Their landing zone had been manned by a dug-in Lamprey squad; the four warp apertures that had dropped the Marine company on top of the aliens’ heads had leveled their position with deadly implosion-explosions with the destructive power of high-explosive artillery shells. Some scattered debris and blood spatter was all that remained; Lampreys bled red, a slightly brighter shade than humans, but clearly recognizable as such. Fromm had walked into a puddle of the greasy fluid; he shifted around to a less slippery position while he oversaw the action.
On the other side of the outcropping was a bunker that oversaw a mountain range from its tallest peak. Its quartet of five-inch grav-cannons posed a minor threat to starships and made it impossible for anything smaller to survive anywhere along its arc of fire. Charlie and Bravo had been tasked with silencing those guns to allow the rest of the 101st to land its heavy equipment behind the mountain range before sallying forth to engage the Planetary Defense Base on the other side.
The sky above him was alive with laser fire: Lamprey fireflies, ball-shaped drones unleashing coherent light from sixteen barrels spread evenly along their surface. The lasers chewed up Charlie’s recon drones and detonated most of the missiles and mortar bombs before they could strike their intended target. A single beam wouldn’t deplete a Marine’s personal force field, but several dozen hits would; another few dozen would degrade and eventually penetrate even their new and improved body armor. The first infantrymen to reach the top of the outcropping were already taking fire; they had lugged a large force field generator to protect them, but the ‘flies needed to be dealt with. Luckily, Staff Sergeant Muller from the mortar section was already on it.
The next mortar volley consisted of new munitions built from designs developed in Xanadu. They were very similar to the enemy’s fireflies, except they had better force fields and lasers. The bomblets took the enemy flying balls under fire as they fell, destroying a dozen or more apiece before being destroyed or landing downrange. The enemy fire slackened off noticeably.
That still left the bunker’s outer defenses, but those would be engaged by guns wielded by men and women who would bleed and die if anything went wrong.
* * *
“Hope the new toys work, brah.”
Russell grunted by way of an answer, too busy climbing the steep rocky slope with two hundred pounds on his back to engage in chit-chat. The suit’s artificial muscles did most of the work, but they still left plenty for his scrawny ass to do. Gonzo was even shorter, but he always managed to have enough breath to bitch about anything and everything.
“Ancient… super… tech,” Grampa said in-between wheezes. “It’ll… work… fine.”
The old guy was even more heavily loaded than the other two members of the fireteam. While Russell was carrying a thirty-pound Widowmaker and as many spare power packs as he could, and Gonzo was loaded up with the equally-heavy and even newer Dragonfire gun system, Grampa had their portable field gennie, even more power packs, and his old-fashioned IW-3a gun, plus ammo for that. Low man on the totem pole got to play pack mule, and Grampa Gorski was going to be at the bottom of the pack for as long as he stayed in Russell’s team. He might be pushing two hundred, but he’d only been a Marine for a handful of years. That made him only slightly better than a boot fresh from New Parris.
“If all y’all can talk, y’all can climb faster,” Sergeant Fuller growled through the squad channel. “Move it, Marines! The party’s at the top, and we’re missing all the fun!”
They could see the fun even from two-thirds of the way up. Scattered plasma blasts illuminated the top of the rocky hill; the Lampreys had taken their sweet time reacting to the warp-dropped assault element, but they were taking their position under fire, and the Marine legs up there didn’t have the firepower to handle a bunker. Russell grunted again and put all he had into it, rushing towards the sound of the guns. The familiar canvas-ripping sound of the infantry’s Squad Automatic Weapons was punctuated by the staccato hammer of a Lamprey 31mm plasma cannon. Russell was something of an expert on the subject of the sounds generated by assorted death-dealing devices; he could also tell that the plasma guns were going to win that fight unless his fireteam didn’t hurry up.
Almost there.
The Ass-Faces manning the bunker weren’t regulars; a no-account planet like DC-97 was defended by People’s Militia units, peons and factory serfs with hypno-implanted military training they only ‘remembered’ when their local union rep ‘triggered’ them. Their reaction time was lousy and their gunnery even worse. On the other hand, enough firepower could cover a multitude of sins. By the time Russell reached the top of the hill and the fighting holes the grunts had kindly dug for them, the bunker was blazing with dozens of firing emplacements, about half of the enemy was raining hell at their hill; the other half was engaging the poor bastards from Bravo Company, who were on another outcropping half a klick to the east.
