by Nick Cole
Maybe he was the lucky one that day. He got out early before the Seeker had a chance to make her madness. Before she tried to make us into something we weren’t and were never supposed to be.
Before she tried to make me believe.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Drop Zero Six Valkyrie was just climbing off the roof of the shot-to-hell terminal when the first fast movers streaked across the battlefield and smoked a bunch of air assets including the Valkyrie One Eight—the HK model on overwatch. A rain squall came out of nowhere as the clouds above flashed lightning, changing eerie colors for an instant. Rain crashed through the open cargo door, dousing us with hot droplets. It felt dirty and oily. Burning like the acid rain on some worlds.
I heard the star scream of the Monarch interceptors as they came in fast. At the same moment I heard the massive thunder break in the skies, snapping and crackling all around us. All ambient noise got suddenly weirdly quiet an instant later. The only sounds that stood out, at least to me on the deck of the drop, was the sound of the comm chatter between the pilots and Resistance combat air control, which was still operational despite the total rout going down along our line. I could hear that and the chatter of the door gunner, a bitter chick with a mean mouth dragging a cigar as she worked the swing-mounted minigun. Swearing violently, she mowed down the first of the Loyalist troopers to hit the roof and try to take us out as the rattling dropship went to engines full and heaved off the LZ, blowing purple smoke and drooling brass from her door guns. I watched the minigun erupt, sending supersonic ball ammo in high doses straight through the roof and the first enemy combatants to make the LZ. Raising their combat rifles to try to get lucky on a drop’s inductor fan as they got smashed by supersonic fire. The minigun ruined them all and then we were suddenly up and over the battlefield watching all kinds of enemy units race forward to exploit the breach in our line. From here the situation looked much worse than I was already worried it was.
So, we had that going for us.
That was when the first of three Monarch fighters streaked over the battlespace and dusted about thirty air and ground assets in a sudden streak of random explosions. Monarch fighters are the best and latest in military hardware. They move like graceful angels of death doling out destruction without discrimination or effort. Both sides got hit. Both sides died near instantly, bewildered that victory, or defeat, had just instantly turned into something far worse.
I didn’t see Valkyrie One Eight get hit. The HK drop riding shotgun on our dustoff. Just saw the flare of the explosion and the sudden orange iridescent hell glow wash over the wounded and dirty of my platoon clinging to the deck of Valkyrie Zero Six.
“Dayum!” swore Punch as the aircrew tried to check for survivors in the burning wreckage of the sister ship now smashing into the field west of the terminal. The co-pilot was already sitrepping an alert and calling for air rescue. Bad day getting worse.
Yeah. Like air rescue was gonna happen today. Today had just officially become cover-your-butts day.
By the time I cranked my head around and saw the burning wreckage of One Eight pile into the tall dead grass, tumbling end over end as it disintegrated all at once, throwing burning fuel and parts, and body parts, in every direction, it was clear no one had survived that sudden crash.
The Vals, as they were known, Silver Valkyries officially, a close air support mercenary dropship company with no small amount of guts, had just lost two crew members in the downed HK drop.
The chick flying our drop, the stunning beauty with the otherworldly eyes I’d seen on the LZ, was over the drop’s comm and telling her flight to stay on task.
“Vals, watch your sectors and get me a loc on those fast movers. They’ll be back in less than two minutes. We’ve gotta make the emergency LZ in less than that!”
Then she said a thing that stunned me, stunned everyone, and made all the weird anomalies in sound and air all around us make sudden sense.
“Monarch Battle Spire entering our airspace now.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
“Those are Avengers!” shouted Punch as another flight of three Monarch state-of-the-art interceptors streaked across the battlefield once more. Explosions developed along the enemy front like sudden cherry blossoms in some kind of new apocalypse bloom. My mind wanted to believe somehow the game had changed for us. That defeat which should have been victory was now somehow victory again.
But the massive leviathan now entering the battlespace over our heads at somewhere around ten thousand feet made notions of victory pipe dreams. This was bad. Real bad in fact. And impossibly, getting worse by the second.
The war on this world was officially over even if no one had said it. And for that matter, the odds indicated Strange Company was done with its time on the galactic lens.
“Thirty seconds to LZ!” shouted the crew chief over the drop’s comm. “Comin’ in hot, ladies!”
She meant us. Strange Company. The actual body stackers. But we were hitching and so of course we’d endure abuse. One of mine did spit some dip on her boots though.
I was proud of that guy.
Meanwhile it was chaos inside the Valkyrie drop, despite the small victories of spitting dip on someone’s shiny combat boots. Stuffed with Reaper wounded and Dog security, those of us who were mobile were hanging on to the cargo straps and trying not to fall over and out as the ship took evasive maneuvers just over the battlefield. Alarms shrieked from the flight deck and I had a real bad feeling one of them indicated missile lock from those sweet-looking death birds the Monarchs were now flying all over our battlefield. Correction—it was their battlefield now. Keep up on current events, Orion. Y’all just got your teeth kicked in.
