Gods of War (Jethro goes to war Book 5)

by Chris Hechtl

  He turned his head to see fires lighting the horizon despite the torrential downpour. He grinned savagely. That meant Delta was off hitting their own village. They had fewer targets but would pull out and cover his own forces when they went to Stage 2.

  Captain Zhukov had envisioned a series of hit and run raids to draw the enemy forces down to engage them. The brutal ruthless strikes on the towns were a distraction. Within five minutes, his troops had finished their job and had fallen back. They knew they would be watched by the drones in the air so they hustled to their first fallback point outside of town.

  Simon nodded in approval when he noted his two injured troops had commandeered a deuce truck and loaded it with their suits as well as all of the captured Marine gear. They'd played paper, rock, scissors to see who had to get out of their suit to drive. PFC Daughtry had apparently lost since he was behind the wheel.

  “Get this thing moving,” the sergeant said pounding on the tail gate.

  Small arms fire hit him in the rear. “You son of a … you shot me in the ass?” he snarled, turning to fire on a guy with a hunting rifle. Three shots tore the guy's heart out, and he toppled backwards.

  “Move. Kill anyone in your way. Get moving to the second fallback. Delta's waiting, and we've got a date,” the sergeant snarled, waving his troops on.

  Two of them slipped and fell in the mud, but they recovered and got to their feet to keep moving on.

  <)>^<)>/

  “Ma'am, no way can we send in regular troops. We need to flush our armor and hit them. Cut them up before they go to ground,” Major N'v'll stated. “We can't wait for the gunships. The nearest one is two hours away. By the time they get on the scene, the enemy will be long gone.”

  Dana grunted, then nodded. “Do it.”

  “Yes, ma'am,” the Veraxin major said as he started to issue orders to the shuttles that were in the hangars. The troops had already suited up; they loaded up quickly as the birds started their engines. Once they were loaded, they rolled out into the night black taxiway and rolled to the nearest runway to take off. It was a short hop to the latest battle zone, and they intended to get there fast.

  <)>^<)>/

  Major Zedeal heard about the three raids and analyzed them quickly as the ships moved to cover the latest attack. He immediately saw a pattern; the first had given away the mission. Yes, they wanted death and destruction, but the other two were mirrors of the first attack right up to the point where the Marines came in. As he puzzled out why, he noted with a corner of his mind that two fresh shuttle loads of troops had been kicked loose in a hop from the spaceport.

  The last two attacks seemed like one squad but a close look at the video told him the armors and timing were off. Comparing the time stamps and the video showed him that different armors had been used in each attack. Furthermore, the groups had fallen back in the general direction of one another as the Marines sortied to go after them.

  Given what happened to the reserve marines in Quenos City, there could be only one answer to what they were doing. “It's a trap,” he whispered just as the Marine shuttles went in.

  He stood. “Order them out! Tell them to let the gunships go in first!” he snarled as Lieutenant Liu and Private Fowley looked up.

  “Get me the pilots!” the major said urgently. The private hastened to obey.

  <)>^<)>/

  On paper, Third Division had one squad of powered armor per company. That meant there were twelve all told. One squad was on Hidoshi's World. But not everything else was as it seemed. Some of the squads were short one or two people. A few were short an entire fire team and had only eight suits in the entire squad.

  So, there were actually a total of 110 Marine suits on Destria. Some of the users had years in the suits to train with; others had only a few months before they'd deployed. None of the suit users had actual combat experience, though most had years of simulations on record.

  Most of the suits were basic shooter suits. There were twelve heavy weapons suits, four command suits, and no RECON or other specialist suits.

  The suits squads were split up covering specific areas as well, such as the base, spaceport, or other major targets. In other words, they were spread all over the planet. That meant only a few of them could be freed up for offensive action.

  The Marine's need for experienced powered armor troops was driven home when they heard reports of all of the marines killed during the night. In one night, five squads of Marines had been killed … and that didn't include the civilian losses.

