She wondered what would happen if the government put all its cards on the table and announced that a renegade American admiral was consorting with demons and plotting to sacrifice billions of aliens to them, likely precipitating Armageddon. Homeland Security’s estimate was that half of the voting public wouldn’t believe it, and the other half would probably believe it strongly enough to start rioting or going on Crusade their own damn selves. Even if they were wrong about the American people – Sondra wanted to believe they were – should the other Starfarers learn what was going on, they’d all jump on the Imperium’s side, Puppies included. No, getting humanity’s house in order had to be done in secret, at least until the job was done.
“Any comments?”
“I think that’s the best course of action under the circumstances, ma’am. I don’t know if it’s going to be a successful course of action, though.”
“Nobody ever knows until it is over, Colonel, and often not even then. Wars are chancy things.”
“Then I guess we’ll just have to roll the dice and see what happens, ma’am.”
“That we will. Dismissed.”
* * *
Coming aboard the USS James N. Mattis felt like returning home in some ways. A home that had undergone a great deal of remodeling.
Like every company and field-grade officer in the 101st Marine Expeditionary Unit, Fromm had been given a virtual tour of the changes the budding shipyards of Malta had made on the assault ship that would be ferrying some fourteen hundred Marines into harm’s way. There were a few new systems aboard that would make life even more interesting than usual, which was saying a lot. None of those modifications altered the living quarters, of course: they remained as cramped and uncomfortable as ever. Some of the ship’s volume had been sacrificed to add an extra power plant. The loss of space had primarily affected cargo areas and their assault shuttle complement: the Mattis and the other Commandant B-class ships in Third Fleet would have to make do with only twenty-eight instead of thirty-two combat-rated landers, and twelve cargo shuttles, down from the original sixteen.
That would ordinarily mean that putting the entire expeditionary unit on a planet’s surface would take three trips instead of the usual two, and the total number for ground forces on the first wave – usually two companies plus motorized and armor support – would be cut significantly; they’d probably not get full ground transport, or have to forgo some armor. Except things weren’t ordinary: the initial landing force would now warp onto the target, along with much of its equipment. All thanks to the new tech – actually the ancient tech – the USS Humboldt had unearthed in Redoubt-Five.
Heather had generated most of that intelligence, taking the knowledge contained in the t-wave data storage units they’d taken from the ruins of a lost Kraxan city and transcribing them into something standard systems could ‘read.’ A lot of that work had been done while the Humboldt spent two months navigating between warp lines, and had consumed most of her waking hours. Her efforts had paid off, provided the new systems worked as per specs, and that there were no unintended consequences. Practice runs had been positive, but no new or rediscovered tech showed its hidden flaws until it was battle-tested. Combat always provided new ways to make your gadgets fail, usually at the worst possible moment.
Fromm entered his cabin – as a company CO, he rated a single compartment; everybody else, including his platoon officers, had to bunk up – and went over the last Tactical Exercises Without Troops he and the rest of the leaders of the 101st had run through. The results had been satisfactory to Colonel Brighton, but not to Fromm. He was still being too cautious. His XO had helped pick up the slack, but that wasn’t Lieutenant Hansen’s job, and wouldn’t be until he was wearing an extra silver bar.
Even knowing it was a simulation, Fromm had hesitated to put his people in situations where he knew casualties were inevitable. Eventually, he did it, but those few seconds spent looking for alternatives started adding up after a while. Making decisions quickly was more important than finding the perfect solution for a given problem; the enemy wasn’t going to wait for you. Indecision was likely to produce more losses than getting things done quickly. He knew all of this, but the moments of hesitation and second-guessing were still happening. The cruise aboard the Humboldt hadn’t settled anything beyond revealing a death wish to add to his other issues.
Fromm would have to keep studying his mistakes and learn not to repeat them. They were going after the Lampreys, and they were nasty, tricky bastards. And they’d be on the defensive, which meant the Marines would need close to a three-to-one local advantage in numbers to overwhelm dug-in positions. And that meant taking losses; there was no way around that. The last TEWT had resulted in three percent casualties for his company, half of them fatalities. And everything had gone right, despite his moments of hesitation. Overall casualties had been closer to four percent. Bravo Company had led the assault, and its losses had been closer to six percent. If things had gone wrong, casualties would have likely doubled or tripled. If they’d gone completely FUBAR, of course, those numbers could have risen to a hundred percent.
