Two Worlds – Chapter 331

Eve Berg

Location: North American Eastern Seaboard, Smokey Mountains, United Commonwealth of Colonies

“Here you go, ma’am,” the SGT finished leading Eve to a corner of the supply hub.

Even several stories below the main entrance to the now-buried bunker, she could hear the ET’s digging to reach them. They were like fucking ticks burrowing into the mountain to suck out the blood that was the human survivors.

She shook off the image. “Thanks,” she replied, but the SGT was already gone.

No one knew how much time they had left to prepare, but they were milking every last second to take as many of these fuckers with them as they could. <At least they won’t have that fucking mountain,> she shivered at the memory of the mobile artillery platform blasting the Commonwealth defenders into ashes . . . and then blowing up the mountain she was standing next to.

<On step forward, two steps back,> she looked at the equipment in front of her.

It was more than a little ironic her life had come full circle. In front of her was the V2 LACS, which, in her modest opinion, was now an obsolete piece of trash. Still, it was better than facing a BAMF in her skivvies. She did not envy the soldiers moving around in scales. They might as well be wearing tissue paper.

<Juts like riding a bike,> she suited and booted.

The armor came alive around her, and by the grace of god it had undergone some updates. It was able to link to her IOR, so she was able to get the data streamed directly into her vision instead of staring at a HUD. Still, it didn’t have the sensory feedback the MOUNT did. In a MOUNT she felt everything. She was the machine. A LACS was just armor she was wearing.

She ran a few diagnostics before she started moving around. It had been a while, and while it might be like riding a bike, one wrong move, or a reaction a second too slow, and she was dead. The scales rippled across the six centimeters of protective armor over the carbon nano-tubing and ballistic gel. She checked to make sure the pockets of repair nanites were online and ready respond to the armors needs. Although, if a BAMF beamer punched through her, those nanites wouldn’t be able to patch the hole in her. Her two shoulder mountain weapons were pathetic compared to the monstrous armaments on her MOUNT. Her missile launcher held a measly eight missiles, and none of the punch of the micromissiles despite their greater size. The swatter was the same as the MOUNT but it was a useless against this enemy. They didn’t use missiles, and duro-steel bullets didn’t stop lasers. She could use it to harass the enemy, but not much more.

The big guns of the LCAS, the 125mm spine-mounted artillery tube was risky underground. The explosions could do more harm than good, so that was a bust in most scenarios. Thankfully, someone had welded an area shield to the armor, so she’d survive a glancing blow from the beamers. The biggest change of all was her primary weapon wasn’t integrated into her armor. Instead of the graviton cannon, which worked wonders against the enemy, she was stuck shooting 3mm plasma-tipped rounds. It took dozens of hits from the weapon, in the same spot, to even break through the shield. A feat the grav-cannon could do in two; and put the BAMF down with a third, final shot.

More than a little dread worked its way into her gut as the systems came back green. She had to give the grunts and HI troopers she’d fought beside props. They knew going into this fight they were outmanned and outgunned. They kept fight and dying anyway. She honored and respected that.

“This is Valkyrie,” she linked into the communications net the defenders were using. “I’m good to go. Where do you need me?”

“Good to see you back online, Warrant Officer Berg,” the base commander replied. “We need you in the main bay. That’s where the focus of their attack will be, and that’s where I need you to hold.”

“Yes, ma’am,” she put one metal boot in front of the other. “I’m on my way.”

***

Sonya Berg

Location: CWS Agincourt, Sol System, United Commonwealth of Colonies

Sonya tasted blood. She snapped back to reality, and consciousness took hold of her. It brought with it pain and suffering. <What’s going on?> her brain tried to piece it all together as she looked for something to dull the pain.

Aggie and the rest of her escort had gone toe-to-toe with the enemy fleet. Their flanking maneuver was meant to put pressure on the enemy. Make them weaken their forward shields, so the main fleet could take them down easier, and as a bonus, get some of the lighter support vessels past the enemy lines and into orbit around Earth. If they could make contact, they could start orbital bombardment of vulnerable enemy positions.

She remembered the ships closing. Even at three hundred thousand kilometers, the enemy ships seemed massive on the holo-tank. Their greater tonnage, more powerful weapons, and heavier shielding were a ship captain’s worst nightmare. Facing them in battle, even with massive force superiority sucked.

She wanted to spit, to cleanse her mouth of the iron taste but her helmet was secured. When she tried to remove it, it gave an alarming beep. The visor was cracked, but still intact. The updates looked funky as the crack broke them up, but the message was clear enough: there was no breathable oxygen.

She took her first look around the flag bridge. The first thing she noticed was the very large hole coming in from the top right, and exiting out the bottom left. Everything around those entry points was black and scarred. Somehow, an enemy beam weapon had gotten through the shields, through the hull, through the extra shields and armor plating around the flag bridge, and left an exit wound out the other side of the ship. She said a silent prayer it hadn’t hit anything more important and turned Aggie into finely dispersed matter.

She gulped, swallowed the blood despite her stomach’s protest, and pushed herself to her feet. Immediately, her body rebelled. More information scrolled across her broken HUD, and it informed she had a broken leg. Nanites had sealed her CMUs to prevent her dying a slow death in her sleep, but she needed medical nanites. She reached down from her chair to the base where a medkit was supposed to be stored. She patted around in vain for a few seconds before realizing the base was gone. Another second, and she realized she wasn’t sitting where she was before the enemy gutted them. She’d been at the tactical console on the side of the bridge. Now, she was in the rear. Whatever follow-on explosion happened; the result was tossing her like a rag doll across the bridge.

<It’s better than being dead,> she did a mental assessment, and concluded on top of her broken leg, she was suffering from the mother-of-all whiplash. Thankfully, her CMUs stiffened as medical programming activated to stabilize her neck and spine. She’d live, it would just be painful for the moment.

“This is Admiral Berg, anyone still alive out there,” she might not be a combat commander by trade, but she knew she need to assess the situation and make a plan.

She got a lot of static in reply, and was nearly sure the local comms relay had been blown to shit before she got a response. “Sonya . . . fuck . . .” the ID said it was Ward.

“Mike,” she unbuckled herself from her chair and carefully followed the waypoint the Aggie’s AI provided her. “Thank god you’re alive.”

“Barely,” the other ADM grumbled, and she soon saw why.

The Human Fleet’s second in command had suffered a similar fate to hers. His chair had been casually tossed around the bridge by the gods of war, and he’d ended up buried under a pile of other loose equipment. Unlike her, he looked like shit. A jagged piece of something had pierced through him. It wasn’t too big or thick, thank god, but being impaled was still being impaled. It couldn’t feel good.

He did have the good fortune of his chair base coming with him, and the bottom was popped open with a used medkit sitting open beside him. The ADM had treated himself as best he could. He’d sprayed new skin around the wound and injected all the medical nanites. Those were keeping him alive, and fighting the blood loss.

He was almost certainly high as fuck, because if Sonya was awake with a piece of duro-steel sticking through her, she’d be screaming her head off. The other ADM was calm and collected.

“I can’t see the holo-tank. How do things look?” he asked when she finally reached him.

Sonya looked over, but it was offline. More than that, it looked like the alien energy beam had cut right through the communication’s device. It was charred, melted, and still smoldering wreckage. When stuff like this happened, command was supposed to automatically shift to the next in the chain of command. Since they were still alive, that had probably happened.

“Everything looks good,” she lied as she linked with his CMUs. His vitals were bad despite everything medical technology had already done.

“Sick bay, I need a medical team to the flag bridge STAT. Admiral Ward is down and his condition is critical,” she ordered. She hoped the ADM didn’t hear her.

“That was a hell of a fight,” the ADM coughed, and blood splattered the inside of his helmet. “Always nice to have a good fight. The Blockies weren’t a real challenge anymore,” he might have chuckled, but it sounded more like gasping for air.

“Hold on, Mike,” let me get another medkit. Medical nanites could work wonders if you pumped enough into someone.

She hobbled over to her chair base. It looked about like she expected it would, ripped to shit, but the medkit was still secure in its compartment. She hobbled back over and started sticking needles and the little machines around her old friends wound.

It was only when she was done, that she realized all she was getting was a flatline response. She pulled out the automatic defibrillator and let the little machine try to restart the old ADM’s heart. The medical team arrived two minutes later, and they looked like they’d been elbow deep in injured spacers. Everyone was covered in some degree of blood.

They gave the ADM the expert attention that a man of his rank deserved. They pulled out one of the few body bags that was supposed to put his body in a form of suspended animation. She’d read the reports, and knew the Hegemony-produced devices worked wonders. She hoped for the best, but in her gut, she knew it was too late. Admiral Michael Ward had already given his life for the Commonwealth.

She just hoped it was worth it. 

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Two Worlds – Chapter 328

Sonya Berg

Location: CWS Agincourt, Alpha Centauri, United Commonwealth of Colonies

Terror; absolute, primal terror coursed through her as she sat on the flag bridge of the battleship and had no hand in her own fate. <How do people deal with this?> she wondered as Aggie rumbled beneath her.

“Magazine’s depleted, sir,” the weapons OIC relayed to Ward.

The ADM didn’t reply. His eyes were on the solid block of missile icons flying across space toward the enemy fleet. The operations order called for the entire fleet to empty their magazines at the enemy starting at their maximum effective range. Battleships carried a lot of missiles, and dozens of broadsides burst out of Aggie and her sisters. They raced toward their targets, their silicon brains doing everything in their power to seek and destroy the enemy. The problem was, the enemy’s EW was significant, their ships massive, and their point defense impressive to say the least. The enemy had no missiles, they concentrated their entire offensive and defensive weapons compliment on energy weapons. The more Sonya thought about it, the more it looked like that was going to be the future.

The missiles were more of a distraction than offensive weapons. They hurtled across millions of kilometers and died by the thousands. Still, when you were talking about tens of thousands of rounds going downrange, that meant plenty got through.

Over a dozen enemy ships died as focused antimatter blasts smashed into them. The kill ratio was abysmal, and the amount of money concentrated in the attack, which would decimate entire pre-hegemony navies, even crack open worlds with its destructive power, was staggering. Better not to think about the billions of credits wasted to kill a measly dozen ships, and focus on what came next.

Thousands of Commonwealth, Blockie, and Euro warships descended on less than two hundred enemies. Aggie was in the middle of the formation, on a flank, to ensure if the enemy killed the High Admiral at the formation’s center, Ward would be able to take over operational command. As the battle was joined in earnest by both sides, the chance of that happening became greater and greater.

That’s when the terror set in. Despite a detailed battle plan, contingencies, and contingencies for the contingencies, everything still degraded into utter madness. Sonya sat there and watched as thousands of spacers were killed every second . . . thousands! Life was blotted out like a speech writer hitting the delete key on a disappointing draft.

The enemy oriented their front toward the approaching human fleet and concentrated all their shields forward. Then they charged. It was the unforgivable naval error of crossing the T; although the aliens seemed to be doing it willingly, and Sonya soon learned why. When in the past, it meant a ship facing the full broadside of the enemy with only their bow cannons to return fire, which left them vulnerable and ceded fire superiority to the enemy. The aliens did not share those disadvantages. With all their power directed forward, their mighty bow cannons delivered untold destruction on the human ships. Even with the upgraded shields, a battleship could only sustain two hits from the massive guns; a third holed the workhorses of humanity’s navies from stem to stern. The enemy quickly figured this out, and meticulously bored a hole into the center of the formation. Whether they knew where Gilmore’s flagship was, or just guessed, Sonya would never know; but it was soon evident they would decapitate the Commonwealth leadership inside a half hour if this continued.

While the enemy’s tactics were formidable, and their weapons deadly, they had their flaws. “We’re ordered to their flanks to divert their power from those monster guns and shields,” Ward didn’t sound upset about the tasking. He might be an old war dog, a fighter to the end, but there was a difference between that and suicide. “Go to a hundred and ten percent on the reactors,” he ordered as he laid in the course, and Sonya watched as several strike groups detached along with Aggie’s escorts.

The enemy watched them at first, content to rip into the guts of the human formation like wild, starving hyenas having their first meal in a week. Through it all, the human fleet was scoring some wins. Thirty-two enemy ships had already died from weight of fire brought to the table by the Commonwealth. Those frontal shields might be the strongest ever recorded by human sensors, but there were only so much you could do as the distance between the fleets closed, and when thousands of guns targeted a handful of ships.

Sonya watched as another enemy ship stuttered and died under the force of human energy weapons. It didn’t explode, but it began to list lazily out of formation. Without any acceleration, it quickly fell behind the rest of the enemy force, and began an awkward spin on its axis. She watched in momentary fascination at the enemy warship’s demise until a status change caught her attention.

“We’ve got company,” the operations OIC announced. “They’re detaching a dozen ships on an intercept course.”

“Well, they were going to do it sooner or later,” Ward huffed.

Sonya was surprised they’d waited this long. With their forward shields taking all the power their flanks were completely exposed. The only thing between them and death was very thick armor; much thicker than a battleship judging by the debris recovered from previous engagements. Still, anything made of matter could be destroyed if enough force was applied. Those alien’s massive war machines would have been putty in Ward’s destructive hands no matter how big they were.

A dozen ships didn’t seem like a large flank guard, but knowing their capabilities, the Commonwealth strike groups were in for a handful. They numbered just over fifty battleships spread through five different strike groups. All the groups had lost ships in the initial skirmishes. Their light escorts units would be useless in a fight against the aliens, and were using their speed and acceleration advantages to put more space between both the enemy and strike groups. Their new orders were to get into earth orbit and see if they could link with the Commonwealth ground forces and provide fire support. If they could soften up things for the planned landing efforts, that would be optimal, <If there are going to be any landings,> she reminded herself. Nothing was decided yet, and getting too far ahead of herself could prove deadly.

“Let’s keep it loose people,” Ward ordered. “Space it out, don’t let them get a bead on too many of us.” In their narrow battlespace, all the ships would be able to bring all their weapons to bear. It actually worked to their advantage as the enemy would need to shield their entire ships from angles of fire from every direction. If Ward could keep his ships from getting hit, then they had a fighting chance. As it stood, their numerical advantage wasn’t enough.

