Decisively Engaged (Warp Marine Corps Book 1) (17 page)

Furthermore, as long as the Marines’ swarm of micro-drones orbited the city and its environs, any attempts to move large numbers of troops towards the Enclave would be spotted long before they could be deployed, and his 100mm mortars would slaughter any enemy concentrations in short order. Even if the Ruddies launched a general attack with all available forces, he should be able to hold them off for a few hours, plenty of time for the corvettes to arrive and end this farce.

“Is there anything else we should be doing, sir?” Obregon asked.

“No. If we had more time, I’d look into getting more people into the trenches. The contractors and constables, maybe,” Fromm said. “But there’s no point now. We’ll remain on high alert, though. I’ll stop worrying when we’ve got friendlies in orbit.”

“You and me both, sir. You and me both.”

* * *

Lieutenant Commander Lisbeth Zhang of the
Feline
-class corvette
USS Wildcat
was enjoying her first independent command enormously, even if it was aboard an obsolete vessel that would have been phased out years ago if the Fleet wasn’t still desperately short of hulls. If only those remfies in Congress hadn’t seen fit to tighten the purse strings, she might be running a frigate by now. Like most men and women in uniform, Lisbeth voted for the Eagle Party with almost religious passion, but the last two elections had seen steady gains by the Federalists, who were growing in popularity among the wealthier planets, the ones who hadn’t experienced war firsthand in decades and wanted to cut back on military expenditures.

Things were tight, she had to admit. Even after a century of growth, the USA still didn’t have an industrial base big enough to produce both guns and butter in the required amounts. Most colonies didn’t have modern power plants and had to make do with pre-Contact sources of energy; some didn’t even have high-grade fabbers. The Navy itself was mostly teeth and not enough tail – the focus in the last several decades had been on warships, relying on civilian merchantmen to handle most of the logistics, and that was turning out to be unfeasible over the long term. All the expansion since First Contact had left America spread too thin.

But some of the idiots in Congress were talking about such idiocies as a ‘consolidation and contraction period.’
Consolidation my ass
, Lisbeth pondered bitterly while she waited for the all clear from Lahiri’s Port Authority. President Hewer should start putting traitors in work camps the way he had during the State of Emergency; the tree of liberty needed to have some deadwood pruned off.

Oh, well, politics weren’t her concern. And she couldn’t complain; even in this time of cutbacks, she’d still gotten her own ship in near-record time. Maxing out every eval since her cadet days helped; the medals she’d earned – the hard way – taking care of those pirates in New Berlin helped even more. And now she was leading a two-ship Task Unit, being senior to the captain of the
Bengal Tiger
. Admittedly, shocking and awing a dirt-bound primitive civilization was not the sort of thing that earned you commendations, or much attention unless you somehow fucked things up. But it was a command, and it would look great on her record when promotion time came around.

Promotions were downright glacial during peacetime, but peace wouldn’t last much longer. Other than the Puppies and to a lesser degree the Ovals, the Wyrms and a couple others, every Eet out there hated humanity in general and America in particular. Their most common nickname for humans was ‘Warp-Demons’ and there was a near-religious element to their hatred that no amount of diplomacy could ever smooth over. Sooner or later, the Lampreys or the Vipers would pick a fight with the USA and the Navy would sail off and kick some alien ass.

“You are clear for departure, Task Unit Fifteen,” a bored-sounding space traffic controller said, just as her imp launch status light flashed green. It was time to get this show on the road.

“Everything’s ready, ma’am,” her XO, said. Lieutenant Omar Givens was a great Executive Officer, always ready to back her up, or to give her his candid opinion in private. At first, Lisbeth had been horrified when she discovered her second in command was the grandson of none other than Admiral Sondra Givens, who’d been part of the Space Navy since there’d been a Space Navy. As it turned out, Omar had never taken advantage of his family connections, had earned his rank the old-fashioned way, and was an excellent officer; Lisbeth had no doubts he’d be commanding his own ship before too long, even if war didn’t speed things up.

