Decisively Engaged (Warp Marine Corps Book 1) (11 page)

Rescuing the thousands of Marines now stranded inside the derelict Snake ships would take some doing: warp catapults could send you out, but couldn’t bring you back in; drops were one-way trips. You won or you died, and if you won you were stuck in a captured ship until someone came to get you or you ran out of consumables and died, or the ship self-destructed and you died. Not the kind of job she would have volunteered for. But those Marines had made all the difference in the end, and those captured hulls would make a major different in the fighting to come. Givens wondered if they’d try to refit the Snake ships or simply strip them of useful weapons and other systems.

Behind her, Captain Carruthers spoke. “We won this time, but we can’t expect them to come on in the same old way. Now they know we’re more than just a primitive tribe to be swept aside. We’ve proven to be a threat.”

Better a threat than a victim
, Givens thought.

The burning remains of the Snake fleet glowed on the screen like beacons of hope.

Year 163 AFC, D Minus Ten

“You fools nearly ruined everything.”

High Magistrate Eereen Leep seethed at the rudeness displayed by the bald statement. The hooded figure facing him hadn’t bothered learning even the basics of Kirosha courtesy. The Star Devil’s arrogance matched his hideousness, which was so abhorrent the only way Eeren could stand his presence was for the alien to keep his features hidden from sight; having seen them once, the Magistrate had no desire to ever do so again. All Star Devils were unpleasant to look at, but this one was shaped like a nightmare made flesh, like a monster from mythology.

“Errors were made,” Eereen said politely, internally wincing at the loss of face even that neutral statement signified. “Some lesser leaders among the rebels saw an opportunity to strike a blow against the Star Devils. The chance to slay one of their emissaries proved to be too tempting for them. They have paid for their mistake with their lives. Their families will suffer even more.” Their deaths would also provide a convenient scapegoat, should the Queen decide to back the Modernists instead of Eereen’s Preservers. Her Supreme Majesty had yet to make up her mind.

“I warned you that you would be helpless against the outsiders without my aid,” the hooded Devil said, compounding his insults by belaboring the facts. “Their weapons are too advanced. Their drones spy on your every movement. Without my gifts, you are less than insects to them.”

“We await your gifts with great anticipation,” was Eeren’s mild reply, his own rebuke tastefully implied and thus completely missed by the monster. Dealing with barbarians was exhausting. “One would wish they had been distributed already.”

“The items are being assembled even as we speak,” the Devil said, or rather, the machine that did his talking for him did. The monster had a revolting sucker-like mouth, surrounded by multiple rows of teeth and featuring not one but two snakelike tongues; it could not produce sounds like normal people, or even the more Kirosha-like Star Devils. “Smuggling modern devices is rather difficult. Even the notoriously lax Wyrms will check for suspicious energy signatures in their cargos. We had to hide the components among seemingly harmless consumer products, which now have to be extracted and put together, one by one. Only a trained laborer can do so, and you only provided a handful of them. Any further delays are your fault.”

“Watchmakers and other skilled craftsmen are somewhat scarce and easily missed. I humbly apologize for failing to gather them in sufficient numbers to meet your needs.” At this point, the Star Devil should have replied with an equally fulsome apology, restoring the balance. Instead, he took Eereen’s words as his due, dealing yet another irreparable offense. Barbarian!

“At the current rate of progress, it will take two, maybe three days to have everything in place. I hope the slaughter the filthy humans inflicted on your cannon fodder will not discourage the rest of you.”

“A mere three thousand dead? That is nothing, a trifle,” Eereen said confidently. During the last great rebellion, over a million revolting peasants had been slaughtered. There were always more low-caste vermin than were needed, and with the proper slogans and rites you could lead them to slaughter easily enough. “When the time comes, we will command a hundred thousand secret society devotees. The Royal Guard will not stand with us, at least not until Her Supreme Majesty comes to see the wisdom of our cause, but they will not interfere. And enough of the Army will support us to give us many rifles. Augmented by your gifts, we shall slaughter every Star Devil in Kirosha in a day and a night.”

Eereen’s boasts seemed to mollify the demon.

“That is good. When my gifts are ready, I will send word to you.”

