Charlie Company, Battalion Landing Team, 101st Marine Expeditionary Unit, led the way towards the cauldron of battle.
“Dammit, where’s Charlie-Three?” USWMC Captain Peter Fromm said, resisting the impulse to slam a gauntleted fist against a console in the command vehicle. The rest of the company was due to start moving forward in about thirty seconds, a bounding overwatch maneuver that required his weapons platoon (Third Platoon, a.k.a. Charlie-Three) to set up and provide cover for the advance.
Artillery from both sides was already in action; the dull roar of distant explosions was getting closer as the defending Vipers struck out at the three battalions trying to destroy their ground base and the American tubes ‘prepared’ the area by trying to smash all enemy strongpoints. Speed was vital when going on the offensive: staying still only made you a better target. And the overwatch platoon was behind schedule, holding up everyone else.
“Lieutenant O’Malley sent two squads forward to check for possible snipers,” said First Lieutenant Hansen, Fromm’s executive officer. “He’s confirmed the position is clear and the platoon is deploying. Five more minutes, he says”
To wait would mean delaying the entire battalion’s advance. O’Malley’s timidity had already cost them ten minutes while he hunted for imaginary snipers. He’d probably caught some ghost sensor reflection and reacted with his typical over-cautiousness. Third Platoon’s sergeant would make sure the weapons sections took their positions as quickly as possible, but they were running out of time.
The modified Land Assault Vehicle that served as the company’s mobile command post enhanced Fromm’s computer implants, enabling him to watch what was happening from multiple angles, from the godlike view afforded by recon drones to the personal helmet sensors of every soldier in his unit. A quick look showed him that the weapons platoon was just beginning to dismount from their vehicles and set up their heavy weapons. Five minutes was an optimistic estimate.
Fromm made a decision. “Send out the Hellcats and Charlie-Two,” he ordered, placing icons on the tactical map. “Move Charlie-One over that ridge to the east, have their LAVs set hull-down to provide overwatch while Third gets its head out of its collective ass.”
“Roger that.” Hansen began to relay the orders while Fromm watched the unfolding situation and prepared for his next move.
Enemy shells were blasting the narrow mountain pass separating the 101st from its primary objective, a Viper Planetary Defense Base. The terrain being traversed by the battalion was a rocky desert plain broken by scattered mesas that rose up to two hundred feet in places. Sections of it were still smoking, indicating spots where defending units had been caught and destroyed by the artillery preparation that had preceded the attack. They were going to have to rush forward and hope the dug-in aliens had been neutralized by the rain of high explosive and plasma that had descended upon them. Intelligence estimated the pass was defended by a company of Viper Crèche Defense fighters (an alternative translation for the alien designation was ‘Child Protective Services’). There would be some survivors even after the extended barrage and the longer they let them be, the more likely it was they would try to do something about the invading force.
Movement to contact against unknown and likely strongly-held enemy positions wasn’t the kind of thing any commander wanted to do, because the butcher’s bill was guaranteed to be high. But the remfies in charge had decided it needed to be done that way, and now it was time to do or die, with any questions to be saved for the after-action report.
If things had gone according to their OPORD, Charlie-Three should have been providing cover for the rest of the company from the heights of one the mesas, hitting possible enemy positions with mortars while their missile and heavy gun sections took out anybody trying to engage the American forces. Their slow deployment meant First Platoon would take their place instead of joining in the advance.
The sixteen Hellcats that comprised Fourth Platoon rushed forward. The Mobile Infantry suits looked like mechanical headless felines: four-legged, nine feet long and no more than three feet high at the shoulder, or a foot lower when lying fully prone. Suit and wearer together weighted about two thousand pounds, but they exerted only slightly more pressure per square inch than a standing trooper in normal combat armor. Shields and armor nearly equal to a Land Assault Vehicle’s, and enough weapon pods to rival a heavy weapon section completed the ensemble. The Hellcats could run at up to a hundred miles an hour, and their power packs allowed for thirty-six hours of sustained operations.
