Decisively Engaged (Warp Marine Corps Book 1)

by Carella, C. J.

  She fired the laser one-handed, held over her head so she could remain behind the wall. Even though the weapon was recoilless and she was using her imp to aim it, the position wasn’t ideal for shooting. She still managed to pot a couple of soldiers as they sent a storm of hot lead in her direction. Most shots hit the exterior wall. A couple of them penetrated the cinderblock structure. More rounds went through the window and the hole the rocket had made. Ricochets bounced all around her.

  This was not her idea of a good time.

  * * *

  Fromm woke up to the staccato sound of rapid gunfire.

  His first attempt to move from his prone position sent a jolt of agony through his skull. He touched his head and felt wetness running down his right temple and cheek. His medical nanites had clotted the spot where a piece of shrapnel had lacerated his scalp, but not before a few ounces of blood had spurted out. His imp answered his unspoken query, displaying a stick-figure diagram of his body, red highlights marking all the injuries he had sustained in the explosion. Mostly bruises and scratches, except for the scalp wound, a minor concussion, and a piece of masonry that was embedded into his right biceps; the nanites had stopped the bleeding, numbed the area and surrounded the fragment with antiseptic gel, but it would take a corpsman to remove it from his flesh. For the time being, he could use the arm, and that was all that mattered.

  He blinked through the pain and took a look around. Heather McClintock was hunched down behind a wall, firing the dead Oval’s laser without exposing herself. The Ruddies were returning fire, and they had a lot more rifles in play than before.

  Another mental query got him an overview of the situation. A detachment from his not-yet-assumed command was on its way to the compound, but was encountering heavy resistance: more rioters, reinforced by regular army units. He thought about contacting Gunny Obregon, but dismissed the idea; no sense joggling the man’s elbow while he was in the middle of a fight.

  His first impulse was to try to find his Colt amidst the wreckage and return fire, but he would be more effective after he assessed the situation and figured out a way to deal with it. He flopped onto his stomach and crawled towards a wall for extra cover, ignoring the bullets flying overhead and the occasional bouncers passing even closer to him. He’d either get hit or not.

  First things first. He sent a call to the Regional Security Officer at the embassy, who had been trying to reach him since shortly before the Ruddy RPG had knocked him out. A gray-haired man’s face appeared in his field of vision. He looked pissed off.

  “What’s the situation, Captain?” were the RSO’s first words.

  “We have a bit of a situation here, sir,” Fromm said as a ricochet kicked up a little cloud of dust a few inches off his face. “Thirty-three American civilians are surrounded and in imminent danger.”

  “We’re trying to have the proper Kirosha authorities come to your aid.”

  “Sir, we’re taking fire from what appear to be Kirosha military units.”

  “I see.” The RSO checked the drone feeds and mulled things over for a couple of seconds. “All right, do whatever you have to do, Captain. I’ll cover your ass from this end.” Which was great, but wouldn’t matter all that much to Fromm if said ass-covering was posthumous. Fucking Rats.

  “Understood. Thank you, sir.”

  The RSO wasn’t a complete asshole, for a fucking Rat, but that wasn’t saying much. You had to serve a minimum of six years in the military to get a State Department job, let alone one dealing with security matters, but remfie ways always managed to seep into their heads after a few years of looking at the world from the comforts of an office, where nobody bled and screamed in impossible agony. No matter. Fromm had been given a green light – more or less – and he planned to make the most of it.

  He had to make a plan with the assets at hand. He’d been handed a reinforced weapons platoon, with its full TOE. Which meant…

  He made another call, this time to the NCO Obregon had left in charge.

  Staff Sergeant Martin’s chiseled features were marred by a worried expression and funnels of sweat running down his face. “Sir! About the guard house…”

  “Never mind that. I need you to deploy the hundred-mike-mikes. Immediately. On my command. Understood?”

  Martin nodded, looking relieved now that he had orders to rely upon. “Aye, aye, sir. Deploying 100-millimeter mortars, roger. Soonest, roger.”

  “Carry on.”

  Soonest would probably be no less than five minutes. The heavy weapons would be inside armored containers next to the barracks. Now all they had to do was survive for the next five minutes.

  Fromm rolled towards the Oval’s body. I’ll say a prayer for you later, buddy, he mentally told the dead ET as he pawed through his robes, looking for weapons and ammo. He found a weapon belt; there was a spare battery for the laser, a ceremonial dagger Oval followers of one of their religions always carried, and a featureless cylinder that he had to Woogle through his imp: it turned out to be a razzle-dazzle grenade. Shiny.

  He couldn’t arm the damn thing, not without ID codes he didn’t have, but he was betting the spook who was firing the dead Oval’s laser could. He rolled towards her.

  “Trade you,” he said.

  She stopped firing, saw what he’d found, and smiled.

  * * *

  “What the fuck’s going on, Russet?”

  Russell assumed Gonzaga was asking about the mass of Ruddies filling the road ahead of them. Most of them were wearing black bathrobes over black pajama bottoms, nothing like the khakis Kirosha regulars wore or the light blue and pink of the Royal Guards, but when a buncha people dressed the same, that was a uniform. Throw weapons into the mix, and that made them military uniforms. And if they fucked with you, uniforms or not, that made them the enemy.

