Decisively Engaged (Warp Marine Corps Book 1) (25 page)

Her estimated time of arrival had been dead wrong. Night had fallen while she was still three klicks away. Nightfall had been a boon; the locals were effectively blind and were mostly congregating around campfires, which further ruined their night vision. She covered the last leg of her journey much faster than she had before.

Which meant she was just outside the spaceport when the shit hit the fan.

After following a game trail for a good hundred yards, she emerged from the woods onto the cleared ground surrounding the fenced perimeter. Finally! Now all she had to do was let people know she was there.

A screeching chorus of alien voices to her left froze her before she could call the spaceport. She hid behind a tree as a horde of armed Eets rushed toward the fences, waving swords and screaming in high-pitched voices that would have sounded funny under any other circumstances. They were struck by a storm of fire from the spaceport’s landing platform. A storm of fire that was too close to Lisbeth’s position. Shit on a shingle.

She ran back the way she came as not-too-distant impacts tore through trees and brushes.
Screw this ground-pounder shit!
She had to put some decent terrain features between her and that firefight, or her unshielded hide would end up eating a plasma blast or a bullet. There were some hills a quarter of a klick back; she’d hole up behind them and try to catch the relief column on their way back.

As soon as she reached a ridge, she discovered there was no safety there, as several gun positions came to life before their eyes. Camo sheets were flung aside: sophisticated, IR-signature-obfuscating camo sheets, better than what the Marines used. The large artillery pieces and crews the sheets had been hiding scrambled into action and began engaging somebody down range, using flares and spotlights to turn night into day. Their target wasn’t the spaceport, which was protected by heavy force fields. They were attacking the relief force down the road.

Lisbeth cursed herself. The vehicles she’d heard earlier that day must have been part of this. She could have warned the rescue force if she hadn’t been too chickenshit to take a gander.

Nothing she could do about that, but there might be something she could do about the current situation. She placed her imp feed on a priority channel so the relief force could see the gun emplacements she’d spotted. That might help, but not enough. If the locals took out the flying column, everybody in the spaceport was doomed. She had to do something.

Surviving the destruction of her ship made the last twenty-four hours nothing more than borrowed time. If she had to follow her dead crew, she might as well do something useful beforehand. Lisbeth crept toward the gun positions. The depressed barrels indicated they were direct-fire weapons; from the frantic calls she was hearing from the humans on the other end, they were effective enough.

She dialed her beamer’s power to its maximum level, which would deplete its battery after five shots. Better make them count. There were ammo limbers behind each truck, designed to be towed by a vehicle, each containing a couple dozen rounds. She found a firing position two hundred yards away, used her imp to find a proper aiming point, and took a shot.

A glowing red circle marked the spot where the metal surface of the artillery ammo container had sublimated away. Nothing else happened. Maybe she’d missed the explosive propellant in the cannon rounds. Maybe…

Light overwhelmed her sensors before something hot and huge slapped her even from across two football fields. Lisbeth ducked behind cover as debris rained all around her.

Scratch one artillery piece. Time to find another.

They weren’t too far apart, and not exactly inconspicuous, not now that their camo nets weren’t hiding them. This time she knew better than to hang around and watch the results of her shots. She was on the move before another explosion consumed the firing position. Two down; how many more to go?

As many as she could hit before they ran her down. She hoped she was making a difference.

She hoped it would be enough.

* * *

The first sign Obregon had that things had turned to shit was a flare going off in the sky, followed by a HEAT round missing his command car by a couple of feet and going off on the other side of the road. Spotlights stabbed down towards the task force and more explosions went off between the moving vehicles.

“Motherfuckers!” Hendrickson roared as he spun the vehicle towards the source of the threat. The closest gun emplacement was on a hill, a thousand meters out. The artillery crew snap-shot a second time four seconds after the initial volley, and the grav car shuddered under a direct hit. The shields held, though, and then it was the Marines’ turn.

Da Costa was the designated gunner; she sent a long double burst of graviton beams uphill, walking the shots towards the source of the attack. The pulses of twisted space-time chewed through dirt and rocks until they hit something that went boom. The hill vanished in an expanding cloud of fire and smoke. 