  Colonel Harley had authorized the hop to get suits to the latest attack as quickly as possible, even before gunships could be re-routed to in ahead of them. The suits operators were coldly enraged by the sight of the destruction. They not only had something to prove, they now had someone to avenge and were determined to do so.

  Four squads of Marine armor, forty-eight, half of their suits came in two shuttles. An additional shuttle with unarmored troops had been dispatched along with a medical team to take back the towns.

  They were coming in on shuttles, the fastest way to get to the battlefield.

  Sergeant Jensen looked across to where Delta was supposed to be. He couldn't tell; they were hunkered down and waiting just as he was. He turned his eyes to the sky in time to see the thermal bloom above as the engines of the shuttles came in. They were planning to land a kilometer out from him as expected.

  Unfortunately, for them that was a bit too close. He motioned to his heavy weapons squads to get ready. The four miniguns were raised to the sky and locked on target.

  The Horathian minigun was a copy of the Marine version. It wasn't a perfect copy; the best it could do was throw a thousand rounds down range per minute. Each suit could carry two minutes of ammunition on its back. The personnel with the weapons had been sternly told not to go hog wild and trigger happy. They had to conserve ammo for this moment.

  The three-barrel Gatling guns had problems with their motors. They tended to seize up and jam sometimes, especially if some grit or dirt got in to gum something up. The barrels tended to overheat when pushed too hard in hot temperatures. The barrels also had problems with lifting off a target, but the servos in the suits had been beefed up to compensate for that.

  They had a mix of rounds in their guns. Some had straight rounds; a few had tracer or incendiary rounds.

  Two of the troopers had hand-carry guns with ammo canisters on their backs. But two of their fellows had their weapons mounted on shoulder pintal mounts that could adjust and fire on their own to allow them to be hands free. They tended to call themselves war machines for some reason.

  Up until the Marines shuttles had winged in, the raider's Gatling guns had been used sparingly if at all. When the Marine reserves dropped almost practically on top of Echo and Delta squads, they walked into an ambush of interlocking fire from below. The Gatling guns locked onto the incoming shuttles heat signatures and opened up on them as they transitioned from standard flight to VTOL. They were at their most vulnerable then and the Horathians took ruthless advantage of that.

  <)>^<)>/

  In one horrifying moment, the shuttle pilots saw they were bracketed by incoming fire. They tried to jink and climb, but the pings of fire turned into a rain storm of a different unwelcome kind. Rounds tore into the undersides of their crafts. They were armored for just such a possibility, but no armor was ever perfect. Eventually some of that fire found its way through and the birds came apart.

  Both shuttles exploded in seconds, their wreckage raining down on the landscape below to stir up the fires there and spread them even further afield.

  <)>^<)>/

  Shuttles 3 and 4 got the major's warning to pull out just as they saw the first two birds explode and go down.

  The Marines in the lead shuttle were unarmored troops and handpicked heavy weapon teams in scratch-built squads. The Horathians saw them coming and turned their Gatling guns on them as the shuttles roared into a screaming climb. They were too far out, ho
wever; both shuttles got clear before the rounds could be walked up into them.

  The rain steamed off the glowing white tips as they spun back down and then stopped.

  “Good job, people,” the sergeant said with a small smile of triumph.

  <)>^<)>/

  Dana stared, aghast at the carnage. In one moment, half her division's limited powered armor units had been destroyed by the enemy. They'd lost half their number in that one brutal night she thought numbly as she shook her head.

  “Hit them,” she said.

  “Ma'am?”

  “Kew strike. Do it now,” she ordered.

  Major N'v'll stared at her with all four eyestalks. “There are civilian towns nearby. The ship is only just over the horizon, ma'am. If the ship is off by a little bit …”

  “They are dead men walking I'm afraid. Do it.”

  “Yes, ma'am,” the major said as he turned and passed on the order to Throat Slasher to strike.