Of the dozen or so civilizations the US had fought since it’d joined the community of Starfarers, only about half had followed such quaint customs as accepting surrenders or keeping POWs alive for any length of time, and even among those the occasional massacre wasn’t unknown. An alien military attaché, back when Fromm had been a butter bar, had once read the Geneva Convention and burst off laughing. Giving up a military advantage for the sake of compassion or even in the hopes that one’s own troops would be treated in kind was seen as amusing at best, and downright stupid or suicidal at worst. If an American unit was cut off and overwhelmed, its personnel would be lucky to be killed out of hand instead of tortured to death.
Fromm had the imp replay a critical moment in the simulation, when a spoiling attack against an enemy relief column had nearly led to his company being encircled and exterminated. Poor intelligence had led to that, and his reluctance to risk his scouting elements had been at fault. He made himself watch the whole thing.
The simulation’s sensory inputs were as close to the real thing as their designers could make it. The Corps removed the normal sensory dampers that civilian VR simulations had implemented for safety and comfort purposes: a hit with a virtual laser in a combat simulator would send pain signals to the brain that would feel as agonizing as the real thing. They also stimulated heart and breathing rates to replicate the effects of adrenaline and strenuous physical action on one’s body and mind. About the only things they never seemed to get quite right were smell and taste, which was just as well. Everybody was all too familiar with the way you stank after a few days running around in combat armor, nanite cleaners or not.
He watched again as a squad from First Platoon lost three men in as many seconds when one of the Lamprey ‘transports’ turned out to be a heavily-shielded tank destroyer. Only luck and Lieutenant Hansen’s foresight in placing an assault team nearby had kept those three deaths from becoming ten or fifteen. Watching the all-too-familiar status icons going from green to black hit him almost as hard as the real thing.
Before he went to sleep, Fromm played through the scenario one more time. If he did it enough times, maybe he’d learn whatever he’d forgotten somewhere along the way.
Four
Lhan Arkh Ninety-Seventh Congressional District, AFC 168
Emergence.
Charlie Company’s assault element – ninety-six Marines armed to the teeth – came out of warp ready to fight, catching the Lampreys by complete surprise.
The new meds had worked like a charm. Fromm felt none of the disorientation a warp drop normally hit him with. Thanks to the new chemical concoction, all his Marines were drop-rated now, instead of the normal thirty to fifty percent expected from line units. Everyone he could see was on the move and apparently unaffected. So far, so good.
Fromm’s view was obstructed by a rocky outcrop standing between
his force and its objective, but he could watch what was happening through the drones First Sergeant Goldberg had just released, as well as the eyes of the infantrymen scrambling up the steep slope towards the firing positions their pre-mission briefing had marked for them. Behind them, the assaultmen from Charlie-Three volley-fired their missile launchers over the obstacle. A few seconds later, the mortar section began to rain bomblets on the target, guided by the swarm of micro-drones that mindlessly exposed their robotic bodies to enemy fire for the privilege of finding targets for their makers.
Their landing zone had been manned by a dug-in Lamprey squad; the four warp apertures that had dropped the Marine company on top of the aliens’ heads had leveled their position with deadly implosion-explosions with the destructive power of high-explosive artillery shells. Some scattered debris and blood spatter was all that remained; Lampreys bled red, a slightly brighter shade than humans, but clearly recognizable as such. Fromm had walked into a puddle of the greasy fluid; he shifted around to a less slippery position while he oversaw the action.
On the other side of the outcropping was a bunker that oversaw a mountain range from its tallest peak. Its quartet of five-inch grav-cannons posed a minor threat to starships and made it impossible for anything smaller to survive anywhere along its arc of fire. Charlie and Bravo had been tasked with silencing those guns to allow the rest of the 101st to land its heavy equipment behind the mountain range before sallying forth to engage the Planetary Defense Base on the other side.
