Read Online Decisively Engaged (Warp Marine Corps Book 1) by C.J. Carella - Free Book Online Page A

gathered indoors, out of sight until they’d used gongs and drums to let everyone know it was time to come out and play. A proper Intelligence section would probably have noticed the Ruddies’ movement patterns and figured out they were massing for an attack, but Third Platoon didn’t have an Intelligence section, just a pack of attached Navy bubbleheads, each trying to do the job of three or four people. Neither did it have organic vehicles, aerial support other than their micro-drones, or much of anything else. They’d been tossed into this miserable shithole with a whole lot of fuck-all.
    It didn’t matter. One of their own, and a bunch of civvies, were out there, surrounded by an estimated five thousand bloodthirsty Ruddies, and it was Obregon’s job to go out there and extricate them by any means necessary.
    Improvising while being ass-deep in alligators was part of the job. Obregon knew that the Dark God Murphy was always waiting in the wings, ready to strike. He’d taken precautions against that possibility, aided and abetted by Lieutenant Murdock, God rest his soul. Even so, the only reason this sortie into hostile territory wasn’t a forlorn hope was the fact that his unit had been Charlie Company’s weapons platoon, and that the same whimsical Rats who had sent them to this God-forsaken mudball had also sent all their equipment along. As soon as Obregon got his feet under him and realized they needed a mobile element in case the shit hit the fan, he and the other NCOs had gone to work, acquiring several native vehicles by means fair and foul and spending their own time and money to turn them into improvised infantry fighting vehicles.
    The traditional term for such makeshifts was ‘technicals.’ Obregon had been raised in a dirt-poor colony world where you had to build most of the stuff you wanted, simply because the hard currency you’d need to buy it wasn’t available, and the few fabbers on site had more important things to produce than consumer goods. Between his hard-earned skills, the info the imps helpfully provided, and a lot of sweat and the liberal application of super-duct tape, he and his volunteers had assembled something better than a typical fleet of technicals.
    A mental command opened the rolling door to their improvised vehicle depot as he and Sergeant Muller approached it. Inside awaited the fruit of their labors. The three monstrosities had started their lives as a cargo van, a ten-ton truck and a demilitarized Ruddy version of the venerable Humvee. Form followed function, and the native-designed vehicles had been roughly similar in appearance and capabilities to their equivalents from Earth’s 20 th century. Had been.
    Force field generators had been cannibalized from the platoon’s area defense gear and welded onto every possible surface on the three vehicles. The devices used Starfarer Tech to bend space-time itself, generating invisible planes of force capable of deflecting all kinds of energies from one direction while allowing their users to shoot from the opposite side. Never mind how – according to Woogle, human brains couldn’t understand the physics behind the force fields; most Eets didn’t, either. Their coverage wasn’t perfect – the vehicles’ tires and parts of their undercarriages were still hideously vulnerable to mines and IEDs – but they would stop a direct hit from the 93mm Ruddy artillery pieces that did triple-duty as general bombardment, anti-aircraft and anti-tank weapons. At least, they would do so as long as their improvised batteries could supply energy to the fields. His imp’s best guess was that three or four hits of that magnitude would deplete the force fields’ power packs, at which point the technicals would turn back into pumpkins, and just as easy to smash. Until then, though, they’d be proof against most things.
    They hadn’t just added defenses to the truck, of course. Obregon and his team of volunteer mechanics had taken a