Decisively Engaged (Warp Marine Corps Book 1) (6 page)

The Gunny was getting the take from the swarm of micro-drones flying over the city, so he knew exactly what was going on out there. Obregon didn’t get excited easily, so whatever was happening wasn’t good.

“What’s the deal, Russet?” Gonzaga asked him; the short private had his ALS-43 Automatic Launch System slung over his shoulder; the big gun was almost as tall as he was, which made him look slightly ridiculous, but Russell knew some very lethal things came in stupid-looking packages.

“We’ll find out soon enough, Gonzo,” he said. “But don’t stray too far from the armory, because I think…”

“Gun Squads One and Two!” Gunny Obregon shouted on the priority channel. “Grab a combat load! We’ve got to extricate civilian and military personnel under attack. We’re rolling hot in five! Martin, you’re in charge till I get back. Organize a perimeter defense and break out the mortars, on my authority. The Ruddies have gone wild.”

“I knew it,” Russell muttered as he and the rest the Guns Section squads followed Obregon’s orders and geared themselves up for the real thing. For combat.

Fifteen of them, without proper vehicles, out in the big city, which last time he’d checked held some two million ETs.

He didn’t need another oak leaf cluster, but life sure as fuck was doing its damnedest to get him one.

* * *

The initial flash was warning enough. Fromm slunk down on the passenger seat before the lead car’s gas tank exploded. The shockwave from the ensuing conflagration washed over the embassy’s vehicle. The oversized four-wheeler shook but wasn’t flipped over; no hot air – or flames – filled the inside of the car, so its windshield had held.

“They are coming,” Locquar said from the driver’s seat.

The ambush had hit the convoy at an intersection, where a small road cut across the main street they’d been using. The rocketeer must have fired from the rooftop of one of the three- and four-story buildings lining both sides of the street.

Dozens of armed Ruddies were coming at them from both sides of the smaller street and from a plaza next to the tail end of the motorcade. Fromm saw them all clearly, thanks to the micro-drones following the convoy from a hundred feet up, recording everything with their artificial eyes. The crowd had erupted from several houses where they’d been hiding until just now. They were armed mostly with spears and swords, but a couple of the black-tunic wearers had rifles with straight box magazines in front of their triggers. Standard-issue Kirosha Army assault weapons, firing .29-caliber chemically-propelled slugs from a twenty-round magazine, capable of selective fire.

The last car in the convoy had eaten another rocket; its smoldering remains blocked most of the right lane of the road.

“Go!” he yelled at Locquar. Standing still meant death. Moving might not save them, depending on how fast the rocket team could reload and fire, but it provided their only chance.

The Ruddy driver reacted well enough. Tires squealed on the pavement as he accelerated; they spun in place for a brief instant before regaining traction and propelling the car forward even as one of the lead attackers brought his rifle to bear.

Fromm fired first, holding his weapon in a two-handed Weaver grip.

The Colt Plasma Projectile Weapon spat a 3mm steel-sheathed bullet that left a neat hole in the side windshield on its way out. It hit the Ruddy rifleman a little high and to the left from his center of mass. On impact – the hit on the windshield had occurred before its warhead was armed – the tiny round detonated, unleashing a jet of pure plasma, half an inch wide and eight inches long. Designed to defeat body armor or damage light military vehicles, the explosive bullet’s effects on mere flesh and bone were devastating. The unfired rifle went spinning off into the air, its wielder’s torn-up arm and a piece of shoulder still holding on to it. The explosion that dismembered the rifleman consisted mostly of steam from his own vaporized bodily fluids. ETs on each side of the target recoiled as bits of bone shrapnel and burning steam hit them, along with an overpressure wave powerful enough to rock them on their feet.

Fromm fired six more times, squeezing the trigger as soon as the targeting dot slid over another target. He missed twice – firing from a moving platform wasn’t easy even with neural implant targeting – but blew four more Ruddies to Kingdom come, turning them into miniature bombs that wounded several others. The car kept going. It shuddered but did not stop when Locquar hit a couple of attackers and sent their bodies caroming over the vehicle. On the other side of the passenger’s seat, McClintock was shooting as well; the screech of her beamer was noticeable even alongside the supersonic cracks of Fromm’s weapon.