Probing shots began at a half a million kilometers. With weapons only moving at the speed of light, and no way to maneuver like missiles, it was easy to dodge. A second of maneuvering could put a ship tens, or even hundreds, of kilometers from where it had been. It was an exercise in skill for the gunnery teams, and some hits were scored. None were fatal on either side, but that changed as the distance fell. Soon beams of kinetic force and unbearable heat would be striking ships nearly the instant they were fired. That was true for both sides, and Sonya held her breath until the range fell to that range and the real battle began.

<Madness. Complete and utter madness,> she thought as a blinding light enveloped her and everything around her.

 

***

 

Mark “Coop” Cooper

Location: North American Eastern Seaboard, Smokey Mountains, United Commonwealth of Colonies

 

Coop hugged the mountain like a burglar in the night trying to avoid detection. He was about as successful as a six-meter war machine could be, as he retreated toward the entrance. He’d called for reinforcements as the battalions charged with holding the line were chipped away into nothing. Thousands lay dead at his feet from beamer, blaster, and artillery fire . . . and more fire still came his way. He launched the last of his missiles into the scared landscape and got the satisfaction of taking down a pair of BAMFs whose shields were still down from the latest artillery exchange.

Those reinforcements were denied. The brass decided to fight it out in the close quarters of the bunker complex then continue to exchange fire in the open where the enemy were more vulnerable. Coop was sure they had all sorts of nasty surprises waiting for the alien fuckers down in those cramped tunnels; he just needed to get there.

The entrance was still three hundred meters off and he was having trouble getting there. The great mountain behind him was scarred and whittled away by the intense fighting. In some places the bunkers external structure was poking through. That was how heavy the fighting had been. He skulked, trying to use the debris and smoke for cover, but that didn’t work well with modern sensors. Beamer fire sliced through the smoke and missed him by centimeters. He fired a burst from his gav-cannon and broke into a sprint. After three seconds, he dove behind a pile of rubble; going prone. A trio of beamers smashed into the wall in front of his position. He got to his feet and sprayed the area with his swatters. They wouldn’t do more than keep the enemy’s head down as he scurried forward.

A fourth beam struck out, damaging his leg actuator. Red icons blinked in his vision and his MOUNT stumbled and collapsed in the open. Pain seized his mind, but he still had enough muscle memory to lay down some cover fire to protect himself. His swatters ran dry and all he half left was his cannon. He fired shot after shot, trying to get back to his feet, and stumbling forward. He had to drag his useless leg, which ironically, was the same leg that currently sported a peg-leg with. He was still a hundred meters out when beams slammed into his back. His shields held, but he wasn’t going to make it another fifty meters under their weight of fire. They’d tear him open like a can opener. He threw himself back to the ground so the beamers blasted over him and blew chunks out of the mountain.

They stopped after a second and fired a few probes in his general direction. None hit him as he lay on the ground, but the aliens weren’t stupid enough to expose themselves to come check on him. They knew what a MOUNT could do, and respected the threat. Coop hated them for it, but couldn’t blame them. <You always hope for stupid enemies, but you don’t always get what you want,> he just hope they gave him enough time for some of his shield to recharge.

He thought for a moment about how he’d gotten to this point in his life. It wasn’t all bad. He was a hard-charging, ass-kicking, lean, mean killing machine. He’d seen several campaigns. Fought all types of foes; both human and alien, and so far, come out on top. He’d also come out on top in life. He’d found the woman of his dreams, had a baby on the way, and, until a few weeks ago, a full life to live and enjoy. As he lay on the ground, he knew he couldn’t have it all, but he could damn well make sure some of the things he loved made it.

He came up with a plan; crazy, stupid, and probably with a one percent chance of working; but hell, something was better than nothing.

“Eve, I’m going to try something stupid,” he sent over the comms channel that had been dark for nearly an hour. He didn’t even remember how long he’d been fighting. “I’ll see you soon. One way or another. Ballboy, out.”

“This course of action is . . .” the AI was momentarily speechless. Something, he didn’t think was possible. “I will do my part.”

“Thanks,” he gave the MOUNT a pat inside his armored womb. “This is the end, old buddy.”

He took a few seconds to gather the balls to do what he was about to do. A few deep breaths, maybe his final ones, and he lurched to his feet. The enemy knew exactly where he was, so they were waiting with their beamers. It felt like a dozen of the damn things targeted him as he ran and fired blindly behind him. It was poor tactics, but he wasn’t going to waste precious seconds turning to look where he was firing.

“Shields at twenty . . . twelve . . . three percent. Breach!” the AI announced calmly as beamers pierced the protective energy layers and smashed into metal.

The metal held long enough for him to cover another twenty meters, and then he felt a jolt at the beamer’s continuous output smashed into the second layer of shielding around his womb. <It’s now or never,> he hit the preprogrammed overrides and made sure he was oriented properly. <Here goes nothing,> he didn’t have time to pray to ancient deities in the sky before explosive bolts built into the armor ignited.

Behind him, the six-meter hulk of humanity’s greatest fighting machine froze like a statue. Coop was anything but frozen. He was violently propelled forward inside the womb as it ejected from the MOUNT. The metal, shielded ball flew into the mountainside with a crunch; only a handful of meters from the angled entrance to the bunker.

<Ten . . . nine . . . > he grunted as he hit the quick release and the womb opened to dump him on the ground like some newborn.

Fresh pain flared through him. Ejection was not designed to be pleasant. It was designed to keep you alive. Coop was alive, but his IOR told him he’d broken two reinforced ribs, dislocated his shoulder, and would be black and blue over a quarter of his body in a few hours.

<Pain is good,> he told himself as he continued the mental countdown. < Six . . . five . . .,> he didn’t have long.

MOUNTs were not designed to be taken by the enemy; human or otherwise. The tech in them was top secret, code-word protected, and the Commonwealth and Gold Technologies didn’t want that falling into anyone’s hands. They’d been told early in training once you ejected you had ten seconds to get the fuck away, or else.

Beamer fire intensified, burning holes through the motionless MOUNT, but Coop didn’t care. That’s what he wanted to happen. He wanted the big bucket of bolts to draw fire from his injury-prone, squishy body. The longer the aliens fired at a useless hunk of metal alloy, the safer he was.

He tried to get to his feet, but his legs didn’t want to work; which was made that much more difficult with only one foot. Quickly abandoning the attempt, he kicked and crawled as fast as he could to reach the safety of the tall alcove, and more importantly, open bunker door.

A pair of grunts, who looked like they were on the verge of shitting their pants, were waving frantically at Coop to hurry the fuck up. He was doing the best he could, and had just reached the protective ledge of the alcove when time ran out. The MOUNT went up like the Fourth of July on steroids. Coop felt the concussive blast pick him up, as light and heat washed over him. He didn’t even have time to scream before darkness reached out and claimed him.

 

***

 

Eve Berg

Location: North American Eastern Seaboard, Smokey Mountains, United Commonwealth of Colonies

 

“No!” Eve’s scream came from her very soul as Coop’s indicator flashed black in her vision.

Not that she had time to let the shock take hold or give it much thought. She’d be joining him soon if she didn’t get her shit together.

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Two Worlds – Chapter 327

Eve Berg

Location: North American Eastern Seaboard, Smokey Mountains, United Commonwealth of Colonies

“Fall back by company!” the LCDR yelled over the net in panic.

<Shut the fuck up!> Eve kept the reply to herself, but grit her teeth in anger. They had the enemy pinned and confused in their L-shaped ambush. They should be pushing now; showing a little violence of action, but the colossal alien tank was moving in.

She ignored the moving mountain as the BAMFs finally got their shit together. Most of the roaches were dead, killed by the mines and thermobaric artillery barrage, so the BAMFs were in full-rampage mode. That’s good. One of the bigger monsters’ charged straight toward the linchpin in the L-shape; right where Eve was standing. The grunts and HI around her hammer the ET with everything they had. A rainbow of color splashed the enemy’s shield but it kept coming.

<Wait for it,> she told herself as the nightmarish creature roared and powers through the incoming fire. <Wait for it.>

The BAMF was firing. The grunts in their entrenched position were well-defended, but they still took casualties. Men and women were torn apart at the BAMF’s beamers slams into, and pierced, the squad-level shields. When it was close enough, the alien leapt into the air, beamer on continuous blast in one hand, while it drew it’s wicked-looking dagger in another.

<Bingo,> Eve had been tracking the enemy, and unloaded on it with her graviton cannon. The heavy ball of projectile gravity smashed into the BAMF’s weakened shield, penetrated, and blew chunks of the creature’s armor and torso into the air, while arresting its forward movement and throwing it backward. It dropped dead a dozen meters from the grunt’s front lines. They cheered the enemy’s death, but didn’t have time to celebrate. They shifted fire and kept bringing the heat.

Eve watched her sensor and saw the company farthest forward start to pull back. They’d filter behind the main defensive line and pull back to reinforce the shorter length of the L-shaped ambush. Gradually, all the companies on the long edge would pull back, until it shifted from an ambush to a blocking force. Depending on how the engagement commenced, they’d start to pull back from the blocking formation if things went to shit.

As if the universe was waiting for her permission, the first retort of the enemy’s mobile mountain split the air. The ball of energy discharged landed short, due to the friendly aliens being in close proximity, but it still killed several grunts with proximity splash, and acted as a giant flash-bang to the entire battlefield. Sensors went haywire, and Eve was forced to rely on her eyes to continue engaging the enemy.

Another sharp retort echoed through the air as the Commonwealth bunker’s heavy guns engaged the enemy. A second eruption of light as the big artillery round smashed into the enemy’s shield. It fails to penetrate, but it made a hell of a show.

<Hopefully, they’d be busy for a while,> she was more than happy to let the heavyweights duke it out. She needed to focus on killing as many BAMFs as she could.

She charged up her next-gen magnetic accelerator, aimed it right into the center of the enemy formations, and let loose. The air ignited as the round traveled downrange, smashing through weakened shields and bodies as it passed. Eventually, it hit something important that went boom. Her AI alerted her to the failure of an enemy area-shield, so she relayed the data to the HI troopers. The fire mission occurred in seconds, and more thermobaric rounds blew the enemy to smithereens.

<We could win this,> she thought, just as an earth-shattering crack echoed behind her. She looked back and saw a chunk of the mountain sloshing off the range like dead skin off a burn victim. <Well fuck.>

Sensing an opportunity, the enemy artillery turned its big guns on the Commonwealth soldiers and opened fire.

 

***

 

Mark “Coop” Cooper

Location: North American Eastern Seaboard, Smokey Mountains, United Commonwealth of Colonies

 

“Fuckety fuck fuck,” Coop’s MOUNT ate up the distance as he sprinted across the battlefield.

“Someone help!” the LT in command of the company on the left flank yelled as his troops continued to get slaughtered.

“I’m coming,” Coop replied evenly as he hurtled a small gorge and took beamer fire up the ass. Thankfully, his shield was full strength back there. “Stay calm,” he tried to talk the panicking officer down. “Keep sending fire missions to the bunker’s gunnery teams. They’ll fire danger close, so make sure to keep your head down.”

“They’re only fifty meters away. Jesus . . . I just lost all of second squad.” The man was on the verge of hyperventilating.

“Almost there,” Coop pushed his MOUNT as fast as he could. He crested a rise, his big metal ass making a giant target for anyone who bothered to look up.

His AI processed the battle in front of him quicker than he ever could. Under the protection of an artillery barrage, the ET’s had moved close to a company-sized force to the flanks and was giving the Commonwealth the squeeze. The troops there were well entrenched, supplied, and trained; despite the LT shitting his pants at the moment. They were holding on by their fingernails, but it didn’t take a genius to tell that the BAMFs numbers and weight of fire were just too much. If they didn’t get any help soon . . .

The AI analyzed the scene and targeting icons popped into Coop’s vision He didn’t question the AI. It had literally saved his ass. He just hit accept on the authorization request. Over a dozen micro-missiles popped free of his chest plate and screamed toward the enemy positions. They went from zero to hypersonic in the blink of an eye. Coupled with their explosive packages, they tore toward the enemy’s right flank. It was a risk to shoot across the enemy’s entire formation, but he had to take it. If he could make the push falter on the edge of the maneuvering element, that might give the Commonwealth grunts enough time to recover and counterattack.

The risk cost him forty percent of his missiles to anti-missile fire, but that still meant over half a dozen made it through. They went off with a boom, and brought the push to a halt. Only two BAMFs went down, due to already depleted shields, but it was enough of a shock to make the remaining forces look for cover . . . and then the fire mission finally arrived.

The earth shook beneath him; enough that his servos whined to keep him upright. As the shockwave spread, a mushroom cloud of destruction rose from the place where a tight grouping of explosive shells and energy beams had torn into the enemy formation. Over a dozen BAMFs were obliterated, and many more roaches were barbequed in the resulting destruction. The resulting confusion of BAMFs going berserk added to the offensive being broken. People still died as the BAMFs mindlessly fired their beamers and blasters into friendly positions, but it looked like the LT could handle it from here. The battalion commander was already moving a squad from their reserve troops to reinforce the flank. It looked like Coop had saved the day again.

“Ballboy, reposition to sector seven. We’ve got incoming artillery, and expect another push,” a comms specialist back in the bunker relayed.

“On it,” he pivoted on his big metal legs and started to crest the rise again to head back into the thick of it.

With one foot midair, all of his sensors suddenly blacked out. It felt like god himself had given Coop a push. The MOUNTs servos were unable to compensate, and he was flung forward, down the small hill, and toward the gorge he’d leapt over before. He felt the MOUNT smack chest-first into the ground and slide several meters before hitting a boulder that brought him to a stop.

“What the fuck was that?” he asked out loud.

“I’ve detected a massive energy discharge,” the AI’s voice sounded fuzzy, like it was trying to talk through static. “Rebooting systems.”

Seconds meant everything in combat, so the three it took for the sensors to come back online was way too long for his taste. Reality blinked back into existence, so he rolled to his side and came up with his graviton cannon scanning.

He didn’t find any targets, but . . . “Rear shields are down to ten percent,” the AI offered, which blew Coop’s mind. He’d only taken the beamer to the ass. How could he . . .?

“Incoming,” the AI warned, just as a downpour of soil and debris crashed down on him. His shields acted as an umbrella, so it didn’t touch him, but the sight of debris falling like rain for nearly twenty seconds underscored whatever had happened had been big.

