AMP The Core

by Stephen Arseneault

  As predicted, the Durians marched towards us in a column that our sensors quickly counted as being fifteen million soldiers deep and growing. I took a long breath as I prepared for the endless fighting that was to come.

  York spoke. “All the marbles, Sir. Last of the Mohicans. End of the paved road. Final spin of the wheel. Last call, Sir!”

  I shook my head and raised my fist as I looked over towards a grinning York.

  Frost spoke. “Really? You two are going to monkey up our last fight with all that archive speak?”

  I pointed to Frost as I smiled. “Monkey up. I like it, Sergeant!”

  Frost rolled her eyes.

  Seconds later, the fight began with the first shot from an ion cannon on the Mirada wall behind us. The skies then turned bright blue as thousands of ion bolts of energy raced back and forth across the fields. Our BGS teams each separated into a long line. A hundred meters separated each of us as we began to cut down the troops along the outside of the column.

  The killing was under way. A continuous stream of death that would possibly go on for days. I squeezed my triggers, and countless Colossun androids, Colossun regulars, Durian Helgrons, Durian regulars, Dakar regulars, Prassi regulars, and even a mix of Targs fell before me. Bodies began to pile up as the attackers marched forward. Those in the middle of the funnel, who had avoided death from a distance, then charged at the wall.

  For hour after hour, the surge of troops pushed forward only to be slaughtered or pushed back. Before I knew it, the day had turned to night and then once again into day. My feet had not moved from their position since I had set them in place. Only the pain drugs from my BGS suit had prevented me from giving up on pulling my triggers.

  Midway into the second day, the Durians decided their mass frontal assault was not working. Bodies lay a meter deep on the fields before us, hindering their attacks.

  As I continued with the slaughter of the enemy, the Colonel blasted out an alert. “We have incoming enemy ships! Grange! Pull your teams back to the wall!”

  As I began to repeat the order, two dozen Durian cruisers swooped in with their heavy cannons firing, striking the fields around us. As we turned to flee, the strafing rounds carried through our BGS positions. The active skin on my suit shot to 60 and then 84 percent as I powered back towards the wall. All twenty-four of the cruisers crashed into the nearby fields as our city cannon fire ripped them apart. The Durian barrage was heavy, killing tens of thousands of their own troops.

  When I reached the wall, I pulled up the stats on my HUD to get a count of who had survived on my team. Seven names remained on the list, including my own. The hair on the back of my neck stood tall as I realized that Sergeant Frost’s name was not among them.

  York was soon standing by my side. “She’s gone, Sir. I saw one of those heavy bolts hit her dead on.”

  I looked out over the field of death that lay before me. Before I had time to think or to mourn, the Durians continued their offensive. I again moved out into the onrushing troops and fired with the relentless rage that I now felt. Body parts flew, blood splattered, and full energy packs exploded, but the enemy continued to come.

  We pushed back hard for an hour, but the weaker parts of the wall began to falter. The enemy troops piled themselves against the walls as living wedges for others to climb. I began to run along the base of the wall, blinking in and out as I continued to fire. My efforts were not enough.

  As the battle raged through the thirty-fourth hour, the outer wall defenses began to fall. In under an hour, the ion inhibitor defenses of the once heavily fortified city began to shut down. An unstoppable barrage of heavy ion bolts rained down from above. Our troops and our people were fleeing the bunkers that filled the earth under the city of Mirada.

  I dropped down into one of the main corridors of the bunker complex and began to unleash my wrath on the enemy who entered from above. For every twenty soldiers I killed, ten others passed my position. Our chances for existence as a species were slipping away rapidly. In the next hour, the city of Mirada and the bunkers under her foundations were in the hands of our enemy. The crossing bunker tunnels from Mirada to her sister cities were all blown in an attempt to allow us to regroup.

  I powered up through the earth that surrounded me and settled into the city of Housil. “Colonel! Are you out there?”

  Several seconds passed before the Colonel replied, “I’m here, Grange. This war is not going well. We need another full day with the labs under Furnac to have that bomb ready for use. We probably only have ten or twelve hours that we can keep them at bay. If you have some dirty tricks up your sleeve, now would be the time to pull them.”

  I raised York and the other remaining BGS Marines on the comm. “We have thousands of ships up there. We can’t make much of a difference down here on the ground, but we can make it up there. I’m ordering the Wrens to land in Housil. I want each of you to take a Wren and use it to take out as many of those ships up there as you can. Blink in and out, use the coil gun, doesn’t matter. Just do whatever damage you can.”

  As we lifted off towards the bulk of the fleet that sat in orbit, I passed along the reminder: “Keep in mind that they can track us to some degree, even when you are blinked out fully. Just keep moving, as I don’t think they have any solid way to do that. Good hunting, all!”

  As we lifted above the atmosphere, the blue glow from the Durian ships that made up the net that surrounded the planet could be seen by the naked eye. I selected a Colossun battleship as my first target. I maneuvered until my Wren occupied the same space as the ship’s bridge. With a simple blink in and out, the entire officer crew on the ship, along with much of her control circuits, was taken out.