Russell’s fireteam clambered into the holes, still smoking from the breaching charges that had created them. Grampa set up their area force field, adding an extra layer of protection to the shields the infantry had emplaced. They were going to need it; two drained power packs were already lying on the ground where the grunts had tossed them away after replacing them. Considering how much energy a field gennie could soak up before being depleted, the Lampreys were hitting it too often for comfort, poor gunnery or not.
Time to make the tangos roll over and be dead.
“Targets marked,” Sergeant Fuller called out when the Guns section was ready to go. Recon drones highlighted the spots to hit: three swiveling bubble turrets on the side of the bunker, each armored as well as a tank and protected by three force field layers. Their old Alsies – Automatic Launch Systems – would have never been tasked for this mission; their 15mm munitions just didn’t have the oomph to do the job. Their new guns, on the other hand…
“Fire!”
That part of the job sucked worst of all. Gonzo and Russell had to rise from their holes and expose their heads and shoulders to fire, trusting that their force fields would keep them alive for the next three to five seconds. So did the other four shooters of the Guns section. All six fired as one.
Half of those guns were Widowmakers; they vomited a twisting graviton beam packing almost as much punch as a tank’s main gun. The other half were Dragonfires, based on a Marauder design, and their particle beams were hell on force fields, draining them at five times the rate of normal energy weapons. Two of the enemy gun emplacements wilted under the impacts. The barrel of one of the plasma guns went flying into the air; the other shattered like a dropped glass.
The third one survived long enough to rake the Marines firing on it. One force field failed, then another, and Lance Corporal Hansel ‘Vato’ Jimenez screamed in unbearable pain when a dollop of plasma burned through his personal shields and armor and found the flesh beneath them.
“Fuck,” Russel muttered, ducking back into the hole. Jimenez’s status icon was flashing yellow; the luckless bastard was still alive, but plasma burns were the worst. The wounded Marine kept screaming for several seconds after his medical implants filled him with enough painkillers to put him into a coma under normal conditions.
“Fuck,” Grampa agreed as he replaced the field’s generator’s power pack. Russell noticed his personal shields were down by eighty percent. He ejected one of his two power packs and gratefully accepted a fresh one from the fireteam’s loader. He’d almost gotten a dose of hellfire himself; a fraction of a second longer and his force field would have burst like a soap bubble. Their new body armor was damn good – it was the only reason Jimenez was alive – but Russell didn’t want to find out how living through a plasma shot felt like. Vato sure as fuck hadn’t liked it.
Through the drones’ video feed, he watched the last bubble turret get taken out by a volley of missiles from the Assault section. That took care of the big guns protecting the enemy bunker. The tangos were still shooting back, but it was all small arms –
Lamprey laser rifles, nasty if they caught you in the open but not that big a deal dug-in. The loader from Jimenez’s fire team dragged the now-unconscious Marine to a corner of the fighting hole and took over the fallen man’s Widowmaker. They still had work to do.
“All right, Devil Dogs,” Sergeant Fuller called out. “Time to knock on their front door. On my mark…”
* * *
Scratch one nest of Lampreys, Lisbeth thought coldly as she flew over the still-smoldering caldera that had once been a city of three million.
“I find it sadly disturbing that you can feel such joy in the slaughter of your enemies, Christopher Robin,” Lisbeth’s invisible friend whispered in her ear as the Death Head Squadron flew over the nearly-depopulated planet, looking for targets of opportunity.
All the Lamprey PDBs on CD-97 had been destroyed, but the aliens had stationed a full division of mobile anti-shipping artillery on the planet. One of those guns was unaccounted for, and it might threaten Third Fleet’s supply vessels as they traveled towards the next warp gate in the system. Better safe than sorry.
“Fuck the Lampreys. Some assholes just deserve to be extinct.”
