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

them. That was the name of the game.
    Rover One was on the ass end of the formation as it drove through the streets of the Foreigners’ Enclave, heading for the curtain wall surrounding the area and yet another gate, a much bigger one, manned by Ruddy Royal Guardsmen. Ruddies who were probably going to object to their going out there and killing a bunch of their friends and neighbors. Things might get hairy in a minute.
    The walls around the Enclave were manned by a battalion of Guardsmen. They wore light blue and pink uniforms – no accounting for ET tastes – but although their equipment was all local-made and out of date, it included artillery and even a tank platoon. Ruddy tanks were no great shakes, about as good as an up-gunned Sherman from two hundred-plus years ago on Earth, but their 79mm main guns were no joke. Russell wasn’t sure the shields they’d mounted on their technicals would take more than a few HEAT rounds from one of those. Even if they did, his Hummer-like car would probably end up flipping end over end just from the shockwave. Which would suck, since the fucking thing was open-topped and body armor wasn’t going to help for shit if you landed on your head with five thousand pounds on top of you.
    What the fuck you gonna do , he told himself.
    They drove past the Wyrm Embassy, which the ETs had built for themselves rather than rent out some Ruddy houses like the Americans had, and which looked like someone had melted a bunch of different kinds of scrap metal and poured them over a giant sea shell. The Wyrms were on lockdown; Russell could see the tell-tale soap-bubble shimmer that meant their shields were up. Russell didn’t care for the scaly bastards; they were biologically related to the Snakes, the assholes who bombed the shit out of Earth during First Contact. Still, the Wyrms had always respected the US and were sort of friendly. If the Royal Ruddies got shitty, the Wyrms would lend the Americans a hand instead of piling on. So would the Ovals, especially since they had people out there too.
    The main gate to the Foreigners’ Enclave stood dead ahead, surrounded by sixty-foot walls and four towers with the pointy-hat roofs Ruddies loved to put on everything they built. The Enclave had once been a fortress before cannon made their walls obsolete. Russell had gone through the gate almost a hundred times during his deployment on Jasper-Five, mostly on his way to and from one of the discreet whorehouses they had downtown. Ruddy women weren’t exactly built like Americans, but all the important parts fit well enough to get the job done, although you had to watch out for their bristle-backs if you were into doggie-style. It had been a while since he’d gotten his dick wet. If he didn’t get killed, and if the fucking curfew was lifted, he’d have to do something about that.
    “Rover One, Rover Three, hang back,” Gunny Obregon said. “I’m gonna try to talk us through the gate. Get ready to start blasting on my command, or if the Ruddies get frisky.”
    “Fuck,” Russell said, driving off to one side, some hundred feet away from the gate. Traffic was light – only complete morons would choose to venture into a riot in progress – so he had a nice view of about a hundred Ruddies in Royal Guard uniforms milling around the gate, and a couple hundred more on the battlements atop the walls. No heavy weapons he could see, but he knew the Guard had plenty of portable rocket launchers, and those mothers packed a hefty punch. More than enough to overload his personal force fields with a direct hit; enough of them would do for the slapped-on shields on their Rovers, too. It would suck if they had to fight their way through.
    They had people out there, though. You didn’t abandon your own. That shit had been true when Marines had deployed out of wooden ships, or when breaking out of Frozen Chosin, long before they’d added the word Warp to the Corps’ name. Russell had forgotten most of the