by Tim C Taylor
As the date for the Legion invasion had neared, Pedro ordered attack tunnels to be built within striking distance of Hardit anti-aircraft and other defenses.
And now that the Human McEwan was here to lead the Trog armies, he put them to good use.
At their new battle commander’s pheromone signal, Trog swarm squads began swimming through the soil that separated their jumping off points from their targets.
Hardit Janissaries were well-trained and resilient fighters, but they were natural tunnel dwellers, craving the security of thick tunnel walls of soil and rock. What could be worse than for those same tunnel walls to betray them, to be the avenue of attack for a merciless enemy who could move with ease through hardpacked soil to emerge with murder in their hearts?
Nothing terrified Hardits more than Trog warriors.
In hundreds of small actions, Trogs of the guardian life-stage sprang out of Hardit walls under the direction of scribe officers.
There was no subtlety to their assault. Anything that did not smell of the Nest was to die, and die they did.
Metal-sheathed feet slashed through Hardit limbs, and decapitated their foes, locking in death trios of eyes wide open with horror.
The heads of these Trog guardians were wreathed in thickets of horns that resembled super-hardened chitinous brambles. These were rammed into flesh whether still living or not.
To the guardians, dead or dying Hardits smelled almost as repugnant as those who now fought back with guns. They did not cease until those who were not of the Nest were gored, speared, and stomped into a furry red paste. Never mind that their comrades were falling in great numbers now – the Hardit survivors of the initial attack were rallying, bringing heavier weapons to bear.
Their scribe officers cared for their soldiers, but the guardians were beyond caring for themselves. In this, the final stage of the complex Trog life-cycle, the sentience of individuals who had themselves once been scribes and engineers and other modes, was now worn away to vestigial stumps. Their former names, friendships, achievements and history were mourned by those they left behind as they had entered their cocoons at the end of the previous life mode. The guardians who emerged, dripping and restless for war, had been reduced to simple killing machines with no other function.
Nonetheless, it was a role for which they were perfectly designed.
And when they had finished their grisly task, they stood without purpose on ground slick with blood, ichor, chitin shards, bone, and spent munition casings.
They moved aside to allow their scribe officers to pass through, their minds empty until given fresh instructions.
The scribes spiked the Hardit guns with acid, shot up sophisticated targeting equipment with their sidearms, and laid charges inside barrels.
The Great Parent of Nest Hortez had intended to use the Hardits’ own guns upon them, making up for the Nest’s critical lack of heavy weapons, but the Human McEwan had insisted this was too risky.
According to the human, the New Order commanders might be worthless pieces of excrement, but that didn’t mean they were stupid frakks. McEwan insisted that the moment you underestimated your enemy was the point when all your plans turned to drent.
The Great Parent and the Human McEwan had been locked in disagreement. No words were spoken, but none were needed.
There could be no battle for supremacy within the Nest hierarchy, not with its structure fixed so rigidly. With horror welling in alien breasts as they perceived the disagreement between the two most senior Nest commanders, the Trog warriors had begun to fidget, their minds trying to encompass the blasphemous prospect of killing the Human McEwan, despite the powerful scent that imbued his every cell.
In retrospect, many scribes remarked that this was a perfect showdown, almost as if engineered. When the two commanders argued vehemently in one of the principal garrison caverns, the confrontation ended in an astonishing display. The Great Parent lowered its antennae in submission, with overpowering pheromone instructions to all present that every single member of Nest Hortez from the lowliest Guardian to the Great Parent must defer to Human McEwan in all matters of war.
The unprecedented scene had imprinted so strongly on the Nest commanders that they were almost jumping out of their chitinous carapaces to do the bidding of the freshly anointed military commander. Indeed, several commanders were so overcome with stress hormones in response to the extraordinary event, that they suffered cardiac arrest and perished at the scene. For the surviving witnesses, the experience was so intense that when they passed on the scent memory to their peers, they in turn felt McEwan’s power with almost the same fervor as if they had been present at the Great Parent’s submission.
Henceforth, the Human McEwan was to be known as the Queen of Battle, and his military orders were paramount.
And now, with the opening act of the battle concluded, they obeyed their Queen’s orders to return to mustering points and await reinforcements.
Meanwhile, high above the surface, New Order defensive platforms in low orbit blared with alarms as a surprise naval attack materialized out of the vacuum, energy beams, spinal-mount railguns, and missile swarms blasting them at point blank range.
The defensive capability of the Hardit platforms had been heavily upgraded in recent days. Although most platforms died in this initial attack, filling the skies above Australia with explosions and fiery debris, many survived.
But the attack from space had drawn Hardit attention long enough to allow the following troopships to approach the outer reaches of Earth’s atmosphere. These were not Admiral Indiya’s command – her flagship only being contacted by the attacking fleet as it went in. This was the Sleeping Legion, and it had arrived with a fierce lust to avenge the comrades who had been slaughtered through New Order treachery on the distant world of Tranquilty-4.
They had waited decades for this, but now it was time to bring the war to Tawfiq Woomer-Calix and finish her once and for all. And they had just over eight days left in which to do so.
