No Price Too High (Warp Marine Corps Book 2)

by C. J. Carella

  They’d been facing a brigade. The second wave was estimated to comprise an entire corps.

  Twelve

  Parthenon-Three, 165 AFC

  Morris Jensen suppressed a yawn as he stood watch.

  The Forward Operations Base consisted of a thinly-manned defense perimeter, a vehicle laager, some hastily-erected tents, and a mass of weekend warriors and civilian volunteers unloading and organizing supplies. Everything from power packs to toilet paper was being stored there to support the Marines trying to keep the aliens from pushing deeper into Forge Valley.

  Trying, and failing. Morris had been listening in on their comm chatter, courtesy of his prior service; when they’d activated the Volunteer Regiment, somebody had screwed up and granted him the same network access he’d had as an E-8, First Sergeant, rather than his current rank, two grades lower, not to mention in an auxiliary branch of the military. Under normal circumstances, he would have been booted out of the network, but nothing was normal. Which had given him a front-row seat to the battle being fought a hundred miles east of his position.

  A Marine Expeditionary Unit packed a lot of firepower, but it was still nothing more than a reinforced battalion, and that just wasn’t enough to hold off two division equivalents, even if they were mostly light infantry. They’d had to pull back to their third prepped position over the last twenty-four hours, which hadn’t been supposed to happen for two or three days. They’d had no choice: the Vipers were tough, and they were getting through natural obstacles that would have slowed down or even halted human infantry. The 101st kept being threatened with encirclement and forced to fall back. Not retreat, mind you. Marines never retreated. They were just relocating backwards at a rapid pace.

  The Volunteers might end up having to load the supplies back into the trucks and drive back to the east end of the valley. Militia didn’t have any problems with retreating. As long as their families were safe, they’d be happy to run away. Came with having a brain.

  “Second Squad, we just got a report of enemy activity somewhere near Lover’s Leap,” Lieutenant Cassidy sent out through the platoon’s net. “Go check it out.”

  “Roger that,” Morris said.

  “Sending you the report.”

  Morris reviewed the imp footage while he led the ten men in the squad towards the cliff commonly known as Lover’s Leap, named after an urban legend involving a couple of teenagers who’d allegedly committed suicide by gravity shortly after the town’s founding, the kind of place the current crop of teenagers liked to frequent to fool around. Morris was grateful Mariah hadn’t yet reached the age where that kind of thing would be an issue.

  The imp recording came from, unsurprisingly enough, two teenaged civvies, a boy and girl, who’d taken a break from helping out at the FOB to spend some quality time together. The footage showed something big moving through some brushes: the kids had panicked and run back screaming, and luckily the girl had retained enough presence of mind to send out an alert. The shaky video wasn’t clear enough for an ID, though: there were a few large critters out in the wild, and whatever had been crashing through the foliage could be any of them. Better safe than sorry, though.

  “Any chance of drone coverage?” he asked the El-Tee.

  “That’s a negatory, Jensen,” the company commander replied. “Drone losses have been heavy and the gyrenes don’t have any to spare.”

  The goddamn officer hadn’t even bothered to ask the Marines about the drones. Lieutenant Cassidy was pushing fifty, but had zero combat experience and was an officer only because his pappy was a wealthy donor who’d paid for a lot of the Volunteers’ equipment. Morris thought about pressing the issue, then sighed and carried on. They’d find out if there was anything to worry about soon enough.

  They ran into the young couple about halfway there. The two fifteen-year olds were out of breath and clearly scared shitless.

  “Oh, thank God!” the girl cried out and she and her boyfriend all but collapsed at their feet.

  Her Facettergram profile popped up in Morris’ field of vision, providing him with her name.

  “Hey, Becky. Becky Cunningham – I know your dad, he runs the general store, doesn’t he?”

  She nodded, panting from fear and exhaustion.

  “Just tell me what you saw.”

