by Nick Cole
“This is the captain. Prep for departure. Clear all mooring lines. All crewmembers, report to battle stations. We’re not sure if this is a drill yet.”
I hope this is a drill, he swore under his breath as he felt the tremor of the ship’s massive engines coming slowly to life.
Desaix knew that the comm officer would be listening in on shipyard and orbital approach control traffic. She’d have a good idea what was really going on out there. If, anything was actually going on.
“What’s this all about, Lieutenant?” he barked irritably. Maybe he should have gotten a few hours rest.
There was a long pause.
“Captain, low-orbit sensors are detecting three unidentified ships just beneath the atmosphere. Approach is saying one minute there wasn’t anything near the defense squadron, and in the next second they were there. Wait… now they’re reporting thousands of contacts falling toward the shipyards. Could be some kind of bombing run by a rogue MCR fleet that just jumped in. No one’s sure of anything.”
And we can’t get deflectors up until we’re airborne, thought Desaix grimly.
Black Fleet Shock Troopers, Third Group
Tarrago Prime Atmosphere, Altitude 110,547 Feet and Falling Fast
0202 Local System Time
Sergeant Bombassa did not like falling through atmosphere. No, he didn’t like it at all. He preferred ground combat. He preferred blasters on full auto, and even knives up close and personal.
And jumping off the back of a Republic destroyer seconds after it had jumped in, skimming atmosphere, in this new armor he’d been issued, was even worse than an ordinary jump. It was like being sucked out into the void only to fall all topsy-turvy longer than you ever thought possible. And much longer than you’ve ever wanted to. It was exactly like when a hull decompressed in deep space and vented in the middle of battle.
A thing that had happened to him only once.
An experience he’d never wanted to repeat.
But you’ve done a lot of things you haven’t liked just to get off Kimshana, he reminded himself in an attempt to distract his mind from the seemingly endless fall toward the planet below. And you kept doing them because you never wanted to go back to that hot, stinking jungle world one of your ancestors colonized on nothing more than hopes, dreams, and old grievances. So you joined the Legion. And you sent all your paychecks back to your family, and your extended family, so they could continue their little back-to-nature experiment. An experiment that resulted in little more than an unbelievable death toll from the Gray Plague—what the rare viral biologist who visited called “hyper-malaria”—or due to bites from any of the four hundred different indigenous and highly poisonous two-headed snakes that called that world home long before your tribe showed up. Never mind all the endless and petty strongman warlord politics and superstitious voodoo your ancestors dragged out there, or the mean daily temperature of well over one hundred degrees in “winter.”
Anything was better than Kimshana.
So, occasionally, as a part of the Legion, you’d allowed yourself to be thrown off the back of a drop shuttle. For as bad as this seemingly endless freefalling moment is… it ain’t Kimshana.
But this ain’t the Legion either, Bombassa had to remind himself as he gritted his teeth and dropped below ninety thousand feet, screaming like a burning comet through hard atmo. Thousands dropped alongside him at this very moment, and statistics indicated, as Bombassa well knew, that some weren’t going to make it to the ground safely. They’d just burn all the way in and crater. The numbers required that X amount did exactly just that.
He could never push that thought out of his head every time he jumped.
“Bombassa!” growled the platoon leader over S-comm. Another ex-legionnaire. “Tighten up. You’re drifting out of the LZ window. Stay within the target squares inside your HUD. It’s almost over, big man. Hang in there.”
Bombassa shifted his weight inside the special armor they’d been issued in the last days of training out there in the wastes of Tusca. Just like modern leej armor, but better. The gear he was wearing now was modified for high-orbit low-opening drops, and it was black, like his skin. A skin that was literally gushing cold sweat as the massive planet raced up at him through his HUD. He was so far up he could see the curvature of the planet in all directions. And to be honest, that freaked him out on levels he couldn’t address without going stark raving mad.
He reminded himself that this was not his best work environment. That would be at the end of this fall.
“KTF, sir,” whispered Bombassa once he was back within the digital glideslope of their approach to target, the massive Kesselverks Shipyards on Tarrago Prime.
He got a two-click acknowledgment.
In addition to the thousand shock troopers in this group, more were dropping on the capital itself, the Legion barracks, and other high-value objectives across the populated peninsula. But Third Group had the primary mission: to secure the shipyards and defend them against counterattack. And they were bringing some pretty heavy-duty equipment to do just that. Bombassa watched as a light mech, currently folded into its boxed-shaped transport mode, fell past a stick of shock troopers. Its modularized thrusters adjusted its flight path toward the pre-selected LZ.
General Nero had ordered them to take the massive shipyards… or die trying. Because if they didn’t, then what was being accomplished would die before it even began to start. And every one of them had shouted back the phrase they’d been re-trained to use, the phrase that affirmed every command within this new Legion. This new… Dark Legion, as it were.
“Death to the Republic!” the general shouted on the desert floor of Tusca where the winds howled like lost ghosts.
And the eighty thousand of the Black Fleet had roared back, “DEATH TO THE REPUBLIC!”
