by Tim C Taylor
And the partying would begin.
Warning icons erupted into the HUD of his Mark 6 Phantom.
Mine proximity alert! Mine proximity alert!
The HUD filled with orange dots, showing the probable location of mines funneling out from the Carbuncle directly into his squadron’s flight path.
“Joke’s on you, monkeys. We knew you knew we were coming.”
Caccamo thumbed the firing stud, and a salvo of flail missiles shot from his ventral missile pod to do their thing triggering mines. Mine clearance, though, wasn’t high on his agenda.
“Cacco to all call signs. Abort! Abort! Alter flight path to backdoor passage. I repeat, backdoor passage. We’ll loop around Luna and assault the Carbuncle from below.”
Making a sharp turn to dive for the moon’s dark side, Caccamo checked the acknowledgements to make sure that his X-Boat escort flights, and the TU Tactical Units they were escorting, were all following the amended flight plan.
“Looks like the monkeys are in a bad mood,” said Cripes in Gold-7 in response to the stream of high-velocity tungsten rounds spat out by the Carbuncle’s anti-fighter turrets.
“All right. Keep your tails on,” Caccamo drawled at the Hardits, relaxed about the incoming fire at such long distance. “We’re going, already.”
“My thanks, Cacco,” came a voice his comm identified as Akinschet 41, but Caccamo recognized as Colonel Reichert, the commander of the TAC Marine Regiment. “Very thoughtful of you to offer my Marines a sightseeing tour before the main attraction.”
“Happy to oblige, Colonel. I’d give you the tour guide experience if I had time, but I really ought to destroy the enemy’s ground defenses before your TUs arrive in their sights and scream, ‘Shoot me!’.”
“Another time, then, Laban. Good hunting.”
“Cacco to Conquer Squadron. Load percussion warheads optimized for New Order rega-crete. Finish your coffees people, and clean your spectacles, because we need to make every shot count. We’ll only get one chance at this or the TUs will get blasted out of the void before they ever reached the Carbuncle.”
Caccamo boosted his Phantom’s thrust to 31g and screamed for the dark moon.
The latest TUs could handle gees like he wouldn’t have believed when he trained on them as a cadet, but that didn’t put them in the same class as an X-boat. Nothing in the galaxy was as fast as his fighter, and it was high time he reminded the New Order of that fact.
In person.
— Chapter 02 —
Concentrate. Concentrate!
When he’d begun his rookie combat tour, Marine-Grenadier Michael Rosenberg had imagined his first tactical assault would be the worst: that the experience would get a little easier each time he flew into combat, strapped in a gibberball on the outside of a Tactical Unit warboat squeezing every last bit of juice out of its engines to avoid enemy fire.
It hadn’t.
There was a reason they called these EVA launch pods gibberballs. Not everyone left them sane.
Rosenberg tried to relax his mind and sink into his training, but the assault was already way off course. They should have hit the Carbuncle head-on from space, but instead the TU squadrons were coming at the enemy command and control center from underneath, inviting incoming fire from the Lunar surface defenses. And they were taking the long way around because the Hardits had known the precise timing and route of their attack, sowing their assault path with traps and mines.
How could anyone sane expect to defeat an enemy who knew your every move?
The Legion could.
Only the Legion could take on insane and still win. None of them would be alive today if that weren’t the case.
Still, that didn’t mean the Legion would win today.
Relaxation evaded him. Despite the buffer gel cramming every body cavity to protect him as his warboat, DeRuyter, thrashed in random directions, it still felt as if an army of giants was smashing his chest with hammers.
DeRuyter was one of the latest generation of TUs, fitted with the new inertial dampers that used the momentum-dump tech that had proved so successful with the X-Boats, but that only meant that its commander, Lieutenant Harper, flew the spherical warboat with even more bone-crushing acceleration – so much so that even Rosenberg’s AI couldn’t construct a meaningful visual image on his helmet display.
The gray-white blur that kept reappearing on his visor had to be Luna, the most famous moon in the galaxy. He should be able to glimpse Earth itself, but the crazy jinking made that completely impossible.
“Attention, Marines!”
