Other places hadn’t been so lucky. Eight Planetary Defense Bases were down, along with three entire MEUs – some two thousand Marines were confirmed KIA – plus tens of thousands militia and Army personnel. Civilians losses had passed the million mark. The primary installations still remained, however, including PDB-18. If it was overrun, that would be pretty much it. The Vipers would be able to fly over most of Parthenon-Three’s eastern hemisphere, shifting troops at will and overwhelming the other half of the planet. At that point, even if Sixth Fleet came back and expelled the aliens, the system would be nearly useless as a staging base. You needed cities, factories and the people to man them to provide support for a fleet, not a collection of lifeless craters filled with molten slag.
The total wipeout of the 73rd, 81st and 87th MEUs loomed large in Fromm’s mind. No battalion-sized Marine unit had ever been exterminated before, even during the darkest days of the First Intergalactic War, when the Corps had conducted planetary assaults with troops largely outfitted with pre-Contact weapons and equipment. This battle would go down in historical annals alongside Frozen Chosin and Guadalcanal. He was beginning to fear it might end up listed alongside Little Bighorn as well.
Battalion outlined new orders for Charlie Company as the last echoes of the massive artillery barrage faded in the distance. Meet with Army mobile elements on the southern edge of Forge Valley; refit and resupply, then threaten the enemy’s flank as it advanced towards its final objective. If necessary, the troops could retreat through Miller’s Stream, following the river out of the valley. Such a retreat could only be authorized by the battalion commander, and Fromm had a feeling Brighton wouldn’t issue any such orders. This was a stand or die – or stand and die – situation. A Viper breakthrough at Miller’s Crossing would doom PDB-18 and tip the balance beyond recovery. Fromm would be expected to spend every last man and round under his command trying to slow down the attack.
Fromm went over his remaining assets. He had about a dozen Hellcats left, along with just enough LAVs for the seventy or so effectives left in the company: the rest were all casualties, either too badly injured to fight or killed in action. His troops had managed to recover most of the latter’s bodies, but too many of them had left their bones somewhere in this damned valley. He shook his head, fighting sorrow and exhaustion. There was no time for either.
The Army units he’d be joining forces with were a logistics platoon with plenty of spare ammo, and a motorized weapons company. Fromm went over their TOE: four assault platoons, each fielding four High Mobility Multi-Purpose Ground-Effect Vehicles, better known as ‘Hunters.’ Hunters had less than a third the force field strength and one fifth the armor of his LAVs, but their 25mm railguns and HAW missile launchers provided almost as much firepower. Mobility-wise, the hovercraft could keep up with the Marine vehicles over level terrain, but couldn’t climb over large obstacles or hover above ten yards off the ground, not that the ability to fly was all that useful in the face of Starfarer weapons that could engage anything peeking over the horizon from ungodly distances.
On paper, the weapons company would more than double Fromm’s firepower. A quick check showed the company commander was a retired Marine who’d mustered out as an O-2 and had made captain in the Army some six months ago, so at least there’d be no arguments as to who was in command. There was a smattering of former Marine NCOs in the unit, but other than that the Army formation was a typical mix of mostly non-warp-rated locals doing their obligatory service and a core of long-term servicemen. Given the lack of hostile natives or even dangerous fauna on Parthenon-Three, all the combat experience of those troops would be virtual, except for a few of the former Marines. A very few: four non-coms had actually fought in earnest. None of the officers had. Going up against hardened Starfarer troops in a battle of maneuver would be one hell of a way to pop their cherry.
All in a day’s work, Fromm thought as he raised US Army Captain Bradford Kruger, who was about to get his first taste of combat.
* * *
Four little Indians had become three, then two, and finally, after Lieutenant Morrell and Butcher and Bolt bought it, just one. Fimbul Winter stood alone against the barbarian hordes at the gate. Well, not completely alone, but Staff Sergeant Konrad Zimmer and his crew sure felt pretty damn lonely.
Nobody was singing. They were all too tired and wrung-out for that.
