Superheavy guns. Lots of them. Not as powerful as the weapons her flagship carried, but she couldn’t use those on a planetary surface, and they could use theirs with impunity.
Intelligence reports indicated that the Obans had fortified their home planet heavily, but it was believed most of those installations had been deactivated over time. It appeared those estimates had been wrong. There were more artillery emplacements on the planet than she’d ever seen before. The power requirements for that many weapons seemed impossible to meet. She ran a few quick data inquiries even as the fleet maneuvered to minimize exposure to ground fire.
Geothermal plants. Ugo-Two had a very active under-crust. In the past, it had led to a great deal of volcanic activity and several major disasters. The Obans had tapped into those vast reservoirs of flowing magma and used them as a source of energy. A heat-to-power converter was cheaper to build and maintain than a gluon power plant, and required a lot fewer exotic materials. Those massive guns – most of them were fifty-inchers or larger – were drawing their energy from the heart of the planet itself.
“We have to silence those guns,” Sondra said, knowing what that would mean. What it would cost.
Those weapon emplacements covered most warp gateways in the system, including the one leading towards Primus. Until they were destroyed, nothing could venture any deeper into Imperium space without getting pounded by those cannon. A warship might survive such treatment, but the equally indispensable support ships would not. The temptation to just let loose with all her heavy weaponry was strong: she could blast those facilities into dust, as long as she didn’t mind unleashing megatons of energy into the atmosphere. Which would violate the rules the Elder Races had set over all Starfarers, and doom her species.
She was going to have to commit her ground forces to get the job done.
Third Fleet pulled back while she began drafting a new set of orders. General MacWhirter wasn’t going to be happy, but he would make sure they were implemented. Third Fleet’s fighters and the gunships would help a lot, along with some limited orbital bombardment, but it was going to be up to the jarheads to go down there and take those emplacements.
And she didn’t know if they could do the job.
* * *
“Jesus wept,” First Sergeant Goldberg said as he went over the new OPORD.
“Even strain, Sergeant,” Fromm said.
“I know we’ve practiced this a few times, but only at battalion level, sir,” Lieutenant Hansen said. “The logistics…”
“Are going to suck, yes, until we clear enough enemy bases to allow for shuttle resupply.”
Goldberg looked like he was about to throw up. It wasn’t fear that was making the senior non-com sick, it was the near-impossible job they’d been given.
“Better get started. Kickoff is in four hours.”
Third Fleet was about to launch the largest warp insertion in the history of the Corps: twelve MEUs in total, about four brigades’ worth of troops. Fromm would have gladly had forgone the honor of being part of it. Mostly because this also had the makings of a disaster of historic proportions.
He felt the Mattis tremble slightly under his feet as he began passing on the operational orders to his platoon commanders. The assault ship was taking fire despite being well in the rear of the formation, which had withdrawn to over three light-seconds from the planet. At those ranges, the chances of a hit inflicting meaningful damage were slim. He ignored the vibrations and concentrated on his job. The next few hours were going to be an all hands on deck evolution, as vehicles and cargo that had been packed for shuttle transport was unloaded and prepped for an unprecedented warp drop. One using improvised, experimental systems.
The shuttle loading bays would be used as impromptu assembly points. Regular warp catapults were accessible to light infantry only, since only infantrymen and whatever they could lug on their backs could be launched in that manner. Their new Kraxan techno-toys had changed that, but assault ships hadn’t been redesigned to exploit those advantages. Instead, they were going to use their recently-issued portable catapults to send vehicles and their crews down to Ugo-Two, along with as many supplies as they could manage.
There were three problems with this. First, initial testing had shown that launching vehicles via warp catapults had higher loss rates than infantry drops. From the looks of it, if anybody aboard one of the transiting vehicles lost his mental grip during the drop, the entire vehicle and crew would be stranded in warp. KIA, in other words. MIW if you wanted to be technical, not that anybody who’d gone Missing In Warp had ever come back. They were going to take losses anywhere between one to three percent just getting there.
