Decisively Engaged (Warp Marine Corps Book 1) (22 page)

Crow smiled. “Gotcha.”

There were a good half-dozen problem children in the platoon; any or even all of them could have been involved in taking the device and trying to sell it in the black market. If nothing else, its components could be ground down into fabber feedstock, but if the catapult could be made whole again, that opened up a number of possibilities. He’d detail Staff Sergeant Tanaka to it, and maybe some of the civilian engineers, some of whom might have worked with warp engines.

As Fromm left the warehouse, he reminded himself to order the work detail to check the rest of the building for any usable cargo; the place was near the three legation buildings, in an area that hadn’t been under fire during the last attack, but it was outside the force field perimeter, which meant it would be lost sooner or later. If necessary, he’d write another voucher for Mr. Crow.

He sat down on the rear of the grav-limo, which had become his command vehicle, and headed back to base. A call came through just as he arrived.

“A survivor from Task Unit Fifteen is attempting to land, sir,” CPO Donnelly said.

“Only one?”
Feline
-class corvettes had eighty-nine crewmembers apiece, and the task unit had been ferrying two platoons of marines besides. One survivor out of almost three hundred was better than he’d expected, but not by a hell of a lot.

“Yes, sir. The captain of the
Wildcat
.”

“That’s one lucky bastard,” Fromm said, calling up the skipper’s files as he walked to his office. LC Lisbeth Zhang. On the young side for the rank, but she had a decent record, until now. The Navy wasn’t going to feel kindly disposed to someone who’d gotten two ships blasted under her. It wasn’t even her fault, considering the threat board had been clear when she emerged into Jasper, but somebody had to be held accountable, and it wouldn’t be the flag-rank assholes who’d allowed the Lampreys to launch a mass attack on America without anybody being the wiser. Heads would roll; he could only hope some of them deserved it.

All above his pay grade, of course. He sat down and went back to work on his plan to rescue the spaceport’s personnel. It mostly depended on the fifty or so Caterpillar and Star Mining volunteers currently working on a new fleet of technicals. He’d have preferred to launch the operation tonight, before the Ruddies could get their shit together, but Rockwell still wasn’t convinced. The poor bastards on the port would have to fend for themselves for at least another day.

“Sir, the escape pod has entered the atmosphere.”

He watched the spectacular reentry through his imp. The ship started coming apart in midair, veered off course, and flew over Kirosha like a rogue comet before making a wide turn to head back towards the spaceport. She almost made it there.

“She’s calling in a mayday, sir. Losing engines once again.” A brief pause. “She’s gone down, sir,”

Fromm lowered his head. Nothing he could do, but it really sucked, surviving the attack on her ship only to die on an alien world a few hours later.

“She made it, sir! Survived the landing, and will attempt to reach the spaceport on foot. Looks like she’s ten miles away.”

He considered launching the rescue mission right then and there for a moment, but the vehicles weren’t ready and the RSO wouldn’t go for it.

“Hope you’ve kept current on your E&E procedures, Commander,” he said to himself, hating the situation, hating the idea of a fellow officer out in the wild with no hope of rescue.

Hope she saves a round for herself, just in case
, he thought.

Being captured by the Kirosha would be a hard way to go.

* * *

Any landing you could walk away from didn’t count as a crash in her book, although most people looking at the deep smoking furrow that the pod had carved in a fallow field would likely disagree.

Lisbeth Zhang hadn’t died. She only wished she had.

When the graviton drive failed for the second and last time, she’d had just enough time to use the attitude thrusters for a desperate attempt to nose up the tiny craft. About half of the pod had been torn loose, luckily the half she hadn’t been sitting on, and the force fields on the bottom quadrant had held just long enough. She hit the ground at a shallow angle rather than head on, and the force fields shunted off just enough of the impact’s kinetic energy to keep the craft more or less in one piece. The shield hadn’t protected her from massive whiplash when the pod came to a rather sudden stop. The impact had nearly snapped her spine and made her pass out for a couple of minutes.

