Bethany Anne glanced at the video wall, which consisted of thirty screens: six across and five down.
Front wall, use four starting at top left.
The first four screens blanked and a new feed replaced the previous one. There were seven humanoid figures and all seemed to be male, but one was very interesting to Bethany Anne since he was a two-legged Yollin.
>>Feeding audio direct to implant.<<
“And I’m telling you I asked about Baba Yaga!” The Yollin was speaking and the motions of his mandibles displayed his agitation. Bethany Anne glanced down at her tablet to read the particulars of the seven members.
The Yollin worked at a local company, not one of hers. The other six were split evenly between a mining company and two warehousing companies. Hard work, and the males looked rough themselves.
“What about it?” a hairy sasquatch-looking alien replied. A few on the team had suggested calling them “Chewbaccas,” but a contingent of Star Wars fans had wailed in anguish. They’d argued that they didn’t look dignified enough to be their favorite alien from the movies, so they became “Bakas,” which everyone accepted.
Such was her life at the moment: playing mediator between two sets of friends on whether they could nickname an alien after a human movie that had been popular before the world imploded.
She sighed and grabbed an energy bar, taking small bites while she watched and listened to the discussion play out.
The Yollin glanced at the Baka. “If this is the real Baba Yaga, then the Witch of the Empire has decided to make our planet her bitch.”
“That’s a bad thing?” the Baka asked.
“No.” The Yollin shook his head. “So long as you work hard and do the right thing she ain’t going to mess with you. BUT,” he waved a hand, his mandibles still clacking in agitation, “the presence of the Witch means the former Empress is involved too.”
“Yeah, so?” the Baka asked. “Why do we care? Do you see anything bad happening at the moment? Hell, we’ve all been bitching about the politicians and the gangs for a long damned time. I say we grab the opportunity to take back our area. The gangs been pushing on the businesses, and now the ‘Yaga is pushing back.”
“If you can believe the legal feed, sure,” one of the other guys—another Baka—remarked.
“Anybody they say they executed come back to refute it?” the Yollin asked. “Cause that’s the easiest way. If this is the real Baba Yaga…”
“Oh, it’s the real Baba Yaga,” Bethany Anne murmured, nibbling on her food bar.
“Then we won’t find anyone alive that they claim to have executed,” the Yollin finished.
Bethany Anne finished her bar and put aside the wrapper, clapping her hands together to get off a couple of crumbs.
She could hear John Grimes coming up behind her and put up a finger to tell him to hold on for a moment.
ADAM, tag these males. I want to know if they do anything at all, or just keep chatting themselves up.
>>Understood, Bethany Anne.<<
As she turned to John, the video she had been watching blanked and the previous feeds came back.
“Yes?” she asked, swallowing her last bite.
“Seems like we have a military strike heading in our direction,” he told her.
She raised an eyebrow. “Here? How the hell does anyone know to attack us here?”
John shrugged. “It isn’t like thousands of support people didn’t help build the base. It’s probably one of the planet’s worst-kept secrets.”
She rubbed her cheek. “Yeah, ok. You guys have told me that, but I suppose there is always a first.” She thought about it. “Air?”
“Yes, and ground. Not troops, but heavy vehicles. Looks like a local merc group or something like that.”
She nodded. “Michael?”
John grinned. “Staying out of this at the moment.”
She frowned. “That’s strange. He must be up to something. He has the armor, and I doubt very much that anything a local merc company has would kill him.” She sighed. “Both of us can’t be stuck here, and I need intel. See if he—" She spied John smiling. “Oh, good grief. Boys and your toys. Go…get intel, and don’t get killed.”
John turned to leave. “And!” she called, and John looked back. “Don’t allow Michael to die. I don’t want to have to resurrect him and then explain to our child why I killed him for incompetence and pissing me off!”
John shook his head and walked off.
She chewed her lip and subconsciously put a hand on her belly.
Chapter Five
High Tortuga, Thirty Minutes Outside the Queen Bitch’s Base
Michael appeared out of thin air and stumbled. Eric, one of the Queen’s Bitches, grabbed his arm. “Problems with the Etheric?” Eric chuckled.
Since they had been Bethany Anne’s closest protectors for decades, she called on the Queen’s Bitches when she couldn’t deliver a smackdown personally.
Michael joined John Grimes, Eric Escobar, Scott English and Darryl Jackson. Michael had rescued and brought Demon, an enhanced mountain lion, from Earth with him and she was going on this mission with them. Tabitha, Peter, Akio, and several others were in Black Eagles, screaming into the atmosphere to lie in wait for the air vehicles.
“It seems,” Michael answered, “that Bethany Anne wasn’t kidding when she told me metal interferes with Etheric travel.”
Scott’s eyes narrowed. “Were you going to try to travel the Etheric to attack the column coming this way sooner?”
Michael turned toward Scott, who put up a finger. “YOU WERE!”
“Not nice, man.” John shook his head. “Trying to take away our fun.”
Michael grimaced. “I wasn’t thinking of it quite that way.” He chuckled. “Ok, I probably was thinking of it in exactly that way. Remember, you Bitches go out on security ops all the time. I have been stuck under hundreds of tons of rock for a long time.”
