“Go duck yourself,” Russell growled. His commo was still working even though he was a notional casualty. Gonzo chuckled.
“What now?” Nacle asked.
“Now we hunker down and wait for support,” Gonzo replied. “And here come the tanks!”
“Tanks for nothing,” Russell said. He normally wasn’t big on puns, but it was better than just lying there. The whole thing felt a little too much like the last time he’d gone down for the count.
He just hoped that the next time it happened for real it wouldn’t be so bad.
“Give ‘em hell, Shellies!” Gonzo cried out.
Russell couldn’t see much from his prone position, but he sneaked a peek through his fire team’s sensors and watched the MEU’s tanks float into position. They didn’t look like much, from two klicks away, at least until they opened up on the laser position. A 250mm graviton cannon blast looked like nothing else in creation, and even the simulated version was scary as hell. The inner core of the beam was the purest black; some egghead had explained to Russell that it was akin to looking into a black hole, not you could actually see a black hole. Black in the center, surrounded with an aura of twisted matter, space and supposedly even time. When four beams hit the laser’s position, they turned it into a crater. Or would have, if it had been for real.
He’d briefly considered going into tanks. There was something to be said about being inside a hundred-ton metal beast with near-invulnerable force fields and armor and a main gun guaranteed to go through just about anything you could find on a planet. On the other hand, whenever a Shellie showed up, everybody on the other side did their level best to kill it. All in all, staying close to the ground and being able to duck for cover was better, he decided, even if sometimes you didn’t duck fast enough.
They were sure handy to have around when the shit hit the fan, though.
* * *
“We bring you death!” Staff Sergeant Konrad Zimmer roared at the top of his lungs.
“We bring you DOOM!” chorused the rest of the tank crew as the Fimbul Winter unleashed twisted gravity devastation on the simulated targets downrange.
Zimmer had been a Kriegsmetall fan ever since he’d been a snot-nosed teenager and his older sister had grudgingly taken him to a Star Valhalla concert. He’d been lucky enough to find two kindred souls in his crew. Both Lance Corporal Mira Rodriguez and PFC Jessie Graves were war-heads. Well, Mira had been, and between the two of them they’d dragged Jessie into it. Now they marched to battle to the sounds of Star Valhalla, Molon Labe or We Own the Night, and they loved it.
Since this was a simulation and not the real thing, they could be a bit more casual about singing and fighting. Things got a lot quieter when it was for real.
“Target, three o’clock,” Zimmer called out. A Viper field gennie, floating along on a weak graviton engine while providing protection to anything inside a two-hundred-yard radius around it.
“On the way! Hit!” Mira shouted. “DOOM!” The cannon blast punctured the force field and turned the generator into a fireball.
A volley of anti-armor rockets sped towards the tank, but Jessie had been alerted by the targeting warning sensors and made the tank lurch sideways fast and hard enough to slam Zimmer against his seat with bone-bruising force.
“Motherfucker!” Zimmer shouted. His armored vest absorbed most of the damage but that was still going to leave a mark.
“DOOM!” Jessie roared. Only one of the dozen or so missiles hit the tank, and it didn’t even make an impression on its shields.
“We bring you Hell,” Mira sang. She fired without calling out the target, but Zimmer had seen it too: a Viper rocketeer, standing up in full sight of God and radar. Were the real ETs that stupid? If they were, they would share the fate of the asshole who’d dared fire on the Fimbul Winter. The graviton blast drank away the lone figure, leaving no trace of the tango behind.
Most Vipers had scrambled for cover. Mira made sure they stayed down with a long burst from the coaxial 15mm automatic launch system. Plasma and frag grenades burst over the target area, showering the ETs with fiery death.
“Your Wyrd is here!” Zimmer sang on. His cupola ALS added some extra firepower to the mix. “Valhalla beckons!”
