“We face a number equal to that already at our rear, what is a few more?” declared the other Large male, the one with the spear.
“If Coalition Hunt Packs are paid to fight by the Pirate Humans, Puko—” said the Primarch looking visibly upset.
“There are thirteen to fourteen thousand Sundered gathered here. More importantly, greater than three thousand of them are fully equipped males,” interrupted the spear-wielding Puko, twirling his weapon and then slamming the edge of his duralloy shield into the floor. “You chose the Moral Path over that of intelligence and safety, my young Primarch, now there is nothing to be done but walk! Walk it, I say!”
The other male then rammed the tip of his spear into the ceiling and roared. Within seconds, more of his people came loping down the hall, rallying to his cry.
“Give us some guides and we’ll have a go at these automated defenses,” Wainwright said as soon as the bellowing had lowered back down enough that normal conversation was possible. Maybe things were finally starting to look up, he allowed himself to think, feeling optimistic for the first time in several hours.
“Of course,” the Primarch said with a solemn nod of his head.
“And one more thing,” Wainwright said leveling a finger at the giant overgrown beast.
“I don’t care how furry or freakish you and the rest of your people are,” he said, lying through his teeth. “At least you’re biologicals with the same basic needs as humanity.” He was unsure if this was technically true, but it was the best fig leaf he could throw up on short notice. “But if I get so much as a hint, one blasted hint that you’ve gone and shacked up with a bunch of droids, me and my people are out of here.”
“We no agreement with metal tribes, so there no need to speak of retreat,” the Primarch said, his forehead wrinkling thunderously.
“Tribes?” demanded the Marine Colonel.
“The droid tribes, Colonel,” the larger, spear-wielder explained evenly. “As far as the Sundered are aware, there are no droids on the Omicron.”
Wainwright waved his hands in the air in exasperation. “Tribes, shmibes! It’s not a retreat if you’ve been betrayed; that’s called a tactical withdrawal in the face of superior forces!”
The Primarch shook his head and walked off.
“No droids, you hear,” Wainwright shouted after the Uplift.
He was still muttering to himself when the first of the guides — some of those smallish, female versions of the freakish race — arrived to show his men the way.
Chapter 78: Quagmired
“It’s no good, Colonel,” shouted a Lieutenant over the link channel.
“You can do it. You just have to hold it together, Marine,” Wainwright urged.
“It’s coming right for us—” a screeching of torn metal was followed by a rapidly cut off gurgling sound.
A red light flashed on the lower left hand side of his HUD, indicating a lost connection.
“Murphy’s Demon Monkey is in the mix for sure, this time,” Wainwright growled, the urge to throw a tantrum and order the Lancers in at charge nearly overpowering. He reminded himself that his Marines had the better training for breaking down defenses and reigned himself in.
A new light popped up on his screen.
“We’re getting cut up into Swiss cheese, Sir,” reported a stead older voice, looking at the ID tag on his HUD it was the Top Sergeant for the Company. A man Wainwright actually knew from prior service. As the Brigade Commander recalled, the man had starch.
Scrolling rapidly through the list, he saw the company was down to a pair of first deployment Junior Lieutenants, one of whom was a member of the walking wounded and the other a transfer from the 1st regiment prior to leaving Easy Haven.
The Colonel made a snap decision.
“You’re temporarily frocked to Senior Lieutenant, Top; I need you to temporarily take the Company. No more advancing, hold what you’ve got if you can, and if not pull back to a more defensible position. I’m going to try and take the pressure off by driving forward from another angle,” he explained, scrolling around the rough semi-circle that was his men’s siege positions around this fortress within a fortress that was Station Command.
“I can hold, but it’ll be tight,” the former Top Sergeant and new acting Company Captain acknowledged after a pause.
“You’ve got officers under you now, so delegate,” Wainwright snapped without compassion, “my advice is to make the wounded Lieutenant your XO. If you put him on the front line he’ll just get axed in his condition, and put the other one on the tip of the spear, since maybe he can inspire some steadiness.”
