by Andrew Beery
General Bar’Jona and Commander Stone stood reviewing the flat table that housed the holographic status board that was receiving real-time feeds. There were multiple factions involved in the fighting. The board was receiving feeds from advanced infiltration units of the Infinity Brigade. These were cloaked human and Basharite Marines whose job it was to identify the location and strength of any opposition forces.
In addition, General Bar’Jona had a number of his Ashtoreth soldiers making their way into the city. Each of these soldiers carried a small, inconspicuous, Friend-Or-Foe beacon that the Marine’s HUD were designed to recognize. Bar’Jona’s troops would be able to infiltrate the loyal Ashtoreth ranks and disrupt them from within. In addition, they would be able to pass signaling devices and FOF beacons to the previously embedded insurgent forces.
Finally, Corporal Manu Yreeb and a handful of carefully picked Basharites had doffed their Marine BDUs and entered the city disguised as civilians. Theirs was perhaps the most dangerous mission. Their task was to rendezvous with the local civilian leaders and bring them up to speed on what was about to happen. Many of those leaders had already been detained and the others were in hiding. Somehow Manu needed to locate them before the Ashtoreth did.
With so many different information streams coming into the TOC… and because they were originating from two different technological bases, AG had asked for special assistance from Admiral Kimbridge. This assistance took the form of a large moth-like creature called Sassi. Sassi was an Ashkelon computer expert with a special gift for complex math.
Stone had two objectives he wanted Lieutenant Sassi to address. First, he wanted to tighten the tactical interface between General Bar’Jona’s forces and those of the Infinity Brigade. Right now they were limited to FOF beacons and direct conversations via a universal translator. AG wanted a richer exchange of tactical information. Location data, biometrics, personal weapons loadouts and logistics data. These were all things each side had access to for their own people. AG wanted them shared across forces. Sassi was the key to making that happen.
Second, AG want Sassi to work on infiltrating the Ashtoreth computer network. Admiral Kimbridge had been able to do some serious damage to the Ashtoreth Empire’s cause by directly accessing the computer core in the primary replication center. AG wanted to be able to do the same thing remotely. Sassi reported that the first of these was easy and he would have it done in a few minutes. When AG asked him about the second, the Ashkelon officer had flatly stated it was impossible – but to give him a couple of hours and he would see what he could do.
Chapter 24: “ Pride paves many a road to destruction…”
Lord Admiral Nsati looked out the dura-glass window of the observation port in her office aboard the AE ReShan. She could see the telltale flashes of plasma beams targeting their intended victims. The ships themselves were not visible. Space was too dark and the distances were too great. The viewscreens on the main bridge automatically compensated for such things but such was not the case for ordinary windows.
The weapons fire she was watching were low-intensity practice beams. Her fleet was practicing for the coming battle to regain the Basharite system. She had done her homework. She studied extensively the few surviving records from Lord Captain Asdartu’s abortive attempt to deal with the Hupenstanii situation. In the process of that review she had been surprised to learn the alien commander who had engineered his defeat was a female human named Admiral Catherine Kimbridge.
The fact that Asdartu had lost the battle was undoubtedly a source of pain for the handsome captain… but to know that it was to a woman that beat him… that must have been like fresh saw-worms on a cut. And yet, to a certain degree, the Lord Captain had brought it on himself. There was a saying among her people… Pride paves many a road to destruction.
Asdartu was a gifted captain. He could be the finest in the fleet. He had but one fatal flaw. He assumed, by right of birth that he, and he alone, had the best answers to whatever the question at hand was… be it a battle or a conversation. This was doubly true when he faced what he perceived to be an inferior. She, in his eyes, by virtue of gender was most certainly an inferior.
It was frustrating for her because there were so few potential mates at her level of competence and success. Theirs could have been a glorious relationship! If only he were willing to accept a female as an equal.
