THRESHOLD OF VICTORY
By Stephen J. Orion
“And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by;”
-Sea Fever, John Masefield
© 2017 Stephen Orion.
All Rights Reserved
Published by Scribed Starlight Press
[email protected]
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Cover Illustration by Anthony Scroggins (shimmering-sword.deviantart.com)
Editing Services provided by Warren Layberry of DarkWater Editing (http://darkwaterediting.com)
To the people bright enough to inspire
And the people grounded enough to see it done
Table of Contents
Prologue
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Chapter XII
Chapter XIII
Chapter XIV
Chapter XV
Epilogue
Prologue
President Rothman’s Speech to the Council of Peers
Zurich, Switzerland, Earth, Sol System
23 June 2312
We are not alone.
Less than four hours ago, we received unequivocal confirmation that mankind shares this universe with other intelligent life. It should be a time of curiosity, of joy at the universe’s complexity.
But this revelation did not come peacefully. These beings who emerged from out of the void attacked the city of Bradley’s Landing in the Asara System without provocation.
At this time, we do not know the extent of the damage or loss of life beyond that it is both grave and widespread.
What we do know is this new species made no demands, that they refused all attempts at negotiation, and that their rampage was stopped only by the complete destruction of the attackers.
What we do know is that, as of this moment, we are at war.
This will not be a war like any we have fought before. We are pitted against a foe so perfectly ruthless there can be nothing held back, no surrender, and no quarter given. We must come together as never before – every city, every home, and even with our Exodite brothers. We must each of us embrace our duty, for this new menace has but one demonstrated goal… our extinction.
Though we have found darkness in this galaxy, we are no longer a primitive tribe clinging desperately to a single world. We are bold, we are many, and we are united. We are the Constellation, and our stars shine brightly over every world, inextinguishable in the face any darkness.
Even this one.
Chapter I
The Luperca
Human Occupied Mauler Settlement
Codename: Box Grid
Planet Grimball, Bryson System
19 April 2315
“…and with an explosion of concrete, this enormous Mauler smashed right through the wall of the building and hits the LT square on! Its weight slams her arcom into the opposite wall, their arms locked like wrestlers, steel straining against flesh, muscle against machine.”
It was mess time, and Sergeant Connors was on his feet, expressively recounting a tale about the capture of Box Grid. Today’s audience were some newbies, a squad of foot infantry who had arrived that morning to bolster the garrison. They were on patrol straight after the meal as evidenced by their BDUs, the rifles stacked at the end of the table, and above all, their excess energy.
“So what did you do, Lieutenant?” one of them asked.
All eyes turned to Lieutenant Kyra Rease.
“Well, I followed a deeply female instinct for handling that situation, one which has been passed down since mankind first learned to walk on two legs.” She stopped speaking to take a mouthful of soup, allowing the suspense to build while she chewed. When the time was just right for comedic effect she said, in perfect dead pan, “I kneed it in the balls.”
There was a roar of laughter from everyone but a corporal at the other end of the table who had a furrowed brow.
“But I thought they were non-gendered.”
Connors slumped back in his chair. Rease rolled her eyes, and the corporal’s own unit predictably suggested that he was in fact ‘non-gendered’.
“So,” Rease said when the revelry had died down sufficiently, “there was this moment where time was just sort of frozen, this two-storey monster staring me in the face through the screens, wondering what the hell I thought I was doing. Thing is I kinda found myself thinking the same thing.”
“But you’re still here, so it musta done something,” said the corporal, perhaps in an attempt to save face.
“You might say that. See the knee on a 60-tonne arcom is basically a massive steel ram. I’d shattered its pelvis or whatever, and a moment later, its legs just gave out from under it.”
“The best part,” Connors said, “was as it went down, it made this little groan on the audio pickups. From where I was standing, it looked like she had genuinely sacked this thing so hard it collapsed.”
“Hey Lieutenant,” shouted an infantryman. “When our brief said they were ‘non-gendered’” – and here he added air quotes for the benefit of the corporal – “did they mean before or after you guys got here.”
Kyra had a witty answer to that, but they never got to find out what it was. All conversation was suddenly swallowed beneath the growling thunder of an explosion that brought the entire north wall down in an avalanche of fire and concrete. As the blast faded, the room was filled with an ear ringing silence and a haze of cement dust. Somewhere an alarm began to ring belatedly.
“Everyone back from the walls!” Rease was shouting, staggering to her feet and barely able to hear her own words over the ringing in her ears. “Anyone with a Med One cert get into that rubble. Sergeant, get your squad together, you’re with me.”
By the time her half-dazed mind had sorted out proper alternating leg motion, the Lieutenant was already halfway across the room, Connor on her heels and both moving with their sidearms out. The sergeant from the infantry patrol, ‘Wilkins’ by the plate on his helmet, was slower to assemble his men, but as soon as they had their gear together, they followed.
Rease let out a breath as she peered out into the street.
