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

said.
    She stopped firing, saw what he’d found, and smiled. 
     
    * * *
     
    “What the fuck’s going on, Russet?”
    Russell assumed Gonzaga was asking about the mass of Ruddies filling the road ahead of them. Most of them were wearing black bathrobes over black pajama bottoms, nothing like the khakis Kirosha regulars wore or the light blue and pink of the Royal Guards, but when a buncha people dressed the same, that was a uniform. Throw weapons into the mix, and that made them military uniforms. And if they fucked with you, uniforms or not, that made them the enemy.
    “Fucked if I know, Gonzo. Ruddies got a hard-on for us all of a sudden.”
    His imp ran the numbers off the corner of his eye. There were two hundred and seventy-nine ETs massing up ahead, mostly armed with spears and swords, the poor bastards. Gunny Obregon was shouting something at them via his loudspeaker implants, but despite the fact he was talking Ruddy at them, they didn’t seem to care.
    “Hold fire,” Obregon said over the command channel. “I’m firing a warning shot. All hands, hold fire.”
    The Gunny leaned out of the van’s window and fired a single round into the ground somewhere between the Marine vehicles and the mob of Ruddies a hundred yards away. The exploding bullet melted a hole in the asphalt-covered road and the concrete below, plasma sparkling like a Roman candle.
    The crowd took it in for a moment. Then some dickhead with a flag or something attached to his back started shouting and the Ruddies surged forward, waving their swords like this was yet another remake of Braveheart vs Henry V .
    “Fuck it,” Obregon said, sounding disgusted. “We’re going through them. Engage the hostiles.”
    That was all that Russell was waiting to hear. He stood up in his seat gave the ETs a three-barrel salute, firing alternate blaster and grenade rounds after dropping a 20mm anti-pers care package on their laps. Gonzo cut loose with his squad gun. One burst apiece from the heavy weapons in each vehicle, plus one from each grunt who wasn’t driving. The plasma bullets were rated to go through a foot of hardened steel and they turned each Ruddy they hit into a bomb. The anti-personnel grenades were worse, detonating overhead and showering the ETs with fragmented ceramic shards. The dumb fucks should have known better than to bunch up; they’d had automatic weapons for a good while in this planet. But the assholes charged forward, packed together shoulder to shoulder, the stupid motherfuckers, and got massacred. Maybe they expected the Marines to use tear gas or some other non-lethal shit. Dumb fucks. Marines weren’t cops.
    The street had been wide enough for all three vehicles to shoot, and by the time they checked fire, the enemy counter off the corner of his eye read sixty-three. That’s how many Ruddies were still lively enough to pose a threat. Not that they were, not really; the sixty Eets who weren’t dead or hollering on the ground were running as if their lives depended on it. Which they did.
    Ruddies sounded like little kids when they screamed. It made him feel bad.
    After the shooting was over, Rover Force’s biggest problem was rolling through the pile of corpses ahead of them. The van got stuck a couple times and people had to unass and move bodies from under it. The Jeep and the truck mostly drove over the crunchy bumps beneath them. A couple of times they stopped to drag living Ruddies off to one side. But mostly they just drove on and ignored the sounds the live ones made when they got crunched.
    They’d lost too much time already.
     
    * * *
     
    Heather handed Fromm the laser and took the Vehelian area effect weapon. She’d never seen one in the flesh, but their specs had been part of her courses in Starfarer tech. Its security locks were slightly more intricate than the laser’s, but she got through them easily enough, leaving her with the decision of how to use it.
    The cylinder in her hand was self-propelled,