“Bunker?” he inquired, but didn’t get a reply. His own sensors showed the energy discharge in the area was high, and it would take several minutes to clear enough to get comms back online.

Coop went to crest the rise and see what the hell had tossed him like yesterday’s leftovers, but there wasn’t a rise anymore. There was a crater. It spanned nearly a hundred meters and was still smoking. Part of the mountain was even gone. He could see the reinforced structure of the bunker still steaming, and imagined the whole place reeked of ozone. As for the company whose asses he’d just saved. They were just gone.

<Fuck!> this could only mean one thing.

So far, the enemy’s orbital bombardments were sporadic at best, and usually only focused on occupying the bunker’s mountain guns when they were moving troops. The LCDR suspected it was because they weren’t a big target in the grand scheme of things. They were a small-to-medium sized bunker complex, and not a threat to anything not directly in front of them. Apparently, that had changed.

<On the bright side, they took out their own people as well,> he tried to see the positive. He couldn’t think about the eighty troops they’d just lost. He still had a lot of fighting to do.

Several minutes later, he got a signal from the bunker. They confirmed a ship from orbit had taken a shot at them. Apparently, Eve was making their lives on the western front a living hell, and they wanted to put the puny human’s in their place. Everyone on the line was showing the ETs that they weren’t going to roll over and die.

 

***

 

Sonya Berg

Location: CWS Agincourt, Sol System, United Commonwealth of Colonies

 

“This is it,” Sonya stood next to ADM Ward on the flag bridge of Aggie. A damage control tech was still putting out a small fire on a control console and working on rerouting the wiring to get the sensor’s feed back up.

“Yep,” Ward answered calmly, as the might of the human fleet lined up against the alien invaders.

All the maneuvering and delaying for time was done for the ETs. They’d gathered everything they could and were sitting in the middle of the least-time-approach to Earth. Several of the Commonwealth task forces had been bloodied in the push forward, but they were now flanked by their Blockie and Euro counterparts. They were a mass of human ingenuity waiting to seriously fuck up the people who invaded their home.

Gilmore was set to give a ra-ra speech, but Sonya and Ward didn’t much care. They were studying the enemy, trying to figure out what they were going to do. They had advantages in acceleration, offensive, and defensive systems; but the human ships outnumbered them significantly.

“A lot of people are about to die,” she said with a sigh. Aggie was deep enough in the formation she might survive.

“We who are about to die salute you,” Ward quoted with a grin.

Sonya knew the reference, and felt a little like the gladiators of old. “Fuck it,” she breathed out all her anxiety. “Let’s get this over with.”

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Two Worlds – Chapter 325

Mark “Coop” Cooper

Location: North American Eastern Seaboard, Smokey Mountains, United Commonwealth of Colonies

“What do you think?” the crew chief stood next to the six-meter MOUNT like a proud parent.

Coop just stood there gaping. “Well . . .”

“I know. No thanks necessary, sir,” the chief patted him on the shoulder and walked away.

Coop didn’t even watch the man go. His eyes were on his MOUNT. <What did he do to you?> he felt his soul break a little inside him as he looked at the once-beautiful dealer of death and destruction.

Now, the MOUNT looked like some patchworked monstrosity. Duro-steel had been grafted over gaping wounds, including the one that made Coop a peg-legged pirate for the time being. Eve’s MOUNT stood in its cradle next to his looking practically brand new compared to his. She still had her fair share of alloy transplants, but nothing compared to Coop’s; especially the large discolored piece directly over the womb.

An involuntary shiver worked its way up Coop’s spine. He’d gotten everyone he could to safety, and his AI had even walked into the bunker under its own power; but he’d come very close to never seeing his unborn child or Eve ever again. All of that made him reconsider his life choices for about thirty seconds, and then the base’s obsolete intercom system barked to life.

“Warrant Officers Berg and Cooper to the command center. Warrant Officers . . .” they were already moving.

The command center was always busy, but now it made the previous weeks look like an anerobic swim class of seniors at the rec center. “We’ve got comms!” the LCDR looked like she’d taken some uppers from when they’d seen her last.

“With who?” Eve asked as they strode to the holo-display lighting up the center of the room with the strategic situation. One look at it and anyone could tell it wasn’t good.

Scouts and sensors had picked up a sizable force moving at the from the west, while a smaller, but still respectable force, pinned them from the east. Coop and Eve had been battling that eastern force to a standstill for weeks, and now they’d called for backup.

“Everyone!” the LCDR’s face lit up like a Christmas tree, despite their position caught between a rock and a hard place and about to be ground to dust.

“Everyone?” Coop was looking for a little more data.

“The cavalry arrived with some goodies up their sleeves,” the LCDR never stopped moving. Coop looked at the previously sparsely manned communications section that was now full to bursting. “Fleet’s got a patch to our comms issue. Anything that was previously affected by the malware is useless, but we’ve got some old nodes from storage up and running. They’re not as good at the modern stuff, but we’ve got contact with the inbound fleet and forces all over the planet. We’re coordinating a global response. They’re going to landing more troops to retake this planet.”

<Yep, definitely on some uppers,> Coop saw the LCDR’s pupils were so wide you’d think her eyes were black.

“Fan-fucking-tastic,” Coop exhaled. At the very least, all this meant proper replacements for his MOUNT. It was borderline combat ineffective as it was, and had been for weeks.

“ETA?” Eve asked the more logical follow-up.

“We’re still looking at twenty-four hours, maybe more. The Blockies and Euros have fleets in system too, and they’re rallying now to make the push towards Earth,” the holo-display shifted until they saw the solar system and the fucking armada advancing toward Earth. They were routing the signals through some of the older satellites that hadn’t been in use when the enemy attacked, so the feed was glitchy at best.

<That’s the beauty of Earth, we’ve got centuries of obsolete redundancy sitting around,> Coop fought back a grin that mankind’s laziness, and inability to pick up their trash, was its savior at the moment.

“That’s tomorrow’s problem,” the LCDR continued, her enthusiasm only diminishing a tad. “We’ve got issues today.” The display flipped back to the tactical situation in the eastern half of North America. “We need to hold until the fleet arrives.”

All Coop could do was grimace. They’d been fighting the eastern force to a standstill, and the western force looked to be a third again their size. They couldn’t win in the east and conduct another breakout. There were too many civilians and too much equipment that the enemy would just scorch in its path. <Including my kid.> They also couldn’t fight in the west, or split their forces to defend against both. They were truly fucked with the cavalry right on the doorstep.

“We need a defense in depth,” Eve and Coop both stated simultaneously. “Send everyone and everything as deep as they can go. We’ll hold outside and fall back into the bunkers. We’ll let those ET fucks in with us. Set up booby traps, ambushes, kill zones; anything and everything to slow them down. Every second we can buy is a second more to land another division of troops to save our asses,” Coop finished.

Eve just nodded. The LCDR had already come to the conclusion. “I’ve already ordered evacuations to the lowest levels. Our engineers are rigging traps, and I’m redeploying our troops to man our fixed defenses as well as possible ambush sites. The only question left is where are you two going to be.

“The tip of the spear,” Eve grinned. “Like we always are.”

“I’m going to need one of you on each front, coordinating and routing communication on top of kicking ass. We have comms, but not enough to go around. Most of the comms in our armor is already fucked, but you guys should be able to talk; even with a mountain between you.”

“Yes, ma’am,” it would add another distraction in combat, but it couldn’t be helped. For all intents and purposes, it looked like Coop and Eve would effectively be in command of ground forces on their two fronts.

Coop was sure there would be some brass back in the command center, or even company and maybe battalion commanders out in the field, but no one was going to have the real-time data Coop and Eve did.

<I should ask for a pay raise,> he chuckled as Eve started going into detail on deployment patterns for the western front. She’d always been gung-ho, and it looked like she was going to take on the bigger threat. <Fine.> While the two women talked, Coop went over the terrain he’d been fighting in over the last few weeks. He was pretty sure he could pull a rabbit or two out of his bag of tricks.

 

***

 

Sonya Berg

Location: CWS Agincourt, Sol System, United Commonwealth of Colonies

 

Agincourt shuddered from the impact. “Hull breech on levels sixteen and seventeen between sections D and G. Damage control is on it. Shield reforming,” the chief in charge of updating ADM Ward on the status of his flagship yelled over the chaos on the flag bridge.

The ADM barely paid any attention as he orchestrated the battle like a maestro. The man was used to combat, but Sonya sure as shit wasn’t, and she felt her guts do a flip at the knowledge they’d just had a hole punched through them. Despite all the upgrades, even a ship as large as Aggie was still vulnerable to the enemy’s incredible energy weapons.

“There . . . there . . . there!” Ward was yelling, jabbing at a point in his holo-tank like a mad-man. “Kill that fucker!”

Kill that fucker they did. Sonya saw what the enemy was doing. For the past several hours they’d been maneuvering token forces to slow the Commonwealth’s advance on Earth. Whether it was to pull their people off the planet, or coordinate a stronger defense, she wasn’t sure. What she did know was they were paying for time with lives and tonnage. The eighth and final enemy ship was cut in two as the combined weight of Strike Force Two’s firepower ripped into the portion of the ship’s shield that had been overloaded. Spin and acceleration did the rest, torqueing the ship and flinging the two pieces farther apart into the void. Something went critical on one section and it exploded like a small sun being born. The second half just continued to drift aimlessly away from the advancing fleet’s course.

They’d killed twenty-four of the enemy ships as they approached Earth, but had lost fifty in the process. Some were completely gone; like the half of the enemy ship that had gone up like a supernova; but others were just combat ineffective. They’d established a casualty collection point back near the portalling location. Most of the resupply ships and troop transports were remaining there until it was safe to move forward, but in the meantime, they were looking over the damaged ships to see if they were salvageable. Many had fallen to the incredible beam weapon the enemies had mounted at the front of their ships. It made her wonder if it wasn’t worth investing in a similar weapons system in the future.

Strike Force Two was down three battleships and a third its escort force after the few engagements they’d been in, and they weren’t even at the forefront of the advance. “Status!” Ward’s command voice echoed across the bridge.

“We’re looking at one more pair of bogies,” the tactical OIC announced. “They’re coming in on heading two-six-three, and should be intercepted by Strike Groups Ten and Twelve well away from the main body of the fleet. After that, it looks like smooth sailing to the main concentration of the enemy force in orbit between Earth and Luna.”

Sonya nodded along with Ward. They were getting some data from the satellites in Earth’s orbit, but the enemies EW was making those number unreliable. They’d shift from one second to the next showing no enemy force, and then over a thousand enemy ships. Since they had a general idea how many ships they were facing, they were only using the incoming transmissions to generalize the location of the enemy force. They’d wait until the AIs on the better-equipped warships got closer to take a crack at cutting through the EW. At this point, she was confident there were under two hundred enemy ships in their path to retaking Earth. That didn’t seem like a lot, but after seeing First and Second fleets get pounded, she knew they were going to need every ship to finish this fight.

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Two Worlds – Chapter 324

Sonya Berg

Location: CWS Agincourt, Alpha Centauri, United Commonwealth of Colonies

<Holy shit,> Sonya kept her face stoic as she looked at the data feeding into the holo-tank at the center of ADM Ward’s flag bridge.

As the soon-to-be former chief of naval intelligence, and an ADM with no real combat experience, she really had no point in the upcoming operation. Still, there was no way in hell she was going to be left behind. This was about to be the largest operation in human history, and the only joint operation of any magnitude between the Commonwealth and Blockies. This was once in a lifetime.

<Maybe, maybe not,> her intellectual side reared its head.

The aliens that hit Earth came out of nowhere. No one expected them, and everyone thought humanity was on pretty good terms with the Hegemony. The thorn in everyone’s side was the Star Empire of Windsor. The small polity was a problem, but they couldn’t match the Commonwealth’s economic might, and once the big players caught back up to the tech imbalance, it was over for the would-be empire. Harper’s Junction had been the first nail in that coffin, and there would have been more to follow if not for this.

Part of her wondered if the Windsor’s had orchestrated this. It was worth looking into, but she doubted it. They didn’t have enough pull with the Hegemony to get them to do what they wanted. The more and more she thought about it, humanity wasn’t making the Hegemony dance to their tunes; despite the generous loan terms and rapid influx of technology. It was the opposite.

<You won’t be looking into anything,> she reminded herself as she cracked her neck and continued to go over the data. She would be lucky to still be in the navy after this was over. <You’re assuming you’ll survive.> She chuckled, and Ward gave her a sideways look.

Agincourt was as intimidating as ever. The flagship of Third Fleet was an imposing sight; but now she had the teeth to back her up: upgraded powerplants and generators, layered defensive shields, energy weapons, and missiles with more bang for their buck. She was an imposing figure, but Sonya knew she’d lose handily in a one-on-one fight against the enemy.

“That’s why we won’t fight one-on-one,” the High Admiral had explained in the endless operational meetings between the admirals gathered in system. There were a lot of cooks in the kitchen, and everyone wanted to put in their two cents.

In the end, Ward and Gilmore formulated the battle plan around the data they had from Second Fleet’s defeat and First Fleet’s pounding. With the massive forces at their disposal now, and the addition of four more fleets when they arrived in Sol, they should be able to deploy any number of strategies depending on the situation.

Looking at the might of eighteen hundred Commonwealth ships flying in formation toward the designated portalling point would bring tears to a lesser woman’s eyes. Having dealt with the logistics, she knew the number of battleships, the tonnage, and the number of human lives was literally something a person couldn’t fully comprehend. It was hard to imagine this wasn’t enough to take back their home. The Blockies were brining another eight or nine hundred ships to the party, and the stingy Euro’s even had a fleet and a hundred screening units inbound.

Then there were the troops. Millions upon millions of troops were onboard transport lagging behind the main body of navy ships. As they said, they were cocked, locked, and ready to rock. They would portal in behind the fleet and chill in the rear until the battle was over. Then their fight began.

“All hands, battlestations,” Ward announced. “Let’s go kick these ET fuckers in their small alien balls and teach them not to fuck with humanity.” The gusto received cheers, and Sonya was sure they were echoed throughout the fleet.

While tied into Agincourt’s internal comms, she was also part of Strike Force Two’s Command net, and Fleet Command net. Gilmore was asking for all the Strike Forces to report in. Each strike force was akin to a carrier group, minus the carrier group. They were roughly a dozen battleships and escort vessels that could engage the enemy in pocket-sized elements. If needed, they could mass into a large battle wall by combining with other strike groups. That was how the Commonwealth forces decided to start the operation, but circumstances would dictate how they finished it.

