by Isaac Stone
The Sisters watched over the settlers and had more power in their personal lives than I’d thought previously. I found out about it while checking the sentries one night on the edge of the plateau. I came across a husband and wife who sat next to one of the Sisters on a rock. I overheard their conversation.
“You have to make sure she is satisfied before you are,” the scarlet woman said to the husband. “I’ll come over tonight and show you what you’re doing wrong.”
A little embarrassed, I hurried onto the next sentry post.
We saw the Invaders the next week.
We’d taken enough food and rations up there to make sure the marines and settlers could last at least a month without assistance. Foraging in the forest would add another week or so to that. The plateau had a natural spring, which flowed down the side in the form of a creek, so water wasn’t an issue. I kept sentries on lookout at all times and they were to report any movement outside the plateau.
It was only a matter of time.
I was in my tent talking to Hamid when Flash ran into it with the news. I could tell he was excited, as he had to catch his breath before he could deliver it to me. He grabbed a cup off the common table I kept at the entrance and swallowed.
“Willy spotted one,” he told us. “To the north.”
“Spotted what?” I demanded.
“Kaiju. Big fucking thing. Armored up like nothing he’s seen before. The bastards have found us.
I had the radio checked for any signals from space every few hours. The line was open and we needed to keep it ready to talk to the Force when they showed up. It was a drain on our power supply, but we needed to know when they would come for us.
“We have to get ready,” I told Hamid. “Let the men know. I’ll go tell the sisterhood and they can let the settlers know who’s on the way.” I stood up from my chair and left the tent.
“How are they going to get up here?” I heard Flash ask Hamid. “There’s no way to do it. We blew up the steps.”
“That’s probably what the big kaiju is for,” I heard Hamid respond.
The sun was on its way up that day. Chaos had a sun like the one on old Earth, so it was easy to confuse the two. Archaeologists speculated years before the Invaders arrived that the civilizations across the know worlds were too similar to Earth to explain synchronicity. Although only humans survived their interplanetary wars, plenty of other humanoids left traces of their presence before they vanished or killed each other off.
I saw Tara Rex and went up to her. She turned her green eyes on me and away from a settler woman with a baby.
“The Invaders know we’re here on this plateau,” I told her. “We’ve blown the steps that lead up, but it won’t hold them forever. I’m hoping the Force will find a way to get us out of here, but I don’t have too much optimism, especially since Zhuang has been radio silent for so long, and nobody has seen anti-air fire or artillery in days. I need you to talk to your Sisters and the settlers. We are in for a siege. We’ve got one dinosaur up here to help us, but when he goes down, and I mean when, the Raptors will keep them at bay as long as we can. After that you’re on your own.”
She took one of my hands in hers. “What do you want us to do? There are thirteen Sisters here to protect the settlers, including me. We’re all armed and range qualified to use our guns. I specialize in hit-and-run tactics. I can go down the hill and take out as many of them as I can.”
I looked at her in amazement. “Tara, you’re pregnant. Should you put yourself in such danger?” I had a feeling she wasn’t going to be argued with, but I had to try, felt like the right thing to do.
“Not your child,” she told me. “Not my child either. She’ll be given to a settler couple that are childless and need one of their own. She’ll never know who her real parents are, we see to that.” She released my hand and ran hers across the handle of her pistol.
“You did this just for one couple who needed a child?” I asked her. This was crazy and I knew less about this woman than I thought.
“I’ve done it several times before,” she informed me. “This will be my fourth for the Order. I do it for Our Lady Babylon so that her word may be spread through the universe.” She leaned her head back and closed those green eyes.
I felt something from her that overpowered the sense of anxiety and fear on the plateau. At that moment, Tara became the most beautiful creature I’d ever seen in my entire life. Also the most stone cold crazy.
“I’ll let the others know,” she told me while she walked away. “At full dark I’ll go down there and start killing the Invaders. It should buy you some time.” I watched her walk away, those divine hips swinging from side to side.
TWELVE
The one thing we had in our favor was the knowledge that the Invaders were spread thin on the planet. Even with all the stalkers they brought along, Chaos was a big place and it had many locations where people could hide. They knew where we were holed up, but they would have to spread their forces all over Chaos to find the others. If the survivors of the city fled into the forest, the Invaders would commit a lot of what they brought along to find them. I still had no idea why they brought so big of an invasion force for this one planet, but the entire fleet couldn’t be dedicated to killing the humans on Chaos. They needed it for something else. I had heard that the Black Road was still the most hotly contested battlefield of the war.
I didn’t worry about an attack from the sky. Using an orbital station to bomb us would be the logical choice, but the Invaders didn’t seem to like air power of any kind. They preferred to rely on their overwhelming ground forces and kaiju to grind down the enemy. I expected at least a few kaiju dedicated to reaching us, although they would have plenty of trouble climbing up the cliffs, other than maybe that big one. I didn’t think the Invaders would dedicate an entire building project just to create a ramp to the plateau. I still hoped the Force would arrive and get us out before things became too heated. Not that I’d heard anything, but a guy starts to cook up some desperate hopes when his sorry ass is about to get thrown out of the frying pan and into the fire.
