No Price Too High (Warp Marine Corps Book 2)

by C. J. Carella

  The deaths were just data points right now. They had a mission, and he was the highest-ranked fucker left standing.

  First, figure out what was going on. A dead LAV was a big target, but they weren’t taking fire at the moment, so maybe they were out of sight for now. Sooner or later, they were going to have to get the fuck out; a stopped vehicle was a bullet magnet. Russell peeked outside via his imp. The combined take of any drones still alive and observation posts back at their rally point gave him a clear picture of what was going on outside the smoking ruins of the vehicle. The view plain sucked.

  The LAV had fallen into a ravine between two hills, which was about the luckiest thing that could have happened under the circumstances. They were out of line of sight from the battle, which was raging a good half a klick from their current position. The company and the Army dog-faces had pushed the Vipers back and were making sure the survivors didn’t get any bright ideas. The Turtles that had fucked them up were gone. The only alien mini-tank Russell could see was engulfed in fire. The enemy had scattered but was regrouping. The American counterattack had taken a big chomp out of ET, but they were going to have to pull back or risk getting enveloped. Two companies just couldn’t cover enough frontage even on these narrow gaps, and more Vipers were coming.

  “Get the wounded out,” he told the squad’s survivors. “We’ve got a ride coming.”

  An Army ambulance was heading their way, moving as low as its ground-effect engine allowed, and darting from cover to cover. Russell approved; there were no rules against shooting at medevac vehicles. By the time the ambulance arrived and they’d loaded up the wounded, Charlie and the Army pukes were heading back the way they’d come, leaving a trail of dead Eets on their way. They’d poked the aliens, and now they were getting poked back. Russell knew there were a couple of ambushes waiting for the ETs if they kept following them.

  Problem was, it looked like the Vipers were sending enough troops their way to absorb the losses and keep coming.

  Seventeen

  Parthenon-Three, 165 AFC

  The Tangos were breaking through.

  Morris had been in enough fights to have a feel for when things were going to hell. The mad scramble down I-10 after the loss (and destruction) of Davistown had been the next best thing to a rout. He remembered the ride on the back of an open cargo truck only as a series of flashes: broken-down vehicles scattered on both sides of the road, where they’d been towed or pushed out of the way. Dead cattle lying on an open field. A family of six making their way on foot, baggage slung over their heads, waving desperately at the vehicles that passed them by without stopping. A trio of Buford tanks going towards the fighting; those poor bastards were probably goners by now.

  He and the rest of the Volunteers had gotten three hours to rest and then they’d been put back on the line. Ten minutes after they’d assembled at their fighting positions, the Vipers had come a-knocking.

  The ETs didn’t have much artillery in play, but what they had was pounding on their lines, and enough leakers were getting through the shields to produce a steady trickle of casualties. And a lot of the troops in the fighting positions next to Morris weren’t doing much fighting.

  Morris had replaced his Iwo with an ALS-43 its previous owner no longer had any use for, and was laying down a steady stream of armor-piercing and explosive rounds on the Vipers crowding the slope below his entrenchment, some less than a five hundred yards away. A battery of four-barreled anti-tank lasers not too far behind him was also in the game, and most of the Volunteers’ platoon as well, even Lemon, who was making up for his skedaddling talk by fighting like hell. Units whose experienced NCOs were kicking people’s asses into shape were doing okay. But too many positions were only generating sporadic fire, effectively unaimed, grunts lifting their guns over their heads and aiming through their imps without exposing themselves. Which was fine if you were using a beam weapon, but Iwos generated recoil, and if the guns weren’t properly braced against your shoulder their shots would scatter all over creation.

  Too many weekend soldiers had joined the Guard and the militias only for the tax breaks and treated training like a joke, because they’d been certain that a core planet was never going to be invaded, not as long as there was a Navy to keep the aliens away. Granted, Morris had moved to Parthenon believing the exact same thing, but even so he’d made an effort to be ready for the worst, because life had a way to turn your expectations into a bitter joke. Too many hadn’t, and they were paying for their lack of imagination with everyone’s lives.

