The Infinity Brigade #3, Stone Breaker

by Andrew Beery

  I signaled to Tommy that we needed to get closer but that we risked getting taken out by friendly fire. I knew that the bio-generators would allow us to get back in the fray, but no one likes meeting the Big-D as a result of friendly fire… it was the principle of the thing.

  Based on the TacVid, it looked like we could get about five hundred meters closer to JJ’s position before we would run out of cover. After that, if my guess was right… Henderson’s people would light us up like a pair of errant ducks flying over a hunting convention. Not good for the duck. I hoped getting even a little bit closer would be enough to get within radio range.

  As we approached JJ’s AO, I could see an ultra-narrowband laser pointed at the ammo depot. The hyperfield shields were designed with a very narrow frequency window that allowed line-of-sight communications to anyone inside of the shield dome while at the same time limiting the amount of energy that could pass through the shields.

  I smiled because JJ’s plan was immediately obvious to me… and I was impressed. As much as we were friends, I had never considered him a brilliant tactician. I might well have to reevaluate that opinion. Somehow, he was goading the Gators into expending their impressive supply of tactical nukes against our heavily shielded ammo depot.

  The fact that they had so many spoke volumes about what they had intended to do to our people. Attacking from the rear with that many nukes would have buggered us big-time.

  I tried my radio again. “JJ, you seem to have made some good friends among the locals. That’s one hell of a surprise party they are throwing for you… candles and everything.”

  Much to my relief, my friend responded immediately.

  “AG, Commander and good buddy… I thought for sure you had bought the Big-D. I saw your FOF beacon go out a few mikes ago,” Lieutenant Hammond answered. “Where be ya, iff’n I might ask?”

  “About half a klick south of your position. I’d take it kindly if you’d let Lieutenant Henderson know that Tommy and I are coming in. Henderson’s got himself and some of his boys behind some of the bigger rocks in defensive positions. My radio is barely op and he’s not responding to my hails.”

  “Roger that, Sir. I’ll have them let you pass. I’ve got Chief Damar up here with me keeping our line-of-sights on target. He can do some work on your Starks if you like.”

  “Excellent news, JJ. We could use some medical nanites too. Ours got fried by some of those party favors meant for you.”

  Chief Damar was the armorer for Henderson’s team. He made quick work of our busted up Stark suits. If he was irritated by the state of them, he was wise enough to keep his comments to himself.

  The radiation poisoning was causing me to become irritable. The flush of medical nanites that JJ injected me with burned like the dickens. That alone told me that Tommy and I had received a lethal dose of radiation. The burning sensation were the billions of microscopic machines diligently repairing our DNA. DNA that had been fried by the RADs we had absorbed courtesy of about a gazillion tactical nukes shared generously with us by our friends, the Gators. I was going to have to make an effort to thank them properly.

  A few minutes later I felt my quantum link with the Yorktown come back online. I sighed a silent sigh of relief. My engrams would now be updated.

  That was the one problem with the bio-generation system. Your resurrection was only as good as your last update. There had been several instances since we started using the alien tech where marines had lost as much as a day’s worth of memories. It could be extremely disorienting as friends and colleagues remembered interactions you had no recollection of.

  It hadn’t happened to me yet, but I knew in my heart that the day would come when it did. I dreaded the mischief JJ would get into claiming I had ostensibly agreed to any matter of BS in my previous incarnation. Having known JJ for as long as I have, I wouldn’t put anything past him.

  I toggled my fleet comm. “Yorktown, this is Commander Stone. I need a high priority target dealt with. Coordinates…” I looked at JJ.

  “Coordinates, latitude 110.24, longitude 12.89,” he completed for me.

  “Roger that, AG. This is Yorktown Actual. Can I assume you want said target handled with extreme prejudice?”

  “Yes, Captain. I would like to make a statement that any potential survivors will remember. Also, be advised, the coordinates are for what we believe to be a submerged aquatic bunker. Titanium KEWs would be advised.”

