“We’re still technically deployable, as you well know,” Hecs admonished Sams. “You can’t be hiding your tether, or turning off your PA.”
“Yeah, you’re right. My bust. Look, we’ve still got an hour and forty minutes. Let me get dressed and cleaned up, and I’ll meet you at the company,” he said, looking hungrily at Tara.
“No, I think you’re coming with us now,” Hecs told him.
Sams sighed, but went back to his room, coming out again in two minutes, uniform on.
“I’ll probably be back in a couple of hours,” he told Tara. “If it’s longer than that, just let yourself out if you have to go.”
Tara waved over the back of the couch as she turned on the holo.
“You do know the meaning of ‘ex-wife,’ don’t you?” Ryck asked Sams as the hatch closed.
“Well yeah, of course I do,” Sams said.
“Yet you’re in there screwing your ex?” Hecs asked.
“Hell, yeah! I mean, so we can’t live together without killing each other. That doesn’t mean we can’t fuck. Why punish ourselves like that?” he said, sounding perplexed.
Ryck just shook his head. He’d known Sams almost his entire Marine Corps career, and just when he thought he understood the gunny, something else came up.
Fifteen minutes later, the three Marines pulled into the company headquarters. The XO was getting the counts in and seemed to have things well in hand, so Ryck changed into the spare uniform he kept in his wall-locker and left for battalion. Hopefully, the drill would end soon, and he’d be home before the twins were brought back.
Donte was walking to battalion, too, and Ryck caught up with him.
“You hear anything?” Ryck asked.
“Nah. Just another drill, I’m guessing. Bad timing, too. I had the steaks on the grill—real steaks, not fabricated ones. Had to take them off and come down.”
“Real steaks? What, you win the lottery?”
“Marry rich, my man, marry rich. Caitlan’s parents brought them over. They’ve been visiting for the last month while we were deployed. They’ll be leaving next week, thank goodness.”
“Hey, send them my way if you want. I’ll put up with any in-laws if they’re packing real steaks,” Ryck said with a laugh.
The two captains entered the battalion CP. There was an air about the building. Ryck’s combat sense picked up the vibe. He had a sudden feeling this might not be just a drill.
Virag Ganesh came down the passageway. When he saw the two other captains, he changed direction and came up to them.
“Better get into the conference room. The CO’s calling a meeting in fifteen,” he said.
“Why, Virag? What’s up?” This is just a drill, right?” Donte asked.
Virag looked around as if trying to see if anyone was listening. “No, this is the real deal. We’re going back on the Inchon. The Confederation has taken over one of our disputed systems, and we’re going to get it back.”
“But we’re not deployed anymore. 3/11’s on the Sevastopol, and they’re operational.” Donte protested.
The Sevastopol was the fourth Falklands Class IAT, and with 3/11 onboard, it had taken over the reins from the Inchon two days before the Inchon arrived back on Sunshine. If there was a contingency, that task force should respond to it.
Virag’s voice got lower as he leaned in. “Word has it that the Marines and Navy have not meshed well, and the Navy command doesn’t think the Sevastopol is up to the challenge. We’re a proven commodity, and they want us. The commandant agreed, so we’re back into the breach.”
They’d only been back for five days, barely enough time to get reacquainted with friends and family. Post-deployment leave hadn’t been scheduled for another week-and-a-half, so at least the battalion was at full strength. Even Sgt Ling, out of regen, had met them upon their return, completely restored to full-duty status.
After Kakurega, Ryck had still wished for a real mission to wash the nasty taste of that one out of his mouth. Their mission to PPL-7, the one that had pulled them off of Kakurega, had been a let-down. Upon their arrival in orbit, the disputing parties, well aware of what had happened on Kakurega, had come to the table and settled their differences. This was a huge victory for the Federation. They had used the Marines as a threat, and without any real action, had diffused a problem.
Ryck knew this was perfect use of the Marines, but he wasn’t suited to be simply a threat. He, like most Marines, wanted action.
