Shetanna and Company 36, like the rest of Bravo, enjoyed having the extra forces to implement the various evac strategies. Then the defender attack units, such as Bravo, were free and clear to unleash all-out fury on the invader without being worried about fighting among a packed mass of helpless civies. That cut the hassles with fleeing refugees way down as well, not to mention a major reduction in civy casualties.
Of course, this wasn’t always possible. And it took many large additional military groups in massive efforts to effect such large scale evac-strategies. But it was worth it, and now they had the numbers to pull it off, where possible.
Coordinated, large scale evacuations ahead of invader attacks became the standing order and strategy of the day, whenever and wherever they could be implemented.
And it also meant that the horrible war was finally beginning to wind down. Everyone was very grateful for that.
Such was the situation Bravo faced on Eldratha-2. The Gigacorp worlds used huge mining transports to swoop in and evacuate the next gigacity about to come under attack.
They quickly leapfrogged and dumped the population off at another gigacity or between gigacities, in an area with a mild climate, somewhere else on the world that wasn’t a war zone. Of course it was a humanitarian and logistics nightmare, but another entire naval group of old ships and swarms of fixers tackled the task at hand. Relocation was better than slaughter, and in most cases, it was only for a matter of days, long enough for the military to wipe out the invaders. Like a big, messy camping trip.
On this world, Bravo and 36 held off the massed invaders and then brought in ground assault ships to eradicate the foe.
The Ejjai could never get the knack of not simply charging all of their forces forward to attack and destroy. Time and time again, this flaw in their strategy allowed them to be jammed up and simply rolled over, exterminating them in large numbers like a plague or swarm of insects.
This seemed to be a major flaw in their mental and strategic mindset and basic make-up.
Things continued to go well for the defenders, until the last few evacuation craft started to lift off, and then suddenly crashed back down into the starport.
One ship even caught fire, causing great loss of life. But the strange thing was, that initial reports from rescue teams said that the people inside were not trying to escape the flames.
The word came down. Everyone on those crashed ships had been stunned or immobilized somehow.
But how?
Scans hadn’t picked up any mass stunners at work. They were usually the size of huge vessels, and no such enemy ships were present, cloaked or uncloaked. Fixers detected no nerve gas agents present. How had so many people been incapacitated, and all at once?
Then more landers on the front lines began to drop, including units of the military. Even when they were in sealed EV suits, combat armor, and buttoned-up vehicles.
Whatever was causing the massive sweeps of stunning seemed to be spreading directly toward Shetanna and 36.
Then it began to take down the Marine units around them.
Om, what the hell is happening? Can the fixers detect anything?
As a precaution, she sealed herself with a gel-like suit of defensive Chaos energy.
I’ve done a nanoparticle scan through several fixer clouds, N. This is a nanolevel attack, far too sophisticated for the Ejjai to develop.
Another gift from the invader masters, then.
Apparently. We can’t see them with our eyes, but clouds of insidious tiny drones, or enemy stunbugs, if you will, are infiltrating everything. They are programmed to stun all of us, and leave us helpless before the Ejjai.
How do we stop it, Om?
This is far too big for you and me, N. I’ve discovered their weaknesses, however. Order the fleets in orbit to bathe this entire area in a low-level disrupting neutrino and electron pulse wave at these concentrated energy levels and frequencies.
At those levels, Om? They won’t harm anything. We won’t even feel a tingle.
Trust me, N. We won’t feel a thing, but the stunbugs’ delicate nanocircuitry will be completely fried, and fuse into useless dust. Then the microfixers can start scrubbing, cleaning them up, and recycling them. The entire task will still take days.
Naero called it in.
Haisha, Om. If only we could do something to make the stunbugs show up better on the scans.
I’ve got it. Tell Intel to flux the wave pulse to these frequencies and intervals. That should activate the stunbugs and cause them to show up toward the bottom of the infrared scans as low-level, ambient glowing light.
Brilliant, Om. That will cause the stunbugs to basically heat up and shimmer slightly, so that our scans can see if we’ve missed any.
I thought I just said that? I’m setting your helmet screen detectors and scan filters so that you can see them, N.
Naero’s face shield flickered before her.
Haisha, Om! We’re already swimming in them, like a sea of plankton in an ocean.
36 was about to be overcome by waves of these stunbugs.
Some of her Marines had already gone down. Somehow the little drones were even able to work their way into stealth combat armor and meks.
Then Naero’s protective gel suit began to light up, as the stunbugs attacked her protective Chaos field and tried to work their way through.
The enemy stunbugs sacrificed themselves by countless millions in an effort to wear down her defenses and literally chew their way through her active barrier of Chaos energy gel.
She flared her field several times, burning away great swaths of them around her. But as soon as she finished incinerating them with Chaos energy, more of them closed in around her.
Urgently, Naero called in the request for the blanket pulse waves over their positions on all channels.
The stunbugs were persistent and apparently adaptive. They swarmed on her with greater and greater intensity in an effort to overwhelm her defenses.
