32
Yancey needn’t have worried about the alert being a drill. Thirteen hours after the Battle of the Angel Shits, as those who’d been at the E-Club were calling it, the call came down. The regiment was deploying, and this time, the Marines, for once, were not kept in the dark.
Maybe it was the new command leadership, figuring that after the last fiasco, things needed to change. Maybe they just decided that an informed Marine was a better Marine. Whatever the reason, Colonel Destafney, Rev’s old recruit battalion CO and now the Regimental commanding officer, put every Marine and sailor in the fieldhouse and personally briefed them just before embarking.
A small contingent of Centaurs had invaded Roher-104, way out on the Outer Arm, even if invaded, in this case, seemed too strong a term.
Roher-104 was in its twenty-ninth year of terraforming, not even into Phase 3. There were no human inhabitants yet, with Roher terratechs visiting twice a standard year to measure progress. Why the Centaurs wanted the planet was anyone’s guess, as was why it was so far removed from their other expansions.
Whatever their reasons, humanity—and Roher, Inc, and its shareholders—wanted it back. And with Roher a true intergalactic, the Marines weren’t going to be the only ones on the mission. A Host battalion was going to join the other Frisian augments, and the Hégémonie Liberté was providing some of the transport.
Which was why, six days after the Angel Shits tried to take on a Marine regiment, the Raider platoon, a sapper platoon, Alpha Company, Fourth Armor Battalion, and Charlie Company, Fourth Mech, were on the Dixmude, L404 of the Liberty Navy, heading back into the shit.