by M. D. Cooper
* * * * *
Alison fired a trio of rounds at one turret with her GNR, while lobbing a thermite burn-stick at the other. Her aim was true, and she raced across the rooftop, watching with her three-sixty vision as the thermite burned away half of one turret. The other continued to track her, spraying rounds in her wake and finally caught up to her, rounds slamming into her armor and the rooftop around her. One caught the back of her right knee, and the joint jammed.
Motherfucker! Alison thought, twisting midrun to fire her GNR’s electron beam at the defense system.
It was a hair too close for such a shot, but Alison wasn’t ready to see how much more of a pounding her armor could take.
The bolt of lightning lanced out and burned away the top of the turret; it must have hit a magazine, because the automated weapon exploded, flinging shrapnel all around her. She stumbled as a chunk of metal hit her, then she resumed her limping run toward the bulge that covered the CIC’s main room.
As luck would have it, there were angled windows along the perimeter of the bulge.
Probably providing light and visual corroboration of incoming flight paths.
“Handy for me,” Alison whispered as she swapped her GNR back to depleted uranium rounds, and fired one rod and then another at either side of a window’s frame.
The reinforced glass held, but she prayed her rounds had bent the frame enough.
Five seconds later, she crashed into the window, and the entire assembly tore free and fell into the spaceport’s central command room.
Screams sounded around her, and Alison took rapid stock of her situation as she rolled to her feet: there were seven people in the room, two were armored soldiers, and the other five were only wearing light combat gear. One bore a colonel’s insignia, two were captains, and the couple were chiefs.
Alison wasted no time, firing half a clip of projectile rounds at one of the soldiers, the shots tearing a gaping hole in his right hip and up into his abdomen, while she lobbed a pair of burn-sticks at the other, turning the woman into a shrieking effigy.
Localized fire suppression systems kicked on and put out the burning soldier, filling the room with a white haze. Alison used the distraction to draw her PR-109, and fired three rounds, one into the head of each of the officers.
Eleven seconds after she’d smashed her way into the room, Alison limped over to the pair of chiefs, a gun leveled at each.
“I want the location of every battery in Memphis in twenty seconds, or I start tearing your limbs off.”
* * * * *
“I’ve got joy!” Chief Ona cried out, half leaping out of her seat as she thrust a fist in the air.
“Count?” Heather demanded as the chief began updating the targeting data.
“Four more than I’d estimated; I had a third of their placements off. Give me thirty seconds to get all the rail launchers realigned.”
“You got it.” Heather nodded in relief, and watched Ferris’s destroyer begin its braking burn on the other holotank.
THE DROP
STELLAR DATE: 10.12.8949 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Burger Street, Memphis, Kansas
REGION: Blue Ridge System, Old Genevia, Nietzschean Empire
Chase closed the connection with Smalls, and watched the skies, a smile gracing his lips as he saw the streaking light from the white-hot tungsten rounds appear in the sky.
No sooner had he spotted them than the rail-fired rods slammed into the ground, fire and fountains of debris rising into the air all around the city, smoke and ash following after.
Chase watched the remaining bright light streaking through the sky, the glow around the Undaunted’s shields now outshining the local star—called ‘Blue Sky’ by the locals—as the destroyer dipped down into the planet’s ionosphere.
The Marauders had never dropped a ship with stasis shields into atmosphere before, but the ISF had told them this would happen if they did. The stasis shields were annihilating most of the atoms they came into contact with—not to mention the fire striking the ship from the Nietzschean AA emplacements.
The ship only carried two B’muths, and it was on Ferris to make sure they dropped intact; that meant he’d come in low and brake hard at the last minute. Chase gauged the Undaunted’s angle of descent and was surprised to see that the ship would come to within only a few hundred meters of the ground.
Whole city is gonna need to scrub down from this fallout.
Not only that, but, though the sound from the ship’s passage was still far behind the light heralding its arrival, Chase knew when it reached them, it would probably blow out half the windows in Memphis.
As Chase watched, the Undaunted shifted to the south and rotated. The destroyer fired its engines at what had to be a fifty-g burn, splashing flames and plasma across what Chase knew to be an uninhabited stretch of the planet’s surface.
Chase saw the cruiser’s engines cut out, and then a strange visual distortion swept across the area the craft’s engine wash had burned. Then the Undaunted flashed overhead, and two objects dropped from its rear bay.
At that exact moment, the sound of the starship’s descent into the atmosphere finally reached their position, and Chase felt the ground shudder as wave after wave of thunder crashed over them.
Boosters on the undersides of the B’muths fired, slewing the squat, four-legged walkers erratically as enemy smallbore anti-air fire streaked through the sky all around them. Then the twelve-meter-tall walker destined for Chase’s side of First Platoon’s formation slammed into the surface three hundred meters further up Burger Street.
“Clever bugger,” Crunch muttered. “See that? He used the grav ramscoop to make a pressure wave that put out the fires from his engines.”
“Ferris is one of a kind,” Chase agreed with a nod as he looked across the street to see Mitch emerge from the closest storefront.
Crunch snorted.
Lauren chuckled.
Chase was only half listening as he checked in with the other squads, ensuring that the second B’muth had dropped safely.
Chris barked a laugh.
* * * * *
“Positive confirmation on all primary targets from Potter,” Chief Ona announced. “Firing on secondary targets in fifteen seconds.”
“Good work, Ona,” Heather said, a near-giddy smile splitting her lips. “Gotta say, raining starfire down on Niets is the highlight of my week.”
“It never gets old, ma’am,” Ona agreed as her hands danced over her holodisplay, acknowledging the three NSAIs’ calculations, and approving the firing solution.
