Major (The United Federation Marine Corps Book 5)

by Jonathan P. Brazee

  Now, though, it was too late. His Marines couldn’t be saved, and while his rage demanded a release, he still had over 70 Marines and sailors under his command, and simply rushing into a fight with a force of unknown size and strength was a recipe for disaster.

  Time to get professional, Ryck! Pull it together! he told himself, concentrating on steadying his breathing and calming down.

  He could use his anger as motivation, but he couldn’t let emotions dictate the battle.

  A single shot sounded a klick or so ahead, and Lieutenant Siripon’s avatar grayed out.

  “Mother fuck!” Sams shouted out from a few meters to Ryck’s left. “Skipper!”

  Renewed rage filled Ryck, and he wanted to lash out. The SOG had just executed Siripon, “Chuckles.” The fuckers had just sealed their fate, but that didn’t change the tactical situation. They would pay dearly, but on the Marines’ terms, not theirs.

  He came to a halt and passed, “Commanders, set security and then on me.”

  Beside him, the usually emotionless Çağlar glowered with anger. He said nothing, though, as he moved to put himself between Ryck and where First had fought and died.

  Ryck tried to gather his thoughts while his two platoon commanders and company staff came up to him. He’d left Captain Lee back at the schoolroom to care for the wounded and secure the building, so that left him with Third and Fourth. Just ahead of them was what Hester had described as a platoon of armored pirates and a Patty. Ryck wished he had even a squad of PICS Marines. He knew they’d make short work of pirates in freaking Nizzies, no matter how many there were. But he had no PICS. His Marines might be the best in the Corps, but they were not set up to fight armor. He needed an infantry company for that.

  “Here’s the situation,” Ryck started, even if they all understood just what was happening. “Charlie and Delta, along with the battalion headquarters, were caught up in some sort of explosion inside the complex. We have no comms with them and have to assume they are KIA. Alpha is essentially in good shape, and Major Halverson is bringing them forward. They will be linking up at the schoolhouse in about an hour. First Platoon is gone.”

  “Fucking SOG pigs!” Capt O’Leary shouted out.

  Ryck ignored the outburst and went on. “There’s nothing we can do about that now but extract revenge. But we have to do this right. We can’t go in there pounding our chests and screaming for a fight. They’ve got armor, and we don’t.

  “So for the moment, we are going to advance cautiously, and I mean that. I want to scour the scene and get whatever Intel we can. We’ve still got two Marines alive, Popper and Creep, and we’re going to get them and bring them back to the link up with Alpha.

  “I’m the senior effective Marine, so I’ve taken command of the battalion, and together with Alpha, we’re going to come up with a plan to take it to the SOG and make them pay. Have no doubt about it, they will pay!

  “Sandy, I want a modified wedge, looping in from the east away from the road. If there is any sign of the SOG, we stop. Do not engage unless we are attacked. Understood?”

  “Yes, sir. Got it,” Sandy acknowledged.

  “OK, let’s move it out.”

  Within minutes, the company was back on the move, but in a controlled formation rather than the pell-mell sprint of before. Ryck went over a list of equipment he wished he had with him. PICS, of course. More Banshees. An M249 Field gun. A dragonfly, for God’s sake! How hard would it have been to fit in some dragonflies with them into the duck eggs? With the little drones, and least he’d be able to see what was up ahead.

  He was proud to be a Raider, and he knew his men were the best there were, but this mission should have gone to a fully-equipped infantry battalion. He knew politics had been involved. The Raider mission needed to be validated, and that would happen even if the mission was not the correct one. And as always when politics got involved, it was the grunt on the ground who paid the price.

  Moving cautiously, it took another 40 minutes before Sandy passed back, “We’re at the site. No enemy, no live enemy, that is, here.”

  His voice was subdued, almost cracking. Ryck acknowledged, then increased his pace to see for himself.

  He almost stumbled on a pair of legs, still connected at the pelvis. He couldn’t see the rest of the body. He took a deep breath and continued to where Sandy and Gunny Van der Flught were waiting for him. Beyond them, the hulk of the Patty was smoking, and Ryck could see a number of destroyed Lizzies among his dead Marines.

