Lieutenant Colonel (The United Federation Marine Corps Book 6) Read online

  Ryck let the captain escort them to the back where a heavily damaged set of stairs led up. If these were “mostly passable,” Ryck wondered what “mostly impassable” might look like. He looked up the stairs, unsure that they could even climb up them.

  But with a little sidestepping and hugging the wall at one point, they made their way up to the second floor. A number of Marines were gathered on the far side of the building. Ryck could see Kent, who was motioning him forward.

  Ryck had to pick his way across the width of the building. The floor had been pretty chewed up by the 75mm shell. It had detonated on the ground floor, but the shrapnel had given the floor a Swiss cheese look. Sections of the floor had simply disappeared, leaving open space between the two levels.

  As Ryck got closer, the Marines parted, letting Ryck see the bodies of the fallen mercs.

  Only they weren’t mercs.

  The bodies of two women and three children lay in tangled messes of blood and body parts. One little girl, who couldn’t have been more than three or four years old, had been cut in half. Her face looked surprisingly serene. Her legs and pelvis were nowhere to be seen.

  Gorge rose up in Ryck’s throat as he struggled to swallow it back down. He felt faint.

  He had killed these five civilians, he immediately realized. He had authorized the fire mission. Him. Ryck Lysander. He had given the order for Wolfpack 5 to fire, and that had killed these people.

  Ryck couldn’t tear his eyes off the little girl. Luckily, the girl was not returning the stare. Her eyes were mercifully closed. One of the women, though, had only half a face, her one remaining eye open, looking accusingly at Ryck, who quickly averted his gaze, only to get trapped back on the little girl. While his own Esther was older, seeing the little body raised a spike of fear for his daughter, and he didn’t want to think of her body broken and torn apart like this.

  “We need to report this up, but I thought you needed to see this first, and maybe you want to make the report?” Kent asked Ryck.

  “There wasn’t a merc position here?” Ryck asked, confused.

  “No, there was. On the lower deck. A plasma gun and two mercs. We think two mercs, that is. The parts are sort of, well, in bits and pieces,” Kent told him.

  That didn’t make him feel any better even if that made his decision for a fire mission the correct call.

  The correct call? he thought bitterly, looking at the dead civilians. Try to tell that to them.

  “You need to report this,” Hecs told him quietly. “The mission was righteous, but we need to stay on top of this.”

  “Fucking mercs, using civilians as shields,” Sams added bitterly.

  Involving civilians in battles was strictly forbidden, and if this were such a case, then the Sylvington Brigade could get fined or even lose its charter. Ryck couldn’t imagine any mercenary company risking that. But there were five dead civilians there who would argue against that opinion—if they could speak any longer, that was.

  Ryck gathered himself. He thought he’d done the right thing, and trying to remember just what had transpired, he still felt his command had been justified. But that was out of his hands, now. There would be an inquiry, and the investigation team would make its recommendation directly to the commandant, and from there, it would go to the first minister himself.

  “Colonel,” Ryck passed on the P2P. When Bert picked up, he continued, “We’ve got a some collateral deaths at coordinates 44873 81293.”

  There was a momentary pause, then Bert asked, “The undocumented building where you authorized the fire mission?”

  “Yes, sir. Five dead. Two adult women and three minors.”

  “Any mercenary dead?”

  “Two and a destroyed plasma cannon,” Ryck answered back, his voice flat.

  “Acknowledged. Do not disturb the scene. Pass that to Lieutenant Colonel Allamien, too. Nothing gets touched. I’ll inform the JAG to get an investigation team there. For now, you’re running out of time for Phase 2, so you better get going.”

  “Uh, should I pass, I mean, do I transfer command to Major Peltier-Aswad?”

  “Why would you do that?” Bert asked, the puzzlement evident in his voice.

  “Until the investigation, I mean,” Ryck answered.

  “Was your order righteous?” Bert asked.

  “Yes. I mean I think so. I had a Marine under fire, about to be KIAd. I had to react.”

  “Then it was righteous. Everything is recorded, and an investigation team will be able to review what happened. So for now, it was a valid mission, and you need to get the Fuzos ready. Understood?”