The second issue was less important, in terms of accomplishing the mission. They would have to use almost every portable catapult in their inventory. Which meant getting back was going to be slow at best, impossible at worst, and would mean leaving any heavy equipment behind. Since standard warp drops were usually one-way trips, it wasn’t a big deal. Once enough landing zones were cleared, shuttles would be able to bring more supplies and equipment down, and eventually take everyone home. Everyone still alive, that was.
The third and final one was, as Hansen had mentioned, logistics. The Mattis was going to drop the better part of a Marine Expeditionary Unit, including its attached supply units, but even with those trucks loaded up and after strapping everything they could onto every vehicle on the drop, it was going to be a ‘bring your own shit’ party. There weren’t enough warp-rated personnel to bring more supplies via catapult, since each drop would need to be crewed. The few catapults they’d be able to set on the planet could take a trickle of ‘mule drivers’ back to the ships for another supply drop, but not enough to keep up with expenditures. At most, another ten to twenty percent additional supplies could be dropped before additional warp drops were deemed too risky to continue.
The Marines would land with enough ordnance and consumables for twenty-four hours of sustained operations. Allegedly. In Fromm’s experience, they’d start running low on some stuff in as little as ten hours, and be high and dry within fifteen. Until they could silence enough enemy emplacements to allow for shuttle resupply, that would be all they had.
In a way, dropping heavy like this made things worse. Yes, he would be glad for the extra firepower and mobility having Light Assault Vehicles and tanks along, but those vehicles and weapons all needed supplies, even the ones powered by internal gluon plants. But they needed to take out at least two hundred fortified hardpoints on the ground to clear a landing zone, and there was no way that light infantry could do the job. There was evidence that an entire Oban Army Group was entrenched around the planetary defense bases.
Less than twenty thousand Marines were about to assault a dug-in force of a quarter of a million ETs.
* * *
“Heavy drop! Fucking heavy drop, y’all. Oorah!”
Russell’s disgusted glare didn’t make an impression on PFC Mendel. The gun bunny was too excited about making a drop inside a Light Assault vehicle to care about what anybody else thought. He whooped in triumph while he peered through the sights of the troop-carrier’s top turret.
“Can’t believe they could fit a Stormin’ Norman inside one of those warp rings,” Gonzo said, ignoring the racket.
“They’re modular. They can configure them to fit anything smaller than a shuttle. A tank will make it. Barely.”
He didn’t add that most of those Schwarzkopf tank drivers would be making their second or third drops ever, and their first time inside a vehicle. Tanks and LAVs weren’t starships. You weren’t supposed to catapult them through warp. Even now that they had all that ancient alien super-tech Russell and his buddies had looted from a creepy dead planet, this was crazy. Nobody wanted to think about it, but none of the Marines’ vehicles had been designed for a warp drop. This kind of improvised shit had a way to come around and bite your ass off.
“Anybody here fought the Froggers?” Grampa asked, usin
g the common nickname for the Obans.
Nobody piped in. Russell wasn’t surprised. The Gimps didn’t have a border with the US; there’d never been a reason for them to start shooting each other. Not until the ETs had decided humans needed killing. Fucking tangos.
“Light-gee world,” the old guy went on. He always got chatty when things looked bad. “Point-eight Earth normal. Atmo’s breathable, at least with our med-imps. Supposed to be pretty hot.”
“Everywhere we land gets pretty hot after we start busting caps,” Gonzo said.
Hot and humid or cold and dry, it all felt pretty much the same inside combat armor, especially when taking off your helmet was an easy way to commit suicide. Russell didn’t say that, either. Everybody knew it, and if Grampa felt better tallying off figures, that was fine by him. Better than Nacle getting preachy or prayerful. Poor guy. Russell still kinda missed him.
“Their bases are all buried deep and surrounded by bunkers. Gonna be a bitch digging them up.”