“Gunnery Pack One is up to fifty percent,” Mira said, startling Zimmer from his half-dozing state. He blinked stupidly at her for a moment. “We’ve got twenty-five war shots available, Zim.”
“Okay, thanks.” That meant the Winter could stop hiding from the Vipers and come out to play again. The retreat towards Miller’s Crossing was threatening to become a rout. A lot of the Guard units were being a mite too enthusiastic about their change of location, and some of the Army pukes that were supposed to hold the rear weren’t holding shit. Not everybody, granted. The tank company that was currently slugging it out with the aliens while their tank recharged its power pack was a case in point. Captain Ryan was one tough bastard, and he was fighting his under-gunned and thin-skinned Bufords for all they were worth. The seventy-ton hover-tanks were only slightly more survivable than a LAV and their 90mm lasers couldn’t score one-shot kills on the Turtles or even a field genny, but those nine – down from their original fourteen – tanks, some odds-and-ends and Fimbul Winter were the only things standing between two retreating American divisions, or what was left of them, and an alien division or maybe an entire corps.
The Vipers that had wiped out PDB-12 had force-marched the three hundred miles separating them from Forge Valley in an impressive three days and reinforced the third wave of landing pods and dropships, which were making it down with relative impunity now that only two PDBs could engage them on their final descent. It all added up to a really bad day in a really bad week.
Zimmer shook his head. The important thing was, they’d reloaded half a power pack and were ready to fight. Time to observe and orient. The Winter was nominally under the command of Captain Ryan, but the Army tank commander had left him alone for the most part. As long as he didn’t seem to be malingering, he was free to do what he wanted. And he wanted to get a piece of Echo Tango.
The current battle was being fought along I-10, which this far west was a graded gravel road two lanes wide cutting through a wooded plain except where it sneaked between medium-sized hills. The Army’s Alpha Company, 11th Cavalry Regiment was blocking the road, alongside a Marine platoon and a reinforced company of National Guard infantry scrapped together from three different brigades. The combined armor force had tricked a battalion of Viper infantry into yet another ambush, during which the Fimbul Winter had shot out its full battle load and had had to retreat to recharge while the Bufords chased the decimated survivors back – and run into one of the two Dragons left in the valley. Three dead tanks and a hasty retreat later, the American forces were waiting for the inevitable alien follow-up attack. It looked like the ETs were rallying around their big tank and a single force field generator. A few drone glimpses indicated the force massing behind some hills to the west was at least as big as the one they’d beaten off, not counting the alien super-tank. And the good guys weren’t getting much artillery support; there’d been a breakthrough in the south and all available indirect fire assets were being diverted to contain it.
Ryan’s plan was to take out the Dragon before falling back towards Davistown, where the combined US forces were consolidating in a final bid to deny the valley to the invaders. Fimbul Winter would play a decisive role in the operation.
“Good,” Mira Rodriguez said when he’d relayed their marching orders. “I want to paint one of those fuckers on our kill gallery.”
They’d already stenciled eight Turtles and two partial Dragons on the Winter’s hull, but they hadn’t gotten a full kill on one of the super-tanks. Lieutenant Morrel’s B & B had fired the decisive shots and that’s where the full icon drawings had been, until a Viper mob
ile gun had returned the favor. It’d been the damaged spot; they’d put a patch on it, but a slight discoloration had shown the alien where to shoot, and the patch hadn’t been as strong as undamaged armor. The Winter had immolated the ET gun crew a moment later, but revenge wouldn’t bring the dead back.
“Target is in range,” Zimmer said. They were turret-down at the moment, but a few crunchies were keeping an eye on the approaching enemy forces. Their laser-transmitted video showed him the Dragon, flanked by infantry. An area field generator was trailing the massive armored vehicle, but a squad of engineers had prepared for it. “It’s a go.”
The engineers opened up the festivities with a bang.