  “Fucked if I know, Gonzo. Ruddies got a hard-on for us all of a sudden.”

  His imp ran the numbers off the corner of his eye. There were two hundred and seventy-nine ETs massing up ahead, mostly armed with spears and swords, the poor bastards. Gunny Obregon was shouting something at them via his loudspeaker implants, but despite the fact he was talking Ruddy at them, they didn’t seem to care.

  “Hold fire,” Obregon said over the command channel. “I’m firing a warning shot. All hands, hold fire.”

  The Gunny leaned out of the van’s window and fired a single round into the ground somewhere between the Marine vehicles and the mob of Ruddies a hundred yards away. The exploding bullet melted a hole in the asphalt-covered road and the concrete below, plasma sparkling like a Roman candle.

  The crowd took it in for a moment. Then some dickhead with a flag or something attached to his back started shouting and the Ruddies surged forward, waving their swords like this was yet another remake of Braveheart vs Henry V.

  “Fuck it,” Obregon said, sounding disgusted. “We’re going through them. Engage the hostiles.”

  That was all that Russell was waiting to hear. He stood up in his seat gave the ETs a three-barrel salute, firing alternate blaster and grenade rounds after dropping a 20mm anti-pers care package on their laps. Gonzo cut loose with his squad gun. One burst apiece from the heavy weapons in each vehicle, plus one from each grunt who wasn’t driving. The plasma bullets were rated to go through a foot of hardened steel and they turned each Ruddy they hit into a bomb. The anti-personnel grenades were worse, detonating overhead and showering the ETs with fragmented ceramic shards. The dumb fucks should have known better than to bunch up; they’d had automatic weapons for a good while in this planet. But the assholes charged forward, packed together shoulder to shoulder, the stupid motherfuckers, and got massacred. Maybe they expected the Marines to use tear gas or some other non-lethal shit. Dumb fucks. Marines weren’t cops.

  The street had been wide enough for all three vehicles to shoot, and by the time they checked fire, the enemy counter off the corner of his eye read sixty-three. That’s how many Ruddies were still lively enough to pose a threat. N
ot that they were, not really; the sixty Eets who weren’t dead or hollering on the ground were running as if their lives depended on it. Which they did.

  Ruddies sounded like little kids when they screamed. It made him feel bad.

  After the shooting was over, Rover Force’s biggest problem was rolling through the pile of corpses ahead of them. The van got stuck a couple times and people had to unass and move bodies from under it. The Jeep and the truck mostly drove over the crunchy bumps beneath them. A couple of times they stopped to drag living Ruddies off to one side. But mostly they just drove on and ignored the sounds the live ones made when they got crunched.

  They’d lost too much time already.

  * * *

  Heather handed Fromm the laser and took the Vehelian area effect weapon. She’d never seen one in the flesh, but their specs had been part of her courses in Starfarer tech. Its security locks were slightly more intricate than the laser’s, but she got through them easily enough, leaving her with the decision of how to use it.

  The cylinder in her hand was self-propelled, able to travel for up to two miles before its batteries burned off. It had two settings, one non-lethal, the other outright deadly. Both relied on using light pulses to overload their target’s nervous systems, sending anybody caught in its area of effect into convulsions, unconsciousness and, at the higher setting, a nasty death.

  Heather opted for the non-lethal setting. Some victims would die nonetheless; as many as one percent of the targets, depending on the species’ sensitivity to light and sheer bad luck; a simple fall from a standing position could be lethal enough. The rest would be incapacitated for half an hour or longer without lasting ill effects. The weapon glided gently out of her hand and flew to its optimal detonation height.

  “Everyone turn back and close your eyes!” she shouted into the defender’s imps. Some of the civilians outside might not react in time, which was the main reason she’d picked the non-lethal setting. Heather followed her own advice, hunching down against the wall.

  The flash was still noticeable from her protected position; it must have been like staring into a supernova for those outside. The gunfire hitting her position stopped with abrupt suddenness, except for one long burst fired when someone’s clenched hand locked onto the trigger mechanism of his weapon, emptying it in a few seconds.

  She took a quick peek out the window. Every Kirosha within a block radius was down, some lying perfectly still, others writhing in galvanic convulsions, the few lucky enough to have been behind some cover staggering blindly around, functional except for their temporarily overloaded optic nerves. Everyone attacking the walled garage was unconscious, dead or blind.

  Fromm stopped firing the Vehelian laser. There was no need, at least for the time being.

  “Not bad for a remfie,” he told her.

  “Who’re you calling a remfie, jarhead?” she growled back; they were both smiling.

  “Ovals have the nicest toys,” Fromm said, peering over the window frame. “Wish we could get them.”

  “It’ll be another couple decades before we can,” Heather said.

  “Too bad. We could use them. As in right now. We’ve got more trouble coming.”

  She accessed the video feed from the micro-drones overhead.

  Two more large groups were out and about. One was busily setting barricades between them and the approaching Marine relief force. The other was rushing towards the garage. Both groups were several hundred strong, and about a tenth of them were Army assault troops with full combat gear.

