“Yes, but I am not the supervisor.”
“I understand. Could we perhaps meet the supervisor?”
The Marines assumed their natural battle stances as they had every time the group stopped moving for more than a few seconds.
“Wait here.”
“Thank you.”
He scurried off. A few minutes later a man in a long white lab coat appeared. “I understand you wish to tour the building.”
“Yes, we would,” Rachel affirmed.
“You may enter the facility, but you are to take no pictures or record any of what you see in any media. We are conducting research that if our competitors found out could ruin us economically.”
“And what are you researching?” Rachel asked.
“We think we have found the cure for the common cold.”
“An elusive quest indeed!”
The engineers had been thoroughly briefed on what to look for when they entered the plant. Within minutes, they found all the evidence they needed and transmitted it to the ship from their helmet cams. There was no question that, in spite of the drivel this man in the lab coat spewed, this facility was manufacturing several varieties of military grade poison gases and packaging them for combat use.
They had completed the tour of the building when the man said, “You’ve been walking all morning. We’ve prepared a snack for you. Why don’t you follow me through this door and have something to eat before you head back.”
They entered what appeared to be a hastily cleared store room. A space had been created by pushing the storeroom’s contents against the walls. The Marines entered first and immediately set out to find the other exits. There were none. Realizing too late that they had been trapped, they turned back around to find the man in the lab coat surrounded by armed guards. The guards had their weapons pointed at the Marines. Rachel was alone inside the circle of guards with the man who had conducted the tour.
“Now let’s see if your men will come rescue you.” He reached out to grab Rachel’s collar. She brushed him off.
“Such brave little girls. Now maybe we get to see the boys and they can watch us kill you. You think we haven’t figured out your little scam? You want the gas for yourselves and you’re going to steal it from us! Well, you can’t have it!”
The man circled inside the protective arc of the guards as he tried to get closer to Rachel. Rachel gracefully danced away staying out of his reach. Unnoticed, while everyone’s attention was focused on the concentric armed circles, two of the engineers slipped behind a row of shelves and crawled along the floor to a rack that held bottles of compressed gas. One made the sign for silence to the other and pointed at one of the bottles. Gently they laid the bottle down on the floor. Carefully and slowly they unscrewed the protective cap from the valve.
Suddenly the man who had been circling against Rachel lunged and grabbed her jacket.
“That’s a bad idea.” Suwanee said loudly but calmly with an evil grin.
The guards turned to look at Suwanee. As they did, Rachel pulled her throwing knife from behind her neck. With a single motion, the knife entered the man’s body above his belt and ripped a gash that continued to his sternum. After a moment of shock, the man screamed in mortal agony. One of the engineers in the main group reached out and grabbed a fire extinguisher which she emptied on the guards. Covered by the sound of the wounded man’s scream and the fog from the fire extinguisher, the engineer who had laid the gas bottle on the floor smashed the valve as hard as she could with a length of heavy pipe. The valve broke away cleanly and the bottle rocketed off through the circle of guards spraying blood and body parts everywhere before knocking a small hole in the block wall.
Sliding in the freshly spilled blood on the floor, Rachel disarmed one of the corpses lying at her feet. In a matter of seconds she and the Marines had dispatched the rest of the guards. Rachel looked around to assess the situation. None of Rachel’s group had been injured although several were covered in the guards’ blood. “I could have planned that better,” Rachel said to no one in particular.
The engineer who had initiated the air bottle plan, the smallest of the group, was jumping up and down laughing and giggling. “MacGyver rules!” When she realized that everyone was looking at her, she stopped bouncing and said, “I’ve been wanting to do that forever!” Laser beams and ballistic ordinance started entering the room through the fog outside the open door.
“You get to do it again.” Rachel observed.
One of the Marines grabbed a short gas bottle.
The engineer shouted, “No! Not that one! It’s acetylene! We want to blow them up not blow us up! Take this one.”