  “Damnit,” he muttered as he switched targets and hit an advancing bunch of Vipers on its flank. Two or three of them went down for good and the rest scrambled for cover like so many cockroaches. He used his imp to identify the platoon of slackers manning that stretch of the line, and broke into its command channel. “Listen, assholes!” he shouted at them. “You stand up and start pouring it on, or I’m going to walk up and machinegun your asses into hamburger! Do you fucking copy?”

  “Who the fuck is this?” someone shouted back. It was a lieutenant – a fucking Marine lieutenant –huddled in the trench along with a bunch of Army troops, all rear echelon assholes that had somehow been thrown into the line. Someone must have thought a Devil Dog officer would be just the thing to motivate those troops, but this happy asshole – he ID’d him as one Randolph O’Malley – was hunkered down with them, not even firing his weapon. Morris had masked his call sign, a trick that would only work as long as an O-3 or higher didn’t get involved, but in a few minutes none of this would matter. Except he would be damned if he was going to let those cowards hide in their hole like scared children while there were aliens to kill.

  “I repeat, identify yourself,” the chickenshit El-Tee said.

  He roared back at him in his sergeant’s voice: “I’m the guy who’s gonna kill every last one of you! I got a platoon of Marines doing morale sweeps. If we don’t see you going up and at ‘em in ten seconds, we’re gonna light you up and use your bleeding corpses as footrests! Do you fucking copy?”

  That got them moving. More bullets and grenades started coming from that section, some of it actually hitting the enemy.

  It wasn’t much, but every bit helped.

  * * *

  “Our position is becoming untenable,” Captain Kruger said.

  Fromm could hear growing panic and shock in the officer’s voice. It started when two Hunters had been caught by the same Turtle platoon that had destroyed one of Fromm’s LAVs along with the Army vehicles. It wasn’t easy to lose men and women under your command, and the first time was also the hardest. Kruger wasn’t afraid for himself; his command car had been on the lead of the counterattack that wiped out the Viper armor and pushed their infantry back. But he cared for his troops, and didn’t want to sacrifice them.

  Even if Kruger was right, however, there was nowhere to run. Their planned escape route along the river had been cut off. Fromm’s LAVs could fly over the mountains, if they didn’t mind becoming a target for every Viper heavy gun in range, not to mention abandoning the Hellcats. The Army ground-effect vehicles didn’t even have that option. They might try running via a few mountain trails that would eventually become too narrow to accommodate their vehicles, or take their chances on foot. Neither was a good option when dealing with enemies who could outrun them in broken terrain. Alternatively, the combined force could attempt to break through the encircling troops and try to flee towards Miller’s Crossing. They’d just have to fight a few divisions of aliens standing in their way. Staying where they were and fighting a battle of maneuver was probably the most survivable course of action.

  “I disagree, Captain,” he told the Army commander. “We will proceed with the plan. An enemy battalion has fallen out of contact with the rest of the opforce; we will engage and destroy it. Carry on.”

  Kruger didn’t protest any further. Just was well.

  They were taking heavy losses, but they were doing their job. The Vipers atta
cking Forge Valley’s eastern mouth had lost all of their armor. The tank company Fromm’s people had destroyed might have played a decisive role in the northeast; now they were just more scattered debris among the mountains. It’d been worth losing a squad from Third Platoon, even though most of the dead and maimed were men he’d come to know personally during the Battle of Kirosha. Those Marines had survived a brutal fight in Jasper-Five only to fall in yet another planet, light years away from their homes. Fromm knew those losses would come back to haunt him, assuming he survived the day, but he was too busy to mourn now.

  As the combined task force maneuvered to take out the lost Viper battalion, he took a moment to check on the larger battle going on to the northeast. That had turned into a simple slugging match, alien light infantry wasting itself in head-on assaults against prepared positions. That kind of suicide attack only worked with overwhelming numbers, but it was beginning to bear fruit. Two times, the enemy had reached the final protective lines of the blocking force and nearly overrun them before being slaughtered by the combined fire of every unit in range. The second time, a Guard company had broken ranks and tried to flee to the rear, until ‘friendly’ artillery fire had herded it back to its fighting positions. Colonel Brighton hadn’t been bluffing about that. There probably were a number of one-star Generals screaming about it just about now. General Hamill, who commanded the Marine ground forces, would tell them to pound sand; he’d already fired two of the Army’s top brass, with the endorsement of Admiral Givens, who was in overall command of Parthenon System’s defenses.

