No Price Too High (Warp Marine Corps Book 2)

by C. J. Carella

  The aliens were playing it smart, not risking their capital ships but instead sending destroyers and frigates to support the planetary assault ships while they deployed more troops. The vat-grown semi-sentient clones didn’t take very long to grow, program and send out to fight; the main constraint on the attack force was the number of landing pods it could deploy, which appeared to be more than enough to do the job. The enemy armada had made another resupply run a couple of days ago and come back with full bunkers and magazines. Sixth Fleet hadn’t even tried to interfere. Her orders didn’t allow her any discretion in that matter and she understood why. Another hundred-thousand-plus missile volley would inflict irreparable damage on her formation. Sooner or later, though, the Vipers would come to her.

  Probably after the planet was depopulated.

  The thought filled Sondra Givens with rage. Civilians had never been massacred on her watch. That was only supposed to happen over her dead body. The few times when her ship or fleet had arrived too late to prevent such mass killings had been bad enough. To hold a position nearby while human cities burned was a new experience. New, and quickly becoming intolerable.

  “Warp emergence anticipated, ma’am,” Space Watch Specialist Morelos said. “Fifty-three minutes from now. Contact is a single vessel, tentatively idenfitied as a courier.”

  Maybe the incoming boat would announce that the long-promised reinforcements were finally on their way. Admiral Givens didn’t feel very optimistic, though. The possibility that she would be ordered to withdraw and abandon Parthenon – and dozens of worlds further down its linked warp chains – loomed large in her mind. Those fifty minutes went by slowly, the waiting interrupted only by further bad news. No more PDBs fell, but they were all taking damage and the Vipers were landing more troops, sending them down as quickly as they were force-grown to adulthood. Their losses were gruesome but the aliens saw assault troops as no less fungible and expendable than power packs.

  “Emergence detected. Contact identified as courier ship.”

  The tiny corvette, its class demoted to mail-carrying duties many decades ago, appeared within Sixth Fleet’s formation. Its burst transmission uploaded several encrypted missives along with the regular mail, everything from personal messages for crewmembers to the Nebraska Times’ weekly crossword puzzle and newest YouMake uploads.

  “I’m sure it’ll be brimming with good news,” she said glibly. “Promotions all around, maybe even news that this whole thing was a big misunderstanding and we’re at peace with the whole universe.”

  Her comment elicited a few chuckles in the TFCC. Gallows humor was the only source of amusement left.

  She mentally opened the Fleet communiques, dreading what they would contain but making sure she looked detached, even bored as she did. Sobbing uncontrollably and tearing out chunks of her hair would be bad for morale.

  The news was bad enough she wished she could do both those things. The President and the JCS had decided to send a freaking Carrier Strike Group her way, brand-new – experimental – weapon systems whose existence she was hearing of for the first time. There’d been rumors about some wild-eyed project along those lines for quite some time, but nobody had thought it was anywhere near completion.

  Givens read the fighters’ technical specs and mentally added a metric ton of salt to the incredible claims. They sounded much too good to be true. She’d use them, of course. Even if the little fighter craft proved to be only a nuisance, the strike group’s modified assault ships and their destroyer escorts would add to her point defenses, and she needed every last bit of those. She noted they’d even butchered a battlecruiser to serve as the group flagship. What a waste.

  The rest of the reinforcements in the force designated as Task Force 43 were conventional. An obsolete battleship, the last of the Planet-class vessels, which was larger than one of her battlecruisers but had less firepower, armor and shields. Eight light cruisers detached from a so-far peaceful sector, not ideal ships for the massive slugfest to come, but at least their crews were experienced and used to working together. About a dozen light ships, newly-commissioned frigates and destroyers, well-armed and fitted, but crewed by a mixture of reassigned veterans and green spacers that hadn’t had a lot of time to learn the idiosyncrasies of their vessels. A quick review of their stats showed their performance was barely adequate, and would likely be even worse when energy beams started flying in earnest.

