Blood on the Stars Collection 1 Read online

  Chapter Ten

  Base Tom Wills

  Planet Santis, Krillus IV

  307 AC

  “Let’s keep that sorry ass moving, Thoms. That goes for the rest of you too. You all look like shit warmed over and dumped on a plate.” Clete Hargraves was running alongside the small column, taking delight in haranguing his Marines, just as any good platoon sergeant would do. “You’re all soft…what are you gonna do if we get shipped up to the front when the balloon goes up? I’ll tell you what. You’re gonna get your fat asses shot off by those Union FRs, that’s what.”

  “Sarge, we done ten klicks already, and it’s gettin’ cold. My balls are frozen.” Joe Thoms looked the part of a Marine, a hulking kid who anyone would have guessed was at least twenty-five, although Hargraves knew damned well he was only twenty.

  “Mine too,” added Janet Blocker, somewhat less literally.

  Hargraves turned around, running backwards—and making it look effortless, though it wasn’t—as he faced his suffering group of Marines. “Yeah, try that with the Union FRs…maybe they won’t blow those frozen fucking balls off if you ask nicely. Problem with that is, you ain’t the only one who gets ganked. The rest of the Marines counting on your sorry ass get blasted too. So, let’s cut the whining and show some hustle. It’s just six klicks back to the barracks. If you pukes can keep up with me the rest of the way, I might even let you rest before chow.”

  There were a few scattered groans, but the twenty-odd Marines kept running, following the platoon sergeant and, for the most part, keeping up with him. Finally, the column snaked its way through a small town, nothing more than a single dirt road with a dozen buildings on each side, and then up to a large, low structure.

  “I knew you could do it, kiddies. And I’m nothin’ but a man of my word. So get a load off, rest those precious little bodies. You got an hour ’til chop.”

  Hargraves turned and walked down to the end of the building, listening to the sounds behind him, mostly exhausted grunts of one kind or another. He continued to the last door and knocked.

  “Come.”

  He opened the door and stepped in, snapping to attention as soon as he was inside. “Sir!”

  “At ease, Sergeant. And close the door…it’s cold enough every day on this forsaken planet, but I’d swear it feels like deep space out there today.”

  Hargraves reached out, pushing the door shut. “I think first and second squads would agree with you, sir. They squalled like a bunch of baby birds, but they finished. They damned near even kept up with me…which goes to show just how much effort a Marine will make to get out of the cold.”

  Lieutenant Luke Plunkett turned and looked up from his desk, clearly trying to hold back a laugh. “You’re a sick bastard, you know that?” Plunkett gestured toward an empty chair.

  “Won’t do them no favors goin’ easy on them, Lieutenant. When they end up in the shit, every time I beat them to the ground gives them an extra chance to make it back home.” Hargraves was the only real combat veteran in fourth platoon, and that included Plunkett. The career sergeant was forty-five, and he’d done service in the last war between the Union and the Confederation. He had stories of the Union ground forces that shook even the lieutenant.

  “Tell me, Sarge. The FRs…they’re really that tough?”

  Hargraves sat down, letting out a deep breath as he did. He’d never have admitted it to his Marines, but he was pretty damned tired himself. “Well, sir…let’s just say they ain’t like nuthin’ you ever saw before. Not better than us…not as good even, I’d say, not by a good chunk. But there’s always more of ’em, Lieutenant, and the thing is, they’re disciplined. Like nuthin’ you ever saw. Every one of ’em would jump off a cliff if an officer ordered it.”

  The Foudre Rouge were the Union’s ground forces, the counterparts of the Confederation Marines. The FRs were clones, genetically optimized for combat, and mentally conditioned for total obedience and a complete lack of fear. In theory they should have been the ultimate warriors, but it didn’t work quite that way in the field, and the Confed Marines had held their own in the last war, at least wherever they weren’t outnumbered two or three to one. The FRs were good fighters, highly effective against most enemies. But they met their match when they faced the Marines.

