“Detached duty! Again! Motherfuckers!”
A waitress came over with fresh drinks. Nice-looking girl, but she looked scared. Russell couldn’t blame her. There were a lot of Charlie Company grunts in the bar, and they’d all gotten the bad news at the same time. A bar full of pissed off Marines didn’t make for a safe work environment.
“It is what it is, Gonzo.”
“Did someone in the company screw with a general’s daughter or something? Are they trying to kill us all?”
“Seems like an awful lot of trouble just to get rid of a few leathernecks. They could just send us off against the Lampreys instead.”
“No, that’s not good enough. We might just end up kicking alien ass and surviving. No, this detached duty shit is going to do us in, man.”
Russell couldn’t disagree with that. They had taken it on the chin every time Charlie Company had gone off on its own, or when Third Platoon had been left to its own devices. They were still putting things together after the last time. The Marines of C-Company had taken the biggest space station in the galaxy pretty much all by themselves. They’d taken the biggest space station in the galaxy using mostly improvised spears, knives and entrenching tools, for fuck’s sake. And instead of giving everybody medals and about two years’ worth of leave, which they richly deserved, they were sending them off on detached duty again.
His fists were clenched so hard his knuckles were turning white. Russell realized Gonzo wasn’t the only one getting worked up about the unfairness of it all. He had to force himself to relax, because if they both lost their shit, things would get real ugly. The kind of ugly that ended in court-martials.
Then again, what else could they do to them? Send them on a more suicidal mission than the one they’d just been given?
“Not to mention, it’s going to ruin all the stuff we just set up,” Gonzo added.
Russell nodded and clenched his teeth. After all the blood and sweat they’d spent taking the place – and holding it in the face of a Lamprey fleet, let’s not forget that shit – this had turned out to be a damn good posting. Lots of space traffic, which meant lots of opportunities to do well while doing good. Most of the ships passing through didn’t dock on the giant space station, but a few did, each bringing new sources of income. The place was also huge and full of alien goodies. They’d sold a few trinkets they’d stumbled on, and were hatching plans to liberate some more. In a month or two, they would have pulled enough scores to retire comfortably. Until their new orders arrived. Detached duty on some Survey starship, destination classified, objectives classified, duration classified. The only thing they hadn’t bothered classifying was that it was going to suck ass.
PFC Keith ‘Grampa’ Gorski joined them in their booth at the newly-opened enlisted bar. It was a pretty damn nice watering hole. A couple of retired Marines from New Parris had moved to Xanadu and set up the place just like the one they’d run back there, with plenty of mementos from their time in service decorating the walls. About the only difference was that the bar was more spacious and less dingy than the original. There was a lot more elbow room all around, courtesy of being located in the largest space station in the known galaxy. A station that was now US territory because Russell and about a hundred of his closest friends had butchered the previous owners with knives and e-tools. Or, in the case of the fat alien in charge of the whole shebang, their bare hands – well, gloved hands; Marine combat gloves were almost as good as brass knuckles when it came to punching someone in the face. In the end, they’d just stomped the fat bastard. Best time to kick some alien to death was when he was down. Those happy memories did little to remove the scowl from Russell’s face, though.
“It’s a bitch, ain’t it?” Grampa said as he sat down.
“They’re trying to kill us, is what they’re doing,” Gonzo said. He emptied his drink and looked at the glass as if considering the best way to weaponize it.
“Way I heard it, it was that Major’s idea to have us along, and this whole mission is on her.”
“What Major?” Gonzo’s expression became calculating and almost wistful. If someone, O-4 or not, gave you shit, there was always a chance that someone could be made to go away.
“Zhang.”
Gonzo carefully set the glass on the table and lay his face next to it.
“We’re fucked.”
