Silesians still courted each other by chasing each other and singing various mating or love songs to one another. Among them, throatbags remained a sign of status and virility.
As a race, Silesians also had a rep for discriminating against other sentient races, and being very abrasive and difficult to deal with. They delighted even in insulting each other at great length, let alone other sentients.
But after suffering hard from the Ejjai invasion on several of their ancient homeworlds, even the normally abusive Silesians had met their match and become desperate, and begged and pleaded for any assistance and deliverance from any quarter, against such a determined and vicious enemy who did not care anything about them, and saw them only as yet another source of meat.
Then they got the word. The mission was on.
That night, Kokey Miles had a major stealth suit malfunction an hour after sunset. A fairly rare incident with their stealth tek, but it did occasionally happen. Things broke down.
Leftenant Wilder sent her back to one of the Company 36 dropships to effect repairs, before her suit lit them all up for the enemy to locate.
But when she arrived at the camouflaged dropship, she noticed a stray unit of several dozen Ejjai skirmishers just happening by that way on their gravwings. Now they were getting into position and preparing to attack the transport and its crew of eight.
Non-working cloaker be damned, Kokey took cover and attempted to get closer, warn the transport, and reach Company Command and HQ.
As it happened, coms in that localized area near the drop zone were being widely jammed by the enemy. She couldn’t even warn the Marines on that transport without being spotted and attacked herself.
One against a hundred or so Ejjai were not very good odds, but Kokey immediately prepared to execute a high velocity, ring-sweep strafing attack via gravwing, in order to alert everyone that something was up.
First she had her fixer reconfigure most of her gear into an E-88 particle beam mini-gun.
Then she increased her velocity and swooped in without hesitating, not only gunning down the enemy skirmishers in droves, but lighting them up and painting them as available targets on the combat grid.
She kept up her sweeping arcs of intense fire, her shields full front, and began to take small arms fire in return.
Kokey killed and wounded several Ejjai, but more importantly, she exposed almost a full company of them on the combat grid in a big way, and took down many of their shields.
Pop-up turrets on the transport responded with supporting fire behind unit shielding. Several Marines guarding the dropship down below and from within were alerted to the enemy presence and moved to engage them as well.
Finally, the dropship itself lifted off and decided to change locations, since that one was now exposed and hot.
Things got dicey when another nearby enemy unit swooped in to assist the first, which by then was being cut to pieces from three different attack vectors.
The heavy Marine transport drew most of the fire, absorbing and blocking it with its shields. They could take it. And that allowed the defenders, like Kokey, to keep cutting the invaders down.
Then a pod of Ejjai gravtanks and two gunships also swept in, and a running fight ensued. The dropship took a major hit from one of the gunships.
In the hail of fire that was exchanged, Kokey’s shields and gravwing went down under intense fire, but her armor saved her.
She dropped down hard onto the roof of a high building, more or less stranded there.
To make things worse, another large contingent of Ejjai marched in from below on the streets of the small town, attracted by the fighting. By now, they were all 0.7 klicks from the original DZ.
The dropship blasted off, leaving the enemy behind.
But that also left Kokey behind.
Kokey found herself surrounded on top of that building. She fired her mini-gun, holding them off as best she could from above. She had her fixer convert more of her tek into an autogun, and kept up a steady rate of fire while she also hurled and directed smart grenades, microbombs, and float-seeker smartmines at targets.
Still the Ejjai kept coming.
Once she was out of explosives and ammo for her primary weapon, Kokey drew her backup blaster pistols and dueled with the enemy as they advanced.
At the last instant, a rear guard Marine element appeared directly behind the Ejjai and cut them down out of the sky and below down on the street.
Shetanna popped in back-to-back with Kokey, making the Marine jump. The MCL threw up a unit level shield pod around them both, right as about two dozen foes swarmed over the top of that roof.
Together, they took the rest of the attackers down, although Kokey only managed to shoot three more.
Shetanna buzzed around and hewed through the others with her glowing red sword blades in less than a flashing second.
“Hey, Miles,” Naero told her, clapping her on the back. “We’d better get that lousy suit of yours fixed. What’s wrong? I had eyes on you as I was circling in, staying out of your firing profiles. You were doing great. Although you did start to look a bit serious and concerned there toward the end.”
Kokey breathed a very visible sigh of relief. “Thanks for the assist, sir. For a few secs, I thought they had me.”
“Hey, like I said, you did great, Miles. Very adaptive. I came along and decided to lend a hand. I knew you had the situation under control. You didn’t mind a little help mopping up, right?”
“If you say so, sir. Not at all.”
“Hey, and good news. You’re not a rook anymore. Again, welcome aboard, Marine.”
Miles rolled her eyes, still catching her breath. “Ooh-rah, sir.”
Shetanna grinned back at her and clapped her on the shoulders once more. “That’s the spirit, Marine.”
Kemela Anthony tripped a shielding negation mine later that night, right before an attack started, exposing half of one entire platoon.
The Marines quickly overwhelmed the enemy position in any case. Anthony fought well.
