Moretti looked at his cigarette and quickly stubbed it out.
“Let us move to the secondary command center,” Harper said.
“Harper, if you don’t mind I want to go and check on the powered armor, if our electronics are down then they might be as well,” Moretti said.
Harper looked at Moretti for a moment before nodding.
“Good, go and send a runner back to report. Stay there and coordinate things from that position,” Harper said.
“For the sake of...” Moretti never got the words out as Landing City shook with an explosion that made the railgun rounds from before seem like love-taps.
“They’re bombing us!” Someone said hysterically. Panic spread through the command center.
Moretti took his leave, grabbing a flashlight that was working and taking an enforcer with him.
Moretti didn’t care and marched out of the command center. The barracks were even worse than the command center, they were rallying and running in every direction, but there was no control. It wasn’t panic but they were throwing themselves around and heading upwards, most of them believing that the troopers had arrived.
Moretti stayed out of their way and took back routes to get to the research and development area; there weren’t any enforcers around but lights were on down near the doors and armed figures stood behind barricades.
“Who goes there?” someone sounding like Domo said.
“Domo, that you? It’s Moretti, here to take command, seems something took out the electronics. Is the powered armor working?”
“Ahhh, yes, sir, sorry about that, sir,” Domo said, his gun lowering.
“Good man.”
“For the sake of Harmony!” Domo said, saluting.
Moretti hoped the enforcer with him wouldn’t pick up on the sarcasm in his voice.
“You, go back to Harper, tell him that I am with the powered armor and it looks to be functional,” Moretti said to the man.
He saluted, did the goddamn “for the sake of Harmony,” and fucked off. Moretti walked past the lights to where Domo and Niemi were.
“Holy shit, I’ve heard those fucking five words too much for a lifetime,” Moretti said.
“For the sake of—” Niemi started, raising her fist and laughing at his pained expression.
“No, for the love of all things holy,” Moretti shook his head, speaking freely for the first time in nearly fifty years. “God, it feels good to talk without worrying someone’s going to hear you,” he said, pushing open the doors to the lit development area.
“Amen, to that,” Domo sighed, pulling the armored doors shut.
Moretti looked at the powered armor. Plates were being added over their joints. Young was moving between troopers working command consoles next to the powered armor.
“Fuck, someone leave the lights on?” Moretti said, looking to Zukic, who was examining ammunition packs.
“Hey, Moretti, good to see you,” Zukic said, holding out his hand. Moretti shook it, as he looked around. There was blood splatter here and there, plus he could smell the bodies that had been thrown together. He’d smelled enough bodies in his time on Masoul that it didn’t affect him much.
“We cut off the external cables physically. We’re running on the techs’ genny down here; without lines to connect us to the EMP raging through the lightning collectors on the surface, we’re A-Okay. And seeing as everyone had to change over to that after the generators and power banks were out, well, let’s just say most of the city should be as dark as hell,” Zukic said.
“Color me impressed,” Moretti said, looking at the troopers working on their machines and checking weapons.
***
Madam Song’s parents had been killed by working themselves to the bone and then giving their rations to Chosen. Song had thought of them as liberators and hope for the future.
Her parents had died in a tunnel collapse and no one had been interested in helping the young girl that had been left an orphan.
When Song had got a bit older, Chosen took interest in her body. They were Chosen, and no one, not even the enforcers, cared what they did to her.
She had sunk into the tunnels, finding others that hated Harmony as she did.
They had plotted their revenge and stayed hidden. Hope had flared when the troopers had shown up. They had stayed in the shadows, not wanting to let their presence show in case Harmony came down on them. They knew they couldn’t win a war against Harmony without the troopers’ help.
It was one of the things that had surprised her so, when they had brought Mark before her and he had shown her the tattoo of a trooper.
Her parents might have wanted to escape the companies, but she saw them as salvation. They weren’t nice people and they weren’t gentle, but they had trained her and her people in the ways of war, had shown them how to make bombs and given her plans that allowed her people to gain weapons and armor that had been hoarded away.
Tyler had told her to keep electronics in metal boxes if she wanted them to work; the entire command center had gone down, but the things in those boxes still worked.
With the power going out, a new phase of attacks was put into motion. Resistance fighters put on their armor and grabbed their weapons and used the tunnels they had built and lived in for years.
Their grenades and bombs weren’t powered by electronics; they were simple gunpowder constructs and chemical formulas that exploded upon mixing.
They dropped them into barracks, threw them into moving groups of Chosen.
Chaos raged across Landing City, the resistance fighters hitting Chosen from the darkness and then running away as fast as they appeared.
“Go,” Song said to Henry. They stepped out between market stalls, hurling their grenades at the two groups of Chosen before ducking back behind cover and down a grate that led to the tunnels.
She heard an annoyed cry, then the explosives going off. Screams were cut off with weapons fire.
In the darkness, no one could see the smile on her face as she saw panicked Chosen being cut down as they tried to find cover.