— Chapter 26 —
Colonel Lance Scipio
Orbital drop over Australia
Lance Scipio sneaked a sidelong glance at the woman he loved.
As a Cardamine Island Marine, Lance saw nothing wrong in giving Sashala Kraevoi a gesture of his affection, even in front of the half company sitting with them in their dropship.
But Sashala was from Detroit, and in her era people had grown up differently, with inflexible upper lips and iron rods up their backsides.
The troopship to which the little craft was clamped shuddered under the fury of Hardit orbital platforms.
“Guess the monkey-vecks have finally seen us,” he said on the unit-wide channel.
A command advisory feed in his visor HUD notified him that the drop was imminent.
In a few seconds, he would lead the first wave down to the planet below. And if the techs had not gambled correctly on how to counter the Hardit corrosion barrier, a few seconds later, he, Sashala, and his entire command would be eaten down to their constituent atoms. Everyone here was thinking the same thing; they’d have to be idiots not to.
He could sense the panic beginning to twist the guts of his brave comrades. Time to raid his meagre store of stirring speeches. He hated this part of the job.
“Brother and sister Marines,” he announced, “we’ve all heard stories of Arun McEwan. It’s easy to think of him as an icon, a demigod of outrageous fortune. But I’ve spoken with him and he’s a real man, a Marine like you and me. With the same dreams… and similar urges.” That won a rumble of laughter. “And if you think the stories about him are wild, you haven’t heard the half of it. I swear, the man is as mad as a bucket of Hardits on heat. And that makes him all right in my book, because whether he realizes it or not, he so obviously has Island heritage that we’re practically related.”
That earned a few more chuckles, though as he said the words, Lance wondered whether they were true. Then green lamps lit the compartment, sig
naling five seconds to drop.
“Time to earn some fresh ink, Marines,” Lance shouted enthusiastically. “Forward to victory!”
The dropship clamp released, and a fraction of a second later the hangar deck retracted, and the Sleeping Legion fell into Earth’s outer atmosphere.
— Chapter 27 —
Arun McEwan
Hidden Dragoon Army
Arun watched Scipio’s dropships descend through enemy fire and begin to flare as they entered the upper atmosphere, superheating cones of atmospheric gasses compressed by their descent. For him to be seeing this at all, the dropships must have made it through the corrosion barrier.
They’d finally done it!
Debris clouds provided the evidence that this was by no means an uncontested drop, but after the regional Hardit surface-to-air defenses had been slaughtered by Nest Hortez, the fire streaking up from the ground was limited.
It was a sight Arun had seen on a dozen invasions, though usually from inside a dropship weaving down to make his appointment with the LZ. Now that Scipio’s wave had passed through the barrier in orbit, what was strangest about this drop was where Arun was viewing it from. Not only was he on the ground already, but he was watching it via a viewscreen secured to the back of his steed’s crest, a fluted shield grown from layers of chitinous armor sheets filled with spongey layers to absorb the energy of incoming fire. Pedro had proudly explained that the frilled and fluted crest had been styled on an ancient Earth creature called Triceratops.
The frills along the top could pass as something from a naturally evolved creature, but then the crest descended like a snow plough in a purely functional design with deeply recessed shuttered apertures to protect the eyes and antennae of the Trog.
The Trogs had no desire for spoken names – their scent being ample identification – but when Arun named his steed Hansel, and Springer followed suit, naming hers Gretel, the unnamed Trogs demanded names from their human riders.
Arun shook away the strangeness of this bunker where his dragoons waited to play their part, and patched into the network of drones and orbital sensors. He observed the opening acts of this battle for Australia on his Triceratops-shaped screen.
The mysterious Rakasa fleet of troopships and escorts was taking a serious pounding from Hardit orbital defenses, but had managed to open up a wide-enough gap in space that the wave of dropships had punched through.
But the New Order were a formidable foe, and the Hardits were already redeploying their forces to close the gaps in their defenses – in orbit, in the atmosphere, and underground. But for the time being, the sky and space above Australia belonged to Arun. The Mars fleet under Indiya’s command had also signaled that it was moving in to support, but was hours away if not more, and worryingly, it was Admiral Kreippil who was in command, relieving Indiya who was apparently resting.
Indiya’s absence was a problem for the future, as were the New Order reserves. It was the Hardit ground forces in Australia that Arun had to contend with first. Legion intelligence said the Hardit defense strategy mixed fixed defensive emplacements with a mobile reserve that could deliver a crushing counter-attack to any landing zone before its defenders had time to establish their position.
In the earlier landing in the Sahara, Aelingir’s assault had overwhelmed the Hardit mobile reserves through weight of numbers, and the sheer impulse of an attacking force relishing the chance to finally bring the fight to Tawfiq. But Arun wondered whether the initial success in the Sahara was at least as much due to Tawfiq deliberately leading them into her traps.
Arun watched in dismay as the Hardit mobile reserve in Australia revealed itself as it emerged from hidden underground positions in far greater strength than he had planned for. Scipio’s forces coming down through the sky didn’t have Aelingir’s numbers and now looked inadequate. Backbone of the Hardit reserves were lightning-fast behemoth tanks with a huge main armament, secondary turrets, and a protective screen of attendant vehicles to provide force deflector screen and anti-missile defenses.