She woke up feeling as if she’d been beaten to within an inch of her life. It took everything she had to crawl out of the crash chair, grab a first-aid kit and give herself a couple of shots: an extra dose of nano-meds to repair the damage, and a hit of Walking Dead, a mixed cocktail of painkillers and stimulants designed to keep you going even if you had one foot in the grave. As soon as the WD shot took effect, she stuffed herself with protein and energy bars; the meds’ metabolic costs were huge. Even chowing down on six, seven thousand calories wouldn’t keep her from crashing into a near-coma as soon as the Walking Dead wore off. Additional doses would only postpone the inevitable for a few minutes, at the cost of an even nastier crash. She figured she had thirty, forty minutes before she had to lay down. Not a lot of time to E&E.

Evade and Escape. That was the name of the game. Every Eet within a hundred miles would have seen her fiery final descent. Anybody nearby only had to head towards the flaming spot the pod had created to find her, and given that the locals were intent on killing every American they could find, she definitely didn’t want to be taking a nap when they arrived. She had to move as far away as possible and find a hiding spot.

Luckily, escape pods were outfitted with the expectation that their passengers might land behind enemy lines. The first thing Lisbeth did was replace her standard uniform with a stealth bodysuit; the escape pod carried two of those. The smart nanofiber outfit stretched to fit her body, and included a full head covering that turned her into a featureless figure. The suit was skin-tight except for two bulges at her waist for the batteries that powered the suits’ systems and a leg holster that would fit a standard issue beamer. The outfit could change colors to match its surroundings and use a photon field to blur her outline, making her effectively invisible at most ranges, especially when standing still. The nanite fibers it was made of would protect her from most weather extremes while also obscuring her IR signature and preventing any body particles from leaking into the environment, making her impossible to track by scent or most enhanced vision systems. Her main problem would be leaving footprints behind, and if she moved slowly enough, the suit could project a static stream that would sweep after her, erasing her tracks. Against gravity-wave sensor systems, a stealth suit would only reduce the range of detection; when dealing with low-tech alien civilizations, however, it was pretty much a cloak of invisibility.

The stealth suit’s only drawback was that all those features consumed too much energy to accommodate such necessities as force fields. The energy packs would only last for twenty-four hours of constant use, after which the bodysuit would revert to its natural grayish-green color. Hopefully she’d be somewhere safe before then.

She quickly grabbed all the supplies she could scavenge. Lisbeth stuck a standard issue beamer in the suit’s integral holster. She hadn’t fired one of those since Basic, but with her imp doing her aiming for her, she didn’t need to rate Expert to hit a target most of the time. She grabbed a backpack with similar stealth capabilities and filled it with food, water, medical nanites and four spare energy packs which could be used for the bodysuit or the pistol.

By the time she’d outfitted herself, exhaustion had begun to creep over her. That thirty-minute estimate might have been a tad optimistic.

Time to go. She followed the path of wreckage and disturbed soil the pod had left on the field, where her footprints would be harder to identify without taking the time to sweep after herself. There was a stream nearby; she thanked her lucky stars as she waded into it and walked through the water. She stayed in the stream for as long as she could; it wasn’t deep, and the current wasn’t too strong, but it was a slog nonetheless. Five minutes into her hike, she sent a self-destruct signal to the pod. She felt bad about consigning Omar’ body to the flames, but she couldn’t leave the pod and its contents to the natives. When this was over, she would do her best to recover the XO’s ashes and send them to his family.

Each step was harder than the last. Her suit’s smart-fibers were waterproof and their environmental controls warmed her lower extremities, but her feet were going numb nonetheless. She had to find shelter.

A wooded hill to her left beckoned to her. Lisbeth left the stream and headed there, trying not to leave too many telltale signs of her passage, but she could barely keep her eyes open so she probably messed that up. She’d messed everything up. Her career was as good as over. Her first ship command, lost with all hands. She was a failure.

Lisbeth shook her head, trying to clear it of evil thoughts. Depression was a sign the Walking Dead was wearing off. A mental command accessed her music playlist and piped it directly into her eardrums. The harsh melodies of Flaming Totenkopf got her heartbeat up and helped her walk the rest of the way to the tree line.