Obregon barely noticed the destruction of the gun; he was too busy trying to figure out what the fuck was going on. Chief Donnelly sent him a brief sit-rep which he downloaded straight into his memory. The drones had been swatted just after the ambush was sprung, and they hadn’t detected anything beforehand. The Navy puke who’d crash-landed out in the wild had spotted several artillery emplacements, and the observation post in the spaceport identified several more. Over twenty guns, a fucking anti-tank
regiment
was all around them, and those 93mm fuckers packed enough punch to flip a truck over even if they didn’t get through its shields.

“All elements, engage enemy artillery! Take them out!”

The order was unnecessary, of course; everyone was doing just that, except for a mercenary crew who tried to rabbit and took a no-deflection shot up the ass for its troubles. The HEAT round went right through the rear force field of the combat car and turned it into a flying fireball. Another car had been overturned by a hit; a follow-up shot finished it off. Fuck.

The two Oval hovercraft maneuvered wildly, evading several shots, and brought their lasers to bear; they took two guns under fire and exploded them in a couple of seconds; after that, they dashed towards the hills, pumping coherent light into anything that moved. Da Costa dropped mortar bombs on two more; they were anti-pers but the frag charges shredded the gunners and silenced the guns. Somewhere behind Obregon’s car, a long ALS-43 burst from Rover Three scored another kill. The Navy chick took out three guns with nothing more than a hand beamer and sheer guts.

That left a good dozen guns still around, still belching fire every five or six seconds. Most of them missed, although a glancing shot sent his grav car veering off course. There were some direct hits; a merc combat car’s frontal shield failed in a shower of sparks as an armor-piercer bounced off it; the vehicle was fine but its force field was off-line. On the other side of the road, a lucky or very skilled team lined their gun perfectly and sent a long-rod penetrator into the unshielded underside of an Oval hovercraft just as it crested a hill. The metal dart punched through the car, destroying one of its fans, and turned one of its crew into a splash of liquefied flesh and bone as it flew out the other side; the vehicle crashed a moment later. The driver and a gunner survived the shot and the crash, but they were both badly hurt. Icons on Obregon’s display flashed yellow or went purple and black as they became casualties or fatalities. Ruddy infantry leaped from their own concealed positions and opened up with small arms and rockets.

How the
fuck
they had managed to sneak a force this size into place, Obregon couldn’t begin to guess. The Navy officer had mentioned camo nets; that still didn’t answer how they’d moved this many troops without anybody twigging to it. Of course, none of that mattered. All that mattered now was wiping out the ETs as soon as possible. The battle turned into a mad scrimmage as the remaining vehicles of Task Force Able fought back. Merc railguns dropped infantrymen back into their ditches and smashed spotlights. The Marines raked hilltops with their ALS-43, silencing a few more guns. It wasn’t going to be enough.

“Take us up,” he told Hendrickson.

“You sure?”

“Take us the fuck up.”

Only way. His was the only vehicle with all-around shield coverage and enough energy output to take multiple shots and survive. The car rose up, spewing mortar bombs and death rays all around as it engaged multiple targets at once. He left Da Costa in charge of the mortar and took over the grav cannon, noting the Navy chick on the ground had taken out a fourth gun; she ought to transfer to the Corps.

He and Da Costa rained death on the Ruddies while Hendricks ducked and weaved, moving too fast to be hit by anything firing over metal sights except by blind luck. A lucky point-blank shot did just that, but the sabot-discarding armor-piercer bounced off the limo’s heavy shields. The Ruddies’ technology just wasn’t up to the job.

Unfortunately, the Kirosha’s benefactor had provided them with ten state of the art Flying Fang surface-to-air missiles. Four had been deployed alongside the ambush force. Three had been destroyed before they could be used, struck by mortar bombs or bursts of autofire. The last missile team targeted the grav car and opened fire. A moment later, a 15mm grenade incinerated the weapon and its gunners, but the damage was already done.

The self-guided duplex warhead went off near the driver’s side. A graviton charge blasted a hole in the force field; the secondary shaped charge sent a jet of plasma into the car. Superheated gas tore Hendricks apart, knocked Da Costa unconscious and burned through both of Obregon’s legs at the calf. It also cracked the containment field of the luxury vehicle’s gluon power plant.

Obregon blinked back into consciousness; he’d been out only for a second before his nano-meds killed the pain and sent a rush of stimulants into his bloodstream. His imp took over the car’s controls just before it crashed into a hillside. A quick glance at the status display showed him he was a dead man walking; the car was going to blow up. Only thing left to decide was how he checked out.

Two anti-tank guns were still firing. He had just enough time to steer the dying vehicle towards a point between them.

