When Words Fail Read online

  Copyrighted Material

  When Words Fail Copyright © 2022 by Variant Publications

  Book design and layout copyright © 2022 by JN Chaney

  This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living, dead, or undead, is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from JN Chaney.

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  CONTENTS

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Epilogue

  Glossary

  Cast of Characters

  Acknowledgments

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  About the Authors

  1

  Corporal Hussein Černý held up his hand, five fingers extended, then the signals for “heavy weapons” and “negative.”

  Staff Sergeant Reverent Pelletier, Perseus Union Marine Corps, hesitated. Five Centaurs were hardly a major prize. In the first stages of the Centaur War, any Centaur kill was something to be celebrated. But with the Centaurs now eschewing their mech and fighting more like light infantry, priorities and expectations had changed.

  Still, it would be nice to get the patrol blooded. They’d been on this moon for eight days now without any contact, and he could feel the frustration level among his Marines rising. Five kills would go a long way in combating that.

  Punch, his embedded AI battle buddy, reminded him.

  With a sigh, Rev signaled Hussein to stand down. His old friend frowned but passed on the orders. Punch was right, of course. First Heavy Infantry Company and Second Force Recon were not on Brahmaloka to engage in combat with the Centaur Infantry. They were there to locate and determine the size of the elusive Centaur forces so that the Marines could land with a large enough task force to overwhelm them.

  Force Recon was the point of main effort for the mission, but after the disaster that had hit the Confederation Rangers on Betel 3, First Heavy Infantry was on the moon to provide a little heavier punch to protect the lightly armed Force Recon Company Marines.

  “It would have been good for morale to take the tin-asses out,” Rev subvocalized.

 

  Again, his battle buddy was right. But while Force Recon may be used to the poop and snoop mindset of finding the enemy and not engaging, First Heavy Infantry Company was built to close with and destroy the bad guys.

  After a moment’s consideration, Rev signaled Hussein’s team to remain in place and record the approaching Centaurs, but for the rest of the patrol to pull back. Slowly, the Marines around him edged farther away from the abandoned access road and into the deeper cover of the rocky outcroppings.

  He uploaded an update into one of the tiny message drones and sent it off on a nap-of-the-earth route back to the company CP located deep in one of the mine shafts that dotted this section of the moon. Maybe one of the Navy’s orbital spy-eyes could follow these five Centaurs to wherever they were going.

  That was if the message drone even made it. Rev glanced up at Āryāvarta, the huge, red and blue gas giant that took up most of the sky. Aside from the earthquakes—moonquakes?—that continually shook the much smaller moon (and made mining so dangerous), the gravitational pull of the massive planet wreaked havoc on navigation systems. Even Rev, with his augmented navigational capabilities, had periods of disorientation.

  Combined with the Centaurs’ own jamming capabilities, the gas giant made locating the Centaur forces difficult. Humans knew the Centaurs were there. The landings had been noted, as had the cries for help from the four mining operations before those were cut off. But despite the best surveillance capabilities known to humankind, no one knew just how many Centaurs were on the planet-like moon and in what strength. The few signs of their presence were fleeting and inconclusive. The four mines they’d taken were still operational, but where were the military forces that grabbed them?

  Enter Force Recon and Heavy Infantry to find out the old-fashioned way, with boots on the ground. But now, with five Centaurs in sight, Rev had to pull his patrol back and let the enemy proceed unmolested.

  He crawled in back of a large chunk of volcanic rock thirty-five meters behind his former position but still with a direct line-of-sight to Hussein.

  Staff Sergeant Kil Rancine, the Second Squad leader, crawled up to him. “Why don’t we take them?” she asked in a quiet whisper. “Let Intel get their hands on the bastards.”

  “Mission orders. Don’t engage except for self-defense.”

  “Sometimes, you’ve just got to take advantage of any opportunity that comes your way.”

  Rev internally winced. He agreed in theory, and his warrior self was clamoring for him to attack, but he also knew that a small tactical win could be a strategic defeat. Five Centaurs meant nothing in the larger scheme of things. They needed to pinpoint the larger forces.

  “Not this time, Kil. Just hold tight.”

  She frowned but low-crawled back to her position.