The local tree trunks looked like a collection of stacked rings, with two or three trunks linked together at their base and thick leaves sprouting all along their length. No branches, and she didn’t think she could climb very high anyway. She squeezed herself between one the largest trio of trunks and drifted off to sleep while Flaming Totenkopf screamed in her ears about the Children of Winter, come to wash the world in blood.

Year 163 AFC, D Minus One

“General Jusha attempted to mobilize his men, but my troops had surrounded his encampment. He tried to fight nonetheless, but his own men slew him, to avoid being massacred. Jusha did not know his men, and he did not know his foes. Thus, he was doomed before he began,” Grand Marshall Seeu Teenu concluded. Behind him, a scribe faithfully stored his words in a newfangled magnetic-strip sound recorder, so they may be later transcribed for posterity. “My officers are all capable men, and have performed well.”

The newly-appointed supreme commander of all the armies of Kirosha sounded rather proud of-himself, Magistrate Eereen Leep thought ungraciously. For all his overly-fulsome self-regard, the notorious general had his uses; he had swiftly and bloodlessly captured all Modernist leaders in the Army, and gained the fealty of the rest of the officer corps. The progressives who wanted to deal with the Star Devils were all dead or languishing in the dungeons beneath the Great Pyramid. And the Queen had finally thrown her support behind Eereen’s faction. The American Devil’s insults had been the mite that collapsed the roof, as the saying went.

The only spot of trouble had occurred the day before, when a bright object had overflown the capital at incredible speeds, sparking panic among the populace. Eeren himself had been briefly horrified, thinking the Star Devils had returned to exact vengeance. Fortunately, their ally had explained the small craft had been a piece of the larger vessels his gifts had helped destroy, and calm had been restored. Eeren had dispatched some troops to hunt for the craft and its pilot, to use as trophies, and turned his mind towards more important matters. Everything was finally coming together.

“We thank you for your service, Grand Marshall,” Eereen said. “Jusha and the renegade Prince Nooan were the last leaders among the Devil-Lovers.” He turned toward the throne in the center of the room, squatting down in front of its occupant. “Your Supreme Majesty, all the Kingdom’s men and cannon are now yours to command.”

“They were always ours to command,” High Queen Virosha the Eighth said. “Ka’at has been restored, all things returned to their proper station.” She paused dramatically. “Except for one.”

“Your wisdom in discerning Truth is unparalleled,” Eeren said with a deep bow, his obsequious demeanor hiding a surge of panic. Whenever the Queen saw fit to correct you, there was a small but very real chance you would be dragged outside and executed. All members of the court had to learn to anticipate and fulfill the Queen’s desires or risk death and worse. That too was Ka’at, the Way. “The Star Devils still pollute our land.”

“Since the time of our father, High King Pirosha, Fifth of that name, it has been so. Our ways have been tainted by strangers from beyond the sky. We were patient, but when their ambassador insulted us under our own roof, our patience was exhausted. It is time to make our displeasure known.” She turned towards the military commander. “What say you, Grand Marshall Seeu Teenu? Is victory at hand?”

“In war, certainty is attainable if enough knowledge is available. I have studied the enemy, and learned much from our honored ally.”

The ‘honored ally’ was not present; the Star Devil’s appearance was too noxious to be tolerated at court, and he was so unwittingly rude he would likely have offered enough offense to merit death, regardless of the consequences.

“Some questions are not easily answered, however,” Seeu continued. “Their weapons are superior to ours, much like the armored knights, musketeers and artillerymen of the Tee-Kir Dynasty were superior to the tribesmen of the north. And yet, in time, the tribesmen prevailed, and eventually overwhelmed the house of Tee-Kir.”

Eeren glanced fearfully at the Queen; the history lesson could well strike a nerve, since the current dynasty descended from said tribesmen, who had conquered Kirosha and become the new ruling class some two centuries and a half ago. The monarch gave no sign of taking offence, however, and instead continued to listen intently as Seeu spoke.