Shetanna came by and told her not to worry too much. Such mines were everywhere and tricky for anyone to avoid. Everyone triggered one at some point during their various actions. It was a gaffe everyone made, eventually, even Shetanna herself.
Tucker James got jumped by several Ejjai who snuck in, concealing themselves under heaps of dead Ejjai prepared for fusion burn disposal.
He had his shields up. The slashers knocked him around at first with various grenades, and finally took down his shields. Then seven of them swarmed on him as he took them on and fired. The enemy went at him close up with various blades and energy blades.
Bad move on their part.
Most Spacers were experts with blades, and elite Marines received special blade-fighting training.
James drew two Spacer Marine battle blades, one of them energized, and proceeded to carve up six of the slashers as if they were big hams.
The seventh Ejjai was about to stab him from behind when a blazing red katana sliced away the alpha’s blade hand first, and then her head.
James whirled an instant too late and instinctively impaled the headless torso with both of his blades. Then he kicked it away.
“Too late, James,” Shetanna told him. “Line them up or arc them. If you let them surround you, and you’re not fast enough, one of those bitches is going to gut you wide open. And, from now on, let’s all scan those gut piles for any life signs before you go to burn them, as well.”
James shook his head. “Sounds good, sir. So, I guess everyone’s going to have a laugh tonight at the rook’s expense, eh?”
“Well, only if you’re stupid enough to tell them. I’m not going to say a damn thing. I’ll just remind everyone to look out. The Ejjai infiltration teams have just started trying to use this trick. Everyone needs to be wary of it.”
“I wasn’t sent here to burn any of them. I was just sent to dump off a deposit.”
“Doesn’t matter, Marine.
Either way, from now on, we guard these dumps with fixers, if nothing else, and we send a full fireteam along with the burn teams to dispose of the trash–not just one or two. I’ll notify HQ and Command, and these disposal sites will be kept under better security from now on to defeat infiltrators. See, James? You almost dying here might just save many other lives, by alerting us to a new problem to deal with.”
“Just doing my job, sir. And…thanks for having my back.” Tucker offered her his hand. Naero took it, up to the elbow.
“You’re welcome. Let’s get back to work, Marine.”
When they returned to 36 at the dropship after the fighting was over, they learned that they had already lost someone else that night.
Perice Logan, crushed to death during an op when a building suddenly toppled over on her squad. She went down warning others and shoving them out of the way ahead of her. She never made it.
A demo team had to recover her crushed body from the rubble. 36 and the new Marines brought Logan in and showed them what was done.
On top of all that, it was Food Night, and now with their newest loss, they needed one more rep.
6
Haitha-1 was a jungle/swamp world of the Silesians as well, who, on that planet, chose to build their homes in gigantic, stone oak trees that naturally petrified from within as they slowly died, due to the minerals and crystal residue in the swampy, underground water.
There were many of these small tree cities, with a system population of only 1.3 billion.
As they did on many such worlds, the Ejjai invaders broke off into smaller, hunter-killer units and teams. This made them harder to track down and eliminate, with them being so scattered across the planet’s surface. And they could engage many more targets at once, better matching the equally scattered population.
In one region in particular, a small enemy sniper team was causing havoc, panic, and death over a wide area, wherever the enemy chose to strike at random. And they kept moving and popping up in the vicinity, only to cause more.
Shetanna and 36 assumed that this was the work of an elite Ejjai sniper unit. They had encountered standard op enemy sniper units similar to this one on several different occasions on other worlds they had served on.
The sniper team would show up, find the highest vantage point in a local area, and then kill as many civilians or military personnel as they could. Then, by the time any troops or competent authorities did show up to combat them, the enemy sniper unit had already packed up, melted away, and was long gone.
These were radical new tactics for the Ejjai, meant to cause Chaos and terror, and not simply bloat their meatships.
They clearly chose a new area, at random, and repeated the bloody process.
From the signs of things–initially, at least–the enemy snipers and their small team also apparently had advance scanning and jamming tek that defeated all normal attempts to pinpoint their locations and firing positions.
That became a problem for the Marines and their teks as well.
These ruthless enemy snipers struck at several random points planetwide, and had already killed thousands within a few days, terrorizing an entire region with small groups of such forces. They obviously had at least one starship, most likely a small insertion ship, with highly advanced stealth tek.
Then something even worse happened the very next day.
A hundred sniper teams just like the first one struck the same region all at once. Civilians, lander military, and even Spacer Marines fell victim to the enemy sniper onslaught.
Bravo Command and 36 organized into rapid-response, anti-sniper teams.
Shetanna formed up with Squad 4, an attached tek unit, and three superb counter-sniper teams, composed of Marine snipers and their spotters.
Sergeant Maria Bucci led Squad 4 with Terrence Dekker, Sarah Maeris, and Pete Cooper in Fireteam 1. Corporal Veronica Nelson led Fireteam 2, with Ken Ryan, Tavis Marshall, and Zina Gordon. Fireteam 3 was comprised of Corporal Braeden Kowalski, Karla Cherokee, Jonny Fox, and Dillon Kothari.
