by M. D. Cooper
An explosive round hit the side of the building that Alison was crouched beside, pulling her back into the present. She spun to see a group of four Niets approaching on her left.
Alison moved behind a stack of wheels while she sent the new orders to Corporal Fred. Once that distraction was out of the way, she checked her drone feeds to see that the four approaching Niets had split up to move around either side of her cover.
That’s the problem with these idiots, she thought. They never think about how high SMIs can jump.
Alison extended her double-jointed knees and crouched down. She drew a deep breath, smelling a trace of the acrid fumes filling the air around the burning spaceport, and raced forward, planting one three-clawed foot on a wheel, then another on a tire.
She kicked on her booster jets, and sailed twenty meters into the air, high over the heads of her would-be ambushers.
Her GNR barked twice from her left arm, while the new PR-109 she clutched in her right hand fired a dozen high explosive rounds at the enemy with lethal precision.
The Nietzscheans were all dead by the time she hit the ground.
The moment her feet met the tarmac, the air was filled with the bellow of an explosion, and she knew that Jenisa’s plan had worked in the mech’s favor.
Alison didn’t ask what had caused Fred’s exclamation, and instead pulled his feeds to see a trio of enemy Terminator drones flying overhead, spraying HE rounds at the mechs.
Alison tracked one of the drones on the squad’s feeds and took aim where she expected it to appear around the hull of a heavy freighter, sitting on a cradle half a kilometer away.
The drone didn’t emerge around the forward end of the freighter’s hull when she expected, and Alison scanned the skies, looking for the thing. Then she caught sight of the Terminator as it pulled around a building on her right.
Whipping her GNR around, Alison fired a trio of projectile rounds at the drone, and one clipped it in the wing just as the Nietzschean robot fired a pair of ASM missiles at her.
Alison sprayed rounds from her PR-109 at the missiles, taking one out only seconds after it launched.
Her rounds missed the second one, and she felt a moment of terror as she struggled to track the wildly veering ASM before it reached her.
She was about to fire, when the incoming weapon exploded, and Alison looked up to see a Skyscream shriek past.
It lay across a hundred meters of runway that was used by surface-to-surface aircraft and any shuttles that came down on glide paths.
It was also completely devoid of cover.
Alison put her stealth systems through a pre-use cooling cycle, bleeding off as much heat as possible in an effort to bring the system back to maximum efficiency. The process flushed a chill through her, and she gave a shiver while reloading her PR-109, and then checked the auto-feeder on her GNR.
OK, ISF tech, don’t fail me now.
With a slow, loping run, Alison took off across the wide-open space, praying that the stealth tech—which read as only eighty percent effective at present—and the battle raging around the spaceport would be enough to keep her from being spotted.
A Nietzschean Terminator drone swept past just a few meters above her head, with two Skyscreams chasing after—though the mech craft paused in their assault so as not to hit Alison with a stray shot.
“Shit,” she whispered aloud in the confines of her helmet, hoping that no enemy targeting NSAI would pick up on the pause in the Skyscreams’ attack.
She kept moving, ready for attacks that may come from the squat, three-story administrative building ahead of her, but nothing seemed to be aimed her way, and she reached the relative safety of its walls without incident.
Alison looked over her fireteams’ placements on the combat net. They were all engaged with Nietzscheans; there was no way any of them could make it in time to back her up.
For a moment, she marveled at the estimation of the Niets’ numbers. The combat net had a tally of seven thousand five hundred and twenty-two, a number that was climbing steadily as more and more of the enemy arrived at the spaceport from elsewhere on the planet.
All to battle eighty mechs. Well, it’s almost a fair fight, but not quite.
Alison snorted.
Lieutenant Fuller flashed an acknowledgement, and Alison considered her best options for the fastest breach.
The schematics of the building—which they’d lifted from an off-planet database a week before—showed the main control room for the spaceport as being in an elevated hub in the center of the building.
Well, I can fight my way through the corridors, or I can just go up and over…
Alison slid her PR-109 onto its mounting hook, gauged the distance to the top of the building, crouched, and leapt twenty meters into the air, landing on the balustrade.
It bent under her weight, and she nearly lost her balance before she leant forward and rolled onto the roof in a mostly graceful move.
The surface was coated in a black, tar-like substance that had become tacky in the day’s heat, and Alison came up with a black strip running down her side, and another on her back.
She hoped no one was watching the roof, when a pair of turrets rose up a dozen meters away, and opened up with armor-piercing rounds.
* * * * *
“I still don’t have any updated targeting data,” Chief Ona said, twisting in her seat to meet Captain Heather’s gaze.
“Do the currently selected targets reflect your best estimations?” Heather asked as she rose from the command chair and stalked to the holotank, which currently showed a top-down view of Memphis.
“Yes, ma’am. Those twenty locations are where I think their hidden AA and surface-to-surface guns are…based on the scans we’ve run, which are limited due—”
“I understand why we can’t get a good reading on the city,” Heather said, cutting the chief off. “They’ve improved their counterscan tech a lot since the war. A lot a lot.”
“I’ve got the Lance’s fire control set up to hit the suspected locations. If we get targets that are too far off, it’ll take a minute to reorient,” Ona replied.
“Ferris is coming in ho
t,” Heather noted, gesturing at the secondary tank that showed the Marauder destroyer’s position as it dropped toward the planet. “He won’t get a second run at this in time to help, so if we don’t have updated data from Fuller’s ‘toon by the time the ‘muths hit, we fire at the targets you’ve extrapolated.”
