Advance to Contact (Warp Marine Corps Book 3)

by C. J. Carella

  That last time he’d seen Gunnery Sergeant Obregon flashed through his mind; the tough-as-nails Marine had looked calm and collected as he led out a flying column of improvised fighting vehicles leavened with a few alien allies and mercenaries. Even the toughest warrior had no chance when his number came up, however. Obregon had died in combat, helping accomplish the mission despite the fact that Fromm’s plan had been deficient, failing to foresee the enemy’s dispositions and tactics.

  And now Fromm was being rewarded for the sacrifice of Obregon and twenty-one other Marines by being paraded like a circus clown, along with his company.

  Clown or not, he still wanted some heavy ordnance around. Kirosha had taught him how easily things could go to hell when you were out in the cold, away from support in Echo Tango Land. There was even a chance the State pukes wanted him around because they knew that when the shit hit the fan he’d do what he had to in order to accomplish his mission.

  Fromm realized he’d spaced out for several seconds. Goldberg didn’t say anything; the non-com knew how that was. After you’d been on the sharp end enough times, sometimes you went back there, whether you wanted to or not.

  “In any case, they want us. We aren’t parade ground soldiers, but they don’t care. So we’re going to pack our dress blues and look pretty for the alien dignitaries. Hopefully the whole thing will be boring and uneventful,” he finished, knowing he’d probably just jinxed them all.

  “The Big Green Weenie strikes again,” the company’s senior NCO said. We’ll have to find ways to keep the troops busy. You know how it is; if they get bored enough they’ll light their own asses on fire just to have something to laugh about.”

  Fromm smiled. “I think our platoon sergeants will find ways to entertain them.”

  “They are good people, even if Graham is kind of an asshole. I wish we had some more time to get the boots ready, though. Maybe we’ll get the chance to knock some sense into them during this deployment.”

  They’d spent the better part of six months integrating their replacements into the company. Heavy fighting at Parthenon had inflicted over fifty percent casualties on Fromm’s unit, including some fifteen percent fatalities. The wounded were back in fighting shape, except for a few whose injuries were beyond even Starfarer technology to bring back to full health. The dead had been replaced by a combination of newbies fresh out of their third year of Obligatory Service Term and more experienced personnel reassigned there. All too often, the reassignments were people their previous units had been glad to get rid of, which meant some of them would be problem children. The platoon commanders and non-coms would whip them into shape, eventually. But getting to that point took work, and they weren’t fully ready yet. On the other tentacle, they weren’t going into combat. Supposedly. The last time he’d been sent ‘somewhere quiet’ he’d ended up in Kirosha.

  The new commander of his weapons platoon was another newcomer, a First Lieutenant who’d transferred from another division to replace the useless coward who’d ran the unit before. His stats looked good, but then again, the gone and unlamented Lieutenant O’Malley’s fitness reports had also looked good. There were always some officers that would let people slide if they kissed enough ass. Fromm had served under one such captain, and had lost a lot of good people as a result. He had no intention of allowing another shirker, coward or idiot to stay in his company. So far, First Lieutenant Chambal had performed adequately, but it was something else to worry about.

  “I’ll make the formal announcement tomorrow, after I hear back from higher about the details. But you can start getting the ball rolling with the non-coms. I’ll be briefing the platoon commanders next. We’re scheduled to depart in three weeks. Paperwork’s just about done. I guess when the War Department sticks its oar in, everyone gets cracking.”

  “We’ll be ready,” Goldberg said.

  Fromm knew the non-com’s confidence was warranted; the company was managed by its sergeants, who took care of training and making sure their people were doing well, and his NCOs’ quality ranged from decent to superb. Sometimes he thought the unit would do just as well without officers, although that wasn’t quite true. The commanders were there to think of the big picture, manage the broad aspects of the mission, and leave the details to their subordinates. That was how the Corps had been organized, at least since the time they added ‘Warp’ to the name. One reason was that most Marines operated in small shipboard units, company-sized or smaller. A light cruiser usually had a reinforced squad, for example. Even a dreadnought had little more than a couple of reinforced companies. Everybody in those teams had to know their jobs; they couldn’t count on a larger formation to take up the slack.