They put the bottle on the floor and quickly unscrewed the cap. The engineer who thought she was MacGyver smashed the valve and the bottle roared off. Screams could be heard from the other side of the wall. They laid down another bottle.
“No, wait, put this one in front of that one.”
They put the acetylene bottle in front of the oxygen bottle with the bottoms together. They took the cap off the acetylene bottle and then smashed the valve on the oxygen bottle. The oxygen bottle acted like a first stage rocket booster and propelled the acetylene bottle through the hole. The exposed valve on the acetylene bottle impacted something on the other side of the wall hard enough to break the valve causing the gas to leak out. The resulting explosion on the other side of the wall shook the floor in the store room. Flames quickly lapped at the hole.
“We can’t go that way.” Someone observed out loud.
“Blow a hole this way,” Rachel ordered pointing at the opposite wall.
Three air bottles later, they had a hole they could walk through. The Marines exited the room first, blasting anyone that stood in their way. The engineers picked up whatever weapons they could as they left the room.
As Rachel stepped through the hole in the wall she said to no one in particular. “No plan survives contact with the enemy.”
The Marines laid down a pattern of protective fire as they advanced through the plant. The group advanced slowly taking advantage of cover where they could find it. The engineers used weapons they had taken from the guards to supplement the ones they had brought with them. The small group packed an impressive amount of fire power and used it to clear the escape route. They could hear fire arms outside the plant.
Rachel called David. “How much can you see?”
“We’re engaging.” He responded breathlessly. “All assets are committed.”
“Roger that.”
The almost calm in David’s voice hid the pandemonium occurring on the ship. When Rachel had first entered the store room. David had sounded battle stations. All of their battle plans had assumed that Rachel would be on the ship to lead the engagement. None of the scenarios had included rescuing the Captain. Swallowing their rising panic, the bridge crew quickly responsibilities and got their equipment and personnel into the battle.
In the confusion, David repeated over and over something Greg had often said when they were working simulations. “Talk to each other! Folks, we have to talk to each other.”
After saying this a half a dozen times in Federation Standard, he suddenly remembered another of Greg’s tricks. He started giving commands in Hebrew to those crew members that knew Hebrew. He knew his transmissions were being monitored just as his people were monitoring transmissions on the surface. He assumed that the enemy would not be as fluent in Hebrew as his own crews, a quarter of whom were Jewish. The battle carried on in a mixture of the two languages making interpretation of the commands and action calls harder for the enemy to decipher.
Suwanee appreciated in a new way having taken the Hebrew lessons as part of the process to convert so she could marry Reuben. She was able to relay commands to the rest of the Marine detail and maintain coordination with the battleship.
At the same time as David sounded battle stations on the ship, the rest of the Marine battle group received their call to action. They had b
een hiding in the med-evac ships’ overhead equipment lockers. They dropped down from the “locked” cabinets and marched out of the ships’ bay doors seeking targets. The spaceports’ guards had inspected these lockers on previous trips and made no attempt to inspect them this time. The Marines were quickly engaged by the guards. A Federation Marine in full battle and riot gear is a formidable adversary. Armed with both lasers and ballistic weapons and fully trained in their use, they can be depended upon to kill large numbers of enemy soldiers. They set out to demonstrate once again that one did not mess with a Federation Marine.
The MMARV’s started their march to the space port. Capable of a hundred kilometers an hour, their estimated drive time was fifteen minutes. The AARV’s took off from the beach where they had been parked and immediately drew fire from ground installations. Missile crews on the battleship tracked the fire and targeted the sources. Firing individual missiles, they went after the defensive installations while they focused on command and control centers.
The AARV’s destroyed several aircraft on the runway as they attempted to lift to respond to the threat. Within minutes, the runway was choked with wreckage that the MMARV’s would have to clear for the med-evac ships to take off.