  “Very good, Commander. One stone breaker on order. I show no FOF beacons in the target zone. Can I assume you want the bombardment to commence immediately?”

  “Affirmative, Sir. Let’em have it at your earliest convenience.”

  “KEWs away. Let us know if you need anything else.”

  “Thank you, Sir. I think we are good for now.”

  “Very good, AG. Happy hunting. KEW impact in forty-five seconds. Keep your heads down. Yorktown Actual out.”

  Captain Kirkland was a good man. True to his word, forty-five seconds later the ground shook as half a metric ton of titanium-clad rock hit the Gator’s underground aquatic bunker with enough force to leave a thousand-meter crater fifty meters deep right on top of the target coordinates.

  If the Gator’s had any aspirations of pulling more nukes to the surface to drop on my Marines… they were dashed by the Yorktown’s precision KEW. I must say, the flash, as a minute fraction of the KEW’s kinetic energy was dissipated converting lake water into superheated steam and then plasma, is quite impressive.

  Two more nukes fell on our supply depot and then the bombardment stopped. My guess was these last two had been inflight before the KEW hit. Even though the Gator’s lobbing the nukes were not the target of the kinetic energy weapon that the Yorktown had used to rain down hell on our Ashtoreth friends… they were close enough that most died in the resulting super-heated explosion.

  JJ watched the scene with me from our vantage point on the bluff.

  “Oh, Bollocks if that doesn’t looks like some well barbequed Gator.”

  I nodded my head.

  ***

  Processing Unit Seven-One-Nine paused for several milliseconds. Analysis of the wreckage confirmed the Ashtoreth rebels had indeed fought a battle in the vicinity of a habitable moon in system A58923. In addition, debris from another advanced race was detected.

  The computer cores on the alien vessels had been partially destroyed by some type of primitive failsafe mechanism. Most sentient entities would have classified the data the cores contained as irretrievable… but the Processing Units created by the Fabricators were both gifted and patient. They would piece together the data in these alien computer cores. Knowledge of one’s friends and foes was an essential tenant of ultimate victory.

  Chapter 4: Into the Arms of Our Enemy…

  The outskirts of the Ashtoreth capital were a ghost town. I can’t say I’m surprised. We had been advancing toward it for the better part of three weeks now. It had taken us longer than anticipated. The entire path of our trek was a nuclear wasteland. It should be noted that this devastation was a result of the Ashtoreth counter offensive.

  My teams had systematically eliminated access to the infrastructure behind the Gator’s war machine. We had cut power to the capital; taken complete control of the planet’s airspace; shut down mass transit to and from major manufacturing hubs. We were even jamming their radio transmissions.

  Given the fact that the Gators didn’t have access to anything similar to our quantum communications network, this meant their only means of communication were buried landlines and line-of-sight lasers. We cut these off as fast as we could find them. In short, the Ashtoreth forces were almost down to fighting with sticks and stones… which was just the way I liked it.

  I scanned the surrounding area with my Stark’s enhanced optics. Nothing. If there was anybody here, they were doing a damn good job of hiding.

  My buddy, JJ Hammond, was by my side. I had decided that the best way to keep him out of trouble was to keep him near
me. Besides my aid, Tommy Davis, had decided it would be a good idea to remove his helmet to scratch an itch. I’d warned him in the past about learning to live with the itch, but the man had spent too much time around JJ. No sooner had the helmet come off than an especially ambitious and gifted marksman on the other side places a round smack between his eyes. It was doubtful that he even realized he had been hit.

  The good news was that when he woke up on the Yorktown after his trip through the bio-generator… there was a good chance his ear would not be itching. Sadly, it left me short one aid.

  I must admit, there are aspects of my job that I hate with a passion. Typically, these are the times where I get to spend quality rump-time planning an operation or filling out the never-ending stream of paperwork that the modern military seems to thrive on. Sadly, I think many marines underestimate the amount of effort that goes into such pursuits. I say that, because I cannot imagine any marine ever accepting a promotion… if they had any inkling of what said promotion would actually entail. It seemed the higher you went… the deeper the paper pile got and the further away from the action you got.

