by Isaac Stone
“We have to do something,” Kelly said. “At least we have the captain and Terry.” He seemed to find something positive in all this.
“Terry is a straight up badass, but if they send a whole herd of those things against him we are all smoked,” I pointed out. “We need to find some position we can defend ourselves until our people arrive.” shenanigans
I passed the word around to the rest of the encampment as quick as I could. This wasn’t the news they wanted to hear, but it was news they needed to hear. As the only NCO on the ground in this part of the planet, the responsibility of putting the troops in order fell to me.
I found Captain Daphne grazing Terry a few hours later. The planet was seeded with large mammals the human settlers could use when they arrived. There were plenty of deer around for Terry to eat and he had a feast the first day on the surface. The captain stood there and watched him chomp away in the distance. She had left his armor back at camp, as it didn’t seem we were going to need it right away.
“He’s recovered nicely,” I told her as I walked up behind the captain, who nodded and went back to watching her dino mech. “Appetite seems to be good.
“Bad news,” I explained to her. “No pick-up from the Force. We’re stuck down here.” For some reason I still remember the way Terry turned and looked at me as if there was some kind of recognition that things were about to get interesting.
“What’s wrong with the Force this time?” she told me. “Do they have to reroute some of the rescue ships to another battle theater? It wouldn’t be the first time.” Her hand slid down to fidget with one of the connectors that would affix her to the pod.
“It’s worse than that,” I explained. “There is a major Invader force headed in our direction. They just opened up a jump point just outside orbit. We don’t have a way to retreat because it blocks us from the jump point we control.”
She was silent and looked across the field at Terry, who chased down another deer. I watched his massive jaws enclose the beast as it struggled. He swallowed it.
“You’re the senior office at this encampment,” I told her. “We need to get everyone rounded up and moved to a safe location in due haste.” I gave her some basic information on the figures that had to do with the Invaders and their formation.
“Do what you think is best,” she informed me. “I’ll stay out of your way and try to take care of the dinosaur. I don’t know what good he’ll do against that whole invasion force, but they’ll sure know they were in a fight.”
“Any idea as to why the Invaders are sending so many ships to this planet? I can’t imagine why it’s so valuable to them.”
“Command didn’t tell me. I’m guessing they don’t even know. Doesn’t make much of a difference because we have to deal with them no matter what.”
We spent another hour talking about the best way to move large groups of unarmed civilians into the hills around the mission. This would have to be done with as much stealth as possible. We didn’t know how much tracking ability the Invaders possessed, but the best way would be to divide the regiment up with the settlers and Sisters in such a way as to keep them apart. She was surprise the Sisters were armed and knew how to use weapons.
“I always heard they had other ways of fulfilling their goals,” she commented. “And you say one of them is an assassin?” I nodded.
“Might be useful if the Force can’t pick us up for a long time,” she commented. “The Invaders don’t take prisoners.”
NINE
I returned to the encampment. The men had told everyone else the bad news. At least both sides of the camp knew they had to leave. I could see the signs as they prepared to pack everything up so we could take to the hills. The mountains were still far away, but the hills around the settlement were steep enough to give us some natural barricades. The forests were very thick in this location too. I needed to talk with Orbital and see if they could find us a good place to hide while we waited for the Force to send in someone to pick us up. Not that I expected that, considering the shitstorm about to land on us, and nobody was going to risk their necks to come rescue a bunch of convicts and one dino mech. Maybe the Sisters of Babylon would merit some top brass attention. Time would tell.
“Everyone ready to go?” I asked Hamid when I saw him supervising some of the new guys as they loaded up our supplies and prepared to move out. “I don’t think we have a lot of time before the bad guys show up. Did you hear from Zhuang or any of the Raptor units around the capitol?”
“They’re preparing to dig in, unlike us they have a whole city to hide in,” he informed me. “They won’t be able to help us much.”
The first sign of the Invaders came just as dusk was settling over the forest. We saw two of their ships soar over the encampment and leave vapor trails in the sky. Terry drove them off with his missile pods, and I am pretty certain at least one of them was severely damaged.
“We have to leave,” I told Captain Daphne after I saw the vapor trails. We were outside her tent, trying to figure out if Terry could find enough food in the hills or if we should round up several deer herd and drive them with us. The big green lizard had an enormous need for food and it could starve if we didn’t have enough chow on hand for it.
“Yeah,” she agreed. “I don’t like those either. We need to pack it up right away and get out of here. Did Orbital ever give you the coordinates for that safe zone before they went dark?” She watched Terry in the background sleep in the sun and snore away.
“Got them an hour before the last transmission,” I replied.
Orbital let me know there was a good location about twenty miles away. It was a plateau that rose up higher than the rest of the forest and had enough coverage to keep us out of view until the rescue team arrived. Rescue would take some time because the fleet was tied up all across known space with the Invaders. This latest Invader arrival was big, but there were other problems out there that needed more attention. It was a mess of a war.