The two ships in Task Unit Fifteen – calling two corvettes a squadron would be pathetic – readied for warp transit. The two ships massed a combined five thousand tons total, making them among the lightest vessels in the Navy other than shuttles and gunboats. Fitting a platoon of marines each into their converted cargo holds had been a stretch, and she’d be glad when she was rid of them. The sad thing was the
Felines
would have been classified as frigates during Gal War One, back when every ET out there laughed at American ship designations, at least before warp shields and Marine boarding parties made them laugh out of the other side of their ugly faces. No self-respecting fleet used corvettes for anything other than custom inspections or anti-piracy patrols.

It’s not the size of the ship in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the ship,
she told herself, only half-believing her own words. The counter-quote to that slogan was
God is on the side with the higher tonnage
.

“Engage,” she ordered.

Time to do the warp dance again. You never got used to it. Lisbeth had taken up paragliding as a hobby, had jumped from the top of Olympus Mons on still-terraforming Mars, and by the sixth or seventh time, the luster, wonder and fear of the act had worn off. Every time she went into warp, on the other hand, was as bad or worse as the last.

She didn’t pray. Music was her coping mechanism. Her imp piped in a series of Warmetal songs right into her auditory nerves, and the warp-induced false sensory input faded away to tolerable levels. The harsh, pounding music, the brainchild of German immigrants of the first post-Contact decades, remained a popular art form a century and a half later. Warmetal would never die. At least among her generation; the current crop of children favored melancholy ballads about peace and love, when they weren’t listening to Colonial Country. Pathetic.

Eight hours of warp transit was no picnic – it felt like a few days, or a week, depending on who you asked – but they made it, emerging into the Jasper Star System some three light-seconds away from its inhabited planet, the fifth rock from the local sun. Recovery took a few seconds, as the memories from warp transit faded away like a forgotten nightmare.

Warning sirens and red emergency lights greeted her before she snapped back into reality.

The Tactical Officer was able to shout one word: “Vampires!”

One of the cold realities of space warfare was that a warp emergence point could be detected the moment the ship entered warp space, hours or days before the ship came out the other end. That was the main reason entries into a hostile star system always happened far away from inhabited planets or installations; the rule of thumb was one light hour per hour of transit time, plus ten percent. Entry into peaceful systems happened at much closer ranges, of course.

The Lamprey stealth mines, assembled by Kirosha clock-makers and launched in the dark of night, had detected the warp emergence point eight hours before its appearance and flocked towards it, getting into position long before Task Unit Fifteen’s emergence. Four of the ten mines engaged their drives, becoming anti-ship missiles, ‘vampires’ in Navy parlance. Each pair of weapons targeted a corvette. One of them malfunctioned and broke apart; the other three reached terminal velocity before the ships had fully recovered from warp transit. Their force fields were up, but their warp shields were not, and point-defense systems were useless at those ranges. 

Lisbeth Zhang’s world dissolved in flames as the
Wildcat
and
Bengal Tiger
broke apart under the ship-killing impacts.

* * *

“Jesus H. Christ,” Fromm whispered as the priority message came through. He instinctively craned his head to look up at the sky, although daylight and distance made it impossible to see the disaster that had just transpired. No details were available, but the gist of it was bad enough: the Navy corvettes had been destroyed. Details could wait.

Down on the planet’s surface, he had plenty of more immediate things to worry about.

“Get everyone ready, Gunny,” he sent out, along with a copy of the message. The RSO was on the phone seconds afterwards.

“What’s happening, Captain?”

“Sir, the micro-drones have spotted large numbers of armed irregulars moving from the suburbs and the city, headed towards the Enclave,” Fromm reported, passing on the condensed information CPO Donnelly was collating and sending his way. “They started moving within minutes of the corvettes’ destruction. I think that means…”

The live drone feed he was watching out of the corner of his eye went dead. It was replaced by another one, which went dead a moment later.