  Sooner or later, the line would break, as it had done around too many PDBs already. When that happened, Fromm’s command might survive a bit longer than the rest of the 101st, but only for as long as the Vipers pulled back from the ruins of PDB-18 and New Burbank and hunted him down for good.

  He couldn’t worry about that, either. He had aliens to kill.

  Sixth Fleet, Parthenon System, 165 AFC

  Lisbeth Zhang went over the checklist a final time as she waited for clearance to launch.

  Sixth Fleet had jumped a few seconds ago, emerging in the vicinity of Parthenon-Three and engaging the alien armada. It was time for Project Lexington show the universe what it was worth.

  “Lamia, you are cleared for launch.”

  That would be the last time she’d hear from the Nimitz’s flight controllers until she came back from the sortie. You couldn’t stay in touch with the mothership, not when the enemy could zero in on graviton transmissions and use them to target your crate. The same applied to the rest of Flight B, Strike Fighter Squadron Ten (a.k.a. the Dragon Fangs). She’d be all alone out there. At least, she would be according to the known laws of physics.

  Transition.

  Her designated target was an enemy dreadnought. All the fighters were going for capital ships, hopefully before they could launch their entire missile load. That many vampires under the control of sapient operators rather than dumb computer systems would probably wipe out half of Sixth Fleet before the first energy weapon was fired. She and the other five War Eagles in Flight B were going to emerge five thousand miles behind the target – beyond point-blank range in space combat – and take it under fire.

  She spent the few subjective seconds of the trip in blessed, silent darkness. Her fellow pilots were close by, and their presence comforted her.

  Emergence.

  The six-fighters of Flight B were thousands of miles from each other, but Lisbeth knew where each of them were, as surely as her visual sensors revealed the dreadnought that was their target.

  The Vipers went for sinuous, curving shapes in their warships; there wasn’t a sharp angle to be seen in the three-mile long capital vessel. The dreadnought looked almost like a balloon animal, its comical lines belied by its sheer size and the technical specs flashing on her imp’s tactical display. The six fighters had emerged behind the alien ship’s main thrusters, where artificially-generated gravity waves pushing against the fabric of space-time reduced the effectiveness of its sensor systems. That worked both ways, of course, but the fighters were relying on passive sensors, mostly infrared, and capital ships ran blindingly hot against the dull background of space.

  She aimed at the pre-designated spot, one of the massive engines on the upper quadrant, and fired. The massive cannon was theoretically recoilless, but the fighter did not have the shielding a normal battleship mount would have, and residual gravity emanations made the whole craft vibrate slightly with each shot. Her firing computer corrected for the disturbance as she sent another blast of fundamental force towards the target, and another.

  The entire flight did. They each had five shots before their main gun’s capacitor ran dry; they emptied them in under ten seconds.

  Pinpoint accuracy in space combat was not possible, given the distances and speeds involved. A ship’s main gun had a Circular Error Probable of two hundred meters at half a light year away, and slightly over ten meters at the current, impossibly close range. The estimated hit probability for each fighter was in the order of twenty percent.

  All six fighters hit the same two-meter spot on the Viper dreadnought with their first volley. The rear quadrant shields could not withstand two simultaneous blows, let alone five. Neither could the armor behind them; the impossibly-close barrage vaporized it. The following four volleys hit within twenty meters of each other. The combined blasts stabbed deep into the bowels of the ship, tearing engines apart and cracking the heavy-metal cores of massive gluon power plants. Ravening strange matter particles were released from their containment bottles, free to roam and generate physical reactions that transformed large amounts of matter into energy.

  As soon as their fifth and final shots were fired, Flight B fled into warp. Their last sensor readings showed a massive thermal bloom on the rear of the Viper dreadnought.

