Warp Marine Corps- The Complete Series

by C. J. Carella

  The Ruddies had come into the open at around a hundred yards; his rangefinder dutifully informed him he was dropping targets at under fifty yards now. The kill zone was littered with bodies, but more Ruddies were coming and getting much closer.

  There was an explosion somewhere to his right, and it’d come from inside the perimeter.

  “Grenades!” someone shouted.

  Fuck. A tossed grenade would fly right through the area force field. Their personal fields would probably handle the blast and shrapnel, but that was a little too much like hard work for Russell’s taste. He started turning his attention to the Ruddies who didn’t have swords or spears, on the grounds they were most likely to be harboring grenades. His suspicion was confirmed by another sympathetic detonation that cleared his sector for several seconds.

  More RPGs were coming into play, too; some Ruddies fired in groups, three, four at a time. The high-explosive warheads blew up harmlessly against the area force field; it looked like even a mass volley wasn’t enough to punch through. None of the rocketeers lived to fire more than one round apiece. But the big-eyed bastards were getting closer. The fastest or luckiest ones lived to reach the coils of concertina wire stretched some ten feet off the edge of the force field. That’s where their luck ran out: the razor edges of the wire cut or snagged their clothes and skin, and they died there, trying to hack through it with their swords or climb over it, which only got them a bit of extra suffering before they got shot.

  Russell emptied his 15mm launcher over the concertina fence, filling his sector with dead and wounded ETs, but more Ruddies came behind the fallen and started to throw their own grenades. Others had Molotov cocktails; they hunched down while they lit the wicks running into glass and ceramic containers filled with flammable liquid, then jumped up and flung them towards the trenches. Most of them got shot or fragged before they could finish, but not all.

  Something slammed into him from behind. Grenade. His force field had stopped the fragments but enough kinetic force had seeped through to shake him. Russell cursed and went back to work. More bomb-throwers had arrived, and shooting them kept him too busy to stop the ones trying to jump over the wire. Some smart fuckers had two or three buddies grab them and fling them over the concertina barrier. Maybe not very smart, as two of the four who went over didn’t clear the wire and got caught in the thick of it, but the other two made it. Russell shot them both, but some asshole on the other side of the wire nailed him with a Molotov cocktail while he was busy.

  “Motherfuck!” He was on fire. His long-johns were fire-resistant, but he was still burning and more Ruddies were piling up onto the wire and throwing shit his way. Another grenade went off inside the trench, close enough to stagger him while he beat at the flames with one hand and popped motherfuckers with the other. His clamshell armor’s environmental controls sent a spray of cold gas all over him; the system was meant to deal with plasma penetration, but it worked fine on the jellied booze the fucker had splashed him with. He managed to scrap off most of the burning stuff with his free hand; he never stopped shooting.

  A hundred-mike-mike dropped a bomb load across his fire sector; a line of puffs of smoke appeared above the wire, each marking a dose of slashing death.

  Anti-pers fragments bounced off Russell’s force field; that fire mission had been danger-fucking-close. He didn’t mind the back-scratching, though, not when the Ruddies milling around the wire went down. Russell shot a couple that were still twitching. The fire on his suit was out; no harm done. His Iwo was almost empty; he reloaded, filled up on grenades, and went back to work.

  Off to his left, Gonzaga mowed down hundreds of them. He’d switched to plasma grenades, and that and the mortar bombs finally got to the next wave of Ruddies. Or maybe it was the sight of all the dead bodies scattered in front of them. They hesitated near the middle of the open field, and many of them stopped cold, doing the worst thing you could do in a kill zone. You had to run when bullets were flying and there was no cover around. You ran, forward or back, or hit the ground and crawled, but you didn’t stand still, not if you didn’t want to go down and never get up.

  The Ruddies didn’t know better. They hesitated, and the Marines on the trenches sent another thousand of them to hell. That did the trick. The ETs ran back the way they came. Russell and his buddies shot them in the back, which some folk would have called unsporting, except this wasn’t a game, and any Ruddy that lived today might come back tomorrow. They killed about as many of them on their way back as they had as they came forward, and the hundred-mike-mikes sent a few more anti-pers bombs their way as a parting gift.