An hour before they sent me the coordinates, the officer I talked with at Orbital let me know there were a few Invader attack ships headed his way. The station decided to load everything they had in some stealth pods and try to reach the Force jump point. This was the last thing I heard about the Invader’s latest move. It was a day since I last talked to the officer on the station and I had to assume they’d made it to the jump point or were dead. I didn’t bet on the jump point.
The captain was busy hitching Terry up to a cart she brought along to move his armor and her supplies. It was a strange thing to see, this massive battle dinosaur, sixty feet in length, harnessed up to the small cart. Most of Terry’s armor was very thin, but built to withstand shrapnel and direct hits. This was his new armor and was light. So light that one person could pull it along if needed. It folded into a large case, but would snap itself around Terry if the right combination was entered into the activation key. I had watched the armor unfold on Terry when they first landed. It was impressive to see how fast it wrapped itself around the dinosaur. The cart also contained his weapons array that strapped to his back and the pod where she rode.
The Sisters already had their supplies packed and ready to move too. Some of them were pulling their gear in small motorized all-terrain carts, but most were using horses and mules to pull them along. Every last one of them was armed. It was a strange thing to see a group of women in low-cut dresses that split up the side with sonic reducers and impact guns. Most of the settlers were unarmed and were preoccupied with their families.
I made sure Hamid and Kelly organized the squads around them and had the civilians in the center. I didn’t expect we’d be attacked on the first day of travel, especially with the landing ships being driven back by Terry’s missile barrage, but there was a lot I didn’t know about the Invaders. We couldn’t get any information from the Force, now that Orbital was gone. We could talk to the Zhuang in the capitol, but they had plenty to worry about on their own.
Before I gave the orde
r to move out, I called Tara Rex and the corporals together. I hadn’t had any dealings with the settlers and assumed they let the Sisterhood speak for them.
“We’ve got a big trip ahead of us,” I told them. “Let’s keep it together on the way. It won’t be any easier once we arrive because I have no way to know when we’ll be rescued. I don’t know why the Invaders have committed so much of their resources to this planet, but I hope it hurts them in other places. If we can stay hidden long enough, we’ll be alive to greet the Force when they come to pick us up. No, I have no idea how long it will be, but we need to keep our senses together until they do show up.”
I could see Captain Daphne in the rear of the columns with Terry bridled and ready to pull the cart along. She stood off to one side with some kind of box in her hand, which I later found out was how she controlled him when not on his back. She looked at me and waited for the sign to move out.
“Our primary concern is the settlers,” Tara informed me, her green eyes focused on mine.
“The safety of our civilians is the reason we’re here,” I replied to her. “The Force is the first line of defense against those things in the green suits. All we need to know is that you will have our backs covered.”
“You don’t have to worry about us, Sergeant. We are both on the same side. Humanity.”
TEN
I ordered the marines to strap their helmets on and start to move forward. I went off to one side so I could see the movement of the columns and make sure no one was left behind. With my plasma rifle slung over my shoulder, I circled around and made sure nothing remained that could indicate our direction. Although the two groups I’d split us into were separated physically, I wanted to make sure each one knew were the other was located. It wouldn’t do to be unaware of the position if we came under attack.
It took us another two days to reach the highland plateau. It wasn’t the distance, on the map the location appeared to be very close. The problem was the terrain we had to cross to reach it. The settlement we had abandoned was already in a high altitude, but the plateau we needed to reach for our safety was higher yet. There were plenty of hills between it and our location. The settlers were accustomed to the terrain, but many of the marines were better off fighting on hard ground or city streets. Terry reminded everyone that he was an apex predator, and the captain had him pulling security for us, sometimes ahead of us, other times behind or in a flanking position.
I didn’t have Sergeant Zhuang’s guidance this time. He was busy with the defense of the capitol. Even against such an overwhelming force, they were determined to hold out as long as they could. When you get down to it, sixty invasion ships on a planet the size of Chaos isn’t much of an invasion force. The population of the planet was scattered and concentrated only in one or two major cities. The Invaders wanted the planet intact, or they would have dropped nuclear bombs on it. Instead of nukes, they tried to figure out some way to kill all the humans without using poison gas or radiation. This left them few choices other than to send down their green suited warriors and engage in one-on-one fighting. The Invader conquest of Chaos couldn’t be accomplished if they relied on the kaiju alone, this was going to be nasty.
The plateau was at the coordinates that Orbital gave to me before we departed. Terry had a little trouble as he made the climb up the ramp to the elevated land, but in the end, he made it. He was able to pull up plenty of the wagons we took along with us.
No word came from the Force after we managed to get everyone to the top of the plateau. I feared it would be awhile before we heard from them. The tracer rounds from anti-air fire and flashes from explosions could still be seen in the sky from time to time, which meant Zhuang wasn’t going anywhere and the Invaders weren’t either.
