Seeker of Moons (Cassidy's Command Book 1)

by Geoff Workman

  “All Shuttle personnel, check your weapons and systems power and respond, “Kyle voiced over his helmet comms. All were 100% except Sunshine, who reported only 60% system power but it was too late to do anything about it now. Damn he thought , I hope we won’t regret not checking earlier.

  Speedy put the Shuttle into a steep dive towards the asteroid's surface and following Kyle’s instruction headed towards the numerous plumes of smoke which were combining to turn the Northern skies above the small planet a dusky blue. Targeting one of the plumes which seemed to be dying out, Speedy flew at tree top level expecting to attract ground fire, but none came.

  As they got closer to the smoke Sunshine turned up the magnification on the view screen and they could see their objective was a collection of around 30 huts surrounded by acres of farmland. They flew closer to the DZ and all the occupants of the craft stared intensely at the screen, looking for life signs. Sunshine ran a bioscan of the area and was only picking up corpses and then there was a shout, "Second last hut on the right, I’m getting a weak reading there is somebody still alive!”

  Speedy set Turbo down at the end of the row of huts and Winkler raced out of the craft at the head of his men to secure the area. For this operation they wore mottled green combat suits and their only protection was a round grey plasmet shield, which most of the troops carried on their backs.

  Winkler’s first perimeter was around the shuttle and leaving half a dozen of his men to guard the craft the remainder worked their way house to house up the short street. As they went along they found each house ravaged, all showed signs of a violent assault with scorch marks. Here and there were body parts seared by plasma hits, or complete bodies which evidenced hits from photon rifles or old style projectiles. As yet there was no sign of the perpetrators, the bodies wore clothing associated with the agricultural community, it had the hallmarks of another pirate massacre.

  The heavily armoured Seeker of Moons contingent lead by Kyle took a little longer to get going, as the wearers got accustomed to walking in their heavy suits. The group walked straight up the main track between the rows of huts, their visors down and suit systems powered up ready for a fight. Lt Winkler kept in touch on the short range comms system, Kyle thought his voice was quite childlike and wondered how their small allies would fair when the fighting did get going.

  It did not take long to reach the hut where the ships scanners had picked up life signs. There was no trouble entering as the door had already been blown off its hinges by some form of blast and the charring around holes in the softcrete walls indicated the residents had been victims of a violent attack. There was no need to look for further signs of violence, as a whole pile of bodies were heaped up in the corner. Mostly they comprised of male adults with some smaller children of both sexes underneath and a couple of rat guns were carelessly discarded on the floor in front of the group, as if this had been some sort of last stand. It seemed that all were dead but as the pile of bodies were pulled apart and each carefully laid down, a soft groan came from a thin frame in a hooded top.

  Boots bent over the slight youngster, started to pull the hood back so that he could to see casualty’s face and a mass of red hair tumbled down onto the floor. The hood had covered the freckled face of a girl in her mid-teens. As Boots began to loosen her clothing the girl opened her eyes and seeing the huge armoured figure with mirrored visor looming over she began screaming using the last of her energy.

  Kyle was no physician but knew they had to act fast, he called Winkler on his helmet comms and asked him to send his medic in quickly, it wasn’t long before the Lillindian ran into the room carrying a medical kit. Two hypercranial shots were administered to the traumatised girl, very soon her breathing stabilised and she was in a calm semi-conscious state.

  Kyle withdrew the Seeker of Moons crew, he understood that their presence would do little to encourage the girl to co-operate with them. It took around half an hour for Marine Orderly Ptomski to get the girl into a condition to speak and under Lt Winkler’s supervision he managed to begin a dialogue. The girl quickly tired but Winkler was able to report back to Kyle that it was pirates again and they attacked without warning, the village elders tried to reason with them, but were savagely cut down without a hearing. The attackers seemed to thirst on killing and all who could not flee were slaughtered without mercy, except for the young women who whilst not molested were dragged away to who knows where. The only survivor, Trilby, took shelter with her extended family in this hut, all they had to defend themselves were the rifles used for pest clearance and it was inevitable that all of them would be killed. As her kinsfolk began to fall her father pushed her under the accumulating bodies and she remembers little else, as the increasing weight crushed the breath out of her. She was the lucky one and apart from a couple of broken ribs was unharmed, though mentally a mess.

