Decisively Engaged (Warp Marine Corps Book 1) by C.J. Carella

Fromm. He’d inserted a fresh power pack into the magazine well in the pistol grip of his laser, and was ready to cut down another two hundred Ruddies.
    “Wait a bit,” Fromm said. Maybe the stupid bastards would decide to run and live to fight another day. Maybe…
    He didn’t hear the rocket’s detonation as it hit the second-story wall, but he sure as hell felt it.
     
    * * *
     
    The weight of all the extra equipment strained the van’s suspension something fierce, making Obregon’s seat bounce uncomfortably, but that didn’t bother him. It kind of reminded him of life in Jazmin-Two, of driving to the town’s general store in his Pappy’s barely-functional jalopy, a hydrogen-burner made of equal parts rust and baling wire.
    What bothered him was seeing the gate leading out of the embassy’s compound was still closed. And that the assholes manning said gate – the Marine assholes manning said gate – were waving at him to stop.
    “Open up!” he sent through his imp.
    “We’ve got orders to keep all combat forces inside the compound,” replied Staff Sergeant Amherst, the former commander of the Embassy Security Group. Amherst was an officious asshole who’d long forgotten what it meant to in the Corps, but Obregon couldn’t believe he was pulling this shit. “You need to deploy to protect the Embassy, Gunny.”
    Obregon’s three-vehicle formation – Rovers One through Three – was coming up to the gate and he had to make a decision. The take from the micro-drones was streaming on his field of vision’s right quadrant, and he could see that the walled property the Americans had holed up in was being hit with rocket and small arms fire, not to mention a couple thousand ETs with swords trying to get over the fence. The skipper was too busy fighting for his life to deal with this bullshit.
    “Move it or lose it,” he said.
    “Say again, Gunnery Sergeant?”
    “Open the gate or we’re busting it open. Last chance.”
    “You don’t have the balls,” the asshole said, just about the worst thing he could have uttered.
    “Light it up,” Obregon told Corporal Hendrickson. The gunner was on the improvised cupola they’d put on the van’s roof, manning the ALS-43 auto-launcher.
    “Copy that,” Hendrickson said without hesitation. The ALS-43 could fire a variety of 15mm projectiles at a rate of three hundred rounds a minute. To blow the gate open, Hendrickson fired a three-round burst of anti-armor plasma rounds. The shaped-charge explosions tore the gate apart without doing much damage to the guardhouse on its left side.
    ‘Much damage’ is a relative term, though. The structure wasn’t destroyed outright, but it did catch fire. Amherst and the other sorry bastard inside got a little bit scorched, given that they were wearing dress blues and no armor. They’d live, though, and the gate could be fixed in under an hour, given all the fabbers the Embassy had. No harm done.
    There would be consequences, of course, but he didn’t give a shit. He had a job to do.
     
    * * *
     
    “We’re gonna get in trouble, aren’t we?” Private First Class Hiram ‘Nacle’ Hamblin asked as their car drove past what was left of the guardhouse.
    “Fuck ‘em if they can’t take a joke,” Russell said. “Gotta save the new skipper, don’t we? Those assholes were acting against orders.”
    “But the ambassador...?”
    “Fuck the ambassador. He ain’t in the chain of command. He gotta tell the RSO and the RSO gotta tell the skipper, and then he tells the NCOs, and they tell us what the fuck to do.”
    Nacle – short for Tabernacle – shrugged, still clearly uncomfortable. He was good people, but also a Mormon, and they mostly didn’t like coloring outside the lines, although Russell had met several wild and woolly exceptions. He’d calm down when they got to the hostiles. Nacle didn’t have any problems shooting ETs. None of them did. Travel the galaxy, meet colorful aliens, and blow the shit out of