The Magistrate watched the retreating hooded figure with a mixture of distaste and relief. The visitors from beyond the sky had brought change and chaos to the High Kingdom, upsetting a millennia-old balance that had maintained peace and harmony for its people, barring a few regrettable incidents. Some had happened recently enough to sting: barbarians had forced trade concessions from the Kingdom, and even launched humiliating invasions. Kirosha had endured, however, and Ka’at, the Way of Things, had been restored.

Until the Star Devils came.

This new breed of invaders was far more dangerous than any other, corrupting with offers of wealth and power instead of using naked force, while still retaining the option to use force should the Kingdom refuse to accept their gifts. It was an intolerable situation, one that would lead to changes that could not be undone.

The hideous Star Devil offered an alternative. His hatred for his rivals, especially the Americans, was so great he would do anything to eradicate them, both in the Kingdom and in other worlds among the stars. Eeren cared little for the universe beyond the realm, of course. Once the outsiders were gone, too busy warring against each other to bother Kirosha again, balance would return to the land.

If reaching those goals meant dealing with the rudest and least seemly of all the Devils, it was worth it.

* * *

The American Embassy in Kirosha had once been the High Monarchs’ Summer Palace. The original building was a good thousand years old, and it had been more of a castle than an actual palace, with utterly functional walls around a solid fortified keep, complete with drafty walls and arrow slits rather than windows. Additions and modifications over the centuries had improved it: the walls and moat had been knocked down, although you could still see their outlines on the colorful gardens that had replaced them. The main building had had additions and entire wings added before High King Jeesha IV had built a nicer place outside the capital some two hundred years ago and turned the old palace into a rooming house for honored guests, a courtesy that had been extended to the US after making Contact.

The place was still deuced hard to heat up in the winter, however.

Heather felt a chilling draft run past her – almost through her – although some of what she felt had to be the aftereffects of her first taste of actual combat. She was shaky, cold and ravenous. And rather randy, perversely enough, not that she had anybody to help her work off such frustrations. Not what she’d expected, she considered as she leaned back on the sofa in the antechamber where she waited to be summoned by the ambassador.

She’d almost been killed, had helped butcher hundreds of sapient beings, and she felt… what? Grateful to her instructors at the Farm, back on Original Earth, for one. The paramilitary facility had put her through a refresher round of Basic training – she’d done her four years in the Army, beginning at age seventeen – before being sent to the CIA’s version of Ranger School, which she’d only managed to pass thanks to a full muscle-enhancement procedure her fairly wealthy parents had bankrolled even as they decried her awful career choices. After that she’d gone through a full SERE course, combining
extremely
realistic virtual simulations – they said that after you died during a FVR Sim, the real thing was no longer a surprise – with hands-on drudgery as she learned all about Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape. All those hours of pain and suffering had paid off: when the real thing came along, she’d reacted instinctively instead of panicking and losing her composure and likely her life. She reminded herself to send a thank-you e-mail to her instructors.

Gratitude, yes. Some measure of pride, yes. Guilt? Not as much as she thought she would, or should feel after something like that. The Kirosha she’d killed had chosen to be there, weapons in hand. Her intellectual side could list all their many grievances, both against the High Crown and the US interlopers, but the rest of her didn’t care. They’d made their choice.

Pacifism had mostly been exterminated during Earth’s First Contact, along with nearly five billion other humans, mostly city-dwellers caught in a merciless honeycomb of force fields and then baked to perfection by the Snakes’ city-busting ‘bloomies.’ The weapons were designed to turn the core of any built-up areas into a flat expanse of mineral-rich slag by the expedient of heating the area to a balmy twenty-five hundred degrees Fahrenheit for several hours and then venting the waste heat outside the atmosphere. Of all of Earth’s great modern monuments, from the Eiffel Tower to the Empire State Building, very little remained; only those far away from cities had survived. The rest had been blended into the many congealed metal-and-concrete ‘soup bowls’ that still dotted much of the planet.

What the vengeful Americans had done to the Risshah some thirty-five years later had been equally savage – and she still couldn’t find it in her heart to condemn them. She’d seen the remains of those dead cities, after all, watched the extant records from the Old Internet, watched people saying goodbye to their loved ones as they slowly burned to death. It took about an hour for the temperature inside the domes to reach lethal levels, and the force fields that contained the fires did not stop electro-magnetic communications from getting through. Millions of people had plenty of time to make a record of the holocaust as it happened. The Selfies of Doom.