  “We heard something, I, uh, tried to take a look, but Tommy pushed me down and we crawled away. I’m sure it was an ET! He woulda shot us if we hadn’t run!”

  Tommy confirmed the story, with a lot of extra profanity thrown in.

  “All right, head back to the FOB, and next time don’t wander out into the woods, all right? We’re having us a war here, in case you didn’t notice.”

  Becky and Tommy nodded emphatically and took off.

  “Think there’s anything to it?” Lemon asked.

  Morris shrugged. He couldn’t believe the Vipers could have made it this deep into the valley, but you never knew.

  “Only one way to find out. All right, people! Spread out, skirmish line. Let’s act like it’s for real.”

  All the men in the squad had been in combat and knew the drill. They moved forward in a staggered double line, half the squad hanging back and providing cover while the other half advanced. Everyone knew the area; they headed for a slight rise that overlooked Lovers’ Leap, staying low and quiet.

  Lemon was the first to spot the ETs.

  Vipers, he sent out via imp.

  And there they were, half a dozen aliens in a half circle next to the cliff. As they watched, a couple more scrambled up. Becky and Tommy must have spotted the first one up.

  The six-hundred-foot cliff was nearly sheer, but it could be climbed. A couple of mountaineering enthusiasts did so every once in a while. And Vipers were like spiders when it came to climbing stuff.

  Another alien made it to the top. Now there were eight. Less than a klick away from the FOB. No time to wait for orders.

  “Light them up!” Morris said, drawing a bead on a Viper with a rocket launcher and double-tapping him with two armor-piercing grenades. The bastard went down.

  Their first fusillade took out four Eets. The others managed to duck for cover and return fire. An eighth Viper poked his head over the edge of the cliff and Morris put a couple of bursts of 4mm explosive into him. The alien’s force field failed and he went back the way he came. It was a long drop to the bottom. Problem was, Morris didn’t need drones to tell him there were plenty more where he came from; the cliff face could well be crawling with hundreds of Echo Tangos.

  It took a bit of yelling to get through to the El-Tee, but word went out. A flight of drones got sent out, along with a promise that help was on the way. Morris and the squad kept the aliens pinned down, but more were coming up, and they couldn’t take them out fast enough. At least the enemy didn’t seem to have any fireflies with them.

  Drones arrived, and Morris got their take as they flew over Lovers’ Leap. It wasn’t as bad as he’d imagined. It was a lot worse.

  A reinforced company’s worth of Vipers were on the cliff’s face, scrambling up like so many spider-monkeys. Two hundred, maybe more. And that wasn’t the real bad news.

  An entire infantry regiment was at the foot of the mountain range, headed for a narrow pass some ten klicks to the southeast. How the aliens had managed to make their way through the largely impassable mountains, Morris had no idea. Maybe they’d had some grav vehicles along to help them through the rough spots. None of that mattered, though. If someone didn’t stop them, they would flank the entire blocking force.

  Morris ducked when a laser shattered a piece of rock and peppered him with stone shards. His shields caught them, but the whole thing reminded him why he’d left the Corps.

  * * *

  Fromm and Charlie Company raced to beat the devil.

  Colonel’s Brighton’s orders had been terse and to the point. Head back towards FOB Sentinel and use his command to stop the flanking force that had managed to bypass most of Forge Valley.
Success was going to depend on who reached their objective first. Fromm’s troop carriers had more ground to cover but their LAVs could move at two hundred miles an hour if they rose above any obstacles and they left the slower Hellcats behind. They did both. There was a chance the extra elevation would allow some of the ETs on the west end of the valley to take a few shots at the vehicles, but he had to risk it.

  The twenty Light Assault Vehicles ferrying Charlie and elements of the battalion’s weapons company rose some twenty feet off the ground and got moving. Someone sent a full flight of forty mini-missiles after them, but they were intercepted mid-flight by the battalion’s air-defense battery. Charlie Company kept going, only slowing down when it approached the area force fields protecting the FOB; going over sixty mph would lead to a crash against the energy shields.

