Alliance (The United Federation Marine Corps' Grub Wars Book 1)

by Jonathan Brazee

  K-3363

  Chapter 29

  Hondo

  The shuttle zigged-and-zagged to the surface, slamming the Marines in their cradles. No shuttles had been shot down yet by the Grubs, but they’d proven before that they were willing to try new approaches.

  This was to be the real deal, not a test run. Operation Brave Justice was in full swing. Over 30,000 human soldiers and four battalions of Klethos were arriving to reinforce the Klethos already on-planet in an attempt to stop the Grubs from taking it.

  Federation Marine recon had already been inserted on the planet, using their clandestine duck eggs, for a week now. They were sending a stream of intel back to Purgamentium and Brussels, and that intel was the basis of the current battle plan.

  The Klethos on the planet had been steadily losing ground since the Grub invasion. They didn’t have the human fascination with numbers, so no one knew exactly how much of the planetary force still survived. It had taken tremendous casualties, though, that much was evident.

  The Joint Klethos-Human Command was going to land in a broad plain down which the Grubs were advancing. The human force was spearheaded by the Federation Marines and Confederation Army, with all other participating governments’ military in the force as well, even if with smaller numbers. The Klethos force was four full battalions.

  Everybody’s got to play for political reasons, Hondo and the rest of the force understood.

  They were going in heavy. M2 Mannerheims, the Marine Corps’ heavy tanks, had been upgraded with new weapons, weapons designed to kill Grubs. The tanks would form the key defense of the attempt to defend the Klethos city that stood in the way of the Grubs. Arty had been modified, and a fleet of combat drones replaced human-powered aircraft.

  The grunts, at Camp Casey, hadn’t been aware of the enhancements made to the other branches, and their appearance had been a welcomed surprise. The “Mannies,” in particular, looked menacing. There had always been somewhat of a rivalry between PICS Marines and tankers, but Hondo felt better with the tank battalion in the operation.

  The shuttle went into its death dive, swooping down at its threshold Gs as it came in for a landing. Hondo tried to keep in his “Battle Meal,” the last real food he’d probably eat before the end of the battle, from coming back up his throat.

  For some, it would be the last real food they’d ever eat.

  With a gentle landing at odds with the herky-jeky approach, the shuttle touched down. Hondo hit the release, and the clamps holding him captive opened, setting him free. The 64 Marines ran out the back ramp, already moving to the assembly area. Staff Sergeant Aster, right on Hondo’s ass and the last man to debark, had barely jumped off the edge of the ramp before the shuttle lifted off and shot into the air, ready to pick up the next load.

  The initial thrust was designed to achieve a rapid build-up of force, getting all hands on the planet surface as quickly as possible. The Klethos, with their personal transport systems, had come in a huge wave, then set up security to allow the humans, with their larger shuttles, to land safely.

  The first time they’d attempted this during training six months prior, it had been a goat rope. As usual, unit discipline seemed to be a foreign concept to the Klethos. It had taken rehearsal after rehearsal to work out the kinks—which was ironic in that for the actual operation, where rehearsals were vital, the landing had not been practiced.

  Hondo checked his display as the platoon ran to their positions. Each Klethos has been given a repeater that could be picked up by the human battle AIs, and to his welcome surprise, all four Klethos battalions looked to be where they were supposed to be. The Marines were to fall into the Klethos’ positions, freeing them up to push farther up the valley and closer to the current battle in this part of the planet.

  Kilo Company settled in to wait for the rest of the force, all sensors arrayed forward and combat drones overflying the Line of Advance. With the Klethos between them and the Grubs, the Marines felt somewhat secure, but the Grubs had a habit of defeating human sensors. It would not have surprised anyone had a swarm of Grubs appeared from underground tunnels and attacked them. There was no such attack, though, and four hours later, the last of the initial assault force had landed. Fifteen minutes after the last shuttle took off, the two Klethos battalions co-located with the Marines were given the order to advance immediately followed by the lead Marine battalions. Twenty-eight klicks away, two more Klethos battalions, followed by the Confederation-heavy envelopment force, advanced on a roughly parallel course. Between the two forces, along the high ground, a new Budapest Ranger battalion and a Legion company kept pace with the two larger human units, acting as both a linking and a ready reaction force.