Mama said there’d be days like this
, he thought just before the power plant’s containment field broke.

* * *

Gluon plants aren’t designed to explode, unlike the similar gluon-quark mixtures found in naval missile ordnance. When the subatomic force particles are let out into the wild, however, they react rather energetically with normal matter. The ensuing release was powerful enough to erase the last two anti-tank cannon from existence, turn the nearest hill into a shallow bowl, and consume the wounded Vehelians and their crashed hovercraft, all while producing a most impressive light show. Russell wished he was in a better position to appreciate the sight. On another planet, watching it on a vid screen while sipping whisky, maybe.

“Gunny’s bought it,” Gonzo said.

“I know.” That was tough. Obregon had been a hardass, but also a good guy. Losing him was a stone cold bitch.

“Who the fuck’s in charge now?” Gonzo said on the command channel.

“I am,” a female voice responded.

“The fuck?”

“I’m Lieutenant Commander Lisbeth Zhang, that’s who the fuck this is. I’m assuming command of this Charlie-Foxtrot under direct orders from Captain Fromm. All operational squadrons, beg pardon, Task Force elements, converge on my position and carry on. The ambush force has been destroyed, but we’ve still got a thousand Ruddies to clean up and more hostile forces likely to be on their way. Move it, people!”

“Fuck me,” Gonzo said after making sure he was only talking to his buddies in the fire team.

Nacle didn’t say anything as he carefully backed the truck out of the ditch he’d driven into during the brutal firefight. There were still Ruddies milling about and taking potshots at them, but railgun fire from the mercs’ surviving combat cars were keeping their heads down for the most part. Gonzo turned a dozen ETs into charred hamburger with his ALS-43. Russell dropped a string of grenades into a nearby foxhole. After that, enemy fire became fairly sporadic.

“Guess we’re in the Navy now,” Gonzo said.

“Check the imp feeds, dabrah. She took out four of them guns by herself. She’s got
guevos
enough to be a Devil Dog.”

“Hope she’s got brains as well as balls, or we’ll be seeing Gunny in Hell soon enough.”

Year 163 AFC, D Minus One

Colonel Neen watched unbelievingly as the survivors of the ambush moved on. The speed with which the Star Devils had reacted had been dizzying, sickening. Their weapons and training were superb; they had broken the teeth of his carefully-coordinated ambush, and while their losses had been terrible – half of their vehicles were down – enough of them had survived to carry on their mission, which was more than could be said for Neen’s force. All his tubes had been destroyed; he doubted one in five of his regiment still lived. The worst part was, he’d lost his regiment without accomplishing his objective.

“Sir?” Captain Jeenu said. “What are your orders?”

The regiment commander shuddered and forced himself back into a semblance of self-control. He still had his duty.

“Have the men rally here. Use lamp signals to reach any surviving warrior militias you can find. We will attempt to stop them on their way back. Gather as many rocket-propelled grenades as you can; they’re the only hand weapon with a chance to get through their energy shields. There are a few mines somewhere. Find them and plant them on the road; the enemy can detect them from too far away to be effective, but they’ll have to slow down to clear them, and that’s when we’ll attack. Maybe we’ll slow them down enough for a real blocking force to move into position.”

“Yes, sir.”

Gone were his certainty and enthusiasm. All Colonel Neen expected was to die heroically, hopefully after inflicting some small harm on the Star Devils.

“Grand Marshall Seeu, give me back my regiment,” he whispered into the night.

* * *

“I hate ground-pounder crap,” Lisbeth muttered under her breath as she clambered aboard a six-wheeled vehicle with clearly improvised force field attachments and a gun mount somebody had slapped onto its hull with space tape and baling wire. The personnel inside weren’t even Marines, except for the ALS-43 gunner. All the others were mercenaries. It just kept getting better and better.

“Let’s roll,” she said, checking the status of the force she’d taken over. The jarhead captain hadn’t sounded happy about her strongly-worded suggestion she assume command of the operation, but his only option would have been to appoint a corporal for the job, and there was a good chance the mercs or the Ovals would balk at following his orders.

Task Force Able was down to five vehicles out of an original nine. Sixteen dead out of thirty personnel. The losses in firepower were even worse, proportionally: seventy, eighty percent at least. It was like assuming command of the
Titanic
just after it hit that big chunk of ice. Her next assignment would probably be the control room of a gluon reactor a second before it went critical. The temptation to curl up somewhere and sob uncontrollably was rather strong, but you couldn’t do that after they put gold oak leaves on your collar. There was no crying in the Navy.