Ryck had just gotten back, and part of him wanted more time with his family, but deep within his DNA was the desire to march to the sound of guns. His heart raced as he followed Donte into the conference room.
He was going back into the fight!
Cygni B System
Chapter 27
“You ready for this?” Preston asked the other three company commanders and Drayton Miller.
“Born ready,” Donte said as he slowly sharpened his Hwa Win on a whetting stone.
The combat knife was already sharp, but the routine act probably helped keep Donte calm as they waited for H-hour. After Ryck had told them about using his Hwa Win to kill a trinocular in hand-to-hand combat, Preston, Donte, and Drayton had ordered their own knives. Only Jasper thought knives were obsolete in the modern battlefield and refused to fork out the 350 units a Hwa Win cost. He held that his Marine-issued multi-tool would be good enough for any cutting that might have to be done.
The five Marines were crowded in Donte’s stateroom. They’d received their last briefs, and while Ryck wanted to watch his Marines do their final preparations, he knew his presence would be a distraction. After telling his lieutenants to make themselves scarce as well, he had left the company to the SNCOs to let them do their jobs unhindered. He’d wandered to Donte’s stateroom to find Jasper already there. Within 15 or 20 more minutes, Preston and Drayton had wandered in as well.
Drayton would not be leaving the ship, but the tension back on the Inchon was high enough as it was. The Confederation had capital ships, ships that could fight, so no one was without risk on the mission.
Seven days before, a Confederation task force had entered the disputed Cygni B system and landed an Army cohort on HECLA-3, the base of operations for the Federation mining company in the system. The 2,000 Federation citizens did not resist, and there was no fighting. They claimed this was in direct response to the Federation incursion into CF-32 to rescue the FS Julianna’s Dream.
The Cygni B system was a valuable, if difficult to exploit piece of real estate. HECLA-3 (Cygni B-3 until the Federation had granted HECLA the charter) had no atmosphere, and the company personnel were housed in two domes. Terraforming, if it was ever to be done, was a long, long way off. What brought HECLA to the system was the Telchines Asteroid belt composed of a moon that had probably orbited the giant Cygni B-5 before it had been somehow destroyed. The moon had been made up of valuable metals that were ripe for mining.
Still, without the geothermal power source on HECLA-3, mining the asteroid belt would have just been too expensive. With Federation assistance (the Federation wanted at least squatters’ rights to the disputed system), HECLA had erected the domes and constructed the processing plants.
When the Confederation had seized the domes, the Federation had wanted to take them back immediately, but HECLA, fearful of damage to the domes, suggested just taking the asteroid belt instead. It wasn’t as if a full-out war would do much more than make big pieces of rock smaller pieces of rock, something the company was doing anyway. So the Inchon Task Force was going to bypass the planet and seize the Telchines. Without them, the Confederation would have no use of the system and could be (hopefully) brought to the negotiating table.
A Marine recon team had been dispatched aboard a Navy Circe picket-skiff. While the skiff remained in far system orbit passively collecting data, the recon team had actually been able to take position on one of the planetoids and had reported back that there was only a century holding the belt, most taking positio
n in the main HECLA sorting ship.
The enemy order of battle was a cohort (minus) on HECLA-3. Subtract the 80-man century in the Telchine Belt, and that left about 400 soldiers on the planet. The converted transport that had brought them into the system was still in orbit around the planet, but the only capital ships were a corvette and a frigate.
The Federation military force consisted of the FS Inchon, with 2,000+ Marines embarked, the FS Tallyday, a destroyer, the FS Kuala Lampur, a frigate, and the monitor R-445. On paper, this gave the overwhelming advantage to the Federation forces.
Ryck’s old ship, the battle cruiser FS Ark Royal, had been considered to lead the task force, but the politicians thought that might be overkill and lead to a wider confrontation. Ryck thought that was ridiculous. If you were going into a fight, you took all you had with you to win. Period.
Ryck checked his watch. It would be another 45 minutes before the Marines would start to move to their debark stations.
“You got another whetstone?” he asked Donte.