“Should have been more careful who you stuck it in.” Eric chuckled. “I don’t think she believes you are invincible after missing you for the last hundred and fifty years.”
Michael thought about Eric’s comment. “You know, I was relatively unharmed for over a thousand years until I met Bethany Anne. Since then I’ve been almost killed twice, and also reduced to atoms and reconstituted in another dimension.”
Darryl grinned, his white teeth flashing in the waning light. His dark skin made his face almost invisible in his helmet. “So, am I to understand you blame Bethany Anne for your run of bad luck?”
Michael pursed his lips, thankful Akio wasn’t here to explain the truth of one of those instances. “I’m merely pointing out that the worst damage I’ve taken, including a kind of death, has happened since I’ve met Bethany Anne.”
“Right.” Scott snorted. “Am I the only one who has the balls to remind you that YOU picked her to help you?”
As a tiny plume of dust in the distance caught his eye Michael murmured, “I was rather hoping you would overlook that.”
The men noticed his focus and turned to see what he was looking at. A moment later all five helmets closed and tiny servos whirred as they locked in place and they activated their defensive shields.
All of them were wearing incarnadine armor that looked black under most light, and on the left arm of each was a female human skull with vampire teeth encircled by the words Ad Aeternitatem.
Michael’s helmet cam zoomed in on the fourteen trucks, each of which sported a large turret on the back. None looked exactly like tanks, but none looked very useful for anything but attacking a ground-based facility.
He wondered what kind of idiots would only bring fourteen trucks to attack a spaceport?
High Tortuga, Outside the Queen Bitch’s Base
“Air Striker 119, do you have eyes on target?”
“Negative, Strike Lead. Either this base is underground or we have bad coordinates.”
“One moment, Striker 119.”
A few mom
ents later the mercenaries’ base of operations came back on the encrypted channel. “Negative on bad coordinates. We have absolute confirmation the coordinates are accurate. Suspect camouflage.”
The pilot of Attack Ship 119 looked at his copilot. “You would think they would have better intel.”
“Heard it’s either a massive base or three sticks strung together to form an outhouse so they can pee in private.” The copilot scanned the ground as they passed over a nearby town. “I’m leaning toward ‘outhouse.’”
“Why?”
“You heard what they said it was, right?” The co-pilot checked the instruments.
“Base of some kind.”
“Not just a base, but a base for thousands and thousands, plus hangars so large you can land battleships and dreadnoughts in them. Advanced stuff.”
“Oh, that’s a good one!” The pilot chuckled as he verified he was an appropriate distance from 117. “Pull the third one, why don’t you?”
“No, I’m serious!” his co-pilot protested. “Big-ass chambers you could fly one of those big ships in. Not just one, but…”
Tabitha, previously Ranger Two and now bored to tears, was waiting in her Black Eagle up above the atmosphere. She touched her communication switch. “This is Overwatch. Waiting for instructions from ArchAngel.”
“And this is ArchAngel,” Michael’s clipped and precise voice replied, “telling Overwatch to continue her efforts to be patient. Apparently the last hundred and fifty years did not provide the practice she desperately needs.”
From behind her, the centuries-old vampire Ryu snickered and Tabitha spoke over their personal channel. “Laugh it up, vamp-boy. Remember, he is twice as old as you. He probably thinks you lack patience as well.”
Ryu gazed out into space, his smile evident in his voice. “That is highly doubtful, Tabitha. I am Japanese. We came out of the womb patient in my century. We waited for permission from our parents to cry for the first time.”
Tabitha stuck her tongue out, knowing her teammate and teacher was probably imagining her doing exactly that.
A hundred and fifty-plus years of familiarity from working together on operations and cleaning up a planet tended to allow people to be easy with each other.
For good or ill.
Michael clicked off the comm with Tabitha, his eyes narrowing inside his helmet. “Gentleman—and I ask this with all sincerity—please confirm that your weapons are set appropriately.”
“God!” Scott exclaimed. “Who told Jean we needed pistols that went to twelve?” He sighed. “I’m ready.”
Darryl chuckled over the comm. “Ready, and the answer to that is, ‘Look in the mirror.’ I probably have video of how excited you were when you found out she upped the power to twelve.”
Eric was a hundred yards away on the other side of the dirt road the armored air trucks were inbound on. The team was in a small valley that was surrounded by cliffs about fifty feet high. “Ready, and I have video.”
“Kiss-ass,” Scott muttered.
“Jean is very excited,” John told them casually, “that we volunteered to try out the new pistols for this attack. As her husband, I appreciate the added enthusiasm in our nightly physical exertions due to her excitement.”
“NIGHTLY?” Eric whined. “Aren’t you old enough to be down to three times a week, or maybe two?”
“What can I say?” John chuckled. “The lady likes her physical activity.”
“And I’m ready,” Michael finished. “We are seventeen seconds from action. Please don’t be late to the party. Choose whatever level you desire, but if your shots bounce off their armor I won’t shield you when everyone laughs.”
