Decisively Engaged (Warp Marine Corps Book 1) (7 page)

Fromm watched the massacre without reacting; he might or might not feel something later, but at the moment all he cared about was the tactical situation. The untouched members of the mob – eight-tenths of them or more – recoiled from the horror show the laser had created. A few leaders tried to rally them, noticeable by the wood and paper banners propped up behind their backs.

Fromm picked them off one by one.

The little rounds of his pistol had an effective range of a hundred and fifty yards, and his imp made aiming ridiculously easy, estimating range, windage and bullet trajectory in the time it took Fromm to level his weapon, and painting a red dot on the estimated landing point of his shot.
Crack
, and a sword-wielding warrior’s head vanished in a cloud of plasma and vaporized brain matter, his audience screaming as pieces of his skull tore into them.
Crack
, and a woman who’d clambered over the abandoned car bent sideways as her hip bone exploded.
Crack. Crack. Crack
. Five shots, five dead leaders.

“Do it again?” the Oval asked Fromm. He’d inserted a fresh power pack into the magazine well in the pistol grip of his laser, and was ready to cut down another two hundred Ruddies.

“Wait a bit,” Fromm said. Maybe the stupid bastards would decide to run and live to fight another day. Maybe…

He didn’t hear the rocket’s detonation as it hit the second-story wall, but he sure as hell felt it.

* * *

The weight of all the extra equipment strained the van’s suspension something fierce, making Obregon’s seat bounce uncomfortably, but that didn’t bother him. It kind of reminded him of life in Jazmin-Two, of driving to the town’s general store in his Pappy’s barely-functional jalopy, a hydrogen-burner made of equal parts rust and baling wire.

What bothered him was seeing the gate leading out of the embassy’s compound was still closed. And that the assholes manning said gate – the
Marine
assholes manning said gate – were waving at him to stop.

“Open up!” he sent through his imp.

“We’ve got orders to keep all combat forces inside the compound,” replied Staff Sergeant Amherst, the former commander of the Embassy Security Group. Amherst was an officious asshole who’d long forgotten what it meant to in the Corps, but Obregon couldn’t believe he was pulling this shit. “You need to deploy to protect the Embassy, Gunny.”

Obregon’s three-vehicle formation – Rovers One through Three – was coming up to the gate and he had to make a decision. The take from the micro-drones was streaming on his field of vision’s right quadrant, and he could see that the walled property the Americans had holed up in was being hit with rocket and small arms fire, not to mention a couple thousand ETs with swords trying to get over the fence. The skipper was too busy fighting for his life to deal with this bullshit.

“Move it or lose it,” he said.

“Say again, Gunnery Sergeant?”

“Open the gate or we’re busting it open. Last chance.”

“You don’t have the balls,” the asshole said, just about the worst thing he could have uttered.

“Light it up,” Obregon told Corporal Hendrickson. The gunner was on the improvised cupola they’d put on the van’s roof, manning the ALS-43 auto-launcher.

“Copy that,” Hendrickson said without hesitation. The ALS-43 could fire a variety of 15mm projectiles at a rate of three hundred rounds a minute. To blow the gate open, Hendrickson fired a three-round burst of anti-armor plasma rounds. The shaped-charge explosions tore the gate apart without doing much damage to the guardhouse on its left side.

‘Much damage’ is a relative term, though. The structure wasn’t destroyed outright, but it did catch fire. Amherst and the other sorry bastard inside got a little bit scorched, given that they were wearing dress blues and no armor. They’d live, though, and the gate could be fixed in under an hour, given all the fabbers the Embassy had. No harm done.

There would be consequences, of course, but he didn’t give a shit. He had a job to do.

* * *

“We’re gonna get in trouble, aren’t we?” Private First Class Hiram ‘Nacle’ Hamblin asked as their car drove past what was left of the guardhouse.

“Fuck ‘em if they can’t take a joke,” Russell said. “Gotta save the new skipper, don’t we? Those assholes were acting against orders.”

“But the ambassador...?”

“Fuck the ambassador. He ain’t in the chain of command. He gotta tell the RSO and the RSO gotta tell the skipper, and then he tells the NCOs, and they tell us what the fuck to do.”