  <)>^<)>/

  Sergeant Simon Jensen looked up when the heavens above light up as if it was daylight. He made the mistake of looking up to see the flash coming down. “Inc …,” he was cut off by the round tearing him and the squad and surrounding area apart.

  Three of his troops were also killed. Those who were on the outer edge of the blast zone were thrown clear. Those that managed to recover in the air found a way to land more or less on their feet or in one case, on something soft. Others weren't so lucky.

  The surviving squad was leaderless and scattered like jackstraws. But they all knew that their mission had been compromised. They went to ground as quickly as they could gather their wits.

  <)>^<)>/

  “Throat Slasher got a good chunk of them,” Lieutenant Eros said as he watched the follow-up report. “I can't be certain, but I know we caught at least two in that blast, maybe three. The rest have been kissed pretty hard.”

  “Good. Follow-up strikes?” Dana asked gruffly.

  “No point, ma'am. They've dispersed. Some are in the population centers; others are too far apart to hit them piecemeal, ma'am.”

  “I didn't ask that …,” the colonel frowned as she watched the video from the eyes drone. She could see the enemy tangos spreading out in all directions like cockroaches. Trying to hit them with another KEW strike would be like trying to hit a bug with a sledgehammer. “Never mind, I can see it. Stand down KEW strike.” She turned to the video image of her Veraxin XO, “Let the Marines know they are on cleanup duty.”

  “Yes, ma'am,” Major N'v'll said.

  <)>^<)>/

  Lieutenant Robinson was acting as a relay for the various groups, using passives to assemble a picture of the various battlefields. She had two small air drones, but she'd been forced to land them in the inclement weather. The winds had been too strong for the small craft to handle. She got a radio call in from the survivors of Echo squad and immediately passed on the recall order to Delta squad. The squad got the withdrawal warning and immediately broke off contact before the ship got overhead.

  By the time Throat Slasher was over the scene, all they could see was smoking fires and a few natives picking their way timidly out of the rubble and wreckage.

  <)>^<)>/

  Dana felt physically ill when the butcher's bill came in mid-morning. They were still looking for a couple outstanding MIAs but most were dead or blown to pieces. A few might take a forensic team to put back together.

  They'd let their guard down. Oh, they'd known the enemy was tricky, they knew they would be hurt, but up until last night, no one thought they could do something like that. They'd gotten sloppy she thought. Complacent. The enemy had shown just how good they were. She had lost the better part of a platoon of unarmored troops and a platoon of armored suits in one night of brutal fighting. That didn't even consider the civilian casualties. She rubbed the bridge of her nose and let Major Zedeal figure out what had happened while she did her best with Major N'v'll to figure out a way to prevent it from happening again.

  <)>^<)>/

  “How do we deal with the damn ships? And the satellites?” Lieutenant Zevaya demanded.

  “We've determined that the satellites are for communications, weather, and surveillance, not KEW strikes. The strikes come from the ships. The answer is to be where the ships aren't,” Lieutenant Robinson said with a shrug.

  “Simple. Sure,” Lieutenant Zevaya said caustically.

  “I didn't say it was simple. It takes them on average twenty minutes to change orbit once they get word. That's a basic factor of orbital mechanics,” Lieutenant Robinson said in a testy voice. “That's if we hit them when they are as far away as possible from our target.”

  “So you are saying in and out fast. Hit and run. Five minutes?” Captain Zhukov said.

  “Yes. Don't linger,” the pilot said. “Hit them from a run, don't loot unless you know the enemy is tied up somewhere else,” she said. “We can't hit them. We can barely hit their air assets.

  “Good to know,” the captain said with an eye to Lieutenant Zevaya. “I think this last op would have worked out if we'd timed it better.”

  The chimera lieutenant grimaced. “Tell that to the units we lost. Jensen was no loss but …”

  “Every one of our troops lost hurts us,” the captain interrupted coldly. “I don't like expending our personnel. Don't pick and choose who you'd rather see dead. That's my job,” the captain growled.

  The chimera lieutenant grimaced but then nodded. “Yes, sir.”