  Sandy very calmly said, “First took out the Patty and 16 of the armored pirates.”

  “Sixteen and the Patty?” Ryck asked, astounded.

  First must have fought like supermen, to be able to take out so many. Ryck wasn’t sure how they’d done it with only two missiles and their combat load of grenades.

  “They fucking kicked ass,” the gunny said.

  Ryck’s momentary elation immediately faded as he caught sight of Corporal Francis Bumante, “Dumbo,” lying on his back, his sightless eyes staring at the morning sky. Dumbo was a new father, his baby girl born while the company was on Livingston. Ariel was her name. He’d never even seen her, and now, she would never see her father, never know her.

  “Sir, you need to see this,” Sandy said, interrupting his chain of thought.

  Sandy was obviously trying to keep it together, and he could be losing that battle. The scene before them was horrible, and Ryck wondered, with a sense of dread, what could be worse than this?

  He followed Sandy and the gunny to the base of a large tree. What he saw there didn’t make sense at first, and it took him a moment to put it together. It was Creep, Sergeant Smith, still in the ziplock. But the clear material was not puffing out slightly as normal. It had collapsed closer to his body. His body. Not his head. Creep’s head had been hacked off, stripped of the ziplock, and placed on the body’s crotch, facing whoever would come upon it.

  For the first time in his career, a career that had seen untold violence and death, Ryck lost it. He lurched to the side and vomited, spasms wracking his body. He heard someone else joining him, but he wasn’t able to raise his head and see who. He felt hands on his shoulders, and as the retching stopped, Çağlar raised him back to a standing position. He glanced back at Creep, rage replacing horror.

  “They fucking executed him!’ he said, stating the obvious.

  A few steps to his right, Sandy also stood up from his bent-over position, wiping vomit from his mouth with his forearm. He’d been trying to hold it in, but when Ryck let loose, that was too much for him, and he’d lost it, too.

  Embarrassed, Ryck wondered about his reaction. He’d seen worse. Maybe it was the surprise of it. As a zipsicle, in stasis, Creep hadn’t registered anymore as a WIA on his reticule, so when they’d beheaded him, he hadn’t registered as a KIA, either. Or maybe it was the cold-blooded nature of his death.

  Any little embarrassment, though, meant nothing given the situation. He took a swig of water from his pack, swished it around his mouth, and spit it out. He took one deep breath, then called for the XO.

  “It looks like the bastards destroyed every reticule, at least that I can see. I want a thorough search to see if any survived. I want to see what happened. And check on Nolan.”

  Doc’s already on him. He’s getting ziplocked as we speak?”

  “And his condition?”

  “He’ll make it. Lots of regen, though. He lost both legs and a good chunk of his guts. He was blown right into a tree when he got hit, and that saved him. The idiots never thought to look up.”

  Never looked up? Ryck wondered as he filed away that piece of information.

  “I want the dead gathered up and put in one place. We’ll leave them here for now, but we’ll take them with us when we leave,” he told the XO. “Have the first sergeant take care of that.

  “I really need you to step up, Ford. I’m going to be throwing a lot on your shoulders.”

  “You’ve got it, sir. I’m ready,” the
XO told him eagerly.

  A Marine with a purpose could do anything, whatever the situation, Ryck thought, as the XO hurried off to carry out his orders. He had to keep his men focused if he was going to not only get them through this, but complete the mission and destroy the SOG.

  And destroy the SOG was just what he was going to do.

  Chapter 34

  “Tell me how many you can count,” Ryck told Trap.

  He’d given the other company commander both surviving reticule modules that the XO’s team had managed to find. All the rest had been systematically destroyed by the pirates. With the modules, and the comms Ryck had recorded, he’d been able to piece together the battle. But the visuals were only what the two Marines had been able to see, so the information was not complete. Sgt Nolan’s reticule had been one of the ones that had been recovered, but he’d been knocked out early, and so it didn’t offer much. Doc Feinstein had been one of the last to fall, though, and his offered more.

