Rudinsky / "BIG GIRLS DON'T CRY" / 45
Big Girls Don’t Cry
Shadowdragon War Diaries: Vol. 1
By J.C. Rudinsky
Big Girls Don’t Cry
Smashwords Edition
Copyright: J.C. Rudinsky March 2014
Cover Art: J.C. Rudinsky
ScryNet Productions
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in retrieval system, copied in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise transmitted without written permission from the publisher. You must not circulate this book in any format.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Table of Contents
Title
Copyright
Glossary of Terms
About the Author
ONE
Fort Belden
Lestante Province, Calandra
18 Avolin, 1376
Sherry Lanis sat in her father’s lap, clutching tightly to his shirt as he gently rocked her back and forth. Tears streamed down her face; making her long, black hair cling to her cheeks in matted clumps. The hem of her dress was torn and stained red from the stream of blood that ran down her leg from a skinned left knee.
It was her best dress--the yellow one with thin, puffy, sleeves. Her mother had bought this dress for Sherry while on a trip to Medinara and insisted that she only wear it for certain occasions. Now Sherry had ruined it.
She’d fallen off her bicycle, the one her father had gotten her less than a week ago. It was her favorite thing in the world and she’d spent the entire morning at church anxiously waiting to get home to ride it. The thought had so preoccupied her mind that the instant they arrived she ran to grab it.
She only wanted to ride around the driveway, which seemed harmless enough, at least to the impatient mind of a child.
But dresses weren’t made for riding bicycles, and the loose fabric had gotten caught around one of the foot-pedals, pulling her off balance. She fell onto the pavement, tearing the dress and skinning her knee.
She wiped her eyes and looked up at her father as she tried to catch her breath between sobs. He was still wearing his military dress uniform, the one he always wore to church. He smiled down at her with his slightly lopsided grin.
She laid her head against his chest and gently fingered the silver insignia pinned to his uniform that marked him as an artillery captain. She sniffled a bit as her sobbing finally began to subside. The pain wasn’t really that bad. Far worse was the shame that she felt over ruining her dress and the fear of facing her mother’s anger and disappointment.
But, for the moment, she was safe; curled in her father’s lap on the front steps of their small house at the Coalition base of Fort Belden. Even the terrible war that raged across the world somehow seemed far, far away.
Her father cupped her chin in his hand and gently lifted her head up to face him. He wiped away the lingering tears on her face. His strong hands were rough from many cycles of handling heavy guns and ordinance, but his touch was amazingly tender.
“Better now?” he asked.
She nodded and forced a slight smile. He lightly tweaked her nose and she recoiled, contorting her face in annoyance but giggling, despite herself.
“Good,” he said.
“You’re a big girl now; and big girls don’t cry, right?”
TWO
Redoubt Montrey
Uregard, Northern Calandra
3 Ii’Laan, 1394
It was late winter in northern Calandra, and the fortress-city of Montrey lay snuggled beneath a heavy mantle of white. It was approaching midday but the sun's rays were masked behind a pallid gray sky and a moderate snow cloaked the city in a dreary, frigid, haze.
The falling snow crowned the tops of abandoned buildings, their hollow, exposed shells encrusted with ice by the chill wind that swept through their fractured walls and shattered windows. Once symbols of mankind's ingenuity and enterprise, they now stood as silent, eerie monuments to the nearly three cycle long siege of the city.
Wind-blown snow wafted through the empty streets, settling over wrecked vehicles, deserted defensive positions, abandoned weapons, and countless bodies that lay frozen amidst the drifts and rubble.
The streets echoed with the rumbling of explosions, the sharp rattling of automatic weapons, and the high-pitched wailing of arcane weaponry, indicating that there were still those who struggled desperately to avoid a similar fate.
A formation of three Coalition LAV's weaved among the battered, empty towers of the inner city, their floodlights cutting shimmering lances through the snowy haze. Generally known as hoppers, the aircraft were deceptively agile, despite their boxy, ungainly-looking design. Skimming only a few mets above the debris-littered street, they stirred up swirling clouds behind them as they banked sharply around the corner of a dilapidated building, heading deeper into the city.
Normally silent to mundane ears, their enchantech magines now hummed audibly as they strained to siphon enough ambient magical energy to keep the aircraft aloft in the heavily Vim-disrupted environment. The effect sounded much like giant insects in flight, a phenomenon that had earned them the nickname "bugs" among the troops.
But to VimSensitives, those who had a talent for sensing magic, the sound of a siphon reactor was anything but silent. It was a high-pitched, undulating, whine that never stopped, only varying in pitch as it passed through fluctuating densities in the Etherum. ‘Sensitives who were unaccustomed to the peculiarities of enchantech equipment usually found the incessant, eerie, wailing almost maddening.
Lieutenant Sheryl Lanis had long ago learned to tune out the grating whine of siphon reactors, pushing it to the back of her mind as one might the conversations in a crowded room. As a fourth tier Battlemancer in the CAF's 33rd Arcane Corps and a specialist in the use of BoosterTech, she found the unsettling drone of enchantech devices almost as familiar as breathing.
