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

  Sixth Fleet was delivering ten MEUs to the system, about thirteen thousand Marines and five thousand Navy personnel, some ten thousand of whom would be expected to carry a gun, drive or operate a weapon system, and go kill the enemy, which would nearly double the combat strength of the local forces in actual firepower and mobility. To say nothing about the difference in experience: most of those planet-bound soldiers had never fired a shot in anger. How they would fare when a host of Viper dropships and landing pods came calling was anyone’s guess. Still, Fromm thought the eye-rolling from his fellow officers wasn’t smart: they were going to need the locals’ help when the proverbial manure smacked against the rotating blades, and they should be thinking about how to improve their effectiveness rather than looking down on them.

  It wouldn’t be his problem, at least not at first. He would be busy in Parthenon-Four, which had four battalions in place, all regular Army, and those two thousand soldiers had plenty of combat experience fighting natives. Parthenon-Four had developed intelligent life, and the locals were primitive but fiercely hostile. They had managed to pick up some dangerous weapons in the seventy years since their First Contact, enough to make themselves a regular nuisance. A month didn’t go by without some violent incident somewhere near the terraforming stations, and the evacuation would provide the locals with plenty of chances for mayhem.

  There was no telling how soon it would be before the Viper invasion force arrived, but he and Charlie Company were unlikely to be bored before then.

  Parthenon-Four, 165 AFC

  “I hate the cold,” PFC Hiram ‘Nacle’ Hamblin said.

  “Better get used to it,” Gonzo said. “Cold as balls, twenty-four seven, twice as cold come Christmas.”

  “It ain’t that bad,” Russell broke in, trying to smooth things over. Nacle was feeling a bit sensitive after the whole deal at the whorehouse, and Gonzo still hadn’t figured out how far he could push before things got out of hand. “Average temp is only like fifteen degrees below Earth-normal.”

  “Yeah. A whole forty-five degrees. Frozen water on the ground eight months a year except ‘round the equator. And big-ass Abominable Snowmen roaming everywhere, ready to bite your head off.”

  “I ain’t scared of no ETs,” Nacle said. “Just don’t like the cold is all.”

  Funny how people were about things, Russell thought. The cold wasn’t going to kill anybody, unless they decided to strip naked and frolic around at night, when temps usually got within spitting distance of freezing even in the equator. Their field uniforms, let alone their full battle-rattle, were designed to trap enough body heat to make exposure unlikely unless they went far enough north to hit perma-zero temps and their batteries ran out, so freezing to death wasn’t something to worry about.

  The local critters, on the other hand, could kill you dead. The place, cold as it was, was teeming with hostile life along the warmer bits in the middle, including a species of intelligent tool users. The natives had some fancy scientific name but were commonly known as Big Furries. They were massive grey-and-white super-gorilla analogs, although the Woogle article claimed their innards were more like a dolphin or whale back on Old Earth. They were also smart enough to mine and work iron, and more recently some asshole had decided it’d be fun to sell them guns, so they were big tough monsters with guns.

  All in all, this deployment was going to suck. The terraforming facilities had bars and whores, but word was their prices were high and they would soon close down as the evacuation got underway. They were going to end up spending their time chasing giant snow apes with nothing to do in between.

  The combat shuttle lurched before the groundside grav-grapples took the boat and lowered it the rest of the way. The view from the sensor feed was nothing to write home about: vast expanses of dull-red forests, with patches of lighter orange-leafed trees here or there. No snow on the ground, at least, which made sense since they were on the tropics, such as they were. When he zoomed in on the trees, he saw they were covered in bristles or spines; they kind of reminded him of pines back home in New Illinois, where most the plants and animals were Earth imports. Not that he’d ever seen many trees growing up in the giant slum known as the Zoo.

  Some sort of squirrel-monkey critters were leaping around the trees or gnawing at pinecones. Russel wondered if they were edible and if so, what they tasted like. Some of the tastiest critters he’d found were ETs. Sure, they often had the nutritional value of chewing tobacco, and sometimes it took a Marine’s full nano-med suite to clear out the toxins in their juices, but they were tasty nonetheless.