“Let’s go,” Song said, looking to her band of fifteen people. They followed her through the tunnels, guided by fluorescent paint that marked their position—another thing that Tyler had advised her on.
With the right tactics and enough grenades, fifteen people could do a lot.
Chapter 42
Combat Shuttle Three-One-Seven
Masoul Actual, Masoul System
6/3242
“Here we fucking go, ladies and gents, time to give these fuckers a nice hello.”
The massive armored doors opened as the pilot talked. The shuttle, like the others around it, was sealed up, the engines primed and ready. The carrier was actually protected against EMP, as was the shuttle. They saw the first two missiles explode, their streams high above Masoul Actual.
It didn’t take long for them to fade to nothing.
They seemed kind of unimpressive, but they were supposed to knock out all of the Harmony forces’ electronics.
The shuttles pushed out of the carriers, flooding out through their hangar doors like a waterfall of shining beetles. Alexis’ shuttle joined the tide, then flipped tail over tip so it was facing Masoul, upside down from their original point. To those inside, the floor was still down.
Got to love gravity controls, she thought as the shuttle turned on the power.
It was time that they got rid of these fuckers once and for all.
Alexis checked the feeds that the combat shuttle pilot was streaming to the troopers.
She watched as a bright light made the sensors dial down. Missiles had gone off in Masoul Actual’s atmosphere, their purpose to clear out the storm coverage and push the massive cloud formations away.
“Wooo! That’s what I’m fucking talking about - clearing the skies trooper-style!” Wiz yelled, getting a grin from the others.
The grins were short-lived as the missile blasts cleared. The clouds pushe
d back as the shuttles headed for the storm and Landing City below.
They all knew what waited for them down there: a fight for survival.
Alexis checked her weapon and her harness, chewing gum as they hit atmosphere, her guts rolling about with the turbulence and choppy flight.
Turbulence wouldn’t kill her, but hell if it didn’t feel like she would just drop all the way to the ground. In a way, she was, streaking towards the planet in a man-made meteor.
The shuttle came in hard and braked hard; the chairs pulled up, and the troopers were held like livestock on a rotating belt. Trapdoors opened and the ground rushed past, air whipping around them as they watched the uninhabitable planet below.
Humans could only live in the planet’s crust.
Alexis surveyed her section, looking at the men and women that had fought over planets; they had each seen more than fifty people would ever see in their lifetimes.
She wished that they could leave and have normal lives. Being a trooper wasn’t a life; it was an action, it was a brotherhood and sisterhood.
They had joined the EMF to get a better lot in life, and they had. They had gained a family, and with that family, they had gained a new understanding of pain.
The people around her wouldn’t have cared if she died on the streets back home. They would have only been interested in what they could pull from her corpse.
The training and trials she had gone through to get her tattoo and the stripes on her armor, that had changed everything. They wouldn’t just watch if she was hurt, they would pick her up and fight her battles with her. Nothing was too small or big for them.
They would stand and fall together.
It sent a wave of purpose and emotion through her, all of it turning into fierce anger at Harmony.
Troopers weren’t good people. They weren’t the best of humanity; they were the motherfucking wolves, the price of the status quo. They came to assert power and return balance to the worlds they met.
They were hardened from the scars that lay under that armor, that lay on their very emotions. Revenge, anger, loss, pain, fear, all of it boiled into one thing.
They would give their lives for one another and make some other fucker die so that they could live.
Fuck the noble shit, that was what they were, the fucking wolves, the fucking hitman at the door.
The shuttle’s air brakes went to full power, opening up fully.
Alexis’ line whizzed out, her shoulders out of the craft as Horley’s legs started coming through the hatch.
They fell, lines of troopers, in a ripple onto a landing pad.
Alexis hit her harness; it fell off her as she grabbed her E-12. She didn’t need to cock the gun; she was already loaded.
She looked out across the landing pad. Thousands of troopers were raining down, and the air was thick with combat shuttles dropping off more troopers or returning to the carriers above.
Her HUD linked into a set of scans, information filling her helmet. With a glance, she saw that she had a full map of the entire city.
“Alexis, take the lead. The rest of you get into formation,” Dang said, the platoon down on the ground and just a few hundred meters apart.
“Contacts!” barked the pilot, who had just dropped Alexis off and was still connected to her net. The shuttle rotated, and its guns came alive and missiles fired as the first rounds started coming from an access hatch.
Other combat shuttles rained fired on any targets that showed themselves.
Alexis and her section kept running, spread out like the tip of an arrow. Only if someone started hitting around them would they start reacting; for now, they were pounding the ground. All this tech and they were fucking running.
Alexis’ momentary levity was lost as one of the new machine guns that she and all of the troopers had been warned about opened up on troopers charging across the landing pads.
Missiles blew the thing to shit, but the first reds, yellows, and blacks now dotted her HUD map.
Pedro was the first to reach the door that led to a stairwell into the tower below.
He kicked the door in, and it was nearly ripped off its hinges as Diez and Summers charged in, E-12s up and ready. No flashes could be seen.
