by M. D. Cooper
“OK, Marauders.” Rika struggled to keep her expression stony. “Let’s do this.”
They filed out of Rika’s office. At the first intersection, where Barne and Leslie broke off for their drop bays, Rika and Chase paused, staring intently into one another’s eyes.
“Good luck, Rika,” Chase said. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow,” Rika nodded.
They parted ways, each trying to focus on the mission ahead, but failing miserably.
INSERTION
STELLAR DATE: 08.19.8949 (Adjusted Gregorian)
LOCATION: Golden Lark
REGION: Approaching Armens, Hercules System, Septhian Alliance
Rika settled into her seat at the front of the dropship, and clipped the harness onto her hard points. She looked at the mechs seated on the benches, First Platoon’s squad one, and nodded to them.
“Ready to kick the door in, Marauders?”
“Rika’s Marauders!” Sergeant Aaron called out, generating a Roo-ah! from the rest of the mechs.
Rika held back a groan and glanced at Kelly, who sat with her helmet on her lap, grinning at Rika. Kelly tapped her chest, and Rika saw that Team Hammerfall’s logo was still there, but below it was the Marauder’s crest.
Rika gave Kelly a thumbs-up and shared a crazy smile with her old friend.
Kelly said privately.
Rika nodded, smiling at the memory.
Rika felt the same way, but knew that Silva needed to be with her daughter, and her daughter needed to be with her mother.
Rika laughed, and then Flight Leader Heather’s voice came over the Link.
Rika had already given her speeches. Everyone had their orders, and Niki had trained the AIs on the breach protocols. Once they dropped, communication would be minimal. From here on out, she was a soldier in a squad, focused on their one objective.
Good luck, everyone.
The light at the front of the dropship went from red to green, and they fell through the deck and out of the ship.
“Goooood afternoon, squad one. We’d like to thank you for flying Air Shit-Storm; I’m your captain, Vargo Klen. The temperature outside is a chilly 120 degrees kelvin, but we expect to enter a warm band soon, where we’ll see things creep up to a nice, comfy 320 degrees.
“If you activate your external feeds, you can see a lovely column of particulate ice off our starboard bow, and to port, it’s raining ammonia. The inside of our grav shield is pressurized, so that scraping noise you hear is the planet’s frozen atmosphere dragging along our shields.”
“Klen!” Crunch hollered up to the cockpit. “Is that supposed to be comforting?”
“Why, thank you for the audience interaction. And yes, it is—at least when you consider that there’s no planetary surface below us. If we experience any failures, we’ll be crushed long before we fall the thirty-five thousand kilometers to Armens’ liquid metallic hydrogen core.”
Crunch looked like he was going to say something else, but only shook his head and sat back.
Klen continued his speech. “Our current flight path and cruising speed has us looking at a nine-hour and thirty-seven-minute flight time, so may I suggest our inflight entertainment system otherwise known as staring at your teammates’ helmets?”
“Man, someone needs to at least get us some good vids on this ride,” Private Kerry groused. “If I have to stare at Ben’s head this whole trip, it’s gonna crack my viewscreen.”
“Stow it,” Sergeant Aaron grunted. “I don’t want to have to listen to your shit the whole ride out.”
“Sorry, Sarge,” Kerry said, giving a thumbs-up. “Can I talk on the way back?”
“Maybe. We’ll see how many Niets you kill.”
The mechs spoke little for the rest of the ride, though Rika suspected that they were still chatting over the Link. Some would be reviewing the mission details and ship layout, others would be thinking and talking about anything but the mission.
The way the dropship bucked and rattled in the gas giant’s winds, she bet a lot of the mechs were pretending to be anywhere else.
Whatever worked was fine by her. So long as when the dropship latched on, everyone got out by the numbers and covered their corners.
Rika had a visual of their progress overlaid on her vision. She kept an eye on it, as the thirty-four dropships slowly crept toward the Nietzschean ships at what felt like an agonizingly slow pace.
The dropships were successfully maintaining their formation, pinging one another periodically on a shifting ULF band. Rika breathed a sigh of relief, as the second check-in passed, and the ships were all still in formation.
Other than a rogue lightning strike, the initial entry was the most dangerous part of the journey. If they’d made it this far, they’d make it to the Niets, no problem.