The dropship’s engines howled urgently. I knew what this was all about. Even though I’d never seen a Monarch Battle Spire in all its terrible glory, few living had, I knew what was going down all around us. They called it “First Pass.” The Ultras were asserting dominance of the field. Every combat unit, friendly or foe, was considered an enemy target during what the Ultra Marines called First Pass. Their chance to kill everything before the demanded surrender.
In other words, for the next few hours, or days, or however long the Ultras felt they needed, surrender wasn’t an official option. Though I had heard rumors that sometimes loopholes existed. I’d also heard there was a planet made of solid gold out beyond the Mutar Nebula.
One sweep over the battlefield to destroy everything. Ultra tradition demanded this be known as the Field of Death and that nothing grow or be built or thrive there for one hundred years to acknowledge the supremacy and totality of their martial force.
It must be fun to always be the winners.
“Maybe we’ll get a chance to tangle, Sarge,” said Puncher, running a systems check on his weapon and not minding that the pilot was flying so fast, and so low, and so recklessly that we were probably going to smash into something in what remained of the last thirty seconds of this flight.
Everything screamed that things were about to end incredibly badly. I could feel it. And I’d felt it before. But this time I was probably right.
I couldn’t take my eyes off what I was seeing below and out the door of the cargo deck, sometimes sideways even. Entire tank and mech platoons suddenly got ignited by fuel-air bomb strikes, cooking the crews inside and turning the landscape into nothing but scorch and char. C-beam strikes came down from the heavens and ripped the terrain up where there had been advancing lines of Loyalist infantry mixed in and fighting with our side. The shock of bright high-energy multi-gigawatt fury scarred the retinas as you looked away from the sudden destruction. Entire divisions had just been melted, the realization scarring the mind worse than the retinas. In their opening moves the Ultras did unimaginable loss of life. If just to get your attention that local fun and games were over. The mind didn’t want to…
And this was just their opening m
ove.
Interceptors streaked down even as the Battle Spire was still finishing execution of her mysterious jump between the stellar gulfs of the universe. The space-fold. Rumors abounded that the Spire was the only ship with fold-capable technology. Were they launching their strikes from that amazing behemoth? Or were there assault carriers rigged for stealth and dumping troops and ships to support the entry?
It was like watching the most fantastic military operation ever witnessed until you realized with horror that you were about to be on the receiving end of all that violence. In the movies, the Ultra Marines were always the heroes saving civilization from the hordes of darkness and the greedheads who wanted to own their own destinies and enslave the colonies rather than submitting to the glory of the Monarchs. In the movies, massive music scores always accompanied this triumphal moment when the Battle Spire entered the scene in a desperate bid against seemingly unstoppable galactic evil. As the hero Ultras raced to the jump decks and flung themselves toward the world below.
In the movies they are always the heroes.
The hour is always desperate.
And the bad guys always die.
It sucked to be the bad guys. Apparently we’d be playing the part of the bad guys today. So it sucks to be us for what’s left of us.
Across what I could see of the line of combat, ours and theirs, both sides were still trying to kill each other regardless. Maybe the Loyalists thought the Ultras were here to support their victory. Maybe the Resistance didn’t see any other move than to just keep on fighting. So they just kept on fighting. Maybe not for any kind of tactical advantage, probably just to get away from the arrival of the Monarchs’ premier fighting force. The Ultras. I watched a running battle between a tank battalion, one of ours, and an anti-vehicle mech’s high-pulse lasers, closing and burning armor-piercing incendiary heavy rounds just to get clear of the engagement zone and the First Pass.
The battles down there were schizophrenic.
No one knew how big the declared First Pass Zone, an official thing, would be at this moment. It was the whim of the Imperator overseeing the Ultra Marines. In a few hours, as the generals from both sides managed to establish diplomatic relations and sue the Ultras for peace, the details would become clear. But right now, in the first moments of total chaos as all cowered and shivered beneath the arrival of the monolithic Battle Spire, sure their end was at hand, the finer points of one’s survival weren’t clear.
Ultras and Monarchs are way above my pay grade. But I knew what every merc on the battlefield was thinking at that exact moment. Show’s over, folks. Time to get your pay, if you can, and get off-world. Real quick. Re-education and time on the cyber-rack’s a real bummer. Ask anyone who can’t remember their real name and how they ended up on some world they had no history on working for the mem factories as little more than a paid slave.
This was why the drop we were in was streaking for a nearby LZ as fast as its engines could scream. Any craft in the air over the battlefield was considered a huge priority target for Monarch air-attack assets. The drop all around us rumbled and shuddered as the reversers kicked in to full and the hover engines throbbed, landing gears deploying, medics trying to hold on to the wounded and comfort the dying.
And still I could not take my eyes off the amazing Battle Spire above us.
It was the largest thing I’d ever seen in my too-short life.
I’ll describe it for the record. If the record survives. Because right at that moment, I wasn’t sure if Strange Company would. No one survives First Pass. No one survives the Ultras. We were dead and the worst part was most of Strange Company knew it. But what else were we gonna do but keep trying to survive for as long as we could?
The central hull of the immense Battle Spire is long. Very long. There is no ship humanity has ever constructed that even approaches its size. At least the size of New Manhattan City on Sakur. But, for the record since that is what this is, I’ve heard there are larger Battle Spires. The Red Dragon is supposedly the biggest. At that moment, watching the monster heave into local airspace, dropping several armies and combat teams all at once, I had no idea what this one was called.