As she watched the last of the fighting stopped. Her captains would be reporting the results of their mock engagements in a few moments. Yes, she had studied the battle in Hupenstanii space. She was not Asdartu. She would not let pride blind her. She would not make the same mistakes he did. She had some surprises for Admiral Catherine Kimbridge.
***
Manu moved forward and bowed to the city elder. “I am Manu of House Yreeb. I bid you, health and long life Elder Nstra Durn.”
“Well met Corporal Yreeb,” the lanky woman responded.
Manu cringed. He was not used to correcting elders, especially ones that were nearly his own age and painfully beautiful. “It would perhaps be best, Elder Durn, if we dispensed with using my rank. The walls may very well have ears.”
“Very well Manu of the House of Yreeb… but you in turn must do the same for me… and for the same reason.” With this she offered him her arm. “Perhaps you would escort me to the fruit market. I understand our ‘hosts’ are allowing it to remain open during their time with us.”
Manu hesitated.
“Don’t be shy. I don’t bite… not much anyway. Besides its quite common for engaged couples to hold hands while walking.”
“We are not engaged,” Manu protested as he took the offered arm anyway.
“True,” she said coyly. “But the Ashtoreth don’t know that… and one never knows what the future will hold. Besides it will give us a chance to whisper sweet nothings into each other’s ears without raising suspicions. I am correct, am I not, that you are here on behalf of Admiral Kimbridge?”
“I am here on behalf of Commander Stone and the Infinity Brigade Marines… so I guess by extension, I suppose I am.”
“Excellent,” she said. “So tell me Manu, what can you tell me? What are we going to do about this situation?”
As the two walked towards the market they passed a number of Ashtoreth soldiers. It struck Manu as odd. They were not treating the Basharites like slaves but rather as civilians under an occupation. He supposed it made sense. These Ashtoreth hadn’t been alive when the Basharites were slaves of the Ashtoreth Empire. In their minds, they truly were an occupying force rather than enslavers. Manu wasn’t sure how this information might help them later but he filed it away in the back of his mind just in case.
“There is a limit to what I am allowed to share with you for security reasons. Also, in fairness, I’m not very far up the food chain when it comes to command decisions. My orders are to tell you that help is coming and to be ready. There will be four forces coming together in very short order. If we are lucky, it will be barely controlled chaos. We need you to get the word out to the civilian population to not stir up any cuda nests. We need the Gators to settle into a routine. Also, when the dung hits the fire, everybody needs to shelter in place. There will be civilian casualties… we’d like to keep them as low as possible.”
“I see,” Nstra said while pretending to nibble on his ear. He jerked his head away and she giggled. The Ashtoreth soldier who had been watching them made a gurgling sound and jabbed his buddy in the side as the two Basharites walked by. “And when might we expect all this to happen?” she asked as she nestled her head against his strong shoulder. I could get used to this, she thought to herself.
“Soon. And that’s why we need your help finding out where the Gators are hanging their hats at night and where they are keeping the hostages.”
***
Lieutenant Sassi twitched his low-frequency antenna. Integrating the Ashtoreth and Marine Combat Information Systems (CIS) had proven as easy as he had anticipated. Having access t
o sample Ashtoreth tech made the work child’s play. The fact that General Bar’Jona’s troops needed to use the same deployment codes as the Ashtoreth regulars under the command of the Praefectus – in order to blend into his force… and that they actually had those codes thanks to the insurgents already within their midst, meant that Sassi could actually integrate both friend and foe data feeds into the CIS.
The only issue was learning to distinguish which Ashtoreth soldiers were friendlies and which were hostiles. In theory the FOF beacons would handle this but Sassi disliked that solution intensely. It required each allied solder to carry an extra piece of equipment. Equipment that could be lost, damaged or confiscated. He solved the issue by programming the AI’s built into the Stark suits to create a secondary data field associated with each Ashtoreth unique combat designator. By default this field would be prepopulated with ‘foe’ but if a FOF beacon were activated, even for a moment, by an Ashtoreth soldier then the nearest Stark AI would toggle the bit to ‘friend’ status and share the information with all the other Starks and by extension the friendly Ashtoreths.