  Confederation ethics frowned heavily on cloning for any purposes, and it was legal only on a few worlds. Breeding a customized class of slave-warriors and removing their will to resist, even to understand the idea of questioning an order, was extremely immoral to the Confederation way of thinking. Indeed, it was downright evil.

  The two sat silently for a while. Then Hargraves said, “Do ya think we’ll get redeployed when the war breaks out? I’m not sure I like the idea of sittin’ out here in the middle of nowhere while Marines are fighting and dyin’ trying to turn back the Union.”

  Plunkett shook his head. “I just don’t know, Sarge. Normal procedure is to rotate after a year’s deployment, especially on Santis. But I don’t know. If the balloon goes up…I hope they don’t forget us. It’s not like one platoon’s going to decide the war, but I don’t like the idea of being stuck here for too long…”

  Hargraves nodded. Santis looked like just about any world in the Confederation, but he knew it wasn’t. The sergeant didn’t have any pretensions as a physicist, but he was well aware of the planet’s special characteristic, the one that made it valuable, but also the thing that had prevented extensive colonization and restricted the population to a hundred or so technicians and a platoon of Marines.

  Santis’s primary, Krillus, was a fairly normal sun, but it was part of a binary system, and the companion was a magnetized neutron star that bathed the system with hard x-rays in concentrations far above normal levels. That had two relevant effects on the planet. First, it caused a concentration of tritium in Santis’s ocean over a hundred times the amount found on a more normal planet. Second, it made the planet a pretty damned unhealthy place to live, at least for any extended time.

  The technicians, the ones who operated the massive refinery that extracted the precious tritium from the ocean, tended to stay for longer than they probably should. But they were making twenty times what they would have in a normal job, and there was no shortage of candidates willing to accept the health risk for that kind of money. But Marines just went where they were told to go, and the meager monthly pay of a sergeant—and even a lieutenant—was hardly compensation for waiting around as your DNA was slowly damaged and mutated by radiation. And the idea of sitting by and watching comrades fight a war that would determine if your people maintained their freedom was anathema to Marines.

  “Sure as shit, the high command don’t want my opinion, but I’d hate to sit here while the rest of the Marines are fighting to save the Confederation.” Hargraves looked up at Plunkett. “I don’t know big strategy or any of that stuff, Lieutenant, but I was there in the last war. I saw the enemy up close. They came to finish things, sir. No doubt about that. If their leader hadn’t died, that woulda been a fight to the finish.” He paused, looking down at the floor for a few seconds. “And now, they’re gonna come again. This one’s gonna be to the end, sir. I don’t want to fight, not against those damned FRs, not again. But it ain’t about what I want. We gotta fight, all of us. And if this is the big war, the final one…no Marine wants to sit here on the edge of nowhere getting eaten alive by rads while somebody else fights for the future.”

  Plunkett sighed. “Well, Sarge, I agree with you one hundred percent. But none of it is up to you. Or up to me, for that matter. I guess we’ll just have to…”

  The small com unit on the table buzzed. “Lieutenant Plunkett, it’s Corporal Williams in the communications hut. Sorry to disturb you, sir, but I have Sergeant Jones on the com for you.”

  Plunkett shot a confused glance over at Hargraves. Jones was on the orbital platform with one of the platoon’s squads. It was a regular rotation that put a quarter of his Marines up there at any time. But what t
he hell could Jones have to report? “Put him through, Corporal.”

  “Lieutenant, sir…it’s Sergeant Jones. I…ah…there’s something happening up here. The techs…their scanners show a ship coming through the transwarp, sir. They got nothing scheduled.” There was a short pause, and Plunkett could hear voices in the background. Then: “Lieutenant, something’s definitely wrong. Unless the scanners are going bonkers, that ship is over four klicks long. The techs say the energy readings are way too high for a tanker…which means…”

  “All right, Sergeant…don’t lose your shit. Let’s take this one step at a time. Even if it is a warship, it could be one of ours…is probably one of ours. Maybe their com is down or something. Maybe…” Plunkett wanted to blurt out a whole series of maybes, as much to calm himself as his Marines. He had no idea what hostile ship could be there…it seemed impossible that a Union vessel could have gotten all the way across the Confederation undetected. But he knew the Confed fleet was massed to face the expected attack on the Union border…and it seemed unlikely a frontline battleship would be all the way out here. Not now.