  “Keep it calm, Marines. We’ve got a long ways to go,” Sergeant Mbangwa passed on the squad circuit before switching to the three fire team leaders.

  “Everyone’s hyped up, but we’re probably ten hours until contact, and we don’t want to shoot our loads now. Xeras and Knight are burning up nervous energy, so try and keep them on an even keel.”

  Hondo pulled up Xeras’ bios. The sergeant was right. Pulse at 120, blood pressure 140 over 100, she was too amped. That would wear her out. He was embarrassed that the sergeant had to not-so-subtly remind him to watch his team better.

  “Fiona, you doing OK?” he asked her on the P2P.”

  “Ready to kick from Grub ass, Corporal,” she replied quickly.

  “I know you are, but we’re at least ten hours to contact, so relax a bit.”

  “Unless those fuckers surprise us like they did with the Brotherhood,” she said.

  Which was true. But he still needed to calm her down.

  “I’m not saying go take a nap. Keep on the alert, but remember, we’ve got a Kluck battalion between them and us. We’ll have plenty of warning.”

  Leading Marines could straddle a fine line. They all needed to be alert and ready for anything, but they couldn’t wear themselves out before the battle commenced. Hondo almost wished he was back as the AR-man, only concerned about his specific job.

  Almost, that was. He wasn’t about to give up his corporal’s stripes and fire team.

  The next nine hours went by uneventfully. Hondo kept up an easy pace, his PICS doing 99% of the work. He ate “ghost shit” to keep his body fueled, and he made use of the gel diapers that kept himself clean. His mind started wandering several times, and he had to snap himself back. Relaxing was all well and good, but they were in a combat zone, and anything could happen.

  “Why didn’t they just drop us off closer?” Valúlfur had asked seven hours into the march.

  “You were there, Sunrise. We needed to keep the shuttles safe to make sure we all got on the ground safely,” BK said.

  “But look at his empty shit. No Grubs so far.”

  “And they can shoot down Navy ships,” Hondo reminded her. “Who knows what their range is?”

  That had been the crux of the matter. No one knew just how far they could range with their weapons. Hondo wondered if the powers that be simply pulled out the distance from their asses.

  Two hundred klicks. Sound good to you, Doctor?

  I’m certain that is fine, Doctor.

  The problem with that was that the science types were back on Purgamentium, safe and sound. If they’d been wrong, Marines—or their body parts—would have been scattered all over the countryside as the shuttles were shot down.

  OK, so it didn’t happen, he had to admit. But it could have.

  After they passed nine hours on the march, Captain Montgomery passed, “We’re about to enter the city. Remember the ops order. Do not interact with the Klethos there. We’re simply passing through.”

  About a third of the Marines were going to advance through the city to get to the series of strong points that were going to form the basis of the defense in depth. Hondo was glad that 3/6 was to be among that number. Everyone was curious as to what the rest of the Klethos looked like, what their buildings looked like. Two s
cience-types who’d served in the Marines had been put in PICS and were traveling with Captain Montgomery and Captain Lyle-Quisenberry, the Lima Company commander, loaded for bear with cams and other scanners to gather as much information about the Klethos civilians as they passed through.

  As they crested a rise, the city lay sprawled out below them, looking like . . . any other city Hondo had ever seen. There wasn’t much in the way of spectacular skyscrapers, and beyond that, the buildings looked rather normal. Within ten minutes at their PICS’ trotting speed, they were entering the outskirts. Klethos warriors were lining the roads through which the Marines were to pass. Hondo got the impression that they were there to protect their people from the Marines.

  So much for trust among the allies.

  They couldn’t hide their people, though. Along the road, smaller Klethos with more colors in their neck crests came up to watch them jog by. Without any of the Klethos warriors’ armor, they looked far more alien, far more bird-like, than the warriors he was used to. He knew some of them were males, but not how many.