  Rev knew that she hadn’t been happy to have Rev assigned as the patrol leader. They were both staff sergeants, after all, and Second Squad made up the bulk of the patrol. But after that exchange, maybe the lieutenant had known what she was doing when she’d put Rev in charge. Kil might be just a little too bloodthirsty.

  He turned his attention back to First Team. After a few moments, Hussein signaled four hundred meters. Rev had picked their location well. In this region of Brahmaloka, the tortured terrain, combined with the short distance to the horizon, made long-range observation difficult. But the small hillock where Hussein and his team were located gave e
xceptional views over not only the access road, but also over a two-klick-wide relatively flat plain. If this was a seek-and-destroy mission, then the Centaurs would have very little cover in the kill zone.

  “Keep this location noted if our mission shifts,” he told Punch.

 

  Now it was just waiting for the Centaurs to pass. Rev glanced to his left. He could just see a small section of the road before it turned down the slope. Maybe he’d get a peek at them before they disappeared.

  “Systems check?”

 

  Rev grunted. He may not be about to enter combat, but his anal side always wanted to know his status in case something did happen. He extended Pashu, his IBHU—Integrated Bionic Hopological Unit—and rotated her a few times. She’d gone through a light upgrade before this deployment, and she seemed to have a slightly smoother movement, but she hadn’t been used in combat since then.

  With three IBHU Marines in the patrol—Lance Corporal Pierson, located with Hussein and first team, Lance Corporal Ethereal Randigold, and himself—they represented a lot of firepower. Given the fact that the Centaurs were infantry and not in their mechs, Rev thought the three of them could handle five Centaurs on their own. While the mech versions were deadly during the first war, the newer, infantry versions of Centaurs were smaller and weaker than even unaugmented humans, and nothing he’d seen on the holovids indicated that they had weapons out of the ordinary. Additionally, their body armor seemed minimal at best.

  It was easy for them to kill and capture civilians, but Rev and the rest were Perseus Union Marines.

  The Confed Rangers were no pushovers, and look what happened to them, his more cautious self whispered from the recesses of his mind.

  Hussein turned again and signaled that the Centaurs were two hundred meters away. Rev’s warrior self tried to surge into control, but Rev easily pushed him back down. He’d had a lot of practice controlling his more violent persona, even if he’d relied on that side to get him out of more than a few jams before. But now was not the time to go into beast-mode.

  The time ticked slowly as the Centaurs advanced until Hussein finally signaled that they were abreast of his position. Just on the other side of the outcropping, forty or fifty meters down the gentle, boulder-strewn slope, the enemy was passing by. Rev hoped that the Navy spy-eyes had managed to cut through the moon-wide jamming and had now a lock on them.

  “Take us to your buddies. Show us where they are,” he muttered a moment before the side of the main rock behind which Hussein’s team was taking cover exploded into dust.

  Rev was up and moving almost before he realized what was happening. “Support element, set up a base of fire. Security, follow me!”

  Ahead and to his right, he could hear Pierson open up with his 20 mm gun, the reports unmistakable for anything else. Rev covered the short distance and went to his belly just short of the crest in the slope. Incoming fire was intense, especially as it was coming from only five Centaurs.

  Two Marines hit the ground on either side of him. “Wait,” Rev told PFC Julian, one of his new joins, as the Marine started to edge over the crest to engage the Centaurs.

  “Where are they, Hus-man?” he shouted at Hussein, almost forty meters to his right.

  “Just ahead of me,” the corporal replied. “I don’t know how they picked us up.”

  Now wasn’t the time for finger-pointing. First Team had been spotted, and that was all there was to it. They had to take care of this first, then worry about the ramifications later.

  “Randigold up!” Rev yelled, his call repeated by those around him. A moment later, his fellow IBHU Marine rushed up, bent over at the waist to keep her head out of sight of the Centaurs below.

  “We gonna hit them?” she asked, her face beaming with excitement through her face shield.

  “Take Bobovitch here and push down the ridge another twenty meters. Then watch for my signal.”

  Calling the slight crest a ridge was generous. It was simply a line where the slope steepened down through the boulders to the roadbed. But they were technically in defilade at the moment—if they kept their heads down.

  “Then watch for my signal. Stay on your beamer, and I’ll be on my twenty.”

  “Hell, Staff Sergeant, you get all the fun,” she said.

  “We’re going to have to dig them out, so make sure you light them up. We outnumber them, and with the three of us, we’ve got the firepower, too.”