  They weren’t out of the woods yet.

  * * *

  “Those rat bastards.”

  A new bunch of Ruddies had shown up. They’d blocked the main street with a pile of overturned carts and cars, and many of them were armed with rifles and rocket launchers. They engaged Rover Two the second it turned the corner. Bullets hit the frontal force field, sparkling pinpricks of light as they flattened against the solid but invisible surface and hanged on for a second or two before sliding down like so many dead flies. Lots of dead flies. An RPG round flashed overhead and hit a storefront behind them as Rover Two frantically backed up the way it’d come.

  “Gotta go around,” Obregon said. “But let me say goodbye first.”

  He hadn’t used any rockets yet, so he fired off a spread of four 20mm missiles from the box launchers on the van. The drone cameras showed him the results as the salvo detonated right above and behind the barricades, turning dozens of ETs into ground chuck. It wasn’t enough, though. Rover Force might smash through the barricade and kill everyone there, but it would take time and keep them in one place long enough for more enemy forces to converge on their position. They didn’t have time to spare. Or ammo. His imp politely pointed out they’d already gone through ten percent of their basic battle load.

  Better to stay on the move.

  “Follow me,” he told the other two Rovers as he directed his van towards one of the side streets. Kirosha was an old town, built long before motor transport was even a glimmer in the eye of some engineer, and most of its streets reflected that. Come to think of it, Obregon had read that the handful of big straight avenues in the city had only been built after gunpowder was discovered; the broad streets were designed to allow muzzle-loading cannon to shoot straight into any rampaging mobs who dared disturb the High King’s Peace. They certainly had helped his troops mow down the current crop of rioters.

  The side streets were narrow and twisty, following even minor terrain features rather than cutting through them. The Rovers could only negotiate them single file; without the micro-drones helping navigate they would have gotten lost in short order. Luckily most Ruddies had decided staying indoors was the thing to do, so the Marines had the streets mostly to themselves. At least at first.

  Smaller groups of insurgents kept trying to catch up with the three technicals. A tall Ruddy wielding something like a big can opener at the end of a stick jumped in Rover Two’s path. The van was moving at a good thirty miles per hour when it hit, too slowly to trigger the force fields; the impact with the welded-on metal grill on its front sent the wannabe warrior flying, the big axe-spear thing still in his hands when he hit a wall and bounced off it.

  “Someone’s shooting at us,” Hendrickson said. More tiny points of light appeared wherever a Ruddy bullet hit the force fields around the van. They were taking fire from above. Houses were so packed together that you could get around jumping from one rooftop to the next, and some enterprising Ruddies with guns had done just that.

  “Take ‘em out.”

  Hendrickson complied as Rover Two kept moving. The ALS-43 stuttered a long burst into the sniper’s building. Armor piercers: the big plasma rounds, designed to spear through force fields and composite armor plate, sawed through the third level of a four-story structure, tearing through support beams, walls and anybody unlucky enough to be inside. Hendricks drew a line of bright explosions as he traversed the weapon on its improvised mount. The top floor staggered before neatly collapsing into the shattered ruin of the third floor; a rifleman was tossed out of the building, screeching like a crying baby before the impact with the ground shut him up. A moment later, the entire building crumbled, scattering bodies and brickwork everywhere.

  The shooting stopped.

  “I think that did the tr…”

  A Ruddy RPG hit the front of the van. The superheated gases of the shaped-charge warhead flattened against the force field, giving Obregon a close look at the fiery core of the anti-tank weapon’s detonation. It was a bit like looking at what awaited all sinners in the end. The deafening sound washed over him and made his teeth vibrate painfully even under his helmet. No damage, but the front shield’s power supply was down fifteen percent. He kept driving. They all knew that if they stood still they’d just make a better target.

  Hendrickson’s reaction to the explosion was much livelier. “Motherfuckers!” he screamed, swiveling the ALS-43 around and laying down a storm of fire. He walked
a series of bursts towards the rocket team’s position around a corner. The café they were using for cover blew apart in a conflagration of hot plasma and superheated brick and mortar. The launcher and the burning upper torso of one of the rocketeers rolled out into the street. Rover Two drove over the body; Lance Corporal Edison in Rover One leaned out and destroyed the launcher with two point-blank shots from his gun.

  All of which was well and good, but the micro-drones had spotted several more groups of armed men rushing out into the streets. They were going to have to fight for every inch of ground between them and the people they were trying to rescue.

  “Gunny?” PFC Kowalski said from the passenger’s seat.

  “Yeah?”

  “Hope the new skipper’s worth all this trouble.”

  “Me too, Kowalski. Me too.”

  Six

  Year 163 AFC, D Minus Ten

  “Got ‘em cocked and loaded, Captain,” Sergeant Martin said.

  Less than a minute. Which could only mean Obregon had ordered the weapons deployed before Fromm thought about it. Having a good NCO made all the difference when commanding a platoon; despite his promotion to O3, Fromm’s instincts were still geared towards platoon command, which was good at the moment because that was all he had.

  “Well done,” Fromm said. “Marking targets. Load anti-personnel rounds. Fire when ready.”