  The base was in chaos. Some militiamen and civvies were still doing their jobs, but some fobbit was trying to organize a perimeter defense by handing out rifles to a bunch of militiamen who hadn’t fired a gun in anger since Basic. Fromm could only hope they wouldn’t end up with a bunch of friendly fire incidents. Not his problem. If the Vipers got to the militia’s defensive perimeter, they were toast. Of course, his command would be long gone if that was the case.

  For once, things went as planned, and Charlie Company got to the pass before the Vipers, thank God for small favors. To call the narrow footpath between a series of rough natural ladders on a mountainside a pass was something of an exaggeration, but apparently the aliens had thought they could move a regiment through it. Fromm intended to disabuse them of such notions.

  The troops came out of their vehicles and got to work setting up a hasty defense. The LAVs retreated back a ways and positioned themselves hull-down, only the tops of their turrets protruding from view. Fromm thought about using camo netting to hide the company, but dismissed the idea. He wanted the area force fields deployed and working, and they would be detected right away by the Vipers. The first ambush had been risky enough, keeping their energy shields down until the enemy was nearly on top of their positions, and that kind of trick was unlikely to work twice. The alien assault troopers might be dumb, but the expert systems leading them were smart enough to learn from their previous mistakes.

  His troops had just enough time to dig in and prepare to receive the enemy. Strips of explosive ‘diggers’ did most of the work, blasting holes into the rocky soil that the soldiers improved with their classic entrenching tools. A mile behind them, a company from the Volunteers were working on a secondary line of defense. Fromm hoped they wouldn’t need it. Their current position was the narrowest point in the pass, barely wide enough to deploy a squad in a line, the place where his company could concentrate the most fire, where the enemy would have to concentrate and take fire from up high for pretty much the entire length of their formation.

  It was still a matchup between a regiment and a company. Fromm concentrated on the positive. It was a lightly-armed regiment. This particular group only had three field generators in support, and no heavy weapons other than their rocket launchers. Their lasers outranged his Marines’ small arms, but that wouldn’t matter here; the twisting pass wouldn’t allow direct fire from more than three, four hundred yards. And he had two artillery batteries backing him up.

  The Vipers’ fireflies began to shoot down drones as the enemy force approached. Somewhere ahead of him, the main gun of one of the LAVs opened up, the stream of gravitons making a thunderous sound as it warped space-time on its way to the target.

  The battle was joined.

  * * *

  The ETs’ lasers were like a rainbow.

  At least that was how they looked to Russell; his imp turned the normally invisible energy streams into lines of red, yellow and green, color-coded to indicate how close they were to his position. Red was the worst, of course. And there was a lot of red.

  When the red lines became dots, it meant they were aimed straight at you, and you ducked, even if you had three force fields between you and them, because you never knew if one of those beams was going to punch through them and punch your ticket. The alien bastards were going continuous beam at the moment, pouring it on in other words, massive amounts of energy concentrated on a point a couple millimeters wide, and the area force fields started to flicker and sparkle when multiple beams converged on them. Somewhere down the line, the status carat of a trooper from First Platoon went yellow. Morales, one of the boots. The poor bastard hadn’t remembered to duck and gotten tagged. He wasn’t dead, but your carat didn’t go yellow from a first-degree burn or a scratch. Somebody had put a hurt on him.

  The detached part of Russell that deal with such things processed the information and set it aside. The rest of him was busy servicing targets in between ducking lasers, shooting at designated aiming points just like the Vipers were. Aim at the virtual dot and fire when ordered: his 20mm shield buster hit the Viper’s area field at the same time as a grenade from Nacle, opening a temporary breach that Gonzo filled with a long burst from his ALS-43. Most rounds were wasted on the shield, but a handful made it through and potted an ET who’d stepped out of cover, and that was enough to send him to hell, personal force field or not.

  Fucking ETs. Behind their area field, it took an entire fire team to get one of them, more like two when you were talking about regular Marine infantry. Russell and his team were more heavily armed than the average leatherneck, but chewing through the enemy defenses still took some doing.