  “My God,” Nacle said over the fire team channel after the shooting died. “Holy fucking shit. God.”

  “Leave God alone,” Russel said as he changed magazines. “He’s probably busy counting all the Ruddies we just sent to Hell.”

  “You…” The Mormon fell silent.

  It was pretty bad, Russell had to admit. The stupid bastards had kept coming, even after seeing what the Marines had done to their buddies. These ETs might make good troops someday, if they could get them civilized enough to build their own starships and plasma guns. He figured that was why the US had been here, almost as much as for the fancy rocks they bought off the locals. The Rats in charge had tried to make allies out the Ruddies. Russell couldn’t imagine the ETs would feel like being pals after the Marines had killed them by the cartload, but who knew? Stranger things had happened.

  He lifted his helmet’s faceplate. The smell was much worse without the filters, but the breeze felt good against his skin. Reaching into a pouch on his belt, he found a protein chew and popped it in his mouth, savoring the salty-meaty flavor as he closed the helmet again and turned his attention to the observation post’s video feed.

  The Ruddies were in full retreat all over. The Wyrms had filled their sector with bodies as well; their security guys had cut loose with flechette guns that fired thousands of hypervelocity ceramic darts, plus heavy weapons that included graviton cannons. The wounds those fuckers inflicted were downright gruesome; the Ruddies on that part of the battle looked like they’d been chewed up and spat out by an angry wolverine, or folded by some sort of industrial machine. The observation post couldn’t see very far into the Ovals’ sector but Russell knew how nasty their lasers could be; he didn’t need visuals to picture thousands of dead Ruddies, either perforated and cooked from the inside out or cut in two by continuous beams. Ugly way to go.

  “Then again, ain’t ever found a pretty way to die,” he said out loud.

  “What was that, Russett?”

  “Never mind, Gonzo. Just musin’ ‘bout nothin’.”

  * * *

  “There are three hours of daylight left. We agree to cease fire until tomorrow morning. You can retrieve your dead until dusk, but you must move to the other side of the wall before it is too dark to tell a white thread from a black one,” Deputy Chief of Mission Norbert said to the Kirosha Magistrate on the other end of the telephone line. He’d put the call on speaker, so everyone in the office could listen in.

  “Agreed,” Magistrate Eereen said. “I take it you still refuse to surrender and accept the protection of the High Queen.”

  “We must regretfully decline, yes.”

  “Very well. The Queen will make a statement over the radio waves tomorrow afternoon. I suggest you listen to it.” The line went dead.

  “Now what?” Heather wondered out loud.

  “Nothing good, I’m sure,” RSO Rockwell said. “In theory, the Queen could pretend the whole thing was a terrible mistake, the actions of a bunch of rebels, bandits and traitors or what have you, and try to set up a lasting cease fire. Considering there’s a galaxy-wide shooting war going on, New Washington would probably be content bringing everyone home and leaving the Ruddies to rot until we can come back in force and exact reparations.”

  “That would make sense,” Deputy Norbert said.

  “Yes. But I doubt that’s what the Queen has
in mind.”

  “I agree,” Captain Fromm said, sipping on a glass of fruit juice. “Today was just a probing attack. The Ruddies sacrificed thousands of their people just to get a feel for our capabilities.”

  “What do you think they learned, Captain?”

  “Our effective engagement ranges, the volume of indirect fire we can deliver, and how much their swatters have degraded our surveillance capabilities. One thing they’ve figured out is that the walls surrounding the Enclave have to go; their gates are chokepoints and perfect targets for our mortars. They are beginning to knock down wall sections to create more entry points. They are learning fast. From what I’ve read about their military, they have a few capable generals in charge. That Seeu Teenu, for one.”

  “Yes,” Heather said. “General Seeu was instrumental in modernizing the Royal Guards, mostly with equipment purchased or copied from the Western Federation, the most technically-advanced nation-state in Jasper-Five. His handling of the last rebellion in the south is worth studying.”