Rosenberg’s heart beat a fraction slower. Sergeant Major Hecht was not a man Rosenberg could ever describe as likeable. But at a time when their battle plan had been thrown out the airlock, and there were surely traitors in their midst, Rosenberg needed someone or something in which to place his trust.
Menes Hecht was that something. Hecht would know what to do.
“The next few minutes are going to be hell,” Hecht said calmly in that rich bass voice of his that sounded as if he swallowed rocks for breakfast and washed them down with undiluted grok. “For the enemy more than you, because you will keep one thought clear in your heads no matter what you face. You will remember that you are Tac Marines. You are not the early hominids they recruit for the assault regiments. Nor are you the frakking airhead pansy-arses of the voidsters. You are Tactical Marines.”
If he weren’t clamped securely into his gibberball, Rosenberg would have held himself a little straighter. It stood to reason that Tac Marines were the best.
“You and your Tactical Unit warboats are the perfect symbiosis of human and machine,” the sergeant major continued, “the ultimate killing combination. These Mark-7 TUs are the best that man, God, or alien has yet devised. Which means you must be better than your forebears. The Legion heroes of Maroo-6 would raise their glasses to you, stop boasting of their great victory, and ply you with drink to hear of your greater one. And if you met Senior Shoal Commander Luelmas-Shan in the afterlife, she would make her excuses and leave, because despite her exploits in the Battle of Sorrow, even she would have to acknowledge that you are the ugliest, rowdiest bunch of desperados in the Legion. Hell, if she were still alive, I’d lock up my mother for her own safety if you came within ten light years, and Ma was a Marine sergeant. You know why I’d do that?”
“No, Sergeant Major,” Rosenberg whispered to himself.
“I’ve been in this war since the very beginning,” growled Hecht fiercely. “Hell, I helped start it. And I can say without doubt that you are the best damned unit of soldiers the human races have ever produced. What are you?”
“The best,” chorused Rosenberg and the thousands of other Marines encased in their gibberballs stuck onto the TU hulls like skin pustules.
“I’m sorry,” said Hecht. “Did someone say something?”
“The best!” roared the reply over the regimental channel.
“Damn frakking right you are. I know it. You know it. Now go show those flea-bitten, sex-crazed bastard Hardits the truth of your superiority.”
“LEGION!” came the response, but the voices were fractured because, with a heart-in-throat lurch, the fleet of warboats had abruptly changed bearing. What now?
“It seems we’re taking one more sightseeing loop around Luna,” explained Hecht after a few heart-stopping moments of silence. The old sergeant major was himself entombed in a gibberball, but you’d never know from the steadiness in his speech. “Seems the Hardit goat chodders weren’t quite ready to invite us in. No offence, Lieutenant Commander Quassi-Haex.”
Strained laughter came over the regimental net.
Rosenberg wasn’t expecting this change of tack from Hecht. Lieutenant Commander Quassi-Haex was chief engineer for one of the sleeve ships, the mothers to the TUs that transported and nurtured the warboats across the vast distances between battles zones. Rosenberg had seen many strange things in the war, and having Hardits serve the Legion with honor
was one of the strangest.
“I’m afraid that’s not good enough, Sergeant Major,” said the Hardit in a computer-translated voice. “You Tac Marines need to do far more than show the defenders of the Carbuncle who’s best. I want you to crush them. Bite them. Slit them open while they still breathe and shit in their chest cavities. Your enemies are the abominations of the New Order, and your duty is to wipe their very memory from the galaxy.”
“Thank you, Lieutenant Commander,” said Hecht in a strangely quivering voice that Rosenberg would interpret in any other person as laughter, if it were not a known fact that Sergeant Major Menes Hecht was incapable of such a thing.
“I can summarize the officer’s instructions in two words,” said Hecht. “No. Mercy.”
“No mercy!” shouted Rosenberg. He was about to repeat the chant when the interior of his gibberball started glowing with green light.
Not long now.