  The video feed blurred as the shuttle landed.

  “Well, here we are.”

  Out they went, by the numbers, not as quickly or organized as if they were on assault mode, not when they were in their field grays and carrying their rucksacks, but not off by that much, either. It wasn’t that cold, with a morning time temp of fifty-three-F. According to his imp, it was going to get up to the sixties by the afternoon. The only snow he could see was on top of some impressive mountains peeking over the horizon. Not too bad, for an ice planet. Although even an ice planet was bound to have nice spots, and only a moron would pick anywhere but those spots to live in.

  The landing pad was a little bit off the main terraforming facility. As he walked down the ramp with the rest of Third Platoon, Russell saw three big gas cyclers looming ahead like artificial mountains, five hundred feet tall and nearly as wide, each designed to spew a mix of greenhouse gases meant to warm up the planet. Only one of them was working; a thick column of putrid-looking smoke rose from its top. Operations were winding down; the brass had decided holding Parthenon-Four wasn’t worth the effort.

  A loud detonation interrupted his sight-seeing. Russell didn’t waste any time; he was down on the ground, his service pistol out, before his mind fully processed what had happened.

  “Oh, no!” Nacle shouted, looking up from his own prone position. Russell took a peek through the private’s imp just in time to see a second missile slam into a descending shuttle, smoke coming from the point where the first hit had penetrated its shield.

  Fuck. That could have been us.

  The second missile sparked a fire in the shuttle’s rear cargo hold, but it looked like nothing vital had been destroyed, although any poor bastard in the way of the explosion would probably disagree. The shuttle spun in place and spat out a stream of laser and 25mm plasma-tipped rounds, searching for the rocket team. A moment later, a volley of guided artillery erupted from one of the Army positions surrounding the facility. Looked like at least some of the local GIs weren’t asleep at the switch. A series of explosions went off in the distance: air bursts. He didn’t need to see them to know what the effect of those blasts would be like: 200mm shells made a mess of anything they hit.

  There were no more missile launches.

  “Clear the area!” Staff Sergeant Dragunov shouted. “Move it, people!”

  Off to Russell’s left, Gunny Wendell took Lieutenant O’Malley firmly by the arm and helped him lead the way. The platoon’s CO looked a bit dazed and confused; instead of hitting the ground like the rest of the troops, O’Malley had only gone down on one knee while he tried to figure out what was going on. The officer’s sluggish reaction just confirmed his suspicions that the El-Tee didn’t know what the fuck he was doing. Too bad; it made Russell miss the time when Captain Fromm had been in direct command of the platoon. The skipper was a damn good officer, even if he’d gotten a bunch of them killed at Jasper-Five.

  The platoon cleared the landing zone fast as the damaged shuttle made its final descent. The grapples grabbed it and gently lowered it to the pad. By then everybody except the corpsmen and emergency techs was safely behind the blast shields that would keep the shuttle’s possible destruction from spreading the damage.

  The shuttle didn’t blow up. There were a couple of WIAs inside, but the missiles had hit mostly supplies, and none of it had included explosive ordnance. They might be short s
ome commo equipment, rations and blankies, but nobody had died.

  Still, it was one hell of a way to start a deployment.

  * * *

  “What the hell is going on here?”

  “No idea, sir. Locals have taken potshots at aircraft before, but never with SAMs.”

  Fromm’s shuttle shuddered in mid-air as the pilots raised its force fields to maximum power. It’d been sheer luck that the hit on First Platoon’s shuttle hadn’t destroyed anything vital – or filled its passenger compartment with fire and death. His own transport was next in line, carrying him and the command element of Charlie Company.

  “We’re getting reports of similar attacks on other landing zones, sir,” Lieutenant Hansen said. “Looks like four missile teams.”

  “Casualties?”