  “Yes, sir. I just thought—”

  “Just get your battalion ready. Without your mission’s success, the entire operation could fail or turn into a protracted siege.”

  “Aye-aye, sir,” Ryck said, a weight lifted off his shoulder.

  “Ryck, get your head on straight. What’s done is done. But I need you now, and you need to be back in the game.”

  “Roger that. I’ve got it,” Ryck said. “Don’t worry about me.’

  Ryck felt a surge of duty, the amorphous soup of feelings that create the need for a warrior to fight and not let his fellows down. He would put everything into the coming battle, and after, if things didn’t work out in his favor with the investigation, then that was the way the cards fell. He’d deal with it at that time, not now.

  Ryck took one last look at the dead civilians, grieving for them and offering a silent apology before he forced his mind clear.

  He still had a battle to fight.

  Chapter 28

  Ryck followed Lance Corporal Andrew Ellis into the Stork. With Sergeant Çağlar already medivaced off the planet for another extended regen, the sergeant major had recruited Ellis from Echo to be the CO’s new babysitter/bodyguard. There was no actual T/O for a bodyguard, and Ryck really didn’t think he needed one, but he wasn’t going to win that fight with both the sergeant major and Sams insisting.

  Ryck still wasn’t sure why Çağlar had been hit so much worse. Ryck had been closer to the cannon, but other than a nagging pain in his right arm, which his nanobots were repairing, he hadn’t seemingly suffered anything permanent, while Çağlar would probably have died without immediate treatment. Ryck had gotten confirmation that the sergeant would be fine only twenty minutes before embarking, and that was one load off his mind.

  Of the WIAs, all should recover, with five going into long-term regen. With four KIAs in the assault, the ratio of the WIAs to KIAs was skewed to the wounded, something at odds with PICS battles and energy weapons. The after action analysts had their work cut out for them to figure that one out.

  Where Çağlar was a huge, hulking brute of a man, Ellis was small and slight. He moved with the predatory grace of a leopard, though, and basically screamed lethality on two legs without even speaking a word. He sort of gave Ryck the creeps, to be honest, but he also made Ryck feel secure. He didn’t think he needed a bodyguard, but if he had to have one, he figured Ellis would fit the bill.

  Ryck buckled his belt and settled in for the short flight. He tried to get his mind off the vulnerability of the Stork while it was in the air. While on the ground, Ryck had entered some serious shit storms, but he had always had control of the situation. Here, in the Stork, he was a passenger, and there was a good chance his Stork could get knocked out of the sky. And there was nothing he could do about it. It was just up to chance.

  The plan of attack was pretty simple, but complicated, too, if that made sense. The basic concept was the simple part. It made sense, and it could work. It was the implementation of the plan that was the complicated aspect of it. There were lots of moving parts, any of which could go wrong. Ryck would rather have had weeks to rehearse it, but sometimes, that was just not possible, and this was one of those times.

  With modern surveillance, it was more difficult to fool an enemy who was expecting an attack. Yet Bert and his Three had come up with a plan that could keep the mercs in t
he fort unsure enough to give the brigade a chance to breech the walls and enter the fort.

  It would have been easier to drop a couple of tungsicles at various places along the walls, but the ROEs prohibited that. The Freemantle government wanted to minimize damage and friendly casualties, and while the Navy could drop a tungsicle on a gnat’s ass, the big chunks of metal did create a lot of destructive energy. A tungsicle would certainly breach the walls, but it would also cause damage to any buildings and facilities in the vicinity.

  3/7 was to spearhead the attack, augmented by 2/3’s tanks, tracs, and several PICS platoons from 2/4 which were to move alongside the 2/3 Armor Company to give the impression of two assault battalions on line. Five kilometers from the fort, the 2/3 tanks were to race off to the east as if to envelope the fort from that side. The hope was that the mercs would see this envelopment as the real assault instead of the initial frontal assault that had been indicated. The intent was to let them react to the dual-pronged assault and hopefully fixing them in place as they rushed to face the incoming Marines.

