Assault Troopers

by Vaughn Heppner

  “Impact breach in thirty minutes,” N7 said over the boat’s loudspeaker.

  In thirty minutes—if we lived that long—we’d be at the Lokhar PDS. The thing had grown on our screen, so had the planet parked behind it. I could see the various points from which the planetary beams originated. Six beams, I counted six different origin sites. Only two of those beams flashed at us. The rest reached out across space to stab at the main fleet.

  “We will all die,” Ella told me. “Our fleet is too far away to support our station assault.”

  I stared at the PDS. The mother was big. There were no two ways about it. I imagined Lokhar legionaries waited there to kill boarders, to cut us down. I wondered if the legionaries would even get the chance at us.

  More fighters rose from the planet. These fighters didn’t head for deep space. This latest swarm swerved toward us.

  I muttered profanities. I didn’t want to die like a cow in a chute. At least let me die with a gun in my hand, firing into a Lokhar belly. I’d trained too long for this. But then I’d come to appreciate as a Jelk assault trooper that the universe was even more unfair then I had ever believed it to be.

  What a crazy way to die.

  -21-

  The screen zoomed in to our part of the battle. The picture of our battling fleet disappeared. The guardian fleet also vanished. In its place, the planet took on mammoth proportions. It had oddly shaped continents with large green bodies of water. Clouds hid some of the scene. I spied mountains and deserts. Each of the planetary beams came out of one of those areas.

  Deceleration set in, and the fighters swarming toward us slowed down, or they seemed to because we no longer sped toward them as fast as before.

  At that point, things turned hot. I couldn’t see what happened at the main fleet anymore. I could see the beams lancing at the PDS, though. These were heavy blue rays and they seemed to come out of the void. They knocked at the station’s electromagnetic field, stopping short of the actual satellite.

  I remembered what we’d learned about those beams. If they actually hit the armored station, they would be laden with tissue-killing radiation. Gamma rays, X-rays, I don’t know which, if even either of those. They were supposed to soften up the enemy for us by burning them to death.

  That was a nice word, huh? Soften up the enemy: squash them like a mad housewife with a flyswatter, slapping them down one by one.

  Deceleration forced my eyelids closed. I rested, concentrating on lifting my chest so I could suck down air. Space war dwarfed anything I’d ever read about concerning Earth battles. One of my favorite topics had been World War II, especially between the Russians and the Germans. I’d read somewhere the Russians had lost ten millions soldiers. I could never imagine that. Ten million soldiers shot, cut, starved and beaten to death.

  How many Lokhar tigers would die to the Jelk gamma-rays hitting the PDS? How many would be killed if the Jelk turned those rays onto the planetary beam sites? We were supposed to conquer that thing?

  I opened my eyes. The station was huge. The armored monstrosity would swallow up my puny cohort.

  An orange sheen showed on the outer electromagnetic field. The Jelk beams hammered for admittance. Even as they did, our swarm of assault boats slowed, and slowed again. Our dash had turned back into a crawl.

  There was one good thing at least about this: the Jelk weren’t going to use us as kinetic projectiles. Claath really meant for us to clench cutlasses between our teeth as we swung on ropes onto the enemy station.

  After the needed time, deceleration quit. I breathed deeply once more.

  For a second time, the screen zoomed in for a close-up. This time, much of the world vanished. What remained filled the screen from one end to the other. In the center of the screen waited the PDS with its extensive, orange-colored electromagnetic field. The field inched backward under the combined weight of battlejumper beams.

  I had to think the guardian fleet poured it on hard against the Jelk fleet. What happened out there? How many battlejumpers were left? Who was wining?

  “Here they come,” Ella said.

  The fighter swarm neared us. Planetary rays swept back and forth and big Jelk drones zoomed like bats out of Hell at the fighters.

  For the next several minutes, confusion reigned out there. Jelk drones beamed. Other faster Jelk drones exploded. Lokhar fighters vaporized. Lokhar fighters tumbled end over end, one of them jettisoning its pilot. The surviving fighters swooped toward us. A few died to their own planetary rays. It was mass murder. I’d never seen anything like it.