Hamid appeared like clockwork with his daily dose of bad news. “You need to get out here and see this,” he told me as we both left my modest command tent. “Something big is going down.”
I walked with him to the observation point where the sentries stood guard. Two young marines held point and watched what unfolded below with handheld scopes. I slid in next to them and brought up my farsight display to get a good look.
I could see piles of green suits lined up in a clearing. There were Invaders everywhere trying to find out what killed them. From our vantage point, we could see the officers of the stalkers, also in the metal suits, as they tried to direct their underlings around the camp.
“How long has this been going on,” I asked one Raptor.
“About an hour,” He told me. “They shot a flair up and it shone on those bodies and the rest of them went crazy. Is it one of our guys doing that to them?” He seemed anxious to find out.
“Hey, look to three o’clock,” Hamid said. He’d taken the other telescope from the second sentry. “I see what’s up. Holy shit, it’s that Sister you were talking to!”
I swung my head over just in time to see Tara and her sisters in action. They sprang into the middle of a group of stalkers with their sonic pistols and wicked knives. The stalkers went down fast, their insides fried from the guns or their throats slashes by blades that seemed to ignore the stout metal suits.
Tara was like a war goddess, moving in and out of the press of stalkers as she dealt death in every direction.
Then I saw her torn apart.
A slithering kaiju that had more mandibles than eyes, and it had a ton of eyes, slid out of the darkness and took her out. Its mouth wasn’t so much a set of jaws as it was a wood chipper, and in seconds that gorgeous woman was hamburger. I looked away, unable to watch any more, even as the remaining sisters turned their sonic guns against th
e nightmare.
“Wow,” said the kid next to me.
And the worst part was that I could do nothing. I was up on an observation point looking down into the valley where she was killed. I wanted to scream and run down there to save her, but there was nothing that could be done. There was no graceful dance in slow motion as you see in the videos. One minute Tara held her sonic pistol and rotated in the direction of a stalker squad, the next, she was a pile of blood and organs on the ground. She was dead.
No, let me change that. She and our child were dead and I’d let her go down there on a suicide mission.
I turned to Hamid. “Corporal, I want a count of how many the sisters took out down there. We need it for whatever report will be filed when we get out of this place.” I made sure I didn’t face him.
“I’ll do the best I can, Sarge,” he told me. “You also want a head count of how many are still down there?” He returned to his handheld scope and began to look at the lower part of the plains again.
“Yes, and if any of the sisters survive the night get them debriefed” I told him and began to walk away. “We need to know what we’re up against.”
I went directly to my tent.
THIRTEEN
I stayed there for a long time. No one saw me walk through the Raptor camp, as it was early in the morning.
How many stalkers, handlers, and elites had she and her sisters killed down there? It looked like they had carved a huge chunk of casualties out of the enemy forces. And she did it while carrying a child.
I bit the sleeve on my uniform and tried to understand what took place down there. I hadn’t wanted to become anyone special in the Raptors, I’d just wanted to do my time and get out so I didn’t have to serve my sentence in the prison. How the hell did I know a war was about to break out in space? I wouldn’t be here if Philly Bob hadn’t fucked me over and screwed up the bank job. I might have got off a lot easier if the bank guard didn’t have a gun on him. I didn’t mean to kill him, but it was him or me and I wasn’t about to die in a bank!
“Sergeant?” a voice called to me from the tent flap. It was a female voice. “May I come in?”
“Yes,” I told her. This had to be one of the Sisters. I looked at the time and realized that nearly an hour had passed, and by now, they would all know about what happened to Tara down there.
She was black-haired, tall, and what skin wasn’t covered in stalker blood looked to be pale. She had to be in her forties and possessed the blackest eyes I’d ever seen on a woman. They were a contrast to the green ones of Tara.
Probably wants to snag another shot of DNA to make up for the one Tara just lost, I thought to myself grimly.
“I’m Hagia,” she told me. “Hagia Gnosis. I’m the Abbess of the local chapter. I don’t think we were ever introduced.” She seated herself in the empty chair next to mine.
I put down the coffee on the table next to me, but I just couldn’t find anything to say, so I kept my mouth shut.
“We’re very grateful for your help,” she told me. “I wanted you to know that. We’ll do whatever we can to make sure you have the support you need until we’re rescued. The Sisters of Babylon owes much to Battle Force Jurassic. We will not sit idle while your marines and your dino mech stand in our defense. That being said, we are of little use in a siege, better for us to make our contribution before the fighting puts our unique talents at a disadvantage.”
“Your people really bloodied their nose. I’m not sure how much good it will do, considering the likely size of their force, but a pile of dead Invaders is a start,” I replied, a little surprised at her pledge of support. “Didn’t do the child she was carrying much good, getting mulched by a kaiju though.”
She leaned close to me. “Did you know there was a baby girl born last night?” she asked me. I shook my head. “The couple named her ‘Emma’ because they knew it was the name Tara was going to name the child she carried.”
“We need you, Sergeant. As you say, our assault has stirred them up even as it has cost them dearly.” she said again. “The real siege is about to begin.”
I leaned back in the chair and thought. Hell, it wasn’t the life I wanted, but it was better than pulling another bank job.