The sky above him was alive with laser fire: Lamprey fireflies, ball-shaped drones unleashing coherent light from sixteen barrels spread evenly along their surface. The lasers chewed up Charlie’s recon drones and detonated most of the missiles and mortar bombs before they could strike their intended target. A single beam wouldn’t deplete a Marine’s personal force field, but several dozen hits would; another few dozen would degrade and eventually penetrate even their new and improved body armor. The first infantrymen to reach the top of the outcropping were already taking fire; they had lugged a large force field generator to protect them, but the ‘flies needed to be dealt with. Luckily, Staff Sergeant Muller from the mortar section was already on it.
The next mortar volley consisted of new munitions built from designs developed in Xanadu. They were very similar to the enemy fireflies, except they had force fields and as higher-intensity lasers. The bomblets took the enemy flying balls under fire as they fell, destroying a dozen or more apiece before being destroyed or landing downrange. The enemy fire slackened off noticeably.
That still left the bunker’s outer defenses, but those would be engaged by guns wielded by men and women who would bleed and die if anything went wrong.
* * *
“Hope the new toys work, brah.”
Russell grunted by way of an answer, too busy climbing the steep rocky slope with two hundred pounds on his back to engage in chit-chat. The suit’s artificial muscles did most of the work, but they still left plenty for his scrawny ass to do. Gonzo was even shorter, but he always managed to have enough breath to bitch about anything and everything.
“Ancient… super… tech,” Grampa said in-between wheezes. “It’ll… work… fine.”
The old guy was even more heavily loaded than the other two members of the fireteam. While Russell was carrying a thirty-pound Widowmaker and as many spare power packs as he could, and Gonzo was loaded up with the equally-heavy and even newer Dragonfire gun system, Grampa had their portable field gennie, even more power packs, and his old-fashioned IW-3a gun, plus ammo for that. Low man on the totem pole got to play pack mule, and Grampa Gorski was going to be at the bottom of the pack for as long as he stayed in Russell’s team. He might be pushing two hundred, but he’d only been a Marine for a handful of years. That made him only slightly better than a boot fresh from New Parris.
“If all y’all can talk, y’all can climb faster,” Sergeant Fuller growled through the squad channel. “Move it, Marines! The party’s at the top, and we’re missing all the fun!”
They could see the fun even from two-thirds of the way up. Scattered plasma blasts illuminated the top of the rocky hill; the Lampreys had taken their sweet time reacting to the warp-dropped assault element, but they were taking their position under fire, and the Marine legs up there didn’t have the firepower to handle a bunker. Russell grunted again and put all he had into it, rushing towards the sound of the guns. The familiar canvas-ripping sound of the infantry’s Squad Automatic Weapons was punctuated by the staccato hammer of a Lamprey 31mm plasma cannon. Russell was something of an expert on the subject of the sounds generated by assorted death-dealing devices; he could also tell that the plasma guns were going to win that fight unless his fireteam didn’t hurry up.
Almost there.
The Ass-Faces manning the bunker weren’t regulars; a no-account planet like DC-97 was defended by People’s Militia units, peons and factory serfs with hypno-implanted military training they only ‘remembered’ when their local union rep ‘triggered’ them. Their reaction time was lousy and their gunnery even worse. On the other hand, enough firepower could cover a multitude of sins. By the time Russell reached the top of the hill and the fighting holes the grunts had kindly dug for them, the bunker was blazing with dozens of firing emplacements, about half of the enemy was raining hell at their hill; the other half was engaging the poor bastards from Bravo Company, who were on another outcropping half a klick to the east.
Russell’s fireteam clambered into the holes, still smoking from the breaching charges that had created them. Grampa set up their area force field, adding an extra layer of protection to the shields the infantry had emplaced. They were going to need it; two drained power packs were already lying on the ground where the grunts had tossed them away after replacing them. Considering how much energy a field gennie could soak up before being depleted, the Lampreys were hitting it too often for comfort, poor gunnery or not.