  What kind of Lokhars signed up to be a fighter pilot anyway? Their life expectancy had to be less than an Earther. I had to remind myself the Jelk hadn’t made a major assault in ten years. Maybe during that time Lokhars forgot how horrible it had been. Maybe Lokhars welcomed suicide missions, tying a special cloth around their tiger heads. I don’t know.

  “Everyone must remain in his seat and strapped in,” N7 said. “We are about to begin violent evasive maneuvers.”

  I counted under my breath. N7 started evading after I counted 315. This turned into the best, or worst, rollercoaster ride I’d ever been on. Right, left, up, down, each time I strained violently in that direction. Some troopers hurled their lunch. Others swore savagely.

  I hung onto my crash seat and wondered why we bothered doing any of this. Assault boats died, and I’m talking real vehicles. The ghost images perished as the last ECM craft exploded in the wash of a planetary beam.

  At that point, the dull orange field protecting the PDS finally went down. The beams from the void smashed against the satellite’s armor. The giant, pillar-like stream of light continued to shoot out of the station, reaching into space for the battlejumpers. Other ports sent missiles streaking at us.

  I imagine this is what it must have felt like in a British warship during the age of sail. At the Battle of Trafalgar, the British fleet met the combined French-Spanish fleet. There, wooden ships of war slid past each other, sometimes by only a few feet. While they did, massive cannons belched timber-destroying cannonballs. Those iron balls crashed completely through at times, killing entire swaths of sailors, marines and even ship’s captains. The British commanding officer, Lord Nelson, died in that bitter fight.

  It was like that here. Fighters darted among us, their cannons chugging exploding shells. We upped the ante by using assault boat missiles and our own shells. Beams flashed from the planet and from the void. Rays hit assault boats, hit planetary sites and washed the PDS with personnel-killing power.

  It was lovely, it was awful.

  “The Saurians are in the lead assault boats,” N7 said.

  “Why tell us?” I asked.

  “For the same reason you dared to speak to Shah Claath,” N7 said, “Earthbeast morale.”

  I raised my eyebrows. Claath burned up his Saurians first, huh? They were fodder and we were the real deal. Why did N7 care a whit about Earther morale?

  I wondered about him. The other day on the cube he had seemed friendly, almost like an ally. While with his fellow androids—

  I sat up.

  “What’s wrong?” Ella asked.

  “Huh?” I turned to her. “Oh. Nothing’s wrong. I just thought of something.”

  Ella waited.

  “It has to do with N7,” I said.

  Still, Ella waited.

  “It doesn’t matter now,” I said. “We have to get in there.”

  The planetary defense station loomed before us. It was squat and square like an old Borg ship from Star Trek and it orbited the planet, hovering high above its equator. Directly below the immense object by several hundred miles was a Himalayan mountain range with white caps, snow presumably.

  The PDS must have been twenty kilometers to a side. It was bigger than any battlejumper, although dwarfed by an Imperial Lokhar Dreadnought.

  How did these space navies find the people to man their ships? That was probably a stupid question. If Claath had originally headed to Ear
th to gain several hundred millions soldiers, then numbers overall in these fleets would be no problem.

  Suddenly, ten thousand Earth troops seemed like far too few. If the Fifth Legion had protected the Forerunner object, how many Lokhar troops were in the PDS?

  I judged distances. Likely, we had five minutes, not much more, until we reached the PDS. I half turned, glancing at the troopers.

  It was time.

  “Listen up!” I said. “Are you listening?”

  “Yes, Overman Creed!” Centurion Rollo shouted from his crash seat.

  “You can see we’re closing in,” I said. “This is a fight. This is a war. You know the score. The Lokhars screwed us royally. We’re Jelk troopers now. They’re out there duking it out with this system’s guardian fleet. We have to storm onto this place and kill every Lokhar we see. It doesn’t matter if he wants to surrender. In this kind of fight, during this phase of it, it is a fight to the death. So kill every tiger you see. There may be a time for mercy later, but it as sure as Hell ain’t now.

