Iron & Blood: Book Two of The Expansion Wars Trilogy Read online

  “Here goes nothing,” he muttered as he waved to the driver to veer off to the right to get his people better into position.

  2

  The buzzing pops hitting the crest of the hill he was crouched behind told Emil that the Darshik had figured out where the incoming was originating from. He slid further down towards the shallow runoff ditch that he’d planned to use to escape since he could do no more good where he was. If he exposed himself again to be greedy and try for one more shot it was almost certain he’d be hit given the volume of fire directed his way.

  “You happy now, hero?” a middle-aged farmhand everyone just called Cal hissed from where he knelt by the ditch, hugging his rifle to him. Emil couldn’t help but notice the weapon wasn’t even activated yet … Cal hadn’t fired a single shot during the entire engagement while their friends behind the other rise had been pinned down with withering fire. “They know we’re here! You killed some of them! They’re coming!”

  “Shut up!” Emil snapped. He was disgusted with Cal’s cowardice only because he felt the same crippling fear welling up in his own chest. It was one thing to pick off targets from afar when they weren’t even paying attention to you, but now that they were surely advancing on his position he felt like his legs were made of rubber and he could hear his heartbeat pounding in his head.

  “Why did you have to provoke them? There’s only four of us here!”

  “I said shut the fuck up, Cal!” Emil hissed. “Listen!” Sure enough, the sound of the enemy’s fire had changed. It had increased in volume, but he could tell that it was no longer directed to their position. No more repeated pop/hiss sounds of their shots hitting the turf and burning as they expended energy. “They’re moving away from the town.”

  “How can you tell?” Cal asked. Emil ignored him and, with a boldness that surprised even him, crawled back up the hill and risked peeking up over the crest. He raised up quickly until just his eyes cleared the obstruction and looked out over the battlefield in confusion. The Darshik were redeploying both of their elements in a way that made no sense. At least it made no sense to him until he saw the first two enemy troops get shredded by some sort of lobbed incendiary that looked like it originated about a half-kilometer further down the ditch line where the larger trees provided a natural break. He saw two more projectiles arc into the Darshik formation and take out another six before the remaining scrambled to get back and behind what sparse cover there was.

  Before they could get set in a new defensive posture heavy weapons fire erupted from where the incendiary projectiles had originated. The chug-chug-chug of modern machine guns was unmistakable as more Darshik fell under the onslaught. The enemy was now pinched between the militia’s defensive position and the overwhelming firepower of whoever the newcomers were. Emil took the opportunity to continue his own personal revenge, sniping targets of opportunity from an even more impressive range though it took him more rounds per target to put them down.

  It wasn’t long before there were only three Darshik troops standing, pinned down behind an abandoned bit of machinery. Under the cover of the heavy machine guns still hammering away, Emil watched in fascination as two humans in mottled camouflage uniforms charged across the field. He was impressed that the machine guns could so accurately lay down suppressive fire as their comrades ran through it. The pair paused around fifty meters away from the derelict bit of farm equipment while one raised a strange-looking short-muzzled weapon.

  Foomp-Foomp-Foomp

  What Emil now recognized as grenades arced away from the weapon and landed on and around the last bit of cover the Darshik could find. The fast-succession triple explosion ripped apart the rusted metal of the Terran machine and the bodies of the Darshik soldiers.

  “Cease fire! Cease fire! Cease fire!” an amplified voice boomed from the treeline and echoed across the hills. The silence was deafening.

  “Juwel militia! We are Terran Federation Marines; we will be approaching your position! Please hold your fire!” the voice rolled across the field to where they were hunkered down. In spite of what he’d just been through and the aftershock he was feeling from the adrenaline dump of battle, Emil turned and smiled to his companions.

  “Looks like the Marines showed up just in time.”

  Barton approached the entrenched militia members cautiously, his weapon hanging loosely from its sling and his hands open wide and swinging where they could be clearly seen. Even though there was little physical resemblance between human Marines and Darshik soldiers he knew that the town’s defenders, like his squad, had just had their first taste of battle. He wanted to make sure there were no mistakes or misunderstandings.

  “I’m Staff Sergeant Willy Barton, TF Marines,” Barton said, extending his hand to the older man who was standing ahead of the other civilians. “You in charge?”

  “As much as anybody is in charge around here,” the man said, grasping the proffered hand firmly. “I’m Finn … Finn Auer. We can’t thank you enough for showing up when you did, Sergeant.”

  “You did a hell of a job here,” Barton said as he looked around. “Good cover, natural choke point, and you engaged a numerically superior enemy with overlapping fields of fire and allowed them to close enough to effectively engage … you have any prior military experience, Mr. Auer?”

  “Just call me Finn, everybody does,” Finn said with a forced smile, wiping back his hair with a still-shaking hand. “I was a corporal in the New European Commonwealth Guard before it was disbanded, but I can’t say that I intentionally placed people in position based on anything I remember from that.”

  “Good soldiers remember … even if they don’t remember that they do,” Barton laughed. “Who is your sharpshooter?”