  Then it was 2/3’s turn. With only one squad per company in PICS, the rest of the battalion was in their skins and bones. The battalion would be airlifted to the south side of the fort and dropped inside where with that foothold, it would attack the walls themselves with a section of combat engineers from the brigade. It would take the engineers a minimum of 15 minutes to create the two breaches, which didn’t seem like a long time, but it was still long enough for the mercs to react. When they did, the battalion, with minimal PICS and no armor, would have to hold off the mercs while the engineers did their thing.

  As the breach was being made, 2/4, mostly mounted in 2/3’s tracs, and the rest of 2/3’s tanks would extend their supposed envelopment and enter the fort through the breaches, conduct a passage of lines with 2/3, and start sweeping the fort.

  In the meantime, the rest of the brigade, with arty and their tanks, would pound away at the west walls of the fort, trying to break through. Due to their bonded-arrayed construction, the walls were much easier to breach from the inside than the outside, but the command hoped that they would eventually be able to break through and join in the fight inside the fort. If the walls proved too tough, the rest of the brigade would swing around and head for the 2/3 breach.

  2/4 and 3/7 had already split, so it was time for the airborne assault to commence. And now Ryck, along with most of the battalion, lifted off in the Storks. He wished again that they could all be in their PICS, but even with 3/7’s Storks, there was no way the two squadrons could lift that many PICS Marines.

  Ryck’s Stork would be the sixth into the fort. On one hand, that meant that any initial anti-air might already be engaged or its ammo expended by the time his Stork crossed the wall. On the other hand, though, the first Storks might slide in before the mercs could mount a defense, which they might have just about the time Ryck’s Stork arrived. It was all a crap shoot. For now, the battle was out of Ryck’s hand as he played passenger.

  The Stork rose smoothly before it swooped into transitional flight. At 30 klicks out, it started juking and jiving to throw off enemy targeting AIs and anything fired their way. Ryck simply endured, although he almost lost it when one of the Fox Marines threw up, his vomit rolling back and forth across the deck plates as the Stork maneuvered. Weirdly fascinated, Ryck joined several other Marines as they watched the vomit flow from one side to the other, never quite reaching the edges of the bird before it started flowing back the other way.

  “I bet you ten is makes it all the way to the bulkhead next time,” a Marine a couple of places down from Ryck said.

  “You’re on,” two different voices accepted the wager.

  They were flying into battle, one that could be quite fierce. In all probability, Marines would die over the next few hours, yet Ryck was morbidly interested in if the first Marine was going to win his bet. As the Stork banked to the right, the vomit started flowing back, and Ryck leaned forward to see if it would touch the starboard side of the bird. He was sure the first Marine was in fact going to win his bet when the pilot juked the bird back to the left, and the vomit started on its way back.

  Shoot! Tough luck on that. Now you’re out 20, Ryck thought.

  The display on his face shield gave the two-minute warning, snapping Ryck back to his mission. He pulled up the Battle Situation Map, where he could see both land elements, and more importantly, his own airborne element. The first Stork was just now crossing over the wall and into the fort, landing at a fabrication plant’s parking lot. Almost immediately, the second stork flared up to land 20 meters away in the same parking lot. Blue avatars scattered on his face shield display as the Marines they represented ran to secure the LZ. As the first two birds took off, numbers Three and Four landed in their spot, disgorging more Marines.

  Ryck’s Stork plunged in a stomach-churning fall as it swooped in to land, flaring out with a couple of Gs as it landed. As the back ramp lowered, the line of Marine unbuckled and rushed out the back. Ryck and Ellis immediately split off to the left and ran to the small receiving building that led to the loading docks. This was the rendezvous for the Alpha Command. Unlike the more dispersed formation while in PICS, for this mission, the command would be centrally located.

  With Genghis pushing out the perimeter, the Marines started to receive small arms fire. It wasn’t too heavy yet, but Ryck was sure it would grow in intensity.

  A fire team from Fox was guarding the building as Ryck and Ellis ran up. Sams and Proctor were already there, with the Three heavy at it on one of the nets. Ryck didn’t listen in on the transmission, but he could hear the Three yelling something about closing a gap. Part of him—a big part—wanted to get involved, but he left that for Proctor to do. He couldn’t be doing everyone else’s job and still be an effective commander.

