Decisively Engaged (Warp Marine Corps Book 1) (5 page)

“It looks peaceful enough around here,” Fromm said.

“It normally is. But there’s signs of trouble even in the country. Coming up in a couple minutes, as a matter of fact. The village to the left of the road.”

A makeshift camp had been erected near the village, haphazardly arranged canvas tents contrasting with the neat rows of wooden houses that served as the peasants’ permanent dwellings. A group of about twenty Kirosha, mostly males, were gathered on a fallow field nearby, practicing with spears, swords, throwing axes and weaponized farm implements. They all wore black tunics emblazoned with a distinctive sigil: a hand clenching a set of spiked brass-knuckles.

“Meet the Final Blow Society. Or the Order of the Coup-de-Grace, if you will,” Heather said as they drove by. A few of the black-clad warriors stopped their drill to look at the passing vehicles. Her hand instinctively reached for the shoulder holster under her jacket before she stopped herself. They hadn’t attacked her car on its way to the spaceport, and they probably wouldn’t attack them now, either. The armed peasants’ glares were definitely unfriendly, though.

“One of the rebel groups?”

“The largest one. They’ve been flocking to the capital over the last few days, allegedly to present their grievances to the Crown. They are suspected in participating in the arsons plaguing the shantytowns around the capital, but either their sponsors are protecting them or the authorities are choosing not to suppress them.”

“And all they’ve got is spears and swords?”

“Yes, for the most part. There’s been a few snipers at work in the slums, shooting at firemen, that sort of thing. The Crown has very strict laws on firearm ownership, so those weapons must have been stolen from the police or military.”

“When I see a bunch of people wearing the same colors, it says ‘military’ to me.”

“The Kingdom is willing to look the other way as long as they pretend to be a martial arts club.”

“Who’s paying for all of this?” Fromm asked. “The uniforms, the weapons, the food they eat? Can’t be cheap, having a bunch of peons running around playing with sticks instead of raising crops or digging ditches.”

“The food’s easy: they ask for ‘voluntary’ contributions from nearby villages, which come out of whatever is left after the royal tax men get their cut. The rest comes from whoever is sponsoring them. The Preserver faction is the likely culprit. It is composed mainly of high-ranking bureaucrats, the Magistrate class, along with a smattering of aristocrats.”

“Rats will be rats,” Fromm said.

The motorcade left the village and the gang of martial artists behind. The smoke pillars up ahead grew larger. Heather saw Fromm was leaning forward, his eyes narrowing.

“The fires are nowhere near our designate route,” she said.

The slums and the fires beneath the rising smoke were hidden from sight by a series of hills, each topped by a small fort and a watchtower. Fromm switched his attention to the fortifications as they drove past them. The ones nearest the road were relatively modern, their squatting, sloped walls designed to deflect cannonballs. Soldiers in colorful blue and pink uniforms and peaked caps milled atop the forts’ battlements; their gates were closed, and cannon and machinegun barrels poked behind the crenellations above, further protected by metal gun shields.

“Sixty-millimeter rifled artillery,” Fromm said, mouthing the specs his imp gave him. “Antiquated even by local standards, but almost as good as French seventy-fives from the second century BFC. And eleven millimeter heavy machineguns. Enough to penetrate standard infantry force fields after ten, fifteen direct hits. The locals really got far on their own, technologically speaking.”

“Good thing you won’t have to fight them, then,” she said.

“My job is to assess capabilities. Intent I leave to the politicians.”

“Fair enough. And although we aren’t formally allied with the Kingdom, we do have a trade agreement and full diplomatic ties.”

“You know who had all kinds of trade agreements and full diplomatic ties? France and Germany, just before they went to war with each other.”

“Sure, but neither France nor Germany could blast every enemy city to cinders.”

“Neither can we, not right this second. That would take at least a corvette in orbit,” Fromm said as the car passed the line of fortifications and drove past the suburbs, white-washed houses with green triangular roofs and black-and-red trimming, surrounded by similarly-decorated walls. Road traffic was strangely sparse for this time of day, Heather noticed. “We have no Fleet assets in-system, last I checked.”

“There is the squadron at Lahiri. That’s eight hours’ warp-transit away. None of the nations on Jasper-Five have any space assets beyond the weather and communication satellites we sold Kirosha, none of which are armed. The local tech is below even what Earth had during First Contact. They are completely helpless against us.”