“Well shit.”
As its name suggested, Box Grid was a cross hatch of streets and roads filled out with massive blocky prefabs. Any given structure would have been a vacant warehouse by human standards, and with the exception of the few weapon and ammunition factories, the buildings were just about as heavily furnished.
This had made clearing the town relatively easy, for there were no real nooks and crannies for the Maulers to hide in. Once the Constellation Army had made a thorough sweep of the town, it should have been enough to set up a perimeter and make themselves at home.
Except no perimeter alarm had been sounded, and nothing short of dozens of the huge bestial monsters were rampaging through the streets. The shot that had taken the wall off the mess building was apparently unintentional. Its perpetrator was currently firing its clunky repeating rifle down the street at a wheeled tank, which was replying in earnest with dual chain guns.
Like most of its species, the Mauler’s pale leathery skin was gaunt in places and flappy in others. It squinted from beneath the bulging brow and thick cheekbones of its overdeveloped skeleton. Though bereft of armour, it
weathered the saw-like barrage of bullets almost unflinchingly, seemingly oblivious as large sections of its flesh were churned to pulp, exposing heavy plates of bone beneath—which were subsequently cracked and pulverised.
The wheeled tank wove back and forth up the broad street as the Mauler continued firing madly after it, each round from its huge rifle hitting like a cannon shell, cratering the street and tearing down building facings. Its aim was getting progressively worse as its body became patterned in rivulets of its own blood. It swayed on its feet and then collapsed drunkenly into the structure beside it, smashing through the concrete and shaking the ground.
Rease turned to the troops assembled behind her. “Sergeant Wilkins, our arcoms are in the building just south and across the street. We need to get there, and you’re going to escort us.”
“Should we wait for backup?” he said, leaning nervously out to glance up the street.
The wheeled tank had disappeared and there were still plenty of Maulers charging through the cross streets.
“We are the backup, Sergeant,” Rease said. “We go now.”
He looked a little paler than he had at dinner, but the man nodded, collected his courage, and took charge.
“We’ll split into two fire teams. Sergeant Connor, you’ll go with Corporal Bess and Fire Team Two. Lieutenant, you’ll be with me in Team One. Team Two will cross the street under cover, then we’ll advance down opposite sides, bounding by team. All copy?”
The rest of the unit nodded, and in moments, Corporal Bess was dashing across the street with Connor and three others in tow while Wilkins’ team provided overwatch. As soon as they were across, they took up cover positions, and it was time for Rease to move. The sense of exposure from being on foot during a Mauler attack was something the Lieutenant hadn’t felt in a long time and had no particular desire to relive. All around them, the ugly little township was alive with the throaty bellow of Mauler rifles and the rattling answer of small arms; all of it interspaced with explosions ranging from distant pops to immediate earth shaking blasts.
They managed to make it almost all the way to the arcom depot when a Mauler lumbered out of the last alley. Wilkins’ unit were in mid-advance when the thing emerged and looked right at them. Its legs formed a literal wall just metres away, and it towered over them like a high-rise.
It was just drawing back its leg to kick them into oblivion when the crackling gunfire of Corporal Bess’s team distracted it, little dots of blood appearing like a pox across its shoulder and broad chest. Wilkins’ unit began to fall back around Rease, desperate to get cover and distance between them and the monstrosity while its attention was elsewhere.
But Rease’s mind was counting the instants, and she knew by the time they got to ground that thing would have devastated the corporal’s team and, with it, her most veteran pilot. She shouted at the troops around her, but they were acting on instinct, so she switched tactics and crash tackled the nearest soldier. As they hit the ground, she strong-armed the weapon out of his stunned grasp and rolled onto her back.
The Mauler loomed above her, its rifle at arm’s length, and its meaty finger already closing on the trigger. Rease was faster, firing her weapon’s underbarrel grenade launcher. The twenty-millimetre explosive departed the weapon with a hollow thunk and was followed immediately by a bloom of fire across the Mauler’s face.
Pieces of burning flesh rained down as the thing’s head was thrown back with the impact. Its rifle discharged, but the weapon was now aimed well above the horizon, the foot-long casing of the spent round landing in the street and bouncing like an empty barrel thrown out of a plane.
Rease scrambled back to her feet, half dragging the private she’d assaulted, and sprinted into the nearest doorway. It was a portal she could have driven a two-storey house through, and Wilkins’ men were already crouched and ready by the time she reached them.
“They’re clear, light it up,” the Sergeant ordered.
With no danger of hitting friendlies, both teams now sent a barrage of grenades from their rifles. The Mauler’s body convulsed as the comparatively small explosives blew craters in the broad surface of it chest. It bled heavily, but the thing’s vital organs were covered by an almost contiguous shield of bone. Though it was exposed, cracked and blackened, the destructive forces levelled against it had scored few penetrating hits.
“Keep on it,” Rease shouted, tossing the rifle to the man she’d attacked and breaking into a dead sprint across the street.