  “We’re an Earth legion, and the creatures of space are going to learn that means we’re the baddest asses there is. They shouldn’t have messed with us. Claath shouldn’t mess with us. But we’ll clean his clock later. Right now, we storm this station and kill everything nonhuman except for the Saurians and the androids you know. Now listen, and I mean listen good with both ears. We have these obedience chips in us. We’ve got find a way to get rid of them pronto. We may never get another chance. That means you look for anything you think will do that.”

  “You will cease with such talk,” N7 said over the loudspeakers. The one nearest us sparked and went silent, but we could hear him from the others.

  “Yes, sir, N7,” I said. “I was just joking, isn’t that right, Centurion Rollo?”

  “No, sir, Overman!” Rollo shouted. “You weren’t joking. You were telling it to us straight.”

  “Cease at once or I will report your sedition,” N7 said.

  “That is all,” I told the troopers.

  “Retract your last words,” N7 said.

  I cleared my throat. “Did you troopers just hear me?”

  “Yes!” several shouted.

  “Excellent,” I said.

  “That is not a retraction,” N7 said.

  “Oh, right.” I said. “What was I thinking?”

  Troopers laughed.

  “Overman Creed—” N7 said.

  “By what I’m seeing on the screen,” I said, “we’re about to crash.”

  The loudspeakers clicked off. I braced myself, and it felt as if the entire assault boat held its breath. Before us loomed the PDS. I couldn’t see the world anymore, just a wall of metal, with gun tubes poking out, firing projectiles at us.

  “Get ready!” I roared. Then I clutched my straps and tightened my body. The bio-suit seemed to understand. It tightened, feeling snugger than ever.

  I stared bug-eyed at the wall screen. Lokhar fighters attacked, skimming the PDS surface before lifting toward us. An assault boat exploded. No, only its outer skin did. Reactive armor blew again, and the boat’s rail-gun chugged shells at the enemy. The Lokhar bubble-fighter shredded into component pieces, as did another. Then heavy PDS shells caught the assault boat, cutting it in half. Troopers spilled into space, tumbling end over end. It put a vile taste in my mouth.

  “Tails,” Ella whispered.

  I concentrated. My mind already felt like mush, absorbing too much mayhem that directly concerned me. It must have been like this for the soldiers on D-Day roaring to the German-held beach.

  “Tails?” I asked.

  “Those troopers have tails,” Ella said. “They’re Saurians.”

  I had time for one more glance. Then our boat swept by as we headed down. It was surreal, and things seemed to happen in time-stop frames. A vast blue shaft of light stabbed past our boat and it boiled against PDS plating. Outer armor curled like a burning bug. The pillar of destruction bored into the station. Then the beam snapped off like someone flipping a switch. Shells like tracers spewed from a working Lokhar gun. The line of fire inched up and sawed an assault boat into pieces. Shrapnel filled space. Hits hammered against our boat. I looked up at the ceiling. Dents appeared where we plowed through floating shrapnel. Words garbled around me. I had no idea what anyone said. My adrenaline must have been pumping like crazy. I heard my heartbeat in my throat and harsh breathing in my ears.

  I wore my helmet. I didn’t even remember putting it on. I found myself clutching my laser rifle, with a sling of pulse grenades at my side.

  The assault boat danced and jigged, it wove and nearly tumbled. I felt heavy bumps shake us and rattle my crash seat as our rail-gun fired steadily. Then my throat hurt because I roared at the top of my lungs. My fingers gripped the crash bars and the boat flew into the PDS. Darkness filled the screen until spotlights appeared. They washed over giant girders and an immense metallic structure. I was thrown hard left as the boat shifted. I went hard right as the boat shifted the other way. N7 dodged blurry images that I only saw for a moment. More rail-gun fire hammered, igniting interior bulkheads and—a cohort of battle-suited tigers vanished in a mist of blood.

  “Now!”

  I heard the word and time ticked by until I realized N7 must have spoken it into my headphones. I flew against the straps, hurling against them as billowing steam appeared directly ahead of our boat.

