DinoMechs: Battle Force Jurassic

by Isaac Stone

  The mission resembled every other Babylon Temple I’d ever seen. It was built on several levels and had a garden around it. Outside the temple was a wall, which is where the dead Invaders lay. I could see a few out buildings behind the wall of the mission. One was on fire and a few people worked to put it out with buckets. As always, the entrance to the temple was in the rear and away from prying eyes. The dull red color they’d painted the temple reminded me of the one outside our building back home. It wouldn’t stand much longer if the kaiju got through us and reached it.

  I looked back at Flash and his railgun.

  “Take him out!” I yelled at Flash.

  “Aye-aye, Captain!” he responded and pulled the trigger. The kid just had to make a joke.

  There was a whoosh sound and the projectile left the barrel. It didn’t give much of recoil; the real problem was making sure the gun was as still as possible and sighted on the objective.

  The kaiju, armored up with the latest metal suit the Invaders could muster, was stomping its way toward us. I watched as the kaiju went down. One moment its head was back in the air making a loud battle cry, the next there was a huge splurge of blood in the middle of its chest. The spot appeared suddenly, almost the same time Flash pulled the trigger. The kaiju froze in place. It held its position for a few seconds and then began to topple over. It reminded me of one of these slow motion images you see in the videos with a narrator telling the audience what is about to happen. The kaiju’s guts had been sent across the forest and a large hole was in the midst of its torso. I could see the internal organs, those which remained, and light from the other side of it. It began to go down faster and faster as the full effects of the hit registered. The monster crashed down to the floor of the forest with a rumble we could hear from where our unit stood. The big bastard was dead and the Invaders had lost the key part of their battle plan.

  “Good shooting, Flash,” I told him. “You just bagged your first kaiju.” The creature’s body didn’t even twitch when it hit the ground.

  “Stuff him up and send him home,” he joked. “I’d like to see that trophy in my parent’s living room.”

  “Don’t joke about that,” I told him as I thought about Hans.

  “Just having fun, Sarge.”

  “I know, but we aren’t out of the woods yet.”

  I ordered the rest of the men forward and we proceeded to secure the landing zone. Hamid took his squad into the forest and went after the Invaders. With their kaiju dead, they didn’t seem to have much of a plan. Most of them fled or were ripped apart by the plasma bolts. Once again, they were easy targets at close range and refused to surrender. Everyone knew not to get to close to a surrounded stalker since it would detonate when it ran out of ammunition. At the time, we didn’t know if the suicide bombs they carried were self-detonated, automatic, or done remotely.

  SIX

  After a few more tense minutes of shooting, we had the landing zone secured and let Orbital know they could send Terry and Captain Daphne down to the surface. If this objective was indeed important to the Invaders then they would no doubt be sending more kaiju after us, and honestly that shot by Flash with the railgun was damn lucky. Usually the railguns were good for wounding the beasts, but most of the time it wasn’t as clean a kill as our kid managed. Our shuttle lifted off and we moved back into the forest to wait for the dinosaur-sized drop shuttle to arrive. We kept a close eye on the tree line. Although the Invaders were beaten back, we didn’t know if they left any snipers or booby traps behind on the field. White Skull had taught us a little something about the Invaders, and nobody was about to let their guard down.

  We watched the big shuttle slowly come down, its rockets burring up more land than our shuttle had avoided. The landing legs deployed and the ramp unfolded as it made landfall. There were no more incidents from the Invaders. The big form of Terry lumbered out, guided by Captain Daphne next to him.

  “Thanks for giving me a place to land,” she told us after Terry settled down. He was healed up after the last incident where the dinosaur took a round from an Invader weapon on White Skull.

  I was surprised they would put him back into action as quick as they did, but the Solar Force needed every able-bodied dinosaur it could muster at this point. The brood pens continued to create more of them, but it still took a long time to get a dinosaur to maturity and train them as a fighting animal. We hoped the other side had the same issues.

  While we were setting up the camp and deciding what to do about the mission, we found out what happened to the Babylon advisor sent along to help us. I had the men unpack the supplies they needed. They worked to establish contact with the other Force units on the surface of the planet. I couldn’t do much now that the initial phase of the mission was over and needed to let Orbital know about what happened with the Invaders.

  I was working a communications array with our radio operator when I looked up to see the form of Tara Rex in front of me. She had her drop suit off and was back to wearing the red dress I remembered from our first meeting. Her scarlet hair flowed down her back and matched the bloody knife she carried in one hand. As I watched her, she produced a cloth, cleaned the knife and placed it in a scabbard attached to her belt. Now she had something on her feet. They were leather boots, a good idea in this environment.

  “Where did you go?” I asked her. “You were supposed to stay with us. We need you to help make contact with the mission.”

  “I’ve already been inside the mission,” she informed me. “The women who are within have been advised of our situation and are debating what to do. I’ve tried to convince them to leave with you, but I won’t know until tomorrow. They have a group of local people who took refuge in the mission when the Invaders appeared.”

  This was grand. Now I had to worry the Sisters didn’t want to leave the surface. Since my entire mission was supposed to get them to go, this was not something I wanted to hear.

