Decisively Engaged (Warp Marine Corps Book 1) (27 page)

Explosions going off among the houses ahead told him some of the Ruddy shells were falling short and hitting their own guys. Friendly fire wasn’t fucking friendly at all.

“Where’re the fucking mortars?” Gonzo growled. There were supposed to be six of them in play now, although four were simpler designs with much lower range, rate of fire and accuracy. The fabbers weren’t up to the task of making proper auto-loading pieces.

“Worry about your fucking job, Gonzo,” Russell said. He figured the mortars were hitting back at the enemy cannon-cockers, or working the gates to the Enclave, although that wasn’t as effective now that the Ruddies had knocked down big sections of wall to let their troops pour in.

And pouring in they were. Russell looked through his sights and spotted enemies moving between the still-standing buildings, heading towards the clear ground around Embassy Row. Mostly Ruddies on foot, spear-chuckers mixed in with regular troops. He dropped a full load of 15mm grenades on them, the overhead bursts knocking ETs down by the half dozen. The rest dived for cover.

A line of explosions hit the force field maybe a hundred feet aboveground. Ruddy tanks and self-propelled artillery firing over the infantry. A section of force field flickered, and some shells went through. Russell figured that out when the ground under him shook hard enough to stagger him. Smoke rose from somewhere to his left, and he heard screams even through the constant roar of artillery. He checked the status lights of his fire team. Everyone was green.

Gonzo called for medics. “Three civvies got pulped by that round,” he said. “Went off behind the porta-shields. Motherfuckers.”

“Keep killin’ Ruddies; only way to make ‘em quit,” Russell said.

“Roger that.”

Russell didn’t get a chance to reply. Sound and darkness washed over him like a monster wave.

He blinked and found himself staring at a smoke-filled sky. He was on the bottom of the trench and his back and neck hurt like a mother. It felt like Crow’s oversized Samoan bodyguard had slammed him against a wall.

Another shell had made it past the force fields and hit the trench line. The porta-shield had stopped most of the explosion, but enough of the blast had gotten through to knock him off his feet. His imp let him know he’d been out for fifteen seconds or so. Several volunteers were also down. No fatalities he could see, just people knocked silly by the shockwave.

Russell went back to his firing position, shrugging off his aching back and neck. Everything would hurt a lot worse if the Ruddies got into the trenches. 

And they were getting close. A few made it to the wire, but didn’t live long enough to throw grenades. More were coming, though. A tank – an ugly boxy thing on tracks with an over-and-under double cannon on a turret – poked out around the remains of a building, three hundred yards away. Russell let it have a burst of 4mm plasma rounds, nailing a line of bright spots on its front glacis. The turret started to swing in his direction but stopped before firing a shot. Smoke poured out from the tank as it ground to a halt. One of the plasma jets that punched through its armor must have found something to ignite. Nobody tried to come out; he figured the Ruddies inside had gotten broiled too quickly to escape.

Russell emptied his Iwo on a handful of grunts and grabbed a new mag, loaded with solids this time; all of the targets he could see were on two legs, and if another tank showed up, he’d send it a 20mm care package. 4mm pre-fragmented bullets didn’t tear people to pieces like plasma rounds, but they were good enough for government work.

More artillery landed right above and in front of the trench line, but nothing got through. A moment later a burst of 100mm bomblets cleared Russell’s sector. The mortars had finally switched targets. The Ruddies retreated back to the ruins. They’d be back, but not for a while. Maybe not until tomorrow or the day after.

Russell had an itch under his chin, but damned if he was going to raise his faceplate to scratch it. Artillery bursts were still going off and it would just be his luck if another leaker hit the trenches while his face was exposed.

This was beginning to feel like hard work.

Year 163 AFC, D Plus Two

The US Embassy building took a hit from a duplex round, blasting a third-floor office into a burning ruin. Luckily, all noncombatants had been evacuated to a force-field protected sub-basement. Fromm wished Heather was down there where it was safe, but she was sitting right next to him in the command bunker, helping with the comm section and wearing the uniform and tabs of a Petty Officer First Class, her old rank in the service. Which put her in his chain of command, which made what they’d been doing a possible Article 134 violation, but that wasn’t important now.

“They only seem to have a few advanced shells, thank Whoever,” Heather said.

“They aren’t supposed to have any,” Fromm replied, suppressing the urge to snarl at her. The high-tech surprises the Ruddies were dropping on them were taking their toll on everyone. “Any luck tracking the guns firing them?”

“Working on it.” Somewhat later: “There is a dedicated brigade doing time on target barrages to take advantage of the duplex rounds; they’ve fired about ten high-tech rounds so far. They are six miles away; got their coordinates.”

Only their remaining 100mm automatic mortars could range that far. “Let them have it,” he ordered Staff Sergeant Martin.

The high-tech mortars stopped hitting the infantry rushing the trenches and switched targets, leaving their previous job to the improvised replacements the fabbers had cobbled up. Those mortars had a rate of fire of sixteen rounds per minute, instead of five rounds per
second
; they were better than nothing, though.