They didn’t know how the Blockies were going to position their forces, but the Euro’s were going to operate by standard fleet practices. They wouldn’t change anything about their tactics until six committees had looked it over, written a dozen reports, which were then reviewed and commented by their citizens, and only put into practice eighteen months from now. They had the least skin in the game, and they weren’t going to leave their planets as unprotected as the other powers. The PM was working out some sort of financial and trade deal the Euros would have to adhere to because everyone else was shouldering the weight, but Sonya didn’t care about that. As they grew closer to the portalling point all she could think about was the sudden pressure in her bladder. All rah-rah-rah aside. They were going to lose a lot of people today.

“Lieutenant Kim,” Ward’s voice cut across the flag bridge, targeting a junior member of his staff. “where are we in the order of march?”

“We are going to be the third strike group to cross the line of departure, sir,” the young man answered after only a second of hesitation.

“And why is that, Admiral Berg?” he turned on her, his eyes making clear even her exalted rank, technically senior to him in the Commonwealth’s organizational structure, wasn’t getting her out of the line of fire.

“Command and control,” she replied with a sigh of exasperation. “High Admiral Gilmore will be transitioning in the later half of the strike groups, so we need someone to take command and control of the first strike groups in case they make contact.” She tried to act bored with his little game to try and catch her unaware, but she could give as good as she took. “And who better than the mighty Admiral Ward with his tactical prowess to lead the charge into the lion’s maw,” she laid the sarcasm on thick, saw several of the crew smile, and an unlucky few actually chortled in amusement.

Ward just grinned, and gave her a nod. He liked the repartee. It kept him on his toes.

“Strike Group Four is away,” the communication’s officer announced. “Strike Group Seven will deploy in thirty seconds . . . Strike Group Seven away. We’re in the queue. Thirty second countdown.” The clock appeared in the holo-tank, and they all waited patiently for the portal to rip a hole in space-time for them to jump between that starts.

“Portalling in five . . . four . . . three . . .” Sonya ignored the helmsman’s countdown as she watched the giant slit of golden light appear before them. They accelerated into it, and were swallowed whole.

“Stay alert, everyone,” Ward ordered as the ship rocketed through the extra-dimensional highway. “We don’t know what we’re going to face when we emerge.”

They’d find out soon. The trip was only slightly over four light years; a hop and a skip when it came to protalling. She knew time moved differently when you were stressed, so it wasn’t a big surprise when the announcement went out that they were about to transition back into normal space.

<Let’s see if the enemy cracked our codes and knows where all our transition sites are,> she thought. If so, it was going to be a bumpy ride.

“Transitioning,” the words were followed by the return of the black of normal space, dotted with familiar stars, and an influx of data.

“Missile launch!” the OIC from the tactical department screamed. Sonya hoped he had time to get a fresh uniform after the engagement.

The data populated on the holo-tank and she saw several waves of missiles flying away from the two strike groups that proceeded them. They were marshalling into a battle wall, the twenty-plus battleships lining up to protect the smaller escort vessels who weren’t powerful enough to take the hits.

“Four bogeys, designated Bravo One through Four,” tactical yelled out as Agincourt linked in with the fleets fire control.

“MALCON warning!” what followed next was expected. They had all the data on what had happened before, and their cyber people had been working on counters for the last eight weeks. Electronic firewalls went up, completely new and revolutionary for the human race.

They were a hybrid of Hegemony contractors input on what the enemy had used to take down their systems during the invasion, and human ingenuity. It hadn’t helped that the contractors had laughed in their own alien way at how the enemy had taken down the human fleets. Apparently, it wasn’t that complicated of a virus; something children used to attack each other’s system in their equivalent of secondary school. Human software was just so obsolete, it was a joke.

<Not this time, motherfuckers,> the thought was premature, but not wrong.

“Firewalls holding. STRATNET and TACCOM still functioning,” the communication’s officer was still professional. Sonya practically melted into her chair as Strike Group Two fully integrated with the other strike groups and launched their birds.

New doctrine called for a constant wave of missiles to be fired. The objective was the degrade the enemy’s shields to the point they were softened up for the knife fighting engagement with energy weapon’s the enemy seemed to prefer. The four bogeys were only a million kilometers from the emerging strike forces.

<Maybe they’re a little full of themselves. That, or they didn’t expect this large of a counter attack,> even though the four ships were huge. There were nearly forty battleships lining up against them, and just as their strike group moved out of the emergence point, another strike group appeared. The numbers were only going to grow. <We’ll see if they run.>

They didn’t. Whoever these aliens were, they had big fat balls. They accelerated at the ridiculous rate for something so large; like four Swords of Damocles headed for their heads.

Missiles continued to smash into their shields, some even getting through as the Commonwealth’s weight of fire increased. Bit of hull, frozen gases, and what looked like some alien bodies began to leave a wake behind the approaching force as it continued to race toward the strike groups.

Then they were all in energy range. It was a holocaust of energy weapons fire that left spots in the eyes of anyone who looked directly at the sensor feeds. It was sustained for about twenty seconds before everything died back down.

“Report!” Ward ordered on the Fleet command net. The replies of the admirals and rear admirals in charge of the other strike forces trickled in over the next minute.

She found it mildly amusing it took longer to report the status of their formations than the entire engagement that had killed the enemy ships . . . and they were dead. Their blackened, broken husks would continue on their course passed the Commonwealth forces. They’d miss by tens of thousands of kilometers, but that still made a shiver go up her spine.

“Keep an eye on them, Group Four. Make sure they aren’t playing possum,” Ward had the same idea she did, but the enemy wasn’t playing possum. Those fuckers were dead, but they had made the fleet work for it.

“We lost Vicksburg,” the tactical officer replied. “Gettysburg and Antietam took some damaged and will have to fall back to the rear to complete some repairs before being combat ready. We also lost two cruisers and a destroyer that were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.” The losses muted the celebration on the bridge of winning the skirmish.

In terms of tonnage and lives the Commonwealth had come out way ahead, but they’d only faced four of the enemy. What would happen when they faced hundreds.

<We come at them with thousands,> Sonya’s mental fortitude reared its head as the holo-tank pulled in more information from any remaining assets in the solar system. <This time will be different.> So far, that looked to be true. She only just hoped they’d made it in time.

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Two Worlds – Chapter 322

Eve Berg

Location: North American Eastern Seaboard, Smokey Mountains, United Commonwealth of Colonies

“Come on, Coop,” Eve sprinted through the mountain bunker and toward the shuttle bay. “Make a hole!”

A squad of grunts was marching through the hall, on their way to nowhere important, as she came barreling around a corner. Most got out of the way quick enough, but a PVT in the back must have had his head up his ass. The man was big, in full scales, weapon slung across his chest, and that didn’t make a difference when she shoulder-checked him. You could hear the air rush out of the PVT’s lungs as he was flung backward, across the hall and into the wall. He crumpled like a rag doll. His squad mates gathered around him, yelling at her things they shouldn’t say to an officer or a woman. They didn’t know much about the black stripes on her CMUs, and she really didn’t care she’d steamrolled the guy. She rushed on.

The bay opened up and spread out before her. The Spyders were still lined up wingtip to wingtip, but there was still plenty of room for what remained of the force sent out to rebuff the enemy. Most were on their asses, their helmets off, pouring water over their heads. Fighting made you sweat, but fighting an enemy that used lasers tended to turn it up a few degrees.

Her eyes ignored the grunts on the ground and gravitated toward the six-meter MOUNT near the door. It was standing there lifeless, dead, with a big fucking hole in its gut. <No!>

Tears annoyed her eyes as she surged forward. There was a group of techs, medics, and miscellaneous soldiers gathering around the mech; but they parted at her approach. The first thing she smelled was blood.

The coppery tinge to the air made her stomach flip; not because she was unaccustomed to it, but because of what it represented. “Report, sergeant,” she found the nearest NCO and demanded answers.

“Wha . . . ma’am,” he nodded to her. “It’s shot to shit and we’re trying to open it, but some stuff is fused.” A torch lit up, temporarily blinding her, and then sparks started to shoot around them as one of the techs went to work cutting into the armor. It wasn’t a quick process, and the smell of smoldering metal, singed circuitry, and the ever-present blood made several back away from the MOUNT for a moment to collect themselves.

“You better be alive, you bastard,” she muttered to herself.

Then, like the universe answering her prayer, “Fuck! Easy with that thing!” Coop roared from inside the MOUNT like a hungry bear awakening for hibernation.

“We’ve almost got it open, sir,” the tech informed.

“Good, because you’ve cut everything up from out there and nothing fucking works anymore,” Coop growled back.

With a final hiss, the torch finished its job and a section of armored plating fell away. The MOUNT wouldn’t be usable for some time, but the techs would get it operational again. They’d opened a section into the womb itself.

“Let’s get him out,” the tech ordered, reached in, and nearly toppled over as he yanked.

His hand came out holding a blackened, severed foot.

“Ahhhhh!” Coop roared from inside.

“Get him out!” Eve yelled, bodily pushing people aside to get to the opening. “Easy, Coop. I’m here.”

“It fucking hurts! Damnit, I’ve already had that foot regrown once,” he cursed as she grabbed ahold of his contorted body and started to shimmy him out.

“Medics get your kits ready. He’ll need fluids if nothing else,” she ordered. “Someone notify sick bay they have an urgent critical incoming. They’ll need to clean up his wound and start a new grow on his foot. He’s essential personnel. We can’t have him sitting out this fight.”

People rushed to obey her orders as Coop’s head appeared in the hole. He looked like death, which was probably better than she expected. Despite his alertness, his body was still in a state of shock. Only pure will and adrenaline were keeping him going at this point. He’d crash soon, and then it would be up to her to get him treatment.

“I came back,” he mumbled, his speech slurred.

“He’s going into shock,” she relayed as the medics mustered around her.

“I’m fine,” he replied as his eyes rolled back into his head and his body went limp.

“Christ, lose some weight, lard ass,” she grunted as Coop’s full enhanced weight settled into her arms. “Let’s get him down.”

Close coordination got him down and onto a gurney with anti-grav tech. The medics rushed off, and passed the CMDR as she entered the hanger. The base leader took one look at the MOUNT and shook her head.

“How long until it’s operational?” Eve asked the tech already inspecting the wreck.

“Give me six hours and it’ll be ready to go into the field. A proper replacement for this section needs supplies we don’t have. We can get some duro-steel over it, but it’s going to be a weak spot.”

“He’ll deal,” her eyes followed the burned stump of Coop’s foot as it rounded the corner. Then she hopped down to confront the CMDR.

“Ma’am,” Eve didn’t realize how tired she sounded.

“You’re all we’ve got, Warrant Officer Berg,” the CMDR looked even more tired than Eve sounded. “If the enemy pushes again, we’ll need you to be in five places at once.”

“I’ll make it work,” Eve’s thoughts went to Coop in sick bay and her child in some storage tank. Everything she cared about was in this mountain. “I’ll make it work,” she repeated with more grit.

 

***

 

Sonya Berg

Location: CWS Jack Frost, Alpha Centauri, United Commonwealth of Colonies

 

The Chief of Naval Intelligence was asleep with her head through a holographic readiness report. It had frozen when her forehead went crashing through it on the master spreadsheet: the completion percentage of the fleet concerning upgrades, and their total numbers. As the senior-most admiral in the system when the directive came down from the prime minister, Sonya was charged with getting the rebuilding program underway.

That made her very unpopular in Alpha Centauri. All civilian shipping was diverted from the area if it wasn’t carrying military equipment. Cargo freighters that carried the life blood of the civilian population were forced to settle into orbit and use shuttles to ferry goods down from their holds. It led to shortages, impossible traffic jams, and the people were letting her know about it. System government officials were in her office every day to complain. She just didn’t give a shit. In one more week, life in the system would go back to normal. The massive fleet would sail off into the black and retake Earth . . . or not. In that case, Alpha Centauri might be next. How those officials loved hearing that ultimatum.

Her door chimed as someone requested admittance. She didn’t even twitch. It chimed again with the same result. After the third chime the door opened through an override, and a man strode in. He looked around at what looked like a bureaucratic nuke had exploded all over the place. The man who entered behind the first man chuckled as he ordered the lights to full brightness.

“Admiral.” Sonya finally began to stir at the summons to consciousness. “Admiral!”

Her face shot up from the desk, temporarily blurring the data in front of her. “Who . . . what . . .?” her vision finally cleared enough to see who was in her office. “Now I know this is a dream. There is no way Gilmore and Ward would be together in my office. Those two men hate each other; couldn’t be more different, both personally and concerning naval doctrine. If they were . . .” she stopped abruptly after she pinched herself and winced.

“You were saying,” Fleet Admiral Xavier Gilmore couldn’t find anywhere to sit, so he stood in front of her cluttered desk. Admiral Michael Ward just leaned against the doorframe.

“That means we really are throwing the kitchen sink at the enemy,” she straightened her CMUs and got to her feet. “I apologize . . .”

The Fleet Admiral waved her off. “I’m the only one who can command this fleet,” he answered the elephant in the room. “We’ve got multiple fleets converging and being refitted. There are going to be too many chefs in the kitchen. Having me take overall command will avoid bruising any egos. Ward will be the deputy commander because he has the most recent successful combat experience.”

Ward was still riding high off the successful raid on Yangon; even though that felt like a century ago. It was going to be a change for him to fight alongside the same forces he’d recently crushed.

“Give me a sitrep, Berg. Barebones is all I need. We’ll have enough briefings and workups over the next week to get into the weeds.”

“Barebones, sir,” Sonya wiped her eyes to clear the last of sleep. “We’re running on schedule for the most part. We’ve got two ships behind, but other than that we’re doing surprisingly well. Fleet techs are arriving on their own accord to help with the refits. We’ve almost got too many hands. People know what’s going on with Earth, and they want to help.”

The spirit of the Commonwealth’s people, even after the loss of Earth and a succession by major corporate interests, was beyond refreshing.

“That’s good news,” Gilmore nodded. “Because in one week we leave to retake Earth, so let’s get back to work.”

“We can sleep when we’re dead,” Ward added with a grin that Sonya shared. She buckled up for a wild ride.