  “Yes, sir…” Jones didn’t sound convinced. “What do you want me to do, sir?”

  Plunkett hesitated. Hargraves could see the lieutenant had no idea what to do. If that was some kind of hostile battleship there wasn’t much one platoon of Marines was going to do to stop it.

  “Put your men on alert, Sergeant. Just to be safe. And ask Mr. Klyde if his people need any help manning the weapons stations up there.”

  The orbital platform was mostly a place for tankers to dock while the ground-to-orbit tenders ferried up refined tritium. It had a few guns manned by civilian techs who’d been given some extra training, a token planetary defense, but nothing that was going to make a four-kilometer long battleship stop and take notice. Still, he couldn’t think of anything else.

  “Yes, Lieutenant.”

  “And, Sergeant…keep me posted. If anything happens, anything at all, you let me know. And even if it doesn’t I want hourly updates.”

  “Yes, sir. Understood. Jones out.”

  Plunkett turned toward his platoon sergeant. “So what do you think, Clete? Any ideas?”

  “It’s probably nothin’ Lieutenant…”

  “But?”

  “Well, they ain’t gonna much like this, but if I was you, I’d get the whole platoon—minus Jones’s people, of course—and march ’em outta here. One blast from orbit, and the barracks is gone…and the armory too. The way I figure it, if that’s a Confed ship, or somethin’ else we ain’t thought of, then no harm done. But if this is an attack, we ain’t gotta chance sittin’ here. There’s caves all along the shoreline, and thick woods up north. Let’s just say some kind of enemy lands here…even if we put up a fight, you figure we’re beat in an hour. But if we’re all spread out, dug in…that’s a nightmare for an attacker. And if somebody does land here and occupy the place…we can do all sorts of hit and runs, keep ’em on edge. Might not be a way to win, but we can damned sure keep ’em on their toes.”

  Plunkett sat quietly for a moment. Then he looked right at Hargraves. “Alright, Clete…let’s do it.” He paused. “They’re not going to like it…it’s cold out there.”

  The veteran sergeant stared back, just the slightest hint of sadism in the crooked little smile on his lips. “They’re Marines, Lieutenant. They’ll complain about anything. But they’ll damned well do what they’re told!”

  * * *

  “Approaching firing range, Commander. Scanning data confirms our earlier conclusions. An orbital platform designed primarily for the loading of compressed tritium. It is armed, but minimally.”

  Kat leaned back in her chair, feeling another twinge of Patrician guilt for enjoying the comfort as much as she was. “Gold Dagger squadron to the launch bay. Advise Optiomagis Junus his people are to target the enemy weapon systems only. I need those guns knocked out, but I want damage to the rest of the platform kept to a minimum.”

  “Yes, Commander.”

  Invictus had passed through three Confederation systems since the initial contact at Ishelar. They had blasted the first enemy ship they’d encountered there to atoms with a single volley, but it had taken almost two days to find and destroy the second vessel. Her fighters had finally run the wily patrol ship down and destroyed its engines. After that, it was just a matter of a few strafing runs to finish the job.

  Her forces had searched the rest of the Alaris system before moving on. It had been empty, save for half a dozen automated scanner stations, all of which she had destroyed. She was in Confederation space, but all hope of maintaining total secrecy had been lost. The second ship had almost certainly had time to send a report through the transwarp lines…and the automated stations as well. She doubted the Confeds would conclude they had an Alliance battleship on their doorstep. Most likely—hopefully, at least—they would assume they were dealing with some kind of pirate or renegade traffic. A problem for sure, but not one that called for immediate, desperate action. Time was the resource she needed, and the longer the Confeds waited, the greater her chance for success. With any luck, by the time a force of any substance was sent against her, it would find the entire Alliance fleet waiting.

  There had been nothing of note between Alaris and the refueling station on Santis, just two small mining colonies, inhospitable worlds with a few hundred hardy souls digging out one sort of rare mineral or another, trying to get rich before their host planets killed them.