  “That would be Emil over there,” Finn waved back towards a young man holding a standard infantry carbine. “Don’t listen for shit but he can pick a fly off the back of a keel deer at five hundred meters.” Barton laughed dutifully, looking back to see that his men were helping direct their transportation through the drainage ditch.

  “Okay, Finn,” he turned back to the militiaman. “We’re going to reinforce this position and build on what you have here. This is still the most logical point for the Darshik to try to secure a main artery into Westfall so they’ll likely be back once they realize their probing attack was decimated here.”

  “What do they want?” the young man Finn had introduced as Emil said as he walked forward.

  “We don’t know, son,” Barton shrugged. “They seem to have some definite goal in mind though; they’re not just wiping out planets like the last aliens that came through. That at least gives us a fighting chance.” Everyone jumped as white-hot flames erupted from an apparatus being manned by two of the Marines wearing hazardous material protective gear. Finn looked to Barton questioningly.

  “Plasma,” he explained. “That’s a sort of self-contained, miniaturized version of a starship’s engine. CENTCOM’s eggheads say that after an engagement we need to burn the remains at the earliest convenience. They’ve not found any pathogens on the alien biological remains that could interact with human physiology, but they don’t want to take the chance.”

  “So what do you need from us, Sergeant?” Finn asked, getting down to business.

  “I need a tally of your personnel and weaponry as well as any machinery you have in the area that can be used to further enhance this position,” Barton said.

  “How long do you think we have until they return?” Finn asked.

  “I wish I could say,” Barton said with a frown, damning to hell the fact they had next to no aerial recon options available save for two underpowered, short-range drones.

  “Sergeant Barton has checked in, sir. His squad has secured Objective Bravo and is requesting reinforcements to hold it.”

  “Send Charlie Company to relieve Sergeant Barton,” Major Lucas Baer said to his com operator. “I want him brought back to HQ and debriefed.”

  “Yes, sir.”

 
Baer squinted at the map again. A single company to hold that position wasn’t enough, but he was spread so thin there were no Marines to spare. It didn’t help that Command had absolutely no clue as to what the Darshik objective was with their invasion. They were committing large numbers of troops to secure highly populated areas, but were seeming to ignore key infrastructure and manufacturing centers. Once they subdued and were containing cities, they did nothing to threaten or harm the civilian population. They refused all attempts at communication and used their orbital superiority sparingly, only calling in strikes from their warships on the most stubborn human defensive positions.

  If his superiors were to ask him, which they hadn’t, he would swear he saw parallels in how the Darshik were approaching the opening battles to some of humanity’s ancient, politically driven wars. In a way he found an odd comfort in that. He’d studied the Phage War extensively and what little declassified information there was had terrified him. At least the Darshik could be met in battle, killed, and definitely had a specific objective they wished to attain. That gave them options in that they could fight to deny them that objective or surrender it with concessions, a far cry better than the war of extermination the Phage had brought to them.

  There was another aspect of the Battle for Juwel that concerned him; what would the newly formed United Terran Federation do if they couldn’t break the blockade and get material support to the planet? From his contacts in Fleet that he trusted, Baer knew CENTCOM had been more than willing to sacrifice the Frontier planets to the Phage and pull vital combat forces back to the core worlds and hope the enemy just went away. Juwel, while an established and important colony world, might fall into the category of “acceptable loss” if Starfleet couldn’t find a way to get past the Darshik warships in the outer system.

  “Major, Alpha Company is reporting no enemy contact at the water treatment facility. They’ve secured the compound and are digging in,” the com operator said. “Orders?”

  “Tell Captain Anders to hold his position and keep us posted,” Baer said, resisting the urge to shrug in exasperation. What the hell game were these aliens playing?

  “Make sure all of our updates are getting back to Command.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  3

  “Helm answering all stop, sir.”

  “Thank you,” Senior Captain Jackson Wolfe said absently, still working on something on his tile. “OPS! Have you recalculated our course yet?”

  “I’m still working on it, sir,” the OPS officer said nervously. “With all due respect, there’s little precedence for what you’re asking, Captain.”

  “Nonsense,” Jackson said calmly. “It’s a maneuver we routinely executed in the Ninth.”

  “This isn’t a destroyer, Captain,” the XO said gently from where he sat at the tactical station.

  “This ship has more than enough sensor capability and engine power to do as required with a reasonable assumption that it will be successful,” Jackson said, turning his full attention onto his squeamish bridge crew. “Let me be clear: We are doing this. The Darshik have figured out roughly where the jump points are into the Juwel System from the established warp lanes and have protected them accordingly. We’ve lost seven starships since they established their blockade. If we do not find a way to get our payload to the Marines fighting on the surface soon we risk losing the system. At this point, calculated risks must be taken. Understood?”

  A handful of faces just stared back at him blankly.

  “That was not a rhetorical question,” he said, letting some of his frustration seep into his voice. “Am I understood?”

  “Yes, sir!” a ragged chorus came back.

  “Good. Let’s get to work and deal with the problems as they arise,” Jackson continued. “XO, how go the repairs in Engineering?”

  “On schedule, sir.”