Previous

Two Worlds – Chapter 278

Mark “Coop” Cooper

Location: Harper’s Junction, United Commonwealth of Colonies

 

“Easy…easy…shit,” Coop cursed as they slid down the side of an embankment. SSG Hightower and Mike were still supporting him, but they were tired. They’d been prisoners for some time, and then forced to drag his injured ass across the entire city and into the farmland around it. Coop knew he’d be bitching up a storm by now if he had to carry so much dead weight, so he had to give respect where respect was due.

That didn’t stop him from spewing a bunch of four-letter words over the IOR when he hit the ground. An agonizing jolt of pain pushed through the drugs that had been pumped into his system and he collapsed out of his team members’ grips.

“Shut the fuck up,” the SSG hissed as he laid against the berm with his weapon pointed up.

A pair of drones rocketed overhead. They banked hard and came back the way they’d come. Coop curled up, hoping his LACS would protect him from the rounds the drones would put into their little group. A steady stream of burps echoed around them as the drones took precision shots.

None of them hit the combat-ineffective SRRT team. Coop still felt the vibrations as the rounds tore up another embankment about fifty meters from them. The drones split away in opposite direction with a howl of their thrusters, and Coop gave himself a pat down just to make sure he was still alive.

“About a dozen Windsor’s were moving parallel to us,” the SGM informed as the popped his head up and ran a scan of their surroundings. “Drones took them out. Come on. Let’s keep moving. Almost there.” The NCOIC hefted Sullivan’s corpse onto his shoulder and started moving again. Of everyone, the SGM was carrying the most weight.

Coop waited for GYSGT Cunningham to grab Eve and help her up. The LT stood nearby to help, and Coop and his helpers brought up the rear. They moved along the small drainage ditch for a few hundred meters before climbing up and over the road to the opposite side. Coop half expected Windsor drones to bear down on them and blow them to pieces, but it seemed the Commonwealth had air superiority in this sector.

They slid down a slope on the opposite side much more gracefully that the last one, and a waypoint appeared on his HUD. There was a small hill less than a kilometer away that was their rendezvous point.

<About fucking time,> Coop was starting to feel woozy.

Medical nanite degradation. Tourniquet application required, flashed on his HUD before more pain ripped through his injured leg. He screamed as the built-in medical device tightened just below him.

Hightower grunted as their gait was disrupted and ran a quick medical check. He cursed the timing, but kept prodding Coop along. Seeing the light at the end of the tunnel helped.

Twenty minutes later, the SSG and Mike happily dropped Coop on his ass on the backside of the hill away from the fighting. “So we just sit here nursing our thumbs with our assholes until these RECON marines decide to show up.” Coop couldn’t feel anything on his injured leg anymore, which wasn’t a good sign.

“This is supposed to be an elite SRRT team,” an accented voice announced over TACCOM. “I’m not impressed.”

STRATCOM pinged the speaker at under twenty meters away, and made Coop flush with embarrassment. His situational awareness was shit right now. Two RECON marines in V3 LACS low crawled out from underneath a cammo-net set up at the apex of the hill. If Coop had to guess they were forward observers providing target coordinates to the brigade artillery and orbital assets.

“Stow it, Master Sergeant,” the SGM cut RECON off before everyone got in a dick measuring contest. “We’ve been through a bit over the past few weeks.”

“Weeks?” the other RECON marines finally spoke. “I guess…” they finally caught sight of the rest of the SRRT team, “Daaaaamn.” What was clearly a junior NCO or enlisted RECON stated.

Coop didn’t fault him for his reaction. Eve was missing an arm, he had a giant spike through his leg, and Sullivan was dead with a spike through his chest. They’d clearly been through some shit.

“Medivac is on the way,” the senior RECON stated with more respect this time. “We’ve got to get back to work,” they two marines retreated back to their OP.

They were true to their word and fifteen minutes later a Spyder swooped down for them. They trudged up the ramp as technicians and medics swarmed them. Coop collapsed onto the deck as the bird took flight again. He caught a brief view of the ongoing battle before the ramp snapped closed and the engines gunned it to make orbit without getting blasted out of the sky.

Maybe it was the drugs, trauma, finally getting Eve back, or just battlefield fatigue, but Coop found himself laughing and crying at the same time. He made sure no one saw what was going on inside his armor. He’d never be able to live that down.

The small view of the battle he caught struck him as sad and inspiring. It had been thousands of years since man first gathered to form civilization and ended up fighting in the first wars. Weapons had changed from rock throwing, spears, and wooden shields to EM power rifles, orbital bombardments from capital ships a few kilometers long, and energy shields that could stop a railgun round but not a rock that one of their ancestors would chuck at them.

Despite all of the changes in weapons, defenses, and tactics, it still involved two groups of men and women, advancing across an open plain, and trying to kill each other. If there was an unalienable truth to humanity, Coop was sure it was that they would always try to kill each other. Even aliens hadn’t changed that. In fact, they was only giving humans better ways to do it.

<As long as I’m the one doing the killing and not the dying that’s fine by me,> Coop gave a mental sigh and composed himself as technicians opened up his damaged armor and medics treated his wound. <Maybe I’ll take a nap now.> The medics must have given him something because he was fast asleep before they popped him out of the LACS.

 

***

 

Location: CWS Agincourt, Harper’s Junction, United Commonwealth of Colonies

 

Coop was violently thrust into consciousness. All around him medical devices beeped, hissed, and thumped; coupled with the hushed-but-hurried tones of doctors and nursed. Despite the abrupt arrival in the world of the living, he kept his eyes closed.

“We shouldn’t be bringing him out just yet, we need things to set more,” a woman’s voice tainted with anger spoke a few meters to his left.

“We don’t have a choice. We’ve got our orders. Plus if he stays in the grav-chair there won’t be an issue. This is just a patch job until we can get him back to a ground-side hospital,” a man’s voice replied.

The woman huffed then the clink of a privacy screen being pulled back, and the assault of artificial light on Coop’s eyelids made him groan.

“Good you’re awake,” the woman hit her PAD and the bed tilted upward until Coop was sitting at a ninety degree angle. It gave him a great view of his leg missing below the hip.

“WHAT THE FUCK!” he roared loud enough for the woman to unconsciously step back. “WHERE IS MY LEG?!” He turned on the doctors with murder in his eyes.

“Sergeant,” the woman had two gold stripes on her collar, and was trying to act the part of a CMDR. “The damage to your leg from the still-unidentified Windsor weapon was extreme. The heat and force of the spike had fused your leg to your armor. To get you out of the armor and into treatment we needed to remove your leg. A replacement is currently being grown, and will be ready once Agincourt returns to New Washington. At the Naval Hospital in the capital you will have the best surgeons in the world to replace your leg and rehabilitate you to peak physical condition.”

Coop knew that. This wasn’t the first time he’d lost a limb, but waking up and finding that limb missing was going to haunt his dreams for months.

The CMDR snapped her fingers when it became apparent he’d stopped listening to her. “This is very important,” she repeated. “We’re going to help you into a grav-chair so you can report as ordered, but you will not, I repeat, you will not get out of it. The nanites and Insta-flesh are still setting from your removal procedure and I don’t want you to rip something and bleed to death.”

“Got it, Doc. Bleeding to death equals bad.” Coop was still focused on his missing leg.

The CMDR rolled her eyes and helped shift his bulk, with the other doctor’s help, to the edge of the bed and a waiting grav-chair. The chair hovered a few centimeters off the ground waiting for him. He waved off the doctors and swung himself over the edge and into the chair. The chair gave a groan and smacked down into the ground before recalibrating for his extra mass. Slowly, it rose to its previous position.

“Look at your fat ass breaking stuff,” a familiar voice joked as Eve pushed her way through the privacy screen. She had what was left of her missing arm mag-locked to the front of her CMUs. The dressing on it was fresh, and a lot better than the field-improvised first-aid Coop had performed.

“How’s it going, stumpy?” he asked.

“Not too bad, gimpy,” she shot back.

“Ouch, low blow,” he retorted.

“You’re lucky that spike hit so low or the removal procedure would have caused us some serious problems,” she winked.

“Oh shit,” his hands flew to his package, “oh thank god.”

“Don’t thank him yet,” Eve grimaced.

Messages started to ping in Coop’s head as his IOR activated again. His mailbox transplanted over his vision and one stood out above the rest: an immediate order to report to Admiral Ward’s office.

“Admiral Ward?” He didn’t know the man other than him being an Admiral and de-facto big kahuna.

“Jesus, Coop,” Eve stepped behind him and started pushing his chair forward. “Admiral Michael Ward, the Hero of Yangon, the man who just took back Harper’s Junction from the Windsor’s. People are starting to call him Nimitz reincarnate.”

“Nitwit, what kind of name is that…” he was cut off as she smacked the back of his head. “I’m just saying that we had a fair deal to do with retaking Harper’s Junction,” he continued. “No one is going to declare it Mark Cooper day since I’ve only got chevrons on my shoulder.”

“Just…don’t embarrass me,” Eve sighed as she pushed his chair into a lift and keyed in a code. The lift rumbled into motion, and didn’t stop at every deck, which was weird for a warship the size of Agincourt.

The lift beeped and the doors opened into a corridor just outside the thickly armored flag bridge. Eve pushed him forward and knocked on a door across the corridor from the bridge’s guarded entrance.

“Enter,” a tired voice replied.

“Sir, Sergeant Berg and Sergeant Cooper reporting as ordered, sir,” Eve snapped to the position of attention, but didn’t salute because she was missing he saluting arm. Coop remained seated, but sat up a little straighter.

“At ease,” the man sitting behind the desk had blue in his eyes, looked distinguished, handsome, had both legs, both arms, and was everything Coop expected of a full Admiral. “Good to see you, Eve. It’s been a while. Your mother told me to relay her gratitude that you didn’t die.”

“Thank you, sir,” Eve didn’t skip a beat despite the awkward exchange.

“Sergeant Cooper. Just the man I wanted to see,” the ADM’s eyes turned on Coop and lost what little warmth they had when directed at Eve. “I should have you thrown out an air locked and jettisoned into the nearest star.”

The barb cut deep. Deeper because Coop had no idea what it was about.” “Sir?” he didn’t know what else to say.

“Sergeant Major,” the ADM called, and their NCOIC popped into the room. “Play the recording.”

The recording from Coop’s V4 popped into a holo in the center of everyone. It played from the point the SRRT rescued its imprisoned members to the point where the Windsor mech backed out of the hole it in the wall with the HVT.

“Sir?” Coop repeated, still not knowing what to say. He considered pointing out the video conveniently cut off before a grenade-propelled spike fucked up his leg, but the ADM didn’t look like he was in a joking mood.

“What was your mission, Sergeant Cooper?” the ADM inquired.

Coop thought back. “Well, sir, our original mission was to Splitstream in, coordinate with the locals to pass intel back to the fleet about the conditions on the ground. That evolved to linking up with rebels and assisting with their counterinsurgency. That, in turn, evolved into sabotaging infrastructure and the enemy’s ability to respond to your fleet’s arrival. After we completed that, we took the initiative to rescue our captured team mates and destroy the elements of the enemy’s command and control that we could. Then…”

“Let’s focus on the last bit,” it looked like the ADM was biting his tongue. “You were participating in a decapitation strike in the center of Windsor power on the planet…”

“If I may, sir.” Surprisingly, the SGM cut off the ADM. That the SGM was a bad ass motherfucker was the only thing that saved him from an ass chewing. “The mission was to rescue our captured team members. We made some situational assessments once that portion of the mission was completed to search for any HVTs in the palace and attempt to kill or capture them,” the NCO clarified.

“The issue at hand, Sergeant, if you haven’t grasped it yet, was the total lack of aggression in trying to capture and kill that HVT.” The ADM clarified.

It took a moment for Coop to digest what the ADM was saying, and then he nearly jumped out of his grav-chair to strangle the man. “Who the fu…”

Sir,” Eve cut in while simultaneously hitting a switch that mag-locked Coop to the chair. He couldn’t even pull his arms off the armrests much less strangle the ADM. “There are many extenuating circumstances of the encounter we witnessed that dictated our situational-dependent response.”

The SGM kept a straight face, but Eve had just used the best-case diplomatic speak to tell a navy fleet puke that he didn’t know his head from his asshole when it came to ground combat; especially ground combat against a Windsor mech. The ADM wasn’t a stupid man, so he understood that, and his face hardened in response.

“First off, sir, there was no way Sergeant Cooper could have taken out that HVT without getting himself and everyone else killed. “He used an ingenious method to force a stalemate with an ultimatum he was not able to carry out. Sergeant Cooper was able to save lives, my life to be specific, and I am very grateful for that.” The emphasis Eve put on the “I” seemed to suggest someone else would be happy with the outcome as well.

The ADM’s eyes were still hard, but his face finally slackened. “Do you know who that was, Sergeant?” He turned back to Coop.

“She said she was some baroness,” Coop shrugged.

“That was Josephina Barrow. Or as she was better known on Harper’s Junction, Queen Josephina. If you want to go back just a bit, she was the Chief of Intelligence for the Star Kingdom of Windsor. You, Sergeant Cooper, single handedly let go the woman who led the invasion against Harper’s Junction, ruled over the planet when it was stolen from us, and until recently, was the most important intelligence operative the Windsor’s had.”

All this hit Coop like a hammer. He slumped in his chair and took a few deep breaths before looking up at Eve. One look at her face and the weight lifted. “Sorry, sir, but I wouldn’t change my decision making process,” he replied confidently.

The ADM just shook his head, but Coop swore he saw a glint of approval in the SGM’s eyes. Eve went even farther and gave his shoulder a comforting squeeze.

“Unfortunately for you, Sergeant Cooper, people with more experience and responsibility disagree. As such, you have been reassigned after you complete your rehabilitation and your restrictive duty is lifted. You will be reduced to the rank of corporal. A review board convened and determined since you did not earn the rank of sergeant, and are no longer a member of an SSRT team, you may not retain it.” The ADM landed body blow after body blow on Coop, but Coop just took it. Eve squeezed his shoulder after each blow landed. “Sergeant Berg,” the ADM returned his attention to Eve. “You are also being reassigned, but on the recommendation of your commanding officer and Sergeant Major Queen, you will retain the rank of Sergeant. You will complete the classroom portion of NCO Academy at your new duty station. The Sergeant Major determines you have completed the field portion of the process under warfighting conditions. As a former Master trainer, he had signed off on its completion.”

