No Price Too High (Warp Marine Corps Book 2) Read online

  Not that he intended to give them a chance to try any new tricks.

  * * *

  “A little fresh air will do ya good, Nacle,” Gonzo said in a cheerful tone.

  Nacle shook his head and kept quiet.

  “Come on, it ain’t even all that cold outside.”

  “Ease up, Gonzo,” Russell said. “We’re unassing in five, so look sharp.”

  They’d been short of warm bodies – the local grunts weren’t worth shit – so the Skipper had sent out most of Third Platoon out with the rest of the company, everyone except the mortar section, which was in the rear providing fire support and also keeping an eye on the Army arty to make sure they didn’t fuck up. That meant that Russell and his fire team got to play infantryman, backing up the regular 0311s with their heavier weapons. Russell was cool with that, but both Gonzo and Nacle were a bit tense. They hadn’t enjoyed their time at Jasper-Five, which had been a bit harder work than usual, and assaulting a fortified position manned by a mix of Viper operators and bloodthirsty natives wasn’t going to be a lot of fun. But that was why they got paid the big bucks.

  The LAV shuddered for a moment, its armored hull ringing like a giant bell under a massive impact that shifted its sixty-ton weight.

  “Motherfuck!” Gonzo growled.

  “Hypervelocity missile,” Russell said. The troop carrier didn’t stop, though, so the direct hit had knocked out the force field but hadn’t penetrated the LAV’s armor. If it had, spalling fragments would have turned at least some of the Marines inside into ground chuck, body armor and personal shields or not.

  This wasn’t going to be much fun at all.

  The LAV stopped behind a rocky outcrop and lowered the rear exit ramp. Russell could hear the thunder of Charlie Company’s mortars and local yokels’ arty, pasting the enemy positions. They obviously hadn’t suppressed the ETs enough to keep them from lobbing heavy ordnance against the Marines’ vehicles, and it was going to get a lot worse, now that they were out in the open.

  “Go, go, go!” shouted Staff Sergeant Dragunov The squad poured out of the assault vehicle, their imps drawing them virtual pathways to follow as they scrambled out into the snow-covered mountainside. Their objective was a fortress built around a cavern complex, a stone warren protected by area force fields and a number of Viper heavy weapons. Taking the place was going to be a bitch and a half.

  Russell rushed to his designated spot while the LAV rose just high enough above the outcropping for its turret to engage the fortress. The crack of its 35mm railgun was loud enough to make his teeth vibrate as he reached a snow-capped boulder and knelt behind it. Gonzaga was right behind him, his ALS-43 at the ready. Nacle arrived a second later.

  “Be careful,” the Mormon said. “They got a firefly over there.”

  “Shit.”

  The floating mirror balls could fire dozens of laser beams every second; they weren’t powerful enough to penetrate their personal force fields, not with one hit, but fireflies never hit you once. Their primary purpose was to shoot down artillery and mortar shells, but a grunt would do if they didn’t have anything better to blast.

  “Gonzo, try to take it out.”

  “Copy that.”

  The gunner lifted the ALS-43 over his head, using the weapon’s sight system to aim it without exposing himself. It wasn’t the best way to shoot the weapon, fancy sights or not, but it was a lot safer than poking your head up and eating a laser. He fired two bursts.

  “Miss,” he said.

  “I’m going to pop a 20-mike-mike to get its attention. Try again when I do.”

  “Roger that.”

  Russell fired a 20mm self-propelled missile. The firefly tagged it before it’d risen more than fifty feet, which would have detonated its warhead and regaled the Marine fire team with a self-inflicted dose of hell – except Russell hadn’t armed the missile before shooting it.

  Gonzo fired another burst. Russell, watching through the weapon’s sights, saw the tell-tale bloom of energy that meant at least one of the 15mm plasma rounds had found the pesky floating ball and taken care of it

  “All right, let’s move.”

  The world narrowed into a series of mad dashes for cover. The occasional laser crackled overhead, but most of the incoming was from the trade rifles some asshole smugglers had sold the natives. To make things worse, some of those rounds were plasma-tipped: the Vipers had contributed to the cause by handing out explosive bullets, just like the ones in Russell’s Iwo, except four times bigger. A direct with one of those and that’d be all she wrote.