The rest of the platoon was spread over a mile-wide front, each of the four tanks creating a bubble of destruction where no living thing could exist without their permission. They had to be careful not to blue-on-blue the ground-pounders who’d been kind enough to fix the Vipers in place so the platoon could come sweeping down their left flank. Leg infantry had its uses, Zimmer supposed. If nothing else, they helped make sure any enemy grunts couldn’t get close enough to the tanks to become a nuisance.
First Lieutenant Morrell called out the all-clear. The platoon had run out of aliens to kill.
“And Death claimed them all!” the three crewmembers went on singing, mercifully only in their vehicle channel. The rest of the platoon didn’t share their passion for metal.
This was the life. Zimmer couldn’t wait for the real aliens to show up.
Sixth Fleet, Parthenon System Warp-Lane, 165 AFC
The courier ship didn’t bring any good news.
“That’s it?” Admiral Sondra Givens said in a soft voice. No sense scaring everyone inside the Tactical Flag Command Center, deep in the bowels of the Admiral-class dreadnought USS William Halsey Jr. Shouting would be bad for morale. Despite her best efforts, her voice rose slightly as she went on. “We know the Vipers are going to hit us here, and at any moment, and that’s all the reinforcements they send us? A squadron of Presidents almost as old as I am, and a smattering of frigates and destroyers?”
“Seventh Fleet is still coming together on Wolf 1061,” Rear Admiral Farragut said diffidently. The skipper of Sixth Fleet’s flagship didn’t sound any happier than Givens felt, despite the vain attempt to reassure the fleet commander.
Givens repressed a string of curses. Maintain an even strain; that saying was as true now that humankind had spread to the stars as it had been during the early days of the space program. This war was putting her normally-unflappable demeanor to the test. The fact that her own grandson had been killed during the opening salvos of the conflict – before the US even knew it was at war – didn’t help. She’d buried her dead, and she was more than ready and eager to bury the enemy next. But she needed the right tools for the job and she was getting a lot less than she’d expected.
Onscreen, Sixth Fleet was an impressive formation. Two dreadnoughts, six battleships, twelve battlecruisers, twenty-four light and medium cruisers that unfortunately included the six Presidential-class antiques that had just arrived and four converted Puppy light cruisers the GACS had sent along, thirty-six destroyers, six assault ships (currently mostly empty of Marines and serving mainly as missile-defense platforms) and sixty frigates.
Impressive, that is, until you considered that Fifth Fleet had been stronger in capital ships (four dreadnoughts and seven battleships) and had fielded about twenty percent more tonnage in all other vessel classes, and yet it’d been defeated and forced to run with its tail between it legs. It’d lost one irreplaceable dreadnought and three battleships, suffered even worse casualties down the rest of the battle line, and was now trying to pull itself together at Wolf 1061 after Givens had relieved it at Parthenon. The damage wasn’t just physical; a brief talk with Admiral Kerensky had made it clear to Givens that the fleet and its commander were beaten, thoroughly demoralized after being forced to abandon a major inhabited system to the Vipers. If Fifth Fleet had to fight again anytime soon, it wouldn’t fare well.
And Sondra Givens wasn’t sure her own ships would do any better.
Kerensky was a gifted commander, forged in the same cauldron where Givens’ own career had begun, fighting the Snakes into extinction. Both admirals were fighters who had eschewed advancement beyond fleet command because they belonged out in the dark of space, trading broadsides with any alien foolish enough to threaten America.
Neither of them had met with defeat in nearly a century of service, broken only by the occasional forced retirement periods meant to give others their chance to learn the tricks of the trade. And yet, despite his skill and resolve, Kerensky had failed; he was a shadow of his former self, at least for the time being.
“Seventh Fleet is expected to arrive no later than three months from now,” Farragut went on, breaking the string of dark thoughts running through her mind. “When it does, our strength will more than double.”
“Except many of those ships are still being built,” Givens said. “Their flagship, the Zeus, was still having its main warp drive assembled when we left Wolf 1061. Sure, they were almost finished when the war began and the Sol and Wolf shipyards are doing their best to get them ready, but it takes more than a launch ceremony to make a ship, and you know it.”