She leaned forward in her seat near the front of the hopper’s cargo bay, carefully studying the map that was spread across her knees. On it was a layout of the city, crisscrossed with lines and symbols--hastily scrawled in blue and red pencil--denoting Coalition defensive lines and fortifications.
She snapped her hand down on the map as a gust of icy wind blasted in through the open bay door, threatening to rip the paper away. She glanced across the aisle, peering past the door-gunner manning the pintle-mounted heavy machine gun. Squinting through the blistering wind, she looked for some landmark by which she might be able to pinpoint the flight's location.
The scarred facade of a building roared past the open door, sliding away like a curtain to reveal the ruined skyline beyond. Smoke from countless fires mingled with the falling and wind-blown snow, creating a chilly gray haze that smelled faintly of explosives, charred wood, and death.
A series of bright flashes erupted in the distance, quickly followed by a thunderous rumbling. Imperium artillery strikes were now reaching the inner city.
Such a thing would have been unthinkable just a few hours ago, when the city’s powerful protective barrier wards would have intercepted the majority of such attacks.
But with those barriers now shut down, the entire central city had become vulnerable to attack, and the Imps had certainly wasted no time in taking advantage of the opening.
For what it was worth, the shelling was a sign that the first stage
of the 33rd’s primary mission had been completed. Now came the hard part.
Montrey’s weakened garrison force was heavily outnumbered by the Imperium assault Legion. The city's barrier wards had evened the odds significantly, allowing the defenders to hold against the enemy's superior numbers for several cycles. Without the wards, the Coalition forces were rapidly losing ground and already close to breaking under the unmitigated attack. CAF defensive positions had been steadily falling back all morning and full rout was inevitable.
The only question was how long could they hold? It fell to units like Shiv Nine to ensure that it was long enough.
As bad as the situation appeared, it hadn’t really come as a surprise to most. The Imperium had been pounding Montrey relentlessly for the past several months, attempting to finally put to rest a siege that had ground up nearly three cycles and thousands of troops.
Still, despite overwhelming odds, the Redoubt had held strong, in large part due to it's powerfully shielded central ward. Unfortunately, the same could not be said for the fortified lines to the east and west of the city. Despite the valiant efforts of CAF forces, repeated Imperium assaults had finally managed to uproot the entrenched defenders, pushing them several kilomets to the south. This had left Montrey in a weakly defended salient that was now seriously threatened with encirclement.
After several counterattacks had failed to reestablish the front, the Coalition High Command had decided that it was best to abandon Montrey and consolidate their defenses further south around Redoubt Halsburg.
Complicating what would already be a costly fighting withdrawal was the fact that Montrey’s main siphon reactor was still active. The massive core Vimstones of its Keiler-Felbs Array were responsible for supplying the vast amounts of magical energy required to maintain the city’s formidable ward matrices.
The 'stones were absolutely priceless -- a valuable prize for the invading Imperium forces should they be captured intact. To prevent this, Command had tasked the 33rd Arcane Corps, supported by the skycruisers Landry and Absolution, with the difficult mission of recovering or destroying the ‘stones at any cost.
General Hanz Daego, commander of the city’s defensive garrison, had been abolutely livid when Lance Marshal Ghelen, commander of the 33rd, had informed him that her orders were to shut down the reactor. For cycles, Montrey had been considered a key element in the Coalition’s northern front, yet Daego's troops had been left to defend the city with very little support, making the General understandably bitter.
When the Landry unexpectedly gated in over the city, Daego and his troops had believed that long-requested reinforcements had finally arrived. Instead, they found themselves being ordered to perform a holding action, without the city’s defensive wards, in order to protect a bunch of magic rocks. The fleeting boost in morale was quickly replaced by despair and resentment.
Ultimately, however, Daego had little choice but to concede that the city was lost. Reluctantly, he issued the orders for his forces to hold the line long enough for the Absolution's crew to secure the vital reactor ‘stones for transport, knowing that it was a death sentence for thousands of troops that could never be evacuated.
Although the recovery operation was her foremost responsibility, Marshal Ghelen had assured Daego that she would not abandon his men. As proof, she’d ordered her best Shiv Teams and units from the 8th Rangers to run interference for the garrison units while the Landry's LAV wing evacuated as many troops as time allowed. It was a considerable gesture of respect that the Lance Marshal would defy protocol by risking valuable Arcane Corps units to protect Daego's mundane troops.
For soldiers like Lieutenant Lanis, it was just another day at work.
Another blast of cold air shot through the open door of the vehicle. Lanis tugged the white hood of her cold-weather armor jack closer around her face and adjusted the high collar. The elemental wards of her runic armor kept her warm enough, but the occasional frigid gust on her face and the misty vapor of her breath served as a reminder that it was well below freezing outside.
She glanced back at the rest of her squad, who huddled on the benches along either side of the hopper’s cargo area, bundled in their heavy winter fatigues and Rune-Boosted body armor, which was currently painted a mottled pattern of gray and white to better blend with the frozen, urban landscape.
