Decisively Engaged (Warp Marine Corps Book 1) (23 page)

But there was nobody else. Rockwell was ex-Navy; he would help a great deal with the staff work required to manage the improvised army, but he couldn’t offer much in the way of tactical advice. McClintock was Intelligence; Fromm would trust her with a gun at his side, or leading a squad or even a platoon, but she was more useful working with Donnelly to process information. And the last senior Embassy staffer, Norbert, was useless, a draftee who’d spent most of her time in uniform working for the Judge Advocate General, a lawyer by trade. Useless. At least she was staying out of the way. Llewellyn was also keeping out of sight, after being warned that he’d be drafted to help dig trenches if he showed his face in public or otherwise attracted attention to himself.

The captain wasn’t afraid of responsibility, only of failure. The last time he’d been faced with an impossible situation, he’d done what he thought was right.

He could only hope he’d be able to do so again.

* * *

“Bring us the Speaking Wand.”

A servant approached the Queen, bearing the gold-plated microphone which would carry her words over the airwaves, to be heard in every home and public establishment with a radio receiver. The monarch waited patiently while another servant counted down to the time of the speech; when the servant raised a red flag to show she was on the air, she began to speak in a carefully modulated voice.

“We are Kirosha. We are the Throne, the Will of the Land, the Voice of the People. Today, we call upon the Devils from the stars to make amends for their crimes. Today, we demand the unconditional surrender of every outlander in the City and Kingdom of Kirosha. We are prepared to be merciful. Only those guilty of murdering our loyal citizens will be punished. All others shall be spared, and sent into exile in the Hanpeer Islands until such time as they can be delivered to the darkness from whence they came.

“If the Devils refuse to surrender, then all Kirosha must raise their hands against them. Slay them without mercy. Plunder the graves of their ancestors and dig up their bones. Crush the skulls of their children beneath your feet. There will be no mercy. Any Kirosha who betrays Ka’at by worshipping the Devils and their false gods will be punished so that death will be seen as an act of supreme mercy.

“To the Devils, we say this: you have until the hour of noon tomorrow to surrender. When that hour is past, there will be no mercy.

“That is all. We now return you to your regular programming.”

* * *

Heather McClintock turned the station off just as what passed for Kirosha martial music filled the airwaves after the Queen’s speech was over.

“Well, that is that.”

“I take it that surrender is not an option,” Deputy Norbert said, not for the first time.

“At the very least, every one of my Marines, and very likely all the senior diplomatic staff, including yourself, will be among those ‘punished’ for their crimes,” Captain Fromm said. “I think we all know what that means.”

Norbert shuddered and shook her head, remembering the scene at the Royal Court. “Not an option.”

“Neither the Wyrashat or Vehelians will surrender, either,” Heather said. “The loss of face incurred by giving up to non-Starfaring primitives is unacceptable to either culture.”

“Very well. No surrender,” Rockwell said. “Moving on. Captain?”

“This ultimatum narrows our window of opportunity to rescue the spaceport personnel, not to mention Lieutenant Commander Zhang,” Fromm said. “If the rescue mission’s going to happen at all, it has to be tonight. Tomorrow at noon they will attack every Starfaring facility they can reach.”

“Are you sure your plan will work?”

“The Kirosha don’t normally fight at night; their night vision is worse than a human’s, probably because they have that huge moon turning night into day half the time, and we’ve never sold them any low-light or night vision equipment. Tonight that planet-moon – the Eye of God is what they call it – is ‘closed,’ so it’ll be as dark as it gets. We’ve been monitoring their radio traffic, so we have a good idea where their modern forces are. If we move fast, we can drive a flying column through their lines before they can react.”

“Flying column?” Norbert asked. “Do we have any aircraft?”

“It’s a technical term for a mobile force,” Fromm explained while everyone else tried not to roll their eyes at the Deputy. “It would consist of ground vehicles only. As to your question, there are three flight-capable vehicles under our control, corporate-owned atmospheric shuttlecraft, heavy and slow-moving. The Kirosha have aircraft of their own, roughly equivalent to early twentieth century models; a squadron was shot down by the Vehelian delegation when it attempted an overflight of the Enclave, so they’re keeping their planes on the ground for now. While the local air defense artillery and aircraft would probably be ineffective against the shuttles, we don’t know if the enemy has been given high-tech anti-air assets, so I’m not risking them for the time being.”

“I see,” Norbert said.

“The plan is to push through any screening forces, reach the spaceport, evacuate its personnel and destroy anything they might use against us. We definitely don’t want them to seize the shield generators, power plant and heavy equipment there.”

“Could they use any of it, even if they captured the facilities intact?” Rockwell asked.