  “Three, we’ve got visuals at 8445. It looked like two combatants were observing us,” Lieutenant Delbert, the Echo XO passed to Proctor, Ryck’s AI isolating the message for Ryck to hear as well.

  Ryck pulled up building 8445. It was a three-story building that gave pretty decent fields of observation—and fields of fire—over two avenues of approach. Ryck toggled to surveillance, and the building showed eight bodies: two on the third floor and six clustered on the second floor right below the first two.

  “Did you get a confirmed identification?” the Three asked.

  “Negative, but the skipper is sure they are bad guys and wants them gone,” Delbert passed.

  “Wait one,” Proctor passed.

  Images of the mangled bodies of the women and children in Hester came unbidden to Ryck’s mind. He had authorized that fire mission, and five innocent people had died.

  Ryck cut in with the Three on the P2P, “Proctor, follow the ROE. We will not fire unless we have clear targets that are posing a threat. There is no confirmation that who those Echo Marines saw were the enemy.

  “Roger that, sir. I’ll let Echo know,” Proctor passed back.

  Ryck broke the connection and stopped to watch the next flight of two birds start coming in. The engineer team was on one of them, and once they debarked, they could start to work on the wall. Just as the first one crossed the wall, a streak from behind Ryck reached out and touched the Stork which then immediately erupted into a fireball.

  “Shit!” Ryck shouted as he broke into a sprint with Sams and Ellis right on his ass to where the Stork was seemingly falling in slow motion to crash at the far end of the parking lot, up against the wall. Flames shot up, and a wave of heat rolled across the parking lot.

  From high overhead, screaming like a banshee, one of the two Wasps immediately dove into the attack. While not a Navy Experion, the Wasp was still a hellacious weapons platform, and Ryck knew it would destroy whatever had launched the missile.

  That was almost an afterthought to Ryck, though, as he ran to the downed bird. It did nothing for the downed Marines.

  “Sams, was the engineer team on Seven or Eight?” he aske
d as the three Marines ran across the parking lot.

  “Eight!” Sams answered. “That’s them coming in now.”

  Thank God, Ryck thought. The mission is still alive.

  The team itself was split between two birds, but the dissonator that was their main tool was on the number Eight bird. Ryck would mourn the lost Marines—his Marines—later, but it was vital that the engineers made it; otherwise the entire brigade mission might fail.

  A body lay some 20 meters from where the bulk of the wreckage lay in a crumbled heap. Flames smoldered, making the body unrecognizable, his ID and bio-readout transmitter knocked out. That was one of Ryck’s Marines, but it would take a DNA scan to know just who it was, and to whom he would be writing that condolence letter. It seemed such a useless way to die, just a piece of burned cargo. If it were their time to go, Marines should die while charging the enemy, shouting bloody murder at the top of their lungs, and ready to enter Valhalla on their own terms.

  Ryck stared at the dead Marine for a moment before starting on to the wreck only to have Lance Corporal Ellis grab him by the arm and pull him back.

  “Sir, Fox has it. No need for you to get closer.”

  Ryck started to pull away and tell the lance corporal to mind his place when he caught Sams nodding. He immediately felt ashamed for his reaction. Ellis was just doing exactly what the sergeant major and probably the XO and everyone else had told him. Ryck didn’t need to be digging around the burning wreckage of the Stork. Others could do that; Ryck needed to command the battalion, and he couldn’t do that as part of a rescue team. He should know that and have it ingrained in him by now and not need a lance corporal to remind him of his duty.

  He took one last look back at the bird where several of the Fox Marines were pulling a body out of the downed bird. The blackened and soot-covered body moved an arm, and Ryck toggled his display. Of the 30 Marines onboard the Stork, 22 had their avatars either grayed out or off, but eight avatars were light blue. A person could be fatally burned yet hang onto life for days even without treatment, so if these WIA Marines could be gotten into regen, they all would have a great chance at recovery, and even some of the tentative KIAs could be put into stasis and revived at the Naval hospital.