Donte merely grunted and opened a drawer in his desk, taking out another stone and tossing it to Ryck. Ryck pulled out his own Hwa Win and started sharpening it. The knife, with its tempered durosteel blade, didn’t need sharpening, but Rycks nerves could use the diversion. There was something almost mesmerizing about the process, and Ryck could imagine his blood pressure falling.
Soon enough, he would be in the shit again.
Chapter 28
The first rank of rekis launched, almost immediately followed by Ryck’s rank. One again, the Inchon’s new technology had enabled her to come out of bubble space almost on top of their objectives.
Neither the Tallyday nor the Kuala Lampur had the same capability, but those two ships were there to hold off the Confederation ships, and they had emerged from bubble space at a more normal distance. Two Gryffyn monitors were needed for the assault, so the Inchon had held them with a tractor beam through the entire voyage. This could have been tricky. Sometimes a lampreyed ship lost contact in bubble space, and when the mother ship arrived at the destination, the lampreyed ship was lost for good. But when the Inchon came out of bubble space in the Cygni B system, the monitors were still attached, and they began firing on the last known positions of the century.
They were so close to the action that Ryck could see the explosions as the monitor’s rail gun hit hard rocks, vaporizing chunks of the planetoids away. Of course, “close” was all relative. They were still over 50 klicks from leaving their rekis and joining in battle.
The entire Charlie Company was assigned to take T-486, a 1.5 kilometer-wide planetoid where a Confederation deca had been last reported. Ryck’s 180 Marines should have no problem rooting out ten Confederation soldiers, but he was still glad the monitor would be pounding the rock with its rail gun in the meantime.
While Ryck was seizing the rock, codenamed Johnnie Walker, Preston would be taking Campari, about 90 klicks sunward, and Donte, with Jasper’s Weapon’s Company in support, would be seizing the sorting ship, codenamed Blue Barrel. Preston’s Alpha Company had the additional mission of re-enforcing Bravo if needed. Both Alpha and Bravo had already debarked the Inchon, which had then moved to give Charlie less of a distance to cover.
Ryck’s display had a number of pre-loaded reports. As his last rank of rekis left the Inchon, he blinked up the “Crossing Phase Line Guava” report. Using his eyes to command his AI was getting to be second nature to him. He’d hated it at first, but he was beginning to see how it allowed him more time to process the huge stream of information available to him.
Ryck barely noticed when Bravo crossed the FCL
[22], which essentially meant Donte was into the assault. Ryck had his own concerns, and he continually monitored his men as the rekis brought them into the belt. From space and on displays used in planning, the belt looked like a jumble of rocks almost on top of each other. In reality, there was quite a bit of room between different planetoids. The reki coxswains had to maneuver the sleds around some of the larger rocks, but there was still plenty of open space within the belt.
As they neared Johnnie Walker, a single beam of light lanced out, glancing off one of the lead rekis. Almost immediately, there was a response as the monitor struck back in counter-fire.
Ryck pulled up that reki on his display. All Marines were nice and blue. Ryck let out a deep breath. The rekis were basically open sleds, and they only had a small shield attached to the front retaining bar. A direct hit with a high-powered weapon would blast right through the reki, hitting Marines in their EVA vacsuits. These weren’t PICS. They offered very little protection against energy weapons, and while the modified bones gave them some protection from small kinetic weapons, a hit could kill a Marine if it wrecked the integrity of the suit. If a Marine were hit in the arm, for example, the suit could do nothing more than seal off the arm at the next higher joint. The arm would be lost, but the Marine himself could be saved.
As they hit the company FCL, the three ranks split, going into a complicated and confusing weaving pattern to approach the rock. “Pattern” was probably a misnomer. The AI’s used chaos calculations to determine each reki’s path to the rock, paths that were supposedly impossible to anticipate by enemy AIs. Another beam of light lanced out, missing one of Third Platoon’s rekis.
Surprisingly calm, Ryck idly wondered why the Confederation used hadron and plasma beams that were visible to the naked eye. Federation beam weapons could not be seen in the vacuum of space, which was an advantage in small-arms combat. An enemy could not see where a shot came from and had to rely on AIs to analyze where the Federation weapon might be located.