Then the real fun would begin.
Rika was with the team assigned to the enemy cruiser dubbed ‘Big Daddy’. It was larger than the others, nearly four kilometers long, and three whole squads were assigned to it.
Squad one, present in the dropship with Rika, would breach an airlock near the rear of the ship, while squads two and three would land amidships, and break up by fireteams once inside to harass the enemy and disrupt any assistance that may be sent back to engineering.
Rika lost track of time—deliberately keeping her eyes from the countdown. It seemed to work, because when Klen announced that they were on their final descent to the Nietzschean ships’ altitude, it took her by surprise.
The message came from Heather’s dropship that she’d sent out the signal to the SAF; a minute later, live scan data began to flow in from orbiting military satellites.
The Niets would detect the scan, but Rika would bet her life they wouldn’t expect what was coming next.
“We’re seven hundred kilometers and closing,” Klen announced. “Expect some turbulence as we pass through the enemy’s shield, and please make sure you take all your weapons with you and kick some ever-lovin’ Nietzschean ass!”
A chorus of shouts met Klen’s proclamation, and Rika pulled up the view from the nose of the dropship, hoping for a visual of the Nietzschean cruiser.
Unfortunately, all she could see were the dark clouds surrounding them, punctuated by periodic flashes of lightning.
Then the enemy cruiser pushed through the clouds, and the dropship spun and fired its engines, lurching, and jostling the mechs about.
“Mind the bump,” Klen cautioned. “We’ve just passed through their shield. Bringing us in toward our landing site.”
Rika could barely see a thing on optical, but on IR, the ship glowed brightly against the dull red of the surrounding clouds.
“Damn, that sucker’s hot,” Klen commented, breaking out of his pilot’s drawl for once. “They’ll have to rise up to higher altitudes soon—seems like they can’t disperse enough heat down here.”
“We’ll see if we can’t help them with that,” Rika replied. “I hear space is pretty cool.”
“Too cool—well,
too lacking in matter to transfer energy to. When you guys bring those ships up, you should try to do it slowly, with the cooling vanes deployed all the way.”
“I have a visual on the other two ships, they’re latching on,” Klen called back. “We’re touching down in three, two, one.”
The pilot’s statement was punctuated by a dull thud, and then the rear hatch on the dropship opened, mechs rushing into the darkness without hesitation.
Rika was last out, and she felt a wave push her upward, off the ship, a moment before her maglocks kicked in and pulled her back down.
A burst of beamfire came from a nearby point defense cannon, splashing against the dropship’s shields.
Ben and Al—who had both been with Rika that fateful night when they defeated the Politica—were joined by Harris and Kim. They each took aim, stepped through the dropship’s shield, and fired in unison.
Aaron nodded with satisfaction.
The airlock was five meters from where Klen had set the dropship down, and one-two set to their task, planting a pair of shaped charges on either side of the door’s center seam.
Rika’s external pickups detected a high-pitched whistle, and she realized it was the planet’s atmosphere, pushing into the ship.
That’s a change. Hope they like hydrogen.
Crunch and Shoshin dropped down into the airlock to attach explosives on the inner door, as fireteam one-one took out another surface turret to Rika’s right.
Rika tried to reach out to the dropships assaulting the other ships and found that it was as they’d suspected. With the planet’s interference, and the Nietzschean ships’ shields, the assault teams couldn’t communicate with one another.
She did connect with squads two and three; both were already moving into the ship and had pulled some rudimentary data from its network. Foremost of which was that the ship they were attacking was the Fury Lance. Rika was tempted to still think of it as the Big Daddy, but updated the combat net with the correct name to avoid confusion.
Another explosion shuddered through the planet’s thick atmosphere, and she saw its cloudy air rush into the ship. The lock was breached.
Fireteams two and three formed up around the airlock while fireteam four held back, just in case anything untoward happened.
Two tiny probes flew out of Kelly’s back and dropped down through the airlock. The outer doors had been smashed inward, and the inner seal—a solid disk that rolled into place—was folded over at the middle, just barely making enough room for the AM-3s in the squad.
Rika was glad that she didn’t have to worry about getting a K1R through the ship. The Van wouldn’t fit through this airlock, even if they’d opened it without explosives.
