by Lance Berry
“I read you loud and clear, Lieutenant-Commander Elliot,” a strong, deep voice quickly answered. “We’ll be landing to the south of the main camp, as ordered. I’m scanning enemy soldiers massing there.”
“I read the same,” Mara replied after a quick affirmation of
Newson’s intel from her board. “We’ll be receiving DFC air support when we land. The other transports know to approach from the west and north. We’ll be following right on your heels.
Good luck, Commander. Elliot out.” She flipped off the com, then called over her shoulder to her own troops, “We’re down in twenty seconds. Heat ‘em up!”
The reassuring sound of VK-10 Blastrifles charging reverberated throughout the cabin as Mara worked her controls to pop open the two panels which covered the energy cannons on the front of the transport’s exterior. The planet contained dense growth across its surface, with very little clear land to touch down on—certainly none near the enemy base. She targeted a large copse of bizarrely shaped ochre trees and tabbed the firing panel. Instantly, bolts of forced coherent light shot out, all but disintegrating the entire clump of them. As the smoke settled, Mara smiled in satisfaction upon seeing her new clearing. She adjusted the attitude and pitch controls, leveling the transport out. Retro-thrusters were ignited, and the transport touched down easily. It was quickly joined by its fellows, and as the last transport settled, Mara toggled a com switch on her board, connecting her to the secondary compartment which was separated from the first by a steel door. She stood and faced the thirty soldiers in her squad, confident that the additional thirty in the rear would hear as well. “This is Lieutenant-Commander Elliot to all troops. Our orders, directly from fleet commander Christenson, are to take the enemy base as intact as possible. We are also to take any officers alive if possible. All intel on our enemy thus far has revealed that Calvorians prefer death over capture. If you see an officer or soldier of any important ranking about to attempt suicide, prevent it. A leg wound or blowing off their trigger fingers should suffice. Watch your stray shots, especially around their tech, but protect yourselves. While it is preferable to carry out Captain Christenson’s orders to the letter, to me it’s also important that as many of us make it back intact as allowable. Check your armor, make sure your safeties are off— let’s go!”
And with that, she tapped off the com, opened the egress doors, and led her troops out into the warm yellow daylight.
Mara stepped onto the hard ground, and felt her nose crinkle unwillingly at the intake of cold air. This planet’s atmosphere was just slightly thinner than Earth’s, and so the temperature was more moderately inclined to a colder bent.
She detached a tactical dsp from a leg pouch, held it out in front of her and scanned the area ahead. As she did, there was a sudden roar from overhead, and she snapped her head up to see a squadron of seven DFCs soar past the ground troops in the direction her dsp was pointed. As the one-person fighter ships moved further into the distance, the three at the apex of the formation fired lasers at the ground, raising columns of fire into the sky.
Mara saw Lieutenant-Commander Newson approaching at a brisk pace, flanked by two soldiers. Newson was a tall yet thickly built man with one blue eye and a noticeably pale left one. Mara figured out the lack of color was due to the cloning and replacement of his left eye, which she remembered hearing he had lost in ground combat in a distant star-system.
Obviously, he had chosen to remove the protective eye patch he should have received, before the pigmentation had fully returned. She didn’t know whether he had done so perhaps to unsettle any enemy troops he might encounter…but it did bother her just a bit, though she couldn’t figure out why.
“Lieutenant-Commander Elliot,” he said tightly, even as he saluted. Mara knew that with his slightly longer years of experience and being on the verge of promotion to full commander, that technically Newson should have been the one to lead this field mission. But since Captain Stubbs’ ship was wing to the Horizon and he had been given authority over who led the ground troops, the decision had been made and was final. While Mara believed that as always, James Stubbs had her best interest at heart and thought that by her leading a successful campaign here, she would be one step closer in her quest to eventual captaincy, she was also certain this whole situation was sticking hard in Newson’s craw. Though unintentional, it was still a humiliation to have to follow a technically ‘lower’ ranking officer’s orders.
Mara returned the salute. “Lieutenant-Commander.
Obviously, our quarry lies in that direction,” she said as she pointed her chin toward the path the DFCs were carving further ahead in the jungle.
Newson stared at her blankly a moment, then turned his head to follow her initial gaze and nodded. “I agree.”
Mara chose to ignore the bitterness in his tone, as well as the unappreciative looks his own soldiers were doing their least to hide. “We’ll press ahead in five columns of sixty troops each, spread a hundred meters apart,” Mara ordered confidently.
“The two outermost columns will flank the north and south of the compound, and we’ll pincer twenty-five yards from their base on command ‘Echo-Bravo.’ Got it?”
There was no tone for argument in her voice, and Newson blinked in surprise at her assuredness. He nodded once, firmly.