“Took another hit on the northern sector.”

Fromm’s display showed him the damage. A duplex round had gone off right over the trench line, cracking the force field open for a couple of seconds, more than long enough for a heavy shell to get through and blow half a dozen men to kingdom come. Black River mercs; the poor bastards had been taking it in the chin ever since hostilities began. Corpsmen and Ruddy volunteers rushed forward to retrieve the wounded and the dead. The survivors picked themselves up and lashed the enemy with railgun fire. Behind them, a graviton cannon turned a Kirosha tank into a twisted mass of metal.

A squad from the Second Volunteers moved forward to relieve the mercs. They wore light armor vests and helmets, the best the one fabber they had dedicated to the job could produce and worse than what the mercs wore. If the Ruddies got close enough to use small arms, it was going to be rough on them.

“We got drone visuals on the mortar strike,” Donnelly reported a few minutes later. “Patching them through.”

Fromm saw the burning remnants of several artillery batteries. The Ruddies had dug in and done a fairly decent job of it, but that wasn’t enough to deter the mortars’ plasma charges. The destruction they’d wreaked on both guns and their trained artillerymen had been devastating.

That had to be an elite unit, to be entrusted with Starfarer shells. Hopefully their replacements won’t be anywhere near as good
.

He could feel a measure of sympathy for fellow professionals doing their jobs, but his main concern was for his people, who wouldn’t have to suffer under the hammer of those guns anymore.

The Ruddy general attack ceased; the enemy stopped feeding more brave boys into the meat grinder awaiting them. Soon, they’d be offering another armistice to bring back their dead. Although the Ruddies weren’t very religious, they had very strict funeral rituals, and would spend a great deal of effort retrieving the corpses of their fallen. That worked out just fine for the Starfarers. Any break from the fighting worked in their favor.

His own dead and wounded were a tiny fraction of the enemy’s losses, but the totals were beginning to climb up. This had become a war of attrition, and while the Ruddies did not have an inexhaustible supply of trained men and relatively modern equipment, the Americans and their allies would likely run out of both before the enemy did.

We’ve got to seize the initiative
. His training was focused on battles of maneuver. Sitting in a spot and letting the enemy dictate when and where to fight ran against every instinct in his body. He was working on a couple of plans to change the equation, but they would take time.

It all came down to time.

Year 163 AFC, D Plus Twelve

“Stand by for rotation.”

Timothy yawned and stretched his back. After a few days in the front lines, he’d discovered that war, or at least the kind of war they were fighting, was boring as heck, except for the times when it was plain disgusting and the briefer but memorable times where it became horrifying. His platoon was due to be relieved so it could get some time off to rest and refit. They’d earned it.

They’d spent five days in or near the trenches, and had fought off two attacks. Timothy’s first taste of combat had consisted mainly of shooting at tiny figures in the distance while checking on his men to make sure they didn’t run or do something stupid, like forgetting to reload. Neither attack had lasted very long; the enemy had fired a few rockets at their position, which the force fields had stopped, and retreated.

The residential buildings beyond the defensive perimeter and the fortified walls around the Enclave had been turned into rubble. Where dozens of buildings and houses once stood, only the outlines of walls and basements remained, surrounded by churned earth and dug-in fortifications. The curtain walls that had been part of the skyline around the mini-city were gone, destroyed by mortar fire or the Kirosha themselves when they discovered they were slowing down their troop movements. The enemy had turned some of the ruins into entrenched positions, allowing them to slowly move their troops forward without taking unbearable losses. The Marine mortars and the Starfarer heavy weapons still worked a fearful slaughter wherever they struck, but the Starfarers didn’t have enough firepower to constantly sweep the enemy lines.

Timothy glanced at the no man’s land and then looked back, towards the troops that would be relieving his platoon. It was the Cops and Robbers, a company made up of the uniformed constables who had kept order in the Enclave – and several dozen former residents of the Enclave jail. He didn’t know who’d had the brilliant idea of mixing policemen and convicts together, but by all accounts they were performing about as well as all the other improvised units in the Enclave. Most of the prisoners hadn’t been hardened felons anyway, but rather miners and machinery operators guilty of being a bit too rowdy while out on the town. They now had the chance to be as belligerent as they wanted.

“Pack it up, guys, we’re going home,” Timothy told his men before greeting Precinct Captain Patel. The officer was wearing riot gear in lieu of battle armor; he lifted his helmet’s transparent visor and smiled.

“It’s another lovely day, isn’t it?” Captain Patel said. “Anything I should know?”

“The Kirosha haven’t done much. They tried to move a few light artillery pieces closer, but the Marine mortars took them out. Other than that, it’s the usual.”

‘The usual’ consisted of sporadic artillery barrages and rocket volleys. Sometimes the artillery would include a shield-piercer, and if you were unlucky, your section of the trench would be in its path. Those special munitions had cost the defenders about a dozen people over the last ten days; ordinary artillery, which sometimes managed to blast through the shields on their own, had wounded or killed about twice as many.