Her imp fed her the things she needed to know: vehicle speeds and survivability ratings, weapon specs, the last known enemy dispositions. There were over a thousand aliens still storming the spaceport, with as many as twenty rocket launchers among them. Best way to proceed was to mow down all the sierras – no, tangos – in sight.

“Task Force Able; fire at will.”

They drove past the destroyed fences and up the winding road, shooting at everything that moved. She took control over a hood-mounted railgun and sent short bursts of supersonic metal disks into running forms, watched men fall or have limbs torn off. A rocket-propelled grenade sailed over her vehicle. A moment later a laser washed over the missile team and detonated their extra ordnance: the explosion rocked her vehicle and flattened another dozen warriors. The six-wheeler bounced up and down as it ran over bodies, dead or still twitching.

Ground-pounder crap. In her world, war meant blips vanishing from the tactical holotank display, or watching your friends and colleagues consumed by fire for a few seconds before either order was restored or swift oblivion ended everyone’s suffering. Here, the slaughter just went on and on.

They reached the summit of the spaceport, where a rough barricade of cargo containers barred the way and a scattering of corpses showed the high-water mark of the attack. A magnetic crane moved forward and made an opening for the task force.

“Are you ready to get the hell out of here?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Chief Warrant Corrigan said. “Only thing, about the demo charges…”

“What about them?”

“We were hoping some of your Marines could make sure they were properly emplaced.”

Lisbeth checked on her remaining Marines. There’d been twelve of them, three in the command car, six spread out among the merc vehicles, and three on a truck. Six were gone and none of the survivors were trained in demolitions. Nobody else knew any more about setting up explosives than the spacers who’d gotten stuck with the job. Demo charges were fairly idiot proof, though.

“Got nobody demo-qualified, Mister Corrigan. Just pile some more explosive ordnance around the targets and hope for the best.”

“Aye, aye, ma’am.”

“We roll out in ten minutes.”

It took more like fifteen minutes. She used the sensors mounted on the spaceport’s air traffic control center to watch their surroundings while the evacuation got under way. The Jasperians weren’t using radios to communicate; instead, they were flashing lights at each other, their patterns reminding her of the Morse Code she’d read about in history class. It looked like the locals were trying to set up a blocking force. It was going to be a race between two one-legged runners; nobody was at their best, but, as an old jarhead boyfriend had once quoted to her, winning meant ‘getting there firstest with the mostest.’ Only one way to find out got to be firstest.

The evacuation column finally got moving. Six cargo trucks and four buses were added to the convoy, along with three personal cars. The buses and one of the trucks had been fitted with makeshift force fields, but all the other vehicles were unprotected. If they ran into any determined opposition, they were going to take losses.

No choice. Anybody left behind would end up tortured to death. They’d have to take their chances.

“Time to go.”

* * *

“Another bunch of dumbasses,” Gonzaga said; he fired a burst towards a group of hostiles who’d made the mistake of thinking darkness and a copse of trees would conceal them. The plasma charges turned both trees and men into burning chunks of organic matter.

“Not many of ‘em left,” Russell replied. Most Ruddies had been caught between the spaceport and Task Force Able and gotten chewed up. Some ETs were scattered among the surrounding woods, but only a few seemed to have any fight left in them. Russell spotted half a dozen aliens trying to run away; he fired a single 15mm grenade at them just to keep them running. Two Ruddies went down; the rest picked up the pace. “That’s right, bitches! Keep going!” he called after them.

“You’d think the Ruddies would get tired of getting killed,” Nacle said from the driver’s seat.

“Just ‘cause they look a bit like us don’t mean they think like us.” That went for humans too, or even fellow Americans, Russell knew. He kept that bit to himself, though; no need to confuse Nacle.

The drive back to the big city was going to suck. Russell was sure of it.

“We’ve got mines up ahead,” the Navy LC in charge said a minute later. “Vehelian-One, clear them. Stay sharp, people!”

The Oval hovercraft darted ahead, using lasers to blow up the explosives. They were working fast, but the convoy had to slow down, just like the Ruddies had intended.

Dozens of hostiles appeared as f by magic and volley-fired rocket launchers from both sides of the road. The bastards were using camo netting, same as in the previous ambush. Russell’s truck staggered under a hit but kept on rolling, same as all the vehicles with force fields. That left four trucks and two cars protected by nothing more than luck.