  In years past, much of that planning was designed to keep the marine body-count, for any given operation, as low as possible. That was still a major consideration for the Infinity Brigade, but it was now more of a logistical exercise. A marine being decanted from a bio-generator was a marine that wasn’t in the field making the enemy’s day miserable.

  When the ground war began, my goal had been to make the affair a surgical one. Get in. Get out. Given the extensive nature of the Ashtoreth interference and incursion into the very heart of the Galactic Coalition, there was no question but that we had to remove, with prejudice, any ability of the Ashtoreth to continue that interference. Sadly, no plan ever survives contact with the enemy. It soon became clear I would need to rethink the nature of our offensive.

  In point of fact, much of my planning efforts now revolved around how to keep the Ashtoreth civilian body-count as low as possible. I had to toss out plan after plan as it became evermore painfully obvious that the royal family just didn’t care how many of their people they got killed. The very fact that we seemed to care, actually made the situation worse as the Ashtoreth military began to use their civilian population as shields from which to launch their own attacks.

  A few weeks earlier, as I had been reworking my plans for the ground offense for what seemed like the sixteenth time, I began to grumble. I was being buried in the minutiae of command. Admiral Catherine Kimbridge chose that moment to utter two words that changed my life… delegate more.

  Now in fairness, I had always been in the habit of delegating but what Cat was sharing was some hard-won wisdom she had obtained over the years. When you feel buried… it often comes down to a failure to adequately delegate. The fact that A.G. Stone could do a thing… was not in and of itself… sufficient reason for A.G. Stone to do that thing. This was something I had said to myself before, but it seemed evermore applicable now.

  In the weeks that followed, Sergeant Davis had become indispensable. I could plan an operation from the field with eyes-on intel, knowing that Tommy would handle the details. His temporary loss due to a sniper threatened to derail my momentum.

  With little choice, I drafted JJ as I had previously turned his people over to Lieutenant Commander Hiller. There were reports of unusual activity some five hundred kilometers to the south of King Astarte’s capital. The Yorktown’s sensors couldn’t penetrate some type of obfuscation field that was being generated over the area in question.

  Since the marines already had boots on the ground, Admiral Kimbridge had ordered us to look into it. Hiller’s team was in the best position to investigate so I dispatched them with instructions to assess the situation and take whatever action he deemed fit. Those instructions would come back to haunt me, but I had no way of knowing it at the time.

  As we made our way slowly forward, we eventually arrived at an intersection that was big enough to offer a better view of the surrounding buildings.

  “The palace is that larger blue structure to the left of the spaceport. The military base is the smaller structure to the left,” I whispered to JJ and the squad of infiltration specialists we had brought with us.

  Strictly speaking, the whispering was completely unnecessary. The cloaking systems in our Starks completely eliminated a broad spectrum of noises. We could yell at the top of our lungs and a person standing two feet away wouldn’t hear a peep. In fact, while cloaked, the only way we heard one another was via our internal comms. Still, the art of skulking about was as old as the first human hunter and whispering was almost embedded in our DNA.

  “Doesn’t it seem odd there is no one about?” JJ whispered back. “We’re in the middle of a war. You’d think there would be somebody guarding something. Almost seems like a trap.”

  “I was thinking the same thing… except if it were a trap it’s a pretty obvious one.”

  “Obvious to us… but who knows how a Gator thinks,” JJ answered.

  “Point taken,” I agreed. “I want you to work your way over to the right and check out the spaceport. There are a lot of structures there that could hold a sizable force.”

  “Ok, Boss. I sure hope we find somebody. It’d be pretty disappointing if we fought this hard only to get here and find nobody’s home… kind’a spoils the mood.”

