by Andrew Beery
B’sarn had expected orders to come down from on high to send a contingent of his elite troops to the spaceport anytime. Troops such as his were designed for such missions. Facilities like the spaceport were not good candidates for orbital bombardment because KEWs tended to destroy everything in the vicinity.
In point of fact, he was surprised the order had not already been issued. There was a rumor that the attack force had been detected when they arrived in system and were even now being dealt with by the Imperial Battlecruisers stationed in orbit. B’sarn tapped the communicator on his left forepaw. “East sector clear. North sector report!”
“North sector clear,” Praetor Tandu replied instantly.
“West sector report!”
“West sector clear,” Praetor Mas replied just as quickly.
“South sector report!”
“Consul, the south sector is clear,” Sub consul RiraNas reported. “Sir, why are we not being ordered to defend the spaceport?”
“Why indeed,” a strange alien voice said from right beside Consul B’sarn.
Chapter 7: Too Little… Too Late…
Lieutenant Commander Anthony Stone shook his head. Whatever Sergeant First Class Jeremy James Hammond had been drinking in his coffee this morning, it apparently affected his judgment. He suspected JJ was attempting yet again to become an augment… the fact that he was having fun while doing it as an added bonus.
The sergeant was standing right next to one of the enemy’s senior officers on the fortified wall that surrounded the maintenance depot. Without bothering to ask for permission, the sergeant had taken it upon himself to test the effectiveness of their Stark suit’s camo systems. He had carefully advanced across an open field using his suit’s passive sensors to detect and avoid buried sensors. Having reached his goal undetected, JJ stood next to the Ashtoreth officer and was listening intently to his radio chatter.
AG was about the order the rest of his troops forward when he saw JJ do something only JJ would do.
Never one to leave good enough alone, the sergeant struck up a conversation with the confused Ashtoreth officer. The result was that the startled officer pulled a handheld projectile weapon from a pouch in his uniform. After a few moments of listening to insults and taunts, he began shooting in the general direction of JJ’s voice. The first several shots missed as the sergeant used his Stark-enhanced speed to dodge out of the line of fire… all the while keeping up a steady stream of verbal jabs.
The sergeant was in no real danger from a weapon so small… not while wearing his body armor. Unfortunately eventually his luck ran out and a projectile found its mark. As the rounds pinged off his Stark suit… the suit’s camo field shuddered. This provided a better target for the Ashtoreth officer to fire at. In a few short moments JJ was taking fire from three separate directions as others joined in the fire fight. At some point his Camo systems failed and he became fully visible.
Of course he gave as well as he got. He fired his plasma riffle with wild abandon… all the while yelling at the top of his lungs. His Stark suit allowed him to dodge and jump… sometimes twenty feet straight up. This served to confuse his opponents. In point of fact, it was this ability to jump that had allowed him to scale the enclosure wall.
Taking advantage of the distraction, Commander Stone ordered the Gunny to advance the men. They moved quickly and with an efficiency that only a marine could achieve. Within fifteen seconds one hundred plus men and women were on the wall. Shortly thereafter the Ashtoreth position was overrun… but not before every alarm on the planet had begun blaring.
A seemingly endless supply of Ashtoreth soldiers rushed out of the impossibly small domed buildings dotted about the compound. The domes had openings on the top that the Ashtoreth could enter and exit from. Where a human would put the egress to a building on the side to keep the rain from entering the structure, the Ashtoreth, because of their different physiology, seemed to welcome the moisture.
It was immediately obvious that the buildings were like the tops of ant hills. The vast majority of the ant colony was underground. The same apparently was true for the Ashtoreth.
As the Ashtoreth rushed out of their hidey-holes, they setup interlinking fields of fire around each of the small buildings. The reason for the odd placement of the structures soon became apparent as each group of Ashtoreth defenders could protect two or more adjoining groups. The layout served to protect the main body of the compound that consisted of a number of large maintenance hangers and a centralized airfield that currently was occupied by twenty all terrain assault vehicles and four craft that looked to be the Ashtoreth equivalent of assault helicopters.
The Ashtoreth troops were using some type of portable shield technology that erected a force barrier between them and their opponents. The shield did not seem to be personal devices but instead protected two to three soldiers at a time from a single direction. It appeared the shields were slightly stronger that the ones built into the mark ten Stark suits that his men wore but they were considerably less flexible. Every time they fired their weapons the shield would flicker momentarily to allow the outgoing round to pass the barrier. It wasn’t much of an opening but it was enough.
AG toggled his command channel. “Lieutenant Jacobs, get third platoon into position. First and Fourth platoons are going to breach the front lines. When we do, you are to advance and take out that airfield.”
“Acknowledged Commander. Splash in place everything we find. Got it.”
“Ricky, I want the second to hold back and take out any vehicles in the air or on the ground that make it past us. Everybody keep one eye on those hangers. We have no idea what type of FUBAR inducing crap the enemy may be hiding in them. You have thirty seconds to get your people in order then we are moving out.”
Next he signaled Lieutenants Watson and Mall from the First and Fourth platoons respectively on a secondary channel. “Becky and Ty… have you noticed anything about those shields they are using?”