Their car sped past the burning wreck of the lead vehicle and ran clear of the charging mob. Fromm twisted in the back seat to see what was going on behind them. The two Vehelian limos were following closely, knocking down Ruddies and running them over even as swords and spears glanced off their sides. The bus followed in their wake. A couple of firearm-wielding Eets raked the vehicles as they went by, but they were firing from the hip, spray-and-pray style, and Fromm didn’t think they hit anybody. He couldn’t see the van anywhere. Nothing he could do about that, except hope they all made it through the ambush point before the rocket launcher teams…

A puff of smoke erupted from the top of the second limo’s roof.

… reloaded.

The explosion didn’t look like much, but Fromm knew what it meant even before the limo swerved off course and drifted lazily to a stop. The missile had crashed through the top of the vehicle and shredded everyone inside. Only someone in sealed combat armor could have survived, and he doubted armor was part of Vehelian diplomatic dress code. The bus behind the doomed Oval car didn’t slow down, clipping the stopped vehicle and sending it off on a spin. The horde of Ruddies giving chase fell upon the stopped limo like lions tackling the slowest member of a fleeing herd.

McClintock looked at him, a question in her eyes. He shook his head. There was nothing they could do for the passengers of the doomed vehicle. The only consolation was that the mob tearing into the vehicle would only find corpses to desecrate. She bit her lip and checked the charge levels on her beamer. The energy weapons were as lethal as the plasma rounds his gun fired, but their effective range was measured in feet rather than yards, and their batteries only held enough power for five to seven shots, depending on the model. The Embassy spook changed battery packs. Fromm replaced his gun’s magazine with a fresh one. He’d only brought a spare magazine, never thinking he’d need more than forty rounds. Now he was down to thirty-three.

“Are we there yet?” he said, deadpan.

McClintock chuckled. “I will turn this car right around.” She went on in a sober tone: “Half a mile as the crow flies. A bit more on the road, but it’s a fairly straight shot there, unless…”

The road they were on had taken them over a slight rise on the ground. When they reached the top of the shallow hill, they saw the massed crowd it had hidden.

Several local vehicles, powered and animal-drawn, had been dragged across the street, blocking it.

“Quiet spot my ass,” Fromm grumbled.

The roar of the Ruddy mob drowned out his words.

* * *

“Where the fuck did they come from?” Gunnery Sergeant Miguel Obregon said as his imp fed him data from the overhead micro-drones. There was plenty of news, and all of it was bad.

One thing was clear: the Ruddies knew the Americans had them under aerial observation. They had come into the city in small groups and gathered indoors, out of sight until they’d used gongs and drums to let everyone know it was time to come out and play. A proper Intelligence section would probably have noticed the Ruddies’ movement patterns and figured out they were massing for an attack, but Third Platoon didn’t have an Intelligence section, just a pack of attached Navy bubbleheads, each trying to do the job of three or four people. Neither did it have organic vehicles, aerial support other than their micro-drones, or much of anything else. They’d been tossed into this miserable shithole with a whole lot of fuck-all.

It didn’t matter. One of their own, and a bunch of civvies, were out there, surrounded by an estimated five thousand bloodthirsty Ruddies, and it was Obregon’s job to go out there and extricate them by any means necessary.

Improvising while being ass-deep in alligators was part of the job. Obregon knew that the Dark God Murphy was always waiting in the wings, ready to strike. He’d taken precautions against that possibility, aided and abetted by Lieutenant Murdock, God rest his soul. Even so, the only reason this sortie into hostile territory wasn’t a forlorn hope was the fact that his unit had been Charlie Company’s weapons platoon, and that the same whimsical Rats who had sent them to this God-forsaken mudball had also sent all their equipment along. As soon as Obregon got his feet under him and realized they needed a mobile element in case the shit hit the fan, he and the other NCOs had gone to work, acquiring several native vehicles by means fair and foul and spending their own time and money to turn them into improvised infantry fighting vehicles.

The traditional term for such makeshifts was ‘technicals.’ Obregon had been raised in a dirt-poor colony world where you had to build most of the stuff you wanted, simply because the hard currency you’d need to buy it wasn’t available, and the few fabbers on site had more important things to produce than consumer goods. Between his hard-earned skills, the info the imps helpfully provided, and a lot of sweat and the liberal application of super-duct tape, he and his volunteers had assembled something better than a typical fleet of technicals.

A mental command opened the rolling door to their improvised vehicle depot as he and Sergeant Muller approached it. Inside awaited the fruit of their labors. The three monstrosities had started their lives as a cargo van, a ten-ton truck and a demilitarized Ruddy version of the venerable Humvee. Form followed function, and the native-designed vehicles had been roughly similar in appearance and capabilities to their equivalents from Earth’s 20
th
century. Had been.

