Decisively Engaged (Warp Marine Corps Book 1) (21 page)

“I suppose. If you take most of your Marines out there, and at least half of the military contractors. Which would leave us pretty much helpless if they launch another mass attack, or worse, if they finally use their military against us.”

“I have a few ideas about that, but let’s set that aside. If we don’t mount a rescue operation, how long can they last out there?”

Heather had the answer to that. “The port facilities have massive force fields, better than anything we’ve got here. They won’t stop an infantry attack, but will keep artillery out. There are ninety-five Navy personnel and dependents there, including a thirty-man security department with combat armor and infantry weapons, plus another thirty-nine civilian workers. They have their own water supply, plus plenty of foodstuffs in their warehouses. Figure they can last as long as a month before running out, barring a mass attack.”

“Which the Ruddies can launch whenever they feel like it,” Fromm said. “They can move a couple Guard or Army battalions along with another ten thousand Final Blow fanatics and overrun the port in a couple of hours, if they don’t mind the losses, and we’ve seen that they don’t. Bringing the port’s personnel here isn’t just the right thing to do. They will strengthen our position here.”

“Sure, and if we could empty those warehouses and bring back several tons of fabber feedstock, we’d be sitting pretty, too,” Rockwell said. “Why not wish for a battlecruiser squadron while we’re at it?”

“Like you said, the alternative is to let over a hundred Americans die, Mr. Rockwell.”

“And if things go wrong, we risk the lives of over two thousand Americans here, Captain.”

Alpha males must alpha around
, Heather thought sourly. Out loud: “Gentlemen, let’s try to work together. We’ve got the resources of a Marine platoon, three Starfarer legations, three humanitarian missions, two major corporations and a good half dozen smaller ones. Maybe we can figure out a plan of action that doesn’t leave us defenseless.”

The arguments and counterarguments went on for a while. By the time they decided to retire for the night, they had the glimmer of a plan but still too many unanswered questions.

What else can go wrong?
Heather wondered before she went to bed.

The universe was happy to answer that question the next day.

Year 163 AFC, D Minus Two

Lieutenant Commander Lisbeth Zhang, formerly of the
USS Wildcat
, opened her eyes and found herself looking at an unfamiliar curved ceiling.

“What...?” she croaked. She was dehydrated and her whole body felt achy and feverish, all symptoms of a massive infusion of medical nanites to repair near-lethal levels of trauma. Whatever had happened had almost killed her.

She carefully looked around; it took her a moment to recognize the unfamiliar surroundings. She’d only spent any time inside an escape pod during Cadet training at Annapolis Novo. And a pod was where she was. Someone had strapped her onto a crash recliner inside a hollow cylinder some twelve feet long and five feet wide.

A corpse floated past her eyes, startling a gasp out of her. It was Lieutenant Givens. He’d bled out; the red stains on the walls and the droplets in the air told the story. Omar had dragged her unconscious carcass into the pod, launched it before the ship blew up, and managed to inject her with a nano-med booster before succumbing to his own injuries.

“Omar,” she said reaching out and touching the cold skin on his cheek. “You’ll be remembered for what you did,” she promised him. “I’ll see to that.” He deserved a Navy Cross at least, the kind of award most recipients got posthumously.

Of course, first she needed to figure out a way to make it out of this floating coffin in one piece.

Lisbeth released herself from the chair and gently secured Omar Givens’ body to it before getting down to work. The pod’s emergency supplies included fifteen gallons of water and two weeks’ worth of foodstuffs, among several other useful items. She downed a good sixty ounces of water and ate a couple of energy bars, allegedly apple- and chocolate-flavored, while her imp accessed the pod’s systems. The overpriced systems – or so she’d thought of them until just now – provided life support, force fields strong enough to withstand atmospheric re-entry, and a rudimentary grav drive.

The pod also had a decent sensor suite, better than her imp’s, and a comm system that would let her contact any friendly ships or facilities within ten light minutes of her location. The first thing she did was look for any other survivors. She spotted half a dozen pods floating within sensor range, mixed in with other fragments from the two ships. All had come from the
Wildcat
; the
Bengal Tiger
had been destroyed too quickly to allow anyone to escape.

As it turned out, the
Wildcat
’s crew hadn’t fared any better. Two of the pods were empty. The rest contained only corpses. Only her pod had launched quickly enough to escape the shower of fast-moving debris from the shattered ships. Pieces of her vessel’s hull had ripped through the other four escape pods, exposing the people inside to vacuum. Her own pod had taken a couple of hits, but the force fields had held. Sheer luck had kept her alive while the rest of her crew died.