Coop looked up at Eve and smiled, but a small part of his brain bristled at getting busted down when he’d been the one to save her ass.

“You are also being put in for a medal for taking the fight to the enemy while virtually unarmored and unarmed. You nearly took out the HVT with your bare hands. That kind of initiative needs to be rewarded, and I’m sure some people will want to talk to you where you are going.” The ADM gave the two former SRRT members a long look before waving them off. “You’re dismissed.”

Eve’s heels clicked as she snapped to and turned Coop’s chair around.

<Well, that could have been worse,> he looked down at his missing leg as a ping announced the arrival of a new message.

It was his new orders. He instructed his IOR to open and display it across his vision. Eve must have received the same email because she stopped.

Coop nearly stopped breathing after reading the first line. He expected to be sent back to Thor and a new infantry unit, maybe even Mars to the HI school for more training. He did not expect what he was reading.

The email was ordering a permanent change of station from his old unit HQ on Thor to Fort Stewart-Benning on Earth. His medical recovery had a projected time table and using that they had assigned him to class 001-2434 of …

“Recruiting School! These fucktards want me to be a recruiter!” Coop closed the message and pinched his eyes shut. Hoping this was a bad dream.

“I’m assigned to Stewart-Benning too,” Eve replied. “Recruiter Class 001-2434 after my NCO Academy classroom completion.”

Coop’s outlook brightened a bit. He was used to the universe fucking him in the ass, but at least it looked like he’d be getting some ass for the foreseeable future.

<It’ll take it,> he grinned.

Not killing the baroness-queen-what’s her face might have been the best decision he’d ever made in the infantry.

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Two Worlds – Chapter 275

CPL Nickelbaucher

Location: Harper’s Junction, Star Kingdom of Windsor

Mitch struggled against gravity and the terrain as he worked his way up the slope. It was slow-going up the hillside opposite the HI firing position. The loose shale had caused him to slip multiple times, and ricocheted down onto his fire team following his lead. More than one person was grumbling over TACCOM, but he ignored them as he pushed forward.

<Screw this,> he thought after sliding down another few meters and almost knocking over the PFC behind him.

Mitch swung his rifle around his back and locked it into position. He bent down and started to use his hands and feet to crawl up the slope like a spider. It was much easier going, and the rest of his team followed his example.

He looked up and saw the HI trooper had already reached the ajar door. “Ok, here is the plan, everyone,” he relayed over TACCOM. “We’re going to get up this hill, stack beside the door, and do a textbook clearing of the inside space. Be prepared for anything. We don’t have any idea what the interior layout is like and I don’t want to…” he cut his mission prep short when the HI trooper slid inside the building.

“Or we’ll just follow him,” a PVT chuckled.

“Let’s move,” Mitch chomped down on the chatter and rushed forward. He didn’t slip again, but he waited for the rest of his team to reach the ledge before moving forward.

It was dark inside the cavern. The only light came from the open door, and his optics had trouble deciding whether to go to night vision or stay normal.

“It’s clear,” the HI trooper stated from the opposite side of the room. The big armored man was down on one knee and running his hand against the floor.

“What…oww!” One of the PVT’s exclaimed as he tripped and fell right on his face.

“Watch your footing,” Mitch chided as he followed the HI’s example.

The cavern was a big bunch of open nothing except for two tracks on the floor spaced a solid fifteen meters apart. “The energy cannon emerges from there,” the HI pointed over his shoulder at another well disguised door that looked like a rock face. “The outdoor opens, it fires, then moves back through the inner door to a lift that will shift its position.” The HI shifted his gaze along the wall. “There’s another door here we can take.”

“Breaching charges,” Mitch ordered, and a PVT ran up and pulled the device from his back. There was no panel to hack, so the electronic override bumper he was carrying was no good.

The PVT started to slap the cord onto the door. Once ignited, the cord would burn through the door and its’ hinges. It would then fall open on its own or they could kick it down.

“Stack up on the door,” Mitch reissued the order as the HI trooper stepped back. The door was too small for the LACS to get through without turning sideways and stooping, so the marines would go in first.

“Ready, Corporal,” the PVT informed as he stepped away from the door with a detonator in his hand.

“Engage tint,” everyone’s HUDs darkened to protect their eyes from the upcoming flash of light. “Blow it in three…two…”

The door opened and three men in smartcloth coveralls stopped dead in their tracks. The one on the right was the first to react. He dropped his bag of tools, turned to scream, and Mitch put a round in the side of his neck. The man died with a gurgle as one of the other men threw himself forward at Mitch, and the other turned to make a run for it.

Mitch pivoted away from the tackling man, throwing off the enemies’ attack. The man slipped around Mitch, fell to the floor, and Mitch put a pair of 1mm rounds in his chest. The man wasn’t wearing any armor, and blood splattered everywhere from the close range shots. Mitch turned to engage the third enemy, only to see the man’s body explode as one of the HI troopers 3mm plasma-tipped rounds impact him in the back. Gore splattered across the stairwell as the momentum carried what remained of the body forward and it fell down the stairs.

“We need to hurry,” the HI trooper ducked through the door and started down the stairs. His head brushed the ceiling as he took them half a flight at a time. “Someone had to have heard that.”

“Let’s move!” Mitch charged after the trooper and tried to shake from blood off the edge of his barrel.

 

***

 

Windsor Planetary Defensive Battery Seven

 

“Maintenance team, please give us a SITREP on the status of the door,” Ned asked for the fifth time. He got nothing but static. “There is a lot of energy discharge happening nearby. Maybe coms are being affected.” He guessed.

The SGT in charge of the battery pursed his lips and shook his head. “Corporal,” he turned to the second in command, “I want you to take half the security team and investigate. The other half of the team will get to their assigned defensive positions. We might have hostiles inbound.” His eyes scanned the control room and locked on several critical personnel, like Ned. “Whatever happens, we need to make this shot. I didn’t want to tell you the severity of the situation, but we’re providing cover fire for the Queen herself.”

People sat up straighter and chests puffed out a little farther at the news. They weren’t just shooting at the Commonwealth anymore. They were protecting their monarch. The news wasn’t as big a deal to Ned as the Windsor-born soldiers and civilians in the room, but he couldn’t help but feed off their energy.

“What’s our charge?” the SGT continued with operations as the CPL left with part of the security team.

“We’re nearing a fifty percent for our capacitors. Depending on how many shots we are going to get we can always overload them and achieve a more powerful shot,” Ned offered.

“Good thinking. We’ll keep that as a secondary option, but I plan to be able to put up more than a shot,” the SGT replied. “Cannon’s location?”

The giant cannon was still a little over two minutes from reaching its firing position. Diagnostics were run to ensure the inner and outer doors there were undamaged and would open and close. Those reports came back green. Now, all they had to do was wait for the charge to reach the desired level so it could threaten any ship that tried to endanger their Queen.

A working silence descended on the battery’s crew for a few minutes before a coms channel on the SGT’s station opened up.

“SERGEANT we’ve got…!” the transmission cut off, but the sound of weapon’s fire was unmistakable.

“Secure those doors!” The SGT yelled as the remainder of the security team slammed them closed and took up their fighting positions outside the command center. “Get ready to overload those capacitors,” he relayed to Ned.

Ned tried to ignore the fear in his gut, and a steadying hand from Martin helped. “Rerouting all power to cannon,” he acknowledged as the dial in front of him went from the green of one hundred percent into the red as numbers climbed higher.

<God save the Queen.> he thought as gunfire sounded just outside the armored door.

 

***

 

Admiral Michael Ward

Location: Harper’s Junction, Star Kingdom of Windsor

 

Ward stood in the main hanger bay and watched as columns of marines boarded Spyder Assault Shuttles bound for the surface of Harper’s Junction. The round-robin drop process had been going on for hours with little sign of letting up anytime soon.

“Sir,” a marine LT, acting as his liaison, handed him a PAD with the latest casualty figures.

A handful of Spyders and their marine compliments had been lost in the first wave of drops. As a total portion of the brigade on Aggie it was only seven percent of their force, but that seven percent was seven hundred soldiers and Spyder crews. Even that was a drop in the bucket to the thousands and thousands of spacers lost in the battles to get the troops to the planet, and all those dead weighed on him as their commander.

He rubbed his tired eyes with his free hand, and when he looked back the number of marine casualties had jumped another two hundred. “What the hell?”

The light-speed communication relays between the ground and fleet transmitted the STRATNET data instantaneously, so commanders had the most up-to-date information on their troops.

“The 942^nd is in heavy contact advancing on the capitol, sir,” the LT relayed. “One of the enemy orbital defense batteries was able to get a shot off. Shields can’t do much against that type of firepower.”

“Shit,” Ward exhaled as the numbers updated again. There wasn’t a big jump this time, but the numbers were climbing. Thankfully, the breakdown listed more injured than dead.

“Sir,” the Aggie’s skipper came over TACCOM. “We’re getting some weird readings from our drone scouts.”

“On my way,” Ward left the ground pounders to do their thing so he could return to his.

The bridge wasn’t nearly as chaotic as it had been a few hours ago, but there was still plenty of activity as search and rescue operations, the marines’ landing, and the constant monitoring of the enemy fleet’s remnants still poking around. Ward bypassed his command chair and went straight to the CAG.

The Carrier Air Group Commander was a Captain, same as the ship’s commander, and he was in charge of the thousands of drones packed into the belly of Aggie and other assault carriers like her. It was the CAG’s operations that made the assault carrier class of warships different from battleships.

“Talk to me CAG,” Ward wasn’t the only one with the other CAPT. Aggie’s skipper was there was well.

“Pull up the data,” the CAG, a tall woman with long, dexterous fingers, pointed into the section’s holo-tank. “Here, we’re getting slight fluctuations, but nothing we’ve seen before.”

“Do we have eyes on?” Ward looked at the confusing jumble of data in the tank.

“Drone Delta-Five-Two and Delta-Five-Three will be coming around the curve of the planet in thirty-one seconds.” The CAG informed.

“Any ships nearby to get a closer look?” Ward asked, and the CAG rolled her eyes. It was a constant battle between drone commanders and ship commanders about what the appropriate use of resources were.

Drones were mobile reconnaissance and fighting platforms. Currently, they were still limited by light-speed communications, but that was going to change with new QE tech. The CAG thought her drones were the best tool to do this type of recon, but Ward also knew that warships had better sensor suites, and were much sturdier than the easily destroyed drones.  Something needed to be dealt with, the drones single missile launcher with five total missile compliment, and low-powered energy cannon wasn’t going to be able to put up much of a fight.

Thirty-one seconds passed and the two drones rounded the curvature of Harper’s Junction and saw nothing. The anomalous readings vanished from the scans and nothing could be seen in front of them.

“Hmmm,” the CAG leaned forward and looked into the tank like she was trying to discern its hidden secrets.

“Embers of Tomorrow is in route. She’ll have eyes on in just under three minutes,” Aggie’s CAPT informed.

“Then we’ll wait,” Ward decided. “But let’s look at that data again.”

Three minutes later they were no closer to knowing what the hell had been happening. Their closest guess was a solar flare that had happened previously was messing with the drone’s instruments. The CAG disagreed, but she wasn’t offering a better argument.

“Ember has eyes,” Ward barked at the bickering CAPTs as the destroyer came into range of the disturbances.

The more powerful sensor suite scanned the area where the anomalous reading originated and got…nothing.

“See,” the CAG’s face was full of confidence. “It was…”

A beam of energy ripped through the atmosphere and smashed into Embers of Tomorrow. The destroyer was an older model, unshielded, and the power from the energy cannon was outside the parameters of what the Commonwealth knew Harper’s Junction processed.

The force of the blast smashed Embers to the side as armor was ripped apart and flung into the void. Violent decompression ejected air, water, material, and crew from the tear in its side until the ship’s internal configuration shut off the compromised sections. Power flickered off as couplets from the main reactor melted and it went off line. Auxiliary power came on immediately, and saved the life of everyone on board, but the engines were out, and the rest of the crew was on a ticking clock to survive.

The bridge flew into a frenzy as the various sections handled the new casualty. Ward turned to the central holo-tank and saw a trio of cruisers dispatched from their makeshift anchorage to the damaged ship. The warship at the center was an upgraded battlecruiser, CWS Borodino. Ward scrolled through his PAD to find the CO’s information.

“Commander Berg,” he muttered to himself. He shot the CMDR with a familiar last name a TACCOM message containing the anomalous data and a warning to be careful. It looked like there was something there the Windsor’s on the surface didn’t want them to find in that seemingly-unimportant piece of space.

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Two Worlds – Chapter 272

Admiral Michael Ward

Location: Harper’s Junction, Star Kingdom of Windsor

 

CWS Agincourt slid into position with puffs from her positioning thrusters. The hull of the task force flag ship had stopped leaking atmosphere, and repair crews could be seen scurrying around the hull.

Admiral Ward made sure the George Bush stood between his ship and any planetary energy weapons that wanted to take a shot at him. Carrier Group Alpha spread out around Carrier Group Charlie to cover their rear and flanks. Now, the Bush’s ships to concentrate on bombarding the planet and not worry about someone sneaking up on him.

Ward wiped some sweat from his brow as he stowed his helmet on the headrest of his command chair. The holo-tank was still scrolling with damage reports, but everything was being handled by the ship’s captain. The greater strategic picture was out of his hands for the moment.

“Commander,” he opened a shipboard TACCOM channel to the marine leader. The woman’s tired face, with a bit of dried blood on her close-cropped bangs, stared back at him.

“I’ve got the first companies ready to disembark now, sir,” she replied. “Due to casualties, and the general mess the Windsor’s made onboard, our deployment plan is totally fucked.” She didn’t look at all worried about using coarse language around the ADM.

“Understood, Commander,” he gave the woman a sympathetic look. “The 942^nd looks like it’s got things handled for the moment. Land your troops with all due speed, but make sure they’re ready to fight.”

“Aye aye, sir,” she cut the line.