“How about the other Starfarers in the area? Our good friends, the Wyrms and the Ovals?”

“The Wyrashat and the Vehelians have trade concessions and an embassy and a consulate, respectively,” she said, pointedly using the two species’ proper names rather than the borderline-insulting slang terms. “They have no military vessels anywhere near us.”

“They’ve got about five hundred people apiece in the Enclave, though,” Fromm said after checking with his imp. “And a short company’s worth of soldiers each.”

“A Velehian security detachment, and a Wyrashat Honor Guard. Hardly a threat. Hold on,” she said as her imp chimed in with a call from the Ambassador. She answered it.

Javier Llewellyn’s disembodied head appeared in front of her, the image inputted directly into her visual cortex by her imp.

“I just received a request from Envoy Lisst,” the Ambassador said, not bothering with any pleasantries before getting to the point, as was his wont when dealing with underlings and other inconsequential people. “He’s returning from the Royal Palace following a meeting with Her Supreme Majesty and would like to join your convoy on the way back to the Enclave. Security concerns.”

“We can rendezvous with him in a few minutes, as long as the roads are clear,” Heather said.

“Do so. Convey my regards to the Envoy.”

Llewellyn’s projection disappeared.

Heather turned to Fromm. “Speaking of the Vehelians, their Envoy wants to join our little parade.”

“Guess he’s worried,” Fromm said.

“With good reason. Something is wrong.”

Heather contacted all the vehicles in the convoy; the contractors in the escort cars weren’t happy about the detour, but a call to the Caterpillar top exec took care of their complaints.

The street they were on was wide and straight, but the rest of the city was a maze of narrow, twisting little paths weaving between wood and brick buildings, mostly three and four-story structures with peaked roofs that were clearly attempts to ape the more prosperous houses in the suburbs. Things didn’t look normal, though.

When she’d left for the spaceport, the city of Kirosha had been teeming with people, mostly on foot or on bicycles and tricycles, along with a few internal combustion cars reserved for the well-to-do. The streets were curiously empty now; the few Kirosha she could see – men in their traditional wide trousers, flowerpot or pointy hats and colorful tunics, women similarly clad except for shawls covering their heads and shoulders instead of hats – were clearly in a hurry to be somewhere else. A few of them were even running, something the dignity-conscious Kirosha only did when in fear of their lives.

“Are we going too far out of our way to pick up the ETs?” Fromm asked.

“A few minutes. At least traffic won’t be an issue.”

The street they were on – Triumphal Thoroughfare One – led straight to the Palace Complex, series of buildings and monuments that had started out as a fortress on top of a hill and had grown in leaps and bounds as successive rulers put their own stamp on it. Its principal building was the Royal Ziggurat, a flat-topped four-hundred-foot tall pyramid off to the side of the original hill, painted a bright canary yellow the Kirosha considered beautiful and Heather found painful to look at. The complex was surrounded by its own fortifications, an old-fashioned curtain wall with towers placed every hundred feet and watchful Royal Guardsmen standing on its battlements. Far more guardsmen than normal, Heather noticed.

The main gates to the palace were still open, however, and two black-painted cars emerged from them, each vehicle flying a little banner festooned with the colorful dark-blue and gold sigils of the O-Vehel Commonwealth. Heather’s imp chimed again.

“Greetings and good health, Ms. McClintock,” Envoy Lisst’s projection said in perfect English, or rather, his implant did. Vehelian imps were more sophisticated than anything humans could manufacture themselves: their implanted nano-chips could access the Envoy’s thoughts and translate them into any of the seventeen Prime Languages of the known galaxy. Just as well; to human ears, Vehelian speech sounded like an unintelligible collection of growls and hisses.

Vehelian heads looked like large eggs, their noses and mouths so flat they appeared to be drawn on their surface; their only other facial features were rows of little bumps that the human eye could barely discern but which were the primary way for the species to recognize each other and to express emotions. Heather was a trained exo-diplomat; she could read the slight discoloration in the upper row of bumps over the Envoy’s eyes as clear signs of worry.

“And good health to you,” she said. “We welcome the chance to render assistance. Please follow my car, and we will hopefully reach the Enclave without incident.”

“May hope become fact, and bless you for your kindness.”