  “Two other shuttles damaged. Twelve WIAs.” Hansen paused for a second. “Two confirmed KIAs from Bravo.”

  Fromm shook his head in frustration. The Vipers had been busy. They’d either armed the natives or inserted a covert team – or teams – sometime before the Days of Infamy. Some equivalent of the US Green Berets was his guess, special forces operators specializing in training and outfitting native troops to conduct asymmetric warfare operations. Getting them past local security wouldn’t have been easy, but Fromm had seen first-hand how devious the enemy could be. They’d managed to provide enough advanced weapons and support systems to wipe out two US corvettes at Jasper-Five, not to mention nearly annihilate the Starfarer legations on that planet. That had been the Lampreys’ work, but the Vipers were just as sneaky.

  They’re trying to ensure we’ll never have anything but war between us and any natives under our influence.

  Relations with the so-called Big Furries had never been good. Some local ETs would engage in trading with human settlements, but only after they’d been taught that raiding didn’t pay off. Most of their clans had rebuffed any attempts to deal with them. A handful of missionaries had been brutally murdered even after reprisals made it obvious that doing so was an elaborate method of suicide. Current policy was to avoid them, but a few greedy bastards had sold them guns in exchange for a variety of luxury goods. The Furries’ favorite trade weapon had been a – very illegal – .60 caliber breech-loading single shot rifle, perfect for hunting or killing their fellow furries, but harmless against armored troops, although a few civilians who’d ended up on the receiving end of sniping attacks would disagree. No American smuggler would have been crazy enough to sell mil-spec weaponry to the natives, though. That had to be the work of the enemy.

  And now we’re going to have to conduct COIN ops, and find out the hard way what else they’ve got waiting for us.

  Anything that slowed down the evacuation of Parthenon-Four and inflicted casualties would be a net gain for the Vipers. Likely more than enough to justify smuggling a few SF teams and their equipment.

  We’ll just have to wipe them out with as few losses as possible.

  Unfortunately, the cheapest methods to achieve that goal were also the most brutal.

  Five

  Groom Base, Star System 3490, 164 AFC

  “Drop initiated. Transition in ten, nine…”

  Lisbeth Zhang glanced around the warp catapult. She and twenty-seven of her closest friends were crowding the big circular pad. Her flight suit felt rather inadequate for the trip she was about to undertake, a hundred-mile jump that would take no time at all in the physical universe but which would feel rather longer from her personal point of view.

  She’d never understood how Marines did it, forgetting for a moment she was a member of the gun club now. Oh, they didn’t do it often, and only a fraction of them were warp-drop certified, but doing it at all seemed insane. Lisbeth didn’t mind traveling through warp when she had a spaceship wrapped around her, protecting her from the bizarre world outside four-dimensional reality. Back during her Obligatory Service term, she’d been rated at level 3, good enough to perform FTL navigation. Not that she’d ever considered going for Warp Propulsion as a career. That was a restricted officer designation, not qualified for commanding vessels, in no small part because warp navigators soon became rather eccentric. She belatedly realized that fighter pilot might become a similar dead end, for the same reasons.

  No sense worrying about that now. Contemplating the odds of surviving this warp drop was slightly more comforting. The chances of death, irreparable psychological damage or simply never returning to the real world were low, well under a hundredth of a percent for WR-2 ratings, and an order of magnitude lower for every higher level; things had improved a great deal from the early days of the new Marine Corps and the desperate boarding actions that had helped lead the US to victory against the Snakes. Back then, the odds of a negative outcome had been a shade under one percent. Not great betting odds when your life, sanity or very existence were on the line.

  “…one.”

  Off to Neverland.

  A short jump only took a few seconds of subjective time. Normally, she powered through them by blasting Deathmetal right into her eardrums. This time, however, she went in cold; part of their training regimen involved not relying on the usual crutches – music or prayer or doing math in your head. The bloodless corpse of Lieutenant Omar Givens was waiting for her in the darkness, looking just as he had after sacrificing his life to save hers.