To Fromm’s surprise, the mechanical kitties were performing as advertised. He’d spent the last eight months integrating Charlie-Four into his company, and he still didn’t have a good feel for the powered armor systems – or a good feeling about them.
Heavily armed and armored battlesuits had entranced visionaries since long before First Contact. Reality kept disrupting those dreams, however. Once you added enough armor and weapons to justify their use, the artificial musculature necessary to move them at more than a walking speed, and the energy supply required to empower both, what you got was something too tall and bulky to be anything more than a better target. The more armor and shields you added, the better a target it became, until you ended up with a tank rather than anything even vaguely humanoid. After many failed prototypes, a team of designers had realized that, if a bipedal suit of armor wouldn’t work in open field combat, maybe a different body plan would. Something like, say, a dog or a cat. The end result now led the way.
Second Platoon followed the Hellcats, five LAVs carrying its three rifle squads, command element and an area field generator that created an invisible umbrella with a three-hundred-yard radius. The troop carriers were long, angular vehicles with a topside bubble turret holding an assortment of support weapons and a boxy four-shot missile launcher on each side. They floated a foot or so off the ground, driven by gravity thrusters at a steady 150 k.p.h. Despite the protection afforded by their heavy force fields and sixty millimeters of carbyne-steel composite armor, any vehicle that stayed in the open for too long risked immediate destruction.
Enemy rockets and shells fell upon the two advancing platoons. Gatling air-defense lasers mounted on the vehicles’ turrets went into action, exploding about half of the barrage mid-flight. The surviving munitions detonated against the area force field and went off harmlessly over the advancing vehicles as they pressed forward towards their objective, a clump of massive boulders a quarter of a klick away.
Two hundred and fifty meters – less than three football fields long – isn’t a long way when you’re dashing forward at over ninety miles an hour. It took Charlie-Two’s vehicles and their picket line of Hellcats a little over six seconds to reach their rally point.
It took a lot less for two camouflaged Viper anti-tank teams to emerge from hiding and engage the Marines.
Camo blankets were thrown aside; their spoofing systems had made the Viper’s dug-in positions look like a harmless pile of rocks, and they had survived the artillery barrage and evaded detection by the drones orbiting overhead. The closest unmasked position was a grav-gun emplacement; it swung towards one of the Hellcats, but its target caught the sudden movement and managed to shoot first. The MI trooper walked a long burst of 15mm AP rounds into the Viper position before it could line its shot, the plasma penetrators tearing gun and gunners to undistinguishable bits of plastic, metal and charred flesh.
The second team sprang into action a couple of seconds later, and whoever was watching that sector didn’t react in time.
A cage launcher holding a quartet of hypervelocity missiles popped out from its concealed position like a jack-in-the-box and fired at Second Platoon’s lead LAV. Four depleted uranium darts, propelled with enough acceleration to reach escape velocity in under two seconds, hit their target. The short range meant their speed at the point of impact was a mere five thousand meters per second, but that was enough. The attack had come from inside the area force field’s perimeter, so on
ly the vehicle’s own shields protected it. They shed one of the missile hits and were overloaded in the process; its tough hull armor sent a second dart flying into the air, leaving a blazing contrail in its wake. The other two penetrated. The LAV spun in place before dropping inertly to the ground. Fromm’s tactical display showed the troop carrier’s status icon change color from green to red, switching a second later to black. The view from the drones showed the vehicle disappearing in a blossoming fireball. Sixteen men had been inside; their personnel icons all turned black at the same time.
The Vipers didn’t live long enough to enjoy the success of their ambush. Less than a second after they fired, they were obliterated by a barrage of plasma and graviton blasts from First Platoon’s LAVs. None of that mattered to the dead Marines, of course.
