or what have you, and try to set up a lasting cease fire. Considering there’s a galaxy-wide shooting war going on, New Washington would probably be content bringing everyone home and leaving the Ruddies to rot until we can come back in force and exact reparations.”

“That would make sense,” Deputy Norbert said.

“Yes. But I doubt that’s what the Queen has in mind.”

“I agree,” Captain Fromm said, sipping on a glass of fruit juice. “Today was just a probing attack. The Ruddies sacrificed thousands of their people just to get a feel for our capabilities.”

“What do you think they learned, Captain?”

“Our effective engagement ranges, the volume of indirect fire we can deliver, and how much their swatters have degraded our surveillance capabilities. One thing they’ve figured out is that the walls surrounding the Enclave have to go; their gates are chokepoints and perfect targets for our mortars. They are beginning to knock down wall sections to create more entry points. They are learning fast. From what I’ve read about their military, they have a few capable generals in charge. That Seeu Teenu, for one.”

“Yes,” Heather said. “General Seeu was instrumental in modernizing the Royal Guards, mostly with equipment purchased or copied from the Western Federation, the most technically-advanced nation-state in Jasper-Five. His handling of the last rebellion in the south is worth studying.”

“I did,” Fromm said. “If he or one of his students is in charge, he’ll put the knowledge he gained to good use. Meanwhile…” He paused for several seconds when an imp call interrupted him. “Sorry. Just was informed unarmed parties of Kirosha with wheeled wagons and trucks are beginning to collect the bodies of their fallen.”

“Good.” The last thing they needed was thousands of rotting corpses all around the legation buildings. Most local viruses and bacteria were utterly inoffensive to humans, but a couple weren’t, and they had a couple of thousand Kirosha refugees crammed all around them to act as incubators for any disease those bodies might spread. Medical nanites could work wonders, but it made no sense to give them extra work.

“I have everyone on full alert, just in case.”

“Of course.”

“Moving on, we have the question of what to do about the spaceport,” Fromm said, bringing up a problem nobody wanted to think about. The short answer to that question was: nothing.

“Is there anything we can do?” Rockwell asked. “I don’t like the idea of over a hundred Americans being left out in the cold, but what
can
we do?”

“They are twenty-five miles away by the most direct route, which would take us right through the city, or forty-five miles if we leave via the south gate and take the old Post Road, which would keep a convoy out of range from the city fortifications. It’s doable.”