  I repeated the process another five times before the ships in orbit began to make the random moves that made targeting difficult.

  As I slipped into a Durian command ship, the Colonel came on the comm. “Just letting you know that the final push is on. They are already hitting the walls of Housil hard. We have moved as many Marines as we can through the bunker corridors. As soon as we have all the civilians out of there, we will evac the walls and bring our boys back to Bethel. Furnac should be the last city they attack.”

  I replied, “Thanks for the info, Colonel. We are going to exact our toll up here for as long as we can.”

  After closing the channel, I swiped my holo-display until the enemy ship counts appeared. Fifty-five thousand, one hundred and forty-eight. Our little fleet of seven Wrens was not going to make a difference, but we would do all we could.

  Word soon came that Housil was lost. Three hours later, the same news came in about Bethel. The once-towering Gonta city of Furnac was our final hope. The walls of the city were high. Our troops were packed in tight, as were our citizens in the great bunkers below. In a final gesture of bravado, in an attempt to show their strength, the Durians halted their attack as their troops surrounded our last best hope.

  Our sensors placed our Marines at twelve million ready and willing. The Durians now had twenty-six million surrounding Furnac, with reinforcements coming in a continuous stream.

  I slid the Wren into another Durian command ship. For a moment, I held off my blink in and out as I looked at their war screens that covered the walls surrounding the bridge. As I focused my eyes on a single screen that displayed a map of Furnac, my psyche was rocked as the blue troops surrounding the city turned to a yellow and then a flashing red. The final assault had begun!

  Without thinking, I pulled the trigger on the Wren’s coil gun, flooding the Durian bridge with flying debris. I spun the Wren 180 degrees and fired off another round before going in search of my next target.

  As I hit free space, I swiped at my holo-display to show the closest target. What I was not expecting was the sight of two green blips on the tactical screen. The two green blips soon turned into two hundred twenty-seven.

  Ashley’s voice came over the comm. “Don, thank goodness we made it in time!”

  I replie
d, “The Durians are assaulting our final city below! We only have a few hours at best before they overrun the walls! I wish you had gotten here before they finished constructing that net. Flying through those beams will overwhelm the active skin on these ships. And we don’t have any way to reach them to take it down.”

  Frig replied, “Don’t get your panties in a wad, Sir. We have a solution.”

  In an excited move, I stood up from my chair. “Oh! Please tell me you are not trying to make some sick joke!”

  Several seconds later, the first of the Durian net ships exploded as a wormhole moved through its internals. The same fate was then suffered by another and another until a hole existed in the Durian net large enough for the fleet of Wrens and the Swift to slip through.

  I threw my right fist up into the air as I let out a howl of joy! My unbridled fist met with a console just over my head, smashing its contents and rendering my environmental system inert.

  I quickly joined the Swift and the procession of Wrens as they dropped through the atmosphere towards the city of Furnac. The Durian troops were just at the beginning stages of topping the high walls as the Swift opened up with her coil gun.

  A two-hundred-meter swath around the walls was cleared out in under a minute’s time as the Wrens swarmed the air over the battlefield. The Durian ships in high orbit soon broke free and raced down to aid their brethren on the ground. The air battle that ensued was like none I had ever seen.

  Our Wrens were invisible to the Durian ships that fired blindly in every direction. Some Durian heavy ion cannon shots hit the ranks of their own in the scramble to kill the attackers who had brought the assault to a stop. I swirled around the battlefield, ducking below the planet’s surface at one point, only to shoot upwards out of a tunnel made from my BHD as it dissolved the earth in front of me.

  As I climbed upwards, I would time a shot from my coil gun as I passed through the bridge area of the ship I had targeted. The result was an immediate kill. An hour after Ashley and Frig’s arrival, the Durian ground forces had been cut in half and were beginning to flee from the fields surrounding Furnac. As the troops fled, our full efforts were turned skyward.

  Frig, using a targeting algorithm that he had written on the trip from Molov, was busy taking out the ion engines of twelve ships at a time. The wormhole generator he had installed in the Swift’s hold served up deaths by the dozen for the enemy ships.

  In another shocking surprise, the 226 Wrens that had come with him had the same wormhole generator weapon installed. In less than an hour, the mighty Durian fleet of more than fifty-five thousand ships was reduced to one-quarter of its previous size.

  In a final gesture of cowardice, the remaining Durian ships turned towards their home world and disappeared out of the Tresha system, leaving millions of their ground fighters to fend for themselves. Our Wrens broke off their pursuit, and the planet was soon cleansed of the attacking force.

  The Swift landed in the city center of Furnac. I landed my Wren beside them. As my rear hatch opened, I pulled off my helmet and stepped outside in time to see Ashley stepping out of the Swift. For a moment I froze in place, as the emotional overload was too much for my brain to handle. I tilted to one side and then fell forward with my face smashing the ground. I had fainted!

  I awoke several seconds later to my smiling wife patting my left cheek. “Hey, you going to be OK, big guy?”

  I took a heavy breath as the surge of drugs from my BGS suit cleared the fog from my head. “I am now!”