Om, hurry. Most of 36 is already down. They’ll stun me in less that a minute. Naero focused all of her Mystical powers just to hold them off.
On the scans, waves of seemingly harmless disruptor energy swept over the battlefield, bathing the the area from orbit in overlapping sweeps.
Om was correct. Keyed properly to the stunbugs, the energy feedback caused the tiny drones to seize up and became completely inert, falling to the ground or floating in the air as fading dust. Naero walked through them, kicking them up in clouds of extremely fine dust.
But the damage had been done, she saw as she looked around at all of her stunned Marines. Scores of units had been taken down and now lay helpless on the battlefield, at the mercy of any enemy forces who wished to rush in and murder them.
Om, we need antidotes to this stunning effect.
The biofixers and I are working as fast as we can. It’s not like they’ve been poisoned. Stunning is different, and knocks out consciousness in different ways–not at the chemical and neurochemical levels, but the deeper, actual energy levels of the brain synapses and body relays.
You mean, we have to find a way to trigger the stunned people so that they wake up again?
Exactly. Stunning puts a sentient mind and body to sleep basically, and usually for an hour or two. We’re working on reversing that process.
Then hop to it, Om. I’ve got a bad feeling that we don’t have too much time.
It is not possible to work on a solution faster. And yes, you are correct. Trouble is heading our way in the form of enemy skirmishers and enemy ground assault craft. They fully intend to pummel and pound this sector and everyone stunned in this area to death, and then suck up the bodies in the mini-meatships that will follow on. They obviously planned it all this way.
First Naero and Om called in all reinforcement units to defend the Marines who were stricken and helpless. The stunbugs were down, so there was no further need to hold back or take precautions.
“All reserves to the front. All av
ailable Spacer Navy orbital batteries. Put fire on these enemy ground assault craft that I have painted on the grid. Take them down. Protect our people who have been stunned. The enemy can’t be allowed to reach them. Halt and throw back the enemy advance.”
At first Naero assailed the enemy on her own. Shetanna smashed into the advancing lines of the enemy skirmishers, cutting, kicking, blasting, and using every lethal trick she could conjure up,
She looked like a flashing wheel of scarlet fire, or a spinning red saw blade of Chaos energy, scything through the enemy forward lines and positions.
Then a thin line of Spacer Marine reinforcements joined her, while the Navy pounded and blasted the attacking enemy ships.
Still, they were too few.
Alone, the Marines could not hold. And Naero and the other MCLs present on the battlefield were quickly exhausting themselves and their abilities.
They would be forced back, or swept away, and their stricken comrades left to the enemy to be slaughtered.
Another tide suddenly swept in.
Lander forces who had originally been part of the evac units soldiered up and flooded in. It wasn’t pretty, but it was enough to first hold the enemy, and then begin to throw them back.
The invaders went for broke, and sent in all of their available reserves, in a last-ditch attempt to press their fleeting advantage and overwhelm the defender lines.
There in that firestorm, Spacer and lander fought side by side against the common foe. And no matter who went down, others stepped in to face that wall of fire, and strike back.
All of humanity stood their ground and marched into battle, shoulder to shoulder, to save their fallen comrades who could not fight back. Shields flared and disrupted on both sides. Humans took the fight straight down the enemy’s gullet with valor and grit, punched the slasher’s tickets, and shot the invaders full of glowing holes.
That night, everyone celebrated Food Night on Thirdday, gorging themselves on an array of delicacies. Naero made fried Guroni cheese and sweet barbecue sandwiches for 36, with help from some of her mates.
She later came upon a somber Jonny Fox, talking with some of their friends while the later still picked at their plates.
Chime and Pete weren’t present. Completely besotted with each other now, the couple had taken a well-earned leave together to one of the playworlds in the rear areas.
By all reports they were having a marvelous time. Naero and the the rest of the gungirls could get all of the juicy details after the lovers returned.
Naero studied her friend. “Why so glum, Jonny?”
He shook his head. “I’m still worried about my cousin, N.”
Naero rested an arm around her friend’s shoulder. “She’s fine. Chime’s never been happier. She and Pete have it good. Be happy for them.”
Jonny made a face and nodded. “You don’t get it, Naero. Sure she’s happy. Both of them are giddy and delirious. That’s the problem. There’s still a war going on. Don’t you know how this works during wartime? It’s like they’re tempting the fates or something. This is exactly when something bad always happens.”
Naero rested her other arm on the table and nodded. “Oh, I get it. Just when things seem at their best, that’s when something really stupid or tragic happens to mess everything up. Yeah, I’ve seen that happen. Too many times. But you can’t think that way. It doesn’t always go wrong. I’ve seen that as well.”
Jonny threw up both of his hands in frustration. “You gotta help me, N. We gotta get everyone else in on this. We need to protect Chime and Pete during these last few weeks, to help make sure that nothing happens to them.”
Naero shook her head sadly. “Jonny, we always look out for each other. That’s all we can do. We can try to do more, but you know as well as I do that there aren’t any guarantees for any of us. What, you’re gonna start acting crazy like Whip?”
“No. I just have this bad feeling about things that I can’t shake.”