The Republic hadn’t been so bad, thought Bombassa as he continued his fall. If they hadn’t thrown him out of the Legion, he would’ve stuck until he made sergeant major. Then retired to some nice little planet with lots of water and tiny islands.
Seventy thousand feet now and falling like a rock.
“Death to the Republic!”
Fifty thousand feet, and Bombassa remembered some old joke the jump masters in the Legion liked to crow in the minutes before a drop. In the minutes when Bombassa was rigid with fear and wanted nothing more than to throw up—or better yet, be somewhere else altogether.
“If my chute don’t open wide, look out, world, I’m a-comin’ through!”
They liked to sing that as they checked everyone’s rig.
Fun times.
Not so much.
“No suh,” whispered Bombassa in his deep bass voice, into the ether of his fancy new armor that smelled all new and high-tech. All industrial in its rubber and padding. “Chute goin’ to open like it’s supposed ta!”
Positive thinking. Just like Legion NCO Development School had taught him. You don’t mind, they won’t either.
Bombassa liked tricks. Especially tricks he could play on himself to get him to do things he didn’t want to do.
“What’s that, Sergeant?” asked the LT over the comm.
Bombassa still hadn’t gotten used to the new software the suit ran. They called it S-comm instead of the Legion’s L-comm. It was exactly like the software the Legion ran inside their armor, but not quite as reliable.
“I say—”
Sudden turbulence began to buffet the falling armor at forty thousand. Bombassa checked his stick. The rest of the men who’d dropped behind him—really gotten sucked out into nothing behind him—were being thrown all across the sky, fighting to maintain their orientation to the ground and the target. The turbulence wouldn’t last, Bombassa reminded himself. The briefing had made that clear. Just weather and temperature layers playing their games.
“I say,” began Bombassa again, his voice shaking from being thrown about. He hoped his compact assault blaster was still secured to his armor. The shaking was getting more
violent now. “KTF, sir.”
“We don’t do that anymore, Sergeant,” came the reply over S-comm. “But I copy all the same. And… roger that. KTF, Sergeant.”
At a thousand feet, Bombassa was screaming in so hard he thought if he waited one more second he’d splatter all over some high-rise sky crane or mammoth construction gantry—even if his chute deployed. A thousand feet above the massive shipyard, in Bombassa’s mind, was way too low for things not to end badly. And for a second it did seem as though he’d just continue straight on into the ground, where he’d bounce off one of the big corvettes under construction down there. Or even go straight through a hull.
But then the graphene micro-fiber SmartChute auto-deployed.
And blaster fire from the anti-air turrets opened up.
As the thousands of floating shock troopers drifted down into the oh-dark-middle-of-the-night shipyards, men all around Bombassa were burned straight through by high-intensity blaster fire that suddenly seemed everywhere all at once. Seared chutes collapsed and dropped armored shock troopers into the heavy cranes and ships under construction. Klieg lights searched and air raid sirens wound up into their urgent doomsday howls, warning everyone against the attack.
Fine, thought Bombassa. And then he forgot all about bad points who made themselves heroes and got good men thrown out of the Legion, or outright killed, just so they could advance their pathetic careers. Or wretched Kimshana. Or dying in the atmosphere. Or dying in space.
Once he reached the ground, everyone was going to pay the price required for him to live the life he wanted.
He executed a perfect parachute-landing fall on a wide spot along the hull of a half-painted corvette. His armor made a loud metallic gong, and he rolled his body with the impact. The gel-shock layers within his armor did their best to cushion the fierce blow and negate the brutality of physics. Bombassa slammed his glove against the auto-disengage and rolled away from the chute harness, coming up with his compact blaster rifle ready to engage targets. Ready to kill his way to the other side of another day.
He forgot about all the terrors that plagued him before this moment, and set his mind to not dying in the next. And to do that he would have to kill everyone who stood in his way.
“K… T… F,” he said slowly, scanning for targets across the midnight shipyards.
House of Reason
Utopion
Orrin Kaar looked gravely into the holobot, his hands folded on his desk. “Of course I agree that a meeting of the House Security Council may be warranted, but not at this juncture.”
Aletha A’lill’n, the Security Council’s vice chair, restated her case. “Delegate Kaar, every indication received so far suggests that the attack at Tarrago is something beyond what the Mid-Core Rebellion is capable of.”
Kaar gave a wan smile. “Now where have I heard that before? Was it Kublar?”
A’lill’n pulled back slightly. “I don’t mean in terms of military threat. There’s a risk in every attack, I understand that. But these comm reports…” The delegate picked up her datapad and read from it. “Legionnaire-like ground forces in black armor. Starfighters of unknown types…”
“Delegate A’lill’n—”
“If there is a threat to those factories, we should ready a battle fleet with full Legion support, and we can’t do that if the Security Council doesn’t first convene.”
“Delegate A’lill’n…” Kaar tried again.
“Military comms aren’t reporting, suggesting localized jamming. Perhaps by a fleet of unknown affiliation focusing on the moon and planetary factories. Or sabotage of the comm relays, or—”
Kaar spoke softly, his voice warm. “Aletha. We both know there isn’t a force large enough in the galaxy to withstand the might of the Republic.”