  If they were outnumbered, the Centaurs didn’t seem to either realize that or care. The amount of incoming fire, only now being matched by Marine outgoing, was impressive. But maybe they figured it was do or die. On this side of the road, they had boulders for some degree of cover. On the other side of the road, there wasn’t much at all. If they tried to retreat, they’d be dead meat.

  He craned his head back to look around Hussein’s outcrop. It was the most significant terrain feature for hundreds of meters. It dawned on him that he should have brought the support element, which was the squad’s Third Team and the attached M-305 Jackhammer team from Weapons Platoon, up to flank the Centaurs from the right.

  Sometimes, Rev could be IBHU-centric, but the Jackhammer, a man-packed automatic 40 mm grenade launcher, had a lot of firepower in its own right.

  Too late now, but keep that in mind for next time, Reverent.

  “Get ready to give me a base of fire!” Rev shouted to Hussein and his team. “Tell Pierson I want rounds on target.”

  Hussein gave him a thumbs-up.

  “You’re with me,” he told Julian. “When I move, you move with me. Keep your neck on a swivel, and if you see movement, hit it.”

  Julian, her eyes wide, gulped but nodded as she gripped her M-49, her knuckles white.

  Rev hugged the dirt while Marines got in position. The Centaurs weren’t letting up. During the previous war, they relied on well-aimed, powerful blasts from their various weapons. These guys seemed to be “spraying and praying,” putting out heavy volleys of rounds, hoping that something would connect. Bits of dirt were showering Rev and the rest.

  A flash and boom filled the air, and shrapnel peppered Rev. Nothing penetrated, but that was a not-so-subtle reminder that they couldn’t just sit there while the Centaurs started employing their full toolbox of weapons.

  Rev motioned to Randigold, counting down with broad sweeps of his arm. On three, he jumped up, spraying the rocks below with his twenty. He caught a flash of movement as a Centaur dove for cover. As quick as Rev was with his IBHU, the Centaur was quicker, and the big 20 mm rounds hit nothing but rock. But at least, the incoming paused, giving the Marines a chance to rise and return fire.

  The two IBHU Marines with Julian and Bobvitch, ran down through the boulders, looking for targets. There were only five of them, they would barely be a meter and a half tall, and there were plenty of boulders on the ground, but still, Rev should be able to see at least one of them.

  One of the Centaurs found Rev, though. As he ran around a two-meter-tall boulder, a Centaur bowled into Rev from the side, hitting him just below the hips with a tackle that made Rev wince even inside his PAL-HX armor. Rev bounced off the boulder and onto his face. He rolled, trying to bring Pashu around, but her very bulk was keeping him from coming around cleanly. Her projector barrel dug into the dirt as the Centaur raised a massive-looking sidearm, the muzzle looking big enough to crawl into.

  A flurry of hypervelocity darts hit the Centaur, making it flinch its aim off Rev as it shifted to face Julian, and that was the opportunity Rev needed to pull Pashu’s muzzle free of the dirt and bring her to bear. A quick burst and five of the heavy 20 mm rounds tore into the Centaur, shredding the body and splattering the gore across the boulders on the other side of it.

  Julian kept firing into the bloody mess until Rev stepped over, put a hand on the barrel of her weapon, and lowered it.

  “Is it dead?” she asked.

&n
bsp;

  Rev ignored Punch and said, “Quite dead. But its buddies are still around here. Let’s move.”

  “That son-of-a-bitch was strong,” Rev told Punch.

 

  “Doesn’t make sense. How could the others be so weak and then these guys . . . ?”

  But that was for later. Forewarned, he wouldn’t be caught like that again as they rooted out the other four.

  Only, the other four Centaurs were not cooperating.

  “No sign of them?” Rev asked Randigold after another minute of fruitless searching.

  “Some of what looks like an alien version of cartridges, but nothing else.”

  Rev paused and looked back up to where the Marines, without targets, had slowed their rate of fire while keeping their rounds clear of the four Marines.

  “Staff Sergeant Rancine, bring up the base of fire to cover us, then I want everyone else down here while we find the bastards.”

  Twenty minutes later, he had to acknowledge that there were no Centaurs in the rock field. He stood for a long moment, surveying the cleared area on either side and across the road. He wouldn’t have thought a mouse could move over there without being seen.