  Guilt and terror washed over her – until she threw a mental switch, banishing all emotion and all but one thought, focused on a single word:

  Stop.

  Weeks of meditation, drugs and bizarre mental exercises turned the word into a spell of sorts. The ghost vanished without a trace, leaving her alone in the dark.

  It worked! If freaking worked! She’d thought the whole warp prep program had been nothing but pseudo-mystical crap. Lisbeth and her fellow candidates had been conditioned into entering trance states nearly at will. Doing so inside warp had turned out to be shockingly easy. She spent the rest of the trip in quiet serenity, no ghosts or hallucinations anywhere.

  Emergence.

  Lisbeth staggered a couple of steps when her feet touched ground and stumbled into another Marine, almost knocking both of them down.

  “Sorry,” she mumbled.

  “No worries,” the guy – Lieutenant Garcia; he was in her squadron – said. He shook his head. “Weird; I feel fine now. It usually takes longer.”

  “Yeah.” Even trained Marines usually took a second or two to recover from a warp drop, but other than a moment’s clumsiness, she was fine. Her mind was clear. Maybe the brainiacs in charge actually had a clue.

  A moment after she had that thought, the screaming started.

  People were backing away from something near the center of the pad. Lisbeth pushed her way past a couple of startled candidates and saw the brawl. One trainee had jumped another and was biting him despite the efforts of two other Marines trying to restrain him. He was tearing the poor bastard’s throat open!

  “Lar! Stop it!” one of the men shouted, doing his best to pull the man’s head back from his victim. He had two inches and a good twenty pounds on the nutjob, but he wasn’t making much progress. Another Marine stumbled back when he caught an elbow in the face. Blood spurted from a pressure cut over one eye; the blow had broken skin and probably bone as well.

  The growling candidate ripped off a chunk of his victim’s flesh. There wasn’t the telltale burst of blood you got if the carotid had been torn open, but the madman was leaning over to take another bite and finish the job.

  Lisbeth dove in before he got the chance.

  She’d never gotten muscle-enhanced: her family didn’t have the cash to spare, and if she needed a strong back, that was what ordinary spacers were for. So she’d learned to fight dirty to compensate for the mass and strength differential between her and the average dickhead. A quick jab to the throat distracted the berserker before he could chomp down on his victim a second time. The blow should have stunned him for at least a second; the kidney-punches the guy holding hi
m from behind was delivering should have disabled him even more decisively, but the berserker didn’t stop. He turned to Lisbeth, and she froze when she met his eyes. They were solid orbs of darkness: she felt in her heart that she was looking at the stuff of warp space.

  The thing wearing the Marine’s body like a costume dropped his victim and lunged at her, dragging the two men holding him as if they weighted nothing. He reached for Lisbeth’s face, and she barely ducked away, sickly realizing that if he grabbed her he would rend her limb from limb.

  Fernando Verdi shouted a Karate kiai and delivered a full-power sidekick into the monster’s chest. Lisbeth heard ribs break under the impact. Fernando’s well-braced blow knocked the man-who-wasn’t backwards; he and the other two fell back in a tangle of flailing limbs. The Marine who’d called the berserker’s name managed to put him in a half-Nelson, but the struggling figure kept twisting around, oblivious to the pain that should be immobilizing him.

  Lisbeth kicked him in the balls with all her strength. There was a sickening squishing sound as her boot’s steel toe connected with the pelvic bone, and she felt the impact rupture something, but the thing didn’t stop. He was growling – no, it was speaking in some language she couldn’t understand, and it was turning his head to bite the Marine holding him; vertebrae cracked as he twisted his neck beyond a normal human’s range of motion.

  Lieutenant Garcia stepped up from the side, a standard-issue multi-tool held tightly in a white-knuckled grip, its cutting blade out. He grabbed the madman’s hair with one hand and drove the tool right through his temple with the other.

  “Jesus God,” Garcia whispered as he twisted the little knife inside the monster’s head. “God.”