This time, Bravo tried something new. The Marine units went in first and fully engaged the enemy. Then the MCLs were sent in last. They raced in cloaked and followed the directions of the field commanders as to where they should strike the enemy next. This way, the combat grid could process what had already been taken out in the initial assaults, and then send their favorite Mystic troublemakers in to exploit the biggest gaps and new weaknesses.
In one particular area, the invaders were using massed artillery batteries up close against the fighting, right inside the domes and smelting facilities. The sheer magnitude of firepower from these batteries was holding the Marines off, and wreaking destruction upon the locals.
Neither Bravo nor the Navy could go in and bomb them out, not without killing tens of thousands of civies in the process.
Then the enemy began rallying around that position, killing more locals as rapidly and efficiently as they could.
While those big guns kept blazing away in all directions at anything the Alliance tried to get going.
Shetanna ghosted her way in undetected, in an attempt to break the stalemate, crack the enemy positions open, and help decimate the foe.
Even as she attacked them, the enemy batteries kept up an intense barrage all about them.
A dozen Marine meks tried to drop in on the enemy. Ten of the twelve got slapped around hard and were driven back, forced to retreat behind the lines. Four Marines had to bail out and shield themselves as their damaged meks cooked off.
Messengers carried the wounded back to the dropships and field hospitals.
Captain Samson Konrad directed her through the enemy lines and positions over a secured link, in an effort to track down the battery fire control forces themselves. Yet, by then, there were thousands of Ejjai in that area, and more filling in as the slashers beefed up their positions.
Naero checked in on her link. “Sam, I could lop heads all day here and wear myself out quick, without making a dent by myself. I can’t do this alone. We gotta try something else.”
“You call it, N. Find a way to bust them up.”
It was the massed big guns themselves that were the problem for the time being, not the troops operating and protecting them. The Ejjai could be dealt with later.
Time to take out those cannons directly.
The combat grid gave her priority targeting on 443 major batteries and gun emplacements.
Haisha, a regular walk in the goddam park for any creative MCL.
But she didn’t have to take every single one of those big guns down all at once.
Shetanna went on a speed attack, and more or less ignored the invader troops, for the time being.
She extended the arcing, sizzling blades of her Chaos katanas before her, smiling her customary half-smile in battle, and buzzed among those big guns, not unlike an angry insect.
She also hurled scarlet lightning, explosive pods of unstable Cosmic energy, and ribbons of force that sliced and blasted their way through that forest of big, glowing barrels, several at a time. She lopped artillery barrels in half even as they attempted to keep firing.
Shetanna sent pods of explosive Chaos energy into the battery power cores and down the barrels and bores themselves.
The invaders filled the sky with every type of fire they could unleash, but usually, by the time they did so, Shetanna was already past those positions, and the secondary explosions were just starting to chain-react and take their toll.
Despite the fact that she remained cloaked as much as possible, the invaders simply wanted to fill the air with as much fire as possible, in the hopes of hitting her or anything else that might be up there.
The volume of fire and explosions behind her eventually caught up, and battered her around like a ball. Shetanna endured and kept at her objectives.
By the time she completed the arc of one pass, she had disabled or destroyed nearly one quarter of the massed artillery pieces, and that area was reduced to being a scorched wasteland. Explosions were still cooking off.
Om cut in at the same time that her sense of warning shot up off the charts.
N, get out of there!
Om…what–
No time. The enemy is filling the sky above them with airbursts.
At this range, the airbursts would inflict damage on the invaders as well, but they didn’t give a damn about that. All they wanted was to take her out and halt her rampage.
The enemy used all of their remaining batteries, tanks, gunships, and ground forces to fill the sky overhead with showers of exploding ordnance, just as Om warned her.
She used her Cosmic energies to transport away from certain death at the last second, popping way over to the opposite end of the enemy’s positions.
That was the key. Do what they least expected her to do.
They might expect for her to simply run for it. Shetanna stayed on the attack.
Speed, speed, speed. The enemy could only focus such concentrated airburst attacks in one small area. She simply had to keep moving and striking fast and hard in order to remain ahead of them.
Keep wearing them down.
But she was rapidly wearing herself down at the same time. Shetanna couldn’t keep up such a pace forever.
The enemy did their best to lock in on her and intercept her with focused airbursts of firepower and explosives. If nothing else, they could track her by the damage she left behind.
Shetanna continued to just barely slip away, and then show up somewhere else and attack from there.
By the time she had reduced almost half of those massed big guns, she knew that she couldn’t do much more.
Her warning sense shot up again. What now, Om?
Get the hell out of that entire area, N. The enemy have just uncloaked not one, but five atomic cosmicide devices. They are arming and preparing to detonate them!
Dammit, where are they, Om? Get our fixers on them. Paint them on the grid. Those atomics will take out the entire gigacity and half of Bravo and the Alliance forces with them!
That’s probably their idea, N. Fixers en-route. I calculate that there’s enough time to neutralize three of the five devices.
Naero got on the link with Captain Konrad. “Samson, come in, we’ve got a real problem here. I need help. Send in 36 with everything they’ve got. We must seize those devices before the enemy can detonate them!”