“You honor me,” Heather said. Most VIPs wouldn’t have personally addressed a mid-level flunky like herself, but the Vehelians were rather informal in such matters, which made them a rarity in Starfarer society.

Her imp talked to their imps, and the two limos put themselves in the center of the formation, between Heather’s car and the bus, driving single file as they turned from Triumphant Thoroughfare One to the Road of Good Fortune, which would lead them straight to the Enclave. Problem was, there were a few questionable neighborhoods along the way.

As the motorcade left the palace grounds, it travelled through more built-up areas, residential buildings with shops on their lower levels, tightly packed except for the occasional park or plaza opening little clearings in the warren-like mass. One such plaza was empty; gone were the usual bunch of peddlers, laborers and beggars. Drums and gongs started playing as they drove by, however, and she spotted men in black tunics and brass-knuckle symbols coming out of nearby buildings. Coming out at a run.

“Trouble,” she said, moments before a rocket-propelled grenade struck the lead car.

Year 163 AFC, D Minus Ten

The new skipper showed up just in time to ruin Lance Corporal Russell ‘Russet’ Edison’s card game. The death and mayhem that followed were just par for the course.

In Russell’s experience, all officers had lousy timing. The former CO of Third Platoon had been an okay guy for a First Lieutenant, but he’d managed to walk right in front of a speeding Ruddy motorcar. Sad way to buy the farm, run down like a dog on the street, but those were the breaks.

“Shuffle up and deal already,” Russell told fellow Lance Corporal Conroy, who was wrinkling his nose and casting glances out the window of the break room. Russell understood Conroy’s worries. He could smell the not-so-distant fires, too. The Ruddies were aliens, but their atmo and chemistry were Class Two, just like humans, even though they looked more like animated red-skinned dolls than people. Their food was even edible, not that was an issue for Marines. The fires that were burning outside the big city smelled just like they would in a human world.

And just like in a human world, the smell of arson was the smell of war. Things were getting hairy on Jasper-Five.

Until recently, their current deployment hadn’t been too bad. Russell didn’t like having his platoon out by itself, but life away from a regular base had its benefits if you weren’t married or otherwise encumbered. The food was damn better, for one; the Marines didn’t have a mess hall, so they ate at the Embassy’s cafeteria, where the chow was miles better than any tray-rats he’d ever had on base. And there were no MPs to worry about, just a bunch of ‘constables’ who treated the Marines with kid gloves. The platoon sergeant ran a tight ship, granted, but he couldn’t be everywhere at once, and that meant the more creative grunts like Russell and his gang had plenty of opportunities for extracurricular activities.

Conroy shook his head and finished shuffling the cards. Russell had checked the deck himself, making sure there were no marks on them. Using your imps to cheat was a tradition as old as the Warp Marine Corps itself. The same micro-implants that let the soldiers do all kind of nifty things to the enemy also made them hell to supervise in peacetime. Even the fact that imps could record every second of your life wasn’t enough to stop them; there were ways around that, if you had a creative mind.

“Smells like the Ruddies are having a party,” said the one private at the table. PFC Raymond Gonzaga was a little rat-faced guy who’d been busted down the ranks a good dozen times. Good guy when the chips were down, but a complete disaster during peacetime.

Russell was like that, too. He’d made it all the way to E-5 before he’d been caught trying to catch a ride back to base while naked, drunk as a skunk and in the company of a couple of bug-eyed tentacle-waving aliens – he never found out what species – who were also drunk. The details of the escapade remained hazy (he’d disabled his imp’s recorder at some point and whatever he’d taken had done a number on his short-term memory), but it’d earned him several Ninja Punches, including a demotion back to Private First Class.

Overall, the gun club had been good for him, though, non-judicial punishments and all. He’d put in twenty years already, starting at age sixteen, when he’d left his former life as a gangsta in the Zoo and used his Obligatory Service Term as a springboard into the fleet. Once he figured his way around the bullshit and discovered that the Corps valued his talent for killing people and breaking things, he realized he had found his calling.

His plan was to put fifty years in, which guaranteed him a twenty-five-year pension. That and a few shady dealings on the side would allow him to buy a bar and spend a couple or more decades having fun. Unless things got boring enough to make him want to go back to the Corps. Or the twenty-five-year pension ran out and he needed another source of income. Nobody was sure how long humans could last, now that they’d worked out most of the kinks on life-extension meds. One of the first casualties of life-ex had been lifetime pensions. Now you got back half the time you put in. Maybe he’d end up serving another fifty years in the Corps after taking two decades off.