They pressed on. Once Charlie-Two and -Four were deployed defensively, the rest of the company moved forward, except for Third Platoon, which was finally ready for action and had the range and visibility to provide overwatch from their current position while the rest of the company moved to its next objective. About time they were ready to do their damn jobs, Fromm thought bitterly. He’d commanded Charlie-Three during the siege of Kirosha’s legations, a brutal extended battle which had shown him the quality of the troops in that unit. They could do better than that.
The Vipers’ artillery barrage was intensifying, and they were using coordinated time-on-target shield busters, multi-stage munitions that unleashed half-mile-long plasma jets after an initial explosion meant to weaken or breach the area force fields protecting each platoon. Once the advance reached one of the taller mesas ahead, their bulk would obstruct most of the incoming. Only a few more seconds and they would be safe…
A trio of missiles went off overhead, their baleful discharges spearing through the shield and down towards their target – the company command vehicle. Fromm’s universe flashed bright white before fading into darkness.
* * *
“Goddammit,” Fromm said, leaning back on his chair when his imp stopped overloading his vision.
Field training exercises combined the realities of moving over actual terrain with extremely vivid sensory input piped directly into everyone’s brains via their cybernetic implants. The grueling advance under fire that had ended with his notional demise had felt so close to the real thing that his body was still pumping adrenaline into his bloodstream. The sensory overload that simulated ‘death’ wasn’t anywhere near as traumatic as being on the receiving end of actual high-energy ordnance, as Fromm could attest from all-too-personal experience, but it wasn’t pleasant, either.
“Not fun at all,” Lieutenant Hansen agreed, recovering from his own administrative murder.
Now that they were done for the rest of the exercise, their training vehicle grounded and showing up on any active unit’s sensors as scattered flaming debris, they could watch the rest of the action while they waited for the FTX to be over. The enlisted personnel in the vehicles could slack off; the driver, gunner and comm specialists in the command vehicle leaned back on their seats and played video games or caught up on their emails or Facetergram feeds. Fromm didn’t have that luxury; he kept watching the action. The diagrams and visual feeds cleared up as the computers dropped the simulated jamming and interference that had been part of the exercise. He now could see everything that was going on, unimpeded by the normal fog of war.
The loss of Charlie Actual had slowed the advance but not stopped it. One more LAV and three Hellcats had also been reduced to – virtual – wreckage by the artillery barrage. The battalion commander had ordered Charlie Company’s survivors to hold their positions and provide cover while Bravo leapfrogged it and pressed forward.
The end result, three hours later, wasn’t pretty: over thirty percent casualties, and no joy in taking the objective. The operation had ended in a disaster of historical proportions; Warp Marine units had only taken those casualty levels in a handful of military operations during their century and a half of existence.
Fromm tried not to take it personally, and failed. His company had been the tip of the spear, and it had taken unacceptable losses without achieving anything. There had been no opportunities where a dash of brilliance might have saved the day, the way they so often did in fiction. In reality you did your job and often failed because someone else fucked up, or due to simple bad luck.
He wanted to blame Lieutenant O’Malley but he couldn’t. The delay in setting up and providing mortar fire had directly led to the destruction of a squad, but the artillery barrage that had decimated the rest of the company hadn’t been his fault. When you maneuvered you were exposed to enemy fire. The MEU’s artillery battery hadn’t been able to suppress the enemy’s. There would be plenty of blame to go around during the post-game analysis.
A big part of him was sick and tired of the training rotation he’d been stuck in for the better part of a year while the war went on. He’d lived through the start of the conflict and two ‘minor conflicts’ before that; some would think that he’d shed enough blood for God and Country and it was time to let others do their share. When he thought about it rationally, he shared the sentiment. He knew only too well how random chance could take you down no matter how well-trained, tough and motivated you were; this FTX was a case in point. But he still kept poring over briefings about the war, trying to guess where and when the 101st would be deployed. The choice of enemies in the field exercise was probably not an accident. Fromm wanted to get a piece of the Lampreys, but the Vipers would do.