“I have the new low-orbit surveillance satellites in position,” Chief Garth announced. “Getting…what the heck!”
Heather saw it as well. There was a mass of heat signatures moving north from the spaceport to First Platoon’s position.
Garth zoomed in and overlaid optics. “Gotta be almost a thousand Niets,” he said, twisting in his seat to face Heather.
“Looks like they peeled a battalion off from the spaceport,” she said.
“Firing on secondary targets,” Ona announced, and a series of vibrations ran through the ship as the rails let fire once more.
“Ona, get the targeting NSAIs to work up solutions for that battalion. Most of the Niets are taking Terrace Avenue. Let’s slow them down.”
“With pleasure, ma’am.”
Chase chuckled before responding.
Another laugh came across the Link from Chase.
Smalls didn’t like the idea of a full-scale bombardment of the city, but they couldn’t take down Nietzschea using kid gloves. Innocent blood is going to get spilled no matter what. Then again, we were all innocent once.
ON THE WALL
STELLAR DATE: 10.12.8949 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Nietzschean System Command, Memphis, Kansas
REGION: Blue Ridge System, Old Genevia, Nietzschean Empire
Gideon was on the far side of the room from the windows, reviewing intel from the analysts two floors down, when General Decoteau’s loud string of curses grabbed his attention.
He was about to chastise the man, when a glowing light on the horizon caught his attention.
“What is it!?” he hollered while rushing to the window.
It was Sofia who answered first. “The enemy…they took the CIC at the spaceport, sir.”
“What does that have to do with whatever’s incoming?”
“They know where our anti-air is,” Decoteau replied. “We’re already tracking incoming rounds.”
The general tapped the window, and an image came up between them. Gideon recognized the Fury Lance.
A Nietzschean Harmon-Class Dreadnought. It still rankled that these mercenaries had such a vessel.
Those thoughts were short-lived, as the dreadnought realigned itself in its geostationary orbit, and began to fire kinetic salvos from its railguns. Ground-based tracking triangulated the incoming rounds, and placed energy estimates on the screen: one-ton slugs moving at over thirty kilometers per second. Each shot would hit with the energy of a one-hundred-ton nuclear bomb.
“Analysis shows them to be shield crackers,” Colonel Sofia commented quietly. “They’ll punch right through the grav shields around our AA emplacements.”
“We’re sure that’s what they’re firing at?” Gideon asked.
Sofia nodded. “Hard to be completely certain until they’re within a hundred klicks—but what else could it be? If they wanted to hit us here, they didn’t need to take the CIC at the spaceport. The locals would have told them our location without hesitation.”
“Why bother?” Gideon mused. “They have those shields, our starships and orbital defenses couldn’t touch them.”
Sofia gestured to the light that was growing increasingly bright on the horizon. “They’re dropping something. Probably heavy armor to reinforce their flanks.”
Gideon clenched his fists, struggling to keep his rage at bay. To be outclassed and outgunned by Genevian mercenaries was unacceptable. It will be a cold day in the core of Blue Ridge’s star before I am defeated by a rag-tag group such as this.
“Decoteau,” he turned to face the general. “You have armor, do you not?”
He grimaced. “I have two platoons with mobile heavy-gun platforms in the city; the rest of my heavy armor was pulled up for the attack on the Theban Alliance. There’s a company on the far side of Kansas with the new hover gun-skiffs, but it’ll take time to get them here.”
Gideon looked at the holodisplay to his left, which portrayed the possible armor the Marauders could be dropping with their inbound ship. At the top of the list was a pair of the Genevian Behemoth walkers.
“Yes, get them here as fast as possible. We’re going to need it.”
The admiral turned from the window, and paced across the room atop the MacWood Building. Two dozen aides were present, from master sergeants and chiefs to a bevy of captains and majors. They all stood still, watching the display of the incoming kinetic rounds, and the approaching destroyer that would be dropping off more ground pounders of some sort or another.
“Well!” he hollered at the assembled men and women. “Do you have any fucking clue what we should do? Or should I just send you out to the fro
nt lines? If I have to come up with everything myself, what do I need you for?”
Colonel Sofia turned from the windows, her expression settling into a deep scowl. “It’s time for scorched earth, Admiral. These are Genevians, attempting to liberate a Genevian city. We shell a part of Memphis, and warn them to stop their advance or we continue. There are billions of people on Kansas, and we hold them in our hands.”
Gideon’s jaw clenched, and he glared at Sofia with undisguised disgust. Scorched earth meant they’d lost, and he wasn’t prepared to concede that yet.
Behind her, streaks of light fell from the heavens, and slammed into the Nietzschean anti-air emplacements spread throughout the city. The building shook, and plumes of fire, ash, and smoke rose into the air.
Every eye in the room was on Gideon, and he felt a small pang of fear.
“OK. Do it. Take out a residential district with the guns on the north end of the city. Then send a broadcast to the entire city as well as the enemy: the Marauders halt, or we start wiping out the civilian population across the globe.”
TAKE THE FIGHT
STELLAR DATE: 10.12.8949 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: 300m of Bridge Street, 46th Ave, Memphis, Kansas
REGION: Blue Ridge System, Old Genevia, Nietzschean Empire
Rika and her team were approaching the front when the second salvo of kinetic rounds from the Fury Lance rained down on the city. They struck targets all around Memphis, but most notably, they hit the four cannons on the far side of Bridge Street.
As she reached the company’s forward command post—occupied by Lieutenant Karen and First Sergeant Tex—another full salvo fell, striking targets further south in the city.