Unfortunately, despite being enchanted with anti-magic and deflection wards, standard issue REBAr didn’t really help much against the elements, lacking the proper schemata for such protection. Still, these days, they were lucky to have any magical protection at all, and they knew it. For the most part, they kept any grumbling amongst themselves.
Most mundane troops, like the ones defending the city below, had little to nothing to protect them from the magical hazards of modern warfare. The Coalition simply didn’t have the resources to equip the entire army with enchantech gear, making elite units, like the 33rd, the exception rather than the rule. It was just one of many signs that things weren’t going well.
“Lieutenant?”
Lanis looked up to see the copilot standing in the doorway to the cockpit. He grabbed the overhead rail to keep his balance as the aircraft suddenly banked into a tight turn around a building. The powerful harmonics of the LAV’s engines gave his voice a strange reverberation, as though he were talking through a high-speed rotary fan.
“Delta zone LZ’s coming up in two minutes,” he said, “Still no contact with sector command.”
He paused as the LAV suddenly banked hard to avoid a burst of ground fire. Luminescent tracers zipped past the open doorway and several disconcerting dull thunks echoed through the bay as the craft's light armor stopped the apparently small-caliber mundane rounds. The door-gunner rattled off several bursts in response. As the ship leveled out the copilot continued, yelling over the noise.
“This area’s hot as hell, right now! We've got incursions all over the place and ‘ScryNet’s pegging Ned activity all up and down the front!
"It's a fraggin' rat's nest down there, Lieutenant! No telling what we're dropping you into!”
Neds. Lanis’s thoughts hung on the word. Ned was common soldier slang for Netherdragons, those sadistic wyrms from the world of Gnisis. Self-proclaimed overlords of the Imperium, they, and their enigmatic so-called emperor, the Shadowdragon, were responsible for this war--a war that raged for over fifty cycles and claimed or destroyed the lives of millions of Elandian inhabitants, as well as countless numbers of Imperium conscripts.
Lanis already knew that they were here. She could sense their magical channeling as clearly as she could smell the smoke from the burning city below. It was a foul, unnatural, sensation--pure evil, just like them.
Her hand slipped down to rest on the grip of her EP rifle.
The copilot continued. “We can’t stay at the LZ. ‘We get caught on the ground and none of us get home.”
Lanis nodded. “Understood.”
“We’ll circle the area as long as possible,” he added, “Just give a yell when you need a pickup.
“Good luck, Lieutenant!” He gave a quick salute then turned and ducked back through the hatch to the front of the craft.
Lanis pulled her V3-A EP rifle out of the long leather holster strapped to her right leg and gave the weapon a quick visual inspection. Similar in size to a standard carbine, the somewhat bulky Ethergenic Plasma rifle was a powerful BoosterTech weapon. Built around a modified K/F array, it was basically a magical transformer that amplified raw Vim into a physical state.
This unstable, quasi-magical plasma was then focused through alchemechanical compression lenses into narrow bolts. EP rifle bursts were extremely disruptive to magical matrices and could shred apart most wards and barriers with only a few shots. Their discordant magical harmonics were so powerful that even mundanes could hear them. The high-pitched squeal of EP rifles bolts had earned the weapon the nickname "Banshee", in part because it was often the last sound heard by its target.
Despite the
Battlemancers' arsenal of enchantech-boosted channeling techniqs, the Banshee had become their most iconic weapon. Even the most arrogant Imperium netherdragon had learned to respect its terrifying, deathly, wail.
But using it came at a cost.
The high magical draw of an EP rifle could only be powered by the user channeling Vim into the weapon at the time of firing. While a skilled Battlemancer might be able to channel a portion of the energy from ambient Vim, the sheer volume needed in so short a time virtually required the firer to supply the majority of the energy. Essentially, in a sort of bizarre karmic irony, every time Lanis used the weapon, a small portion of her own life essence was burned away to power it.
She ejected the Vimstone cartridge from the bottom of the weapon and slowly turned the small metal cylinder in her fingers. Inside the cartridge, suspended in an aerogel medium, was a tiny Vimstone, the key element in the booster's amplifying array. This particular 'stone was rated a D1, the lowest on the Dynardeval Scale, but plenty adequate for its purpose.
Lanis used her Vimsense to delve the harmonics of the ‘stone within, pushing a tiny amount of Vim into the stone as she listened to the sound of the resulting resonance. There were no noticeably discordant harmonics or obvious variances, which would indicate impurities within the ‘stone. That was important. EP rifles were particularly hard on 'stone cartridges, often getting only a few shots before burnout. A flawed or damaged ‘stone would more easily succumb to burnout, possibly failing at a critical moment or, worse, subjecting the user to amplified Backlash, the dangerous burst of uncontrolled Vim resulting from unfocused channeling.
Lanis reloaded the cartridge, then gently ran her hand down the side of the weapon. As her fingers moved along the worn and stained wooden stock, she silently counted the three distinct gouges carved into the wood. Each mark represented a single netherdragon kill.
Big Girls Don't Cry: Shadowdragon War Diaries Vol. 1 Page 1