“Understood, Chief.” He then glanced at the soldier on his left.
“You heard the boss! Get the word to Sweeney and Cappello.
Move it, ya fuckin’ lunkhead!”
“Sir, yes sir,” the soldier affirmed, and headed off to rejoin the troops that had disembarked from Newson’s transport. The lieutenant-commander saluted again, and this time Mara could’ve sworn there was just a bit more respect in it. She returned, and as Newson led his other soldier back the way they’d come, Mara gave the order for her own troops to follow her into the path of blood.
Chapter 26
As Mara led her complement of sixty troops through the jungle, the Ground-To-Space (GTS) comlink strapped to her shoulder sounded. She bent her left arm, toggling the link with her thumb. “Elliot. Go ahead,” she said in a clipped tone as her eyes intensely scanned the area ahead of her for any enemy movement.
“This is Lieutenant Geary in DFC twenty-two, doing flyby about three clicks ahead of you, Ma’am. Just wanted to let you know that we’ve pretty much cleared the space ahead of enemy ground troops, but there might be some stragglers. Eyes out.”
There was some light static on Geary’s channel, and what sounded like muted explosions. Up ahead about four hundred yards, Mara could see fire peeking out through several bald spots in the denseness of the jungle.
“Appreciated, Geary. What’s your own current status?”
“My wing and I are at the enemy base camp now. They’ve got some mighty powerful energy turrets mounted at ten-foot intervals on their roof. We’ve managed to take out four of them, but still—” A burst of static, and the line went dead.
Mara frowned as she called Geary’s name twice more, but there was no response. She stopped walking and her second, Lieutenant Cohen, did likewise and held her hand up for the company to halt. It only took a moment for Mara to collect herself, and she turned to Cohen. “Pass it back: stragglers.
Eyes out.”
Cohen acknowledged the order and carried it out, passing the knowledge back along the line. After only a few seconds, the column was proceeding forward again. A shot rang out and a laser beam brushed past, just missing Mara and Cohen behind her. It smashed into a tree, blasting bark off its hide.
“Forward troops, flank and fire,” Cohen cried out, and the five most forward troops spread to either side of the company and fired their laser rounds at the spot where the shot had come from. There were several explosions as their beams blasted into the trees ahead and whatever hid in them. As the body of a dead Calvorian fell out of the trees, several more came out of their hiding spots nearby and opened fire on Mara and her people.
Mara and her forward t
roops returned, cutting down three of the enemy soldiers. One of the aliens yelled something to his remaining fellows and they turned tail, heading toward the fires in the distance. They were very fast, Mara noted, disappearing into the brush within moments.
Mara looked at Cohen, who was keeping her own Blastrifle at the ready, but had taken out her tactical dsp and was scanning the area ahead. “No more. They’re all at the base camp.”
“Good,” Mara said. “Let’s move forward, ready to unload the second we get through the trees and have clear shots.”
Cohen responded affirmatively and informed the troops they were moving onward. Still vigilant as they walked, they headed toward the increasing sounds of cannon fire.
The Calvorian base camp was a circular dome structure, only a single story tall. It had ten ion cannons mounted to its roof, six of which had been destroyed—one of them by the crash of a DFC into it. Part of the craft’s dorsal wing still stuck out of the wreckage of the turret and partially caved-in spot on the roof. Two other DFCs had crashed nearby, shot down by the cannons. One was buried in a clump of fallen trees, the other not twenty feet from the base itself, yet its canopy was missing, its pilot presumably ejected. Four other DFCs circled in low passing, taking shots at the turrets, attempting to blast them into scrap while trying to dodge large bolts of coherent ion energy. Fifty alien troops stood their ground, some in a protective semi-circle around the base, others taking refuge behind the crashed DFC nearby as they returned fire upon the advancing humans.
Mara and her troops came upon this spectacle and she ordered her unit to spread out in a widening net, even as she saw Lieutenant-Commander Newson’s troops carrying out their pincer movement from opposite sides of the surrounding jungle. As they began to thin out, movement out of the corner of Mara’s left eye caught her attention and she swung around, Blastrifle ready, but it was only a young lieutenant (j.g.) dressed in flight gear—obviously the pilot from the DFC with the ejected canopy—headed her way. He instantly held up a hand to stay off her shot. “Whoa! I’m Lieutenant Stephen Smith, pilot from the Corsica. You’re Commander Elliot, right?”
Mara straightened up a bit as she partially lowered her Blastrifle. “Lieutenant-Commander Elliot, yes,” she said, surprised to see that Smith was a Native American. With the writing of the Indigenous Peoples Countermeasure into law several years back, Native Americans could no longer be brought into the military via planetary draft, which meant that Smith had joined of his own volition.