Ward pinched the bridge of his nose and tried to summon up a little energy. The adrenaline rush of battle was wearing off, a crash was coming, but he didn’t have time for that. This was only step one of the game plan. He pulled up the latest data on Bravo and Delta groups. Delta had been savaged by the Windsor’s. The assault carrier at the center of the formation was still making its way slowly toward Harper’s Junction, but just about all of its escort ships were limping behind it. The Windsor’s had broken off contact when Bravo came into range, and their retreat cost them some ships, but in the tally of lives and ships, the enemy came out ahead in that engagement. In the tally of the meeting the mission objectives, the Commonwealth was victorious. They just paid a big price.

Aggie’s AIs had calculated Delta, with Bravo providing cover, was nineteen hours from dropping anchor around Harper’s Junction. That meant the 942^nd was going to be handling the brunt of ground combat while Aggie’s marines got their act together and got in the fight.

<Then there is still the remaining ships to worry about,> he sighed as he got up off his chair and stretched with an audible crack of the spine.

The Windsor fleet wasn’t gone. It was regrouping in orbit around one of the nearby planets. He had a drone screen between them so they couldn’t sneak up on his forces, but he still didn’t know what they had planned. He also didn’t like the firepower they still had at their disposal.

He stepped out of his armored flag bridge and nearly slipped on a pool of blood.

“Take it easy, sir,” a marine CPL advised as he picked up a body in dragonscale armor. The marine with him picked up another body with Windsor armor. Both of the dead soldiers’ blood was intermingled at the hatch to the bridge.

Ward wasn’t one to spook easily, but he gulped involuntarily. He’d never known how close he was to the enemy boarders. He’d focused on his job, coordinating the battle, and that tunnel vision was readily apparent now.

“Good work,” he gave the CPL a pat on the shoulder and headed for his ready room. The room was pockmarked with bullet holes and more than one scorch from a plasma explosion.

<This gives me a whole new appreciation for recovery operations,> he bent over and started to sort through the stuff he could save and the stuff he’d have to trash.

 

***

 

Mark “Coop” Cooper

Location: Harper’s Junction, Star Kingdom of Windsor

 

<All those VR games and holo-movies are complete horseshit!> Coop cursed as rounds slammed into his shield for the last few meters before he put a wall between him and his enemy. The SGM was right behind him returning fire, while both used their bulk to provide cover for the unarmored Eve.

In all those movies and games, after you faced off with the big, bad boss man you would emerge to your allies already victorious over the evil bad guy’s subordinates. In reality, that was a bullshit. Coop had faced off against the Windsor mech, and come away without a scratch, but now he had to fend off the rest of the palace’s security forces with only the half-strength SRRT team as back up.

“Last mag,” the GYSGT informed as she swapped out her M3’s empty 1mm drum for a fresh one.

Coop quickly checked his own ammo gauge before checking on Eve. She’d been patched up by the GYSGT while the SGM figured out how the hell they’d get out of this hornet’s nest, but it wasn’t meant to hold. They’d controlled the bleeding and sedated her enough so the pain wasn’t too bad, but she was still ambulatory. SSG Hightower was assigned to guard her, which Coop thought was redundant since he wasn’t leaving her side.

The GYSGT slapped the magazine into her M3, popped up, and fired a burst downrange. A couple of Windsor soldiers, who’d taken the lack of fire as an opportunity, caught the brunt of the blast as they tried to creep up on the team’s position. One went down from what had to be a lucky hit, while the rest scampered for cover.

“Where we going, Sergeant Major,” Coop asked over TACCOM. He had an uncomfortable feeling like a noose was tightening around his neck. The enemy was going to pin them down and wear them down if they didn’t move.

“Our exit is a hundred and fifty meters in front of us,” the SGM announced.

Coop popped up to take a look, and only saw the palace’s exterior wall. Between them and that wall were a number of enemy troops behind cover and concealment, and they opened fire on Coop once they saw his head pop up.

“No way in hell we’re going to…” Coop began, but the SGM cut him off.

“Wait for it,” the SGM had to be looking at something on his HUD because no one else knew a thing. “Wait for it,” he repeated.

A flash of light emitted from above as railgun rounds tore through the atmosphere on a direct course for the city. Coop instinctually ducked, like any survival-oriented human would, when those duro-steel rounds smashed into the city’s shield like the hand of god. The shield flashed with energy as it absorbed and deflected the rounds from the ships in orbit, but it did succeed in providing a significant distraction, which was only compounded when the palace wall directly ahead of the team exploded.

“Sergeant Major took down the wall’s generator while inside the palace,” Sullivan informed as he jumped up with the rest of the team.

“Why didn’t he tell us?” Coop followed suit and vaulted the wall to provide covering fire so the unarmored members of their team could advance.

“He did,” Sullivan’s Buss boomed next to Coop’s as they established a firing line and started to eat away at the enemy’s positions. “You were too busy making lovey-dovey eyes at Berg to notice.”

“Well…whatever,” Coop didn’t have a comeback, and some the Windsor’s were trying to move around to flank them.

He drove them back into position with withering fire that killed at least two members of that assault element. More gunfire erupted behind the Windsor’s as resistance fighters started to pour through the breech in the walls.

<Those magnificent bastards!> Coop grinning like a kid in a candy store as the rebels fanned out to envelop the Windsor’s.

The enemy’s fire discipline started to crack as they realized they were being hit from all sides, and that was Coop’s cue to move. He half-trotted next to, half-carried Eve forward as he sprayed enemy position with his plasma-tipped rounds.

“Move right!” the SGM yelled when they were about halfway to the exit.

Coop pivoted to put his body between the enemy and Eve. They were out in the open and moving, so he was the cover. He fired where his AI told him the enemy was, and his rounds smacked into a blue barrier.

“Fuckers have an area shield!” he relayed, as he switched to his regular rounds and poured fire on the shield on full auto. The constant disruption would keep the enemy from effectively targeting the team.

“I’m set, move, Cooper!” Sullivan sent when he was ready to provide cover fire.

Coop disengaged and sprinted back toward a chunk of wall that Sullivan was using to rest his Buss on. Coop slid in next to him, but the cover wasn’t big enough for the both of them.

“Grenades and we make a break for it!” the SGM ordered. The team was only fifty meters from the exit. Bodies littered the open space, with many more belonging to the rebels than Windsor’s.  They were brave but outmatched by the enemy.

Coop cycled his barrel until the grenade chamber popped into place. He made sure a frag round was in the chamber followed by smoke.

“Fire!” the SGM was moving before he finished.

The grenades were set to a lower velocity so they would penetrate the shield. The frag grenades lobbed out of the Busses and through the energy barrier followed by the smoke. There were muffled screams as the frags detonated, and then the smoke obscured everything.

“Move!” Coop yelled as he pushed SSG Hightower forward.

The two unarmored NCOs grabbed Eve between them and ran for the exit. The LT was in the lead with the SGM covering her, Mike right on their asses, while Sullivan took up flank security, and Coop rear security. He was the last to leave the position, and the first to see the return volley. The problem was they didn’t look like any grenades he’d ever seen before.

“What the hell?” he watched as the oblong-shape arched toward their old position. Since he was nearly fifteen meters away, with a shield and armor between him and the incoming blast, he wasn’t worried, and he was even less worried about the rest of the team.

The enemy had blown their load on an old position. Coop grinned at the oversight until a red warning siren sounded in his armor. Text came up on his HUD to warn him of whatever problem his AI had detected.

<What the hell?> The text on his screen looked like a feral cat had been given LSD, starved for a week, and then allowed to send a message on a scratch post. Coop stared at it in complete confusion was a half-second.

“What is…?” Sullivan seemed to be getting the same message.

{Translate?} Coop thought through his IOR and the alien thing in his brain went to work.

If Coop would have known this would be an issue, he would have put alien default translation protocols at the top of his check list when he reformatted the GYSGT’s armor.

The deranged-cat scribbles reordered themselves into English, and Coop’s blood ran cold.

Alert: Shield Frequency Deciphered. Recommend fresh scramble.

“Do you know how to…?” Sullivan and Coop were obviously on the same wavelength, but those seconds were critical and it was already too late.

The oblong grenades that had been tossed out of the enemy’s shield, at the SRRT team’s old position, ended up being anything but harmless. The Commonwealth had nothing like them in their inventory, and only a handful of the grenades were even on Harper’s Junction. The team didn’t know this, but the grenades were only given to the Queen’s personal bodyguards, and they had a single purpose…to kill armored enemies.

Sensors in the grenade used magnetics and energy sensors to hone in on their target, so despite being thrown over a dozen meters off course, they had no problem finding their targets. Once the grenade’s AIs identified their victims, they initiated the first of their three stages. Stage one was designed to identify and defeat an enemy’s shield. The grenades had to be in the vicinity and measuring the enemy’s shield for long enough to crack the frequency before being used. So, despite being in the courtyard the entire battle since the SRRT team emerged from the palace, they were only being used now.

With the frequencies deciphered, the grenade’s computer initiated stage two. Stage two was an energy blast that was meant to break down a shield’s integrity. Traveling at the speed of light, the blasts of energy hit Coop and Sullivan before they knew what was happening. Before they could shout in surprise that their shields were down, the grenades engaged the third and final stage. A powerful graviton blast turned a hunk of duro-steel in the center of the grenade’s housing into a lance of death. The lance was launched from the grenade, on target for the two LACS, on speeds that had never before been achieved by electro-magnetic projectiles. It ignited the atmosphere as it passed through the space between the grenade’s housing and the two armored soldiers.

With their shields down, all Coop and Sullivan had was their 6cm armor between them and these armor-killing spikes.

All this happened so fast that Coop wasn’t able to follow it. However, the silicon brains of his LACS were, which was what saved his life. Like some HI, he had presets and favorites programmed into his armor. The language default wasn’t one of them, but his grav-boots engaging when in the presence of a sudden gravitational change was. He had losing a leg to a pirate’s grenade on that stupid mining facility, while saving LCDR Gold’s ass to thank for that.

So, when the graviton burst fired the armor-piercing lance at him, Coop’s presets identified the explosion and pulsed his grav-boots.

{Armor Breech!} his IOR blared inside his brain a second before overwhelming pain washed over him.

Coop screamed and didn’t even feel himself falling to the ground as his LACS dumped drugs into his system. The pain subsided to a dull throb about the time he realized he was on his back, and in the open about fifteen meters from the exit.

Sullivan was almost at the exit and he was down too.

<What the hell?> his groggy mind tried to fight through the haze of the drugs.

His training took over and he ran a suit diagnostic. His left thigh was a mess of red icons on the results. The armor had been breached, there was internal injury, and it didn’t look like he was getting up on his own anytime soon.

“Sergeant Major, I’m hit,” his voice sounded emotionless over TACCOM.

“Stay put, Sergeant, I’ll be there in one.” The SGM replied.

Coop saw the NCOIC dragged Sullivan’s LACS the last few meters to the exit while firing his Buss one handed. Plasma rounds impacted the area shield, which was still obscured with smoke. The GYSGT, Mike, and SSG Hightower were leaning into the wall’s opening and taking shots with their weapons to keep the Windsor’s head down.

The SGM got Sullivan’s LACS on the opposite side of the wall and ran to Coop. Grenades thumped out of his Buss and splattered against the shield. The enemy had tightened things up, but in doing so had obscured their own view of the battlefield. No one could see shit through that smoke. Not that Coop cared. He was looking down at his thigh and marveling at the meter-long, duro-steel spike that had impaled his leg and was sticking out the other side.

<It’s not every day you see that,> his drug-addled brain thought as the SGM grabbed him by a carrier handle at the back of his armor and started pulling him toward the exit.

The enemy was hunkered down to ride out the rest of the fight, so they didn’t take any fire as they got out of the palace. Hightower, Mike, and the GYSGT were providing security on the war-torn street while the LT was bent over Sullivan’s LACS. Coop only got a glance as he was plopped down on the opposite side of the wall, but it didn’t look good.

The other SGT had a duro-steel spike sticking out of his chest plate where his heart would normally be, and the LT’s face wasn’t a vote of confidence in his condition. Coop tried to hail his on TACCOM…nothing. He tried his IOR…nothing. He reached out to try and connect suit-to-suit with the man who’d helped cover the team’s retreat with him, but the LT held up a hand to stop him. She shook her head and looked back up at the SGM. The armored NCOIC hung his head for a second.

<Fuuuuuck,> Coop didn’t know if it was the drugs or sadness that was hitting him harder.

“We need to keep moving,” the SGM announced. There would be time to mourn later. “Cooper, can you move?”

“If you get me off my ass, I can stumble along, Sergeant Major,” Coop replied.

“If we can make it to the outskirts of the city, we should be able to keep our heads low and ride this out until the cavalry arrives.” The SGM set a waypoint on Coop’s HUD and then yanked him to his feet.

<Fine by me,> Coop thought as he limped forward. <I think I’ve fought enough for one day.>

Previous                                  Next

Two Worlds – Chapter 266

Mark “Coop” Cooper

Location: Harper’s Junction, Star Kingdom of Windsor

Coop, the SGM, and Sullivan advanced down the hallway. The other SGT and SGM led the way, moving quickly but cautiously, as they checked doors and covered their advance. Coop made sure no one snuck up and shot them in the ass. They’d taken the guards at the side entrance by surprise, but a well-prepared force with the Windsor’s level of technology would be able to put up a fight even against the three of them.

Their mission was simple: find the captured SRRT members and get them to safety while breaking important Windsor stuff in the process.

“Clear,” the SGM tried a door, stuck his head in really quickly, and found no one waiting for them. “This way.”

The team had a map of the palace from a disgruntled former employee who’d worked on the governor’s staff before the invasion and was now in the rebellion. She had good intel on the main floors, but the Windsor’s wouldn’t be keeping a bunch of captured Commonwealth soldiers in a penthouse suite. The woman knew where they needed to go, but didn’t know what they’d find when they got there.

“Twenty meters, take a right, and it is the third door on the left,” the SGM relayed as they approached the turn in the corridor. They rounded the corner and were instantly met by incoming fire.

Coop’s shield registered the hit, but by the time he turned around the SGM and Sullivan had already mowed down the two, lightly-armed Windsor’s guarding the door to their target.

The SGM tried the door and it didn’t budge. He put a solid kick into it next, and that left nothing but a boot shaped dent in the heavy material. “Breech,” he ordered, and Coop came forward with left over explosives from their sabotage missions earlier in the week.

