No Price Too High (Warp Marine Corps Book 2) Page 3

  A trio of missiles went off overhead, their baleful discharges spearing through the shield and down towards their target – the company command vehicle. Fromm’s universe flashed bright white before fading into darkness.

  * * *

  “Goddammit,” Fromm said, leaning back on his chair when his imp stopped overloading his vision.

  Field training exercises combined the realities of moving over actual terrain with extremely vivid sensory input piped directly into everyone’s brains via their cybernetic implants. The grueling advance under fire that had ended with his notional demise had felt so close to the real thing that his body was still pumping adrenaline into his bloodstream. The sensory overload that simulated ‘death’ wasn’t anywhere near as traumatic as being on the receiving end of actual high-energy ordnance, as Fromm could attest from all-too-personal experience, but it wasn’t pleasant, either.

  “Not fun at all,” Lieutenant Hansen agreed, recovering from his own administrative murder.

  Now that they were done for the rest of the exercise, their training vehicle grounded and showing up on any active unit’s sensors as scattered flaming debris, they could watch the rest of the action while they waited for the FTX to be over. The enlisted personnel in the vehicles could slack off; the driver, gunner and comm specialists in the command vehicle leaned back on their seats and played video games or caught up on their emails or Facetergram feeds. Fromm didn’t have that luxury; he kept watching the action. The diagrams and visual feeds cleared up as the computers dropped the simulated jamming and interference that had been part of the exercise. He now could see everything that was going on, unimpeded by the normal fog of war.

  The loss of Charlie Actual had slowed the advance but not stopped it. One more LAV and three Hellcats had also been reduced to – virtual – wreckage by the artillery barrage. The battalion commander had ordered Charlie Company’s survivors to hold their positions and provide cover while Bravo leapfrogged it and pressed forward.

  The end result, three hours later, wasn’t pretty: over thirty percent casualties, and no joy in taking the objective. The operation had ended in a disaster of historical proportions; Warp Marine units had only taken those casualty levels in a handful of military operations during their century and a half of existence.

  Fromm tried not to take it personally, and failed. His company had been the tip of the spear, and it had taken unacceptable losses without achieving anything. There had been no opportunities where a dash of brilliance might have saved the day, the way they so often did in fiction. In reality you did your job and often failed because someone else fucked up, or due to simple bad luck.

  He wanted to blame Lieutenant O’Malley but he couldn’t. The delay in setting up and providing mortar fire had directly led to the destruction of a squad, but the artillery barrage that had decimated the rest of the company hadn’t been his fault. When you maneuvered you were exposed to enemy fire. The MEU’s artillery battery hadn’t been able to suppress the enemy’s. There would be plenty of blame to go around during the post-game analysis.

  A big part of him was sick and tired of the training rotation he’d been stuck in for the better part of a year while the war went on. He’d lived through the start of the conflict and two ‘minor conflicts’ before that; some would think that he’d shed enough blood for God and Country and it was time to let others do their share. When he thought about it rationally, he shared the sentiment. He knew only too well how random chance could take you down no matter how well-trained, tough and motivated you were; this FTX was a case in point. But he still kept poring over briefings about the war, trying to guess where and when the 101st would be deployed. The choice of enemies in the field exercise was probably not an accident. Fromm wanted to get a piece of the Lampreys, but the Vipers would do.

  Fighting was the only way he knew how to begin to pay his obligation to the Marines he’d led to their deaths, in Jasper-Five and Astarte-Three. Nothing would ever make up for those losses, but doing his part to make sure their sacrifices wouldn’t be in vain was all he had left.

  That, and laying down his own life.

  * * *

  A passing freighter dropped a load of emails from Earth later that evening. Fromm got two, one from Heather McClintock and one from his sister. He read Heather’s first.

  Fromm hadn’t seen her since his last leave, six months ago. He’d hopped a ride on a troop transport headed for Sol System and met her in New Washington, where she’d been stuck behind a desk. The three days they’d spent together had been worth the combined eighteen hours of warp transit. Since then, they’d kept in touch with weekly or monthly emails, depending on how busy they were. Neither of them had a lot of spare time; their energy was focused on their respective careers.