  “You were supposed to stay with us,” I told her. “What happened out there with that knife?” I had a feeling the blood on it wasn’t from one of the local fauna.

  “You can thank me for saving your squad from the Invader commandos, elite stalkers,” she told me. “If I hadn’t killed them all, you’d be dead by now when they detonated the bomb under your feet.” Her green eyes flashed in anger.

  “Bomb?” I asked her and looked down. “What bomb?” This was not good news.

  “Here,” she told me and pointed to a bare spot. “Have one of your men dig it up. It’s harmless now since I killed their demolition squad and destroyed the detonation equipment. You should still be careful when you take it out.”

  “How many were out there?” I asked while moving away from the spot she pointed out. Who was this crazy woman?

  “Ten,” she told me. “There were ten of them. They didn’t give me a lot of trouble.” She continued to stare directly at me.

  “You killed ten Invaders with a knife?” I asked her. This story increased its insanity level with every word she spoke.

  “No,” she replied. “I killed the first one with the knife. It was his blood on it. He’d taken his helmet off when I came up behind and slit his throat. He didn’t hear me, nor did the other nine when I picked up his laser and burned the lot of them. They don’t appear to have trained their people very well.”

  I believed her. Later we sent someone back to the site she told me about to confirm her story and gather intelligence. They found the bodies right where Tara told us they would be found.

  “Where did you learn how to kill like that?” I asked her.

  Of all the things I’d ever heard about the Sisters of Babylon, killing was not something they were supposed to do. In fact, they would claim the whole reason they existed was to protect life and spirit. Or something like that.

  “I’m an assassin for the Order,” she told me. “We found out years ago it made more sense to take out our enemies by subterfuge than to pose an immediate threat to them. The Sisters i
nside the mission let me know where I could find the Invaders and I took care of them.”

  From what they told her, the Invaders did their usual procedure of killing every human in sight when they arrived. They’d shown up a few days ago with the kaiju we eliminated and began the slaughter. The people who survived ran to the mission and hoped the Invaders would ignore it.

  They didn’t.

  The Invaders reached the walls of the mission the day after they arrived. They used the kaiju to hunt down lone groups of humans on the ground. The moment the stalkers started to climb over the walls, the Sisterhood hit them with a series of sonic weapons no one outside the mission knew they possessed. The bodies we saw were the remains of the first wave of stalkers who tried to take their mission. The Invaders even tried to bring their kaiju up to it, but the combined effects of the ultrasonic guns nearly fried it. The Invaders pulled the beast back to a safe distance. I was surprised they didn’t hit the mission with the long-range weapons, but the Invaders saved them for something else. They must have decided the mission was a low priority item they could decimate later, or they just really wanted to get their hands on whomever was inside.

  Tara knew what was going on down on the surface while she was with us on the starship. The mission and Sisterhood had its’ own communication network and could stay in touch with each other constantly. Why the Force gave them such attention was a thing I never could understand. Somehow, this Babylon Sisterhood had all kinds of power in the government. They could get the Force to send us down for a rescue. It wasn’t cheap to land an entire regiment of Raptors and we would have better been deployed outside the capitol where I understood the fighting was intense. Terry was just standing around, and that was after over a dozen good men had died to secure the landing zone. It stank.

  SEVEN

  Tara vanished into the mission after we’d talked. The standing instructions I had from Orbital was not to interfere with any kind of relationship the Sisterhood had with the civilians and settlers. There was some kind of delicate balance between the people who lived outside the mission and the Sisters inside it. I wasn’t privy to the nature and would have to put up with whatever administrative nonsense directed to me. Whatever. We were going to hunker down and wait a few days to see what came next. The Force told me to stay put for the time being with the men. We were too far away from the capitol to be deployed there on short notice. If they wanted us to make it to the Imani, we would need some kind of transport.

  “The women have decided to leave,” I heard two days later as we worked to clean-up our weapons after an hour of range practice. I didn’t want the guys to get rusty with their weapons, and if Terry didn’t continuously stalk the nearby forests he might have gotten bored enough to attempt to munch on a settler. The Force cleared us to do some target practice in the forest while we waited for our next deployment. Considering that there were still a few stalker elements out there, most of the targets moved and shot back.

  It was Tara who brought the news to me. She had on that red dress again. I wondered if they ever let these Sisters wear anything else other than red. Over all the years I’d ran into them, never did I see a member of the Babylon Sisterhood wear anything else. You could see them walk down the street, a bright crimson sight that caught everyone’s attention. You saw a Sister of Babylon clothed in red or you saw them as nature intended. But only the latter if you’d made a significant donation to the temple and passed a physical. At least that’s what all the teenage boys used to tell each other back home.

  The civilians came out of the mission first. There were about ten families inside it and I couldn’t understand why they hadn’t come out when we took the field. The Sisters, all twelve of them, emerged afterwards and formed a small line on each side of the families as they went to examine the remains of their huts and homes. I told the guys to keep their distance. Those women in red were armed with sonic pistols. I could see the lust in the eyes of my men, but they knew better than to mess with those women.