Nacle – short for Tabernacle – shrugged, still clearly uncomfortable. He was good people, but also a Mormon, and they mostly didn’t like coloring outside the lines, although Russell had met several wild and woolly exceptions. He’d calm down when they got to the hostiles. Nacle didn’t have any problems shooting ETs. None of them did. Travel the galaxy, meet colorful aliens, and blow the shit out of them. That was the name of the game.

Rover One was on the ass end of the formation as it drove through the streets of the Foreigners’ Enclave, heading for the curtain wall surrounding the area and yet another gate, a much bigger one, manned by Ruddy Royal Guardsmen. Ruddies who were probably going to object to their going out there and killing a bunch of their friends and neighbors. Things might get hairy in a minute.

The walls around the Enclave were manned by a battalion of Guardsmen. They wore light blue and pink uniforms – no accounting for ET tastes – but although their equipment was all local-made and out of date, it included artillery and even a tank platoon. Ruddy tanks were no great shakes, about as good as an up-gunned Sherman from two hundred-plus years ago on Earth, but their 79mm main guns were no joke. Russell wasn’t sure the shields they’d mounted on their technicals would take more than a few HEAT rounds from one of those. Even if they did, his Hummer-like car would probably end up flipping end over end just from the shockwave. Which would suck, since the fucking thing was open-topped and body armor wasn’t going to help for shit if you landed on your head with five thousand pounds on top of you.

What the fuck you gonna do
, he told himself.

They drove past the Wyrm Embassy, which the ETs had built for themselves rather than rent out some Ruddy houses like the Americans had, and which looked like someone had melted a bunch of different kinds of scrap metal and poured them over a giant sea shell. The Wyrms were on lockdown; Russell could see the tell-tale soap-bubble shimmer that meant their shields were up. Russell didn’t care for the scaly bastards; they were biologically related to the Snakes, the assholes who bombed the shit out of Earth during First Contact. Still, the Wyrms had always respected the US and were sort of friendly. If the Royal Ruddies got shitty, the Wyrms would lend the Americans a hand instead of piling on. So would the Ovals, especially since they had people out there too.

The main gate to the Foreigners’ Enclave stood dead ahead, surrounded by sixty-foot walls and four towers with the pointy-hat roofs Ruddies loved to put on everything they built. The Enclave had once been a fortress before cannon made their walls obsolete. Russell had gone through the gate almost a hundred times during his deployment on Jasper-Five, mostly on his way to and from one of the discreet whorehouses they had downtown. Ruddy women weren’t exactly built like Americans, but all the important parts fit well enough to get the job done, although you had to watch out for their bristle-backs if you were into doggie-style. It had been a while since he’d gotten his dick wet. If he didn’t get killed, and if the fucking curfew was lifted, he’d have to do something about that.

“Rover One, Rover Three, hang back,” Gunny Obregon said. “I’m gonna try to talk us through the gate. Get ready to start blasting on my command, or if the Ruddies get frisky.”

“Fuck,” Russell said, driving off to one side, some hundred feet away from the gate. Traffic was light – only complete morons would choose to venture into a riot in progress – so he had a nice view of about a hundred Ruddies in Royal Guard uniforms milling around the gate, and a couple hundred more on the battlements atop the walls. No heavy weapons he could see, but he knew the Guard had plenty of portable rocket launchers, and those mothers packed a hefty punch. More than enough to overload his personal force fields with a direct hit; enough of them would do for the slapped-on shields on their Rovers, too. It would suck if they had to fight their way through.

They had people out there, though. You didn’t abandon your own. That shit had been true when Marines had deployed out of wooden ships, or when breaking out of Frozen Chosin, long before they’d added the word Warp to the Corps’ name. Russell had forgotten most of the useless crap they’d tried to teach him at boot camp, but the history lessons had sunk in.