  Talking to the group Kyle said “The pattern repeats, they only want the young women but they don’t molest them. Everyone back to the shuttle it’s time for some action.”

  The marines and crew were strapped in and the rescued girl was carefully laid securely on the emergency couch, as Kyle set his Comms for all ears, “We can guess that what happened here, has also been repeated where the other smoke plumes can be seen and I want us to get ahead of their trail to provide a welcoming committee.”

  This update was fed back to the still hidden Seeker of Moons and Shiner got to work on Kyle’s pane to try and forecast where the pirates would strike next.

  Speedy advised the occupants in the shuttle that she was taking off and the next minute the ionprop motor lifted the craft into the aquamarine sky of Edenfall’s afternoon. It only took a couple of minutes to get to within sight of their next objective, the hamlet of Reverence then as they were searching for a landing site disaster struck.

  Without any warning the engine cut-out, the internal lights extinguished and all viewscreens and instruments went dead.

  “Hell Speedy what’s happening?” shouted Kyle, not using the coms.

  “I don’t know, we’ve lost all power, we are going in, brace for crash landing,” she shouted back into the passenger cabin.

  Speedy reacted like lightning, she switched to manual, attempting to recover the craft’s attitude, wrestling with the flight controls whilst ordering Sunshine to manually crank up the outside blast screens so they could see where they were headed, then berated him for not moving fast enough.

  The pilots and all the passengers could not only see, but also feel that their craft was rapidly heading towards the ground. Flying controls were exceedingly heavy and Speedy was struggling to get any lift at all from her joystick. Sunshine was also experiencing the same, as he feverishly spun the manual control spheres to try and trim the craft.

  To Kyle and the others the events on-board Turbo were taking place in slow motion and despite their impending doom he found time to look up at the observation window in the roof of the fuselage, just for a moment he spied the black spidery shape of the alien craft, which he had first seen during the attack on Seeker and it now slipped past the crippled shuttle, its evil work done.

  Kyle was thinking thinking and thinking again if there was anything they could do. He unbuckled his safety harness and fell towards the flight deck, he had worked on shuttles himself and knew what he was looking for. After two unproductive stabs with his finger, his third strike hit the master power switch and the button depressed revealing an ‘off’ label. He counted to three and hit it again, the shuttle lurched but still no power, he repeated the action and the rising button glowed to ‘on’ and the power surged back through the craft and its controls. It was too late to avoid a crash, but the two pilots still struggling with the controls managed to get some lift and Turbo’s nose gradually started to rise and this was accentuated when the engine burst back into life.

  Kyle clawed his way back to his seat and forced the safety straps closed, he could still see the ground rushing towards them. Fields of cereal crops became clo
ser as Turbo’s belly began to flatten the tops of the stems and gradually move ever closer to the earth.

  There was a violent bump and then another and another as the craft continued careering across the field, before entering an area of woodland bordering the cultivated land. The trees were mercifully quite young and slender but they still gave the fuselage a battering until the shuttle started to slow and finally stop.

  “Everybody out, now,” screamed Kyle, with Winkler adding “and take your weapons.” The Seeker of Moons crew came out relatively unscathed, apart from a few bruises as their intelligent armour had cushioned the blows. Three of the Lillindians were not in such great shape, they had slipped through their seat belts after the first bump and then bounced around the cabin. The girl, Trilby wasn’t badly hurt but being sedated she needed helping out of the emergency exit door.