  Which meant that Charlie Company would do its duty as well as could be expected, whether it was a simple babysitting mission or something more complicated and dangerous. After the last few years, Fromm was pretty sure the latter possibility was far more likely.

  * * *

  “Ruddies all around. Kinda brings you back, doesn’t it?” Corporal Russell ‘Russet’ Edison said before he dropped a 20mm high-explosive munition behind a peaked-roof house where some suspected tangos where hiding. The ensuing explosion was much louder and fierier than the real thing, but that was Nullywood for you. Those fucking remfies thought a hand grenade could blow up a house.

  Things weren’t going well. His fireteam was already down one guy, and unlike infantry units, weapon platoons’ fireteams only had three people in them. Two grunts just didn’t do well on their own.

  “I hate this fucking flick,” Lance Corporal Raymond ‘Gonzo’ Gonzaga grumbled.

  “Sergeant Fuller said this would be a good team-building exercise.”

  “FOS is full of shit,” Gonzo said. “But I repeat myself.”

  Russell had to agree that their new squad sergeant, Bob ‘FOS’ Fuller did indeed live up to his unofficial nickname. Not a bad guy, but not too bright, and a little too ready to do all the motivational crap that some remfies always wanted to foist on the Corps.

  “Never mind that. We’ve got movement ahead.”

  “I got them,” Gonzo said before he opened up with his ALS-43, putting a burst of plasma micro-missiles on the virtual Ruddies that had emerged from the smoke-filled house. The Ruddies didn’t die easy; they were protected by personal force fields.

  “Can you believe this bullshit? They never had fucking shields!”

  “They had the one at the end.”

  “Area field. Not the same. Fucking bullshit, man.”

  They were playing 33 Days in Kirosha, which was – very loosely – based on a real bad month Russell and the rest of Charlie Company’s weapons platoon had endured in a remote planet in the galactic boondocks. Of the original seventy-odd Marines who’d been there, only thirty-four were still in the unit. Some had transferred, a couple had retired, and the rest had gotten killed, at the Battle of Kirosha or the actions at Parthenon a year later. None of the survivors had anything good to say about the Nullywood production.

  Russell thought the multimedia flick – available in 2-D, full virtual, and full virtual interactive, the latter being currently running through the squad’s cybernetic implants as they played at being Marines surrounded by hordes of primitive aliens – sucked ass, but he’d done what he usually did with everything and figured out some angle he could play to his advantage. Showing off his Battle of Kirosha Combat Action Ribbon had earned him quite a few free drinks and even a discount at his favorite whorehouse in the two months since the movie opened in New Parris. That would last as long as the flick was popular; he figured it’d be another month or so before the novelty wore off.

  Playing this game was a pain in the ass, though. For one, the Nullywood dickweeds had gotten just about everything wrong, which was pretty amazing considering the Corps had helpfully provided them with about five thousand hours of sensor footage from drones, OPs and every grunt’s suit sensors. The explosions were too big, except the final one, which hadn’t been big
enough. They’d given the Ruddies combat lasers and personal shields instead of the low-tech slug-throwers and cloth uniforms they’d had in reality. If that switch had happened for real, everyone in Embassy Row would have gotten killed. And they’d tossed in a team of Lamprey special ops types to serve as the main villains, which as Gonzo kept saying was total bullshit.

  “Watch out!” Gonzo shouted, a moment too late.

  A blinding flash of light filled Russell’s field of vision before being replaced by darkness and a blinking sign. YOU’RE DEAD flashed in red letters for several seconds. Russell shrugged and ran the instant replay. Speak of the devil: a Lamprey sniper had nailed him from the top of the Kirosha Royal Pyramid with a 5mm laser rifle. Well, at least he was out of the game.

  He switched back to regular vision and lay back on the VR armchair in the rec room. The third member of his fireteam, who’d gotten killed early on, was sitting between Russell and Gonzo, who was cursing out a storm while he continued playing. He was trying to reach the rest of the squad, but with Lamprey snipers running around he probably wasn’t going to make it.