Force field generators had been cannibalized from the platoon’s area defense gear and welded onto every possible surface on the three vehicles. The devices used Starfarer Tech to bend space-time itself, generating invisible planes of force capable of deflecting all kinds of energies from one direction while allowing their users to shoot from the opposite side. Never mind how – according to Woogle, human brains couldn’t understand the physics behind the force fields; most Eets didn’t, either. Their coverage wasn’t perfect – the vehicles’ tires and parts of their undercarriages were still hideously vulnerable to mines and IEDs – but they would stop a direct hit from the 93mm Ruddy artillery pieces that did triple-duty as general bombardment, anti-aircraft and anti-tank weapons. At least, they would do so as long as their improvised batteries could supply energy to the fields. His imp’s best guess was that three or four hits of that magnitude would deplete the force fields’ power packs, at which point the technicals would turn back into pumpkins, and just as easy to smash. Until then, though, they’d be proof against most things.

They hadn’t just added defenses to the truck, of course. Obregon and his team of volunteer mechanics had taken a sizable fraction of the heavy weapons in the platoon’s Table of Organization and Equipment and attached them to diverse parts of their vehicles. ALS-43s were the bastard plasma-spitting children of the pre-Contact M240 machinegun and the Mk 19 automatic grenade launcher; he’d gotten at least one of them mounted on every vehicle. His command van had a ALS-43 and two 20mm self-propelled missile launchers, which gave the unit – they’d named it Rover Force – more firepower than a local tank company. He had no desire to get into a running battle with the local ETs, but if he was forced into one he intended to win it.

Obregon all but leaped into the driver’s compartment of Rover Two. He turned the primitive ignition system’s switch, and the vehicle roared into life. He did a status check: most everything was green, and the systems highlighted with blinking yellow lights would do, for a while.

“Y’all fucked with the wrong people,” the Marine growled as he gunned the engine.

Year 163 AFC, D Minus Ten

They were probably screwed, but it wouldn’t be because they hadn’t tried everything they could think of.

“There,” Heather said, her imp marking the building she’d selected as Locquar swerved to a stop, less than a hundred yards from the barricade. Nobody had shot at them yet, but that was bound to change.

The structure she’d led them to was an auto garage situated at the top of the hill. The locals’ propensity to steal anything that wasn’t nailed down meant the lot was surrounded by a sturdy wall, concrete blocks with razor wire strung on top, its main entrance sealed off by a sliding metal gate.

“We can make our stand inside until the authorities drive off the rioters,” she said.

“Fine,” Fromm said. He didn’t sound terribly convinced, but time was short and he clearly knew that a bad plan of action executed now was better than a perfect plan contrived after it was too late. “Get everyone inside. I’ll cover you.”

“Locquar, help him,” she said as they left the car. The Vehelian limo began to go around it, then stopped when its driver saw the barricade and mob waiting down the road. Behind them, the bus also came to a stop. A glance told her the mob giving chase behind them wasn’t very far away, and it’d been reinforced by more militant society warriors and regular civilians. Her imp could have given her a good estimate of the number of aliens rushing towards them, but she didn’t really want to know. More than enough, she was sure.

“We’re going to fort up over there,” she announced through the imp, which overlay a virtual arrow all humans and Vehelians would see through their own implants.

Heather headed towards the garage’s entrance. There was an intercom by the metal gate but she was sure the people inside weren’t going to be hospitable. Instead of trying to communicate with them, she placed a hand over the gate. Its lock was electronic, a new model using imported Starfarer tech, the kind of cheap trinket any fabber could produce for pennies’ worth of raw materials and then sell at a nice profit to primitive worlds. Her imp’s special apps took over the lock’s crude systems, and the gate started rolling open. Off to her right, the captain’s blaster coughed once, followed by a burst from the submachinegun Locquar kept under the driver’s seat. Things were getting lively already, and there was no time to lose.

She rushed inside as soon as enough of a gap opened up. There were two Kirosha on the courtyard, a man in grease-stained coveralls who’d been working on a sporty-looking two-door car, and an older male in the informal tunic, pointy hat and pantaloons of one of Kirosha’s small but growing entrepreneurial middle class. They were both unarmed, which was unsurprising, since city ordinances made possession of firearms of any kind a crime punishable by mutilation, torture or death, sometimes all of the above.

“You are not welcome here!” the shop owner shouted at her, his head shaking up and down in the Kirosha negative gesture.

“Sodomizing foreign devils!” the mechanic said, rummaging through his toolbox.