  Speedy was clearly shaken up and would not stop apologising to Kyle for losing Turbo, but Kyle tried to re-assure her that without her flying skill none of them would be alive. The discussion would have to wait till later as they had some unwelcome visitors. Approaching the wood from three sides were armed bands of pirates, presumably coming to finish them off.

  Kyle looked across at Winkler and using their respective comms, Kyle ordered him to split his force to enable them to hold the south and east of the woods against the two bands attacking from those directions, whilst the Seeker of Moons crew would hold the North. As the diminutive soldiers moved off he thought he heard them singing but he was full of admiration at their bravery watching them advance towards their foes.

  It was time to organise his own forces, ordering his group to search out cover, initiate the camouflage colouring on their visor heads up display and to programme their dominator super carbines for maximum rate firepower (anti-personnel).

  As the three enemy groups approached they took their time, edging forward cautiously. Using the enhanced vision facility on his visor, Kyle could see that this group contained the usual garish attired ruffians but there were also half a dozen wearing red heavy armour and carrying their own multi-purpose carbines. This was not going to be a walk in the park.

  Before the action started on Kyle’s front he could hear the hissing of plasma rounds crashing into the woods and the loud bangs of projectile weapons in accompaniment. There was no answering fire from the Lillindians but Kyle thought they could look out for themselves.

  He looked again at the band approaching his sector and they were being urged on by a fat man in a large black cloak and wearing an old style top hat. They halted, the fat man indicated for the armoured troops to approach first and onward they came, their armour painted the colour of blood.

  “Don’t shoot yet,” he whispered into his helmet comms, though he would not have been heard anyway. “Boots and Shiner switch to anti-tank rounds and hold fire until my order, now eat dirt and be ready.”

  The red suited Leviathans strode on and at a word from their leader sent a volley of plasma at waist height into the undergrowth and trees, the multi-coloured streams of death crackled, then vaporised the foliage above the defenders heads.

  “Fire,” barked Kyle and he watched the flash as his own anti-tank round left the muzzle of his dominator as it headed towards the first red suit in his sights. It was a ball of golden fire, which mercilessly tracked on its target before blasting into the unfortunate prey cutting through it like paper, exploding the suit and its owner into a million golden and red fragments. Boots and Shiner had similar success leaving the other five armoured suits looking at each other for a plan of action but it was already too late for three of them as they erupted into a million tiny stars destroyed by the second volley of fire. One of the survivors hit the deck in self-preservation, the other turned to run but was hit on the turn and met a similar fate as his companions.

  Although shaken by what had happened to his crack troops, the fat leader pushed the bulk of his men forward at a charge, making the false assumption that single anti-tank rounds would not cause many casualties but they were met by volleys of anti-personnel fire from Speedy and Sunshine, which slowed the attack. Kyle and the other two had also switched their munitions back to anti-personnel and the combined salvoes caused many pirate losses, other attackers dived into the soft mud to escape the murderous volleys.

  Kyle's front became a battle of attrition but it was about to heat up on the two fronts held by Winkler’s men. They too faced groups with a number of armoured troops bolstering them but they had different tactics in mind. Playing a waiting game, they let the attackers get to the edge of the trees, which cost them a number of casualties from the random fire of the pirate assault. Then on Winkler’s command most of his troops unleashed a blizzard of Lillindian ferric plasma, whilst simultaneously his mortar team used high explosive mortar rounds to inflict damage to the centre of the attacking enemy.

  These tactics caused numerous fatalities to the attackers, but it did not stop them and lead by their armoured shock troops they began to push the Lillindians back. The same situation was happening in the other Lillindian sector and Winkler co-ordinated a fighting retreat back into the woodland but they were also taking losses and things looked grim, until privates Hashimoto and Wei decided to act. Hiding inside a hollow tree the two mini marines let the wave of red armoured attackers go past, and then timed their attack to take place before the rest of the pirate group entered the wood.