  “Oh, eyes right at zero-seven-zero. Baby Klucks,” BK said.

  Hondo turned and saw at least a dozen of the mini-Klethos. They sure looked like young ones and not simply smaller adults. Two of the warriors, as if aware of the Marines’ gazes to the little ones, crowded closer together as if to block the view with their bodies.

  “Remember, we’re supposed to be looking at the layout in case we have to fall back and defend this place house-to-house,” he reminded his three Marines.

  It was difficult, though, to ignore the Klethos civilians, when the buildings did not offer very much in the way of the exotic. On closer look, they did have differences from typical human buildings, but those differences were surprisingly few. The windows were sort of lopsided and irregular, there were what looked like little shelves protruding from the outside walls, and what had to be doors looked like they went into the ground instead of opening at street-level.

  They passed hundreds of the one-story buildings, then even more multi-story buildings.

  “How many do you think live here?” BK asked him.

  Hondo had been trying to get a feel for it. On a human world, when faced with imminent danger, the population would have fled, but everywhere he looked, the non-warrior Klethos seemed to be milling about, more curious about the humans than afraid of the advancing Grubs—that is if he was reading them correctly. For all he knew, their demeanor could be a reflection of abject panic.

  “I’m guessing close to a million. But we don’t know how many of them live in each building. Could be one each or twenty in each one.”

  “Still, that’s a lot of Klucks.”

  “Hell, we’ve got cities with a hundred million. This planet doesn’t seem that populated.”

  “So, why are we here, then? Just get the civvy-Klucks out of here and leave the place to the Grubs.”

  “We’ve got to make a stand somewhere. This place is as good as any, I’m guessing,” Hondo said. “So, enough chatter. Keep an eye out and try to get a feel for this place. We could be back here soon depending on how things work out up ahead.”

  Fifteen minutes later, they were leaving the city and proceeding to “up ahead,” only thirty more klicks away. That was where the Klethos-human force was going to draw their line in the sand.

  No one knew if they were going to be able to keep the Grubs from crossing it.

  Chapter 30

  Hondo

  Fifteen hours later, the joint force was still in position, waiting for the Grubs. Perhaps the major advantage of the defense is that the defenders get to select the terrain. However, that means nothing if the attackers choose not to play. If defending the Klethos city behind them was the actual objective, then things were going well. However, the real mission was to close with and destroy the enemy, to validate all the work and effort over the last year-and-a-half.

  The Grubs, 206 of them in all, had stopped their advance some 40 klicks from the force’s front lines. Several sorties of the planetary-based Klethos had hit the Grubs and been destroyed while accounting for two Grubs, and still, the enemy just sat there, doing nothing.

  Hondo could imagine what was going on at the command levels. They had to be shitting bricks, wondering what was happening. In a human war, something would have broken by now, and a good chance that would have been for the defending force, which far outnumbered the attackers, to transition into the assault.

  “Second Platoon, just giving you all another head’s up,” Lieutenant Silas passed, just as she’d done at the top of the last ten hours. “Nothing much has changed with the local Grubs. They’ve not moved, nor have they expended any energy that we can pick up. However, we do have a bit more information on the rest of the Grubs on the planet. It seems as if all of them have stopped moving. We don’t know if they’re all communicating somehow or not or what’s going on.

  “On the friendly side, Task Force Pompeii has shifted closer to the high ground to be ready to close in if and when the Grubs advance to contact.”

  That bit about the other Grubs, which Intel thought might number over 10,000, having also stopped, was pretty interesting. No one knew just how quickly they could move themselves, and several hundred more of them were within a thousand klicks of the city. Their current Ops order called for a quick extract should any significant number of new Grubs head their way, but that left the question if the 204 facing them would simply let shuttles land and extract the force. If push came to shove, 3/6 was among the force ordered to engage the Grubs to allow the shuttles to land and load the force.

  “What do you think about those others?” BK asked on the P2P.