  Most people their age had to do that if they wanted to get ahead. In a world where your competition could have decades of experience over you, the only way to rise in the ranks was to work harder than the old farts were willing to. You wanted to make your mark before you were fifty, take twenty years off to raise a family, and then jump back into the grind for another three or four decades. The seventy- to ninety-year olds were the toughest competition. In the Corps, they tended to dominate the Major and Colonel ranks, and filled the talent pool from which general officers were selected. Or, at the enlisted level, they ruled the E-8 and E-9 roost. The ranks above were in the hands of hundred-year olds. Fromm didn’t follow the Navy’s inner workings, but he figured that their command ranks were filled by the same age brackets, except for the occasional maverick like Lisbeth Zhang, who’d gotten her first ship at the tender age of thirty-two – only lose it at Jasper-Five. Of course, the old bastards would blame Zhang’s problems on her age and lack of experience, even though most anybody would have lost their command under those circumstances.

  Fromm wondered what’d happened to the ballsy bubblehead officer as he opened Heather’s message. He hadn’t really followed up on her, but Heather had, and apparently Zhang had left the Navy and dropped off the face of the Earth. She deserved better than that, but a lot of people did. He set that aside and started reading. You could put anything from a full sensory display to mere video or sound clips in an email, but most people still preferred to use the written word to communicate.

  All’s well, Heather wrote. Still on desk unit on Old Mother Earth, but that may change in the near future. Which meant she’d be going out into the field again, probably as an ‘illegal’ intelligence officer. That usually wasn’t as dangerous as being a ground-pounder, but it could have its moments, and if the shit hit the fan the spooks would have little or no support while in far-foreign space.

  He could sympathize with being on one’s own, surrounded by enemies.

  Walking down the middle of the broad street, bullets flattening against his force field, the pressure of a multitude of hits making him stagger slightly as he moved on, the heavy grav-cannon vibrating against his body armor as he unleashed hell on the hundreds, on the thousands of screaming red-skinned aliens in the fancy uniforms of the Kirosha Royal Guard, their bodies torn apart by the relentless energy stream. He guided the beam towards the main target, the shield generator that must be destroyed before the enemy overwhelmed the Starfarer embassies and murdered everyone inside.

  A brief flash of light was his only warning before a massive wave of force washed over him…

  Fromm blinked. The memories of those frenzied minutes still came back once in a while, uninvited guests he hadn’t quite learned how to get rid of. The dreams were bad; the urge to cringe or throw himself to the ground when hearing an unexpected loud noise was worse. The explosion had ripped off three of his limbs and very nearly killed him. There were wounds that even the best Starfarer tech couldn’t repair, and the besieged compound had been running out of critical medical supplies when he’d become a casualty, so the best tech hadn’t been available. He had lines of scar tissue at the points where his vat-grown limbs had been attached, courtesy of the emergency patchw
ork which was the best that Navy corpsmen using substandard methods and materials had managed to achieve. The Frankenstein’s Monster-like marks did not affect his range of motion, and removing them would take time he couldn’t afford to waste at the moment, so the scars remained, a constant reminder of how close he’d come to the end of the line.

  He shook his head and read the rest of the email; whatever joy he’d been feeling at hearing from Heather was gone, replaced with a dull, bleak numbness. The flashbacks had a way of ruining his mood.

  The rest of the email became just words on his field of vision, the warmth they usually stirred in him gone. Even the news that former Ambassador Llewellyn was getting his just desserts failed to cheer him up. Llewellyn, whose incompetence had helped precipitate the crisis that killed dozens of Americans at Jasper-Five, was currently serving a four-year sentence in Venus, assigned to the terraforming project there. Working on the second planet from the sun was nobody’s idea of fun; the convicts would be trapped in small subterranean habitats, doing hard labor while surrounded by a lethal atmosphere with an average temperature in the hundreds of degrees even after fifty years of artificial cooling. With a war on, on the other hand, hard time in Venus might be considered a lucky break; convicts could be inducted into penal battalions and used as cannon fodder, but that was rarely done. Fromm doubted Llewellyn would count himself lucky; the fact that his family connections hadn’t saved him from his fate also meant he’d been finally cut off from their support. The ‘rat might even have to figure out how to work for a living after his sentence was over, assuming he didn’t piss someone off and end up the victim of an ‘unfortunate accident.’ Those were easy to come by in Venus.