The aft section of the Battle Spire is wide, where the engines should be but aren’t. The local-space maneuver engines are all along the hull. Its main engine for motive transport throughout the universe, the fold engine, is supposedly deep within the ship, but no one knows for sure because no one’s allowed to get close to a Battle Spire. Automatic death sentence. But whatever and wherever it is, there’s nothing conventional about that engine. It’s one of the most closely guarded secrets in the Monarchy.
The aft section, rather than housing the main engine, presuming it doesn’t, is for the immense hover and a-grav converters that allow the Battle Spire to set down tail first and establish an overlord tower from which to continue the destruction of a world. It’s like a wedding cake top to bottom but moving horizontally in this configuration at ten thousand feet as it executes the space-fold and enters the time stream in the skies above our heads to begin the invasion. The hull races forward up there, tapering at the extreme end, the bow, into a series of command blisters that form the bridge and finally the navigation needle which conspiracy theorists say is critical to the space-fold engine located deep within the immense ship.
As I understand it, the central hull is all Monarch blue. The main hull is brilliant white and dotted with glittering lights that come from the inside and seem to be small cities crawling along its tapering cylinder. All of it run, crewed, and lived in by the ship’s complement of beam gunners, transport officers, supply chiefs, and air attack squadron pilots both sub and orbital. I have no credibility in guessing the size of the crew complement, but if I had to, I’d put it at upwards of ten thousand. But I could be off by a hundred thousand. The mind fractures looking at the immense size of the ship that has come to kill us all drifting into the skies above our war like some casual end of the world come to make good on its promise.
That’s not totally correct. The ship will kill some of us. The Ultras will kill the rest. That’s how it’ll go from here on out for what remains of this world’s last gasp of self-rule.
If the magnificence of the incredibly long central hull wasn’t just a universal wonder in and of itself… I mean seriously, how do they build these things? Mega-corporations can build city-sized orbital refineries or bulk cargo haulers, and of course small destroyers, cutters, liners, and the scouts and free traders. But nothing even approaches the incredible size of a Battle Spire.
If anything, its very existence makes the argument that the Monarchs are better than the rest of us. To build a ship of that size defies every known science. And yet… there it is. Moments from raining down a thousand different forms of death on our heads.
One of our wounded just died on the deck of the Drop Zero Six. Maybe two minutes from getting triaged by Chief Cutter’s medics. Now he’ll go to Preacher. I watch as Choker shuts the eyes of the dead man.
As I was saying, if the central hull wasn’t enough to make you remind yourself to close your jaw and stop gaping like some slack-jawed local yokel, then it’s the Ultra Battle Rings rotating independently about the hull that make you dizzy with fatal wonder.
I don’t want to look at the dead man on the deck or remember his name. Or ask myself if I got his story down in the logs. It’s all too much right now. So I look at the fantastic death machine I’m being given the rare privilege of actually seeing during an invasion. As I’ve said, this is a sight reserved mostly for the deceased of other forgotten battles.
Death and wonder don’t mix.
On this Spire there are five. Five battle rings. Again, I’ve heard other Spires have more. But five is more than enough to assure us of our imminent destruction. The rings are not attached in any way to the main hull. And yet they encompass its diameter, rotating languidly like some magnetic levitation art instal
lation inside a mem zillionaire’s private tower on one of the Bright Worlds.
These rings are where the Ultras are.
Even now as I watch, mechs, walkers, and actual airborne are being dropped all across the battlefield. Combat teams, strike divisions, enforcers, inquisition squads, death squads, special forces, armor, artillery, and drop commandos. Departing from the drop, jump, and combat cargo decks.
It’s raining death out there.
It’s beautiful to behold if you’re given to grim fascination and your mind just keeps whispering in the background, low enough so you can ignore it completely, that you’re all about to die. Then, yes, it really is fascinating to behold.
They come down like falling stars, the big mechs that will soon form the main assets of their attack and sweep during the First Pass. Walkers with GAU guns and missile packs. Big walkers with 140mm main guns and anti-personnel chain guns. Heavies with Maas Gausers and A-beams to sear right through structures and boil any defenders inside.
Small dots like swarms of dark birds race through the drop formations.
“Drones!” yells Punch over the howling engines as the drop slams in hard to our new LZ.
“Down! Down! Down!” screams the drop’s beefy crew chief. “Don’t forget yer bags, ladies, that’s the last flight of Air Val. Every man and woman for themselves.”
We’ve come down inside a supply yard near the main city that was supposed to be our follow-up target of exploitation if the attack on the airfield went well.
Which it didn’t. Obviously.
I slide off the cargo deck, dragging my rifle and ruck, and the beefy Val crew chief is next to me. Her voice low and husky. A woman’s voice.
“We’ll help with your dead, Sergeant,” she says. The opposite of how she’d been on the ride over when I’d begun to hate her for calling us ladies.
But she’s a woman. And women never stop caring, nurturing. It’s hardwired into them. Even if they are warriors. They always care for the wounded bird.