“Aye, ma’am,” Ona replied with a nod.
Heather shook her head, the ghost of a smile tugging at her lips. Sometimes the reality she was now living was almost too much to swallow. She was standing on the bridge of what was once a Nietzschean dreadnought, giving orders to squishie naval personnel who were perfectly cordial and deferential to her.
Feels good, she thought while pacing to the other holotank, and then back to the one at the center of the bridge.
* * * * *
Alison fired a trio of rounds at one turret with her GNR, while lobbing a thermite burn-stick at the other. Her aim was true, and she raced across the rooftop, watching with her three-sixty vision as the thermite burned away half of one turret. The other continued to track her, spraying rounds in her wake and finally caught up to her, rounds slamming into her armor and the rooftop around her. One caught the back of her right knee, and the joint jammed.
Motherfucker! Alison thought, twisting midrun to fire her GNR’s electron beam at the defense system.
It was a hair too close for such a shot, but Alison wasn’t ready to see how much more of a pounding her armor could take.
The bolt of lightning lanced out and burned away the top of the turret; it must have hit a magazine, because the automated weapon exploded, flinging shrapnel all around her. She stumbled as a chunk of metal hit her, then she resumed her limping run toward the bulge that covered the CIC’s main room.
As luck would have it, there were angled windows along the perimeter of the bulge.
Probably providing light and visual corroboration of incoming flight paths.
“Handy for me,” Alison whispered as she swapped her GNR back to depleted uranium rounds, and fired one rod and then another at either side of a window’s frame.
The reinforced glass held, but she prayed her rounds had bent the frame enough.
Five seconds later, she crashed into the window, and the entire assembly tore free and fell into the spaceport’s central command room.
Screams sounded around her, and Alison took rapid stock of her situation as she rolled to her feet: there were seven people in the room, two were armored soldiers, and the other five were only wearing light combat gear. One bore a colonel’s insignia, two were captains, and the couple were chiefs.
Alison wasted no time, firing half a clip of projectile rounds at one of the soldiers, the shots tearing a gaping hole in his right hip and up into his abdomen, while she lobbed a pair of burn-sticks at the other, turning the woman into a shrieking effigy.
Localized fire suppression systems kicked on and put out the burning soldier, filling the room with a white haze. Alison used the distraction to draw her PR-109, and fired three rounds, one into the head of each of the officers.
Eleven seconds after she’d smashed her way into the room, Alison limped over to the pair of chiefs, a gun leveled at each.
“I want the location of every battery in Memphis in twenty seconds, or I start tearing your limbs off.”
* * * * *
“I’ve got joy!” Chief Ona cried out, half leaping out of her seat as she thrust a fist in the air.
“Count?” Heather demanded as the chief began updating the targeting data.
“Four more than I’d estimated; I had a third of their placements off. Give me thirty seconds to get all the rail launchers realigned.”
“You got it.” Heather nodded in relief, and watched Ferris’s destroyer begin its braking burn on the other holotank.
THE DROP
STELLAR DATE: 10.12.8949 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Burger Street, Memphis, Kansas
REGION: Blue Ridge System, Old Genevia, Nietzschean Empire
Chase closed the connection with Smalls, and watched the skies, a smile gracing his lips as he saw the streaking light from the white-hot tungsten rounds appear in the sky.
No sooner had he spotted them than the rail-fired rods slammed into the ground, fire and fountains of debris rising into the air all around the city, smoke and ash following after.
Chase watched the remaining bright light streaking through the sky, the glow around the Undaunted’s shields now outshining the local star—called ‘Blue Sky’ by the locals—as the destroyer dipped down into the planet’s ionosphere.
The Marauders had never dropped a ship with stasis shields into atmosphere before, but the ISF had told them this would happen if they did. The stasis shields were annihilating most of the atoms they came into contact with—not to mention the fire striking the ship from the Nietzschean AA emplacements.
The ship only carried two B’muths, and it was on Ferris to make sure they dropped intact; that meant he’d come in low and brake hard at the last minute. Chase gauged the Undaunted’s angle of descent and was surprised to see that the ship would come to within only a few hundred meters of the ground.
Whole city is gonna need to scrub down from this fallout.
Not only that, but, though the sound from the ship’s passage was still far behind the light heralding its arrival, Chase knew when it reached them, it would probably blow out half the windows in Memphis.
As Chase watched, the Undaunted shifted to the south and rotated. The destroyer fired its engines at what had to be a fifty-g burn, splashing flames and plasma across what Chase knew to be an uninhabited stretch of the planet’s surface.
Chase saw the cruiser’s engines cut out, and then a strange visual distortion swept across the area the craft’s engine wash had burned. Then the Undaunted flashed overhead, and two objects dropped from its rear bay.
At that exact moment, the sound of the starship’s descent into the atmosphere finally reached their position, and Chase felt the ground shudder as wave after wave of thunder crashed over them.
Boosters on the undersides of the B’muths fired, slewing the squat, four-legged walkers erratically as enemy smallbore anti-air fire streaked through the sky all around them. Then the twelve-meter-tall walker destined for Chase’s side of First Platoon’s formation slammed into the surface three hundred meters further up Burger Street.
“Clever bugger,” Crunch mutter
ed. “See that? He used the grav ramscoop to make a pressure wave that put out the fires from his engines.”
“Ferris is one of a kind,” Chase agreed with a nod as he looked across the street to see Mitch emerge from the closest storefront.
Crunch snorted.
Lauren chuckled.
Chase was only half listening as he checked in with the other squads, ensuring that the second B’muth had dropped safely.