Farragut didn’t even try to argue the point. The fact was that putting crews together for those ships and getting them ready for action was going to take a lot more than three months, even if the paperwork was expedited. Normally a starship wasn’t deemed fit for service until a lengthy shakedown cruise to work out any kinks the engineers had missed, not to mention making sure the crew learned how to work together in an unfamiliar environment. While the Navy wasn’t short of experienced officers and crews, it too time to learn the idiosyncrasies of brand-new ship classes. Even if it arrived in time, Seventh Fleet’s effectiveness would be far lower than a landlubber would assume.
But they weren’t going to arrive in time. Three months was a wildly optimistic estimate, and she didn’t think the Vipers were going to give them three months to prepare. She’d sent a steady stream of scout ships into Heinlein System; the little stealth destroyers had taken losses from enemy pickets but their efforts had formed a picture of the aliens’ activities. Heinlein-Five was gone, all defensive bases and every city burned to the ground. There were probably scattered survivors in remote areas, but for all intents and purposes the planet had been lost.
The enemy fleet was replacing the losses it’d incurred taking that system. Her scouts’ reports indicated the Vipers would be at full strength in fifteen to twenty days. For most intents and purposes, they were ready now.
They didn’t have three months. She didn’t think they had three weeks.
Nine
Trade Nexus Eleven, 165 AFC
“Isn’t this interesting?” Heather said.
“What’s interesting?” Guillermo Hamilton asked. He’d been busy poring over the latest Imperium production figures he’d gotten from a friendly Oval trader who was amenable to taking bribes and sharing information.
“The GACSS 1138 docked onto TN-11 earlier today.”
“And this is important because...?” the station chief muttered instead of bothering to do a search of the name. Heather sighed and sent him the info directly, imp-to-imp. Remfie.
“Oh,” he said after reading the data dump.
“Yeah. That ship played a role in the Days of Infamy. More specifically, in the attack on Jasper-Five. We even got some eyewitness accounts from the natives after we made a deal with the new government; they testified that the ship unloaded the components used to destroy two American corvettes. Which in turn almost cost the lives of every human on the planet.”
Including my own, but let’s not make this personal, not quite yet.
“I see. And why haven’t our good friends the Pan-Asians turned them over to us?”
“They tried. I know they usually don’t like cooperating with us, but the situation has changed.” The realities of the situation couldn’t be ignored. Like every other human nation in the galaxy, the Greater Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere was at war with the Tripartite Galactic Alliance, and only the US could protect their space colonies. “They issued arrests warrants for the ship’s captain and her crew. Someone warned them, however, and they’ve gone rogue. For the past year, they’ve avoided human space, and anywhere else that will extradite them. Which unfortunately doesn’t include the O-Vehel Commonwealth. The Ovals don’t like bothering traders. Too much of their economy depends on the ‘free passage of goods and information.’ Free except for their tariffs and fees, that is.”
“Despite the fact that the ship’s actions got a number of Ovals killed on Jasper-Five?”
“A lot of human pilots are working for the Vehelians,” Heather explained. The ability to handle warp space better than any other extant species in the galaxy made human-crewed vessels rather valuable. Enterprising Earthlings could write their own ticket crewing alien ships. And many of them didn’t bother paying US taxes on their income, which made them outlaws in human space. Thousands of those rogue pilots were happy with their status as exiles, though. “The Ovals don’t want to antagonize them by turning on one of their own. On the other hand, they aren’t likely to join the Tripartite Alliance for pretty much the same reasons. They consider humans a valuable asset.”
“All of which means there isn’t much we can do,” the chief spook said. “They don’t let bounty hunters operate in their territory, either. If they won’t turn them over to us, that’s the end of the matter. I guess we can report their passage, maybe try to find out what their next port of call will be. We don’t have any other options,” he concluded, clearly intent on forgetting about the Pan-Asian rogue ship and getting back to work.
“Our legal options,” Heather said.