Russell wanted to disagree with his buddy, but he really couldn’t. Major Zhang was the weirdest Marine in the entire Corps, bar none. That lady could do warp drops without using a catapult. Russell had seen the vids. It was one of the few shows where the naked chick onscreen was the least-interesting part. The look on the admiral’s face when he returned the nude Marine’s salute was priceless. Word was that Zhang was crazy on top of being a witch.
Russell had met another witch, back at Parthenon. Deborah Genovisi was a former bubblehead warp navigator. Gorgeous but spooky as hell. She was back in the Fleet, as a warp fighter pilot, which didn’t surprise him one bit. Deborah could read minds, more or less, which if Russell had any sense would have been a damn good reason to run away from her as fast as possible. Instead, he’d spent a few very memorable days with her. After that, he’d written her a couple of e-mails, and gotten answers each time; he didn’t know what that meant.
“In all fairness, the Major saved our asses,” Grampa reminded them.
“If she’s involved, you know it’s going to be something crazy.”
“We’re just going to be running ground security, right?”
“Sure, Gramps. Because it’s always as simple as it sounds, right? Like the one time we were just supposed to do a dog and pony show for a bunch of ETs? Remember that one?”
They all looked down for a moment. A lot of their buddies hadn’t made it.
“And almost half of the people in the company are new,” Gonzo went on.
“No boots, though,” Russell said. “We’re getting set up as an elite battalion, the 101st. They let us keep all them new weapons and armor, too. This is turning out to be a prestige post.”
“Ain’t gonna be enough.”
“Save that can’t do shit for the Army.”
Privately, though, Russell thought Gonzo was right.
Two
CRURON 23, McCormick System, 167 AFC
Admiral – former Fleet Admiral – Nicholas Kerensky watched his enemies burn in the bonfire he had prepared for them.
The twelve ships of Cruiser Squadron 23 fired as one: a total of forty-eight heavy graviton cannon unleased their fury onto their targets just as the pirates realized the American formation had emerged from warp a mere light second away. The alien vessels were arranged in a ragged column tens of thousands of kilometers long, each of the thirty-odd ships moving at its best speed with no thought about keeping formation. The sudden appearance of the American squadron on their flank had caught the Horde raiders by surprise. Executing an ambush was no easy feat in space engagements, but Kerensky’s people had performed the maneuver flawlessly, performing a warp jump before the invaders’ sensors had time to alert them that an American fleet was in the system.
The holotank in the Tactical Command Center had detailed visual icons for the enemy forces, designated Sierra-One through Sierra-Thirty-four. Like all Horde raiding fleets, it was a ragtag collection of hulls from a dozen different civilizations, with new weapons and systems added as opportunity or whim dictated. Command and control was spotty at best.
That didn’t make the individual vessels any less dangerous, however; underestimating the Horde was hazardous to one’s health. The larger pirate ships had the tonnage and energy signatures of a battlecruiser or even a pocket battleship, and there were a good dozen of those; the rest were somewhere between a light cruiser and a frigate in displacement, all heavily armed, and all manned by members of a warrior culture whose only pleasures were combat and pillage. In a head-on confrontation, Kerensky’s squadron would have been outgunned and likely taken losses even with the huge advantage warp s
hields conferred on American vessels. The enemy had given him a perfect chance to avoid a fair fight, however, and he planned to make the most of it.
Three large enemy icons and nine smaller ones flashed red before they turned black and vanished from the tactical display, indicating confirmed kills. Kerensky’s ships had gone after the leading contacts, which belonged to the swiftest pirate vessels. In this case, the quick had become the dead.
“Their shields were down,” Kerensky commented dryly as the performance of the squadron’s opening salvo was processed and presented to him. “They were in too much of a hurry to reach McCormick-Seven, I suppose.”