“Clear! Hear motion, but moving down,” Diez reported.
“Move it, people!” Dang barked. The section piled in, the rest of the platoon following shortly after.
They spread into the stairwell and moved to the first level that they found.
Only brief rays of light penetrated to this level. Alexis’ view filled with red targets; Chosen waiting to move.
“Fire!” she yelled, rounds already leaving Summer, Diez, and Wiz’s barrels before she finished the command.
“Move in, secure a foothold. I want repulsors ready to move in right afterwards. Hyunh, you seeing this?” she asked, her brain working on adrenaline and the augments that Tyler and his brothers had pressed for her to get.
“Seen. Moving forces to you,” Hyunh responded.
“Good.” She cut the channel to go back to her section’s. “Pedro, I want this stairwell secure, then push past. We’re going to have those fuckers up here at some time. I want to be ready for them,” she said, climbing on a railing, jumping down a floor, and rolling as she landed.
“Shit, Alexis, you could have fallen all the way to the bottom,” Horley said.
“Sometimes shit ain’t so crazy in war,” Alexis said, hearing Mark’s words come from her mouth, and wondering where that mass of muscle and deadly intent was. She sensed that she would find out soon enough.
Horley seemed fine with that answer and pushed on, as Pedro and the rest of the section moved down to the next level.
Alexis’ view changed as her HUD started getting to work at making her able to see in the dark. Hyunh and the weapons detail had used the surprise created by Wiz, Diez, and Summer, pushing hard into the first floor.
The rest of the platoon was moving to assist, with a new group behind them pushing through to help Alexis.
“Pedro, how’s the second floor looking?” she asked.
“Chosen moving around. Not as bad as the first floor, but a build-up.”
“Alright, send it up to Dang, tell him to have a platoon or higher take the objective. I want to move down as many levels as possible and get as much…” A hatch opened, showing a girl sitting there with a flashlight. She looked over the troopers.
“Message from the Triple-Twos: welcome to the fucking party. My name’s Jolie. Tyler said that you would have sensor units; give them to us and we can put them up across the tower,” the girl said, jumping down from her hatch. Other kids were behind her, all of them looking skinny, but Alexis saw a fire in them.
“What’s Tyler’s nickname?” Alexis asked.
“SWAS,” Jolie said.
“Give her your sensor units and the mines,” Alexis said to those around her.
Alexis opened a channel to Dang as she stuffed mines into the bag Jolie had produced.
“Just met a resistance contact who comes bearing a message from Triple-Twos. They want sensor units,” Alexis said, her section pulling out sensor units as she and Horley faced down towards the stairwell where Chosen might come from.
Bags were produced and sensor bricks the size of a person’s pinkie and filled with sensors were tossed in, as well as the small disk mines.
They were shuffled back into the duct; Alexis could hear people moving off with the equipment.
“Got a resupply coming in with extras. Move your section up and keep clearing; as sections pass, they’ll hand off their sensor gear and mines,” Dang said.
“We’re going to clear lower. As sections pass, they’ll give you their sensor gear,” Alexis relayed to Jolie.
“Alright,” Jolie said. Alexis had already started seeing sections of the tower on her HUD showing red haloes of moving Chosen in real-time.
The troopers’ job had just gotten a bit easier.
Chapter 43
Masoul Actual, Masoul System
6/3242
Nerva looked over the reports all around him; resistance groups had made contact, and a sensor grid was quickly being established. Colonel Domashev was pushing troopers and supplies out of the flight deck as fast as Combat Shuttles could be loaded.
The majors were dealing with the action on the ground, the lieutenant colonels giving advice instead of orders. The majors were the ones on the ground actually dealing with the problem head-on.
Even then, if a section was under contact and couldn’t follow Nerva’s orders, he expected them to tell him to go to hell instead of try and carry out his orders and put themselves in a position that would get them all killed.
There were no reports of powered armor yet; hopefully there wouldn’t be. Right now he was focused on getting people into Landing City, pushing down from every tower’s landing pad. The faster he could get enough people on a level, the more he could use the confusion and fear that was raging through Chosen’s ranks.
There was limited light in the city, meaning that Chosen had to do with the few lights that they had left—here and there a fixture on a secondary grid that hadn’t blown out worked. It was rare, but it happened in some sections.
Other Chosen had flashlights, but it was chaos in there; they wanted to close with the enemy, but it was pitch black beneath the surface, buried under tens or hundreds of meters of rock. Light never reached down there, and people didn’t know what to do.
Nerva needed to capitalize on that. In Central Tower, they’d gained access to the first floor, flanked them, and put a weapons detail right into their midst. You could walk across the floor without ever touching the ground now.
He looked to the adjoining towers; he knew that Haas had said that the tunnels connecting them should be down except for the ones that the resistance used, but Nerva wanted to be ready for the enemy factor. No matter what, one could never completely understand what the enemy might do. Sure, they could in broad strokes, but down on the individual and section level, no military leader was that good.
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