by Isaac Stone
The tent the officers were inside was slightly better than our own day tent, but not by much. I walked in behind the sergeant and saw a table unfolded with several computers on it under operation by some kind of aides in uniforms. As they typed away, Captain Daphne, and some other officer with United Nations emblems on his shoulders sat behind the table and looked over some forms. They barely registered our arrival. Only when Zhuang announced who were did they look up at us.
“So this is the Claymore we’ve heard so much about,” the UN officer spoke in a thick accent that I had difficulty placing, maybe South Africa. “Your sergeant seems impressed with you.” My surprise must have registered in his eyes as he grinned.
“You’re promoted to lance corporal,” the dino rider said to me. “You did better than any other of that rabble out there in holding the line. Sergeant Zhuang recommended you and we agree. I didn’t see a much of what went on the ground, but your quick action saved my dinosaur several times.”
I didn’t know if I should thank her or fall to my knees. Here was one of the most striking women I’d ever met complimenting me on staying alive. I prayed my boner didn’t show through my pants. She glanced down and smiled. It did.
I was dismissed with the sergeant and we headed back to the tents where Raptor Nine, Twelve, and Four were situated. I couldn’t for the life of me fathom why I’d been promoted, and the only thing I could figure was that either I was better in combat than I realized or the men around me really sucked at it. We had sustained roughly forty percent casualties in a single engagement, and though we’d broken the advance of the enemy that was still a hard pill to swallow.
“It just got a whole lot harder, kid,” he smiled at me. “Not only do you have to keep your ass alive from now on, but you have to make sure that worthless bunch with you stays alive. I’m counting on you to make certain they all stay alive, and after today we both know that you’ll fail in this. As such I’m going to become your worst nightmare, but maybe, just maybe, we’ll lose less than we might otherwise.” He turned around and glared at me to make sure I go the point.
I got many pats on the back from the other guys later that day at the mess tent. We usually didn’t have a chance to eat very much at that mess. We were lined up from short to tall and, since I was one of the tall guys, I ate last. I learned to stuff food in my pockets because they only allowed us so much time to eat.
It was grinding work, those next few weeks, as we set about wiping the Invaders off the face of our home planet. The longer we were there the more important I realized our initial battle had been, it was all about stopping the advance and being seen doing it by both the enemy and the rest of humanity. I guess seeing dinosaurs kicking ass was a serious morale booster for the regular folks out there.
Two days after we killed the first group of kaiju, the full force of Battle Force Jurassic landed with forty dinosaurs in armor and proceeded to destroy everything in their path. This time the Invaders were licking their wounds and didn’t expect a full frontal and rear attack from the humans. It was one of the worst battles of the war and we had to watch the videos taken from the carnage. Raptor Nine missed out on most of that fighting as we waited for fresh recruits to replenish our numbers, not to mention the fact that Terry was pretty banged up and needed time to heal. So we cleaned our weapons, nursed our wounds, and let the other guys get in the ring while we watched from the sidelines. You might think it exciting to watch armored dinosaurs slug it out with kaiju when they weren’t sending off missiles from the weapon array, but it was pretty disgusting to view. I saw a kaiju blown apart by a combined hit of explosives and plasma, and I watched several of our own dino mechs get shredded by gunfire and the claws and teeth of the enemy. When you’re talking a walking mountain of meat, the results are nauseating. I don’t know how they managed to clean up the carcasses of all those beasts and I’m glad I wasn’t involved in it.
FIFTEEN
Later that week, we found out the Invaders were on White Skull. It wasn’t a bad place as far as the colony worlds went. White Skull was settled by some people who spoke a strange language, and their word for the planet translated to something other than what everyone else it. However, the name stuck and ended up as “White Skull” on the star maps. It certainly sounds cooler than Planet 1626BU.
No one knew how the enemy arrived as fast as and without warning as they did, especially considering that with the landing party on Earth wiped out the Kaiju Armada was still being held back, barely, on the Black Road. One day White Skull was a peaceful place, the next it was total war. The terraforming was completed last year with a few settlers from some obscure religious group allowed to settle. Two days before we had the news, Solar Force Command intercepted a message from their quadrant begging for help from anyone who would listen. The Invaders appeared unexpectedly and killed everyone they could find. It was a massacre in progress.
It took a long time for the Force to figure out how they arrived undetected. They discovered the Invaders had access to another form of technology that allowed them to open a jump hole anywhere they wanted to put it. Earth would’ve been the obvious choice, but the Invaders were smart enough to test it at some remote location with a small population. They could kill the settlers without much trouble.
The Invaders landed an entire contingent of kaiju first. They proceeded to destroy the fields the settlers needed to grow food and then turned their attention to the small shacks where the humans lived. The operation was supposed to be quick and over with before the settlers could send out a distress signal. They almost had them, but there was one transmitter operator the Invaders didn’t know about. They eventually found him, killed him, and destroyed his transmitter too, but not before, he was able to get the signal out.