“That’s why they pay us the big bucks, Grampa.”
“Silence in the ranks, fuck-nuggets!” Sergeant Fuller broke in. “We’re off in three mikes.”
Three minutes until kick-off. Not a lot of time to make things right with Jesus, if one was a faithful man. Russell spent most of the quiet time thinking about Deborah. He wanted to make a life with her even after the war was over. Maybe they could go back to Parthenon-Three and he could provide security for her fortune-teller business. Maybe do a little strong-arm stuff on the side. The idea made him chuckle.
“Ten seconds to drop. Nine…”
They’d trained for this, done visualization exercises, and taken some new meds that supposedly helped people who weren’t drop-rated, which would be about six in ten grunts in the battalion, and just about any MOS that didn’t start with 03. All of them were going to get their golden planet badge after this. Kinda cheapened the whole thing. Warp drops were supposed to be a rare, elite sort of thing.
Transition.
Not good. You always got a feeling of being in freefall when you did a drop, but this time it was like the LAV wasn’t just falling but also spinning in the dark. Claustrophobia and motion-sickness hit him at the same time, and he grunted while he tried to keep his breakfast right where it was. Upchucking in your helmet wasn’t fatal, just a total pain in the ass.
“Die, bitch,” the kid from the Zoo whispered in his ear. “Die, already.”
Emergence.
They landed hard. The LAV hit the ground with enough force to rattle everybody. Russell tasted blood in his mouth. He’d bitten his tongue pretty good, something that hadn’t happened to him since boot camp. The Suck struck again.
PFC Mendel wasn’t whooping anymore. “Oh, good Jesus. I done shit myself.”
“Too much information, man,” Grampa told him.
Russell figured that Mendel wouldn’t be the only drop virgin who’d have to fight with a full load in his pants. New drugs and better catapults or not, nobody did well on their first few drops. At least they’d made it, and that was what counted.
“Fuck,” Gonzo said. He’d recovered quickly enough to check the roster icons. We’re short one LAV.”
The little guy was right. Only fifteen vehicles had appeared on the LZ, instead of the TOE’s sixteen. It took him a second to find out who hadn’t made it. Second Platoon’s command car. That meant Lieutenant Berry and his C&C team were goners. That wasn’t all: one of their twelve Medium Tactical Vehicles hadn’t emerged, either. A big truck, and its load of beans and bullets, were floating in whatever hell awaited the MIWs. Charlie Company had taken worse losses than in most engagements he’d been in, and before the first shot had fired.
“Can’t believe I shit myself,” Mendel was grumbling.
“Keep your shit to yourself,” Russell said. Mendel shut up.
“We’re on the move in three mikes,” Sergeant Fuller said. “We’re staying buttoned up until we reach our first objective and linking up with Second Platoon. Lieutenant Chambal is taking over command for both platoons until Second gets a replacement.”
Russell nodded to himself. Chambal had been in charge of Third for a while. Ever since Lieutenant O’Malley turned out to be a chickenshit little bastard back on Parthenon. The Ell-Tee wasn’t a bad officer, and he’d improved over time. He’d be all right.
Even inside his armor and the LAV, he heard a distant roaring sound. Somebody’s arty was already in the game.
* * *
The Death Heads had performed six Fire Walls during the fleet action, and were all feeling pretty frazzled, but they were about to go back out into the fray yet again. Close Air Support this time. The ground-pounders were trying to storm heavily fortified positions, and the defenders outnumbered them, which from what she remembered from her Marine lessons was a big no-no. Her gunships and the fighters would have to take up the slack.
“Here’s our first mission,” Lisbeth Zhang told the squadron. “Looks like two battalions of armor are trying to concentrate along a line of hills. Lots of plasma air-defense artillery, and a few grav weapons heavy enough for anti-starship work. We’re going to earn our pay. Us and the War Eagle jockeys both. They’re hitting twelve other targets. We’ve got to break up those formations or the Marines down there are hosed.”