Sole survivor. All the people in her command, caught by surprise and slaughtered. Her command. Her responsibility.

Stop making this about you
, she told herself.
We’re at war. Your duty is to reach friendly forces and rejoin the action. Even if you have to carry a rifle and play ground-pounder
.

Lisbeth raised the spaceport facility on Jasper-Five.

“I’m in an escape pod,” she explained to the panicked-sounding space traffic controller after establishing her identity. “Do I have clearance to land?”

“We’re surrounded by hostile Eets at the moment, ma’am,” the Chief Warrant in charge told her after he joined the conversation. “Mostly armed with swords and the like, but the hostiles might have air defense artillery assets. We cannot guarantee a safe landing.”

Lisbeth considered her options after Ground Control sent her the latest update of the situation beyond Jasper-Five, consisting mostly of the copy of a terse QE-telegram from the War Department. A coordinated attack against the US was underway, involving dozens of star systems. The chances any Fleet forces would be dispatched to Jasper-Five anytime soon were slim to none. This had been a quiet sector for decades; the corvette squadron which had dispatched her task unit consisted of four additional vessels, which would be needed to guard Lahiri until reinforcements arrived. The nearest other force not on a frontier picket was a flotilla on Third Deseret, a good twenty-five hours’ warp transit away, and likely under attack or expecting an attack. She would run out of consumables long before any rescue force arrived. She could risk being murdered groundside or dying alone in space.

“I’m going to attempt a landing, Ground Control,” she announced.

“Aye, aye, ma’am. We’ll ready the tractor grapples for you.”

Getting to Jasper-Five while driving a pod was very much like in the training simulations. She strapped herself to a crash chair next to the one holding the body of her XO and used her imp to set the pod on course. Some four hours later, she plunged into the blue planet. The mini-ship was rated for atmospheric entry, but barely so; air friction surrounded the pod in a sheath of superheated air as it descended at high speeds and she turned all the power of its engines to slow her down enough for the spaceport’s grapples to catch it. It was daytime, but her fiery reentry lit the pod like a plunging star, bright enough to be visible for miles and miles.

The pod started shuddering violently during its final approach. As it turned out, it hadn’t escaped the
Wildcat
’s destruction unscathed after all, and its upper quadrant’s force field failed. Pieces of fuselage peeled away, no longer protected from the laws of physics. Lisbeth tried to reduce its speed further, and the overstrained and, as it turned out, also-damaged graviton drive shut down.

“Too fast!” the ground controller shouted. “Veer off! Veer off!”

The world seemed to slow down as she set aside all emotions – mostly pure panic – and concentrated on the task at hand. She created a checklist in her mind and went over each entry. Use the emergency attitude thrusters to climb over the spaceport’s force fields before the pod splattered against them. Restart the grav engine without engaging it, not until she could slow down enough to avoid another shutdown. The attitude thrusters were her only means of steering the ship until the engines came back online, and all they could really do was impart slight changes in course. She used them to aim the pod skywards, letting the planet’s gravity reduce her velocity, and hoped the pod didn’t come apart.

Her altered course took her over the city. Three sets of sensors painted her craft; her imp identified them as American, Wyrm and Oval systems. It appeared the alien embassies had air defense systems in place, which meant that her IFF transponder was the only thing keeping her from eating a laser or graviton burst. To add to her worries, more pod pieces broke off; nothing vital so far, but that couldn’t last; most of the pod was made of important or essential systems.

Nothing she could do about either problem, so she concentrated on her flying. The pod left the big city behind; she found herself soaring over dark countryside with only a few scattered pinpricks of light indicating the presence of fire or electricity down below. Out in the distance, a smaller town’s lights flickered weakly. A few moments later, she left the land mass entirely; she was over the ocean, and if she couldn’t fly back she was going to have to swim home.

Gritting her teeth, she engaged the graviton engine once again. Another emergency shutdown might result in catastrophic damage which would leave her with nothing but momentum and the attitude thrusters, neither of which would keep the aircraft aloft for very long. She idly wondered what the local sea life would make of her.

The engine caught on; the pod started vibrating violently, but she was in control again, instead of trying to steer a missile. Her imp sent her the result of the system’s diagnostics: the news wasn’t great. She had maybe two, three minutes before the engine gave up the ghost. That might be enough to get her back to the spaceport. Might. There were cracks in the outer fuselage; the pod might fall to pieces before the drive died.

“Here goes nothing,” she said to herself as she changed course and headed back the way she’d come.

* * *

“Figgered I had to share this,” the smuggler said.