He was probably looking for something hefty enough to batter someone’s brains out. Heather didn’t give him a chance to try; a warning shot aimed at the ground between the mechanic’s feet sent him scrambling away as dirt flew from the point of impact, some of it hot enough to sting wherever it touched his skin.

“Now you sodomizing listen to me!” she told them in flawless Kirosha with enough of a high-class accent to command respect. The sight of the Star-Devil-filled bus and limo rolling through the gate added to the intimidation factor. “Stay out of the way, and you won’t be hurt. We need to remain here until the authorities disperse the riot. You will be compensated for any damages, and receive a fitting reward for your hospitality. Do you understand?”

Both Kirosha squatted down in submission.

“Yes, Blessed Star Devil,” the owner said. “The Final Blow Society will kill us all, but perhaps my family will be compensated for my sacrifice, yes?”

Outside, a flurry of blaster and slug-thrower fire seemed to confirm the Kirosha’s pessimism.

* * *

At first, the Ruddies at the barricade just stood there and watched them. Fromm accepted the momentary truce with gratitude. If the ETs charged before they could get behind cover, he and every human and Oval in the convoy were dead.

The quiet only lasted a few seconds. One of the leaders, a big Ruddy with a fluttering banner strapped to his back, stepped in front of the barricade and started haranguing the troops, who cheered him on.

Fromm turned to Locquar. “Will shooting him help or hurt?”

“Can’t hurt,” the friendly said with a shrug.

“Okay.”

The plasma discharge set the banner on fire as it burned a hole big enough to fit a grapefruit into the leader’s torso and sent his head flying up like a popped cork. The crowd fell silent at the sudden and gruesome death, and Locquar added a three-round burst into the mix, riddling another banner-man. The driver shouted something at the rioters. Fromm hoped it was something meant to scare them into withdrawing.

The mob swarmed over the barricade, screeching like a gaggle of angry human schoolgirls.

Well, that didn’t work
, Fromm thought as he fired the remaining nineteen rounds in his Colt, pivoting to the right to spread the joy over a wide front. The rioters were packed so tightly together that each round injured or killed at least two or three extra targets. Locquar followed suit with his submachinegun, and between the two of them they filled the street with limp and writhing bodies. Fromm ducked behind cover and switched the empty magazine with the partially-full one that was all he had left. Fourteen rounds and a target-rich environment added up to a really bad day.

The Embassy Rat had gotten the compound’s gate open and the bus and limo were already inside. Good. There would be no time to move their car, though. He and Locquar scrambled towards the gate as the Ruddy mob made its way past the bodies they’d dropped. The sliding metal door was already closing; he made it through with a couple seconds to spare.

Now that he was behind cover he had time to answer the phone.

One of the problems of modern communications was that people kept trying to talk to you while you were too busy staying alive to talk back. Imps helped by answering some calls themselves. The faux-AI systems learned a number of preset responses by watching their owners over time. Some things required a personal touch, however.

The imp downloaded several voice messages directly into Fromm’s memory, a highly-uncomfortable process used only for emergencies. Suddenly remembering things you hadn’t known a moment before could induce several forms of mental trauma.

Suddenly remembering some very bad news was no fun, trauma or no trauma.

Gunnery Sergeant Obregon was mounting an impromptu rescue and the Embassy was trying to contact the Kirosha authorities to lend a hand. Problem was, the locals weren’t answering the phone and the Embassy remfies were dithering instead of authorizing the rescue mission. That kind of SNAFU wouldn’t be solved before the mob outside stormed the compound and slaughtered everyone inside.

“Gunny, I authorize the rescue operation,” he sent out; his imp added all the requisite legalese that would turn the sentence into a formal command and would place all responsibility and blame squarely on Fromm’s shoulders. It wouldn’t be the first time he’d pissed off assorted officers and gentlemen. The last time, he’d ended up assigned to Jasper-Five, and it clearly couldn’t get much worse than that.

The Embassy woman was busy organizing the passengers as they disembarked from the bus. The Ovals from the surviving limo included three civvies in colorful robes of office, good only for catching rounds that might hit somebody useful, and a driver/bodyguard armed with a short-barreled combat laser, the kind of weapon the US still couldn’t afford to manufacture in quantity. The Oval and his ray-gun would come in handy.