Two of them took multiple hits in their cargo trailers; the RPGs made holes in them and likely fucked up anything fragile inside but otherwise had no effect. One truck was blasted right in the nose, destroying its hydrogen cell engine and sending it jackknifing off the road. The last one was struck in the driver’s compartment, killing everyone inside; the out-of-control truck sideswiped a combat car, moving too slowly to be stopped by its force field. Truck and car were smashed together and turned into an immobile mass of twisted metal that blocked half of the road.

The Ruddies’ success didn’t save them. They’d unmasked their positions, all within a hundred yards of Task Force Able, and they were mowed down in short order; their camo nets burned along with their corpses. The damage was already done, thought.

“Rover Three!” the Navy chick called out. “Pick up survivors from Truck Three and Car Six and burn the wreckage! Car Four, look for survivors on Truck Four. Cars Two and Three, cover the perimeter. Vehelian-One, scout ahead. We’re moving in five!”

Five minutes was probably four minutes too long, but leaving people behind wasn’t the American way. Russell and Gonzo unassed and rushed to the crashed vehicles. The cargo truck driver and the three people who’d been sharing the cab with him were all goners, and one of the mercs in Car Six had broken his neck. The two survivors helped them drag the bodies out, load them up on Rover Three, and drop some thermal grenades on the wreck to make sure the Ruddies didn’t get anything out of the ambush but a long KIA list. They could hear the stutter of railguns and the screech of lasers not too far away; the ETs were still around, even after the massive losses they’d suffered. Humans, and just about every other Eet they’d encountered would have packed up and gone home by now. The Corps ought to set up a recruiting station in this planet.

Squeezing the two live mercs and the dead bodies into the back of the already-crowded truck took some doing, but they were done and ready before the five minutes were up. The diminished convoy got moving, leaving three more of their number behind.

It was turning into a hell of a long night.

* * *

Colonel Neen watched the enemy drive on and wondered about the futility of it all.

Considering the numbers and firepower involved, his second ambush had been even more successful than the last. Armed only with hand weapons, his men had destroyed three enemy vehicles and damaged at least two more. The camouflage blankets had once again proved their worth, but they had all been destroyed alongside the last remnants of his regiment. Years of training and careful nurturing had vanished in the space of a few minutes. He could not even contemplate starting over; it would feel like raising a child to replace the one you lost, all the while knowing he was doomed to die as well.

Other elements from First Army were assembling further down the road, but they didn’t have any means to hide from the enemy’s sensors, and in Neen’s opinion would lack the necessary strength to achieve much. They might destroy one or two more unprotected cargo vehicles, and maybe damage the rest, but would take gruesome losses in return. If Neen were in command, he would order them back, to conserve their strength for another time.

He wasn’t in a position to issue any orders, of course. He was an officer without a unit, and he expected to be arrested as soon as he reported back to headquarters. Failure of this magnitude was a capital offence.

There was another option. His headquarters company was personally loyal to him; he’d carefully weeded out any informants or doubters among them. He could probably glean another fifty or a hundred men from among the survivors of his regiment, and they could take their motor transport, which had largely survived unscathed, and flee. The southwest still seethed with rebellion; its population refused to accept the descendants of Northern barbarians as the true rulers of the land. He could join their forces and spend his remaining days as a skulking bandit in the hills.

Neen dipped his head in negation. He had sworn an oath to the Crown. Even if his superiors had failed him and his regiment, he would not betray that oath. He would assemble his surviving men and march back to the capital to accept whatever punishment he deserved.

* * *

Fromm watched the scene unfold from multiple points of view.

A third truck broke down and had to be destroyed and abandoned. Fromm listened in as his Marines cursed at the truck driver for fucking things up.

“That’s the last of the fucking fabber powder,” one of them said as he turned the irreplaceable cargo into useless slag with a brace plasma grenade. They were only able to move a handful of the fifty-kilo blocks into their already-overloaded vehicles before destroying the rest.

The KIA list was raised by one: an injured mercenary died of his wounds as the convoy moved on. Six black icons flashed on the roster list on the bottom left quadrant of his field of vision.  Obregon, Da Costa, Hendrickson, Bauer, Martinez, Findley. His people. Another dozen dead from the rest of the force he’d sent out into the night. He set all that aside and concentrated on the job at hand, jumping back and forth between personal sensor feeds, the view from the Wyrm observation post, and the short-lived drone videos.