by Jay Korza
“That information gives me, the Coalition, a huge tactical advantage.”
“I am aware of that.”
“Then why give it to me?”
“You are a pivot point, Emily.”
“I don’t understand.” Emily knew what a pivot point was; she just was not sure why Jenny thought of her as one.
“You will. Soon enough.” Jenny’s expression and body language changed as though she suddenly became a different Cherta. “We are only a few hours from the target. I suggest you get back to your last-minute preparations. I will leave you alone to do so.”
Emily’s mouth fell open with several unspoken questions. She watched Jenny slither out of the room and knew that no more questions would be answered today. When Chertas were done talking, and wanted to get somewhere quickly, they dispensed with using their legs and went fully into what Daria had begun to refer to as “slither mode.”
Thinking of Daria, Emily used her commlink to call her friend and Wilks to the conference room to go over the mission details. Talking with her team would help Emily to get her head back in the game and stop thinking about everything it had just been filled with.
At the back of her mind, she kept thinking about pivot points and why she had been called one.
~
The boarding craft was taking heavy fire and its shields were barely staying up. Jockey had complained when he had been told he was not going to be flying this mission and now he was angrier that he had not been allowed to fly in this combat soup. He sat third seat in the cockpit, which equated to observer-only status. He did admire the pilot’s skill, though; Jockey had never encountered this particular species but he was impressed so far.
Wilks didn’t much like the Cherta’s insertion plan but he eventually went along with it. They guaranteed the Cherta shields could outmatch the warrior’s weapons for the time it would take to get the small boarding crafts to reach the orbital shipyard. That being the case, their plan was simply to fly through the maelstrom of weapons fire from the warriors and then land on the surface of the yard. Purposely taking fire for this long was not Wilks’ idea of a good time or a good plan.
Emily tried not to grit her teeth as the small craft bounced around in the vacuum of space. The bouncing didn’t come from explosions outside the hull — that kind of bouncing only took place inside of an atmosphere. The bouncing came from the pilot trying to avoid head-on collisions with missiles and other projectile weapons being hurtled at their craft. Many times, too many times actually, the ship’s shields were hit with incoming fire and the little craft got knocked around even more.
“I hate combat drops like this,” Daria said from Emily’s right side.
“Like this?! How many have you had like this?”
“None.” Daria laughed. “But I really hate this one.”
Snake sat across the aisle from both of them, his eyes closed. “We will either make it or we won’t. Might as well relax and get a few minutes of sleep before we get there.”
“Is that your polite way of telling us to shut up?” Emily was thankful that her team was chatty; it kept her mind off dying.
“Captain, I would never be so bold.” Snake opened one eye in a reverse-wink.
One minute to boarding. One minute to boarding. All personnel prepare to disengage safety harnesses for rapid deployment.
The voice of the co-pilot came over their commlinks and everyone did a last-minute gear check to make sure nothing was amiss after all of the bouncing around they had done.
“This is when things get fun.” Snake was now fully awake and ready to go.
“Our definitions of fun must be very different.”
Bloom was having fun, though, and Snake knew it. They all were. This is what they lived for: the thrill of the fight. Emily was starting to be one of them despite herself. She had always loved adventure and danger, but she was actually excited to get into a fight and she wasn’t sure how she felt about that on a deeper emotional level.
Brace for hard landing in five-four-three-two-one. Docking clamps engaged. Un-ass yourself, soldiers! Get off my bird!
Wilks was sure that no matter what species a pilot was, or government they were serving, they were all the same. You were on their craft, taking up their valuable time and resources. “You heard the man! Get through that airlock and secure our first hallway. Expect heavy resistance. They knew we were coming for at least the last eight minutes.”
Wilks commanded the second boarding shuttle and Emily had the first one. They were landing at different access hatches at either end of the shipyard. By dividing their forces, they doubled their chances of at least one ship making it to the yard intact. They were also forcing their opponents to split their attention and fight on two fronts.
Wilks’ team landed at the end of the cylinder dubbed the south end and Emily’s team landed at the north end. The teams were divided into twelve-person crews, unless you didn’t count Jeeves as a person, in which case Emily’s team had eleven people and one annoying, albeit useful, robot.
The shipyard looked like a huge Navy port that you would find in an ocean, except it was floating in space. A long cylindrical central hub formed the spine of the yard. At each ninety-degree angle of the cylinder, docking arms extended straight out from the cylinder to create berths where ships docked for repair or were built from scratch. Each row had three berths, for a total of twelve berths in the whole facility.
As they exited the craft, Wilks saw Major Telfer, the Nortes advisor, take point up to the airlock door. She did a quick peek through the window on the airlock and then motioned for Scan to activate the unlocking sequence.
As the door rolled open, she did a limited entry facing right and immediately received fire. She fired back and quickly ducked her head back in. Without skipping a beat, she pulled a grenade from her combat vest, thumbed the arming switch and threw it down the hallway without a second look.
When the grenade detonated, she followed the BOOM and entered the hallway with her weapon up and trigger down. Scan and another operator followed her and poured rounds downrange.