  <)>^<)>/

  “They are on the ropes. We're going to keep them there,” General Drier growled. “Sucker Punch was such a success I want you to go for the KO on their armor.”

  “Yes, sir. We're working on it now,” the captain replied. He couldn't get any more armor out so the squads that were out had been regrouped in a shallow cave they had dug out and covered with trees and lead shielding.

  He'd sent Gunny Brillo out to put Echo squad back together. He knew it wouldn't be easy; they'd been hammered. From what he'd heard, they'd lost quite a lot of their leadership.

  “Get it done,” the general growled.

  “Roger that, sir. Delta Baker One out.”

  <)>^<)>/

  Gunny Brillo led two of the squads into combat the following evening. It would pressure the Marines; keep them on alert even when they'd already been on alert for the previous 24 hours. The plan was to hit another town hard and fast then retreat up a narrow ravine pass before they hit the deep woods and relative safety. Delta was sent out ahead of their path of retreat before the mission was kicked off.

  The remains of Echo squad were kept in reserve with the gunny as he kept oversight of the mission. That left the actual shooting to Bravo to do the job. Since it was a small logging town, it was relatively easy to get in and hammer them.

  <)>^<)>/

  “We've got another town going up, Major, a logging town,” Lieutenant Queen reported.

  “Where?” Major R'nz demanded as he scuttled into the briefing room.

  The lieutenant pointed to the map. Around it was images of the fighting. “We've got a drone in the air there as well as a robot fire team and one fire team of Marines who had been out on patrol.”

  “Tell the Marines to hold off,” the major said.

  “They can't break contact; the enemy has already engaged them,” the lieutenant replied, indicating the video on the left.

  The major focused on the scene to see a series of robots attacking the suits. He wondered why until one of the enemy went down. From the impact angle, something big had hit them from the flank.

  <)>^<)>/

  The gunny saw one suit go down. His computer reported the direction of the weapons fire. “Sniper on our left flank! Take cover!” Gunny Brillo snarled as two more suits were hit in rapid succession. Both suits had been in motion so the hits were not clean kill shots.

  “More than one!” Trig warned as he fired in the direction of the last shot. “If they're smart, they'll shoot and scoot. I'm
not getting thermal images this far out. Must be pretty well camouflaged.”

  “They used the robots to distract us,” the gunny said as the last robot went down.

  “Wish we'd gotten the bastard,” Mendes said as she looked around them.

  “Me too,” the gunny said just as their sensors lit up with a warning of audio engine sounds incoming. They looked around but then Mendes happened to look up. She saw the short range drone coming at them and pushed the gunny to the side with one hand as her free hand hip shot her rifle at the thing.

  The drone returned fire. Other suits looked up and fired at the drone. It started to smoke but kept firing at her.

  “Mendes, move!” the gunny said just as the drone sprinted and rammed straight into her. Its self-destruct went off killing her.

  “Frack!” the gunny snarled as he got to his feet.

  <)>^<)>/

  “That got two of them, sir,” Lieutenant Queen reported. “We've got a single Reaper drone in the area. With your permission?”

  “Go for it. Bleed them. I'm busy calling in support,” the major replied, touching one lobster claw to his head to indicate he was using his implants.

  The lieutenant nodded. “Send the drone in. Have it fire at clusters but keep watch of a SAM or sniper. If we get a sniff, be ready to pull it out without my order,” she ordered the controller.

  “Aye aye, ma'am.”

  <)>^<)>/

  As the timber mills and piles of wood burned behind them, Gunny Brillo had the team scavenge their dead, then destroy the suit's computer. His moment of inattention allowed the Reaper drone to get close enough to fire a missile. The missile's lidar set off alarms in their suits, but they took cover expecting another sniper attack. By the time they realized their error, the missile had passed mach 2 and was on final approach. It hit the wounded suits, detonating its warhead and taking out both privates and wounding two more in the process.

  “Where the hell did that come from?” Trig demanded, spitting blood.