By time the signal was picked up across space, the Force realized the Invaders had enough time to lock up White Skull and use it as a forward operations base. A scout ship was dispatched to the planet and came back with even more bad news. Not only did they control the entire planet, but the Invaders were about to assemble another invasion force, presumably to strike deep in to human territory on the opposite side of the galaxy from the frontlines of the Milky Way. Solar Force could hold their own in space battles against the Invaders, but other than Battle Force Jurassic humanity’s ground game was just no match for the Invaders and their kaiju war machines. With their new transpace technology, they could appear just about any place they desired. In short, the war had transformed into a complete shitshow in the span of about two weeks.
I was cleaning my plasma rifle when the word came about White Skull, and since then I’d kept cleaning it, almost obsessively. I knew we were about to be in the thick of it.
“You think we’ll be sent to White Skull?” Hans asked me that night at mess. The planet was located in a place that was difficult to reach. The odds on a safe return weren’t good, so I had some thoughts about the likelihood that they’d send anyone but us.
“I don’t know,” I told him. “With those bastards popping up all over the place, I’m sure we’ll have our chance to kill plenty of them.” I went back to the indiscernible junk I was expected to eat that day.
“I want to kill a kaiju,” Hans said to me for the four hundredth time. “I want the trophy.”
“Where would you keep it?” I asked him. “Even if they let you take the head home, it’s the size of a truck. How would you get it mounted?” I wanted to see how he’d respond to logic. My expectations were low.
“I just want a claw then maybe,” He said. “That would be cool enough. I could send it to my mom and she’d find someone to mount it. I could show everyone in the neighborhood I had a dragon claw from one I killed myself.”
I wanted to tell him a dragon and a kaiju were two different things, but decided it wasn’t worth the effort. Why not let Hans enjoy his delusion? We still had plenty of fighting to do and the guy had good battle sense. Too bad he couldn’t keep what was inside his head to himself.
Later
I spent some time with a beer one of the guys had found in an abandoned building in one hand in the modest privacy of my tent and thought about it. This was about as close to a suicide mission as I could imagine, which is why I had no doubt that I’d be on my way there soon, but there was an upside to it. If we successfully took out the Invaders before they could strike again, we stood a good chance of finding out how they made the jump holes on their own.
The smart money said those jump point generators were created by a more advanced civilization and had been scavenged by the Invaders. Why else would they simply not just show up on Earth in full force and wipe us out? There was a lot about the Invaders that we were starting to notice now that we weren’t so busy getting our asses kicked by them. Sadly we found more questions than answers.
It didn’t help that no one had ever captured an Invader they could interrogate. If the suits weren’t detonated by remote, the stalkers and kaiju died before they could get them to a medic or mechanic, whichever seemed more appropriate. There were plenty of bodies to examine, but everyone was so similar in cause of death it was too difficult to find out how they died. I heard later they seemed to die in a plethora of different ways, but always from a different infection or incompatibility with the atmosphere. The Invader soldiers seemed to be augmented with individual specifications for the order, like the kaiju handlers, the stalkers, and the elite stalkers, even the snipers had bio-modifications.
The order came the next morning, and before I even read the message I knew we were going to White Skull. There was a rumor circulating that no one expected the first wave of dinosaur or marines on Earth to be as effective as it was. I heard they were stunned when a regiment made of prison convicts and rejects were able to turn the assault of an Invader landing party where the Solar Force had been so soundly defeated. The original plan was to watch us get slaughtered and then try to learn from our messy demise. Soon everyone had started whispering that the whole dino mech thing was just a publicity stunt. I don’t put much stock in rumors myself, but it made a kind of twisted sense.
Still I wasn’t about to let go of the penal legion payout, or at least the promise of it. In five years I’d have my freedom and the respect it would earn me from my fellow humans, I could do some farming on one of the retirement worlds just like they said. Maybe pick me up a wife or two from one of those polyamorous worlds and raise a whole horde of little ankle biters. I leaned back in the canvas chair I was seated in and thought it sounded pretty nice. My only challenge would be going from point A to point B. I took a sip of the beer I had poured and thought about it some more. Yes, once you thought about the possible gains from this little assault, it outweighed the minuses. Michael Claymore ain’t scared of no alien invaders, no sir.
SIXTEEN
I found Sergeant Zhuang outside his tent talking to three other men of similar station. As we were trained, I stopped and let him finish talking to the other men. A few of them smirked at me before they left. It was strange how my whole attitude changed toward authority while I was in the Stompers. Up until then the only authority I knew was my mother and she wasn’t around that much. The other kids in the family did as we pleased, even though there wasn’t much to do besides cause trouble. The huge shelter we lived at was in the process of falling apart and no one seemed to care. Some of us made a little money digging out the brass we could find from around old factories, but it was dangerous, as you never knew what you might uncover. If anyone had ever showed up to tell me to stop, we would have told them to frak off, even if it was an old chemical plant.
“Yeah?” Zhuang said to me when he turned in my direction. “You need something?” He had the “make it quick” look on his face.