CRURON 23 advanced towards the disorganized pirates, pounding them with steady main gun volleys as it closed the distance. Six more enemy icons disappeared from the tactical display before the Horde ships altered course and raised their shields. Most of the survivors were already damaged. The plan had worked even better than Kerensky had expected. The raiders had diverted most of their power to their propulsion systems, trading defensive capabilities for greater speed. Since the aliens were over an hour away from McCormick-Seven’s orbital defense stations, they’d thought it was a safe maneuver. It wasn’t the sort of mistake a professional navy formation would normally make, but the Horde were barbarians.
“Sierra-One is down,” Tactical Officer Mendez reported. That had been the flagship of the enemy force, a big whale of a boat that had started life as a pair of Viper destroyers – of different classes, from the uneven look of their lines – before the Horde had welded them onto the larger hull of a Botari freighter and tacked an extra fifteen kilotons of armor plate and a dozen forty-inch grav cannon of Lizard make to the ensuing mess. Kerensky wouldn’t have cared to exchange broadsides with that bloated monster, not from the bridge of any of the City-class battlecruisers that comprised his squadron.
Not too long ago, he had commanded Fifth Fleet from the CIC of a dreadnought that could have wiped out the entire pirate flotilla without bothering to warm up its main guns. He’d been stripped of that command and sent off to rusticate in a remote frontier for the rest of the war. Deservedly so: he had led Fifth Fleet to disaster and defeat, and fled the system he’d been charged to protect, abandoning millions of innocents to their deaths.
Fourteen million, eight hundred seventy-three thousand and ninety-seven innocents, to be exact. He’d memorized the final tally once a relief force liberated the system and rescued a scant three hundred thousand survivors. 14,873,097 dead. He could provide chapter and verse of the victims’ demographic data. Average age of twenty-three, which in a civilization with anti-aging treatments meant a large percentage of children. Thirty-eight point-seven percent: 5,755,889 total victims under eighteen years of age. He had the exact number of children he’d left to die forever engraved in his mind and soul.
The ghosts of those dead children were part of his mental background as he impassively watched the battle unfold, giving orders only when necessary. After assuming command of CRURON 23, Kerensky had drilled every ship mercilessly. Once he was sure every cruiser captain knew how to do his or her job, replacing those who didn’t with all due haste, he mostly let them run their ships at their discretion. His preparations had paid off. Not that this was much of a battle, of course. It could technically be called a massacre, given how little the enemy could do to change its outcome.
The Horde ships tended to burn brightly after taking critical levels of damage; their preferred atmospheric mix was high in oxygen, and they carried huge containers of high-pressure volatiles in their holds. When their shields and armor were pierced, each colorfully-painted vessel became a fireball in short order.
The remaining pirates tried to fight, shooting back at their tormentors with a wild variety of weapons and unleashing several hundred ship-killing missiles. Most of the incoming fire was swallowed by the Americans’ warp shields without achieving anything; the few leakers or lucky hits didn’t inflict even cosmetic damage on the cruisers. The missile barrage was as badly coordinated as everything else, and the cruisers’ point-defense batteries destroyed them all long before they covered half the distance between the two formations.
After the utterly uneven exchange resulted in another dozen kills, a few of the more foolish or desperate warlords tried to jump into warp, which only hastened their demise. Engaging FTL engines took time and energy; an undamaged ship with a well-trained crew could perform the maneuver in under five minutes, if one diverted most of its power to that purpose, leaving it all but defenseless. In the Horde’s case, weakening their shields only provided the Navy gunners with easier targets. The last two volleys from the squadron immolated every last pirate vessel in the system. The final score was Navy 34, Horde 0.
“Maintain course. We will scan the debris for survivors, then clear potential navigational hazards.”
In the unlikely event that any Horde raiders still lived in those blazing hulls, they would be shot on sight. For untold millennia, the space nomads had murdered and enslaved billions of Starfarers, and every civilization in the known galaxy had only one method of dealing with them. The Horde didn’t negotiate and never surrendered. For once, Kerensky was glad of the simplicity of choices facing him. He wasn’t feeling particularly merciful. What little mercy had been in his soul was left behind at Heinlein-Five, along with his honor.