  His fire team moved slowly forward, pausing only to send back some explosive love. Russell went through half of his 20mm loads. Most of the smart rounds ended up splattered against the enemy force fields, or blasted by other fireflies back behind their lines, but at least one of them hit something important, triggering a massive explosion less than a hundred yards away. He felt the shockwave from behind a big-ass rock he was using for cover; the Vipers and their Furry pets must be hurting.

  “Hold one,” Russell said while he sent out a status report and checked for new instructions.

  No new orders from higher; Lieutenant O’Malley usually let people alone, maybe a little too much. The objective was the same, and a quick check with his imp showed him the company was two-thirds of the way there. They’d taken a few casualties; no KIAs, but a couple of Hellcats had been disabled, and five grunts from Second Platoon were down with serious injuries. It’d been simple bad luck; they’d been caught by some ET with a heavy laser and the balls to keep the beam on target long enough to chew through force field and armor alike. A quick check of the tape showed the Viper gunner had paid the ultimate price for being a badass when he got a sheaf of mortar bombs dropped on his position. Now the bastard was comparing notes with Alien Jesus.

  The surviving scalies had pulled back after that, letting the Furries hold the perimeter while they rallied deeper inside the cavern. Russell had only caught a few glimpses of the Vipers; they weren’t pretty, eight-limbed and sort of like a snake and a spider had gotten drunk enough to make some babies. The enemy were down to one area force field, too, and had run out of swatters; Russell could tell because he was getting a full panoramic view of the battlefield, without the interruptions that meant a bunch of recon drones had been clawed out of the sky. From overhead, the fight didn’t look like much, other than occasional explosions; just a bunch of grunts moving through narrow passes between rock outcroppings, trying not to slip on icy patches and only pausing long enough to shoot or lob grenades. He couldn’t see very far into the cavern, other than a double handful of Big Furries with rifles. They would pop up behind cover to take a shot, duck back to reload, rinse and repeat. Even with the area force field, most of them had the sense not to fire from the same spot more than once. The lone exception ate a 20mm mini-missile that opened a hole in the force field and took his head clean off.

  After a minute or two, Sergeant Dragunov sent new vectors to everyone, paths forward where most of the enemy fire couldn’t bear. Russell passed the info along to the fire team and they started moving again. Time to crawl now. At least it looked like any mines or booby-traps the ETs had set up had been cleared up by the mortars. He saw a couple of places where chewed-up rocks marked the spot where a mine had been detonated before it could hit the advancing Marines. That was good news, as long as the mortar section hadn’t missed any –

  A sudden threat warning triggered reflexes developed over years of training and personal experience. Russell rolled off to one side as fast as humanly possible, away from the spot an enemy anti-personnel device had marked for destruction.

  He was almost fast enough.

  Technically, the explosion that smashed his body against the rocks like the hand of an angry god didn’t come from a mine, but rather a single-shot rocket launcher. The weapon was fairly simple: a short-range missile mated to a motion-sensing low-power laser, and dropped alongside a likely path. The ambush weapon had been hidde
n from view under a lightweight, extruded foam cover shaped to look like a random rock. It was simple, hard to detect, and its warhead was powerful enough to pulp a Marine even under full shields and body armor.

  Overwhelming pain gave way to cold numbness, which scared Russell even more. Agony meant you were still alive; feeling nothing could mean your nanomeds had kicked in, or that you were on your way out.

  “We got you.” Gonzo’s voice seemed to be coming from far away, but hearing it made all the difference in the world. He wasn’t dead. He was still there. “We got you, buddy. Hang on.”

  He could see the sky, broken here and there by rocky outcroppings. Gonzo and Nacle were dragging him back. “Get a medic here right the fuck NOW!” Nacle was calling through his imp, and that scared Russell again, because the Mormon only swore when things were well and truly FUBAR.

  Numbness everywhere. He couldn’t move his arms, his legs. He tried to crane up his head to see the damage, but Gonzo gently pushed him back down.