The two massive iron-bound doors at the gate were wide open, which was about the only piece of good news so far. Rover Two headed towards it and the troops standing guard in front of it. None of the Ruddies leveled their assault rifles in its direction, but they were holding them at port arms, so that could change in a hurry. If the shit hit the fan, Gonzaga and his ALS-43 would unleash hell on the Ruddies on the ground floor while Rocky on Rover Three raked the battlements above and Nacle and Conroy dropped 15 and 20mm death on them. That should suppress them well enough for the three technicals to roll out without taking too much fire. Should. If Russell had a buck for every time things didn’t turn out the way they should, he’d be sitting pretty.

That left the small problem of what would be waiting for them when they got back. The Ruddies would have plenty of time to warm up their tanks and assemble their arty by then, and they might be pissed off enough to use them.

The whole situation was weird. Whatever happened today, the fleet would show up sooner or later, and every ET involved in shooting Americans would end up dead. The city might even eat a bloomie if things got bad enough. Americans frowned on using city-busters but were willing to make exceptions, as the Snakes had found out. The Ruddies would have to be crazy to get in the way of a rescue. Problem was, people didn’t have to make sense, be they alien or American.

Russell decided to let leave the big questions to the assholes in charge and concentrated on marking targets for his IW-3a with his imp; he could drive with one hand and fire his Iwo’s missile launcher with the other. There was a Ruddy officer off to one side riding a fucking horse – the Ruddy version looked more like a skinned deer than a horse – who was begging for a 20mm frag round, and Russell would be happy to oblige him.

Obregon’s voice came on again. “Rovers, we’re clear. Proceed.”

The Rovers got moving. Russell’s fire team kept an eye out in case the Ruddies were playing games, but they rolled without incident past the guards, through the thick walls surrounding the gate, and out into the open. Other than the fires still burning out in the distance, the only sign of trouble was a much nearer mess of smoke less than a klick away.

“Here we go,” Russell muttered as Rover One drove towards their date with the Ruddies.

Year 163 AFC, D Minus Ten

Heather McClintock hated violence. Shots fired meant she’d failed at her job, which was to get things done without the enemy’s knowledge. And she had a dim view of war, which she considered a mostly irrational activity. Both sides in a conflict entered it with the expectation they would win, and at least one of them was dead wrong; often everyone involved was.

Case in point: the Kirosha mob outside had to know the most they could accomplish today would be to commit a few dozen murders, and that the consequences would be dire. The implants inside their victims’ skulls would record the identities of their attackers, and the US government would demand no less than death for anyone involved. Given the Kirosha penchant for judicial torture, a quick death would be the best outcome for the rioters.

The hundreds of screaming aliens outside didn’t seem to care for the facts, though.

Half a dozen of them had managed to make it to the top of the walls and tried to throw rugs or other heavy chunks of fabric over the razor wire barrier on top. Heather had shot two of them herself: one head shot, one center of mass hit. Each beamer shot sent a stream of charged particles towards the target that packed about as much punch as a twelve-gauge shotgun; a kinetic baffle made it effectively recoilless. The weapon had shitty range but was very effective against unarmored opponents, provided you could shoot straight, which she did.

She loathed violence, but she’d discovered she was distressingly good at it.

The others had died at the hands of her fellow humans, several of whom had been armed with an assortment of weapons ranging from beamers like her own to an ancient Colt 1911 slug-thrower. All the US citizens had gone through their four-year Obligatory Service Term, which included going through Basic and learning how to shoot. A dozen handguns were not going to stop the mob outside for long, but they would help.

The Vehelian bodyguard on the second floor helped a lot more. His laser slaughtered dozens of rioters, and the survivors were too stunned at the massacre to do anything for several seconds. Heather used the lull in the action to download a status report straight into her brain, a definitely unhealthy way to access information, but needs must when the devil drives.

She shuddered at the sudden influx of knowledge.

As soon as news of the attack broke – a matter of seconds, given the small swarm of micro-drones watching the city – the Embassy had contacted the Kirosha City Prefect to ask for help. The official had refused to accept the call; a secretary claimed he was indisposed. Heather was sure he’d get well soon, but by then the Americans and Vehelians trapped in their makeshift fort would be beyond help. Calls to other ministers had also been met with lies and avoidance; so had an attempt to reach the Queen herself. The Kirosha authorities were leaving them out in the cold.