Patel nodded. “Nothing we can’t handle, then.”

“Best of luck.”

Timothy led his platoon out of the trench and they marched to the armory to turn over their guns, and then to the mission, where they stood at attention while he addressed them.

“You’ve done well. You have two days of liberty. When it is over, I expect you to be here at six in the morning. You are dismissed.”

The Kirosha cheered like children at recess and then broke apart, becoming individuals or groups of friends once again. They would be back, two days from now, Timothy knew. They wouldn’t dream of deserting their posts, not when they were standing between their families and certain death. Not to mention everyone knew everyone, and a coward would get no sympathy from his friends and neighbors. Timothy wondered how many of his men were more afraid of shaming themselves in front of their fellows than of the enemy.

He searched for Jonah; his portable device informed him that his companion was on duty on the northern side of the perimeter. Timothy sighed. President Jensen had exempted them from their missionary duties for the duration of the emergency, but it still felt strange, being apart from his companion after a year and a half of hardly ever being out of sight from one another.

Several artillery shells burst overhead. He ignored them as he walked to his room.

Year 163 AFC, D Plus Twenty

“They’ve got a fabber,” Heather McClintock said. “A salvaged one from the spaceport is my guess.”

Peter – even after weeks spending their nights together, she found it hard not to think of him as just Fromm – sat up in the bed.

“You probably should have brought that up during the intelligence briefing this morning.”

He had one arm around her, something Heather usually didn’t care for, but which in this case she found rather comforting. She leaned against him, her fingers idly tracing one of the many scars on his chest. Nano-meds did wonders, but hastily-repaired tissue always left marks behind.

“It just came to me. About two minutes after I came, as a matter of fact,” she added with a mischievous grin.

Peter smiled back at her. “So you were working while we were, um, in
flagrante delicto
? That kind of devotion to duty deserves a commendation. And probably a spanking.”

“Promises, promises. It was mostly my imp doing the work. I had it running figures and collating data. Lots of data. Like using sound recordings from all the Kirosha artillery barrages to determine just how many duplex rounds they’ve used so far.”

As she spoke, a sudden spate of Kirosha-made thunder broke out somewhere in the night. The enemy was keeping up a steady stream of harassing fire, twenty-four seven. You got used to it after a while. At least, Heather had. A few embassy staffers had to sedate themselves into unconsciousness to get any sleep. Word was that ex-ambassador Llewellyn was relying on massive quantities of alcohol to achieve the same effect. He was not the only one.

Peter looked up for a second at the sound of the explosions, probably gauging how close they’d been, before leaning forward and kissing the top of her head. When it was just the two of them, he could be tender, gentle. A completely different man than the cold, detached leader who had overseen the deaths of tens of thousands already, and would likely help kill many more. They set business aside for a while more.

Only for a while, though.

“So how does the data support your fabber theory?” he asked her as they cuddled together and got ready to sleep. For some reason, talking shop just after making love made her feel at home.

“They’ve been using a standard anti-shield warhead. Nothing fancy, a plasma sub-munition designed to fit any number of artillery shells in the 80-150mm range. The standard explosive detonates and triggers a breaching graviton charge, weakening or piercing the force field, and then the secondary charge unleashes a plasma jet. The second discharge is about sixty millimeters wide and five hundred meters long.”

“Nasty stuff. If they’d used them at the ambush, they would have wiped out Task Force Able, instead of just killing half of it.”

“The thing is, they
did
use them at the ambush. I reviewed those records as well. About fifty shells. Most of them missed. Several of the rest malfunctioned; about half of the ones that scored a hit.”

“That’s a damn high failure rate.”

“My guess is, the components were put together by hand. Even with modular designs, the locals didn’t have the tools to ensure the proper tolerances. The saboteur in charge couldn’t exactly run detailed quality control checks, either.”

“So the only reason we didn’t lose everybody at the spaceport was lousy quality control?”

“Call it luck. No matter how good you are, if it turns bad you’re screwed.”

He nodded. “I know. It’s fucking frustrating.”

“You telling me? I’m a control freak. The very idea makes me break out in hives.”

“Let me check. I don’t feel any hives here. What about under here?” His hands roamed beneath the covers.

She laughed. “No groping during intelligence briefings, please.”

“Sorry. Continue.”

“Their quality control remained lousy for their heavy artillery. Data crunching indicates they’ve fired about three hundred augmented shells at us; a fragment of a percent of the total, which is a whopping twenty
thousand
shells a day, give or take.”

“Jesus. I hadn’t bothered to check the totals.”

“Could be worse. A truly sustained rate of fire would be more like a hundred thousand shells a day.”

“I knew they’ve been stockpiling ordnance for a while, but they can’t keep that up. Can they?”

“They have several munition factories working nonstop, plus they’re buying more stuff from other countries, trading some of the electronics they’ve been getting from us. We’re not quite dealing with the entire industrialized might of the planet, but certainly a goodly percentage of it. It’s going to bankrupt Kirosha – probably already has – but I guess they’re hoping their Lhan Arkh allies will bail them out.”