  Kat had ordered their satellites and orbital facilities destroyed, but she’d left the ground settlements unmolested, a choice she knew had raised a few eyebrows among the crew. She had the authority to do as she deemed best for the mission, and her destruction of the orbital assets left the mining colonies cut off, unable to communicate or call for help. Still, she realized most Alliance commanders would have chosen to bombard the ground positions, slaughtering the miners and other civilians as an added security measure. Alliance doctrine wasn’t genocidal by nature, but it placed first priority on the mission above all things, and enemy casualties, civilian or otherwise, were rarely considered.

  Kat had felt the urge at first to do the same, but something had stopped her. Death in battle was one thing, the struggle to conquer or die rather than ever accept slavery again…she understood that. It was the nature of the universe. But slaughtering innocent civilians left her cold. She knew uncountable numbers had died on Heliopolis, and in her other campaigns. She hadn’t really considered it until recently, but it had begun to trouble her. She would do whatever was necessary to execute her orders, but that was all.

  “Gold Dagger Squadron reports ready to launch, Commander.”

  “Reverse thrust. Bring us to a halt five hundred thousand kilometers from the station.” She had no idea of the range of the platform’s weapons, but she was sure it was less than half a million kilometers.

  “Reversing thrust.”

  “Launch fighters.” The Gold Daggers were her elite squadron, under the direct leadership of her overall fighter commander. It was overkill launching a fighter strike, especially with her top pilots, but precision was important here, and the small craft could deliver that far more effectively than Invictus’s massive batteries.

  Santis was the primary goal of the mission, the refueling station the fleet needed to invade the Confederation. And if she blasted the orbital facilities to scrap, they’d have to be rebuilt before the fleet could move.

  “Gold Dagger squadron launched, Commander.”

  Kat’s eyes focused on the main display, watching the twelve tiny dots move forward, already traveling at three hundred kilometers per second, courtesy of Invictus’s powerful magnetic catapults.

  “Get me Praefectus Millius.” Praefectus-Princeps Arn Millius commanded the three centuries of stormtroopers she had aboard Invictus. Millius was new to her service, but she’d reviewed his record and been quite impressed. He’d been at Heliopolis too, in the vanguard of the assault. He’d led
a full cohort there, so his service aboard Invictus could be considered a step back, at least in terms of the numbers of troops under his command.

  She saw the hand of Tarkus Vennius in Millius’s assignment, and she suspected the old man had found a reliable ground commander for her. Millius’s apparent lack of any resentment or concern at the nearly fifty percent reduction in forces under his command suggested that Vennius had promised him a promotion as a reward for completing the mission, much as he had with her.

  I can see Uncle Taks’s hand in almost everyone on this crew. Junus, Millius…he’s really worried about this mission.

  “Praefectus Millius, Commander.” The infantry officer’s voice was crisp, hard.

  Kat turned toward the com. “Praefectus, we’re going to knock out that station’s offensive weapons, but I want to capture it intact. Prepare a boarding force…” She paused, her eyes drifting to the list of scanner results on her screen. The station was fairly large, but she suspected its crew was small…and that it had little in the way of a security force.

  Still, no sense taking chances…

  “I believe one century will be more than enough.” It was also the most her four assault shuttles could carry in a single wave. Probably overkill, but better to have too much force than too little.

  “Yes, Commander. We will be ready in ten minutes.”

  Kat hadn’t intended to send Millius himself, but she respected the officer’s intent to lead his people personally. Millius had a hard edge to him, and some of her other officers had found the Praefectus difficult, unpleasant. But Kat liked his directness. It seemed a match for her own.

  “Very well, Praefectus. Remember, I want as little physical damage as possible. We need that station intact.”

  “Understood, Commander. Millius out.”

  She turned toward Wentus. “Optiomagis, prepare assault shuttles for launch.”

  “Yes, Commander.”

  Her eyes darted back to the main screen. Junus’s fighters were almost to the station. The enemy batteries had opened up, and her suspicions were confirmed. They were light lasers, with effective ranges under one hundred thousand kilometers.