Mines were great defensive weapons, but Starfarer tech had made them largely useless via systems that could defeat most pressure, sensor and comm-activated devices. The daisy-chained devices buried under the gravel road relied on pre-Contact hand-mixed explosives, wrapped in camo blankets and carefully buried and concealed. Two sets of fiber-optic cables leading to the explosive experts’ positions would be use to detonate the shaped charge. A lot of work had been involved, although the mines didn’t have enough power to penetrate the Dragon’s force field.
The field genny following the super-tank wasn’t as well-protected, however, which made it the target of choice.
Five explosions went off once the floating platform reached the designated point. Only one of the charges was close enough to inflict damage, but that did the job. The genny’s compromised power plant transformed it into an even bigger bomb, which devoured a couple of luckless Viper companies in its blast radius.
Army and Marine infantry volley-fired two dozen anti-armor missiles as several LAVs and the Winter rose up from behind cover and took the Dragon under fire. Its shield, already partially drained by the massive explosion behind it, failed in a spectacular shower of sparks.
“Hit!” Mira announced as she cycled the gun’s capacitor for a follow-up shot. The 250mm grav-cannon could normally fire twelve shots per minute, but if you goosed its controls and didn’t mind putting a little stress on the barrel and firing system – increasing the risk of catastrophic failure sometime down the line – you could put a second shot on target in under two seconds. She fired again while the echoes of the first impact on the Dragon’s armor were still reverberating over the hills like a nearby thunderstorm.
“Miss! Dude, stop jumping around!”
“Dude, there’s a glowing crater where we just were,” Jessie said. “I stop dancing, we die.”
“Shut up and do your jobs,” Zimmer told them; his sense of humor had evaporated not too long after the Butcher and Bolt did. They shut up.
The gunner had been too focused to make her shot to notice the Dragon was shooting back, but Zimmer had watched the twisting singularity beam as it missed his tank by less than a foot, close enough to make its shields flare up and lose ten percent of their power. The Fimbul Winter went turret-down and shifted positions; Zimmer kept an eye on the fighting while tapping into other units’ sensors.
Three Bufords had burned a hole in one of the Dragon’s sides by switching on continuous beam and staying still to remain on target, turning the 90mm guns into giant blowtorches. That had been ballsy, and had cost them: two of the tanks had been shredded, one by a main gun blast that’d left behind nothing recognizable as a vehicle, the other by a railgun burst that didn’t do much visible damage. The Buford simply stopped moving; a thin column of smoke rose from its turret, which meant one or more of the railgun rounds had gotten through and bounced all over the interior, pureeing everyone inside. The insides of that tank had been turned into what the heartless called a ‘hose and bucket job.’ Zimmer didn’t know which of those ways to go was worse.
“Hit! Got you, motherfucker!” Mira shouted.
“Dragon Slayer! Good going, Valkyrie!”
The shot had penetrated right above the alien tank’s main gun pod. The Dragon stopped moving and shooting even as more American soldiers and vehicles engaged its still form.
“Jessie, back us up a bit,” Zimmer said. He had a bad feeling about this, for all that they were nearly two klicks away from the target.
“Going hull-down, aye.”
“Make that turret-d…”
The Dragon blew up in an apocalyptic, multihued light explosion that indicated a catastrophic gluon plant failure like the one that had consumed the mine-destroyed field genny. The difference between the two power plants was at least an order of magnitude, however. The conflagration killed everyone caught in the open for a good mile in every direction. One LAV had its turret ripped clean off and a Buford was tossed into the air like a child’s toy, smashing into a hillside with a sickening sound like a giant beer can being crushed. Metal shrapnel moving faster than a railgun round slashed at everything around the dying super-tank. Viper and human alike were scythed down. A heavy fragment struck the Fimbul Winter and made it ring like a giant gong.
“Frontal and side shields are down!” Jessie cried out. They hadn’t moved fast enough.