They were thirty klicks away when the call came in about an enemy sniper starting to kill among the locals.
Shetanna and her team swept in fast.
For good measure, Shetanna transported in ahead of them cloaked, and spread out a rapidly expanding cloudnet of specially modified detection fixers.
Let’s locate this sniper and take her down, Om. She’s not going to show up on any normal scans.
Got it, N. I have local reports of six casualties. Four civilians, one local police, and one medical response person. Nope…make that seven KIA. The sniper just fired again and took down another first responder.
Any kind of trace-back trajectory, Om?
They were meters away from where the action was going down, and still no one, including Naero herself, had heard any conventional shots.
Nothing yet. Fixers almost in place. Net up and running.
Any anomalies or background scatter feedback or blips?
None. Nada. Nacha.
Naero sighed. Then I think I know what this is, Om. We faced something like this back in the Annexation War, remember?
Phaze rifles?
Exactly, Om. It was originally Triaxian Hevangian tek, but I’m guessing our new enemies have improved upon it and taken it to the next level. Adjust the fixernet; watch for subtle energy fluctuations in the near psyonic ranges, similar to the spectrum flux frequencies and vibronic patterns of Astral energies. Have the fixernet track, triangulate, and follow any spikes or even blips.
Adjusting and tracking along those bands that you have specified and anything close. Uh-oh. You’re not going to like this.
What, Om?
Four more KIA–a mother and three kids. They were caught in the open, running down a street looking for cover.
Om, if we don’t find this sharpshooting invader bitch and neutralize her and her team, there’s going to be a lot more death. Find her so that we can ghost her hairy ass and put an end to this slaughter.
N, we have reports of over a hundred such enemy units, doing the same thing on this continent alone.
We crack one of these teams, scan their gear, and send it to Intel, and then we’ll figure out how to nail all of these bitches.
There’s a flood of data. I think they’re trying to confuse our efforts by overwhelming the nets with bursts of useless chatter junk info. I’ll shunt it to the tek unit to sort it out.
The tek team called her back seconds later over their link, breaking up a bit from the enemy jamming.
“Talk to me, guys.”
“We’ve computed various anomalies from the fixernet, and gotten rid of the intentional data garbage dumps obscuring the real info.”
“Do you have a lock?” she nearly demanded.
“Not yet, but we’re close. We can tell you where the sniper last fired from.”
“Boys, what good does that do us?”
“Sir, they move thirty meters left and then back thirty meters right, popping targets of opportunity from that position in any direction, at random.”
“Then what? That can’t be all of it,” Naero said.
“Hmm, the full analysis says that they move again within five to ten minutes at most, and they set up again within one minute and start shooting again.”
“That’s tight, guys. Thanks a lot,” Naero told them. “These sniper teams are elite and extremely well-trained. They excel at this.”
“Sir, we still can’t locate the next exact location of the shooter, but we can pinpoint several possibilities. May we suggest having auto or miniguns ready to shred all of those areas at the same time? We might get lucky with a scattershot approach?”
“Negative. One sign of something like that and they’ll just fade away and set up shop somewhere else, where we aren’t.”
“What if we mass stun the blanket area and sort it all-out from there, sir?”
“No good either, guys. Stunfields won’t affect phazed troops. We know at least that much. Exp
losions or indirect fire won’t, either. Their rounds only un-phaze an instant before they hit their targets. We can only detect them for sure when they pause to recharge.”
“Sir, didn’t phaze armor originally kill the users in some horrible fashion?”
“It did. Phaze-sickness. But we think the enemy has improved upon that tek by now, although it sucks up lots of juice to function. They will still be forced to recharge at some point, or swap out energy paks or some such.”
“Sir, we’ve got just such an apparent recharge spike.”
“Get it up on the Combat Grid locator.”
“Wait a sec–no good, sir. We’ve got five more bursts of charging echoes just like it, all within thirty klicks. Probably just echoes.”
Shetanna kept up the feeds live to Squad-4 and the others, now positioned around her, ready to go in. Then she spotted the pattern and what it meant.
N, those aren’t echoes or feedback scatter and chatter.
I know, Om.
“People, listen up,” Naero said. “Each one of those pockets of blips is coming from a six-person sniper team operating in this area, each of them independent. One or two spotters, two shooters, and the other pair are mostly guards or lookouts. That’s how they’re making this work.”
One of the attached snipers called in. “That’s how they make all of this work so well. The shooters kill as much as they want. Then they vanish with their team before the area gets too hot, and they go do the same thing somewhere else. I bet they already have the next location selected before they even move.”
Word reached them. An enemy sniper had just killed Spacer Marine Macon Abraham with a clean head shot.
“Now the slashers are killing us. Suggestions?” Sergeant Bucci asked. “How do we break them down and take them out?”
“Let me try something,” Corporal Nelson suggested. “Maybe our MCL can help. I happen to be a telepath myself, a very strong one.”
“Nelson,” Naero said, “I’m a Mystic. I’ve already tried to detect their minds. But you can’t detect a mind that is phazed or even cloaked, for that matter.”
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