There would be consequences for this. At least six people were already dead, not to mention the seven or eight passengers in the missing van. And the O-Vehel Envoy had been in the destroyed limo. You didn’t kill an emissary of the Commonwealth without risking massive retaliation. If the US did not avenge the Envoy’s death, the O-Vehel might risk war and send a fleet to Jasper-Five to settle the score themselves.

Heather barely had time to assimilate the info dump when something flashed above her, leaving a contrail behind; an instant later, an explosion shook the main building of the auto garage. A piece of glass flew less than an inch past her head and struck the ground. Other debris pelted her and everyone else in the courtyard.

The rocketeers were back in action, and they had taken out the Marine and the Vehelian.

She needed to get to the laser, if it was still operable, and try to take out the rocket launcher team, or the next hit might knock down the gate and let the murderous hordes pour into the compound. The screams outside turned into triumphant roars when the rocket hit, and rioters started trying to get over the wall yet again.

“Hold them off!” she shouted unnecessarily and rushed to the building.

The lights were out, and smoke filled ground floor. She found the stairs in the dark, and ran up. Someone was screaming, the high-pitched sounds almost certainly coming from a Kirosha. One of the garage’s employees or its owner, probably, and either way irrelevant to the situation at hand.

He found the bleeding forms of her travel companions on the second floor. The rocket-propelled warhead had blasted a hole in one wall and filled the room with shrapnel. The Vehelian had been closest to the blast, and his body had shielded Fromm; the alien was dying, his injuries too severe for even Starfarer tech to save him.

Fromm was breathing, and his wounds appeared to be superficial, not that she had time to do anything about them if they weren’t. She desperately searched through the wreckage, praying the Vehelian’s weapon hadn’t been destroyed.

There! The explosion had flung the laser against the other side of the room, but a quick look showed her it had only sustained a few scratches. The weapon was ID-locked, though; it would only work for authorized users with the proper biometric signatures, which a human State Department employee certainly didn’t have.

Fortunately, Heather wasn’t just a State Department employee, and her imp wasn’t an ordinary implant. She used it to hack into the weapon’s security system. By the time Heather made it to the window, the laser’s sights were slaved to her implants and she could use them to track the rocket team. Or teams, she mused, expecting a second rocket to blow her into bloody rags at any second.

The rocket team was on the roof of the building across the street. One man wore the black tunic of the Final Blow Society, but the other was in the khaki uniform of a Kirosha Army regular. Both were busily reloading the launcher. The specs on the Kirosha RPG Mk III claimed a trained team could reload it in fifteen seconds. This team was still struggling with the warhead, some thirty seconds later. They clearly hadn’t been properly trained.

They were never going to get any better, either.

She’d only used lasers during a weapon familiarization course back at the Farm – lasers were too expensive to see much use in the USA – but the weapons were idiot proof. Instead of a continuous beam, she fired a pulse burst, ten micro-second discharges, each powerful enough to penetrate several inches of hardened steel plate.

The rocketeer had finally reloaded and was trying to sight the weapon when the laser burst exploded his mid-section. Dying reflex squeezed the RPG’s trigger as the man toppled backwards, sending the missile flying towards the sky as the launcher’s back blast incinerated him and his partner. Heather shifted aim to the still screaming, burning figure of the loader and put him out of his misery.

Bullets hit the building as gunshots cracked outside. Lots of shots. Heather ducked under the window. The initial group of ambushers only had a handful of rifles; the volume of fire hitting the compound was several times greater.

Heather lifted the laser over the window, using its sights to see what was going on without exposing herself. Sure enough, a formation of Kirosha soldiers had joined the fray – in support of the rioters. They weren’t Royal Guardsmen; their khaki uniforms, identical to the one worn by the now-dead rocketeer on the roof, marked them as Army men; several units were on station near the capital. Some of them – about a company’s worth, she guessed at a glance – had decided to join the rioters, in a complete reversal of everything she’d known about the political situation. The Army – or at least most of its officers – had been under the control of the Modernist faction. The crowd parted before the soldiers as they took the second floor of the garage under fire.

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.