Kelly’s probes flew into the passageway beyond the entrance, and noted likely locations of auto turrets—though why they hadn’t deployed was curious.
The passageway ended in a T, and the probes split up, each travelling to the next intersections and stopping to keep an eye on all approaches.
The rest of the fireteam followed, and then Aaron leapt in after them.
Rika deployed one of her own probes to keep an eye on the fireteam from the rear. She pulled up feeds from second and squad three, which were relayed from their dropships to Klen’s, and then to her.
The other squads had already met resistance, but in the form of unarmored crew, barely even worth reporting.
Rika considered the possibilities.
Rika nodded absently as she watched third and fourth fireteams slip into the airlock. She looked to her right where one-one was ranging across the ship’s hull, destroying surface cannons—most before they even came online.
Rika looked up at the dark clouds surrounding the Fury Lance. Though two atmospheres of pressure had seeped through the ship’s shields, there was a lot more out there.
Not to mention winds that screamed like howling banshees. Crazy as it sounded, she looked forward to the refuge of an enemy starship.
Rika set the feeds from her squad on the left side of her vision, and the feeds from the other two squads along the right side and bottom. Fifty-six layered squares surrounded the view before her, and Rika set combat detection alerts on them.
Satisfied that she could watch the entire breach with minimal obstruction to what lay around her, Rika jumped into the airlock and joined her Marauders in the storming of the Fury Lance.
THE FURY LANCE
STELLAR DATE: 08.19.8949 (Adjusted Gregorian)
LOCATION: The Fury Lance
REGION: Within Armens, Hercules System, Septhian Alliance
Kelly was on point, with Crunch and Shoshin covering her six. She’d killed a dozen Niets so far; four of them had been unarmored, and she’d dispatched them without a second thought.
On closer inspection, two of those didn’t even have weapons, but she wasn’t going to wait for them to fire at her to see if they had malicious intent.
The only good Niet was a dead Niet.
Her fireteam was on a direct route to the network access point that Niki needed to reach, while the others were taking parallel passages, on the lookout for flanking maneuvers from the enemy.
Kelly’s probes rounded a corner ahead and caught a view of several Niets in powered armor—a moment later, the feed went dead.
Crunch eased up to the corner, glanced back at Shoshin, and raised his KE-72, toggling the grenade launcher.
He fired a trio of grenades that bounced off the wall and disappeared around the corner, at the same moment that three came back.
Kelly had a moment of confusion, wondering how the Niets had kicked the ‘nades back so fast, before she realized they had used the exact same tactic at the same
time.
Crunch screamed something and dove to the side as the grenades detonated. The force of the explosion picked Kelly up and threw her back to the last intersection they’d passed.
She scrambled to her feet, sending out more probes while cycling her vision to see through the fire and smoke that filled the corridor.
She made out the shapes of Crunch and Shoshin and rushed toward them, but Crunch waved her off as he struggled to his feet.
Kelly nodded and walked past, JE-87 in her right hand, angling her GNR-40E on her left arm to get a clear shot at anyone who showed a body part around the corner.
She spared a glance at Shoshin as she passed him. He looked OK, though his faceplate was cracked, and the ablative plating on his right side was almost entirely gone. Poor guy was having the worst luck, lately.
Focus, Kelly!
She didn’t want to waste a probe, in case their EM source was still functional. Instead, she drew a deep breath and then leapt across the intersection, firing at any shapes she could discern through the smoke.
Something moved on the left side of the passage, and it got a trio of projectile rounds from her GNR. Another shape got a burst from her JE-87, and then another burst from her GNR hit a third shape.
She landed and ducked behind the bulkhead, waiting for return fire, but none came.
Movement to her right caught Kelly’s attention, and she nodded to Crunch and Shoshin as they eased up to the intersection. Crunch had a slight limp, and she hoped it wasn’t enough to slow him down.
Crunch was an RR-3, and unlike earlier RR models, the 3s had leg stubs like SMIs—which meant they could suffer injury to their thighs and hips. Unlike Shoshin, who no longer possessed organic limbs.
An electron beam streaked down the corridor and struck something behind Kelly. She spun around to see a Niet in heavy armor fall to the deck, his neck half burned away.