Lieutenant Harper stepped hard on DeRuyter’s gas pedal and, despite the buffer gel and the momentum-dump magic, it was as if one of the lumbering Tallermanians of the Mountain Division had grabbed Rosenberg’s cheeks from behind and was pulling back for all it was worth to test the tensile strength of human skin to breaking point… and beyond. Rosenberg deployed every ounce of willpower just to keep conscious.
Just got to hold on… he told himself. Just a few seconds more…
But the seconds stretched on with excruciating slowness.
I’m a Tac Marine, dammit. I was built for this.
And then the agonizing, disgusting magic happened. In a confusing blur, the gibberball was blasted into the void and erupted in a halo of flash-frozen gel. Rosenberg’s own body purged itself, the suit dumping the expelled contents into space and adding a flurry of defensive munitions to cloak the Marine-Grenadier as he emerged into battle, suit stealthed.
Rosenberg’s AI brought him fully back to working order with the equivalent of a sharp poke in the buttocks, and then placed a composite of visual and tactical information on the inside of his helmet visor.
The Carbuncle, they called it. Their target was the bulbous, warty orbital station that was the local Hardit command and control center, and it was rapidly filling his visor thanks to the momentum imparted by the TU. At the same time as throwing Rosenberg around furiously to avoid presenting an easy target, his combat suit motors were braking his approach as hard as they could without compromising the suit’s stealth capability.
The AI put a wordless tactical summary into his mind. The formidable defenses of the station had been badly degraded by the Legion X-Boat squadrons, although it seemed that Mad Dog Caccamo’s squadron had paid a heavy price in the process. The Tac Marines were only facing basic point-defense railguns firing blind. The cloud of dots around him that represented his brother and sister Marines began to wink out nonetheless.
Although he was flying in a wildly random approach, his body remained oriented toward the target. He set his assault carbine to x-ray mode and stitched a line of high-energy particles through the fast-approaching Carbuncle, pausing frustratingly often when the carbine battery needed to recharge.
The Hardit guns soon fell silent, though, and the thermal view showed the station’s hull was quickly heating up, which meant the enemy’s thermal shunts had been destroyed in the x-ray volleys. If that station couldn’t radiate heat, it was going to literally melt from the inside, but not before the Marines had retrieved the intelligence their assault force had bled for. Not if Marine-Grenadier Michael Rosenberg had any say in the matter.
“Breachers ready?” called First Sergeant Gomez on the company channel.
“Ready, Sergeant,” Rosenberg replied.
“Oh, I’m ready,” he whispered to himself as he clamped his carbine to his back and reached for his breach pack, all the while picturing the doomed Hardits inside the Carbuncle.
“I’m ready as hell. The Legion finally reached Earth, and now it’s payback!”
— Chapter 03 —
From the pilot’s station of his X4B-Buccaneer fighter-bomber, Arun studied the battle’s progress, making full use of the fleet command level feed that X-Boat flight leaders would not normally be privy to.
But normal was not a word that sat easily with Arun. His call sign of Catcher had been earned earlier in the war flying combat space patrols in the desperate battles around Khallini. But that had been a time when everyone with flight experience had been needed to pull shifts fending off the overwhelming numbers of the enemy.
Many still referred to Arun’s rank as flight-general, but as the years went by, fewer used the term affectionately and more did so as a term of reproach for his recklessness.
“Caccamo’s punching hard with the Lunar assault,” said his bombardier, bodyguard, and aide from the position behind him in the three-seat craft. “What are we waiting for?”
There was far more to this initial phase of the campaign than the Tac Marine assault on the New Order sector command station they’d nicknamed the Carbuncle. Reports streamed through his AI via entangled comms from multiple Legion battle groups. The eyes, ears, and secret defenses the enemy had seeded throughout the Solar System were being swept away, but it didn’t suit Arun’s plans to destroy them all. Not yet.
“Arun!” snapped the woman behind him. “Don’t get stuck inside that thing in your head again. I need you with me.”
“Sorry,” he said. “My mind’s running smoothly. There’s just a lot for an old man to take in.”
“Don’t feed me that drent! Old men don’t pull strings to be given command of X-Boat flights. Why aren’t we going in for the attack?”