“Normally, probably not, but they’ve got to have Starfarer advisors stashed somewhere. They provided the mines that destroyed the corvettes, not to mention the Swatters. We can’t afford to take the chance. The correlation of forces is adverse enough as it is.”

“And you are sure they won’t attempt a night attack once they know you’ve sortied?”

“Nothing is certain, but I doubt they will, and they will suffer badly if they do. Their ability to coordinate will be degraded, while every implanted human can see perfectly well at night. And we will keep most of the Marines and heavy weapons in place.”

Rockwell nodded. “Very well. You may proceed, with one condition. You cannot lead the sortie. We can’t afford to lose you.”

Fromm looked like he wanted to argue, but finally shrugged. “All right. Obregon can handle the mission as well or better than I could.” He didn’t sound happy about sending his people out without him. Captain Devil Dog was a leads-from-the-front type. Very strong, very brave, very handsome, and very… well, not very stupid, not really. More like focused on the job at hand, to the exclusion of everything else, including his survival.

You’ll never make it to flag rank with that attitude, buddy
, Heather thought.

“Anything else? No? Then this meeting’s over,” Rockwell said.

Heather stayed behind. “I’ve been monitoring Kirosha radio traffic,” she reported. “All of my agents are dead, executed for treason. Along with every trader, government official or nobility member who favored accommodation with the US. It’s a clean sweep for the Preserver faction.”

Rockwell frowned. “They clearly don’t expect the Fleet to come back, ever.”

“Which suggests they expect the Lhan Arkh or Nasstah to show up at some point.”

“If that happens, we might as well kiss our collective ass goodbye,” the RSO said. “The Lampreys and Vipers don’t treat their prisoners much better than the Kirosha. When they bother taking any. And there’s more bad news, I’m afraid.”

“What do you mean?”

“I got an eyes-only QE telegram just before the meeting,” the RSO explained. “I needed to talk about it with someone, and I know you can keep your mouth shut. Besides the Lampreys, possible hostiles now include the Vipers – and the Imperium.”

“Jesus.” The Lampreys and Vipers were no surprise; the US had fought three wars against them, one against the former and two against the latter. The Galactic Imperium, on the other hand, had held a long and relatively peaceful relationship with America. It was the only Starfarer polity that was a true consortium of multiple species. And it was also the largest and most powerful civilization in the known galaxy. “How certain are we of this?”

“Not certain at all. ‘Tentatively-identified Imperium vessels have fired upon Fleet assets’ is how the telegram put it. If it’s true, it’s a disaster. We can handle the Toothsome Twosome, together or separately, even after all the rearming they’ve both been doing. We could probably hold our own against the Imperium, one on one. Against all three? After all the cutbacks? I don’t see it, unless we get the Puppies and Wyrms on our side.”

“We’re going to lose entire worlds,” Heather said.

“We’ve already lost over a dozen trading posts and a minor colony. The massacres are a matter of policy. The aim is to kill all Americans – all humans – they can get their hands on. The Pan-Asians’ holdings are being targeted, too.”

“We can count on them, at least,” Heather said.

“Yeah, for what it’s worth. The GACS has been improving its Navy, but it can only field about one tenth as many ships as we can, and most of them are obsolete models that we and the Puppies sold them. We’ll probably have to use more assets to protect their colonies than anything they bring to the table.”

“Maybe we should have helped them more along the way.”

Rockwell shrugged. “Maybe. They weren’t exactly good friends to the US. The Sino-Russian alliance actually launched nukes at us, back in the day.”

“Which our Puppy-given tech blasted clean out of the sky.”

“Yeah, but after that, not exterminating them was the best you could hope for.”

Heather could have argued the point, but decided it wouldn’t be good for her career. She didn’t want a ‘politically unreliable’ mark on her record.

Of course, given the news, none of that might matter for long. Whoever was behind this didn’t want concessions or surrender.

They wanted humanity gone.

* * *

Lisbeth Zhang’s first day on Kirosha was nobody’s idea of fun.

She woke up with a start shortly after dawn, still wedged between the three alien tree trunks, sore and ravenous. A few gulps of water and several protein chews and energy bars later, she felt somewhat better, but still not quite up to snuff. The nanites had fixed the injuries she’d sustained during her all-expense-paid trip to colorful Jasper-Five, but at the cost of leaving her wrung out. A few extra hours of sleep and another five or six thousand calories would fix that; the calories she could get, but sleep would have to wait.

After using her imp to triangulate her position, she looked at a detailed map of the area. She was about fifteen klicks from the spaceport as the crow flew. There was a major road connecting the port with the capital city not too far away from her position, and several minor ones sneaking throughout the area and connecting several farming villages. If she paralleled the main road she could make it to the spaceport before nightfall, give or take a few hours.