  Ryck watched the Alpha company commander silently count each Nizzie pirate as he came into view of Doc ‘Stein’s reticule. Stan paused, fast forwarded, and reversed, all by sub-vocalizing, but Ryck could lip-read enough to understand each command.

  “I don’t know,” Stan finally said. “I’m thinking maybe 13 of them? But some of them could have been knocked out later.”

  Ryck had counted what he thought to be 15, but 13 or 15 didn’t make that much of a difference. That was a lot of armor to face what remained of the battalion.

  Alpha company’s initial mission had been to take out an armory. The company had been a little late getting to its objective, and the guards there had time to prepare. The company had still accomplished the mission with no KIAs and three WIAs, but it had expended all of its Banshees and was down to only a handful of grenades. That left the battalion with two of the missiles and about 25 grenades. It took an average of three grenades to take out a combat suit, even an economy model like the Nizzie, so that meant they had the capability, on paper, at least, to take out 10 or 11 of the remaining armored pirates, leaving seven or eight to be neutralized in other ways.

  On Kakurega, Michiko MacCailín had been able to take out two PICS by burying them in rubble. Out beyond the main SOG base, however, there were no handy cliffs around that could be brought down. If they could get them into the volcanic vents that formed the foundation for the SOG cave complex, Ryck could trap them there, but he didn’t think they would be that cooperative. He also didn’t know how much damage there was there. He’d sent the XO and a recon team to try and make an initial assessment, but Ford had passed back that he could not get past rubble that covered the main entrance. He was on his way to the second entrance, but Ryck was not too optimistic about that.

  “So, what’s the plan,” Trap asked.

  “I told you what command has passed,” Ryck said. “Our mission has not changed.”

  Bert had been the only Marine to have comms with the “command” section that was out there in the spacelanes somewhere. Keeping up the ridiculous charade, this was not a Marine command, but some anonymous voice giving them their instructions. With Bert buried in the rubble of the complex, Ryck was the commander, and his AI had opened up the comms channels to him. He’d reported back, and he was told the mission was still a go.

  That was a relief to Ryck, who’d been afraid the mission might be scrubbed. The Marines faced some pretty serious odds, but they had payback to administer.

  “So this is what I want,” he said, pulling up a map on his reticule, then using that as a guide, he used a stick to trace out in the dirt the main terrain features. The reticule offered more detail, but it was small, and with him copying the map in the dirt, each of the Marines gathered around him could see what he was doing.

  “We need to locate the Nizzie force first and foremost. They know we’re here, and they’ll want to engage. I’ve got teams out here, here, and here as OPs,” he said, using his stick to point out their positions. “They be able to give us early warning. But I don’t want to wait for them to come after us. I want to take it to them.

  “Alpha, I want you to take a crescent line of defense here, along this low ridge. I want OPs out, but I want patrols to locate the bastards. Raiders are recon, so let’s recon. Find them. Once spotted, I want eyes on them until we can close with them.

  “That’s going to be the job of our assault team. Sandy Peltier-Aswad will lead that team. We’ve got two missiles left, so Alpha, I want your best gunner attached to the team, and I want him to take one. For the HGLs, I want 15 of the remaining rounds with the element. The rest get divvied up to the patrols.”

  “All our eggs in one basket?” Trap asked.

  “Yeah. We need to concentrate our force, then channelize them to where we can take them out. We need them close so we can improve the chances for a kill.”

  “How do we channelize them?” Captain Rob Wright, one of Trap’s platoon commanders asked. “We just humped the terrain getting here, and it’s pretty much featureless forest.”

  “That depends on where we find them. I’ve got a feeling that they’re around here somewhere, close to the complex. They’ll be needing access to power and cooling packs soon. The Nizzies don’t have the PICS’ endurance. So if we can locate the power supplies, starting right here at the schoolhouse, we’re going to be able to minimize the areas where they’ll have to be. And remember, the forest is pretty mature and pretty dense. It will be more difficult for them to maneuver, and they’ll be seeing Marines in back of every tree trunk, every bush.