Fighting was the only way he knew how to begin to pay his obligation to the Marines he’d led to their deaths, in Jasper-Five and Astarte-Three. Nothing would ever make up for those losses, but doing his part to make sure their sacrifices wouldn’t be in vain was all he had left.
That, and laying down his own life.
* * *
A passing freighter dropped a load of emails from Earth later that evening. Fromm got two, one from Heather McClintock and one from his sister. He read Heather’s first.
Fromm hadn’t seen her since his last leave, six months ago. He’d hopped a ride on a troop transport headed for Sol System and met her in New Washington, where she’d been stuck behind a desk. The three days they’d spent together had been worth the combined eighteen hours of warp transit. Since then, they’d kept in touch with weekly or monthly emails, depending on how busy they were. Neither of them had a lot of spare time; their energy was focused on their respective careers.
Most people their age had to do that if they wanted to get ahead. In a world where your competition could have decades of experience over you, the only way to rise in the ranks was to work harder than the old farts were willing to. You wanted to make your mark before you were fifty, take twenty years off to raise a family, and then jump back into the grind for another three or four decades. The seventy- to ninety-year olds were the toughest competition. In the Corps, they tended to dominate the Major and Colonel ranks, and filled the talent pool from which general officers were selected. Or, at the enlisted level, they ruled the E-8 and E-9 roost. The ranks above were in the hands of hundred-year olds. Fromm didn’t follow the Navy’s inner workings, but he figured that their command ranks were filled by the same age brackets, except for the occasional maverick like Lisbeth Zhang, who’d gotten her first ship at the tender age of thirty-two – only to lose it at Jasper-Five. Of course, the old bastards would blame Zhang’s problems on her age and lack of experience, even though most anybody would have lost their command under those circumstances.
Fromm wondered what’d happened to the ballsy bubblehead officer as he opened Heather’s message. He hadn’t really followed up on her, but Heather had, and apparently Zhang had left the Navy and dropped off the face of the Earth. She deserved better than that, but a lot of people did. He set that aside and started reading. You could put anything from a full sensory display to mere video or sound clips in an email, but most people still preferred to use the written word to communicate.
All’s well, Heather wrote. Still on desk duty on Old Mother Earth, but that may change in the near future. Which meant she’d be going out into the field again, probably as an ‘illegal’ intelligence officer. That usually wasn’t as dangerous as being a ground-pounder, but it could have its moments, and if the shit hit the fan the spooks would have little or no support while in far-foreign space.
He could sympathize with being on your own, surrounded by enemies.
Walking down the middle of the broad street, bullets flattening against his force field, the pressure of a multitude of hits making him stagger slightly as he moved on, the heavy grav-cannon vibrating against his body armor as he unleashed hell on the hundreds, on the thousands of screaming red-skinned aliens in the fancy uniforms of the Kirosha Royal Guard, their bodies torn apart by the relentless energy stream. He guided the beam towards the main target, the shield generator that must be destroyed before the enemy overwhelmed the Starfarer embassies and murdered everyone inside.
A brief flash of light was his only warning before a massive wave of force washed over him…
Fromm blinked. The memories of those frenzied minutes still came back once in a while, uninvited guests he hadn’t quite learned how to get rid of. The dreams were bad; the urge to cringe or throw himself to the ground when hearing an unexpected loud noise was worse. The explosion had ripped off three of his limbs and very nearly killed him. There were wounds that even the best Starfarer tech couldn’t repair, and the besieged compound had been running out of critical medical supplies when he’d become a casualty, so the best tech hadn’t been available. He had lines of scar tissue at the points where his vat-grown limbs had been attached, courtesy of the emergency patchwork which was the best that Navy corpsmen using substandard methods and materials had managed to achieve. The Frankenstein’s Monster-like marks did not affect his range of motion, and removing them would take time he couldn’t afford to waste at the moment, so the scars remained, a constant reminder of how close he’d come to the end of the line.
Warp Marine Corps- The Complete Series Page 35