  “I did,” Fromm said. “If he or one of his students is in charge, he’ll put the knowledge he gained to good use. Meanwhile…” He paused for several seconds when an imp call interrupted him. “Sorry. Just was informed unarmed parties of Kirosha with wheeled wagons and trucks are beginning to collect the bodies of their fallen.”

  “Good.” The last thing they needed was thousands of rotting corpses all around the legation buildings. Most local viruses and bacteria were utterly inoffensive to humans, but a couple weren’t, and they had a couple of thousand Kirosha refugees crammed all around them to act as incubators for any disease those bodies might spread. Medical nanites could work wonders, but it made no sense to give them extra work.

  “I have everyone on full alert, just in case.”

  “Of course.”

  “Moving on, we have the question of what to do about the spaceport,” Fromm said, bringing up a problem nobody wanted to think about. The short answer to that question was: nothing.

  “Is there anything we can do?” Rockwell asked. “I don’t like the idea of over a hundred Americans being left out in the cold, but what can we do?”

  “They are twenty-five miles away by the most direct route, which would take us right through the city, or forty-five miles if we leave via the south gate and take the old Post Road, which would keep a convoy out of range from the city fortifications. It’s doable.”

  “I suppose. If you take most of your Marines out there, and at least half of the military contractors. Which would leave us pretty much helpless if they launch another mass attack, or worse, if they finally use their military against us.”

  “I have a few ideas about that, but let’s set that aside. If we don’t mount a rescue operation, how long can they last out there?”

  Heather had the answer to that. “The port facilities have massive force fields, better than anything we’ve got here. They won’t stop an infantry attack, but will keep artillery out. There are ninety-five Navy personnel and dependents there, including a thirty-man security department with combat armor and infantry weapons, plus another thirty-nine civilian workers. They have their own water supply, plus plenty of foodstuffs in their warehouses. Figure they can last as long as a month before running out, barring a mass attack.”

  “Which the Ruddies can launch whenever they feel like it,” Fromm said. “They can move a couple Guard or Army battalions along with another ten thousand Final Blow fanatics and overrun the port in a couple of hours, if they don’t mind the losses, and we’ve seen that they don’t. Bringing the port’s personnel here isn’t just the right thing to do. They will strengthen our position here.”

  “Sure, and if we could empty those warehouses and bring back several tons of fabber feedstock, we’d be sitting pretty, too,” Rockwell said. “Why not wish for a battlecruiser squadron while we’re at it?”

  “Like you said, the alternative is to let over a hundred Americans die, Mr. Rockwell.”

  “And if things go wrong, we risk the lives of over two thousand Americans here, Captain.”

  Alpha males must alpha around, Heather thought sourly. Out loud: “Gentlemen, let’s try to work together. We’ve got the resources of a Marine platoon, three Starfarer legations, three humanitarian missions, two major corporations and a good half dozen smaller ones. Maybe we can figure out a plan of action that doesn’t leave us defenseless.”

  The arguments and counterarguments went on for a while. By the time they decided to retire for the night, they had the glimmer of a plan but still too many unanswered questions.

  What else can go wrong? Heather wondered before she went to bed.

  The universe was happy to answer that question the next day.

  Thirteen

  Year 163 AFC, D Minus Two

  Lieutenant Commander Lisbeth Zhang, formerly of the USS Wildcat, opened her eyes and found herself looking at an unfamiliar curved ceiling.

  “What...?” she croaked. She was dehydrated and her whole body felt achy and feverish, all symptoms of a massive infusion of medical nanites to repair near-lethal levels of trauma. Whatever had happened had almost killed her.

  She carefully looked around; it took her a moment to recognize the unfamiliar surroundings. She’d only spent any time inside an escape pod during Cadet training at Annapolis Novo. And a pod was where she was. Someone had strapped her onto a crash recliner inside a hollow cylinder some twelve feet long and five feet wide.