“Yeah right,” snorted the top sergeant, “I can handle my company without any advice from the peanut gallery.”
Wainwright huffed with outrage, “Consider yourself on report, just as soon as the battle is over, Acting Senior Lieutenant. Just make sure if you stay, you can hold onto those gains!” he snapped, cutting the connection. “Peanut Gallery, my hairy hind end!” he snorted.
A few minutes later, elements of the 4th regiment were just starting to make some solid gains despite the formidable fixed defenses and those Demon-inspired roving plasma turrets, when a whole slew of icons started turning red.
“What’s going on up there, Major Cameron,” he barked, switching to the regimental channel.
“This is Senior Captain LeVere, the Major and her entire headquarters unit just got foxed along with half my Company. They’re gone, Sir,” the Captain shouted and Wainwright could hear the thunder of rapidly cycling weaponry, a clear sign of a compromised helmet or visor.
“What is it this time, more turrets and men in power armor,” demanded the Brigade Commander. If so, the pirates were showing more intelligence and discipline than they had the entire time up to this point.
“Droids, Sir!” the Senior Captain replied, then shouted with agony and the Colonel could hear the sound of metal screeching against metal as things went hand to hand.
“Pull back, man,” cried the Colonel.
“They’re all over the place; the walls, the ceiling, we’re being cut off, Sir,” yelled the Captain.
“Captain,” Wainwright waited a few moments, “Captain,” he repeated with more force, but all he could hear was some grunting and heavy breathing. Clearly Senior Captain LeVere was too heavily engaged to have any more time for a mere Brigade Commander.
Wainwright’s mind raced.
“Captain Atticus,” he snapped over the Lancer Command Channel.
“What,” the Captain demanded shortly, “more orders to stay in the rear and guard our numbers?” the man all but sneered over the line.
Wainwright held onto his temper with both hands and throttled it into a compliant death.
“I have a company of Marines under assault by a new, deadly powerful force, so I need you and your men to get over there at the run and give those droids what-for,” he barked.
“You’re actually letting us come to grips with the enemy,” Captain Atticus blurted incredulously.
“At the charge, Lancer Captain, or I’ll give this assignment to someone else!” he bellowed.
“We won’t let you down,” Atticus assured him, sounding a completely different man than all the other times the Marine Colonel had heard him. “To battle,” the Captain roared over the Command Line before suddenly cutting it off.
Wainwright watched with agony as the blue dots representing his marines winked out one by one, until a surge of green dots representing Atticus and his Lancer Company showed up to reinforce their position.
The red dots representing Station Defense systems were quickly knocked out, but the new purple ones representing the droids still surged around and within the blue and green dots of his men.
With nothing to do but wait and pray his troops were up to the task, the Marine Colonel flicked open the link to the Primarch.
“I said no droids, and you assured me there weren’t any of them on the station,” he raged over the link, letting
loose his fury and frustration with the situation.
There was a pause.
“The Sundered not aware of Droids within the Omicron,” Primarch Glue said eventually.
“Well they’re here now and thanks to your lack of warning they’re cutting my men to pieces!” thundered Wainwright, all his feelings of disgust and frustration with the ‘reinforcements’ rising to the fore, “was this all some kind of elaborate trap to lure us in, cut us off and then whittle us down to nothing!”
“That explain surprise defenses surrounding Core of Station,” the Primarch mused, then his voice flattened to an angry grunt. “Believe what you will; Sundered die in droves for Confederation, I have no time for whiny tantrums of children, the People need me lead!”
“A child,” roared Wainwright into the now-dead line. He tried for almost a minute to re-raise the gorilla man, but to no effect.
Meanwhile, the combined Lancer and Marine companies managed a running battle that eventually saw the droids withdraw. Unfortunately, not until after they had pushed his forces almost all the way back to their previous positions, before that last drive forward.