Since it took an Ashtoreth who was already designated as a friendly to activate the FOF, there was little risk of the enemy capturing and using the FOF beacons to their advantage.
The reason Sassi was nervously twitching his low frequency antenna was because of the other half of the orders he had received from Commander Stone. He wanted the ability to hack into the Ashtoreth computer network.
Hacking into an alien computer network was never easy unless you were a ridiculously advanced and powerful Heshe AI like a WhimPy. Sadly, the rules of engagement that the Heshe had put in place that allowed the WhimPy’s to aid the GCP (and more specifically Cat Kimbridge)… disallowed activities that went beyond defense.
That meant that Sassi had to do this the hard way. Fortunately having access to General Bar’Jona and his people made the task at least potentially possible. After much thought and discussion with various Ashtoreth technicians, Sassi settled on an approach that would yield the results the commander was after without necessarily breaching the entire Ashtoreth security system.
Sassi was going to take advantage of the fact that they had operatives already in place at the T’Nagra City site. Sassi used a simple remote buffer overflow exploit to place a set of specially crafted control codes on a computer with limited security in place at the T’Nagra site.
The computer did not have access to anything important and was not in and of itself a significant security threat to the Ashtoreth loyalists. What it was for Sassi, however, was a communication conduit to General Bar’Jona’s son, Roc. The codes, which looked innocent enough, were designed to catch the attention of the insurgents. They contained instructions for establishing the communications link.
According to the General there were currently some thirty replicants of his son working at the facility as mid-level technicians. Each and every one was actually a Colonel in his father’s organization. Roc, who was brilliant, had years ago devised a way to store messages in an isolated computer buffer that each of the replicants could access and decode. Sassi, unfortunately, had no way to access that buffer directly… but with a little help that situation would soon change.
Once the allied forces could remotely access that message queue, they could send and receive information more directly with the insurgent forces that remained at the T’Nagra base. The only way for them to pass information and instructions currently was for a person to physically visit the base. This had not been a problem when the base had been filled with almost twenty thousand soldiers. But now that the bulk had deployed and there were few, if any, soldiers returning to the base, communication had virtually come to a standstill.
After several hours of dropping bait in the overflow buffer, Sassi finally got a bite. One of the Rocs must have spotted his cryptic messages. A few moments later he received a ping on a communications port he had been monitoring. He checked and it was the access he had been requesting. It would not support high data volumes. The message buffer was too small for that but it would be two way and it would be relatively fast.
***
Cat watched as ship after ship, almost five hundred at this point, appeared nearly forty five AU out from her current position on Marine City in orbit around Bashar. Whoever was leading this armada, they had learned from the previous engagement near the Hupenstanii home world.
Cat had numerous reconnaissance probes seeded throughout the system as far as sixty AU out. Each was tied to the Operations Center at Marine City via an FTL link. She hoped this gave her a little bit of an advantage over her adversary. Cat new from conversations with their latest ally, General Bar’Jona that while the Ashtoreth had FTL communications, its use was very restricted. It would be unlikely that any of the ships in this armada would be trusted with it.
The armada’s first order of business was to fire an endless stream of jump-capable missiles at the hyperfield disrupters circling the planet. The missiles must have been built specifically for this task because they utilized relatively unsophisticated radar tracking systems that did not rely on advanced computers or AIs to accomplish their task.
Within thirty minutes of arriving in system, the armada had destroyed or disabled the vast majority of Cat’s disrupters. On top of that, they soon began to take out many of Cat’s reconnaissance probes.
Cat swiveled her command chair to face the four holographic alcoves that housed real-time representations of the bridge of each of the Yorktown-Class starships at her disposal.