When he finished speaking, Michael checked to make sure his own pistol was set to twelve. He had fired on eleven, and the kickback from that setting wasn’t pleasant. Although it would have broken a normal human’s wrist, the bone structures of everyone here had been enhanced by nanocytes which maximized strength in all directions.
Even twisting.
He smirked and sent the command to his armor to become more rigid at the wrist. He wasn’t so cocky that he wouldn’t accept the bracing the armor would provide once he integrated his pistols.
Integration successful…
It was time to see how protected these vehicles were.
Over a century and a half before, Bethany Anne’s lead weapons developer Jean Dukes (later Jean Grimes) acquired technology from TOM and created weapons which used magnetic pulses to fire shards. The tiny slivers of hardened metal accelerated to hypersonic speeds, making them damn near as powerful as crew-serviced field weapons.
She had engineered the pistols to offset most of the recoil by using a similar technology to that which sent the tiny shard of metal screaming out of the pistol. However, the higher power settings required exponentially more strength, and even the stoutest complained after shooting too many shots at the fabled ’eleven.’
As a joke, Jean had modified the pistols so they went to eleven so they could use the quote from the movie This is Spinal Tap.
Each pistol was set up to be usable by only its owner; set to their DNA, making them useless for others. If they were stolen and anyone should try to fire them they wouldn’t function. If they tried to take them apart, they would explode.
Leaving a very large crater.
Jean had recently found a way to up the power even further. First, she built the technology into a sniper rifle Bethany Anne had given her as a gift. Then, during the time the ships were in orbit around Earth setting up the defensive satellite network of BYPSs, she tinkered with making the mechanics smaller.
Jean had finally been successful with her modifications a week after arriving on High Tortuga, and this would be the first time the pistols would be used.
Michael wondered if any of the other guys had thought to alter their armor.
He grinned as he aimed the reticle in his HUD at the far end of the caravan.
“Fire.”
“This is Ground Lead 717.” Th’et wiped his eyes. The glow from the screens annoyed him at the best of times, and these heavy armored trucks were bouncing up and down at least a couple of finger-lengths on the rough surface they were traveling over, annoying him further.
One would think the air cushions would provide a better ride in these beasts.
“All units, leave active radar off until we have active engagement or you are ordered to go live. Let’s get as close as we can to the coordinates. This is a hit-and-run. Send your attack munitions into any openings you find. We are here to disrupt and disengage. That will allow those above us to keep away any—”
That was when he heard the first screams from the back of the convoy.
The amount of mass necessary to cause damage goes down as the velocity of the projectile goes up. Back on Earth, there had been incidents where a piece of straw had been thrust through a tree by hurricane-force winds.
The WCH-HHU Heavily Armored Air Lift vehicle used both antigravity and air cushion technologies to move troops or missiles and other munitions to ground warfare locations.
Presently there were fourteen WCH-HHU vehicles traveling down the path toward the coordinates. It wasn’t so much a real road as dirt compressed by vehicles such as theirs over a long period.
The eight missiles in the back of each transport gave them a hundred and twelve ways to make this evening a significant downer to those who were at the coordinates.
It would suck horribly—for them—if the lucky recipients were not connected with Baba Yaga.
These armored vehicles had been modified to fire two missiles at a time, one from each side. When the missile was fired the antigrav engine became a catapult, launching it into the air before its chemical ignition system kicked in. They would fire from a distance to allow the kinetic energy to increase before the heavy missiles hit their intended targets.
Each missile had a small mass-to-energy-conversion tip which would further enhance the headaches for those at the
base.
If they lived to have headaches, that is.
The problem was the idiots in WCH-HHU 342 (five up from the rear) had gotten a bit excited and started prepping their missiles in advance. This was against the rules of engagement and, frankly, against common sense.
When molten tungsten slag had hit the third missile down the row the kinetic energy had transferred to it and the heat had overridden the temporary lockdowns.
The resulting explosion had set off every missile in the armored vehicle.
Two eye-blinks later the missiles in the next two trucks detonated as a result of the previous explosions; the mercenaries in the vehicles were already dead.
In the distance, the armored humans who were still firing their pistols were tossed backward by the shockwave to slam against the rocks behind them. Then they were swept over them and out into the surrounding desert area.
Fortunately for them, their armor had antigrav as well or their landings might have been a bit rougher.
Tabitha hit the button to call the Black Eagles. “COMMENCE!” she ordered and her own ship plummeted out of space.
Although Michael’s voice had come over her earpiece, it was the explosions they could see from the video drones miles away which had caused her to order the attack.
There was no way she wasn’t coming down when it looked like Michael might be in trouble.
“He will be okay, Kemosabe,” Ryu told her. “If you will but check the signals from their armor on screen two, they are mostly green.”
Tabitha stabbed the screen Ryu was talking about and confirmed that while all five suits of armor had spots of yellow, none of the bodies they protected were in trouble.
Yet.
The group was no longer together, though. “Damn, what happened down there?” she murmured as her ship broke through the upper atmosphere, but then enemy ships and explosions started popping up on her HUD and she was too busy to think about his absence further.
“All Overwatch, attack.”
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