“Captain Darius,” he began, getting on the horn and linking up his communicator with the off-brand native Captain.
“Yes, Colonel Wainwright,” Darius replied stiffly.
“We have to keep those droids guessing while we continue our drive deeper into the station,” he said, shooting over a diagram of the station with a line showing where he wanted the native Captain to take his lancers. “I want you to take your company and the rest of your Lyco-whatevers around to this position.”
“We hear, and we obey,” acknowledged Darius.
“Wait for my signal, then let loose with all your fury, lad,” he urged the Lancer Captain.
“You can count on us,” replied the Tracto-an native.
Wainwright moved his men around with the timing and precision of a lifetime spent as a senior officer in the Caprian Marine Corps, but with the arrival of this new droid force in defense of the heavily fortified station command, his new gains were marginal. Worse, the droids were bleeding his people white.
Looking at the force levels of each company as displayed on his screen, he pounded his fist leg in frustration. If they could still penetrate the command center, a prospect now in serious doubt, he was unsure if he could do it while he had anything left worthy of calling even a Regiment, let alone a Brigade.
He was not sure what more he could do, other than urge his people to fight harder, like some sort of aged cheerleader. Strangely enough, that might actually work with those Tracto-an head-cases, who called themselves lancers.
“Dig deep men, we’re almost there,” he said over the general push, not letting the sense of despair he was feeling enter his voice. They’d come so far, so very far, and thanks to the help of their allies they were within striking distance of taking the station. Blast those droids right into Murphy’s Demon pit anyways
Now it was anyone’s guess.
Chapter 79: Up on the Armored Bridge
Akantha leapt to her feet, pumping her fist in the air as she saw another pirate Corvette explode on the main viewer. “Yes!”
A swarm of over a hundred miniature gunships engulfed the small fleet of Corvettes that had been threatening the rear of her ship, and they had made a fine account of themselves to this point.
“If only most of our weapons hadn’t been destroyed by the oathbreakers’ initial attack,” she declared furiously. She glared around the bridge, as if by sheer force of will she could order the universe as she desired, and turn damaged weapons back to functionality.
“We can detach from dock, roll the ship to present our undamaged broadside and then re-dock,” declared the decreasingly abrasive shuttle pilot.
“As if I would trust a sniveling man like you with such a precision maneuver,” Akantha sneered. “Now sit down and be silent,” she ordered, ignoring the fact that he was still sitting, in favor of firm rhetoric.
The main screen suddenly zoomed in.
“I think I’m getting a feel for these controls,” Isis said happily.
Forgetting the insulting little shuttle pilot, Akantha watched with eager fascination as a Sundered gunship squadron, in tight formation, sought to engage one of the Corvettes. The squadron had lost only three of their number to point defense fire, before they reached the ship. Within moments of the engagement, the shield of the pirate ship began spotting, and the gunships focused their attention on those openings.
The Deep Fleet corvette went into a flurry of evasive maneuvers, turning their ship in an increasingly rapid series of spinning maneuvers. Akantha wondered how many of the crew of that little warship would be killed in the maneuvers if their gravity plating so much as flickered.
The wildly maneuvering Corvette slammed into a cutter belonging to the Piranha Pirates. Shields flared, and the cutter was careened off course, crashing into a Sundered gunship before exploding. The still-spinning Deep Fleet Space Army Corvette lost power and began drifting away from the station.
A trio of Sundered Corvettes, were currently engaged in a running battle with the combined forces of the Black Hole Armada and Deep Fleet Space Army. The Piranha squadron cutters hand their hands full trying (and generally failing) to screen the more numerous small gunships away from the main force.
Another pirate ship on the main screen took damage, this time a lucky shot from her still docked battleship.
The Skull Rangers suddenly broke off, firing a combined broadside as they sped away, their bows pointed toward the hyperlimit.