The force fields weren’t just down, they were out. Overloaded and drained; the diagnostic system estimated it would take ten minutes to come back online. Jessie maneuvered the tank behind some cover. Until the shields regenerated they were hideously exposed. The dash for safety inadvertently put them in view of an enemy firing position five miles away. The Viper gunners tracked the vehicle and lined up a perfect shot.
A hypervelocity missile quartet caught the Fimbul Winter on the side.
The last tank of the 101st MEU shuddered under the impacts; an instant later it dropped to the ground and fell still, thin pillars of smoke rising from the two spots where its hull had been pierced.
A Marine on a nearby hill saw the sight of the unmoving tank and shook his head.
“That’s a hose and bucket job,” he said. “God have mercy on their souls.”
Sixteen
Romulus, Wolf 1061 System, 165 AFC
The shipyards around Romulus were as busy as Lisbeth Zhang had ever seen them.
The planet (formerly known as Wolf 1061c) was Earth’s oldest colony, a rocky ‘super-Earth’ with a marginally-useful atmosphere, a Class Two biosphere whose largest life forms had been shockingly similar to Earth’s pre-Cambrian trilobites, and a local gravity slightly below 1.5 G-standard. Its close location to Sol System (a mere twenty-minute warp transition away) had made it the focus of intensive colonization and terraforming efforts early on. The system now held three hundred million people, mostly clustered in Romulus and the system’s asteroid belt, making it the second-largest extra-terrestrial population center in the US, as well as its fifty-ninth state. Its economy was based on ship-building, both civilian and military, and as a major trading point, with six warp-lines leading to other American star systems.
At the moment, just about everyone who could operate a fabber, or swing a hammer for that matter, was working on warships, either building them from scratch or refitting them. Lisbeth could see the outlines of the Zeus, the largest American dreadnought ever built, an impressive-looking ship that could actually hold her own in a slugfest with enemy vessels in her weight class even without warp shields. It still wasn’t ready, however, and would not be accompanying CSG-1 and the rest of Task Force 43 as it headed towards Parthenon System. The ragtag formation had taken longer than expected to assemble and prepare for combat. Some yard remfies had been loath to divert their construction efforts into outfitting existing ships, and they’d dragged their feet until the dreaded GAO Inspector General herself had made an appearance. Shortly thereafter, two admirals and a dozen civilian executives had lost their jobs (two of them had been arrested) and things had moved a lot faster.
They were due to leave in four hours. Fifty more minutes in warp space, and the fighters would endure their baptism by fire.
Lisbeth felt Fernando’s presence behind her as he entered the Nimitz’s largely-deserted viewing room. She hadn’t heard him, but she knew who it was, just as she
knew where all sixty-three fighter pilots aboard the carrier were, as well as the ten warp navigators in the crew and a couple of older naval chiefs who’d done the warp-dance enough times for their psyches to become accessible to her and others like her.
She didn’t know what to call her kind. Something with the word ‘warp’ in it, of course. Clearly navigators had undergone a similar transformation a good while ago, but they’d been very good at not advertising their otherness, and the brass hadn’t seemed too inclined to pry. She hoped things would work out the same for the… What? Warp Adepts, maybe.
“Better than Warp Demons,” Fernando said, replying to her unspoken thought out loud.
“Hey.”
“Hey yourself.”
“Looks like we’ll get there in the proverbial nick of time.”
“Hopefully.” The reports from the last courier ship hadn’t been comforting. Parthenon-Three’s PDBs were being taken down one by one; the planet would be rendered defenseless and depopulated in no more than three, maybe four days. She’d heard that Admiral Givens had threatened to launch an attack without the promised reinforcements, and had only relented when the new timetable had been confirmed. They would arrive in Parthenon and go to war within minutes of their emergence. There was no time to lose.
“We should get some rest,” Fernando said.
“Too wired to sleep.”
She’d also found herself needing less sleep of late, without suffering any adverse side effects. At least, none that affected her performance, and that was all that mattered at the moment.
“No sleep for me,” she said. “But this could be the last time we are together.”
No Price Too High (Warp Marine Corps Book 2) Page 26