  Other people’s suffering, even when well-deserved, had never pleased him very much, and in his current mood the news mostly irritated him. He skimmed over Heather’s parting words – she wasn’t one for effusive endearments anyway – and went over the dutiful message from her sister. Lucinda Fromm-Bertucci and her husband ran a catering service for the rich and famous in Windsor. She hadn’t had any contact with the military after doing her four years’ Obligatory Service, spent largely in Logistics, and she acted as if her very survival had nothing to do with the efforts of men and women in uniform fighting and dying light years away from home. Her email didn’t mention the war at all, except to note that business was down because there were ‘hardly any receptions or parties being thrown in the city.’ She concluded her email with a terse ‘Take care.’ That only deepened his dark mood.

  Sometimes he wondered why he did any of this. Whether anything mattered at all. He remembered the day he’d chosen life in the Corps, when such things had mattered very much, but the memories seemed distant, like someone else’s story.

  Windsor, New Michigan, 153 AFC

  “You can’t be serious.”

  Peter Fromm shrugged and looked away from his friends, savoring the view from the high-rise where they were throwing the End of Ob-Serv party. The open balcony looked upon the lake where the city of Detroit and much of the original site of Windsor, Canada had once stood. His imp provided a pre-Contact image of the cityscape that the Snakes had burned into slag, creating a miles-wide crater that Lake St. Clair and the Detroit River had quickly filled. He didn’t need video replays to remind him of the screaming and dying of its inhabitants. The restless ghosts of the dead still called out to him, a hundred and fifty years after the fact. The doomed people of Detroit-Windsor had left hundreds of hours of audiovisual records of their demise, and Fromm had watched most of them, obsessively going over the worst ones.

  “Pete? Hello? Anybody home?”

  He turned his gaze back to the inside of the luxury apartment where a bunch of other twenty-something Freebirds were cavorting; he’d missed something June or Brad had said. It’d be easy enough to have his imp play back the tape and find out what they’d told him, but he didn’t bother. His friends would be happy to repeat themselves.

  “Sorry,” he said.

  “You’re not even drunk or stoned,” June Gillespie said accusingly. “And you don’t get to drop that bombshell and then ignore us. What’s your excuse? We just got out and you’re ready to go back in? After you almost got killed?”

  A brief image flashed through his mind – the hulking shapes of Horde pirates, plasma rounds detonating uselessly on their heavy force fields as they advanced towards him and the rest of his squad. He repressed a shudder and turned it into a shrug.

  “I’m staying in, that’s all. It’s a good deal, and I’ll be going to college, same as you.”

  “New Annapolis,” Brad said in the same tones he would have used for ‘the Seventh Circle of Hell.’ “How about NIT? What happened to the plan?”

  “Now you sound like my father.” Fromm’s parents had been elated when the acceptance e-package from the Nebraska Institute of Technology had arrived. Getting a degree from the premiere school in the nation was a golden ticket, a stepping stone to wealth and glory. Brad and June had also been accepted; their plan had been to all go there once they were free and clear.

  Had. Plans changed.

  He’d thought about showing up to the party in his dress blues, but that wouldn’t have gone over well. Telling his best friends that he had just signed for a full ten years in the Corps was turning out badly enough. Almost as badly as telling his family had been, earlier that day.

  “Well, your old man is right, Pete. It’s a waste, man. A total waste. We already did our time in uniform. Time to get on with real life. To have a life without being told when to sleep, wake up, eat, take a dump. Seriously. Did you enjoy that shit so much you’re going back for a big heap of seconds? You did your duty. You even got to fight. Just what you get when you do your last two years in the freaking Corps. That thing at Galileo-Nine should have gotten all that hero crap out of your system.”