His LACS showed him the best place to put the charges, so all he had to do is dial in the frequency detonation and backpedal to the bend in the hallway. “If they didn’t know we were here before they sure as shit will now,” he muttered to himself as the SGM nodded and he sent the detonation code.

The whole hallway rumbled and a puff of dust and debris shot out in front of them. They quickly advanced forward to the blasted open door. It led to a wide stairway leading down.

“Violence of action,” the SGM offered three words of advice as he activated his grav-boots. A soft hum filled the air as he hovered off the ground and then shot down the stairs twice as fast as an armored man could run. When he found the enemy, they wouldn’t know what hit them.

Coop shrugged, activated his own boots, and followed the NCOIC into the darkness that was methodically interrupted by pulsing, red emergency lights.

 

***

 

Admiral Michael Ward

Location: Harper’s Junction, Star Kingdom of Windsor

 

“Come on you fat bitch!” ADM Ward grabbed and pulled the side of his command chair like his feeble yanking would help the kilometer-long assault carrier to turn faster.

The engagement with the Windsor forces had quickly disintegrated into madness. The enemy didn’t follow the traditional rules of combat. They didn’t slug it out for the million-kilometer distances that was the standard naval warfare practice. A few salvos had been exchanged, but then the Windsor’s modern warships made a kamikaze turn and plunged straight toward the heart of his formation.

He didn’t have long to figure out what to do. He’d watched the same thing unfold with Carrier Group Delta. The Windsor’s had exchanged a few distanced blows to test the Commonwealth’s new capabilities before diving right into the heart of the carrier group. The RADM in charge of Delta made them pay for it, but the intense pounding that would have turned any fleet ship into wreckage a few years ago, only managed to overwhelm a small number of ships. Then the real fight was on.

As a student of naval history, Ward had images of Trafalgar flashing through his mind. Were the Windsor’s Nelson while he was the French? <No.> he swatted the thought aside. His ships weren’t constrained by wind and sail. He could maneuver freely to counter his enemy.

He watched Delta’s struggle closely for any trends or strategy. The massive battleships were holding their own, but the smaller vessels were getting pounded to star dust. There were far too many greyed-out icons on his holo-tank, and that number was sure to keep on climbing. Communications were also spotty. The distance was part of the problem as STARTNET and TACCOM were delayed, and the QE system just wasn’t prepared for the bandwidth of fleet battle communication. Also, as the Windsor’s got closer, jamming came into effect, which made it even more difficult.

As Delta’s battle dissolved into a free-for-all, Ward adapted. He broke up his carrier group further. He clustered the smaller ships around his battleships and assault carrier to create more reinforced targets. He then put the battleship captains in charge of their mini-flotillas because he knew this was about to get up close and personal. Whatever the Windsor’s knew about fighting with this new tech, he was about to learn the hard way. He’d done everything he could think of. Now it was time for the crews to fight the ships and emerge victorious.

When the Windsor’s dived further into his weapon’s envelope he let them have it. He fired tens of thousands of missiles right down their throats. He was dealing with a smaller force than Delta Group, and it showed. He broke nearly half the ships before they got into knife fight range, which in 25^th century naval warfare meant within three hundred thousand kilometers. Or, as he found out from one brutal second to the next, energy weapons range of the Windsor’s powerful cannons.

Alarms screamed as the remaining cruisers blasted cannon’s far too powerful for their class into his ships. Two battlecruisers crumbled under the blows. Just like that, over three thousand Commonwealth spacers and marines were erased from existence. Worst of all, after those cannons recharged, they did it again. A trio of cruisers just exploded, while another battlecruiser listed out of formation, dead in the water.

“All units, get behind the shielded ships!” The order came out frantic because it was. The power behind those energy cannons was something he hadn’t seen before out of battleships, much less cruisers, and there was no countermeasure to something that took less than a second to reach you. If he ordered evasive maneuvers he’d be just as up shit’s creek as Delta. The only thing to do was use his shields and mass to protect his spacers.

“I said turn you fat bitch!” he punched his armchair because some physical connection to Aggie was necessary.

“Guns, can we increase our output on our energy cannons?” he sent to the gunnery chief at the tactical station, bypassing the younger, less-experienced OIC.

“If we removed safeties and overcharged capacitors, we could get another ten percent, maybe fifteen,” there was a lot of hesitation in the man’s voice. “If we do then we run the risk of blowing out the power lines or melting the cannons themselves. We’re built for missile engagements, not this up-close blasting.” The CPO was clearly frustrated. It was his job to kill the enemy, and the enemy was proving move difficult than usual.

“When we complete the turn I want a full broadside with everything: supped-up cannons, shotgun missiles, railguns, hell, throw the fucking kitchen sink at them while you’re at it!” he snapped as he watched the Windsor ships dispersing slightly to engage his four weakened mini-groups. Specifically, one battlecruiser, two cruisers, and a couple destroyers were making a break for his assault carrier. That was the lion’s share of the enemy. They knew the assault carrier was the prize.

“Commander,” he opened a private line to the marine brigade commander. “How are you holding up?”

“I’m stuck in a tin can, surrounded by nothingness, while you squids shoot this shit out without me. How do you think I feel?” The woman on the other end sounded just a tiny bit bitter.

“Who knows, maybe…?”

“Capacitors overloaded, missiles in the tubs, and guns trained on the enemy. Distance in two hundred and eighty nine thousand kilometers and closing. We’ll be lined up for a shot in three…two…one…”

CWS Agincourt present her broadside to the enemy formation barreling through space to kill her. “Fire everything!” he yelled, and the ship shuddered as it let loose its deadly cargo.

The results were nearly instantaneous.

Both cruisers shuddered under the force of Aggie’s enhanced blows. One went careening to starboard and diving below the elliptical to get away from any more fire. The second cruiser lost power and the next second exploded. This close to the enemy, Ward could see the explosion with his own two eyes.

The battlecruiser fared better, but it was still damaged. Sensors showed air and people venting out of the largest enemy ship, but it kept on coming into the storm of missiles Aggie fired. The majority of the missiles were originally targeted on it, and some of the ones meant for the cruisers were able to reorient onto the more pressing threat.

The shotgun missiles exploded and sent duro-steel penetrators rocketing toward the battlecruisers at a percentage of the speed of light. The cone of dispersion was determined at detonation, so there weren’t any last-minute adjustments. Still, a good portion of space was filled with ballistic metal, which hit the enemy ship with tremendous force.

In front of his eyes, Ward saw the enemy ship start to come apart as its shields were overwhelmed by his cannons and missile fire. Cheers erupted around the bridge as the smaller ships started to break off.

“Send the other formations our recipe for success, and then plot a course for whoever needs our help the most.” He sat back in his chair and exhaled. The enemy destroyers were still firing, but Aggie’s shields were more than capable of taking those hits for the rest of the formation’s sake. “Guns?”

“You managed to slag half a dozen cannons, Admiral. Capacitors are rebooting, so we have at least ninety seconds before the next shots can ever charge. Give it three to five minutes before we can engage again.” It didn’t sound like much, but three to five minutes was enough time for the enemy ships to close to within a few thousand kilometers. Aggie might be able to get in a second shot before the Windsor’s rammed into her.

That was a design flaw he needed to take up with the construction crews working on building and refitting the upgraded fleet. The new power plants didn’t mean shit if you couldn’t fire the more powerful blasts.

<I’m sure the tree-things can advise on what to do.> He didn’t like aliens knowing so much about the Commonwealth fleet’s combat capabilities, but beggars couldn’t be choosers.

“Sir,” his thought was cut short by one of the EW techs.

“Spit it out lieutenant?” he wanted to make sure people followed their department’s chain of command to avoid madness on the bridge, but there was something in the young man’s tone.

“I’m getting weird readings from the debris,” the LT stated and forwarded the images to the ADM.

Ward took a close look at the sensor scan. The battlecruiser was steadily coming apart under the G’s it was pulling, but things just didn’t stop in space. The debris were continuing at their trajectory and speed and would until they met something to stop them. That wouldn’t be Aggie, she was already moving away to assist in another battle, but the battlecruiser had been adjusting to come at them when still alive, so the debris would pass within twenty-thousand kilometers. That was spitting distance.

There were some power fluctuations in the sensor data, but it wasn’t unheard of as a ship died and its integrity broke down. Power was bound to spike and drain in several places.

“Run another scan and tell me…” he didn’t get to finish his sentence.

“Engine signatures!” a petty officer yelled as new targets appeared on the holo-tank.

“What the hell,” the ADM watched as the ship’s AI ran the numbers. Whatever these things were, they were small and headed right for Aggie.

“Give me a visual and reorient railguns,” he ordered and a screen came to life showing space and the crumbling battlecruisers as a rapidly receding backdrop.

“LT what am I…” it was tough to see, but he caught a glimpse and zoomed in.

Small T-shaped ships raced away from the battlecruiser and toward his command. They triggered something in his memory, but he couldn’t quite put his finger on it.

“Cross reference against known enemy vessels,” he ordered the AI. A second later his holo-tank beeps and footage from one of the Commonwealth’s worst defeats came alive in front of him.

It was a dusty landscape, and the footage came from an infantry grunt running to a prepared fighting position. The footage was still crystal clear as the enemy ships broke through the atmosphere, sizzled with energy as land-based cannons failed to destroy them before they embedded themselves into the crust of New Lancashire.

“Concentrate fire on the enemy ships!” he ordered as realization hit him.

“Sir, capacitors are still resetting we’ve got no energy weapons at all, including point defense,” the CPO at the gunnery station had an I-told-you-so tone. “Missiles are locked and loaded, but they’re too close.

“Railguns, turn those things into scrap metal!” he ordered as the gunnery NCO shrugged.

Aggie shuddered as the railguns in range opened up on the Windsor’s troop transports. Every second counted, and the enemy pilots knew that.

“Shield fluctuations,” the EW LT informed. “They’re diverting power to their forward shields.”

Ward saw it as the railgun rounds sparked blue against the ships but didn’t penetrate. “Keep firing. They’ll have to hit us at an angle,” he drew lines on the holo tank to show the shallow angle the enemy ships would have to overtake the assault carrier and hit its hull. “Be ready to light up their flanks when they pass here.” A red line appeared on the holo and a countdown clock began ticking down next to it. The rail guns that would take the kill shots flashed green as they acknowledged receipt of their targeting designations.

Ward knew the enemy would reconfigure their shields to counter, but even a split second was enough for a round to get through and tear open those ships.

“Sir, how are they going to get through our shields?” The EW LT asked.

“They seem to think they can,” Ward wasn’t sure himself, but the enemies had more experience with shields than the Commonwealth. “Get any readings coming off those things and archive them for further investigation,” he switched circuits. “Commander, looks like your marines are going to get in this fight after all. Have them arm up and cover the areas I’m sending you now.” He transmitted a section of the ship where the Windsor’s were going to land.

“On it,” was all the CMDR said before getting to work.

Seventy-five seconds passed between identifying the enemy transports and when they reached Aggie. Twenty-two ships were identified. Only two were knocked out by the railguns firing right into their strengthened shields before they crossed the red line on the holo. The rail gunners pounded them good as they passed over sections of Aggie and had to reconfigure their shields. Fifteen more ships died in that onslaught. The five remaining ships hit Aggie’s shield and the protective barrier held for a few seconds before a violent fluctuation allowed the enemy ships through before resetting.

“Agincourt, prepare to rebel borders!” he ordered as the ship shuddered when the enemy vessels burrowed into her hull.

<Now it’s up to the marines.> He never liked handing the battle over to the ground pounders, especially when it was still happening in space.

 

***

 

Mark “Coop” Cooper

Location: Harper’s Junction, Star Kingdom of Windsor

 

Coop skated around a bend in the subterranean palace basement. He went nearly horizontal as he trained his weapon down the hallway. Flashes from the SGM’s Buss were already lighting up the area as he drove back the enemy guard detachment.

“Fuck…kill…prison…” one guard yelled out as a plasma-tipped round took him in the throat and burned through to separate his head form his body. The SGM just skated right over him.

{Magnify.} Coop brought himself up short and dropped to the ground. Skating around on the grav-boots was great, but it didn’t offer the most stable firing position.

The end of the hallway jumped forward as the Buss’ scope engaged. The remaining guards were headed for a room at the end of the hallway. Coop set his sights on the doorway knowing full well that if he missed, the guards were going to cut down Eve and the rest of the captured SRRT team.

<No pressure.> He breathed and pulled the trigger.

The round hit the guard in the shoulder and spun him around. He might not be dead but he was hurting. The only other guard that the SGM and Sullivan hadn’t killed made a beeline for the door. Coop’s next round took the man in the head. There was no question he was dead.

“Move!” Coop’s exasperated yell wasn’t needed as the SGM and Sullivan swarmed into the room. Coop ran the rest of the way feeling like an idiot for not being at the front of the assault to rescue Eve.

His armored bulk smashed into the doorframe, deforming it slightly as he pushed his way through. He ended up in what looked like a prison cafeteria, but the place didn’t matter. It was the people inside it.

Thankfully, all the guards were accounted for. The one Coop had winged was on the floor with a deadly dent in his skull. Eve and the GYSGT stood above him with dead man’s weapon in the GYSGT’s hand.

“Clear!” The SGM and Sullivan had methodically cleared the room. Coop turned his back to them and looked back the way they’d come. “Hallway clear,” he called back.

“Coop?” the voice was weak, but he’d know it anywhere.

He knew he was supposed to be watching the hallway, but he couldn’t not turn to her.

“Hey boss-lady,” he replied with barely restrained anger.

She looked like shit. She looked like she’d been tortured, so he was really upset the guard wasn’t still alive because he needed to beat someone to death.

She heard the tone and frowned. “Nothing a little R&R can’t fix,” she tried to sound relaxed, but it didn’t help.

“You can kiss and make up later,” the GYSGT interjected herself into the conversation. “Grab us weapons so we can get the hell out of here.”

“Glad you’re alive, Gunney,” Coop added as an afterthought despite the sense of relief that flooded through him at seeing her again.

“Is that my armor?” she stopped what she was doing and looked closely at him.

“Ummm nope,” he made a quick exit to grab the requested weapons.

“Sergeant Major, why the fuck is Cooper in my armor?” the GYSGT screamed as he got out of her line of sight.

It didn’t matter if they were in the middle of enemy territory without a concrete evac plan. An HI trooper didn’t like someone else fucking with their armor.

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