“Really sucks our battlewagons can’t just blast those suckers into smoking craters,” Preacher commented.
“That’d be nice, except it might piss off the Elder Races.”
Preacher shrugged. The phrase might as well mean ‘because it’s a sin.’ Nobody was sure where the line was drawn, exactly, only that you’d know you crossed it when your civilization was mysteriously obliterated. But pumping enough energy into a planet to drastically damage its ecosystem was one of them. No idea why that wasn’t okay but terraforming a planet and eradicating the original ecology in the process was fine. The Elder Races worked in mysterious ways.
They went into the Starless Path a few moments later. There was some Warpling activity around the edges, mostly finishing off several dozen Marines who’d gotten stranded during the large-scale warp drop on the Gimp planet. There was nothing Lisbeth or the others could do for them, other than listen for their pleas for help. Someone trapped inside a truck was screaming.
“They’re getting in! They’re getting in!”
Lisbeth gritted her teeth. Even if she could locate the truck driver, she couldn’t drag him out of warp. The poor bastard was in a deeper level of warp space, in the equivalent of quicksand. The most she’d manage to do would be to end up trapped by his side.
She caught a flare of energy coming from Grinner’s ship, and the screaming came to a sudden halt.
“I released him,” Genovisi said, anger and sorrow radiating from her like waves of heat. “I couldn’t save him, but I got close enough to put him out of his misery. The Warplings won’t be able to feed on his soul.”
“I should have thought of that. Good call, Grinner.”
They managed to do that small mercy for two other Marines before they emerged. It didn’t make anybody feel any better. They needed to figure out a way to do more.
The squadron appeared over a mountain range. Their sensors showed them the enemy forces on one side of the obstacle, advancing under the cover of several mobile area force fields. Tanks, self-propelled artillery and armored personnel carriers, all floating a few meters over the surface. The Death Heads plunged into the fray, moving at a stately fifty kph and blasting the column with graviton and plasma beams.
The local ETs fought back. Most of their vehicle-mounted weapons could engage airborne threats, and the five gunships were met with a storm of fire. Lisbeth kept an eye on the force field gauge while she serviced her targets. The shields had dropped by fifteen percent by the time the last tank in the formation had been torn apart and the surviving Obans were scattering in every direction, no longer a cohesive force. The Froggers had done better than some starships against the Death Heads, but their best hadn’t bee
n good enough.
“All right, that takes care of this bunch,” she said. “Next.”
They’d broken two battalions. Unfortunately that was less than one percent of the enemy forces left on this sector of the planet.
It was going to be one of those days.
* * *
“Tangos ahead,” Sergeant Fuller called out. “Dug-in infantry and some anti-tank pieces, looks like. We’re gonna flank ‘em.”
Russell could hear the ripping-canvas sound of ALS-43s sending explosive munitions downrange at six hundred rounds per minute, about a hundred meters forward. They were moving through heavy jungle, so only the bright flashes of energy weapons were visible through the thick underbrush, and only as flickering lights. It looked like Fourth Platoon’s Hellcats were well and truly stuck in. The four-legged armored suits packed a lot of firepower in their highly-mobile frames, but they would need help, and that meant Russell and his buddies were going to hoof it through rough terrain. The LAVs were no use for now; they could hover over the canopy, but that would put them in clear view of any Eet with an energy weapon from miles around. For the time being, the vehicles would have to hang back while a platoon of engineers cleared a path for them.
A squad of grunts led the way; Russell and his Weapons section jogged behind them at a steady pace, Even with his suit carrying most of the hundred and fifty pounds of gear on his back, Russell began to feel the burn soon enough. Nothing too bad, just uncomfortable. Bad would be when they’d been at it for a few hours. Most combat ops consisted of running somewhere or huddling behind cover shooting at some half-glimpsed figures in the distance. What really tired you out was the knowledge it all could go to hell in an instant.
Havoc of War (Warp Marine Corps Book 5) Page 19