“This is the Supreme Patrona,” exclaimed an extremely muscular individual with green tinted skin. “I didn’t sign on with the League to die; I joined up for protection!” The woman was wearing a helmet shaped like a skull, and had arm bones crossed in pink and green pairs painted all across her powerful chest. “I can sell my loot in the black colonies and hire as many pretty boys for the Skull Rangers as I please there, without risking damage to my ships!” she declared, before cutting the connection with a hammer fist to the arm of her chair.
“That one looked more like a man, than she did a woman,” Akantha remarked, partially intrigued by the sight of all those overly enhanced muscles, but mostly she was disgusted. The woman pirate was definitely unattractive and her chin had protruded terribly. Green skin and pink-colored bones, she thought with a shudder.
“Two of her ships appear structurally undamaged, but the one the transmission is coming from, is leaking oxygen from several rents in the hull,” Isis reported with great satisfaction.
As if a dam had been broken, the Black Hole Armada signaled its withdrawal as well. Swinging by, while still under the fire of Sundered craft, they attached bucking cables to one of the more heavily damaged Armada ships before also pointing their bows away from the Omicron and engaging their drives.
“We’re getting a transmission from the Space Army ships, Mistress,” reported the woman at Communications.
“Put it through,” Akantha ordered, having nothing better to do than stare at the screen and keep from biting her nails out of frustration at not being able to actually do anything.
“The Deep Fleet will never ask for terms, yah?” said an ebony-skinned pirate in camouflage patterned fatigues, a bandolier of power cells, frag grenades and a pair of machetes in sheaths across his back.
Akantha looked at him as if he was stupid. “I didn’t offer any,” she replied, careful to project disdain with both tone an body language.
“We will slaughter the Monkey Boys in droves. We will fight to the bitter end,” he declared. Behind him in the background, a pair of overgrown white-skinned bodyguards loomed threateningly, their jaws unnaturally square and protruding. Akantha wondered what failed lineage had produced these muscle-bound failures.
“At least you have the courage to fight for what you believe in,” Akantha said, unable to suppress a little eye roll and head toss.
The ebony man smiled, his ey
es lighting up with an inner fire at these words
“We should join forces! With my battle skills and your deadly beautiful battleships we would be invincible,” he yelled, holding his hand up even with his nose and then squeezing it for emphasis.
She almost laughed with scorn, “Deadly beautiful?”
“As Supreme General of the Deep Fleet Space Army, I shall be as a husband to you, and together we shall produce as many children as we have war ships. Together, we shall conquer our very own world,” he proposed with fire in his voice. “All you need to do is turn your back on the Monkey King and his foul kind. Join us in eradicating them from the Sector, and together we shall have full bellies and feast upon all that our foes possess!”
Akantha stared at him as she would a bug splattered on the bottom of her foot. “You… are offering to be my next Protector?” she asked with obvious disdain.
The ebony man’s head twitched and he looked at her, as if something she had not followed his script before smiling, revealing teeth sharpened into razor sharp points.
“I shall protect you, my precious flower,” he said. Some emotion was behind his voice which she failed to recognize, but she knew she did not like in the least.
“So far, you are the only person who has made an offer to stand at my side,” she admitted. “However, I fear I must decline, but you have earned some small favor in my eyes,” not feeling sad or favorable in the least, but it was not politic to say so.
He scowled at her, anger clouding his face.
“I have a counter proposal. Foreswear your Bandit ways, beg for my mercy and submit yourself to my judgment, and I swear that at least six in ten of you and your men shall be given the chance to redeem themselves in honorable service as warriors. The remainder, the worst among you, shall work as war-slaves for a period not to exceed ten years, redeeming their lives through hard labor,” she assured him, standing and placing her hands on her hips, “However, I will warn you that I expect courtesy and discipline from those who serve me. It will be a hard and grueling experience for you, but I am willing to be lenient the first day or two until you are taught proper etiquette.”
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