“Psychological impact. Hit them from too many directions at once and they freeze in panic. That’s the impact I want to have on the monkeys. I want monkey fur to be soiled all over the Solar System. And I want it… now!”
Arun opened an entangled connection to Fleet Admiral Indiya. He had a direct line into her mind, but he connected instead to the main comm station on her flagship, Holy Retribution. They needed to be overheard.
“Misfit Alpha to Flag-6. You out of bed yet, Indiya?”
“Flag-6 Alpha to Misfit,” Indiya replied. “Maintain comm discipline.”
“Your call, boss. I am transferring operational command to you. Flag-6, you have Legion Alpha status.”
“I have Legion Alpha status, Misfit, but only until you return. You’re a dumb jock-chodder, McEwan, but come back safe all the same.”
“Planning on it, Legion Alpha. But I have to follow the command transfer rules. It’s that aide of mine. Lissa’s a worse stickler than Nhlappo ever was. Keep my seat warm, Indiya. Misfit out.”
“Laying it on a bit thick, aren’t you?” challenged Lissa from behind him.
He shrugged, the gesture probably invisible beneath the thickness of his pressure suit. “It’s just an act,” he said, feeling good to communicate naturally in the privacy of the Barracuda’s cockpit. If the other occupant of the X-Boat was infected by the Hardit Blood Virus, then they were already as good as dead.
“Even though the expeditionary fleet has only got Holy Retribution, the Lance, and a few fast cruisers in support, there’s enough personnel that someone with the virus will have overheard that and passed on our conversation to the enemy without even knowing they were committing treachery. I don’t want to act naturally. I need to perform according to the character the enemy has painted for me. You of all people should understand that, Springer.”
“Don’t call me that! Don’t even form that word in your head, you absolute moron. Phaedra Tremayne died in the Cull, but Springer was dead long before that. Even if I were stupid enough to allow someone close to me to call me that name, it would not be you, McEwan. It would never be you.”
Arun held his hands up in a gesture of surrender. “OK. That was dumb. Won’t happen again. But you’ve still got my six. Right, Lissa?”
“That’s my job, and I’m a Wolf. We never forget our duty.”
“Glad to hear it. Ga
me face on, Lissa. We’re coming out of the cold.”
Arun switched on active comms to connect with the other six Barracudas in Misfit Flight. If the New Order had a high density of sensor nodes in the area, they would have seen him do so. “Flakes, Choosy, form up on Zébulon and spring the trap. Boudicca, Lard, Cheb, form up on me and wait for my signal.”
“Roger that,” acknowledged Zébulon. “Might as well punch yourself another coffee. We won’t leave much for you to play with.”
“I knew I should have packed doughnuts,” joked Boudicca.
“No one’s having doughnuts,” Arun laughed. “Not until we liberate Hamilton, Canada. That’s what we agreed, and we’ve got an entire star system of bad Hardits to kill first. Now, let’s make a start, Zéb.”
“I’m on it,” Zébulon replied, and led two other Barracudas around the BOI-6437 cluster to hit it from celestial north.
Intel suggested that the New Order’s entire reason for conquering the Solar System was to entice the Legion to attack the Earth. There it would dash itself against the formidable defenses built up around the planet. With everything so centered on Earth, the Hardits had made little effort to defend the rest of the system. But even a little was still far too much.
From long range, Zébulon launched the first salvo of missile clusters at 6437-Delta, the artificial rock that seemed to be the hub of local Hardit signal traffic. Flakes and Choosy followed with a wide spread of ECM pods.
Misfit Flight was a newly formed part of 827 Ripper Squadron, which was itself part of the effort to clear out the limited New Order presence south of the ecliptic. Body of Interest 6437 was a loose cluster of artificial rocks and asteroids in eccentric orbits that had been towed together to form a New Order base.
It had to be destroyed.
And it would be.
Before Zébulon’s strike hit home, the archipelago of rocks lit up with targeting sensors, weapons systems coming hot, and shield domes extending over previously unremarkable areas of frozen rock. Decoys or high value targets? There was no way of knowing yet, but the Hardits distrusted automation with a passion, which meant there were real live Hardits for Misfit to kill on 6437.