“There are many factors in our favor. The morale of our army is excellent. We were striving to build the most powerful force on the planet when the Star Devils arrived, and we have improved our tanks, artillery and tactics ever since. Even though the Devils will not sell us weapons, they often unwittingly allowed us to learn much from their history books and technical manuals. The Kingdom is as strong as it has ever been.

“Time is also on our side; eventually their supplies will grow low. Whether they run out of bullets or food, the end result will be the same. However, there is no need to wait that long, nor indeed is it desirable. Sieges are wasteful and lengthy, and no kingdom ever benefited from a protracted conflict. Instead, we shall seek a quick decision, in a matter of days.

“Tonight, we will set a trap for them and possibly slay some of their best warriors, should they venture forth beyond their lair, as I expect they will. Once war is officially declared, we will attempt a stratagem against them, striking at their weakness rather than their strength.”

“And will you use the Final Blow Society for this?” Eeren asked. His faction controlled the peasant militias, and they had taken severe losses already. There were still tens of thousands inside the capital, and more were coming, but the supply of foolish, fanatical peasants willing to blunt cannon fire by smothering it with their corpses was not endless.

“The martial societies will comprise the bulk of the attacking force, but they will not be alone. From studying the Americans, I have learned that they love children, even Kirosha children, more than they love their own lives. Their missionaries cherish youngsters above all other thing, bringing them food and toys, caring for even the whelps of the lowest castes.”

“That means the Devils are weak,” Eeren said. Children had few uses until they were old enough to work, and more were always born than were needed, especially after the Star Devils brought medical knowledge that insured few died at birth or in their early years. Yes, parents should feel fondness for their young; that was part of Ka’at. But to put them above all other things was a violation of the Way, and a breach of common sense. You could replace children, so long as your people and culture survived.

“We will exploit that weakness,” the Grand Marshall said. “If that does not work, we use the Guard and the Army in earnest. And that
will
work. I simply prefer to spare our best tools until they are truly needed.”

Eeren, who had some inkling how much treasure had been spent in training and outfitting the modern forces gathering at the capital, wholly shared that sentiment, even if it meant his warrior-peasants would suffer. Come to think of it, now that Kirosha’s other factions had been neutralized, the martial societies’ usefulness was nearly at an end. Might as well send the best and bravest among them to their deaths, lest they decide to turn their virtues against the Crown.

The Queen nodded. “Then we give you our blessing. You have our supreme confidence, Grand Marshall Seeu Teenu.”

* * *

“Switch production to solid rounds,” Fromm told Staff Sergeant Tanaka. The supply sergeant and armorer was the unofficial logistic officer of the American Defense Force, as Fromm had labelled the collection of irregulars, militia and auxiliaries that were now under his command. He’d gone from running half a company to an oversized regiment. While he’d often thought he could do a better job than most colonels he’d met, Fromm hadn’t expected to get the chance to prove so, not at this point of his career.

“Explosive bullets are overpowered against unarmored personnel and they consume too many resources” he explained. “I’ll instruct the troops to save the plasma bullets for when vehicles come into range.”

“Yes, sir,” Tanaka replied.

Solid steel-copper bullets with pre-fragmented casings wouldn’t have the stopping power of standard issue Marine ammo, but the 4mm rounds would break apart upon hitting flesh, inflicting nasty wounds. More importantly, producing them would use a tiny fraction of the fabber feedstock plasma rounds did, since their components could be easily be made from locally-available materials. That would also allow the fabricators to build another hundred IW-3 rifles for an auxiliary company. He needed to think about logistics, organization and grand strategy, and hope he’d have enough time to think of everything before he had to face a new onslaught.