Injured and angry, the Mauler’s tiny mind locked onto the single human running hell for leather in front of it. It cocked its rifle and fired, but to Rease’s great relief, its attack bit into the earth a half dozen paces behind her, the explosive round failing to detonate but kicking up a shower of asphalt and dirt nonetheless.
Before it could fire again, it was peppered by another volley of grenades, knocking it back onto one knee. One of its bulging hands reached out to steady itself, demolishing the upper floor of a building in the process. It didn’t get another chance at Rease, who shot through the cavernous doorway of the depot, dodging falling debris and making straight for the arcoms.
The depot’s security team were on the far side of the building, firing rockets at some unseen enemy. A bare handful of techs were trying to balance getting the four machines ready against the encroaching finality of the monsters on their doorstep.
No other pilots had arrived, but Rease wasn’t particularly concerned. Less than a dozen yards away was her avatar of battle, an armoured war machine broadly humanoid and as tall as a Mauler. Incorporating Exodite technology, the Articulated Combat Platform – or arcom – was the only thing that allowed a human to engage the aliens on equal or better footing. Every arcom in the line was identical, except for Rease’s
The Maulers were about to find out that Box Grid had a secret weapon, and its name was Lieutenant Kyra Rease.
****
Connor couldn’t believe the resilience of the Mauler that Wilkins’ team were struggling to take down. Every man in the unit carried six grenades, and they’d just expended half their ammunition into this monster. Its attempts to return fire had become more violent, if not more accurate, leaving the street a shattered mess of torn asphalt and crumbled building faces. It was still down on one knee, leaning its weight heavily on one leg as it lashed out at them. The damage Rease had done to its face left the thing with a leering grin that was somehow strangely defiant.
And then two more arrived.
Their battle had just turned from a slow but certain victory into a catastrophic defeat. The new creatures lumbered into the street with utter fearlessness, swinging their massive weapons around to level them on the infantry unit spread out amid the destruction. In the faces of those around him, Connor suddenly saw the collapse of the courage that following the bold and daring Lieutenant Rease had given them. Realisation had set in that they were just a handful of foot soldiers taking on giants in a planetary invasion that already had a reputation for being the biggest meat grinder of a war that was itself a massive abattoir.
But those soldiers didn’t realise that getting Rease to her machine would give them an edge worth all their lives.
Before the Maulers could scour the street with gunfire, the concrete wall beside them burst amid a flurry of grey and black steel. The emerging machine collided with one of the Maulers, shoulder first, and sent it staggering into the building opposite, collapsing through its wall and caving in the roof on top of itself.
The whole of this arcom was stylised into lupine features, hued in blacks and greys. Its head fashioned with swept-back ears and bared teeth; its metal hands and armoured feet were painted as though they were claws while suggestions of fur ran down its flanks.
The arcom’s pose had ended in a firing stance, the barrel of its sleek automatic rifle levelled at the Mauler that Wilkins’ unit had been struggling with from the start. Without pause, the weapon fired a single one-twenty-millimetre kinetic energy shell int
o the creature’s head. The round pierced the undamaged side of its face as a single projectile and came out the other end as a grisly swath of metal, carbon and the contents of the monster’s skull.
The only Mauler still standing tried to swing its aim to deal with this new threat, but if you knew how to use one, an arcom was surprisingly agile. Rease didn’t just know how to use one: she was Luperca, the She-Wolf, a living legend. On Grimball, it was said even the best didn’t survive more than a half dozen battles, and Rease had landed with the first wave. She’d redeployed to six engagements in that first week alone, and nobody knew how many she’d fought in since.
Before Connor’s eyes, it was unfolding all over again. The Mauler seemed to move in slow motion as Rease’s Arcom crouched low and swept past it. She snapped a shot into the creature she’d first collided with before taking out the turning Mauler’s knee with a devastating elbow strike. All in one fluid motion, Luperca drew back to her feet and turned to face her staggered prey. The rifle came up, and another trademark single round pierced the monster’s skull from behind and scattered its face all over the street.
Rease’s voice boomed from the Arcom’s external speakers.
“Connor, you getting old or something? I need you geared up now.”
And that was that. There was no mention of the near brush with death, no remark on beating three-to-one odds in less time than it would take to tell the story. Connor could practice his entire life and never do what she’d just done, but Luperca’s eye was already on the next fight, so how could she know his hands were still shaking from the last one.
****
Constellation Carrier CNS Arcadia
On rapid planetary approach
Planet Grimball, Bryson System
19 April 2315
Flight Sergeant Andrew ‘Silver’ Tarek felt the lurch of the carrier returning to real space as he joined the other pilots in the briefing room. Not much larger than a double garage, it could pack in the Arcadia’s full air wing of sixty pilots, and today was almost a full house. The ranks of chairs and eager pilots stopped at the foot of the small raised platform where the speaker gave the briefing, a space the pilots referred to as the little quarter deck.
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