She’d joined the Agency because, like many of her peers, she wasn’t done extracting payback from the universe. Over the years she’d acquired some sense of nuance, and come to respect and even like some of the Starfarer polities America must learn to live with, but she never felt able to trust them wholeheartedly. There was no community of Star Empires. There were only fear and calculation, masked by largely empty platitudes. Heather hated the reality she lived in, but couldn’t think of a feasible alternative that wasn’t worse.

“The ambassador will see you now.”

“Thank you, Molly,” she said, sitting up. She hadn’t had a chance to change her torn and bloodied suit; as soon as she arrived the Ambassador had demanded her personal brief and then kept her waiting for a good half an hour. The State Department seemed to attract more than its share of dickheads, and although Ambassador Llewellyn wasn’t a career diplomat, he fit right in.

The office could have been located in New Washington or any city on Earth; its furniture was Old Earth wood, imported at great expense. A hologram of President Albert P. Hewer filled most of one wall, dominating the room with the man’s dour but intense presence. Heather nodded towards it with instinctive reverence – President Hewer had been a constant in the lives of every American born since First Contact; he had won twenty-six elections in a row after the end of the state of emergency restored democracy, for some values of democracy – before turning to face her boss.

Ambassador Javier Llewellyn was tall and handsome, his once-red hair gone mostly silver; anti-aging drugs didn’t alter time’s effect on melanin production, although cosmetics could take care of that easily enough. In his case, the mane of white hair matched the man’s patrician features perfectly, giving him an aura of gravitas Heather could only wish matched the reality within. His eyes were sharp, but whatever wit they displayed was of a low kind, reserved for political in-fighting and dedicated to his personal survival and prosperity. A Rat, in other words.

Even before his appointment to Kirosha, Llewellyn had been a perfect example of the dangers inherent in a hereditary aristocracy. His family were among the new USA’s upper crust: well-to-do industrialists before First Contact who had been instrumental in incorporating the new technologies the Hrauwah had gifted America to make amends for leading the Snakes to Earth. The Llewellyn clan had supported Hewer’s seizure of power during the chaotic years following the Snakes’ attack, the state of emergency during which the country’s laws and customs had been fundamentally altered, and in the process became part of the cadre that founded the United Stars of America.

As it turned out, Founding Parents could have rather troublesome children.

This particular Llewellyn was a third-generation scion of that illustrious family. In olden times, he would have gone to an Ivy League university (none of those had survived First Contact); in the new one, that meant Brigham Young for his Bachelor’s degree after completing his four years’ military service, and The Citadel for his Masters in Engineering. No law degree: lawyers remained in distinct disfavor throughout the country.

Young Javier had spent most of his school years partying, even at Brigham Young, which frowned upon such things, and had managed to turn every opportunity his family extended to him into a disaster. Twenty years in the private sector had led to one failed business venture after another; a term back in uniform with the Army Corps of Engineers ended in a dishonorable discharge rather than a court-martial only because the clan had gone to bat for him; after that, he’d been exiled to a minor colony world, where he’d managed to get himself elected Governor for two terms before corruption charges led to a resignation in disgrace, barely avoiding impeachment.

Heather wasn’t privy to the machinations behind the man’s current appointment, but she could guess that the Llewellyn clan had exchanged its support for the President, who was facing increasing opposition from Congress, in return for a nice sinecure for their little darling, somewhere out of harm’s way and out of sight. An ambassadorship in a planet of little strategic significance had probably seemed like a good place to spend a few decades. Except that the lives of over two thousand Americans might well depend on the decisions made by this ancient trouble child.

The Regional Security Officer was in the room as well. Mario Rockwell had joined the State Department after two decades’ service in the Navy, where his career had plateaued at the rank of Commander when, as the executive officer of the Assault Ship
USS Lewis Puller
, he’d participated in the Battle of Risshah, where the last Snake fleet had been destroyed. Unable to advance further for reasons unknown – she suspected Navy politics – Rockwell had resigned his commission and moved into the diplomatic service.