MERCS: Crimson Worlds Successors (15 page)

“There’s nothing else we can do, Erik.”  Gilson’s voice was soft, sad.  “I couldn’t bear to disband the Corps entirely, but we’re going to have to come close.”  She sighed and continued, “I was counting on Jarrod Tyler, at least, but it never occurred to me that Lucia could be voted out of power.  The two of them were enormous heroes when I went back there after the war.  It is hard to believe things could change so much in ten years.”

“That is what people are like, Cate.”  Cain’s voice was fatigued, but the fiery anger he’d once felt about things like this was gone, replaced my exhausted acceptance.  “It used to enrage me, but they are what they are.  They are shortsighted, and few are willing to put in enough effort to truly understand things.  That is why they become the playthings of political manipulators.  That has always been the way of things, and I see no reason to expect anything different.”

“Well, it doesn’t matter now.  I’ll issue the orders tomorrow.  Without a source of sufficient funding, the Corps will have to downsize dramatically.  We will transition into Armstrong’s planetary armed forces.”  The world of Armstrong had been the headquarters of the Alliance’s inter-planetary military since the rebellions twenty years before.  The population was largely military and ex-military, or support services for the Corps and the fleet.  In the years since the Fall, the planet had transitioned from almost entirely military-industrial to an export-based high tech economy.  Its position as the home world for the Corps and the fleet ensured that its technology was the most advanced of any former colony, and within just a few short years, it was exporting microprocessors and sophisticated AIs to planets all across Occupied Space.  Armstrong could afford a significant military of its own, but nothing like either the Corps or the fleet had been.

“What are you planning?”  Cain asked, without providing any input of his own.  Gilson had stood watch while he’d enjoyed retirement and fatherhood.  He cared deeply about the future of the Corps, but he didn’t feel it was his place to second-guess his colleague.

“I have a proposed organizational chart you can look at for specifics, but essentially, it calls for two regiments, each of two battalions, with a small cadre for a third battalion.”

Cain exhaled softly.  “So, three thousand combat troops, give or take?”  He knew an armored Marine cost at least ten times what a normal planetary army soldier did, and he realized the expenses of even Gilson’s tiny force would be staggering for a world like Armstrong.  But hearing it spoken out loud hit him like a hammer.  The Corps had fielded 375,000 at its peak at the end of the Third Frontier War.  He understood what was happening, but part of him couldn’t quite accept it.

“Yes…about.  Plus support personnel.  Roughly 5,000 in total.”  Gilson was trying to stay positive, but Cain could tell she was as hurt by all this as he was.”  We’re going to turn the Marine and Naval Academies over to the new Armstrong University—most of them, at least.  We’ll be maintaining a small officer training facility, enough for an annual cadet class of about twenty Marines.”

Cain turned toward Garret.  “What about the fleet?  What are you planning?”

Garret looked across the room at Cain, his face almost devoid of emotion.  “I’m afraid the fleet is in even worse shape.  Armstrong is building a strong economy, but maintaining a large fleet is out of the question.  We’re going to convert six fast attack ships for patrol duty.  They will become Armstrong’s navy, along with two light cruisers.”

“Eight ships?”  Cain was stunned, though he realized he shouldn’t be.  None of the colony worlds had the capacity to support significant navies.  “What about the others?”

“I spoke with Roderick Vance, and he agreed to add them to the mothballed reserve on Phobos.”  Cain could see the pain on the admiral’s face.  Augustus Garret had been a naval officer for eighty years.  He had sacrificed everything to the service.  Cain had faced a difficult time imagining himself living a life outside the Corps, but he failed utterly to picture Garret anywhere but on the bridge of his flagship.

“There is something else we could consider.”  The words just blurted out.  Cain had been thinking about it for days, but he’d discounted it again and again.  Still, it kept coming back into his mind.”

“What, Erik?”  Garret’s voice was soft, inquisitive.  “What do you have in mind?”  He paused, but when Erik remained silent, he added, “You’re among friends here, Erik.  By God, there’s nothing you couldn’t say to us.”