Lieutenant JG Tyrone Mall answered first. “They drop them for a fraction of a second as they are firing on our positions.”
“We can tie our HUDs into our fire control systems. When they detect the shields going down they can fire accordingly. Our plasma rifles operate near relativistic speeds. We should be able to get past their shields before their KEW rounds have even left their barrels,” Lieutenant Watson added.
“Exactly,” AG agreed. I’m passing the word to the other platoon leaders. Make sure your people have their HUD’s programmed to feed the sensor data to your Stark’s fire control systems. With any luck those Gators will never know what hit them.”
AG listened as the various officers and NCOs got their men in order. A few seconds later the First and Fourth lit up the Ashtoreth front lines.
It was an impressive sight. The first few seconds seemed like a stalemate. Twenty marines from the two Infinity Brigade platoons fired plasma beams that flashed ineffectively off the Ashtoreth shields. As soon as the IBs stopped firing the defenders started to fire back. The First and Fourth were ready for them however.
Three milliseconds after their shields were down one hundred of AG’s marines poured plasma hell straight into their undefended positions.
“It’s a veritable Gator roast!” JJ yelled as he ran forward. He was on top of the first position before half of the other marines had even stopped firing. The first thing he did was point his weapon straight down the opening on the top of the dome he was standing on and open fire.
Several more domes were overrun in short order. AG noted that Private Manu was doing a pretty good imitation of Sergeant Hammond, standing on top of his own dome and firing a continuous stream of plasma into its opening. He even duplicated the sergeant’s maniacal scream as he went about his gruesome business. AG would have to talk to the young man about choosing effective role models.
On cue, Third platoon raced forward. Seeing sixty marines, most of whom were augments, running in powered Stark suits was an impressive
sight. Unless, you were the opposition. In that case the sight must have been terrifying. A marine in a Stark suit could easily run at speeds approaching eighty kilometers an hour.
With a sigh, AG started to move forward himself. He picked a target and pressed and held the trigger to his rifle. The sensors in his suit waited for the target’s shield to fluctuate before actually firing. The result was one shot one kill.
Unfortunately the enemy was not stupid and slowly picked up on what was happening. Every time one of them would attempt to fire his weapon he would end up on the receiving end of a plasma beam. As a result the enemy simply quit firing.
“Time to switch tactics!” AG yelled over the command channel. “Order your men to switch to continuous fire and concentrate on a single defender at a time.”
The plan would have worked if the enemy had been willing to cooperate. Sadly, as was often the case in war, the enemy got a say in what happened. In this particular case that ‘say’ came in the form of what could only be describes as a walking tank.
As predicted, the hangers contained some nasty surprises. Doors rolled away with an ominous creaking sound and several massive eight-legged flattened spheres walked out of the openings on short stubby legs. On the top of the spheres a rotating egg-shaped protuberance fired extremely powerful energy bolts. If AG had to guess, they were lasers and not plasma beams. Periodically the protuberance would make a popping sound and a mortar shell would be ejected.
The first such shell landed right next to Sergeant First Class Jeremy James Hammond. The explosion was enough to create a fifteen foot crater where the Sergeant had been standing. If AG had to guess his friend had finally gotten his wish to become an augment.
***
JJ Hammond was not a man given to believing in luck. Things happened for a reason. What exactly that reason was… was often itself a subject of great debate. Such was the situation in which he now found himself.
One moment he was minding his own business blowing away the enemy left and right… the next he was fifty feet down a shaft with twenty Gators looking at him like he was the ‘other white meat.’ The worst part of his situation was, he knew he was alone. Any help that might come would likely be too little… too late.
“Bloody Hell,” he mumbled to himself. He tried to toggle his comms but the suit’s AI informed him that it, as well as, his personal shields were offline.
“Time to repair shields?” He asked as he slowly backed away from the hoard of advancing Ashtoreth.
“Four minutes and thirty six seconds if they are made the priority,” came the cold and calculating reply.
“Time to fix communications?”
“One minute and twelve seconds if they are made the priority.”
“Prioritize communications. Record a message and transmit once the system comes back online. Transmit whether or not I am alive.”
“Order acknowledged. Please dictate message.”
“Hey Chaps… JJ here. You will never believe where I am…”
***
Private Manu Yreeb was not a happy camper. He had just watched one of his newest friends disappear in a mortar explosion. The attacker guilty of this offense was one of four armored siege-bots that had come crawling out of a near-by hanger.
Manu had seen one of these before, although this was the first working one he had run across. As a child playing in a field he and a few of his friends had discovered a burnt out shell that was the remains of just such a machine. He had not known at the time what it was… just that it was something from what the elders called the ‘time before.’ More importantly, he remembered crawling inside the beast from a hole that was located approximately where that egg-shaped protuberance was located. He suspected that was its weak spot.
Had he been Manu, the Basharite slave… there would have been nothing he could do with this knowledge. Now, however he was a marine in the Infinity Brigade. By virtue of an engram transplant, he had years of training and experience that he could call upon. That… and a specially built, extra-large mark ten Stark suit.