Her imp linked up with the Navy’s net. She’d uploaded a brief report before going to sleep last night, but she wanted to talk to somebody.

“What’s your status, Commander?” the CPO on the other end asked.

“In a word, FUBAR,” Lisbeth said. She explained further and let them know her plans.

“Be advised that there are irregular forces around the spaceport,” the comm tech told her.

“I’ll be sneaky. Anything else?”

“Be careful, and best of luck, ma’am.”

“Thank you.”

Lisbeth started walking. She skirted a farming village that she had no doubt terrorized when she landed; the locals must have been too scared to come out of their homes to check on the wreckage, which was fortunate for everyone concerned.

The long walk was largely uneventful. In fact, SERE training had been tougher than this, although she hadn’t been in a pod crash beforehand, so it kind of evened out. She was still tired, and the long trek around the edges of populated areas didn’t help. A couple of times, she heard the distant roaring of vehicles. Lots of vehicles. Enemy patrols? Troop movements, and if so, in which direction? She considered walking closer to the road to find out, but decided against it. The stealth suit was great, but the Jasperians’ unknown benefactor had given them space mines and other toys; they might be able to detect her presence if she ventured too close. Best to play it safe.

She would live to regret her decision.

Year 163 AFC, D Minus One

Timothy was hard at work when President Jensen called him.

He put down the entrenching tool with a sight of relief when his portable device announced the call. There weren’t enough shovels to go around, and the Marines had kindly lent out their digging equipment. “Here ya go, civvie,” a weasely-looking jarhead had told Timothy. “Same e-tool the Corps’ been using since long before First Contact.” The short collapsible shovel wasn’t as good as a regular one, and the unfamiliar stoop labor had taken its toll on him. He stretched his back while he answered.

“We’re trying to organize an armed group of Kirosha volunteers,” President Jensen explained. “Would you and Jonah consider helping train them? Brother Thalman was a staff sergeant in the Marine Corps; he will assume command.”

Timothy glanced at Jonah, who was linked into the call. His companion nodded enthusiastically. Neither of them would complain about their current duties, but teaching Kirosha how to shoot sounded better than digging, and since they hadn’t tried to shirk their duties but been asked to switch jobs, they wouldn’t even have to feel guilty about it.

“We would be glad to, President Jensen.”

Soon enough, Jonah and Timothy stood by the side of Elder Michael Thalman. The missionary was an older man, who with his wife had devoted his life to missionary work after retiring from the military. He did not look happy to be holding a weapon in his hands yet again; Timothy supposed Elder Thalman had thought that part of his life was over and done with.

None can guess what plans Heavenly Father has for you
, Timothy thought.

“Very well. As of now, you two are sergeants,” Elder Thalman said. “You will each command a company of a hundred men. Yes, that means you should be officers, but you plain aren’t; you’re not even qualified to be NCOs, but we’ve got to use what we have.” He tilted his head to the Kirosha that milled around on the mission’s soccer field. which they’d taken over as a training ground.

There were two distinct groups of them, standing apart from each other. The larger contingent were Jersh, the refugees the Enclave had taken in. The others were not Kirosha but a different variant of the species; their skin was several shades darker, and their clothes and demeanor were different; they favored leather leggings and vests with chain mail patches sawn over their upper torso and shoulders. They also looked tough and confident; Timothy could tell their very presence intimidated the Kirosha. One of them stood out by virtue of the American-style business suit he wore.

“The fellows in the leather outfits are Clansmen from the islands south of Kirosha,” Thalman explained. “They served as bodyguards and hired guns, and the Embassy foisted them on us. I’m keeping them together as an independent unit, under the command of Locquar, the man in the suit. I don’t want to stir things up by putting them with the others, so you won’t have to worry about them.

“The ones you’ll be dealing with have never held a weapon, except for a couple of criminal types who’re likely to be more trouble than they’re worth. We need to teach them how to shoot, mainly. If they get deployed at all, it will be inside entrenchments. Fighting from fixed positions is about the easiest combat job there is. As long as they don’t run the moment someone starts shooting at them, that is. Remember what you were taught during Basic, try to pass it on, and hopefully we will not disgrace ourselves. Got it?”

Jonah and Timothy nodded, soberly aware of their responsibilities.
There are no bad regiments, only bad officers
. Timothy remembered reading that line, but not where and when. Whatever Elder Thalman had said, he was an officer now. The realization felt like a lump of ice-cold stone in his guts.

The two of them helped the former sergeant organize his new charges into a regular, evenly-spaced block. They went through some very basic drill moves. No gun training, not on the first day. First they had to get them used to obeying commands, to moving as units, to feel like a group rather than a random clump of individuals. And that was going to take longer than a day, or even a week. They tried to jump-start the process by groping together people from the same family, profession or neighborhood. That took advantage of any pre-existing camaraderie, although that had its own risks regarding discipline.