“We all take our chances in combat, Jonny. That’s just the way it is.”
“Don’t you think I know all of that by now? Look. Just promise me you’ll help me in this, N.”
“You have my word. I will.”
29
Naero relived the same strange nightmare. She was trapped inside some kind of metal pod, cylinder, or missile-like craft. She wore strange, bulky clothes that were also hard and weird. Parts of the nightmare she could not remember exactly right.
Lights flashed; she recalled hearing strange voices in her head and all around. There was fire and an explosion right as she penetrated some kind of unusual energy barrier. The equally strange vessel began to plummet and then proceeded to crash, despite her best efforts to avoid doing so. She struggled to control its descent and protect herself.
Another, even more violent blast tore her free of the stricken craft. She hurtled to the ground, slowed by some kind of odd wings on her back.
Was that it? Was she from the stars, from heaven itself? Was she some kind of angel? If so, what kind was she?
There were supposedly both good and bad angels as she recalled.
Again she wondered. What kind was she?
But her wings hadn’t worked right, or she and they had been damaged somehow. Despite her odd protective suit, her head hurt terribly and then, at the very last, her wings stopped working altogether. She still fell toward the rapidly rising ground and her doom.
At the last instant, she had heard a voice inside her head, and together, with the power of that voice, they had somehow slowed hers down enough so that she did not perish.
Then, somehow, she made herself go from one place to another, from several hundred meters up in the sky to just a handful of meters, without gaining speed. In fact, he had even slowed her rate of descent.
What were these strange powers and abilities that she possessed?
Still above the ground, she spotted farm fields as far as the eye could see, in every direction. The pain in her head remained terrible.
A spinning, simple machine like a big fan set up on top of a simple wooden stand broke her fall when she smashed into it. She broke off the thin metal fan blades and crashed through the flimsy, wooden structure.
The structure broke her fall, but Naero struck her head again in the process. Perhaps more than once.
After the farmer and his family dug her out of the wreckage and the ground, she couldn’t think straight for a very long while or remember anything about herself.
Who was she? What was her name, even? Where had she come from and why? Why did she come here? Why had she hurtled down from the sky? Why had her wings stopped working?
So many bewildering questions. Even when she recalled that her name was Naero, that still did not tell her very much at all.
Mama Kincaid on the farm plainly said that Naero was clearly a star girl from the star people. And that some of the star people were good, and some of them were very wicked.
Naero smiled. It was just like the angels.
The farm people hoped very much that she was one of the good ones. Naero did not think of herself as evil.
If she was of the good sort, that would make everything much easier, for all concerned.
After Naero healed up, she was more than welcome to stay with the Kincaids and the farm people in that region. But some day soon, the council of elders among the farm people said that Naero would be taken to the great trade station on the capital of the farm world. From there, she would need to return to the other star people, and hopefully go back to her star family.
Naero healed up enough in that one day–at least physically–that the farm people were very amazed. Mama Kincaid said that that was the way of some of the star people, and that they had special blood, it was said, which made them fast healers. Yet Naero’s head still hurt, and she could not remember much yet. Mama Kincaid told her that the head took its own time to heal, just like the heart, and that it wasn’t good to try to rush either of them.
That s
econd day, Naero was up and out of her sick bed and started walking around the big farmhouse and outside, filled with curiosity and questions about everything around her. It all seemed so strange.
And deep inside herself, she felt that there was something very important that she was either forgetting or had forgotten, like misplacing an object or an article of clothing, and not being able to find it. She had something terribly important to tell the farm people who were helping her and being so nice to her.
Something…if only she could remember what.
Some kind of danger or threat that was coming soon, but Naero could not recall what it was.
Knowing practically nothing made Naero even more full of questions. Where was she? On a special farm world, of course. But why had she come here or been sent here? Sent here by whom? What was a farm world? Why was this one special? Who were these people and why did they live here as they did? Why didn’t they seem to know anything that might help her?
Mama Kincaid finally sat Naero down with some of the girls and the womenfolk from the neighboring farms who had gathered together to talk about the star girl who fell from the sky, and what should be done with her in the time they would have together. They all brought things with them to give her. Things that she might need, like clothing, hats, shoes, soap, and brushes. They were very generous. She couldn’t go around in a nightgown all the time she was among them.
They tried to answer her many questions, calmly and patiently, but they didn’t seem to know very much beyond their world.
Like most of the adult women, Mama Kincaid wore her long brown hair, shot with lines of bright silver, in a long, plain braid down her broad back, with the front parted simply in the middle. She was in her mid to late forties, and held to be very wise and even shrewd, in her own ways, about farm life and people in general. Many of the other older women in the women’s circle politely deferred to her as a respected leader.
She was a small woman–still much taller than Naero–which bothered Naero for some reason she could not remember. But Mama Kincaid was both strong and gentle at the same time. She was neither slender like the young girls, nor fat. She had womanly curves without being plump. Her small hands and arms looked powerful and more that able thanks to a daily life of hard work.
Naero's War: The Citation Series 2: The High Crusade Page 28