Luckily for him, the Ruddies seemed to be taking the day off. No attacks before or after reveille, which had given him time to meet with the auxiliary commanders and get things organized. Intercepted radio chatter indicated the enemy was conducting some housecleaning within their ranks. The chaos of the previous days had been due to the maneuvering of rival factions within the Army, the Guard and the militant societies. It looked like whoever had come on top was making sure all dissenters were taken care of. In a way, it reminded him of the first years after First Contact, when former Defense Secretary and newly-appointed President Hewer had unified the country by means fair and foul. You could read between the lines of even the most rosy-colored accounts of that time period, and it hadn’t been pretty. That process had taken some years on Earth; Fromm suspected the Ruddies would take care of things much more quickly, since they were apparently just executing faction leaders by the carload. Meanwhile, he’d take advantage of the unofficial lull for as long as it lasted.

Turning hundreds of volunteers into semi-coherent units hadn’t been quite as hard as he’d feared. As it turned out, there were some fifty NCOs, half a dozen former lieutenants, two captains, and a major among the civilian volunteers, although the latter had been with the Army Corps of Engineers and suggested he’d be more useful helping fortify the area than getting back in uniform. All the other officers and NCOs had been reactivated at their former grade, with Fromm retaining command by virtue of being the only infantry officer.

He’d put the six lieutenants in charge of oversized companies of two hundred men each, drawing from the civilian volunteers with the most combat experience, and had the captains divide those companies into two battalions with three companies each. Each company would have an IW-3 platoon; the rest would be armed with the assault rifles Mr. Crow had turned over, and they wouldn’t have any organic heavy weapons, which made their effective firepower a fraction of what his Marines had. Thankfully all the volunteers had neural implants or portable equivalents, making command-and-control relatively easy, especially with CPO Donnelly’s communication team helping organize things. The hundred or so contractors he left as they were; each unit was used to working together, so it was best to let them operate on their own, under his overall command. The Black River group had its own transport, six-wheeled hydrogen-cell American-made ATVs. They had light force fields and railgun mounts. They would act as mobile reserves, ready to bolster any hard-pressed section. Fromm spread the other mercenary units along the perimeter as a ready reaction force.

The Ovals and Wyrms had joined in without reservations. The alien consulates were on their own and their survival was dependent on cooperating with each other. Each legation had brought along about a company’s worth of combat effectives; there were another hundred or so low-ranking diplomats, spacers and merchants who’d been impressed into service, but that was about it. On the other hand, the weapons of the three hundred alien volunteers were state-of-the-art stuff, as good as what his Marines fielded. Fromm detailed one of his new battalions to man the trenches protecting the two alien embassies, with the second one evenly split between the human and ET buildings. The aliens themselves he spread out as impromptu heavy weapon units, along with two thirds of his Marines. That should provide plenty of firepower to the entire line of defense.

That left the matter of the Ruddy refugees inside the compound. A few people had demanded they be thrown out, but the missionaries had made it categorically clear they would not stand for that, and Fromm and Rockwell had backed them up. The Kirosha were so caste-conscious that he couldn’t imagine infiltrators posing as the despised Jersh under any circumstances. The local refugees would make the most loyal kind of allies: people who literally had nowhere else to go.

Unfortunately, except for Locquar’s gang – about sixty or seventy mercenaries – the Kirosha allies didn’t have any kind of military training, or any experience with firearms. The entire Jersh caste was forbidden from owning weapons of any kind, with even knives restricted to certain lengths and hefts. A couple of Mormon missionaries with military experience had volunteered to raise a company out of the most promising refugees; Fromm had given them two hundred rifles and plenty of ammo for practice. The rest of the Kirosha converts were already helping; all able-bodied males and females were busy digging more entrenchments and contributing their labor wherever necessary.

All he needed now was time. Everybody was working as hard as they could, and thanks to the Caterpillar earthmoving vehicles and the Ruddy pick-and-shovel volunteers, all the backup trench lines would be finished before nightfall. If the Ruddies gave him that long, the Starfarers’ position would be much stronger.

Whether or not it would be strong enough remained to be seen.

Fromm didn’t have many illusions about the effectiveness of the makeshift formations being put together. A fighting unit was more than troops and equipment; it took training, hard work and time to forge it into a reliable force, not to mention effective leadership. As a newly-minted captain, he knew he lacked the experience for proper large unit management. Beneath the outward confidence and optimism he had to project at all times lurked creeping doubts that he wasn’t up for the job.