  All in all, though, she’d have traded the carriers for the same tonnage of destroyers and frigates, or even assault ships. Boarding actions were forlorn hopes nowadays, but if most of her Marines hadn’t been on P-3, she’d have used them against those missile cruisers, just in case the Vipers had tried to save space by reducing the security complements on their ships. Unfortunately, she didn’t have enough warp-rated troops for even one boarding party, let alone the dozens needed to make a difference.

  The relief force was twenty-four hours away. One more day she’d spend watching a planet die, and hoping there would be something worth saving when she finally took action.

  Fifteen

  Parthenon-Three, 165 AFC

  “Look at them kitties,” Bozo said in near-awe.

  “I see them. Slick, aren’t they?”

  Russell was less impressed with the video feed from the drones orbiting the forward edge of the battle area but Bozeman had never seen the Hellcats in action before. The four-legged war machines hadn’t been around when the new guy in the fire team had been a grunt. They’d only been deployed a couple years ago, and most units still hadn’t gotten them. The 101st’s kitty platoons had arrived after the BLT had been reconstituted last year. After training with them for several months, Russell thought they were neat, but all in all he’d rather be a ground pounder.

  They sure could run fast, though.

  The thirteen surviving ‘cats in Fourth Platoon were conducting a fighting retreat, half of them holding the line while the other half moved to the next fallback position and provided cover for the next dash back. The rear guard greeted the pursuing Vipers with a storm of 15mm rounds and mini-missiles. The snake-spiders dived for cover and returned the favor with their lasers and rocket launchers. For a few furious seconds, a lot of terrain got rearranged without any casualties for either side. Russell knew that happy state of affairs wouldn’t last for long.

  “Any second now,” he muttered; you learned to time the enemy’s reactions after being on the receiving end enough times. “Kitties better start moving.”

  They did. The front line abandoned their positions and bugged out just before the Vipers peppered the area with a short barrage of 89mm mortar bombs. The tangos were still short of real artillery but the third landing force had brought plenty of mortars with them, and they were nasty mothers. The little puffs of smoke and flashes of light going off at thirty feet over their targets looked harmless enough from two klicks away, but Russell had recently learned how nasty the rain of shaped-charge plasma penetrators and hypersonic shrapnel really was at close range. If the Hellcats had waited too long, they would have taken losses, heavy force fields and armor notwithstanding.

  You had to know when to walk away, and when to run, as the old song went. True in war, love, business and gambling. In life, in other words.

  The Eets wasted no time making a forward rush under the cover of their mobile area shields, but the second half of Fourth Platoon was set up and waiting for them. A coordinated volley took out their field genny; and sent a few luckless Vipers to Hell. A moment later, Charlie’s own mortars added to the kill count. The surviving aliens went to ground once again. Russell was willing bet they wouldn’t be so eager to chase the ‘cats next time.

  It would have been great if one of the 101st’s tanks had been around to help out, but the three Normies still running were some ten klicks away and had problems of their own. There were never enough tanks to go around. The Corps fielded a whole three Marine armored brigades, and Russell had never been deployed with any of them. He had no
idea what the brass ever did with them. Maybe parade them around New Parris so they could tell themselves what tough sumbitches they all were. An additional seven or eight hundred tanks were scattered in platoon- and company-sized bits among assorted units, and that was it. Which meant Charlie had no armor support at the moment.

  “Fuck. Their armor’s rolling in,” Bozo said.

  The enemy had brought its own tanks to play.

  Russell switched his sensor feed to take a wider look and spotted them. Four of the little Turtles, which had turned out to be a joke, and two Dragons, which were anything but.

  The gliding metal mountain coming their way weighed in at some three hundred tons, a tetrahedron roughly thirty feet tall. Its bulk and huge profile made it a dream target. Except said dream target had battleship force fields and armor plating. Only a Normie’s main gun could hope to put a hole on that monster with a single shot. The Dragon also had a dozen weapon systems distributed among weapon pods on each of its three sides, including a souped-up version of a firefly that could destroy dozens of shells or missiles per burst and three 333mm grav-cannon, each of which would punch right through a Schwarzkopf’s glacis plate. Plus a mortar battery’s worth of indirect-fire tubes per side. The Vipers had landed six of those monsters with their last wave. One had gotten caught by a full regimental artillery barrage the day before; it was still burning merrily some fifty klicks west, the thick smoke rising from its funeral pyre visible in the distance. That left five unaccounted for. And they’d found one of them.