Emboldened by the fire raging out of control and enveloping the gas plant, the slaves attacked and killed many of the guards. The dependent families, many of whom knew the dangers involved with an incident at the plant, headed for the spaceport. Within ten minutes of the plant supervisor grabbing Rachel by the collar, the entire population of the settlement except for those too far out in the farms to know what was going on, was headed for the space port. Within ten minutes of the start of hostilities, half of the guards were dead and virtually the entire population was on the move.
Rachel and her group of thirty headed for the ships with the Marines laying down protective fire as they ran. They took advantage of what cover they could find. The weapons they carried kept most enemies at bay, but some enemy fire found some targets. Three of the engineers, including the one who had been so happy about her air bottle idea, were killed in the flight. The fleeing survivors swooped up their bodies and carried them along. The Marines continually took fire, but their combat suits protected them. The hydraulic lifts in their suits allowed them to shoot over the heads of the masses fleeing in the direction of the spaceport as well as their companions whose escape they covered. Rachel’s group reached the flight line at the same time the first of the MMARV’s arrived.
Supported by information provided by sensors on the battleship, the Marines realized that holding the flight line and protecting the refugee ships would be all they could handle. They set up a defensive perimeter through which the fleeing slaves and civilian dependents of the guards and workers ran to the ships. In order to be able to fire on the guards without endangering the fleeing slaves, all the Marines engaged their hydraulic leg extenders so they could fire over the heads of the crowds without hitting them. The additional height made them identifiable targets, but their combat armor absorbed much of the fire thrown in their direction.
Firing from their turret mounted cannons, two of the MMARV’s destroyed aircraft the AARV’s had missed and using the blunt face of their armored front surfaces, began clearing the runway.
Once Rachel’s group reached the flight line, three of the MMARV’s formed a protective ring around the group and escorted them to the waiting ships. Rachel and the engineers boarded the ship carrying their dead and injured. The Marines in Rachel’s group joined their male colleagues on the flight line to protect the mass of humanity fleeing in their direction. Rachel’s group had done their share in eliminating the guards who obstructed their path. As Rachel had suspected, it was easy to know who was on which side by the direction of fire. Anyone shooting at them was an enemy. Anyone running with their head down away from the people shooting at them was a refugee.
As soon as the first med-evac ship was full, they closed the bay door and the ship took off. The runway was still obstructed by the MMARV’s clearing debris, so the pilot elected to take off from the taxiway. The P I ships had arrived by this time and focused their attention on the air breathing defending fighter interceptors that had gotten airborne before the AARV’s blocked the runway with debris. The AARV’s pounded the anti-aircraft and ground installations around the space port. Pillars of smoke rose from all around the space port.
By the time Rachel returned to the ship, the other three med-evac ships were airborne. The shuttles were on the ground loading evacuees. The strength of the assault from space had eliminated most of the ground defenses. Rachel realized, perhaps more than anyone, that what was determining the outcome of this battle was superior technology with greater firepower and not superior strategy, because her strategies had clearly failed.
The picket ships guarding the Schweitzer’s vulnerable propulsion system quickly saw action. Even though the ships attacking the Schweitzer were older and less capable ships than the pickets, their greater numbers guaranteed that some of them would reach their targets. The pickets coordinated their action against the local defenders with the lasers mounted on the big ship and fended off the first wave of attacks at the cost of two of their own. Individual enemy ships continued to throw themselves at the battleship and the two surviving pickets continued their part of the battle. As the space battle progressed, the pickets destroyed the enemy ships one at a time. Eventually the last two pickets were lost although they had repulsed all but the last few of the enemy ships and the few of those that remained were heavily damaged. The battleship’s laser batteries continued to take their toll on enemy ships and missiles. By the time Rachel returned to the bridge, the Schweitzer was left to its own defenses having lost all of its pickets. All of the planet’s space ships had been destroyed.