“Well, Occupied Space is in complete disarray right now.”  He spoke slowly, uncomfortable with what he was about to suggest.  “Instead of downsizing so severely, we could…”  He hesitated again.  “…we could be a bit more…insistent about it.”

“You mean impose our will on the independent worlds?”  Gilson’s tone was odd, not exactly disapproving, as if she herself had considered what Cain was suggesting.  “Force them at gunpoint?”

Garret was sitting in the corner, silently watching the exchange.  His expression was deadpan, not giving away an inkling of what he was thinking.

“No, of course not.  I don’t mean park a battleship in orbit around Columbia or take control of any large worlds.  But there are resource planets too, with very small populations, and incredibly valuable mineral deposits.  If a few of those worlds were dedicated to supporting the Corps and the fleet, we could continue to protect everyone, at least at some level.”

“And only oppress a few miners and their families?  And the companies that own those mines?”  Gilson’s voice had no edge to it, no condemnation of what Cain had proposed, just a strange sense of fatigue.  “I understand the thought, Erik.  I’ve had it myself.  But is that what the Corps stands for?  Is that what you want our legacy to be?”

Cain sighed.  “No, of course not.  But we all know those worlds will eventually come under the control of the stronger planets anyway.  All the colonies were declared independent after the Fall, but do you think over 1,000 worlds, with cultures from eight different Superpowers, will respect each other’s sovereignty forever?  When some are strong and others weak, with enormously valuable resources?”

“No, probably not,” Gilson replied.  “But think about it, Erik, do you want history to show the Corps was the first to impose its rule on a colony world?  That we set up a military dictatorship so we could confiscate a planet’s resources?”

“No, of course not.”  Cain’s voice was strained.  He knew he agreed with Gilson, but there was something else nagging at him.  “But you know what will happen,” he said, his voice becoming more agitated.  “The Corps and the fleet will be virtually gone.  What will we do when the next crisis hits, because you know it will.  And all those puffed up heads of state who were here for the meeting will be yelling in fear, begging us for help.  And they will be shit out of luck.  When all these newly independent worlds are facing a deadly danger, and the Corps and the fleet are gone, what then?”

“I don’t know, Erik.  I went through all of this with myself.”  She looked across the room at Cain.  “But we can’t make ourselves what we want to be by ignoring who we are.  The Alliance was rotten, but for a century, the Corps managed to keep itself from being used as an instrument of oppression.  When the rebellions came, we resisted the pressure to crush the freedom fighters, and we navigated an honorable path through the crisis.  Would you see that legacy thrown away on your watch?  Or mine?”

Cain didn’t answer.  He understood what she was saying, and he agreed.  But he’d always been a realist, not one to fool himself and believe what he wanted to believe, pushing facts aside to do it.  The thought of the Corps being used to conquer former Alliance worlds, to impose rule on their people—it was anathema to him.  But he knew the alternative was allowing the colonies to behave irresponsibly.  And if they did that, a lot of those people would die the next time war came.  They would be almost defenseless, and the fleet and Corps that had always come wouldn’t be there anymore.  Those resource worlds the Corps didn’t seize would be conquered by someone else, their wealth stripped with a brutal efficiency the Marines would never have matched.  The cost of the next war would be vastly higher than it should be.

“Erik, I understand your frustration.”  Garret leaned forward in his chair.  “My whole life, I have chosen duty first.  You, more than anyone, know what that has cost me.”

Cain and Garret had sat long one night long ago, talking about their pasts, and the admiral had spoken of the guilt he carried, the pain that consumed him every waking hour.  Admiral Garret, even more than Cain, was credited with saving the human race from the First Imperium, and for countless other victories.  But very few people knew what that record of success had cost Augustus Garret, the man.

“But life can’t be all duty,” Garret continued.  “Men are not robots.  Sometimes, you simply have to do what is right, even though you know there may be a price to pay one day.”  He paused.  “I, too, am tempted to go down the road you suggest.  But I will not do it.  Whatever the consequences.”

“Nor will I,” Gilson added, though Cain could hear the doubt in her voice.  He suspected he just might convince her if he really tried.  But he didn’t have the drive to do it.