  “I don’t know, but it means something, that’s for sure. Maybe they want to see what happens, just like us. I mean, this is the first time they’ve faced such a large force of us.”

  “They hit the Brotherhood and Confed battalions,” she reminded him.

  “Yeah, but there weren’t that many of them there. Maybe 200 in all on the planet, and we’ve got that just here in our AO.”

  “It’s gonna suck if the rest of their buddies decide to come and help out,” she said.

  Yeah, “suck” is an understatement.

  “We’ll see. We’ve got the shuttles ready to get us out of here if that happens.”

  “And we’re the last ones to load out. It doesn’t take a fucking genius to see how that’ll turn out,” she said, cutting the circuit.

  Hondo chose not to think about that for now. If it came to that, so be it, but there was no use stressing out about something that might never happen. He took another sip of his ghost shit. It might give him the required nutrients to keep fighting ad infinitim, but it tasted like insipid cotton—not horrible, but hardly a treat for the taste buds. When they completed the mission (not “if”) and were extracted, the Navy mess cooks would have a righteous meal laid out for them. That was good enough reason not to get killed on this dustball.

  He flipped his display to the Order of Battle, which gave the positions of the Grubs, the human forces, and the Klethos. The humans and “their” Klethos had transponders that made their positions accurate. The Grubs were painted by the combat AIs as were the local Klethos. With the 204 remaining Grubs, that was pretty accurate—less so for the local Klethos. Task Force Pompeii had shifted in, closer to Task Force Rhine on the high ground. To Hondo’s mild surprise, the Klethos screening force was still in place. They hadn’t gone musth and charged the Grubs yet. The real test would be if they would abide by the plan when the time came. BK had bet him 100 credits they would break and go into musth-mode.

  As he was watching his display, the first loose Grub rank, if you could call it that, eased into motion.

  “We’ve got movement,” the lieutenant passed. “This could be it.”

  Hondo zoomed in, and like a tsunami, the Grubs quickly reached 70 KPH as they barreled right down the valley at them.

  “Get ready,” Hondo needlessly passed to his te
am.

  The local Klethos clashed with the front line, slowing down 20 or 30 of them. The humans would rather have had them out of the way so they could begin to employ their new long-range weaponry, but with the Klethos intermixed with the Grubs, that was not an option any longer.

  Grubs fell, though. The local Klethos were dropping like flies, but five Grubs looked to be killed, five less that the Marines would face. The rest of the Grubs bypassed the initial contact and flowed towards the waiting force. Task Force Dino, the name given to their Klethos, was arrayed 20 klicks in front of the Marines. This was going to be the tricky part of the plan.

  The two forces clashed, and Hondo could almost imagine he could feel the ground shake. Other than a few modifications and an attempt to instill in mutual support to each other, the Klethos of Task Force Dino were not much different from the locals. They swarmed the Grubs like army ants on a caterpillar—only this caterpillar had its own bite. The surveillance drones, high above the battlefield, were left undisturbed, and they beamed images of the fight to the human fighters. A few Grubs were overwhelmed, although it was difficult to see if the Klethos’ new training was having an impact. More Klethos fell to the power of the Grubs.

  “Come on, any time now,” BK passed.

  Hondo watched as still more Klethos warriors fell. He kept expecting the order to come—the plan relied largely on it.

  At last, the order was sent, and Hondo was probably not the only Marine to hold his breath waiting to see if the Klethos would obey it.

  They did.

  It was not a clean breaking contact. It came in is spurts, and some of the Klethos refused to disengage, but the bulk of them pulled to the flanks, allowing the Grubs to surge forward.

  That was the second part of the plan—that the Grubs would allow for the break in contact and not pursue the Klethos.

  “Now it’s our turn,” Sergeant Mbangwa passed. “Gear up, boys and girls.”

  The Marines were arrayed in a series of strongpoints, a defense in depth. The commander’s intent was to slow and canalize the advancing Grubs. If the Grubs shifted to the planetary west and bypassed the Marines, not only would the town fall, but the entire operation would have been OBE. The Marines needed the Grubs to engage.