“Uh, oh. I smell cowboy crap. We’re not set up to do wet work, McClintock.”
“We are authorized to sanction enemy assets, as long as such operation can be safely disavowed,” she reminded her boss. ‘Sanction’ was spook jargon for killing. While the CIA was primarily in the info gathering business, it also helped deal with enemies foreign and, under certain circumstances, domestic.
“What do you propose?”
“Well, I have been gathering contacts with the local underworld.”
“Criminals,” Hamilton said with disdain. “Unreliable, dangerous. I thought you had more sense than that.”
“They have their uses. My report on those Viper fleet movements came from smugglers, in case you forgot.”
“You got lucky. Next time, they’ll probably try to sell you garbage. I don’t know, McClintock. I don’t like improvising an op on the fly. Could this be a trap?” Guillermo was trying to be the voice of reason, and was coming off like the voice of a chickenshit.
“I checked their travel records. They’ve made stopped at TN-11 seven times over the last six years. They are currently delivering Lamprey foodstuffs to a couple high-rent restaurants that serve Class One delicacies at ruinous prices. Doesn’t smell fishy to me. Except maybe the food.”
“How long do we have before they’re gone?”
“They’ve paid docking fees for the next seventy-two hours, with an option to extend. Probably trying to negotiate for new cargo. So figure we’ve got two, maybe three days minimum.”
“Not exactly a surfeit of time. What do you propose to do? We can’t bring the Marine security detachment into this. We’re not going to instigate an act of war against a neutral just to get some pirates.”
“I know,” she said, trying not to let her impatience show. Yes, this was personal, but it also fulfilled their professional duties. Traitors to humanity couldn’t be allowed to live. “Like I said, I’ve made some useful local contacts.”
“Again with the thugs,” Guillermo said. He preferred to work with high-class criminals, like corrupt government officials who could be bribed and blackmailed. He didn’t quite get that regular criminals could provide a great deal of support. Too many CIA operatives came from the wealthier and more ‘civilized’ sections of the US, on Earth or off, places where getting your hands dirty or bloody just wasn’t done. Heather might have been raised in that community, but contact with the real world had changed her. Maybe Guillermo would get it too, eventually.
“I can handle it, Gill. I’ll take care of it, and if anything goes wrong, you can disavow me. If everything works out, you g
et the credit. I don’t care about credit. I just want to get those bastards.”
Hamilton thought about. In the end, she guessed the chance of getting rid of her was as much an incentive for him as pulling off a major covert operation. The two intelligence officers hadn’t warmed up to each other. “All right. Let’s keep it off the books. Completely off. Can’t leave any sort of trail on this one.”
By which he meant that he didn’t want CIA funds to show up anywhere near the operation. They wouldn’t. Heather had been accumulating a decent stash of ‘unofficial’ funds during the past six months. She’d used her own money to start with, and made it grow via a variety of investments, some legal, some somewhat questionable. She’d learned from her time in Kirosha that relying on her official budget could leave you high and dry in the field. Sometimes you needed to be able to pony up some cash up front and there wasn’t time for some bean counter up the chain of command to approve the expense. And she’d discovered she had a not inconsiderable talent in business. When or if she retired from public service, she’d probably be able to supplement her pension rather handsomely.
Her family would be proud, the day she got a ‘real’ job. Assuming she lived that long.
“I’ve got it covered,” she said. If the op went well, he’d make everything ‘official’ and reimburse her for the expenses, along with getting all the credit. That was fine by her.
She had a score to settle.
* * *
“How about a discount, jingjing girl?” the Korean spacer said for the third time as he allowed the hooker to drag him into an alleyway between two dive bars in the low-rent section of the station, so low-rent you needed to bring your own oxygen along unless you came from a very light-atmosphere planet. He and his buddy – you didn’t wander the more disreputable parts of TN-11 on your own – were drunk, stoned, and ready to play. Their facemasks and inebriation slurred their words as they shared a joke and laughed.
No Price Too High (Warp Marine Corps Book 2) Page 14