“I see them, N. 36 on the way. They should be right on top of you in seconds. We see the two remaining atomics that need to be taken out.”
“Copy that. I’m going in.”
Shetanna focused on cutting down the enemy teks and troops trying to activate the devices.
Two of the goddam things went live and armed. She was too late to avoid that part. Detonation was set for a few minutes away. The enemy was going to attempt to pull back.
Now invader troops swarmed on Shetanna, trying to take back the devices to activate the other three.
36 dropped in right on top of them at that moment.
Even in the midst of the intense firefight that erupted, picked teams of the Marines and teks ignored their own peril and attached gravlifts on the two live devices.
Fixers and I are jamming enemy attempts to set the devices off remotely, N.
Great work, Om. We still have to get these two out of here. We don’t have time.
Naero encircled the floating devices in globes of Chaos energy and rocketed up into the sky, hauling them away from the battle zone.
Transport away from them, N.
Not yet, Om. I can’t.
N, get us out of here!
Not…high enough…yet. Naero shrieked in agony. She was tearing herself apart to get the devices safely away.
Finally they reached fourteen kilometers up and still rising when the atomic cosmicide devices were seconds away from going off.
Om transported them back to the surface at the last instant.
Naero slammed into the ground, nearly unconscious, as the bright atomic airburst blinded the sky all above the gig
acity, doing little damage.
It took Naero nearly two standard days to regenerate after that. Which brought them to another Secondday, and that meant Gear Night.
She and her mates spent the evening going over their rigs and various weapons, debating the latest mods and adaptations sent down by Spacer Intel’s R&D weapons, armor, and shielding divisions.
There were new power cells that lasted hours longer. There was a hot new float-seeker smartmine with a radical new mini-AI command splinter.
Naero and Om were even amazed by them. “Haisha,” Naero commented. “Talk about unleash and forget. These damn things could almost be turned loose to fight on their own.”
Everyone present had the same epiphany all at once, and then spoke all together.
“Haisha, we can launch clouds of them from the ground attack ships.”
“From drop pods on our suits!”
“From the fixer clouds!
“How hard would it be to cloak them?”
“Wait, what if the slashers figure out a way to turn them, and send them back at us? Remember what they did on that botworld.”
Everyone got on the horn with Intel, shunting their various suggestions and ideas on how to best deploy the new smartmine devices.
After things calmed down and winded down later, Naero passed by Whip Konrad, wringing his red hands and going into his routine once more before the next mission.
“A dream. It was just a dream. But they say sometimes dreams come true. I dreamed the slashers knifed me in the back. That’s how they’re going to kill me. Knives in the back. I’ll never see them coming.”
“Konrad, you’re an idiot. You gotta stop all of this shit.”
Whip just shook his head and kept muttering to himself. “Knives in the dark. A knife in the back…”
Naero rolled her eyes and kept walking. If that goon wanted to waste his time being all crazy and sad sack like that. It was his own stupid choice.
A bunch of Marines didn’t get enough of Chat Night on Fifthday, so they were bunched up in the vid room, sharing vids with each other, mostly of their kids or some trip they took on leave with a spouse or lover.
Luke Barrett just got himself hitched, to an extremely pretty girl named Thalia Kim, a fresh faced Navy ensign. Everyone was jealous and gave him crap about the honeymoon pics and vids–and how few there actually were.
Branton Taylor had sent himself as a holo to his wife Raiina Lii, and their little one-year-old boy Flynn. There was laughter and tears on both sides.
Maurice James broke down, mourning the fact that his three-year-old daughter Camilla, with his logistics wife Sarah Steiner, barely knew what he looked like. And his daughter had taken to calling one of her uncles ‘daddy.’ Everyone present tried to comfort Maury, and tell him it would be all right. In a handful of months, the war would end, and he would be back with them all.
Trevor Lakota laughed with his children as a holo, attempting to play and sing with them. Lakota did not normally laugh that much, and was very quiet and stoic. But laugh he did with his children. His wife Jenna was also of Clan Lakota, an engineer on a naval warship. Their children, Ronald, at two-and-a-half, and Elizabeth at age one were adorable, among the cutest infants Naero and many others had ever seen. It was clear how proud Trevor was of his family.
Then the vids ended, and he stopped smiling. His war face snapped back up. They were, in truth, still at war.
Trevor Lakota left his friends without a word to be alone with his private thoughts and feelings. All of the Marines had their own ways of dealing with their personal and private issues.
Naero left and heard deep sobbing coming from another area. Chime Fox, Bessa Jackson, and a bunch of the 36 gungirls were all huddled around Neesha Flynn. Flynn’s Marine lover, Duncan Cherokee, had just been reported KIA. He died bravely during their latest action but his body had not been found and recovered until much later by the locals.
Duncan was dead an gone. Other Marines would give him a Spacer burial in the nearest star.
Neesha would never see him again, and she took the news very hard.
Each day during wartime brought so much joy and sorrow mixed together.