  A corpse floated past her eyes, startling a gasp out of her. It was Lieutenant Givens. He’d bled out; the red stains on the walls and the droplets in the air told the story. Omar had dragged her unconscious carcass into the pod, launched it before the ship blew up, and managed to inject her with a nano-med booster before succumbing to his own injuries.

  “Omar,” she said reaching out and touching the cold skin on his cheek. “You’ll be remembered for what you did,” she promised him. “I’ll see to that.” He deserved a Navy Cross at least, the kind of award most recipients got posthumously.

  Of course, first she needed to figure out a way to make it out of this floating coffin in one piece.

  Lisbeth released herself from the chair and gently secured Omar Givens’ body to it before getting down to work. The pod’s emergency supplies included fifteen gallons of water and two weeks’ worth of foodstuffs, among several other useful items. She downed a good sixty ounces of water and ate a couple of energy bars, allegedly apple- and chocolate-flavored, while her imp accessed the pod’s systems. The overpriced systems – or so she’d thought of them until just now – provided life support, force fields strong enough to withstand atmospheric re-entry, and a rudimentary grav drive.

  The pod also had a decent sensor suite, better than her imp’s, and a comm system that would let her contact any friendly ships or facilities within ten light minutes of her location. The first thing she did was look for any other survivors. She spotted half a dozen pods floating within sensor range, mixed in with other fragments from the two ships. All had come from the Wildcat; the Bengal Tiger had been destroyed too quickly to allow anyone to escape.

  As it turned out, the Wildcat’s crew hadn’t fared any better. Two of the pods were empty. The rest contained only corpses. Only her pod had launched quickly enough to escape the shower of fast-moving debris from the shattered ships. Pieces of her vessel’s hull had ripped through the other four escape pods, exposing the people inside to vacuum. Her own pod had taken a couple of hits, but the force fields had held. Sheer luck had kept her alive while the rest of her crew died.

  Sole survivor. All the people in her command, caught by surprise and slaughtered. Her command. Her responsibility.

  Stop making this about you, she told herself. We’re at war. Your duty is to reach friendly forces and rejoin the action. Even if you have to carry a rifle and play ground-pounder.

  Lisbeth raised the spaceport facility on Jasper-Five.

  “I’m in an escape pod,” she explained to the panicked-sou
nding space traffic controller after establishing her identity. “Do I have clearance to land?”

  “We’re surrounded by hostile Eets at the moment, ma’am,” the Chief Warrant in charge told her after he joined the conversation. “Mostly armed with swords and the like, but the hostiles might have air defense artillery assets. We cannot guarantee a safe landing.”

  Lisbeth considered her options after Ground Control sent her the latest update of the situation beyond Jasper-Five, consisting mostly of the copy of a terse QE-telegram from the War Department. A coordinated attack against the US was underway, involving dozens of star systems. The chances any Fleet forces would be dispatched to Jasper-Five anytime soon were slim to none. This had been a quiet sector for decades; the corvette squadron which had dispatched her task unit consisted of four additional vessels, which would be needed to guard Lahiri until reinforcements arrived. The nearest other force not on a frontier picket was a flotilla on Third Deseret, a good twenty-five hours’ warp transit away, and likely under attack or expecting an attack. She would run out of consumables long before any rescue force arrived. She could risk being murdered groundside or dying alone in space.

  “I’m going to attempt a landing, Ground Control,” she announced.

  “Aye, aye, ma’am. We’ll ready the tractor grapples for you.”

  Getting to Jasper-Five while driving a pod was very much like in the training simulations. She strapped herself to a crash chair next to the one holding the body of her XO and used her imp to set the pod on course. Some four hours later, she plunged into the blue planet. The mini-ship was rated for atmospheric entry, but barely so; air friction surrounded the pod in a sheath of superheated air as it descended at high speeds and she turned all the power of its engines to slow her down enough for the spaceport’s grapples to catch it. It was daytime, but her fiery reentry lit the pod like a plunging star, bright enough to be visible for miles and miles.