Cain nodded.  “I am with you both.  I thought it was something we had to discuss.”  He felt relieved—but there was still a nagging doubt, a certainty they would all one day regret their principled position.  He wondered what he would have done on his own, if it had been his decision.  Would he have lashed out, imposed military rule?  He didn’t know, and he suspected he never would.  It was the kind of thing a man could never understand fully, not until he faced it.

Chapter 11

“The pressure on the main pump is a little high, Fritzie.”  Dolph’s voice was almost drowned out by static, and Fritz Ludendorf turned up the volume on his receiver so he could hear.  “I think I should get down there and check it out.”

Ludendorf was sitting in the command shed staring down at the panel.  The gauge read 875.  That was high, but not critically so.  Still, if his nearly two years on this miserable hellhole had taught him anything it was that Dolph Gerhard could sniff out a problem in the equipment like a bloodhound.

“Go ahead, Dolph, but be careful.  The rig’s running full out.  It’s fucking dangerous in there.”

“You know me, Fritzie.  I’m the soul of caution.”  Ludendorf could hear his field engineer laughing.  They both knew Gerhard was a crazy son of a bitch who’d take almost any chance to squeeze a little extra production out of the mine.  When your product sold for 500 credits a gram, you tried hard not to waste anything.

Extracting stable super-heavy metals from the few planetary environments where they occurred naturally was not work for the faint of heart.  The trans-uranian isotopes were extremely rare, and they were almost always found on planets that seemed otherwise designed to kill men.  Kalte fit that bill nicely.  Its atmosphere was toxic, and fairly corrosive to boot, except at night, when most of it liquefied into a hazardous mess that pooled all around, making even a slow walk back from the mine a hazardous adventure.

The frigid cold could kill an unprotected man in a two or three minutes, running a close race with asphyxiation as the cause of death.  The radiation was deadly too, but while a lethal dose was almost instantaneous to an unprotected man, it actually took a few hours to die—time the victim didn’t generally have.  No matter how you categorized the dangers, Kalte was a nightmare world, one of the unlikeliest places one would expect to find human habitation.  But it also had rich veins of the ultra-rare metals so vital in the construction of spaceship drives.  So men were here battling the deadly environment for the most prosaic of reasons.  To become extremely wealthy.

A two-year stint on Kalte could earn an engineer enough to retire to any colony world in Occupied Space and spend the rest of his life in considerable luxury without ever working another day.  Ludendorf’s crew had managed to beat the record for production during their tour, which meant when they left in three weeks, they were all rich men.

“OK, Fritzie, I’m down in the main shaft.  Everything looks fine, but I don’t like the way it feels.”  It was an open question if a man—especially one wrapped up head to toe in a Suit—could “feel” whether a mining pump was running properly.  Of course, if there was anyone who could, it was Gerhard.  “Can you back off to 80% for a few seconds?”  Shutting down the pump would bring the whole mining operation to a halt.  It would take at least half a day to restart everything, costing a king’s ransom in lost production.  But throttling back for a few minutes was no big deal.

“Down to 80%...now.”  Ludendorf stayed silent for a few seconds, letting his friend focus on the pump mechanism.  He was about to ask how things were going when his com unit activated.

“Engineer Ludendorf, this is Heinrich in the control room.”  Otto Heinrich was the youngest member of the control room crew, barely twenty years old.  His voice was cracking.  Ludendorf could tell immediately something was wrong.

“What is it, Heinrich?”

“We’re tracking incoming ships, sir.”  Ludendorf could tell Heinrich was scared shitless.  “We have no ID, and they have failed to answer any of our communications.”

“Alert the security team, Heinrich.”  It was some kind of raid, Ludendorf decided immediately.  The Kalte team was sitting on a fortune in super-heavy metals, waiting for the transports due in three weeks.  That made them a target.  For pirates, for other worlds, for anyone.

“Yes, sir.”

Ludendorf flipped his com unit back to Gerhard’s channel.  “Get the hell out of there, Dolph.  Right now.  We’ve got uninvited company.  Unidentified ships coming in.”