He found it highly doubtful that he would ever regain them.
* * *
Kerensky was going over the after-action report when the courier ship arrived.
The actual AAR had been easy enough to generate, of course. The operation had been carried off flawlessly, thanks to an incompetent enemy force and well-drilled crews. He couldn’t help adding his own thoughts about the strategic import of the event, however. The Horde probe was worrisome, not in itself but because of what the pirates’ appearance meant.
McCormick System was an American backwater, an island of civilization in a largely unexplored frontier. The raiders had come from the only Starfarer-occupied warp line in the system, one belonging to the Botari, colloquially known as the Blue Men for reasons obvious to anyone who saw them. That meant the Blues had let the Horde flotilla travel through their space unmolested, in violation of the non-aggression pact they’d signed with the US almost a century ago. Another friendly neutral had turned against the US.
Botari and humans had never been at war; they’d worked together during the Gremlin Conflict, and been peaceful trade partners ever since the two polities had come into direct contact, shortly after humanity defeated the Risshah and took over their ley line network. They’d had as good a relationship as any other species other than the Puppies.
And none of that mattered worth a damn, he thought bitterly.
Granted, the Blue Men were loosely organized, more of a confederation than an actual nation-state, and the local satraps had a reputation as mavericks if not outright rogues. The kind of robber baron types that might have sold the Horde the hulls used in their flagship, say. But letting pirates stage a raid through a warp gateway under their control was an indisputably unfriendly act, and something that the Greater Botari Council would have to punish forcefully – provided it hadn’t allowed it to happen. There would be excuses and pretexts aplenty, but the reality was that a raiding party of that size couldn’t have forced its way to McCormick without massive neglect or outright complicity.
In either case, Kerensky’s conclusion was that this sector could no longer be considered safe. A cruiser squadron wasn’t enough to guarantee the safety of the one million inhabitants of McCormick System, let alone the other three million colonists scattered across six stars further down its second warp chain. The nearest openly hostile polity, the Lhan Arkh Congress, was twelve warp transits away, too far to push through a substantial force, but if the Blue Men let even a few enemy squadrons through…
Images of devastated Heinlein-Five flashed through his mind. 14,873,097. That number, never to be forgotten or forgiven.
The US was runnin
g out of friends. The Hrauwah still hadn’t committed to a formal alliance, although after the US had seized Xanadu System their supplies were flowing into human space at an increased rate. That helped, but having the Royal Fleet join in the fun would help a lot more. Through the few contacts Kerensky still had in the Navy, he’d heard that other Starfarer civilizations had stepped up the pressure on the Puppies, pressure that included threats of war if they intervened directly in the conflict. Plenty of polities who weren’t willing to join the crusade against humanity were still happy to give aid and comfort to it.
We are not a numerous people, and nobody loves us.
The first time Kerensky had heard that phrase had been during a speech by Vice-President Olsen some eighty years ago, but he was sure the VP had been quoting somebody else. The statement’s truth remained self-evident, no matter who’d said it. There were eight billion humans in the universe, and only two billion or so lived under the American flag. The actual belligerents in the conflict outnumbered humanity fifty to one. If all major civilizations turned against it, the odds would become over five hundred to one.
Kerensky shook his head. Worrying about the overall strategic picture might have been part of his job when he was CINC-Five, but that part of his life was over. He’d all but begged for a command, even if that meant becoming the skipper of a logistics vessel in some galactic backwater. Getting a squadron to call his own was more than he deserved. They even let him keep his rank, but he was a five-star admiral in name only.
He went back and deleted most of his insights into the political situation from the report. There were plenty other people with that job, men and women untainted by the decimation of a Sector Fleet and the loss of 14,873,097 civilians. Instead, Kerensky dutifully listed the officers and spacers he wanted to nominate for commendation and promotion. He could do that much, at least.
In Dread Silence (Warp Marine Corps Book 4) Page 6