  First Squad’s LAV opened up over their heads, firing behind a massive boulder that added its bulk to the vehicle’s own force field and composite armor. Its 30mm grav cannon was part of a volley aimed at a Viper field genny. Knocking those out would make killing the ETs a lot easier. There was no big boom among the scurrying scaly critters filling up the pass, though; no joy this time.

  Russell got another target, and he and his buddies dutifully tagged it. The Viper staggered but made it behind cover, and his alien pals’ lasers got through the platoon’s big shield before being stopped by the squad’s portable one; everyone in the fire team ducked before that. The aliens were getting closer, down to three hundred yards. Some artillery would be nice just about now, but Russell hadn’t seen any explosions overhead for a while. Things must be getting livelier on the other side of the valley, there a couple alien divisions were chasing the rest of the 101st all over the place. He’d chanced a peek during a lull in the action, and he’d watched some short-lived drone footage. The second wave of Vipers had included a company of Turtles. Light tanks, small and not even as tough as a LAV, let alone a Stormin’ Norman, but a lot more dangerous than the leg infantry they’d mostly been fighting so far. That wasn’t going to be any fun.

  He ducked as multiple red dots joined together towards him. The portable force field dissolved in a shower of colorful sparks and a chunk of rock over his head exploded as a laser superheated it and turned it into a good imitation of a hand grenade. Fragments peppered everyone, but their personal shields kept them in one piece.

  The squad’s portable shield didn’t come back.

  “Drained battery,” Gonzo said while he fired a short burst before ducking for cover.

  “I got it,” Nacle called out; the Mormon started crawling towards the genny, a boxy contraption they’d set on the ground some five yards behind their position. It would take him about a minute to grab a power pack from the supply box and replace the spent one, and Russell and Gonzo couldn’t hunker down and wait that long. The squad’s fire computer was calling out more targets; they were going to have to do without a shield and start shooting. All in a day’s work.

  “Ready?”

  “Ready,” Gonzo said, sounding as happy as Russell felt.

  Tango at two-fifty meters. Another rocket-launching mother lover. Russell and Gonzaga leaned out and let him have it, full bursts and a 20mm plasma round that reached out and tore the fucker apart – just as he ripple-fired a full load of missiles their way. Russell had just enough time to s
ee a wall of flame blossoms against the platoon’s area force field before a leaker got to his unprotected foxhole.

  The world turned white, then black.

  He was on his hands and knees, blood filling his mouth, clogging his nose. Everything hurt. He hawked, snorted and spat until he could breathe again, ignoring the bloody phlegm dripping on the inside of the helmet and running down his chin. It took him a moment to remember who he was and what was going on, and another moment to query his imp and get a status check. Green. Well, greenish. He had a mild concussion, but the nanomeds were on the job. Nothing else was broken, other than his Iwo: the infantry weapon had taken the brunt of the explosion, and it was no longer usable.

  Russell checked on the rest of his fire team next. Gonzo’s carat was yellow. A piece of his own body armor had spalled under the explosion. The fragment of high-refractory carbon-ceramic alloy had stabbed him in the chest and perforated a lung. The wound was being serviced by the nanomeds but it was going to take a full regen tank to fix. Nacle had been knocked silly by the overpressure but was back on the job. By the time Russell regained his bearings, the squad’s force field was active again.

  Two bubblehead corpsmen put Gonzo on a static lift stretcher and crawled away, the stretcher floating an inch off the ground. He’d be all right, assuming their position didn’t get overrun.

  “Nacle, check on Gonzo’s Alsie,” Russell ordered. According to his imp, the ALS-43 was in working order, but it was best to be sure.

  “On it.” Nacle crawled to the spot where the Automatic Launch System had been flung aside when the Viper missile volley had blasted their position. The fighting hole had been chewed up to hell; Russell and Gonzo were lucky to be alive.