  “And we’ll give them every reason for that. Once we locate them, the patrols will try and take out at least one of them with a grenade. Even if it doesn’t score a kill, it will get their attention. And then the patrol’s job will be to lead them to our kill zone.”

  Ryck looked around to gauge their reception of his plan. It wasn’t very detailed, but it was more of just a commander’s intent at this point rather than a full op order.

  “OK, we’ve got a lot of work to do. I want those OPs and patrols out ASAP. Then, I want reps back here to we can put some meat to this plan. I want no fewer than five potential ambush sites within the next 30 minutes. We can’t afford to wait and give them the initiative.”

  “Think this will work?” Sams asked matter-of-factly as the Marines moved off to get things moving.

  “I don’t know, Sams. But we’ve faced worse, so if I was a betting man, I’d be betting on us.”

  Chapter 35

  With all the patrols out looking for the pirates, it was the XO’s patrol, which had gone to see what it could find out about the missing companies, which found them. Ryck had been correct, though. It was the power supply that was their Achilles’ heel. But the power supply was nowhere they had guessed. The XO, returning to the rest, had stumbled upon them in the middle of nowhere, charging two at a time at a small power station, no more than a post sticking out of the ground.

  A PICS could do a quick power pack switch-out in the field, but a Nizzie’s power pack could only be changed in an armory. For normal usage, it had to be charged like old-time electronics with a cable.

  Ryck ordered the two companies to converge on the closest spot that could act as a kill zone. Working as fast as they could, they prepared the area, blocking off spots to channelize them where Ryck wanted them. Marines created deadfalls, and several others dug tiger traps. One of Alpha’s Marines, a heavy-worlder, moved dirt like a badger, digging straight down into the forest loam. As on most terra-formed worlds, the loam was rich and deep, which made for quicker forestation and easy digging.

  The XO kept Ryck with updates. Ryck had considered moving the two klicks to the spot and hit them while they were charging up, but the XO thought the terrain would not be conducive to the Banshees, and while two pirates were recharging, the other 16 were in a defensive posture.

  Ryck had hoped that he’d over-estimated the number of Nizzie pirate at 15, but there were 18 of them. Oh, well, just more targets for hi
s Marines.

  He looked up into the sky as if he could will a Navy Experion fighter into existence. One simple air strike, and their problems would be over.

  It would make too much sense, though, to actually use existing weapons and doctrine in battle, doctrine developed over years of combat, he thought sarcastically.

  “Skipper, they’re down to the last two,” the XO passed.

  “OK, you ready?”

  “Roger that.”

  “Wait one,” Ryck said.

  He switched to the battalion command net and passed, “You’ve got three minutes to get done what you’re doing. Finish it and get into position.”

  Ryck and Çağlar left the Marines who were hoisting a huge log into a deadfall and ran back to the kill zone, which was an open area, about 20 meters wide and 40 long. It was pretty small, and it barely gave the Banshees enough room to arm, but it was the best they could do. There were better areas, but none close enough that Ryck thought they could get the pirates to enter.

  Ryck jumped into the fighting hole inside the tree line that Çağlar had dug.

  “Shit, Evgeni! Did you have to make it so deep?” he asked, his head barely able to see out.

  “Sorry, sir. I guess I thought you were taller,” the big Marine said.

  Ryck stared at him for a moment, then asked, “Are you actually making an attempt at humor, there Evgeni? ‘Cause if you are, you need more work on it.”

  Çağlar shrugged, then looked toward the front, but not before a tiny smile creased the edges of his mouth.

  Ryck choked back a laugh and focused on the area in front of him. To his eyes, he could see the area had been disturbed. He just hoped the pirates would be too pumped up to notice.

  “OK, Ford. Kick it off. And God’s speed.”

  “We’ll need it,” the XO said.

  It took a few moments, but from off in the distance, a popping noise reached them, quickly followed by concerted firing.