  “Just relax, Russet. It’s all good. It’s all good, man. Just hang on.”

  “Pull the other one,” Russell said – or tried to. His throat was bone-dry, and the built-in water dispenser in his helmet wasn’t working. None of his helmet systems were; all he had was his imp. That was all he needed, though.

  A couple mental commands were all it took, and Russell was able to see through Gonzo’s sensors. His buddy was looking down at a charred, mangled carcass, missing an arm and a leg. It took Russell a moment to accept the fact that was him, and another moment to swallow back the scream that tried to force its way past his parched lips.

  “Shit. Stop squirming, Russet,” Gonzo said. “You had to look, didn’t you?”

  Another wave of coldness washed over him. Either Gonzo had given him another dose of painkillers, or it was time to face the Reaper.

  He went into the dark without knowing which.

  * * *

  “They’ve located all the exits, sir,” Lieutenant Hansen said.

  “All right. Have everyone hold in place or pull back out of the enemy’s fields of fire,” Fromm ordered while he mentally drafted a new fire mission. The Furry cavern complex had included several escape tunnels, but they were all accounted for now. He’d hoped to take some prisoners, but storming the caves would only result in more casualties, and in any case the Vipers rarely allowed themselves to be captured alive. His company already had one KIA and ten WIAs; no sense adding to the butcher bill.

  The multi-platoon advance had achieved its objectives, forcing the enemy back and destroying all but one area force field. That would be enough for his purposes. The mortar section switched ammo types as he directed the assaultmen from Third Platoon to prepare to volley missiles. A few seconds later, he gave the ETs in the cave a final dose of hell.

  A volley of light missiles battered the enemy energy barrier with plasma discharges, enough to disrupt it in time for four thermobaric mortar bomblets to reach the interior of the cave. The tunnels were filled with highly volatile chemicals in the space of a heartbeat, and ignited a moment later.

  Fromm couldn’t see inside the caverns, other than a grav-wave general layout of the underground complex. The view from outside was impressive enough, as a huge fireball erupted from the cavern’s mouth like some ancient dragon’s breath. All his troops were under cover, but they still were shaken up by the massive detonation. The entire mountainside crumbled onto the cavern’s entrance, sealing it up.

  Inside the caves… Well, it would have been mercifully quick, at least.

  Most of the tunnels collapsed; the entire mountain shuddered as portions of its interior settled down. By the time it was over, there wasn’t enough space inside the complex to fit anything larger than a mouse. It would serve as a fitting monument to the ETs who’d made their last stand there, and the Marines who’d ensured they died for their cause.

  As he watched the smoky ruin and went over the casualty reports, a part of him was refighting old battles. If he’d held back some of those especial munitions during the final fight at Jasper-Five, many Marines would still be alive. Instead, he’d had them broken down by fabbers to make more conventional shells, never expecting the primitives he was facing to ever bring area force fields into play.

  It’s not what you don’t know that gets you killed. It’s the things you think you know.

  The Vipers had made it clear they wanted to take this system. And they were deploying their full bag of tricks to do so. He’d better make sure his own preconceptions didn’t get him killed, along with everyone under him.

  Groom Base, Star System 3490, 164 AFC

  The Lockheed Martin SF-10 War Eagle – you could blame the name on a number of notable Auburn University alumni among the design team – didn’t look pretty. It was a sixty-foot long cylinder with two bulbous warp generators at each end, with another bulge in the middle for its power plant and graviton thrusters. The tube of a 20-inch graviton cannon protruded under the frontal warp generator; the weapon ran down the entire length of the fighter and packed the punch of a battleship’s main gun, although the onboard capacitors only allowed it to fire five times before the little ship went Winchester (out of ammo) and had to return to base to reload. A trio of medium lasers and a pair of plasma projectors that comprised the fighter’s secondary armament were hardly visible on the spacecraft’s surface.

  It didn’t look pretty at all, but it was the most beautiful thing in the universe.