Timothy watched the Kirosha volunteers as they dutifully followed every order he and the other two humans gave them. They had grown up being told they were good for nothing other than collecting filth and engaging in the most noxious trades. The common Kirosha epithet for the Jersh was ‘stinkers;’ a more accurate translation of the word was ‘shit-smelling scum.’ Timothy tried to picture himself in their shoes and found it difficult. In North California, Mormons were thirty percent of the population; they weren’t outsiders, and while there were plenty of disagreements between them and their non-LDS neighbors, nobody hated each other. Well, not much, he ruefully corrected himself, remembering a number of schoolyard brawls. He’d even gotten detention a couple of times, which took a lot, since school policy was usually to let the kids work things out by themselves except in cases of extreme bullying and violence. Still, he couldn’t really understand what it meant to live in a society that utterly despised you.

They had to harbor a lot of anger, he thought, studying their expressions as they did the whole left, right, about-face routines. He’d gotten somewhat good at reading Kirosha expressions, the way their wide eyes would shift dramatically in size when surprised, shocked, or angry, and the blinking that was complex enough to serve as a coded language of its own. A half-lidded, narrow stare was a sign of rage. He didn’t see much of that there, or, surprisingly, the wide-eyed, raised-eyebrow look of fear. Their faces looked mostly resigned, which in retrospect wasn’t all that surprising. Kirosha culture encouraged fatalism. Things were what they were; it was all part of Ka’at, and you accepted them or you set yourself up for disappointment or worse.

They were also converts who had learned that there was a loving God and that they were all His children, and that good works and faith meant more than the caste system or the old ways of their ancestors. But they still expected their fate was sealed. They had been condemned by their betters, and that meant their deaths were inevitable.

And yet, they were there, learning how to fight. Timothy wasn’t sure how that combination of resolve and pessimism would affect their behavior in combat.

He wondered how he would do when lasers – well, bullets here – started filling the air. He had never experienced combat outside the admittedly-realistic simulations he’d endured during Basic. Like many of his generation, he’d lived without the fear of imminent war long enough to think maybe he would be spared. Circumstances had proven him wrong.

“Moorrah! It’s left-right! Do I have to color-code your feet?” he growled at a recruit, trying to hide his doubts in the work at hand.

* * *

“This shit ain’t fair,” Gonzaga groused while he did one more weapons check. “We already went out and kicked Ruddy ass. And now we gotta do it again?”

“Gonzo, you forgot the prize you get for kicking ass,” Russell said wearily. Gonzo was okay, but whenever his sense of right and wrong got engaged, the little guy liked to bitch up a storm.

“What prize?”

“More asses to kick, that’s what. Skipper figures we won’t fuck up too badly, so off we go.”

“Wasn’t no skipper. It was Obregon, that’s who. He figgers if we’re out there we ain’t getting in no trouble over here.”

“Not much trouble to get into, now that we’re under siege,” Russell observed as he did his own unnecessary weapons check. He was just as nervous as Gonzo, just keeping it under wraps better. The last rescue operation had been a cinch. They’d been up against a bunch of poorly armed Eets, and the round trip had been a couple miles all told. Now they were going to have to drive forty-five miles to the spaceport and the same distance back. Even if the Ruddies were asleep at the switch the first half of the trip, they sure as fuck were going to do something about them on the way back.

“It don’t matter none,” he said, as much to himself as to his partner in crime.

“At least it’s not just First Squad this time,” Nacle said. He didn’t look all that worried. It wasn’t that the kid was stupid; in some ways he had more going on upstairs than either Russell or Gonzo. Nacle knew he could get killed; he’d been in enough dances to have lost any teenager belief in his own immortality. The bastard just didn’t worry about it all that much. If he caught a bullet or got his throat slit open, he was sure his Heavenly Papa would be waiting for him on the other side, complete with a welcoming committee of all his friends and relatives and a marching band. Lucky bastard.

If there was a God, He wouldn’t be so happy to see good ole Russell; if he ended up anywhere, he figured it’d be a lot hotter and less pleasant than whatever awaited Nacle, who’d only gotten his dick wet that one time in Lahiri and then cried himself to sleep for a week afterward.

“Russet?”

Russell snapped out of his daze. “What’d I miss, Gonzo?”

“I said, what do you think about the rest of the team?”

“Oh, them.” He glanced to the other groups getting ready in the assembly area, a warehouse they’d picked up because its rolling doors and empty space were big enough to fit all the vehicles and personnel comprising Task Force Able. There were three distinct groups in the hangar. Russell nodded towards the Americans in the black outfits. “The mercs are all right. Most of them used to be in the Corps.”

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.