Atu gave her a sad puppy-eyed look, made worse by the fact that it consisted of three cartoonishly large puppy eyes. Lisbeth ignored the alien ghost and concentrated on flying her ‘gunboat.’ Although Corpse-Ships had the aerodynamics of a brick house, their force fields could be realigned into a shape suited for atmospheric flight. Her squadron zipped through the air at fifty-thousand feet, scanning the area below for any signs of the mobile gun they were hunting. If the ETs were smart, they’d abandon it and run for the hills; Third Fleet didn’t have the time or inclination to conduct a full kill sweep; incinerating the cities on the planet was good enough for government work.
CLANG! The graviton beam impact on her hybrid shields felt as if God’s own baseball bat had tried to knock her out of the park. The Corpse-Ship lurched in mid-air, and enough G’s got through the inertial dampeners to whip her back and forth with brutal force.
Some Lamprey cannon-cocker team had turned out to be not smart at all.
Grinner Genovisi lashed the now-unmasked gun position with her secondary guns; the shield-piercing particle beam weapons turned the self-propelled cannon and a three hundred-meter swatch of forest around it into molten, lifeless patch of lava.
Lamprey stealth systems were among the best in the known galaxy; the easiest way to find the hidden guns had been to offer her ships as decoys. Luckily the Corpse-Ship’s shields were powerful enough to shrug off a heavy graviton blast without any damage. It still hadn’t been much fun.
“And that’s that,” Lisbeth said. “RTB, people. Well done.”
It hadn’t been much of a fight, at least from her perspective; the Marines who’d helped take out the three Planetary Defense Bases on the surface would likely disagree, of course. The space action had been the next best thing to a cakewalk: Third Fleet had been met by a frigate squadron backed by a couple of dozen STL monitors, about as well-armed as battlecruisers but unable to warp, and two orbital fortresses. Her gunboat squadron destroyed them all before the rest of the Navy formation even got into range; it had been about as dangerous as a training run. After that was over, it’d been time to deploy field-encasement thermal weapons on every major population center.
Transition.
The Starless Path was quiet on the way home. Lisbeth had given orders that any Warpling that approached the squadron was to be shot on sight. The Corpse-Ships could engage targets inside warp space, including the natives. So far, the only ‘Foos’ foolish enough to show up had been minor apparitions, the kind that could embody bad memories. Blasting them away had been a pleasure, but she knew the weapons wouldn’t be as effective against one of the Big Kahunas. The Marauders had spent centuries looking for ways to kill Greater Warplings without success.
And no angels or saints have shown up so far. Maybe that’s for the best. It would suck if we shot one of them by mistake.
“I would alert you before you did something you would regret,” Atu assured her.
“The Starless Ones will torment you for ten thousand eternities, meal-on-legs,” another voice growled inside her head.
That was Vlad the Impaler, her other spirit guide. The ghost of a Marauder, for some values of ghost. Lisbeth had been sharing an intimate psychic moment with the Kraxan when he died, and his memories and thought patterns had been imprinted onto hers. Atu kept the murderous alien muzzled for the most part, but he occasionally broke free to regale her with detailed descriptions of death by torture.
“Atu, if you please?”
The good alien fell upon the bad one and overpowered him. Lisbeth could still hear the faint echoes of their struggle as her ship emerged from warp and settled down gently unto the cradle aboard the Laramie. The maintenance crew approached her gunboat like a pack of natives in the face of an ancient idol, one that might suddenly come alive and claim a living sacrifice. Even after dozens of training missions, the skeleton-shaped ships still made most everyone uneasy, even the people who thought they were the coolest damn things in the known galaxies.
Word was that a couple of Warmetal songs dealing with the Death Head Squadron were already out, although they hadn’t caught up with Third Fleet before it sailed off, worse luck. Having one of her favorite bands sing about her deeds was a dream come true, the kind of thing that made all the shit she’d been through seem worth the trouble.
“Vanity is a frail motivator, Christopher Robin.”
“Quiet, you. And keep your half-brother quiet, too.”
“I assure you we bear no relation to one another,” Atu replied in a prim tone before shutting up.