“I can’t pinpoint any malfunction down here, but I’m sure this pump isn’t right.”  Gerhard was distracted, focused on his analysis of the equipment.

“Fuck it, Dolph.  We may be under attack in a few minutes.  Get the hell out of the mine!”

“Attack…who?”  He was paying attention now.

“No idea.  Some kind of ships coming in now.  We need to get to the bunkers.  Now get the hell out of there, because I’m shutting the mine down in one minute.”

“On my way, Fritzie.”

Ludendorf cut the line, and began punching in the shutdown sequence. 
Fuck
, he thought. 
Whoever this is had to pull this shit now?  They couldn’t wait a month?

*        *        *        *        *

“We’re in position, Engineer Ludendorf.”  Dave Vanik was standing in a trench looking out across the rugged plateau.  The high plain extended out from the narrow mountain range that housed the company mines, stretching a hundred kilometers into the distance.  The ground was barren, covered with shattered stone and gray, powdery dust.

Vanik was an ex-Marine who’d bounced around for a number of years after the Corps disbanded most of its field forces twenty years earlier.  He’d taken a number of training positions with planetary militias until the Kalte Ownership Combine offered him a 1,000% raise for organizing and training its security units.

“All the incoming ships appear to be on the surface.  If this is an attack, I expect they’ll be coming at you soon.”  Ludendorf was trying to sound calm, but Vanik knew the engineer was no soldier.  He was probably halfway to shitting himself down there in the bunker.

Vanik was cool, calm.  That didn’t mean he wasn’t afraid, but his training and experience helped keep things in perspective.  He’d served under Erik Cain on Sandoval, fighting against the robots of the First Imperium, and later on Columbia with General Gilson.  No pack of claim-jumping raiders was going to get inside his head.

Whoever was coming, they had to be reasonably well-funded.  A planet like Kalte was no joke, and it would kill a poorly equipped force, saving Vanik and his defenders the trouble.  But that didn’t mean whoever was coming could beat his hand-picked and drilled warriors.  There were half a dozen other Marines among his 120 troops, and four ex-Janissaries.  And the rest had been trained with all the ferocity and thoroughness a veteran Marine sergeant had been able to muster.  Vanik was cautious, as he always was on the eve of battle, but he was confident his people would prevail.

“Have you been able to make contact, sir?”  Ludendorf’s tone had already told him what he needed to know, but he wanted express permission before he opened fire.

“Negative, Captain Vanik.  We have issued multiple warnings.  You are authorized to fire at your discretion.  Your only consideration is the safety of the operation.”

“Understood, sir.  I suggest all non-combat personnel remain in the bunker until further notice.”  He stared out through the dusky light of late afternoon.  The battlefield was going to be a nightmare.  The atmosphere would begin to condense in another hour, making movement dangerous and slowing it to a crawl.  He didn’t know who it was out there thinking they were going to sweep away his dug in forces in less than an hour, but as far as he was concerned, they were in for a rude shock.

He stared at the display inside his helmet.  His scanner array was crude, but he could see the enemy formations approaching.  He didn’t have exact numbers, but from the looks of things there were a lot of them.  Two hundred at least.

His force was equipped with fighting suits, but they were sixty year old surplus units, poor substitutes for the top of the line armor he’d worn in the Corps.  They lacked the portable nuclear power plants of the old Mark VII units, and that severely limited their capabilities.  His people had standard assault rifles instead of the hyper-velocity electro-magnetic weapons the Marines had used.  The servo-mechanical systems were powerful enough to move the suits around, but they lacked the enormous strength magnification of the Marine units.  Perhaps the most telling difference in an environment like Kalte, the suits could only operate in hostile conditions for a day without a recharge, even less under full battle conditions.  That was something to keep in mind on a world where a loss of air or heating meant almost instant death.