  “See that it doesn’t slip; divert manpower if you have to, but we cannot be the piece that holds up the mission,” Jackson said sternly. “Captain Wright is depending on us being where we need to be, when we need to be there. I do not intend to fail over a maintenance issue.”

  “Understood, Captain.” The XO stood up. “I’ll go down now and check on their progress.”

  The bridge of the TFS Aludra Star was cramped, not especially comfortable, and undermanned. The last observation was strictly her captain’s opinion, of course, but he strongly felt the ship had too many tasks divided between too few people. He’d taken command of the Star when her former CO met with an unfortunate accident on the surface of New Sierra and CENTCOM could not afford for the ship to be delayed in its mission.

  Circumstances had been such that just as Black Fleet Command was looking for a billet to put Jackson Wolfe into the Star’s chair opened up. She was a Vega-class assault carrier though Jackson felt the designers may have been a bit too liberal with the term “assault.” The ship was sturdy and only five years old, but there was little doubt her primary mission was to shuttle cargo from once place to another; she had been given only a smattering of armament with which to defend herself when dropping over a contested planet. He held no illusions about the ship going toe to toe with one of the Darshik cruisers and would be relying heavily on his destroyer escort to get the needed war-fighting materiel to the stranded Marines on Juwel.

  It certainly wasn’t the billet Jackson wanted, but it was the one he was expecting. Fleet Admiral Marcum, still serving as the CENTCOM Chief of Staff, wasn’t going to put him back on the bridge of a mainline warship after he’d come out to the Arcadia System and yanked him back into service from retirement. Jackson assumed that Marcum, never one of his biggest fans, had been forced by political considerations and would do the bare minimum to honor the request. Hence, Jackson Wolfe was given command of a glorified cargo hauler.

  No matter. He would perform his duty to the best of his ability and wouldn’t give the clowns in Command the satisfaction of seeing him dejected or openly embarrassed by what could only be viewed as a demotion. Celesta Wright was turning down command of battleships; Jackson Wolfe wasn’t even asked to relieve a temporary skipper on an obsolete Fourth Fleet frigate.

  “Sir, I believe I have our first course plotted,” the OPS officer said. “Would you like to look it over?” Jackson bit back his initial response. On the Star his OPS officer was also his navigation specialist. The ship wasn’t normally required to navigate outside of established and well-mapped space so the designers hadn’t felt a dedicated navigation specialist was required with the duties being divided between the OPS officer and the helmsman. It was an oversight he felt was almost criminal in its ignorance.

  “Send it over, Ensign Dole,” he said calmly. “And exactly how much experience do you have, Ensign? I don’t mean operating your station, I mean how much astral navigation have you been exposed to?”

  “I have completed all requisite post-graduate courses after the Academy and have completed all specialized training when I was assigned to Black Fleet and the Vega-class,” Dole said somewhat stiffly.

  “This isn’t an interrogation, Ensign,” Jackson said, catching the tone. “I need to know what the crew capabilities are on this ship … all of our lives and the lives of the people on Juwel could depend on it. Just assume that nothing I ask is meant as anything other than a CO who’s being rushed to get a ship ready for deployment without much experience with either the class or the crew.”

  “Understood, Captain,” Dole said.

  Jackson let his OPS officer escape back to his work as he reviewed the first series of flight parameters that would take the Star out of the DeLonges System and most of the way to the Jewel System. The nav plan was sufficient and only required a few tweaks to make it serviceable for the mission. The navigation computers aboard the Star were much more capable than those on the Blue Jacket and, in some ways, better than what he had had on the Ares. Fleet engineers seemed to have made a legitimate effort to take the human error factor out of spaceflight with the starships that were r
olling out. He ruefully had to admit that any outdated systems that might have been in place on the Starwolf-class destroyers were likely done so at his specific request when he was consulting on the design.

  “Captain Wolfe, New Sierra Control has informed us that we’re to stand by for our cargo,” his com officer said. “It’s being ferried out from the Platform now.”

  “Thank you, Lieutenant Epsen,” Jackson said over his shoulder. “Please inform Engineering and Flight OPS to be ready to receive the drop shuttles.”

  “Aye aye, sir,” Epsen said sharply, turning back to her terminal.

  The Vega-class assault carrier was designed specifically to rapidly deploy troops and material onto a planet’s surface. The ship’s hull had actually been laid over two decades prior, but had been moved out of the shipyard and parked in orbit over a moon for the duration of the Phage War. Once that had ended and CENTCOM slowly got back around to trying to replenish a decimated Starfleet the hull had been pulled back in, the designs updated, and the ship finished.

  All cargo was packed in up to twenty-seven drop shuttles, each capable of ferrying just over three hundred and fifty metric tons of cargo to the surface in their maximum load configuration. Two hundred and seventy-five if they wanted the shuttles to be able to get back to orbit. One Vega-class ship could be loaded with a formidable quick-reaction force for fast interdictions or contingencies. On this trip Jackson would be bringing reinforcements, critical equipment, ammunition, and specialists to Juwel to hold the planet against the Darshik incursion. He understood his burden as he doubted there would be another resupply attempt if the Star failed.