  Lisbeth Zhang watched the line of starfighters arranged neatly on the hangar bay below the viewing window. In less than two hours, she and ten other pilot trainees under a slightly more experienced squadron commander would undertake their first flight mission: to engage and destroy the antiquated and barely-functional battlecruiser Bull Run. She’d taken a little stroll onto the observation deck for one last look at Tenth Squadron: twelve War Eagles, ready for action. At the moment, those twelve fighters represented five percent of the entire Marine Aviation force. A whole two hundred and forty War Eagles had been built, and further production had been halted to prepare for deployment: the same fabbers that could make more fighters were now busy making spare parts for the ones already in service. As it was, going into battle with a single class of vessel was risky as hell. Normally you wanted at least two variants in service, so a single design flaw didn’t ground the entire fleet. But needs must when the devil rides. That should be the motto of the Spacefighters. Needs must.

  After she was done sightseeing, Lisbeth headed down to the Ready Room for final pre-flight briefings and prep.

  Getting to this point had been no picnic.

  She got there early, but there was already a line of pilots waiting to get their medicine, the latest concoction of drugs unofficially known as ‘Mélange’ or simply ‘The Spice.’ Lisbeth had Woogled the terms and discovered they referred to some pre-Contact sci-fi story that’d been long on mysticism and light on science, not to mention based on the idiotic belief that humans were the only intelligent species in the universe. Some idiots in R&D must be either super-geeks or very old geeks, probably both. Whatever.

  Normally, the chemical cocktail would have been added to her nano-med pack, to be injected at the discretion of her imp’s medical systems. Mélange usage followed its own rules, however, in no small part because each dose was carefully tailored to each pilot, down to their current physiological state. Before her experiences in the Lexington Project, she might have found the whole thing more than slightly ridiculous. Not anymore, though.

  They’d lost two more people. One had merely never come back from warp space. The other had…

  Lisbeth shuddered.

  “You okay, ma’am?” a Lieutenant behind her asked.

  “Yes, thank you,” she said absently. She didn’t want to explain. Lisbeth had been there and she still didn’t fully believe it. It’d been over a month since the incident, but it felt like it’d just happened. That sense of immediacy was just one of the many things that were bothering
her.

  It was her turn. The med-tech ran a full scan of her vitals. A couple of minutes later, an ampoule of Spice was produced. She took the injection on her upper arm, feeling the coolness of the liquid solution as it spread through her body. Other than that, there was no apparent effect, but Lisbeth knew that wouldn’t last. Sooner or later, something would happen.

  The amazing thing was, only a handful of candidates had resigned from the program. The effects of Mélange and the visions they induced were disturbing, yes. But they were also fascinating. Maybe even addictive. She still had nightmares about what happened to Captain Brangan, but she hadn’t considered leaving the program. Part of it was patriotism: the fighters were going to make a huge difference in the war, she was sure of it. But that wasn’t the only reason.

  Lisbeth relived Brangan’s death while heading towards the locker room. They’d made yet another warp jump, and she’d done a quick headcount. She’d had just enough time to breathe a sigh of relief – everyone was accounted for – when Brangan had dissolved before her eyes. The poor guy hadn’t had a chance to scream. His body, uniform, everything, had appeared to liquefy and twist into a swirling funnel shape for a fraction of a second before disappearing without a trace. Nothing had been left behind, not even a droplet of blood, a skin cell, nothing. It was as if he’d never existed.

  She saw it happen again, this time in slow motion, and felt Brangan’s mind, or maybe his soul, still alive and aware as he was dragged somewhere else, a level of existence beneath warp space, where something was waiting for him. Something bad. She saw all those things, several seconds worth of information, in the time between one step and the next, and she didn’t even slow down or stumble. Her brain absorbed the information in no time at all, without affecting her outwardly.

  All the candidates were required to report any hallucination, fugue states, lost time episodes, and changes in mood or behavior. At first, she’d done so dutifully, but now she was maybe mentioning one out of three of those episodes, and she was certain the same was true of the other candidates. For one, there were so many that she’d spend all her time going over each and every event. For another, the bizarre visions had stopped happening in real time. She’d found herself experiencing minutes’ worth of flashbacks or waking nightmares within the space of an eyeblink. They didn’t affect her performance in any negative way. If anything, her reaction time, spatial awareness and coolness under fire were all improving.