  The pirate was eight feet tall and almost as wide. He swung the heavy particle-beam projector and played the ongoing energy pulses like a hose. Two of Fromm’s squaddies screamed briefly before their shields failed and they were torn apart. Fromm’s Iwo cycled empty; he closed his eyes, unaware he’d been screaming as well until First Sergeant Bolton shook him and slammed him into a bulkhead, shutting him up. When he dared to look, he saw the massive alien’s body sprawled three feet in front of him, smoke pouring from the exit wounds on his back.

  Everybody in his squad but him was dead.

  “You got ‘im, Fromm,” the NCO said. “Not bad for a Foxtrot-November, even if you punked out at the end. Now quit yer crying and get on your feet, Marine! We ain’t done clearing out the station.”

  He blinked rapidly for a few seconds, slowly realizing he’d almost punched Brad. The sudden motion, which he’d arrested just in time, was completely lost on his friends.

  “Take it easy, Brad,” June broke in. The look in her face made it clear she knew Brad’s badgering wasn’t going to help matters. Her boyfriend ignored her, too angry to stop his tirade. Brad and Peter had grown up together, had been as close as brothers. Fromm could see his anger was mostly out of concern. But there was also an element of pique involved: Brad didn’t like surprises, or changes of plans, and he took them personally.

  “What’s with your obsession with the Marines, for Christ’s sake? At least in the Navy you can actually make a career.”

  “Brad!”

  “All right, Junes. Sorry, Pete, but I just can’t believe you’re doing this. We’re having this party to celebrate being done with the whole yes-sir, no-sir, three-bags-full-sir crap. Why are you doing this?”

  Fromm looked back out and gestured towards the flat expanse that used to be Detroit. It took them a second to get it.

  “Jesus. First Contact? Ancient history, Pete. You aren’t a Golden Oldie. You didn’t live through it. Might as well get upset about the Japanese killing General Custer.”

  “The ETs are still out there,” Fromm said. “There’s fighting going on right now, over at Xon System.”

  Brad sig
hed. “That’s just a police action. A skirmish here or there, or a little conflict whenever someone’s worked up the nerve to ask President Hewer if he’s ever going to retire and he starts something to distract everyone. We killed off the Snakes over a century ago, man. It’s over. The other Starfarers may push us around the edges, but they aren’t going to risk an existential war with us.”

  “That’s not what I hear.”

  “You’re taking that Galactic Studies crap too seriously. It’s scaremongering, plain and simple, to keep us on an eternal war footing.”

  “Not really, but never mind that,” June said, always the voice of reason. “Okay, forget about Brad and his lack of knowledge about anything that doesn’t involve nanotech…”

  “Hey!”

  “And I quote: ‘the Japanese killing General Custer.’ Give me a break.”

  “Didn’t they? Or was it the Soviets? Something like that. Who cares?”

  “Woogle it.” June turned back to Fromm. “Yes, the other Starfarers pose a potential threat. But the fact is, we’ve got enough soldiers and spacers already. You could be an engineer, a designer, and accomplish a lot more using that brain of yours for something constructive. Why waste all that talent to become a killer?”

  “I…” Fromm struggled for words. He didn’t know how to explain the incident at Galileo-Nine, the terror he’d felt, and the way he’d set that terror aside and done what he’d had to. He couldn’t just say that he’d never felt so alive as during those insane moments in the pirated mining complex. The memories haunted him, but the thought of never going back bothered him more.

  I am a killer. He couldn’t say that, though; they’d never understand.

  And then there were the Detroit Archives. Ancient history, perhaps, but unlike Brad, Fromm felt certain history could easily repeat itself. Starfarer species weren’t exterminated routinely, but it happened: three times in the last century and a half, as a matter of fact. Humans had been responsible for one of those extinctions and played a role in the second. To think it couldn’t happen to the US, to Earth, was idiotic. Only an over-privileged kid could indulge in that sort of illusion, and not for long.