  “Designating priority target,” Lieutenant Hansen said over Third Platoon’s channel. Third Platoon’s new CO sounded cool as a cucumber, which helped a bit. The old El-Tee, O’Malley, would have been pissing his pants and probably arguing with higher about conducting a retrograde maneuver just about now. “We’ve got to hit that thing with everything we’ve got. Fire on my command.”

  Everyone acknowledged. Specific weapon and targeting instructions followed. It looked like three of the four platoons in the company were going to throw everything at the Dragon, up to and including the kitchen sink, bad language and evil thoughts. The good news is that no enemy area field generators seemed to have survived to tag along. The bad news was that the Dragon carried his own area shield projector as well as close-in and internal shields. Digging their way into its mechanical guts was going to be a job of work.

  The alien super-tank wasn’t just prancing around in the open, either. It was gliding at a steady sixty miles an hour, taking a few potshots at the retreating Hellcats while it used dips in elevation and other terrain features to reduce its profile. It didn’t have a turret; its guns were spaced evenly among its three sides, each weapon pod covering a field of fire a hundred and twenty degrees wide. One of its secondaries opened up on a Hellcat that had ducked behind a boulder, and a stream of railgun slugs chewed through the granite like a monsoon hitting a spun sugar confection. The ‘cat ran for its life, barely outrunning the long burst and finding safety behind a hill.

  Russell turned off the drone feed; the Dragon had its own swatters and was knocking out the little robotic cameras by the cartload, so the view was beginning to deteriorate. He focused on his sight picture and assigned target. Five rounds rapid of 20mm armor-piercing might scratch the super-tank’s paint job, but the purpose of his shots was to drain a little bit of power from the force fields protecting the beast’s armored skin. He waited for the orders to fire.

  Artillery came first, a time-on-target barrage. The ADA systems on the super-tank and its Turtle escorts destroyed many of the shells, but plenty others broke through the area force field and struck both the Dragon and its escorts with multiple plasma penetrators. All four lightly-protected tankettes went up in flames; the behemoth’s own shields flickered but held.

  His aiming carat blinked green and he fired his five-round stonk as fast as he could cycle the launcher’s action. His shots were lost amidst a couple hundred guns of assorted varieties. A myriad beam and physical impacts turned the normally near-invisible outline of super-tank’s force field into a colorful bubble and wreathed it in flames before it collapsed.

  Nacle opened up with his Alsie a moment later as a second set of gunners took advantage of the shield’s failure, striking the Dragon’s hull just as another time-on-target artillery volley hit, every shell going off at the same time. Self-forging armor-piercers and plasma penetrators smashed into the ambulatory three-sided pyramid. A dozen molten spears hammered its top structure and made it ring so loudly Russell could hear the impacts over the other sounds of battle.

  The Viper death-machine continued advancing and returned fire before anybody could asses what damage the Marines had inflicted on it.

  A heavy railgun position six klicks back was devoured by a graviton blast that shaved off the top of the hill where it’d been emplaced. The poor Army bastards manning that weapon never knew what hit them. A Hellcat that had lingered too long to empty its missile load took a direct hit from another main gun and simply ceased to exist, swallowed by the twisting beam of compressed space-time. A sheaf of mortars bombs went off over Charlie Co’s firing positions; its area force fields held, for the time being at least.

  Every LAV available, twelve vehicles total, raised their hulls just enough for their main guns to clear cover and opened up. Russell and everyone with a ready weapon were instructed to fire at the same time.

  The brutal exchange that followed was like a high-tech version of a knife fight: the loser might end up in the morgue, but the winner would be lucky to end up in the emergency room. Or maybe it was like a beamer duel at five yards: nobody walked away from one of those.