  “Was it really that bad?” Keith ‘Grampa’ Gorski asked him. The newbie wasn’t the usual kind of boot; he was in fact a damn Ancient, one of the seventy million or so people still drawing breath who’d been around during First Contact. He didn’t look like he was a hundred and eighty years old, or even ninety; he was one of the lucky sumbitches who were able to completely turn back the clock and look twenty-seven or so for however many centuries it took for the Grim Reaper to catch up to them. Although he obviously dyed his hair black, the fancy fuck.

  “It was nothing like that,” Russell said, nodding his head at the other grunts still playing in the rec room. They could have just as easily played from their bunks, but the VR chairs were designed to make their real bodies comfortable while their minds were having whatever fantasy adventure they’d chosen to waste time on. All in all, Russell would rather play a hand of real-life poker. By the same token, VR porn didn’t do much for him, either. Even the ugliest flesh-and-blood hooker was better than a virtual supermodel, as far as he was concerned. He was weird that way.

  “But it was bad,” Grampa said. He knew about bad. The old guy had lived in the aftermath of First Contact, had fought in one of the militias trying to keep order after the surviving cities fell apart in chaos and panic, then joined the Old Army and done some pretty harsh things when a good chunk of Mexico was annexed into the US, which the few surviving Mexicans hadn’t liked one bit.

  “The real Kirosha fight wasn’t fun, yeah. Not fun at all, being out there with no support but a bunch of civvies trying to remember their Obie training, a gaggle of mercs, and a few friendly Eets.”

  “I can see that.”

  “You haven’t fought any ETs, have you?” Russell asked him.

  Grampa shook his head. “I was done with fighting by Year Twenty, when they did the big demobilization so they could start in on the Space Navy and all that happy crappy. Haven’t worn a uniform or fired a round since then until I volunteered after the Days of Infamy. All the fighting I did was against my fellow man. A few women, too, not counting the wives.” He grinned. “I fought with my better halves plenty, but we never exchanged gunfire. You ever fought humans?”

  “Once, sort of. Some Pan-Asians and Columbians went off the reservation and tried to play pirate on Peterson System. We hit their base and they folded like a pup tent. Not much of a fight. All my serious shit involved Echo Tangos. Lizards once, Horde pirates, two times, a couple primmie species you’ve never heard of, then the Ruddies at Kirosha and the Furries and Vipers at Parthenon.”

  Grampa had ended up replacing the third member of Russell’s old fireteam, who’d gotten killed at Parthenon. He still woke up expecting to see Nacle around, looking sad and disappointed at something Russell had done or said. The little Mormon had been a good guy. Even Francesca had broken down in tears when hearing about her favorite customer’s demise, and that hooker had a heart of solid granite.

  The old guy – had to be the oldest boot in the Corps’ history – nodded. “Yep, this is going to be a learning experience.”

  Russell had looked at Gorski’s records; the Ancient had breezed through Recruit Training and the School of Infantry before spending a year with the 23rd Marine Expeditionary Brigade, which had been set for an attack into Lamprey space that never materialized, and transferred to the 101st MEU after Parthenon. He was surprised the old bastard hadn’t gone through OCS and become a boss instead of a grunt. He was surprised the guy had enlisted at all.

  “Last time I was running around with a gun, we didn’t have no fancy powered armor,” Grampa said. “It was just us. We didn’t even have APCs most of the time. Shank’s mare or whatever civilian transport we could requisition, when we had enough fuel to keep it running, that was. Half the country was dead. The other half was running out of everything – food, fuel, medicine. Most of the time we helped get stuff from places that had too much of it to places that had nothing. And to keep thieves from stealing it along the way.

  “That was hard. Most of the poor bastards we ended up shooting and blowing up were just hungry and scared, trying to provide for their own. But I guess it’s the same with aliens, too. The fuckers at the sharp end are mostly just like us, following orders and worried only about making it out alive.”