Smith straightened himself. “Pleased to meet you, Lieutenant-Commander. Forgive my not saluting, but I don’t want to mark you for the enemy. I have my report.”
Mara nodded and pointed to a nearby tree. They took refuge behind it so they could converse in relative safety while her troops spread out into their final attack positions.
“I know you were on the line with my CO, Lieutenant Geary.
That’s his DFC up there, buried on the Calvorians’ rooftop.
Those freak jobs shot him down, but Geary managed to steer his bird right into one of their cannons. To the last, he was a fighter.”
“I’ll see to it he receives a commendation,” Mara assured him. “Go on.”
“We’ve cleared the majority of the enemy troops, both here and at other mapped locations, through low-altitude strafing,”
Smith reported. “As you can see, we’re still taking out the turrets. They don’t have force-fields or other protection, but their gunmen are damn good. It’s a bear getting a bead on them without getting singed. Our dsp’s are having minor difficulty penetrating the metal of the structure, but we’ve managed to scan only about thirty troops left inside.”
Mara considered what he had told her, then peeked around the tree to get a view of the ongoing battle. Several more of the Calvorian troops around the structure had fallen and another one of the turrets was blasted away by a passing DFC, yet the enemy seemed to return fire with renewed vigor, determined to defend the base to the last of them.
“This isn’t working,” Mara said, more to herself than Smith, and toggled the link on her GTS. “Elliot to Newson. Come in.”
“Newson here.”
“The enemy structure’s going to take too much damage, and
I’m worried about the tech. We also need to get past those troops without too many fatalities on either side. Any one of them could have info we can use.”
“What do you suggest?”
Mara’s eyes narrowed, not liking his tone. “I want you to get scalers ready. Fire a round of concussion grenades at the enemy to topple them. I’ll order the DFCs to pull away a bit, making the Calvorians think they’ve pressed them back. As we rush and surround the ground troops, the scalers will go up the side of the building and take out the gunners. Once all that’s done, we’ll take the officers inside. You have your orders—carry them out.” She immediately closed the line, not giving him the chance to reply or argue his own opinions. In truth, also just not wanting to hear the annoying tone of his voice.
Over on the north side of the building, Newson himself had also taken refuge near a tree with one of his troops, so he could respond to Mara’s message. “Not much for respecting the chain of command, is she?” the soldier opined as Newson switched off his GTS in disgust. Newson glanced at his commando and grunted. “Right now, she is the chain of command, as per Captain Stubbs’ orders. Me, I don’t get what he sees in her.”
“She is a hot piece of ass,” the trooper said with a snicker.
“Maybe she’s worked her way up his chain…if you get my drift.”
Newson cut him a hard look. “Watch your mouth, Corporal.
That kind of talk will get you placed in stockade or court-martialed… in any other unit. Maybe Stubbs will get an oral report from her on this mission when it’s over…but for now, we follow her orders. When all’s said and done, we don’t need to see the little bitch again, anyway.”
Back at Mara’s position, she had just ordered the DFCs to pull off slightly, and had relayed her other orders to Cohen and her troops. “Smith, you’re with me,” she said, and as the dirt kicked up around the structure from the concussion blasts set off by Newson’s troops, she and her unit proceeded forward, lasers flaring as they scorched the ground near the fallen enemy troops.
“Stay down,” Mara yelled at them as she and her soldiers surrounded them. “I know you understand me! Keep flat on your stomachs, hands away from your weapons! You are now prisoners of the United Earth Force! Make a single move of defiance, and you die!”
The Calvorians on the ground looked up at her with hatred and astonishment in their eyes. Hatred because of the natural animosity between their two peoples…and astonishment, because they had been bested by a female leader. Not much was known of Calvorian culture…but some information had been disseminated, revealing that it was a patriarchal society, and their women had little or no say in the structure of it. To be defeated by a female on the battlefield was perhaps the ultimate shame for a Calvorian male. Good, Mara thought. You can all lick me when the day’s done, you chauvinist bastards.
She quickly glanced upwards at the side of the building, and could see five scalers crawling up the side of the structure.
Scalers were special-ops soldiers whose equipment included gloves and boots containing nanotech smartware. When activated, the nanotech would project outwards as hundreds of micro-talons, capable of piercing metal and supporting the weight of up to three hundred pounds—allowing troops to scale walls in order to take out well-ensconced enemies such as the rooftop gunners.
As the turrets continued to fire at the weaving and retreating
DFCs, Newson and several of his troops approached.
“Lieutenant-Commander,” he said neutrally. “Two dozen troops are standing outside the base door, ready to go in.”
“That’s not enough,” Mara retorted sharply. “There’s at least thirty in that structure. You take charge of these prisoners. I’ll take another complement and lead the r
ush inside. I’ll signal you when the job’s done.”