18
Delker-7 was the world where the shit finally hit the screws, in a temperate zone, during yet another joyous slugfest with superior invader numbers.
When the enemy attacked across multiple Marine positions, even threatening command and control, it was clear exactly what had occurred.
“All units. Our coms and command and control systems have all been hacked and compromised,” HQ reported. “We don’t know how they’ve done it, but the enemy has cracked our COMSYS and decoded all of our coms and can read our entire combat grid. For the near future we will be going blind and dark. So, all units be advised and act accordingly.”
“Switch and dump all randomized, rotation shifting encryption algorithms and code batch sets,” Naero suggested.
“That’s a no go,” HQ said. “We say again. They’ve somehow managed to crack our entire system, and all of its backups, ghosts, and shadows for the current SYSNET. They now own it, and we don’t. There’s no other way to put it. We must go dark. All units on their own for a bit until we adjust, recover, and respond. Don’t trust the coms and stay off them. All units will operate independently. Follow your commanders and your direct chains.”
The combat grid that they had all come to rely on suddenly winked out and went completely dark. HQ and Command were intentionally jamming everything and shutting it all down until they had a solution.
Naero spoke with Om. How could such a thing happen, Om?
I can’t say, N. I think we’re looking at more evidence of highly advanced alien assistance here. Once again, the Ejjai clones are just lackeys, shock troops, cannon fodder–they do not even have the aptitude for this level of sophistication. Nor do they have anything close to the tek that would be needed to crack our system open like this–like so many eggs. And the enemy has managed to do so in less than a month. Scary, as you would say.
Yeah, it sure stinks, Om. This has alien overlords written all over it.
Bravo kept fighting and went where the fighting was hottest–directed by observation and instinct. They took down gravtanks and gunships. They fought the invaders day and night in the city streets and airways of the domes of another Corps gigacity where sometimes, the isolated locals still fired upon them just as readily as they did the Ejjai.
To the terrified minds of the landers, Spacers might be just as bad and bloodthirsty as the other invaders.
Yet without the Alliance’s superior coms network and the all-knowing, all-seeing combat grid, the Ejjai were free to play a lot more tricks on them and jerk them around.
The Ejjai were masters at using humans as decoys, and had sadly even managed to brainwash and train thousands of Corps men, women, and children of all ages. These dupes, selected from several races, were broken and trained to do whatever the invaders told them to do, without question.
The fear of horrible death at the hands of the enemy or the blades of the meatships made many normal civilians pliable and willing to help the invaders–anything in order to stay alive, or keep their families or loved ones alive.
These dupes, brainwashed from the sentient races, helped lure the Marines and other Alliance and local defenders into many traps and ambushes.
Bravo called them puppets. Many of these puppets were terrific actors, and could be very convincing.
The situation grew so bad that whenever the locals pleaded for help, by default, Bravo had to start assuming that they were being played and drawn into another trap by more of such puppets.
Shetanna often played spoiler, and would sneak ahead, cloaked in her stealth armor, to check things out first.
She would spring, ruin, and otherwise expose such traps for her Marines to pounce on and wipe out.
The enemy puppets were trained to fear the Ejjai more than anything else, and do their bidding. They willingly lure
d other defenders into the enemy’s firetraps and ambushes.
Once, Shetanna was moving up after another firefight, attached to Squad 2 under Staff Sergeant Owen Valmont.
Several pockets of heavy fighting were erupting within range. They merely had to pick one to join up with.
Out of the black, a new Bravo Marine joined them from another unit, a young woman with Cherokee tribal war paint and battle markings on her combat armor.
Tribal Clan markings or paint were optional in the Marines. Some Spacers used them. Some didn’t. It was a personal choice.
Waylon Aztec in Fireteam 1 had his suit decked out like an ancient leopard warrior.
There were entire Bravo and other Marine units that were composed completely of all members from one tribal Clan. Or, such native Clan members could be scattered among the units as many were, all among of the other forces.
Generally, all Marines were free to customize the paint on their rigs, as long as the spolymers, decorations, and even holos did not affect function.
“I’m Corporal Meko Cherokee,” the newcomer said. “My brothers and sisters and I are filtering into all of the units among the frontlines. We’re here to assist taking our basic com and scanning system back from the slashers.”
Sergeant Valmont nodded. “Welcome, Corporal. But just how in the hell is that going to work? The invaders have our system completely broken down into pieces. Completely cracked and wide open. If we try to use it, they know where we are, and they know everything we are trying to do.”
Meko Cherokee smiled. She paused and spoke some kind of battle code language into her helmet link.
“That’s already changing as we speak, Sarge. We’re using something the enemy never expected, has any experience with, or knowledge of. We’re using coded Cherokee battle language, on all new flux algorithms filtered through the fixernet. It’s completely off the grid–never has been a part of Spacer Naval and Marine encryption systems.
“Trust us. The slashers are stumped. They have no frame of reference to even start with. They’re tearing out their fur trying to figure out what’s going on and what’s being said. It’s giving them fits.”
Naero's War: The Citation Series 2: The High Crusade Page 20