“You sent for me sir,” I reminded him.
“Right! About that,” he said, as if only now recalling why he wanted me there, “We are going to White Skull, as I’m sure you’ve guessed.”
“Battle Force Jurassic makes the most sense,” I agreed, and then added, “We hit hard and we are expendable.”
He grinned with his white teeth and seemed amused. “Self-awareness is a virtue,” he nodded. “Just as well, because I’ve just now volunteered Raptor Nine for a special task.”
“How special?” I asked. I’d learned to say as little as possible after basic training.
“Commands want someone to scout ahead and hit the Invaders before the main Jurassic Force makes planetfall,” he explained. “I want you and a nine man squad to secure a landing zone, then we’ll drop Terry and the rest of Raptor Nine once you give us the all clear.”
“Sure, “I told him. “Give me Hans and Hamid for starters.”
“You have some fascination with the same letter of the alphabet?” he asked me. “I thought you couldn’t stand Hans, nobody can. You absolutely sure you want those him?”
“No question about it,” I replied to him. “Hans never gives up and had my back all through the Albany campaign. Hamid was with me from the basic onwards. If I have to take a suicide mission, I want to be with the men I trust the most.”
“Smart decision, Claymore,” he said to me and used the name I couldn’t stand. “I’ll fill you in on the details later. You better go tell your brothers in arms they get the glory of being the first ones in.” He turned and walked back in his tent.
I went and found Hans. He seemed to be sure he’d get his dinosaur this time.
SEVENTEEN
The ten of us were sent down in some kind of single-use capsule. I don’t understand the engineering part, but they told me in advance it was similar to the first capsules used by the men who ventured out of the atmosphere of Earth hundreds of years ago. It kept us safe inside a stasis chamber and when it struck the surface of White Skull, we never felt the impact. I remember waking up to the sight of lights flashing on the inside and an open hatch.
Hamid, Hans, Willy, and I put our gear on and were outside the capsule in three minutes, followed closely by the rest of the unit. We had to climb over all the dirt it pushed up, but it came down in a jungle where the Force decided the enemy didn’t have enough troops around to look for it. They bet their detection systems would indicate a meteor had struck the surface of the planet and leave it alone. Later I found out we only had a fifty percent survival chance when the capsule hit the surface, something the Force neglected to tell us in advance. Isn’t being expendable great?
“Everyone alright?” I asked the other two after we climbed out of the big ditch the capsule made when it landed. They nodded.
Willy looked back at the trench the capsule made where it impacted. “They brought us down the hard way,” he commented.
“Guess it was the only way to get us here ahead of everyone else,” I said while I sent the “arrived safely” signal to the fleet.
We painted a landing zone with coordinates and transmitted those to command before we started to patrol the area. It wasn’t long before we came across a lone stalker, a sniper by the look of him, prowling around the area near our landing zone.
“What do you make of that?” Hamid asked as we watched the beast and handler go by. “A lone sniper? I thought they had a massive army here.”
“Oh they’re out there I know it,” Hans opinioned. “They sent this one out to check on the crash and didn’t expect to find anything.” His eyes glowed in anticipation.
Hans walked up to the right of the green suit and yelled at him. “Hey, asshole, you had breakfast yet?” He turned around with his impact gun, but Hans ripped him open with the plasma rifle before he could fire.
“Didn’t expect that to happen,” Hamid commented as I sent our location to the fleet.
We let Command know what took place and they told us to secure and hold the landing zone. I’d hoped we would be allowed to proceed to the nearest Invader position and tear up some shit, and command did not disappoint.
“Okay,” I told the other two, “I just got the word. The cavalry is on the way and we get to go shoot some bad guys. Let’s move out.”
“No,” he cut in, “I want to get some action.” We headed off in the direction of the coordinates we were given. It was nothing but thick jungle that was devoid of anything Invaderish that we could kill.
Not ten minutes later, we heard the concussion of a bombardment and watched a heavy transporter from our side fly overhead. Somebody in command had changed Zhuang’s plan for Raptor Nine and it looked like a full scale assault had gotten underway while we were babysitting Terry’s landing zone and wandering around in the bush.
I pushed a branch out of the way and walked into a huge clearing. Right in front of me was a drop shuttle of Invader design. Like everything else they used, it appeared to be decades behind us in technology. Without the kaiju they really would have been no match for us and it made sense why we were so successful in beating them in space battles. I could even see the metal seams in the side. It had the odd cursive letters on it no one had yet deciphered.
I stood there while the other two came out and starred at it. None of us knew what to say. After all this time it was weird to be up close to the alien craft, and believe me it most certainly looked like they do in the old videos, straight out of a fiction novel let me tell ya.
“You think they can see us inside that thing?” Hamid asked me.
“Sure,” Hans cut in. “They have the same kind of external visual feed we used to have fifty years ago. Even the same kind of cables to send it into a computer drive that reads it….” He would have talked all day if I let him.
Their response came when the door to the drop shuttle opened and four stalkers piled out, each blasting away with impact sidearms.