The med-evac ships unloaded and returned to the surface. One of the ships had taken some ground fire on its first run and had damage to the lift and control surfaces. It made four more trips before breaking up on re-entry on its way to pick up more evacuees. A second med-evac ship was hit with ground fire during take off and crashed with the loss of its crew and a hundred civilians. The other two med-evac ships and the two shuttles continued to fly until the last of the people who wanted to flee and could reach the ships had done so. Surprisingly, the slow moving shuttles were spared battle damage. None of the anti-aircraft fire had hit them.
The battle on the ground was as intense as the battle in space. Luther had watched a mother and three young children mowed down from a gun emplacement as they fled across the flight line and went berserk. Supported by a single MMARV, he advanced on the emplacement and overran it. Leading off with a series of grenades, he killed everyone inside. The MMARV followed him into the emplacement as he advanced, entering the tunnels behind the gun emplacement’s walls. Luther’s MMARV was one of three J T was running at the time. J T’s proficiency with the MMARV had come as a pleasant surprise. When Luther assaulted the emplacement, J T passed control of his other two units to people he had only trained within the last few hours. Man and remotely controlled machine advanced together into the labyrinth. The MMARV’s turret swung side to side with its lasers providing covering fire for Luther’s advance. J T was working hard. He knew that his only job was to keep this testosterone enhanced Marine alive long enough to get him back to the ship. With every step Luther took and every rotation of the MMARV’s treads carrying it deeper into the enemy stronghold the odds against their ever leaving this complex increased exponentially.
Luther and the MMARV took many rounds of ordinance against their shielding. Luther’s combat armor was designed for extreme combat, but not of the intensity of fire that Luther was absorbing. The MMARV sustained significant damage which J T could see through the device’s cameras. J T could also see that Luther was bleeding from wounds under the armor. MMARV’s are equipped with a fold down shelf on their after end where a wounded Marine could take refuge while the MMARV hauled them to safety. Luther made no attempt to use the MMA
RV as a rescue vehicle. His anger drove him forward even as he left a trail of blood on the floor.
Luther continued to weaken due to the loss of blood. He turned around to look at the MMARV which had followed him like a lost puppy. Except that lost puppies do not carry cannons with which to disintegrate enemy soldiers who stood in their way or blow holes in walls that happened to block their path. J T used the MMARV’s speaker to try to convince Luther to get on the MMARV and let it take him to the ship. Luther turned to the MMARV, gave the thumbs up sign and continued his lone assault. J T could see Luther getting weaker and continued to shout at him. For the first time in as long as anyone could remember, J T neither stuttered nor stammered. As Luther weakened, J T’s desperation to get him to retreat intensified.
Luther and the MMARV were deep underneath the port’s control tower when he succumbed to his wounds. With his every move being relayed by the MMARV’s camera, he sat down. Blood poured out of the tops of his boots. J T implored him to get on the MMARV’s back seat. Luther said a short prayer. J T had the MMARV approach close enough for him to reach it. If he hooked his arm over the MMARV’s gun barrel, J T could lift him to a standing position and spin the MMARV around for Luther to sit and be carried to safety. As much as J T hoped Luther would take his advice he knew that even if he did, he was bleeding so profusely that he would be dead before he reached the surface. Tears of anger and frustration flowed down J T’s face.
J T knew what Luther was planning next long before anyone else in the MMARV control suite did. He screamed for Luther to not do what he was about to do. Luther keyed the MMARV’s over ride self destruct code into the control pad. The resulting explosion destroyed the control tower above him sending it crumbling to the ground as it toppled and landed on the buildings that housed most of the spaceport’s command structure. J T screamed until a medic shoved a syringe in his arm sedating him.
Lionel was guarding a gap in the wall through which slaves were racing toward the waiting ships. A shoulder fired grenade landed in the middle of the crowd. He threw himself on top of the grenade so that his combat armor would take the bulk of the force. The grenade’s explosion lifted his body a meter off the ground, but he absorbed enough of the shock that none of the people around him were injured. Barely alive, the fleeing slaves picked up his now limp body and carried it to the ship.
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