“What the fuck?” he screamed, forgetting the RSO was on the net.

“What is it, Captain?”

“Hold on,” he said curtly while he raised Donnelly.

“They’ve got swatters,” she said. “They’ve killed all the drones!”

Swatters fired wide beams of charged particles, more than powerful enough to instantly turn the unshielded drones into useless lumps of metal and plastic. Only Starfarer civilizations could build that sort of weapon.

They were blind.

* * *

“Move your asses!” Corporal Petrossian shouted at First Squad. “The Ruddies are coming!”

How many, and armed with what, nobody fucking knew. The fuckers had gotten anti-drone weapons. Which meant they could have anything.

Russell and his fire team got moving. At least they didn’t have far to go, once they’d put on their armor over the bodysuits they’d slept in. The skipper had kept them in their assigned fighting positions all day and night, expecting the worst. Russell and everyone else had grumbled about having to sleep in the trenches, but it turned out the CO had known what the fuck he was talking about. Except the worst had turned to be even worse than anybody had expected.

Somebody was helping the fucking Ruddies. And that somebody had taken out two Navy ships. Russell tried not to think about that as he went to do his job.

Their doss was in the improvised bunkers behind the support trench. It was only three hundred feet from the first line, the one currently being manned by two of the three fire teams in Russell’s squad. They joined them, jumping into the trenches after sending an imp-to-imp heads up to their buddies. You didn’t want to surprise nervous Marines when they were cocked and loaded, not if you didn’t want to eat a dollop or two of piping hot plasma.

The fire team spread out. They ended up twenty-five meters apart. The line of green icons looked awfully thin on the map display.

“Anything?” he asked Corporal Jeremiah ‘Deacon’ Watkins, who’d been at the trenches when the turd flew into the propeller blades.

“Nothing yet. A few Americans came in running. Couple Ruddies too, but they turned back when we fired warning shots.”

“Yeah, no new Ruddies allowed,” Russell said. He felt bad about any Christian Ruddies that got caught outside the compound, but most of them were already huddled inside their perimeter. Anybody outside could just as well be an infiltrator; he was plenty worried about the ones inside as it was.

“Hey, we got drones!” Gonzaga said.

And so they did. The bubblehead in charge of commo had launched a new flight of eyes in the sky. They would be taken down in a matter of seconds, assuming the Ruddies knew what they were doing with the swatters some Starfarer motherfucker had given them, but until then they’d be able to see what the fuck was going on. He watched as the vid feeds started dying one by one. Yeah, it was as bad as he expected.

A horde of Ruddies was pouring through the wide open gates of the Enclave, waving their pig-stickers, following leaders with their funny back-strapped banners.

“They ain’t got nothing but swords,” Nacle said.

“Wish that was true,” Russell said. Yeah, most of the charging Eets were wielding hand weapons, but before the last video feed was erased he’d spotted a few of them with rocket launchers slung over their shoulders, and buddies carrying a few spare missiles on their backs. No rifles that he could see, but their RPGs were plenty bad enough. And if their Army butt-buddies had given them RPGs, they’d probably handed them some grenades, too. You could throw a grenade, or a satchel charge, right through a force field.

They had to get in close for that, though, and the mortar section was on the job.

He didn’t notice the bombs flying overhead, but the multiple airbursts looked like a fireworks display as they rained death along every street leading towards Embassy Row.

“Cleared hot, motherfuckers,” Russell growled. The closely-spaced buildings between the parklands around Embassy Row and the Enclave walls obscured the slaughter, but he knew what was happening in there, and he didn’t feel bad at all about it. Any Ruddy out on the streets was heading this way to get a piece of Russell and his fellow ‘muricans. They were going to learn that Marine scalps didn’t come cheap. The rain of plasma and slashing ceramic fragments was the first of many lessons.