The Grethnar twins, Jenarah and Kuruk, entered the hallway in the opposite direction of the major and cleared the small area that was to the team’s rear. Once that area was clear, the twins moved forward and took up covering firing positions down the main hallway.
Although the main body of the shipyard was an elongated cylinder, the interior of the yard was a winding maze of hallways, doors, rooms, and open areas. The Detrill government had supplied the team with detailed maps of the installation, which Wilks was now very grateful for; as he looked down the first hallway they encountered, he knew they could easily get lost as the mission took them deeper into the maze.
“Wilks to Captain Riley.”
“Go ahead, Gunny.”
Wilks had recently been promoted so he was still getting used to being called Gunny, but he liked it. “Ma’am, we are through the airlock and our ride has departed. We’ve encountered light resistance but we haven’t had any losses and their initial response team is almost gone.”
“Copy that, Wilks,” Emily said between rounds. “They must have sent their heavies to this end. We have a medium-sized reaction force and two of them have personal shields.”
“We will finish up down here and work towards you as planned. Wilks out.”
The commlink disconnected and Wilks put his full focus back into the fight in front of him. So far he was impressed with the new additions to his team. Jenarah and Kuruk especially.
Jenarah being blind and Kuruk being deaf didn’t hold them back at all. Wilks did cringe a bit when he saw Jenarah arm a grenade, but after she threw it with dead-on accuracy, all of his doubts were gone. He didn’t know how they did it, but they did and that was enough for him.
The warriors were using the same plasma rifles that Wilks had encountered during his first engagement with the warriors at an ancient dig site. The plasma rifles were too large for a human to hold and use ef
fectively, but the Coalition was working on reverse-engineering the technology to get these superior weapons into Coalition soldiers’ hands.
The plasma rifles fired a superheated alloy that released argon gas as it burned. Then, the released argon was ignited by the burning metal slug and the argon gas turned into plasma that burned at more than forty thousand degrees Fahrenheit. The slug itself traveled at six thousand, five hundred feet per second, around twice as fast as most Coalition rifle rounds.
The effect of a plasma round hitting an organic target was devastating, to say the least. The plasma also caused an aging effect to its target. Almost like when a rattlesnake envenomates a human, the person could live but for the next several days or even weeks, the hemotoxin in the venom would continue to kill tissue cells in and around the bitten area. If a soldier got shot with a plasma round to the leg, it would remove his leg but the soldier could survive the injury. If he was not treated, though, the plasma effect continued for several days and the soldier would have massive tissue death as his cells aged rapidly from the injury and that would cause death to the victim.
The science behind the metal slug turning into plasma was the easy part for Coalition scientists to figure out. What they still had not been able to determine is where the metal slug alloy came from or exactly what it was. They also did not understand the cellular decay that occurred in the victims who had been shot.
In the confines of the hallway, the plasma rounds were not causing as much damage as you would expect them to. Whoever created the rounds realized that they would completely destroy their fighting environment, including their spaceships, if they did not control the plasma burn. The plasma or slug, they weren’t sure which, had a smart component that stopped the plasma from burning through ships’ hulls or interiors. Wilks had no idea how the rounds distinguished between types of surfaces they hit, but he was glad they did, or they would all be in a vacuum now after the plasma rounds punched through the station’s hull.
“There are only two warriors remaining.” Scan took cover and reloaded. His hand had long since grown back from his first encounter with the warriors when it was shot off with a plasma round.
“Are you sure?” Wilks trusted Scan, but he had had limited exposure to the warriors and Wilks wasn’t sure whether his empathic friend had a perfect read on them yet.
“Yes, Gunny, I’m sure.” Scan’s new hand slapped home a fresh magazine and he rolled out to go prone for a better firing position. “Mostly.”
“Mostly?”
“They are clones, Gunny.” Scan fired two rounds in quick succession. “They grow into their own person after they leave their incubators but their emotional projections are extremely similar to one another. It is hard to separate what I’m feeling as coming from multiple people, but I CAN tell there are only two of them left now.”
“I trust you, buddy.” Wilks looked over their current situation. The warriors had a great position of cover and unless they stupidly gave it up, Wilks’ team was never going to get a shot on either of them. He needed to advance his team or die in place.
“We need to press our attack,” Wilks said over the team push so everyone could hear his plan. “I am going to send Patz and Hood forward to the next point of cover and then we will continue with basic bounding overwatch movement. Questions?”
Kuruk spoke up. “Gunny, not a question, but a suggestion if you do not mind.”
“Of course, Lieutenant.” The team was under fire but it was indirect fire. Neither side had any immediate advantage over the other; this allowed Wilks to be open to discussing alternatives.
“Let Jenarah and me handle it.”
“That’s your plan? Let you handle it?”
“We’ve been working on something in our training. This is the perfect time to try it out. Trust us.” Kuruk smirked a little. “The worst that can happen is you lose a lieutenant or two. The Coalition has tons of butter-bars running around.”