  The wild images ceased. Glaring lights like car-beams showed us the inside of the Lokhar station. I saw twisted bulkheads, gaping holes and constant shuddering and shaking out there. In an instant, our assault boat shook as a heavy clang rang throughout the craft.

  “We’ve landed.”

  Again, it took time for the words to penetrate my brain. N7 had spoken again.

  Our assault boat opened up like an amusement park ride that had come to a complete stop. “Watch your step as you exit. We’re glad that you enjoyed the ride. Come again please when we reopen in the spring.”

  “Overman Creed!”

  Harsh breathing played over my ears. My heartbeat pounded in my throat.

  “Overman Creed, we have landed. Exit the boat.”

  Surreal time ended, and the world seemed to rush in and slam against me. I sucked down reality in an explosive moment. It made my head throb, spiking with pain, with agony. I didn’t want to think. I didn’t want to do. I was tired. I just wanted to sit and gape at the inner station. Why did I have to do all the fighting, all the thinking all of the time.

  “Overman Creed, you must storm the PDS. The Lokhars—”

  I didn’t hear another word. Lokhars flipped a switch in my mind. Something whirled like a generator. Maybe it was me returning to sanity, or whatever passed for it in the Sigma Draconis system. I took one breath, two, three—

  “Overman Creed here,” I said. I’d returned. We’d landed. We’d made it to the PDS hanging over a Lokhar military colony world.

  I laughed. It was the last bout of insanity, of unreality, spewing out of me.

  “Are you well, Overman?” N7 asked.

  “Fit as a fiddle, plastic man,” I said. I slapped the release button on my harness. The straps flew away and I surged to my feet. Most of the assault troopers had already run off the boat. Each vessel also boasted a battle robot to help secure a landing zone. They were squat things on treads sporting a mortar tube and laser.

  “Go, go, go!” I shouted, rousing others who had taken a mind vacation as I’d just done. We were in. We were here and we needed to capture this gargantuan satellite.

  I stumbled out of the craft, feeling pull at my knees again and a twinge in the right one. We had gravity. Other assault boats clanged down nearby. Their sides opened up and more of my cohort joined me. The battle for the planetary defense station—the nitty-gritty bloodletting with personal weapons—was about to begin.

  -22-

  What if a SWAT team had to clear a skyscraper full of maniac snipers murdering the citizens of New York City? And what if those s
nipers had more than high-powered rifles, but RPGs, mortars and drone controls? Let’s make it even worse. What if the snipers were suicide bombers trained to the level of SEALs? Reckless courage mingled with the very best training and procedures.

  Imagine if the SWAT team finally busted into the bottom of the building, and they’d used one of those armored personnel carriers to do it. When they boiled out of the vehicle, they didn’t find elevators and regular floors, but a madman’s maze of twisted girders, hangar bays and claustrophobic access tubes.

  That would give you some of an idea of what we felt in here. In a skyscraper, though, a man would have some idea of where to start. But here?

  “We need a perimeter,” I said.

  We had three cohorts and no assault leader, three-fourths of a legion without a commanding officer.

  The vast hangar bay shuddered. Metal rained, and three troopers died, speared by falling shards as if they were part of a bad B movie.

  Then the arrival of Lokhar legionaries changed the situation. Another vast, station-sized shudder caused twenty or more Lokhars to rain down this time. Big suited aliens thudded among us. The force of the fall caused some of their helmets to pop off like zits.

  “Tigers!” a trooper shouted.

  Our laser beams flashed, a multitude of them. The tigers died a second time and three troopers were hit by stray shots.

  “Cease fire, cease fire!” Rollo shouted.

  I looked up. I imagine most of us did. The tigers were up there above us. We could see helmets, the glint of a gun tube.

  “Scatter!” I shouted.

  Rays and gunfire rained down, hosing us, killing assault troopers. I ran with neuro-fiber speed. So did those near me. With seven other troopers, I darted into what might have been a mechanic’s shed. Enormous machines sat on lifters. At least the Lokhars couldn’t hit us while we were in here.

  “We need a schematic of this place,” I said into my comm. “N7, do we have one?”

  “Negative,” the android said. I wasn’t sure where he was, but strangely, I was glad he was alive.