Or maybe he’d switch outfits. Some people ended up serving in every branch of the service, from the shit ones like the Army or Coast Guard all the way to the Navy. Russell didn’t know how well he might do as a bubblehead – he hadn’t met many bubblies he liked – but you never knew till you tried.

“They’re burning down the slums,” Russell said, setting aside his plans for the future. “Not our problem. Enclave’s the safest place to be in the damn planet, other than the Ruddy Queen’s bedroom.”

He didn’t mind that the guys were worried about what was going on outside the Enclave. Worried grunts made stupid bets, which meant he might be able to get out of the hole he’d dug for himself. A hundred bucks in the red so far, which was a good half a week’s pay for a lowly Lance. Sure, a dollar went pretty far Ruddy-land, a.k.a. Jasper-Five, but if you ended up with zero dollars in your pocket you were screwed until the next payday. Twenty years in, and he had less than two hundred bucks in his savings account. Booze, smokes and hookers; all his money always ended up split three-ways between them. Russell had a big score in the works, selling some combat-lossed high-tech equipment to a notorious smuggler passing through Jasper-Five, but it’d be a while before he collected his cut, and hookers and booze couldn’t be bought on promises, even if his word was good enough to cadge a few smokes.

“Guess you’re right, Russet,” Corporal Harold ‘Rocky’ Petrossian said after he ponied up the small blind; when the dealing was done, he looked at his hand, and clearly saw something he didn’t like. Rocky was good people but if he looked unhappy, that was because he’d gotten a lousy hand. Rocky couldn’t bluff for shit.

“I know I’m right,” Russell replied absently, glancing at his hand: pocket sixes. Good enough to stay in the game.

“You shoulda been in New Lancaster when the Lizards torched their own town before we could get to it,” Gonzo told Conroy. “It spread out all over the forests around it. Flames all over the horizon, far as the eye could see. They had these trees, they were full of this gummy paste, and man, did that shit stink when it caught fire. Suit filters couldn’t cope with the fucking stench.”

“Yeah, that was nasty,” Rocky said. “We kicked ass, though.”

“Kill bodies,” Gonzo agreed.

Flop came out. An ace, a six, and the other six. Russell’s expression didn’t change an iota as his mind started figuring out the best course of action.

He never got a chance to work out the angles, though. His imp chimed in his ear – everybody’s imp did. Priority call.

“Stop whatever the fuck you’re doing, fuck-socks,” Gunnery Sergeant Miguel Obregon said through the command channel. “The new CO is on his way from orbit, should arrive in about an hour. I want y’all out on the yard, field unis and gear, looking sharp, in forty-five minutes, or y’all gonna be on police call all over the embassy grounds. Acknowledge and get moving.”

Russell dutifully sent an ‘Acknowledged’ signal from his imp, which would show in the platoon display as a green light. A yellow light meant the Marine in question had failed to acknowledge, and Obregon would track the miscreant down and made him sorry he’d ever been born. With an imp right inside your skull, your only excuses not to acknowledge a command were death or a situation where taking a second to answer a call was worth your life.

The skipper had already screwed Russell over and he hadn’t even shown up yet. Fucking officers.

The card game broke up as everyone’s imps transferred their wins or deducted their losses from their accounts. Russell tried not to think about his depleted savings as he took a quick shower and put on his field ‘long johns’ back on. They wore the skin-tight gray-green bodysuits most of the time; the material was self-repairing, self-cleaning, breathed better than most civvie clothing, local or American, and was tough enough to resist knife slashes, something that Russell could attest to from personal experience. He clamped his back-and-breast clamshell armor over the long johns, followed by the articulated knee, elbow and wrist pads that, along with his helmet and the force field projectors built into them, made each infantryman invulnerable to explosive fragments and most civvie and primmie small arms, and highly resistant to modern weapons. Russell had been on the receiving end of arrows, spears, blunderbusses, bucketloads of plasma, grav beams and Lamprey lasers rifles, spread over seven different engagements in two wars and three minor conflicts, which had earned him a three-star Combat Action Ribbon and a Purple Heart with three oak leaf clusters. Considering he’d also bled like a stuck pig, shit and pissed himself, and endured more pain than he’d thought possible, he would have happily declined the honors, not that the fucking ETs trying to kill him had given him a choice in the matter. His armor was one of the reasons he was still around to bitch about it. Dumb luck and being a sneaky sumbitch were the other two.