Still, they would do the job.  He couldn’t imagine any enemy having better equipment.  Since the Corps retired its last combat units, few forces in Occupied Space could match the standards of the old armies that had fought the wars of the Superpowers.  The Black Eagles, of course.  Darius Cain’s famous unit had even better armor, based on the Mark VIII designs that had never gone into full-scale production for the Corps.  And a few of the other elite Companies had quality fighting suits too.  But no one else.  There wasn’t a single world in human space that could afford to field its own army so equipped, at least not beyond a tiny elite group of Special Forces.  Certainly no pack of raiders looking to pillage a mining world.

“Mortar teams, prepare to fire at 5,000 meters.”  Vanik’s troops didn’t have the grenade launchers that had been built into Marine armor, but they did have two mortar teams.  With any luck, the enemy would panic as soon as his people opened up and started dropping shells in their ranks.

His eyes darted back to the display.  He didn’t like what he was seeing.  The enemy was too ordered, their formations too perfect.  They looked more like Marines than a pack of raiders.  He had a cold feeling in his gut.  He tried to ignore it, but it kept nagging at him.  Was it possible someone had hired one of the top-tier merc companies to attack Kalte? 
No, it couldn’t be.  There’s no way.
  The elite Companies considered themselves legitimate enterprises.  Their clients were worlds with real political conflicts; they didn’t take contracts for pirate raids on mining colonies. 
At least not openly
.

Vanik glanced at his display.  Just over 5,500 meters.  His mortar teams would open up in…”

He saw a series of flashes on the small projected screen inside his visor.  Then the ground shook hard, and the sounds of explosions reverberated in his helmet.

His head snapped around, watching the plumes of flame rising into the sky. 
Rockets,
he thought immediately. 
Hyper-velocity rockets.  What the hell are these raiders doing with HVRs?

“HVRs incoming,” he shouted into the com, realizing the futility of the announcement as he opened his mouth.  The ground shook again as another volley hit all around.  He could feel a wave of dirt and crushed stone smacking into his armor, and he dove to the ground.  “Get down,” he yelled, his voice raw and scratchy.

He felt his heart pounding in his ears. 
Keep it together, Marine.  You’re facing an enemy with HVRs.
  “All units, form consecutive skirmish lines now.”  Extending the order of his troops would make them that much weaker against a direct assault, but there was no choice.  The enemy outranged him.  He had to minimize the effects of the incoming rockets or his force would be gutted before it could even return fire.

He looked up slowly, trying to get a view toward the enemy lines.  According to his display, they were all hidden just behind the next ridge, but he couldn’t get a decent view of any of them. 
We have to advance.  They’ve got better cover and longer-ranged weapons.  We’re fucked if we stay here.

He stared down at the display.  His troops were in three long lines, each one hundred meters behind the last.  His troopers were 20 meters apart, making his overall position a little over 800 meters in frontage.  “All units, advance.  Fire at will with all weapons, as soon as you come into range.”  He wasn’t about to sit there and let the enemy pick his people off with rockets.

He moved forward himself, trying to angle his path to take advantage of whatever cover the terrain offered.  There were a few dips and folds in the ground, but he was forced to move across a lot of open country.  He ducked behind a small ridgeline about 4,000 meters from the enemy positions.  “Mortars….deploy and open fire.”  It was time to flush the enemy out from behind that hill.  The rocket launchers were still firing, but they were hitting mostly behind his advancing troops.  He knew that wouldn’t last—the enemy would adjust their targeting.  He had to do something now.

“Other units, continue to advance.” 
We’ll drop a couple mortar rounds on their heads, and then the rest of the line will be on them.

He’d just lunged forward when he saw the entire enemy line advance from the cover of the hillside.  They came over the crest, 150 of them, in a single perfect line.  “Fire!” he screamed, just as the entire attacking force opened up.

His line was riddled with hyper-velocity rounds, virtually identical to the ones he’d used in the Corps.  The deadly weapons overwhelmed his own peoples’ return fire by a factor of at least ten.  He leapt to the ground, feeling an impact in his leg as he went down.  He screamed in pain, reaching around, trying to activate the pharmakit inside his armor.  The old fighting suits didn’t have AI-controlled trauma systems like Marine armor.  He had to flip a switch and swing his hip into the now-exposed needle to give himself a cocktail of painkillers and stims.