  I stood in a clearing next to the encampment with Hamid later that evening when Tara appeared again. We were trying to figure out how the battle for the city had progressed from the reports we received from Orbital. It was in the Force’s interest to clamp down on the news, but we wanted to know since the regiment could be tossed into battle on short notice. Even Captain Daphne had no idea what was going on out there, as they didn’t tell her any more than we were told. She was getting as bored as Terry with the slim pickings we’d had of the enemy since that first engagement.

  “Come walk with me, Sergeant,” a voice said to my right and there was the specter in red. “I want to go over some things in private.” Even Hamid was startled by the way she appeared out of nowhere.

  I handed my beer to Hamid and told him to wait a bit. I wouldn’t be long. We walked down a small trail, but not too far as I only had a small lantern. The planet’s single moon hadn’t risen. I could feel something emanating from her. Tara, this diminutive killing machine, walked behind me, but stayed in my personal space. I noted she’d traded her usual work boots in for sandals. She was perfumed.

  “Stop here, Sergeant,” she said to me. I halted and turned around to face her.

  The green eyes locked with my blue ones. “What is it you want, Tara?” I asked her. “Or should I call you ‘Sister’? I notice all the families who took refuge in your mission use that term.”

  She reached out with both hands and took mine in them. “I want you to call me lover,” she informed me. “You do want me, Sergeant, don’t you? We are trained to tell the need in men and it’s very strong in you.”

  She released my left hand and slid hers down the front of my pants. Son of a bitch.

  “You like that don’t you?” she told me. “I want your genes, Sergeant. I’ve seen your medical file. They’re good. Nice, healthy and strong. You are what I need for the father of my second girl child.” With one hand, she undid the front of her dress and it fell to the ground. As I expected she had nothing under it.

  We did it in the grass, because I’m a sucker for a hot woman and after prison I wasn’t about to ask questions. If she wanted the seed of some convicted felon turned dumb grunt then so be it. It had to do something with her perfume, I think, made my mind foggy and my passion a little bit crazy. I neglected to ask her how she knew it would take and how she knew it was to be a girl.

  I got seduced, drugged, and harvested. I guess there are worse ways to get used.

  EIGHT

  The main body of an Invader fleet entered space around Planet Chaos a few days later. While we listened to reports from Orbital about how the battle for the capitol progressed, a jump point appeared a close distance from the planet. Orbital picked it up and let the rest of the Force know what happened before the Invader landing contingent was dispatched from it. At the time, we didn’t know their overall plans. It was assumed Chaos was far enough away from Earth not to be of any use to them other than as a staging point, which is how we used it. The assumption was that the original presence of Invaders on the planet was to pull their usual invasion-turned-insurgency trick.

  By the time the main body of the Invader forces was across the jump point, it was obvious Chaos represented something that they wanted badly. Orbital was horrified to discover that the Raptors and Dino mechs on the ground couldn’t handle a new division of such size.

  There were at least sixty ships in the group that emerged from the jump point. The Solar Force only committed twenty of Jurassic ships to the relief effort on Chaos. None of them were full class warships, just security frigates and modest troop transports, nothing that could hold back the massive landing party. The Invader ships were huge and each one could carry several legions of Invader green suits. This was a major operation on the part of the Invaders. The Force had deluded itself and thought that this was small potatoes. The Force contingent was assumed to be large enough to handle whatever they encountered on the planet. Some of the staff felt it would be good training ex
ercise for the new troops sent into battle without much experience. But now the Invaders had arrived in vast numbers. They made certain the new jump point was inside the older one.

  There was no way to escape quickly if we wanted to do so. The Invader fleet was positioned to keep us tied up and to make sure they would control the planet. We were pinned and had no way to escape.

  I slept through all of that, because, you know, redheads.

  Flash woke me up in the first light of morning. “Hey, Sarge,” I heard outside of my tent flap. “We just received a message from Orbital. You need to see this.”

  “What did it say?” I asked while struggling to get my boots on. I hate lacing up boots in a tent unless you had a good place to sit.

  “We can’t read it,” he responded. “It’s in code and meant only for you.”

  I staggered out of the tent and tried to step over the puddles. It rained the night before and left mud everywhere. The weather on this planet was unpredictable, which is one of the reasons it had its name. I assumed the message had to do with the pick-up from Orbital.

  I couldn’t have been more wrong. Like I said, a lot happened while I was snoozing.

  “So what’s it say?” Kelly asked me as I sat there with the decoded message in my hand. “They coming to get us out of here today? I’m sure the settlers will like to know. Should I go tell them?”

  “Not today,” I responded to his question. “And not tomorrow. I have no idea when they’ll pick us up. According to this message, there’s a huge group of Invaders headed in our direction. About sixty ships. There is no way they can get more people here in time to get us out.”

  “Oh, shit.”

  “You got that right. We’re stuck here for the time being. And with hordes of those green metal bastards headed in our direction. We need to make plans. And we need to make them fast.” I placed the message down on the table after I hit the “received” button.