  Something made the ground heave up under Russell’s feet. A moment later the rocky hill he’d been firing from settled down a good six or seven inches lower than it’d been a moment before. A grav-cannon hit, Russell figured. The Viper gunner had aimed low and killed a chunk of hill. A slightly higher angle would have ended with him and the whole squad getting spaghettified along the beam’s path. The thought was lost amidst the frenzy of shooting and reloading and shooting again. Portions of the Dragon’s armor were deforming under the rain of gravitons, plasma, hypervelocity rockets and a dozen other munition or energy types; molten craters formed as sections of its ultra-dense alloy splashed away, revealing cracks in the crystalline matrix of its hull’s second layer. The LAVs’ graviton guns were beginning to blast their way in, but only by exposing themselves.

  The Dragon shifted aim. Only two of its main guns were able to bear, but each of them scored a hit. An assault vehicle’s turret disappeared in a flash of light; another LAV was struck by a glancing shot that knocked out its shields and blotted out one of its (luckily empty) missile launchers. The outpour of fire slackened off. Some gunners were ducking for cover and refusing to follow their aiming directives; others had died at their posts. Either way, they weren’t shooting anymore.

  Fucker wouldn’t die. It just wouldn’t…

  The end was anticlimactic. The Dragon seemed to shudder, and one of its three weapon pods burst open from the inside; a power pack or some explosive ordnance must have gone off, Russell guessed. The super-tank’s three-hundred-ton hulk hit the ground like a dropped anvil and stopped fighting or moving. The Americans kept shooting at the lifeless pyramid for several seconds until the barked orders to check fire finally sunk in.

  Russell sipped some electrolyte-rich flavored water from the integral straw in his helmet. He wanted to raise his visor but there were were too many fires raging nearby, spewing all kinds of toxic chemicals into the atmosphere. Better let the filters do their jobs.

  “Can’t believe we killed it,” Nacle said. The barrel of his ALS-43 was hot enough to make the air shimmer around it.

  “Can’t believe it didn’t kill us first,” Russell said. All of us, that is, he corrected himself mentally. There were plenty of black status carats among the three platoons that had engaged the monster and the Army elements that had joined in the fun. And most of t
he Viper infantry was still in play; they weren’t coming out of their hidey-holes, not after their big daddy had bought it, but sooner or later an AI or a vehicle pilot with normal brains would assume command and herd them forward.

  The order to fall back and leave this section of the valley came in before the tangos did anything. Which meant the enemy had pushed through somewhere else and was threatening one of their flanks.

  The Marines were getting steamrolled. Slowly, and it was costing the aliens plenty, but all that mattered was the fact they no longer could hold their ground against the enemy.

  * * *

  “Danger close!”

  Ducking for cover inside a LAV was a mostly futile gesture; the best you could do was make sure you were strapped down tightly enough you didn’t bounce inside the armored confines of the compartment like dice in a bucket. Fromm still lowered his head when he heard the warning. A moment later, the shockwave from multiple fuel-air explosives reached the speeding vehicles of Charlie Company.

  The massive blasts were aimed at the leading edge of the Viper advance, their spread designed to allow the Marine rear guard to break contact as it fled east. Some of the explosions were close enough to knock out one of Charlie’s area force fields and stagger Fromm’s command vehicle. The drone feed showed that several Hellcats had been bowled over as well. They all managed to land on their feet and keep running, however. That was a relief, because stopping to pick up anybody forced to ditch out of their suit was likely suicide for everyone concerned.

  The Vipers had lost most of their heavy armor during their push towards Davistown, but at least two of their Dragons remained, versus a single surviving Marine MBT-5 and a company of antiquated Army Buford tanks that had been rushed forward to help out. Both sides were losing their heavies at a horrendous rate.

  About the only good news so far was that the local enemy force’s heavy artillery had been mostly destroyed inside their cargo dropships. That stroke of bad luck forced the Vipers to rely mostly on direct-fire weapons and their mortars; the advantage in artillery was probably the only reason the ETs were still bottled up in the valley.