“And what about the reports of Republic destroyers firing on one another?”
“In the confusion of a terrorist attack, it is often difficult for those observing to deliver accurate information. And, should friendly fire have occurred, tragic as those times are, they hardly necessitate an emergency meeting of the Security Council.”
The Security Council’s vice chair surrendered with a sigh. “Of course you’re right, Orrin.”
Kaar smiled. “That the MCR is capable of the occasional coordinated attack is a persistent and sad reality. After Kublar, they nearly pulled off a terrorist bombing of the House of Reason itself. Let’s wait for the Legion to repulse the assault. If the MCR acquired more capital ships, let them come and see firsthand what our orbital gun emplacements can do.”
Delegate A’lill’n nodded slowly, her conviction seeming to grow with each second. “Thank you, Delegate Kaar.”
“It’s my pleasure, dear Aletha. If Tarrago doesn’t report the situation under control within”—Kaar glanced at the chrono-display—“two hours, I’ll arrange a meeting and we’ll make sure the Legion and armed forces are doing their jobs to protect the Republic.”
The transmission ended, and Kaar leaned back in his chair, the leather releasing a blurp as his hips shifted. He tapped his chin twice, then leaned forward to activate a secure comm transmission.
Kaar arched an eyebrow as the face of a young woman with platinum-blond hair appeared. She seemed to be recovering from a pair of black eyes.
“Sentrella,” Kaar said, passing over any discussion about how she came to look like that. “Get me your employer. Immediately, if you please.”
Black Fleet
Third Wing, First Squadron, “Pit Vipers”
Tarrago Moon, Over Fortress Omicron
0205 Local System Time
The battery towers that encircled the massive gun tube opened up on the swarming tri-fighters in the dark space above the base.
“Watch that north tower, Viper Six,” called out the squadron leader over the comm.
His warning was too late.
Targeted turret fire found its mark. The massive quad barrels of the turret opened up in their tom tom motion on Katazzo, a guy Kat had only barely known. That tri-fighter exploded, leaving a smoking debris trail that ended somewhere out in the gray dust of the long lunar valley.
Someone called out a targeting spot report.
Kat was doing everything she could to evade heavy concentrations of green-hued streaking turret fire in order to set up a strafing run on any tower she could get an angle on. But it was verging on the impossible. The firepower coming from the base had gone from nothing to completely overwhelming in seconds.
She picked up Viper Lead’s six and fell in as his wingman as he streaked across the base once more, trying to draw turret fire so the others could attack.
“Break off, break off, break off!” he was calling out to her when a turret burst caught his dorsal deflector and sent him spinning off course. He screamed just before his ship smashed into a monolithic gray wall that surrounded the fortress below.
There was no surviving that.
For a moment, Kat did nothing. Felt nothing. She was stunned and empty. She let her tri-fighter streak out across the barren surface of the moon. Away from the battle.
Someone in the squad was calling for her.
Asking for orders.
Needing help.
“What’re the orders, Viper Two?”
And then it hit her.
She was in charge.
She came to and pulled the tri-fighter back around in a hard-banking turn, coming straight back at the fortress on the horizon. She dialed in a broad-focus setting on the target-assist for the 30mm cannons that hung below her ship.
Spray and pray, she thought as she increased to attack speed. She streaked just over the outer wall of the sprawling fortress, jerking the fighter hard first this way, then that to avoid fire. Doing everything she could to dodge the heavier clusters of interlocking turret fire all around her.
The 30mm barrels spun up and began to spit out short bass-note thrumming bursts of depleted uranium ball ammunition in mass quantities. She barely saw her wild strafin
g line rip a turret to shreds, but she heard the distant detonation through the hull of her fighter and saw the sudden light flare lit up the inside of her dark cockpit.
“Got one!” she grunted into the ether. Radar lock warnings screamed across her controls, and she banked hard and pushed the throttle full forward to evade. Turret fire tracked ahead of her, anticipating her position, and behind her in case she tried something tricky.
Over the comm, came the sounds of screaming and dying. She watched other tri-fighters get knocked down, or plow into the fortress complex. A few climbed to avoid green chasing blaster fire. It was setting up to be a slaughter.
Some part of her wanted to scrub and run. Get everyone out of here, or at least as many as she could. They’d lost the edge provided by surprise, and now they were being swatted from the skies like darting and annoying insects in some light show shooting gallery.
She was out over the lifeless gray wastes of the moon once more. She diverted power to the deflectors and ran for cover behind a series of low jagged hills beyond the complex.
“Viper Two!” shouted someone over the comm. “Bad guys inbound. Break off?”
She checked the comm traffic identifier and her available ammo in one quick look. Then she cranked her helmeted head to scan outside the starboard cockpit glass to visually identify the targets. She clocked several Lancers inbound on the tri-fighters that still swarmed the gun towers. Less than there had been, but some of the squadron was still in action. Still on mission.
A mission that had begun less than a minute ago.
“Negative, Viper Five. Re-form and stagger attacks on the towers. We’ve got to take them out before the bombers arrive. Otherwise this whole op is a no-go. Fleet’s depending on us, boys. Make your shots count.”