A week after we reached the plateau, the transmissions ceased from the capitol. Zhuang told me the Invaders set up some kind of firebase outside the city and were unloading more kaiju. The last thing he sent out was that the monsters were on the move and the green suits with them. I could only figure they were in no position to let us know about their situation. At least he had our coordinates if any of the survivors needed a refuge. He had most of the strength of Battle Force Jurassic in that city, with plenty of dino mechs, raptor marines, and more than a few Solar troopers with railguns. They would hold out, I was sure of it, and if they didn’t the Invaders would be so spent by the time they found us we might actually stand a chance of surviving this mess.
We kept several mobile patrols at the base of the plateau. This is how we knew the Invaders located us a week later. It turned out their aerial surveys weren’t as bad as we assumed.
Hamid took a few of the guys down the ramp that lead from the plateau to the lower part of the hills early in the day. The ramp was, in fact, a long series of steps that were carved in the past by some civilization that existed in the distant past of Chaos. No one ever did find out who they were or what they looked like. All traces of them were gone by the time humans showed up to the planet and began the process of terraforming. Most of Chaos was desert by that time, not the lush forests humanity had conjured up from the terraformed alien soil. It took a lot of effort to reclaim the planet and restock it with what the human settlers could use in the future. There was a small amount of background radiation that existed on the surface that indicated the possibility of a nuclear war of some kind in the distant past. No trace was ever found of the civilization that had been there before. A few buildings and lone structures did survive. One of them was the steps, which lead up to the plateau. I checked and found them mentioned in the surveys of the first planetary engineers, but there wasn’t a whole lot about the structure. It was assumed to be artificial, but some of the archaeologists argued they might have been the product of erosion. We decided to mine them in case we needed to block the entrance to the plateau.
Hamid and the guys were deep in the forest around the plateau when they came upon a small group of green suits. They tried to hide and hoped the stalkers would go away, but somehow they found out the humans were nearby them. It didn’t take them long to be discovered once the bad guys found their tracks. A firefight ensured and most of the stalkers were wiped out. A few escaped. The patrol decided to make a retreat and warn the plateau just to be safe.
Hamid took a hit on his arm. His men brought him up after their medic they patched him back together. It wasn’t a severe wound, but one that might be infected in a forest. When I came in to see him, another medic was already working on him. He had a large bandage around the arm.
“I’m too pretty to die,” He laughed when I entered the day tent. His shirt was off and they were just about done with the wrap on his arm.
“What the hell happened down there?” I asked him. This was not something I wanted to hear.
“Surprised some stalkers and they tried to shoot it out with us,” he told me. “We got all we could, but a few got away.”
“Casualties?”
“None. Just me. Like I said, we surprised them, gave em a good old fashioned bayonet charge.”
We decided to detonate the charges on the steps later in the day. There was a possibility the Invaders would see the explosions, so we masked them as best as we could, but I knew our days were numbered. I took a few marines up and down with me to make sure they were clear before we blew them. It was a shame to do it when so little was known about the civilization that built the steps, but we had no choice. The steps could be used by the Invaders to make an assault and we had the high ground.
Flash was with me that day as the detonator. He had some knowledge about demolition work so I took him along. We stood up at the top of the stairs and looked out across the hills to see if there were any signs the Invaders were coming. I couldn’t see any and nodded to him.
“In the name of Babylon!” He yelled and pulled the switch. Flash had gotten friendly with the Sisterhood, they probably harvested his DNA, but instead of getting his piece of tail and moving along it looked like he’d bought into
the rest of it too.
The charges went off at the same time and the ramp leading up to the plateau was reduced to rubble. The Invaders could still climb up it, but they would have to get past all the guns we were going to train down it. I watched the dust rise in the air and wondered if we’d just created a smoke signal to anyone who wanted to find us. We still hadn’t heard anything from the defenders of the capitol. If it fell, and I speculated it had, they would be headed toward us. Maybe they were the ones who needed to see the explosion to know we were still here. But if the defenders were in the forest and coming in our direction, why had we not received any signals from them?
“You think that will keep them down there, Sarge?” Flash asked me. Two more marines stood behind us and clutched their plasma rifles. In the distance, I could hear the howls of Terry. It must be time for the captain to feed him.
“It won’t hold them forever,” I responded, scratching the helmet strap on my chin. “They’ll find a way up here to kill us all if they can, and we all know that some of those kaiju are more like spiders and snakes than the behemoths we usually face. I’m hoping they will decide the cost of rooting us out won’t be worth it and leave us alone until the Force rescues us. We have enough room up here to land a drop shuttle, even a big one for our dino mech.” I could see no movement in the trees with my farsight setting, but it didn’t mean there was nothing out there.
ELEVEN
The settlers and the Sisterhood were quiet most of the time. I finally understood the relation of the settlers to the Sisterhood after a while on the plateau. The settlers were recruited across the known worlds by the Babylon temples who wanted to populate Chaos with people of their sect. They’d recruited families from all over the Alliance to come and build a new, shiny city on the hill that was eventually to be the Babylon Prime. An entire cult planet.