The human capital ships in orbit were trying to take out these behemoths, but energy weapons were withered by the intervening atmosphere, and missiles were easily swatted away by the attendant swarm of anti-missile trucks.
These beasts weren’t so much tanks as miniature battleships the size of a shuttlecraft. They were making at least 15 klicks per second as they moved over the ground in a holding pattern to avoid offering up a stationary target. The main turrets housed a large-caliber railgun which they raised high in the sky… at the descending cloud of dropships. Despite their high-speed movement along the uneven ground, the turrets absorbed the shock, keeping the main guns perfectly aligned on their targets.
Through a camera in the lower stratosphere, Arun watched a gun bloom in fire as a behemoth spat its first shot at the upper atmosphere, leaving a cloud of burning air behind as it sped away.
Seconds later, he started hearing reports of dropships being shot out the sky. Intel had assessed that 27 of these behemoths had revealed themselves so far, and by the time Barney had told him the casualty figures from the initial tank salvo, he’d seen the fire belch again from the end of the massive railguns.
To the Hardits it must have seemed like a video game on easy setting. At this rate, none of the dropships would make it down, and without the heavy weapons the Sleeping Legion was bringing with them, Arun’s attack on Tawfiq stood no chance.
But Arun was no longer the Marine cadet who’d dreamed of a human legion. He had learned to respect his opponents.
“Activate Antilles defense,” he said, but he needn’t have bothered. The scribes acting as aides raced to implement his order, having read his intention through his scent transmitter before the words finished forming in his mouth.
A mile away from his hidden position, a patch of desert had been labelled Landing Zone-Alpha. Buried beneath the LZ, repurposed Nest ventilation turbines spun into action, as did force beams and an ever-shifting pattern of energy shields and pressure barriers.
A slowly circling tunnel of red dust and dirt reached up into the sky, where the dropships were coming in hot and hard through the devastating fire of the behemoths. The plummeting ships fired every last piece of defensive munitions in a desperate attempt to reach the safety of the rapidly extending dirt tunnel.
With the New Order satellites and defense platforms reduced to orbiting wreckage, the tanks lacked effective targeting data. The combination of first the defensive munitions and then the unnatural sand tornado quickly degraded the accuracy of the Hardit fire.
The dropships – the two thirds who’d made it to the sand tunnel – landed at the LZ. The bad news was that they would all be clumped together into a single force concentration.
With the behemoths leading the New Order reserves charging toward LZ-Alpha, this was very bad. Every Hardit missile and shell within range would be retargeting on the LZ, a task made easier because it was situated in the shadow of the most obvious natural landmark in central Australia, a thousand-foot high sandstone brick that glowed an eerie red in the late afternoon sun.
Before the human inhabitants had been killed or driven away centuries ago, some had venerated this place they called Uluru Ayers Rock. Maybe in recognizing the spiritual power of this place, they had sensed an echo of the crucial events playing out here today. Who could tell? Certainly, Arun had learned that cause and effect was not a simple one-way flow along the river of time.
He winked at Springer whose knuckles showed white through her scales as she gripped the rail that grew out of Gretel’s thorax for the use of human riders. She even smelled good to him on an inhuman level, a Nest Hortez scent marker having been inserted within her chest cavity the day before.
He had to force himself to look away from her and take in a view of the hushed assembly of human and Trog warriors hidden inside the rock. Everyone here was silently waiting for his command.
The one redeeming aspect of concentrating Scipio’s units close t
o Uluru Ayers Rock was that Arun could predict the New Order response to the letter. True, the enemy’s numbers were greater than he’d hoped, but he had planned for this outcome from the very start.
After a lifetime of being manipulated by friends, conspirators, and enemies alike, now it was his turn.
— Chapter 28 —
Colonel Lance Scipio
LZ-Alpha
Lance Scipio’s first impression of Earth was of a featureless drentball of a planet infested with angry Hardits. The only landmarks in the flat desert were a red zit of a mountain, and fat enemy tanks that were seriously ruining his day because they wouldn’t die, no matter what he threw at them. At least the mountain wasn’t trying to kill him.
He’d ordered his Marines to fire EMP grenades from a range of vintages, knowing from experience that New Order military tech was often vulnerable to ordnance long declared obsolete.
Looked like the Hardits had grown wise to that, because the tanks hadn’t even slowed in the face of EM fireworks that had burned so brightly that his AI, Xena, cursed him, his mother, and his entire lineage, whether yet born or not.
But when he unleashed GX-cannon firing X-Ray munitions, doubling them up with volleys of anti-tank missiles, that was when he really started to worry. The super-tanks shrugged off the punishment, scorched and battered but with those enormous railguns still operational, and making it impossible for Lance to properly establish his position.
As for the vaunted General McEwan, savior of all humankinds, Lance checked the BattleNet tactical map in his HUD once more, but the man had yet to show up to his own battle. All he’d supplied to the party were giant ants Xena called guardians, which had chased away any of his Marines who’d gotten too close to them.