Twice within less than 15 seconds, Ryck flinched as another reki seemed about to collide with his. This close to Johnnie Walker, the rekis were buzzing around like flies over a dead dog, and a collision seemed inevitable. But the AIs did their jobs, and the 28 rekis landed almost simultaneously.
Even before they landed, though, Marines from Third took a Confed position under fire. Ryck’s AI struggled to give him a picture of what they were firing at, but Ryck’s reki touched down and he was vaulting out, holding the handrail to keep himself from floating up.
One key in EVA warfare like this was not to get too high where a Marine would be an easy target. Of course, a Marine wouldn’t float away to drift off in space. EVA vacsuits had their own propulsion, so they could simply fly back. Being high above the surface of the planetoid, however, could bring a Marine under too much enemy fire.
Ryck couldn’t see anything from his position. The heavy, iron and nickel-rich body of this particular planetoid interfered with comms, and without an atmosphere, the Marines could not bounce transmissions, so four of the rekis were to take geosynchronous orbits around the rock and act as relay stations. The problem was that they had just let the Marines off and were not in position yet.
“Gershon, form a perimeter,” Ryck passed on a P2P to his Second Platoon commander.
Then Ryck, followed by Çağlar, let his propulsion unit lift him off and fly him around the horizon. He’d flown only 40 meters when his comms with Third were reestablished. His display lit up, all with bright blue avatars. But there was a fight going on.
“Jeff, commit the PICS to Third’s position now,” he passed.
“Roger that,” came the immediate reply.
The PICS was an amazing piece of gear. It rendered a Marine almost immune to small arms, although it could still be brought down by field expedient methods, as Ling found out on Kakurega. It was not a good EVA fighting suit, though. With the strap-on M-722 Propulsion Pack, it could maneuver through space, if slowly and clumsily. It was too big for most spacecraft, too, so it wasn’t particularly useful in ship-to-ship operations.
However, T-486 was primarily an iron-nickel chunk of space-rock, and that meant that the small magnetic slip-on soles, the same kind, if bigger, used in vacsuits, could anchor the PICS to the planet’s surface. In other words, they could walk.
O
ne squad of Marines had made the crossing in their PICS. Jeff had assigned Second Squad, Joab Ling’s squad, to the mission. The last time Ling had been in a PICS, he’d almost been killed. Ryck knew he would be wanting payback, and any enemy was good enough to bear the brunt of that retribution.
Ryck flew forward another 300 meters, and the PICS Marines came into view. This had to be a surprise to the Confederation troops. Who used PICS in space?
A few beams lanced out, glancing off the Marines and doing no harm. As Ling advanced his squad, the deca leader opposing him must have realized his predicament.
“Hold your fire! We surrender!” came over the universal freq.
“Cease fire, cease fire,” Ryck passed through the relay rekis on station so the entire company could here.
The Battle of T-486 was over.
Chapter 29
“Come on, Contradari,” Gunny told the police sergeant. “We need to get that thing up.
“That thing” was a portable tiki hut, a tent-like structure that was air-tight and could hold pressure. The PICS could operate in a vacuum, but their time was limited far more than a vacsuit. Ling’s squad had to get out of their PICS and into their vacsuits. The tiki hut was not huge, so only one Marine could go in at a time to make the switch. The Inchon was supposed to return well before the PICS reached their use-by date, but Ryck felt better being able to control that evolution.
Besides, no one knew how long they were going to remain on this rock, and while the vacsuits could sustain a Marine for up to a few days, that wasn’t very comfortable. If he could cycle through a few Marines at a time, that would go a long way in increasing their endurance.
Doc Kitoma came loping up to Ryck in that oddly graceful stride that kept him low to the surface, but able to use his propulsion unit to move forward. Doc didn’t have to be next to Ryck to report in, but habits sometimes made it easier to be close to each other.
Captain (The United Federation Marine Corps Book 4) Page 16