The helmet closed around his head with a hiss as it pressurized its interior. The thin eye-slit provided fuck-all peripheral vision and little enough frontal vision, but his imp made up for it, projecting the take from his helmet sensors right into his brain. As far as his peepers were concerned, it was like he wasn’t wearing a helmet at all. Nanowire filaments sneaked out from the clamshell breastplate until they connected to the armor pads and his boots, creating a network of artificial muscle that allowed him to carry a hundred and fifty pounds of weapons and equipment with almost zero strain and fatigue, although it took training to overcome the momentum you generated while running under a full load.

A quick check showed that the two power packs mounted on the back of the clamshell armor were fully charged. One was dedicated to the force fields; the other kept the suit’s systems running for up to twenty-four hours, give or take, depending on how active those hours were. You could divert power from one pack to the other at a pinch, at the risk of running out of juice for the shields or the suit. It almost never came to that, but there’d been exceptions, and then it became a race between the force fields going down or having to move under a hundred and fifty pounds of weight while trying to see out of the little slit in your helmet without the benefit of your sensors. If both packs ran out, you ditched the armor and prepared to have a really bad day.

He and the other Marines emerged from their barracks – a converted warehouse behind the American legation buildings – and headed for the armory, a makeshift structure made out of three starship cargo containers welded together into a ‘U’ shape. Gunny Obregon was there, overseeing the weapons issue personally, probably to make sure nobody tried to walk away with more than their allotted stuff.

As the leader of a fire team, Russell’s issue weapon was a triple-barreled IW-3a – his Iwo, as all Infantry Weapons were affectionately called in the Corps. He checked the gun – his gun, there were many like it, but this one was his – to make sure it was the one he’d lovingly maintained and cleaned as if his life depended on it, because it did.

The IW-3a fired 4mm explosive bullets from a 50-round magazine, 15mm grenades from a 10-round tube, and a single-shot 20mm self-propelled projectile that came in a variety of flavors. Ordinary grunts made do with an IW-3 that only fired the 4- and 15mm stuff. Gonzaga was the fire team gunner; he got a ALS-43 burp-gun with more firepower than the rest of the team combined. Russell was happy enough with his Iwo, though. He went over the gun as if greeting an old friend.

Ever since they’d arrived to Jasper-Five, Marines not on guard or maintenance duty had been ordered to leave all their weapons – even their personal ones – at the armory. The order had come from the ambassador himself, relayed through the Regional Security Officer; Lieutenant Murdock had no choice but to go along. After Murdock got run over by a car, Gunny Obregon had done the same, even when things started heating up during the last few days. Russell had availed himself of a new set of personal hardware – a switchblade, a revolver and a holdout two-shot derringer, both .41 caliber, all of Ruddy manufacture – soon enough, but he’d much rather have some good American gear at hand instead. He was worried he might need it.

There was a lot to worry about. Third Platoon shouldn’t be here, out of contact with Charlie Company and the rest of the battalion some fucking Rat had broken up to save a buck or two. A weapons platoon wasn’t mean to operate by itself. The pogues in charge had stuck them in an embassy, enough grunts to cause trouble but not enough to defend shit, and if anything happened he and the rest of the unit would be expected to do the impossible. The platoon wasn’t in bad shape – even the boots that had come along for the trip had gotten a clue, thanks to the Gunny’s constant training – but if it was expected to protect the Enclave by itself, they were fucked.

He’d been in the shit often enough to tell when he was about to take another dip in the brown stuff.

Of course, he didn’t expect it to happen quite so soon.

His first hint that something was going on was a distant
crump
sound he recognized immediately. That was an explosion: either one of the fires had lit up something volatile, or someone had detonated some military-grade ordnance. A second one followed mere seconds later. Ordnance it was; you rarely got explosions that closely together unless someone was making them happen.

Obregon stepped away from the armory and started talking into his imp. Russell couldn’t overhear the conversation – the NCO had engaged his privacy filter – but his furious arm gestures made it clear he was having a violent argument with someone. Probably some Embassy puke.