About two-thirds of the human passengers had some kind of weapon. Only about half the Rats, of course –
corp-o-RAT, bureau-cRAT, city-RAT
; the immortal song’s lyrics flashed through his mind – but most of the passengers were miners or machinery operators, the kind of men and women who felt naked without something that could cut, bludgeon or shoot. McClintock directed the ones with handguns to take cover behind the vehicles scattered around the garage, where they could pick off anyone trying to climb over the razor-wire on top of the walls. For a Rat or even a spook, she was turning out to have the makings of a damn good sergeant.

He looked around, studying the battleground at hand. The walled enclosure was a rough square, some sixty feet on each side. A cinderblock wall surrounded the perimeter, topped with the Ruddy version of concertina wire. Good enough to stop bullets and keep the rabble out, for a little while at least, although it wouldn’t prevent the mob from tossing things over it, anything from spears to hand grenades or Molotov cocktails. There were two buildings inside the perimeter, the larger one in the center; the other was a supply shack near one of the walls. The bigger structure was two stories tall, a box with a peaked roof. The upper level had a window overlooking the street.

Fromm had his imp contact the Vehelian bodyguard, who promptly walked over to him. Ovals looked like what you’d get if you shaved a bear, replaced its head with an ostrich egg, and painted a face on its surface. The bodyguard was a particularly large specimen, a good seven feet tall and almost as wide; hopefully he’d be able to fit inside the building.

“Follow me!” he sent out; the implant translated the order a couple of seconds later.

“I will comply, Marine Captain,” the ET said in English.

Fromm turned to the Ruddy driver. “Locquar, assist your boss. We’re seizing the high ground.”

The Kirosha tilted his head sideways, his version of nodding yes. Fromm left him to it and headed for the main building, gun ready. The front door was open; Fromm took a quick peek inside. He felt horribly exposed – fucking naked –  doing a building entry evolution without backup other than an ET he hadn’t worked with before, and without grenades to clear the way. He went in, fully expecting to get shot.

Nobody shot at him. The room had a glass counter with several auto parts on display, a couple of armchairs in a reception area, and a statue of a naked fat Ruddy riding some sort of dragon. There were no signs of life. He had to kick open a couple of doors before he found one leading to a set of stairs going up. The Oval behind him had to squeeze past a couple of tight spots, but was able to keep up with him.

Meanwhile, the enemy had arrived. He could hear them screaming all around the compound. Someone was beating on the metal gate. They’d better get a move on or they’d be overrun.

A dash up the stairs led them to a narrow corridor and two closed doors. Fromm heard a fusillade of gunshots and beamer discharges, which increased his sense of urgency. He kicked down another door and found the window he’d seen from outside.

Two cowering Ruddies were inside the room, hiding behind a desk. He watched them over the barrel of his Colt, his imp painting targeting carats over their centers of mass. An old male and a young female, looking absurdly cute with their oversized eyes and narrow chins. Seemingly unarmed.

“Go!” he shouted at them in American, gesturing with his head for them to get out. They got the idea and scrammed. Leaving two potential hostiles loose behind him was not a great idea, but there was no time to do anything other than shoot them dead or let them go, and he needed to save his last fourteen rounds for confirmed hostiles. At least, that was what he told himself as he and the Oval headed for the window.

The view was terrible.

The street outside was jammed with ETs. At the moment, most of them were beating ineffectually at the walls and gates. One body was draped over the razor wire on top of a wall, leaking blood and pureed tissues from a through-and-through wound. That death wouldn’t deter them for long, however.

The Oval knew what to do. “Do I kill them now?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

The laser weapon usually fired micro-second pulses, each packing about half as much energy as a blaster round, with a cyclic rate of six hundred pulses a minute. Against the massed crowd, the ET switched to a continuous beam setting, and swung the long line of coherent light like a giant industrial cutter, tilting the weapon so the energy stream cleared the wall and slashed into the rioters at a shallow angle.

The Ruddies protected by their proximity to the wall were unharmed as the beam passed over their heads. Those further back were sliced in two by the one-millimeter coherent-light weapon. The laser went through a hundred feet of cloth, flesh and bone like piano wire driven into a block of soft cheese. The beam wasn’t hot enough to cauterize the wounds, so Ruddy blood spurted freely from severed limbs and torsos as dozens bodies fell in two pieces; variations in biochemistry gave the fluids that spattered everywhere an orange coloration and a greasy quality. The ones closest to the laser had the tops of their heads loped off; the ones further out, their necks or faces. Dozens of rioters were bisected at the chest or waist, some of them still alive as their upper torsos slid off the convulsing lower halves of their bodies. As the beam angled down, it severed hips, thighs, knees.

Three seconds. A hundred dead. Another hundred maimed and dying.