  I snorted. Tens of thousands of civilians had died to get us to this point… the vast majority killed by so-called friendly fire from their own side. I was not normally a fan of ‘forced regime change’ but I was willing to make an exception for King Asparte.

  I pointed towards the gilded structures that were the palace. “I’ll take Nichols, DeForest and Doohan. You take everybody else. Keep your comms open. Call out if you see anything and I’ll do the same.”

  I watched as JJ and his team headed off. Of course, ‘watched’ was a relative term as we all had our stealth systems fully engaged. I motioned to my team and we headed towards the buildings I had indicated earlier.

  I was pretty sure we were undetectable in our starks, but the Gators had started using volume displacement sensors that detected minute changes in atmospheric pressure. On a starship, in an enclosed environment, they were the preferred means of detecting a cloaked adversary. In a city… they were more problematic… unless the city was devoid of inhabitants.

  About the time that thought worked its way through what passes for my noggin…. the proverbial caca hit the fan.

  “Incoming!” Nichols yelled.

  Sure enough, my AI was showing sixteen inbound shells fired from emplacements located five kilometers to the south. If they got through our defenses… and if they were tac-nukes we were headed for the pickle jars. Starks are good but not that good.

  “Umbrella Ack-Ack,” I yelled back.

  Immediately the four of us began filling the airspace around our AO with hyper-velocity kinetics. With any luck we could take out the incoming rounds while they were still a few kilometers away. The stream of kinetics rounds was traveling so fast they superheated on contact with the air. Titanium casings kept the bb-sized pellets together long enough to reach their targets one point one kilometers away.

  My AI showed six of the sixteen inbound rounds destroyed. That left ten. Not good. We continued to fire Ack-Ack, but I knew the math was not going to work out.

  I had my AI fire a sonic blast from the heels of my armored feet. The echo pattern indicated solid ground. Where was a good hole when you needed one?

  I moved a few meters and tried again. This time my AI detected the subterranean void I had been looking for. I aimed my arm-mounted grenade launcher straight down and fired off three rounds right beside where I was standing. I’m sure that somewhere in the technical operations manual for the Mark-16 Stark suit there probably was a paragraph or two that specifically recommended against said actions but what the hey… my guess was the incoming ordnance was going to void the warranty anyway.

  When the
dust settled I was a good three meters below the surface of the road. It wasn’t as deep as I would have liked but beggars can’t be choosey.

  “On me… in the hole. Move it Marines!”

  As the others joined me I could see we had only a couple of seconds before the inbounds were on us. The tunnel we found ourselves in seemed to be some type of aqueduct system. It was just tall enough that we could carefully jog down its length.

  I say ‘carefully’ because the power-assist built into our armor meant that it was all too easy to bounce into the ten-foot high ceiling if one were not careful. There was no danger of being hurt but it would serious damage a marine’s pride.

  In less than ten seconds the first of the incoming rounds started to hit the city above us. In classical Astarte fashion, the ordinance was of the nuclear variety. The only good news was the city seemed to be empty.

  We made it another one hundred meters in the general direction of the palace before we ran into serious opposition. It seemed the Gator King had left some of his minions behind. From their reaction as we rounded the bend in the tunnel and ran into them… they were as surprised to see us as we were to see them.

  Apparently, there was a whole company of the Ashtoreth ground pounders waiting to rush out of the tunnels and engage any force that had survived the initial bombardment. I think the Ashtoreth commanders had assumed we would attack the capital in force. The idea of a surgical strike seemed foreign to them. For all I knew there were many such troop caches scattered about the capital. For the moment though… it meant that there were about two hundred pissed-off Gators against me and my three marines. I liked those odds.

  I had to give Astarte’s boys credit. They didn’t panic, and they didn’t run… not that there was any place to run in a tunnel that only went two directions. The nearest Gators took a knee and began to fire their rifles at us. The next rank behind them also began to fire. Given the size of the space they were operating within, this meant that only about ten percent of the Gators where actively engaging us.