Fromm looked at the neatly-stacked crates that filled the basement of the warehouse. A hidden basement, shielded from a possible custom inspection by a rather fancy stealth system. One of the crates was open, revealing its contents.

“Ruddy designs,” he said, picking up one of the assault rifles from the crate and hefting it. It looked just like a Royal Armory’s CR-11: .29 caliber, 20-round magazine, able to fire single shots and 3-round bursts. It was the cutting edge of Kirosha’s small arms technology. Unlike normal CR-11s, though, this model had an integral electronic scope, a pistol grip, and a folding wire stock. “But improved.”

“Yessir,” the smuggler said. “We added a decent rangefinder with a lowlight and laser-targeting scope; figger they’ll increase accuracy a good fifty, sixty percent. We was gonna sell ‘em to the Ruddies in exchange for gold and other heavies, plus silk and some organics.”

“I see.” Technically, it wasn’t illegal. The current trade treaty forbid the sale of modern weapons to the locals, but these weren’t modern, technically speaking; even the electronic sights weren’t state of the art, although they were easily fifty years ahead of Kirosha’s technology. The rifles had been fabricated in some US planet for little more than the cost in materials and fabber time, brought in hidden with other cargo, and stored in the sub-warehouse until a buyer could be found. It’d all been done covertly to avoid the risk that some officious bastard in the diplomatic service would object to the sale of weapons to the natives and scuttle the whole operation. Or possibly because Crow had been toying with the idea of selling them to Kirosha’s enemies instead.

“How come you haven’t sold them already?” he asked the free trader.

Howard Crow’s personal files identified him as an independent trader, co-owner and licensed operator of a small freighter, the five-thousand ton
Alan Dean Foster
. The starship was currently in transit to Lahiri; its cargo allegedly consisted of ingots of assorted metals plus a variety of luxury Kirosha goods: artwork, several tons of a local variety of silk with several potential uses, and a number of ‘medicinal’ organic compounds, including a variety of intoxicants and narcotics. The FDA, like most non-military government agencies, was chronically underfunded and understaffed, so new drugs could be sold with impunity for decades before being declared controlled substances, if they ever were.

The same files claimed he’d only served his obligatory four years in the service, and that his record was perfectly clean. Fromm suspected those files were as trustworthy as a politician’s promise. It was hard to cheat the system, but not impossible. At the moment, however, he was only interested in the smuggler’s weapon cache. He wasn’t a cop and had much bigger fish to fry.

“I had a deal all set up, but the Ruddy bigwig who agreed to buy the fuck’n guns got the chop last week,” Crow explained. “He was too chummy with us Starfarers, mebbe, or pissed off the wrong VIP. Whofuck knows?”

“How many?”

“Two thousand rifles. Million rounds, full metal jacket .29 caliber. Better’n what the locals make.”

“Good.” His platoon only had a couple dozen or so spare IW-3 rifles. The fabbers could make more, but doing so would eat up on their feedstock supplies, and they needed those to replace all the ammo they’d spent stopping the attack. While the antiquated rifles were nowhere near as effective as Starfarer weapons, they were infinitely better than nothing. “I’ll take them.”

“Hoped you’d said that,” Mr. Crow said.

“I e-mailed you a War Department voucher. Verify that you got it.”

Crow took a second to read it and smiled, revealing several gleaming gold and grav-transistor teeth. “Looks good. Figger I can pay this year’s taxes with it.”

“Thank you, Mr. Crow,” Fromm said. “I’ll send a work detail to come pick up the guns.”

The smuggler hesitated for a moment before speaking again. “Ah… there’s one more thing, ser.”

Fromm had a feeling that the smuggler’s semi-illiterate speech patterns were as genuine as his official files. “What is it?”

“Gots a piece of military gear you might find useful. And since I figger yer boys are gonna toss the place anyways and find it, might’s well tell ye.”

“Smart of you.”

Fromm followed him to the other side of the warehouse, where several large containers were piled up. Crow was right; his Marines would have gone over those boxes sooner or later. And when he opened the nearest one he understood the smuggler’s reluctance. The round white surface and the circuit-board ridges were unmistakable.

“Those are components of a warp catapult’s launch pad.”

“Yessuh. Figger I kin let you have it for cost.”

“Figure I won’t charge you for holding stolen goods and just take it instead. And I won’t even ask you which of my Marines sold it to you.”

“I was holding it on consignment. They ain’t gonna be happy ‘bout not getting’ paid.”

“Feel free to pass this on: I don’t give a fuck who they are, but if they make any sort of stink, I’ll start giving a fuck.”