After their AAR, they would be able to relax for a bit. Third Fleet would spend a day or two foraging for consumables in-system before moving on, which would take another day or so. Three days of relative calm, assuming the Lampreys didn’t send their Quadrant Fleet here, which she doubted. The Lhan Arkh would no doubt made their stand two warp transits away, in the system known as Greater Congressional District Five. With a population of two billion, and the sixth largest shipyards of the polity, that was a system the enemy had to defend. A quick victory there would severely weaken the Lampreys and free Third Fleet to prepare for the next job at hand. If all went well, they’d be back to Xanadu ahead of schedule, in three weeks instead of four.
The Lhan Arkh would be waiting for them with everything they could muster, of course. Just because Lisbeth couldn’t think of anything the enemy could do to change the outcome of the next battle didn’t mean they wouldn’t.
* * *
Admiral Sondra Givens opened the courier-delivered dispatch and idly wondered how long it had been since a stealth corvette catching up with her flagship had brought unqualified good news. Not since the war began, she thought.
The electronic file she downloaded was a mixture of good and bad tidings. Bad news first: intelligence reports indicated the Lamprey forces at Congressional District Five had been reinforced by a flotilla of unknown origins. The reports were all marked as ‘unverified,’ which meant they depended on somewhat untrustworthy sources. Alien spacers who’d sold their sensor data to American agents, most likely. The alleged ‘thirty to fifty-ship formation’ detected maneuvering around one of the three Lhan Arkh inhabited worlds in the system had been observed by civilian sensors at long range; the energy signatures were too faint to even identity possible ship classes. Civilian vessels didn’t gather in such numbers and dispositions, however: those bogeys were warships, and their transponder readings weren’t Lhan Arkh or Imperium but something the informants hadn’t been able to identify.
Flag officers positively loathed surprises, and that was what awaited them at CD-5.
Much of the rest of the report was filled with things anybody with a star map and basic literacy could think of, plus a variety of wild guesses. The Lhan Arkh Congress had ‘borders’ with five other Starfarer polities: the Galactic Imper
ium, the Vipers, and the Wyrashat Empire were three of them, and it was vanishingly unlikely that any of them was the source of the unidentified fleet.
The Byriam, a.k.a. the Butterflies, were a possible but not probable suspect. They had contributed ships to the doomed Interstellar Armada that Kerensky had obliterated at New Texas, but the consensus was that they’d done so under duress from the Imperium. They also didn’t have a lot of ships to send; their system defense doctrine was based on STL ‘meteor showers’ – vast formations of unmanned space rocks with rudimentary guidance and control systems which would pelt any invader foolish enough to enter their worlds. Not the sort of weapon system you could pack up and use to project force elsewhere, in other words.
The Donn-Hee could also be safely eliminated. They were a small and generally despised civilization. Known commonly as the Diggers, the Class One species had been ground down by the Lampreys and other rapacious Starfarers and were confined to only a handful of systems, all containing only airless rocky planets made inhabitable only by the expedient of burrowing deep belowground and using geothermal and fusion power to provide life support. The Diggers were still around only because they had nothing worthwhile to steal. Even the Lampreys had figured it was easier to pay for warp transit rights through those systems than to spend ships and treasure conquering a bunch of near-useless planets. In any case, the Diggers had no ships to send; they had a frigate navy, barely good enough to fend off any pirates desperate enough to try to rob them.
From there, the guesses went from the merely useless to the fantastic. It was pointless to speculate; all she knew was that the enemy had been reinforced by an unknown actor, and she would have to adjust her plans with no knowledge beyond that.
The good news, such as it was, didn’t quite make up for the bad: the Navy was sending a carrier strike group to Xanadu to rendezvous with Third Fleet after it returned there in preparation of the second phase of the campaign. It was a small force: one first-generation fleet carrier and five light carriers, plus a destroyer squadron for escorts, with a total fighter strength of a hundred and sixty. The same number she’d had at the Battle of Parthenon, in other words. Once Third Fleet was out of contact and beyond resupply, the relative handful of War Eagles would be quickly attrited, unless they used the new ‘ghosting’ tactic, which had caused so much trouble already. Something else to worry about.
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