  I pulled her close for a long, passionate kiss. As we left the embrace, the green fog that came as a result of the ion inhibitors quickly dissipated as the inhibitors were switched off. Other than the occasional wisp of black smoke from a downed Durian ship, the sky above Furnac was a beautiful deep blue, only highlighted by the bright yellow Tresha sun.

  The Colonel then powered forward from his prior position on the outer wall. “Grange! What happened? Is he OK?”

  Ashley looked back and replied, “He’s fine, Colonel. He just got a little too emotionally stimulated.”

  The Colonel let out a howl of laughter. “Classic, Grange! Classic!”

  I rolled my eyes at the betrayal of my manhood by my wife. “I’m good, Colonel. I just got a little too happy, that’s all.”

  As the four of us stood, I threw my arms out and signaled for a group hug. When the others began to step closer, York blinked in just behind me. I waved her forward.

  As I pulled the others in close, my eyes glazed over and the tears began to flow. We had done it! My friends! My species! We were victorious and had earned the right to live! There would be much to do to spread that freedom throughout the Triangulum galaxy, but there would be plenty of time ahead for those efforts.

  After fully securing the star system that now held our species, we turned to the efforts of healing our wounded and setting ourselves up for a sustainable existence. Tresha was a world rich in resources and fertile lands. The oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere was perfectly suited to our continued survival.

  Cities would be rebuilt, crops planted, and defenses once again fully established, including the new fleet that was still under construction at Molov.

  For two days we did nothing but heal and celebrate our good fortune. George concocted a beverage that matched the red Brivad ale that I had so longed for since our run from the Mensa sector.

  As I turned up a cup of George’s imposter ale, I spoke. “So, Frig, the wormhole generator—is it still limited to a one-meter-diameter aperture?”

  Frig replied, “Unfortunately it is, but I believe that condition to only be temporary, Sir.”

  The Duke then signaled the Colonel’s comm.

  The Colonel placed him on speaker. “What do you want, jackass? We put down your bullies and sent them home with their scaly tails between their legs!”

  The Duke replied, “Hello, Colonel. I just thought I would offer my congratulations! You, Humans, are now the rulers of the Triangulum! How does it feel to know that you are the species that bested all the others?”

  The Colonel gestured to me to answer. I waved and shook my head. I wanted to remain silent. No good would come from the Duke knowing that I was still alive.

  The Colonel spoke. “Kicking your ass felt great, Duke. Now, if you don’t mind, how about you let us get on with our victory party here. You killed a lot of our people, but we are willing to let that go for at least a little while, if you just go away.”

  The Duke let out a sigh. “Ah, the Human spirit shines through. Enjoy your victory celebration, Colonel. I will be in touch when I am in need of your services!”

  Before the Colonel could respond, the comm channel went dead.

  The Colonel spoke. “Well, good riddance.”

  I replied, “Somehow I think he has more in store for us, Colonel. I can only hope that he doesn’t, but I will always remain skeptical of his motives so long as we both live.”

  I stood and again raised my cup in tribute. “To our fallen Humans! To Frost! And may we long outlive the Duke!”

  The others eagerly joined me.

  ~~~

  What’s Next!

  This Human is asking for your help!

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  I sincerely hope you have enjoyed reading this book. Chapter 1 of the next book in the series is provided below, I hope you enjoy it as well!
r />   Steve

  AMP

  8

  Armageddon

  Chapter 1

  In the months that followed our great victory over the Durians, our fleet was reestablished and the planet of Tresha reconstructed into a sustainable state. Our species was beginning to thrive with the old Human technologies we had found. Autonomous robots begot autonomous robots, which increased the output of our farms and factories with each ongoing day. The remaining Colossuns were eradicated, as were the nasty Bulgar Consortium. An alliance treaty was quickly signed with the Bulgar who had offered assistance.

  Plans were being drawn up to sweep back through the Mensa sector and the hundred sectors we had come through before. Species that were inherently hostile would have no place in the Triangulum galaxy. Friendly species would be free to govern themselves, with disputes settled by binding arbitration in sector councils that would answer to the new Human empire. In a gesture to honor our Human past, and to provide a sense of belonging to all, the empire was named the Alliance of Major Planets. AMP would be the empire to justly and fairly rule all empires.

  In the fifth month after our victory, I walked into Frig’s lab in Furnac. “What’s the good news today, my friend?”

  Frig leaned back, crossed his short arms behind his wide, flat head, and smiled. “I have done it! I have cracked the problem with the wormhole aperture! I only needed to use harmonic frequencies to achieve the power amplification necessary for widening a portal once it was opened. If you want to follow me out to the Swift, we can make these modifications and give the ship-sized wormhole a try!”

  I stepped back and gestured towards the door. “Well, come on! We aren’t getting any younger!”

  Frig replied, “Well, technically, Sir, that does not appear to be a true statement for you. You are looking younger every day. In fact, I would say that you appear to be younger than on the day we first met. Do you remember raising your hand in the Batteract Lounge on the Grid as you were looking for a new ship’s mechanic? You appear to be even younger than on that day.”