She toggled her fleet-wide comm channel. “Gentlemen, I think it’s time we let our visitors know they are not welcome. Please deploy you forces but remember there are one hundred of them for each one of you. Don’t take any unnecessary risks. WhimPy is in a defense posture which is well within his acceptable rules of engagement. If you need to, fall back to his position and he will cover you with his shields.”
Her Executive Officer, Commander Ben First trotted up to her in his six-legged D’rlalu form. He looked like a curious cross between a centaur and a German shepherd. He handed her a cup of coffee. As Execs went he knew her like the back of his… paw.
She looked at his cup. “Hot Chocolate?”
His tongue wagged out of the side of his mouth which was his way of smiling. “Dark with just a hint of mint.”
“Is our surprise ready?” Cat asked.
“The engineers finished the last of the work on the evening shift last night. We are deploying the last of the units as I speak.”
“How about redundancy,” she said as she sipped the hot liquid.
Ben tapped a button on her command chair and a small floating holographic display appeared in the air in front of her chair. It showed WhimPy-101 with Marine City in orbit around Bashar. A simulated force field, originating at the WhimPy and enveloping the entire planet, appeared.
Ben used his free hand to expand a portion of the display. “We have second level backups throughout the network. WhimPy did an analysis of likely points of failure and we’ve attempted to place a third level of redundancy in as many of those areas as we can.”
“When you say most… what do you mean?” Cat asked.
“Currently we are talking sixty-seven percent. If our guests give us another two hours we can have that number up to ninety percent, Admiral.”
Cat studied the hologram for another few minutes. Her mind was racing through a number of potential scenarios. She knew, better than most, that if there was a ten percent chance of a system failing, that Mister Murphy would find a way to get to that ten percent.
“Order the Mador to cloak and hold position here,” Cat pointed to a location near the weakest point of the defense grid they were setting up.
Chapter 25: Armada
“OK boys and girls, it game time!” Gunny Ramirez yelled. “Move’m out! GO! GO! GO!”
Commander Anthony Stone watched remotely from the TOC via a direct feed into his Stark suit’s HUD the view from Gunnery S
ergeant Ramirez’s HUD.
The Gunny and thirty of Marine City’s finest were engaging in a cloaked HALO jump from thirty-five thousand feet above the city of New Hope. Attached to the back of each soldier was a steerable grav-pack that would drop the Marine to within a few inches of a designated target. They would free fall until sensors in the grav-pack determined they were a mere one hundred feet from the ground. At that point, the pack would engage and the Marine would be lowered the last several feet on a tether. Once on the ground, the tether would release and the grav-pack would autopilot itself to a predesignated pickup area. It was a hell of a ride and breakfast beforehand was definitely not recommended.
The Gunny’s jump was mirrored over the next twenty minutes by sixteen shuttles. In all, almost five hundred Marines HALO jumped into New Hope. At the same time, close to three thousand Marines, also under cloak, made their way towards the outskirts of the city.
The Gators had cleared out an impressive ring around the city. Every home and building within two blocks of that ring had been razed and torn down. The Ashtoreth occupation force was a well-oiled machine. It had taken them less than a day to clear a well-defined defensive perimeter around the city. In the next several days they had thoroughly dug in.
A maze of trenches followed the perimeter. These were fortified with quick-set, steel reinforced concrete buttresses and walls. High-intensity lasers swept the entire front of the structures the Ashtoreth had erected.
To be honest, AG was impressed. In a mere handful of days they had built fortifications that were far and away more secure than anything the Infinity Brigade had had to face to date on this planet.
None of those fortifications would have delayed a fully cloaked and geared-up combat marine… especial if said marine was an augment. The real barrier was the threat that Praefectus Niegar had put in place within moments of taking the city. Twenty of the highest ranking officials in the city, to include Elder Tannaka would be killed the instant there was any sign that the city’s defenses were being breached. On top of this, the Praefectus had placed a series of small tactical nuclear weapons in a number of locations about the city. In essence, he was holding the entire city hostage.