  Together they took out a pair of sticky grenades from their bandoliers and set out a fast pace. After the first wave of armoured attackers had passed, Hashimoto took the first bomb and weaving through the undergrowth patted the sticky ball on to the armoured soldiers back plate. Looking to his right he saw Wei doing the same and they continued along the whole line of attackers.

  They reached the end of the run and their last target somehow detected the marines presence, turning with his plasma rifle raised he shot at them less than 10 feet away. The marines had no time to go for their own weapons and Hashimoto caught the plasma stream right in the middle of his back where his plasmet shield was bouncing around on its shoulder strap. He took a hell of a wallop from the impact and was knocked off his feet but except for being singed around the edges he was fine. Wei seeing the plasma bolt in transit swung his rifle up to waist height, but before he could return fire the first armoured pirate erupted in a ball of orange flame followed by the next and next until all that was left was a series of smoking red debris with various discarded limbs dotted about the undergrowth.

  The follow up-band of lightly or non-armoured pirates froze in their tracks and shocked they fled back to their hiding positions in the crop field beside the woods.

  Kyle called up Winkler on his helmet comm for a situation report, which was that he was down to 13 marines in the two sectors and two of those had burn wounds, which had been temporarily dressed. He wasn’t a trained tactician but he knew that with upwards of 40 pirates still surrounding the woods he could not maintain his perimeter and he guessed that it would not be long before enemy re-enforcements arrived to bolster the attackers.

  In his mind, desperate times called for desperate action and he contacted Seeker of Moons from the shuttle’s commset and gave Kang his orders. He needed all the pirates on one front, so decided that leaving a rear-guard of three marines in each of the Lillindians sectors, he would launch an attack on the group facing him. If all went according to plan they would assume a breakout was being attempted and the pirates would call in their other two wings to assist and then he would have them all together.

  The synchronised attack began, led by the Seeker of Moons armoured troops and with their suit power switched to weapons and auto targetting they soon punched large holes in the pirate’s defensive positions. It would be difficult to imagine the terror caused by the CBF armoured troops, seemingly impervious to small arms fire and getting ever closer. Hot trails from their plasma rounds lit up the early evening sky and they hissed like angry snakes before striking their pray.

  As Kyle had hope
d the other two wings of the pirates raced to outflank his group but thinking his advance was too quick he called a halt, while the pirate groups caught up, he wanted them all in one place for the next stage of his plan.

  The two factions were now firing randomly at each other across a narrow strip of the field with the hiss and whistle of the plasma being heard as they just missed and then the occasional thud and scream of a target being hit.

  Kyle’s armour showed black impact marks here and there but so far his suit was holding up and he began to feel that strange elation again of fighting, surviving and killing his enemies. The situation was still a stalemate but it was sustained fire coming from behind the pirates’ line that was the tipping point. A substantial volley of plasma was being directed into the unguarded rear of the pirates’ formation and this was inflicting substantial casualties. Once the attackers, the pirates were now the attacked and being suddenly challenged from the rear threw them into a disarray that their burly commander had no hope of controlling.

  The pirates in their cover panicked and started to flee to both sides in an attempt to escape. Many were cut down but a few including their leader dropped their weapons, raised their hands and shouted pleas for surrender.

  As the flanks of the attackers joined up, Kyle found Lt Kang, “What took you so long?”

  “You were having so much fun we thought we would leave you to it. Though to be serious it took Seeker of Moons a while to get into position for the paramotor drop and many of Winkler’s lads needed persuading to make the jump.”

  It was Kyle’s last throw of the dice and it paid off in so far as his Lillindian re-enforcements lead by Kang changed the shape of the battle. As part of his ships military stores Kyle had found a number of paramotor sets, consisting of parachutes with small directional motors. After limited training they successfully landed Kang and the remaining marines, all of whom managed to land safely though not many hit the drop zone, which again resulted in loosing valuable time before they could intervene.