Time to make the tangos roll over and be dead.
“Targets marked,” Sergeant Fuller called out when the Guns section was ready to go. Recon drones highlighted the spots to hit: three swiveling bubble turrets on the side of the bunker, each armored as well as a tank and protected by three force field layers. Their old Alsies – Automatic Launch Systems – would have never been tasked for this mission; their 15mm munitions just didn’t have the oomph to do the job. Their new guns, on the other hand…
“Fire!”
That part of the job sucked worst of all. Gonzo and Russell had to rise from their holes and expose their heads and shoulders to fire, trusting that their force fields would keep them alive for the next three to five seconds. So did the other four shooters of the Guns section. All six fired as one.
Half of those guns were Widowmakers; they vomited a twisting graviton beam packing almost as much punch as a tank’s main gun. The other half were Dragonfires, based on a Marauder design, and their particle beams were hell on force fields, draining them at five times the rate of normal energy weapons. Two of the enemy gun emplacements wilted under the impacts. The barrel of one of the plasma guns went flying into the air; the other shattered like a dropped glass.
The third one survived long enough to rake the Marines firing on it. One force field failed, then another, and Lance Corporal Hansel ‘Vato’ Jimenez screamed in unbearable pain when a dollop of plasma burned through his personal shields and armor and found the flesh beneath them.
“Fuck,” Russel muttered, ducking back into the hole. Jimenez’s status icon was flashing yellow; the luckless bastard was still alive, but plasma burns were the worst. The wounded Marine kept screaming for several seconds after his medical implants filled him with enough painkillers to put him into a coma under normal conditions.
“Fuck,” Grampa agreed as he replaced the field’s generator’s power pack. Russell noticed his personal shields were down by eighty percent. He ejected one of his two power packs and gratefully accepted a fresh one from the fireteam’s loader. He
’d almost gotten a dose of hellfire himself; a fraction of a second longer and his force field would have burst like a soap bubble. Their new body armor was damn good – it was the only reason Jimenez was alive – but Russell didn’t want to find out how living through a plasma shot felt like. Vato sure as fuck hadn’t liked it.
Through the drones’ video feed, he watched the last bubble turret get taken out by a volley of missiles from the Assault section. That took care of the big guns protecting the enemy bunker. The tangos were still shooting back, but it was all small arms – Lamprey laser rifles, nasty if they caught you in the open but not that big a deal dug-in. The loader from Jimenez’s fire team dragged the now-unconscious Marine to a corner of the fighting hole and took over the fallen man’s Widowmaker. They still had work to do.
“All right, Devil Dogs,” Sergeant Fuller called out. “Time to knock on their front door. On my mark…”
* * *
Scratch one nest of Lampreys, Lisbeth thought coldly as she flew over the still-smoldering caldera that had once been a city of three million.
“I find it sadly disturbing that you can feel such joy in the slaughter of your enemies, Christopher Robin,” Lisbeth’s invisible friend whispered in her ear as the Death Head Squadron flew over the nearly-depopulated planet, looking for targets of opportunity.
All the Lamprey PDBs on CD-97 had been destroyed, but the aliens had stationed a full division of mobile anti-shipping artillery on the planet. One of those guns was unaccounted for, and it might threaten Third Fleet’s supply vessels as they traveled towards the next warp gate in the system. Better safe than sorry.
“Fuck the Lampreys. Some assholes just deserve to be extinct.”
Atu gave her a sad puppy-eyed look, made worse by the fact that it consisted of three cartoonishly large puppy eyes. Lisbeth ignored the alien ghost and concentrated on flying her ‘gunboat.’ Although Corpse-Ships had the aerodynamics of a brick house, their force fields could be realigned into a shape suited for atmospheric flight. Her squadron zipped through the air at fifty-thousand feet, scanning the area below for any signs of the mobile gun they were hunting. If the ETs were smart, they’d abandon it and run for the hills; Third Fleet didn’t have the time or inclination to conduct a full kill sweep; incinerating the cities on the planet was good enough for government work.
Havoc of War (Warp Marine Corps Book 5) Page 6