Chapter 8: Little John…
Gunny Sergeant George Moore was not an easy man to impress. That said, he was most definitely impressed by their newest recruit. The Basharite with the last name no one could pronounce was the first marine ever to be inducted into the corps by virtue of synthetic boot camp. Little John, as the men in his platoon had started calling him, in all likelihood would remain an exception. It was only by virtue of need and his pre-existing physical prowess that Commander Stone had allowed the exception.
What was most remarkable was that even with the head-knowledge to be a marine… the young man’s body had not been conditioned to function at the levels that a marine typically operated at… and yet the man was holding his own. The real question was how long would he be able to do so?
It was for this reason that the Gunny was keeping an extra eye on the Private. It was also the reason that the Gunny was watching when he saw the man do one of the most foolhardy and yet brilliant moves he had ever seen.
The first of the mortars from those walking tanks started to fall in and amongst the marines. Marine armor is good, but asking it to handle a hundred kilo explosive mortar was a little much.
The Basharite Private took several dozen running leaps and landed nimbly on the back of one of those machines. In one swift motion he dropped what the Gunny could only assume was a plasma grenade down its mortar shaft.
Before the grenade had even made it down the tube the Private was leaping off the first machine and onto the second.
A deep rumble filled the air and the top most portion of the first tank ripped loose and flew a good twenty meters in the air. As it crashed back into the ground it crushed several of the Ashtoreth defenders. Remarkably the main body of the tank remained standing. Moore thought that it looked remarkably like a very short old-style water tower.
Unfortunately for the Private, things were not going so well on the second tank. His landing had been awkward and he slipped over the side of the tank. It took several moments for the gecko-like grips on his suit’s hand pads to find enough purchase to pull himself back up to the top of the machine.
By this time the operators were well aware that he was there and posed a real and present threat. As a result, they were actively trying to dislodge him. It was this distraction that possibly doomed the Private to his first Big D.
He tossed another plasma grenade down the mortar shoot. At about the same time the tank operators collapsed several of the machine’s legs on one side in an effort to toss him off. Instinctively he grabbed the lip of the mortar shaft with his free had. At exactly the same moment the Ashtoreth attempted to fire the mortar. When the live mortar shell rammed the descending plasma grenade both devices exploded in a fireball that ripped the tank as well as the Private in half. The man probably never felt the blast.
The Basharite Private was not the first Marine to fall in combat today and he would not be the last.
***
AG was working his way towards the third of the Ashtoreth tanks. He had seen Manu take two of them out single-handedly. He gave the man props for daring but his technique could use some improvement. The idea was not to get blown up in the process.
He used the burning wreckage of the second tank as cover. AG had previously ordered his men to disengage their cloaks because they drew too much power from their shields and when the enemy saw repeated plasma discharges coming out of thin air it didn’t take a rocket scientist to deduce that somewhere nearby there was a marine. That said, he had a use for his cloak now.
With the unit activated he moved from behind the disabled tank and approached the third tank at a run. He hoped that the machine did not have enhanced sensors that could detect him… otherwise he was going to be seeing Doctor Pulaski a little sooner than planned.
As he approached the lumbering machine he activated special microfilament tarsi pads on the palms of his hands and knees. These minute hair-like fibers allowed hi
s Stark suit to slowly climb the smooth metal walls of the Ashtoreth tank like a gecko.
He saw his voice mail queue flash with an incoming message but he didn’t have time to deal with it. If it had required immediate attention the caller would have used his commlink.
With his active camouflage still enabled he dropped a plasma grenade down the mortar shoot. Before it had a chance to go off he jumped off the machine and rolled as he struck the ground. As he came back to his feet he saw the fourth of the tanks topple over. Apparently Gunny Sergeant Moore had also been watching Manu.
AG toggled his comms. “Jacobs, report. How goes the airfield?”
“The field is secure sir… lots of wreaked machinery. Very few un-friendlies. Those we ran into we dealt with. A handful of ATs got out the gate along with one flyer but Lieutenant Rodrigues’ crew took care of them. We were fix’n to head into the tunnels unless you have something else you want us to do?”
“Tunnels are where we are headed next as well. Pull Ricky and his men in to hold our topside position and then join the First and the Fourth in walking the sewers hunting Gators. We will take prisoners if they are inclined to surrender but take no excessive risks.”
“Acknowledged Commander. See you in the sewers soon. Jacobs out.”
***
Twenty minutes later AG could honestly say he had developed a healthy dislike for damp, dark, and Gator infested places. He and a group of six men were working their way west through the dark corridors. It seemed the Ashtoreth preferred natural dirt in their tunnel works. The underground corridors where reinforced with concrete every few dozen yards. In between the reinforcing arches there was some type of stainless steel mesh that allowed small amounts of moisture and mud to seep through… along with the occasional plant root.
The result was a musty smell and numerous shallow puddles of water on the floor of the cavern. It was only when they approached the openings to the various rooms and chambers that budded off the corridor that things dried out. The Ashtoreth planted some type of moss on the ground that served to sop up the excess water. They reminded AG of the door mats his mother used to have at the front door to his childhood home.