  “Guess so,” Russell said. “Don’t spend a lot of time thinking about their feelings.”

  This was the longest conversation he’d had with the old guy since he’d joined Russell’s crew. At first, he’d been too busy making sure the newbie could cut the mustard. He still had no idea why someone that age would see fit to join the Corps.

  “Yeah, I didn’t think about it too much, not when I was doing the fighting. Saw too many buddies freeze up and get shot. Can’t second-guess yourself when you’re out there.”

  “So what were you up to after you left the Army?”

  “Bunch of stuff. I started five different business ventures,” Grampa said. “Three did pretty well, the other two were complete disasters. Been married seven times; longest one lasted all of eight years. Ten kids, each more worthless than the last. Managed to spend every cent I’ve earned, mostly to stay alive.”

  As it turned out, staying young forever was pretty expensive. Aging was caused by a bunch of different things, and suppressing them had a bunch of side effects, which required even more stuff to suppress them. Kinda like fighting a war, come to think of it. The drugs you had to take to stay young after you hit a hundred or so cost about three, four times as much as what the average American made. The biggest bennie of being in the military was that the government picked up the tab for your anti-aging meds. The main drawback was, you’d better make it worth the government’s while to stay in uniform. Well, that and the chance you’d get killed, which in times of war happened quite a bit.

  “When the ETs bushwhacked us, I figured it was time to do something worthwhile for a change. I never went past E-4 in the Army, and I don’t want to be a goddam officer. So here I am.”

  “Well, brah, you picked a fine time to join our beloved Corps. All the alien asses you can kick, as long as you don’t mind them trying to kick yours.”

  “Sounds good to me.”

  We’ll see how good it sounds when you’ve running around in a sealed suit for three days straight and you can’t even smell your own stink anymore, haven’t slept a wink the entire time and the Doze-Nots are beginning to make you crazy. Hope you ain’t forgotten how shitty it gets. But at least the dude wasn’t some civvie trying to play soldier. Maybe he’d handle it fine. On the other hand, maybe he’d think he was too good to take orders from a brand-new Corporal. So far Grampa hadn’t bitched about being the low man on the totem pole. Hopefully it’d stay that way.

  And there had to be more to Gorski’s story than what he’d said; Russell was sure of it. You don’t make that close to your two hundredth birthday only to join an outfit where you got shot at o
n a fairly regular basis. Old bastards usually ended up in the Navy. Not that he expected the Foxtrot-November to share his real reasons, not at first anyway. After they went through a couple fights together, things might change, or they might not. Some people never opened up to the rest of their team. Russell didn’t even care all that much, as long as it wasn’t something that interfered with his fireteam’s work.

  “Shit, I’m dead,” Gonzo said from the couch.

  “Well, that’s all of us.” It would be nice if they could just leave, but they were going to have to wait until the whole thing was over, and then sit through an after-action discussion. Trust Sergeant Fuller to turn a game into a pain in the ass.

  Grampa seemed to be about done with the small talk, so Russell let him be and went back to writing the email he’d been working on for the past few months. First time in his life he was trying to write to somebody he’d had sex with. First time he’d contacted anyone he’d been with, other than as a return customer.

  Damn warp-witch done put a spell on me.

  The thought was half a joke, but only half. His brief dalliance with one Lieutenant Commander Deborah Genovisi had been one of the weirdest experiences of his life. He still couldn’t get her out of his mind. Chances were they’d never see each other again. She was in the Navy, training to be a warp fighter pilot; as usual, the Navy couldn’t let the Corps have any cool toys without trying to muscle into the action. Anyway, they’d ended up assigned to different fleets in different parts of the galaxy. Following her on Facettergream was already above and beyond. Even crazier was writing an email to her.

  And yet he was still doing it. Well, trying to. He hadn’t been able to come up with something he was willing to actually send out, to bounce around assorted shipping vessels until it made its way to whatever base she was posted at; she hadn’t made her location public. For all he knew she’d forgotten all about the corporal she’d screwed during the victory celebrations at Parthenon.