  From inside warp space, Lisbeth felt the death screams of fifteen thousand Nasstah. The dreadnought had been obliterated, something they’d never imagined possible after a single pass. But that was of minor importance next to the feeling that those deaths had somehow reached into warp space – and touched something there.

  Flight B reappeared in normal space some hundreds of miles away from their carrier vessel. It took some maneuvering to get close enough to the carrier for its grav-grapples to bring them in, using a modified version of the systems that handled shuttle landings. The return trip ended with a familiar jolt as they were conveyed deeper into the ship, back to the catapult platforms that had launched them. Lisbeth’s first combat sortie was over.

  “That’s a kill, Flight B,” the space traffic controller said, almost shouting in shocked enthusiasm. “Confirmed kill, scratch one dreadnought. Flight A inflicted severe damage on its target. Flight C downed another Sierra. You have destroyed two dreadnoughts and severely damaged a third on this sortie. It’s… it’s fucking incredible.”

  Lisbeth shuddered in her seat while the flight crew rushed forward to replace her main gun’s power pack. In five minutes or so, she’d be ready to go out there again. She should be elated after she’d helped destroy a capital ship. Or maybe amazed: nobody expected they would inflict catastrophic damage on a heavily-shielded and armored dreadnought with a few shots, even at close range. The only reason they’d pulled it off was the psychic link she and her fellow pilots shared. That realization should have filled her with awe.

  Instead, she felt drained, and strangely enough, afraid.

  Something had happened in warp space. Something bad.

  * * *

  “Dear God Almighty,” Admiral Givens whispered. The tactical holotank display combined the input from hundreds of sensor systems and had been confirmed by multiple sources, but she still couldn’t believe what she was seeing.

  Three Viper dreadnoughts and five battleships had been destroyed outright, and all the rest were heavily damaged; the enemy armada’s flagship was drifting at a mere two kilometers per second, essentially dead in the water. The fighters had ravage
d the alien ships of the line, turning the stately maneuvers of the enemy fleet into a shambles as it tried to deal with the unexpected threat. The tiny warp emergences hadn’t even registered in the aliens’ sensor systems until after they’d fired their load and escaped. A hundred and eighty fighters were preparing for their second sortie; they’d suffered no casualties and destroyed more tonnage than Givens’ entire force had in all its previous engagements at Parthenon combined.

  She wished she could enjoy the unexpected success of the new weapon systems, but her ships had problems of their own.

  While the fighters performed miracles, Sixth Fleet had been dealing with another Sun-Blotter, eighty thousand missiles headed their way. The enemy hadn’t been able to perform a full launch before the fighters struck, but even half a mass salvo was a lot to handle. The swarm of vampires was thirty seconds away, and a lot of them were going to get through.

  “For what we’re about to receive, may the Lord make us truly thankful,” she muttered. Her old mentor, Admiral Carruthers, had been fond of that sarcastic prayer.

  Eight thousand American missiles flew towards the eleven thousand survivors while standard point defenses redoubled their frantic efforts. The ensuing fireworks were actually impressive even with standard visual sensors, a rarity in space combat. Thousands of flashes in the dark blinked malignantly on the main view screen; the tactical holotank ran the counter of survivors. Two thousand and seventy-six missiles emerged from the massive conflagration and entered the final energy weapon gauntlet. Twelve hundred and ninety-one reached Sixth Fleet.

  The Halsey shuddered more violently than in previous engagements; the shaking was enough to knock an ensign off her seat. The foolish child hadn’t strapped herself in. Givens almost chided the crewmember for her carelessness, but shrugged instead and concentrated on the damage reports. The American dreadnought had taken four direct hits. No fatalities and only eleven light casualties among her crew, but one of her main gun turrets was out of commission, reducing her firepower by twenty percent. The last surviving President-class light cruiser in the galaxy, the USS Chester A. Arthur, was struck a dozen times, suffering catastrophic levels of damage; her surviving crew was taking to the escape pods. Two destroyers and one frigate had been destroyed outright, and several other ships had been heavily damaged. Bad losses to be sure, but nothing like what would have happened if the warp fighters hadn’t disrupted the missile launches and the manual controllers aboard the now-dead and crippled dreadnoughts.