“Thank you,” I told her. “I’ll be out in a few minutes.” She stood up and left the tent.
I waited a few minutes since I knew they would wait out there for me. I breathed deep and checked the uniform.
“Let’s do this, Sarge,” I said to my reflection in the mirror. “Somebody has to keep them together.”
They were waiting for me when I left the tent. Both Kelly and Hamid were outside it and stood at attention when I left the flap. This was a little bit crazy, as I’d never pushed formalities in the squads. If it kept us all alive, then I’d do what was necessary.
“Ease up, gentlemen,” I told them. “What’s the word on the Invaders down below?”
“They’re trying to reform,” Hamid told me. “That woman from the Sisterhood put a big scare into them and they’ve pulled back for the time being.”
“Did you get a count on how many she killed?” I asked him.
“Sixty-three is the best number we could come up with, and one kaiju. Lost four of those battle sisters in the exchange. The Invaders pulled back into the tree line and left their dead. And ours.”
“Some movement beyond the valley,” Kelly replied. “Sentries think they might be moving in more divisions to deal with us.”
“I’d expect it. Any word from the Force?”
“Not a thing,” it was Hamid this time. “We haven’t even received a stray signal, but I’m not surprised. If the Invaders control the jump point, all they have to do is block it.”
“We need to get some patrols down there and find out what they’re up to,” I told them. “See if you can find two or three men who want to go out on reconnaissance duty. I’m sure there will be plenty who want off this rock. Tell them to go deep, but not too deep. We can’t afford radio transmissions since those will be intercepted. They’ll be in the dark until they come back. Have them stay out there two days and come back with some information. If they notice any sudden movements against us, they are to return right away.”
FOURTEEN
We spent the rest of the day checking on what we had to help us survive. I put a team of men to work digging bunkers in case we needed to retreat into them. The kaiju had those rocket arrays on them and they could do a lot of damage if they got high enough to sight on the position.
The Sisterhood organized some work details that helped the men dig out trenches. I was surprised at how well they worked with us, but the threat of an Invader attack helped the relationship.
Two days later, I decided to go down the bottom of the valley next and have a look at the situation. I had a report when the first patrol came back that the Invaders were still disorganized down there. They didn’t seem to know what to do. They would advance a few hundred yards to the base of the plateau, exchange fire with Terry and the Raptors who defended it, then pull back further. So far we’d made them pay for each advance, though every time we would lose a marine or two, our I knew that Captain Daphne was growing as concerned about Terry’s ammunition reserves as I was about our plasma units.
I put a pack together and checked my plasma rifle to make sure it had a full charge. I made certain at least one sonic pistol was strapped to my belt before I left the tent, a gift from Hagia. I could’ve had one of my men pack the kit, but wanted to do it myself. Some things you can’t leave up to happenstance.
I met Flash and another marine named Frank at the edge of the former steps down to the grounds below. Although the steps were turned to rubble, it was still the best way to descent to the base. We connected with a small squad of ten marines at the edge of the plateau.
Hamid and Kelly were there to see us off. “Just stay in touch with the captain,” I told them. “I don’t think anything will happen while I’m gone and I’ll be back in two hours.”<
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It took us four hours to crawl over the rocks to reach the forest below. The previous recon unit had told us which spots were dangerous and which ones were easy to descend around. I didn’t think it would be easy on the return trip, but it wasn’t what was in the front of my mind. We needed to find out what the Invaders were doing out there and how much time we had if they decided to attack. That big kaiju we’d seen on the first night hadn’t been seen since, and that scared me.
We encountered a stalker recon unit pretty much as soon as we were down in the forest.
Flash was on my right side and Frank on the right. We moved in silence through the forest and communicated with hand signals. There were plenty of signs the stalkers were about. I saw broken branches everywhere, always a good indication a larger force has moved through your area.
I could hear them before making visual contact. We were on the other side of a grove of trees in the forest and heard the sounds of boots on the ground. I had the guys stay put and walked forward to peer through the tree line. I pushed a few leafy branches aside and faced thirty or so green suits who moved away from me down a trail. I looked up and saw they were headed in the direction of the plateau. Bastards were going to attempt flanking us by climbing up the sheer wall we’d just come down from.
I slid back into the foliage and whispered to the guys with me. “We need to get back to the plateau,” I said to them. “The stalkers are headed there now, if we move now we can catch them exposed on the cliff face.”
“Yeah,” Flash agreed, “We’ll have to be real quiet.”
A state of silence Flash ruined instantly by falling down and making a loud noise as his armor smacked into the rock outcropping at the base of the plateau.
Nice.
“So much for that. Burn em down!” I ordered them.
The thirteen of us emerged from the tree line and took a knee as we brought up our plasma rifles at the same time. The stalkers were sitting ducks as they were caught in the open trying to climb the rocks. They went down when the plasma bolts burned through their armor. It was raining aliens. Our attack didn’t last long though, as the stalkers still on the ground started returning fire, blasting a few marines off their feet and buying those on the rocks enough time to adjust their aim and lend their fire to the fight. We had smoked half their number, but already they were tipping the scales by sheer force of numbers.