“I can’t argue that one, sir.” Wilks thought hard about his decision before he answered. “Okay Kuruk, show us what you two can do.”
Jenarah and Kuruk knelt down in front of each other and put their foreheads together and whispered to each other. Wilks had never seen this before during training but he suspected it was some sort of joint meditation. In less than ten seconds, they were done and parted from each other.
Kuruk continued to kneel but he turned to look down the hallway. Jenarah had set her rifle down and in turn unholstered her sidearm in her right hand and drew a large fighting knife in her left. Jenarah then took off at a dead sprint down the hallway towards the warriors’ position.
Jenarah used her brother’s view of the hallway to guide herself towards her target. Being blind caused her other senses to enhance themselves and she could hear one of the warriors shift behind his cover. She knew he was moving to fire; she continued straight on towards him.
The warrior saw the little female running towards him, and he shifted to bring his weapon out from behind cover to shoot her. When he depressed the firing stud for the plasma rifle, the electric firing mechanism clicked and Jenarah could hear it.
Jenarah danced to her left and jumped halfway up the wall to a junction box and planted her foot on it; she instantly pushed away and performed a cartwheel flip in the air. Her flip took her over the plasma ball that hurtled down the hallway. As she was still in the air, she fired two rounds from her handgun; they went wide but still caused the warrior to duck back behind cover.
This dance continued the rest of the way down the hallway. Jenarah juked, jumped, flipped, slid, and ran the length of the hallway without getting hit. Her final aerial move was to run up the wall at an angle, holster her sidearm and replace it with a grenade. Arming the grenade as she continued up the wall, she pushed off and up and gained enough height to toss the grenade over the warriors’ position of cover.
Jenarah landed in a crouch and instinctively turned her back towards the pending explosion. The warriors’ cover that had served them well against the small arms of their attackers acted as an overpressure amplifier and rebounded the blast fully onto them. They were torn to shreds and the last of the first defensive wave had been killed.
Wilks was impressed. “Nice job.” He patted Kuruk on the shoulder as he led the rest of his team in a jog down the now-safe hallway. “Does your sister always do all of the work?”
“Only when it is dangerous.” Kuruk laughed.
“I would laugh except he is being honest,” Jenarah’s voice said over the commlink.
“Scan, take point. Move us to position bravo.” Wilks closed the holographic map in his visor and moved up to Major Telfer. “Great job back there, Major. I haven’t had the opportunity to work with any Nortes-trained soldiers.”
“Soldiering is a fairly universal concept, at least in my experience.” The major was either naturally unfriendly or she liked to wear a poker face while she was on a mission. “The only time I have found major differences in combat techniques is when a species has such a different and unique biology that they naturally fight differently than you, or the enemy has technology and weapons that are also so different from yours that it has the same effect.”
“Good points both.” The major’s lack of interest in Wilks made him more interested in her than he cared or wanted to admit. “When this is over, I would enjoy talking with you more about this subject.”
The major did not respond in the slightest.
Wilks did his best to extract himself from the awkward moment and then got on the team push. “We are moving to our next waypoint. Scan is taking the lead. We have a little more than two kilometers to travel to link up with the other team. If our space support can’t hold off the warriors outside, we might end up with attackers to our rear, so be mindful of that. Let’s move out.”
~
Emily reloaded from a position of cover and looked over to her right. Daria worked on Schneps and it didn’t look good. Emily inserted her magazine and then released the bo
lt, putting the weapon back into play. Emily leaned slightly out of cover and fired three rounds before ducking back behind a pillar.
Daria worked at a frantic pace, though her actions and emotions were anything but. Stroth, the Detrill lieutenant, tried to help her. “Hand me that microclamp and the wound sealer.”
Stroth handed Daria a pen-looking device that was filled with microclamps, along with a tube filled with a substance that was basically tub caulk that had been engineered for biological use.
“Thank you.” Daria greedily took the instruments. Schneps had only received a glancing wound from a plasma bolt but that had been enough to burn through a good portion of his right flank, along with his liver and kidney.
Daria tried to clamp off the hepatic artery that fed the liver. Once the artery was taken care of, she turned the microclamp to the other bleeding vessels in his gaping wound; alternating between clamp and wound sealer, she had the wound under control but Schneps was far from saved at this point.
“What’s his status?” Emily still fired at targets of opportunity.
“His wound is as controlled as it is going to get, given the circumstances. If I had access to a medical evac right now, I would say he had at least an eighty percent chance of recovering.” Daria put the finishing touches on her patient’s packaging. “But given the mission, we’re going to have to leave him here on his own. I’ve put an in-line blood filter that will take over for his damaged liver until he can get a new one grown, and I’ve infused three units of hemosynth to replace his lost blood. There’s not much else I can do right now. It really depends on whether or not he can hold on long enough for his body to start working on itself and/or a medical evac.”
They both knew that a medical evac was at least hours away from happening, if at all. They didn’t have enough people to stay behind with him while they pushed forward, so if the warriors came back to this area, he would not be able to defend himself at all.